Thoughts on liberal Islam? | Mufti Abu Layth

But to what do I think about liberal Islam? Right now I mean, I'm not sure what that exactly means because there's a lot of these labels and I don't know if you can really apply these things to religion in that sense because really these were You see, these terms like liberal and conservative and stuff like that were really uh

defining spectrums of a politic of politics. So, it was to do with authority. That where you stand in relation to authority. That are you somebody who feels that the state should have more involvement in your life.

Or do you feel that, you know, you're anti kind of totalitarianism and anti-control and you want people to have more liberties and this is what liberal was in essence. Today, to be fair, many like um if we're going to look at um the UK, I suppose by that standard most politicians are liberal by that standard.

And then, yes, because Europe its state was also intertwined with the church. So, liberalism being liberated from the state or equally meant being liberated from the church because of its power. It's very difficult applying these parameters to Islam because Islam never really worked in that way.

There was never really a papacy or a pope system in Islam. And it was never it's it's just a different paradigm. The scholars were usually independent. Um and they are the ones who came up with the rulings. Now, I'm not saying there were no power politics at play, there were, but it's not the same kind of um you know, how do you define a liberal?

Is it somebody that just goes with the easy rulings? Then in that case, would you say the companions, some of the companions were liberals? I mean, you wouldn't really use that word for them. Would you say Imam Abu Hanifah was a liberal? I mean, it's really difficult understanding what these words mean in terms of Islam. I know a lot of Muslims use them.

But they're not really they don't not truly meaningful. They they seem to be using them to mean strict Islam and not so strict Islam. But that's not you know, because those rulings that they're going to go by will be said by scholars of the past. Nobody's making those rulings up. So how does that work then? Because those scholars of the past wouldn't be defined as liberal.

Mhm. So, okay. Cool, let's move on.