Contemporary Thought In The Muslim World: Trends, Themes, And Issues 0415855071, 9780415855075, 1135008930, 9781135008932, 041585508X, 9780415855082

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‘Carool Kersten offers us a much-needed compass through the wide landscape of contemporary Muslim thought addressing some of the burning intellectual, ethical, legal and political issues of the Muslim world, from the Middle East, to North and South Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. The complex, varied and nuanced picture he depicts is a valuable service to the growing field of contemporary Islamic intellectual history.’ Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar ‘Carool Kersten captures a breathtakingly vast canvas of Islamic thought in a brilliant, effortless and digestible manner in this book. Encompassing philosophy, theology, history, politics and ethics, among other subjects, Kersten provides a lucid reading of especially the contemporary debates and intellectuals who are earnestly engaged with the construction and critique of Muslim thought. Readers, especially students, will greatly profit from both the historical details and the contours of ideas generated by an array of modern thinkers hailing from different geographical locations, which is also the strength of the book. The author dissects the critical debates and offers the reader a valuable and informative read.’ Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of Islamic Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA ‘In this timely book, Carool Kersten treats us to the most comprehensive and accessible investigation of contemporary Islamic thought ever written. The book explores the social and political relevance of Islamically inflected, contemporary intellectual thought, its ambivalent interfacing with the discourse of secularity, its feeding into citizenship claims, and its ingraining into movements of democratization, along with its exposure to repression by state authorities. A profound familiarity with distant and diverse parts of the Muslim intellectual multiverse is matched by their contextualization in global currents of contemporary thought. Carool Kersten disentangles the often dazzling complexity of contemporary Islamic intellectual life. He guides us through the maze thanks to a critical reappraisal of the lopsided conceptual toolkit that we have inherited from two centuries of orientalist and post-orientalist taxonomies.’ Armando Salvatore, Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies, McGill University, Canada

CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

This book presents an intellectual history of today’s Muslim world, surveying contemporary Muslim thinking in its various manifestations, addressing a variety of themes that impact on the lives of present-day Muslims. Focusing on the period from roughly the late 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the book is global in its approach and offers an overview of different strands of thought and trends in the development of new ideas, distinguishing between traditional, reactionary and progressive approaches. It presents a variety of themes and issues including: The continuing relevance of the legacy of transmitted traditional Islamic learning as well as the use of reason; the centrality of the Qur’an; the spiritual concerns of contemporary Muslims; political thought regarding secularity, statehood and governance; legal and ethical debates; related current issues like human rights, gender equality and religious plurality; as well as globalization, ecology and the environment, bioethics, and life sciences. An alternative account of Islam and the Muslim world today, counterbalancing narratives that emphasize politics and confrontations with the West, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars of Islam. Carool Kersten is Reader in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World at King’s College London, UK. His previous publications include Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values (2015) and Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam (2011).

Contemporary Thought in the Islamic World Series editor: Carool Kersten, King’s College London, UK Contemporary Thought in the Islamic World promotes new directions in scholarship in the study of Islamic thinking. Muslim scholars of today challenge deeply ingrained dichotomies and binaries. New ideas have stimulated an upcoming generation of progressive Muslim thinkers and scholars of Islam to radically rethink the ways in which immediate and emergent issues affecting the contemporary Islamic world are to be assessed. This series aims to take the field beyond the usual historical-philological and social science-driven approaches, and to insert the study of Islam and the Muslim world into far wider multi-disciplinary inquiries on religion and religiosity in an increasingly interconnected world.

The Sociology of Islam Collected Essays of Bryan S. Turner Edited by Bryan S. Turner and Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir Alternative Islamic Discourses and Religious Authority Edited by Carool Kersten and Susanne Olsson The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism A Study in Islamic Political Thought Andrea Mura A Muslim Response to Evil Said Nursi on the Theodicy Tubanur Yesilhark Ozkan A Muslim Reformist in Communist Yugoslavia The Life and Thought of Husein Đozo Sejad Mekić For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/religion/ series/ACONTISLAM

CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT IN THE MUSLIM WORLD Trends, Themes and Issues

Carool Kersten

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Carool Kersten The right of Carool Kersten to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-415-85507-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-85508-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-74025-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1

The problem of taxonomy: categorizing contemporary Muslim intellectuals

6

2

Philosophies of knowledge: transmission and reason

27

3

Scripture: alternative ways of engaging with the Qur’an

58

4

Spiritual dimensions of contemporary Muslim thought: Sufism today: psychology, literature, and Islamization of knowledge

79

5

Islam and politics: thinking about secularity, freedom and democracy

103

6

Shariʿa: Islamic legal system or ethical guideline?

127

7

Dealing with difference and plurality: emancipation, toleration and human rights

149

viii

8

Contents

Issues of the twenty-first century: globalization, ecology and medical ethics

Bibliography Index

176

194 210

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first expression of gratitude goes to Lesley Riddle. Now retired as Editor of Religion at Routledge, she extended the initial invitation to turn my teachings on the intellectual history of the contemporary Muslim world into a book. I am also indebted to her successor Steve Wiggins for seeing the project through the proposal stage, and to the reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Thanks are also due to the many students who have taken the undergraduate and postgraduate modules that form the basis for this book. Their questions, responses, and overall engagement with the material have been vital for shaping the contents. The same goes for the countless colleagues (at King’s College London and elsewhere), whose encouragement and critical observations have been so helpful and stimulating in seeing this project through. Any shortcomings remain, of course, solely my responsibility. The final product has greatly benefited from the support – and patience! – of the Editor of Religion at Routledge, Joshua Wells, and Editorial Assistant, Jack Boothroyd, who are not only concerned with this individual publication, but who are also looking after the book series in which this monograph appears. I also want to thank Kelvin Selmes at Taylor & Francis and Sasikumar Selvaraj of Integra for shepherding me and the book through the production process. Carool Kersten, Roermond, February 2019

INTRODUCTION Carool Kersten

This book is based on more than a decade teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate modules about the intellectual history of the contemporary Muslim world. While a subject central to my research interests, the contents of this book go well beyond the findings of my own specific projects, extending to wider reading in terms of scope, and going back thirty-five years in time studying Islam and the Muslim world in general. Therefore this is a synthetic rather than an analytic book. It points out parallels and contrasts, differences and similarities between thinkers and their ideas, presenting a variety of themes and issues as a set of interlocking concerns for contemporary Muslim intellectuals. This book seeks to tease out the merits of contemporary Muslim thinking in its various manifestations, addressing a wide range of themes that impact on the lives of present-day Muslims. In the face of internal and external challenges, many of the positions on these matters and subjects are conceived as counterpoints to Muslim apologetics or a retreat into a ‘siege mentality’. The detractors of these alternative ideas and strands of thought would qualify them as dissident or even heretical jeopardizing the integrity of the community of Muslims worldwide. Equally unhelpful are alarmist and paranoid perceptions of Islam and the Muslim world as an intimidating monolithic bloc held by outsiders, often leading to the cynical conclusion that a ‘divide-and-rule’ approach is the right response to fend off the alleged threat. Instead, it is more realistic and productive to accept that difference and diversity are integral to the human condition. This is one of the reasons why I have chosen for a reading of the intellectual history of the contemporary Muslim world that is both deconstructive and constructive. I want to put a positive spin on discursive variety, debate and even disagreement, advocating an attitude of discernment, even skepsis, towards received discourses, and extending an invitation for a critical engagement with the Islamic intellectual legacy.

2

Introduction

As a demonstration of intellectual diligence and effort, or ijtihad and jihad – as per the original Arabic etymology of these two terms before receiving the specific and technical meanings they tend to have today – such an approach will lead to a better comprehension and understanding of the varying ideas and views expounded by Muslim intellectuals today. Hopefully, this will enable the reader to make sense of the critical attitudes of both reactionary and progressive Muslims towards the perceived ‘blind imitation’ (taqlid) of conservative or traditional Muslims, while at the same time retaining an appreciation for the latter group’s attempts to preserve centuries of learning and keep it relevant for Muslims living today. The literature on contemporary Islam and the Muslim world often speaks of an Islamic resurgence, set in motion from the late 1970s and early 1980s onward. Considering events such as the regime change in Iran in early 1979 and the foundation of an Islamic republic; the occupation of the Great Mosque of Mecca by Saudi zealots; the formation of a resistance movement against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan called the Mujahideen (Jihad fighters); or the assassination of the Egyptian President Sadat in 1981 by a radical Islamist organization called Jamaʿat Islamiyya, make it seem that this is indeed true. However, this characterization of ‘Islamic resurgence’ needs some qualification. To take note of a development or trend is one thing, determining its starting point quite another. More detailed studies of the Iranian revolution or extremist organizations such as Jamaʿat Islamiyya show that these were decades in the making. This teaches us that there is a difference between first noticing an event or phenomenon and what would have been observable earlier of the matter had been investigated more carefully. Jamaʿat Islamiyya is a splinter group established by disaffected former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that was established already in 1928 and the ideological roots of which can be traced to Islamic reformist ideas from the nineteenth century. The history of Iran shows that the political mobilization of religious scholars is a process stretching over centuries. In closer inspection, it is therefore more accurate to speak of the ‘salience’ of Islam-inspired activism, not always political in nature, than of an Islamic resurgence – because Islam was never really away. An important aspect of the period under investigation is a very drastic change in the intellectual setting of the Muslim world in the past decades. This concerns both its demographics and its media landscape. In his 1999 Templeton Lecture on Religion in World Affairs, the American anthropologist Dale Eickelman referred to it as ‘The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World’. The combined effects of widening access to advanced education for increasing numbers of young Muslims and the introduction of new avenues for disseminating knowledge and news have eroded the control over information and, with that, also ‘hierarchical notions of religious authority’.1 This book gives attention to the contexts as much as to texts in which contemporary Muslim thinkers engage with topics such as knowledge and engagement with the Islamic heritage (including scripture and traditional Islamic

Introduction

3

learning); political questions dealing with secularity, statehood and governance; ethical and legal questions on both a fundamental and applied level (including human rights, gender issues, plurality; in short: dealing with ‘the other’). It includes surveys of the continuous spiritual interest of today’s Muslims, as well as questions that will be of increasing importance and concern for the future, such as the effects of globalization and the ecological state of the planet. I also make the bold claim that – intellectually – the most interesting developments are taking place on the progressive side of the spectrum, where thinkers contextualize the relevance of Islam’s intellectual legacy for Muslims today through postmodern and postcolonial lenses. Before beginning to discuss the substance of contemporary Muslim thinking, something needs to be said about the different strands of thought; in other words: How to characterize and categorize contemporary Muslim thinkers. The opening chapter maps the intellectual landscape of the contemporary Muslim world. It strips down the dizzying amount of designations, used in both scholarship and media for different strands of present-day Muslim thinking, to three categories, which to my mind are at, one and same time, broad and accurate enough to capture and characterize the enormous variety of ideas circulating in the Muslim world today. This brings me to another point I wish to stress. The categories traditional, reactionary and progressive refer to ideas, not people. Like taxidermy, also taxonomy is better not performed on the living, and people are notoriously difficult to pigeonhole. It is very well possible to be a pious and socially conservative Muslim, faithfully adhering to the religious traditions of Islam, while at the same time subscribing to progressive political ideas. A reactionary Muslim can restrict his return to the practices of the Prophet and his Companion to a personal lifestyle choice, without translating it into a political agenda, let alone propagate or actively engage in its implementation through violence. Similarly, a progressively minded Muslim advocating gay rights can also be captivated by the Muslim world’s spiritual tradition, becoming an initiate in one of many Sufi Orders that still exist and commanding millions of adherents worldwide. The next chapter (2) on philosophies of knowledge, or epistemology, is of central importance for appreciating what contemporary Islamic thinking is all about. For that reason, it has become the most voluminous. A distinctive feature of Muslim epistemologies is the prominence of fiqh and usul al-fiqh, two Arabic terms referring to Islamic jurisprudence and the foundations of Islamic jurisprudence, respectively. This close relation between law and epistemology may strike non-Muslim readers as odd, but the same could be said of the continued interest of contemporary, and supposedly secularized, Western philosophers in Christian theology. In that sense, parallels can be drawn between the preoccupations of Muslim philosophers, such as the Egyptian Hasan Hanafi and the Iranian Abdolkarim Soroush with the potential offered by usul al-fiqh for developing general methods of philosophical investigation, and that of Western thinkers as different as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, or Giorgio Agamben

4

Introduction

and Gianni Vattimo, as well as the late Jacques Derida and René Girard in theology and religion in general, not to mention the published dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Pope Benedict XVI. Also for contemporary Muslims, as the revealed word of God, the Qur’an remains the first point of reference for all things Islamic. But this does not prevent many from engaging both creatively and critically with Islam’s core sacred text. This is why Chapter 3 deals with new approaches to scriptural exegesis and Qur’anic Studies as a field of academic inquiry. Similar considerations underlie the decision to include a chapter on the spiritual dimensions in contemporary Islamic thought (Chapter 4). The next four thematic chapters address sets of topics that are closely connected and even intertwined. Political views (Chapter 5) inform positions on the role of Islamic law (Chapter 6) in the lives of Muslims today. Thus, the ideas Muslims hold about religion and secularity, freedom and democracy, the rule of law, loyalty and citizenship have an impact on what they think of religious freedom, the rights of non-Muslims and women, as well as gender equality or intersectionality. Together, they shape Muslim attitudes towards questions of diversity, plurality and tolerance, discrimination, emancipation and human rights (Chapter 7). This is why Muslim feminists feature here alongside advocates of religious pluralism. Here special attention is given to intellectuals from countries like Indonesia and South Africa. The largest Muslim majority country in the world, Indonesia, is at the same time also an ethnically and religiously very diverse country, where adherents of all major world religions are present in substantial numbers. In South Africa, Muslim activists have been at the forefront of the anti-Apartheid struggle, fighting not only against racial discrimination, but also for the emancipation of its Muslim community and for more socio-economic equality. All these issues bear on the question whether Muslims should subscribe to universal human rights standards or whether they should make certain reservations on account of their own religious affiliations. While all these interests and concerns affect Muslims most directly in their concrete and immediate surroundings, they cannot be isolated to these domestic settings, regardless whether this is inside or outside of the historical Muslim world: Wider global developments, not just influence, but impact directly on the lives of Muslims everywhere. Globalization may have only been named or have begun receiving widespread attention quite recently, but as a phenomenon it is much older than its increasingly distinct discursive articulation since the 1990s. Taking into consideration that Islam spread its influence on the back of the Arab conquests from the Atlantic Ocean to the River Indus within a century of its emergence, one could argue that globalization has been built into its evolving traditions from the very start. Colonialism and imperialism are only one of many other encounters, challenges and confrontations, which Muslims have faced and absorbed over time. In that sense, there is nothing novel about advocating a ‘cosmopolitan Islam’.

Introduction

5

So, while Chapter 8 could have preceded the previous three, it is placed where it is in order to facilitate a transition to very contemporary questions which Muslims have to confront, now and in the future. Therefore, the final chapter also includes a discussion of Muslim engagement with ecology and life sciences as two themes with which Muslims have to grapple and to which their responses will be determined not only by scientific advances, but also shaped by their worldview and religious outlook, which are the products of a civilizational legacy that is now close to a millennium-and-a-half old.

Note 1 Dale F. Eickelman, ‘The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World’, Middle East Review of International Affairs 3, 3 (1999): 80. A more detailed description of this emerging new public sphere can be found in a jointly-written article with fellow anthropologist Jon Anderson:Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, ‘Print, Islam, and the Prospects for Civic Pluralism: New Religious Writings and their Audiences’, Journal of Islamic Studies 8, 1 (1997): 43–62.

1 THE PROBLEM OF TAXONOMY Categorizing contemporary Muslim intellectuals

Before turning to the issues and themes that occupy the minds of contemporary Muslim thinkers, we first need to survey their intellectual field so that we can find our bearings. When identifying, mapping and categorizing the various existing discourses or strands of thought, it is important to keep in mind that Muslim intellectuals are real people and therefore difficult to pigeonhole, because they seldom fit snugly into a single category. In that sense, like taxidermy, taxonomy is best not performed on the living. The classification that I propose for this book is therefore better applied to the ideas that are represented rather than the individuals expounding the views in question. This brings me to another matter: the accuracy of existing designations. My argumentation for the proposed alternatives rests in part on a critical evaluation of a number of terms that are widely used in both the media and in the scholarly literature. By way of illustration, Table 1.1 tabulates only a sample of characterizations and designations from the literature on contemporary Islamic thinking. It is by no means complete or exhaustive, but it should suffice to appreciate the complexity of today’s Muslim intellectual landscape. The Muslim mainstream continues to subscribe to the doctrinal teachings that have been established over centuries. Adherence to that tradition of learning is generally combined with upholding socially conservative values regarding personal conduct. This also applies to those engaging in intellectual activities, such as religious education and other ways of disseminating Islam’s teachings, as well as counselling and research. Traditional Muslims should not be confused with adherents of ‘Traditionalism’ nor with ‘Traditionists’. The former refers to an anti-modernist strand of Islamic thinking that will be discussed in Chapter 4. The latter are also called ahl al-hadith; they form another school of thought that considers the Traditions of the Prophet, together with the revealed word of

The problem of taxonomy

7

TABLE 1.1 sample classifications for contemporary Muslim thinking

Kamrava

Shepard

Saeed

Ramadan

Official Islam

Traditionalism (Neo-Traditionalism) cf. NU (Indonesia)

Legal Traditionalism

Scholastic Traditionalism Sufism

Theological Puritanism Political Islamism Militant Extremism

Salafi Literalism Salafi Reformism Political literalism Salafism

Populist Islam • Popular Islam as Religion Islamism Modernist Radical rejectionist • Political activist Fundamentalist (instrumentalist) incrementalism ‘al-Qa’idaphenomenon Secularism Islam as belief Muslim secularism (nonReligious secularism instrumentalist) • Intellectual – Conservative – Reformist

Secular Liberalism Liberal Classical Reformism Modernism Progressive Ijtihad Cultural Nominalism

God encapsulated in the Qur’an, as the only required sources for Islamic learning. The two outliers of traditional Islamic thought, I characterize as reactionary and progressive thinking respectively. The ideas of the former have considerable currency among observing Muslims, and thus also gained commensurate political traction. However, it is in the latter category that we find the bolder intellectual ideas and examples of creative interpretation and innovative thinking.

Traditional and socially conservative The vast majority of Muslims in the world today can be considered, and would probably also self-identify, as traditional. Presently, Muslims have to cope with increasing polarization where it concerns the place of their religion in today’s world. Within this charged atmosphere, traditional Islam is often referred to as moderate. This may make sense in terms of its emphasis on occupying an intermediate position between extremes, or by following a middle way (tawassut), characterized by temperance (iʿtidal) and tolerance (tasamuh). However, many traditional Muslims are uncomfortable with the characterization ‘moderate’, because it seems to suggest they are only ‘lukewarm’ in their adherence to the faith, while they regard themselves as sincerely committed believers subscribing

8

The problem of taxonomy

to doctrinal orthodoxy and generally also piously observing the required practices. Within Sunni Islam, the religious establishment of the ulama (the plural of alim, a scholar trained in Islamic sciences) has coined a specific term for this collective commitment to traditional doctrine and practice: ahl al-Sunna wa’l-jamaʿa – ‘people of the tradition and the community’. Historically, the Sunni ulama regard themselves as the custodians of that tradition, not only that; historically, this intellectual class also has laid claim to being ‘heirs of the prophets’. In terms of the legacy they claim to guard, this means first of all upholding one of the four surviving authoritative Sunni schools of law. It further consists in adhering to the theological thinking formulated by the ninth- and tenth-century scholars al-Ashʿari (874–936) and al-Maturidi (853–944) and further developed in the eleventh century by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), who also proposed a synthesis with sober Sufism. Traditionally, educated religious scholars remain important authority figures. Officeholders such as the shaykh al-Azhar, the head of the Al-Azhar Mosque-University in Cairo, are not only important for Egyptian Muslims. Because of Al-Azhar’s standing as a centre of Sunni Islamic learning, the institution’s authority radiates across the Muslim world. Since the 1960s, but especially on the back of the oil boom starting in the 1970s, scholars from Saudi Arabia have begun extending their influence abroad too. Part of the historical symbiosis between the ruling Saudi dynasty and a religious establishment subscribing to a very literalist interpretation of Islam often referred to as ‘Wahhabism’ (named after the eighteenth-century scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab), they surpass al-Azhar scholars not only in terms of conservatism, but – thanks to the country’s financial largesse – they also compete for international influence. Beholden to the royal family for resources, Saudi religious scholars can find themselves in awkward positions. This was for example the case in 1990, when the country’s leading scholar, Shaykh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz (1910–1999), was forced to vindicate the government’s decision to join a predominantly non-Muslim international alliance led by the United States against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Husain’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait, thus pitching Saudi Arabia in battle against another Muslim country. There are also traditional religious scholars who criticize this symbiosis between the dynasty and the religious establishment. Figures like Safar al-Hawali (b. 1950) and Salman al-Ouda (Awdah) (b. 1956) rose to prominence and notoriety in the 1990s when their criticism directed at the royal family and their own former teachers like Ibn Baz landed them in jail. Although they seem to have mellowed over time, with the advent of social media, their support base under young Saudis has grown exponentially, with al-Ouda commanding millions of followers on twitter. Concerned about his influence and his sceptical reactions to the reforms announced by the new crown prince, he was again arrested in September 2017. These scholars are difficult to classify: should they

The problem of taxonomy

9

be considered as ultraconservative traditional scholars? Or does their involvement in the Saudi Islamic Awakening faction (al-sahwa al-Islamiyya) and its affinity with the ideas of Sayyid Qutb make them reactionaries?1 A further complication is added, by the emergence of a faction of ulama, who have joined other intellectuals referred to as ‘Islamic thinkers’ (mufakkirun islamiyyun) in opting for ‘an alternative third way, between the radical Jihadi Salafi movement and the acquiescent Salafi trend’.2 It illustrates once more that the proposed categories are better applied to ideas than real people. As in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, also in many other Muslim countries, traditional Islamic scholars are turned into a religious establishment, either by cooptation or by integrating them into the state bureaucracy. This can take the form of appointment to specific ministerial posts or other important administrative positions, such as that of grand mufti – the chief jurisconsult charged with issuing fatwas, or non-binding legal opinions on issues that concern Islamic doctrine or affect the daily lives of Muslims. At the same time, it is important to stress that ulama can also be open to reform and innovation. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, al-Azhar’s curriculum has been twice the subject of drastic reform efforts. The first initiative came from Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), one of the most prominent modern Islamic reformers of the nineteenth century, and the second overhaul took place under the direction of Shaykh al-Azhar Mahmud Shaltut (1893–1963) in the late 1950s and early 1960s.3 Shaltut was also accepting of worship under Shiʿa doctrine and maintained warm relations with the leading Shiʿa cleric at the time, Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi (1875–1961). Shiʿa Islam has not only its own tradition of doctrinal and legal learning and teachings, its religious scholarship is also more hierarchically structured than that of its Sunni counterparts. This system can be called meritocratic in the sense that a scholar’s rise in the hierarchy is based on intellectual and spiritual attainment. Scholars at the lower levels are referred to as mollahs, next come the hojatoleslam, while the top echelon is formed by the Ayatollahs.4 At the apex of this pyramid stand the so-called Grand Ayatollahs. These latter scholars hold the status of what the Shiʿa tradition refers to as Marjaʿ al-Taqlid. Translated as ‘source of imitation’, these scholars are exactly that: a point of reference of Shiʿa Muslims, which is not limited to doctrine and religious questions, but which can also have political significance. How this functions in the contemporary Muslim world has become clear after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the establishment of an Islamic republic. Aside from the formal state structures, in which clerics are also very well represented, there is a parallel structure of authority consisting of an 88-member Assembly of Experts and smaller Guardian Council composed of twelve members, at the head of which stands the Supreme Guide. The first scholar to hold that office was the figurehead of the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1901–1989). Considered a marjaʿ al-taqlid, the Ayatollah also actively advanced the politicized notion of ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’ (wilayat al-faqih or velayat-e faqih).

10

The problem of taxonomy

Outside of such Sunni and Shi´i (pseudo-)state structures, there are also alternative institutions and authority figures commanding wide respect and thus gaining very significant national and international influence. An example of that is Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama (‘Renaissance of the Religious Scholars’, often abbreviated to NU), an Islamic mass organization established in 1926 to represent the traditional, largely rurally based, religious teachers in this Southeast Asian country. Officially a non-political organization, thanks to an estimated forty-million following it does have tremendous societal influence. In the 1980s and 1990s, leading NU scholars, such as Sahal Mahfudh (also spelled Mahfudz) (1937–2014) and Mustofa Bisri (b. 1946), but especially Said Aqil Siradj (b. 1953) and Masdar Farid Masʿudi (b. 1954), began offering new, socially more relevant, interpretations of traditional Islamic learning. Aside from the age gap, there is another reason to set the latter duo apart from the old guard. Unlike Mahfudh, Siradj and Masʿudi complemented their traditional Islamic education with postgraduate studies at Mecca’s Umm al-Qura University and Indonesia’s most prestigious secular university, Universitas Indonesia, respectively. This made them into the key exponents of youngers a generation of scholars, referred to as the NU’s ‘new ulama’.5 The NU received a further prestigious boost, when – after the 1999 regime-change – its then serving Executive Chairman Abdurrahman Wahid (1940–2009) became the first freely elected president of the Indonesian Republic. Also on the Shiʿi side of the spectrum, there are scholars holding ambivalent positions vis-à-vis the state and politics. These include such figures as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (b. 1930), whose combination of religious authority and political significance became manifest after the 2003 regime change in Iraq. Also worth mentioning is Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (1935–2010), another scholar of Iraqi origin, but who had been living in Lebanon since 1952. During his lifetime, he was regarded as the spiritual head of Hezbollah, the country’s influential Shiʿi movement. Another instance of such an individual authority figure is Shaykh Yusuf alQaradawi (b. 1926). Originally from Egypt and educated at Al-Azhar, alQaradawi has been living in Qatar since 1961 and was the founding President of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), from 2004 until 2018.6 In addition, he is the President of the Dublin-based European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR). Founded to look after the interests of Muslim minorities living in Europe, the ECFR is composed of both scholars based in the continent and from elsewhere.7 What sets al-Qaradawi apart from many other ulama, is his early recognition of the power of new media in the Information Age.8 Thanks to appearances on satellite TV-channels such as Al-Jazeera and the use of the Internet, he developed audiences worldwide, turning him into a ‘global mufti’.9 Other such scholars with considerable international influence include Abdallah ibn Bayya (b. 1935) and Taha Jabir al-Alwani (1935–2016). Born in Mauretania (then French West-Africa) and partly educated in Tunisia, Ibn Bayya served as minister of education and justice. He later moved to Saudi Arabia, where he

The problem of taxonomy

11

taught at King Abd al-Aziz University in Jeddah. Until 2014, Ibn Bayya was alQaradawi’s deputy at IUMS and he is also a member of the ECFR. Al-Alwani was educated at al-Azhar and subsequently taught in his native Iraq and in Saudi Arabia, before emigrating to the United States in 1983, where he became involved in training Muslim chaplains for the US armed forces at Washington Theological Consortium and Cordoba University. Also among the Shiʿi clergy, one finds scholars with comparable international reputations. One of the leading Iranian clerics of the twentieth century was Ayatollah Mohammed Hossein Tabataba’i (1903–1981), who held study sessions with lay scholars and foreign intellectuals. Another internationally renowned scholar and thinker was Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari (Murtada Mutahhari) (1919–1979). Aside from being an influential cleric who prepared much of the groundwork for the revolution that brought Khomeini to power in 1979, he was a philosopher writing books on religious pluralism and founder of the Hosseiniyeh Ershad, an institution hosting wide-ranging lectures on history, culture, society and religion.10 In the wake of the Iranian revolution, Motahhari’s intellectual legacy began to extend as far as Indonesia. Despite being a majority Sunni country, an intellectual by the name of Jalaluddin Rakhmat (b. 1949) even established an Indonesian Mutahhari Foundation to disseminate the late Ayatollah’s thought. This makes a figure like Motahhari, despite his indisputable credentials in traditional Islamic learning, difficult to categorize. The same applies to other Iranian clerics, like Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari (Mujtahid-Shabistari) (b. 1936) and Mohsen Kadivar (b. 1959). Shabestari studied with both Tabataba’i and Motahhari, but he was also influenced by the lay intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969) and Ali Shariʿati (1933–1977). Both Shabestari and Kadivar have spent time abroad. During his time in Germany, Shabestari studied the work of Christian theologians, such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, and philosophers like Kant, Dilthey and Gadamer. Kadivar is a specialist in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and philosophy, who has been teaching at American universities since 2008. Other keepers of traditional interpretations, whose ideas and thoughts are not limited to academic scholasticism but imbued with a dose of spiritual zest, include Ismaʿil Raji al-Faruqi (1921–1986), Syed Naguib al-Attas (b. 1931) and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In 1970s, they began advancing a project called the ‘Islamization of knowledge’. While these initiatives appeared to have a promising start in the 1980s, even receiving support from Muslim politicians and activists, such as Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim (1947) and the British-Pakistani intellectual Ziauddin Sardar (1951), their influence has since petered out. Of comparable ambivalence is the categorization of the Pakistani scholars Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988) and Muhammad Khalid Masud (b. 1939). Having pious Muslim backgrounds and descending from families of prominent religious scholars, Fazlur Rahman and Masud obtained their own academic credentials from universities in Europe and Canada. Both have also

12

The problem of taxonomy

served as directors of Pakistan’s Central Institute of Islamic Research (now the Council of Islamic Ideology) and spent time as expatriate academics at the university of Chicago and Leiden, respectively. In this latter capacity, they have supervised countless students from many different countries, who have gone on to become prominent scholars and intellectuals in their own right. Thus, their ideas are situated in the interstices of traditional Islamic learning and progressive intellectualism. Finally, there is the interesting phenomenon of intellectuals from non-Muslim backgrounds who have converted to Islam and set out on the path of traditional Islamic learning. These include the American Mark Hanson (b. 1958, who became Shaykh Hamza Yusuf) and the Briton Timothy Winter (b. 1960, a.k.a. Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad). Both have studied with ulama in the Arab world and, aside from transmitting traditional Islamic learning in English, their significance lies in the establishment of alternative centres of Islamic learning: the Zaytuna Institute (1996, now Zaytuna College) in Berkeley, California and Cambridge Muslim College.11 As mentioned earlier, no individual Muslim will fit snugly into any of the categories discussed in this chapter, and religious scholars and other intellectuals are no exception. Yusuf al-Qaradawi may be an alim with a traditional Islamic education, but, under the influence of Islamist thinker-activists such as Hassan alBanna and Abu’l-Ala al-Mawdudi (both of whom are not ulama) on some issues, his position tilts towards the reactionary side, while – with some generosity – his more recent pronouncements on notions such as citizenship could be qualified as more progressively inclined. Also the above-mentioned Indonesian ‘new ulama’ can be considered as transformers of traditional religious learning into progressive Islamic discourses.

Reactionary In the wake of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the assassination of Egyptian President Sadat in the early 1980s, the term ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ entered the vocabulary of the literature on Islam and the Muslim world. The designation ‘fundamentalist’ for all kinds of puritanical Muslim activism, political and non-political, was originally used to describe Christian theological interpretations, emerging in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, grounded in strict adherence to the literal meaning of the Bible. Since then, the designation ‘Islamism’ has become more common, but this term needs to be reserved for diverse forms of social and political activism that advocate the organization of public life in general in accordance with Islamic principles (the latter often poorly defined, or not at all). In addition to fundamentalism and Islamism, non-Muslim audiences have also been introduced to other terms, like ‘Salafi’, ‘Wahhabi’ and ‘Jihadi’. Quintan Wiktorowicz, a political scientist specializing in Islam who has shuttled between academia, policymaking and consultancy, provided a useful breakdown

The problem of taxonomy

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of some of these terms.12 Within the broader category of Salafism, he distinguishes three factions: ‘purists’, ‘politicos’ and ‘jihadis’. The term Salafi is derived from the Arabic expression al-sala¯f al-ṣa¯lih ̣, which translates as ‘the pious ancestors’ and which refers to the first three generations of Muslims, consisting of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad and the two generations after that. They are held up as the representatives of a – supposedly – quintessential pristine Islam, and thus the benchmark for proper Muslim conduct, grounded in strict adherence to the Islamic doctrines and legal precepts informed by literal readings of the Qur’an, as the revealed word of God, and the Hadith collections as depositories of the Traditions of the Prophet (or Sunna). Within this broader current of action and thought, the purists exhibit a preoccupation with personal conduct and spreading the Salafi interpretation of Islam through nonviolent and non-political methods, such as daʿwa, or religious propagation, and education. Purists regard politics as a distraction that can only lead to deviance from the right path. The politicos, by contrast, regard the political arena as the crucial domain for implementing the conviction that all lawgiving rests with God and to ensure that society is organized accordingly, which to them means the enforcement of Islamic law in accordance with their literal interpretation. Thus, the politicos among the Salafis can be considered Islamists, but the reverse, that all Islamists are politicized Salafis, is not true. As will be explained in Chapter 5, not all Islamists subscribe to the Salafi interpretation of the Islamic teachings and, consequently, different forms of Islamic political organization have been proposed. Also, not all politicos condone the use of violence, but those Salafi activists who do are referred to as ‘jihadis’. The differences between the three factions are not in thought or belief, but a matter of contextual analysis and strategies proposed for implementing these convinctions. Finally, there is an inclination to regard the term ‘Wahhabism’ as an equivalent of Salafism and apply it as a gloss for the three factions distinguished by Wiktorowicz. However, the designation ‘Wahhabi’ needs to be reserved for the specific historical phenomenon of a puritanical movement emerging in eighteenth-century Arabia and forged into an enduring political alliance between the descendants of the religious scholar Muhammad ibn Abd alWahhab (1703–1792) and the central Arabian chieftain Muhammad ibn Saud (d. 1765), which continues to dominate the political scene up to the present day in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This tendency to conflate Wahhabism with Salafism can be partly explained by the tremendous influence Saudi Arabia has been able to exercise on Muslims worldwide, thanks to the vast financial wealth accrued after the oil boom of the 1970s. Since then, it has turned this particular interpretation of Islam into a tool for furthering the Kingdom’s political interests and an instrument for influencing Muslim conduct beyond the confines of its own borders.13 As an alternative to this amalgamation of terms, and also to extend it to encompass the broadest possible range of contextualized interpretations of Islam motivated by a shared outlook on the role of religion in contemporary Muslim

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The problem of taxonomy

societies, I propose the term ‘reactionary’. I qualify as reactionary those strands of Islamic thinking which originate from a dissatisfaction with the present-day situation in the Muslim world and the state of affairs in Islamic thinking, and which returns to the Islamic past for an answer or solution to remedy those conditions. Such reactions need not be unsophisticated or to be considered unmodern or archaic. Note that this not the same as anachronistic – which I think they are. Prior to the 1970s, students of the political history of different parts of the Muslim world have tended to pay scant attention to political Islam during late colonial times and the early decades of the postcolonial era, focussing instead on alternative secular ideologies. However, that does not mean nothing of interest was happening in Islamic thinking during that period. On an intellectual level, the most important thinker filling this void between the late 1940s and mid1960s was Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966). The enormous influence he has exercised on Islamic thinking in the second half of the twentieth century warrants a closer look at his writings. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind Umberto Eco’s observation that an author has no control over a text’s afterlife. So the effects that Sayyid Qutb’s ideas have had on a wide spectrum of Muslim activists do not necessarily coincide with the author’s intentions.14 Sayyid Qutb had started out in the 1930 as a ‘man of letters’, influenced by literary writers, such as Mahmud Abbas al-Aqqad (1889–1964) and his Diwan group. But from the 1940s onward, Qutb became increasing assertive in positing a ‘spiritual East’ over against a ‘materialistic West’. Although this seems to echo the thinking of the British-Indian poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), there was also a marked difference. Iqbal’s diagnosis of the ‘maladies’ of the brain and the heart afflicting the East and the West, respectively, is very much at odds with the dualism, the irreconcilable binary, that marks Sayyid Qutb’s later writings. In fact, other South Asian Muslim thinkers, such as the founder of the Jamaat-e Islami and future Pakistani politician, Abu’l-Ala alMawdudi (1903–1979), and the Indian scholar Abu’l-Hasan al-Nadwi (1914–1999), become much more important for Sayyid Qutb’s further intellectual development.15 Books like Artistic Imagery in the Qur’an (Al-taswir al-fanni fi’l-qur’an, 1945) and Signs of the Resurrection in the Qur’an (Mashahid al-qiyama fi’l-qur’an, 1947) can be considered as transitions between Qutb’s literary and religious interests, but with the publication of the first edition of Social Justice in Islam (Al-‘adala al-ijtima’iya fi’l-Islam,1948), Sayyid Qutb produced his first significant political Islamic book. However, his ‘religious turn’ was only completed after returning from a twoyear study trip to the United States in 1951, which only confirmed his disaffection with the West’s perceived materialism and superficiality. It resulted in Sayyid Qutb becoming one of the most prominent intellectuals to join the Muslim Brotherhood. Commentators agree that his ten-year incarceration following the 1954 breakdown of the Brotherhood’s relations with the Nasser regime had a significant impact on the nature of Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and

The problem of taxonomy

15

writings. His uncompromisingly theocentric worldview culminated in what, with benefit of hindsight, can be considered Sayyid Qutb’s ideological testament: Signposts on the Road (Ma‘alim fi’l-tariq). Its publication shortly after his release in 1964 soon resulted in Sayyid Qutb being arrested again on treason charges, put on trial, sentenced to death and executed in 1966. Although Sayyid Qutb was almost entirely banished from the public sphere during the early 1960s, and his writings had little immediate effect on the political debates at the time, that does not mean that a younger generation of budding intellectuals was not aware of or unfamiliar with his ideas. In fact, they were probably more acutely aware of the multifaceted dimensions characterizing Qutb’s oeuvre than what can be taken from the words and actions of radicalized Islamists appearing on the scene in Qutb’s native Egypt and far beyond, from the 1980s onwards. A prime example is provided by the pamphlet written by the ideologue behind the extremist Gamaat Islamiyah, which assassinated President Sadat in 1981. Abd al-Salam Faraj’s tract The Neglected Duty – an unambiguous reference to jihad as mandatory armed struggle – is emblematic of the texts produced by Islamists who consider violence a legitimate means, an obligation even, to realize their goal of an Islamized society as envisioned by them on the basis of the ideas expounded by Sayyid Qutb in Signposts on the Road.16 At the same time, it is important to note here that intellectuals propounding millenarian Islamist agendas do not necessarily espouse violence themselves. A good example of this is the Jordanian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (b. 1959), the ideologue behind the Islamic State (IS). In what seems a conflation of Wiktorowicz’s categories, he has been characterized as a ‘quietist Jihadi’, combining the pious attitude of the a-political purists with a violent action plan for an Islamic End Times scenario.17 This provides yet another illustration of the slipperiness of categories: Whatever taxonomy one chooses to adopt, it is sheer impossible to fit individual Muslims espousing comparable ideas into a single classification. For contemporary Shiʿi thinking, the Paris-trained sociologist Ali Shariʿati (1933–1977) occupies a position comparable to that of Sayyid Qutb, also sharing the latter’s eclectic intellectual upbringing. First there was the influence of Shariʿati’s father, who had received a clerical training at the seminary (hauza) of Mashhad, but who was also involved with the nationalist movement of onetime prime minister Ali Mossadeq. Then there was the exposure to what Shariʿati’s biographer Ali Rahnema calls ‘God-Worshipping Socialists’.18 It was during his stay in France that the ideas of figures as diverse as scholars of Islam and the Middle East Louis Massignon and Jacques Berque; the forefather of postcolonial theory Frantz Fanon; the sociologist Georg Gurvitch; and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, inspired Shariʿati ‘to prove that Shiʿi Islam already possessed the quintessence of all Western progressive schools of thought’.19 The further articulation of his ideas was developed through his engagement with the so-called Hosseiniyeh Ershad, which was the home of the ‘Monthly Talks Society for Displaying the Right Path of Religion’ led by the earlier mentioned

16

The problem of taxonomy

Ayatolah Morteza Motahhari and another cleric, the progressively minded Mahmud Taleqani (1911–1979).20 Although this duo was part of Iran’s religious establishment, they were considered to belong to its progressive wing. Initially, they were impressed with Shariʿati, who had an ability to move ‘across different religions and concepts. […] taking the soul of the East to the West and bringing the reality of the West to the East’.21 This not only resonates with the words of the British-Indian poet Muhammad Iqbal, who spoke of the ‘heart malady’ and ‘brain malady’ afflicting East and West, respectively.22 Also, Shariʿati’s Egyptian counterpart, Sayyid Qutb, shared this interest in Indian religions.23 In spite of his connections with clerics like Motahhari and Taleqani, in Shariʿati’s view, ‘the Islam of the clergy and the masses was incompatible with what he believed to be the authentic, revolutionary and progressive Islam of the Qur’an and the Prophet’.24 Not surprising then that Motahhari became increasingly critical of Shariʿati’s ideas.25 In addition, his lectures also drew the attention of the authorities, leading eventually to Shariʿati’s imprisonment. Under pressure from both sides, it is not inconceivable that this combination of intellectual oppression and political repression drove Shariʿati to an increasingly uncompromising adherence to what he perceived as the necessary transformative élan of his thinking, not dissimilar to the hardening of Sayyid Qutb’s stance under the duress of his decade-long persecution at the hands of the Nasser regime. Shariʿati’s dismissal of clerical scholarship and focus on the authenticity to the Qur’an and the Sunna points at a reactionary rather than progressive interpretation, which takes account of the cumulative traditions of Islam’s wider heritage. However, the effects of the ‘radical Islamic ideology’, which Shariʿati developed in the course of the 1970s, became manifest two years after his untimely death in 1977.26 In May 1979, shortly after the Iranian Revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power, members of an anti-clerical resistance group inspired by Shariʿati’s ideology assassinated Morteza Motahhari. A few months later, Mahmud Taleqani, who succeeded Motahhari as Head of the Council of the Islamic Revolution, also died under suspicious circumstances. Such murders echo with the political violence perpetrated by radicalized Sunni Muslims, such as the assassins of President Sadat and others who draw their inspiration from the likes of Sayyid Qutb. The ideas of Mawdudi, Qutb and Shariʿati were not only adopted by violent Sunni and Shiʿi political extremists: Their ideas also coloured attempts during the 1980s by Turkish intellectuals to cleanse the minds of Muslims polluted by Western ideas, albeit that many of them gradually changed their minds and developed ideas which are more appropriately situated on the progressive side of the spectrum.27

Progressive Islamic discourses Slippery terms also motivate the choice of the final category for the taxonomy adopted in this book. To my mind, ‘progressive’ makes more sense vis-à-vis the

The problem of taxonomy

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categories ‘traditional/socially conservative’ and ‘reactionary’ than a term like ‘liberal’, which brings with it similar pitfalls as ‘moderate’ and ‘fundamentalist’. Since the late 1990s, the notion of ‘liberal Islam’ has gained quite some traction, thanks to an anthology with the same title, compiled by the American political scientist Charles Kurzman.28 The book has been rightly criticized for presenting under the same header texts by intellectuals as different as the Tunisian historian Mohamed Talbi and the leader of the country’s Ennahda Party, Rachid Ghannouchi, or by juxtaposing Indonesia’s chief post-independence Islamist politician Mohammed Natsir (1908–1993) with his younger compatriot Nurcholish Madjid who disavowed Islamic party politics. Even more questionable is the inclusion of a figure like the earlier mentioned Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Such a lumping-together of incomparable voices turns ‘liberal’ into a rather empty category. Moreover, the distinction of ‘liberal’, ‘silent’ and ‘interpreted shariʿa’ as the three defining tropes of liberal Islam not only obscures more than it clarifies, it also imposes an unhelpful restriction in that it suggests that the notion’s defining feature lies in the attitude toward Islamic law. That is to say nothing of the term’s connotational baggage; more specifically, the implied connections that will be made with the Western political ideology of (Neo-) Liberalism.29 When insisting on using terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ in connection with Islam and Muslims, studies like Leonard Binder’s Islamic Liberalism offer more convincing insights into the distinction between liberal and illiberal Islamic views.30 As a final critical point, a comparison of Liberal Islam with Kurzman’s other anthology on modernist Islam, which covers Islamic discourses from the 1840s to the 1940s, also invites the question wherein consists the exact difference between ‘modernist’ and ‘liberal’, other than the chosen time frame? A more consistent and fine-mazed alternative is provided by Fazlur Rahman’s Islam and Modernity (1982), which distinguishes between modernist and neomodernist, and also between revivalists and neo-revivalist ideas (‘reactionary’ in my vocabulary). It also shows that – just as with the renewed salience of reactionary discourses since the 1980s – the antecedents of contemporary progressive reinterpretations of the Islamic tradition can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century, and even earlier. One of the first instances of creating a modern Islamic philosophy was attempted by Muhammad Iqbal, the most celebrated poet from British India who is also considered the spiritual father of Pakistan. Before turning to literature, Iqbal had trained as a barrister in Britain and obtained a doctorate in philosophy from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In fact, his dissertation on the metaphysics of Ibn Sina was the first ever written on Islamic philosophy in European academia. The central idea in Iqbal’s own thought was the notion of a strong, vigorous and creative self, leading to the claim that ‘in great action alone the self of man becomes united with God without losing its own identity’.31 In his philosophical investigations, Iqbal suspended any final judgement on what Islam exactly means. Such assertions rested on a view that the world as we know it is a product of human

18

The problem of taxonomy

enterprise. Iqbal has laid this out in great detail in one of the very few academic philosophical discourses he ever produced: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.32 This attempt to reconcile earlier Islamic thought with modern European philosophy and science reflect the ‘cosmopolitan eclecticism’ underlying Iqbal’s hybrid identity composed of Western Idealism and Indo-Persian poetic sensitivity. It also makes him a postcolonial intellectual avant la lettre, trying to subvert Western intellectual dominance.33 Iqbal’s denial of ‘dichotomies such as being and becoming, man and God, mind and matter, reason and intuition, science and religion, sacred and profane, subject and object, thinking and action’ reflect a liminality that is one of the defining characteristics in the hermeneutics developed by progressively minded Muslim intellectuals.34 Also in the Arabic-speaking part of the Muslim world, cultural life during the 1930s and 1940s evinced a shift in the work of intellectual and literary icons, such as the earlier mentioned Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad and Taha Husayn (1889–1973), towards Islamic themes. However, set against the prevailing background of the late 1960s, intellectual historian Issa Boullata insists that writings on the subject published from that point in time onward had much greater urgency and resonance. When the disenchantment with the status quo in the Arab world reached its peak following the crushing defeat in the 1967 Arab– Israeli War, it ushered in not only the so-called resurgence of political Islam of the 1970s and 1980s, it also led to a self-reflection of a very different kind on the other side of the intellectual spectrum. Writing in 1995, Boullata distinguishes three main trends in the ‘painful introspection’ by Arabs in the preceding two decades: One set of writings still envisaging a cultural revolution, in which the religious outlook is jettisoned in favour of a transformation towards a completely secular one. In contrast to the former, a very vocal group of intellectuals intends to remain committed to the religious aspects of Arab culture and conform to its so-called ‘authentic Islamic origins’ at the expense of external influences (this is what I call the reactionary strand). Third, there are the intellectuals who see Arab culture as capable of dealing with modernity.35 It is in this last trend that I see the germinations of today’s progressive Islamic discourses. These three trends are indicative of the various positions taken by Arab intellectuals in assessing their civilizational heritage, or turath in Arabic. Symptomatic of the urgency of the situation were two conferences held in the early 1970s, which brought together a wide array of intellectuals.36 The conferences on ‘Authenticity and Renewal in Contemporary Arab Culture’ in Cairo and on ‘The Crisis of Civilizational Development in the Arab Homeland’ in Kuwait held in 1971 and 1974, respectively, leading philosophers and other academics, like Zaki Naguib Mahmud (1905–1993), Shukri Ayyad (1921–1999), Mahmud Amin al-‛Alim (1922–2009), Anouar Abdel Malek (1924–2012) and Fouad Zakariyya (1927–2010), criticized reactionary preoccupations with ‘authenticity’ (asala). Instead, a robust reinvigoration would demand

The problem of taxonomy

19

a creative, critical and historically sensitive comprehension of the Arab-Islamic cultural legacy. In spite of disagreements on how to proceed with such an analysis of turath, especially ‘the Kuwait conference was one of the most important cultural events to occur in the Arab world in recent years, if only for the attempt to raise questions’.37 In the wake of these conferences began to emerge a rich and varied turath literature, with Zaki Naguib Mahmud as its most prominent early exponent, although he was not able to wrest himself entirely free from the secular mindset that actually makes him first and foremost a representative of that first – secular minded – strand of thinking about the Islamic heritage. Mahmud’s viewpoints were carried forward by younger intellectuals, such as Fouad Zakariyya and Faraj Foda (1945–1992). The position of these secularists, who opposed not just the political agendas of the Islamists, but also challenged the interpretations of the heritage thinkers (turathiyyun), was extremely precarious. Zakariyya argued that Islamist ideologies were neither representative of the views of most Muslims nor a correct interpretation of Islam itself. He contrasted the reification of Islam through a-historical readings of its texts with a different understanding of Islam, namely as what Muslims have made of their religion throughout history.38 Clearly playing on the wording of Abd al-Salam’s Faraj’s The Neglected Duty, Faraj Foda’s historical excursion in a book entitled The Neglected Truth also bears evidence that there has never been a perfect Islamic state since the time of the Four Righteous Caliph (632–661 CE).39 Within just a few years from the start of these debates, the climate in Egypt – and elsewhere in the Muslim world – became dramatically polarized. In 1992, Faraj Foda was assassinated by radicalized Islamists and, a year later, the first Arab recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, the aging novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), was also nearly fatally stabbed by another extremist, after puritan Muslims deigned his literary depictions of Islam disrespectful of the religion. Key heritage thinkers of which Zakariyya and Foda had remained critical, include the French-Algerian historian Mohammed Arkoun (1928–2010), the philosophers Mohammed Abed al-Jabri40 (1935–2010) and Hasan Hanafi (b. 1935), and the latter’s former student, the literary scholar and text critic Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943–2010).41 The ideas of this quartet constitute the core of the new heritage thinking of the 1980s and 1990s, and its influence radiates far beyond the Arab world, meeting with especially receptive audiences in a country like Indonesia and among expatriate Muslims in the West. What characterizes these new heritage thinkers is the way their work joins intimate familiarity with the Islamic tradition derived from their personal backgrounds to a solid knowledge of advances made in the human sciences by Western academe, which these intellectuals acquired through wide reading, advanced studies abroad and stints as visiting scholars at foreign universities. Operating in the interstices between different cultural traditions, the resulting liminality of their positions has stimulated an intellectual creativity from which they have

20

The problem of taxonomy

developed novel ways of engaging with the Islamic tradition, arriving at innovating interpretations of the intellectual heritage of the Muslim world through the methodological lenses of the humanities and social sciences. What needs to be acknowledged, though, is that these heritage thinkers are less widely read than, say, Sayyid Qutb or Ali Shariʿati. Although some of them also write opinion pieces in newspapers and other periodicals, and make TV and radio appearances, their main writings are academic in nature. Consequently, the subjects, style and tone of these books tend to only appeal to the highest educated strata of society. At present, in most Muslim countries, access to higher education, let alone advanced academic studies, is still restricted to a relatively small segment of the population. However, because the middle classes are growing and the number of young people entering universities increases not only in absolute but also in relative terms, the audiences of these intellectually challenging authors will expand too. Another difference that must be pointed out is that heritage thinkers tend to be read by students in the humanities and social sciences, while the readers of Sayyid Qutb consist to a large extent of professionals like engineers, doctors and lawyers. Equivalents of the Arab heritage thinkers are also found elsewhere in the Muslim world. Given the Islamist takeover in 1979, it is perhaps surprising that Iran is one of the most interesting places to watch when it comes to emerging progressive Islamic discourses. The best known Iranian thinker after Ali Shariʿati is in fact a reformed revolutionary, whose initial academic training was not in the humanities, but in the exact sciences. Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945), whose birth name is Hossein Hajj Faraj Dabbagh, originally trained as a chemist and pharmacologist, but then branched out into the history and philosophy of sciences, obtaining advanced degrees from London’s Chelsea College (now merged into King’s College London). Upon his return to Iran, Soroush became director of Tehran’s Teacher Training College. His subsequent appointment by the Ayatollah Khomeini to the seven-member Cultural Revolution Committee has been an issue of controversy. Although he resigned this commission in 1983 and transferred from the Teacher Training College to the Institute for Cultural Research Studies, opponents of the regime have criticized Soroush for his involvement in the purging of academics from university campuses, while reactionaries and orthodox critics have accused him of hindering the ‘Islamization of the human sciences’. Since the 1990s, Soroush has become openly critical of the political role played by Iran’s Shiʿa clergy, using a monthly magazine called Kiyan as his main outlet. Because of his increasingly tense relations with the regime, Soroush now spends his time abroad; accepting visiting positions at Ivy League universities like Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, as well as Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Publishing articles and books on topics such as hermeneutics, pluralism and religious tolerance, Soroush became an emblematic representative of what in Persian is called roshanfekr dini – ‘the religious intellectual’.42 Other intellectuals, contributing to this discourse that cautions

The problem of taxonomy

21

against the political ideologization of religion, include also the earlier mentioned dissident clerics Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari and Mohsen Kadivar. Alternatively, the approach advocated by Soroush, Shabestari and Kadivar is also called ‘religious’ or ‘Islamic new-thinking’ (nouandishi-ye dīnī/isla¯mī ).43 Despite being geographically located on opposite sides of the Muslim world, there are interesting parallels between the developments in Indonesian and Turkish Muslim intellectualism. Constitutional restrictions on the role of religion in the public domain have shaped the way in which Islamic discourses were allowed to evolve in the Republics of Indonesia and Turkey. After decades of tight control through powerful ministries of religious affairs, responsible for ensuring that Islam was kept at arm’s length of the political process, in the 1980s, the military-dominated governments of Turkey and Indonesia somewhat eased their grip on religion, allowing for a re-Islamization of their societies through new policies known as the ‘Reactualization Agenda’ and ‘TurkishIslamic Synthesis’, respectively. In both instances, commentators have signalled the use of different terms for ‘intellectual’ that reflect a shift in disposition and topical concerns. Turkish observers refer to these new intellectuals as islamci aydin (Islamist intellectual), but the individuals involved prefer calling themselves müsülman aydin (Muslim intellectual). Born in the 1940s and 1950s, they tend to hail from provincial towns in Anatolia rather than megacities like Istanbul or Ankara. Without precedent in the earlier intellectual history of the Turkish republic, the employment of the Turkish term aydin, rather than the more Europeanized cognate entelektüel, serves to distinguish them from their more secular-minded counterparts and to assert their Muslim identities. Like in Turkey, in Indonesia, there has been a parallel change in the terminology used for intellectuals, although it is coloured less by religion than by Indonesia’s identity as a Southeast Asian entity: Since the mid-1960s, the term intelektuil has been replaced by cendekiawan, a word originating from Sanskrit.44 Not unlike the Arabic-speaking heritage thinkers, also the Turkish Muslim intellectuals rely on Western writers and scholarship to underscore the compatibility of the use of reason and science with the teachings of Islam, but without a need to embrace secularism.45 Among the leading proponents of this Turkish Muslim intellectualism are Rasim Özdenören (b. 1940), Ismet Özel (b. 1944) and – most prominently – Ali Bulaç (b. 1951).46 These Turkish Muslim intellectuals are familiar with South Asian and Arab writers like Muhammad Iqbal, Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb. However, it is actually Iranian thinkers, such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Daryush Shayegan, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and especially Ali Shariʿati, who exercise the most influence on figures like Ali Bulaç. In the transitory period between the 1997 ‘velvet coup’ against the government of Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and the rise of the Justice & Development Party (AKP) since 2002, another designation, ‘post-Islamist intellectual’, was introduced to refer to ‘those Muslim intellectuals […] [who] have abandoned their ideas for the construction of an alternative social and political order that in effect

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enabled them to seek a rapprochement with the West, Western ideas and institutions’.47 In Indonesia, progressive Muslim discourses have a longer history than in Turkey. A partial explanation for this is that Indonesia’s quasi-state ideology of Pancasila, the doctrine of Five Principles introduced by founding President Sukarno in 1945, is not as restrictive of religion as Turkish Kemalism, which is very similar to French laicism in banning religion from the public scene. The Pancasila, by contrast, imposes an obligation on all Indonesian citizens to adhere to one of six formally recognized religions. As I have written elsewhere, progressive Islamic discourses articulated by Indonesian intellectuals can be traced through three or four generational shifts, starting with the generation who consciously experienced the transition from colonialism to independence.48 They were also the first Muslims to pursue academic studies at universities in the West. Among them were the scholars Abdul Mukti Ali (1923–2004) and Harun Nasution (1919–1998). Both obtained advanced degrees from McGill University in Canada and rose to top positions at the State Islamic Universities. When Mukti Ali became Minister of Religious Affairs in 1971, he charged Nasution with modernizing the Islamic higher education curriculum, introducing the study of ‘heretical’ philosophical and Sufi doctrines and adding the writings of Western scholars of Islam to the reading lists. Mukti Ali and Nasution also acted as mentors to the first generation of postcolonial intellectuals coming to prominence as student activists in the 1960s. Individuals such as Nurcholish Madjid (1939–2005), Djohan Effendi (1939–2017) and Dawam Rahardjo (1942–2018) were all part of what was known as the Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thinking (Gerakan Pembaruan Pemikiran Islam). All went on to become the leading Muslim intellectuals of the final decades of the twentieth century. They, in turn, groomed the next generation, who tend to gravitate around the State Islamic Universities of Jakarta and Yogyakarta. Since the beginning of the new millennium, this third generation have become the country’s senior Muslim intelligentsia, as professors, university rectors, senior officials in the ministries of religious affairs and education, as scholars working for think tanks, and as leading executives of Islamic mass organizations, such as the NU and its modernist-reformist counterpart, the Muhammadiyah. It is within these two mass organizations that the latest generation is now reaching intellectual maturity. Supported by the ‘new ulama’ of the 1990s and senior Muhammadiyah intellectuals, these cadres – referring to themselves as ‘Islamic Post-Traditionalists’ or united in the ‘Network of Young Muhammadiyah Intellectuals’ (Jaringan Intelektual Muda Muhammadiyah, JIMM) respectively – are the ones to watch for the future. Sub-Saharan Africa is probably even more neglected in scholarship on Islam and the Muslim world than the Southeast Asian region. In South Africa, a scholar-activist like Farid Esack (b. 1959) combines anti-Apartheid campaigning with emancipation of the country’s Muslim communities. Also of South African origin, circumstances forced Ebrahim Moosa (b. 1957) to leave his

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country and settle in the United States. In this he is not alone; it has also happened to the earlier mentioned Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar, as well as the Sudanese jurist Abdullahi Ahmad an-Na’im (1946). All have had to leave their native countries to take up positions at universities abroad. Other African scholars who found an academic base overseas include the late Ali Mazrui (1933–2014) from Kenia and the Senegalese Souleymane Bachir Diagne (b. 1955), an expert on both the thought of Muhammad Iqbal and African philosophies teaching at Columbia University in New York. The latter is also the academic home of another Iranian: The sociologist of knowledge, Middle East historian and cultural critic Hamid Dabashi (b. 1951) Together with Muslim intellectuals from migrant backgrounds, these expatriate scholars are becoming increasingly important for the articulation of progressive Islamic discourses. Particularly interesting are those capable of straddling the traditional–progressive divide, combining advanced degrees from Western universities with traditional Islamic religious training. Among these are the earlier mentioned Ebrahim Moosa, Khaled Abou El Fadl (b. 1963), Jasser Auda (b. 1966), Mouhanad Khorchide (1971) and Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962). An increasingly prolific young intellectual in the progressive camp is Adis Duderija (b. 1977), an academic of Bosnian origin based in Australia. Like Ebrahim Moosa and the American-Iranian Omid Safi (b. 1970), he emphatically self-identifies as a ‘progressive Muslim’.49 Virtually absent from the traditional and reactionary discourses are the voices of women. The community of progressive Muslim intellectuals is still only doing slightly better there. Given this imbalance, it is not surprising that women’s rights and gender equality remains the major preoccupation in the work of female Muslim intellectuals. Leading scholar-activists to what, since the 1990s, is referred as Islamic or Muslim feminism, include the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi (1940–2015), the Iranian-born but UK-based legal anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini (b. 1952) and the African-American convert Amina Wadud (b. 1952).50 Gradually the baton is being passed on to a younger generation of academics, including the late Saba Mahmood (1962–2018), Kecia Ali (b. 1972), Sa’diyya Shaikh (b. 1969) and Asma Barlas (b. 1950). Articulate and bold, sometimes bordering on the provocative, these progressive intellectuals are frequently criticized by other, more conservative or outright reactionary, Muslims. Moreover, because of their backgrounds, on occasion, their views are also met with suspicion as to the exact nature of their intentions. A case in point is Tariq Ramadan, who also holds a degree in philosophy from a Swiss university, but who is also a grandson of Hasan al-Banna – the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.51 However, as one commentator on Ramadan’s work observed: ‘it is doubtless precisely because Ramadan’s thought does not fit neatly into the mold of more conventional radical Islamist ideology, or even conservative Islamic jurisprudence, that he generates so much anxiety’.52

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Notes 1 Stéphane Lacroix, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia. Translated by George Holoch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 2 Madawi al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 3 More recently, Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmed el-Tayeb, who was appointed in 2010 and graduated himself from the Sorbonne, initiated a study-abroad programme for AlAzhar faculty to study for advanced degrees in the study of religions at British universities in cooperation with the British Council. 4 These spellings are also the most current in the media and based on transliterations from the Persian. The Arabic equivalents are mullah, hujjat al-Islam and Ayat Allah. 5 Carool Kersten, Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values (London and New York: Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press, 2015), 62–64. 6 Cf. the IUMS website at http://iumsonline.org/en/, last accessed 19 November 2018. 7 Cf. The ECFR website at www.e-cfr.org/, last accessed 19 November 2018. 8 The website of Yusuf al-Qaradawi can be found at: www.al-qaradawi.net/new/ Home/page, last accessed 9 October 2018. 9 Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Global Mufti; The Phenomenon on Yusuf al-Qaradawi (London and New York: Hurst, 2009). 10 Ayatollah Motahhari was also the father-in-law of the current speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani (b. 1957). An influential politician who has held sensitive responsibilities such as chief negotiator on the nuclear issue, Larijani is also a philosopher in his own right. Switching to the subject from computer sciences at Motahhari’s instigation, he has published on Kant and Kripke. 11 Zaytuna College website https://zaytuna.edu/; Cambridge Muslim College website www.cambridgemuslimcollege.org/.Both last accessed 9 October 2018. 12 Quintan Wiktorowicz, ‘Anatomy of the Salafi Movement’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29 (2006): 207–239. 13 Madawi al-Rasheed, Kingdom without Borders: Saudi Arabia’s Political, Religious and Media Frontiers (London: Hurst Publishers, 2008). 14 For a survey of Sayyid Qutb’s life, idea and influence, cf. John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. Revised and updated edition (London and New York: Hurst & Oxford University Press, 2018). 15 For these two scholars, cf. Peter-Jan Hartung, A System of Life: Mawdudi and the Ideologisation of Islam (London and New York: Hurst & Oxford University Press, 2013). and Viele Wege und ein Ziel: Leben und Wirken von Sayyid Abû l-Hasan Ali al-Hasani Nadwi (1914–1999) (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004). 16 J.J.G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins (New York: RVP Press, 1987). 17 Joas Wagemakers, A Quietist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad alMaqdisi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 18 Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariʿati (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 24ff. 19 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 128. 20 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 226. 21 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 231. 22 Robert D. Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity (Boulder: Westview, 1997), 60–64. 23 Nadia Duvall, ‘The Evolution of the Otherness Process Targetting the West in Sayyid Qutb’s Discourse (1939–1966)’, unpublished PhD Thesis (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2016). 24 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 129. 25 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 248, 354.

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26 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 287. During a visit to the UK, Shariʿati was most likely poisoned by the SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. 27 Ihsan D. Dagi, ‘Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and the West: Post-Islamist Intellectuals in Turkey’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 13:2 (2004): 137. 28 Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A Source Book (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 29 That is not to say all Muslims object to the term ‘liberal Islam’: In Indonesia, there exists a virtual publishing industry on the subject, cf. Carool Kersten, Islam in Indonesia. 30 Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1988); Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi (eds.), Islam after Liberalism (London and New York: Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press, 2017). 31 Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity, 62. 32 Consisting of a series of lectures he gave at British Universities in 1930. Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1974). 33 Javed Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (London, New York and New Delhi: Routledge, 2009), 95, 144. 34 Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity, 61. 35 Issa Boulatta, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (Albany: New York State University Press, 1995), 3–4. 36 Cf. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University, 2010), 116–172. 37 Boulatta, Trends and Issues, 25. 38 Fouad Zakariyya, Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamic Movement, translated and with an introduction and Bibliography by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’ (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005). 39 Faraj Foda, Al-Haqīqa al-Gha¯’ib (Cairo and Paris: Dar al-Fikr, 1986). 40 This is the spelling preferred by al-Jabri himself; in the secondary literature, his name also appears as ‘al-Jabiri’. 41 Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought, 174–194, 200–206; 221–228. 42 Hamid Dabashi, ‘Blindness and Insight: The Predicament of a Muslim Intellectual’ in Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Ramin Jahanbegloo (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 101. 43 Katajun Amirpur, ‘The Expansion of Prophetic Experience: ʿAbdolkarim Soru¯š’s New Approach to Qur’a¯nic Revelation’, Welt des Islams 51 (2011): 412. 44 Yudi Latif, Indonesian Muslim Intelligentsia and Power (Singapore: ISEAS, 2008). 45 Michael E. Meeker, ‘The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey’ in Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991), 189–219. 46 Like the Iranian-born US-based Hamid Dabashi, Bulaç comes from an Arabicspeaking minority in his country. 47 Ihsan D. Dagi, ‘Rethinking human rights, democracy, and the West: post-Islamist intellectuals in Turkey’, 135–151. 48 Carool Kersten, ‘Indonesia’s New Muslim Intellectuals’, Religion Compass 3:6 (2009): 971–85; ‘Cosmopolitan Muslim Intellectuals and the Mediation of Cultural Islam in Indonesia’, Comparative Islamic Studies 7, 1–2 (2011c), 105–136. 49 Adis Duderija, The Imperatives of Progressive Islam (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Omid Safi, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003). 50 Born Mary Teasley, she converted to Islam in 1972, changing her name to Amina Wadud in 1974.

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51 This is particularly the case with Tariq Ramadan, cf. Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (New York: Encounter Books, 2008).; Nina von Fu¯rstenberg, Wer had Angst vor Tariq Ramadan? Der Mann, der den Islam reformieren und die Westliche Welt verändern will (Freiburg: Herder, 2008).; Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House, 2010). 52 Andrew F. March, ‘Law as a Vanishing Mediator in the Theological Ethics of Tariq Ramadan’, European Journal of Political Theory 10:2 (2011a): 178(original emphasis).

2 PHILOSOPHIES OF KNOWLEDGE Transmission and reason

A central theme running through Islamic intellectual history is what constitutes knowledge and how this is attained. When applied to religion, the question of the origins and methods of religious knowing has, since its very beginning, revolved around the relationship – and competition – between naql, transmitted knowledge, that is: revelation and tradition, on the one hand, and on the other, ʿaql, knowledge derived from independently exercising the faculty of human reason, or what in Islamic parlay is called ijtihad. Although ensuing debates were, first and foremost, epistemological in nature, they were not devoid of politics. This relation between knowledge and power has given rise to so-called regimes of knowledge, or what Michael Foucault called epistèmès. Whether freely competing with each other or one being imposed at the expense of the other, postmodern philosophers and postcolonial theorists refer to the victorious strand of thinking as the dominant or hegemonic discourse; or what theologians call orthodoxy, as opposed to heterodoxy or heresy. Within the Sunni Muslim world, the dominant strand of religious thought of the last millennium or so has emphasized the primacy of transmitted knowledge. However, there has also been an instance when the tenets of a school promoting rational theological thinking, known as the Muʿtazila, were considered as representing the proper Islamic teachings. Emerging in eighth-century Iraq and drawing on what the Muslims had learned from classical Hellenic thought through translations from the Greek into Arabic, Muʿtazili thinkers used reason to underpin their interpretation of five articles of faith known as al-usul al-khamsa.1 For about fifteen years from 833 CE, the Abbasid caliphs imposed these tenets as dogma, until – not least due to the hostility of the masses fanned by opposing scholars – Caliph al-Mutawakkil recanted this decision in 848 CE. Since then, the vast majority of Sunni scholars have considered the Muʿtazila as heretical.

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Among Shiʿa Muslims though, Muʿtazili thinking remained important. It continued to operate – alongside other strands of philosophical thinking – for centuries, gaining even more prominence in the course of the nineteenth century, when the so-called Usuli School became the predominant strand of Shiʿi thinking at the expense of Akhbari School, which had remained more loyal to transmitted knowledge.2 I am making these historical excursions because, after a hesitant reappreciation by some Islamic reformers from the late nineteenth century onward, in the present-day Muslim world, there are bold progressive thinkers who now – explicitly – self-identify as (Neo-)Muʿtazilites.3 Moreover, aside from the Muʿtazila, also other early advocates of the use of reason are important to contemporary progressive thinking in the Muslim world. Perhaps no one more so than Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), a polymath from Spanish Cordoba, who ended up in Morocco working for the Almohad Sultans and whose name was Latinized to Averroes by medieval European scholars. The ups and downs of his intellectual legacy are not dissimilar to that of the Muʿtazila, and today there are also thinkers who call themselves – or are referred to as – new Averroists or neo-Ibn Rushdians.4 While the Latin Averroes was primarily known for his commentaries on the works of Aristotle, to the Muslims, Ibn Rushd’s significance lies in his evaluation of revelation, discursive theology and philosophical thinking. This formed part of his ultimate argument that reason is capable of attaining the same truth as what is transmitted through revealed knowledge. Standing in sharp contrast to these advocates of the exercise of reason and even free-thinking are the proponents of a Salafi lifestyle and exponents of political Islamic ideologies. While both Islamists and progressive Muslims subscribe to the slogan ‘back to the Qur’an and Sunna’, the latter do so as the starting point for developing an Islam that is critical and self-reflective, forward-looking and positively disposed to an open-ended future. On the other hand, figures like Abu’l-Aʿla Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb and Ali Shariʿati can be considered as reactionary, in that they propagate a return to the Qur’an and Sunna as all that is needed for turning Islam into a complete system (manhaj in Arabic), providing Muslims with all the answers to all possible questions; epistemological and ethical, as well as political and theological. Underlying such interpretations of Islam as an all-encompassing and self-sufficient system is an all-encompassing worldview that is not only closed but also of a totalitarian disposition. Parallel to the increasing salience of political Islam, there was another trend in which intellectuals began distancing themselves from Islamism and abandon the ideas of figures such as Mawdud and Qutb. In Indonesia, this was the case with Nurcholish Madjid, the leader of the Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thinking. Initially hailed as the ‘young Natsir’, after the leader of the country’s main Islamic party, by the late 1960s, his ideas on the role of religion in public life had been completely transformed by his reading of progressive American theologians and sociologists of religion. During his ten years of study in Paris

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between 1956 and 1966, also the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi underwent a dramatic transformation from a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer inspired by Qutb into a follower of the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, a student of Catholic modernism and liberation theology, and avid reader of Muhammad Iqbal.5 In the heavily secularized climate of Kemalist Turkey, such a change of mind occurred only later. Under the influence of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Turkish new Muslim intellectuals retained their belief in Islam as a total way of life capable of eliminating the ills of modernity. Having conceived of an a-historical social theory of Islam with a claim for reordering life in modern times, rather than merely a religion derived from the revelation of God, they went on rethinking their religion for a reimagined Islamic community. They presented ambitious claims in order to not only Islamize politics and society but knowledge too: With their understanding of social and political sciences, as well as philosophy, they could hold their ground in intellectual debates, particularly with secular leftists, who had begun to take Islamist intellectuals seriously. It was not until the military intervention of 1997 that they lost confidence in political Islam and began exploring different avenues.6 At the turn of the century, this new thinking became increasingly characterized by ‘a more rationalist and individualist outlook toward religious texts’, leading one commentator to observe that, also in Turkey, ‘the Mutazilite perspective is becoming the dominant and widespread mind among today’s Muslims’.7

Heritage thinkers: Arab Averroists, Renewers and Critics As noted above, aside from the Muʿtazila, also the rationalist philosophy of Ibn Rushd is important for contemporary progressive thinking in the Muslim world. One such unabashed Averroist is the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. His life’s work, the ‘Critique of Arab Reason’ project, is so firmly grounded in Ibn Rushd’s thinking that he has not only adopted the same categories for his anatomy of Arab-Islamic thinking, it also led him to call for an ‘Andalusian resurgence’, positing the claim that ‘the future can only be Averroist’.8 Al-Jabri’s critique forms part of the wider strand of heritage thinking, which also includes the work of Mohammed Arkoun, Hasan Hanafi and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. Even before the emergence of this quartet in the 1980s and 1990, the earlier mentioned Zaki Naguib Mahmud had already opined that the rejection of the ‘Greek cultural alternative’ (read: Hellenic philosophy) has been ‘greatly damaging to Islam’.9 Mahmud paired his sympathy for Islamic philosophy with a parallel appreciation of literature. Searching for a regional ‘Arab philosophy for the modern age’, his identification of the duality of matter and spirit as essential principles of Arab culture resonates with the South Asian poetphilosopher Muhammad Iqbal. However, Mahmud takes this further by

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introducing a second opposition, positing nature over against art as the realms of necessity and freedom respectively. For an intellectual revival of their culture, the Arabs must adopt a second dualism in addition to that of matter and spirit, and that is the duality of science and freedom; of objective necessity versus the free expression of one’s identity. Mahmud’s conclusion that ‘the Western problematic is epistemological, while the Arab problematic is ethical’ is reflected in the ways in which other heritage thinkers, such as Hanafi, approached their critical examinations of turath. Al-Jabri studied philosophy in both his native Morocco and in Syria, continuing his academic training alongside his activities in socialist party politics and his work as a teacher and contributor to textbooks for philosophy students. Emphasizing the relationship between culture and society, as well as the significance of knowledge and education in effectuating social change, these publications have influenced scores of Moroccan students during the late sixties and early seventies. Meanwhile, the Marxist rereading of Ibn Khaldun by the Moroccan-born French geographer Yves Lacoste was instrumental to al-Jabri’s decision to dedicate his own doctoral studies to this fourteenthcentury courtier and historian.10 Mentored by Aziz Lahbabi (1922–1993), Morocco’s leading philosopher at the time, al-Jabri examined how Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the rise and fall of civilizations provided a structural and systemic alternative to the Ash‛ari projection of history, while keeping Ghazalian Sufism intact. This formed the basis for al-Jabri’s future poststructuralist analyses of the historical relation between knowledge and power in Islamic thinking. In We and our heritage (1980) and Contemporary Arab Discourse (1982), al-Jabri identified the shortcomings of Liberal, Marxist and reactionary Islamic readings of the Muslim past. As self-appointed custodians of what they consider ‘true Islam’, reactionaries remain locked up in their own construction of the tradition, whereas Liberals and Marxists suggest misleading linear progressions, in which they project for the Muslim world an identical teleological trajectory as was followed in the West; traversing the same phases of renaissance, enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity. In the reality of today’s Muslim world, these phases are coexistent and intertwined. Consequently, there is no single modernity, but a plurality of modernities. al-Jabri is careful to point out that none of these reject tradition or constitute a break with the past. Instead modernity must be understood as a different way of relating to it. In his epistemological investigations, al-Jabri argues that there are two aspects to knowledge: A cognitive field and an ideological content. The cognitive field consists of material knowledge or substance and of a thinking apparatus. From today’s perspective, other than its historical value, the substance of philosophical and scientific knowledge from the Arab-Islamic past is useless, but its thinking apparatus, or systemic and methodological aspects of thinking through which this substance came into being, remains of interest. Therefore, Arab Muslims must rid themselves of ideologically or emotionally informed conceptions of

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tradition and its substance as an absolute reality that stands outside time, and instead come to terms with tradition as relative and historicized. For his own interpretation of the Arab-Islamic heritage, al-Jabri took his cues from structural linguists and anthropologists like Ferdinand Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget, and poststructuralist philosophers – in particular Marxist-oriented individuals such as Louis Althusser and Michel Pêcheux. This resulted in the publication of a tetralogy, collectively known as the Critique of Arab reason, in which al-Jabri deals with the formative, structural, political and ethical dimensions of Arab philosophical and religious thinking. For the present chapter, the first two volumes on the history and structures of Arab-Islamic thinking are the most important. In The Formation of Arab Reason (1984), al-Jabri focused on analyzing what he called the ʿasr al-tadwīn. By this he means the ‘period of recording or codification’, during which scholars determined what were to be considered ‘acceptable’ ways of thinking about Islam both in terms of content and methodology were determined.11 According to alJabri, this heralded a period of decline, because – instead of encouraging the production of new discursive forms – the tradition ended up only reproducing existing knowledge. In the second volume, titled The Structure of Arab Reason (1986), al-Jabri distinguished three different thinking apparatuses – regimes of knowledge or epistemes, for which he used Arabic descriptors: bayani or discursive reasoning; ʿirfani or gnosticism and intuitive thinking; burhani or reasoning through the use of demonstrative proof.12 Bayani thinking is based on explications of texts using Arabic grammar and rhetoric, and drawn from pre-Islamic Arabic literary heritage. This thinking apparatus came to dominate most fields of knowledge and learning, as it was applied in philology and linguistics, Qur’an exegesis, legal thinking, and theology. One of the most influential figures promoting this way of thinking was Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i (767–820). Regarded as the founder of the eponymous School of Islamic Law, it was al-Shafi‘i’s restriction of ijtihad, or independent reasoning, to qiyas, or reasoning by analogy that made language the sole point of reference at the expense of other rationalist methods, such as inductive or deductive reasoning. Pointing back to his historical studies, in which he had shown that the bayani method already prevailed among grammarians, jurists and theologians, it was thanks to the synthesis provided by alGhazali that it eventually became the definitive mode of thinking about religion in traditional Sunni Islamic learning. Al-Jabri traces ʿirfani thinking to pre-Islamic Persia and adjacent India, where it continued to develop in Islamic contexts. It is not only found in fields as diverse as astrology, alchemy, magic, theosophy, illuminationism, and strands of Shiʿi theology, but also in the thinking of Ibn Sina (980–1037). Known in the West under the name Avicenna, where he exercised influence as both a physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina is regarded as the key contributor to the systematization of philosophical thinking. ʿIrfan or Gnosticism is grounded in

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a dichotomy between the manifest (zahir) and hidden (batin) meanings of realities, including scripture. Al-Jabri views this mystically inclined thinking apparatus as rather negatively, dismissing it as irrational, which – and this needs to be stressed – is not the same as unreasonable. According to al-Jabri, it is because of the combined influences of Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali that, historically, ʿirfani and bayani thinking have dominated religious and philosophical thinking in the Eastern parts of Muslim world (the socalled Mashriq). While he does not deny that, also in the Muslim East, there have been early examples of burhani thinking or reasoning through demonstrative proof, such as the rationalist theology of the Muʿtazila or the philosophers al-Kindi (d. 873) and al-Farabi (d. 951), al-Jabri associates the heyday of the burhani thinking apparatus with its restoration by Muslim thinkers from the Muslim west (Maghrib). Aside from Ibn Rushd, al-Jabri’s intellectual heroes also include the former’s fellow-Cordoban Ibn Hazm (994–1064), the legal scholar al-Shatibi (1322–1388) from Granada and the earlier mentioned Tunisian Ibn Khaldun. However, things are not always as straightforward as al-Jabri’s list might suggest: For example, in terms of jurisprudence, Ibn Hazm subscribed to Zahirism, a legal school rejecting reasoning by analogy and adhering to literal readings of the Qur’an and Hadith. As for Ibn Rushd himself, it must be noted that as a jurist of the Maliki legal school, he worked for the puritan and frequently repressive Almohad dynasty of Marrakesh. Although some of its emirs and viziers had an interest in philosophy, the name Almohad is a corruption of the Arabic al-Muwahhidun – strict upholders of the doctrine of the absolute Unity of God (tawhid). This is also the same name by which the Wahhabis of Arabia refer to themselves. Al-Jabri gives several reasons for singling out Ibn Rushd as the benchmark for demonstrative reasoning: First of all, his commentaries on Aristotle and his persistent upholding of the law of cause and effect in scientific and philosophical thinking. Second, in relation to religious and metaphysical questions, Ibn Rushd worked out a compromise between the bayani reliance on revelation and burhani proofs of philosophical truths, arguing that the latter posed no threat to the teaching of Islam. Like al-Jabri, also the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi advocates the development of an endogenous Islamic method of philosophical enquiry, but remains committed to the constructive modernity project rather than the deconstructive critiques of postmodernism. Otherwise, also Hanafi’s philosophy can be considered as a conflation of epistemological, ethical, juridical and political concerns, reflective of the theoretical and moral questions that betray the influence of one of his teachers: the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Born into a family of musicians, for a while Hasan Hanafi combined his study of philosophy at Cairo University with training as a violinist, during which time he also briefly flirted with the Muslim Brotherhood. However, when he got an opportunity to continue his post-graduate studies at the Sorbonne, he soon

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traded Sayyid Qutb of Muhammad Iqbal. The latter’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam echoes in the subtitles of the multi-volume outputs of what became Hasan Hanafi’s lifelong preoccupation: The ‘heritage and renewal’ (alturath wa’l-tajdid) project. The seeds of this project were planted during his tenyear stay in France between 1956 and 1966. This was an interesting time to be in Paris, which was fermenting with the existentialism of Camus and Sartre, but also suffused with the ‘Spirit of Bandung’ ignited by the Asia-Africa Conference of 1955, which led not only to the establishment of the Movement of NonAligned Countries, but also the Tiers-Mondisme, or Third-Worldism of figures like Frantz Fanon. Academically, Hanafi was mentored by three influential scholars. Aside from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, these also included the Catholic theologian Jean Guitton, and the Islamicist Robert Brunschvig. This trio was instrumental to Hanafi’s first three monumental publications, written in French and together constituting the theses submitted for the prestigious doctorat d’état. As France’s leading expert on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Ricoeur determined Hanafi’s epistemological approach, while the moral questions addressed in Ricoeur’s own ‘philosophy of will’ gave direction to the ethical and political dimensions of what eventually became Hanafi’s ‘Heritage and Renewal’ project. A similar role was played by Guitton. A prominent representative of Catholic modernism, Guitton was the only lay theologian invited to address the Council of Vatican II, on which occasion he took his Egyptian student with him to Rome. Comparing his relation with Guitton to that of Aristotle with Plato or Marx with Feuerbach, Hanafi credits Guitton for helping him to translate the idealism of the German Romantics into realist philosophy, and turning a purely epistemological interest into a more metaphysically inclined concern with being. As a ‘philosopher of ecumene’, Guitton shared Ricoeur’s ability to creatively reconcile seemingly opposing philosophical positions.13 Finally, it was Brunschvig who suggested Hanafi make a case study of usul al-fiqh or the ‘foundations of Islamic jurisprudence’. The theoretical sophistication of this sub-discipline within Islamic legal learning offered the greatest potential from which to extrapolate a general Islamic method for philosophical investigations, which Hanafi wanted to develop. The first book resulting from this research, Methods of Exegesis, is an investigation into the structures of philosophical thinking underlying the legal science of usul al-fiqh.14 Hasan Hanafi puts his ambition on par with the constructive philosophical efforts of al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, as well as with Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of Aristotelian formal logic as used by Muslim theologians and philosophers. Further resonating with the thinking of Ludwig Feuerbach and Henry Bergson, Hanafi proposes a bold transmutation of vertical theocentric religious language into a horizontal anthropology more in tune with the contemporary human condition.15 Instead of the top-down, text-based deductive

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rationalism dominating Muʿtazili thought, the suggested alternative method is inductive and grounded in lived human experience. With The Methods of Exegesis, Hanafi had created the blueprint for his future ‘Heritage and Renewal’ project. In spite of its preoccupation with structure and language, Hanafi’s philosophy is not an exercise in postmodern deconstruction in line with Roland Barthes’s announcement of the ‘death of the author’. It is a hermeneutics sharing Iqbal’s reflections on subjectivity and the ambition to reconstruct an endogenous Islamic philosophical method that is concerned with ‘being-in-the-world’, in which the transcendent going by the name of God becomes immanent in human consciousness. Hanafi wants to demonstrate how religion is a truly human science and since – like Husserl – he regards human sciences as methodologies, he concludes that also ‘religion is essentially a method’.16 With the publication of Heritage and Renewal: Our Attitude toward the Old Heritage in 1980, Hanafi formally launched the philosophical undertaking that keeps him busy until today. However, the full scope was not defined until 1991. The release of An Introduction to the Discipline of Occidentalism not only widened the investigation from the old Islamic heritage to a critique of the intellectual heritage of the West. It also contains an examination of the current situation in the Muslim world in which Hanafi envisioned synthesizing the anti-theses of the other two critiques into an emancipatory theory of interpretation.17 Hanafi insists that heritage and renewal must be understood in this particular sequential order, because heritage forms the point of departure for a renewal through the reinterpretation of the Islamic tradition according to contemporary demands. Although much of a civilization’s cultural heritage originates in religion, Hanafi nevertheless privileged the former because ‘religion is part of heritage and not the other way around, since heritage also contains social, political, cultural and historical elements’.18 Nor can the contents of a cultural heritage be restricted to what has been officially documented, preserved and theorized; it must also include those less tangible aspects shaping a culture’s mentality and which are often transmitted through more traditional or popular ways, such as the Sufi tradition, axioms, maxims and proverbs in jurisprudence, as well as other forms of expressing religious sentiments. Also, the more specific term ‘Islamic’ has multiple layers of meaning, which can either refer to that particular religious tradition; the civilization that arose from it; or even – as had been shown in The Method of Exegesis – a philosophical methodology. Heritage and Renewal subscribes to the slogan used by earlier Muslim modernizers: ‘Taking from the old what is in accordance with the demands of the present era and measuring the new against the standards of the old’.19 The novelty of Hanafi’s project lies in its theoretical foundation which draws a parallel between the contemporary Muslim world and its historical legacy on the basis of an interpretation of renewal as a re-evaluation of that heritage in the light of the current situation. Extrapolating from his earlier transmutations of the vocabulary of usul al-fiqh, he calls for ‘logic of linguistic renewal’ of the wider

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legacy of traditional Islamic learning.20 According to this hermeneutics, heritage is open to multiple readings because – in themselves, – the text corpora of traditions are devoid of meaning. Earlier readings may not have been wrong at the time, but clinging to archaic interpretations will lead to an anachronistic understanding of the Islamic tradition. Having emerged from unmediated, philological, intuitive or allegorical readings of revealed texts, the various disciplines of the Islamic intellectual tradition need to be transposed into a language better equipped to deal with contemporary circumstances. The ‘final objective of “Heritage and Renewal” is to unify all these disciplines into one that is synonymous with civilization’.21 To illustrate the feasibility of this ambition, Hanafi pointed to such figures as al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya. Rather than considering them in their separate roles as theologian, logician, Sufi, jurist, and philosopher, these respective specialisms should be considered as elements of a consolidated intellectual approach to deal with the Islamic heritage in a comprehensive manner. This applies to Hanafi too. Throughout his career as an academic philosopher, Hanafi constantly referred to himself as an Islamic jurist or faqih. Not hindered by any false modesty, Hanafi considered the contribution of Methods of Exegesis as no less radical than that of the discipline’s founder of usul al-fiqh, Imam alShafi’i. Hanafi even regarded his own book as the modern-day equivalent of the former’s Al-Risala.22 Also in An Introduction to the Science of Occidentalism, Hanafi presented himself as an ‘old faqih positioned between two civilisations – representing one, criticising the other, while innovating both’. And when describing his work in an interview, he said that he was ‘not making theology […] [but] jurisprudence’.23 This linking of philosophy to legal thought also extends to his characterization of heritage thinkers as Arab Averroists. In an article about Ibn Rushd, Hanafi distinguished between ‘Ibn Rushd, the jurist’ (al-faqih) and ‘the juristic Ibn Rushd’ (Ibn Rushd faqihan), referring to the practitioner of conventional jurisprudence and the ‘philosophical renewer’ engaged in theology, philosophy, medicine and exegesis, respectively.24 In this latter sense, also Hasan Hanafi would indeed qualify as an Arab Averroist, while his ‘Heritage and Renewal’ project is an instance of the intertwining of epistemology, ethics, juridical thought and theology in contemporary Islamic thinking. Some commentators have suggested that al-Jabri’s approach was less ideological than Hanafi’s, and while the latter’s project may be more ‘daring’, it was ‘methodologically less sophisticated’ than al-Jabri’s.25 In its later elaborations, the ‘Heritage and Renewal’ project may have suffered from an encyclopaedic treatment, but the earlier Hanafi’s phenomenological unpacking of philosophical methods is every bit as rigorous as al-Jabri’s. The latter’s somewhat chauvinist contrasting of the ‘irrational’ traditions of the eastern, Persian-speaking parts of the Muslim world, with the ‘rational’ legacy of its Western domains (thus ignoring Andalusian and North African Sufis such as Ibn Arabi or Abu Midyan), makes his ‘Critique of Arab Reason’ no less ideological than Hanafi’s ‘Heritage and Renewal’ project.26

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Like al-Jabri and Hanafi, also Mohammed Arkoun can be considered a heritage thinker, although his approach is that of a professional historian instead of an academic philosopher. Arkoun’s ‘Critique of Islamic Reason’ is not only wider in its geographical scope than al-Jabri’s ‘Critique of Arab Reason’, it is also more accommodating of gnostic thinking. To Mohammed Arkoun, together with Muʿtazili and Averroist rationalism, also gnostic and mystical texts – both Sunni and Shiʿi are elements of the Islamic heritage that have been relegated to what he calls the domain of ‘the unthought’ under the pressure of dominant discourses.27 An ethnic Berber from Kabylia who received both an Arabic and Francophone education in Algeria, Arkoun is a quintessential cultural and intellectual ‘border crosser’.28 After moving to France at the height of the Algerian independence war, he landed into the same intellectual and political cauldron as Hanafi, but – in contrast to the latter and also to al-Jabri – Arkoun remained wary of left-leaning ideologies infused with the ‘Spirit of Bandung’ that informed Third-Worldism in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘Historians, sociologists and political scientists have not yet assessed the negative intellectual and cultural consequences of this massive adhesion to a dogmatic, totalitarian ideology’.29 Instead, he decided to concentrate on the neglected aspects of the history of thought in the Muslim world, in particular ‘the spectacular success of Greek philosophy and sciences’ and the ‘expanding horizons of religious reason through dynamics schools of theology and law’.30 These became concentration areas in his agenda-setting epistemological work. Arkoun presented his programmatic suggestions for this new research approach under the heading ‘Applied Islamology’. It brings together a variety of intellectual influences that have shaped Arkoun’s own thinking about the Islamic heritage. Of central importance was the so-called Annales School of historiography to which Arkoun was exposed during his work with the medievalist Claude Cahen at the University of Strasbourg. Less interested in the ‘kings and battles’ that dominate the histories of great men, founding members of the school, such as Marc Bloch and Lucien Fevbre, used Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collective conscience to develop a ‘history of mentalities’ and introduced the idea of ‘unthinkability’. After them, Fernand Braudel, the leading figure of the second generation of Annales historians, underscored the significance of the longue durée effects of environmental and civilizational conditions, as well as economic and political conjunctures, over individual events on the course of history. In his doctoral studies, Arkoun put the Annales School methods to the test in his case study of the intellectual milieu at the courts of the Shiʿī Buyid viziers in Bagdad, Isfahan and Rayy. Focussing on the figure of Miskaway, a tenth-century man of letters, Arkoun presented his writings and thought as an instance of Arab humanism. This anthropocentric focus would not only continue to dominate Arkoun’s own outlook on the Islamic intellectual heritage, it is also a hallmark in the work of other heritage thinkers.31

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Arkoun’s term ‘Applied Islamology’ was inspired by the ‘Applied Anthropology’ of the ethnographer Roger Bastide, an expert on Africo-Brasilian religions. Bastide drew on the notion of ‘basic personality structure’ developed by the American Abram Kardiner and introduced in France by the phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne. Arkoun defined the scope of his Applied Islamology in what would become his most influential essay collection, For a Critique of Islamic Reason.32 Its noticeable shift from text-critical historical studies toward programmatic discourse analysis reflects the underlying aggregate of intellectual influences. Hindered by reservations among fellow scholars toward Arkoun’s new – often idiosyncratic and distinctly postmodern – terminology, the delay in the influence of his ‘Critique of Islamic Reason’ is an instance of what Hamid Dabashi calls the phenomenon of ‘Found in Translation’.33 Also, the phenomenology and hermeneutics of figures like Husserl and Heidegger only received wider circulation after their work had been translated from German into French, and the effects of its subsequent deconstruction by post-structuralists did not gain traction until the writings of Derrida became available in English. Once Arkoun began publishing more in English, his adoption of the terminology of continental philosophy, creatively applying it to the study of Islam, started to gain wider acceptance. A good example of this is Arkoun’s adoption of logocentrism, which Derrida had introduced in Of Grammatology to highlight the privileging of the written and officially sanctioned text corpora, or what Arkoun referred to as the ‘Official Closed Corpus’. To demonstrate how logocentrism is also at work in both the Islamic tradition and in conventional approaches to the academic study of Islam, Arkoun combined it with a pair of terms he had coined himself: ‘Qur’anic fact as a historical, linguistic, discursive stage’ needs to be carefully distinguished from what he termed ‘Islamic fact’, which encompasses ‘the political, theological, juridical, mystical, literary and historiographical expansions, elaborations and doctrinal disputes’ about the former.34 To gain a fuller insight into the dialectic between Qur’anic and Islamic fact, it is necessary to conduct what in postmodernist idiom can be described as a ‘Foucauldian archaeological expedition or act of retrieval from what Derrida calls the archive’.35 The purpose of this comprehensive survey of the Islamic heritage is to establish it as an ‘exhaustive tradition’, which also includes what Islamic thinking has either ignored, neglected, rejected out of hand or failed to critically interrogate.36 To these strands of thinking refer Arkoun’s other twin terms: the ‘Unthought’ and the ‘Unthinkable’, which characterize the Islamic logosphere or ‘linguistic mental space shared by all those who use the same language with which to articulate [what] is claimed as a unifying Weltanschauung’.37 The resulting inventory of Applied Islamology will open up a horizon of plural meanings that needs a further sophistication of the methodological apparatus. To that end, Arkoun introduces six ‘epistemological triangles’ that will enable the plotting of what he calls ‘abstract heuristic “topoi”’38 The first two are anthropological triangles dealing with the relations and dynamics between human engagement with (1) ‘Revelation, History and Truth’ and (2) ‘Violence,

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Sacred and Truth’, respectively. These can be joined with the cognitive triangle of (3) ‘Language, History and Thought’. The remaining four are a theological– philosophical triangle consisting of (4) ‘Faith, Reason and Truth’, used to deal with medieval religious disputes; a hermeneutical triangle of (5) ‘Time, Narrative and Ultimate Truth’, investigating the dialects between understanding and believing; and (6) a philosophical–anthropological triangle dealing with ‘Rationality, Irrationality and Imaginary’ bringing the circle round to the two triangles at the start. The terminological triangulations used by Arkoun are indicative of the intellectuals who inform his epistemology: The anthropological focus of three out of six triangles points at the historical anthropology or ‘archaeology of daily life’ developed by third-generation Annales historians, like Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff. They were also responsible for directing Arkoun to the notion of imaginaire (‘The Imaginary’) used by the philosophers Louis Althusser and Cornelius Castoriadis – a debt which Arkoun also has explicitly acknowledged.39 The linking of time and narrative is evidently derived from Paul Ricoeur’s project of that name. Given the wide scope of the Applied Islamology agenda, and its eventual expansion of the ‘Critique of Islamic Reason’ into an ‘Emerging Reason’ project, the catholicity of Paul Ricoeur’s scholarship and his ability to reconcile conflicting philosophical positions make him an eminently suitable and also increasingly important source for Arkoun. Inspired by Jean de Munck’s book L’Institution sociale de l’-Esprit (1999), the ‘Emerging Reason’ project was conceived as a critical-historical examination of what Arkoun calls the three dominant postures of reason: religious reason, the rationalism of the Enlightenment and tele-techno-scientific reason.40 The emergence of this final discourse is closely tied up with the phenomenon of globalization and will therefore be taken up again in the pertaining chapter below. Occupying Arkoun during the final decade of his working life, the project extended beyond philosophical and psychoanalytical engagement with metaphysics and foundational religious texts. Armed with the tools of discourse analysis and clinical observations, they had opened new fields of study that had been closed to ‘all earlier inquiries of the rational mind’.41 However, ‘Emerging reason’ is concerned with the philosophical subversion of the use of reason itself and all forms of rationality produced so far and those that will be produced in the future so as not to repeat the ideological compromises and derivations of the precedent postures and performances of reason.42 On a more practical level, finally, the ‘Emerging Reason’ Project required the ‘intellectual and scientific vigilance one associates with the most exacting of philosophers’, intellectuals who match the profile of what Arkoun calls chercheurpenseurs or ‘scholar-thinkers’.43 As an example of the sort of work he expects them to produce, Arkoun invokes Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History and

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Forgetting.44 He considers this book as emblematic of Ricoeur’s knack for ‘putting together again, re-articulating, and re-appropriating domains of reflexive thought and knowledge accumulated by the social sciences such as history, sociology, linguistics and anthropology’.45 In the same breath, Arkoun also points at the same scholar who inspired the early work of al-Jabri: Jean-Yves Lacoste and his Le Dictionnaire de Théologie (1995), which tried closing the gap between philosophy and theology. Arkoun considers his Applied Islamology and Emerging Reason projects as more rigorous epistemological critiques than the ideological agendas underlying the work of other heritage thinkers, such as al-Jabri and Hanafi, because they have not been capable of moving beyond the dichotomy between Islam and the West. Ten to fifteen years younger than al-Jabri, Hanafi or Arkoun, and coming from the field of Arabic language and literary studies rather than philosophy or history, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd can be considered a heritage thinker too. In several autobiographical reflections, Abu Zayd notes that not just reactionaries, but also progressively minded, often left-leaning intellectuals began looking back at the Islamic past.46 However, it was only the Islamists who managed to connect with the people, while the intellectuals failed because they displayed the same arrogance toward the common people as the political elite. According to Abu Zayd, instead of patronizing the people, it is an intellectual’s task to act as translator between cultures. He has unpacked this further in his book Critique of Religious Discourse.47 First released in Arabic in 1994 and the first monograph-size book by Abu Zayd to be integrally translated into English in 2018, this publication forms a hinge between his earlier historical–philological and text-critical studies and the more engaged publications which he began writing after he was forced into exile because of the legal prosecution and public persecutions he was facing in his home country of Egypt. Having grown up under trying circumstances, it was not until 1968 that Abu Zayd was able to enrol in university, where he majored in Arabic. Even though the focus of studies remained linguistic and literary rather than philosophical in the academic sense of the word, in his third year, he fell under the influence of Hasan Hanafi, who suggested he direct his attention to hermeneutics. During a study leave at the University of Pennsylvania, he began exploring the history of hermeneutics from its classical Greek origins to the modern contributions by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, before branching out into structural linguistics and anthropology, as well as Heidegger’s existentialism and the phenomenological hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur. The study of hermeneutics and an enduring fascination with the Qur’an resulted in Abu Zayd’s first two published works: Rationalist Exegesis (1982), consisting of an investigation of the metaphoric readings of the Qur’an by the Muʿtazila and The Philosophy of Hermeneutics (1983), based on a case study of the Qur’anic hermeneutics of the medieval Andalusian Sufi philosopher Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240).48 He continued his Qur’anic studies

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during a four-year stint (1984–1989) at the University of Osaka in Japan, which he later described as an extended ‘course in semiotics’.49 It was here that he developed the ideas for his most important text-critical work on the Qur’an and discourse analysis of Islamic religious thinking: Mafhum al-Nass, which already contained an introductory section on religious discourse and scholarly method.50 Abu Zayd agrees that Arab-Islamic civilization can indeed be characterized as a ‘civilization of the text’ (hadara al-nass), but this is not a complete and wholly accurate definition, because texts in themselves do not create the learning, knowledge and cultural artefacts of which a civilization consists. Knowledge is produced and cultures can emerge because humans are in dialogue (hiwar) with (revealed) texts and because humankind stands in a dialectical relationship (jadl) with worldly reality. Knowledge production resulting from the direct interpretation of a civilization’s foundational texts belongs to the realm of the religious sciences, while indirect interpretations constitute the domain of the other (worldly) sciences. The complex dialectical relationships between revealed text, reality and culture, and the communicative dimensions of the revelatory relationship between God and man, require what Abu Zayd called a ‘humanistic hermeneutics’.51 As a heritage thinker, Abu Zayd maintained an appreciation for endogenous methods of exegesis developed within the Islamic tradition, albeit with the purpose of lining them up with methodological and theoretical advances made by Western scholarship in the human sciences. For this, he turned to the phenomenological hermeneutics of Gadamer and to the work of the literary scholar and cultural historian Juri Lotman. Both recognized the role of language in the production of meaning and the simultaneous importance of practical social interests in formulating theoretical knowledge that accommodates historicity. However, Gadamer’s assumption of a single major tradition needs a cautionary and critical note. The literary theorist Terry Eagleton has called it a ‘grossly complacent theory of history’, without the ‘possibility for critically challenging that authority’ because its justification is ‘outside the arguments of reason’.52 This resonates strongly with Abu Zayd’s criticism of the hegemony of Ashʻari orthodoxy at the expense of Muʻtazilite rationalism, Sufi hermeneutics and certain strands of Shiʻite theology. Because of its ‘remorseless demystification of literature’ and ‘emphasis on the “constructedness” of human meaning’, like Eagleton, also Abu Zayd turned to structural linguistics because it provides a tool for challenging the notion of a permanently fixed tradition by undermining its ‘ontologically privileged status’.53 By expanding the static structuralism of Saussure from three elements (sign, signifier, signified) to six: addresser, addressee, message, shared code, physical medium and context, the Prague School of Roman Jakobson was instrumental to the emergence of a new field like semiotics, which enabled scholars to pry open the closed system of early structuralism and re-accommodate the intention of the author and the role of the reader. In the final fifteen years of his career, Abu Zayd continued to work on this ‘humanistic hermeneutics’ as a visiting Professor at Leiden University and later

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as Professor of Humanism and Islam at the Humanistics University in Utrecht. This exploration of the communications between God as Author and Humankind as reader/interpreter resonates with both the anthropological turn made by Abu Zayd’s teacher Hasan Hanafi and the text-critical and structuralist undertones of Mohammed Arkoun’s Islamic humanism. Whether manifestly present as in the works of al-Jabri and Hanafi, or more implicitly, as in the cases of Arkoun and Abu Zayd, the ‘rediscovery’ of Ibn Rushd by contemporary Arab philosophers and other scholars is such a distinguishing mark of these critics seeking to excavate the forgotten aspects of the Arab-Islamic world’s intellectual heritage that their identification as ‘Arab Averroists’ seems fitting.

From renewal thinking to Islamic post-traditionalism and transformative Islam: progressive Muslim discourses in Indonesia The ideas of the above-mentioned quartet of Arab heritage thinkers have met with particularly receptive audiences among Indonesian Muslims. Especially in the cases of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Hasan Hanafi, who had been forced into permanent exile or extended periods of absence as visiting scholar abroad because of their security situation in Egypt, the treatment in their home country stands in stark contrast to how they are regarded by Indonesians. In comparison to many other Muslim countries, Indonesia is more accommodating of divergent views of Islam, certainly since the regime change of 1998–1999. A key figure in preparing Indonesia’s intellectual climate for the acceptance of heritage thinking was Nurcholish Madjid. In the 1970s, his Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thinking was instrumental in stimulating critical thinking about the role of religion in modernizing Muslim societies and in advocating the use of reason as opposed to an overreliance on transmitted knowledge. As early as 1968, Nurcholish Madjid had written an article that also reflected the influence of his own academic mentor. Professor Harun Nasution of the State Islamic University Jakarta had just completed a doctorate at McGill University in Canada on the influence of the Muʿtazila on Muhammad Abduh.54 In ‘Modernisation is Rationalisation not Westernisation’, Madjid argued for the need of a rational Islamic methodology capable of contributing to the development of Indonesian society. At the same time, he cautioned against attributing absolute validity to what the human faculty of reason comes up with, and warned against mindlessly copying all the ‘isms’ generated by the West. Humanism, rationalism, liberalism, communism, even secularism: All are ideologies which had evolved within specific European intellectual and political contexts.55 To illustrate the crucial difference between the absolutized dialectical materialist worldview of communism and Islam’s acceptance of the transcendent, Madjid has invoked Iqbal’s provocative definition of Islam as ‘Bolshevism plus God’.56 Together with a reference to the hadith in which the Prophet calls upon Muslims to ‘seek knowledge even as far as China’, the quote was meant to

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underscore that there is no need to traverse identical routes towards modernity as Europe or America, and that Islam’s earliest sources already exhort Muslims to pursue learning on their own accord. The heated debates generated by Nurcholish Madjid’s earliest writings were due to his use of controversial terms like ‘desacralization’ and ‘secularization’, as part of his argument against re-establishing Islamic parties in Indonesia. This political issue will be addressed in a later chapter, but it is important to be conscious of the fact that Madjid’s reasoning on politics is closely tied up with a theology that has also epistemological implications. Distinguishing between a human’s transcendental life (kehidupan uchrawi), represented by a vertical axis connecting the individual believer with God, and the horizontal relations which humans maintain with nature and fellow human beings in their this-worldly existence (kehidupan duniawi), Madjid explains that, even though these two dimensions of human existence merge in individual lives, they require different epistemological approaches. While eternal eschatological law (hukum uchrawi) governing the vertical spiritual dimension of a believer’s relation with God cannot be comprehended in rational terms, the horizontal domain of temporal matters of humankind’s this-worldly life (duniawi) is to be governed by the human faculty of reason, not by spiritual methods drawing on revealed knowledge. This epistemological theory is grounded in Nurcholish Madjid’s theology of ‘radical monotheism’.57 If the absolutely transcendent were not considered to be beyond this-worldly (rational) human comprehension, which – as he had already argued in 1968 – is always relative knowledge, then that would imply that God can be relativized, which contradicts Tawhid. This response to revelation is bound up with the central importance Madjid attached to the concept of taqwa, or ‘God-consciousness’ – or the sense of what Rudolf Otto called ‘the numinous’ – in which faith or belief in god (iman) is grounded. Within the Islamic context, this disposition is considered a manifestation of fitra; the ability intrinsic to human nature to be inclined towards Absolute Truth, with which God endowed the ‘primordial monotheist’ or hanif, embodied by Adam and, historically more relevant, the figure of Abraham. Aside from the continuing influence of Nurcholish Madjid’s Renewal Thinking through his Paramadina Foundation, a think tank he established in 1986, ground was also broken for the introduction of the progressive interpretations of Islamic heritage by Abdurrahman Wahid and other key figures in the Nahdlatul Ulama. Although both Madjid and Wahid have often been referred exponents of what Fazlur Rahman calls Islamic neo-modernism, there are important differences. As leader of one of Indonesia’s largest Islamic mass organizations with grassroots level support among tens of millions of Muslims, Abdurrahman Wahid’s intellectual orientation is more pragmatic and empirical than that of the academic Nurcholish Madjid. His improvised reinterpretation of the doctrine and practices of the ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamaʿa (in Indonesian abbreviated to aswaja) may share the same universal humanism as Madjid’s, but also explicitly draws

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from Latin American Liberation Theology.58 In 1993, Abdurrahman Wahid wrote an introduction to a study of Hasan Hanafi’s political manifesto for an ‘Islamic Left’.59 Another leading NU official and academic, Yudian Wahyudi has translated a number of Hasan Hanafi’s writings from French and Arabic into Indonesian, while the organization’s current Executive Chairman Said Aqil Siradj was one of the first to introduce the ideas of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri.60 With this, a seedbed was prepared from which has germinated a new strand of progressive Muslim thought, developed by young NU cadres who refer to it as ‘Islamic Post-Traditionalism’. The name is derived from the title used for the first Indonesian translation of a selection of texts from alJabri, which appeared in 2000.61 By way of detour via the heritage thinkers, these Islamic Post-Traditionalists were introduced to postmodern philosophy, which they use to criticize not only reactionary interpretations of the Islamic heritage, but also their own intellectual predecessors like Nurcholish Madjid, whose ‘neo-modernism’ they regard as having moved toward the uncritical acceptance of the dominant Islamic discourses and thus contributing to its continuing hegemony.62 It forms the starting point for an alternative – more subversive – discourse along the lines of what postcolonial theorists refer to as ‘critical traditionalism’ (Ashis Nandy) or ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ (Walter Mignolo), crafting a creative synthesis of local histories and global designs.63 Chief articulators of Islamic Post-Traditionalism, such as Ahmad Baso (1971) and Ahmad Rumadi (1970), build on the reformulations of the notion of Aswaja by Abdurrahman Wahid and Said Aqil Siradj, regarding it less as a doctrinal school and more as a ‘method of thinking’ (manhaj al-fikr) or as a ‘critical school of thought’ (mazhab kritis). Referencing Foucault’s political history of truth production and the social imaginary of Castoriadis, Baso invokes Hasan al-Basri (d. 728) as an emblematic figure of the middle way during decades of internal strife and chaos, which then – in the course of ninth century – moved from the fringes to becoming the dominant Islamic discourse, marginalizing both Muʿtazili rationalism and Hanbali literalism. Particularly interesting, and echoing the views of Hasan Hanafi, is Rumadi’s rating of jurisprudence, or fiqh,64 as more conducive to critical and creative thinking than theology. Theocentric orientation and sectarian preoccupations had sapped the dominant discourse of orthodox Ashʿarism of its intellectual energies. Thanks to its fiqh-oriented way of thinking, the NU also manages to accommodate what Abdurrahman Wahid had considered the greatest loss suffered by Islamic reformism – the disappearance of the spiritual dimensions offered by tasawwuf or Sufism from Islamic learning.65 These epistemological considerations also point to the consequences for contemporary Islamic legal thinking and spirituality addressed in other chapters of this book. Intellectuals from the Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s modernist Islamic mass organization, have also drawn from the work of heritage thinkers. The philosopher M. Amin Abdullah (b. 1953) has used al-Jabri’s categories of bayani,

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ʿirfani and burhani to develop an ‘integrative and interconnective approach’ to the study of Islam, in which he seeks to reconcile the normativity of traditional Islamic teachings with the historicity of contemporary academic study of religion. Amin Abdullah also relies on advances made in the philosophy of science by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. In Abdullah’s reading, Islam’s foundational texts can be compared to the ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn) or ‘hard core’ (Lakatos) in scientific theories, whereas the empirical-historical studies by the heritage thinkers and others, including Fazlur Rahman, Ebrahim Moosa and Khalid Abou El Fadl, function as the protective belt. The ambition of Amin Abdullah, who has likened his project to a twenty first-century version of alGhazali’s Revivification of the Islamic Sciences (Ih ̣ya¯ʿ ʿulu¯m al-dīn), is to develop a pedagogy, as well as suggestions for a curriculum that humanizes Islamic learning rather than Islamizes knowledge.66 Its agenda-setting scope is not dissimilar to Arkoun’s Applied Islamology, but its orientation and objectives resemble more what the Iranian philosopher of science (and avid reader of Popper) Abdolkarim Soroush envisaged with his theory of the evolution of religious knowledge that will be discussed below. A younger generation of modernist Islamic reformists, loosely associated in the Network of Young Muhammadiyah Intellectuals (JIMM), is translating these epistemologies into a more engaged social transformation agenda taking inspiration from the notion of ‘transformative Islam’ developed by the anthropologist Moeslim Abdurrahman (1948–2012); the creative Qur’an exegesis of the economist Dawam Rahardjo; and the ‘Prophetic Social Science’ developed by the historian and literary writer Kuntowijoyo (1943–2005) in a provocative book called Muslims without Mosques.67

Turkey’s Ankara school Further to the West, in Turkey, the so-called ‘Ankara School’ was characterized by historical criticism and a revivification of Muʿtazili rationality. The origins of its approach can be traced to the 1980s, when Edip Yu¯ksel (b. 1957), invoking critical hadith studies to question the reliability of the body of literature through which the Traditions of the Prophet have been transmitted, proposed ‘a “Qur’an-only” formula’.68 This led to severe criticism, his condemnation as a heretic, and being disowned as an apostate by his father, a traditional scholar of Islam and teacher of Arabic. Leaving Turkey for the United States in 1989, Yu¯ksel has become a key representative of the ‘Quranists’, who are not only found in Turkey, but as far afield as Malaysia and among expatriate Muslims in the West. Despite such challenges for innovative Muslim intellectuals, in the course of the 1990s, critical engagement with the Islamic heritage continued to be pushed by scholars at the School of Theology of Ankara University. Strongly influenced by the approach to the study of Islam by Fazlur Rahman and the importance making a distinction between historicity and religiosity, they have been at the

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forefront the contextual study of the Qur’an and a continuation of critical hadith study.69 Aside from these scholars of religion, Fazlur Rahman has also exercised an influence on Turkish academic philosophers. Most prominent among them is Alparslan Açikgenç (b. 1952). After writing a doctoral thesis on the ontologies of the sixteenth-century Persian metaphysician Mulla Sadra and Martin Heidegger under the direction of Fazlur Rahman, he began teaching at Middle Eastern Technological University (META) in 1983, where he was the supervisor of two Indonesian philosophers and leading university administrators, M. Amin Abdulah and Komaruddin Hidayat.

New religious intellectuals in Iran What Sayyid Qutb provided in terms of ideas for reactionary strands of Sunni Islam, Shariʿati did for the Shi’a, in particular in Iran. He too ‘decided to revive authentic Islam, presenting it as an alternative ideology’.70 He too developed the idea of Islam providing contemporary Muslims with a complete worldview, for which he coined the term jahanbini, ‘corresponding to the German Weltanschauung’.71 Most of his thinking has been collected in publications based on talks at Hosseiniyeh Ershad. Delivered over one-and-a-half years in 1971 and 1972, they consisted of fourteen lessons on the history of religions and twentytwo on ‘Islamology’. These lectures were considered controversial because they were borderline subversive. Shariʿati’s analyses called into question Shiʿi orthodoxy, positing instead his own redefinitions of core notions and symbols of Shiʿi Islam. Boldly formulated and thus more attractive than the tired platitudes preached by the clerics, these radically new meanings struck a chord, in particular with younger and better educated audiences. The red thread running through Ali Shariʿati’s approach was the multiplicity in interpreting religions based on a historicized understanding using class analysis and economic determinism. For this he took his cues from Émile Durkheim and his discipline Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Shariʿati reinterpreted the Shiʿi understanding of the imamate through the lens of a worldview that combined anthropological, sociological and historical perspectives, and that dismissed the binary views opposing body to soul, material to spiritual, and physical to metaphysical. A harmoniously functioning Islamic society combines material and spiritual well-being, meaning that it has to be socially managed using reason and applying justice and economy, while individual felicity depends on the honing of metaphysical religious sentiments through Gnosticism. Rejecting the resigned longing (entezar) of official Islam, since Safavid times represented by the clergy and nobility, Shariʿati viewed Shiʿa Islam as a religion of protest.72 His ‘credal doctrine’ (maktab-e eʿteqadi) represented nothing less than a radical Islamic ideology consisting in ‘the two crucial elements of a utopia and an ideal conception of man’.73 Shariʿati outlined an alternative Islamic educational set-up

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combining Marxian and Weberian social theorizing, which should carve out a place of its own over and against religious traditionalists and secular modernists. Referring to the Qur’anic story about Cain versus Abel as the respective representations of polytheism and social exploitation versus monotheism and repression, Shariʿati envisaged the umma or Muslim community as a society from which exploitation and oppression is absent. While Hegelian dialectics shine through Shariʿati’s Marxian worldview, his biographer Ali Rahnema regards his interpretation of Marx as flawed. Attributing all what he did not like about Marxism to the negative influence of Stalin, Shariʿati even denied that Marx believed in historical materialism and the determination of society by control of the forces of production. In formulating his alternative Islamic ideology, he was very much a child of his time and a product of his own intellectual formation in the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s. Shariʿati gave the prevailing leftist and existential ideologies an Islamic twist, attracting young Muslims looking for alternative ways of accommodating socialism and existentialism with Islamic Gnosticism. The purpose of his thinking was to use Shiʿa Islam as a liberation theology directed at emancipating the oppressed. To retain this revolutionary élan, Shiʿism needs to be constantly reinvigorated, and this, in turn, required the redefinition of three Islamic concepts: The maxim of ‘Commanding Virtue and Prohibiting Vice’ (in Persian: amr-e beh maʿruf va nahy-ye az monkar), emigration (mohajerat) and independent reasoning or individual judgment (ejtehad). In the context of this chapter’s concern with epistemology, this last concept is the most important. Shariʿati interpreted ijtihad/ejtehad as a dynamic process through which Islam could be kept in pace with modern developments. In contrast to Shiʿi orthodoxy, which reserved the right to independent reasoning for the clergy trained in the traditional Islamic sciences, Shariʿati saw the mojtahed/ mujtahid as a ‘free researcher’ looking for answers to the challenges of modernity that remained true to the spirit of religion, drawing on the sources of Islamic law, as well as scientific logic. This way he wanted to free independent reasoning from the restrictions imposed by its traditional formulations. In the previous chapter, the Iranian Shi’i cleric Hojatelislam Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari has already been profiled as a religious intellectual positioned in the interstices of traditional and progressive Muslim thinking. Shaped as much by his seminary training as by his exposure to German philosophy and Protestant theology, Shabestari’s way of thinking has been characterized as an ‘intersubjective hermeneutics’, sharing the anti-ideological outlook of fellow cleric Kadivar and the lay intellectual Abdolkarim Soroush.74 Three years younger than Shariʿati, Shabestari’s deeper acquaintance with traditional Islamic scholarship enabled him to develop an epistemology that is ‘more balanced and rooted in the juristic foundations of Shiʿi Islam’ than the provocative readings of the Islamic sources by the much bolder Ali Shariʿati.75 Shabestaris approach is an attempt to define a philosophy that remains genuinely Muslim in the sense that it conceives of a distinctly Islamic variant of modernity. Shabestari was acutely aware that

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absorbing the technological achievements of modernity could not be separated from the underlying system of meaning and values. At the same time he was convinced that an Islamic worldview was compatible with the findings of modern sciences, although that would mean a serious re-examination of the epistemological foundations of the human sciences. The Qur’an contains the kernel of all religious and moral truths, but – historically – Muslims have developed their own strand of ‘Islamic logocentricity’ to accommodate that message to human reason, ever since their encounter with Hellenic philosophy.76 Shabestari has laid out his methodological framework in a series of articles published between 1998 and 2001 in the newspaper Roznamehaye Iran. His elaborations betray the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology; Heidegger’s ontology of understanding as a mode of both knowledge and being; and the hermeneutics of Gadamer. Shabestari suggests adopting their philosophical categories for the interpretation of religious texts in order to tease out the normative system encapsulated in prophetic experience. Because in all three cases, human experience is at the centre of their philosophies. His thinking about religion, which he calls kalam-e jadid or ‘new theology’, reflects the influence of both Protestants, such as Emil Brunner, Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, and Catholics, including Hans Küng and Karl Rahner, as well as the ‘American philosopher Ian Barbour’s idea of science as an endeavour separate from and independent from religion’.77 A discipline like kalam engages with religious truth as matters of faith, not the philosophical quest for epistemological foundations. Similarly, Shabestari makes a distinction between modern legal philosophy and fiqh. This gives his epistemology a different accent than that of Abdolkarim Soroush, whose concern is with formulating an integral philosophy of knowledge. Although, in a similar vein as Gadamer, Shabestari presents his philosophy as a method, but his thinking has also a metaphysical component, including doctrinal theological positions on the constitutive ideas of Ibn Sina’s philosophy of truth, world and self. Referring to Shabestari’s distinction between his own existential hermeneutics, the ideological phenomenology of Ali Shariʿati and the empirical approach of Abdolkarim Soroush, one commentator suggests regarding Shabestari’s philosophy as a response to what can be called the latter’s neopositivistic methodology and the conceptualization of religion, in this instance Islam, as ‘a political, economic and social system’ by the former.78 Schooled in the exact sciences, heavily influenced by the falsification principle underlying Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, and his study of Kant’s transcendental idealism, Abdolkarim Soroush has not only been called a ‘neo-positivist’, but also characterized as a ‘critical rationalist and realist’, and even a ‘sceptic’.79 But when it comes to the relation between knowledge and religion, his thinking has also been shaped by the philosopher Robin Collingwood and the historian Arnold Toynbee. For Soroush, epistemology is descriptive and not teleological; ‘demonstrating how the present with all its problems […] has come into existence and not how the future will be’.80 In this regard, he is not only critical of the a-historical idealism of Shiʿism’s traditional religious learning or of its

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present-day exponents. He is also vehemently opposed to certain strands of Western philosophy, such as Hegelianism and Marxism, which he considers as shirk – idolatry. This also explains his rejection of the holistic and utopian Islamist ideologies developed by figures like Ali Shari’ati. A prolific writer, Soroush’s religious epistemology is an eclectic mix: Consisting of Western philosophies of science and history; Shiʿi and Sunni theology and philosophy; and excursions into the poetry of Rumi (also known as Jalal alDin al-Balkhi, 1207–1273).81 His earliest publications on the subject date back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. In his first book, The Dynamic Nature of the Universe, written when he was still studying in England, Soroush offered a philosophical underpinning for the Islamic core tenets of the Unity of God (tawhid) and Judgment Day (ma’ad), using the work of the Persian philosopher and mystic Mulla Sadra (1572–1640).82 His second one, Knowledge and Value, came out when he was back in Iran and holding important positions in higher education.83 This was followed by a defence of the social sciences in the wake of the new Islamic Republic’s ‘cultural revolution’ and the concomitant purges of the universities, heralding the beginning of Soroush’s increasingly tense and troubled relationship with the regime.84 In spite of his own increasingly precarious position vis-a-vis the regime, resulting in an absence from Iran now lasting for over a decade, he remains the most prominent exponent of the country’s ‘new religious intellectualism’.85 The books mentioned so far prefigure the core epistemological theory, which Soroush developed between 1988 and 1990 in a series of articles published in the monthly Keyhan-i Farhangī. When they were collected for the first time in book-form, they were published under a title that one finds translated into English as both The Contraction and Expansion of Legal Theory and as The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Religion. The Arabic terms used by Soroush for contraction (qabḍ) and expansion (bast)̣ are Qur’anic in origin and have become part of the Sufi idiom, where they refer to the ‘constriction respectively dilation of the mystic’s heart’.86 Meanwhile, the translation of the term shariʿa as either legal theory or religion indicates that the word has a wider meaning than its usual association with Islamic law. Also the book’s subtitle, Theory of the Development of Religious Knowledge alludes to an epistemological distinction which Soroush makes between ‘religion’ (dīn) and ‘religious knowledge’ (maʿrifat dini).87 The project stemmed from Soroush’s dissatisfaction with the attempts by earlier reformist-minded intellectuals to reconcile Islam with the challenges of modernization. He attributed the shortcomings of figures such as al-Afghani, Iqbal and Shari’ati to their failure to draw the epistemological consequences of the difference between the immutable (thabit) aspects of the Islamic tenets and the historicity of religious traditions as they evolve over time and which are subject to change (mutaghayyir). This contingency Soroush captures by introducing an accompanying tandem notion for theoretical contraction and expansion: ‘the historical constriction and dissipation of the school of thought’.88 Human access to a religion’s eternal and sacred truths is always mediated through religious

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knowledge. Although the latter is temporal and contingent, claimants of authority want to sacralize their interpretations in order to endow them with permanent validity. This is also the case with the Shiʿa clergy who is currently in power in Iran. Soroush’s attention for and interest in the etymological association of fiqh with tafaqquh (understanding) and its historical development in traditional Islamic learning as an epistemologically sophisticated field of intellectual inquiry resonate with Hasan Hanafi’s attempts to turn into usul al-fiqh into a general method for philosophical investigation. This is also illustrated by the parallel between Soroush’s remark that ‘Islamic law is not faqihanah (juristic) in terms of involving justification, but rather maʿrifat-shinasanah (epistemological) and descriptive in character’, and Hasan Hanafi’s earlier mentioned article on Ibn Rushd, in which the latter distinguishes the Andalusian philosopher’s two personae as a ‘jurist’ and ‘juristic thinker’, respectively.89 A further similarity is Hasan Hanafi’s claim of his ‘Heritage and Renewal Project’ as being a continuation of Muhammad Iqbal’s reconstruction of religious thought and the affinity between Iqbal and Soroush’s expanded understanding of ijtihad as ‘reconstruction, recomprehension and new conceptualization’.90 Radically different from the instrumentalized use of ijtihad in traditional scholarship, makes Soroush also downplay the differences between the akhbari and usuli schools and tone down the alleged rational outlook of the latter. Meanwhile, Soroush’s one-time reference that ‘the secret of theology is anthropology’ points at another interest he shares with Hanafi: The work of Ludwig Feuerbach and the importance of humanizing religion and historicizing religious discourses.91 Hanafi has elaborated on this in a commentary in Arabic on Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and in an essay written in French, entitled ‘Theology or Anthropology?’92 The use of the word shariʿat in the Persian title of his ground-breaking book points at another important distinction made by Soroush; whether Islam is conceived first and foremost as ‘outward practice’ (amal) or as ‘inner faith’ (iman), that is to say, whether it is occupied primarily with formal religion administered through jurisprudence or with fitra; the innate human capacity for understanding truth and piety, so extensively elaborated by al-Ghazali in his theological and mystical thinking: ‘By initiating a process of transforming the heritage of traditional fiqh through an amalgamating selection of traditional doctrines to engender ijtiha¯d […] Suru¯sh’s aim is evidently to keep what he believes is the spirit of Islam’.93 Soroush has subtly unpacked his concern with this-worldly existence in relation to the individual believer’s orientation toward the hereafter. Central to the epistemological dimensions of that interpretative exercise is the creation of a suitable framework by making a fundamental distinction between the substances and accidents of a religion. At the same time, Soroush prefers to situate his spiritual preoccupations within Islam’s mystical traditions, and refrain from ‘dismantling the various aspects of the religious tradition by reference to the Derridean deconstructionist method’.94 This is also evinced by his identification of the three categories of cognition of things religious, which he relates to the three Sufi categories of

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truth, derived from a hadith: Shariʿa (the Prophet’s word), tariqa (his conduct) and haqiqa (his state). The corresponding sources for attaining these truths are theological–philosophical thought, emulation and theosophy.95 Just as in the case of Nurcholish Madjid, also Abdolkarim Soroush’s epistemology is closely tied up with theology and political thought, as well as with his anthropology or understanding of human nature. How he combines his insistence on the ‘de-ideologization of religion’ with the advocacy of a ‘religious democratic state’ will be subject of a later chapter, but what is relevant to the present chapter is the central importance attached to the human faculty of reason in Islam. In terms of its sophistication, Soroush points at the various ‘binary divisions in reason between pure (nazari) and practical (amali), the innate (fetri) and acquired (kasb), and the particular (jozvi) and universal (kolli)’.96 The development and uninhibited exercise of reason requires freedom, which Soroush divides in ‘freedom from’, or external freedom, and ‘freedom to’, or internal freedom. This distinction is significant because ‘it is not enough to attain the truth, the manner of its attainment is equally important’.97 Here Soroush’s conceptualization of the production of knowledge resonates with Thomas Kuhn’s view of scientific progress as exponential and qualitative rather than cumulative.98 This also entails a criticism of the instrumentalized use of reason as ‘a storehouse’, only used to enforce and administer claimed truths, as opposed to dynamic reason, which leaves room for questioning and doubt. Inquiries into religion require the same freedom of thought as the natural and empirical sciences. Only this will create the necessary autonomy in individuals to freely choose to believe in religious truths; making freedom a truth in itself and thus contribute to what Soroush calls an ‘ennobling understanding of religion’.99 The way in which reason and freedom are connected to democracy does not make Soroush an adherent of Liberalism. It remains very ‘Islamic’ in the sense that his interpretations draw on the exercise of ijtihad, Muʿtazili thinking and Islamic philosophy. At the same time, it is important to stress that Soroush rejects any inward-looking or essentializing understanding of what constitutes authentic Islam. As someone schooled in both traditional Islamic learning and modern sciences, Soroush does not regard the West in binary or dichotomous terms as a ‘unified absolute “other”’; also he considers contemporary Iranian culture as a ‘composite of three cultures: pre-Islamic Persian, Islamic, and Western’.100 Soroush does not confine himself to reason as an individual ability. In relation to religious knowledge, he also recognizes the importance of ʿaql-i jamʿī or collective consciousness (which also features in the ‘history of mentalities’ informed by the ideas of Halbwachs and Piaget, discussed earlier in this chapter) and considers this to be in accordance with fitra. To demonstrate how to extract the eternal truth of a religion from the materials provided by the tradition itself, he grounds his arguments in proofs derived from theology, the philosophies of Ibn Sina and Mulla Sadra, as well as Islamic history and meta-history (by which he means Qur’anic revelation), but refracted through the lens of contemporary epistemologies. Positioned half-way between foundationalism and deconstructionism, Soroush ‘does not

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believe in hitting upon one true theory since no method can establish its sole truth and the number of possible interpretations remains infinite and inconclusive: a theory may be better, but not the best’.101 Criticisms of Soroush’s thinking are in no small measure a matter of authority claims. His challenge of the centrality of Islamic law and his controversial views of prophethood and revelation met with much fiercer resistance than the very similar critiques of fiqh by clerics, such as the Ayatollahs Taleqani and Motahhari, or the hermeneutics of Hojatoleslam Mojtahed Shabestari. However, aside from the religious establishment associated with the Islamic republic, Soroush has also debated the idea of religious pluralism with a cleric who would eventual follow him in exile. Growing up in Shiraz, Mohsen Kadivar was an ardent reader of the writings of Shariʿati, Taleqani and Bazarghan, while during his years at the seminaries Qom, he studied with the Ayatollahs Tabataba’i, Motahhari and Montazeri (who awarded him with an ijtihad degree). Coinciding with the early years of the reform-oriented presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), his intellectual career was cut short when his book Theories of Government in Shiʿite Jurisprudence earned him a two-year prison sentence. After his release in 2000, Kadivar embarked on a new project, ‘alternately termed “spiritual Islam” (Islam-i maʿnawī), “goal-oriented Islam” (Islam-i ghayat-madar), and “new-thinker” Islam (Islam-i nau-andish)’. Highlighting the spiritual dimensions of religion, while simultaneously remaining ‘self-consciously anchored within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence’, his principled efforts seemingly constitute sincere attempts by a trained mujtahid to come to terms with the perceived challenges of modernity, or in his words, ‘to defend religiosity in the age of modernity’.102 Unrepentant, he was forced into exile in 2007, and is currently a professor at Duke University in North Carolina, USA. Kadivar and Soroush have also been criticized lay intellectuals. A case in point is Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-born but US-based sociologist of knowledge and cultural critic who insists that, in spite of its radical intentions and its openness to both Muslim and non-Muslim knowledge and scholarship, Soroush’s epistemology is not radical enough and that its author is blind to the fact that his propositions remain not only ideologically indebted to Islam, but also determined by an understanding of religion that is defined in Western terms.103 Dabashi has also challenged Mohsen Kadivar’s continued reliance on jurisprudence.104 As a professor at Columbia University Dabashi’s profile is closer to that of other expatriate Muslim intellectuals, who are becoming increasingly important for new formulations of contemporary Islamic thinking in an increasingly interconnected world, in which Muslims find themselves in growing numbers outside of the historical Dar al-Islam.

Khaled Abou El Fadl’s methodology of ihsan Another illustrative example of such an expatriate intellectual is Khaled Abou El Fadl. Born in Kuwait, but of Egyptian origin, he is currently a professor of law

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at UCLA, holding advanced degrees from several Ivy League universities. However, he has also received more than ten years of instruction in traditional Islamic learning in Egypt and Kuwait.105 As a legal scholar Abou El Fadl is primarily concerned with law. But, as a Muslim intellectual, he is more interested in renewal and a new presentation of the Islamic tradition than with its deconstruction. The ultimate objective of the political and social reforms advocated by Abou El Fadl is to create a space for the expression of individually formulated Islamic discourses against the homogenizing essentialism of both reactionary authoritarianism and liberal relativism. For this purpose he has worked toward the formulation of a coherent methodology, which has also epistemological underpinnings, as becomes clear from the title of one of his latest books: Reasoning with God (2014).106 Abou El Fadl has developed this epistemology in two earlier books: And God Knows the Soldiers (2001) and The Search for Beauty in Islam (2006). In the first book, Abou El Fadl argues that piety is exhibited by a search for knowledge.107 The notion of ‘beauty’ mentioned in the title of the second book, does not so much refer to aesthetics as to the idea of internalized belief or ihsan, which is a central notion in Sufism, functioning as the spiritual counterpart of inner faith (iman) encountered earlier in the epistemology of Abdolkarim Soroush.108 Moreover, again like Soroush, Abou El Fadl is not only concerned with ‘the content of the proposed reformation, but also the way in which that reformation is to be achieved with respect to tradition’.109 Reactionary manifestations of Islam of the type of Saudi Wahhabism are in themselves modern in the sense that they have been employed as responses against Western colonization and imperialism. However, their reassertions of Islamic identity extending into postcolonial times are reductionist; stripping away the diversity that was one of the hallmarks of pre-modern Islamic tradition. Abou El Fadl’s retrieval of that tradition is not anachronistic, but can be qualified as post-modernist in its attempt to restore ‘the possibility of multiple meanings being apparent in the texts, a deconstruction of established discourses, and a broader questioning of established constructions of knowledge’.110 This is further evinced by his reliance on Gadamer’s notion of the ‘fusion of horizons’ and Lyotard’s investigations of the relation between narrative structures and knowledge production, which inform his suspicious attitude toward claims of universal explanatory validity or normativity by established authorities.111 Abou El Fadl’s methodology consist of three parts: A process of delegitimizing hegemonic discourses that lay claim to exclusive authority; formulating anew the plurality of the Islamic tradition in a postmodern context; and an ethical understanding to structure this new plurality. It is in the latter that the notion of beauty (ihsan) as a convergence of the Sufi concepts of knowledge, being, and love is manifested in contemporary notions of reasonableness and proportionality as determinants of best practice. Together they offer the building blocks for resisting the homogenization of identity and for enabling alternative discourses.

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Closing remarks Coming from various academic disciplines, and with interests in different aspects of the Islamic tradition and its wider civilizational heritage, the progressivelyminded Muslim intellectuals introduced in this chapter all have developed their own approaches to studying the intellectual legacies of various parts of the Muslim world. As philosophers, historians, linguists, legal scholars, and social scientists, they propose different research agendas and have developed a variety of projects. However, if there is one common denominator that characterizes their work, then that would be the anthropocentric focus of their epistemologies: Religious knowledge and religious traditions are the outcome of human interpretative efforts. In some instances this is translated into critiques grounded in text and discourse analysis, in other cases in the proposition of an Islamic variant of humanism, or, in the formulation of more politicized emancipatory agendas. Before addressing the political implications of these new philosophies of knowledge, the next two chapters will investigate how they have influenced the study of Islamic scripture and contemporary engagement with spirituality.

Notes 1 Richard C. Martin and Mark R. Woodward, with Dwi S. Atmaja, Defenders of Reason in Islam: Mu’tazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). 2 Ashk P. Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity: Legal Philosophy in Contemporary Iran (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 61–66. 3 Abdolkarim Soroush, ‘I am a neo-Mu’tazilite’, interview by Matin Ghaffarian, www.drsoroush.com/English/Interviews/E-INT-Neo-Mutazilite_July2008.html, accessed 27 December 2017. 4 Anke von Kügelgen explores this in greater detail in: Averroës und die arabische Moderne (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994) and her introduction to a special issue of Alif: entitled ‘Averroës and the rational legacy in the East and the West’: Anke von Kügelgen, ‘A Call for Rationalism: “Arab Averroists” in the Twentieth Century’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 16 (1996), 97–132. 5 Carool Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam (London and New York: Hurst Publishers & Oxford University Press), 45–68, 105–128. 6 Dagi, ‘Rethinking human rights, democracy, and the West: Post-Islamist intellectuals in Turkey’, 138. 7 Mustafa Akyol, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 237, quoting Dücane Cündioğlu. 8 Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique (Austin: The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 1996), 63 and 120. 9 Binder, Islamic Liberalism, 301. 10 Yves Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World (London: Verso, 1985. French original: 1965). 11 In Arabic: Takwin al-Aql al-Arabi. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, The Formation of Arab Reason: Text, Tradition and the Construction of Modernity in the Arab World (London, I.B. Tauris, 2011). 12 Bunya al-Aql al-Arabi, an English translation is not yet available.

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13 Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 114–115. 14 Hasan Hanafi, Les Méthodes d’Exégèse: Essai sur la Science des Fondements de la Compréhension ‘Ilm Usul al-Fiqh’ (Cairo: Conseil Supérieur des Arts, des Lettres et des Sciences Socials, 1965). 15 Carool Kersten, ‘Bold Transmutations: Rereading Hasan Hanafi’s Early Writings on Fiqh’, Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies 3:1 (2007), 22–38. 16 Hanafi, Les Méthodes d’Exégèse, cclxxv. 17 Hasan Hanafi, Muqaddima fi ‘Ilm al-Istighra¯b (Cairo: Al-Dar al-Fanniyya li’l-Nashr wa’l-Tawzi, 1991), 9–15. 18 Hasan Hanafi, Al-Tura¯th wa’l-Tajdīd: Mawqifuna¯ min al-Tura¯th al-Qadīm (Cairo: alMarkaz al-‘Arabi li’l-Bahth wa’l-Nashr, 1980), 21. 19 Hanafi Al-Tura¯th wa’l-Tajdīd, 31. 20 Hanafi, Al-Tura¯th wa’l-Tajdīd, 152. 21 Hanafi, Al-Tura¯th wa’l-Tajdīd, 199. 22 Hanafi, Les Méthodes d’Exégèse, xc. 23 Hanafi, Muqaddima fi ‘Ilm al-Istighra¯b, 791; Susanne Olsson, Renewal and Heritage: The Quest for Authenticity in Hasan Hanafi’s Islamic Ideology (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2004), 60. 24 Hasan Hanafi, ‘Ibn Rushd Faqihan’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Politics 16 (1996), 116, Quoted in Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 172. 25 Boullata, Trends and Issues, 45; Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997), 239. 26 Al-Jabri and Hanafi have explored this together in a joint publication called EastWest Dialogue: Hasan Hanafi and Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Hiwa¯r al-mashriq wa almaghrib (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1990). 27 Mohammed Arkoun, The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (London: Saqi Books, 2002). 28 Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 192ff. 29 Arkoun, The Unthought, 15. 30 Arkoun, The Unthought, 13. 31 Mohammed Arkoun, L’humanisme Arabe au 4e/10e siècle: Miskawayh, Philosophe et Historien (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982b); idem, ‘Peut-on parler d’humanisme en contexte islamique?’ in Compilation and Creation in Adab and Lugha: Studies in Memory of Naphtali Kinberg (1948–1997), eds. Albert Arazi, Joseph Sadan, David J. Wasserstein, Israel Oriental Studies 19 (1999), 11–22; idem, Humanisme et Islam: Combats et Propositions (Paris: Vrin, 2005). 32 Mohammed Arkoun, Pour Une Critique de la Raison Islamique (Paris: Éditions Maissoneuve et Larose, 1984). 33 Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Books, 2015b), 37. 34 Arkoun, The Unthought, 262. 35 Carool Kersten, ‘From Braudel to Derrida: Mohammed Arkoun’s Rethinking of Islam and Religion’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 4:1 (2011b), 33. 36 Mohammed Arkoun, Essais sur la Pensée Islamique (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1973), 10. 37 Arkoun, The Unthought, 12. 38 Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 203. 39 Arkoun, The Unthought, 274; Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 203; and ‘From Braudel to Derrida’, 33. 40 Mohammed Arkoun, ‘From Inter-Religious Dialogue to the Recognition of the Religious Phenomenon’, Diogenes 182:46/2 (1998), 125. 41 Mohammed Arkoun, ‘The Answers of Applied Islamology’, Theory, Culture & Society 24: 22 (2007), 22. 42 Arkoun, The Unthought, 23–24. 43 Arkoun, ‘From Inter-Religious Dialogue to the Recognition of the Religious Phenomenon’, 131.

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44 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History and Forgetting. Translated by Katherine Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014). The French original had appeared in 2000. 45 Arkoun, The Unthought, 130. 46 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Ein Leben mit dem Islam: Erzählt von Navid Kermani (Freiburg in Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 1999); idem, Mijn leven met de Islam: Zoals Verteld aan Navid Kermani. Translated by Vreni Obrecht (Haarlem: Becht, 2002); Nasr Abu Zayd with Esther N. Nelson, Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam (Westport and London: Praeger, 2004). 47 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Critique of Religious Discourse. Naqd al-Khitab al-Dini. Translated by Jonathan Wright. With a Scholarly Introduction by Carool Kersten (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 48 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Al-Itijah al-ʻaqli fi al-tafsir: Dirasat fi qadiya al-majaz fi al-Qur ’an ʻinda al-Muʻtazila, seventh edition (Beirut: Center of Arab Culture, 2011); idem, Falsafat al-ta’wil: Dirasat fi ta’wil al-qur’an ʻinda Muhyi al-Din bin ʻArabi, sixth edition (Beirut: Center for Arab Culture, 2007). 49 Abu Zayd, Mijn leven met de Islam, 118. 50 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Mafhum al-nass, ninth edition (Beirut and Casablanca: Center for Arab Culture, 2014), 9–28. To my mind, Abu Zayd selected the Arabic word mafhum because it contains the meanings of both ‘concept’ and ‘understanding’. Thus the title of the book can rendered in English as ‘The Concept of the Text’ or ‘Understanding the Text’. It is for that reason that I have decided the Arabic title throughout instead of using an English translation. 51 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, ‘Rethinking the Qur’an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics’ Inaugural Lecture as Extraordinary Professor of ‘Humanism and Islam’, 27 May 2004. Available at www.stichtingsocrates.nl/Zayd/SocratesOratie%20Nasr% 20Abu%20Zayd.pdf. Accessed 2 January 2018. Cf. also Sukidi, ‘Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the quest for a Humanistic Hermeneutics of the Qur’an,’ Die Welt des Islams 49:2 (2009): 181–211. 52 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 63. 53 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 92–3. 54 Later published in book form: Harun Nasution Muhammad Abduh dan Teologi Rasional Mu’tazilah (Jakarta: Universitas Indonesia Press, 1987). 55 Nurcholish Madjid, Islam Kemodernan Keindonesiaan (Bandung: Mizan, 1987), 181–190. 56 Nurcholish Madjid, Pembaruan Pemikiran Islam (Jakarta: Islamic Research Centre, 1970), 6, 19. 57 M. Dawam Rahardjo, ‘Islam dan Modernisasi: Catatan atas Paham Sekularisasi Nurcholish Madjid’ in Islam Kemodernan Keindonesiaan, 22. 58 Fachry Ali and Bahtiar Effendy, Merambah Jalan Baru Islam: Rekonstruksi Pemikiran Islam Indonesia Masa Orde Baru (Bandung: Mizan, 1986), 186. 59 Abdurrahman Wahid, ‘Pengantaran’ in Kiri Islam: Antara Modernisme dan PostModernisme, ed. Kazuo Shimogaki (Yogyakarta: LkiS, 1993), ix–xi. 60 Currently the rector of the State Islamic University in Yogyakarta, Yudian Wahyudi is a graduate of McGill University where he obtained PhD with a comparative study of Hasan Hanafi, Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Nurcholish Madjid. 61 Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri, Post-Traditionalisme Islam, ed. Ahmad Baso (Yogyakarta: LKiS, 2000). 62 Kersten, Islam in Indonesia, 109–117. 63 Richard King, ‘Philosophy of Religion as Border Control: Globalization and the Decolonization of the “Love for Wisdom” (philosophia)’ in Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion, eds. Purushottama Bilimoria and Andrew Irvine (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 43. 64 Currently the rector of the State Islamic University in Yogyakarta, Yudian Wahyudi is a graduate of McGill University where he obtained PhD with a comparative study of Hasan Hanafi, Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Nurcholish Madjid.

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65 Kersten, Islam in Indonesia, 87–95, 104–109. 66 Kersten, Islam in Indonesia, 264–275. 67 Cf. Kersten, Islam in Indonesia, 49–51, 125–134 and Carool Kersten, ‘Bourgeois Islam and Muslims without Mosques’ in Islam after Liberalism, eds. Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi (London & New York: Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2017), 167–187. 68 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 234. 69 Cf. Felix Körner, Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in Contemporary Turkish University Theology: Rethinking Islam (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005); Peter Riddell, ‘The Turkish Hadith Project: Revisiting Traditions and the Struggle Within the Islamic World’, Lausanne Global Analysis 5:4 (2016), www.lausanne.org/content/lga/201607/turkish-hadith-project last accessed 7 October 2018. 70 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 130. 71 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 112. 72 Cf. also Hamid Dabashi, Shiʿism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). 73 Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian, 289. 74 Farzin Vahdat, ‘Post-Revolutionary Islamic Modernity in Iran: The Intersubjective Hermeneutics of Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari’ in Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an, ed. Suha Taji-Farouki (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2004), 199–224. 75 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 185. 76 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 165. 77 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 166. 78 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 170. 79 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 197, 263, 312. 80 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 259. 81 Soroush has extensively engaged with canonical Shiʿī texts, such as Nahj al-Bala¯gha (‘The Peak of Eloquence’, a collection of sermons, letters and hadiths attributed to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Imam Ali) and the Mathnawi of Rumi. 82 Abdolkarim Soroush, Naha¯d-i Na¯ Āra¯m-i Jaha¯n (Tehran: Sirat, 1978). 83 Abdolkarim Soroush, Danesh va Arzesh (Tehran: Yaran, 1983). 84 Abdolkarim Soroush, Tafarru-i Sunʿ: Guftarha¯’ī dar Akhla¯q wa Sanʿat wa ʿIlm-i Insa¯nī (Tehran: Sirat, 1994a). 85 Cf. the website dedicated to his work: http://drsoroush.com/en/. 86 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, p. 253. 87 Abdolkarim Soroush, Qabḍ wa Bast-ị Te’orik-i Shariʿa¯t: Naẓarīyat-i Taka¯mul-i Maʿrifat-i dīnī (Tehran: Mo’assesseh-ye Farhangi-ye Serat, 1991). Originally a series of articles, which appeared in the periodical Kiya¯n between 1988 and 1990. 88 Hamid Dabashi, ‘Blindness and Insight’, 98. This chapter has been reprinted in: Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 89 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 228, Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 172 and page 35. 90 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 242. 91 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, p. 212, 218, 246. 92 Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 175–176. 93 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 244. 94 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 245. 95 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 215–216. 96 Abdolkarim Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam’ in The New Voices of Islam, Reforming Politics and Modernity: A Reader, ed. Mehran Kamrava (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 244. 97 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam’, 245. 98 Dabashi, ‘Blindness and Insight’, 99.

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99 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam’, 24; Dabashi, ‘Blindness and Insight’, 98. 100 Forough Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran (1953–2000): From Ba¯zarga¯n to Soroush (Leiden, etc.: Brill, 2011), 164–165. 101 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 336. 102 Yasuyuki Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, Welt des Islams 51:3/4 (2011), 360. 103 Dabashi, ‘Blindness and Insight’, 95–116. 104 Cf. the entry for 16 June 2009 on the Hamid Dabashi website: http://hamiddabashi. com/current-affairs/featured-current-affair/diary-of-a-defiance-iran-un-interrupted/. Last accessed, 3 August 2018. 105 Students and other supporters of Khaled Abou El Fadl maintain a website dedicated to his work: www.scholarofthehouse.org/abdrabelfad.html. 106 Khaled Abou El Fadl, Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shariʿah in the Modern Age (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). 107 Khaled Abou El Fadl, And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourse (Lanham: University Press of America, 2001), 11. 108 Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Search for Beauty in Islam A Conference of the Books (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 109 Angus Slater, ‘Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Methodology of Reform’, Journal of Law, Religion and State 4 (2016), 295. 110 Slater, ‘Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Methodology of Reform’, 298. 111 Slater, ‘Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Methodology of Reform’, 299–300.

3 SCRIPTURE Alternative ways of engaging with the Qur’an

As the foundational Islamic scripture also for present-day Muslims, the Qur’an remains at the core of religious understanding. Therefore, the interpretation of Islam’s main sacred text continues to preoccupy many contemporary intellectuals too. Their new approaches to the Qur’an are closely tied up with the epistemological questions addressed in the previous chapter. Thus, they are a prime illustration of how the thematic topics discussed in this book form sets of interlocking interests and concerns. Before surveying the varying ways in which intellectuals engage with the Qur’an today, it is important to clarify the very special status held by the Qur’an within Islamic faith and its scholarly tradition. In contrast to the Hebrew Bible or the Gospels, where human intervention is acknowledged and accepted, the Qur’an is regarded as the verbatim word of God. As such it functions not merely as the first point of reference for religious questions and many worldly issues as well, in theological terms, the Qur’an is better compared to the significance of the figure of Christ in Christian religious thought than the place occupied by the Bible. It is because of this special status that Qur’anic exegesis is such a delicate and even dangerous undertaking. Nothing shows this more dramatically than the execution of the Sudanese religious activist and politician Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (also spelled Mahmud Muhammad Taha, 1909–1985) after being convicted for apostasy and sedition on account of his controversial interpretation of the Qur’an. Also the controversies caused by the critical and creative ways in which Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Abdolkarim Soroush have interpreted the Qur’an illustrate that innovative approaches to sacred texts and the process of revelation remain sensitive issues. In both instances, it was a chance event that triggered public interest in what had so far remained a matter of arcane scholarship and

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intellectual interpretation appealing to only a select readership capable of appreciating its merits. In the case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, this happened when the objections to his promotion to full professor raised by a reactionary scholar appeared in the media, triggering not only wider indignation, but also an official investigation into the integrity of Abu Zayd as a Muslim. Not willing to await the consequences of a verdict on that matter, Abu Zayd went into self-imposed exile in the Netherlands. Where Abdolkarim Soroush is concerned, wider interest in his views of Prophethood and revelation was the result of an interview he gave to a Dutch magazine, eight years after publishing a book on the subject. In 1999, the release of Soroush’s The Expansion of Prophetic Experience had gone virtually unnoticed by his critics. But that all changed by what he said to Zem Zem in 2007 and which was subsequently also picked up by the Iranian media.1 The fallout of his statements about Qur’an and revelation caused also Soroush to opt for a life abroad. In traditional Islamic scholarship, a distinction was made between tafsir, historical-philological Qur’an commentaries focusing on lexicographical and grammatical explanations, and taʿwil, allegorical or metaphorical readings searching for deeper layers of meaning, which have also contributed considerably to the development of an Islamic tradition of esotericism. Muslims have not ceased consulting authoritative commentaries of both genres, nor have they stopped following and applying traditional approaches and methods in current exegetical practice. In fact, since the vast majority of Muslims remains committed to a traditional – often socially conservative – adherence to their faith and its doctrines, traditional exegesis continues to be the standard too. But in addition to that, tafsir and ta’wil have also evolved into more critical ways of interpreting and studying scripture. One prominent specialist in Qur’anic studies, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, did not hesitate to translate tafsir as exegesis and ta’wil as hermeneutics. Alternatively, tafsir and ta’wil can also be said to have morphed into modern textualist and contextualist approaches. The difference lies in the contrast between narrow literal-legalistic readings of the Qur’an in the former and the broader ethical interpretations of the latter – allowing for an indeterminacy of meaning and thus leaving room for contingency and plurality. Another way of expressing that contrast is by distinguishing an atomistic as opposed to a holistic understanding of the Qur’an. The Maldivian-Australian scholar of Islam Abdullah Saeed has suggested that Contextualists can also be termed ‘Progressive Ijtihadis’, because it combines the word ijtihad, which he translates as engaging in an effort to search for the meaning of a Qur’anic verse, and progressive, which Saeed interprets as ‘someone who is questioning and challenging established traditions of a particular system of thought’. This results into too restrictive a definition, especially considering Saeed’s addition that ‘Contextualists are best described as social critics rather than ideologues’.2 That last point may be true of some progressive interpreters, but does certainly not apply to all contemporary intellectuals, who take context into account when interpreting the meaning and

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significance of the Qur’an for Muslims today. An alternative more detailed breakdown of modern and contemporary Qur’anic hermeneutics distinguishes modernist, Islamist, scientist, translationist, revisionist and feminist discursive trajectories.3 This categorization is organized around the substantive – often ideologized, orientation – of the interpreters rather than their focus on text or context. Moreover, as also Saeed has taken care to point out, all exegesis – also that of contextualists – starts with ‘becoming familiar with the text through reading and listening’ and ‘analysing the text independently of its historical or contemporary context’.4 The key difference between textualists and contextualists lies in an a-historical approach to the Qur’an fixated on a totalizing Islamic worldview as opposed to a historically contingent understanding that allows for constantly evolving interpretations.

Textualist approaches Examples of a-historical textual approaches to the Qur’an are the commentaries written by the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami, Abu’l-Aʿla Mawdudi, and Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb. Their exegesis is not only based on literal readings of the Qur’an text, at the same time they can also be classified as Islamist interpretations, because they reflect an understanding of Islam as a self-sufficient, closed – and therefore totalizing – system.5 The what Shepard has called ‘increased theocentrism’ in Sayyid Qutb’s thought of the late 1950s affected not only his Qur’an commentary In the Shadow of the Qur’an and other writings after 1954, but has also been worked into the multiple revised editions of Social Justice in Islam.6 Rejecting all other philosophical, theological and spiritual thought, from the time he was arrested in 1954, the quality of Sayyid Qutb’s thought has been described as: In prison, Qutb abstracted himself from all except the Qura¯nic text, which became his only intellectual framework and reference to life. Being absorbed in the text made him to structure a utopian political existence, as opposed to the wicked universal institutions webbed together under the umbrella of colonialism and Zionism, and permitted him to image the existence of an angelic Muslim vanguard opposed to the reality of a devilish hypocritical society.7 Sayyid Qutb had not started out as an Islamist; his earliest engagement with the Qur’an, dating back to the early 1940s, was through aesthetics and had resulted in a book called Artistic Imaginary in the Qur’an.8 This alternative textualist approach to the Qur’an was continued by other scholars advocating the treatment of the Qur’an as literature. Ironically, this makes Sayyid Qutb into a trailblazer for the pioneers of modern-day literary study of the Qur’an: Muhammad Khalafallah (±1916–1991) and his teacher Amin al-Khuli (1895–1966) were not only ‘two precursors of modern literary analysis of the

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Qur’an’, they have broken ground for the ‘revisionist hermeneutics’ introduced by scholars from a later generation, most notably Mohammed Arkoun and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd.9 Al-Khuli had received both an Islamic religious and secular state education. Later he had the opportunity to spend time in Rome and Berlin (1923–1927), where he learnt Italian and German, and studied the works of Western orientalists. Eventually, he became a professor at King Fuad I (later Cairo) University, teaching – among other subject – Qur’an exegesis (tafsir). In 1947, his career was compromised when his student Muhammad Khalafallah was denied a doctorate on the basis of a study of narrative structures in the Qur’an. Although rejected as a PhD thesis, six years later, Khalafallah’s research was published anyway as a book under the title, The Art of Narrative in the Holy Qur’an. In 1961, also al-Khuli published a book that contained his views on the literary study of the Qur’an.10 Influenced by the hermeneutics of Romanticism, both scholars advocated the application of literary text criticism in interpreting the Qur’an. In addition, as proponents of a thematic and comprehensive approach to its text, they also drew on historical, sociological and psychological studies. With their treatment of the Qur’anic text as an integral unity, they can also be considered as predecessors of the holistic approach of Fazlur Rahman. Not only the writings of al-Khuli and Khalafallah are relevant for the kind of research that Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd decided to undertake a few decades later. Also the consequences they suffered as a result of their chosen approaches to the Qur’an prefigure what happened to Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd in the 1990s, when the polarization between reactionary and progressive Muslims had become much more pronounced than had been the case in the 1940s and 1950s. For his own literary study of the Qur’an, Abu Zayd makes use of structural linguistics and other new tools for advanced text criticism and discourse analysis, such as semiotics. Of particular influence was the work of the Estonian literary scholar and semiotician Juri Lotman. Abu Zayd has translated two of his works into Arabic and he modelled his own theory of communication for analyzing the Qur’an on Lotman’s ‘concept of the text’, using that very phrase as the title for his most important book on Qur’anic studies: Mafhum al-Nass – which can be translated as either ‘The Concept of the Text’ or ‘Understanding the Text’. The upheaval caused by Abu Zayd’s text criticism and discourse analysis can to a considerable degree be attributed to ‘the vocabulary and methods he employs to discuss the Qur’an’.11 In modern standard Arabic, the term nass can be used for ‘text’ in the generic sense of the word. However, as Abu Zayd has explained himself, in classical Arabic – and in particular ‘in the fields of the Qur’anic Sciences, ʿulum al-Qur’an, and jurisprudence, usul al-fiqh, the word nass became a semantic term referring to any very clear and obvious statement of the Qur’an which needs no explanation’. Accordingly, this requires no ijtihad, let alone that it allows for intellectual speculation. The problem is that ‘there is a semantic manipulation of religious terminology when the word is used in modern Islamic discourse to imply that it means the whole text of the

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Qur’an’.12 The controversies surrounding Abu Zayd’s approach and vocabulary also extend to the terminology used for Qur’an commentaries in traditional Islamic scholarship: tafsir and ta’wil. Abu Zayd makes an emphatic distinction between the exegesis, or the mere explanation of words in the text (tafsir) on the basis of transmitted traditional learning (riwaya), and interpretation (ta’wil) using human intellect (dhahn, diraya), which resembles the modern philosophical discipline of hermeneutics.13 This distinction is also reflected in the titles of two books mentioned in the previous chapter, on the exegesis of the Muʿtazili School and the hermeneutics developed by Ibn al-Arabi, respectively. Abu Zayd’s theoretical communication model for the Qur’an closely followed Lotman’s The Structure of the Artistic Text and can be schematized as sets of relationships consisting of a message (risala) that is communicated through signs (ayat) by a sender (mursil) to a receiver (mustaqbil), through a ‘code (shifra) or linguistic system’.14 The complexity of these relations increases commensurate with the density of the linguistic structures of texts, as found in sophisticated literary texts, such as those of Shakespeare, but also the Qur’an with its so-called ʿi’jaz, or poetic inimitability.15 Teasing out the deep structure of the Qur’an text from the surface structure becomes therefore only all the more acute and urgent. Abu Zayd’s regards Ibn al-Arabi’s system of thought as a way to ‘uncover the reality of things which would not be perceived otherwise’.16 The ontology represented in the inward reality and outward manifestations of the Divine have their epistemological parallels in the inward reality of prophethood and its ultimate outward manifestation in the mission of the historical Muhammad. According to Lotman, a text ‘behaves as a kind of living organism which has a feedback channel to the reader’, conveying ‘different information to different readers in proportion to each one’s comprehension’.17 No single interpretation can lay claim to absolute validity, on the contrary: Abu Zayd’s research consists in demonstrating the diversity in interpretations of the Qur’an; tracing how this variety in interpretations has historically evolved; only to be neglected as time progressed. Abu Zayd explains that – since Muhammad is not the author of the Qur’an, from then on the text has moved from being a divine text to a human text. Thus, the prophet must be considered the first exegete who broke ground for a continuous process of interpretation – or what Abu Zayd calls ‘the other side of the text’.18 This conceptualization of the genesis of a text also impacts on the status accorded to the Qur’an and, with that, how one conceives of revelation. In this regard, Abu Zayd sides with the Muʿtazila, whose theory of the connection between Qur’an, language and humankind he regards as ‘the most rationalistic’.19 Considering language as a human invention, Muʿtazila thinkers concluded that the Qur’an was therefore not an eternal verbal utterance by God but created action. However, from the late ninth century onward, that position was considered anathema in Sunni orthodoxy: Language is God’s gift to humankind, therefore the Qur’an has eternal

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existence in the realm of the transcendent, and the relation between ‘signifier’ (dalala) and ‘signified’ (al-madlul alayhi) is also divine.20 Aside from Lotman, the schematics of Abu Zayd’s communicative model remain indebted to the Muʿtazila representation of revelation: This process of revealing (wahy) is nothing but an act of communication which naturally includes a speaker, which is God in this case, a recipient, which is the Prophet Muhammad, a code of communication, which is Arabic, and a channel which is the Holy Spirit.21 And yet, for some critics of Abu Zayd, such phrasing still reflects too much the viewpoint of a believer rather than that of a dispassionate scholar, leading the Lebanese philosopher Ali Harb to observe that while ‘Abu Zayd’s statements are progressive and secular, […] his way of thinking is still fundamentalist’.22 It is more difficult to level such accusations against Mohammed Arkoun. While the controversial approaches of Abu Zayd and Soroush remain intellectual exercises toward committed pious understanding, as a critic rather than a caretaker, Mohammed Arkoun has pushed innovative approaches to Qur’an studies much further.23 With his call for genuinely open-ended readings and the unrestrained accommodation of a plurality of meanings, Arkoun can be said to go to a limit where not many engaged Muslim intellectuals are willing to follow him. As suggested in the previous chapter, much of what Arkoun has contributed to the study of Islam can be considered as agenda-setting. The proposed comprehensive research programme for what he calls ‘Applied Islamology’, as a contribution to an exhaustive ‘Critique of Islamic Reason’, also contains a critical examination of the Qur’an. An example of this is found in the one book that Arkoun has dedicated solely to the Qur’an: Readings of the Qur’an; a compilation of articles written between 1970 and 1980.24 Of more enduring relevance is a pair of terms already mentioned in the previous chapter: ‘Qur’anic Fact’ and ‘Islamic Fact’. First used in 1975, the binary was not introduced to call into question the historical veracity of revelation or denigrade the Islamic tradition, but for the purpose of creating an epistemological distance between the two events. In fact, Arkoun wishes to acknowledge that ‘the Qur’an is the obligatory point of departure for any critical re-examination of the Arab-Islamic past’.25 However, ‘the distinction does not mean an endorsement of the theological status of the Qur’an as the Revelation remaining above human history; both the Qur’a¯nic and Islamic fact should be examined as components of concrete history’.26 Again, this too is not meant to undermine the ‘basic theological propositions shared by all Muslims’, Arkoun assures.27 However, in order to excavate the deeper epistemological levels, Arkoun suggests that, to understand the Qur’an as revelation, it is imperative to displace the theological perspective by the introduction of the procedures and rules used in discourse analysis.

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For that purpose, Arkoun has relied on the structural linguistics developed by Emile Benveniste. The first extensive exploration of the potential of structural linguistics and semiotics can be found in his Readings of the Quran, alongside references to Khalafallah, Izutsu and Ricoeur, as well as the mention of challenges of ‘traditional exegesis’ by earlier hermeneuticians of suspicion: Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. In a later evaluation, Arkoun summarized his analysis of the Qur’an’s discursive formations as an examination of metaphoric organization; semiotic structure; and intertextuality, adding that its neglect in ‘classical Islamology’ constitutes an ‘epistemological failure’.28 By availing of this particular toolbox, Arkoun’s phrasing of his understanding of revelation very much resembles the wording of Abu Zayd: This annunciation [revelation] can be called prophetic discourse and establishes an arena of communication between three grammatical persons, a speaker who articulates the discourse contained in the Heavenly Book; a first addressee who transmits the message of the enunciation as an event of faith; and a second addressee, al-na¯s (the people).29 The same methods of discourse analysis must also be applied to the other constituent elements of the Closed Official Corpus or Islamic logosphere, namely the body or Qur’an commentaries (tafsir), the hadith collections containing the ‘Traditions of the Prophet’ and key source for his biography (sira), as well as mystical texts. Furthermore, Arkoun shares Abu Zayd’s interest in Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi. The latter’s monumental oeuvre and the scholarly study of his works are of great significance; not only for discerning the interconnections between poetry and philosophy, but also for understanding the metaphoric values of the Qur’anic language and the role of the imaginary.30 Aside from drawing on structural linguistics, and acknowledging the importance of interventions by the early Sayyid Qutb for raising a theoretic debate on the use of literary criticism in the analysis of the Qur’an, Arkoun deplores the absence in Qur’anic studies of an equivalent to Northrop Frye’s The Great Code.31 Also the influence of the Annales School is detectable in Arkoun’s approach to the Qur’an, when he characterizes intertextuality as ‘the horizontal historical reading of the Qur’a¯nic discourse in the perspective of the very longue durée (to use the famous conceptualization of F. Braudel)’, which is to include not just the Hebrew Bible and Gospels, but encompass also the cultural memories of the ancient religions of the Middle East.32 To help break down the dogmatic restrictions imposed on scriptural readings by Jewish, Christian and Islamic theologies, Arkoun suggests replacing the Islamic notion of the ‘peoples of the Book’ (the ahl al-kitab of the Qur’an) with his new concept of ‘societies of the Book-book’. Aside from creating a framework of greater sociological, linguistic and cultural intelligibility, by hyphenating ‘Book-book’, this alternative concept underscores the inseparability of the theological concept of the ‘Heavenly Book’ as Holy Scripture and the cultural, historical and anthropological understanding of

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‘book’, as an artefact facilitating the transformation of orality and illiteracy into literacy and written culture. By underscoring the linguistic, sociological, political and cultural dimensions of the transformation of ‘Qur’anic Fact’ into ‘Islamic Fact’, the sublimation of ‘book’ into Scripture is historicized anew.33 Arkoun’s approach to the Qur’an forms parts of his efforts to expand the exhaustive tradition beyond the Official Closed Corpus into a much broader domain encompassing a rich tradition of the ‘oral populist delivery of a simplified orthodox creed’, supporting the ‘beliefs, customs and cultural mores of many ethno-linguistic groups’ living in Central and Southeast Asia, India, China, Central Asia and parts of North Africa, who ‘do not even have access to the Arabic original of the Qur’an’.34

Contextualist approaches There is wide recognition of Fazlur Rahman as one of the most important pioneers of contemporary Qur’an interpretation. His path-breaking work can be considered as emblematic of the contextualist approach, as well as an illustrative example of a modernist hermeneutics.35 Appreciative of the achievements of figures such as Muhammad Abduh and Sayyid Ahmad Khan, as well as Hasan al-Banna and Abu’l-Aʿla Mawdudi, Fazlur Rahman’s contribution consisted in formulating an exegetical method that systematizes the continuous process of adapting to the challenges of modernity undertaken by these earlier Muslim reformist-modernists. The answer lies not in accepting or resigning to Westernization, but in renewing and revitalizing Islam by interpreting the message of the Qur’an as setting ‘a trajectory, rather than an eternally binding terminus’.36 The hallmark of Fazlur Rahman’s methodology is the so-called ‘double movement theory’, elaborated in his most influential book, Islam and Modernity.37 This is a form of historical criticism used to distinguish the ideal and from the contingent in Qur’anic pronouncements. In an effort to understand what the Qur’an meant to its original audience, it consists in moving back in time and deduct general principles from the text, especially in regards to ethical guidelines concerning justice, equality and freedom. This is done by examining and evaluating the influence of social factors at the time on the language of the revealed text and its contemporaneous exegesis. The second step of the double movement is to apply these principles to the present-day context in which Muslims find themselves or, in other words, how the eternal message of the Qur’an can be actualized today. The substance of the Qur’anic message forms the subject of another one of Fazlur Rahman’s monographs entitled, Major Themes of the Qur’an.38 Fazlur Rahman’s methodological contributions flow forth from his critique of traditional Islam, consisting of appreciation for the contribution by the Muʿtazila to the theory of prophecy and the nature of revelation, on the one hand, while criticizing the consequences of the ‘break between politics and law in the nascent Muslim community and the ethics of the Qur’an’, on the other, because

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this has led to an atomistic approach to the text and the ad hoc nature of traditional Islamic exegesis.39 The combination of these positive and negative assessments produced an affinity with the use of intuitive reason in the Muʿtazili thinking in order to discover the ethics encapsulated in the Qur’an, while blaming the anti-rationalist and overly deterministic attitudes of Ashʿari theologians for stripping humans of moral responsibility for their actions. Fazlur Rahman’s agreement with the notion of a created Qur’an, as argued by the Muʿtazila School, is grounded in his ‘critique of the “dictation theory” of revelation accepted by most Muslims’.40 To his mind, this invited too passive a view of prophecy, leaving the messenger with no agency but for acting as a receiver and transmitter. Instead, Fazlur Rahman proposed a more active and creative role for prophets in the revelatory process: ‘If the entire process occurs in [the prophet’s mind], then, in an ordinary sense, it is his word, insofar as the psychological process is concerned, but is Revealed Word insofar as its source lies beyond his reach’.41 He goes on to explain that, whereas ‘in terms of religious and moral import and valuation the Qur’an is something entirely sui generis and entirely separate from any other form of creative thinking’, the communicative side of revelation involves an encounter between the uncreated and eternal Transcendent and the created world of human existence.42 The resulting text is very much the linguistic product of the environment in which Muhammad and his audience were operating. This is the link between revelation and context which has been severed by later Islamic orthodoxy. Its rejection of the historicity of the Qur’an is to be blamed for equating the medium with the message issuing from divine transcendence. According to Fazlur Rahman, ‘revelation does not function outside history, and we must recognize this if we are to make a strong connection between the Qur’an and the community to which it was initially addressed’.43 Acknowledging that the early Islamic disciplines of tafsir and fiqh catered to some extent to this historicity through a subfield known as asbab al-nuzul (‘occasions of revelation’), in his own approach, Fazlur Rahman was influenced by the twentieth-century philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who conceived of it as capturing the whole of human experience of the world.44 Such a comprehensive conceptualization of the hermeneutical exercise resonates with Fazlur Rahman’s advocacy of understanding texts such as the Qur’an in their totality – that is to say, holistically and encapsulating a worldview. Of particular importance are two notions, which Gadamer developed in his seminal Truth and Method: ‘preunderstanding’ and ‘fusion of horizons’. New experiences can only be accounted for by taking into consideration humans’ familiarity with earlier experiences. To avoid their dismissal as ‘prejudices’ that need to be shed or avoided and accept them as valuable, Gadamer uses the term ‘preunderstanding’. This is particularly important when engaging with religious texts. These have been produced at a specific time and in a specific context, with preunderstandings different from those of later readers; each having their own ‘horizon’. Appreciation of (religious) texts requires a fusion of these horizons.

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However, Fazlur Rahman does not agree with all that Truth and Method has to offer and shows himself a distinctly modernist thinker resisting the postmodernism that shapes another of Gadamer’s concepts. In Islam and Modernity, he makes this explicit by siding with the Italian legal hermeneutician Emilio Betti, sharing his confidence in the possibility of an objective hermeneutics and rejecting Gadamer’s interpretation of ‘historically effected consciousness’ as ‘hopelessly subjective’.45 Gadamer’s view that the ‘effective history’ (Fazlur Rahman’s rendition) of any given tradition consists in an indefinite process of question and response without a fixed or privileged point undermines the method of ‘Double Movement’. According to Fazlur Rahman, traditions are modified in two distinct steps; a questioning of historical facts, followed by a response informed by the ethical evaluation of those facts, whereas Gadamer insists that these two movements are inseparable and indistinguishable. With his confidence in objectivity and the certainty of knowledge, Fazlur Rahman positions himself as a modernist. Fazlur Rahman’s work has inspired other Muslim intellectuals of successive younger generations, who have developed their own approaches and taken it into a variety of directions. For example, the South African scholar-activist Farid Esack and the African-American Muslim feminist Amina Wadud draw heavily on Fazlur Rahman for their emancipatory hermeneutics. While he is not very well known in Arabic-speaking parts of the Muslim world, he has exercised considerable influence among Indonesian and Turkish Muslims – not least because he has supervised the doctoral studies of prominent intellectuals from these two countries at the University of Chicago. Also, Fazlur Rahman’s methodology has made inroads in ‘Turkish University Theology’, where academics have used it to develop their own revisionist Qur’an hermeneutics. However, that influence involves mainly the application of Fazlur Rahman’s methods to substantive matters rather than that it has resulted in an improvement of his approach.46

A contrarian reading of the Qur’an A complete opposite interpretation of the Qur’an, grounded in a contrarian reading of the revealed text, has been presented by one of Sayyid Qutb’s contemporaries, Mahmud Muhammad Taha (1909–1985), a former independence activist, leader of the Sudanese Republican party and spiritual leader (referred to as the Ustadh). Like Sayyid Qutb, Taha was executed too – albeit that in his case, the charges of sedition and apostasy came from the Islamist Regime that was ruling Sudan in the 1980s. Mahmud Muhammad Taha’s approach of the Qur’an was very much influenced by his spiritual orientation and involvement with Sufism. While the act of divine revelation, or tanazzul, makes the Qur’an part of God’s essence, Taha also held the view that as an ‘event [it] involves the revelatory trinity of God, Gabriel, and Muhammad’, which could be expanded to ‘revelatory quaternity’

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on account of being addressed to all humankind past and present.47 At the same time, Taha cautioned his contemporaries to heed orthodox theological positions so as preserve the sanctity of the Qur’an. He also tried to extract himself from the contentious debate between proponents of a ‘created Qur’an’ (the Muʿtazila) and their detractors from the traditional and reactionary camps, advocating its eternity. Although Taha coins much of his interpretations in Sufi idiom, employing in particular the vocabulary of Ibn al-Arabi’s theory of the Unity of Being (wahdat al-wujud) and the idea that the Qur’an, aside from partaking in Divine essence, also represents the attributes of the ‘Perfect Human’ (al-insan alkamil) hypostatised through the ideal of Muhammad, it is nonetheless suggested that ‘it is evident that the camp to which he really belongs regarding this issue is that of the Muʿtazilites’.48 However, the real focus of Taha’s engagement with the Qur’an is not this type of theological questions or linguistic issues, such as the use of Arabic and the Qur’an’s inimitability (ʿijaz). For Taha, the Qur’an functions as a ‘book of guidance (huda)’, because the human condition is one of ‘alienation from God’ or forgetfulness of universal truths.49 It is therefore the content of the Qur’an that interests Taha and how it continues to speak to humankind. For this reason, he does not use terms like interpreting the Qur’an, but of God incessantly revealing himself. Although acknowledging that prophecy ended with the mission of Muhammad, Taha moves away from a prophet-centered revelation and approaches the Qur’an as ‘an open parallel deep text’ that brings together three themes: (1) the whole world is God’s ‘book’ and His ‘speech’, (2) mankind’s progress toward God is eternal, and (3) divine revelation is a continuous process as humans are engaged every single moment in learning from God.50 This conceptualization of the Qur’an as an educational tool is most evident from the book that led to Taha’s eventual undoing: The Second Message of Islam, first published in 1967 and appearing in English translation twenty years later.51 Its radical re-reading of the early history of Islam cast in an ‘evolutionary framework’ also offers a ‘gradualist cognitive strategy’.52 Taha presents Islam as the synthesis of a Hegelian triad in which Judaism constitutes the thesis and Christianity the anti-thesis. Pointing at the Qur’anic notion of the Muslims as the ‘community of the middle’ (umma al-wasat, Q II.143), Taha regards Islam as representing the intermediate position between the extremes of the legal principle of retribution found in Mosaic law and the excessive spirituality of Christianity. According to Taha, the Qur’an is a kind of Islamic Trinity, balancing the Judaic and Christian teachings in its first and second messages. However, Taha turns these two messages into a contrarian reading in the sense that it reverses the way in which the Islamic tradition understood the Qur’an. Whereas he accepts the conventional division of the Qur’an into revelations dating to the Meccan and Medinan periods respectively. Taha also adopts the Qur’anic references to the religious community around Muhammad as muslimin, those who have submitted (hat is to say formally embraced Islam), and mu’minin, or ‘believers’, meaning those who are truly committed and have internalized the faith.

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However, he challenges the interpretation that this chronology also represents a progression in religious understanding or spiritual attainment. Taha insists the opposite is true. Instead of regarding the verses revealed after the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622CE as more advanced and providing the necessary legislation for the formation of a distinct religious community, he suggests understanding the Medinan verses as a didactics. The deep spiritual message contained in the often mystical verses revealed to Muhammad in Mecca was too demanding for his followers. Thus, the elaborate Medinan verses provide the first message, offering both explanations of what was revealed in Mecca, while their legislative features resembling Judaic law must be considered as a form of discipline required for attaining the spiritual insights provided by the Meccan verses. Thus, the mu’minin addressed in the first message will eventually mature into true Muslims capable of comprehending the second message contained in the initial revelations from the Meccan period. Consequently, the ‘fundamental, primary, intrinsic, ultimate’ Meccan verses reflect the essence of Islam, while the Medinan ones are ‘subsidiary, secondary, temporary, provisional, transitional’.53 This means that legal rulings concerning jihad, slavery, the inequality between men and women, polygamy, and veiling can’t be considered ‘original precepts of Islam’.54 The impact of The Second Message is not felt so much in Qur’anic studies as a field of academic inquiry. Rather its emancipatory hermeneutics is acutely relevant in the political and juridical domains, and especially in relation to debates on human rights, as will be seen in a later chapter.

A scientific contemporary reading of the Qur’an In the Arabic-speaking parts of the Muslim world, one of the most prominent voices expressing new ways of engaging with the Qur’an is that of Muhammad Shahrur (b. 1938). In comparison to the other intellectuals featuring in this particular chapter, or in this book in general, the place he occupies is exceptional for a number of reasons. First of all, his professional academic expertise is not in the human but in the natural sciences. Shahrur trained in Moscow and Dublin as a civil engineer, specializing in foundational construction and soil investigations, before serving for more than twenty-five years as a professor at the University of Damascus and working as a consulting engineer throughout the Arab World. He only published his first Islam-related work in 1990.55 Entitled The Book and the Qur’an: A Contemporary Reading, it is unique both in the sense of Shahrur’s writing style and argumentation, as well as in the unprecedented impact it has made. The book went through multiple authorized and pirated editions, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers and creating massive controversy. As such it stands as an emblematic confirmation of the sea change that has been taking place throughout the Muslim world in the course of the 1990s. The ‘Shahrur phenomenon’ of the early 1990s prefigures Dale Eickelman’s earlier

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mentioned ‘Coming Transformation of the Muslim World’, in which established religious authority is challenged.56 While many of these new readers greeted Shahrur’s interpretation of the Qur’an with enthusiasm, it was also met with severe criticism and outright rejection. In the first five years since its publication, religious scholars – and later also other intellectuals – dedicated dozens of reviews, articles and eventually even entire monographs to The Book and the Qur’an. Regarded as an ‘unwelcome intruder’, Shahrur had to contend not only with ‘the massed opposition of almost the entire body of professional specialists’, he also did not receive any positive reactions from fellow scientists, while other controversial intellectuals such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd criticize his ‘methodological naïvité’.57 Consequently, Shahrur works without any institutional support. On the other hand, unlike Abu Zayd, Shahrur was never the subject of any formal investigation or official censure on the part of Syria’s state authorities, nor has there been any indication that, in spite of the hostility expressed in some commentaries, he has had to genuinely fear for his life.58 This may have had something to do with the secular nature of the Asad Regime and the control it has been able to exercise over Syrian society (although, since 2011, this changed dramatically). Like reformists such as Muhammad Abduh and Fazlur Rahman before him, also Muhammad Shahrur’s interpretation of the Qur’an forms an integral part of a broader epistemology seeking ‘to synthesize qur’anic with modern worldviews’.59 Displaying even more confidence in the project of modernity than Fazlur Rahman, an argument can be made to categorize Shahrur’s approach as a late instance of ‘scientific hermeneutics’, while on account of its boldness and idiosyncrasy, it could also be classified as a ‘revisionist hermeneutics’.60 What sets him apart from other progressive thinkers is that Shahrur’s approach is grounded in a distinctive conceptualization of religion, consisting in a linguistic– philosophical–mathematical analysis that can be schematized in the format of a ‘triple movement model’, rather than the Double Movement Theory used by Fazlur Rahman in his historical-critical hermeneutics.61 Shahrur distinguishes between general religion and particular religion. The Arabic vocabulary he uses is reminiscent of Mahmud Muhammad Taha’s terminology: The term al-islam is used for general religion, which is geared toward moral principles with eternal, and thus a-historical, validity that can be grasped by applying human reason. Al-iman refers to particular religion, in this instance Islam, which is ‘brought into existence during a limited period of time by a prophet’s appearance’.62 Thus, Shahrur shares Taha’s use of al-islam and aliman, as well as Fazlur Rahman’s distinction between the ideal and contingent aspects of religions. But Shahrur’s application and understanding are not based on a historicized interpretation, but on a philosophical understanding of religion that is heavily influenced by the neo-Kantian idealism of Alfred Whitehead and the logical positivism of Bertrand Russell, projecting ‘not the personal God of established religion, but a manifestation of an idea that represents the foundation of all existence’.63

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As rational ethical religion, al-islam is concerned with shaping the future of humankind on the basis of values that are intrinsic to human existence, which in turn consists of what Shahrur – drawing on mathematical terminology – calls the ‘three coordinates’ of ‘being’ (material existence), ‘progressing’ (time), and ‘becoming’ (change and development).64 This last dimension forms the teleological aspect in which life realizes its meaning, but that has been largely lost to Muslims because of the tradition’s preoccupation with ritualism and the neglect of the human faculty of reason in traditional Islamic learning. Shahrur scientifically inspired approach to religion in general and the notion of God also affects his conceptualization of prophethood. Revelation is not sent down by God to ‘chosen prophets’ and the latter are ‘not divinely charged geniuses’.65 In the case of Muhammad, as a prophet, he introduced his people to the objective truth of al-islam, but encoded in what was ‘then contemporary knowledge’, he was also the messenger of al-iman, bringing the text we refer to as the Qur’an.66 The uniqueness of Shahrur’s approach lies in the way he synthesizes this prophetology with his concept of God as an idea in his proposed contemporary reading of the Qur’an; an approach that was not appreciated by his critics: What they were unable to see is that Shahrur neither projected his philosophical thoughts into the Qur’an (a form of subjective eisegesis, they claimed) nor illegitimately extracted them from the Qur’an (a kind of dilettante misreading), because he always maintained that the Qur’an instead is part of the ontological, cosmological structure (discerned by philosophy) that exists outside the text.67 Aside from using Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica and Russell’s Mathematical Philosophy, Shahrur also draws on the analytical models provided by structural linguistics. The Qur’an as scripture is a closed communicative set, but its textual pattern must not be equated with its structure. The latter underlies the former, in the sense that it provides the hidden configurations of dialectical relationships between binary pairs, such as absolute and relative; object and subject; the eternal and temporal; divine and human. It explains the arrangements that give the text its meaning. In the Arabic title of his book, al-qur’an refers to those verses of the Islamic sacred scripture – also called Al-Qur’an (but capitalized) – that are to be considered as representing absolute, objective and eternal truths, while alkitab – derived from the scripture’s alternative name, umm al-kitab – refers to the historically contingent verses which are changeable and subject to human interpretation. This division of Qur’anic verses parallels the distinction between Muhammad’s role as a prophet communicating the intrinsically immutable truths of al-islam, and as a messenger of temporal and relative al-iman, consisting in particular rules pertaining to, for example, jurisprudence, administration or political conduct. Consequently, Shahrur no longer considers the Qur’an as Scripture in the conventional sense of the word, which needs to be unlocked hermeneutically by

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a qualified exegete, the ʿalim mufassir recruited from the establishment of religious scholars. Instead, the actual words of the Qur’an are but ‘vehicles of meanings that point to a nontextual structure to be discovered either in cosmos, nature, and history of all humankind (the universal laws of al-qur’an) or in the manifestation of humanity in concrete historical human societies (the contingent laws of umm al-kitab)’.68 To tease out these respective universal and contingent meanings, Shahrur again recoins existing Islamic jargon. The eternal and objective truths of al-islam, encapsulated in al-qur’an, are established through ta’wil, which in Shahrur’s parlay does not refer to metaphorical exegesis, but an increasingly sophisticated intellectual participation of humankind in absolute knowledge. The contingent laws of al-iman are to be deducted from those parts of the text referred to as umm al-kitab through a process of ijtihad. This is not to be understood as an exercise in adapting eternally valid rules to fit into the context of contemporary society, but establishing the underlying congruence between the two through the episteme of the epoch. It is for this very reason that al-qur’an and umm al-kitab verses appear together in the Qur’an/Book. Shahrur has schematized his idiosyncratic process of interpretation in a ‘triple movement model’. The first movement is to approach the Qur’an with a cognitive understanding of reality derived from the most up-to-date advances in both the natural and human sciences. The objective of Shahrur’s interpretation is not to come as close as possible to the semantics at the time of revelation, but the exact opposite. This is followed by a second movement, consisting in teasing out the correspondence or likeness (tashabuh) between the contemporary state of human knowledge with the al-qur’an verses, and the compatibility of the al-kitab verses with contemporary values and accepted codes of conduct. The third and final movement is to use this improved knowledge and understanding to move away from analyzing textual patterns toward comprehending the underlying structures, and adjust human behaviour accordingly. The controversy stirred by Shahrur lies not only in the ‘bitter anticlericalism and antitraditionalism’ that made him suggest to ‘categorically dispense with the ʿulama¯’s interpretation of the Qur’an’ (tafsir) and, instead, rely on the nonclerical intellectuals who are untouched by traditional scholarship’.69 Many among this latter category were sceptical of Shahrur’s simultaneous insistence that his ‘contemporary readings of the Qur’an [also] regard as irrelevant historical-critical studies of the Qur’an and any attempt to ask what the text meant to the original readers in seventh-century Arabia’.70 Apart from their irreconcilable boldness, such statements reflect a confidence in scientific positivism that strikes thinkers of the postmodern age as naïve, because they can’t be reconciled with more rigorous exercises in falsification and verification, ignoring the extent to which such self-assured understanding of the achievements of modernity remains indebted to a Judeo–Christian–Islamic theological worldview. The mention of scientific positivism and falsification theory in connection with Muhammad Shahrur recalls the epistemological orientation of the Iranian Abdolkarim Soroush; like Shahrur, an academic trained in the exact sciences.

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Indirect exegesis: how to understand revelation in post-revolutionary Iran: Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari and Abdolkarim Soroush Shaped by the ideas of senior clerics such as Ayatollahs Khomeini and Motahhari, as well as lay intellectuals like the sociologist Ali Shariʿati, since the revolution of 1979, the dominant Islamic discourse in Iran has significantly impacted on the parameters within which the Qur’an can be interpreted. Drawing on the Qur’anic notion of humankind as God’s vicegerents on earth (khalifa Allah fi’l-ard), human subjectivity is projected onto the attributes of the Divine, and thus made contingent on God’s subjectivity. The effects of this particular metaphysics on human agency have been termed ‘mediated subjectivity’.71 In addition, intellectuals are also confronted with the constraints imposed by the political-ideological underpinnings of the Iranian Islamic Republic. Consequently: [t]he contemporary Islamic discourse in Iran is no longer engaged primarily in a direct interpretation of Qur’anic verses […] post-revolutionary Islamic discourses, and especially those articulated by Mohamad Mojtahed Shabestari and Abdolkarim Soroush, have, by and large, refrained from interpreting the Qur’anic text directly.72 Initially, Abdolkarim Soroush’s engagement with the Qur’an and revelation in The Expansion of Prophetic Experience received little attention. But Soroush’s comparison of the Prophet Muhammad with a poet became known in Iran through translations from an interview with a Dutch magazine; this led to severe criticism.73 This delayed negative attention can be explained from the fact that the social and political climate had changed between the books original publication in 1999 and the circulation of the quotes in 2008, as well as the more explicit language used by Soroush in the interview, especially in regard to ‘the Prophet’s flaws and limitations’.74 The purport of Soroush’s book on the role of the prophet in the revelatory process is that it was a learning curve. Muhammad had to grow into his role as Messenger of God. To that end, Soroush inserted an anecdote taken from Ibn Khaldun, where the North African historian and former courtier suggests that the early Mecca revelations were so short, because Muhammad was not yet used to the prophetic experience and tired quickly. According to Soroush, this also explains the errors and contradictions found in the Qur’an. Just as a poet’s ability develops by the practice of writing, also a prophet expands and deepens his experience over time. For Soroush then, Prophethood is a formative experience, whereby the Prophet becomes more apt as both a ‘receptacle and generator’ of revelation, drawing both closer to God and developing his eloquence.75 This appears to reflect a negotiation between the Muʿtazili position regarding the createdness of the Qur’an, which is met with qualified toleration in Shiʿa theology

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and more explicitly embraced by Soroush himself, and his own mystical inclinations, evident not only from his frequent references to Rumi, but also from a statement like: The beloved Prophet of Islam was a human being and he acknowledged and was conscious of his humanity, but this human being had, at the same time acquired such a divine hue and quality – and the intermediaries (even Gabriel) had so fallen away from between him and God – that whatever he said was both earthly and divine; these two things were inseparable.76 This ‘humanization’ of Muhammad and mystical-poetical understanding of the revelatory process not only drew criticism from the religious establishment in Iran, but also from other Iranian religious intellectuals who otherwise share Soroush’s critical outlook. Mohsen Kadivar expressed concern that ‘it will end in the disintegration of religious New-thinking’, whereas Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd is said to have received with incredulity Soroush’s statements that the use of Arabic in the Qur’an is just an historical accident and that the text could very well have been more voluminous had the Muhammad lived longer.77 An intellectual historian characterized the book as ‘being on the edge of a razor blade between faith and heresy’.78 A more circumspect way of interpreting the Qur’an within the context of Iran’s highly charged political and intellectual climate has been developed by the cleric Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari. He regards Qur’anic exegesis as one of the ‘two main interpretative traditions in Islam’, alongside legal reasoning (ijtihad-e fiqhi).79 Like Fazlur Rahman, Shabestari grapples with reconciling the centrality accorded to human subjectivity in post-Hegelian philosophy with religious claims to the universal validity of divinely revealed scripture. In finding a solution for the challenges posed by the excessive relativism of postmodern thinking and the obstacles to intellectual freedom in Iran, Shabestari draws on both his solid grounding in traditional Islamic learning and his acquaintance with German theology and philosophy obtained during a nine-year stay in Hamburg. His intersubjective hermeneutics resonates not only with the dialectical Theory of Communicative Action of Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas; its subject–subject paradigm of an ‘I and Thou’ dialogue between humankind and the divine also seems to contain echoes of Martin Buber. While using existentialist categories such as ‘history’, ‘language’, ‘society’ and ‘body’, Shabestari remains more faithful to the theomorphic approaches of Khomeini, Motahhari and Shariʿati than Soroush in that he ‘calls for a migration from a “self” caught in these “prisons” toward divinity’. At the same time, he shares Soroush’s concern over the peril of ‘humans becoming God-like’.80 The tactic employed by Shabestari is laid out in his Hermeneutics: Book and Tradition. Because:

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every text is a hidden reality that has to be revealed through interpretation. The meaning of the text is produced in the act of interpretation. In reality, the text comes to speak by means of interpretation, and pour out what it contains inside.81 This way, revelation is placed in a dialogical relationship with the reader/interpreter, who seeks meaning by questioning the text. The prerequisite for such a relationship is a critical attitude on the part of the reader, recognizing interpretation as a matter of human volition. While these aspects resonate modern and postmodern European philosophers, such as Habermas, Gadamer and Ricoeur, also detectable in Shabestari’s hermeneutics are the influences of Muʿtazili linguistics and semiotics, which adhere to ‘the “conventional” character of signifiers, and the intentionality of the speech acts’, thus retaining a place for human agency.82 Aside from what can be called an indirect exegesis of the Qur’an text, the epistemological detour followed by Shabestari also applies to the contextualist dimension of his hermeneutics. Knowledge of God and his revelations is only possible in terms of the available human knowledge in a specific period in history, or what Foucault has termed the episteme of the epoch. It is in this dialogue between the two sides of the Qur’anic message that human subjectivity is subtly restored, as Shabestari has explained in another book, entitled Faith and Freedom. While the depth of divine existence will remain impenetrable, this does not make God ‘deny human existence’, nor does it mean that ultimate truth is inaccessible to human knowledge, only that a distinction needs to be made between ‘infinite’ and ‘finite’ truths.83 Ultimately, humanity finds its confirmation in this dialectics (called jedal in Persian) between divine revelation and human reason.84 Employing the same image as Khomeini, Motahhari and Shariʿati of humankind’s journey from material origins in nature to its spiritual attainment in God, Shabestari’s ontology does not follow them to their theomorphic conclusion, in which humankind as a metaphorical drop dissolves in the ocean of divinity. On the contrary, in Faith and Freedom, he continues that in its movement toward the Absolute, humanity finds its affirmation in freedom as its ‘authentic identity’, an expression of volition as ‘a will that wills itself’ and ‘sine qua non for modern subjectivity’.85 In conclusion, Shabestari’s approach to the Qur’an expands subjectivist elements into mediated subjectivity. His intersubjective hermeneutics functions as an epistemological detour in the form of a subtle dialectics that enables Shabestari to navigate between the extremes of subsuming human subjectivity in the divine while at the same time avoiding a form of harsh modern positivism that would challenge God’s sovereignty. By positing a dialogue between the divine author of the Qur’an and its human recipients, a subject-to-subject relationship is established, whereby the text becomes an object of interpretation by an exegete who retains his freedom.

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Notes 1 Katajun Amirpur, ‘The Expansion of the Prophet Experience: ʿAbdolkarīm Soru¯š’s New Approach to Qur’a¯nic Revelation’, Welt des Islams 51 (2011), 422–423. 2 Abdullah Saeed, ‘Some Reflections on the Contextualist Approach to Ethico-Legal Texts of the Quran’, Bulletin of SOAS 71:2 (2008), 222 and 223. 3 Erik Ohlander, ‘Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics’, Religion Compass 3/4 (2009), 620– 636. 4 Abdullah Saeed, ‘Some reflections in the Contextualist approach’, 226. 5 Ohlander, ‘Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics’, 623–624. 6 William Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), xxiv. 7 Ahmad S. Moussalli, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992), 35. 8 Sayyid Qutb, Al-Taswir al-Fanni fi’l-Qur’an (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1945). 9 Rachid Benzine, Les nouveaux penseurs de l’islam (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004), 149 [my translation]; Ohlander, ‘Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics’, 629. 10 Muhammad Khalafallah Al-Fann al-Qasasi fi al-Qur’an al-Karim [Narrative Art in the Qur’an] (Cairo: Maktaba al-Nahda al-Misriyya, 1957); Amin al-Khuli, Manahij Tajdid fi al-Nahw wa’l-Balagha wa’l-Tafsir wa’l-Adab [New Methods in Grammar, Rhetoric, Interpretation and Literature] (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1961). 11 Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid,[sic!] ‘Divine Attributes in the Qur’an: Some Poetic Aspects’ in Islam and Modernity: Muslim Intellectuals respond, eds. John Cooper, Ronald Nettler and Mohamed Mahmoud (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2000), 193. 12 Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid,[sic!] ‘Divine Attributes in the Qur’an: Some Poetic Aspects’ in Islam and Modernity: Muslim Intellectuals respond, eds. John Cooper, Ronald Nettler and Mohamed Mahmoud (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2000), 193. 13 Abu Zayd, Mafhum al-Nass, 219–241; Abu Zayd, Critique of Religious Discourse, 138–140. 14 Kermani, ‘From Revelation to Interpretation’, 172. 15 Abu Zayd, Mafhum al-Nass, 137–157. 16 Abu Zaid, ‘Divine Attributes in the Qur’an’, 206–207. 17 Kermani, ‘From Revelation to Interpretation’, 173 – citing from an English translation if Lotman’s The Structure of the Artistic Text. 18 Carool Kersten ‘Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd: An Introduction to his Life and Work’ in Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Critique of Religious Discourse. Naqd al-Khitab al-Dini. Translated by Jonathan Wright. With a Scholarly Introduction by Carool Kersten (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 11. Cf. also Stefan Wild, ‘Die andere Seite des Textes: Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd under der Koran’, Welt des Islams 33 (1993), 256–261 and Rachid Benzine, Les nouveaux penseurs de l’islam, 206–209. 19 Abu Zaid, ‘Divine Attributes in the Qur’an’, 194. 20 Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd, ‘The Dilemma of the Literary Approach to the Qur’an’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 23 (2003), 12. 21 Abu Zaid [sic!], ‘Divine Attributes in the Qur’an’, 195. 22 Kermani, ‘From Revelation to Interpretation’, 186, quoting from Harb’s Critique of the Text: Ali Harb, Naqd al-Nass (Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi, 1993). 23 Cf. Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 19 and 217. 24 Mohammed Arkoun, Lectures du Coran (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1982). 25 Mohammed Arkoun, La Pensée Arabe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), 117. 26 Arkoun, The Unthought, 262. 27 Arkoun, The Unthought, 71. 28 Arkoun, The Unthought, 80. 29 Arkoun, The Unthought, 45. 30 Arkoun, The Unthought, 81, 274.

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

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Arkoun, The Unthought, 58, 80. Arkoun, The Unthought, 84. Arkoun, The Unthought, 111–125. Arkoun, The Unthought, 70–71. Saeed, ‘Some reflections on the Contextualist Approach’, 225; Ohlander, ‘Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics’, 622–623; Victoria S. Harrison, ‘Hermeneutics, Religious Language and the Qur’an’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 21:3 (2010), 212. Ohlander, ‘Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics’, 622. Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 5–7. Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1980). Abdullah Saeed, ‘Fazlur Rahman: A Framework of Interpreting the Ethico-Legal Content of the Qur’an’ in Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an, ed. Suha TajiFarouki (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2004), 41. Saeed. ‘Fazlur Rahman’, 45. Fazlur Rahman, ‘Divine Revelation and the Prophet’, Hamdard Islamicus 1:2 (1978), 111 [sic!] quoted in Saeed, ‘Fazlur Rahman’, 46. Fazlur Rahman, ‘Divine Revelation and the Prophet’, 114, quoted in Saeed, ‘Fazlur Rahman’, 46. Saeed, ‘Fazlur Rahman’, 47. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London/New York: Continuum, 2004), 444–464. Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 9. Felix Körner, Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in Contemporary Turkish University Theology, 133. Mohamed A. Mahmoud, Quest for Divinity: A Critical Examination of the Thought of Mahmud Muhammad Taha (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 77. Mahmoud, Quest for Divinity, 85. Mahmoud, Quest for Divinity, 86. Mahmoud, Quest for Divinity, 97. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, The Second Message of Islam. Translation and Introduction by Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997). Mohamed Mahmoud, ‘Mahmud Muhammad Taha’s Second Message of Islam and His Modernist Project’ in Islam and Modernity: Muslim Intellectuals Respond (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 114 and Mahmoud, Quest for Divinity, 91. Mahmoud, Quest for Divinity, 143. Taha, The Second Message of Islam, 132–145. Muhammad Shahrur, Al-Kitab wa’l-Qur’an: Qira’a Muʿasira (Damascus: Dar al-Ahali li’l-Nashr wa’l-Tawziʿ, 1990). Peter B. Clarke, ‘The Shahrur Phenomenon: A liberal Islamic voice from Syria’, Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations 7:3 (1996), 337–341; Dale F. Eickelman, ‘The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World’, Middle East Review of International Affairs 3:3 (1999), 79. Andreas Christmann, ‘“The Form is Permanent, But the Content Moves”: The Qurʿanic Text and Its Interpretation(s) in Mohamad Shahrour’s al-Kitab wal-Qurʿan’ in Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an, ed. Suha Taji-Farouki (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2004), 265–266. For a very detailed inventory and commentary on the reception of The Book and the Qur’an, cf. Andreas Christmann, ‘“Read the Qur’an as if It Was revealed Last Night”: An Introduction to Muhammad Shahrur’s Life and Work’ in The Qur’an,

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

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Morality and Critical Reason: The Essential Muhammad Shahrur, ed. Andreas Christmann (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), xxiii–xxvii. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxviii. Ohlander, ‘Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics’, 625, 630. Christmann, ‘Reading the Qur’an’, xxxviii. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxviii. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxix. Shahrur, ‘Introduction’ in The Qur’an, Morality and Critical Reason, 11 and Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxix. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxxi. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxviii–xxix; Shahrur, ‘Introduction’, 2. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxxiii (original italics). Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxxvi. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxxii–xxxiii. Christmann, ‘Read the Qur’an’, xxxviii. Farzin Vahdat, ‘Post-revolutionary Islamic modernity in Iran’, 197. Vahdat, ‘Post-revolutionary Islamic modernity in Iran’, 193–194. Abdolkarim Soru¯š, The Expansion of Prophetic Experience: Essays on Historicity, Contingency and Plurality in Religion, Nilou Mobasser (trans.), ed. Forough Jahanbakhsh (Leiden: Brill, 2009), originally published in Persian 1999 as Bast-ẹ Tağrobe-ye nabavī. Soru¯š, The Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 10 – mentioned by Amirpur, ‘The Expansion of Prophetic Experience’, 424. Amirpur, ‘The Expansion of Prophetic Experience’, 425. Soru¯š, The Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 289. Amirpur, ‘The Expansion of Prophetic Experience’, 434–435. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Islam (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 226. Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 175. Vahdat, ‘Post-revolutionary Islamic modernity in Iran’, 200. Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Hermenutik, Ketab va Sunnat: Farayand-e tafsir-e vahy (Tehran: Tarh-e Naw, 1996), 15; quoted in Vahdat, ‘Post-revolutionary Islamic modernity in Iran’, 201. Vahdat, ‘Post-revolutionary Islamic modernity in Iran’, 202. Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Iman va Azadi, 112; quoted in Vahdat, ‘Postrevolutionary Islamic modernity in Iran’, 204. Cf. also Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd’s use of jadl (p. 40 above). Shabestari, Iman va Azadi, 33, quoted in Vahdat, ‘Post-revolutionary Islamic modernity in Iran’, 27.

4 SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM THOUGHT Sufism today: psychology, literature, and Islamization of knowledge

The acquisition of religious knowledge is not confined to the domains of transmission and reason alone; there is a spiritual dimension attached to it too. While manifesting itself in various forms, it emphasizes a highly personal, intimate and inward experience of the encounter between the individual believer and the transcendent. In Islamic history, the key manifestation of this internalization of a Muslim’s faith, and giving expression to that inward turn, is known as tasawwuf, or Sufism in English. Over time, such activities were also pursued collectively, as is evinced by the existence of mystical or Sufi orders, called tariqa in Arabic. Emerging from the twelfth century onward, they are still active today. Some orders are confined to particular regions, but others have developed into transnational brotherhoods, with followings across the Muslim world and in communities elsewhere. Historically, they have been very important for holding together the social fabric of the Muslim world after the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, and as an outlet for piety and devotion among the largely illiterate masses. In more recent times, some orders have adapted or reinvented themselves in order to remain relevant to the concerns of present-day Muslims. This does not mean that Sufism is per se non-intellectual; in this regard, the distinction between the Arabic words for religious knowledge used in Islamic contexts – ʿilm (generic word for knowledge), hikma (wisdom), ishraq (illuminationism) and maʿrifa (gnosis) – becomes blurred. The spiritual path is also often referred to as the search for beauty, ihsan in Arabic. This understanding of beauty refers not solely to aesthetics (its Greek etymology refers to sensory perception, therefore dealing with form and taste). Instead, pointing to an understanding that transcends both islam, outward submission, and iman, ihsan is considered the highest level of piety and insight. The significance of the meditative and contemplative activities associated with the spiritual path is also

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illustrated by another set of three terms that refer to successive levels of religious commitment and attainment: shariʿa (observance of the law), tariqa (following the spiritual path) and haqiqa (grasping Reality). Muslim intellectuals, past and present, have translated this integration of piety, knowledge and insight into philosophical interpretations captured under the name theosophy. Not unlike the rapturous statements (shatahat) made by some early ecstatic Sufis, such as Abu Yazid al-Bistami (804–874) and al-Hallaj (858–922), the later development of philosophical Sufism by the likes of Abd al-Karim Abu al-Qasim al-Qushayri (987–1073), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240) and Abu Muhammad ibn Sabʿin (1217–1271) exhibit a creative merging of the intellectual and the imaginary. Such forays have often had a sceptical reception; meeting with suspicion, leading to controversy, even resulting in outright rejection. For example, in the case of al-Hallaj, it ended with his execution on charges of heresy. In another instance, there followed centuries of debate about how to understand the notion of ‘unity of being’ (wahdat al-wujud), evolving out of the work of Ibn Sabʿin and Ibn al-Arabi. Islamic reformists and Muslim modernists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were also highly critical of certain manifestations of popular piety, such as shrine visits and other practices in which the intercession of holy men (such as founders of Sufi orders and other saintly figures) was sought. In reality, facing internal and external challenges, the relationship between Sufism and Islamic reformism and modernism was ambiguous, and much more intertwined than the dichotomies or binary oppositions projected by both some interlocutors in these complex processes, and by scholars who have studied them. The attitudes of Islamic reformers ranged from qualified acceptance of ‘sober’ Sufism by Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) to virulent demonization by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamaat-i Islami, Hasan al-Banna and Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi, were as critical of Sufism as their ideological progenitors. At the same time, they were not just very familiar with Sufi orders: ‘From their writings it is quite clear that they admired the organizational strength of Sufi orders, and they acted in relation to their followers with the charisma of a Sufi master in the company of disciples’.1 While it may be so that, in dealing with the strains of modernization, ‘Sufis themselves actually reinforced perceptions that their traditions were incompatible with modernity, presenting themselves as anti-modernist and anti-reformist’, it is also the case that in places as diverse as Chechnya and Central Asia, Libya, the Sudan and Turkey, from the late nineteenth century onward, Sufis led resistance against imperialism; played a role in maintaining the structural integrity of their societies; and contributed to nation building in the transition from colonialism to independence.2 Consequently, ‘the political attitude of colonial regimes toward Sufi groups is an interesting prefiguration of the depictions of modern fundamentalist groups in the mass media and military intelligence reports’.3

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Negative attitudes are not only found on the reactionary side of the spectrum, also otherwise progressive thinkers have expressed reservations. Muslim philosophers, such as Muhammad Iqbal and Aziz Lahbabi, had ambivalent views. As a modernist thinker, Iqbal associated the work of the Persian Poet Hafiz (Hafez, 1325–1390) with the ‘negative Islam’ that was responsible for what he perceived as the pervading passivity and fatalism in the Muslim world. According to leading Sufi expert Carl Ernst, ‘Iqbal’s attack on Hafiz was emblematic of the modernist discomfort with mysticism’.4 However, in his own literary writings, Iqbal was very much preoccupied with the spiritual dimensions of selfhood. Similarly, Lahbabi combines his criticism of Sufism with a preoccupation with personalism and humanism. In modern and postmodern times, this continuing engagement in meditation or communal spiritual practices, which had evolved over centuries, has given rise to new exponents of Sufism and other manifestations of Muslim spirituality, some of which reject or resist the onslaught of modernity, while others explore constructive and creative syntheses. In Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell present a worldwide survey with examples illustrating that ‘the Sufi heritage of Islam is actually manifest in the contemporary social world’ inhabited by Muslims today.5 In regards to the earlier signalled ambiguities, they point at the role of Chechen Sufi orders acting as forces of ‘opposition to the Kremlin and as vehicles for pro-Russian rapprochement’.6 Among Turkish-speaking Muslims worldwide, both the traditional Naqshbandi-Haqqani order and followers of Said Nursi (the Nurcus) remain relevant because they have managed to successfully adapt to changing social and political conditions. A related phenomenon is the urban Sufism that attracts the westernized bourgeoisie and elite urbanites from Morocco to Indonesia. Frequently, these socially upwardly mobile city dwellers have experimented with other religions and new religious movements, to which they were often exposed during studies abroad. The resulting ‘new Sufi networks’ include both established Sufi orders and other ‘spiritual service providers’. As a result, van Bruinessen and Howell conclude that ‘it is impossible to make a strict separation between Sufi groups and New Age-type movements’ – a conclusion that echoes what Ernst observed ‘in the realm of popular culture, where Sufism has been assimilated to generic New Age spirituality’.7 Such syntheses or hybridizations also characterize the excursions into Sufism by Westerners, which can involve a formal conversion to Islam or not. This phenomenon has also played an important role in the emergence, in the course of the first half of the twentieth century, of what is interchangeably referred as ‘Traditionalism’ and ‘Perennial Philosophy’ (Sophia Perennis): [a] response to colonialism and modernism that has been adopted by European converts to Islam and by intellectuals from Muslim countries as well. This school of thought, as represented by René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon,

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and S.H. Nasr, proposes a primordial divine tradition as the source of all religions, compared to which the secular modern world is a deviation and degeneration. […] The traditionalist perspective has also proven attractive to thinkers such as Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith.8 Other Muslim intellectuals opted for different approaches; developing holistic epistemologies that seek to reconcile modern advances in the natural and human sciences with spiritual contemplation. Illustrative exponents of this are projects that have become known under the name ‘Islamization of knowledge’. In other instances, parallels between Sufi understandings of the human mind or soul and psychoanalysis have given rise to an understanding of ‘modern Sufism as a “theoretical stance in its own right,” one that encompasses an ethicophilosophical orientation and a phenomenological pathway of subjective experience at one and the same time’.9 This discourse developed along different tracks, one involving professional psychologists and psychoanalysts. This includes the work of Yusuf Murad (1902–1966), whom Mahmud Amin al-Alim had called the ‘philosopher of integration’, in reference to Murad’s ‘integrative psychology’ drawing on Gestalt Theory and the Sufi psychologies of al-Ghazali and Ibn al-Arabi.10 The Paris-based Tunisian analyst Fethi Benslama (b. 1951) and the Syrian writer George Tarabishi (1939–2016) have used psychoanalysis in their critiques of radical Islamists and heritage thinkers, respectively.11 Another trajectory is pursued by intellectuals with direct Sufi connections and will be examined in some more detail below. Another domain where the relationship between religion and individual or self is explored is literature and life-writing. This is evinced by the interest in the classics of Sufi poetry among European intellectuals, which can be traced to the Enlightenment; the featuring of Sufism as a trope in contemporary novels; and innovative ways of exploring spirituality in the new formats provided by information technology, such as blogs or social media platforms. Rights-based, rather than duty-bound, interpretations of religion makes contemporary Muslims become increasingly and more acutely concerned with individuality and the possibility of expressing their personal experiences with the faith, which not only include delight and rapture, but can lead to raising questions, venting doubts and frustrations as well.

Critiques of modernism: the connections between modern-day Sufism and traditionalism As a response to the challenges of the modern world, Traditionalism must be emphatically set apart from those other Muslim reactions advocating a return to the early community around Muhammad, because these latter reactionaries have shown themselves equally hostile to Sufism as to modernity. Emerging in the first half of the twentieth century, initially, Traditionalist discourses were formulated by Europeans, who articulated their reservations about

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or outright opposition to the way in which the modern world was developing by turning to ancient ‘wisdom traditions’; not only from the pre-Christian Mediterranean, medieval Christian mysticism or Christianity-inspired esotericism, but also the Near East and Egypt, India, China and even the native Americans. Where it concerned Islam, they were particularly interested in Sufism. Instrumental to the Sufi turn in Traditionalism was the French writer René Guénon (also Known as Abd al-Wahid Yahya, 1886–1951). After his early involvement in the esoteric Christian Martinist order and Gnostic Church, subsequent readings and publications on the Indian Vedanta and Chinese Taoism, as well as initiations into Freemasonry and the Shadhiliyya Sufi order by the Swedish convert Ivan Aguéli (also known as Abd al-Hadi Aqili, 1869–1917), in 1930, Guénon took a decisive step by leaving France for Egypt. Settling down in Cairo, he continued his writings, while adopting the conduct and practices of an observant Muslim as his personal lifestyle. He published occasionally in an Islamic periodical with a Sufi slant, called Al-Marifa and edited by Mustafa Abd al-Raziq (1885–1947), who served as the Shaykh Al-Azhar from 1945 until 1947. Guénon also maintained contacts with another future Shaykh al-Azhar (1973–1978), Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910–1978). Mahmud was actively interested in Sufism and his publications on the intellectual dimensions of Sufism betrayed the influence of al-Ghazali. He challenged depictions of Sufism as mere superstition, arguing that maʿrifa, or gnosis, constituted a sound metaphysical science for dealing with an intellectual realm inaccessible to sense perception and deductive or inductive reasoning. Other followers and readers of Guénon during his Egyptian period included the French writer André Gide (1869–1951), the British Sufi and scholar of Islam Martin Lings (also known as Abu Bakr Siraj al-Din, 1909–2005), and especially Frithjof Schuon (also known as Isa Nur al-Din, 1907–1998). Twenty years younger than Guénon, and of German–French parentage, before becoming a Swiss citizen, Schuon had followed a similar trajectory. Reading widely about philosophy and religion (including Guénon’s writings), and being initiated in the order of the Algerian Sufi Ahmad al-Alawi (1869–1934), Schuon travelled widely and eventually settled down in the United States. In relation to Sufism, Schuon was less concerned with the outward or exoteric (zahiri in Arabic) aspects of Islam than Guénon, who insisted that ‘not only must esoteric practice take place in an orthodox exoteric framework, but the two must coincide’.12 Apart from writing about Sufism from a more universal Traditionalist standpoint, Schuon established a Sufi order of his own: the Maryamiyya. Initially founded as a sub-branch of the Shadhiliyya-Alawiyya lineage, from the 1960s, it continued as a generic Traditionalist rather than Islamic Sufi order.13 Aside from Guénon and Schuon’s Traditionalism, also the academic scholarship of certain French Orientalists has contributed to the shaping of modern-day Sufi discourses. Louis Massignon (1883–1962) wrote a magisterial study of alHallaj, but his personal spiritual quest led him to be ordained a Melkite Greek Catholic priest. However, learning of the encounter between Francis of Assisi

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and the Egyptian Mamluk Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, he founded the so-called Badaliya Prayer Association whose members took the vow of ‘substitution’ (badil in Arabic); living as Christians for the sake of Muslims.14 Among Massignon’s students at the Écolepratique des hautesétudes (EPHS) were the earlier mentioned Sufi and Al-Azhar scholar Abd al-Halim Mahmud and the Iranian sociologist Ali Shariʿati In 1954, Massignon’s chair at EPHS was taken over by the philosopher and Persianist Henri Corbin (1903–1978). An authority on the illuminationism of Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191) and the Sufi philosophy of Ibn al-ʿArabi. Later, Corbin also became interested in the thought of Sadr alDın Muhammad Shirazi (also known as Mulla Sadra.15 Aside from his professorship in Paris, from the mid-1950s until 1979, Corbin taught autumn semesters in Tehran, where he established a close relationship with the Ayatollah Tabataba’i and came to know Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933). A member of the Iranian elite, Nasr’s father was a one-time minister of education who had sent his son to high school in the United States, followed by undergraduate studies in geology and geophysics at MIT. There Nasr attended the classes of the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer (who had learned Sanskrit because of his interest in Hindu texts) and of the philosopher Giorgio de Santillana, through whom he became acquainted with philosophies ranging from the third-century neo-Platonist Plotinus to the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). He also met Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and the widow of British-Sri Lankan Traditionalist Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), in whose library Nasr became acquainted with the writings of Guénon, Schuon and yet another Traditionalist: Titus Burckhardt (1908–1984). Especially the encounters with Oppenheimer and Russell contributed to Nasr’s loss of confidence in what physics could explain about reality, leading to a spiritual and intellectual crisis that was resolved by his introduction to Traditionalism and Perennialism. It was also during this period that Nasr too joined the Maryamiyya Sufi order.16 As a result of this exposure to a wide variety of intellectual influences, Nasr resolved to pursue postgraduate studies in the philosophy of science and in Islamic philosophy, completing a PhD at Harvard in 1958. After his return to Iran, Seyyed Hossein Nasr continued his philosophical studies under the directions of, among others, Ayatollah Tabataba’i. Until the revolution of 1979, he taught philosophy of science and Islamic philosophy at Tehran University. During this period, he also published a number of books in English that were translated into Persian, Turkish, Malay and a number of European languages. Of particular significance in the present context are Three Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi and An Introduction to Islamic Cosmologies (both appearing 1964); The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (1968); and Sufi Essays (1972). Under the personal patronage of Empress Farah Diba, in 1974, Nasr founded the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, which also issued a bilingual English-Persian journal called Sophia Perennis/Javidan Kherad. Among the most prominent scholars hosted by the Academy were Ayatollah Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani (1925–2005), Henri Corbin,

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the philosopher and expert on Indian religions and philosophies, Daryush Shayegan (1935–2018), as well as the American Rumi and Ibn al-Arabi expert William Chittick (b. 1943), who completed his PhD under the direction of Nasr. Nasr’s close connections with the Shah forced him into exile in the United States, while Shayegan traded Tehran for Paris. Also in America, while at Temple University and George Washington University, Nasr continued with his work on Sufism, both in the broader context of his general interest in ‘wisdom traditions’ and, specifically, as part of presenting Shiʿa contributions to the field: Islamic Spirituality appeared in 1987 as a volume in a series on world spirituality; a year later, he co-edited with his son Vali and Hamid Dabashi Shi’ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality.17 In Nasr’s absence, Traditionalism continued to be represented in post-revolutionary Iran through Ashtiyani’s teachings of the philosophy of Mulla Sadra – which contained elements from the thought of Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi’s illuminationism, and the metaphysics of Ibn al-ʿArabi. In a more circumspect way, Nasr’s Traditionalism also continued to exercise influence on Abdolkarim Soroush and his interlocutor in a debate on Sufism, the philosopher Reza Davari Ardakani (b. 1933). As mentioned above, several Europeans received their initiation into Sufi orders in North Africa. The reverse has occurred as well: Traditionalistperennialist ideas being absorbed by locals associated with Sufi Orders. In Morocco, members of the Budshishiyya (also spelled Boutchichi) order played a prominent role in this process. Founded in 1942 as a sub-branch of the Qadiriyya by Abu Madyanibn Munawwar al-Budshish (Boumediene Boutchich, 1873–1955), under the direction of its long-serving murshid, or spiritual guide, Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boutchichi (1922–2017), the order transformed itself from a rural into an urban order addressing city-based liberal professionals and students, as well as the Francophone elite: Initially, a tabarrukiyya brotherhood, i.e. one focused on the acquisition of blessing and confined to a religious elite whose activities revolved around prayer and meditation, the Budshishiyya evolved into an actively proselytizing tarbawiyya brotherhood, i.e. a mass movement concentrating on the moral education of its recruits.18 A key figure in this transformation and the order’s recruitment among secularized middle classes was Shaykh Abdesslam Yassine (1928–2012), who later left Budshishiyya for the ‘Justice & Spirituality Association’ (Jamaʿa al-ʿAdlwa’l-Ihsan). Crucial contributions have also been made by Faouzi Skali (Fawzy Sqali, b. 1953), a French-trained anthropologist and founder of the Fez Festival of Sacred Music in the World. Although both his grandfathers were ʿulama at the Qarawiyyin mosque-university in Fez and members of the Khalwatiyya Sufi order, Skali received a Francophone education and was first interested in Taoism, before turning to Islam during his student time in Paris. He only discovered the Budshishiyya after reading the work of Guénon and Abd al-Halim

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Mahmud, becoming a muqaddam or local branch leader.19 Skali’s influence rests in his ability to reformulate Sufism in a language ‘emphasizing the importance of inner experience, humanism and dialogue’, also found in other contemporary spiritualities, through books, a glossy magazine called Al-Ishara (‘The Sign’), and several websites.20

Integrating the intellectual and spiritual: Islamization of knowledge and Sufi psychology Nasr’s background in physics combined with his disillusionment with the materialist and positivist orientation that dominates modern scientific pursuits and scholarship connect him also to what has become known as the ‘Islamization of knowledge’. As part of a broader effort to reconnect contemporary Muslims with spirituality, it seeks to rehabilitate what Nasr calls ‘sacred science’.21 Emerging in the 1970s, it forms a distinct discourse situated on the interstices of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science and spirituality. Although Nasr had already touched on the subject in 1968, in Science and Civilization, he laid out his vision in another book that has defined his post-1979 career: Knowledge and the Sacred (1981), which is based on the prestigious Gifford Lectures he gave in Edinburgh that same year. The proposed merging of Islamic and Traditionalist values as the starting point in his formulation of an alternative Islamic science was already prefigured in the earlier mentioned Man and Nature, where he also demonstrates an interest in ecological issues to be discussed in a later chapter. Central to Nasr’s view of how scientific research and study should function in today’s Muslim world is that ‘the metaphysical and religious bases of that civilization, the Islamic sciences, as already mentioned, have always echoed and reflected the central Islamic doctrine of unity (tawhid)’.22 Nasr’s later elaboration of this view has been paraphrased as: Tradition signifies all that is sacred and revealed to man through revelation, and that what he characterizes as the unfolding and development of the sacred message for a specific part of humanity. This is part of a horizontal or this-worldly continuity which is paralleled with a vertical connection to the divine. The latter functions as a metaphysical bond integrating the affairs of the world, e.g. relations between human beings and society – the horizontal – with the sacred. Hence, the function of the vertical connection is to embrace all activities of the tradition and relate it to a ‘meta-historical Transcendent. Reality’. Tradition is, according to him, ad-dın (the religion). This term comprises all aspects of religion and that what he describes as its sacred models or ‘ramifications’, as-sunna. All fields of the traditional world is attached to the origin by the chain (assilsila) which is clearly seen in Sufism. Nasr sees Islam as ad-dın al-hanıf (the primordial religion). He claims that this conclusion is founded on Islam’s doctrine of unity, which every religion was ultimately based on.23

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For Nasr, the acquisition of scientific knowledge is not an end in itself, but an integral part of the attainment of spiritual perfection by the individual involved. The distinction between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Islam, its connection with primordial religion, and the integrative working of the notion of tawhid strongly resonate with the thinking of Nurcholish Madjid discussed in an earlier chapter. Although, as a mature intellectual, Madjid became increasingly appreciative of the Islamic tradition, there is no indication that he was a Traditionalist or Perennialist, nor was he involved in the Islamization of knowledge endeavour. He did, however, influence the development of an Indonesian strand of urban Sufism, which will be discussed later in this chapter. The most sustained interest in the Islamization of knowledge project is found in another Southeast Asian Muslim country: Malaysia, where the discourse was developed along several tracks. There, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s thought exercises its influence there through his student Osman Bakar (b. 1946). Originally trained as a mathematician in England, he became interested in the relation between philosophy and religion. After reading Nasr’s books, Bakar interrupted his academic career as a lecturer in algebra to study the philosophy of science with Nasr at Temple University in the United States, concentrating on the writings of al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, and the Persian polymath and poet Qutb al-Din alShirazi (1236–1311). Stenberg proposes that both Nasr and Bakar can be characterized as ‘Perennialists’, while Sedgwick adds that Bakar is most likely also an initiate of the Maryamiyya order.24 Obtaining a PhD in 1981, which was later published in book form as Classification of Knowledge in Islam, Bakar returned to Malaysia, where he has had a distinguished academic career; serving as Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Malaya and Deputy Chief Executive of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) in Kuala Lumpur.25 At the time of writing, he is Director of the Sultan Omar ‘Ali Saifuddien Centre for Islamic Studies (SOASCIS) at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. A prolific author, many of his books, including the influential Tawhid and Science, have been translated into numerous languages.26 Another approach to the Islamization of knowledge that became influential in Malaysia was actually proposed by a British-Pakistani Muslim, Ziauddin Sardar. Like Nasr and Bakar, also Sardar has a science background, but he does not share their Traditionalist or Perennialist orientation. On the contrary, in his younger years, Sardar was influenced by the idea of a totalizing Islamic worldview as expounded by Sayyid Qutb and Mawdudi, and some of his early collaborators leaned politically toward Trotskyism. In the context of his take on the Islamization of knowledge, Sardar coined an alternative term for the notion of beauty that is used in Sufi discourses: Instead of ihsan, he speaks of idjmali (adapted from the Arabic ajmal): In his view the root form dj-m-l denotes ‘beauty’ and ‘wholeness’. Idjma¯lī ‘captures the substance of synthesis with the style of aesthetics’. In the mid-1980s, Sardar and others introduced the term idjma¯lī not only to

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describe their views in the discourse about the Islamization of science, but also to describe their position on questions concerning Islam and Muslims on the whole.27 A further contrast with Nasr and Bakar is that Sardar’s project lacks the Sufi dimension and is characterized by a social scientific orientation.28 In fact, he is equally critical of ‘official and traditional Islamic education promoting taqlıd’, which to him represents a stale and outdated form of Islam of ‘instrumentalism’; that is the ‘uncritical introduction of science and technology without, for example, any ethical considerations’.29 Also, Sardar is no professional academic; aside from having been active in several Muslim associations and institutes, he has always made a living as a writer and broadcaster. Aside from attributing a central role to al-Ghazali as the emblematic figure representative of ‘the Islamic principle of the unity of all knowledge’, rather than on Sufis, Sardar draws on other classical scholars, such as the polymath al-Biruni (d. 1050) and the historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406).30 The Malaysian connection of Sardar’s Islamization of knowledge initiative came about because of his relationship with the politician Anwar Ibrahim (b. 1947), who, during his stint as education minister (1986–1991), facilitated support for Sardar’s project.31 Despite this high-level government support, in the course of the 1990s, Sardar’s attention shifted away from the Islamization of knowledge. The interest in formulating a specifically Islamic variant of the social sciences was continued by others, including a son of Syed Hussein Alatas, the Singapore-based sociologist Syed Farid Alatas (b. 1961), who has been involved in developing a Khaldunian framework for social historical research, writing two monographs and countless articles about Ibn Khaldun and his thought.32 The Islamization of knowledge project with the most sustained impact, and – like Sardar’s – also primarily geared toward the social sciences and educational reform, is that of Ismaʿil Raji al-Faruqi (1921–1986): The man who claimed being the first one to have incepted such an initiative, and having coined the term itself. This has been contested by another Malaysian intellectual Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (b. 1931) leading to a polemic exchange between the two.33 A Palestinian-born former government administrator-turnedacademic, working (like Nasr) at Temple University in Philadelphia, al-Faruqi established the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Founded in 1981, it is headquartered just outside Washington DC, but now has offices across the world. This institute became the vehicle for an education and research programme that proposes an alternative approach to the study and teaching about Islam and Muslims.34 Al-Faruqi’s approach to the Islamization of knowledge stood in stark contrast to the approaches of other contributors, as his former colleague Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains: Isma‘il al Faruqi’s espousal of a certain kind of what one might call ‘neosalafism’ – emphasizing the teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah and his students,

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and continuing it with a rationalism which emphasized only the transcendence of God at the expense of His nearness and imminence – caused him to reject the whole tradition of Islamic philosophy, while emphasizing the sciences which were so closely wed to it, as well as opposing most of the religious thought of both Shi‘ism and Sufism.35 A very different inception of reconciling the spiritual and intellectual in Islamic contexts was developed by Egyptian intellectuals familiar with Freud, psychoanalysis and psychology in general. Before his Islamist turn, Sayyid Qutb had made reference to the Freudian notion of the unconscious (al-la-shuʿur in Arabic) in his book on literary criticism.36 This was part of a broader trend of thinking about selfhood, individuality and the person that challenged the supposed irreconcilability of Islam and modern psychology: […] the new science of the self that emerged drew both from Freudianism and other psychoanalytical traditions, as well as from key classical Islamic thinkers, such as Avicenna (d. 1037), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209), and most extensively, Ibn Arabi (d. 1240). This contemporaneity of classical Islamic texts, coexisting, intermingling with psychoanalytical models, allows us to trace the epistemological resonances of discursive traditions as they come into contact.37 Inversely, a link between psychoanalysis and Sufism can be traced to the entourage of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), whose psychoanalytical model was more accommodating to religion than that of its progenitor, Sigmund Freud, as it conceived ‘the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion through the prism of ethical being, being for the other’.38 Lacan was introduced to Ibn alArabi by the Egyptian-French psychoanalyst Moustapha Safouan (b. 1921), who had studied with Abu’l-ʿAla Afifi (1897–1966), a philosopher specializing in ‘the medieval mystic’s conception of psychology’.39 His subsequent reading of Corbin’s writings about Ibn al-Arabi perception of an imaginal world as an intermediate realm between the spiritual and corporeal world played an important role in Lacan’s adoption of the idea of the imaginary.40 The most significant intervention in bringing modern psychology and Sufism together was made by Abu’l-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani (1930–1993), a Shaykh of the Ghunaymiyya order and a professor of Islamic philosophy and Sufism at Cairo University. Al-Taftazani had been a student of the philosopher Muhammad Mustafa Hilmi (1904–1969), who in turn was mentored by Mustafa Abd al-Raziq, the earlier mentioned Azhar Shaykh and editor of the journal AlMarifa. This made al-Taftazani part of ‘a wider trend that sought to integrate Sufism within both mainstream orthodox Islam and academic discourses’.41 Sufi thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century have indicated several points of contact between psychoanalysis and Sufism: In the realm of dream interpretation; the parallel between the Sufi master-disciple and therapist –analysand

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relationships; and between the Sufi’s loosening of his relation with reason and the decentering of the subject from autonomy and rational consciousness in Freudian theories. Al-Taftazani saw it as his mission to reintroduce figures, such as Ibn alArabi, Ibn Sabʿin, and the lesser known Sufi Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari (1260–1309), into orthodox Sufism ‘through psychological theories that excluded their more heterodox formulations as the product of peak or ecstatic experiences for which they were not responsible’.42 In his writings on Sufi psychology, al-Taftazani points at the similarity between Ghazali’s ‘architecture of the self’, as a network of soul (nafs), spirit (ruh), heart (qalb) and inner secret (sirr), and Freudian concepts of conscious and unconscious as the ‘seat of subjectivity’.43 In contrast to the negative depictions of the soul by al-Qushayri and Ibn al-Arabi as dark and sick, al-Iskandari dismissed this essentialist singularity, suggesting instead an oscillation between ‘bodily and spiritual manifestations, functioning as a barzakh or isthmus between spirit and matter’.44 This matched with the mainstream Sufi depictions of soul as the human ego and spirit as the Divine Other, merging in the heart, which – according to al-Taftazani – is where gnosis resides. The inner secret, finally, is the location of what he refers to as ‘seeing’ (mushahada), an epistemologically different kind of knowledge than is attained by reason.45 Al-Taftazani has developed a complex ‘phenomenology of mysticism’. Distinguishing between psychological and affective states, the Sufi path (tariqa) is not sequentially progressive, but a matter of harmonization. Al-Taftazani illustrates this by drawing a parallel between the six Sufi stations (maqamat) identified by al-Qushayri (knowledge, certainty, confirmation, sincerity, immediate witnessing and full obedience) and his repentance, asceticism, patience, thankfulness, love and gnosis, complemented with the affective states of joy, sadness and simplicity.46 Referred to it as a jihad al-nafs, or self-struggle, a battle against tendencies that undermine the desired moral and spiritual principles, al-Taftazani has characterized the psychological journey of self-improvement as ‘a form of sublimation, thereby directly engaging with the psychoanalytical tradition’.47 This path can’t be pursued unaided, but requires the guidance of a Sufi master (shaykh). Both al-Taftazani and Shaykh al-Azhar Abd al-Halim Mahmud have referred to the role of this Sufi master as that of a ‘psychologist’ or ‘psychotherapist’ respectively.48 When considering the Sufi tradition from a historical perspective, it follows that it ‘entailed a complex conception of the self, at once autonomous and heteronomous and simultaneously characterized by unity and division’.49 Knowledge of God can be attained directly through experiences, referred to in the intuitive sciences (al-ʿulum al-laduniyya) as ‘unveiling’ (kashf) and ‘tasting’ (dhawq). Al-Taftazani’s contribution consists in merging premodern and modern discourses. He has integrated a Ghazalian view of the self with Freudian theory, by psychologizing the Sufi subject and thus achieving the ‘coexistence […] of

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the traditional practice of ethical self-attunement (tahdhib al-nafs) and the modern science of psychology (ʿilm al-nafs)’.50

Sufism and literature Another outlet for Islamic conceptualizations of selfhood and individual experiences of the divine is literature, traceable to classical Sufi poetry; the modern novel, and new literary formats of our postmodern time. The unlocking of mystical insights and sacred sciences to wider audiences has been very much tied up with the use of print media and the more recent introduction of new information technologies. Despite the inherent elitism attached to the emphasis on initiation in both the Sufi orders and into the Traditionalism developed by the likes of Guénon and Schuon, the expanded circulation of their ideas in book form, including translations into languages of the Muslim world, has resulted in a degree of democratization or levelling of what was hitherto considered privileged secret knowledge. Paralleling Traditionalist-Perennialist discourses and Orientalist academic research is the translation of Sufi poetry into European languages. What Massignon and Corbin did for the academic study of Sufism, had already been in motion in the literary field by Edward Fitzgerald (1808–1883) and Reynold Nicholson (1868–1945) with their translations of Omar Khayyam, Rumi, Iqbal and other poets. More recently, this has been continued by Annemarie Schimmel, Michel Chodkiewicz, William Chittick and others doubling as established academic scholars of Islam and authoritative translators of Sufi texts. The contributions of these scholars are also known to Muslim audiences through translations into – among other languages – Persian, Urdu and Turkish (less frequently in Arabic). In fact, both Traditionalism and engagement with Sufi poetry have historical antecedents that go further back than the nineteenth century. The observation of Wouter Hanegraaff, a Professor in Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, that esotericism in Europe can be traced back to the early modern era is paralleled by the research of Ziad Elmarsafy, Hamid Dabashi, Katharina Mommsen and Navid Kermani, which shows that European interest in Islam and its literatures can be dated back to the Enlightenment.51 Two figures standing out in today’s interest in medieval Sufi poetry are the near contemporaries Ibn al-Arabi and Rumi. So far, Ibn al-ʿArabi has been mentioned primarily in connection to epistemology, Qur’an commentaries, and philosophy, but his wider popularity rests on translations from his literary output, in particular collections of poetry, such as The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam). In the wake of these translations, a scholarly association was founded in 1977. The Oxford-based Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society is dedicated to the study of its namesake’s poetry and ideas.52 The society is closely associated with the Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education, a charitable trust established in 1971 offering courses on the writings of Ibn al-Arabi and Rumi, as well as a wider array of spiritual themes.53 In 1998, students of the School established

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a publishing house, specializing in the writings of Ibn al-Arabi, under the name Anqa Publishing.54 Founder of the School and first president of the Society was Bulent Rauf (1911–1987), a Turkish aristocrat and translator of Ibn al-ʿArabi, who had married into the Egyptian royal family, before moving to England with his British second wife.55 Ibn al-Arabi’s fame and popularity is only outdone by Rumi, author of what his fellow poet Jami (1414–1492) had called ‘the Qur’an in the Persian tongue’: the Mathnawi (Masnavi), an epic poem running several volumes.56 Muhammad Iqbal, who had been so dismissive of Sufism and its ‘false notion of the absorption of humanity in unity with God’, was full of admiration for Rumi.57 Although, in his 1908 doctoral dissertation, he had presented him as a Pantheist, in Iqbal’s first large poetry collection, Secrets of the Self (Asrar-i Khudi), Rumi is compared favourably against Hafez, ‘as an advocate of divine love and selftranscendence, with which Iqbal himself could identify’.58 In Iran and Turkey, where the historical Rumi actually lived and worked, he is still regarded as ‘an apostle of tolerance’ and ‘exponent of human liberation’.59 As ‘the reputedly best-selling poet in America today’, Rumi has attained near cult-status.60 Scholarly translators, such as Nicholson, produced literal translations that reflect the meaning of his poetry; preserving original references and metaphors, while making ‘the source accessible in a form that was as transparent as possible’.61 A more liberal treatment of Rumi’s poetry is found in the work of Idries Shah (1924–1996). Of Afghan-Scottish descent and a Naqshbandiyya initiate, he became one of the most prolific and widely read writers on Sufism. As early as 1964, Seyyed Hossein Nasr criticized Shah (and others) for ‘divorcing Sufism from Islam and turning it into a kind of esotericism and pseudo-spiritualism’.62 More recently, following an approach which was set in motion by Ezra Pound, poets with no knowledge of Persian, like Robert Bly (b. 1926) and Coleman Barks (b. 1937), have rendered Rumi into poetic English.63 The attraction Rumi holds for Abdolkarim Soroush has already been mentioned in earlier chapters of this book. In the 1980s, Iranian TV broadcasted a series of lectures by Soroush on Rumi’s poetry, which also features in a book he wrote in 1994, called The Story of the Spiritual Masters.64 Written in a format ‘which appeals specifically to the example of Muhammad Iqbal and his ideas about the revivification of the Islamic sciences’, Soroush presents Rumi alongside Ali Shariʿati, but holds him higher than Hafez as ‘representative of the truest form of Islamic spirituality’.65 His influence is also a constituent element in Soroush’s views of religious diversity, pluralism and tolerance, to be discussed later. In a section called ‘Romancing Rumi’, Hamid Dabashi acknowledges the scholarship of Nicholson, Schimmel and Iranian counterparts like Badiozaman Forouzanfar (1904–1970), but considers his erstwhile academic collaborator, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, as belonging to a generation of ‘less gifted scholars and far more clever in accommodating power’, and characterizes Daryush Shayegan as a ‘mystic-philosopher, who developed an ahistorical mystic disposition that links

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Corbin to Persian Sufism and Indian philosophies’.66 He continues by saying that this intellectual milieu also facilitated the entry of Heideggerian thought and the Interbellum writings of the German author Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) into Iran. This strand of anti-modernism was formative for the thinking of the philosopher Ahmad Fardid (1909–1994), and the writer and social scientist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969), whose notion gharbzadegi, which translates as ‘westoxification’ or ‘occidentosis’, has also influenced Ali Shariʿati, as well as: Abdolkarim Soroush, who in effect picked up that legacy and became a peculiar combination of Ali Shariʿati, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Daryush Shayegan. Soroush became the champion of what in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution would be termed ‘Roshanfekr-e Dini/religious intellectual’.67 Aside from his work on Enlightenment intellectuals and Islam, Ziad Elmarsafy has also researched the featuring of Sufism in another literary genre, the novel. The importance of this medium for disseminating modern and contemporary views of Sufism was already signalled by Carl Ernst, but Elmarsafy’s study is the first to make ‘representative case studies of the most central exponents of Sufi thought in the contemporary Arabic novel’.68 According to Elmarsafy, ‘Arabic novelists used the language and thought of the Sufis […] as a way of interrogating the limits of the creating self and the creative act’, appealing in particular to al-Hallaj, Ibn al-Arabi and al-Qushayri.69 Like the literary counterparts who mix Sufi references into their poetry, such as Adonis (b. 1930) and Salah Abd alSabur (1931–1981), what the authors of novels seek to do ‘is thinking through individuality via the language and thought of Sufism’, which speaks of separating the self from the self, and an opening up to the Other; human and divine.70 Such attestations of selfhood have steadily increased after 1980, inaugurating a period that saw the failure of ideologies with which Arab countries had experimented throughout the twentieth century. And yet, ‘there is far more to the Sufi turn in contemporary Arabic fiction than a reaction to living in an age of injustice and corruption’. According to Elmarsafy, also ‘questions of love, desire, mortality, hospitality and survival play a prominent role in shaping the appropriation of Sufi idioms in contemporary Arabic fiction’.71 One of the earliest examples of such spiritual wrestling in the modern Arab world is Yahya Haqqi’s (1905–1992) novel The Lamp of Umm Hashim (Qindil Umm Hashim). ‘Built around two axes, one running from East to West, the other linking the human to the divine’, it examines the force of faith versus advances in science to illustrate that some things are beyond the capacities of articulation and expression of both language and rational knowledge.72 A comparable ambiguity can be found in the novels of Nobel Prize Laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), who had a longstanding interest in Sufism – allegedly also the intended topic for a Master’s thesis he never completed.73 According to Elmarsafy, under the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Mahfouz was an idealist disguised as a realist, and as his ‘career

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progresses, the equation between artist and Sufi generates a process whereby the novels trace a sort of sanctification, the becoming Sufi of the artist as means of recovering a self under siege from social and political upheaval’.74 Managing to combine distinguished academic, diplomatic, political and literary careers, Mahfouz’s Tunisian contemporary, Mahmoud Messadi (Mahmud alMasʿadi, 1911–2004) also wrote novels featuring Sufi themes. A former student of Louis Massignon, Messadi explores what his teacher called testimonial monism, and what sober Sufis posit – in contradistinction of ‘unity of being’ (wahdat al-wujud) – as the ‘oneness of witnessing’ (wahdat al-shuhud). To this end, Messadi constructs a novel around a famous hadith narrator, which he entitled Thus Spake Abu Hurayra (1973) – a double reference to the format of a reported hadith and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. It presents Abu Hurayra on a spiritual path along ‘themes with strong Sufi resonances: the journey, desire, eternity, contemplation and salvation’.75 It also features the core passage in the Qur’an alluding to mysticism: The story of Moses’ encounter with the mysterious figure of al-Khidr, which ‘centres on the knowledge that the latter has received directly from God (al-ʿilm al-ladunni)’.76 In another book, The Birth of Forgetting (1974), Messadi meditates on eternity, immortality and memory. It also features the tensions between reason and supernatural, science and magic, and tradition versus modernity. In his reflections on these questions, Messadi also alludes to the illuminationism of Suhrawardi. Despite being part of the same avant-garde ‘Generation of the 1960s’, AbdelHakim Kassem (1934–1990) and Gamal al-Ghitany (1945–2015) represent very different positions vis-à-vis Sufism. While availing of Sufi and Islamic philosophical idiom, Kassem’s The Seven Days of Man (1969) is a Bildungsroman telling the story of ‘the unmaking of a Sufi world’ as the novel’s protagonist grows increasingly distant from his rural origins. Al-Ghitany’s oeuvre – in contrast with Kassem, but mirroring Mahfouz – develops ‘a narrative that recounts an increasingly saintliness in a character’s life’.77 Al-Ghitany’s trilogy Book of Theophanies (Kitab al-Tajalliyat, 1983–1986) borrows not just its title from one of Ibn alArabi treatises; as ‘a master of pastiche’, the author has also created a ‘Sufi hypotext’, imitating the Andalusian Sufi master, alongside allusions to the poems and sayings of other Sufis, including al-Junayd, al-Hallaj, al-Niffari and al-Jilani.78 Al-Ghitany’s interest in creating an alternative autobiography by introducing multiple self-portraits modelled on figures from the Sufi canon and Arab-Islamic history in general reflect a preoccupation with identity. In addition, ‘the device of the Sufi vision […] allows al-Ghitany to risk treating subjects that might displease the authorities’.79 In Book of Theophanies, the narrator refers to himself as an individual facing ‘collective agents of power’. The generic word in Arabic for individual, fard, refers in Ibn al-Arabi ‘s vocabulary ‘to the highest degree of sainthood’.80 Finally, structuring the book into three parts, ‘Al-Ghitany’s work circumscribes the three points of Ibn ʿArabi’s triangle – the spiritual voyage, the gnosis it brings about; and the formation of the individual’.81

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The latter part of the twentieth century also witnessed the rise of other forms of life-writing, the opportunities and outlets for which have only grown exponentially with the arrival of the Information Age. An example of such an alternative spiritual autobiography is the diaries of Ahmad Wahib (1942–1973), a member of the Indonesian Renewal Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thirty years after his premature death, these diaries have been rediscovered by Muslim senior high school and university students. Testimony to this ‘Wahib revival’ is the establishment of an essay prize in his name: The Sayembara Ahmad Wahib Award (AWA). First awarded in 2003, in 2010, some of the winning entries were collected in a volume of essays, published under the title Non-Apologetic Renewal. Originally from Madura, sometimes referred to as the ‘Island of a Thousand Pesantren’, Ahmad Wahib demonstrated an independent mind. Trained as a mathematician at Yogyakarta’s Universitas Gadjah Mada, he was active in the Muslim student union HMI, but resigned in protest against the organization’s growing involvement in politics; its fierce anti-communism; and its promotion of religious exclusivism. Later he also sent his children for a secular state education, instead of enrolling them in a faith school. Between 1961 and 1971, Wahib kept a diary which was only discovered after his death and published posthumously as Pergolakan Pemikiran Islam (‘Upheaval in Islamic Thinking’).82 Its release in 1981 caused quite a stir, not least because of its criticisms of the religious establishment and the condemnation of the ‘reactionary and primitive’ attitude of Islamist student-activists.83 Radically rethinking his attitude toward Islam and religion in general after his resignation from the HMI, Wahib concluded that total freedom of thought and unreserved acceptance of religious pluralism are the only remedies against narrow-minded religious apologetics. The inescapable tension between accepting the revealed truth of religion while simultaneously claiming freedom of thought, led Wahib to uncomfortable discoveries where the teachings of man seem superior to those of God. The only way to overcome such apparent contradictions was through uncompromising intellectual honesty, meaning that ‘the only repository left for trust is the individual, on whom, in the last resort, the responsibility for the search for truth must lie’.84 Wahib’s diaries abound with frustrations over his own personal lack of understanding of Islam or failure to grasp its perfection. Instead of ‘being Muslim’, Wahib talks of ‘becoming Muslim’ (menjadi Muslim) and ‘becoming Wahib’ (me-Wahib).85 Similar to the attempts of this Indonesian Islamic avant-garde to recast Sufism as this-worldly mysticism, in Turkey too, a new Muslim literary elite had emerged, who ‘created a language that merged Islamic esoteric traditions of inner dimensionality with the outward modern idiom of individuality’.86 Following the example of earlier figures engaged in the literary field, as poets and novelists, as well as founders and contributors of new periodicals, such as Necip Fazil Kisakürek (1904–1983), Nurettin Topçu (1909–1975), writers like Sezai Karakoç (1933), Hayderrin Karaman (b. 1934) and Nuri Pakdil (b. 1934) began

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modifying Islamic concepts and reformulate them in line with modern demands of identity formation and ethics, while simultaneously holding on to the legacy of quietist, a-political, Sufism of the Nakşibendi (Naqshbandiyya).

Further manifestations of contemporary Sufism: urban, intellectual and otherwise According to Ann Kull, Nurcholish Madjid’s engagement with Sufism became so significant in the latter part of his career, that he should be characterized as ‘first and foremost a Sufi’.87 While a cursory look at some of his publications at the time seems to validate this description, on closer examination, it becomes clear that Madjid’s understanding of Sufism was multi-layered. In some instances, he showed a fascination with Ibn al-Arabi and the writings of René Guénon, Martin Lings, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Fritjof Schuon.88 Elsewhere his examination of the relationship between tariqa (the Sufi way) and shari’a (Islamic law), and its role as an opposition movement, points towards an understanding of Sufism as a form of ‘this-worldly’ activism.89 In other instances, he supported this with a careful qualification of Ibn Taymiyya’s condemnation of Sufism as extending only to ‘excessive Sufism’, while fully acknowledging the usefulness of ‘neo-sufism or new Sufism (also referred to as “positive tasawwuf”)’ or by referring to the writings about Sufism by Indonesia’s foremost men of Islamic letters, Hamka (pen name of Haji Abdul Malik Abdul Karim Amrullah, 1908–1981).90 Given his interest in Miskawayh’s javidankhirad or ‘Sophia Perennis’ (also the title of the journal of Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy), Madjid’s take on Sufism can also be related back to the humanism described by Mohammed Arkoun.91 Through these writings and via the workshops on spirituality he organized at his Paramadina Foundation, Nurcholish Madjid reached out to the newly emerging urban middle classes consisting of young professionals and other highly educated Muslims. Often the first generation to have traded rural or small town origins for large cities, such as the capital Jakarta, once they had attained a degree of material prosperity, they often experienced a spiritual void in their lives away from the comfort of their familiar surroundings. In Morocco, the success of the Budshishiyya order in appealing to the, often heavily secularized, urban bourgeoisie can also be deduced from the initiation of growing numbers of individuals who had previously experimented with Indian and Chinese religions, yoga and New Age ideas and movements. Researchers have interpreted this as a ‘re-centring of Islam’, emphasizing a more sober engagement with Sufism, but combined with toleration of other practices, such as Zen mediation or yoga, which ‘are recognized as a valued part of a new religious pluralism’ – a subject explored further in Chapter 7.92 Meanwhile, life-writing and other forms of individualized engagement with religion, spirituality and the search for meaning of life are also pursued online; in blogs and through social media. Ethnographers are currently researching such

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activities among Egyptian youth.93 Even in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, young educated Muslims reflect on what Islam, and religion in general, means for them as individuals. In 2009, Abdullah Hamidaddin, a Saudi of Yemeni origins, published the first edition of a book, entitled Harmonious Being: The Search for God in our Fluid Lives.94 It deals with the majalis, or ‘salons’, which he moderated and in which young Saudis gathered to discuss their faith.95 More recently, Hamiddadin has researched the ways in which Saudis ‘deconstruct’ Islam and religion in the virtual space created by social media, following a government clampdown on physical spaces of assembly. Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals is a condensation of his ethnographical research into the alternative and new ways in which young educated Muslims search for meaning in their lives.96

By way of conclusion: Sufism as part of Turkey’s ‘third way’ The return of Sufism in late twentieth-century Turkey forms part of what has been called the ‘Turkish Cultural Third Way’.97 In fact, despite attempts to stamp out the Sufi infrastructure in the Turkish Republic (as part of founding President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s uncompromising modernization and secularization policies), the Nakşibendi Order managed to survive by adapting itself to the new realities. Having accommodated themselves to the national-secular philosophy of the state, affiliates of what was formally a forbidden organization nevertheless succeeded in dominating religious positions on all levels in Diyanet, the Ministry of Religious Affairs. This way, the order managed to lay out ‘the intellectual and historical groundwork for a new urban Islamic intellectual discourse’.98 Urbanization and educational reforms also stimulated other ways in which Turkish Muslims explored spirituality. An important inspiration for this was Bediüzzaman Said Nursi. This former soldier-turned Sufi had suffered brutal persecution during the first twenty-five years of the republic, but the massive body of writings he managed to produce despite this adversity had continued to circulate underground in manuscript form. During the more liberal 1950s, when Turkey experimented with a multi-party political system, followers of Nursi, known as Nurcu’s, turned these into a ‘print-based Islamic discourse’ that has continued to colour the religious outlook of subsequent generations of Turkish Muslims.99 In the course of the decade that followed the military coup of 1960, a subbranch of the Nakşibendi order, known as Gümüşhaveni Nakşibendi led by Shaykh Mehmet Zahid Kotku (1897–1980) rose to prominence. Rather than entering into government service, Kotku encouraged his followers to opt for mercantile careers. This created the conditions for transmitting Nakşibendi Sufism into a new urban culture of pious, socially conservative small town entrepreneurs, and turning his Sufi order into ‘the incubator of the postwar generation of prominent Islamist intellectuals’.100 Although he kept a distance from

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politics, some of Kotku’s followers played a crucial role in the formation of the pro-Islamist National Outlook Movement or MilliGörüş Hareketi (MGH). Another military intervention in 1981 can be considered the watershed event when coup leader General Evren (himself the son of a mosque imam) permitted the introduction of what came to be called the ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS)’. The actual driving force behind TIS was Prime Minister (and later President) Turgut Özal (1927–1993), an American-trained engineer and civil servant, but also a pious Muslim with close links to Mehmet Zahid Kotku.101 Emphasizing ‘the merchant ethics of the Prophet Muhammad’ and trying to fuse this with modern capitalism, Özal became the architect of a highly successful neoliberal economic policy founded on privatization and support for entrepreneurship.102 Combining democratization, economic development and religiously inspired social conservatism, the TIS was envisaged as a counter force to the ideological fragmentation of Turkish society along leftist and rightist lines, but also as a way to alleviate the tensions between the Sunni Muslims and Alevi minority, and between Kurdish nationalists and the central state.103 However, this will be discussed in the next chapter on Islam and politics in the contemporary Muslim world. The combined effect of this military-supported recalibration of Turkish politics and the replacement of state capitalism with a market-driven economy with the financial backing of ‘green capital’ was the emergence of a ‘postmodern urbanism’ reflected by the rise of global cities and the formation of new Islamic identities.104 For several decades, until a clampdown after a failed coup in 2016, the most successful operator in this arena was a rather amorphous movement alternately referred to as the Cemaat, the Hizmet, or the Gülen movement. This is a loose network of individual initiatives, associations and foundations that drew inspiration from the former Diyanet imam and preacher, Fethullah Gülen, who had reworked the legacy of Said Nursi to fit his vision for education and media activities.105

Notes 1 Carl W. Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambala South Asian Editions, 2000), 213. 2 Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell, Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 7. 3 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 207. 4 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 202. 5 Van Bruinessen and Howell, Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, 12. 6 Van Bruinessen and Howell, Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, 10. 7 Van Bruinessen and Howell, Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, 15–16; Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 199. 8 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 224. 9 Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 43. 10 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 13.

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11 Fethi Benslama, La psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’islam (Paris: Aubier, 2002); George Tarabishi, Al-Muthaqqafun al-‘Arab wa’l-Turath: Al-Tahlil al-Nafsi li-‘Isab Jama‘i (London: Riyadh al-Rayyes, 1991). 12 Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 2004), 124. 13 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 150–153. 14 The best description of Massignon’s own religiosity is found in Marie Louise Gude, Louis Massignon: The Crucible of Compassion (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 15 Henri Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1994); Idem, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ͑ Arabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 16 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘Intellectual Biography’ in The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2001), 16. 17 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Spirituality: Foundations. Volume 19 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1987); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hamid Dabashi and Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Shi‘ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 18 Patrick Haenni and Raphaël Vox, ‘God by All Means. Eclectic Faith and Sufi Resurgence among the Moroccan Bourgeoisie’ in Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam, eds. van Bruinessen and Day Howell, 246. 19 For a more detailed discussion of Skali and his writings, cf. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 244–248. 20 Haenni and Vox, ‘God by All Means’, 247. 21 Leif Stenberg, Islamization of Science: Four Muslim Positions Developing an Islamic Modernity (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1996), 95ff. 22 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Life and Thought (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 124. 23 Stenberg, Islamization of Science, 99. 24 Stenberg, Islamization of Science, 97; Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 336. 25 Osman Bakar, Classification of Knowledge in Islam: A Study in Islamic Philosophies (Kuala Lumpur: Institute for Policy Research, 1992). 26 Osman Bakar, Tawhid and Science: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Islamic Science (Kuala Lumpur and Penang: Secretariat for Islamic Philosophy and Science, 1991). 27 Stenberg, Islamization of Science, 39. Sardar spells it ijmali, cf. Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (London: Granta Books, 2004), 208–211. 28 One of his closed collaborators is the anthropologist MerrylWyn Davies, cf. Stenberg, Islamization of Science, 85–89. 29 Stenberg, Islamization of Science, 40. 30 Stenberg, Islamization of Science, 71. 31 Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise, 313–316. 32 Nurullah Ardiç, ‘Khaldunian Studies Today: The Contributions of Syed Farid Alatas’, Journal of Historical Sociology 30:1 (2017), 77–85. Syed Farid Alatas, Ibn Khaldun (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 33 An uncle of Syed Farid Alatas, Muhammad Naguib al-Attas claims he introduced the term already in 1978, in the first edition of Islam and Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia [ABIM], 1978). Ismail R. al-Faruqi, Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Work Plan (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought [IIIT], 1981).

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34 Ismail R. al-Faruqi, Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Work Plan (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought [IIIT], 1981). 35 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘The Essence of Dr Faruqi’s Life’s Work’ in Islam and Knowledge: Al-Faruqi’s Concept of Religion in Islamic Thought, ed. Imtiyaz Yusuf (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012). E-book, no page number. 36 Sayyid Qutb, Al-Naqd al-Adabi: Usuluh wa-Manhajihu (Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 1970). 37 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 2. 38 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 6. 39 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 44. 40 Also featuring the thinking of Mohammed Arkoun, Louis Althusser, and Cornelius Castoriadis, cf. Chapter 3 above. 41 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 45. 42 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 46. 43 The term comes from Ebrahim Moosa, Ghaza¯lī and the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 224. Quoted in Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 46. 44 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 47. 45 Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, ‘Sikulujiyyat al-Tasawwuf (2)’ Majallat al-Nafs 5: 3(1950), 381. 46 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 49–51. 47 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 54. 48 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 52, 54. 49 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 55. 50 Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 60. 51 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 15; Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009); Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Idem, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015a); Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und der Islam (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2001); Navid Kermani, Between Qur’an and Kafka: West-Eastern Affinities (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2016). 52 The Society’s website can be found at www.ibnarabisociety.org/index.html, last accessed 2 November 2018. 53 The School’s website can be found at http://beshara.org/about-beshara/, last accessed 2 November 2018. Cf. Also Suha Taji-Farouki, Beshara and Ibn Arabi: A Movement of Sufi Spirituality in the Modern World (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2009). 54 The Publisher’s website can be found at https://anqa.co.uk/, last accessed 2 November 2018. 55 A website dedicated to Rauf can be found at: www.bulentrauf.org/biographicalnote.html, last accessed 2 November 2018. 56 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 170. 57 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 201. 58 Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi (Oxford: OneWorld, 2000), 483. 59 Lewis, Rumi, 489. 60 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 170. For an exhaustive account of Rumi in the West, cf. Lewis, Rumi, 499–643. 61 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 171. 62 Lewis, Rumi, 517. 63 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 171. 64 Abdolkarim Soroush, Qesse-ye Arbab-e Maʿrefat (Tehran: Meʿraj, 1994b). 65 Lewis, Rumi, 494. 66 Dabashi, Persophilia, 207. 67 Dabashi, Persophilia, 208.

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68 Ernst, The Shambala Guide to Sufism, 218. Rasheed El-Enany, ‘Series Editor’s Foreword’ in Sufism in the Contemporary Arab Novel, ed. Ziad Elmarsafy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), ix. 69 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 1. 70 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 5. 71 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 11. 72 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 12–13. 73 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 24, 178. 74 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 25. 75 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 67. 76 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 72. Sura 7: ‘People of the Cave’ (Ahl al-Kahf ). 77 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 22. 78 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 78. 79 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 82. 80 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 91–92. 81 Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, 97. 82 Djohan Effendi and Ismed Natsir, Pergolakan Pemikiran Islam: Catatan Harian Ahmad Wahib (Jakarta: LP3ES, 1993). It was first published in 1981 and has seen many reprints. In 1987, the Australian scholar of Islam, Anthony Johns produced a translation in English. 83 A.H. Johns, ‘An Islamic System of Islamic Values? Nucleus of a Debate in Contemporary Indonesia’ in Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning: Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse, ed. William R. Roff (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987) 258–259, 266–267. 84 Johns, ‘An Islamic System or Islamic Values?’ 268. 85 Johns, ‘An Islamic System or Islamic Values?’ 274 86 M. Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 115. 87 Ann Kull, Piety and Politics: Nurcholish Madjid and His Interpretation of Islam in Modern Indonesia (Lund: Department of History and Anthropology of Religions, Lund University, 2005), 276. 88 Nurcholish Madjid, The True Face of Islam-Essays on Islam and Modernity in Indonesia, eds. Rudy Harisyah Alam and Ihsan Ali-Fauzi (Ciputat: Voice Centre, 2003): 77. 89 Nurcholish Madjid, Islam Doktrin dan Peradaban: Sebuah Telaah Kritik tentang Masalah Keimanan, Kemanusiaan, dan Kemodernan (Jakarta: Paramadina, 2005), 254–258. 90 Nurcholish Madjid ‘Tasawuf dan Kekuasan Politik’ in Manusia Modern Mendamba Allah: Renungan Tasawuf Positif, ed. Haidar Bagir (Jakarta: Imam, 2002), 188. 91 Kull, Piety and Politics, 261. 92 Haenni and Vox, ‘God by All Means’, 253, 255. 93 Samuli Schielke, Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope Frustration and Ambivalence before and after 2011 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Cf. also Schielke’s current project ‘Motivations and Consequences of Literary Writing in Alexandria after 2011’ (ZMO, Berlin). 94 Abdullah Hamidaddin, Al-Kaynuna al-Mutanaghima: Al-Bahth ʿan Allah fi Hayatina al-Siyasa, 2nd expanded edition (Beirut, Dubai and Riyadh: Madarek, 2012). 95 Abdullah Hamidaddin, ‘Harmonious Being: A Space for an Alternative Way for Exploring Religion’ in Alternative Religious Discourses and Religious Authority, eds. Carool Kersten and Susanne Olsson (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 119–136. 96 Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam and the Uncanny (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018). 97 Marie-Elisabeth Maigre, ‘The Influence of the Gülen Movement in the Emergence of a Turkish Cultural Third Way’ in Muslim World in Transition: Contributions of the

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Gülen Movement, ed. Ihsan Yilmaz (Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University Press, 2007), 33–45. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, 140. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, 151. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, 141. Cf. Korkut Őzal, ‘Twenty Years with Mehmed Zahid Kotku: A Personal Story’ in Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia, ed. Elisabeth Őzdalga (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute, 1999), 159–185. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, 95. For a detailed discussion of the TIS, cf. Gokhan Cetinsaya, ‘Rethinking Nationalism and Islam: Some Preliminary Notes of the Roots of the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” in Modern Turkish Political Thought’, The Muslim World 89:3–4 (1999), 350–376. Kerem Karaosmanoglu, ‘Beyond the Nation: Minorities and Identities in Urban Turkey’, Unpublished PhD Thesis (London: Goldsmith’s College, 2005), 3, 83, 136–138. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, 185–193.

5 ISLAM AND POLITICS Thinking about secularity, freedom and democracy

This chapter on the political thinking of contemporary Muslim intellectuals revolves around three key notions: secularity, freedom and democracy. Aside from discussing the substantive interpretations of these notions, the intention is to also show how the political ideas of contemporary Muslim intellectuals fit with their epistemologies and theologies. To appreciate these interconnections, it is also necessary to provide some context; more specifically how these discourses can be situated into the intellectual history of Islamic political theory and how – in modern times – political thinking became increasingly delineated between diametrically opposed positions. On the one hand, there are the proponents of Islam as a total system governing all aspects of Muslim life, captured in slogans like Islam as din wa dawla (‘Islam is a religion and a state’) or din wa dunya (‘religion and the worldly’). On the other side of the spectrum are those advocating a differentiation between religion and politics. Alternative terms used to describe these two opposing camps are the maximalist readings of the role of religion in politics held by ‘conflationists’ and the minimalist position of the ‘de-conflationists’.1 It is fair to state that, where it concerns politics, the intellectuals featuring in this chapter have most in common with the minimalists/deconflationists. During the 1950s and 1960s, conflationists were largely absent from the dominant ArabIslamic political discourse, creating the impression of an ‘Islamic resurgence’ from the 1970s onward. Consequently, most heritage thinkers and other progressive intellectuals have spent their formative years in an environment dominated by deconflationist political discourses, but not devoid of a broader intellectual interest in exploring the civilizational heritage of the Arab-Islamic world. The same is true elsewhere in the Muslim world. In Turkey and Indonesia, thinking about the political role of religion was strictly circumscribed by

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(quasi-)state ideologies like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Kemalism and the Pancasila Doctrine of Sukarno, as well as the latter’s close involvement in the Nonaligned Movement. However, in the years between 1983 and 1993, both countries underwent a sea change in state attitudes toward the role of religion in public life, captured by the emergence of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) and the introduction of the Reactualization Agenda in Indonesia, respectively. These parallel developments helped prepare the ground for the political democratization of these two countries around the turn of the century.2

Islam: religion and state, or religion and not a state? Historically, the notions of din wa dawla or din wa dunya have shaped Islamic political thinking since the classical era. Even after the end of the high caliphate and its effective collapse following the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the religious scholars or ulama continued to theorize the institution as a necessary form of governance: This genre of writing about God, sovereignty and politics, known as siyasa shari‘iyya (roughly: ‘religiously-legitimate governance’), stipulated a sort of condominium of authority whereby scholars apply their understanding of God’s law in the civil realm fully independently from the secular rulers and the secular rulers in turn enjoy a certain space to exercise temporally bound powers of command beyond the strict letter of the law.3 This emphasis on the law makes that political theologies of Islamic governance are more accurately defined as advocating a ‘nomocracy’ than ‘theocracy’. It also elucidates how Islamic political and legal thinking have merged, and how legitimate governance drew on different legal sources: divine law, in the prevailing shorthand referred to as shariʿa, and the secular law promulgated by rulers under the names siyasa and qanun. Reactions to the 1924 abolition of the Islamic political institution of the caliphate, lastly held by the Ottoman sultans, showed how captivating the notion of a single unifying figurehead continued to be for many Muslims. To them, its disappearance was nothing less than traumatic. However, not all Muslim intellectuals shared this outlook. One of the earliest dissenters was the Azhar-educated religious scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq (1888–1966).4 One year after the abolition of the caliphate, he published a book entitled, Islam and the Foundations of Political Power, in which he argued that neither Qur’an nor the Traditions of the Prophet contain any concrete support for a prescribed form of Islamic governance.5 Therefore, the caliphate must be considered as a historical contingency. Abd al-Raziq’s book has been as influential as it has been controversial. It was met with indignation by the religious establishment and other opponents of Abd al-Raziq’s claim of the caliphate’s contingency. While his detractors managed to get him ousted from al-Azhar, proponents of Abd al-Raziq’s

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interpretation used it to advocate a separation of religion and state in the politics of the modern Muslim world. Islam and the Foundations of Politics Power has become a key text for those who have pursued secular political agendas on the grounds that Islam is a religion, not a state. Diametrically opposed to the ideas evolving out of Abd al-Raziq’s book, was the political Islamic thinking developed by reactionary Sunni thinkers, such as Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb. In line with their theocentric worldview, the term hakimiyya Allah, or ‘sovereignty of God’, re-appeared with increasing frequency in Islamist discourses during the second half of the twentieth century. In the ‘high utopian Islamism’ of Abu’l-Aʿla Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb, acknowledging divine sovereignty was considered the only panacea against the prevailing human condition, with which they had diagnosed the Muslim world and which they likened to the state the Arabs found themselves in prior to the arrival of Islam: jahiliyya or ‘era or ignorance’.6 However, in their a-historical reinterpretation, it described a state of affairs, not so much a discrete period in time. The implementation of hakimiyya Allah required a third concept: jihad, which was used to vindicate the overthrow of regimes that refused to implement hakimiyya Allah and thus leave Muslims in a state of ignorance. More recently, an alternative way of thinking about Islamic rule has also been developing among Sunni traditional Islamic scholars. Less preoccupied with the specific form of governance and more concerned with ensuring that the substance of Islam’s teachings is implemented, it is referred to as wasatiyya, or centrism – a reference to the Qur’anic notion of the Muslims as a ‘community of the middle’ (umma al-wasat).7 Exponents of this line of thinking include figures, such as the late Azhar scholar Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1997), but also the later Yusuf al-Qaradawi.8 Starting out as an unabashed advocate of the conflation of din and dawla, al-Qaradawi became the emblematic representative of the ‘Islamic Awakening’ (al-sahwa al-islamiyya) and its slogan that ‘Islam is the solution’ (Islam huwa al-hall), a panacea against all the ills affecting the Muslim world. Be it for pragmatic reasons, or because he has genuinely mellowed, alQaradawi has even begun to speak positively about democracy and to adopt a more inclusivist stance toward non-Muslims, talking about citizenship as a way to create social cohesion, instead of the inherent exclusivism of solidarity along religious lines.9 However, their chosen discursive domain is not politics and political theory, but legal thought and jurisprudence. Because they never recognized the Sunni Caliphate and followed a lineage of Imams instead, Shi’a thinkers developed their own alternative Islamic political theories. As noted in an earlier chapter of this book, the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini introduced the concept of ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’ (wilayat al-faqih in Arabic; velayat-e faqih in Persian) to transform the religious authority invested in senior religious scholars through the notion of ‘Source of Imitation’ (marjaʿ altaqlid) into political power. After the revolution of 1979, wilayat al-faqih has provided the founding ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran and channelled effective power to the religious establishment rather than formal state

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institutions, such as the presidency or parliament. A relatively novel concept in Shiʿi political thought, the notion of ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’ has even been criticized by clerics like Mohsen Kadivar.

Secularity, secularization, secularism Another concept entering the vocabulary of contemporary Muslim political thought is secularity, and its cognates, secularism and secularization. According to the Moroccan philosopher Abdou Filali-Ansari, the Arabic terminology employed betrays a conceptual and theoretical rather than historicized understanding. Originally, secularists were referred to as dahriyyin, a designation that was also used by nineteenth-century reformists like al-Afghani to describe atheists. Later terms, including ladini (‘non-religious’) and the now most frequently used ʿilmani (‘this-worldly’), indicate an assumed categorical opposition to religion, and Islam in particular. Contemporary conservative and reactionary Muslim scholars, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, continue to reject secularism on similar grounds. In contrast to what Filali-Ansari alleges, his understanding is also historically informed. In view of their experiences with clerical rule and confronted with the despotic authority of the church, it is very understandable that Christians made good on the injunction in Matthew 22:21 to ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s’, effecting a separation of church and state. In the face of the dismissal of God as a metaphysical reality, Al-Qaradawi also sees the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious traditions as each other’s natural allies in saving humanity from the detrimental effects and moral dilemmas caused by ‘secularism, mundane morality, consumerism, crime and hedonism’.10 In Muslim contexts, discussions also often by-pass the important distinction between secularization, as a historical and social process involving ‘an alternative way of ordering society and of conceiving the world’, and secularism, which constitutes the ideologization of that process.11 In his survey of the secularization on Muslim societies, the sociologist Sami Zubaida has been very explicit in disentangling the indiscriminate use of secularism and secularization, pointing out that in ‘Islamic/Arabic parlance, the old distinction is between din (religion) and dunya (worldly affairs), without implication of a separation’, is glossed over.12 In spite of such resistance, in most Muslim countries, the process has affected the legal domain whereby the law has been codified and remodelled along European lines. Similar effects can be discerned in education, state institutions, the media and the arts. Zubaida even suggests that Islamic reforms associated with the Arab Renaissance of the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries contained secularized elements, which ‘further diluted the rules and claims of religion by acknowledging the authority and superiority of modern science’.13 These are early instances of the interconnectedness of epistemology, theology and political theorizing also found in the thought of contemporary Muslim intellectuals. Zubaida goes even so far as to propose considering ‘the religious “revival” as part of the process of

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secularization’, because it is in effect an ideological and cultural counter narrative to that process.14 As an example, he points at the Islamic Republic of Iran, where most government institutions resemble those of other modern states and where religious authority is expressed symbolically. However, the dominance of these secular institutions by Iran’s Shi’a clergy has led to two different responses from religious intellectuals. The journalist and writer Reza Alijani distinguishes a ‘minimalist–maximalist’ religious discourse, represented by figures such as Abdolkarim Soroush calling for a clear separation between private and public sphere, and what he calls ‘a thin progressive conception of religion in “all” spheres’, advocated by – among others – Ali Shariʿati, Mehdi Bazarghan, and Mahmud Taleqani.15 Describing the first response as an understandable and widely supported reaction to the clerical state in Iran, as a self-proclaimed ‘neo-Shariatist’, Alijani nevertheless prefers the latter conceptualization. Not only because it ‘enjoys more “solid” theoretical and religious (Islamic) foundations’, but also because it is less likely to invite a confrontational counter-reaction from the religious establishment. The resulting further polarization between these proponents of a ‘sharia-centered’ and ‘text-oriented religiosity’ and their minimalist detractors would reduce the chances for a ‘human-oriented religiosity’ to take shape.16 To avoid the danger of a collision between religious and secular fundamentalists, and a concomitant impasse in the secularization process, Alijani calls for a ‘dialogue between a dynamic, progressive secularism and a dynamic, progressive, post-Sharia, post-religious formalism’.17 The main contribution which both secular and religious intellectuals can make to that dialogue is by presenting historicized readings of religious texts that highlight the role of the founders of religions as progressive reformers and by defending ‘its eternal and humane voice as a pertinent point of reference in addressing human needs’.18 The failure to distinguish between secularization and secularism reinforces the perception that the whole notion of secularity is alien to Islam and has been imposed from the outside rather than something that is occurring in all modernizing societies. As a young Muslim student leader during the 1960s and 1970s, the Indonesian intellectual Nurcholish Madjid may not have shared such preoccupations with the Christian roots of the notion of secularity, but he too appreciated the crucial importance of differentiating between secularization and secularism – making it the key concern in his earliest writings. In fact, he took his cue from Harvard theologian Harvey Cox and his influential book, The Secular City (1965), to advocate acceptance of secularization as separating temporal from transcendental values, while remaining critical of secularism, as an ideology advocating man’s own ability to resolve all issues of human life.19 Comparing the Graeco-Roman and Arabic etymologies of their respective ‘secularization vocabularies’, Madjid related the influence of the Bible on temporalizing a-historical Greek and Latin terms for world-as-space (cosmos and mundus) into world-becoming-history (aeon and saeculum), to the Qur’anic distinction between earthly existence (dunya in Arabic, duniawi in Indonesian) and

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the Hereafter (al-akhirah in Arabic, Indonesianized to uchrawi).20 To demonstrate that Muslims need not consider the secularization process as an alien intervention, Madjid coined the Arabic-Indonesianized term menduniawikan for temporalization of this-worldly values. This way Madjid emulated Harvey Cox’s search for Biblical sources of secularization by tracing comparable evidence of a need to secularize in the Islamic tradition. In making this case, Madjid’s political theorizing also employs theological, anthropological and epistemological arguments. Madjid sees the differences between the earlier mentioned two dimensions of human existence – vertical/ transcendent and horizontal/this-worldly – correspond with the epistemologically different but complementary categories of iman (faith) and ‘ilm (knowledge). With his rational faculty a human developed himself and his life on this earth. So there is consistency between secularization and rationalization. For the essence of secularization is to solve and understand the problems of this world by marshalling intelligence or reason.21 According to Madjid, secularization not only constitutes the full consummation of humankind’s role as ‘God’s vicegerent on earth’ (khalifa Allah fi’l-ard), it also safeguards the integrity of the core Muslim belief in the One God as the absolutely Transcendent (Tawhid) as the only thing that is to be held sacred. Consequently, secularization demands the ‘desacralization’ of this-worldly existence, including politics. That is to say divesting it from all divine connotations. Failing to do so would constitute a violation of Tawhid, not just by distorting the relationship between state and religion, but actually demeaning to the essence of Islam through association with the banal concerns of politics. This way, Madjid has inverted the argumentation used by Islamists to condemn secularization and turned it against their conflation of religion and state. In the Iranian context, a parallel line of reasoning was later developed by Abdolkarim Soroush as part of his criticism of Ali Shariʿati’s totalizing interpretation of Islam. Accordingly, ‘religion should stay aloof from politics […], because it sublime truthfulness will be compromised in the mundane world of politics’.22 At the same time, Soroush also shares Madjid’s scepticism against the unquestioned adoption of political ideologies, such as secularism or liberalism, which had historically evolved in the West, without dismissing its intellectual achievements altogether. Like Nurcholish Madjid, also Soroush takes care to ‘distinguish secularism as doctrine from secularization as a process’.23 The primary concern of a religion should be to direct the individual believer toward preparing for the Hereafter, and leave politics and governance to the relevant professionals. Also, Muhammad Khalid Masud of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology considers secularism an ideology. While ‘in its semantic journey, [it] has grown in association with ideas of modernity, humanism, rationalism and democracy’, he insists that in Muslim world, its discourse ‘cannot be modelled on the

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Western experience because religion and religious values have different political and cultural trajectories on the Muslim experience’.24 Reconciling Muslim societies with secularization has been further complicated by the association of secularism with Communist ideology and the concomitant formation of religion as a counterforce, leading to the ideologization of Islam, which is then presented as ‘a natural, historical and eternal system’, claiming self-sufficiency and exclusivity. As a consequence, both earlier Muslim modernists, such as Muhammad Iqbal, and Islamists as different as Maududi and the Malaysian historian of Islam Syed Naguib al-Attas ‘pushed political Islam to a gradual theologization of political concepts’. Their unwillingness to accept the separation of the here-and-now from the afterlife forced them also to look for ‘Islamic alternatives for modern concepts such as democracy’.25 Madjid’s contributions prepared the ground for younger generations of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, enabling them to appreciate the subtleties of the secularity debate and become conversant with the constructive critiques of the 1960s secularization thesis and its subsequent revisions. This also includes the sophisticated reformulation found in José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World, which challenges the sub-theses of classical secularization theory: the separation of church and state; the decline of religion, and the privatization of religion.26 His suggestion that it is more accurate to speak of a functional differentiation between political and religious authority than an outright separation of state and religion was picked up by like-minded Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia, such as Madjid’s contemporary Dawam Rahardjo and former director of the Paramadina Foundation, Budhy Munawar-Rachman (b. 1963). Aside from invoking Casanova, MunawarRachman also refers to Abdullahi an-Na’im (b. 1946), a Sudanese legal scholar and follower Mahmud Muhammad Taha, currently based in the United States. An-Na’im observed that, while religion can provide the moral underpinnings of public policy, legislation itself must be a matter of public reasoning and subject to constitutional constrains and universal human rights standards.27 This led him to the conclusion that a secular state offers the best prospects for guaranteeing religious freedoms and thus the safest place for a Muslim.28 The early ideas of Nurcholish Madjid remain also popular among the unabashed advocates of liberal politics, such as Ulil Abshar-Abdalla (b. 1967) and Luthfi Assyaukanie (b. 1967), co-founders of Indonesia’s Liberal Islam Network (Jaringan Islam Liberal, JIL) and the Freedom Institute in Jakarta. Referring explicitly to Madjid and to former President and NU leader Abdurrahman Wahid, who also defended political secularization on the grounds that it represents the best option for a rational administration of a state, without interfering with religion as a social ethics, Assyaukanie makes a distinction between government-driven ‘secularization from without’ and ‘secularization from within’ initiated by the Muslim bloc itself.29 Ulil Abshar-Abdalla extends the meaning of secularization and desacralization beyond the political realm and applies it also to thinking about religion in general, which must be clearly distinguished from religion itself: While the latter has absolute pretentions, the former is always

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relative. For this, Abshar-Abdalla points explicitly to the correspondence between Nurcholish Madjid’s interpretations and the more recent work of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, but the observation also resonates with the ideas of Abdolkarim Soroush.30

Theorizing Islam and the state in Indonesia On the back of the Islamic renewal thinking initiated by Nurcholish Madjid and the debates triggered by his writings on secularity, younger Muslim intellectuals have moved discussions of political Islam to a three-point agenda consisting of theological renewal, political-bureaucratic reform and social transformation. Grounding its Islamic valuations in the Qur’anic maxim ‘to propagate virtue and prevent vice’ (amr bi al-ma’ruf wa nahyu ‘an al-munkar) and the verse referring to ‘a fair land and an indulgent Lord’ (baldatun thayyibatun warabbun ghafur), it draws its inspiration from Moeslim Abdurrahman’s theology of Transformative Islam, the notion of ‘Prophetic Social Science’ developed by the historian Kuntowijyo and the creative Qur’an exegesis of Dawam Rahardjo.31 Present-day intellectuals engage in substantialist, rather than legalistic and formalistic, conceptualizations of Islamic political theory. In the estimation of the political scientist Bahtiar Effendy: In today’s Indonesian political Islam [these injunctions] are no longer articulated in the context of ideological and symbolic subjectivism (that is, Islamic state or Islamic ideology). Instead, they are translated and decoded into several agendas pertinent to the interests of the Indonesian society in general, including a number of broader issues such as democratization, religious and political tolerance, socio-economic egalitarianism, and political participation.32 In contrast to what he calls the subjective articulation of ideologies and Islamic symbols by Islamists, this transformation of Qur’anic values into inclusive and integrative agendas of political action reflects an important shift from a theocentric perspective to an anthropocentric focus, and thus an objectification of Islam in this-worldly existence, reflected in a diversification of interpretations. Bahtiar Effendy shares Kuntowijoyo’s concerns that the trends set in motion during the Reformasi Era following the ousting of President Suharto from power might undo some of the perhaps unforeseen positive outcomes of the repression of political Islam. In this reading, Suharto’s clampdown provided the incentive to diversify the political meaning of Islam, especially a shift toward using the ‘potential and energy in areas of strategic interest such as human resource development’.33 This forced retreat from party politics ‘played a pivotal role in establishing a relatively amicable relationship between Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama’ and reducing the political polarities of the early independence years under President Sukarno.34 At the same time, he cautions against the

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tendency of stigmatizing the new Islamic parties established after the regime change of 1999 as Islamist; insinuating they wish to establish a theocracy or at the very least absorb Islamic law into the country’s legal system. In fact, none of these parties has explicitly calls for an Islamic state, and that only two of them have actively campaigned for including a reference to Islamic law in the new constitution. Moreover, the disappointing results of Islamic parties in four consecutive national elections demonstrate that there is little popular support for such agendas. Another political scientist, Luthfi Assyaukanie of the Liberal Islam Network and Freedom Institute, has formulated an even bolder counter narrative to the Islamist discourse in Indonesia. The opportunity space created since 1999 must be used to push the democratization of Indonesia’s political system to the next stage. The forceful argument in his book Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia is driven by an interpretation of Indonesian Islamic political discourses as a ‘history of progress and transformation towards moderation’.35 Aside from offering a political theory, the book is also a sociology of knowledge, using Karl Mannheim’s notion of utopia – rather than the overused concept of ideology – as its starting point for examining the philosophical foundations and limitations of three different models for a democratic polity in Indonesia. Distinguishing between an Islamic Democratic State (IDS), Religious Democratic State (RDS), and Liberal Democratic State (LDS), Assayaukanie’s discussion is circumscribed by the basic assumption that all three models accept democracy as the best available system of governance. However, in spite of that shared premise, the proponents of these respective models do not agree on such issues as secularization and the place of religion in political life; on the role of Islamic law in Indonesian society; the extent to which pluralism is accepted; and the position of religious minorities and women. While the model for an IDS has become largely obsolete, Assyaukanie’s alternative model of a RDS no longer subscribes to the need for a particular Islamic polity. Instead, it understands Islam as a religion of morality providing ‘transcendental ethic values for human life’, rather than a political theory prescribing a concrete form of statehood.36 The core foundation of this model is the conviction that religion forms a ‘vital element in communal life’ which does not need to be translated into a specifically Islamic form of governance.37 To a large extent spurred on by Suharto’s New Order Regime and its insistence that the Pancasila Doctrine is recognized as asas tunggal, or the founding principle of Indonesian statehood, the theorists behind this model subscribe to this idea, but also to the simultaneous rejection of secularism as an ideology.38 The RDS model has remained particularly popular with senior figures in the two Muslim mass organizations. Assyaukanie singles out former Muhammadiyah chairmen Amien Rais and Ahmad Syafii Maarif, as well as leading intellectuals Dawam Rahardjo and Kuntowijoyo as being among its main proponents. In NU circles, the model was mainly supported by older moderates such as Sahal Mahfudh, who became more conservative as they advanced in age.

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In Lutfi Assyaukanie’s analysis, the difference between the RDS and LDS models lies in the extent to which religion should play a role in politics and government. As a co-founder of the Liberal Islam Network (JIL), it is not surprising that he prefers the LDS model because it accords separate roles to state and society. In this reasoning, the major weakness of the RDS model is that it leaves certain contradictions and dilemmas unresolved where it comes to safeguarding the inherent plurality of Indonesia society. In effect, this means that where proponents of a religious state draw the line at secularization, those in favour of liberal democracy not only accept secularization, but are actively advocating the process.

Writing about freedom, democracy and reason in Iran and Turkey The intersecting of political theory, epistemology and theology also carries over into thinking about democracy and freedom. This affects not only issues pertaining to political liberties and governance, but also law, religious freedom, and – with that – thinking about human rights, diversity and tolerance. Intellectuals such as Abdolkarim Soroush and Mustafa Akyol (b. 1972) have explored these interconnections between political, philosophical and religious ideas. It is telling that the translators and editors of what they refer to as ‘the essential writings of Abdolkarim Soroush’ have chosen a 1991 lecture as the title essay for Reason, Freedom and Democracy.39 At the same time, it is important to realize that – like al-Jabri – Soroush is not a political scientist, but first and foremost a philosopher. Consequently, his understanding of reason and freedom is primarily theoretical and his interpretation of both notions is multi-layered. The various binary divisions of reason identified by Soroush have been mentioned in a previous chapter: The same is true of the concept of freedom: It has been divided into civil and philosophical, external and internal. Some have observed the differences between the social and spiritual varieties of freedom, between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ or ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberties. Freedom is contrasted to submission to the divine will, human bondage, or the law. There is even a distinction between freedom and the feeling of freedom. Freedom is compared and contrasted to such opposing concepts as tyranny and democracy; at other times it is used a synonym of democracy.40 Reason and freedom are so inextricably intertwined because together they define our humanity and in humankind’s pursuit of truth. The manner in which we attain this truth is as important as that attainment itself, because ‘no end is completely detached from the means’ nor are ‘errors a menace to freedom’.41 Falsehood and conflict caused by the exercise of reason are considered lesser evils than the greater good that is made possible by freedom: Namely, human

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autonomy that prevents ‘independence of the mind [and] prevents the dissolution of the individual personality’.42 What worries Soroush more is the human propensity to become captive to the emotions on which tyranny and dictatorship thrive. For that reason, humans need both internal and external freedom to liberate themselves from their own passions and from despots respectively. This also informs his concern about ideology: not in its conventional sense as a school of thought, but in ‘its exact and precise meaning: those ideas that have causes but no reasons’.43 It is on these grounds that Soroush pleads for a deideologization of religion, because a religiously informed ideology is a threat to both the proper pursuit of knowledge and governance. While being critical of Ali Shari‘ati’s interpretation of Islam as an all-encompassing system governing all aspects of human life, including politics, this does not mean Soroush wants to ban religion from the public sphere altogether. On the contrary, he explicitly advocates the establishment of a RDS, which he considers not simply compatible with religion, but even a vital necessity for a religious society, arguing that – in such a context – a democratically elected government can’t be antireligious. This brings Soroush to the flaw of Western societies, which have secured external, but neglected internal freedoms. Therefore, ‘[w]hat we desperately need today is to take our cue from the seekers of freedom and from our own religious and mystic culture’.44 In response to critics who accuse him of having not only a poor understanding of democracy or leaving the institutional structures of such a government undefined, but also exposing citizens to the danger of a repressive Islamic legal system, Soroush points at the difference between faith-based religiosity (iman) and an interpretation of religion emphasizing conduct (amal), which seeks to enact the imposition of Islamic law. Because law only constitutes a portion of the Islamic tradition, while faith forms the core or pillar of a religious society, Soroush regards a society organized in accordance with Islamic law as neither properly religious, nor democratic. A faith-based society, on the contrary, is not only compatible with democracy, but will also not impose a particular conception of religion. Instead, it will leave its members free to choose for themselves. Here Soroush’s political thinking returns not only from deliberating institutions of governance to the notion of freedom, but also to his abiding epistemological concern for stimulating the expansion of religious understanding. According to Soroush, it is power – not freedom – that opposed truth, because ‘a dominant regime considers itself to be the measure of all truths’.45 Also Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty by Mustafa Akyol is concerned with the relation between reason, freedom and democracy. Unlike Soroush, Akyol’s approach is historical rather than philosophical, and – being Turkish – he presents the legacy of the Ottoman Empire as instrumental to what he calls ‘the Turkish March to Islamic Liberalism’.46 Taking his cues from Leonard Binder’s Islamic Liberalism, he demonstrates that it is possible for a religious society to engage in liberal politics, provided that the community acknowledges that its individual members are endowed with reason and free will.

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Akyol’s first point of departure is the assertion that the Qur’anic notion of ‘man as God’s viceroy on earth […] emphasized the individual’s personal responsibility to his Creator’. Second, he contends that already in the first centuries, the Muslim world created an ‘Islamic Free Market’ by establishing ‘financial and commercial capitalism’, adding with a nod to the Marxist French historian Maxime Rodinson that the prophet was no socialist.47 The origins of what must be considered a rights-based rather than duty-bound religion lie not only in the Qur’an itself, but also in the blueprint for the Prophet’s own political conduct: the Charter of Medina, which he claims was pluralist, and even secular, in outlook. In making the case for the primacy of the use of reason over the undue sacralization of transmitted knowledge encapsulated in the hadith collections, Akyol’s argumentation converges with that of Soroush in highlighting the importance of the Muʿtazila as pious Muslims and how the ‘Qur’anic emphasis on reason gave rise to the rationalist school in Islam, which in turn laid the philosophical foundation for individual freedom’.48 However, whereas Soroush evokes mystical and often anti-nominal poetry of figures like Rumi and Hafez, Akyol turns to the figure of Abu Hanifa (d. 767). Aside from being the eponymous founder of the Hanafi School of Law, he was also a sympathizer of the so-called ‘Murjiites’, or ‘Postponers’ – a reference to their deferment of judging sinners to the Afterlife and also leaving ultimate decisions on theological questions to God. Akyol compares their argument for religious tolerance to that of John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. Akyol’s observation that – for the Murjiites – faith was a matter of conscience and of the year parallels Soroush’s assertion that faith-based religiosity prevails over law-based interpretations of Islam. As the allegedly most tolerant of the Sunni schools of law, the Hanafis remain central to the rest of Akyol’s historical account. Emerging in Iraq, the epicenter of the cosmopolitan Abbasid Caliphate, the Hanafi School also dominated in the religiously diverse Ottoman Empire. It was combined with the theology of alMaturidi, which – according to Akyol – still betrays Muʿtazili influences, because of the importance accorded to human reason and free will. The Hanafis provided the Ottomans with the intellectual underpinnings for their administration’s recognition of pluralism and the tolerance they displayed toward religious differences. In addition, the Ottoman system was also open to change, in the sense that it allowed the state the right to promulgate secular laws (kanun) to complement the Islamic legal stipulations. In the nineteenth century, this flexibility enabled the Ottomans to respond to the challenges of modernity with reform initiatives, such as the Tanzimat or ‘Reorganization’, introduced in 1839. While clearly inspired by European Liberalism, Ottoman intellectuals articulated their ideas within a religious rather than secular context. The same remains true for later reform activists known as the Young Ottomans. Although he characterizes them as liberals, Akyol insists they too ‘were Islamic rather than secular, “Ottomanist” rather than nationalist, and progressive rather than revolutionary’.49 It is this Ottoman-Islamic intellectual

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legacy that forms the seedbed for the developments that present-day Turkey has seen in the last thirty years or so, but which was ignored for the better part of the twentieth century by successive Turkish regimes. Consequently, says Akyol, ‘secular Turks today often believe that religious authorities resisted the whole modernization effort, but this is a myth created in the Republican Era in order to discredit the ancient régime’.50 Despite decades of repression, elements of this Islamic heritage and its accommodation to modernity managed to survive. Initially finding their way into the depoliticized writings of Bediüzzaman Said (also known as Said Nursi), his ideas seeped through to via his followers (known as Nurcus) to other activists, such as Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet Movement, which can be characterized as a Muslim civil society initiative. Eventually, these continuing influences also turned political, breaking the Turkish exceptionalism of the Kemalist era and transforming it into the ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’ inaugurated during the years that Turgut Ȍ zal served as prime minister and president. A US-trained technocrat who was also shaped by the dual influence of the Sufi piety that persisted in the provinces and the traditional entrepreneurial flair of small-town Anatolians, Ȍ zal offered an alternative to both Kemalist hard-core secularism and the opposing agendas of a succession of Islamist parties that had begun emerging in the 1970s. His agenda has been described as a kind of Islamic Calvinism in the Weberian sense. Once they realized that ‘their yearning for religious freedom could be satisfied by adopting Western-style liberal democracy’, a growing middle class of pious Muslims from the provinces joined the Nurcus and adherents of traditional Sufi orders, such as the Naqshbandiyya, in voting for Ȍ zal.51 After what Akyol calls the ‘lost decade’ following Ȍ zal’s death in 1993, the way was paved for the continued political successes of a new political party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) from 2002 onward. Its triumph is attributed to an ideology characterized as democratic conservativism, citing party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Akyol characterizes it as ‘a concept of modernity that does not reject tradition, a belief in universalism that accepts localism, and an understanding of rationalism that does not disregard the spiritual meaning of life’.52 Akyol insists that the pedigree of this democratic conservatism can be traced back beyond Ȍ zal to the Islamic liberals of the Ottoman Empire. The more recent political transformation introduced by the AKP is ‘in line with the changing intellectual landscape in Turkey’.53 While Akyol’s historical tracing is spurious, the morphing of former Islamist politicians into advocates of ideas more closely associated with liberalism than the Islamic tradition is also observable among the religious intellectuals emerging in the 1980s. Borrowing the term ‘post-Islamist’, first introduced by the Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat in 1996, Ihsan Dagi, another observer of contemporary Muslim intellectuals in Turkey, suggests that ‘opposition of the post-Islamists to the Kemalist regime continues but this is no longer expressed in the name of Islam per se but in the name of pluralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law’.54 The intellectual support base for Ȍ zal’s promotion of free-market

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capitalism and the American idea of liberty had come from a small group of liberal thinkers, whom Akyol characterizes as ‘secular but not secularist’.55 In the preceding decades, they had been marginalized, as the political arena was dominated by Kemalists, Marxists and right-wing nationalists. Then, in the course of 1980s and 1990s, Turkey witnessed phenomena like the establishment of an Association for Liberal Thinking and a conference on ‘Islam and Secularism’ organized by the Gülen Movement.56 They are indicative of a changing political and cultural climate, reflecting the emergence of a wholly new Islamic culture, including a literature shifting ‘from “a rhetoric of collective salvation” to “new individualistic Muslimhoods”’.57 This attention for the individual has also been picked up by intellectuals in government service, such as the academic Mehmet Aydin (b. 1943). A graduate of the Faculty of Theology in Ankara and holder of a doctorate in philosophy from Edinburgh, Aydin is in favour of a liberal democratic culture. He can be considered emblematic of a new assertiveness among Turkish Muslim intellectuals, promoting ‘the AKP’s post-Islamist liberalism’ to the rest of the Muslim world.58 In publications like ‘Raising the Self-Governing Believer of the Open Society’, ‘The Responsibility of the Individual to Construct His Own Religiosity’ and ‘A Liberating Religious Education’, Aydin suggests Turkish Muslims not only consult religious authority figures, but also think for themselves, while cautioning parents against imposing religious views on their children.59 Jumping on the bandwagon of popularizing Islamic liberalism and making the arguments for liberty more accessible, Mustafa Akyol resorts to a cheeky reference to Sayyid Qutb by entitling the closing part of his book ‘Signposts on the Liberal Road’.60 Like Soroush, Akyol too makes a distinction between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. In the chapter ‘Freedom from the state’, he contrasts the non-etatist attitude of the Muʿtazila with the quasi-sacred theorizing of the caliphate by the Ashʿaris and quotes Abdullahi an-Na’im’s contention that ‘the best state for Muslims is a secular state’.61 In a similar vein, the next chapter, ‘Freedom of Sin’, castigates al-Ghazali for listing ‘sanctions for almost all forms of perceived sinful behaviour’ and the excessive zeal of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Islamist movements of varying persuasions in enforcing the maxim ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’.62 In the book’s final chapter ‘Freedom from Islam’, the question of liberties is carried over from politics and governance to adjacent domains of human rights and the safeguarding of religious plurality and toleration. Although Turkey’s ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’ is held up as an example to which other Muslim countries should aspire, detractors of the resulting ‘ThirdWay’ reject this suggestion, arguing, on the basis of the so-called ‘Turkish exceptionalism’ thesis, that Turkey’s present political course is the outcome of the country’s unique historical experience and cannot be replicated anywhere.63

The case of democracy in the Arab-Islamic world An illustrative example of the influence of the post-Islamist Turkish model is its effect on the political thinking of Rachid Ghannouchi (b. 1941). Co-founder

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and leader of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, both in exile and at home after the regime change of 2011, Ghannouchi is on record as stating that ‘we admire the Turkish case’.64 A philosopher trained at Tunisia’s Zaytouna University, as well as in Cairo, Damascus and Paris, it was an encounter with the originally Pakistani Islamic missionary organization Tablighi Jamaat that had set in motion his transformation from an ardent Pan-Arab nationalist into an Islamist who became conversant with the ideas of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb. Ghannouchi’s thinking revolves around reconciling divine sovereignty with the political authority of humankind. It has been characterized as reflecting the ‘ambiguities and ambivalences inherent to a political theology that proclaims both monism and pluralism, both divine and popular sovereignty’.65 Its point of the departure is the primordial covenant (mithaq) between God and humankind, in which humans are made God’s designated deputies on earth on account of their distinctiveness from other creatures in terms of being endowed with reason, liberty and individual responsibility. In order to provide human rights and freedoms with a metaphysical foundation, Ghannouchi makes a distinction between the Islamic approach and ‘“Western” conceptions, which he tends to see in a reductive way as all based on a kind of arbitrary, foundationless human will and purposeless philosophical anthropology’.66 That is not to say he was principally anti-Western. In contrast to the dichotomous views and binary oppositions posited by figures such as Sayyid Qutb, Ghannouchi advocated Muslim intellectual and political assertiveness on the basis of a ‘reevaluation and redefinition of the relationship of the Muslim community to the West’.67 He regards claims to sovereignty of the people in the West as ‘a parochial response’ to its own particular context; centuries of struggle between church and state for political domination.68 Although Ghannouchi’s theorizing envisages a condominium of sorts between religious scholars and political officeholders that is also found in classical works on siyasa shariʿiyya, his own main political study, Public Freedoms in the Islamic State, doesn’t cast religious scholars as guardians of the tradition, elite representatives of the people, and political watchdog constraining rulers. Based on the Qur’anic injunction of mutual consultation, the legal maxim ‘to propagate virtue and prevent vice’, as well as early Islamic practices, including bay’a and ijma’ (which political theorist and Ghannounchi-commentator, Andrew March, translates as ‘popular ratification of rulers’ and ‘communal consensus about religious practices and points of law’), Ghannouchi proposes a ‘more direct condominium of divine and popular sovereignty’.69 This is also in line with his doctrine of human vicegerency of God, which gives effective political authority to the people, but in a strictly contractual sense, making it an entirely civil matter. Because of his dismissal of the claim that ‘whoever gains power by force over a city or country has the legal status of the imam in all things’, Ghannouchi’s political thinking differentiates not just from that of the siyasa shariʿiyya theorists and Salafists like Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, it also means he rejects the Western notion of a social contract as

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‘the free act of self-binding by persons in a state of nature’, because the contract is already there in the sacred text as primordial covenant, providing sufficient ground for the establishment of a state and requiring no further philosophical or theological foundations.70 With the community of believers (umma) as the source of all political authority, the rulers and the rest of the executive administration must be regarded as agents or employee of the umma, contracted for the sole purpose of helping with discharging the umma’s own obligation to obey God’s law. Ratification (bay’a) and communal consensus (ijmaʿ) also means that the people’s sovereignty includes and encompasses the right to dismiss or remove rulers from office, as well as the right to determine the meaning of shariʿa. In case interpretation is delegated to the religious scholars, Ghannouchi is of the opinion that this authority is restricted; ‘derived exclusively from popular ratification and not their own epistemic claims’.71 This is certainly not how those who articulated classical siyasa shariʿiyya saw their own role. Another problem is caused by the use of the term umma. Although Ghannouchi argues that his interpretation of final political authority resting with the people is best implemented through a democratic system of governance in which all citizens of the modern state are equal, the term umma in the context of an Islamic democracy refers to Muslims. Consequently, Ghannouchi has postulated two categories of citizenship: Muslims enjoy unqualified citizenship (muwatanah amah), and non-Muslims possess qualified citizenship (muwatanah khasah). While the latter enjoy full citizenship, the majority of citizens [i.e. the Muslims, c.k] may choose to have their faith influence public life, and thus the state may prohibit nonMuslims from holding senior positions in government.72 Since his return to Tunisia following the ousting of the autocratic regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, Ghannouchi has landed in the thick of reallife politics as the Ennahda party had to contend with the vicissitudes of having to actually govern. After winning the first free elections, his party was unseated again from power when it failed to deliver on the expectations of the electorate. In the precarious and often chaotic aftermath of the regime change, and in the face of criticism from Ennahda’s own support base and other Islamists, Ghannouchi (who did not take up any cabinet post) revealed himself as both a realist, looking for compromise with the powerful bloc of Tunisian secularists, and a principled political actor respecting the rules of the democratic process. However, in relation to Ghannouchi’s existing political writings, Andrew March cautions against downplaying the limitations a hybrid political theory like Public Freedom in the Islamic State places on the sovereignty of the people. On the one hand, humankind’s viceregency can’t be dismissed as ‘duplicity and tactical double speak’, reducing it to a theological narrative leading to ‘authoritarian guardianship’.73 On the other hand, the ‘ontological priority and normative

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supremacy of shariʿa to any human political authority’ can’t be so generously interpreted as a ‘rhetorical cover for a kind of Lockean vision of popular sovereignty endowed with God’s imprimatur and hedged in only by a loose conception of natural right’, because humankind ‘is not the possessor of original right over himself or others, but only a deputy’.74 According to March, the shift in Ghannouchi’s thinking has less to do with genuine popular sovereignty than with ‘popular participation in the determination of what in the ‘shariʿa’ is timeless, fixed and specific and what is a matter of general ethical principles and open to reinterpretation and application in time’.75 As a further caveat, March adds that, when Ghannouchi writes about the ‘text’ (Qur’an) or employs the term ‘shari‘a’, he is not referring to fiqh or ‘positive jurisprudence’.76 With this, we encounter yet another instance of how the themes treated in the various chapters of this book interlock with each other. In this case, how theories of sovereignty and political authority merge into ethicallegal thinking about the differences between generalities and particulars of the law will be explored in detail in the next chapter. The intellectual standing of Morocco’s Mohammed Abed al-Jabri rests primarily on his contributions to epistemology. However, aside from work as an academic philosopher, he was also active as a politician for Morocco’s socialist party. Not unlike Soroush, also al-Jabri’s political writings evince a philosophical understanding of democracy, less preoccupied with technicalities, such as elections, than with fundamental questions concerning democratic choice as a notion of liberty and exercise of human free will.77 Working from the premise that neither Qur’an nor the Traditions of the Prophet provide a clear definition of the relation between religion and state in Islam, al-Jabri’s anthropocentric, or even humanist, perspective informs his willingness to adopt a conceptualization of the relation between church and state along the lines of what he calls the ‘Renaissance Authoritative Referent’.78 In spite of its European historical origins, in al-Jabri’s mind, this bears a close affinity with the Qur’anic understanding of humankind, demonstrating the fallacy of the alleged dichotomy between religion and politics in modern thought. Instead, the relationship is more accurately understood in terms of democracy and rationality than within the ideological framework of secularism. In dealing with economics, politics and social relations, Muslims should use their faculty of reason: The question, then, is not whether Islam is good and valid for all time and places. No Muslim would remain Muslim if they doubted that religious postulate for a moment. But the question which should always be asked is whether the Muslims of today are good enough for their own time, able to live in their own age, to inaugurate a new ‘conduct’, compatible with the old ‘conduct of the forefathers’, making it a living reality, suitable to be followed by future generations in building their own code of conduct.79

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The problem with the way democracy has historically featured in modern ArabIslamic political thinking is that the idea was carried by an urban elite that not only lacks a direct relationship with the rest of society, but that also ignores the traditional intellectual establishment of religious scholars and Muslim reactionaries, who remain ‘organically connected with the masses’. This has put the latter in an advantageous position for continuing to ‘legislate for the future, even if by calling for a return to the past’.80 The democratization of Arab-Islamic societies should not be fashioned after the ancient Greek-Roman or modern European and American models, nor by resorting to the traditional Islamic concept of shura or consultation. The lexicographical meaning of this originally Qur’anic notion and its historical application by rulers bears no relation to the democratic concept of human sovereignty. Moreover, in classical Islamic political theory, consultation was never considered a sine qua non condition. Al-Jabri also cautioned that, while the ‘call for democracy in the Arab nation is getting stronger and has been increasing since the 1980s’, it still has a long way to go before it can be transformed within the Arabs’ collective conscience into an ‘unshakeable conviction’, firmly embedded in collective Arab conscience.81 Misgivings regarding the viability of genuine democratic practice in the Arab world are the result of frequent experiences with the corruption of electoral processes or the deferment of democracy on the pretext of the more important national struggles towards independence. Consequently, in the political process in the Arab world democracy remains a tool in the hands of the surveillance state rather than an expression of a flourishing civil society. Successive generations of elites have continued to be culpable of this offense the moment they attain political power. In spite of this sad state of affairs, al-Jabri insists that ‘democracy should not be viewed as a process that may be applied in one society or another, but as an essential process to be established’, it is the ‘only acceptable legitimacy; there is no alternative to it’.82

Euro-Islam: citizenship, loyalty and political participation of Muslims in minority situations The intersecting of political theory and theology in negotiating secularity, freedom and democracy also shapes the ways in which expatriate Muslim intellectuals have thought through how their co-religionists should adjust to finding themselves in minority situations. When considering migrant communities in the West, should we speak of Islam in Europe, or is there a European Islam in the making? One response has been Bassam Tibi’s ‘Euro-Islam’. Born in Syria in 1944, Tibi moved to Germany at the age of eighteen and has been a German citizen since 1976. Therefore, he considers himself to be writing from the perspective of a European. Moreover, as a professor of international relations, his chosen format is the first and foremost one of academic analysis.83 Presenting himself as an alternative to both Christian conservatives deploring the decline of the West and Muslims with – according to Tibi – clearly politically motivated agendas like Tariq Ramadan, in

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2016, he announced that he has given up on the idea of Euro-Islam altogether under the onslaught of what he calls ‘headscarf Islam’.84 Perhaps, the most influential interlocutor in the debate on how Muslims should meet the challenges posed by permanent residence outside the historical Dar al-Islam, Tariq Ramadan’s influence was initially limited to Francophone Muslims. But thanks to the three books written in English, his ideas about a European Islam have reached wider international audiences. To Be a European Muslim (1999), Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (2004), and Radical Reform (2009) offer valuable insights into both the political and legal dimensions of Muslim adjustment to a minority situation in the eyes of this Muslim public intellectual.85 On the one hand, firmly embedding his thinking into the conservative Islamic legal and theological tradition, on the other hand, Ramadan’s writings betray intimate acquaintance with both the language and concerns of political liberalism in the West. Some have called Ramadan a ‘Muslim Martin Luther’, but one commentator has corrected this: ‘What was meant, of course, was that Ramadan might be a potential “Muslim John Locke” – that is, a thinker who would use religious and scriptural arguments to formulate a doctrine of religious tolerance and secular government’.86 This begs the question how Ramadan sees a potentially illiberal religion fit into a liberal society. Central to the answer are Ramadan’s responses to the demands of citizenship and justice. The latter is a legal issue that will be addressed in the next chapter. The former is evidently political in nature and also involves the question of loyalty (wala’, muwala). The reaction of conservative and reactionary scholars and intellectuals from Muslim majority countries to this, from an Islamic perspective, problematic issue has been negative. Their responses range from discouraging or rejecting close bonds with non-Muslims to forbidding permanent residence outside the Dar al-Islam, let alone expressing loyalty to non-Muslim political entities, such as states or political parties.87 Living in and thinking from a minority situation, Ramadan offers a more considerate – some would say, calculated – evaluation that navigates between two forms of liberalism: A comprehensive value-laden version, and a political version that is limited to social and political cooperation grounded in the recognition of the equal right to freedom for all citizens, but without formulating a single worldview or epistemology to which all have to subscribe. Borrowing John Rawls’ term of ‘overlapping consensus’ (the endorsement of political and social cooperation by a variety of doctrines using ‘their own unique justifications’), Andrew March argues that in To Be a European Muslim, Ramadan presents a way of adopting core elements of political liberalism that would also be acceptable to socially conservative traditional Muslims.88 To this end, he draws on the concept of the ‘public good’ (maslaha in Arabic), and a subfield of traditional Islamic legal learning: a theory called maqasid al-shariʿa, which can be translated as ‘higher objectives of shari’a’ or ‘purposes of Divine Law’. From this perspective, loyalty to the state and respect for the system of governance in the

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country of residence is presented as a sort of social contract that is also recognized in Islamic legal practice. The fact that it involves a non-Muslim entity, or the argument that belonging to the worldwide Muslim community or umma trumps other – civic – obligations, does not nullify the validity of the overarching injunction of Islamic teachings to respect the law of the land. While some conservative and reactionary scholars, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, have softened their stance regarding residency in non-Muslim countries, they reject participation in its political system on grounds of collusion with non-Islamic legislation and forms of governance. Tariq Ramadan deviates from this stance: Muslims should be allowed to commit themselves within societies and to act in favour of human solidarity. This also means that Muslims can be engaged in social as well as in political activities. This is why, both at local and national levels, their commitment as Muslims and citizens is imperative for it is the sole way of completing and perfecting their Faith and the essential Message of their Religion.89 Thus, Muslims are not just permitted to vote and stand as candidates in elections, it is even a religious duty to do so. For this reason, Tariq Ramadan has added a third category to the traditional Islamic world order, which distinguishes between the Dar al-Islam or ‘Abode of Islam’ and the Dar al-Kufr or Dar al-Harb (‘Abode of Unbelief’ and ‘Abode of War’ respectively). Ramadan has introduced the term Dar al-Shahada or ‘Abode of Witnessing to the Islamic Message’. This characterization stands also in contrast to Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s conceptualization of a third category: Dar al-Daʿwa or ‘Abode of Islamic Propagation’. This term has a more intrusive connotation of not just advocating conversion of nonMuslims, but reflecting an invasive missionary drive toward the Islamization of the West. Characterized by Bassam Tibi as a political Muslim who knows exactly what he wants, others have used more negative qualifications for Tariq Ramadan, expressing outright suspicion toward the precise intentions of articulate and sophisticated individuals like him.90 These attitudes reflect the polarized climate in which the debates on European Muslim minorities are being conducted, as painful memories of terrorist attacks in Belgium, Britain, France and Spain are overlaid with feelings of fear and unrest over an influx of people from the Muslim world, consisting of refugees fleeing war-torn countries in the Middle East and of economic migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Concluding remarks What ties together the buzzwords of this chapter – secularity, freedom and democracy – is transformation. The slogan din wa dawla of the classical theorists of siyasa shariʿiyya has morphed into various forms of utopian Islamism of reactionary thinkers. In other instances, the secularization thesis of the 1960s and its

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more sophisticated reformulation of the 1990s have produced a transformative Islam held on to by successive generations of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, while Turkish Islamic exceptionalism has been replaced by a Turkish-Islamic Synthesis. On the back of these developments, Indonesia and Turkey embarked on what are still – despite obstacles and setbacks – the most successful experiments with democratization in the Muslim world. This, in turn, has motivated some Islamists from elsewhere to reinvent themselves as Muslim democrats.

Notes 1 The terms are borrowed from Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (London: Ithaca Press, 1997). 2 I have discussed this parallel in more detail elsewhere: Carool Kersten, ‘Urbanization, Civil Society and Religious Pluralism in Indonesia and Turkey’ in Religious Pluralism, State and Society in Asia, ed. Chiara Formichi (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 13–34. 3 Andrew F. March, Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology, Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 268 (2012), 4, 9–10, SSRN: https://ssrn.com /abstract=2166953. 4 And a brother of Mustafa Abd al-Raziq. 5 Ali Abdel Razek, Islam and the Foundations of Political Power. Maryam Loutfi (trans.) and Abdou Filali-Ansari (ed.) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and the Aga Khan University, 2013). 6 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 17. For detailed discussions of these two concepts, cf. Sayed Khatab, The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of Jahiliyya (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 7 Q 2:143. 8 Raymond William Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4. Bettina Gräf, ‘The Concept of Wasatiyya in the work of Yusuf al-Qaradawi’, 213–230. 9 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, ‘Islam and Democracy’ in Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought, eds. Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 224–245; David H. Warren and Christine Gilmore, ‘Rethinking Neo-Salafism through an Emerging Fiqh of Citizenship: The Changing Status of Minorities in the Discourse of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the “School of the Middle Way”’, New Middle Eastern Studies 2 (2012), https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php /nmes/article/view/2630/2462, last accessed 21 July 2018; David H. Warren and Christine Gilmore, ‘One Nation under God? Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Changing Fiqh of Citizenship in the Light of the Islamic Legal Tradition’, Contemporary Islam 8:3 (2013): 217–237. 10 Reading Islam, Ask About Islam in Should World Religions Unite Against Immorality? www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-AAbout _Islam/AskAboutIslamE/AskAboutIslamE&cid=1173695384292, quoted in Andrew F. March, ‘Are Secularism and Neutrality Attractive to Religious Minorities? Islamic Discussions of Western Secularism in the “Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities” (Fiqh Al-Aqalliyyat) Discourse’, Cardozo Law Review 30:6 (2009): 2831. 11 Abdou Filali-Ansari, ‘The Debate on Secularism in Contemporary Societies of Muslims’, ISIM Newsletter 2:99 (1999): 6. 12 Sami Zubaida, ‘Islam and Secularization’, Asian Journal of Social Science 33:3 (2005): 439. 13 Zubaida, ‘Islam and Secularization’, 444. 14 Zubaida, ‘Islam and Secularization’, 445.

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15 Reza Alijani, ‘Pre-Secular Iranians in a Post-secular Age: The Death of God, the Resurrection of God’, Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31:1 (2011): 28. 16 Alijani, ‘Pre-secular Iranians in a Post-secular Age’, 31–32 [original italics]. 17 Alijani, ‘Pre-secular Iranians in a Post-secular Age’, 32 [original italics]. 18 Alijani, ‘Pre-secular Iranians in a Post-secular Age’, 32–33. 19 Nurcholish Madjid, Pembaruan Pemikiran Islam, 4. 20 Nurcholish Madjid, Islam Kemodernan Keindonesiaan, 216–217. 21 Nurcholish Madjid, ‘Sekali Lagi Tentang Sekularisasi’ in Koreksi terhadap Drs Nurcholish Madjid tentang Sekularisasi, ed. Muhammed Rasjidi (Jakarta: Bulan Bintang, 1972), 38. 22 Jahanbakhsh, Islam Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran, 169. 23 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 217. 24 Muhammad Khalid Masud, ‘The Construction and Deconstruction of Secularism as an Ideology in Contemporary Muslim Thought’, Asian Journal of Social Science 33:3 (2005): 363, 381. 25 Masud, ‘The Construction and Deconstruction of Secularism’, 381–382. 26 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). This book has also appeared in Arabic and Indonesian. 27 Budhy Munawar-Rachman, ‘Reorientasi Pembaruan Islam: Sekularisme, Liberalisme, Pluralisme’ in Paradigma Baru Islam Indonesia (Jakarta: Paramadina, 2010), 215, 246– 247 28 Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1. 29 Luthfi Assyaukanie, Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), 3, 18. 30 Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, ‘Apa Setelah Nurcholish Madjid?’ in Menembus Batas Tradisi: Menuju Masa Depan yang Bebaskan: Refleksi atas Pemikiran Nurcholish Madjid, ed. Abdulhalim (Jakarta: Kompas & Universitas Paramadina, 2006), 144. For Soroush, cf. Valla Vakili, ‘Abdolkarim Soroush and Critical Discourse in Iran’ in Makers of Contemporary Islam, eds. John Esposito and John O. Voll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 153–155. 31 Q 3: 14, 110, 114 and 34:15. 32 Bahtiar Effendy, Islam and the State in Indonesia (Athens OH and Singapore: University of Ohio Press & ISEAS, 2004), 128. 33 Effendy, 2003: 203. 34 Effendy, Islam and the State in Indonesia, 203. 35 Assyaukanie, Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia, 2. 36 Assyaukanie, Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia, 18. 37 Assyaukanie, Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia, 17. 38 Assyaukanie, Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia, 103. 39 Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom and Democracy: The Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, eds. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The title essay has also been included in Mehran Kamrava (ed.), The New Voices of Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 243–261. 40 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam’, 244. 41 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam’, 248 and 247. 42 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam’, 249. 43 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam’, 250. 44 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam’, 261. 45 Soroush, ‘Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam’, 257. 46 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 203–244.

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47 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 49, 74–75. The quote comes from Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism (London: Saqi Books, 2007), 51. 48 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 52. 49 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 154. 50 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 162. 51 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 219. 52 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 223. 53 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 225. 54 Asef Bayat, ‘The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 5:9 (1996): 43–52; Dagi, ‘Rethinking human rights, democracy, and the West: Post-Islamist intellectuals in Turkey’, 139. 55 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 219. 56 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 225. 57 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 232, citing a study in Turkish by Kenan Çayir. 58 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 240–241. 59 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 235. 60 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 245. 61 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 256. 62 Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 264. 63 Şerif Mardin, ‘Turkish Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today: Continuity, Rupture and Reconstruction in Operational Codes’, Turkish Studies 6:2 (2005): 145–165. 64 Nazanine Moshiri, ‘Interview with Rachid Ghannouchi’, Al-Jazeera, 7 April 2011, www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/02/2011233464273624.html, last accessed 4 March 2018. Also quoted in Akyol, Islam without Extremes, 241. 65 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 2 [original italics]. 66 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 18. 67 John Esposito and John O. Voll, ‘Rachid Ghannoushi: Activist in Exile’ in Makers of Contemporary Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 107. 68 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 18. 69 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 18–19. 70 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 19. 71 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 20. 72 Esposito and Voll, ‘Rachid Ghannoushi: Activist in Exile’, 115. 73 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 2 and 20. 74 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 20, quoting from Ghannouchi, Al-Hurriyat al-ʿamma, 99. 75 March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 21. 76 Ghannouchi, Al-Hurriyat al-ʿamma, 101, quoted in March, ‘Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology’, 21 77 Mohammad Abed al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 108. 78 Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 47. 79 Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 70. 80 Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 121. 81 Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 155. 82 Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 169. 83 Bassam Tibi, Euro-Islam: Die Lösung eines Zivilisationskonfliktes (Darmstadt: VBG, 2009), 15. 84 Bassam Tibi, ‘Warum ich kapituliere’, Cicero 6 (2016): 115–119. 85 Tariq Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim: A Study of Islamic Sources in the European Context (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 1999); Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Radical Reform: Islam Ethics and Liberation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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86 Paul Donnelly, ‘Tariq Ramadan: The Muslim Martin Luther?’ Salon, 15 February 2002, www.salon.com/2002/02/15/ramadan_2; Andrew F. March, ‘Reading Tariq Ramadan: Political Liberalism, Islam and “Overlapping Consensus”’, Ethics and International Affairs 21:4 (2007): 400. 87 Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an, Translated from the Arabic by Adil Salahi and Ashur Shamis, Vol. III (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2001), 286; Muhammad Saeed al-Qahtani, Al-Wala’ Wa’l-Bara’ According to the Aqeedah of the Salaf, 3 volumes (London: Al-Firdous, 1999). 88 March, ‘Reading Tariq Ramadan’, 405–406, cf. also: Andrew F. March, ‘Liberal Citizenship and the Search for an Overlapping Consensus: The Case of Muslim Minorities’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 34:4 (2006): 373–421. 89 Ramadan, To be a European Muslim, 134. 90 Tibi, Euro-Islam, 9; Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan; Fu¯rstenberg, Wer had Angst vor Tariq Ramadan?; Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals.

6 SHARIʿA Islamic legal system or ethical guideline?

Islam is often characterized as an orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, meaning that it is a performative religion rather than a theological edifice structured around a complex doctrine. Instead, an orthopraxy is characterized by a preoccupation with the correct execution of religious obligations and with appropriate conduct. This makes providing the believers with the necessary guidance and rules, regulating practices and behaviour, as well as giving ethical qualifications to their actions, a matter of central importance. What Muslims refer to as ‘shariʿa’, and what is often used as shorthand for ‘Islamic law’, has thus become the focal point of intellectual attention in scholarship. This has led to a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The original meaning of the Arabic word shariʿa is a route to a water source, and makes its translation as ‘Islamic law’ a misnomer. It is therefore better understood as a moral compass or ethical guideline for the believers. The appropriate term for Islamic law, in a concrete and technical sense, is fiqh, usually translated as ‘jurisprudence’. The centrality of law to Islam also gives great importance to the experts in this field, the fuqaha (plural of faqih) or legal scholars. When determining their authoritative status, it must be noted that historically such specializations were not as exclusivist as is the case with the present-day distinctions of academic disciplines. The curriculum of traditional Islamic learning turned out religious scholars with a universal schooling. Aside from law, they had to be at home in sacred scripture and its commentaries, doctrinal and other theological issues, elements of metaphysics and mysticism, but also non-religious sciences, such as logic and often medicine. Aside from academic knowledge, their authority and standing also depends on personal characteristics: honesty, diligence, restraint, comprehensiveness and reasonableness.1

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Law needs a theoretical underpinning and methodology providing jurists with the professional means for executing their work. This legal theory and its accompanying technical ‘toolbox’ are laid out in two genres of juristic literature called usul al-fiqh, or ‘foundations of jurisprudence’, and furuʿ al-fiqh, or ‘branches of jurisprudence’, respectively. Usul al-fiqh has already been mentioned in the discussions on epistemology, where it was noted how jurisprudence intertwines with other fields of Islamic thought: This can also be deduced from the etymology of the word fiqh, which originally means ‘understanding’ or ‘comprehension’ – clearly pointing at a more comprehensive conceptualization in Islamic traditional learning than mere legalism. In legal practice, usul and furuʿ al-fiqh are closely connected. However as a legal theory, usul al-fiqh operates discursively on two levels: one constant and bound by divine command, the other nonconstant and open to interpretation.2 The constant sources of jurisprudence consist of the Qur’an; the Traditions of the Prophet, or Sunna; and the consensus of the scholars, known as ijmaʿ. The non-constant source is formed by what is called ijtihad or ‘independent reasoning’. As an integral methodology, usul alfiqh sets out both the normative framework and the interpretative criteria for legal hermeneutics; therefore, ‘One cannot overstress the multi-faceted nature of uṣu¯l al-fiqh, which comprises what is equivalent in Western jurisprudence to legal theory, legal methodology, interpretation, and more importantly in this context, legal philosophy’.3 Substantive differences between Sunni and Shiʿi jurisprudence are found not so much in furuʿ al-fiqh, but in usul al-fiqh.4 ‘Historically, Sunni scholars have rejected the determinations of Shiʿi narrators of h ̣adīth and vice versa’. Even more uncompromising is a group known as the ahl al-hadith, which also dismisses the transmission of hadith by Shiʿis, and – for that matter – by Muʿtazilis and Kharijites as well.5 A further contrast between Sunnis and Shiʿis is the use of reason. Where jurists use a method of reasoning by analogy known as qiyas, which has its origin with the first great systematizer of legal thought and eponymous founder the Shafiʿi school of law, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafiʿi (767–820), the Shiʿa have continued to adhere to Muʿtazili-inspired rationalist approaches.6 However, this must come with a caveat: Although the reliance on the Muʿtazila gives reason a wider license in Shiʿi legal thinking, it must not be taken as a full embrace of rationalism: ‘Reason is meant in a weak sense, as argumentation and calculation […]. The formalisation of Shiʿi legal theory was to a large extent an acclimatisation of logic, where the position of faith in reason, rather than the polarisation of faith and reason came to triumph’.7 This instrumentalized use of reason by Shiʿi legal scholars is therefore better qualified as ‘rationalistic’ than ‘rationalist’. In the context of contemporary Islamic thought, traditional and reactionary understandings of shariʿa remain therefore not only very much preoccupied with the technicalities of furuʿ al-fiqh, but also with an application of usul al-fiqh aligned with strict adherence to historically defined methods, sanctioned as orthodox.

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Among progressive thinkers there is a tendency to call into question not only the epistemological merits of these methods, but also critically reflect on the underlying morality; what is Islamic law for? These critiques are developed not only under the influence of Western philosophy, but also through a return to another subfield of traditional Islamic learning, briefly mentioned in the previous chapter: maqasid al-shariʿa, ‘the (higher) objectives of shariʿa’. Operating on a higher level of abstraction than usul al-fiqh and addressing the fundamental ethics underpinning law-giving, it can be considered the Islamic equivalent of a philosophy of law. For that reason, it has remained subordinate to the attention given by legal scholars to usul al-fiqh. Leaving this theorizing of Islamic law momentarily aside, the continuing preoccupation with regulating appropriate Muslim conduct through law is also evinced by calls of contemporary Islamists from Morocco to Indonesia for implementing shariʿa. In some instances, their efforts have had effect. Since the late 1970s or early 1980s, countries like Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and Afghanistan have witnessed the reintroduction of aspects of Islamic law. It is important to stress this partiality, because even a country like Saudi Arabia, despite claims of having preserved the integrity of Islamic law and retaining the Qur’an as its constitution, has had to make allowances for positive – that is man-made – laws. This is because of lacuna in fiqh where it comes to running a modern government administration operating in a global system of nation states. However, within the confines of this order, traditional, reactionary and progressive Muslims continue to negotiate the intricacies of retaining what they consider an authentic Islamic life style in the modern world through the lens of Islamic legal learning.8

Substantivist critiques and reinterpretations of Islamic law A substantive critique of ultra-conservative and reactionary legal positions is provided by Khaled Abou El Fadl.9 His methodology ‘goes beyond the more common appeals to the maqa¯sid (the goals of Sharīʿa) or maslaha (common god) offered by some contemporary reformists such as Ramadan and Auda’.10 Instead, the fight is taken to the fuqaha in their own domain; that of actual judicial rulings and legal pronouncements. An example of this is provided by his criticism of the pronouncements of Saudi Arabia’s Permanent Council for Scientific Research and Legal Opinions (CRLO) regarding women. Abou El Fadl begins with the observation that, in the modern age, the authority resting with the ‘ultimate author’ of the divinely revealed sources of Islamic law, that is God, is only all too often abused ‘to justify the despotism of the reader’, that is the interpreters of Islamic law – the fuqaha.11 He rejects the CRLO’s rulings on grounds of both its epistemology and methodology, accusing its members of discrimination by calling for female exclusion and seclusion on account of their selective use of the Sunna (Traditions of the Prophet) as source of law. At the core of their juristic

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deliberations is a preoccupation with what Abou El Fadl calls the ‘fitna traditions’. As a generic term, fitna means social upheaval and political chaos, but in this context, it refers to ‘seduction and seductive acts’. The traditions in question are preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with notions such as ʿawra (the female and male private parts that must be covered), zina (adornments that women need to keep away from view) and khalwa (secretive association between a man and a woman who are not married), which are used to call for the veiling of women (hijab) and the prohibition of a mixing of the sexes in public spaces (ikhtila¯t).̣ 12 Going into the minute details of hadith studies, Abou El Fadl criticizes the CRLO scholars for following a group of archconservative and reactionary scholars, historically known as the ahl al-hadith, in their practice to accept narrations with so-called singular lines of transmission and to use these to underpin the CRLO’s rulings in which women are not just told to be obedient to their husbands, but in which it is even implied that their very salvation depends on it. In many instances, the hadith or narratives used by the CRLO explicitly ‘contradict other portrayals of the Prophet’s character and conflict with the Qur’anic spirit’.13 This is a violation of an established principle in jurisprudence to reconcile such oppositions, as has been historically practiced in traditional scholarship. Moreover, in view of the profound differences between contemporary Muslim societies and the community at the time of the Prophet, the positions taken by the CRLO are also at odds with Abou El Fadl’s suggestion of striking a balance ‘between our assessment of the instructions (mostly Sunna and hadith) and their theological, legal and sociological impact’.14 In the absence of such a degree of proportionality, in final analysis, Abou El Fadl can only come to the sober conclusion that: if Islamic jurisprudence is about a methodology for a reflective life that searches for the Divine, and about a process of weighing and balancing the core values of Shariʿa in pursuit of a moral, then I think one would have to concede that it has disintegrated and disappeared in the last three centuries, but particularly in the second half of the twentieth century.15 Even in Indonesia, where Islam is kept at arm’s length of political institutions, Islamists of various dispositions have tried using the window of opportunity opened up during the transition to democracy after the regime change of 1998 to formally include Islamic law in the country’s new political framework by reviving the so-called ‘Jakarta Charter’ from 1945. Now a historical document, it proposed making a reference in Indonesia’s original constitution to the need for Muslims to adhere to Islamic law. In 2002, two Islamist splinter parties attempted to again include it in the country’s new constitution. After failing in their attempts, the Islamists changed tactics, using the decentralization of state administration and the devolution of power to provincial and local authorities for a shariʿatization from below.

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At the same time, one finds also religious scholars who take a substantivist rather than formalist approach to the implementation of Islamic law in presentday Indonesian society. As one scholar from a traditional Islamic background argues: Working out the concrete details of the issues (the domain of furuʿ alfiqhg) confronting the Muslim community in their present and future lives requires a ‘new foundation of jurisprudence (ushul fiqh baru)’ linking legal thinking with other matters of social life.16 Since the 1990s, senior religious scholars in the NU, the Islamic mass organization uniting tens of millions of traditional Indonesian Muslims, have been rethinking the relevance of Islamic law to Indonesian society. Unlike other senior figures in the NU, such as its Executive Chairman Abdurrahman Wahid, during the 1980s and 1990s, its General President Sahal Mahfudh remained on the political sideline, closely adhering to the NU’s new strategy, introduced in the early 1980s, of returning to its founding document known as Khittah 1926, which concentrates on emancipating Indonesian Muslims through education and scholarship. Mahfudh saw his role as that of a reformer of the pesantren, the Javanese Islamic boarding school milieu where these Islamic discourses were actually developed and articulated. Remaining immersed in the Arabic tradition of Shafiʿi legal scholarship, he also worked together with another senior NU scholar, Mustofa Bisri, in producing an Indonesian-language encyclopaedia on ijma‘ (scholarly consensus), informed by direct reference to these classical sources. A strong advocate of the continued use of the traditional text corpus, Mahfudh also stressed the plurality of interpretations found within the respective schools of law themselves. For him this meant that text materials used in the pesantren, the so-called kitab kuning or ‘yellow books’, retain a value that extends beyond their ‘significance as historicized documents’.17 Mahfudh’s position that fiqh is best regarded as a method or way of thinking (manhaj) than a fixed normative approach prefigured that of the ‘new ʿulama’ emerging from a younger generation of scholars and their protégés who presented themselves as ‘Islamic post-traditionalists’, discussed in the first chapter of this book. In his book Nuances of Social Fiqh, Mahfudh has explained that contextual perspectives must be teased out by means of direct and appreciative – but at the same time critical – engagement with traditional scholarship, turning fiqh into a dynamic counter narrative to the dominant discourse of modernity. For this, Mahfudh attached great importance to the notion of maslaha, which can be translated as the ‘common good’ or ‘general welfare’; a concept that classical Shafiʿi legal scholarship has not elaborated very extensively. Therefore, Madfudh had to revert to the writings of Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi (d. 1388), a Malike scholar from Andalusia, who is considered one of the greatest authorities on the subject of maqasid al-shariʿa; the ‘higher objectives of Islamic law’. In Mahfudh’s reading, maslaha gives fiqh a double role; simultaneously functioning as a safeguard of orthodox truth claims and as a tool for grasping contemporary social realities.

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Ultimately, the reinterpretation and reimplementation of Islamic law is both ‘a means for social control and social engineering’.18 However, after he eventually ascended to the general presidency of the NU, while also becoming chairman of the Indonesian Council of Religious Scholars (Majelis Ulema Indonesia, MUI), Mahfudh oversaw the release of a series of fatwas, or legal opinions, that took negative positions toward inter-religious marriage, declared the Ahmadiyya movement heretical, and condemned concepts like pluralism, liberalism and secularism as ‘un-Islamic’, despite the fact that these are implicitly enshrined in Indonesia’s Pancasila Doctrine. Sahal Mahfudh must therefore be set apart from figures such as Said Aqil Siradj, the NU’s current Executive Chairman and another senior executive and scholar, Masdar Masʿudi. Both have been highly critical of these rulings and have continuously maintained that there is no contradiction between Muslim piety and the Pancasila. As director of the NU’s think tank P3M, also Mas‘udi stresses the enduring value of the Kitab Kuning because of their potential to engage in a dynamic and flexible manner with contemporary issues. At the same time, the grounding of fiqh in revealed sources points to the NU’s propagation of Islam as a middle way rather than an invitation to extreme relativism. This concern for moderation, tolerance, and justice, as enshrined in the organization’s founding document Khittah 1926, also informs Masʿudi’s writings on law. His advocacy of coherence based on an integral vision of human life challenges the atomistic approach often found in the work of many other jurists. The revival of ijtihad by early Muslim reformists is criticized for its lack in academic rigour. In Masʿudi’s opinion, their approach is more appropriately understood as tarjih, a juristic instrument used in furuʿ al-fiqh to arrive at the right legal position regarding concrete issues on the basis of the strongest available evidence. In his most important book Religion of Justice: A Treatise on Zakat (Tax) in Islam, Mas‘udi applies ijtihad as an interpretative tool for teasing out the parallel between the ethical dimensions of the obligation of zakat (mandatory charitable donations) and the abstract notion of economic justice.19 With this, Masʿudi takes the preoccupation of jurists with the piecemeal fashioning of juridical rulings to the general level of moral responsibility. Intent on offering a unified understanding of zakat and tax, Masʿudi writes how the connection between state and religion is best understood as a symbiotic relationship, comparable to that of ‘soul and body, spirit and flesh, value and institution, or vision and action’, with religion offering direction and the state providing the required structure for the translation and actualization of religiously inspired imperatives.20 Discovering how to infuse this spirit of justice and mercy into secularized state structures is a divine duty of all believers and a concrete task for religious specialists. Mas‘udi explains that, while in the execution of its duties towards its citizens, a state faces expenditures, it is not designed to generate revenues by engaging itself in commercial activities. Instead, as a social and humanitarian institution,

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the state imposes taxes on grounds of a public ethic, balancing the payments it receives against a need for a redistribution of wealth that protects the weak and helps the poor in the interest of the common good (maslaha) and thus to the benefit of all citizens. Mas‘udi agrees that there is a meritocratic dimension to this interpretation of the Islamic teachings. While acknowledging the principle of human equality, he qualifies this with the observation that only those who put in the right effort will thrive and prosper. Invoking a Qur’anic injunction found in Sura 49 (al-Hujarat), this Islamic variant on the principle of the ‘survival of the fittest’ is interpreted ethically as those who excel in doing ‘good deeds’; a morality that sets Islam apart from neoliberal open-market policies of presentday capitalism.21 Masʿudi has continued to apply this approach to other topics, such as gender equality and women’s reproductive rights, on which he worked together with the leading female Muslim scholar and women’s rights activist Lies MarcoesNatsir (b. 1959).22 However, like Sahal Mahfudh, also Masdar F. Masʿudi is not without critics. While agreeing that Religion of Justice constitutes Masdar Masʽudi’s masterpiece, younger NU cadres, such as Ahmad Baso, question whether Masʽudi’s system of thought has actually managed to turn traditional Islamic jurisprudence away from furuʿ al-fiqh and toward a creative way of thinking. In terms of normativity, Baso finds Masʿudi’s approach too doctrinal and instrumental in its normativity. As what Mohammed Arkoun used to call a-historical ‘sublimation’ of Sunni thinking, Masʿudi has not only misconstrued zakat as a form of taxation. He also does not really take the thinking of Indonesia’s ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamaʿa (aswaja) beyond their Ashʽari-Maturidi theology, Shafi‘i fiqh and Ghazalian Sufism.23 Baso goes on to contend that Masʿudi harbours real reservations toward the use of reason. Occasionally, Masʿudi has characterized this as ‘counterproductive’ and even compared to an ‘invasion of foreign thinking’ – echoing reactionary Muslim obsessions with ghazwul fikr. Rather than using the deconstruction of texts or engaging in discourse critique to innovate Islamic thinking, he seems more concerned with consolidating Ashʽari doctrine. When it comes to interpretation, he puts his faith in intuition; not along the lines of Western philosophers such as Descartes of Kant, but in terms of the concept of fitra (the innate human disposition to believe) and a type of irfani thinking known as illuminationism (ishraq). It is this kind of a-historical idealism that leads to misconstruing the relation between religious duties and state-imposed obligations, because historically zakat has never been identified with tax, as also the research of Muhammad Abid al-Jabri has shown. In classical Islamic societies, the economic system was not redistributive, but tributary based on spoils of war and coercion. Identifying the state as the guarantor of the public good reflects an étatist understanding shaped by Masʿudi’s orthodox Sunni normativity, driven by pragmatic or even utilitarian considerations of what benefits the community. Such an approach serves to justify the status quo, relativism, the secular and collaboration with those in power. Also in terms of an Islamic philosophy of law,

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such associations are problematic, because Mas‘udi’s understanding of maslaha is very different from that of classical scholars such as al-Shatibi or Ibn Rushd, who challenged the dominance of Shafiʽi qiyas (reasoning by analogy) and advocated an alternative approach: The inductive or demonstrative reasoning that characterizes the classical theory of maqasid al-shariʿa – the ‘higher objectives of shariʿa’.

From maqasid al-shariʿa to maqasidi thinking This renewed attention for the ‘higher objectives of shariʿa’ is evinced by a steady stream of publications on the subject not only in Arabic and other languages of the Muslim world, but also in English. It has also given rise to a strand of contemporary thinking about Islamic law referred to as ‘maqasidi thinking’.24 Maqasid al-shariʿa also appears to have become a matter of interest for religious scholars from traditional backgrounds, identifying with the wasatiyya discourse, which should not only be associated with Muhammad al-Ghazali and the later Yusuf al-Qaradawi, but which is also very influential in Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama. In relation to law, in fact, especially in relation to Islamic law, wasatiyya thinkers reject a dichotomous understanding or binary opposition of tradition (taqlid) versus modernity. Instead, they advocate a middle position (tawassut) of moderation (i´tidal) and balance (tawazun), reflective of the divine wishes encapsulated in the maqasid.25 Wael Hallaq argues that such a realignment of maqasid al-shariʿa with modernity leaves the Muslims with two options, each requiring nothing less than what he calls ‘a transplantation [of historically evolved Islamic law] into a profoundly new legal ecology’.26 The first option involves the recognition of the status quo of modernity and the primacy of the nation state. This means subjugation to the will of the state of what used to be a sociallyembedded but at the same time personalist legal hermeneutics focusing on the morality of the individual Muslim. The other more radical solution is to transcend the modern condition and recreate a moral community that was lost with the political-legal triumph of modernity. Contemporary theorists of maqasid al-shariʿa suggest that Muslim reformers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), Rashid Rida (1865–1935) and Muhammad al-Tahir ibn Ashur (1879–1973), had not taken the subject beyond the doctrinal manifestations found in the classical sources. Such reductionist understanding robs usul al-fiqh of its philosophical dimension; ‘cutting it off from its civilizational dynamics, as if usul al-fiqh is not at all connected with historical and social developments’.27 Also, the attention for maqasid al-shariʽa in the 1980s, found in Fazlur Rahman and Khalid Masud’s discussion of the writings of al-Shatibi, did not manage to move the discourse beyond a descriptive and doctrinal engagement, or mere repetition of legal maxims. Consequently, even by the end of the 1990s, scholarship in usul al-fiqh still continued to adhere to the cautionary

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maxim that ‘the avoidance of damage takes precedence over obtaining benefit’ (dar’ al-mafasid muqaddam ‘ala jalb al-masalih).28 By contrast, new theorists, such as Jasser Auda and Muhammad Hashim Kamali take a more integral approach, combining theological and epistemological thinking. Finally, it is also worth noting that maqasidi thinking coincides with the emergence of the post-Islamist thinking mentioned in the previous chapter. After a brief discussion of its classical origins, I will present a few examples from across the present-day Muslim world, which articulate the connections between maqasid al-shariʿa, maqasidi thinking and post-Islamism. I interpret it as a shift from two hundred years of adapting Islam to external influences towards a more radical internal transformation – an innovation through creative engagement with that particular aspect of Islam’s civilizational heritage (turath) that deals with law and extrapolating from it a philosophical method of enquiry. Although part of the body of traditional Islamic learning from the classical age, within premodern Islamic jurisprudence, some regarded the theory of maqasid al-shariʿa as a controversial discourse, because it allows for the possibility that ‘Islamic law can be derived not only from textual interpretation but also from conjecture about which aims and interests God intends to protect through law’.29 Although maqasid al-shariʿa was first addressed in a coherent fashion in the eleventh century by al-Juwayni (d. 1085) and further developed by his student Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), it was only in the late fourteenth century, that the Andalusian scholar al-Shatibi gave it its first full systematic treatment. Summarized in the briefest of terms, maqasid al-shariʿa defines the scope of Islamic law as encompassing the preservation of religion, life, property, intellect and offspring. The latter generally also includes family honour, although some scholars posit that as a separate sixth category. Second, it distinguishes a threetier scale of priorities in determining what benefits the public good or human welfare. Establishing three levels of necessities, identified as absolute necessities (daruriyyat), needs (hajiyyat), and improvements (tahsiniyyat, takmiliyyat), or embellishments (tazyiniyyat), this provides a hierarchical structure for thinking about law. Absolute necessities are primary objectives that must be realized, because failure to do so will jeopardize the integrity and dignity of human life. Needs are secondary objectives; although not imperative to safeguard and sustain human life, their realization is necessary in order to ease, facilitate or complement the absolute necessities. On the third and lowest level are the tahsiniyyat. Neither imperative nor necessary, their role in the realization of both the necessity and need is a matter of aesthetics or etiquette. This last type of objectives offers a vindication of cultural diversity in the manifestations or ways of expressing religious practice. This also demonstrates that ‘Muslim religiosity does not mean the extinction of creativity’.30 Finally, an indication that the theory of maqasid al-shariʿa is situated in the interstices of ethics and philosophy of law are the five categories that can be attributed to actions. Ranging from obligatory (wajib or fard), recommended (mandub), neutral or permitted (mubah), reprehensive or objectionable (makruh) to forbidden (haram), it offers a more subtle scale

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for determining appropriate conduct and judging behaviour than the legal binary of halal/haram, or permitted/forbidden. Al-Shatibi’s theory has been given renewed currency through an English translation by Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s successor as Chairman of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR): The Moroccan scholar Ahmad alRaysuni (b. 1953) who represents a younger generation of ulama. Aside from having received ijaza in Islamic law from Qarawina University in Fes, he also possesses academic degrees from the Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences at Muhammad V University in Rabat, where he continues to work as Professor of usul al-fiqh and maqasid al-shariʿa. In addition, Raysuni is active in politics, serving on the executive board of Harakat al-Tawhid wa’l-Islah (Movement for Unity and Reform, MUR), which has close links to Morocco’s Justice and Development Party. I suggest considering Ahmad al-Raysuni as a facilitator. His contributions consist in reintroducing contemporary audiences to the classical theory through an English translation of al-Shatibi’s writings and explaining its continuing relevance for contemporary interpretations of Islamic law and applications in jurisprudence in a book of his own dedicated to what he has termed ‘maqasidi thinking’.31 A similar role can be attributed to Muhammad Hashim Kamali, who has published widely on Islamic law, including the theory and philosophy of law.32 In his writings on maqasid al-shariʿa, Kamali adheres faithfully to the classical theory developed by al-Shatibi and interpretations by the influential legal scholar from Al-Azhar, Muhammad Abu Zahra (1898–1974). Accordingly, maqasid al-shariʿa is said to have three goals: The spiritual formation of the individual believer; ensuring justice, and specifically social justice; and the safeguarding of maslaha, which takes up central importance in Abu Zahra’s legal theorizing. Kamali also maintains a guarded approach toward the use of reason, which is reflective of Abu Zahra’s attempts to stay loyal to the epistemological positions taken by a figure like al-Ashʿari and avoiding any suggestion of Muʿtazilism.33 One of the prominent contributors to maqasidi thinking is Jasser Auda. A Canadian of Egyptian extraction, he holds two PhDs: One in systems analysis from Canada’s Waterloo University, and another in the Philosophy of Islamic Law from the University of Wales at Lampeter. Auda’s thesis was subsequently published as Maqasid al-Shariah as Philosophy of Islamic Law: A Systems Approach.34 In addition, Auda also received tutoring in traditional Islamic learning at alAzhar University in Cairo. Formerly with the Al-Furqan Foundation in London, where he was founding director of the Al-Maqasid Centre for Research in the Philosophy of Law, he later became Deputy Director of the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE) in Qatar. Now he lectures worldwide on the subject of maqasid al-shari’a, and his writings have been translated into sixteen languages, making him the most high-profile contemporary theorizer in the field. According to Auda, the significance of al-Shatibi’s articulation of maqasid alshariʿa is twofold. First of all, he lifted maqasid al-shariʿa out of the methodological

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domain of usul al-fiqh, making it part of the fundamentals of faith (usul al-din) and universals of belief (kulliyyat al-milla). Second, he safeguarded the universal validity of its levels of necessity from partial juridical rulings. Moreover, in contradistinction to the Hellenic philosophers who remained skeptical about the reliability of empiricism, al-Shatibi considered this inductive method of reasoning as providing the required degree of certainty. Auda also revisits the critiques of maqasid al-shariʿa by figures like Rashid Rida, al-Tahir ibn Ashur, Muhammad al-Ghazali, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Taha al-Alwani. In Auda’s estimation, they were dissatisfied with the theory’s narrow focus on safeguarding the integrity of individual Muslims rather than the wellbeing of society as a whole. This expansion to a communal approach gives new relevance and a central role to the notion of maslaha. Modern Muslim criticism of maqasid al-shariʿa also extends to methodology, because the higher objectives were derived from the fiqh literature rather than the primary scriptural sources. Not surprising that the reformist slogan ‘back to the Qur’an and Sunna’ is also applicable to the revision of the theory of maqasid al-shariʿa. Jasser Auda suggests that it heralds a shift from preserving the integrity of religion, life, intellect, property and family toward a developmental and ‘rights-based’ understanding of these five foundational goals. As for his own contributions to the field, Auda proposes studying maqasid alshariʿa on the basis of a Systems Theory approach. This suggestion is informed by his dissatisfaction with tendencies in modern thinking to go for ‘decompositional’ analysis or ‘piece-meal’ explanations of cause-and-effect. He also has reservations about the rejection of metanarratives and free play of opposites in deconstructionist postmodernism. As an alternative to the reductionist views of the modernists and the hostility to reason that is characteristic of postmodern nihilism, Auda proposes a restoration of a teleological; approach. He argues that systems theory fits the bill, because it has a number of features which reflect what also maqasid al-shariʿa sets out to do: Its cognitive nature holds a middle ground between realism and nominalism; its holistic orientation offsets the atomism of fiqh scholarship and of the reductionism of modern rational explanations; its hierarchical and multi-dimensional features can accommodate different levels and scopes; while, finally, its purposefulness gives the system a moral direction. In terms of its epistemology, maqasid al-shariʿa offers a middle ground between the separation between revelation and knowledge, while the priority of universals over particulars, the social over the individual, and the prevalence of thematic exegesis over the atomism of traditional scriptural commentaries affirm a holistic orientation. Maqasidi thinking also provides a way out of the debate between, on the one hand, Ashʿaris, Salafis and Zahiris who deny causality in God’s creative acts as opposed to law-giving acts and, on the other hand, Shiʿa, Mu’tazila and Maturidi scholars who see a causality to all God’s acts. It also advocates openness and self-renewal. Except for preserving the detailed rulings related to the acts of worship, maqasid al-shariʿa opens up the muʿamalat, the domain concerned with human interaction, to what he calls competent

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worldviews associated with the sciences. In terms of philosophical openness, Auda makes an unabashed case for a restoration of Averroist thinking. While the multidimensionality of maqasid al-shariʿa is a more technical legalist aspect that is of less relevance to philosophical approaches, the purposefulness which maqasid al-shariʿa shares with systems theories is underpinned by thematic Qur’an exegesis and contextualized interpretations of the Sunna, as well as the ways of implementing ijtihad. These parallels with various model systems theory render maqasid al-shariʿa not just into a set of core principles underlying the methodologies used in usul alfiqh, as a practicing Muslim, Auda also admits that it makes it possible to bring ‘God’ back into the equation in terms of intelligent design and the need for a synthesizer, which to his mind can be read as contemporary versions of philosophical proofs of God. In Indonesia too, religious scholars, such as Sahal Mahfudh and Masdar F. Mas’udi, have made cursory references to the notion of maqasid al-shari’a, but the most consistent argument for treating this subfield of legal thinking as both an epistemological method and legal doctrine is made by Yudian Wahyudi (b. 1960), a professor of philosophy of law and currently also the rector of the State Islamic University in Yogyakarta. Wahyudi highlights the centrality of maqasid al-shariʽa in linking legal, ethical and political thinking – underscoring the importance of recognizing both its doctrinal and methodological aspects. Like other exponents of maqasidi thinking, Yudian Wahyudi regards the maqasidi or purpose-based approach as seeking to ‘realize, ensure and preserve the common good for humankind’, in particular the Muslim community.35 Paralleling the three levels of objectives of shariʻa (necessities, needs and embellishments) is the doctrine of the ‘unity of knowledge’, encapsulated in the constitutive ideas posited by Ibn Sina (God, world and man), and also found in the holistic approach of Jasser Auda. This parallel demonstrates and reinforces the potential of usul al-fiqh, but especially of maqasid al-shari’a, to articulate the coherence of Islam in providing salvation and peace for the world by conceiving of its teachings as a process rather than a teleology.36 While the Qur’anic verses (ayat quraniah) function as textual signs of God’s greatness, providing the doctrines of the oneness of God, morality and justice, there are also ontological signs (ayat kauniyat); manifesting the divine in the creation of the cosmos (sunnatullah) and the laws of nature.37 Finally, there are the ‘signs of humanity’ (ayat insaniyah); the rules regulating human life, in which Islam as both submission (islam) and faith (iman) come together through the principle of complementarity to create a balance or social justice. It is this realization that God is found on all these levels that constitutes Islam kaffah or ‘complete Islam’, which finds its human expression in taqwa or the ‘Godconsciousness’ of humankind.38 What led religious scholars to formulate this understanding into a closed theory and self-sufficient method of interpretation is the fact that the sacred

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scriptures are limited in a quantitative sense, whereas human civilization and – in terms of legal thinking – its concomitant casuistry continues to evolve. Consequently scholars, schools of thought and religious organizations have fallen victim to the atrophy of Islamic law. As a legal tool, Wahyudi compares maqasid al-shariʽa to an anatomist’s scalpel or the refraction of an optical lens, used for analyzing constantly changing situations by distinguishing between its primary, secondary and tertiary purposes. It also affirms the rule of complementarity: The principle that there can be no good without evil, or benefits without disadvantages, and the reverse. On the basis of this principle of complementarity, governing both maqasid al-shari’a and the unity of knowledge, Wahyudi distinguishes five parities that characterize Islamic law: It is at one and the same time divine (ilahi) and positive (manusiawi, man-made) or secular; absolute and relative in terms of values and their implementation in accordance with the circumstances, respectively; universal and local; eternal and temporal; and literal and figurative or spiritual. Thus it becomes clear why maqasidi thinking does not simply distinguish a juristic binary between permitted (halal) and forbidden (haram), but instead introduces a five-level ethical scale ranging from mandatory, recommended, permissible, reprehensible and forbidden. For Wahyudi, maqasidi thinking confirms that interpretative exercises are in effect what Gadamer called a Horizontverschmelzung or ‘fusion of horizons’, whereby priorities are determined either deductively, that is top-down, or bottom-up through induction.39 Like Auda’s systems theory, also Wahyudi credits maqasidi thinking with articulating the coherence of Islam’s teachings, but he differs from Auda in arguing that it provides salvation and peace for the world by conceiving of Islam’s teachings as a process rather than a teleology.40 Such a conceptualization of religion will truly transform doctrine and dogma into a method of philosophical inquiry, an extrapolation that resonates with Hasan Hanafi’s earliest work on usul al-fiqh.

Debating Islamic law in the Islamic Republic of Iran Maqasid al-shariʿa also features in Shiʿi contemporary thinking about law. Alongside emphasizing the ethical rather than legalistic import of revelation, Abdolkarim Soroush has identified it as ‘the principal substance of Islam’.41 In line with his enduring interest in the individual believer and incessant appeals to humanizing religion, ‘ethics can be made possible only when man is put at the centre of interest, since morals exist for the sake of man’.42 Embedded within his earlier mentioned intermediate epistemological position between logical positivism and pragmatism, ethics is not an exact science, because an ‘eternal (detached) morality is incapable of judging human conditions’.43 It is this acceptance of a degree of indeterminacy that informs Soroush’s challenge of what he calls the legal positivism dominating juridical thinking that turns religion and – in the case of Islam – with it also law into totalizing concepts:

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The incorrect concept that religion and fiqh are all-encompassing must be amended. This conception is beneficial neither to religion nor to fiqh. One must not imagine that the all-embracing nature of religion means that religion has raised and solved every problem. Religion is ka¯mil (complete), but it is not ja¯miʿ (comprehensive) and there is a difference between completeness and comprehensiveness.44 Accordingly, the new theoretical and methodological foundations needed for a transformation of Islamic law that bring it into line with present-day demands can’t be found within fiqh itself. Traditional formulations of fiqh are no longer relevant, because the instrumentalized use of reason in the interpretation of law means that jurisprudence is locked up in taqlid (blind imitation of the tradition), which discourages the uninhibited questioning of reason. Therefore, Soroush finds himself not only odds with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s in itself commendable reliance on the notion of the common good, because it is out-of-date with the situation in present-day Iranian society, but also with Islamic modernists wishing to modify Islamic legal theory only to the extent that they remain within the confines of its traditional postulations. As he puts it: ‘the modern world is not the place for new furuʿ, but the place for new usu¯l’.45 Soroush pushes things even further by suggesting that all legal norms are speculative and none are exempt from human error; going as far as dismissing as irrelevant the distinction made in legal categorization between ʿibadat (acts of worship), which also most modernist Muslim still regard as sacred and eternal, and muʿamalat (social interactions), which are contextual. Instead, Soroush proposes a temporal division in regard to the social and political importance of legal norms, distinguishing between the formative period of Islamic law, coinciding with the lifetime of the prophet, and the subsequent settlement period, in which Muslims engage in finding practical answers to legal questions. Soroush’s interpretation of this chronology is contrarian, in the sense that – unlike conservative and many reform-minded Muslims – the norms formulated during the settlement periods are more useful to contemporary Muslims than those attributed to the Qur’an and to the Prophet. Echoing earlier observations of this nature made by Muhammad Iqbal. Soroush nonetheless insists fiqh will have to function in a similar manner as secular legal systems: Producing and enforcing laws under the direction of human authority.46 In making that case, and demonstrating the intertwining of law (jurisprudence), knowledge (epistemology) and faith (theology), he also invokes the etymological connection between fiqh as jurisprudence and tafaqquh as understanding: ‘As long as there is understanding, there is fiqh and as long as there is continuous understanding of shariʿat, there is religious belief’.47 This quote from The Contraction and Expansion of the Legal Theory serves to recall the wider meaning that was historically attached to the terms fiqh and shariʿa. Also the earlier noted occurrence of the word shariʿat in the Persian title of this ground-breaking and controversial book and an understanding of ijtihad that is as broad as it is open point in this direction.

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This expanded understanding of legal theory and of religion (here the two possible English translations of the book title converge) has its counterpart in the earlier mentioned writings of Tariq Ramadan on maqasid al-shariʿa, in which he too envisages that further development of religious knowledge for the future requires contributions from both text and context scholars, including those working on the natural sciences. In contradistinction to the position held by most of the Shiʿa clergy in Iran, Soroush often invokes al-Ghazali’s observation in the ‘Book of Knowledge’ from the Revivification of the Religious Sciences that ‘the heart (dil) is beyond the control (wila¯yat) of the faqīh’.48 This subjugation of governance and law to inner convictions touches on the very foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is based on the notion of the ‘guardianship of the jurist’, granting ultimate authority to the clergy in matters of religion and politics. Not surprising then that Soroush has been the subject of severe criticism on the part of clerics and other intellectuals from seminary backgrounds or traditional dispositions. The fact that, in the vein of Shariʿati’s anti-clericalism, Soroush has also criticized Iran’s clergy for monopolizing and making a good living of religion, did of course very little for endearing him with the religious establishment. Most prominent among Soroush’s critics from the traditionalist camp are Ayatollahs Jaʿfar Sobhani (Subhani) (b. 1929/30) and Sadegh Larijani (b. 1961). The latter challenges Soroush on epistemological grounds, arguing that the empiricism underlying his inductive methods can only lead to unfinished hypotheses, an open-endedness that is at odds with the logical conclusions provided by the deductive methods used in traditional applications of reason to arrive at certain knowledge of religious truths. Sobhani claims that not only the revealed and transmitted sources, such as Qur’an, Traditions of the Prophet, and scholarly consensus, are constant, but also the inference of rational proofs in law, a process known as istinbat, has an element of constancy. Sobhani and Larijani consider the ‘demonstrative approach of logic as superior to induction’ and reject modern Western philosophers on grounds of what they call ‘non-realist forms of epistemology that reduce science to relative dialectical standards’.49 In this regard, their shared position faithfully resembles that of the senior Ayatollah Javadi-Amoli, who had also joined the polemics against Soroush with a book entitled Islamic Law in the Light of Knowledge.50 The crux of Javadi-Amoli’s objections to Soroush is that his claim of the contingency of knowledge due its dependence on the human mind relativizes truth. Instead, he teaches that ‘rational and intuitive methods are the only fully reliable methods for certain and valid knowledge since these, in contrast to empirical or inductive methods are believe to decipher the constant and intrinsic nature of things’.51 At the same time, the Ayatollah affirms a point for which Soroush criticizes the juristic practices of the clergy: ‘ijtiha¯d covers only the furu¯ʿ al-fiqh and must be conducted by a qualified mujtahid learned in the religious sciences’.52 Also, Sobhani’s insistence that Shiʿi religious scholars do not allow their philosophical or mystical positions to interfere with their juristic practice, emulates Javadi-Amoli’s

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connection of jurisprudence and ethics with theology and spirituality, in the sense that philosophy is ‘a means for spiritual progress to Divine Unity rather than only having a rational picture of the realm of existence’, and that ‘Islamic law serves as an instrument for human perfection’.53 Also the dissident clerics Shabestari and Kadivar have taken part in debates on the role of Islamic law in the contemporary Muslim world. Shabestari has devoted an entire book, entitled Critique of the Official Readings of Religion, to challenging the ‘so-called fiqa¯hatī (legalistic) version of Islam propagated by the Iranian state authorities’, which he sees as conflicting with the ethical and personal considerations that have historically ‘governed the traditional interpretation of Islamic law’.54 As already noted in an earlier chapter, Shabestari regards both the history and philosophy of law as fields of academic inquiry quite distinct from how law is studied in the Shiʿi hauzahs or seminaries. Notwithstanding Shabestari’s epistemological position that human knowledge does not constitute an integrated unity, the domain of usul al-fiqh is very much influenced by other fields of learning. This makes ijtihad into the ‘the most critical issue for philosophy of law’.55 Also in Shabestari’s case, there is a detectable influence of Muhammad Iqbal’s distinction between two different approaches toward ijtihad in relation to fiqh: The traditional one, geared toward teasing out legal norms from the sacred texts reflecting the five-tier scale in accordance with the maqasid al-shariʿa, but at the same time restricted to the furu¯ʿ al fiqh; the other advocating a freer and dynamic use of reason, expanding into the non-legal realms of human existence.

Maqasid al-Shariʿa and minority fiqh The classical theory on the purposes of divine law also features in the development of a ‘jurisprudence of Muslim minorities’ (fiqh al-aqalliyyat al-muslima – minority fiqh) by traditional religious scholars. Chief articulators of this very recent and new discourse in Islamic legal thinking include Yusuf al-Qaradawi; his fellow member in the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), Abdallah ibn Bayya; and the late Taha Jabir al-Alwani, founder and chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America.56 Aside from Sunni scholars, the two leading Shiʿi clerics writing on the subject are Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the late Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah.57 While much of their work continues to be preoccupied with the minutiae of jurisprudence relating to rituals, personal piety and morality, it is in relation to the divine wish or objective of preserving religion (maqsadhifz al-din) that it is possible to detect a more in-depth theoretical and philosophical concern. Traditional religious scholars invoke Shatibi’s three levels of necessity, needs and improvements/embellishments to provide the theoretical underpinning for what they call a ‘positive preservation’ of religion. The injunction of ‘promoting virtue and preventing vice’ (al-amr bi’l-maʿruf wa-‘l-nahiʿan al-munkar) frames the various modes of the ‘negative preservation’ by the removal or avoidance of

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harm: Jihad; punishing apostates and sinners; and combatting unlawful innovations (bidʿa).58 The actual positions taken by these scholars range from reactionary and ultraconservative militant defence of Muslim rights, combined with cautioning against too close an association with non-Muslims, to more pragmatic attempts of maintaining the formalist and substantive integrity of Islam while becoming loyal and involved citizens. For example, Yusuf al-Qaradawi likens minority fiqh to fiqh al-muwazanat, or jurisprudence that balances costs and benefits for Muslims. For this, he appeals to Ibn Taymiyya’s interpretation that the shariʿa’s purpose is to bring about perfect welfare and reduce corruption. The purpose of the law is not there to inflict hardship, but make people’s lives easier (taysir). In the previous chapter, we have already seen how maqasidi thinking featured in Tariq Ramadan’s formulation of Euro-Islam. In To Be a European Muslim, he invokes both the notion of ‘public good’ and the ‘higher objectives of shariʿa’ to argue that Islam is more than ‘a series of rules, interdictions and prohibitions’.59 He also dismisses most work on minority fiqh as a ‘hodgepodge of fatawa thought up like so many accommodations largely in response to arguments from necessity in order to justify a number of legal exemptions to make life less difficult’.60 To Ramadan’s mind, maintaining such an understanding of the Islamic tradition in the contemporary world reflects a reactive attitude, resulting from ‘fear of Western permissive culture rather than in the light of a deep comprehension of Islamic science’.61 A more careful study of the Islamic legal tradition would show that only the rules and regulations in relation to acts of worship (ʿibadat) are permanently fixed (thabit), whereas human interaction (muʿamalat) – and Ramadan explicitly includes here the notorious Islamic penal code – ‘needs constant reflection and adaptation’, making all legal pronouncement in this respect flexible (mutaghayyir).62 For Ramadan, the point of departure is not the many does and don’ts imposed in the various branches of jurisprudence (ʿfuru al-fiqh), but the principle of permissibility (al-asl huwa al-ibaha): What is not explicitly forbidden is in fact allowed.63 With this, Ramadan distances himself to some degree from traditional scholarship, leaving the question, as to how to implement an Islamic morality when living in a minority situation, open to interpretation. Although this is a significant departure from conservative – and certain reactionary – positions, Ramadan’s discussion is intellectually not very compelling. In spite of its potential openness, it nevertheless remains rather empty in terms of a concrete creative engagement with the dynamics of how to accord to God’s will under the condition of freedom. Also his later propositions for a radical reform of Islamic thinking remains firmly grounded in the classical theory, presenting al-Shatibi’s writings on the subject as a synthesis of what he calls al-Shafiʿi’s deductive approach to legal thinking and the inductive method used by the Hanafi school.64 Ramadan claims that adaptive reform, or tajdid (renewal), which has been part of traditional Islamic learning since its inception and which continued to characterize the attitudes of Muslim reformists in the past two centuries, has reached its

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limit. He insists that contemporary Muslim thought is in need of a much more radical change by way of a drastic transformation of legal formalism into a more incisive and fundamental interrogation. For Ramadan, this revolves around the formulation of a new Islamic ethics resulting from the collaboration on an equal footing between what he calls text scholars (ʿulama’ al-nusus), in particular specialists in fiqh and usul al-fiqh (fuqaha’ and usuliyyun), and context scholars (ʿulama’ al-waqiʿ), by which he means both experts in the natural and human sciences.65 Echoing similar suggestions by Yudian Wahyudi and Abdolkarim Soroush, Tariq Ramadan suggested that experts in modern academic fields should also be recognized as proper ʿulama’, instead of being somewhat dismissively referred to as intellectuals (muthaqqifun), thinkers (mufakkirun) or specialists (mutakhassisun).66 In fact, in view of the expansion of human knowledge since the formative period of traditional Islamic learning, their contributions are pivotal and crucial for the credibility and continuing relevance of Islamic principles in the contemporary and future world. While much of the content of Radical Reform is geared toward criticizing the formalist preoccupations of conservative scholarship and reactionary literalism, in the interceding ten years since writing To Be a European Muslim (1999), Ramadan has also developed some more concrete instances of what he envisages with his call to radical reform, some of which also bear relevance to topics discussed in the chapters to follow. In doing so: Ramadan […] was able to construct an Islamic ethics for European citizenship almost perfectly along the lines of what a Rawlsian or Habermasian liberal might wish for entirely from sources and concepts provided by the classical Islamic legal tradition.[…] The shift in effect amounts to a radical displacement of Law form the centre of Islamic normative inquiry and its substitution with a much more elusive concept of ‘ethics’.67 So while the possibilities he explores no longer comply with the formal dimensions of Islamic law or its methods of legal reasoning, in its constituent elements, Ramadan remains indebted to the jurisprudential framework in its traditional form. Andrew March divides the evolution of Ramadan’s legal thinking into three stages. In To Be a European Muslim and Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, he remains loyal to the classical legal theory as a medium for political moderation and legal change. However, Radical Reform consists in the outright dismissal of Islamic legal reformism by traditional scholars as defensive and reactive, and concerned only with accommodation and adaptation. The third moment in Ramadan’s thinking March characterizes as an ‘explosion of the very idea of law from within’.68 Ramadan proposes that divine revelation consists in the text of the Qur’an and in the creation of the universe. From relying on classical ‘text scholars’, he moves to a broader view of revelation, and with that to an expanded understanding of the purposes of divine law that requires the involvement of ‘context scholars’.69

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Radical as this may seem, Ramadan’s concept of a dual revelation is not really all that novel or innovative. Throughout history, Muslim mystics have embraced such holistic interpretations, recognizing the universe as a living Qur’an. In the end then, Ramadan’s propositions for radical reform are more apologetic than argumentative, rhetorical rather than demonstrative, including a tendency to accord with – what Ricoeur would call a ‘surplus of meaning’ – technical Arabic terms from both jurisprudence and epistemology through too generous a use of cognates when translating them into English.70

Closing remarks Also in today’s Muslim world, legal and ethical questions take centre stage in Islamic religious thinking. Contemporary Muslim intellectuals, traditionally educated religious scholars and experts in modern academic disciplines alike, continue to engage with these questions, in terms of substance, method and theoretical approach. Unprecedented challenges have given new relevance to examining the fundamental underpinnings of legal thought, moving from method and theory to the abstractions of what can be called an Islamic philosophy of law, encapsulated in the classical theory of maqasid al-shariʿa and presently reformulated in different strands of maqasidi thinking, as well as grappling with the position of Muslims in minority situations. In terms of the two options sketched by Wael Hallaq for meeting the challenges that modernity posits for maqasidi thinking, it is suggested that Yudian Wahyudi has chosen for the first option: recognition of the status quo of modernity and its primacy of the nation state. The other option is to transcend the modern condition and recreate a moral community that was lost with the political-legal triumph of modernity.71 It appears that figures such as Jasser Auda and Tariq Ramadan are either undecided or simply ambiguous regarding whether to go for this radical solution of effectively establishing a new moral community – which for now seems only a utopian possibility in a rather distant post-Islamist future. What maqasidi thinking and minority fiqh also highlight is the other side of the coin: Namely the acceptance of diversity and equality, and developing attitudes of toleration vis-a-vis plurality on the part of Muslims when they occupy a majority position. This is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 Khaled Abou El Fadl, ‘Islamic Authority’ in New Directions in Islamic Thought: Exploring Reform and Muslim Tradition, eds. Kari Vogt, Lena Larsen and Christian Moe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 130. 2 Wael Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni usu¯l al-fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125. 3 Wael Hallaq, ‘Uṣu¯l al-fiqh Beyond Tradition’, Journal of Islamic Studies 3:2 (1992): 184.

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4 Devin J. Steward, Islamic Legal Orthodoxy: Twelver Shiite Responses to the Sunni Legal System (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Pres, 1998), 100–102. 5 Abou El Fadl, ‘Islamic Authority’, 131. 6 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 83. 7 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 82–83. 8 Useful overviews of these recent developments in the role of Islamic law in the modern Muslim world are provided by: Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Shariʿa Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univerity Press, 2011); Robert W. Hefner, Shariʿa: Law and Modern Muslim Ethics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016); Amyn Sajoo, The Shari’a: History, Ethics, and Law (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). 9 Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 54. 10 Slater, ‘Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Methodology of Reform’, 308. 11 Abou El Fadl, ‘Islamic Authority’, 129. 12 Abou El Fadl, ‘Islamic Authority’, 136–142. 13 Abou El Fadl, ‘Islamic Authority’, 134. 14 Abou El Fadl, ‘Islamic Authority’, 135. 15 Abou El Fadl, ‘Islamic Authority’, 133. 16 Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, ‘Apa Setelah Nurcholish Madjid?’, 161. 17 Rumadi, ‘Menebar Wacana, Menyodok Tradisi: Geliat Mencari Makna Liberalisme’, Tashwirul Afkar: Jurnal Refleksi Pemikiran Keagamaan & Kebudayaan 9 (2000): 33. The name refers to the quality of the paper on which they were printed, for a detailed study of the relevance of these texts, cf. Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Kitab Kuning: Books in Arabic Script Used in the Pesantren Milieu’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 146 (1990): 226–269, and Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Pesantren and Kitab Kuning: Continuity and Change in a Tradition of Religious Learning’ in Texts from the Islands. Oral and Written Traditions of Indonesia and the Malay world, ed. Wolfgang Marshall (Bern: University of Bern, 1994), 121–145. 18 Sahal Mahfudh, Nuansa Fiqh Sosial (Yogyakarta: LKiS, 2003), liii (original emphasis). 19 Masdar F. Mas’udi, Agama Keadilan: Risalah Zakat (Pajak) dalam Islam (Jakarta: Pustaka Firdaus, 1991). 20 Masdar F. Masʿudi, ‘Islam and the State: The Social Justice Perspective’ in Islam in Contention: Rethinking Islam and State in Indonesia, eds. Ota Atsushi, Okamoto Masaaki and Ahmad Suaedy (Jakarta: The Wahid Institute), 24. 21 Masʿudi, ‘Islam and the State: The Social Justice Perspective’, 22. 22 R. Michael Feener, Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 180–181. One matter which Mas’udi appears to have studiously avoided is polygamy, and it was this issue that would damage his reputation when he took a second wife in 2000, causing him to lose a lot of goodwill. 23 Ahmad Baso, NU Studies: Pergolakan Pemikiran Antara Fundamentalisme Islam & Fundamentalisme Neo-Liberal (Jakarta: Erlangga, 2006), 317, 363. 24 For example by institutions like the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). 25 Ahmad Najib Burhani, ‘Al-Tawassut wa’l-I´tidal: The NU and Moderatism in Indonesian Islam’, Asian Journal of Social Science 40 (2012): 264–281. 26 Wael Hallaq, ‘Maqasid and the Challenges of Modernity’, Al-Jami’ah: Journal of Islamic Studies 49:1 (2011): 26. 27 Yudian Wahyudi, Maqashid Syari’ah dalam Pergumulan Politik: Berfilsafat Hkuum Islam dari Harvard ke Sunan Kalijaga (Yogyakarta: Nawesea Press, 2007), 9. 28 Wahyudi, Maqashid Syari ’ahdalam Pergumulan Politik, 10. 29 Andrews F. March, ‘Reading Tariq Ramadan’, 407. 30 Yudian Wahyudi, Ushul Fikih versus Hermeneutika: Membaca Islam dari Kanada dan Amerika (Yogyakarta: Nawesea Press, 2006), 48.

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31 Ahmad al-Raysuni, Imam Al Shatibi’s Theory of The Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law (London and Washington, DC: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), 2005); Al-Fikr al-Maqasidi: Qawa’idihi wa-Fawa’idihi (Rabat: Al-Zaman, 1999). 32 Ahmad al-Raysuni, Imam Al Shatibi’s Theory of The Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law (London and Washington, DC: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), 2005); Al-Fikr al-Maqasidi: Qawa’idihi wa-Fawa’idihi (Rabat: Al-Zaman, 1999). 33 Davis Johnston, ‘A Turn in the Epistemology and Hermeneutics of TwentiethCentury Usu¯l al-Fiqh’, Islamic Law and Society 11:2 (2004): 273–278. 34 Jasser Auda, Maqasid al-Shariah as Philosophy of Islamic Law: A Systems Approach (Hendon, VA: IIIT, 2008). 35 Yudian Wahyudi, Ushul Fikih versus Hermeneutika, 45. 36 Wahyudi, Maqashid Syari’ah, 20–21. 37 Wahyudi, Maqashid Syari’ah, 21. 38 Wahyudi Maqashid Syari’ah, 23. 39 Wahyudi, Maqashid Syari’ah, 34–35. 40 Wahyudi, Maqashid Syari’ah, 20–21. 41 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 214, cf. also 237 and 245. 42 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 238. 43 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 239. 44 Quote from Soroush’s Mudarawa mudiriyat (Tolerance and Governance): Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 223. 45 Quote from an article that appeared in Kiyan in 1999, Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 225. 46 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 226–227. 47 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 227. 48 Forough Jahanbakhsh, Islam Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran, 154. 49 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 122. 50 Ali Javadi-Amoli, Shari ʿat dara ’inah-yi ma ʿarifat (Qum, 1998), cf. Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 135. 51 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 128. 52 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 137. 53 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 129. 54 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 165. Cf. Mojtahed Shabestari, Naqdi bar qaraʿat-e rasmi-e dīn (Tehran: Tarh-e Naw, 2000). 55 Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 167. 56 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Fi fiqh al-aqalliyat al-muslima (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2001); Abdallah Ibn Bayya, Sinaʿat al-fatwa wa-fiqh al-aqalliyyat (Jeddah and Beirut: Dar al-Minhaj, 2007); Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Toward a Fiqh for Minorities: Some Basic Reflections (Herndon, VA: International institute of Islamic Thought, 2003). The first and still most extensive and comprehensive discussion, however, is found in: Khalid Abd al-Qadir, Fiqh al-aqalliyyat al-muslima (Tripoli, Lebanon: Dar al-Iman, 1998). 57 Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani, Al-fiqh li’l-mughtaribin (London and Beirut: Mu’assasa alImam Ali, 2002); Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, Al-hijra wa’l-ightirab: Ta’sis fiqhi li – mushkila al-luju’ wa’l-hijra (Beirut: Mu’assasa al-Arif li’l-Matbuʿat, 1999). 58 Andrew March refers to the work of Abdullah Muhammad al-Amin al-Na’im (not to be confused with Abdullahi Ahmad an-Na’im), Yusuf al-Bashir Muhammad, and Ziyad Muhammad Ihmaydan, cf. Andrew F. March, ‘The Maqṣad of Ḥifẓ al-Dīn: Is Liberal Religious Freedom Sufficient for the Sharīʿah?’ Islam and Civilizational Renewal 2:2 (2011): 363–367, 376. 59 Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, 3. 60 Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 54. 61 Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, 55. 62 Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, 43. 63 Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, 62–65.

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Ramadan, Radical Reform, 41ff. Ramadan, Radical Reform, 4, 37, and 121. Ramadan, Radical Reform, 131. March, ‘Law as a vanishing mediator in the theological ethics of Tariq Ramadan’, 179 (original emphasis). March, ‘Law as a vanishing mediator in the theological ethics of Tariq Ramadan’, 192. March, ‘Law as a vanishing mediator in the theological ethics of Tariq Ramadan’, 180ff. Andrew F. March, ‘The Post-Legal Ethics of Tariq Ramadan: Persuasion and Performance in Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation’, Middle East Law and Governance 2 (2010): 271. Hallaq, ‘Maqasid’, 27–28.

7 DEALING WITH DIFFERENCE AND PLURALITY Emancipation, toleration and human rights

The question surrounding the legal position of Muslims in minority situations, which was discussed in the previous chapter, points at wider issues pertaining to the freedom of religion, conviction and expression, and by extension to the matter of human rights in relation to the recognition and acceptance of diversity and plurality in Islamic contexts. Also, Khaled Abou El Fadl’s substantive critique of conservative and reactionary positions on women that continue to characterize traditional jurisprudential practice in today’s Muslim world is not limited to emancipation and feminism alone, it too invites further reflections on the relation between human rights and religion. This is why the present chapter links Muslim attitudes toward women, gender equality and religious plurality to human rights. An important aspect of the debate on Islam and human rights is whether the emancipation of those facing discrimination should be guided by the human rights standards enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its associate legal instruments or whether there are exceptions on grounds of reservations expressed in various Islamic Declarations of Human Rights issued since 1981.

Muslim feminists on women’s rights Women rights and gender equality issues offer further instances of the ways in which epistemology intersects with the legal, political and theological questions in relation to emancipation discourses in Muslim contexts. In their campaigns against misogyny and the discrimination of Muslim women, female intellectuals, such as Amina Wadud and the late Fatima Mernissi, use the slogan ‘back to the Qur’an and Sunna’ to fight conservative and reactionary Muslims with their own weapons. Similarly, Scott Kugle makes a case for a rereading of scripture

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that leaves room for an alternative interpretation that is sensitive to gender diversity. Also, Ziba Mir-Hosseini confronts traditional Islamic scholarship on its own terrain, criticizing the patriarchy that characterizes both legal theory and practice across the Muslim world. Like Khaled Abou El Fadl, she takes the battle for women rights into the domain of Islamic law, both in her academic writings and through her involvement in international Muslim women organizations. And – again like Abou El Fadl – Mir-Hosseini too focusses on the question of authority. A quick survey of the historical development of what is often referred to as ‘Islamic feminism’ reveals the need for a systematic and reflective conversation about its origins and assumptions. The first work dedicated to the position of women in the modern Muslim world features a blind spot that characterizes many early writings on the subject. Qasim Amin’s The Liberation of Women from 1899 focusses on women’s education in order to better equip them as wives and mothers in a rapidly modernizing Muslim world. Laudable as such an initiative may have been, it reduces women to their biological role. Moreover, pioneers of feminism in the Muslim world, such as the Egyptian Huda Shaʿarawi (1879–1947) or the Javanese noblewoman Raden Kartini (1879–1904) in the Netherlands East Indies, worked and wrote from a nationalist rather than religious disposition, while the literature on gender and Islam continues to be dominated by men, thus in effect affirming male patriarchy. Muslim Women in Law and Society (1930) by the Tunisian religious scholar Tahir al-Haddad (1899–1936) is presented as a major attempt to change fiqh at the moment its regulations concerning family law are being entered into the state codes.1 The book ‘debunks a number of misconceptions by challenging the received interpretations on such issues as the veil, polygamy, marriage, divorce and inheritance’. Al-Haddad’s alternative dynamic view, by which Muslims could retain ‘the same spirit that rescued woman from the dark pre-Islamic times’, exercised considerable influence on the later codification of Tunisian family law under founding President Habib Bourguiba. Aside from legal issues, al-Haddad also advocated participation of women in arts and culture, ‘because under the current circumstances, “women are not just imprisoned within their bodies, but also in their soul and spirit. They cannot express themselves except through men: they only sing men’s poetry […]”’.2 The writings of two contemporary intellectuals, Fazlur Rahman and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, ‘have become the backbone of feminist scholarship in Islam’ and – like al-Haddad – they ‘met with a great deal of opposition in their own countries, where their ideas were declared heretical’.3 In books like Qur’an and Woman (1999) and Inside the Gender Jihad (2006), Amina Wadud uses her academic credentials as a scholar of Islam to resist the inequalities faced by Muslim women within their communities and traditions.4 The two books reflect how she has expanded her theoretical framing during the intervening years between publication.

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Written very much as an apologetics during her stay in Malaysia from 1988 to 1992, Qur’an and Woman is very much informed by Fazlur Rahman’s Double Movement method.5 A challenging read because it is based on her doctoral thesis, the book has become a seminal text in Muslim women studies. Devoted to a painstakingly detailed study of the Arabic language in which it is revealed, as well as the context in which it was received and the various ways in which it has been interpreted, Amina Wadud explains that ‘concerns for what the Qur’an says, how it says it, what is said about the Qur’an, and who is doing the saying, have been supplemented by a recent concern over what is left unsaid: the ellipses and silences’.6 The book is namely about the emancipation of women qua human beings and qua Muslims. This is also the reason why Amina Wadud rejects for herself the designation ‘feminist’. Examining the story of the creation of humankind, how the Qur’an speaks of women in the world and what happens to humankind in the Hereafter, led Wadud to the following observations: Although the male and female are essential contingent characters in the creation of humankind, no specific cultural functions or roles are defined at the moment of creation. At that moment, Allah defines certain traits universal to all humans and not specific to one particular gender nor to any particular people from any particular place or time.7 I propose that the Qur’an does not support a specific and stereotyped role for its characters, male or female. The roles of the women who have been referred to in the Qur’an fall into one of three categories: 1. A role which represents the social, cultural and historical context in which that individual woman lived – without compliment or critique from the text. 2. A role which fulfils a universally accepted (i.e. nurturing or caretaking) female function, to which exceptions can be made – and have been made even in the Qur’an itself. 3. A role which fulfils a non-gender-specific function, i.e. the role represents human endeavours on the earth and is cited in the Qur’an to demonstrate this specific function and not the gender of the performer, who happens to be a woman.8 [The] individual is not distinguished on the basis of gender but on the basis of faith and deeds, which is the standard for distinction consistently applied in the Qur’an. Recompense is distributed with complete equity between individuals with no regard to gender. The potential to attain the best reward or to receive the ultimate punishment lies equally before women as before men. The Qur’an is emphatic and explicit about this.9 It was her subsequent experience during the late 1990s of attending UN-sponsored conferences on women rights that made Amina Wadud realize the monumental task that lay still ahead in terms of mediating between increasingly salient Islamists and those activists who rejected the religion altogether as hopelessly patriarchal, instead pinning all their hopes on universal human rights standards. At the time this ‘binary between Islam and human rights provided more effective support for a patriarchal

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Islamist agenda than we find today’.10 Recognizing that ‘the “letter” of the divine text remains a problem’, Amina Wadud realized that is was ‘time to stop grappling with it and direct our attention to its “possible trajectory”’.11 Overcoming the binary opposition between Islamists and human rights activists thus meant transcending text analysis and trade it for a ‘primary Islamic theology’ grounded in the core Islamic doctrinal notion of tawhid.12 In the concluding remarks, she wrote to the essay collection resulting from the Musawah knowledge building project, Amina Wadud proposes and explains the ‘tawhidic paradigm’ as a way for transforming Muslim societies in line with the underlying Islamic ethics, and to overcome the injustice that comes with the alleged superiority of men over women (qiwamah). To restore the basic teleology of human stewardship on earth (khalifa Allah fi’l-ard), she captured the proposed paradigm shift reflecting its intended gender equality in the following diagrams (Figure 7.1): Allah Allah male male

female

female

FIGURE 7.1

Paradigm shift in gender equality

Where Amina Wadud’s earlier work focussed on the Qur’an, the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi concentrated on the Traditions of the Prophet, examining the hostility toward women which she considers characteristic of the hadith collections. Also in contrast to Wadud’s text-analytical religious studies approach, Mernissi works from a social-scientific perspective, but her historical analysis is also inspired by the writings of her compatriot, the philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri.13 To challenge the a-historical conservative and reactionary interpretations by traditional Islamic scholars, in the first part of her influential book The Veil and the Male Elite, Mernissi studies the biographies of narrators and the criteria used for the transmission of their reports to trace the development of what she calls ‘A Tradition of Misogyny’.14 The second part offers Mernissi’s interpretation of the personality of the Prophet and his attitude toward women, in particular his relations with his wives, during the Medina period, when – in addition to being a Prophet – he also became a statesman: Faced with this difficult choice – equality of the sexes or the survival of Islam – the genius of Muhammad and the greatness of his God shows in the fact that at least at the beginning of the seventh century the question was posed and the community was pushed to reflect about it. It is a debate that fifteen centuries later politicians are calling alien to the

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culture, alien to the Sunna, the Prophet’s tradition. A prophet is above all a man who masters the art of the sacred dance between an idealistic God, who is far away, alien, celestial, and men who suffer as prisoners of a world in which violence and injustice rage.15 Aside from the misogynist narrators examined in the first part of the book, on account of his reputation for treating women harshly, Mernissi also singles out the second Caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, for critical assessment. Her analysis of the Medinan milieu is also extended beyond the position of women to the status of slaves, in particular female slaves. Using the image of how eventually a veil comes down over Medina, Mernissi notes: Symbolically, regression on social equality became entangled and implicated in regression on sexual equality in the case of the female slave. The hijab/curtain descended on them both, mingling and confusing the two ideas in the consciousness of Muslims during the fifteen centuries that followed.16 This also includes a monopolization of knowledge by the – exclusively male – establishment of religious scholars: the activities of the jurists were reduced to simply accumulating various cases and opinions. Scientific in it is ambitions, traditional scholarship remained at the level of empiricism, without attempting a synthesis that enables a distinction between ‘the essential and the secondary’, or what alternatively can be also be called ‘the universal and particular’ or ‘fixed and changeable’. Extrapolating this to the present-day, Mernissi notes a missed opportunity: We can imagine, or dream, that an elaboration of a system of fundamental principles would probably have allowed Islam as a civilization of the written word, to come logically to a sort of declaration of human rights, similar to the grand principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a universal declaration that still today is challenged as being alien to our culture and imported from the West. The position of modern Islam as a society on the questions of women and slavery is a good illustration of that utter neglect of principles, that inability of political Islam as a practice (as opposed to an ideal) to enforce equality in daily social life as an endogenous highly valued characteristic.17 The regret expressed by Fatima Mernissi links the concerns of contemporary Muslim thinkers about the position of women with other debates on liberation, including slavery in the past and today on religious freedom, with the discussions on human rights and Islam. While veiling and female seclusion as concrete issues are often at the forefront on debates of the position of women in Muslim society, Ziba Mir-Hosseini digs

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deeper into underlying epistemological questions. Having established her academic reputation as a legal anthropologist in the 1990s with a comparative study of marriage law in Iran and Morocco, she is the driving force behind the Knowledge Building Working Group of Musawah, the Malaysia-based women’s rights group Sisters in Islam of which also Amina Wadud is a founding member.18 Mir-Hosseini’s project examines key concepts, which have been used in classical Islamic jurisprudence for ‘institutionalizing, justifying and sustaining gender inequality in Muslim contexts’, and which continue to dominate the state codes regulating family law in Muslim societies: Qiwamah generally denotes a husband’s authority over his wife and his financial responsibilities towards her. Wilayah generally denotes the right and duty of male family members to exercise guardianship over female members (e.g. fathers over daughters when entering into marriage contracts) and grants father’s priority over mothers in guardianship of their children.19 While the latter term occurs in verse 18:44 of the Qur’an, qiwama (qiwamah) does not. It is a legal construction derived from the expression qawwamun, used in verse 4:34 to describe men as ‘the protectors and maintainers of women’. The project led by Mir-Hosseini contends that these concepts ‘have been mistakenly understood as placing women under men’s authority, with the result that they have become the building blocks of patriarchy within the Muslim legal traditions’.20 Other academics and intellectuals involved in the project have explored different avenues to subvert this legal hierarchy by rethinking and reconstructing these concepts as part of a campaign for equal rights for women and men. These include Omaima Abou-Bakr’s comparison of patriarchal interpretations of qiwama and wilaya by traditional Qur’an commentators from al-Tabari onward to reactionary and ultra-conservative exegetes, such as Sayyid Qutb and the TV preacher Mitwalli al-Shaʿrawi (1911–1998), with alternative contemporary strategies developed by progressive intellectuals. The sophisticated and complex methodology of Khaled Abou El Fadl, who ‘is not willing to completely forego consideration of classical traditions and rely only on timely and contemporary interpretations’, enables and informs ‘his specific reflections on qawwamun, which he describes as ambiguous’.21 Aside from ‘intellectual celebrities’ Abou El Fadl and Amina Wadud, Abou-Bakr also mentions the Pakistani writer Asma Barlas and the upcoming scholar Kecia Ali. Not unlike Amina Wadud’s ‘tawhidic paradigm’, also the Moroccan medical doctor Asma Lamrabet takes this core doctrinal notion as het initial point of department for relating the concepts of wilaya and qiwama to the Qur’anic view of humankind as God’s vicegerents on earth (khilafa Allah fi’l-ard). Said to embody values such as knowledge, justice, freedom of belief, diversity and love: ‘it is through the lens of these Qur’anic ethical values that we should understand

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qiwamah and wilayah and gender relations and rights today’, in order to arrive at a more egalitarian reading of Islam’s commandments.22 The work of the South African religious studies expert Sa’diyya Shaikh adds a spiritual-mystical dimension to Muslim feminism. Shaikh suggests that ‘particular Sufi discourses present substantial resources for more relevant, enriching and benevolent interpretations of the Shariʿah and the related understandings of human nature reflected in the Qur’an than do the prevailing fiqh discourses’.23 The Sufi psychology of the spiritual path traversed by the self, consisting of soul (nafs), heart (qalb) and spirit (ruh), challenges the egotism associated with the gendered body and concomitant claims of male superiority. The author of a book on Ibn Arabi, Shaikh also invokes two tropes central to the theosophist’s writings: The so-called 99 beautiful names of God (al-asma al-husna), and the ‘complete human’ (al-insan al-kamil), – which is to be preferred to the more common translation as ‘the perfect man’.24 Foregrounding spiritual attainment, these tropes can be read in a way that ‘destabilizes some of the normative gender assumptions in traditional legal discourse’.25 This is further corroborated by Ibn Arabi’s life story, which mentions women as spiritual teachers, fellow Sufis and disciples. Musawah’s knowledge building project is the first coordinated and concerted effort toward ‘Islamic feminism’ as an ‘emerging field of knowledge’.26 Earlier engagement was very much a matter of individual initiatives by pioneers, including Fatima Mernissi and Amina Wadud. What makes this duo stand out is their sensitivity to another blind spot in the discourses on Muslim women’s rights besides the focus on their biological role: Many women’s rights activists and campaigners in Muslim contexts, in line with mainstream feminism, have long considered engagement with religious ideas and practitioners to be counter-productive; they want to work only within a human rights framework and avoid any religion-based arguments. But the epistemological heritage of feminism, alongside its denotation as consciousness, can enable us to understand what we know about women and gender in all branches of knowledge, including religious thought.27 The battle for gender equality is not confined to women’s rights. As elsewhere in the world, only more recently, it has been expanded to include those now fitted under the initials LGBTQ. An instance of broaching the possibility of accepting homosexuality in a Muslim context is the work of the American Muslim Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, who is also an academic student of Islam. Like Wadud and Mernissi, he subscribes to the slogan ‘back to the Qur’an and Sunna’, but uses it for offering an alternative reading of the sacred scriptures in relation to the acceptability of gender diversity and – by extension – the need for a recognition of the rights those not identifying as heterosexual. One of his earlier explorations, ‘Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims’ has since been expanded into a monograph-size study

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entitled Homosexuality in Islam.28 This agenda-setting essay from 2003 contains two very important observations. First of all, ‘the Qur’an contains no word that means “homosexual” as a man or woman who is characterized as this type of sexuality as forming a core part of his or her identity’, but neither ‘does it contain a word that means “heterosexuality”. The very concept of “sexuality” as an abstract idea is a characteristic of modern societies’.29 Consequently, contemporary sociologists writing in Arabic had to coin a term for this and they opted for al-shudhudh al-jinsi, which translates as ‘sexually unusual’. This is in line with what is admittedly in the Qur’an: Namely, the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm. Instead of abstractions, the Qur’an does indeed contain descriptions of sexual acts. And while those of homosexuals are qualified as a transgression (fahisha), the second important observation is that ‘the Qur’an does not explicitly specify any punishment for sexual acts between two men or two women’.30 The practice of jurists to equate homosexual acts with adultery (zina) is based on a contentious mode of reasoning by analogy (qiyas), because that Qur’an term specifically refers to the act of penetration between a man and a woman outside of a legal contractual relationship. Since sacred texts in themselves are mute and their interpretation depends on the experiences of the exegetes (not only academically, also personally), ‘gay and lesbian readers of the Qur’an have much to contribute to a nonpatriarchal reading of the sacred text, but have only recently become empowered to join this project in the footsteps of their feminist heroines’.31 By way of example, Kugle offers a sexually sensitive and contextualized interpretation, by analyzing the Qur’an’s rendition of the biblical story of Lot both semantically and thematically. Drawing on the classical Qur’an commentaries, hadith studies and jurisprudential literature, Kugle destabilizes the allegedly indisputable heteronormativity imposed on the Qur’an by traditional Islamic scholarship and readily accepted by contemporary conservative and reactionary Muslims. The objective of subverting received interpretations and opinions is to make way for an alternative sexual ethics that resists patriarchy. In his book, Kugle captures the lengthier analyses of scripture and scholarship under evocative chapter titles: ‘Liberating Qur’an’; ‘Critiquing Hadith’; ‘Assessing Fiqh’; and ‘Reforming Shariʿah’. In the conclusion, he embeds his earlier proposal for an alternative sexual ethics in a call for Islamic humanism, which – among others, consists in recognizing that: When Sufism or Islamic mysticism remained an integral part of Islam, there were mechanisms in place for Muslims to balance the rational and non-rational dimensions of the human personality, to balance erotic urges toward rapture with ascetic impulses toward self-control. It must be the goal of a revived ‘Islamic humanism’ to counter the destruction wrought by both colonial domination and Islamist ideological reactions.32 Moving from spiritual transformation to social and political change, and noting that ‘law can impose order but cannot foster the development of a truly ethical

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society’, Kugle invokes his colleague at Emory University, the Sudanese jurist Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im, who has argued that Islamic law cannot be maintained in its current historical form, but is in need of urgent reform, taking account of present-day international law, human rights standards and civil liberties. The point being that sexual orientation can’t be used to exclude people, and that also non-heterosexuals must be accepted as fully human and as ‘equals in faith’.33

Minority fiqh and religious diversity In the previous chapter, we have already encountered jurisprudence of minorities as a new Islamic legal discourse fashioned by traditional religious scholars. Based on the principle of reciprocity, a maqasid approach should also facilitate an opening up of minority fiqh in the sense of expanding its concerns to nonMuslims living in Muslim countries. This would make it suitable for regulating the religious rights of their communities beyond the limited rights accorded under the legal instrument developed by classical jurists known as dhimma. However, in its present manifestations, minority fiqh fails in coming to terms with fully acknowledging religious pluralism and recognize the resulting implications for religious freedom. Very useful in assessing this shortcoming is the perceptive analysis by the political and legal theorist Andrew March, in which he identifies four different approaches towards moral obligation to non-Muslims, distinguishing ‘revelatorydeontological’, ‘contractualist-constructivist’, ‘consequentialist-utilitarian’ and ‘comprehensive-qualitative’ variants. In all instances:34 [F]or sharīʿa-minded scholars the primary vehicle for theorizing and theologizing a relatively rich relationship of moral obligation towards and solidarity with non-Muslims is the concept of daʿwa, or Islamic proselytism. […] embedded in contemporary discussions of daʿwa is a subtle reformulation of basic attitudes towards non-Muslims.35 The problem with the first two approaches, grounded in scriptural commands and their juristic elaboration, is that they are blind to or do not recognize any moral imperatives outside revelation and the specific rights formulated in the substantive law of Islamic jurisprudence respectively. According to the revelatory-deontological approach, ‘the natural state of man is one of moralobligation’ encapsulated in a theological doctrine called fundamental disavowal (bara¯’a asliyya), to which both the ahl al-hadith and Ashʿari School adhere.36 The key limitation to this approach is that it makes impossible any fundamental moral dialogue about rights and duties, because all commands are derived from the revealed text, which – in itself – is ‘not a rich source of specific rights and duties for Muslims outside of an Islamic polity’.37 In the ‘contractualist-constructive approach’, the moral imperative lies in the instrument of aman or contract of

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mutual security. ‘This value, articulated deeply and widely in the classical legal tradition, is the most common present-day Islamic justification (in both Sunni and Shiʿi sources) for honouring non-Muslim interests while residing in nonMuslim lands’.38 In this case, March finds fault with the narrow definition of obligations derived from specific texts and limited to the fulfilment of the letter of the agreement: ‘Beyond this, one has no general obligation or moral concern to the agent with whom one has contracted’.39 The problematic of this restrictive validity of jurisprudence also occurs in relation to the question of reciprocity (al-muʿa¯mala bi’l-mithl in Islamic jurisprudential jargon), which ‘is limited to that which is considered virtuous in Islam’.40 The third option, the ‘consequentialist-utilitarian approach’, tries to engage more pragmatically with the fuller extent of social cooperation, but – again – ‘its substance centers on the way in which accepting certain social and political facts may or may not benefit Muslims’, as exemplified by the earlier mentioned ‘balanced fiqh’ (fiqh al-muwazanat) elaborated by Yusuf al-Qaradawi.41 While it extends the management of relations with non-Muslims beyond contractual obligations to daʿwa, it too says little about the rights of religious minorities in the Muslim world. This applies even to the fourth alternative, which seeks to expand daʿwa from religious propagation to its embedding in a notion of citizenship and thus form a basis for ‘a thicker relationship of moral obligation with non-Muslims than that created by contract and considerations of utility’.42 The point of departure for the comprehensive-qualitative approach is four themes that can all be related to Qur’anic injunctions from which to develop a broader and deeper moral obligation and solidarity with non-Muslims. The first one is ‘good-willed exhortation’ (al-mawʿiẓa al-h ̣asana) cited in the Qur’anic chapter entitled ‘The Bee’ (Sura al-Nahl).43 Minority fiqh scholars, including al-Qaradawi and Ibn Bayya, as well as the Lebanese Shiʿi cleric Ayatollah Fadlallah, have used this injunction to theorize a notion of innate human love (hubb fitri), distinct from creedal love (hubb ʿaqa’idi), as a basis for forging firm bonds (wala¯’), which ‘ties people together in a special, close and intimate relationship which gives rise to obligations, rights and duties’.44 March notes how Ibn Bayya even cites Jürgen Habermas to demonstrate that the modern conception of citizenship can be reconciled with minorities jurisprudence. The same Qur’anic verse (16: 125) also mentions argumentation (jadal) and wisdom (hikma). In this context, Ayatollah Fadlallah made this concrete by contending that daʿwa is methodologically grounded in science and that integral to this scientific method one ‘leaves others to take responsibility for themselves’, which is in line with the Qur’anic verse stating that ‘there is no coercion in religion’.45 March suggests a degree of resemblance between the discourse ethics and theories of deliberative democracy developed by contemporary Western political philosophers and the view of the Muslim thinkers in question of the comprehensive-qualitative approach to interpret daʿwa as ‘a call for knowing the other and

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integrating with the wider society’.46 However, this does not mean that daʿwa is reciprocal. The main obstacle is that, in contrast to the search for truth in discourse ethics, ‘Islamic daʿwa obviously presumes the result and the norm sought before contact with the other’, in that sense it ‘does not share the epistemic ambitions of discourse ethics’ and remains wedded to its foundational belief in the universality of Islam.47

From Islamic exclusivism to religious pluralism In contrast to reactionary and ultra-conservative interpretations of religious diversity, Nurcholish Madjid, the leading thinker of the Indonesian Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thought, appealed to a more ‘optimistic-positive view of humanity’, which he traced to the combined influences of humanist dimensions in Arab-Islamic civilization and to the father of modern humanism, Pico della Mirandola.48 He also invoked the Qur’anic images of the rope of God and the rope of man as ‘two important values in life [that] will guarantee human salvation’ and a reinvigoration of ijtihad to dispel what Iqbal had called a ‘reading of the Qur’an with the eyes of the dead’.49 Madjid further used the expression ‘primordial monotheism’ (al-hanifiyyat al-samhah) as an inclusivist search for the ultimate truth without losing sight of humankind’s rootedness in this-worldly existence. The openness to different cultures was further grounded in the earlier mentioned Islamic concept of the unity of God (tawhid) and fitra, which – with nods to Max Weber and Erich Fromm – Madjid related to modern interpretations of the history of Prophethood, as manifestations of authentic and radical monotheism, and to the instinctive human need for religiosity.50 This variety of sources served also as a warning against communitarianism and its peril of exacerbating sectarian divisions and tensions. All this cleared the way for the introduction of an alternative and more open understanding of religion, consisting of an inclusivist theology and commitment to pluralism. This articulation of Nurcholish Madjid’s attitude toward religious difference coincided with his ‘turn to spirituality’ mentioned in an earlier chapter.51 Disciples of Madjid’s renewal thinking have continued to promote this line of thinking. In 2006, the International Center for Islam and Pluralism (ICIP) in Jakarta released a book under the title Interfaith Theology: Responses of Progressive Indonesian Muslims. It was edited by Munʿim Sirry, an Indonesian scholar of religions who trained at Islamic International University in Pakistan before obtaining a doctorate from the University of Chicago and taking a position at Notre Dame University in the USA. Evolving out of a cross-generation conversation involving Nurcholish Madjid, Masdar Masʿudi, Budhy Munawar-Rachman and others, Sirry argues: Pluralistic theology is very much needed in order to create and maintain basic interfaith harmony. But pluralistic theology in this sense is a theoretical theology, and because of this, requires a practical theology which comprises

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guidelines for implementing it in concrete interfaith situations. This practical theology is the operational manual of theoretical theology. Theological pluralism in Islam, because its characteristic is theoretical and speculative, can be categorised as a scientific discipline which is called ‘ilm al-kalam’ (scholastic theology). Practical theology in Islam, because its characteristic is practical, can be categorised as a scientific discipline called ‘ilm al-fiqh’ (the science of Islamic jurisprudence).52 Too vital to be left as the exclusive domain of jurists, the transformation of classical jurisprudence into a new type of fiqh requires a radical change in Islamic thinking: ‘The birth of inclusivist and pluralist fiqh is a consequence of inclusive and pluralist theology’.53 This inclusiveness also required the routing of sectarianism and its replacement with an alternative sense of communal belonging hinges on Nurcholish Madjid’s use of the notions fitra and taqwa. Both the disposition and its manifestation can be traced back to the figure of Abraham as the ‘primordial monotheist’ (hanif).54 In the Islamic context, the religion of Abraham (milla Ibrahim) is restored through Muhammad as the final Prophet. In its call to Islam, in the generic sense of word as submission to God, the Qur’an introduced the idea of a ‘Common Word’ (kalimatun sawa) re-establishing the original religious pact between God and humankind, while the notion of the ‘peoples of the Book’, or Ahl al-Kitab, forms its concrete historical manifestation. Although a faithful custodian of Nurcholish Madjid’s intellectual heritage, in a book called An Islamic Argument for Pluralism, Budhy Munawar–Rachman has acquainted himself with another strand of thinking about religious diversity, referred to as ‘theologies of religions’ (plural!).55 The theologies of religions discourse was developed in the second half of the twentieth century by scholars from Christian backgrounds and has since become an integral part of Christian renewal thinking. It calls for an empathic and a paradigmatic distinction between exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist (or parallel) attitudes towards religion. Religious exclusivists are those claiming finality for their own tradition and its adherents. Inclusivists privilege their own religion while recognizing that its soteriology can also operate through other faiths. Pluralists, finally, insist that all religious traditions are equally valid in pointing to the same ultimate truth and leading to the salvation of humankind. Contributions by both Catholic theologians, including Karl Rahner, and by Protestant philosophers and historians of religion, such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith and John Hick, were critical in developing a genuine religious pluralism. Writing in the immediate post-Vatican II period, Rahner’s concept of the ‘anonymous Christian’ qualifies him as an inclusivist, because it suggests that the grace of Jesus Christ can also work through other religious traditions. Hick and Cantwell Smith were prepared to go further in developing a pluralist attitude by promoting an approach to other religions that accorded the same degree of respect as to one’s own faith. However, the most rigorous theorist of religious pluralism Paul Knitter, a theologian and former Catholic priest, argues that true

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interreligious dialogue is only possible by giving up the claim that salvation can only come through a particular deity or church. It should be noted however that he also dismisses the reductionist understanding of pluralism whereby all religions are taken as basically being the same. Promoting what Paul Tillich already referred to as ‘correlation theology’, Knitter introduced the notion of ‘rough parity’, a respect for difference that he considers the only responsible and morally correct attitude towards religion in a global age.56 Although originating from Christian theology, Budhy Munawar-Rachman accepts theologies of religions have worldwide relevance and significance, including, or maybe especially, in a country like Indonesia, which is at one and the same time a Muslim majority country, but also religiously very diverse. The theologies of religions discourse is not just doctrine but also a praxis. First of all, because it insists on active social involvement toward developing a shared civilization that accommodates difference; or – citing Nurcholish Madjid – that offers ‘genuine engagement of diversities within the bounds of civility’.57 In addition, it presupposes an attitude of active acceptance and engagement with others along the lines of Michael Walzer’s On Toleration. Finally, its full acknowledgment of the values of other faith communities means that pluralism is not the same as relativism, because the latter implies the absence or even a denial of any general standard or the existence of any fundamental values. From this, Munawar-Rachman still retains the view that ‘the inclusivist view, in all its openness, becomes the foundation for true pluralism. And, the other way around, a truly pluralist view can only arise on the basis of such an inclusivist attitude’.58 For all intends and purposes, this ambiguity continues to colour the Indonesian Muslim discourse on religious pluralism, notwithstanding the fact that other progressive Muslim intellectuals are unhappy with this conflation of inclusivism and pluralism. They think that Nurcholish Madjid’s renewal thinking does not go far enough. Like the change of mind evinced by the most recent writings of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the conservative turn by the late Nurcholish Madjid makes that his ideas on religious diversity remain suspended between the exclusivism of earlier generations of phenomenologists and comparativists of religion and the true religious pluralism of Knitter’s version of the ‘theologies of religions’. One of Nurcholish Madjid’s colleagues in the renewal movement, Dawam Rahardjo, insists that all religions must be considered as true in the sense that this truth is accorded in the light of the convictions of their respective adherents. Notwithstanding their acknowledged indebtedness to Madjid’s ideas, selfconfessed Muslims liberals like Luthfi Assyaukanie and Ulil Abshar-Abdalla believe that Madjid’s strand of Islamic renewal thinking does not go far enough in promoting religious pluralism. For Luthfi Assyaukanie, this is reason enough to reject the Religious Democratic State (RDS) model as a weak compromise with unresolved contradictions and persistent dilemmas when it comes to safeguarding the inherent religious plurality of Indonesia society. As a proponent of the Liberal Democratic State (LDS) model, he finds RDS wanting, because the

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very principle of pluralism depends on a rigorous differentiation – Assyaukanie does not hesitate to speak of a need for a complete separation – between the respective roles of religion and the state, which can only be guaranteed in a fullfledged liberal democracy.59 Ulil Abshar-Abdalla too considers Nurcholish Madjid thinking about inter-religious relations insufficiently pluralist, arguing that it is largely shaped by his later conservatism coinciding with his spiritual turn. However, Ulil Abshar-Abdalla interprets Madjid’s earlier ideas on secularization and desacralization as a clear acceptance of the relativity of all human thinking about religion, and therefore diametrically opposed to the confrontational apologetics of the reactionary Muslim bloc.60 Abshar-Abdalla reasons that liberal Muslim intellectuals who subscribe to true religious pluralism must assume an attitude that expresses ‘at one and the same time irony and solidarity’.61 A very incisive critique of Nurcholish Madjid is found in the books on bourgeois pluralism and proletarian Islam of Nur Khalik Ridwan (b. 1974), an Islamic post-traditionalist intellectual from the NU.62 Influenced by the discourse critique and deconstruction of texts by Foucault and Derrida, as well as left-leaning post-structuralists like Louis Althusser and Michel Pêcheux, Ridwan dismisses Madjid’s pluralism as ‘bourgeois’ on two accounts. First of all, his humanism is entirely grounded in the classical text corpus. Drawing only on jurists and theologians like al-Shafiʿi and al-Ghazali, or philosophers and historians like Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun, Madjid pays no attention to elite and middle class control of economic resources and its concomitant domination of the political domain. Similarly, Madjid’s religious symbolism subscribes to what Ridwan calls a vertical, sequential and linear oriented model of semiotics that only accounts for texts, and which he describes as semantic-syntagmatic. This stands in contrast to his own paradigmatic alternative, which deals with language on a horizontal level and accommodates associative relations which produce a plurality of meanings. Transposing these findings to religious pluralism, Ridwan argues that Madjid’s pluralism suffers from a lack of analytical clarity and is therefore unable to distinguish the particularity of faith – or iman in the terminology of historical Islam – from Islam in a universal sense. This is reflected in Madjid’s use of the term ‘peoples of the books’ (ahl al-Kitab), which seems to apply only to Jews and Christians, never mentioning adherents of Indonesia’s rich tradition of ‘indigenous’ beliefs and practices, known as kebatinan or kepercayaan. Also equating Indonesia’s quasi state doctrine of Pancasila to the Common Word creates problems for groups who are presently excluded from its protection, such as the communists. Ridwan insists that there are Muslim communists, but that Madjid fails to see that because his use of the notion of pluralism does not explicitly account for oppressed segments of the population. Bourgeois pluralism is therefore very different from a truly emancipatory pluralism. The latter’s tolerance is not neutral, in the sense that it does not condone repression on any ground: religious, ethnic, political or otherwise. Emancipatory

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pluralism opposes religious discrimination within the same faith community; against those who belong to a different religion; and against even those who do not belong to any formal religion. It resists those who fail to accord truth, equality, justice or protection to the weak. Operating on the grassroots level, this emancipatory pluralism is not just rhetorical, but a praxis working for the poor, the labourers and peasants. This grassroots level orientation and concern for the downtrodden also characterizes the religious pluralism of Farid Esack. A South African scholar-activist, schooled in Islamic Studies and theology in Pakistan and the UK, and at the forefront of the Anti-Apartheid struggle, Esack, too regards the approach of traditional scholars to minorities jurisprudence as unsatisfactory and finds its acceptance of religious diversity wanting. A former member of the Tablighi Jamaat, he has turned away from conservative and reactionary interpretations of daʿwa and now subscribes to Paul Knitter’s theologies of religions. Diametrically opposed to any ‘form of proselytization that regards the other as being in various status of damnation’, Esack has become an unabashed promotor of ‘intrareligious and extra-religious proselytization based on liberative practice’.63 As indicated by the title of one of his most influential books, Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism, Esack’s religious pluralism remains nevertheless solidly grounded in scripture and – like his progressive counterpart working on women’s rights, the Muslim feminist Amina Wadud – he draws his inspiration from Fazlur Rahman. Although he considers him methodologically inferior to a figure like Mohammed Arkoun, in final analysis, ‘Rahman’s approach to the Qur’an from the perspective of its all-pervasive insistence on taqwa and commitment to social justice is, nonetheless, a welcome departure from Arkoun’s idea that the ideal search for knowledge is motivated by seemingly neutral reason’.64 Also, Farid Esack’s hermeneutical keys are in part identical to Nurcholish Madjid’s epistemological-theological apparatus. While sharing the centrality of humanity in relation to God-consciousness and the unity of God, as well as the importance to distinguish islam from iman, Esack parts ways with Madjid’s renewal thinking where his own liberation theology takes its cues from the notions of the marginalized and oppressed: Where taqwa and tawhid are aimed at developing the moral and ‘doctrinal’ criteria with which to examine the other keys and the ‘theological glasses’ with which to read the Qur’an in general and, more specifically, the texts dealing with the religious other […] al-nas (the people) and the marginalized (mustadʿafun fi’l-ard) define the location of our interpretative activity. The last two, justice (ʿadl and qist) and struggle (jihad), reflect the method and the ethos that produce and shape a contextual understanding of the word of God in an unjust society.65 The notions of iman as faith and belief, Islam as a historical religious tradition, and kufr – translated not as ‘unbelief, but interpreted as a denial of divine

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grace’ – feature prominently in the book’s central chapter on religious pluralism.66 ‘Redefining Self & Other’ engages not only with modern theorists, such as Cantwell Smith and Knitter, but also with scholars from the classical tradition, including al-Tabari, Ibn Arabi, al-Zamakhshari and al-Razi, as well as the modern reformist Rashid Rida and the Iranian cleric al-Tabataba’i. They become his standard interlocutors in conceptualizing an engaged form of religious pluralism that is as much praxis as theory, participants in a discourse affirming ‘the dynamic nature of iman, islam and kufr and their nuances’ and of the Qur’anic ethos: One cannot hold hostage to the ethos of kufr […] those who, by accident of birth, are part of any group, nor others who subsequently emerge from it; nor can we do this to individuals who existed within that group, but were non-participants in kufr. Similarly, one cannot attribute the faith commitment and faith of preceding generations of muslims to contemporary Muslims.67 The meaning and referential frameworks of categories such as ‘people of the book’ and ‘polytheists’, or historical events like the Treaty of Covenant of Medina, are not fixed and their applicability to the present-day world needs to be constantly rethought. These observations serve as an introduction to Esack’s bold claims that, in connection with the religious other, the Qur’an connects religious doctrines to economical exploitation. Islamic scripture also denounces the narrow religious exclusivist claims made by Jewish and Christian communities and explicitly forwarded the acceptance of religious diversity. This is further evinced by the presentation of Muhammad as the last in a ‘galaxy of prophets’, and the Qur’anic declaration that ‘unto every one of you have We appointed a [different[] shirʿah (path) and minhaj (way)’.68 Although this leads Esack to conclude that Muslims did not make any superiority claims, there is a hint of the conflation of inclusivism and pluralism also found in the views of Nurcholish Madjid and the followers of his renewal thinking: [T]he Qur’an does not regard all people and their ideas as equal, but proceeds from the premise that the idea of inclusiveness is superior to that of exclusiveness. […] Inclusivity was not merely a willingness to let every idea and practice exist. Instead it was geared toward specific objectives, such as freeing humankind from injustice and servitude to other human beings so that they might be free to worship God.69 However, Farid Esack’s focus on socio-economic circumstances of the mustadʿafun fi’l-ard resonates more with Nur Khalik Ridwan’s critique of bourgeois pluralism. Pointing to Muhammad’s solidarity with the oppressed and his own experiences in South African society, Esack invokes to the writings of liberation theologians like the Boff Brothers and Gustavo Gutierrez:

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Interreligious solidarity against apartheid gives credence to the argument of Paul Knitter […] that ‘if the religions of the world, can recognize poverty and oppression as a common problem, if they share a common commitment to remove such evils, they will have the basis for reaching across their incommensurabilities and differences in order to hear and understand each other and possibly be transformed in the process’.70

Islam and human rights Scholar-activists Amina Wadud and Fatima Mernissi have made direct reference to human rights in their academic writings. And as has been just discussed, also the distinction between inclusivist and pluralist attitudes toward religious diversity has a direct bearing on the debate about human rights and Islam. The central question here is whether Muslims should subscribe to universal human rights standards or whether they can make certain reservations and propose an alternative discourse of Islamic human rights? Legal experts from both Sunni and Shiʿi backgrounds have contributed to these debates, but so have non-specialists like post-Islamist intellectuals from Turkey, the Moroccan (Sunni) philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and his Shiʿi counterpart from Iran, Abdolkarim Soroush. From the late 1990s onward, Muslim intellectuals, who used to subscribe to Islamist ideas ‘defend their position not by referring to Islam, Islamic values and civilization but by referring to Western/modern notions like democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and institutions like the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights’.71 Intellectuals, such as Ali Bulaç, discovered that the universal norms and values they associated with Western notions of modernity, such as liberalism and secularity, are in fact also protecting the rights of Muslims. Paradoxically, to preserve the particularities of Islamic identity, postIslamists use sets of ideas and a vocabulary derived from modern Western political thinking rather than rely on ‘Islamic self-referentialism’.72 In writing about universal human rights, Bulaç is no longer preoccupied with genealogical approaches searching for Eurocentric origins, nor does he disqualify its language as ‘historically unique to the West’ and propose an equally uniquely Islamic alternative.73 Al-Jabri’s Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought demonstrates once again how these themes form a set of interlocking interests and concerns. Evincing a philosophical rather than legal-technical preoccupation, the importance of democracy concerns people’s fundamental questions about liberty and the exercise of free will, ‘summed up in the desire to create conditions in which they can live free from anxiety or misery’.74 While political democracy offers the opportunity of raising the awareness of the masses to their plight, social crises can only be resolved by changing people’s living condition. The relation between ‘political and social democracy is dialectical’; ‘neither can be achieved

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without the other’.75 Essential to guaranteeing civil liberties, al-Jabri insists that ‘democracy requires, first and foremost, the respect for human rights’.76 As a philosopher primarily concerned with Arab-Islamic society, al-Jabri notes that, even though democracy can’t be confined to any particular society, modern human rights are often regarded as a ‘cultural implantation’ into the collective Arab psyche.77 Their place in the modern world order is indeed fraught with difficulty, as they have been manipulated as a weapon during the Cold War era, while their global validity was also questioned and criticized on grounds of the ‘Western form’ in which they were promulgated through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and other instruments of international law.78 This points to what al-Jabri identifies as the main feature of the current human rights discourse: The tension between the claim to universal validity and the relativizing perspective of cultural particularity. He seeks to resolve this by highlighting ‘the universality of human rights in both European and Islamic cultures, to show that both are based on the same philosophical principles’ and that ‘particularity and universality are not two opposite attributes but two integral ones’.79 With this, al-Jabri returns to the epistemological concerns in his work as an academic philosopher. In response to criticisms that a comparison between modern European political thought and classical Islamic religious thought is flawed, or that the specifics of Islamic jurisprudence are incommensurable with modern ideas of freedom and equality, he counters that European thought is not opposed to religion as such, but to the way it was practiced by the church and that the rationale that underpins Islamic jurisprudence is only ‘relative, not permanent or unchangeable’.80 According to al-Jabri, the question that needs to be resolved first is how present-day human rights can be related to ‘a type of thought based on ideas and views that belong to a cultural field which is an inseparable part of the Middle Ages’.81 Insisting that there is a parallel between the correlation between nature and reason, or the ‘natural state’, and ‘social contract’ developed in eighteenth-century European Enlightenment philosophy, on the one hand, and the Islamic notion of fitra, on the other, al-Jabri invokes the maqasid al-shari‛a, because this theory offers Muslims a way out of the dilemmas surrounding the issue of religious freedom and apostasy, slavery and women’s rights. Abdolkarim Soroush situates human rights in the wider domain of theology and philosophy too, in particular the debates in Western political philosophy on natural and innate rights. Recalling Soroush’s view that ‘Islamic law is not faqihanah (juristic) in terms of involving justification, but rather maʿrifat-shinasanah (epistemological) and descriptive in character’, the resulting ambiguity becomes particularly evident when he discusses Islam and human rights.82 Unlike secular legal systems, Islamic jurisprudence deals not only with inter-human relations, but also the relationship between God and man. And yet, even though ‘modern secular law and fiqh inevitably differ as regards philosophy of law’, on an abstract philosophical level – the concept of natural right can be reconciled with the Islamic belief of God as the ultimate and transcendent legislator:

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Discussion of human rights belongs to the domain of philosophical theology and philosophy in general. It is, so to say, an extra-religious area of discourse. […] The discourse of Western political philosophers about natural and innate rights is to a certain extent the answer to the issue at hand. In the sphere of Islamic and religious thought we must also activate this debate.83 Therefore, Soroush insists that Muslims have no excuse for failing to embrace the UDHR. This touches at the heart of what is at stake in the debate on human rights and Islam; acknowledging and adopting universal human rights standards or insisting on alternative interpretations of human rights, such as the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (UIDHR), which cannot be considered truly universal, because of its reservations regarding the rights of women and non-Muslims. The ‘rights of man’ and the notion of ‘natural law’ also feature prominently in Khaled Abou El Fadl’s deliberations on human rights. With his dual background as a legal scholar holding both law degrees from prestigious American universities and having received advanced training in fiqh, he is well equipped to assess the contrasts between, on the one hand, the UDHR and its derivative legal instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Form of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and, on the other hand, the Saudisponsored UIDHR from 1981, which was prepared by the Islamic Council and ratified by the Muslim World League, and subsequent proclamations, such as the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), adopted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in 1990.84 In answering the question whether there is a distinctly Islamic view of human rights and whether this is compatible with the UDHR, Abou El Fadl’s point of departure is that the UDHR is ‘positive law’ in the sense that it takes effect through a procedural agreement between nations. However, the rights defined in that instrument are more elusive: ‘very much like the idea of natural law [ … .] human rights is a fundamental moral commitment’.85 This makes human rights larger than a procedure or political process, and, because its conceptualization is self-referential, it resembles both ideologies and religions. Since this normativity is grounded in a notion of the sanctity of human life, and since this is also one of the five purposes defined in maqasid al-shariʿa, Abou El Fadl’s qualified response to the question whether there is a distinctly Islamic view of human rights is: ‘Yes, but not really’.86 This must not be read as a retraction, but a step toward explaining that the purpose of divine law to protect life makes it part of something bigger than the Islamic tradition alone. The underlying philosophical deliberations produced ‘within Islamic discourse the most intriguing statements, namely that the fulfilment of the rights of people [huquq al-ʿibad] takes priority over the rights of God [huquq Allah]’.87 This unequivocal privileging contrasts with the ambiguity

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distinguishing Soroush’s characterization of Islamic law where ‘[t]he question of human rights might be problematic from the Islamic point of view, since revelation principally is concerned with the rights of God’.88 According to Abou El Fadl, these statements occurred in the context of twelfth-century debates involving jurists and philosophers on the issue whether there are inalienable rights and duties flowing forth from the innate human capacity to distinguish right from wrong in the same way as telling truth from falsity, or whether it all started with divinely revealed commandments and that, therefore, no fundamental rights are accorded to humanity. Such issues resonate also in other philosophical and religious traditions as well: Let us not forget the fact when Thomas Aquinas was wrestling with issues of human dignity and said that the first principle of human law is to call for the good and forbid what is bad, that concept already existed in Islam in the injunction al-amr bi’l ma’ruf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar – (‘enjoining the good and forbidding the evil.’) Indeed, it is possible and even likely that since Thomas Aquinas was quite aware of several important aspects of the Islamic tradition in deducting his first principle of natural law, that he was influenced by the Islamic tradition. Here, we are fundamentally talking about where it is possible for the human rights tradition and Islam to meet.89 Unfortunately, this has either not been recognized or wilfully ignored in the alternative Islamic declarations on human rights. Abou El Fadl is acutely aware of the circumstances under which modern Muslim states began engaging in international relations involving human rights; under the yoke of European imperialism and the subsequent jostling for position amidst the struggle for global power during the Cold War era and the dramatically changing world order after that. However, he nevertheless maintains that the reservations made in relation to the rights of women and non-Muslims are not motivated by the desire to remain within the boundaries of what is permissible under Islamic law. Instead, ‘conditions are imposed out of concern for issues of realpolitik, power, dominance, and hegemony, and to control the abilities of others in determining the fates of Muslim states’. According to Abou El Fadl, these motivations or any other appeal to cultural relativism ‘makes no useful contribution to determining a distinctly Islamic view of human rights’.90 Rather more productive would be to recognize that the influence of the concept of natural law on the drafting of the UDHR through twentieth-century neo-Thomists like Jacques Maritain is compatible with the maqasidi conceptualization of the sanctity of human life and the rights of people flowing forth from that. The Sudanese legal scholar and human rights specialist Abdullahi an-Na’im developed a ‘theory of “synergy and interdependence” of religion, human rights and secularism’.91 Although most of an-Na‛im’s discussions are coined in a much more technical juristic jargon than those of al-Jabri or Soroush, his legal

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thought did not develop in a philosophical and religious vacuum. Aside from holding undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in law from the University of Khartum, Cambridge and Edinburgh, Abdullahi an-Na’im is also a disciple of the controversial Ustadh Mahmoud Mohammad Taha, and has translated The Second Message in Islam into English. This was also the reason he was forced to seek refuge in the West, now serving as a professor law at Emory University in Atlanta. His ideas are laid out in books like Islam and the Secular State (2007) and Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and international Law (1990). Mashood Baderin is a Nigerian legal scholar working at SOAS and former UN Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in the Sudan (2012–2014), who has edited another collection of an-Na’im’s writings. Baderin identifies three elements in an-Na’im’s general philosophy of Islam and human rights: (1) Muslim acceptance of the UDHR on the basis of its cross-cultural universality; (2) a reconciliation of shariʿa with modern human rights standards through an internal reform of Islamic law; (3) safeguarding freedom of belief and political action by secularizing Muslim states.92 Like al-Jabri and Abou El Fadl, also an-Na‛im sees the ‘stark choice between the “divine” law of god and the “anti-religious” law of man’ as false.93 He too contends that ‘[w]hatever the historical self of Islamic peoples may have been it is neither possible nor desirable to redeem it in the modern intensely interdependent and interacting world of nation-states and sharp international boundaries’.94 In the vastly different world order of today, it becomes all the more important to realize that law does not represent Islam as such: The totality of Islam of Islam should be seen in light of an important fact: it had to fill the needs of a specific community of Muslims of seventhcentury Arabia at the same time that the eternal and universal principles of justice and human dignity were being formulated. Owing to this duality of purpose the sources of Islam inevitably contained a rather contradictory set of principles […] Islam consists of two messages, one transitional in nature and localized in application and the other eternal in nature and universal in application.95 This vision also underlies an-Na‛im’s refashioning of the issue of particularity vs universality in the human rights debate in terms of synergy and mutual influence: ‘This debate should be expanded, to include the role of the local and global social, economic and political factors, instead of focused on purely theological analyses of the relationship between religion and human rights’.96 Implementing modern human rights standards can only be successfully achieved through a genuine reconciliation between socio-political conditions and scripture. Citing Bassam Tibi’s observation that ‘there is no universal Islam, but [only] a variety of local Islamic cultures’, an-Na‛im stresses that ‘the question is always about people’s understanding and practice of their religion, not the

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religion itself as an abstract notion’.97 This reflects not just a perceptive appreciation of creative human agency, it also means that, in concrete circumstances, ‘the relationship to human rights is always about how people negotiate power, justice and pragmatic self-interest, at home and abroad’.98 Sharing the humanist perspective of philosophers like al-Jabri, an-Na‛im singles out the very same themes to demonstrate the shortcomings of Islamic human rights declarations in recognizing the true universality of human rights: Freedom of religion and apostasy; the position of religious minorities in Muslim world; and the rights of women. The only way to redress these inequalities and injustices is through a ‘radical revision and reformulation of the techniques for deriving legal rules from basic Islamic along the revolutionary lines of Mahmoud Mohammed Taha’.99 Although he remains cognizant of the contingent process through which the universal human rights discourse developed and, even though, he supports the view that only its proper enculturation will ensure its vitality and dynamism, anNa‛im nevertheless insists that there are limits to ‘cultural relativism’ if that implies discriminatory practices which violate the general standards of basic rights to which all human beings are entitled. The UDHR may be of Western provenance, but ‘the genesis of the same norms […] can be found in almost all major cultural traditions’, including Islam.100 Human rights has also become a central theme in the work of Mohsen Kadivar, after he switched from criticizing the monopolization of political rule by Shiʿi jurisprudents in Iran to what he calls ‘New Thinker Islam’. In 2008, this resulted in a hefty volume called Haqq al-Nas, in which he discusses the tension between traditional interpretations of Islam and modern human rights standards. The book also addresses the shortcomings of traditional Islamic jurisprudence in resolving this problem and Kadivar’s own ideas toward a solution.101 According to Kadivar, religious establishment scholars in Iran resort to apologetics in defending historical Islam and their own traditional interpretations against the, in his view, inescapable and commonsense need of Muslims to subscribe to modern formulations of universal human rights standards. The clerics insist that ‘human rights have all along been abundantly found in the religious texts (the Qurʾa¯n and the Sunna)’, and ‘that the notion of human rights in Islam is richer than the modern-day norms of human rights and that the Sacred Lawgiver has comprehensively enacted the “real rights of humans”’.102 Kadivar counters with a survey of clashes between historical Islam and modern human rights norms. The incompatibility of traditional Islamic jurisprudence and human rights is evinced by the inequalities between Muslims and non-Muslims, men and women, slaves and free human beings. Calling these distinctions into question are dismissed as un-Islamic or a sign of disrespect for the Qur’an. Further tensions are caused by disputes over the freedom of religion, the punishment of apostates and extrajudicial corporeal violence, as well as the authority of religious scholars over common believers in public affairs.

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All this is the outcome of a theocentric as opposed to an anthropocentric view of the law, and the insistence of the jurists that they have fixed, once and for all, the legal precepts of the sacred texts by privileging transmitted revealed knowledge over self-acquired rational and mystical knowledge. Even the wider license given to ijtihad within the Shiʿ tradition by the Usuli School only allows for an instrumentalized use of reason, limited to making minor adjustments, while leaving fundamental problems unresolved. The only way out of this deadend is the development of an entirely new jurisprudence that does away with the existing branches of jurisprudence (furu ʿal-fiqh): It will culminate in stressing the ‘meaning and the spirit of the religion’ (maʿna¯ wa ru¯h ̣-i dīn), the ‘purpose of the Prophetic mission’ (hadaf-i baʿthat-i piya¯mbar), the ‘exalted objectives of sharīʿa’ and, above all, the ‘exalted goals of the religion’ (gha¯ya¯t-imutaʿa¯lī-yi dīn).103 This narrative of a spiritual and goal-oriented Islam represents an intellectual discourse of Islam that is compatible with modern-day human rights standards, because of three distinguishing features. First of all, it represents an anthropological and epistemological shift toward an approach that recognizes critical reason as an inherent human faculty. While cutting to size the realm of the religious, it simultaneously emphasizes its spiritual aspects, thus contributing to a definition of human rights as intrinsic rights accorded to people qua human beings. Second, it offers a method for ‘extracting once again the sacred message and push aside the sediment of [the revelation-era] custom’.104 Here, Kadivar turns to the legal theory and jurisprudence of the Usuli School. This provides a set of commonly accepted, but underused, distinctions and criteria for separating permanent (worship-related) precepts from temporary benefits and harms associated with the those precepts of shariʿa dealing with human interactions. After distinguishing these two types of precepts, the three criteria used to determine whether a temporary benefit or harm has expired or not consist in: (1) It was deemed to be rational by the conventions of the time. (2) It was deemed just by the conventions of the time. (3) In comparison with the precepts stipulated by other rights and religions, it was considered a better solution.105 In a remarkable parallel with Tariq Ramadan’s interpretation of the objectives of shariʿa, also Kadivar’s purpose-oriented Islam requires that a legal precept meeting these three criteria ought to be assigned ‘not exclusively to mujtahids, but to the “customary knowledge” (ʿurf) of ʿulama¯ʾ and qualified specialists in various disciplines of “human” sciences’.106 This brings Kadivar also to his third point, namely that, historically, disproportionate attention was given to nondevotional or interpersonal transaction. In his own interpretation of purposeoriented Islam, the focus is on the spirit of Islam, that is, ‘the purification and calming of the soul with noble ethical values and to God-fearing piety (taqwa¯)’.107

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Like that of many of his peers discussed in this chapter, also Kadivar’s approach to human rights is controversial. In his case, traditional religious scholars raise objections to his proposed new jurisprudence, because it involves the very controversial question of the abrogation of certain precepts contained in scripture. The other issue is the philosophical grounding of inalienable human rights in extra-Islamic and even extra-religious principles, such as the earlier mentioned notion of natural law. For traditional Muslims, this concept and the ‘whole human rights business may well be considered something alien, or even heretical’.108 For others, who have no qualms in accepting secularity, Kadivar’s ‘new thinker’ or intellectual Islam on universal human rights standards may be superfluous. However, according to Kadivar himself, in a society where the public discourse is dominated by religious references, his narrative has a better chance of striking a chord.109

Closing remarks This chapter has discussed a variety of intellectual developments as Muslims come to terms with questions of diversity and equality, plurality and toleration in an increasingly interconnected world. Advances have been made in the formulation of emancipatory discourses by Muslim feminists. Looking for ways to deal with religious difference, scholars of religion and participants in interfaith encounters and dialogue have explored the distinctions made between religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, and how this impacts on tolerating other beliefs, while retaining their own religious distinctiveness and Muslim identities. The remarkable parallels between the views of human rights held by a Moroccan neo-Averroist philosopher and an Iranian neo-Muʿtazilite, or the shared outlooks of an expatriate Shiʿi jurist and two Sunni counterparts who share an interest in spirituality and Sufism, reflect the cultural hybridity and intellectual symbiosis characterizing the cosmopolitanism of late twentieth-century progressive Muslim intellectuals, which are leaving an indelible imprint on new ways of thinking about Islamic heritage in the globalizing world of the third millennium.

Notes 1 Ronak Husni and Daniel Newman (eds.), Muslim Women in Law and Society: Annotated Translation of al-Ta¯hir al-Hadda¯d’s Imra’tuna¯ fi’l-shari’a wa’l-mujtamaʿ (London: Routledge, 2007). 2 Carool Kersten, ‘Muslim Women in Law and Society. Annotated Translation of alTa¯hir al-Hadda¯d’s Imra’tuna¯ fi’l-shari’a wa’l-mujtama’’, Middle Eastern Studies 44: 4 (2008), 642. 3 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, ‘Muslim Legal Tradition and the Challenge of Gender Equality’ in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, eds. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger (London: Oneworld, 2015), 18, 35. 4 Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Women’s Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); idem, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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It was first released in Kuala Lumpur by Penerbit Fajar Bakati in 1992. Wadud, Qur’an and Woman, xiii. Wadud, Qur’an and Woman, 26. Wadud, Qur’an and Woman, 29. Wadud, Qur’an and Woman, 58. Amina Wadud, ‘The Ethics of Tawhid over the Ethics of Qiwamah’ in Men in Charge? 263. Omaima Abou-Bakr, ‘The Interpretive Legacy of Qiwamah as an Exegetical Construct’ in Men in Charge? 60, quoting from Inside the Gender Jihad, 197. Wadud, ‘The Ethics of Tawhid over the Ethics of Qiwamah’, 268. Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Perseus Books, 1991), 15–20. Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, 49–81. Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, 139. Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, 179. Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, 128–129. Described as a ‘global movement for equality and justice in Muslim families’, Musawah was formally launched in 2009 at an event in Kuala Lumpur, which was attended by ‘over 250 women and men, activists, scholars and policymakers from 47 countries, including 32 countries that are member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’, cf. Zainab Anwar, ‘Foreword’ in Men in Charge? vii. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger, ‘Introduction’ in Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, 1 (original emphasis). Mir-Hosseini a.o., ‘Introduction’, 3. Omaima Abou-Bakr, ‘The Interpretive Legacy of Qiwamah as an Exegetical Construct’ in Men in Charge? 59. Asma Lamrabet, ‘An Egalitarian Reading of the Concepts of Khilafah, Wilayah and Qiwamah’ in Men in Charge? 67. Sa’diyya Shaikh, ‘Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender’ in ed. Mir-Hosseini, Men in Charge? 107. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2012). Shaikh, ‘Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender’, 124. Mir-Hosseini a.o., ‘Introduction’, 4. Mir-Hosseini a.o., ‘Introduction’, 4–5. Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflections on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010). Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, ‘Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims’ in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 200. Kugle, ‘Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims’, 200–201. Kugle, ‘Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims’, 203. Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam, 271. Kugle Homosexuality in Islam, 274. Andrew F. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims in the “Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities” (Fiqh al-aqalliyyat) Discourse’, Islamic Law and Society 16: 1 (2009), 38. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 39 (original emphasis). March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 42. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 48 (original emphasis). March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 56. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 57.

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March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 62. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 63. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 69. S 16:125. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 80, quoting from Ibn Bayya, Sinaʿat al-fatwa wa-fiqh al-aqalliyyat, 292. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 84, quoting from Fadlallah, Uslub al-daʿwa fi’l-Qur’an (Beirut: Dar al-Zahra’, 1986), 164; 2: 256. March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 86 (original emphasis). March, ‘Sources of Moral Obligation to non-Muslims’, 88, 90. Madjid, The True Face of Islam, 108. Madjid, The True Face of Islam, 103, 106. Madjid, The True Face of Islam, 90. Ann Kull, Piety and Politics, 276. Munʿim Sirry, Interfaith Theology: Responses of Progressive Indonesian Muslims (Jakarta: International Center for Islam and Pluralism, 2006), 39 (original emphases). Sirry, Interfaith Theology, 11. Sirry, Interfaith Theology, 17. Published in one band as the third volume of a trilogy:Budhy Munawar-Rachman, Reorientasi Pembaruan Islam: Sekularisme, Liberalisme, Pluralism. Paradigma Baru Islam Indonesia (Jakarta: LSAF and Paramadina, 2010). Cf. Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002). Munawar-Rachman, Reorientasi Pembaruan Islam, 540. Munawar-Rachman Reorientasi Pembaruan Islam, 548. Assyaukanie, Islam and the Secular State in Indonesia (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009). Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, ‘Apa Setelah Nurcholish Madjid?’ in Menembus Batas Tradisi: Menuju Masa Depan yang Membebaskan, Refleksi atas Pemikiran Nurcholish Madjid, ed. AbdulHalim (Jakarta: Kompas & Universitas Paramadina, 2006), 152. Abshar-Abdallah, ‘Apa Setelah Nurcholish Madjid?’, 153. Nur Khalik Ridwan, Pluralisme Borjuis: Kritik atas Nalar Pluralisme Cak Nur. (Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2002); idem, Islam Borjuis Dan Islam Proletar: Konstruksi Baru Masyarakat Islam Indonesia (Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2002). Farid Esack, ‘Muslims Engaging the Other and the Humanum’ Emory International Law Review 14: 2 (2000), 529–530. Farid Esack, Qur’a¯n, Liberation & Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Represssion (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998), 68. Esack, Qur’a¯n, Liberation & Pluralism, 86–87. Esack, Qur’a¯n, Liberation & Pluralism, 114ff. Esack, Qur’a¯n, Liberation & Pluralism, 144 (original emphasis). Esack, Qur’a¯n, Liberation & Pluralism, 166, citing Sura 5:48. Esack, Qur’a¯n, Liberation & Pluralism, 175. Esack, Qur’a¯n, Liberation & Pluralism, 258, quoting from Paul F. Knitter, ‘Towards a Liberation Theology of Religion’ in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, eds. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll: SCM Press, 1987), 186 Dagi, ‘Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and the West: Post-Islamist Intellectuals in Turkey’, 139. Dagi, ‘Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and the West: Post-Islamist Intellectuals in Turkey’, 141. Dagi, ‘Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and the West: Post-Islamist Intellectuals in Turkey’, 148. Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 113. Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 115. Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 156.

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77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

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Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 179. Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 175. Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 177. Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 192. Al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought, 209. Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 228, also page 49. Dahlén, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 230, quoting from Soroush’s Loftier than Ideology (Farbithar az idi’uluzhi, 1996). Now called the Organisation of Islamic Countries. Khaled Abou El Fadl, ‘A Distinctly Islamic View of Human Rights: Does It Exist and is It Compatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?’ in Islam and Human Rights: Advancing a US-Muslim Dialogue, ed. Shireen Hunter (Washington DC: CSIS Press, 2005), 28. Abou El Fadl, ‘A Distinctly Islamic View of Human Rights’, 30. Abou El Fadl, ‘A Distinctly Islamic View of Human Rights’, 33–34. Dahlén, Islam Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 231. Abou El Fadl, ‘A Distinctly Islamic View of Human Rights’, 30. Abou El Fadl, ‘A Distinctly Islamic View of Human Rights’, 29–30. Abdullahi an-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights: Selected Essays in Law of Abdullahi anNa’im. ed. Mashood A. Baderin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), xxi. an-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, xvi-xx An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 9. An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 35. An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 42. An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 57. An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 130–131. An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 205. An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 248. An-Na’im, Islam and Human Rights, 249. Translates as The Right of Humans, rather than ‘human rights’. Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, 365. Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, 371. Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, 372, quoting from Haqq al-Nas. Kadivar, ‘Human Rights and Intellectual Islam’, 66. Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, 374. Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, 375. Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, 378. Matsunaga, ‘Human Rights and New Jurisprudence in Mohsen Kadivar’s Advocacy of “New Thinker” Islam’, 381.

8 ISSUES OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Globalization, ecology and medical ethics

The debate on universal versus Islamic human rights is but one of the pertinent questions arising in an increasingly interconnected world. It forms part of a phenomenon that tends to be regarded as having emerged relatively recent: Globalization.1 Primarily associated with economic integration on the basis of open market and free trade principles, it also tends to be regarded as setting in motion a homogenization process of other values. However, increasingly extensive and intensive contacts between different parts of the world have given new salience to cultural diversity and religious plurality. This awareness, combined with a growing assertiveness on the part of non-Western cultures, also carries over in the responses to other matters of a global nature, including ecological questions, such as environmentalism and sustainability, as well as questions related to medical ethics.

Muslims in a globalizing world In contrast to the widely held view that globalization is a recent manifestation of worldwide interconnectivities, it can be argued that globalization is built into the Islamic tradition from the start: both in its scriptural sources and on account of its rapid territorial expansion. For a missionizing religion like Islam, Qur’anic references to the umma, the community of believers, have an inherent universal connotation despite its parochial beginnings. This is also borne out by the early Arab conquests and the establishment of Muslim empires: Within a hundred years from its emergence in Western Arabia, Muslim armies stood on the shores of the Atlantic and banks of the Indus, controlling a territorial expanse from which emerged a new vibrant culture through intensive interactions with the adjacent civilizations. Considered from such an angle, globalization is to be

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regarded as a broad, multifaceted historical phenomenon – as the philosophers Hasan Hanafi and Sadiq al-Azm argue in their book, What is Globalization?2 The resulting encounters with a multitude of peoples, languages and religions led scholars to the conceptualization of the respective ‘Abode of Islam’ (Dar alIslam) and ‘Abode of War/Unbelief’ (Dar al-Harb/Kufr). As noted in earlier chapters, in today’s increasingly interconnected world, these concepts had to be rethought, leading to the introduction of alternative, ‘in-between’, categories, such as Dar al-Daʿwa and Dar al-Shahada. Aside from these legalistic categories, which were used in what can be considered the Islamic equivalents of international law (law of nations) and international relations, the worldviews – in this instance to be taken quite literally – of modern and contemporary Muslims have been further shaped by more recent historical experiences. During the heyday of European expansionism, when, in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, colonialism morphed into high imperialism, one of the responses from the Muslim world took the form of an ideological counter current which became known as ‘Pan-Islamism’. The idea was primarily articulated by the Islamic reformer Jalal al-Din alAfghani, who sought to convince the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II to adopt it as part of his foreign policy. Not just to fend off further European incursions into his empire’s territories, but also to use his caliphal title to present himself as the defender of Muslim interests elsewhere, in particular in populous areas of the historical Dar al-Islam, such as British India and the Netherlands East Indies. Although other ideologies, including nationalism, attained primacy in the course of twentieth century, Pan-Islamist ideals have survived and continue to be manifested in other initiatives. These include the Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary organization originating in British India in the 1920s, which has since spread across the world, and the 1953 foundation of Hizb al-Tahrir, an Islamist organization advocating the re-establishment of a universal caliphate. From the 1960s onward, the international ambitions of a country like Saudi Arabia took shape in the sponsoring and hosting of the largest global Muslim NGO, the Muslim World League, and in becoming the driving force behind the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), which is also headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Wedged between these manifestations of Pan-Islamism and the globalization debate emerging on the eve of the new millennium is an alternative discourse associated with the post-World War decolonization era. Often referred to by a French designation, tiers mondisme, or ‘Third Worldism’ in English, this discourse foreshadowed the concerns of postcolonial theory and globalization. It properly emerged in the wake of the 1955 Asia-Africa conference held in the Indonesian city of Bandung, with host Indonesia and Egypt representing two populous Muslim majority countries among the participants and becoming founding members of the ensuing Nonaligned Movement. The key features of Third Worldism and its subsequent incarnation of postcolonial theory include a challenge of the ‘naturalness’ of the nation and examination of alternative spatial configurations; the insistence that also third world nations have agency;

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a consistent critique of Western cultural imperialism; and a positioning of developing countries in an ‘interstitial location between the superpowers’ within the global power structures of the Cold War Era.3 Where it concerns economic and political issues, Third Worldism has a distinctly secular character. However, aside from featuring in international politics, Third Worldism has also been developed on a more abstract and philosophical level. Here intellectuals from the Muslim world have introduced a religious element into the epistemological aspects of this discursive formation. Of particular significance have been the contributions of two social scientists: Anouar Abdel Malek (1924–2012) and Syed Hussein Alatas (1928–2007).4 Abdel Malek established his name by writing a critique of Orientalism in French, appearing a full fifteen years before the publication of Edward Said’s hugely influential Orientalism.5 It is somewhat ironic that two intellectuals sharing such concern for Western representations of Islam and the Muslim world were themselves Arabs from Christian backgrounds. Most of Abdel Malek’s earlier writings consisted of Marxist-inspired criticisms of liberal Development Theory. Later, he shifted his attention from structural socio-economic and political analyses of relations between the centre and the periphery to explorations of the importance of cultural-specific intellectual creativity and the advocacy of a return to authenticity in the discourses of social movements concerned with both socio-economic emancipation and cultural recognition.6 Like other intellectuals, including Michel Foucault and Hasan Hanafi, also Anouar Abdel Malek initially fell under the spell of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Consequently, his interest in cultural specificity was not just concerned with finding alternative epistemes, but has also been criticized as an apologetics for contemporary Islamism.7 The interest in alternative epistemes was shared by his fellow social scientist Syed Hussein Alatas. Born in what was then the Netherlands East Indies into a prominent family of southern Yemeni (Hadrami) descent, Alatas had also connections with Malay royalty. When pursuing a doctorate in the sociology of religions at the University of Amsterdam, Alatas founded and edited a short-lived journal, which he called Progressive Islam (1954–1955). An English-language imitation of Al-Manar, the periodical published by the Islamic Reformer Rashid Rida from 1898 until his death in 1935, ‘Progressive Islam dedicated ample space to cross-cultural East-West conceptions’, and was illustrative of the ‘Islamic internationalism’ found among Muslims during the fifties, both in Europe and elsewhere.8 The journal’s significance lies in the insight it provides into a strand of Muslim thinking of a global orientation, which tends to be ‘forgotten in favour of the discourse on post-modernity and Islamic insurgence’, emergence a two decades later.9 After obtaining his doctorate, Syed Hussein Alatas embarked on an academic career as a sociologist and university administrator in Singapore and Malaysia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he expanded his interests towards epistemological questions related to Development Theory. Alatas’ critical examinations of the cultural

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stereotyping of Asians and of the ideas of Max Weber on modernization and change in Southeast Asia echo the critiques of Orientalism written by Anouar Abdel Malek and Edward Said. Together with Abdel Malek, Alatas developed the idea of ‘endogenous intellectual creativity’.10 A consistent argument informing Alatas’ writings during this span of nearly half a century is that both the classic and contemporary Islamic heritage can be quarried for the development of an ‘autonomous social science’.11 That argument, however, was accompanied by the assertion that ‘one cannot, as a Third World intellectual write about religion without tackling issues related to modernization, the elites and development’.12 Abdel Malek and Alatas’ sociological work fits within the paradigm of Developmentalism critique known as Dependency Theory. Its proponents advocate alternative multidisciplinary approaches to global development issues which account for ‘the historical experience of peripheral countries’ and ‘the necessity of identifying the specific political-economic, social-institutional and cultural linkages of centres and peripheries’.13 While their work is very much coloured by the decolonization process of the second half of the twentieth century, in relation to the Muslim world, many of these concerns have not lost their currency. Despite the fact that the globalization debate is now unfolding within a global power configuration that is markedly different from that of the bi-polar Cold War Era, the apparently worldwide embrace of neoliberal principles associated with free market economics, while simultaneously coming to grips with an alleged clash of civilizations, make that the questions raised in Dependency Theory and the attentiveness to cultural specificity have not lost their relevance. A useful overview of Muslim reactions to globalization at the turn of the century is presented by the Sudanese historian Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk.14 Whether one takes a historicized view of the phenomenon or not, and whether one defines its present-day manifestation as synonymous with internationalization, liberalization, universalization, Westernization or deterritorialization, Abushouk argues that, since this comprehensive agenda is driven mainly by Western interests, central to Muslim responses is the challenge this presents to their identity.15 Consequently, Muslim engagement with globalization ranges from embrace and adaptation, accommodation and harmonization, to rejection. Instructive for this period are the writings about globalization by the Turkish intellectual Ali Bulaç, because they reflect the author’s transformation from an Islamist into a religious intellectual embracing economic and political liberal values, as well as the balancing act involved in turning politically secularized and economically étatist Turkey into a Muslim majority country embracing free market economics, while giving space to its citizens to freely exhibit their Muslim identities. From the 1990s, Bulaç begins to express his opposition to a state-led economy, closed to the outside world, managed by the Kemalist state, and controlled by the interests of a powerful military establishment. Instead, he considers liberalization and international competition as necessary elements for integrating Turkey into the world economy. Given his earlier criticism of the capitalist

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system, this reflects a marked shift in his thinking, and one that is not grounded in Islamic traditions and its underlying values. At the same time, Bulaç also began to argue that globalization presents Turkey with an alternative to other aspects of the Turkish republic’s early modernization policies, which were characterized by a wholesale homogenization of its population that went against the people’s aspirations and desires, and which constituted therefore a violation of their rights as citizens. Giving up a degree of national sovereignty to supranational political entities is a price Turkey should be willing to pay, according to Bulaç, because only by subscribing to globally shared concepts of democratization and universal human rights standards will it be possible to attain a kind of ‘non-authoritarian universalism’ and get rid of the ‘yoke of the Kemalist state’.16 Thus, the globalization agenda offers not only attractive economic prospects, but also provide new avenues for those whose individual identities and beliefs are repressed, or whose ethnic origins prevent them from free public expression and political participation. Reserved, negative and outright rejectionist Muslim responses to the globalization phenomenon have led to the rise of ‘Neo-Orientalist’ and ‘Neo-Third Worldist’ schools of interpretation.17 The former has found its most influential articulation in Samuel Huntington’s article of 1993 and subsequent book, The Clash of Civilizations.18 Its argument hinges on the premise that it is not so much the economic, social and cultural dynamics of Muslim societies as Islam’s inherent incapacity to accommodate the values of Anglo-Saxon globalization. Written as a response to his former student Francis Fukuyama’s more optimistic suggestion in The End of History, that America take the lead in the new postCold War Era and actively propagate democratization and free trade as driving forces of development and prosperity, Huntington takes a dim view of future world politics, where the sources of conflict are not economic or ideological, but cultural – which he equates with religion. As detractors of this thesis, Abushouk quotes the political scientist François Burgat (a French convert to Islam) and the Pakistani economist Khurshid Ahmad, who countered with pointing at a combination of poverty and socio-cultural alienation that defines a north–south rather than east–west divide, and by characterizing Islamism as a reassertion of Muslims’ own cultural, ethical, ideological and intellectual roots.19 Taking a more long durée view of the globalization phenomenon, in ‘PresentDay Islam between its tradition and globalization’, Mohammed Arkoun connects historicized examinations in the vein of Hanafi and al-Azm’s What is Globalization? with the Third Worldist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, and with a third influential text from the clash of civilizations discourse: Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs McWorld.20 Arkoun contends that – despite its rhetoric about the right to selfdetermination, the commitment to humanitarian aid stimulating economic development, or advocacy of democratization processes – present-day globalization shares the same disregard as nineteenth-century European capitalism for emancipating its own women and workers, let alone the colonized peoples

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elsewhere. When it comes to practical interstate diplomacy, where the direction and consequential effects of globalization are determined, one finds an even more blatant disregard for the principle of popular sovereignty. Together with their political and economic allies in the West, Arkoun holds the ‘nationalist elites’ in the Muslim majority countries of the global south jointly responsible for ‘the riposte of the Islamic Revolution […] supported by the marginalized social strata which were badly integrated in enclaves of modernity’.21 He continues: Globalisation deploys on a planetary scale the strategies of market conquest and multiplication of consumers and their loyalties without any regard for the cultural regression, intellectual misery, political oppression, social tragedy and individual enslavement brought about by this “unequal exchange” which for so long has been denounced in vain.22 Consequently, Arkoun summarizes his central concern as follows: The relentless march of globalization generates more ruptures, tensions, contradictions and collective conflicts than did the exportation of fragments of material modernity to colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Neither the researchers and theoreticians with the highest competence and know-how, nor the expanding armies of managers of large multinational firms, nor the politicians who monopolise the use of ‘legal violence’ (as Max Weber would say) integrate into their analyses, expectations and strategies of development the real problems, the needs and hopes of those peoples who are deprived of adequate representation, as well as possibilities of direct expression and emancipation. The philosophical implications of this global process of change, which relate as much to scientific research as to technological innovation and economic expansion, are not even evoked as one of the decisive parameters which ought to inform decisions at all levels and in every sphere of activity.23 Inspired by Baruch Spinoza’s view of the public teaching of philosophy, Arkoun argues that both the current theorizing and praxis of globalization need to be countered with a philosophy of globalization, which takes as its points of departure the concept of the ‘person-individual-citizen.’24 Such an anthropological-philosophical exercise implies dispensing with classical metaphysics and challenging on a foundational cognitive level what Arkoun calls the ‘disposable thought’ of the current human sciences.25 While not dismissing the philosophical achievements of ancient Hellenic thought, instead of too hastily inscribing them with universal validity, Arkoun suggests that it is important to recognize the vast differences in socio-cultural and political outlook which have occurred over time in the European historical space. Rather ‘a universalisable [sic!] philosophical attitude is precisely that which cultivates systematically the aporia of tension between the local and the

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global’.26 Arkoun suggests developing this attitude along the lines of his agendasetting ‘Applied Islamology’, involving scholar-thinkers from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics and other relevant cognitive sciences. The example which Arkoun uses to illustrate this point and to demonstrate that Muslims can constructively take part in this debate by quarrying their own tradition, has also been adopted by the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Diagne: The remarkable parallel between a philosophical disputatio/munazara in tenth-century Baghdad, involving grammarian al-Sarafi and logician Matta bin Yunus, and the critique of Aristotelian categories by the structural linguist Emile Benveniste.27 At various instances, Arkoun expresses his appreciation for McWorld vs Jihad; ‘sharing the arguments of B. R. Barber on the subject of political, economic and juridical strategies of McWorld and the phantasmal proclamations of Jihad’, and acknowledging that it is ‘seductive in its resolute option for a universalisable humanist democracy’.28 However, Barber remains within the epistemological paradigm of Enlightenment Reason, which cannot be retained for a project of writing a critical history of thought as envisaged in Arkoun’s ‘Emerging Reason’ Project; an undertaking that he sees to be of acute and immediate relevance to the globalization debate in general, and Muslim involvement in particular.

From clash to dialogue, to alliance of civilizations: the securitization of the globalization debate Although Huntington formulated his Clash of Civilizations thesis in 1993, in the early 2000s, it gained a new lease of life in the wake 9/11 and subsequent attacks by violent Islamists from Spain to Indonesia, because their atrocities seemed to confirm the premises on which the ‘Neo-Orientalist’ School was founded. With the resulting ‘War on Terror’, the globalization debate in relation to the Muslim world can be said to have morphed into a securitization discourse, illustrated by the transformation of the UN programme for a dialogue among civilizations into an alliance of civilizations. The impetus for the UN declaration of 2001 as the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations had come from an unlikely direction; Iran, in the form of a series conciliatory speeches in international fora, such the OIC and UN, by its then President, the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami. Aside from ‘instrumentalist’ explanations for this initiative in the face of domestic opposition and continued US hostility towards Iran, commentators have also focussed on Khatami’s specific intellectual identity, pointing out the evident ‘exposure to the philosophical debates of Kant and Habermas’, or drawing attention to his ‘creatively combining elements in western political philosophy and Sufi Islam’.29 Others have cautioned against attaching too much importance to the figure of Khatami, noting that – as a Muslim intellectual – he is not operating in a vacuum and that also Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, Hasan Hanafi, Tariq Ramadan, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Abdurrahman Wahid have called for more active involvement of Muslims in global religious dialogues.30 Aside from these individual voices, there are also

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other collective initiatives of interfaith dialogue, outside of the institutional frameworks provided by the UN and OIC: These include the ‘A Common Word between Us and You’ initiative of the Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and the Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman, and the various fora provided by the Hizmet or Gülen Movement.31 Although the dialogue of civilizations project was initiated by a Muslim leader, it has not been without critics from Muslim quarters, who remain sceptical of its intentions. Arguments for its dismissal range from suspecting a plot involving the United States, the Vatican and the World Council of Churches, to concerns that the proposed dialogue undermines the Islamic faith, practices and institutions, or diverts attention away from resistance to American hegemony in the post-Cold War era. Other religious leaders, on the contrary, have supported the dialogue of civilizations agenda: Because it constructs a frame of reference […] that provides symbols and a vision that empowers some Islamic discourses, groups, and normative positions over and against other Islamic and non-Islamic discourses, groups, and normative positions […] to reject Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism, Huntington’s cultural pessimism, and radical Islamist fundamentalism.32 Different actors have framed the dialogue by drawing on a wide array of symbols from the Islamic tradition in its widest sense, some of which have been introduced in earlier chapters, including the notion Abraham as the primordial monotheist; the Covenant or Treaty of Medina; Muslim Spain as an Andalusian Convivencia of religions; the pluralist religious sensitivities of the great classical Persian poets or a ruler like the Mughal Emperor Akbar, and the Ottoman Millet System. The timing of the dialogue of civilizations was rather unfortunate, because the very year of its proclamation, and the years thereafter, saw an upsurge in acts of violence on the part of Islamist extremists with disruptive reactionary agendas. In a joint response and effort to defuse tensions between Muslim and non-Muslims worldwide, the prime ministers of two countries that had been on the receiving end of such terrorist attacks, Spain’s Zapatero and Turkey’s Erdogan, proposed and gained approval for a United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) at the organization’s 2005 General Assembly. On the back of continuing political instability in the Muslim world and a perceived ‘creeping Islamization’ of Europe by certain alarmist politicians and commentators, as a result of an influx of refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and Asia, as well as constant stream of economic migrants from Muslim countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the globalization debate involving Muslims has only polarized further into a new culture war.

Sleepwalking into a crisis? Islam and ecology Security and Islamophobia are not the only issues of global significance with which Muslim have to engage. Also Muslims have to contend with the

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ecological crisis that is affecting the planet and what this means in terms of protecting the environment and sustainable development. In 2003, Seyyed Hossein Nasr observed that ‘most Muslims, much like other fellow human beings, are sleepwalking through this unprecedented crisis’ affecting the natural world and the relation of human beings to it’.33 The first concerted effort to bring Muslim intellectuals together to reflect on Islam and ecology was a conference hosted by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School in May 1998. On the level of ideas, its main outcome was the landmark publication which also includes Nasr’s critical remarks. By that time Nasr had already spent more than forty years thinking about the issue in terms of humankind’s relation with nature, briefly touched on in Chapter 4. Together with Ziauddin Sardar, a British-Pakistani intellectual who shares Nasr’s background, he can therefore be considered as one of the pioneers in that field.34 In both cases, their views are an admixture of science and religion, its elements consisting of epistemological concerns and spiritual interests. In the case of Nasr, his formulation of an ‘Islamic environmental ethics in contemporary terms’ can be traced back to the mid-1960s, originating in a lectures series at the University of Chicago that led to his first book on the subject called The Encounter of Man and Nature, and culminating thirty years later in Religion and the Order of Nature.35 Nasr’s thinking combines criticism of Western modernity with mysticism. It is shaped by a metaphysics bringing together traditional Islamic epistemology and an interest in Sufism that betrays the influence of the Traditionalism or Perennial philosophies of René Guenon, Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt.36 In his contribution to Islam and Ecology, Nasr also notes that: [A]mong religious scholars in the Islamic world, who wield so much influence among ordinary people, only a few have risen to defend with a strong voice the Islamic teachings about the natural environment and to criticize in depth actions taken by both government and nongovernmental agencies which are detrimental to the health of the environment.37 Muslim interest in the relation between Islam, ecology, and related environmental and development issues appears mainly a concern of technocrats with spiritual inclinations or holistic orientations, who are sceptical towards what Nasr calls ‘Faustian science’, with its uncritical confidence in technological advances and disregard for the negative effects on the environment.38 He further observes that also among proponents of Islamist agendas, interest in Islamic teachings regarding nature is confined to a small minority.39 Consequently, in most Muslim societies, development policies continue to be based on Western models adopted by the ruling classes. Nasr recalls how classical Islamic thought regards the cosmos as ‘God’s first revelation’ and that, together with the verses of the Qur’an and events within

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the human soul, it constitutes the ‘portents or signs (a¯ya¯t) of God’.40 Reflecting God’s Wisdom and His Will, the created world is sacred but not divine: Its other creatures stand in a direct relation to human beings, but also to God, and other than their material function, they are also contributing to the fulfilment of our spiritual needs. This dual relationship and the consequential rights and duties of humankind toward the environment are captured in the notion of humans as God’s vicegerents on earth (khalifat Allah fi’l-ard). Nasr’s view of the Qur’an and Hadith collections as the primary sources for Islamic teachings about nature and its treatment by human is shared by other intellectuals, such as the Pakistani educationist Saadia Khawar Khan Chishti and Ibrahim Özdemir (b. 1960), a Turkish philosopher whose work evinces a sustained interest in environmental and globalization issues.41 Also, Özdemir suggests that the Qur’an ‘can provide the metaphysical foundation necessary for an environmental ethics’, a concern that appears to be missing from most modern Islamic thinking, but which should actually help enable Muslims to discover ‘the meaning of nature and humankind’s place within it’.42 Özdemir invokes Said Nursi’s depiction of the world as a mirror in which God’s existence is manifested, and goes on to suggest that ‘[t]he Qur’an’s insistence on the order, beauty, and harmony of nature implies that there is no demarcation between what the Qur’an reveals and what nature manifests’.43 Both are also ‘pointing to something “beyond” themselves’, and that, ‘just like the Qur’an, the universe reveals to us the existence of the Sustainer and Creator’.44 Focussing on notions, like ‘measuring out’ or ‘determination’ (taqdir) and ‘balance’ (mizan), Özdemir’s interpretations of Qur’anic verses concerning nature and environment are also informed by the hermeneutics of Fazlur Rahman and the Qur’an translator Yusuf Ali. Humans are not disconnected from nature and for that reason – like Nasr – Özdemir stresses that ‘even if humankind is the vicegerent of God on earth, it does not necessarily mean that the whole of nature and its resources are designed for humans’ benefits only’.45 Paralleling the ecological views of both Nasr and Özdemir, also Saadia Khawar Khan Chishti’s thinking about ecology takes as its point of departure the text of the Qur’an and nature as the ‘twin manifestations of Allah as the Sender of Qur’anic revelation’ and the ‘Creator’, as well as the idea of khilafat Allah fi’l-ard, which she translates as ‘humankind’s position as one of vicegerent, or steward, of creation’.46 This includes also a different attitude toward science, namely as ‘enveloped in a reverence for and humility toward the divine’.47 As manifestations of such an attitude, Chishti appeals to the way in which Sufis have developed humankind’s proximity to God in terms of servanthood (ʿabudiyya), in combination with reflections on the ‘light verse’ (Q 24:35) and contemplations of the so-called ‘Most Beautiful Names of God’ (asma al-husna), in this context especially the name for God as the ‘All-encompassing Being’ (almuhit). This interest in Sufism is shared by Seyyed Hossein Nasr: ‘Certain Sufi texts bring out the most inward meaning of the Qur’anic doctrine concerning the cosmos and human beings in relation to the world of nature’.48 Aside from

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philosophical elaborations of this integrity, this holistic worldview is also manifested in the creative expressions of Muslims. The Islamic arts constitute ‘visible applications and embodiments of the Islamic sciences of nature and cosmology’.49 As an educationist, Saadia Chishti is also concerned with the ‘combination of a lack of knowledge and a free-rider problem’ as the causes of a ‘general environmental compromise’, which is now becoming increasingly evident through phenomena like global warning. The inability to take a holistic view of the impact of human actions on nature is one of the ‘symptoms of humankind’s dissociation from Allah’. This connection can be restored by making people aware of Islam as what both the Qur’an and Tradition of the Prophet refer to as ‘din al-fitra, or a religion true to the primordial nature of humankind’.50 According to Chishti, this can also be understood as a mode of living, an ethos that ‘encompasses an altruistic spirit, thoughtfulness in action, and a conservationist bias.’51 Such an interpretation of fitra also dovetails with Chishti’s understanding of shariʿa as divine law providing a path for reversing humankind’s wandering away from God, as well as a way for regulating daily conduct of spiritual development in terms of ‘an absolute standard of performance for a Muslim’.52 Seyyed Hossein Nasr too suggests that ‘the Sharīʿa contains both concrete laws and principles for the regulation needed to help the Islamic community confront the critical environmental situation today’.53 The idea of an Islamic environmental law has been picked up by the Pakistani-American intellectual historian S. Nomanul Haq (b. 1948) and by Othman Abdar-Rahman Llewellyn, a conservationist and jurist working for Saudi Arabia’s Commission for Wildlife Conservation and Development since 1988. Nomanul Haq’s point of departure is that no ‘epistemological finality’ can be attached to normative sources, such as the Qur’an, because he claims that also in traditional Islamic learning ‘scholars have characterized the Qur’an not so much as a doctrinal textbook, but “more valuable as a rich and subtle stimulus to religions imagination”’, a discourse operating on three levels: metaphysical, naturalistic and human.54 On the other hand, Haq does consider the hadith collections as ‘manuals of what one may in a qualified sense describe as a body of case law’, containing material on water resources, agriculture, livestock, and the wider flora and fauna, as well as construction work, that have been ‘subjected to highly sophisticated processing into a rigorous body of legal theory’.55 These can be profitably used to address present-day environmental concerns. However, it has fallen to Othman Llewellyn to try and translate Islamic ethics and legal philosophy encapsulated in the primary sources and the theory of the higher objectives of Islamic law into a substantive body of law (fiqh) on ecological issues, such as waste management and pollution, as well as environmental planning in relation to renewable and non-renewable resources. In terms of concrete legal instruments, Llewellyn takes the inviolable sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina, known as the haramayn, as precedents for developing what he calls ‘h ̣arīm zones’ and h ̣ima¯, greenbelts and protected areas, respectively, as tools for

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nature conservation and economically viable and ecologically sustainable development. Their formal institutionalization can be modelled on existent instruments, including the charitable endowment (waqf ); the granting of unowned land (iqta¯’); lease and usufruct (ijara); and areas designated for special purposes (ihtikar).56 Llewellyn extends the scope of a discrete discipline of Islamic environmental law also to the domain of animal rights and genetic modification, which intersects with other aspects of the life sciences, touching on medical ethics as a field of inquiry that poses formidable questions at the beginning of the new millennium.

Medical ethics and bioethics This brings us to medical ethics and other questions of morality related to the health sciences. Because of rapid developments in these fields, the Muslim discourses on these issues are very fluid and much of the debates on bioethics and related medical issues are dominated by their legal aspects and implications, rather than explorations of the underlying ethical-philosophical questions that plumb the metaphysical dimensions of the issues at hand.57 Aside from the academic literature on the subject, this is also evinced by an explosive growth in the production of legal opinions (ifta’) in response to question ranging from abortion and euthanasia to ever new biotechnological advances, addressing issues such as blood transfusions, organ transplantations and transgender sexreassignment surgery, IVF (inter-species) cloning, and stem cell research, as well as genetically modified food.58 Abortion has been a medical question that was already addressed in early Islamic legal practice. Whereas the default position is a prohibition of abortion, on grounds of the sanctity of life (starting from conception), the widespread occurrence of abortions in a country like Indonesia has led contemporary religious scholars to revisit the issue. In a fatwa promulgated by the Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI) in 2005, this prohibition was reiterated in the first part of the fatwa, but the recognition of other necessities and needs as per the theory on the higher objectives of shariʿa, mentioned in the second part, resulted in condoning abortions if the mother’s life is in danger or in case a defective foetus is diagnosed before the 40th day from conception, although the fatwa also records many reservations in regard to what can be considered deficiencies. The social-political dimensions of ethics surrounding abortion become clear in the third part of the fatwas, where termination of a pregnancy due to fornication is forbidden, except in cases where there is proof of rape.59 In 1987 and 1988 respectively, two very senior neo-traditionalist scholars, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, issued fatwas permitting sex-reassignment surgery, drawing on the historical sources describing categories of gender ambiguity in pre-modern Muslim societies and applying traditional Islamic legal maxims (al-qawa’id alfiqhiyya) and procedural principles (al-usul al-ʿamaliyya).60 Moreover, in contrast

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to Sunni legal opinion-making which tends to more conservative in its interpretation of the sources, fatwas issued by Shiʿa mujtahids (juridical interpreters) have also enabled scientists and physicians to use medical advances in Assisted Reproductive Techniques. Already in 1999, Iran’s Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i released a fatwa permitting third party egg and sperm notions in order to help childless couples conceive – a pressing issue also affecting other Middle Eastern countries where, due to the prevalence of consanguineous marriage practices, infertility rates stand at 20%.61 As a result, Iran and Lebanon (with its sizable Shiʿa community) have become the IVF capitals of the Middle East, treating Shiʿi and Sunnis alike.62 As the Information Age is turning the Muslim public sphere into an increasingly crowded space, also debates on ethical questions related to medical and other scientific achievements are becoming more complex and multi-vocal. Fuqaha or jurists from established institutions, such as Al-Azhar, ‘must compete with popular preachers and ideologues who also speak in the name of Islam and sometimes even issue “fatwas”’.63 An instance of such creative Islamic legal opinion-making are English-language fatwas issued via the Internet (e-fatwas) on blood transfusion and organ donation. Based on a survey of seventy contemporary e-fatwas, it appears organ transplantations from dead donors remain a very controversial matter, while there is more flexibility with regard to non-singular organs (kidneys) given by consenting living donors. With respect to blood transfusions, the donation is often treated as a charitable act.64 In addition, Muslim countries have established transnational and interstate bodies, such as the Muslim World League (MWL) and Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), which are also used for reaching consensus on normproduction in regard to these issues. In 2016, the OIC’s former Secretary General Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu chaired a task force to explore the relationship between Islam and science from multiple dimensions. The resulting report seeks to reconcile advances in medicine and science with traditional views on soul and spirit, naturalism and causality, and theological objections to evolution theory.65 It is here that we also find the intersections with the Islamization of knowledge and with the broader spiritual interests and concerns of present-day Muslims, briefly alluded to in Chapter 4. Contemporary intellectuals who have reflected on medical ethics and biotechnologies in Muslim contexts beyond a strictly juridical and traditional theological scope by pushing the ethical and philosophical boundaries include Omar Haque and Ebrahim Moosa. Omar Haque uses the phenomenon of ‘brain death’ identified in modern neuroscience and the ‘acceptance of death as the end of essential brain function’ as his point of departure for a critical examination of dualistic notions of the human person prevailing in traditional Islamic learning.66 Both philosophers and Sufis considered the body as ontologically distinct from notions of spirit (ruh), heart (qalb) and soul/self (ruh), but advances in medical knowledge showing that mind and neurophysiology function in a continuum

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makes such a strict separation untenable. However, such scientific findings have also theological and philosophical implications because they undermine the metaphysical foundations of these dualist stances within traditional Islamic learning. Consequently, a unified naturalistic conceptualization of personhood seems to be the only viable alternative, according to Haque. He goes on to observe that ‘[i]n contrast to these influential dualists, the majority of Islamic dialectical theologians (mutakallimun), including Mu’tazilite and Ash’arite branches, are corporeal monists’. In spite of ‘an unmentionable tension that work [sic!] to reconcile the actual implications of monistic corporeal ontology with the doctrinal necessities implied by a literal or non-allegorical reading of the Qur’an’, such pre-modern concepts of embodied consciousness offers a way out of the dilemma of having to choose between a doctrinal Islamic view of self and modern scientific insights.67 It opens up an opportunity for a real and very necessary dialogue involving ethicists, theologians and physicians about the resulting ‘radical ontological shift in the notion of what it means to be human and what a Muslim account of personhood entails’, which the casuistic approach of jurists leaves unaddressed.68 Without it, Muslims will have to come to terms with the fact: Bioethical arguments that presume the existence of an immaterial soul will continue to find themselves at intractable impasses with the scientific community. Such a bifurcation between Islamic and scientific and medical methods of problem solving will allow Islamic solutions only to problems of a certain, increasingly limited kind. Tragically, the most rigorous of conversations about ethical problems in the world related to scientific technology or other advances – such as stem-cell research, abortion, or end-of-life interventions – will be dealt with and solved without recourse to Islamically informed proposals.69 Also Ebrahim Moosa addresses this ‘vulnerability of Muslim ethics’ when they are out of touch with the epistemologies governing the debates about biotechnology.70 Situating these debates in a global context, Moosa notes that biotechnology intersects with three other sets of questions: socio-economic and political; biocultural and psycho-social; and Muslim moral philosophical and theological issues. Not only are there vast differences among Muslim countries in terms of the kind of biotechnological questions which they have to confront, he also deplores the fact that Muslim ethicists are still coming to terms with ‘an early generation of biotechnology: transplantation surgery, brain death, artificial enhancement’, whereas the next generation, ‘ranging from molecular genetics through stem cell and regenerative medical technologies’, has already arrived.71 This makes the gap between healthcare professionals and religious authorities ever wider. Like Haque, Moosa too identifies a discrepancy between advances in scientific knowledge, in particular findings informed by Darwinist naturalism, and

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‘inherited Muslim theological precepts that were part of a speculative philosophical tradition’.72 Ambivalence toward modern science can be traced to nineteenth-century Islamic reformers like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who rejected newly emerging naturalist philosophies of science as materialistic, ungodly and even diabolical. Meaningful debates about these issues in Muslim circles are made impossible by what Moosa calls a ‘sclerotic, scripture-based theology’, which ‘ran aground in apologetics mired in pseudo-science and pseudo-theology ’.73 As examples, he cites Faruqi’s ‘Islamization of Knowledge’ and the bizarre creationism propagated by the eccentric Turkish preacher Harun Yahya (also known as Adnan Oktar, b. 1956).74 What the Muslim world needs instead is a genuinely reformulated theology that will also take theoretical debates beyond the ‘ethical pragmatism’ of the juridical casuistry which was also criticized by Haque. However, that hinges on the development of ‘a critical and informed discourse about the philosophical grounds that underpin a contemporary Muslim moral and ethical vision in a prospective manner’.75

Notes 1 Apparently the first use of the term can be traced to:O. L. Reiser and B. Davies, Planetary Democracy: An Introduction to Scientific Humanism and Applied Semantics (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944), mentioned in Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk, ‘Globalization and Muslim Identity Challenges and Prospects’, The Muslim World 96:3 (2006): 487. 2 Hasan Hanafi and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Ma al-Awlama? (Damascus: Dar al-Fikr, 2000). 3 Akhil Gupta, ‘The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism’, Cultural Anthropology 7:1 (1992): 64–6. 4 Earlier comparisons of this duo can be found in: Mona Abaza, Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt: Shifting Worlds (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002) and Daniel Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2007). 5 Anouar Abdel Malek, ‘L’orientalisme en Crise’’, Diogène 44 (1963): 109–42. 6 Anouar Abdel Malek and Amar Nath Pandeya, Intellectual Creativity in Endogenous Culture (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1981). 7 Abaza, Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt, 125. 8 Abaza, Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt, 132. 9 Abaza, Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt, 138. 10 Syed Hussein Alatas, ‘Social Aspects of Endogenous Intellectual Creativity: The Problem of Obstacles – Guidelines for Research’ in Intellectual Creativity in Endogenous Culture, eds. Abdel Malek and Pandeya 462–470. 11 Syed Farid Alatas, ‘Alatas and Shari’ati on Socialism: Autonomous Social Science and Occidentalism’ in The Local and the Global: Social Transformation in Southeast Asia: Essays in Honour of Professor Syed Hussein Alatas, ed. Riaz Hassan (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 161–179. 12 Abaza, Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt, 137. 13 Peter Wallace Preston, Development Theory (Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 323. 14 Educated in Norway, at the time of writing Abushouk worked at the International Islamic University in Malaysia, now he is a professor at Qatar University. 15 Abushouk, ‘Globalization and Muslim Identity Challenges and Prospects’, 487–489.

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16 Dagi, ‘Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy and the West: Post-Islamist Intellectuals in Turkey’, 146. 17 Shireen T. Hunter, The Future of Islam and the West: Clash of Civilizations or Peaceful Coexistence? (Westport. Connecticut. London: Praeger, 1998). 18 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 19 Abushouk, ‘Globalization and Muslim Identity Challenges and Prospects’, 494–497. 20 Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (New York: Times Books, 1995). 21 Mohammed Arkoun, ‘Present-day Islam Between Its Tradition and Globalization’ in The New Voices of Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity, ed. Mehran Kamrava (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 32. It appeared earlier in Farhad Daftary (ed.), Intellectual Traditions in Islam (London: I. B. Tauris in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2000), 179–221. A slightly edited version of the text is also available online at https://iis.ac.uk/academicarticle/present-day-islam-between-its-tradition-and-globalisation, last accessed 12 August 2018. 22 Arkoun, ‘Present-day Islam between its tradition and globalization’, 32. 23 Arkoun, ‘Present-day Islam between its tradition and globalization’, 33. 24 Arkoun, ‘Present-day Islam between its tradition and globalization’, 34–35. 25 Arkoun, ‘Present-day Islam between its tradition and globalization’, 36. 26 Arkoun, ‘Present-day Islam between its tradition and globalization’, 36. 27 Cf. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition. Translated by Jonathan Adjemian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 18–22. 28 Arkoun, ‘Present-day Islam between its tradition and globalization’, 60 and 38. 29 Turan Kayaoglu, ‘Constructing the Dialogue of Civilizations in World Politics: A Case of Global Islamic Activism’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 23:2 (2012): 134. Quoting from Fred Dallmayr and Abbas Manoochehri, Civilizational Dialogue and Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007) and Fabio Petito, ‘The Global Political Discourse of Dialogue Among Civilizations: Mohammad Khatami and Vaclav Havel’, Global Change, Peace and Security 19:2 (2007): 3–26, respectively. 30 Kayaoglu, ‘Constructing the Dialogue of Civilizations in World Politics’, 135, referencing John Esposito and John O. Voll, ‘Islam and the West: Muslim voices of dialogue’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29:3 (2000): 613–639. 31 Miroslav Volf, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal and Melissa Yarrington, A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2010). 32 Kayaoglu, ‘Constructing the Dialogue of Civilizations in World Politics’, 130. 33 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘Islam, The Contemporary Islamic World, and The Environmental Crisis’ in Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust, eds. Richard Foltz, Frederick M. Denny and Azizan Baharuddin (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press for the Center for Study of World Religions, 2003), 83. 34 Ziauddin Sardar (ed.), The Touch of Midas: Science, Values and the Environment in Islam and the West (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); An Early Crescent: The Future of Knowledge and the Environment in Islam (London: Mansell, 1989). 35 Richard C. Foltz, ‘Introduction’ in Islam and Ecology, ed. a.o. Foltz xxxviii. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man (New York: George Allen &Unwin, 1968); Religion and the Order of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 36 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘The Ecological Problem in Light of Sufism: The Conquest of Nature and the Teachings of Eastern Science’ in Sufi Essays, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr second edition, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 152–63. 37 Nasr, ‘Islam and the Environmental Crisis’, 86.

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38 Nasr, ‘Islam and the Environmental Crisis’, 89. 39 Emmanuel Karagiannis, ‘The Rise of Islamist Environmentalism: Why and How Islamists Want to Protect the Environment?’ Unpublished PhD thesis (London: King’s College London, forthcoming). 40 Nasr, ‘Islam and the Environmental Crisis’, 95. 41 Ibrahim Özdemir, The Ethical Dimensions of Human Attitudes toward Nature (Ankara: Ministry of Environment, 1997); with Ian Markham, Globalization, Ethics and Islam (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 42 Ibrahim Özdemir, ‘Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics from a Qur’anic Perspective’ in Islam and Ecology, 5–6. 43 Özdemir, ‘Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics from a Qur’anic Perspective’, 8–9. 44 Özdemir, ‘Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics from a Qur’anic Perspective’, 20–21. 45 Özdemir, ‘Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics from a Qur’anic Perspective’, 23. 46 S. Nomanul Haq, ‘Islam and Ecology: Toward Retrieval and Reconstruction’ in Islam and Ecology, 125, quoting from George F. Hourani’s Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Hourani, 1995). 47 Chishti, ‘Fitra: ̣ An Islamic Model for Humans and the Environment’, 70. 48 Nasr, ‘Islam and the Environmental Crisis’, 94. 49 Nasr, ‘Islam and the Environmental Crisis’, 94. 50 Chishti, ‘Fitra: ̣ An Islamic Model for Humans and the Environment’, 67. 51 Chishti, ‘Fitra: ̣ An Islamic Model for Humans and the Environment’, 78. 52 Chishti, ‘Fitra: ̣ An Islamic Model for Humans and the Environment’, 69. 53 Nasr, ‘Islam and the Environmental Crisis’, 99. 54 S. Nomanul Haq, ‘Islam and Ecology: Toward Retrieval and Reconstruction’ in Islam and Ecology, 125, quoting from George F. Hourani’s Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Hourani, 1995). 55 Haq, ‘Islam and Ecology: Toward Retrieval and Reconstruction’, 125 and 142. 56 Othman Abd ar-Rahman Llewellyn, ‘The Basis for a Discipline of Islamic Environmental Law’ in Islam and Ecology, 185–248. 57 Sayyid Fadhil Bahrululoom, ‘Foreword’ in Islamic Metaphysics in Bioethics: AnimaHuman Experimentations, eds. Sibtain Panjwani and Imranali Panjwani, (London: CISS Press, 2010), viii. 58 Cf. Jonathan E. Brockopp (ed.), Islamic Ethics of Life: Abortion, War, and Euthanasia (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003); Jonathan E. Brockopp and Thomas Eich (eds.), Muslim Medical Ethics: From Theory to Practice (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); Mohammed Ghaly (ed.), Islamic Ethics and the Genome Question (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 59 Mohamed Abdun Nasr and Asnawi, ‘The Majelis Ulama’s Fatwa on Abortion in Contemporary Indonesia’ in The Fatwa as an Islamic Legal Instrument: Concept, Historical Role, Contemporary Relevance, ed. Carool Kersten Vol. 3, (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2018), 295–300. 60 Mehrdad Alipour, ‘Islamic Shariʿa Law, Neo-Traditionalist Muslim Scholars and Transgender Sex-Reassignment Surgery: A Case Study of Ayatollah Khomeini’s and Sheikh al-Tantawi’s Fatwas’ in The Fatwa as an Islamic Legal Instrument: Concept, Historical Role, Contemporary Relevance, Vol. 3, 261–282. 61 As early 1964, the Ayatollah Khomeini had already issued a fatwa allowing organs derived from living and braindead donors to be used for transplantations, cf. Omar Sultan Haque ‘Brain Death and Its Entanglements: A Redefinition of Personhood for Islamic Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics 36:1 (2008): 13–36; S.M. Akrami, Z. Osati, F. Zahedi and M. Raza, ‘Brain Death: Recent Ethical and Religious Considerations in Iran’, Transplantation Proceedings 36:10 (2004): 2883–87.

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62 Marcia C. Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne (eds.), Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 3–6. 63 Jonathan Brockopp, ‘Islam and Ethic Beyond Abortion and Euthanasia’, Journal of Religious Ethics 36:1 (2008): 5. 64 Stef van den Branden and Bert Broeckaert, ‘The Ongoing Charity of Organ Donation: Contemporary English Sunni Fatwas on Organ Donation and Blood Transfusion’ in The Fatwa as an Islamic Legal Instrument: Concept, Historical Role, Contemporary Relevance, Vol. 3. 305–320. 65 Usama Hasan and Athar Osama (eds.), Islam and Science: Muslim Reponses to Science’s Big Questions [Report of İhsanoğlu Task Force on Islam and Science] (London and Islamabad: The Muslim world Science Initiative, 2016). 66 Haque, ‘Brain Death and Its Entanglements’, 13. 67 Haque, ‘Brain Death and Its Entanglements’, 18. 68 Haque, ‘Brain Death and Its Entanglements’, 23. 69 Haque, ‘Brain Death and Its Entanglements’, 26. 70 Ebrahim Moosa, ‘Muslim Ethics and Biotechnology’ in The Routledge Companion to Religion and Science, eds. James W. Haag, Gregory R. Peterson and Michael L. Spezio (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 455. 71 Moosa, ‘Muslim Ethics and Biotechnology’, 458. 72 Moosa, ‘Muslim Ethics and Biotechnology’, 459. 73 Moosa, ‘Muslim Ethics and Biotechnology’, 460. 74 For a study of Yahya, cf. Anne Ross Solberg, The Mahdi wears Armani: An Analysis of the Harun Yahya Enterprise (Stockholm: Södertörn högskola, 2013). 75 Moosa, ‘Muslim Ethics and Biotechnology’, 461.

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INDEX

Abd al-Raziq, Ali 104, 105 Abd al-Raziq, Mustafa 83, 89 Abd al-Sabur, Salah 93 Abdel Malek, Anouar 18, 178, 179 Abduh, Muhammad 9, 41, 65, 70, 134 Abdullah, M. Amin 43, 44 Abdurrahman, Moeslim 44, 110 abortion 187, 189 Abou El Fadl, Khalid 23, 44, 51, 52, 129, 130, 149, 150, 154, 167–69 Abou-Bakr, Omaima 154 Abrahim (Ibrahim) Abshar-Abdalla, Ulil 109, 110, 161, 162 Abu Hanifa 114 Abu Hurayra 94 Abu Zahra, Muhammad 136 Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid 19, 23, 29, 39–41, 58, 59, 61–64, 70, 74, 110, 150 Abushouk, Ahmed 179, 180 Adonis 93 aesthetics 52, 60, 79, 87, 135 Afghani, Jamal al-Din al- 48, 177, 190 Afghanistan 2, 12, 129 Afifi, Abu’l-‘Ala 89 Agamben, Giorgio 3 Ahl al-hadith. See also traditionists 6, 128, 130, 157 Ahl al-kitab 160, 162 ahl al-Sunna wa’l-jama‘a 8, 42, 133 Ahmad, Khurshid 180 Akhbari School 28 AKP (Justice & Development Party) 21, 115, 116

Akyol, Mustafa 112–16 Alatas, Syed Farid 88 Alatas, Syed Hussein 88, 178, 179 Alawi, Ahmad al- 83 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal 21, 93 Ali, Kecia 23, 154 Alijani, Reza 107 Alim, Mahmud Amin al- 8, 12, 18 Alliance of Civilizations 182–83 Althusser, Louis 31, 38, 162 al-usul al-khamsa 27 Alwani, Tahir Jabir al- 10, 11, 137, 142 Amal 49, 113 Amin, Qasim 150 Ankara School 44–45 Annales School 36, 64 anthropocentrism 36, 53, 110, 119, 171 Applied Islamology 36–39, 44, 63, 182 aql (reason) 27 Aqqad, Mahmud Abbas al- 14, 18 Aristotle 28, 32, 33 Arkoun, Mohammed 19, 29, 36–39, 41, 61, 63, 64, 96, 133, 163, 180–82 asāla. See also authenticity 16, 18, 178 asastunggal 111 Ash‘ari, al- 8, 43, 66, 116, 136, 137, 157 Ashtiyani, Jalal al-Din 84, 85 Aşikgenç, Alparslan 45 Assyaukanie, Luthfi 109, 111, 161, 162 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 97, 104 Attas, Syed Naguib al- 11, 88, 109 Auda, Jasser 23, 129, 135–39, 145, 150 authenticity. See also asala 16, 18, 178

Index

Averroes. See also Ibn Rushd 28 Averroist 28, 29, 35, 36, 41, 138, 172 Avicenna. See also Ibn Sina 31, 84, 89 Aydin, Mehmet 116 Ayyād, Shukri 18 Azhar, al- 8–11, 83, 84, 89, 90, 104, 105, 136, 188 Azm, Sadiq al- 177 back to the Qur’an and Sunna 137, 149, 155 Baderin, Mashood 169 Bakar, Osman 87, 88 Banna, Hasan al- 12, 23, 65, 80, 117 Barber, Benjamin 182 Barbour, Ian 47 Barks, Coleman 92 Barlas, Asma 23, 154 Barth, Karl 11, 47 Baso, Ahmad 43, 133 Batin(baton) 23 Bayani 31, 32, 43 Bayat, Asef 115 Bazarghan, Mehdi 107 Benedict XVI 4 Benslama, Fethi 82 Benveniste, Emile 64, 182 Bergson, Henry 33, 93 Berque, Jacques 15 Betti, Emilio 67 Binder, Leonard 17, 113 Bioethics 187–90 Biotechnology 189 Biruni, al- 88 Bisri, Mustofa 10, 131 Bistami, Abu Yazid al- 80 blind imitation. See also taqlid 2, 88, 134, 140 Bloch, Marc 36 blood transfusion 187, 188 Bly, Robert 92 Borujerdi, Seyyed Hossein al- 9 Boullata, Isa 18 Bourguiba, Habib 150 Boutchich, Boumediene 85 Braudel, Fernand 36, 64 Bruinessen, Martin van 81 Brunner, Emil 47 Brunschvig, Robert 33 Buber, Martin 74 Budshishiyya 85, 96 Bulaç, Ali 21, 165, 179, 180 Burckhardt, Titus 84, 184

211

Burgat, François 180 burhani 145 Cahen, Claude 36 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam 167 caliphate 79, 104, 105, 114, 116, 177 Cambridge Muslim College 12 Camus, Albert 33 Cantwell Smith, Wilfred 160, 164 Casanova, José 109 Castoriadis, Cornelius 43 Central Institute of Islamic Research (Pakistan) 12 chercheurpenseur 38 Chishti, Saadia 185, 186 Chittick, William 85, 91 Chodkiewicz, Michel 91 Christianity 49, 68, 83 citizenship 4, 12, 105, 118, 120, 121, 144, 158 Clash of Civilizations 179, 180, 182 Closed Official Corpus 64 Cold War 166, 168, 178–80, 183 Collingwood, Robin 47 colonialism 4, 22, 60, 80, 81, 177 Common Word 160, 162, 183 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 84 Corbin, Henri 84, 89, 91, 93 cosmopolitan Islam 4 cosmopolitanism 172 Council of Islamic Ideology (Pakistan) 12 Cox, Harvey 107, 108 Critique of Arab Reason 29, 31, 35, 36 Critique of Islamic Reason 36–38, 63 CRLO (Council for Scientific Research and Legal Opinions) 129, 130 Dabashi, Hamid 23, 37, 51, 85, 91, 92 Dagi, Ihsan 115 Dar al-Da‘wa 122, 177 Dar al-Harb 122, 177 Dar al-Islam 51, 121, 122, 177 Dar al-Shahada 122, 177 Davari Ardakani, Reza 85 da‘wa 13, 122, 157–59, 163, 177 democracy 4, 50, 103, 105, 108, 109, 111–13, 115, 116, 118–20, 122, 130, 158, 162, 165, 166, 182 Dependency Theory 179 Derrida, Jacques 37, 62 Development Theory 178 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir 23, 182 Dialogue of Civilizations 183

212

Index

Dilthey, Wilhelm 11, 39 discourse analysis 37, 38, 40, 53, 61, 63, 64 diversity 14, 52, 62, 92, 112, 135, 145, 149, 150, 154, 155, 157, 159–61, 163–65, 172, 176 Diyanet 97, 98 Doostdar, Alireza 97 Double Movement theory 65, 65, 67, 70, 151 Duby, Georges 38 Duderija, Adis 23 Durkheim, Émile 45 Eagleton, Terry 40 ecology 5, 134, 176, 183–87 Effendi, Djohan 22 Effendy, Bahtiar 110 Egypt 9, 10, 15, 19, 23, 39, 41, 52, 83, 177, 187 Eickelman, Dale 2 Elmarsafy, Ziad 91, 93 emancipation 4, 22, 149–172, 178, 181 Emerging Reason 38, 39, 182 Enlightenment 30, 38, 82, 91, 93, 166, 182 Ennahda Party 17, 117, 118 environmentalism 176 epistemology 3, 35, 38, 46–48, 50–52, 70, 86, 91, 106, 112, 119, 121, 128, 129, 137, 140, 141, 145, 149, 184 equality 4, 23, 65, 133, 145, 149, 152, 153, 155, 163, 166, 172 Erbakan, Necmettin 21 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 115 Ernst, Carl 81, 93 Esack, Farid 22, 67, 163, 164 esotericism 59, 83, 91, 92 ethics 35, 65, 66, 96, 98, 109, 129, 135, 136, 139, 142, 144, 152, 155, 156, 158, 159, 176, 184–89 Euro-Islam 120, 121, 143 European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) 10, 11, 136, 142 euthanasia 187 exceptionalism 115, 116, 123 exegesis 4, 31, 33–35, 39, 40, 44, 58–62, 64–66, 72–75, 110, 137, 138 existentialism 33, 39, 46 Fadlallah, Muhammad Husayn 10, 142, 158 Fanon, Frantz 15, 33 Faqih 9, 35, 105, 127, 141 Farabi, al- 32, 33, 87 Faraj, Abd al-Salam 19, 20

Fardid, Ahmad 93 Faruqi, Isma‘il Raji al- 11, 88, 182 fatwa 10, 136, 142, 187, 188 feminist 60, 67, 150, 151, 156, 163 Feuerbach, Ludwig 33, 49 Fevbre, Lucien 36 Filali-Ansari, Abdou 106 fiqh 3, 11, 43, 47, 49, 51, 66, 119, 127–29, 131–33, 137, 140, 142–45, 150, 155, 157, 160, 166, 167, 186 fiqh al-aqalliyyat. See also minority fiqh 142 fitra 42, 49, 50, 133, 159, 160, 166, 186 Fitzgerald, Edwar 91 Foda, Faraj 19 Forouzanfar, Badiozaman 92 Foucault, Michel 27, 75, 162, 178 Freedom 4, 30, 50, 65, 74, 75, 95, 103, 109, 111–16, 118, 120–22, 143, 149, 153, 154, 157, 166, 169, 170 Freud, Sigmund 64, 89 Frye, Northrop 64 Fukuyama, Francis 180, 183 fundamentalism 12, 183 fuqaha. See also faqih 127, 129, 144, 188 furu’ al-fiqh 128, 132, 133 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 11, 39, 40, 47, 52, 66, 67, 75, 139 Gamaat Islamiyah. See also Jama‘at Islamiyya 15 gender 3, 4, 23, 133, 149–52, 154, 155, 187 Gerakan Pembaruan Pemikiran Islam. See also Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thinking 22 Ghannouchi, Rachid 17, 116–19 Ghazali, Abu Hamid al- 8, 80, 89, 135 Ghazali, Muhammad al- 105, 116, 133–35, 137, 141, 162 Ghazi bin Muhammad 183 Ghitany, Gamal al- 94 Ghunaymiyya 89 Girard, René 4 Globalization 3, 4, 38, 176–90 gnosis. See also ma‘rifa 79, 83, 90, 94 gnosticism 31, 45, 46 Gospels 58, 64 Governance 3, 104, 105, 108, 111–13, 116, 118, 121, 122, 141 Guénon, René 81, 83–85, 91, 96, 184 Guitton, Jean 33 Gülen Movement 98, 115, 116, 183 Gülen, Fethullah 98 Gurvitch, Georg 15

Index

Habermas, Jürgen 4, 74, 75, 158, 182 Haddad, Tahir al- 150 Hadith 13, 32, 41, 44, 45, 50, 64, 94, 114, 128, 130, 152, 156, 185, 186 Hafez (also spelled Hafiz) 81, 92, 114 hakimiyya Allah 105 Halbwachs, Maurice 36, 50 Hallaj, Mansur al- 80, 83, 93, 94 Hallaq, Wael 134, 145 Hamidaddin, Abdullah 97 Hamka 96 Hanafi (School of Islamic law) 114, 143 Hanafi, Hasan 3, 19, 29, 30, 32–36, 39, 41, 43, 49, 139, 177, 178, 180, 182 Hanbali (School of Islamic law) 43 Hanegraaff, Wouter 91 Haq, Nomanul 186 Haqiqa 50, 80 Haqqi, Yahya 93 Haque, Omar 188–90 Harb, Ali 63 Hawali, Safar al- 8 Hebrew Bible 58, 64 Hegelian 46 Heidegger, Martin 3, 37, 45 Heresy 27, 74, 80 heritage. See also turath 135 heritage and renewal project 33–35, 49 heritage thinkers. See also turathiyyun 19–21, 29, 30, 35, 36, 39–41, 43, 44, 82, 103 hermeneutics 18, 20, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 51, 59–62, 65–67, 69, 70, 74, 75, 128, 134, 185 heterodoxy 27 Hezbollah 10 Hick, John 160 Hidayat, Komaruddin 45 Hijab 130, 153 hikma. See also wisdom 78, 158 Hilmi, Muhammad Mustafa 89 Hizb al-Tahrir 177 Hizmet. See also Gülen Movement 98, 115, 183 Hojatoleslam 51 Hosseiniyeh Ershad 11, 15, 45 Howell, Julia Day 81 human rights 3, 4, 69, 109, 112, 115–17, 149–72, 176, 180 humanism 36, 41, 42, 53, 81, 86, 96, 108, 156, 159, 162 Huntington, Samuel 180, 182, 183 Husain, Saddam 8 Husserl, Edmund 29, 33, 34, 37, 47

213

Huxley, Aldous 82 Hybridity 172 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad 8, 13, 80, 117 Ibn al-Arabi 62, 90 Ibn Ashur al-Tahir Ibn Bayya, Abdallah 10, 11, 142, 158 Ibn Bayya Muhammad Ibn Baz, Abd al-Aziz 8 Ibn Hanbal Ahmad Ibn Hazm 32 Ibn Khaldun 30, 32, 73, 88, 162 Ibn Rushd. See also Averroes 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 41, 49, 134, 162 Ibn Sab‘in, Abu Muhammad 80, 90 Ibn Saud, Muhammad 13 Ibn Sina. See also Avicenna 17, 31–33, 47, 50, 85, 138 Ibn Taymiyya 33, 35, 88, 96, 143 Ibrahim, Anwar 11, 88 Ihsan 51, 79, 87, 115 İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin 188 i’jaz 62 ijma‘ 118, 128 ijtihad. See also independent reasoning 2, 27, 31, 47, 49–51, 59, 61, 72, 74, 128, 132, 138, 142, 159, 171 illuminationism. See also ishraq 31, 79, 84, 85, 94, 133 ilm 79, 108 imaginary (imaginaire) 38, 43, 60, 64, 80, 89 Imam 98, 117 Iman 42, 49, 79, 108, 113, 138, 162–64 independent reasoning. See also ijtihad 31, 46, 128 Indonesia 4, 7, 10, 11, 19, 21, 22, 28, 41, 42, 81, 103, 104, 109–12, 123, 129, 130, 132, 138, 161, 177, 182, 187 insan al-kamil, al- 155 Institute for Cultural Research Studies (Iran) 20 International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) 10 Iqbal, Muhammad 14, 16–18, 21, 23, 29, 33, 48, 49, 81, 91, 92, 109, 140, 159 Iran 2, 20, 45, 47, 48, 49, 73, 74, 84, 85, 92, 93, 97, 105, 107, 112, 116, 129, 139, 141, 154, 165, 170, 182, 188 Iranian revolution 2, 9, 11, 12, 16, 93, 178 Iraq 10, 11, 27, 114 Irfani 133 ishraq. See also illuminationism 79, 133

214

Index

Iskandari, Ibn Ata Allah al- 90 islamci aydin (Islamist intellectual) 21 Islamic Fact 37, 63, 65 Islamic Post-Traditionalism (Indonesia) 41, 43 Islamic Post-Traditionalists (Indonesia) 22, 43, 131 Islamic Republic 2, 9, 51, 73, 105, 107, 139, 141 Islamic resurgence 2, 103 Islamic State (IS) 15, 19, 110, 111, 117, 118 Islamic-Post-Traditionalism 41, 43 Islamism 12, 28, 105, 122, 135, 177, 178, 180 Islamization of Knowledge 11, 79–98, 188, 190 i‘tidal 134 IVF 187, 188 Jabri (also spelled Jabiri), Mohammed Abed al- 19, 29–32, 35, 36, 39, 41, 43, 112, 119, 120, 133, 152, 165, 166, 168–70 Jahiliyya 105 Jakarta Charter 130 Jakobson, Roman 40 Jama‘at Islamiyya (Gamaat Islamiyah) 2 Jamaat-e Islami 14, 60 Jami 92 Jaringan Intelektual Muda Muhammadiyah (JIMM) 22, 44 Jaringan Islam Liberal (JIL) 109, 112 Javadi-Amoli, Ali 141 Jihad 2, 15, 69, 90, 105, 143, 150, 163, 180, 182 Jihadi 9, 12, 15 jihadism JIMM (Jaringan Intelektual Muda Muhammadiyah) 22, 44 Judaism 68 Jünger, Ernst 93 Justice 10, 14, 21, 45, 60, 65, 85, 93, 115, 121, 132, 133, 136, 138, 152–54, 163, 164, 169, 170 Justice & Development Party. See also AKP 21 Juwayni, al- 135 Kadivar, Mohsen 11, 21, 23, 46, 51, 74, 106, 142, 170–72 kalam (theology) 47, 160 Kamali, Muhammad Hashim 135, 136 Kamrava, Mehran 7 Kant, Emmanuel 11, 47, 70, 133, 182 Karakoç, Sezai 95

Karaman, Haydderin 95 Kassem, Hakim 94 Kebatinan 162 Kemalism 22, 104 Kepercayaan 162 Kermani, Navid 91 Khalafallah, Muhammad 60, 61 khalifa Allah fi’l-ard 73, 108, 152 khalifat Allah fi’l-ard 185 Khalwatiyya 85 Khamene’i, Ali 188 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad 65 Khatami, Mohammad 51, 182 Khayyam, Omar 91 khilafa Allah fi’l-ard 154 Khomeini, Ruhollah 9, 11 Khorchide, Mouhanad 23 Khuli, Amin al- 60, 61 Kindi, al- 32, 33 Kisakürek, Nesip 95 Knitter, Paul 160, 161, 163–65 Kotku, Mehmet 97, 98 Kugle, Scott 149, 155–57 Kuhn, Thomas 44, 50 Küng, Hans 47 Kuntowijoyo 444, 110, 111 Kurzman, Charles 17 Kuwait 8, 18, 19, 51, 52 Lacan, Jacques 89 Lacoste, Jean-Yves 39 Lacoste, Yves 30 Lahbabi, Aziz 30, 81 Lakatos, Imre 44 Lamrabet, Asma 154 Larijani, Sadegh 141 Le Goff, Jacques 38 Lebanon 10, 188 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 31 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 45 Liberal Islam Network 109, 111, 112 Liberal Islam 17, 109, 111, 112 liberalism 17, 41, 50, 108, 113–16, 121, 132, 165 liberation Theology 29, 43, 46, 163 liberty 113, 116, 117, 119, 165 liminality 18, 19 Lings, Martin 83, 96 Llewellyn, Othman 186, 187 Locke, John 121 logocentrism 37 logosphere 37, 64 Lotman, Juri 40, 61–63

Index

Maarif, Ahmad Syafii 111 Madjid, Nurcholish 17, 22, 28, 41–43, 50, 87, 96, 107–10, 159, 161, 162, 164 Mahfouz, Naguib 19, 93, 94 Mahfudh, Sahal 10, 111, 131–33 Mahmood, Saba 23 Mahmud, Abd al-Halim 83–85, 90 Mahmud, Zaki Naguib 18, 19, 29 Malaysia 44, 87, 151, 154, 178 Maliki (School of Islamic law) 32 Manhaj 28, 43, 131 maqasid al-shari‘a 121, 134, 135–39, 141, 142, 145, 167 maqasidi thinking 134–39, 143, 145 Maqdisi, Abu Muhammad al- 15 March, Andrew 117–19, 121, 144 Marcoes-Natsir, Lies 133 ma‘rifa. See also gnosis and gnosticism 79, 83 Maritain, Jacques 84, 168 marja’ al-taqlid 9 Marx, Karl 33, 46, 64 Maryamiyya 83, 84, 87 Mashhad 15 Maslaha 121, 129, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137 Massignon, Louis 15, 83, 91, 94 Masud, Muhammad Khalid 11, 108 Mas‘udi, Masdar Farid 10, 132, 133, 159 Materialism 14, 46 Maturidi, al- 114, 133, 137 Mawdudi, Abu’l-Ala al-. 14, 80, 87, 105, 117 Mazrui, Ali 23 Mecca 2, 69, 73, 186 medical ethics 176, 187, 188 Medina 69, 114, 152, 153, 164, 183, 186 Mernissi, Fatima 23, 149, 152, 153, 155, 165 Messadi, Mahmoud 94 Mignolo, Walter 43 minority fiqh 142, 143, 145, 157, 158 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba 23, 150, 153, 154 Miskaway 36 Modernism 29, 33, 42, 43, 80–82, 93 modernity 17, 18, 29, 30, 32, 42, 46, 47, 51, 65, 67, 70, 72, 80–82, 94, 108, 114, 115, 131, 134, 135, 165, 178, 181, 184 mollah 9 Mommsen, Katharina 91 Monotheism 42, 46, 159 Moosa, Ebrahim 22, 23, 44, 188–90 Morocco 28, 30, 81, 85, 96, 119, 129, 136, 154 Mossadeq, Ali 59

215

Motahhari, Morteza. See also Mutahhari, Murtada 11, 16, 51, 73, 74 Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thinking (Indonesia) 22, 28, 41, 159 mufakkirun islamiyyun 9, 144 mufti 9, 10, 187 Muhammad (Prophet) 13, 63, 73, 98 Muhammadiyah (Indonesia) 22, 43, 44, 110, 111 MUI (Majelis Ulema Indonesia) 132, 187 Mujahideen 2 Mukti Ali, Abdul 22 Mulla Sadra 45, 48, 50, 84, 85 Munawar-Rachman, Budhy 109, 161 Musawah 152, 154, 155 Muslim Brotherhood 2, 14, 23, 29, 60, 80, 117 müsülman aydin (Muslim intellectual) 21 Mutahhari, Murtada. See also Motahhari, Morteza 11, 16, 75 Mutawakkil, al- (Caliph) 27 Mu‘tazila 27–29, 32, 39, 41, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 114, 116, 128 Mu‘tazili School 62 Mu‘tazilite (as intellectual qualification) 28, 68, 172 muwatana. See also citizenship 118 mysticism 81, 83, 90, 94, 95, 127, 156, 184 Nadwi, Abu’l-Hasan al- 14 Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) 10, 42, 110, 134 Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmad an- 23, 109, 116, 157, 168, 169 Nakşibendi. See also Naqshbandiyya 96, 97 Nandy, Ashis 43 naql (transmitted knowledge) 27 Naqshbandiyya 92, 96 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 11, 21, 84, 87, 88, 92, 93, 96, 184–86 Nasser, Gamal 14, 16 Nasution, Harun 22, 41 Natsir, Mohammed 17, 28, 133 neo-modernism 42, 43 neo-positivism 70, 72, 75, 139 Network of Young Muhammadiyah Intellectuals. See also JIMM 22, 44 New Age 81, 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich 64, 94 Nomocracy 104 NU (Nahdlatul Ulama) 10, 42, 110, 134 Oppenheimer, Robert 84 organ donation 188

216

Index

Organization of Islamic Cooperation 167 Organization of Islamic Countries 177, 188 Orientalism 178, 179 Orthodoxy 8, 27, 40, 45, 46, 62, 66, 127 Orthopraxy 127 Otto, Rudolf 42 Ottoman Empire 113–15 Ouda, Salman al- 8 Özal, Turgut 98 Özdemir, Ibrahim 185 Özdenören, Rasim 21 Özel, Ismet 21 Pakdil, Nuri 95 Pakistan 17, 129, 159, 163 Pancasila Doctrine 104, 111, 132 Paris 15, 28, 33, 46, 82, 84, 85, 117 Patriarchy 150, 154, 156 Pêcheux, Michel 31, 162 Perennial Philosophy. See also sophia perennis 81 Perennialism 84 Perfect Human (al-insan al-kamil) 68, 155 philosophy 11, 17, 18, 20, 23, 29, 30, 32–37, 39, 43, 46–48, 50, 64, 71, 74, 81, 83–87, 89, 91, 96, 97, 116, 128, 129, 133, 135, 136, 138, 142, 145, 166, 167, 169, 181, 182, 186 Piaget, Jean 31, 50 pious ancestors. See also al-salaf al-salih 13 Plato 33 pluralism 4, 11, 20, 51, 92, 95, 96, 111, 114, 115, 117, 132, 157, 159, 160–64, 172 plurality 3, 4, 30, 52, 59, 63, 112, 116, 131, 145, 149–72, 176 politico 13 polygamy 69, 150 polytheism 46 Popper, Karl 44, 47 positivism 70, 72, 75, 139 postcolonial theory 15, 177 post-Islamist 21, 115, 116, 135, 145, 165 postmodernism 32, 67, 137 Postra. See also Islamic Post-Traditionalism 41, 43 poststructuralism Pound, Ezra 92 progressive Islam 12, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 178 progressive Muslims 2, 28, 61, 129, 155 prophecy 65, 66, 68

prophet 3, 6, 8, 13, 16, 41, 44, 50, 62, 63, 64, 68, 71, 73, 74, 98, 104, 114, 119, 128–30, 140, 141, 152, 153, 160, 186 prophethood 51, 59, 62, 71, 73, 159 psychoanalysis 82, 89 purist 13, 15 Qadiriyya 85 Qaradawi, Yusuf al- 10–12, 17, 105, 106, 122, 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 158, 161 qiwama (qiwamah) 152, 154, 155 qiyas 31, 128, 134, 156 Qur’an 4, 7, 13, 14, 16, 28, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 44–48, 50, 58–75, 91, 92, 94, 104, 105, 107, 110, 114, 117, 119, 120, 128–30, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 145, 149–52, 154–56, 158–60, 163, 164, 170, 176, 184–86, 189 Qur’anic Fact 37, 63, 65 Quranists 44 Qushayri, Abd al-Karim al- 80, 90, 93 Qutb, Sayyid 9, 14–16, 20, 21, 28, 29, 33, 45, 60, 64, 67, 87, 89, 105, 116, 117, 154 Raden Kartini 150 Rahardjo, Rawam 22, 44, 109–11, 161 Rahman, Fazlur 11, 42, 44, 45, 61, 65–67, 70, 74, 77, 134, 150, 163, 185, 186 Rahnema, Ali 15, 46 Rahner, Karl 11, 47, 160 Rais, Amien 111 Rakhmat, Jalaluddin 11 Ramadan, Tariq 23, 120–22, 141, 143–45, 171, 182 Rationalism 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 89, 108, 115, 128 Rawls, John 121 Raysuni, Ahmad al- 136 Razi, Fakhr al-Din al- 89, 164 reactionary Islam 30 reactionary Muslims 23, 149, 156 Reactualization Agenda 104 reformism 43, 80, 144 relativism 52, 74, 132, 133, 161, 168, 170 religious intellectuals 45, 74, 107, 115 Renaissance 10, 30, 106, 119 renewal. See also tajdid 143 revelation 27–29, 32, 37, 42, 50, 51, 58, 59, 62–69, 71–73, 75, 86, 137, 139, 144, 145, 157, 168, 171, 184, 185 Reynold Nicholson 91 Ricoeur, Paul 32, 33, 38, 39, 64, 75, 145 Rida, Rashid 134, 137, 164, 178

Index

Ridwan, Nur Khalik 162, 164 Rodinson, Maxime 114 Romanticism 61 roshanfekr dini. See also religious intellectuals 20 Rumadi, Ahmad 43 Rumi 48, 74, 85, 91, 92, 114 Russell, Bertrand 70, 71, 84 sacred texts. See also scripture 58, 142, 156, 171 Sadat, Anwar 2, 12, 15, 16 Saeed, Abdullah 59, 60 Safi, Omid 23 Safouan, Moustapha 89 Sahwa (awakening) 9, 105 Said Nursi 81, 97, 98, 115, 185 Said, Edward 178, 179 salaf al-salih, al-. See also pious ancestors 13 salafism 13, 88 Sardar, Ziauddin 878, 11, 88, 184 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 33 Saudi Arabia 8–11, 13, 97, 116, 129, 177, 186 Saussure, Ferdinand 31, 40 Schimmel Annemarie 91, 92 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 39 Schmitt, Carl 3 Schuon, Frithjof 81, 83, 84, 91, 96, 184 scripture. See also sacred texts 2, 32, 53, 58–75, 127, 139, 149, 155, 156, 163, 164, 169, 172, 190 secularism 21, 41, 106–09, 111, 115, 116, 119, 132, 168 secularity 3, 4, 103–23, 165, 172 secularization 42, 97, 106, 107–09, 111, 112, 122, 162 Sedgwick, Mark 87 Semiotics 40, 61, 64, 75, 162, 182 Sha‘arawi, Huda 150 Shabestari, Mohammad Mojtahed 11, 21, 46, 47, 51, 73–75, 142 Shadhiliyya-Alawiyya 83 Shafi‘i (School of Islamic law) 128 Shafi‘i, Muhammad ibn Idris al- 31, 128 Shah, Idries 92 Shahrur, Muhammad 69–72 Shaltut,Mahmud 9 Sha‘rawi, Mitwalli al- 154 shari‘a 17, 48, 50, 80, 104, 118, 119, 121, 127–45, 169, 171, 186, 187 Shari‘ati, Ali 11, 15, 16, 20, 21, 45, 46, 47, 51, 73, 92, 93, 107 Shatibi, Abu Ishaq al- 32, 131, 134–37

217

Shayegan, Daryush 21, 85, 92, 93 Shaykh, Sa’diyya 23, 155 Shepard, William 60 Shirazi, Qutb al-Din al- 87 Sidi Hamza 85 Siradj, Said Aqil 10, 43, 132 Sirhindi, Ahmad 80 Sirry, Mun‘im 159 Sistani, Ali al- 10, 142 Sisters of(in) Islam 154 siyasa shari‘iyya 104 Skali, Faouzi 85, 86 Slavery 69, 153, 166 Smith, Huston 82 Sobhani, Ja‘far 141 sophia perennis. See also Perennial Philosophy 81, 84, 86 Soroush, Abdolkarim 3, 20, 23, 44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 58, 59, 72, 73, 85, 92, 93, 107, 108, 110, 112, 139, 144, 165, 166, 182 South Africa 4, 22, 67, 155, 163, 164 Spinoza, Baruch 181 Spirituality 43, 53, 68, 81, 82, 85, 86, 92, 96, 97, 142, 159, 172 Statehood 3, 111 stem cell 187, 189 Stenberg, Leif 87 structural anthropology 39 structural linguistics 31, 39, 40, 61, 64, 71, 182 structuralism 40 Sufi orders. See also tariqa 3, 79, 80, 81, 85, 91, 115 Sufism. See also tasawwuf 8, 30, 43, 52, 67, 79–98, 133, 156, 172, 184, 185 Suharto 110, 111 Suhrawardi, Shibal al-Din 84, 85, 94 Sukarno 22, 104, 110 Sunna. See also Traditions of the Prophet 129 Sustainability 176 Tabataba’i, Mohammed Hossein 11 Tablighi Jamaat 117, 163, 177 Tafsir 59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 72 Taftazani, Abu’l-Wafa al-Ghunaymi 89, 90 Taha, Mahmoud Mohamed 58 tajdid. See also renewal 143 Talbi, Mohamed 17 Taleqani, Mahmud 16, 51, 107 Tantawi, Muhammad Sayyid al- 187 taqlid. See also blind imitation 2, 140 taqwa 42, 138, 160, 163, 171 Tarabishi, George 82

218

Index

tariqa. See also Sufi orders 96 tasāmuh 7 tasawwuf. See also Sufism 43, 79 tawassut 7, 134 tawhid 32, 42, 48, 86, 87, 108, 152, 159, 163 ta’wil 59, 62, 72 text criticism 61 theocentrism 60 theocracy 104, 111 theology 3, 4, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46–50, 67, 73, 74, 106, 110, 112, 114, 116, 117, 120, 133, 140, 142, 152, 159–61, 163, 166, 167, 190 theosophy 31, 50, 80 Third Way 9, 97, 116 Third Worldism 33, 36, 177, 178 Tibi, Bassam 120, 122 Tillich, Paul 11, 47, 161 TIS (Turkish-Islamic Synthesis) 98, 104 Tolerance 4, 7, 20, 92, 110, 112, 114, 121, 132, 162 Toleration 73, 96, 114, 116, 145, 149–72 Topçu, Nurettin 95 Toynbee, Arnold 47 Traditional Islam 7, 65 traditional Muslims 2, 6, 7, 121, 172 Traditionalism 6, 41, 43, 81–85, 91, 184 Traditionists. See also Ahl al-hadith 6 Traditions of the Prophet. See also Sunna 6, 13, 44, 64, 104, 119, 128, 129, 141 transmitted knowledge. See also naq l27, 28, 41, 114 transplantation 134, 187–89 triple movement model 72 turath. See also heritage 135 turāthiyūn. See also heritage thinkers 19–21, 29, 30, 35, 36, 39, 41, 43, 44, 82, 103 Turkey 21, 22, 29, 44, 80, 92, 95, 97, 103, 112, 115, 116, 123, 165, 179, 180, 183 Turkish Islamic Synthesis (TIS) 21, 29, 98, 104, 115, 116, 123

Umar ibn al-Khattab 153 Umma 46, 118, 122, 176 umma al-wasat 68, 105 United States 8, 11, 12, 14, 23, 44, 83–85, 87, 109, 183 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 149, 153, 166 usul al-fiqh 3, 33–35, 49, 61, 128, 129, 134, 136–39, 142, 144 Usuli School 28, 49, 171

UDHR. See also Universal Declaration of Human Rights 149, 166–70 ulama (pl. of alim, scholar) 8–10, 12, 22, 42, 72, 85, 104, 110, 131, 134, 136, 144, 171, 187

zahir Zakariyya, Fouad 18, 19 Zakat 132, 133 Zaytuna Institute 12 Zubaida, Sami 106

Vattimo, Gianni 4 Veiling 69, 130, 153 velayat-e faqih (also wilayat al-faqih) 9, 105 Wadud, Amina 23, 67, 149–52, 154, 155, 163, 165 wahdat al-shuhud 94 wahdat al-wujud 68, 80, 94 Wahhabism 8, 13, 52 Wahib, Ahmad 95 Wahid, Abdurrahman 10, 42, 43, 83, 109, 131, 182 Wahyudi, Yudian 43, 138, 139, 144, 145 Walzer, Michael 161 Wasatiyya 105, 163 Weber, Max 159, 179, 181 Westernization 65, 179 Whitehead, Alfred 70, 71 Wiktorowicz, Quintan 12, 13, 15 wilaya 154 wilayat al-faqih (also velayat-e faqih) 9, 105 Winter, Timothy (Abdal Hakim Murad) 12 wisdom. See also hikma 79, 83, 85, 91, 158, 185 Yahya, Harun 190 Yassine, Abdessalam 85 Yüksel, Edip 44 Yusuf, Hamza (Mark Hanson) 12 Yusuf, Murad 82