The Bible of Militant Atheism

Contrary to the mainstream religious belief, incredulity and skepticism regarding the ultimate nature of truth, existence of God and eschatological claims of scripture is not an entirely modern phenomenon. In his famous thought experiment Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Ibn Tufayl the famous Muslim philosopher of 12th century Spain, aesthetically described discovery of God as the “joy without lapse, unending bliss, infinite rapture and delight” and inability to find Him as “infinite torture”. The curious and always speculative protagonist of the fable remains incessantly engaged between cosmological antinomies such as those put forward by contests between classical Greek eternalism and scriptural creationism; or the ones related to human origins such as spontaneous generation (understandably so, considering the scientific milieu of 12th century) or simple creationism as proposed by orthodox religion.

Ibn Tufayl’s classic as well as other such theologically flavored thought experiments of pre-modern period, for instance Avicenna’s “Floating Man”, can be characteristically distinguished from modernist discourse in three important ways: their peculiar guarded speculative approach towards theology, the careful selection of premises mostly leading towards theistic conclusions and most importantly aesthetics of literary exposition.

There were of course exceptions raising more formal agnostic queries regarding nature of God, for example the physician Zakariya Razi and Avicenna himself; however these undertakings, even though penned by intellectuals who were primarily scientists did not go as far as to purport an outright rejection of faith. In modern times, the western philosophical tradition having roots in enlightenment, especially Kant and Hume, provided basis for a scientific endeavor that gave rise to more formal and popular agnosticism – and indirectly atheism – whose main proponents were among logicians, paleontologists and physicists whose writings while popularizing science as it was never done before in the history of scientific culture, also extended the domain of science to purely philosophical realms including metaphysics, ethics and theology. Yet, the religion was never presented so antagonistically in opposition to reason as it is done so remarkably by Richard Dawkins in God Delusion.

Based upon extreme scientific naturalism, Dawkins’ thesis casts the proposition that atheism is a natural consequence of human evolution. All kind of religious faith, being impossible to be vindicated empirically, is necessarily dissonant with reason. Religion, as interpreted by Dawkins, is at the the root of much that is going wrong in the world. Moreover, the idea of God in human consciousness can be explained away as a naturally evolved impulse to believe in an omniscient and omnipotent entity, an indulgence which is byproduct of “something useful” or simply speaking an error in the grand evolutionary process.

Unlike some of his predecessors, for instance Thomas Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Stephen. J. Gould, who chose to describe themselves as agnostics rather than atheists, Dawkins does not accept the idea that outright atheism is simply dogmatic due to its unwarranted metaphysical claims about the non-existence of God without enough empirical evidence. Therefore, religion and science does not belong to two “non-overlapping magisteria” – a term coined by Gould – limited to their respective domains. Consequently, any question or claim related to existence of God should be strictly considered a scientific question; simply, because it cannot circumvent other cosmological queries concerning origins of human life and universe.

The approach of Dawkins is rightly expressed as militant atheism by many intellectuals as he is in favor of dismantling all practical religion and every procedure that facilitates or establishes basis for its survival. As explained succinctly by Karen Armstrong in her new book The Case for God, the approach taken by Dawkins has a peculiar reductionist tendency which is remarkably similar to religious extremists as each considers the other as the “epitome of evil”. In both discourses, oversimplifications and gross generalizations necessitate wrong premises, ultimately bringing out the absolute worst of the other; no wonder therefore, why Dawkins invoke the likes of Ibn Warraq and Christopher Hitchens to argue that a tolerant and respectable view of religion is equally reprehensible for all the wrongs committed by religious extremists. Indeed, the superficiality of logical analysis in such discourses does not demand intellectually laborious critique as similarities are not hard to draw.

The nature of God, as understood by Dawkins to present his case against religion, is vulgarly anthropomorphic. The reader is almost duped into believing that all theists, irrespective of the particular creed they ascribe to, believe in some kind of spirit out there; a kind of superhuman entity which Dawkins pejoratively equates with Russell’s ‘Cosmic Teapot’ or ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’. The idea of universal symbolism towards some transcendent ineffable entity beyond the capacity of vocation of language seems alien to Dawkins’ naturalist preoccupancy. The religious belief, therefore, as he vociferously advocates, is something stupid, naive and incapable to be hold by an intelligent and unbiased rational being.

Due to his proclivity towards oversimplification in matters metaphysical, Dawkins seems to advertently disregard the inherent ineradicability of unknowing in the nature of acquired religious truth. He does not acknowledge the fact that no theist claims explicitly that he is in possession of the ultimate sacred truth, except the reductionism loving religious extremists. The scripture itself closes the door on such kind of claim by contending that “there is nothing like the likeness of Him“. All we have are symbols pointing towards the nature of ultimate truth concerning God and sundry eschatological issues.

Probably due to his aphilosophical bent, Dawkins is apparently unable to comprehend that for a theist, there is beauty in this astonishment; a sense of awe that tends to make him humbly aware regarding the degree of obscurity of his own self in the macrocosm. But he would at least agree that science, no matter how much it achieves in reducing complexity that surrounds us, also shares this sense of awe with religion as it also had to consistently rely on an act of faith.

On this particular note, conjuring probability model to disregard the so-called God hypothesis is outrageously strange. Dawkins’ conclusion that “God almost certainly does not exist” cannot be philosophically taken as a knowledge producing utterance unless ‘probability’ is taken as synonymous for ‘truth’; a subtle yet important point, that was profoundly framed by Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery:

…we must not look upon science as a ‘body of knowledge’, but rather as a ’system of hypothesis’; that is to say, as a system of guesses or anticipation which in principle cannot be justified but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never justified in saying that we know that they are ‘true’ or ‘more or less certain’ or even ‘probable’”.

Because of strict evolutionary perspective that he sets up for himself, it was incumbent for Dawkins to give some kind of Darwinian origins to morality. Ultimately entailing the biological evolution of human intellect, this is perhaps the crassest assertion of the book; amounting to claim that our ancestors were less capable or probably less intellectually equipped to be objective in apprehending the ultimate reality. As Iqbal mentions in his second lecture on nature of religious experience, any such view regarding intellect being a product of evolution would “bring science into conflict with its own objective principle of investigation”. To find an appropriate expression of this conflict, he quotes Wildon Carr:

If intellect is a product of evolution the whole mechanistic concept of the nature and origin of life is absurd, and the principle that science has adopted must clearly be revised [...] How can the intellect, a mode of apprehending reality, be itself an evolution of something which only exists as an abstraction of that mode of apprehending, which is the intellect? If intellect is an evolution of life, then the concept of the life which can evolve intellect as a particular mode of apprehending reality must be the concept of a more concrete activity than that of any abstract mechanical movement which the intellect can present to itself by analyzing its apprehended content.

Dawkins wishes to portray the book as a consciousness raiser of sorts: regarding atheism being more reasonable than agnosticism, religion being the root of all evil, religious education being equal to child abuse, religion and morality being completely uncorrelated and atheism being an objective conclusion not to be ashamed of rather the only rational position one can possibly hold with a sense of pride. I think some of the aims were partially achieved, especially raising the atheist pride by providing a kind of polemicist manual to hold tightly.

But perhaps the real strength of the book lies in questioning the innermost religious convictions of the people who are equally awed by the respective magisteria of religion and science and want to bridge gaps. Regarding the kind of evidence that would convince him regarding the existence of God, Bertrand Russell once replied that if a voice from the sky would reveal to him each and every thing that is going to happen in next few hours and that would eventually happen also, he may consider the possibility of existence of God. I sincerely doubt that even in the face of such evidence, Richard Dawkins would even come close in considering the truthfulness of God hypothesis. To borrow the quip that he himself quotes in the book, he does not merely believe in non-existence of God, he knows.

Filed under: Books & Reviews, Philosophy , Atheism, Religion, God, Dawkins, Agnosticism

Is Shariah Possible (II): Origins of a Cosmopolitan Venture

A moral philosophy characteristically presupposes a sociology. For every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world. [Alasdair Macintyre]

Any study of Muslim civilization – with the purpose of exploring the roots of law – cannot remain unaffected by a certain kind of arbitrariness as far as specific time spans concerning various formative and post formative legal developments are concerned. However, it can be said with certainty that during the time of pious caliphate, there was no formal body of religious law that can be understood as binding on all Muslims. The community, being a direct recipient of revealed word of God, had no need to indulge in formal interpretation as the text (being characteristically a recitation-text as indicated by the word Quran itself and the first revelation Iqra’a) naturally exercised authority through immediate oral methods. A striking example of this spontaneous textual authority is Abu Bakr’s admonition to Umar at the time of Prophet’s demise which automatically brought the latter out from a state of denial.

This spontaneity, however, does not imply normative singularity (as we shall see later in the detailed examination of the Quran as a source of Sharia’h) and there were differences of opinions among companions regarding meaning of various verses.

Similarly, the concept Sunnah was not understood to be taken as a authoritative binding source in a proper and well defined framework. It was a kind of exemplary Prophetic practice – not yet formally situated in history – having a quasi-authoritative character; a disposition, which has to be necessarily distinguished from a relatively formal framework developed by later scholars especially Shafii.

It is difficult to identify the triggering point in history where Islamic tradition began to transform itself into a coherent, encompassing and self-assertive social order from a crudely authoritative moral philosophy . In this regard, one of the best studies of historical development of Islamic civilization has been carried out by Marshall Hodgson.

In his majestically detailed work, Hodgson goes on to explain the early  origins of a certain piously conscious class within Muslim societies supporting a faith-based egalitarianism in contrast to ruling absolutism of Marwani caliphate. A striking characteristic of this class – which was later specialized to be accepted as Ul’ema - was the pronouncement of this expectation that Islam has to have its own system of law, ethics, education and set of governing principles for public as well as private life.

With regards to Muslim civilization as a whole, the most profound cultural implication of this universalistic phenomenon was the emergence of a global social concern. In the words of Hodgson:

[...] the Muslims, unlike the Jews, did not regard their own community as a unique and (in principle) hereditary body selected out from a world left otherwise without direct divine guidance. The Muslim community was thought of as one among many divinely guided communities such as the Jewish or Christian, all (at their origin) equally blessed. Thus far, Islam took explicitly the form that various Christian and Jewish bodies had implicitly been assuming under the confessional empires [...]. The difference between Islam and the other communities was that Islam was first to rule over and then to supersede all others. Islam was to bring the true and uncorrupted divine guidance to all mankind, creating a world-wide society in which the true revelation would be the everyday norm of all the nations. It must not guide an autonomous community like the Jewish; it must guide the practical policies of a cosmopolitan world.

This indeed was the aspiration which can be termed as the cornerstone of that sacred socio-moral vision we call Sharia’h or Islamic Canon. It is important to note that this sacred vision was as much informed by a will to act in opposition to the political reality of pre-Abbasid period as it was by the resolve to bring the whole ambit of individual life in accordance with divine will; or more specifically, to act as ordained by the Quran and Sunnah.

Filed under: Series & Sequels, Sociology of Religion, Suspended Judgments, Traditional Islam , Fiqh, Islamic Law, Shariah

Talibanization: Nemesis of a Betrayed Idea

In order for Islamic idea to stand up to the efficacious ideas of twentieth century dynamic societies, it has to recover its original efficacy, that is to say, to resume its position among the ideas that make history -Malik Bennabi

This Sunday, as I was surfing through Malik Bennabi’s ‘Islam in History and Society‘ at my car mechanic’s workshop, a 15 year illiterate boy who was working there asked me about the ‘Sabaq‘ (lesson) I was reading. I told him that it was not a ‘Sabaq‘ in the classical sense; rather, a book about history, society and religion. Perhaps deceived by the beard on my face and the title of the book, the kid spontaneously shared with me his own one-second sociological percept. “The establishment of Islamic law is better than the current system“, the boy remarked as if he was insinuating agreement with my presumable stand, “we will have quick justice and everybody will be equal.” I engaged with him for some time and by the end of our brief conversation, I realized how the kid’s perception was shaped by the complex matrix of economic deprivation, sense of injustice and a belief in an almost superficial Islamic ideal. While driving back, I kept wondering whether the boy would have any qualms accepting Taliban’s brand of Islam in exchange of justice as a starting point; would he doubt the authenticity of their religious pronouncements – unmarried women as war booty, the Jizya, dhimmi status of non-muslims, black turbans, long beards and 15th century school syllabi – if they promise to get his illegally detained cousin released from jail.

The phenomenon of Talibanization has been increasingly symbolized to depict all kinds of religious extremism in Pakistani society – “a response to modernity“, a recent analyst calls it. Even beyond a cursory judicial institutionalization and entirely ahistorical in nature, Taliban’s version of Sharia is understood to be dangerously myopic and repressive in character. Coalesced with a tribal outlook, Taliban’s rudimentary religious and political philosophy is seen to radiate a certain savage medieval character; a disposition which can be attributed to its proclivity for anti-westernization and thus against all kinds of modernity and enlightenment. The intellectual deficit is visible as unlike bimodal Islamic reform movements of first half of last century – where they had separate militant and scholarly wings – these radical militant groups under the umbrella of Taliban are totally deprived of any strong ideological backbone. Yet, with its radical physiognomy and onionskin ideological structure, Taliban movement is successfully endangering a nation’s existence which was built on a so-called strong and modern Islamic ideal just 60 years ago. Therefore, on an intellectual front, we should engage more with the phenomenological principles that are at work since the creation of Pakistan in the realm of ideas rather than actual happenings in the realm of persons and objects.

As much as I contemplate about the ideological foundation of Pakistan, I am forced to believe that the underlying idea was the triggering of a new cultural universe which can grow on its own, thereby transforming, reforming and keep enriching itself according to Islamic ideals. Due to its arguable historical reawakening, it was idealized that a socio-political future of Islam is possible in the subcontinent due to a presumable shift of centre of ideological gravity from the Mediterranean. A separate state for Muslims – which may not be an Islamic state per se – was understood to present a direct opportunity for Islam; “…an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilize its laws, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times“, as articulated by Iqbal in his historical address of 1930.

In his philosophy of ideas, Malik Bennabi states that all the “ideas governing the moral and material order have their moment of grace“. “Archimedean moment“, he specifically terms it; but whether this moment successfully shapes the objective reality depends upon the sustenance of logical relationships between the idea and its archetypes. It still may be a genuine idea, even if it fails to do so, but it will not be an efficacious one, i.e., an impressed idea, it is; but not an expressed one.

When expressed ideas incessantly betray the impressed ideas – as it is happening in the land of pure for more than half a century – the latter eventually become dead, trigger a sociological metamorphosis and shape up new deadly ideas. Deadly ideas, which take vengeance and bring forth new crises which are never heard of hitherto. Modernity, justice, tolerance, religious harmony, revival and reformation – each great ideal falls one by one.

The mother of all crises, however, is the one related to identity. With all the statistical limitations of sample size, choice and demographics, figures reported by world value survey indicate few dimensions of this crisis: 83.5 percent of the subjects would like to identify themselves as Pakistanis first, in contrast to 14.2 percent who would like to be described as Muslims first. What is strange, however, is that 71.8 percent believe nationalism is incompatible with Islam in contrast to 2.2 percent who believe otherwise; 26 percent remain dithery. Large groups of people remain oblivious regarding most fundamental Islamic questions related to modernity; 50.8 percent do not know whether democracy is compatible with Islam; 63.4 percent remain clueless whether Islam permits killing of civilians if a country pursues laws harmful to Muslims and 74.2 percent cannot decide whether a true Islamic country should have a parliament with the right to pass laws. The only concrete deduction that can be successfully made out of these figures is the extent up to which an average Pakistani’s mind is plagued with atomism – a mind that is totally incapable of making systematic generalizations. Not surprisingly, therefore, 61.5 percent want implementations of Sharia law in contrast to 7.5 percent who disagree. The rest (30.9 percent), obviously, are still thinking.

With my mind drifting and meandering, I kept driving back home with a whole lot of ‘Sabaq’ in my mind – Bennabi, Iqbal, Jinnah and the philosophies they proposed and stood for in their own respective ways. But the strongest voice that kept tearing me apart was of Abul Kalam Azad. Almost prophetically with a pinch of well-placed acerbity, he wrote as he finished his own account of partition of India:

It is one of the greatest frauds on the people to suggest that religious affinity can unite areas which are geographically, economically, linguistically and culturally different. It is true that Islam sought to establish a society which transcends racial, linguistic, economic and political frontiers. History has however proved that after the first few decades or at the most after the first century, Islam was not able to unite all the Muslims countries on the basis of Islam alone.

Unlike Mukhtar Masood, the proverbial cat within me does not walk away hearing this; yet, my heart is unable to sync with the first part of the contention. I am not ready to believe that the whole idea was nothing more than a hoax. Believing that would mean suicidal self destruction. At the same time, however, I do believe that an idea is true as long as it brings success. There is no question defending it indefatigably without trying to restore its efficacy.

Filed under: Islam & Modernity, Land of the 'Pure', Reflections, Sociology of Religion

Is Sharia’h Possible? (I): Definition and Scope

The Shari’a is all justice, kindness, common good and wisdom. Any rule that departs from justice to injustice [...] or departs from common good (maslaha) to harm (mafsada) [...] is not part of Sharia’h, even if it is arrived at by literal interpretation. [Ibn Qayyim]

“Just what is Shari’ah“, asks Zakintosh on his blog as he invites “unemotional” responses which are aimed towards understanding and clarifying things. In a series of posts, I would try to limn my understanding of the concept as well as sundry issues which do inform the current socio-religious and political discourse.

As far as it serves in drawing parallels, Iqbal’s famous enquiry: Is religion possible? (his lecture to fifty fourth session of Aristotelian Society, London in 1932) can be used as a starting point in examining the problematic of Sharia’h. Proposing three periods of religious life, i.e. faith, thought and discovery, Iqbal asserts that in the period of faith an individual or society must submit unconditionally without grasping completely the ultimate rationality behind religious demand. Similarly, before considering Sharia’h as a viable vocation, we should probably come in terms with the concept that Islam – during its present sojourn into modernity – can be seen beyond the duality of temporal and spiritual, i.e., as a unified dynamic experience which can enrich and facilitate all the modern aspects of life. It is only after grappling with the sociological possibility of Sharia’h that a modern muslim mind can overcome its proclivity for atomism and its incapability for generalization. In this sense, it is the only right premise that can mother the possibility for right conclusions.

Moving forward beyond the usual etymological distinctions, the concept Sharia’h has been traditionally used to refer to a wide range of philosophical and legal connotations. In an epistemological sense, the arabic terms aq’l (the reason) and hawa (desire) have been often used in contrast with Shara’a in traditional texts (for instance in Shatibi’s Al-Muwafiqaat or Ibn Qayyim’s Ailaam al-Muwaqaeen). At this level, Sharia’h has been essentially understood as a knowledge producing category emanating from the realm of Divine. From an ontological perspective, it has been understood as the expression of legislative aspects of Divine Will whose compliance is not immediate; rather, it is conditional to be exercised by the society itself. This is in clear distinction to His creative Will which is immediately complied for automatically achieving the intended end.

Probably for utilitarian reasons, Sharia’h has often been seen as synonymous to wahy (revelation), especially in the domain of law. True, that revelation is also a knowledge producing function; yet, the contention of equating Sharia’h with revelation historically gave birth to two major ambiguities. Foremost being that revelation is a process which brings the intent of the Divine to the creation, i.e., a medium for expression and not the intended meaning of the expression itself; hence, goes the famous adage by Ali that Quran is but ink and paper, it is the human being that interprets. Secondly, due to an additional understanding of the nature of revelation as a law producing function – albeit indirectly – the terms Sharia’h and Fiqh have been used interchangeably in much of the medieval religious discourse. Right up to the modern times, this usage has added considerable complexity to the discourse. No wonder, the most famous shibboleth of our times: whose Sharia’h? is a by product of same confused usage. What is generally understood as Sharia’h is actually its understanding or explanation, i.e., Fiqh.

But perhaps the most serious historical problem associated with this arguably confused equation was the question of immutability or adaptability of Sharia’h. The upholders of immutability-view claimed that rulings of Sharia’h are absolutely final and unalterable; the premise being that revelation is complete and final. Whereas, the proponents of adaptability-view upheld that the contents of Sharia’h are constantly expanding and undergoing change with varying sociological conditions. As we shall see later, both the views are historically significant because of their direct effect on respective choice and handling of sources of Sharia’h and therefore its ultimate scope.

A final point having great contemporary relevance is whether the Sharia’h can be termed as law in modern sense. The modern notion of law entails in itself the concept of an imposing authority. If Sharia’h or a particular set of its substantive interpretations (i.e. Fiqh) may understood to have the same import as modern law, the nature of ritual, worship and various other moral injunctions (included in the corpus of Sharia’h) will become questionable as far as their respective relationship with individual and society is concerned. This is why it is interesting to note that the practice of Islamic moral brigades forcing individuals to keep beards and imposing particular dress codes is intrinsically modern. The phenomenon will be explored further during the analysis of socio-moral dynamics of Sharia’h. At this point it is sufficient to mention that in Islamic legal tradition, the idea of formally separating legal obligation from theology and morality has its origins in 13th century Spain.

With this introduction, it now seems imperative to dwell into the purposes of Sharia’h, what constitutes it and the major disagreements regarding the nature of various sources.

Filed under: Islam & Modernity, Suspended Judgments, Traditional Islam , Fiqh, Islamic Law, Shariah

Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (III): Grundnorm, a cosmological myth

To effectively address the original Weberian objection i.e. normative pluralism is substantively irrational, it is mandatory to reformulate the problem in concise terms, starting point being that change in Islamic law takes place by means of some interpretive mechanism called Ijtihad. What exactly constitutes it: Is it the interpretation of the textual source ab initio; is it merely a pseudo-clandestine thought experiment to seek out verdicts on issues on which there is no past consensus among jurists; or is it merely a different solution to an old problem, but one which is in sync with contemporary social reality?

Irrespective of the particular theoretical inclination favored, there is no doubt that multiple norms will be generated in any interpretive undertaking; a fact which is amply observed by the term ta’addud al-ahkam in traditional Islamic literature. That this multiplicity of norms gives an irrational character to the law is the contention I am presently trying to analyze.

In my view, basis of this contention can be traced back to Islamic legal history and literature with some effort. After the post-recognition phase of Madhabs (the schools of Islamic Law), Muslims jurists increasingly found it hard to espouse the concept of Ijtihad “proper” through the medium of ifta’a, thereby limiting the response of an independent jurist to the ambit of his own juridical school. At times, some of these jurists resorted to quasi-artificial casuistic methods in order to achieve equity between presumed universality of complete legal paradigm, i.e. Sharia’h, and its practical manifestation when it comes to application of law to facilitate the functions of a society. Most of these casuistic developments – for instance Istihsan (Juristic Preference), Istishab (Presumption of Continuity), Urf (Custom) – in medieval times were arguably instigated by the desire to achieve a rational character of the law, thereby circumventing an almost subjective and probably mistakenly understood and emphasized universality of norms. And if all these developments and the enormous literary genre evolved from them achieved a kind of “practical wisdom” in line with social reality of times, it seemed rationally inconsistent to a modern critical mind.

But there is more to this discourse than casuistry acquiring a contemptuous nuance in Islamic law.

The Austrian-American jurist Hans Kelsen argued in his theories of legal positivism that all newly discovered norms must conform to the Grundnorm, a kind of hypothetical higher logical condition. The argument has been contextualized islamically in recent times, whereby many modern scholars** of Islamic law have argued that the Islamic moral expression “obedience to Allah” is an expression of the transcendental myth that fulfills the function of grundnorm in Islamic legal discourse.

There is no doubt that this remarkable proposition serves to make Sharia’h and natural law compatible; however, the real use of it lies in disentangling two confusingly snarled threads that modernity has brought to the fabric of Islamic law. On one hand, there is an increased proclivity for stringent applications of law in various spheres of public and private life. There are two contrasting shades of this tilt: 1) the literalist “text as norm” approach generally subscribed by the Islamists, liberals and revivalists alike (albeit not always erroneous intrinsically) and 2) a kind of “formal jurisprudence” employing all the tools of discursive logic, yet envisaging the use of universal principles and clearly pronounced norms. On the other hand, there is a resort to casuistry, most of the times employing specious argumentation that is clearly extended to achieve specific preconceived ends. In many cases, the latter can be observed in localized jurists muddled between knowledge and identity issues related to their respective communities.

Most of the modern readings of Islamic law generally fail to acknowledge these subtle distinctions but so is the modern jurist who remains strangled, on one side, between the pursuit of legal as well as ethical application of law in the society and the quest to achieve formalized rationality of jurisprudential method on the other.

To drive the point home, it can be concluded that social change and legal developments cannot be visualized to act in water-tight compartments rather the former triggers the latter in more than one ways. It is imperative to understand that norm-creating activity is a perpetual human-divine legislative process which is validated – without exceptions – by a Grundnorm revealed as a guiding authority for the independent jurist (mujtahid). At the same time, it is not necessary that the content of all the newly discovered norms must be implicitly found in revelation; rather, these are deduced through the science of Islamic legal epistemology, commonly termed as Usul al-Fiqh in traditional jargon.

In modern times Islamic legal developments are at a juncture where these cannot be technically characterized as formally rational (in the modern sense of the word); however, the characteristic modern reading of the law which imply that jurisprudential method of medieval times was substantively irrational is not correct either. In fact these developments – at that time – were meant to achieve a kind of normative pluralism which inadvertently harmonized the law with the social reality and worldview of those times. ____________________________

**For instance read Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, “Islamic Jurisprudence“; Ebrahim Moosa, “The Allegory of Rule (Hukm): Law as Simulacrum in Islam“

Related:

• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (I): Normative Pluralism
• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (II): Ifta’a, Ijtihad and Social Customs

Filed under: Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Islam & Modernity, Series & Sequels, Sociology of Religion, Traditional Islam , Ijtihad, Islamic Law, Philosophy, Pluralism, Society, Sociology

On Suicide Bombing

Originally published in Dawn (Books & Authors)

Is there a crucial difference between someone who kills in order to die and someone who dies in order to kill? – [Talal Asad]

Alasdair MacIntyre – while making a ‘disquieting suggestion’ in the beginning of his chef-d’oeuvre ‘After Virtue‘ – hypothesized that what we chiefly possess as a vocabulary of morality can best be understood as ’simulacrum of morality’ rather than the actual and true morality. He argued that we are so confident of the absolute objectivity of this contemporary moral paradigm, which guides and constitutes our language, reasoning and transactions, that any transposed hypothesis would most certainly seem utterly implausible, at least at first glance. In short, that we are being betrayed by the very language we use is a proposition that is not acceptable to us.

In these heavily nuanced Welleck Library Lectures on Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad not only vindicates MacIntyre’s thesis but also contributes in reshaping the ongoing narrative regarding terrorism and war. Asad’s discourse centers around the paradoxes presented by the modern sensibilities regarding morally justified and unjustified violence and the responses that are essentially triggered by these sensibilities. As the ruminations move from terrorism to suicidal terrorism and speculations regarding dynamics of horror associated with the latter, Asad aims to disturb his audience with arguments and counter arguments – at times phenomenological and often historical or textual – questioning modern notions of clash of civilizations, war ethics and various assumptions regarding what motivates suicide bombings including religious significance of sacrificial suicide.

Coming from someone who has identified religion as an anthropological category, Talal’s take on modern ethics governing kinds of violence and delimiting its extent is perhaps the most assertive part of his musings. The idea of clash of civilizations, in his view, is based on a false premise that Jihad is a ‘culturally distinctive expression of Muslim intolerance’. Moreover, selective history-making often tends to insinuate – albeit inadvertently at times – that civilizational values are evolved and transformed in undifferentiated societal compartments. “There is no such thing as clash of civilizations”, he contends,”because there are no self-contained societies to which fixed civilizational values correspond”. False premises thus lead to fallacious arguments which in turn supply vocabulary to the modern discourses that contain subjective and oversimplified entities to base conclusions upon.

Asad’s choice of texts – from left as well as right – is appropriate as he chooses the ones that are recent, foundational in respect to philosophical problematics and encompassing. Among these, his critique of Michael Walzer’s ‘Arguing About War’ is most profound. He does not see Walzer’s reiteration of war being a legally sanctioned activity as problematic; what he instead sees questionable is Walzer’s ingenuity with which he gives an absolute mutually exclusivity to ‘war’ and ‘terrorism’ and the manner in which he differentiates both on the basis of legality, vulnerability and fear of social disorder: Even a just war, in Asad’s opinion, infuses insecurity in public sphere and intrudes fear into private life. On the question of various motivations and intentions of suicidal terrorists, Asad looks objectively at wide range of western commentators as well as theorists and analyzes critically their explanations. In Asad’s view, all these explanations – whether theological, political or psychological – tell us more about ‘liberal assumptions of religious subjectivities and political violence’ rather than what is ostensibly being explained. Pointing out the kind of violence embedded in liberal thought, he writes,

More difficult is the question of the role of mortal violence in the continuing maintenance of the good political life. For in liberal secular society, one that apparently abjures political metaphysics, the morally autonomous individual has the right to choose his own life, and the sovereign state has the right to use violence in defense of the conditions for the good life.

In effect, Asad consistently contests the idea that an absolutely objective comment on the individual motivations of suicide bombers is possible. Obviously in line with the argument itself, the question of motive has to be left open ended as he develops his thesis; but he does enough to attain a shift in the central point around which the contemporary debates about individual acts of suicidal terrorism revolve. “The uniqueness of suicide bombing”, Asad opines, “resides elsewhere. It resides, one might say, not in its essence but in its contingent circumstance.”

In my opinion, the book achieves its primary purpose; that is to shift the contemporary discourse from the moral interpretations of individual acts of suicidal terrorism to the realization that these interpretive attempts are always limited by the inherent political, philosophical and historical subjectivities. Moreover, it raises an altogether new question: Why the individual acts of suicidal terrorism do impress us with far more horror than the brutalities that are committed by modern states; further more, what gives the kind of morally justified and civilized sensibility to the modern war while generalizing most of the other conflicts as terrorism.

The book can be misread and misunderstood, as Asad points himself but after all, it is a ‘disquieting suggestion’; the kind of transposed hypothesis that must seem implausible in order to be closer to truth.

Filed under: Books & Reviews, Philosophy , Books, Modernity, Philosophy, Reviews, Suicide Bombings, Talal Asad, Terrorism

I am “Confessions”

Don’t have much time these days to blog but the amazing accuracy of this quiz forced me to share it here. Thank you Lawrence of Arabia for the hat tip.

You’re Confessions!

by St. Augustine

You’re a sinner, you’re a saint, you do not feel ashamed. Well, you might feel a little ashamed of your past, but it did such a good job of teaching you what not to do. Now you’ve become a devout Christian [Muslim] and have spent more time ruminating on the world to come rather than worldly pleasures. Your realizations and ability to change will bring reverence upon you despite your hedonistic transgressions.
Florida will honor you most in the end.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Filed under: Books & Reviews

Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (II): Iftaa, Ijtihad and Social Customs

The “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.
[Marshall McLuhan]

In 1913, Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanawi gave his famous juridical response to a British court in India. The seeker was a claimant who wanted to re-establish conjugal rights with his wife but his in-laws refused to let her join on the plea that she has apostatized and can no longer be his wife according to Islamic law. “Annulled”, wrote Thanawi while explaining that “unbelief causes annulment of the marriage contract and marriage of the claimant stands invalidated.“

During next seven years, the same fatwa was pronounced on ten different instances, albeit in marginally different contexts, by the same Mufti. However, in 1931, Mawlana Thanawi published an independent treatise dealing with the same issue at length and revised his previous opinion citing Maliki law as an authority instead of usual Hanafi law citations from al-Haskafi’s text or Ibn Abidin’s commentary.

Dr. Khalid Masud, in his paper on Apostasy and Judicial Separation in British India [included in this volume], analyzes the intricacies of these two fatwas (original and the revised one) at length and makes some interesting observations regarding social changes that took place between 1920 to 1930 in British India. He notes that the number of applications in the courts – seeking judicial separation from husbands – substantially increased in the span of these ten years. A large number of Muslim women were encouraged to declare themselves Christian and get their marriages dissolved by producing certificates of baptism.

According to Masud, situation became noticeable to an extent that some notable Muslim Scholars, for instance Dr. Iqbal in his famous lectures, questioned the validity of Hanafi law in this particular area and asked the Muslim jurists to exercise Ijtihad in order to reform the law. The debate triggered by these collective developments finally culminated into the revised fatwa of 1931, thus permitting the use of grounds in Maliki law – including husband’s impotence, cruelty or inability to maintain his wife – to dissolve a marriage instead of using apostasy as a legal device.

The normative shift in these fatwas, besides reflecting normative pluralism, also reflects another important dimension of legal change in Islamic Law: an almost inseparable construct of two mediums, i.e. Iftaa’ and Ijtihad.

Even though, many contemporary experts [1, 2, 3] of Islamic law argue that the terms ‘Mufti’ and ‘Mujtahid’ have been used interchangeably in pre-modern Islamic literature, it would not be entirely wrong to assert that fatwa still remains the primary medium of extending Ijtihad towards the society. For in actuality, it is only the Mufti (even today) who – inadvertently at times – creates and extends new legal norms to the level of positive law that works in a particular social construct.

It should not, therefore, sound surprisingly ‘liberal’ to a ‘traditionalist mind’ when a Maliki jurist from 14th century Spain, Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi, gives primary importance to social reality in his celebrated treatise on Islamic legal philosophy:

The rule is that you examine the given case in the light of Sharia. If it is correct according to the Sharia then consider its consequences in the conditions of its time and its people. If by its mention, your mind does not recall any evil then submit it to reason. If you feel that it will be accepted by reasonable people, then you may give your opinion in general terms if the case relates to a matter that is generally acceptable. If it cannot be generalized then give specific opinion. If the case in question does not accept this process, then it is better to keep silent; that would be more in conformity with the welfare of the people, legal as well as rational.

Having argued elsewhere, albeit not so eloquently, that Islamic law can be essentially experienced as a tradition of literature, I now use that observation to reassert that the available legal tradition – if hierarchically arranged and closely analyzed from primary texts (mutun) to commentaries / super commentaries (shuruh) to juridical responses (fatawaa) – can reveal a lot about normative pluralism in Islamic law and the inherent ability of law to perpetually adapt itself to the ever changing social conditions through well-knit and remarkably reasonable mediums.

concludes next…

Related:

• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (I): Normative Pluralism
• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (III): Grundnorm, a cosmological myth
• Tradition of Literature

Filed under: Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Islam & Modernity, Series & Sequels, Sociology of Religion, Traditional Islam , Ijtihad, Islamic Law, Philosophy, Pluralism, Society, Sociology

Persiflage

If Tradition is a phenomenal conversation that we perpetually undertake with our collective histories, going back to it will result in anachronism.

Related:

• Tradition (I) : key Dualities
• Tradition (II) : Conversation Incarnate
• Tradition (III) : Converse to create knowledge
• Tradition (IV) : Conclusion and more

Filed under: Reflections , Reflections, Tradition

My Interview at Pakistani Spectator

The Pakistani Spectator is a team blog centered at happenings in and related to Pakistan. They have been running a series in which they are conducting interviews of Pakistani bloggers. You can read my exchange here.

Filed under: Blogs & Blogging , Blogging, Blogs