The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

liberalism

Islamic liberalism grew out of the Islamic modernist movement of the 19th century. While modernism claimed that Islamic faith was compatible with a wide variety of European institutions, including technologies and administrative apparatuses, liberalism focused on a narrower set of norms relating to the Western liberal tradition, especially democracy, human rights, gender equality, and intercommunal harmony. Not every Muslim liberal adopted the entire package of Western liberalism, and many resented the term “liberal,” which they associated with the hypocrisies of European imperialism. Nonetheless, the label of liberalism encapsulates a coherent and ongoing segment of Islamic political thought.

The first phase of liberal Islamic thought, from the middle of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century, treated liberal ideals as divinely revealed requirements. One of the most common liberal Islamic justifications for democratic reforms, the Qur’anic verse “and seek their counsel in the matter” (3:159) was pioneered at this time by Ottoman reformer Namık Kemal (1840–88). Early victories of these movements included constitutional documents in Egypt (1860, 1882), Tunisia (1861), and the Ottoman Empire (1876). These constitutional structures offered limited avenues for democratic political participation, even by the standards of restricted suffrage then in force in Western Europe. Only in the early 20th century did liberal Islamic movements manage to institute more meaningful democratic reforms. Tatar and Turkish modernists participated in the Russian revolution of 1905, which led to the first parliamentary elections in the Russian empire. Iranians followed with the Mashrutiyyat, or Constitutional Revolution, of 1906, and Ottomans with the İkinci Meşrütiyet, or Second Constitutional Revolution, in 1908. In each of these cases, the prerogatives of the monarch were circumscribed by elected representatives, though suffrage was still strictly limited. Parallel movements arose but failed to take power in several other Muslim-majority states, including Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Khiva. Like the earlier constitutional experiments, these semidemocratic interludes were soon undermined. However, their legacy of political institutions and aspirations was adopted by authoritarian modernizing elites, as well as by anticolonial movements with modernist ideals.

Beginning in the 1920s, as Islamic modernism splintered into hostile camps, Islamic liberalism took shape as an independent movement seeking to reconcile Islamic faith and modern liberal norms such as democracy and human rights. This decolonization phase pioneered a new form of liberal Islamic reasoning, exemplified by the Egyptian ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (1888–1966), who argued in the 1920s that Islamic sources left methods of governance for humans to devise. The Prophet Muhammad “was not a king nor the founder of a state, nor did he seek to rule,” wrote ‘Abd al-Raziq, and by extension no other Muslims could claim an Islamic mandate for their form of government. Over the following decades, liberal Islamic movements engaged in similar arguments during the constitutional debates following decolonization. Liberal Islamic movements succeeded in creating partially democratic postcolonial states in several countries, including Indonesia and Pakistan, where competitive elections were held and civil legal systems were instituted. By the end of the 1970s, however, liberal Islamic politics had been suppressed by authoritarian governments in many Muslim societies. In Indonesia and Pakistan, for example, democratic experiments were overturned by military coups d’état.

In the 1980s, even as Islamic revivalism captured headlines, liberal Islamic movements began to revive as well, with a new liberal Islamic approach emerging simultaneously and independently in numerous Muslim societies at this time. According to this reasoning, all interpretations of the sacred sources, including one’s own, are viewed as partial and fallible. In the words of Abdolkarim Soroush, a leading Iranian intellectual, “Religion is divine, but its interpretation is thoroughly human and this-worldly.” Soroush’s writings were among the inspirations for the Iranian reform movement, which won landslides in Iran’s 1997 presidential election, as well as parliamentary elections in 1998 and elections for city councils in 1999, before being suppressed by illiberal factions. Elsewhere, too, liberal Islamic thought was linked with democratic and social reform. In Turkey, the Welfare Party reorganized itself as a liberal Islamic movement, committing itself to democratic procedures and pressing for membership in the European Union, recognition of Kurdish minority identities, and human rights limitations on the military. In Indonesia, liberal Islamic movements actively engaged in democratic political competition after the return of democracy in 1999, criticizing other Islamic parties for their failure to stand up to communal violence. In Malaysia, former fans of the Iranian revolution such as Anwar Ibrahim, a leading Islamic politician, helped to organize the Reformasi movement, the first Internet campaign for civil liberties in a Muslim society, which drew hundreds of thousands of hits from the well-wired Malay middle classes. In Egypt and several other Arab countries, the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots embraced pluralistic norms with more or less clarity and force.

Liberalism’s opponents have long denounced it as un-Islamic. Derviş Vahdeti (1870–1909), founder of an Islamist movement in the Ottoman Empire, denounced liberals in 1909 as “cucumber people”: “To expect religion from those who don’t know their religion and have no Islamic training is like extracting oil from a cucumber.” Almost a century later, in 2005, the Indonesian Ulama Council declared “liberal Islam” to be ḥarām (religiously impermissible), and Salih al-Fawzan, a senior Islamic scholar in Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa against liberal Islam in 2007: “He who says, ‘I am a liberal Muslim,’ contradicts himself.” Those who advocate such a position “should repent unto God in order to become truly Muslim.” Notwithstanding these critiques, Muslims frequently view Islamic piety as consistent with liberal ideals. Surveys in the early 21st century consistently found large majorities of Muslims favoring democracy. Where a variety of Islamic movements have been permitted to contest elections, as in Indonesia and Kuwait, liberal Islamic candidates consistently outpolled more militant Islamists. Calls for revolutionary violence as a duty incumbent upon every individual Muslim have fallen on deaf ears, hence the minuscule portion of the world’s billion Muslims who have engaged in such acts.