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Akyol?įrom a simple and much more widely shared idea than anyone would envisage. Quite the opposite, it means retrieving that outstanding legacy of tolerance that once made Islam great – as he explains in this interview given ahead of his speech at the 2021 Carthage Seminars.Įver since that unfortunate night in Kuala Lumpur, you have been mulling the idea of “reopening Muslim minds”.
MUSTAFA AKYOL FREE
According to Akyol, it is one key to free Islam from any monist anxiety – be that apostasy, blasphemy or intolerance for other faiths according to Malayan religious guardians, this is a phrase taken out of its real context, if not inexistent. It was this episode that marked the beginning of Akyol’s journey through fourteen centuries of Islamic thought – Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance, (Macmillan, 2021) – so as to convince his fellow worshipers across the globe that calling for an Islamic Enlightenment does not remotely mean compromising with the Western “enemy”. In addition to the “provocative” title of his presentations, what stands at the very core of the theological dispute is a verse in the Qur’an: La ikraha fi al-din “There is no compulsion in religion”. He will leave town 48 hours later after personally experiencing the distance there is between intellectual ambition and harsh reality: detention and questioning first by the religious police and then by a Hakim Syarie, a Sharia judge. Mustafa Akyol, a prominent Turkish scholar and writer, once a columnist for Hürriyet and now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute, lands in the Malay capital to make the case for ideas expressed in his latest book-manifesto: Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty.