Ali Rahnamae’s Reviews > Why, as a Muslim, I Defend Liberty > Status Update

In reality, liberalism is a political philosophy, not a lifestyle. So it would defend a Western-looking lifestyle in the East, as well as an Eastern-looking lifestyle in the West. It would defend freedom of religion, as well as freedom from religion. It is not a religion, metaphysical worldview, or lifestyle in itself. It is rather a framework that allows different religions, to coexist, without oppressing each other

In reality, liberalism is a political philosophy, not a life style. So it would defend a Western-looking lifestyle in the East, as well as an Eastern-looking lifestyle in the West.

we can well say that rather than advancing liberalism in the Muslim world, Western powers in fact often hindered its advance—sometimes unintentionally by exporting their own illiberal ideas, sometimes even intentionally by blocking liberal steps.

New Ottomans saw Islam as “a set of abstract principles,” instead of “a set of concrete practices”. even before them, some Ottoman reformers had begun seeing the Sharia not merely as fiqh (jurisprudence), but as an ethical reference against “bribery, nepotism, laziness, apathy, lust for power, oppression.” That ethical understanding of the Sharia plus openness to the outside world gave birth to Islamic liberalism.

Namik Kemal (1840-188) introduced into Islam the same transition that John Locke had introduced to Christendom: there are God-given “rights,” not to rulers to rule without question, but to each and every individual to live in freedom. “Being created free by God, man is naturally obliged to benefit from this divine gift".

While it is true that our forefathers heard liberal concepts initially from colonial Europe, some of them—the first Muslim liberals—used the same concepts to stand up against the same colonial Europe (just like America’s Founders, who inherited liberalism from the British).
The same Muslim liberals wanted to advance liberty within their own societies, only because they saw it as the secret behind Western success.

This is mainly because liberalism and colonialism largely coincided in Western history in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although not all liberal thinkers supported colonialism, some did, whereas others criticized it (e.g. Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder)

In the late 20th century, another dead end emerged in the Muslim world: “Islamic economics”—an ideological construct that assumed Islam had an “economic system” of its own, with its self-styled rules and institutions. The centerpiece of this new ideology was an ancient notion: riba (increase), a term for a financial practice that the Qur’an condemns quite severely, without clearly defining it.

Islamic capitalism had its zenith between the 7th and 13th centuries, later to be gradually eclipsed by Western capitalism.

There is little doubt that the economic system of medieval Islam was capitalism—a “pre-industrial, commercial capitalism ... The West should not have a monopoly over this term.” It was a system, in his words, that “favors merchants, respects property rights and free trade, applies the principles of market economy and market wage rate, and treats interference in the markets as transgression.”
-Murat Çizakça