Intellectual Traditions in Islam

Probing The ‘Intellect’Probing The ‘Intellect’
by Aziz Esmail

This particular seminar in Cambridge is being held at a time in history — I mean the history not just of the Muslim world but of mankind as a whole — at which each of the concepts that are reflected in its title are in question. Take, first of all, the concept of ‘intellectual 1ife’. A great question mark looms over the very concepts of ‘the intellectual’ and ‘intellectual life’ today. What is the place of the intellectual in society? Is he an ideologue — a proponent or supporter of the prevailing or dominant thought, or is his role that of a critic? Is it a role which calls one to question the assumptions of the age? Are the corridors of power the proper place for an intellectual? Is that the place where he should take up his lodgings? Or does he belong, like the prophets of the Old Testament, beyond the walls of the city, where he calls out from the wilderness, from outside the dominant, prevailing powers and forms of thought?There is an old saying, which you might remember, that a prophet is never honoured in his own country. In that saying, there is a statement about the distance of intellectual thought from the centre. But if this is so, if the role of the critic is to interrogate, to challenge what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, to open new horizons, new possibilities of thinking and feeling, of being and acting, how is one, then, to understand the responsibility of the intellectual to society? These are questions about the place of the intellectual in culture and in society. There are similar questions which concern the mind of the individual. What is the place of the life of the mind within the personality? What is its relationship to feeling? What is its relationship to character? What is its relationship to faith? What role does intellectual life have in the development of personal identity and character? What relation does it have to the ordinary joys, affections and sorrows of life, to friendship and love, and not least, to one’s relationship with God? What place does it have in the individual’s participation in society? To what extent does intellectual consciousness, which is often a critical consciousness, enable such participation, and to what extent does it impede it? And how exactly does the individual relate to the society through his intellectual activities?Questioning ‘Tradition’
These are questions, then, to do with the intellect. Now take the second concept that is present in the title: that, namely, of ‘tradition’. What traditions is one to cherish or to uphold in a world in which an individual is exposed, as is the case nowadays, not to one group of traditions but to a multitude of them? The world of today is characterised by a pluralism of traditions. Numerous traditions criss-cross, overlap and jostle one another. Furthermore, modern electronic media and communications have made diverse traditions of the world uniquely, immediately and instantaneously available at various parts of the globe. How might one maintain anchorage in particular historical traditions in such circumstances? Which thread among these traditions relates to which one, such that the threads might somehow constitute a fabric that one can call one’s own? And where, therefore, is one to find a sense of belonging, or what is called ‘authenticity’ or ‘identity’ (words about which I have a series of other questions)? These are some of the vexing and uncertain issues that surround the very concept of tradition. Beyond them there lies a more fundamental question. And that question, which is a contemporary one, is not only about which traditions to call one’s own, but about the likelihood of any traditions surviving at all in a world which is changing rapidly under one’s very eyes. In a sense, one might ask: what is the future of the past? What future does the past have in a world which is changing so fast — a world saturated with the instantaneous culture of global communication? What role does history have here? And if there is no past, if the past has no future, what is one to think about the present and the future?Subjective Time
Now, let me clarify what I mean by this. I am not talking about public or objective time here, but what we might call subjective time. For objectively, there is always a yesterday, a today and a tomorrow. There is the time of the clock; but there is also, in the life of a society, what we might call historical time — the mode of time in which one is related to, and bears a kinship with, one’s ancestors and with the inheritance of an age, a legacy which one carries forward into the future. And this is true not only of society, but also of the individual, because the individual has a life history. The importance of life history, not so much in the public, observable form, but in its subjective mode, becomes especially pronounced at certain critical junctures in life, for instance, old age as well as youth. Where old age is blessed with wisdom, one looks back at the course of one’s life as the only course that it could have taken, with the feeling that it was as it ought to have been. One finds a new relationship with one’s parents, free of the wish that they should have been different. More generally, one might cherish, at this stage, the sense of a connection with bygone ages, a kinship with history and with distant forefathers which is at the same time a relationship that is to come. For the passing generation gives its lifeblood, part of its soul, to the generation which is yet to come. In this way one closes, as it were, the circle of life history.Youth is another stage in the life history where the same negotiation, a very difficult, delicate negotiation, between what has gone on in one’s life and what is to come, occurs. And what is particularly important at such a time is the relationship of the individual life history to the traditions that are outside it — in a word, to culture. The young man’s or woman’s relationship to traditions is one of either dependence or defiance. Youth has two opposite yearnings: a yearning to be told what to do and a yearning to tell whoever tells him what to do, to get lost. You will notice that I am using slightly milder language than may be heard in practice. What, however constitutes dependency? What is involved here are not only issues to do with family. They also appertain to the whole question of education, of schooling and the place of the school, as an institution, in society.Models of Education
There are two models of the school, located at opposite ends of a spectrum. One is that of a military camp; the other of a playing field. The school which is based on the model of a military camp is the sort of school to which most of us gathered here probably went. This is not unlike the model of the public school in England, although the public school has its own grim kind of playfulness. This particular model of education treats with the utmost seriousness the maxim that the child is the father of the man. What it proposes is that the child must be more adult than the adult himself, that he must bend before the objective imperatives of learning. He must learn to make of his life a sustained devotion to duty, a consistent obedience to objective rules. The other type of school, which is the contrary model of education, takes seriously, perhaps too seriously, the adage that ‘all work and no play make Jack a dull boy’. Modern liberal theories of education carry this maxim very far indeed, to the point where what it really means is ‘all play and no work make Jack a smart boy’. Its central premise is that discipline is something to be avoided at all costs. Now, this is the trend of education which shuns traditions altogether so as to give the child the privilege, as it claims, of ‘finding himself,’ of creating his own knowledge, of forming his own opinions, in the absence of external discipline or constraint. We in our time have been so conditioned, so accustomed to notice the defects of the formal model of education, now widely considered ‘oppressive,’ that we are as yet little aware of the grave deficiencies of that model which places all its emphasis on the self rather than on society. It should become obvious, when we ponder on this problem, that education is only a microcosm of the culture of the society at large. The model of education I am criticising leads to what I might call the tyranny of self-absorption. And one often finds among people who come from that particular regime of education a longing, a yearning for a system that will tell them what the world is like, what their place in the world is, and what one is supposed to do in the world.The Longing For An Objective Order
In a nutshell, this longing is a quest for objectivity: that is to say, for a relationship to an objective order. Now, an objective order is accessible, especially for the young man or woman, through two channels. One is work, the other is culture. Work — a profession or occupation — gives one a firm relationship to a world of ideas, skills and tools. It is significant that throughout history, a majority of men and women have always found their identity in work, whether in hunting animals, in tilling the soil, in raising children, in making machines work, or in all those sundry occupations of an economic, political or organisational kind that enable these other kinds of work to proceed. They have always left to a minority, to higher institutions as it were, the task of complementing the satisfactions to be got out of basic, physical work. Thus, for most of history, political work was left in the hands of rulers; religious life was left in the hands of priests, rabbis and ‘ulama; and culture was entrusted to poets, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists.In the modern world this relationship has altered. It altered about three centuries ago with the Industrial Revolution when the unit of work shifted from the family home, the farm and the shop to the factory. Traditionally, the shop was a family-orientated affair. It was in a way an extension of the community. But the factory is not an extension of the community, and modern work has proceeded from this point onwards on a separate track from activities in a family, and in a community. Thus, it is very common nowadays to hear people say, ‘I find my social satisfaction outside work and not in work itself.’ Accordingly, the types of self-expression available in each sector of life differ widely among themselves. This development has many sources, all of which are characteristic of modern history. They include the automatisation and rationalisation of work which went hand in hand with the rise of modern commerce and industry. The twin consequences of this was a differentiation of society into distinct sectors, and a corresponding differentiation of the individual personality into a multiplicity of roles.As a result of these historical changes, the ethos of modern work is strictly apart from opportunities for self-expression now available in the secular Western world only in the cinema, the concert hall, the theatre, or else in pubs or cafés. But these institutions too —institutions like the theatre and the concert hall — are less communal than was true in the past. One may recall, for instance, the fact that chamber music was largely played in homes and not in concert halls; or that the opera was an event where people came to meet and talk. If you look at copies of The Times in England for example, from the last century, you will occasionally find in them complaints about opera singing which was so noisy as to make it impossible for the audience to talk to one another, and so enjoy themselves. Today, however all such activities have become markedly impersonal, rather than communal.Education and the Inroads of Modernity
In the Third World, two tendencies or trends may be found. On the one side, there is a greater prevalence of forms of art and recreation which are communal or social. There are, for instance, the rousing and rumbustious forms of music like qawwali performances, which are fundamentally communal, and where the social, the spiritual and the artistic seem to go together. Another religiopolitical form of self-expression is nowadays to be found in activities centred on the mosque, religious schools or madrasas, and theological colleges. Some of these institutions are taking over a large amount of the functions of culture and communal solidarity in Muslim societies. This is a phenomenon which demands some explanation.One of the reasons for this trend has to do with the inroads of modernity, which causes the alienation provoking the search, in turn, for social forms embodying what are seen as moral spiritual values. There is also, of course, the problem of education. In the West at least there is a wide availability of opportunities not only for education but for education to be followed by work — opportunities, in other words, for the acquisition of skills and a chance to exercise those skills. When education is denied altogether, or having been acquired appears irrelevant or fruitless, when one is denied what competence one has and the sense of belonging that comes when that competence is exercised, then there is an enormous sense of anomie and moral vacuum among the young people affected by this trend. I think what is happening in the Islamic world is but a variant of what is happening in the Third World at large, in African and Asian countries, though not necessarily as much, perhaps, in the Far East.The Rise of Totalistic Ideologies
One of the problems of modern history has been the rise of totalistic ideologies. In the Muslim world, the only major ideology which for a time seemed to be capable of mobilising the society, and in particular its youth, was nationalism, which was usually combined with a degree of real or ostensible socialism. These ideologies were seldom successful in ensuring social justice and solidarity, and hence were succeeded by a period of gathering disillusionment. There is, therefore, a hiatus in these societies: a hiatus in meaning, a crisis of meaning. It has often been said that the rise of ‘fundamentalism,’ or what is called ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ in these countries is best explained by politics. But beneath the political problem, there lies the cultural problem. One must, therefore, look at culture, and not just at the political issue in order to understand the matter fully. For regardless of whether an ideology is religious or secular, it is intended to relate the self to society and to a picture of the cosmos at large. Ideologies represent the human need for a unifying doctrine — something that will tell people, firstly, what the world is like; secondly, what man’s place in the world is; and thirdly, what the principles governing human actions or conduct in the world are to be. Ideology is thus a total phenomenon. It answers several of those great questions that Kant asked about the order of things, such as ‘What is man?’, ‘What is my place in the world?’, and above all, ‘What shall I do?’ This last question, it will be noticed, is that of ethics.Within ideologies, there is a distinction to be made between what the psychoanalyst Eric H. Erikson once called, respectively, ‘totalism’ and ‘wholeness’. ‘Wholeness’ may be defined, negatively, as an absence of disconnection or fragmentation. It represents a sense that one is connected to the universe; that one is connected to fellow human beings; and that within oneself, the various parts are interconnected, giving a unity to the personality. ‘Totalism’, which in some respects is preferable to the term ‘fundamentalism’, denotes a unifying system of thought which spells out everything, dictates everything, and makes, moreover, a very sharp distinction between its own world and other worlds, between what is deemed to belong inside and to lie outside its own sphere. Totalism insists that what belongs outside must not be let in, and what belongs to itself must not, at any cost, be left out. This rigid separation of the inside and the outside is a-dichotomy found in all totalising ideologies. It is present in the West’s image of Islam as antithetical to everything for which Western civilisation stands, and it is equally present in the absolutist definition of Islam, which opposes itself entirely to the culture of modernity.It is important to realise that this totalistic definition of Islam is a modern one. Although it invokes history, it is not itself based in history. Historically, Islamic thought, or Islamic culture, was a composite phenomenon. It was a product of many cultural influences, a river into which many a tributary flowed. It had a certain central unity, some central integrity, which is very difficult to define. For instance, when we look at art across the Islamic world, it has a sufficient commonality, and a sufficient distinctiveness, to justify our calling it Islamic. Yet the diversity is considerable, and the influences from all the corners of the globe are also quite extensive.The Idea of Tradition
Before going further, I would like to add several points of clarification. Often enough, when people say that they are looking for a Judaic answer to the problems of the world today, or a Christian answer, or an Islamic solution, what they seem to be saying is that they wish the tradition in question to continue. But there is every difference in the world between tradition and the desire for tradition, between what I call ‘tradition’ and ‘traditionalism’. The idea of tradition is not a child of tradition. The idea of tradition, which is traditionalism, is born, so to speak, out of wedlock. It emerges from a divorce between ideals and the society in which those ideals are supposed to reign. It is the product of a divorce between past and present. In fact, traditional societies are the one kind of society which are singularly free from the idea of tradition. In the Islamic world, for instance, there is considerable talk, which has been going on now for an odd fifty years or so, about the Muslim ‘tradition’, the Muslim ‘heritage’, and so on. These are peculiarly modern preoccupations, however. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger has a lucid image to describe something analogous to what I am speaking of here. A hammer in the hands of an artisan is a very different thing from a hammer in the hands of a repair man. In the hands of the artisan, when the hammer is in working order, it is almost an extension of his body. It is part of him and it is part of the workshop, hence a part of the economy of which that workshop is in turn a part. The moment the hammer breaks, when it no longer works ‘naturally,’ it becomes an object of scrutiny. It is separated from its function, and when one now looks at the hammer, one looks at it as an object, as a tool, whereas the artisan was probably using it almost unconsciously when it was working. If the economy runs into a problem and the workshop encounters difficulties, it becomes an object of attention, whereas formerly it was not. In the same way, tradition becomes an object of anxiety, nostalgia and attention when it ceases to work, not when it is actually at work. Therefore, it is not in traditional societies that one gets the idea of tradition. It is not in traditional societies that you get the attitude of mind or the cast of mind that I have here called traditionalism.The measure of a traditional age lies in the amount of life that it is able to take for granted; and the amount, by contrast, that it cannot take for granted, or is no longer able to take for granted. In the distance that separates these two kinds of society lies the distance between the world which was once dominated by Athens, Jerusalem or Mecca, and the world dominated by Washington, Tokyo, by post-imperial London and Paris, and by all those cities in the rest of the world which are satellites of these metropolises. And even when societies which revolve around the modern cities seek to recapture the spiritual dominion of Jerusalem or Mecca, what they display, in so doing, is not their closeness or proximity to those ancient cities, but rather their nostalgic distance from them.Let me move on now to some very general observations. I began by saying that each of the concepts that we have in the title of this seminar is not a topic but a question: that the life of intellect is a question, that the idea of a tradition is a question, indeed the idea of Islam itself raises a question. What is meant by Islam, and what is the relationship of the past and present in Islam? One of the functions of the seminar is to define these questions more sharply, because in these matters more than half the battle is accomplished by asking the right kinds of questions. Let us remember that for nearly the first four centuries of Muslim history, the nature of Islam was contested between different interpretations which had not yet hardened into fixed and compartmentalised positions. The notion that Islam had spelled out literal answers to every question to be encountered in history, and that the only impending task was to put it into practice, to effect it, is a misconception. What actually happened in history was, first of all, the fact of the tremendous expansion of Arab rule over large parts of the world, in historical terms an astonishingly brief spell of time. That rule raised all kinds of questions about governance, about ideas and values, about law and the organisation of society. It also provoked considerable variation and dissent. From the beginning, there was a great divide over the question of authority, as to how the Islamic dominions were to be legitimately governed in a spiritual and temporal sense (the distinction between these two realms was not really made till much later). There is, I think, increasing evidence to show that the Shi‘i viewpoint on this issue, which located authority in the ahl al-bayt, the Prophet Muhammad’s family, began very early, not withstanding the orthodox Sunni view as well as the view of Western Islamicists who had greater access to Sunni than to Shi‘i sources, and whose view was correspondingly shaped. So there was a period of ferment and formation, and that is why one may appropriately call this period, to which I have assigned a loose and necessarily arbitrary date, the formative age of Islam.From the historical vantage point where we now stand, all the societies that originated from the Mediterranean region — I refer to all societies and not just Muslim societies, leaving out the great civilisations of India and China which have a very different history — appear to share a triple heritage. One is the heritage of a monotheistic faith, which believes in revelation inscribed in a scripture. Hence the term ‘societies of the book,’ used by Mohammed Arkoun. The second mainspring of their culture is Graeco-Roman. Ancient Greek culture was not, of course, monotheistic. It was based on poetry and philosophy, on ritual and, of course, the theatre. The third major heritage of the modern world is that of the Enlightenment which took place in Europe in the 18th century, with the preceding events of the Reformation and the Renaissance. We must not forget the very close kinship in this context between the Judaic, Christian and Islamic societies. All of them are founded on a concept of revelation; all trace the foundation of their meaning back to the written word, even in Christianity, in which the Logos, the Word of God, is not a book, but the person of Jesus. But one only learns of Jesus through the Gospels, which then is the word that gives access to the figure of Jesus. In the case of Islam, of course, the primacy of the Word is wholly central.Textualising the Universe
It is relevant, in this connection, to make a few general observations on the Qur’an. On the one Land, the Qur’an is a historical response to a historical problem. The tendency to read the Qur’an solely as a transcendent text tends to leave out the fact that it was a response to real historical events of the time. Yet, in answering the dilemmas of immediate history, contemporary history, what the Qur’an does is to place its response in a larger, a grander statement of the condition of man in the universe. In this sense, the Qur’an is an immensely integrating text. It integrates, gathers together all meanings under the aegis of the concept of the One God. The concept of the unity of God gathers together all the meanings that would otherwise be scattered. That is the way in which the Qur’an addressed the issues of the day, and the issues that pertain to the human condition at large. If we simply look at the very notion of what the Qur’an calls signs, the ayat, the context in which one is familiar with that term is in the designation of the verses of the text. But the same term is used in the Qur’an for the phenomena of nature. Again, the Qur’an treats history, the fate that befell former nations, as ‘signs’ of divine providence. It thus effects what I might call a textualisation of the universe. It shows the entire universe as a text, of which the Qur’an is the central, shining paradigm. It converts the signs and marks of existence into a map. It integrates diverse facets of the world as we experience it — as the Prophet Muhammad’s contemporaries experienced it — into a unitive, all-encompassing meaning.Another topic which I would like to comment on very briefly in this connection is that of symbolic language. The specific point I have in mind is that there is a certain difference between symbolic religious language on the one hand, and ideological religious language on the other. There is a certain distinction to be made between spiritual religion and ideological religion, between symbolic faith — which keeps everything open, which fosters a plurality of meanings, because symbolic meaning cannot be tied down in a dogma or a formula — and a system of closed meanings. So, this contrast between the openness of the symbolic mode and the closure of ideological religion is something which, I think, is well-worth keeping in mind. One can talk about this in the context of the other faiths as well, but here I am confining my remarks to Islam.Graeco-Roman Heritage
The second component of the triple heritage was that of Greek philosophy, which contributed a specific discipline of reason. In speaking of reason, one must remember that the Qur’an itself represents a rationalisation at work, because it combats myth. Owing to its symbolic language, there is in the Qur’an the notion of the supernatural, of supernatural beings like angels, jinns, and so on. But it is nonetheless quite parsimonious about the concept of miracles. The Qur’an mentions the Quraysh as demanding a miracle to be sent down from God as a proof of the prophethood of Muhammad. However, it resolutely repudiates the expectation of such a miracle, and refers instead to the signs of God in the natural universe and in human history. There is thus a certain distancing from magic and miracle, and a rationalisation which corresponds to the transformation of social structure brought about by the preaching of the Prophet. In Greek culture, philosophy emerged with Plato and Aristotle as the preferred pathway to truth. The ideal of reason had the same pre-eminence in ancient Greek society that God-fearing piety has in the monotheistic faiths. For that reason, when in the first few centuries following the Prophet’s death, Muslim intellectuals came into contact with the philosophical tradition initiated by the Greeks, they were forced to wrestle with the differences between, on the one hand, the traditions of monotheistic faiths, which were embodied in the shari‘a and based on the authority of scripture, and on the other hand, what the Greeks had said about reason as the gateway to truth. And what is most interesting about the efforts of the few, but towering, intellectual giants in all the three faiths, beginning with the Islamic domain, who studied philosophy, was the nature of the reconciliation that they tried to achieve between them. This reconciliation involved something which has not been emphasised sufficiently, what I would call political theology: the theology of life in a community or society. What philosophers like al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were emphasising was the unity of truth. Given this unity, the paths of reason on the one hand, and of tradition, based on authority and revelation, had to be both distinguished and related.The intellectual path in the thinking of these philosophers, who clearly echoed Plato in this respect, is one that only an elite with the requisite intellectual aptitude can pursue. For the masses the same truth needs to be couched in terms of imagination — figurative language, parables, metaphors, symbols, stories, narratives. Furthermore, in this view, the Prophet is uniquely gifted not only at perceiving the truth, but in being able to relate it to the masses — in other words, in being able to couch it in the language of creative imagination, which is the only language that can mobilise people and recruit them into the service of the order of the body politic, while ensuring their own well-being and happiness. To this end, the philosophers disapproved of any attempts to expose the masses to philosophy. For they thought that this was something that would create havoc — undigested reason among people who cannot master it would cause them to lose their faith and attachment to traditions, without giving them the comforts or solace of the way of reason. That was one particular response to the issue of the relationship between philosophy and the traditions of monotheistic faiths.‘Reason’ and The Enlightenement
The third major development in history relevant to this question is that of the Enlightenment. Here, reason came to mean something quite distinct. To an extent, the Enlightenment harked back to the classical philosophical heritage. But the operative model was that of modern science. The science of Newton provided the model for all human knowledge and all human activity. The philosophers of the 18th century associated religion in Europe, among other things, with the corruption of the clergy and the power of the Roman Catholic Church. The reaction to what was seen as the history of religious oppression and obscurantism came from several quarters. There was the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment, but earlier on there had been the Reformation launched by Martin Luther. It was, I think, one of the most important events in human history when Luther translated the Bible into the vernacular. For it gave to the ordinary man access to the scripture which had previously been monopolised by the clergy. Finally, the rise of the nation state was also crucial in all these developments, because the nation state broke the unity of Christendom, just as in the present century the abolition of the Sunni khilafa in 1924 by Kemal Atatürk and the formation of the Arab states with the retreat of the British and French powers in areas of the Middle East, also had a great influence on the way that Islam is understood today.Coming To Terms with ‘Intellectual Life’, ‘Islam’ and ‘Tradition ’
All these three traditions — that is, the traditions of monotheistic faith, Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment — have come under explicit or implicit pressure and questioning in the contemporary world. There are many reasons for this. Here I will confine myself to alluding only to a few of them. One is the fact that in the modern world the very awareness of a plurality of cultures makes it very difficult for any one culture to believe in itself to the exclusion of others. It poses the danger, or to put it more mildly, the challenge, of relativism. Relativism says that all doctrines, all ideas and values can be explained by reference to time and place. But if all ideas and values are to be thus explained, one’s confidence in upholding a single culture or tradition is seriously dented. It is this dilemma which is partly reflected in the controversy currently raging in England, for instance, over whether schools ought to teach world religions in a neutral tone, that is, without advocating any normative religious positions. Is then the function of religious education to provide facts or is it to inculcate belief? There are those who will say that to inculcate belief in a young child is a form of indoctrination. There are those, by contrast, who will insist that the neutral way of teaching religion, that is, of imparting only facts about religion, is anything but religious education.Another central issue of our times concerns the relation of the individual to society. In the late modern West, the dominant model, which is the model of the market, dictates attitudes towards culture. Culture, in this way of thinking, becomes a supermarket of ideas, values and doctrines, where one chooses according to taste, not according to objective essence — where the desire of the individual is the final arbiter of choice. Thus, if I choose to live a particular life, it is not because I am justified in believing in the objective rightness or suitability of that particular option, but because I so desire it. For freedom goes hand in hand with desire, and it is one’s desire which eventually dictates what is right and what is wrong. Now this model presupposes a different conception of selfhood than the models which it has displaced. And although at one level it may be felt as liberating, it also harbours a potential for moral crisis. For, when morality is predicated on choice, that means there is nothing else but choice to dictate what the morality of the age shall be. A society based on this notion is more in the nature of an association than a Gestalt, a whole bigger than the sum of the parts. In earlier cultures, community came first and individuals second; individuals drew their lifeblood, as it were, from society. But in the contemporary world, society is seen as the product of individual decisions to band together, to come together in random groups, and that in itself constitutes one of the major cultural and intellectual dilemmas of the present age.In answering, or in at least asking these questions, in exploring these issues, which represent the need of the hour in the world today, the monotheistic faiths have a great role to play. But this role will be effective only under certain conditions. One of these conditions is the growing need for a genuine mutual appreciation between the faiths which share a common origin, what we call the Abrahamic faiths. Attention to this common heritage, the Abrahamic heritage, which is a source of shared issues and problems, is especially important for Muslims who live as minorities in the Western world. The second condition is that to engage with the contemporary world means to take it seriously, which means to understand it, not to dismiss it. The theological rhetoric which says that the modern world is the antithesis of what the Islamic tradition teaches us — in other words, the rhetoric which sets Islam and the modern world as separate, opposing blocs — is a maladaptive rhetoric. Engagement does not mean surrender; for criticism too is a form of engagement.One of the great mistakes that Protestant Christianity and Protestant Christian theology made in recent history was to take on board virtually all the concepts of the modern age. When the age passes, so do its concepts. If Protestant theology becomes too strongly wedded to the modern concept of modernity, it will find itself left behind, because it will have succumbed to the drift, the fashion, of a particular age. It will have abdicated the critical distance, which is the gift of prophecy, from the world in which it operates. How Islamic theology may engage with the modern world without becoming a prisoner of the modern understanding of modernity is one of the major challenges facing Islamic thought today. How it will meet this challenge is anybody’s guess at the moment. It is something that still awaits the verdict of history.a
This particular seminar in Cambridge is being held at a time in history — I mean the history not just of the Muslim world but of mankind as a whole — at which each of the concepts that are reflected in its title are in question. Take, first of all, the concept of ‘intellectual 1ife’. A great question mark looms over the very concepts of ‘the intellectual’ and ‘intellectual life’ today. What is the place of the intellectual in society? Is he an ideologue — a proponent or supporter of the prevailing or dominant thought, or is his role that of a critic? Is it a role which calls one to question the assumptions of the age? Are the corridors of power the proper place for an intellectual? Is that the place where he should take up his lodgings? Or does he belong, like the prophets of the Old Testament, beyond the walls of the city, where he calls out from the wilderness, from outside the dominant, prevailing powers and forms of thought?There is an old saying, which you might remember, that a prophet is never honoured in his own country. In that saying, there is a statement about the distance of intellectual thought from the centre. But if this is so, if the role of the critic is to interrogate, to challenge what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, to open new horizons, new possibilities of thinking and feeling, of being and acting, how is one, then, to understand the responsibility of the intellectual to society? These are questions about the place of the intellectual in culture and in society. There are similar questions which concern the mind of the individual. What is the place of the life of the mind within the personality? What is its relationship to feeling? What is its relationship to character? What is its relationship to faith? What role does intellectual life have in the development of personal identity and character? What relation does it have to the ordinary joys, affections and sorrows of life, to friendship and love, and not least, to one’s relationship with God? What place does it have in the individual’s participation in society? To what extent does intellectual consciousness, which is often a critical consciousness, enable such participation, and to what extent does it impede it? And how exactly does the individual relate to the society through his intellectual activities?Questioning ‘Tradition’
These are questions, then, to do with the intellect. Now take the second concept that is present in the title: that, namely, of ‘tradition’. What traditions is one to cherish or to uphold in a world in which an individual is exposed, as is the case nowadays, not to one group of traditions but to a multitude of them? The world of today is characterised by a pluralism of traditions. Numerous traditions criss-cross, overlap and jostle one another. Furthermore, modern electronic media and communications have made diverse traditions of the world uniquely, immediately and instantaneously available at various parts of the globe. How might one maintain anchorage in particular historical traditions in such circumstances? Which thread among these traditions relates to which one, such that the threads might somehow constitute a fabric that one can call one’s own? And where, therefore, is one to find a sense of belonging, or what is called ‘authenticity’ or ‘identity’ (words about which I have a series of other questions)? These are some of the vexing and uncertain issues that surround the very concept of tradition. Beyond them there lies a more fundamental question. And that question, which is a contemporary one, is not only about which traditions to call one’s own, but about the likelihood of any traditions surviving at all in a world which is changing rapidly under one’s very eyes. In a sense, one might ask: what is the future of the past? What future does the past have in a world which is changing so fast — a world saturated with the instantaneous culture of global communication? What role does history have here? And if there is no past, if the past has no future, what is one to think about the present and the future?Subjective Time
Now, let me clarify what I mean by this. I am not talking about public or objective time here, but what we might call subjective time. For objectively, there is always a yesterday, a today and a tomorrow. There is the time of the clock; but there is also, in the life of a society, what we might call historical time — the mode of time in which one is related to, and bears a kinship with, one’s ancestors and with the inheritance of an age, a legacy which one carries forward into the future. And this is true not only of society, but also of the individual, because the individual has a life history. The importance of life history, not so much in the public, observable form, but in its subjective mode, becomes especially pronounced at certain critical junctures in life, for instance, old age as well as youth. Where old age is blessed with wisdom, one looks back at the course of one’s life as the only course that it could have taken, with the feeling that it was as it ought to have been. One finds a new relationship with one’s parents, free of the wish that they should have been different. More generally, one might cherish, at this stage, the sense of a connection with bygone ages, a kinship with history and with distant forefathers which is at the same time a relationship that is to come. For the passing generation gives its lifeblood, part of its soul, to the generation which is yet to come. In this way one closes, as it were, the circle of life history.Youth is another stage in the life history where the same negotiation, a very difficult, delicate negotiation, between what has gone on in one’s life and what is to come, occurs. And what is particularly important at such a time is the relationship of the individual life history to the traditions that are outside it — in a word, to culture. The young man’s or woman’s relationship to traditions is one of either dependence or defiance. Youth has two opposite yearnings: a yearning to be told what to do and a yearning to tell whoever tells him what to do, to get lost. You will notice that I am using slightly milder language than may be heard in practice. What, however constitutes dependency? What is involved here are not only issues to do with family. They also appertain to the whole question of education, of schooling and the place of the school, as an institution, in society.Models of Education
There are two models of the school, located at opposite ends of a spectrum. One is that of a military camp; the other of a playing field. The school which is based on the model of a military camp is the sort of school to which most of us gathered here probably went. This is not unlike the model of the public school in England, although the public school has its own grim kind of playfulness. This particular model of education treats with the utmost seriousness the maxim that the child is the father of the man. What it proposes is that the child must be more adult than the adult himself, that he must bend before the objective imperatives of learning. He must learn to make of his life a sustained devotion to duty, a consistent obedience to objective rules. The other type of school, which is the contrary model of education, takes seriously, perhaps too seriously, the adage that ‘all work and no play make Jack a dull boy’. Modern liberal theories of education carry this maxim very far indeed, to the point where what it really means is ‘all play and no work make Jack a smart boy’. Its central premise is that discipline is something to be avoided at all costs. Now, this is the trend of education which shuns traditions altogether so as to give the child the privilege, as it claims, of ‘finding himself,’ of creating his own knowledge, of forming his own opinions, in the absence of external discipline or constraint. We in our time have been so conditioned, so accustomed to notice the defects of the formal model of education, now widely considered ‘oppressive,’ that we are as yet little aware of the grave deficiencies of that model which places all its emphasis on the self rather than on society. It should become obvious, when we ponder on this problem, that education is only a microcosm of the culture of the society at large. The model of education I am criticising leads to what I might call the tyranny of self-absorption. And one often finds among people who come from that particular regime of education a longing, a yearning for a system that will tell them what the world is like, what their place in the world is, and what one is supposed to do in the world.The Longing For An Objective Order
In a nutshell, this longing is a quest for objectivity: that is to say, for a relationship to an objective order. Now, an objective order is accessible, especially for the young man or woman, through two channels. One is work, the other is culture. Work — a profession or occupation — gives one a firm relationship to a world of ideas, skills and tools. It is significant that throughout history, a majority of men and women have always found their identity in work, whether in hunting animals, in tilling the soil, in raising children, in making machines work, or in all those sundry occupations of an economic, political or organisational kind that enable these other kinds of work to proceed. They have always left to a minority, to higher institutions as it were, the task of complementing the satisfactions to be got out of basic, physical work. Thus, for most of history, political work was left in the hands of rulers; religious life was left in the hands of priests, rabbis and ‘ulama; and culture was entrusted to poets, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists.In the modern world this relationship has altered. It altered about three centuries ago with the Industrial Revolution when the unit of work shifted from the family home, the farm and the shop to the factory. Traditionally, the shop was a family-orientated affair. It was in a way an extension of the community. But the factory is not an extension of the community, and modern work has proceeded from this point onwards on a separate track from activities in a family, and in a community. Thus, it is very common nowadays to hear people say, ‘I find my social satisfaction outside work and not in work itself.’ Accordingly, the types of self-expression available in each sector of life differ widely among themselves. This development has many sources, all of which are characteristic of modern history. They include the automatisation and rationalisation of work which went hand in hand with the rise of modern commerce and industry. The twin consequences of this was a differentiation of society into distinct sectors, and a corresponding differentiation of the individual personality into a multiplicity of roles.As a result of these historical changes, the ethos of modern work is strictly apart from opportunities for self-expression now available in the secular Western world only in the cinema, the concert hall, the theatre, or else in pubs or cafés. But these institutions too —institutions like the theatre and the concert hall — are less communal than was true in the past. One may recall, for instance, the fact that chamber music was largely played in homes and not in concert halls; or that the opera was an event where people came to meet and talk. If you look at copies of The Times in England for example, from the last century, you will occasionally find in them complaints about opera singing which was so noisy as to make it impossible for the audience to talk to one another, and so enjoy themselves. Today, however all such activities have become markedly impersonal, rather than communal.Education and the Inroads of Modernity
In the Third World, two tendencies or trends may be found. On the one side, there is a greater prevalence of forms of art and recreation which are communal or social. There are, for instance, the rousing and rumbustious forms of music like qawwali performances, which are fundamentally communal, and where the social, the spiritual and the artistic seem to go together. Another religiopolitical form of self-expression is nowadays to be found in activities centred on the mosque, religious schools or madrasas, and theological colleges. Some of these institutions are taking over a large amount of the functions of culture and communal solidarity in Muslim societies. This is a phenomenon which demands some explanation.One of the reasons for this trend has to do with the inroads of modernity, which causes the alienation provoking the search, in turn, for social forms embodying what are seen as moral spiritual values. There is also, of course, the problem of education. In the West at least there is a wide availability of opportunities not only for education but for education to be followed by work — opportunities, in other words, for the acquisition of skills and a chance to exercise those skills. When education is denied altogether, or having been acquired appears irrelevant or fruitless, when one is denied what competence one has and the sense of belonging that comes when that competence is exercised, then there is an enormous sense of anomie and moral vacuum among the young people affected by this trend. I think what is happening in the Islamic world is but a variant of what is happening in the Third World at large, in African and Asian countries, though not necessarily as much, perhaps, in the Far East.The Rise of Totalistic Ideologies
One of the problems of modern history has been the rise of totalistic ideologies. In the Muslim world, the only major ideology which for a time seemed to be capable of mobilising the society, and in particular its youth, was nationalism, which was usually combined with a degree of real or ostensible socialism. These ideologies were seldom successful in ensuring social justice and solidarity, and hence were succeeded by a period of gathering disillusionment. There is, therefore, a hiatus in these societies: a hiatus in meaning, a crisis of meaning. It has often been said that the rise of ‘fundamentalism,’ or what is called ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ in these countries is best explained by politics. But beneath the political problem, there lies the cultural problem. One must, therefore, look at culture, and not just at the political issue in order to understand the matter fully. For regardless of whether an ideology is religious or secular, it is intended to relate the self to society and to a picture of the cosmos at large. Ideologies represent the human need for a unifying doctrine — something that will tell people, firstly, what the world is like; secondly, what man’s place in the world is; and thirdly, what the principles governing human actions or conduct in the world are to be. Ideology is thus a total phenomenon. It answers several of those great questions that Kant asked about the order of things, such as ‘What is man?’, ‘What is my place in the world?’, and above all, ‘What shall I do?’ This last question, it will be noticed, is that of ethics.Within ideologies, there is a distinction to be made between what the psychoanalyst Eric H. Erikson once called, respectively, ‘totalism’ and ‘wholeness’. ‘Wholeness’ may be defined, negatively, as an absence of disconnection or fragmentation. It represents a sense that one is connected to the universe; that one is connected to fellow human beings; and that within oneself, the various parts are interconnected, giving a unity to the personality. ‘Totalism’, which in some respects is preferable to the term ‘fundamentalism’, denotes a unifying system of thought which spells out everything, dictates everything, and makes, moreover, a very sharp distinction between its own world and other worlds, between what is deemed to belong inside and to lie outside its own sphere. Totalism insists that what belongs outside must not be let in, and what belongs to itself must not, at any cost, be left out. This rigid separation of the inside and the outside is a-dichotomy found in all totalising ideologies. It is present in the West’s image of Islam as antithetical to everything for which Western civilisation stands, and it is equally present in the absolutist definition of Islam, which opposes itself entirely to the culture of modernity.It is important to realise that this totalistic definition of Islam is a modern one. Although it invokes history, it is not itself based in history. Historically, Islamic thought, or Islamic culture, was a composite phenomenon. It was a product of many cultural influences, a river into which many a tributary flowed. It had a certain central unity, some central integrity, which is very difficult to define. For instance, when we look at art across the Islamic world, it has a sufficient commonality, and a sufficient distinctiveness, to justify our calling it Islamic. Yet the diversity is considerable, and the influences from all the corners of the globe are also quite extensive.The Idea of Tradition
Before going further, I would like to add several points of clarification. Often enough, when people say that they are looking for a Judaic answer to the problems of the world today, or a Christian answer, or an Islamic solution, what they seem to be saying is that they wish the tradition in question to continue. But there is every difference in the world between tradition and the desire for tradition, between what I call ‘tradition’ and ‘traditionalism’. The idea of tradition is not a child of tradition. The idea of tradition, which is traditionalism, is born, so to speak, out of wedlock. It emerges from a divorce between ideals and the society in which those ideals are supposed to reign. It is the product of a divorce between past and present. In fact, traditional societies are the one kind of society which are singularly free from the idea of tradition. In the Islamic world, for instance, there is considerable talk, which has been going on now for an odd fifty years or so, about the Muslim ‘tradition’, the Muslim ‘heritage’, and so on. These are peculiarly modern preoccupations, however. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger has a lucid image to describe something analogous to what I am speaking of here. A hammer in the hands of an artisan is a very different thing from a hammer in the hands of a repair man. In the hands of the artisan, when the hammer is in working order, it is almost an extension of his body. It is part of him and it is part of the workshop, hence a part of the economy of which that workshop is in turn a part. The moment the hammer breaks, when it no longer works ‘naturally,’ it becomes an object of scrutiny. It is separated from its function, and when one now looks at the hammer, one looks at it as an object, as a tool, whereas the artisan was probably using it almost unconsciously when it was working. If the economy runs into a problem and the workshop encounters difficulties, it becomes an object of attention, whereas formerly it was not. In the same way, tradition becomes an object of anxiety, nostalgia and attention when it ceases to work, not when it is actually at work. Therefore, it is not in traditional societies that one gets the idea of tradition. It is not in traditional societies that you get the attitude of mind or the cast of mind that I have here called traditionalism.The measure of a traditional age lies in the amount of life that it is able to take for granted; and the amount, by contrast, that it cannot take for granted, or is no longer able to take for granted. In the distance that separates these two kinds of society lies the distance between the world which was once dominated by Athens, Jerusalem or Mecca, and the world dominated by Washington, Tokyo, by post-imperial London and Paris, and by all those cities in the rest of the world which are satellites of these metropolises. And even when societies which revolve around the modern cities seek to recapture the spiritual dominion of Jerusalem or Mecca, what they display, in so doing, is not their closeness or proximity to those ancient cities, but rather their nostalgic distance from them.Let me move on now to some very general observations. I began by saying that each of the concepts that we have in the title of this seminar is not a topic but a question: that the life of intellect is a question, that the idea of a tradition is a question, indeed the idea of Islam itself raises a question. What is meant by Islam, and what is the relationship of the past and present in Islam? One of the functions of the seminar is to define these questions more sharply, because in these matters more than half the battle is accomplished by asking the right kinds of questions. Let us remember that for nearly the first four centuries of Muslim history, the nature of Islam was contested between different interpretations which had not yet hardened into fixed and compartmentalised positions. The notion that Islam had spelled out literal answers to every question to be encountered in history, and that the only impending task was to put it into practice, to effect it, is a misconception. What actually happened in history was, first of all, the fact of the tremendous expansion of Arab rule over large parts of the world, in historical terms an astonishingly brief spell of time. That rule raised all kinds of questions about governance, about ideas and values, about law and the organisation of society. It also provoked considerable variation and dissent. From the beginning, there was a great divide over the question of authority, as to how the Islamic dominions were to be legitimately governed in a spiritual and temporal sense (the distinction between these two realms was not really made till much later). There is, I think, increasing evidence to show that the Shi‘i viewpoint on this issue, which located authority in the ahl al-bayt, the Prophet Muhammad’s family, began very early, not withstanding the orthodox Sunni view as well as the view of Western Islamicists who had greater access to Sunni than to Shi‘i sources, and whose view was correspondingly shaped. So there was a period of ferment and formation, and that is why one may appropriately call this period, to which I have assigned a loose and necessarily arbitrary date, the formative age of Islam.From the historical vantage point where we now stand, all the societies that originated from the Mediterranean region — I refer to all societies and not just Muslim societies, leaving out the great civilisations of India and China which have a very different history — appear to share a triple heritage. One is the heritage of a monotheistic faith, which believes in revelation inscribed in a scripture. Hence the term ‘societies of the book,’ used by Mohammed Arkoun. The second mainspring of their culture is Graeco-Roman. Ancient Greek culture was not, of course, monotheistic. It was based on poetry and philosophy, on ritual and, of course, the theatre. The third major heritage of the modern world is that of the Enlightenment which took place in Europe in the 18th century, with the preceding events of the Reformation and the Renaissance. We must not forget the very close kinship in this context between the Judaic, Christian and Islamic societies. All of them are founded on a concept of revelation; all trace the foundation of their meaning back to the written word, even in Christianity, in which the Logos, the Word of God, is not a book, but the person of Jesus. But one only learns of Jesus through the Gospels, which then is the word that gives access to the figure of Jesus. In the case of Islam, of course, the primacy of the Word is wholly central.Textualising the Universe
It is relevant, in this connection, to make a few general observations on the Qur’an. On the one Land, the Qur’an is a historical response to a historical problem. The tendency to read the Qur’an solely as a transcendent text tends to leave out the fact that it was a response to real historical events of the time. Yet, in answering the dilemmas of immediate history, contemporary history, what the Qur’an does is to place its response in a larger, a grander statement of the condition of man in the universe. In this sense, the Qur’an is an immensely integrating text. It integrates, gathers together all meanings under the aegis of the concept of the One God. The concept of the unity of God gathers together all the meanings that would otherwise be scattered. That is the way in which the Qur’an addressed the issues of the day, and the issues that pertain to the human condition at large. If we simply look at the very notion of what the Qur’an calls signs, the ayat, the context in which one is familiar with that term is in the designation of the verses of the text. But the same term is used in the Qur’an for the phenomena of nature. Again, the Qur’an treats history, the fate that befell former nations, as ‘signs’ of divine providence. It thus effects what I might call a textualisation of the universe. It shows the entire universe as a text, of which the Qur’an is the central, shining paradigm. It converts the signs and marks of existence into a map. It integrates diverse facets of the world as we experience it — as the Prophet Muhammad’s contemporaries experienced it — into a unitive, all-encompassing meaning.Another topic which I would like to comment on very briefly in this connection is that of symbolic language. The specific point I have in mind is that there is a certain difference between symbolic religious language on the one hand, and ideological religious language on the other. There is a certain distinction to be made between spiritual religion and ideological religion, between symbolic faith — which keeps everything open, which fosters a plurality of meanings, because symbolic meaning cannot be tied down in a dogma or a formula — and a system of closed meanings. So, this contrast between the openness of the symbolic mode and the closure of ideological religion is something which, I think, is well-worth keeping in mind. One can talk about this in the context of the other faiths as well, but here I am confining my remarks to Islam.Graeco-Roman Heritage
The second component of the triple heritage was that of Greek philosophy, which contributed a specific discipline of reason. In speaking of reason, one must remember that the Qur’an itself represents a rationalisation at work, because it combats myth. Owing to its symbolic language, there is in the Qur’an the notion of the supernatural, of supernatural beings like angels, jinns, and so on. But it is nonetheless quite parsimonious about the concept of miracles. The Qur’an mentions the Quraysh as demanding a miracle to be sent down from God as a proof of the prophethood of Muhammad. However, it resolutely repudiates the expectation of such a miracle, and refers instead to the signs of God in the natural universe and in human history. There is thus a certain distancing from magic and miracle, and a rationalisation which corresponds to the transformation of social structure brought about by the preaching of the Prophet. In Greek culture, philosophy emerged with Plato and Aristotle as the preferred pathway to truth. The ideal of reason had the same pre-eminence in ancient Greek society that God-fearing piety has in the monotheistic faiths. For that reason, when in the first few centuries following the Prophet’s death, Muslim intellectuals came into contact with the philosophical tradition initiated by the Greeks, they were forced to wrestle with the differences between, on the one hand, the traditions of monotheistic faiths, which were embodied in the shari‘a and based on the authority of scripture, and on the other hand, what the Greeks had said about reason as the gateway to truth. And what is most interesting about the efforts of the few, but towering, intellectual giants in all the three faiths, beginning with the Islamic domain, who studied philosophy, was the nature of the reconciliation that they tried to achieve between them. This reconciliation involved something which has not been emphasised sufficiently, what I would call political theology: the theology of life in a community or society. What philosophers like al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were emphasising was the unity of truth. Given this unity, the paths of reason on the one hand, and of tradition, based on authority and revelation, had to be both distinguished and related.The intellectual path in the thinking of these philosophers, who clearly echoed Plato in this respect, is one that only an elite with the requisite intellectual aptitude can pursue. For the masses the same truth needs to be couched in terms of imagination — figurative language, parables, metaphors, symbols, stories, narratives. Furthermore, in this view, the Prophet is uniquely gifted not only at perceiving the truth, but in being able to relate it to the masses — in other words, in being able to couch it in the language of creative imagination, which is the only language that can mobilise people and recruit them into the service of the order of the body politic, while ensuring their own well-being and happiness. To this end, the philosophers disapproved of any attempts to expose the masses to philosophy. For they thought that this was something that would create havoc — undigested reason among people who cannot master it would cause them to lose their faith and attachment to traditions, without giving them the comforts or solace of the way of reason. That was one particular response to the issue of the relationship between philosophy and the traditions of monotheistic faiths.‘Reason’ and The Enlightenement
The third major development in history relevant to this question is that of the Enlightenment. Here, reason came to mean something quite distinct. To an extent, the Enlightenment harked back to the classical philosophical heritage. But the operative model was that of modern science. The science of Newton provided the model for all human knowledge and all human activity. The philosophers of the 18th century associated religion in Europe, among other things, with the corruption of the clergy and the power of the Roman Catholic Church. The reaction to what was seen as the history of religious oppression and obscurantism came from several quarters. There was the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment, but earlier on there had been the Reformation launched by Martin Luther. It was, I think, one of the most important events in human history when Luther translated the Bible into the vernacular. For it gave to the ordinary man access to the scripture which had previously been monopolised by the clergy. Finally, the rise of the nation state was also crucial in all these developments, because the nation state broke the unity of Christendom, just as in the present century the abolition of the Sunni khilafa in 1924 by Kemal Atatürk and the formation of the Arab states with the retreat of the British and French powers in areas of the Middle East, also had a great influence on the way that Islam is understood today.Coming To Terms with ‘Intellectual Life’, ‘Islam’ and ‘Tradition ’
All these three traditions — that is, the traditions of monotheistic faith, Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment — have come under explicit or implicit pressure and questioning in the contemporary world. There are many reasons for this. Here I will confine myself to alluding only to a few of them. One is the fact that in the modern world the very awareness of a plurality of cultures makes it very difficult for any one culture to believe in itself to the exclusion of others. It poses the danger, or to put it more mildly, the challenge, of relativism. Relativism says that all doctrines, all ideas and values can be explained by reference to time and place. But if all ideas and values are to be thus explained, one’s confidence in upholding a single culture or tradition is seriously dented. It is this dilemma which is partly reflected in the controversy currently raging in England, for instance, over whether schools ought to teach world religions in a neutral tone, that is, without advocating any normative religious positions. Is then the function of religious education to provide facts or is it to inculcate belief? There are those who will say that to inculcate belief in a young child is a form of indoctrination. There are those, by contrast, who will insist that the neutral way of teaching religion, that is, of imparting only facts about religion, is anything but religious education.Another central issue of our times concerns the relation of the individual to society. In the late modern West, the dominant model, which is the model of the market, dictates attitudes towards culture. Culture, in this way of thinking, becomes a supermarket of ideas, values and doctrines, where one chooses according to taste, not according to objective essence — where the desire of the individual is the final arbiter of choice. Thus, if I choose to live a particular life, it is not because I am justified in believing in the objective rightness or suitability of that particular option, but because I so desire it. For freedom goes hand in hand with desire, and it is one’s desire which eventually dictates what is right and what is wrong. Now this model presupposes a different conception of selfhood than the models which it has displaced. And although at one level it may be felt as liberating, it also harbours a potential for moral crisis. For, when morality is predicated on choice, that means there is nothing else but choice to dictate what the morality of the age shall be. A society based on this notion is more in the nature of an association than a Gestalt, a whole bigger than the sum of the parts. In earlier cultures, community came first and individuals second; individuals drew their lifeblood, as it were, from society. But in the contemporary world, society is seen as the product of individual decisions to band together, to come together in random groups, and that in itself constitutes one of the major cultural and intellectual dilemmas of the present age.In answering, or in at least asking these questions, in exploring these issues, which represent the need of the hour in the world today, the monotheistic faiths have a great role to play. But this role will be effective only under certain conditions. One of these conditions is the growing need for a genuine mutual appreciation between the faiths which share a common origin, what we call the Abrahamic faiths. Attention to this common heritage, the Abrahamic heritage, which is a source of shared issues and problems, is especially important for Muslims who live as minorities in the Western world. The second condition is that to engage with the contemporary world means to take it seriously, which means to understand it, not to dismiss it. The theological rhetoric which says that the modern world is the antithesis of what the Islamic tradition teaches us — in other words, the rhetoric which sets Islam and the modern world as separate, opposing blocs — is a maladaptive rhetoric. Engagement does not mean surrender; for criticism too is a form of engagement.One of the great mistakes that Protestant Christianity and Protestant Christian theology made in recent history was to take on board virtually all the concepts of the modern age. When the age passes, so do its concepts. If Protestant theology becomes too strongly wedded to the modern concept of modernity, it will find itself left behind, because it will have succumbed to the drift, the fashion, of a particular age. It will have abdicated the critical distance, which is the gift of prophecy, from the world in which it operates. How Islamic theology may engage with the modern world without becoming a prisoner of the modern understanding of modernity is one of the major challenges facing Islamic thought today. How it will meet this challenge is anybody’s guess at the moment. It is something that still awaits the verdict of history.
courtsey: Institute of IsmailI Studies-London

First things first

By Shehzad Roy

WHEN I was in grade 6, I was absent from school on the day that our English language teacher explained the meanings of a list of words. The next day she gave us a surprise test. We had to construct sentences with those words. I still remember two words that I was asked to use in sentences: ‘phenomenon’ and ‘vague’.

I made the following sentences: ‘It is difficult to pronounce the word phenomenon’ and ‘In my exams I forgot the meaning of the word vague.’ After checking my script, the teacher smiled and then gave me what is now referred to as the impressive-sounding ‘corporal punishment’.

This happened in a good private school. I wonder what the teacher would have done to me if I was studying at a government school! Of course, my answers betrayed my ignorance but I think I deserved credit for being so creative by making sentences using words which were well beyond my comprehension. My creativity was discouraged.

Now, seeing the state of affairs in government schools, I wonder how things would be if everyone in Pakistan became literate. Would life improve for the people? The answer is a categorical ‘no’. Reason? Literacy alone is not the answer to all our ills. There is more to education than meets the eye. Along with the process of imparting literacy, there is need for multiple interventions in education, such as sports, art, music, etc. Literacy simply teaches a person to read and write. Education creates a well-rounded personality and shapes the thinking processes of an individual.

Why have we not succeeded in providing quality education to children in government schools? Because we do not have qualified human resources, good syllabi, infrastructure and other components that go into the making of state of the art education. In my opinion, we lack these resources because a majority of teachers suffer from economic constraints and the rising inflation makes it very difficult for them and their colleagues in the education department to make two ends meet and raise a family.

They unabashedly resort to corruption or concentrate on other money-making ventures. Until their problems are solved, they will not be able to focus on their professional development and capacity-building, let alone issues like syllabi and infrastructure. Once these issues are resolved then the few capable educationists in the country should come forward and offer their services to the government to train teachers using good teaching material and syllabi that should include sports, art and music.

The problem is that every time these issues are raised and the issues identified, the concerned authorities respond by raising the salaries of the teachers by a measly 10 to 15 per cent when the need of the hour is to raise the salaries and benefits of the teachers to a level that would enable them to enjoy a life of dignity and would empower them to meet the needs of their families in an adequate manner.

Indiscriminate interventions do not guarantee a quality education system that produces students who can think. Keeping in view the fact that we are not a welfare state, our policy planning must provide for a student who comes from a socio-economic class that is determined by the national economy. A majority of them are impoverished. The students must be relieved of their major worry, of coming to school on an empty stomach and then being expected to fully concentrate on their lessons. No matter how good the school, teachers and syllabi are, if the student is malnourished and hungry and comes from a troubled background with financial woes, especially when his parents are illiterate, he will not be able to benefit from the best of education that is offered to him.

Since the performance of all government departments shape the economy, they should work cohesively, with integrity and honesty, to ensure that the proposed efforts in the field of education prove to be fruitful.

It is time steps were taken to control and improve the state of education before matters get out of hand. A country’s standing is determined by the quality of its human resources. The more illiterate and backward its people are, the more underdeveloped it is considered. Finally, it must be remembered that without ethics and moral values, no education system is worth its while. It is because our education system has lacked these vital elements that our country has been harmed by our highly educated and learned people. n

The writer, a pop singer, is president of Zindagi Trust, an organisation working for child welfare and education.

royzad@gmail.com

Love’s labour lost?

Ali Al-Hakim

There is no shortage of martyrs in Pakistan. Some have died in their struggle to defend their faith, others have died to uphold their values, and still others have rather unceremoniously passed away in their battle with poverty and hunger. The souls of these martyrs have filled Pakistan’s short but turbulent and eventful history. While such sorts of martyrs are familiar across the region and in the Muslim world, but we recently witnessed a new breed of martyrs, who unambiguously offered their lives to defend the sanctity of constitution, rule of law, and the independence of judiciary. All of these martyrs, whether we agree or disagree with their respective causes are however products of love. However those who died on May 18^th and other occasions in their fight for democracy are, if we may call, ‘martyrs of justice’.

The unprecedentedly successful social and political struggle mounted by lawyers clad in black suits was a clear sign of the need of justice as a pre-condition for the survival and stability of Pakistan. Despite the brutal violence that was meted out to peaceful demonstrators, lawyers, students, members of the labour unions, all and sundry pressed ahead to demand for justice. It felt that every lawyer has transformed himself into a modern day al-Hallaj, chanting the humble plea for justice.

The unending and ceaseless ambition of politically savvy Army top-brass had corrosively destroyed the political and civil institutional edifice of this country, disallowing Pakistan to become a progressive homeland for its citizens. Now a new government that has come into being in the wake of an arguably clean election should put the questions of justice at the forefront of its agenda for the country.

This means that the people of Giligt-Baltistan are today waiting to see if this virtuous circle of the struggle for justice will also engulf them. They are wondering if it doesn’t cover them now: when will it. Like love, justice is indiscriminate. The voice of justice is universal, encompassing everything in its way. Justice doesn’t recognise any social, ethnic, regional, or linguistic boundaries. Justice is there to rise above the conspiracies of day-to-day politics, and selfish interests.

The people of Giligit-Baltistan are bewilderingly awaiting the torch of justice to light their land as well. They are waiting for the rain of justice to pour on their politically barren land. Will Qamar Zaman Kaira who himself has, personal sacrifices to count, will deliver what is just for the people of Northern Areas, or lose the labour of love that has catapulted him into this position of power.

The evils that men do.

By Dr Murad M Khan

‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones’.— William ShakespeareI RECENTLY watched ‘Live with Talat’ on Aaj TV. Despite being a practising psychiatrist for over 20 years and having come across countless stories of human misery, trauma, hopelessness, violence, aggression and abuse I was shocked at what I witnessed.Here was the state apparatus let loose on protesting but absolutely unarmed lawyers, journalists, students, housewives, the general public, the young and old, men and women. And let loose as though it was dealing with the most vile criminals on the face of earth.Uniformed policemen, with the help of other men in white shalwar kameez, were laathi-charging and tear-gassing the protesters in the most violent manner possible. They would first charge towards the crowd and disperse them, then would isolate one individual and about eight to 10 uniformed men clad in white shalwar kameez would descend on him, hold him by his arms, pull his hair and start punching, slapping and kicking him before violently pushing him into a waiting police van. (Please visit www.flickr.com, type ‘Pakistan police lawyers’ and see the treatment meted out to those who dare to raise their voice).As I watched the programme, I thought to myself: what have to come to? How have we managed to sink to this level of depravity? Where are we heading? Who is responsible for this brutalisation? And does anybody care?Are we inherently violent? Or have we become so because of what we constantly witness around us? Do the policemen who swing the laathis and those who give the orders not belong to the same religion — one that espouses peace and love, brotherhood and tolerance — as the protesters? Do those who give the orders not have mothers and daughters and sisters and sons and brothers? What kind of brutes rule this land of the pure?In terms of psychological evolution our society is functioning at what Sigmund Freud called the ‘id’ level. This is the level where we want instant gratification, cannot postpone our desires, do not think of the consequences of our actions and give free vent to our innate aggressive drives. We have yet to enter the ‘ego’ and ‘superego’ levels when individuals and societies develop concepts of ethics and morality, right and wrong and a conscience that rewards and punishes good and bad behaviour respectively.There is a serious crisis of governance in the country. Corruption is not only institutionalised in Pakistan, but internalised as a societal norm. We have no qualms about not paying taxes or not stopping at traffic lights or allowing our 14- and 15-year-old sons to drive.Witness the number of guns on our streets. Witness their naked display by the growing number of security guards. What if the gun goes off accidentally? How many guns have gone off accidentally? Does anyone know? Does anyone care to know?Our television channels have dehumanised brutality. By showing acts of violence repeatedly — witness the security guard being knocked down by the rampaging truck at the FIA building in Lahore or Dr Sher Afghan being manhandled — we have trivialised acts of violence to the level of everyday events, in the process increasing our tolerance for them. No wonder that six people were burned alive in Karachi in the afternoon and by evening everything was back to normal.Why has no government invested in institution-building? Why do they always bring in their ‘own’ president and their own judges? Nawaz Sharif brought in Rafiq Tarar (remember him?) while Benazir Bhutto brought in Farooq Leghari. The motive in both cases was ulterior (‘our’ president would not go against us). While the former got away with it, the latter bit the hand that fed it. It is the law of nature — actions that are not morally right will be undone in due course of time.Now we have another illegitimate situation initiated in October 1999 that has continued to this day. It came with a promise to do away with ‘sham democracy’ and to give us a government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’ (shamelessly using Abraham Lincoln’s hallowed words). In the intervening eight years every institution of this country has been decimated and emasculated, the law treated as a nuisance and the Constitution trampled upon so many times that it has become almost irrelevant. We forget that when those in high positions break the law and violate the Constitution, the lowly-ranked police constable and man on the street take it as a signal to do the same.Is there a way out of this morass we find ourselves in? Can the rot be stemmed? Can the blatant brutalisation of this society be stopped? The answer is — yes. But there is a big BUT after the yes.First, we have to accept that the present generation is a lost one — it cannot be rescued. Its value system is so flawed and sense of ethics and morality so poor that trying to salvage the behaviour displayed by it is all but a lost cause. There is hope, though, that future generations may fare better, provided we declare an emergency and invest heavily in education, healthcare and the social sector. We have to include the teaching of ethics and morality in our curriculum. We have to build, strengthen and make all pillars of state truly independent.We have to stop using violence against unarmed innocent men and women who have every right to raise their voices in protest against injustices. Our leaders, whether politicians or retired generals, have to publicly recant on violence. They are all part of this system and all have directly or indirectly contributed to the brutalisation of this society. They must apologise to the Pakistani nation. Reconciliation does not mean turning a blind eye to the excesses of the past and carrying on as though nothing has happened.True reconciliation means realising, accepting, confessing and being genuinely sorry for the wrongs done and asking for forgiveness from those who have been wronged. Only then can the wounds begin to heal and a true spirit of understanding be fostered. There should be no ‘sham reconciliation’.This country was bequeathed by the Quaid to honest, decent, hardworking and law-abiding Pakistanis and not to the crooked and corrupt, who trample on our rights, who have no respect for the law and Constitution and who take the law into their own hands. Pakistanis deserve better than this. This brutalisation has to stop.

The writer is professor of psychiatry at the Aga Khan University, Karachi

muradmk@gmail.com

Is Religion the opium of the Masses

Originating in late 18th century in Western Europe the Industrial Revolution dismantled traditional and pre-modern modes of production, consumption and exchange. The Industrial Revolution and its attendant socio-political developments also substantially challenged traditional way of living and ‘being’ and it also displaced traditional attempts at making sense of the world and nature. This whole scale transformation and change took place in a relatively short period of time. It all happened because of a diverse range of factors but predominantly because of a scientific and ‘objective’ attitude towards subjugating nature, and locating the human-being as the measure of all things in its true senses of the word. Man was now able to cast philosophical doubt on all kinds of orthodoxies and received notions, perceptions and taken for granted assumptions. This sceptical attitude towards the past and a hopefully progressive future set the stage for the emergence of new ways of looking at things. It was an intellectual and epistemological leap of world-historical proportions that created such a conducive environment for creative thought. Now, interestingly religion had held a key role in the socio-political organization of pre-modern societies providing them with essential values that effectively contributed in the production of what the French sociologist Emile Durkhime has termed as ‘organic solidarity’, a sense of community which is adhesive, cohesive and durable over a period of time. Religion also offered a way of understanding nature; it was seen as the ‘intellectual response of the individual to natural phenomenon, the finitude of human life or the meaning of subjective reality.

Religious was a cognitive phenomenon, a system of propositions, which aimed to provide explanations of reality by reference to supernatural entities.[1] This was done usually in a static fashion, such as before the discovery of Galileo it was a widely held belief, based on Scripture, that earth is the centre of the universe which is stationary and everything including the sun revolved around it. But the idea was challenged and Galileo advanced a scientific explanation of cosmology which was based on observable facts. His theory concluded the opposite thus questioning a religious conviction. There was dismay, hatred, rejection and surprise at Galileo’s discovery among those who held religion and its ideas as the ultimate truth. Because religion was massive phenomenon so it exercised power over its followers. And managers of the sacred, those who spoke for religion held power consequently. They sentenced Galileo for life. All this happened, while science was still an essentially intellectually elitists activity available to those who were privileged enough to do so. But science progressively penetrated to the core of the society. In short, the emergence of Western modernity, capitalist economy based on consumerist ethos, rational and scientific world view and bureaucratic control of society radically divorced the conception of religion as key factor in the formation of people’s self, identity and community.

In addition, the early modern Europe was deeply embroiled in internecine wars of religion resulting in the death of thousands of people and in some instances wiping out the whole generations in the wars fought in the name of religion. One such example is that of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) whose ultimate cessation established the foundations of the modern nation-state. This was an essentially religious war fought between Protestants and Catholics each group claiming supposedly the ‘truth’, but ironically from a modernist perspective none having the truth. Both the groups were claiming more virtue and more religion, both were more eager than the other to claim the moral high ground. But, in reality, both were more of the same as both groups killed, raped, and destroyed. Such historical examples of religion’s distinct role in fuelling hatred and violence set the stage for subsequent debunking the exclusive hegemony of religion in society, politics and culture.

Within this backdrop and historical-intellectual milieu, however it fell on the shoulders of Karl Marx (1818-88) who did a partial but a trenchant critique of the role religion plays in society and the way it exhibits itself in the consciousness of the people, and the way it contributes in the formation of attitudes and values in society that are so essential in tempering the behaviour of masses, and forward march of history. Much of Marxist critique of religion stems form a materialist conception of history. This conception is based on a dialectical process, the role of private property relations, the critical role of the base expressed in terms of ‘relations of production’ and a linearly progressive development of history. Without taking into account these fundamental ‘scientific’ categories of human social existence, the partial analysis and attempts at understanding different social phenomenon, including religion, becomes a hopeless affair of fictions imagination.

In Marx’s conception of the role of religion in society, religion was nothing but a false consciousness which gave people a use less sense of meaning and direction in life. It divorced people from the active participation in the affairs of this world, which are essentially mediated by different powers, social, political and economic. Marx, however stressed the pre-dominant role played by a mode of production in the formation of such super-structural ‘residues’ as social and cultural institutions, religion being one of the best manifestations of social-cultural superstructure. Once in the public domain religion continues to offer opportunities of redemption, grand avenues of hope for those who have already systematically been disposed of hope, stripped of opportunities of realizing their potential. Here religion enters with a very attractive alternative to seek refuge and express one’s possible realization as well as put hope in it, but ironically it is futile and the consciousness it engenders is fundamentally flawed and essentially useless.

Religion drugs people, replaces prayer for action and protects the status quo against revolution. So Marxism has mocked the religious promise of future reassurance while present ills are ubiquitous. Those who believe in a scientific and rational understanding of religion and society seek to jettison religious delusions which have so far retarded the promise of progress, thus holding back the modern man form the freedom he deserves. Religion and its attendant super-structure of morality and the culture it forms, is for the weak to seek refuge in it so as to shy away form actual ‘material reality’, but for those who can bear it they need to liberate themselves from the ‘slave morality’ of the weak and the powerless and instead erect a new morality of power and progress which doesn’t rely on religious ideas for its inspiration and justification. Religion creates an environment divorced from reality and offers a trans-historical and metaphysical solution to the problems of the man. Instead of troubleshooting or seeking to understand the problems and the causes of the problems, religion attempts to create a false meaning in it. For example the great debate about theodicy, of the presence of evil in the world greatly obscures an effort towards objective understanding of the world. This attitude results in the ‘passive faith’ instead of active and creative engagement, with the cruel nature out there. It is largely because of human liberation form the chains of the passive faith that modernity has progressively conquered nature for its advantage.

In most of the organized religion the essential relationship between the transcendent and the immanent and between the sacred and the secular, are fundamentally in mutual exclusion of each other. For example, in Christianity there are historic tendencies which set the secular and sacred in opposition to each other. In such theologies it becomes increasingly inevitable that the oppositional characters of the relationship will lead to an other-worldly and purely individualistic outlook. This process begets the danger of the disenchantment and retirement of individuals from a genuine creative engagement with social, material and cultural conditions of real history. Enter Marx here and his inspiration for criticism of religion which was undoubtedly inspired from the famous Young Hegelian Feurbach. He had severely attacked in a philosophical and theological fashion the Christianity and its essence and the way Christian religion seeks to alienate human power and capabilities by imaginatively projecting these very properties and powers onto an objective, distant, unachievable transcendent God. This theological conception and process involved the transformation of an ‘active-creative’ subject into a residue of an omnipotent, all-knowing being in the from of God. In Fuerbach’s scheme of things and praxis it was incumbent on the liberated individual and the modern subject to take control of his own existence and settle this-worldly scores with the logic of this world, and based on an ethic which appeals to this world. It was a forceful and powerful assault on the edifice of Christianity, and for that matter any organized religion and spiritual system, but Marx found that Fuerbach’s critique of religion as inadequate as it speaks the language of theology as opposed to doing a sociological critique, by identifying the social sources of the legitimacy of religion and other quasi-religious ideologies and systems of belief. Partially agreeing with Feurbach but advancing his own critique of religion, however, Marx puts premium on trying to understand and interpret the social consequences of religion as critical, necessary and important than debating on the philosophical truth or falsity of religious practices. In a sense Marx attempted to dissect the functional role of religion. And in order to do that, an analyst needs to go beyond what a believer or a faithful has to say. When Marx uses the metaphor of the opium he clearly wants to suggest a tendency of individuals and men of faith who are misled and religion becomes an illusion in the sense that religion engulfs its believers in its world-view and totality. It inhibits its followers in thinking rationality and clearly. As Marx points out in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that people are born into a society not of their own choice or of their own making but a society with its prevailing set of values, assumptions and rules. In such a milieu, it is the nature of the location of individuals in the established social relations which determines the nature of their consciousness and not their subjective consciousness which determines their social existence.

Religion exhibits and operates in society as an ideology to be exploited by the ruling establishment. Given this tendency of religion it becomes a tool in the hands of those who have power. Religion becomes as an instrument of exploitation. As it serves to perpetuate existing power-relations, religion is the bastion and source of a falsely authoritative moral justification for the system of exploitation. Why so much emphasis on the religions complicity with power? It is so because religion, in the ultimate analysis, is based on beliefs and transcendent ideas, in shot religion is system of idealism. And Marx argued in The German Ideology in such forceful terms about the way ideas operate in society, ‘ The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production. Now, given the predominance of capitalism in 18th century as the key ruling material force, it is clear that capitalism will also be providing the necessary intellectual tools for its rule. In Marx’s time the bastion of power was capitalist bourgeoisie who had far surpassed the feats of ‘Roman Aqueducts and Gothic Architecture’ so Christian religion has necessarily become complicit in justifying the existing or established power-system and that is the ‘capitalist’ system. Religion being an ideological and intellectual system would be subservient to the exigencies of capitalism. Ironically, though religion expresses the real problems and ‘real suffering’. Therefore, in the final analysis it becomes imperative to treat religion as an ideological system, so it is incumbent upon an analyst who uses ‘scientific’ tools to understand society should study religion, not from the perspective of the faith, but he should study religion by taking into account socio-economic circumstances that have shaped religious ideas, structures and discourse. When scrutinized dispassionately, objectively and scientifically the religion emerges as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[2]

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[1] Bryan Turner, ‘Religion and Society’ London p-45

[2] Karl Marx ‘On the Jewish Question’

Islam and Civil Society:Confrontation or Confluence

Arguably the idea of civil society is a Western concept, even a ‘Western dream[1]’ as Serif Mardin, a celebrated Turkish historian of ideas would have us believe. If we take Mardin as a prototypical modern Muslim intellectual then we can safely assert that, there is a concern among Muslims, about the philosophical origins of the idea of civil society, along with similar liberal notions of human rights, democracy, the state and dispensation of justice. It can be further argued that, for any idea to be authentic and vibrant, for example in a particular community or in a particular civilisation, it must be grounded in its history and collective memory, for otherwise it may ‘remain abstract, cut off from their existential, cultural, historical and intellectual contexts of [their] emergence[2]’.

Well, let us now discuss the idea of civil society. The idea of civil society rose to prominence followed by the political experience of modernity in the eighteenth century Europe. It developed out of philosophical reflection of such enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinkers as Hobbes, Adam Ferguson and Hegel among others, whose main concern was contrasting the state of nature with that of a peaceful society. These thinkers envisaged a society where people lived their lives according to certain rule of conduct, defined and agreed by all the members of any society in question. These rules were to be embodied in a social contract that constituted the basis of civilisation. So the idea of ‘civility’ or understood in terms of moral behaviour was certainly part of a ‘civil society’, to be contrasted with an anarchic state of affairs or a barbarian mode of living. In its origins, the idea of civil society was not really distinguishable form the idea of the ‘state’. However it was with Hegel who clearly contrasted civil society as separate arena both form the ‘state’ and other primordial social units as the family. In a Hegelian sense all the political space between the state and the family was the realm of the civil society. Hegel conceived the state as the ultimate expression of human reason, thus blessing it a universal character. While state embodied and symbolised the universal conscience of people, yet there was a need for particular forms of consciences to be expressed. Civil society provided precisely that arena for the expression of particularism at the cost of universalism. Hence in this socio-political space, autonomous people negotiated and re-negotiated the social contract that has already bound them with the state and hence it provides an opportunity for individuals to exercise the power of their liberty. So the modern conception of civil society is essentially about liberty, and by extension about the rule of law, about democracy, and about rights and all the trappings of a liberal bourgeoisie society.

Islam is the youngest of the Abrahamic faiths which originated in Mecca in the 610 AD when Prophet Muhammad’s claims to divine revelation were widely accepted across the Arabian Peninsula. This new religion was not less than a moral revolution in the tribal society of seventh century of Arabia embodying many of the Judeo-Christian concepts of ethical behaviour, purpose and meaning of life. As a religion Islam contrasted itself from the earlier periods of Arabian life which was termed as the period of ‘jahilliya’, an age of ignorance, moral decadence and social fragmentation. Islam presented itself as a new ethical order, whose central concerns were, like its Abrahamic predecessors not only spiritual redemption and other-worldly goals of its adherents but also, unlike Christianity, Islam concerned itself with this-worldly and even practical concerns of the believers. With subsequent expansion of Islam throughout the Middle-east by conquest, conversion and moral appeal, Islam truly emerged as a world civilisation with its own distinct system of values whose bedrock was the Quran and the Prophet guidance or the Sunna. One of the defining features of Islamic civilisation, during its formative stages, was a clear division of the whole world into two mutually exclusive categories: Dar al-Harb wa Darb al-Islam [Abode of War and Abode of Peace]. The abode of peace was the area where such values as the rule of law and Islamic brotherhood were practised, in addition to peace and social order being the normal political conditions. It was in opposition to the Abode of War where Islam was not practised and hence a barbarian state of affairs existed. It follows that within the realm of Islamic civilisation there was no place for violence as an option or as a policy instrument: it was sinful to fell a tree un-necessarily. This idea comes closer to the enlightenment[3] notion of a just and rule-governed society. Over the course of the last 1400 years of its existence Muslims have ceaselessly, on many historical occasions, sought to revert to the ideals and goals that were first set by the Prophet himself and actualised during the ‘‘Golden Age of Islam.’’[4] In this light, it becomes inevitably necessary to highlight the historic experience and the guidance contained in Quran, on any topic that concerns Islam and Muslims. It follows that, the discussion of the existence of an Islamic civil society we should turn to the origins of Islamic thought that can explain things in the light of the Quran. As a matter of fact the Quran has demonstrated a sustained concern about justice and there are many quotations, some categorically stated and others suggested in a characteristically metaphorical language. For example, Quran says something like this on private property, ‘and eat up not one another’s property unjustly (in any illegal way e.g. stealing, robbing, deceiving, etc), nor give bribery to the rulers (judges before presenting your cases) that you may knowingly eat up a part of the property of others sinfully. Sura al-Baqra.:188(2). Such statements were subsequently embodied in Islamic legal thought that takes into account the importance of private property, but with a concern for justice. The interpreters were normally the ulemma or the learned people who were a fairly independent community, whose primary obligation was to interpret and deduce meaning form the divine text. The ulema were supplemented by yet another group of species; the qadis [jurists and judges] who were also, like the ulema were independent from the clutches of the state authority and executive government. The decisions and judgements of qadis were binding both on the caliph and the common man, and in turn their judgments were subject to the opinions (or fatwas) of the ulemma. Both the ulemma and qaids acted as bulwarks against the extremes of the caliphate and thus kept important checks on caliphal power. They also acted as ‘watchdogs’ against each other as well. This creative tension sustained a vibrant civil society, quite independent from the state and we can confidently assert, as Hasan Hanafi a leading Cario based contemporary Muslim philosopher observes that

Islamic theory and practice sustain a number of legitimate human groupings existing between the state and the individual. These groupings are endowed with their own sphere of autonomy free from government intrusion, which made Islamic societies historically far less monolithic and undifferentiated than some Western stereotypes of a theocratic society allow.(Hanafi: 2002)

These institutional mechanisms were accompanied by active participation and public debate on issues not only of theological interest but also issues concerning contemporary politics, social and economic problems, war and issues of justice. However the defining framework was Islamic and settings were often centres of power or metropolitan cities. These debates were called munizara, where people came and debated any topic with active interest and keen engagement. This whole affair is not less than Habermasina public sphere which is a ‘realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body[5].’

In the Mid-east there are many coffee houses, tea houses and places where people hangout and discuss issues of the day, quite independently and with enough liberty[6]. This has been a feature of many Mid-eastern societies for a long period of its history, as there were some six hundred coffee house in Istanbul in the reign of Selim II (1566-1574)[7]’’. These places have always served as opportunities for exchange of information, poetry, and political commentary and of course socialisation. While these discussions don’t quite often translate into real political struggles or a sustained socio-political engagement, is an entirely different question. However, it follows that, there may be trappings of civil society existing in many Muslim societies today, if we understand civil society in its very simple definition as a place for discourse independent of family and the sate. Given this situation it may be pertinent to ask as to the possibility of a distinct civil society with an Islamic flavour. Since civil society has a lot to do with modernity it can be argued that the presence of an ‘Islamic civil society’ is a step towards what Eisetndeat has called ‘multiple modernities’ where modernity should be seen ‘as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs’.[8 This is a certainly helpful way of investigating about the success of the idea of civil society in Islam, but in order gain a fuller understanding of this phenomenon we will have to distinguish between two basic but useful categories: Islamic society and Muslim society. An Islamic society is a society where the law is Sharia and its strict sense of the word and all members of the society are subjected to this law. This society can be contrasted with that of a Muslim society where the majority of the people are Muslims and their lived realities may be according to Islam but Sharia is not the law. Our concern should be with the later category given the plurality of Muslim societies and diverse interpretations of the fundamental sources of Islam. So in this context one of the abiding concerns of Muslim societies has been acceptance of the government of a ‘just’ ruler [often a just prince], at the cost of individual agency and liberty. This values its legitimation in a Prophetic guidance when Muhammad advised his followers to obey ‘even a slave if he leads you according to the precepts of Islam’. The abiding concern of Muslim societies was to avoid disorder or fitna, an idea which is quite similar to the Hobbesian state of nature. So for much of its history Muslim societies have preferred a dynastic system of caliphate, a system that remained in tact until the early part of the 20^th century when the Ottoman [caliphate] empire was finally dismantled. Although the Ottoman Sultan or the caliph was Turkish and his actual political sovereignty extended to a rather limited geo-graphical area but his legitimacy as a caliph extended far beyond the boundaries of the empire as far as to, for example, India[9].

But much of political discourse and concepts about civil society in Islam revolve around the impact of the West and its consequent results in the modern period. The first direct experience of the Muslim world with Western hegemony started off from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, who brought scientists, physicians and also intellectuals and scholars. This encounter was followed by colonisation of many Muslim countries and subsequent emergence of independent nation-states. These new states resisted colonial and imperial oppression by uniting different elements of the society on nationalist grounds along the secular lines. While these new governments pursued modernization polices along secular lines the ulema and the religious establishment pursued to resist these change and pushed for their own programme of Islamisation as opposed to copying Western modernity, as Ira Lapidus observes that, ‘Muslim religious life, in general, became separated from state institutions and flourishes as a differentiated element of ‘civil society[10].’ Given continued weakness of secular states, and in some cases state-failure in the Muslim world the religious establishment has come to the foreground. The claims of these religious groups is often a reversion to a nostalgic past or re-enacting, or re-grafting a old institutions. These groups are usually found around mosques, madrassas, awqaf groups (endowments for social welfare). Ironically these groups are also fundamentalist ones whose interpretation of Islam is rather exclusivist and literalist, and view the West values as culturall hegemony, nevertheless they form par of the civil society in the post-colonial Muslim World. For example these civil society groups along with the collaboration of Bazaris (usually petty bourgeoisie) during the reign of Reza Shah Pehlavi (1952-1979) in Iran effectively challenged the state and were even ultimately successful in overthrowing the regime in 1979 through a popular revolution. However, disillusionment with the ideal of the revolution has resulted in a process of questioning the legitimacy of an Islamic government, excesses of the revolutionary state and concerns about human liberty and freedom of expression. This whole reformist political movement, originating in 1997 following the election of President Muhammed Khatami, is led by active citizen groups including the media, such independent intellectuals as Abdolkarim Soroush and liberal theologians like Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahiri. The idea idea of civil society or ‘jame’h mandani stood in opposition to Islamic Society or jame’eh eslami as promoted by the segment of the state that adhered to a totalitarian mode of governance[11’.

Given the active participation of many Muslims in the public life of Muslim societies, historically as well as in some instances in modern Muslim states, it can be asserted that there is much room for an Islamic civil society. The presence of various intellectual traditions in the Islamic thought that seeks to check the excesses of the Islamic government established in a caliphate system, and a sustained emphasis on redistributive justice in the Quran and the prophetic traditions gives credence to the idea of a diverse Islamic society that accommodates equally diverse opinions and interpretations of the message of Islam.