In an attempt to
understand the role of religion in the public sphere as an inspiration for the
integration and complementarity of citizens and communities, I offer thoughts
on some of the philosophical reasoning that is required, focusing on the major
issue of an Islamic theology of pluralism.[1]
While I do not adhere to the notion that conflict in our contemporary world is
primarily religious in nature, I am also not convinced that religious people
can provide a theological solution to conflict.[2]
Conflicts, like much else in life, are neither monocausal nor monosoluble. Similarly,
family resemblances among the Abrahamic faiths require that we recognise the
extent of the common grounds, common mutualities of trust but also common
challenges that people of Abrahamic faiths share in the contemporary world.[3]
But clearly, people of faith do need to articulate reasons for co-operation,
for mutual respect and compassion to live fruitful and fulfilling lives in this
world. My argument will proceed from knowledge to being and then onto ethics,
not necessarily indicating this as a foundationalist order of causality but to
save the appearances of much of the Islamic philosophical and theological
traditions that begin with how we know and proceed to who we were and where we
are going – the whence, what and whither of the famous saying attributed to the
cousin and successor to the Prophet, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib when he was asked about
the essence of wisdom.
I: Knowledge and Truth
We live in a world
of mutually contradictory truth claims; peer epistemic pressure and anxiety dominate,
predicated upon the basic notion that each of us is capable of providing a
rational account for our beliefs and that we take our truth claims seriously.[4]
For many, this is the basic reason why we ought to hold a relativistic concept
of truth and to embrace pluralism.[5]
While many theological approaches to truth seem to be predicated on the notion
that propositions about the nature of God or the world or humanity are
predicted on their correspondence to some reality, these approaches would lead
to an even more heightened anxiety. One possible response articulated by the
contemporary Iranian thinker ʿAbdol-Karim Soroush is to make a distinction,
drawing upon John Hick, between the religious truth an sich and our understanding of it.[6]
However, a more pragmatic approach to truth could also be useful: the Qurʾan’s
recognition of difference as a basic social fact, which is of no consequence,
only privileges the moral as a mark of distinction and not the epistemological
(al-Ḥujurāt verse 43). Similarly, the famous poet Rūmī expresses this
perspectival pragmatism and lack of understanding through the famous Buddhist
parable of the blind men and the elephant. Mutuality actually assists us in
understanding – and pragmatism may well be the best approach to epistemic
pluralism.
II: Ontology of persons
One of the
fundamental features of modern life is the desire to be true to oneself, to
seek authentic being that is predicated on the individual’s exclusive, introspectively
determined personhood.[7]
This notion is based on the idea that each of us possesses a basic autonomy and
ability to choose and assert our will, unencumbered by processes of coercion –
thus, negative liberty becomes one of the foundational myths of our time. A
further problem with such a notion of using the inner self as a guide for moral
agency (apart from the wider philosophical debate about whether such a self
exists and acts as the ground for moral agency), is that one finds any exercise
of morality lapsing into subjectivism and emotivism.[8]
The converse of
this liberally grounded notion of an atomistic autonomy is the communitarian
insight that in fact we are selves embedded in contexts and communities and
that our personhood, identity and ability to exercise moral agency is deeply
attached to those contexts in which we find ourselves.[9]
The danger with this position is that we see individuals purely in terms of
their membership of such groups and therefore consider both religious and
political relationships to exist between those groups: the personhood of the
individual is therefore dissolved in an extended corporate personhood of the
community.[10] Autonomy
and selfhood are multilogically determined and socially embodied. We need a
philosophy not so much of the ‘I’ but of the ‘We’ in which the ‘I’ does not
dissolve but is nurtured and nurtures the moral impulses of the ‘We’. Muslim
societies need to appreciate the need for balancing the individual and the
community in these terms and to deal with the non-Muslim other at both these
levels as well. The theological traditions of Islam address the individual as a
person with obligations to fulfil moral agency (taklīf), but they also address persons as believers with mutual
ties and obligations (ayyuhā l-ladhīn
āmanū) and as humans (ayyuhā l-nās).
ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib summarised this dual-level mutuality when he is reported to
have said: ‘People are of two kinds: either your brothers in faith or your
brothers in humanity’. The social play
and interaction of everyday life is not about the relationships between minds
or between disembodied selves but between real persons in real mutual
situations.
III: Religiously-inspired
humanism
So where does
religion impinge in this open, social and public sphere upon the ontology of
mutual personhood? It is perhaps not too great a generalisation to argue that
religious ethics often concern the moral psychology of persons: our selfhood
emerges and is negotiated in the public sphere, and our morality enacted on the
basis of what we are. If modern, post-Enlightenment ethics is primarily
concerned with the value one ascribes to the act, then most religious ethics is
concerned with the person. Both scripture and the philosophical traditions of
Islam discuss the modes of human becoming, the life of a self that comes into
existence with a body to define the person and the human, traverses and
develops in an almost unlimited manner in this world existence and continue the
process of renewing and becoming with the death of the body, with its
resurrection and with the further resurrections and lives of the self in the
afterlife. The Safavid thinker Mullā Ṣadrā describes these processes of
becoming of mutual personhood, focusing on the individual but recognising
mutuality in the important introduction to his Qurʾanic exegesis, precisely
because the process of reading scripture is a means to self-becoming.[11]
The act of reading
the Qurʾan is therefore a ‘reading act’ which has both lectionary and
illectionary aspects. The illectionary has the force of reading as a spiritual
practice in which the words and utterances strike the heart and have the effect
of self-transformation leading one to realise one’s mutuality.[12]
The lectionary is the consistent reading of the exhortation to the good: for
the human rooted in a religious consciousness to do good, to seek good and to
cooperate for and in the good: ‘.[13]
The good cannot be achieved by the individual nor even just by a small group
but rather through mutuality and cooperation: the Qurʾan exhorts competing with
one another for the good in the context of recognition of religious diversity
(al-Māʾida verse 48). It also exhorts people to cooperate for the good and not
to cooperate for evil (al-Māʾida verse 2). The exhortation to the good and to
justice is complemented with the disavowal of evil and of injustice – again in
the famous statement of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib: ‘Be a support for the oppressed and
always challenge the oppressor’. This religiously-inspired humanism is about
activating the human imagination to see the other as the self.[14]
This moral mandate for procedural pluralism has roots in the classical period
in what Lenn Goodman has classified as ‘Islamic humanism’.[15]
IV: Political theology and
accommodation
An important
corollary of this humanism is to account for the possibility of states to
recognise and allow for religiously-inspired public policy and to accommodate what
are sometimes called theocratic communities within the public sphere as long as
they agree to certain ground rules, whether identified as the Rawlsian
‘original position’ or within the rubric of the overlapping consensus within
deliberate rational, public discourse required of thinking citizens.[16]
However, this entails retaining a basic liberal architecture of the polity and
also assumes that we define faith primarily in terms of belief, very much a
central dogma of post-enlightenment study of religion. An ethics and public
theology of mutuality needs to be more than placing one’s beliefs in the same
basket as others and engaging in rational debate in the public: it must also
allow for the practice of faith, of ritual engagement and of sharing of experience
which far too often we find uncomfortable.
[1] Two useful collections of
Muslim theological positions on pluralism are Roger Boase (ed), Islam and Global Dialogue: Religious
Pluralism and the Pursuit of Peace, Aldershot: Ashgate Publications, 2005,
and Mohammad Khalil (ed), Between Heaven
and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
[2] William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular
Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
[3] Cf. Paul Heck, Common Ground: Islam, Christianity, and
Religious Pluralism, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009.
[5] Manuel Garcia-Carpintero
and Max Kolbel (ed), Relative Truth,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
[8] Most famously critiqued in
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd
edition, London: Duckworth, 1981.
[10] This danger within
communitarianism is highlighted in Javeed Alam, ‘Public sphere and democratic
governance in contemporary India’, in Rajeev Bhargava, Amiya Kumar Bagchi &
R. Sudarshan (eds), Multiculturalism,
Liberalism and Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 323-47.
[11] Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-karīm, ed. Muḥsin
Bīdārfar, Qum: Intishārāt-i Bīdār 1987, I: 2-3.
[12] Cf. Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive
Thinking in Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999. ‘Reading act’ – analogy with ‘speech act’.
[13] One of the best arguments
in this light and with a view to pluralism is Abdulaziz Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; idem, ‘Advancing religious pluralism
in Islam’, Religion: Compass 4.4
(2010), 221-33
[16] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971; cf. Lucas Swaine, The Liberal Conscience: Politics and Principle in a World of Religious
Pluralism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006; Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search
for an Overlapping Consensus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
