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00:01A few weeks ago, I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia.
00:05And the first thing I wanted to do as a Muslim was to go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba,
00:10the holiest shrine of Islam.
00:11And I did that. I put on my ritualistic dress. I went to the holy mosque.
00:16I said my prayers. I observed all the rituals.
00:20And meanwhile, besides all the spirituality, there was one mundane detail in the Kaaba that was pretty interesting for me.
00:27There was no separation of sexes.
00:30In other words, man and woman were worshiping all together.
00:34They were together while doing the Tawaf, the circular walk around the Kaaba.
00:39They were together while praying.
00:40And if you wonder why this is interesting at all, you have to see the rest of Saudi Arabia.
00:47Because this is a country which is strictly divided between the sexes.
00:52In other words, as men, you are not simply supposed to be in the same physical space with women.
00:58And I noticed this in a very funny way.
01:00I left the Kaaba to eat something in downtown Mecca.
01:03I headed to the nearest Burger King restaurant.
01:06And I went there.
01:07I noticed that there is a male section, which is carefully separated from the female section.
01:13And I had to pay, order, and eat at the male section.
01:15I said to myself, you can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger
01:22King.
01:24I said to myself, I think, quite ironic.
01:52I said to myself, I said, is that the female section is something that you also do not find in
01:55the Koran.
01:56The very core of Islam.
01:58The divine core of Islam that all Muslims, including myself, believe.
02:03And I think it's not an accident that, you know, you don't find this idea in the very origin of
02:08Islam.
02:08Because many scholars who study the history of Islamic thought, Muslim scholars or Westerners, think that actually the practice of
02:16dividing man and woman physically came as a later development in Islam, as Muslims adopted some pre-existing cultures and
02:25traditions of the Middle East.
02:26Seclusion of women was actually a Byzantine and Persian practice, and Muslims adopted that and made that a part of
02:34religion.
02:35And actually, this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon.
02:40What we call today Islamic law, and especially Islamic culture, and there are many Islamic cultures, actually.
02:45The one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from, Istanbul or Turkey.
02:49But still, I mean, if you're going to speak about a Muslim culture, this has a core, the divine message,
02:56which began the religion.
02:58But then many traditions, perceptions, many practices were added on top of it.
03:03And these were traditions of the Middle East, medieval traditions.
03:07And there are two important messages, I think, or two lessons to take from that, you know, reality.
03:13First of all, Muslims, pious, conservative, believing Muslims who want to be loyal to their religion, should not cling on
03:19to everything in their culture, thinking that that's demyelo-mandated.
03:23Maybe some things are bad traditions, and they need to be changed.
03:26On the other hand, the Westerners, who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects, should not readily conclude
03:34that this is what Islam ordains.
03:36Maybe it's a Middle Eastern culture that became confused with Islam.
03:39There is a practice called female circumcision.
03:43It's something terrible, horrible.
03:45It is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure.
03:51And Westerners, Europeans or Americans, who didn't know about this before, faced this practice within some of the Muslim communities
04:00who migrated from North Africa.
04:01And they've thought, oh, what a horrible religion that is, which, you know, orders something like that.
04:08But actually, when you look at female circumcision, you see that it has nothing to do with Islam.
04:11It's just a North African practice, which predates Islam.
04:15It was there for thousands of years.
04:17And quite tellingly, some Muslims do practice that.
04:20The Muslims in North Africa, not in other places.
04:22But also the non-Muslim communities of North Africa, the animists, even some Christians, and even a Jewish tribe in
04:30North Africa is known to practice female circumcision.
04:33So what might look like a problem with an Islamic faith might turn out to be a tradition that Muslims
04:40have subscribed to.
04:41The same thing can be said for honor killings, which is a recurrent theme in the Western media, and which
04:47is, of course, a horrible tradition.
04:49And we see it thoroughly in some Muslim communities, that tradition.
04:53But in the non-Muslim communities of the Middle East, such as some Christian communities, Eastern communities, you see the
04:58same practice.
04:59We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey's Armenian community just a few months ago.
05:05Now, these are things about general culture, but I'm also very much interested in political culture, and whether liberty and
05:13Democracy is appreciated,
05:14or whether there's an authoritarian political culture in which the state is supposed to impose things on the citizens.
05:20And it is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian,
05:26and some of the so-called Islamic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the worst case was the Taliban
05:32in Afghanistan,
05:33they are pretty authoritarian, no doubt about that.
05:36For example, in Saudi Arabia, there is a phenomenon called the religious police,
05:40and the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen by force.
05:46Like, women are forced to cover their heads, wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover.
05:53Now, that is pretty authoritarian, and that's something I'm very much critical of,
05:57but when I realized that the non-Muslim or the non-Islamic-minded actors in the same geography sometimes behave
06:06Similarly,
06:07I realized that the problem lies in the political culture of the whole region, not just Islam.
06:12Let me give you an example.
06:13In Turkey, where I come from, which is a hyper-secular republic,
06:17until very recently, we used to have what I call secularism police,
06:22which would guard the universities against Wales students.
06:27In other words, they would force students to uncover their heads.
06:31And I think forcing people to uncover their heads is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it.
06:37It should be the citizen's decision.
06:39But when I saw that, I said,
06:40maybe the problem isn't just an authoritarian culture in the region,
06:44and some Muslims have been influenced by that,
06:47but the secular-minded people can be influenced by that.
06:49Maybe you'd say it's a problem about the political culture,
06:52and we have to think about how to change that political culture.
06:56Now, these are some of the questions I had in mind about a few years ago
07:00when I sat down to write a book.
07:02I said, well, I will make a research about how Islam actually came to be what it's today,
07:09and what roads were taken, and what roads could have been taken.
07:13The name of the book is Islam Without Extremes, A Muslim Case for Liberty.
07:17And as the subtitle suggests,
07:19I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought
07:22from the perspective of individual liberty,
07:25and I tried to find what are the strengths with regards to individual liberty.
07:29And there are strengths in Islamic tradition.
07:31Islam actually, as a monotheistic religion,
07:33which defined man as a responsible agent by himself,
07:38created the idea of the individual in the Middle East,
07:40and saved it from the communitarianism, the collectivism of the tribe.
07:44You can derive many ideas from that.
07:46But besides that, I also saw problems with an Islamic tradition.
07:50But one thing was curious.
07:51Most of those problems turned out to be problems that emerged later,
07:55not from the very divine core of Islam, the Koran,
07:58but from, again, traditions and mentalities,
08:01or the interpretations of the Koran that Muslims made in the Middle Ages.
08:05The Koran, for example, doesn't condone stoning.
08:08There is no punishment on apostasy.
08:10There is no punishment on personal sins like drinking.
08:14These things which make Islamic law,
08:17the troubling aspects of Islamic law,
08:20were later developments and later interpretations in Islam.
08:23Which means that Muslims can today look at those things and say,
08:27well, the core of our religion is here to stay with us.
08:32It's our faith, and we will be loyal to it.
08:33But we can't change how it was interpreted,
08:36because it was interpreted according to the time and milieu in the Middle Ages.
08:39Now we are living in a different world with different values and different political systems.
08:42That interpretation is quite possible and feasible.
08:47Now, if I were the only person thinking that way,
08:50We would be in trouble.
08:52But that's not the case at all.
08:54Well, actually, from the 19th century on,
08:58there is a whole revisionist, reformist, whatever you call it,
09:02tradition, a trend in Islamic thinking.
09:06And these were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century and later 20th century,
09:12which looked at Europe, basically,
09:13and saw that Europe has many things to admire, like science and technology.
09:17But not just that, also democracy, parliament,
09:20parliament, the idea of representation, the idea of equal citizenship.
09:24These Muslim thinkers and intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th century
09:28looked at Europe, saw these things, they said,
09:31why we don't have these things?
09:32And they looked back at Islamic tradition,
09:34they saw that there are problematic aspects,
09:37but they are not the core of religion,
09:38so maybe they can be re-understood,
09:40and the Koran can be re-read in the modern world.
09:44That trend is generally called as Islamic modernism,
09:48and it was advanced by intellectuals and statesmen,
09:52not just as an intellectual idea, though,
09:54but also as a political program.
09:55And that's why, actually, in the 19th century,
09:58the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East,
10:01made very important reforms,
10:04reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status,
10:08accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament,
10:12advancing the freedom, idea of freedom of religion.
10:14And that's why the Ottoman Empire, in its last, actually, decades,
10:18turned into a proto-democracy, a constitutional monarchy.
10:22And freedom was a very important political value at the time.
10:25Similarly, in the Arab world,
10:27there was what the great Arab historian, Albert Hourani,
10:30defines as the liberal age.
10:32He has a book, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.
10:34And the liberal age he defines is 19th century and early 20th century.
10:39Quite notably, this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century
10:44among Islamic thinkers and statesmen and theologians.
10:47But there is a very curious pattern in the rest of the 20th century
10:51because we see a sharp decline in this Islamic modernist line.
10:56And in place of that, what happens is that Islamism grows
11:01as an ideology which is authoritarian, which is quite strident,
11:06which is quite anti-Western,
11:08and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision.
11:12So Islamism is the problematic idea
11:14that really created a lot of problems in the 20th century Islamic world.
11:19And even in the very extreme forms of Islamism,
11:23it led to terrorism in the name of Islam,
11:26which is actually a practice that I think is against Islam,
11:29but some obviously extremists did not think that way.
11:32But there is a curious question.
11:34If Islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th and early 20th century,
11:39why Islamism became so popular in the rest of the 20th century?
11:43And this is a question I think which needs to be discussed carefully.
11:46And in my book, I went into that question as well.
11:49And actually, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that.
11:52Just you look at the political history of the 20th century,
11:55and you see, well, things have changed a lot.
11:57The context has changed.
11:59In the 19th century, when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example,
12:03They were independent.
12:04They were more self-confident.
12:05In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire,
12:09the whole Middle East was colonized.
12:11And when you have colonialization, what do you have?
12:13You have anti-colonialization.
12:16So Europe is not just an example now to emulate.
12:19It's an enemy to fight and to resist.
12:21So there's a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the Muslim world.
12:26And what you see is more of a defensive, rigid, reactionary strain,
12:31which led to Arab socialism, Arab nationalism,
12:33and ultimately the Islamist ideology.
12:36And when the colonial period ended,
12:40what you had in place of that was generally secular dictators,
12:44which saved their country, but did not bring democracy to the country
12:48and established their own dictatorship.
12:50And I think the West, at least some powers in the West,
12:53particularly the United States,
12:54made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators,
12:57thinking that they are more, you know, helpful for their interests.
13:01But the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in their country
13:04and suppressed Islamic groups in their country
13:06actually made the Islamists much more strident.
13:09So in the 20th century, you had this vicious cycle in the Arab world
13:13where you have a dictatorship suppressing your own people,
13:16including the Islamic pious,
13:18and they're reacting in reactionary ways.
13:21There was one country, though,
13:23which was able to escape or stay away from that vicious cycle.
13:28And that's the country where you're coming from.
13:29That's Turkey.
13:31Turkey has never been colonized,
13:33so it remained as an independent nation
13:35after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
13:36That's one thing to remember.
13:38So it did not share the same anti-colonial hype
13:41that you can find in some other countries in the region.
13:44Secondly, and most importantly,
13:45Turkey became a democracy earlier
13:47than any of the countries we were talking about.
13:49In 1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections,
13:52which ended the most autocratic secular regime,
13:55which was in the beginning of Turkey.
13:57And Turkish, the pious Muslims in Turkey,
13:59saw that they can change the political system by voting.
14:03And they realized that democracy is something
14:05that is compatible with Islam,
14:06compatible with their values,
14:08and they've been supportive of democracy.
14:10That's an experience that not every other Muslim nation
14:14in the Middle East had until very recently.
14:16Secondly, in the past two decades,
14:18thanks to globalization,
14:20thanks to the market economy,
14:21thanks to the rise of a middle class,
14:23we in Turkey see what I define
14:26as a rebirth of Islamic modernism.
14:28Now, there's a more urban, middle class, pious Muslims
14:32who, again, look at their tradition
14:34and see that there are some problems in the tradition
14:37and they understand that they need to be changed
14:39and questioned and reformed.
14:40And they look at Europe
14:42and they see an example, again, to follow.
14:44They see an example that needs to take some inspiration from.
14:47That's why the EU process,
14:49Turkey's effort to join the EU,
14:51has been supported inside Turkey
14:53by the pious Islamic,
14:55while some secular nationalists were against that.
14:58Well, that process has been a little bit blurred
15:00by the fact that not all Europeans are that welcoming,
15:02but that's another discussion.
15:04But the pro-EU sentiment in Turkey in the past decade
15:08has become almost an Islamic cause
15:10and supported by the Islamic liberals
15:12and the secular liberals as well, of course.
15:14And thanks to that,
15:16Turkey has been able to recently create a success story
15:19in which Islam
15:20and the most pious understandings of Islam
15:24have become part of the democratic game
15:26and even contributes to the democracy
15:27and economic advance of the country.
15:30And this has been an inspiring example right now
15:34for some of the Islamic movements
15:36or some of the countries in the Arab world.
15:38You must have all seen the Arab Spring,
15:41which began in Tunis and in Egypt.
15:43And Arab masses just revolted against their dictators.
15:48They were asking for democracy.
15:50They were asking for freedom.
15:51And they didn't turn out to be the Islamist boogeyman
15:54that the dictators were always fooling,
15:56using to justify their regime.
15:59They said that we want freedom.
16:01We want democracy.
16:02We are Muslim believers.
16:03But we want to be living as free people in free societies.
16:08Of course, this is a long road.
16:10Democracy is not an overnight achievement.
16:12It's a process.
16:13But this is a promising era in the Muslim world.
16:17And I believe that the Islamic modernism,
16:19which began in the 19th century,
16:21but which had a setback in the 20th century
16:23because of the political troubles of the Muslim world,
16:25is having a rebirth.
16:27And I think the getaway message from that would be
16:30that Islam, despite some of the skeptics in the West,
16:34has the potential in itself
16:36to create its own way to democracy,
16:38creates its own way to liberalism,
16:40creates its own way to freedom.
16:42They should just be allowed to work for that.
16:44Thanks so much.
16:45Thank you.
16:46Applause
16:48Applause
16:49Applause
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