Would Islam have become radicalized without Euro-American intervention in the Middle East. Would the US have a high incarceration rate and massive OD death incidence without a drug war? The question answer themselves.
I'm curious how you can refer to Islam as "fundamentally liberal" when it considers a womans testimony to be worth half that of a mans, and her brain to be deficient. A religion that allows slavery (which is still flourishing in the Islamic world) and permits the murder and rape of non-believers.
There is no possibility of separation of religious belief and politics in Quranic Islam. It is a unitary system. There is only Al-Islam v. all that is not: Dar al-Islam v. Dar al-Harb. One need only look at the history of Islamic conquest or read the Quran to know this. Or you could ask believing Muslims who have sought “asylum” in the west. They will tell you. Believe them.
I am not sure exactly what is meant by "Quranic Islam," but there scores of Muslims living in the world today who have no interest in a global caliphate or in a return to a time of Islamic conquest.
Quranic Islam, is Islam that follows the Quran (Sunnah and Hadith), analogous to fundamentalist, biblical literalist Christians - with the key difference being that in fundamentalist Islam there is no conception of separation of religious and secular authority. They are inseparable; there is no “…render unto caesar..” underlying the acceptance of a non-religious government or civil authority - as evident from the earliest days of Christianity.
Of course there are many Muslims, particularly among those who have emigrated to the west, who do not embrace fundamentalist, historical Islam. But there are also very many who do. Are you familiar with the situation in The UK, and in Europe more generally? Very large numbers of recent immigrants from islamic countries not only will not accept civil laws that deviate from Sharia, but who want to see Sharia become the governing law of their adopted countries.
The situation is even worse in the Islamic world itself, where secular governments have been overthrown and replaced with governments based on Quranic Islam (e.g.Afghanistan, Iran) or where a still nominally secular government has moved progressively towards rule by islamist law (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan).
So no, contrary to the recent article, Islam is not “…a Fundamentally Liberal Faith.” that has been corrupted by “political Islam”; not theologically, not historically, and not according to the beliefs and practices of a majority of its adherents around the world.
This is too vast a discussion to have here, but I'll say a few things.
I agree that Christianity has been able to count on remarkable theological resources to develop liberal-friendly models of itself. And one reason for this, one reason why Christianity has proven quite hospitable to liberal arrangements, is its incredible scriptural breadth—written across a far greater time span, to a far more diverse set of peoples. I mean, the Quran is 10% the length of the Protestant Bible. This is also why, no matter how imaginative you can get, there is probably a "Christian [insert whatever you want here]" movement or school of thought. Christianity's central source is capacious enough to accommodate every reading under the sun. The sheer volume of Christian scripture, written across roughly 1,500 years by dozens of authors in multiple languages addressing vastly different historical circumstances, produces an enormous range of theological possibilities to draw from—including ones that can be marshaled in support of liberal arrangements. The Quran, by contrast, is understood by Muslims to have been revealed over 20 or so years to a single prophet in a specific historical context, which produces a more unified but less internally diverse textual tradition.
The "render unto Caesar" distinction is quite powerful, sure, but it obviously doesn't produce liberal democracy on its own. Centuries of Christian theocracy, religious warfare, and ecclesiastical domination of civil authority preceded the more settled versions that are friendlier toward liberalism. The separation of church and state had to be fought for against fierce Christian resistance. The resources were there, but they had to be activated, and many times they weren't. As we speak, there are countless millions of Muslims who have found a way to marry their faith commitments to their embrace of multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious society.
I am not making a comparative claim about religions here—this isn't a 1 v. 1 pitting Christianity against Islam. I am a Christian, myself. So I obviously think it's got the best theological system overall. But if you want to claim that there structural asymmetries between Christianity and Islam, and that the latter is more intrinsically inclined to extremism than the former, what Nosseir's piece argues is that Islam's liberal-friendly resources have been suppressed by political Islam rather than being absent from the tradition. That's a contested claim, but it deserves engagement on its merits.
You've very clearly described some of the differences between Christian and Islamic theology, illustrating the key reasons Christianity is inherently more amenable to a liberal, humanistic world view, which is compatible with secular political authority. I understand Nosseir's argument. But it seems to me not only to avoid, but actively deflects from the consideration of an fundamental difference between Islam an all other major faiths, Islam's intentional and complete melding of religious and political authority, which seems to me to explain the supposed rise of modern "political" Islam. It is not, in fact, a flawed interpretation of Islam, a basic component of that belief system. It is therefore inherently much more difficult to reconcile Islam to any form of secular political authority.
The problem with holy texts is not in how they're interpreted, but that they must be. Religions are inherently stupid, regardless of whether they're inherently political, and should be excised.
Like the Christian religions, Islam, too, has been a political project from the very beginning. It took centuries and countless wars to extract the fangs of the Christian religions. And even now, the zombie of Christian nationalism rears its head.
If I understand your claim, I think this is a conceptual error. You said: "These religions have been political projects from the beginning" ... and if by this you simply mean that they have intersected with politics since the beginning, then that's historically true, of course. But if you are characterizing their *intrinsic design,* if you are suggesting that this is what they are by nature, then that's not a correct read on these faiths. These are revealed religions, not political programs. They are attempts—whatever you think about how successful they've been on this score—at transmitting a correct story about reality. They are not fundamentally about how society ought to be configured, although their respective tenets often steer adherents toward some political conclusions more than other ones. The fact that Christianity and Islam have frequently been politicized, significantly distoring their core tenets in the process, is not a reason for thinking they have been "political projects from the beginning."
Both religions—Christianity and Islam—are universalist, in contrast to Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This inevitably leads to an influence on politics. Even Buddhism could not escape this dynamic. Furthermore, various rulers have utilized their respective religions as instruments of power. The so-called Investiture Controversy—the dispute over who appoints bishops: the Pope or the King—lasted for centuries.
This is an intelligent and important distinction between Islam as a faith and political Islam as a domination project. But I think the article remains too theoretical about the Islam most societies are actually dealing with today.
It is certainly possible that Islam contains pluralist and liberal traditions, just as Christianity and Judaism do. But politically, people judge civilizations partly by the institutional forms they repeatedly produce in practice, not only by their highest internal aspirations.
The real question is not whether Islam can support pluralism in theory. The real question is why pluralist interpretations have remained comparatively weak institutionally across much of the Muslim world while Islamist, authoritarian, or communal forms remain far more politically powerful.
That does not justify anti-Muslim essentialism. But neither can the sociological reality simply be dismissed as misunderstanding or Western prejudice.
The challenge is not theoretical compatibility with pluralism. The challenge is building durable institutions that actually sustain it. If Islam has it takes to live peacefully in the modern world, let it show it rather than talk about it.
You provide an argument for seeing "the challenge" as one thing rather than another, but in fact there are many challenges—not just one. Yes, one of those challenges is, as you say, "building durable institutions that actually sustain it." But the reason it is *also* important to establish Islam's fundamental and substantive compatibility with liberalism is precisely because that alleged compatibility is often called into question or outright denied—often by hostile political elements like a right-wing information space that needs ongoing targets to vilify. (The Texas GOP didn't perpetrate anti-Muslim discrimination in a vacuum.)
I do want to note that your response here, or the template of your response, is correct in almost all cases—for example, a piece on how people need to understand that worship of the Crusades is not an element in most Christians' faith expressions would be a waste of time, since it's already broadly accepted that the Christian tradition can give rise to both militant and more peaceful and liberal-friendly forms. There is no fundamental challenge for Christianity, aside from certain New Atheist-like corners of the internet, on the question of whether it can give rise to a faith expression that is compatible with a liberal political configuration. Islam, however, is at least in the West frequently flattened into its worst manifestations. That is, when it comes to this particular faith, people less frequently frame bad actions perpetrated by a member of that faith as an *extremist* distorting the faith and instead more frequently cast those actions as the straightforward interpretation of the sacred texts and the historical movement's traditions, or as the predictable consequences of taking that faith's tenets seriously or literally. Indeed, this is one of the author's animating interests of the piece: laying out how a Western's conceptualization of Islam shouldn't be reduced to ISIS or whatever.
It’s like people who watch communism fail over and over and continually claim “it’s not REAL communism”. No, the failure is intrinsic to the telos.
The best case for Islam is people not really believing it. To treat it the way “cultural Catholics” treat the church today. They kind of sort of have some faith but ignore large parts they don’t like, and it’s mostly a social club.
I understand the distinction between Islam and political Islam that the author posits. But if it is to be anything more than wishful thinking, I think it requires more than is articulated here. What’s missing for me is the underlying, and unsupported, assumption of a “fundamentally liberal” theology. By way of example, but not with modern politics, we could go back to the Spanish Inquisition. I expect few would argue that the Inquisition was not a Politicized Christianity that betrayed a fundamentally different theology. Bur was Christianity at the time fundamentally liberal? Perhaps. But it might depend on what you mean by that. What does it mean to be “fundamentally liberal”? I see little evidence for it from what I know of Islam. And the author’s passing reference to Quran 42:38–which strikes me as much tribal as it does democratic—is not exactly an endorsement of the Enlightenment. [Nor do the Quran's provisions about women and Jews strike me as fundamentally liberal; but I am in no position to make an educated assessment. That is why I ask.] But if it is to be taken seriously as a bedrock democratic principle, perhaps the author could point to some real world examples of such democracy in action, or other liberal principles like women and minority rights (many of which were frankly also late to the game in Western civilization, but they did arrive; their late arrival raises the same question: what does it mean to be fundamentally liberal?).
One distinction worth making when interpreting descriptions like "fundamentally liberal"—or similar phrases—is the distinction between someone (1) showing how a faith tradition is, at its core, compatible with the target political configuration and (2) trying to establish that that faith tradition is in some important respect *especially* aligned with the liberal democratic values in question, either that it's better than other faiths at aligning with them, or that it picks out a liberal configuration more than it does other ones. Most of the time, and certainly in this piece, our focus is on the first. We are *not* saying Islam is more liberal-friendly than other faiths. We are *not* saying that there is only one way to understand the Islamic tradition: as a faith perfectly in sync with liberal principles. Instead, we are making the case that Islam, as a faith tradition—but not just as a faith tradition; also as an aggregate of the religious experiences of its billions of adherents—shouldn't be reduced to anti-liberal manifestations of it, or to be seen as reflecting some intrinsic commitment to violence or even underwriting extremism.
Thank you for this. For 25 years, I have said that it is the responsibility of the larger Islamic community to critique and oppose the radical fringe. Of course, as an evangelical Christian, it is MY responsibility to point out the analogous errors of Christian Nationalism.
May we both be diligent. I almost said "successful", but God asks of us our obedience, not our results.
Would Islam have become radicalized without Euro-American intervention in the Middle East. Would the US have a high incarceration rate and massive OD death incidence without a drug war? The question answer themselves.
I'm curious how you can refer to Islam as "fundamentally liberal" when it considers a womans testimony to be worth half that of a mans, and her brain to be deficient. A religion that allows slavery (which is still flourishing in the Islamic world) and permits the murder and rape of non-believers.
There is no possibility of separation of religious belief and politics in Quranic Islam. It is a unitary system. There is only Al-Islam v. all that is not: Dar al-Islam v. Dar al-Harb. One need only look at the history of Islamic conquest or read the Quran to know this. Or you could ask believing Muslims who have sought “asylum” in the west. They will tell you. Believe them.
I am not sure exactly what is meant by "Quranic Islam," but there scores of Muslims living in the world today who have no interest in a global caliphate or in a return to a time of Islamic conquest.
Quranic Islam, is Islam that follows the Quran (Sunnah and Hadith), analogous to fundamentalist, biblical literalist Christians - with the key difference being that in fundamentalist Islam there is no conception of separation of religious and secular authority. They are inseparable; there is no “…render unto caesar..” underlying the acceptance of a non-religious government or civil authority - as evident from the earliest days of Christianity.
Of course there are many Muslims, particularly among those who have emigrated to the west, who do not embrace fundamentalist, historical Islam. But there are also very many who do. Are you familiar with the situation in The UK, and in Europe more generally? Very large numbers of recent immigrants from islamic countries not only will not accept civil laws that deviate from Sharia, but who want to see Sharia become the governing law of their adopted countries.
The situation is even worse in the Islamic world itself, where secular governments have been overthrown and replaced with governments based on Quranic Islam (e.g.Afghanistan, Iran) or where a still nominally secular government has moved progressively towards rule by islamist law (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan).
So no, contrary to the recent article, Islam is not “…a Fundamentally Liberal Faith.” that has been corrupted by “political Islam”; not theologically, not historically, and not according to the beliefs and practices of a majority of its adherents around the world.
This is too vast a discussion to have here, but I'll say a few things.
I agree that Christianity has been able to count on remarkable theological resources to develop liberal-friendly models of itself. And one reason for this, one reason why Christianity has proven quite hospitable to liberal arrangements, is its incredible scriptural breadth—written across a far greater time span, to a far more diverse set of peoples. I mean, the Quran is 10% the length of the Protestant Bible. This is also why, no matter how imaginative you can get, there is probably a "Christian [insert whatever you want here]" movement or school of thought. Christianity's central source is capacious enough to accommodate every reading under the sun. The sheer volume of Christian scripture, written across roughly 1,500 years by dozens of authors in multiple languages addressing vastly different historical circumstances, produces an enormous range of theological possibilities to draw from—including ones that can be marshaled in support of liberal arrangements. The Quran, by contrast, is understood by Muslims to have been revealed over 20 or so years to a single prophet in a specific historical context, which produces a more unified but less internally diverse textual tradition.
The "render unto Caesar" distinction is quite powerful, sure, but it obviously doesn't produce liberal democracy on its own. Centuries of Christian theocracy, religious warfare, and ecclesiastical domination of civil authority preceded the more settled versions that are friendlier toward liberalism. The separation of church and state had to be fought for against fierce Christian resistance. The resources were there, but they had to be activated, and many times they weren't. As we speak, there are countless millions of Muslims who have found a way to marry their faith commitments to their embrace of multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious society.
I am not making a comparative claim about religions here—this isn't a 1 v. 1 pitting Christianity against Islam. I am a Christian, myself. So I obviously think it's got the best theological system overall. But if you want to claim that there structural asymmetries between Christianity and Islam, and that the latter is more intrinsically inclined to extremism than the former, what Nosseir's piece argues is that Islam's liberal-friendly resources have been suppressed by political Islam rather than being absent from the tradition. That's a contested claim, but it deserves engagement on its merits.
You've very clearly described some of the differences between Christian and Islamic theology, illustrating the key reasons Christianity is inherently more amenable to a liberal, humanistic world view, which is compatible with secular political authority. I understand Nosseir's argument. But it seems to me not only to avoid, but actively deflects from the consideration of an fundamental difference between Islam an all other major faiths, Islam's intentional and complete melding of religious and political authority, which seems to me to explain the supposed rise of modern "political" Islam. It is not, in fact, a flawed interpretation of Islam, a basic component of that belief system. It is therefore inherently much more difficult to reconcile Islam to any form of secular political authority.
Islam cannot be started from Sharia.
The problem with holy texts is not in how they're interpreted, but that they must be. Religions are inherently stupid, regardless of whether they're inherently political, and should be excised.
Like the Christian religions, Islam, too, has been a political project from the very beginning. It took centuries and countless wars to extract the fangs of the Christian religions. And even now, the zombie of Christian nationalism rears its head.
If I understand your claim, I think this is a conceptual error. You said: "These religions have been political projects from the beginning" ... and if by this you simply mean that they have intersected with politics since the beginning, then that's historically true, of course. But if you are characterizing their *intrinsic design,* if you are suggesting that this is what they are by nature, then that's not a correct read on these faiths. These are revealed religions, not political programs. They are attempts—whatever you think about how successful they've been on this score—at transmitting a correct story about reality. They are not fundamentally about how society ought to be configured, although their respective tenets often steer adherents toward some political conclusions more than other ones. The fact that Christianity and Islam have frequently been politicized, significantly distoring their core tenets in the process, is not a reason for thinking they have been "political projects from the beginning."
Both religions—Christianity and Islam—are universalist, in contrast to Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This inevitably leads to an influence on politics. Even Buddhism could not escape this dynamic. Furthermore, various rulers have utilized their respective religions as instruments of power. The so-called Investiture Controversy—the dispute over who appoints bishops: the Pope or the King—lasted for centuries.
This is an intelligent and important distinction between Islam as a faith and political Islam as a domination project. But I think the article remains too theoretical about the Islam most societies are actually dealing with today.
It is certainly possible that Islam contains pluralist and liberal traditions, just as Christianity and Judaism do. But politically, people judge civilizations partly by the institutional forms they repeatedly produce in practice, not only by their highest internal aspirations.
The real question is not whether Islam can support pluralism in theory. The real question is why pluralist interpretations have remained comparatively weak institutionally across much of the Muslim world while Islamist, authoritarian, or communal forms remain far more politically powerful.
That does not justify anti-Muslim essentialism. But neither can the sociological reality simply be dismissed as misunderstanding or Western prejudice.
The challenge is not theoretical compatibility with pluralism. The challenge is building durable institutions that actually sustain it. If Islam has it takes to live peacefully in the modern world, let it show it rather than talk about it.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
You provide an argument for seeing "the challenge" as one thing rather than another, but in fact there are many challenges—not just one. Yes, one of those challenges is, as you say, "building durable institutions that actually sustain it." But the reason it is *also* important to establish Islam's fundamental and substantive compatibility with liberalism is precisely because that alleged compatibility is often called into question or outright denied—often by hostile political elements like a right-wing information space that needs ongoing targets to vilify. (The Texas GOP didn't perpetrate anti-Muslim discrimination in a vacuum.)
I do want to note that your response here, or the template of your response, is correct in almost all cases—for example, a piece on how people need to understand that worship of the Crusades is not an element in most Christians' faith expressions would be a waste of time, since it's already broadly accepted that the Christian tradition can give rise to both militant and more peaceful and liberal-friendly forms. There is no fundamental challenge for Christianity, aside from certain New Atheist-like corners of the internet, on the question of whether it can give rise to a faith expression that is compatible with a liberal political configuration. Islam, however, is at least in the West frequently flattened into its worst manifestations. That is, when it comes to this particular faith, people less frequently frame bad actions perpetrated by a member of that faith as an *extremist* distorting the faith and instead more frequently cast those actions as the straightforward interpretation of the sacred texts and the historical movement's traditions, or as the predictable consequences of taking that faith's tenets seriously or literally. Indeed, this is one of the author's animating interests of the piece: laying out how a Western's conceptualization of Islam shouldn't be reduced to ISIS or whatever.
Thanks for reading.
It’s like people who watch communism fail over and over and continually claim “it’s not REAL communism”. No, the failure is intrinsic to the telos.
The best case for Islam is people not really believing it. To treat it the way “cultural Catholics” treat the church today. They kind of sort of have some faith but ignore large parts they don’t like, and it’s mostly a social club.
I wonder what percentage of ruling parties in majority Muslim countries agree with you.
I understand the distinction between Islam and political Islam that the author posits. But if it is to be anything more than wishful thinking, I think it requires more than is articulated here. What’s missing for me is the underlying, and unsupported, assumption of a “fundamentally liberal” theology. By way of example, but not with modern politics, we could go back to the Spanish Inquisition. I expect few would argue that the Inquisition was not a Politicized Christianity that betrayed a fundamentally different theology. Bur was Christianity at the time fundamentally liberal? Perhaps. But it might depend on what you mean by that. What does it mean to be “fundamentally liberal”? I see little evidence for it from what I know of Islam. And the author’s passing reference to Quran 42:38–which strikes me as much tribal as it does democratic—is not exactly an endorsement of the Enlightenment. [Nor do the Quran's provisions about women and Jews strike me as fundamentally liberal; but I am in no position to make an educated assessment. That is why I ask.] But if it is to be taken seriously as a bedrock democratic principle, perhaps the author could point to some real world examples of such democracy in action, or other liberal principles like women and minority rights (many of which were frankly also late to the game in Western civilization, but they did arrive; their late arrival raises the same question: what does it mean to be fundamentally liberal?).
Thanks for this, Greg.
You probably already saw this, but in case you didn't, here's a piece that goes deeper on that question: https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/contrary-to-western-understanding
One distinction worth making when interpreting descriptions like "fundamentally liberal"—or similar phrases—is the distinction between someone (1) showing how a faith tradition is, at its core, compatible with the target political configuration and (2) trying to establish that that faith tradition is in some important respect *especially* aligned with the liberal democratic values in question, either that it's better than other faiths at aligning with them, or that it picks out a liberal configuration more than it does other ones. Most of the time, and certainly in this piece, our focus is on the first. We are *not* saying Islam is more liberal-friendly than other faiths. We are *not* saying that there is only one way to understand the Islamic tradition: as a faith perfectly in sync with liberal principles. Instead, we are making the case that Islam, as a faith tradition—but not just as a faith tradition; also as an aggregate of the religious experiences of its billions of adherents—shouldn't be reduced to anti-liberal manifestations of it, or to be seen as reflecting some intrinsic commitment to violence or even underwriting extremism.
I appreciate you elucidating that distinction further. And thanks for the link. I had not seen that before.
No , just trying to get out this message as widely as possible
Thank you for this. For 25 years, I have said that it is the responsibility of the larger Islamic community to critique and oppose the radical fringe. Of course, as an evangelical Christian, it is MY responsibility to point out the analogous errors of Christian Nationalism.
May we both be diligent. I almost said "successful", but God asks of us our obedience, not our results.
Did you mean to post this elsewhere?