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

yeah well we can't get we can't let the literalists get away with the notion that their understanding of a sentence is right that just isn't how a text works it's way more complicated than that and that's a big problem because it opens up the specter of infinite interpretations which is the post-modernist dilemma but but saying the text has no meaning or any meaning is no solution to that it's like saying life has any meaning or no meaning it's a problem especially when they say their understanding is right and they have the right to dominate the state and they have to impose that on everybody else so that's the that's the key problem we have [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased today to have as my guest mustafa akul he is a senior fellow at the cato institute where he focuses on the intersection between public policy islam and modernity since 2013 he's also been a frequent opinion writer for the new york times covering politics and religion in the muslim world he is the author of several books including the most recent reopening muslim minds a return to reason freedom and tolerance 2021 why i as a muslim sorry why as a muslim i defend liberty which is also 2021 the islamic jesus how the king of the jews became a prophet of the muslims 2017 and islam without extremes a muslim case for liberty liberty 2011. his books have been translated into many languages and praised in the new york times wall street journal the chicago tribune the economist the financial times and many publications across the muslim world meanwhile islam without extremes was banned in malaysia for challenging the authority of the religion police so to speak the thinking muslim a popular podcast recently defined accola as probably the most notable muslim modernist and reformer so that's really something and in july 2021 prospect magazine in the uk listed him among the world's top 50 thinkers and that's quite the pinnacle he's been thinking about the problems of making peace in the modern world for a very long time and stressing the need for a liberalization in the islamic world and perhaps some modification on the christian side as well along the lines at least of what happened in the west he's interested in theological questions as well as political questions and i'm particularly interested in talking to him because the conflict between islam and the jewish and the christian worlds is a theological and political problem as well as a psychological problem so welcome i'm very much looking forward to this conversation and i hope i have many more of the same with many islamic thinkers so thanks for agreeing to talk to me thank you so much uh dr peterson it's a pleasure and a privilege to have this conversation with you and i hope this should be the beginning of broader conversations between muslims and western intellectuals on the crucial issues of peace coexistence freedom toleration that we all need to have and need to cultivate in our respective traditions so let me start with a really difficult issue that i've been thinking a lot about lately partly because of the well some of the what would you say incomprehensible goings on that bedevil the western world at the moment now i've been thinking a lot about this statement in the new testament about rendering unto god what is god's and unto caesar what is caesar's the idea that there's a clear distinction between those two and i believe that to be true for psychological reasons as well as political reasons and it's an extraordinarily notable statement in my estimation i don't know if you could find a single sentence that anyone has ever said that has had a bigger impact on the history of the world because as i understand it that statement was the justification for the development in the west of political processes that were independent of the theological substructure beneath them and the justification for that that there were separate domains and that was okay theologically and so i want to know if that's your understanding of the situation as well and then we can talk about what that means for for islam where i i understand that it's not so obvious let's say that such a distinction can be easily drawn uh i would totally agree with you that separation of church and state in the western tradition has been a blessing for humanity i mean west itself and the broader i think human story and i think that's evident in the fact that a lot of muslims around the world today who are persecuted in their countries come to live in the west and where they find freedom and if it was a christian theocracy you know they wouldn't be happily living there i mean i a few times i said that i mean there is one country in which all denominations of islam happily live together without any sectarian persecution and that is the united states of america and i'm sure canada is doing pretty well or uk pretty well uh one thing i mean some of course separate some models of separation of religion and state sometimes went ill-liberal towards religion authoritarian towards religion and that's a problem for example i see that in the french tradition and and when secularism is understood in that sort of intolerant way and somehow a bias towards religion actually it becomes harder to accept from a religious point of view and one problem in the islamic tradition is that we always had the french version in my country turkey and in tunisia so we never got a full sense of a a liberal classically liberal idea of secularism but i mean that's the political story i mean we can discuss more but coming back to your point it is remarkable that actually a statement from uh jesus christ you know right there in the new testament has been discovered and used to justify the separation church and state i mean the very life story of christ is interesting i mean he was never the state right he was he was actually persecuted by the state so there's a great story there but i will also remind you one thing for centuries christians didn't understand the render on to caesar and rendron to god as the justification of secularism actually it was used to justify divine rights of kings as well i mean robert filmer makes that argument in his patriarcha and john locke argues against him so it was used by christians to uh to defend rewind divine rights of kings but then other christians said hey no no no there's a better understanding of this it actually says there are separate authorities here and the one that the the divine authority is what we're loyal to and the political one should be based on contracts so that gave us of course the liberal tradition that i highly value but i will say a similar process of re-reading the scripture is taking place in the muslim world in the past few centuries past two centuries in the late 19th century a tradition broadly called islamic modernism which i you know hope to represent and i'm trying to advance also said well there are messages in the quran that our classical scholars maybe didn't fully get or didn't fully develop because in their time and context it wasn't possible but now we see the full meaning of that for example one example is a powerful statement in the quran which reads in arabic which means there is no compulsion in religion i mean it doesn't say secure state but it means religion should be based on no compulsion in other words freedom and this was there in the quran for centuries and muslims made only a little sense of this they said okay this means you will not convert people to enter islam generally that was observed in the classical islamic tradition that's why jews and christians could live under islam but they didn't understand it in other ways for example this should mean that perhaps if people want to convert out of islam that is apostasy it should be free too based on this verse but no no they said you know actually it doesn't mean that way so they limited the meaning of the verse and of course there was religious policing checking people are really pious or not for persecution of heretics these things happen in islamic history but now other muslim thinkers are saying listen when god said there is no compulsion in religion it's a universal statement of no compulsion in other words religious freedom so that's a new reading that muslim scholars of the more modernist or reformist i think uh persuasion have been advocating in the past let's say two century and my book was banned in malaysia precisely because i irrigated religious freedom based on such quranic basis well the the the pathway from a statement like that to a fully developed political and theological system that are separate in the details but somehow still able to mutually function and in some sense one still containing the other i would argue you know even in the united states it's one country under god that's in the background all the time in some sense and i would also say that the elevation of the right to free speech as perhaps the primary right and i'm speaking psychologically here to some degree is a reflection in the political domain i think of what was being developed symbolically in christian theology with the idea of the divine word and and that that idea in many ways is older than christianity it's it's older than judaism as well like you can you can you can see like i've traced that back to it for example to the mesopotamian writings about marduk who was that the the god who emerged at the pinnacle of the mesopotamian gods and who was the model for the sovereign of the mesopotamian emperor and he had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words and so even if you trace our stories back as far back as we've been able to trace them the idea that there was something divine about the word itself so and we could have a discussion about what that divinity means and i'm interested in doing that because you wrote this book um the islamic jesus how the king of the jews became a prophet of the muslims and that's that's all of this all of this is tangled up in some sense in the figure of christ historically and mythologically and so in the west i think we managed to maintain the relationship between the secular and the religious by putting forth these axiomatic rights which are in some sense religious in their derivation and they slaughtered nicely into the religious understructure but then simultaneously allowed for enough freedom so the political could do its own thing and so that's partly why i'm so curious about your your writings about christ and about his place in muslim thinking obviously in the west whatever christ was is was elevated to the highest place right now how do you understand now i know christ is a major figure in islamic thinking but there are differences so can you help me can you wade me through that to some degree definitely uh first of all to enter a discussion i should just maybe make one broad statement and that is that in the western world in the 20th century people began to speak about the judeo-christian tradition and i think it's a very valuable way of looking into the world yes there's a judeo-christian tradition but i think there is something missing in that there's islam that is missing because i think i see the world history and i look at there is a judeo-crystal islamic tradition because it's all abrahamic monotheism coming from actually from judaism and judaism had began i mean historically initiated monotheism and then it had a big outburst with christianity the greatest outburst but the greatest world world's greatest religion but then six centuries later it had a second outburst with islam which spread monotheism in four corners of the world i mean there are people in living indonesia whose name is moses or abraham i mean why are they coming i mean because islam brought this biblical story that brings us to some instant discussion of what these three abrahamic religions have in common that's extraordinarily deep so one they're monotheistic two they partake of the same tradition as you've pointed out and three they all have to one degree or another an insistence that the bedrock of culture is a book which is a very strange insistence that it's it's taken for granted in some sense because it's been insistent upon so long but this is something that like it's very difficult to see in some ways that a book lasts longer than a city or an empire or a country and that there's there's something profound about the notion that the bedrock of a culture should be a book and there is an implicit respect for the word in that insistence and that does unite those three religions in a very profound way it does and i think it can it has created these amazing civilizations which advance human history and i think the very fact that islam speaking of islam advanced human history in terms of pluralism in terms of law in terms of religious toleration for its time i think is undeniable and a lot of and and the fact that islam even brought you know greek philosophy because of its universalism muslims believe in the book but they believe that reason is also from god so they this created a universalistic outlook and muslims studied aristotle and plato and even carried them to europe so there is an amazing history there which are the positive things but also there are times that these religious civilizations sometimes go into a crisis and they go self-destructive and bitter and that has happened in europe i mean and if you look into 17th century early 17th century europe and catholics and protestants were you know killing each other for sectarian reasons i mean heretics were being burned at the stake and which led people like john locke to seek a way out and they did it by looking into the core of religion and saying that this is not what christ had told us i mean loxes i mean when i read his letter concerning toleration i said well he's speaking of christian issues but he's speaking of our issues too the idea that should there be a christian state or not should heretics be persecuted or not so he makes certain arguments or would religion be based on sincerity if it is coerced by the state it wouldn't so there's no point in coercion so those kind of arguments are i think very interesting which i that's why i i believe in reading these traditions as by learning from each other instead of thinking oh they are the christians and they have nothing to do with us or these are muslims they have nothing to do with us well the problem the problem with that perspective you know those are the muslims and they have nothing to do with us is that underneath such a presumption is let's say the presumption that christians and muslims can't talk but even deeper that than that is the presumption on the part of the person making such a statement that their interpretation of christianity is absolutely right and that seems ridiculously presumptuous to me no because i i i don't think that you could find a christian worth his salt let's say who would regard himself as as stellar an exemplar of christianity as christ and you know since we all fall short of the glory of god we're all stupid and ignorant beyond belief and so we have to listen to other people because they might know something we don't and then you see if we if we take that other attitude then there's an implicit totalitarianism already there which is well i'm right and you're not only wrong but wrong in some way that's probably malevolent and sometimes that's true but it's not it's not a good way to start a conversation it is not and and i think religion becomes most dangerous when it is combined with group narcissism and acting uh in the name of god to punish people for their sins and heresies you know as you define them and that has happened in islam it still happens i mean groups like isis al-qaeda those terrorists i mean they are attacking westerners but they are attacking fellow muslims too and by defining them as heretics i mean we see bombs of shiites being sorry mosques of shiites being bombed by eight isis terrorists in the past in the past two months it happened twice and this is a destructive dynamic which has been always extreme in islam but existed and but there are antidotes to this sort of thinking as well and and i i sometimes read those antidotes and i say oh in the christian tradition here's an example of that i mean if you can uh for example let me give you an example one the big dispute in early islam was who was the true muslim like there was a civil war between the first muslims it's called the first fitness and supporters of ali and moabi had the two figures and i would sympathize with ali but they had a war and and there's a fanatic faction called the hawari the dissenters and they said these are both they have gone wrong they have sinned because they have sinned they are not muslims they become infidels and infidels should be punished so they started killing them they were like the terrorists of the first century always hated by mainstream muslims but what they were doing is to judge people and punish them in the name of god but there was a alternative theology called murja theology and it's it's called murjah in arabic means postponer they said on this issue of who's right and wrong we don't know we cannot judge only god can judge so let's postpone this to afterlife to be resolved by god and until then until it is resolved by god in heaven when we go there we can live and let live so they promoted toleration among muslims now this actually allowed calming down some of the early violence and broad coexistence in different uh factions of islam and i think still it was brought into sunni islam by abu hanifah and the hanafi school and added broader acceptance and i was particularly struck to read something very similar in john locke in his letter concerning toleration he says there are different churches for every church the third is theirs they are orthodox to themselves and if one of them dominate government they will persecute others and he says let's leave this to almighty the judge to decide which doctrine is right and in the meantime let the government only protect the rights the natural rights of all people and let people follow that's part of the thorny psychological problem of rendering unto caesar what is caesar's and unto god what is god's because a lot of times now when people talk about tolerance they insist that judgment is wrong and in in essence in some sense and the reason they're afraid of judgment is because in its extremes it can lead to the demonization of others and we know exactly where that goes but there's no dispensing with judgment you can't even look at something without judgment because you have to pick what you're going to look at instead of something else and you can't act without judgment and so all of us are faced with this problem of of well what what we should believe and and how we can be tolerant at the same time we believe and how we can be tolerant at the same time that we have to judge and and there's a kernel in that in that insistence by by by lock it was locked you were referring to or was it mills they let they let her on tolerance i was just referring to john locke sorry it's lock yeah okay and you just slip my mind for a second it's very difficult for us to figure out what we can tolerate if we must simultaneously believe right and that's a problem i've been trying to work out psychologically for a very long time it's you do that you see that in your own family when you're a father let's say because you obviously have to have tolerance for your children but at the same time you're obligated to show them the difference let's say between right and wrong and also to help them separate the wheat from the chaff which is judgment and so well i i totally see her see the point the balance you're pointing out here but i agree with that's why i use the term tolerance because i mean you might not need to accept everything and cherish and bless everything but you need to accept different ways of life or theologies or doctrines and by judgment i mean of course we can have value judgments i judge a lot of people in society i say these people are bigoted or these people are arrogant and or their way of life is destructive for themselves i have those judgments but i'm not going to go and punish them in the name of god unless they attack me so there should be a social order in which we can disapprove people uh ways of life religious beliefs theologies and and our religions make truth statements and we cannot get away from that i mean you say christ is god the other person will say well no that's not acceptable for my theology so there are gaps that we cannot uh and we should not you know try to make make disappear but we can live together and that's why tolerance is the key idea and that's why by judgment what i'm referring to is judging and punishing in the name of god and of course crime will be punished i mean theftfully punished or murderfully punished but if someone has a doctrine religious doctrine that i find wrong i should tolerate that person although i can you know criticize of course and and we can and that and i can be criticized back which what free speech allows of course for us so i mean sorry you asked me about christ but i i uh i mean i opened a broader chapter if you will you want to you want me to go into that discussion yes yes that would be good uh i mean for a lot of christians who may not much know much about the muslim world i mean it might be surprising to learn that the most prominent female figure in the whole quran is mary actually she's the only woman mentioned by name there's a chapter named mary there's a chapter named after her family ali imran and the quran because because the the calling of the quran is to say this is a new this is not a new religion this is monotheism muhammad is god's messenger but god had other messengers before there was moses there was abraham there was jesus christ and there was his mary and the quran tells the story of mary to affirm something which is again might be surprising to christians the quran affirms the virgin birth of christ that mary was a chaste woman she didn't she was not touched by any man and one day she heard an angel coming and say you will have a son and she says how can i have a son no man has ever touched me but but the angel says this is what god willed and he wills and he creates so that is how christ christ you know uh comes to you know his mother's uh womb and ultimately he comes and the quran calls him the word of god again this is a very powerful statement if you if you're if one is familiar with the gospel of john and this is very unusual but the same quran also insists that he was not divine so he should not be worshipped so on the one hand it reversed mary and jesus it tells a lot of things very similar to gospel of luke and some apocryphal gospels also resonate strongly with the quran interestingly so there's great respect great reverence there are good words about christians i mean one in words one verse the quran says among all people you will love the christians nearest to the believers that that's the muslims because it says they're not arrogant and they have learned they have learned scholars and so there are a lot of positive things because islam was born let's not forget that islam was born as a monotheist campaign in an idolatrous society meccans were worshiping idols and prophet muhammad who didn't think of becoming a prophet until the age of 40. he heard the voice in a cave angel gabriel like a burning bush experience of moses which told him recite in the name of god who created man and then he became convinced that he's god's prophet and he started to preach monotheism and when you preach monotheism muslims consider jews and christians as their allies that's why when muslims were muslims were persecuted in mecca prophet muhammad told a group of muslims to flee to ethiopia the christian kingdom of ethiopia they went there and they were really saved by the christian king that's a memory that muslims have so there is that monotheistic so what what does it mean in islam that christ well two things that you said that that christ is his birth is the virgin birth is accepted that's that's a major issue which we should also discuss and also the emphasis on mary and what that means let's say for the position of women theologically within islam and and also what does it mean when muslims claim believe that christ is the word of god now it's hard for me as a westerner to separate that out from claims of divinity and and and we could also talk in some sense about worship about what worship means and so when i i try to look at these things from a psychological perspective as much as possible and stay out of theological territory where i'm a neophyte in any case um one of the things that worship means to me psychologically is something like the desire or compulsion to imitate like you think about to worship something is to place it in the place of highest value and you know people claim to think that actions speak louder than words and i think that's a reasonable proposition if you act something out it's pretty compelling evidence that you believe it and that means in some ways that you hold it in the highest place and so to worship is to imitate i think in the deepest sense it might be to celebrate what should be imitated as well something like that and this is a complicated issue because we're unbelievably imitative and i was struck when my kids were little when they were playing house for example my son would play out the father and you might say well he was copying his dad but he wasn't because he wasn't moving the same way he saw me move what he was doing was watching me over a whole variety of instances and then also watching portrayals of fathers in media movies and tv shows and that sort of thing and abstracting out from that some kind of i would call it like a disembodied spirit which represented the core essence of paternity and then imitating that and and i see in that the biological underpinnings let's say of what religious people talk about when they talk about worship so when the muslim world regards christ as the word of god but but not divine i i don't know how to i don't know how to understand that uh very good question i mean it says in the quran that he is a word from god and it doesn't explain much and muslims discuss what this means exactly uh it's not certainly understood in the way that the gospel of john defines that word was word was with god and word was god so that's not the beginning of time yeah no that's not the step taken there most common interpretations said well he was the word of god in the sense that god it was the word of god directed to mary so god he was created with the creator word be in mary's body so that's what it means so that's generally a like a low interpret low christology if you will but there are alternative views which i mentioned you know in my book uh in the islamic jesus that some people said maybe he was worth the word of god in the sense that he was the revelation itself like everything he did and said was revelation like god's living word which still though from an isla which which means he was something like the quran like quran we believe is revelation god's revelation so he was he was the revelation became flesh rather than revelation became a book right and that's why the new testament narrates about jesus i mean it's it he is the he is the revelation and new testaments are reports about the revelation so that's i think that's possible to uh that's a step possible to take within the quranic framework however still muslims don't worship the quran i mean you say still god is beyond i mean god is another transcendent at another transcendent level and in islam so let's let's talk about that in relationship to the totalitarian impulse okay i mean i was i just had a discussion with sam harris and i mentioned that i was going to be talking to some islamic scholars i didn't mention you by name and i asked him if he might want to participate in such a discussion he said he's done that he's done there and he's been there and done that and so he wasn't particularly interested in that although we had a wonderful conversation but one of the what what i see happening very frequently with thinkers like harrison and i'm saying this with all due respect i truly am is that for them there is very little distinction between the religious and the totalitarian and that's the essence of the objection now sam has come to regard some domains as sacred and we talked a lot about that and i think that it's i think it's an understatement of the severity of the totalitarian problem to attribute it merely to the religious and the part of the reason i think that is well look what happened in the 20th century in the west it's like well there was the nazis and how about mao and then there's stalin and you know you could say those were religions but you know you're pretty you're weasley were you're using weasel words at that point you expand the definition of what constitutes religion so it doesn't violate your initial presuppositions and so we could see in christianity and in judaism and in islam the constant human struggle to deal with whatever is the totalitarian impulse which is something like insistence that what i already know is well is literally the word of god it's in some sense it's absolutely true i have the knowledge there shall be no deviation from that and and to to us to identify that with tradition in religion i think is a big mistake it's it it doesn't get to the issue i'm totally on the same page with you on that i mean uh the history of 20th century shows that some of the greatest crimes against humanity were considered were committed by secular ideologies i mean communism and nazism as you well put and today probably the worst totalitarian regimes in the world number one is north korea i mean it's it's not a really it's a secular state but it's a bit a juche called ideology but it's totally secular so being i mean i'm in favor of a secular state in terms of a neutral state that respects everybody's rights regardless of religion or creed but secularization of society it doesn't necessarily bring anything good i mean we have seen that okay so let's talk about that for a second so i've been trying to figure out all right so one of the things i realized a long time ago as a psychologist was that there were depths of meaning and we have intimations of this constantly so for example we can read a book and we think that was shallow and we can read another book and we think that was deep and then when we talk to a bunch of other people they tend to think that the shallow book was shallow and the deep book was deep and they tend to think that shallow and deep actually mean something and so there's this there's this experience of depth now i've tried to figure out what that meant exactly and what occurred to me was that and this was partly derived from watching people in my clinical practice so imagine people will get much more upset about a pending divorce than they will about a discussion about who should do the dishes and you think well that's obvious it's like yeah it's it's obvious because that's what happens to you but it isn't easy to explain so what i thought was what i hypothesized was something like we have representations of the world of different sizes and different temporal expanses a small plan for the day nested inside a plan for the week and nested inside a plan for the month the year nested inside our family nested inside our community nested inside our polity nested inside our theology okay and the deeper you go the more those representations are dependent on the more representations are dependent on that level and so when something happens to you where you're deeply affected or traumatized let's say technically what's happened is that you've taken a blow to a representation upon which almost all your other representations depend and so then you could think technically about the difference between the secular and the religious as being one of depth once you go down to the fundamental substrata so that would be the most axiomatic of presuppositions whether you're secular or not you're in the religious domain yeah okay okay okay so i mean the people who call themselves secular and of course i have many friends who are secular and i respect that point of view but they have metaphysical beliefs at the end of the day i mean if you say the universe always existed and matter it made us and you know that's your creation story i mean every every worldview has ultimately a metaphysical uh dimension i think even if if it does accept like coming back to your totalitarianism point we have totalitarian entities right now i mean in the world in the name of islam i mean i think the iranian republic is pretty much the islamic republic of iran pretty close to that saudi arabia is i mean very oppressive and these are the two most oppressive interpretations of islam isis is like khmer rouge i mean he was the khmer rouge of the islamic spectrum so it was pretty evil and very i think totalitarian too but there was something though in classical islam although i have a lot of criticisms towards medieval jurisprudence but there was a value in classical islam and that that value was in in this word which is a generally scary word in the western today and that's the sharia you know that's god's law i mean i there are two phases of the sharia there are a lot of things about women and apostasy and blasphemy that i keep criticizing that we have to reform those aspects but there was another value in the sharia which highlighted my book new book why as a muslim i defend liberty the sharia was a set of laws that were separate from the rulers they were even even above the rulers like sharia wasn't what the sultan required or you know wanted the sharia was the law of god articulated by scholars who were generally independent of the rulers that's why the classical medieval islamic civilization wasn't totalitarian there were a lot of autocratic rulers tyrants but they were mitigated by the sharia and and i i tell them so this is also something that i think people like harris let's say and and those atheist rationalists i think they failed to understand the necessity of that so i mentioned ancient mesopotamia a while back but one thing that happened in that society was that the emperor would be taken outside the gates of the city so it was a walled city once a year at the new year's festival and he would be stripped of his empire emperor garb and forced to kneel and then the priest would slap him with a glove and he would be forced to recite all the ways that he hadn't been an appropriate marduk which was the high god for the last year so he hadn't seen what he should see if he wasn't being blind and he hadn't said what he should have said if he was speaking the right kind of magic and so he was he was humbled in front of what was highest and the mesopotamians were working hard you know in their mythology you see this battle between the gods in the face of an apocalyptic danger and this is a very common story worldwide this battle between the gods so what's highest in the face of an apocalyptic danger and the emergence of a supreme principle which constitutes the essence of sovereignty itself and if you have a society a secular society let's say where that highest thing isn't outside the polity in some sense then you have north korea where the leader is elevated to the status of a god and then you have hell and that seems like a bad idea exactly you have stalin you have mao you have uh all those modern dictators and you have the islamist you know totalitarian regimes today because the islamist totalitarians of today differ from the classical medieval islamic tradition i mean imagine i mean look at taliban today i mean taliban has dominated afghanistan once again the head of the taliban is also the head of the executive and the judiciary and the ex i mean legislation so that wasn't like that in classical islam there was a ruler but there were also scholars who were independent from the they were independent in the beginning and rulers gradually actually co-opted scholars and that was the beginning of the doom of the decline of the islamic civilization my friend ahmed kuru has a very good book about that he shows how the scholar religious scholars who develop law were gradually co-opted by the state by the rulers and that actually killed the diversity and dynamism of islamic thought it means that they've lo they've been lowered from the from the ultimate to the to the political particular and that's a catastrophe exactly and uh i mean there are many tales in islamic civilization today i think we can highlight to uh articulate values like rule of law or separation of powers i mean i tell one of them for example we know that in ottoman history ottoman sultans were stopped by rulers sometimes from executing people out of just anger or confiscating property or over taxing the population they said this tax is not compatible with the sharia you can over tax people so they so there was a balance in the classical islamic civilization which work for its time and let's not forget that classical islamic civilization had a toleration which again was not very common at the time that's why when jews were persecuted in europe they often fled to the islamic lands i mean the ottoman empire unfortunately today we have a crisis in the islamic civilization we lost some of the blessings of the classical tradition that tradition itself stagnated its jurisprudence stagnated and then we had the modern state and these islamic movements came with the passion to grab the modern state and use it in the name of islam which created a deadly mix of medieval jurisprudence and modern totalitarianism which is the story of the iranian islamic republic of iran saudi arabia is going towards the direction of andre let's talk about the saudis for a sec if you don't mind i mean yeah sure okay because why why not do something incredibly dangerous i mean i i am stunned at the naivety of the west in rendering unto the wahhabis a fortune of staggering magnitude and thinking that in some way this was a recipe for medium and long-term peace i mean i don't how why do you think we're so stupid just out of curiosity i mean i think every government in the world is stupid in the sense that you know they make decisions on very short-term interest without really understanding the long-term consequences the stupidity of western governments just have more impact because they have more power you know to shape things uh regarding to wahhabis i mean for for example i mean first of all let's establish what wahhabism is wahhabism is i mean first of all islam should be compared more to judaism than christianity to make i think meaningful analogies because of its theology is very similar to judaism and the idea of law sharia and are very similar traditions so in islam sunni islam is like orthodox judaism it's the mainstream body right it's traditional conservative but it has some flexibility and then there's the ultra orthodox you know tradition in judaism so wahhabism represents the ultra ultra-orthodox point of view with a violent and intolerant bent to it so that emerged in the 18th century in the ottoman empire and their first targets were other muslims i mean they can they condemn the ottoman empire for being into a heresy and bida as they call it innovation they attack sunnis fellow sunnis and also slaughtered shiites which they consider as heretics then when the ottoman empire banned slave trade in the middle of the 19th century there was a revolt in hijaz fueled by wahhabis they said turks have gone infidels because slavery is in our jurisprudence you cannot change that though although the ottomans were more flexible in their understanding but until the 20th century wahhabism was a very regressive like a force in the middle of the arabian desert nations which people didn't know they didn't go there it was a very marginal force in the 20th century these people discovered that they are sitting on the world on top of the world's richest oil reserves which they consider as a blessing from god to use you know to advance their understanding and also western powers thought that oh we can use them i mean we can get a deal with them first the british first the british thought that they could be used against the ottoman empire uh there was even some discussion that there are like protestantism which are potentially more tolerant which is not i mean they're not like protestants but they were certainly not tolerant so that was one thing first of all because the ottoman empire being the seat of the caliphate and the superpower that was the problem although you would prefer the ottomans to the wahhabis by any definition because of their toleration and pluralism for their time and then of course so so you're you're making the case to some degree if i understand you right that a polit a totalitarian doctrine let's say was granted exceptional riches which there's no possibility they could have accrued had that theology that totalitarian theology had to make its way in its own way in the world but because of the vagaries of fate in some sense there was immense riches at the fingertips of this movement that would have otherwise been and likely remained extraordinarily isolated yes what i'm saying is that i mean uh there are i'm not saying that the classical islamic world was full i mean it was not ideal there was a lot of persecution of heretics and here and there too but for its time you wouldn't judge the classical islamic civilization and say they have less religious freedom compared to what was there at christendom at the time that's where that's why jews repeatedly fled to the muslim world for example from spain to the ottoman empire in the modern era one problem is islamic jurisprudence the interpretation of the sharia stagnated and why that happened is a big discussion among muslims but that's one problem and and the idea of a modern state came the modern state with its police and which is national law controlling everything with its bureaucracy and it come and islamist movements emerge saying that we will revive the sharia by grabbing the modern state by all its centralized power and that created the totalitarian movement in islamic tradition and and we see that in saudi arabia we see that in iran we're seeing that in under the taliban so there's and one problem is that islamic world in the past two centuries modernized but we didn't get the good forms of modernity uh one thing i mean first of all the only secularism muslims experienced was was the french-style securism which generally pushed back the believers because if you say i'm bringing you saccharism it's a wonderful thing which means you will not be able to wear a head scarf and go to the campus well there's not much freedom in that securism so unfortunately it gave bad name to that secondly arab republics got influenced by soviet communism i mean arab socialism was a very powerful move in the middle of the 20th century republican turkey my country uh it is it westernized it's good but you know it acquired its legal system from fascist italy uh in the 1930s because let's not forget i mean the west was not always a liberal democratic heaven there were a lot of bad ideas that came from the west so i see this today in the islamic civilization a really a perfect storm a crisis of some we lost some of the traditions we have some of the toleration and pluralism we had back then there's a stagnant jurisprudence and bad ideas of modernity came and when you mix them there's a crisis in every society and and and that's why i think we muslims need ideas that will be new different than what we have before but that should be rooted in the tradition bad ideas from the west are in fact devastating i mean when cultures object to western hegemony in favor of their local traditions let's say i have a certain amount of uh what would you say understanding of why they're doing that because the ideas that emerged after the renaissance let's say especially ideas that undermined religious tradition are unbelievably difficult to withstand and that's still causing all sorts of trouble in the west and it's caused all sorts of political trouble in the west not least this development of this absolutely anti-liberal totalitarianism that you saw in both nazism and communism and in the west you know we like to look at free modernity and say well that's that's us in the last 500 years but those offshoots the soviet union and nazi germany are just as much a part of that tradition as well as as the more positive elements of modernity and so and that's where that's why i think that this conflation of the totalitarian impulse with the religious impulse is dangerous now i understand though there's another issue here that's lurking beneath the surface constantly is that there's the spiritual element in some sense of of religious the perception and practice and there's the tradition and you know you see those juxtaposed to some degree in the new testament when the pharisees and the and the lawyers attempt to trap christ into saying something heretical when they ask him to rank order the mosaic commandments what's the most important commandment which implies that some of them aren't so important and he just sidesteps that so absolutely brilliantly and says well if i remember correctly that you should love god above all else and love your brother like yourself and and what he did there was extract out the essence of the root tradition and make that into something that's an embodied dynamic conscious practice and that's it's one of those stories you read and you think what the hell was going on there how could someone come up with an answer like that that's such a devastating remarkable creative answer and of course it's had a huge impact on the civilization of the world since then but you know the people who criticize religion the materialist atheist types for example they constantly conflate the problem of the totalitarian proclivity that tradition tends towards if unchecked with religion itself and that's a huge problem because those aren't the same thing they're not and i think religion obviously has become oppressive in world history when it's when it combines with state power it becomes the same thing with state power and that's what theocracy and we have examples of that in christian history and obviously in islamic history but religion can also be a balance to power it can hold values outside of the power sphere and actually check power so and i think there are grounds for that in the christian tradition and and of course in the islamic tradition and we have to cultivate those but i think this whole discussion of religion and power requires a rethinking of the very birth story of islam how prophet muhammad came and what he preached so and i have some ideas some some reformist perspectives there i mean i can speak about that a little bit please do please do uh here's here's one thing that here's one thing that clouds uh thinkings thinking about islam by sometimes muslims and by sometimes others and that is that in the very beginning of islam you see prophet a preacher a preacher of monotheism a prophet but also somebody who led armies who led battles who establish a state so what is going on right that's why i mean some people say you know in christianity it's much easier to make the case for a secular state but in islam it's much more difficult because they have the state at the very beginning and it also makes muhammad into quite a frightening figure i mean on the one hand when i look at what he did the fact that it it it fits in this pattern that has happened time and time again in religious history where the warring i'd idolatry was united into a monotheism and that's a civilizing force it means that it means integration and of course the the empire that resulted was one of the largest empires that humans have ever created it was an unbelievable achievement so there's this push towards monotheism and insistence on a highest like transcendent value but as you just pointed out at the same time well yeah but there was war and there was conquest and that's absent from the story of christ completely and so it's it's quite frightening from a western perspective i understand that but that's why i think we need a discussion about that which i you know offer in in my books especially reopening muslim minds and i calling i call for understanding why prophet muhammad had to fight wars was that a divine blueprint that he had to fulfill or was that a accident of history that he was forced into i mean and before that i'll just say one thing uh there are i mean we have to compare islamic christianity but to understand islam also always check the old testament because i think that his story of prophet muhammad is also very similar to the story of moses and also the later joshua and the you know wars in the land of canon and so there are a lot of old testament parallels there so here is what happened at the very birth of islam prophet muhammad began preaching monotheism in the city of mecca in year 2010 actually he didn't preach publicly in the beginning for three years they were secret they were just about 40 people gradually it became a community and they publicly began preaching there's one god and no god right and of course the god of abraham it was very clear that it's a continuation of the abrahamic tradition now for ten years because of this they were persecuted the the pagan big grandes of the city the the leaders of the tribes they said to muhammad you're insulting our religion you're defying our gods you're insulting our forefathers in other words they accuse prophet muhammad for blasphemy against their religion and which i think should be in the minds of every muslim today on free speech issues and but muslims didn't give up but muslims didn't threaten there was no act of violence muslims were not trying to found an army and actually there are passages in the quran which shows that muslims were just preaching their fate and one of them reads to you your religion and to me mine i mean that was a statement made to the pagans another one says the lord the truth is from your lord let anyone who want to believe it believe it let anyone who want to disbelieve it disbelieve it another verse says to muhammad oh muhammad you're just a preacher you're not a compeller over people and if god had willed everybody would believe but you know god led it this way so there's a very non there's a non-political and non-violent message right there in mecca now i ask a question that generally people didn't ask what if the meccan said okay do what you do right and what if the meccans said let the muslims go and preach their religion i think the history of islam would be different because muslims were just going to peacefully preach the faith probably faith would grow and it would gradually win over the city and still the kaaba would be transformed into a monotheistic temple but it would be a different history what rather happened is that they they persecuted the muslims they killed muslims some of them had to flee to ethiopia as i said they were almost coming to clo kill prophet muhammed himself assassinate him and that's why he finally fled mecca and went to the city yatrip called medina later and there he established a community he established a group of people he became a political leader in the city and all their properties were plundered after they were left their homes were raided and they were sold they were raided by the pagans and then came the first verse of the quran which allowed war jihad a military jihad in the name of god and that was in surah hajj is very interesting it says permission to fight has been given to those who have been persecuted they were persecuted because they said our lord is one they were driven out of their homes because they said our lord is one so the war aspect the war part of the story was the reaction to persecution the ongoing persecution once you start war it went on there were many battles like in the ten last years the 10 years in mecca there are raids there are battles there are fights and when you read the quran today in certain chapters surah 9 for example you will see harsh passages go and fight the unbelievers go and find them go and kill them you know and those are historical commandments directing the first muslim community just like commandments in the old testament telling joshua or the israelites you know to fight the the amalekites you know the tribes in the land of canaan that were trying to kill the israelites so i understand the war aspect there as an outcome of a oppressive environment which wouldn't let islam to grow and even exist so muslims had to fight not because they wanted but they were forced into however a problem the whole thorny moral problem of what you should do when you're oppressed is not something that we've as a species let's say have completely figured out i mean in christianity i would say you propose that one of the prime injunctions is to turn the other cheek but that that didn't seem to apply so obviously let's say in in the decades leading to world war ii and and so yeah it's not like every society doesn't have to wrestle with this problem i mean christ is presented as a pacemaker there's no doubt about that but he's also presented in the book of revelation as a judge who separates the damn from the elect and there's a harshness in that as well and so i don't think it's go ahead sorry but there is an additional problem i mean i mean the founding story is not a problem but i think we have to understand it correctly that war was a consequence of that particular context and what is eternal about islam to me is the theology that the faith the practice and the worship that was brought by islam but there was an additional problem after prophet muhammad passed away uh muslims had an army and a state and they kept continuing i mean they kept uh conquering the world and from in one century from spain to india basically muslims built an empire and this empire itself partly transformed islamic teaching and adjusted it to its imperial needs and i think that's something we muslims should see today one clear example of this is the theory of abrogation uh because the the jurists who were with the imperial project they looked at the quran and and they saw that well there are verses in the quran which says uh you're not a you're just a preacher not a compeller well but we're having a war here right like i mean to you your religion to be mine but we are not allowing the polytheists to to have this so what they did was they took the verses about war and fighting the unbelievers the polytheists in particular but also jews and christians because there was a word about the people of the book they took those verses as definitive which abrogated the earlier verses so a lot of the verses you will open and read the quran today which are tolerant peaceful you know lenient uh if you read medieval jurisprudence you will find notes that the verse is there in the quran but it's abrogated like it doesn't have a function it doesn't rule it doesn't have a hukum which to me is a huge problem when you're dealing with a text as complicated as the quran or let's say the bible where taken singly there are certainly passages that contradict one another and so then well then you were tempted by the desire to justify your own unquestioned beliefs because of your demand for power using reference to god and then it's a worse problem than that too because well who's right in their interpretation you know and the way out of that in some sense is to approach a book like that with as much admission of your own ignorance and as much humility as possible so that i mean if you assume that such thing is reasonable given that we're all people of the book and pray to god in some sense that you don't bend that to your own unacknowledged malevolence and ignorance but that's a very very difficult thing to manage and it isn't even clear when you manage it which is why we need to talk to each other in part exactly and i see this abrogation theory and and the theory of jihad and conquest and and coercion built around that which is right honestly right there in the islamic jurisprudence in medieval interpretations of the sharia as islam interpreted for the age of empires i mean it was how empires were behaving at the time christians were doing the same things too i mean byzantine empire was also expanding through war they had anti-paganism laws religious coercion was the norm of the day islam was born in such a world and it took a imperial form and jurisprudence but to me it was not a divine blueprint that we muslims should preserve forever it was a different context and we live in a different world today so that's why we have to reinterpret and to me the abrogated verses of the quran are the eternal messages of islam those abrogated verses which says to you your religion to be mine and okay so why would you why okay so let me play devil's advocate here i mean you're making you're making a judgment there and it's a non-trivial judgment and you could say also that it's an unbelievably presumptuous judgment and this is not an insult at all this is independent of whether or not i agree with you but we run right into this thorny problem right which is well why on what grounds do you think you're justified in making the claim that your interpretation should supersede that particular interpretation very good question first of all i begin with showing that i begin by showing that the existing interpretation the imperial interpretation let's say which relied on expensive jihad coercion suppression of heresy apostasy laws blasphemy laws that's all part of that by showing that this was not a inevitable interpretation it was an interpretation based on imperial conditions and i showed that people who dissented against those two i mean in my book in reopening muslim minds i said well this became the mainstream view but wait wait there was a scholar who was actually you know arguing against that there was a scholar who was saying no we don't need abrogation we just need to understand it as one big story with different emphases there were so there were and i show how these were cynically used by muslim rulers sometimes to just get rid of dissent i mean some muslims early critics of the umayya dynasty which was mostly a tyrannical dynasty that dominated the islamic world they were killed as blasphemers or apostates but they were only critics of the rulers so this is so let me ask you okay so let me ask you another question so you've you've spent a lot of time on this you've written many books and you've put yourself in some danger i would say and and this has been quite successful and so i want to know what you're up to you know what i mean it's like you're you're aiming at something with all these books and maybe you don't even fully know what it is because you realize these things as you write right and as you struggle and so i would say for a book like the bible like there's a way that you have to approach it i believe that what would you say so that you're the least likely to deceive yourself about what you're doing and that has to be something like i think it has to be something like an orientation towards love and love is something like the desire that the the most possible good happens to the most possible people i don't mean to be utilitarian about it i'm not making that kind of case but it even extends to your enemies because well wouldn't it be better if they didn't have such miserable lives and wouldn't be better if you didn't have enemies and so you have to approach it a traditional text in the spirit that the text fundamentally embodies or you bend it to your own will now you what are you aiming at with all your books what what is it that you want that's a good question well what do i want i want to make as a just a ordinary but thinking muslim i want to make a contribution to to the future of my religion in this day and age where i see great value in islam i think islam can contribute to the world in many ways but i also see islam being still captured by some medieval interpretations that were actually using was was used and built up for medieval imperial projects and and i need i believe we need to rethink certain issues in islam and there are a lot of scholars doing this i mean that's why i speak of the 19th century islamic modernists i mean i learned from these scholars from fazu rahman to muhammad abdul to admin liberals and today some contemporary scholars that i quote in my book as well but scholars write in academic articles so i i or very complicated books i try to popularize these ideas because i see there's hunger for that i mean there are a lot of muslims around the world today from pakistan to malaysia to indonesia to the arab world who are faithful who are happy with their religion but they are disturbed sometimes disgusted by the things they see in the name of their religion oppression violence persecution of innocent people by calling them heretics and so on so forth and they want to see a way forward how can we go forward by preserving our faith living our values but also being at peace with non-muslims and even muslims of different persuasion and we can have so do you see that that what is perturbing them is the manifestation of that central totalitarian spirit it is totalitarian or just sometimes bigger than hateful it i mean to be totalitarian it has to be unified with power but it is potentially totalitarian so yeah well there's the psychological equivalence psychology exactly and and i also see that this is uh make this is also leading to a great this enchantment for islam as well i mean a lot of people are not in the west thinking about that they think muslim world everybody is pious but quite the contrary there is a great escape from islam in iran i mean iran today is the number one country in the world that produces ex-muslims like people who become atheists and christians and i respect their point of view i mean they have all the right to become 80s or christians but as a muslim who believes in my faith i mean like i would like to have a faith that attracts people with its spirituality and with its values but not frightens them and scares them and pushes them away in turkey my country there is a new type of deism which is like young people are believing in god but not any religion and certainly not islam precisely because of the disenchantment of islam being used for authoritarian politics by the current government for example so i think this is a critical period in islam and when i look back in christian history i see people uh christian humanists from loch to others roger williams in the united states who re-articulated their religion reinterpreted their religion to emphasize freedom freedom of conscience uh like i mean the switch from divine rights of kings to the idea of a you know limited government with uh which with religious freedom that was a big shift in christianity and it had to be done by christians who value their fate and i i think this is a big effort a lot of muslims are trying i'm just trying to do my part with my writings which are aimed at a broad understanding with a broad population so everybody can read and get it you know what what the point is but also here are the key arguments and and the you know patterns for going forward yeah well you're you're a strange sort of traditionalist in some sense right because you are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in relationship to the past but also not proposing that all of this be abandoned as an entirely failed project which i think is a very naive would be a very naive thing to do in any case it's like well abandon it in favor of what exactly well you know rationality it's well okay but it's a need some fleshing out well not by rationality i mean we can't discuss that because you know my book reopening muslim minds a return to reason you know begins with that reasonable freedom uh i'm not a rationalist in the sense of you know people like sam harris that you know you talk to so i don't think that there's reason that supersedes everything else and by rationally we can always arrive at throat i mean mao rationally arrived at a terrible through so i i certainly see well there's a lot of problem of the axiomatic pressure i mean hayek you know criticizes you know rationalists that build systems of authoritarianism and i think there was a great value there however by reason i refer to a specific theological branch in islam called rational theology or akul that's the term in arabic reason and it goes back to a theological dispute in early islam between two schools of thought and it was on the meaning of sharia i mean god's god's commandments and actually it goes back to this was a discussion on islam and but it goes back to socrates and his famous europhro dilemma and i think this was discussed in christianity as well the dilemma is this when god has commandments like ten commandments like thou shall not murder right thou shall not steal these are fundamental key values that mu our civilizations go forward but one question is this does god say thou shall not murder because murder is inherently wrong does does god teach us about this ethical value it's out there in the world or does murder become wrong simply because god said so so these two ways of looking into rules commandments and in islam one theology is spearheaded by the mutezula school but also it had an impact on the maturity theology which is in mainstream sunni islam which i sympathize with they said the commandments of god are educating us about values which are also there inherently out there in the world and also knowable by reason in other words even if there was no revelation human could figure out that theft or murder are wrong but because of human passions and human you know tendency to forget god is educating and reminding us about those values and there are a lot of reasons in the in the quran to think like that the other school the asharite said no these things are right and wrong simply because god said so therefore if god said murder is good murder would be good so the the commandments define everything that is ethical and this was this is the asharite theology and i in my book i show how these discussions took place and what were the nuances ashore theology became more influential in sunni islam and i i'm critical of that because i think if we say god's commandments only have value in themselves first of all we are turning god into a capricious arbitrary legislator right things become right and wrong only because he says so they're not it's not like like he is looking into the world and seeing com and with compassion seeing that ordinary people i mean innocent people should not die yeah well you could secularize that you could secularize that argument by asking yourself as a secular person these fundamental laws that we have like we sh we should not murder do they reflect some underlying reality in some sen in some profound sense or are they arbitrary constructions of a particular time and place and it's a it's a it's a very difficult argument to walk through um because it it it always depends in some sense on what you're aiming at right if you're aiming at power and conquest well then maybe murder is just just what you need but if you're aiming at peace well maybe that's not the right route exactly and actually i mean the secular way of looking at this is that for example should governments legislate according to what they think is right and their commandment their laws define everything or should there be values beyond the governments that they should honor right right like well that's a natural right argument in some sense right which is exactly foundational in the west and less so in the french system i would say very english common law system which that's why i i believe uh the right view in islam was the natural right argument which what the muta zela said and the maturities also in the sunni tradition pretty much came close the the other one is called divine positivism like god says whatever he says and we just obey it without asking why and how i mean it got more sophisticated over time still i mean the ashrae scholars look into the purposes of god try to figure out so they that allowed analogy but ultimately this divine command theory that god posits as he wills legislates as he wills and this had two consequences one is one means that people you who don't have your religious tradition cannot have any value because all value comes from divine commandments so people who are secular people who are beyond uh right you you close yourself to the ethical reality out there in the world all the ethical traditions and reasoning second and you deny an essential commonality between the tribes of mankind exactly and you put yourself in a permanent state of war exactly that's why i call it the loss of universalism because i mean early muslims studied aristotle and his ethical philosophy because aristotle is an infidel from an islamic point of view but they saw value because they said god gave humanity and ethical intuition and reason and reason is universal that allowed them so that was the universalistic path but the other path actually closed uh ethical thinking that's why after that first you can also see how it would foster a kind of totalitarianism because if god's commandments are what define good and evil but i'm interpreting them exactly then then there isn't anything beyond my interpretation in some sense as long as i'm correct whereas with the more universalist view it's like well wait a second there's something outside of this that i'm not intelligent enough wise enough to understand that i have to be mindful of so let me let me take it in that direction for a sec so i'll tell you something i've been thinking about i'm writing this book now called we who wrestle with god and i'm i'm i'm really trying to work out this the the natural right issue in relationship to free speech and i'm trying to do that as a clinician and so one of the things that carl rogers proposed um and he was extraordinarily influenced by protestantism he was a seminar and he wanted to be an evangelist before he became a secular humanist but rogers observed that if you listen to people talk if you actually listened that they would spontaneously transform themselves in a way that improved their life and he pointed to a fundamental psychological mechanism that was driving that you you could think about it in some sense as exactly the same thing that a parent does when that parent attends very carefully to their children so that attention facilitates well i would say in some sense the manifestation of the healing word and i mean that as a clinician now freud rogers took a page from freud because freud also observed that if you just let people talk but you listened that they would unwind themselves and and straighten themselves out and and this isn't such a preposterous suggestion unless you believe that speech is somehow divorced from neurological integrity let's say or social integrity and so i think there's a very real sense in which the the reason that free speech is a natural right and maybe the the highest of natural rights is because it is precisely reflective of the mechanism by which we move from the stagnation of our dead thoughts into a future that's what better than the dead past and so any society that interferes with that will degenerate into a kind of totalitarian absolutism and that becomes indistinguishable from hell it does i mean very interesting i mean what you said reminds me of a quranic verse it defines believers as those people who listen to the word and and follow the most beautiful of that to be able to do that you have to listen first and right you have to be able to choose that exactly uh it's a verse in the quran i can't remember the number now but i can send you later the number of it uh it's a great verse that's a great idea because you know it also it also touches on the notion of a profound intuition of beauty and the idea that beauty is an intimation of what's what is divine and divine is deep and profound and necessary and i don't care if you speak about that in secular religious terms it boils down to the same thing in the final analysis and to use i i talked with one of canada's great journalists recently this man named rex murphy who's a real national treasure and he's so poetic and he's a deep admirer of poetry but also a very practical and down-to-earth person but his words are beautiful and and part of the reason they have such force is because he is in communion with that beauty and and it shines through everything he does so these are non-trivial realities that are being pointed to we ignore them at our apparel exactly and and that is a universalistic outlook to listen to and learn from everything and it was there right at the beginning of the islamic civilization and that's why muslims built the house of wisdom and bagged that and translated all greek philosophy into arabic you know which ultimately made its way to europe through through spain muslim spain uh so there was this hunger to learn and appreciate but that gradually narrowed down and why and it's a fact that it has down it does happen why it happened how it happened there are a lot of theories about it you know what happens all the time it happens happens all the time it's it's it's a huge existential reality for that to happen i think it will happen to any civilization at the moment they say we have reached perfection right we don't need to learn anything from the outside world and i see that sort of trend in the western civil war yeah that's the tower of babel that's the tower of babel right you build a structure and you think it's reached the heights of god and as soon as you think that everyone fragments and speaks a different language and everything descends and then the next story is the flood and that's not a bloody accident disintegration exactly so by reason i am referring to this view universalistic view in early islam which believe that morality is universal ethics are universal the quran reminds us and educates us indicates i mean according to abdul-jabbar he said the sharia indicates what's right and wrong the other group said the sharia constitutes what is right and wrong so if the sharia constitutes it you don't have to interpret my interpretation of the quran is what defines well you can't have that statement without that implicit belief behind it that's the problem with that kind of idea it's like well it contains the absolute truth well through whose lens well mine well that's pretty damn convenient for you isn't it yeah yeah exactly and of course thinking like that had political advantages and actually that's an argument i made in the book and but that narrowed islamic thinking it also led to literalism i mean blind literalism because if you don't have except values outside of the written text you ultimately become less willing to interpret the text and move away a little bit from the text because you're bound with it too much and and that is that literalism is a burning problem i think in islamic jurisprudence today i mean a lot of the issues about women's rights in the muslim world come from illiteracy it's also a terrible technical problem right which the postmodernists grappled with and which in some sense defeated them it's because when you read a book you say well is the truth is in a single word or is it in a phrase but the phrase is in the sentence and the sentence changes the phrase and then the sentence is in a paragraph and then you know there's a really interesting image online showing the hyperlink nature of the bible which verses refer to which other it looks like a kind of a rainbow the bible is densely hyperlinked because all of it refers to it it all refers to other parts of itself which is part of its depth but what that means is that while you need the whole thing to interpret each word you need every paragraph to interpret each sentence and so how do you know if your interpretation is correct well we we believe what the sentence says it's like nope sorry that's just not going to do and and what do you mean by literally true ex and are you so sure that literal truth is the mo is the deepest form of truth because i don't think it is there's fictional truth and and what that's deeper than literal truth obviously so there's certainly uh and we have that in islam the interpretation of the quran by the quran so you read it's surah 2 something and you read 57 something else and they actually explain each other that's a very powerful approach biliteralism i mean i can give you one example of women's rights for example like which is of course a burning issue in certain parts of not all but certain parts of the muslim world today you may have heard that you know saudi authorities didn't allow women to drive cars for a long time and finally when it was allowed you know it was a big reform and the autocratic prince who did that you know got a lot of brony points in the west although it was probably a bigger reform than was even wrecked it was it wasn't for them but the people who demanded were jailed so it's a it's a weird autocratic form of reform but then now pakistan i mean not sorry in afghanistan the taliban came to power in the 90s they were not allowing women to even walk on the street but now they will say we will allow that okay that's the progress for taliban but still women will not be able to travel alone so there is this issue of woman traveling alone with a male guardian i mean it will come up in all these islamic issues i mean to conservative islamic interpretations now where does it come from well it comes from a few hadiths that are sayings reported from prophet muhammad peace be upon him and it's in sahih buhari one of the most authoritative the most authoritative i think collection of hadith sources although i would still have some questions there on on certain texts but anyway there you read prophet muhammad saying a woman a muslim woman should not travel alone without a machere that's a male guardian for longer than a distance of three days another version is a distance of one day so that's there that's the text and classical scholars you know of course they thought this is important they calculated actually what's the difference of three days oh 78 miles or 57 miles there are different versions of that so women should not be able to go and still today like in the uk if you ask a fatwa from a conservative scholars they can say can a woman go between birmingham and london they can measure the distance they say no no it's not it's not more than that distance well that is a textualist reading of this now another reading which is promoted by turkish scholars and others i'm sure is that well prophet muhammad said so probably because in seventh century arabia in the desert between mecca and medina there were bad bandits attacking every unprotected woman so a woman walking alone without a male guardian and and woman didn't carry swords by this i mean only men could protect women would be attacked by these people so he said something obviously related to that context so his security his issue was security so security is a universal value we should care about but if you today worry about the security of a woman driving between mecca and medina make sure she wears a seat belt right i mean it's a different the right of a woman to walk unaccompanied which is obviously a right that should not be trammelled is dependent to no small degree on the fact that she can do so in relative safety and that's forgotten in some sense right i mean i'm not saying that that right shouldn't be promoted or doesn't exist i'm saying that the conditions that currently prevail in the west i mean when i lived in montreal for example anyone pretty much could go anywhere at any time of day and be safe well that's a hell of an accomplishment that that's the case and that is not the historical norm by any stretch of the imagination so that's for sure i mean these religious commandments even the quran and prophet muhammad's commandments as a muslim i value i respect all of them but i understand that they were issued in a certain context they were given they were altered in a certain context and when you understand the intention behind that you begin to understand the sharia more intention based called makassett in islamic tradition so that's one way of going forward in islamic tradition that scholars are thinking and i understand like corporal punishment i mean that's one of the issues that come up very much with islam i mean why you know why are there corporal punishments in the quran and in the prophet's commandments well why are they in the old testament too right i mean on all these texts you have corporal punishment yes an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was a marked improvement over the previous arrangement exactly and and the quran says there is a life for you in casas which is retaliation because in before the quran arabs were killing each other in drones and you know tribes were fighting each other and by the way there was no individual responsibility so anybody from the other tribe would be given you know as as a as a retaliation so but the quran brought the idea of retaliation with individual responsibility and also it brought a few uh corporal punishments like amputation of hands for theft for example which is one of the most controversial issues i think about islamic law in the world today now one the littlest way to understand it is that while god says this so you will implement it as as the way it is or you know you will find to you know find some modifications around it but another way of looking at it is well there's a very good reason why i gave corporal punishment in seventh century early seventh century arabia because there were no prisons i mean prison is an institution that is built by a state and you need to build brick walls and you need to feed somebody inside and you need to have a guard i mean 7th century early 17th century mecca and medina weren't anything like that people people could only punish crime instantly or let them go i mean there was no idea and that's why pre-islamic arabs were also amputated or killed and risk a feud exactly and that's why pre-islamic arabs were also amputated hands for theft so the quran legislated in that context and as a muslim i believe it legislated for justice it legislated for the right moral purposes but today we can punish theft with other means such as you know prison sentences or fines which the ottomans already did i mean these modifications have already taken place to a certain extent in the muslim world i'm saying these things because i mean this kind of literalist understanding of islamic things we can't let the literalists get away with the notion that their understanding of a sentence is right that just isn't how a text works it's way more complicated than that and that's a big problem because it opens up the specter of infinite interpretations which is the postmodernist dilemma but but saying the text has no meaning or any meaning is no solution to that it's like saying life has any meaning or no meaning it's a problem especially when they say their understanding is right and they have the right to dominate the state and they have to impose that on everybody else right that's right that's a key problem we have in in the islamist movements let's talk about mary for a minute oh yeah sure all right yeah well because this issue yeah well this issue of women's rights is definitely worth touching on now so so why do you think mary is represented so uh what would you say why does she have this privileged representation in the quran and what does that mean as far as you've been able to determine well very good question very interesting i should also add that the most prominent figure in the whole quran the most prominent human being is moses you know followed by probably mary and abraham and then come jesus christ you know he's also of course narrated because the quran is educating prophet muhammad about his predecessors like these were the pious people before you these are the people your your forbearers i mean you should follow the footsteps of moses you should be like jesus and and mary is narrated because he's so high up and revered in the islamic tradition she's praised for her chastity and she's praised for uh being brave because the fact that i mean she was of course accused for committing adultery i mean that's what the quran says because she had a child without a father and and we we hear that actually we see that in the quran and she uh she goes and the quranic birth story is different than the gospels in the gospels you know mary gives birth in in bethlehem and as stable and you know that's the christian imagery the chordic story is different she goes and gives birth on in the wilderness out of nowhere and under palm tree because she's afraid that you know people will blame her and people do blame her after that and then under this palm tree she gives birth to jesus and she's afraid but god comforts her and angels speak to her now i think the story there the archetype there is a woman who will be unjustly blamed for committing adultery already she didn't do and that's a deem that comes up also in the quran for another woman who's not named but we know it's aisha prophet muhammad's wife in the 24th chapter of the quran prophet muhammad's wife i mean that's we know from postcarding sources but she was left alone in the desert a man had given her a ride with her with his camel when she came back to the city there was a rumor that maybe something happened between them and prophet muhammed was devastated aisha was devastated it was a very stressful moment and then the court and then the koran legislated about that condemned the lie and the libels and said if you will bring any accusation against a woman of adultery you should bring four witnesses to before you blame her and of course there was no witness in this case so these two stories i'm reading them together like it's about protecting women from accusation of adultery which was of course the worst thing you could do it to a woman especially in the pre-modern era even today i think in many societies so mary is highlighted in that sense which is very interesting uh by the way it's interesting though and sad that the quranic injunction to protect women by asking for four witnesses was misabused in pakistan to actually abuse women i mean it was was used because when you don't understand the intention this is what happens there has been cases in pakistan of a woman being raped raped in a village getting pregnant and she goes to she's taken to a uh sharia court in the in the rural areas and they ask where are your four witnesses she says i don't have four witnesses but the fact that she's pregnant proves that she committed adultery although she's raped and she there has been a few cases like that who were given the death penalty by the court although it was later overturned luckily by the constitutional court so i'm just saying this to if you don't understand what guy what god legislated with what intention and if you blindly bring a a law into another different context without understanding the understanding the difference between rape and adultery also it can have disastrous consequences but sorry we digress so mary is highly praised some of the things said in the quran about mary you cannot find them in the gospels but you can find them somewhere else you can find them in the uh in the gospel of james which is an apocryphal gospel protagonium of james because there were these eastern gospels which told about the childhood of mary and childhood of jesus which are not gnostic gospels yeah gnostic or other ones and so the koran strongly resonates with that and i think one reason how do you account for that historically i mean was there an influence of james mode of thinking on muhammad or what what do you think's happening there well i wrote a book i know you did i know he says yes no it's a great question i appreciate it well how do i account that i mean islam certainly continues judeo-christian traditions and very strongly resonates by a little known christian strain known as jewish christianity i mean which which comes from which considered james as their saint you know patron saint jewish christians which we know from the church fathers called ebionites people called or nazarenes they were practicing jews who accepted christ as the messiah but as the jewish messiah not in the fully christian sense of the term not divine but as jews expect the messiah today so they were practicing jews who accepted jesus which made them unorthodox from both a jewish point of view and also a mainstream christian point of view not the wisest political move maybe yeah so that's why i mean they were squeezed in uh we hear them as heresies in church father's writings and they disappeared after fourth century but what is striking is that the jesus defined by the quran is very similar to what the jewish christians believed and also the theology of quran is very similar to this idea that you're saved by acts not just faith alone which is you know a this is not a thorny line yeah and uh i think it's more on a jewish path but appreciates jesus from a more jewish perspective uh and it is very similar now there are two ways to understand this one is to say well some of these teachings made their way to arabia and you know obviously influenced the birth of islam and prophet muhammad might have acquired these teachings from these christian unorthodox groups that's the historical interpretation and and i can understand how uh people think like that as a muslim i believe well this is revelation i mean god sent that revelation god sent this revelation again so i don't need to believe that prophet muhammad acquired that wisdom from a pre-existing community but that's a that's an answer of faith others can i can very easily understand that they can say these christian teachings influence the birth of islam but whatever path we take even if we believe that there's revelation or even if we believe that there's a history the point is our religious traditions are deeply connected and and they are not alien and and there is not a judeo-christian tradition but judeo-christo islamic tradition as i said and the moment we begin to connect them we will learn we can learn from each other i think muslims can learn from christian tradition more and christians can learn certain things from the islamic tradition today and we can think of our problems as we the monotheists you know we have these issues and how do we deal with them in the modern world that's why i find intra-christian discussions about freedom or freedom of conscience or secular state very interesting and i think we have we have patterns and roots in islam which can be connected to those okay i want to torture you with one more issue and and then we should probably stop because i'm getting i'm getting worn out listening and talking so um so it might stop making sense no it's per it's good it's not a bad thing it's a good thing so i mentioned earlier this idea that rogers developed that was deeply influenced by his protestantism and that had also been observed by freud and the psychoanalysts that merely letting people speak but in a welcoming way right in in in an attentive way so you're providing a container for the revelation let's say the revelation of themselves to themselves that that was intrinsically deeply healing and one of the things that jung pointed out which i thought was staggering in its implications was that the mythological or theological christ was actually a symbolic representation of that process yes so it's quite so imagine there's a historical figure but there's a there's a psychological figure that's how i would look at it but a theolo you can think about it in theological terms at all this gets complicated when you get into the outer reaches of thought but then so what i see happening was that the west organized itself unbeknownst to itself to some degree under this principle that free discourse accompanied by attentive listening which is something like care for the other person's self-revelation and belief that that will make the world a better place in the highest sense and it's sort of the science of of successful therapy in my estimation well that's that's that's both embodied and symbolized by the figure of christ and you can see that as a reflection of human universalism as well he happens to be the figure in the west when you're speaking psychologically but it's representing something that's a lot more like john's notion of the eternal word and and something that the egyptians tried to represent with the figure of horus and the mesopotamians with the figure of marduk and so forth and it's sort of at the basis of the campbell jung idea of a universal archetypal redemption story and so what i what i struggle with is in the islam world you have this contradiction in some sense from my perspective as a westerner between the figure of muhammad as in some ways the ultimate authority or guide or or prophet and the figure of christ and i can't understand it psychologically it's like because i can't distinguish between the honor given christ in islam and the honor given muhammad there's a contradiction there that i can't think my way through uh well great question i think there is no contradiction from an islamic point of view because islam sees this as one big history of monotheism so prophet muhammad is following the footsteps of moses or abraham or isaac or jacob or noah and christ is put in that path so that's why christ isn't divine but he is he is a word from god he's revelation so he's actually metaphysically speaking the statements about jesus puts him about any other actually creature uh besides the angels when you look at from a quranic point of view but the quran still insists that he's not divine so and there is no paulian theology of him you know being dying for the sins of humanity so there's there's not that so that's why christ is brought to the broader abrahamic story which doesn't culminate only with christ but continues with with muhammad so that's why i mean islam takes the lower christology i mean if you will from it so that's why i think it makes sense although uh i think enough attention maybe has not been given an islamic thought to the story of christ that has narrated us to us in the new testament uh in in early islamic history actually you see that muslims were studying the bible called israelite i mean the jewish and christian sources because the quran refers to them so go and learn more from resources and i think that was a valuable flocks of information and wisdom into islam later it was seen as oh no no we don't need them we just need our own you know trajectory and so the loss of universalism was not just loss of greek philosophy but maybe even more so this you know the matrix between the quran and bible that's why i'm also calling on fellow muslims to study the new testament and learn about the story of christ there are passages in the new testament especially paulian letters that will not go well with muslim theology but we can still read and learn at least the history of christ and that is one actually that's why that's what brought me to writing an article in the new york times a few years ago what jesus can teach muslims today because besides all the theological issues about his nature like that's that's a matter of theology but christ had a role in first century judaism when jews were in a crisis like we muslims today i mean that analogy was made by arnold toynbee he said muslims of the modern era are like first century jews in the sense that there is a powerful civilization rome that is coming on to you and you have you have herodians who you know ally with that you know become imitating of that and you have the zealots you know become fanatic and and and toybe made a knowledge and i think that's very uh very apt for us i see christ as a third vey i mean he was not a collaborator of rome but he wasn't a fanatic he was not a guerrilla leader fighting a battle against them and and he called on his fellow jews to rediscover their own values let's look at bakar halaka and see the intention and his criticism of dry literalism and sometimes arrogant piety you know you take pride you look down upon other people saying that they are sinners but um i'm pious they are so relevant to some of the problems we have in the muslim world today i mean and in the western world in the western world too and i think that's why that's why i mean i uh as a monotheist you know walking on the abrahamic path and being a muslim alhamdulillah as we say i believe the broader tradition of monotheism that's includes moses of course but the story of christ in particular there's a lot to teach us and muhammad abdul made this point i mean he was a muslim reformer in the late 19th century and he said actually muslims believe in the second coming of christ i mean it's there it's an art article of faith in sunni islam he says the second coming of christ means we will begin to look at the sharia as he looked at the law look at the intentions you know look at the this is the moral wisdom behind that and just don't turn into a dry set of laws we just you know implement without you know thinking of the consequences i think there is such deep wisdom there in the in the christian tradition which is important for us muslims there are a lot of i mean wisdom in the muslim tradition too i think to share with the world but we could use some more wisdom couldn't we yeah i mean one thing i mean like i see people becoming so obsessed with race in the western world since i came to america a few years ago i mean people speak about all the colors skin colors up there and i understand that there's a history behind that there's a of course persecution and yeah just a termination of babel but i mean one thing we can say proudly as muslim is that well we never had that islam is a color blind religion and you know who was fascinated by that malcolm x he was of course a leader in the uh african-american community he was because of the persecution and discrimination he had also a very negative view of the white people but his life changed when he went to mecca and that's a very powerful story and he saw muslims with blue eyes and blonde hair and black skin and brown skin and he said they're all brothers in faith they're not discriminating against each other so he became post you know racial thanks to his exposure to that universalism in islam which i'm proud of as a muslim so i think there are great things in our traditions to share with each other but we have to overcome the totalitarian impulse as you said the coercive interpretations the hateful interpretations and uh there's there is ground to work in every tradition and i i'm trying to do my part as a you know muslim living in the 21st century is concerned about the future of the world and the umma much appreciated thank you very much for talking to me thank you very much for talking to me this was a great conversation where are you i'm in washington dc right now you're in washington yeah at the cato institute offices well it would be nice to see you if i i'm going to come to washington next year and it would be very nice to see you oh inshallah as we say i would love to uh let's break bread together and and speak about all these great uh issues which we should all think about thanks a lot thank you thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 668,012

Keywords: islam, islam jordan peterson, mustafa akyol jordan peterson, mustafa akyol, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, mustafa akyol jesus, religion, akyol peterson islam, akyol peterson debate, akyol peterson, Jordan peterson muslim

Id: 9b8kprIQ-yo

Length: 105min 8sec (6308 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021