Mustafa Akyol - Reopening Muslim Minds
Here you can read online Mustafa Akyol - Reopening Muslim Minds full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. publisher: St. Martins Publishing Group, genre: Religion. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
![No cover](/templates/la/images/nocover.jpg)
- Book:Reopening Muslim Minds
- Author:
- Publisher:St. Martins Publishing Group
- Genre:
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
- 100
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
Reopening Muslim Minds: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Reopening Muslim Minds" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Reopening Muslim Minds — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Reopening Muslim Minds" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
![The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 1](/uploads/posts/book/263883/images/9781250256072.jpg)
![The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 2](/uploads/posts/book/263883/images/titlepage.jpg)
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
To my beloved sons, Levent Taha & Efe Rauf,
so that they may grow up with both Islamic faith & universal ethics
Political Islam is only an aspect of the overall problem of Islam in the modern world.
Ali A. Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, 2010
The task before the modern Muslim is, therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past.
Muhammad Iqbal,
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, 1930
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
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «Reopening Muslim Minds»
Look at similar books to Reopening Muslim Minds. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book Reopening Muslim Minds and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.