The prominent Muslim reformer and modernist Mustafa Akyol presents a collection of essays asserting that Muslims can—and must—update how their faith is practiced. Akyol and his reformist contributors find Qur’anic sanction for their effort in the assertion of Sura 2:256 that “there is no compulsion in religion,” seeing in this verse an affirmation of freedom of conscience and religion.
To be sure, as Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, has highlighted, this verse has competing interpretations. Writing in 2004, Pipes reports that while some scholars argue the verse has been abrogated by more aggressive passages in the Qur’an, other scholars say it only protects Muslims from coercion; others claim it applies only to non-Muslims or to internal belief and not to external practice. However, Pipes reports that some scholars affirm the passage must be applied to all humanity to allow Muslims to reach the true faith “through trial and testing,” which is “a process that compulsion undercuts.”
Along these lines, Akyol enters the fray by arguing that rulers who force women to wear the veil, threaten those who blaspheme, and execute those who apostatize do not advance the cause of Islam but hinder it. Such oppression, Akyol writes in the introduction, “generates resentment against religion if not outright hostility.” Indeed, he argues that the top-down enforcement of Islamic law in Iran has made “society not more Islamic, but less so.”
This reality has historical antecedents. Akyol offers an example from the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Murad IV (1623–1640) became a follower of Kadızade Mehmed, an imam who called upon his followers not only to purify their own lives, but to “seek out sinners and . . . force them back onto the straight path [of Islam].” Accordingly, Murad IV ordered the execution of those who consumed tobacco, coffee, and wine (despite being a heavy drinker of wine himself). The Kadızadeli campaign against innovation continued well after Murad IV. Vani Mehmed Efendi, a later preacher in the campaign, used the same call to “command the right” to convince Ottoman rulers that piety and prayer made victory at Vienna in 1683 inevitable. The catastrophic defeat there helped discredit the movement.
Akyol’s implication is clear: For Muslim countries, acceding to the arrogant goal of using government power to “command the right and forbid the wrong” contributes to disaster at home and abroad. Instead, Akyol encourages Muslim elites to follow the advice of Kâtib Çelebi (1609–1657) who wrote, “The duty of complying belongs to the people; they cannot be forced to comply.” Akyol considers this “really a remarkable comment by a 17th-century Ottoman Muslim scholar, anticipating what the Catholic Pope John Paul II would proclaim in the late 20th century: religion should be ‘proposed, not imposed.’ It was also a reaffirmation of that much-neglected Qur’anic maxim ‘No compulsion in religion’ in its fullest meaning.”
Other contributors to the volume offer similarly hopeful interpretations of the Qur’an. Asma Afsaruddin of Indiana University Bloomington reports that Muslim women have found within the Qur’an an “egalitarian ethos . . . that values women’s and men’s personal piety and deeds as completely equivalent and equally worthy of reward in the next world.”
Writing about Pakistan, Abdullah Saeed of the University of Melbourne reports that many Islamic scholars have concluded that “the current application of blasphemy laws and the enforcement of capital punishment as hadd (a fixed divine penalty) constitute a misinterpretation that deviates from the Qur’an, the Prophet’s practice, and even the classical jurisprudence of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam.”
Two major questions present themselves to the non-Muslim reader of No Compulsion. First, will this book find a sympathetic audience among Muslims, or will they dismiss it as an imposition of Western hermeneutics on Islamic tradition? Second, will Muslim readers accept Sura 2:256 as abrogating verse 9:5, the one calling on Muslims to “slay the disbelievers wherever you find them”?
