October 22, 2025

Mustafa Akyol — How Free Is The Muslim World?

51 minutes

In this conversation from 2020, Alex Aragona speaks with Mustafa Akyol as he explores whether Islam can be compatible with liberalism, and his recent research on freedom in Muslim-majority countries.

References from Episode 70 with Mustafa Akyol

Mustafa Akyol is the author of Rethinking the Kurdish Question: What Went Wrong, What Next? (Turkish), Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case For Liberty, The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims, and his book set for release in April 2021, Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance (all available titles hyperlinked to Amazon Canada store pages).

You can read Mustafa’s articles featured on his profile on the CATO Institute’s website at this link.

The concluding segment of this podcast was dedicated to discussing Mustafa’s findings in his study, Freedom in the Muslim World, which was published on the Cato Institute’s website and is available for reading here.

Mustafa quotes the observation that Islam had compatible socio-legal setups for embracing liberal society early on had it abided by its foundational teachings from Professor David Forte’s article, Islam’s Trajectory. This article can be read on the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s website at this link.

One of the themes in his upcoming book, Reopening Muslim Minds, Mustafa cites Ash’arism as one of the theological paradigms predating modernity which gave rise to the insularity in Islamic philosophy towards thoughts not originating from revelation. The journal Studia Islamica has an article recounting the religious history of Ash’arism and can be accessed at this link through an active JSTOR account.

Mustafa briefly mentions the Euthyphro Dilemma (Wikipedia), Divine Command Theory (Michael W. Austin, Eastern Kentucky University), and Ethical Objectivism (Oxford Reference) whilst discussing the different camps in Islamic thought. More can be read about these topics through their respective hyperlinks.

You can read more about philosopher John Locke’s premises on toleration of religion and heresy here (A Letter Concerning Toleration courtesy of McMaster University), as well as his view on the separation of church and state at this link (Liberty Fund).

While literature on Islamic liberalism is vast, a good place to start is this article titled What Is Liberal Islam?: The Sources of Enlightend Muslim Thought featured in the Journal of Democracy at this link.

This article on Deutsche Welle summarizes the domestic and international tensions stemming from the cartoons of religious caricatures that were published in France.

Mustafa quotes Daniel Philpott’s book, Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World (available on Amazon Canada), about how Islam “had seeds of freedom, but those seeds need to be cultivated.”

You can read the excerpt where the French jurist, Jean Bodin, commended the religious freedom of the Ottoman empire compared to the denominational violence amongst Christians in Europe in Daniel Goffman’s book, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe here.

Here are Wikipedia articles to the controversy of Islamic scarfs in France, policing over the burkini, and Saudi Arabia’s legislation on public head coverings for women.

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By Institute for Liberal Studies

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