1. t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f t e x a s at a u s t i n
MUSTAFA AKYOL
TURKISH AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST From furious reactions to the cartoons depicting the Prophet
Muhammad to the suppression of women, contemporary
news from the Muslim world seems to beg the question:
Is Islam compatible with freedom and democracy? With an
eye sympathetic to both to Western liberalism and Islamic
theology, Mustafa Akyol traced the ideological and historical
roots of political Islam in his 2011 book, Islam without
Extremes:A Muslim Case for Liberty.
Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s in 632
AD, an intellectual “war of ideas” raged between rationalist,
flexible schools of Islam and the more dogmatic, rigid
interpretations.Although the traditionalist school won out,
fostering perceptions of Islam as antithetical to modernity,
Akyol suggests that a reexamination of the currents of
Muslim thought reveal a flourishing of liberalism in the
nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the unique“Islam-
liberal synthesis” of present-day Turkey. His analysis offers a
desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of
Islam and religious, political, economic, and social freedoms.
MUSTA FA AK YO L is a columnist for two Turkish
newspapers, Hürriyet Daily News and Star. His articles
have also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs,
Newsweek, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He
studied political science and history at Boğaziçi University in
Istanbul, where he lives. His talk at TED, titled “Faith Versus
Tradition in Islam,” was widely acclaimed.
TURKISH
OTTOMANISLAM WITHOUT EXTREMES:
A MUSLIM CASE FOR LIBERTY
LectureSeries
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4
3:00PMCLA 1.302E
A RECEPTION WILL FOLLOW THE LECTURE.
PUBLIC PARKING IS AVAILABLE IN THE SAN JACINTO GARAGE.
MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES
Sponsored by: Middle Eastern Studies and
the Dialogue Institute of the Southwest,
the departments of Government, History,
Religious Studies, Slavic and Eurasian
Studies, Radio–Television–Film, the Center
for European Studies, and the Program in
Comparative Literature.