Read Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty Online
Authors: Mustafa Akyol
58.
“Dinlerini anlatmak en dogal hakları,”
Hürriyet
, April 21, 2009.
59.
“Top Turkish Religious Official Says Saint Paul Church Should Be Reopened,”
Hürriyet Daily News
, August 23, 2010.
60.
Ali Bulaç, “Azınlık, Zımmi, Muahid!” [Minority, Dhimmi, Contractee],
Zaman
, January 6, 2010.
61.
All quotes are from Hayrettin Karaman’s articles in
Yeni Safak
: “Necat Konusu,” August 29, 2008; “Dinden Dönen Öldürülür mü?,” September 11, 2009; “Islam Ülkelerinde Demokrasi,” August 4, 2006; “Dine Zorlamak,” September 24, 2006.
62.
Hayrettin Karaman, “Kadınlarla Tokalasmak,”
Yeni Safak
, September 9, 2009.
63.
“Dayak yiyen kadın karete ögrensin,”
Radikal
, October 26, 2008.
64.
Sami Hocaoglu,
“Kur’an kitaplıgına yeni katkılar” [New Contributions to Qur’an Library],
Yeni Safak
, June 28, 2004.
65.
Dücane Cündioglu, “Düsünürken modern, inanırken geleneksel” [Modern While Thinking, Traditional While Believing],
Yeni Safak
, December 13, 2009. Cündioglu, a conservative who is highly critical of Islamic capitalism, says this disapprovingly.
66.
Zakaria,
Future of Freedom
, p. 73.
67.
Vali Nasr,
Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World
(New York: Free Press, 2009).
68.
Graham E. Fuller,
The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World
(Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2008).
69.
Ibid., p. 49.
70.
See Kinzer,
Reset
, p. 198. This new Turkey can actually be more helpful to America, argues Kinzer, formerly the
New York Times
bureau chief in Turkey. Now, he asserts, “Turkey can go places, engage partners, and make deals that America cannot.”
71.
Nazanine Moshiri, “Interview with Rachid Ghannouchi,” Al Jazeera English website, February 3, 2011.
72.
Soner Çagaptay, “Arab Revolt Makes Turkey a Regional Power,”
Hürriyet
Daily News
, February 16, 2011.
73.
Olivier Roy, “This Is Not an Islamic Revolution,”
New Statesman
, February 15, 2011.
74.
Olivier Roy, “Where Were the Tunisian Islamists?,”
International Herald Tribune
, January 21, 2011.
75.
Walter Russell Mead,
God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 372.
CHAPTER NINE: FREEDOM FROM THE STATE
1.
Vincent Cornell, “Islam: Theological Hostility and the Problem of Difference,” King Fahd Center for the Middle East and Islamic Studies, University of Arkansas,
http://www.worde.org/articles/Cornell_Islam-TheologicalHostility.php
.
2.
Tariq Ramadan,
In the Footsteps of the Prophet
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 103.
3.
Afsaruddin,
First Muslims
, p. 17.
4.
Qur’an 8:1, Bewley translation, with Arabic words anglicized.
5.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values of Humanity
(New York: HarperOne, 2002), p. 147. Nasr argues that the Shiite ideal is nomocracy, too”and that theocracy was established in the Shiite world only with the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
6.
The most dramatic example of this was the late-nineteenth-century “Mahdi” in Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah. He, like the Wahhabis, rebelled against the Ottomans and declared, “Let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels.” He ultimately lost to the British. P. M. Holt,
The Mahdist State in Sudan
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 51.
7.
Qur’an 4:59, Shakir translation.
8.
Qur’an 42:38, Bewley translation.
9.
Afsaruddin,
First Muslims
, p. 26.
10.
Ibid., p. 190.
11.
Esposito, ed.,
Oxford History of Islam
, p. 146.
12.
See Michelangelo Guida, “Seyyid Bey and the Abolition of the Caliphate,”
Middle Eastern Studies
44, no. 2 (March 2008); Abdelwahab El-Affendi,
Who Needs an Islamic State?
(London: Malaysia Think Tank, 2008), pp. 85–88.
13.
Kemalettin Nomer,
seriat, Hilafet, Laiklik
[Shariah, Caliphate, Secularity] (Istanbul: Bogaziçi Publishing, 1996), p. 380.
14.
El-Affendi,
Who Needs an Islamic State?,
p. 83.
15.
Ibid
.,
p. 69.
16.
http://www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org/english/books/hizb-ut-Tahrir/chapter_09.html.
17.
El-Affendi,
Who Needs an Islamic State?,
p. 33.
18.
See chapter 3.
19.
This occurred in Pakistan in the late 1970s and 1980s, when General Zia ul-Haqq initiated his policy of “the Islamization of laws.” Soon it turned out that each of Pakistan’s diverse groups wanted implementation of its own version of the Shariah, and, in the end, Zia could handle the escalating tension only by adopting martial law, which was secular. Taha Akyol,
Medine’den Lozan’a
, pp. 203–9; Mohammad Amin,
Islamization of Laws in Pakistan
(Lahore: Sang e Meel Publications, 1989).
20.
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na‘im, “Thomas Jefferson, Islam and the State,
Huffington Post
, March 20, 2008.
21.
An-Na‘im,
Islam and the Secular State
, p. 1.
22.
For an interesting analysis of the matter, see Ahmet T. Kuru,
Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
23.
Here An-Na‘im only argues (
Islam and the Secular State
, p. 139) that the way to practice Islamic politics must be through “civic reason, which means that reasons can be debated among all citizens without reference to religious beliefs.” Muslims can promote policies that derive from their beliefs, in other words, but they should use the voice of reason to bring them to the public square, which would include secular or non-Muslim people, or simply Muslims with different political views.
24.
Caliph Umar banned some practices that were allowed in the Qur’an”such as marriage to non-Muslim women and “timed marriage”and suspended the implementation of others, such as cutting off the hands of thieves and distributing conquered lands among the soldiers. In each case, he showed the possible negative implications as his justification. Mehmet Erdogan, Islam Hukukunda Ahkamın De
gismesi
[The Change of Verdicts in Islamic Law] (Istanbul: M. Ü. Ilahiyat Fakültesi Vakfı Yayınları, 1990), pp. 51, 161.
25.
All statements come from http://www.islam4uk.com.
26.
Muhammad Bin Ahmed al-Sarakhsi,
Sharh Kitab al-Siyar al-Kabir
(Pakistan: Nusrullah Mansour, 1405 AH/1985 AD, 4:1530; cited in Safi, “Overcoming the Religious-Secular Divide,” p. 19.
27.
El-Affendi,
Who Needs an Islamic State?,
p. 19.
28.
Olivier Roy, “Islam in Europe: The Exception to the Rule?,” Eurotopics.net, May 2, 2007. In the same article, Roy also observes: “Salafism, the type of Islam to which many born-again Muslims in Europe adhere, explicitly opposes all national cultures, including Islamic ones, and demands a religion purified of all cultural influences and local flavor. That also explains why Salafism attracts culturally uprooted young people like second-generation Muslims in Europe . . . . In contrast, one finds that the Turkish expatriate population throughout the rest of Europe continues to be closely connected to Turkey (by means of its language, television, and various organizations) and is rarely involved in acts of Islamic terrorism. This shows that practiced Islam is less radical the stronger the ties to the country of origin are.”
29.
Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit,
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. 43.
30.
These are the words of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the twenty-three-year-old Nigerian who tried to blow up a passenger airliner near Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. “I imagine how the great
jihad
will take place,” he reportedly wrote in a February 2005 Internet post, “how the Muslims will win, God willing, and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” Margaret Wente, “The Global Internet Jihad: Web of Terror,
” Globe and Mail
, January 8, 2010.