WHICH IS WHY W COULD SO EASILY BECOME ITS MARTIN LUTHER:

Liberating Islam: A concerned Muslim tries to do his part. (Kathryn Jean Lopez, 7/26/11, National Review)

A practicing Muslim, [Mustafa Akyol] is the author of a new book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. He talks about the case, as he sees it, with National Review Online's Kathryn Jean Lopez. [...]

LOPEZ: You ask, "Could authoritarian Muslims be just authoritarians who happen to be Muslim?" But isn't it a huge obstacle that they have as much Islamic material to work with?

AKYOL: Sure, there is a lot of material in the classical Sharia that Muslim authoritarians of today can refer to -- as they do. But I am showing that those materials were also products of authoritarians who happened to be Muslim a millennium ago. One of my basic arguments is that most authoritarian elements within the Sharia come from post-Koranic (i.e., "man-made") parts of Islam. I also show that the more liberal strains within this "man-made" tradition were suppressed by the more rigid camp, which we face in the modern world, in its purest form, as Wahhabism.

LOPEZ: You're not an Islamic scholar. Why should a Muslim believe your interpretations and insights? Why should an infidel or anyone?

AKYOL: Well, I am not an Islamic scholar, I don't claim to be one, and I don't need to be one. For I am not issuing fatwas (religious opinions) here. Much of what I do is to show how Islamic thought evolved over time and how things could have been different. As for my argumentative chapters -- "Freedom from the State," "Freedom to Sin," and "Freedom from Islam" -- most of the ideas I express there are already advanced by various theologians, such as the modernist "Ankara school" in Turkey. What I did was to take those ideas from dry academic papers and make them more accessible -- and, I hope, convincing for a broader audience.

LOPEZ: Doesn't that hit an overwhelming obstacle though? There is no authoritative reading. There is no one leader who can be a voice of reason.

AKYOL: You are right, and no one can do anything about it. Islam, especially Sunni Islam, has never had any pope or anything like a church hierarchy. In that sense, it is more "Protestant" than "Catholic." In other words, any charismatic imam who claims to get the scripture right can create his own following. That's why the only way forward is convincing more and more individual Muslims of the more tolerant and flexible interpretations of Islam. That's why, as a concerned Muslim, I tried to do my part.

The delicious irony is that Islam eventually will mean whatever we in the Anglosphere decide it does.

Posted by oj at July 31, 2011 8:46 AM
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