Islamic Liberalism

1
Islamic Liberalism

• What?
• Why?
• How?

2
What is this thing called Islamic Liberalism? (1)

• What is Islam? (1)
• An Ideology?
• A Tradition?
• A Civilisation?
• A World-view?
• A System of Government?
• A Nation?
• A Way of Life?
• A Faith?
• A Religion?

3
What is this thing called Islamic Liberalism? (2)

• What is Islam? (2)
• Islam or Islams?
• Orthodoxy, Traditionalism, Fundamentalism,
  Modernism, Critical Rationalism
• Islam and our understanding of Islam
• Islam basic tenets

4
What is this thing called Islamic Liberalism? (3)

• What is Liberalism? (3)
• A Political Tradition?
• A Political Philosophy?
• A General Philosophy?
• An Ideology?
• A Way of Life?

5
What is this thing called Islamic Liberalism? (4)

• What is Liberalism? (4)
• Liberalism or Liberalisms?
• British, French, Scandinavian, American,
  Australasian , Models of Liberalism
• Liberalism basic tenets

6
Liberalism A Brief Introduction (1)

• the Fundamental Liberal Principle freedom is
  normatively basic, and so the onus of
  justification is on those who would limit
  freedom. It follows from this that political
  authority and law must be justified, as they
  limit the liberty of citizens.
• Three Concepts of Liberty
• Negative the absence of coercion by others
• Positive to be able to act according to one's
  true will
• Republican not having to live in servitude to
  another not being subject to the arbitrary power
  of another. Unlike the positive liberty,
  republican liberty is not primarily concerned
  with rational autonomy, realizing one's true
  nature, or becoming one's higher self. Unlike the
  ordinary negative conception, the mere
  possibility of arbitrary interference constitutes
  a violation of republican liberty.

7
Liberalism A Brief Introduction (2)

• Liberalism as a Political Philosophy
• Liberal political philosophy explores the
  foundations of the principles most commonly
  associated with liberal politics.
• In politics, the term liberalism denotes a
  family of positions centred around constitutional
  democracy, the rule of law, political and
  intellectual freedom, toleration in religion,
  morals and lifestyle, opposition to racial and
  sexual discrimination, and respect for the rights
  of the individual. It refers also to a heritage
  of abstract thought about human nature, agency,
  freedom, and value, and their bearing on the
  functions and origins of political and legal
  institutions.

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Liberalism A Brief Introduction (4)

• Liberalism as a Political Philosophy (Cont.)
• Individualism
• Liberals believe that the individual person is
  what matters for the purposes of social and
  political evaluation. individualism is not the
  same as egoism. But individualism excludes social
  and collective entities from the realm of
  ultimate goods.
• Belief in the importance of freedom.
• A commitment to equality. People are entitled to
  equal concern for their interests in the design
  and operation of their societys institutions
  and they have the right to be equally respected
  in their desire to lead their lives on their own
  terms.
• An insistence on the rights of individual reason.
  This involves not just freedom of thought,
  conscience or discussion, but a deeper demand
  about justification in politics the demand that
  rules and institutions of social life must be
  justified at the tribunal of each individuals
  reason.

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Liberalism A Brief Introduction (5)

• Liberalism as a Political Philosophy (Cont.)
• Liberals hold that political organizations are
  justified by the contribution they make to the
  interests of individuals, interests which can be
  understood apart from the idea of society and
  politics. They reject both the view that
  cultures, communities and states are ends in
  themselves, and the view that social and
  political organizations should aim to transform
  or perfect human nature.
• People have purposes of their own to pursue,
  either economic or spiritual (or both). Since
  those purposes do not naturally harmonize with
  one another, a framework of rules may be
  necessary so that individuals know what they can
  count on for their own purposes and what they
  must concede to the purposes of others. The
  challenge for political philosophy, then, is to
  design a social framework that provides this
  security and predictability, but represents at
  the same time a safe and reasonable compromise
  among the disparate demands of individuals.

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Liberalism A Brief Introduction (6)

• Liberalism as a Political Philosophy (Cont.)
• Liberal political theory fractures over the
  conception of liberty. But a more important
  division concerns the place of private property
  and the market order.
• For classical liberals liberty and private
  property are intimately related all rights,
  including liberty rights, are forms of property
  property is itself a form of freedom
• For classical liberals private property is the
  only effective means for the protection of
  liberty. Here the idea is that the dispersion of
  power that results from a free market economy
  based on private property protects the liberty of
  subjects against encroachments by the state.

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Liberalism A Brief Introduction (7)

• Liberalism as a Political Philosophy (Cont.)
• welfare state liberalism challenges this
  intimate connection between personal liberty and
  a private property based market order on three
  grounds
• Doubt about the ability of a free market to
  sustain a prosperous equilibrium if a private
  property based market tended to be unstable, or
  could get stuck in an equilibrium with high
  unemployment, then it is doubtfule whether it is
  an adequate foundation for a stable, free
  society.
• The Importance of Government
• far from being the guardian of every other
  right property rights generated an unjust
  inequality of power that led to a less-than-equal
  liberty (typically, positive liberty) for the
  working class.

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Liberalism A Brief Introduction (8)

• Liberalism as a Political Philosophy (Cont.)
• The social contract In its classical form - in
  the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and to a
  lesser extent Kant - the argument from liberal
  premises to the legitimacy of something like the
  modern state was presented in terms of the social
  contract. The argument goes something like this
• Imagine people living outside any framework of
  political authority, exercising the right to
  direct their own lives and their own dealings
  with one another, in what liberal philosophers
  have called the state of nature. Using this as
  a baseline, try to model the development of
  political institutions as a way in which
  individuals exercise their freedom not as a way
  in which their freedom is abrogated.

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Liberalism A Brief Introduction (9)

• Liberalism as a General Philosophy
• Personhood and Human Nature
• Liberals believe that individual persons are
  ontologically prior to social groups and
  relations and, so, persons and their identities
  are distinct, and that central to personhood is a
  capacity to choose among alternative ways of
  living.
• The perennial issue in liberal theory is the
  extent to which this basic individualism can be
  combined with a recognition of the social nature
  of humans, and the importance of one's social
  environment in the formation of personality.
• A Theory of Knowledge

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Liberalism A Brief Introduction (10)

• Liberalism as a General Philosophy (Cont.)
• Liberal Ethics Liberalism is not just a theory
  about politics it is a substantive,
  perfectionist, moral theory about the good. And,
  on this view, the right thing to do is to promote
  development, and only a regime securing each
  individual extensive liberty can accomplish this.
• Liberal Theories of Value
• Values or ends are plural, and no interpersonally
  justifiable ranking among these many ends is to
  be had.
• A person values rests on experiences that vary
  from person to person
• Values are Objective and (in principle)
  commensurable

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Liberalism and Islamic Liberalism (1)

• Is it possible to reconcile Islam and Liberalism?
  How?
• An example from Iran Abdolkarim Soroush and his
  challenge to Traditionalists Fundamentalists
• A between any religion per se and our
  understanding of that religion.
• A distinction concerning the essential and the
  accidental aspects of Islam.
• A distinction concerning the minimal and the
  maximal interpretations of Islam.
• A distinction concerning internal and external
  value systems for a religion.
• A distinction concerning the differences between
  religious faith and religious belief.
• A concerning dissimilarities between religion in
  the sense of a combination of both religious
  faith and religious belief system on the one hand
  and religion as an ideology on the other.

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Liberalism and Islamic Liberalism (2)

• Why is it desirable to reconcile Islam and
  Liberalism? Or is it?
• Liberalism as a Social Construct
• Liberalism, Islam and Democracy?
• Liberalism with Islamic tenets?
• Islamic Liberalism or Liberal Muslims?
• Liberalism and Islam The Possibility of a
  Dialogue?