This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 6, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Cato's Mustafa Achio believes there is a crisis in Islam and offers a path to resolving it by stressing the importance

of freedom, reason, tolerance, and an appreciation of science.

He lays out his argument in the new book, Reopening Muslim Minds, a Return to Reason, Freedom, and

Tolerance.

The book was released today.

The title of your book, Reopening Muslim Minds, a return to reason, freedom, and tolerance.

I think it's worth asking at the outset here, in your view, how closed are Muslim minds and what closed them in the first place?

First of all I should say that of course I'm not saying every Muslim mind out there in the world is closed.

I mean I'm a Muslim myself, but what I mean by that title is that I believe

Islamic thought and theology and jurisprudence have narrowed over time.

There is a certain orthodoxy which doesn't accept values

like freedom of religion or freedom of speech or accepts them in very limited sense.

That is why you have blasphemy laws in more than two dozen countries. There are problems with religious freedom in

most Muslim majority countries, not all of them obviously and there's a

spectrum there but in many of them. And there are clerics in different parts of the Muslim world in the Sunni or

Shia world who will say women are not equal to men and of course you know heretics or in an unorthodox interpretation of Islam don't have the same rights

they have to be suppressed and and in the very extreme end of the spectrum, of course you have people who commit violence in the name of Islam.

They just not believe in blasphemy, but they want to go vigilante on it and attack a cartoonist in the middle of Paris. So I see a big need for some new thinking in the world of Islam. I'm not the only one.

I mean, since the 19th century,

there have been a lot of Muslim reformists,

...