RELIGIOUS authorities, in their zeal to protect Islam, are instead producing hypocrites and are causing people to lose faith and respect in the religion, said a Turkish journalist who was recently detained by religious authorities.

In an opinion piece published in the New York Times, Mustafa Akyol said he came to this realisation while he was sitting in the headquarters of the Federal Territories Islamic Religious Authorities (Jawi) in Malaysia.

“By policing religion, the authorities are not really protecting it. They are only enfeebling their societies, raising hypocrites and causing many people to lose their faith in or respect for Islam.

“I came to understand that while I was being held in the Jawi headquarters, listening to a loud Quranic recitation coming from the next room.

“I heard the Quran and for the first time in my life it sounded like the voice of an oppressor,” he wrote in the article.

Akyol said the incident was indicative of a major problem in Islam today, in which religion is imposed upon others rather than just preaching.

He said this contradicted the Quranic verse of ‘no compulsion in religion’, which he noted that Jawi officers repeatedly chided him for daring to bring up.

Akyol said religious authorities in some countries, including Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, had even inserted the phrase ‘in becoming a Muslim’ after the verse to justify policing Muslims on how they practice their religion.

The US-based writer was initially summoned by Jawi for giving an unauthorised talk on Islam after he gave lectures on the suppression of rational ideology by dogmatism in early Islam and on apostasy.

Akyol canceled his third lecture, which was about his most recent book, ‘The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims’, but was detained for 18 hours at KLIA before he boarded his flight home. – September 28, 2017.