Book completed
Jul. 22nd, 2021 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeReopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance, by Mustafa Akyol. I thought this would be a good fit for me since I know a fair amount about Islam and I also hoped there would be insights on how half of the U.S. could return to "reason, freedom, and tolerance." Well... I did learn that thanks to political pressures over the centuries, a great many Muslims live in countries where practicing their religion means they are not ever to use their own consciences - the concept doesn't even really exist in Islam. (And that got me wondering about other major worldviews, but that's for another day.)
I was also somewhat frustrated with the author, who is a Turk who now lives in the United States and is a fellow at the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank. He seems to have a rather narrow understanding of "communitarianism" (an opposite of "libertarianism"); he seems to equate it with community control over people's lives, as can happen in Islam. At one point he calls it "a losing strategy in the modern world." Yet elsewhere he tells us that when they've calculated "Islamicity Indices" to see which countries best match the values of Islam (which he lists as safety and security, socioeconomic justice, health care, and business environment) and they've found that New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Ireland are at the top of the list (not Islamic countries), he fails to note that these are all countries where communitarianism is strong.
Anyway, his main point is that Islam has three ways built into it that would support greater "reason, freedom, and tolerance," but none of them has much influence today. One was the scholarly movement known as the Mu'tazila, who encouraged people to interpret the Quran and other traditional sources through the light of reason, rather than just relying on existing legal interpretations. Another was the work of the scholar Ibn Rushd, who brought numerous ideas from Aristotle and Plato into Islamic thought. Finally, and more recently, the Murji'ites taught that in most cases, it is better to leave the judging of others to God rather than taking it on ourselves.
Unfortunately, although this information is interesting, I can't see how his work is likely to do much at all to influence the practice of Islam. He left out the psychology of it. It's as if one would hope to improve the thinking of Trump followers by saying, "but... science! but... the Enlightenment!" And science and reason are everyday practices in the Western world; they haven't been suppressed for centuries.
Nevertheless, it was interesting.
I was also somewhat frustrated with the author, who is a Turk who now lives in the United States and is a fellow at the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank. He seems to have a rather narrow understanding of "communitarianism" (an opposite of "libertarianism"); he seems to equate it with community control over people's lives, as can happen in Islam. At one point he calls it "a losing strategy in the modern world." Yet elsewhere he tells us that when they've calculated "Islamicity Indices" to see which countries best match the values of Islam (which he lists as safety and security, socioeconomic justice, health care, and business environment) and they've found that New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Ireland are at the top of the list (not Islamic countries), he fails to note that these are all countries where communitarianism is strong.
Anyway, his main point is that Islam has three ways built into it that would support greater "reason, freedom, and tolerance," but none of them has much influence today. One was the scholarly movement known as the Mu'tazila, who encouraged people to interpret the Quran and other traditional sources through the light of reason, rather than just relying on existing legal interpretations. Another was the work of the scholar Ibn Rushd, who brought numerous ideas from Aristotle and Plato into Islamic thought. Finally, and more recently, the Murji'ites taught that in most cases, it is better to leave the judging of others to God rather than taking it on ourselves.
Unfortunately, although this information is interesting, I can't see how his work is likely to do much at all to influence the practice of Islam. He left out the psychology of it. It's as if one would hope to improve the thinking of Trump followers by saying, "but... science! but... the Enlightenment!" And science and reason are everyday practices in the Western world; they haven't been suppressed for centuries.
Nevertheless, it was interesting.