The Mises Institute is proud to present
the Lew Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics.
Made possible by the Lew Church Educational Foundation,
Dr. Robert D. Hemhold, Chairman,
this annual lecture seeks to honor the late Lew Church,
a Florida businessman and advocate of liberty,
and the ideas to which he was dedicated.
Starting out as a swimming pool cleaner,
Mr. Church eventually established successful businesses
in swimming pool construction
and the restaurant and travel industries.
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.
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.
He completed his master's thesis on the Kurdish question at the history department of the same university.
He has given seminars in several universities and think tanks in the US and the UK on issues relating to Islam and modernity.
since 2002 he has been a regular commentator in the Turkish media. He is
currently a regular columnist for Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey's foremost
English language daily. He also writes a regular column for the Turkish language
daily star. Akil's articles have also appeared in Foreign Affairs, the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek,
the American Interest, First Things, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times and
and many other publications.
Mustafa Akyal has a book in Turkish
titled Rethinking the Kurdish Question,
What Went Wrong, What Next?
His forthcoming book, Islam Without Extremes,
A Muslim Case for Liberty, will be published by Norton
in July 2011.
It is my pleasure to present Mustafa Akyal,
who will address us on the commercial heritage
The Commercial Heritage and Contribution of Islam.
Thank you. Thank you. Well, good afternoon and first I should thank Mises Institute for flying me all over from Istanbul to Alabama.
It's really a pleasure and privilege to be here. I had a chance to see friends, meet new friends.
Anyone taste grits as breakfast, which was quite an experience and quite nice, I should say.
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,
I said, yeah, sure, I would love to.
Because I think in the West right now, there is focus on some unpleasant elements in the Islamic world.
And sure, we have them. And, you know, why we have them is a big, big question, and we can get into that too.
but we have some nasty people doing some nasty things
in the name of their religion in our part of the world.
We have nasty people doing nasty things
in some other, in the name of other religions as well
but there's focus on Islam right now
which is understandable in the West
but that's not the only side of the story.
Islam is like 14th century old civilization
and actually some of the facts within the Islamic history
are quite surprising to a modern observer who presumes that there is not much to learn from Islam.
It's quite the contrary, it's quite interesting.
Especially from a business angle, if you're a believer in free market, if you're a believer in capitalism,
Islam has an interesting story to tell.
So let me try to share that with you a little bit.
Among the founders of the world's great religions,
if I'm not wrong, there is only one who's a businessman,
and that's Prophet Muhammad.
He was a businessman, quite a successful one.
He was a merchant until the age of 40.
I mean, he started, I mean, Mecca,
where he was born and raised,
was the trade center of the Arabian Peninsula.
It was also the religious center at the Kaaba,
which had turned into a pagan pantheon,
so that's another story, but it was also the business center
and Muhammad was a very successful merchant
who married to a woman older than himself at the age of 25
and they established a very successful enterprise.
He became a prophet only at the age of 40
when in a cave as Muslims believe, including myself,
believe that he heard a voice telling him to worship God
and proclaim that there's only one God
to a basically polytheist society
and that's where the story of Islam begins.
But the fact that Muhammad was a businessman
had obvious influence on his thinking.
So when you look at the hadiths,
which are the recorded or the alleged words
of Prophet Muhammad, because they're always controversial.
They were written a few centuries after the prophet
and that's an important thing to keep in mind.
But anyway, when you look at his words and what he said,
you can find very interesting remarks.
Like he said, he's on record for saying
Like nine out of 10 of God's blessings come from trade.
Pretty like a pro-trade argument.
There's another tale, like when Prophet Muhammad
was in Medina, the second city he migrated from Mecca
because of religious persecution,
and people come to him at some point, Muslims,
and they say, the merchants at the market
are selling their goods with a very heavy,
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.
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.
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,
it's about how to write a proper loan contract it is and the fact that the
most of the early Muslims were merchants can be traced in the language of the
Quran because while Quran is preaching people it's using an almost a merchant
language there are many verses in the Quran which says you know the contract
between God and man will be rewarded in afterlife.
The covenant is defined as a contract.
So many scholars who have actually studied the Islamic,
the language of the Quran from a very linguistic perspective,
Arabic, have thought that this is appealing
to a very commercial society.
And also, it might be interesting to note
that Islam doesn't have the exact idea of a Sabbath,
a day that you stop work.
But there is the idea of a Friday, which is a holy day, that you stop what you do and go to the mosque.
But in the verse that orders Muslims to do the Friday prayer, it's a very interesting chapter.
It says, do your trade before the prayers.
And when you're called for prayer, leave everything and come to prayer.
When you're done, go back to your work and seek for God's blessings and bounties.
So, there are many examples like this from the Quran and the prophetic tradition,
which actually defines Islam as a very, like a, at least a, like a trade-oriented religion.
And a scholar who actually wrote a really good book on this, for those of you who would like
to be, you know, interested, who'd like to look into this more, is a, Maxime Rodinson,
who's actually a French Marxist, but he wrote this book, Islamic Capitalism, in the 1960s.
And being a Marxist, he was not a fan of capitalism, but he thought Islam is a very capitalist
religion.
That was not a socialist, you know, he emphasized in the book.
And that book really still is a good source, you know, he evaluated the Quran and the hadiths
and, you know, looked deep into those issues.
There are, though, some other themes in the Quran which had led some Muslims to a more
socialistic interpretation of the faith.
And the two of them are, first, the idea of zakat, which means almsgiving, which you can
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another theme in the Quran which is of course very much debated and is shown by some Muslims
as an objection to the capitalist economy is the ban on interest.
But whether that is interest or not, that's actually a good question and that's a debated
question.
This is something called RIBA and that means an over-extended, like an over-achieved wealth in just a short period.
But some scholars who look at what RIBA is have just concluded that this is actually usury, like an overextend, like an emphasized usury.
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.
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.
So that was an extensive interest, whereas some scholars think that in the modern age, banking interest is something different from that.
So there should be a distinction between interest and usury.
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
and there are Islamic banks which do some, actually use some legal tricks to go over the ban on injury
but they do do some obviously financing without the idea of interest
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
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
and Your Discover Law.
And that is actually very relevant
for the Islamic civilization
because of the whole notion of the sharia, Islamic law.
Now I know that the sharia is not a very popular term.
For obvious reasons.
I mean, people do very harsh things
in the name of the sharia, you know, chopping of hands
and, you know, lashing people,
or especially suppression of women in the Muslim world.
And that's a real, real, real problem
that we should be talking about.
But that is one way of understanding the sharia.
And the problem in that understanding of the sharia,
which is popular, especially in places like Afghanistan,
under the Taliban, is that the proponents of the sharia,
which is the Islamic law, insist on implementing it
as it was written some 10 centuries ago.
Like if you insist on implementing British common,
or like English common law, that would be pretty brutal,
you know, in the modern world.
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,
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,
then yeah, Sharia was understandable in that environment, but we live in a different world right now,
There obviously needs to be a reform of the sharia, if people will go and implement the sharia.
But let's leave that aside for a moment and let's think what the sharia is.
I mean, if you look at like an encyclopedia or something, it will say,
well, sharia is Islamic law as it is developed by scholars.
And many people read that and just go, well, the fact that it is developed by scholars was crucial,
because it means it was not dictated by the state.
let me tell you what this means like the Sharia was based on the Quran but very
vaguely on the Quran because the Quran like the New Testament is not a legal
book it speaks mostly about theology God afterlife and morality but there are a
few principles in the Quran that you can you know deduct from some laws from more
on the hadiths what the hadith was the bulk of the Sharia the sayings
attributed to Prophet Muhammad and just the legal opinions of the scholars at
at the time.
But what happened was that when Islam became a civilization,
and a big state right after the death of Prophet Muhammad,
Islamic scholars sat down and made these laws,
the Sharia laws.
But since they were not government employees,
their interest was not about serving the state
and its ambitions, their interest was about keeping justice,
upholding justice actually under the state.
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.
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,
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.
And he'll just complain, he said, whenever I want to consolidate my power, someone tells me that this is against the Sharia.
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.
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.
and he found very interesting cases in which the mufti, the legal scholar, whose job is to protect the sharia,
blocks the ruler from doing something which violates the rights of the individuals.
One case, for example, was when Yawuz, the ninth Ottoman sultan, Yawuz Selim the Grim, which was a very heavy-handed sultan,
he considered converting all Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire into Islam, forcibly.
Now Sharia grants that Jews and Christians have their religious freedom.
They are not equal citizens, you know, like Muslims, but they have the right to worship in Islamic lands.
That's why in Islamic lands, you know, Christian communities continued until today.
So when the Sultan thought about converting all Christians into Islam forcibly,
for the sake of politics, for the sake of homogeneity for his empire,
It was his top scholar, again, the Shaykh of Islam said you cannot do this, and this is against the Sharia.
Another example that Haim Gerber, again, the Israeli scholar, gives in his book about the Ottoman society and culture,
is a religious fatwa ruling by a mufti, a legal scholar, an Islamic scholar in the 17th century Palestine.
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.
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.
He doesn't like to see peasants around, but the peasants go to the Mufti and the Mufti
gives a fatwa which reads, it is not permissible to force them to immigrate from a town they
have taken to be their home and to which they have become accustomed.
For the believer is the lord of his soul.
He may live in whichever country he sees fit and whichever town he chooses.
It's not permissible to harass them.
So here is the reason why Muslim societies still have a deep respect for the notion of
the Sharia.
I mean, I know this is surprising to Westerners, when people are cutting hands and every Sharia
promoting party becomes very popular in the Muslim world, because for them Sharia simply
means justice, not the justice of the ruler, which is not justice, but the justice which
which is out there inherent and God-given ultimately, but as discovered through just and fair scholars.
But of course, if you already implement it today as it was in the Middle Ages, you have
a big problem, and we have a big problem because of that.
But even that distinction, whether to take Sharia literally or non-literally, was actually
discussed in the Middle Ages, and Imam Shatibi of the 14th century from North Africa actually
had created a theory of the higher intentions of the sharia.
And he said sharia has made laws,
but when you deduct principles from those laws,
you come to basically some fundamental principles.
And he said all sharia is actually
about protecting these five things,
protection of life, religion, property, lineage,
and the intellect.
The intellect is about banning drugs or things like that.
And property is one of the key things in the sharia,
and life of course.
So if sharia can be taken as such a set of principles,
and actually it is a good basis to devise a culture,
a political culture which emphasizes
the rights of the individuals
rather than the rights of the state,
the so-called rights of the state.
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.
Because of these, Islamic civilization had a big success in the Middle Ages
because it was a civilization which very much respected the rule of law
with many exceptions, with many tyrants and so on, with many nasty stories too
but there was the idea of rule of law
and under this rule of law, civil society flourished in medieval Islam
the idea of waqf, which in Arabic means foundation, grew up
Because the ruler was forbidden from confiscating a foundation that I found for the sake of God.
So there were many foundations which supported education, which opened soup kitchens,
or which supported even scientific research in the Middle Ages.
And the ruler was simply forced by the law to respect these things and not confiscate his property.
Hence came the scientific boom of the Islamic world.
Islamic world, hence came education, Islamic educational institutions in the medieval world.
That's why Muslims invented many things in the Middle Ages which were slowly and slowly
transferred into Europe, especially during the time of the Crusades when Crusaders came
to the Middle East and learned many new things from the Middle East.
Some of these inventions were quite economic inventions.
Let me give you a few examples.
Muslims devised a legal understanding called,
a legal form of contract called muhatra,
which means actually going over the ban on interest
and charging interest without going
against the letter of law.
This soon became muhatra in Latin
and Christians in the Middle Ages
started to use the same concept.
The Islamic concept of mudaraba,
in which a few people come and create a company
soon appeared in Italy in the 12th or 13th century
under the name Commenda, which ultimately became
the limited company in the West.
Another term which made its way from Arabic
to the English, the first French and English languages
is the word suck.
Suck in means Arabic written document.
and this was a document that Muslims merchants used to,
they didn't want to carry money from Fez to Baghdad
all the way, so they wrote down a paper
and that paper would equal some money
and they would go and cash it on the other side
of the Islamic civilization.
That suck became the check in the French
and the British and the English languages.
There are actually many terms in Arabic
which made their way into English
and let me just give you a few examples.
These are terms like algebra,
which comes from Al-Jabir, an Islamic scholar
in the 12th or 14th century.
Algorithm, which comes from Al-Kharizmi,
another Muslim scholar.
Alchemy, alkali, amalgam, almanac, alembic, admiral, alco,
mask, nadir, zenith, tariff, sugar, syrup,
Europe, checkmate, loot and guitar, all these come from Arabic, there are of course also
the Arabic numerals.
So Islam was quite a successful civilization and one of the success as Bernard Lewis, you
know not the greatest fan of the Islamic civilization based on some you know at least some considerations
He says Islam was the most advanced civilization in the Middle Ages in terms of freedom, in
terms of liberty.
It gave freedom to individuals like any other civilization because of this idea of law and
rights protected by law.
And that's why, and as Islam, this was of course a Muslim civilization first and Muslims
were the ruling class.
But Jews and Christians were given certain rights and that's why many Jews migrated from
Europe to Islamic lands when they were persecuted.
I mean the Jews who fled Spain in 1492, they came to the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Sultan welcomed them and they have been living in Turkey and the Ottoman
lands since the 15th century quite happily.
Unfortunately, we have a rabid anti-Semitism today in many parts of the Muslim world but
But that came as a response to Israel and that's a new phenomenon in the Muslim world.
If you look at until the 20th century, the Muslim world was much more preferable to Europe
when compared with the, when looked from the perspective of anti-Semitism and right of
the Jews.
Now while all these things were going on on the ground, a particular scholar even made
He created theory of Islam and the free market and that was Ibn Khaldun, a Muslim scholar
of the 14th century who lived in North Africa.
And Ibn Khaldun is a very interesting figure.
He has this book called Mukaddima, which means introduction, the longer thing, introduction
to history.
That was his thing.
And he actually devised it like a philosophy of history and he's also accepted as a beginner
of Sociology, because he studied how tribes and nations and societies change according
to geographic conditions, an idea which would be later developed by Montesquieu in the modern
age.
But one of Ibn Khaldun's contributions to world thought was the idea that governments
should use as minimal taxes as they can, because he observed every society around us, and in
In his Mukaddimah, he says, the less tax there is in a land, the more prosperity there is.
So he advises governments to minimize taxes.
He advises them not to engage in production or trade.
He says this should be done by the individual people.
And he also very much emphasizes protection of property rights.
The World Bank a few years ago called Ibn Khaldun the first advocate of privatization.
Now there was certainly a success story in medieval Islam, and it's impossible not to
see that, but then the question comes, what went wrong?
The Bernard Louisian question.
It's a right question, what went wrong?
Because today the Muslim world is really not the wealthiest part of the world, but there
is oil wealth, but it doesn't bring any good to anybody.
This is certainly underdeveloped in many ways, and when you compare with the West, there's a huge difference.
But this is a difference, this is a huge gap between this Muslim world and the West.
I mean, in favor of the West is a new phenomenon. In the past three or four centuries this emerged.
This emerged when the West really made a big leap forward with the modern world,
inventions and the age of science and discovery and capitalism and industrial revolution and so on.
So the West went forward, and not just the Muslim world, but the whole world lagged behind
the West.
I mean, you can say the same thing for Latin America, or Russia, or China, or Asia, or
of course Africa as well.
But what went wrong in the Muslim world?
And that's a question very much debated between, you know, it's a big historical question.
Now one answer given by some scholars, and I find it very compelling, is that the decline
The decline of the Muslim world is very much related with the decline of trade within the Islamic world.
Because when you look at how things evolved within Islam, in the second or third century,
there is an interesting decline in the role of merchants, which were the original makers of the Sharia,
because when you look at the early Sharia scholars, many of them were merchants themselves,
and they created a much more dynamic understanding of this area.
On the other hand, you see a more stagnant force
which was not in the trade centers,
but which were more based in like the Arabian Peninsula,
the Hijaz region, and this was another school of thought,
a much more dogmatic rather than the rational,
you know, scars of this area.
And that becomes gradually dominant in the Muslim world
and you see a rise of landlords and soldiers
and the Empire creating its bureaucracy, mainly bureaucrats, at the expense of merchants.
Another thing which adds to that is the gradual shift of trade, world trade, from the Muslim
world first to the Mediterranean and ultimately to North Europe.
Actually the real killer of the Muslim world is the discovery of the route from the oceans
to India by Vasco da Gama at the end of the 15th century.
That changes the whole world trade
and what we know as the Silk Road gradually declines,
oceans become the new source of making money and trade.
And the decline of trade in Islam
leads not only to the loss of wealth,
but it leads to the stagnation of minds.
Because trade not only creates wealth,
but through trade, you travel, new people come and go,
you are exposed to new ideas, and thanks to that,
a civilization becomes much more dynamic
by being exposed to new ideas.
But when you look at the Islamic civilization,
that's why Baghdad or Basra or Alexandria, Cairo,
these were the more, these were the places
where the most brilliant ideas came out from Muslim scholars.
When you go back to the center of Saudi Arabia,
Today's Saudi Arabia, there was nothing,
there was no new idea, it was a stagnant culture.
But that stagnant culture gradually became very powerful
and ultimately dominated in Islam.
That's why after the 13th or 14th century,
you don't really see new ideas in Islam.
It's just a repetition of the same thing.
It becomes very scholastic, very dogmatic.
Now, that's why Muslims basically lagged behind the West
and as trade and the bourgeois middle class it's created,
went down in the Muslim world.
But in the 19th century, Muslims started to discover that.
So at least some Muslims tried to see the problem
and that in the Ottoman Empire,
which was based in Istanbul where I come from,
the Ottomans especially in the 19th century
understand that the West has been very successful
thanks to not just science which they tried to adopt
and Technology, but also to institutions and ideas,
and most important, the idea of freedom.
That's why the Ottomans in the mid-19th century,
and the Ottoman Empire at the time
controlled the whole Middle East,
what we call the Middle East today was the Ottoman Empire.
27 nation states emerged from the Ottoman Empire,
which includes all the Arab states that we can discuss.
And the Ottomans in 1839 had their reorganization edict,
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.
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.
Empire, that there was the idea that the land belonged to the state, and that would lead
at redistribution of the land, which did not allow the rise of feudalism in Islam as it
did in Europe.
But the Ottomans realized that they should just bring all these things, change all these
things and they allowed private property of the land as well.
And that's why you see actually some rise of a middle class in the Ottoman Empire and
and some important reforms taking place.
And liberalism at the time was quite fashionable both among the Turkish and the Arab intellectuals.
The Arab historian Albert Hurani has a book, a fascinating book, titled Arabic Thought
in the Liberal Age.
This liberal age he's speaking about is the 19th and early 20th century.
Almost every notable Muslim thinker at the time was fascinated by liberalism and European
and Success Through Liberal Ideas.
But what is most striking is that this liberal age
ends rapidly in the second quarter of the 20th century.
And instead, you see the rise of Islamism,
which is not Islam, it's obviously an ideology
which refers to Islam, but an ideology
which combines Islam with socialism
and some form of nationalism.
and Islamists started to look,
not at the liberal tradition in the West,
but actually the illiberal tradition in the West.
Actually Mehdoudi, the Pakistani scholar
who devised much of the Islamist ideas,
said, fascism is a great idea.
Islam should be like fascism, the Islamic state.
We will only have the right idea instead of the wrong idea,
but we will impose it like the fascists do.
So there was an admiration to these,
all these totalitarian ideas suddenly in the 20s and 30s.
And that legacy lasted for quite a long time.
It's still out there.
Now, why, but why, like why did, if liberalism was quite popular, and that's something I
address in my upcoming book, you know, Islam Without Extremes, A Muslim Case for Liberty,
if liberalism was so popular in the 19th century, why did decline so gradually, and not gradually,
so dramatically?
Well, the answer is, at least a big part of the answer is colonialism.
In the 19th century, Muslims were independent.
Under the Ottoman Empire, it was a sovereign Muslim state.
It was more self-confident than what Muslims would become later.
With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, all Arab states, with the exclusion of Saudi Arabia
and Yemen, which no one bothered to colonize, all Arab states were colonized by the Europeans,
the French or the British, and Italians, Italians were the worst.
This colonialism ultimately created anti-colonialism, which is not a liberal way of approaching.
It created the idea of solidarity and national liberation, that we should fight them.
And liberalism was seen now as the tool of the imperialists to come into our markets
and corrupt our nation and so on.
The Islamic world became very defensive and reactionary, and the West was seen not as
is a model or an example to emulate as it was for the Muslim reformers of the 19th century,
but an enemy to fight and to resist.
That's why all these radical movements in the 20th century, some of which have gone radical
enough to become terrorists, something that I join like my Western friends in denouncing.
But they have a history.
There's a reason why they became.
In Iran, for example, which became a very oppressive regime after overthrowing the Shah,
the reason why Iran is so anti-American is because all of the leaders of the Iranian
revolution were tortured by the Shah and the Shah was a great friend of the American government.
So the reason why they have so much reaction has a reason in itself, which doesn't justify
everything they do, but there's a context.
So that's why I think if we want to support liberalism in the Muslim world, liberalism
in the classical sense, of course, if we want to support liberalism in the Muslim world,
there are things of course Muslim liberals will do. I mean, like, I heard very nice speeches
today about the compatibility of the New Testament and libertarianism. I mean, I can make similar
arguments about the Qur'an. There are people who make these arguments. But if the West
wants to help, the best thing they will do is not to attack Muslim countries and bomb
Muslim lands and reinforce the idea, and not to reinforce the idea that Islam is under
attack and Muslims choose resistant fight.
When you look at, listen to Osama Bin Laden's speeches, he's delusional, but he's speaking
about, oh, we are occupied here, we are occupied there, and then we should go and fight them.
The West should be only wise not to reinforce that and rather actually make the Muslims
feel comfortable and safe and secure.
That's when the idea of freedom will flourish.
And actually, when we look at the history between Islam and the West of the past century
or past two centuries, we always see that peaceful interactions between the Westerns
and Muslims, like cultural interactions, trade, they help flourish new ideas among Muslims
and they look at the West and they say, oh, that's a good idea, they achieved something
we can get to learn from.
And that is actually the Turkish, that's becoming a Turkish experience right now.
And now even in the Arab world, with the Arab Spring, there's like a more interest in Western
democracy or open society and concepts like this.
But it will go all horrible if another bomb happens or another occupation happens.
Facebook and Twitter turn out to be much more liberating than the bombs of W. Bush in that
sense.
So I think this is all to say.
What I want to emphasize at the very end, and I would like to leave some Q&A time if
we have, Islam has the potential in itself to find its own way to freedom.
was not at peace with freedom all the time, I mean, remember the Middle Ages, the Crusades
and the Inquisition and so on, but Christians can understand their faith in various ways,
as Muslims can understand their faith in various ways, but Islam, to find its own way to freedom,
Muslims should be just given the chance to try, and it will be only with more peaceful
relations between other relations, including the West.
Thank you so much.
We have 15 minutes for questions.
Yes, please.
You touched a little bit on the root cause of terrorism in the Middle East,
and I agree with you that a lot of it has to come with the colonialization and the interventionism.
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?
Sure, the question is whether is there a religious element to terrorism in the name of Islam
other than, you know, political reasons and like reactionism, reaction to the West.
There is a religious element in the sense that Islam has an idea of jihad, a holy war.
But jihad has been understood in different ways and the more common interpretation to
understand jihad is a defensive act.
If Muslim countries are attacked, if Muslim lands are attacked, Muslims should fight back.
And when you look at actual, listen to sermons of the terrorists or the ideologues of terrorism
in the name of Islam, they would say, oh, we are occupied in Palestine, we are occupied
in Chechnya, we are occupied in here, we are occupied there, and they see this as a grand
conspiracy against Islam, so jihad is promoted as an act of defense.
But they go and attack innocent people, which is another actually violation of the sharia.
In medieval Islamic law, there was a clear difference between combatants and non-combatants.
For example, there was a discussion in medieval texts whether Muslims can use catapults to
throw rocks to cities.
And some jurists did not permit saying that that will kill innocent people in the city,
not just the soldiers.
So there was always this idea of combatants and non-combatants, and jihad had this distinction
between the two, and that non-combatants cannot be attacked.
But now what the Islamists, the terrorists and the extremists do, they try to find ways
to get over that and the thing they say mainly is that they kill our children too, like when
they throw a bomb somewhere, you know, like that's the way they try to justify.
I'm not justifying any of that argument, you know, I think it's, but there is, they refer
to religion, but they could be referring to something else, like and actually it is not
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.
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.
But you know, the communists were doing that 20 years ago. That was the more fashionable way of resistance or fighting.
and there is certainly a problem there in the region
which creates anger and hatred
and if like some Christian terrorists,
some Palestinian Christians are, sorry,
some Palestinian terrorists are Christian
like Abu Nidal which was one of the bloodiest terrorists.
So it expresses itself through different ways
and these days Islam has become more fashionable
because of after the fall of communism
and the Soviet Union and so on.
So there are some religious arguments they use
but I think the root cause is the political context
which they're in and their hatred which comes from,
you know, all of the political conditions.
Sorry?
Isn't he a great man?
I don't know, sorry, yes sir.
I have heard different,
order of the various swaths.
Order, sorry, yeah.
Yeah, the order in which they're written,
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?
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.
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.
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.
Well, that's a theme, and here's the reason. Prophet Muhammad had two, you know, periods.
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,
So they were just preaching and the verses are just about, you know, like God after life and morality and so on.
When he went to Medina, this was a new city, he just automatically became the ruler of the city
and the Meccans started to attack them and they founded an army to fight them.
So there are many verses in the Medina later, you know, later verses of the Quran about war,
like fight them, fight the enemies of God and so on.
and so on.
Some scholars, just right after Prophet Muhammad, thought that the verses about war came later,
so they are the ones which have to be taken as the most authoritative.
So they defined a more militant doctrine of jihad, which was necessary for the empire.
We should understand that jihad is a little disturbing, but many empires use jihad just
to expand their power, I mean.
But there is another way of understanding this,
as understanding Muslims should be peaceful
and the war verses only refer to the context
in which they're attacked.
I mean, if you're attacked, you have to protect yourself.
You can understand them that way,
but other people have preferred to extend those verses
into a unified doctrine of war, it will,
and that's a definition that I refuse,
but there are people who have done that
and that was mainly for political reasons.
They preferred that more militant doctrine of jihad.
You're welcome, please, yes sir.
A sort of welcome-ready characterization
of libertarianism would be that politics
should be completely separated from economics.
You make some illuminating remarks
about Islam and the Arab world
and some illuminating remarks about economics
about Islamic Literature, but you also mentioned that the hadith is essential to Islamic culture,
it is a kind of hadith, and so is the telegrapher.
Can you concede of any point to any Islamic scholars, ancient or modern,
who characterize Islam in which politics is separated completely from economic life?
Or any Islamic scholars who do not defend the caliphate or some simulacrum like Aqib Bait?
Okay, well, Aqib Bait is not a bunch of Islamic scholars, but that's a good point.
Well, thank you. It's a good question.
Well, and it says, maybe you can be interested in my book.
There's a chapter about it called Freedom from the State, and I deal with the idea of caliphate.
The caliphate is a creation by Muslims. It's not a creation of the Quran.
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.
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.
But then, what about the prophet's practices, or the practices of the Muslims who were close to the prophet?
Are they also, you know, binding? And that's a big question.
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.
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.
So not everything he did is binding forever. And actually there are episodes within the
hadith to justify this point of view. For example, during one of the wars, the battles
between the Meccan pagans and the Medinan Muslims, the Muslims army had to camp somewhere
and the prophet said, let's camp here. And one of his companions come and ask him, is
Is this God's revelation or is this your idea?
When he says, it's my idea, then he says, okay, well I think differently, let's do that.
And the prophet listens, and you know, according to hadiths, and that happens.
Now that tells me that anything besides revelation can be disputed, or can be put in context.
And the prophet did this, well, he was a seventh century Arab living in his time and milieu.
I mean, the reasons why, for example, Muslims wear a turban and have a long beard, is that
They say, oh, prophet dressed that way.
Well, even the pagans dressed that way.
That's the fashion of the time, you know?
So, contextualizing these things is, I think,
a good way to understand.
The prophet did so.
We can understand the purpose and the meaning,
but we don't have to take it today.
Unfortunately, there is a very literalist understanding
of the prophet, and some Muslims have said,
well, voting is against Islam because the prophet
did not vote.
Well, he did not use a toothbrush, he did not drive a car,
If you go with that logic, I mean, you'll just go back to the Middle Ages, 14th century
back.
And the institution of the caliphate, prophet died and Muslims did not know what to do,
and they just discussed and they said, well, let's have a leader among us and let's call
him the caliph.
So it was a human institution created by the Muslims according to norms of the time.
So I think the big issue for Muslims is to be able to distinguish between their core
or principles of their religion and the way those principles were put in practice by Muslims
in the context of the seventh century or the eighth or ninth century.
And now there is a big effort to distinguish these things and in Turkey, for example, theologians
are discussing these things and let's say, let's just distinguish what is historical
and what is religious.
And I think it's possible and hadiths, the questioning of the hadiths, the sayings of
for Profit, and putting them in context would be very helpful
in that regard.
Yes, sir, and I'll come back to you.
We'll see.
It is a good thing, ultimately, because, I mean,
these dictators, well, I don't know what will happen
in Libya, because the dictator in Libya is the craziest of all, and I mean there are
rational dictators and there are crazy dictators, so the rational ones understand that they
with Rome, so they just leave the country and go and live in a nice, you know, home
in some luxury place.
But the irrational, the crazy ones want the key power and they start, you know, genocidal
acts, so in Libya that's where we're heading and that's very scary.
But in terms of when we speak about Tunis and Egypt, they, yeah, I mean the overthrowing
of those dictators was good for that country.
And it is very interesting that those dictators
in Tunis and Egypt, and now there's a pattern
in all these countries.
There was a colonial period, the colonial power
is pushed away by some liberator,
and the liberator establishes his own tyranny.
That's mostly a socialist party, like in Tunis
it was this modernist socialist party,
in Algeria it was the Socialist Party, FLN.
So, being independent doesn't always make you free.
So, I mean, that's something,
we can infer from those examples.
So, but what happened was, though,
in those countries, in Tunisia and Egypt,
with the dictators which ruled the country
justified themselves, to the West especially,
by saying, oh, if we go, the radical Islamists will come
and they will be worse than us,
and they will be anti-Israel,
and they won't help your foreign policy goals and so on.
But the radical Islamists had emerged in the first place
because they were suppressed by these people.
And when you look at Ikhwan,
like you see the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,
you see they're becoming more and more strident
because they're persecuted by the regime.
Like the Sayed Qutb, the big ideologue of Ikhwan,
the Muslim Brotherhood,
he was an Islamist to begin with,
but he was more mild in the beginning and he spent many years in the prisons of Nasser
under heavy torture and his latest tracks were like let's fight these infidels and
godless rulers and so on and from there you had, so it was a vicious cycle that you had
the dictator, the west says oh let's keep him in power because he's good for us and
that's why you were having the you know hatred against you, I mean why do they hate us? Well
go and ask the people in Cairo why do they hate you or go and ask the people in Gaza
that's why they hate you, when bombs are falling on their head, you know, like, so, but toppling
of those dictators, and it's, it's phenomenal that the, the Hwana Muslimin in Egypt, or
the Islamists in Tunis, they did not go out and say, hey, we want an Islamic regime right
now. They said, oh no, we want to be in a democratic game. That's a lesson from, probably
they learned from Turkey's ruling party, the AKP, which coming from, it's coming from
an Islamist background, but reformed itself to a quite, you know, democratic position.
And that's why I think the myth that if the secular dictators go, Islamists will come
and establish a worse tyranny is broken by these examples.
Iran certainly was something which consolidated that idea, but now we are seeing examples
which contradict that idea.
And I think many people can now see that the Arabs, after all, they want freedom too.
They don't hate your freedoms.
They hate the fact that their freedoms were crushed
by the dictators, which were partly supposed by the West.
Yes sir, oh sorry, last question, sorry, yeah.
Yeah, I'm not, I very much prefer the Scottish to Enlightenment to the French one as well.
What is unfortunate for the Muslim world that we have faced only the French Enlightenment.
So Enlightenment came as an anti-religious idea.
First to Turkey and then to the Arab world.
So this, we have this dichotomy between either you will be enlightened and godless or you
will be a believer and reject everything that is new and Western or modern and so on.
That's why I think discovering the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which is not very much known in
the Muslim world, or the American way of separation of church and state, which is, again, not
much known.
I mean, in Turkey, secularism means the headscarf will be banned by the regime and Islamic institutions
will be closed down.
That's what is secularism in Turkey.
And no Muslim wanted that, of course.
So that's one thing to put on what you said.
As for the, yeah, I mean Islam does not have a reformation
in the sense that Christianity has,
because there is no Pope to reform.
Actually the problem is that there's no central authority.
Unlike the Catholic Church, there was this central authority
and the Protestants rebelled against that.
Maybe Islam is maybe a bit closer to Judaism
than Christianity, because of this idea of law.
because of its understanding of God and so on.
And maybe the Jewish response to enlightenment
is maybe something which can be more helpful
in understanding Islam.
When Jews faced enlightenment, some of them said,
well, let's change some things in our tradition.
They became the Reform Jews.
Some remained the Orthodox.
Some remained, you know, some became conservative
in the middle.
And I think that process is going on right now
in the Muslim world.
The question is, will Muslims be pluralist enough to, you know?
Some Muslims will be very, very conservative and so be it if they want to live that way.
The question is, will they just be that way and impose that to others?
And that discussion is really going on in the Muslim world right now.
And I'm quite optimistic to be, I mean reasonably, but I'm optimistic about what will happen.
And it is mainly related with dynamics in the Muslim world,
but it's also related with dynamics between the Muslim world and the rest of the world.