CSGC codirector Todd Johnson interviewed Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol about his new book, Reopening Muslim Minds, and about how an honest examination of the best and worst of Islamic history offers lessons for improving religious freedom and pluralism today.

In 1800, 33 percent of the world was either Christian or Muslim. Their share is 57 percent today and very likely to reach two-thirds by 2100. What do you see as hopeful signs in the relationship between Christians and Muslims?

We have had some terrible episodes, right? ISIS killed and tortured everyone who didn’t agree with it—Christians and fellow Muslims as well. But I believe that the past two decades of terrorism, violence, and attacks on churches and mosques of heretical sects has resulted in a growing yearning for freedom and toleration. It’s like 17th-century Europe after the Thirty Years’ War, when people said there must be a better way. I wrote this book to support that sentiment and offer one way of looking to the future.

Muslim minorities in the West are becoming a visible and important part of the Islamic world. I welcome this, because if we succeed to have peaceful, integrated Muslim minorities in the West—which we broadly have—it will show Muslims in other parts of the world that they don’t need an Islamic state to be good Muslims. They just need a decent state—a liberal, democratic state. Bosnia is a good example, as a secular state for 130 years. But it is also important for American, British, and European Muslims to establish themselves and remain who they are but also become visible believers in the idea of human rights and equal justice for all.

But there are two problems. One is the nativist far right in Western societies that can derail this process through Islamophobia, terrorist attacks, and hate crimes. The other is the double standard I see in some conservative Muslim thinkers in the West who say, “We like liberal democracy because we’re a minority here, but we’re not going to preach it at home because we believe in Muslim supremacy.” I’m paraphrasing, but this is real, and I’m criticizing that also and pushing those conversations.

In the Muslim mind, Christianity has long been associated with colonial Europe. But the Christian minorities suffering in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Malaysia need to be better recognized. Christianity is not an extension of colonial Western powers, and missionaries are not a fifth column of a coming colonial army. Will South Koreans occupy Turkey? Christianity is a sister Abrahamic faith with legitimate, equal rights—the rights we deserve in the West. Christians in the East should have them too.

One of our professors opened an eye hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, back in the 1960s. There was a church and Christian community there for a long time, but the government said we’re going to shut this down because it doesn’t belong here. The Christians then submitted a document with a picture of the large mosque in London to compare it with this tiny little church in Kabul. They razed it [anyway].

People’s rights don’t depend on what’s happening in other parts of the world, but Muslims need to understand the Golden Rule. What if Christians executed their apostates to Islam? Muslims would be enraged. Then we shouldn’t do it to them. They argue that our religion is the true religion. But if I impose it, the other guy will say and do the exact same thing. That gives you crusades and jihads for centuries.

To live together, we need to accept a neutral, secular political order built upon liberalism, human rights, and the separation of church and state. In my book, I address the theological, jurisprudential, and epistemological dimensions of this within Islam.

Reason, freedom, and tolerance once flourished in Baghdad, Cordoba, and other parts of the Muslim world. Could it happen again?

There are many such episodes. Jews migrated from Spain to the Ottoman Empire because the Inquisition forced them to convert to Catholicism or be heavily persecuted. But Muslims should also realize that though the Islamic toleration of non-Muslims was quite enlightened for its age, it was hierarchical tolerance.

Muslims were the ruling class, while Christians and Jews were tolerated as quasi-legitimate, flawed religious traditions. They didn’t have the same rights. And then consider the Armenians, who lived under hierarchical toleration for six centuries. Though it was more a representation of nationalism, they were wiped out in the Armenian genocide [1915–17]. The Islamic world fell behind its medieval standards, whereas the Western world went forward with an egalitarian system of coexistence as the legal norm. But I remind Muslims that in 1876, the liberal constitution of the Ottoman Empire tried to establish equal citizenship for Muslims and Jews. There have been efforts, and that’s how we have to go forward.