Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist and lecturer on Islam who presents himself as both a loyal Believer and as a determined Reformer, one whose understanding of the true Islam, if only it were to find favor among 1.5 billion Muslims, would allow the Faithful to slough off the unpleasant aspects of Islam, in Akyol’s view tangential to the faith, and bring about the conditions that would allow for genuine coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims.
His latest piece in the New York Times, on September 28, is posted below, with a running commentary:
A Proposal for Islam
I am writing this column from an airplane, on my way from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to my new home, Wellesley, Mass. I’m in a comfortable seat, and I’m looking forward to getting back to my family. About 12 hours ago, though, I was miserable, locked in a holding cell by Malaysia’s “religious police.”
The story began a few months ago, when the Islamic Renaissance Front, a reformist, progressive Muslim organization in Malaysia, invited me to give a series of lectures on Islam, reason and freedom. The group had hosted me three times before in the past five years for similar events and also published the Malay version of my book “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty.” I was glad for the chance to visit Malaysia again.
I arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Sept. 22. The next day I gave my first lecture on the suppression of rational theology by dogmatists in early Islam, making the point that this “intellectual suicide” still haunts Muslim civilization.”
The second talk was on a more controversial topic: apostasy from Islam. I argued that Muslims must uphold freedom of conscience, in line with the Quranic dictum “No compulsion in religion.” I said that apostasy should not be punished by death, as it is in Saudi Arabia, or with “rehabilitation,” as it is in Malaysia. The practice of Islam must be on the basis of freedom, not coercion, and governments shouldn’t police religion or morality.
The punishment of apostasy by death is not some whim of the Wahhabis. It is sanctioned both by many verses in the Qur’an and many stories in the Hadith. Here is Qur’an 4:89: “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they). But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (from what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks.” Other verses that support death for apostasy include 2:217, 9:73-74, 88:21, 5:54, 9:66. In the Hadith, there are many statements by Muhammad that call for killing apostates, as Sahih Bukhari (52:260): “The Prophet said, ‘If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.'” And we find in the Al-Muwatta of Imam Malik (36.18.15): “The Messenger of Allah said, ‘If someone changes his religion – then strike off his head.’ This does not admit of ambiguity. It cannot be interpreted away. Is Mustafa Akyol prepared to declare these verses and stories no longer valid, and if so, on what basis?
The most renowned Muslim cleric in the world, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has insisted that apostasy by Muslims deserves the death penalty and, furthermore, has claimed that had there not been such punishment, Islam itself would never have survived, which is quite an admission. Is Mustafa Akyol prepared to claim that Yusuf al-Qaradawi has an insufficient knowledge of Islam?
Mustafa Akyol uses the story of his own treatment in Malaysia, where his lectures to a group of would-be Muslim reformers ran afoul of the authorities, those censorious Malays of the Religious Police (JAWI), who are depicted by Akyol as mimicking the beyond-the-pale Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. But what he said about the need to observe 2:256 — the Qur’anic verse that insists “there is no compulsion in religion” and has always been held to have been “abrogated” by later verses — beggars belief: he claims that Muslims should start applying it, as they never have before. Easy to say, but how does he intend to convince 1.5 billion Muslims that, all of a sudden, they are to do away with the interpretative doctrine of “naskh” or abrogation, that has been observed by Qur’anic commentators since the earliest days of Islam, and to accept as written 2:256, forbidding “compulsion in religion”? Will the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject abrogation because Mustafa Akyol thinks they should? How, exactly, will they manage to ignore all the Qur’anic verses and Hadith stories about the punishment of apostates and instead quietly accept that 2:256, instead of being abrogated (as it was during 1400 years of Islamic history), must now be observed by Muslims? Note that Akyol maintains that the reason for observing this verse is not to end the mistreatment of Infidels in Muslim-dominated societies, but to end the punishment for Muslims who are apostates. Akyol insists that will make Islam stronger, which is apparently his goal, a goal that well-informed Infidels will not share. It is for the sake of Islam itself, Akyol maintains, that “freedom of religion” must be observed. How many Muslims will be convinced by Akyol that their embrace of the principle of “no compulsion in religion” will strengthen Islam, and how many are firmly convinced that without compulsion there may be mass defections from the army of Islam? Who is more likely to be listened to by Muslim Believers: Mustafa Akyol or Yusuf al-Qaradawi?
Mustafya Akyol is whistling in the dark, with a handful of other would-be reformers, who are unable to reach large audiences in Muslim lands but flog their wares in the West, where their significance is greatly exaggerated, as they offer the hope, devoutly clung to by Western non-Muslims, that the transformation of Islam offers a way out of our current morass. These “reformers” nibble at the edges of Islam but leave its core — the inculcated hatred of Infidels — untouched, because they realize they can’t really do anything about it. In all of his many articles, Mustafa Akyol has never quoted those passages in the Qur’an and Hadith that reveal how devout Muslims are commanded to treat Infidels. Perhaps he’ll be getting around to it eventually; meanwhile, the years pass, more Muslim terrorist attacks take place in Europe and North America, more Muslim migrants keep arriving throughout the West, there’s lots of hopeful talk in the West about reformation in Islam by Akyol and others, but nothing much seems to happen to change the deeply-held and disturbing views that 1.5 billion people have about the other six million people sharing the planet.
Akyol is very fond of himself, it’s clear from his this and other articles. He manages to pack into his very short “A Proposal For Islam” 35 “I’s,” 18 “my’s,” and 10 “me’s” — I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Yes, I did bother to count. Self-effacement is not in his line. Nor is self-doubt, nor realism about the possibilities of reforming Islam. A little modesty about what can be done to change the reception of what is in the Qur’an might stand him in good stead.
Back to Akyol, and his Malaysian “ordeal”:
It turns out all you have to do is speak of the police and they will appear.
At the end of my talk, a group of serious-looking men came into the lecture hall and showed me badges indicating that they were “religion enforcement officers.”
“We heard that you just gave an unauthorized talk on religion,” one of the men said. “And we got complaints about it.” They took me to another room, photographed me and asked questions about my speech.
When they were done with their questioning, they handed me a piece of paper with Malay writing on it and told me that I shouldn’t speak again without proper authorization. They also warned me away from my next planned talk, which was going to be about my most recent book, “The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims.”
“We heard that you will speak about commonalities between Islam, Judaism and Christianity,” one officer said. “We don’t like that kind of stuff.” Then they left.
After all this, I consulted with my hosts, and we decided to cancel the final lecture. I assumed that was the end of the matter and went shopping for gifts for my wife and children.
Later in the day, I went to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport to begin the 30-hour trip back to Massachusetts. When I gave my passport to the border police, I realized that my experience with offending Malaysia’s Islamic sensibilities wasn’t over.
“You need to wait, sir,” said the woman who checked my passport. She called some police officers, who called other police officers, who took me to a room where my arrest order was read to me. Apparently the religious police, known as JAWI, wanted to interrogate me again for my “unauthorized” talk on religious freedom and had issued that arrest order to make sure I didn’t leave the country.
I was taken from the airport to a police station, then to another station. Finally, I was taken to the JAWI headquarters, where I was locked up.
To be fair, nobody was rude to me, let alone cruel. Still, I was distressed: I had been arrested in an alien country whose laws and language I did not understand. I had no idea what would happen to me — and, most painfully, when I would see my wife, Riada, our 2-year-old son, Levent, and our 2-month-old baby, Efe.
In the morning, I was taken to a Shariah court, which is used in Malaysia to adjudicate religious issues, where I was interrogated for two hours. At the end, to my surprise, I was let go. Soon I learned that this was greatly facilitated by the diplomatic efforts of my country, Turkey — and especially the contact made by a former Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, with Malaysian royalty.
Abdullah Gul has for years been Erdogan’s collaborator in de-kemalizing Turkey.
This incident showed me once again that there is a major problem in Islam today: a passion to impose religion, rather than merely proposing it, a mind-set that most Christians left behind at the time of the Inquisition.
To describe the Muslim “passion to impose religion” as “a major problem in Islam today” is to imply that it has not always been part of Islam. Where in the Muslim lands, and when, does Akyol think Muslims did not have a “passion to impose [their] religion” whether by violence or by other means, such as relieving non-Muslims who converted of the onerous burden of the dhimmi status?
Luckily, there are antidotes within Islam to this problem. One of them is the Quranic verse that the JAWI officers repeatedly chided me for daring to recite: “No compulsion in religion.”
In fact, mainstream Muslim tradition, reflecting its illiberal context, never fully appreciated the freedom implied by this verse — and other ones with similar messages. “The ‘no compulsion’ verse was a problem to the earliest exegetes,” as Patricia Crone, a scholar of Islamic history, has noted. “And they reacted by interpreting it restrictively.” The verse was declared “abrogated,” or its scope was radically limited.
This is still evident in a parenthetical that is too frequently inserted into translations of the verse. “There shall be no compulsion in religion (in becoming a Muslim).” I’d known that Saudi translations added those extra words at the end. Now I have learned that the Malaysian authorities do, too. They append the extra phrase because while they agree with the Quran that no one should be forced to become a Muslim, they think that Muslims should be compelled to practice the religion — in the way that the authorities define. They also believe that if Muslims decide to abandon their religion, they must be punished for “apostasy.”
See the quotes from the Qur’an and the Hadith in the paragraphs above, where “compulsion in religion” for both non-Muslims and Muslims who want to leave Islam can be found in a dozen places. Akyol claims that according to the Qur’an, “no one should be forced to become a Muslim,” but let it be repeated, does not the imposition of the dhimmi status, with its many sometimes crippling disabilities, compel some dhimmis to convert to Islam? Aren’t they then being “forced to become Muslims”? Or are we to pretend to believe that if violence is not involved, there can be no “compulsion”? Would not the Jizyah by itself be compulsion enough to make many poor Unbelievers convert to Islam?
One of the officers at my Malaysian Shariah court trial proudly told me that all of this was being done to “protect religion.” But I have an important message for her (which I didn’t share at the time): By policing religion, the authorities are not really protecting it. They are only enfeebling their societies, raising hypocrites and causing many people to lose their faith in or respect for Islam.
I came to understand that while I was being held in the JAWI headquarters, listening to a loud Quranic recitation coming from the next room. I heard the Quran and for the first time in my life it sounded like the voice of an oppressor. But I did not give in to that impression. “I hear you and I trust in you, God,” I said as I prayed, “despite these bigots who act in your name.”
Akyol claims that, when he was being held by the religious police, he “heard the Quran and for the first time in my life it sounded like the voice of an oppressor.”
Can this possibly be true? Could Mustafa Akyol have hear such verses as those just below and never before did it occur to him what they meant? Was it only now, after that little contretemps in Kuala Lumpur, that “for the first time in [Akyol’s] life..it sounded like the voice of an oppressor”?
How many thousands of times had he heard, or read, such verses as these?
9:29: “Fight against those who do not obey Allah and do not believe in Allah or the Last Day and do not forbid what has been forbidden by Allah and His messenger even if they are of the People of the Book until they pay the Jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”
9:5: “When the sacred months have passed, then kill the Mushrikin wherever you find them. Capture them. Besiege them. Lie in wait for them in each and every ambush but if they repent, and perform the prayers, and give zakat then leave their way free.”
2:191: “Kill them wherever you find them and drive them out from where they drove you out. Persecution is worse than slaughter.”
47:4: “When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks.”
8:12: “When your Lord revealed to the angels, ‘Truly I am with you. So, keep firm those who have believed. I will strike terror into the hearts of those who have disbelieved. So, strike them at the necks and cut off their fingers.’”
98:6: Unbelievers are “the most vile of creatures.”
It is impossible to believe that Mustafa Akyol is unfamiliar with these Qur’anic verses, or with the more than 100 others in the same blood-curdling vein. So how can he possibly tell us with a straight face that it was only then, after being briefly held by the police (not much of an ordeal by Muslim standards, though he makes much of it for his own purposes of self-aggrandizement) in Malaysia, that he heard the Qur’an, for the first time, as “the voice of the oppressor”? As he cannot be unaware of the verses I’ve quoted above, a small but representative sample of the Qur’an’s violence and hate, he must be regarded as a practitioner of taqiyya, an apologist for Islam not quite as innocuous as he appears, and indeed, some might say, a greater danger precisely because he presents himself as a reformer. Years ago, Akyol was peddling another way to deal with Islam, which was to insist that Muslims rely on the Qur’an alone and jettison entirely the hadith, which Akyol seemed to think was the source of all the problems in Islam. This he described, borrowing language from the Christian Reformation, as reliance on “sola scriptura.”
There were two things wrong with this proposal. First, Akyol refused to recognize that the Qur’an by itself was so full of anti-Infidel sentiment that ignoring the Hadith would not rid Islam of its violence and inculcated hate. Second, he never did explain how it was that 1.5 billion Muslims could be convinced to ignore the hadith. It was enough for Mustafa Akyol that he had provided the “solution” of “sola scriptura”; let others work out the details. He likes to make sweeping proposals, but leaves the indispensable details to others. Akyol’s a Big Idea Man, a well-pleased pleaser always TED-talking through his hat, which makes sense because he’s all hat and no cattle. Of course, it is precisely those “details” that cannot possibly be worked out — getting rid of the hadith, or ending “abrogation” so as to give force to the phrase, at 2:256, that “there is no compulsion in religion.” And that is why Islam will, unless it suffers a series of catastrophic defeats that completely demoralize the Believers, remain as it has immutably been, to our great unhappiness, for 1400 years, the sworn enemy of all of us, just for being us, the Unbelievers.
Sam says
These enablers do a lot of damage to humanity and some have no clue that they are actually doing it.
Any JW reader would be more knowledgeable about Islam than this “Reformer of Islam”
eduardo odraude says
Mr. Fitzgerald says,
There may be another explanation. Probably the majority of human beings, “intellectuals” or otherwise, do not have the knack of thinking in accord with reality. They do not evaluate ideas in light of reality, but in light of personal and subjective factors of various kinds. Thus the only way they can learn of reality is by sufficient amount of direct experience. Mustafa Akyol is one of these — he could only get an inkling of what Islam is by actually experiencing, in his own flesh, what a Muslim majority country can do to a free thinking person. The same inability to learn by thinking and dependence on direct experience was evidenced in many people when it came to communism. How many people in the West, who had never directly experienced communism, were able to make idiotic statements about how it wasn’t that bad, perhaps as good or better than Western societies? These same idiots, periodically, did come into direct contact with communism and only then wised up. Some of them wised up when the whole communist system collapsed. These people can’t see below the surface of things, and consequently the facts have to knock them on the head before personal and subjective fantasies about reality will be abandoned.
Krazy Kafir says
Precisely because these so called Muslim reformers go out of their way to ignore what is written in the Quran, and hadiths, makes me believe they’re just obfuscators. They do their best to cover Islam’s horrible foundation with a veneer of deception. It’s a sale that is not bought easily, if at all, in the ummah, but they’re lining up in the west.
roxy says
We don’t buy it but most people do. These “reformers” like the taqiya-spewing con artist, Mohamed Zuhdi Jasser, are very dangerous because they trick people into thinking Islam really isn’t bad, it’s just a small minority. A wolf in wolf’s clothing is better than a wolf in sheep’s clothing because the threat is obvious.
awake says
A Mohammedan, applying doctrinally-sanctioned taqiyya, in the face of the obvious intolerant doctrinal trifecta of the Qur’an, Hadith and Sira?
Well, knock me down with a feather.
Zimriel says
Akyol’s “The Islamic Jesus” was a good book; far better than (say) Aslan’s “Zealot”. I don’t think he’s an obfuscator, unless he’s obfuscating to his own soul. I personally would have been less hard on him, but then, I agree he will have to learn the truth somehow and someway.
eduardo odraude: Your name seems Iberian. Did you live under the pre-Franco Republic? Chile? Venezuela?
gravenimage says
The “Islamic Jesus”–really, the “prophet Isa”–is *not* the same figure. His major role is to slaughter Christians in the last days.
eduardo odraude says
Zimriel, no, Iberia not in my background, as far as I know — but friends sometimes call me eduardo because the sound dances a lot more than the rather static, point-like, “Ed”.
Dacritic says
Yep. He has to learn the truth.
The problem facing Akyol, and I suppose many, is this.
“IF Christianity WERE true, and Jesus did die on the cross and rose again, would you become a Christian?”… to borrow from Frank Turek.
Emilie Green says
The guy’s full of shiitte, as he makes his way in his comfortable seat back to his comfortable home in the leafy, ultra liberal town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, where law, in the West, is respected and Islam isn’t jammed down your throat.
Hypocrisy much?
katherine says
True – back in the USA he’s not doing anything productive to free Islam from its incipient tyranny. To his credit he actually dared to go to Malaysia to lecture, unlike Hirsi Ali who gave Australia a wide berth after a whiff of threats.
If Akyol is as respectable as he’s made out to be, why isn’t he weighing in on Congressional and State legislative reforms to influence the ignorant politicians so that bills can be introduced to reinforce American statutes regarding human rights to guarantee non-conformity to Sharia and its legal transgressions on the US constitution ?
To make it simple, what is so difficult about passing laws to make forced-misogyny criminal ; religious amputations, extra-judicial death sentences or even Fatwas in general. Without such supplementary clear-cut laws singularly aimed at Cult Practices, the corrupted legal practitioners in the US have been free to betray the American public by selectively supporting Islamic Laws for their own pecuniary agenda.
The most ridiculous result of all this foot-dragging is that US citizens who are converts from Islam have no effective protection at all from the absolutely illegal death sentences imposed on them by cult leaders WITHIN the US, as if their so-called Religious Rights are above the Nation’s Constitution.
So all these self-appointed Moderate Muslims : are they actively pushing for legal protection by highlighting their own plight, or like Akyol going round the world preaching to non-Muslims about how peaceful their religion can Possibly be.
Dacritic says
“So all these self-appointed Moderate Muslims : are they actively pushing for legal protection by highlighting their own plight, or like Akyol going round the world preaching to non-Muslims about how peaceful their religion can Possibly be.”
And therein lies their danger to society. Are they more dangerous than outright jihadis? I’d put them on the same par.
gravenimage says
Wait–you’re sneering at brave anti-Jihadist Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Her partner was murdered by Jihadists, and she had to leave the Netherlands when the government there said they could not protect her. I think she has every right to take threats seriously.
katherine says
Nothing personal against AHI : just occurred to me that she’s another anti-J celebrity who believes Islam can be reformed. She’s definitely not foolhardy by comparison – even to Spenser who wishes to get into Britain where violent Pakislamists rule apparently.
Australia is not that dangerous by a long shot (my perspective) but I still admire Mr. Magoo Akyol who blissfully lectures in Malaysia about Islamic Moderation and manages to walk away scot-free.
Hope he carries on – but pray his luck holds.
gravenimage says
Katherine, I agree with you that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is too optimistic about the reformability of Islam. Still, she is a major Anti-Jihadist, and I wish the average Westerner was half as savvy as she is about the threat of Islam.
I think Ali is a much bigger target than is the “reformer” Akyol.
She has proven her courage many times–if she felt there was a credible threat, there probably was.
gravenimage says
Mustafa Akyol: The Great Pretender as Reformer
……………….
Another fake Muslim reformer. Who ever would have guessed? sarc/off
gfmucci says
Another “mis-directing Zudhi Jasser-type, apparently. I wouldn’t trust Jasser as far as I could spit, and most of the time it just dribbles down my chin.
mortimer says
Based on his PERSONAL TASTE ALONE, Mustafa Akyol wants to decide SUBJECTIVELY what should stay and what should go in Islam.
Mind you, MOHAMMED said that whoever changed Mohammed’s religion should be killed.
Mustafa Akyol no doubt has decided that hadith isn’t valid since it would apply to his personal survival.
Mustafa Akyol is what Islam calls an INNOVATOR … a very bad thing to be… an INNOVATOR is severely punished in Islam, even by the death penalty!
His innovations include the following ‘bida’ or ‘kufr’ (thought crimes):
Kufrul-Istihaal: Disbelief out of trying to make haram into halal by convoluted reasoning.
Kufrul-I’raadh: Disbelief due to avoidance. This applies to those who turn away and avoid the teaching of Islam, such as jihad, hatred of kafirs, etc.
Kufrul-Istibdaal: Disbelief because of trying to substitute human laws for Allaah’s Laws. Muslims who refuse jihad or the death penalty for apostates in favour of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are considered apostates who should be executed.
Islam’s doctrine of bida makes Islam unreformable. No one has the right to change Allah’s words or their canonical interpretations.
Sarah says
Hugh, I feel like all you needed to do, after publishing this, was do a mike drop and saunter out the door!
Great job. Says it all. Even I don’t have my usual 40 paragraphs to add this time.
Michael Copeland says
Memo for Mustafa Akyol:
“And whoever desires other than Islam as religion – never will it be accepted from him, and he, in the Hereafter, will be among the losers.”
Koran 3:85, part of Islamic law.
lebel says
” but nothing much seems to happen to change the deeply-held and disturbing views that 1.5 billion people have about the other six million people sharing the planet.”
There has been change, for example:
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2017/02/207505/moroccos-high-religious-committee-says-apostates-should-not-be-killed/
Why was this completely ignored by jwatch? because it does not fit its narrative
gravenimage says
Apologist for Islamic savagery lebel wrote:
” but nothing much seems to happen to change the deeply-held and disturbing views that 1.5 billion people have about the other six million people sharing the planet.”
There has been change, for example:
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2017/02/207505/moroccos-high-religious-committee-says-apostates-should-not-be-killed/
Why was this completely ignored by jwatch? because it does not fit its narrative
……………………
What claptrap–despite the headline, this article *does not* say that apostates should not be murdered.
Morocco’s High Religious Committee is just reclassifying apostasy as “high treason”–which is quite common as a reason given for murdering apostates in the first place–that the Ummah is a political body, and hence anyone leaving it is guilty of treason, and hence should be killed for that reason.
Will lebel now tell us how exactly this is a step forward? I doubt it…
Aussie Infidel says
How does Akyol hope to succeed in reforming Islam, when the Sharia deems anyone who criticises Islam or leaves the faith to be an apostate – and thereby punishable by death? He might cite Q2:256 “Let there be no compulsion in religion”, as an example of Islamic ‘tolerance’, but as Robert says that verse has been abrogated – even by the very next one.
Most informed Muslims are well aware of this, and as has happened many times before, dissenters would be dealt with very quickly by the fanatics in the Muslim community. How many would-be reformers are likely to challenge this age old plank of the Sharia, knowing fully well they would be putting their lives on the line? Even in Western countries they would not be out of reach of the fanatics.
How long would reform take? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Given the number of Muslims migrating to the West, we do not have that time to wait. If nothing is done to halt this demographic change, eventually our societies will have a majority of Muslims, and they will then have political control. The only solution is to halt Muslim immigration immediately and ban the practice of this criminal ideology in our own backyards.
Demsci says
well, I too think reforming Islam is impossible. That’s not why I find such types as Akyol, Jasser, Irshad Manji interesting.
Much more interesting I find Jay Smith and the historian Tom Holland, whose book about the origines of Islam I read. as I read Robert Spencers book on that topic.
On the clarity of Quran-Hadiths-Sira. Yes, some verses seem very clear. But Gerd Puin said that 1/5 of the Quran was gibberish.
and the Hadiths contradict each other, and the weak ones are sometimes used to make a point, but then we often conclude contradictions with stronger ones. David Wood is good at detecting the unclarity, contradiction, down right faults in Quran-Hadiths-Sira.
Well, The caliph Abd Al Malik, 695-705, seems to have given the real starting shot to Islam. And what happened thn in history? After # 900 came the TAFSIRS, from Al Tabari onwards. it became a veritable industry to explain Quran-Hadiths Sira. Why? Because it was so clear in their Original form???
OK, we can now humor the Muslims by proposing that Quran-Hadiths-Sira, are not to be doubted as word of God. That we don’t go there.
But what if in the early period of Islam there had been other Tafsirs, more symbolic interpreters than the now established ones? These established ones may well NOT have been inspired by God, not in ALL they wrote anyway.
Muslims should be allowed to digress from these all too human Tafsirs and later established Islam-scholars, Islamic schools of thought, like Yusuf Qaradawi. And only in controversial parts mind you.
And then, yes, then Muslims, or we, can play the game of discarding the abrogation -theory.
Muslims can make the Meccan verses valid again.
And they can point out by way of better interpretation of Quran Hadiths Sira that says that all these clear verses were only DESCRIPTIVE and are no longer PRESCRIPTIVE (and I often heard and read Islam-apologists saying just that).
Oh, we know long since that the Muslims DO follow these Tafsirs and these Scholars. And no, they won’t change their mind, that is not what I am aiming at.
I am saying that we use our extensive knowledge of Islam to loudly and publicly drive a wedge between Quran-Hadiths-Sira and a crucial part of the later Tafsirs/ Scholars/ Schools of thought.
The Quran-Hadiths-Sira by themselves are unclear, incomplete, Multi interpretable, and certainly when taken symbolically, DESCRIPTIVE.
It is the Tafsirs and scholars that make Islam so clear to so many Muslims. Let us undermine THEM then, as Mustafa Akyol and other reformers are already unwittingly doing.
Philip says
When reading Turkish media, much better to read the excellent, Islam-skeptical Burak Bekdil than his Islamist ‘colleague’ at the English-language Turkish Daily News. Sometimes the rows between them are extremely entertaining and Bekdil has much more to offer in the intellect and humour department.
Philip says
Re. my above comment, I hadn’t realised that Bekdil was fired from the TDN last December for his criticism of Erdogan. He now writes for the Gatestone Institute:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/biography/Burak+Bekdil
Well worth a read!
Pal says
M. Akyol is a Taqiya insinuator.
Nothing more than that.
He is in favor of the Turkish president R. Erdogan and the Islamic movement with its ruling party there, the way they enjoy and use him for their propaganda purposes.
Mahendra Singh says
What reform?
The protogonists for Islam say the Koran is “perfect”, that no modification is ever necessary.
It is the “word of God”, is it not? All I see the adherents only wish to increase their numbers
by any means: fraud. violence, coercion and cheating. My native country India is going
through this trauma. There are attempts to trap Hindu and Christian women into fake
marriages with Muslim men. The children are, of course, property of Islam.
There is a need to confine Islam to the frontiers that is in right now. Through this “refugee”
business they are sinking they are sinking their claws in non-Muslim countries. As an example,
there a very vigorous attempt by Islamic and secular groups to admit these thugs in the
name of humanity. The refugee pimps going by the name UNHCR encourage the mass migration
of Muslims into non-Muslims countries. By the way, the Rohingiyas have an amazing fertility
rate. Look at their camps. Every womanan is carrying a child, even children are carrying a child.
No wonder Burma got scared.