April 4: ATLANTA

12 AM Luncheon: A Conversation with Mustafa Akyol, Callaway Center S-319 Emory University

5:30 PM: Barnes & Noble at Georgia Tech in-store book signing, 48 5th Street, NW Atlanta, GA 30308

April 5: ATHENS

5.30 PM: Lecture and book signing, University of Georgia, Miller Learning Center Room 250

April 6: ATLANTA

Dinner, lecture and book signing, at Istanbul Cultural Center, Alpharetta Branch

April 8: MIAMI

Dinner, lecture and book signing, Anatolia Cultural Center, Miami

April 9: MIAMI

10 AM: Panel at Middle East Studies Center at Florida International University

Luncheon and panel at Florida Atlantic University & Florida State College

April 10: ATLANTA

11:30 AM: Midtown Luncheon Series Program, “Media Freedom in Turkey,” Istanbul Center, Midtown 1349 w Peachtree St, Atlanta 30309

April 11: SOUTH CAROLINA

11 AM: Lecture, book signing and luncheon at Walker Institute, University of South Carolina

6 PM: Dinner, lecture and book signing at Thurmond Institute, Clemson University

April 12: DALLAS

6:30 PM: Lecture and book signing at the The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture

April 13: OKLAHOMA CITY

9:00 AM: Lecture and book signing at Pegasus Theatre, Liberal Arts Building at University of Central Oklahoma

10:45 AM: Lecture and book signing at Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 555 Elm Avenue, Norman, OK 73019, University of Oklahoma

6:00 PM: Lecture and book signing at the Kerr McGee auditorium in the Meinders School of Business Oklahoma City University

April 14: WICHITA, KANSAS CITY

Lecture and book signing at Wichita State University

April 15: HOUSTON

April 17: SAN FRANCISCO

10:15 AM: Lecture and book signing at Los Altos Morning Forum

April 19: NEW YORK CITY

Evening lecture at NYU, details to be announced

April 20, NEW YORK CITY

2:00 – 4:00 PM: Lecture, discussion and book signing at Columbia University’s main campus in Hamilton Hall, room 702 (7th floor)

Watch Mustafa Akyol at TED, arguing for “Islamic liberalism.”

Read the piece in The Guardian »

Tuesday 22nd November

6.30 pm: Talk at CAABU (The Council for Arab-British Understanding), “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,”  Houses of Parliament, Committee Room Ten

Wednesday 23rd November

12.30 pm: A talk at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), “Is Islam incompatible with freedom?,” 2 Lord North Street, London, SW1 (door on Great Peter Street)

5 pm: Talk at the University of Warwick, “Islam and Liberty,” Maths and Stats Building MS.05

Thursday 24th November

6.30 pm: Talk at the London School of Economics Hayek Society.

Friday 25th November

4.00 pm: Talk at Westminster University, “Current Situation of Kurdish Issue in Turkey: Liberal Response,” 309 Fyvie Hall Theatre – Regent Street Campus, W1B2UW

6.30 pm: Talk at City Circle, “Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” Abrar House, 45 Crawford Place, W1H 4LP.

Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, recently became much more famous than it ever was. Early this month, it came out with a provocative issue whose cover presented a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, and the headline, “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” Shortly afterwards, the offices of the magazine were firebombed, and its website got hacked.

Luckily, no one died. But this incident underlined a recurrent conflict between European notions oreportedly, by a group of Turkish Muslims.f free speech and the Islamic notions of the sacred. The pro-Charlie Hebdodemonstrators that gathered outside Paris City Hall last Sunday were expressing one side of that dilemma by declaring their “right to blaspheme.” Even mainstream Muslim organizations, however, have long been arguing for laws against blasphemy.

Do we have an irreconcilable gap, then, between Islam and free speech?

I am sure many, among both Muslims and Westerners, would readily say “yes” to this question, but I am not one of them. I rather propose a different answer by differentiating between the moral and the legal spheres.

Let me explain. The problem with some of Europeans who declare their “right to blasphemy” is that they are asking from Muslims to abandon their respect for the sacred. “Learning to take a joke is part of living in Western society,” writes a commentator on the web. “Nothing is sacred here — get used to it.”

But, well, no. Neither Muslims nor other believers will “get used to” the idea that nothing is sacred. A sense of the sacred is the very thing that makes them believers. And, as Nietzsche once put it well, the sacred is whatever it is in a culture at which one cannot laugh.

However, having a sense of the sacred is one thing, forcing others to respect it, by law or brute force, is another. And while no Muslim worthy of his name would lose his respect for God, the Prophet Muhammad, and other symbols of Islam, he might well refrain from using legal prosecution or violent reaction to those who do not show the same respect.

My basis for this claim is nothing other than the holiest source of Islam, the Quran. The most relevant verse on this topic, the one that tells Muslims what to do in the face of mockery of their faith, reads as follows:

“When you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.” (4:140)

As I explain in my book, in my chapter on “Freedom from Islam,” what we see suggested here is a civilized form of disapproval: Muslims are not supposed to be a part of a discourse that mocks Islam. But all they have to do is to stay away from it. And even then, that is only until the discourse changes. Once mockery ends, dialogue can restart. (By the way, this verse is from a “Medinan” chapter. It, in other words, comes from a later phase in which Muslims had military power, and thus it can’t be explained away as resulting from necessity.)

If we apply the spirit of this verse to the modern world, we can say that Muslims can boycott anti-Islamic rhetoric by refusing to join conversations, buying newspapers and magazines, or watching films and plays that mock the values of their faith. But that’s it. Disapproving and boycotting is the Quranic thing to do, whereas violence and threats are not.

So, if I were a French Muslim, I would end my subscription to Charlie Hebdo, if I had one. I would also express that I found their cartoons about Prophet Muhammad disrespectful to the Muslim community. But that’s it. The violent attack on the magazine cannot be justified or tolerated. And its “right to blasphemy” cannot be countered by anything other than a peaceful stance for the sacred.

Philip Jenkins’ September 2011 piece, “9/11: Did the Qur’an really make them do it?,” was an eye-opener on the touchy issue of religion and violence. For me it was also a reminder of an anti-Semitic piece of propaganda I found in an Istanbul bookstore years ago.

With the conspiracy-mongering title, Judaism and Freemasonry, this was a crude volume — one that, among other things, claimed to explain “Israeli terrorism” in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was full of photos showing Israeli soldiers attacking Palestinians, and presented huge captions that included verses from the Old Testament and especially the Book of Joshua. If the photograph showed Israelis breaking the bones of a Palestinian youngster — a globally notorious scene from the ‘80s — then the caption featured the biblical verse, “He shall break their bones” (Numbers 24: 8b, KJV). The book’s argument was blunt: The Israelis were torturing a nation because their God made them do it.

The more I learned about the Old Testament and the politics of the Middle East, the more I realized that what the book presented was not analysis but propaganda. It remains true that Israel’s 40-year-long occupation is a pretty brutal one, and that the Old Testament includes some belligerent passages, but the reality was far more complex. I noticed that Jewish religious sources also include many words of wisdom and compassion, and that there are many Jews who are willing to make peace with their Arab neighbors. Indeed, the militants who advocate and even practice violence in the name of Judaism are pretty marginal. Moreover, the source of their hatred is actually not the confrontational passages of the Torah, but the political and social situation that they are in.

In other words, such militants turn angry and violent not because they read their religious texts. Rather, they focus on the harsher parts of those texts because they are already angry and violent for temporal — often political — reasons.

The sloganization of Scripture

I often recall my experience with that anti-Semitic book and the way it misread the Hebrew Scriptures because I see that more and more people are doing the same thing with the Qur’an. When Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda bomb innocents, or when some fringe imam in a radical mosque preaches hatred toward non-Muslims, greenhorn “Islam experts” find passages in the Qur’an that apparently justify such extremism. And, it turns out, these extremists themselves refer to similar passages in the Qur’an or other Islamic sources. The situation is very similar to the strange agreement between the anti-Semites and the Jewish extremists on the incorrect notion that Judaism justifies carnage.

One common problem in all such misreading of the Scriptures amounts to the “sloganization” of certain texts. This is done by taking a part of the holy text out of its textual and historical context, and turning it into a slogan that “justifies” a mundane political agenda. For example, some Islamic revolutionaries, especially those who were inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, used to find a political message in this verse: “Those who do wrong will come to know by what a great reverse they will be overturned!” (26:227) But in fact the verse speaks about the punishment that God will hand down to unbelievers on judgment day, not about a this-worldly turn of events.

The crucial mistake is to overlook Islam’s scholarly tradition called “tafseer,” which is the study of the meaning of the Qur’an. Tafseer has a basic rule: A single verse or passage can’t be understood in itself. Instead, it has to be evaluated according to the other parts of the Qur’an, the general goals and principles of the holy text, and the way it was implemented by the prophet. Yet most radicals — be they Islamist or anti-Islamist — don’t have the time or the patience to “waste” on tafseer. They prefer to copy and paste the divine words to create powerful slogans for their immediate purposes.

Muslims and non-Muslims

For an example of sloganization, consider this Qur’anic verse, which is frequently quoted by Muslims who are hostile to other followers of the Abrahamic path:

“O (Muslim) believers! Don’t make friends with the Jews or Christians” (5:51).

But then look at this verse, which puts the one above in context:

“(Muslims!) God does not forbid you from being good to those who have not fought you in religion or driven you from your homes, or from being just towards them. God loves those who are just. God merely forbids you from taking as friends those who have fought you in religion and driven you from your homes and who supported your expulsion. Any who take them as friends are wrongdoers” (60:8-9).

One can also add to the discussion the Qur’anic verse that declares that “all who have faith in God and the Last Day and act rightly,” including “those who are Jews, and the Christians,” will be rewarded by God in the afterlife (2:62). From this premise, it is quite possible to build a Muslim form of ecumenism, in which other monotheistic faiths are seen as sisters, not enemies.

In short, if one looks at the Qur’an with a pre-existing aversion to non-Muslims, one can find verses that will justify and amplify this attitude. But if one looks with a more sober mind, one can see the contexts of those particular verses — and even find arguments for peace and tolerance.

Islam without extremes

That’s why, as I argue in my new book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, we have to look not only at the texts of Islam, but also at the contexts of Muslims. The texts are of course not unimportant — contrary to what an absolute sociological reductionist might claim — but they are always interpreted in the light of pre-existing cultures and mindsets. That is why more rigid schools of Islam have generally emerged in more culturally isolated and parochial locales, while more flexible and liberal schools of theology have tended to arise in more cosmopolitan centers of commerce. And that is why the decline of rationality and liberty in late medieval Islam was very much linked with the decline of economic dynamism, and the dawn of a “liberal Islam” is now especially evident in more cosmopolitan Muslim societies.

If one dismisses all such nuances, and looks at an alien faith only to see its deficiencies, one can find plenty of ways to denounce that alien faith and venerate one’s own. But as I learned from my encounter with anti-Semitic literature in that Istanbul bookstore some years ago, that is not the way to understand the world — or change it for the better.

I will have a 20-day lecture in the United States, beginning on Oct 5. Here are some of the highlights. (More will be added soon!)

Oct 5: Barnes & Noble, Redlands, CA (5.30 pm)

Oct 6: Peace Catalyst, Seattle (First Free Methodist Church, 6:30pm – 8:00pm)

Oct 7: Discovery Institute, Seattle, noon

Oct 7: Sullivan Hall School of Law, Seattle University,  8 PM

Oct 8-9: Anatolian Cultures Festival, Costa Mesa, CA

Oct 10: Stanford University

Oct 13: Cato Institute, Washington DC

Oct 17: Heritage Foundation, Washington DC

Since 9/11, much ink has been spilled on the troubles of the world of Islam. The problem was painfully obvious: There were only a few functioning democracies in the Muslim world, and simply none among the Arabs. Some even presumed a fundamental contradiction between Islam and democracy. Islam, they argued, could only produce dictatorial regimes.

But there was a serious flaw in this argument. Most of the Middle Eastern dictators — Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Bashar al-Assad of Syria — were secular, not Islamic, figures. In fact, the Islamic groups in these countries, such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and its various franchises, were often brutally suppressed by the secular autocrats in question.

Read more in The Daily ».