Faith versus tradition in Islam Mustafa Akyol
a few weeks ago I have a chance to go to
Saudi Arabia and the first thing I want
to do as a Muslim was to go to Mecca and
visit the Kaaba the holiest shrine of
Islam and I did that I put on my
ritualistic dress I went to the Holy
Mosque I did my prayers I observed all
the rituals and meanwhile besides all
the spirituality there was one mundane
detail in the Kaaba that was pretty
interesting for me there was no
separation of sexes in other words man
and woman were worshipping altogether
they were together while doing the table
off the circular walk around the Kaaba
they were together while praying and if
you wonder why this is interesting at
all you have to see the rest of Saudi
Arabia because this is a country which
is strictly divided between the sexes in
other words as men your are not simply
supposed to be in the same physical
space with woman and I noticed this in a
very funny way I left the Kaaba to eat
something in downtown Mecca I headed to
the nearest Burger King restaurant and I
went there I noticed that there’s a mail
section which is carefully separated
from the female section and I had to pay
order and eat at the mail section it’s
funny I said to myself you can mingle
with the opposite sex at the holy Kaba
but not at the Burger King quite quite
ironic ironic and it’s also I think
quite telling because the Kaaba and the
rituals around it are relics from the
earliest phase of Islam that of Prophet
Muhammad and if there was a big emphasis
at the time to separate men from woman
the rituals around the Kaaba could have
designed accordingly but apparently that
was not an issue at the time so the
rituals came that way this is also I
think confirmed by the fact that the
seclusion of woman and creating a
divided society is something that you
also do not find in the Quran the very
core of Islam the divine core of Islam
that all Muslims and including myself
believe and I think it’s not an accident
that you know you don’t find this idea
in the very
of Islam because many scholars who study
the history of Islamic thought Muslim
scholars or Westerners think that
actually the practice of dividing men
and women physically there came as a
later development in Islam as Muslims
adopted some pre-existing cultures and
traditions of the Middle East seclusion
of women was actually a Byzantine and
Persian practice and Muslims adopted
that and made that a part of the
religion and actually this is just one
example of a much larger phenomenon what
we call today Islamic law and especially
Islamic culture and there are many
Islamic cultures actually the one in
Saudi Arabia is much different from
where I come from Istanbul or Turkey but
still I mean if you’re gonna speak about
a Muslim culture this has a core the
divine message which began the religion
but then many traditions perceptions
many practices were added on top of it
and these were traditions of the Middle
East medieval traditions and there are
two important messages I think or two
lessons to take from that you know
reality first of all Muslims pious
conservative believing Muslims who want
to be loyal to their religion should not
cling on to everything in their culture
thinking that that’s demilo mandated
maybe some things are about traditions
and they need to be changed on the other
hand the Westerners who look at Islamic
culture and see some troubling aspects
should not readily conclude that this is
what Islam ordains
maybe it’s a it’s just a Middle Eastern
culture that became confused with Islam
there is a practice called female
circumcision it’s something terrible
horrible it is basically an operation to
deprive woman from sexual pleasure and
Westerners Europeans or Americans who
didn’t know about this before face this
practice within some of the Muslim
communities who migrated from North
Africa and they’ve thought oh what a
horrible religion that is which
ordained something like that but
actually when you look at female
circumcision you see that it has nothing
to do with Islam it’s just a North
African practice which predates Islam it
was there four thousand eight years and
quite tellingly
some Muslims do practice that the
Muslims
North Africa not in other places but
also the non-muslim communities or both
North Africa the Animists even some
Christians and even a Jewish tribe in
North Africa is known to practice female
circumcision so what might look like a
problem with an Islamic faith might turn
out to be a tradition that Muslims have
subscribed to the same thing can be said
for honor killings which is a recurrent
theme in the Western media and which is
of course a horrible tradition and we
see thoroughly in in some Muslim
communities that tradition but in the
non-muslim communities of the Middle
East such as some Christian communities
Eastern Christians you see the same
practice we had a tragic case of an
honor killing em within Turkey’s
Armenian community just a few months ago
now these are things about general
culture but I’m also very much
interested in political culture and
whether Liberty and democracy is
appreciated or whether you there’s an
authoritarian political called culture
in which the state is supposed to impose
things on the citizens and it is no
secret that many Islamic movements in
the Middle East tend to be authoritarian
and some of the so-called Islamic
regimes such as Saudi Arabia Iran and
the worst case was a Taliban you know in
Afghanistan they are pretty old
territorial no doubt about that for
example in Saudi Arabia there is a
phenomenon called the religious police
and the religious police imposes the
supposed Islamic way of life on every
citizen by force like women are forced
to cover their heads wear a hijab the
Islamic now that is pretty alteration
and I am that’s something I’m very much
critical off but when I realize that the
non-muslim or the non Islamic minded
actors in the same geography sometimes
behave similarly I realize that the
problems may be like lies in the
political culture of the whole region
not just Islam let me give an example in
Turkey where I come from which is a
hyper secular republic until very
recently we used to have what I call
secularism police which would guard the
universities against Wales to the
students in other words they would force
students to uncover their heads and I
think forcing people to uncover their
head
is s tyrannical as forcing them to cover
it should be the citizens decision but
when I saw that I said I mean it’d be
the problem is it just a Rotarian
culture in the region and some Muslims
have been influenced by that but you
know the secular minded people can be
influenced by that maybe you’d say it’s
a problem about the political culture
and we have to see we have to think
about how to change that political
culture now these are some of the
questions I had in mind about a few
years ago when I sat down to write a
book I said well I will make a research
about how Islam actually came to be it
came to be but it today and what roles
were taken and what roads could have
been taken the name of the book is Islam
without extremes and Muslim case for
liberty and as as the subtitle suggests
I looked at Islamic tradition and the
history of Islamic thought from the
perspective of individual liberty and I
tried to find what are the strengths
with regards to individual liberty and
there are strengths in Islamic tradition
Islam actually as a monotheistic
religion which defined man as a
responsible agent by itself created the
idea of the individual in the Middle
East and saved it from the
communitarianism the collectivism of the
tribe
you can drive many ideas from that but
besides that I also saw problems with an
Islamic tradition but one thing was
curious most of those problems turn out
to be problems that emerged later not
from the very divine core of Islam the
Quran but from again traditions and
mentalities or the interpretations of
the Quran that Muslims made in the
Middle Ages the Quran for example
doesn’t condone stoning there is no
punishment on apostasy there is no
punishment on personal sins like
drinking these things which make Islamic
law the troubling aspects of Islamic law
were later developments and later
interpretations in Islam which means
that Muslims can today look at those
things and say well the core of our
religion is is here us to stay with us
it’s our fate and we will be loyal to it
but we can’t change how it was
interpreted because it was interpreted
according to the time and Emilia in the
Middle Ages now we are living in a
different world with different values
and different political systems that
interpretation is quite possible and
feasible
now if I were the only person thinking
that way but we would be in trouble but
that’s not the case at all actually from
the 19th century on there’s a whole
revisionist reformist
whatever-you-call-it
tradition a trend in Islamic thinking
and these were intellectuals or
statesmen of the 19th century and later
20th century which looked at Europe
basically and saw that the Europe has
many things to admire like science and
technology but not just that also
democracy Parliament the idea of
representation the idea of equal
citizenship these Muslim thinkers and
intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th
century looked at Europe saw these
things they said why we don’t have these
things and they looked back at Islamic
tradition they saw that there are
problems problematic aspects but they’re
not the core of religion so maybe they
can be Rihanna stood and the Quran can
be reread in the modern world that trend
is generally called as Islamic modernism
and it was advanced by intellectuals and
statesmen not just as an intellectual
idea though but also as a political
program and that’s why actually in the
19th century the Ottoman Empire which
then covered the whole Middle East made
very important reforms reforms like
giving Christians and Jews and equal
citizenship status accepting a
constitution accepting a representative
Parliament advancing the freedom idea of
freedom of religion and that’s why the
Ottoman Empire in its last actually
decades turned into a pro to democracy a
constitutional monarchy and freedom was
a very important political value at a
time similarly in the Arab world there
was what the great Arab historian Albert
Hourani defines as the liberal age he
has a book Arabic thought in the liberal
age and the liberal age he defines is
19th century and early 20th century
quite not ibly this was the dominant
trend in the early 20th century among
Islamic thinkers and statesmen and
theologians but there is a very curious
pattern in the rest of the 20th century
because we see a sharp decline in this
Islamic modernist line and in place of
that what happens
that Islamism grows as an ideology which
is authoritarian which is quite strident
which is quite anti Western and which
wants to shape society based on an
utopian vision so Islamism is the
problematic idea that that really
created a lot of problems in 20th
century Islamic world and even in the in
the very extreme forms of Islamism led
to terrorism in the name of Islam which
is actually practice that I’m I think is
against Islam but you know some some
obviously extremist did not think that
way but there’s a curious question if
Islamic modernism was so popular in the
19th and early 20th century why Islamism
became so popular in the rest of the
20th century and this is a question I
think which needs to be discussed
carefully and in my book I went to that
question as well and actually you don’t
need to be a rocket scientist to
understand that just you look at the
political history of the 20th century
and you see well things have changed a
lot the contexts have changed in the
19th century when Muslims were looking
at Europe as an example they were
independent they were more
self-confident in the early 20th century
with the fall of the Ottoman Empire the
whole Middle East was colonized and when
you have colonialization what you have
you have anti colonialization so Europe
is not just an example now to emulate
it’s an enemy to fight and to resist so
there’s a very sharp decline in liberal
ideas in the Muslim world and what you
see is more more of a defensive rigid
reactionary strain which led to Arab
socialism Arab Nationals been ultimately
the Islamist ideology and when the
colonial period ended what you had was
in in place of that was generally
secular dictators which say their
country but did not bring democracy to
the country and establish their own
dictatorship and I think the West at
least some powers in the West particular
United State made the mistake of
supporting those secular dictators
thinking that they are more you know
helpful for their interests but the fact
that those dictators suppressed
democracy in their country and suppress
Islamic groups in that country actually
made the islam is much more strident so
in the 20th century you had this
vicious cycle in the Arab world where
you have a dictatorship suppressing its
own people including the Islamic pious
and they’re reacting in reactionary ways
there was one country though which was
able to escape or stay away from that
vicious cycle and that’s the country
where coming from it that’s that’s
Turkey turkey has never been colonized
so it remained as an independent nation
after the fall of the Ottoman Empire
that’s one thing to remember it did not
share the same anti colonial hype that
you can find in some other countries in
the region secondly and most importantly
Turkey became a democracy earlier than
any of the countries we were talking
about in 1950 turkey had the first free
and fair elections which ended the more
autocratic secular regime which was in
the beginning of Turkey and Turkish the
pi’s Muslims in Turkey saw that they can
change the political system by voting
and they realized that democracy is
something that is compatible with Islam
compatible with their values and they’ve
been supportive of democracy that’s
that’s that’s an experience that not
every other Muslim nation in the Middle
East had until very recently secondly in
the past two decades thanks to
globalization thanks to the market
economy thanks to the rise of a middle
class we in Turkey see what I define as
a rebirth of Islamic modernism now
there’s a more urban middle class pious
Muslims who again look at their
tradition and see that there are some
problems in the tradition and the
understanding they need to be changed
and questioned and reformed and they
look at Europe and they see an example
again to follow they see an example at
least to take some inspiration from
that’s why the EU process turkey’s
effort to join the EU has been supported
inside turkey by the islamic pious while
some sacred nations were against that
well that process has been a little bit
blurred by the fact that not all
Europeans are that welcoming but that’s
another discussion but the pro EU
sentiment in Turkey in the past decade
has become almost an Islamic cause and
supported by the Islamic liberals and
the sacral as well of course and thanks
to that Turkey has been able to create
recently create a success story in which
Islam and the most pious
the standings of Islam have become a
part of the Democratic game and even
contributes to the democratic and
economic advance of the country and this
has been an inspiring example right now
for some of the Islamic movements are
some of the countries in the Arab world
you must have all seen the Arab Spring
which began in Tunis and in Egypt and
Arab masses just revolted against their
dictators they were asking for democracy
they were asking for freedom and they
were they did not turn out to be the
Islamist boogeyman that the dictators
were always fooling using to you know
justify their regime they said that we
want freedom we want democracy we are
Muslim believers but we want to be
living as free people in free societies
of course this is a long road it’s so
it’s it’s a democracy is not an
overnight achievement it’s a process but
there is promise this is a promising era
in the Muslim world and I believe that
the Islamic modernism which began in the
19th century but which had a setback in
the 20th century because of the
political troubles of the Muslim world
is having a rebirth and I think the
getaway message from that would be that
Islam despite some of the skeptics in
the West has the potential in itself to
create its own way to democracy creates
its own way to liberalism crazy its own
way to freedom they just should be
allowed to work for that thanks so much
you