Scripture, reason, and the contemporary Islam-west encounter: studying the ''other'', understanding the ''self''

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Author: Basit Bilal Koshul | Steven Kepnes

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S cr i ptu r e , Re ason , an d the C on te m po r ary I s l am -Wes t E n c o u n te r

10.1057/9780230605626 - Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter, Edited by Steven Kepnes and Basit Bilal Koshul


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St u dy i n g t he “Oth e r, ” Un de rs ta n di n g th e “S e l f ”

Edited by

Basit Bilal Koshul and Steven Kepnes


Scripture, Rea s o n , a n d t h e C o ntemp o ra ry I s l a m - We s t E nc o u nt e r


SCRIPTURE, REASON, AND THE CONTEMPORARY ISLAM-WEST ENCOUNTER

© Basit Bilal Koshul and Steven Kepnes, 2007.

First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7535–5 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7535–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scripture, reason, and the contemporary Islam-west encounter : studying the “other,” understanding the “self” / editors, Basit Bilal Koshul and Steven Kepnes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7535–3 (alk. paper) 1. Islam—21st century. 2. Islam—Essence, genius, nature. 3. Islam— Relations—Christianity. 4. Christianity and other religions—Islam. 5. Islamic countries—Relations—Europe. 6. Europe—Relations— Islamic countries. I. Koshul, Basit Bilal, 1968– II. Kepnes, Steven, 1952– BP161.3.S38 2007 297.2⬘8—dc22

2007060017

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.



To Our Parents The Editors





Contributors

ix

Preface

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1 Introduction: Studying the Western “Other,” Understanding the Islamic “Self” Kelton Cobb

1

Part I

Islam and the West

2 The Qur’anic Self, the Biblical Other and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter Basit Bilal Koshul 3 “Voltaire’s Bastards”: A Response to Koshul Muhammad Suheyl Umar 4 Islam: A Dissenting Prophetic Voice within the Modern World Yamine Mermer

Part II

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69

The West and Islam

5 Islam as Our Other, Islam as Ourselves Steven Kepnes 6 Beyond Logics of Preservation and Burial: The Display of Distance and Proximity of Traditions in Scriptural Reasoning Nicholas Adams 7 Is Scriptural Reasoning Senseless? Martin Kavka

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Contents

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C o n t e n ts

8 Ishmael and the Enlightenment’s Crise De Coeur Tim Winter

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9 From Two to Three: To Know Is Also to Know the Context of Knowing Peter Ochs

177

10 Developing Scriptural Reasoning Further David F. Ford

201

Name Index

221

Subject Index

225


Part III Reflections on Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter


Nicholas Adams Lecturer, Christian Systematic Theology and Philosophical Theology University of Edinburgh Kelton Cobb Professor of Theology and Ethics Hartford Seminary David Ford Regius Professor of Divinity and Fellow of Selwyn College University of Cambridge Martin Kavka Assistant Professor of Religion Florida State University Steven Kepnes Murray W. and Mildred K. Finard Professor in Jewish Studies Colgate University Basit Bilal Koshul Assistant Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences Lahore University of Management Sciences Yamine Mermer Assistant Professor, Islamic Studies Swarthmore College Peter Ochs Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies University of Virginia


Contributors

Muhammad Suheyl Umar Director, Iqbal Academy, Lahore Pakistan Tim Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad) University Lecturer in Islamic Studies and Fellow of Wolfson College University of Cambridge





A

s a religious tradition of the “East” Islam has often been portrayed as “other” to the Western, Jewish, or Christian “self.” Similarly, the religious traditions taken together have often been portrayed as the religious “other” of secular modernity. In both cases conflict is the defining characteristic of the relationship of the Self to the Other. This book offers an alternative vision of a mutually enriching relationship between the Self and Other based on insights gleaned from religious scripture as well as academic inquiry. The principal objective of this collection of chapters is to use the underlying allegiance to scripture in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity to underscore the deep affinities between the three monotheistic traditions and at the same time preserve the respect for differences between the traditions. A second objective of this collection of chapters is to lay bare the intimate relationship between the religious Other and the secular Self. This is done in an attempt to heal the rift between not only Islam and the West, but also between “tradition” and the contemporary world. The attempts to bridge the Islam-West and secular-religious divides is neither a “religious” nor a “secular”undertaking because the chapters in this book bring together both contemporary academic and traditional religious scholarship. The effort of this collection of chapters to explore the issue of the Islam-West encounter (and the place of religion in secular modernity) at this particular time does not take place in a vacuum. It is the product of specific circumstances. A leading view that shapes both academic and popular discourse on the relationship between contemporary Islam and the West is that “Islam” and the “modern West” are pitched against one another in a “clash of civilizations.”1 This means that the two entities are not only alien to one another, but that perpetual conflict between the two is inevitable. This is not only an academic position taken by a few scholars, but also a position that has been adopted by some of the most powerful policymakers (both Western and Muslim) in the world. Therefore, the “clash of civilization” thesis has very real consequences that are played out daily in war, suicide bombings, and


Preface


Preface

hate speeches that are telecast and dramatized in the global media. Unlike, its precursor, the cold war, which was argued out and legitimated in mainly secular economic, political, and strategic terms, the present Islam-West conflict is largely being argued and legitimated in religious terms. This is a decisive difference and it is precisely because religion is so central to the present conflict that many former “cold warriors” who yet remain in positions of power and policy making (or advising those in power and policy making positions) are caught off guard. If the well-known pundits and commentators appear “flat-footed” when they address the alleged clash between Islam and the West , this has created a vacuum that can be adequately filled only by religious studies academics, philosophers, and theologians. The religious quality of the present conflict means that scholars of religion and leaders of faith communities have a special responsibility to turn their expertise to religious understanding and peace making. The first thing that makes this book unique, then, is that it attempts to address the supposed civilizational clash between Islam and the West through the lens of religious studies. One of the first things that a religious scholar sees when she looks at the present situation of conflict between Islam and the West is that scripture and its interpretation is central. Thus, in order to understand and address this situation of conflict one needs to understand scriptural logic and interpretation; this book attempts to do precisely this. Beyond outlining the logic of scripture and interpretation, scholars in this book attempt to apply that logic in creative ways to develop constructive responses to the contemporary Islam-West encounter. One of the most creative aspects of the chapters in this book is that the contributors try to interpret the scripture of each of the monotheistic traditions in light of the other two. This means that this book attempts to involve Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a combined attempt to understand the contemporary conflicts between them and also in an enterprise to overcome these conflicts. The contributors understand, however, that “overcoming conflict” is not their main goal for that can too easily be reduced to a search for some underlying unity or overarching principle that can unite the three monotheistic traditions. Rather, the goal of the contributors is to replace a situation of stagnant conflict with dialogue and respect for difference. The editors and contributors of this collection are all associated with a new interfaith movement called Scriptural Reasoning. Scriptural Reasoning is a practice of group reading of the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that builds sociality among its practitioners and releases sources of reason, divine spirit, and compassion for healing both the separate religious communities and the larger world. The


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book began as a collection of talks that were given at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and led to a number sessions of group readings of scripture. Scripture grounds dialogue in the primary texts of the religious traditions and prohibits discussion from moving to abstract theological, propositional, or conceptual modes of discourse that end up declaring that “after all the traditions are (or should be) saying the same thing.” In centering dialogue on scripture, Scriptural Reasoning is able to stay close to the primal documents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and to preserve the unique languages and practices of the religious traditions. If this was an actual Scriptural Reasoning session, scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would break into small groups to study and comment upon the texts that Kepnes and Koshul use as the basis of their talks. The “reasoning” of Scriptural Reasoning is properly revealed in the face-to-face moment of dialogue. A book cannot substitute for this, but it can mimic dialogue in a structural manner. And this we try to do by presenting written responses to our chapters. The introduction to this book by Kelton Cobb opens up the “selfother” relation as a metaphor for discovery of the Self by encountering the Other. This provides the overall metaphor for the book as a variety of oppositional relationships are found to reveal paths for discovery of similarities and dialogue. Part I begins with an chapter by Basit Koshul in which he attempts to take from the Qur’an a threepronged method of approach to the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity that includes criticism, affirmation, and common understanding. Koshul then offers this as a method for Islam to approach modernity. He argues that Islam must critique modernity for its failure to retain a connection to religious wisdom, illumination, and the divine. Yet, Islam can also affirm the modern values of individual dignity, equality under the law, and the goodness of the material world. Koshul offers the Islamic notion of ‘aql or reason as a fruitful parallel to Enlightenment reason, and he suggests that much constructive work can be done to explore and expand this parallel as a mutual ground for dialogue. Koshul’s final suggestion is that the relation between Islam, modernity, and the monotheisms be reconceived on the basis of an attempt to “redeem-reform-embrace” modernity as opposed to the current model of conflict with its threefold notions “critique-condemn-replace.” The responses to Koshul’s chapter by Muhammed Suheyl Umar and Yamine Mermer draw out the logic of Koshul’s methods. Umar attempts to “update” the modernity-Islam conflict by suggesting that the contemporary situation is better described as a conflict between Islam and “postmodernity.” Postmodernity offers Islam not only new


Preface


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challenges but also new opportunities. Whereas modernity challenged Islam with a monolithic secular worldview that threatened to swallow up its particularistic language, wisdom, and rituals, postmodernity challenges Islam with the claim that there is no such thing as a “worldview.” This has ushered in a new chaos and a new paganism that threatens to engulf Islamic traditions of perennial truths of monotheism. At the same time, postmodernism has highlighted ethical social issues of poverty, slavery, women’s rights, and the environment that demand that Islam live up to its ethical principles and contribute to the postmodern attempt to put together a new worldview that integrates science, social ethics, and interfaith dialogue with Islamic monotheism. Yamine Mermer’s response is opposed to Koshul’s position in that she sees the Islamic resistance to the Western secular Enlightenment, as “a bonus, putting Islam in a rather advantageous position in the debate with modernity.” Mermer presents us with an argument that is becoming increasingly popular with Islamic intellectuals and theologians: Islam must play the role of forming an opposition to modern secularism. Mermer argues that Islam has a historic responsibility, at this moment, to preserve “the purity of the traditional worldview.” In doing so it will both “inspire humans and be inspired by them.” In part II of the book, the Jewish philosopher Steven Kepnes attempts to find, in the figures of Hagar and Ishmael, a biblical basis that requires both Jews and Christians to engage with Muslims in Scriptural Reasoning. Kepnes argues that Islam, as the third monotheistic religion, shares a dual identity as both “other” and “same” to Judaism, to Christianity, and to Western civilization. Hagar is at once the Other who comes from Egypt and the wife of the patriarch Abraham through whom all the peoples of the world will be blessed. Ishmael is both the ignored son of Abraham and the thorn in Isaac’s side, and the dutiful brother who helps Isaac bury his father. Through Hagar and Ishmael, Islam regains its place as simultaneously the first child of Abraham and the third stage in the development of monotheism. Kepnes argues that scripture accomplishes the difficult feat of making Islam both part of and different from the Jewish and Christian Self by employing complex literary and logical strategies that are not available in modern philosophy. He, therefore, also argues that scripture offers unique paths to keep Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in dialogue, while respecting and preserving the differences between the traditions. In his response to Kepnes, Nicholas Adams details how Kepnes’s attempt to preserve difference, while fostering dialogue, works. Adams delineates what one might call “rules” for respecting the Other that are implicit in Kepnes’s paper. These include “not finding a


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Western expert on Islam to tell us what Islam is” and “not pretending to be an expert ourselves if we do not have the requisite knowledge.” Adams calls these rules “logic of preservation” of “both otherness and identity.” But he supplies a crucial condition that makes this possible and that is the preservation takes place “before God.” Adams then suggests that if non-Muslims want to find a model for a reading of scripture that takes place “before God” we could do no better than attend to the ways in which our Muslims colleagues read the Qur’an. Here, Adams notices that, unlike many Western readers of scripture who assume authority over the texts, “Muslims do not approach their sacred texts in the dominating attitude of an expert, one who has command over the text.” Rather, they approach with “exemplary humility, reverence and intimacy.” Martin Kavka’s chapter is an attempt to focus on the philosophical dimension of Spiritual Reasoning. Kavka finds that despite Kepnes’s attempts to surface a “scriptural logic,” his chapter contains continual references to philosophers such as Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. Kavka suggests that these figures together with other modern and postmodern philosophers can be important allies to the Scriptural Reasoning project. It is, after all, the philosopher who can clarify the logic of scripture and it is the philosophical ethicist who makes it clear that Jews, Christians, and Muslims cannot do their religious thinking in a vacuum but must, for the sake of the world and humanity, and God, take the thought and the existence of the Other seriously. The last three chapters of this book are written by three important thinkers in the Scriptural Reasoning movement who did not participate in the original Hartford Seminary conference. They, thus, bring new perspectives to the conference discussions. The Muslim thinker, Tim Winter (Abdul Hakim Murad) takes on Koshul’s claim that Islam and modern Enlightenment culture have important affinities that make continuing dialogue and interactions possible, beneficial, and necessary. Winter puts the issue starkly, “Islam did not produce the modern world” and its discontents. Islam did not produce an ideology that curtails cultural difference in the name of a “global monoculture.” Islam did not produce the world wars and Holocausts of the twentieth century, and Islam did not produce a “world without God.” Given this, Islam might very well serve God and humanity best by remaining modernity’s “other.” Winter’s piece is far more complex than we have presented it. Along the way, he shows that Islam has always been part of the “West” and he also outlines subtle ways in which Enlightenment modernity and Islamic thought did and could


Preface


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continue to intersect. However, the real power of the chapter remains its prophetic critique of the continuing march of Western capitalist and secular modernity that threatens to swallow up all particular cultures and the world itself. Winter displays the best of the penetrating thought of many Islamic intellectuals today that simply will not stand the march of Western modernity without at least getting in its way through an extended and deep cultural critique. The chapter of the Jewish pragmatist philosopher Peter Ochs is an attempt to make the philosophical logics of the chapters by Koshul and Kepnes explicit. Ochs suggests that what is common to both authors is a movement from a logic of “dichotomous twos” in which either the Jewish and Christian, West and Islam, or Islam and modernity are placed in opposition to the relational terms of dialogue or what he calls “three-ness.” Ochs shows that Scriptural Reasoning, at its best, is a hopeful and creative attempt to stress what is best in both the religious traditions and modernity and to move forward from this toward forms of scriptural mediation. Ochs connects the logic of “three-ness” that he finds in the chapters of Koshul and Kepnes to larger issues in contemporary philosophy and logic. Here, he suggests that scriptural logic finds important commonalities with the new logical models provided in the indeterminacy and quantum theories of contemporary physics. Ochs argues that the older philosophy and science of modernity follows epistemological models based on propositional truth claims. Propositional claims like the table is black, the dog is quick-tempered, Hagar is cast-out, Hagar is faithful, are not so much useless as they are narrow. They work well to assess color in tables and temperament in dogs but are simply too crude to assess the character and existence of God, the complexities of lived experience, the life of faith, and the ambiguities of scripture. Like the structure of the universe, or the nature of light, God, faith, and scripture simply require a more complex logic. To say that light and God cannot be expressed in syllogistic logic and propositional terms is thus not to say that light and God are nonexistent, or false, or even nonlogical. “The error is not, therefore, to trust in formal reasoning and thus logic, but simply to have nurtured too limited a view of how to practice formal reasoning and of what logical models we can build. As physicists, philosophers, and logicians have learned since early twentieth-century discoveries in quantum theory, standard propositional logics are useful for mapping only a limited range of behaviors and beliefs. In briefest terms, one could say that they are useful for mapping only those things about which we have potentially little or no doubt.”


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Ochs addresses the seemingly contradictory readings of scripture in which two or more meanings are given for the same verse through Peirce’s triadic semiotics. This means that reading scripture requires an awareness of three elements: text, reading, context of reading. A dyadic or propositional model would suggest the direct reading—for example, “Hagar is cast-out.” The triadic model allows that in the present context of Jewish-Muslim conflict, scripture reveals an additional meaning that suggests that Hagar is also God’s messenger and Ishmael Isaac’s loyal brother. In the final response David Ford attempts to extend Kepnes and Koshul’s papers to further develop Scriptural Reasoning. Although most of the chapters in the book group Judaism and Christianity together as “religions of the West” that are contrasted with or related to Islam, Ford is careful to attend to the difficulties of the JewishChristian relation. Ford foucuses on Kepnes’s remarks about the difficulties of Christian hermeneutics of the “Old Testament” that suggests that the Hebrew scriptures are at once “revealed and limited.” He then undertakes an interpretation of a difficult passage in Paul’s letter to Galatians (4:21–31) in which Israel is described as to the law and the flesh is compared to Hagar. Christians, then, become the new Isaac, the new sons of the spirit. Ford’s careful exegesis reveals that, just as the Hebrew scriptures can be seen to both regard Hagar as cast out and part of Israel, Galatians allows the Jews to retain their position as under God’s law even as Christians are offered a new path through Jesus to God’s “riches and wisdom” (Romans 11:32). Picking up on Koshul’s attempt to opening Islam to the modern West, Ford then pushes further to suggest that Scriptural Reasoning, especially as it is practiced in the University, may want to interact far more seriously with what is called “the secular.” Here, the call is as much to the religious traditions to learn from secular science, art, and literature, as it is for the celebrants of secularism to recognize the power and truth of the religious traditions. Ford challenges the secular leaders to “share the public sphere with the religious without expecting that the ground rules have to be secular or ‘neutral.’” Ford suggests that working out mutual ground between the secular and religious is “vital for twenty-first century polity and civil society.” As we have mentioned the chapters in this collections are the result of a conversation that began at a conference at Hartford Seminary in April 2005. The theme of the conference was “Studying the ‘Other,’ Understanding the ‘Self’: Scripture, Reason and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter.” The papers presented at this conference were published in the April–October 2005 issue of Iqbal Review. The original


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papers were the result of informal and personal conversations among the participants. The actual presentation of the papers led to the formalization and deepening of the conversation. The present book contains revised versions of the original presentations. It is worth noting that in almost all cases either the conclusion or the argument leading up to the conclusion (and in some cases both) have been significantly affected by the conversation. This is the most compelling evidence in favor of the assertion that if there is a general “conclusion” that can be derived from the chapters as a whole, it was not a conclusion that was argued from, it is one that was argued to. While a summary of the “conclusion” of the chapters as a whole may be out of place in a preface, observations about other shared characteristics are certainly not out of place. In contrast to the reading of texts and history that leads to the conclusion of the “clash of civilizations” thesis, these chapters demonstrate that there is an alternative method of reading texts and history that reveals an intimate philosophical, cultural, and religious affinity between “Islam” and the “West.” This affinity is a matter of fact both for the past and present— thereby opening up the possibility of affinity (instead of clash) in the future. This affinity between “Islam” and the “West” is demonstrated by showing that both contemporary “Islam” and the contemporary “West” can best appreciate their own contemporary predicament by critically but empathetically studying the primal religious texts, historical development, notable achievements, and unique characteristics of the Other. If a descriptive label is to be affixed to the approach that lays bare this affinity, it would be “Scriptural Reasoning.” The fact that both contemporary “Islam” and the “West” are facing daunting challenges is hardly debated. A scripturally reasoned analysis of these challenges shows that the two need each other not only to adequately address these challenges, but also to appreciate the challenges in the first place. In short, a scripturally reasoned analysis of the contemporary Islam-West encounter demonstrates that an empathetic understanding of the alien “other” is necessary for an adequate understanding of the alienated “self” as both “Islam” and the “West” seek to understand and address the challenges that they face at the dawn of the twenty-first century. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of and thank the following people: Farrukh Siddiqui, Zahid Hassan, Jawad Ashraf, Hassan Chowdry, Umeyye Isra Yazicioglou, and Yvonne Bowen-Mack. They played an essential (but largely invisible) role in organizing the Hartford Seminary conference. We would also like to thank Hartford Seminary for graciously hosting the conference that inspired this book. In this regard our special gratitude to Ian Markham, the Dean


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of the Seminary and Heidi Hadsell the President. Thanks also to Syed Rafay Ahmed for help in the editing process. Earlier versions of the conference chapters (parts I and II) appeared in the Iqbal Review 46:2–4 (Spring 2005) Lahore, Pakistan.

1. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996).


Note





I ntroduction: Stu dyin g the Western “Other, ” U ndersta nding the Isl a mic “Self ” Kelton Cobb

W

e are living at a moment in history in which with each passing day people (on all sides) with explosives and the loudest megaphones seem bent on playing out the script of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” In academic circles, where we are accustomed to speaking in more measured tones, there is an effort to resist cooperating with this script. Whether this resistance will restrain those who are out there making history is anyone’s guess, but that some backroom resistance is happening is crucial. The chapters in this book are part of that effort. The authors resist the idea that a bloody clash between Islam and the West is inevitable, but only if the faithful on all sides seize this historical moment to revisit their own fundamental assumptions after viewing the world through the eyes of the alien Other. It has become a familiar proposition in academic circles that insight may be won from a turn to the Other. But there are a variety of ways to do this, some more promising than others. Paul Ricoeur was adamant about what is to be gained from a disciplined turn to the Other—a reorientation in one’s moral life. Whether the Other is the ancient texts of one’s tradition, historical epics, novels,


Chapter 1


K e lt o n C o b b

the mythopoetic heart of another tradition, or even the utterances of a friend, a new and strange world is beckoning, inviting one to explore new terrain and ultimately to enlarge one’s own world. Whatever the Other is, detouring through it in a sustained act of interpretation will result in the reinterpretation of oneself. Ricoeur described this in detail in his book Oneself as Another: We venture into the world of the Other in order to have our imaginations addressed by it.1 Histories thus borrowed confront us as possibilities and tasks that we might ourselves undertake. We are to take what we learn there back into the practical field of human action. Having been addressed by these alternative narratives, we are compelled to embark into new ways of seeing that this exposure has given to us. Because we have learned to see in new ways, we find ourselves compelled to reorient our practical lives. In other words, the possibilities for envisioning the world and determining how one ought to act in that world are contingent on the new and strange narratives one hears and reads. Only with this have we followed the full arc of interpretation. It is by means of this detour through the texts and narratives of others that one can reflect retrospectively on one’s own life, consider the possibilities that went undeveloped, recall the critical junctures, and reimagine it all through a different series of choices. By venturing out of the Self, into the world of the Other, and ultimately returning to the Self, we become intimately acquainted with others who, faced with the mysteries of life, have made different choices, and have become different persons. But this receptivity to the Other must avoid two opposite errors. On one hand, the interpreter must not absolutize his or her categories for understanding all things human. These must be held lightly during the encounter, even put at risk—not cast aside altogether, but held back. On the other hand, the interpreter must not pretend to have the ability to enter fully the world of another. A certain strangeness and incommensurability of the world of the Self and the world of the Other will remain stubbornly in the way. It is not possible to go utterly “native,” and to imagine that one has done so is a delusion that will result in misrepresenting the world of the Other to any interested listeners once one has returned. In describing the world of the Other to those in one’s own world, the interpreter will inescapably misrepresent it—that is given. But it does not mean new levels of understanding will not be reached by having ventured out in good will. Nor does it mean that judgments on the viability of the world of the Other cannot be made. As Martin Buber maintained, the most exemplary I/Thou relationship both respects and confronts the Other.


2


3

More than twenty years ago, Tzvetan Todorov pondered these matters in relation to the ways that Europeans encountered the native inhabitants of the New World. If ever there was a test case for the pitfalls of how to encounter an alien Other, the early decades of the Spanish conquest is it. Todorov was not the first to remind us that different approaches were tried—Columbus encountered the Indians as defective human beings in need of Christian civilization, Bartolomé de Las Casas defended them as nobler than their European conquerors, and Cortés strategically ascertained what motivated them so that he could use them for his own ends. What was really astonishing about Todorov’s take on all of this is his conclusion that in some important ways Cortés showed the Indians more respect than did Las Casas. While Las Casas and other friars who defended the Indians back in the courts of Europe spoke up admirably on their behalf, they so thoroughly translated Indian cultures into terms familiar to Europeans that they obliterated the strangeness of the Other. Cortés was more effective as an interlocutor, scrutinizing the Indians for the ways in which their world worked, a world he astutely surmised was fundamentally different from—but as complex as—Europe, surrounded as it was by forces and powers that were inconceivable in the biblically inflected world of the European imagination. The lesson Todorov drew from all of this was that “one does not let the other live merely by leaving him intact any more than by obliterating his voice entirely.”2 Either extreme is simply indifference to the Other, and a refusal to consider that the meaning of one’s own familiar world might benefit from adjustments provoked by the encounter. The highly charged encounter of Islam and the West that we are now living through is nowhere near as radical an encounter with otherness as what happened in the sixteenth century in the decades after Columbus stumbled into the Americas. The “West” is an amalgam of Jewish, Christian, Greco-Roman, and pagan European elements. Islam is an amalgam of Jewish, Christian, Greco-Roman, Persian, Arabian, and uniquely Islamic elements. As Steven Kepnes describes it, Islam is both Western and Eastern, both “Same and Different.” Islam and the West are different trajectories of the biblical-classical synthesis, distinguished by the additional cultures they absorbed and to which they made themselves answerable. These are two complex world civilizations that have generated viable political, social, scientific, literary, artistic, economic, and religious institutions over time. Neither one is uniform or static; both are fully immersed in history and capable of innovation and self-transcendence. And if Islam and the West are honest enough to admit deficiencies in


Introduction


K e lt o n C o b b

some aspects of their complex existence, they are wise to consider each other as kindred historical experiments. We have each put Adam and Eve, Abraham, monotheism, the Hebrew prophets, Plato, Aristotle, natural law, the rejection of idolatry, and trust in a created world that is amenable to human flourishing to work as world-ordering ideas. We have not exercised them in the same ways, nor prioritized them in the same order, but we have agreed on the authority of these elements. This raises an interesting possibility. What might come of a detour through each other’s scriptures, sacred stories, and histories? Some of the materials at the heart of our traditions are held in common, yet have been put to work in different ways, come under different influences, conjuring the different worlds that we now inhabit. Might a privileged look into each other’s worlds give us an eye-opening experience of roads not taken? Some of these roads we will be relieved not to have traveled—and this is valuable self-knowledge. But in other roads we may see terrain we wish our traditions had guided us into but did not, and we may discover otherwise hidden potentialities in our own worlds. As Ricoeur suggests, in venturing into the world of the Other, our imaginations can think new thoughts and our practical lives find rejuvenating new orientations. The chapters in this book demonstrate how this might work. Grounded in the method of Scriptural Reasoning, the approach is one in which insiders interpret their own sacred texts and histories, relying on homegrown “reading traditions” to search for meaning. This initial work is done under the shelter of time-honored practices of interpretation that are unique to the interpreter’s own tradition. But then the interpretation, including both the insight that has been achieved and how it was arrived at, is presented to the scrutiny of outsiders. In the words of Peter Ochs, one of the best practitioners of this method, after seeking from within the tradition wisdom from one’s own scriptures, Jew, Muslim, and Christian sit down at a common table that is “outside all three of our Houses . . . and examine our scriptural sources together.” Ochs operates on the assumption that when we sit together with our scriptures, having first wrestled with them from inside our distinctive reading traditions, we find, in moments, “that our texts call one to the other.” Scriptural Reasoning pursued in this manner, he believes, “opens each of us, somehow, to both greater love and understanding of our new peers and their scriptures and a greater passion for our own tradition and House.” Even more, it brings him electric moments in which his Judaism feels loved by the Church and the Mosque “in a way that it has not been loved before,” and, reciprocally, loves the Church and the Mosque in ways it has not loved them before.3


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There is a remarkable reciprocity found in the chapters of this book, a reciprocity that is found both across the chapters and inside of each chapter. As Kepnes remarks in his chapter, Jews and Christians (who can be found forging new alliances with each other against the Muslim-Other) find certain uneasiness in the existing ways that the West has attempted to negotiate relations between tradition and modernity. We may find some illumination on these muddled negotiations if we pay attention to thoughtful Muslims who are also cutting new trails between tradition and modernity. And Basit Koshul, in his chapter, offers a Qur’anic approach toward the Bible as a framework for looking at contemporary Islam’s encounter with the modern West. This approach leads him to point out shortcomings in both Islam and the West—Islam for failing to live up to the Qur’anic ideals of human dignity, equality, and esteem for material creation because these ideals resonate with the Enlightenment, and the West for neglecting the positive reforming power of critique. In place of the familiar modern Western formula of “critique-condemn-replace,” Koshul recommends a Qur’anically informed formula of “redeem-reform-embrace.” Of the various models of interfaith dialogue with which I am familiar, the Scriptural Reasoning approach that is on display in this book shows remarkable promise. I say this as one who has not practiced it but who has had several occasions to observe it being practiced in some lively backrooms. It shows reverence for the sacred scriptures and unique traditions of interpretation of each faith at the front end, and lends itself, at the back end, to the kind of respect and confrontation that Buber invited us to practice when we seek to genuinely encounter each other across our historical and religious boundaries. Scriptural Reasoning follows the full arc of interpretation, with a guided tour of the strange world of the Other by an informed insider that allows one to understand one’s familiar world with renewed and renovated wisdom.

Notes 1. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 250–251. 3. Peter Ochs, “Reading Scripture Together in Sight of Our Open Doors,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 26/1 (2005), 36–47.


Introduction





I sl a m and the W est


Part I





Th e Qur’anic Self, the Biblical Other a nd the Contempo rary I sl am-West Encou nte r Basit Bilal Koshul

T

he fact that Islam is facing a particularly difficult challenge in its sociocultural encounter with the modern West is attentively detailed by Abdal Hakim Murad in his essay titled “Faith in the Future: Islam after the Enlightenment.”1 In the beginning of the essay he cites the late right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn pointing to the root cause of the impasse. Fortuyn said: “Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam.”2 Fortuyn’s position requires contemporary Islam to pass through the Enlightenment for it to become a part of the modern world. In reaction to this diatribe from the right in Western Europe, certain quarters in the Muslim world assert that Islam must resist any and all constructive engagement with the Enlightenment tradition. The former position sees nothing good in Islam and requires a complete embrace of the Enlightenment while the latter position sees nothing good in the Enlightenment and advocates an assertion of traditional (or premodern) Islamic ideals in the face of encroaching modernity. Both of these positions fail to note that the post-Nietzschean critique of the Enlightenment has laid bare the fact that there is no such thing as Enlightenment orthodoxy. A careful review of the Enlightenment tradition reveals that it is composed of differing (and very often competing) voices, ideas, and


Chapter 2


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trends. This postmodern “discovery” brings with it the possibility of a more nuanced (and perhaps more fruitful) way of discussing the possibilities and dynamics of Islam’s encounter with the modern West. While some elements in the Enlightenment are clearly repugnant to Islamic (and other religious) ideals, other elements show remarkable convergence with traditional Islamic ideals and teachings. Given the multiform character of the Enlightenment, a more adequate way of discussing Islam’s encounter with Enlightenment modernity would be to identify those elements that are antithetical to Islamic teachings and propose a meaningful way of responding to the difficulties and challenges that they pose. Furthermore, the multiform character of the Enlightenment requires that this critical engagement with Enlightenment modernity be complemented with constructive engagement. The constructive engagement for its part will have to go beyond merely providing a list of the positive attributes of the Enlightenment and then identifying possibilities and parameters of their affirmation from an Islamic perspective. This engagement with the alien Other has to emerge out of an understanding of the Self that sees a constructive engagement (alongside critical engagement) with the alien Other as being a prerequisite for self-understanding and self-realization. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate that this is the dynamics of the relationship between the Self and the Other that emerges from the Qur’anic description of the Qur’an’s relationship with the Bible. If one brings together different passages in the Qur’an that are dispersed in the Qur’anic narrative and arranges them in a particular order it becomes clear that the Qur’an sees critical as well as constructive engagement with the biblical Other as an essential prerequisite for an understanding of the Qur’an. Then I will use this scripturally reasoned approach to describe the implications of this mode of the Self relating to the Other in the contemporary encounter between Islam and the West. The Qur’anically reasoned approach allows us to see possibilities in the contemporary Islam-West encounter that are obscured if the approaches suggested by proponents of Western modernism and Islamic traditionalism are used to explore this phenomenon. At the risk of sounding pedantic I must offer a disclaimer at the very beginning of this discussion. Terms such as “Islam,” “modern West,” “Enlightenment,” “modernity,” and so on, will be used often in the following pages. I am conscious of the fact that the reality that these terms refer to is far more varied (actually infinitely more varied) than my presentation suggests. But the use of these terms is not problematic if two things are kept in mind: (1) these terms are ideal types


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in a strictly Weberian sense—concepts that have been abstracted from empirical reality in order to facilitate the conceptual mastery of that reality; (2) the goal of the discussion is not to define “Islam,” “modern West,” “modernity,” and so on, but to describe the possibilities of understanding (and eventually remedying) a particularly deleterious cultural condition. Consequently, this particular value position shapes/ determines the particulars of “Islam,” “modern West,” “Enlightenment,” and so forth, on which attention is focused.

The Qur’anic Self and Biblical Other in the Qur’an The Qur’an’s relationship to the Bible is multidimensional and not always “consistent,” if “consistency” is understood in Aristotelian or Cartesian terms. On the one hand, the Qur’an engages with the Bible in very critical terms. On the other hand, it engages with the Bible in very constructive terms. The critical engagement with the Bible presents itself in the claim that the text of Bible, as we find it today, is a maculated version of an original immaculate Revelation. The maculation3 comes in the form of not only misinterpreting and concealing the message of the Bible on the part of biblical scholars but also in the form of presenting texts that are the products of human hands and minds as the word of God. With respect to misinterpreting and concealing the message of the Bible, Allah says in the Qur’an: An Lo, Allah accepted a solemn oath from those who were granted earlier revelation [when He bade them]: “Make it known unto humanity, and do not conceal it!” But they cast this oath behind their backs, and bartered it away for a trifling gain: and how evil was their exchange! (3:187).

With respect to presenting the products of human hands and minds as the words of God, Allah says in the Qur’an: Woe, then, unto those who write down, with their own hands, [something which they claim to be] divine writ, and then say, “This is from Allah,” in order to obtain a trifling gain thereby; woe, then unto them for what their hands have written, and woe unto them for all that they may have gained! (2:79)


Contemporary Isl am-West Encounter

From the Qur’anic perspective, the Divine Word in the Bible has been obscured by the weight of interpretive tradition and as well as human interjections into the textual body of the scriptures. (This is especially true of the Ketuvim in the Tanakh and the non-Gospel part


Basit Bilal Koshul

of the New Testament.) One of the main tasks that the Qur’an sets for itself is to undo the maculation of the Divine Word by pre-Qur’anic religious communities and restate the Divine Word in its immaculate purity. At this level the Qur’an leaves no doubt that an unbridgeable gulf separates the Taurat and Injeel of the Qur’an from the Torah of the Rabbis and the Gospels of the Church respectively. From the Qur’anic perspective important aspects of the original revelation (i.e., Taurat and Injeel) have become so obscured in the Torah and the Gospels because of human interpolation that only a new revelation (i.e., the Qur’an) can undo the damage. At the same time as its critical engagement with the Bible, paradoxically, the Qur’an turns around and engages with the Torah and the Gospels constructively. One of the places where this constructive engagement is dramatically illustrated is where the Qur’an refers to the Bible in support of one its own central theological claims (i.e., the verity of the Prophet Muhammad’s ministry): I shall ordain My mercy for those who are conscious of Allah and pay the prescribed alms; who believe in Our Revelations; who follow the messenger—the unlettered prophet they find described in the Torah that is with them and in the Gospels—who commands them to do right and forbids them to do wrong, who makes good things lawful to them and bad things unlawful, and relieves them of their burdens and the iron collars that were on them. (7:156–7)

The Qur’an’s constructive engagement with the Bible goes further. The Qur’an also turns to the Bible to support its critique of certain parts of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions.4 The Qur’an states explicitly that there is no biblical warrant for certain Jewish/ Christian beliefs or practices. For example, 3:93 makes this claim with reference to certain Jewish dietary laws, 3:65 in reference to Jewish and Christian claims regarding the religious identity of Prophet Abraham (peace be upon him). On other occasions it implies that there is no biblical warrant by using phrases such as “We did not enjoin it on them . . .” (57:48) in reference to Christian monasticism, or phrases like “Say bring forth your proof if you are indeed truthful” (2:111) in reference to Jewish claims about the outcome of the Final Judgment. In addition to critiquing the Jewish and Christian communities for having introduced extra-biblical beliefs and practices into their respective religious tradition, the Qur’an also takes them to task for having abandoned certain injunctions that are found in the Bible. According to hadith literature, a group of Jews in Madinah came to


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the Prophet for a judgment on a halakhic issue—the punishment for adultery. In response to this query, Allah says in the Qur’an:

This passage is quite remarkable in that the Qur’an uses the instance of the Jews approaching the Blessed Prophet for judgment on an issue that is already discussed and detailed in the Torah as a sign of their lack of faith in the Torah. In turn, the Qur’an will point to the lack of faith in the Torah as a sign of the real reason that most of the Jews in Madinah rejected the Blessed Prophet. Though somewhat different in tone, there is no dearth of affirmative references to the Gospels in the Qur’an. For example: We sent Jesus, the son of Mary, in their [the Israelite Prophets’] footsteps, to confirm the Torah that had been sent before him: We gave him the Gospels with guidance, light, and confirmation of the Torah already revealed—a guide and lesson for those who take heed of God. (5:46)

The fact that the affirmation of the Torah and Gospels as containing “guidance, light” holds true even for the maculated versions of these scriptures is obvious in light of the fact that the Qur’an is referring to the Torah and Gospels that the Jewish and Christian communities considered to be canonical scriptures at the time that the Qur’an is addressing them. In addition to explicitly asserting that the Bible provides the starting point of conversation between the Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the following ayah suggests that a shared scriptural framework is an essential prerequisite for genuine conversation between the different religious communities: Say, “People of the Book, you have no true basis [for your religion/ arguments] unless you uphold the Torah, the Gospels and that which has been sent down to you from your Lord.” (5:68)


. . . why do they come to you for judgment when they have the Torah with God’s judgment and even then still turn away? These are not believers. We revealed the Torah with guidance and light. (5:43)

The foregoing discussion makes it clear that the Qur’an is able to engage with the Bible constructively in spite (actually in light) of its critical attitude toward the Torah of the Rabbis and the Gospels of the Church. The Qur’an turns to the Torah and the Gospels when affirming some of its own theological positions or critiquing different theological positions in vogue among the Jewish and Christian communities. It is worth noting that I have cited only a few of the many instances where the


Basit Bilal Koshul

Qur’an refers to the Bible in support of one of its own claims. A closer reading of the Qur’an demonstrates that as remarkable as this constructive engagement with the Bible is, it is only one part of the picture (and perhaps the less important part.) The Qur’an’s constructive engagement with the Bible goes deeper than theological engagement; it goes to the foundational level of the affirmation of faith itself. In other words, it is not only for the purpose of helping the individual to rationally comprehend the Divine Word that the Qur’an instructs the seeker to turn to the Bible. Under certain circumstances and with respect to particular issues, the Qur’an instructs an individual struggling to attain a state of belief to also turn to the Bible: And so, if you have misgivings about [the reality of] what We have revealed to you, ask those who have been reading the scriptures before your time: [and you will find that,] surely, the truth has now come to you from your Lord. Be not, then, among hesitators. (10: 94)

To appreciate the significance of this passage it must be kept in mind that one of the distinguishing characteristics that separated the Arabs from the Jews and Christians was the fact that the former were an ummi (unlettered, pre-literate) people, whereas the latter were ahl-alkitab (people of the book.) Consequently, it is not surprising that individuals among the first generation of Muslims would have queries about the Qur’anic event given the fact that revelation, scripture, prophethood, and so on, had not been a part of their historical experience. In the most general terms, this ayah instructs the Muslims with questions and concerns about the Qur’anic phenomenon to turn to individuals well versed in the pre-Qur’anic scriptures (i.e., the Bible). The ayah is very confident that the end result of any such conversation would be the fact that the misgivings of the inquirer will be satisfactorily resolved and their faith in the Qur’an affirmed. A closer look at (10:94) suggests that it is addressed directly to the Blessed Prophet. The “you” in the ayah is in the singular and on other such occasions it is understood to be those instances in the Qur’an where Allah is directly addressing Muhammad (peace be upon him). The Qur’an makes it clear that, like almost everyone else in his sociocultural environment, the Blessed Prophet had no experience with revelation, scripture, prophethood, and so on:


14

[Before this revelation came to you,] you [O Muhammad] did not know what revelation is, nor what faith [implies]: but [now] We have caused this [revelation] to be a light, whereby We guide whom We will



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Consequently, it is not surprising that the Blessed Prophet has numerous questions and concerns in the aftermath of his encounter with the Archangel Gabriel in the Cave of Hira. The Blessed Prophet’s incomprehension surrounding this experience was of such a nature that he thought that he had gone mad (or even worse.) A look at how he responds to his personal misgivings surrounding the revelation of the first passage of the Qur’an (96: 1–5) suggests that 10: 94 is a postfacto validation of his behavior. After his encounter with Gabriel in Hira, he makes his way back home in a most agitated and disoriented state and describes his experience to his wife, Khadija (may Allah be pleased with her). This incident is described by Ibn Ishaq from the perspective of the Blessed Prophet: This I told her of what I had seen; and she said. “Rejoice, O son of my uncle, and be of good heart. Verily by Him in whose hand is Khadija’s soul, I have hope that thou wilt be the prophet of his people.” Then she rose and gathered her garments about her and set forth to her cousin Waraqa b. Naufal . . . who had become a Christian and read the scriptures and learned from those that follow the Torah and the Gospel. And when she related to him what the apostle of God told her he had seen and heard Waraqa cried, “Holy! Holy! Verily by Him in whose hand is Waraqa’s soul, if thou hast spoken to me the truth, O Khadija, there hath come unto him the greatest Namus (T. meaning Gabriel) who came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the prophet of this people. Bid him [to be] of good heart.” So Khadija returned to the apostle of God and told him what Waraqa had said. (T. and that calmed his fears somewhat.)5

The events recorded by Ibn Ishaq document the fact that the Blessed Prophet, through his wife Khadija (may Allah be pleased with her), had indeed turned to “those who had been given scriptures” before him in order to clarify some of his own personal concerns regarding the phenomenon of revelation. Furthermore, we find many examples where the early Muslims’ recognition, acceptance, and affirmation of the Qur’anic event is a direct result of their interaction with saints and sages steeped in biblical teachings. Salman Farsi, Abdallah ibn Salam, and the entire group who took the first pledge at Aqaba (may Allah be pleased with them) are notable examples of Muslims from the first generation whose journey to Islam was guided by knowledge of the Bible.


of Our servants: and, verily, [on the strength thereof] you, too, shall guide [others] onto the straight way. (42: 52)


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And even before your time [O Muhammad], all the messengers We sent were only [mortal] men, whom We inspired—hence [tell the pagan unbelievers] “If you do not know, ask the followers of earlier revelation” (21:7)

In sum, the Qur’an turns to the Bible in at least two different contexts in order to dispel various misgivings regarding the authenticity and reality of the Qur’anic event. At the same time that the Qur’an sees the biblical Other as a resource that affirms the Qur’anic Self, it sees the Qur’anic Self as a resource that can help the biblical Other heal some of its afflictions. The Qur’an is aware of the fact that there are bitter divisions within the biblical community and it sees itself as a resource that the Jews and Christians can turn to in order to resolve some of the particularly difficult issues that divide them. At the same time the Qur’an contains an implicit invitation to the practitioners of biblical religion to take advantage of the Qur’anic resources. Allah says in the Qur’an: Behold, this Qur’an explains to the children of Israel most [of that] whereon they hold divergent views; and, verily, it is a guidance and a grace unto all who believe [in it.] Verily, your Lord will judge between them in His wisdom—for He alone is Almighty, All-Knowing. (27: 76–8)

The fact that this passage applies to both Jews and Christians is explained by Muhammad Asad in his commentary. With specific reference to the phrase “whereon they hold divergent views,” Asad notes, I.e. where they differ from the truth made evident to them in their scriptures. The term “children of Israel” comprises here both Jews and Christians (Zamakhshari) inasmuch as both follow the Old Testament, albeit in a corrupted form. It is precisely because of this corruption, and because of the great influence which Jewish and Christian ideas exert over a large segment of mankind, that the Qur’an sets out to explain certain ethical truths to both these communities. The above reference to “most” (and not all) of the problems alluded to in this context shows that the present passage bears only on man’s moral outlook and social life in this world, and not on ultimate, metaphysical


The Qur’an turns to the Bible not only to allay the concerns of the believers who are unfamiliar with the event of revelation; it also turns to the Bible to counter the polemics of the pagans who ridicule the notion that a mortal from amongst them has been chosen by God to be the recipient of revelation:



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The fact that most of the debates dividing the Jewish and Christian communities, that are being alluded to in this passage, can be ultimately traced back to differing interpretations of the Bible is almost self-evident. What is interesting, in the context of the present discussion, is that the Qur’anic Self is offering itself to the biblical Other in order to help the biblical Other alleviate (at least some) of its afflictions. The Qur’an’s self-consciousness in its relationship to the Bible goes further. It is also the case that “. . . the learned men from among the Children of Israel have recognized . . .” (26:197) the fact that the Qur’an is indeed Allah’s revelation to humanity. Consequently, whether the Qur’an is turning to the Bible in support of its own claims or offering itself to the Bible to redress the afflictions of the biblical community—all of this is as much in keeping with the message of the Bible as it is in keeping with the message of the Qur’an. While 10:94 invites Muslims to turn the Bible in order to dispel their misgivings regarding the reality of the Qur’anic event, 27:76–8 and 26:197 contain an implicit invitation to the Jewish and Christian communities to turn to the Qur’an in order to settle the disputes arising from differing interpretations of the Bible. Here the Qur’an does the impossible—if the “possible” is understood in strictly Aristotelean or Cartesian terms. On the one hand 3:187, 2:79, and 3:199 make it clear that there is an unbridgeable gap between the Qur’anic Self and the biblical Other—the Torah and New Testament of the Church are not the same as the Taurat and Injeel of the Qur’an. On the other hand 10:94, 27:76–8, and 26:197 make it clear that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can deepen their faith in their own respective scriptures if they take advantage of the resources that are available in the scriptures of the other communities. One can be provocative and take this latter line of reasoning further. 10:94 suggests that the Bible can allay some of the misgivings that Muslims have about the Qur’anic event that the Qur’an cannot do by itself. This is due to the fact that the Bible can witness in favor of the Qur’an in a way that the Qur’an cannot witness for itself. Similarly, 27:76–8 suggest that the biblical communities can repair some of the deepest schisms dividing them by turning to the Qur’an. This is due to the fact that the Qur’an contains resources for healing and repair that are not found in the Bible. The Qur’an achieves the impossible because it simultaneously engages the Bible in critical and constructive terms. The final word in the Qur’anic Self’s relation to the biblical Other is neither critical nor constructive


questions which—as the Qur’an so often repeats—will be answered only in the hereafter.6


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Say, “People of the Book, let us arrive at a statement that is common to us all: we worship Allah alone, we ascribe no partners to Him, and none of us takes others besides Allah as lords.” If they turn away, say: “Bear witness that it is we who have surrendered ourselves unto Him.” (3:64)

In short, the manner in which the Qur’anic Self relates to the biblical Other can be summarized in the following terms: 1. Critical engagement that sees the Self distancing itself from the Other, 2. Constructive engagement that sees the Other as affirming the Self, 3. An invitation by the Self to the Other to come to a common understanding so that both can work together toward a common goal. This threefold approach of the Self relating to the Other provides the framework through which to explore the possibilities of the contemporary encounter between the Islamic Self and the modern Western Other.

Islam and Critical Engagement with the Modern West From inside the Muslim community, the two dominant voices that have shaped the manner in which the Muslim Self relates to the modern Western Other are those of the fundamentalist zealots and acculturated liberals. In spite of the differences between these two groups, both responses are remarkably similar on a number of different accounts. For Murad, the most important point of commonality is the fact that both the zealots and the liberals offer a “purely non-spiritual reading of Islam, lacking the vertical dimension” and in the end this reading (and the two groups producing it) “have proved irrelevant to our needs.”7 In contrast to blindness characterizing the zealots and the slavishness of the liberals:


engagement—it is an invitation to the biblical Other to come to a common understanding:

A more sane policy, albeit a more courageous, complex and nuanced one, has to be the introduction of Islam as a prophetic, dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world.8

It is difficult to argue with Murad’s conclusion that an essential condition for a healthy relationship between the contemporary


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Islamic Self and modern Western Other requires that the Islamic Self play the role of a “prophetic, dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world.” But in order to do this adequately the difficulties and challenges inherent in such an undertaking need to be understood clearly. A close look at the defining characteristics of modern Western thought reveals the fact that it is extremely difficult (if not altogether impossible) for a position articulated from the perspective of traditional religion or classical philosophy to be a dissenting voice from within the reality of the modern world. It is well known that concern with wisdom, illumination, and the Divine is at the heart of all premodern religious traditions. Recent studies of classical philosophy have shown that this also the case with the philosophical tradition. For example, Pierre Hadot notes that in spite of many differences regarding the particulars, all schools of classical Greek philosophy viewed the study of philosophy as askesis or philosophical exercises “linked to the custom of spiritual instruction.”9 The ultimate goal of these exercises was “to effect a modification and a transformation in the subject who practiced them.”10 Furthermore, philosophy as a means of “attaining wisdom” was seen as being inseparable from the choice of a particular way of life, [w]hether it is the choice of the good, as in Plato; or the choice of pleasure, as for the Epicureans; or the choice of moral intent, as for the Stoics; or the choice of life in accordance with the Intellect, in the case of Aristotle and Plotinus . . . 11

In agreement with traditional religion, classical philosophy viewed human reason as one means among others in the pursuit of the ultimate goal irrespective of how “ultimate goal” is understood. (The ultimate goal could be wisdom, illumination, or the Divine). Additionally, both traditional religion and classical philosophy saw ethical praxis as an indispensable element in the exercise and disciplining of human reason. In short the premodern religious and philosophical traditions see human reason as a finite and limited entity that needs the aid of additional resources if it is to fulfill its function adequately. But Enlightenment philosophy categorically rejects the limited and relational character of human reason. Murad notes:



The Enlightenment, . . . , as Descartes foresaw, would propose that the mind is already self-sufficient and that moral and spiritual growth are not preconditions for intellectual eminence . . . Not only is the precondition of the transformation of the subject repudiated, but the classical idea,


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The repudiation of classical philosophy and traditional religion by Enlightenment thought has far reaching implications regarding the possibility of a meaningful “prophetic dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world” (emphasis in original). This possibility requires that the critiquing, dissenting witness, and the critiqued modern world share some common ground. In the absence of some common ground relating the critic to the critiqued there cannot be any critique from within, only (zealous) condemnation from the outsider, or the obsequious surrender of the outsider. But Enlightenment philosophy categorically rejects all philosophical and religious notions of wisdom, illumination and the Divine. From the Enlightenment perspective all talk about these “spiritual realities” is either irrational nonsense or a hermeneutical mask concealing economic interests, the will to power or libidinal desires. Because of the Enlightenment’s notion of self-sufficient human reason as the ultimate arbiter between true/ false, right/wrong, beauty/ugliness, and so on, the crucial question that any religious or philosophical voice aspiring to be a dissenting voice within modernity has to face is: Where is the common ground that I share with Enlightenment thought that allows for a meaningful exchange? In addition to the aforementioned difficulty that faces all religious and philosophical traditions, modern Western philosophy offers Islam a particularly acute challenge. In the well known Hadith-e-Gibreel, the salient features of Iman, Islam, and Ihsan are described in detail by the Blessed Prophet—and it is implied that faith, peace/surrender and grace/plentitude are the natural order of things. If we take Descartes, Hobbes, and Malthus as representative thinkers of the Enlightenment paradigm we can say that doubt, brutishness and scarcity/selfishness characterize the state of nature.13 To the degree that Cartesian doubt, Hobesian brutishness, and Malthusian calculations are part of the ethos that shaped (and is shaping) the modern West, it becomes that much more difficult to envision Islam playing the role of a “dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world.” While other religious traditions are challenged by the Enlightenment paradigm, none is challenged more directly and acutely than Islam given the centrality of faith (iman), peace/surrender (islam) and grace/plentitude (ihsan) in the Islamic theological and sociocultural vision. Any attempt to foster a meaningful exchange between contemporary Islam and the modern West requires a candid acknowledgement


shared by the religions and the Greeks, that access to truth itself brings about a personal transformation, is dethroned just as insistently.12


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of the unique characteristics of the Enlightenment paradigm that has given birth to the modern Western reality. Because of the Enlightenment’s rejection of the traditional religious/philosophical understanding of wisdom, illumination and the Divine, human reason becomes the only common ground on which the dissenting voice and the dominant paradigm can relate to each other. Consequently, the dissenting voice has to accept the following conditions if it wants to be acknowledged as speaking “from within the reality of the modern world”: (1) human reason be the court of appeal for all critique/ complaints; and (2) human reason be the foundation on which all alternatives are affirmed/stand. In other words reason and rationality have to be the starting point of both the critique of the Enlightenment paradigm and the affirmation of any alternative—whether that alternative is Islamic or otherwise. In sum, in order for Islam to be a dissenting voice from within the modern world the twin tasks of critique of the Enlightenment paradigm and affirmation of the Islamic alternative has to be done “within the limits of reason alone.”14 While this task seems quite daunting one can scarcely imagine the implications for contemporary Islam’s self-understanding if an affirmation of iman, islam, and ihsan (if not Iman, Islam and Ihsan) can be accomplished “within the limits of reason alone.” This apparent capitulation to the Enlightenment paradigm should not in any way be taken to mean that revelation and tradition have no role to play in Islam’s contemporary encounter with the modern West (the next section will detail the role of revelation and tradition in this regard.) But it should be understood that since any appeal to “spiritual realities,” “traditional wisdom,” “religious teachings,” and so on, place the dissenting voice outside the reality of the modern world, then such appeals undermine the attempt to be a dissenting voice located within the reality of the modern world.

Islam and Constructive Engagement with the Modern West Murad is very much on the mark when he notes that Islam has a long and distinguished (perhaps incomparable) record of fruitful exchange with different cultures:



Despite its Arabian origins, Islam is not to be merely for the nations, but of the nations. No pre-modern civilization embraced more cultures than that of Islam . . . The many-coloured fabric of the traditional Umma is not merely part of the glory of the Blessed Prophet, of whom it is said: “Truly your adversary is the one cut off” (108:3). It also


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In other words, the ability of Islam to constructively interact with non-Arab cultural configurations, uplifting them (and also being uplifted by them) is part and parcel of the Islamic identity. Murad uses the imagery of “squaring the circle” to describe Islam’s fruitful interaction with non-Arab cultural configurations in the past. In order for Islam to remain true to itself, this part of its identity and historical legacy cannot be deemed irrelevant in its contemporary encounter with the West. In other words contemporary Islam will have to “square the circle” in the modern setting. In the past, Islam has been able to affirm the validity and authenticity of the deepest aspirations and yearnings of numerous non-Arab cultural configurations—and offer the resources of the life giving Divine Word (i.e., the Qur’an) in which these aspirations and yearnings can be expressed, augmenting, and enriching the preexisting expressions. This affirming role from outside the existing cultural configuration has gone hand in hand with being a prophetic, dissenting voice that critiques other aspects of the cultural configuration. Keeping true to its historical character, contemporary Islam will also have to play the role of affirming witness from outside the modern reality, in addition to being a prophetic, dissenting witness from inside the modern cultural configuration. The dual role of dissent and affirmation is in keeping with a holistic vision of the prophetic witness. Robert Ellwood notes that the apostle (or prophetic witness in our terms) is not merely a dissenting critic but also (and maybe more importantly) an affirming advocate. For Ellwood, the prophetic witness becomes a “spokesperson for an existing, but perhaps uncrystallized and emergent”16 spiritual and ethical agenda that was already present in society. It is the task (and genius) of the prophetic witness to adapt and reconfigure these preexisting (positive) trends in society, distinguish them from the established (negative) trends and attitudes inhibiting their emergence and affirm the positive trends from the perspective of his ministry. In other words, the prophetic witness offers a revelatory affirmation of some of the real but dormant aspirations and potentialities at the very heart of its sociocultural environment, whose emergence and maturation is being forestalled by neglect and forgetfulness. In short, in addition to striving to be a dissenting witness from within an established order, the prophetic witness also strives to be an affirming voice from outside of that order—with the revealed word providing the grounds of affirmation.17 Consequently, if the contemporary encounter between Islam and the


demonstrates the divine purpose that this Ismaelite covenant is to bring a monotheism that uplifts, rather than devastates cultures.15


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modern West is to result in a fruitful and meaningful exchange, there has to be an Islamic affirmation of some of the deepest aspirations that are at the heart of the Enlightenment project. The task of affirmation in the contemporary meeting of Islam with the modern world presupposes that there is something worthy of affirmation. This for its part requires an identification of the affirmative side of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is not merely a negative program that rejects the reality of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine, it is also a positive program that affirms the ideals of individualism, universalism, and materialism. Expressing these Enlightenment ideals in their nonreified form, it can be said that the Enlightenment ideals affirm the irreducible dignity of the individual human being, the equality of all human beings before the law and the value of the material/profane world. In conjunction with other ideas and in tension with still some others, these three ideals have shaped the social, political, and educational institutions of the modern West. Speaking in the most general terms, it can be said that modern civil law, the modern political state and the modern secular academy/university represent the institutionalization of these ideals. While the depth and breath of the institutionalization of these ideals has varied greatly in different Western societies, the past three to four centuries of Western history show a continuous movement in this direction. An argument could be made (and has been made) that the United States has institutionalized Enlightenment ideals with a greater consistency and breadth than any other Western country. The evidence in favor of this contention is not insignificant. What cannot be contested is the fact that the modern West’s institutions, self-understanding and historical development are closely tied to these three ideals. The Enlightenment break with traditional religion18 is as much tied to the affirmation of individualism, universalism, and materialism as to the rejection of the notions of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine. In short, the institutionalization of these three ideals represents those positive affirmations that set Enlightenment thought apart from traditional religion. This Enlightenment affirmation provides the opportunity for the monotheistic religious traditions to engage with the Enlightenment tradition on a positive note. Beginning with Max Weber19 in the early part of the twentieth century, a body of literature has been steadily accumulating, demonstrating that some of the defining ideas and trends of the modern world cannot be understood in isolation from the sublimation of a particular religious impulse—the monotheistic vision of reality. Alasdair McIntyre,20 Peter Berger,21 John Milbank,22 and Rodney Stark23 (among others) have further detailed the intimate




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link between religious ideals and the birth of the modern West. The sociologists in this list have gone so far as to suggest that secularization of human culture becomes a historical possibility only with the emergence of monotheism and that the modern, secular West is the product of a particularly monotheistic religious development. To the degree that the analysis linking monotheism with modernity is correct, it provides the traditional monotheistic religions with the opportunity to consider the Enlightenment as a post-traditional expression of monotheistic ideals and engage with it on constructive terms. In addition to the opportunity that Islam shares with other monotheistic traditions for positively engaging with the Enlightenment, it is uniquely positioned to affirm key Enlightenment ideals in a way that other religious traditions cannot. The Enlightenment affirmation of the dignity of the individual, equality before the law, and the value of the material/profane world provides Islam with a unique opportunity to be an affirming witness from outside the modern world. It can be stated with confidence that Islam can affirm the three aforementioned ideals (in their nonreified form) with a greater degree of consistency and insistency than any other religious tradition. The fact that the Qur’an is a revealed book by which the Divine instructed humanity in the ways of knowledge, wisdom, and so on, locates Islam in the premodern historical period. Consequently, the Qur’anic event places Islam outside the modern world in a very particular and limited (but by no means insignificant) sense. At the same time, even a brief look at the Islamic attitude toward the individual, law and material reality evidences that there is deep affinity between the (premodern) Islamic and (modern) Western positions. The Hajj rituals are the symbolic enactment of the Islamic attitude that affirms individual dignity, supremacy of law, and the goodness of the material world. The annual circling of the square (the tawaf) is the Islamic affirmation of the irreducible dignity of the individual, the equality of all human beings before the law, and the spiritual value of the material world and profane acts. During the Hajj all pilgrims perform the same rites, in the exact same way and in the exact same sanctuary. Furthermore, every act that the pilgrim performs, from eating and getting a haircut to circling the Ka’aba and standing at the plain of Arafat, is a consecrating act. There is no culminating event where a particular individual, from a particular tribe, goes into a particular part of the sanctuary to perform particular rituals that signal the culmination of communion between the human and the Divine. Similarly there is no particular caste whose members perform particular rituals to symbolize the human participation in the life of the Divine. In other


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words, potentially every human being is a Levite/Brahman, every place in the world the Holy Land and every worldly act (or material thing) a sacrament. The Hajj is the most intense expression of the Islamic attitude that any act done by any human being, at any time, in any place can be a means of communion with the Divine. For Muhammad Iqbal, this is the real cultural and philosophic significance of the doctrine of the finality of Prophethood: [T]he [Blessed] Prophet of Islam seems to stand between the ancient and the modern world. In so far as the source of his revelation [the Qur’an] is concerned he belongs to the ancient world; in so far as the spirit of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the modern world. In him life discovers other sources of knowledge suitable to its new direction. The birth of Islam . . . is the birth of the inductive intellect. In Islam prophecy reaches its perfection in discovering the need of its own abolition. This involves the keen perception that life cannot for ever be kept in leading strings; that, in order to achieve full self-consciousness, man must be finally thrown back on his own resources. The abolition of priesthood and hereditary kingship in Islam, the constant appeal to reason and experience in the Qur’an, and the emphasis it lays on Nature and History as sources of human knowledge, are all different aspects of the same idea of finality.24

In spite of the notable and real difference, there are strong affinities between the Qur’anic notion of the human dignity, import of law, and value of the material/profane worlds and the Enlightenment view of the individual, law and material reality.25 The research of George Makdisi26 on the rise of colleges, Marcel Boisard27 on the rise of humanism and Richard Bulliet28 on the rise of modern culture in the modern West (among others) suggests that there are causal links between the Islamic affirmation of these ideals and the emergence of these ideals in post-Renaissance Europe. It is beyond the scope of the present discussion to delve into this issue in detail, but a growing body of research suggests that the aforementioned affinities are not mere theoretical possibilities, but historical realities—thereby providing the historical grounds on which future possibilities can be constructed. Islamic ideals and teaching as well as modern scholarship on the historical exchange of ideas between Islam and the West suggest that the Islamic affirmation of modern Western ideals from outside of the modern world is a real possibility. The fact that Islam contains the resources to be an affirming witness from outside the modern world is a very attractive possibility for the present and the future. But at the same time it raises a very troubling question about the past. If it is indeed the case that Islam affirms the




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irreducible dignity of the individual, equality of all before the law and the inherent goodness of the material/profane worlds then the question emerges: Why is it that the modern, secular West has succeeded in institutionalizing these ideals with a greater degree of consistency than contemporary Muslim society? Whether we look at the issue from the perspective of the “secular” inquiry or the Qur’anic narrative, the one thing that is obvious is that the failure of contemporary Muslim society to embody Islamic ideals can be only partially explained in terms of external factors. A look at the later part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century shows that a number of Islamic reform movements spanning the breadth of the Muslim world failed due to largely internal factors. Malek Bennabi argues that the lack of dynamism and critical self-reflection characteristic of the larger Muslim society in recent centuries is the culmination of a process that can be traced back to the fourteenth century.29 For Bennabi the colonization of the Muslim world was the result of advanced internal decay not its cause (as is often assumed by most Muslims.) An exploration and understanding of this process would appear to be an almost essential prerequisite for contemporary Muslim society to adequately respond to twenty-first-century challenges. Bennabi’s insights take on added significance given the work of two prominent Western social scientists, Robert Bellah30 and Ernest Gellner.31 Both of them are puzzled by the friction characterizing Islam’s encounter with the modern world, precisely because they see the Qur’anic event anticipating certain “modern” ideals, being open to them and affirming them. Gellner argues that Islam appears to be better suited than any other premodern religious tradition to integrate itself into the modern world while maintaining the integrity of its foundational principles. Bellah notes that the “social complexity and political capacity” of the structures of early Muslim society, founded by the Prophet and built upon by his immediate successors, “is something that for its time and place is remarkably modern.”32 Keeping in mind the fact that key elements of the Prophet’s model were abandoned in favor of political expediency not too long after the Prophet’s death, Bellah goes on to note:


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In a way the failure of the early community, the relapse into pre-Islamic principles of social organization, is an added proof of the modernity of the early experiment. It was too modern to succeed.33

This does not mean that the Prophetic model was entirely abandoned—on the contrary, the model “would continue to exercise


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the pressure of an ideal throughout subsequent centuries”34 up until the present day. Bellah is expressing in more precise terms an observation made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 200 years earlier. Rousseau makes a passing, but insightful, remark on the sophistication and soundness of political theory rooted in Prophetic practice in The Social Contract. In the section titled “Civil Religion” and in the context of the division between the secular and the sacred initiated by monotheism, Rousseau notes that the political implications of the split have been far reaching and all attempts bridge the divide have proven to be wanting. After the split between the Church and state engendered by monotheism, there has been only one historical example of successfully bridging the divide. With specific reference to a political theory and religious theology that establishes a relationship between state and religion Rousseau notes: Mohammed had very sound opinions. He tied his political system together very well, and so long as the form of his government subsisted under his successors, the caliphs, this government was utterly unified, and for that reason it was good. But as the Arabs became prosperous, lettered, polished, soft and cowardly, they were subjugated by the barbarians. Then the divisions between the two powers began again. Although, it is less apparent among the Mohammedans than among the Christians, it is there all the same, especially in the sect of Ali . . . 35

It is not only in the political domain that the Muslims have achieved something remarkably modern, the same applies in the area of women’s empowerment. Murad notes that at the end of the nineteenth century Ignaz Goldziher showed that about 15 percent of medieval hadith scholars were women. Then Murad goes on to cite the work of a late twentieth-century scholar, Ruth Roded, who has done research on the biographies of women scholars in classical Islam. He sums up Roded’s findings in the following words: Stereotypes come under almost intolerable strain when Roded documents the fact that the proportion of female lecturers in many classical Islamic colleges was higher than in modern Western universities.36



While tradition can be very helpful in contemporary Islam’s attempt to come to terms with the modern world, there are also hindrances (both intellectual and institutional) in the Muslim history that must be overcome. In other words, if constructive engagement with the modern West is to be done in an honest and consistent manner, then the affirmation of modern Western ideals from outside of the modern


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world must be complemented by a critical stance toward certain developments in Muslim history based on the same criteria (i.e., the Qur’anic event). This means that constructive engagement with the modern West requires a rejection of the uncritical affirmation of tradition (or a particular school within tradition) just as the critical engagement with the modern West requires a rejection of the blind negation of tradition by the zealots and liberals. After using the first section to construct a framework within which to analyze the relationship between the Self and Other, based on how the Qur’an treats the Bible, the next two sections turned directly to the encounter between Islam and the West. The second section focused on the parameters of Islam’s critical engagement with the modern West where Islam plays the role of a prophetic dissenting witness from within the modern world. This part of the discussion suggested that this means the critique of the Enlightenment rejection of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine has to be from “within the limits of reason alone.” Following through on this line of argument the discussion concluded on the note that this critical engagement would also mean that an affirmation of the Islamic ideals of iman, islam, and ihsan be articulated on the same grounds—on the basis of reasoned argument. The second section focused on the parameters of Islam’s constructive engagement with the modern West where Islam plays the role of a prophetic affirming witness from outside the modern world. This part of the discussion suggested that the affirmation of the Enlightenment ideals of human dignity, human equality, and the value of the profane/material worlds be articulated from the Qur’anic perspective. Following this line of argument, the discussion concluded with the observation that a critical evaluation of certain developments in Muslim history that have undermined (and even reversed) the affirmation of human dignity, human equality, and value of the material/ profane worlds be articulated from the same perspective—the Qur’anic event. In short, the argument in the previous two sections can be summarized thus: Islam can gain valuable insights into its own inner ethos, historical development, and latent potentialities by critically but constructively engaging with the modern West.


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Qur’anic ‘A QL and Enlightenment Reason: A Critical-Constructive Encounter In the second section I identified the Enlightenment enshrinement of human reason as the single most daunting obstacle faced by any


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perspective aspiring to be a “dissenting voice within the reality of the modern world.” It would be worthwhile to spend some time specifically addressing the Qur’anic possibilities in facing this obstacle. The Qur’an repeatedly refers to the processes of “thinking” and “reasoning” properly, using the word ‘aql to refer to something that, roughly, can be called “reason.” But the question emerges regarding the validity of equating or identifying Qur’anic ‘aql with Enlightenment “reason.” It might be the case that there is only a superficial resemblance between the two and that in reality ‘aql and reason do not have anything in common. If this is the case then it becomes Qur’anically questionable to base critical engagement with the Enlightenment tradition from “within the limits of reason alone.” This would mean that even if the argument presented earlier is rationally coherent and attractive, it is not Qur’anically sound. It is for this reason that the issue of the relationship between Qur’anic ‘aql and Enlightenment reason has to be explored in greater depth. Perhaps the best place to begin the discussion on ‘aql in the Qur’an is to restate the Qur’anic valuation of the Bible. As already noted, there is a significant difference between the Qur’anic Taurat and the Torah of Rabbinic Judaism as well as the Qur’anic Injeel and the Gospels of the Church. In spite of the differences the claim that there is no similarity between the Qur’anic and the non-Qur’anic conceptions proves to be untenable in light of the Qur’an’s self-affirmation with reference to the Bible. This basically means that the Qur’anic narrative holds open the possibility of engaging in constructive dialogue with someone/something that it considers to be profoundly flawed at some level. If Enlightenment reason is viewed through the lens of this Qur’anic attitude toward the Bible, then the implication is that a meaningful engagement between the two, from the Qur’anic perspective, is not predicated on the need for an exact equivalence between reason and ‘aql. Far short of demonstrating an equivalence (or even something close to equivalence) the only thing that needs to be demonstrated is that there is an affinity between the two, that is roughly the same as the affinity between the Qur’an and the Bible, in order for meaningful exchange to take place. If a degree of affinity between Qur’anic ‘aql and Enlightenment “reason” is not recognized/acknowledged (or if there is no similarity to be recognized)37 then any interaction between Islam and the Enlightenment will be a forced encounter rather than a meaningful conversation. Unlike what it says about the Torah and the Gospels, the Qur’an does not explicitly say that human ‘aql contains “light, guidance.” But it does say, repeatedly, that misguided people groping about in the




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Shame upon you and that which you worship besides Allah! Will you not, then, use your reason? (21:67)

On the Day of Judgment, Allah will say to those who followed Satan: He had already led astray a great many of you: could you not, then, use your reason? (36:62)

On nearly 36 other occasions the Qur’an states those who use their ‘aql properly will be blessed with the ability to interpret God’s signs in the world around them (as well as in the Revealed Word) and recognize the reality toward which the signs point. For example: Thus do We spell out these ayaat [signs] unto people who use their reason. (30: 28)

And: And in the succession of night and day, and in the means of subsistence which God sends down from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and in the change of the winds: [in all this] there are ayaat[sings] for people who use their reason. (45:5)

What the Qur’an lacks in explicit formulation it makes up by implicit pointers. While never explicitly saying that human reason contains “light, guidance,” on nearly 60 different occasions the Qur’an draws attention to the inherent value in using the ‘aql properly and the pitfalls of not using it properly. In contrast there are only about 12 references to the Torah and Gospels in the same vein. It is not only the Qur’anic valuation of reasoning faculties that is directly relevant to the present discussion, the Enlightenment understanding of reason is just as relevant. It is obvious that from within the Enlightenment tradition the understanding of “reason” is hardly a settled issue. It is obvious that Descartes’ understanding is different than that of Hume, who differs from Kant, who obviously differs from Locke, and so on. Leaving aside the understanding of “reason” postulated during the infancy period of the Enlightenment, the


dark are not using their reasoning faculties (‘aql) properly. On nearly 24 occasions the Qur’an condemns those who misuse their ‘aql and thereby turn away from light and guidance. For example, the Qur’an has Abraham (peace be upon him) saying to the idol worshippers:


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more mature understanding of this human faculty articulated by late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western thinkers opens up novel possibilities of bringing the Enlightenment tradition into conversation with the Scriptural traditions. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heideger, Theodore Adorno, and Emanuel Levinas (to name a few) have interrogated the different understandings of “reason” offered by their predecessors.Their analysis shows the preceding understandings to be wanting and points in directions that show reason to be much more amenable to conversation with “religion” or the “religious” than previously believed. Hent de Vries, in his reading of Adorno and Levinas, has noticed echoes and remnants of the religious implicit in the rational/philosophical critique of the earlier understandings of reason.38 While the multiform of the Enlightenment has been known since at least Nietzsche’s critique, it has taken longer for the realization that a mature and self-critical progeny of Enlightenment reason is not inherently antithetical to the religious to gain acceptance. These two factors signal a shift in the self-understanding of reason that traces its origin back to the Enlightenment. This in turn opens up the possibility of identifying what David Ford has called “mutual grounds” (in contrast to the alleged “neutral grounds”) on which a mutually enriching exchange can take place between ‘aql and reason. The foregoing discussion of ‘aql in the Qur’an and the evolution of the selfunderstanding of modern reason is far too cursory to lead to the strong claim that mutual grounds between ‘aql and reason actually exist. But it is not so cursory that a more modest claim cannot be made that the resources are present for the cultivation of such grounds. If there is a strong claim that is being made it is that engaging with the Enlightenment tradition on these mutual grounds would be as Qur’anically authentic as the Qur’an’s use of the Bible in its engagement with Judaism and Christianity, should these mutual grounds be found.

A Final Word In the final few pages I would like to explicitly express the logic that has been implicitly shaping the foregoing discussion. In very simple terms, the proposal to “study the Other, understand the Self” is underpinned by the value-position that in the Self’s encounter with the Other, the ultimate goal is not to critique-condemn-replace but redeem-reform-embrace. It is obvious that this is the Qur’anic logic in its engagement with Judaism and Christianity. Speaking from the Qur’anic perspective, while there is certainly something deeply




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problematic in the modern secular reality that needs to be critiqued loudly (just as there is something deeply problematic in the Jewish and Christian traditions that needs to be critiqued loudly), the critique cannot become reified. The critique is a means toward redeeming, which itself is a prelude to reforming with the ultimate goal being the embracing of the afflicted paradigm/event. If the possibilities of reformation and redemption are not implicit in the critique, then the critique itself is an expression of the worst characteristics of the Enlightenment. Looking at certain “orthodox” expressions of the Enlightenment critique of illumination, wisdom and the Divine shows that this critique does not hold open the possibility of reforming and redeeming the paradigm that is being critiqued. It is obvious that the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment analysis of illumination, wisdom, and the Divine laid bare deeply problematic aspects of traditional culture (including traditional religion) that were not known before. But instead of endeavoring to redress these problematic aspects of traditional culture as a “philosophic healer” using the resources already present in the afflicted paradigm, certain expression of Enlightenment thought played the role of a colonizing imperialist on a mission to civilize the savage/primitive by a variety of means—some of which amounted to burning the body to save the soul. In short the only unredeemable aspect of the Enlightenment is that its stance toward nonEnlightenment paradigms is one of critique-condemn-replace. But in the interests of intellectual honesty it must be forcefully stated that the “sin” of reification is not a peculiarly Enlightenment/modern/Western shortcoming—it is a universal human potential. As everyone knows very well, long before the birth of the modern West, this potential was actualized repeatedly during the course of history by every religion known to historians. Long before modern sociologists, philosophers, and historical-critical scholars, built their reputation by naming this phenomenon, religious reformers from every tradition had risked not only their reputations, but in many cases also their lives, fighting it. Social scientific analysis of the different religious tradition has laid bare the inescapable fact that particular theologies and institutions, throughout the course of religious history, have been identified with the Absolute or Ultimate Truth—to question the legitimacy of these particular theologies and institution was the same as questioning the legitimacy of Islam, Christianity, and/or Judaism. Just as the effective diagnosis and remedy of the reifications of religious traditions in the past did not mean the abandoning of the tradition itself, a meaningful response to the reifications of the Enlightenment tradition cannot mean the abandoning of the


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tradition itself. To adopt the position that the Enlightenment tradition has to be abandoned in its entirety in response to its shortcomings is to exhibit the worst characteristics of that which one is critiquing and rejecting. This basically means that one has adopted the same attitude toward the Enlightenment paradigm that the Enlightenment paradigm had adopted toward traditional religion and classical philosophy. This is not only a modernist move in the most negative sense, but also one that is doomed to failure. In fact, the approach of critique-condemn-replace is being increasingly heard in mainstream Western political and intellectual circles vis-à-vis the Muslim world. Pim Fortuyn’s fulminations are not an anomaly. His voice is loudly echoed by important segments in Western politics, academics and popular culture. Contemporary Islam should not only challenge the conclusions that the critique-condemn-replace approach produces, but also the fact that the troubled and disturbed Self automatically labels the Other as troubling and disturbing in this approach. A more sane approach “albeit a more courageous, complex and nuanced one” and one that is built on scripturally (Qur’anically) reasoned grounds is redeem-reform-embrace. The is a life-affirming approach that will lead to enhanced understanding on the part of a troubled and alienated Self as a result of its critical but empathetic encounter with the alien Other.

Notes I would like to thank Abdal Hakim Murad, Muhammad Suheyl Umar, Yamine Mermer, Vincent Cornell and Jim Fodor for their comments on earlier versions of this paper—comments that proved to be very helpful as I revised the paper. 1. Murad, “Faith in the Future: Islam after the Enlightenment,” Article posted on http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/postEnlight.htm, 2002. This article was reprinted in Islamic Studies 42/2 (Summer 2003): 245–258. 2. Murad, “Faith in the Future,” p. 3 3. The terms “maculate” and “maculation” are used here in the same sense that David Weis Halivni uses them in Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 4. This is “constructive” engagement with the Bible because the Qur’an turns to the Bible to support its own position—even thought the position is one where parts of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions are being critiqued. 5. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s “Sirat Rasul Allah” (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.107.




Basit Bilal Koshul 6. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an (Gibraltar, Spain: Dar Al-Andalus, 1997), p. 586, fn. 70. 7. Murad, “Faith in the Future,” p. 9. 8. Ibid., p. 8. 9. P. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? Translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 188. 10. Ibid., p. 6. 11. Ibid., p. 175. 12. Murad, “Faith in the Future,” p. 9. 13. It is obvious that the Enlightenment paradigm does not define the modern West in its totality, and it is equally obvious that Descartes, Hobbes, and Malthus do not exhaust the possibilities of Enlightenment thought. Enlightenment thought and the ideas of these thinkers are cited here only to bring into sharp relief the uniquely modern character of the problematic that Islam must face (and face up to) in its critical (and/or constructive) engagement with modern Western thought. 14. This phrase is used with due acknowledgment (and apologies) to Kant. 15. Murad, “Faith in the Future,” p. 2. 16. R. Ellwood, Cycles of Faith: The Development of the World’s Religions (California: Altamira Press, 2003), p. 85. 17. Mohammed Bamyeh has authored a study detailing the fact that the Blessed Prophet simultaneously built upon, and critiqued/dismantled existing ideas and structures from the pre-Islamic era. While this part of Bamyeh’s analysis is quite insightful, he lapses into a form of sociological determinism by positing too close a causal relation between particular social conditions (pre-Islamic Arab culture on the eve of Islam’s emergence) and a unique historical phenomenon (i.e., the emergence of Islam.) See Mohammed A. Bamyeh, The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (Minnesota, London: University of Minnesota Press. 1999). 18. I do not mention classical philosophy at this point because Enlightenment self-understanding posits a continuation with and fulfillment of the classical philosophical tradition. While scholarly research shows that Enlightenment philosophy is a break from classical philosophy in its rejection of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine (i.e., Hadot), I am not aware of a similar argument showing that the Enlightenment understanding of individualism, universalism, and materialism is also a departure from classical philosophy. 19. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Press, 2002). 20. See Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1984). 21. See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).


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22. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford and Massachusettes: Doubleday, 1988). 23. See Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 24. M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore, Pakistan: Institute of Islamic Culture, 1999), pp. 100–101. 25. In the previous section the examples of Descartes, Hobbes, and Malthus were isolated from the Enlightenment tradition in order to highlight and sharpen the distinction between Islam and Enlightenment thought. Here three particular ideals are isolated in order to highlight the commonality between Islam and the modern West. In both cases I am well aware of the fact that countervailing arguments could be made—and I have made such an argument myself. In the present case it could be argued that the guillotine in revolutionary France and the gas chambers in nazi Germany are as much an expression of Enlightenment ideals as the three ideals that have been mentioned. Astute thinkers since the birth of the Enlightenment— Pascal, Blake, Goethe, Rousseau—have warned of the “dark” side of the Enlightenment long before world wars, death camps, totalitarianism, mutually assured destruction, and so on. In more recent times, Weber [Economy and Society, vol. 2. (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1978).] is probably alluding to the role of guillotine in revolutionary France when he comments: “This charismatic glorification of ‘Reason,’. . . found a characteristic expression in its apotheosis by Robespierre . . .” (p. 1209). Richard Rubenstein takes Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy and technology further and analyzes the nazi Holocaust in light of Weber’s analysis of the process of rationalization in (The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1987). He argues that: The Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that produced the two world wars and Hitler. (p. 6, emphasis in original) And a little bit later: One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization. On the contrary, we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. (p. 21, emphasis in original)




Basit Bilal Koshul Given the depth and breadth of the critique of the Enlightenment that is part and parcel of the Western intellectual tradition, it is probably not an exaggeration to state that Muslims do not bring any genuinely original insights to the discussion when they describe the dark side of the Enlightenment. The point of the present discussion is not to offer a value-judgment based on comparing and contrasting the “bright” side of the Enlightenment with its “dark” side. The goal is to identify the particular points and the particular conditions under which Islam (in contrast to other religious traditions) can make a (uniquely?) positive contribution to the modern world, and also benefit from what the modern world has to offer. In the context of the circling of the square, the following observations by Iqbal are very much on the mark: Humanity needs three things to-day—a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and the basic principle of a universal import directing the evolution of society on a spiritual basis. Modern Europe has, no doubt, built idealistic systems on these lines, but experience shows that truth revealed through pure reason is incapable of bringing that fire of living conviction which personal revelation alone can bring. This is the reason why pure thought has so little influenced men, while religion has always elevated individuals, and transformed whole societies. The idealism of Europe never became a living factor in her life, and the result is a perverted ego seeking itself through mutually intolerant democracies whose sole function is to exploit the poor in the interest of the rich. Believe me, Europe today is the greatest hindrance in the way of man’s ethical advancement. The Muslim, on the other hand, is in possession of these ultimate ideas on the basis of a revelation, which, speaking from the inmost depths of life, internalizes its own apparent externality . . . and in view of the basic idea of Islam that there can be no further revelation binding on man, we ought to be spiritually one of the most emancipated peoples on earth. Iqbal in Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, p. 142 The fact that the Enlightenment ideals (i.e., the “bright” side of the Enlightenment) is currently under siege is obvious—and it is under siege from precisely the “dark” side of the Enlightenment. In its current predicament it is difficult to see how the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment can survive the assault from the unrestrained quest for economic profit, technological domination and manipulation of the environment, and bureaucratic efficiency. This is what Rubenstein wrote in the concluding paragraph of his book after acknowledging that the book was the “result of one political conservative’s attempt to reassess his views on politics and society in the aftermath of Watergate and the Nixon presidency” (The Cunning of History, p. 95): Much of this book has dealt with the fate of those who were rendered politically or economically redundant in earlier decades of


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26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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this century. Their story is one of the most terrible in the annals of the race. In a time of diminishing affluence and increasing mass unemployment, their story carries a warning concerning our own future. The history of the twentieth century has taught us that people who are rendered permanently superfluous are eventually condemned to segregated precincts of the living dead or are exterminated outright. No genuine conservative could possibly defend policies or institutions that condemn an ever-multiplying number of people to such a fate. Such policies are recipes for unmitigated disaster. Before it is too late—and the hour is very late indeed— conservatives must distinguish themselves from defenders of selfish, anti-social privilege. (pp. 96–97) Given the predicament of Enlightenment ideals, Islam is afforded with a unique historical opportunity to render a most meaningful service to modern humanity. If it is the case that the modern Muslim can affirm the ideals of human dignity, universal equality before the law and the value of the material/profane on the basis of revelation then Islam can provide a supra-rational affirmation of these ideals and inject fresh life and vigor into them. In return the Muslim would be in a position to move out of his/her own state of spiritual stupor and lethargy. See, George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Higher Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). See also the companion volume he wrote to follow up on the argument/evidence he presented in the first book: The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). See the “Introduction,” in Marcel Boisard, Humanism in Islam (Indiana: American Trust Publications, 1988). See Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). See Bennabi’s discussion of “colonialisibility” and “post al-Muwahhid man,” in Islam in History and Society, trans. Asma Rashid (Islamabad, Pakistan: Islamic Research Institute, 1988). See Robert Bellah, “Islamic Tradition and Problems of Modernization,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (California: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 146–167. See Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London, New York: Routledge, 1992). Bellah, Islamic Tradition and Problems, p. 150. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid. J. Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), p. 222.




Basit Bilal Koshul 36. See Abdal Hakim Murad, “Islam, Irigaray, and the Retrieval of Gender,” available at: http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/ gender.htm, 1999, p.16. 37. If it is indeed the case that there is no similarity between Qur’anic ‘aql and Enlightenment “reason” then there is very little practical value or meaningful substance in the line of argument in this presentation. 38. H. De Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).


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“ Volta ire’s Bastards” : A Response to Koshu l Muhammad Suheyl Umar

P

ostmodernism took hold of the intellectual scene during the later half of the twentieth century. It was well before its occupying the centre stage, while modernity held its sway, that, amidst an erosion of earlier cultural values as well as a blurring of the distinctive characteristics of the world’s traditional civilizations—giving rise to philosophic and moral relativism, multiculturalism, and dangerous fundamentalist reactions—many thinkers diagnosed these tendencies and suggested various remedies. Best among these were characterized by a foundational critique of the modern world coupled with a call for intellectual reform; a renewed examination of metaphysics, the traditional sciences, and symbolism, with special reference to the ultimate unanimity of all spiritual traditions; and finally, a call to the work of spiritual realization. It was in the wake of postmodernism that Frithjof Schoun says the following: . . . it should be pointed out that if the West needs the East, the latter also has need of the West—not of the West as such, of course, but of such few thinkers in the West as have managed to integrate their experiences of the modern world in a traditional and spiritual outlook that might, if one likes, be described as “oriental” or “mediaeval”. When in contact with the West, Orientals generally display an astonishing lack of suspicion and this can be explained by the fact that the modern world, while being a “necessary evil”, is not a normal possibility. Now the


Chapter 3


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Muhammad Suheyl Umar

Koshul is an Oriental by lineage but having lived in the West and completing his entire education in the Western academic world has given him the opportunity to “integrate his experiences of the modern world in a traditional and spiritual outlook.” The recent outcome, his article “The Qur’anic Self, the Biblical Other, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter” has offered me the possibility to reconsider and reevaluate certain settled convictions about the Enlightenment paradigm and the issue of the Western Other and to revisit the “halftruths” that used to create obstacles to an appreciation of the point in question. I would have preferred to begin my response on a nonpersonal note but since his article has held a mirror to my thinking and has challenged the mode of interpretation used for studying modernity, I have been goaded into responding otherwise. It has changed the frontiers of my views on the matter and, in some cases at least, has pulled down the walls that isolated one perspective from another. The destruction of such walls may be an evil; but the virtues it helped promote are indispensable and must be supported by other means. In what follows I have tried to explore these other means. But first let me raise a few questions about some of the issues the Koshul mentions in his article. In what follows I will think aloud about some of the premises which inform Koshul’s argument. I must raise these points because from my perspective these premises lead to a few complications that must be carefully considered. Koshul speaks of the twin tasks of dissension and affirmation from “within the reality of the modern world”1 that Islam has to undertake for successfully “squaring of the circle.” As could be surmised from the general thrust of the argument in the article the reality of the modern world is equated with the Enlightenment paradigm and its social program that was “most consistently and systematically institutionalized in the modern, secular West.” Can we refer to the reality of the modern world as a monolithic whole or is there a need to differentiate between the conceptual shifts that distinguish modernity from the postmodern and “beyond-postmodern”2 paradigms? I think that a distinction needs to be made on at least two counts; the obsessive concern with society that is a hallmark of postmodernism as well as its


Western elite to which we are referring is endowed with a “discernment of spirits” and a sense of proportion that often are lacking in Orientals; the latter, however, today stand greatly in need of these particular qualities, not on the still uncontaminated soil of their own civilisation where they understand what they are doing, but outside it in a chaotic world that violates every framework and insinuates itself everywhere.


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radical departure from Enlightenment philosophy’s categorical rejection of “the limited and relational character of the human mind/reason” and “enshrinement of reason” espoused by the Enlightenment paradigm to a position that could be termed as “the collapse of faith in reason’s power, thus to hold court.”3 This obviously entails that we take a different and perhaps more challenging set of “difficulties inherent” into consideration that arise with postmodernism and its aftermath. I will have the occasion to say something more on this point later. The same remark holds good for philosophy. “Concern with wisdom, illumination, and the Divine” was shared by premodern religious traditions and classical philosophy and “philosophy as a means of ‘attaining wisdom’ was seen as being inseparable from the choice of a particular way of life.”4 Both the Enlightenment paradigm and its postmodern and beyond-postmodern conceptual shifts profoundly differ from this shared vision of the entire premodern world. They are, however, not similar in their disagreement, hence cannot be subsumed under a single disclaimer. If the Enlightenment paradigm revolted against the premodern in the name of a Promethean humanism resulting in an “enshrinement of autonomous human reason” and claimed that there is an objective, universally applicable court of appeal that can adjudicate between worldviews, determining their truth or falsity, postmodernism is relativistic, nihilistic, and signifies loss of faith in reason’s power.5 This remark allows for a digression. Some where, during the course of its historical development, Western thought took a sharp turn in another direction. It branched off as a tangent from the collective heritage of all humanity and claimed the autonomy of reason. It chose to follow that reason alone, unguided by revelation and cut off from the Intellect that was regarded as its transcendent root.6 Political and social realms quickly followed suit. Autonomous statecraft and excessive individualism in the social order were the elements that shaped a dominant paradigm that did not prove successful.7 A few centuries of unbridled activity led Western philosophy to an impasse.8 Commenting upon the situation, Huston Smith remarked, “the deepest reason for the crisis in philosophy is its realization that autonomous reason—reason without infusions that both power and vector it—is helpless. By itself, reason can deliver nothing apodictic. Working, as it necessarily must, with variables, variables are all it can come up with. The Enlightenment’s ‘natural light of reason’ turns out to have been a myth. Reason is not itself a light. It is more than a conductor, for it does more than transmit. It seems to resemble an adapter which makes useful translations but on condition that it is


“ V o lt a i r e ’ s B a s t a r d s ”



powered by a generator.”9 The nature and direction of these “infusions” is still being debated.10 Clearly aware of reason’s contingency, medieval philosophy attached itself to theology as its handmaiden. Earlier, Plato too had accepted reason’s contingency and grounded his philosophy in intuitions that are discernible by the “eye of the soul” but not by reason without it. In the seventeenth century, though, responding to the advent of modern science with the controlled experiment as its new and powerful way of getting at truth, philosophy separated from theology. Bacon and Comte were ready to bring it into relation at once, this time into science. But there were frequencies science still could not register, so philosophy took off on its own. Modern philosophy took off in the seventeenth century by declaring its independence from theology; Descartes set it on its course by dedicating it to the proposition that reason, its instrument, can stand on its own. An important reason for thinking that modernity has come to an end is that its faith in autonomous reason has now collapsed. Recent developments in beyond-postmodern (or reversionary Postmodern) theology indicate that, finding the modern (read Enlightenment) position untenable, it now claims that its reason should not be called autonomous and therefore modern, for it insists that it is not autonomous: reason in their view must be supplemented by vision. But, in my opinion this augmented reason still continues to look modern in claiming the power to winnow the visions that supplement it, accepting or rejecting them by its own standards.11 This brings us to the core issue of the shared ground. If tradition, modernity, and postmodernism are so radically apart on the question of reason and human rationality how can we safely speak of a shared ground? Koshul posits: “Because of the Enlightenment’s rejection of the traditional religious/philosophical understanding of wisdom, illumination and the Divine, human reason becomes the only common ground on which the dissenting voice and the dominant paradigm can relate to each other. Consequently, the dissenting voice has to accept the following conditions if it wants to be acknowledged as speaking ‘from within the reality of the modern world’: (1) human reason be the court of appeal for all critique/complaints; and (2) human reason be the foundation on which all alternatives are affirmed/stand.” But it must be kept in mind that all religious/wisdom traditions and almost all premodern philosophy drew a sharp distinction between ratio and intellectus inasmuch as the latter operates intuitively and directly and were unanimous that reason operated in the restricted region of the mind’s domain. Modernity, postmodernism and, to a


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large extent,12 beyond-postmodern theology (or reversionary Postmodern) are at the antipodes of this view. I shall not detail the issues here as they are already well known. The point I like to emphasize is that it is difficult to see how, in the absence of a shared definition of reason and human rationality and with the collapse of faith in a universally applicable court of appeal, critiques/complaints could be addressed meaningfully and how can the dissenting voice and the dominant paradigm relate to each other? Citing the examples of “squaring the circles in the past” in the case “of numerous non-Arab cultural configurations” he has mentioned the pre-Islamic Arab civilization as well where “. . . the prophetic witness offers a revelatory affirmation of some of the real but dormant aspirations and potentialities at the very heart of its sociocultural environment, whose emergence and maturation is being forestalled by neglect and forgetfulness.” The argument culminates in saying that “there has to be an Islamic affirmation of some of the deepest aspirations that are at the heart of the Enlightenment project.” To me this seems to be a problematic analogy. No sociocultural environment in the premodern times had turned its back on Transcendence in the systematic way that characterized modernity. The Arabs of the times of the Prophet had many dormant virtues and principles. Their principles were lacking in height, confined to the horizontal plane, without any consciousness of the relationship between human virtues and the divine qualities of which they are the reflections. Nonetheless, human virtues cannot exist without their archetypes, which is another way of saying that in these men the apparently missing link was not absent but dormant; inevitably the degree of dormancy varied from man to man. The prophetic witness triggered its awakening. It derives its legitimacy from the inherent principles and practice of the Islamic tradition itself. Islamic tradition, from its vantage point of being the summer-up, incorporated—obviously with alterations, amendments, abrogation, and adaptations—the “Judeo-Christian” elements; especially the legal (or Shari’ite, in the technical sense of the word) aspects of the Mosaic code and the esoteric elements of the Christian message. These elements were brought to perfection in addition to the specifically Islamic aspects of the new faith in the Islamic revelation. This process, as it was accomplished on a purely vertical plane, had the stamp of divine sanction on it which distinguished it from any subsequent attempts that the Islamic community may have envisaged in the same direction. Nevertheless it had the significant role of setting the example for integrating ideas and symbols of pre-Islamic origin into the unitary perspective of Islam and its general framework. This could not be the





case of a mindset which is woven out of a rejection of Transcendence. The Enlightenment paradigm rejected Transcendence or a certain interpretation of it that denied human reason its legitimate rights and refused to meet its demands. This is a question that defies neat solutions and needs further deliberations to which I will return later. Let me begin with an important clarification because my observations noted earlier may have led the readers to believe that I see the Enlightenment paradigm flawed on all counts. That is not the case. I have voiced my reservations about one, albeit a fundamental and very important, aspect of the Enlightenment project. I will rely on Huston Smith to make the point for me. Smith notes: “A worldview is an inclusive outlook, and it is useful to distinguish its social, cosmological, and metaphysical components. The social component of past worldviews included, at times, justifications for slavery and the divine right of kings, while its cosmological components described the physical universe as understood by the science of the day—Ptolemaic astronomy or whatever. The contents of those two components obviously change, so are not perennial. The perennial, unchanging philosophy is metaphysical, or more precisely, ontological. It concerns such matters as the distinction between the Absolute and the relative, and the doctrine of the degrees of reality that is consequent thereon.”13 Following this threefold criteria I would like say a few words about the metaphysical, cosmological, and sociological achievements/shortcomings of tradition, modernity and postmodernism, respectively. This is in response to Koshul’s observation that the Enlightenment tradition contains certain trends, ideas, institutions, and so on that need to be not only accepted but also affirmed. This is a very pertinent point because if the Enlightenment paradigm has its virtues and human virtues cannot exist without their archetypes how did Enlightenment come to possess these virtues without any consciousness of the relationship between human virtues and the divine qualities of which they are the reflections? Is that phenomenon similar to the pre-Islamic Arabia? Before before this idea is discussed, a brief overview of the metaphysical, cosmological, and sociological achievements/shortcomings of tradition, modernity and postmodernism.14 When we align these problems with the three15 major periods in human history: the traditional period,16 the modern period,17 and postmodernism,18 it is obvious that each of these periods poured more of its energies into, and did better by, one of life’s inescapable problems than did the other two. Specifically, modernity gave us our view of nature,19 postmodernism is tackling social injustices more resolutely than people previously did. This leaves worldviews—metaphysics as distinct from


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Cosmological Achievements of Modernity In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europe stumbled on a new way of knowing that we refer to as the scientific method. It centers on the controlled experiment and has given us modern science21 which adds proof to generic science by its controlled experiment. True hypotheses can be separated from false ones, and brick by brick an edifice has been erected from those proven truths. We commonly call that edifice the scientific worldview, but scientific cosmology is more precise because of the ambiguity of the word world. The scientific edifice is a worldview only for those who assume that science can in principle take in all that exists. The scientific cosmology is so much a part of the air we breathe that it is hardly necessary to describe it.22

Tradition’s Cosmological Shortcomings That this scientific cosmology retires traditional cosmologies with their six days of creation and the like goes without saying. And there is another point. There is a naturalism in Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Islamic cosmological doctrines, and tribal outlooks that in its own way rivals science’s calculative cosmology, but that is the naturalism of the artist, the poet, and the nature lover23 not that of Galileo and Bacon. For present purposes, aesthetics is irrelevant. Modern cosmology derives from laboratory experiments, not landscape paintings.

Postmodernism’s Cosmological Shortcomings


cosmology, which restricts itself to the empirical universe—for our ancestors, whose accomplishments on that front have not been improved upon.20 Let us shuffle the historical sequence of the periods and proceed topically—from nature, through society, to the Big Picture, tying each topic to the period that did best by it. Modernity first, then postmodernity, leaving the traditional period for last.

With traditional cosmology out of the race, the question turns to postmodernism. Because science is cumulative, it follows as a matter of course that the cosmology we have in the twenty-first century is an improvement over what we had in the middle of the twentieth, which on my timeline is when modernity phased into postmodernity. But the



refinements that postmodern scientists (it is well to say postmodern physics here) have achieved have not affected life to anything like the degree that postmodern social thrusts have, so the social Oscar is the one that postmodernists are most entitled to.24 Be that as it may, postmodernism’s discoveries (unlike modern discoveries in physics—the laws of gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics, which are still used to launch space shuttles and to help us understand how hot electrons behave in semiconductors) have concerned details and exotica.25 Outranking the foregoing reason for not giving the cosmological Oscar to postmodernism is the fact that the noisiest postmodernists have called into question the very notion of truth by turning claims to truth into little more than power plays.26 This relativizes science’s assertions radically and rules out even the possibility of its closing in on the nature of nature.27 As there are no neutral standards by which to judge these paradigms, Kuhn’s thesis (if unnuanced) leads to relativism among paradigms that places Hottentot science on par with Newton’s. Kuhn himself phrased his thesis carefully enough to parry such relativism, but even taken at its best, it does not provide any method by which science can discover the foundation of matter. This demotes the whole enterprise of science as understood by modernity, and in doing so provides a strong supporting reason for not giving postmodernism the cosmological prize. It does better with social issues therefore we shall discuss postmodernism’s achievements on the social front.

Postmodernism’s Fairness Revolution The key word for postmodernism is “society.” This is not surprising. With the belief that there is nothing beyond our present world, nature and society are all that remain, and of the two, nature has become the province of specialists.28 This leaves society as the domain that presses on us directly and the one in which there is some prospect of our making a difference. And changes are occurring.29 A quick rehearsal of some changes that have occurred in a single lifetime makes it clear that social injustices are being recognized and addressed more earnestly today than they were by our ancestors.30


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Tradition’s Social Shortcomings These signs of progress acquire additional life when they are set against the unconcern of earlier times regarding such matters. This is another way of saying what Koshul has put forward in his question: “Why is it


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that the modern, secular West has succeeded in institutionalizing these ideals with a greater degree of consistency than traditional Muslim society?” There is no reason to think that traditional peoples were more callous than we are, but on the whole they saw their obligations as extending no further than to members of their primary communities: Buddhism’s dana (gifts), Jesus’ “cup of water given in my name,” Islam’s “poor due” and the likes. Encountered face-to-face, the hungry were fed, the naked were clothed, and widows and orphans were provided for as means allowed, but there human obligations ended. Injustices that were built into institutions (if such injustices were even recognized) were not human beings’ responsibility.31 Modernity changed this attitude. Accelerating travel and trade caused encounters between peoples whose societal structures were very different from one another, and these differences showed that such institutions were not like natural laws after all; they were humanly devised and could therefore be critiqued.The French Revolution put this prospect to a historic test; scrapping the divine right of kings, it set out to create a society built on liberty, equality, and fraternity. The experiment failed and the backlash was immediate, but its premise— that societies are malleable—survived.

Modernity’s Social Shortcomings Modernity deserves credit for that discovery, and (if we wished) we might excuse it for its poor handling of this discovery on grounds that it was working with a new idea. The record itself, however, is by postmodern standards, deplorable. Under the pretext of shouldering “the white man’s burden” to minister to “lesser breeds without the law,” it ensconced colonialism, which raped Asia and Africa, hit its nadir in the Opium Wars of 1841–1842, and ended by subjecting the entire civilized world to Western domination.32 Having dealt with nature and society, let us turn now to the third inescapable issue that human beings must face: the Big Picture.

Modernity’s Metaphysical Shortcomings



Modernity was metaphysically sloppy. Entranced by science’s accomplishments, it elevated the scientific method to “our sacral mode of knowing” (Alex Comfort), and because that mode registers nothing that is without a material component, immaterial realities at first dropped from view and then (as the position hardened) were denied existence.



In the distinction registered earlier, this was metaphysics reduced to cosmology.33 Modernity’s Big Picture is materialism or (in its more plausible version) naturalism, which acknowledges that there are immaterial things—thoughts and feelings, for example—while insisting that those things are totally dependent on matter. Both versions are stunted when compared with the traditional outlook. It is important to understand that neither materialism nor naturalism is required by anything science has discovered in the way of actual facts. We have slid into most restricted of metaphysical positions for psychological, not logical, reasons.

Postmodernity’s Metaphysical Shortcomings As for postmodernity, it sets itself against the very idea of such a thing as the Big Picture. It got off on the right foot by critiquing the truncated worldview of the Enlightenment, but from that reasonable beginning it plunged on to argue unreasonably that worldviews (often derisively referred to as grand narratives) are misguided in principle.34 Stated in the in-house idiom postmodernists are fond of, worldviews “totalize” by “marginalizing” minority viewpoints. They are oppressive in principle and should be resolutely resisted. If hardcore postmodernism were accurate in this charge one should stop in one’s tracks, but it has not proved that it is accurate—it merely assumes that it is accurate and rests its case on examples of oppression that, of course, are not lacking. What has not been demonstrated is the impossibility of a worldview that builds the rights of minorities into its foundations as an essential building block. It is ironic that the very postmodernism that is dismissing the possibility of a comprehensive humane outlook is working toward the creation of such an outlook through its fairness revolution—its insistence that everybody be given an equal chance of pursuing what they deem to be the good life. The deeper fact, however, is that to have or not have a worldview is not an option. This is because peripheral vision always conditions what we are attending to focally, and in conceptual “seeing” the periphery has no cut off. The only choice we have is to be consciously aware of our worldviews and criticize them where they need criticizing, or let them work on us unnoticed and acquiesce to living unexamined lives.


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Tradition’s Metaphysical Excellence Neither modernity nor postmodernism has handled the metaphysical problem well. It is, of course, no proof that tradition handled it better.


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The traditional worldview is so maligned today that the only possible way to gain a hearing for it is to ease into it, so to speak, by suggesting plausibilities wherever openings for them appear. Describing the traditional worldview and defending its merits, therefore, comes close to being the object of an entire book.35 I will not try to compress it into a page or two here. The present audience, I presume, agrees that with regard to postmodernism’s religious alternative, we can speak of it in the singular and simply assume that a common metaphysical “spine” underlies the differences in the theologies of the classical languages of the human soul, and the world’s great religions. This is coupled with the claims of tradition that people need worldviews, that reliable ones are possible, and that they already exist. If mainline and polemical postmodernism were to recede, the obsession with life’s social dimension that they saddled us with would relax and we would find ourselves able to think ontologically again. An important consequence of this would be that we would then perceive that religious outlooks have a great deal in common. For one thing, they all situate the manifest, visible world within a larger, invisible whole.36 The further unanimous claim of religious cosmologies, though, finds no echo in science, for (being a value judgment) it is beyond science’s reach. Not only is the invisible real; regions of it are more real and of greater worth than the visible, material world. The inclusive, presiding paradigm for tradition is the Great Chain of Being, composed of links ranging in hierarchical order from meager existents up to the ens perfectissimum; the foremost student of that concept, Arthur Lovejoy, reported that “most educated persons everywhere accepted [it] without question down to late in the eighteenth century.”37 To that endorsement, Ken Wilber has added that the Great Chain of Being is “so overwhelmingly widespread . . . that it is either the single greatest intellectual error ever to appear in humankind’s history—an error so colossally widespread as to literally stagger the mind—or it is the single most accurate reflection of reality yet to appear.”38 An obvious moral emerges from what has been said. If we run a strainer through our past to lift from each of its three periods the gold it contains and let its dross sink back into the sands of history what do we get? Modernity’s gold that is, science is certain to figure importantly in the third millennium, and postmodernity’s focus on justice likewise stands a good chance of continuing. It is the worldview of tradition that is in jeopardy and must be rehabilitated if it is to survive. Being more specific, the present challenge to the Muslim world is reversed in the sense that it must learn to be tolerant of a world which





threatens its very existence without losing its identity and the secularized West must learn the very difficult lesson that its modern and postmodern understanding of man and the world is not universal. Moreover, since religion does not acknowledge any principles higher than its own, not even the survival of the human race, if asked to establish peace, it will do so on its own terms or not at all. This brings me back to the initial question of the virtues of Enlightenment paradigm. Koshul points out that “The Enlightenment break with traditional religion is as much tied to the affirmation of individualism, universalism, and materialism as to the rejection of the notions of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine.” He also notes that the “Enlightenment affirmation of the dignity of the individual, equality before the law, and the value of the material/profane world provides Islam with a unique opportunity to be an affirming witness from outside the modern world” because these ideals are also at the core of the Islamic worldview. Koshul supports this contention by commenting on the annual Hajj ritual, noting that he “annual circling of the square (the tawaf) is the Islamic affirmation of the irreducible dignity of the individual, the equality of all human beings before the law, and the spiritual value of the material world and profane acts.” With this as the background he goes on to conclude that “[i]n spite of the notable and real difference, there are strong affinities between the Qur’anic notion of the human dignity, import of law, and value of the material/profane worlds and the Enlightenment view of the individual, law and material reality.” This brings us face to face with certain questions: Did in any epoch ever a worldview (and its translation into practice) achieve these “Enlightenment ideals of individualism, universalism, and materialism” without turning its back on wisdom, illumination, and the Divine? If Islam succeeded in achieving these ideals without paying its price of rejecting Transcendence (Hajj being a palpable example) what was the saving grace? Moreover Hajj is an Abrahamic ritual predating Islam and the Jews only stopped visiting the outlying Meccan Tabernacle of God when the corruption of its custodians had brought crude idolatry to the sacred precinct. Is it true that early Muslim society and, before that, other human collectivities, had achieved these Enlightenment ideals without severing their roots? A negative inference also imposes itself. If these ideals could be achieved without the burden of “wisdom, illumination, and the Divine” why bother? If human reason is not autonomous and it needs objective data to operate effectively, what provided the Enlightenment project with its “infusions” with its rejection of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine? Iqbal’s understanding of “inductive Intellect” cannot


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be cited here because his understanding sees the Intellect to be related to and proceeding from revealed knowledge and within the parameters of a wisdom tradition. Do we commit a mistake when we attribute “rejection of the notions of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine” to the Enlightenment paradigm? Is it only a reaction to the social side of the issue, the mixed bag of history that modernity and, more resolutely, postmodernity has manifested? As religions are worldviews or metanarratives—inclusive posits concerning the ultimate nature of things—its custodians cannot accept polemical postmodernism’s contention that on balance they are oppressive. We have noted that “the key word for postmodernism is society” and we may add this is also the case for modernity. Our present question bears on it, for it is almost entirely for their social repercussions that postmoderns fault worldviews. In applying that measuring rod both modernity and postmodernity simply assume (they do not argue) that religion does more harm than good.39 Whether this concern with society of modernity and of postmodernity is modern or instead modernly conceived, one cannot be sure—the Stoics and Prophets were fairly good on the subject. But we cannot have enough of the concern itself.40 Koshul continues: “This means that constructive engagement with the modern West requires a rejection of the uncritical affirmation of tradition (or a particular school within tradition) just as the critical engagement with the modern West requires a rejection of the blind negation of tradition by the zealots and liberals.” Following this line of reasoning, he argues that Muslims must subject the Islamic tradition to critique and explore the reasons why Muslim society failed to embody key Islamic ideals in institutional form. This is a task which, from my perspective, is innate to the Islamic tradition, its principle of movement. Do we require a reference to the Enlightenment paradigm to be alerted to its importance? If that is the case and we need awakening calls there is no problem with it. Koshul’s discussion of the way the Qur’anic Self relates to the biblical Other is very illuminating and I can only affirm what he has said in this regard. I would offer only a few brief comments. First, with reference to what has been said about the “shared ground” earlier it should be pointed out here that the critique/affirmation of Judaism and Christianity is the case of two sister wisdom traditions which share the common ground of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine with Islam. In the case of Enlightenment no such sharing on principles seems to exist. Second his reading of the Qur’anic texts would not please a large number of his coreligionists who are prone to making an exclusivist reading of the inclusivist verses of the Qur’an. The danger





of excluding those who can only open up to the religious Other on the basis of upholding the normativity of one’s own faith was vividly brought to light by the controversy over the book by the chief rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks. The manner in which Dr. Sacks was compelled by senior theologians in his own community to retract certain sentences from his latest book, The Dignity of Difference41 highlights well the intellectual challenge involved in reaching out to the Other without alienating one’s own community. I pray that Koshul is spared that fate. A key part of Koshul’s argument is that “the critique of the Enlightenment rejection of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine has to be from ‘within the limits of reason alone.’” His repeated emphasis on this point suggests that he does not think that such a task has been carried out. My assessment is rather different. It is not because I have deep sympathies or even affinities with some of them. I genuinely believe that the task of facing this paradigm squarely and producing “a critique of the Enlightenment rejection of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine . . . from ‘within the limits of reason alone’” has been successfully done, to a large extant, by the group of thinkers who are collectively referred to as “Perennialists.”42 Moreover, the “Perennialists” (Universalist would be a better word) are not the only ones who criticizes modernity/Enlightenment in this vein.43 This is also the verdict that “beyond-postmodern” or “reversionary Postmodernism” has passed on modernity/Enlightenment paradigm. I will let David Ray Griffin make the point for me. Griffin says, “Modernity paradigm, rather than being regarded as the norm for human society toward which all history has been aiming and into which all societies should be ushered—forcibly if necessary—is instead increasingly seen as an aberration. A new respect for the wisdom of traditional societies is growing as we realize that they have endured for thousands of years and that, by contrast, the existence of modern society for even another century seems doubtful.” Likewise, modernity as a worldview is less and less seen as The Final Truth, in comparison with which all divergent worldviews are automatically regarded as “superstitious.” The modern worldview is increasingly relativized to the status of one among many, useful for some purposes, inadequate for others.44 In the same vein, S. H. Nasr, a prominent Perennialist, has time and again argued for the need emphasizing the rational approach and mode of engagement. “Today in the West, as well as in the Islamic world itself, there is an ever greater need to study both the principles and manifestations of Islam from its own authentic point of view and a manner comprehensible to contemporary man, or at least to one


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who possesses sufficient intelligence and good intentions. Moreover, this needs to be achieved by using methods of analysis and description which are at once logical and in conformity with the Islamic perspective; for this latter places the highest value upon intelligence (al-’aql) and logic, which is inseparable from it, although of course the transcendent realities cannot be reduced to logical categories. This type of writing which can ‘translate’ Islamic teachings into a contemporary idiom without betraying it is very important not only for non-Muslims who wish to learn about Islam but most of all for young Muslims, who are now mainly products of modern educational systems.”45 Demands of reason should be satisfied—both the Perennialists and the “beyond-postmodernism” or “reversionary Postmodernism” agree, but where they part company is in defining reason and its role/ function in creating “a reasoned/rational critique of the Enlightenment rejection . . .” Huston Smith makes the point in the following remarks: “Whitehead’s categories are demanding, but they do in the end fit into our three-dimensional reason, from which it follows that to fit God into them is to position her inside our limited understanding. This translates into putting God in a cage. Religion must, to be sure, be intelligible in certain ways, but to try to make it rationally intelligible, fully so, is to sound its death knell” (emphasis in original). (In keeping with Perennialists generally, I draw a sharp distinction between ratio and intellectus inasmuch as the latter operates intuitively and directly.) It is to squeeze the pneuma—a word usually translated as spirit, but etymologically deriving from breath or air—out of it, leaving us with what someone has called “flat tire” theology. I realize that my rejection of Whitehead’s “ontological principle” here will sound like mystery-mongering to process theologians, but, apart from the pejorative in the word mongering, I welcome the charge. Vis-à-vis most modern and postmodern theology, I side with Sir Thomas Browne, who complained in his Religio Medici that the religion he typically heard preached did not contain sufficient impossibilities, adding that it is “no vulgar part of faith to believe things not only above but contrary to reason and against the evidence proper to our senses.”46 In the present context we are concerned with the preliminary stage of removing obstacles which make it difficult or impossible for the mind to understand. Intelligence has its rights, and these have not always been upheld by the representatives of religion. Agreed. The mental faculties need to be appeased and reassured; to this end religion has no option but to sacrifice certain half-truths, not to speak of mere suppositions and conjectures, which in the past were considered





as powerful motives for loving God “with all thy soul and with all thy strength” and a lack of which lead the Enlightenment thinkers to the revolt mentioned so often in this paper.47 I am also troubled by Koshul’s assertion that the Enlightenment could be considered as “a post-traditional expression of monotheistic ideals” and his insinuation that the secular Enlightenment has contributed a qualitatively better conception of human will, human freedom, and human consciousness than traditional religion. If this is indeed the case then one must wonder; what kept Providence waiting so long to actualize its ideals and that only through an instrument which ostensibly rejected “wisdom, illumination, and the Divine?” I think that these assertions by Koshul need strict qualifiers. I would read it as “the Enlightenment reasserted a more rational and comprehensible description of human will, human freedom, and human consciousness than was possible in its milieu.” Consequently, it would be more accurate to say that Enlightenment was a case similar to that of Islamic science which influenced the West and provided it with foundations for its scientific enterprise but had a different trajectory in the West and resulted in a very different ethos.48 Deliberation on this aspect of the issue may give us insights about the two faces of the Enlightenment paradigm. This entails that while correcting Enlightenment on its rejections and claims of autonomous reason and emphasizing the essential requirement of “vectored reason,” legitimate demands of reason should also be upheld. This does not mean—I add by way of a word of caution—that consciousness should be reduced to rationality alone that is discursive thought49 or reason severed from its transcendent noetic roots,50 since, to borrow the words of Iqbal, “The Total reality . . . has other ways of invading our consciousness”51; there are “non-rational modes of consciousness”52; “there is the possibility of unknown levels of consciousness”53 and “there are potential types of consciousness54 lying close to our normal consciousness.”55 On the practical level we are dealing with a received body of thought and praxis which, despite the postmodern critiques of its conceptual foundations, continues to hold sway in many ways. By head count the West is still modern. Not only that; Enlightenment, its “rejection of the notions of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine” and claims of autonomous reason, have perpetuated, in “reified/dogmatic assertions.” We are dealing, not with Voltaire but, to use John Ralston Saul’s term, with “Voltaire’s bastards” responsible for dissolution of human values and the rejections mentioned earlier.56


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The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God, however. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines about him that were abhorrent to reason. But their belief in a Supreme Being remained intact. Voltaire built a chapel at Femey with the inscription “Deo Erexit Voltaire” inscribed on the lintel and went so far as to suggest that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. In the Philosophical Dictionary, he had argued that faith in one god was more rational and natural to humanity than belief in numerous deities. Originally people living in isolated hamlets and communities had acknowledged that a single god had control of their destinies: polytheism was a later development. Science and rational philosophy both pointed to the existence of a Supreme Being: “What conclusion can we draw from all this?” he asks at the end of his essay on “Atheism” in the Dictionary. He replies: That atheism is a monstrous evil in those who govern; and also in learned men even if their lives are innocent, because from their studies they can affect those who hold office; and that, even if it is not as baleful as fanaticism, it is nearly always fatal to virtue. Above all, let me add that there are fewer atheists today than there have ever been, since philosophers have perceived that there is no vegetative being without germ, no germ without design . . .58 Voltaire equated atheism with the superstition and fanaticism that the philosophers were so anxious to eradicate. His problem was not God but the doctrines about him which offended the sacred standard of reason.

The question of reason in the Enlightenment paradigm and its subsequent reification could be read in a different light too. Schuon has remarked:59 In speaking of the great theophanies—Beyond-Being, Being and Divine Centre of Existence, or Self, Lord and Logos-Intellect— mention has also been made of the human intellect (this being referable to the Logos), which is “neither created nor uncreated”: it is thus possible, if desired, to distinguish a fourth theophany, namely, the Logos reflected in the microcosm; this is the same Divine Logos, but manifesting itself “inwardly” rather than “outwardly”. If “no man cometh unto the Father but by Me”, this truth or this principle is equally applicable to the pure Intellect in ourselves: in the sapiential


Karen Armstrong has a very pertinent remark in her chapter on “Enlightenment” in A History of God. Concerning Voltaire she observed:57


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Its degeneration is what is relevant to our present discussion. He says:60 When the Ancients saw wisdom and felicity in submission to reason, both human and cosmic, they were referring directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, to the one Intellect. The proof of this lies precisely in the fact that they linked reason to Universal Nature; in practice many committed the error of reducing this Nature to human reason,61 after having reduced God to Nature. This double reduction is the very definition of Greco-Roman paganism, or of the Greco-Roman spirit in so far, as it was pagan, and not Platonic; it may be added that only the Man-Logos or Revelation ‘resuscitates’ and gives full importance to reason,62 and only an exact notion of the Absolutely Real and of its transcendence gives a meaning to Nature.

It is not difficult to see where Enlightenment stands in this perspective and the way it has to be redeemed! “Beyond-postmodernism” or “reversionary Postmodernism” would also like to see the Enlightenment paradigm humbled in many ways and it insists on “reason supplemented by vision.”63 Its vision statement could be summarized in Griffin. David Ray Griffin concludes his statement, in Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, with a prophetic call for a new, postmodern science that will support rather than oppose theology. It is a bracing summons, but it rides a crucial oversight. To the extent that science moves in the direction Griffin wants it to, it will relax its effort to control and will content itself with trying to describe, because most of the things Griffin wants it to add to its repertoire—the immaterial, qualities, final causes, freedom, downward, and divine causation— cannot be manipulated. There is nothing wrong with describing, of course, or anything sacrosanct about control. On the contrary, the most valuable aspect of Heidegger’s entire corpus is his analysis of the manner in which Western civilization has drifted toward calculative reason and the disaster portended by that drift. The question is not whether we should correct this drift, as Griffin and Koshul are both convinced we should; the question concerns division of labor and what Confucius called “the rectification of names.” I see “reversionary Postmodernism” as still wedded to the modern conviction


order? and it is only in this order that we may speak of Intellect or intellectuality without making implacable reservations—it is essential to submit all the powers of the soul to the pure Spirit, which is identified, but in a supra-formal and ontological manner, with the fundamental dogma of the Revelation.


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that science is the privileged mode of knowledge. If this conviction be true, it stands to reason that all knowing should enter its camp. And so “reversionary Postmodernism” would have it: “science . . . means knowledge,” and Griffin goes on to tell us, that “even the modern boundary between science and theology will . . . be overcome.”64 Koshul parts company with the “reversionary Postmodernism” at this point as could be surmised from his argument developed in his fine comparative study of Ghazali and Ibn Rushd on the issue of reason and revelation.65

Conclusion Koshul begins the concluding part of his arguments with these words: “I would like to explicitly express the logic that has been implicitly shaping the foregoing discussion. In very simple terms, the proposal to “study the Other, understand the Self” is underpinned by the valueposition that in the Self’s encounter with the Other, the ultimate goal is not to critique-condemn-replace but redeem-reform-embrace.” He goes on to note that the attitude of “critique-condemn-replace” is a reflection of the worst characteristics of the Enlightenment, and it cannot/should not be adopted by those who are troubled by certain aspects of the Enlightenment tradition. While agreeing with him “to redeem-reform-embrace” I offer the following remarks as my conclusion. The view advocated by Koshul could be termed as a postmodernism, which in contrast to its deconstructive predecessor,66 be called constructive or revisionary. It seeks to overcome the modern worldview not by eliminating the possibility of worldviews as such, but by constructing a postmodern worldview through a revision of modern premises and traditional concepts. This constructive or revisionary postmodernism involves a new synthesis of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions. It rejects not science as such but only that scientism in which the data of the modern natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the construction of our worldview. The constructive activity of this type of postmodern thought is not limited to a revised worldview; it is equally concerned with a postmodern world that will support and be supported by the new worldview. A postmodern world will involve postmodern persons, with a postmodern spirituality, on the one hand, and a postmodern society, ultimately a postmodern global order, on the other. Going beyond the modern world will involve transcending its individualism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy, mechanization, economism, consumerism,





nationalism, and militarism. Constructive postmodern thought provides support for the ecology, peace, feminist, and other emancipatory movements of our time, while stressing that the inclusive emancipation must be from modernity itself. It however, by contrast with premodern, emphasizes that the modern world has produced unparalleled advances that must not be lost in a general revulsion against its negative features.67 This revisionary postmodernism is not only more adequate to our experience but also more genuinely postmodern. It does not simply carry the premises of modernity through to their logical conclusions, but criticizes and revises those premises. Through its return to organicism and its acceptance of nonsensory perception, it opens itself to the recovery of truths and values from various forms of premodern thought and practice that had been dogmatically rejected by modernity. This constructive, revisionary Postmodernism involves a creative synthesis of modern and premodern truths and values. But to work out such a creative synthesis is a challenging task. I would conclude with three reminders. First, finding Enlightenment thought useful to Islamic thought does not mean following it blindly or swallowing it uncritically. Neither in intention nor in result are they Islamic thinkers. Second, the kind of appropriation Koshul proposes is possible just to the degree that various postmodern critical analyses are conceptually separable from the secular, atheistic contexts in which they are to be found. Finally, I hope that by now it is clear the very thin soup one finds in postmodernism is not the only piety that one could call “postmodern.” Rather, some postmodern critiques open the door for a kind of Islamic thought that is robustly theistic and quite specifically Islamic. Perhaps one of the most important Islamic uses to which secular Enlightenment/postmodernism can be put is to help contemporary Islamic thinkers sort the wheat from the tares in our own traditions. The postmodern can lead back to the premodern, or, more precisely, a critically appropriated postmodernism can lead to a critical reappropriation of premodern resources. The characteristic features of this epoch very definitely correspond with the indications supplied from time immemorial by the traditional doctrines when describing the cyclic period of which it forms a part; and this will at the same time serve to show that what appears as anomalous and disorderly from a certain point of view is nevertheless a necessary element in a wider order and an inevitable consequence of the laws governing the development of all manifestation. However, let it be said forthwith, this is not a reason for consenting to submit passively to the confusion and obscurity which seem momentarily to be


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triumphing, for in such a case there would be nothing else to do but to remain silent; on the contrary, it is a reason for striving to the utmost to prepare the way of escape out of this “dark age,” for there are many signs that its end is approaching, if it be not immediately at hand. This eventuality also is in accordance with order, since equilibrium is the result of the simultaneous action of two contrary tendencies; if one or the other could entirely cease to function, equilibrium would never be restored and the world itself would disappear; such a supposition cannot possibly be realized, for the two terms of an opposition have no meaning apart from one another, and whatever the appearances may be, one can be rest assured that all partial and transitory disequilibrium’s will finally contribute toward the realization of the total equilibrium itself.

Notes 1. Emphasis my own. 2. David Ray Griffin has termed it “reversionary Postmodernism.” See David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology (State University of New York Press, 1989). 3. Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2000), pp. 133–142. 4. For a representative narrative, elucidating the long standing position of definition, function, and purpose of philosophy in Islam, see M. S. Umar, comp. “From the Niche of Prophecy”—Nasr’s Position on Islamic Philosophy with in the Islamic Tradition (Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 2000). 5. A quick overview of the course of philosophy would elucidate the point. I have selected Huston Smith to make the point for me. “If logic isn’t philosophy’s essence (Quine) and language isn’t either (Davidson), the question ‘what essence remains?’ cannot be avoided. We can argue over whether ‘essence’ is the right word here, but let us come to the point. The deepest reason for the current crisis in philosophy is its realization that autonomous reason—reason without infusions that both power and vector it—is helpless. By itself, reason can deliver nothing apodictic. Working (as it necessarily must) with variables, variables are all it can come up with. The Enlightenment’s ‘natural light of reason’ turns out to have been a myth. Reason is not itself a light. It is more like a transformer that does useful things but on condition that it is hitched to a generator.” Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2000), p. 137. 6. See Martin Lings, “Intellect and Reason,” in Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions, (repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1988), pp. 57–68;




7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

F. Schuon, Gnosis Divine Wisdom (London: J. Murray, 1978), pp. 93–99; S. H. Nasr, “Knowledge and its Desacralization,” in Knowledge and the Sacred (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 1–64; Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992), pp. 60–95. Also see his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2000). See René Guenon, “Individualism,” in Crisis of the Modern World (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1981), pp. 51–65. Also see “Social Chaos” in the same book, pp. 66–78. For a few representative writings that indicate this situation, see “Scientism, Pragmatism and the Fate of Philosophy,” Inquiry29, p. 278; cf. Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, p. 142, (repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004); Hilary Putnam, “After Empiricism,” in Behaviorism 16/1 (Spring 1988); Alasdair MacIntrye, “Philosophy; Past Conflict and Future Direction,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Supplement to 16/1 (September 1987); also see Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association59 (1986), and Kenneth Baynes, Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). Huston Smith, “Crisis in Modern Philosophy,” in Beyond the PostModern Mind (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1990; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004), p. 137. Huston Smith has pointed towards the possibility of accepting these “infusions” from Philosophia Perennis or Religio-Perennis, the sapiential doctrines of mankind. See his “Two Traditions and Philosophy,” in Religion of the Heart—Essays Presented to Frithjof Schuon on his 80th Birthday (Washington, DC: Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1991), pp. 278–296. In this regard also see F. Schuon, “Tracing the Notion of Philosophy,” Sufism Veil and Quintessence (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1985), pp. 115–128; F. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, trans. Peter N. Townsend (New York: Harper and Row, 1975; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004). A similar awareness could be discerned in the arena of politics, humanities, and social sciences. The impasse, though with different implications, was reached by the parallel paradigm of autonomous politics and social sciences which had refused to accept any “infusion” from a higher domain. In this regard see the important debate between David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology. I say so because that which the beyond-Postmodern theology calls “prehensions” is what comes closest to tradition’s “intellection.” David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, p. 62. I summarize it from Huston Smith, Religion–Significance and Meaning in an Age of Disbelief (repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2002), pp. 11–22.



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15. For the present discussion I have left out the beyond-Postmodern paradigm and its conceptual shift. 16. Which extended from human beginnings up to the rise of modern science. 17. Which took over from there and continued through the first half of the twentieth century. 18. Which Nietzsche anticipated, but which waited for the second half of the twentieth century to take hold. 19. It continues to be refined, but because modernity laid the foundations for the scientific understanding of nature, it deserves credit for the discovery. 20. The just entered distinction between cosmology and metaphysics is important here, so I shall expand it slightly. Cosmology is the study of the physical universe—or the world of nature as science conceives of it—and is the domain of science. Metaphysics, on the other hand, deals with all there is. (The terms worldview and Big Picture are used interchangeably with metaphysics in this book.) In the worldview that holds that nature is all there is metaphysics coincides with cosmology. That metaphysics is named naturalism. 21. Generic science (which consists of careful attention to nature and its regularities) is as old as the hills—at least as old as art and religion. 22. Around fifteen billion years ago an incredibly compact pellet of matter exploded to launch its components on a voyage that still continues. Differentiation set in as hydrogen proliferated into the periodic table. Atoms gathered into gaseous clouds. Stars condensed from whirling filaments of flame, and planets spun off from those to become molten drops that pulsated and grew rock-encrusted. Narrowing our gaze to the planet that was to become our home, we watch it grow, oceanfilmed and swathed in atmosphere. Some three and a half billion years ago shallow waters began to ferment with life, which could maintain its inner milieu through homeostasis and could reproduce itself. Life spread from oceans across continents, and intelligence appeared. Several million years ago our ancestors arrived. It is difficult to say exactly when, for every few years palaeontologists announce discoveries that “set the human race back another million years or so,” as press reports like to break the news. 23. Of Li Po, Wordsworth, and Thoreau. 24. I need to support my contention that postmodern science does not measure up to modern physics in the scope of its discoveries. It says nothing against the brilliance of Stephen Hawking, Fred Hoyle, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg, and their likes to add that they have discovered nothing about nature that compares with the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Born. In molecular chemistry things are different. DNA is a staggering discovery, but—extending back only several billion years compared with the astrophysicists




25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

billions of light years—it does not pertain to nature’s foundations. The fact that no new abstract idea in physics has emerged for the last 70 years may suggest that nothing more remains to be discovered about nature’s foundations. The billions of dollars that have been spent since the middle of the twentieth century (and the millions of papers that have been written on theories that change back and forth) have produced no discoveries that impact human beings in important ways. All are in the domain of the meta-sciences of high-energy particle physics and astronomy, whose findings—what is supposed to have happened in the first 10–42 seconds of the universe’s life, and the like—while headlined by the media have no conceivable connection to human life and can be neither falsified nor checked in normal ways. This allows the building blocks of nature—particles, strings, or packets—to keep changing, and the age of the universe to be halved or doubled every now and then. Roughly 99.999 percent of science (scientist Rustum Roy’s estimate) is unaffected by these flickering hypotheses, and the public does not much care about their fate. According to this reading of the matter, when people claim that what they say is true, all they are really doing is claiming status for beliefs that advance their own social standing. The most widely used textbook on college campuses for the past 30 years has been Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and its thesis—that facts derive their meaning from the paradigms that set them in place—has shifted attention from scientific facts to scientific paradigms. We seldom confront it directly anymore; mostly it comes to us via supermarkets and cushioned by air-conditioning and central heating. Postcolonial guilt may play a part here, and so much remains to be done that self-congratulation is premature. In 1919 the Brooklyn Zoo exhibited an African American caged alongside chimpanzees and gorillas. Today such an act would be met with outrage anywhere in the world. A few examples of these changes include ● The civil rights movement of the 1960s accomplished its major objectives. In the United States and even in South Africa today, people of different races mix where they never could before—on beaches, in airline cabin crews, everywhere. ● In the 1930s, if a streetcar in San Francisco approached a stop where only Chinese Americans were waiting to board, it would routinely pass them by. By contrast, when (50 years later) I retired from teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, my highly respected chancellor was a Chinese American who spoke English with a Chinese accent. ● No war has ever been as vigorously protested as was the war in Vietnam by U.S. citizens. When things were going when the situation



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31.

32.

33.

34.

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was so appalling that military leaders advised President Nixon to use nuclear weapons, he declined because (as he said) if he did that, he would face a nation that had taken to the streets. ● The women’s movement is only a blink in the annals of history, but it has already scored impressive victories. Until long after the Civil War, American women really had no civil rights, no legal rights, and no property rights. Not until 1918 did Texas alter its law that everyone had the right to vote except “idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane, and women.” ● Arguably, the most important theological development of the latter twentieth century was the emergence of the theology of liberation, with its Latin American and feminist versions in the vanguard. ● In an unprecedented move, in March 2000 the pope prayed to God to forgive the sins his church had committed against the people of Israel, against love, peace, and respect for cultures and religions, against the dignity of women and the unity of the human race, and against the fundamental rights of persons. Two months later, 200,000 Australians marched across Sydney Harbor Bridge to apologize for their treatment of the aborigines while the sky written word SORRY floated above the Sydney Opera House. Perhaps because for those institutions were considered to be God given and unalterable. People regarded them in the way we regard laws of nature—as givens to be worked with, not criticized. David Hume is commonly credited with having the clearest head of all the great philosophers, but I (Huston Smith) read that somewhere in his correspondence (I have not been able to find the passage) he wrote that the worst white man is better than the best black man. What I can report firsthand is signs posted in parks of the international settlements in Shanghai, where I attended high school, that read, “No dogs or Chinese allowed” (Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters? [Harper and Row, 2002], pp. 19; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004 [as Religion—Significance and Meaning in an Age of Disbelief]). With a virgin continent to rape, the United States did not need colonies, but this did not keep it from hunting down the Native Americans, continuing the institution of slavery, annexing Puerto Rico and Hawaii, and establishing “protectorates” in the Philippines and several other places. When Carl Sagan opened his television series, Cosmos, by announcing that “the Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be,” he presented that unargued assumption as if it were a scientific fact. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean Francois Lyotard goes so far as to define postmodernism as “incredulity toward meta-narratives,” a synonym for metaphysics. The incredulity takes three forms that grow increasingly shrill as they proceed. Postmodern minimalism contents itself with pointing out that we have no consensual worldview today; “we have no maps and don’t know how to make them.” Mainline




35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

Postmodernism adds, “and never again will we have a consensual worldview, such as prevailed in the Middle Ages, Elizabethan England, or seventeenth century New England; we now know too well how little the human mind can know.” Hardcore Postmodernism carries this trajectory to its logical limit by adding, “good riddance!” See Huston Smith, Religion—Significance and Meaning in an Age of Disbelief (repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2002); Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, The Common Vision of the World’s Religions (Harper: San Francisco, 1992; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1984, 2002). Also see his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2002). This is of particular interest at the moment because currently science does the same. Dark matter does not impact any of science’s detectors, and the current recipe for the universe is “70 parts cold dark matter, about 30 parts hot dark matter, and just a pinch for all the rest the matter detectable to scientific instruments.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 1, 1992, A 16. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 59. Ernst Cassirer corroborates Lovejoy on this point: “The most important legacy of ancient speculation was the concept and general picture of a graduated cosmos.” Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, p. 9 Ken Wilber, “The Great Chain of Being,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 33/3 (Summer 1993), p. 53. That this runs counter to social science functionalism, which holds that institutions do not survive unless they serve social needs, is conveniently overlooked, but the deeper point is that the vertical dimension—the way religion feeds the human soul in its inwardness and solitude—gets little attention. For details see Huston Smith, “Brilliant Answers to the Wrong Question—Postmodernism and the World’s Religions” in Iqbal Review, Journal of the Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, Pakistan 46/2 (April–October 2005): pp. 25–42. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference—How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London and New York, Continuum, 2002). To prove my point I invite the readers to have a look at a few of the following works. Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, trans. Peter N. Townsend (New York: Harper and Row, 1975; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004); S. H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred; Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2000); Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters? (Harper and Row, 2002; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004 [as Religion–Significance and Meaning in an Age of Disbelief]); David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology; Titus Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect (repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004). The Perennialists are, after all, not that bad either.



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43. The criticisms we have in mind are well represented by the books cited by Lawrence E. Sullivan in his masterly study, Icanchus Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 884–885. What he says in the passage leading up to the suggested reading applies also to Western perceptions of Islam: One of the great disservices to our understanding of South American religions [read: Islam] has been the perception of tribal peoples [read: Muslims] as slavishly dedicated to an unchanging order revealed in the images of myth and handed down unquestioned and unmodified from one generation to the next. This attitude accompanies the evaluation of “myth” as a banal and inane narrative. Tribal peoples (representing “archaic” modes of thought) childishly cling to their myths, infantile fantasies, whereas mature contemporaries jettison myths with the passage of “historical time” and the entrance into “modernity.” It would be fascinating to study these and other justifications proffered for avoiding a serious encounter with the reality of myth [read: Islamic thought] and symbolic acts … This is not the place to carry out a history of the ‘modern’ ideas of myth and religion. It is enough to suggest that the Western cultural imagination turned away when it encountered the stunning variety of cultural worlds that appeared for the first time in the Age of Discovery. Doubtless this inward turn sparked the appearance of all sorts of imaginary realities. The Enlightenment, the withdrawal of Western thinkers from the whirling world of cultural values into an utterly imaginary world of “objective” forms of knowledge, and its intellectual follow-up coined new symbolic currency. These terms brought new meanings and new self-definition to Western culture: “consciousness/unconsciousness,” “primitive/civilized,” “ethics/mores,” “law/custom,” “critical or reflective thought/action.” 44. David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, p. xi. 45. S. H. Nasr, “Introduction,” in Islamic Life and Thought (Unwin, London, 1976; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2001), pp. 161–176. 46. David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, p. 81. 47. St. Mark, XII, 30. In Deuteronomy VI, 5, to which this is a reference, the element “mind” is not mentioned, which makes no fundamental difference since the mind is strictly speaking a psychic faculty, and is therefore implicit in the word “soul.” In St. Matthew, XXII, 37, on the other hand, the element “strength” is absent which again makes no difference inasmuch as physical energy and endurance are dominated by the will, which is also a psychic faculty. 48. S. H. Nasr, O’ Brian, eds., “Islamic Science, Western Science— Common Heritage, Diverse Destinies” in In Quest of the Sacred (repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2001), pp. 161–176.




Muhammad Suheyl Umar 49. Which is, as if, a reflection of the Intellect on the mental plane. 50. In the words of Rumi, “‘aql i juz’i ‘aql ra badnam kard,” Mathnawi, ed. Nicholson, Sang e Meel, Lahore, 2005, vol. III, p. 31, line, 8. Also see vol. II, p. 352, line, 11and vol. I, p. 130, line, 4. 51. Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Iqbal Academy Pakistan/Institute of Islamic Culture: Lahore, 1989), p. 13. 52. Ibid., p. 14. 53. Ibid., p. 37. 54. Ibid., p. 146. 55. How do these “other ways of invasion ‘relate to poetry?’ Iqbal tells us that the questions that call for an intellectual vision of reality for their answers are, ‘common to religion, philosophy and higher poetry.’” His complete statement reads as follows: “What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? These are the questions that are common to religion, philosophy and higher poetry. But the kind of knowledge that poetic inspiration brings is essentially individual in its character; it is figurative, vague and indefinite (The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam), p. 1. 56. For a powerful argument showing the intimate links between reason and the dissolution of human values in the modern world, see John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reasoning the West (New York: The Free Press, 1992). 57. Karen Armstrong, A History of God (Mandarin, 1993), pp. 352. 58. Philosophical Dictionary, trans. T. Besterman (London, London, 1972, p. 57.) 59. Frithjof Schuon, Dimensions of Islam (Unwin, London,1969; repr. Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1985), p. 76. 60. Ibid. 61. Emphasis mine. 62. This is the essence of Basit’s thesis in both of its negative and positive aspects. 63. See note 13 earlier. 64. See David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, p. 49. 65. See Basit B. Koshul, “Ghazzali, Ibn Rushd and Islam’s Sojourn into Modernity: A Comparative Analysis,” Islamic Studies, (Summer, 2004). Also see, S. H. Nasr, “Falsafey ka Mukhaalif Falasafi” [Ghazzali—A Philosopher’s Critique of Philosophy], Iqbaliyat, Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, 1987, p. 126, p. 128. 66. Prone to assume that maps must be believed fanatically if they are to be believed at all, polemical postmoderns condemn religions for fomenting disharmony. But it is useful here to refer back to a characteristic of


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postmodernity, which includes its being “paired with ethno-religious fundamentalism.” Postmoderns overlook that pairing. They do not perceive the extent to which their styles of thought (with the dangers of relativism and nihilism they conceal) have produced fundamentalism; this fundamentalism is the breeding ground for the fanaticism and intolerance they rightly deplore. 67. From the point of view of deconstructive postmodernists, this constructive postmodernism is still hopelessly wedded to outdated concepts, because it wishes to salvage a positive meaning not only for the notions of the human self, historical meaning, and truth as correspondence, which were central to modernity, but also for premodern notions of a divine reality, cosmic meaning, and an enchanted nature.







I sl am: A Dissenting Prophetic Voice within the Modern World Ya m i n e M e r m e r

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criptural Reasoning is about recovering the practice of hearing God’s speech in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures. In Scriptural Reasoning, the purpose of reading and interpreting the scriptures is the seeking of wisdom. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars focus on their scriptures in interfaith engagement because they believe that scripture lies at the core of each of their tradition’s identities. Scriptural Reasoning is thus a forum that aspires to bring “core identities into conversation.”1 The purpose in this seeking of wisdom and initiating conversation is to heal modernity. More specifically, Scriptural Reasoning is an attempt to repair specific kinds of suffering that are not being attended to by the academic community. Within this context of Scriptural Reasoning, an interesting question is how the Qur’anic scripture can contribute to the resolution of that suffering. This question is especially important given the widespread assumption that Islam and the West are basically incompatible: Islam did not develop in a secular environment and hence it has not been tamed to fit the terms of modernity. Scriptural Reasoning, however, does not view this situation as a challenge but as an opportunity. It sees in Islam the potential to infuse religion with a new life and thus to contribute with valuable resources of healing and wisdom in the modern world. If Islam has “failed” to adapt itself to the demands of the


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Enlightenment, as some believe, it has to be said that this “failure” may prove to be not so detrimental in the end; for a lack of adaptation to the Enlightenment project, may translate into a bonus, putting Islam in a rather advantageous position in the debate with modernity. A lack of adaptation, I suggest, does not necessarily amount in this case to the ossification of a religion or its death. I submit that in some important respects this seemingly negative situation has allowed Islam to preserve the purity of the traditional worldview; though, of course beyond preservation, this traditional worldview must also be revived, inspire humans, and be inspired by them.

Religion in Modernity and Islamic Tradition Modernity is often understood to denote Western secularism and the eviction of religious values. However, the role that religious traditions play in the lives of a vast majority of people in Western societies never died out. My understanding is that interest in religion in the West has always existed but that modern Western societies were at variance with religious thought, and discourse. “Religious” in the modern West often refers to some feeling felt for eternity or an intuitive knowledge of the metaphysical dimensions of life as Schleiermacher saw it for instance; Kant and post-Kantian thought did not make a significant departure from that stance either. In contrast, for the majority of Muslims, religion (din)2 is a way of life, as it comprises all aspects of life. This vision has roots in the Qur’anic perspective that faith is part of the world, and belief in God and His revelation is supported by evidence from the observable world. The Qur’an repeatedly refers to beings and events in the world as signs (ayat), which are proofs for the veracity of its claims. It calls its interlocutors to confirm that it is the Speech of God by inviting them to verify the truth of its claims in the world and in their selves; in other words, the Qur’an does not stand on its own claim of authority. This prompted the Muslim scholar Said Nursi to affirm that the students of the Qur’an follow evidence (burhan) and not mere authority or feeling: “They approach the truths of belief through both reason and heart. They do not abandon evidence in favor of blind obedience.”3 The fact that the Qur’an attaches tremendous importance to the use of reason and observation of the world is exceptionally significant in the context of the modern world. These mutually shared values may well constitute the starting point for Islam and the modern world to engage in a fruitful conversation.


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Islam: A Dissenting Prophetic Voice

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Following Abdulhakim Murad, Basit Koshul suggests pertinently that in order for Islam to engage the modern West constructively, it has to play the role of a “prophetic, dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world.” In what follows, I analyze the role of the Prophet as it is described in the Qur’anic scripture so as to expose the underlying axiology. It appears that the Prophet is the carrier of a remarkable message that is the source of healing and mercy (17:82) and that “guides those who follow it to peace and those who give it the lie to suffering” (20:48). The Qur’anic verses, suggest that peace and mercy are related to the concept of tawhid (divine unity) whereas suffering is connected to the notion of shirk (associating partners with God). I will argue that the Prophet aspires to transform us by revealing the scripture’s axiology and logic, which appear to be centered on the issue of tawhid. This logic supplies a frame of reference, a kind of map to use in the search for possibilities of healing and restoring peace within the Self and eventually in the world. I will make the case that in the context of the Qur’anic frame of reference the issue is not about using reason or not using it. It is rather that the search for wisdom entails a particular line of reasoning and a particular line of questioning. Questions play a key role in using reason and in the shaping of answers. The issue is: according to what standard/reference do we ask questions? What is it that determines our questions? What are our sources of inspiration, our prior experiences, and “internal libraries?” What if the object of our inquiry is completely alien or if our previous knowledge of it is in fact erroneous? How is it possible to ask the appropriate questions that lead to its understanding? How do we know we are not distorting the object of inquiry by imposing our prejudices on it? How do we ask the “right” questions that reveal rather than distort our object of inquiry? What are our criteria? To give an example, say a person, a few centuries ago, was presented with a laptop and asked to investigate it; how would he have proceeded? How revealing would his questions be, if he had no clue of what the computer was or for the purpose for which it had been assembled? Unless he was given some hints, could he have asked meaningful questions? I propose that from the Qur’anic perspective, our relationship to the world may be similar to that of the imaginary person mentioned earlier. To my mind, the value of the Qur’an is precisely here: the Qur’an draws attention to the signs for asking meaningful


Preunderstanding as a Way to Reasoning


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questions that do justice to the otherwise alien Other including the world and the Self 4 for it is by asking “genuine” questions, that “rational” answers may be obtained.The scripture also teaches us how to use reason to check the validity of its frame of reference. Once we are told that things are signs, for instance, we can go out into the world and check whether the claim is true or not; the answers would transform us and our presuppositions; then new questions informed by our transformed assumptions would arise with the hope of receiving new answers and so on. In the absence of a frame of reference, would it occur to us at all that “things” are actually signs, for instance? What would be the value of pragmatic, empirical experience alone then? (In the example mentioned earlier, the laptop can be demonstrated to work quite well as a tray for instance.) The point I want to make is that questions do not arise out of a void; what is it that shapes our questions and gives direction to them? How do we make sure that our questions are not distortive and misleading? I will contend that the prophetic voice’s foremost aim is to help us question our assumptions and presuppositions as well as our very modes of thinking by providing us with a “way to reason.”5

Prophetic Voice As Mercy In order to understand the nature of the prophetic voice and identify its major features as depicted in the Qur’an, I propose to start by analyzing the concept of “prophet” in the Qur’an.First, it is significant to note that the Qur’an describes the advent of prophets as an act of mercy, “And [thus, O Prophet,] We have sent you as [an evidence of Our] grace towards all humankind”6 (21:107). “Rahma,” which signifies “mercy,” “compassion,” “loving tenderness,” and more comprehensively “grace,” is a key concept in Islam.7 Although the prevalent belief in the West is that God in the Qur’an is “a god of fear rather than of love,” rahma is the divine attribute that is emphasized most in the Qur’an: “God has willed upon Himself the law of grace and of mercy” (6:12), “Say: ‘Peace be upon you. Your Sustainer has willed upon Himself the law of grace and mercy—so that if any of you does a bad deed out of ignorance, and thereafter repents and lives righteously, He shall be [found] much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace.’” (6:54)


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None of the other divine attributes has been similarly described.8 This exceptional quality of God’s mercy is further stressed in verse


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7:156, “My grace and mercy overspread everything.”9 And by sending prophets to the world, God dispenses grace and mercy on the world. In other words, a prophetic voice is essentially a voice of grace. In Qur’anic understanding, then, the mission of prophet is set by the Merciful, for the purpose of mercy. The Prophet is guided with mercy to find mercy (rahma) in this world and to convey the good news of scriptural wisdom to the world. “We have bestowed from on high upon you, step by step, this scripture (al-kitab) to make everything clear, and to provide guidance and grace and a glad tiding unto all who have surrendered themselves to God” (16:89). The Prophet is sent from within his people, so as to teach them the signs of God and purify them and teach them wisdom. “Even as We have sent unto you a Messenger from among yourselves to convey to you Our signs (ayat), and to cause you to grow in purity, and to impart unto you the Scripture and wisdom, and to teach you that which you knew not” (2:151).10 Moreover, the Qur’an teaches that this wisdom and guidance cannot be gained through any other means. The teachings of the prophet are original and essential to guide people who were previously “lost in error.”11

Reasoning to Mercy: The Case of Abraham The case of Abraham underscores the fact that reason needs to be “cultivated,” “reared” and blessed with mercy before it is able to “see” that beings are “signs” for the creator and then answer its rational thirst. Describing Abraham’s preprophetic reasoning, the Qur’an states that, [w]hen the night overshadowed him with its darkness, he beheld a star; [and] he exclaimed, “This is my Sustainer!”—but when it went down, he said, “I love not the things that go down.” Then, when he beheld the moon rising, he said, “This is my Sustainer!”—but when it went down, he said, “Indeed, if my Sustainer guide me not, I will most certainly become one of the people who go astray!” (6:76–77)



In these verses, we see an example of the use and limits of unguided reason. Here we see Abraham raising questions about the world. Abraham is reasoning. His reasoning is neither faulty nor problematic, and, yet, it is not adequate, either. Abraham’s indefinite questioning leads him to indefinite results. He realizes that his reasoning,


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which is definitely a necessary step, is nonetheless inconclusive. His line of questioning does not provide any rationally satisfactory answers for his concern (existential concern with his ultimate destiny, the ultimate destiny of the people around him, and that of the world around him). While searching for the one God, he finds himself lost in the world of multiplicity, and split into pieces amongst the contingent beings of the world (sun, moon, and so on) because he did not know yet how to ask genuine questions that lead to rational answers.He “reasoned” that these celestial bodies were great and thus they could be his Sustainer as is clear from the following verse, “Then, when he beheld the sun rising, he said, ‘This is my Sustainer! This one is the greatest [of all]!’” (6:78). Each time, however, he understood that they were transient and hence could not possibly be his Sustainer. Hence he refused them as gods, but he still could not find his way to the everlasting One. Questions such as, “Who am I?” “What are these beings around me doing here?” “What is my relationship with them and their relationship with me?” constitute the core of Abraham’s line of questioning or preunderstanding; questions that preoccupy much of philosophy, ancient and modern alike. Intrinsic to his primordial human nature is a longing for eternal life, infinity, and a fear of separation. Wherever Abraham looked his reasoning, though rigorous, showed only death, instability and impermanence.. It brought him only perplexity. His quest for the Infinite brought only an infinitely indefinite situation that made him declare his utter incapacity (faqr). He understood that his reasoning did not answer his existential issues. As he recognized his limitations and incapacity (faqr), he started seeking help outside the world. Reason needed an enlightening suggestion, a guide in asking the right questions. It is this recognition that leads Abraham to declare, “If Sustainer does not guide me, I will most certainly become one of the people who go astray!” (6:77). Abraham, thus, displays a case of reasoning which is rigorous and yet inadequate without guidance. Human reason needs guidance to ask the right questions. The rightness of the questions becomes apparent only after they are posed. Hence divine guidance is not something imposed on human reason or unverifiable by it. It is a suggestion which is essential and verifiable at the same time. To return to the metaphor of a medieval man’s encounter with a laptop, he needs questions that guide him on what can be done with it, otherwise he is lost, but these questions are not hostile to his own reasoning and experimentation, rather they require his testing. That is why, in a different episode narrated in the Qur’an we see Abraham wanting to “verify”


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the divine guidance announcing the life after death:

To sum up, one decisive result of Abraham’s reasoning was the recognition of his incapacity to ask the right questions. Moreover, his surrender to his reality made his incapacity, faqr, his most rational question; a question that led him to ask help from his Sustainer and thus made him receptive to divine guidance and mercy as it is understood from the Qur’anic text.12 Verse 6:77 “Indeed, if my Sustainer does not guide me, I will most certainly become one of the people who go astray!” elucidates that preunderstanding in the preprophetic phase was not simply theoretical but existential; without “living” the questions through faqr, the Prophet could not have grasped and embodied the answers. Hence, faqr being the trigger to “receiving” rational answers has a cognitive value. Only after surrendering (taslim) in a state of faqr, and being receptive to divine guidance and thus to the enlightening suggestion that things are signs pointing to their Eternal Creator, do beings in the world appear as signs.Again this very recognition of faqr is transformative, only when human reason surrenders completely. Then it is able to “see” that all beings are in a state of surrender (islam).13 This guided reasoning leads to tawhid: “If I am infinitely weak and needy then everything else is like me and my Sustainer must be the Sustainer of all beings.”This is why Abraham reasons at the end, “Behold, unto Him who brought into being the heavens and the earth have I turned my face, having turned away from all that is false; and I am not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him” (6:79).Similarly, a state of arrogance leads to shirk. Hence Pharaoh does not even ask questions; he reasoned that he himself is the lord and arrogated himself to divine status and said, “I am your Lord All-Highest!” (79:24). A claim, which according to the Qur’an, is the cardinal sin whereby “he has transgressed all bounds of what is right” (79:17). The Qur’anic criterion for “right” is tawhid (divine unity). Pharaoh is a transgressor because he claimed lordship/divinity besides God while it was not the case. It was Pharaoh’s own delusion.Moreover, it is not an inherent quality of Pharaoh but denotes his relationship to the world and to the Other. In other words, Pharaoh is potentially able to transform this relationship if he chooses to surrender and admit his reality of faqr. Consequently, Moses and Aaron, (peace be upon them), were directed to initiate conversation with Pharaoh in a “mild manner.”


Abraham said: “O my Sustainer! Show me how You give life unto the dead!” He said: “Have you, then, no faith?” (Abraham) answered: “Yea, but [let me see it] so that my heart may be set fully at rest.” (2:260)


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Go forth, both of you, unto Pharaoh: for, verily, he has transgressed all bounds of equity. But speak unto him in a mild manner, so that he might bethink himself or [at least] be filled with apprehension. (20:43–44) Go, then; you two (Moses and Aaron) go unto him and say, “Behold, we are apostles sent by your Sustainer: let, then, the children of Israel go with us, and cause them not to suffer [any longer]. We have now come unto you with a message from your Sustainer; and [know that His] peace shall be [only] on those who follow [His] guidance: for, behold, it has been revealed to us that suffering shall befall all who give the lie to the truth and turn away [from it]!” (20:47–48)

Thus in the Qur’an, the Prophets brought an extraordinary message to Pharaoh, a message that leads those who follow it to peace and those who turn away from it to suffering.15 This message is a source of healing and mercy for those who believe, “We send down (step by step) in the Qur’an that which is a healing and a mercy to those who believe: to the unjust it causes nothing but loss after loss” (17:82).

Dissenting with Reason The prophet conveys his message of mercy and wisdom “in the most kindly manner.”16 That is to say he embodies the message he delivers. His character reflects the message of mercy and wisdom that he proclaims. As the Qur’an says, “And you (O prophet) (stand) on an exalted standard of character (khuluq)”17 (68:4). Muhammad Asad understands this emphasis on kindness and wisdom as a summon to use “reason alone in all religious discussions with adherents of other creeds” which is “fully in tune with the basic, categorical Qur’anic injunction, ‘There shall be no coercion in matters of faith’ (2:256).”18 This picture of the prophet proclaiming wisdom and guiding to mercy, but without power of coercion is very much like offering a truthful map and signposts to facilitate treasure hunting. The map enables one to follow the signs or to reach the treasure that is hidden. Bringing a map is not the same as handing out pieces from the treasury; the challenge is promising but can also be dropped. If one refuses to take up the idea, one may well be as abject as he was before receiving the map. If, however one recognizes the possibility that things are


Likewise, Scriptural Reasoning would not embrace Pharaoh’s stand, but it can and may be should engage him kindly and make its resources available to him. And indeed, the Qur’an addresses Pharaoh in gentle and wise language.14


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signs and listens to the scripture to learn how to decipher the signs, one may find out what they stand for. But one may just as well decide that things exist in themselves and from themselves, in which case the assumption is from the outset that there is no treasure to search for, except the very thing that signs are made of. What is fascinating is that the Qur’an implies that the latter stand is unreasonable; we might say that it corresponds to an improper exercising of reason, which the Qur’an simply qualifies as not using one’s reason, “Can you cause the deaf to hearken even though they will not use their reason?” (10:42). Scriptural Reasoning practitioners are inclined to believe that the plight of modern Western society is the outcome of this “distorted reason.” Peter Ochs explains that, [t]he Society of Scriptural Reasoning appears to have arisen specifically in response to the great failing of Intelligence in the modern world. Our shared sense, in this society, is that the dominant paradigms of reason both in the university and in our seminaries are deeply flawed . . . The purpose of SSR is, from the midst of modern thinking . . . to recover the practices of hearing God’s speech that both preceded and still provide the terms for modern thinking. This means to re-enact traditional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim practices of scriptural reading and interpretation and to reconstitute the practices of modern Intelligence as practices of reflecting on the rules of scriptural reasoning.19

According to the logic of Qur’anic verses, the proper use of reason is incompatible with the worship of idols. In fact, the Qur’an appeals to reason to establish tawhid (divine unity) and while doing this, it confronts idolatrous reasoning, “Shame upon you and that which you worship besides God! Will you not, then, use your reason?” (21:67). Refusing to surrender and being inattentive to the signs, then, transforms reason into its opposite. Accordingly, proper reasoning concurs with perceiving the signs in the so-called natural phenomena. And in the succession of night and day, and in the means of subsistence which God sends down from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and in the change of the winds: (in all this) there are signs (ayat) for people who use their reason. (45:5)20



While being inattentive to the signs undoes the proper function of reasoning, appeal to reason dismisses dogma and unjustified beliefs: [b]ut when they are told, “Follow what God has bestowed from on high,” some answer, “Nay, we shall follow [only] that which we found


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So far, two main dimensions of the role of “prophetic, dissenting voice” emerged: wisdom and mercy. Wisdom is a main dimension because the prophetic witness needs to question the prejudices and claims of the existing dominant paradigm in order to establish the validity of the divine message. In doing so he appeals to reason “in a most kindly manner” and out of mercy cultivates it into an intellect acquired through Scripture, an intellectus fidei or ‘aql imani (as it is called in the Islamic tradition) that is receptive to wisdom and mercy. In this sense, as Koshul noted, “The prophetic witness offers a revelatory affirmation of some of the real but dormant aspirations and potentialities at the very heart of its sociocultural environment, whose emergence and maturation is being forestalled by neglect and forgetfulness.” Nevertheless, the prophetic witness does not speak in terms of the existing dominant paradigm. He typically questions its social values and feels deeply dissatisfied with them. Then he makes hijra (migration or self-separation from one’s fellows); that is, he feels very deeply the inadequacy of assumptions and reasoning that stem from the afflicted existing paradigm. He rejects them as inconsistent and false but does not claim that he has the answers. Take the case of the prophet Abraham (peace be upon him), who said, “I am going to my Sustainer! He will surely guide me!” (inni dhahibun ila rabbi sayahdin) (37:99). It is as if he is saying to his people, “I do not know yet, but I am sure that the path to God begins by leaving what you worship.” Thus Quran quotes Abraham (peace be upon him) as saying: “I shall withdraw from you all and from whatever you invoke instead of God, and shall invoke my Sustainer alone” (19:48). That is, although Abraham used rigorous logical reasoning to come to the conclusion that the path of his people was wrong,21 he could not find his way out himself until he asked for guidance and was granted revelation. The prophet is certain of the failings of the dominant paradigm because of the sufferings it causes and because it is not in harmony with his fitra (innate disposition) but he also has hope in divine mercy and this assuredly is the beginning of the practice of hearing God’s speech. When Abraham was instructed, “Be not of those who abandon hope!” (15:55), he exclaimed, “And who—other than those who have utterly lost their way––could ever abandon the hope of his Sustainer’s grace?” (15:56). Thus the Prophet is aware that hope distinguishes him from the afflicted paradigm; this means that he has already moved


our forefathers believing in and doing.” Why, even if their forefathers did not use their reason, and were devoid of all guidance? (2:170)


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away from that paradigm. Hope is the omen of new possibilities as it makes him receptive to the divine response. Divine revelation in turn provides him with the means to move from the state of interrupting the ailing paradigm to that of healing and revitalizing. This cycle of “interruption-hope-revelation/inspiration-healing” is a transformational process known as tazkiya or purification in the Islamic tradition.It is a similar kind of hope that animates the performing of Scriptural Reasoning, the hope that by listening to God speaking to us through the signs in the scriptures and in the world we will be guided to the solutions for the possibility of a new life. That is, like Abraham we say, “we’re going to God (by listening to the scriptures), He will surely guide us.” After being healed himself, the Prophet returns to his people22 to heal them with mercy and compassion, with the teaching of revelation. He invites his people to “migrate unto God,” and strive in His way: verily, they who have attained to faith, and they who migrate unto God, and are striving hard in God’s cause—these it is who may look forward to God’s grace: for God is much forgiving, a dispenser of grace (2:218).23 Without compromising the content of the message, he looks for compassionate and wise ways of delivering it. He returns out of mercy but he returns as a dissenting prophetic voice from within. To recapitulate, the goal of the message that the Prophet brings is peace and mercy and liberation from suffering. The approach in conveying this message is mercy and wisdom, that is, making the message accessible to all with the aim of redeeming and transforming. As to the content, the core of the teachings of the prophet is tawhid, which can be anticipated since the main aim of the Qur’an is to establish tawhid or divine unity, as Muslim scholars of the Qur’an unanimously agreed. The Qur’an repeatedly calls to “worship God [alone], and do not ascribe divinity, in any way, to aught beside Him.”24 “And do good” (4:36). The prophet Abraham (peace be upon him) who is known as the father of tawhid in the Islamic tradition and who is referred to as a paradigm for the believers in the Qur’an,25 is described as, “a man who combined within himself all virtues, devoutly obeying God’s will, turning away from all that is false, and not being of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God” (16:120). The Prophet is asked to profess tawhid and discard shirk that is, the associating of partners with God, “Say : ‘I have only been bidden to worship God, and not to ascribe divine powers to aught beside Him : unto Him do I call all humankind, and He is my goal!’” (13:36).26 The Qur’an warns that shirk is injustice. The prophet Luqman spoke thus unto his son, admonishing him: “O my dear son! Do not ascribe




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divine powers to aught beside God: for, behold, such [a false] ascribing of divinity is indeed an awesome injustice! (31:13). Hence, the test of truth that the Qur’an offers is not merely logical but also practical: shirk is rejected not only because it is logically precluded but also because it generates injustice and “suffering” as suggested earlier in verse 20:48. At one level, the Qur’an rules out the validity of shirk as it contradicts empirical observations. At another level it appeals to the heart and identifies tawhid with peace, mercy, easiness and joy and shirk with hardship, injustice and suffering. The Qur’an bids the Prophet “Say: ‘Come, let me convey unto you what God has [really] forbidden to you: Do not ascribe divinity, in any way, to aught beside Him:. . . this has He enjoined upon you so that you might use your reason’” (6:151). Again shirk is identified as opposed to reason. The repeated argument is that sound reasoning affirms tawhid and rejects shirk. Thus [Abraham] said, unto his father and his people, “What are these images to which you are so intensely devoted?” They answered: “We found our forefathers worshipping them.” He said: “Indeed, you and your forefathers have obviously gone astray!” They asked: “Have you come unto us [with this claim] in all earnest—or are you one of those jesters?” He answered: “Nay, but your [true] Sustainer is the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth—He who has brought them into being: and I am one of those who bear witness to this [truth]!” And [he added to himself.] “By God, I shall most certainly bring about the downfall of your idols as soon as you have turned your backs and gone away!” And then he broke those [idols] to pieces, [all] save the biggest of them, so that they might [be able to] turn to it [for an explanation of what had happened]. (21:52–58)

After Abraham destroyed the idols that his people worshipped, they put him on trial and asked him, “Have you done this to our gods, O Abraham?” (21:62). He answered: “Nay, it was this one, the biggest of them, that did it: but ask them [yourselves]—provided they can speak!” (21:63). Abraham wanted to attract their attention and cause them to question their beliefs.27 And so they turned upon one another, saying (to each other), “Behold, it is you who are doing wrong” (21:64). Yet, this interruption could not transform them against their will:


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But then they relapsed into their former way of thinking and said: “You know very well that these [idols] cannot speak!” [Abraham] said then: “Do you then worship, instead of God, something that cannot benefit you in any way, nor harm you? Fie upon you and upon all that you worship instead of God! Will you not, then, use your reason?” They



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The prophetic voice does not undermine freedom of choice. Indeed, the Qur’an states, “[O Prophet,] exhort them; your task is only to exhort; you can not compel them [to believe]” (88:21–22). Whether the addressee is the obstinate Pharaoh, or the unaware humankind, or the already learned People of the Book, or the Prophet’s own house, the Prophet’s role is invariably to “convey the truth” (19:50) with mercy and compassion, and without compulsion or compromise. The following reasoning of prophet Joseph (peace be upon him) is exemplary: “O my companions in imprisonment! Which is more reasonable: [belief in the existence of numerous divine] lords, each of them different from the other—or [in] the One God, who holds absolute sway over all that exists? All that you worship instead of God is nothing but [empty] names which you have invented—you and your forefathers—[and] for which God has bestowed no warrant from on high. Judgment [as to what is right and what is wrong] rests with God alone—[and] He has ordained that you should worship nought but Him: this is the [one] ever-true faith; but most people know it not.” (12: 39–40)28

That is when things and causes are viewed as efficient in themselves, the principle of divine unity (tawhid) dissolves and beings are seen as independent and alien to each other; they are attributed the status of partners to God rather than signs to Him. Then, each of them needs to have all—encompassing Divine attributes, power, knowledge, and mercy, to sustain its existence and interact coherently with the rest of the world because all things, all beings, all events are interconnected. The Qur’an reasons that whoever gives life to a fly can only be the one who creates all flies, all insects, and indeed the whole cosmos since a fly does not exist by itself independently of the whole cosmos. O people! A parable is set forth [herewith]; hearken, then, to it! Behold, those beings whom you invoke instead of God cannot create [as much as] a fly, even were they to join all their forces to that end! And if a fly robs them of anything, they cannot [even] rescue it from him! Weak indeed is the seeker, and [weak] the sought! (22:73)


exclaimed: “Burn him, and [thereby] succor your gods, if you are going to do [anything]” (21:65–70)

Things are described as utterly helpless: If you invoke them, they do not hear your call; and even if they could hear, they would not [be able to] respond to you. And [withal,] on the Day of


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[w]ill they, then,—ascribe divinity, side by side with Him, unto that which cannot create anything since they themselves are created. (7:191)29

The Qur’an challenges the skeptic to explain the world without a maker, Who is it that has created the heavens and the earth, and sends down for you [life-giving] water from the skies? For it is by this means that We cause gardens of shining beauty to grow—[whereas] it is not in your power to cause [even one single of] its trees to grow! Could there be any divine power besides God? Nay, they [who think so] are people who swerve [from the path of reason] And who is it that has made the earth a fitting abode [for living things], and has caused running waters [to flow] in its midst, and has set upon it mountains firm, and has placed a barrier between the two great bodies of water? Could there be any divine power besides God? Nay, most of those [who think so] do not know [what they are saying]! (27:60–62) He (it is who) has created the skies without any supports that you could see, and has placed firm mountains upon the earth, lest it sway with you, and has caused all manner of living creatures to multiply thereon. And We send down water from the skies, and thus We cause every noble kind (of life) to grow on earth (All) this is God’s creation: show Me, then, what others than He may have created! Nay, but the evildoers (who ascribe divine powers to beings or things other than God) are obviously lost in error. (31:10–11)30

Reasoning to Wisdom The Qur’an appeals to reason but as mentioned earlier, it does not stop there; it lifts that reason up to intellect in order to make it aligned with the heart and with the conscience; the goal is to make the heart reason because the heart is sensitive to wrongdoing and suffering. Put differently, the Qur’an aims at cultivating reason so that it becomes a function of the heart (qulubun ya’qiluna biha, see 22:46) rather than of selfish desires or hawa as the Qur’an calls it. In the following verses for instance, the Qur’an invites the heart to “reason.”


The Qur’an dismisses all things and causes from the ability to create for they themselves need to be created,



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It is God Who has created you, and then has provided you with sustenance, and then will cause you to die, and then will bring you to life again. Can any of those beings or powers to whom you ascribe a share in His divinity do any of these things? Limitless is He in His glory, and sublimely exalted above anything to which men may ascribe a share in His divinity! (30:40)

From the Qur’anic verses mentioned earlier, it is clear that tawhid is a major concern. What is remarkable is that tawhid is not presented as a “metaphysical” principle but as a cosmic reality in the sense that all beings are interconnected through a universal law of creativity to which all creative events are tied. In other words, the cosmos witnesses to the truth of the ayat al-tadwiniyyah (Qur’anic signs/verses) and reveals their import, while the Qur’an interprets or rather translates the speech of the cosmos in its ayat al-takwiniyyah (cosmic signs) into a language that is comprehensible to humankind. Following this vision, Nursi asserts that “in order to describe His act to both eye and ear, the Maker describes His act while performing it: as a true artist, He unravels His art as He works it, and as a true Bestower of bounties He displays His boons in the very act of bestowing.” As such, His very word constitutes His very act and vice versa. The Creator speaks as He creates; and thus He unites word and act through the “audible” Qur’an and the cosmic Qur’an in one revelation.31 Accordingly, these Qur’anic statements are not simply “moral” injunctions but express actual facts. So if we consider the verse, “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith” (2:256) it does not mean, “you’d better not use force in religion,” but rather that force and faith cannot ontologically coexist.Hence “in matters of faith there is no coercion” means there can be no coercion because faith is free choice and a state of being willingly open to the divine speech; it is a state of grateful surrendering to the mercy of God. The use of force would negate all these qualities and the result would not be “faith” but hypocrisy. It is for the same reason that the affirmation of tawhid in Islam is called shahada or witnessing that is, the witnessing of the signs of tawhid in the world. So the logic of the Qur’an is not that shirk is “an awesome injustice” because it is “irreligious” and hence impious; rather, shirk is injustice because it does not do justice to the reality of the world. It is a delusion of the ungrateful who does not accept to surrender to the


O men! Call to mind the blessings which God has bestowed upon you! Is there any creator, other than God, that could provide for you sustenance out of heaven and earth? There is no deity save Him: and yet, how perverted are your minds! [i.e. inasmuch as you attribute divine qualities or powers to anyone or anything beside Him]. (35:3)


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And so, surrender your whole being to the [one ever-true] faith, turning away from all that is false, in accordance with the natural disposition (fitra) which God has instilled into humans: [for,] no change shall there be in what God has thus created: this is the [purpose of the one] ever-true faith; but most people know it not. (30:30)

At this point it is significant to note that tawhid is a tenet shared by the people of the book. Hence, the Qur’an says, “O People of the Book! Come unto that tenet which we and you hold in common: that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall not ascribe divinity to aught beside Him, and that we shall not take one another for lords beside God.” (3:64)

This Qur’anic injunction to come to a “common term” with the People of the Book may be understood as an indication that Muslims and People of the Book may come to a mutual awareness that as communities founded on faith in God they can bear witness to the divine within the modern world.In which case, the earlier mentioned Qur’anic verse could be read as a call to join in mutual assistance to uphold the prophetic voice from within the modern world and an invitation to cooperate with each other and end competition.32

Prophetic Voice as an Invitation to Choose T AWHID Thus far, the message of the Qur’an appears to revolve primarily around tawhid, and the Prophet’s role is to instruct in tawhid and warn against shirk. Tawhid constitutes the basis of the Qur’an’s frame of reference. The extent of the perils associated with shirk can only be appreciated against tawhid.33 A dissenting prophetic voice within the modern world may have to start there too. It would have to explain how tawhid contributes to healing the world and alleviating suffering. The Qur’an would first simply say that people need God, “O people! It is you, who stand in need of God, whereas He alone is self-sufficient, the One to whom all praise is due” (35:15). Through the realization


reality of his weakness and consequently to the reality of the divine. It is for this reason that in the Qur’an, shirk is described as constituting a crime or a sin that the sinner commits primarily against his own soul because he deprives himself of access to mercy. And it is also for this reason that the Qur’an states that tawhid corresponds to the innate human disposition and to the actual reality of things.



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Verily, they who are close to God, no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve: they who have attained to faith and have always been conscious of Him. For them there is the glad tiding [of happiness] in the life of this world and in the life to come; nothing could ever alter God’s promises, this, this is the triumph supreme! (10:62–64)

He gratefully acknowledges God as the source of everything and recognizes abundance in the world as the result of a dynamics of boundless givenness.34 This potential energy of gift is convertible in kinetic energy in the socioeconomic order so that faith in the limitless givenness and exercise of reliance on it translate into sharing with others and practicing charity and cooperation; thus embodying infinite givenness in one’s interaction with others as the Qur’an enjoins, “do good [unto others] as God has done good unto you; and seek not to spread corruption on earth: for, verily, God does not love those who spread corruption!” (28:77). The opposite of this experience would be “appropriation” of the gifts, which are given as trust. This monopolization reveals a disregard or blindness to the dynamics of givennes; resources are viewed as limited. Such scarcity and competition mindset seems to be at the root of all kind of negativity including hoarding, exploitation, and injustice. It is a potential source of destructive energy that is expressed in unhealthy sociality. Within the scriptural context, the practice of appropriation is a betrayal to the human condition; it is what the Qur’an terms as shirk. In contrast to shirk, the logic of reliance and surrendering (islam) to unending mercy and gift is the source of charitable and merciful action in the social order. Thus faith and love of God translate in this causal world into love and care for others in the name of the divine.35 The Qur’an points to these different paths, [t]hus, as for him who gives [to others] and is conscious of God, and affirms the truth of the ultimate good for him shall We make easy the path towards [ultimate] ease. But as for him who is niggardly, and thinks that he is self-sufficient, and calls the ultimate good a lie—for him shall We make easy the path towards hardship: and what will his wealth avail him when he goes down [to his grave]? Behold, it is indeed for Us to grace [you] with guidance. (92:4–12)


of tawhid, the individual becomes conscious of his close connection to his merciful Sustainer.

The “niggardly” who imagines himself to be self-sufficient, conceives of himself as the creator of his life. Consequently, he views things as


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existing in themselves and ascribes to them the power to create as though they were associate partners with God. From the vantage point of the Qur’anic scripture, this paradigm is afflicted by shirk. Moreover, things are not to be contemplated, but coerced and controlled to make up for his inherent weakness: “Might is right” is the norm. There is nothing to be grateful for; everything is self-earned. Life is envisioned as a struggle; it is full of hardship. The vertical dimension of life is (at least) practically irrelevant to this worldview. What the Qur’an stresses is that from the outset this vision of reality is rooted in a faulty understanding of existence, which conveys a distorted meaning of being. Conversation between Islam and modernity is possible when the horizontal perspective of the Self and the world needs to be overcome. In a spirit of mercy and wisdom, the Qur’an insist on tawhid and warns against shirk. Accordingly, God forbids all sins except shirk. Verily, God does not forgive the ascribing of divinity to aught beside Him, although He forgives any lesser sin unto whomever He wills: for he who ascribes divinity to aught beside God has indeed contrived an awesome sin. (4:48)36

M. Asad explains, that [t]he continuous stress, in the Qur’an, on tawhid, i.e. on God’s transcendental oneness and uniqueness aims at freeing man from all sense of dependence on other influences and powers, and thus at elevating him spiritually and bringing about “purification.” Since this objective is vitiated by the sin of shirk (the ascribing of divine qualities to aught beside God), the Qur’an describes it as “unforgivable” so long as it is persisted in, i.e., unless and until the sinner repents.37

It is also related in a qudsi hadith, that God said, O son of Adam, so long as you call upon Me and ask of Me, I shall forgive you for what you have done, and I shall not mind. O son of Adam, were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask forgiveness of Me, I would forgive you. O son of Adam, were you to come to Me with sins nearly as great as the earth and were you then to face Me, ascribing no partner to Me, I would bring you forgiveness nearly as great at it.38


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According to this hadith, God forgives all sins as long as one turns back to God without ascribing any partners with Him. Shirk is the


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only sin that is not negotiable39 because it is detrimental to individual life and consequently to social life also. The Qur’an entreats humans to shun shirk because “he who ascribes divinity to aught but God is like one who is hurtling down from the skies—whereupon the birds carry him off, or the wind blows him away onto a far-off place” (22:31). In Tafsir al-Jalalayn, this idiom is interpreted as meaning “it is as though he had fallen from the heaven and been snatched away by [vulture] birds, that is, [as though] they had seized him swiftly, or [as though] the wind had blown him, dropped him, into a far-off place, so that there is no hope of his being saved.” Similary, in Tanwir alMiqbas min Tafsir Ibn ‘Abbas, this idiom is taken to mean, “it is as if he had fallen from the sky and the birds had snatched him to take him wherever they wish (or the wind had blown him to a far-off place).” In both cases, the perpetrator of shirk is lost and has no control over his destiny. His life is “like a mirage in the desert, which the thirsty supposes to be water—until, when he approaches it, he finds that it was nothing: instead, he finds [that] God [has always been present] with him, and [that] He will pay him his account in full—for God is swift in reckoning!” (24:39). In the Qur’an shirk is often associated with wrongdoing and injustice, while belief in God and His unity (tawhid) is over and over evoked in conjunction with good deeds, “Verily, this Qur’an shows the way to all that is most upright, and gives the believers who do good deeds the glad tiding that theirs will be a great reward” (17:9).40 Wrongdoing may “obscure belief”41 and so the Qur’an condemns evildoing, “Never would Your Sustainer destroy a community for wrong [beliefs alone] so long as its people behave righteously [toward one another]”42 (11:117). M. Asad notes that, [a]ccording to most of the classical commentators, the term zulm (lit., “wrong”) is in this context synonymous with “wrong beliefs” amounting to a denial of the truths revealed by God through His prophets, a refusal to acknowledge His existence, or the ascribing of divine powers or qualities to anyone or anything beside Him. Explaining the above verse in this sense, Razi says: “God’s chastisement does not afflict any people merely on—account of their holding beliefs amounting to shirk and kufr, but afflicts them only if they persistently commit evil in their mutual dealings, and deliberately hurt [other human beings] and act tyrannically [toward them]. Hence, those who are learned in Islamic Law (al-fuqaha’) hold that men’s obligations toward God rest on the principle of His forgiveness and liberality, whereas the rights of man are of a stringent nature and must always be strictly observed”—the obvious reason being that God is almighty and needs no defender, whereas man is weak and needs protection.43




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The implications of tawhid and shirk in individual and social life have been studied by traditional Muslim scholars in great depth, especially in Sufi literature. It remains to explore them so as to highlight their relevance to the modern world. What is of interest to us in this chapter is that tawhid constitutes the central theme of the Qur’an and hence of the prophetic voice. Consequently we can call the logic of the prophetic voice the “logic of tawhid.” Within this reference frame, the role of the prophetic voice is to heal the world of the ailing shirk paradigm that manifests itself in various forms and to restore the fitra (innate disposition) that is in harmony with tawhid. The Prophet brings the divine at the center of life in this world for the Qur’an asserts, “If one desires the rewards of this world, [let him remember that] with God are the rewards of [both] this world and the life to come: and God is indeed all-hearing, all-seeing” (4:134). In other words, “even if you are interested in the good of worldly life alone, you still need to turn to God for with Him is the source of good whether in this world or in the next.”

Prophetic Voice in Relation to Modernity Now that I have outlined the reference frame of the prophetic voice, I will examine its possible standpoint in respect to reason. Koshul correctly points out that the possibility of a meaningful dissenting voice within the modern world requires that the dissenting voice shares some common ground with the modern world. He argues, rightly, that the common ground cannot be religion. I will add that it cannot be reason afflicted with shirk either if we want to repair it. If we conceded to this specific type of afflicted reason (at least from the perspective of the prophetic voice), not only would we fall in clear contradiction with our project of Scriptural Reasoning, but also we would not find the means to start a meaningful conversation, we would only perpetuate the already existing confusion and suffering. The prophetic voice needs to engage modernity and confront its dogmas. This may entail that the prophetic voice debunk Enlightenment’s reason using a language that is comprehensible to it, but critical of it. There will not be much possibility for modernity to reform itself if it not supplied with new resources for transforming Promethean reason by clearing the heedlessness dormant in its operation. When that is done, the fitra (human nature) would seek a point of support and consequently it would reach the state of searching for a source outside itself, namely the ghayb (the transcendent unseen) and like Abraham (peace be upon


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him) it would cry out for help, “if my Sustainer does not guide me, I will most certainly become one of the people who go astray!” (6:77). Thereby, it would hopefully be transformed to a state of listening to revelation that would bring about its awakening and healing. A major ailment of modernity is probably the fact that it has no inbuilt mechanism for self-criticism.44 By making the message available to modernity in a way it understands, the prophetic voice would supply it with a new vision and therefore with new prospects for selfenhancement and hopefully for restitution and repair. At any rate, being at the root of the modern world’s suffering and its antagonistic attitude toward the divine, the Enlightenment’s reason cannot possibly constitute the common ground but reason per se can. In other words, when we say that the common point is reason, we need not equate reason with Enlightenment’s reasoning. In fact, the common ground is within us; it is our reading of the scriptures with the hope to find clues to possible solutions that constitutes the link between scripture and modernity within us. In other words, we bring scripture in conversation with modernity when we, as suffering people afflicted with the wounds of modernity, seek healing from scripture. But in order to remain true to the spirit of the prophetic voice, we need to proceed within the limits of the frame of tawhid. Then we may succeed in interrupting and deconstructing the ill aspects of modern reason within us in the prophetic spirit of wisdom and mercy in a manner that includes the seeds of restitution. Thus we will consent to let the scripture transform us. Then, we may go out into the world to convey hope and to repair with wisdom and compassion speaking the language of the afflicted paradigm but not in its terms. Scriptural Reasoning is in this sense a representative of the dissenting prophetic voice from within. It follows the example of Adam in that it wants to go back to the scriptures to listen out for God’s guidance in order to find out a solution to our predicament, which is not peculiar to modernity as the story of the fall of Adam indicates but is a basic human condition. To return to the common ground, what common grounds did Moses (peace be upon him) share with Pharaoh when he spoke to him. What did Muhammad share with the Arab polytheists of Mecca when he engaged them? The fitra or human innate disposition. The Muslim scholar al-Ghazali (d. 1111) observes that the intellect (‘aql) refers to an innate (bi al-tab’) intellect and to an acquired (bi al-iktisab) intellect. He explains that “the first, namely the innate intellect, was intended by the Prophet when he said, ‘God has not created a more honored thing than the intellect (‘aql).’” 45 All humans share this innate intellect from which the conversation can begin. Islam is




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actually in a unique position to launch such a conversation for the Qur’an consistently addresses this innate intellect, while at the same time it draws its evidence from the physical world. It restores to man his dignity as the addressee and guest of the Divine and restores the significative value of the world by disclosing the sign-nature of everything. And by addressing all humanity46 in a way all understand, it declares the equality of all before the divine law of mercy and wisdom, and offers to all the opportunity to transform innate reason into a higher intellect, which al-Ghazali calls “scripturally acquired intellect.” Koshul analyses the dynamics of the relationship between the Self and the Other that emerges from the Qur’anic description of the Qur’an’s relationship with the Bible then he uses this “scripturally reasoned approach” to explore the implications of this mode of the Self relating to the Other in the contemporary encounter between Islam and the Enlightenment. It is an interesting move, indeed. But, the analogy is not clear enough to my mind. The Qur’an is self-aware of the common grounds it shares with the Bible, namely belief in God, the Hereafter, and righteous deeds. In the case of the Enlightenment however, it is not evident whether they share a common ground at all or what that ground may be. Are we overlooking the possibility that the common ground may not be that explicit? What if the Enlightenment genuinely corresponds to the Promethean use of reason that the Qur’an condemns? It would be more cautious to set the particular context of the entities to be compared and find out how they may relate to each other before starting this analogy. Whereas the Qur’an embraces reason per se and innate human disposition for that matter, as they are created inherently good, it condemns certain uses of reason that do not affirm tawhid.In the context of the Qur’an, the issue is not about using reason or not using it but rather about modes of using reason. In the case of the Bible, the Qur’an refers to the Torah and the Gospel as containing “light and guidance.” What is subject to critique is the relationship of the People of the Book to the Bible. That is, the Qur’an denounces the “misinterpreting and concealing the message of the Bible on the part of biblical scholars but also in the form of presenting texts that are the products of human hands and minds as the word of God,” as Koshul explains. The same approach holds for the world. The world is created and it is inherently good, it is the “speaking Qur’an.” What the Qur’an condemns is not the world, therefore, but the “deification” of the world, which is a relationship to the world. The Qur’an rejects the materialistic view that the world exists of itself and for itself. This feature of Islam is perplexing to the “polarized” modern mind and it is often questioned how a


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religion that is so “worldly” (meaning that it celebrates the world) can be so spiritual at the same time.47 Likewise, the Qur’an embraces reason but it clearly condemns a certain use of reason and affirms another. In this context, the Enlightenment is a particular mode of relating to the world; it is not comparable to the Bible, at least a part of which is revealed, or to reason or the world, which are created and innately good. Also the Enlightenment’s reason is a particular use of reason. Where does this mode of reasoning fall? If we take the Enlightenment to refer to reason’s claim to autonomy from the divine, then it belongs more into shirk. The denunciation of a use of reason that may coincide with the Enlightenment’s reason, does not amount to the rejection of reason per se and it does not indicate that the Qur’an shares no common ground with the modern world. The Qur’an shares many features that the modern world is particularly apt to appreciate, namely the crucial role of reason and the world. Koshul put his finger on an important point by noting that the logic of the Qur’an is not dialectical. This means that the Qur’an’s relationship to the Other is not monolithic but nuanced and complex; it also means that this relationship follows some criteria and falls within a certain frame of reference. The Other is not a static entity and therefore our critique or affirmation of the Other is a critique/affirmation of the relationship of the Other to something. In the process of affirming and critiquing what matters most is to ask the right questions. Questions always display the particularity of their context but we can still relate between different contexts if we have a point of reference that gives direction to our questions within a particular context. Whatever our particular context, it is the point of reference that makes conversation not only possible but also meaningful. Hence, the answers may be relative to particular circumstances but they are not arbitrary as they can be positioned within the general frame. The venture of embracing and critiquing becomes more nuanced but it is not random; tawhid is the point of reference. This is what makes the Qur’an’s move seems puzzling to dialectical reason that has not been transformed and healed. An example of what Koshul names as “achieving the impossible” in relating to the Other, would be the appropriation of Hajj (pilgrimage) in the Qur’an. In prophet Muhammad’s time, the pilgrimage to Ka’ba was a ritual practiced by pagan Arabs. Islam took up the original meaning of this initially Abrahamic ritual which symbolizes worship of God alone and incorporated it as one of the main rituals of Islam after cleansing of idols the house of worship, the Kaba, that Abraham (peace be upon him)




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had edified to celebrate tawhid. Islam did not replace the ritual or the Ka’ba but “revived” them, restored and healed them. Similarly we may say that scripture offers the resources to heal reasoning afflicted by the paradigm of modernity. In the case of modernity, there is no question of replacing but need for cleansing and transformation. Modernity is not a distant Other, rather, it constitutes who we are. Clearly, while reading scriptures, we always bring our prior assumptions and questions to the text. In other words, “the text does not speak; we make it speak” as it is said in the Islamic tradition. The text speaks through us. Whether we are aware of it or not, our questions and reasoning are informed by their modern context.48 Being part of the modern world ourselves, the failings of modernity are part of our assumptions. We read scriptures in order to seek ways to heal the wounds of modernity, and as we interact with the text and listen to it, we are transformed; our reasoning is transformed. The ailment dictates the cure so to speak. In this sense, modernity informs the starting point of our Qur’anic inquiry. Qur’anic reasoning is about articulating this reparative enquiry; it is a statement about the reparative relation between the Qur’an and modernity. Thus, modernity plays a crucial role in shaping and enhancing Qur’anic reasoning as modernity encounters scriptures through us. The danger, then, is less about throwing modernity out with the bath water. Rather, the challenge is how to be open and receptive enough to be reshaped through the scripture. Indeed, for the encounter between our modern selves and the Qur’an to be fertile and bear the fruits of healing it needs to be performed within the reference frame of scripture. Extreme care should be taken so that our search for healing also includes ultimate removal of our idols.

Conclusion In this chapter, I focused on the possibility of Islam contributing to the West, as that is a rather controversial issue. It remains, however, to examine the ways in which Muslims may benefit from the modern world. My analysis is far from being exhaustive and it raises more questions than it actually resolves. My aim was to point to the ways in which Qur’anic reasoning may constitute a platform for conversation between the West and Islam under the aegis of Scriptural Reasoning. What I referred to earlier as the Qur’an’s frame of reference is a mode of reasoning that is never fully expressed or grasped as it is revealed in particular instances, for particular tasks of repair to the extent that it is drawn to and brought into play. My hope is that from the Islamic


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perspective, this “frame of reference” may be called into play for the particular purpose of building an intelligible conversation with modernity that is healing to both sides. I hope furthermore, that this system may be used to generate an intellectual discourse that is commensurate with various cultural conditions and hence provide the possibility of converting different outlooks into commonly understandable terms. One important methodological contribution of the Qur’anic discourse is the relation of reason to guidance. Unlike current assumptions, we do not have to choose between a reason burdened with authority (scholasticism) and reason resigned to its own devices (humanism). There is the third option: reasoning with the guidance of revelation. The Qur’an neither burdens reason nor leaves it to its own resources. In seeking rational discourse as common ground between religion and the Enlightenment mindset, we need to be aware of this third option, which is an opportunity for hope. It is this third option which is promising and which may enable us both to reach the modern mind—within our very selves—and to heal it. The present cultural and intellectual conditions are certainly good omens for this healing, revival, and restoration. The fact that the modern predicament of humankind contains the seeds of great goodness is momentous. To realize this possibility, the role of the prophetic voice is, most likely, to engage, confront, and transform the reasoning of modernity, with the hope of lifting it up to intellect and making it aligned with the heart and hence sensitive to suffering. Following a spirit of mercy, Koshul proposes a “redeem-reform-embrace” approach to the Enlightenment. I agree with him except that I feel the need to emphasize the implicit aspects of healing, which may involve interruption and uplifting with wisdom. Thus, it sounds to me more complete from the Qur’anic perspective to rearticulate Koshul’s “formula” as “condemn/redeem, critique/reform, replace/embrace” at the same time.49

Notes I would like to thank Isra Umeyye Yazicioglu and Redha Ameur for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.



1. D. Ford, “An Interfaith Wisdom: Scriptural Reasoning between Jews, Christians and Muslims,” Modern Theology 22/3 (July, 2006): 2. 2. The term din is usually translated as “religion.” However, one of the primary significances of the term din as explained in Qamus, is “a way of life,” “a manner of behavior” or “of acting.” 3. S. Nursi, The Damascus Sermon, trans. S. Vahide (Istanbul: Sozler Nesriyat. 1996), p. 32.


Yamine Mermer 4. As Helen Lynd wrote, “We have become strangers in a world where we thought we were at home. We experience anxiety in becoming aware that we cannot trust our answers to the questions, ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where do I belong?’ . . . with every recurrent violation of trust we become again children unsure of ourselves in an alien world.” Shame and the Search for Identity (London: Routledge, 1958), pp. 46–47. 5. The starting point to this “way to reason” is the interruption of presuppositions and unquestioned dogmas. For instance, the Qur’an constantly calls into question the so-called common sense: seemingly unconscious things are in fact signs and they “extol the glory” of their Maker. The seven heavens extol His limitless glory, and the earth, and all that they contain; and there is not a single thing but extols His limitless glory and praise: but you (O people) fail to grasp the manner of their glorifying Him! Verily, He is forbearing, much-forgiving! (17:44). See also 24:41. Just like the Qur’an is God’s speech through word and discourse, the heavens (along with the rest of the created world) are also a kind of speech of God . . . This way, the Qur’an interrupts the taken for granted and points beyond it to an infinitely complex reality. One feels like, “Hold on, what is going on?” And if we take this interruption seriously and listen then we are likely to experience a “crisis” that may lead us to internalize the questions and thus become receptive to the sign-answers therein. Genuine questions yield answers; there are no meaningful answers without genuine questions. 6. Just as the Qur’an in many instances addresses all humanity, the Prophet of Islam too said, “Every prophet was sent to his own people; but I am sent to all humankind” (bu’ithtu li’l-nasi kaffa). The Qur’an also explicitly says, Say (O Muhammad): “O Humankind! Verily, I am an apostle of God to all of you (sent by Him) unto Whom the dominion over the heaven and the earth belongs! There is no deity save Him: He alone grants life and deals death” (7:158). Muhammad Asad notes the following among the factors for the universality of the Quranic revelation:, “its appeal to all humankind irrespective of descent, race or cultural environment” and “the fact that it appeals exclusively to man’s reason and, hence, does not postulate any dogma that could be accepted on the basis of blind faith alone.” M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an (Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1980), p. 502. 7. The Qur’anic suras start “in the name of the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” Also, within the Quranic text, the word “rahma” or mercy 114 times. What is more, the Qur’an refers to God’s attributes of mercy 298 times. It is also worth noting that Muslim Sufi masters such as Ibn al-’Arabi and Mevlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi asserted that Islam is peculiarly the religion of compassion and love, inasmuch as the prophet Mohammed is considered as God’s beloved (habibullah). Their evidence were the numerous Qur’anic verses that speak of God as


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a loving God: “If you do love God, Follow me: God will love you and forgive you your sins: For God is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful”(3:31), “God loves those who do good” (2:195, 3:134, 3:148); “God loves those who turn to Him constantly and He loves those who keep themselves pure and clean” (2:222; 9:108); “verily God loves those who act aright” (3:76; 9:7); “God Loves those who are firm and steadfast and patient” (3:146); “God loves those who put their trust (in Him)” (3:159); “God loves those who are fair (and just.)” (49:9; 60:8) There are many other verses like this. This is probably because mercy encompasses the other attributes as may be understood from the Qur’an when it says, “Call upon God, or call upon the Most Gracious (Rahman): by whatever name you call upon Him, (it is well): for to Him alone belong the attributes of perfection” (17:110). It finds echo in the tradition or hadith qudsi in which God is quoted to say, “Verily, My grace and mercy prevails over My wrath.” Narrated on the Abu Hurayra and related in Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 9, book 93, no. 518; (also narrated in Muslim, al Nasa’i and Ibn Majah.) “O our Sustainer! Raise up from the midst of our off spring an apostle from among themselves, who shall convey unto them Your messages, and impart unto them revelation as well as wisdom, and cause them to grow in purity: for, verily, You alone are almighty, truly wise!” (2:129) Indeed, God bestowed a favor upon the believers when he raised up in their midst an apostle from among themselves, to convey His messages unto them, and to cause them to grow in purity, and to impart unto them the divine writ as well as wisdom—whereas before that they were indeed, most obviously, lost in error. (3:164) And who could be of better faith than he who surrenders his whole being unto God and is doer of good withal, and follows the creed of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false—seeing that God exalted Abraham with His love? (4:125). According to the Qur’anic narrative, Abraham “turns away from that is false” and surrenders his faqr to God and then he becomes receptive to the divine disclosure; he is made to see the signs. The Qur’an says, “And thus We gave Abraham insight [literally: We made him see] into [God’s] mighty dominion over the heavens and the earth” (6:75). It is also remarkable that when Pharaoh asked Moses (peace be upon him) about God, the Prophet, who was instructed to speak kindly to Pharaoh, immediately referred to the world and the signs therein. [But when God’s message was conveyed unto Pharaoh,] he said: “Who, now, is this Sustainer of you two, O Moses?” He replied: “Our Sustainer is He who gives unto every thing [that exists] its true nature and form and thereupon guides it [toward its fulfillment].” (20:49–50)




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Eat, [then, of this produce of the soil,] and pasture your cattle [thereon]. In all this, behold, there are signs indeed for those who are endowed with reason. (20:53–4) Thus “speaking kindly” stands for the use of reason and accessible evidence in conveying the message. The fact that the prophetic message is couched in accessible terms and with reference to common experience of the world does not, however, eliminate the addressee’s choice. The addressee of the prophet may choose not to listen. The Qur’an says, “The truth [has now come] from your Sustainer: let, then, him who wills, believe in it, and let him who wills, reject it” (18:29). 15. In the Qur’an, the scriptures are repeatedly designated as “guidance and grace.” We vouchsafed the scripture unto Moses in fulfillment of Our favor upon those who persevered in doing good, clearly spelling out everything, and [thus providing] guidance and grace, so that they might have faith in the meeting with their Sustainer(6:154). We did convey unto them a divine writ which We clearly, and wisely, spelled out—a guidance and a grace unto people who will believe (7:52). And upon you have We bestowed from on high this divine writ for no other reason than that you might make clear unto them that on which they have come to hold divergent views, and [thus offer] guidance and grace unto people who will believe (16:64). One day We shall raise from within every community a witness against them, from amongst themselves: and We shall bring you to bear witness regarding those (whom your message may have reached), inasmuch as We have bestowed from on high upon you, step by step, this divine writ, to make everything clear, and to provide guidance and mercy, and a glad tiding unto all those who have surrendered themselves to God.(16:89) 16. Call humankind unto you Sustainer’s path with wisdom and goodly exhortation, and argue with them in the most kindly manner—for, behold, your Sustainer knows best as to who strays from His path, and He best knows He who are the right-guided. (16:125) 17. The term khuluq describes a person’s “character,” “innate disposition” or “nature” in the widest sense of these concepts, as well as “habitual behavior” which becomes, as it were, one’s “second nature” (Taj al-’Arus). Moreover, there are several well-authenticated traditions according to which the prophet Muhammad’s (peace and blessings be upon him) widow A’isha (may God be pleased with her), speaking of the Prophet many years after his death, repeatedly stressed that “his


He it is who has made the earth a cradle for you, and has traced out for you ways [of livelihood] thereon, and [who] sends down waters from the sky: and by this means We bring forth various kinds of plants. (20:53)


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character (khuluq) was the Qur’an.” Related by Muslim, Tabari, and Hakim, on the authority of Sa’id Ibn Hisham, Ibn Hanbal, Abu Da’ud and Nasa’i, on the authority of Al-Hasan al-Basri, Tabari, on the authority of Qatadah and Jubayr ibn Nufayl, and several other compilations. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 883. 18. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 57. Related to this issue of engaging the Other most kindly, the Qur’an specifically mentions the People of the Book, “And do not argue with the People of the Book otherwise than in a most kindly manner—unless it be such of them as are bent on evildoing [And are therefore not accessible to friendly argument:]” the implication being that in such cases all disputes should a priori be avoided. “And say: ‘We believe in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you: our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto Him that We [all] surrender ourselves’” (29:46) M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 613. It is important to note here, that together with calling for kind conversation with the followers of other scriptures, the Qur’an embraces the People of the Book who are true to their faith. In each instance, the common ground that they share is stressed: belief in God and the Last Day, and doing good works. Verily, those who have attained to faith [in this divine writ], as well as those who follow the Jewish faith, and the Christians, and the Sabians—all who believe in God and the Last Day and do righteous deeds—shall have their reward with their Sustainer; and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve. (2:62) Among the People of the Book there are upright people who recite God’s signs (throughout the night, and prostrate themselves in adoration. They believe in God and the Last Day; they enjoin what is right, and forbid what is wrong; and they hasten (in emulation) in good works: They are in the ranks of the righteous. (3:113–114) 19. P. Ochs, “SSR: The Rules of Scriptural Reasoning,” 1–2, Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 2/1 (May 2002). 20. Verily, in the creation of the heavens and of the earth, and the succession of night and day: and in the ships that speed through the sea with what is useful to man: and in the waters which God sends down from the sky, giving life thereby to the earth after it had, been lifeless, and causing all manner of living creatures to multiply thereon: and in the change of the winds, and the clouds that run their appointed courses between sky and earth: [in all this] there are messages indeed for people who use their reason. (2:164)



This passage is one of the many in which the Qur’an appeals to “those who use their reason” to observe the daily wonders of nature, including the evidence of man’s own ingenuity (“the ships


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21.

that speed through the sea”), as so many indications of a conscious, creative Power pervading the universe. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 34. And lo, [thus] spoke Abraham unto his father Azar: “Do you take idols for gods? Verily, I see that you and your people have obviously gone astray!” (6:74) When he spoke [thus] unto his father: “O my father! Why dost you worship something that neither hears nor sees and can be of no avail whatever to you? (19:42)

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23. 24.

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26. 27.

Have you, then, ever considered what it is that you have been worshipping you and those forbears of yours? Now (as for me, I know that) verily, these (false deities) are my enemies, (and that none is my helper) save the Sustainer of all worlds, who has created me and is the One who guides me, and when I fall ill, is the One who restores me to health, and who will cause to die and then will bring me back to life, and who, I hope, will forgive me my faults on Judgment Day!” (26:75–82). However, this is not the case of the prophet Abraham (peace be upon him), who had to forsake his people as they were not willing to listen and also because they persecuted him. Other major prophets, on the other hand, did return to their people. It may be in different circumstances, the Prophet may need to adopt different ways of dealing with the afflicted paradigm. See also Qur’an, 8:74. The expression shay’an (here rendered as “in any way”) makes it clear that shirk (“the ascribing of divinity to anything beside God”) is not confined to a worship of other “deities,” but implies also the attribution of divine or quasi-divine powers to things not regarded as deities. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 110. Indeed, you have a good example In Abraham and those who followed him, when they said unto their idolatrous people: “Verily, we are quit of you and of all that you worship instead of God: we deny the truth of whatever you believe; and between us and you there has arisen enmity and hatred, to last until such a time as you come to believe in the One God!” (60:4) Say: “I invoke my Sustainer alone, for I do not ascribe divinity to anyone beside Him.” (72:20). The following verse illustrates an instance of the Prophet (Abraham)’s interrupting a belief taken for granted. Are you not aware of that [king] who argued with Abraham about his Sustainer, [simply] because God had granted him kingship? Abraham said: “My Sustainer is He who grants life and deals death.” [The king] replied: “I [too] grant life and deal death!” Abraham said: “Verily, God causes the sun to rise in the east; cause it, then, to rise in the west!” Thereupon he who was bent on


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denying the truth remained dumbfounded: for God does not guide people who [deliberately] do wrong. (2:258) 28. The same logic is expounded in verse 39:29, God sets forth a parable: A man who has for his masters several partners, [all of them] at variance with one another, and a man depending wholly on one person: can these two be deemed equal as regards their condition? [Nay,] all praise is due to God [alone]: but most of them do not understand this. 29. See also Qur’an, 16:20, [n]ow those beings that some people invoke beside God cannot create anything, since they themselves are but created. 30. Say: “Have you ever [really] considered those things and forces to whom you ascribe a share in God’s divinity, [and] whom you invoke beside God? Show me what it is that they have created on earth—or do [you claim that] they have a share in [governing] the heavens?” Have We ever vouchsafed them a divine writ on which they could rely as evidence [in support of their views]? Nay, [the hope which] the evildoers hold out to one another [is] nothing but a delusion. (35:40) It is God who has created you, and then has provided you with sustenance, and then will cause you to die, and then will bring you to life again. Can any of those beings or powers to whom you ascribe a share in His divinity do any of these things? Limitless is He in His glory, and sublimely exalted above anything to which men may ascribe a share in His divinity! (30: 40) Say: “Who is it that provides you with sustenance out of heaven and earth, or who is it that has full power over [your] hearing and sight? And who is it that brings forth the living out of that which is dead, and brings forth the dead out of that which is alive? And who is it that governs all that exists?” And they will [surely] answer: “[It is] God, Say, then: “Will you not, then, become [fully] conscious of Him. (10:31) Say: “Have you [really] given thought to what it is that you invoke instead of God? Show me what these [beings or forces] have created anywhere on earth! Or had they, perchance, a share in [creating] the heavens? [If so,] bring me any divine writ preceding this one, or any [other] vestige of knowledge—if what you claim is true!” [i.e., in support of your claim that there are other divine powers besides God] (46:4)



You call upon me to deny [the oneness of] God and to ascribe a share in His divinity to aught of which I cannot [possibly] have any knowledge the while I summon you to [a cognition of] the Almighty, the All-Forgiving! (40:42) I.e., because there is no reality whatsoever in those supposedly “divine” beings or forces (Zamakhshari) 31. B.S.Nursi, “Isharat al-I’ jaz” in Risale-i-Nur Kulliyati (Istanbul: Nesil Yayinlari, 1996), p. 1216.


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32. Nursi wrote that “the triumph of the Qur’an in expounding convincing evidences and sound arguments for the divine unity and the truths of belief is a point of support for believers of all religions in the face of the overwhelming atheistic currents.” In Risale-i-Nur Kulliyati, (Istanbul: Nesil Yayinlari, 1996), 1716. 33. The approach followed is like this: If, for instance, we wanted to convince a person who lived in the dark all her life to go out in the light, how would we proceed? Darkness for her is a “natural” state of being; it is a “universal” fact until she is introduced to the light. 34. And [remember the time] when your Sustainer made [this promise] known: “If you are grateful [to Me], I shall most certainly give you more than you deserve.” (14:7) 35. He would say, “Verily, I have come to love the love of all that is good because I bear my Sustainer in mind!” (38:32) 36. Verily, God does not forgive the ascribing of divinity to aught beside Him, although He forgives any lesser sin unto whomever He wills: for those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God have indeed gone far astray. (4:116) 37. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 113. 38. Hatidh qudsi 34. Narrated by Anas and related by al-Tirmidhi and Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Its chain of authorities is deemed sound. Similarly, the Quran says: Yet he who does evil or [otherwise] sins against himself, and thereafter prays God to forgive him, shall find God much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace (4:110) 39. Abu Hurayrah narrated the following qudsi hadith: A servant of God committed a sin and said: O God, forgive me my sin. And He (glorified and exalted be He) said: My servant has committed a sin and has known that he has a Lord who forgives sins and punishes for them. Then he sinned again and said: O Lord, forgive me my sin. And He (glorified and exalted be He) said: My servant has committed a sin and has known that he has a Lord who forgives sins and punishes for them. Then he sinned again and said: O Lord, forgive me my sin. And He (glorified and exalted be He) said: My servant has committed a sin and has known that he has a Lord who forgives sins and punishes for sins. Do what you wish, for I have forgiven you. Qudsi hadith 33. It was related by Muslim and by al-Bukhari. 40. See also 2:25; 2:82; 2:277; 3:57; 4:57; 4: 122; 4:124; 4173; 5:9; 10: 4; 13:29; 18; 2. 41. Those who have attained to faith, and who have not obscured their faith by wrongdoing—it is they who shall be secure, since it is they who have found the right path! (6:82) 42. The previous verse reads as follows, But alas, among those generations [whom We destroyed] before your time there were no people endowed with any virtue—[people]


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who would speak out against the [spread of] corruption on earth except the few of them whom We saved [because of their righteousness], whereas those who were bent on evildoing only pursued pleasures which corrupted their whole being, and so lost themselves in sinning. (11:116) M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 334. In this particular point I agree with a Muslim scholar who observes that, “Modern civilization takes pride in having developed the critical mind and the power of objective criticism, whereas in reality it is in a fundamental sense the least critical of all known civilizations for it does not possess the objective criteria to judge and criticize its own activities. It is a civilization which fails in every kind of reform because it cannot begin with the reform of itself.” S. H. Nasr, “The Western World and Its Challenges to Islam,” in Islam: Its Meaning and Message, ed. K. Ahmad (London: Islamic Council of Europe, 1975), p. 217. Al-Ghazali, The Book of Knowledge, trans. N. A. Faris (Lahore: Ashraf Press, 1962), p. 228. See note 5. It is noteworthy that Islamic mysticism (Sufism) is quite widespread and popular in the Islamic world. Whereas, in other religious traditions mysticism is usually limited to the small minority. An important point is that the “same question” may generate different answers when asked by different people. This is because the answers are responses to the particular context of the inquiry. It may be for this reason that traditional Muslim scholars endorsed diversity in matters that would seem to have only one right answer. “They agreed to disagree.” (J. Walbridge, “The Islamic Art of Asking Questions: Ilm alIkhtilaf and the Institutionalization of Disagreement,” in Islamic Studies, Occasional Paper 46, p. 10) and actually institutionalized disagreement or ilm al-ikhtilaf (literally science of disagreement) as Muslim scholars called it, because they held that individual texts must be understood within a larger textual, intellectual, and social context. Prof. Walbridge notes that “The asking of questions and disagreement about their answers is at the heart of the Islamic experience.” (Ibid., 2) An apt example is the existence of the various formally conflicting legal schools, the madhhabs. All claim to reflect the shari’a or divine law as revealed in the Qur’an and the consensus is that they are all equally acceptable interpretations of the revealed shari’a. Traditionally, this diversity has been viewed as a source of richness and mercy, which was expressed in a hadith, “The disagreement of my community (umma) is mercy.” Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, Ikhtilaf al-Madhahib, ed. Abd alQayyum b. Muhammad Shafi al-Bastawi (Cairo: Dar al-I’tisam, 1989), pp. 19–20. In modern times, however, the consensus of disagreement together with its accompanying flexibility in adapting to diversity




Yamine Mermer failed to the extent that Muslims have been modernized. As Abdulhakim Murad explained, “[t]he British historian John Gray goes so far as to describe the process which Washington describes as the “war on terror” as an internal Western argument which has nothing to do with traditional Islam. Murad quotes John Gray as saying, “‘The ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.’” (http://www.themodernreligion.com/ht/faith-future.html) Traditionally, Islam has adapted to diversity quite successfully. Islam embraced substantially very diverse cultures in lands, which stretched from Morocco to Indonesia and which were geographically very distant from each other, and whose respective local pre-Islamic cultures—whether Christian, Zoroastrian, Hindi or Buddhist—differed greatly. A good example of how Islam transformed diverse cultures without destroying them is Islamic art. For centuries, mosques in China, India, or in Spain have shared a distinctly Islamic “personality” despite local variations in material and structural techniques.Islamic art manifests an overall uniformity, something that makes us recognize it as distinctively “Islamic” although it took the hue of the many diverse local cultures it thrived in. Although, the arts created under the aegis of Islam display a unity and an “Islamic” quality, they also reveal undeniable local and regional characters that exhibit their historical origins. In Oleg Grabar’s view, Islamic art borrowed artistic forms from various cultural traditions but “liberated” them from their non-Islamic associations before using them as “free” forms. Often it is the case that the antimodern “zealots” claim that their understanding of religion represents the norm as they are often not even aware that theirs is only an interpretation among others. Their intolerance gives reason to the secularist modernists who are inclined to dismiss religion anyway, to accuse religion of bigotry and advocate secularism under the guise of “objectivity” or for pragmatic reasons (if religion is about bigotry then it is better to eliminate it from public debates). In doing so however, they often espoused secularist bigotry. The additional peril here is that universalism is concealed under the semblance of neutrality. Naïve universalism characterizes both stands as each takes its own self as its point of reference. The resulting selfcentered logic is of the kind, “Whatever my net does not catch, is not fish; or whatever I don’t understand, is irrational; or whatever does not resemble me, is weird and evil.” This self-centered vision of the world defines itself by negating the Other and seeing in the Other a mirror image of its own less attractive potentialities. This dialectical self-centered logic is typical of modernity. A relevant case in point would be the West’s projection of Islam as its inverse image, as Edward Said explained, or likewise the antimodernist zealots’ mythical representation of the West as seen on movies, a world of sex and


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violence that overlooks the role that religion, custom, and tradition play in the lives of many people in Western societies. Noting the self-destructive effect of this dialectical mind, the Jewish scholar Magonet said, Islamophobia like anti-Semitism or any other kind of racism is as destructive to those who use it, teach it or preach it or disseminate it as it is to the victims it produces because like all prejudice it undermines the humanity of those who promote it and is a betrayal of the integrity of God. Before we are Jews or Muslims, we are human beings made, as Jewish tradition teaches, in the image of God. If we diminish the humanity of another we diminish it within ourselves and that is the way to our own destruction. (Emphasis mine.) J. Magonet, Talking to the other: Jewish Interfaith Dialogue with Christians and Muslims (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 165. From the Qur’an’s point of view, God created people different so that they may know each other that is, not that they may despise each other, O humankind! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another. (2) Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all-knowing, all-aware. (49:13) According to commentators such as Zamakhshari, Razi, and Baydawi, the first part of the above verse means “We have created you out of a father and a mother,” which implies that this equality of biological origin is reflected in the equality of the human dignity common to all. And with the expression, “so that you might come to know one another,” the Qur’an says, “know that all belong to one human family, without any inherent superiority of one over another,” according to Zamakhshari. Asad explains, [t]his connects with the exhortation, in the preceding two verses, to respect and safeguard each other’s dignity. In other words, men’s organization into “nations and tribes” is meant to foster rather than to diminish their mutual desire to understand and appreciate the essential human oneness underlying their outward differentiations; and, correspondingly, all racial, national or tribal prejudice (asabiyya) is condemned—implicitly in the Qur’an, and most explicitly by the Prophet (peace be upon him). In addition, speaking of people’s boasting of their national or tribal past, the Prophet said: “Behold, God has removed from you the arrogance of pagan ignorance (jahiliyya) with its boast of ancestral glories. Man is but a God-conscious believer or an unfortunate sinner. All people are children of Adam, and Adam was created out of dust. Fragment of a hadith quoted by Tirmidhi and Abu Da’ud, on the authority of Abu Hurayrah. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, p. 794.




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Said Nursi interprets the above verse to mean, I created you as peoples, nations, and tribes, so that you know one another and assist one another; not that you regard each other as strangers, and nurture hostility and enmity toward each other. Nursi, Risale-i-Nur Kulliyati, p. 498. Accordingly, the Other is the mirror of the Self (as stated in the hadith), not its inverse image. The Self sees its positive and negative potentialities reflected in the Other and thereby embraces and critiques it. At the same time, the Self sees the Other in itself; a move that generates compassion and empathy and opens possibilities for self-criticism too. The Other’s otherness is a means to know the Self better and to realize that after all the Other is not alien. In the above verse, difference is acknowledged and respected, but the point in difference is to engage each other and know each other and learn from each other. Difference may be celebrated but not to the point of obliterating the fact that we are all very much alike. This is like human faces: they are all distinct but they are also quite similar depending on our perspective. 49. As Taha Abdel Rahman has noted that abstract rational enquiry may make it look as though there are possibilities of reconciliating the Promethean reason with scriptural wisdom. But he goes on to note that the social and political upheaval that shook history and undermined society with a shocking effect on humanity refuted the possibility of such combination. See T.Abdel Rahman, “The Separation of Human Philosophy from the Wisdom of the Qur’an,” in Islam at the Crossroads, ed. I. M. Abu Rabi (Albany: SUNY:, 2003), p. 200


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The West a nd Isl am


Part II





Isl a m as Our Other, Isl am a s Ourselves Steven Kepnes

I

slam, as the third monotheistic religion, shares a dual identity as both Other and Self to Judaism, to Christianity, and to Western civilization. This ambiguous position calls forth the ambiguous emotions of sibling rivalry but also promises the possibility of brotherly and sisterly love. From the point of view of scripture, which I will take as my starting point, Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity not only a devotion to the one God, to the goodness of creation, and the dream of a future time of judgment and peace, but the very basic principle that revelation is given in scripture. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all People of the Book in this sense and though their books are different they share common narratives, common prophets, and common hermeneutical principles to guide them in the interpretation of scripture. And this gives them, despite all differences, a common ground for discussion of the issues that both divide and unite them. For my reflections on the simultaneous otherness and sameness of Islam to Judaism and Christianity, I have chosen to take you through an exercise in scriptural exegesis or what I call Scriptural Reasoning on the figures of Hagar and Ishmael. I choose these figures because they appear as important figures both in Hebrew and Muslim sacred texts.Hagar is the second wife of the patriarch Abraham and mother of Abraham’s first son Ishmael. According to the Tales of the Prophets, the first part of the biography of Muhammed, Ishmael is the father of the Arab and larger Ummah of the Muslim people. Hagar is also a


Chapter 5


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central figure in the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, as pilgrims walk back and forth in an effort to retrace Hagar’s steps when she was forced by Sarah into the wilderness. I must admit that I began my scriptural reasoning on Hagar and Ishmael with the apprehension that it may not be the appropriate place to begin, since the Jewish tradition is fairly negative about these figures. Yet as I reread the stories I was taken in by the spiritual insights and depth of the character of Hagar. And I recalled a point made by the modern Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, which I take to be most instructive in doing Scriptural Reasoning. Buber argues that the Hebrew scriptures should be viewed, not as an objective history of creation and redemption, but as a story of the relation of God to Israel that is told primarily from the perspective of the people of Israel.1 Hebrew scripture certainly moves out from Israel to attempt to embrace the entire world, but its starting point is a small family that wanders from somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan and comes to see itself as bearing a world historic message This means that the Hebrew scriptures or Torah is at once a particularistic and universal document. I could put this somewhat differently and say that the Torah is both an ethnocentric and theocentric document. From the ethnocentric perspective of Israel, Hagar may be a mere slave-girl and Ishmael a wild ass of a man and thorn in the side of Israel, but from the perspective of the larger narrative of the Bible and from the perspective of God, Hagar and Ishmael have a unique role in God’s design. Also, although some might be put off by Hagar’s status as a lowly slave-girl in the Hebrew scriptures, she can also be seen as a symbol of the Israelite nation as a whole. this fact actually unites her to Jewish and Christian origins. For the children of Israel trace their origins to their status as Egyptian slaves who were freed by God and Christians find their origins in the death of a lowly carpenter who suffered the criminal’s death of crucifixion. Yet in addition to these rough analogies to overarching concepts, the use of scripture, and lowly origins, the stronger point I wish to make is that the presence of the figures of Hagar and Ishmael in scripture embeds the Muslim people in the Torah of the Jews and the Old Testament of the Christians. Hagar is at once the “other” who comes from Egypt, the land of exile and slavery, and the wife of the patriarch Abraham through whom all the peoples of the world are blessed. Hagar is also the surrogate womb for Sarah to exploit, and the second wife of Abraham, and mother of his first son. The most obvious implication of this to me is that although Islam is often presented as the


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Other to Judaism and Christianity and to the strange fiction called the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” Hagar and Ishmael’s presence in those very scriptures is a warrant for Jews and Christians to take Islam seriously, not only as the third monotheism, but as a tradition that is rooted in Genesis and whose origin and destiny is intertwined with Israel. If Islam is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures what this opens up is a new possibility to see Islam as not opposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition of monotheism but, indeed, part of it. Through Hagar and Ishmael, Islam regains its place as simultaneously the first child of Abraham and the third stage in the development of monotheism. What this means is that Jews and Christians have a warrant in their scriptures to engage with the Muslims not as strange Others but as long lost members of the great family whose destiny is to be a light of truth and healing to all the nations of the world.

I With this as an introduction I will move now to scripture: Genesis 16 7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” 9 The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.” 10 The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” 11 And the angel of the Lord said to her, “Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction. 12 He shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and he shall live at odds with all his kin.” 13 So she named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are El-roi”; for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” 14 Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered.


I s l a m a s O u r O t h e r , a s O u r s e lv e s

The first thing to note in these verses is that we have the first appearance of an angel in biblical literature and the first time that God speaks to a woman. Thus, though a slave-girl, Hagar merits particular interest on the part of God. God sends a messenger to her, the messenger finds her in the middle of a journey back to Egypt (as Shur is close to Egypt Gen 25:13), and he finds her by a well. Well scenes are replete throughout the Genesis narrative and I would remind you of the visits


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of Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, even Joseph to wells at crucial points in their lives. The angel asks a highly loaded question, “Where have you come from and where are you going?” Clearly the angel knows where Hagar comes from. So this question must be asked more for Hagar’s sake than for the angel’s. This is the type of question that is only asked of biblical characters of significance, Adam, Cain, Abraham. Elijah, and Jonah. It is an existential question that seeks out a person’s integrity and ability to respond and to take responsibility. It is a kind of trick question or question of testing that biblical figures often fail. Hagar’s answer however, is straight forward, honest, unequivocal, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” Apparently, Hagar passes the test, but this leads to a seemingly cruel command that she return and submit, or literally “place herself under her mistress’s hand.” Given that biblical law demands that one help a run away slave escape, this is, indeed, a strange command. We can either view it as an expression of the cruelty of slavery, of abusive patriarchy, and divine tyranny or search in it for another level of meaning. If, indeed, I am correct, that the first question, “where have you come from . . .” is a test, then the command that follows may be interpreted as a deeper more difficult test. Hagar, must return to Sarah and submit to her. Although the Hebrew hitani appears to have no relation to the Arabic word to submit, am I stretching too far to find an intimation to the command all Muslims, indeed all Jews and Christians, have to submit to the will of God? The supposition however, that God wishes Hagar no ill and, indeed, has a special mission for her is born out in the next lines. “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” Nahum Sarna notes that the messenger uses a rhetorical form that signifies “the birth and destiny of one who is given a special role in God’s design of history (cf. Gen 25:23 and Judges 13:3).”2 It is easy to see connections between Hagar and the first woman, Eve. The Hebrew harbah arbeh “I will greatly multiply . . .” is the same phrase that God uses in the curse of Eve, in greatly multiplying Eve’s pain in childbirth. Yet, the consequence of Hagar’s suffering is that she will be abundantly rewarded with multitudes of descendents.Thus, unlike Eve, Hagar is blessed and not cursed. Since Hagar flees Sarah’s home in Canaan, heads for Egypt and then returns to Canaan, her journey reminds us of Abraham’s journeys. Like Abraham, Hagar is a wanderer who comes to hear the word of call and fulfill a divine mission. The feminist Bible scholar, Tikvah Frymer -Kensky, reminds us that the verses that describe Hagar fleeing the home of Sarah and traveling


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Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be strangers [Ger iyeh zarha] in a land that is not theirs and they shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years, but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.

It is startling when we realize that the word used to describe Israel in Egypt is Ger. Ger iyeh zarha, “strangers shall your offspring be.” Thus, God tells Abraham in Gen. 15:13 that his offspring will be literally be Gerim. And in the next chapter we meet Hagar, Ha-Ger, the Egyptian stranger. Frymer-Kensky makes the point obvious, Hagar the stranger, Hagar the servant, Hagar wife of Abraham and mother of Ishmael is Israel! She presages, she prefigures, Israel’s suffering in Egypt. And in her deep connection to God, and in the fact that God sees and listens to her suffering and rewards her with a multitude of offspring, Hagar also prefigures Israel’s ultimate redemption! But now we must pause to reflect on Ishmael and who he is. First, we have his wonderful name which means “God hears.” Our verses connect the hearing to God attending to Hagar’s suffering, “for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.” But later in verse 21:17 a connection is made to God’s hearing the voice of Ishmael. “And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, ‘What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is’” (21:17). In 16:15, Abraham gives Hagar’s son the name Ishmael, fulfilling the divine directive and also legitimizing Ishmael as his son.4 Ishmael clearly has a name that suggests that God hears and will attend to his voice; and thus the Torah seems to recognize and underscore the fact that Ishmael and his offspring will maintain a special relationship with God and that God will continue to hear the voice of Ishmael wherever he is! In this context, it is quite difficult to understand the second part of the description of Ishmael in verse 12. “He shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and he shall live at odds with all his kin.” It is easy to describe this as the view of Ishmael from the perspective of Israel, which highlights the tension between the descendents of Ishmael and the descendents of Isaac. It is noteworthy, however, that the recent Jewish Publication Society version of the last part of verse “al penai kol echav ishkan” translates it not as “he shall live at odds with” but, “He shall dwell


toward Egypt occur right after God has told Abraham in 15:13 that his offspring will be enslaved in Egypt.3


Steven Kepnes

alongside all his kinsmen.” This stresses the intricate relationship between the descendents of Ishmael and the descendents of Isaac without the eternal state of conflict. It is further interesting that the description of Ishmael later in Gen. 21:20 describes him in less contentious terms. “God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt” (21: 20–21). If we leave Ishmael and return to the fascinating figure of Hagar we notice some more remarkable characteristics associated with her in the biblical story. We have to comment on the fact she names God and, furthermore, is the only figure, male or female, in the Bible to do this! “So she named the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are El-roi’; for she said, ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’” (16:13). This expression seems to give witness not only to God seeing into the very soul of Hagar, and her passing this test, but to Hagar’s own ability to see God! It is remarkable that after God names Ishmael, Hagar names God, and the Hebrew expression used in both these occasions are similar. Thus “Korat Shmo Ismael,” “you shall call him Ishmael” is followed by “v’tikrah shem Adonai,” “And she called God . . .” The Hebrew expression v’tikrah shem Adonai also calls to mind a different use of the phrase by Abraham in Genesis 13:13. Here we also have v-ikrah bshem adonai. This is generally rendered in English “and Abraham called on or called out the name of God.” However, the Talmud interprets this to mean that Abraham was fulfilling his prophetic role and publicizing the revelation of the oneness of God throughout the world. Could it be that Hagar was not just speaking to herself when he called out God’s name, but also wished to publicize her revelation of God as one who sees into the essence of humanity and one who sees the suffering of humanity and responds to it? If this were true, Hagar would be a counterpart to Abraham as another Prophet of the One God. Yet since Hagar begins her mission by going out into the wilderness of Egypt to a source of water, to a well, we could also say that Hagar establishes the pattern for the greatest Prophet of Israel, Moses. For Moses also goes out in the wilderness and Moses’s very name means he who is drawn from water. Beyond Moses, we even see vestiges of the Hagar pattern in the New Testament. For in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry with baptism followed by his journey into the wilderness. Aside from her presence as archetype of God’s messenger, Hagar lives on in the Hebrew Scriptures through her name. Thus, we see countless references to Hager, to the stranger, and how Israel is to


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treat the stranger. The notion of the Ger occurs no less than 36 times in the Torah and is connected with the commandment to treat the stranger as one of Israel. The nineteenth-century German Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen, argues that the development of the notion of the Ger in the Torah represents one of the most significant events in the history of all of Western thought. Cohen tells us that the Ger is a “great step with which humanitarianism begins.”5 The power of this notion can be clearly seen in two texts of the Torah. “One law shall be unto him that is home-born and unto the Ger, the stranger that lives among you” (Ex 12:49) (cf. Num 15.15, Lev 24.22, Deut 1.16). “Thou shall love the Ger, the stranger, as yourself” (Lev 19:33). Cohen tells us that what is remarkable about the notion of the Ger is that the term achieves its development as monotheism is codified in law and given political expression in the nation. Thus, the notion of the Ger is not developed as an afterthought, but comes immediately with the formation of Israel. Here, under the commandment of the Torah, the stranger must be treated equally, even though he is not a member of the house of Israel. In the holiness code of Leviticus, the principle of the Ger as fellowman is intensified to the commandment of love. “You shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19.33). Where Kantian ethics develops the responsibility of the self for others on the basis of a universal rational law, the categorical imperative, and the recognition a fundamental moral duty, Cohen recognizes that humans are not motivated by reason and duty alone. In turning to Leviticus, Cohen follows the lead of the Torah to add the emotions of love and compassion to the ethical relation. “Religion achieves what morality fails to achieve. Love for man is brought forth.”6 The Torah accomplishes this achievement on the basis of Israel’s own experience of slavery. Israel should be able to identify with the stranger and love her because she too went through the experience of being a stranger when she was in Egypt.7

II



I hope that I have convinced you of the power of the figures of Hagar and Ishmael in the Hebrew scripture of Judaism which is, of course the Old Testament of Christianity. I have argued that far from being “the Other,” the figures of Hagar and Ishmael are part of the very fabric that ties the people of Israel to God. Having walked you through a short exercise in scriptural exegesis, I would like now to speak a little more about the power of scripture in general and the


Steven Kepnes

power of the three particular scriptures of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This will allow me to say a few things about the promise of the movement called Scriptural Reasoning which I mentioned earlier. In discussing Scriptural Reasoning, one of my central tasks will be to distinguish it from Western philosophic reasoning. One of the wonders of scripture is that it is not beholden to modern secular standards of narrative, historical, and philosophic coherence. These standards might demand that Hagar and Ishmael, as minor figures in the story of Israel, be painted in wholly negative terms or be excised from the narrative after they have filled their functions as foils to Sarah and Isaac. Yet, we see that after these figures are introduced in Genesis 16 and 21 they are not erased, but they appear again. Thus, seemingly out of the blue, Ishmael appears in chapter 25:9 to bury his father Abraham alongside Isaac. The burial site is not just any place but the cave of Machpelah, where Sarah was also buried. Scripture then tells us that Isaac settled near Beer-lahai-roi, the place where God revealed himself to Hagar! The fact that Isaac settles here clearly ties him to Hagar. After being informed of this, we then are given a long list of the genealogy of Ishmael (25:12). Narrative coherence might demand that this information on Ishmael be left out. Or, rather, if Hagar and Ishmael, were truly enemies of Israel, coherence might demand that they be painted in consistent negative portraits. Yet, what we find is a far more complex portrait of these figures. As I have shown, Hagar is a counterpart of Abraham in prophetic sight, she is a positive counterpart to Eve, and her wandering, suffering, and blessing are counterparts to Israel’s slavery and redemption and she even sets a pattern that is followed by Moses and Christ! Similarly, Ishmael might be a wild ass of a man but then, in the end, he shows up as a dutiful son to his father and brother to Isaac at Abraham’s burial. We may say that this treatment of the Other as both different and same, foe and friend, is unique to the Hebrew scriptures. But if we move to the New Testament, we see an equally ambivalent portrait of the most clear and obvious Other to the Christian, the Jew. On the one hand, we have the portrait of the Jews as hypocrites, Christ killers, stubborn sinners doomed to Hell, and on the other hand the Jews carry the law that Christ fulfills without abrogating. The Jews represent the trunk of the tree onto which Christians are grafted. And most importantly, the scriptures of the Jews, despite many attempts to sever their connection to Christianity, are tenaciously maintained, preserved, and even revered as part of Christian scriptures, as the Old Testament. Holding on to the Jewish scriptures as Christian scripture, simply put, is not easy. Certainly, from the standpoint of narrative and logical


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coherence it does not really work. To pull it off, Christianity must develop a complex, self-contradictory hermeneutic which says at once that Jewish scripture is revealed and wrong. Its way of Torah, its way of the law, is both necessary and superseded. Its promise to the children of Abraham both nullified and fulfilled. Muslims may look over the shoulders at Christians and see this as strange, but they must admit that they have a similar ambivalence about their older monotheistic brothers and sisters. On the one hand, Muhammed is the final seal, the last Prophet, the one who corrects what was wrong in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. On the other hand, the Qur’an, in its infinite mercy and openness, recognizes Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and many others as prophets. And the Qur’an preserves many of the narratives of the Jewish and Christian scripture and it praises the People of the Book as righteous children of Abraham. There is no question that there are highly negative statements about the Jews and the Christians in the Qur’an, but if we remember Buber’s insight that scripture is at least partially written from the perspective of one people in an attempt to understand their unique relation to God, we can understand why non-Muslims are presented, at times, in a negative light. Yet, if I may return to my original point about scripture, one of its truly wondrous aspects is that it neither thoroughly demonizes the Other nor does it leave their narratives out. On the contrary, it preserves the memories and stories of the others and states, in fundamental ways, that these Others are related to us. These Others, indeed, are us! Thus we read in the Qur’an Surah 2:62, [t]he believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians—whoever believes in Allah and the last day and does what is good shall receive their reward from their Lord. They shall have nothing to fear and they shall not grieve.

And in Surah 2:135–36 We follow the religion of Abraham who was no polytheist. We believe in Allah, in what has been revealed to us, what was revealed to Abraham, Ismail, Isaac, Jacob and the Tribes, and in what was imparted to Moses, Jesus, making no distinction between any of them.



And finally, in Surah 3:1–3 Allah, There is no God but He, the Living, the Everlasting. He revealed the Book to you in truth, confirming what came before it And He has revealed the Torah and the Gospel.


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The Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs likes to say that if we look at the logical pattern of modern Western philosophy and the modern culture which it reflects, we are offered a way of thinking that follows the logic of dichotomies. On the one hand we have secularists on one side and the religious fundamentalists on the other side. On the other hand we have the progressive West on one side and backward Islam on the other side. These dichotomies are summed up in the distinction between modernity on the one hand and tradition on the other hand. Light/dark, spirit/matter, male/female, same/other, us/them, yes/ no, 0/1, these are the binaries that define our thinking and our world. However, in the face of this logic, scripture offers us another way of thinking. Ochs calls it, following Charles Sanders Peirce, a logic of relations. In this logic the binary pairs are placed in dialogue. To paraphrase the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, scripture places the isolated elements, God, World, and Human in fundamental relations. Scripture offers us concepts of connectedness: creation, revelation, covenant, redemption. It offers us figures of mediation, Adam, Abraham, Hagar, Jesus, Muhammed. These figures are given to fill the gap between us and them, between God and human, and between human and human. This is not to say that scripture is innocent and pure, divorced from dichotomies of spirit and matter, saved and damned, us and them. Indeed, if we look, we can find ample examples of these oppositions. But, the point is that scripture cannot be adequately and fully define by these dichotomies. Rather, a closer look reveals, in almost every page of the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, elements and figures that lie outside of neat dichotomies and divisions. Scripture is filled with lacunae, gaps, inconsistencies, and mysterious sayings, images, and parables that defy simple logic. Scripture, again in the words of Ochs, is “vague,” its meaning unclear and hidden. Because of the fundamental vagueness of scripture, the reader is called upon, indeed, required to interpret the text. Unlike a mathematical formula, or a simple sign like a traffic light, scripture does not yield clear, distinct, univocal meanings. Scripture, instead, is an opaque semiotic system whose meaning is fulfilled in its interpretation by us. This is another way of pointing to the logic of relations of scripture. Its meaning is only given in relation to the interpreter or community of interpreters that receives it. In Hebrew, the Hebrew scriptures are often called the Miqra which means a “calling out.” Thus, the Torah is a system of signs that calls out, it calls out to those who listen for it and truly hear it. But we could also reverse the line of communication and say that the cry does not only come from scripture, but that it comes from humans who cry out in their need and


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suffering. As a conduit of communication between God and humans, scripture itself is a form of mediation, a vessel that bridges the gaps in material and spiritual life. As a conduit for divine communication, scripture is an agent of healing, redemption, even salvation. Now if my description of the logic of relations in scripture is correct, we should not be shy and bringing our voice and cries of the twenty-first century to it. I have already spoken of the dichotomizing logic of the modern world and I have, at least, intimated that scripture may give us a vision and a way to heal that logic. But I want to go even further and suggest that scripture holds within it additional spiritual resources that may help us address the suffering in our existential and historical world today. Certainly, the problem that plagues contemporary Jews, Christians, and Muslims today is the problem of distrust, hatred, and misunderstanding between them. One of the great blessings and also curses of the modern world is that the world seems to have shrunk. What this means is that we no longer have the luxury of Hagar to run away into the wilderness where we can be alone and isolated from each other. Where Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the premodern world could pretty much keep to themselves, we, like Ishmael and Isaac, must live next to each other. And like Ishmael and Isaac, we can either live against each other or alongside each other. Certainly, our scriptures offer us ammunition to oppose one another and even kill one another. But it also offers us alternative avenues of mediation, conciliation, and peaceful coexistence. As well as offering us logic of dichotomies, modernity, to be fair to it, did and still does offer us another way to solve the problem of many different people, with different cultures, living in an increasingly smaller world. This is the route of universal principles, universal rights of men, a universal economic order, and a universal global culture. The universalizing move of modernity flips all the dichotomies vertically and subsumes the base into the apex. Thus, “them” is subsumed into “us,” tradition is subsumed into modernity, religion into secularism, East into West—in short the Other is subsumed into the Self. Although this modern solution has had some success, it has also led to great suffering throughout the world as people see their traditional cultures, local customs, belief in God—which are constructed to preserve human dignity and ethical relations between communal members—dissolving in the solvent of modern universalisms. Certainly, part of the supposed battle between secularism and fundamentalism and between the modern West and Islam is a reaction to the relentless onslaught of a modern universalism which would wash




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away all particularism in the tidal wave of a global culture. Here again, I believe that Scriptural Reasoning can be an aid. Although, some have argued that monotheism represents the first great attempt at an imperialistic and universalistic world culture, the record from the scriptures suggests something else. If I follow Buber’s logic and assert that the three scriptures offer a mixture of particularism and universalism, the Torah singles out Abraham, but he is told that “all the nations of the world will be blessed through you.” Before Abraham, Noah, a non-Israelite, is called “righteous” and before him Adam, the first human who represents all humans, is created in the image of God. The Tower of Babel story clearly favors a diversity of peoples and languages as it suggests that the attempt to have one language, and one culture, is counter to God’s will. I have given only hints to parallel attempts in the New Testament and the Qur’an to negotiate particularity and universalism and to provide resources for conciliation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. What I especially like about the Hagar and Ishmael narratives in scripture is that the differences between Sarah and Hagar, and Isaac and Ishmael are neither overlooked nor dissolved. The tension and conflict between then is neither denied nor obscured. Instead difference, tension, conflict is acknowledged and strategies and models for conciliation and coexistence offered. This conciliation and coexistence is offered not on the basis of some universal principle, or abstract declaration of human unity, but, instead on the basis of a shared sense of the oneness of God. Hagar may be a servant and stranger, but she also is a woman, who suffers, wanders, fears and perseveres until she sees God. Ishmael, whose name means “God hears” may be the son of a surrogate mother, who is unloved by his father’s wife and tossed under a bush to die, but he also knows how to cry out to God and is heard by God. Hagar and Ishmael may be Others to Israel, but in their suffering and redemption, Hagar and Ishmael also represent Israel. And in their spiritual search they recall the “suffering servants” of the Lord who even go beyond Israel to represent the spiritual struggle of all human beings. The movement of scriptural reasoning began over 12 years ago when a group of Jewish philosophers gathered to read Jewish texts with scholars of Talmud and Jewish mysticism. The movement was enlarged and broadened when Christians joined us around 10 years ago and we then read from the Torah and the New Testament. This was fairly natural for Christians, because the Torah is part of the


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Christian Bible and despite the long history of Jewish and Christian animosities, there has been, for over a century, a sense that it was the combination of Judaism and Christianity together with Greek culture that produced what is sometimes called Western culture or as we like to say in America, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Following the holocaust and with recent Christian scholarship on the historical Jesus and the Jewish character of the early Church, Christian scholars have sought to bring Christianity closer to Judaism. But this has been met by an increasing Jewish and Christian antipathy toward Islam. Scriptural Reasoning was relatively tame and acceptable when its practitioners read and interpreted the Torah and New Testament, but the movement really became bold and internationally significant when, around seven years ago it started to included the study of Islamic texts. One can imagine the exciting possibilities for discourse and discovery if you merely consider the math. When you move from two partners to three, from a dyad to a triad, the possibilities multiply. Two represents a lovely couple capable of romance but three represents a family, which brings with it the challenge to translate romance into reality. Emmanuel Levinas has said that the relation of the one to another can easily remain a private matter, but when you add a third, you enter the public domain, things become far more complex and you must consider issues of justice. We have already discussed the problem of binaries which tend toward polarities and oppositions. When a third is added complexity multiplies but so too do terms of relation and mediation. I have already mentioned my sense that the three scriptures are each, in their own way, a combination of ethnocentrism and theocentrism. Ochs likes to say that the Enlightenment sought a solution to what it saw as excessive ethnocentrism in the Bible by substituting abstract universals for God. My sense is that the addition of Islamic texts to Scriptural Reasoning supplies it with yet another avenue to approach the problem of the new modern form of ethnocentrism. This is an ethnocentrism which pits the JudeoChristian tradition and its modern reincarnation in a postcapitalist global culture against the rest of the world. In the face of this new ethnocentrism, Islam, as both “Western and Eastern” both Us and Them, Same and Different, can be the crucial mediating element between the West and the world. In addition, Islam offers the world the possibility of another chance, another model, for dealing with the conflict between tradition and modernity, between religion and the secular. Judaism followed Christianity in allowing its religious texts,




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rituals, symbols, and liturgies to be disemboweled and made over into the terms of the Enlightenment. In this process, Christianity and Judaism became “modern liberal religions” that were transformed into mere handmaidens of modernity. They became shallow reflections of enlightenment ideals and supplied superficial proof texts to legitimate and not challenge the new modern economic, political, social, and cultural order. Islam has by and large resisted the modern West and now wages a desperate battle to preserve its traditional beliefs and practices in the face of modernity.Islamic leaders are certainly aware of the avenues carved out by modern Jews and Christians and some are calling for Muslims to follow parallel paths. Yet others are trying to blaze a new way that will steer between the paths of modern liberal religion on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. Some Muslims are again trying to blend tradition and modernity, Islam and the secular, in new ways that will be a true mediation between the two poles of fundamentalism and secularism and a source of healing and truth that contemporary Jews and Christians will want to follow.

Notes 1. Martin Buber, On the Bible (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 24. 2. Nahum Sarna, Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2001), p. 85. 3. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Sarah and Hagar,” in Talking about Genesis: A Resource Guide (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p.97. 4. Sarna, Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, p. 88. 5. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. S. Kaplan (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), p. 121. 6. Ibid., p.146. 7. It seems that there is a rough parallel in the Torah’s notion of the Ger to the notion of the Dimi in Muslim societies. The Dimi is granted respect and certain protections; but the position of the Dimi, like that of the Ger, is not ultimately equal to the members of the host societies. I will shortly discuss the modern way of dealing with the relation of host societies to others who do not share the dominate religiocultural identity. The modern way is to move to a universal homogenized culture which dissolves all cultural differences between peoples and assures them all the same minimal human rights. Although this strategy has obvious advantages, it also has the disadvantage of depriving people of life giving religiocultural systems. Scriptural Reasoning attempts to forge a third way between the solution of bestowing minority status, as


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in the Ger or Dimi, and washing out all cultural difference in a universal global culture, and abstract declaration of human rights. That third way may begin from the notions of the Ger and Dimi but need to move well beyond them to recognition of equal status for those who are different before God.





Beyond Logics of Preservation a nd Buria l: The Displ ay of Di sta nce a nd Prox imity of Tra ditions in S cri ptural Reasonin g Nicholas Adams

The chapters by Basit Koshul and Steve Kepnes perform a vital service

for contemporary discussions of the relations of members of the Abrahamic traditions. Basit Koshul, following Murad, has argued that Islam “squares the circle” by being a vital dissenting voice within modern cultures. He goes on to also argue that that Scriptural Reasoning may be a fruitful means of accomplishing this (see chapter 2, this volume). One aim of this paper is to show that some non-Muslims are sufficiently attentive to this friendly dissent: an unheard voice is not an effective form of criticism, and (to use Koshul’s image) circles remain unsquared. I shall make some remarks about this at the end. The more immediate task is to respond, from a Christian perspective, to Steve Kepnes’ paper. Kepnes has tried to show us how a Jew understands Islam. There are three things which he has not done, and I want to draw attention to these.


Chapter 6

1. Kepnes has not tried to find a Western expert on Islam to tell him what Islam is. Ours is an age of hopeless generalization, where 10.1057/9780230605626 - Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter, Edited by Steven Kepnes and Basit Bilal Koshul

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experts appear at a moment’s notice and pronounce about the essence of some phenomenon. It is possible, in today’s universities, to be an expert on Islam. It is possible, in today’s public sphere, to find people who will tell us what Islam is. But that is not what Kepnes has done at all. He offers no overview of Islam; he makes no recourse to “the facts,” and he cites no Western ethnographies of Islamic culture. He has not sought to “place” Islam in a theoretical context determined by non-Islamic political interests. 2. Kepnes has not tried to find a Muslim expert on Islam to tell him what Islam is. Ours is an age of lamentable tact and sensitivity, where we “find space” for the other to speak for himself or herself, while we secretly make our own judgments but of course are not so crass as to articulate these in public. Kepnes could have tried to find a Muslim expert behind whom he could safely and respectably conceal his own understanding, his own view, of Islam. He did not. One can notice something interesting about these first two points: they run counter to each other. It is a mark of our cultural confusion that our age is marked by these two competing tendencies. A little more can be said about them. Hopeless generalization is not merely a matter of intellectual shortcomings. It marks something more dangerous, where concepts forged by one party, in one context, at one time, are imposed on other parties, in other contexts, in other times. I am thinking of concepts such as democracy, freedom, or community, to all of which I and many other Christians are fully committed in our own contexts, but about which there is room for a significant diversity of interpretation. “Everybody knows” what they mean when used in public speeches: who would wish to be against these things? But concepts have geographies and histories, and to be engaged in hopeless generalization is to be blind and deaf to them. This is not to say that one should abandon such particularly forged concepts: this is literally unthinkable. Rather, one must pay attention to the forging, and to its provisionality when the concepts forged are attempts—guesses really—at expressing how other persons in other contexts see the world. The second point is about lamentable tact and sensitivity. This too is not merely a matter of social weakness: it seriously impairs powers of judgment. Judgments may be indefinitely postponed, or—if judgments about action need to be made nonetheless—made in a sinister fashion behind closed doors. To be a modern person is to be perpetually exhausted as, in the face of the need to make judgments, one shuttles between generalization and tact, between an all-embracing public voice, and a narrowly self-interested private voice. It would be an extraordinary achievement if this shuttling were replaced by attentiveness to


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geographies and histories. Tact would be replaced by attentiveness, generalization by investigation into geographies and histories. Such investigation would not seek “the” description of the phenomena, but would recognize the hypothetical quality of its own guesses as it tries to render unfamiliar material in the terms of its own languages. And it would investigate not just geographies and histories but texts. Kepnes’ chapter is an example of the kinds of judgment that emerge from this attentiveness. The language he uses is best heard as an apologetically Jewish voice, not in the register of an allegedly “neutral” academic stance. 3. Kepnes has not tried to read a Muslim text and then say what he thinks of it. Ours is, in a most alarming way, an age of “the power of the reader.” No texts are forbidden to us; we have access to them all, so it seems, and our interpretations have infinite validity “for us.” We are entitled to pick up any text from any time and to ventilate our “response” to it. Kepnes has not tried, in this sense, to understand a Muslim text. Instead, he has read a Jewish text. He has tried to understand that. Now understanding is best pursued through conversation: through offers made, through offers accepted, through offers refused, and through offers transformed into new offers. Kepnes has begun his act of understanding by making an offer: in this case, he offers a reading of Genesis 16 and Genesis 21. Setting his face against a culture of generalization, Kepnes has offered a highly particular understanding of Islam. Setting his face against a culture of lamentable tact and sensitivity, Kepnes has indeed made his judgments about Islam public. Setting his face against the infinite power of the reader, Kepnes has responded to texts that belong to his own tradition, and has submitted his interpretation of those texts to the discipline of other authoritative readings in his tradition. This is all radical stuff: and it emerges just because Kepnes has chosen to read a small part of Jewish scripture: a small part of Genesis 16 and Genesis 21. His reasons for doing so are obvious: the Jewish texts appear to be, in his cautious words, “fairly negative about these figures.” The text thus appears, in an everyday kind of way, as a problem. Consequenlty, this raises a danger: for a Jew to reflect on Hagar and Ishmael from within Jewish scripture could be to start with negativity, and to provide yet more negativity in the interpretation of these texts. Kepnes starts with a problem. The situation which brings these texts together in this volume is marked by precisely this problem. Our traditions are beset with practices


B e y o n d L o g i c s o f P r e s e r vat i o n a n d B u r i a l


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of speech and political action which are “fairly negative” about each other. To put it mildly! Our newspapers and pamphlets, our politicians and their researchers, our talk in cafés and bars: trouble is not just brewing; it has already begun. In the United Kingdom, my home country, a law has been passed that increases the period for which our (excellent) police officers may detain British nationals without any evidence and without charging them with any crime. The majority of these nationals are Muslims. British Muslims can now be seen, in the eyes of the law, as an “internal threat” to national security, before they have committed any crime, and before evidence is presented that shows they are about to commit a crime. Some of our Christian bishops spoke out against this legislation when it was proposed, to their credit, but they were not heeded. Muslims have become quite prominent in our national press, and the reporting is indeed “fairly negative about these figures.” Genesis 16 is a kind of sign of our situation, and I think it is for this reason that Kepnes has chosen that text. His method is to try to offer a reading of the text which acknowledges the problem and tries to address it in a reparative way. Instead of reading Genesis 16 and 21 in a way that minimizes the problem, Kepnes in some ways allows it to be exaggerated: Hagar really is the stranger; she is emphatically Egyptian. Yet, drawing on Frymer-Kensky, we are enabled to see that Hagar prefigures not just Israel’s suffering in Egypt but Israel’s redemption. Hagar, the mother of Islam, is also a type of Israel: one who receives the Lord’s blessing in perpetuity. Going beyond Frymer-Kensky, Hagar is the only one— male or female—who names God; going even further, by analogy with Rashi’s description of Abraham, Hagar is one who makes known the revelation of God. Kepnes daringly places Hagar as a “counterpart” to Abraham as “evangelist of the one God.” Kepnes’ reading gives us Hagar as one who is emphatically Other to Israel: she is the mother of Ishmael, the one who is given bread and water and sent away, the one who provides one of the wives for Esau, and whose history is an alternative history: an other history to that of Israel. But she is also identified as Israel: in the blessing she receives from the Lord; in her prefigurement of the enslavement and redemption of Israel in Egypt; she is also, in Kepnes’ reading, like Abraham, as one who makes public the revelation of God. There is no question of playing down the Otherness. There is no attempt to integrate Sarah’s maternity and Hagar’s maternity into one history. There remain two histories, or even three, as Genesis presents the contrasting lines of Isaac and Ishmael, and then the contrasting


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lines of Jacob and Esau. Neither is there an attempt to play down the identity: Hagar is not merely like Sarah. She is like Abraham. Her children are not merely like Sarah’s: Hagar’s very self is a type of Israel as the bearer of blessing, and a sign of suffering and redemption. This interpretation is taken to a new level when Kepnes suggests that just as the “other” of Hagar and Ishmael is preserved in Genesis’ narrative, so the “other” of Judaism is preserved in Christian narrative. Just as Genesis includes the genealogy of Hagar, narrates Abraham’s burial by his two sons, and records Isaac’s settlement at Beer-lahai-roi, so the New Testament preserves the Jews as bearers of the law, and Christian communities preserve the Tanakh (albeit now as Old Testament). Kepnes recognizes that there are problems with this, and sees at work in Christian theology a complex hermeneutic. If I understand Kepnes right, the crucial point is the preservation of one narrative within another: just as Genesis lists the offspring of Hagar, and keeps their names alive, so Christianity preserves the Tanakh as Old Testament, and “keeps” the law in some sense; and so Islam . . . but here I want to venture a friendly disagreement. The logic of preservation which Kepnes sets next to Peter Ochs’ logic of dialogue, means paying attention to who is doing the preserving. I wonder if Kepnes has in a way too anxiously anticipated what Christians are doing with the Tanakh, or too hastily cited ayat 62, 145, and 136 from Sura 2, and the opening ayat from Sura 3. For me, Kepnes’ reading of Genesis 16, 21, 25, should evoke a corresponding reading of New Testament texts from Christians, and corresponding readings of Qur’anic texts from Muslims. I wonder if Kepnes should be doing all the work for us here? But maybe it is not anxiety or hastiness but rather enthusiasm, and an experience of trust that these readings will be evoked, and that this entitles Kepnes to speak on our behalf with the joy of anticipating that we do, indeed, say these things. This is worth mentioning, because those who may be curious about Scriptural Reasoning may be surprised by the swiftness and confidence of Kepnes’ moves outward from Genesis to the New Testament and to the Qur’an. This is not something guaranteed in advance: it is a task and a responsibility that is undertaken by members of each tradition. Kepnes has generously refrained from offering any scripture from the New Testament, and so I want to offer the first beginnings of such an offer. This also arises from my strong belief that any truly reparative reasoning is a social endeavor requiring many participants. No one voice, from one tradition, can be reparative in a situation whose problems are not merely exacerbated by the encounter of many traditions, but whose problems in many cases are the encounter of




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many traditions. And in any case, those traditions themselves are the products of encounter: they do not greet each other for the first time having been grown in a sterile laboratory. Every greeting already bears the histories of previous greetings, conflicts, and settlements. The most obvious place to do this would be through a reading of Romans 3 and 4. These deal with the relationship between Judaism, the law, and faith. The texts are long and complex, however, and this is just a short response. I will focus, then, on part of Romans 4: For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now to one who works, his wages are not reckoned as a gift but as his due. And to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness. (Rom 4: 3–5)

Paul here is a wonderful example of the logic of preservation. He “preserves” Genesis 15.6. Let us turn to that text: And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendents be.” And he believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness. (Gen 15:5–6)

It is appropriate that Romans 4 should be evoked by Kepnes’ reading of Genesis 15, 21, 25: it is not just another passage narrating God’s blessing, but produces an “intertext,” where the older text is contained in the newer. The moment of Torah which Paul “preserves” is not just of Abraham’s faith, but of Abraham’s blessing by the Lord: the descendants as numberless as the stars. It is not only the law that is preserved by Paul, but the descendants too, just as Genesis 16 preserves the generations of Hagar, and Genesis 17 and 25 preserve the generations of Ishmael. And, it is important to note, as Genesis 36 preserves the generations of Esau. It is not just “material” that is preserved: the logic of preservation is the preservation of peoples. But at the same time, something more worrying may be at work in the texts. It is a in some ways the logic of burial: the preservation of names at the same time as the marking of their passing away. This is why it is such a dangerous business. If Christians see their theology as a means of burying Judaism, this will mean something darkly different from remembering the blessings poured by God on the different families. In some sense, there is a passing away between the traditions: this is their Otherness. But there is also a memory of names: this is the memory of familial blessings and the generations which are meant to


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continue. The logic of burial, which we see in the theology of my own Christian tradition again and again, is more than a theoretical danger when its consequence is that traditions are buried alive. It is one thing to mark a “passing away” that is the condition for the birth of a new tradition. This is one way for Christians to say “we are no longer Jewish.” It is quite another to universalize this in such a way that one might think it possible to say that the other tradition is not now merely “other” but has itself “passed away” and is dead. This would be to say “there are no longer any Jews.” Some Christians have tried to say this in the past, so this is not an imaginary problem. It is difficult to say whether one sees this in Genesis 17 and 25 or in Romans 4. The urgent task is to find interpretations which do not follow this bleak, murderous logic. I think Kepnes struggles a little to see the significance of his own logic of preservation when he sees Christian hermeneutics as complex and perhaps even self-contradictory. Of course he is right: but I think it is misleading to give all the credit to Christians here, and perhaps one can share the wealth of self-contradictions. It is the logic of preservation that seems complex and self-contradictory when viewed from the perspective of the logic of binary opposition. Drawing out the riches of Kepnes’ analysis, I would say that the logic of preservation is an alternative to a logic of binary opposition. It is precisely a logic of binary opposition that forces the reader to choose: Hagar or Sarai; Ishmael or Isaac; Esau or Jacob. And, indeed, the text does rehearse this possibility. There is genuine expulsion: of Hagar, Ishmael, and Esau. But there is also a logic of preservation: the genealogies, the burial of Abraham, the tribes of Edom. What we see in Scriptural Reasoning is a rereading of texts; these texts practice a logic of burial; Scriptural Reasoning develops a logic of preservation into another form of a logic of dialogue: a logic of scripture, and here I simply echo Kepnes’ reminder of the importance of the work of Peter Ochs.1 Our texts may practice a logic of burial, but the generations of the different families have continued, as God commanded them to do. Our texts have merely preserved the other. But when we gather, today, to read together these testimonies of preservation, we practice more than preservation. We do not have a vocabulary, yet, to say what this more might be. But we do have the practice which teaches us, together, how we might hold our Otherness and our identity together, through the reading of scripture. For me, Kepnes achieves—with remarkable clarity and skill—a logic of preservation where both Otherness and identity are both evoked with respect to the one who binds them together: the one




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Lord of Genesis 16, 21, 25 and the God of Romans 4. The Otherness and identity are not overcome or absorbed into some super-reality where differences are obliterated, and nations are assimilated into each other. Instead, they are preserved, not just for the same of preservation, but as the preservation of a set of family relations before God. More than preservation is the result. And that is what this volume is trying, in different ways, to get at. With these issues in mind, I want to return to the negative remarks I began with: the things that Kepnes did not do. But the perspective I wish to introduce now is the crucial contribution that Muslims and Qur’anic reasoning make to Scriptural Reasoning. Two things are worth clarifying. First, those who do Scriptural Reasoning are typically not experts in the other religious traditions: so the Muslims who do Scriptural Reasoning are not typically experts in Rabbinics or in Patristics. Second, Scriptural Reasoning might look to an outsider like an exercise where members of one tradition teach members of other traditions about the tradition to which they belong. This is not the case at all, and I think the Muslim contribution shows very clearly how this is so. At this juncture I would like to attempt, in a preliminary way, to show how some non-Muslims might be attentive to practices of squaring the circle. Let us take another look at the list of “DON’Ts.” 1. Muslims do not approach their sacred texts in the dominating attitude of an expert, one who has command over the text, and can bend it to his or her will. They neither assimilate to Western liberal paradigms and present their texts as mere historical documents, nor do they adopt the hermetic attitude of the Middle Eastern seer who claims that none but the initiated can understand them. Rather, they approach the texts with an exemplary humility, reverence and intimacy, as God’s gift which evokes study and wonder, as recipients of, and perhaps contributors to, a long history of authoritative interpretation. 2. Muslims do not approach their sacred texts in the dominating attitude of the absolutely free reader, whose interpretations are always valid because they arise from his or her own personal experience. They do not force the texts to submit to the demands of their own infinite subjectivity, or distort them into meaning whatever they want them to mean. Rather, they approach the texts with a sense that their own subjectivity is evoked by the texts, and made possible by the divine love that shines in those texts, again disciplined by the history of authoritative interpretation.


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In other words, our Muslim colleagues display forms of reading that have nothing to do with the tact and sensitivity that would place the Qur’an under glass, in a display case. Nor do they fling the text about as if its relevance to discussion can be magicked into being by the superpowers of the reader. The texts are objects of love: reverentially distant and therefore a matter of humility, and astonishingly intimate and therefore a matter of love and delight. It is not tact, but faithfulness to tradition, that governs the tradition of Muslim interpretation of scripture. Our Muslim colleagues display forms of reading that have nothing to do with the vatic posture of the expert who claims to know the text’s secrets: this would transform other participants into sponges for knowledge. Scriptural Reasoning does not degenerate into a forum for explaining “what the Qur’an means” in the manner of a poor quality undergraduate lecture. Rather, it becomes an opportunity for displaying distance and proximity, reverence and delight, humility and love. Muslim colleagues have, of course, a deep knowledge of the tradition of interpretation of Qur’an, (not to have this knowledge is not to be a Muslim interpreter of Qur’an). It is not the purpose of interpretation merely to display this knowledge, however. Instead, it functions as an inspiration for the detailed attention to the texts, and the surprises they hold not just for Christians and Jews (for whom many routine traditional interpretations come as a surprise because of the ignorance of the non-Muslim). It is also an inspiration even—and perhaps especially—for Muslims who find new and different things in the texts: aspects that may be muted in the tradition but which fizz to the surface in Scriptural Reasoning. And it is infectious. The effect of being in the presence of Muslims who are generous hearted to their brothers and sisters from other religions and who share this humility and love with us is quite shocking. It is different from what I might have anticipated and has fundamentally shaped how I approach not just the Qur’an but even texts in my own tradition. This needs to be said carefully: I do not mean that I read the New Testament as if it were the Qur’an. Instead, I mean that I become conscious just how seductive the postures of the expert, or the empowered reader, or the imperatives of tact and sensitivity have become for the reading of scripture in my own tradition, and I find I have learned resources from my Muslim colleagues in how to overcome these contradictions. It is an extraordinary thing. But there is a danger for a Christian, especially a Protestant Christian, in recording this delight. It is an easy matter for such a person to suggest that Muslims might find “new and different things” in




Nicholas Adams

the text. It is something on which Christian theologians in my own Anglican tradition place a high value. It comes quite naturally to such theologians to think that the same is true for Muslims. But, as I noted before, concepts have geographies and histories, and to be blind and deaf to them is to be guilty of hopeless generalization. The concept of the “new and different” is worth pausing over. Tim Winter, reflecting on Scriptural Reasoning, argues that Muslims do not approach the task of interpretation with a view to “returning” to scripture, in a way that a modern Christian might, because there is for Muslims no sense that scripture was ever abandoned.2 The desire for the “new and different” is often, for Christians, part of a recovery of the significance of scripture in the wake of nineteenth-century Christian philosophy’s legacy of scriptural neglect. There is no analogue for Muslims. I do not know, at this stage, how best to temper my delight at Muslim discovery of the “new and different” but, as I remarked earlier, reparative reasoning is a social practice, and the best way to think through these questions is to raise them with my Muslim colleagues and to work through them together. One of the things that Muslims might teach Christians, during Scriptural Reasoning, is how to temper certain enthusiasms! But most of all, I have begun to form fragile friendships with Muslim and Jewish members of the Abrahamic family of faiths. Not just casual friendships rooted in shared interest, but relationships that are somehow characterized by the distance and proximity, humility and intimacy that the texts themselves evoke. I do not have any clever theories for how this happens: it is always a surprise to me, each time we do Scriptural Reasoning together. And for that, I give thanks to God.

Notes 1. Peter Ochs Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1998. 2. Tim Winter “Qur’anic Reasoning as an Academic Practice,” Modern Theology 22 (3) (2006): 449–463


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I s Scri ptural Reasoni ng Senseless? Martin Kavka

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teven Kepnes has offered two rich texts. First, of course, is the set of passages from Genesis and the Qur’an that he has read very closely, but second is his own commentary. About the biblical texts I have little to say; Kepnes has taught me a reading of these texts that is impeccably elegant, and I fear that anything I add at this point would only end up repeating points that he has already made. But I do believe that Kepnes has not fully realized what is at stake in his own commentary; its implications do not only have a healing effect for the relationship between the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael, but also for the relationship between these children of Abraham and the world of Western reason, a relationship which Kepnes—like Yamine Mermer in her response to Basit Koshul that appears earlier in this volume—insists on reading as essentially inimical. The depth of Kepnes’ reading of the texts on Ishmael and Hagar shows us the messiness of religion in all of its burdensome glory, or its glorious burden. (In Hebrew, the words for “weight” and “glory”—k’vedut and kavod—come from the same linguistic root). How messy is the picture that Kepnes has drawn for us in his very precise reading of the text? It is one in which the Torah is fundamentally about the boundaries between one people and its Others—boundaries that are constantly drawn, erased, redrawn, and reerased. It is one in which Hagar—who because she is Egyptian is not Israel—is also Israel because she is the stranger, just as the people of Israel are. And as a


Chapter 7


M a r t i n K av k a

result, it is one in which the children of Hagar are both, as Steve put it in his title, others and ourselves. The relationship between Self and Other in this text is thus simultaneously one of the deepest intimacy and the denial of that intimacy: I am you! I’m not you! I am you! I’m not you! This is almost too dizzying to respond to. I would like to try and make sense of it, but this is a tall order. On the one hand, if I do try and make sense of it, perhaps using that great sense-making tool called “philosophy,” I will perhaps only succeed in cleaning up the mess, and so I will do nothing more than describe something that does not actually exist. On the other hand, it is impossible to revel in the mess, because such a situation does not give any clear orientation. If religion is really just something messy—something senseless—then it becomes far more difficult to articulate why its structures and commands would remain compelling. In short, I am up a tree, as I always am when I am called upon to do theology, as I am at this moment, having been asked to respond to Kepnes’ reading of these texts. This is something that I want very much to do, on the one hand because I want to honor a friend, and on the other because ultimate matters are useless if they are foreign to discourse. But for the reasons I have just given, this is something that I cannot do. So let me continue by describing one other messy aspect of the structure that Kepnes has offered. About halfway through his chapter, Kepnes describes his reading of the Hagar and Ishmael narrative as an example of Scriptural Reasoning. As an act of reasoning based in the particularity of a scriptural text, and thus detached from universalist foundations, Kepnes’ paper exemplifies a mode of thinking which for him is at least distinct from Western philosophical reasoning, if not completely opposed to it because “scripture is not beholden to modern secular standards of . . . philosophic coherence.”1 Nevertheless, in his paper, we hear many good things about three philosophers of the twentieth century: the Jewish existentialist Martin Buber, the Jewish rationalist Hermann Cohen, and the founder of American pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce. Perhaps Kepnes reads these three figures as qualitatively different from a more predominant trend in philosophy. Perhaps he judges Hegel, Kant, and/or Plato, as having deleterious effects which Western philosophy essentially might always risk running, but only achieves in certain times and places. But it is Plato who teaches us in the Sophist about the intimacy of the mixing together of categorical kinds.2 It is Kant who teaches us in the Critique of Pure Reason that speculative reason can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God and thereby that philosophy can make room for faith.3 It is Hegel who


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argues in the Philosophy of Right that the universalism of the state is nothing other than the complete development of the particular interests of singular persons.4 Any account of a horizon that is broader than that of the particular (in other words, what passes for “universal”) that ends up omitting or abolishing one particular interest, or that refuses to see particular interests as potentially analogous and thus relatable to each other, is therefore on Hegel’s account simply incomplete, false, and the result of bad thinking. All of these are claims that are internal to allegedly secular Western thought. On the other hand, one could also point to scads of quotations from Kant and Hegel (and other thinkers) that portray Judaism and Islam in a negative light, or to the role that scholars have often assigned to “Greek” philosophy in order to put religion in a subservient place in the assessing of claims to truth and knowledge.5 These quotations would also speak to something internal to Western thought, but not to something essential to it. I do not make this claim simply because I want to persuade Kepnes that he can be—and already is—friends with someone who has an apparently different view of philosophy than he does. I do it because it is the only way that I can deal with the inability to find analogies between Kepnes’ remarks and those that Basit Koshul makes in his chapter in this volume. What has occurred in these two chapters is that two strong supporters of Scriptural Reasoning—the practice in which members of Abrahamic traditions read each other’s sacred texts together, letting the opacity of those sacred texts suspend Jews, Christians, and Muslims in difference and friendship—have given quite different accounts of the relationship between scripture and philosophy. Kepnes describes Scriptural Reasoning as something that is neither a scriptural fundamentalism nor a “shallow reflection of Enlightenment ideals,”6 but rather some third thing that is definitely neither anything like either pole nor a mixture of the two. On the other hand, Koshul takes the messy path of the mixture when he described prophetic witness as both dissenting from as well as affirming the Enlightenment tradition. The relationship between Kepnes’ chapter and Koshul’s comes out best if one considers that Koshul’s paper might well have been titled “Enlightenment as our Other, Enlightenment as Ourself.” In other words, for Koshul Scriptural Reasoning both exemplifies and critiques Enlightenment thinking, while for Kepnes, Scriptural Reasoning only critiques it. At such an impasse, it seems that the activity of scriptural reasoning, which both Kepnes and Koshul claim to represent, has no clarity about its aims. For this specific lack of clarity, one can only thank God.7 This is not simply because it is from this mysterious opacity of its own essence


Is Scriptural Reasoning Senseless?



that scriptural reasoners can continue to engage in that practice. It is indeed the case that if scriptural reasoners had clarity—in this case, if Kepnes and Koshul had agreed about whether the future of certain religious structures and concepts in the West is secure or not, or if Kepnes and myself were to agree on the relationship between Judaism and Western philosophy—there would be no reason whatsoever to talk to each other (except to bolster one’s own ego). One does not need to speak to someone whom one knows fully; the universality of concepts would make speech unnecessary; I would know that you think something simply because I think it. In addition, one cannot speak to someone who is such a stranger that her or his language is utterly impermeable, untranslatable into one’s own tongue. The stranger cannot be completely strange; a family member cannot be completely familiar. However, it does not make immediate sense that one would want to thank God for the nature of conversational pragmatics. One might say that the mystery of how conversation works might tie into believers’ claims about who transcends and grounds the world. But I would like to suggest that the desire to thank God for a lack of clarity does not only have to do with how a lack of clarity might be the beginning of a certain theological account. In addition, the ability to talk to each other, grounded in this opacity, participates in the work of redemption. Such a claim, perhaps, will not seem at first blush to be defensible. But even though it may seem amusing to claim that a conversation—especially one that ends up being printed in a book with a nontheological publisher—could have such a redemptive end, I would like to make the claim in all seriousness. The way to go about defending such a claim is, I think, to narrate briefly what occurs in a Scriptural Reasoning session. Kepnes illustrated some of these things in his paper. In talking, we ask questions. What is it with this text? What’s distinctive about it? What is at stake in the words that it chooses to express its ideas—words that cannot have been whimsically chosen? What do these words mean in other places? Do the narrative details of the text mesh perfectly with each other? What do later authorities say about this text? How do those understandings augment or constrict, harmonize or conflict with, what we think the plain sense of the text states? How does the text defend its claims? Now these kinds of questions are not in and of themselves anything special; they occur all the time in seminary classrooms, or university classrooms—places that we might not think of as interfaith or even intrafaith scenes. So narrating what occurs in Scriptural Reasoning is not enough. One must also focus on who is asking the questions. More often than not, the people who are asking


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questions of the texts are foreigners to the texts’ logic.This has a very basic consequence, but one that to my mind is the key for Scriptural Reasoning: foreigners ask questions that “natives” have forgotten should be questions at all.8 Having foreigners—strangers in a land that is not theirs, to bring us back to the text of Genesis 15—read a text with you brings in all that messiness that is easily evaded when one is reading sacred texts with other natives only. The expression of identity in those native contexts is, far more often than one would like, disturbingly smooth; it reflects little more than the participants’ desires to formulate a religious identity that does not take them too far from the comfort zones of a broader culture.9 So focusing on the who of Scriptural Reasoning allows us to see how articulating the messiness of sacred texts—in other words, the odd contours of the relationship between religious identity and a modern identity—displays a key element of why scriptural reasoning is different from apparently similar conversations in other settings. Yet it still remains to be asked what exactly is the effect of this messiness that seems to be so constitutive for Scriptural Reasoning, a messiness that is present in the Book of Genesis (as Kepnes has shown) and duplicated in the attempt to read Koshul and Kepnes together. Here, it is key to reflect on what happens in the encounter with the stranger who reads your text. All of a sudden, one hears the text being approached from new angles—not from beliefs about what does or does not constitute the “fulfillment” of the texts, but with an eye to different textual elements, or from a viewpoint that shows the text in a new light (a strong sense of divine command, perhaps, or a quasi-Marxian attentiveness to the material culture described in a text). This is lovely. The questions one was asking shift. No longer is one simply asking what is going on in this text and why. One now is also asking, “How did you learn to read that way? Tell me more about yourself. Stay for awhile.” Friendships begin that are not rooted in a predetermined agreement on the meaning of a certain text. Similarly, as one reads another’s text, being led and leading others through it, that tradition—as well as its interpreters who are at the table alongside one—takes on the qualities of loveliness. (This does not undo participants’ commitments to their own traditions. A judgment of loveliness does not lead to a shift in one’s orientation, as evidenced by any gay man who compliments a woman on her style.) As Nick Adams has perceptively stated in a recent book, Scriptural Reasoning involves “acknowledging that God is great: greater than language, greater than traditions, greater than scripture.”10 We are still not quite at redemption yet, however. Acknowledging that God is great does not necessarily give me confidence that the life





of a scriptural reasoner—one that oscillates fitfully between saying “I am you,” and “I am not you,” as Kepnes so patiently showed—is not a senseless life, a life of madness which might be better described as “doom” than as “redemption.” How can one show that this kind of life of intimate relationship betwixt the Abrahamic traditions, and between the Abrahamic traditions and modernity, is any better than the life typified by the clash of civilizations? Here, it helps to point out that what Adams has said has been said before.11 The assertion that scriptural study can lead to the acknowledgment of God’s transcendence echoes a statement that the GermanJewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig made in the 1920s: “The unlimited refuses to be organized.”12 Rosenzweig said this in the context of his desire to reenergize Jewish life in Germany through structures of Jewish learning that updated the classical institution of the study-house.13 Rosenzweig’s claim is that the idea that something higher than ourselves (such as religion) could be reduced to an ideological program or a canon of propositions is an absurd one, because by its very nature religion transcends the language we use to talk about it. This means that all we have is a readiness for the heights of religious life—a desire to know what’s at stake in proclaiming a religious identity, a desire to be able to articulate cogently the relationship between the parameters of the interior world and the parameters of the exterior one, whether this be the world of the Enlightenment or the world of another religious tradition. In short, all we have is a desire for home, a place where everything is just so. Such a desire cannot possibly be fulfilled by human means; if it could, that would be an act of organizing the unlimited, of violating divine transcendence. So what keeps this desire from collapsing into hopelessness? Rosenzweig hints at an answer: “wishes are the messengers of confidence.”14 This is a difficult sentence, perhaps the most difficult sentence in modern Jewish philosophy. I believe it means something like the following. “Wishes” refer to the desire on the part of those who walk into a study-house—or any place in which sacred texts are read—to forge a link to the past that seems to be irrecoverable in the context of modernity. (Rosenzweig saw this only as a problem for German Jews. But today, the problem of how to relate to the West shows itself to be a broadly Abrahamic one.) Neither simply rejecting modernity nor simply accepting modernity seem to be options, for the reasons Kepnes lays out at the end of his chapter. “Confidence” is the faith that these wishes can bear fruit, that a home that has its roots in sacred texts and the contemporary world at the same time is really possible. But what of this messenger service to which these wishes


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People will be coming, people who, by the very act of coming into the speaking space of the [study room] give testimony to the fact that the religious human being is alive within them. Otherwise they would not come. For the time being, let us [“us” meaning Rosenzweig and Strauss] offer them nothing at all. Let us hearken. And from that hearkening, words will grow. And the words will grow together and be united into wishes. And wishes are the messengers of confidence. Wishes that find each other, human beings that find each other, religious human beings—let us attempt to create what they desire.15

The engine of the study room’s messenger service would thus appear to be the act of listening. In listening to others, we come to learn that we are not alone in not knowing who we are, and in striving to forge an identity. This is what gives confidence. My desire for home is only a hopeless one if I think that it is only my desire, or only the desire of my narrow community. In a claim that only I (or a small we) want something, the object of that desire becomes less secure, for in such a situation, it always remains possible that someone else could come along and render my world completely chaotic by, say, enacting laws or supporting customs that make that pursuit more dangerous or more difficult, and thereby throw my identity and self-image into upheaval. The more people who come together, listen to each other, and recognize the possibility of those chains of reasoning that articulate that desire for home, the fewer outsiders there are to destabilize that identity. In other words, my wish means nothing objectively unless you confirm it for me, by agreeing that I am entitled to be the person that I have committed myself to being.16 And in order to come to that agreement, we must first listen to what those claims are, and to how people infer the structures and ways of being religious from those texts that they view as sacred. We cannot confirm each other’s identities unless we evaluate them, and we cannot evaluate them unless we hearken. It is important to note that your confirmation that I am entitled to the identity to which I have committed myself is not at all the same thing as your agreeing with what I say. The conversation that takes place in study does not have to lead to convergence on the content of what one believes. Indeed, the conversation that takes place in study


belong? Rosenzweig gives a more complete account in a letter to the chemist Eduard Strauss in which he describes a study-room. In citing the following quote, I will purposefully detach it from the specific Jewish context, taking the risk to substitute the word “religious” where Rosenzweig uses the word “Jewish.”



can lead to claims in which you show me, through your reading of my texts, how some of my commitments do not mesh with each other. So while conversation does not necessarily lead to convergence, neither is it necessarily a static structure in which the participants cling stubbornly to their identities for dear life. The act of reading together, or thinking together, performs what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called a “game of giving and asking for reasons.” In that game (on which everything hangs), there is agreement on what counts as possibly valid claims, and on the validity of the various patterns of reasoning that underlie those claims. But this is all one needs for what Rosenzweig described as confidence. One only needs verification of the belief that one’s identity is not invalid. When wishes come together, it is only insofar as the desire for a home is something shared by all participants in the activity of study. What that home looks like—how it is decorated, so to speak—can be bracketed for the time being. But in recognizing that there is a common striving to articulate how a religious identity, whatever that identity may be, fits in with the contemporary world, people come alive. They come to be more than the faceless attributes and predicates that one might ordinarily ascribe to them from a distance. And in entitling others to their commitments, they—excuse me, we—become committed to each other. This gives hope that the possibility to articulate how Abrahamic identities fit into the contemporary world is not a sham, because I am neither alone nor am I only with my coreligionists. But if this is what I have confidence in, then I also have confidence that doom will not and does not necessarily win out over redemption; I have confidence that when time comes to an end, justice will prevail. This is what I mean when I say that the ability to talk to each other—to share our wishes and recognize each other as wishing subjects, to recognize the validity of the language in which those wishes are expressed— participates in the work of redemption. Becoming committed to each other ensures that there is a path forward, a path toward something that very well might be an image of redemption or the last things to which I am personally committed. So in short, we make identities for ourselves in conversation with other people. Finding ourselves at home depends on finding others, and hearkening to them; in the case of Scriptural Reasoning, this means reading others’ sacred texts. Now it is burdensome to need others. But if we only study with people who claim to have the same exact home, the same exact understanding of the text, that we do, then no confidence will result. How will I feel at home in the world if I have the sense that only a narrow group is wishing with me?


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Therefore, it is necessary on occasion (but regularly) to go outside of the realm of who we think of as “ourselves,” to Others, and talk so that the sense of who we are—wishers, seekers for a home—broadens outside the narrow circle of “ourselves.” The need for confidence in the possibility of redemption requires this mixture of the translatability and untranslatability of worldviews—the ability to share with others what our wishes are without coming to agree on the content of that wish—that Kepnes has shown to be the primary characteristic of Scriptural Reasoning. What I have striven to do is give a fuller explanation of that mix of us and them, ourselves and Other, outside and inside, affirmation and critique, that we find in both Kepnes’ assertion that Hagar is Israel and Koshul’s analysis of the rituals of the Hajj as affirming certain Western Enlightenment values. But the way that I have tried to explain why this occurs—why Scriptural Reasoning fundamentally lacks clarity—has not been a scripturally-based argument. In order to show how each of them works with an analogue of the other’s messiness, I needed philosophy, or at least thick empirical description. For this reason, I resist the conclusion that Kepnes has made that Scriptural Reasoning exists on some conceptual plane that is wholly exterior to Western philosophical reasoning; rather, it seems to me that Scriptural Reasoning iterates the messiness that is characteristic of part of Western philosophical discourse. (To use the framework of Kepnes’ chapter, one might say that Kepnes is my Other.) One brief example: in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—so often misunderstood as a one-dimensional account of universalism that erases diversity and plurality—Hegel describes the movement of recognition by which self-consciousness comes to know itself as “the exposition of a spiritual unity in its doubling . . . a many-sided intersection of and correlation between multiple meanings.”17 The reference to “multiple meanings” shows that the “doubling” in Hegel’s account of the self-other relation is not the duplication of a photocopy; the language of analogy seems to be closer to what Hegel wants to say.18 Hegel’s articulation of intersubjectivity, like the articulation of a scripturally-based identity, is complex—far more complex than Kepnes’ description of the standards of secular philosophic coherence allows. In Hegel, and in Scriptural Reasoning, both Self and Other exist as Self and Other, as a member of both “us” and “them.” There is difference and a recognized likeness. Only in this way, by attending to what happens in the conversational dynamics of Scriptural Reasoning, and thereby coming to see that it is not simply opposed to philosophy but also at one with philosophy, can we make sense of the following three claims: (1) Kepnes’ claim that Islam is both





the “ourselves” and the “other” of Israel; (2) Koshul’s claim that Islam both affirms and critiques the West; and (3) both Kepnes and Koshul are scriptural reasoners. Without redescribing such messiness in the language of the process of the giving and taking of reasons—in other words, without participating in part of the discourse of “Western” philosophy—all of these claims are simply contradictory signs, and therefore signs of a fundamental meaninglessness to existence from which there is no good reason to believe we can be redeemed. But with this explanation, reading scripture together opens itself up as the possibility of a rapprochement with the West, since philosophy shows that the “clash of civilizations” model is a bad description of the situation, both in terms of scripture and in terms of philosophy. And so my need for philosophy shows itself to be a contingent need. I should be able, in the course of verifying my own account of philosophy, to offer an account of how one could have explained why Scriptural Reasoning lacks clarity with a scripturally-based argument. (To use the framework of Kepnes’ chapter, one might say that Kepnes is not only my Other, but is also myself.) If I were to do this, I would, as I said at the beginning, simply repeat Kepnes’ account of the Hagar narrative. But there are some other points that could be made by turning to Genesis 21, which Kepnes mentions briefly in his chapter. This chapter not only narrates the birth of Isaac to Sarah, but also the suffering of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness of Beersheba after Sarah has Abraham expel them from his household. Now there are at least three kinds of opacity in the text. First is a directly scriptural opacity in the text. In 21:17, “God heard the cry of the boy” Ishmael, even though no previous verse mentions him crying; indeed, in 21:16 it is Hagar who raises her voice and cries (va tissa’ et-qolah va-tevekh). Similarly, God is with the boy (21:20) while Hagar, despite having seen God in 16:13, converses not with God directly but with an angel. Why is Hagar’s cry not heard? Why is she not directly remembered (paqad) as Sarah is in the opening verse of this chapter? After all, God satisfies her desire as he satisfies Sarah’s. In 21:19, “God opened (vayifeqach) her eyes and she saw a well of water” which saved both of their lives and guaranteed the perdurance of the Ishmaelite people (especially since it is Hagar who acquires Ishmael’s wife for him in the final verse of the chapter). There is a stratum of this text in which Hagar is just as important as Ishmael, despite the text’s overt silencing of her cry and its reduction of her to a provider (feeding Ishmael, but not herself, water in 21:19) and matchmaker. She is just as important as Sarah, since God in effect remembers her by opening her eyes to the water. And, as Kepnes suggested in his


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chapter, she might be just as important as Abraham “as another prophet of the One God.”19 Excavating this opacity, and the possibilities that it generates are a key part of Scriptural Reasoning. The second opacity has to do with the appropriation of this text in the liturgical cycle of the Jewish people.20 The entirety of Genesis 21 is regularly read in synagogues on the first day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. I freely admit that I have always been somewhat puzzled by this. The standard narrative of the meaning of Rosh Hashanah proceeds, generally speaking, along these lines: It is only through the ten day period of the High Holidays that begin with Rosh Hashanah—centering on introspection, repentance, and meditation on God’s grandeur and might as expressed in Rosh Hashanah’s central prayer, Unetaneh Tokef, which dates from the eleventh century CE— can Jews be inscribed and sealed into the book of life. Even though the prayer stresses that it is through repentance or turning to God, prayer, and charity that the evil decree is averted, the Jewish tradition has stressed repentance above the other two virtues. This is especially the case for Moses Maimonides, who writes in his great twelfth-century ordering of halakha, the Mishneh Torah, as follows in regards to the command to blow a ram’s horn (shofar) on the Jewish New Year: Although the sounding of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a decree of the written Torah, still it has a deep meaning, as if saying: “Awake, awake, O sleeper from your sleep. O slumberers, arouse yourselves from your slumbers, examine your deeds, return in repentance, and remember your Creator . . . Look to your souls, improve your ways and works. Abandon, every one of you, the evil course and the thought that is not good.”21

This imagery of being called to introspection in order to avoid the negative judgment of a mighty God is all so very stereotypically “Old Testament.” But the force of Maimonides’ account suddenly evaporates when we remember Hagar and Sarah. The graciousness of Genesis 21 lies askew from the rhetoric of judgment and power that Jews hear every year on Rosh Hashanah. Hagar and Sarah do not have to be called to remember God; God remembers them. And Hagar does not have to repent of anything, for she has done nothing to deserve her thirst. This calls forth the third opacity in the text, which is largely thematic, but which arises out of the textual and liturgical aspects of Genesis 21. It is very easy to forget that the meaning of God’s dominion and transcendence includes God’s freedom to remember those in various existential crises and God’s ability to help them in their crises.





Remembering this is not simply a matter of keeping a fact at hand, but a real appropriation of the depth of the lovely tension that exists between the God to whom Jews pray in the Unetaneh Tokef and the God who remembers Hagar. Miraculously, they are the same God. But being aware that God remembers those in crisis is a risky awareness. After all, it is not long after God remembers Sarah in the opening of Genesis 21 that Sarah forgets about Hagar, and has Abraham kick her out of the house. I am still waiting for Sarah to repent for causing Hagar’s suffering, and I yearn for her to learn a lesson or two from Maimonides, who is hardly wrong in his opinion about the meaning of the shofar. With this lack of clarity in the text, amplified by the Jewish tradition, how could any process of reasoning about this text lead us to a land of sense? A robust sense is too much to ask for. It is enough to say that the practice of asking and giving of reasons about sacred texts between members the Abrahamic traditions can give sustenance by participating in the work of redemption. To read scripture along with a philosophy that authorizes reading scripture together across traditional lines—what Kepnes is doing in his citations of Buber, Cohen, and Peirce while discussing the scriptural basis of Muslim-Jewish relations—is to follow Hagar when she is given a view of the well. In reading together, our eyes are opened and we see a source of sustenance that will carry us into the future—others who are not (and are) us. For Hagar is (and is not) Israel, Israel is (and is not) Hagar, and both are (and are not) the West. These are burdensome things to say; history has shown repeatedly how both secularized nations as well as religious communities have failed to bear these truths. Sarah herself is unable to bear this burden. But without bearing this burden—without the philosophical knowledge that this burden is legitimate and without the skills in religious reading that show how this burden can quench our thirst—a glorious future seems to me to be impossible.22

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1. Steve Kepnes, “Islam As Our Other, Islam As Ourselves,” in Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter, p. 114. 2. Sophist 253b ff. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B xxx. 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, paragraph 260. 5. See Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Michael Mack, German Idealism


6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

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and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Kepnes, “Islam As Our Other, Islam As Ourselves,” p. 120. It is important to note that it would be possible to point to other lacks in clarity for which one would not want to thank God. The difference between Kepnes and Koshul is rooted in the multiple possible inferences that one can make from a sacred text. This multiplicity—which one might say licenses, but does not prove, believers’ claims that these texts are transcendent—both pulls them toward and apart from each other. This is qualitatively different from simple muddled thinking. For example, I have learned the most about modern Jewish philosophy by teaching it in classrooms that are populated mostly with evangelical Christians. They ask questions that are in their horizon but not mine, and they focus on issues that I never thought about when I learned how to read these books many years ago. Again, I think of some of my students, for whom the difference between the attributes of Jesus of Nazareth and those of Dr. Phil, or, as in a few bizarre cases, between the attributes of Oprah Winfrey and those of Ariel Sharon, appears to be less and less with each passing year. While the fact that I teach in the American South does skew matters somewhat, I believe that my students are signs of a broader current in contemporary America, in which it is philosophy—even “Enlightenment reason”—that now takes the place of the counterculture. Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 249. Parts of the next two paragraphs are drawn from my “What Does It Mean to Receive Tradition?: Jewish Studies in Higher Education,” Cross Currents 56/2 (Summer 2006): 180–197. Franz Rosenzweig, “Of Bildung there is no end,” trans. Michael Zank as an appendix to Zank, “Franz Rosenzweig, the 1920s and the ⬍email⬎ moment of textual reasoning,” in Textual Reasonings, eds. Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene (London and Grand Rapids, MI: SCM/Eerdmans, 2002), p. 235. See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 69–99. Rosenzweig, “Of Bildung there is no end,” p. 237. Ibid., p. 237. For more on the coimplication of commitments and entitlements in linguistic practice, see Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, & Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 157–180. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 178. I have used Robert R. Williams’s translation in Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 50.





18. See Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 149–160. 19. Kepnes, p. 112. 20. For more on liturgy as a more of access to religious thought, see Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption, eds. Randi Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, and London: SCM, 2006) and Kepnes’ own forthcoming book, Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 21. A Maimonides Reader, ed. Isadore Twersky (New York: Behrman House, 1972), p. 76. 22. The argument that I make in this chapter is significantly different than the claim I made in the earlier version that was published in the Iqbal Review, which unfortunately gave philosophy a pride of place that was not licensed by my own argument. My apologies to readers of that chapter, and especially to Steven Kepnes.


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Reflections on Scriptu re, Re ason, and the Contemporary Isl a m-West Encou nte r


Part III





I shmael a nd the Enli ghtenment’s C R I S E DE COEUR Ti m Wi n t e r

Lord God, give me light in my heart, and light in my tongue. Give me light in my eye, and light in my hearing. Give me light upon my right side and upon my left side. Give me light above me, light beneath me, light before me, and light behind me. Give me light. Make me light. (Hadith in Muslim, Musafirin, 181, 187)

I

f the modern West is the civilizational climax of the profane and the material, then Islamic civilization, when it existed, was probably the civilizational climax of the sacred. This function need not be attributed to a spiritual eminence, which Muslims might wish to claim but which is certainly undemonstrable; nor can it be shown that any given Muslim artifact or text was more refined than a cognate production of, say, Hinduism. Rather, Islam’s civilizational eminence stemmed from a spectacular plenitude. Of the other religions of the pre-Enlightenment world, only Buddhism rivaled Islam in massively encompassing a range of cultures; however Islam, uncontroversially, was the foundation for a still wider range and variety of cultural worlds. In particular, we may identify distinctive high civilizations among Muslim Africans, Arabs, Turks (including Central Asians), Persians (including, as an immensely fertile extension, Muslim India),


Chapter 8


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and the population of the Malay Archipelago, radiating from the complex court cultures of Java. Despite brave talk of a “dialogue of civilizations” proposed by the United Nations and the Iranian ex-president Khatami, not a single Islamic civilization remains. Individual Muslims may frequently be embedded in neighborhoods or congregations whose values are substantially pre-Enlightenment, but nowhere do those social modules remain part of a functioning civilization. Our larger embeddedness lies always within political and economic structures borrowed from the values and administrative methods of the West. Even modern Islamism, which claims to be the Third World’s great revolt against the imposition of the West’s monoculture, typically defines itself in solidly Western terms as a “vanguard” (4ali:a), “movement” (6araka), or, when finally ensconced in the palace of a fallen tyrant, as an “Islamic Republic.” Hence John Gray’s diagnosis: “The ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.”1 Islamic civilization as such did not long outlive the Ottoman tan8imat reforms, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, and Clive’s destruction of Mogul India. Muslim thinkers therefore tend to contemplate the Enlightenment from within. Whether we adopt liberal readings of our scriptures, or fundamentalist or conservative positions, we admit that our civilization has been profoundly defeated, and that our role, whether as revolutionaries, collaborators, or academics, is at root a subaltern one. It is true that the rapid spread of Islamism is not always considered by outside observers to be proof of a Muslim willingness to adapt to modernity; in fact, modern Islamic movements are typically presented as symptoms of the sole remaining Other’s desperate resistance to the universal march of reason and science. But a broader perspective will readily reject this. Islamism is far from the liberal entailments of the Enlightenment, but it is closely allied to the more totalitarian possibilities which the Enlightenment unleashed.2 Let us begin, then, with the proposition that the current “Islamic revival” is a proof of Islam’s intrinsic receptivity to modernity, broadly understood. Basit Koshul has implied this with his list of convergences between Qur’anic religion and some major Enlightenment concerns, and, before examining an alternative perspective, we may as well support his contention by proposing the following additional resemblances. First, there is the matter of clerical power. The Enlightenment, a Protean tidal wave of disparate sects and currents, was not uniformly


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secular in a straightforward way. Instead, it was a reaction against certain specifically Christian institutions and doctrines, many of which Islam also rejects. Its trenchant anticlericalism chimes readily enough with the Qur’an, which, while praising some clergy (5:82) claims that “many of the rabbis and monks devour the people’s property without any right,” (9:34) words which, translated into French, might have fallen from the lips of Voltaire or Condorcet. In the place of elaborate liturgies led by a priesthood which governed the people’s access to truth, Islam saw itself as abolishing all mediators between creature and creator, denying that any ritual might be the preserve of a distinct human category, and proposing a radically nonsacramental system of worship which obstructed the creation of religious hierarchies. This is why Rilke, precisely in the Enlightenment spirit, could write like this: Muhammad was immediate, like a river bursting through a mountain range; he breaks through to the One God with whom you can talk so wonderfully, every morning, without the telephone called ‘Christ’ into which people constantly shout, ‘Hallo, is anyone there,’ and no-one replies.3

Islam, which Louis Gardet was able to call “a lay, egalitarian theocracy,”4 thus appears as a sort of seventh-century Reformation, and must therefore be reckoned as a precursor of the Enlightenment, particularly since its reforming urges veered toward the most radical dissent. For like Servetus, the Racovians and the Quakers, its insistence on a return to what it thought was Jesus’ original doctrine through the rejection of supposed Hellenic accretion and sacramental excess was more thoroughgoing than even Luther’s.5 The Qur’an calls itself “Light” on many occasions; indeed, its God’s name is The Light, and the transformation of the world which it seeks is classically seen by apologists as a tanwir, an “Enlightenment,” because it sweeps away superstition, priestcraft, and dead Aristotelian verbiage. If the Enlightenment was made possible by Protestant demolitions of hierarchy and cumulative tradition, then it is hard to deny that it was anticipated also by the Ishmaelite Reformation. If such an argument will not stand on its own, let us consider Islam’s vision of a diverse but ordered society. Much Enlightenment anticlericalism was moved by the spectacle of religious wars in a Europe in which confessional difference was considered a threat to the coherence of the state. Kepnes would see this as a potential by-product of scripture’s “combination of ethnocentrism and theocentrism.” Such a combination also exists in cultures grounded in Qur’anic


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revelation, but differently, since the Qur’an is characterized by a radical xenocentrism. The values and beliefs of its immediate community, the Arabs, are condemned, in favor of the monotheism (but not the detailed religions) of their neighbors. Perhaps as a partial consequence of this, Muslim cultures could often be religiously diverse. Islam was certainly privileged, as befitted the highest repository of truth, but it coexisted with Jewish and Christian minorities as well as with internal sectarian communities. Jews, in particular, often reckoned themselves fortunate to be protected from the violence of neighboring rulers;6 and some Christian sectarian communities found the indifference of the sultans more congenial than the persecution which they feared in many Christian kingdoms.7 ‘Better the turban of the Sultan than the tiara of the Pope’ was a regularly heard protest against the prospect of Latin rule. Acknowledging this, Gotthold Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1780), a classic fable of the Enlightenment, exalts Saladin as the very model of a reasonable prince, who governs impartially and refuses religious fanaticism.8 With the exception of those Enlightenment theorists who viewed legal equality as a necessary entailment of justice, the philosophes should have been delighted with, say, the Ottoman Empire, which, although a ramshackle and corrupt entity during the Enlightenment period, was a far safer place for minorities than most Christian countries.9 For Voltaire, in particular, Islam could seem “a sociable and tolerant religion.”10 A third point, scarcely needful after all the foregoing, may be added to Koshul’s case, in view of its centrality. Conservatives often berated the Enlightenment’s leaders as “deists” or “atheists.” Of the latter there seem to have been very few; and the “deism” in most cases turns out to be a derogatory term for some version of Unitarianism. Thomas Jefferson certainly rejected the Trinity, but his God was more than the vague, inactive ghost of “deism.”11 Islam, which historically saw itself as the restoration of simple Semitic monotheism against the Nicene God, is surely not far away. So one early Enlightenment author of an admiring biography of the Prophet, the Comte de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), concluded that in all the world there is not “a more plausible system than his, more agreeable to the light of reason.”12 It was the desert, de Boulainvilliers held, that saved the Arabs from superstition and priestcraft, “and preserved among them the natural notion of the true God.” Accused of “deism,” the Count turns out simply to be a “pure” monotheist hostile to the subtleties of Trinitarian doctrine. The Prophet is the perfect homme raisonnable, and his rules on circumcision, swine-flesh, and regular ritual ablution are emblematic of a sensible hygienic outlook which also sweeps away


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the accumulated theological dust of centuries. The same themes appear in the utopian City of the Sun of Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), where the example of the Ottomans inspires a City of God devoid of gambling, alcohol, or inherited aristocratic privilege, where the citizenry rises to wash and pray toward the East at dawn, following a natural religion presumably linked to Campanella’s known doubts about the Trinity and the sacraments.13 Much of the same admiration appears also in the English Civil War thinker Henry Stubbe (1632–1676), whose book An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, with the Life of Mahomet, and a Vindication of him and his Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians could hardly be published during his lifetime,14 but used the Prophet’s religion as a foil against which to compare the complexities of the established doctrines of England over which so much blood was being spilt. Enlightenment admiration for the Prophet, although erratic thanks to a continuing and even intensifying European xenophobia,15 therefore seems to have been linked to a desire for simplicity and reasonableness. Goethe is one important symbol of this tendency: his own Mahomets Gesang, set twice to music by Schubert, rivals in its enthusiasm for the Prophet the most ecstatic productions of Muslim poets, while his West-ostlicher Divan is perhaps the greatest work of Western literature written in conscious emulation of an Islamic model.16 It was as a child of the Enlightenment, too, that he praised the Ottoman educational method. Here are his thoughts, based on an outline understanding of classical kalam dialectics: Something of that faith is held in us all [. . .] Then the Mahometans begin their instruction in philosophy, with the doctrine that nothing exists of which the contrary may not be affirmed. Thus they practice the minds of youth, by giving them the task of detecting and expressing the opposite of every proposition; from which great adroitness in thinking and speaking is sure to arise. Certainly, after the contrary of any proposition has been maintained, doubt arises as to which is really true. But there is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer enquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction. You see that nothing is wanting in this doctrine, that with all our systems, we have got no further; and that, generally speaking, no one can get further.17



Islamic scholasticism, which supposedly allowed all propositions to be entertained, was itself rooted in a principle of scriptural hermeneutic which, surprisingly perhaps, determined that one of the four concurrently valid senses of the hadith which prohibits Qur’anic


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exegesis on the basis of personal opinion (ra’y) was that “it is forbidden to consider that one’s own interpretation alone is correct, for that would be to raise one’s view to the rank of revelation.”18 This was the principle which allowed classical Islam to exist as concurrently valid but extremely diverse schools, including, most notably, the four Sunni schools of law, and the Maturidi and Ash˘ari theologies. The only significant medieval school that discounted and persecuted all others was Mu‘tazilism, and it is no coincidence that Mu‘tazilism was known for its simplistic and dichotomizing prioritization of reason over scripture. Koshul’s case for classical Islam as an enlightenment that succeeded in retaining the sovereignty of God thus seems a credible one. It has been made with particular elegance by Roger Garaudy, for whom its highest expression unfolded in medieval Cordova, a city which witnessed a combination of revealed and rational wisdom so sophisticated that it was a “first Renaissance.” Saint-Simon and others had claimed that the Middle Ages ended once Arab science was transmitted to the West,19 while for the humanities, George Makdisi traces European humanism to Islamic antecedents;20 the implication being that without Islam, the medieval world might have endured forever. However Westerners, unlike the Moors of Cordova, proved less able to tolerate diversity or fecundation by the Other, and their own Renaissance and Enlightenment only added to the European’s absolute sense of superiority over other cultures, a prejudice that was augmented further by an escalating positivism that finally dethroned God. Garaudy thus concludes that only by radically challenging its own version of Enlightenment and accepting a Muslim version, rooted in what he calls the Third Heritage (the first two being the Classics and the Bible), will the West save itself from its “deadly hegemonic adventure,” and “its suicidal model of growth and civilization.”21

The Enlightenment’s Decline and Fall? On this view, the Islamic tanwir—a missed opportunity for Europe which Garaudy has spent much of his life documenting and lamenting—would have precluded some of the most lethal versions or perversions of Enlightenment culture, such as Communism and Fascism. It would also have spared us the late twentieth-century’s réprise of the Enlightenment backlash against tradition and authenticity which followed the essentialism and ideologized nostalgia of extreme nationalism. That backlash continues to advocate a form of life which strives to reduce or abolish the public role of religion. For many heirs of the Enlightenment, political religion is better at challenging human


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freedom, and therefore flourishing, than at supporting it. Secularity must be the public certainty; all other certainties must be contemplated in private. An idealism about Reason’s ability to purvey Virtue exalts the human consciousness in a way which is thought to be artistically and humanly indispensable; “faith,” on the contrary, is predicated on an undesirable Augustinian or even Jansenist pessimism. It is in the spirit of this kind of humanism that Michelangelo’s David, serene in his Promethean autonomy from heaven, vaunts his musculature as a splendid alternative to his prophetic robes. He is the perfect icon of man’s bienfaisant independence from original sin. Yet David’s legacy has in the past century taken unforeseen turns. His most obvious genetic descendents are probably to be sought in Socialist Realism or among the Aryan nudes of Nazi art; and today one looks entirely in vain for an analogous exaltation of Man in the art of the liberal democracies, which, apart from Islamism and Chinese communism, represent the only version of Enlightenment which has survived the twentieth century. (Lucian Freud’s Leigh Bowery shows how far we have come from David, with more disfigurement, probably, still to come.) The novel, an even prouder vehicle of Enlightenment ideals of freedom through intensified subjectivity, has been attacked by the successors of Bakhtin as an enemy of heteroglossia, and by feminists (Cixous and others) as a foolish attempt to create linear and “phallocentric” meaning by illicitly claiming a natural link between linguistic signifiers and what they signify. The polarities on which the novel is conventionally predicated (East/West, religious/ secular, straight/gay, bourgeois/proletarian), now lie strewn amidst the literary wreckage, and the new novel, although broadly humanistic and even forensic in its introspective obsessions, has nothing obvious in common with the vision of the philosophes. Perhaps the only “Western” trope which survives in the contemporary novel is the undying Isaac/Ishmael dichotomy (Rushdie, Houellebecq, Piers Paul Reid), which has become the sole uncontroversial icon for the battle between humanism (however ironic), and tradition. The only realist idiom of representation turns out to exist in order to define the Western Self against the persistent, archaic realism and fixity of Islam’s perception of the world and human nature. A significant novel in this late-Enlightenment genre is Michel Houellebecq’s Platform.22 In this abrasive account of a Parisian flâneur’s movement toward self-discovery, the City of Light becomes a 1990s urban Alphaville where an entrepreneurial culture has thrown up a new set of bourgeois sensibilities. The narrator, in attempting to articulate his horror at the absolute demands of this suffocating




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culture, seeks refuge first in apathy, and then in a series of extreme erotic adventures which, he finds, help to centre him in his body, the only locus of a residual sense of self in a world where the disconnection with the past is absolute, and only the market is real. There are unmistakable parallels with Proust, and as in Proust, the narrator is a leading protagonist in the story, which enables him to explore the rupture between his present and past identity. The theme is one of “becoming oneself,” that ironic modern quest which, as Robert Pippin has noted, has replaced the ancient and Enlightenment dream of “knowing oneself,” so that instead of learning what it is to be human, the novelist avoids any generalization from his own selfawareness to the nature of humanity as such or the quality of reality.23 “Self-becoming” takes place through relationality, once the experiment with isolation has failed; and relationality’s summit is not romantic love, but sexuality. Hence, as with Proust, Houellebecq’s narrator is only able to reflect upon his own growth to self-becoming in connection with the body. In both novels, the Romantic trope of love as an antidote to bourgeois claustrophobia has been set aside as just another form of mauvais foi. What distinguishes Houellebecq’s voyage into himself is the introduction of the Ishmaelite Other. His narrator reacts fiercely against the sight of Arabs in Paris, as the symbol of a constraint upon the senses and the body which represents a residual conventionality’s obstruction of his right to find himself. He yearns to liberate Arab women from the foulard. Yet at the close of the novel Ishmael defeats him. The paradisial sex-tourism resort he has established in Thailand, which becomes the site of an alliance between local prostitutes and Westerners seeking to “be themselves,” is attacked by Islamic fundamentalists, and his partner Valérie is killed. The Islam which began as a dark and menacing Other on the Paris subway ends by destroying his hopes for fidelity to himself, and he dies in absolute hopelessness, alone and still far from himself, like Proust’s Marcel. Houellebecq’s extension of the Proustian meditation on modern selfhood has hence adopted a new theme, that of the Ishmaelite. He is aware that the Ishmaelite Other represents an alternative mode of protest against the Thatcherite culture of the new Europe and the absolutist snobbisms of a consumerism for which, as documented in Naomi Klein’s book No Logo, prestige is determined by prestige, not by content or quality, just as celebrities are famous only for being famous, and therefore, in a sense, for having no self.24 The resentment between zonards and arabes, the obsessive media concern with la mentalité arabe, and the rise of the National Front and the Muslim


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Brotherhood, become, for Houellebecq, signs that the new polarity is certainly not between civilizations (for the sales bicots have none), but between rival modalities of knowledge. Islam’s Puritanism, represented most intolerably in public spaces by the foulard, is an alternative journey toward the self, whether as real faith, or as identity-politics. Only Islam and the radical pleasure culture which thrives at the fringes of contemporary urban anomie are paths to self-becoming; all else is a treasonable submission to the formal logic of the monoculture. If this last survivor of the Enlightenment enterprise, self-becoming, which is itself all that remains of the more solid Enlightenment hope that self-knowledge might be so possible that all the travails of humanity will naturally come to an end, has only two contemporary modalities: the Ishmaelite and, let us say, the idealistic-hedonist, then Islam again becomes a possible, albeit partial and conditional, ally against the recent deflation of the Enlightenment dream. This has been made possible by the fact that the doctrine of Acquisition (kasb) continues to hold the allegiance of most Muslim thinkers, against the collapse into scientific determinism which seems implied by materialistic models of consciousness. God has foreordained all, it is true; and indeed Islam was clearer about this aspect of the divine power than was, say, Thomism; but the Jabrite and certainly inhuman implications of scientism, inhibited only by the slowness of progress in neuroscience, are impossible in an Ash‘arite context. God creates our actions, accompanied by an infinity of proximate causes, but we acquire them so that they are truly ours. The problem of freedom which Proust and Houellebecq are attempting to unravel has substantially died with the demise of Kantian and Hegelian accounts of moral agency. However Ash‘arism, at least in this respect, may be strong enough to haul Europe off the rock of the crisis of human subjectivity.25 If late modernity tends to strip us of true agency, then must we conclude that the core Enlightenment ideal can only be found in religion? Again, to remember the religious content of much Enlightenment thought, minimized by subsequent memories (conservative and secular alike), will be helpful here. Recall Maine de Biran, whose adoption, and then rejection, of purely laïque Enlightenment claims about the sufficiency of consciousness and sense-perception in favor of the idea that knowledge and virtue come from God and human company, seems like a premonition of much current post-Enlightenment thought that nonetheless continues some of the Enlightenment’s key themes.26 Such a brave claim will, however, have to contend with the enormous distinction evident between Islamic and Enlightenment conceptions of human subjectivity. A consciousness which is the




Tim Winter

highest and most mysterious aspect of our being made “in God’s image” (f i kuratihi), and which is expressed in the Qur’an’s aporetic declaration that although we have been told little about it, we have a “soul” (ru6), which is “from God,” (17:85) is not at all the same thing as the self-awareness of the lumières. The Enlightenment’s idea of the self was, of course, riding on centuries of Christian confidence, but following Schopenhauer the Christian ghost was progressively banished in favor of an increasingly explicit behaviorist model. The Islam/Enlightenment dichotomy here seems absolute. But once more, neither turns out to be a single thing. Rousseau, for instance, had his own argument against the reified self, which he took to be an alienation from an earlier, nonsubjective form of consciousness. And the kalam doctrine of an immortal soul seemed to be in tension with some Sufi views, so that Ibn ‘Arabi, while developing an interesting doctrine of the human will on the basis of hadiths about self-denial, is aware of the ambiguity of a selfhood which exists against the backdrop of a monist philosophy, the goal of whose self-knowledge is in fact annihilation (fana’).27 At times, radical Sufi considerations of the thinking subject can approach the great Buddhist paradox of Self/noSelf; an enigma which is doubtless one reason for Buddhism’s contemporary appeal. To return, though, to Houellebecq. For him, self-becoming requires separation from bourgeois false consciousness, and only two such separations are currently available: Islam and idealistic hedonism. His option is for the latter, but only because the former is alien to him. But perhaps in that very alienness lies an authentic Otherness, an option which would enhance our free separation from the monoculture. Another Frenchman, René Guénon (1886–1951), who during the period portrayed by Proust had experimented with a range of alternative lifestyles, exercised his own freedom in favor of the Islamic Other. Guénon entered Islam at the hands of an Egyptian Sufi, and spent the remainder of his life writing and praying as a semirecluse in Cairo.28 In his numerous books, which constitute an absolute apostasy from the modern doctrines of progress and humanism, he advocated Islam as the most appropriate religious choice for Westerners who seek freedom from the monoculture, both because Islam is radically unsecular, and because it is spiritually proximate to the Christian genius which the Enlightenment had suppressed. “This Islamic civilization,” he wrote, “with its two aspects, esoteric and exoteric, and with the religious form which the latter is clothed in, comes nearest to being like what a traditional Western civilization would be.”29 Thanks to an archetypal law of opposites, the West which has betrayed Tradition has


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as its nearest neighbor the civilization which has been most successful in retaining it. Islam stands like an everlasting island amid a sea of change, offering to shipwrecked Europeans a pattern of life still utterly fixed on God. “What Westerners call progress is for Moslems nothing but change and instability; and the need for change, so characteristic of modern times, is in their eyes a mark of manifest inferiority: he who has reached a state of equilibrium no longer feels this need.”30 Ishmael, despised by the smart and the ambitious, is like Proust’s character Françoise, a maid rooted in peasant certainties, whose fixed identity serves as the only constant in his novel. But whereas Marcel cannot be like Françoise, Guénon can become an Ishmaelite, joining Europe’s symbolic Other which now becomes a sign not of one monotheism in tension with another, but of a world for God which offers an infinitely welcome refuge from the thousand false gods of a machine age. While Isaac “laughs” in the midst of the entertainment culture which the West has created to fortify itself against the thought of mortality, Ishmael still “hears God,” and therefore alone deserves to be heard. Houellebecq rejects this choice, although he (like Umberto Eco), is aware of it.31 The Islamic option has been famous or notorious in France: Garaudy, who opted for Islam after resigning as chairman of the Communist Party, has been a continuing irritant, and there have been others.32 But Houellebecq’s choice is open to challenge; his antinomy Islam/Eros appears as a curious modernism. For medieval Europe, Islam’s status as dark Other was indicated by its sensuality as much as by its theological outrages; and even today, despite three sexual revolutions, Hans Küng can criticise Muslims for “sensuality.”33 Yet Gide in Biskra, Flaubert in Cairo, and the Arabian Nights, are also part of Europe’s consciousness. So too is Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), whose bacchanalia in Tunis led finally to the life of a Sufi contemplative.34 The painter Étienne Dinet (1861–1929) began with the Orientalist theme of the Ouled-Naïl dancer, but went on to portray the Ka‘ba itself, where he finally found his home.35 Hence Houellebecq’s narrator, who discovers himself in the arms of prostitutes from simple Thai villages, whose pleasures are elemental, is in fact pursuing a quest for knowledge which readily suggests Islamic parallels. If, in Proust and Houellebecq, the reconstitution of the quest for the human subject, and of the subject itself, is to take place primarily through the senses, so that the great site of a promised healing is the beach (Phuket; the Balbec sequences in Proust), then perhaps their quest is not entirely alien to Islam. (Guénon, from a family of priests, married an Egyptian woman.) They are engaged, as Muslims would




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see it, in a kind of quest for salvation, since sexuality, the ultimate teleology of the body, is nothing if it is not a proleptic anticipation of the life of the blessed.36 Paradise, the locus amoenus of the Muslims denounced by Latin medievals as a “garden of nature,” is fully itself because it encompasses the perfect archetypes of which every benign aspect of our mortal humanity is a shadowy anticipation. Not only resurrection, but salvation too, is bodily, and therefore the religion’s theologians need to expound the virtues and propagate the modalities of sexuality.37 The dualism carried into Enlightenment thought, and indeed massively exacerbated by Descartes, is foreign to Islam, and also to Judaism.38 De Biran’s rejection of Cartesianism in favor of a relation with God and with human others is given its necessary support in the Islamic idea of sexuality as simultaneously a connection with paradise, and with the human Other. Proust and Houellebecq, then, are victims of what Guénonians would see as the great inherited tragedy of their culture: the original sin of failing to discern in the body’s fulfillment a retrieval of the prelapsarian. They intuit the epistemological power of our embodied selfhood, but lack awareness of sexuality’s significance as a sign pointing toward the final healing and consummation of humanity in heaven. Their misfortune is that despite their conscientious sensual rebellion against bourgeois values and mere romantic love, they cannot sever their genetic ties with a patrimony which saw Eros as a rival to God. Hence their stories peter out in irresolution, as they instinctively use a proleptic sign of God as a means of rebelling against him. This is a great theme in Western culture: Peter Abelard and John Donne, to take only two instances, were also stymied by their simultaneous love of God and of women, which becomes a great interruptus of Europe’s cultural history. Diderot, who was perhaps the first to introduce the beach as the symbol of a non-Christian Eden into Western culture, is challenging this directly.39 Hegel, as Nietzsche saw, made matters still worse, as he equated progress with dematerialization, a misprision of the kind of Christian soteriology which sees the messianic event as consummated in God’s separation from a body. However for us, every move against our enfleshed reality is a disincarnation, a term which sums up the major line of culture which was spun from the Enlightenment, and which perhaps accounts for the multiple aberrations of its erotic forms (de Sade). Hence the fall from David to Leigh Bowery: Western art abandons representation because there is no longer any consensus on the use of the body or the telos of the genders; whereas Islam never had such a representation, precisely because of its consensus. After losing its iconography as part of the


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simultaneous consummation and collapse of the Enlightenment, Western art seemed to trace the path of Islam in experimenting with geometry; yet this was short-lived, and was replaced finally by a conceptual art which is purely self-referential, and referential to a self which defines itself exclusively in terms of its project of finding itself in its own representations of itself, or (more usually) of what it is not. Mind, disconnected from body, ends in deconstruction; body, disconnected from mind, becomes smeared and twisted by Lucian Freud’s impasto. The disconnection betrays sibling errors: that of Leibniz, who opens the doors to abolishing the function of the exterior world; and that of Locke, who anticipates the more worrying neuroscientists by emphasizing the mind’s passivity. Neo-Kantians strove to overcome this gulf. But Muslim theists, who have found it hard to sustain a mind-body dualism, will seek to overcome it through reference not to rationality (‘aql, na·ar), but to a prerational intuition (fıt. ra), which allows us to link the mind directly to objects. The instrumentalizing of this link is the revealed Law, which begins with elementary bodily functions, and ramifies into every dimension of life. Thus the reality of the world is affirmed (it is for us); but also its heterogeneity (difference is real, and to be affirmed, because we know that it merits different forms of halakhic access and address). This body-world relation which is the sunna or halakha is a sophisticated expression of what Michael Bakhtin calls “architectonics.” For Bakhtin, the Enlightenment had not offered an adequate account of the manner by which we may negotiate the hiatus between perception of the self, and perception of external entities. We see others from our own “horizon,” but radically homogenize them within a generic category of “others.” What is required is a mode of perception which obliges us to ground our perception of others in an awareness of their mutual separation and distinctiveness. This, in turn, requires a proper acknowledgement of our own situatedness, particularly of our characteristic enfleshment within human bodies.40 Bakhtin’s notion of architectonics appears to supply a helpful vocabulary for a positive Muslim critique of Enlightenment reason. It seems to require not only an affirmation of the integrity of the Other’s act, but also a political act by the Self to serve the Other; although his relationship to religion was eccentric, he was once arrested for membership of a political group that combined Christian and Marxist teachings.41 The Other is detected and valued through architectonic apprehension, and must be actively defended. Here Bakhtin is far from Heidegger, who shared his strong sense of the defeat of scientific




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optimism during the Great War, but whose system seemed to valorize an affirmation of selfhood through the mere fact of decision making, so that, as Karl Jaspers described Heidegger’s position, “the manner of thinking [was] more important than the content of political judgements.”42 Bakhtin offers a system that makes this kind of idolatry of the will more difficult. No less concerned for social and political activism grounded in a rejection of dualism is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Like Bakhtin, he appreciates the contemporary concern with self-awareness, and wishes to affirm its bodily quality. His concept of the body-subject seeks to defeat Enlightenment dualism without conceding any ground to behaviorism. Body and mind are not a composite of two principles, one of which is simply a part of a material network of causality, while the other, “incarnated” within it, is a sovereign but moral agent of perception. Instead, the body-subject is a single entity, with the “self” existing as the highest modality of the fully integrated phenomenon that is the body-subject. The “spiritual” is real, and is not reducible simply to the physical; nonetheless, it is an aspect of it. Without the body, we do not exist.43 This interrogation of Enlightenment accounts of human subjectivity appears congenial to the Ash’arite manner of perception which roots it in the body, which is the primary subject of moral accountability (taklif), the physically coterminous site of a “soul” possessed of spatial extension, and the source of our intuitive, prerational cognition of self, others, and objects. The Prophet’s prayer for a light, or “intellect,” that is at once bodily and spiritual is a consequence of this. The insights of Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty cry out for a practical response, and this is supplied by the inheritance of a Law which affirms the architectonics of the body-world relation, and predicts that each part of the human body will be judged.44 The central practice of the monotheist will therefore be physical “as well as” interior, beginning with ablutions; the kalat worship being the highest sign, in an Islamic context, of how the two are to act as a single entity. Gender, too, is affirmed in a productive way, as a principle which is fundamental to mind.45 Shari‘a and halakha, as modes of integrated knowing, must have distinctively gendered variants. At the opposite pole of the Semitic integration of body and soul stands the type dreaded by Merleau-Ponty, the detached modern, for whom body is a source only of perceptions and pleasures transmitted to an incarnate mind. Swift, in a well-known chapter of Gulliver’s Travels, seems to anticipate this deformed modern condition in his account of Laputa. On this flying island governed by scientists, the


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bond with the original corporeal context of our humanity has so atrophied that the Laputans live with one eye turned perpetually inwards, while the other stares toward the sky. As ideal Cartesians, they narcissistically contemplate the self, or the most remote phenomena, but cannot link the two or deal with the intermediate region. Hence they see no reasonable objection to their wives’ infidelity, but are endlessly preoccupied with politics and news of great events far away.46 The Semitic body-mind integration is thus the polar opposite of Enlightenment valorizations, framed against a certain image of Christianity, of both body and mind.47 Although in rejecting peccatism and eremeticism, the lumières revalorized the body, this did not take place through a ressourcement in the despised Semitisms, but through a return to pagan conceptions. Unlike the Semites, the philosophes ended up not knowing what to do with the body other than heal it or make it stronger.48 The Semitisms, however, which generally rejected the public cult of the body, had always been attuned to its functions, each of which was integrated into the human subject through intention (niyya) and comprehensive halakhic practice. Such an anthropology will have immediate ethical repercussions, for instance, on our apprehension of the rights of the natural environment.49 The body-subject is fully part of the world; in fact, Islam will have no real term for “environment,” as something which “surrounds” us. For Ibn ‘ArabÏ, the cosmos is “the large man”; for our own “body-spirit” relation is a microcosm of a larger way of viewing things in which the divine is the reality of the world.50 The saint, who is God’s “vicegerent” (khalÏfa) on the earth, is precisely the one who realizes the teleology of the body-subject by using the plenitude of “body and spirit” in harmonious conformity to God’s commands; and in consequence, a sign of his/her sanctity is that like the Prophet he/she is a refuge for the animal kingdom.51 The body-subject knows that there is a due response to everything, beginning with the sunrise. For the Semitisms, the secularization which seemed to flow from the identification of the body with “the fallen world,” will be almost impossible to initiate in such a context.



In essence, at the very heart of Christianity, there is a split between civilization and faith, between culture and redemption, between man and the city of God. All Christian culture and civilization are the result of the compromise, a partial surrender of the originally sacred to the inescapably secular. The process of secularization, the death of God, started with the delayed Parousia.52


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Here, at first glance, Judaism and Islam appear to converge with the Enlightenment trope of the bon sauvage, and of a Golden Age when “the state of Nature was the reign of God.”53 Yet this theme, despite certain short-lived Platonizing appropriations, was more a deliberate provocation of the church than a philosophicallydisciplined theory of decay. The mainstream Enlightenment, which began with such potential sympathy for Semitism, soon mobilized itself as a positivism impatient with Rousseau’s ideal agrarian age, since its science demanded applications which could only be valuable if human life were in need of improvement. Progress became central to Western conceptions of history, and nature was progressively disenchanted as human beings mastered the world rather than themselves. The ancient trope of moral and spiritual entropy, which begins for the West with Genesis, Hesiod and the Prometheus myth, was turned on its head, perhaps, as Simone Weil fanatically asserted, because “Christianity fabricated the poisonous idea of progress, through the notion of a divine education that was to mould man and enable him to receive the message of Christ.”54 After countless millennia, humanity was finally ready for the fullness of truth, and even after the Christ-event, progress would continue, toward the conversion of the world. This counter-entropic, optimistic vision was in time appropriated and overtaken by the mechanism of Descartes and Malebranche, who banished Providence, and opened the way to the idea that progress might be inherent in the nature of the profane world. If such a key Enlightenment topos has a Christian pedigree, despite its deployment against the church, are Judaism and Islam excluded from such a joyful vision? If Israel is “in waiting” still, and if the alleged Messiah accepted by Christianity and Islam turned out to inaugurate an age of unequalled suffering for his own people, then simple ideas of progress will appear difficult. Perhaps an Israel as nation-state will, despite Auschwitz, make a Jewish theology of progress more feasible; but it is unclear whether the return before the Messiah will end in joy or in a new calamity; both are imaginable. Horkheimer, toward the pessimistic end of his life, took the view that the “going up” to Zion had abolished the dream of the Messiah, and hence the underlying hope of Jewry.55 Perhaps such ambiguities, coupled with twentieth-century genocide, explain why much Jewish reflection on modernity, even among decided moderns, has been ambivalent or pessimistic; Walter Benjamin is a well-known example,56 and in the same category we can probably include Freud’s insistence that progress entails a loss of happiness by reason of a steady


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intensification of guilt.57 George Steiner’s dismal prophecies about human language and the “core-tiredness” of the West are in roughly the same genre.58 Ishmael has been no less divided. Modern Islamism typically reveres technology, finds scientific truths in the Qur’an, abhors superstition, and struggles to explain why an “irrational” Christianity should have overtaken Islam after eight centuries of eclipse and irrelevance;59 and there are quasi-secular minds who lament the demise of an alleged Averroist “rationalism.”60 Shabbir Akhtar insists that the Enlightenment, by enhancing our appreciation of human autonomy, and hence of the quality of intentionality prized by Muslim ethics, must be considered an advance by theologians.61 By contrast, the traditionalist thinker Seyyed Hossein Nasr presents modernity as a rebellion against God. “Equipped with a Faustian knowledge, secular in character and based on power over the natural order, the new man began to create unprecedented havoc over the globe, for there was now no limit set by any spiritual laws upon his rights of domination.”62 Like Garaudy, he predicts that the disintegration of modern selfhood will be accompanied by a collapse in human conviviality, for if there is no consistent Self, then no other selves can be imagined or apprehended. The environment, too, has no future, for if nature is simply a set of our perceptions it is of even less significance than the objectified external nature that, in older European tradition, allowed human beings a jus utendi et abutendi. Muslims, in their wisdom, developed science and technology only to a point where divine agency and human frailty were still undeniable; and were providentially protected from further “progress.” For Frithjof Schuon, “humanism in the conventional sense of the term de facto exalts fallen man and not man as such. The humanism of the moderns is practically a utilitarianism aimed at fragmentary man; it is the will to make oneself as useful as possible to a humanity as useless as possible.”63 Abdul Wadod Shalabi speaks of “spiritual entropy,” a topos rooted in a genre of pessimistic hadiths.64 For him, such entropy is “the backbone of history, a dialectic far more profound than that of the Marxist, who sees the process from beneath, as it were, and imagines it to be grounds for optimism.”65 The conclusion must be that modern Islam is hence deeply ambivalent, with Islamists, as befits their Enlightenment roots, generally more upbeat than traditionalists and Sufis. It is significant that messianic expectations, common in the Islamic past and conspicuous in nineteenthcentury responses to Western encroachment (Mahdism, Baha’ism, Qadianism), are largely absent from modern Islamist discourse,




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which instead stresses “planning” and “unity” as the keys to establishing the “Islamic State.” Islamism’s implicit repudiation of classical Muslim messianism is demonstrated further in its rigorism. Again, this is a sign of distance from classical assumptions: Prophetic predictions of entropy came coupled with the idea that God will require less from his servants as time goes on. One hadith tells the Prophet’s companions, who lived in the “Age of Felicity” (‘akr al-sa‘ada): “You are living in a time when someone who renounces a tenth of what is enjoined upon him will be destroyed; but a time will come when someone who performs a tenth of what is enjoined upon him will be saved.”66 Traditional Sunnism took this to mean that the law should be applied more gently as time went on. For instance, even one of the most rigorous of Ottoman jurists, al-BirgivÏ (1523–1573), thought that his age was so distant from the Prophet’s time that it was forbidden for the jurist to apply any but the most easy and gentle interpretations of the Shari:a.67 Under modern conditions, however, Islamists, heirs to Enlightenment beliefs about instrumental reason and the Utopian perfectibility of the world, have repudiated this by typically insisting on interpretations more rigorous even than the mainstream Shari:a of early Islamic times.

One Humanity Koshul notes Islam’s historic tolerance and even sponsorship of cultural diversity. Yet this is no proof of Islam’s compatibility with mainstream Enlightenment notions. Perhaps because of their sympathy with the “body-subject” principle, the Semitisms have shown themselves capable of an internal cultural differentiation which, to the extent that they value it, in fact challenges one of the most visible consequences of the Enlightenment: the annihilation of cultural specificity at the hands of universal Reason. In an intensification of ancient disdain for the barbaroi, Renaissance humanism had generally been reluctant to contemplate the humanity of non-Europeans, and the Enlightenment in many ways took this further. In the first instance, an accelerating secular messianism, apparently vindicated by science, enabled a kind of military expansion whose narcissism was unlike any that had preceded it. As Guénon complained, during the heyday of empire:


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If they merely took pleasure in affirming their imagined superiority, the illusion would only do harm to themselves; but their most terrible offence is their proselytising fury: in them the spirit of conquest goes



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This new militancy in the name of Freedom typically affirms the possibility of diversity in the context of Enlightenment rights discourse; yet in practice it subjects difference to rapid atrophy. The consequences of this even for the West may prove severe. Much of the energy of internal critics of the Enlightenment came from a deep knowledge of other civilizations (for Rousseau and Nietzsche it was classical antiquity; for many German romantics it was India69). Today, however, “we do not have such an alternative because in contrast to the historical civilizations, authentic culture cannot co-exist and survive under the hegemonic character of modern Western civilization.”70 For Davutoˇglu, the Enlightenment’s liquidation of non-Western cultures traps us forever in the monoculture, since the option of borrowing and syncretism open at earlier times of civilizational crisis has now been confiscated. The “peoples and tribes” which are created “to know each other” (Qur’an 49:13), are abolished by globalizing processes. Even the multiplicity of languages, regarded as a sign of God in the Qur’an (30:22), and a source of quasi-religious amazement to Bakhtin,71 is eroded by the extinction of small language groups and the progressive intrusion of English into larger ones. Here, again, the Semitic will resist: Western reason is a single thing; but the body-subject is going to be radically disparate across the globe; for it is scripture, not reason, which insists that: Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life. And if God has so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise] in order to test you by means of what He has vouchsafed unto you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works.72

The diversity of Islamic civilizations was invoked at the beginning of this chapter, and was mirrored, in a demographically minor key, by the capacity of Judaism to maintain its identity in a huge range of cultural settings, which it found ways of selectively but substantially integrating. The Enlightenment, however, in effect universalizes Rome, which was itself a kind of early monoculture. Under the caliphs, a synagogue or mosque in Toledo differed from a synagogue or a mosque in Ephesus; even though the forum, the theatre and the insula had been remarkably consistent throughout the Roman Mediterranean. Medieval Islam and Judaism imported freely from Athens; but they


under the disguise of “moralist” pretexts, and it is in the name of “liberty” that they would force the world to imitate them.68


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seem to have instinctively excluded those dimensions which obstructed diversity: poetics, drama, architecture. Maimonidean and Ghazalian theology contained strong rationalizing and universalizing teachings, and this could be reflected in yeshiva and in madrasa; but the primacy of scripture ensured that this took place in the context of a cultural world that was sustainably and radically diverse. Modern “Westernisation” introduces a rationalism which, by contrast, underpins a vast global process of homogenization, creating a global reach for what Walter Benjamin called the “automatic society” from which no escape is possible or even imagined. Such a world does not constitute “signs,” and is apprehended only through cognition and science, never though worship, fasting, or purity laws. The theoretical willingness of Enlightenment humanity to seek wisdom, as the Prophet said, “even in China,”73 hardly remains as a practical option. Are we to conclude that modern Islam, so often sympathetic to the Enlightenment’s claims, and in its Islamist version one of their most powerful instantiations, has been deeply mistaken? The totalitarian forms of Enlightenment reason which recurred throughout the twentieth century have discredited it in the eyes of many; and are now less dangerous only because postmodernism seems to have abolished so many of the Enlightenment’s key beliefs.74 If the ideal of freedom is now based less on ideas of inalienable natural rights than on the notion that all truth is relative, then perhaps mainstream Islamist thinking will need to unhitch itself more explicitly from the broadly Western paradigms which it accepted for most of the twentieth century. Yet the relation Islam/Enlightenment seems predicated on simplistic definitions of both. Islamism may be an Enlightenment project, but conservative Sufism (for instance) is probably not. Conversely, even without adopting a postmodern perspective we are not so willing today to assume a necessary antithesis between tradition and reason.75 The way forward, probably, is to recognize that Islam genuinely converges with Enlightenment concerns on some issues, in the way indicated at the beginning of this chapter; while on other matters, notably the Enlightenment’s individualism and its increasingly Promethean confidence in humanity’s autonomous capacities, it is likely to demur radically. What matters about Islam is that it did not produce the modern world. If modernity ends in a technologically-induced holocaust, then survivors will probably hail the religion’s wisdom in not authoring something similar.76 If, however, it survives, and continues to produce a global monoculture where the past is forgotten, and where international laws and customs are increasingly restrictive of cultural


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difference, then Islam is likely to remain the world’s great heresy. In that case, Kepnes’ description of Islam’s historic status as the rejected Ishmaelite, ha-ger, may not prove so unhelpful as he suggests. What if Ishmael actually wishes to be rejected, since the one who is doing the rejecting has ended up creating a world without God? Grounded in our stubbornly immobile liturgy and doctrine, we Ishmaelites should serve the invaluable, though deeply resented, function of a culture which would like to be an Other, even if that is no longer quite possible.

Notes 1. The Independent, July 28, 2002; quoted in Abdal Hakim Murad, “Islam after the Enlightenment: some reflections on a polemic,” Islamic Studies 42/ii (Summer 2003): 245–258. For more on Islamism as a modern Western version of Islam see John Gray, Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 2003); Abdelwahab Meddeb, Islam and Its Discontents (London: Heinemann, 2003); Abdal Hakim Murad, “Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism,” Encounters 10 (2004): 85–118. 2. Popularly, the Enlightenment heritage is associated exclusively with a rationalism that leads to egalitarianism and participatory government; that this is an enormous oversimplification is evident from J. G. A. Pocock’s magisterial survey Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–). 3. Cited in Minou Reeves, Muhammad in Europe (Reading: Garnet, 2000), p. 275. 4. Louis Gardet, La Cité Musulmane: vie sociale et politique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1954), p. 23, p. 32; the phrase originates with Louis Massignon. Gardet goes on to discuss the inferior legal status of non-Muslims, p. 58. 5. Cf. for instance Qur’an 5:116, which has God asking Jesus: “ ‘Did you say unto the people, ‘Worship me and my mother?’” Islam is, in a sense, the formalizing of Ebionite Christianity; see for instance Hugh J. Schonfield, The History of Jewish Christianity (London: Duckworth, 1936), pp. 119–120; Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus I: The Cup of the Lord (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. 164–165; Pierre-Antoine Bernheim, James, Brother of Jesus (London: SCM, 1997), p. 269. Note that Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity was attacked for making early Christianity look like Islam (John Edwards, The Socinian Creed: Or a Brief Account of the Professed Tenents [sic] and Doctrines of the Foreign and English Socinians [London: J. Robinson, 1697], p. 227–228; Ahmed Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-century Writings [London: Grey Seal, 1996], p. 132).




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6. Stanford Shaw, “Christian Anti-Semitism in the Ottoman Empire,” Belleten (Türk Tarih Kurumu), 54/211 (1990): 1073–1149. 7. Susan Ritchie, “The Islamic Ottoman Influence on the Development of Religious Toleration in Reformation Transylvania,” Seasons: Journal of the Zaytuna Institute, 2/I (Spring/Summer 2004): 59–70. 8. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (London: Continuum, 1992). 9. Noel Malcolm, “The Crescent and the City of the Sun: Islam and the Renaissance Utopia of Tommaso Campanella,” Proceedings of the British Academy 125 (2005): 41–67. For the theology of “minority rights” in Shari˘a law see Recep Tentürk, “Minority Rights in Islam: from dhimmi to citizen,” in Islam and Human Rights: Advancing a U.S.-Muslim Dialogue, ed. Shireen T. Hunter and Huma Malik (Washington DC: Center for International and Strategic Studies, 2005), pp. 67–99. As Tentürk shows, for the majoritarian hanafi school, human beings are born with certain inalienable rights irrespective of religious affiliation. 10. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, p. 109. He pointed out that no Christian state allowed the presence of a mosque; but that the Ottoman Empire was filled with churches (Gunny, 149). For one (overstated) Muslim attempt to present the later Voltaire as a thoroughgoing ally of Islam, see Javad Hadidi, Islam az naz.ar-e Voltir (Tehran, 1355solar). 11. Garrett Ward Sheldon, “Eclectic Synthesis: Jesus, Aristotle and Locke,” in Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Nature, ed. Thomas S. Engeman (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), pp. 81–98. Much of eighteenth century “deism” was a reaction against the vulnerability which Hume imagined to inhere in the Christian idea of a “personal” God. A God who can be so like us as to be incarnated, must be answerable to our human charges that he has authored a world full of suffering. The “deist” God, is certainly not “human” in this sense, thanks to a radical idea of divine transcendence (what Muslims call tanzih), yet where his attributes have names analogous to the virtues we recognize among humans, he can still be the object of prayer, like the God of Ash’arism, Cf. Eric Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 12. Le Comte de Boulainvilliers, La Vie de Mahomet (1728), cited in Reeves, 147. 13. Malcolm, “City of the Sun.” 14. Ed. Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani, reprint Lahore: Orientalia, 1954. For Stubbe see James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 15. J. J. Virey, Histoire naturelle du genre humain (Revised edition, Paris: Crochard, 1824), I, p. 439, includes the Arabs towards the lower end of the moral and intellectual spectrum of the white races.


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16. For the Mahomets gesang see Johann Gottfried Bellerman, Mahomets gesang von Goethe (n.d., n.p); for Schubert’s Muhammadan lieder (D549 and D721) see Walther Dürr, ed., Franz Schubert: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke: Lieder, band 13 (Kassel: BärenreiterVerlag, 1992), pp. 201–212; also the recording titled “A Goethe Schubertiad” (Hyperion), ASIN B000002ZFI; there is also a more ambitious setting by Robert Kahn, Mahomet’s gesang, für gemischten chor mit orchester (op. 24) (Leipzig: F. E. C. Leuckart, 1896). For the West-ostlicher Divan see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems of the West and East: West-eastern Divan ⫽ West-Östlicher Divan, trans. John Whaley (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1998). 17. Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1850), I, p. 391; see Recep Tentürk, “Towards an Open Science and Society: Multiplex Relations in Language, Religion and Society: Revisiting Ottoman Culture,” in Islam Ara»tirmalari Dergisi 6 (2001): 93–129, 97. 18. Mu6ammad ibn 7amza Fenari, :Ayn al-A:yan Tafsir al-Fati6a (Dar-i Sa˘adet: Rif˘at Bey Mat.ba˘ası, 1325), 9. For the hadith see Muslim, Munafıqin, 40. 19. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy 9: Maine de Biran to Sartre (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 1975), p. 60. 20. George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism: Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. xx: “the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the reception of both movements, scholasticism and humanism, from classical Islam by the Christian Latin West.” 21. Roger Garaudy, Promesses de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1981), p. 19. 22. Houellebecq, Platform, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Heinemann, 2002). 23. Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 307. 24. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Flamingo, 2001). 25. For the doctrine of Acquisition see Majid Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), pp. 53–55. 26. For de Biran’s critique of a purely secular Enlightenment see Copleston, A History of Philosophy 9, pp. 32–35. 27. William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 325–327. 28. For Guénon see, for instance, Robin Waterfield, René Guénon and the future of the West (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1989); Paul Chacornac, The simple life of René Guénon, trans. Cecil Bethell (Ghent NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001); Michel Valsân, L’Islam et la fonction de René Guénon: Recueil posthume (Paris: L’Oeuvre, 1984); Pierre Prévost, Georges Bataille et René Guénon: l’expérience souveraine (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1992).




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29. René Guénon, East and West, trans. M. Lings (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pp. 148–149. 30. Guénon, East and West, p. 26. 31. See Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” in Eco, trans. Alastair McEwan as Five Moral Pieces (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001), pp. 65–88. Eco is here, as en passant in Foucault’s Pendulum, accusing Guénon of providing ammunition for Fascism (cf. the Fascist theorist Julius Evola’s René Guénon: a teacher for modern times [Edmonds, WA: Holmes, 1993]); this is absurd, however, given Guénon’s insistence on orthodoxy and his rejection of the occult; for the debate see M. Ali Lakhani, “Umberto Eco, Fascism and Tradition,” in Sacred Web, 11, pp. 23–29. 32. For Garaudy’s life see Roger Garaudy, Mon tour du siècle en solitaire: mémoires (Beirut: Al Fihrist, 1999), for some other irritants see Lisbeth Rocher and Fatima Cherkaoui, D’une foi l’autre: les conversions à l’Islam en Occident (Paris: Seuil, 1986). 33. Hans Küng, “Christianity and World Religions: The Dialogue with Islam As One Model,” Muslim World 77 (1987): 80–95, 84. 34. Isabelle Eberhardt, Dans l’ombre chaude de l’Islam (Paris: Charpentier and Fasquelle, 1908). 35. Denise Brahimi, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Étienne Dinet, avec catalogue raisonné de Koudir Benchikou (Courbevoie: ACR, 1991). A similar case is that of the Swedish painter Ivan Aguéli (1869–1917), who began his juvenile reading career by simultaneously borrowing the Qur’an and a copy of Baudelaire from a public library. Cf. G. Rocca’s introduction to Abdul Hadi (Ivan Aguéli), Écrits pour La Gnose: comprenant la traduction de l’arabe du Traité sur l’unité (Milan: Archè, 1988); for some shortcomings in Rocca’s account see Pietro Nutrizio, René Guénon e l’occidente (Milan: Luni Editrice, 1999), passim. 36. Abu 7amid al-Ghazali, On Disciplining the Soul, trans. T. J. Winter Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1995), p. 165. For a symptomatic European attempt to dismiss the possibility of a sensual locus amoenus see Alfred Rodriguez and Joel F. Dykstra, “Cervantes’ Parodic Rendering of a Traditional Topos: Locus Amoenus,” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 17 (1997): 115–121. It is interesting to note that according to some, the figure of the Green Man who stares from the stonework of medieval cathedrals as an apparent survival of pagan nature-worship may be a partial borrowing from the Qur’anic and Islamic Khi∂r (the Green Man); see for instance William Anderson, The Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth (London and San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990), pp. 75–76; Coleman Barks and J. Moyne, The Essential Rumi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 288. 37. Melek Chebel, “Theologiens de l’amour,” in Encyclopédie de l’Amour en Islam (Paris: Payot, 1995), pp. 605–609.


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38. In the latter case, of course, the dualism is abolished even more thoroughly by the frequent denial of personal survival after death; otherwise, the two “Semitisms” are roughly equivalent here. As for Christian “dualism,” this is certainly not present in the Gospels; nonetheless it emerges as a theme at a relatively early date. 39. In his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772). Tahiti is like Eden, but it is a defiance of the church’s earthly and heavenly ideal. 40. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Chapters by M. M. Bakhtin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. xxvii–ix. 41. Holquist and Liapunov, Art and Answerability, p. xxxix. 42. Cited by Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, trans. Gary Steiner, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 24. 43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1962). 44. “Today We seal their mouths, and their hands shall speak to us, and their feet shall testify to what they used to do” (Qur’an, 36:65). 45. An analogous view is developed in Luce Irigarary’s Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), which advances a case against Plato and the Enlightenment; see Philippe Berry, “Woman and Space according to Kristeva and Irigarary,” in Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, ed. Philippe Berry and Andrew Werninck (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 250–264. 46. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, part III, chapter 2. 47. Christian theologies of a body-mind integration are of course abundant; for a recent venture inspired by the example of Islamic worship, see Oddbjørn Leirvik, “Prostrate and Erect: Some Christian-Muslim Reflections on Religious Body Language,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 16 (2006): 29–40. 48. As part of a broadly Jewish critique of some consequences of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer contrast the nazi metrical obsession with the body with the Jewish aversion to measuring it (the dead are measured for the coffin). “That is what gives the body-manipulators their enjoyment. Unaware, they measure the other with the eye of the coffin maker.” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002], p. 195). 49. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 236: “The recovery of the religious view of nature must turn to the central issue of the body, where the spiritual, psychic and physical elements combine in a unity.” 50. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 16. This is not a pantheism; for the world is in a state of absolute ontological dependence on God; nonetheless, God is the ground of the world’s being (wujud). 51. B. A. Masri, Animals in Islam (Petersfield: Athene Trust, 1989).




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52. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973), p. 56. 53. Alexander Pope, An Chapter on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (London and New York: Routledge, 1950), p. 107. 54. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 162. 55. Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer: From Utopia to Redemption” (http://construct.Haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Utopia4.html). 56. For example, “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 235. 57. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 78. 58. George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 59. Typical is the view expressed in Ahmad Y. al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 281–283: Islam’s science would have outstripped that of the West but for the development of a clerical faction, the political fragmentation of the Muslim world, and economic decline; explanations which, however, do not seem at all persuasive. For instance, the Ottoman ulema, the most formally hierarchalized scholars in Sunni history, were strongly in favor of the printing press; see Metin Kunt, “Reading Elite, Elite Reading,” unpublished paper given at the International Symposium on the History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, November 2 , 2005. 60. Mohammed Abid al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic philosophy: A Contemporary Critique (Austin: University of Texas, 1999); cf. Mourad Wahba and Mona Abousenna, Averroes and the Enlightenment (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996). 61. Shabbir Akhtar, The Light in the Enlightenment (London: Grey Seal, 1990). 62. Nasr, Order of Nature, p. 179. Similar is the position of John Ahmed Herlihy, Modern Man at the Crossroads: The Encounter of Modern Science and Traditional Knowledge (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1999). 63. Frithjof Schuon, To Have a Centre (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1990), p. viii. 64. For instance: “Never does an age come, but that its successor is worse” (Bukhari, Fitan, 6). 65. Abdul Wadod Shalabi, Islam Religion of Life (Dorton: Quilliam Press, 1989), p. 10. 66. TirmidhÏ, Fitan, 79.


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67. Mu6ammad ibn Pir ‘Ali al-Birgivi, al-Tariqa al-Mu6ammadiyya wa’l-sira al-a6madiya, ed. Mu6ammad 7usni Mukt.af a (Aleppo: Dar alQalam al-˘Arabi, 1423/2002), 419. 68. Guénon, East and West, p. 25. 69. J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1998). 70. Ahmet Davutoˇglu, Civilizational Transformation and the Muslim World (Kuala Lumpur: Mahir, 1994), pp. 26–27. 71. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and other Late chapters, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 60–102. 72. Qur’an 5:48; the translation is Muhammad Asad’s. 73. For this hadith see Mu6ammad ibn ‘Ali al-Kaghdi, al-Nawaqi6 al-‘A.t ira fi’l-a6adith al-mushtahira (Beirut: Mu’assasa al-Kitab al-Thaqafıyya, 1412/1992), 46. 74. Vaclav Havel could write that “the totalitarian systems warn of something far more serious than Western rationalism is willing to admit. They are [. . .] a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies, an extremist offshoot of its own development” (William Ophuls, Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium [Boulder and Oxford: Westview, 1997], p. 258); this seems somewhat outdated. 75. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (second edition, London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), p. 281. 76. Is this what Melville, whose days in Turkey had made him an admirer of Islam, meant when he made Ishmael the only survivor of the Pequod?







From Two to Three: T o Know Is A lso to Know t he C ontext of Knowing Peter Ochs

Studying the Other, Understanding the Self marks what may be a mile-

stone in dialogue among all four parties to the discomfort and conflict that marks life in the Western world today: the three Abrahamic communities and the secular modern West. The conflict among these four is often characterized in the secular West as a conflict between fundamentalism and secularism. More traditional proponents of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism may actually accept the characterization, while reversing the implicit lesson about who is on the side of the good. The major contribution of this volume is to have framed the conflict in a symmetrical way, suggesting a logical parity between those who take their stand on either pole. Rather than accept the terms of the conflict or seek some neutral ground outside it, Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter acknowledges the fact of the conflict but denies its intractability: in the vision of coeditors Basit Koshul and Steven Kepnes, both Islam (along with each of the other Abrahamic religions) and the modern West possess much greater and deeper capacities to read and reason both for themselves and on behalf of the other. This chapter focuses on the coeditors’ central argument, suggesting that Koshul and Kepnes illustrate how Abrahamic readers and philosophic reasoners may, together, transform the one-against-one terms of this conflict (what we will call


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its “two-ness”) into the relational terms of dialogue (what we call “three-ness”).

Steven Kepnes’ transformative account of Hagar introduces what I am calling the move from “two to three” as a movement within the House of Abraham, from intra-Abrahamic conflict to the celebration of inner Abrahamic differences. The story he tells goes like this. There is more than one story of Abraham inside the story of Abraham. The story most of us think we know is that Abraham’s two sons, Ishmael (son of the second wife Hagar) and Isaac (son of the matriarch Sarah) are pitted for conflict from birth. While their father loves them both, they are born of prototypically unequal mothers: one, an Egyptian bondswoman, the other her Israelite (mistress). Jealous that this servant’s son was born before hers, Sarah has Hagar and her son cast out into the desert. One customary reading is that the narrative displays ancient Israel’s understanding of its superiority over its non-Israelite neighbors, or proleptically, over what will become the Ishmaelite or Muslim line of Abraham’s religion. The customary reading has seemed to predict the conflict that seems at times to have defined Jewish-Muslim relations over the centuries. Whatever the actual political relations have been in this land or that, under this ruling nation or that, the customary view has seemed to make sense at least of ancient Israel’s attitude: that Hagar was an eponym for a people and a tradition cast out of Israel’s covenant with God. Kepnes’ chapter shows us, first, how much more complicated and nuanced are both the biblical texts and their subsequent reading within, as well as outside of, Jewish tradition. He suggests that Hagar’s estrangement from the House of Abraham may also be read as a biblical type of Israel herself, cast off by her master, exiled from her home, sensing herself a neglected handmaid among the nations. In this way, Kepnes more than complicates Biblical Israel’s relation to Islam in the future; he suggests that their identities as well as destinies may be profoundly intertwined. To receive the impact of this reading is not simply to substitute it for the usual reading, for such substitution would flatten the hermeneutic Kepnes is recommending. It is instead to read this more subtle reading as overlaying the other, so that there is reason for both readings. There is reason not only because of our realistic sense of human weakness, (that “yes, the Jews, like all other peoples will fail to appreciate the equality of all peoples and fail to see that they occupy only one place around the table.”)


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There is reason also because ethnic self-separation, or tribal identity, is not intrinsically sinful or simply a sign of human failing; it is a dimension of creaturely life. In this view, to become a people is a stage of becoming fully human. It is simply not the only stage and, like every stage in this world before the end of days, it carries its own burdens and dangers. The central danger is exclusion or even hatred, or even mistreatment of others outside or on the margins of one’s people. But, in the biblical view, the lack of ethnic identity may prove even more dangerous; like being a human without a body or skin or language or finite sets of relations, or land or housing and clothing. Kepnes’ reading does not sublate this tribal dimension of being. It suggests, instead, that at some point the tribe will be overlaid (without erasure) by other dimensions of being human. Members of Israel, who are those who once said, “we are Israel, not Ishmael,” will say, “our God is the God of Hagar.” Kepnes’ reading thus brings a logic with it and teaches us the logic along with its more evident politics. After Franz Rosenzweig, we might call this a logic of “both-and.” According to this logic, of any two things that not only differ but appear to compete over the same space, the truth may be both-and: that they shall both occupy the space, even if we do not yet see how this is possible. We shall come to see. According to our reading of Kepnes, the both-and is that the Bible affirms both tribal identity and the identity that two or more tribes may come to share, and this second is not better than the first. While the human Isaac and the human Ishmael are tribes who must come to discover that they are also children of one father, they cannot know this at the outset. The lesson of Kepnes’ both-and is that learning means transformation, but without regretting where one was before the transformation. The transformation of “two into three” is another logical lesson to learn from Kepnes’ reading: a lesson about what it means to transform a state of conflict into a state of difference without conflict. We might be tempted to read this as an exception to the rule of both-and, for surely conflict is never good. But that would be another way of substituting substitution for both-and: wishing that we had not fought so much with our siblings when we were children rather than thinking the issue today is about today and tomorrow, not the past. This is not at all (pace Hegel) to legitimate conflict. On the one hand, we cannot account for our humanity without recognizing that we inherit a stage of identity formation in which we seek identity through exclusion and, given our character, that exclusion may also engender conflict. On the other hand, we raise this question only when we are in the midst of


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a transformation. Within this moment we indeed say no to conflict: even though we do not regret having had it, we do not now want to return to our past; we want now to live this present moment of transformation and to be attentive to where it is going, which is away from conflict and toward relationship-amidst-difference. Delivering this lesson, Kepnes begins with the siblings’ past. Here, Sarah is perhaps Israel’s eponym; to protect and nurture her own tribe’s identity, she casts Hagar and Ishmael out, protecting her own even at the potential cost of the others’ lives. Kepnes acknowledges that level of reading. But then he opens the next level. Here, Hagar becomes Israel’s eponym. Unlike the first level, however, the second level is more likely also to invoke its predecessor. We might say that Hagar is the eponym of Israel when, cast out, she also remembers herself as not cast out, but home. In different words, Abraham is eponym for Israel as three: which means not one oblivious to any other, nor one over and against another. This is to suggest that Israel is never two, per se, since to be two is to be thought of as two, and that is possible only in relation to a third who thinks this. But this one is Abraham, as one of three. The life-giving achievement of Kepnes’ prose is perhaps most visible in what it says about the place of Islam within the religion of Israel, and, more generally, the place of one eponym within the life of another. Once Hagar is seen as Israel, then the one who was once only eponym of a future Islam is now eponym of a future Judaism as well as Islam: neither one in place of the other nor as copresent, but as, here, fully this one, and, here, fully that one: both-and. In this way of speaking, Abraham is a name for that dimension of the religion of Israel that can see Islam within itself without assimilating one to the other and of that dimension of Islam that can, comfortably, see Israel as a dimension within itself. As a fruit of Kepnes’ chapter, Abraham emerges as a name for a place of “three” within Judaism (and, he may hope, within Islam as well). The three acknowledges appropriately different dimensions of religious life within Israel, but it turns in this particular day to a time when Israel affirms Islam and prays that Islam can do the same. From this perspective, the “two” of the past was a two that could not be reconciled, because there was no third for whom the two was a subject of thought. If you want to philosophize about it, you might say that a two of this kind is a form of illusion: an actual illusion, one might say, that has real effects in the world, bad effects, but that has no other enduring reality beyond these effects. From the perspective of a third we now entertain, it is as if this two were the product of two illusory views, “Hagar, when Israel saw her as merely other,” plus “Israel,


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when Israel saw itself as all it cared about.” To try to account for these two illusory views is already to transform them into a third view. In this third view the religion of Israel is transformed into one that knows itself to be one of the children of Abraham and the religion of Islam as also one of the children of Abrahm. Is Kepnes’ reading warranted by the text? His study illustrates another feature of “three”: while it may be, in the end, “all there is to know,” it cannot be known at first, as the immediate sense of a scriptural text, but only as the fruit of a dimension of rereading. A three, therefore, can always be contested. “But you have just made that up,” one can always protest, “All we see is two.” Does scripture offer any more explicit evidence on behalf of reading three? No, not in the text in question (since the three is displayed only in any text’s second reading); but yes, in another text. “You want to know my name?” ehyeh imakh, “I will be with you.” (ehyeh asher ehyeh,) “I will be what I will be” (Ex. 3). This is not a text you could presume to interpret in just a few sentences. But it is appropriate to cite such a text as evidence of how scripture sometimes speaks without any clarity in its plain sense. We saw that, while the text of Hagar reveals a three, it also recommends a two on first reading. But I know of no such first reading of this text from Exodus 3, as if it had no plain sense but were always already in a second reading. There have, indeed, been sophisticated efforts to capture the meaning of this text in the closure of some philosophic vision. Thus we have the scholastic claims of Maimonides and Aquinas that the name “I will be what I will be” refers to the One, alone, “whose existence is contained in his essence,” who is, thus, necessary being. But these may be read as third-level readings, efforts to reread an enigmatic text so that it has the clarity and demonstrability of a first-level reading. Within each of the Abrahamic traditions there are strong countertendencies, however, to argue that there is no such way to evade the riskiness of reading three in scripture; in other words, no intimate relation with God without risk, chance, and wonderment; no intimate reading of revealed scripture without risk of not knowing. In Nachmanides’ reading, it is as if God said in the words of Exodus 3, “You want to know my name? Well, I am known only in my acts . . . You must wait and see . . . But I now assure you that there is reason to wait and that you need not fear the full fearfulness of this wait: I will be with you in your suffering, for this is what I say to you now as you speak to me out of Israel’s suffering in Egypt; you have called and I say to you, I am with you.” This is a reading of the text in its narrative context: God’s speaking to Moses in the midst of Israel’s suffering. In this way, the




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text also speaks to us, but only as it would be read again in our own context: in relation to the specific questions that bring us to ask of the text now, “What do you name, that is, what do you mean?” just as Moses asked, “What is Your name, what do you ask of me?” There is no way for us to say for certain, once and for all, that we ought to read Nachmanides’s way and not Maimonides’s. But, as a reader in this epoch of transformation, I can say that I am moved to read Nachmanides’s way, and that I hear Kepnes to be moved this way, too, and, “reading three” is a consequence of his reading that way.

Twos and Threes in the Relation of Islam-Abraham to the Modern West In Basit Koshul’s remarkable chapter, the “move from two to three” concerns the relation of all Abrahamic religion with the secular modern West. Koshul’s focus is Islam, in particular, but the way he reads the drama of Islam’s relation to the modern West offers a prototype for Judaism and Christianity’s experiences as well. Where Kepnes began inside of the narrative of Scripture, Koshul begins on the outside: looking broadly across the intellectual terrain of Enlightenment rationality and asking how Qur’anic rationality has appeared and fared when set in that terrain. For Koshul, the defining case of “two” is the way that both religious Muslims and secular modernists have often tended to define their relation, with one another: as if “Enlightenment rationality” precluded and excluded Qur’anic religion and as if Qur’anic religion precluded and excluded the Enlightenment’s practice of reason. Koshul does not deny the historical fact of this conflict nor the way that this conflict can emerge out of the sources of both Enlightenment and Qur’anic religion. His remarkable move is to envision, however, that both Enlightenment rationality and Qur’anic religion can also give birth to a nonconflictual relation and that such a relation would, in fact, draw on more profound resources within these two traditions. For Koshul, both Islam and the Enlightenment are capable of reading each other through the lens of “two.” Enlightenment rationality may define itself as a unique instrument for humanity’s global selfunderstanding, in relation to which Islam’s Qur’anic discourse appears to be nonrational because it is specific to its own textual sources and, therefore nonuniversal. Comparably, Qur’anic religion may define itself as a unique expression of the will of the one God of all humanity: an unsurpassable measure of human rationality, in relation to which Enlightenment reason reflects only the finite interests of its human


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authors and is, therefore, nonuniversal. Koshul’s response is not to look past the terms of this conflict, but to reenvision them within the terms of “three” rather than two. His central contribution is to suggest precisely how this can be done. Koshul’s begins “at home,” one might say, by addressing peers in Qur’anic studies. It is a move of both confidence and generosity: drawing from out of Qur’anic sources an ethic, a logic, a stimulus for intercivilizational dialogue. The ethic offers Qur’anic hospitality to the other two religions of the book: I shall ordain My mercy for those who are conscious of Allah and pay the prescribed alms; who believe in Our Revelations; who follow the messenger—the unlettered prophet they find described in the Torah that is with them and in the Gospels . . . (7:156–7)

It is a lesson in finding wisdom within the others’ books: We sent Jesus, the son of Mary, in their [the Israelite Prophets’] footsteps, to confirm the Torah that had been sent before him: We gave him the Gospels with guidance, light, and confirmation of the Torah already revealed—a guide and lesson for those who take heed of God. (5:46)

And in offering the wisdom of the Qur’an to others: Behold, this Qur’an explains to the children of Israel most [of that] whereon they hold divergent views; and, verily, it is a guidance and a grace unto all who believe [in it.] Verily, your Lord will judge between them in His wisdom—for He alone is Almighty, All-Knowing. (27: 76–8)

Koshul suggests, in sum, that the Qur’an approaches the other traditions on three levels: 1. Critical engagement that sees the Self distancing itself from the Other, 2. Constructive engagement that sees the Other as affirming the Self 3. An invitation by the Self to the Other to come to a common understanding so that both can work together toward a common goal.



He then suggests we see dialogue between Islam and the West emerging through these three levels as well. “Critical engagement” marks a stage of “two-ness” or nondialogue. It is displayed, for example, when Enlightenment thinkers promote the ideal of active, self-sufficient human reason against “all philosophical


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and religious notions of wisdom, illumination, and the Divine . . . all talk about ‘spiritual realities.’” Such an ideal appears utterly incompatible with Islamic ideals of faith, surrender, and plenitude. This ideal may be met, on the other hand, by the equal and opposite two-ness of Muslim “zealots” who “resist any and all constructive engagement with the Enlightenment tradition.” The profundity of Koshul’s proposal is illustrated by the way he turns to “constructive engagement.” Rather than speak generically of the way both Islam and the secular West could engage in dialogue, he directs his proposal to the one side in which he is ultimately rooted and invested: suggesting how Muslims could make the first move toward dialogue. In this way, Koshul shows by example how threeness emerges in this world from the ground up, through the actions of particular groups—persons and institutions—rather than top down, through the application of general concepts to particular cases. The generality inherent in three-ness cannot be seen all-at-once, but only through the consequences of a process of growth, from one context of action toward another and thus from one actor toward another.1 Each movement will have its own particular shape and will most likely not resemble any other. The similarity between the different movements will become apparent only after the fact and as a consequence of the way that two or more movements happen to have converged. According to Koshul, movement begins in this case when Muslims turn, against the grain of any conflict, to observe some particular ways in which the Enlightenment may in fact affirm what Islam affirms. Turning against the grain in this way takes courage, discipline, and resistance to one’s natural inclination to react, measure-for-measure, against Enlightenment criticisms. If we conceive of criticism as a “two” (one against the other) and reaction as a two, then we should say that this turning from two (reacting) to three (considering positive aspects of the Other) displays its own inner two-ness: a moment of pressing back against oneself (one against itself) to inhibit the urge to react. Later, I will suggest that three-ness displays this law: that no three can come of a two (not far from the popular slogan, “no peace from war”). If the law holds, then how could self-discipline, as a two, engender the three of critical engagement? I will suggest that, when self-discipline proves, in fact, to have served a move from two to three, what appears now as “self-discipline” will appear, later, to have been an act of self-surrender: not an action taken against the Self, but the Self’s act of letting go of an obsession of some two.In Koshul’s terms, this is why the move from critical to constructive engagement “affirms the Islamic ideals of faith (iman), peace/surrender (islam) and


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On nearly 24 occasions the Qur’an condemns those who misuse their ‘aql and thereby turn away from light and guidance. For example, the Qur’an has Abraham (peace be upon him) saying to the idol-worshippers: “Shame upon you and that which you worship besides Allah! Will you not, then, use your reason?” (21:67).2

Koshul’s bold and compelling inference is that “reason and rationality” must therefore be the starting point of both the critique of the Enlightenment paradigm and the affirmation of any alternative—whether that alternative is Islamic or otherwise . . . In order for Islam to be a dissenting voice from within the modern world the twin tasks of critique of the Enlightenment paradigm and affirmation of the Islamic alternative has to be done “within the limits of reason alone.” 3

This is not to assimilate modern Islam to the terms of modernity, but to engage Enlightenment modernism on its own terms. In other words, Islam has the plenitude to extend itself in this way and, thus, to draw the Other into a dialogue that might not be possible otherwise. The activity of “three” is an activity of such kenotic power. Koshul proposes that, to engage Enlightenment reasoning in this way would also be to engage three of the major ideals of Enlightenment reasoning: “the irreducible dignity of the individual human being, the equality of all human beings before the law and the value of the material/profane world,” as institutionalized in “modern civil law, the modern political state and the modern secular academy/university.” Islam, he argues, can affirm these “ideals (in their nonreified form) with a greater degree of consistency and insistency than any other religious tradition.” By way of illustration he cites the Hajj rituals as “the symbolic enactment of the Islamic attitude that affirms individual dignity, supremacy of law, and the goodness of the material world. The annual circling of the square (the tawaf) is the Islamic affirmation of the irreducible dignity of the individual, the equality of all human beings before the law and the spiritual value of the material world and profane acts.”


grace/plentitude (ihsan).” To be Muslim is, literally, to “surrender” the Self to Allah. The power to do this comes through the grace of Allah. And the courage to do this comes from faith in Allah. Turning this way to reconsider modernity, Koshul proposes that the Enlightenment ideal of “critical reason” is in fact compatible–even if not identical–with the Qur’anic ideal of ‘aql:


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It is a remarkable proposal, capped off by Koshul’s hope that modern Western thinkers would join Qur’anic reasoners in working on behalf of their overlapping goals. Koshul’s current research on Max Weber offers a prime illustration.4 On Koshul’s reading, Weber’s well-known account of “disenchantment” in the modern West is accompanied by a much less known account of what Koshul calls the “intimate link between religious ideals and the birth of modern West”: the claim that secularization emerged as a sublimated expression of monotheist ideals. On this view, the project of critical reasoning is a philosophic consequence of faith in the one, infinite and inscrutable God before whom all creaturely projects and aspirations stand under unlimited scrutiny, and this includes all projects of belief and of reason. Scientific intelligence meets ‘aql in a project of reasoning that draws on Qur’anic roots and warrants as much as on logical discipline. This is a reasoning whose products are threes and not twos: reasoning that builds relations rather than sundering them and that examines things as they relate to the other things around rather than as they might be abstracted from out of their lived environments.

Two to Three: Between Philosophy and Scripture Koshul narrates the past and potential future of Islam in the modern West as it is shaped by Enlightenment philosophy. Kepnes narrates the past and potential future of Islam as a trope within Jewish scriptural literature as it moves from plain to deeper or interpreted sense. But each narrative depends on something displayed only in the other, and our capacity to read the two narratives as movements from two to three depends on our drawing these two somethings together as complementary parts of a greater whole. One level of complementarity is not hard to see. Kepnes displays a movement of intrascriptural reading, Koshul displays movements of intra- and intercivilizational reasoning, and the message of this book as a whole is that peace will come to Western reason, to scriptural reading, and between them only through Scriptural Reasoning (or something like it). Another level of complementarity is more complex and less visible. Kepnes warns scripturalists not to get locked into onedimensional reading and not to read against the other. Koshul encourages them to learn, specifically, from the modern Other, by learning to reason when they read. But by what means can one-dimensional readers come to see their own error? I believe the answer is implicit in both Kepnes and Koshul’s chapters but becomes fully explicit only when we


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Philosophic Lessons from Koshul’s Chapter Philosophy’s contribution is, in a word, the discipline of self-reflection. Hermann Cohen made this observation over a century ago: that without Isaiah (and thus, scriptural prophecy) there would be no modern ethics, but without Plato (and thus,Western philosophy) there would be no way to articulate ethics in terms we can understand. Here, to articulate means to translate ethics into terms and thus concepts that are meaningful to us wherever we live in the West; translation of this kind presupposes self-awareness; and self-awareness means having a reasonable picture of what we believe so that we can hear what else the Prophets may be saying to us. Not unlike Cohen, Koshul may be suggesting that prophecy without self-awareness is truth that remains too obscure for us to understand and embody. If philosophy is an instrument of self-awareness, then the ironic lesson is that modern religious Muslims may need in fact to read philosophy in order to articulate the meaning and force of what they have learned from the Prophet. If Koshul is not arguing this case in general, he is, at the very least, arguing it on behalf of Muslims who seek to enter into dialogue with the modern West: that, in order to participate in this dialogue, Muslims need to achieve self-awareness and that, ironically, the philosophers whom they might otherwise criticize may provide them one effective tool for this self-awareness. The irony is double, however. Once they acquire this tool, religious Muslims would then have reason to urge their philosophic counterparts to use it, in a more disciplined way, to achieve greater awareness of how modern philosophy may itself err against its own standards of reasoning. Restated in these terms, Koshul’s proposal is that if radical secularists and radical traditionalists would only stop to see themselves in a single mirror—for example, the mirror of propositional logic—they may discover, to their mutual horror, how they are in at least one sense mirror images, one of the other. To see how they would see this, we need to introduce just a little more detail about how philosophy serves as an instrument of self-awareness. How does the discipline of Western philosophy contribute to our capacity for self-awareness? Cohen’s answer is that it provides skills in


combine their contributions in the following way. The first step is to draw from Koshul’s chapter a lesson about the place of philosophy in resolving conflicts between the Abrahamic traditions and the secular West. The second step is to draw from Kepnes’ chapter a lesson about the place of scriptural reading in refining the logic philosophy employs to resolve conflicts.


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concept-formation as a practice of making publicly visible icons of our judgments—mapping them in grammatical and logical diagrams. The simplest diagram that is used is the classical logic of propositions: mapping our judgments as propositions that connect a predicate to some subject, where the subject refers to some entity in the world and the predicate displays our beliefs or options about it. Thus, “this cat is friendly,” identifies some entity in the world (this cat) and reports my judgment about it (that it is friendly). One of the dreams of Enlightenment philosophers was to bring clarity to all our beliefs by translating them into propositions of this kind, where we could identify precisely what subjects we are talking about and precisely what judgments we mean to make about them. In these terms, Koshul’s argument is that both the actual error and the potential contribution of Enlightenment reasoning is contained in this dream; antimodern Muslims see the error, but their failure to perceive the contribution is evidence that they may be guilty of this error as well. The contribution is to recognize how logical analysis can serve as an instrument of selfawareness. The error is not, therefore, to trust in formal reasoning and thus logic, but simply to have nurtured too limited a view of how to practice formal reasoning and of what logical models we can build. As physicists, philosophers, and logicians have learned since early twentieth-century discoveries in quantum theory, standard propositional logics are useful for mapping only a limited range of behaviors and beliefs. In briefest terms, one could say that they are useful for mapping only those things about which we have potentially little or no doubt. One example is mapping the judgments we make to others who share, effectively, the same language, grammar, and pragmatics (or rules for how to use language in a specific context). Say, for example, I am sitting around a meal table with old friends, I need some salt, and there is only one saltshaker on the table. If I ask, “Please pass me the salt,” the odds are good that some friend will have no problem in knowing just what I want and how to provide it. Propositional logic will do a perfect job, in this case, of mapping my judgment and how it was received (something like: “I need salt; the salt I need is in saltshaker X; saltshaker X is on the table; I assume that you see the salt shaker; I assume you can hand it to me; I ask you to hand it to me.”) Another example is when members of a small religious community believe they have no doubts about the message that a certain verse of scripture has to offer them. Say, for example, members of that community identify abortion with murder, without any ambiguity. They may, then, read the scriptural verse, “Thou shalt not murder” to mean, “Murder is not permitted, abortion is murder, abortion is not


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permitted, you (some particular person) may not commit abortion.” To this extent, propositional logic is an effective instrument for bringing a finite set of judgments to our self-awareness. We might label these “judgments of certainty” (the types of judgment we offer within a system of unambiguous orthodoxy or positivity, where we trust our capacity to make positive judgments about each issue before us). The problem is how to handle judgments that do not belong to this finite set. Koshul’s argument implies that Enlightenment thinkers who argue against religion may do so because, unable to map religious claims in the terms of their propositional logics, they conclude that religion is unmappable, therefore beyond the limits of our concepts, and therefore nonrational or perhaps irrational. On the other hand, antimodern religionists may conclude from judgments like these that the Enlightenment is antireligious by definition and that their religious claims cannot be reduced to the terms of any modern project of reasoning. Koshul’s three-tiered model for repairing conflicts between Islam and the modern West may then be restated in the following terms. The stage of “critical engagement” is achieved when a group of religious Muslims and Enlightenment thinkers can agree to map the claims of both antimodern religionists and antireligious secularists in the terms of a single system of logic. To say that these two antagonists are in fact mirror images, one of the other, is to say that their respective arguments against the other can be translated into the terms of a propositional logic. Surprisingly, they would both agree to the proposition, “Religious judgments are nonrational.” They would both agree to identify what is rational with what can be stated in the terms of propositional logic, and they would only disagree about the relative value of what is rational. Strict secularists would identify this sort of rationality with the good; strict religionists would identify it with the not-good or at least with what is inadequate to account for the good. In these terms, however, both sides would admit to contradictory claims. While rejecting this kind of rationality, strict religionists would be able to state their case against secularists within the terms of this rationality, implying that at least one of their beliefs is merely rational. To account for this exception, these religionists would have to admit either that rationality has a place, after all, in their practices, or that their judgments about modernity cannot be accounted for or gainsaid. As for secularists, this debate should suggest either that even the most radical religionists can engage at times in rational debate (in which case secularists would need to adjust their conception of religion), or that certain behaviors and judgments simply fall beyond the purview of Enlightenment rationality. Koshul’s proposal is, it appears,




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simply to move beyond these two and invest energy in dialogue with those religionists and secularists who are at least open to the possibility of dialogue. To these, we might then appeal to a higher logic. This does not mean appealing to a logic beyond human ken, but to disciplines of mapping that are more subtle and supple than simple propositional logics. This is where the move from “two to three” displays its logical force. Propositional logics are fully adequate only for clarifying our judgments about twos, that is, judgments that say “X is Y (and not—Y).” But what would a propositional logician have to say about threes? How would we map Kepnes and Koshul’s claims about how conflict can be transformed into dialogue, contradiction into mere difference? Scriptural Lessons from Kepnes’ Chapter Scripture does not introduce logics, but it transforms them, which is to say that it does not introduce concepts (icons, products of human self-awareness) but transforms them. This is not Cohen’s claim, but it is compatible with Cohen’s distinction between the philosophic activity of bringing-us-to-self-awareness and the prophetic activity of commanding us to care for the other. If we label the latter bringingus-to-awareness-of-the-other, then Cohen’s claim is that awareness of the Other should set the condition for self-awareness: God’s word sets the condition for human speaking. But what are the limits of human self-awareness and, thus, for what humans can say? According to our preceding discussion, modern philosophy tended to define these limits as the limits of propositional logic: what cannot be reduced to the either/or terms of subject-predicate logic cannot be spoken or represented. This is why modern philosophy set such stark limits on dialogue between philosophers and religious believers: both agree that the claims of religion cannot be reduced to the either/or terms of modern reasoning. This is what we conclude when logic begins with the assumptions of modern reasoning. But what if logic began with the activity of scriptural reading? Kepnes’ study suggests that one-dimensional, or strictly plainsense, reading would lead to the same propositional logic. But how would we map his two- or multidimensional reading? It was, we may recall, not a substitute for plain-sense reading, but an addition to it. It was a commentary on it, much the way that Cohen’s prophetic ethics comments on and transforms human self-awareness. How might we map such readings in the subject-predicate terms of propositional logic? On a plain sense reading, “Hagar is cast out of Israel,” might be


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mapped as predicating the property, “excludes Hagar” of the subject “Israel’s covenant.” But what of the second-level reading, that “Hagar is cast out . . . but she is also Israel as cast out?” This reading might be mapped as a clear contradictory: “it is true both that ‘Hagar is not (or “is excluded from”) Israel’ and that ‘Hagar is Israel (as “being excluded”’).” This set of contradictory propositions delivers information to us, for example about the irony of deeper readings like this or also of the meaning of “Hagar” (and of hager, “the stranger,” who is and is not or who “dwells,” gar, and dwells not). But, if scriptural reading warrants the use of propositional logic, exclusively, then it also warrants the law of noncontradiction that accompanies this logic and that, in this case, would imply that Kepnes’ second-level reading says, in effect, nothing, since it denies what it affirms and affirms what it denies. Another liability is that a propositional logic would in the latter sense treat all ironic readings as identical: whether they are about Hagar or Moses, they all deliver the same message of yes-and-no (contradiction or irony). Shall we conclude that, since Kepnes’ multidimensional reading cannot be mapped in an adequately informative way, it is not rational? According to Koshul’s chapter, one purpose and fruit of modern reasoning is critique. If so, we would be hard pressed to deny the critical force of Kepnes’ reading as a means of identifying and potentially repairing ethnocentric social ethics. If it may therefore be judged rational by its fruit, may we also display its rationality through some logical map? We conclude this chapter by considering two ways of answering this question. The first way is to try reasoning from scripture toward logic, by identifying the elemental features of any map of scriptural second reading. The second way is to try reasoning from logic toward scripture, by considering how well these features may be anticipated in some nonpropositional logics developed in recent philosophies of science.

Reasoning from Scripture to Logic To reason from scripture to logic is, first, to conceive of logic as a descriptive activity: a way to represent, as efficiently as possible, the elemental features of a practice of reasoning in which we are interested (for any given reason). By “elemental,” we mean the minimal number of features the recognition of which would enable us to recognize the practice or, perhaps, to imitate it. There is no a priori criterion of what is elemental, nor for what may make this reasoning normative for us. The normativity lies only in the choice of subject matter: for reasons




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given only outside the logic, we believe this practice of reasoning— here, a practice of second reading—is worthy of our attention. After that, it is all a matter of description and, then, of selective redescription until we end up with a map that identifies this practice as efficiently as possible. Put this way, logical description emerges directly out of narration: whatever line we draw between the two is arbitrary, marking a more bountiful and evocative description on the one side and a more efficient and selective one on the other. In these terms, scriptural narratives that give rise to worthy practices of reasoning can be reread as contexts for delivering logical description as much as for delivering other dimensions of received meaning (history, ethical, religious, and so on). And logical description, to repeat, does not mean disclosing some cosmic formula that names this practice of reasoning, alone; it means offering an easy-to-carry set of marks that proves effective in reminding us, later, how to recognize or imitate this practice. So characterized, a logic emerging from scriptural reading will already differ in several respects from propositional logic as characterized by radically modern (secular) philosophers. It will be descriptive rather than normative; its terms and value will be determined a posteriori, by their effects and usefulness, rather than by a priori criteria; and, perhaps most significantly of all, its characterization of a given practice of reasoning will include a characterization of context. In order to be useful as a guide to future behavior, a logic of scriptural reading must be general, describing patterns or rules that can be seen or imitated. Because this logic arises after the fact of reading, however, logicians cannot presume that they have selectively observed what is most reiterable in a given instance of reading. For all they know, this may be an odd instance of this practice, or this practice may appear differently each time, or the practice will appear somewhat differently depending on how and where and by whom it was conducted. These are all reasons to attend to context as part of logical description. Another reason is that context is intrinsic to a second level of reading, since the second reading of a scriptural passage is also a rereading or commentary on a first-level reading and because the second reading revalorizes the first reading as only a single reading, which means a particular reading for a particular context. Suppose, for example, we mapped the biblical tradition’s first reading of the Hagar narrative as “Israel’s covenant excludes Hagar (or some people of whom she is an eponym),” or symbolically “X is not Y.” Then, our map of the second reading would have to be doubly or triply complex, since, as we discussed earlier, a second reading is not just another first reading, but is


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(1) a new reading that is; (2) added to the first reading so that; (3) it re-presents both the new reading and the old as different readings of the primary text in relation to different contexts of reading. A second reading is therefore irreducible to the terms of propositional logic because it involves more than the presentation of a single judgment. Say, for example, that a second reading adds the judgment “Hagar is Israel as cast out” (or “Y is X, where X is not Z”) to the previous judgment that “Hagar is cast out of Israel (or “Y is not X”). This, we have seen, means that, along with the new judgment, it also introduces a new rule about making judgments. We were able to map the first reading only as a judgment, independent of any accompanying claim about the conditions for making that judgment. But the second reading requires our remapping the first as a particular reading of some scriptural text for an as yet unidentified context of reading.5 It then maps itself as another reading of the same text but also in relation to the first reading and with respect to some second context of reading. This means that the second reading also brings with it the claims that each reading of scripture is a reading and that each reading entails some relationship among the text, the context of reading (that is to say, who read, where and how), and the resulting reading (or meaning or interpretation). This last sentence is already a way of mapping a logic of the second reading, since it describes necessary elements of the reading—and it has the advantage of doing so in a fairly general English that may not require extra instructions for the reader. If we wanted to make this map a little lighter-tocarry, we might introduce some more efficient icons, but this brevity would also bring with it special instructions or conventions. Thus, we might say that a second reading introduces (1) the rule “A means B for C” (where A refers to any given scriptural text, B a particular reading or meaning, and C a particular reader or context of reading); (2) and the new reading “A1 means B1 for C1” (where the subscript1 refers to some particular event of reading). We may then infer that (1) ⫹ (2)傻(“A1 means B1 for C1,” “A1 means B2 for C2,” “A1 means Bn for Cn”): which is to repeat what we concluded before, that the new reading implies the possibility of an indefinite series of readings of a given text, where each reading is particular to its context of reading. We must add only one caveat for this series of implications: that whatever a second reading implies about a first reading remains conditioned by that second reading. This means that we cannot claim, independently of the second reading, that a first reading is context-bound. For the same token, any competing claim about the first-reading—for example, that it is valid “for all contexts of second reading”—also has no prima facie warrant outside some second-reading.




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If second-readings imply the possibility of indefinitely more readings, how could our map account for the specificity and authority of any individual reading? We may suggest that the map implies a scriptural reader’s version of what mathematicians call the “Axiom of Choice.”6 For our purposes, this means that, since there are a nonfinite number of possible contexts of reading, there are a nonfinite number of possible readings, and to offer a specific reading is to introduce some implicit “Rule of Selective Reading” (as we will call it) according to which one could potentially make some interpretive claim within any context of reading and a true or warranted claim within at least one specific context. We may then infer that any two apparently contradictory (or competing) readings of a given text are in fact contradictory only if they are offered with respect to a single rule of selective reading. Otherwise, their apparent contradiction is a sign only of their being offered with respect to simply different (contrary) rules, and there is no definitive way, within the limits of finite or earthly judgment, for an individual reader or community of readers to offer a noncontext specific judgment about the relative validity of one rule versus another. In “human” (finite) terms, the Rule of Selective Reading7 implies the relativity of scriptural readings. In this sense, however, “human terms” means terms applied to scriptural study from the standpoint of some a priori logic or philosophy. Logics derived from scriptural reading itself are, indeed, valid only with respect to some particular context of reading, but this also means that we have no a priori criterion for distinguishing what is finite and nonfinite within such a context. Once the Rule is applied in a given context, then indeed the reading that results marks some finite choice. But this same axiom implies that, prior to or independent of such a choice, we cannot distinguish finitude and nonfinitude in that context. Those who choose to assign terms like “divine,” or “heavenly” or “godly” to what is nonfinite would have logical warrant for claiming, with respect to their vocabularies, that we cannot distinguish what is godly and what is human within any particular context of reading. Even though the product of an actual reading is marked, therefore, by human finitude, we cannot on this basis alone rule out divine or nondivine warrant for the reading. Criteria for distinguishing one from the other must come from some other axiom or form of inquiry. Our map of the second-reading does not do away with propositional logic, since it still allows us to map the contents of any single reading in propositional form: B ⫽ X is Y (for example, “Hagar is Israel”). A map of the second-reading is simply more than propositional and is, therefore, irreducible to a merely propositional logic. Its


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1. Second-reading adds to rather than substituting for a first-reading (B2傻B1 ⫹ B2). 2. Second-reading thereby implies the possibility of an indefinite series of additional readings (since a second-reading to a secondreading is also additive: B2傻B1 ⫹ B2 ⫹ . . . Bn). 3. Second-reading includes a rule for making a second-reading and thus any subsequent reading (B2傻A is B2 for C2傻A is Bn for Cn). We may label this the Rule for Selective Reading: that a reading of some text is warranted for a specific context of reading. 4. Second-reading thereby introduces a rule for identifying the context of any reading and, in that sense, for what we may label “the activity of bringing any reading to self-awareness.” Here, “self-awareness” is a label for the way that a reading refers to its triadic context of meaning, which is also its specific rule for selective reading. 5. The Rule for Selective Reading is triadic, or irreducible to any less than three elements (text ⫹ reading ⫹ context of reading). It may therefore be distinguished from the Rule for Mapping Propositions, which is dyadic (indicating only subject and predicate or, in this case, either some subject in the narrative ⫹ some characteristic of her (“Hagar is cast out”) or some text ⫹ some meaning/reading (“‘The narrative about Hagar’ is ‘A narrative about Hagar’s being cast out.’”) 6. A move from “two to three” may therefore be mapped, for example, as a move from one dimensional reading (or reading identified exclusively with first-reading) to two- or more dimensional reading. The former can be mapped by dyadic propositions; the latter cannot, but can be mapped by triadic rules for scriptural reading.


primary addition is to include, along with the map of any judgment, a map of the rule for making this judgment. This modest addition appears to be the defining element of a logical map of Kepnes’ multidimensional reading. It enables us to summarize the following, elemental features of a map of scriptural second-reading:

Reasoning from Logic to Scripture For Koshul, the purpose of reasoning from two to three is to help repair the current conflict between Qur’anic religion and the secular West. Reasoning from scripture to logic contributes to this repair by isolating one symptom of the conflict (tendencies on either side to warrant only one-dimensional reading or only propositional reasoning)


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and by offering Qur’anic readers models of logic and of reasoning they can trust (because they emerge directly out of scriptural reading). Reasoning from scripture to logic also has its liabilities, however, since its source makes it unappealing to secular reasoners and since its product appears to challenge the propositional foundation of Enlightenment rationality. To underwrite Koshul’s effort we therefore need to explore a second means of mapping the rationality of scriptural reading, which is to reason from logic to scripture by identifying recent models of logic in the West that would be compatible with our maps of multidimensional reading. These models should enable Western reasoners to enter into dialogue with Qur’anic and other scriptural readers without fear of losing their own standards of rationality. Koshul initiates this work by citing twentieth-century thinkers whose work acknowledges the potential rationality of religious claims and the inadequacy of Enlightenment models to account for this rationality: Weber is first on Koshul’s list, along with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, and Levinas. We might add to Koshul’s claim by noting that, through the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the hegemony of Newtonian physics gave way to a variety of non-Newtonian models of the subatomic physical world and that this change was accompanied by a break in the hegemony of proposition-based logics of science. One well-known illustration of the change was the set of inferences that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg drew from their Quantum Theory. One significant inference was Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” that it is impossible to identify simultaneously both the position and the momentum of an electron or other subatomic particle. Another significant inference was Bohr’s notion of “complementarity,” that, depending on the mode of measurement, a quantum event could be represented according to either one of a pair of complementary but mutually exclusive physical models: as either a “wave” or a “particle,” but not both at once. Both these inferences impose an unusual rule on the observer: to consider any subatomic event as having an indeterminate value (measurable quality) prior to and independently of the observer’s choosing which one of any pair of values to measure. The question pertinent to our study is, “What kind of logic could map judgments made in accordance with this rule?” A propositional logic would fail, since it could map only a determinate value—one that is either this or that—but not an indeterminate one. One alternative would be what the philosopher Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) called a “three-valued logic”: one that allows the


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observer to claim, for any given value, that it is either present, or absent, or neither present-nor absent;8 such a logic could also be extended to treat “multivalues,” beyond three. Another alternative is what the philosopher Charles Peirce (1839–1914) termed a “logic of relations:” one that restricts any value to the conditions for measuring it, so that we would say of a given quantum event, “it measures X with respect to our criteria for measuring waves, Y with respect to another criterion, and so on.”9 These transformations from two to three in logic anticipated subsequent transformations in the philosophy of language, among them Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), John Austin (1911–1960) and Paul Grice’s (1913–1988) studies of linguistic meaning as use or performance.10 All three argued that the meaning of my judgments is not carried only by what I say but also by what I do through saying: my utterances as performances and my utterances as, intentionally or not, bearing some effects on the hearer. What I say can be mapped as the propositional content of my utterances, but the meanings that are borne by the performance and effects of what I say cannot be mapped in this way, since their character cannot be determined prior to the event and independently of its context. In other words, the meaning of human speech bears analogies to the character of quantum events: in each case, meaning and measurement is inseparable from context and from mode of reception—of measuring, hearing, or reading. In these terms, we may say that developments in Western philosophies of physics and of language complement what we have called “the move from two to three” in scriptural second-reading. Each element in our logical map of second-reading therefore corresponds to the logical claims of one or more of these Western philosophers. The rules of second-reading correspond to elemental claims of pragmatists and of speech-act theorists: that meaning is delivered adequately only when we communicate not only our claims but also the conditions for making them (and thus the rules for understanding and evaluating them). These rules also correspond to elemental claims of quantum physicists and of logicians of quantum science: that there are elemental events in this world that we know only as relations and as members of infinite sets of events—or only in their relations to other things and to us— rather than as events abstracted from such relations. To say that the second-reading adds to the first-reading (element “a” in our map) is to say both that reading may go on indefinitely (element “b”) and that each reading is true-or-false relative to the conditions for making it (that is, relative to a choice we make or a rule of selectivity, element “c”). Meaning and truth are relational (relative to conditions) but not relativistic (arbitrary or strictly subjective).




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These complementarities suggest that dialogue is, indeed, possible between at least some western philosophers and some Qur’anic readers (and biblical readers as well): those we may call “Qur’anic secondreaders,” or Qur’anic reasoners (and scriptural reasoners), and those we may call “philosophers of relation (or of indeterminacy)” or “philosophers of three-ness.” One condition for this dialogue is selfawareness, as illustrated by the second-reader who explicates her rule of selectivity, or by the speaker who explicates his implicit assumptions about what his words are supposed to mean in what context.11 Both dialogue partners should be able to recognize what we are calling the triadic form of such rules: that they map the relation of an act of speech or reading to its meaning or reception and to its conditions of meaning or reception. They should be able to recognize why dialogue is obstructed when any one of these three elements is “taken off the table” or left unexamined and why, therefore, dialogue is obstructed by “either/or” claims as well as by the fear of making any claim at all.12

Notes 1. While it may also be displayed in the movements of many actors toward the others, there is no perspective out of which we can see this movement before the fact. 2. Koshul, p. 30. 3. Ibid., p. 21. 4. See Basit Bilal Koshul, The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 5. But, as we note later, there is no way to warrant this claim independently of the second reading. There is no way to preclude the possibility that a first reading is as qualitatively distinct from the second reading as the first reading is from the scriptural text itself. At the same time, as we also note later, there is also no a priori way to distinguish what is “strictly scriptural” (or “divine”) in the first reading from what is strictly interpretive (or of the nature of a second reading). What we will call the Rule for Selective Reading will therefore apply to both first and second readings, although we have no warrant for assuming that a single rule applies to both. 6. Formulated in 1904 by the mathematician Ernst Zermelo, the Axiom of Choice states that, if there is an infinite collection of nonempty sets, then there is a “choice function” (or rule of selectivity) according to which one item from each set can be chosen and placed in another set. This axiom is unnecessary when we are dealing with a finite number of sets. It is necessary for an infinite number, however, which implies that, when dealing for example with our indefinite number of possible contexts of reading a given text, we cannot simply assume that each


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context necessarily warrants some way of reading: we will have to locate and choose such a way. “Rule” is uppercased when referring to the “Rule” in general, that is, as an axiom about reading, and lowercased when referring to the assertion of a specific rule that accompanies a particular reading. See Hans Reichenbach, Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Berekely: University of California Press, 1 1998), Ch. 30 (“Three-Valued Logic”), passim. See Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Harteshorne and Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 35 vol. III, Par. 45–149, 214–251, 328–358, 636–643, passim. Readers may note that my distinction between “twos and threes” comes right out of Peirce’s phenomenological distinction among the categories he calls “Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.” See Collected Papers, Vol. I, Par. 300–353, passim. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition (New York: Prentice Hall, 1999); John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) and Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). What Grice calls the rules of “conversational implicature”: the context-specific and generally unstated assumptions through which we may deliver the meanings of our performed speech acts. My thanks to Carly Brown for helping me out with the typing and editing of this chapter.







Dev eloping Sc riptu ral Reasoning Fu rther D a v i d F. F o rd

W

hat is required in current encounters between Islam and the West? This is a question that inevitably has many answers according to participants, situations, issues, and spheres of life. Scriptural Reasoning, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims study and discuss their scriptures together, is one response.1 I see it as a wisdom-seeking practice that has so far proved adaptable to varied participants, situations, issues, and spheres of life, and just because of this is facing challenges about its future shape. At its heart is conversation around the scriptures, but that cannot be performed in print. The next best thing to an actual conversation centered around the scriptures is to have a dialogue in written format between those who have studied together, as have many of the contributors to this volume. In what follows the main aim is not to recount the story and elements of Scriptural Reasoning (which are covered in detail elsewhere, especially in a recent issue of the journal Modern Theology to which six of the authors of this volume contributed)2 but to focus on the following question: how might Scriptural Reasoning be developed further so that it might play a constructive role in the engagement between the Abrahamic faiths in a Western context and also between the faiths and secular understandings and forces?


Chapter 10

Interactive Particularity The last sentence in the previous section deliberately rephrases the “Islam-West encounter” in terms of Islam as a religion that is located 10.1057/9780230605626 - Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter, Edited by Steven Kepnes and Basit Bilal Koshul

D av i d F . F o r d

(among other places) in the West, where it relates in particular ways both to other religions and to the secular. Scriptural Reasoning has its roots in just this situation in the United States and Britain, though it is now being practiced in non-Western countries also and one question about its further development concerns its transferability elsewhere. Moreover its main institutional setting so far has been that quintessentially European institution, the university. Again, it is now being practiced in other settings too, and its adaptability to diverse institutions and communities (schools, civil service, citizens’ groups, business, media, the arts, interfaith families, and professions such as healthcare or law) raises further issues about its future. The reason why its further development in different places and settings raises so many questions is that it has to be reinvented, or at least improvised upon, in each particular situation.It is a form of “interactive particularity.”3 In the study of scriptures, while a participant’s particular concerns, background, tradition, formation, and way of reading make a crucial contribution to conversations around specific texts, it is also the case that such formative factors change with each type of participant and with each shift in setting. These factors require not only complex discussion and negotiation in order to be understood but also the (literal and figural) space to to interact Scriptural Reasoning has so far been worked through in a very limited number of settings, and the number of potential forms is immense. This should be no surprise, since Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have each for many centuries generated, and continues to generate, a variety of ways of reading, inhabiting and applying their scriptures, and when the three come together the possibilities are multiplied further. The problem then becomes how to cope with the variety, intensified by the deep differences between the three. There can be no formula for this. Each tradition within itself has ways of coping with diverse and conflicting interpretations (often, of course, unsuccessfully, if success is measured in terms of agreement), and part of Scriptural Reasoning is exploring how far these work in this new interaction. The results of the exploration come in many forms, ranging from readings of specific texts to general statements of rules4 or maxims,5 but the general statements are best seen as distillations of the particular readings, the outcome of an apprenticeship in one form of interactive particularity. The practical conclusion for the present paper is that, for me as a Christian interpreter of scripture, the aim of developing Scriptural Reasoning further in the service of contributing to the contemporary Islam-West encounter requires an attempt to do three things. First, there should be further interpretation of Christian scriptural texts.


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Second, there should be careful listening and response to Jewish and Muslim interpretations of their scriptures. Third, there should be an attempt to distil wisdom for the Islam-West encounter (as understood earlier). My way of trying to fulfill those requirements will be to comment in turn on the chapters of Kepnes and Koshul, doing further scriptural interpretation where appropriate, and concluding with suggestions for the further development of Scriptural Reasoning.

Hagar, God, and Modernity The heart of Kepnes’ paper is its interpretation of the story of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 16:7–14 and other texts. They are seen as a warrant for Jews and Christians to take Islam seriously, not only as the third monotheism, but as a tradition that is rooted in Genesis and whose origin and destiny is intertwined with Israel . . . Jews and Christians have a warrant in their scriptures to engage with Muslims not as strange Others but as long lost members of the great family whose destiny is to be a light of truth and healing to all the nations of the world.6

The actual interpretation, while supporting that lesson, cannot be reduced to it. Kepnes accumulates significant details about Hagar: God speaking to a woman—a slave-girl—for the first time in Torah; the resonances elsewhere in scripture of the encounter at a well, the journey to Egypt, the blessing of descendants, going out into a wilderness (in the stories of Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, Joseph, Moses); the form of the question God asks her (one that “seeks out a person’s integrity and ability to respond and take responsibility”); the command to return and submit to Sarah understood as a test; the meaning of her name (“the stranger”) in the context of Torah commanding love of the stranger as of yourself (Leviticus 19:33); and her being the only person in scripture to name God, “You are El-roi.” There is an interweaving of Hagar with other key figures, so that the otherness of Hagar, as a figure of the otherness of Islam, becomes inextricable from Israel’s identity—biological, historical, ethical, and theological. The climax, in line with the interpretation of Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, is:


Developing Scriptural Reasoning Further

Hagar the stranger, Hagar the servant, Hagar, wife of Abraham and mother of Ishmael, is Israel! She presages, she prefigures, Israel’s suffering in Egypt. And in her deep connection to God, and in the fact that God sees and listens to her suffering and rewards her with a multitude of


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Kepnes does something similar with Ishmael as the one whose name means “God hears,” whose destiny as one who “shall live at odds with all his kin” can be translated as “he shall dwell alongside all his kinsmen,” and who later in Genesis 25:9 appears as a dutiful son to Abraham and brother to Isaac at Abraham’s burial. What is happening here? Kepnes is using a combination of plain sense and figural interpretation to complexify the lessons to be drawn from Israel’s foundational narratives. Any Jew who takes the Torah seriously as revelation is offered a way to regard Muslims as “family,” as ambivalently related to Israel, but yet as having a significant positive role in history under God. A text that has frequently been used to justify stereotypes of Islam and hostility between Muslims and Israel is opened up to fresh meaning. Kepnes also engages with the New Testament (to which I will return later) and with the Qur’an, complementing his reinterpretation of Genesis with suggestions as to where Christians and Muslims might find the resources for similar sorts of interpretation in their scriptures. In other words, his rich exploration of Genesis acts as an invitation, model, and challenge to others in relation to their canonical texts. I want to take up that challenge now as a Christian reader. The first move is to examine Kepnes’ interpretation of the Genesis stories. It seems to me exemplary, and there is nothing in it with which to disagree. Yet it is not just a matter of not disagreeing; this is masterly and inspired reading, both plain sense and figural. The main potential for further interpretation is in the figural. Kepnes suggests first that “vestiges of the Hagar pattern” can be seen in Jesus beginning his ministry with “baptism followed by his journey into the wilderness.”8 Later he sums up by noting: “Hagar is a counterpart of Abraham in prophetic sight, she is a positive counterpart to Eve, and her wandering, suffering, and blessing are counterpart to Israel’s slavery and redemption and she even sets a pattern that is followed by Moses and Christ.” The typology of Jesus and Hagar might have been taken further in terms of Jesus being tested, his relationship with God, his obedience, his identification of himself with slaves, his parallels with Adam, Joseph and Moses, his rejection and suffering, and his identification with Israel. It also might have been turned around, figurally identifying Jesus with God in the Hagar story. The most fruitful possibility here is the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in John 4. Here too a fundamental, divisive difference is at stake, between Jews and Samaritans; the naming of Jesus (as the Prophet, Messiah, Saviour) is central; the woman is drawn into the


offspring, Hagar also prefigures Israel’s ultimate redemption!7 (Emphasis in original)


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ministry of Jesus by becoming a witness to him; and “worship in spirit and truth” transcends the differences between the Samaritans worshipping God on the mountain sacred to them or the Jews worshipping in Jerusalem. Taking up the theme of Hagar’s ambivalence in Hebrew scriptures, Kepnes follows through this “treatment of the Other as both different and the same, foe and friend” in the New Testament, where “we see an equally ambivalent portrait of the most clear and obvious Other to the Christian, the Jew.” He notes the hermeneutical challenge of the Old Testament for Christians: Holding on to the Jewish scriptures as Christian scripture, simply put, is not easy. Certainly, from the standpoint of narrative and logical coherence it doesn’t really work. To pull it off, Christianity must develop a complex, self-contradictory hermeneutic which says at once that Jewish scripture is revealed and wrong. Its way of Torah, its way of the law, is both necessary and superseded, its promise to the children of Abraham both nullified and fulfilled.9

The thrust of Kepnes’ argument here is both contentious10 and generous, in effect saying that, in the light (or chiaroscuro!) of the ambivalence intrinsic to Jewish scriptures, the Christian ambivalence about both Jews and their scriptures makes a certain sort of sense. Christians are being very Jewish! Above all this need not entail a dichotomous, mutually exclusive relationship. Yet such a statement, generalizing from a specific interpretation of Hagar, must also be exposed to other texts, including difficult ones. As it happens there is in fact an explicit New Testament interpretation of the story of Hagar, and it is difficult. Paul writes to the Galatians: NRSV Galatians 4:21 Tell me, you who desire to be subject to the law, will you not listen to the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. 23 One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. 24 Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.





26 But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother. 27 For it is written, “Rejoice, you childless one, you who bear no children, burst into song and shout, you who endure no birth pangs; for the children of the desolate woman are more numerous than the children of the one who is married.” 28 Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac. 29 But just as at that time the child who was born according to the flesh persecuted the child who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now also. 30 But what does the scripture say? “Drive out the slave and her child; for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman.” 31 So then, friends, we are children, not of the slave but of the free woman. 5:1 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 2 Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. 3 Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. 4 You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. 5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love. 7 You were running well; who prevented you from obeying the truth? 8 Such persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. 9 A little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough. 10 I am confident about you in the Lord that you will not think otherwise. But whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty. 11 But my friends, why am I still being persecuted if I am still preaching circumcision? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed. 12 I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves! 13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14 For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”


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15 If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. 16 Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. 19 Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21 envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. That is an urgent, passionate appeal to the Galatians not to listen to those who were making circumcision a condition for non-Jews to be admitted to the Church. It exaggerates for the sake of the argument and seems about as dichotomous as possible: two contrasted covenants; two contrasted mothers and sons; slave versus free; flesh versus Spirit or promise; the present Jerusalem versus the Jerusalem above; and the resolution by expulsion: “Drive out the slave and her child!” This pattern has been tragically instantiated in Christian relations with Jews century after century. Yet even this text has resources for a more complex reading that opens toward conclusions analogous to those Kepnes arrives at through Genesis. Partly this relies on seeing that this is a conflict within the Christian family about the conditions for admission. Paul is not objecting to Jews being circumcised but to them imposing circumcision on Gentiles who become Christians. In other words, in a largely Jewish church it is a protest against the majority imposing homogeneity according to their law. Paul is arguing for the maintenance of difference within unity, grounded in belonging to Christ. He had earlier concluded:



27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.


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One might see through the history of Christianity a slow awakening to just how radical that is: the first century faced the Jew/Gentile issue, but it has never gone away; the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries faced the slave/free issue, but it too is still with us in many forms; and the twentieth century faced the male/female issue and that continues as a current concern. So if one wants to imagine a contemporary parallel to Paul as a Jew arguing on behalf of Gentile Christians, it might be found in those men who argue for women’s ordination or other forms of equality or empowerment for women, but without ignoring sexual differentiation. Beyond the immediate argument (which one might say was appropriately either/or: being half-circumcised was not an option— though, as Paul exclaims in exasperation, castration might be!), there is a great deal in the passage that encourages peaceful relations across differences, above all living in the Spirit with the fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (5:22–3). Paul throughout the argument is reaching for things that go deeper than the division. The righteousness of faith working through love refers to something he regards as more fundamental than circumcision/uncircumcision, and might be seen as a classic instance of “abduction” that moves beyond a contrast to a new level. Similarly, he appeals to Abraham as father of Jewish faith prior to the law of Moses, to the fruits of the Spirit as in accordance with and transcending the law, to creation,11 and above all to being “in Christ”— all his readers being fellow Christians. His allegorical midrash on the story of Hagar is polemically employed in the argument about circumcision and is not his last word on law and Gospel or on Jesus as Messiah for Jews and Gentiles. Later in Romans 9–11 he wrestles explicitly with the problem of his fellow Jews who reject his Gospel and comes to the extraordinary, nondichotomous conclusion that “God has imprisoned all [Jews and Gentiles] in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.” He follows this with a passionate cry of amazement at the mystery of God, who is supremely the one who goes deeper than divisions and can embrace the apparently irreconcilable:


29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:27–29)

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:32–33)


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One might follow the Pauline tradition further into the letter to the Ephesians, with its rich theology of unity and differentiation between Jews and Gentiles (2:11–3:6), all taken up into prayer to the God of love (3:14–21).12 The power of Kepnes’ argument from Genesis seems to me to lie in what he says about God in relation to Hagar and Ishmael, supported by his inspired exploration of the multifaceted narrative. That can be used as a complementary strategy in exploring the contemporary implications of Paul’s interpretation of Hagar. My first strategy has been to see it as a midrash, focussed on a specific intra-Christian quarrel (yet complicated by the fact that Judaism and Christianity did not yet have distinct identities), which can have devastating effects if generalized to later contexts, whether Jewish-Christian or (perhaps more of a danger in the current situation) Christian-Muslim. When it is read in that way it remains ambivalent (in its drive to expulsion, for example), but its resources for peacemaking “in the Spirit” can also be recognized. What Paul says in the rest of Galatians and in later letters (especially to the Romans) allows for an approach to identity and otherness analogous to that proposed by Kepnes. So there is scope for Kepnes’ interpretation of Hagar to be used to complement my interpretation of Galatians. As is widely recognized, there can be more than one midrash on a particular text in different circumstances, and it is often not appropriate to use a simple logic of contradiction in order to choose between them. A more general lesson in this regard has been repeatedly learnt in intra-Christian ecumenical discussions, where the investigation of deep differences has been greatly helped by understanding the contexts of positions that have come to be reified in opposition to each other, usually with supporting scriptural references. I am less convinced by Kepnes’ suggestion that there is a straightforward contrast between his reasoning from scripture and characteristically modern reasoning that follows a “logic of dichotomies.” I want to affirm what he says positively—that, for example, “scripture offers us concepts of connectedness: creation, revelation, covenant, redemption” and “figures of mediation,” but to question the implied dichotomy between scripture and modernity. Kepnes says:



[A] closer look reveals, in almost every page of the Torah, the New Testament and the Qur’an, elements and figures that lie outside of neat dichotomies and divisions. Scripture is filled with lacunae, gaps, inconsistencies and mysterious sayings, images, and parables that defy simple


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Yet that list of scriptural features could equally well be said of a multitude of modern novels, poems, songs, dramas, operas, science fiction, and films, with analogous things to be said about painting, sculpture, dance, cartoons, music, and architecture. Among historians, philosophers, and theologians there has also been considerable resistance to what Kepnes describes as normative dichotomous logic. He is in danger of overgeneralizing and so ignoring the considerable resources in modernity that can resonate strongly with his interpretation of scripture. There have of course been philosophies such as Kepnes describes, and they have had, and continue to have, great influence. But modernity has by no means been monolithic and it too has resources to aid in Kepnes’ project (and mine) of fresh engagement with scriptures. Such resources are not only found in the arts and discourses listed earlier but also in certain forms of polity and social dynamic. The importance of all this for the future of Scriptural Reasoning is that it needs to be nourished by and learn from such arts and discourses and to shape its own collegiality and politics in line with wisdom that has modern as well as premodern dimensions. This in turn has consequences for the Islam-West encounter, which has great need of such wisdom. I now turn to Basit Koshul’s attempt to work out such a wisdom in Islamic terms.

The Qur’an and the Bible, Islam and the West In Scriptural Reasoning the relationship between the Qur’an, the Tanakh, and the Bible is not generally thematized explicitly but is worked out piecemeal through interpreting the three in conversation with each other. It is recognized that they are not only different in themselves but also play very different roles in each of the three traditions (and within various strands in each tradition), but the most fruitful way of handling this is not to attempt to sum up and agree on positions; rather it is repeatedly to bring the texts and their traditions of interpretation into dialogue with each other. One difference is that the only text that speaks about itself is the Qur’an. The nearest parallel within Jewish scriptures is probably the editing of and reflection upon Torah, and within Christianity the engagement by the New Testament writers both with the Jewish scriptures and with Jesus Christ as God’s


logic. Scripture, again in the words of Ochs, is “vague,” its meaning unclear and hidden.13


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Word. Koshul’s proposal, that the way in which the Qur’an engages with Jewish and Christian scriptures is a model for the relationship of Islam to Western modernity, therefore potentially opens up some of the deepest issues between the three at the same time as inviting the other two to think through their responses to modernity. Koshul claims that the Qur’an “does the impossible” in its simultaneous critical and affirmative attitude to the Bible, and after quoting many passages in illustration he concludes as follows: The manner in which the Qur’anic Self relates to the biblical Other can be summarized in the following terms: 1. Critical engagement that sees the Self distancing itself from the Other, 2. Constructive engagement that sees the Other as affirming the Self, 3. An invitation by the Self to the Other to come to a common understanding so that both can work together toward a common goal.14 This is taken by him as a warrant for Scriptural Reasoning since it encourages Muslims to study with Jews and Christians and opens up a large space for interpreting together. Further, it seems likely that Muslims themselves are always going to have considerable discretion as regards the proportioning of the three points mentioned by Koshul. There is likely to be discussion about just how each of the Qur’anic passages is to be applied to particular biblical texts, and if, as Koshul insists, there are Qur’anic and traditional warrants for Muslims (including the Prophet himself) to learn from Jews and Christians, then the way is opened to develop ongoing collegiality centered on the different scriptures. What might a Christian response to that be? Because the Bible, as Christians understand it, does not have anything to say specifically about the Qur’an there can be no question of comparing texts on the same topic. But it is appropriate to see whether the threefold pattern Koshul discerns has parallels in the Bible. In the Old Testament it might be seen in the fundamental affirmation of all reality through God’s creation and blessing (Koshul’s “constructive engagement”); in God’s radical judgment on sin and his alienation from those who disobey him or do evil (Koshul’s “critical engagement”); and in God’s commitment to ending the alienation, healing the relationships between God, human beings and creation, and living with people in a covenant relationship (Koshul’s “invitation to common understanding). Two comments might be made on those parallels. First, they ground Koshul’s points in God’s activity. This is a God who affirms, judges,





and transforms through drawing into a covenant and community. That is implicit in Koshul’s points—God is involved in them all. As with Kepnes’ interpretation of the story of Hagar, and mine of Paul’s wrestling with the problem of the Gospel and his fellow Jews, the engagement with scripture’s complexities, ambivalences, and impossibilities points to the radical need for deeper engagement with God. It is of course possible to throw up one’s hands and despair of making any sense, but for Jews, Christians, and Muslims one practical implication of finding difficulties in their scriptures is that they must wrestle further and, through this agony of searching and argument, attend more intensively to God.15 Second, I have changed Koshul’s order, putting the affirmation first. I do not know whether Koshul would set any store by his order. It would appear to me that the Qur’an could support my order as well as his, and there are some advantages in putting affirmation first, especially in an interfaith setting where there has been a long history of giving priority to the critical engagement and self-distancing. More radically, by centering all three on God I have put the affirmation of God as God at the root of them all. In Koshul’s own key terms there is a noteworthy development later in his paper. As he seeks out what is to be affirmed and negated in the Enlightenment he reaches the daring conclusion that “the only unredeemable aspect of the Enlightenment is that its stance toward nonEnlightenment paradigms is one of critique-condemn-replace.”16 Any such priority of critique is denied. His alternative is: A more sane approach “albeit a more courageous, complex and nuanced one” and one that is built on scripturally (Qur’anically) reasoned grounds is redeem-reform-embrace—an approach that will lead to enhanced understanding on the part of a troubled and alienated Self, as a result of its critical but empathetic study of the alien Other.17

This seems to embrace any critique within affirmation, reform and redemption—all of which, in Qur’anic terms, are rooted in God. The New Testament confirms the pattern and order I have suggested. The incarnation of Jesus can be seen as the most fundamental affirmation of humanity and of all creation by God, even while deeply alienated.


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NRSV John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God.



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The ministry of Jesus is fundamentally affirmative and transformative, giving the good news of the Kingdom of God, forgiving, healing, feeding, and teaching, while also including vigorous judgment. The death of Jesus can be seen as the most radical judgment of all, exposing the truth of a world that turns away from God. The resurrection of Jesus opens the way to transformed life with God and each other in the Spirit in covenantal community. In this it is the living Jesus Christ who is the affirmer, judge and transformer. What does all this mean for the Islam-West encounter? Koshul sees the Qur’an opening up a third way distinct from fundamentalist rejection of the West and acculturated liberal assimilation to it. In place of such one-sided responses he proposes a differentiated response in line with the Qur’an’s engagement with the Bible, culminating in the pattern of redeem-reform-embrace discussed earlier. He judges modernity by how it deals with philosophical and religious conceptions and practices relating to wisdom, illumination, and the Divine, and, using more specifically Islamic categories, with faith, peace/surrender and grace/plenitude. These are rich criteria, and at times he seems to be heading for dichotomous confrontation,18 but he is drawn back by his own categories to give a richer account. This involves a dual insider/outsider perspective of affirmation and dissent. Central to the affirmation is his correlation of the modern ideals of individualism, universalism, and materialism with the dignity of the human being, equality before the law, and the value of the material/profane world. He even claims that Islam is in a better position to affirm these than other religious traditions, despite frequent failures to realize them in Islamic countries.19 The climax is an exploration of the relationship of a Qur’anic concept of “thinking” or “reasoning” (‘aql) with Enlightenment “reason.” Here he breaks free of any stereotype of the thought of the modern West and acknowledges the importance of the mature understanding of reason seen in thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, and Levinas, who have related critically to the narrower Enlightenment notion of reason and offer “novel possibilities of bringing the Enlightenment tradition into conversation with the scriptural traditions.”20 It might even be possible to find “mutual grounds”


3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.


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between the two. His conditional conclusion is:

Mutual ground is distinct not only from ground “owned” by one party but also from neutral ground. Mutual ground is owned by none of the participants but is a place of mutual hospitality, with each able to be host and guest at the same time. Neutral ground tends to exclude what is most distinctive in favor of a lowest common denominator of values and discourse that can be shared. There is nothing wrong with such commonality, but where there are serious differences and yet no opportunity for participants to engage out of their deepest convictions the possibility of peaceful and constructive collegiality is very limited. Mutual ground does not have to require prior agreement on fundamentals: the point is to have a space where differing fundamentals can be discussed. In Koshul’s terms, it is where there can be critical, affirmative, and collaborative engagement. This is why scriptures are so well suited to being the focus. Each can act as host to their own scriptures, welcoming them to their own most sacred “ground,” while also being guests of the others. In this interactive particularity the matters most important to the identity of each can be explored— and these will often be in tension or in conflict with each other. Yet what about those parts of the Enlightenment tradition as Koshul describes them in their alienation from “wisdom, illumination, and the Divine?” How might “mutual ground” be found between them and the Abrahamic scriptural traditions? This is a crucial issue for the Islam-West encounter. I would propose it as the second part of a threefold strategy, which I find implicit in Koshul’s paper. 1. Corresponding to the first part of Koshul’s paper on the Bible and the Qur’an, the three Abrahamic faiths need to engage in Scriptural Reasoning on mutual ground, in the course of which they can explore how their core identities are to be articulated and developed today and can learn from each other through affirmation, criticism, and collaboration. 2. Corresponding to the second part of Koshul’s paper, there is need for similar “mutual ground” engagements with the more secular elements of modern thought and culture, in which there should likewise be scope for affirmation, criticism, and collaboration. In


If there is a strong claim that is being made it is that engaging with the Enlightenment tradition on these mutual grounds would be as Qur’anically authentic as the Qur’an’s use of the Bible in its engagement with Judaism and Christianity, should these mutual grounds be found.21


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fact, an enormous amount of this has gone on in recent centuries, especially in universities where the religions have been represented.22 There is of course always the danger that Koshul notes of the religious being assimilated to the secular. Yet my reading of twentiethcentury Christian theology is that both in the West and in other parts of the world it has usually been acutely aware of the dangers, and has developed many creative yet faithful ways of avoiding them, without avoiding the challenge of dialogue with secular understandings. Judaism and Islam too have, as Kepnes and Koshul show, learnt wisdom through their complex engagements with modernity. The constructive task is to bring that wisdom into dialogue with secular wisdoms (and, of course, the wisdoms of other religious traditions). Such mutual wisdom-seeking is already occurring in many spheres. The distinctive impulse emerging from Koshul and Kepnes is toward the double, simultaneous intensity of both reasoning around scriptures and reasoning across the scriptural-secular boundary. To do one without the other limits the resources of possible wisdom. To do both together in mutual enhancement and critique could well shape vital contributions to the Islam-West encounter, since this would address two central, interrelated questions: (1) How might Judaism, Christianity, and Islam best relate to each other so as to draw on their resources for understanding, peace and human flourishing? (2) How might a complexly religious and secular world such as ours negotiate settlements that allow for particular religious and secular identities and contributions to the public sphere, yet without allowing either religious or secular domination? 3. The third part of the strategy is perhaps the most difficult: the shaping of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the secular in ways that open them up to each other while at the same time renewing their core identities from their deepest sources. Scriptural Reasoning grew out of a Jewish group called Textual Reasoning, and it has stimulated the formation of Muslim Qur’anic Reasoning and Christian Biblical Reasoning groups. In other words, there has been a complementarity between going deeper into each other’s scriptures and deeper into one’s own. Yet the most sensitive issues of identity are raised here. Sustaining the double dynamic (triple if one adds engagement with the secular) is always risky and especially vulnerable to attacks by those who stand either for a more exclusive or for a less particular identity. However, I am most concerned about the secular side in this. It is as diverse as the religious, and is as vulnerable to ideological takeovers and exclusivisms. In a





world where religions cause much conflict, a secular temptation is to try to exclude it from the public sphere. One challenge facing the secular is how to share the public sphere with the religions without expecting that the ground rules have to be secular—for example, by insisting on neutral ground. In other words, those who are secular, like those who are religious, have to work out what they bring to mutual ground and how to negotiate there. Such work is happening,23 and seems to me to be vital for twenty-first century polity and civil society.

Developing Scriptural Reasoning Further Scriptural Reasoning has in this chapter been seen as having a considerable contribution to make to Islam-West dialogue but also as needing to be developed further in order to do so. In conclusion I will draw together and supplement the suggestions for its further development that have been made at various points, presenting them as points of an agenda ●

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The main contribution of Scriptural Reasoning is as a flexible, wisdom-seeking practice. As such, it needs to be creatively adapted to as many participants, situations, issues, and spheres of life as possible, as has happened with the scriptures within each of the traditions over the centuries and around the world. In each setting it needs to build up collegiality on “mutual ground” among Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others through an ethos of affirmation, critique, and collaboration directed toward each other’s traditions and toward secular understandings and forces. That double thrust toward other Abrahamic faiths and toward the secular needs to be accompanied by a third toward enriched appreciation of one’s own tradition of interpretation. The difficulties, inconsistencies, and ambivalences found in scriptures can become occasions for learning to cope with differences and conflicts, such as how to sustain a tradition of vigorous argument, and how to have a faith that is intelligently interrogative and exploratory. This faith would also be oriented toward a future with God that is open to learning the incompleteness and inadequacy of present affirmations and imperatives. Each tradition has its wisdom of disagreement and dispute, from which far more could be learned. Within Christianity the nearest


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analogy to interfaith engagement has been the ecumenical movement, attempting to heal divisions among Christian churches. At the least that shows the scale of what is required in order to deal with deep religious differences: long-term discussion and deliberation grappling with core questions; slow building up of forms of collegiality in diverse settings—local, regional, national, international; thorough study and academic support through research, teaching, and education both of specialists and of as many clergy and laity as possible in a less specialist way; courageous leadership; and material resources. Within all this there has been a vital role for the interchurch interpretation of scripture, and it would be surprising if this were not the case in interfaith relations too. In universities, where Scriptural Reasoning originated, there are major questions to be tackled about how the traditional “guilds” of scripture scholars, philosophers, theologians, and other specialists relate to it, and how it might be part of research programs, curricula, and pedagogy. There is also the possibility of Scriptural Reasoning being a catalyst in enabling some universities to develop as “interfaith and secular” and so provide “mutual ground” where people of many faiths and none can respond collegially to questions raised by our multifaith and secular world. The relation between plain sense and figural interpretation (see Kepnes on Hagar) is fruitful and fascinating, and deserves greater attention. From a Christian standpoint, figural reading might be seen as the integrator of its understanding of history—past, present and future—but also often in sharp tension with Jewish, Muslim, and secular understandings of history. Is it conceivable that figural reading might both be critically retrieved “after modernity” and also serve to enable non-allergic relations among Jews, Christians, Muslims and the West in the twenty-first century? The broader question raised by figural reading concerns hermeneutics. To which hermeneutical thinkers should scriptural reasoners be apprenticed in order to develop further? One of the marks of Scriptural Reasoning to date has been the variety of its philosophical mentors. With regard to the present volume I would suggest that, among Christian thinkers, Paul Ricoeur holds great promise. He is a wide-ranging philosopher who has engaged deeply with the Bible, fiction, history, and poetry as well as with hermeneutical theory, he has learnt from and critiqued premodern, modern, and postmodern thinkers, he takes seriously both historical critical study of the Bible and questions about its meaning for today, and he has a magisterial book on the relation of Self and Other, Oneself As




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Another,24 in which he offers a conceptuality that helps describe the complex identities explored by Kepnes and Koshul. The very idea of “developing further” and contributing to IslamWest encounter might suggest an inappropriate linear progression and instrumentalizing of Scriptural Reasoning. There is a quasiliturgical aspect to it in which attention is paid to these remarkable texts for their own sake and for the sake of the God to whom they witness. Indeed, the paradox is that the benefits maybe greater if this is the core attitude. As a God-centered practice the most important thing for its future may simply be that more people from various walks of life join in studying together in this spirit.

Finally all of this suggests that the ultimate orientation of Scriptural Reasoning toward relating more intelligently and wholeheartedly to God and being drawn more fully into God’s good purposes for all creation. That, from Jewish, Christian and Muslim standpoints, is the key criterion for any further developments both in the study of scripture and in the Islam-West encounter.

Notes 1. Kepnes gives a brief description of its origins toward the end of his chapter, pp. 118–120. 2. Modern Theology 22/3 (July 2006) also to be published as The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning, ed. David F. Ford and Chad C. Pecknold (Blackwell, Oxford 2006). 3. A term I owe to Daniel W. Hardy. Dr Ben Quash, Academic Coordinator of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, has employed it in papers on the academic design of that program. 4. Cf. Steven Kepnes, “A Handbook for Scriptural Reasoning” Modern Theology 22/3 (July 2006): 367–383. 5. Cf. David F. Ford, “An Inter-Faith Wisdom: Scriptural Reasoning between Jews, Christians and Muslims” Modern Theology 22/3 (July 2006): 345–366, especially pp. 348–351. 6. Kepnes, “Islam as our Other, Islam as Ourselves”, p. 109. 7. Ibid., p. 111. 8. Ibid., p. 114. 9. Ibid. 10. For example, I would propose “revealed and limited” rather than “revealed and wrong,” and “necessary and fulfilled” rather than “necessary and superseded,” both preferred phrases being understood in the light of an “already/not yet” eschatology which embraces Jews, Christians and others.


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219

11. Cf. “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!” (Gals. 6:15). 12. For my own application of Ephesians to the question of Jesus as Messiah and relations between Jews and Christians see David F. Ford, “A Messiah for the Third Millennium” Modern Theology, 16/1 (January 2000): 75–90; also in Theology and Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. James Buckley and L. Gregory Jones (Blackwell, Oxford 2001), pp. 73–88. 13. Kepnes, p. 116. 14. Koshul, p. 18. 15. Job is a model of such wrestling in Jewish and Christian scriptures. For my interpretation of the book of Job see Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007), chapters 3–4. 16. Koshul, p. 32. 17. Ibid., p. 33. 18. For example, “Enlightenment philosophy categorically rejects all philosophical and religious notions of wisdom, illumination and the Divine,” Koshul, p. 20. 19. His diagnosis of why for many centuries Islam has often failed to realize Qur’anic principles in its political life calls for a hermeneutic of self-critique as well as self-affirmation, especially with regard to Qur’anic interpretation. 20. Ibid., p. 31. 21. Ibid., p. 31. 22. For a discussion of universities in relation to the religious and the secular see “Faith and Universities in a Religious and Secular World (1)” in Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 81/2 (2005): 83–91 and “Faith and Universities in a Religious and Secular World (2)” in Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 81/3(2005): 97–106. 23. A good example of a secular thinker who is proposing for the United States a polity that takes seriously the religions in the public sphere (and also explores key texts in the secular democratic tradition which might be considered candidates for potential scriptural-and-secular reasoning groups) is Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); cf. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 24. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992). For my interpretation of him in this regard see Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).







Aaron 75–6 Abbas 87 Abelard, Peter 160 Abraham 4, 30, 73–5, 78–80, 88, 91, 107–12, 114–16, 118, 126–9, 142–4, 178, 180–1, 203–5, 208 Adam 4, 86, 89, 110, 116, 118, 138, 204 Adams, Nicholas 123 Adams, Nick 137 Adorno, Theodore 31, 196, 213 Akhtar, Shabbir 165 Ali 27 Aquinas 181 Arabi 158, 163 Arafat 24 Aristotle 4, 19 Armstrong, Karen 55 Asad, Muhammad 16, 76, 86–7, 103 Bacon 42, 45 Bakhtin, Michael 155, 161–2, 167 Balbec 159 Bartolomé 3 Bellah, Robert 26–7 Benjamin, Walter 164, 168 Bennabi, Malek 26 Berger, Peter 23 Biran, Maine de 157, 160 Bohr, Niels 196 Boisard, Marcel 25 Boulainvilliers, Comte de 152 Bowery, Leigh 155, 160 Browne, Sir Thomas 53

Buber, Martin 2, 5, 108, 115, 118, 144 Bulliet, Richard 25 Campanella, Tommaso 153 Christ, Jesus 114, 151, 164, 206–8, 210 Clive 150 Cohen, Hermann 113, 134, 187 Columbus 3 Comfort, Alex 47 Comte, Auguste 42 Condorcet 151 Confucius 56 Cortés 3 David 115, 155, 160 David Ray Griffin 52, 56 Davutoglu 167 de Sade, Marquis 160 Descartes 19, 20, 30, 42, 160, 164 Diderot 160 Donne, John 160 Eberhardt, Isabelle 159 Eco, Umberto 159 Elijah 110 Ellwood, Robert 22 Eve 4, 110, 114, 203


Na me Index

Farsi, Salman 15 Flaubert 159 Ford, David F. 31, 201 Fortuyn, Pim 9, 33 Freud, Lucian 155, 161, 164 Frymer-Kensky, Tikvah 110, 203


NAME INDEX

Gabriel 15 Galileo 45 Garaudy, Roger 154, 159, 165 Gardet, Louis 151 Gellner, Ernest 26 Ghazali 57 Goethe 153 Grabar, Oleg 102 Gray, John 150 Grice, Paul 197 Griffin, David Ray 52, 56–7 Guénon, René 158–9, 166

Jesus 13, 47, 112, 115–16, 119, 151, 183, 204–8, 210, 212–13 Jonah 110 Joseph 81, 110, 203–4

Hadot, Pierre 19 Hagar 107–118, 125–9, 133–4, 141–4, 178–81, 190–5, 203–5, 208–9, 212, 217 Hegel 134–5, 141, 160, 179 Heidegger, Martin 31, 56, 161–2, 196, 213 Heisenberg, Werner 196 Hesiod 164 Hobbes 20 Horkheimer 164 Houellebecq, Michel 155–60 Hume 30 Huntington, Samuel 1

Leibniz 161 Levinas, Emmanuel 31, 119, 196, 213 Locke 30, 161, 186 Lovejoy, Arthur 49

Iqbal, Muhammad 25, 50, 54 Isaac 110–112, 114–115, 117–118, 126–7, 129, 133, 142, 155, 159, 178–9, 203–4, 206 Isaiah 187 Ishaq, Ibn 15 Ishmael 107–9, 111–14, 117–18, 125–9, 133–4, 142, 151, 155–9, 165, 169, 178–80, 203–4, 209 Ismail 115 Jacob 115, 127, 129, 204 Jaspers, Karl 162 Jefferson, Thomas 152

Kant 30, 70, 113, 134–5, 157, 161 Khadija 15 Klein, Naomi 156 Kuhn, Thomas 46 Küng, Hans 159

Maimonides, Moses 143–4, 181–2 Makdisi, George 25, 154 Malebranche 164 Malthus 20 Marx, Karl 102, 150 Mary 13, 183 Maxwell 61 McIntyre, Alasdair 23 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 162 Mermer, Yamine 133 Michelangelo 155 Milbank, John 23 Moses 15, 75–6, 89, 112, 114–15, 143, 181–2, 191, 203–4, 208 Muhammed (Mohammed), Prophet 27, 107, 115–16 Murad, Abdal Hakim 9, 18–19, 21–2, 27, 71, 102, 123


222

Napoleon 150 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 52, 165 Naufal, Waraqa bin 15 Newton 46, 61, 196 Nietzsche 31, 160, 167


Nixon 36, 63 Noah 118 Nursi, Said 70, 83 Ochs, Peter 4, 77, 116, 119, 127, 129, 210 Paul 128, 205–9, 212, 217 Peirce, Charles S. 116, 134, 144, 197 Pippin, Robert B. 156 Plato 4, 19, 42, 56, 134, 164, 187 Razi 87 Rebecca 110, 203 Reichenbach, Hans 196 Reid, Piers Paul 155 Ricoeur, Paul 1–2, 4, 217 Rilke, Rainer Maria 151 Roded, Ruth 27, 167 Rosenzweig, Franz 116, 138–40, 179 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 27, 158, 164, 167 Rushd, Ibn 57 Rushdie, Salman 155 Sacks, Jonathan 52 Said, Edward 102 Saint-Simon 154

223

Salam, Abdallah ibn 15 Sarah 108, 110, 114, 118, 126–7, 142–4, 178, 180, 203 Schleiermacher 70 Schopenhauer 158 Schubert, Franz 153 Schuon, Frithjof 39, 165 Shalabi, Abdul Wadod 165 Smith, Huston 41, 44, 53 Stark, Rodney 23 Steiner, George 165 Strauss, Eduard 139 Stubbe, Henry 153 Swift, Jonathan 162 Todorov, Tzvetan

3

Voltaire 54–5, 151–2 Vries, Hent de 31 Weber 23, 186, 196 Weil, Simone 164 Whitehead 53 Wilber, Ken 49 Winter, Tim 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 31, 196–7, 213 Zamakhshari 16, 103


NAME INDEX





Abrahamic 50, 91, 123, 132, 135, 138, 140, 144, 177–8, 181–2, 187, 201, 214 Allah 11–18, 30, 115, 183, 185 All-Knowing 16, 183 Americas 3, 119 Anglican 132 Arabs 14, 27, 43, 89, 107, 149, 152, 154, 156 Aristotelian 11, 17 Aryan 155 Ash’arite 162 Augustinian 155 Baha’ism 165 Beer-lahai-roi 109, 127 Beersheba 142 Beyond-Being 55 Bible 5, 10–17, 28–9, 31, 90–1, 108, 112, 119, 154, 179, 210–11, 213–14 Biblical Israel 178 British Muslims 126 Buddhism 47, 149, 158 Buddhist paradox of Self 158 Cartesianism 160 Cave of Hira 15 Central Asians 149 Chinese 155 Christianity 9, 32, 107, 114–15, 119–20, 127, 163–4, 177, 202, 205, 208, 210, 215 Christians 3, 4, 12–13, 69, 107–8, 114–15, 117–20, 123–4, 126–9,

131–2, 151–3, 158, 201–2, 204–5, 207, 211–12 Church 4, 12–13, 17, 27, 29, 207 City of God 153 City of Light 155 Civil Religion 27 Communism 154 Communist Party 159 Contemporary Islam-West Encounter 40, 147, 177 Critique of Pure Reason 134 Deo Erexit Voltaire 55 Divine Logos 55 Divine Word 11–12, 14, 22 East 39, 117, 153, 155 English Civil War 153 Enlightenment 9–11, 19–21, 23–5, 28–33, 40–4, 50–8, 70, 89–91, 93, 135, 150–8, 160–8, 182–6, 188–9, 212–14 Epicureans 19 Europe 3, 151, 154, 156, 160 Exodus 181 Fascism 154 Faustian 165


S ubject Index

Galatians 205, 207–9 Genesis 109, 112, 114, 125–9, 133, 137, 142–4, 164, 203–4, 207, 209 Gentiles 207–9


SUBJECT INDEX

German Jews 138 Ghazalian 168 God 11, 55, 70–5, 77–91, 107–19, 128–30, 134–8, 142–4, 151–4, 157, 159–60, 163–7, 181–3, 203–4, 207–13 Golden Age 164 Gospels 12–13, 15, 29, 30, 90, 115, 183, 204, 208, 212 Greco-Roman 3, 56 Greek 20, 119, 135, 207 Guénonians 160 Gulliver’s Travels 162 Hajj 24–5, 50, 91, 141, 185 Hebrew 4, 107–10, 112–14, 116, 133, 205 Hegelian 157 Hell 114 Hellenic 151 Hinduism 149 Hobesian 20 Ishmaelite, Ismaelite 22, 142, 151, 156–7, 159, 169, 178 Islam(ic) 1, 3, 5, 9–11, 16, 18–29, 33, 40, 43–5, 47, 50–1, 53–4, 58, 69–72, 75, 78–9, 83, 85–7, 90–2, 107, 109, 116, 118–20, 123–7, 135, 142, 149–68, 177–86, 189, 201–4, 210–11, 213–16, 218 Islamism 150, 155, 165–6, 168 Islamists 165–6 Islam-West 10, 40, 202–3, 210, 213–16, 218 Israelite 118, 178 Jabrite 157 Jansenist 155 Jerusalem 205–7 Jewish 3, 12–13, 16–17, 32, 69, 77, 108, 112–13, 115–16, 118–19, 125, 129, 132, 134,

138–9, 143–4, 152, 164, 178, 186, 203, 205, 207–9, 211, 215, 217–18 Jewry 164 Jews 5, 13–14, 16–17, 50, 107–10, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 127, 129, 131, 135, 138, 143, 144, 152, 179, 201, 203, 205, 207–9, 211–12, 216–17 Jews and Christians 5, 14, 16, 109–10, 120, 203, 211 Judaism 5, 9, 29, 31, 33, 51, 107, 109, 113, 119–20, 127–8, 135–6, 160, 164, 167, 177, 180, 182, 202, 209, 214–15 Judaism and Christianity 31, 51, 107, 109, 119, 182, 209, 214 Judeo-Christian 43, 109, 119 Kantian

70, 113

Laputa, Laputans Logos 55–56

163

Mahdism 166 Malthusian 20 Messiah 164, 205, 208 Muslims 5, 13–15, 17, 26–7, 51, 53, 70, 84, 92, 107, 109–10, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 123, 126–7, 130–2, 135, 149–50, 159–60, 165, 182, 184, 187–9, 201, 203–4, 211–12, 216–17 New Testament 12, 17, 112, 114, 116, 118–19, 127, 131, 204–5, 210, 212 Newtonian 196


226

Old Testament 16, 108, 113, 115, 127, 143, 205, 211 Opium Wars 47


Oriental 40 Orientalist 159 Parisian 155 Patristics 130 Pauline 209 Platonic 56 Pope 152 Postmodern(ism) 10, 39, 41–6, 48–54, 56–8, 168 Promethean 41, 88, 90, 155, 168 Prometheus 164 Prophet 12–15, 20, 22, 25–6, 43, 71–3, 75, 79–81, 84, 88, 90, 112, 115, 152–3, 162–3, 166, 168, 187, 205, 211 Protestant 132, 151 Proustian 156 Ptolemaic 44 Qadianism 166 Qur’anic Self 16–18, 40, 51, 211 Qur’an 5, 10–18, 22, 24–6, 28–31, 33, 40, 50–1, 69–73, 75–7, 79–88, 90–3, 115–16, 118, 127, 130–1, 133, 150–2, 154, 158, 165, 167, 182–3, 185–6, 196, 198, 204, 210–15 Rabbinics 130 Racovians 151 Renaissance 25, 154, 166 Romans 128–30, 208–9 Romantic 156 Sabians 115 Samaritans 205 Scriptural Reasoning 4–5, 69, 76–7, 79, 88–9, 92, 107–8, 114, 118–19, 123, 127, 129–132, 134–7, 140–3, 186, 201–3, 210–11, 214–18

227

Secularity 155 Semites 163 Semitic 152, 162–3, 167 Semitism 164 Semitisms 163, 166 Shari’ite 43 Shur 109 Social Contract 27 Socialist Realism 155 Society of Scriptural Reasoning 77 Sophist 135 Speech of God 70 Stoics 19 Sufi 88, 158–9 Sufism 168 Sunni 154 Supreme Being 55 Sura(h) 115, 127 Sustainer 72–6, 78, 80, 85, 87, 89 Tafsir 87 Talmud 112, 118 Tanakh 12, 127, 210 Taoism 45 Taurat 12, 17 Textual Reasoning 215 Thatcherite 156 Third Heritage 154 Third World 150 Torah 12–13, 15, 17, 29–30, 90, 108, 111, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 128, 133, 143, 183, 203–5, 210–11 Torah 12–13, 15, 17, 29–30, 90, 108, 111, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 128, 133, 143, 183, 203–5, 210–11 Tower of Babel 118 Trinitarian 153 Trinity 152


SUBJECT INDEX

Ultimate Truth 32 Ummah 108 Unitarianism 152 Universal Nature 56


SUBJECT INDEX

Universalist 52 Utopian 166 Weberian 11 West 1, 3, 5, 9–11, 20–6, 28, 32–3, 39–40, 47, 50–1, 53–4, 69–72, 92, 116–17, 119–20, 136, 138, 142, 144, 149–50, 154–5, 159, 164–5, 167, 177, 182–4, 186–7, 189, 196, 201–3, 210, 213–18

Western and Eastern 3 Western Enlightenment 141 Western Europe 9 Western Self 155 Westerners 154, 156, 158–9 Westernisation 168 West-ostlicher Divan 153 Zen Buddhism Zion 164

45


228


Scripture, reason, and the contemporary Islam-west encounter: studying the ''other'', understanding the ''self''

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