Sharia, Freedom, and the American Way of Life: A Response to Daniel Brubaker

Mustafa Akyol

I was glad to read, in The Federalist, Daniel Brubaker’s recent piece, “Why Sharia Law Is Incompatible with the American Way of Life,” which took up on an earlier piece of mine in Al Hurra: “Why Sharia Courts Have a Place in Israel.” I was also humbled that Dr. Brubaker kindly introduced me as “perhaps the most articulate Muslim advocate of reconciling Islam with Western liberty.” But generous framing aside, I think his response missed some of my own argument’s finer distinctions and oversimplified the case I was actually making.

First, let me clarify what we are discussing. My piece never claimed that Islamic law, or sharia, is already compatible with liberal democracy in its classical, state-enforced form. It made a narrower and, I think, more useful claim: that a specific, limited kind of sharia observance—personal-status law administered by community courts that operate underneath, not above, a rights-protecting state—has a long working history in exactly the kind of societies Dr. Brubaker may want to defend: Israel and Greece, the latter being more liberal thanks to the European Court of Human Rights. If I had more space, I could add other non-Muslim states such as India, Thailand, Singapore, or Sri Lanka, which also maintain sharia courts for their Muslim citizens, adjudicating family matters such as marriage and divorce without violating national constitutions or laws.

These examples do not show “what Akyol wishes sharia to be,” in Dr. Brubaker’s words. They show existing realities in the world, which are much more complex than what most of the contemporary sharia alarmists in America imagine.

None of this means I minimize the problem posed by the violent and coercive side of sharia, in its premodern/​imperial or modern/​Islamist formulations: a full legal order complete with apostasy and blasphemy laws, corporal punishments, and legal discrimination. These are serious threats to freedom—which is exactly why my own work for over two decades has been about building and popularizing reformist Islamic arguments to abolish these illiberal elements from Islamic law and Islamic states. (I also personally know the threat is real, as the Malaysian religious police taught me in 2017 by detaining me for a public lecture where I argued there should be no apostasy laws and no religious police.) 

On the other hand, I also recognize that a large share of the world’s roughly two billion Muslims simply wish to practice their faith—prayer, dietary rules, modest dress, all parts of sharia in the broad sense—without any interest in imposing these on others. My argument is that such voluntary piety, even when it includes family law, does not violate or threaten freedom so long as individuals remain free to exit or opt out—much as with the practice of Jewish law, the halakha, by Orthodox Jews in the modern world.

Yet Dr. Brubaker seems unimpressed by these nuances, because he thinks in slippery-slope terms. “A small quantity of poison in a glass of water is a poor reason to drink it,” he writes. In other words, he sees the illiberal elements in Islamic law as a reason to outlaw all of it. In fact, his title declares not just Islamic law, but more categorically “today’s Islam,” as incompatible with American liberty.

But this reasoning could be turned against nearly any group. Catholicism has its own long history of religious illiberalism, and there are Catholic integralists today who seriously aspire to remake America along theocratic lines. So, does that make all of Catholicism a glass of water with poison in it? Or consider white supremacists and their explicitly racist aims: Was the “woke left” correct to take them as reason enough to declare war on all “whiteness”?

Instead of such categorical judgments, I believe the line should be drawn at freedom itself, applied evenhandedly to any comprehensive worldview, religious or secular. That means people holding illiberal views should still be free to take part in a liberal order so long as they follow its rules and respect the freedoms of others. That consistency is what keeps freedom coherent—and it is also what eventually helps illiberal minorities come to recognize and appreciate freedom’s blessings for themselves.

That second point seems to be lost entirely on today’s sharia alarmists in the West, who treat Muslims’ exercise of freedom as itself the danger. In their view, when Western Muslims pray, dress, or speak in explicitly Islamic terms, or enter democratic politics to advocate for their views, freedom is under threat—because Islam is anti-freedom by definition. What these alarmists rarely consider is that the exercise of freedom is precisely what leads many Muslims to value it, as polls keep showing. A recent poll found that 67 percent of American Muslims are happy to “enjoy more freedom in America than anywhere else,” and 95 percent of them feel “proud to be American.”

Yet Dr. Brubaker still may not be impressed, for he says that “sharia conforms to liberal norms when and only when a superior external power requires it to.” In return, I would say there is truth in this, but so what? External realities, not just state regulation but also shifting norms and values, have pushed all our ancient religions to revisit teachings that once seemed permanent. Slavery was defended within both Christianity and Islam well into the modern era, and its abolition owed a real debt to outside pressure. Jewish communities became more individualist substantially because European liberalism sparked their own Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th century, to which I pointed as an example for Islam today.

In fact, Abrahamic traditions, Islam included, even carry a built-in theological rationale for absorbing such external pressures, a rationale that rests on two recognized sources of wisdom, revelation and reason—one as eternally fixed, the other as continuously unfolding.

Finally, I will grant that Dr. Brubaker is right to insist that full compatibility between liberalism and Islam will be possible only once Muslims honestly confront the real tensions between the two. So, I agree with these words of his: 

Until someone inside the tradition with genuine scholarly authority explains how Muhammad’s commands on apostasy and blasphemy are permanently inapplicable—without abandoning the prophethood that makes his words authoritative—the constitutional conflict…remains.

Yes indeed, and that is precisely the challenge my newly released edited volume, No Compulsion in Religion—No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom (Cato, 2026), takes up directly, with chapters on apostasy and blasphemy laws as well as religious policing and gender discrimination, each authored by Islamic scholars working from within the tradition’s own sources. Our Arabic, Persian, and Urdu editions are coming soon.

True, these reformist arguments have not yet won the day in Islam, but they are being seriously discussed among Muslims around the world. If they eventually do prevail, it will be in part because more Muslims come to see freedom as a noble and genuine ideal worth embracing. And that, in turn, will be possible only if freedom is understood to mean not only freedom from Islam, as Dr. Brubaker seems to focus on, but freedom of Islam as well.

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/sharia-freedom-american-way-life-response-daniel-brubaker