Islam, Christ, and Liberty | Mustafa Akyol | EP 201

Yeah, well we can't get we can't let the literalists get away with the notion that their understanding of a sentence is right. That just isn't how a text works. It's way more complicated than that, and that's a big problem because it opens up the specter of infinite interpretations, which is the post-modernist dilemma. But saying the text has no meaning or any meaning is no solution to that; it's like saying life has any meaning or no meaning. It's a problem, especially when they say their understanding is right and they have the right to dominate the state and they have to impose that on everybody else. So that's the key problem we have.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have as my guest Mustafa Akyol. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, where he focuses on the intersection between public policy, Islam, and modernity. Since 2013, he's also been a frequent opinion writer for The New York Times, covering politics and religion in the Muslim world. He is the author of several books, including the most recent "Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance" (2021), "Why I as a Muslim... Sorry, Why as a Muslim I Defend Liberty," which is also 2021, "The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims" (2017), and "Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty" (2011). His books have been translated into many languages and praised in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Financial Times, and many publications across the Muslim world. Meanwhile, "Islam Without Extremes" was banned in Malaysia for challenging the authority of the religion police, so to speak. The Thinking Muslim, a popular podcast, recently defined Akyol as probably the most notable Muslim modernist and reformer, so that's really something. In July 2021, Prospect magazine in the UK listed him among the world's top 50 thinkers, and that's quite the pinnacle. He's been thinking about the problems of making peace in the modern world for a very long time and stressing the need for liberalization in the Islamic world and perhaps some modification on the Christian side as well, along the lines at least of what happened in the West. He's interested in theological questions as well as political questions, and I'm particularly interested in talking to him because the conflict between Islam and the Jewish and the Christian worlds is a theological and political problem as well as a psychological problem. So welcome! I'm very much looking forward to this conversation, and I hope I have many more of the same with many Islamic thinkers. So thanks for agreeing to talk to me.

Thank you so much, Dr. Peterson. It's a pleasure and a privilege to have this conversation with you, and I hope this should be the beginning of broader conversations between Muslims and Western intellectuals on crucial issues of peace, coexistence, freedom, and toleration that we all need to have and need to cultivate in our respective traditions. So let me start with a really difficult issue that I've been thinking a lot about lately, partly because of the—well, some of the, what would you say—incomprehensible goings-on that bedevil the Western world at the moment. Now, I've been thinking a lot about this statement in the New Testament about rendering unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's—the idea that there's a clear distinction between those two. And I believe that to be true for psychological reasons as well as political reasons. And it's an extraordinarily notable statement in my estimation. I don't know if you could find a single sentence that anyone has ever said that has had a bigger impact on the history of the world. Because as I understand it, that statement was the justification for the development in the West of political processes that were independent of the theological substructure beneath them, and the justification for that, that there were separate domains and that was okay theologically. And so I want to know if that's your understanding of the situation as well, and then we can talk about what that means for Islam where I understand that it's not so obvious, let's say, that such a distinction can be easily drawn.

I would totally agree with you that the separation of church and state in the Western tradition has been a blessing for humanity. I mean the West itself and the broader, I think, human story, and I think that's evident in the fact that a lot of Muslims around the world today who are persecuted in their countries come to live in the West, where they find freedom. And if it was a Christian theocracy, you know, they wouldn't be happily living there. I mean, a few times I said that there is one country in which all denominations of Islam happily live together without any sectarian persecution, and that is the United States of America. And I'm sure Canada is doing pretty well, or the UK pretty well. One thing—I mean some, of course, separate some models of separation of religion and state sometimes went illiberal towards religion, authoritarian towards religion, and that's a problem. For example, I see that in the French tradition, and when secularism is understood in that sort of intolerant way and somehow a bias towards religion, actually it becomes harder to accept from a religious point of view.

And one problem in the Islamic tradition is that we always had the French version in my country, Turkey, and in Tunisia. So we never got a full sense of a classically liberal idea of secularism. But I mean that's the political story. I mean, we can discuss more. But coming back to your point, it is remarkable that actually a statement from Jesus Christ, you know, right there in the New Testament, has been discovered and used to justify the separation of church and state. I mean, the very life story of Christ is interesting. I mean, he was never the state, right? He was actually persecuted by the state. So there's a great story there. But I will also remind you of one thing: for centuries, Christians didn't understand the render unto Caesar and render unto God as the justification of secularism. Actually, it was used to justify the divine rights of kings as well. I mean, Robert Filmer makes that argument in his Patriarcha, and John Locke argues against him. So it was used by Christians to defend divine rights of kings. But then other Christians said, "Hey, no, no, no. There's a better understanding of this. It actually says there are separate authorities here, and the one that the divine authority is what we're loyal to, and the political one should be based on contracts." So that gave us, of course, the liberal tradition that I highly value. But I will say a similar process of re-reading the scripture is taking place in the Muslim world in the past few centuries—the past two centuries. In the late 19th century, a tradition broadly called Islamic modernism, which I hope to represent and I'm trying to advance, also said, "Well, there are messages in the Quran that our classical scholars maybe didn't fully get or didn't fully develop because in their time and context it wasn't possible. But now we see the full meaning of that." For example, one example is a powerful statement in the Quran, which reads in Arabic, which means there is no compulsion in religion. I mean, it doesn't say secular state, but it means religion should be based on no compulsion. In other words, freedom. And this was there in the Quran for centuries, and Muslims made only a little sense of this. They said, "Okay, this means you will not convert people to enter Islam." Generally, that was observed in the classical Islamic tradition. That's why Jews and Christians could live under Islam. But they didn't understand it in other ways—for example, this should mean that perhaps if people want to convert out of Islam, that is apostasy, it should be free too based on this verse. But no, no. They said, "You know, actually, it doesn't mean that way." So they limited the meaning of the verse, and of course, there was religious policing checking people are really pious or not, or persecution of heretics. These things happen in Islamic history. But now other Muslim thinkers are saying, "Listen, when God said there is no compulsion in religion, it's a universal statement of no compulsion—in other words, religious freedom." So that's a new reading that Muslim scholars of the more modernist or reformist persuasion have been advocating in the past, let's say, two centuries. And my book was banned in Malaysia precisely because I argued for religious freedom based on such Quranic basis.

Well, the pathway from a statement like that to a fully developed political and theological system that are separate in the details but somehow still able to mutually function, and in some sense one still containing the other, I would argue— you know, even in the United States, it's one country under God. That's in the background all the time in some sense. And I would also say that the elevation of the right to free speech as perhaps the primary right—and I'm speaking psychologically here to some degree—is a reflection in the political domain, I think, of what was being developed symbolically in Christian theology with the idea of the divine word. And that idea, in many ways, is older than Christianity. It's older than Judaism as well. Like, you can see—like, I've traced that back, for example, to the Mesopotamian writings about Marduk, who was the god who emerged at the pinnacle of the Mesopotamian gods and who was the model for the sovereign of the Mesopotamian emperor. And he had eyes all the way around his head, and he spoke magic words. And so even if you trace our stories back as far back as we've been able to trace them, the idea that there was something divine about the word itself. So, and we could have a discussion about what that divinity means, and I'm interested in doing that because you wrote this book, "The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims." And that’s— that's all of this—all of this is tangled up in some sense in the figure of Christ historically and mythologically. And so in the West, I think we managed to maintain the relationship between the secular and the religious by putting forth these axiomatic rights, which are in some sense religious in their derivation, and they slot into nicely into the religious understructure but then simultaneously allowed for enough freedom so the political could do its own thing. And so that's partly why I'm so curious about your writings about Christ and about his place in Muslim thinking. Obviously in the West, whatever Christ was, was elevated to the highest place. Right? Now, how do you understand—now, I know Christ is a major figure in Islamic thinking, but there are differences, so can you help me—can you wade me through that to some degree?

Definitely. First of all, to enter the discussion, I should just maybe make one broad statement, and that is that in the Western world, in the 20th century, people began to speak about the Judeo-Christian tradition. And I think it's a very valuable way of looking into the world. Yes, there's a Judeo-Christian tradition, but I think there is something missing in that—there's Islam that is missing. Because I think, I see the world history and I look at there is a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition because it's all Abrahamic monotheism coming from actually from Judaism. Judaism had begun, I mean, historically initiated monotheism, and then it had a big outburst with Christianity, the greatest outburst, but then six centuries later it had a second outburst with Islam, which spread monotheism in four corners of the world. I mean, there are people in living Indonesia whose name is Moses or Abraham. I mean, why are they coming? I mean, because Islam brought this biblical story that brings us to some instant discussion of what these three Abrahamic religions have in common. That's extraordinarily deep. So one, they're monotheistic. Two, they partake of the same tradition, as you've pointed out. And three, they all have, to one degree or another, an insistence that the bedrock of culture is a book, which is a very strange insistence. It's taken for granted in some sense because it's been insistent upon so long. But this is something that—it's very difficult to see in some ways that a book lasts longer than a city or an empire or a country. And there's something profound about the notion that the bedrock of a culture should be a book. And there is an implicit respect for the word in that insistence, and that does unite those three religions in a very profound way.

It does, and I think it can—it has created these amazing civilizations which advance human history. And I think the very fact that Islam, speaking of Islam, advanced human history in terms of pluralism, in terms of law, in terms of religious toleration for its time, I think is undeniable. And the fact that Islam even brought, you know, Greek philosophy because of its universalism—Muslims believed in the book, but they believed that reason is also from God, so they—this created a universalistic outlook, and Muslims studied Aristotle and Plato, and even carried them to Europe. So there is an amazing history there which are the positive things. But also there are times that these religious civilizations sometimes go into a crisis, and they go self-destructive, and that has happened in Europe. I mean, if you look into 17th century, early 17th century Europe and Catholics and Protestants were, you know, killing each other for sectarian reasons. I mean, heretics were being burned at the stake, and which led people like John Locke to seek a way out. And they did it by looking into the core of religion and saying that this is not what Christ had told us. I mean, Locke says—I mean, when I read his "Letter Concerning Toleration," I said, well, he's speaking of Christian issues but he's speaking of our issues too—the idea that should there be a Christian state or not? Should heretics be persecuted or not? So he makes certain arguments: would religion be based on sincerity? If it is coerced by the state, it wouldn't. So there's no point in coercion. So those kind of arguments are, I think, very interesting, which—that's why I believe in reading these traditions as by learning from each other instead of thinking, oh, they are the Christians and they have nothing to do with us, or these are Muslims, they have nothing to do with us.

Well, the problem with that perspective, you know—those are the Muslims and they have nothing to do with us—is that underneath such a presumption is, let's say, the presumption that Christians and Muslims can't talk. But even deeper than that is the presumption on the part of the person making such a statement that their interpretation of Christianity is absolutely right. And that seems ridiculously presumptuous to me. No, because I don't think that you could find a Christian worth his salt, let's say, who would regard himself as, as stellar an exemplar of Christianity as Christ. And you know, since we all fall short of the glory of God, we're all stupid and ignorant beyond belief. And so we have to listen to other people because they might know something we don't. And then you see if we take that other attitude, then there's an implicit totalitarianism already there, which is, well, I'm right, and you're not only wrong but wrong in some way that's probably malevolent. And sometimes that's true, but it's not a good way to start a conversation.

It is not, and I think religion becomes most dangerous when it is combined with group narcissism and acting in the name of God to punish people for their sins and heresies, you know, as you define them. And that has happened in Islam; it still happens. I mean groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, those terrorists—they are attacking Westerners, but they are attacking fellow Muslims too. And by defining them as heretics, I mean we see bombs of Shiites being—I’m sorry, mosques of Shiites being bombed by ISIS terrorists in the past— in the past two months it happened twice. And this is a destructive dynamic which has been always extreme in Islam but existed. But there are antidotes to this sort of thinking as well. And I sometimes read those antidotes, and I say, oh, in the Christian tradition, here's an example of that. I mean, if you can—for example, let me give you an example: one of the big disputes in early Islam was who was the true Muslim? Like there was a civil war between the first Muslims, it's called the First Fitna, and supporters of Ali and Muawiya had the two figures. And I would sympathize with Ali, but they had a war, and there's a fanatic faction called the Hawarij, the dissenters. And they said, these are both— they have gone wrong, they have sinned. Because they have sinned, they are not Muslims—they become infidels, and infidels should be punished. So they started killing them. They were like the terrorists of the first century, always hated by mainstream Muslims. But what they were doing is to judge people and punish them in the name of God. But there was an alternative theology called Murja theology, and it's called Murja in Arabic, means postponer. They said, on this issue of who's right and wrong, we don't know—we cannot judge; only God can judge. So let's postpone this to afterlife to be resolved by God, and until then, until it is resolved by God in heaven—when we go there—we can live and let live. So they promoted toleration among Muslims. Now this actually allowed calming down some of the early violence and broad coexistence in different factions of Islam. It was brought into Sunni Islam by Abu Hanifa and the Hanafi school and added broader acceptance.

And I was particularly struck to read something very similar in John Locke in his "Letter Concerning Toleration." He says there are different churches for every church; the third is theirs. They are orthodox to themselves, and if one of them dominates government, they will persecute others. And he says, let’s leave this to Almighty the Judge to decide which doctrine is right, and in the meantime, let the government only protect the rights, the natural rights of all people, and let people follow— that's part of the thorny psychological problem of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's because a lot of times now when people talk about tolerance, they insist that judgment is wrong in essence, and the reason they're afraid of judgment is because in its extremes it can lead to the demonization of others, and we know exactly where that goes. But there's no dispensing with judgment. You can't even look at something without judgment because you have to pick what you're going to look at instead of something else, and you can't act without judgment. And so all of us are faced with this problem of, well, what we should believe and how we can be tolerant at the same time we believe, and how we can be tolerant at the same time that we have to judge. And there's a kernel in that in that insistence by Locke—was it Locke you were referring to, or was it Mill’s "Letter on Tolerance?"

I was just referring to John Locke, sorry.

It's Locke, yeah. Okay. I just slipped my mind for a second. It's very difficult for us to figure out what we can tolerate if we must simultaneously believe right. And that's a problem I've been trying to work out psychologically for a very long time. You see that in your own family when you're a father, let's say, because you obviously have to have tolerance for your children, but at the same time you're obligated to show them the difference, let's say, between right and wrong, and also to help them separate the wheat from the chaff, which is judgment. And so, well, I totally see the balance you're pointing out here. But I agree with—that's why I use the term tolerance because I mean, you might not need to accept everything and cherish and bless everything, but you need to accept different ways of life or theologies or doctrines. And by judgment, I mean of course we can have value judgments. I judge a lot of people in society. I say these people are bigoted, or these people are arrogant, or their way of life is destructive for themselves. I have those judgments, but I'm not going to go and punish them in the name of God unless they attack me. So there should be a social order in which we can disapprove people’s ways of life, religious beliefs, theologies, and our religions make truth statements. And we cannot get away from that. I mean, you say Christ is God, the other person will say, well, no, that's not acceptable for my theology. So there are gaps that we cannot and we should not try to make disappear, but we can live together. And that's why tolerance is the key idea, and that's why by judgment what I'm referring to is judging and punishing in the name of God. And of course, crime will be punished—I mean, theft will be punished or murder will be punished. But if someone has a doctrine, religious doctrine that I find wrong, I should tolerate that person, although I can criticize, of course, and that, and I can be criticized back, which what free speech allows, of course, for us.

So, I mean, sorry, you asked me about Christ, but I opened a broader chapter, if you will. Do you want to—you want me to go into that discussion?

Yes, yes, that would be good. I mean, for a lot of Christians who may not know much about the Muslim world, it might be surprising to learn that the most prominent female figure in the whole Quran is Mary, actually. She's the only woman mentioned by name. There's a chapter named Mary. There's a chapter named after her family, Ali Imran, in the Quran. Because the calling of the Quran is to say this is a new—this is not a new religion, this is monotheism. Muhammad is God's messenger, but God had other messengers before. There was Moses, there was Abraham, there was Jesus Christ, and there was Mary. And the Quran tells the story of Mary to affirm something which is, again, might be surprising to Christians. The Quran affirms the virgin birth of Christ, that Mary was a chaste woman. She didn't—she was not touched by any man and one day she heard an angel coming and say you will have a son, and she says, how can I have a son? No man has ever touched me. But the angel says this is what God willed, and He wills and He creates. So that is how Christ comes to, you know, his mother's womb. And ultimately, he comes, and the Quran calls him the word of God. Again, this is a very powerful statement if you're familiar with the Gospel of John. And this is very unusual, but the same Quran also insists that he was not divine, so he should not be worshipped. So on the one hand, it's a reverence of Mary and Jesus—it tells a lot of things very similar to the Gospel of Luke and some apocryphal gospels also resonate strongly with the Quran, interestingly. So there's great respect, great reverence; there are good words about Christians. I mean, in one verse, the Quran says among all people, you will love the Christians nearest to the believers—that's the Muslims—because it says they're not arrogant and they have learned scholars.

And so there are a lot of positive things because Islam was born—let's not forget that Islam was born as a monotheist campaign in an idolatrous society. Meccans were worshiping idols, and Prophet Muhammad, who didn't think of becoming a prophet until the age of 40, he heard the voice in a cave, angel Gabriel, like a burning bush experience of Moses, which told him, "Recite in the name of God who created man." And then he became convinced that he's God's prophet, and he started to preach monotheism. And when you preach monotheism, Muslims consider Jews and Christians as their allies. That's why when Muslims were persecuted in Mecca, Prophet Muhammad told a group of Muslims to flee to Ethiopia, the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. They went there, and they were really saved by the Christian king. That's a memory that Muslims have.

So what does it mean in Islam that Christ—well, two things that you said. That Christ is—his birth is the virgin birth is accepted—that's a major issue, which we should also discuss—and also the emphasis on Mary and what that means, let's say, for the position of women, theologically within Islam, and also what does it mean when Muslims claim—believe that Christ is the word of God? Now it's hard for me as a Westerner to separate that out from claims of divinity. And we could also talk in some sense about worship, about what worship means. And so when I try to look at these things from a psychological perspective as much as possible and stay out of theological territory, where I'm a neophyte in any case, one of the things that worship means to me psychologically is something like the desire or compulsion to imitate. Like you think about—to worship something is to place it in the place of highest value. And people claim to think that actions speak louder than words, and I think that's a reasonable proposition. If you act something out, it's pretty compelling evidence that you believe it, and that means in some ways that you hold it in the highest place. And so to worship is to imitate, I think in the deepest sense. It might be to celebrate what should be imitated as well, something like that. And this is a complicated issue because we're unbelievably imitative. And I was struck when my kids were little, when they were playing house, for example. My son would play out the father, and you might say, well, he was copying his dad. But he wasn't. Because he wasn't moving the same way. He saw me move. What he was doing was watching me over a whole variety of instances and then also watching portrayals of fathers in media, movies, and TV shows, and that sort of thing, and abstracting out from that some kind of, I would call it like a disembodied spirit which represented the core essence of paternity and then imitating that. And I see in that the biological underpinnings, let's say, of what religious people talk about when they talk about worship. So when the Muslim world regards Christ as the word of God—but not divine—I don't know how to understand that.

Very good question. I mean, it says in the Quran that he is a word from God, and it doesn't explain much, and Muslims discuss what this means exactly. It's not certainly understood in the way that the Gospel of John defines—that word was with God, and the word was God. So that's not—the beginning of time.

Yeah, no, that’s not the step taken there. The most common interpretation said, well, he was the word of God in the sense that God—it was the word of God directed to Mary, so He was created with the Creator word—be—in Mary’s body. So that's what it means. So that's generally a low interpretation—low Christology, if you will. But there are alternative views, which I mentioned in my book "The Islamic Jesus," that some people said maybe he was the word of God in the sense that he was the revelation itself; like everything he did and said was revelation, like God's living word, which still, though, from an Islamic point of view, means he was something like the Quran—like the Quran we believe is revelation, God's revelation. So he was—the revelation became flesh rather than the revelation became a book, right? And that’s why the New Testament narrates about Jesus. I mean, he is the revelation, and the New Testament's a report about the revelation. So that's, I think, that’s a possible step to take within the Quranic framework. However, still, Muslims don't worship the Quran. I mean, you say still God is beyond—I mean, God is at another transcendent level and in Islam.

So let's talk about that in relationship to the totalitarian impulse. Okay, I mean, I just had a discussion with Sam Harris, and I mentioned that I was going to be talking to some Islamic scholars. I didn't mention you by name, and I asked him if he might want to participate in such a discussion. He said he's done that; he's been there, done that, and so he wasn't particularly interested in that, although we had a wonderful conversation. But one of the—what I see happening very frequently with thinkers like Harris, and I'm saying this with all due respect, I truly am, is that for them there is very little distinction between the religious and the totalitarian. And that's the essence of the objection. Now, Sam has come to regard some domains as sacred, and we talked a lot about that. And I think that it's—I think it's an understatement of the severity of the totalitarian problem to attribute it merely to the religious. And part of the reason I think that is—well, look what happened in the 20th century in the West. It's like, well, there was the Nazis and how about Mao, and then there's Stalin, and you could say those were religions—but you know, you're pretty weasely—we're using weasely words at that point. You expand the definition of what constitutes religion so it doesn't violate your initial presuppositions. And so we could see in Christianity and in Judaism and in Islam the constant human struggle to deal with whatever is the totalitarian impulse, which is something like insistence that what I already know is literally the word of God. It's in some sense absolutely true. I have the knowledge; there shall be no deviation from that. And to identify that with tradition in religion I think is a big mistake. It doesn't get to the issue.

I'm totally on the same page with you on that. I mean, the history of the 20th century shows that some of the greatest crimes against humanity were committed by secular ideologies. I mean, communism and Nazism, as you well put. And today, probably the worst totalitarian regimes in the world, number one is North Korea. I mean, it's a secular state, but it's a bit of a Juche ideology, but it's totally secular. So being—I mean, I'm in favor of a secular state in terms of a neutral state that respects everybody's rights regardless of religion or creed, but secularization of society, it doesn't necessarily bring anything good. I mean, we have seen that.

Okay, so let's talk about that for a second. So I've been trying to figure out—alright, so one of the things I realized a long time ago as a psychologist was that there were depths of meaning, and we have intimations of this constantly. So for example, we can read a book, and we think that was shallow, and we can read another book, and we think that was deep, and then when we talk to a bunch of other people, they tend to think that the shallow book was shallow and the deep book was deep, and they tend to think that shallow and deep actually mean something. And so there's this experience of depth. Now, I've tried to figure out what that meant exactly. And what occurred to me was that—and this was partly derived from watching people in my clinical practice—so imagine people will get much more upset about a pending divorce than they will about a discussion about who should do the dishes. And you think, well, that's obvious. It's like, yeah, it's obvious because that's what happens to you. But it isn't easy to explain. So what I thought was what I hypothesized was something like we have representations of the world of different sizes and different temporal expanses—a small plan for the day nested inside a plan for the week and nested inside a plan for the month—the year, nested inside our family, nested inside our community, nested inside our polity, nested inside our theology, okay? And the deeper you go, the more those representations are dependent on the more representations are dependent on that level. And so when something happens to you where you're deeply affected or traumatized, let's say, technically what's happened is that you've taken a blow to a representation upon which almost all your other representations depend. And so then you could think technically about the difference between the secular and the religious as being one of depth. Once you go down to the fundamental substrata, so that would be the most axiomatic of presuppositions—whether you're secular or not, you're in the religious domain.

Yeah, okay, okay.

Okay, so the people who call themselves secular—and of course I have many friends who are secular and I respect that point of view—but they have metaphysical beliefs at the end of the day. I mean, if you say the universe always existed and matter made us, you know, that's your creation story. I mean, every worldview has ultimately a metaphysical dimension, I think. Even if it does accept—like, coming back to your totalitarianism point, we have totalitarian entities right now. I mean, in the name of Islam, I think the Iranian Republic is pretty much—the Islamic Republic of Iran—pretty close to that; Saudi Arabia is, I mean, very oppressive. And these are the two most oppressive interpretations of Islam. ISIS is like Khmer Rouge. I mean, it was the Khmer Rouge of the Islamic spectrum, so it was pretty evil and very, I think, totalitarian too.

But there was something, though, in classical Islam—although I have a lot of criticisms towards medieval jurisprudence—but there was a value in classical Islam, and that value was in this word—which is a generally scary word in the Western today—and that's the sharia. You know, that's God's law. I mean, there are two phases of the sharia. There are a lot of things about women and apostasy and blasphemy that I keep criticizing that we have to reform those aspects, but there was another value in the sharia which highlighted my book, my new book, "Why as a Muslim I Defend Liberty." The sharia was a set of laws that were separate from the rulers. They were even above the rulers. Like sharia wasn't what the sultan required or, you know, wanted. The sharia was the law of God articulated by scholars who were generally independent of the rulers. That's why the classical medieval Islamic civilization wasn't totalitarian. There were a lot of autocratic rulers, tyrants, but they were mitigated by the sharia. And I tell them, so this is also something that I think people like Harris, let's say, and those atheist rationalists, I think they failed to understand the necessity of that.

So I mentioned ancient Mesopotamia a while back, but one thing that happened in that society was that the emperor would be taken outside the gates of the city—so it was a walled city—at the New Year's festival. And he would be stripped of his emperor garb and forced to kneel, and then the priest would slap him with a glove, and he would be forced to recite all the ways that he hadn't been an appropriate Marduk, which was the high god for the last year. So he hadn't seen what he should see if he wasn't being blind, and he hadn't said what he should have said if he was speaking the right kind of magic. And so he was humbled in front of what was highest. And the Mesopotamians were working hard, you know, in their mythology; you see this battle between the gods in the face of an apocalyptic danger. And this is a very common story worldwide, this battle between the gods. So what's highest in the face of an apocalyptic danger is the emergence of a supreme principle which constitutes the essence of sovereignty itself. And if you have a society—a secular society, let's say—where that highest thing isn't outside the polity in some sense, then you have North Korea, where the leader is elevated to the status of a god. And then you have hell, and that seems like a bad idea.

Exactly—you have Stalin, you have Mao, you have all those modern dictators, and you have the Islamist, you know, totalitarian regimes today. Because the Islamist totalitarians of today differ from the classical medieval Islamic tradition. I mean, imagine—I mean, look at the Taliban today. I mean, the Taliban has dominated Afghanistan once again. The head of the Taliban is also the head of the executive, and the judiciary, and the legislature. I mean, legislation. So that wasn't like that in classical Islam. There was a ruler, but there were also scholars who were independent from the—they were independent in the beginning, and rulers gradually actually co-opted scholars, and that was the beginning of the doom of the decline of the Islamic civilization. My friend Ahmed Kuru has a very good book about that; he shows how the scholar, religious scholars who developed law were gradually co-opted by the state, by the rulers, and that actually killed the diversity and dynamism of Islamic thought.

It means that they've been lowered from the ultimate to the political particular, and that's a catastrophe.

Exactly, and I mean, there are many tales in Islamic civilization today I think we can highlight to articulate values like rule of law or separation of powers. I mean, I tell one of them. For example, we know that in Ottoman history, Ottoman sultans were stopped by rulers sometimes from executing people out of just anger or confiscating property or overtaxing the population. They said, "This tax is not compatible with the sharia; you can overtax people." So there was a balance in the classical Islamic civilization, which worked for its time. And let's not forget that classical Islamic civilization had a toleration which, again, was not very common at the time. That's why when Jews were persecuted in Europe, they often fled to the Islamic lands. I mean, the Ottoman Empire—unfortunately, today we have a crisis in the Islamic civilization. We lost some of the blessings of the classical tradition. That tradition itself stagnated; its jurisprudence stagnated, and then we had the modern state, and these Islamic movements came with the passion to grab the modern state and use it in the name of Islam, which created a deadly mix of medieval jurisprudence and modern totalitarianism, which is the story of the Iranian Islamic Republic of Iran. Saudi Arabia is going towards the direction of...

And let's talk about the Saudis for a sec, if you don't mind.

Yeah, sure.

Okay, because why—why not do something incredibly dangerous? I mean, I am stunned at the naivety of the West in rendering unto the Wahhabis a fortune of staggering magnitude and thinking that in some way this was a recipe for medium and long-term peace. I mean, I don't—how—why do you think we're so stupid, just out of curiosity?

I mean, I think every government in the world is stupid in the sense that you know they make decisions on very short-term interest without really understanding the long-term consequences. The stupidity of Western governments just has more impact because they have more power, you know, to shape things. Regarding the Wahhabis, I mean, first of all, let's establish what Wahhabism is. Wahhabism is—I mean, first of all, Islam should be compared more to Judaism than Christianity to make I think meaningful analogies because of its theology. It's very similar to Judaism, and the idea of law, sharia, and are very similar traditions.

So in Islam, Sunni Islam is like Orthodox Judaism—it's the mainstream body, right? It's traditional, conservative, but it has some flexibility. And then there's the ultra-Orthodox, you know, tradition in Judaism. So Wahhabism represents the ultra-orthodox point of view with a violent and intolerant bent to it. So that emerged in the 18th century in the Ottoman Empire, and their first targets were other Muslims. I mean, they condemned the Ottoman Empire for being into a heresy and bida, as they call it, innovation. They attacked Sunnis, fellow Sunnis, and also slaughtered Shiites, which they consider as heretics. Then, when the Ottoman Empire banned slave trade in the middle of the 19th century, there was a revolt in Hijaz fueled by Wahhabis. They said, "Turks have gone infidels because slavery is in our jurisprudence; you cannot change that." Though, although the Ottomans were more flexible in their understanding, until the 20th century, Wahhabism was a very regressive, like a force in the middle of the Arabian desert—nations which people didn't know; they didn't go there. It was a very marginal force. In the 20th century, these people discovered that they are sitting on the world's richest oil reserves, which they consider as a blessing from God to use, you know, to advance their understanding. And also Western powers thought that, "Oh, we can use them. I mean, we can get a deal with them." First the British thought that they could be used against the Ottoman Empire. There was even some discussion that they were like Protestantism, which is potentially more tolerant—which is not. I mean, they're not like Protestants, but they were certainly not tolerant. So that was one thing, first of all, because the Ottoman Empire, being the seat of the Caliphate and the superpower, that was the problem, although you would prefer the Ottomans to the Wahhabis by any definition because of their toleration and pluralism for their time.

And then, of course, so you're making the case to some degree, if I understand you right, that a totalitarian doctrine, let's say, was granted exceptional riches, which there's no possibility they could have accrued had that theology—that totalitarian theology—had to make its way in its own way in the world. But because of the vagaries of fate, in some sense, there was immense riches at the fingertips of this movement that would have otherwise been and likely remained extraordinarily isolated.

Yes, what I'm saying is that, I mean, there are—I'm not saying that the classical Islamic world was full—I mean, it was not ideal. There was a lot of persecution of heretics here and there too, but for its time you wouldn't judge the classical Islamic civilization and say they have less religious freedom compared to what was there at Christendom at the time. That's why Jews repeatedly fled to the Muslim world. For example, from Spain to the Ottoman Empire, in the modern era, one problem is that Islamic jurisprudence—the interpretation of the sharia—stagnated. And why that happened is a big discussion among Muslims, but that's one problem. And the idea of a modern state came. The modern state with its police, which is national law controlling everything with its bureaucracy, and Islamists' movements emerge saying that we will revive the sharia by grabbing the modern state by all its centralized power, and that created the totalitarian movement in the Islamic tradition. And we see that in Saudi Arabia; we see that in Iran; we're seeing that under the Taliban. So there’s—and one problem is the Islamic world in the past two centuries modernized, but we didn't get the good forms of modernity. One thing—I mean, first of all, the only secularism Muslims experienced was the French-style secularism, which generally pushed back the believers, because if you say I'm bringing you secularism, it's a wonderful thing, which means you will not be able to wear a headscarf and go to the campus—well, there's not much freedom in that secularism. So unfortunately, it gave a bad name to that. Secondly, Arab republics got influenced by Soviet communism. I mean, Arab socialism was a very powerful move in the middle of the 20th century. Republican Turkey, my country, it westernized. It's good, but you know, it acquired its legal system from fascist Italy in the 1930s. Because let's not forget, I mean, the West was not always a liberal democratic heaven. There were a lot of bad ideas that came from the West. So I see this today in the Islamic civilization—a really perfect storm. A crisis of some—we lost some of the traditions; we have some of the toleration and pluralism we had back then. There's a stagnant jurisprudence, and bad ideas of modernity came, and when you mix them, there's a crisis in every society.

And that's why I think we Muslims need ideas that will be new, different than what we have before, but that should be rooted in the tradition. Bad ideas from the West are, in fact, devastating. I mean, when cultures object to Western hegemony in favor of their local traditions, let's say, I have a certain amount of, what would you say, understanding of why they're doing that. Because the ideas that emerged after the Renaissance, let's say, especially ideas that undermined religious tradition, are unbelievably difficult to withstand. And that's still causing all sorts of trouble in the West, and it's caused all sorts of political trouble in the West—not least this development of this absolutely anti-liberal totalitarianism that you saw in both Nazism and communism. And in the West, you know, we like to look at free modernity and say, "Well, that's us in the last 500 years," but those offshoots—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—are just as much a part of that tradition as well as the more positive elements of modernity. And so, and that's where—that's why I think that this conflation of the totalitarian impulse with the religious impulse is dangerous.

Now, I understand, though, there's another issue here that's lurking beneath the surface constantly, is that there's the spiritual element in some sense of the religious, the perception and practice. And you know, you see those juxtaposed to some degree in the New Testament when the Pharisees and the lawyers attempt to trap Christ into saying something heretical when they ask him to rank order the Mosaic commandments—what's the most important commandment—which implies that some of them aren't so important. And he just sidesteps that so absolutely brilliantly and says, well, if I remember correctly, that you should love God above all else and love your brother like yourself. And what he did there was extract out the essence of the root tradition and make that into something that's an embodied dynamic conscious practice. And it's one of those stories you read and you think, what the hell was going on there? How could someone come up with an answer like that? That's such a devastating, remarkable, creative answer, and of course, it's had a huge impact on the civilization of the world since then. But, you know, the people who criticize religion—the materialist atheist types, for example—they constantly conflate the problem of the totalitarian proclivity that tradition tends towards, if unchecked, with religion itself, and that's a huge problem because those aren't the same thing.

They're not. And I think religion obviously has become oppressive in world history when it's combined with state power. It becomes the same thing with state power, and we have examples of that in Christian history and obviously in Islamic history. But religion can also be a balance to power. It can hold values outside of the power sphere and actually check power. So, and I think there are grounds for that in the Christian tradition, and of course in the Islamic tradition, and we have to cultivate those. But I think this whole discussion of religion and power requires a rethinking of the very birth story of Islam—how Prophet Muhammad came and what he preached. So, and I have some ideas, some reformist perspectives there. I mean, I can speak about that a little bit.

Please do, please do.

Here's one thing that clouds thinking about Islam by sometimes Muslims and by sometimes others, and that is that in the very beginning of Islam, you see Prophet a preacher of monotheism, a prophet, but also somebody who led armies, who led battles, who established a state. So what is going on, right? That's why I mean some people say, you know, in Christianity it's much easier to make the case for a secular state, but in Islam it's much more difficult because they have the state at the very beginning. And it also makes Muhammad into quite a frightening figure. I mean, on the one hand, when I look at what he did, the fact that it fits in this pattern that has happened time and time again in religious history where the warring idolatry was united into a monotheism and that's a civilizing force—it means that means integration. And, of course, the empire that resulted was one of the largest empires that humans have ever created. It was an unbelievable achievement. So there's this push towards monotheism and insistence on a highest transcendent value. But as you just pointed out, at the same time, well yeah, but there was war and there was conquest and that's absent from the story of Christ completely. And so it's quite frightening from a Western perspective, I understand that.

But that's why I think we need a discussion about that which I offer in my books, especially "Reopening Muslim Minds." And I'm calling—I call for understanding why Prophet Muhammad had to fight wars. Was that a divine blueprint that he had to fulfill or was that an accident of history that he was forced into? I mean, before that, I'll just say one thing—there are, I mean, we have to compare Islamic Christianity, but to understand Islam also always check the Old Testament because I think that the story of Prophet Muhammad is also very similar to the story of Moses and also to the later Joshua and the wars in the land of Canaan. And so there are a lot of Old Testament parallels there. So here is what happened at the very birth of Islam: Prophet Muhammad began preaching monotheism in the city of Mecca in the year 610. Actually, he didn't preach publicly in the beginning for three years. They were secret; there were just about 40 people. Gradually, it became a community, and they publicly began preaching, "There's one God." And of course, the god of Abraham. It was very clear that it's a continuation of the Abrahamic tradition. Now, for ten years, because of this, they were persecuted, the pagan bigwigs of the city—the leaders of the tribes—they said to Muhammad, "You're insulting our religion. You're defying our gods. You're insulting our forefathers." In other words, they accuse Prophet Muhammad of blasphemy against their religion, and which I think should be in the minds of every Muslim today on free speech issues. But Muslims didn't give up, but Muslims didn't threaten; there was no act of violence. Muslims were not trying to found an army. And actually, there are passages in the Quran which shows that Muslims were just preaching their faith. And one of them reads, "To you your religion and to me mine." I mean, that was a statement made to the pagans. Another one says, "The Lord—the truth is from your Lord. Let anyone who want to believe it believe it. Let anyone who want to disbelieve it disbelieve it." Another verse says to Muhammad, "Oh, Muhammad, you're just a preacher. You're not a compeller over people. And if God wished, everybody would believe."

But you know, God led it this way. So there's a very non-political and non-violent message right there in Mecca. Now I ask a question that generally people didn't ask: what if the Meccans said, "Okay, do what you do, right?" And what if the Meccans said, "Let the Muslims go and preach their religion?" I think the history of Islam would be different because Muslims were just going to peacefully preach the faith. Probably the faith would grow and it would gradually win over the city, and still the Kaaba would be transformed into a monotheistic temple. But it would be a different history. What rather happened is that they persecuted the Muslims; they killed Muslims. Some of them had to flee to Ethiopia, as I said. They were almost coming to kill Prophet Muhammad himself—assassinate him. And that's why he finally fled Mecca and went to the city Yathrib, called Medina later. And there he established a community; he established a group of people; he became a political leader in the city and all their properties were plundered after they were left. Their homes were raided, and they were sold. They were raided by the pagans, and then came the first verse of the Quran which allowed war—jihad—a military jihad in the name of God. And that was in Surah Hajj. It's very interesting; it says, "Permission to fight has been given to those who have been persecuted." They were persecuted because they said, "Our Lord is one." They were driven out of their homes because they said, "Our Lord is one."

So the war aspect—the war part of the story was the reaction to persecution—the ongoing persecution. Once you start war, it went on. There were many battles, like in the ten last years—the 10 years in Mecca—there are raids, there are battles, there are fights. And when you read the Quran today, in certain chapters, Surah 9, for example, you will see harsh passages, "Go and fight the unbelievers. Go and find them. Go and kill them." You know, and those are historical commandments directing the first Muslim community, just like commandments in the Old Testament, telling Joshua or the Israelites to fight the Amalekites, you know, the tribes in the land of Canaan that were trying to kill the Israelites. So, I understand the war aspect there as an outcome of an oppressive environment, which wouldn't let Islam to grow and even exist. So Muslims had to fight not because they wanted, but they were forced into.

However, a problem—the whole thorny moral problem of what you should do when you're oppressed is not something that we've, as a species, let's say, have completely figured out. I mean, in Christianity, I would say you propose that one of the prime injunctions is to turn the other cheek. But that didn't seem to apply, so obviously, let's say, in the decades leading to World War II. And, yeah, it's not like every society doesn't have to wrestle with this problem. I mean, Christ is presented as a pacemaker; there's no doubt about that. But he's also presented in the Book of Revelation as a judge who separates the damned from the elect, and there's a harshness in that as well. And so I don't think it's—go ahead, sir.

But there is an additional problem. I mean, the founding story is not a problem, but I think we have to understand it correctly that war was a consequence of that particular context. And what is eternal about Islam to me is the theology—the faith, the practice, and the worship that was brought by Islam. But there was an additional problem after Prophet Muhammad passed away. Muslims had an army and a state, and they kept continuing. I mean, they kept conquering the world. And from, in one century, from Spain to India, basically, Muslims built an empire. And this empire itself partly transformed Islamic teaching and adjusted it to its imperial needs, and I think that's something we Muslims should see today. One clear example of this is the theory of abrogation, because the jurists who were with the imperial project—they looked at the Quran, and they saw that, well, there are verses in the Quran which says, 'You're not a compeller. You're just a preacher. Not a compeller over people.' Well, but we're having a war here, right? Like, I mean, to you, your religion, to me mine, but we are not allowing the polytheists to have this. So what they did was they took the verses about war and fighting the unbelievers, the polytheists in particular, but also Jews and Christians. Because there was a word about the people of the book—they took those verses as definitive, which abrogated the earlier verses. So a lot of the verses you will open and read the Quran today, which are tolerant, peaceful, you know, lenient—if you read medieval jurisprudence, you will find notes that the verse is there in the Quran, but it's abrogated; like it doesn't have a function, it doesn't rule, it doesn't have a hukm.

Which to me is a huge problem when you're dealing with a text as complicated as the Quran or, let's say, the Bible, where taken singly, there are certainly passages that contradict one another. And so then, well, then you were tempted by the desire to justify your own unquestioned beliefs because of your demand for power using reference to God. And then it's a worse problem than that too because, well, who's right in their interpretation? You know, and the way out of that in some sense is to approach a book like that with as much admission of your own ignorance and as much humility as possible. So that—I mean, if you assume that such a thing is reasonable, given that we're all people of the book, and pray to God in some sense that you don't bend that to your own unacknowledged malevolence and ignorance. But that's a very, very difficult thing to manage. And it isn't even clear when you manage it, which is why we need to talk to each other in part.

Exactly, and I see this abrogation theory and the theory of jihad and conquest and coercion built around that, which is right there in the Islamic jurisprudence, in medieval interpretations of the sharia as Islam interpreted for the age of empires. I mean, it was how empires were behaving at the time. Christians were doing the same things too. I mean, the Byzantine Empire was also expanding through war. They had anti-paganism laws; religious coercion was the norm of the day. Islam was born in such a world, and it took an imperial form and jurisprudence. But to me, it was not a divine blueprint that we Muslims should preserve forever; it was a different context, and we live in a different world today. So that's why we have to reinterpret, and to me, the abrogated verses of the Quran are the eternal messages of Islam—those abrogated verses which says, "To you your religion, to me mine."

And okay, so why would you—okay, so let me play devil's advocate here. I mean, you're making a judgment there, and it's a non-trivial judgment, and you could say also that it’s an unbelievably presumptuous judgment. And this is not an insult at all; this is independent of whether or not I agree with you. But we run right into this thorny problem, right? Which is, well, why—on what grounds do you think you're justified in making the claim that your interpretation should supersede that particular interpretation?

Very good question. First of all, I begin with showing that I begin by showing that the existing interpretation, the imperial interpretation, let's say, which relied on expansive jihad, coercion, suppression of heresy, apostasy laws, blasphemy laws—that's all part of that—by showing that this was not an inevitable interpretation. It was an interpretation based on imperial conditions. And I showed that people who dissented against those too—I mean, in my book in "Reopening Muslim Minds," I said, well, this became the mainstream view. But, wait, wait, there was a scholar who was actually arguing against that. There was a scholar who was saying, "No, we don't need abrogation; we just need to understand it as one big story with different emphases." There were, so there were—and I show how these were cynically used by Muslim rulers sometimes to just get rid of dissent. I mean some Muslim early critics of the Umayyad dynasty—which was mostly a tyrannical dynasty that dominated the Islamic world—they were killed as blasphemers or apostates, but they were only critics of the rulers.

So this is—so let me ask you, okay, so let me ask you another question. So you've spent a lot of time on this, you've written many books, and you've put yourself in some danger, I would say, and this has been quite successful. And so I want to know what you're up to, you know? I mean, it's like you're aiming at something with all these books. And maybe you don't even fully know what it is because you realize these things as you write, right? And as you struggle. And so I would say for a book like the Bible, there's a way that you have to approach it, I believe, that what would you say—so that you're the least likely to deceive yourself about what you're doing. And that has to be something like an orientation towards love. And love is something like the desire that the most possible good happens to the most possible people. I don't mean to be utilitarian about it; I'm not making that kind of case. But it even extends to your enemies because, well, wouldn't it be better if they didn't have such miserable lives? And wouldn't it be better if you didn't have enemies? And so you have to approach a traditional text in the spirit that the text fundamentally embodies, or you bend it to your own will. Now, you—what are you aiming at with all your books? What is it that you want?

That's a good question. Well, what do I want? I want to make, as just an ordinary but thinking Muslim, I want to make a contribution to the future of my religion in this day and age, where I see great value in Islam. I think Islam can contribute to the world in many ways, but I also see Islam being still captured by some medieval interpretations that were actually using—was used and built up for medieval imperial projects. And I need—I believe we need to rethink certain issues in Islam. There are a lot of scholars doing this. I mean, that's why I speak of the 19th-century Islamic modernists. I mean, I learned from these scholars—from Fazlur Rahman to Muhammad Abduh to Amin Liberal—and today some contemporary scholars that I quote in my book as well, but scholars write in academic articles. So, I—or very complicated books, I try to popularize these ideas because I see there's hunger for that.

I mean, there are a lot of Muslims around the world today—from Pakistan to Malaysia to Indonesia to the Arab world—who are faithful, who are happy with their religion, but they are disturbed, sometimes disgusted by the things they see in the name of their religion: oppression, violence, persecution of innocent people by calling them heretics, and so on and so forth. And they want to see a way forward: how can we go forward by preserving our faith, living our values, but also being at peace with non-Muslims and even Muslims of different persuasion?

And we can have so, do you see that—that what is perturbing them is the manifestation of that central totalitarian spirit?

It is totalitarian or just sometimes bigger than hateful. I mean, to be totalitarian, it has to be unified with power, but it is potentially totalitarian. So, yeah, well, there's the psychological equivalence, psychology exact. And I also see that this is making—this is also leading to a great disenchantment for Islam as well. I mean, a lot of people are not—in the West, thinking about that, they think Muslim world—everybody is pious. But quite the contrary; there is a great escape from Islam in Iran. I mean, Iran today is the number one country in the world that produces ex-Muslims, like people who become atheists and Christians. And I respect their point of view; I mean, they have all the right to become atheists or Christians. But as a Muslim who believes in my faith, I mean, like I would like to have a faith that attracts people with its spirituality and with its values, but not frightens them and scares them and pushes them away. In Turkey, my country, there is a new type of deism, which is like young people are believing in God but not any religion and certainly not Islam, precisely because of the disenchantment of Islam being used for authoritarian politics by the current government, for example. So I think this is a critical period in Islam, and when I look back in Christian history, I see people, Christian humanists from Locke to others—Roger Williams in the United States—who re-articulated their religion, reinterpreted their religion to emphasize freedom, freedom of conscience. I mean, the switch from divine rights of kings to the idea of a limited government with religious freedom—that was a big shift in Christianity, and it had to be done by Christians who valued their faith. And I think this is a big effort a lot of Muslims are trying. I'm just trying to do my part with my writings, which are aimed at a broad understanding with a broad population, so everybody can read and get it, you know, what the point is, but also hear the key arguments and the patterns for going forward.

Yeah, well, you're a strange sort of traditionalist in some sense, right? Because you are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in relationship to the past, but also not proposing that all of this be abandoned as an entirely failed project, which I think is a very naive—would be a very naive thing to do in any case. It's like, well, abandon it in favor of what exactly?

Well, you know, rationality. It's—I mean, it's well, okay, but it's a—needs some flesh and out.

Well, not by rationality. I mean, we can't discuss that because, you know, my book "Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason," you know, begins with that reasonable freedom. You know, as I said, I'm not a rationalist in the sense of, you know, people like Sam Harris that you know you talk to. So I don't think that there's reason that supersedes everything else. And by rationally, we can always arrive at truth. I mean, Mao rationally arrived at a terrible truth. So I certainly see—

Well, there's a lot of problems with the axiomatic pressure. I mean, Hayek criticizes rationalists that build systems of authoritarianism. And I think there was a great value there. However, by reason, I refer to a specific theological branch in Islam called rational theology, or akl—that's the term in Arabic, reason. And it goes back to a theological dispute in early Islam between two schools of thought, and it was on the meaning of sharia—I mean, God's commandments. And actually, it goes back to this was a discussion on Islam, but it goes back to Socrates and his famous Euthyphro dilemma, and I think this was discussed in Christianity as well. The dilemma is this: when God has commandments, like Ten Commandments, like "Thou shall not murder," right? "Thou shall not steal." These are fundamental key values that our civilizations go forward. But one question is this: does God say "Thou shall not murder" because murder is inherently wrong? Does God teach us about this ethical value that is out there in the world? Or does murder become wrong simply because God said so? So these two ways of looking into rules, commandments—in Islam, one theology is spearheaded by the Mutazila school, but also it had an impact on the Maturidi theology, which is in mainstream Sunni Islam, which I sympathize with. They said the commandments of God are educating us about values which are also there inherently out there in the world and also knowable by reason. In other words, even if there was no revelation, humans could figure out that theft or murder are wrong. But because of human passions and human tendency to forget, God is educating and reminding us about those values. And there are a lot of reasons in the Quran to think like that.

The other school, the Asharite, said no, these things are right and wrong simply because God said so. Therefore, if God said murder is good, murder would be good. So the commandments define everything that is ethical. And this was a problem in the Asharite theology. And I, in my book, I show how these discussions took place and what were the nuances. Asharite theology became more influential in Sunni Islam, and I’m critical of that because I think if we say God's commandments only have value in themselves, first of all, we are turning God into a capricious, arbitrary legislator, right? Things become right and wrong only because He says so. They're not—it’s not like He is looking into the world and seeing with compassion that ordinary people— I mean innocent people should not die.

Well, you could secularize that argument by asking yourself, as a secular person, these fundamental laws that we have—like we should not murder—do they reflect some underlying reality in some profound sense? Or are they arbitrary constructions of a particular time and place? And it's a very difficult argument to walk through because it always depends, in some sense, on what you're aiming at, right? If you're aiming at power and conquest, well then, maybe murder is just what you need. But if you're aiming at peace, well, maybe that's not the right route.

Exactly, and actually, I mean the secular way of looking at this is that, for example, should governments legislate according to what they think is right and their commandments—their laws define everything? Or should there be values beyond the governments that they should honor? Right? Right?

Well, that's a natural right argument in some sense, right? Which is foundational in the West and less so in the French system, I would say. Very English common law system, which—that's why I believe the right view in Islam was the natural right argument, which what the Mutazila said. And the Maturidis also in the Sunni tradition pretty much came close. The other one is called divine positivism, like God says whatever he says and we just obey it without asking why and how. I mean, it got more sophisticated over time still. I mean, the Asharite scholars look into the purposes of God, try to figure out, so they—that allowed analogy. But ultimately this divine command theory that God posits as He wills, legislates as He wills, and this had two consequences. One means that people who don’t have your religious tradition cannot have any value because all value comes from divine commandments. So people who are secular—people who are beyond—right? You close yourself to the ethical reality out there in the world—all the ethical traditions and reasoning.

Second, you deny an essential commonality between the tribes of mankind, exactly, and you put yourself in a permanent state of war. Exactly, that's why I call it the loss of universalism. Because, I mean, early Muslims studied Aristotle and his ethical philosophy because Aristotle is an infidel from an Islamic point of view, but they saw value because they said God gave humanity an ethical intuition and reason. And reason is universal; that allowed them. So that was the universalistic path. But the other path actually closed ethical thinking. That's why after that first, you can also see how it would foster a kind of totalitarianism because if God's commandments are what define good and evil but I'm interpreting them exactly, then there isn't anything beyond my interpretation in some sense as long as I'm correct.

Whereas with the more universalist view, it's like, well, wait a second, there's something outside of this that I'm not intelligent enough, wise enough to understand that I have to be mindful of. So let me take it in that direction for a sec. So I'll tell you something I've been thinking about. I'm writing this book now called "We Who Wrestle with God," and I'm really trying to work out this—the natural right issue in relationship to free speech. And I'm trying to do that as a clinician. And so one of the things that Carl Rogers proposed, and he was extraordinarily influenced by Protestantism. He was a seminarian, and he wanted to be an evangelist before he became a secular humanist. But Rogers observed that if you listen to people talk, if you actually listened, that they would spontaneously transform themselves in a way that improved their life. And he pointed to a fundamental psychological mechanism that was driving that. You could think about it in some sense as exactly the same thing that a parent does when that parent attends very carefully to their children so that attention facilitates, well, I would say in some sense the manifestation of the healing word. And I mean that as a clinician now. Freud—Rogers took a page from Freud, because Freud also observed that if you just let people talk, but you listened, that they would unwind themselves and straighten themselves out. And this isn't such a preposterous suggestion, unless you believe that speech is somehow divorced from neurological integrity, let's say, or social integrity. And so I think there's a very real sense in which the reason that free speech is a natural right, and maybe the highest of natural rights, is because it is precisely reflective of the mechanism by which we move from the stagnation of our dead thoughts into a future that's better than the dead past.

And so any society that interferes with that will degenerate into a kind of totalitarian absolutism, and that becomes indistinguishable from hell.

It does—I mean, very interesting. What you said reminds me of a Quranic verse that defines believers as those people who listen to the word and follow the most beautiful of that. To be able to do that, you have to listen first.

Right, you have to be able to choose that, exactly.

It's a verse in the Quran; I can't remember the number now, but I can send you later the number of it. It's a great verse; that's a great idea because you know—it also touches on the notion of a profound intuition of beauty, and the idea that beauty is an intimation of what is divine, and divine is deep and profound and necessary. And I don't care if you speak about that in secular or religious terms; it boils down to the same thing in the final analysis. And to use—I talked with one of Canada's great journalists recently, this man named Rex Murphy, who's a real national treasure, and he's so poetic, and he's a deep admirer of poetry—but also a very practical and down-to-earth person. But his words are beautiful, and and part of the reason they have such force is because he is in communion with that beauty, and it shines through everything he does. So these are non-trivial realities that are being pointed to. We ignore them at our apparel.

Exactly, and that is a universalistic outlook—to listen to and learn from everything. And it was there right at the beginning of the Islamic civilization, and that's why Muslims built the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and translated all Greek philosophy into Arabic, you know, which ultimately made its way to Europe through Spain, Muslim Spain. So there was this hunger to learn and appreciate. But that gradually narrowed down. And why it happened, how it happened, there are a lot of theories about it, you know, what happens all the time. It happens all the time. It's a huge existential reality for that to happen. I think it will happen to any civilization the moment they say we have reached perfection, right? We don't need to learn anything from the outside world. And I see that sort of trend in the Western civil war.

Yeah, that's the Tower of Babel—that's the Tower of Babel, right? You build a structure and you think it's reached the heights of God, and as soon as you think that, everyone fragments and speaks a different language, and everything descends—and then the next story is the flood. And that's not a bloody accident. Disintegration, exactly. So by reason, I am referring to this view, the universalistic view in early Islam which believes that morality is universal, ethics are universal. The Quran reminds us and educates us—indicates—I mean, according to Abdul Jabbar, he said the sharia indicates what's right and wrong. The other group said the sharia constitutes what is right and wrong.

And this has to be dealt with in the modern world because let's say you have the modern world in front of you. You have people—and there are young people today who are not only looking at the past; they're also looking at the present. Right? Unlike the generation that preceded them, which could look at the past and say, okay, here was a great, transcendent historical moment, they look at the present world and say, well, this is a mess and I can't follow the stories that you tell me because I look around me in society, and they see this chaos and it doesn't fit neatly into these narratives about where we come from and where we're going and they think, well, the old rules don't apply to me either. Even the pious don't seem to be living a blessed life. We're so far beyond the pale that we can't make sense of things in the same way. So then they look for new structures and new narratives, you know, outside of the Abrahamic tradition because, frankly, the old ones don't seem to work. Well, if you want them to be held, how do you keep them in tune with the fundamental truths that only transcendence can provide?

And if you emphasize that, they—that they have to be unrooted from their tradition or whatever—that means there's no way to ground them in the present. It's just nihilism. I mean, that's what it moves toward.

Exactly, and that's why I see responding to the challenges around the very new modern world today and the coherence that this universe vision provides, but also the respect for the traditions and wisdom of one or another—that's why I feel responsible for saying we need our a modernity of some sort. A modernity which marries tradition and rationality, where we understand our traditional values not as enforcing blunt rules but as actual ideas to allow us liberty if we understand the essence of these values—the essence of human dignity—is a foundational value, and I think certain passages in the Quran help us get there at this present time and in this world.

Well, that's a hard balance to strike because it's easy to see why people would retreat from the traditions because of the degree to which they can be manipulated to support oppression at times. But at the same time, that's dangerous because you need to understand what is absolutely real or you'll be vulnerable to the mach