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Cato Institute Book Forum: Sharia, the Modern State, and Freedom — A Reformist Perspective

Mustafa Akyol, senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, moderates a discussion with Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, emeritus professor of law at Emory University, and Matthew Cavedon, Director of Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice, on separating Sharia from the coercive power of the state, drawing on An-Na’im’s chapter in Akyol’s edited volume No Compulsion in Religion — No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom.

Mustafa Akyol: Hello, and thanks for joining us on this Cato Institute online book forum. My name is Mustafa Akyol, and I’m a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity here at Cato, focusing on Islam, modernity, and public policy. Today I’m pleased to welcome you to this online discussion titled “Sharia, the Modern State, and Freedom: A Reformist Perspective.”

Why discuss Sharia, the legal tradition of Islam? Because it’s a very controversial topic in the world today — not just in parts of the Muslim world, but increasingly in the West as well. But it’s a discussion that generally takes place without much nuance, understanding, or fairness. We’ll try to overcome that simplistic view of Sharia while acknowledging and addressing legitimate concerns about religious and civil liberties.

One basic truth I think we should put out there is that Sharia does not really mean “law” in the modern sense. Instead, just like the halakha in Judaism, it’s a way of life, which includes many personal practices such as regular prayers, dietary rules, or dress codes. So when a Muslim fasts in the holy month of Ramadan, or wears a headscarf willingly, that is Sharia voluntarily observed, and it doesn’t violate freedom — it’s an exercise of freedom. But when a state enforces Sharia as the law of the land — by mandating headscarves, for example, or going after so-called heretics or apostates — then freedom can be severely curtailed. So for modern-day Muslims, what is the right way to think about Sharia in a way that protects freedom for everyone — for pious Muslims themselves, who understand it differently, and for other people too?

One of the most erudite and innovative scholars addressing this question in our day and age is Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, whom we’re honored to have on our forum today. Originally a scholar of law from Sudan, where he personally observed the perils of weaponized religion, Dr. An-Na’im has devoted much of his academic life, in America at Emory University, where he’s emeritus professor, to developing an Islamic basis for human rights and constitutional government. His pioneering books include Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law, and the 2008 book Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia. More recently, Dr. An-Na’im contributed to the Cato Institute book that I edited, No Compulsion in Religion, No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom, which you can download as a free e‑book on our website, and order copies. Today we’ll hear from Dr. An-Na’im some of the insights he shared in that book, in the chapter titled “Separating the Sharia and the State.” Then we’ll hear from my Cato Institute colleague, Matthew Cavedon, whom we’re also delighted to have on this forum. Besides his important work at Cato as director of the Project on Criminal Justice, Matthew is a scholar of religion — a theologian, if I can say — and he’s also a former student of Professor An-Na’im at Emory University. In a recent article, he looked at this issue of religion, coercion, and freedom from an interfaith perspective — how it’s meaningful to other religious traditions, to Christians, today as well. So we’ll hear from him too.

So, gentlemen, many thanks to both of you for joining our panel, and many thanks to all of you joining us online today. Our viewers can send us questions online — please, on our webpage, on Facebook, YouTube, or X, send your questions, identify yourself, and we’ll be happy to get to them. We already have a few and we’ll, inshallah, get to them as well.

Dr. An-Na’im, let’s begin with you. As I noted, you’re originally from Sudan, and there, in the early ’80s, you saw how your own teacher, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha — a pious Muslim with reformist views — was executed by the regime for so-called apostasy. In this book, No Compulsion in Religion, I began the discussion by asking you about that incident, which you witnessed, and which shaped your perspective on religion and freedom. Can you remind us how that injustice happened, and what lessons you took from it?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Well, okay — salaam alaikum.

Mustafa Akyol: Alaikum salaam.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Thank you very much, Mustafa, for this opportunity, and greetings to everybody. Sheikh Mahmoud had been formative and transformative in my life since I was a student at the University of Khartoum in the 1960s — in fact, I joined his movement in 1967, ’68. I say formative and transformative because it was early enough in my life to shape my own thinking about Islam and human rights, and transformative in that, constantly — he was a Sufi, an engineer by profession, but formed a movement, and he had a methodology of education and instruction. I think he represented a more fundamental threat to Islamists, to radical and conservative Islamists, than even the most extreme leftist Sudanese Marxists, because he was challenging from within the Islamic tradition, transforming our thinking about what Islam means and what Sharia means in our daily lives. Throughout his life, since the 1950s, he’d been persecuted in various ways, but never prosecuted, until the events of the early 1980s, when Nimeiri — our dictator at the time — was moving to implement Sharia as the law of the land for the first time in our history. That had never happened before, except during the Mahdist state in the nineteenth century, and even that was a very limited and preliminary practice. But Nimeiri had the advantage of having a modern state at his will.

And that’s the point I’d like to bring to our discussion now: the notion of the state is crucial here, because in Muslim history we never had the experience of the post-colonial state that we have today — centralized, bureaucratic, with massive, extensive powers reaching every aspect of life. This is new, and it is very insidious, because — as you know from Marxist or fascist or other extremist secular doctrines, and now from Islamists — the state can be an extremely destructive tool. That’s what happened with Nimeiri: he tried to use the state to enforce Sharia as the law of the land. Sheikh Mahmoud represented a challenge to that from within the Islamic tradition, which is why Nimeiri engineered a process whereby Taha was presented for trial and executed, in January of 1985. Sheikh Mahmoud, along with some of his students, including myself, had been in detention for a year and a half. We were released, and within one month of our release, Sheikh Mahmoud was prosecuted, convicted — his conviction upheld by Nimeiri himself — and executed within four weeks of his release from prison. It was a very, very arbitrary process; there was a travesty of justice even in the process itself, which I explain in the book. And I think that incident underlines a topic we discuss in the book — this whole idea of criminalizing apostasy. Dr. Abdullah Saeed has a chapter on that, making the case against it, and I agree with him — I’ve written the same. There’s nothing in the Qur’an that punishes people for losing their belief in Islam; that’s between them and God, a matter for the afterlife. But the irony is that when apostasy is criminalized, real ex-Muslims are targeted, and fellow Muslims can be targeted too, by being told, “you’ve actually become an apostate through these heretical ideas” — which is what happened to Mahmoud Taha. So I think we should accept, in Muslim-majority societies, that people have their opinions and their conscience, and it’s not a matter for the state.

Mustafa Akyol: So from those experiences, you came to see this idea of injecting Sharia into the modern state as an innovation to some extent — an Islamist innovation, and wrong fundamentally. Just as the Marxists wanted to inject Marxism, others wanted to inject their own ideas into this massive new entity called the modern state. And you came to think: I need a secular state in order to live in accordance with Sharia out of my own genuine, free choice and conviction, personally and in community with other Muslims. So in Sudan there was this Islamist regime that went after people for their ideas, for enforcing what they understood as Sharia — whereas you say the best regime to live in as a Muslim is actually a secular one, which gives you religious freedom, freedom of expression, and the freedom to live your life. How did you come to that? Did you arrive at that conclusion immediately, or was it a process of rethinking Sharia?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Actually, historically, there was never really an Islamic state in Muslim history — not for a single day.

Mustafa Akyol: Okay, I see.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Because, you see, since the Prophet died — peace and blessings be upon him — before he was even buried, Muslims disagreed politically, and that disagreement has continued to the present day. There was never a time when Muslims agreed on what an Islamic state means or how to implement it — it wasn’t even a state in the modern sense of the term, as I was saying earlier. All of this came in a post-colonial context. In fact, I say an Islamic state is, in fact, a post-colonial project — it’s not an Islamic project, it’s not true to history. And the point about Sharia — as you quoted from the book — is that it has to be accepted and practiced; it doesn’t count if it’s not practiced genuinely and freely. The concept of niyyah, intention to comply, is central to Muslim practice in every respect — from prayer to religious practice to social and even commercial practices. If it’s not complied with voluntarily, it doesn’t count as Sharia — it’s irrelevant as Sharia. So the irony is using the coercive power of the state to enforce one view of Sharia, unique to the enforcer, contrary to the Muslim historical experience of fundamental and constant disagreement, vigorous debate and discussion — in order to enforce what is really more like a Marxist view of Sharia. And by the way, the Islamists in Sudan are the other side of the coin from the Marxists in Sudan — they accommodate each other in every respect, socially as well as politically.

Mustafa Akyol: So the niyyah, the intention, which you also emphasize in this chapter, is crucial. For example, let’s say Sharia, by most definitions, tells a Muslim woman to dress modestly — that might include wearing a headscarf. She should be doing that by her own will and choice, not by government enforcement — because if it’s enforced by government, there’s no good intention in it, right? That destroys the conviction and willingness behind it. Is that how we can frame it?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: That’s precisely what I mean, and therefore it’s counterproductive — not only a violation of the woman’s own right to make that choice, but the claim that the choice is made in the name of Islam, in the name of Sharia, is violated by the very act of coercion. It becomes irrelevant from a Sharia point of view.

Mustafa Akyol: Thank you. I’ll come back to your arguments — there’s lots to unpack there — but I want to welcome Matthew as well. Thank you for joining us, Matthew. You look at this from a Catholic point of view, a tradition you know very well. How do these discussions look to you from the sense of the Christian tradition? Did Catholics, and broader Christianity, also discuss religious coercion in their history — and were there “Islamists” in their camp too, so to speak — maybe there still are? What do you think?

Matthew Cavedon: Absolutely. The Catholic Church, in particular, as I’m sure a lot of folks know, has a long history of entanglement with governments and with coercion — this was a debate that occurred over the course of millennia. But the modern Catholic Church, beginning in the 1960s, has really put its foot down and said that coercion by government in matters of conscience and religion is not appropriate — that government’s job is to maintain public order only. A couple of different strands contributed to that. One is the principle that government is responsible not for the salvation of souls but for the maintenance of public order — that goes all the way back to Aristotle, even before Christianity; St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas philosophized about how the role of government is simply to keep things running as well as they can here on Earth in this life. That’s it — a pretty modest role. Nevertheless, it was understood for a long time that allowing certain seditious, corrosive religious views space in the public sphere was dangerous — that allowing religious disagreement, or rejection of the faith, to be spoken and practiced openly, could endanger others who might then “fall into” those problems.

The way the Catholic Church came around to backing liberty in religious matters involves both revelation and reason — terms important to both of you as well. From the revelation standpoint, Christianity itself began, and throughout the life of Jesus Christ, was taught peaceably. Christ had plenty of people who disagreed with him, and there’s even a passage in the Christian scriptures where people reject the Christian message and some of the early apostles ask, “should we punish them by calling down fire?” — and Jesus rejects that. So at the source, there was always this standard that the faith is not meant to be spread by force. And the reasoning is similar to what you just gave: intent matters. Without voluntary acceptance of the faith, there’s no value in it for the individual — you don’t get to heaven and say, “I was forced to be a good person, therefore I’m acceptable to God.” The other side of the coin is reason — the Catholic Church has always put a strong emphasis on understanding God as reasonable, as the logos, the Greek word John’s Gospel uses to describe God and Christ, the Word of God, as an invitation to reason, the reasonable orderer of the universe. Christian thought has long reflected on the teaching from Genesis that humans are made in the image and likeness of God to mean that human beings are reasonable, that our reasoning capacity is a gift from God — so we’re supposed to look at historical developments, at the realities of life together, and use those to deepen our understanding of what’s contained in revelation. Put the two together, and it allowed Catholics — at the starting point of scripture and revelation, and at the ending point of current experience — to look at diverse societies, at the emerging modern, pluralist world, and ask: is the proper response to try to get the government to force everybody to be like us, or not? Ultimately, the Church came to believe the appropriate, faithful response is to bring forward what we believe in dialogue, in peace, in truth.

I’ll close by saying today is the day the Catholic Church celebrates the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who I know is important to Muslims as well as Christians. Even in God’s interaction with Mary — God comes and announces what will happen through her, and then waits for her “yes.” God doesn’t impose the birth of Christ on Mary; God simply gives an invitation and waits for Mary to say, “your will be done.” That, I believe, is what Christians and Muslims together are seeking in our relationship with God, and ultimately why I believe liberty is where we come down as a matter of principle.

Mustafa Akyol: Thank you, Matthew. I once read in a Catholic text that what the Church does is “propose, but not impose” — you’re proposing the faith, sharing it with people; if they believe, it’s their choice, and if they don’t, it’s still their choice, and they still have the same dignity and rights as fellow human beings and citizens. So that argument can definitely be made through Christian theology, as you’ve well explained — it can be made through Islamic theology and jurisprudence as well. What fascinates me is that a lot of precepts for freedom and human dignity were there in Christianity from the very beginning — from the example of Jesus, from the New Testament — but Christians didn’t always highlight them enough; maybe they went the other way at times. But then, in the modern era, there’s a renewed movement toward more freedom — grounds for it were there all along. In Islam, we’re thinking about that freedom too — that’s what we’re doing in this book, No Compulsion in Religion: No Exceptions. The words “la ikraha fid-din,” “no compulsion in religion,” were always there in the Qur’an, but for centuries Muslims didn’t pay much attention to it — sometimes they even sidelined it. Some medieval jurists or exegetes said the verse was abrogated — it’s there, but not effective. So one thing we’re doing in this book is saying: no, the verse is not abrogated, it’s fundamental — that’s why we say it should apply with no exceptions, even though many introduced exceptions to it, like the apostasy ban. Dr. An-Na’im, any thoughts on this? Have you looked into how Christianity grappled with some of the coercive elements in its own past?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Very much so. I find it very instructive — the fact that the three traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have really coexisted in the same region, the broader Mediterranean, throughout history. They’ve interacted throughout their histories and cross-fertilized, sharing the same philosophical and historical roots. What I find rather sad is that, more recently, in the post-colonial era, we’ve parted company in the sense that we’ve lost track of that history of coexistence and mutual tolerance among the three traditions, as they’ve been co-opted by political projects — colonialism, and, unfortunately, more recently, very violent tendencies within Islamic and Jewish contexts that manipulate a historical wealth of coexistence and acceptance for political ends. So I’ve learned, and continue to learn, a lot from that.

Mustafa Akyol: Which indeed existed in Islamic civilization for centuries, and has been curbed a lot — nationalism is a big part of that, too, in the past 200 years — religion becoming nationalism, or nationalized religion. I’m from Istanbul, my hometown — one-third of Istanbul’s population 100 years ago was non-Muslim: Greek, Armenian, or Jewish. We have the population census, and there were many elected MPs of those communities in the Ottoman parliament. Today it’s about 99 percent Muslim. That happened not because of Islam — that diversity was always there — it happened because of nationalism, which pushed Christians out. The same thing happened in the Balkans to Muslims, in Greece, Bulgaria, and other places. So nationalism curbed and destroyed, physically and culturally, a lot of the coexistence we actually had in the pre-modern era. People sometimes forget that.

One more question, Dr. An-Na’im, regarding your arguments in our chapter of No Compulsion in Religion: No Exceptions. For some Muslims, the idea of a secular state still sounds alarming — a bad, “godless” thing. They also think it’s irrational, because one is man’s law and the other is God’s law, and of course God’s law is better than man’s law and should reign supreme — that’s actually one of the fundamental slogans, one of the main themes, of Islamist movements generally. Why is that not the right way to think about it, in your view?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Because God’s law can only be understood through human agency and rational human thinking. God does not talk to us personally, and even if God speaks to us in a sense we understand, we cannot communicate that to other human beings except through shared experience and institutions and processes we share with other human beings, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. So it’s ironic that people call a secular state “ungodly” — what makes a state religious, or its quality secular or non-religious? Historically, the process by which Muslims have adopted Western and other models of the state — administration of justice, of economic and political affairs — draws from all types of traditions; if you go from China to Western Europe to Africa, you find a wide variety of experiences. In the modern era, this happens to be what we now call a secular state, and it’s a need we have to live with — not a choice we have to adopt or reject.

Mustafa Akyol: And you also emphasize that by a “secular state” you don’t mean a “secularizing state” — a state that goes after religious practices, trying to eradicate religion from society, as we saw in communist regimes, or as some excessive secularists in places like France want, banning public expressions of religion. That’s not what you’re arguing for — quite the contrary, you argue for religion to be robust, healthy, and able to manifest itself in society.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Yes — in the book Islam and the Secular State, my central argument is that I’m talking about a secular state, not a secular society. Those are very different things. In fact, I need the state to be secular precisely so that society can remain Muslim — because Islam has to be a matter of choice and conviction.

Mustafa Akyol: People sometimes think — especially in the Muslim world, among Islamist movements, and sometimes conservative Muslims too — that we need to keep the state Islamic so that society remains good Muslims. But it could be the other way — it could actually be a contradiction in terms, and it can actually harm piety. I think this book gets into that discussion, and I’ll bring in Matthew on it. In this book we have a chapter on Iran written by Mohamad Machine-Chian, a journalist from Iran now in the United States, whom I also worked closely with. He shows that in Iran, after the revolution, under Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamist movement wanted to Islamize society top-down — creating, as you’d call it, the perfectly post-colonial Islamist state. The state enforced what it understood as Sharia on society — enforcing headscarves on women, banning alcohol, banning blasphemous or “un-Islamic” beliefs, going after minorities like the Baha’is and others — hoping that society would become more Islamic as a result. It ended up counterproductive: the Islamist nature of the state actually triggered a secular backlash and, at times, quite anti-religious strains in society.

Matthew, you wrote about this — I think it captured your attention — in a recent article reviewing our book and Kevin Vallier’s book, which is also worth mentioning. Your article is titled “Iran Learns Locke the Hard Way: Integralism, Post-Liberalism, and Religious Compulsion.” I’m also a fan of Locke, especially on religious freedom and coercion. How did you connect the Iranian experiment we discuss in the book with John Locke and integralism — and please explain what integralism is too, since some viewers might not be familiar with it.

Matthew Cavedon: John Locke predicted that religious liberty would actually be better for religion itself than government coercion, because people don’t like hypocrisy — they don’t like it when religion and the sacred get associated with the awful, compromised things governments do. It’s not a problem you can solve by snapping your fingers and having a perfect government that lends credence to religion — governments do brutal things, they’re made up of corrupt human beings operating in a fallen world, and the closer religion gets tangled up with that, the more likely people are to have a backlash against it.

Thinking of the Catholic example, you can contrast Spain with Poland. In the Spanish Civil War — communists versus nationalists — the communists threatened extermination of the Church and began killing a number of Catholic clergy. Franco promised to lead in the name of church, family, and nation; he won the civil war, cracked down hard on religious diversity, and made the Catholic Church a central part of public identity in Spain. He died in the mid-1970s, and within a generation or two, Spain’s religious practice fell through the floor, down to levels common throughout the rest of Europe — Franco wasn’t a bulwark against the liberal, secularizing trend happening elsewhere. Meanwhile, look at Poland under foreign, atheist, Marxist domination — Catholicism became an important part of national identity and cultural resistance. In the 1980s, as religiosity numbers were falling in Spain, you had a Polish pope pushing trade unionists into the streets to resist communism, and they succeeded — Poland’s Catholic identity is far more robust today than that of traditionally Catholic countries throughout much of Western Europe. It’s not an iron law of history, but it is significant that religion often does well under pressure, while it tends to lose credibility when it’s the one inflicting the pressure.

To come back to integralism: there’s a movement within Catholic thought over the past five or ten years, responding to the rise of Donald Trump and critiques of neoliberalism, seeking a reintegration between the Catholic Church and the state. This isn’t coming from the actual authorities of the Church — popes have shown no interest in it — but a number of intellectuals have talked about wanting to replace the lowercase‑L liberal order with something more robustly guided by the Church. First, there’s the sheer difficulty of implementing this: it was remarkable to see the Islamic revolution succeed in Iran, a country far more religiously homogeneous than any place the Catholic integralists are talking about — if this project didn’t fully work even in Iran, what makes anyone think it’s feasible in the United States? Second, think about the coercion, violence, and cruelty that comes with trying to implement this against people who don’t want it — that comes at a tremendous cost to the perceived legitimacy of the religion itself. So in my write-up, I argue that efforts to “re-Christianize” society — a kind of Reconquista — end up turning off the very people who might otherwise be interested in the faith.

Mustafa Akyol: Yeah — Reconquista campaigns don’t end well, as we know from history, or from your use of it as a metaphor today. That’s a great example, Matthew — comparing Spain and Poland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Spain had a dictatorship that enforced Catholicism and ended up a very secular society; Poland lived under communism, where Catholicism was suppressed, and ended up a more pious, religious society — showing that religion doesn’t flourish by capturing the state, it flourishes by winning hearts and minds. One more thing — the Franco regime, to me, is a reminder that the illiberal systems we discuss in the Muslim world today had counterparts in the West not too long ago. I see some pundits in America say, “look at the Muslim world, so many authoritarian regimes, some theocracies — whereas Christendom, the West, has always been liberal and democratic.” Actually, that’s a new development — in Spain, until the 1970s, you had a dictatorship enforcing Catholicism in many ways, banning other expressions of religion through public education and other means. But Spain changed, so I think change is possible in civilizations, toward better or worse. Would you agree with that? And what was the connection between Spain and the Vatican, and Franco?

Matthew Cavedon: To come back to your point about nationalism — that’s always been one of the difficulties. One of the tensions that’s helped generate religious liberty within the Catholic world is that Catholicism is, by definition, transnational and, unlike Islam or Judaism, not decentralized. You truly can’t do a “Catholic-dressed-up” government without the endorsement of the Catholic Church. So when the Church says, “no, we’re getting too tangled up with provincial political issues in this or that country,” and Rome pulls away and refuses to sanction it, that’s a problem for people who want to turn Catholicism into a basis for illiberalism locally. Now, the Church has had many different practices over the years of negotiation and compromise with governments seeking its sanction, and for a long time was quite comfortable with that. But there were tensions going back a thousand years — the Holy Roman Empire tried hard to make Catholicism a blessing for its efforts to conquer the rest of Europe, and as the Church resisted, Frederick Barbarossa threatened to declare a state church and break away. Fast-forward to Renaissance and early-modern France, and there was an effort to create a Gallican church that would answer more to the king than to the popes. So institutional diversity helped drive some of these tensions — which made it something of a historical oddity that in the 1960s the pope was calling the Second Vatican Council, backing public religious liberty, while you had this holdover regime from the 1930s in Spain, or in Portugal, still cracking down on religious liberty in the name of Catholicism. It’s been described as an oddity that Francisco Franco sent flowers to the funeral of Pope John XXIII, who had backed religious liberty and reconciliation with democracy. Institutional tensions matter — and I’m sure the two of you can speak to that within the Islamic world too. There are other places of authority — academies, universities, Sufi orders — other places “doing” Islam in ways that run into tension with governments trying to claim an exclusive monopoly over the religion.

Mustafa Akyol: You’re right about the difference between Islam and Catholicism in terms of decentralization versus centralization — sometimes I say I wish we had a good pope who could take a few steps, but it’s not like that; you have to work in every different pocket of Islamic thinking, in different countries. But very good insights, thank you, Matthew.

I want to come back to online questions now — there are quite a few. One is to Dr. An-Na’im directly, from Peter Mentzel, a great scholar from Liberty Fund and a good friend, a scholar of Ottoman history. He asks: “Professor An-Na’im, your work seems to have some similarities with that of Ali Abdel Raziq, the great Egyptian scholar from the early twentieth century. How would you describe the similarities and differences between your two approaches? Do you see your own project as building on and perhaps strengthening his insights and arguments?” — And to remind our audience, Ali Abdel Raziq was the Egyptian scholar who, in 1925, argued that the caliphate is not a religious requirement of Islam — that it’s simply part of Muslim history, so Muslims are not obliged to reestablish a caliphate and can choose other forms of government, including liberal ones. So, Dr. An-Na’im, does your work resonate with Ali Abdel Raziq’s?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Very much so. In fact, I was really excited to discover Ali Abdel Raziq when I was growing up in Sudan, and to find his insight and incisive, powerfully articulated arguments so instructive — presenting the argument in terms of the modern state, the post-colonial, post-Ottoman state, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was declining and disintegrating into national situations. My disagreement with him — not really a disagreement, more that he simply didn’t go far enough — concerns the substance of Sharia: aspects of family law, for example, marriage, polygamy, the unilateral power of divorce that men hold over women. He didn’t really attack those, because he wasn’t a lawyer in that sense — he was a theologian, a scholar of Al-Azhar, and presented his argument within his own intellectual environment. As a lawyer myself, I was more concerned with the legal aspects of Sharia, and on those, I think Ali Abdel Raziq didn’t go far enough — though merely saying the caliphate wasn’t an obligation was scandalous enough for his time. By the way, an Ottoman scholar of his era, Said Bey, made a similar argument in a speech at the Turkish parliament, back in the day.

Mustafa Akyol: I just wanted to note that — thanks to Peter Mentzel for the question. We have another one, from Jacob Williams at Princeton University: “Salaam, thanks for this discussion. What would you say to the claim that enforcing some practices — like dress codes, rules around alcohol — may also have a secular rationale: not to forcibly make Muslims moral, but to improve the moral ecology that encourages others to act morally?” So could there be a kind of “soft coercion” that isn’t explicitly religious but still helps the moral ecology, as the question puts it? I’ll ask you both. I think this was discussed in Catholicism too, but Dr. An-Na’im, would you go first?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: As soon as you say “coercion,” I shy away.

Mustafa Akyol: We’re together on that — whose coercion, though, and coercion toward whatever social practice you want people to do or not do?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Exactly. So long as you keep it entirely contestable, open to debate and discussion as a matter of law, why use a religious or secular or whatever-you-call-it way of forcing people to do or not do something? Who is it that gets to ask people to do or not do it?

Mustafa Akyol: I know Jacob — a brilliant scholar with a lot of good insight on these discussions in Islam — but this nuance is interesting. Here’s my take: if we accept a little soft coercion in favor of the religion of our choosing, we should think about it the other way around too. In India, there’s some soft coercion on Muslims not to publicly eat or trade beef — people actually get beaten for it, because Hindus consider beef haram in their religion, banned. We respect that, but do Muslims have to abide by it? Or take some of the bans in Europe now on Muslim women’s dress — that’s also soft coercion toward a more secular, modern society. Some French secularists say the headscarf shouldn’t be visible — that it “pollutes” the public sphere, encourages an “ancient, pre-modern” way of life, and so on. Well, if it’s her choice, it’s her choice. So I think we should always look from both sides — if we justify this argument one way, it could be used just the same against Islamic practices. So I agree with you on being cautious. There will definitely be coercion needed to stop violent crime, but otherwise, I’m cautious too. What would you say, Matthew — do some integralists also speak of this kind of soft coercion or soft manipulation by government of society?

Matthew Cavedon: It definitely does exist, and there’s a longstanding historical distinction in Catholicism between soft coercion and hard coercion — the idea being, as long as we’re not forcing you to accept the faith, we can create conditions amenable to your doing so. The most extreme examples in the Middle Ages were popes ordering every copy of the Talmud burned, and Jews forced to sit weekly and listen to Christian instruction — the pope saying, “we’re not forcing anyone to accept Christianity, we’re just removing obstacles and creating conditions primed for it.” Obviously there need to be limits on that. On the other side, every society engages in some regulation of the public sphere for the sake of public morals, of getting along together — we don’t allow certain things in public spaces. Setting aside the headscarf issue, at least my interpretation of Cato’s libertarianism isn’t that we have to repeal all laws against public nudity, say — there are certain “rules of the road” that make life together work in public spaces. Important limits on that public-morals regulation, though, include freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection, and equal regard for citizenship regardless of religious belief — which is where I have a real problem with the French laïcité movement’s claim that headscarves “pollute the moral order.” To the extent it’s targeting Muslims in particular, that violates anti-discrimination and religious-liberty concerns by singling out one group for ill treatment — or, to the extent it’s equally concerned about the cross I wear around my neck, then it’s a violation of freedom of speech and religion for singling out certain kinds of religious messaging for disfavored treatment. So I wouldn’t go quite as far as saying there’s no role at all for public morals in regulating public space or commerce — moral discourse, even religiously inspired moral discourse, matters for social cohesion and identity — but other principles in play will, in practice, limit those kinds of regulations quite a bit.

That said, I’m a Christian, a Catholic — I’m happy to have alcohol, that’s an important part of my life — but if I moved to, say, Kuwait, or went on vacation to the UAE, I wouldn’t feel comfortable demanding, as a right, that I be allowed to go to a bar. I don’t mean to speak for Christians or other religious minorities — I have the privilege of living in a society where Christianity is favored in a lot of ways — but if I were a tourist in India, I’m not sure how I’d feel about eating a hamburger in public either. That said, I’m sensitive to the fact that Christians and Muslims have both been targeted for violent treatment based on cow-slaughter-protection groups, so I have some nuance around that.

Mustafa Akyol: I think societies naturally regulate behavior through disapproval — there are things people find awkward or unacceptable, and that gets worked out over time, a kind of natural social process, which is different from government coming in and penalizing things. But I agree that certain things — obscenity, indecency — are appropriately regulated in a republic, and we could refer to a natural-law concept for that, rather than to particular religions.

More questions are coming in. Here’s one for you, Dr. An-Na’im, from Pat Dixon: “Republicans in Texas are claiming there’s a great threat of Sharia law, and a lot of Texas voters seem to support this. What will you say about that?” You’ve certainly criticized Sharia enforcement by Islamist regimes in the Muslim world — but is this a real issue, could it be a real threat, in a place like the US?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Yeah, I think it’s a real issue, in the sense that it’s counterproductive — it creates a backlash of apprehension, of religious persecution. Anybody who says Sharia should be banned really doesn’t understand Sharia at all. As you started this conversation by explaining, Sharia is a way of life — how can you ban a way of life, in any society, logistically, politically, or legally? Again, it is not Sharia if it isn’t voluntarily practiced — and if it’s voluntary practice, how can you ban it?

Mustafa Akyol: That’s freedom, right?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Exactly. So it’s a type of discourse that betrays, with all due respect, the ignorance of anybody who makes that claim. People should really take time to think about what it would mean for a thousand years of Muslim tradition — Islam is the second-largest, if not the largest, religion globally, a billion people are Muslim — how can you ban their way of life? What authority do you have for doing so? And what happens when people do the same to you? You’ll be leading those societies too, and they’ll react the same way you did.

Mustafa Akyol: Are you saying that Christians should be banned from practicing Christianity because Muslims are banned from practicing Islam in Texas? I mean, America should uphold freedom for everyone, so it can be an example too — if you ban Muslims here, then whoever wants to ban Christians in some authoritarian regime somewhere will only be emboldened.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: You’re quite right about that.

Matthew Cavedon: And just to clarify a bit — I don’t think people are often aware, when they’re pushing for a state ban on Sharia, that what they actually mean is stopping Muslims from getting the government to stone people to death, or upholding sex-discriminatory divorce contracts, or something like that. For one, the idea that Muslims are going to get a handle on the mechanisms of government in the United States — we’re talking about two to three percent of the population here. If we get to a point where a majority feels differently about the use of coercion, we’ll have to address that differently. As far as private law, contracts, family law — there’s the public-policy exception: regardless of whether a term comes from Islamic law, foreign law, a Christian tribunal, or Jewish law, courts will not uphold private agreements that fly in the face of fundamental American norms. The law of the land is the law of the land. So these Sharia bans go way too far, trying to carve out all kinds of practices, without recognizing the ways American law already handles the genuinely hard cases these bans claim to be addressing.

Mustafa Akyol: There’s a question for me — it says: “It was noted that Istanbul was multi-religious years ago, but it’s now 99 percent Islam. Is that not state coercion?” It is, and it’s bad — it’s state coercion due to nationalism, which happened in Turkey, and happened in the Balkans and in Salonika, which was a much more diverse city 100 years ago, with a huge Jewish community alongside Muslims — now it’s overwhelmingly Greek Orthodox Christian. That happened because of nationalism — there were population exchanges, even expulsions, and people felt uncomfortable and moved, in the post-Ottoman territories.

Here’s a philosophical question from David Forte: “At bottom, does this debate not center on the very nature of man — the human anthropology, particularly as thought by Aristotle, of a person who is rational, social, deliberative, linguistic — and isn’t that what rights are based on? What is your opinion?” So do we have a certain anthropology of the human being in mind when we discuss these things? I think you can find it in both Islam and Christianity — Matthew, what would you say? Then I’ll go to Dr. An-Na’im quickly, because we’re running out of time.

Matthew Cavedon: Christians received that understanding from Aristotle and connected it with the idea of the image of God as human reason — the Catholic Church has always put a strong emphasis on human reason as an important part of human anthropology. I don’t want to repeat myself too much.

Mustafa Akyol: Yep, exactly. Dr. An-Na’im?

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Yes, very much — I appreciate the point our colleague raises. For me, I’d take the totality of human experience — anthropology, philosophy, everything — and put it all on the table for discussion and debate. I wouldn’t exclude any aspect of human experience, or overemphasize any single aspect as coercively dominant over the discourse. Rationality is fundamental to humanity itself — to be human is to be rational. So I find it abhorrent to think that one could repress rationality in the name of any tradition.

Mustafa Akyol: Thank you. There’s a question about Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and the parable of the rings — we might not have time to get into that, but it’s indeed a phenomenal work from the early Enlightenment, where there are three religions, and only God knows which one is right, so people aspire to live those religions well — it’s more about salvation, but I think we should have that perspective too. We have our religious traditions — Catholicism, broader Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, you name it — and most of us are in them because we’re genuinely convinced, our hearts and minds genuinely won over, and they can only flourish through that conviction. We should leave the ultimate judgment to God — that’s Nathan the Wise’s lesson, and I think we can make the same argument in Christianity and Islam as well.

There’s much more to discuss, and apologies to everyone whose questions we couldn’t get to — I’ll forward them to our speakers and we’ll try to write back. But we have to end now, our time is up. Thank you again for joining us in this conversation. If you want to read more of Dr. An-Na’im’s views, check out No Compulsion in Religion, No Exceptions, where he has a chapter, alongside other scholars writing on these issues from an Islamic point of view. And definitely read Matthew’s article on Locke and how Iran learned Locke’s lesson the hard way. Thank you for joining us. Dr. An-Na’im, thank you for joining this project — it’s an honor to have you; your work has been an eye-opener for many Muslims around the world, including myself, thinking through these issues. We wish you well, and for your home country, Sudan, too, which is going through a lot of trouble these days — hopefully things improve. And Matthew, thank you for joining us, we’ll keep reading your work — and I’ll go learn more about Spain and Poland myself, that comparison was pretty insightful. Thank you.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im: Thank you for joining us.

Matthew Cavedon: Thank you, gentlemen.