Stumbling toward liberty to find God

Turkish journalist and author Mustafa Akyol's Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty has three parts, all very valuable to an enquiring reader.

The first section -- The Beginnings -- is a highly readable, uncomplicated narrative of the intellectual history of Islam as the faith expanded beyond its Arabian peninsula origins and became a world empire. Akyol explicates a repeated conflict between two Islamic schools of thought, Rationalists and Traditionalists. The former believed that the faith of Muslims was compatible with individual liberty and free will, with objectivity and reason. The latter, who almost always had the support of the political authorities of their day, scorned such theological exploration, insisting on unchanging dogmatism and narrow constructions of the stories of the Prophet which served as glosses on the many subjects not addressed in the Qur'an. All of this is history remains controversial, but Akyol makes the contours of the ongoing struggle quite accessible to non-Muslim readers. (It's not as if historic Christianity has failed to familiarized people from a European tradition with perennial intramural theological and organizational quarrels.)

The second section -- The Modern Era -- traces how these currents played out in the last days of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century and on through its collapse in 1918. Unlike the rest of Islamic Asia, Africa and the Far East, the Ottoman heartland never fell under direct Western rule which afforded both its modernizers and it conservative clerics a freedom to make their own paths toward accommodation with western, Christian, European modernity. Modern Turkey's subsequent rulers continued a pattern of oscillation between military dictatorship, radical secularization, and, sometimes, a search for an Islamic liberalism.

Akyol published this book in 2011, a moment which proved a high water mark for the potential for such an Islamic liberalism. Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed to be leading Turkey toward intellectual pluralism, democracy, and religious tolerance. In the years since, Erdogan has become one of Donald Trump's favorite autocrats, jailing thousands of opponents and remaking Turkey's political system to protect his power. In this book, Fethullah Gülen was a clerical educator cooperating with Erdogan; today it has been revealed that Erdogan tried to pay Trump's fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to kidnap Gülen from his refuge in Pennsylvania.

Despite the demise of the political space for a different Islam in Turkey, Akyol's third section -- Signposts on the Liberal Road -- remains an interesting catalogue of what Muslim reformers might seek to develop if they have the chance. He tries to lay out for non-technical readers the predicate in Muslim tradition and theology for a religion 1) emancipated from state power; 2) affirming human adulthood by admitting a "freedom to sin" while still condemning wrongdoing; and 3) even allowing for individual freedom of belief including what traditionalists would call criminal apostasy. He sums up with a bold affirmation:

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

These days, Mustafa Akyol is a New York Times opinion writer -- and he's still making the same arguments to his co-religionists for the same evolution of religious understanding on the same basis. Just last month, he responded to the announcement that the Sultanate of Brunei interpreted Islamic law to require stoning of homosexuals with a column headed "The Sultan of Brunei Doesn’t Understand Modern Islam; The Ottoman Empire was more liberal." If you have any interest in humane Islam, I recommend it highly.