Mustafa Akyol - Reopening Muslim Minds

Anyone who can liberate the Malay Muslim mind is a dangerous threat. That is why the authorities had to censure Mustafa Akyol. They detained him, interrogated him and made his immediate future uncertain.

Mariam Mokhtar, Malaysian journalist, Oct 2017

O n September 21, 2017, I took the very long journey from the small town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, with no clue about what awaited me in this far end of the world.

At that time, I was a visiting fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley Collegean initiative aimed at cherishing classical liberal values, such as freedom of speech within American academia. What took me to Malaysia was also a liberal initiative, albeit one that operated within a very different milieu. Named Islamic Renaissance Front, or IRF, this was a small but vocal organization founded by faithful Malay Muslims who challenged the oppressive and intolerant interpretations of Islam in their countrywith arguments from Islam itself.

My acquaintance with the IRF had a history. The organization had hosted me in Malaysia three times before, organizing seminars at universities, institutes, and other public venues. In 2016, it also published the Malay version of my 2011 book, Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. The founding leader of IRF, Dr. Ahmad Farouk Musa, was energized with the attention Malay Muslims were giving to foreign voices like mine. He just had a concern with the Inquisition, the seriousness of which I had not yet grasped.

On this trip, the first event on my schedule was a panel on how rational theology and philosophy flourished in early Islam and how their later decline marked an intellectual suicide that still haunts usas we shall also see in this book. To an attentive audience, I argued that we Muslims need to revisit some of the ideas that have been banned to us as heresy for about a thousand years.

The next day, at another public venue in Kuala Lumpur, I spoke at the second panel on my schedule, which probed a sensitive topic: apostasy from Islam.

In my speech, I argued that apostates should be neither executed nor rehabilitated, but just left alone with their conscience. I referred to Islamic scholars who have reformist views on this matter, and also I reminded my audience of a Quranic phrase: La ikraha fi al-din, or There is no compulsion in religion. Yes, apostasy was condemned as a capital crime in classical Islamic law, I explained, but this only reflected the medieval norms according to which leaving the religious community also implied political treason. Times have changed, I noted, and our laws and attitudes must change as well.

In the same speech, I also added that if a Muslim loses faith in the religion, dictates would achieve nothing. For faith is a sincere conviction in the heart and mind that cannot be imposed from the outside. Faith, I emphatically said, is not something you can police.

Well, speak of the devil, as the saying goes, and he shall appear.

As the panel ended and I was getting ready to leave, a group of serious-looking men approached me. Are you Mustafa Akyol? asked one of them. I said, yes, wondering who he was. As-salamu alaykum, the man said. We are the religion police. Then he showed me his card, which defined his job really as religion enforcement officer.

The officers just wanted to ask a few questions. Supposedly, they had heard complaints about my speech, and now they were to investigate what I had said. We got the recorded video of your talk, the senior officer said. We will watch it and then inform you about the next step. He also asked me if I really quoted the Quranic phrase There is no compulsion in religion? I affirmed, yes, wondering why that could be a problem.

The officers also noted that they didnt like my lecture planned for the next daya conversation on my more recent book, The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims. Apparently the problem was the events subtitle, which read, Commonalities Between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We dont like that kind of stuff, the senior officer plainly told me, making me recall the obsession in the country of drawing sharp boundaries between Abrahamic religionsto the absurd extent of banning Christians from using the word Allah, which Arab Christians have used for centuries without any question.

Then, after this short interrogation, the religion police let me go, and I thought that was it.

The next morning, however, I woke up in my hotel room to read in the Malay media that I had been summoned to their headquartersto the government ministry called Federal Territories Islamic Affairs Department, or, shortly, JAWI. My hosts suggested that we should cancel my last lecture and I should leave the country as soon as possible, to deal with JAWIs questions through a lawyer and from afar. Following this advice, I packed my bags, bought souvenirs for my wife, and headed to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Around 8 P.M., I checked in and got my boarding pass. When I arrived at the passport control area, however, I realized that my adventure in Malaysia wasnt yet over.

The female officer who looked at my passport turned a bit nervous when she put my name in her computer. You need to wait, sir, she said. She then called some police officers, who called other police officers, who soon escorted me to the police unit at the airport. There I learned that JAWI had issued a nationwide arrest order for me, to make sure I didnt leave the country.

That was the beginning of a very long night. I was taken from the airport to a nearby police station, then to another official building, going through sluggish processes and also long distances around the unfamiliar Malay capital. Finally, toward 5 A.M., I was taken to the JAWI headquarters, where I was locked up in a detention room. No one was rude or harsh toward me, but the many unknowns were nevertheless distressing. I kept thinking about my children and my wife, who had given birth to our second son just weeks before my arrival in Malaysia.

In the morning, around 8 A.M., my door was unlocked and I was told that we were heading to the Sharia court. Finally, after another long drive and some waiting, I entered the court, which must have been the Inquisition that Dr. Musa had been talking about. I found two young veiled female officers sitting next to an older religious scholar with a long bearda