This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 25, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's widely believed that Islam is simply not compatible with a free society, but is that really true?

Mustafa Akyol makes the case that Islam is compatible with a free society in his book, Islam

without extremes. We spoke last week.

I would say if we were living like in what's called the Middle Ages a thousand years ago and if someone looked at

Christian Europe they would not be very again hopeful about Christianity and

maybe individual liberty because there were institutions like the

Inquisition, there were crusades, and religious freedom was not really a strong

idea in Christian Europe, but that was not a direct outcome of the message of the New Testament of the Bible,

but it was a product of different power structures and people who understood the world in those times.

So Christianity has changed obviously and created its own way to freedom

to a free society or at least became compatible with a free society and that took a lot of effort, you know, changes in the Catholic

Church, Catholic doctrine and so on. And I'm saying in my book, Islam

without extremes, a Muslim case for liberty, that the same sources for liberalism exist within Islamic

thinking as well but they're not really very much emphasized right now in the

Muslim world because the Muslim world is in its probably own dark ages.

The 20th century has been the most unfortunate probably century in the history of the

Muslim world because of many political misfortunes which unfortunately led to some violent expressions of

Islam, reactionary expressions of Islam. But that is not the only thing that Islam can be and

when you look at Islamic history and even some Muslim societies today, you see more

tolerant, flexible interpretations of Islam, which create more room for individual liberty.

In your book you mentioned Rose Wilder Lane and how she described Islam from what she could put together.

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