Riada talks to Shadi Hamid & Mustafa Akyol on French secularism, whether Islam faces crisis and implications for the future, liberalism and much more

Dignified Resilience with Riada Akyol

This podcast episode is truly a great treat for all those who are interested in conversations on religion and politics! It was my honor and pleasure to host two guests who are both very prolific writers and thinkers in their field. They are also my good friends (one of two guests, Mustafa, happens to be my husband as well) and it was great to get reunited over Zoom this time, because I miss the intellectually stimulating conversations that three of us have when we get together. As you will witness in this episode too, even when we disagree on something, we always listen to each other with attention, curiosity and care. In this episode, we talked about the implications of recent actions and statements by the French government and its officials regarding Islam, and Shadi and Mustafa pretty much agree on that topic. After that, I kept expanding the conversation towards necessary discussion on a broader picture and situation regarding religious pluralism and human rights in many Muslim majority countries. This was a fascinating exchange of opinions on the idea of crisis that Islam faces, what is or can something be done regarding improvement of the human rights situation in many Muslim majority countries, is there an order in which those changes should be done, what is the future of liberalism and much more! I hope you learn a lot and enjoy this meaningful conversation as much as I did. Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at Brookings Institution and the author of "Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping The World," "Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East," among other books. Hamid is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and vice-chair of the Project on Middle East Democracy's board of directors. Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. Akyol is the author of "Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty," "The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims," and of six books in Turkish, including "Rethinking the Kurdish Question." His TED talk on “Faith versus Tradition in Islam” has been watched by more than 1.2 million viewers.