Liberalism Was Once Foreign to Europe Too

The West’s freedoms were not native to its culture but the product of deliberate intellectual activism—a history that holds lessons for the Middle East today.

Can liberal ideas take root in the Middle East? The history of the European Enlightenment offers hope that even widely unpopular liberal ideas can eventually take hold. It is often claimed that liberalism is uniquely Western. But the West itself once rejected these ideas, and when they first emerged, political and religious authorities regarded them as dangerous and heretical. The triumph of liberalism in Europe was not the inevitable outgrowth of Christianity or local traditions—it was a hard-won achievement. This history holds lessons for advocates of the Enlightenment in the Middle East today.

The Enlightenment's core legacy was a broader shift toward reason, individualism, and a skepticism of traditional authority. But the path there was slow and bloody. Post-Reformation Europe was consumed by sectarian conflict: France bled for decades in the Wars of Religion, culminating in a massacre of Protestants; the Thirty Years’ War devastated the German lands, killing perhaps a fifth of the population; and mid-seventeenth-century England was torn apart by civil wars that ended with the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649. In these societies, Christian conviction did not foster toleration; instead, religion drove princes, parliaments, and preachers alike to violence. Religious freedom, like any idea, had to be discovered and fought for.

At first, European rulers followed St. Augustine’s command to compel nonbelievers into the church. Compulsion, Augustine argued, would lead to eventual assent: “Let compulsion be found outside, the will will arise within.” A Presbyterian clergyman expressed the mainstream clerical view when he warned that “To let men serve God according to the persuasion of their own consciences was to cast out one devil that seven worse might enter.” What mattered was the profession of the right beliefs—whether by reason or fear of violence was irrelevant.

It was necessity, not principle, that first gave rise to religious toleration. Rival sects, unable to annihilate one another, were forced to coexist. Protestants in France, for example, were granted limited freedoms only after both sides recognized they could not destroy each other. Even England’s Toleration Act of 1689 excluded Catholics, atheists, and anyone who denied the Holy Trinity.

It was a radical minority of intellectuals who ultimately broke this cycle of persecution. Thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, and the lesser-known Pierre Bayle offered a way out of religious violence by emphasizing the individual’s judgment and conscience. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary challenged dogmas and superstitions, teaching readers to evaluate popular views critically. Banned in both Protestant and Catholic countries, it nevertheless shaped the next generation of thinkers, including Voltaire and Hume.

For Enlightenment thinkers, the key was not only what people believed but how they reached their beliefs. Fanatics, Locke argued, mistook intensity of conviction for evidence of truth and divine inspiration. Voltaire warned: “Whoever has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.” The solution was to discipline the mind: to believe only what reason could justify. Gradually, political and intellectual elites came to insist that conviction must rest on judgment rather than compulsion or passion. This principle, articulated by Bayle and Locke, later found political expression in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As Jefferson proudly noted in a letter written to James Madison, “it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who has had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions.”

Religious freedom opened the door to other liberties. For centuries, premarital sex was treated as a crime across Europe, punishable by fines, whipping, or even death. As historian of sex, Faramerz Dabhoiwala explains:

“Though the details varied from place to place, every European society promoted the ideal of sexual discipline and punished people for consensual non-marital sex. So did their colonial off-shoots, in North America and elsewhere. This was a central feature of Christian civilization, one that had steadily grown in importance since the early Middle Ages. In Britain alone by the early seventeenth century, thousands of men and women suffered the consequences every year. Sometimes, as we shall see, they were even put to death. Nowadays we regard such practices with repugnance. We associate them with the Taliban, with Sharia law, with people far away and alien in outlook. Yet until quite recently, until the Enlightenment, our own culture was like this too.”

This was a natural, if hard-won, evolution: if individuals should be free to choose their religion, why not also their personal choices? Critics worried about where this reasoning might lead. Anglican clergyman Jonas Proast warned that if conscience were free, “perhaps other men may think it as reasonable to except some other things [from state control], which they have a kindness for. For instance: some perhaps may except arbitrary divorcing, others polygamy, others concubinacy, others simple fornication.” In the end, he was right—freedom of conscience gradually encouraged greater personal freedoms, making it untenable to claim that people should control their souls but not their bodies.

The same pattern held in art, science, agriculture, and trade: progress came not from inevitability but from the activism of dedicated heterodox minorities. Liberty takes root not because it is native to a culture but because individuals insist that conscience cannot be coerced and reason can be trusted. Europe did not begin with this conviction—it acquired it painfully, through war, persecution, and the persistence of those who refused to bow to dogma. The Middle East is not exempt from this pattern. If freedom could emerge from Europe’s wars of religion, it can rise as well from the region's own struggles, so long as there are voices with the courage to insist that conscience is beyond coercion and that reason may be trusted to form its own judgments.

But the history of Europe also warns us that such a transformation is neither swift nor certain. Progress required generations of conflict, setbacks, and the persistence of small minorities who refused to surrender their principles even when they paid for it with exile, imprisonment, or death. The same will be true in the Middle East: liberal ideas will not triumph by inevitability or outside intervention, but only through the long and painful work of those who defend them against overwhelming odds. The path is slow, the resistance formidable, and the outcome never guaranteed. Yet if history shows anything, it is that what begins as dangerous heresy can, through struggle and sacrifice, one day become accepted as common sense.

The question facing the Middle East, then, is not whether liberalism is foreign, but whether its advocates can sustain their case until what is now seen as dangerous novelty becomes accepted principle.

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