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Can Islamists be Modern Liberals?
Respected Life is all for educating its' readers through different perspectives which is why we enjoy publishing guest posts.
We found this amazing article from Michael Rank online.
Michael Rank is a doctoral candidate in Middle East history who also writes at the educational website, Five Minute Courses. He has studied Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, and French but can still pull out a backwater Midwestern accent if need be. He has also worked as a journalist in Istanbul where he reported on religion and human rights.
This particular article questions the possibility of Modern Liberal Islamists. Enjoy :)
This is the question asked in the NY Times by Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol. I’ve had the pleasure to meet Mr. Akyol on many occasions and he speaks intelligently on many topics: from religion and the free market to global human rights. In this column he asks whether Muslim countries can be pious yet accept personal liberty (or modernity, as some would call it) for its non-religious citizens. Here is his key idea:
The main bone of contention is whether Islamic injunctions are legal or moral categories. When Muslims say Islam commands daily prayers or bans alcohol, are they talking about public obligations that will be enforced by the state or personal ones that will be judged by God?
I’ll get to his question in a second, but first I want to address what I think is the question behind the question: Is Islam and modernity compatible? Well, depending on how you define “modernity, ” they have been attempting compatibility for over a century. The dapper man pictured to the right is Abdulhamit II, the Ottoman Sultan from 1876 to 1909. Although he promoted a robust Islamic identity in his weakening Empire, he also thought of Islam as something that could be consciously produced to fit within the modern world and not a “taken-for-grant” aspect of society. He promoted the building of schools that taught modern science, Western language instruction, and the humanities along side Islamic theology. He reformed the legal system according to French civil and criminal law. And he also worked to fashion himself as a European monarch rather than as a theocratic leader.
Returning to Mustafa’s question, just because something is modern, does it mean that it fits within religious liberty? Not necessarily. Many Middle Eastern and predominately Muslim countries embrace modernity but have a terrible track record when it comes to separating public obligations from personal belief. Just ask the Christian and Jewish minorities have been fleeing the Middle East for the better part of a century. A 2012 Religious Freedom Report ranks nearly all Muslim countries as “Partly Free” or “Unfree.”
But there are some beacons of light. Mustafa talks of his homeland of Turkey that has fiercely guarded its secular past and does work hard to be liberals and protect the religious liberty of all. While they haven’t done a great job concerning religious minorities (the dwindling number of Greeks, Jews, and Armenians in the country have fought for decades to have personal property restored that was confiscated by previous regimes), the ruling AKP party and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured left) has made more headway on this issue than any of its predecessors. Even though it is a moderate Islamist party, it has worked harder to cultivate positive relations with non-Muslim religious bodies such as the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate than any of the secularist political parties of previous decades.
This is clearly an ongoing, unsettled question that varies greatly from country-to-country in the Middle East.
For more info like this come to our website at http://fiveminutecourses.com. We offer crash courses from expects on any subject you can imagine.
We found this amazing article from Michael Rank online.
Michael Rank is a doctoral candidate in Middle East history who also writes at the educational website, Five Minute Courses. He has studied Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, and French but can still pull out a backwater Midwestern accent if need be. He has also worked as a journalist in Istanbul where he reported on religion and human rights.
This particular article questions the possibility of Modern Liberal Islamists. Enjoy :)
This is the question asked in the NY Times by Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol. I’ve had the pleasure to meet Mr. Akyol on many occasions and he speaks intelligently on many topics: from religion and the free market to global human rights. In this column he asks whether Muslim countries can be pious yet accept personal liberty (or modernity, as some would call it) for its non-religious citizens. Here is his key idea:
The main bone of contention is whether Islamic injunctions are legal or moral categories. When Muslims say Islam commands daily prayers or bans alcohol, are they talking about public obligations that will be enforced by the state or personal ones that will be judged by God?
I’ll get to his question in a second, but first I want to address what I think is the question behind the question: Is Islam and modernity compatible? Well, depending on how you define “modernity, ” they have been attempting compatibility for over a century. The dapper man pictured to the right is Abdulhamit II, the Ottoman Sultan from 1876 to 1909. Although he promoted a robust Islamic identity in his weakening Empire, he also thought of Islam as something that could be consciously produced to fit within the modern world and not a “taken-for-grant” aspect of society. He promoted the building of schools that taught modern science, Western language instruction, and the humanities along side Islamic theology. He reformed the legal system according to French civil and criminal law. And he also worked to fashion himself as a European monarch rather than as a theocratic leader.
Returning to Mustafa’s question, just because something is modern, does it mean that it fits within religious liberty? Not necessarily. Many Middle Eastern and predominately Muslim countries embrace modernity but have a terrible track record when it comes to separating public obligations from personal belief. Just ask the Christian and Jewish minorities have been fleeing the Middle East for the better part of a century. A 2012 Religious Freedom Report ranks nearly all Muslim countries as “Partly Free” or “Unfree.”
But there are some beacons of light. Mustafa talks of his homeland of Turkey that has fiercely guarded its secular past and does work hard to be liberals and protect the religious liberty of all. While they haven’t done a great job concerning religious minorities (the dwindling number of Greeks, Jews, and Armenians in the country have fought for decades to have personal property restored that was confiscated by previous regimes), the ruling AKP party and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured left) has made more headway on this issue than any of its predecessors. Even though it is a moderate Islamist party, it has worked harder to cultivate positive relations with non-Muslim religious bodies such as the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate than any of the secularist political parties of previous decades.
This is clearly an ongoing, unsettled question that varies greatly from country-to-country in the Middle East.
For more info like this come to our website at http://fiveminutecourses.com. We offer crash courses from expects on any subject you can imagine.
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