Libertarian Islam: A new youth movement in Turkey

The "Anti-Capitalist Muslims" are a major player in the protests that have rocked Turkey.

These folks simultaneously call themselves anti-capitalists and libertarians.

What's that about?

They emphasize two core Islamic principles: Social justice, and freedom of conscience. 

The media has called them "secularist" protestors against the "islamist" rule of Erdogan. But that may be an oversimplification.

Below is an interview with İhsan Eliaçık, one of the movement's leaders.

-Kevin Barrett

Anti-Capitalist Muslim leader says Gezi youth want new approach to Islam

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News (**)

The public face of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims, a key player in the Gezi protests, says the secular demonstrating youth are interested in their libertarian interpretation of Islam. A new understanding of religion could be born out of the Gezi spirit, according to theologian İhsan Eliaçık (*)

‘I am a Muslim with an anti-capitalist and revolutionary understanding of Islam. I defend an understanding of Islam based on freedoms and pluralism,’ theologian İhsan Eliaçık tells the Daily News. DAILY NEWS photo

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has portrayed the Gezi Park protesters as “marauders” with no respect for religion, but many of those participating are youth who are seeking a new approach to faith, according to the public face of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims.

In contrast, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has a backward understanding of religion, İhsan Eliaçık told the Hürriyet Daily News.

How would you define yourself? Some call you a modernist Islamist.

I am a Muslim with an anti-capitalist and revolutionary understanding of Islam. I defend an understanding of Islam based on freedoms and pluralism. I am working to reveal what really lies at the heart of Islam.

What do you mean by anti-capitalist and revolutionary?

We want a world where there is no exploitation, no privileges.

Does that make you a socialist?

No. We criticize capitalism on its essence while we criticize socialism by method. We share the fundamental teachings of socialism, like equality, sharing, no discrimination based on social class; but we criticize the practical implementations, the political experiences of the Soviet Union, China and Albania.

What is libertarian Islam?

Islam has been understood in a totalitarian and authoritarian way. When Islam came somewhere, it was understood to oppress all the different identities, preferences and religions. Yet the coming of Islam should provide an environment free of pressure, where everyone can express themselves freely.

The gist of Islam lies in universal values like justice, equality, love and mercy. The Quran says there is no compulsion in religion. In this case, religion means worldviews and lifestyles.

No one can be forced to adopt a certain world view or lifestyle. I deduce this from the Quran. It is wrong to force women to cover their head in Islam.

So when you say equality, you are also including gender equality?

Of course. It is unacceptable that people are oppressed due to their religion, language, political and social identities. There is no place for that in Islam.

In that case, you would argue that Islam is being misinterpreted by the majority of the world?

States use Islam to advance their interests. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan all interpret Islam with an oppressive understanding. When Islam appears, a restriction of freedoms comes with it instead of freedom.

In this respect, you would most probably place Turkey somewhere else?

Not necessarily. Obviously Turkey has its own particularities. If you ask me where my understanding of Islam could best flourish, I would say Turkey, of course.

Why?

The infrastructure of Turkey is ready; it has an experience in secularism, the transition from a sultanate to a republic. This is a strong experience but not sufficient. Turkish secularism needs criticism. It is an oppressive secularism.

You are not categorically against secularism then?

My understanding of secularism is this: clerics should not have the authority to rule just because they are clerics.

So you don’t interpret secularism as separation of state and religion?

No; the Quran says nice things about the state; why should we not take it? Classical secularism excludes the holy book; but we can take the guidance that overlaps with universal values. For instance, it writes that sovereignty belongs to people in the Parliament; next to it we can have a writing that says God orders justice.

The prime minister defended the alcohol ban saying religion orders it; how can we be sure which interpretation we should use once you involve religion?

By discussing it. Otherwise it is also wrong to completely exclude it.

How do you evaluate the 10-year rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)?

The AKP implemented capitalism by covering it with Islam; it has used religion to legitimize capitalism. It has no alternative economic approach; on the political side; it has not changed the state’s fundamental reflexes; it has only made some changes to the details. Its own conservative reflexes have become the state itself. There are 204 laws remaining from the 1980 coup period. These need to change. There are 27,000 names of locations that have been changed, starting with Kurdistan. This region has been called Kurdistan since Ottoman times. The changed names have not been reinstituted.

It has a conservative interpretation of Islam. It has a backward understanding of Islam; it talks about alcohol, abortion; there is no need to deal with these issues. Islam does not ask you to deal with these issues, it asks you to get rid of the gap between rich and poor.

You seem to claim that the principles of Islam are actually universal principles.
The Quran’s fundamental principles are based on universal values: fairness, honesty, love, mercy.

How did the Anti-Capitalist Muslim movement come about?

It evolved around my views. We first walked from Fatih Mosque to Taksim square on May Day last year with the banner “fight against capitalism.” Some 110 mostly young people attended it; the media called it the Anti-Capitalist Muslims.

The Anti-Capitalist Muslims have taken part in the Gezi protests. What were the Gezi protests?

It was a spirit without a body. It was a youth uprising. The fundamental principles of Gezi were freedom, pluralism, respect and solidarity. They believe Turkey should be reconstructed based upon these principles. There was an anti-capitalist spirit there; we celebrated the [Muslim holy night of] kandil; we did Friday prayers.

Was it your idea?

No, we did not propose it; the youth in Gezi requested it from us.

What does this tell us?

Prior to Gezi, the understanding [of secularists] was “we don’t approve of it but we respect it.” Now it is one step further, there is also interest. They are interested in our understanding of religion. They continue to refuse the other [classic] religious understanding, they say, we have nothing to do with it.

The secular youth are not distant to religion, are they?

They were thinking “one side has captured religion; we can’t express ourselves in this type of religious understanding. They started to look for other ways. Now it is not the case, they say we can express ourselves in religion, but this does not have to be the AKP’s understanding of religion. They say we are not atheists, for instance.

The majority of Turkey’s secularists were never distant from religion; some of them were even pious. You can fast and pray five times a day and be secular at the same time.

Our understanding of Islam is based on social behavior and moral values; you should not hurt anyone, you should not steal, you should not lie, you should not remain silent against injustice; you have to have love and mercy for humans and nature. Those that [do not apply] these principles fall outside of religion; fasting, praying and covering your head is all personal.

Fasting and praying five times a day does not mean religion; these rituals for us are just details. Going to mosques or cemevis is just symbolic. … The real worship is what you do when you are in the middle of life, walking in the street in your relations with your neighbor.

It must have been interesting for you to see the Gezi youth interest in religion; I guess they don’t have a problem with Islam.

They are searching for a different type of religious understanding. If one day the Gezi spirit will have a body, there will be religion in it. A new type of religious understanding is going to be born from the Gezi spirit; [it will be] more libertarian, giving more importance to moral social values, with a spirit of revolution.

They must have been new to you as well?

I have seen women with décolleté asking me philosophical questions. Coming from conservative circles, you tend to think a woman with a miniskirt can’t have anything to do with religion. My conversations with them were more in-depth than the conversations I had in theological circles.


(*) Who is İhsan Eliaçık ?
İhsan Eliaçık was born in 1961 in the Central Anatolian city of Kayseri.
He graduated from the theology department of Kayseri’s Erciyes University. In the turbulent years preceding the Sept. 12, 1980 military coup, he was an active member of Akıncılar, an Islamist youth movement. He spent a year in prison after the coup, but was acquitted.
In 1990, Eliaçık started his profession as an independent writer, and later founded a publishing house, Çizgi, in Kayseri. He also published a local daily newspaper in Kayseri.
His articles have been published in numerous magazine, and he also served as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Söz ve Adalet.
Eliaçık is the author of 20 books, among them “Revolutionary Islam,” and “Islam and Capitalism.”
(**) Author Barçın Yinanç can be reached via barcin.yinanc[AT]hurriyet.com.tr

Muslims defend pig farmer's freedom

The fruit of an unnatural union between Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant and a laboratory pig

emailed to:

DNR-LawEnforcement@michigan.gov

Michigan Department of Natural Resources
Executive Division
P.O. Box 30028
Lansing, MI 48909

To Whom It May Concern,

As-salaamu alaikum,

It has come to our attention that your agency has ordered pig farmer Mark Baker to destroy his herd of Mangalista heritage pigs. We also understand that you are fining Mr. Baker $700,000 for refusing to kill all of his pigs immediately.

Why the fatwa* on Mr. Baker's pigs? They are guilty of the crime of being natural, normal pigs - not  Monsanto (TM) genetically-modified pork-bearing artificial life forms. If one of Mr. Baker's natural, healthy pigs escaped and "porked" one of the neighboring farmer's Monsanto (TM) pseudo-pigs, the bacon they'd be makin' would not be 100% Monsanto (TM) bacon-flavored food substitute. While such an act would admittedly be sordid and disgusting, and would reflect poorly on Mr. Baker's pig's taste in female pigs, executing all of Mr. Baker's pigs to pre-emptively prevent something like this from occurring seems to us to be a gross over-reaction.

And while the insertion of a few natural pig-genes into Monsanto's artificial bacon might pose a problem for Monsanto, which is trying to condition American consumers to accept its brand of 100%-genetically-modified unfood, the slight chance of such pig-on-plastic porking hardly seems adequate grounds for your mandated porcine hecatomb.

As a Muslim, I do not eat pork. And as a sentient, conscious being, I certainly do not eat Monsanto's test-tube-originated genetically-modified ersatz pork product.

But we Muslims believe in freedom. That's why Muslim-ruled lands have been protecting the rights of non-Muslims to eat pork and drink alcohol - which we Muslims believe have been forbidden by God - for 1,400 years.

As a Muslim, I must enjoin good and forbid evil. And one of the worst evils is oppression and tyranny.

Your attack on Mr. Baker's pigs is tyrannical and oppressive.

Stop it.

Now.

Sincerely,

Dr. Kevin Barrett
Islamic Freedom Forum

* Note: The word "fatwa" has been misconstrued by the media as a "death sentence." In reality, it just means "legal opinion issued by a Muslim scholar." So I am misusing the word here, just for fun.

_ _ _

The Bakers are asking for help in their struggle against tyranny and oppression:

Ways you can help:  1) July 12: Court at 111 Canal St. Lake City, MI starts at 2 pm, come early! It would be great to fill the 100 seats with supporters! 2) July 13: Celebration of the Farm at Baker’s Green Acres, starting at 10 am, food at 1pm, ending at 9 pm or so. Come for a hog roast fundraiser. A silent auction is planned and we have room for more donations–call 231-825-0293 or e-mail bakersgreenacres@yahoo.com. More information here: Court and a Party 3) Join the community of supporters at Pledgie: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/20620  Jill

How to eliminate force and fraud? The libertarian paradox

Islamic Freedom Forum (IFF) is for Muslims who say "we love our freedoms" - and for anyone else interested in thinking about freedom from an Islamic perspective. Non-Muslims curious about Islamic perspectives on liberty, and libertarian perspectives on Islam, are also welcome. For an activist slant on these issues, see Muslims for Liberty.

The Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham: Can they help overthrow bankster tyranny?

How to eliminate force and fraud? The libertarian paradox

Libertarians and anarchists say they want a society of maximum freedom, in which the only taboos are force and fraud.

Most libertarians are not big fans of democracy.

The problem with democracy, as they see it, is that majorities tend to vote to redistribute wealth - to themselves. Such redistribution is enforced by the state, with its cops, prisons, and armies. To libertarians, that is an unacceptable use of force. And it is accompanied by fraud, as the propaganda machine spins the facts to convince people that this wholesale looting is something other than wholesale looting.

Paradoxically - and not all libertarians notice this - even more force and fraud is used by wealthy minorities to protect their wealth from majorities who covet it.

When pro-redistribution leftist Salvador Allende was voted into power in Chile, he used relatively little force and fraud. He openly announced: We are going to tax and redistribute a larger portion of rich people's wealth, and use it to build better infrastructure and education (not to mention nutrition and housing) for everyone. 

Unlike Fidel Castro, Allende did not bother to build up much ability to wield force. He did not surround himself with enough trained killers and professional thugs to defend himself and his program.

Allende was relatively honest (he committed little fraud) and relatively peaceful (he was not interested in using force).

As a result, he was murdered by "libertarian" liars and thugs - ironically, the disciples of Chicago school economist Milton Friedman. These people believed that the end - liberalizing Chile's economy - justified the means: Spewing outrageous BS to the masses 24/7/365, rounding up their political enemies, and torturing, murdering, and terrorizing them.

"Libertarian" Chile became one of the worst gulag societies of the 20th century. (Yes, it's better now - the "libertarian" General Pinochet was finally arrested for war crimes, though he died under house arrest before he could be convicted.)

Unfortunately, the 9/11 (1971) coup in Chile is not an isolated instance. The most egregious force and fraud in modern political systems is being committed not by poor voters seeking to redistribute wealth, but by the wealthy seeking to protect their wealth. This should not be surprising, since the wealthy are generally more competent at everything - including force and fraud - than the less-wealthy.

As Naomi Klein explains in The Shock Doctrine, the New World Order program to "liberalize economies" in service to the rich, while enslaving everyone else, is forcing itself on the world through the most hideous combination of force and fraud imaginable. Using CIA-developed trauma-based mind control, the architects of planetary "liberalization" are destroying the middle class and the liberal democratic institutions that sustain it - labor unions, national industrial policies, progressive taxation, government services, high-quality public education, and the rule of law.

It isn't just leftists like Naomi Klein who have noticed this.

Paul Craig Roberts, the father of Reaganomics, ushered in the biggest-ever liberalization of the American economy. Top marginal tax rates on the rich were cut from over 70% to around 30%. In those days, Roberts was a supporter of Milton Friedman.

Today, Roberts looks at the world he helped create - and screams in anguish. The USA has become a gulag society. Economic "freedom" for the rich - tax cuts, free trade agreements, the destruction of unions, the degradation of public education - has led to the creation of a slave state, in which everyone's every move is being wiretapped by the NSA, the Bill of Rights is a dead letter, extra-judicial political executions of Americans and others are a regular occurrence, the masses sink into ever-deeper poverty and ignorance, and the mass media lies more outrageously than the fictional propagandists in Orwell's 1984.

All around the world, we see variations on the same theme: Wealthy, powerful minorities are using force and fraud to prevent poorer, less-powerful majorities from getting what they want.

In the Islamic world, strong majorities have favored Islamic governance and independence for at least three decades - arguably for more than 13 centuries. But the Western secularists who invaded, occupied, and colonized the Islamic world have been using outrageous amounts of force and fraud to maintain neo-colonial rule. Their local collaborators, the comprador class, are generally secularists...though the imperialists have recently begun courting "Islamists" who are willing to be compradors-in-turbans.

In Algeria circa 1990, the anti-imperialist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to sweep into power nationwide with around 90% of the vote. The criminal military oligarchy occupying Algeria on behalf of the West canceled the elections, and imprisoned, tortured, and murdered the FIS leadership, Then it slaughtered more than 100,000 people in pro-FIS neighborhoods and villages, using government death squads dressed as "radical Islamists."

The Algerian regime's wildly successful campaign of false-flag terror and mass murder made it a model for the Zionist-dominated West's struggle against Islam. On September 11th, 2001, the most spectacular false-flag attack in history was used to trigger a multi-generational war on Islam on behalf of Zionism, imperialism, and the New World Order.

Today, everywhere you look in the Middle East, powerful forces are trying to thwart the will of the people, using deception and violence.

In Egypt, as in all Muslim countries, the majority wants an Islamic society. But a small minority of secularists, funded by Soros-linked NGOs, is raising hell, trying to win on the streets what it cannot win at the ballot box.

If you talk to the Egyptian secularists, you'll find that they are an insufferably arrogant lot. They think the relatively poor, traditional, religious people who vote for Islamic parties need to be "educated" into thinking like they, the secularists, think. (Note: I am not particularly enamored with President Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood; I'm just saying that the vast majority in Egypt wants an Islamic system, and unfortunately the Brotherhood is currently the only realistic alternative.)

The same thing is true in Iran, where the vast majority supports the Islamic Republic, while a tiny minority of secularists tried to create a Soros-funded "Green Revolution" in 2009 by contesting the outcome of elections that were far more honest and transparent than those in the USA.

In Syria, a much more ethnically- and religiously-divided country, the clear majority supports the current government headed by President Bashar al-Assad, which is relatively secularist but anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist. According to polls and surveys taken by Assad's enemies, his lowest approval rating was 55% two years ago. Today, it is much higher. But powerful enemies, including the USA, Israel, NATO, and their puppet states in the Gulf and in Asia Minor, are using force and fraud to try to overthrow Assad.

Here in the USA, force and fraud have consistently been used to thwart the will of the people. A long list of domestic political assassinations, from Huey Long to the Kennedies, Martin Luther King, and Paul Wellstone, and fraudulent elections, most spectacularly in 2000 and 2004, have been committed to maintain and increase the wealth and power of America's criminal oligarchy. The list of foreign political assassinations is much longer.

As these and countless other examples show, the problem (in the real world, not libertarian theory) is not that poor people use force and fraud to redistribute rich people's wealth. It is that rich and powerful people use force and fraud to protect and grow their own wealth, at the expense of the less-rich and less-powerful.

If we want to get rid of force and fraud, we cannot simply eliminate taxation and government. That happened for a few years after the fall of the USSR. The mafia - a bunch of thugs even worse than the government ones - stepped in to "keep order." They didn't call their protection money "taxes," but it amounted to the same thing, only worse.

If we eliminate "government," it will simply be replaced by a less-transparent, more brutal version of the same thing.

So how can we get rid of force and fraud?

Not through any re-arranging of human institutions.

Only through the power of the sacred.

At the end of the day, the only reason for respecting a set of rules, beyond self-interest, is that those rules are sacred.  The sacred, the holy, the numinous - whatever you want to call it, it is the only effective bar to force and fraud.

So secular law systems are a contradiction in terms. If it isn't sacred, it isn't really law, and nobody will follow it if they don't think they'll get caught. For the details, read up on Critical Legal Studies.

Every known human society has been held together by two things, two loci of the sacred: family and religion. Both institutions are under attack by the New World Order, whose secularist ideology has roots in the radical illuminist strain of freemasonry. The NWO goal: Global "anarchy" (in the sense of nothing sacred and therefore no law) leading to global dictatorship (run by themselves).

When Cheney openly embraced "a government of men, not laws" after 9/11, he was voicing the New World Order ideal.

When Nick Rockefeller admitted to Aaron Russo that we Rockefellers created women's lib to destroy the family and force women into the labor marketplace that we control, he was revealing the NWO agenda.

When David Rockefeller said:  "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National autodetermination practiced in past centuries" he was confessing to the same thing.

These people's mission is to destroy the sacred. Once it is gone, they can rule through force and fraud raised to the Nth power.

They are destroying the sacred by spreading pornography and the slavery of "sexual liberation"; using the media to demonize and mock religion and the sacred; creating CIA-engineered New Age cults to spread religious disinformation and confusion; and even conducting anti-religious ("satanic") rituals of unimaginable sexual depravity and human sacrifice.

All of this New World Order "liberation" is covertly aimed at creating an Orwellian dystopia: A boot stomping on a human face for all eternity.

Libertarians who want to minimize force and fraud in the real world should recognize that their real enemy is the "liberator" who seeks to de-sacralize human life. Libertarians hould join forces with those working to maintain time-tested "institutions of the sacred" - in other words, traditional religion.

As libertarian economist David Friedman recently noted, Islamic law is rather amazing: It has been voluntarily followed by billions of people - yet practically all enforcement is in the hands of God, not human beings.

Other religions, too, have had at least some success maintaining man's freedom from the tyranny of man - by establishing his submission to the sacred.

If we are to diminish or eliminate force and fraud, let's face it: Religion is the only game in town.

Among the major religions, Islam has several advantages:

*It has a built-in mechanism for, and a history of, peacefully coexisting with other religious communities. (Christianity says "my way or the highway," which is why there were no Muslim communities allowed in Europe until relatively recently; whereas there have always been large, thriving minority religious communities in most Islamic lands.)

*It has a well-developed legal system that has worked well in a wide variety of times, places, and cultures with hardly any human enforcement.

*It commands the strongest allegiance of the most people. (More than a billion people voluntarily follow the law telling them to eat no food and drink no water from dawn to dusk during the Ramadan month of fasting - a sign of mass religious commitment far beyond anything else on earth today.)

*It opposes the usurious fiat currency system - the power base of the New World order's incipient Orwellian dictatorship.

*It has a glorious free market tradition similar in many respects to contemporary agorism. 

So listen up, libertarians: If you want to effectively oppose force and fraud, please make the effort to strip away the layers of propaganda and learn the truth about Islam - liberty's most powerful ally.