The Translation Movement - a Real Step Forward

The Late Antique Aristotelian tradition that was inherited by the world of early Islam in the Near East considered the Rhetoric to be an integral part of one’s training in logic and reasoning. However, thus far there has been little academic interest in it, apart from the ground-breaking monograph of Deborah Black published some two decades ago and the recent edition, translation and study of Averroes’ commentary on the Rhetoric by Maroun Aouad. Vagelpohl’s revised Cambridge dissertation is a careful historical and linguistic study of the translation of the Rhetoric and its naturalisation in Syriac (less so) and Arabic learned culture in the Near East. As such, he considers the text to be a case study that raises wider questions about the whole process of the translation movement, which after a relative absence of interest, is again inspiring a new vague of academic literature. Since translation is a process of cultural exchange, it is important to pay attention to details and formulations. The choice of the Rhetoric requires some justification, as Vagelpohl admits, for two reasons: first, the Aristotelian text was not that significant in the antiquity; more practical manuals were more widely used and taught. Second, the Arabic tradition distinguished between two traditions of rhetoric, an indigenous genre of balāgha (and bayān) that was essential for the training of preachers and functionaries drawing upon classics of the Arabic language, and a more philosophical and hellenizing khiṭāba represented by the Aristotelian text and its commentary such as Averroes’. Clearly the former tradition dominated, and a cursory examination of the manuscript traditions and texts in libraries attests to this imbalance. However, Vagelpohl’s argument is that the challenges posed by the text reveal strategies and approaches used by the translators to deal with the cultural exchange that may assist our understanding of the wider translation movement.

The study is divided into four chapters. The first analyses the translation movement as a whole and locates the Rhetoric within this context. The author argues for a contextualised approach in opposition to a narrow philological isolationism. While positivism has been the order of the day stressing the need for historical transmission and consistently wishing to find the missing links between the Aristotelian text and its translation, Vagelpohl suggests that an element of the oral should not be overlooked. The wider history and sociology of the transmission of knowledge in early and classical Islam suggests that oral transmission occurred alongside the written and cannot be discounted as a serious mode of dissemination (as Schoeler has shown in a work that Vagelpohl translated from German). The rest of the chapter is a summary of the state of research on the translation movement drawing upon Rosenthal, Gutas and Endress, especially on the Kindī-circle and that of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq.

The next chapter is a careful examination of the translation of the Rhetoric with a consideration of the Syriac tradition. The Paris unicum has been edited twice by Badawī and Lyons and Vagelpohl weighs up the relative merits of the editions. The discussion of the Syriac tradition is significant because of Lyons’ hunch that there must have been a Syriac intermediary, an assumption often made for many of the works of Aristotle. However, while the Arabic and Syriac Aristotelian traditions were linked, and the translators themselves often knew both languages, they were formed and perpetuated in pedagogical contexts that were quite distinct. As ever, we are left with a situation in which there is little historical evidence to make firm conclusions.

The third chapter is the longest and most substantial philological examination comparing the Arabic and Greek and raising issues. Around one sixth of the text is sampled using the translation theory of Basim Hatim and Ian Mason. Vagelpohl concludes that the translation must be a fairly early one. The difficulties of the Greek and the literary context from which it arose constituted obstacles. The translator struggled with the text and produced something with significant terminological variation. Assessing the internal terminological evidence in its context, he concludes that it must have been produced in the Kindī-circle in which the language was often preliminary and terms not as fixed as the latter translations of Ḥunayn. This would tally with the assumption that the earliest texts produced in the translation movement were eminently practical elements of logic and argument and some preliminary metaphysics. Given the place of the Rhetoric in the organon, this clearly makes sense.

The final chapter, which is far too brief, analyses the legacy both East and West of the translation. The author recognises the importance; after all the translation itself is only a step in cultural transmission. The three great philosophers of the classical period all engaged with the text in different ways. For al-Fārābī, the text was an inspiration for his own thinking on rhetoric and its logical function. Ibn Sīnā wrote two relevant works: the short sections of al-Ḥikma al-ʿarūḍiyya functions somewhat like a manual of rhetoric and focuses upon the practical elements, while his own work on the rhetoric in al-Shifāʾ is a more extensive and complete contemplation of the Aristotelian text, often responding to the long commentary of Ibn al-Ṭayyib, one of the Baghdadi Christian Peripatetics he often criticised. While some other authors wrote small epitomes, the most significant contribution which signalled (as it did for his whole corpus) a return to Aristotle was the Middle Commentary of Ibn Rushd, so magisterially analysed and translated by Aouad. It is also a controversial text given the attempts by Straussians such as Butterworth to relate Ibn Rushd’s understanding of rhetoric to political philosophy. The Latin afterlife of the influence of Ibn Rushd’s commentary continued interest in the Rhetoric, although it died out (as did formal interest in the works of Aristotle) after the thirteenth century in Islam. It would have been interesting for Vagelpohl to discuss the influence of the rhetoric in balāgha and in other genres of writing and disciplines of the madrasa since the approach of the middle period led to a more holistic vision of intellectual inquiry. But that, in itself, might merit a monograph on its own. The conclusion follows appended with a good, extensive glossary of relevant terms Greek-Arabic and Arabic-Greek, acting as a wonderful complement to the argument.

The author concludes with an important insight: what the Greek into Arabic tradition often sees as mistakes in translation and transcription are in facts attempts by the translator to find a cultural fit. Any translation is a new literary text and needs to be taken seriously as that. This is precisely why it is the Arabic Aristotle that is of relevance to understanding classical philosophy in Islam and not the Greek. Overall the text is well produced although inevitably there are a number of small typographical errors. Vagelpohl has produced an excellent text that contributes to our understanding of the translation movement, even if the title does not entirely indicate it.

Assessing a recent book on Mulla Sadra by Bonmariage

The history of ideas is punctuated with philosophers who attempted to grapple with questions which were often considered to be perennial. One of the most significant of these was how to reconcile one’s desire for a totalising monistic account of reality with one’s phenomenal experience of pluralism, namely the problem of the One and the many. This question had a venerable tradition in the ancient and medieval trajectories of philosophy and was a major source of intellectual inspiration for philosophers and mystics in Islam. Broadly speaking within Islamic intellectual tradition, pluralism was seen as being championed by the modified peripateticism of Avicenna and monism promoted by the Sufi school of Ibn ʿArabī. A number of thinkers in the later period, especially from around the fifteenth century attempted a reconciliation of monism and pluralism beginning with the Shiraz philosophers Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī (d. 1502) and Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Dashtakī (d. 1498) and their students. The eminent philosopher who attempted this synthesis as a means towards a new method and meta-philosophical and a ‘transcendent’ conception of philosophical inquiry, which he named ‘al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya’ in homage to the Peripatetic Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274) and Akbarian Sufi Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 1350), was Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī (d. c. 1635), popularly known as Mullā Ṣadrā.
Bonmariage’s monographic study of this issue in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā is a revised version of her doctoral dissertation at the Catholic University of Louvain, supervised by Yahya Michot and Jules Janssens. The publication comprises in one volume the academic study and a selection of key passages translated from the work of Mullā Ṣadrā. This second part includes thirty-six texts chosen from his two major philosophical works al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fī-l-asfār al-ʿaqliyya al-arbaʿa (commonly called Asfār), and its epitome al-Shawāhid al-rubūbiyya fī-l-manāhij al-sulūkiyya. These are organised under three headings: on being, on the Necessary Being and the deployment of being from it, and the relationship between the Necessary and the contingent. The translations are good and well-supported by footnotes which refer the reader to relevant passages in other works by Mullā Ṣadrā, to works in the Peripatetic tradition that influence or contrast with the passages (such as works by Avicenna, his student Bahmanyār and al-Ṭūsī), to the Neoplatonic tradition exemplified in the pseudo-Aristotelian/Plotinian Theology of Aristotle, works of the Illuminationist tradition, and to the Sufis school of Ibn ʿArabī. What is clear from these selections, and this is confirmed in the analytical first part of the book, is that Bonmariage attempts to explain Mullā Ṣadrā primarily in terms of the Avicennan tradition. This is not surprising. Avicenna remains the most important figure in Islamic intellectual history and it is constantly with respect to his work that subsequent philosophers comment, object, refine, criticise and condemn. Mullā Ṣadrā’s work is an engagement with the history of Islamic philosophical traditions in which he deals dialogically with the major thinkers of the traditions, especially Avicenna. The extensive nature of the relationship between Avicenna and Mullā Ṣadrā still requires further investigation although a number of scholars (Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī, Saʿīd Raḥīmiyān, Jules Janssens, Yahya Michot among others) have written about it.
Bonmariage’s argument concerns the notion of tashkīk al-wujūd in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā, a notion that she translates as the modulated singularity of being. The translation of ‘modulation’ seems to be drawn from Yahya Bonaud’s Paris dissertation on the philosophy and mysticism of Khomeini. Being for Mullā Ṣadrā is a singular reality (following the Akbarian theory of the oneness of being or waḥdat al-wujūd), but it comprises the Avicennan regard for plurality through undergoing gradation and degrees, in itself also an indication of a Neoplatonic synthesis of the one and the many. That being admits of degrees was a common position in Platonic traditions.
The analytical part comprises three sections: preliminaries on his biography, influences and the nature of ḥikma mutaʿāliya, the fundamental aspects of Sadrian ontology (namely, the three doctrines of the self-evident nature of being, the ontological priority of being over essence, and the modulated and singular nature of being), and the structure of the Real and of reality, the critical examination of the nature of God and his bestowal of being upon all that is other-than-God. The theological implications of such philosophy are clear. Ever since Avicenna, philosophers have sought to incorporate theological questions in their inquiry and claimed that their demonstrative methods of examining questions about the nature of God, for instance, are more effective and conclusive than kalām arguments. Thus the question of being for Mullā Ṣadrā is not extricable from the question of the nature of God and his relationship with the world. Bonmariage’s method of analysis is deeply textual; positions and arguments are well-supported with reference to the works of Mullā Ṣadrā and to those who influenced him. This is refreshing change from some who work on Islamic intellectual history and pronounce on elements of thought with any reference to the relevant texts that may substantiate their claims. The Sadrian conception of philosophy is textured and comprises a tasting of reality, a deep meditation on scripture and the notion of a Prophetic inheritance of wisdom, as well as the Greek heritage of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. Pierre Hadot’s insight into the nature of philosophy as care for the self and as a spiritual exercise and commitment to a way of life is extremely useful for understanding Mullā Ṣadrā, and perhaps Bonmariage should have indicated this wider context for explanation. The main analytical chapters require a more substantial introduction to the nature of philosophy and the impacts of influences on Mullā Ṣadrā.
The chapters on Sadrian ontology are careful historical reconstructions of the development of key notions like being, the doctrine of its ontological priority and rehearsal of the main arguments about tashkīk. The ontological priority of being (aṣālat al-wujūd) demonstrates Mullā Ṣadrā’s critique of the Illuminationist tradition and a refutation of Suhrawardī’s argument against existence having reference. It also indicates the shifts in his own understanding from an early period, when under the influence of his teacher Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) he was an essentialist, to a shift towards a monistic understanding that focuses upon being as ontologically prior. Bonmariage rightly traces the history of the notion of tashkīk to the Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle particularly on the Categories and relates the notion to the ancient tertium quid, and to kalām arguments about discourse concerning God and contingents, as well as the idea of modulation of lights in the Illuminationist tradition. However, the Sadrian notion is richer than such a logical concept. The concept for Mullā Ṣadrā entails and reflects an ontological commitment to a particular vision of reality. It is not mere semantics.
The presentation of the Necessary Being includes a discussion of his arguments for the existence of God, including the famous ‘proof of the veracious’ (burhān al-ṣiddīqīn) and engages extensively with the kalām tradition. It also shows how Mullā Ṣadrā draws on the Ibn ʿArabī’s tradition’s formulation of the three modes of being and how being is deployed, disclosed and emanated from the One. A key mode in which the One relates to the many is epistemological. Bonmariage does not remark that the discussion of divine knowledge was central to arguments for God’s existence in the theological tradition of commentaries and super-commentaries on al-Ṭūsī’s famous work Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād and hence it influenced this line of argumentation in Mullā Ṣadrā’s work. The real question with respect to contingents regards in what sense they can be said to exist. Rahman’s position was that monism dominates and the unreality of particular existences means that tashkīk fails to provide an adequate reconciliation of monism and pluralism. The affirmation of human will and the rejection of theological and Avicennan determinism implies that Mullā Ṣadrā’s commitment to the reality of contingents is not merely a conventional genuflection to a synthesis. The Sadrian formulation is paradoxical but multiplicity is confirmed under the rubric of unity. This is better understood through a Neoplatonic paradigm in which the logical and metaphysics of unity and multiplicity are akin to the Sadrian reconciliation. Of course, the final question is whether it works. How does a reader overcome the apparent contradictions in the work? This is where one returns to the cultural question of the conception and role of philosophy which is not a straightforward ratiocinative and discursive exercise but a commitment to cognising reality through reason, inspiration and intuition. It is ultimately rather difficult to both verify and confirm the Sadrian vision. But the creativity of the approach and the strong rejection of rehearsing positions needs to be adhered. Bonmariage has little to say about the legacy of Mullā Ṣadrā. His dominance of the intellectual life of the Shiʿi seminary in Iran is clear. But a more engaged and critical approach to his work and to his ontology is still requires. Tashkīk in this way is not merely a modulated approach to reality as such but is also an equivocation and suspension of a simple binary and discursive hermeneutics of the text.
Bonmariage’s book is a successful historical and analytical exposition of this key ontological position of Mullā Ṣadrā. It deserves to be read and to push people to engage with the later traditions of Islamic philosophy. One feels that it would have been improved by a more careful contextualisation of his thought and a consideration of the wider legacy of Sadrian thought which continues to resonate today.

Shiʿi Ethics in the 21st Century: Beyond Jurisprudence and Politics

Shiʿi Islam has been for centuries a minority trend, the praised few defending the light in a world of darkness, adhering to the devotion and the cause of the friends of God and promoting the notion of being virtuous agents in the world, believers whose faith demanded testing, striking a path of being a muʾmin mumtaḥan. The pursuit of moral agency and excellence was therefore a pathway towards realisation, an examined life, and a commitment to living the multilogical walāya of the Imams. Contemporary Shiʿism finds itself at odds with this tradition, forced to rehearse the conflicts of the past between ghuluww and taqṣīr, and locked in an argument about whether the faith is an other-worldly denial of this dystopian world, or a call to establish a utopian order of the faithful who inherit and realise the true purpose of creation, or whether the faith articulates an essential opposition and dissent speaking truth to illegitimate power or provides the basis for authority that justifies the exercise of power within the modern state. The de-centring of a moral and spiritual core in the de-sacralised present is not peculiar to Shiʿi Islam; in fact, elements of what I want to discuss are clearly discernable in modern developments within Sunni Islam, various Indian religions and the like. This is not an argument for exceptionalism. But the particular details of features that I suggest inhibit the full realisation of moral Shiʿi selves in the present are rooted in the historical contingencies of modern Shiʿism. I would like you to consider this presentation as an introspective provocation, a search for the core self, an articulation of the famous statement and call to action man ʿarafa nafsahu fa-ʿarafa rabbahu. As such I will not deny that this is more of a polemic than a dispassionate, academic consideration of the nature of ethics, jurisprudence and law in contemporary Shiʿi Islam. At the same time, I do not claim that I am expressing something new – many before me have already indicated the malaise of our situation and many others will no doubt continue to do so.

I want to suggest that developments since the 19^th century especially pose a threat to the nature of Shiʿi communities and belief in our contemporary age through the wilful obliteration of the tradition in two key areas of jurisprudence and law. In many ways, some of the themes that interest me have already been discussed by my colleague. The crisis of authority that is posed in the idiom of the contestations around the marjaʿiyya is symptomatic of the loss of the Shiʿi self in the contemporary, or rather of the oblivion of the confidence of being a minority alienated in this world. We live in the age of the oblivion of the self in which the question of authentic living and what it means to be Shiʿi is entangled in cultural identity politics and not a pursuit of moral agency. The basic dichotomies of understanding the nature of the world have been sidelined which have been part of the intellectual traditions of our inheritance and perhaps require a quick rehearsal:

· The complementarity between ḥaqq and ḥaqīqa, between the underlying reality of the divine and the manifest reality of our cosmos – the idea of the gracious and just God producing a world of grace and justice that allows us to fulfil our moral obligations by realising our humanity

· The desire to see the two poles of the world as a pursuit of understanding and recognising wujūd and walāya, being and becoming, striking the balance between the utter transcendence and immanence of the Divine, and

· The need to balance the exoteric and the esoteric, neither straying too far into the denial of the heart of one or a rampant antinomianism of the other

Of course, there is an idealism and elitism and perhaps essentialism in what I have said so far but the institution of the marjaʿiyya, the privileging of jurisprudence over all else in the madrasa and the politics of religion and state in more recent decades, exemplified in the theory of state known as wilāyat al-faqīh, have robbed ordinary believers of their basic moral agency and obligation and left us in a state in which we are reliant on a small group of individuals, some of whom are of rather dubious moral ethics, to fulfil our humanity, surrendering personal and even collective responsibility to the few. I am interested in how one can effect the ethical turn and reinvigorate communities, thought and spiritual life, an exigency of our diasporic communities in Europe and North America as much as those in the Middle East and South Asia. That there is a reality is not contested; but it is not a given, assumed and accepted, but rather interrogated and disclosed. Understanding and making sense of that reality requires a critical hermeneutics that balances the three sets of dichotomies that I have mentioned. I want to indicate some suggestions forward that focus on the ethical turn and the requisite hermeneutics of the text for our time.

But first I want to begin with the diagnosis, with the legal turn and the statist shift of modern history.

The Legal Turn

That the Shiʿi community has, on the whole, become the juristically compliant people par excellence is rather difficult to deny. It is not entirely a joke to suggest that in certain household the presence of a risāla ʿamaliyya on the bookshelf is more evident than other works, the site of Sayyid Sīstānī for example, holding an enviable slot in the favourites folder of many a web browser. I remember when I was 10 going to madrasa, in effect Sunday school in Hammersmith, we were barely trained in the fundamentals of the faith, not assisted in making sense of what it meant to be Shiʿi in London, but rather were made to memorise the risāla of Sayyid Khūʾī, perhaps a useful mnemonic exercise in itself although with rather limited implications for the future. You may think that I am generalising from the experience of a middle class South Asian experience but this anecdotal understanding is corroborated by many others who have grown up in Iranian, Iraqi and other contexts. The minutiae of compliance take precedence over the basic understanding of the central concept of Shiʿi Islam, namely walāya.

The privileging of positive law (fiqh) and jurisprudence and legal theory and hermeneutics that comprise uṣūl al-fiqh within the ḥawza is not entirely a new phenomenon and no doubt reflected the quotidian exigencies of believers. The faith has thus become purely about law. The slogan that Islam is comprehensive and provides a complete set of rules and guidelines for life makes the notion of the shariʿa a totality but in the privileged hands of jurists, in effect, it telescopes fiqh into a mechanism that covers every aspect of life, even more so in recent decades with the extension of the scope of the law into the public space, the political arena and the realm of finance and economics. What are the features of this obsessive focus on fiqh?

· The narrow scholasticism of the text in which the context is purely the text itself and the juristic tradition that discusses the text. Little attempt is made to draw out the relevance of the text and to situate it either historically or in the present. The hermeneutics of the text certainly genuflects towards a multivocal reading and understanding but in practice often avoids it.

· The dual mechanism of ijtihād and taqlīd does not produce moral agents, but complaints humans who was been absolved of the responsibility of their actions by jurists who take on the burden. We pride ourselves on having retained the tradition of ijtihād for centuries and yet little actual independent legal reasoning is performed and the provisional nature of much of what accounts for the uṣūl al-fiqh tradition is made permanent. There is no ijtihād, no new thinking, and certainly no creative hermeneutics in uṣūl. No doubt one of the factors determining this is the very modes of teaching and training jurists in the ḥawza.

· The institution of the marjaʿiyya (itself a rather recent phenomenon I would argue and indeed has been argued by Ahmad Kazemi Mousavi and others being traceable to Mīrzā-ye Qummī, Shaykh Najafī and Shaykh Anṣārī in the nineteenth century) and its centrality has led to the abnegation of moral responsibility, the imitation of practice authorised by the traditional hermeneutics that is called taqlīd. This is enough in itself, without the scandals of corruption, impropriety, lack of moral conduct on behalf of the representatives of the marājiʿ and indeed at time of the marājiʿ themselves that are elements further indicting the institution. The very conditions of marjaʿiyya articulated in works of uṣūl fail to live up to their definitions. In practice, it is not aʿlamiyya or taqwā or waraʿ or any such high virtue that defines a marjaʿ; it is rather cold hard cash raised through khums, social and political organisation, and astute manipulation. If indeed, for example, Shaykh Fayyāḍ is the most learned and pious uṣūlī in Najaf as many say, why is he not the paramount marjaʿ?

· We have become a sharʿia compliant people and not a moral people. Elements of the language of morality are retained in the value range from ḥarām to wājib but there is little reflection on what constitutes ethical living. Fiqh is a vehicle for understanding and fulfilling our moral obligation, our taklīf, the burden that we place on ourselves once a rational decision has been reached to believe. It is not co-extensive with ethics as such. The reduction of ethics in Islam to fiqh does a fundamental problem. While some in nineteenth North India attempted to balance this by focusing on akhlāq and ādāb, this remained an elite discourse and has been quickly forgotten.

It is not sufficient to absolve the non-juristic disciplines of the ḥawza either. The tendency towards ḥikmat and ʿirfān does not balance the stress upon the fiqh but becomes an expression of a staunch ba-sharʿ spirituality.

Scholasticism of maʿqūlāt

But before I move onto the statist shift, a quick corollary of the legal turn is the scholasticism of the seminary. The discrepancy of actually philosophical and ethical/political within the ḥawza is disturbing indeed. Ideas are rehearsed and much like the modern academic philosophy department, people trained in the history of thought but rarely inspired to think themselves. The hegemony of the school of Mullā Ṣadrā is one of the central problems. The quite brilliant but flawed Shirazi has not escaped the spectacular presumptions or the abuses of posterity. His philosophical method of tashkīk has been interpreted as a system and then become the system or the definition of Shiʿi philosophy that is juxtaposed and then compared to everything from Advaita Vedanta to Aquinas to Wittgenstein. But for Mullā Ṣadrā, our hermeneutics of the books of the Qurʾan and the cosmos are inherently unstable. Our grasping of reality is fleeting; our reification and essentialisation of it a wilful distortion and misrepresentation. The strong condemnation of intellectual taqlīd articulated by Mullā Ṣadrā seems to have been totally forgotten.

There is a true lack of independence in matters intellectual and the truly original marginalised. Let me cite one example, again from North India. Sayyid Murtażā Nawnehravī was one of the most creative Shiʿi thinkers of the early twentieth century, entirely trained in the dars-e niẓāmī curriculum in India but having spent most of his life in his hometown of Ghāzīpūr in Eastern UP. His Miʿrāj al-ʿuqūl fī sharḥ duʿāʾ Mashlūl published in Ghāzīpūr in 1914 is a wonderful text, perpetuating an honourable tradition of the expression of philosophy through exegesis. But it has been sorely neglected – copies are rare to find and he himself never achieved any recognition at the intellectual centre of Shiʿi Islam in India, Lucknow. The clear reason for this was his independent minded approach to texts and his time. He wrote works on the ritual purity of Hindus and encouraged social discourse against the isolationism of the Lucknow ʿulama, and even strongly condemned the insistence on slaughtering cow. He also made the mistake of vehement criticising the two main idols of the hierocracy in matters of belief and rational theology, namely ʿAllāma Majlisī and also Ghufrān Maʾāb Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī Naqvī. The result is that a work that is truly liberal in both its jurisprudence and hermeneutics, inclined to the spiritual life and contemplation, eloquent in its Arabic expression, is not even known to specialists.

A New political theory – Wilāyat al-faqīh

While the relationship of Shiʿism and politics is not a new one, the well known theory of the legitimate authority of the jurist or wilāyat al-faqīh marks a significant statist shift in Shiʿi thought and the absurd culmination and implication of the marjaʿiyya. I will not rehearse the theory which requires little introduction but instead focus on some critical remarks:

· The juristic context of the emergence of the theory is clear and represents a new opening of the area of public fiqh. However, as a political theory based on the notion that the ruler should be qualified as a jurist, a conception that conceives of the qualifications of political power in legal terms and indeed sees the ruler primarily as judge and arbiter, it is clear that the theory has little to do with traditional Shiʿi conceptions of authority and rather is much concerned with a Sunni conception of the caliphate. In the twentieth century, it was Rashīd Ridā’s notion that the head of the state ought to be a mujtahid which is closest to wilāyat al-faqīh. Beyond this, Muḥsin Kadīvar has done an excellent job in Naẓariyya-hā-ye dawlat dar fiqh-e shiʿeh to contextualise the theory and place it as one among many others.

· While it is no doubt an innovative political theory, the lack of serious political philosophy among the Shiʿa in the ghayba, consistently decried by a number of thinkers including Sayyid Javād Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Sayyid Muḥammad Khātamī and Jamīleh Kadīvar is not really compensated by it.

· Wilāyat al-faqīh represents the culmination of the abnegation of individual moral and collective responsibility initiated by the marjaʿiyya. But even more than that it infantilises believers in the ultimate act of condescension. Traditionally it is of course minors and the intellectually infirm who deserve the guardianship of senior members of the community, especially the jurists as general representatives of the Imam. At the same time, there is a basic contradiction. As the late great Mihdī Ḥāʾirī put in it in his excellent critique entitled Ḥikmat va ḥukūmat, published not surprisingly in London in 1996, the theory at once assumes that the people are like children and the mentally challenged and yet gives them the democratic right through the ballot box to determine who is the valī-ye faqīh.

· Of course, once one gets to the maximal conception in the absolute authority of the jurist things are taken further still. The power of such a jurist is beyond the constitutionality of parliamentary politics and the transparency and accountability of the separation of powers. His authority over the basic rituals of the faith makes the denial of ethics complete.

Before I conclude with some comments on the ethical turn and the need for a new hermeneutics, let me digress slightly on a further issue of the descent of moral agency.

Cultural Authenticity versus the pursuit of the good

In many of our communities, we have sacrificed the pursuit of the good and the practice of moral agency in favour of an identity politics of cultural authenticity. One good example and a controversial one at that is the practice of taṭbīr. The demands for culturally authentic and exclusively Shiʿi practices sanctioned by the state can be seen especially in Pakistan, India and Bahrain where political alliances inimical to the welfare of believers, that fail to enable the flourishing of the moral life have been made in the name of cultural authenticity. Political rights and claims upon the state in the public sphere forsaken in return for the state’s indulgence to practice taṭbīr. I am not making any value judgements as such about the nature of taṭbīr, its moral or legal status but just trying to point out the myopia of such a position.

So how do we regain our moral agency?

By Way of Conclusion

· Taqlīd must be forsaken and moral responsibility for the self and for one’s own actions regained; it is after all we ourselves who will stand before our Lord. This does not mean that one confines fiqh to the dustbin of history but one needs to be more watchful and critical of jurists.

· The state needs to become either neutral with respect to moral agency or an enabler of the pursuit of the good and not a hindrance. Wilāyat al-faqīh as an experiment has come and failed and we need to move on. The essential intellectual work now is to de-couple the concept from the theology of the imamate with which it has been confused and conflated by the likes of Āyatollāhs Miṣbāh and Javādī Āmulī.

· Believers need to be empowered to regain their moral agency and the role of education is critical to provide them with the intellectual tools to understand their situation, to privilege a critical intellectual culture placing philosophy properly at the foundation, and training people in the basics of belief, and both strands of theology, namely the understanding of the human condition within this cosmos and the big questions of the nature of God and his communication and interaction with us. We need the ʿulama to be public theologians and not jurists and judges foremost.

· Finally, we need to be more sophisticated with the text and recognise that our understanding of our situation and who we are evolves and hence so should our engagement with the text on the horizon of our experience. At times, the silences of the text need to be retained and at other times the noises of the text perhaps politely ignored.

Reith Lectures

I'm sure many bloggers will be linking to this year's Reith Lectures on the BBC. The Harvard political philosopher and eminent communitarian, Michael Sandel, will be addressing the new citizenship, criticising the neo-liberal emphasis on the pursuit of individualism towards a moral and spiritual renewal through an emphasis on the common good. It fits within my own recent interests on the role of moral and faith-based arguments in the secular public sphere.

Mulla Sadra

My long article on Mulla Sadra for the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has gone online. Any suggestions, please email me at mullasadra@gmail.com

Manuscripts online

Just thought it might be useful to gather together some links for full digital images of manuscripts that are available online (various others are in the process of being uploaded including apparently the collection of the former Asafiyya in Hyderabad kept at the Osmania University Library and al-Azhar's collection which was partly online and has gone offline).

1) King Saud University in Riyadh - an interesting and quite mixed collection just listed in order and not divided by subject. You need to browse to find what you want but the quality of the images is excellent.
2) Princeton University Library - around 200 manuscripts so far from the Islamic collections (the best in North America) are available
3) Manuscripts from Mali - a small collection digitised and available through the Library of Congress
4) Iranian manuscripts and catalogues portal - a wonderful site with various types of links named after the great bibliographer Agha Buzurg Tihrani
5) American University of Beirut - a small collection from the Jafet Library
6) Markaz Wadud li-l-makhtutat - a clearing house allowing download of digital images
7) The Minasian Collection at UCLA - at the moment the catalogue is up but the digital images will apparently follow

Also this is a useful site run by the Islamic Manuscript Association which provides links to online catalogues.
And here are a few useful sites on manscripts:
1) Jan Just Witkam
2) Youssef Ziedan

There are surely plenty more and would appreciate any further links which I can supplement later.

Religious Ethics in the 'Now'

A constant regard to God in all our actions and enjoyments, will give a new beauty to every virtue, by making it an act of gratitude and love to him; and increase our pleasure in every enjoyment, as it will appear an evidence of his goodness; it will give a diviner purity and simplicity of heart, to conceive all our virtuous dispositions as implanted by God in our hearts, and all our beneficent offices as our proper work, and the natural duties of that station we hold in our universe, and the services that we owe.
[Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (Hildesheim, 1969), 216]

In this sentiment articulated by a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment, we remember that the Enlightenment itself was not essentially inimical to deism and indeed to theistically grounded systems of morality. However, nowadays when the Enlightenment is evoked, it is the radical Enlightenment with its pronounced atheism and Promethean vision of humanity that is at the forefront of the ethical debate; the moral self is an autonomous self, a concept attributed to Immanuel Kant. It is for humans to develop a system of morals through agreement that be rationally justified and universalised.
Teaching religious ethics, or any aspect of religion and spirituality, in the disenchanted and de-sacralised sphere of the contemporary metropolitan university is a difficult and frustrating task. One cannot assume the basic contours and narratives of the Judaeo-Christian tradition that once informed European and American societies. Nor can one assume that students have the slightest conception of the belief systems, phenomenal practice and meaning of religious faith and ritual. One cannot even assume that one’s students have a clear, historically contextualised notion of morality, the moral self and moral agency. The ‘now’ culture is which we live affects academia as well: it is rare indeed to find a philosophy department that takes the history of philosophy seriously as an intellectual pursuit that is central to informing the framework of their contemporary concerns.