Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (38 page)

So it is time to stop seeing the world as divided between an Abode of Islam versus an Abode of War. Rather, what exists now is an Abode of Freedom versus an Abode of Tyranny. The former is what Muslims should seek.

In this free world, there surely will be ideas that Muslims, including me, will not like. What we need to do is to respond to them with reason and wisdom—an effort that might help us revitalize the intellectual dynamism of our earliest generations, as in the way the Mutazilites dealt with the challenges, and the contributions, of Greek philosophy.

In this free world, there also will be people with lifestyles that we will find misguided and abhorrent. We need to try to share with those people the values that we uphold. How they will react is not our business. “If they become Muslim, they have been guided,” God told the Prophet. “If they turn away, you are only responsible for transmission.”
⁴¹

And, ultimately, we need this free world for our individual selves. Each of us has a personal life to live—an amazing journey that starts with our birth and continuously unfolds while we grow up to experience a mind-boggling drama. We learn and discover, we achieve and enjoy, and we fail and suffer. For the believer, none of these ups and downs of life are devoid of meaning—all are meant to be lessons to make us more mature and wise and, we hope, more godly.

Liberty is what every individual needs to be able to live such a fulfilling life, based on his own choices and decisions, successes and failures.

Liberty is, you could also say, what everyone needs to find God.

Acknowledgments

There are many individuals I have to thank for making this book possible—and here are only some of them.

First, I thank Phillip E. Johnson, who, several years ago, encouraged me to write about Islam in America, despite living thousands of miles away. I also thank Jay Richards and Claire Berlinski for helping me take the first steps, and Walter Russell Mead for opening the way for more. I thank fellow writer Mark Scheel, too, whose gracious friendship not only improved my writing but also enriched my spirit.

I also thank my agent Jeff Gerecke for all his support, and Maria Guarnaschelli, along with Melanie Tortoroli and Kathy Brandes, for doing a terrific job as my editors at W. W. Norton. They not only corrected my not-so-native language but also made many suggestions and criticisms that made the book much more compelling and articulate. I thank Nuri Tınaz for his help for my research at the ISAM library in Istanbul, and “Kiti” and her mom in Washington, DC, for their support for my research at the Library of Congress.

I also am thankful to Bruce Chapman, I˙skender Öksüz, Fuat Andıç, Linda Whetstone, Morgaan Sinclair, Alper Bilgili, Ahmet Kuru, and Bilal Sambur, who took the time to read the galleys and made very helpful comments. The support of my father, Taha Akyol, who not only inspired some of the ideas in this book but also helped me articulate them, was particularly invaluable. So was the emotional support of my gracious mother, Tülin Akyol, and my beloved young brother, Ertug˘rul, from whom I expect better works.

Finally, the highest praise should go for God the Almighty, from whom, I believe, come all our gifts. As we say in the Islamic tradition; it is us who show the effort, it is Him who grants the success.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1.
Qur’an 23:78. Mohammedali H. Shakir,
The Qur’an Translation
(Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, 1983); hereafter, Shakir translation.

2.
Page Rockwell, “Secret Cutting,” Salon.com, October 30, 2006.

3.
Warner Todd Huston, “Muslim Mutilation of Little Girl in Atlanta, Georgia,” Americandaily.com, October 27, 2006.

4.
Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hemlund,
Female ‘Circumcision’ in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), p. 168.

5.
Richard Pankhurst, “A Historical Examination of Traditional Ethiopian Medicine,”
Ethiopian Medical Journal
3 (1965): 157–72.

6.
Frances A. Althaus, “Female Circumcision: Rite of Passage or Violation of Rights?,”
International Family Planning Perspectives
23, no. 3 (September 1997).

7.
Soli Özel, “Gelecegi Kurmak (3),”
Habertürk
, September 10, 2010.

8.
By “secularism police” in Turkey, I refer to the policemen whom some Turkish universities used to post at their gates. Until 2010, when the headscarf ban virtually ended, one of their jobs was to make sure that no student with “unmodern outlook” (particularly the female students who wear headscarves) could get onto the campus.

9.
In his 1905 book
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
German sociologist Max Weber argued that Puritan ethics and ideas in Europe had positively influenced the development of modern capitalism. The term
Islamic Calvinists
comes from a report by the European Stability Initiative (
Islamic Calvinists: Change and Conservatism in Central Anatolia
, September 19, 2005, Berlin/Istanbul).

10.
Dücane Cündioglu, “Düsünürken modern, inanırken geleneksel” [Modern when Thinking, Traditional when Believing],
Yeni Safak
, December 13, 2009. Cündioglu, a conservative who is highly critical of Islamic capitalism, says this somewhat disapprovingly.

CHAPTER ONE: A LIGHT UNTO THE TRIBES

1.
Robert A. Sirico,
Toward a Free and Virtuous Society
(Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute, 1997), p. 2.

2.
Ibn-i Ishak’s
Sira
[Life of the Prophet], quoted in Karen Armstrong,
Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 85.

3.
Western Christians sometimes regard Allah as a uniquely Islamic name for God, or even a name for a deity totally separate from the one they worship. In fact, Allah is Arabic for “the God.” No wonder it is used by Arabic-speakers of all Abrahamic faiths, including Christians and Jews. Arab Christians today, having no other word for God than Allah, use terms such as Allah al-‘Ab, or “God the Father.”

4.
For an example of this argument, see Caner Taslaman,
The Quran: Unchallengeable Miracle
(Istanbul: Çitlembik/Nettleberry Publications), 2006.

5.
Hans Küng,
Islam: Past, Present and Future
(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), p. 75.

6.
Albert Hourani,
A History of the Arab Peoples
(London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 17.

7.
Qur’anic verses 17:73–75 refer to this incident.

8.
W. Montgomery Watt,
Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 232.

9.
Armstrong,
Muhammad
, p. 59.

10.
See Qur’an 2:30–34. It is notable that in these verses, Adam, the first man, is elevated over the angels by the “names—taught to him by God. Some Muslim scholars have interpreted these “names—as the faculty to conceptualize things, which distinguish mankind from other creatures. “The Qur’anic view of Adam’s
khilafa
[viceroyship],” further argues Muslim thinker Parvez Manzoor, “is a supremely humanistic doctrine, without the hubris and arrogance of errant humanism which according to the critics of modernity is its bane and the source of its nihilism.” S. Parvez Manzoor, “Faith beyond Political Correctness: Islam’s Commitment to Humanity,”
IslamOnline
, August 4, 2003.

11.
Qur’an 90:4–17, with Arabic words anglicized. Abdalhaqq Bewley and Aisha Bewley,
The Noble Qur’an: A New Rendering of its Meaning in English
(Norwich, UK: Bookwork, 1999); hereafter, Bewley translation.

12.
Qur’an 6:164.

13.
Qur’an 6:94, translation from Fazlur Rahman, “The Status of the Individual in Islam,”
Islamic Studies
5, no. 4 (1996): 321.

14.
Fred M. Donner,
Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. xii. In his book, Donner opposes some Orientalist views, such as the idea that Islam emerged as a “social, economic, or ‘national’” movement rather than a religious one.

15.
Küng,
Islam
, p. 153.

16.
Asma Afsaruddin,
First Muslims: History and Memory
(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), p. 23.

17.
As for the Islamic change in the Arabic custom of vendetta, Tor Andrae notes: “Mohammed was unable completely to abolish blood-vengeance. Apparently it was too deeply rooted in the legal conceptions of the Arabs. But he attempted to check the most striking abuse of this primitive custom by stipulating that only
one
life could be taken, the life of a free man for a free man, of a woman for a woman, of a slave for a slave. Unintentional homicide does not give one the right to blood-vengeance. The kinsmen of the victim must be satisfied with a settlement consisting of one hundred camels for a man and fifty camels for a woman.” Tor Andrae,
Mohammed: The Man and His Faith
, trans. Theophil Menzel (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 79.

18.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam
, vol. 1,
The Classical Age of Islam
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 181.

19.
For an example of this argument, see Rodney Stark,
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success
(New York: Random House, 2006), especially pp. 24–26.

20.
Qur’an 5:48, Bewley translation.

21.
Qur’an 2:164, Bewley translation.

22.
Qur’an 59:14, Bewley translation.

23.
Maxime Rodinson cites Henri Lammens’s comment in his
Islam and Capitalism
(London: Saqi Books, 2007), p. 115.

24.
Martin Lings,
Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources
(Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1995), pp. 258–59.