The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:02:14.300 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, season four, episode 56.

00:02:19.300 This episode was recorded on October 18th, 2021.

00:02:23.960 Mustafa Akil joined Dad to discuss Islam as a whole.

00:02:28.660 They talked about the different roles Jesus and Mary play in Islam and Christianity, about

00:02:33.400 the dangers of literal readings of religious texts, and the separation of church and state,

00:02:38.380 just to name a few things.

00:02:40.620 Mustafa is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, where he focuses on the intersection of public

00:02:45.780 policy, Islam, and modernity.

00:02:48.520 He's been an opinion writer for the New York Times since 2013, where he covers politics

00:02:53.480 and religion in the Muslim world.

00:02:56.120 His 2011 book, Islam Without Extremes, A Muslim Case for Liberty, was long listed for the Lionel

00:03:02.380 Gelber Prize.

00:03:03.320 It offers a strong case for Islamic liberalism that's also been praised by the Financial

00:03:08.080 Times, calling it an elegant Muslim defense of freedom.

00:03:11.900 His other books include Reopening Muslim Minds and the Islamic Jesus.

00:03:15.820 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:03:17.980 Hello, everyone.

00:03:22.900 I'm pleased today to have as my guest, Mustafa Akil.

00:03:27.620 He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, where he focuses on the intersection between

00:03:33.120 public policy, Islam, and modernity.

00:03:35.780 Since 2013, he's also been a frequent opinion writer for the New York Times, covering politics

00:03:40.700 and religion in the Muslim world.

00:03:42.680 He is the author of several books, including the most recent, Reopening Muslim Minds, A

00:03:49.060 Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance, 2021, Why I, as a Muslim, I Defend Liberty, which

00:03:59.580 is also 2021, The Islamic Jesus, How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims,

00:04:05.140 2017, and Islam Without Extremes, A Muslim Case for Liberty, 2011.

00:04:12.680 His books have been translated into many languages and praised in the New York Times, Wall Street

00:04:17.500 Journal, the Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Financial Times, and many publications across

00:04:22.440 the Muslim world.

00:04:23.880 Meanwhile, Islam Without Extremes was banned in Malaysia for challenging the authority of the

00:04:28.960 religion police, so to speak.

00:04:30.640 The Thinking Muslim, a popular podcast, recently defined Akyol as probably the most notable Muslim

00:04:38.920 modernist and reformer, so that's really something.

00:04:42.620 And in July 2021, Prospect magazine in the UK listed him among the world's top 50 thinkers,

00:04:48.980 and that's quite the pinnacle.

00:04:50.980 He's been thinking about the problems of making peace in the modern world for a very long time,

00:04:55.800 and stressing the need for a liberalization in the Islamic world, and perhaps some modification

00:05:01.040 on the Christian side as well, along the lines, at least, of what happened in the West.

00:05:05.520 He's interested in theological questions as well as political questions, and I'm particularly

00:05:09.960 interested in talking to him because the conflict between Islam and the Jewish and the Christian

00:05:15.120 worlds is a theological and political problem, as well as a psychological problem.

00:05:19.560 So, welcome.

00:05:20.680 I'm very much looking forward to this conversation, and I hope I have many more of the same with

00:05:25.400 many Islamic thinkers.

00:05:27.660 So, thanks for agreeing to talk to me.

00:05:30.580 Thank you so much, Dr. Peterson.

00:05:32.720 It's a pleasure and a privilege to have this conversation with you, and I hope this should

00:05:37.560 be the beginning of broader conversations between Muslims and Western intellectuals on the crucial

00:05:43.100 issues of peace, coexistence, freedom, toleration that we all need to have and need to cultivate

00:05:48.720 in our respective traditions.

00:05:50.860 So, let me start with a really difficult issue that I've been thinking a lot about lately,

00:05:56.840 partly because of the, well, some of the, what would you say, incomprehensible goings-on

00:06:03.000 that bedevil the Western world at the moment.

00:06:05.480 Now, I've been thinking a lot about a statement in the New Testament about rendering unto God what

00:06:10.560 is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's, the idea that there's a clear distinction between

00:06:15.340 those two, and I believe that to be true for psychological reasons as well as political

00:06:19.960 reasons.

00:06:21.000 And it's an extraordinarily notable statement in my estimation.

00:06:25.600 I don't know if you could find a single sentence that anyone has ever said that has had a bigger

00:06:30.160 impact on the history of the world, because as I understand it, that statement was the justification

00:06:35.620 for the development in the West of political processes that were independent of the theological

00:06:41.820 substructure beneath them, and the justification for that, that there were separate domains

00:06:46.400 and that was okay theologically.

00:06:48.920 And so, I want to know if that's your understanding of the situation as well, and then we can talk

00:06:53.380 about what that means for Islam, where I understand that it's not so obvious, let's say, that such

00:07:00.500 a distinction can be easily drawn.

00:07:02.200 I would totally agree with you that separation of church and state in the Western tradition

00:07:09.500 has been a blessing for humanity.

00:07:12.340 I mean, West itself and the broader, I think, human story.

00:07:16.220 And I think that's evident in the fact that a lot of Muslims around the world today who are

00:07:20.040 persecuted in their countries come to live in the West and where they find freedom.

00:07:23.680 And if it was a Christian theocracy, you know, they wouldn't be happily living there.

00:07:27.260 I mean, I, a few times I said that, I mean, there's one country in which all denominations

00:07:32.400 of Islam happily live together without any sectarian persecution, and that is the United

00:07:38.160 States of America.

00:07:38.980 And I'm sure Canada is doing pretty well, or UK.

00:07:42.660 Yeah, pretty well.

00:07:44.660 One thing, I mean, some, of course, separate, some models of separation of religion and states

00:07:50.220 sometimes went illiberal towards religion, authoritarian towards religion, and that's a problem.

00:07:54.820 For example, I see that in the French laicite tradition, and when secularism is understood

00:08:00.080 in that sort of intolerant way and somehow a bias towards religion, actually, it becomes

00:08:05.300 harder to accept from a religious point of view.

00:08:07.420 And one problem in the Islamic tradition is that we always had the French version in my

00:08:11.780 country, Turkey, and in Tunisia.

00:08:13.920 So we never got a full sense of a liberal, classically liberal idea of secularism.

00:08:20.720 But I mean, that's the political story.

00:08:22.500 I mean, we can discuss more, but coming back to your point, it is remarkable that actually

00:08:27.740 a statement from Jesus Christ, you know, right there in the New Testament, has been discovered

00:08:33.200 and used to justify the suppression, church, and state.

00:08:36.460 I mean, the very life story of Christ is interesting.

00:08:39.460 I mean, he was never the state, right?

00:08:41.040 He was actually persecuted by the state.

00:08:43.760 So there's a great story there.

00:08:45.160 But I will also remind you one thing.

00:08:46.640 For centuries, Christians didn't understand the render on to Caesar and render on to God

00:08:51.840 as the justification of secularism.

00:08:55.240 Actually, it was used to justify divine rights of kings as well.

00:08:59.140 I mean, Robert Filmer makes that argument in his Patriarcha, and John Locke argues against

00:09:04.200 him.

00:09:04.460 So it was used by Christians to defend divine rights of kings.

00:09:09.940 But then other Christians said, hey, no, no, no, there's a better understanding of this.

00:09:13.940 It actually says there are separate authorities here.

00:09:16.580 And the one that the divine authority is what we're loyal to.

00:09:20.700 And the political one should be based on contracts.

00:09:23.300 So that gave us, of course, the liberal tradition that I highly value.

00:09:26.320 But I will say a similar process of rereading the scripture is taking place in the Muslim

00:09:32.720 world in the past few centuries, past two centuries, in the late 19th century, a tradition broadly

00:09:37.520 called Islamic modernism, which I hope to represent and I'm trying to advance, also said, well, there

00:09:45.380 are messages in the Quran that our classical scholars maybe didn't fully get or didn't fully

00:09:50.300 develop because in their time and context, it wasn't possible.

00:09:53.640 But now we see the full meaning of that.

00:09:55.540 For example, one example is a powerful statement in the Quran, which reads in Arabic, which

00:10:02.160 means there is no compulsion in religion.

00:10:05.660 I mean, it doesn't say secular state, but it means religion should be based on no compulsion,

00:10:09.800 in other words, freedom.

00:10:11.420 And this was there in the Quran for centuries.

00:10:13.520 And Muslims made only a little sense of this.

00:10:16.480 They said, OK, this means you will not convert people to enter Islam.

00:10:20.740 Generally, that was observed in the classical Islamic tradition.

00:10:23.120 That's why Jews and Christians could live under Islam.

00:10:26.180 But they didn't understand it in other ways.

00:10:28.640 For example, this should mean that perhaps if people want to convert out of Islam, that

00:10:33.540 is apostasy.

00:10:34.740 It should be free to based on this verse.

00:10:37.000 But no, no, no.

00:10:37.480 They said, you know, actually, it doesn't mean that way.

00:10:39.320 So they limited the meaning of the verse.

00:10:41.740 And of course, there was religious policing, checking people are really pious or not, or persecution

00:10:46.120 of heretics.

00:10:46.760 These things happen in Islamic history.

00:10:48.700 But now other Muslim thinkers are saying, listen, when God said there is no compulsion

00:10:54.040 in religion, it's a universal statement of no compulsion, in other words, religious freedom.

00:10:59.260 So that's a new reading that Muslim scholars of the more modernist or reformist, I think,

00:11:05.360 persuasion have been advocating in the past, let's say, two centuries.

00:11:09.540 And my book was banned in Malaysia precisely because I advocated religious freedom based on

00:11:14.740 such a Quranic basis.

00:11:15.880 Well, the pathway from a statement like that to a fully developed political and theological

00:11:22.380 system that are separate in the details, but somehow still able to mutually function,

00:11:27.820 and in some sense, one still containing the other, I would argue, you know, even in the

00:11:33.260 United States, it's one country under God.

00:11:35.640 That's in the background all the time, in some sense.

00:11:38.020 And I would also say that the elevation of the right to free speech as perhaps the primary

00:11:44.800 right, and I'm speaking psychologically here to some degree, is a reflection in the political

00:11:50.520 domain, I think, of what was being developed symbolically in Christian theology with the

00:11:55.480 idea of the divine word.

00:11:57.960 And that idea, in many ways, is older than Christianity.

00:12:01.880 It's older than Judaism as well.

00:12:03.760 You can see, like, I've traced that back to, for example, to the Mesopotamian writings about

00:12:10.980 Marduk, who was the god who emerged at the pinnacle of the Mesopotamian gods, and who was the model for

00:12:19.520 the sovereign of the Mesopotamian emperor.

00:12:22.360 And he had eyes all the way around his head, and he spoke magic words.

00:12:27.260 And so, even if you trace our stories back, as far back as we've been able to trace them,

00:12:32.780 the idea that there was something divine about the word itself, and we could have a discussion

00:12:38.780 about what that divinity means.

00:12:40.300 And I'm interested in doing that because you wrote this book, The Islamic Jesus, How the King

00:12:45.240 of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims.

00:12:47.120 And all of this is tangled up, in some sense, in the figure of Christ, historically and mythologically.

00:12:57.680 And so, in the West, I think we managed to maintain the relationship between the secular

00:13:04.520 and the religious by putting forth these axiomatic rites, which are, in some sense, religious

00:13:11.980 in their derivation.

00:13:13.560 And they slotted nicely into the religious understructure, but then simultaneously allowed

00:13:18.700 for enough freedom so the political could do its own thing.

00:13:22.760 And so, that's partly why I'm so curious about your writings about Christ and about his

00:13:27.680 place in Muslim thinking.

00:13:30.160 Obviously, in the West, whatever Christ was, was elevated to the highest place, right?

00:13:37.000 Now, how do you understand?

00:13:39.380 Now, I know Christ is a major figure in Islamic thinking, but there are differences.

00:13:43.080 So, can you help me?

00:13:44.900 Can you wade me through that to some degree?

00:13:48.120 Definitely.

00:13:49.200 First of all, to answer our discussion, I should just maybe make one broad statement.

00:13:53.120 And that is that in the Western world, in the 20th century, people began to speak about

00:13:57.820 the Judeo-Christian tradition.

00:13:59.180 And I think it's a very valuable way of looking into the world.

00:14:02.020 Yes, there's a Judeo-Christian tradition.

00:14:03.860 But I think there is something missing in that.

00:14:06.540 There's Islam that is missing.

00:14:08.240 Because I think I see the world history, and I look at there is a Judeo-Christo-Islamic

00:14:12.420 tradition, because it's all Abrahamic monotheism coming from actually from Judaism.

00:14:17.080 And Judaism had began, I mean, historically, initiated monotheism.

00:14:21.760 And then it had a big outburst with Christianity, the greatest outburst, with the greatest world,

00:14:27.420 the greatest religion.

00:14:29.000 But then six centuries later, it had a second outburst with Islam, which spread monotheism in

00:14:35.240 four corners of the world.

00:14:36.400 I mean, there are people living in Indonesia whose name is Moses or Abraham.

00:14:40.520 I mean, why are they coming?

00:14:41.820 I mean, because Islam brought this biblical story to them.

00:14:44.900 That brings us to some instant discussion of what these three Abrahamic religions have in

00:14:52.000 common.

00:14:52.700 That's extraordinarily deep.

00:14:54.420 So one, they're monotheistic.

00:14:57.460 Two, they partake of the same tradition, as you've pointed out.

00:15:01.260 And three, they all have, to one degree or another, an insistence that the bedrock of

00:15:08.260 culture is a book, which is a very strange insistence.

00:15:11.840 It's taken for granted in some sense, because it's been insisted upon so long.

00:15:16.000 But this is something that, like, it's very difficult to see in some ways, that a book

00:15:22.340 lasts longer than a city or an empire or a country.

00:15:25.440 And that there's something profound about the notion that the bedrock of a culture should

00:15:29.800 be a book.

00:15:30.440 And there is an implicit respect for the word in that insistence.

00:15:35.840 And that does unite those three religions in a very profound way.

00:15:39.600 It does.

00:15:41.160 And I think it can, it has created these amazing civilizations, which advance human history.

00:15:47.960 And I think the very fact that Islam, speaking of Islam, advance human history in terms of

00:15:52.600 pluralism, in terms of law, in terms of religious toleration for its time, I think is undeniable.

00:15:59.040 And a lot of, and the fact that Islam even brought, you know, Greek philosophy because of

00:16:03.160 its universalism, Muslims believe in the book, but they believe that reason is also from

00:16:08.220 God.

00:16:08.480 So they, this created a universalistic outlook and Muslims studied Aristotle and Plato and

00:16:13.480 even carried them to Europe.

00:16:14.740 So there's an amazing history there, which are the positive things.

00:16:18.980 But also there are times that these religious civilizations sometimes go into a crisis and

00:16:25.420 they go self-destructive and bitter.

00:16:27.940 And that has happened in Europe.

00:16:29.360 I mean, and if you look into 17th century, early 17th century Europe and Catholics and Protestants

00:16:34.800 were, you know, killing each other for sectarian reasons.

00:16:37.200 I mean, heretics were being burned at the stake and which led people like John Locke to seek

00:16:43.160 a way out.

00:16:43.900 And they did it by looking into the core of religion and saying that this is not what Christ

00:16:48.840 had told us.

00:16:50.360 I mean, Locke says, I mean, when I read his letter concerning toleration, I said, well,

00:16:54.580 he's speaking of Christian issues, but he's speaking of our issues too.

00:16:58.140 The idea that should there be a Christian state or not?

00:17:00.600 Should heretics be persecuted or not?

00:17:02.200 So he makes certain arguments or would religion be based on sincerity if it is coerced by the

00:17:07.560 state?

00:17:07.860 It wouldn't.

00:17:08.380 So there's no point in coercion.

00:17:09.800 So those kinds of arguments are, I think, very interesting, which I, that's why I believe

00:17:15.040 in reading these traditions as by learning from each other instead of thinking, oh, they

00:17:19.760 are the Christians and they have nothing to do with us.

00:17:21.540 Or these are Muslims.

00:17:22.580 They have nothing to do with us.

00:17:24.020 Well, the problem, the problem with that perspective, you know, those are the Muslims

00:17:28.380 and they have nothing to do with us, is that underneath such a presumption is, let's say,

00:17:34.620 the presumption that Christians and Muslims can't talk.

00:17:37.820 But even deeper than that is the presumption on the part of the person making such a statement

00:17:42.520 that their interpretation of Christianity is absolutely right.

00:17:47.800 And that seems ridiculously presumptuous to me, you know, because I don't think that

00:17:54.300 you could find a Christian worth his salt, let's say, who would regard himself as stellar

00:17:59.900 and an exemplar of Christianity as Christ.

00:18:03.360 And, you know, since we all fall short of the glory of God, we're all stupid and ignorant

00:18:07.600 beyond belief.

00:18:08.640 And so we have to listen to other people because they might know something we don't.

00:18:13.440 And then, you see, if we take that other attitude, then there's an implicit totalitarianism

00:18:18.580 already there, which is, well, I'm right and you're not only wrong, but wrong in some

00:18:23.740 way that's probably malevolent.

00:18:25.400 And sometimes that's true, but it's not a good way to start a conversation.

00:18:31.660 It is not.

00:18:32.580 And I think religion becomes most dangerous when it is combined with group narcissism and acting

00:18:39.320 in the name of God to punish people for their sins and heresies, you know, as you define

00:18:44.520 them.

00:18:44.940 And that has happened in Islam.

00:18:46.540 It still happens.

00:18:47.280 I mean, groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, those terrorists, I mean, they are attacking Westerners,

00:18:52.260 but they're attacking fellow Muslims too.

00:18:54.200 And by defining them as heretics, I mean, we see bombs of Shiites being, sorry, mosques

00:19:00.300 of Shiites being bombed by ISIS terrorists in the past two months.

00:19:06.000 It happened twice.

00:19:07.280 And this is a destructive dynamic, which has been always extreme in Islam, but existed.

00:19:12.540 And, but there are antidotes to this sort of thinking as well.

00:19:15.640 And, and I, I sometimes read those antidotes and I say, oh, in the Christian tradition, here's

00:19:20.020 an example of that.

00:19:20.860 I mean, if you can, for example, let me give you an example.

00:19:23.620 One, the big dispute in early Islam was who was the true Muslim?

00:19:28.020 Like there was a civil war between the first Muslims.

00:19:31.160 It's called the first fitna first and supporters of Ali and Muavi added two figures.

00:19:35.200 And I would sympathize with Ali, but they had a war and, and there's a fanatic faction called

00:19:40.780 the Khabarij, the dissenters.

00:19:42.180 And they said, these are both, they have gone wrong.

00:19:44.680 They have sinned because they have sinned.

00:19:46.980 They're not Muslims.

00:19:47.840 They become infidels and infidels should be punished.

00:19:51.060 So they started killing them.

00:19:52.340 They were like the terrorists of the first century, always hated by mainstream Muslims.

00:19:56.620 But what they were doing is to judge people and punish them in the name of God.

00:20:00.880 But there was an alternative theology called Murgia theology, and it's, it's called Murgia

00:20:06.320 in Arabic means postponer.

00:20:09.000 They said on this issue of who's right and wrong, we don't know.

00:20:13.680 We cannot judge.

00:20:15.320 Only God can judge.

00:20:16.900 So let's postpone this to afterlife to be resolved by God.

00:20:20.980 And until then, until it is resolved by God in heaven, when we go there, we can live and

00:20:26.600 let live.

00:20:26.960 So they promoted toleration among Muslims.

00:20:29.880 Now, this actually allowed calming down some of the early violence and broad coexistence

00:20:35.160 in different factions of Islam.

00:20:37.320 And I think still, it was brought into Sunni Islam by Abu Hanifa and the Hanafi school and

00:20:41.460 added broader acceptance.

00:20:43.420 And I was particularly struck to read something very similar in John Locke in his letter concerning

00:20:49.800 toleration.

00:20:50.440 He says, there are different churches for every church.

00:20:53.540 The third is theirs.

00:20:54.640 They are orthodox to themselves.

00:20:55.900 And if one of them dominate government, they will persecute others.

00:20:59.400 And he says, let's leave this to Almighty, the judge, to decide which doctrine is right.

00:21:05.500 And in the meantime, let the government only protect the rights, the natural rights of

00:21:09.580 all people and let people follow.

00:21:11.460 That's part of the thorny psychological problem of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and

00:21:16.620 unto God what is God's.

00:21:17.860 Because a lot of times now when people talk about tolerance, they insist that judgment is wrong.

00:21:25.300 And in essence, in some sense.

00:21:28.340 And the reason they're afraid of judgment is because in its extremes, it can lead to the

00:21:32.420 demonization of others.

00:21:33.920 And we know exactly where that goes.

00:21:36.160 But there's no dispensing with judgment.

00:21:38.740 You can't even look at something without judgment because you have to pick what you're

00:21:42.460 going to look at instead of something else.

00:21:44.800 And you can't act without judgment.

00:21:46.800 And so all of us are faced with this problem of what we should believe and how we can be

00:21:54.880 tolerant at the same time we believe and how we can be tolerant at the same time that we

00:22:00.520 have to judge.

00:22:01.380 And there's a kernel in that insistence by Locke, it was Locke you were referring to, or was

00:22:10.080 it Mills?

00:22:12.220 They let her on tolerance.

00:22:16.220 I was referring to John Locke, sorry.

00:22:18.280 It's Locke, yeah, okay.

00:22:19.400 And you just slipped my mind for a second.

00:22:21.980 It's very difficult for us to figure out what we can tolerate if we must simultaneously believe,

00:22:28.720 right?

00:22:28.980 And that's a problem I've been trying to work out psychologically for a very long time.

00:22:33.740 You do that, you see that in your own family, when you're a father, let's say, because you

00:22:38.740 obviously have to have tolerance for your children.

00:22:41.280 But at the same time, you're obligated to show them the difference, let's say, between

00:22:47.020 right and wrong, and also to help them separate the wheat from the chaff, which is judgment.

00:22:52.300 And so, well, I totally see the balance you're pointing out here, and I agree with it.

00:22:58.300 That's why I use the term tolerance, because, I mean, you might not need to accept everything

00:23:02.700 and cherish and bless everything, but you need to accept different ways of life or theologies

00:23:07.080 or doctrines.

00:23:08.520 And by judgment, I mean, of course, we can have value judgments.

00:23:12.100 I judge a lot of people in society.

00:23:13.700 I say these people are bigoted, or these people are arrogant, or their way of life is destructive

00:23:18.420 for themselves.

00:23:19.900 I have those judgments, but I'm not going to go and punish them in the name of God, unless

00:23:24.240 they attack me.

00:23:25.100 So there should be a social order in which we can disapprove people, ways of life, religious

00:23:30.420 beliefs, theologies.

00:23:31.780 And our religions make truth statements, and we cannot get away from that.

00:23:35.340 I mean, you say Christ is God, the other person will say, well, no, that's not acceptable

00:23:38.920 for my theology.

00:23:39.740 So there are gaps that we cannot, and we should not, you know, try to make this appear, but

00:23:47.200 we can live together.

00:23:48.560 And that's why tolerance is the key idea.

00:23:50.700 And that's why, by judgment, what I'm referring to is judging and punishing in the name of God.

00:23:56.780 And of course, crime will be punished.

00:23:58.900 I mean, theft will be punished or murder will be punished.

00:24:00.680 But if someone has a doctrine, religious doctrine that I find wrong, I should tolerate that

00:24:05.500 person, although I can, you know, criticize, of course, and I can be criticized back, which

00:24:11.040 what free speech allows, of course, for us.

00:24:13.700 So, I mean, sorry, you asked me about Christ, but I, I mean, I opened a broader chapter, if

00:24:18.320 you will.

00:24:18.560 You want to, you want me to go into that discussion?

00:24:20.820 Yes, yes, that would be good.

00:24:23.620 I mean, for a lot of Christians who may not much know much about the Muslim world, I mean,

00:24:28.400 it might be surprising to learn that the most prominent female figure in the whole Quran

00:24:35.320 is Mary.

00:24:37.560 Actually, she's the only woman mentioned by name.

00:24:40.700 There's a chapter named Mary.

00:24:43.200 There's a chapter named after her family, Ali Imran.

00:24:46.720 And the Quran, because, because the calling of the Quran is to say, this is a new, this

00:24:54.020 is not a new religion.

00:24:55.000 This is monotheism.

00:24:55.920 Muhammad is God's messenger, but God had other messengers before.

00:25:00.020 There was Moses, there was Abraham, there was Jesus Christ, and there was his, Mary.

00:25:05.820 And the Quran tells the story of Mary to affirm something, which is, again, might be surprising

00:25:13.820 to Christians.

00:25:14.740 The Quran affirms the virgin birth of Christ.

00:25:18.180 That Mary was a chaste woman.

00:25:20.640 She didn't, she was not touched by any man.

00:25:23.640 And one day she heard an angel coming and say, you will have a son.

00:25:27.220 And she says, how can I have a son?

00:25:29.000 No man has ever touched me.

00:25:30.700 But the angel says, this is what God willed, and he wills and he creates.

00:25:36.060 So that is how Christ, you know, comes to, you know, his mother's womb.

00:25:43.540 And ultimately he comes and the Quran calls him the word of God.

00:25:48.000 Again, this is a very powerful statement.

00:25:49.600 If you, if you're, if one is familiar with the gospel of John, and this is very unusual,

00:25:54.600 but the same Quran also insists that he was not divine.

00:25:59.160 So he should not be worshiped.

00:26:00.520 So on the one hand, it reversed Mary and Jesus.

00:26:03.840 It tells a lot of things, very similar to gospel of Luke.

00:26:07.320 And some apocryphal gospels also resonate strongly with the Quran, interestingly.

00:26:12.600 So there's great respect, great reverence.

00:26:15.240 There are good words about Christians.

00:26:16.480 I mean, one, in one, one verse, the Quran says, among all people, you will love the Christians

00:26:22.900 nearest to the believers.

00:26:25.400 That's the Muslims.

00:26:26.380 Because it says they're not arrogant and they have learned, they have learned scholars.

00:26:32.540 And so there are a lot of positive things because Islam was born.

00:26:36.780 Let's not forget that Islam was born as a monotheist campaign in an idolatrous society.

00:26:43.260 Meccans were worshiping idols and Prophet Muhammad, who didn't think of becoming a prophet until

00:26:48.280 the age of 40.

00:26:49.600 He heard the voice in a cave, Angel Gabriel, like a burning bush experience of Moses, which

00:26:55.480 told him, recite in the name of God who created man.

00:26:58.740 And then he became convinced that he's God's prophet and he started to preach monotheism.

00:27:03.640 And when you preach monotheism, Muslims consider Jews and Christians as their allies.

00:27:08.620 That's why when Muslims were persecuted in Mecca, Prophet Muhammad told a group of Muslims

00:27:14.560 to flee to Ethiopia, the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia.

00:27:17.460 They went there and they were really saved by the Christian king.

00:27:19.840 That's a memory that Muslims have.

00:27:22.560 So there is that monotheistic.

00:27:24.180 So what does it mean in Islam that Christ, well, two things that you said, that Christ

00:27:29.320 is, his birth is, the virgin birth is accepted.

00:27:33.580 That's a major issue, which we should also discuss.

00:27:36.120 And also the emphasis on Mary and what that means, let's say, for the position of women

00:27:42.000 theologically within Islam.

00:27:44.120 And also what does it mean when Muslims claim, believe that Christ is the word of God?

00:27:52.460 Now, it's hard for me as a Westerner to separate that out from claims of divinity.

00:27:57.580 And we could also talk in some sense about worship, about what worship means.

00:28:02.080 And so when I, I try to look at these things from a psychological perspective as much as possible

00:28:06.400 and stay out of theological territory, where I'm a neophyte in any case, one of the things

00:28:12.320 that worship means to me psychologically is something like the desire or compulsion to

00:28:18.840 imitate.

00:28:20.260 Like, you think about, to worship something is to place it in the place of highest value.

00:28:25.200 And, you know, people claim to think that actions speak louder than words.

00:28:32.500 And I think that's a reasonable proposition.

00:28:35.360 If you act something out, it's pretty compelling evidence that you believe it.

00:28:39.640 And that means in some ways that you hold it in the highest place.

00:28:44.000 And so to worship is to imitate, I think, in the deepest sense.

00:28:48.640 It might be to celebrate what should be imitated as well, something like that.

00:28:53.180 And this is a complicated issue because we're unbelievably imitative.

00:28:58.120 And I was struck when my kids were little, when they were playing house, for example, my

00:29:03.240 son would play out the father.

00:29:05.160 And you might say, well, he was copying his dad, but he wasn't because he wasn't moving

00:29:09.820 the same way he saw me move.

00:29:12.100 What he was doing was watching me over a whole variety of instances and then also watching

00:29:19.400 portrayals of fathers in media, movies and TV shows and that sort of thing, and abstracting

00:29:27.140 out from that some kind of, I would call it like a disembodied spirit, which represented

00:29:34.960 the core essence of paternity, and then imitating that.

00:29:39.000 And I see in that the biological underpinnings, let's say, of what religious people talk about

00:29:46.620 when they talk about worship.

00:29:47.900 So when the Muslim world regards Christ as the word of God, but not divine, I don't know

00:29:54.980 how to understand that.

00:29:58.420 Very good question.

00:29:59.680 I mean, it says in the Quran that he is a word from God, and it doesn't explain much.

00:30:06.400 And Muslims discuss what this means, exactly.

00:30:09.880 It's not certainly understood in the way that the Gospel of John defines that word was with

00:30:16.740 God and word was God.

00:30:18.520 So that's not the step taken there.

00:30:22.720 Most common interpretations said, well, he was the word of God in the sense that it was

00:30:29.860 the word of God directed to Mary.

00:30:31.660 So God, he was created with the creative word be in Mary's body.

00:30:37.600 So that's what it means.

00:30:39.220 So that's generally a, like a low interpret, low Christology, if you will.

00:30:43.160 But there are alternative views, which I mentioned, you know, in my book, in the Islamic Jesus,

00:30:48.400 that some people said maybe he was the word of God in the sense that he was the revelation

00:30:54.260 itself, like everything he did and said was revelation, like God's living word, which still

00:31:02.420 though, from an Islamic, which means he was something like the Quran, like Quran, we believe

00:31:08.060 is revelation, God's revelation.

00:31:09.620 So he was, he was the revelation became flesh rather than revelation became a book, right?

00:31:15.120 And that's why the New Testament narrates about Jesus.

00:31:19.080 I mean, it's, he is the, he is the revelation and New Testaments are reports about the revelation.

00:31:24.280 So that's, I think that's possible to, that's a step possible to take within the Quranic

00:31:30.980 framework.

00:31:31.660 However, still Muslims don't worship the Quran.

00:31:35.460 I mean, you say still God is beyond, I mean, God is another transcendent, at another transcendent

00:31:41.460 level.

00:31:41.920 And in Islam, there is a very.

00:31:43.620 So let's, let's talk about that in relationship to the totalitarian impulse.

00:31:47.620 I mean, I would, I just had a discussion with Sam Harris and I mentioned that I was going

00:31:52.380 to be talking to some Islamic scholars.

00:31:54.460 I didn't mention you by name.

00:31:55.760 And I asked him if he might want to participate in such a discussion.

00:31:58.820 He said, he's done that.

00:31:59.980 He's done there and he's been there and done that.

00:32:01.980 And so he wasn't particularly interested in that.

00:32:04.660 Although we had a wonderful conversation.

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00:36:47.880 But what I see happening very frequently with thinkers like Harris, and I'm saying this with

00:36:59.080 all due respect, I truly am, is that for them, there is very little distinction between the

00:37:06.180 religious and the totalitarian, and that's the essence of the objection.

00:37:10.580 Now, Sam has come to regard some domains as sacred, and we talked a lot about that, and

00:37:17.380 I think it's an understatement of the severity of the totalitarian problem to attribute it

00:37:25.060 merely to the religious.

00:37:27.500 And part of the reason I think that is, well, look what happened in the 20th century in the

00:37:31.700 West.

00:37:32.000 It's just like, well, there was the Nazis, and how about Mao, and then there's Stalin,

00:37:37.820 and, you know, you could say those were religions, but, you know, you're pretty, you're weasley

00:37:43.280 word, you're using weasel words at that point.

00:37:45.880 You expand the definition of what constitutes religion so it doesn't violate your initial

00:37:50.160 presuppositions.

00:37:51.140 And so, we could see in Christianity, and in Judaism, and in Islam, the constant human

00:37:59.180 struggle to deal with whatever is the totalitarian impulse, which is something like insistence that

00:38:06.840 what I already know is, well, is literally the word of God, in some sense.

00:38:12.060 It's absolutely true.

00:38:14.600 I have the knowledge.

00:38:15.840 There shall be no deviation from that.

00:38:19.320 And to identify that with tradition in religion, I think, is a big mistake.

00:38:27.820 It doesn't get to the issue.

00:38:30.560 I'm totally on the same page with you on that.

00:38:32.800 I mean, the history of the 20th century shows that some of the greatest crimes against humanity

00:38:37.680 were committed by secular ideologies.

00:38:41.180 I mean, communism and Nazism, as you well put.

00:38:43.080 And today, probably the worst totalitarian regimes in the world.

00:38:47.300 Number one is North Korea.

00:38:49.120 I mean, it's not a really, it's a secular state, but it's a juche, called ideology, but it's

00:38:54.500 totally secular.

00:38:55.380 So, being, I mean, I'm in favor of a secular state in terms of a neutral state that respects

00:39:00.820 everybody's rights, regardless of religion or creed.

00:39:03.460 But secularization of society, it doesn't necessarily bring anything good.

00:39:08.140 I mean, we have seen that.

00:39:09.160 Okay, so let's talk about that for a second.

00:39:11.180 So I've been trying to figure out, all right, so one of the things I realized a long time

00:39:15.940 ago as a psychologist was that there were depths of meaning.

00:39:20.600 And we have intimations of this constantly.

00:39:23.140 So, for example, we can read a book and we think that was shallow, and we can read another

00:39:27.840 book and we think that was deep.

00:39:29.320 And then when we talk to a bunch of other people, they tend to think that the shallow

00:39:33.400 book was shallow and the deep book was deep.

00:39:35.400 And they tend to think that shallow and deep actually means something.

00:39:40.160 And so there's this experience of depth.

00:39:43.680 Now, I've tried to figure out what that meant exactly.

00:39:48.020 And what occurred to me was that, and this was partly derived from watching people in

00:39:54.420 my clinical practice.

00:39:56.160 So imagine people will get much more upset about a pending divorce than they will about

00:40:01.920 a discussion about who should do the dishes.

00:40:04.300 And you think, well, that's obvious.

00:40:05.820 It's like, yeah, it's obvious because that's what happens to you.

00:40:09.920 But it isn't easy to explain.

00:40:13.220 So what I thought was, what I hypothesized was something like, we have representations

00:40:20.000 of the world of different sizes and different temporal expanses.

00:40:25.320 A small plan for the day nested inside a plan for the week and nested inside a plan for the

00:40:30.440 month, the year, nested inside our family, nested inside our community, nested inside our

00:40:36.160 polity, nested inside our theology.

00:40:38.300 And the deeper you go, the more those representations are dependent on that level.

00:40:51.100 And so when something happens to you where you're deeply affected or traumatized, let's

00:40:55.820 say, technically, what's happened is that you've taken a blow to a representation upon

00:41:01.520 which almost all your other representations depend.

00:41:05.100 And so then you could think technically about the difference between the secular and the

00:41:10.400 religious as being one of depth.

00:41:12.420 Once you go down to the fundamental substrata, so that would be the most axiomatic of presuppositions,

00:41:20.500 whether you're secular or not, you're in the religious domain.

00:41:24.740 Yeah.

00:41:24.840 Okay, okay, okay.

00:41:26.980 So, I mean, the people who call themselves secular, and of course, I have many friends

00:41:31.040 who are secular and I respect that point of view, but they have metaphysical beliefs at

00:41:35.500 the end of the day.

00:41:36.320 I mean, if you say the universe always existed and matter made us and, you know, that's your

00:41:40.600 creation story.

00:41:41.480 I mean, every worldview has ultimately a metaphysical dimension, even if it does accept.

00:41:48.500 Like, coming back to your totalitarianism point, though, we have totalitarian entities right

00:41:57.020 now, I mean, in the world, in the name of Islam.

00:41:59.640 I mean, I think the Iranian Republic is pretty much the Islamic Republic of Iran, pretty close

00:42:03.040 to that.

00:42:03.980 Saudi Arabia is, I mean, very oppressive, and these are the two most oppressive interpretations

00:42:09.700 of Islam.

00:42:10.400 ISIS is like Khmer Rouge.

00:42:12.020 I mean, he was the Khmer Rouge of the Islamic spectrum, so it was pretty evil and very, I

00:42:17.980 think, totalitarian, too.

00:42:19.800 But there was something, though, in classical Islam, although I have a lot of criticisms

00:42:24.040 towards medieval jurisprudence, but there was a value in classical Islam, and that value

00:42:30.060 was in this word, which is a generally scary word in the Western today, and that's the sharia,

00:42:34.980 you know, that's God's law.

00:42:38.340 I mean, there are two phases of the sharia.

00:42:40.260 There are a lot of things about women and apostasy and blasphemy that I keep criticizing that

00:42:44.480 we have to reform those aspects.

00:42:46.520 But there was another value in the sharia, which highlighted in my book, new book, Why

00:42:51.040 As a Muslim I Defend Liberty.

00:42:52.900 The sharia was a set of laws that were separate from the rulers.

00:42:58.160 They were even above the rulers.

00:43:01.020 Like, sharia wasn't what the sultan required or, you know, he wanted.

00:43:05.680 The sharia was the law of God articulated by scholars who were generally independent of

00:43:11.540 the rulers.

00:43:12.700 That's why the classical medieval Islamic civilization wasn't totalitarian.

00:43:17.280 There were a lot of autocratic rulers, tyrants, but they were mitigated by the sharia.

00:43:22.020 And I tell a story...

00:43:23.160 Well, this is also something that I think people like Harris, let's say, and those atheist

00:43:28.740 rationalists, I think they failed to understand the necessity of that.

00:43:33.280 So I mentioned ancient Mesopotamia a while back.

00:43:36.600 But one thing that happened in that society was that the emperor would be taken outside

00:43:42.340 the gates of the city.

00:43:43.880 So it was a walled city once a year at the New Year's festival, and he would be stripped

00:43:49.100 of his emperor garb and forced to kneel.

00:43:52.820 And then the priest would slap him with a glove, and he would be forced to recite all the ways

00:43:57.880 that he hadn't been an appropriate Marduk, which was the high god, for the last year.

00:44:02.580 So he hadn't seen what he should see if he wasn't being blind, and he hadn't said what

00:44:07.000 he should have said if he was speaking the right kind of magic.

00:44:09.540 And so he was humbled in front of what was highest.

00:44:14.140 And the Mesopotamians were working hard, you know, in their mythology, you see this battle

00:44:18.920 between the gods in the face of an apocalyptic danger.

00:44:22.600 And this is a very common story worldwide, this battle between the gods, so what's highest

00:44:28.240 in the face of an apocalyptic danger, and the emergence of a supreme principle, which

00:44:34.080 constitutes the essence of sovereignty itself.

00:44:36.500 And if you have a society, a secular society, let's say, where that highest thing isn't

00:44:43.500 outside the polity in some sense, then you have North Korea, where the leader is elevated

00:44:48.680 to the status of a god.

00:44:50.280 And then you have hell.

00:44:52.020 And that seems like a bad idea.

00:44:54.260 Exactly.

00:44:54.780 You have Stalin, you have Mao, you have all those modern dictators.

00:44:58.700 And you have the Islamist, you know, totalitarian regimes today.

00:45:03.100 Because the Islamist totalitarians of today differ from the classical medieval Islamic tradition.

00:45:08.600 I mean, imagine, I mean, look at Taliban today.

00:45:11.200 I mean, Taliban has dominated Afghanistan once again.

00:45:15.060 The head of the Taliban is also the head of the executive and the judiciary and the, I mean,

00:45:21.000 legislation.

00:45:21.660 So that wasn't like that in classical Islam.

00:45:24.060 There was a ruler.

00:45:24.800 But there were also scholars who were independent from the, they were independent in the beginning.

00:45:30.860 And rulers gradually actually co-opted scholars.

00:45:33.960 And that was the beginning of the doom of the decline of the Islamic civilization.

00:45:37.300 My friend, Ahmed Kuru, has a very good book about that.

00:45:39.940 He shows how the scholars, religious scholars who developed law, were gradually co-opted by

00:45:44.920 the states, by the rulers.

00:45:46.180 And that actually killed the diversity and dynamism of Islamic thought.

00:45:49.920 Yeah, well, it means that they've been lowered from the ultimate to the political particular.

00:45:56.880 And that's a catastrophe.

00:45:58.420 Exactly.

00:45:59.040 And I mean, there are many tales in Islamic civilization.

00:46:02.540 Today, I think we can highlight to articulate values like rule of law or separation of powers.

00:46:08.460 I mean, I tell one of them, for example, we know that in Ottoman history, Ottoman sultans

00:46:13.720 were stopped by rulers, sometimes from executing people out of just anger or confiscating property

00:46:20.580 or overtaxing the population.

00:46:23.480 They said, this text is not compatible with the sharia.

00:46:25.520 You can overtax people.

00:46:27.280 So there was a balance in the classical Islamic civilization, which worked for its time.

00:46:33.260 And let's not forget that classical Islamic civilization had a toleration, which, again, was not very

00:46:37.780 common at the time.

00:46:38.640 That's why when Jews were persecuted in Europe, they often fled to the Islamic lands.

00:46:44.540 I mean, the Ottoman Empire.

00:46:46.260 Unfortunately, today, we have a crisis in the Islamic civilization.

00:46:49.220 We lost some of the blessings of the classical tradition.

00:46:52.760 That tradition itself stagnated.

00:46:54.740 Its jurisprudence stagnated.

00:46:56.300 And then we had the modern state.

00:46:58.040 And these Islamic movements came with the passion to grab the modern state and use it in the name

00:47:02.620 of Islam, which created a deadly mix of medieval jurisprudence and modern totalitarianism.

00:47:07.780 Which is the story of the Iranian Islamic Republic of Iran.

00:47:11.540 Saudi Arabia is going towards that direction.

00:47:13.860 Let's talk about the Saudis for a sec, if you don't mind.

00:47:17.020 Yeah, sure.

00:47:17.700 Sure.

00:47:17.880 Okay.

00:47:18.280 Because why not do something incredibly dangerous?

00:47:21.280 I mean, I am stunned at the naivety of the West in rendering unto the Wahhabis a fortune

00:47:32.000 of staggering magnitude and thinking that in some way, this was a recipe for medium and

00:47:38.140 long-term peace.

00:47:40.120 I mean, why do you think we're so stupid just out of curiosity?

00:47:46.640 I mean, I think every government in the world is stupid in the sense that, you know, they

00:47:50.700 make decisions on very short-term interests without really understanding the long-term

00:47:54.960 consequences.

00:47:55.580 The stupidity of Western governments just have more impact because they have more power,

00:48:00.340 you know, to shape things.

00:48:02.580 Regarding to Wahhabis, I mean, for example, I mean, first of all, let's establish what

00:48:07.380 Wahhabism is.

00:48:08.100 Wahhabism is, I mean, I compare, first of all, Islam should be compared more to Judaism than

00:48:13.480 Christianity to make, I think, meaningful analogies.

00:48:15.940 Because of its theology is very similar to Judaism and the idea of law, sharia and halakha

00:48:20.720 are very similar traditions.

00:48:22.500 So in Islam, Sunni Islam is like Orthodox Judaism.

00:48:26.080 It's the mainstream body, right?

00:48:27.540 Traditional, conservative, but it has some flexibility.

00:48:31.140 And then there's the ultra-Orthodox, you know, tradition in Judaism.

00:48:34.740 So Wahhabism represents the ultra-Orthodox point of view with a violent and intolerant bent

00:48:42.500 to it.

00:48:42.940 So that emerged in the 18th century in the Ottoman Empire, and their first targets were

00:48:48.520 other Muslims.

00:48:49.340 I mean, they condemned the Ottoman Empire for being into a heresy and bidah, as they

00:48:53.660 call it, innovation.

00:48:55.140 They attacked Sunnis, fellow Sunnis, and also slaughtered Shiites, which they consider as

00:48:59.980 heretics.

00:49:00.980 Then when the Ottoman Empire banned slave trade in the middle of the 19th century, there was

00:49:05.160 a revolt in Hijaz, fueled by Wahhabis.

00:49:08.060 They said Turks have gone infidels because slavery is in our jurisprudence.

00:49:11.660 You cannot change that.

00:49:12.520 Although the Ottomans were more flexible in their understanding.

00:49:15.940 But until the 20th century, Wahhabism was a very regressive, like a force in the middle

00:49:23.760 of the Arabian desert, Najat, which people didn't know.

00:49:26.880 They didn't go there.

00:49:27.480 It was a very marginal force.

00:49:30.020 In the 20th century, these people discovered that they are sitting on top of the world's

00:49:35.560 richest oil reserves, which they consider as a blessing from God to use, you know, to advance

00:49:39.760 their understanding.

00:49:41.700 And also Western powers thought that, oh, we can use them.

00:49:44.520 I mean, we can get a deal with them.

00:49:46.000 First, the British.

00:49:47.120 First, the British thought that they could be used against the Ottoman Empire.

00:49:51.860 There was even some discussion that they are like Protestantism, which are potentially more

00:49:55.980 tolerant, which is not.

00:49:57.940 I mean, they're not like Protestants, but they were certainly not tolerant.

00:50:00.540 So that was one thing.

00:50:01.700 First of all, because the Ottoman Empire being the seat of the caliphate and the superpower,

00:50:05.400 that was the problem.

00:50:07.080 Although you would prefer the Ottomans to the Wahhabis by any definition because of their

00:50:11.660 toleration and pluralism for their time.

00:50:14.700 And then, of course, so you're you're making the case to some degree, if I understand you

00:50:19.360 right, that a totalitarian doctrine, let's say, was granted exceptional riches, which there's

00:50:27.860 no possibility they could have accrued had that theology, that totalitarian theology, had

00:50:33.580 to make its way in its own way in the world.

00:50:36.560 But because of the vagaries of fate, in some sense, there was immense riches at the fingertips

00:50:44.700 of this movement that would have otherwise been and likely remained extraordinarily isolated.

00:50:49.580 Yes, what I'm saying is that, I mean, there are I'm not saying that the classical Islamic

00:50:56.480 world was I mean, it was not ideal.

00:50:59.400 There was a lot of persecution of heretics and here and there are two.

00:51:02.600 But for its time, you wouldn't judge the classical Islamic civilization and say they have less

00:51:08.100 religious freedom compared to what was there at Christendom at the time.

00:51:11.080 That's where that's why Jews repeatedly fled to the Muslim world, for example, from Spain to

00:51:17.020 the Ottoman Empire. In the modern era, one problem is Islamic jurisprudence, the interpretation

00:51:23.500 of the Sharia stagnated. And why that happened is a big discussion on Muslims, but that's one

00:51:27.920 problem.

00:51:29.440 This episode was sponsored by Canva. Making content is an essential part of what I do to

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00:52:40.520 I hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. And the idea of a modern state came. The modern state

00:52:46.780 with its police and its national law controlling everything with its bureaucracy and Islamist

00:52:54.080 movements emerged saying that we will revive the Sharia by grabbing the modern state by all its

00:52:59.400 centralized power. And that created the totalitarian moment in Islamic tradition. And we see that in

00:53:06.720 Saudi Arabia. We see that in Iran. We're seeing that under the Taliban. So there is. And one problem

00:53:12.800 is that Islamic world in the past two centuries modernized, but we didn't get the good forms of

00:53:20.260 modernity. One thing, I mean, first of all, the only secularism Muslims experienced was the French

00:53:27.120 style secularism, which generally pushed back the believers. Because if you say, I'm bringing you

00:53:31.840 secularism, it's a wonderful thing, which means you will not be able to wear a headscarf and go to

00:53:35.760 the campus. Well, there's not much freedom in that secularism. So unfortunately, it gave bad name

00:53:41.340 to that. Secondly, Arab republics got influenced by Soviet communism. I mean, Arab socialism was a very

00:53:49.200 powerful move in the middle of the 20th century. Republican Turkey, my country, it westernized,

00:53:57.540 it's good, but you know, it acquired its legal system from fascist Italy in the 1930s. Because

00:54:04.660 let's not forget, I mean, the West was not always a liberal democratic heaven. There were a lot of bad

00:54:08.640 ideas that came from the West. So I see this today in the Islamic civilization, a really a perfect storm,

00:54:15.400 a crisis of some, we lost some of the traditions we have, some of the toleration and pluralism we had

00:54:21.460 back then. There's a stagnant jurisprudence and bad ideas of modernity came. And when you mix them,

00:54:27.220 there's a crisis in every society. And that's why I think we Muslims need ideas that will be new,

00:54:33.380 different than what we have before, but that should be rooted in the tradition.

00:54:36.840 Bad ideas from the West are, in fact, devastating. I mean, when cultures object to Western hegemony

00:54:44.380 in favor of their local traditions, let's say, I have a certain amount of, what would you say,

00:54:49.760 understanding of why they're doing that? Because the ideas that emerged after the Renaissance,

00:54:57.660 let's say, especially the ideas that undermined religious tradition are unbelievably difficult

00:55:03.700 to withstand. And that's still causing all sorts of trouble in the West. And it's caused all sorts

00:55:09.140 of political trouble in the West, not least this development of this absolutely anti-liberal

00:55:14.500 totalitarianism that you saw in both Nazism and communism. And in the West, you know, we like to

00:55:20.520 look at free modernity and say, well, that's us in the last 500 years. But those offshoots,

00:55:27.740 the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are just as much a part of that tradition as, well, as the more

00:55:34.200 positive elements of modernity. And so, and that's where, that's why I think that this conflation of the

00:55:40.560 totalitarian impulse with the religious impulse is dangerous. Now, I understand, though, there's

00:55:46.820 another issue here that's lurking beneath the surface constantly, is that there's the spiritual

00:55:52.200 element in some sense of religious perception and practice, and there's the tradition. And, you know,

00:56:00.400 you see those juxtaposed to some degree in the New Testament, when the Pharisees and the lawyers

00:56:06.960 attempt to trap Christ into saying something heretical, when they ask him to rank order the

00:56:12.720 Mosaic commandments, what's the most important commandment, which implies that some of them

00:56:17.300 aren't so important. And he just sidesteps that so absolutely brilliantly and says, well, if I

00:56:23.720 remember correctly, that you should love God above all else and love your brother like yourself. And

00:56:29.000 what he did there was extract out the essence of the root tradition and make that into something

00:56:35.240 that's an embodied, dynamic, conscious practice. And that's, it's one of those stories you read and

00:56:41.380 you think, what the hell was going on there? How could someone come up with an answer like that? That's

00:56:46.560 such a devastating, remarkable, creative answer. And of course, it's had a huge impact on the

00:56:53.300 civilization of the world since then. But, you know, the people who criticize religion, the materialist

00:56:58.580 atheist types, for example, they constantly conflate the problem of the totalitarian proclivity that

00:57:06.780 tradition tends towards, if unchecked, with religion itself. And that's a huge problem, because those

00:57:14.700 aren't the same thing.

00:57:16.720 They're not. And I think religion obviously has become oppressive in world history when it

00:57:23.220 when it combines with state power, it becomes the same thing with state power. And that's what

00:57:27.560 theocracy and we have examples of that in Christian history and obviously in Islamic history. But

00:57:32.200 religion can also be a balance to power. It can hold values outside of the power sphere and actually

00:57:38.400 check power. And I think there are grounds for that in the Christian tradition. And of course,

00:57:43.760 in the Islamic tradition, and we have to cultivate those. But I think this whole discussion of religion

00:57:48.180 and power requires a rethinking of the very birth story of Islam, how Prophet Muhammad came and

00:57:53.560 what he preached. So, and I have some ideas, some reformist perspectives there. I mean, I can speak

00:58:00.000 about that a little bit.

00:58:00.660 Please do. Please do.

00:58:02.940 Here's one thing that clouds thinking about Islam by sometimes Muslims and by sometimes others.

00:58:11.880 And that is that in the very beginning of Islam, you see Prophet Muhammad, a preacher,

00:58:16.380 a preacher of monotheism, a prophet, but also somebody who led armies, who led battles,

00:58:22.760 who established a state. So what is going on? So that's why, I mean, some people say, you know,

00:58:28.080 in Christianity, it's much easier to make the case for a secular state. But in Islam,

00:58:32.180 it's much more difficult because they have the state at the very beginning.

00:58:35.840 It also makes Muhammad into quite a frightening figure. I mean, on the one hand, when I look at what

00:58:41.240 he did, the fact that it fits in this pattern that has happened time and time again in religious

00:58:50.220 history, where the warring idolatry was united into a monotheism. And that's a civilizing force.

00:58:59.360 It means that it means integration. And of course, the empire that resulted was one of the largest

00:59:05.360 empires that humans have ever created. It was an unbelievable achievement. So there's this push

00:59:11.280 towards monotheism and insistence on a highest, like transcendent value. But as you just pointed

00:59:18.040 out, at the same time, well, yeah, but there was war and there was conquest. And that's absent from

00:59:24.420 the story of Christ completely. And so it's quite frightening from a Western perspective.

00:59:29.340 I understand that. But that's why I think we need a discussion about that, which I offer in my books,

00:59:35.680 especially Reopening Muslim Minds. And I call for understanding why Prophet Muhammad had to fight

00:59:41.820 wars. Was that a divine blueprint that he had to fulfill? Or was that a accident of history that he

00:59:48.460 was forced into? And before that, I'll just say one thing. I mean, we have to compare Islam and

00:59:55.880 Christianity. But to understand Islam also always check the Old Testament, because I think the

01:00:02.120 history of Prophet Muhammad is also very similar to the story of Moses and also the later Joshua and

01:00:09.040 the wars in the land of Canaan. And so there are a lot of Old Testament parallels there. So here's

01:00:14.100 what happened at the very birth of Islam. Prophet Muhammad began preaching monotheism in the city of

01:00:19.880 Mecca in year 2010. Actually, he didn't preach publicly in the beginning. For three years,

01:00:24.940 they were secret. There were just about 40 people gradually became a community and they publicly

01:00:30.540 began preaching there's one God and no God, right? And of course, the God of Abraham, it was very clear

01:00:37.140 that it's a continuation of the Abrahamic tradition. Now, for 10 years, because of this, they were

01:00:43.140 persecuted. The pagan big grandees of the city, the leaders of the tribes, they said to Muhammad,

01:00:51.040 you're insulting our religion, you're defying our gods, you're insulting our forefathers. In other

01:00:56.480 words, they accused Prophet Muhammad for blasphemy against their religion, which I think should be in

01:01:01.480 the minds of every Muslim today on free speech issues. But Muslims didn't give up, but Muslims

01:01:07.200 didn't threaten. There was no act of violence. Muslims were not trying to found an army. And actually,

01:01:12.640 there are passages in the Quran, which shows that Muslims were just preaching their faith. And one of

01:01:17.560 them reads, to you, your religion, and to me, mine. I mean, that was a statement made to the pagans.

01:01:23.060 Another one says, the Lord, the truth is from your Lord. Let anyone who want to believe it, believe it.

01:01:27.800 Let anyone who want to disbelieve it, disbelieve it. Another word says to Muhammad, oh, Muhammad,

01:01:33.340 you're just a preacher. You're not a compeller over people. And if God had willed, everybody would

01:01:39.220 believe, but you know, God led it this way. So there's a very non, there's a non-political and

01:01:45.720 non-violent message right there in Mecca. Now, I ask a question that generally people didn't ask.

01:01:52.560 What if the Meccans said, okay, do what you do, right? And what if the Meccans said, let the Muslims

01:01:57.560 go and preach their religion? I think the history of Islam would be different because Muslims were

01:02:02.780 just going to peacefully preach the faith. Probably the faith would grow and it would gradually win

01:02:07.220 over the city. And still the Kaaba would be transformed into a monotheistic temple, but it would

01:02:12.100 be a different history. What rather happened is that they persecuted the Muslims. They killed

01:02:16.440 Muslims. Some of them had to flee to Ethiopia, as I said. They were almost coming to kill Prophet

01:02:22.880 Muhammad himself, assassinate him. And that's why he finally fled Mecca and went to the city Yathrib,

01:02:30.160 called Medina later. And there he established a community. He established a group of people. He

01:02:36.180 became a political leader in the city. And all their properties were plundered after they were

01:02:41.980 left. Their homes were raided and they were sold. They were raided by the pagans. And then came the

01:02:48.100 first verse of the Quran, which allowed war, jihad, military jihad in the name of God. And that verse

01:02:54.720 in Surah Hajj is very interesting. It says, permission to fight has been given to those who have been

01:03:01.440 persecuted. They were persecuted because they said, our Lord is one. They were driven out of their homes

01:03:07.800 because they said, our Lord is one. So the war aspect, the war part of the story was the reaction

01:03:14.680 to persecution, the ongoing persecution. Once you start war, it went on. There were many battles,

01:03:21.700 like in the 10 last years, the 10 years in Mecca, there are raids, there are battles, there are fights.

01:03:27.760 And when you read the Quran today in certain chapters, Surah 9, for example, Surah Tawbah, you will see

01:03:33.260 harsh passages, go and fight the unbelievers, go and find them, go and kill them, you know. And those are

01:03:38.680 historical commandments directing the first Muslim community, just like commandments in the Old

01:03:44.660 Testament, telling Joshua or the Israelites, you know, to fight the Amalekites, you know, the tribes in the

01:03:51.880 land of Canaan that were trying to kill the Israelites. So I understand the war aspect there

01:03:59.500 as an outcome of a oppressive environment, which wouldn't let Islam to grow and even exist. So

01:04:08.960 Muslims had to fight, not because they wanted, but they were forced into. However, a problem came after

01:04:15.820 that. The whole thorny moral problem of what you should do when you're oppressed is not something that

01:04:20.520 we've, as a species, let's say, have completely figured out. I mean, in Christianity, I would

01:04:25.020 say, propose that one of the prime injunctions is to turn the other cheek. But that didn't seem to

01:04:32.840 apply so obviously, let's say, in the decades leading to World War II. And so it's not like every

01:04:41.460 society doesn't have to wrestle with this problem. I mean, Christ is presented as a peacemaker,

01:04:46.860 there's no doubt about that. But he's also presented in the book of Revelation as a judge

01:04:51.400 who separates them from the elect. And there's a harshness in that as well. And so I don't think

01:04:58.500 it's... Go ahead. Sorry, but there is an additional problem. I mean, the founding story is not a

01:05:04.280 problem, but I think we have to understand it correctly, that war was a consequence of that

01:05:08.740 particular context. And what is eternal about Islam to me is the theology, the faith, the practice,

01:05:14.120 and the worship that was brought by Islam. But there was an additional problem. After Prophet

01:05:19.100 Muhammad passed away, Muslims had an army and a state, and they kept continuing. I mean, they kept

01:05:24.480 conquering the world. And from in one century, from Spain to India, basically, Muslims built an empire.

01:05:32.140 And this empire itself partly transformed Islamic teaching and adjusted it to its imperial needs.

01:05:40.880 And I think that's something we Muslims should see today. One clear example of this is the theory of

01:05:47.360 abrogation. Because the jurists who were with the imperial project, they looked at the Quran,

01:05:55.920 and they saw that, well, there are verses in the Quran which says, you're just a preacher,

01:06:02.200 not a compelling. Well, but we're having a war here, right? Like, I mean, to you, your religion,

01:06:06.940 to me mind, but we are not allowing the polytheists to have this. So what they did was they took the

01:06:13.300 verses about war and fighting the unbelievers, the polytheists in particular, but also Jews and

01:06:19.160 Christians, because there was a word about the people of the book. They took those verses as

01:06:24.440 definitive, which abrogated the earlier verses. So a lot of the verses you will open and read the Quran

01:06:31.120 today, which are tolerant, peaceful, you know, lenient. If you read medieval jurisprudence,

01:06:38.820 you will find notes that the worst is there in the Quran, but it's abrogated. Like, it doesn't

01:06:43.240 have a function. It doesn't rule. It doesn't have a hukum. Which, to me, is not...

01:06:48.480 Well, it's a huge problem when you're dealing with a text as complicated as the Quran, or let's say

01:06:53.620 the Bible, where, taken singly, there are certainly passages that contradict one another. And so then,

01:07:01.160 well, then you're tempted by the desire to justify your own unquestioned beliefs because of your

01:07:10.000 demand for power using reference to God. And then it's a worse problem than that, too, because,

01:07:16.480 well, who's right in their interpretation? You know, and the way out of that, in some sense,

01:07:21.280 is to approach a book like that with as much admission of your own ignorance and as much

01:07:27.880 humility as possible, so that, I mean, if you assume that such thing is reasonable, given that

01:07:33.320 we're all people of the book, and pray to God, in some sense, that you don't bend that to your own

01:07:39.460 unacknowledged malevolence and ignorance. But that's a very, very difficult thing to manage,

01:07:45.080 and it isn't even clear when you manage it, which is why we need to talk to each other, in part.

01:07:50.000 Right? Exactly. And I see this abrogation theory and the theory of jihad and conquest and coercion

01:07:58.440 built around that, which is honestly right there in the Islamic jurisprudence, in medieval

01:08:03.160 interpretations of the sharia, as Islam interpreted for the age of empires. I mean, it was how empires

01:08:10.380 were behaving at the time. Christians were doing the same things, too. I mean, Byzantine Empire was also

01:08:14.860 expanding through war. They had anti-paganism laws. Villigious coercion was the norm of the day.

01:08:22.220 Islam was born in such a world, and it took an imperial form and jurisprudence. But to me,

01:08:28.680 it was not a divine blueprint that we Muslims should preserve forever. It was a different context,

01:08:33.980 and we live in a different world today, so that's why we have to reinterpret. And to me,

01:08:38.200 the abrogated verses of the Quran are the eternal messages of Islam. Those abrogated verses which

01:08:45.260 says, to you your religion, to me mine, and... Okay, so why would you... Okay, so let me play devil's

01:08:51.660 advocate here. I mean, you're making a judgment there, and it's a non-trivial judgment. And you

01:08:57.660 could say also that it's an unbelievably presumptuous judgment. And this is not an insult at all.

01:09:03.400 This is independent of whether or not I agree with you. But we run right into this thorny problem,

01:09:08.900 right? Which is, well, why... On what grounds do you think you're justified in making the claim

01:09:15.980 that your interpretation should supersede that particular interpretation?

01:09:22.240 Very good question. First of all, I begin with showing that... I begin by showing that

01:09:28.920 the existing interpretation, the imperial interpretation, let's say, which relied on

01:09:34.500 expensive jihad, coercion, suppression of heresy, apostasy laws, blasphemy laws, those are all part

01:09:39.980 of that. By showing that this was not an inevitable interpretation, it was an interpretation based on

01:09:47.500 imperial conditions. And I showed that people who dissented against those two. I mean, in my book,

01:09:52.400 in Reopening Muslim Minds, I said, well, this became the mainstream view. But wait, wait, there was a

01:09:56.320 scholar who was actually arguing against that. There was a scholar who was saying, no, we don't need

01:10:00.640 abrogation. We just need to understand it as one big story with different emphases. And I show how

01:10:09.220 these were cynically used by Muslim rulers sometimes to just get rid of dissent. I mean, some Muslims,

01:10:15.680 early critics of the Umayyad dynasty, which was mostly a tyrannical dynasty that dominated the Islamic

01:10:21.480 world. They were killed as blasphemers or apostates, but they were only critics of the rulers.

01:10:28.960 So this was used...

01:10:30.000 Okay, so let me ask you another question. So you've spent a lot of time on this. You've written many

01:10:34.620 books, and you've put yourself in some danger, I would say. And this has been quite successful. And

01:10:40.620 so I want to know what you're up to. You know what I mean? It's like you're aiming at something with

01:10:48.100 all these books, and maybe you don't even fully know what it is, because you realize these things

01:10:51.980 as you write, right? And as you struggle. And so I would say, for a book like the Bible, like there's

01:10:57.880 a way that you have to approach it, I believe, that, what would you say? So that you're the least

01:11:04.840 likely to deceive yourself about what you're doing. And that has to be something like, I think it has to

01:11:10.720 be something like an orientation towards love. And love is something like the desire that the most

01:11:17.240 possible good happens to the most possible people. I don't mean to be utilitarian about

01:11:21.500 it. I'm not making that kind of case. But it even extends to your enemies, because, well,

01:11:25.920 wouldn't it be better if they didn't have such miserable lives? And wouldn't it be better if

01:11:29.520 you didn't have enemies? And so you have to approach a traditional text in the spirit that

01:11:35.640 the text fundamentally embodies, or you bend it to your own will. Now, what are you aiming at with

01:11:42.960 all your books? What is it that you want? That's a good question. Well, what do I want?

01:11:49.220 I want to make, as just an ordinary but thinking Muslim, I want to make a contribution to the future

01:11:57.160 of my religion in this day and age, where I see great value in Islam. I think Islam can contribute

01:12:03.500 to the world in many ways. But I also see Islam being still captured by some medieval interpretations

01:12:11.440 that were actually using, was used and built up for medieval imperial projects. And I need,

01:12:19.720 I believe we need to rethink certain issues in Islam. And there are a lot of scholars doing this. I

01:12:24.560 mean, that's why I speak of the 19th century Islamic modernist. I mean, I learned from these scholars,

01:12:29.560 from Fazul Rahman to Mohammed Abdul to Ottoman liberals, and today, some contemporary scholars that

01:12:35.300 I quote in my book as well. But scholars write in academic articles, or very complicated books.

01:12:42.160 I try to popularize these ideas, because I see there's hunger for that. I mean, there are a lot

01:12:46.380 of Muslims around the world today, from Pakistan to Malaysia, to Indonesia, to the Arab world,

01:12:51.740 who are faithful, who are happy with their religion, but they are disturbed, sometimes disgusted

01:12:57.900 by the things they see in the name of their religion. Oppression, violence, persecution of

01:13:03.420 innocent people, by calling them heretics, and so on and so forth. And they want to see a way forward.

01:13:08.060 How can we go forward by preserving our faith, living our values, but also being at peace with

01:13:14.380 non-Muslims, and even Muslims of different persuasion, and we can have a teaching...

01:13:18.640 And so do you see that what is perturbing them is the manifestation of that central totalitarian spirit?

01:13:25.040 It is. Totalitarian or just sometimes bigoted and hateful. I mean, to be totalitarian,

01:13:30.120 it has to be unified with power, but it is potentially totalitarian.

01:13:34.320 Yeah, well, there's the psychological equivalence of that, right?

01:13:36.840 Exactly. And I also see that this is also leading to a great disenchantment with Islam as well. I mean,

01:13:44.840 a lot of people are not in the West thinking about that. They think Muslim world, everybody is

01:13:49.140 pious, but quite the contrary. There is a great escape from Islam in Iran. I mean, Iran today is,

01:13:55.040 the number one country in the world that produces ex-Muslims, like people who become atheists

01:14:00.900 and Christians. And I respect their point of view. I mean, they have all the right to become

01:14:04.500 atheists or Christians. But as a Muslim who believes in my faith, I mean, like I would like to have a

01:14:09.900 faith that attracts people with its spirituality and with its values, but not frightens them and

01:14:14.200 scares them and pushes them away. In Turkey, my country, there is a new tide of deism, which is like

01:14:19.680 young people are believing in God, but not any religion and certainly not Islam, precisely

01:14:25.540 because of the disenchantment of Islam being used for authoritarian politics by the current

01:14:31.500 government, for example. So I think this is a critical period in Islam. And when I look back

01:14:36.740 in Christian history, I see people, Christian humanists from Locke to others, Roger Williams in

01:14:43.560 the United States, who re-articulated their religion, reinterpreted their religion to emphasize

01:14:48.380 freedom, freedom of conscience. Like, I mean, the switch from divine rights of kings to the

01:14:54.640 idea of a, you know, limited government with religious freedom, that was a big shift in

01:15:00.680 Christianity. And it had to be done by Christians who value their faith. And I think this is a big

01:15:06.700 effort. A lot of Muslims are trying. I'm just trying to do my part with my writings, which are

01:15:11.620 aimed at a broad understanding, a bit of broad population. So everybody can read and get it,

01:15:16.260 you know, what the point is. But also here are the key arguments and the, you know, patterns for going

01:15:22.500 forward. Yeah, well, you're a strange sort of traditionalist in some sense, right? Because you

01:15:28.200 are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in relationship to the past, but also not proposing

01:15:33.720 that all of this be abandoned as an entirely failed project, which I think is a very naive,

01:15:38.320 would be a very naive thing to do in any case. It's like, well, abandon it in favor of what exactly?

01:15:44.120 Well, you know, rationality. It's, well, okay, but it needs some fleshing out.

01:15:50.540 Well, not by rationality. I mean, we can discuss that because, you know, my book,

01:15:53.680 Reopening Muslim Minds, A Return to Reason, you know, begins with that reason and freedom.

01:15:57.760 So I'm not a rationalist in the sense of, you know, people like Sam Harris that, you know,

01:16:03.940 you talk to. So I don't think that there's reason that supersedes everything else. And by

01:16:08.400 rationally, we can always arrive at the truth. I mean, Mao rationally arrived at a terrible truth.

01:16:13.660 So I certainly see the flaw in that. Yeah, well, there's always the problem of the

01:16:16.660 axiomatic presumptions. Yeah, I mean, Hayek, you know, criticizes, you know,

01:16:20.360 rationalists that build systems of authoritarianism. And I think there was a great value there.

01:16:25.560 However, by reason, I refer to a specific theological branch in Islam called rational

01:16:32.980 theology or akl. That's the term in Arabic reason. And it goes back to a theological dispute in early

01:16:40.360 Islam between two schools of thought. And it was on the meaning of sharia. I mean, God's God's

01:16:46.840 commandments. And actually, it goes back to this was a discussion on Islam. And but it goes back to

01:16:53.100 Socrates and his famous Unifro dilemma. And I think this was discussed in Christianity as well.

01:16:58.880 The dilemma is this when God has commandments, like 10 commandments, like thou shall not murder,

01:17:05.240 right? Thou shall not steal. These are fundamental key values that who are civilizations go forward.

01:17:12.020 But one question is this, does God say thou shall not murder, because murder is inherently wrong?

01:17:19.240 Does God teach us about this ethical value? It's out there in the world? Or does murder become wrong

01:17:29.000 simply because God said so? So these two ways of looking into religious commandments. And in Islam,

01:17:37.800 one theology is spearheaded by the Mutazila school, but also it had an impact on the Maturidi theology,

01:17:44.640 which is in mainstream Sunni Islam, which I sympathize with. They said, the commandments of

01:17:49.740 God are educating us about values, which are also there inherently out there in the world and also

01:17:58.200 knowable by reason. In other words, even if there was no revelation, human could figure out that theft

01:18:04.660 or murder are wrong. But because of human passions and human tendency to forget, God is educating and

01:18:10.840 reminding us about those values. And there are a lot of reasons in the Quran to think like that.

01:18:16.440 The other school, the Asharite said, no, these things are right or wrong simply because God said so.

01:18:23.260 Therefore, if God said murder is good, murder would be good. So the commandments define everything

01:18:30.640 that is ethical. And this is the Asharite theology. And in my book, I show how these discussions took

01:18:37.680 place and what were the nuances. Asharite theology became more influential in Sunni Islam. And I'm

01:18:43.680 critical of that because I think if we say God's commandments only have value in themselves, first of

01:18:50.780 all, we are turning God into a capricious, arbitrary legislator, right? Things become right and wrong only

01:18:58.380 because he says so. It's not like he is looking into the world and with compassion, seeing that

01:19:05.520 ordinary people and innocent people should not die. Yeah, well, you could secularize that. You could

01:19:09.540 secularize that argument by asking yourself, as a secular person, these fundamental laws that we

01:19:15.540 have, like we should not murder, do they reflect some underlying reality in some profound sense or are

01:19:24.040 they arbitrary constructions of a particular time and place? And it's a very difficult argument to walk

01:19:30.600 through. Because it always depends in some sense on what you're aiming at, right? If you're aiming at

01:19:39.120 power and conquest, well, then maybe murder is just what you need. But if you're aiming at peace, well,

01:19:44.300 maybe that's not the right route. Exactly. And actually, I mean, the secular way of looking at this

01:19:50.080 is that, for example, should governments legislate according to what they think is right and their

01:19:55.480 commandment, their laws define everything? Or should there be values beyond the governments

01:20:00.940 that they should honor, right? Right. Well, that's a natural right argument in some sense,

01:20:05.180 right? Which is really foundational in the West and less so in the French system, I would say.

01:20:09.980 Very true. In the English common law system. Very true. Which... That's why I believe the right

01:20:16.160 view in Islam was the natural right argument, which what the Mutazila said and the Maturidis also in the

01:20:22.420 Sunni tradition pretty much came close. The other one is called divine positivism. Like, God says

01:20:28.960 whatever he says, and we just obey it without asking why and how. I mean, it got more sophisticated

01:20:34.280 over time. Still, I mean, Asharite scholars look into the purposes of God, try to figure out.

01:20:39.880 So that allowed analogy. But ultimately, this divine command theory that God posits as he wills,

01:20:47.420 legislates as he wills. And this had two consequences. One is... One means that people

01:20:53.440 who don't have your religious tradition cannot have any value because all value comes from divine

01:20:59.040 commandments. So people who are secular, people who are beyond... Oh, yeah, right. You close yourself

01:21:05.000 to the ethical reality out there in the world, all the ethical traditions and reasoning. Second...

01:21:10.360 And you deny an essential commonality between the tribes of mankind by doing so. Exactly.

01:21:14.800 And you put yourself in a permanent state of war. Exactly. That's why I call it the loss of

01:21:19.880 universalism. Because, I mean, early Muslims studied Aristotle and his ethical philosophy,

01:21:24.560 because Aristotle is an infidel from an Islamic point of view. But they saw value because they

01:21:29.540 said God gave humanity an ethical intuition and reason, and reason is universal. That allowed them.

01:21:34.820 So that was the universalistic path. But the other path actually closed ethical thinking. That's why

01:21:41.300 after that first... Well, you can also see how it would foster a kind of totalitarianism. Because

01:21:46.120 if God's commandments are what define good and evil, but I'm interpreting them... Exactly.

01:21:52.460 ...then there isn't anything beyond my interpretation in some sense, as long as I'm correct. Whereas with

01:21:58.860 the more universalist view, it's like, well, wait a second, there's something outside of this that I'm not

01:22:03.080 intelligent enough, wise enough to understand that I have to be mindful of. So let me take it in that

01:22:08.620 direction for a sec. So I'll tell you something I've been thinking about. I'm writing this book now

01:22:13.040 called We Who Wrestle With God. And I'm really trying to work out the natural right issue in

01:22:21.440 relationship to free speech. And I'm trying to do that as a clinician. And so one of the things that

01:22:26.860 Carl Rogers proposed, and he was extraordinarily influenced by Protestantism, he was a seminarian,

01:22:34.140 he wanted to be an evangelist before he became a secular humanist. But Rogers observed that if you

01:22:40.880 listen to people talk, if you actually listened, that they would spontaneously transform themselves in

01:22:48.800 a way that improved their life. And he pointed to a fundamental psychological mechanism that was

01:22:54.900 driving that. And you could think about it in some sense, as exactly the same thing that a parent does

01:23:01.280 when that parent attends very carefully to their children. So that attention facilitates, well, I would

01:23:08.460 say in some sense, the manifestation of the healing word. And I mean that as a clinician. Now, Freud,

01:23:15.060 Rogers took a page from Freud, because Freud also observed that if you just let people talk,

01:23:20.180 but you listened, that they would unwind themselves and straighten themselves out. And this isn't such a

01:23:29.460 preposterous suggestion, unless you believe that speech is somehow divorced from neurological integrity,

01:23:35.060 let's say, or social integrity. And so I think there's a very real sense in which the reason that free speech

01:23:43.380 is a natural right and maybe the highest of natural rights is because it is precisely reflective of the

01:23:49.780 mechanism by which we move from the stagnation of our dead thoughts into a future that's

01:23:58.260 better than the dead past. And so any society that interferes with that will degenerate into a kind

01:24:05.140 of totalitarian absolutism. And that becomes indistinguishable from hell.

01:24:09.620 It does. I mean, very interesting. I mean, what you said reminds me of a Quranic verse. It defines

01:24:16.020 believers as those people who listen to the word and follow the most beautiful of that. To be able to do

01:24:23.220 that, you have to listen first. And you have to be able to choose that. Exactly. It's a verse in the Quran.

01:24:28.340 I can't remember the number now, but I can send you later the number of it.

01:24:31.460 But that's a great verse. That's a great idea. Because it also touches on the notion of

01:24:37.540 a profound intuition of beauty and the idea that beauty is an intimation of what is divine.

01:24:45.380 And divine is deep and profound and necessary. And I don't care if you speak about that in secular

01:24:51.060 religious terms. It boils down to the same thing in the final analysis. And to use... I talked with

01:24:57.140 one of Canada's great journalists recently, this man named Rex Murphy, who's a real national treasure.

01:25:02.180 And he's so poetic. And he's a deep admirer of poetry, but also a very practical and down-to-earth

01:25:08.500 person. But his words are beautiful. And part of the reason they have such force is because

01:25:14.340 he is in communion with that beauty. And it shines through everything he does.

01:25:19.220 And so these are non-trivial realities that are being pointed to. We ignore them at our peril.

01:25:26.260 Exactly. And that is a universalistic outlook to listen to and learn from everything. And

01:25:32.100 it was there right at the beginning of the Islamic civilization. And that's why Muslims

01:25:36.260 built the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and translated all Greek philosophy into Arabic,

01:25:41.140 which ultimately made its way to Europe through Spain, Muslim Spain.

01:25:44.820 So there was this hunger to learn and appreciate, but that gradually narrowed down.

01:25:51.780 And it's a fact that it has happened. Why it happened, how it happened, there are a lot of

01:25:56.820 theories about it. You know, it happens all the time.

01:25:59.220 It happens all the time. It happens all the time. It's a human existential reality for that to happen.

01:26:04.820 I think it will happen to any civilization at the moment they say, we have reached perfection,

01:26:10.260 right? We don't need to learn anything from the outside world. And I see that sort of trend in the

01:26:16.340 Western civilization.

01:26:17.060 You know, that's the Tower of Babel. That's the Tower of Babel, right?

01:26:20.020 Yeah.

01:26:20.420 You build a structure and you think it's reached the heights of God. And as soon as you think that,

01:26:26.340 everyone fragments and speaks a different language and everything descends. And then the next story

01:26:30.980 is the flood. And that's not a bloody accident.

01:26:33.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Disintegration. Exactly. So by reason, I am referring to this view, universalistic

01:26:41.700 view in early Islam, which believed that morality is universal, ethics are universal. The Quran reminds

01:26:48.980 us and educates us, indicates. I mean, according to Qadda Abdul Jabbar, he said the Sharia indicates

01:26:56.100 what's right and wrong. The other group said the Sharia constitutes what is right and wrong.

01:27:02.580 So if the Sharia constitutes it, you don't have ethical wisdom beyond that.

01:27:06.820 My interpretation of the Quran is what defines, well, you can't have that

01:27:12.180 statement without that implicit belief behind it. That's the problem with that kind of idea. It's

01:27:17.780 like, well, it contains the absolute truth. Well, through whose lens? Well, mine. Well,

01:27:22.900 that's pretty damn convenient for you, isn't it?

01:27:25.060 Yeah, exactly. And of course, thinking like that had political advantages. And actually,

01:27:29.780 that's an argument I made in the book. But that narrowed Islamic thinking. It also led to

01:27:34.900 literalism. I mean, blind literalism, because if you don't have accepted values outside of the written

01:27:40.260 text, you ultimately become less willing to interpret the text and move away a little bit

01:27:47.540 from the text because you're bound with it too much. And that literalism is a burning problem,

01:27:53.060 I think, in Islamic jurisprudence today. I mean, a lot of the issues about women's rights and the Muslim

01:27:56.980 world come from it. It's also a terrible technical problem, right, which the postmodernists grappled

01:28:02.180 with and which in some sense defeated them. It's because when you read a book, you say,

01:28:06.740 well, where's the truth? Is it in a single word or is it in a phrase? But the phrase is in the

01:28:12.500 sentence and the sentence changes the phrase. And then the sentence is in a paragraph. And then,

01:28:17.380 you know, there's a really interesting image online showing the hyperlinked nature of the Bible,

01:28:23.540 which verses refer to which other. It looks like a kind of a rainbow. The Bible is densely

01:28:29.620 hyperlinked because all of it refers to, it all refers to other parts of itself, which is part of

01:28:36.100 its depth. But what that means is that while you need the whole thing to interpret each word,

01:28:42.660 you need every paragraph to interpret each sentence. And so how do you know if your interpretation is

01:28:47.300 correct? Well, we believe what the sentence says. It's like, nope, sorry, that's just not going to

01:28:53.220 do. And what do you mean by literally true? And are you so sure that literal truth is the deepest form

01:29:00.740 of truth? Because I don't think it is. There's fictional truth. And that's deeper than literal truth,

01:29:07.540 obviously. So there's certainly, and we have that in Islam, the interpretation of the Quran by the

01:29:15.620 Quran. So you read it's Surah 2 something, and you read 57 something else, and they actually explain

01:29:20.500 each other. That's a very powerful approach. And by literalism, I mean, I can give you one example

01:29:25.700 on women's rights, for example, like, which is, of course, a burning issue in certain parts of not all,

01:29:30.500 but certain parts of the Muslim world today. You may have heard that, you know, Saudi authorities

01:29:35.460 didn't allow women to drive cars for a long time. And finally, when it was allowed, you know, it was

01:29:40.340 a big reform. And the autocratic prince who did that, you know, got a lot of brony points in the

01:29:44.580 West, although... It was probably a bigger reform than was even recognized. It was a big reform for

01:29:48.820 them, but the people who demanded were jailed. So it's a weird autocratic form of reform. But then

01:29:54.740 in now Pakistan, I mean, not, sorry, in Afghanistan, the Taliban came to power in the 90s. They were not

01:30:00.020 allowing women to even walk on the street, but now they will say we will allow that. Okay, that's

01:30:05.140 a progress for Taliban. But still, women will not be able to travel alone. So there is this issue of

01:30:10.820 women traveling alone with a male guardian. I mean, it will come up in all these Islamic issues,

01:30:15.380 I mean, conservative Islamic interpretations. Now, where does it come from? Well, it comes from

01:30:19.860 a few hadiths that are sayings reported from Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. And it's in Sahih

01:30:25.620 Bukhari, one of the most authoritative, the most authoritative, I think, collection of hadith sources,

01:30:30.420 although I would still have some questions there on certain texts. But anyway, there you read Prophet

01:30:37.700 Muhammad saying, a woman, a Muslim woman should not travel alone without a mahram, that's a male guardian,

01:30:46.340 for longer than a distance of three days. Another version is a distance of one day.

01:30:52.020 So that's there. That's the text. And classical scholars, you know, of course, they thought this

01:30:57.700 is important. They calculated actually, what's the difference of three days? Oh, 78 miles or 57 miles,

01:31:04.020 there are different versions of that. So women should not be able to go. And still today, like in the UK,

01:31:09.380 if you ask a fatwa from a conservative scholars, they can say, can a woman go between Birmingham and

01:31:13.700 London? They can measure the distance. They say, no, no, it's not. It's not more than that distance.

01:31:18.980 Well, that is a textualist reading of this. Now, another reading, which is promoted by Turkish

01:31:24.500 scholars and others, I'm sure, is that, well, Prophet Muhammad said so probably because in seventh

01:31:30.500 century Arabia, in the desert between Mecca and Medina, there were bandits attacking every

01:31:36.420 unprotected woman. So a woman walking alone without a male guardian, and women didn't carry swords by this,

01:31:43.460 I mean, only men could protect women, would be attacked by these people. So he said something

01:31:49.060 obviously related to that context. So his security, his issue was security. So security is a universal

01:31:55.220 value we should care about. But if you today worry about the security of a woman driving between Mecca

01:32:00.340 and Medina, make sure she wears a seatbelt, right? I mean, it's a different...

01:32:05.460 In the West, the right of a woman to walk unaccompanied, which is obviously a right that

01:32:12.580 should not be trammeled, is dependent to no small degree on the fact that she can do so in relative

01:32:19.060 safety. And that's forgotten in some sense, right? I mean, I'm not saying that that right shouldn't be

01:32:24.740 promoted or doesn't exist. I'm saying that the conditions that currently prevail in the West,

01:32:31.460 I mean, when I lived in Montreal, for example, anyone pretty much could go anywhere at any

01:32:36.020 time of day and be safe. Well, that's a hell of an accomplishment that that's the case. And that

01:32:40.740 is not the historical norm by any stretch of the imagination. No, that's for sure. I mean,

01:32:46.420 these religious commandments, even the Quran and Prophet Muhammad's commandments, as a Muslim, I value

01:32:51.860 and respect all of them. But I understand that they were issued in a certain context. They were given,

01:32:57.300 they were uttered in a certain context. And when you understand the intention behind that,

01:33:01.940 you begin to understand the Sharia more intention-based, called maqasid in Islamic tradition.

01:33:07.540 So that's one way of going forward in Islamic tradition that scholars are thinking.

01:33:12.500 And I understand, like, corporal punishments. I mean, that's one of the issues that come up very

01:33:17.140 much with Islam. I mean, why, you know, why are there corporal punishments in the Quran and in the

01:33:23.380 prophet's commandments? Well, why are they in the Old Testament too, right? I mean, in all these texts,

01:33:27.620 you have corporal punishments. Yes, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was a marked

01:33:32.340 improvement over the previous arrangement. Exactly. And the Quran says there is a life for you in

01:33:38.180 Qasas, which is retaliation, because before the Quran, Arabs were killing each other in drones and,

01:33:44.020 you know, tribes were fighting each other. And by the way, there was no individual responsibility.

01:33:48.740 So anybody from the other tribe would be given, you know, as a retaliation. But the Quran brought

01:33:54.900 the idea of retaliation with individual responsibility. And also, it brought a few

01:33:59.860 corporal punishments, like amputation of hands for theft, for example, which is one of the most

01:34:03.860 controversial issues, I think, about Islamic law in the world today. Now, the literalist way to

01:34:08.660 understand it is that, well, God says this, so you will implement it as the way it is, or, you know,

01:34:12.660 you will find some modifications around it. But another way of looking at it is,

01:34:18.980 well, there's a very good reason why I gave corporal punishments in 7th century,

01:34:23.220 early 7th century Arabia, because there were no prisons. I mean, prison is an institution

01:34:28.660 that is built by a state, and you need to build brick walls, and you need to feed somebody inside

01:34:33.140 it, and you need to have a guard. I mean, 7th century, early 7th century Mecca and Medina

01:34:37.940 weren't anything like that. People, people could only punish crime instantly or let them go. I mean,

01:34:42.500 there was no idea. And that's why pre-Islamic Arabs also amputated, or kill them, or kill them.

01:34:48.500 And risk a feud. Exactly. And that's why pre-Islamic

01:34:52.020 Arabs were also amputating hands for theft. So, the Quran legislated in that context,

01:34:57.620 and as a Muslim, I believe it legislated for justice. It legislated for the right moral purposes.

01:35:03.300 But today, we can punish theft with other means, such as, you know, prison sentences,

01:35:09.380 or fines, which the Ottomans already did. I mean, these modifications have already taken place to a

01:35:14.980 certain extent in the Muslim world. I'm saying these things because, I mean, this kind of literalist

01:35:19.620 understanding of Islamic texts have led to a lot of problems. We can't let the literalists get away

01:35:23.780 with the notion that their understanding of a sentence is right. That just isn't how a text

01:35:30.580 works. It's way more complicated than that. And that's a big problem, because it opens up the

01:35:34.980 specter of infinite interpretations, which is the postmodernist dilemma. But saying the text has no

01:35:41.860 meaning or any meaning is no solution to that. It's like saying life has any meaning or no meaning.

01:35:47.700 It's a problem, especially when they say their understanding is right, and they have the right

01:35:52.420 to dominate the state, and they have to impose that on everybody else. So, that's the key problem

01:35:58.020 we have in the Islamist movements we have in the modern world today. Let's talk about Mary for a

01:36:03.060 minute. Oh yeah, sure. All right. Yeah, well, because this issue of women's rights is definitely worth

01:36:09.380 touching on. Now, so why do you think Mary is represented so

01:36:17.700 what would you say? Why does she have this privileged representation in the Quran? And

01:36:22.500 what does that mean as far as you've been able to determine?

01:36:27.700 Well, very good question. Very interesting. I should also add that the most prominent

01:36:34.100 figure in the whole Quran, the most prominent human being is Moses, you know, followed by probably

01:36:39.460 Mary and Abraham, and then comes Jesus Christ. You know, he's also, of course, narrated.

01:36:44.420 Because the Quran is educating Prophet Muhammad about his predecessors. Like, these were the pious

01:36:53.140 people before you. These are the people your forebearers. I mean, you should follow the footsteps

01:36:57.460 of Moses. You should be like Jesus. And Mary is narrated because he's so high up and revered in the

01:37:03.300 Islamic tradition. She's praised for her chastity. And she's praised for being brave. Because the fact

01:37:12.580 that, I mean, she was, of course, accused for committing adultery. I mean, that's what the Quran

01:37:17.300 says. Because she had a child without a father. And we hear that, actually. We see that in the Quran. And

01:37:23.700 she goes, and the Quranic birth story is different than the Gospels. In the Gospels, you know, Mary gives

01:37:31.220 birth in Bethlehem in a stable. And, you know, that's the Christian imagery. The Quranic story is

01:37:36.820 different. She goes and gives birth in the wilderness out of nowhere and under palm tree. Because she's

01:37:45.860 afraid that, you know, people will blame her. And people do blame her after that. And then under this

01:37:51.300 palm tree, she gives birth to Jesus and she's afraid. But God comforts her and angels speak to

01:37:57.060 her. Now, I think the story there, the archetype there is a woman who will be unjustly blamed for

01:38:06.020 committing adultery. Already she didn't do. And that's a deem that comes up also in the Quran for

01:38:13.220 another woman who's not named, but we know it's Aisha, Prophet Muhammad's wife. In the 24th chapter of

01:38:19.700 the Quran, Prophet Muhammad's wife, I mean, that's we know from post-Quranic sources, but she was left

01:38:26.340 alone in the desert. A man had given her a ride with his camel. When she came back to the city,

01:38:31.140 there was a rumor that maybe something happened between them. And Prophet Muhammad was devastated.

01:38:35.380 Aisha was devastated. It was a very stressful moment. And then the Quran legislated about that,

01:38:42.260 condemned the lie and the libels, and said, if you will bring any accusation against a woman,

01:38:49.700 of adultery, you should bring four witnesses before you blame her. And of course, there was no witness

01:38:55.700 in this case. So these two stories, I'm reading them together, like it's about protecting women from

01:39:02.260 accusation of adultery, which was, of course, the worst thing you could do to a woman, especially in

01:39:06.500 the pre-modern era, even today, I think, in many societies. So Mary's highlighted in that sense,

01:39:13.140 which is very interesting. By the way, it's interesting, though, and sad that the Quranic

01:39:18.740 injunction to protect women by asking for four witnesses was misabused in Pakistan to actually

01:39:28.180 abuse women. I mean, it was used, because when you don't understand the intention, this is what

01:39:33.700 happens. There has been cases in Pakistan of a woman being raped, raped in a village, getting pregnant,

01:39:40.340 and she's taken to a sharia court in the rural areas. And they ask, where are your four witnesses?

01:39:49.620 She says, I don't have four witnesses. But the fact that she's pregnant proves that she committed

01:39:54.580 adultery, although she's raped. And there has been a few cases like that who were given the death penalty

01:40:01.140 by the court, although it was later overturned, luckily, by the constitutional court. So I'm just

01:40:05.220 saying this too, if you don't understand what God legislated with what intention, and if you blindly

01:40:11.220 bring a law into another different context without understanding the difference between rape and

01:40:17.460 adultery also, it can have disastrous consequences. But sorry, we digress. So Mary is highly praised.

01:40:24.180 Some of the things said in the Quran about Mary, you cannot find them in the Gospels,

01:40:28.660 but you can find them somewhere else. You can find them in the Gospel of James, which is an

01:40:36.180 apocryphal Gospel, Protavangelium of James, because there were these Eastern Gospels which told about

01:40:41.860 the childhood of Mary and childhood of Jesus, which are not in the New Testament. Like Gnostic Gospels.

01:40:46.820 Yeah, Gnostic or other ones. And so the Quran strongly resonates with that. And I think one reason...

01:40:54.100 And how do you account for that historically? I mean, was there an influence of James' mode of

01:40:59.940 thinking on Muhammad? Or what do you think is happening there? Well, I wrote a book...

01:41:04.900 I know you did. I know you did. Yes, yes, yes. No, it's a great question. I appreciate it.

01:41:08.500 Well, how do I account that? I mean, Islam certainly continues Judeo-Christian traditions,

01:41:15.060 and very strongly resonates by a little-known Christian strain known as Jewish Christianity.

01:41:21.860 I mean, which comes from... which considered James as their saint, you know, patron saint.

01:41:27.460 Jewish Christians, which we know from the Church Fathers, called Edionites, people called Nazarenes,

01:41:33.700 they were practicing Jews who accepted Christ as the Messiah, but as the Jewish Messiah.

01:41:40.420 Not in the fully Christian sense of the term. Not divine, but as Jews expect a Messiah today.

01:41:46.660 So they were practicing Jews who accepted Jesus, which made them unorthodox from both a Jewish point

01:41:53.300 of view and also a mainstream Christian point of view. Not the wisest political move, maybe.

01:41:58.100 Yeah, so that's why... I mean, they were squeezed, and we hear them as heresies in Church Fathers'

01:42:02.980 writings, and they disappeared after the fourth century. But what is striking is that the

01:42:07.620 Jesus defined by the Quran is very similar to what the Jewish Christians believed. And also the theology

01:42:17.620 of Quran is very similar to this idea that you're saved by act, not just faith alone, which is, you know,

01:42:22.980 a distinction from the Quran line. Yeah, and I think it's more on a Jewish path, but it appreciates Jesus from a more Jewish perspective.

01:42:31.220 And it is very similar. Now, there are two ways to understand this. One is to say,

01:42:36.580 well, some of these teachings made their way to Arabia and, you know, obviously influenced the birth of Islam,

01:42:42.660 and Prophet Muhammad might have acquired these teachings from these Christian unorthodox groups.

01:42:48.500 That's the historical interpretation, and I can understand how people think like that.

01:42:53.780 As a Muslim, I believe, well, this is a revelation. I mean, God sent that revelation. God sent this revelation again.

01:42:59.380 So I don't need to believe that Prophet Muhammad acquired that wisdom from a pre-existing community,

01:43:04.420 but that's an answer of faith. Others can, I can very easily understand that they can say,

01:43:10.420 these Christian teachings influenced the birth of Islam. But whatever path we take, even if we believe

01:43:16.900 that there's revelation, or even if we believe that there's a history, the point is, our religious

01:43:21.860 traditions are deeply connected, and they are not alien. And there is not a Judeo-Christian tradition,

01:43:27.780 but Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, as I said. And the moment we begin to connect them,

01:43:32.660 we will learn, we can learn from each other. I think Muslims can learn from Christian tradition

01:43:37.860 more, and Christians can learn certain things from the Islamic tradition today. And we can think of

01:43:43.460 our problems as we, the monotheists, you know, we have these issues, and how do we deal with them

01:43:47.940 in the modern world? That's why I find intra-Christian discussions about freedom, or freedom of conscience,

01:43:54.260 or secular state very interesting. And I think we have patterns and roots in Islam which can be

01:44:01.700 connected to those. Okay, I want to torch you with one more issue, and then we should probably stop,

01:44:07.380 because I'm getting worn out listening and talking, so I might stop making sense. No, it's good, it's not

01:44:15.140 a bad thing, it's a good thing. So, I mentioned earlier this idea that Rogers developed, that was

01:44:21.940 deeply influenced by his Protestantism, and that had also been observed by Freud and the psychoanalysts,

01:44:27.540 that merely letting people speak, but in a welcoming way, right, in an attentive way, so you're providing

01:44:37.380 a container for the revelation, let's say, the revelation of themselves to themselves, that that

01:44:42.660 was intrinsically deeply healing. And one of the things that Jung pointed out, which I thought was

01:44:48.660 staggering in its implications, was that the mythological or theological Christ was actually a

01:44:54.500 symbolic representation of that process. Yes, so it's quite, so imagine there's a historical figure,

01:45:01.940 but there's a psychological figure, that's how I would look at it, but you can think about it in

01:45:06.820 theological terms at all. This gets complicated when you get into the outer reaches of thought.

01:45:11.940 But then, so what I see happening was that the West organized itself, unbeknownst to itself,

01:45:18.100 to some degree, under this principle, that free discourse, accompanied by attentive listening,

01:45:26.180 which is something like care for the other person's self-revelation and belief that that will make

01:45:31.300 the world a better place in the highest sense, and it's sort of the sine qua non of successful

01:45:37.300 therapy in my estimation. Well, that's both embodied and symbolized by the figure of Christ.

01:45:46.420 And you can see that as a reflection of human universalism as well. He happens to be the figure

01:45:52.660 in the West when you're speaking psychologically, but it's representing something that's a lot more

01:45:57.620 like John's notion of the eternal word and something that the Egyptians tried to represent with the

01:46:03.780 figure of Horus and the Mesopotamians with the figure of Marduk and so forth. And it's sort of at the

01:46:08.740 basis of the Campbell-Jung idea of a universal archetypal redemption story. And so what I struggle with is

01:46:19.060 in the Islam world, you have this contradiction in some sense, from my perspective as a Westerner,

01:46:24.740 between the figure of Muhammad as, in some ways, the ultimate authority or guide or prophet,

01:46:31.700 and the figure of Christ. And I can't understand it psychologically. It's like, because I can't

01:46:37.940 distinguish between the honour given Christ in Islam and the honour given Muhammad. There's

01:46:44.660 a contradiction there that I can't think my way through.

01:46:47.060 Well, great question. I think there is no contradiction from an Islamic point of view,

01:46:53.860 because Islam sees this as one big history of monotheism. So Prophet Muhammad is following the

01:47:00.100 footsteps of Moses or Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or Noah, and Christ is put in that path. So that's why

01:47:09.620 Christ isn't divine, but he is a word from God, he's revelation. So he's actually, metaphysically

01:47:17.140 speaking, the statements about Jesus puts him about any other actually creature, besides the angels,

01:47:24.020 when you look at from a Quranic point of view. But the Quran still insists that he's not divine.

01:47:28.900 And there is no Polian theology of him dying for the sins of humanity. So there's not that.

01:47:36.180 So that's why Christ is brought to the broader Abrahamic story, which doesn't culminate only with

01:47:43.060 Christ, but continues with Muhammad. So that's why, I mean, Islam takes the lower Christology,

01:47:49.140 I mean, if you will, from it. So that's why I think it makes sense. Although I think enough attention

01:47:56.100 maybe has not been given in Islamic thought to the story of Christ that is narrated us in the New

01:48:02.900 Testament. In early Islamic history, actually, you see that Muslims were studying the Bible called

01:48:09.060 Israiliyat, I mean, the Jewish and Christian sources, because the Quran refers to them. So go

01:48:13.780 and learn more from these sources. And I think that was a valuable flux of information and wisdom into

01:48:20.260 Islam. Later, it was seen as, oh, no, no, we don't need them. We just need our own, you know, trajectory.

01:48:25.060 And so the loss of universalism was not just loss of Greek philosophy, but maybe even more so the

01:48:31.460 this, you know, the metrics between the Quran and Bible. That's why I'm also calling on fellow Muslims

01:48:37.780 to study the New Testament and learn about the story of Christ. There are passages in the New

01:48:42.100 Testament, especially Polian letters that will not go well with Muslim theology, but we can still read

01:48:46.820 and learn at least the history of Christ. And that is one, actually, that's why, that's what brought me

01:48:53.700 to writing an article in the New York Times a few years ago, what Jesus can teach Muslims today.

01:49:01.140 Because, besides all the theological issues about his nature, like, that's, that's a matter of theology.

01:49:07.220 But Christ had a role in first century Judaism, when Jews were in a crisis, like we Muslims today,

01:49:14.340 I mean, that analogy was made by Arnold Toynbee. He said, Muslims of the modern era are like first

01:49:19.460 century Jews, in the sense that there is a powerful civilization, Rome, that is coming on to you.

01:49:24.660 And you have, you have Herodians who, you know, ally with that, you know, become imitating of that,

01:49:29.780 and you have the Zealots, you know, become fanatic. And, and, and Toynbee made an analogy,

01:49:35.220 and I think that's very, very apt for us. I see Christ as a third way. I mean, he was not a

01:49:41.300 collaborator of Rome, but he wasn't a fanatic, he wasn't a guerrilla leader fighting a battle

01:49:46.740 against them. And, and he called on his fellow Jews to rediscover their own values. Let's look

01:49:52.980 at Beccar Halakha and see the intention. And his criticism of dry literalism, and sometimes arrogant

01:49:59.620 piety, you know, you take pride, you look down upon other people saying that there are sinners,

01:50:04.180 but I'm, I'm biased. They are so relevant to some of the problems we have in the Muslim world today.

01:50:10.500 I mean, and in the Western world, in the Western world too. And I think that's why, that's why,

01:50:15.620 I mean, I, as a monotheist, you know, walking on the Abrahamic path and being a Muslim,

01:50:22.420 Alhamdulillah, as we say, I believe the broader tradition of monotheism, that includes Moses,

01:50:28.340 of course, but the story of Christ in particular, there's a lot to teach us. And Muhammad Abduh made this

01:50:33.700 point. I mean, he was a Muslim reformer in the late 19th century. And he said,

01:50:37.540 actually, Muslims believe in the second coming of Christ. I mean, it's there, it's an article of

01:50:42.100 faith in Sunni Islam. He says, the second coming of Christ means we will begin to look at the Sharia

01:50:48.180 as he looked at the law, look at the intentions, you know, look at the wisdom, moral wisdom behind

01:50:53.940 that, and just don't turn into a dry set of laws, which just, you know, implement without, you know,

01:50:59.700 thinking of the consequences. I think there's such deep wisdom there in the, in the Christian

01:51:03.620 tradition, which is important for us Muslims. There are a lot of, I mean, wisdom in the Muslim

01:51:08.580 tradition too, I think to share with the world, but we have to figure out some more wisdom.

01:51:13.700 Couldn't we? Yeah. I mean, one thing, I mean, like I see people becoming so obsessed with race in the

01:51:19.700 Western world since I came to America a few years ago. I mean, people speak about all the colors,

01:51:24.020 skin colors of their, and, and I understand that there's a history behind that. There's a,

01:51:27.460 of course, persecution and discrimination of Babel. But I mean, one thing we can say proudly as

01:51:33.460 Muslims is that, well, we never had that Islam is a colorblind religion. And you know, who was

01:51:37.780 fascinated by that? Malcolm X. He was, of course, a leader in the African-American community. He was,

01:51:46.260 because of the persecution and discrimination, he had also a very negative view of the white people.

01:51:51.540 But his life changed when he went to Mecca. And that's a very powerful story. And he saw Muslims

01:51:56.980 with blue eyes and blonde hair and black skin and brown skin. And he said, they're all brothers

01:52:02.340 in faith, they're not discriminating against each other. So he became post, you know, racial,

01:52:09.300 thanks to his exposure to that universalism in Islam, which I'm proud of as a Muslim.

01:52:14.260 So I think there are great things in our traditions to share with each other. But we have to overcome

01:52:19.620 the totalitarian impulse, as you said, the coercive interpretations, the hateful interpretations.

01:52:25.140 And there's, there's ground to work in every tradition. And I'm trying to do my

01:52:30.260 part as a, you know, Muslim living in the 21st century is who's concerned about the

01:52:34.900 future of the world and the Ummah.

01:52:36.980 Much appreciated. Thank you very much for talking to me.

01:52:40.900 Thank you very much for talking to me. This was a great conversation.

01:52:43.700 Where are you?

01:52:45.220 I'm in Washington DC right now.

01:52:46.580 You're in Washington.

01:52:47.300 Yeah, at the Cato Institute offices.

01:52:49.060 Well, it would be nice to see you if I, I'm going to come to Washington next year,

01:52:53.140 and it would be very nice to see you.

01:52:54.740 Oh, inshallah, as we say, I would love to. Let's break bread together and speak about

01:52:59.460 all these great issues, which we should all think about.

01:53:04.580 Thanks a lot.

01:53:05.380 Thank you. Thank you very much.

201. Islam, Christ, and Liberty ｜ Mustafa Akyol

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