Islam & the Modern World · How the West Changed

Where liberalism came from

In short

• 1.Classical liberalism begins with specific thinkers — Locke, Mill — solving specific European problems: religious war and absolute monarchy.
• 2.It is a particular tradition with a history, not a neutral default.
• 3.Islam forbids compulsion in faith while insisting a society still has to answer what a good life is.

The claim being examined

Liberalism is presented as the natural end point of human progress: maximise individual liberty, let the state stay neutral about the good life.

The Islamic position

Islam agrees that coercion in belief is forbidden (Q 2:256) but denies that a society can be neutral about the good. Every legal order teaches something.

Analysis

John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and Two Treatises of Government (1689), and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) with its harm principle, are the load-bearing texts. Both were written to solve real and terrible problems: a century of European religious warfare and the arbitrary power of monarchs. The contemporary critique does not come mainly from Muslims. Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed, 2018) argues that liberalism succeeded so completely that it dissolved the family, community and religious institutions it had quietly depended on. Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982) argues that the state cannot in fact be neutral about the good, because its laws form citizens whether it intends to or not. The Islamic position engages this directly. Q 2:256 — there is no compulsion in religion — is not a modern apologetic invention; it is the ground of the classical treatment of non-Muslims, who kept their own courts in matters of personal law. But Islam does not accept the further claim that law can be silent about virtue. Its law is explicitly formative: it aims at the preservation of religion, life, intellect, lineage and property, the five maqasid al-shari'ah systematised by al-Shatibi (d. 790 AH / 1388 CE).

From the Qur'an

Sources

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) · J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859) · Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018) · Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) · Al-Shatibi, al-Muwafaqat · Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018)

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• Why the churches kept conceding
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• The decline of belief itself
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