An Idea Whose Time Has Come: ‘Islamic Declaration Against Religious Police’
On January 4, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a non‐profit organization founded by a group of American Muslims in 1988, released an important document: “Islamic Declaration Against Religious Police.”
It began by explaining why such a declaration is necessary:
The distressing events transpiring in the Islamic Republic of Iran impress upon us the need to issue a clear and declarative statement against the institution of religious or morality police in particular, and the ideology of compulsion in general. We do so not from a political or partisan perspective but from a deeply held sense of moral and religious obligation flowing from our Islamic faith and sincere commitment to God.
Then the declaration noted that “religious police” is a grave problem not just in Iran, but also “Afghanistan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.” It added that in some other Muslim‐majority countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, regular police forces also engage in “moral or religious policing.”
Why was that wrong? The answer must be obvious to anyone with a sense of human liberty. But the MPAC also made a specifically religious case against religious coercion:
The institution of religious or morality police violates a core tenet of the Quranic message: “Let there be no compulsion in religion; truth stands out clearly from error” (Q 2:256). This verse can be understood as a universal declaration of religious freedom, which prohibits any coercion of conscience in matters of faith…
Even more explicitly, the Quran proclaims:
And had your Lord willed, all those who are on earth would have believed all together. Would you then compel men till they become believers? (Q 10:99)
Of course, while such Qur’anic verses are remarkably in favor of liberty, there is a problem that I myself addressed in my own writings: Medieval Islamic jurists, operating under imperial conditions, “abrogated” most of these magnanimous passages of the Qur’an, while taking more combative verses as definitive. Ultimately, they limited the Qur’an’s “no compulsion” principle only to allowing Jews and Christians remain in their own religions, while still making Islam dominant over them, and also coercive on its own believers. That is why, indeed, we have the very problem of religiously‐sanctified religious policing, which requires a detailed discussion of medieval roots of religious police in Islam, as I addressed recently.
Yet that is also why re‐affirming the liberating messages of the Qur’an is crucial for making an Islamic case for liberty. That makes MPAC’s declaration a powerful statement, which I welcome and support wholeheartedly. It promotes an idea whose time has long come: There should be really no compulsion in Islam. People should practice it, or not, freely, with the dictates of none other than their own conscience.