Islamophobia and Biopolitics in the Age of Empire

Text of a lecture I gave back in November at SOAS:

INTRODUCTION

We live in the age of Empire, of clashes of power and identity politics, of self-affirmations and subjugations, and above all in an age marked by the most violent forms of othering, manipulating and controlling lives through the violence of our actions and our words. If politics is the management of conflict but ultimately of war by ‘other means’, then its most extreme form is biopolitics, governmental and power-dominated forms of total imposition on humans reducing them to their ‘bare life’, stripping them of their rational and political agency and advocating the precariousness of their passivity. The late Michel Foucault, who did much to advocate a new style of politics by diagnosing and excavating the modern problem of the self located in its bare zoology, famously inverted the Aristotelian maxim in his magisterial History of Sexuality:

For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question [Foucault 1976: 188].

Biopolitics and the exercise of biopower is the critical context within which to place any understanding of the twin phenomena of radical and violent othering that we call Islamophobia and Anti-semitism, as forms of subjugating the bare lives of Jews and Muslims. As such, it is not of primary theological concern with apologies for the title of this panel and indeed to my colleagues here. But then as the late Jacques Derrida and others have noticed, contemporary intellectual life does not compartmentalise theology to the sole concern of religious studies but to forms of inquiry that have critical relevance to philosophy and indeed politics [de Vries 1999]. Confronting Islamophobia and Anti-semitism should therefore be about confronting biopolitics and seeking means for a reinvigoration of active politics which promotes human agency. Today, I propose to do precisely that by analysing the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s use of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in the construction of his own theory of the bare life of humans and the state of exception which defines the normativity of political life, one in which crucially the concentration camp, the most extreme reality of Anti-semitism and symbol of Islamophobia is no longer the exception. In particular, I will analyse his groundbreaking study Remnants of Auschwitz, his notion of radical agency that derives from the examination of the notion of the ‘Muselmann’ in the camps, and his concept of the witness and memory of the events. Overcoming radical discrimination is entangled with the need for communities to bear witness to their histories and to carry their voices and silences across generations. Islamophobia and anti-semitism are challenges and problems for political thinkers and it is in that context that I want to examine these phenomena.

BIOPOLITICS

But before we move on with Agamben, we need to return to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and sovereignty to understand the philosophical context. Although Agamben draws upon Foucault’s notions of biopolitics and biopower, Foucault’s own rejection of sovereignty is quite significant. He wishes to transcend traditional notions of sovereignty that are implicated in the concept of European monarchies and the nation-state, in which sovereignty defines legitimacy, acts as arbitration above points of conflict and embodies law and standpoints of judgement [Joseph Rouse in Gutting (ed) 1994: 100–101]. Foucault’s concern as articulated in his History of Sexuality is that ‘in thought and political analysis, we have still not cut off the head of the king’ because the theory of sovereignty remained central as an ideology of right and as the organisation of jurisprudence [Foucault 2003: 36]. Power is exercised on the dual foundation of sovereignty and the mechanics of discipline [Foucault 2003: 38]. Sovereignty cannot deal with multiplicity of powers but seeks unity [Foucault 2003: 43]. Later on, once his rejection of sovereignty was complete, he became more interested in domination than sovereignty and questions of legitimacy [Foucault 2003: 46]. The politics of domination and bare life raises the issue of civilizational struggles, about which we hear so much these days.
Biopower for Foucault is central to the exercise of the state’s sovereign power:

The very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill: it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life. [Foucault 2003: 240].

It was critically in the 18th century that we saw a shift from the right to take life or let someone live to one of ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die because of the nature of the social contract and the rise of modes of political techniques of control [Foucault 1976: 186; Sublon 2005: 153; cf. Agamben 1999b: 159].
Biopolitics is therefore a discipline and power to reduce humans to mere life and biological processes and statistics.

Now that power is decreasingly the power of the right to take life, and increasingly the right to intervene to make live or once power begins to intervene mainly at this level in order to improve life by eliminating accidents, the random element, and deficiencies, death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too. [Foucault 2003: 248]

Foucault’s main point fits this within his notion that sovereignty is increasingly dead as a concept of legitimacy and is being replaced by discipline and regulatory power. Biopolitics draws upon the Greek distinction between two terms to render life: zoē and bios, the former denotes unqualified bare life, while the latter is the life of the citizen in the polis [Agamben 2000: 2].
This distinction lies at the heart of Western political thought for Agamben. He rejects Foucault historical genealogy of sovereignty and politics. He sees the world especially in the post-9/11 period as a permanent state of exception in which draconian anti-terrorism laws have reduced humans to their bare life, their zoē, devoid of agency and in which the sovereign power of the state is exercised and defined by its ability, drawing upon Carl Schmitt, to decide on the ‘state of exception’ [Agamben 2005a: 1]. Necessity, contingency, emergency powers, the Patriot Act and so forth are mere names for what classical jurists called the state of exception. The modern nation state, thus, has a biopolitical ‘vocation’. At the heart of his theory is the notion of the homo sacer, the Roman legal notion of human life which is included in the juridical order ‘solely in the form of its exclusion, that is, of its capacity to be killed’ [Agamben 1998: 8]. The paradox of life in modern states converges upon an ambiguity between the good life and the not-good life of Aristotelian politics, of recognising the freedom and happiness of citizens in their very subjugation. It is the nature of the modern even democratic nation state that:

the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as the originary political element and threshold of articulation between nature and culture [Agamben 1998: 181].

It was already in Homo Sacer that Agamben introduced the relationship between his theory of biopolitics and the concentration camp as the biopolitical paradigm of modernity and as the nomos of biopolitical space in the world [Agamben 1998: 119–88]. Significantly, Agamben argues that:

What happened in the camps so exceeds the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration. The camp is merely the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized [Agamben 1998: 166]

His interest therefore lies in the political structures that produce such a phenomenon and the types of agency and passivity expressed in that space. It is therefore to the camp that we now turn.

REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ – THE MUSELMANN AND THE WITNESS

One of Agamben’s most interesting and disturbing works is Remnants of Auschwitz. It is an extended commentary on the notion of testimony and the liminal region between humanity and inhumanity. The concentration camp expresses for Agamben a ‘space of exception’, a structure within which the state of exception (defined in terms of his understanding of sovereignty) is permanently realized. For Agamben, the camp is therefore the ultimate symbol and manifestation of biopolitics that reduces humans to their bare life:

Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to bare life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized – a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation [Agamben 2000: 40]

Any structure, therefore, that replicates such biopolitical objectification of humans is at the very least a virtual concentration camp. Some of his earliest notes on this topic were written in the early 1990s when camps did in fact reappear in the former Yugoslavia populated by, of course significantly, Muslims, humans stripped of every political status and indeed cultural affiliation except for their biological state and indeed their objectification as Muslim.
A number of theorists, following Heidegger, have commented upon the tendency within modernity, within the modern subject and its quest for technology and an interventionist notion of sovereign power to slide towards the limit of mechanised and planned violence that is genocide. During the furore over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1989, the Muslim intellectual and critic Shabbir Akhtar commented upon liberal modernity’s quest to dissolve difference by seeking scapegoats, comparing the image of the Jew in the Holocaust to the Muslim in contemporary Europe. He famously quipped, ‘The next time we see gas chambers in Europe, it will be no surprise to find Muslims in them’. This is a theme upon the notion of the experience of Muslims in Europe who find themselves within a police state, Nazi Germany being the limit of such a case.
It is, therefore, striking that in the work, Agamben’s hero in the quest for an ethics seeking the survival of memory and language is paradoxically the figure of the Muselmann in the camp. Drawing among the testimony of Primo Levi among others, the term Muselmann (Muslim) was used at Auschwitz to denote a passive prisoner who had given up, had no consciousness or conscience, was despised and not an object of sympathy, and was a mere staggering corpse, a bundle of physicality of no consequence [Agamben 1999b: 41–43]. More importantly, he had no agency, no dignity, and was not a survivor who could testify as he was devoid of his humanity. This state of being the Muslim is the limit case, the exception, the Orientalised and objectified Other. Survivors and witnesses speak for the inhuman Muselmann and resent it [Agamben 1999b: 120]. Following Foucault, Agamben argues that racism is the process by which biopower intervenes and marks breaks within the biological continuum of humanity and reintroduces the principle of war into the system of ‘making live’ [Agamben 1999b: 84]. Yet drawing on Levi, it is only the Muselmann as the inhuman who is truly human, a paradox as the witnesses are the mere remnants; at the same time, it is the human being who can survive being a human being [Agamben 1999b: 133]. In this sense, witnesses ‘were’ Muselmanner. Thomas Carl Wall has commented on the central concern of Agamben with inverting passivity; for example, an ontological paradox for Agamben is that a thing is simultaneously itself and its qualities without being the same thing as its qualities [Agamben 1993b: 97–8; Wall 1999: 19]; similarly presence and absence, image and reality [Wall 1999: 153]. The Muselmann is therefore despised and honoured, passive yet active. While all strove to remain human, the Muselmann was seen as having abdicated humanity and dignity. In the fracturing of humanity and subjectivity, he emerges as a figure that is fully human and in control of his subjectivity. Dignity and autonomy were not critical for the retention of humanity; as Agamben says,

Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent. And the ‘ultimate sentiment of belonging to the species’ cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity [Agamben 1999b: 69].

It was a state of wretchedness, a final one of complete dehumanisation. And yet because of its existence, a clear and key testimony and articulation of humanity in the face of complete dehumanisation.
But what kind of testimony or witness does the Muselmann represent? For Agamben, testimony is the relation between the sayable and unsayable, but ‘archive’, to which it is juxtaposed, is a system of relations between the said and unsaid [Agamben 1999b: 145]; this is analogous to the radical binaries that Agamben establishes in which the gap between the said and unsaid or rather between voice and language, and between the unwritten and the preface are articulated as key to understanding what we normally understand as philosophy of language or the politics of expression [Agamben 1993a: 6–8]. It also expresses a key feature of Agamben’s philosophy: the primacy and ambiguity of experience over its expression, of infancy over history, the ‘thing itself’ (in Platonic terms – see especially Agamben 1999c, chapter 1) over the manifest object, the deus absconditus over the deus revelatus, and of course of potentiality over actuality. Testimony is normally associated with survival, the ability to live to tell the tale, something which was not the privilege of the Muselmann. However, the Muselmann do the ultimate limit experience; it was his experience of inhumanity that provided the complete witness. On this point, Agamben quotes Primo Levi:

I must repeat: we, the survivors are not the true witnesses…We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority; we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch the bottom. Those who did…have not returned to tell about it, or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception [Agamben 1999b: 33].

Testimony therefore comes from the eye of the experience, not from the margins or even the outside. It concerns what can be said and what must be said.

CONCLUSION

There is little doubt that Agamben’s thesis of the state of exception and the homo sacer, and indeed his assertion of the camp as the nomos of a biopolitical world is a hyperbole, indeed a distasteful one to some. We may also disagree vehemently with his post-humanism. I am not arguing that we need to accept it at face value; there are far too many undetermined and unexplained assumptions and wild assertions to consider his argument to be apodictical to use an Aristotelian term. However, the events of the last few years and the responses of states and indeed of those reacting against states in their own form of biopolitics by using their bodies as their only means of agency forces us to consider whether the shift in emphasis in politics away from subjectivity and democracy and towards objectification and the dehumanisations of citizens does require serious attention. Agamben cautions us against thinking that notions of sovereignty are obsolete, that we have moved beyond politics as power that objectifies and controls humans. I have tried to argue that confronting radical forms of subjugation, discipline and order and ultimately othering inherent in the forms of discrimination which we confront in these times and in the idiom of this conference necessitates a serious consideration of the political context in which we live, a consideration that means we not only think about our context and what it means for it to be political but also what it means for us to ‘live’ in the societies in which we live. What is the nature of our life, our power and ability to manipulate ourselves? How can we transcend processes of othering that force us to subjugate and control the other? If anything, Agamben shows us the most pessimistic image of a mirror placed before ourselves. It is the work of political theorists and indeed theologians to replace the mirror of pessimism with a more optimistic one that shows human realization and aspiration at its best, a mirror that allows us to see ourselves in others and realize a co-operative common humanity that defeats the violence of othering.

Mystical hermeneutics?

It is a rare event indeed when one comes across a study that radically changes our field and makes such a telling contribution by proffering a hitherto unknown text and translation and a masterful introduction and contextualisation of the work. Mayer has presented us with such a work that not only provides us with more evidence for the Shiʿi (even Ismāʿīlī) tendencies of the theologian Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153, who was previously considered to be a doyen of the Khurasani school of the Ashāʿira), but also is an excellent example of how to understand the processes of exegesis and hermeneutics of the Qurʾanic text in classical Islam. The Qurʾanic Studies Series convened by the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) is thus to be congratulated for making a further contribution to our understanding of this critical field within the study of Islam.
Scholars at least since the 1950s (and the publication of some texts and studies by Sayyid Muḥammad Riḍā Jālālī Nāʾinī in Persian) have been familiar with the Ismāʿīlī affiliation of Shahrastānī. In more recent times, Diane Steigerwald’s study of some short texts and her monograph (La pensée philosophique et théologique de Shahrastānī m. 548/1153, Saint-Nicholas: Presse de l’Université de Laval, 1997), and Mayer and Madelung’s edition and translation of Shahrastānī’s anti-Avicennan philosophical polemic Muṣāraʿat al-falāsifa (Struggling with the Philosopher) provided key textual points of evidence. The publication of the first part of his exgesis here, therefore, provides further evidence. The Arabic edition based on the Tehran unicum was edited in two volumes by Muḥammad ʿAlī Ādharshab and published by Mīrāth-i Maktūb in Tehran: the thousand page work covers an important introduction and exegesis of sūrat al-Fātiḥa and al-Baqara. The present volume reprints Ādharshab’s first volume covering the introduction and the commentary on al-Fātiḥa. The volume therefore comprises a short foreword by Professor Hermann Landolt (emeritus of McGill and one of the outstanding specialists in the intellectual history of the Islamic East and of Ismāʿīlī thought in particular), a masterful introduction by Mayer, the translation of the exegesis of al-Fātiḥa, some excellent and scholarly endnotes and bibliography, and the Arabic text and indices at the end. One small quibble which I often have with the IIS’s publications concerns whether it would be preferable for them to follow the model of the Islamic Texts in Translation Series at Brigham Young University Press and provide the Arabic on the page facing the translation to facilitate easier bi-lingual reading and study.
The work, as I indicated, makes three contributions: first, it provides further evidence for the Shiʿi affiliation of Shahrastānī and tries to explain how Shiʿi taʾwīl and esoteric reading of the Qurʾanic text can coalesce – especially within a work that does not violate the exoteric reading of the text: in fact much of the introduction is taken up with a study of the collection of the Qurʾan within a broadly non-sectarian context while retaining the notion of a privileged qirāʾa associated with Imām ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib as Shiʿi exegetes have always held. Second, it offers a model for how one ought to translate and make sense of intricate exegetical scriptural reasoning – tafsīr is for many a deceptively simple genre of writing but it can be quite tricky to render into comprehensible, academic English. Third, Mayer offers some excellent advice and readings of what constitutes an esoteric reading of the Qurʾan (and takes up a theme which is to be developed in a volume edited by Annabel Keeler and myself on the theme with a contribution by Mayer, forthcoming in the same Qurʾanic Studies Series).
Turning to the introduction, Mayer first shows that the Ashʿarī school, in which Sharastānī was trained, was more than a simple mainstream Sunnī theological school of apologetics but rather also had important intersections with both Sufi circles in Khurasan and Shiʿi ones relating to the reading and study of the Qurʾan. In fact, in this sense, the book can be seen as offering some further evidence (as is clear in the new literature on al-Ghazālī and on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī on how the Ashʿarī school is more than meets the eye and far more than just what Abū-l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, Imām al-Ḥaramayn and Ibn al-Bāqillānī argued). To an extent, the study of Ashʿarism has traditionally suffered from a somewhat ahistorical approach that arises out of the construction of Sunnī orthodoxy in the modern period. Second, he makes some comments concerning the link between the Muṣāraʿa and the tafsir Mafātīḥ al-asrār (Keys to the Arcana) on the key theological issue of the nature of God. Third, he argues that the approach to the Qurʾan is decidedly Shiʿi, invoking the existing of a codex of Imām ʿAlī alongside the ʿUthmānic recension and insisting upon the variant readings available, but without denigrating the existing vulgate – in fact, here we do not find, like among some early Shiʿi and indeed non-Shiʿi authors, a position on the corruption of the text (taḥrīf) but rather a position found in Shiʿi ḥadīth and in the theological works of al-Ṣadūq (d. 991) onwards on the integrity of the text ‘between the covers’. Understanding that text, however, requires the Shiʿi affiliation and attachment to the household of the Prophet, one of the two weighty sources, along with the Qurʾan, as indicated in the famous ḥadīth of the Prophet. True understanding arises out of the encounter with the Imam, and the internalisation of the Imam’s teaching (tamaththul), as Mayer indicates, which was an Ismāʿīlī teaching of the period. However, on the face of it, it does seem to me that there is little in the attitude towards the Qurʾan and on its hermeneutics that is explicitly Ismāʿīlī as opposed to generically Shiʿi and this may be a result of the fact that most of Shahrastānī’s Shiʿi works were written for an Imāmī (Twelver) Shiʿi audience and patronage. This address is clear as often ḥadīth are cited from the Imāmī collection al-Kāfī of al-Kulaynī (d. 941). At the same time, the general Khurasani audience for whom Sunni authorities were still of relevance is present as well. Fourth, Mayer indicates four sets of complementary notions that lie at the heart of Shahrastānī’s hermeneutics and which he sources in Ismāʿīlī thought: the dynamic of creation/command (khalq/amr) that explains cosmogony, the balance between hierarchy (tarattub) and contrariety (taḍādd), the accomplished (mafrūgh) and inchoative (mustaʾnaf) that engages with vexing issues of human responsibility and divine knowledge, and standard hermeneutic of the general and specific. To this are added two sets of standard exegetical notions of the abrogated (mansūkh) and the abrogating (nāsikh), and the clear (muḥkam) and the ambiguous (mutashābih). What all of this reveals is the simple point about how the exegesis is formulated through the horizon of the reader’s understanding, the deployment of his training and his self to make sense of the scripture.
The translation of the exegesis itself is fluent and meaningful. Like other works of the period (Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt of al-Qushayrī, the Kashf al-asrār of Maybudī and the Majmaʿ al-bayān of al-Ṭabrisī come to mind), the commentary on each verse is divided into the reading, orthography, lexicography and semantics, and then finally comes the section on the arcana (asrār). As such, it is quite distinct from other Sufi tafāsir of Kāshānī or Rūzbihān Baqlī or even Shaykh ʿAlvān among others who dispense with the need to address the exoteric. Of course, for Shahrastānī, the esoteric is somewhat uprooted from its meaning without the presence of the exoteric, as indicated in a famous ḥadīth of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq.
Qurʾanic Studies, especially focusing on how the text is understood and what it had within the rich intellectual history of Muslims, is maturing. While others get bogged down into the polemics of the historicity of the text, its literary or theologically immaculate nature and so forth, the Qurʾanic Studies Series and others are making serious contributions to the method by which we can make sense of the text and draw upon the rich intellectual heritage that we have, which in our days cannot be simply and narrowly relegated to a particular tradition. The multivocality of the tafsīr tradition demands of us a similarly multilogical response. For this, the reading of works such as this commentary of Shahrastānī will be of immense value.

Hermeticism in Islam?

Unfortunately there is still far much by way of conjecture, innuendo, ahistoricity, ideology and basic guess-work in the study of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, at least in what passes for historical studies of these intellectual traditions. But as we have seen the serious study of intellectual history particularly in the Graeco-Arabic period and in classical Islamdom flourish, so too has attention upon those critical intersections between disciplines and bodies of knowledge. It is no longer the case that one can argue for the Neopythagorean roots of a particular intellectual tradition or make the case that the ‘esoteric’ doctrine of a thinker is due to his ‘hermeticism’. The publication of a revised version of Kevin van Bladel’s Yale doctoral dissertation is a wonderfully solid historical masterpiece that greatly contributes to our understanding of certain strands of intellectual transmission in the late antique Near East as well as disabusing us of many a myth about the presence of Hermes and hermeticism in classical Islamic learned culture. Hermetic manuscripts on the occult, on alchemy, on the esoteric doctrine of the soul of course abound, within collections of Sufis works and without; what is critical is to make sense of why they exist where they are found and a deeper sense of what constitutes the Arabic Hermes in the same way that we now understand far better the Arabic Plato and the Arabic Aristotle. The historical transmission of texts and ideas is of course not just an obsession of the positivist pedant but rather to avoid woolly thinking on cross-cultural relations and their possibilities, exigencies and lacunae. It is true that unless texts were available to translators and adaptors, they could not have emerged in an Arabic form; but we should not insist too much on strict historical orthographical trails since orality did figure as a medium of transmission (no doubt partly influenced by Platonic logocentrism) and texts sometimes disappeared and reappeared over the ages. Nonetheless, the story of how early Muslims appropriated Hermes is a case in point of how ideas and figures were taken from their Hellenic (or Hellenizing Near Eastern, or maybe even orientalising Hellenic) contexts and naturalisation within an Arabic idiom. Van Bladel rather carefully avoids the use of the terms Hermeticist and hermeticism because we have an absence of evidence of continuity of communities engaged in hermetic learning and practice from late antiquity into classical Islam.

Van Bladel’s study is divided into two parts, the former on the background and the intellectual formation of the Arabic Hermes located in the tripartite history of Islamic learned culture located in Hellenic late antiquity, Sasanian Iran, and those elusive Sabeans of Harran; the latter examines the shift from the concept of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-Hermes of the doxographies to the notion of Hermes-Idris as the Prophetic sage and teacher and the proliferation of wisdom sayings associated with him, some of which are extracted and adapted (though not many) from the Greek Hermetica, which in itself survives due to its existence with Gnostic corpora in late antique Egypt, not least the Nag Hammadi codices. What is, however, missing from this picture is one important element of what passed for Hermetic texts in Arabic, namely the alchemical and astrological (and generally occult) works that have interested Charles Burnett and his many students at the Warburg Institute in London for some years. The question which still remains to be considered is the relationship between the alchemical and the philosophical-mystical. Chapter one on the Hellenic heritage and the context of the translation movement does not actually tell us much about the transmission because we have so little evidence of direct translations from what we know as the Greek Corpus Hermeticum into Arabic. Chapter two moves onto the Sasanian context. The skill with which van Bladel demonstrates the existence of a middle Persian hermetica, primarily in alchemy and astrology shows the value of training in ancient Iranian languages for those studying late antiquity and early Islam. Chapter three on the Sabeans engages with a thorny debate on the transmission of modes of learning in late antiquity with the likes of Michel Tardieu arguing for a vibrant school in Syria that bore the Alexandrian tradition of Neoplatonism as well as hermeticism and which bridged the suppression of philosophy in the sixth century to its revival in ‘Abbasid Baghdad. It seems that Sabeans in Baghdad islamicized their doctrines and in pursuit of a prophet for their religious community and dispensation adopted Hermes. This may well have been one of the sources for the appropriation of Hermes into a ‘prophetic chain of philosophical initiation’. What emerges from part I is that there are elements of fragmentary evidence but unlike the transmission of Plato and Aristotle, little actual historical evidence from the Hellenic, Iranian and Syrian background to Islamic learned culture.

Part II engages with the construction of the Arabic Hermes. Chapter four deals with the confused understanding of Trismegistus and the idea that there were in fact three Hermeses. In fact, the early Muslims merely seemed to have perpetuated the notion that there were multiple Hermeses and did not misunderstand the term trismegistus as previous scholars argued. Once again the analysis is based on careful consideration of the texts. The final chapter analyses the prophetic appropriation of Hermes drawing on existing Judaeo-Christian patterns. Ismailis incorporated the prophetic teachings of Hermes as did compilers of wisdom sayings such as Mubashshir ibn Fatik. It is disappointing that so little of this chapter is devoted to the famous text the Zijr al-nafs which had widespread fame in philosophical and Sufis circles in medieval Islamdom. Ultimately van Bladel’s book seems like a prolegomenon – a solidly historical foundation on the basis of which a serious study of what constitutes ‘hermeticism’ in medieval thought needs to be undertaken.

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.