Today, in most minds, the words "liberalism" and "Islam" can come together only to form an oxymoron. However, this was not the case a century ago. The Islamic world was still much less open and democratic then the West, but most intellectuals and statesmen of that world were self-declared liberals.
One of the vanguards of this forgotten trend was an intellectual group in the late Ottoman Empire -- which then covered almost the whole Muslim Middle East -- called Young Ottomans. (Not to be confused with the later Young Turks, who were more secular and nationalist.) The Young Ottomans were both pious Muslims and committed liberals, who believed that the only cure to Muslim societies was to import the liberal democracy of the West and re-articulate it in Islamic terms.
The most prominent Young Ottoman was Namık Kemal, who saw liberty as the secret of the West's ascendance, but also believed that Islam had the same ideal in its core. "Being created free by Allah, man is naturally obliged to benefit from this divine gift," he wrote in his journal Hürriyet ("Freedom") in 1868. "[Thus] state authority should be realized in the way which will least limit the freedom of the individual."
For more: Mustafa Akyol: The Forgotten Liberalism Within Islam
