Wooing the Quran (2): Teleology, Eschatology and Rationality (Al Mulk, the Dominion)

The thoughts shared in the last post will insha’allah continue in future posts. The present piece is not in continuation of the last one but deliberately included in the same series as I want to aggregate all my readings and reflections related to Quran at one place.

An important element of Quranic discourse – and a kind of indirect proof of its Divine originality – is how it pushes the reader towards an almost natural and impulsive mode of pondering. This is sometimes achieved by countering the inner-most arguments developing deep within the folds of the human self. In his autobiographical journey towards Islam from atheism, Dr. Jeffrey Lang shares how he used to encounter responses to his questions as he interacted with the Quran on day to day basis. In fact, most of the Quranic interlocutors would agree that this observation is not a totally extraordinary experience and often there are moments when an unbiased and persistently reflective reader would feel as if his subconscious is laid bare before the Quran.

Being structurally as well as linguistically more coherent and direct, shorter Surahs [1] towards the end of the Quran better depict these characteristics of brevity and candor and this one, i.e., Al Mulk (the Dominion), is indeed no exception.

In what can be called a thematically single and well connected unit, a reader is warned regarding temporal nature of human life and this world, through an invitation to reflect upon the multifarious dimensions in which God’s Omnipotence is depicted in the observable universe. Being a frequently adopted style throughout Quran, this warning is delivered categorically by repetitively invoking the person of the Prophet by using explicitly the vocative case  قُلْ  implying that interlocutors of the Prophet were actively engaged with him where verses of the Quran were continuously serving as part of the ongoing dialogue.

Using observable phenomena in nature as a symbol pointing towards an Omniscient (67:14) and Omnipotent (67:1) Designer, the reader is asked to literally look upwards and observe the universe and creation of skies (67:3-5), look down and observe the creation of earth and how it facilitates movement like a tamed and domesticated camel (67:15) [2], and again pointed above to watch the flight and suspension of birds (67:19).

At first sight, this indeed looks like a straightforward framing of teleological argument, which is critically reviewed by Iqbal in these words [3]:

The teleological argument is no better. It scrutinizes the effect with a view to discover the character of its cause. From the traces of foresight, purpose, and adaptation in nature, it infers the existence of a self-conscious being of infinite intelligence and power. At best, it gives us a skillful external contriver working on a pre-existing dead and intractable material the elements of which are, by their own nature, incapable of orderly structures and combinations.

Even though, Iqbal’s critique of the argument emanates from an altogether different motivation (i.e., aiming at philosophical framing of the argument which is obviously distinct than the Divine formulation; and the latter cannot possibly be restricted under one of the classical arguments for the existence of God), a reader primarily accessing the revelation philosophically may still remain unsatisfied on closely similar grounds as Iqbal. Yet another kind of agnostic reader may feel utterly unmoved by Quran’s call to find the flaws in the perfect design of natural world. Take for instance, the case of this classic argument for denial in someone like Russell [4]:

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. [...] Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. [...] Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

Quranic discourse tends to address most of such counter-arguments all over the revelation; however, in this Surah specifically, part of the above limitations are overcome by what can be called a carefully refining of somewhat mechanistic God-Nature relationship (as viewed in classical framing of the argument) with the one of considered Divine intention and purpose [5]. In my view, this is achieved right in the beginning when the concept of death, which essentially implies transformation of of all life into an eventual mote of cosmic dust in a world without God, is not only attached with the Divine creativity but also given a greater and completely logical purpose of Divine judgement regarding who ultimately succeeds in achieving the moral good (67:2).

As if providing a possible rejoinder to Russell’s last remark, Quran forces the reader to remain attentive to this world as much as the other.

Without picking up this important nuance, the whole argument is rendered too simplistic and seemingly based on mechanistic Designer/ Designed duality. On a different note, these initial verses tend to transpose the way how an atheistic argument would approach this whole issue of life and death, i.e., by turning one’s attention to other things. Quranic argument like the atheistic stand is also rooted in the natural world but unlike the latter, this natural world – in its existence as well as extinction – is not considered to be moving towards a purposeless decay but serving as a test bed for human conduct.

Not classically opposing but nevertheless an ostensibly reasonable counter-question can be that when will this promise of ultimate day of judgement be fulfilled (67:25), to which the Prophet is simply asked to respond that he does not possess such knowledge, as he is merely given the mission to convey a clear warning (67:26). Faith, therefore, is not always based on positivist empirical grounds (67:12).

The acme of this Divine drama as well as response to deniers’ myopic reasoning is set in the hereafter where groups of the persistent deniers, after being thrown into the animated Hell, will be asked whether no warner has been sent to them with the warning. To which, they will reply that warners were indeed sent to them but they rejected them and considered them deluded (67:7-11).

Perhaps the most peculiar and interesting point in these verses is Quranic commentary on rationality. The human faculty of reason, as the dialogue (67:7-11) quite clearly establishes, if used judiciously, must lead man to use natural world as a symbol to infer existence of God and a greater plan in creation. “Is then one who walks headlong, with his face grovelling, better guided,- or one who walks evenly on a Straight Way?”, asks Quran from the ones who ascribe to reason as an ideal in itself and blinds themselves to the actual ideals in the process (67:22).

Just like it is reasonable enough to believe in warnings given to us daily by people whom we fully trust, it is also rational to believe in the warnings given to us by human beings whom God chooses as His messengers. It is perhaps correct to contend that reason, according to Quranic view of rationality, is not an ideal in itself but a means to achieve the only true ideal of conceiving and appreciating the Divine consciousness scattered everywhere in the cosmos [6].

Among the obvious philosophical difficulties of understanding this kind of Quranic discourse – where the argument is rooted in the warning as well as the person of the warner – is the question whether a contemporary reader should differentiate between the direct and indirect recipients of the revelation. In my view, the point regarding warner’s proximity to those being warned clearly differentiates both kind of recipients in how they employ their respective faculties of reason; as what was originally a two-dimensional approach of warning – closely binding the person of Prophet as well as the Revelation – has been transformed into a single textual dimension for later communities after the Prophet.

This indeed is among the common semantic difficulties (albeit usually ignored) which a careful reader of the Quran, especially the one carrying the burden of historical interpretation, faces too often. Important among some other difficulties specific to this Surah are the exegetical issues whether the idiomatic meaning of phrase رُجُومًا لِّلشَّيَاطِين can be taken in verse 67:5 [7]; and what purpose is possibly intended when Quran employs a language that apparently confines God to celestial space (67:16-17) [8].
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1. Shah Wali Ullah categorizes these Surahs as Mufassal in Al-Fauzul Kabir fi Usul al-Tafsir (although the categorization is not originally from him but coming from the classical tradition of exegesis) and this is the seventh and last group of according to Amin Ahsan Islahi’s grouping in Taddabbur-e-Quran.
2. Islahi shares great insights on idiomatic constructions in 67:15 in his Taddabbur-e-Quran.
3. Muhammad Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.
4. Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian.
5. For detailed analysis of Iqbal’s critique and transformation of traditional philosophical arguments for existence of God, see Basit Bilal Koshul, Muhammad Iqbal’s Reconstruction of the Philosophical Argument for the Existence of God in Muhammad Iqbal: A Contemporary.
6. Muhammad Asad gives brief but good insights regarding these verses in his Message of Quran. For detailed critique of modern views of rationality in relation to human psychology and its inter-relationship with knowledge, ideals, instincts and self, see Muhammad Rafiuddin, Ideology of the Future.
7. Asad, for instance, translates the verse idiomatically by rendering it to refer to astrologers who use patterns and positions of stars to make futile and random guesses.
8. This indeed seems to be a metaphorical figure of speech not implying literal confinement to heavens above, as human beings sometimes symbolically (and almost naturally) refer to the celestial spaces while mentioning God. Some translators have rendered the particle فِي as possessive rather than implying the usual meaning of containing within, which is a linguistic stretch in my opinion.

Wooing the Quran (1): The Question of Interpretation

This is first post of a series that I would love (and pray) to continue forever for who would like to stop collecting the jewels scattered in and around Quran. However, these ramblings should be taken as if coming from a novice who is trying to indulge himself into a patient, considerate and occasionally intense dialogue with Quran.

Jalaluddin Rumi compared the Book to a bride, unwilling to lift her veil before a rough and importunate lover; and most importunate of all are those who seek to plumb its depths without effort, patience or humility. It is no mere figure of speech to say that those who wish to win the Quran must indeed woo it. (Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man)

I remember arguing sometime back that Quran is not as simple and straightforward as it is usually purported popularly, by drawing inference from the Quran itself that it is a clear guidance and contains established and explained verses (11:1). This inference, as already elaborated (in the same post), gives a kind of superficially monosemous character to Quranic language implying necessity of universal comprehension and consequently a singular as well as monolithically understood absolute truth. Towards the end of that post, I tried to pose some questions to myself for further deliberation:

What then do we mean by agreed upon universals of language? What we must know in order to determine the reference of an expression? Is it legitimate to disregard and discard agreed upon historical interpretations using tools of linguistic and literary criticism only? Isn’t it true that what we choose to eliminate also has valid basis in language though not always in historical context of revelation? What is the correct priority of sources of understanding Quran? What comes first in Quranic hermeneutics – knowledge of language, tribal dialects and jahilia poetry or Hadith, context of revelation and understanding of Companions and their students? Is it a valid assertion that understanding of Quran would always remain evolving and there would always be room for new interpretations?

Since then, further readings as well as exposure to better developed percepts have helped crystallizing more such questions, which in my view, belongs to the domain of interpretation in general and Quranic hermeneutics in particular. In this backdrop, as far as overall exegetical domain (specifically with respect to Quran) is concerned, better informed technical expositions may include a whole range of historical approaches and variety of methods which have been employed to approach the Quranic text [1].

However, if one takes the liberty of using a broad brush, these myriad of approaches may well be reduced to two parallel (albeit sometimes historically traversing) interpretive traditions, i.e., Tafsir Bil Riwayah (or Mathura) which is primarily based on transmission through written or oral tradition, including the Prophetic Hadith as well as exegesis of companions and their successors, and Tafsir Bil Ra’y having basis in reasonable and considered opinion through textual deconstruction as well as historical context and setting of revelation. Even though both the approaches are not strictly mutually exclusive, – for instance, sharing almost all the sources and tools of interpretation (i.e., context, linguistic tools, Hadith and opinions of past exegetes and classical Jahilia poetry) – there is a considerable difference regarding priority of these sources as well as the manner in which a particular source is employed. To facilitate further discourse we can call them traditionalist and rationalist schools of Quranic interpretation, respectively.

Even though both these approaches have been traditionally distinguished in numerous expects as well as object of a lot of historical (as well as contemporary) heresiography, in my view, there are two fundamental aspects of traditionalist school which may be used to meaningfully characterize its contrast with the rationalist approach: one, the principle that any interpretation of Quran must be based on authentic Hadith or interpretation of the Salaf (including companions and their successors) and two, approaching the Quran as a generally incoherent text (not ambiguous) with no primary consideration of thematic unity. 

Needless to reiterate that these contrasts sometimes reflect considerably different (at times opposing) manifestations of perceived absolute truth, thereby raising complex hermeneutical challenges; for instance, the question whether one should justifiably claim to have located the original Divine intent behind the revelation, for not only because multiplicity of meanings is an inherent characteristic of language, but also because historical pre-understanding is essentially embedded into the community of meanings surrounding the text (as fundamentally characterized in case of traditionalist approach).

In its most fundamental exposition, the first aspect of traditionalist approach draws Prophetic authority of interpretation from the Quran itself when it states that:

(We sent them) with Clear Signs and Books of dark prophecies; and We have sent down unto thee (also) the Message; that thou mayest explain clearly to men what is sent for them, and that they may give thought. (16:44)

Thus, it is not even slightly disputable (at least among Muslims) that one of the foremost Prophetic roles was to explain the Quran to its direct recipients. Instances were recorded where Prophet expounded the meanings of various verses to his companions and sometimes responded to their queries. There were companions who toiled hard and spent a lot of time to learn Quran from the Prophet, an example being the record in Muwatta that Abdullah Ibn Umar spent eight years to learn Surah Al-Baqarah from Prophet. Hadith collections and commentaries also record other interesting instances related to Quranic exegesis, for instance the report in Sahih Bukhari that Prophet prayed for Ibn Abbas for granting him the wisdom regarding the interpretation of Quran. Many such reports can be found in Hadith corpus as well as classical encyclopaedic works written on Quran.

However, similar data also suggests that Prophet did not formally arrange to record the interpretation of the Quran, in the modern sense of interpretation proper; ostensibly because the phenomenon of revelation was still open and did not attain its final textual character. Some scholars of Quran have chosen to call this Prophetic interpretive indulgence ‘practical exegesis’. Furthermore, some reports ascribed to him indicate that he even directed categorically that nothing should be formally recorded (in written form) besides the Quran so as to preserve the distinct character of revealed word. Therefore, it is hard to argue the case for formally intended (and preserved) Prophetic exegesis using verses like above, which apparently relate to Sunnah of the Prophet or his authority in general as the character of revelation was embodied in his person according to fundamental Muslim faith and his relation with Quran being ultimately reciprocal.

This last assertion however, does not mean to undermine those authentic reports according to which Prophet did indeed resort to formal interpretation in some sense. For instance, an interesting case is of verse 6:82 when some of the companions took literal meaning of the word Zulm and asked the Prophet that who among them could possibly claim to have never committed any wrongdoing (i.e., Zulm); to which he responded that the Zulm in this verse is synonymous with associating partners with Allah. Another such example is of Adiy Ibn Hatim who literally comprehended the meaning of black and white threads in verse 2:187 and sought clarification from Prophet next morning.

It is obvious that on occasions like above, Prophet indeed gave (or sanctioned) formal and specific meanings to the Divine text but it is still arguable whether these expositive incidents can be used to conclude that these reports add something substantial to the Quran which cannot be otherwise interpreted from the text itself? For in the first case, Quran itself equates associating partners with Allah as the greatest wrongdoing (31:13) and in the second case, the refered companion indeed missed the idiomatic character of the Quranic language, a mistake which was not obviously committed by the complete community of recipients at that time [2].

Historical reports like above can be used as test cases to distinguish the traditionalist and rationalist approaches with regards to the issue of authority of interpretation (the first of the two aspect already mentioned above) and raise some important concerns regarding the autonomy of the Divine text itself or the autonomy of the historical interpretive baggage that surrounds it.

Most importantly, these solitary incidents, though reasonably authentic, cannot serve to add to the fundamental textual character of the Quran as a complete and autonomous body of text even by the standards of traditionalist school itself; because obviously, any interpretation of Quran (including direct expository Hadith) is not synonymous with Quran itself. Indeed, it is hard to deny that Quran itself gives enough pointers to preserve its character of a complete book arranged in a specific order, containing message which does not essentially require support of other texts for its meaningful completion.

Secondly, any historical interpretation attributed to Prophet (or his companions) draws its authority from the fact that the original narrator memorized it and decided to report it later. This act of the narrator was neither directed by the Prophet categorically nor enjoy the elaborate Divine sanction of textual preservance as in the case of Quran; for it does not seem sensible that we would have been trying to distinguish white and black pieces of threads early in the morning had Adiy Ibn Hatim not transmitted this report further down the generations or the report was lost due to some other reason.

Interestingly, as I have already argued previously, similar examples (including the ones shared above) can be used to argue that companions, besides being the direct recipients of Quran and having been better exposed to classical language of the times experienced various kinds of interpretive difficulties. An important dimension of these challenges were posed by various tribal dialects as in the case of Ibn Abbas who correctly understood the meaning of Fatir (35:1) after encountering its usage by two bedouins [3]. These difficulties obviously multiplied considerably in the last years of revelation when the Quranic message reached out to Arab commuities other than Hijaz.

Understanding historical incidents mentioned in the Quran (especially related to Bani Israel) was another important challenge and many companions famously turned to Jewish converts to Islam (for instance Abdullah Ibn Salam and Kaab Ahbar) for better understanding of incidents related to Jewish history. Their personal opinion also mattered a lot in the matters of exegesis when there was no authentic statement of Prophet in their knowledge. Most classical exegetical works are full of those variety of opinions.

In this last respect, both approaches (i.e., Traditionalist and Rationalist) seems to silently converge as tradition-based exegetes, like Tabari or Ibn Kathir for instance, normally relate all such opinions (which are very much personal) reached to them and sometimes mention their own preference (as in usually in case of Tabari) which is obviously based on considered reason (ra’y), formalising it in hermeneutical structure as principle of Tarjih (preference).

In my view, traditionalist school itself acknowledges all these concerns and generally considers it least error-prone (or risky if one may call it keeping in view the sensitive nature of deciphering and deciding the absolute truth from the revealed text) to trust interpretation from a historical chain going to the Prophet or Salaf rather than giving preference to own reason or opinion. Interestingly, a generally accepted traditionalist exegetical principle is that no authentic Hadith can be against the Quran and an attempt is always made to reconcile both, even if it adds something to the apparently clear meanings of the Quranic text.

Rationalist school on the other hand, especially the modernists after Shah Wali Ullah (who in a way belongs to both schools but visibly shifts towards the traditionalist as far as authentic Hadith is concerned), fundamentally considers Hadith and Athar-e-Sahaba (what has reached from companions) as secondary sources which can be used to strengthen (or in some cases specify) the interpretation of Quran primarily reached through textual methods and linguistic tools. In case of handling ostensible incompatibilities and contradictions among Quran and Hadith, it is the latter that has to interpreted differently (and some times rejected) rather than a clearly purported message of the Quran.

It is difficult to locate, therefore, why adherents of both the approaches generally resort to acerbic criticism against each other when both of these ultimately want to achieve a higher aim of understanding the true message, as it was originally received (and perceived)  by the communities in Prophet’s times. For the sake of present discourse if we disregard the secondary reasons – like insecurities related to preservation (and securing) of traditional archetypes related to religious knowledge (especially of Quran), the major conclusions of the Orientalist project and modernist reactions to those conclusions which sometimes resulted in whole scale scepticism (and at times categorical denial) towards tradition – the clue might lie in how the Quran has been approached fundamentally (as far as its textual character is concerned) by both the camps which is the second major aspect in which both the approaches stand in complete contrast to each other.
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1. See for instance, Shah Wali Ullah, Al Fauzul Kabir Fi Usul al-Tafisr or Jalaluddin Suyuti, Al-Itqan Fi Ulum al-Quran.
2. Prophet himself referred the verse of Surah Luqman in order to explain the correct meaning of 6:82. The incident is reported widely and Ibn Kathir records it in his Tafsir.
3. This and few more examples are quoted in a previous entry. Suyuti includes a list of Quranic vocabulary that belongs to different tribal dialects.

Is Islam a patriarchical tradition (II): Exegesis or Eisegesis

Those who listen to the Word, and follow the best (meaning) in it: those are the ones whom Allah has guided, and those are the ones endued with understanding. (Al Quran 39:18)

Every interpreter comes to the text bearing those complex histories of effects we call tradition. There is no more a possibility of escape from tradition than there is a possibility of an escape from history or language. (David Tracy in Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope)

Interpretation being a human enterprise primarily means that it would be essentially modulated by inherent subjectivities of the interpreters, about which they might not be fully aware of themselves. This is because we cannot claim objectivity beyond our personal and social construct of reality. This is exactly the kind of subjectivity which Heidegger calls a reader’s ‘pre-understanding‘ and Gadamer terms as their ‘effect histories‘. Farid Esack, a South African Muslim scholar, terms interpreters as ‘beasts of many burdens‘ and contends that the whole concept of meaning is null and void unless an active and perpetual participation of the reader is assumed [1].

Consequently, as each reader brings along his own burden of contemporary contexts as well as innermost constructs of thought, all of them are bound to approach Quranic text with essentially different viewpoints. Speaking of gender and human sexuality, for instance, is it justifiable (philosophically as well as psychologically) that readings of men, women or eunuchs are understood to produce exactly similar meanings of the scripture? In the words of Cantwell Smith [2],

If you yourself are a Muslim writing a commentary; or a Sufi pir instructing your murid [disciple]; or a conscientious jurisconsult deciding a tricky point of law; or are a modern oxford educated Muslim reflecting on contemporary life; or a 12th century Sherazi housewife; or are a left wing leader of the slave revolt of the Zanji protesting against what seem to you the exploitation and hypocrisy of the establishment – in all such cases the correct interpretation of the particular Quran verse is the best possible interpretation that comes to you or that you can think up.

But the contention, as Smith continues to expound further, does not mean that these individual interpretations are intentionally crafted to concoct pre-concieved meanings of the scripture; rather, these interpretatins represents true will of God in the sincere and uncontrived good judgment of the respective interpreters. Moreover, the fact that one absolutely objective correct reading cannot be claimed by any of the readers does not necessitate that all these individual readings are rendered false. In fact, it is always likely that one of these subjective readings is rendered absolutely true, representing fully well the original intent of the God but there is no way of authoritatively claiming that, since one cannot speak in God’s name; and therefore, the usual concluding remark at the end of all traditional discourses: and God knows best.

While moving towards a better understanding of nature of conservative Quranic exegesis, it is perhaps more fruitful to invoke a framework of tradition rather than aforementioned individual subjectivities. Many contemporary scholars, for instance Fazlur Rahman [3], Amin Ahsan Islahi [4] and Mustansar Mir [5] have noted that traditional exegetes of the Quran generally failed to access it in hermeneutic totality and instead took it as a lineary constructed incoherent text without any literary considerations of textual groups (and sub-groups) with consistent thematic elements and clusters of verses addressed to specific groups of original addressees in their respective contexts. The occassions of revelation (asbab al-nuzul) which these exegetes often refer to are disjointed solitary narrations often having distant contextual imports which are seldom agreed unanimously among themselves. Moreover, there had always been disagreements regarding more important concepts such as nature and extent of abrogation (naskh) and the scriptural content which has been abrogated by the later content.

On a more complex note, originators as well as heirs of this conservative discourse did not possess adequate philosophical tools to realize the true social import of Muslim belief that real Quran is the eternal speech of God and the text between the covers (famously called bayn al duf’atay’n in traditional literature) is its earthly realization [6]; thereby, creating coalesced layers of paradoxes, which on one hand confused Divine ontology with Divine discourse and confused the eternal Quran with its readings on the other.

As the traditions became crystallized and meanings of the scripture were faithfully transferred to next generations of students, complexities like these were eventually buried under the burden of tradition . Consequently, these tendencies to access Quran atomistically and somewhat randomly resulted in future inabilities to consider it as an integrated document perpetually unfolding itself in time.

This hermeneutic view that Divine discourse is unfolding itself in time is well synced with the Quranic claims of divinity, transcendence and applicability for diverse individual and social realities including those which are yet to be realized. These claims are indeed ascribed by conservatives as well, but unfortunately, the failures (or inabilities) to respond to complex hermeneutical paradoxes resulted in a perplexed state of denial as well as acceptance; i.e., denial of historicity and acceptance of some form of imaginary time in which meaning of Divine discourse is strictly atemporal and situated historically.

Furthermore, these subjective responses were always supplemented by an equally ambiguous notion of authorized readings of the scripture, whereas contemporary readings as well as modern hermeneutical methods being rejected as biased and whimsical without due deliberation. Interestingly all the problems followed by assuming this notion of misplaced authority were also referred circularly to the same authority.

A simple and concrete example to depict these interpretive tendencies is verse 33 of Surah al-Ahzaab translated as [7]:

And stay quietly in your houses, and make not a dazzling display, like that of the former Times of Ignorance; and establish regular Prayer, and give regular Charity; and obey Allah and His Messenger. And Allah only wishes to remove all abomination from you, ye members of the Family, and to make you pure and spotless.

Bulk of contemporary conservative exegesis (which in Sunni Islam is conventionally understood to be authorized by an ambiguous authority ahl-e-sunnah wal-jamaah) interprets this verse to contain a mandatory (and commendatory according to some) directive for all Muslim women to remain confined to their homes without an urgent need, which would not be decided by the women themselves but scholars of ahl-e-sunnah wal-jamaah. The popular sermons preached in street mosques display amazing selectivity and seldom mention it (perhaps in a cursory manner) that the said verse is actually addressed to the wives of the Prophet. This is evident by the beginning of the preceding verse (33:32) which states ‘O Consorts of the Prophet! Ye are not like any of the (other) women…‘ and also by the end of this verse (33:33) in which ‘members of the family‘ are again mentioned exclusively.

Many orthodox exegetes (for instance Tabari and Ibn Kathir) of early and medieval Islam indeed mention this fact in their respective interpretations while also generalizing the import of this verse for all Muslim women as according to these scholars, they should follow the exemplary character of Prophet’s wives. According to them, the directive was understood in a general sense by the earliest Muslim community, as indicated by some of the historical reports. This is obviously a claim, which though hard to establish for each single woman of that community, can easily be explained by the fact that it was generally a homogeneous community with extraordinary sense of piety due to various factors including presence of God’s Prophet among them.

Furthermore, these exegetes never state categorically that this directive has explicit mandatory value for all Muslim women and seldom brings this issue as a primary message of the verse. Bulk of their interpretations consist of other pertinent issues related to the context of the ayah (and Surah al-Ahzab in general) for which Prophet’s household was cautioned and directed to observe extra care, caution and character. In line with their method of using traditions for interpretation, these traditional scholars also dwell upon sundry issues like the ‘dazzling‘ character displayed by many women during the pre-Islamic (Jahilia) society.

However, the contemporary patriarchical minds employ an extremely piecemeal and authoritarian approach to interpret it as an explicit directive for all Muslim women. Indeed many other misogynist and sexist interpretations can be easily traced back to their respective originating traditions which were not considered as patriarchical in their respective historical and social conditions; but all of course, are not that simple to deconstruct.

In the context of revisiting (and contesting) patriarchical and authoritarian readings of Quran and Hadith, there is a need to retrieve the ‘antipatriarchical epistemology‘ [8] of these texts while also moving towards a unified hermeneutics based upon ethico-religious principles of Quran. There has already been an encouraging trend in contemporary scholarship for finding keys which can be used to enter into Quran-centered hermeneutics
in contrast to the bulk of the orthodox approach which is generally tradition-centered. Even though these keys vary according to respective motivations of the scholars, for instance God-consciousness and social justice in case of Fazlur Rahman; Divine unity, justice and incomparability in case of Asma Barlas; Taqwa, Tawhid and liberation of opressed in case of Farid Esack; or Divine justice and Beauty in case of Khalid Abou Al-Fadl [9], all these modernists present a common argument rooted in socio-historical perspectives in which God’s word is not merely an event of the past but a perpetual phenomenon always meaningful to contemporary realities.

Interestingly this aspect of transcendence of God’s word is shared by conservatives as well, but of course with a different (and myopic) viewpoint of history and society with respect to religion and religious authority. There are encouraging pointers in the fact that at least some of these modernists had formal religious education from traditionalist madrasas
at the start of their carriers (for instance Rahman and Esack) thus being exposed to whole myriad of complexities inherent in their discourses. To conclude with the profound words of Farid Esack,

The urgent need of contemporary Quranic scholarship is to remove preunderstanding from the much-maligned tafsir bi’l-ra’y (interpretation based on considered sound reasoning) which, in conservative discourse, has come to mean baseless and devious theological or political concoctions superimposed on the Quran.

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1. Farid Esack, Quran, Liberation and Pluralism.
2. Wilfred Cantwell-Smith, The True Meaning of Scripture: An Empirical Historian’s Non-Reductionist Interpretation of the Quran.
3. This indeed is a recurring theme in Rahman’s various works, especially Islam or Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition.
4. Amin Ahsan Islahi’s exegetical work Taddabbur-e-Quran is considered one of the best among the modernists and published in Urdu in 8 Volumes. Some parts have been translated in English and can be accessed here.
5. Mustansir Mir, Thematic and structural coherence in the Quran: a study of ‘Islahi’s concept of Nazm and The Sura as a Unity: A twentieth century development in Qur’an exegesis.
6. The concept has firm basis in Quran, for instance 85:21.
7. The quoted translation is Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s.
8. The term is borrowed from Asma Barlas, “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an.
9. Khalid Abou Al Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women.

Is Islam a patriarchical tradition (I): Understanding the hermeneutical gap

We have made it a Qur’an in Arabic, that ye may be able to understand.     (Al Quran, 43:3)
Nothing exists except through language. -Gadamer in Truth and Method

Islamic tradition, in many ways, can be described as a tradition of literature and one way to legitimately analyze the above question is to ask whether the core Islamic texts, i.e., Quran and Hadith are necessarily patriarchical [1]. Although it is true that Quran was originally revealed in a primarily patriarchical society and, at least in Islamic tradition’s formative and post-formative periods, interpreted mostly by the subjects of patriarchies, its text equally allows more coherent, less subjective and unauthoritarian interpretations to contest the popular traditionalist (or orthodox) interpretations with a visible patriarchical bent [2].

A direct import of these orthodox interpretations is that the core texts of Islamic tradition are explicitly sexist in favor of men and advocate a society in which women are essentially subjected to men. Interestingly, these interpretations have ontological as well as hermeneutical basis: ontological, because women are created after/ from men and thus their purpose of creation merely reduces to service provision to a superior creation and hermeneutical, because literal, authoritative and patriarchical readings of the text dictate so.

These patriarchical and to some extent misogynist interpretations of scripture have far reaching implications for the society because they not only serve to demean the status of majority (or at least half) of the Muslim population, thereby subjecting them to the other half, but also render scripture as a misogynist text purporting women as a creation which is essentially unclean, deficient in intellect and created primarily ‘for‘ men. In fact, these readings are authoritatively used to an extent that serving husbands, for instance, is popularly preached as an essential article of a wife’s faith. Indeed, more crass and popularly sold interpretations boastfully build upon vivid details to create a kind of pietism in men where women merely fit as a serving commodity and must not be ‘used more than physically necessary‘ because the real pleasure is coming their way in heavens [3]. But till that time, being an inherent distraction for man’s sexual urges, they should be confined to houses and should be covered from head to toe if they come out.

It is interesting that same interpretations, if objected to, quickly rely upon socio-historical narratives – which are also rooted well in the scripture but generally reduced to secondary narratives in terms of employing them in the popular social discourse – that Islam liberated women from the pre-Islamic traditions and raised their status in a society where daughters were considered a disgrace and female infanticide was a norm.

In my view, the first step towards unreading these oppressively authoritarian and patriarchical interpretations of the scripture is to characterize the hermeneutical
tendencies of these predominantly sexist readings. There are various dimensions of this characterization and at least two different broad layers at which critique can be carried out to articulate some right questions: 1) a complete disregard of the so-called hermeneutical gap between various stages of development of Islamic tradition and 2) an almost ambiguous notion of authority, which presumes a monolithic and anachronistic view of interpretive tradition as well as Islamic societies in which that tradition was developed, thereby aiding authoritarian (mis)use of the scripture.

It is perhaps a trite observation that any form of scriptural interpretation is aimed at deciphering the will of God. In Islamic theological tradition, this will, after the demise of Prophet, is essentially embodied in the form of text. It is important to note this peculiarity of character because no human being after the Prophet can explicitly claim absolute knowledge of God’s will. Prophet too, as obvious from the explicit pointers in Quran [4], only possessed that knowledge due to his exceptional status as a messenger of God, thereby giving this possession a kind of metaphysically intuitive miraculous character, not discernible through ordinary human intellect.

This observation, however, must not be misconstrued to understand that I am in anyway implying delimitation of Prophet’s authority and diminishing his interpretive role [5]. In fact, being the direct recipient or revelation and its carrier, Prophet’s will (that is Sunnah) is only the second most importance source of Islamic law after Quran; however, this will is also contained in textual reports [6], which are preserved, transmitted and defended by generations of Muslims. The peculiar textual nature of this will is evident by the fact that Muslims have proudly developed exceptionally scientific methods to criticize these textual (and once oral) reports for validity of the content as well as authenticity of transmission. Deciphering God’s will, therefore, since the formative periods of Islam is essentially an interpretive enterprise; and any claim regarding absolute and exhaustive knowledge of that will would not only be fallacious but can be seen as effectively claiming the interpretive character of none other than Prophet himself.

Many modern semantic theories generally characterize texts through three dimensional models which, in one way or the other, incorporate roles of author, reader and the text itself in the hermeneutical or interpretive undertakings. Moreover, these three components are always interrelated as texts are understood to be bound by contexts and contain words with multiple communities of meanings which are used by readers (as they access texts) to decipher the original intent (or will) of the author. Jorge Gracia, a contemporary expert on texts, defines them [7] as

Groups of entities, used as signs, that are selected, arranged and intended by an author in a certain context to convey some specific meanings to an audience.

This is indeed a conservatively concise definition (not involving artifacts and other art forms) but enough to convey the complexities that surround a text for our present purpose. Moreover, this definition explicitly implies that all texts (and Divine ones are no exception) allow variant readings by nature, as all the audience are bound to disagree regarding the original intent of the author to some extent, thus goes the famous cliche that no two persons ever read the same book.

Admittedly, this definition is rather more fluidly structured than the conventional concept of Nass [8] in Islamic tradition, which is more stringently structured and symmetrically deterministic to cater for Quranic claim of divinity, transcendence and immutability; rightly so, because of the peculiar character of the author here – who is Himself believed to be Divine and Transcendent – which necessitates a faith-based assumption that He must have chosen and structured each word and phrase carefully enough to convey His full intent in best possible manner. Yet, these are still words and to paraphrase a saying attributed to Ali Ibn Abi Talib- one of the most knowledgeable and equipped exegetes in whole Islamic tradition – Quran is but ink and paper and ultimately it is a human enterprise which makes sense of it. In other words, it is reasonable to contend that language is an imperfect medium, and the faith-based assumption that God uses that medium perfectly does not reduces the inherent ambiguities and complexities of the medium itself.

Therefore, any interpretive indulgence remaining within the conventional dictates of language, thereby not relying on some esoteric knowledge inaccessible by the whole linguistic community or employing an orphic or quasi-orphic semiotic and semantic framework, has to be respected as a reasonable interpretation of scripture and a well intended exercise to decipher God’s will, albeit allowing disagreement and criticism by adherents of other readings.                                                                                                     ______________________________________

1. It is important to note that I am not mentioning the sources of Islamic law but the core texts; the former implies sources other than Quran and Sunnah, with Sunnah being defined in various ways and other sources being selected and weighed according to methodological dictates of a particular juridic tradition or an individual jurisconsult. I employ the terminology of text as it is more in line with the present framework of inquiry.
2. I hate to simplistically employ complex (and often confusing) terminologies like traditional or orthodox but unfortunately the present discourse in predominantly patriarchical Muslim societies like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia demands that; primarily, because adherents to these patriarchical readings of scripture themselves choose to employ these cliches and love to associate with these dualities.
3. An example is recently circulated video lecture by a Pakistanic scholar on connubial pleasures in heaven. The lecture is in Urdu titled Jannat Ki Hoor and can be accessed here.
4. See for instance, verse 41:6 or 6:50.
5. My views on the question of Prophetic authority can be accessed here and here.
6. To contend that Sunnah is only contained in textual reports (i.e., Hadith) is rather another oversimplification, but one which is the popularly held orthodox stance; in reality, there are classical as well as modernist schools and individuals who also/ or only believed in some form of perpetually transmitted practice as Sunnah, which obviously is supported by textual reports too.
7. Jorge Gracia, Texts: Ontological Status, Identity, Author, Audience.
8. Nass is a term used in Islamic jurisprudence to generally mean a clear legal injunction; however, there are other specific legal connotations too, for instance, declaring a legal injunction as Nass may entail that there is not an iota of doubt that the said injunction can be authentically traced back to the originator, which may be God or the Prophet.

Dialogue: Ali Abbas Jalalpuri on Iqbal’s scholasticism

Even though it can be entirely attributed to my shameful reluctance to read philosophy in Urdu, I am embarrassed to be introduced to Ali Abbas Jalalpuri’s work so late, especially his profound critique on Iqbal.

Jalalpuri’s critique of Iqbal, besides being academically valuable in its own right, is also important as it can help us immensely to reclaim Iqbal from armchair ideologues and political islamists whose strictly authoritarian projections are a source of constant confusion, especially for the youth, given the theoretical impact of Iqbal’s poetry and thought on our education system as well as so-called national ideology. But there is a downside of this critique as well; that it can be equally employed to brush aside one of the most important contribution of Iqbal, i.e, an attempt to reconstruct religious thought during Islam’s sojourn into modernity.

Though multi-faceted and decently encompassing, Jalalpuri’s criticism on Iqbal emanates from a single contention that Iqbal should be essentially understood as a scholastic rather than a philosopher, an assertion that I find ineffectual on many grounds.

Firstly, with this assertion, Jalalpuri tries to convey to the reader that Scholasticism and Philosophy are two strictly separate academic disciplines which can somehow be distinctly traced from antiquity to present times. It is true that Scholastic tradition can be traced back to medieval times (when it was pursued as a discipline combining various other disciplines, e.g., semantics, logic and metaphysics), it is difficult not to consider it as an undercurrent within the medieval philosophical tradition.

Secondly, an indirect import of this distinction would be that Philosophy must be equated with a purely skeptic indulgence where perhaps the indulgence to discern truth stands more important than the truth itself. Contrastingly, by subscribing himself to a confessional religion, a philosopher automatically begins his quest by holding true a set of faith-based assumptions. If not denying completely the cohabitation of theism and philosophy, considering the scholastic method aphilosophical would at least take philosophy and religious faith to their respective non-overlapping magisteria, leaving no question for any kind of synthesis.

Thirdly, Iqbal adequately addresses these epistemic issues himself in his first lecture as he tries to put religious faith in correct philosophical perspective. Before moving further with his synthesis, Iqbal tries to establish cognitive value of faith as he tries to elaborate the domains of religion and philosophy

Philosophy, no doubt, has jurisdiction to judge religion, but what is to be judged is of such a nature that it will not submit to the jurisdiction of philosophy except on its own terms. While sitting in judgment on religion, philosophy cannot give religion an inferior place among its data. Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought, nor mere feeling, nor mere action; it is an expression of the whole man. Thus, in the evaluation of religion, philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis.

In view of the fact that Iqbal adequately explains the kind of philosophical method he is employing to undertake his inquiry, any criticism of his overall outlook towards philosophy as an academic indulgence would not serve well while ignoring his lectures and primarily utilizing secondary sources like letters, poetry and opinions of other critics.

According to the obvious ambit of his critique, which is primarily meant to criticize Iqbal’s theology, most pertinent part of Jalalpuri’s thesis constitutes his reading of Iqbal’s concept of God and theological monism (or oneness of being popularly known as wahdat al-wujood in Islamic tradition). After briefly summarizing the history of Transcendentalist and Immanentist schools of conceptualizing Divinity, Jalalpuri contends that Iqbal belonged to the latter.

Once again, to support his contention within a space of not more than seven odd pages, Jalalpuri seldom deconstructs Iqbal’s thesis directly (as presented in second and third lecture of Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam) and feels content to criticize scholars who influenced the thought of Iqbal, for instance Bergson or Fichte. Nevertheless, he raises two important objections on Iqbal’s allegedly Immanentist view of God: first, that assuming immanence of God necessitates negation of His divine self, and second, that if change is an inherent part of the universe than change has to be predicated as well to the Ultimate Ego immanent in the universe.

In my view, what is completely missed in the aforementioned objections is the acknowledgment of Iqbal’s methodology of invoking scripture to support his re-visioning of the Divine self. Even a casual reading of Iqbal’s lectures at least conveys the kind of methodology he is employing to limn the nature of God’s existence. Take for his instance the beginning when he starts picking apart the common arguments of God’s existence utilizing arguments from science as well as scripture, and as he build up his thesis, he seldom hides the inherent problems and limitations of his arguments. Therefore keeping Jalapuri’s above two objections in backdrop, a careful reading of Iqbal’s take on cosmological argument seems mandatory to evaluate his thought in detail.

To summarize his approach, Iqbal starts by questioning the tendency of cosmological argument to ‘reach the infinite by merely negating the finite‘, terming this infinite a ‘false infinite‘. He goes on to question the materialistic nature of Newtonian space, calling contemporary theories of Whitehead, Berkeley and Einstein in his support and ends up conceiving a novel relationship between Nature and God; a relationship which stands significantly distinct with Bergson’s, as contended by Jalalpuri in his review.

Perhaps the most important part of this significance is how Iqbal vindicates this relationship using the terminology of Sunnat Allah (habits of Allah) from Quran. In the words of Basit Bilal Koshul, a quite recent reviewer of Iqbal’s reconstruction project, Iqbal innovatively transforms the cosmological argument’s ‘cause-effect dualism‘ to ‘person-habit relationship‘ between God and nature and goes on to explain his transformed view of nature, infinity and the kind of finitude inherent in this transformed view of infinity, which he terms as ‘true infinite’. Koshul further observes that infinity of God, in the paradigm constructed by Iqbal, is ‘intensive‘, rather than ‘extensive‘. Coming from this kind of perspective, Iqbal successfully ends up constructing a more personal God than the one purported by the dictates of cosmological argument.

Albeit it can be termed as partially fair, there is enough room to disagree with some of the major points of Jalalpuri’s review of Iqbal’s romanticism, rationalism and a the kind of quixotically poetic emphasis Iqbal gives on intuition as compared to reason. For instance, the contention that Iqbal was an ‘enemy of the reason (khirad dushman)‘ and originator of the movement against rationalism in modern Islam, is not only an oversimplification but can be called a blatant misreading of Iqbal. A probably reason of this misinterpretation can be Jalalpuri’s failure to find the correct pivoting point where two equally important (and often contrasting) character traits of Iqbal can be balanced, i.e., his mystic disposition and proclivity for a discourse primarily guided by reason.

In fact, Iqbal himself struggled to find that correct balance, and though he seldom strikes that equilibrium in his poetry – where intuition mostly comes out as winner – his prose sufficiently contains that magical reconciliation. An important prerequisite for understanding that balance is to know how Iqbal redefines the relationships between consciousness, ideas and various levels of inner human experiences. In the mystic dimension of this newly constructed complex, intuition is ‘thought in its deeper movement‘ and, feelings and ideas are two facets of a same ‘inner experience‘. In the rational dimension, however, same mystic experience has to be objectively verified by the faculty of reason. His project to use philosophical test bed for vindicating revelation of religious experience can easily be seen as an undertaking towards synthesis of intuition and reason.

Overall, Ali Abbas Jalalpuri’s critique of Iqbal is a refreshing read with some really thought-provoking and intriguing observations; however, what should have been the most profound part of the thesis – that is Iqbal’s theology and scholasticism – turned out to be its major weakness. Contrary to the chiefly pluralist tradition of conceptualizing God and its attributes, Jalalpuri ended up projecting Islamic God as an almost vulgarly anthropomorphic entity for his readers, in order to characterize Iqbal’s scholasticism as a divergent discourse.

Is Shariah Possible (III): Tennessee Bill, Objective Resolution and Ibn Qayyim

I had almost forgotten about this ongoing series until coming across this recent piece by John Esposito and Sheila Lalwani discussing fear of Shariah in the state of Tennessee.

That the bill introduced by Senator Bill Ketron exemplifies the irrational fear of Islam is a fact that cannot be denied by anyone generally aware of political, social and philosophical nuances of Islamic law. It is also true that the language and dictates of the bill are prejudiced and outright Islamophobic, likely to cause disturbance among US Muslims. However, even a somewhat perfunctory analysis of the language of the bill shows that it thrives upon more or less similar kind of sensibilities which are prevalent in many Muslim societies as well. These sensibilities are not only popular among masses (educated as well as uneducated) of these societies but also provide intellectual foundations for some famous contemporary religious reform movements. Interestingly though, both the discourses differ in terms of transposition of political realities, i.e., the discourse presented in the Tennessee bill arguably fears the encroachment of Islamic law in the American society led otherwise by a secular constitutional ideal; whereas in many Muslim states the popular political discourse in various manners assumes supremacy of some kind of a higher Islamic ideal.

Lets take, for example, the notion of Shariah being a supreme political doctrine governing affairs of a majority Muslim state like Pakistan. Since moving on from the status of dominion to republic in 1956, Islamic character has officially been an essential part of governing political philosophy of the state, best described by the Objective Resolution of 1949, which states that:

Sovereignty belongs to Allah alone but He has delegated it to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him as a sacred trust.

The 1973 Constitution of Pakistan prolifically manifests that no law repugnant to Quran and Sunnah can be legislated by the parliament, which may also take advice from a Counsel of Islamic Ideology. In fact, Pakistan is perhaps the only Muslim country besides Iran which finds it necessary to literally interject the Islamic character in its official state title. However, in spite of all these statutory vehicles and guiding principles in place, many political parties in Pakistan choose to jump in public arena with an overriding religious disposition. True that they differ considerably in their political and religious outlook and objectives, all of them, in one way or another, thrive upon the promise of religious reform and Shariah based Islamic society without giving a slightest hint as to what that promise objectively means. Besides successful equivocation of religious semantics, this kind of attitude ends up lumping technically distinct categories of religious discourse into one large basket.

In this backdrop, it is hardly shocking that Tennessee Bill defines Shariah as a legal-political-military doctrinal system combined with certain religious beliefs. For instance, when the bill states that,

Sharia as a political doctrine requires all its adherents to actively support the establishment of a political society based upon sharia as foundational or supreme law and the replacement of any political entity not governed by sharia with a sharia political order; [...] Sharia requires all its adherents to actively and passively support the replacement of America’s constitutional republic, including the representative government of this state with a political system based upon sharia…

it is not very different in its outlook from the manifesto of any ‘Islamic’ political party or a puritanical religious reform movement of a Muslim state like Pakistan, Egypt or Malaysia. What is common in the language of the bill and the prevailing jargon of these Islamist parties is the underlying Orwellian structures in which words are deformed, twisted and intentionally mis-joined to render ideas which are not permitted commonly by the associated communities of meanings. No wonder how, in Pakistan, the concept of Shariah is usually misconstrued with punishments of various crimes prescribed by Quran, prohibition of economic indulgences like bank interest and interest-based loans, or ban on various cultural activities and behaviors not perceived in conformance with popular religious understanding.

In order to have a fair idea of these misapprehended subtleties, it is useful to juxtapose the above understanding of Shariah (as contended in the Tennessee Bill) with the one provided by 14th century Hanbali jurist, Ibn Qayyim

The Shariah is God’s justice among His servants, and His mercy among his creatures. It is God’s shadow on this earth. It is His wisdom which leads to Him in the most exact way and the most exact affirmation of the truthfulness of His Prophet. It is His light which enlightens the seekers and His guidance for the rightly guided. It is the absolute cure of all ills and the straight path which if followed would lead to righteousness. It is life and nutrition, the medicine, the light, the cure and the safeguard. Every good in this life is derived from it and achieved through it, and every deficiency in existence results from its dissipation. [...] If God would wish to destroy the world and dissolve existence, He would void whatever remains of its injunctions. For the Shariah which was sent to His Prophet is the pillar of existence and the key to success in this world and the Hereafter.

The above description, albeit quixotically poetic, aptly conveys the most important conceptual nuance: Shariah is a linguistic abstraction employed to point towards the perpetually emanating will of the God; an ideal, that one who submits to it, should incessantly strive to achieve but without the ultimate notion of reaching the terminus. The actual will of the God, consequently, stands distinctly separate from the understanding or implementation of that will; the latter being a totally human dominion and therefore subject to all the usual human failings.

This distinction between the understanding and implementation of Shariah, and the Shariah proper needs to be adequately understood by the predominantly Muslim societies as well as those in which Muslims are in minority. Shariah is not a political or legal doctrine which is always in need of implementation through internal or external formal mechanisms. The concept of its implementation effectively entails that a moral life should always be guided by the Divine will; a search which should naturally encompass all dimensions of individual and collective life without trying slightly to evade the inherent burden of contemporary subjectivities.

Discoursing Blasphemy (I): Deconstructing the Contemporary Authoritarian Context

The materials could be used to construct either the authoritative or the authoritarian. If the authoritarian is constructed, the text is rendered subservient and submerged into its representer and reader. If authoritative is constructed, the text survives unencumbered and unlimited by its representer and reader. – Khaled Abou El Fadl in Conference of the Books

Imagine your were born into a middle or lower-middle class Christian family in Islamic Republic of Pakistan. This ironic accident of nature would automatically grant you the deplorable status among approximately one percent ignorant, disbelieving and impure inhabitants of the otherwise land of the pure. Stretch your imagination a little further and assume being grown up to become an individual with religious conviction in line with any of the mainstream Christian denominations. Needless to add that you would strongly believe in fundamentals of your religion; fundamentals, which unlike Islam, do not necessitate belief in other Prophets and the truthfulness of their message. Obviously, you would not have a smidge of reverence for Prophet Muhammad or Quran in your heart.

At this point, a number of hypothesis can be proffered; however, among worst-case scenarios, lets just assume that you truly happen to doubt the historicity of Islam and its venerated Prophet, who erroneously – or with the sheer intent of deceit – pretended to be the last Messenger of God [1]. With truthful compassion and deep sincerity, you do not, for a moment, regard Quran as a piece of literature on which “a society can be safely of sensibly based”. Furthermore, you might consider it a “crude, endless iteration” faked as God’s word, and whose reading, would be a “toilsome experience” [2].

Now, would you reckon pronouncing your belief publicly in a decent, truthful and academic manner without facing charges for the crime of blasphemy and instigating Islamist upheavals demanding your death? And if the sheer simplicity of this hypothetical proposition is not enough to demonstrate the hidden strata of ironies, lets put it this way: the accident of your birth (and what you come to believe subsequently) might leave you with a strict binary choice in the land of the pure, i.e., live dishonorably as an infidel hypocrite or die ignominiously as a profane blasphemer.

There has been plenty of discussion in print and electronic media regarding the infamous blasphemy law of Pakistan. A common supporting argument, usually initiated to evade the real question regarding the actual religious basis of the law, goes like this: there is nothing wrong with the law itself, and therefore the soundness of religious injunctive value attached to it; however, there may be flaws in its procedural implementations – as there in almost all other clauses of Pakistan Penal Code – which can be exploited to prosecute people unjustly.

I want to argue here that the above proposition is flawed for two distinct but often interactive reasons: 1) it overlooks an important lingual nuance in the framing of the law itself and 2) it supplies us with a presumably monolithic, homogeneous and historically connected Islamic definition and character of blasphemy.

Coming first to textual ambiguity in framing the language of the law (295-C), which is hard to miss even by a careless reader. It is not too difficult to understand that terms like “derogatory remarks, etc.”, “imputation”, “innuendo”, “insinuation” and “defiles the sacred name” can be misconstrued and misused easily. In fact it is so easy that a mere refusal to insert the common salutations after the name of the Prophet due to simple academic and publishing requirements can be easily misconstrued as blasphemy and can be portrayed socially to incite dangerous reactions. This mostly ignorant and reactive social milieu is tragically ironic to an extent that prestigious publishers in Pakistan, e.g., Oxford University Press, insert ‘PBUH’ after the name of the Prophet as an ‘in-house policy’ to avoid unnecessary hue and cry [3].

What is more troubling, however, is the ease with which the question regarding real definition and character of blasphemy is circumvented by the street mullahs, facebook zealots and common people who enthusiastically – and at times, inadvertently – support murderers.

Starting from the time of Greek Sophists, blasphemy has a long and vicious history in all canonical religions, especially Christianity [4]. In more than one way, Islam emphatically redefined the sacred in relation to an individual and society and placed it in its correct metaphysical and eschatological perspective. While the divine message was repetitively explained with exceptional clarity and forceful persuasion (3:85; 4:125), submission of an individual was eventually came about in Islamic theology as a matter of personal preference without any compulsions (2:256) by the society or Muslim polity; and as a human psychological condition which may have immediate and distant repercussions in this world but will be judged ultimately in hereafter. Moreover, the assertive statement in Quran (18:29) that

Say, “The truth is from your Lord”: Let him who will believe, and let him who will, reject (it)…

tends to establish a clear contrast with the Christian dogma that thoughts can blaspheme too and therefore subject to confession [5]. Ultimately, in Islamic theological doctrine, sacredness and sanctity of the symbols of God is contingent upon submission of the individual in first place (5:2).

In this backdrop, classical Islamic jurists always considered an individual’s personal religious conviction to be a matter between him and his Creator (baynahu wa bayna rabbiy). Some of them theorized further, discussing extensively the underlying theological intricacies, and argued that the Islamic doctrine of kufr simply means non-belief in the truthfulness of the Prophethood of Muhammad (pbuh) – a psychological condition which should not be considered immoral for all worldly purposes [6].  Thus, regardless of its rare practical implementation, the classical advocacy of capital punishment for apostasy is not because of a Muslim’s intellectual subjection to a false doctrine but due to its direct and indirect sociopolitical consequences – a sense which is more in line with the modern concept of high treason against one’s government.

It is also pertinent to note that all convictions of presumed blasphemy – or heresy which is an often interrelated and sometimes indistinguishable thread – recorded in classical as well as modern Islamic heresiography had always been nuanced sociopolitically; some examples are Ibn Taymiah’s trials for his alleged anthropomorphic views [7], Ahmed Bin Hanbal’s condemnation for his views on nature of Quran [8], conviction of Mansoor Al-Hallaj for his claims of extreme mystical universalism, Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid’s exile from Egypt to Netherlands in 1994, and Hashem Aghajari’s trial and subsequent conviction in Iran in 2003.

It can be ultimately contended that the contemporary debate of blasphemy (as seen in Pakistan these days) thrives upon postmodern sensibilities of the sacred which are theologically inaccurate as well as morally ambiguous. While successfully carrying the burden of far-right Islamist politics, these sensibilities also appeal to the popular, mostly apolitical and semi-religious mindset which is easily provoked by complexity and naturally adores a simple and perfect causality. However, what still remains to be shown is that this dangerously simplistic discourse is based upon strictly radical and authoritarian readings of the scripture (both Quran and Hadith).                                                                             __________________________________________

1. The aim is not to instigate the expected emotional response but just to bring about the moral ambiguity of the popular religious discourse insinuating complete homogeneity. For specific remarks see various publications by Ibn Warraq and Patricia Crone, for instance.
2. For first remark see Sacred Cows by Britain’s foremost feminist Fay Weldon; for second see On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle.
3. For the description of actual event see Riaz Hassan, Expressions of Religiosity and Blasphemy in Modern Societies, Asian Journal of Social Science, 2007 – Springer.
4. Two very important texts in this regard are A Brief History of Blasphemy by Richard Webster and Genealogies of Religion by Talal Asad.
5. For details and discussion on related issues see Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion and his essay Reflections on Blasphemy and Secular Criticism in Religion: Beyond a Concept.
6. Sherman Jackson, On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abu Hamid al Ghazali’s Faysal al Tafriqa.
7. Sherman Jackson, Ibn Taymiyyah on Trial in Damascus, Journal of Semitic Studies, 1994.
8. See for instance, Abu Zuhra’s work on Imam Ahmed Bin Hanbal’s life, work and fiqh.

Some Recent Readings (II)

In Balram Halvai, Adiga creates a powerful character that makes it hard to put down the novel. Its a powerful story and a real page turner; although I am not sure it really deserved the Man Booker if considered strictly for originality of theme. Perhaps it was to show the “underbelly” of India (as one reviewer puts it) as never done before with such lucidity and so few characters. The book is now going to be adapted into a film with screenplay being written by Hanif Kureishi.

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Although Dr Lang considered this project as “some impressions of a Muslim convert” when it first came out, it proved to be far more profound and insightful for Muslims and non Muslims alike. One can personally relate with Lang’s struggle at many levels and his approach towards making sense of religion vis-à-vis life is remarkably honest. One thing that impressed me most is the depth with which Lang approaches to analyze the source of shariah, especially Hadith. From the standpoint of a new convert, even his mention of Azami and Nabia Abbott is enough to show the breadth of Islamic literature he has dealt with.

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Ahsan’s work is no less a treat for anyone desperately seeking an alternative history of ideology of Pakistan other than the usual mechanically concocted ones by people like Sharif-ul-Mujahid. Rather than early Arab Muslim conquerors, Ahsan traces ideological and cultural roots of today’s Pakistan in the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Although the book got good reviews by scholars like late Ahmad Hasan Dani, Ahsan’s method seems to have many flaws, thus diminishing the value of his overall thesis. Take for instance, how almost 60-70 % of his ancient historical version is solely based upon Kosambi (who has a Marxist approach towards history) with virtually no comparisons with nationalist and imperialist versions. Nevertheless, the work is highly original and thought-provoking.

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My bliss, my heartbreak, my life…

May it be old habits, old schools or old classmates, I have always been terrible at departing throughout my life. This is a worthy exception as I happily say good bye to a lingering on PhD.

I didn’t realize the prophetic astuteness of this seemingly simple thought, when it was first shared by Shabana Mir (aka Koonj) on her blog almost three years ago:

A PhD is a long haul. It is a frighteningly long haul. Don’t romanticize it before you jump into it. In some ways (though not all), higher education is a strategy to delay the entry of people into the job market. It’s a good way to keep people spending money while NOT getting paid. It stretches your resources to the ultimate.

How beautifully put and how amazingly true. The truest part is that like all the profound realities of life, you can never fully apprehend this almost devilish quest until it grows on you, takes over all your precious resources one by one (foremost being time), enshrouds yourself completely and sometimes, as in my case, tries to take you down with it.

Obviously, I am not that dumb to argue that getting higher-education (especially a PhD) is something bad, per se. In fact, I am indirectly trying to make a strong case here to have a go at it; but only when you are ready to pursue it as a passion of your life and not simply for the sake of it, like in my case.

I have been great at multitasking all my life. Since last fourteen years, due to some unavoidable reasons (foremost being my chronic indecisiveness and procrastination), I have been enthusiastically putting up with one of the most demanding yet least productive of the jobs. In all these years, like almost living an alternate life, I have struggled really hard to traverse against the tide for exploring questions that matter a lot to me. Readers of this blog, no matter how meager they are, instantly become aware of multifarious ways in which I continue stammering incessantly in this little space. As if all this was not onerous enough, I earned a part-time graduate degree in computer engineering six years ago. That somehow duped me into believing that I can have a shot at part-time PhD too.

Staggering in search for the right research topic for an year or so, I finally settled on cardiac signal processing considering my previous one-night stands with things biomedical. Since then, I have been studying footprints of human cardiac activity, especially repolarization alternans and their significance in sudden cardiac death. For the last three years, while at job, during travel, in evenings with kids playing around, even during sleep and prayers, the research kept me preoccupied. There have been short lull periods too but I successfully pulled along while carrying on other indulgences as well.

If not for this last week, I might never have recognized the kind of metamorphosis I have gone through in this seemingly short span of just three years. The realization itself is no less than a bliss; however at the same time, as I experience this hypertensive phase visiting hospitals and undergoing tests, and as I study my own ECGs with interest, it is ironically heartbreaking to see how one can become an object of his own research so easily.

I hate to pass the burden of my responsibility to circumstances, but in many ways, my story is typical of the lost generation of Pakistanis which was forced to live the life of the previous one. With apology to the readers who can’t understand Urdu, this funny moment of discombobulation reminds me of Faiz Sahab’s excellent depiction of misconstrued priorities:

Wo log bohat khush qismat thay
Jo ishq ko kaam samajhtey thay
Ya kaam se aashqi karte thay
Ham jeetey jee masroof rahe
Kuch isq kiya, kuch kaam kiya
Kaam ishq ke aarre aata raha
Aur ishq se kaam ulajhta raha
Phir aakhir tang aa kar ham ne
Dono ko adhoora chorr diya

Nomination for Brass Crescent Awards

I am extremely honored to be nominated for this year’s Brass Crescent Awards in the category of Best Writer. I do not consider myself to be a prolific writer at all and I am very grateful to all those who considered me for this honorable nomination.

Brass Crescent Awards were launched in 2004 to promote Muslim bloggers and expose them to a large variety of readership. With the continuous expansion in Muslim blogosphere since past few years, various new and interesting categories are being added. Since the beginning, there is also a category reserved for best Non Muslim blog seeking bridge building and genuine dialog with Muslims. You can read more about the awards here with methodology of nomination and judgment.

Voting is already open and scheduled to be closed by November 19. Please visit the awards site, cast your vote and get introduced to some of the most talented writers of Muslim blogosphere.