WEBVTT NOTE The Commercial Heritage and Contribution of Islam 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.000 The Mises Institute is proud to present 2 00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:05.440 the Lew Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics. 3 00:00:05.440 --> 00:00:08.480 Made possible by the Lew Church Educational Foundation, 4 00:00:08.480 --> 00:00:10.720 Dr. Robert D. Hemhold, Chairman, 5 00:00:10.720 --> 00:00:14.040 this annual lecture seeks to honor the late Lew Church, 6 00:00:14.040 --> 00:00:16.800 a Florida businessman and advocate of liberty, 7 00:00:16.800 --> 00:00:19.320 and the ideas to which he was dedicated. 8 00:00:19.320 --> 00:00:21.720 Starting out as a swimming pool cleaner, 9 00:00:21.720 --> 00:00:24.360 Mr. Church eventually established successful businesses 10 00:00:24.360 --> 00:00:25.840 in swimming pool construction 11 00:00:25.840 --> 00:00:27.940 and the restaurant and travel industries. 12 00:00:27.940 --> 00:00:42.940 Through it all, he dedicated himself to the values of the free market, private property, free association, entrepreneurship and liberty. Realizing that big government threatened not only the free enterprise system, but all that is good about America. 13 00:00:42.940 --> 00:00:57.940 Our lecturer is Mustafa Akyol. He's a Turkish political commentator and author based in Istanbul, Turkey. Akyol graduated from the International Relations Department of the Bosphorus University. 14 00:00:57.940 --> 00:01:03.940 He completed his master's thesis on the Kurdish question at the history department of the same university. 15 00:01:03.940 --> 00:01:10.940 He has given seminars in several universities and think tanks in the US and the UK on issues relating to Islam and modernity. 16 00:01:10.940 --> 00:01:16.780 since 2002 he has been a regular commentator in the Turkish media. He is 17 00:01:16.780 --> 00:01:20.940 currently a regular columnist for Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey's foremost 18 00:01:20.940 --> 00:01:25.340 English language daily. He also writes a regular column for the Turkish language 19 00:01:25.340 --> 00:01:30.540 daily star. Akil's articles have also appeared in Foreign Affairs, the 20 00:01:30.540 --> 00:01:35.340 Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, 21 00:01:35.340 --> 00:01:40.260 the American Interest, First Things, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times and 22 00:01:40.260 --> 00:01:42.240 and many other publications. 23 00:01:43.460 --> 00:01:45.300 Mustafa Akyal has a book in Turkish 24 00:01:45.300 --> 00:01:48.060 titled Rethinking the Kurdish Question, 25 00:01:48.060 --> 00:01:50.640 What Went Wrong, What Next? 26 00:01:50.640 --> 00:01:53.900 His forthcoming book, Islam Without Extremes, 27 00:01:53.900 --> 00:01:56.980 A Muslim Case for Liberty, will be published by Norton 28 00:01:56.980 --> 00:01:59.420 in July 2011. 29 00:01:59.420 --> 00:02:02.140 It is my pleasure to present Mustafa Akyal, 30 00:02:02.140 --> 00:02:06.140 who will address us on the commercial heritage 31 00:02:06.140 --> 00:02:10.140 The Commercial Heritage and Contribution of Islam. 32 00:02:18.140 --> 00:02:26.140 Thank you. Thank you. Well, good afternoon and first I should thank Mises Institute for flying me all over from Istanbul to Alabama. 33 00:02:26.140 --> 00:02:33.140 It's really a pleasure and privilege to be here. I had a chance to see friends, meet new friends. 34 00:02:33.140 --> 00:02:39.540 Anyone taste grits as breakfast, which was quite an experience and quite nice, I should say. 35 00:02:39.540 --> 00:02:47.140 I mean, when I got this invitation, this kind invitation from the Mises Institute a few months ago to speak about Islam's commercial heritage, 36 00:02:47.140 --> 00:02:49.140 I said, yeah, sure, I would love to. 37 00:02:49.140 --> 00:02:57.140 Because I think in the West right now, there is focus on some unpleasant elements in the Islamic world. 38 00:02:57.140 --> 00:03:02.640 And sure, we have them. And, you know, why we have them is a big, big question, and we can get into that too. 39 00:03:02.640 --> 00:03:05.880 but we have some nasty people doing some nasty things 40 00:03:05.880 --> 00:03:08.620 in the name of their religion in our part of the world. 41 00:03:08.620 --> 00:03:10.760 We have nasty people doing nasty things 42 00:03:10.760 --> 00:03:12.720 in some other, in the name of other religions as well 43 00:03:12.720 --> 00:03:14.280 but there's focus on Islam right now 44 00:03:14.280 --> 00:03:16.800 which is understandable in the West 45 00:03:16.800 --> 00:03:20.480 but that's not the only side of the story. 46 00:03:20.480 --> 00:03:24.500 Islam is like 14th century old civilization 47 00:03:24.500 --> 00:03:28.820 and actually some of the facts within the Islamic history 48 00:03:28.820 --> 00:03:37.020 are quite surprising to a modern observer who presumes that there is not much to learn from Islam. 49 00:03:37.020 --> 00:03:39.860 It's quite the contrary, it's quite interesting. 50 00:03:39.860 --> 00:03:48.340 Especially from a business angle, if you're a believer in free market, if you're a believer in capitalism, 51 00:03:48.340 --> 00:03:50.540 Islam has an interesting story to tell. 52 00:03:50.540 --> 00:03:54.500 So let me try to share that with you a little bit. 53 00:03:54.500 --> 00:03:59.500 Among the founders of the world's great religions, 54 00:03:59.680 --> 00:04:02.700 if I'm not wrong, there is only one who's a businessman, 55 00:04:02.700 --> 00:04:04.100 and that's Prophet Muhammad. 56 00:04:05.340 --> 00:04:07.480 He was a businessman, quite a successful one. 57 00:04:07.480 --> 00:04:10.620 He was a merchant until the age of 40. 58 00:04:10.620 --> 00:04:13.180 I mean, he started, I mean, Mecca, 59 00:04:13.180 --> 00:04:15.580 where he was born and raised, 60 00:04:15.580 --> 00:04:19.620 was the trade center of the Arabian Peninsula. 61 00:04:19.620 --> 00:04:22.220 It was also the religious center at the Kaaba, 62 00:04:22.220 --> 00:04:24.300 which had turned into a pagan pantheon, 63 00:04:24.300 --> 00:04:26.820 so that's another story, but it was also the business center 64 00:04:26.820 --> 00:04:28.860 and Muhammad was a very successful merchant 65 00:04:30.260 --> 00:04:34.200 who married to a woman older than himself at the age of 25 66 00:04:34.200 --> 00:04:37.540 and they established a very successful enterprise. 67 00:04:38.800 --> 00:04:41.760 He became a prophet only at the age of 40 68 00:04:41.760 --> 00:04:44.860 when in a cave as Muslims believe, including myself, 69 00:04:44.860 --> 00:04:48.860 believe that he heard a voice telling him to worship God 70 00:04:48.860 --> 00:04:50.560 and proclaim that there's only one God 71 00:04:50.560 --> 00:04:54.060 to a basically polytheist society 72 00:04:54.060 --> 00:04:57.660 and that's where the story of Islam begins. 73 00:04:57.660 --> 00:04:59.960 But the fact that Muhammad was a businessman 74 00:04:59.960 --> 00:05:03.560 had obvious influence on his thinking. 75 00:05:03.560 --> 00:05:05.620 So when you look at the hadiths, 76 00:05:05.620 --> 00:05:09.000 which are the recorded or the alleged words 77 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:11.100 of Prophet Muhammad, because they're always controversial. 78 00:05:11.100 --> 00:05:13.420 They were written a few centuries after the prophet 79 00:05:13.420 --> 00:05:15.300 and that's an important thing to keep in mind. 80 00:05:15.300 --> 00:05:18.020 But anyway, when you look at his words and what he said, 81 00:05:18.020 --> 00:05:19.540 you can find very interesting remarks. 82 00:05:19.540 --> 00:05:22.580 Like he said, he's on record for saying 83 00:05:22.580 --> 00:05:27.580 Like nine out of 10 of God's blessings come from trade. 84 00:05:28.140 --> 00:05:31.220 Pretty like a pro-trade argument. 85 00:05:31.220 --> 00:05:33.500 There's another tale, like when Prophet Muhammad 86 00:05:33.500 --> 00:05:37.220 was in Medina, the second city he migrated from Mecca 87 00:05:37.220 --> 00:05:39.060 because of religious persecution, 88 00:05:39.060 --> 00:05:42.020 and people come to him at some point, Muslims, 89 00:05:42.020 --> 00:05:45.700 and they say, the merchants at the market 90 00:05:45.700 --> 00:05:49.980 are selling their goods with a very heavy, 91 00:05:49.980 --> 00:06:08.980 And his answer was, well no, only God fixes the prices, which from which many Muslim free-minded thinkers have inferred the idea that there should be a sacred hand, a divine hand maybe, but not a human hand obviously, which fixed prices in the market. 92 00:06:08.980 --> 00:06:23.980 And well, that's the prophet's career and when you look at the Quran, which the revelation that Muslims believe that he got from, you know, God and gave to human beings, you can also see that it's quite a pro-business book, if you will. 93 00:06:23.980 --> 00:06:35.980 Maybe, to begin with, I mean, maybe it's interesting to note that the longest verse in the Quran, which is in the chapter, the surah, chapter 282, which is like a page long, 94 00:06:35.980 --> 00:06:47.260 it's about how to write a proper loan contract it is and the fact that the 95 00:06:47.260 --> 00:06:53.820 most of the early Muslims were merchants can be traced in the language of the 96 00:06:53.820 --> 00:06:58.700 Quran because while Quran is preaching people it's using an almost a merchant 97 00:06:58.700 --> 00:07:03.180 language there are many verses in the Quran which says you know the contract 98 00:07:03.180 --> 00:07:06.740 between God and man will be rewarded in afterlife. 99 00:07:06.740 --> 00:07:09.860 The covenant is defined as a contract. 100 00:07:09.860 --> 00:07:13.740 So many scholars who have actually studied the Islamic, 101 00:07:13.740 --> 00:07:17.660 the language of the Quran from a very linguistic perspective, 102 00:07:17.660 --> 00:07:20.560 Arabic, have thought that this is appealing 103 00:07:20.560 --> 00:07:23.700 to a very commercial society. 104 00:07:23.700 --> 00:07:25.980 And also, it might be interesting to note 105 00:07:25.980 --> 00:07:31.460 that Islam doesn't have the exact idea of a Sabbath, 106 00:07:31.460 --> 00:07:32.900 a day that you stop work. 107 00:07:32.900 --> 00:07:38.420 But there is the idea of a Friday, which is a holy day, that you stop what you do and go to the mosque. 108 00:07:38.420 --> 00:07:44.100 But in the verse that orders Muslims to do the Friday prayer, it's a very interesting chapter. 109 00:07:44.100 --> 00:07:47.500 It says, do your trade before the prayers. 110 00:07:47.500 --> 00:07:51.260 And when you're called for prayer, leave everything and come to prayer. 111 00:07:51.260 --> 00:07:56.740 When you're done, go back to your work and seek for God's blessings and bounties. 112 00:07:56.740 --> 00:08:02.300 So, there are many examples like this from the Quran and the prophetic tradition, 113 00:08:02.300 --> 00:08:10.540 which actually defines Islam as a very, like a, at least a, like a trade-oriented religion. 114 00:08:10.540 --> 00:08:14.980 And a scholar who actually wrote a really good book on this, for those of you who would like 115 00:08:14.980 --> 00:08:20.980 to be, you know, interested, who'd like to look into this more, is a, Maxime Rodinson, 116 00:08:20.980 --> 00:08:27.260 who's actually a French Marxist, but he wrote this book, Islamic Capitalism, in the 1960s. 117 00:08:27.260 --> 00:08:31.060 And being a Marxist, he was not a fan of capitalism, but he thought Islam is a very capitalist 118 00:08:31.060 --> 00:08:32.060 religion. 119 00:08:32.060 --> 00:08:36.020 That was not a socialist, you know, he emphasized in the book. 120 00:08:36.020 --> 00:08:40.540 And that book really still is a good source, you know, he evaluated the Quran and the hadiths 121 00:08:40.540 --> 00:08:43.620 and, you know, looked deep into those issues. 122 00:08:43.620 --> 00:08:49.020 There are, though, some other themes in the Quran which had led some Muslims to a more 123 00:08:49.020 --> 00:08:51.940 socialistic interpretation of the faith. 124 00:08:51.940 --> 00:08:58.500 And the two of them are, first, the idea of zakat, which means almsgiving, which you can 125 00:08:58.500 --> 00:09:21.500 which is about charity, helping the poor and like a very oft quoted word like a saying by prophets says that person is not a good Muslim if his neighbor is hungry but he's sleeping with a full stomach, that your neighbor is hungry, you should feed your neighbor. 126 00:09:21.500 --> 00:09:51.500 And many Muslims, I know, infer a kind of a socialist paradigm from this, and I always say to them, well, the prophet doesn't say, go and call the welfare state if your neighbor is hungry, it tells you to take care of your neighbor, so it is your personal responsibility to care for the people in need, so it's a moral responsibility on the individual believer, and it doesn't define a centralized redistribution of wealth. 127 00:09:51.500 --> 00:09:56.500 I don't want to understand that way, but I think it's not the really right way to understand the Islamic idea of charity. 128 00:09:56.500 --> 00:10:12.500 So Zakat, that's why in Islamic traditions, Zakat has been a civil duty and Muslims are supposed to go and look for the society and find poor people and needy people and help them themselves rather than redistribution of wealth kind of system. 129 00:10:12.500 --> 00:10:19.480 Another theme in the Quran which is of course very much debated and is shown by some Muslims 130 00:10:19.480 --> 00:10:25.700 as an objection to the capitalist economy is the ban on interest. 131 00:10:25.700 --> 00:10:29.740 But whether that is interest or not, that's actually a good question and that's a debated 132 00:10:29.740 --> 00:10:30.740 question. 133 00:10:30.740 --> 00:10:44.740 This is something called RIBA and that means an over-extended, like an over-achieved wealth in just a short period. 134 00:10:44.740 --> 00:10:54.740 But some scholars who look at what RIBA is have just concluded that this is actually usury, like an overextend, like an emphasized usury. 135 00:10:54.740 --> 00:11:05.240 At the time, when you look at Mecca, there were people who were lending money, just maybe $100, there were no dollars at the time, like gold or some precious money. 136 00:11:05.240 --> 00:11:12.240 And they were asking twice of that next week or something, and when you did not give that, you would be in trouble and so on. 137 00:11:12.240 --> 00:11:20.240 So that was an extensive interest, whereas some scholars think that in the modern age, banking interest is something different from that. 138 00:11:20.240 --> 00:11:23.240 So there should be a distinction between interest and usury. 139 00:11:23.240 --> 00:11:31.720 But still the idea that Riba is interest and so there should be an alternative Islamic banking is still quite popular in the Muslim world 140 00:11:31.720 --> 00:11:38.120 and there are Islamic banks which do some, actually use some legal tricks to go over the ban on injury 141 00:11:38.120 --> 00:11:44.120 but they do do some obviously financing without the idea of interest 142 00:11:44.120 --> 00:11:52.120 and I think in a free economy it is possible to choose between Islamic banking and a normal banking as it is in Turkey where I come from 143 00:11:52.120 --> 00:12:22.120 I mean the Muslims who have an idea that you know they should do do find a way to go without you know interest they can use that but that's still I mean that doesn't stop them from establishing businesses obviously and you know taking loans from Islamic banks now another aspect of the sharia and I actually recall that quite obviously when I was listening to the lecture on Hayek just a lecture before the idea that law is discovered it's not you know dictated by the state but it's out there 144 00:12:22.120 --> 00:12:23.600 and Your Discover Law. 145 00:12:23.600 --> 00:12:25.120 And that is actually very relevant 146 00:12:25.120 --> 00:12:26.280 for the Islamic civilization 147 00:12:26.280 --> 00:12:31.280 because of the whole notion of the sharia, Islamic law. 148 00:12:31.920 --> 00:12:35.280 Now I know that the sharia is not a very popular term. 149 00:12:39.280 --> 00:12:40.280 For obvious reasons. 150 00:12:40.280 --> 00:12:42.480 I mean, people do very harsh things 151 00:12:42.480 --> 00:12:44.960 in the name of the sharia, you know, chopping of hands 152 00:12:44.960 --> 00:12:46.360 and, you know, lashing people, 153 00:12:46.360 --> 00:12:49.660 or especially suppression of women in the Muslim world. 154 00:12:49.660 --> 00:12:51.600 And that's a real, real, real problem 155 00:12:51.600 --> 00:12:53.040 that we should be talking about. 156 00:12:53.040 --> 00:12:57.640 But that is one way of understanding the sharia. 157 00:12:57.640 --> 00:12:59.920 And the problem in that understanding of the sharia, 158 00:12:59.920 --> 00:13:03.280 which is popular, especially in places like Afghanistan, 159 00:13:03.280 --> 00:13:06.320 under the Taliban, is that the proponents of the sharia, 160 00:13:06.320 --> 00:13:10.000 which is the Islamic law, insist on implementing it 161 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:13.160 as it was written some 10 centuries ago. 162 00:13:13.160 --> 00:13:15.760 Like if you insist on implementing British common, 163 00:13:15.760 --> 00:13:18.800 or like English common law, that would be pretty brutal, 164 00:13:18.800 --> 00:13:20.920 you know, in the modern world. 165 00:13:20.920 --> 00:13:31.920 So, if you take the letter of what Sharia is and bring it today, and if you take a legal system which was designed in an age where you did not have correctional facilities, 166 00:13:32.920 --> 00:13:40.920 the only way to punish a crime is basically to kill or physically give some pain to the culprit, which was the case in 7th century Arabia, 167 00:13:40.920 --> 00:13:46.920 then yeah, Sharia was understandable in that environment, but we live in a different world right now, 168 00:13:46.920 --> 00:13:52.920 There obviously needs to be a reform of the sharia, if people will go and implement the sharia. 169 00:13:52.920 --> 00:13:56.920 But let's leave that aside for a moment and let's think what the sharia is. 170 00:13:56.920 --> 00:13:59.920 I mean, if you look at like an encyclopedia or something, it will say, 171 00:13:59.920 --> 00:14:03.920 well, sharia is Islamic law as it is developed by scholars. 172 00:14:03.920 --> 00:14:09.920 And many people read that and just go, well, the fact that it is developed by scholars was crucial, 173 00:14:09.920 --> 00:14:14.920 because it means it was not dictated by the state. 174 00:14:14.920 --> 00:14:20.760 let me tell you what this means like the Sharia was based on the Quran but very 175 00:14:20.760 --> 00:14:24.160 vaguely on the Quran because the Quran like the New Testament is not a legal 176 00:14:24.160 --> 00:14:29.960 book it speaks mostly about theology God afterlife and morality but there are a 177 00:14:29.960 --> 00:14:34.800 few principles in the Quran that you can you know deduct from some laws from more 178 00:14:34.800 --> 00:14:39.080 on the hadiths what the hadith was the bulk of the Sharia the sayings 179 00:14:39.080 --> 00:14:42.600 attributed to Prophet Muhammad and just the legal opinions of the scholars at 180 00:14:42.600 --> 00:14:43.680 at the time. 181 00:14:43.680 --> 00:14:47.000 But what happened was that when Islam became a civilization, 182 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:50.840 and a big state right after the death of Prophet Muhammad, 183 00:14:50.840 --> 00:14:54.920 Islamic scholars sat down and made these laws, 184 00:14:54.920 --> 00:14:56.360 the Sharia laws. 185 00:14:56.360 --> 00:14:59.280 But since they were not government employees, 186 00:14:59.280 --> 00:15:02.760 their interest was not about serving the state 187 00:15:02.760 --> 00:15:07.240 and its ambitions, their interest was about keeping justice, 188 00:15:07.240 --> 00:15:09.760 upholding justice actually under the state. 189 00:15:09.760 --> 00:15:21.760 That's why, actually, when you look at the history of Islamic law, you see the Sharia acting as a constraint on the temporal authority, rather than being a tool of the temporal authority. 190 00:15:21.760 --> 00:15:34.760 And there are many examples of this, like in the 14th century, when al-Hilji, the Muslim ruler in India, when there was an Islamic empire at the time, which built Taj Mahal and many other things there, 191 00:15:34.760 --> 00:15:48.760 When he wanted to overtax his Hindu subjects, his top scholar, Shaykh al-Islam, whose job was to oversee the state according to the Sharia, he said, you cannot do this, that's against the laws of the Sharia. 192 00:15:48.760 --> 00:15:54.760 And he'll just complain, he said, whenever I want to consolidate my power, someone tells me that this is against the Sharia. 193 00:15:54.760 --> 00:16:09.760 And there are many other cases that, you know, the rulers are blocked by the Sharia and its moral authority, the moral authority it had in society, to do something which was excessive. 194 00:16:09.760 --> 00:16:22.760 And one scholar who really studied what this aspect of the Sharia was, Haim Gerber, an Israeli scholar at the Hebrew University, he studied Ottoman court decisions of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. 195 00:16:22.760 --> 00:16:29.760 and he found very interesting cases in which the mufti, the legal scholar, whose job is to protect the sharia, 196 00:16:29.760 --> 00:16:34.760 blocks the ruler from doing something which violates the rights of the individuals. 197 00:16:34.760 --> 00:16:43.760 One case, for example, was when Yawuz, the ninth Ottoman sultan, Yawuz Selim the Grim, which was a very heavy-handed sultan, 198 00:16:43.760 --> 00:16:50.760 he considered converting all Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire into Islam, forcibly. 199 00:16:50.760 --> 00:16:54.760 Now Sharia grants that Jews and Christians have their religious freedom. 200 00:16:54.760 --> 00:16:59.760 They are not equal citizens, you know, like Muslims, but they have the right to worship in Islamic lands. 201 00:16:59.760 --> 00:17:03.760 That's why in Islamic lands, you know, Christian communities continued until today. 202 00:17:03.760 --> 00:17:10.760 So when the Sultan thought about converting all Christians into Islam forcibly, 203 00:17:10.760 --> 00:17:14.760 for the sake of politics, for the sake of homogeneity for his empire, 204 00:17:14.760 --> 00:17:20.760 It was his top scholar, again, the Shaykh of Islam said you cannot do this, and this is against the Sharia. 205 00:17:20.760 --> 00:17:29.760 Another example that Haim Gerber, again, the Israeli scholar, gives in his book about the Ottoman society and culture, 206 00:17:29.760 --> 00:17:39.760 is a religious fatwa ruling by a mufti, a legal scholar, an Islamic scholar in the 17th century Palestine. 207 00:17:39.760 --> 00:17:55.760 There was a case in the city of Lod, there was a local governor, the Pasha, which was a secular, I mean it was an Ottoman government official, but his task was secular, then you have the Mufti. 208 00:17:55.760 --> 00:18:07.760 So there are many immigrants to the city from the village, and the governor thinks, well let's just send them back, the city has become too crowded, so he decides to just send people away, back to their villages. 209 00:18:07.760 --> 00:18:13.280 He doesn't like to see peasants around, but the peasants go to the Mufti and the Mufti 210 00:18:13.280 --> 00:18:20.100 gives a fatwa which reads, it is not permissible to force them to immigrate from a town they 211 00:18:20.100 --> 00:18:24.720 have taken to be their home and to which they have become accustomed. 212 00:18:24.720 --> 00:18:27.440 For the believer is the lord of his soul. 213 00:18:27.440 --> 00:18:32.280 He may live in whichever country he sees fit and whichever town he chooses. 214 00:18:32.280 --> 00:18:35.600 It's not permissible to harass them. 215 00:18:35.600 --> 00:18:44.800 So here is the reason why Muslim societies still have a deep respect for the notion of 216 00:18:44.800 --> 00:18:45.800 the Sharia. 217 00:18:45.800 --> 00:18:50.160 I mean, I know this is surprising to Westerners, when people are cutting hands and every Sharia 218 00:18:50.160 --> 00:18:54.840 promoting party becomes very popular in the Muslim world, because for them Sharia simply 219 00:18:54.840 --> 00:19:00.960 means justice, not the justice of the ruler, which is not justice, but the justice which 220 00:19:00.960 --> 00:19:08.400 which is out there inherent and God-given ultimately, but as discovered through just and fair scholars. 221 00:19:08.400 --> 00:19:12.960 But of course, if you already implement it today as it was in the Middle Ages, you have 222 00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:15.680 a big problem, and we have a big problem because of that. 223 00:19:15.680 --> 00:19:22.040 But even that distinction, whether to take Sharia literally or non-literally, was actually 224 00:19:22.040 --> 00:19:28.360 discussed in the Middle Ages, and Imam Shatibi of the 14th century from North Africa actually 225 00:19:28.360 --> 00:19:33.080 had created a theory of the higher intentions of the sharia. 226 00:19:33.080 --> 00:19:34.860 And he said sharia has made laws, 227 00:19:34.860 --> 00:19:39.160 but when you deduct principles from those laws, 228 00:19:39.160 --> 00:19:42.600 you come to basically some fundamental principles. 229 00:19:42.600 --> 00:19:44.120 And he said all sharia is actually 230 00:19:44.120 --> 00:19:46.480 about protecting these five things, 231 00:19:46.480 --> 00:19:51.480 protection of life, religion, property, lineage, 232 00:19:52.900 --> 00:19:54.360 and the intellect. 233 00:19:54.360 --> 00:19:59.360 The intellect is about banning drugs or things like that. 234 00:20:00.800 --> 00:20:04.920 And property is one of the key things in the sharia, 235 00:20:04.920 --> 00:20:06.400 and life of course. 236 00:20:06.400 --> 00:20:11.400 So if sharia can be taken as such a set of principles, 237 00:20:12.760 --> 00:20:16.920 and actually it is a good basis to devise a culture, 238 00:20:16.920 --> 00:20:19.240 a political culture which emphasizes 239 00:20:19.240 --> 00:20:20.700 the rights of the individuals 240 00:20:20.700 --> 00:20:22.160 rather than the rights of the state, 241 00:20:22.160 --> 00:20:23.800 the so-called rights of the state. 242 00:20:24.360 --> 00:20:45.360 Well, because of this whole notion of the rights of the individual, which are given by God, like the property rights, which also the Quran very much emphasizes property rights, I mean the Quran bans, of course, theft, it also guarantees inheritance as a right, hence you have property rights. 243 00:20:45.360 --> 00:20:51.360 Because of these, Islamic civilization had a big success in the Middle Ages 244 00:20:51.360 --> 00:20:54.360 because it was a civilization which very much respected the rule of law 245 00:20:54.360 --> 00:20:57.360 with many exceptions, with many tyrants and so on, with many nasty stories too 246 00:20:57.360 --> 00:20:59.360 but there was the idea of rule of law 247 00:20:59.360 --> 00:21:04.360 and under this rule of law, civil society flourished in medieval Islam 248 00:21:04.360 --> 00:21:09.360 the idea of waqf, which in Arabic means foundation, grew up 249 00:21:09.360 --> 00:21:19.360 Because the ruler was forbidden from confiscating a foundation that I found for the sake of God. 250 00:21:19.360 --> 00:21:24.360 So there were many foundations which supported education, which opened soup kitchens, 251 00:21:24.360 --> 00:21:28.360 or which supported even scientific research in the Middle Ages. 252 00:21:28.360 --> 00:21:34.360 And the ruler was simply forced by the law to respect these things and not confiscate his property. 253 00:21:34.360 --> 00:21:38.360 Hence came the scientific boom of the Islamic world. 254 00:21:38.360 --> 00:21:45.860 Islamic world, hence came education, Islamic educational institutions in the medieval world. 255 00:21:45.860 --> 00:21:52.560 That's why Muslims invented many things in the Middle Ages which were slowly and slowly 256 00:21:52.560 --> 00:21:56.380 transferred into Europe, especially during the time of the Crusades when Crusaders came 257 00:21:56.380 --> 00:21:59.940 to the Middle East and learned many new things from the Middle East. 258 00:21:59.940 --> 00:22:06.020 Some of these inventions were quite economic inventions. 259 00:22:06.020 --> 00:22:07.660 Let me give you a few examples. 260 00:22:07.660 --> 00:22:11.060 Muslims devised a legal understanding called, 261 00:22:11.060 --> 00:22:15.700 a legal form of contract called muhatra, 262 00:22:15.700 --> 00:22:19.420 which means actually going over the ban on interest 263 00:22:19.420 --> 00:22:21.860 and charging interest without going 264 00:22:21.860 --> 00:22:23.560 against the letter of law. 265 00:22:23.560 --> 00:22:25.900 This soon became muhatra in Latin 266 00:22:25.900 --> 00:22:27.380 and Christians in the Middle Ages 267 00:22:27.380 --> 00:22:29.460 started to use the same concept. 268 00:22:29.460 --> 00:22:32.060 The Islamic concept of mudaraba, 269 00:22:32.060 --> 00:22:36.900 in which a few people come and create a company 270 00:22:36.900 --> 00:22:41.600 soon appeared in Italy in the 12th or 13th century 271 00:22:41.600 --> 00:22:44.260 under the name Commenda, which ultimately became 272 00:22:44.260 --> 00:22:46.060 the limited company in the West. 273 00:22:47.340 --> 00:22:52.180 Another term which made its way from Arabic 274 00:22:52.180 --> 00:22:56.700 to the English, the first French and English languages 275 00:22:56.700 --> 00:22:58.440 is the word suck. 276 00:22:58.440 --> 00:23:01.260 Suck in means Arabic written document. 277 00:23:01.260 --> 00:23:06.260 and this was a document that Muslims merchants used to, 278 00:23:07.060 --> 00:23:09.940 they didn't want to carry money from Fez to Baghdad 279 00:23:09.940 --> 00:23:12.860 all the way, so they wrote down a paper 280 00:23:12.860 --> 00:23:14.900 and that paper would equal some money 281 00:23:14.900 --> 00:23:17.040 and they would go and cash it on the other side 282 00:23:17.040 --> 00:23:18.600 of the Islamic civilization. 283 00:23:18.600 --> 00:23:21.900 That suck became the check in the French 284 00:23:21.900 --> 00:23:24.540 and the British and the English languages. 285 00:23:24.540 --> 00:23:27.000 There are actually many terms in Arabic 286 00:23:27.000 --> 00:23:30.120 which made their way into English 287 00:23:30.120 --> 00:23:33.240 and let me just give you a few examples. 288 00:23:33.240 --> 00:23:35.520 These are terms like algebra, 289 00:23:35.520 --> 00:23:37.640 which comes from Al-Jabir, an Islamic scholar 290 00:23:37.640 --> 00:23:40.680 in the 12th or 14th century. 291 00:23:41.800 --> 00:23:43.880 Algorithm, which comes from Al-Kharizmi, 292 00:23:43.880 --> 00:23:45.440 another Muslim scholar. 293 00:23:45.440 --> 00:23:50.440 Alchemy, alkali, amalgam, almanac, alembic, admiral, alco, 294 00:23:54.480 --> 00:23:59.480 mask, nadir, zenith, tariff, sugar, syrup, 295 00:23:59.480 --> 00:24:06.360 Europe, checkmate, loot and guitar, all these come from Arabic, there are of course also 296 00:24:06.360 --> 00:24:13.240 the Arabic numerals. 297 00:24:13.240 --> 00:24:18.360 So Islam was quite a successful civilization and one of the success as Bernard Lewis, you 298 00:24:18.360 --> 00:24:24.040 know not the greatest fan of the Islamic civilization based on some you know at least some considerations 299 00:24:24.040 --> 00:24:32.680 He says Islam was the most advanced civilization in the Middle Ages in terms of freedom, in 300 00:24:32.680 --> 00:24:33.680 terms of liberty. 301 00:24:33.680 --> 00:24:39.080 It gave freedom to individuals like any other civilization because of this idea of law and 302 00:24:39.080 --> 00:24:43.640 rights protected by law. 303 00:24:43.640 --> 00:24:49.200 And that's why, and as Islam, this was of course a Muslim civilization first and Muslims 304 00:24:49.200 --> 00:24:53.080 were the ruling class. 305 00:24:53.080 --> 00:24:57.720 But Jews and Christians were given certain rights and that's why many Jews migrated from 306 00:24:57.720 --> 00:25:00.560 Europe to Islamic lands when they were persecuted. 307 00:25:00.560 --> 00:25:07.160 I mean the Jews who fled Spain in 1492, they came to the Ottoman Empire. 308 00:25:07.160 --> 00:25:12.000 The Ottoman Sultan welcomed them and they have been living in Turkey and the Ottoman 309 00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:15.080 lands since the 15th century quite happily. 310 00:25:15.080 --> 00:25:19.560 Unfortunately, we have a rabid anti-Semitism today in many parts of the Muslim world but 311 00:25:19.560 --> 00:25:25.440 But that came as a response to Israel and that's a new phenomenon in the Muslim world. 312 00:25:25.440 --> 00:25:32.640 If you look at until the 20th century, the Muslim world was much more preferable to Europe 313 00:25:32.640 --> 00:25:38.200 when compared with the, when looked from the perspective of anti-Semitism and right of 314 00:25:38.200 --> 00:25:40.040 the Jews. 315 00:25:40.040 --> 00:25:48.000 Now while all these things were going on on the ground, a particular scholar even made 316 00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:55.680 He created theory of Islam and the free market and that was Ibn Khaldun, a Muslim scholar 317 00:25:55.680 --> 00:25:58.880 of the 14th century who lived in North Africa. 318 00:25:58.880 --> 00:26:01.040 And Ibn Khaldun is a very interesting figure. 319 00:26:01.040 --> 00:26:07.440 He has this book called Mukaddima, which means introduction, the longer thing, introduction 320 00:26:07.440 --> 00:26:08.440 to history. 321 00:26:08.440 --> 00:26:09.700 That was his thing. 322 00:26:09.700 --> 00:26:16.360 And he actually devised it like a philosophy of history and he's also accepted as a beginner 323 00:26:16.360 --> 00:26:21.480 of Sociology, because he studied how tribes and nations and societies change according 324 00:26:21.480 --> 00:26:28.000 to geographic conditions, an idea which would be later developed by Montesquieu in the modern 325 00:26:28.000 --> 00:26:29.360 age. 326 00:26:29.360 --> 00:26:35.000 But one of Ibn Khaldun's contributions to world thought was the idea that governments 327 00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:41.960 should use as minimal taxes as they can, because he observed every society around us, and in 328 00:26:41.960 --> 00:26:49.460 In his Mukaddimah, he says, the less tax there is in a land, the more prosperity there is. 329 00:26:49.460 --> 00:26:52.960 So he advises governments to minimize taxes. 330 00:26:52.960 --> 00:26:57.140 He advises them not to engage in production or trade. 331 00:26:57.140 --> 00:27:01.000 He says this should be done by the individual people. 332 00:27:01.000 --> 00:27:05.760 And he also very much emphasizes protection of property rights. 333 00:27:05.760 --> 00:27:13.240 The World Bank a few years ago called Ibn Khaldun the first advocate of privatization. 334 00:27:13.240 --> 00:27:20.440 Now there was certainly a success story in medieval Islam, and it's impossible not to 335 00:27:20.440 --> 00:27:23.720 see that, but then the question comes, what went wrong? 336 00:27:23.720 --> 00:27:24.720 The Bernard Louisian question. 337 00:27:24.720 --> 00:27:26.180 It's a right question, what went wrong? 338 00:27:26.180 --> 00:27:30.160 Because today the Muslim world is really not the wealthiest part of the world, but there 339 00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:33.960 is oil wealth, but it doesn't bring any good to anybody. 340 00:27:33.960 --> 00:27:39.160 This is certainly underdeveloped in many ways, and when you compare with the West, there's a huge difference. 341 00:27:39.160 --> 00:27:45.160 But this is a difference, this is a huge gap between this Muslim world and the West. 342 00:27:45.160 --> 00:27:51.160 I mean, in favor of the West is a new phenomenon. In the past three or four centuries this emerged. 343 00:27:51.160 --> 00:27:57.160 This emerged when the West really made a big leap forward with the modern world, 344 00:27:57.160 --> 00:28:03.160 inventions and the age of science and discovery and capitalism and industrial revolution and so on. 345 00:28:03.160 --> 00:28:07.680 So the West went forward, and not just the Muslim world, but the whole world lagged behind 346 00:28:07.680 --> 00:28:08.680 the West. 347 00:28:08.680 --> 00:28:15.320 I mean, you can say the same thing for Latin America, or Russia, or China, or Asia, or 348 00:28:15.320 --> 00:28:17.360 of course Africa as well. 349 00:28:17.360 --> 00:28:19.000 But what went wrong in the Muslim world? 350 00:28:19.000 --> 00:28:24.520 And that's a question very much debated between, you know, it's a big historical question. 351 00:28:24.520 --> 00:28:29.920 Now one answer given by some scholars, and I find it very compelling, is that the decline 352 00:28:29.920 --> 00:28:36.920 The decline of the Muslim world is very much related with the decline of trade within the Islamic world. 353 00:28:36.920 --> 00:28:45.920 Because when you look at how things evolved within Islam, in the second or third century, 354 00:28:45.920 --> 00:28:51.920 there is an interesting decline in the role of merchants, which were the original makers of the Sharia, 355 00:28:51.920 --> 00:28:56.920 because when you look at the early Sharia scholars, many of them were merchants themselves, 356 00:28:56.920 --> 00:29:00.760 and they created a much more dynamic understanding of this area. 357 00:29:00.760 --> 00:29:04.480 On the other hand, you see a more stagnant force 358 00:29:04.480 --> 00:29:07.440 which was not in the trade centers, 359 00:29:07.440 --> 00:29:10.320 but which were more based in like the Arabian Peninsula, 360 00:29:10.320 --> 00:29:14.760 the Hijaz region, and this was another school of thought, 361 00:29:14.760 --> 00:29:17.960 a much more dogmatic rather than the rational, 362 00:29:17.960 --> 00:29:19.600 you know, scars of this area. 363 00:29:19.600 --> 00:29:22.880 And that becomes gradually dominant in the Muslim world 364 00:29:22.880 --> 00:29:26.880 and you see a rise of landlords and soldiers 365 00:29:26.880 --> 00:29:34.760 and the Empire creating its bureaucracy, mainly bureaucrats, at the expense of merchants. 366 00:29:34.760 --> 00:29:41.200 Another thing which adds to that is the gradual shift of trade, world trade, from the Muslim 367 00:29:41.200 --> 00:29:45.040 world first to the Mediterranean and ultimately to North Europe. 368 00:29:45.040 --> 00:29:52.880 Actually the real killer of the Muslim world is the discovery of the route from the oceans 369 00:29:52.880 --> 00:29:57.580 to India by Vasco da Gama at the end of the 15th century. 370 00:29:57.580 --> 00:29:59.520 That changes the whole world trade 371 00:29:59.520 --> 00:30:02.640 and what we know as the Silk Road gradually declines, 372 00:30:02.640 --> 00:30:07.640 oceans become the new source of making money and trade. 373 00:30:09.040 --> 00:30:12.280 And the decline of trade in Islam 374 00:30:12.280 --> 00:30:15.920 leads not only to the loss of wealth, 375 00:30:15.920 --> 00:30:20.720 but it leads to the stagnation of minds. 376 00:30:20.720 --> 00:30:23.080 Because trade not only creates wealth, 377 00:30:23.080 --> 00:30:26.640 but through trade, you travel, new people come and go, 378 00:30:26.640 --> 00:30:30.640 you are exposed to new ideas, and thanks to that, 379 00:30:30.640 --> 00:30:32.680 a civilization becomes much more dynamic 380 00:30:32.680 --> 00:30:34.640 by being exposed to new ideas. 381 00:30:34.640 --> 00:30:37.260 But when you look at the Islamic civilization, 382 00:30:37.260 --> 00:30:41.040 that's why Baghdad or Basra or Alexandria, Cairo, 383 00:30:41.040 --> 00:30:44.320 these were the more, these were the places 384 00:30:44.320 --> 00:30:48.000 where the most brilliant ideas came out from Muslim scholars. 385 00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:50.360 When you go back to the center of Saudi Arabia, 386 00:30:50.360 --> 00:30:52.120 Today's Saudi Arabia, there was nothing, 387 00:30:52.120 --> 00:30:55.200 there was no new idea, it was a stagnant culture. 388 00:30:55.200 --> 00:30:59.520 But that stagnant culture gradually became very powerful 389 00:30:59.520 --> 00:31:01.240 and ultimately dominated in Islam. 390 00:31:01.240 --> 00:31:03.480 That's why after the 13th or 14th century, 391 00:31:03.480 --> 00:31:05.600 you don't really see new ideas in Islam. 392 00:31:05.600 --> 00:31:07.280 It's just a repetition of the same thing. 393 00:31:07.280 --> 00:31:10.080 It becomes very scholastic, very dogmatic. 394 00:31:11.200 --> 00:31:16.200 Now, that's why Muslims basically lagged behind the West 395 00:31:16.200 --> 00:31:21.200 and as trade and the bourgeois middle class it's created, 396 00:31:21.880 --> 00:31:23.840 went down in the Muslim world. 397 00:31:23.840 --> 00:31:27.840 But in the 19th century, Muslims started to discover that. 398 00:31:27.840 --> 00:31:31.480 So at least some Muslims tried to see the problem 399 00:31:31.480 --> 00:31:33.920 and that in the Ottoman Empire, 400 00:31:33.920 --> 00:31:36.440 which was based in Istanbul where I come from, 401 00:31:36.440 --> 00:31:38.360 the Ottomans especially in the 19th century 402 00:31:38.360 --> 00:31:40.560 understand that the West has been very successful 403 00:31:40.560 --> 00:31:44.360 thanks to not just science which they tried to adopt 404 00:31:44.360 --> 00:31:48.420 and Technology, but also to institutions and ideas, 405 00:31:48.420 --> 00:31:51.360 and most important, the idea of freedom. 406 00:31:53.220 --> 00:31:55.660 That's why the Ottomans in the mid-19th century, 407 00:31:55.660 --> 00:31:56.740 and the Ottoman Empire at the time 408 00:31:56.740 --> 00:31:58.040 controlled the whole Middle East, 409 00:31:58.040 --> 00:32:00.400 what we call the Middle East today was the Ottoman Empire. 410 00:32:00.400 --> 00:32:03.200 27 nation states emerged from the Ottoman Empire, 411 00:32:03.200 --> 00:32:06.080 which includes all the Arab states that we can discuss. 412 00:32:07.480 --> 00:32:12.480 And the Ottomans in 1839 had their reorganization edict, 413 00:32:12.480 --> 00:32:25.480 The Tanzimat, as it's called in Turkish, and among some of the important things in that edict was the further securing of property rights that the Sultan cannot confiscate anything, period. 414 00:32:25.480 --> 00:32:41.480 And another thing which was brought in was the idea that people could own land, because there was, in the Islamic civilization, despite, it was not a product of the Quran, but it was actually a practice adopted from the Sassanid Empire. 415 00:32:41.480 --> 00:32:47.800 Empire, that there was the idea that the land belonged to the state, and that would lead 416 00:32:47.800 --> 00:32:55.200 at redistribution of the land, which did not allow the rise of feudalism in Islam as it 417 00:32:55.200 --> 00:32:57.080 did in Europe. 418 00:32:57.080 --> 00:33:01.860 But the Ottomans realized that they should just bring all these things, change all these 419 00:33:01.860 --> 00:33:06.120 things and they allowed private property of the land as well. 420 00:33:06.120 --> 00:33:10.840 And that's why you see actually some rise of a middle class in the Ottoman Empire and 421 00:33:10.840 --> 00:33:13.000 and some important reforms taking place. 422 00:33:13.000 --> 00:33:19.480 And liberalism at the time was quite fashionable both among the Turkish and the Arab intellectuals. 423 00:33:19.480 --> 00:33:25.680 The Arab historian Albert Hurani has a book, a fascinating book, titled Arabic Thought 424 00:33:25.680 --> 00:33:28.640 in the Liberal Age. 425 00:33:28.640 --> 00:33:34.080 This liberal age he's speaking about is the 19th and early 20th century. 426 00:33:34.080 --> 00:33:39.940 Almost every notable Muslim thinker at the time was fascinated by liberalism and European 427 00:33:39.940 --> 00:33:41.620 and Success Through Liberal Ideas. 428 00:33:42.580 --> 00:33:46.460 But what is most striking is that this liberal age 429 00:33:46.460 --> 00:33:51.380 ends rapidly in the second quarter of the 20th century. 430 00:33:51.380 --> 00:33:55.140 And instead, you see the rise of Islamism, 431 00:33:55.140 --> 00:33:59.140 which is not Islam, it's obviously an ideology 432 00:33:59.140 --> 00:34:01.700 which refers to Islam, but an ideology 433 00:34:01.700 --> 00:34:05.580 which combines Islam with socialism 434 00:34:05.580 --> 00:34:08.100 and some form of nationalism. 435 00:34:08.100 --> 00:34:09.980 and Islamists started to look, 436 00:34:09.980 --> 00:34:12.200 not at the liberal tradition in the West, 437 00:34:12.200 --> 00:34:14.220 but actually the illiberal tradition in the West. 438 00:34:14.220 --> 00:34:16.340 Actually Mehdoudi, the Pakistani scholar 439 00:34:16.340 --> 00:34:19.220 who devised much of the Islamist ideas, 440 00:34:19.220 --> 00:34:21.120 said, fascism is a great idea. 441 00:34:21.120 --> 00:34:23.600 Islam should be like fascism, the Islamic state. 442 00:34:23.600 --> 00:34:26.140 We will only have the right idea instead of the wrong idea, 443 00:34:26.140 --> 00:34:28.800 but we will impose it like the fascists do. 444 00:34:28.800 --> 00:34:30.020 So there was an admiration to these, 445 00:34:30.020 --> 00:34:33.380 all these totalitarian ideas suddenly in the 20s and 30s. 446 00:34:33.380 --> 00:34:35.480 And that legacy lasted for quite a long time. 447 00:34:35.480 --> 00:34:36.900 It's still out there. 448 00:34:36.900 --> 00:34:41.860 Now, why, but why, like why did, if liberalism was quite popular, and that's something I 449 00:34:41.860 --> 00:34:47.140 address in my upcoming book, you know, Islam Without Extremes, A Muslim Case for Liberty, 450 00:34:47.140 --> 00:34:53.500 if liberalism was so popular in the 19th century, why did decline so gradually, and not gradually, 451 00:34:53.500 --> 00:34:55.220 so dramatically? 452 00:34:55.220 --> 00:35:02.020 Well, the answer is, at least a big part of the answer is colonialism. 453 00:35:02.020 --> 00:35:04.740 In the 19th century, Muslims were independent. 454 00:35:04.740 --> 00:35:07.440 Under the Ottoman Empire, it was a sovereign Muslim state. 455 00:35:07.440 --> 00:35:12.500 It was more self-confident than what Muslims would become later. 456 00:35:12.500 --> 00:35:17.020 With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, all Arab states, with the exclusion of Saudi Arabia 457 00:35:17.020 --> 00:35:24.980 and Yemen, which no one bothered to colonize, all Arab states were colonized by the Europeans, 458 00:35:24.980 --> 00:35:31.780 the French or the British, and Italians, Italians were the worst. 459 00:35:31.780 --> 00:35:39.020 This colonialism ultimately created anti-colonialism, which is not a liberal way of approaching. 460 00:35:39.020 --> 00:35:44.880 It created the idea of solidarity and national liberation, that we should fight them. 461 00:35:44.880 --> 00:35:50.980 And liberalism was seen now as the tool of the imperialists to come into our markets 462 00:35:50.980 --> 00:35:53.900 and corrupt our nation and so on. 463 00:35:53.900 --> 00:35:59.000 The Islamic world became very defensive and reactionary, and the West was seen not as 464 00:35:59.000 --> 00:36:03.480 is a model or an example to emulate as it was for the Muslim reformers of the 19th century, 465 00:36:03.480 --> 00:36:07.240 but an enemy to fight and to resist. 466 00:36:07.240 --> 00:36:13.520 That's why all these radical movements in the 20th century, some of which have gone radical 467 00:36:13.520 --> 00:36:21.560 enough to become terrorists, something that I join like my Western friends in denouncing. 468 00:36:21.560 --> 00:36:22.560 But they have a history. 469 00:36:22.560 --> 00:36:25.480 There's a reason why they became. 470 00:36:25.480 --> 00:36:33.600 In Iran, for example, which became a very oppressive regime after overthrowing the Shah, 471 00:36:33.600 --> 00:36:37.920 the reason why Iran is so anti-American is because all of the leaders of the Iranian 472 00:36:37.920 --> 00:36:44.520 revolution were tortured by the Shah and the Shah was a great friend of the American government. 473 00:36:44.520 --> 00:36:50.440 So the reason why they have so much reaction has a reason in itself, which doesn't justify 474 00:36:50.440 --> 00:36:53.440 everything they do, but there's a context. 475 00:36:53.440 --> 00:36:58.320 So that's why I think if we want to support liberalism in the Muslim world, liberalism 476 00:36:58.320 --> 00:37:02.040 in the classical sense, of course, if we want to support liberalism in the Muslim world, 477 00:37:02.040 --> 00:37:07.560 there are things of course Muslim liberals will do. I mean, like, I heard very nice speeches 478 00:37:07.560 --> 00:37:12.360 today about the compatibility of the New Testament and libertarianism. I mean, I can make similar 479 00:37:12.360 --> 00:37:17.480 arguments about the Qur'an. There are people who make these arguments. But if the West 480 00:37:17.480 --> 00:37:23.960 wants to help, the best thing they will do is not to attack Muslim countries and bomb 481 00:37:23.960 --> 00:37:38.160 Muslim lands and reinforce the idea, and not to reinforce the idea that Islam is under 482 00:37:38.160 --> 00:37:41.600 attack and Muslims choose resistant fight. 483 00:37:41.600 --> 00:37:45.400 When you look at, listen to Osama Bin Laden's speeches, he's delusional, but he's speaking 484 00:37:45.400 --> 00:37:51.280 about, oh, we are occupied here, we are occupied there, and then we should go and fight them. 485 00:37:51.280 --> 00:37:57.760 The West should be only wise not to reinforce that and rather actually make the Muslims 486 00:37:57.760 --> 00:38:00.320 feel comfortable and safe and secure. 487 00:38:00.320 --> 00:38:04.040 That's when the idea of freedom will flourish. 488 00:38:04.040 --> 00:38:07.800 And actually, when we look at the history between Islam and the West of the past century 489 00:38:07.800 --> 00:38:11.880 or past two centuries, we always see that peaceful interactions between the Westerns 490 00:38:11.880 --> 00:38:18.960 and Muslims, like cultural interactions, trade, they help flourish new ideas among Muslims 491 00:38:18.960 --> 00:38:22.720 and they look at the West and they say, oh, that's a good idea, they achieved something 492 00:38:22.720 --> 00:38:24.080 we can get to learn from. 493 00:38:24.080 --> 00:38:28.800 And that is actually the Turkish, that's becoming a Turkish experience right now. 494 00:38:28.800 --> 00:38:35.400 And now even in the Arab world, with the Arab Spring, there's like a more interest in Western 495 00:38:35.400 --> 00:38:39.800 democracy or open society and concepts like this. 496 00:38:39.800 --> 00:38:44.800 But it will go all horrible if another bomb happens or another occupation happens. 497 00:38:44.800 --> 00:38:50.840 Facebook and Twitter turn out to be much more liberating than the bombs of W. Bush in that 498 00:38:50.840 --> 00:38:52.400 sense. 499 00:38:52.400 --> 00:38:57.040 So I think this is all to say. 500 00:38:57.040 --> 00:39:01.040 What I want to emphasize at the very end, and I would like to leave some Q&A time if 501 00:39:01.040 --> 00:39:07.960 we have, Islam has the potential in itself to find its own way to freedom. 502 00:39:07.960 --> 00:39:11.480 was not at peace with freedom all the time, I mean, remember the Middle Ages, the Crusades 503 00:39:11.480 --> 00:39:15.480 and the Inquisition and so on, but Christians can understand their faith in various ways, 504 00:39:15.480 --> 00:39:22.280 as Muslims can understand their faith in various ways, but Islam, to find its own way to freedom, 505 00:39:22.280 --> 00:39:26.840 Muslims should be just given the chance to try, and it will be only with more peaceful 506 00:39:26.840 --> 00:39:30.280 relations between other relations, including the West. 507 00:39:30.280 --> 00:39:30.800 Thank you so much. 508 00:39:47.960 --> 00:39:51.960 We have 15 minutes for questions. 509 00:39:51.960 --> 00:39:53.960 Yes, please. 510 00:39:53.960 --> 00:39:57.960 You touched a little bit on the root cause of terrorism in the Middle East, 511 00:39:57.960 --> 00:40:03.960 and I agree with you that a lot of it has to come with the colonialization and the interventionism. 512 00:40:03.960 --> 00:40:23.960 Though, do you think that there is also another element to that that comes from the religious aspect, because people do use the argument that they hate us for our freedom, and I think that's absurd, but they must be getting that from something, and I was just wondering if you believe that there is some religious element in that that is human, some of the terrorist elements? 513 00:40:23.960 --> 00:40:29.480 Sure, the question is whether is there a religious element to terrorism in the name of Islam 514 00:40:29.480 --> 00:40:34.920 other than, you know, political reasons and like reactionism, reaction to the West. 515 00:40:34.920 --> 00:40:41.560 There is a religious element in the sense that Islam has an idea of jihad, a holy war. 516 00:40:41.560 --> 00:40:46.480 But jihad has been understood in different ways and the more common interpretation to 517 00:40:46.480 --> 00:40:49.080 understand jihad is a defensive act. 518 00:40:49.080 --> 00:40:53.840 If Muslim countries are attacked, if Muslim lands are attacked, Muslims should fight back. 519 00:40:53.840 --> 00:41:01.600 And when you look at actual, listen to sermons of the terrorists or the ideologues of terrorism 520 00:41:01.600 --> 00:41:05.960 in the name of Islam, they would say, oh, we are occupied in Palestine, we are occupied 521 00:41:05.960 --> 00:41:10.040 in Chechnya, we are occupied in here, we are occupied there, and they see this as a grand 522 00:41:10.040 --> 00:41:15.200 conspiracy against Islam, so jihad is promoted as an act of defense. 523 00:41:15.200 --> 00:41:20.400 But they go and attack innocent people, which is another actually violation of the sharia. 524 00:41:20.400 --> 00:41:26.140 In medieval Islamic law, there was a clear difference between combatants and non-combatants. 525 00:41:26.140 --> 00:41:31.520 For example, there was a discussion in medieval texts whether Muslims can use catapults to 526 00:41:31.520 --> 00:41:34.640 throw rocks to cities. 527 00:41:34.640 --> 00:41:40.720 And some jurists did not permit saying that that will kill innocent people in the city, 528 00:41:40.720 --> 00:41:41.720 not just the soldiers. 529 00:41:41.720 --> 00:41:46.500 So there was always this idea of combatants and non-combatants, and jihad had this distinction 530 00:41:46.500 --> 00:41:49.300 between the two, and that non-combatants cannot be attacked. 531 00:41:49.300 --> 00:41:56.620 But now what the Islamists, the terrorists and the extremists do, they try to find ways 532 00:41:56.620 --> 00:42:02.060 to get over that and the thing they say mainly is that they kill our children too, like when 533 00:42:02.060 --> 00:42:06.060 they throw a bomb somewhere, you know, like that's the way they try to justify. 534 00:42:06.060 --> 00:42:12.020 I'm not justifying any of that argument, you know, I think it's, but there is, they refer 535 00:42:12.020 --> 00:42:16.900 to religion, but they could be referring to something else, like and actually it is not 536 00:42:16.900 --> 00:42:25.900 It's not a surprise that today the violence that is committed in the name of Islam was committed under some other ideology a few decades ago. 537 00:42:25.900 --> 00:42:35.900 Like in Palestine today, the Hamas or the Islamic Jihad is the most fanatic and they attack Israeli civilians, which I denounce, which is terrorism. 538 00:42:35.900 --> 00:42:41.900 But you know, the communists were doing that 20 years ago. That was the more fashionable way of resistance or fighting. 539 00:42:41.900 --> 00:42:44.320 and there is certainly a problem there in the region 540 00:42:44.320 --> 00:42:47.120 which creates anger and hatred 541 00:42:47.120 --> 00:42:50.880 and if like some Christian terrorists, 542 00:42:50.880 --> 00:42:53.760 some Palestinian Christians are, sorry, 543 00:42:53.760 --> 00:42:55.240 some Palestinian terrorists are Christian 544 00:42:55.240 --> 00:42:58.680 like Abu Nidal which was one of the bloodiest terrorists. 545 00:42:58.680 --> 00:43:01.840 So it expresses itself through different ways 546 00:43:01.840 --> 00:43:04.080 and these days Islam has become more fashionable 547 00:43:04.080 --> 00:43:06.480 because of after the fall of communism 548 00:43:06.480 --> 00:43:08.200 and the Soviet Union and so on. 549 00:43:08.200 --> 00:43:10.160 So there are some religious arguments they use 550 00:43:10.160 --> 00:43:13.380 but I think the root cause is the political context 551 00:43:13.380 --> 00:43:17.360 which they're in and their hatred which comes from, 552 00:43:17.360 --> 00:43:20.420 you know, all of the political conditions. 553 00:43:22.420 --> 00:43:23.260 Sorry? 554 00:43:23.260 --> 00:43:26.460 Isn't he a great man? 555 00:43:26.460 --> 00:43:28.260 I don't know, sorry, yes sir. 556 00:43:29.120 --> 00:43:30.320 I have heard different, 557 00:43:32.760 --> 00:43:35.280 order of the various swaths. 558 00:43:35.280 --> 00:43:36.360 Order, sorry, yeah. 559 00:43:36.360 --> 00:43:39.200 Yeah, the order in which they're written, 560 00:43:39.200 --> 00:43:50.200 Has there been a reshuffling of those over the years, and were the later writings of Muhammad, say less violent, or more violent than the earlier ones? 561 00:44:09.200 --> 00:44:18.200 The Surahs in the beginning and the shortest ones at the back, but actually the ones which were revealed the first were the ones in the beginning, I mean, so at the end, sorry, the shortest ones. 562 00:44:18.200 --> 00:44:34.200 So when you go back in time, it's like you don't read, there's another ordering of the Quran, which starts with the first verse revealed, which was in time order, but the common Quran is not according to timeline, so that's confusing in that sense. 563 00:44:34.200 --> 00:44:45.200 What you're asking is, I think, whether the initial, like, suras which are more peaceful than they're replaced by, you know, more militant suras later. 564 00:44:45.200 --> 00:44:51.200 Well, that's a theme, and here's the reason. Prophet Muhammad had two, you know, periods. 565 00:44:51.200 --> 00:44:58.200 He was in Mecca for 13 years, and he had 10 years in Medina. In Mecca, they were a minority, a persecuted minority by the pagans, 566 00:44:58.200 --> 00:45:07.200 So they were just preaching and the verses are just about, you know, like God after life and morality and so on. 567 00:45:07.200 --> 00:45:14.200 When he went to Medina, this was a new city, he just automatically became the ruler of the city 568 00:45:14.200 --> 00:45:18.200 and the Meccans started to attack them and they founded an army to fight them. 569 00:45:18.200 --> 00:45:24.200 So there are many verses in the Medina later, you know, later verses of the Quran about war, 570 00:45:24.200 --> 00:45:27.200 like fight them, fight the enemies of God and so on. 571 00:45:27.200 --> 00:45:29.120 and so on. 572 00:45:29.120 --> 00:45:38.580 Some scholars, just right after Prophet Muhammad, thought that the verses about war came later, 573 00:45:38.580 --> 00:45:43.320 so they are the ones which have to be taken as the most authoritative. 574 00:45:43.320 --> 00:45:51.320 So they defined a more militant doctrine of jihad, which was necessary for the empire. 575 00:45:51.320 --> 00:45:54.560 We should understand that jihad is a little disturbing, but many empires use jihad just 576 00:45:54.560 --> 00:45:56.940 to expand their power, I mean. 577 00:45:58.440 --> 00:46:00.960 But there is another way of understanding this, 578 00:46:00.960 --> 00:46:03.400 as understanding Muslims should be peaceful 579 00:46:03.400 --> 00:46:06.800 and the war verses only refer to the context 580 00:46:06.800 --> 00:46:07.920 in which they're attacked. 581 00:46:07.920 --> 00:46:09.800 I mean, if you're attacked, you have to protect yourself. 582 00:46:09.800 --> 00:46:12.440 You can understand them that way, 583 00:46:12.440 --> 00:46:15.920 but other people have preferred to extend those verses 584 00:46:15.920 --> 00:46:20.440 into a unified doctrine of war, it will, 585 00:46:20.440 --> 00:46:23.280 and that's a definition that I refuse, 586 00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:26.280 but there are people who have done that 587 00:46:26.280 --> 00:46:28.560 and that was mainly for political reasons. 588 00:46:28.560 --> 00:46:32.400 They preferred that more militant doctrine of jihad. 589 00:46:34.560 --> 00:46:36.360 You're welcome, please, yes sir. 590 00:46:36.360 --> 00:46:38.960 A sort of welcome-ready characterization 591 00:46:38.960 --> 00:46:42.160 of libertarianism would be that politics 592 00:46:42.160 --> 00:46:46.120 should be completely separated from economics. 593 00:46:46.120 --> 00:46:48.160 You make some illuminating remarks 594 00:46:48.160 --> 00:46:50.480 about Islam and the Arab world 595 00:46:50.480 --> 00:46:53.000 and some illuminating remarks about economics 596 00:46:53.000 --> 00:47:00.000 about Islamic Literature, but you also mentioned that the hadith is essential to Islamic culture, 597 00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:03.000 it is a kind of hadith, and so is the telegrapher. 598 00:47:03.000 --> 00:47:10.000 Can you concede of any point to any Islamic scholars, ancient or modern, 599 00:47:10.000 --> 00:47:18.000 who characterize Islam in which politics is separated completely from economic life? 600 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:25.000 Or any Islamic scholars who do not defend the caliphate or some simulacrum like Aqib Bait? 601 00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:29.000 Okay, well, Aqib Bait is not a bunch of Islamic scholars, but that's a good point. 602 00:47:29.000 --> 00:47:33.000 Well, thank you. It's a good question. 603 00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:36.000 Well, and it says, maybe you can be interested in my book. 604 00:47:36.000 --> 00:47:41.000 There's a chapter about it called Freedom from the State, and I deal with the idea of caliphate. 605 00:47:41.000 --> 00:47:46.000 The caliphate is a creation by Muslims. It's not a creation of the Quran. 606 00:47:46.000 --> 00:47:59.400 Yes, but actually, I have an issue with the Hadiths. I mean, Hadiths, exactly, exactly, exactly. That's why I think the Sharia should be revised and, you know, looked at that. 607 00:47:59.400 --> 00:48:08.400 The thing is, here is the thing. What is divinely mandated and what is man-made? That is a big question for all Muslims. The Quran, every Muslim understands as God's revelation. 608 00:48:08.400 --> 00:48:14.400 But then, what about the prophet's practices, or the practices of the Muslims who were close to the prophet? 609 00:48:14.400 --> 00:48:17.400 Are they also, you know, binding? And that's a big question. 610 00:48:17.400 --> 00:48:25.400 And most Sharia scholars in the Middle Ages, you know, took all these binding and, you know, they developed a very extensive, you know, like a legal doctrine. 611 00:48:25.400 --> 00:48:37.400 My take, and the take of other Muslims who are more reformist-minded, would be to say, well, the prophet, you know, received revelation from God, but he acted as a human being in his own time and milieu. 612 00:48:37.400 --> 00:48:45.600 So not everything he did is binding forever. And actually there are episodes within the 613 00:48:45.600 --> 00:48:50.760 hadith to justify this point of view. For example, during one of the wars, the battles 614 00:48:50.760 --> 00:48:55.900 between the Meccan pagans and the Medinan Muslims, the Muslims army had to camp somewhere 615 00:48:55.900 --> 00:49:02.400 and the prophet said, let's camp here. And one of his companions come and ask him, is 616 00:49:02.400 --> 00:49:06.160 Is this God's revelation or is this your idea? 617 00:49:06.160 --> 00:49:11.120 When he says, it's my idea, then he says, okay, well I think differently, let's do that. 618 00:49:11.120 --> 00:49:14.640 And the prophet listens, and you know, according to hadiths, and that happens. 619 00:49:14.640 --> 00:49:21.640 Now that tells me that anything besides revelation can be disputed, or can be put in context. 620 00:49:21.640 --> 00:49:26.560 And the prophet did this, well, he was a seventh century Arab living in his time and milieu. 621 00:49:26.560 --> 00:49:31.200 I mean, the reasons why, for example, Muslims wear a turban and have a long beard, is that 622 00:49:31.200 --> 00:49:33.920 They say, oh, prophet dressed that way. 623 00:49:33.920 --> 00:49:35.560 Well, even the pagans dressed that way. 624 00:49:35.560 --> 00:49:37.440 That's the fashion of the time, you know? 625 00:49:37.440 --> 00:49:43.000 So, contextualizing these things is, I think, 626 00:49:43.000 --> 00:49:44.480 a good way to understand. 627 00:49:44.480 --> 00:49:45.680 The prophet did so. 628 00:49:45.680 --> 00:49:47.360 We can understand the purpose and the meaning, 629 00:49:47.360 --> 00:49:48.720 but we don't have to take it today. 630 00:49:48.720 --> 00:49:52.040 Unfortunately, there is a very literalist understanding 631 00:49:52.040 --> 00:49:54.120 of the prophet, and some Muslims have said, 632 00:49:54.120 --> 00:49:56.320 well, voting is against Islam because the prophet 633 00:49:56.320 --> 00:49:57.720 did not vote. 634 00:49:57.720 --> 00:50:00.440 Well, he did not use a toothbrush, he did not drive a car, 635 00:50:00.440 --> 00:50:04.560 If you go with that logic, I mean, you'll just go back to the Middle Ages, 14th century 636 00:50:04.560 --> 00:50:07.080 back. 637 00:50:07.080 --> 00:50:11.080 And the institution of the caliphate, prophet died and Muslims did not know what to do, 638 00:50:11.080 --> 00:50:14.400 and they just discussed and they said, well, let's have a leader among us and let's call 639 00:50:14.400 --> 00:50:15.400 him the caliph. 640 00:50:15.400 --> 00:50:20.240 So it was a human institution created by the Muslims according to norms of the time. 641 00:50:20.240 --> 00:50:25.600 So I think the big issue for Muslims is to be able to distinguish between their core 642 00:50:25.600 --> 00:50:31.640 or principles of their religion and the way those principles were put in practice by Muslims 643 00:50:31.640 --> 00:50:36.340 in the context of the seventh century or the eighth or ninth century. 644 00:50:36.340 --> 00:50:39.960 And now there is a big effort to distinguish these things and in Turkey, for example, theologians 645 00:50:39.960 --> 00:50:43.880 are discussing these things and let's say, let's just distinguish what is historical 646 00:50:43.880 --> 00:50:47.480 and what is religious. 647 00:50:47.480 --> 00:50:52.280 And I think it's possible and hadiths, the questioning of the hadiths, the sayings of 648 00:50:52.280 --> 00:50:55.200 for Profit, and putting them in context would be very helpful 649 00:50:55.200 --> 00:50:56.040 in that regard. 650 00:50:58.480 --> 00:51:00.280 Yes, sir, and I'll come back to you. 651 00:51:14.000 --> 00:51:14.840 We'll see. 652 00:51:14.840 --> 00:51:19.480 It is a good thing, ultimately, because, I mean, 653 00:51:19.480 --> 00:51:21.600 these dictators, well, I don't know what will happen 654 00:51:21.600 --> 00:51:26.240 in Libya, because the dictator in Libya is the craziest of all, and I mean there are 655 00:51:26.240 --> 00:51:30.240 rational dictators and there are crazy dictators, so the rational ones understand that they 656 00:51:30.240 --> 00:51:34.480 with Rome, so they just leave the country and go and live in a nice, you know, home 657 00:51:34.480 --> 00:51:36.720 in some luxury place. 658 00:51:36.720 --> 00:51:41.040 But the irrational, the crazy ones want the key power and they start, you know, genocidal 659 00:51:41.040 --> 00:51:44.780 acts, so in Libya that's where we're heading and that's very scary. 660 00:51:44.780 --> 00:51:49.840 But in terms of when we speak about Tunis and Egypt, they, yeah, I mean the overthrowing 661 00:51:49.840 --> 00:51:52.560 of those dictators was good for that country. 662 00:51:52.560 --> 00:51:55.000 And it is very interesting that those dictators 663 00:51:55.000 --> 00:51:59.080 in Tunis and Egypt, and now there's a pattern 664 00:51:59.080 --> 00:52:00.240 in all these countries. 665 00:52:00.240 --> 00:52:03.480 There was a colonial period, the colonial power 666 00:52:03.480 --> 00:52:06.680 is pushed away by some liberator, 667 00:52:06.680 --> 00:52:09.180 and the liberator establishes his own tyranny. 668 00:52:10.240 --> 00:52:12.560 That's mostly a socialist party, like in Tunis 669 00:52:12.560 --> 00:52:14.800 it was this modernist socialist party, 670 00:52:14.800 --> 00:52:18.160 in Algeria it was the Socialist Party, FLN. 671 00:52:18.160 --> 00:52:22.240 So, being independent doesn't always make you free. 672 00:52:22.240 --> 00:52:23.760 So, I mean, that's something, 673 00:52:23.760 --> 00:52:25.840 we can infer from those examples. 674 00:52:25.840 --> 00:52:28.000 So, but what happened was, though, 675 00:52:28.000 --> 00:52:30.560 in those countries, in Tunisia and Egypt, 676 00:52:30.560 --> 00:52:34.240 with the dictators which ruled the country 677 00:52:35.480 --> 00:52:38.680 justified themselves, to the West especially, 678 00:52:38.680 --> 00:52:42.380 by saying, oh, if we go, the radical Islamists will come 679 00:52:42.380 --> 00:52:44.400 and they will be worse than us, 680 00:52:44.400 --> 00:52:46.040 and they will be anti-Israel, 681 00:52:46.040 --> 00:52:50.720 and they won't help your foreign policy goals and so on. 682 00:52:50.720 --> 00:52:54.000 But the radical Islamists had emerged in the first place 683 00:52:54.000 --> 00:52:57.120 because they were suppressed by these people. 684 00:52:57.120 --> 00:52:58.800 And when you look at Ikhwan, 685 00:52:58.800 --> 00:53:01.300 like you see the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, 686 00:53:01.300 --> 00:53:04.520 you see they're becoming more and more strident 687 00:53:04.520 --> 00:53:06.800 because they're persecuted by the regime. 688 00:53:06.800 --> 00:53:11.520 Like the Sayed Qutb, the big ideologue of Ikhwan, 689 00:53:11.520 --> 00:53:12.640 the Muslim Brotherhood, 690 00:53:12.640 --> 00:53:14.480 he was an Islamist to begin with, 691 00:53:14.480 --> 00:53:20.600 but he was more mild in the beginning and he spent many years in the prisons of Nasser 692 00:53:20.600 --> 00:53:24.640 under heavy torture and his latest tracks were like let's fight these infidels and 693 00:53:24.640 --> 00:53:30.480 godless rulers and so on and from there you had, so it was a vicious cycle that you had 694 00:53:30.480 --> 00:53:34.480 the dictator, the west says oh let's keep him in power because he's good for us and 695 00:53:34.480 --> 00:53:38.880 that's why you were having the you know hatred against you, I mean why do they hate us? Well 696 00:53:38.880 --> 00:53:43.600 go and ask the people in Cairo why do they hate you or go and ask the people in Gaza 697 00:53:43.600 --> 00:53:48.320 that's why they hate you, when bombs are falling on their head, you know, like, so, but toppling 698 00:53:48.320 --> 00:53:54.240 of those dictators, and it's, it's phenomenal that the, the Hwana Muslimin in Egypt, or 699 00:53:54.240 --> 00:53:58.720 the Islamists in Tunis, they did not go out and say, hey, we want an Islamic regime right 700 00:53:58.720 --> 00:54:02.680 now. They said, oh no, we want to be in a democratic game. That's a lesson from, probably 701 00:54:02.680 --> 00:54:06.520 they learned from Turkey's ruling party, the AKP, which coming from, it's coming from 702 00:54:06.520 --> 00:54:12.000 an Islamist background, but reformed itself to a quite, you know, democratic position. 703 00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:18.240 And that's why I think the myth that if the secular dictators go, Islamists will come 704 00:54:18.240 --> 00:54:22.240 and establish a worse tyranny is broken by these examples. 705 00:54:22.240 --> 00:54:30.040 Iran certainly was something which consolidated that idea, but now we are seeing examples 706 00:54:30.040 --> 00:54:32.240 which contradict that idea. 707 00:54:32.240 --> 00:54:35.880 And I think many people can now see that the Arabs, after all, they want freedom too. 708 00:54:35.880 --> 00:54:38.040 They don't hate your freedoms. 709 00:54:38.040 --> 00:54:40.960 They hate the fact that their freedoms were crushed 710 00:54:40.960 --> 00:54:44.620 by the dictators, which were partly supposed by the West. 711 00:54:46.400 --> 00:54:49.840 Yes sir, oh sorry, last question, sorry, yeah. 712 00:55:19.840 --> 00:55:30.840 Yeah, I'm not, I very much prefer the Scottish to Enlightenment to the French one as well. 713 00:55:30.840 --> 00:55:35.940 What is unfortunate for the Muslim world that we have faced only the French Enlightenment. 714 00:55:35.940 --> 00:55:40.040 So Enlightenment came as an anti-religious idea. 715 00:55:40.040 --> 00:55:43.660 First to Turkey and then to the Arab world. 716 00:55:43.660 --> 00:55:49.040 So this, we have this dichotomy between either you will be enlightened and godless or you 717 00:55:49.040 --> 00:55:55.360 will be a believer and reject everything that is new and Western or modern and so on. 718 00:55:55.360 --> 00:55:59.360 That's why I think discovering the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which is not very much known in 719 00:55:59.360 --> 00:56:03.720 the Muslim world, or the American way of separation of church and state, which is, again, not 720 00:56:03.720 --> 00:56:04.720 much known. 721 00:56:04.720 --> 00:56:10.360 I mean, in Turkey, secularism means the headscarf will be banned by the regime and Islamic institutions 722 00:56:10.360 --> 00:56:11.360 will be closed down. 723 00:56:11.360 --> 00:56:12.960 That's what is secularism in Turkey. 724 00:56:12.960 --> 00:56:15.760 And no Muslim wanted that, of course. 725 00:56:15.760 --> 00:56:20.760 So that's one thing to put on what you said. 726 00:56:20.920 --> 00:56:24.200 As for the, yeah, I mean Islam does not have a reformation 727 00:56:24.200 --> 00:56:27.000 in the sense that Christianity has, 728 00:56:27.000 --> 00:56:29.600 because there is no Pope to reform. 729 00:56:29.600 --> 00:56:32.400 Actually the problem is that there's no central authority. 730 00:56:33.360 --> 00:56:36.280 Unlike the Catholic Church, there was this central authority 731 00:56:36.280 --> 00:56:40.000 and the Protestants rebelled against that. 732 00:56:40.000 --> 00:56:43.000 Maybe Islam is maybe a bit closer to Judaism 733 00:56:43.000 --> 00:56:45.640 than Christianity, because of this idea of law. 734 00:56:45.640 --> 00:56:48.640 because of its understanding of God and so on. 735 00:56:48.640 --> 00:56:52.800 And maybe the Jewish response to enlightenment 736 00:56:52.800 --> 00:56:55.520 is maybe something which can be more helpful 737 00:56:55.520 --> 00:56:56.520 in understanding Islam. 738 00:56:56.520 --> 00:56:58.840 When Jews faced enlightenment, some of them said, 739 00:56:58.840 --> 00:57:00.840 well, let's change some things in our tradition. 740 00:57:00.840 --> 00:57:02.600 They became the Reform Jews. 741 00:57:02.600 --> 00:57:04.240 Some remained the Orthodox. 742 00:57:04.240 --> 00:57:06.240 Some remained, you know, some became conservative 743 00:57:06.240 --> 00:57:07.080 in the middle. 744 00:57:07.080 --> 00:57:09.440 And I think that process is going on right now 745 00:57:09.440 --> 00:57:10.280 in the Muslim world. 746 00:57:10.280 --> 00:57:13.600 The question is, will Muslims be pluralist enough to, you know? 747 00:57:13.600 --> 00:57:18.320 Some Muslims will be very, very conservative and so be it if they want to live that way. 748 00:57:18.320 --> 00:57:22.360 The question is, will they just be that way and impose that to others? 749 00:57:22.360 --> 00:57:26.840 And that discussion is really going on in the Muslim world right now. 750 00:57:26.840 --> 00:57:32.800 And I'm quite optimistic to be, I mean reasonably, but I'm optimistic about what will happen. 751 00:57:32.800 --> 00:57:36.240 And it is mainly related with dynamics in the Muslim world, 752 00:57:36.240 --> 00:57:40.120 but it's also related with dynamics between the Muslim world and the rest of the world.