Some Thoughts on Religion and Violence

There is a strong prejudice in the social sciences (no doubt influenced by Marxian views on ideology and beliefs as motivations that are in fact expressions of false consciousness) against taking religion seriously, a bias that faced with the category of religion finds it removed from our social and intellectual existence in a post-Enlightenment age. Even critical theory suffers from such an assumption, being broadly suspicious of religion’s ontological and epistemological commitments and claims; yet, surely a properly critical approach would be dismissal of such absolutism and apply the metaphysical critique to its very claim about religion itself.

The ways in which we perceive of religion in our time is as constructed a social reality as the development of the notion of secularity as the anthropologist Talal Asad had extensively discussed in recent years. It is an expression of the narrative of the autonomous self that has emerged since at least the Enlightenment, postulating a particular anthropology of what it means to be human and to possess critical human faculties, and how that human self interacts within his cosmos and articulates his identity. In a post-Kantian world in which the immediacy of experience as the source of knowledge is denied and our world constructed through our language and conceptual schemes, religion, history and modernity are similarly constructed. Religion in such a world is seen as a private matter guided by a reason which is not critically interrogated in the public sphere, and yet is seen as a transhistorical essence expressing discourses and beliefs through practices and conventions that yield a vision of reality. The public sphere denuded of religious expression finds it all the more perplexing when political action is justified in terms of religious motivation. Critical to the personal reason of religion is the displacement of the scripture in favour of a symbolic universe of meaning, a natural and rational order of understanding reality. But as such this is a European genealogy and faced with the case of Islam, the shibboleth of the Qurʾan as central idol and referent of the faith signals a complete absence of reason, public or private. The scripturalist approach to reality is therefore an irrational one and unfavourably juxtaposed with both scientific notions and commonsense ones.

Furthermore, if we consider the category through its opposites to understand more clearly what we mean, what constitutes the opposite of religion? Reason? Science? Secularity? Surely all of these are categories that in themselves evince particular genealogies, mythologies and discourses of asserting their power within the marketplaces of disciplinary formations. And yet to paraphrase Slavoj Žižek, in a point which I cite a bit later, religion in its purest form is secularity and secularity religion. In the face of such formations, the understanding of religious even by the religious seems to have shifts in disperse directions: new age spiritualities replace institutions, religion becomes a wider and even overarching category of adherence into which even philosophy and art are placed, and the metaphysical critique of the Heideggerian tradition leads to postulation of a God who may be. Such understandings, I would contend, are for good conventionalist reasons, if not others, divergent from the historical traditions of understanding faith in the past and lead to the hermeneutical problem of the increasing gap between the reader and the text.

At the same time as understanding and contextualising jihad as violence, we need to be self-reflective about violence. Consider three definitions of violence in relation to religion. First, violence, defined expansively, is considered to be part and parcel of the original sin of being human and is articulated in the insights of the significant monograph of Hent de Vries’ Religion and Violence. At the outset, he postulates that

Violence, in both the widest possible and the most elementary senses of the word, entails any cause, any justified or illegitimate force, that is exerted – physically or otherwise – by one thing (event or instance, group or person, and perhaps, word and object) upon another. Violence thus defined finds its prime model – its source, force and counterforce – in key elements of the tradition called the religious. It can be seen as the very element of religion.

While this alerts us to the possibilities in the use of the term, it is too overarching and too elastic a definition to be helpful. It also entails a rather gendered genealogy of religion and violence, one condemned by the late feminist theologian Grace Jantzen in her wonderful critique of the death and violence-centred theological metaphysics of the European tradition in favour of one preferring ‘natality’ and life-affirmation. An imbalanced view of violence in Western metaphysics might lead one to see violence beyond in a rather skewed manner. Nevertheless it considers violence to be a form of relationship between the self and other which is akin to religion and as such both the other and the self of religion. In a post-Kantian world, religion is neither relegated to the private sphere nor are religious categories including righteous, godly violence rendered obsolete. The major contribution of de Vries’ work is to alert us to the elasticity of the terms violence and religion and show how they may apply beyond the narrow confines of what we may have assumed.

The second definition focuses on the very human act of othering. Difference may entail either the recognition and the pursuit of an ethics of identity (such as envisioned by Ricoeur), or the onset of alterity and danger. As the literary historian Regina Schwartz defines it, violence is not

a consequence of defining identity as either particular or universal. Violence stems from any conception of identity forged negatively against the Other, an invention of identity parasitically depends upon the invention of some Other to be reviled.

As such, the process of othering deliberately distorts and forges the self as a positive mirror image of the other. Identity construction is not the sole concern of religious communities, even with the need to define the boundaries of the faith community and objectify heresy although violence is the means through which the formation is effected.

Third, Slavoj Žižek’s wonderful polemic on violence urges us to take the self-reflection a further step. He distinguishes between ‘subjective’ violence, an exertion of one upon the other that is considered to be a violation, a perturbation, of the normal state of affairs such as one man stabbing another, and objective violence which is inherent in normality. The exceptionalism of violence may dissolve into its routineness. The objective is constituted both by our language and our economic and political systems, and of particular concern is ideological violence. Žižek writes:

We live in a society where a kind of Hegelian speculative identity of opposites exists. Certain features, attitudes and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked. They appear to be neutral, non-ideological, natural, commonsense. We designate as ideology that which stands out from this background: extreme religious zeal or dedication to a particular political orientation. The Hegelian point here would be that it is precisely the neutralisation of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that marks out ideology at its purest and at its most effective. This is the dialectical ‘coincidence of opposites’: the actualisation of a notion or an ideology at its purest coincides with, or more precisely, appears as its opposite, as non-ideology. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for violence. Social-symbolic violence at its purest appears as its opposite, as the spontaneity of the milieu in which we dwell, of the air we breathe.

Violence may therefore lie in our very conceptual frameworks, our assumptions about citizenship and mutuality, in tolerance and liberalism. Tolerant reason as articulated in liberal outrage against Muslim fundamentalists in Europe is one of his primary examples. However, we need not go that far. It merely suffices to recognise that violence is not just the illegitimate actions and words of the other but also embedded in the self.

The result of this quick assessment (there is after all a far too extensive literature on the relationship of religion and violence to consider in a single lecture – perhaps a good theme for a module?) is that arguments concerning the essential relationship between the two often end up negating themselves. The ‘commonsense’ feeling that one of the major factors that discredit institutionalised religion and indeed the faith imperial is the conduct of war, internecine sectarian fighting and the suppression of liberties, deduced from an interpretation of European history and from the image of an imperial and violent Islam spread by the sword.

It is therefore not surprising that such a polemic, extended by renowned pseudo-academic ex-Muslims such as Ibn Warraq lead to both nuanced questioning by anthropologists such as Asad and theologians such as Cavanaugh as well as Muslim apologetics. Even the very idea that violence is essential to humanity, and therefore to religion as a manifestation of homo religiosus may be conceptually neat and rhetorically persuasive but requires one to step back from one’s pre-understandings. The problem of religious violence becomes acute for the Muslim reformist seeking to understand his faith and reconcile it to his context, historical, political and intellectual, not least because the Muslim reformer tends to be as much a product of a liberal intellectual formation as a non-Muslim one and similarly afflicted by the contradiction inherent within liberalism between a desire to recognise and grant liberties of diversity and the exhortation to universalising the liberal way of life as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement.

Re-centering Foundationalist Ethics? John Rist on Platonism and Real Ethics

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.
In this paper, I will investigate (quite critically) one strategy for presenting religious ethics to students of philosophy and the humanities as part of the pursuit of a liberal education, namely, a recent robust and fairly ambitious defence of realist and foundationalist ethics and moral agency articulated by John Rist, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Toronto. By way of some comparison, I will juxtapose his thought with the historically contextualised vision of narrating the moral self through a critique of the ‘Enlightenment project’ proffered by Alasdair MacIntyre, an Aristotelian Thomistic quest for the vibrancy of moral foundationalism, and Robert Adams’ Christian Platonic defence of the concept of the Good and the moral quest for being and doing good. Although they all engage with the contemporary discourse on ethics (Adams most successfully from a philosophical perspective), they deliberately place their ideas beyond the standard fourfold division of ethics: deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and ‘anti-ethics’. But they remain committed to an account for the rational justification for morality. The rehabilitation of a metaphysical moral realism may well be worth considering as it has been so neglected by the ethical academic mainstream. For the purposes of this paper, I will assume that religious ethics are foundationalist and based on transcendent moral realism; the possibilities of a non-transcendent moral realism, therefore, lies beyond the scope of my discussion here.
In these anti-foundationalist and post-Christian (and even post-secular) times, it is a brave (perhaps foolhardy?) person who will defend a moral realism founded upon transcendent principles, rules even, of morality based upon a theistic modification of Platonic realism. The naturalistic fallacy known as the derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ lies at the heart of this study. The shift away from foundationalism and ontology was arguably initiated by Kant in his systematic critique of the mediaeval principles of metaphysics and epistemology. But the twentieth century really brought about the death knell of foundationalism, first through the rise of the Vienna circle and logical positivism and later through the linguistic turn and the rejection of ‘philosophy as we know it’ by Derrida in his oeuvre and Rorty in his hugely influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The desire to return metaphysics to its original place as the mistress of the sciences remained the priority of Catholic philosophers dissatisfied with the shift in our academic understanding of philosophy and its branches. John Rist, as a Christian Platonist, has much in common with this latter tendency. Along with Catholic philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Rist offers a bleak diagnosis of contemporary humans and the inability of societies to function morally and effectively divorced from metaphysical foundations of value. We are in moral and spiritual crisis because professional philosophy fails to address ethical issues in a clear and robust manner that can be communicated to the ‘man in the street’. The academic crisis over the theoretical foundations of moral agency has translated into the public sphere:

The perception in many academic and professional circles of the seriousness and ramifications of the theoretical crisis, combined with the ignorance of ordinary people, makes way for deception, equivocations, and outright lying and humbug in public debates.

MacIntyre’s diagnosis is somewhat bleaker and based on an interesting parallel with the exact sciences:

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successful abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single page from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless all these fragments are re-embodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology. Adults argue with each other about the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory and phlogiston theory, although they possess only a very partial knowledge of each. Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid. Nobody, or almost nobody, realises that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.

MacIntyre believes that the loss of the conceptual scheme of morality and the oblivion of the tradition(s) of morality requires us to re-assess and re-acquire our familiarity with that history. Forms of postmodern Nietzschean irrationalism should be eschewed in favour of a narrative and historical understanding of traditions and their interpretive communities. The real challenge is emotivism which MacIntyre defines as:

the doctrine that all evaluative judgements and more specifically all moral judgements are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.

Rist believes that we should return to Plato’s conception of rational ethics as a moral system that is only justifiable if it is predicated upon metaphysical foundations; only with such a base can morality be more than ‘enlightened self-interest’. He blames, much like MacIntyre, Nietzsche and his followers, for the assault on ‘enlightenment values’ and morality such that one finds a contemporary philosopher like Derek Parfit articulating the modern ‘consensus’ that rejects religious ethics in favour of seeking a consensual morality through ‘principled agreement’. Rist quotes him:

Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a very recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

The desire to axiomatize ethics is odd indeed coming from a (post-)analytical philosopher. Nevertheless, it reflects a somewhat Kantian need to achieve an understanding of the qualifications of a moral agent. As Onora O’Neill, perhaps one of the most eminent of Kantians, says:

Without a more explicit vindication of some background perfectionism, or more generally of the necessary metaphysics, it may quite simply be impossible to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for qualifying as an agent (or person), or as a subject (or holder of rights). Yet most contemporary universalists are uninclined to argue for this type of background position.

The present moral chaos, for Rist, is because ‘Western philosophers and their opinion-forming disciples have come to resemble midwives – to borrow Plato’s metaphor – to the birth of a class of intellectual lager-louts’. He argues for a return to foundationalism in ethics. As an analytical (and ill-tempered, even intemperate) polemic and an argument that eliminates alternative moralities (often willy-nilly and rather unfairly) without really offering a positive account of transcendent moral realism, Real Ethics is reminiscent of MacIntyre’s After Virtue, a work that is equally concerned with showing up the failures of the ‘Enlightenment project’ not least in its inability to establish a vigorous and robust moral theory devoid of transcendent principles, of God and of metaphysics. It is a work that is indicative of one analytical, post-Thomist trend in contemporary Catholic philosophy. Those Catholic philosophers who retain an interest in philosophical theology either attempt to reconcile the demands of revelation and reason and offer an analytical ‘recovery’ and justification of transcendent principles in metaphysics and ethics (as MacIntyre and Rist do), or deconstruct the very notion of metaphysics and ethical theory, even of the ‘supra-category’ of being when talking about God, and permit a hermeneutics of revelation devoid of standard ‘reason’, ethical realism and metaphysics. A good example of the former is the work of the late Norman Kretzmann and Marilyn Adams. The latter trend is well represented by Gianni Vattimo, Jean-Luc Marion and John Caputo. Rist remains an analytical philosopher profoundly alienated by the main preoccupations and interests of analytical philosophy, and wishes to use analytical tools to criticise and condemn postmodern shifts against foundationalism and Kantian contractualism.
Rist’s argument begins with the Republic and the moral choice in that work between Socrates’ transcendent moral realism founded upon the metaphysical theory of the Forms and variations on what he describes as ‘Thrasymachian’ alternatives that are all versions of moral perspectivism or even nihilism; it culminates with the recovery of moral realism through theistic Platonism as exemplified in Augustine and Aquinas. There are three steps to his negative argument to which I now turn in detail.
The first step is rather tendentious. Rist argues that the central point of the Republic is to demonstrate that there are only two options for the first principles of morality: Socratic realist values, and Thrasymachian arbitrary values. He expresses surprise that generations of scholars in ancient philosophy have not discerned this obvious choice (including most recently Julia Annas). But this is precisely because his claim is so debatable. A corollary of this step is to argue that the core of the Republic is the theory of Forms that provides the metaphysical foundations for moral theory and inspiration for ‘how to live the good life’. Rist is not prepared (quite rightly) to justify this theory because it has become so discredited. Instead, he attempts to defend theistic Platonic realism through a via negativa consideration and rejection of some major alternatives. Adams, on the other hand, provides a more nuanced and critical examination of Platonic realism: theism and real ethics is more significant for him than a slavish adherence to a particular vision of Plato; if Plato and Platonism are indefensible and violate the need to save the appearances of theism, then Adams is more than happy to jettison Platonism. Further, instead of focusing on the Republic, he begins with the Symposium which is a more explicit meditation upon love and beauty, love defined as the attraction and orientation towards Beauty as a manifestation of the Good. Adams has no desire to defend the theory of Forms; his intention is to provide a structure for a theory of values and personhood, not of universals. Unlike Rist, he believes that we can differentiate between the language and semantics of value on the one hand and the metaphysics of value on the other. His pursuit is to ward the plausibility of objectivity, not objectivity itself. A central motif to this argument, and arguably the central concern of Platonic ethics, is the notion of godlikeness: theistic moral realism implies the existence of a God, but the pursuit of the good as a resemblance of the divine is even more pronounced. This is what the Platonic tradition calls theosis. Unfortunately, Rist’s argument fails to link to this critical feature and is more restrictive.
Rist’s metaphysically grounded theory has the following characteristics: first, metaphysical realism is the only answer to Thrasymachus; second, pseudo-moralities based on pleasure and subjective preferences will prevail if we do not accept foundations (akin to MacIntyre’s point against emotivism); third, conventional societies need true beliefs and not deception (what is a conventional society?); fourth, metaphysical realities must reveal beauty and inspire love, a critical element of they theory to which we will return; fifth, men (not the gendered language as most critics would put it) are unequal in their abilities to justify their moral beliefs; sixth, a moral society is only intelligible with the existence of a metaphysically defensible God. Nowhere in the book is a demonstration or a positive proof provided for any of these points.
The Thrasymachian alternatives that Rist criticises all engage in ‘free-floating’ moral language and take in a range of positions from Epicurean pursuit of hedonism, Humean constructivism, Hobbesian contractualism, Straussian comunitarianism and Nietzschean nihilism. Moral language, according to Rist, must be ‘more or less stable’ and have transcendent referents which can be inferred and which inspire moral agency. However, his critique fails to deal adequately with those ethical theories that include an account of human nature that constrains choice of agency (as does Hobbes). Another consistent problem, as he admits is deception, both of the self and by those entities that one assumes are transcendent beings, namely forms. He does not explain satisfactorily how his model of ethics circumvents this problem.
The second step in the argument is to present a Platonic theory of the soul that explains how humans acquire moral unity and extract values from the transcendent principles. The pursuit of the good life entails the possession and unification of the soul since we wrong ourselves and become embroiled in immoral activity once our souls acquire extraneous layers and become ‘pluralized selves’. On this point, he actually cites MacIntyre: irrationality and moral turpitude follow from our disintegrated souls. Critical for his argument is the suggestion that humans cannot achieve psychological unity without some external pull factor, whether that be the pull of love (or self-love, or the love of transcendent principles that inspire us such as the Good), or communal filial friendship or even God himself. Thus we cannot construct a robust form of moral unity within ourselves. He criticises political forms and attempts at moral unity that are devoid of ethics such as Marxism and liberal democratic values. However, nowhere does Rist provide a convincing argument to show that we need an extrinsic metaphysical form for moral unity in our selves and many political and theorists and moral philosophers would argue, especially if they are within the Kantian rationalist tradition, that the extrinsic recourse for unity is unnecessary. The concept of love is central to his argument and demonstrates his debt to Augustine. It also reveals the way in which Rist disregards Plato for Christian Platonism as soon as possible. Once again, we see that Adams provides a more satisfactory account of the need for love as the key instrument for identifying the property and nature of excellence and for recognising the Good. Ethics is thus revealed as the means for loving and pursuing the Good. As Adams’ work is aimed at both philosophers and theologians, he allows himself the latitude to discuss in this context notions of grace and idolatry.
Thus far, Rist has completed two steps of his negative argument: first, the need for metaphysical foundations and principles for morality; second, the psychology of the soul that requires unity for moral agency and factors extrinsic to the soul to effect unity. Thus two sides of the moral equation are complete: an account of the moral agent and of moral principles. The third step in the argument is to reintroduce the need for rules and principles and articulate the drawbacks of theories that bypass rules. In this part of the argument, he discusses the ‘principled’ person and the avoidance of hypocrisy. He completes the shift to theistic ethics and continues to cast aspersions upon the misconceptions and lacunae of thought prevalent in the contemporary Anglo-American analytical tradition.
At times, his polemic overcomes the argument and he lapses into a weak position and even admits the inherent weakness of a positive argument for his case:

The epistemological difficulties confronting the Platonic moral realist should not be underestimated. If there are metaphysical or religious truths which validate certain systems of morality and invalidate others (because they give the best answers to questions about what we are and therefore what we ought to be), these truths cannot be demonstrated by ordinary methods of philosophical enquiry. That may seem surprising but it is not fatal: there is no reason why there should not be truths which we cannot even know or discover for ourselves, let alone demonstrate either to ourselves or to others. Our minds may be inadequate to them or the date necessary for understanding them may not be available to us…
Of course, to recognize that a Platonic foundationalism cannot be demonstrated is not to allow that it is implausible, let alone necessarily to open the doors to crude irrationalism; it may still be the most plausible, even the only intelligible, explanation of what we are and of the nature of moral experience.

This rather bizarre apologetic begs at least two questions: what standard of plausibility for moral realism is being advocated, and what are the extraordinary means of philosophical inquiry that might demonstrate the truths of moral realism? At the end of the book, the apologetics give way to utopianism and in an interesting chapter on God and ethics he concludes that moral obligation remains a utopian dream in a non-theistic world.
While Real Ethics may be a disappointing but ambitious work, it merits engagement. His attacks on neo-Nietzscheanism (much like MacIntyre) might conform to the prejudices of many. But he fails to engage properly and adequately with the Kantian tradition that dominates the discourse of ethics and is not entirely opposed to foundationalism. He is also palpably unfair in his dismissal of alternatives to transcendent theistic moral realism. The persistent claim that there are only two options in moral theory, between Socrates and Thrasymachus, between Good and bad, is an unfair, ‘fixed’ choice. Rist may be accused of a basic double standard: he applies a rigorous critique to moral alternatives but never subjects his own theory of realism to the standard critical analysis. Furthermore, he never makes a positive argument in its favour, contenting himself with ‘counter-punching’ and bemoaning the moral crisis of our times. More problematic is his avoidance of a key critical problem: formulating an epistemological theory for explaining the rational distinction between knowledge and mere belief. Whilst many may agree with his diagnosis, few will probably adhere to his prescription. The market of moral ideas deserves a morally rigorous and balanced assessment of positions and a defence of theistic moral realism really ought to engage more critically and fairly with both its opponents and its self.
Teaching and understanding religious ethics requires an engagement with good and bad arguments. There is much in Rist’s negative argument that resonates, informs and renders the moral confusion of a believer in the contemporary world and this may well be the best contribution that he provides. It is now left to others to produce a positive argument in favour of a theistic moral realism and to engage especially with the mainstream of debates on ethics, led as they are by Kantianism. One final point: one need not insist that the pursuit of moral realism should only engage with a narrowly defined set of philosophical problems. Adams’ contribution is precisely more effective because he does not pretend that religious ethics is merely ethics in the way in which, for example, Hare presents his theory. We should not be embarrassed by religion or religious thinkers and it can often be counter-productive to reduce a religious thinker to a mere philosopher. Critical honesty is far better than slavish apologetics.

Some notes on rational fideism in Qum - or the Maktab-e Tafkik

In recent years, the hegemony of the philosophical school of Mullā Ṣadrā in the ḥawza has been challenged from two intersecting directions, both now associated with the maktab-i tafkīk: first, there is still a traditional hesitation and distrust of philosophy associated with the ḥawza of Najaf which has been imported to Qum and Mashhad – the teachings of the Ahl al-bayt are far more significant than alien ‘Greek’ learning. Second, there is a critical attitude towards the Sadrian school and the need to engage with a new method of philosophy which is more authentically derived from scriptural reasoning within the Shiʿi tradition. Both of these tendencies have important precursors in the Imāmī intellectual tradition at least in the Safavid and Qajar periods: one may cite Qāḍī Saʿīd Qummī (d. 1696) and Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī (d. 1826) as examples of critics of the school of Mullā Ṣadrā who struck an independent path of intellectual inquiry often focused upon a meditation of the sayings of the Imams.
In the early period, the school was known as the school of the teachings of the Ahl al-Bayt (maʿārif-i ahl-i bayt) and was found by a triumvirate of scholars, the first two were both trained in Najaf but never met and the third was an important student of theirs: Sayyid Mūsā Zarābādī (d. 1353/1934), Mīrzā Mahdī Gharavī Iṣfahānī (d. 1365/1946), and Shaykh Mujtabá Qazvīnī Khurāsānī (d. 1386/1966). Zarābādī and Iṣfahānī had studied in Najaf and were closely associated with the major jurists of the period such as Ākhund Muḥammad Kāẓim Khurāsānī (d. 1329/1911), Mīrzā Muḥammad Ḥusayn Nāʾinī (d. 1355/1936), Sayyid Muḥammad Kāẓim Ṭabāṭabāʾī Yazdī (d. 1925??), and Shaykh Fażlullāh Nūrī (d. 1327/1909). Zarābādī entertained an interest in philosophy and studied with prominent students of Mullā Hādī Sabzavārī (d. 1289/1873) of the philosophers of Tehran, namely Mīrzā Ḥasan Kirmānshāhī (d. 1336/1918), Sayyid Shihāb al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 1320/1902), and Shaykh ʿAlī Nūrī Ḥakamī (d. 1335/1917); he also wrote glosses on the famous philosophical text of Sabzavārī, Sharḥ-i manẓūma. Later he settled in his hometown where he taught until his death and was much appreciated with well-known philosophers such as his townsman Sayyid Abū-l-Ḥasan Rafīʿī Qazvīnī (d. 1975). Iṣfahānī was more mystically inclined and associated with the teachers of ethics and mysticism such as Sayyid Aḥmad Karbalāʾī (d. 1332/1914), Shaykh Muḥammad Bahārī Hamadānī (a student of the famous Ḥusayn-Qulī Hamadānī), and the renowned Sayyid ʿAlī Qāḍī Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1366/1947). He settled in Mashhad where he taught and established the centre of the school, perpetuated by Qazvīnī. The work of Iṣfahānī, particularly his Abwāb al-hudá, and Qazvīnī’s compendious set of intellectual meditations upon the Qurʾān established the foundations of the school. These were then developed by their students such as Shaykh ʿAlī Akbar Ilāhiyān Tunkābunī (d. 1380/1960), Sayyid Abū-l-Ḥasan Ḥāfiẓiyān (d. 1360 Sh/1981), Mīrzā ʿAlī Akbar Nawqānī (d. 1370/1950), Shaykh ʿAlī Namāzī Shāhrūdī (d. 1405/1985), Shaykh Muḥammad Bāqir Malakī Miyānjī (d. 1377 Sh/1998), Mīrzā Javād Āqā Tihrānī (d. 1368 Sh/1989), Sayyid Kāẓim al-Mudarrissī (d. 1414/1994), Mīrzā Ḥasan ʿAlī Marvārīd (d. 1425/2004), and Shaykh Muḥammad Riḍā Ḥakīmī. It was the latter, Ḥakīmī, who supposed coined the term maktab-i tafkīk and his book of that name which has undergone over eight printings and editions remains the manifesto of the school. In the contemporary ḥawza both the students of Shaykh Vaḥīd Khurāsānī (who had apparently studied with Iṣfahānī) and the Shīrāziyya have allied themselves in Iran with the maktab-i tafkīk to express their distaste for philosophy. Prominent contemporary polemicists and thinkers of the school include Sayyid Jaʿfar Sayyidān and ʿAlī Riżā Raḥīmiyān.
One approach to understanding tafkīk is to understand it as a fideist movement. Fideism has a venerable history back at least to the Church father Tertullian (d. 230) and articulates the view that the intellectual jurisdictions of faith and reason are quite distinct and can even be hostile (although the hostility is not acknowledged in the school). In particular and in contrast to natural law and theology’s approach to presenting types of apodictic proofs for the existence of God, ontological, cosmological and teleological, fideists insist that religious belief in the divine does not depend on rational justification and draw upon philosophers who insist upon the unknowability of reality and truth, ‘evidential ambiguity’, and the limits of human reason such as Soren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. More recently, a number of Protestant theologians and philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and William Alston have argued for a reformed epistemology which in a sense provides a rational justification for fideism although they resist the term.
The school of tafkīk separates out the language and discourses of scripture, philosophy and mysticism and deliberately opposing the synthetical approach of the Sadrian school reflecting in the teaching of ḥikmat and ʿirfān in the Sadrian school dominant in the ḥawza. However, the proponents are clear that this does not entail a hermeneutics of suspicion with respect to the text or reality or truth and that tafkīk is not a fideist form of Derridean deconstruction.

The school also distinguishes between one legitimate form of intellectual inquiry that is described is rooted in revelation (waḥyānī), and two man-made forms of inquiry that represent the ‘deviations’ of philosophy and mysticism, namely the rational (ratiocinative) philosophical method (al-manhaj al-falsafī al-ʿaqlānī) and the intuitive, gnostic approach (al-manhaj al-ʿirfānī al-kashfī).

Charisma, Walaya and Early Shi'i Islam

For all the paranoia of the politics of the ‘Shiʿi crescent’, it is a fruitful and exciting time to be working in Shiʿi studies. New studies have emerged examining critical aspects of the early period, theology and intellectual developments ranging from Liakat Takim’s study of the networks of the Imams (The Heirs of the Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shiʿite Islam, Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), Robert Gleave on the akhbārī school (Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbārī Shīʿī School, Leiden: Brill, 2007), Hossein Modarressi’s paradigm-shifting studies on the early period (Tradition and Survival: A Bibliographic Survey of Early Shiʿite Literature, Oxford: Oneworld, 2003) and Amir-Moezzi’s wide ranging studies (La religion discrete, Paris: Vrin, 2006; Revelation and Falsification: The Kitāb al-qirāʾāt of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Sayyārī, Leiden: Brill, 2008). This is not to mention the many studies on contemporary Shiʿism produced by Lara Deeb, Max Weiss, Roshanak Shaery-Eisenlohr, Rula Abisaab and Laurence Louër. There are even two or three competing journals specialising in Shiʿi studies both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Maria Dakake’s revised 2000 Princeton doctoral dissertation makes an important contribution in this company by refocusing our understanding of early Shiʿism on two points: the cohesion of a counter-community coalescing around the concept of walāya both as an ontological status and authority of the Imams and as a devotion that believers owe to them, and the identity of this community as an elect, the praised few who are the true believers and the true guardians of the faith. These points are located within an insistence that Shiʿism developed not as a political doctrine of succession first to which a theology of discontent and dissent was later grafted but as a theological tendency attached to the family of the Prophet. In fact, Dakake is careful to assert that it is highly misleading to refer to Shiʿism as a ‘heterodox sect’, at the very least because it begs the question of the formation of ‘orthodoxy’ in Islam as well as the basic nuances of the concept of ‘sect’. She dates the emergence of Shiʿism from the First Civil War, and not from either the early Prophetic period (as many believers would), nor from the second century responses to various Alid revolts as many academics do.

Dakake puts forward three theses that comprise the three sections of the book. First, Shiʿism represents an early religious perspective rooted in basic principles such as the charismatic authority of the Prophet’s family as leaders of the Muslim community, a theology that remained ‘essentially unchanged from its inception in the first Islamic century through the period of its doctrinal solidification in the late second and early third centuries’ (page 3). This position is argued through four chapters on the nature of walāya in the Islamic tradition, a close reading of the famous Ghadīr Khumm tradition, walāya in the First Civil War, and the community in its aftermath. The notion of continuity in doctrine will surprise many specialists, not least the sceptics who are well represented in the historiography of early Islam. Her contention also draws upon the Weberian concept of religious charisma without allowing for a straight ‘fit’ between charisma and walāya. The first of these chapters is a general introduction. One would have wanted to see a more extensive analysis of walāya in the Qurʾan and in early texts, and the relationship between Shiʿi and Sufi notions of the concept needs further elaboration and analysis (too much of what is discussed is read through the prism of the more recent ʿirfānī understanding of the link between Shiʿi thought and Sufi metaphysics). Chapter two does well to focus on the Ghadīr tradition, far too neglected in the study of Shiʿism but is mainly concerned with identifying sources and the polemics around the text. There is no source-critical engagement here which will disappoint many students of early Islam. Chapter three focuses on the First Civil War and the articulation of communal identity and partisan adherence through a study of the historical accounts, and does well to draw out the importance of the dual notion of walāya and barāʾa (association and dissociation) so important to early Shiʿism as well as to its arch-enemy Khārijism. The final chapter of this section centres on the crystallisation of identity in the conflicts of the various uprisings both before and after Karbala. Both this chapter and the previous one draw upon the material of the Kūfan traditionist and historian Abū Mikhnaf but there is little assessment of him as a source. An important question which Dakake raises but does not examine adequately is Hāshimī Shiʿism and the legacy of the claims put forward for Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥanafiyya, the son of ʿAlī who was not a descendent of the Prophet.

The second thesis concerns walāya as a representation of a principle of spiritual charisma at the heart of the Shiʿi ethos and articulation of the ‘profound spiritual connection and ontological affinity between the Imāms and their followers’ (page 7). This theme comprises four further chapters on the theology of walāya, salvation in the community, predestination, and the charismatic distinction of the Shiʿa. Chapter five examines walāya in Shiʿi poetry and in the nascent ḥadīth corpus. Chapter six considers walāya as a pre-requisite for salvation and locates it within the theological debate of how best to avoid the hellfire and balance the requirements of faith as belief and works as articulations of belief. Chapter seven presents an important theme of Shiʿi tradition, namely predestination; but given the later espousal of soft determinism or at least a genuflection to free will, some consideration of the rational theological reconfiguration would have been useful. Chapter eighth articulates the spiritual hierarchy of Shiʿism as sets of relationship directed towards the Imam as master.

The third thesis of the book is that walāya and the elite spiritual status of the Shiʿa provided the ideological foundation for establishing sets of rules for social and intellectual interaction in the larger Muslim community. The final four chapters make this point by discussing the interaction between commonality and the elite through the contrast between islām and īmān, the notion of a spiritual hierarchy in the community, a discussion of women’s identity in early Shiʿism, and codes of conduct for interaction with the wider ummah. In total, there are twelve chapters, numerically significant in the context of a study on Twelver Shiʿism. Chapter nine is important especially in the light of more recent Shiʿi discussions around the notion of religious and civic pluralisms. Two concepts raised here would have benefitted from further discussion: the semantic range of the term kufr and the mustaḍaʿf. Chapter ten shifts to hierarchy within the Shiʿi community determined by the twin instruments of recognition-knowledge (maʿrifa) and obedience to the Imam (ṭāʿa). Dakake’s analysis would have benefitted from a greater engagement in this context with the work of Amir-Moezzi and Karim Crow’s masterful doctoral dissertation on early Islamic notions of intellect. Chapter eleven is on both Shiʿi women and attitudes to women in Shiʿi ḥadīth. In some ways, the chapter seems rather out of place, as if a journal article were suddenly introduced into the text to make it ‘more relevant’. Once again from a present-minded perspective, if early Shiʿism were so misogynistic, then how can one account for a radical reversal in the present period where Twelver Shiʿism is arguably the most positive about women and their role in the public sphere? The final chapter is once again brief (somewhat like the first chapter) and, one suspects, in the place of a proper conclusion (which is clearly needed and lacking). It does not really detail the twin (parallel?) codes of conduct for believers as mentioned in the title of the chapter.

The method that Dakake adopts involves an approach to early history and theology through the prism of ḥadīth material, somewhat akin to Amir-Moezzi’s studies of early Shiʿism. There is no critical assessment of the value of these sources. While Dakake has a few footnotes in which she acknowledges her use of later ḥadīth and historical sources to represent earlier events and words, her only response is to claim that there is ‘strong indications’ that the terms used are authentic representations of the early debates. While it may well be that the question of the authenticity of this corpus (and by extension I mean the various uṣūl attributed to the companions of the Imāms, some purported works of the Imāms and the famous kitāb al-saqīfa of Sulaym ibn Qays al-Ḥilālī) is somehow a pseudo-problem and obsession of source-(over)critical scholars, and indeed what is often far more important is how texts are deployed and used to interrogate positions, Dakake should have made some effort to locate and explain her use of sources. After all, one cannot simply use ḥadīth in an unreflective manner in a field that is so sensitive to usage, canonisation and integrity of that corpus. Within this context, one would also like to have seen a discussion of extremism and moderation (ghuluww, taqṣīr), or doctrinal confusion (takhlīṭ) – terms that were in the early texts and early theological critiques of the tradition, and which remain very much the core of internal debate and difference within Shiʿi communities in the present.

Despite this methodological critique and the gaps that one inevitably encounters, Dakake’s book is a wonderfully rich examination of the emergence of Shiʿism as a community of walāya at the core of Islam. One feels that this is very much a heart-felt project attempting a more inclusive approach to the study of Islam, away from the binarism (orthodoxy-heterodoxy, works-faith) of much that passes for Islamic studies. In the articulation of her three core theses, she is remarkably successful. The Charismatic Community is a significant and welcome contribution to the study of the theology and sacred history of early Islam.

Some Notes on al-Hikma al-Yamaniyya

It was in a conversation with Ali Owjabi in Tehran almost 8 years ago that I first seriously considered how a school of 'Yemeni philosophy' provided an alternative to Sadrian philosophy.
The school of Mīr Dāmād was known as the Yemeni philosophy (al-ḥikma al-yamāniyya). His method involved a presentation of philosophy that existed before him primarily from the school of Avicenna, which he labels as ‘Greek philosophy’ (ḥikma yunāniyya) and then a critical exposition of the position replacing it with his improved argument which he described as ‘ḥikma yamāniyya’ based on the famous saying attributed to the Prophet: ‘Faith is Yemeni and wisdom is Yemeni (al-īmān yamānī wa-l-ḥikma yamāniyya).’ He considered all previous schools of thought (Peripatetic and Illuminationist philosophy, Ashʿarī theology, and even Twelver Šīʿī theology) to be incomplete and unreliable and their understanding of reality. His Yemeni position is not a purely ratiocinative one and extends knowledge and understanding beyond the confines of discourse (baḥṯ) and reason to the non-propositional, intuitive (ḏawq), immediate and mystically disclosed (kašf). Often he presents his argument by stating that he will first examine the ‘Greek’ philosophical position and then move onto the Yemeni one. As his primary concern is with the philosophy of theistic creation, his Yemeni philosophy is deployed to solve the problems of time and creation.

In Flaming Embers and Epiphanies (Jadhavāt va mawāqīt), a thoughtful contemplation written in Persian (his only major work in that language) of Moses’ encounter with the theophany of the burning bush on Mount Sinai, he describes different conceptions and level of creation:

Causation – which is a term for emanation, ‘making’ and bringing into existence – in the doctrine of ‘those rooted in knowledge’ (rāsiḫīn ʿulamāʾ) and the metaphysicians of Greek philosophy (ḥikmat-i yūnānī) and of Yemeni philosophy (ḥikmat-i yamānī) is of four types: ibdāʿ (origination, creatio ex nihilo), ikhtirāʿ (production), ṣunʿ (fashioning or creation in the higher intelligible world) and takwīn (generation or creation in the sub-lunar world).

Later in the same text, he analyses the ‘Yemeni’ understanding of numerical order and the existence of Platonic numbers as first-order emanations from the One, an important element of the argument concerning levels of creation from the One.

In one of his most important works on philosophical theology which like many others remained unfinished, primarily concerned with the problem of creation, The Straight Path (al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm), Mīr Dāmād set out what he intended to do in the work:

The one most desirous among creation for his Lord the Self-Sufficient, Muḥammad b. Muḥammad known as Bāqir Dāmād al-Ḥusaynī – may God make his afterlife good – presents to you, O brothers of mysticism, and expounds for you, O brothers of retreat and solitude, a solution to the confusion caused in you by the mass of teachers attempting to reveal the difficult relationship between the Eternal and the incipient, and [aims] to ease its difficulties with clear thought according to the method of Greek philosophy and of Yemeni philosophy and to investigate the discourse of those expounders and to wither them away with form writing and forthright exposition.

He clearly thought that those who had written before him on the issue of creation and time, including Avicenna, had failed to convince and he felt that he could produce a more robust argument and pin his Yemeni philosophy on the central doctrine of perpetual creation. Later in the text before he embarks on the main discussion of the doctrine, he distinguishes three types of prior non-existence based on Yemeni philosophy:

According to what we have acquired from the mature Yemeni philosophy ripened by the faculty of the intellect, obtained through demonstrative syllogisms and divine inspirations, it appears that incipience has three possible meanings:
First of them is the priority of the existence of a thing by essential non-existence and this is named according to the philosophers ‘essential creation’ (ḥudūṯ ḏātī)…
The second of them is the priority of a thing by its non-existence in perpetuity and eternity that is atemporal such that the thing is non-existent in a real sense through pure non-existence that is not qualified by continuity and its opposite. It then moves from this pure non-existence to existence and would appear to be the most appropriate to be termed it [incipience], that is perpetual creation (ḥudūṯ dahrī).
The third of them is the priority of the existence of the thing by its non-existence in time so that its existence is preceded by an element of time and this is called by the theologians temporal creation (ḥudūṯ zamānī).

The very notion of perpetual creation is directly related to his school of Yemeni philosophy. In al-Ufuq al-mubīn (The Clear Horizon), the text which was so popular in India, he begins by saying that the work on the nature of the metaphysics of theistic creation is the result of what came to him from ‘matured Yemeni philosophy and the pure, ecstatic philosophy of faith’.

Arguing the Just War

I am about to write a piece examining the problem of political violence and othering in the contemporary Muslim world. Here are some thoughts on a good, recent work by John Kelsay.
Jihad has become a normal English word, a term to describe irrational violence, ‘holy war’, terrorism and the generally rather nasty things that ‘bad Muslims do’. Kelsay, in this wonderfully succinct and accessible work, wants to argue that the real issue in discussing jihad is to make sense of legitimate violence and how it may be deployed and hence to locate the discourse within an existing discussion about just war theory. I am not generally sympathetic to the use of the comparable frame of just war theory because as a juridical and ethical concept it is rather limited, arising out of a particular politico-theological context of medieval Catholicism. Having said that, any serious attempt to nuance the meaning of jihad in the contemporary world, to contextualise the discourse adequately and historically, and to pose difficult questions to those who appropriate it on the basis of a claim towards establishing justice and acting in a just cause is welcome. Kelsay is interested in the contemporary debate about the nature of political ethics among Muslims. His book is not just an attempt to ‘whitewash’ Muslims and their theologies from any culpability in the acts and ideologies of the likes of al-Qaeda. While he interrogates the theological and juridical reasoning of such terrorists, he wants to show not only their distance from historically grounded narratives of jihad but also how their reasoning may be shared. It is indeed foolish to argue that jihadi ideology has nothing to do with reasoning about jihad as such; it is counter-intuitive and unhelpful. He also wants to indicate how the language of just war is mutually supportive between the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ and al-Qaeda’s war on the ‘Zionist-Crusaders’ (which is in theological terms also the subject of a forthcoming book by Alia Brahimi to be published by Cambridge University Press).

In six chapters, Kelsay takes us from the textual sources through to the arguments about justified violence in the contemporary world. Chapter one is not so much a discussion of the sources on jihad as a basic sketch of early Islam that one expects from introductory works discussing the near eastern context, the life of the prophet and the event of the Qurʾan and raising the question of how early Islam dealt with difference in a perfunctory manner. But he does not discuss the contentious issues of how one may access this or evaluate the sources. Nor does he discuss how the sources have been used and might be used.

The next chapter indicates why this may be the case as the focus is on ‘shariʿa reasoning’. Although he begins by mentioning other forms of reasoning through right and wrong (belle-lettrist, philosophical and theological approaches), he traces the ways in which Muslims beginning with the early caliphate and taking it up to the 1980s understand political ethics. The central concern that emerges is the problem of fitna, of discord and disorder and how the function of the political order is to control and quell it. Politics therefore strives for consensus and protects the community and the faith. Along the way, we get a brief discursus on Islamic law and the development of political thinking up to the present. What is not mentioned here is that the conflation of dissent and heresy and the obsession with fitna and fasād are precisely the themes of continuity with contemporary jihadi ideology. This single-minded focus on order and the identification of the acts of the state and the caliphate with the faith have meant that normative Sunni attempts at arguing against jihadi ideology face the problem of trying to decouple a form of juristic reasoning which is clearly linked.

Chapter three moves onto juristic reasoning about war and the rules of engagement focusing on al-Shaybānī and Ibn Taymiyya and discusses the nature of rebellion in the pre-modern period, the subject of an excellent if rather turgid monograph by Khaled Abou El-Fadl. Wars are conducted by states and legitimated by their rulers. The medieval Sunni consensus insisted upon justification by power. The chapter concludes with a brief mention of Shiʿi perspectives. Chapter four on armed resistance follows and represents the use of medieval precedent by jihadi ideologues to justify their actions. Developing from the anti-colonial struggles of the nineteenth century, the discourse becomes one of establishing the role of a just state which enforces the faith. Kelsay discusses a number of key texts beginning with the Neglected Duty and moving through to various statements from al-Qaeda leaders. The possibilities of shifting and flexible uses of precedents and analogies between the medieval past and the ‘resistance’ in the present are made all the more possible because of the crisis of legitimacy in the Muslim world that affects not only expected sources of authoritative proclamations on juridical reasoning but also the state itself. It is therefore no accident that most pronouncements on the nature of resistance and the theory of the state within a juridical way of life are articulated by non-state actors.

Chapter five on militancy and authority focuses our attention to the real issue in politics and juxtaposes the argument of militants with liberal voices represented by Abdulaziz Sachedina, Abdullahi an-Naʿim and Khaled Abou El-Fadl. It is the longest chapter in the book and the real pivot that addresses the present debate. As Kelsay acknowledges, the militants’ argument is that the alternative of a proper Islamic government (brought about through the use of violence) is a liberating process and even a humanitarian one (as argued in a recent book by Faisal Devji). The question of suicide bombing is therefore one of tactics. Most of the chapter is taken up with the ‘democrats’ who resist and refute the militant argument. Perhaps the main contribution of these liberal voices is to loose up the hermeneutical binds by insisting that texts are multivocal and the totalising and monopolising readings of militants does violence to the Islamic traditions that they pretend to defend and uphold. At the same time, these democrats set themselves outside of the mainstream of Muslim political thinking. The just war is not merely about the wielding of authority by a legitimate force but also about the very conduct of the violence. But ultimately both sides of the argument are genuflecting to the text.

The final chapter brings us to the critical context of the debate, namely US foreign policy and the war on terror. What chance do Muslim democrats have in such an environment? US policy justifies all manner of excess. However, the discussion of Ahmadinejad and his discourse on justice is not entirely apposite here. He is not concerned with just was but with just and equitable social order. The two need to be kept apart just as jihadi ideology and activities are not identical. The fact that Ahmadinejad can be seen to speak for Muslims (despite his Iranian, Shiʿi and non-ʿulema states) is a symptom of the crisis of authority and legitimacy in the contemporary world, so much so that in the present political crisis in Iran after the June elections, a number of Muslim observers outside Iran support him because he ‘speaks truth to power’, opposes US policy and speak openly about the wrongs perpetrated by Israel. The basic question remains: what constitutes legitimate use of force in the contemporary world?

Kelsay’s book is nuanced and insightful in its identification of the weaknesses of Muslim liberal voices and their context. He is also quite correct to note the real conflict and debate between liberals and militants. But one would wish to see more engagement with the traditionalists who equally oppose the militants and can do so on their own ground through shariʿa reasoning. Clearly an ethical turn is required. Any serious reinterpretation of the just use of violence justified in Muslim terms needs to refocus on the notion of justice itself and locate it within an ethical framework that asks the moral questions that the shariʿa poses, and not the issues with which Islamic law becomes embroiled. A turn to moral agency and responsibility is the basic requisite in these confused times.

Shii Threat, Shii Challenge

Fear of the spread of Shiʿi power in the Middle East has seized the imagination of Arab dictatorships at least since 2003 and the hysteria surrounding the so-called Shiʿi crescent (al-hilāl al-shīʿī) has become heightened since the Israeli-Lebanese war of August 2006. Paranoia towards minorities is unfortunately not a new phenomenon in the Middle East but at the same time there are qualitative differences between the last Shiʿi ‘scare’ following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and this new hysteria after the fall of Saddam in 2003. The policy implications of the Iraq war raised issues both for her neighbours and for those powers involved in the conflict. The discourse of the Shiʿi crescent or threat is one particular type of response and further emphasises the basic problematisation of Shiʿi presences in the Middle East (not to speak of the problems of South Asia and the borrowed conflicts in the diasporic communities of Europe and North America where London and New York among others locales constitute significant Shiʿi presences).

1979 was primarily a concern for the shape of the Middle East and particularly the Gulf, after the vacuum created by the removal of the Shah, the ‘policeman’ of the region, in the face of the virulent ideology intent on exporting revolution, culminating in political shifts in places as diverse as Lebanon and Pakistan (with the formation of Hezbollah and various movements beginning with Tehreek-e Jafaria in the latter) and attempted political seizures and coups in the southern Gulf monarchies. Thus the fear of Shiʿi power articulated a concern for the containment of Iran, which had already been recognised as the paramount regional power before then. It was therefore a policy of confronting Iran led by US foreign policy, one which remains the case today heightened by the nuclear negotiations. Post-2003, the Shiʿi crescent is often described as a revival of this concern to contain the Iranian state and its foreign policy ambitions in the light of a few basic realities on the ground: the war in Afghanistan in 2001 that removed the Taliban placed a friendly pro-Iranian government in Kabul, the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran led to a revival of the rhetoric of the early 1980s concerned with the export of the revolution alongside an active promulgation of a programme to acquire nuclear power, and the removal of Saddam in 2003 led to a new Iraqi government (and parliament) that has dominated by friends and clients of the Iranian state (many of whom were Shiʿis who spent time in exile in Iran). The August 2006 war in Lebanon confirmed for many the reality of the Iranian state’s flexing of its muscle beyond its borders and its powerful role in manipulating its proxies. To a large extent, the Shiʿi-Sunni tension in the Middle East and beyond is an expression of a proxy ideological conflict between two rival versions of public Islam promoted by Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Consistently since 2005 and 2006 Arab leaders especially in the Gulf have expressed concern over this aggrandisement of Iranian power, not least because of the basic assumption that their own Shiʿi communities (which in the case of Bahrain is still – just about – the majority of the citizens of the state) constitute a fifth-column, an ‘Iranian’ horde amongst them, ready to open the gate to welcome the invading Iranian armies. That such discourse is irresponsible is clear given the affect it has on people who are then subject to discrimination, harassment and violence, with the implicit and at times explicit support of the state, most notably in the case of Saudi Arabia. But the attitude of the Shiʿi communities towards the state, no doubt due to the successful acceptance of the nation-state even when it excludes them by explicitly denying any pluralistic notion of citizenship, remains remarkably non-belligerent. Perception often trumps reality in this sense. The loyalty of the Shiʿa is consistently tested: Hosni Mubarak in his strange outburst in April 2006 claimed that the majority of the Shiʿa were loyal first to Iran. As the cultural critic Nader Kadhim has shown in the case of Bahrain, the discourse of loyalty and treachery is far too simplistic when aligned with sectarian affiliation: the simplistic equation of Sunni with loyal subject and Shiʿi with rebel is belied by the evidence. Similarly one prominent Shīrāzī activist in the Gulf said in an interview with me in January 2009, people often confuse the influence of ideas with political loyalty. Even if one supports the role of ʿulema in government (an important aspect of the theory of wilāyat al-faqīh), that does not entail loyalty to Iran; in fact, both in Bahrain and in Iraq the position often comes with a staunch suspicion of Iran if not outright hostility. The political landscape of loyalty and dissent in Bahrain is far more variegated.

But the new ‘threat’ is about much more than Iran. The key factor, particularly for the Gulf, is in fact Iraq and the new Iraqi government. In fieldwork interviews in Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq in 2008 and 2009, it was clear to me that Shiʿi (often Islamist) politics has taken a more activist turn because they have seen what is possible in Iraq. The bolder claims and statements made by opposition figures in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia (in the latter case the events of February 2009 and the ‘Nimr’ affair in ʿAwāmiyya), in contexts in which their communities are severely disadvantaged by those states, allies and clients of the American and British states in particular, are clearly a direct result, as they themselves admitted, of events in Iraq. The Shiʿi rise to power expressed by the United Iraqi Alliance (al-iʾtilāf al-muwaḥḥid al-ʿirāqī) in elections since 2005 has emboldened and encouraged them.

The wider regional issues and their policy implications are discussed in the two influential books by Vali Nasr (now a major policy player at the Council on Foreign Relations) and Yitzhak Nakash. These books in some ways pre-empted (encouraged?) the discourse of a Shiʿi threat in the Arab (Sunni) media. The assault of al-Qaraḍāwī in September 2008 (significantly during Ramaḍān) reveals the continuing conflation of the sorts of political and theological challenges that Shiʿi thought poses in a majoritarian Sunni context. In the vacuum of legitimate authority that exists in the Arab Middle East, any shift of allegiance and embrace of an alternative struggle against ‘imperialism’ is bound to disturb. Charismatic authority that appeals to the ‘Arab street’ is the greatest threat. The state does not seem to discuss between the embrace of Nasrallah as a symbol and a theological adherence to a doctrine. In some ways, the roots of this problem lie in the dual failures of medieval Sunni political thought and theology. First, authority in the theory of al-Ghazālī, Ibn Jamāʿa and al-Māwardī was seen as stemming from the successful deployment of power. Power defined the political order and not the successful promotion of justice in society. Legitimacy and authority were considered to be secondary to the naked use of power in pursuit of defining the community within particular set parameters, and then objectifying heretics as those who would not be accommodated. The construction of heresy, the process of heretication, was central to the legitimation of power. Second, they often were incapable (or unwilling) to distinguish adequately between heresy and political dissent and confused the two. A radical misreading of early history meant that the tax rebellion known as the ridda was defined as heresy, while the theological dissent of the Khawārij was primarily seen as an issue of political rebellion. A dystopian assumption prevailed with an associated distrust of the human. In response, various forms of Shiʿi Islam posed an intellectual challenge because of a clear notion of legitimacy, underpinned by the charisma of the family of the Prophet, and a utopian and even messianic notion of how proper governance should be established rooted in justice. In the present scenario, the political power of Shiʿi state and non-state agents is conflated and confused with the missionary aspects of faith. This confusion is most clearly at play in Egyptian public discourse. Of course, the real worry for Mubarak and other authoritarian rulers is not that their populations will convert to Shiʿi Islam as a faith but that they will adopt it as a political identity, empathising with Sayyid Ḥasan Naṣrallāh and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nasr sees the tension and competition between rival Shiʿi and Sunni conceptions of power and authority to be the key dynamic for change in the Middle East and indeed the wider Muslim world. This poses a problem for Shiʿi political actors because it places them in the role of being perceived as agitators promoting a neo-conservative agenda in the region, as was precisely the problem with elements of the Iraqi Shiʿi opposition pre-2003 embracing the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. As Nasr sees it, there are opportunities for both sides. For far too long US policy in the Middle East has been mediated through Sunni authoritarian regimes. The change in Iraq in 2003 signals a possible shift. Identity politics is here to stay. What he is not arguing for is the promotion of sectarian conflict (although it may well have been seen in such terms). Competing concepts of authority and the state are healthy aspects of politics which is after all concerned with managing difference. Violence is the breakdown of such politics. Nasr’s concern in the book is to explain to a general American audience who the Shiʿa are, what effect the Iraq war has and how the conflicts will shape an emerging new Muslim world. But the delicate balance between description and prescription is a difficult one to sustain. Certainly, his work has been read as being more prescriptive and policy-oriented, not least because of his professional role.

The nine chapters of the book move from a basic account of the Shiʿi faith and the development of Shiʿi political thought, through to the modern period and the failure of secular and socialist nationalisms coupled with the competition of ‘fundamentalisms’ both Iranian since 1979 and Wahhabi sponsored by the Saudi state, played out in proxy conflicts in locations such as Pakistan. The final few chapters focus on Iraq and the impact of Iraq as an Arab Shiʿi state with a friendly Iran on its borders. Writing towards the end of 2006, the afterword focuses on the triumvirate of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shiʿi government in Iraq post-Samarra and after the death of Zarqawi, and Iran in the ascendency under Ahmadinejad. The height of the sectarian violence and the war for Baghdad was still to come. At that point, Nasr raises the question of whether the constitutionalist politics of Sayyid Sīstānī in Iraq will prevail or whether the Hezbollah model will dominate Shiʿi politics. This was and remains a policy concern for the US and for Britain as well as for the regional actors. Allied to this question is the fear of radicalisation among the Shiʿa and how Shiʿi intellectual figures and actors can be deployed against the problem of Sunni radicalisation. This is misleading and dangerous policy. Given the vehement anti-Shiʿism of the jihādī (and salafī) spectrum in which the talk of the Iranian, ṣafawī, rāfiḍī enemy within is the first one to attack, it is difficult to see how policy can engage. Besides, US policy towards Iran vitiates against this as does the unwillingness of authoritarian Sunni regimes to make alliances with the Shiʿi communities against the jihādīs.

Such policy concerns also set up a false dichotomy of quietism and activism, based on the assumption that Shiʿi political history has fluctuated between these two poles. If anything, Iraq demonstrates that this is not the case and that activism is often a function of the context – the shifting roles and positions of Sayyid Muqtadā al-Ṣadr is a case in point.
What one misses in the political analysis is that Shiʿi intellectual discourse is not primarily minoritarian. In fact, it is based on the notion that the Shiʿi ʿulema are the true guardians and custodians of Islam. This basic fact is missed by many analysts. Reform and intellectual development will not come from jihādī circles.

Nakash’s book represents a descriptive recognition of this. The policy focus on Sunni radicals has led to a serious neglect of policy towards Shiʿi actors in the Middle East and this is more acute since 2003. His book is in many ways similar to Nasr’s although he is more optimistic about the policy implications of the Shiʿa allying themselves with US interests in the Middle East. This has not happened, not only because the surge for democratisation was quickly jettisoned as policy, but also because a suspicion towards US intentions is rife among Shiʿi political actors in Iran, Lebanon and Gulf (and even in Iraq where anti-Americanism is a feature even of the governing parties such as Maliki’s Daʿwa Party). The strength of Nakash’s work, following on from his earlier book on Iraq, is to identify the Arabic discourses and place Iraq at the centre of the debate on Shiʿi politics shifting the emphasis away from Iran. He is quite correct to focus on the role of history and memory as key components of identity and conflict and draws out the main contours of Arab Shiʿi communities in Lebanon and the Gulf. Written somewhat earlier than Nasr, Nakash sees Iraq as critical either to a serious shift in legitimacy based on constitutional arrangements (and the hero of the book is clearly Sīstānī) or a descent into civil war. We have witnessed both, especially in Iraq. The question that many have is what impact does this have on communities in the Gulf and the sporadic rioting and violence since 2008 in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia alongside the electoral successes of Shiʿi parties in the Kuwaiti elections of 2009 suggests that the two track development of political relations remains the case. A serious consideration of Shiʿi politics in the present necessarily needs to refocus on Iraq but also to consider more widely the communities in the Arab world and beyond. Nakash limits his study to the former, but one quibble with Nasr is the weakness of his analysis of South Asian Shiʿi communities (including Afghanistan) which given his previous research is quite inexcusable. Studies on contemporary Shiʿi Islam in South Asia remains academically a rather weak field. Since arguably South Asia hosts the largest communities of the Shiʿa, this lacuna and academic weakness is deplorable.

Interest in the Shiʿi question is not merely the concern of European academics. More recently the Nasr, Ibrahim and Nakash have all been translated into Arabic by Dār al-Sāqī. They have also published a number of relevant monographs and collections in Arabic particularly concerned with the development of politics in Iraq and in the Gulf. These include one collection focused on the so-called Sunni-Shiʿi problem in the Middle East, the subject of a Chatham House conference in the summer of 2008. What is striking is the new literature which is being produced by Shiʿi intellectuals relating to their communities particularly in Iraq and the Gulf. London has for some time been a major centre for the exchange of ideas and the presence of Shiʿi oppositions and their activities through the Gulf Club, the Abrar Foundation and other organisations provides the forum for debate of ideas and shifts in positions and policies.

A key member of these diasporic politics is Fouad Ibrahim, a major thinker and member of the former Iṣlāḥiyya in Saudi Arabia who has spent many years in exile in London. Ibrahim’s book is the first serious work in a European language on the Shiʿa of Saudi Arabia. It follows a groundbreaking work on the topic in Arabic by his friend and colleague in the Saudi Shiʿi opposition, Ḥamza al-Ḥasan which was published in London and Beirut in the early 1990s in two volumes. Ibrahim’s work is a slightly revised doctoral dissertation from London University (SOAS) and is an insider’s account of the development of Shiʿi oppositionism in Saudi Arabia, and in particular its links with the Shīrāziyya political networks that arose out of Iraq. Of course, the political shift post-1979 was towards a more Iran-oriented politics of encouraging the export of the revolution and the key ideological doctrine of the authority of the jurist (wilāyat al-faqīh) associated with the movement that became known as Hezbollah al-Hijaz. In seven chapters, Ibrahim begins with a history of the Shiʿa in the Eastern Province, one that is quite contested, and he does well to indicate some of these. The basic fact that no one can agree on how many Shiʿa are in Saudi Arabia is a problem that affects policy. He then traces the history of Shiʿi activism as a response to Saudi state repression, examining the early impact of Daʿwa in the region and work of the Shīrāziyya in promoting revolutionary ideals leading to the troubled 1980s. The 1990s and beyond signals an approach towards accommodation as the revolutionary leaders Shaykh Ḥasan al-Ṣaffār and Tawfīq al-Sayf moved towards a more conciliatory position. The work ends with a few speculations about the impact of Iraq post-Saddam, but this is a topic that requires a more careful investigation. Clearly, as the events of February 2009 and other flashpoints before suggest, the impact of Iraq has been a source of encouragement for the more radical Shiʿi opposition exemplified by Shaykh Nimr al-Nimr and Khalāṣ led by Ḥamza al-Ḥasan in London and expressed online through the Shīrāzī website al-Rāṣid. Ibrahim’s book is not a critical examination; it is in many ways a vital primary source for understanding the role and positions of Saudi Shiʿi intellectuals. A consistent feature, and one finds this among other opposition intellectuals in the Gulf, is the insistence that the treatment of the Shiʿa and their response are not expressions of primordial Sunni-Shiʿi hatreds; rather, the political situation is the result of tensions between ruling Sunni elites and Shiʿi subjects. However, state policy is expressed in a salafī idiom and the government has done little to curb anti-Shiʿi excesses of the salafī ʿulema and their media outlets, taking advantage of the discourse of a Shiʿi threat. No doubt most Shiʿi Saudis want a normalisation of their identity but it is difficult to see how the question of loyalty can be postponed as long as the Saudi state refuses to internalise the forms of pluralism that it has been espousing in the last few years on the international stage for political expediency.

The simple choice often imposed is that the Shiʿi opposition in the Gulf has either to find accommodation with the rulers of their state and buy into a system of quasi-representative politics (although in practice this is rarely a serious step towards constitutional politics) or to continue the revolutionary and rejectionist position articulated by the Shīrāziyya in the 1970s with the Organisation of the Islamic Revolution (Munẓamat al-thawra al-Islāmiyya) established by Shaykh Ḥasan al-Ṣaffār and Shaykh Tawfīq al-Sayf. The former tendency in Bahrain is represented by al-Wefaq and their engagement in the assembly and in politics since 2004 following the National Pact of 2002 and amnesties of those involved in political activism. In Saudi Arabia, it is represented more recently by Shaykh Ḥasan al-Ṣaffār who embarked on the accommodationist path with the publication in 1990 of his influential work al-Taʿaddudiyya wa-l-ḥurriyya fī-l-Islām (Pluralism and Freedom in Islam). More recently, al-Ṣaffār has written a work that tries to articulate a path between the exigencies of sectarian and national politics, and he has already dealt with the question of how the Shiʿa ‘fit’ within a kingdom whose identity is so staunchly salafī. Those advocating direct action in Bahrain include al-Ḥaqq led by Ustād Ḥasan Mshaymaʿ and Khalāṣ led by Ḥamza al-Ḥasan based in London. But there is a sense of a false dichotomy here. A constitutionalist approach would benefit the opposition more and seek wider participation and alliances against the basic injustices of a monarchical absolutism in the Gulf, drawing upon secular and Sunni liberal opinions and activists. Tawfīq al-Sayf’s path from revolutionary politics has taken the form of a serious engagement with political thought, making sense of the possibilities of Shiʿi political philosophy and the implications of Iranian reformist policies and intellectual shifts for Shiʿi communities in the Gulf and beyond.

These wider regional dimensions and the role of the Shīrāziyya in them is also the focus of a more recent volume by Laurence Louër. She examines the regional impact of Iraq and rather neglects the Iranian politics arising out of the Hezbollah tendency that is difficult to quantify in Bahrain and Kuwait. Shiʿi politics in the Gulf has to an extent always been lead by events and debates beyond their shores: first, it was Iraqi politics and the Daʿwa, then the Iranian revolution and the Shīrāziyya, and now arguably we are seeing a return to a competition between Iranian led ideas and organisations and those looking more towards Iraq. Mere use of the symbolism of Khamenei and Iran does not entail loyalty to Iranian politics. The importance of Louër’s analysis lies in the re-orientation of the Shiʿi question in the Gulf to links with Iraq, historically significant with the Iraqi Daʿwa Party which established cadres in the Gulf in the early 1970s, through Shaykh ʿĪsā Qāsim and Shaykh Sulaymān al-Madanī in Bahrain, and the Shīrāziyya through the work of Sayyid Hādī al-Mudarrissī and his Karbala origin network. These transnational and yet localised networks remain prominent in the contemporary Gulf and it is of significance that the present Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki is a Daʿwa-led coalition government.

It is often said that the politics of wilāyat al-faqīh in the Middle East is organisationally led by two figures in two locations: Shaykh ʿĪsā Qāsim acts as Khamenei’s representative in the Gulf (and as such is paramount over other important figures such as Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hādī al-Faḍlī based in Dammām in Saudi Arabia), and Sayyid Ḥasan Naṣrallāh in Lebanon. Shaery-Eisenlohr’s anthropologically informed volume pursues the Iranian-Lebanese link in greater detail as a way of understanding Lebanese politics and society and the wider impact of Iran in the Middle East. In many ways, the Lebanese context is the most interesting and relevant to other multicultural spheres such as those in the diaspora.

She takes up a critical theme in the work of Louër, namely how to reconcile local and national concerns and negotiations on identity with transnational networks and affiliations. Given the nature of minority status of the Shiʿa in the Middle East lacking a state (or at least one espousing the political cause of the Shiʿa before Iran became such an entity in 1979), transnationalism was always a strong feature of Shiʿi communities. But just as globalisation has made transnationalism somewhat more normal and accessible, those Shiʿi movements such as Hezbollah that are seen as international actors have had to respond increasingly to local concerns. The shift from a revolutionary resistance movement to a politically normalised player on the Lebanese scene has come about due to the demands of the context as the Shiʿa have moved from the margins to the centre, confronting the cultural biases of the urbane non-Shiʿi Lebanese. Shaery-Eisenlohr does a good job of emphasising the significance of such cultural factors. While a series of recent books have analysed the rise to political awareness of the Shiʿa in Lebanon since the 1920s, she focuses on two themes which comprise two parts of the book. The first analyses the creation of Shiʿi nationalism within Lebanon as a modular form of Maronite nationalism (also a minority in an Arab context), and the creation of a discourse that links piety, belonging and cultural citizenship among the Shiʿa as manifestations of what Usama Makdisi has called the culture of sectarianism in Lebanon. What emerges from her study is the perceptions among the Lebanese and even among the Shiʿa tend to be rather caricaturised. Iranians are considered to be pious, political hezbollahis and resented as external interference; Khatami-style reformists are not the first who come to mind. Others have commented on how liberal and reformists voices in Lebanon, while exhibiting some influences of the Iranian reformists, tend to reflect local exigencies. Faḍlallāh’s open-handed and open-minded jurisprudence is an example of this given the assault upon his integrity and credentials by the Qum juristic establishment.

Perhaps this is the main point that the author is making: that we need to disaggregate when discussing the Shiʿa either globally or within a national context. Any talk of a Shiʿi crescent begs the question: which notion of the Shiʿi political? Sīstānī or Khamenei? Hezbollah or Soroush? The problem thus with sectarianism is that it becomes self-fulfilling; in the quest for find sectarian politics and conflicts we inevitably confirm them.