What Western Thinkers Get Wrong About Islam and Liberty

By Zunab Zehra

“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” — Lord Acton

For centuries, many Western thinkers have treated Islam as civilization’s permanent “other.” In their imagination, Europe became the home of liberty while Muslim societies became symbols of obedience, fatalism, and authoritarianism. The story was repeated so often that it began to sound like historical fact. But like many powerful narratives, it was built on selective memory.

Some of the same thinkers who praised liberty also defended empire, colonial domination, and the “civilizing mission” imposed on Muslim lands. Their understanding of freedom often stopped at Europe’s borders.

One of the clearest examples is John Stuart Mill, celebrated as one of the greatest philosophers of liberty. Mill famously wrote that “the only freedom which deserves the name” is the freedom to pursue one’s own good in one’s own way. Yet the same Mill also argued that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.”

That contradiction matters.

Muslim societies were often placed into this category of supposedly “uncivilized” peoples who needed foreign control before they could become free. Liberty, in this worldview, was not universal. It was conditional. Europeans were ready for it. Others were not.

The irony is difficult to ignore. While European intellectuals accused Islam of being hostile to liberty, European empires were occupying Egypt, Algeria, India, Sudan, and countless other Muslim regions by force. Colonial governors censored newspapers, crushed dissent, and ruled without democratic consent while claiming to teach Muslims the meaning of freedom.

The problem was never simply Islam. It was that Muslim societies challenged Europe’s belief that it alone represented civilization.

The Myth That Islam Rejects Individual Freedom

A common Western assumption is that Islam only values obedience and leaves no room for individuality. This argument usually comes from reading Islam through the lens of medieval monarchies or modern dictatorships rather than through its foundational texts and intellectual traditions.

But Islamic history tells a more complicated story.

The Qur’an repeatedly appeals to reason, reflection, and moral responsibility. Human beings are addressed as thinking individuals accountable for their own choices. “There is no compulsion in religion” is not merely a theological slogan. It reflects a broader moral principle about conscience and belief.

Classical Muslim civilization also developed traditions of legal disagreement that many modern societies still struggle to tolerate. Scholars debated publicly across schools of thought for centuries. A jurist could disagree with another scholar without declaring him outside the faith. Intellectual plurality was not viewed as civilizational weakness but as part of scholarly life.

Western critics often describe Islamic law as rigid, yet Islamic jurisprudence historically contained diverse interpretations across regions and schools. In some periods of history, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived under systems that allowed communal autonomy long before Europe embraced modern religious tolerance.

None of this means Muslim societies were perfect. They were not. Muslim empires committed injustices just as European powers did. But reducing Islamic civilization to tyranny while portraying Western civilization as naturally liberal is historically dishonest.

Freedom According to Whom?

Many Western thinkers define liberty almost entirely in terms of radical individual autonomy. The ideal human being becomes someone detached from tradition, religion, and inherited moral limits.

Islam approaches freedom differently.

In Islamic thought, freedom is not simply the removal of restraints. It is liberation from domination by other human beings, by greed, by ego, and by injustice. A person addicted to power, wealth, or desire may appear “free” in a modern liberal sense while remaining deeply enslaved internally.

This is why many Muslim thinkers see moral discipline not as the enemy of liberty but as one of its conditions.

Muhammad Iqbal once warned against societies that worship material freedom while neglecting the human soul. He admired aspects of Western dynamism and scientific progress, yet criticized a civilization that could produce both democracy and colonial exploitation at the same time.

That criticism still feels relevant today.

Modern Western states often present themselves as guardians of universal liberty while supporting dictatorships abroad, surveilling populations, restricting speech during political crises, or treating Muslim religious expression as inherently suspicious. Debates over hijabs, minarets, Islamic schools, and Muslim immigration frequently reveal that “freedom” becomes negotiable when Islam enters the conversation.

The Selective Memory of History

Another major misunderstanding is the belief that liberty itself is an exclusively Western invention.

This ignores centuries of intellectual exchange.

European philosophers inherited mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and political thought through contact with Muslim civilization. Cities like Cordoba and Baghdad were centers of learning while much of medieval Europe was still emerging from political fragmentation. Muslim scholars preserved and expanded Greek philosophy, influencing later European intellectual development.

Even the idea that authority should be morally constrained existed deeply within Islamic political thought. Many Muslim scholars openly challenged rulers and argued that unjust governance violated Islamic principles. The belief that power must answer to ethics was never foreign to Islam.

The real issue is that many Western narratives measure liberty only through secular liberal standards. If freedom does not look European, it is often dismissed as incomplete or false.

But civilizations define human flourishing differently.

A society where family bonds, spiritual purpose, and communal ethics matter deeply may not fit modern liberal expectations, yet that does not automatically make it oppressive. Sometimes, the Western demand that every culture become a mirror image of Europe becomes its own form of intellectual intolerance.

Beyond the False Choice

The debate between Islam and liberty is often framed as if Muslims must choose one or the other. But history shows that Muslims have long struggled for justice, dignity, constitutionalism, and limits on power in ways rooted within their own traditions.

The real question is not whether Islam can coexist with liberty.

It is whether modern discussions of liberty are willing to move beyond colonial assumptions and recognize that freedom may have more than one intellectual language.

Because once liberty becomes the monopoly of one civilization, it quietly stops being liberty at all.