Exploring Critical islam: Muslims and their Religion in a Post-Islamist World

This article was released as part of the Singapore Middle East Papers series, published by the Middle East Institute at NUS
 
The term ‘critical Islam’ can mean a host of things and therefore needs to be qualified. Here it will be used to describe a strand of contemporary Muslim thinking arising  and developing both in parallel with–and in contrast to–what scholars of Islam from different academic disciplines refer to as the ‘Islamic Resurgence’ beginning in 1970s.The exponents of this other current are called turāthiyyūn, or ‘heritage thinkers’, because they do not take Islam as a narrowly defined and fixed set of doctrines and tenets, nor do they regard it as offering a set and concrete political model that works as a panacea against all the ills affecting Muslims and Muslim societies. Instead, they regard Islam as a civilizational concept with a rich legacy of religious, philosophical, and cultural expressions. This is not to imply that the advocates of political Islam, or Islamists, can’t be critical too. In fact, a case could be made that their views of the role of religion in human life refers to another meaning of ‘critical’; in the sense of considering it crucial or critically important to human felicity. However, rather than projecting Islam as an ideal, the heritage thinkers–depending on their disciplinary backgrounds–take religion as an idea or a social fact. 

The full text can be accessed by clicking on the image below

An intellectual History of the Contemporary Muslim World

An impressionist and anecdotal talk by yours truly about contemporary thinking in the Muslim World at Mahfil Ali Shi'a Ithna'ashari Community in Middlesex (SICM).

Critical Muslims: Cosmopolitans or Heretics?

I have managed to track down lengthy videos of two of the protagonists featured in Cosmopolitans and Heretics: the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi and the late Algerian-French historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun. Unfortunately, there does not seem to exist a comparable audiovisual impression of the third intellectual featured in the book, Nurcholish Madjid. Instead, I have included a recording of the fifth Nurcholish Madjid Memorial Lecture, entitled 'Marx or Machiavelli: Towards quality Democracy in Indonesia and America' of 2011, delivered by the American political scientist and Indonesianist, R. William Liddle. The lecture was organized by the Center for the Study of Religion and Democracy (PUSAD) of the Paramadina Foundation in Jakarta, and hosted by Paramadina University.

Documentary on Hasan Hanafi

 

Former presidential adviser and head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Jacques Attali, talks to Mohammed Arkoun.

 Nurcholish Madjid Memorial Lecture by R. William Liddle

For further readings on these three Muslim thinkers, check out the recommendations below:

WAGNER IN ARABIA: IS THE ARAB SPRING DOOMED?

Tunisian philosopher Mohamed Turki

The uncomparable German Qantara website covering the World of Islam again provides an interesting take on the dramatic changes that have been taking place in the Arabic-speaking parts of the Muslim world over the last year or so, by showcasing the views of thinkers and intellectuals who are often receiving far too little attention in the Western media. In an interview Tunisian philosopher Mohamed Turki offers his insight into the Arab Spring that began in his country with the 'Jasmin Revolution', only to turn into a hot and bloody Summer.

Turki sees a real danger that developments are only foreshadowing a Götterdämmerung or Wagnerian 'twilight of the gods'  as campaigns for democratization, respect for universal human rights standards, and more transparency of murky politics are brutally crushed.

In response to suggestions that what Palestinian-Lebanese historian Hisham Sharabi (1927-2005) has called 'neo-patriarchy' or French-Algerian scholar of Islam Mohamed Arkoun (1928-2010) referred to as 'dogmatically closed systems' remain resilient and resistant to change, Turki noted: 

The neo-patriarchal system – which may look modern from the outside, but is in fact patriarchal – holds fast to certain consolidated structures of rule and resists any change in the balance of political power. This is why these neo-patriarchal structures – which may seem modern, but are in fact nothing more than modernistic – remain a sham. It takes more than this to be modern. Being modern is a project that has many facets and necessitates many changes too. It begins with the rule of law, includes human rights and goes right up to economic, political and social structures, which should all be open. This is not the case with either neo-patriarchates or patriarchates.

Real progress can only be made by transforming the economic, social, and political spheres. Without that the status quo will persist and the political system will continue to remain immune to structural changes. There are also inter-cultural and intellectual dimensions to this process:

The most important thing is that we work together and not against each other. Interculturally and transculturally: these are the elements that bring us forward, not Manichaeism, thinking in terms of black and white or thinking in terms of opposites. Ultimately, the West is a product of historical developments, just as the Arab-Islamic cultural heritage is.

As a philosopher interested in existentialism, Turki has published a book on such interfaces between humanism and inter-cultural dialogue:

In a further elaboration of how to avoid or leave behind the age-old assumed dichotomy between East and West, notwitstanding his own reference to Kant's theory of 'man's emergence of self-incurred immaturity', Turki stresses the need for collapsing such binaries: 

I consider it necessary that we speak here of a process that carries humanity, that brings us forward in the spirit of a society where everyone is equal, is recognised, can voice their demands and can in turn be criticised so that the project can be improved. This project must not be Western or Eastern. It must be universal. And that, basically, is the most important aspect of enlightenment, which, incidentally, did not start in the eighteenth century, but in the Arab-Islamic world avant la lettre, as the saying goes, in other words in the eleventh century with Avicenna and in particular Averroes.

To read the whole interview, click here.
 

Liberal heresy in the contemporary Islamic cosmopolis

A review of Cosmopolitans and Heretics by Sajjad Rizvi, Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. Here are a few highlights:

The book under review is [...] an exercise in contemporary intellectual history. [...] Critically, it not only abandons an essentialist reading of religion as a timeless set of doctrines, practices and rituals, but also distances itself from postmodernist approaches to religion by holding onto the category of religion as a meaningful concept and signifier. 

[it] examines the role of three contemporary ‘liberal’ Muslim thinkers who stand outside the mainstream, who have a training in the traditional disciplines of the Islamic space of learning often called the madrasa (or at least have a familiarity with it), and who are not just influenced by but also express the traditions of intellectual fashion current in metropolitan academia and its study of religion. These three voices are Hasan Hanafi, the late Nurcholish Madjid and the late Mohammed Arkoun.

 Kersten’s argument is partly that unlike the earlier generation of colonial, modernists who were simply concerned with making Islam ‘relevant’ to the contemporary world through the adoption of modern ideologies, institutions and practices, this generation of thinkers expresses not only a distrust of the possibilities of modernist commensurability but also of the ‘fundamentalist’ quest for authentic being through an atavistic and ahistorical ‘return’ to the pristine, early generation of Muslims, al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ. 

...the book offers an excellent corrective to the Middle East focused bias of Islamic studies and is a strong advocate for a serious study of South East Asian studies. It is refreshing to see a ‘view from the edge’, especially given the demographic and institutional significance of Indonesia.

Read the full article on Rizvi's MullaSadra blog: Hikmat: Liberal heresy in the contemporary Islamic cosmopolis.

Refashioning the Study of Islam: Muslim contributions

Kristian Petersen, the new host of the Islamic Studies and Religion section of New Books Network (NBN) interviewed this blogger about the contributions of three Muslim intellectuals to finding new approaches to the study of Islam. The talk is based on the book Cosmopolitans and Heretics examinations of the writings of Indonesian Islamicist and public intellectual Nurcholish Madjid, the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi, and the French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun.

Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective.

Click here to listen to the whole interview. And the the image below to buy the book.

Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi and the 'anthropological turn' in Muslim thinking

This week's edition of  Qantara, the Germany-based website covering current political, cultural and intellectual affairs in the Muslim world draws attention to the work of the Moroccan philosopher and poet Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (1923-1993) and the latter's important contributions he has made to developing an Islamic-philosophical anthropology through his 'Muslim personalism'.

Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (1923-1993)

 The German theologian and philosopher, Pastor Dr Markus Kneer, has recently published an annoted German translation of Lahbabi's Le Personnalisme Musulman under the title Der Mensch: Zeuge Gottes: Entwurf eine islamischen Anthropology. In an interview he discusses some aspects of Lahbabi's work. Motivated to find a new way of engaging in Muslim-Christian dialogue, Kneer was looking for a Muslim thinker who could be presented with reference to Western anthropologies:

It seemed to me that localising what is to a great extent a Christian and Occidental concept of the individual within a Muslim context harboured the potential for a dialogue on the Christian and Islamic images of man – potential that should by all means be tapped. Lahbabi's "Muslim personalism" consists of just such an articulation of the human individual from Islamic sources. His points of reference in European philosophy are the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) and Jean Lacroix (1900–1986) as well as the life philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941).

Admitting that Lahbabi's ideas are very much grounded in the intellectual climate of the 1950s and 1960s, Kneer argues that, against the dramatic changes in the political landscape in North Africa, the time is ripe for a new appreciation of some of the ideas that had come to fruition in that time frame:

Today, personalism has largely been replaced by other discourses. Nevertheless, contemplation of the human as person is more intense today than in past decades, and what Paul Ricœur already predicted thirty years ago now seems to be coming true: "Personalism will die, but the person will return!" 

This concept after all bundles together other values that are of great importance for the articulation and ethical analysis of human life: e.g. dignity, freedom, responsibility. And I think it's no accident that in recent official publications of the Arab League on the subject of human rights the Arabic equivalent of person, "shakhs", frequently appears.

Although two generations have passed since North Africa shook off the yoke of political imperialism, the Muslim world's intellectual emancipation has only been partially realized. Recently, its progress has been obstructed by the positing of unhelpful theses, such as Francis Fukuyama's 'The End of History', and dangerous polarizing ideological paradigms for a new post-Cold War world order, like the 'Clash of Civilizations', advocated by the likes of Samuel Huntington. It seems in many parts of the Muslim world the time is ripe for challenging these remnants of Western hegemonism, thus giving new currency to the ideas Lahbabi developed a few decades ago. As Kneer explains: 

The historical and practical reasons why Lahbabi chose to analyse the process of becoming a person can be found in the identity crisis experienced by the colonised populace during the colonial era – in particular by the intellectuals. Lahbabi described how the colonial system had depersonalising effects for him and many others. Instead of experiencing language, communication and mental life as fields for personalisation, his generation suffered from speechlessness, non-communication and a feeling of inner emptiness. He wondered for a long time whether he was a person equal to the others, in other words, to the Europeans. The role of the Other in becoming a person and a human is thus not unproblematic.

The awareness of this philosophical problem is also reflected in Lahbabi's stance towards the place of reason in human thinking and how this can be accommodated within a Muslim Personalist philosophy:

Lahbabi is not talking about an absolute reason of the word, divorced from the religious context, but rather a reason that illuminates and lends dynamics to this context. In other words, ijtihad, the term used in Islamic theology to describe the personal and rational adoption of faith, must be rehabilitated as the fundamental method of theological work. Lahbabi's profound criticism of taqlid, the blind mimicking of and adherence to opinions passed down by the great Muslim scholarly authorities, is connected with this stance. Only shahada (profession of the one and only God, the Muslim creed) that reflects true ijtihad has personalising value, says Lahbabi.

With his dynamic concept of reason, Lahbabi takes up a position within value hermeneutics that mediates between the cultural and religious sources of values and their universal validity. In the process of transcending the bounds of the self, culturally inflected values become understandable against the horizon of other value traditions, and their universality can be tested. One-sided culturalism or universalism is not possible with Lahbabi.

Read the full article by clicking here.

Dr Marien van den Boom

Kneer is not the first Western scholar to draw attention to Lahbabi's thought. In 1984, the Dutch scholar Marien van den Boom published a PhD thesis in which he juxtaposes Lahbabi with the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi. Written in Dutch, De Bevrijding van de Mens in Islamitisch Perspektief (The Liberation of Man from an Islamic Perspective) unfortunately went largely unnoticed. To my knowledge, it was -- and still is -- the only detailed examination of the anthropological turn by two Muslim philosophers, who are not only united by this anthropocentric focus, but also by their ambition to develop a kind of Islamic liberation theology as a contribution to the liberation of the entire 'Third World'.

Of course, other thinkers from the Muslim world, such as Hichem Djait, Mohammed Arkoun, and -- in Indonesia -- Nurcholish Madjid have also developed personalist and humanist ways of thinking, drawing on concepts such as Kardiner's 'basic personality structure' or advocating new epistemologies that make a clear distinction between theological and anthropological approaches to the study of religious phenomena. For a more detailed discussion of the contributions of Arkoun, Hanafi and Madjid to these debates, see my Cosmopolitans and Heretics, which has just been released by Columbia University Press.

Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010): Trailblazer for new approaches to the study of Islam

After Mohammed Abid al-Jabiri (cf. blog post of 16 May 2010) and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (cf. blogpost 6 July 2010), a third innovative Muslim intellectual has just passed away as well. Mohammed Arkoun died yesterday in Paris at the age of 82.

Carool Kersten with Mohammed Arkoun (London, October 2009)

An Algerian Berber educated in French and Arabic in Oran and Algiers, in 1954 Arkoun moved to France in for postgraduate studies. In Paris, he studied under eminent scholars such as Jacques Berque, Robert Brunschvig, Louis Massignon and Paul Ricoeur, while his teaching duties in Strasbourg brought him into contact with Claude Cahen, who in turn introduced Arkoun to the historians of the Annales School, which had emerged in that city a quarter of a century earlier. This proved to be a revelation which left an indelible mark on Arkoun's scholarship. Notions like the 'history of mentalities' and the 'unthinkable' developed by the school's founders Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, or Braudel's conceptualization of the Mediterranean as a 'geo-historical space' found their way into Arkoun's pioneering historiographies of Islamic thought.


Coinciding with the Algerian war of independence and the student uprisings of 1968, Arkoun's postgraduate studies overlap with the Aufbruch of the French political, cultural and academic scene. His years as a doctoral student  are also framed by global events like the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring twelve years later, thus matching almost exactly with what Patricia O'Brien has called 'the milestone dates in the chronology of dislocation’ characterizing the intellectual upheaval in the postwar era.

In his subsequent scholarship, which must primarily be regarded as setting a new agenda for the study of Islam as a field of scholarly inquiry, Arkoun has drawn from across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences, using the latest advances made in the Western -- and in particular the French -- academe. Aside from the Annales school,  the structural linguistics and anthropology developed by Saussure, Benveniste and Levi-Strauss, the semiotics of Greimas, the sociology and political philosophy of Cornelius Castoriades, Foucault's discursive formations, as well as his archaeologies of knowledge and power, or Derrida's poststructuralist deconstructions; have all left their traces in Arkoun's rethinking of Islamic studies. 

Initially conceived as a 'Critique of Islamic Reason', he moved on to a more constructive proposition for a new research programme for studying Islam and the Muslim world. Presented under the name 'Applied Islamology'., this project envisaging a collaborative effort requiring the participation of international teams of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars, was not only inspired by the French ethnographer Roger Bastide's 'Applied Anthropology', but also informed by the Luso-Tropicology (Tropicalism) of the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre. 


Arkoun's ability to draw all these different strings and strands of thought together into a coherent whole betrays the influence from yet another of his intellectual mentors, Paul Ricoeur. Just as the latter's generous or charitable interpretations had enabled him to reconcile conflicting philosophical positions on knowledge and understanding, Arkoun adhered to a similar catholic approach. Following his master through the 'narrow gate' of structural-linguistic analysis, Arkoun's insistence that 'accurate description must precede interpretation; but interpretation cannot be attempted today without a rigorous analysis, using linguistics, semiotic, historical, and anthropological tools’, reflects Ricoeur's hermeneutic adage that 'to explain more is to understand better'.


In the final years of his career, Arkoun repeatedly expressed regret that his methodological suggestions often fell on deaf ears among scholars of Islam. But that did not deter him the least. In fact, in the last ten years or so, he actually expanded his horizons from the study of Islamic thought to a critique of all forms of reason and rational thinking, proposing an almost Kantian philosophical recalibration, which he called the 'Emerging Reason Project' and continued to advocate and propagate until the very end.


Last year, in October 2009, the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) in London organized a symposium in honour of Arkoun's efforts to renew the study of Islam (cf. blog post of 11 October 2009). For links to some of Arkoun's publications, click on the images below.

Obama and the 'Absent Word'

Recently, I have registered interesting responses by two very different Muslims to Barack Obama's historic Cairo speech * in which he sought to redefine America's relations with the Muslim world.

The more high-profile response came on 29 September from the leader of the world's most populous Muslim country. Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) used again a G20 summit to present himself as the architect of a new global policy for the Muslim world's interaction with other civilizations.

Whereas in April he had outlined Indonesia's bridge function between the rest of the Asia, the Muslim world and the West during a lecture at the London School of Economics (mentioned my post of 3 September 2009), in September he provided a more generic vision for resolving the conflicts in the Muslim world and ease its relations with the rest of the global community. At the beginning of his second term in office, reinforced by an even stronger electoral mandate, SBY's confidence as a leading figure in the Muslim world rings through in the no less than nine imperatives he suggested in a speech entitled 'Harmony Between Civilizations' delivered at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School for Government, after the G20 meeting in Pennsylvania.

Recalling Samuel Huntington's seminal article of sixteen years ago, in which the latter defined a 'Clash of Civilizations' as the governing paradigm for the 21st century, SBY opined that, even though he considered it a counterproductive projection, it must yet be acknowledged that the fault lines identified by Huntington are 'not a trivial reminder' of the many complicated issues affecting international relations.

A more harmonious way of global interaction however would first of all depend on exercising 'soft power' instead of 'hard power'. SBY cited the example of the thirteenth-century Islamic civilisation which was at the time the most sophisticated in the world due to its enormous thirst for learning. The accrued body of knowledge was later utilised by the Western Renaissance, showing how 'civilizations have built on each other's knowledge and have become enriched by it'.

The second imperative is the need for a much intenser global dialogue. Some initiatives in that direction have actually been launched by Muslim states. In conjunction with Spain, Turkey established the Alliance of Civilizations and, more recently, Saudi Arabia convened the Interfaith Conference at the UN.

The third imperative is finding solutions for the actual political conflicts in which two out of every three Muslim countries are caught up. This needs also a degree of soul-searching on the part of Muslim nations, instead of blaming all problems on a concerted "war against Islam".

The fourth and fifth imperatives concern the need for moderation and turning multiculturalism and tolerance into a 'global norm'. This can only be achieved if globalisation is made to work for all (6) through a reform of global governance (7), as there can be no genuine harmony among civilisations as long as the majority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims feel marginalised and insecure. While the G-20 is more representative of today's global dynamics, the UN Security Council still reflects the power balance of 1945 rather than 2009. Therefore the council needs to be restructured to keep up with today's geopolitical realities.

The real battlegrounds to achieve such a rethinking of world order lie in the education systems (8) where the global conscience (9) of future generations s shaped. His experiences with the overwhelming response to the tragedy hitting the Indonesian province of Aceh in northern Sumatra with the 2004 Tsunami, convinced SBY that such a global conscience indeed exists.


A week later, the French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun formulated a more intellectualised assessment in his closing remarks at the conference 'Construction of Belief' (see my post of 11 October 2009). Engaging with what in Braudelian terms is called the 'geohistorical space' of the Mediterranean has been Arkoun's life-long scholarly concern, as it allowed him to move away from the geo-political dimensions of the post-WWII perspective on the relations between civilisations.

This forms part of his concern for various forms of 'reason' in which he has shown himself to be equally critical of the miserable track record of religious thought as well as the 'political theology; of modernity, which can be traced to the origins of monotheism (some 4000 years ago) and the Greek concept of logos respectively. Both have been ever present, working and creating the violence that has marred the history of the Mediterranean, and give Arkoun the long duree perspective needed to analyse the beginnings of the current situation in that region.

According to Arkoun, the Mediterranean Space cannot be accurately described in terms of a north-south divide grounded in notions of 'true religion'. However current-day modern thinking nor politics appear to be able to break free from what has become a vicious circle of the Christian-Muslim dichotomy in the Mediterranean. These two traditions have been at loggerheads since the end of the thirteenth century when the Muslim world turned against the so-called 'intrusive sciences' (al-Ulum al-Dakhiliya) that is the Hellenic legacy it had embraced in earlier centuries.

To deal with this polarisation a new dictionary is required to adequately conceptualise this situation. The Islam 'on the ground' is not reflected in the way it is ethnographically or culturally represented in scholarship.

In political terms, post-independence Northwest Africans had been expecting a democracy as propagated by the West, instead their region has regressed into an imagined model of the early community in Medina. Authoritarian regimes have created a fictive Islam, allowing them to claim to be following a divine law. Unfortunately, the way political scientists tend to study this situation is too short-term to accurately analyse the local phenomena. what is needed is a corrective through a new scholarship in religion.

So far this scholarship has not emerged because both intellectuals and politicians are locked into a form of logocentrism that has declared whole areas of our cultural heritage or civilisational legacy as 'The Unthought', which through existing power structures has been been reified into the 'The Unthinkable'.

It is in the realm of actual global politics that the missing key word (parole absente) has finally been pronounced by Barack Obama, when he acknowledged that until now the West has spoken with a hegemonic voice. This extends not only to contemporary post-war and post-cold war politics but also to the cognitive status of Revelation, to which Arkoun not only counts sacred scriptures such as the Bible, The Gospel, or the Upanishads for that matter, but also the oeuvre of Karl Marx to which a similar status has been attributed.

This sanctifaction and sacralisation much be recognized as the outcome of social and historical processes and the only way to escape from it is to trangress all boundaries of knowledge production, displace all theologies into the realm of linguistic analysis, and thus surpass hegemonic discourse.

* for the video of Obama's speech, click here

Construction of Belief: Comparative Perspectives Conference, in honour of Mohammed Arkoun

On 9 and 10 October, 2009, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations (ISMC) of the Aga Khan University (AKU) in London, organized a conference on Construction of Belief, honouring the work of Mohammed Arkoun, Emeritus Professor of Islamic Thought at the Sorbonne and currently serving on the board of governors of the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS).

The roster of speakers at this event included both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars who approach the study of Islam through multiple disciplinary fields. According to Abdou Filali-Ansary, Director of the ISMC, the variety of academic specializations gathered around the table is not just reflective of Mohammed Arkoun's advocacy of a comprehensive or holistic research agenda for the Islamic studies as a field of scholarly investigation, but also of his overarching concern for the 'Human Condition'. Surveying contemporary Muslim thought, the catholicity (in the original sense of the word) of Mohammed Arkoun's work makes it difficult to classify, but suggests that he wishes to distinguish himself both from the deconstructive scholar and from the normative engagement of the 'preacher'. Prof. Filali-Ansary stressed that this 'Arkounian approach' has become the hallmark of the programmes offered at AKU-ISMC. These words were echoed by Dr. Aziz Esmail, the former dean of the IIS, noting that, for Mohammed Arkoun, Islam is first and foremost a human phenomenon.

The conference was kicked off with contributions by three eminent scholars from what Mohammed Arkoun himself -- not without appreciation -- refers to as 'classical Islamology' characterized by historical-philological approaches which provide -- as he pointed out repeatedly in the course of the conference -- the valuable data required for the critical engagement propagated by himself.

R. Stephen Humphreys, Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, spoke about 'The Authenticity of Sacred Texts', underlining that while the term is used freely in discourses on history and religion it is rarely ever properly defined. To illustrate various understandings of authenticity within the context of Islamic history, he explained how the notions works on very different levels in regards to the Qur'an, the Hadith and Sira (biography of the Prophet Muhammad), whereby the latter two sources respectively provide the authentication of doctrinal postulates (aqida) and ways of conduct (ahkam) professed in the Qur'an and the historical context for the reverence due to both this core text and the figure of Muhammad.

In a response to the points made by Humphreys, Arkoun added that our present understanding of authenticity is grounded in a nineteenth-century notion of historicity based on philological examinations. However, Arkoun's own view is coloured by what he calls 'historical psychology', which also seeks to include oral traditions. From this perspective, all texts are considered as 'reliable', i.e. 'authentic' -- even if traditional philological-historical investigations would qualify such characterization as an 'anachronism'. In this regard he also took care to point out that discussions such as the one engaged in at the present conference are still not possible in Egypt, Algeria or Pakistan. The fact that Arabic even lacks an adequate equivalent term for the notion of anarchonism is indicative of the psychological and epistemological obstacles which continue to hamper Muslim thinking.

Josef van Ess, perhaps the single-most respected authority on the formative period of Islamic discursive theology or kalam, presented an erudite but at the same time accesible and refreshing rereading of the construction of Islamic thought in the classical period, using the maqalat literature on the 'seventy-two sects' as a vehicle to explain how the later heresiography gradually evolved out if what in German is called Listenwissenschaft or doxography. Initially merely 'listing' linguistic and regional differences among the early Muslims, these text became the building blocks not only for historical and doctrinal constructions in which those claiming to represent the 'true Islam' would set themselves apart with designations such as Ahl al-Islam, Ahl al-Salat, Ahl al-Jama'a, etc., but also for bureaucratic classification systems -- such as Shahrastani's maqalat, which were used for tax purposes. In his conclusions van Ess stressed that, in spite of polemics and disputes, until the nineteenth century the situation in the Muslim world had remained relatively peaceful in comparison to the history of the viciously violent European wars of religion. Responding to a more generic observation by van Ess that all historiography is a construction in which even the sincerest attempts to establish 'the reality; remain locked, Arkoun suggested to call van Ess' theoretical imagination as 'denominational', which has as its greatest advantage that it depicts 'Islam' not as a monolithic whole but as a diverse tradition.

Retired Bonn University Professor for Semitic Languages and Islamic Studies Stefan Wild brought the discussion to contemporary times with an attempt to discover some commonalities between Muslims and Christians through the construction of the 'theological other'. Following a critical side note that the tendency not to translate the Arabic term Allah when writing about Islam in other languages than Arabic creates an 'otherness' that is distancing and alienating, he then discussed the terminology used in the Christian and Muslim traditions to underscore their common origins: i.e. hanif (a monotheist who is neither part of historical Judiasm, Christianity or Islam), 'Abrahamic' or 'heavenly religions' (Adyan samawiyya). He drew also parallels between the notion of fitra, or the primordial quality in humankind leading to worshipping the Transcendent, and Karl Rahner's 'anonymous Christian', as well as the distinctions made by Muhammad Shahrur between 'Muslim' and 'Mu'min' (believer), and the idea of Muslims as constituting a 'Community of the Middle Way' (Ummat al-Wasat). Ending with a reference to the Indonesian Muslim intellectual Nurcholish Madjid that all non-Muslims who believe in God should be recompensed with Paradise, Wild closed by observing that these new ecumenical approaches tend to come from the geographical peripheries of the Muslim world, in particular Indonesia and the 'diasporas' in Europe and North America.

Moving from the theological to the historical, Mark Sedgwick engaged in a 'class-based' analysis to explain the waning influence of the Egyptian reformist Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) on the grounds of shifts in the make-up of what he calls 'disruptive' classes. In this project he correlates the growing disruptive influence of better educated but impoverished lower middle class urbanites and peasants to the increasing support base for more radical movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Adel Daher, a Lebanese-born but US-trained philosopher who has worked closely together with the poet Adonis, also used a secular explanatory model for a rethinking of ijtihad, challenging traditionalist and modernist Islamic positions which seek to exclude certain parts of the Islamic heritage from its purview. Using reason in a formal rather than substantive sense, Daher argues that even when grounded in a religious ethic such exceptions defy logic.

Adel Daher and Mohammed Arkoun

On the second day, Ursula Gunther, author of the first extensive intellectual biography of Mohammed Arkoun published under the title Mohammed Arkoun: ein moderner Kritiker der islamischen Vernunft, shared her preliminary findings from her research among adolescent Muslims in Germany. To position herself in the field of religious studies, she started with the following quote from Carl Gustav Jung:

Oddly enough, the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions while uniformity of meaning is a sign of Weakness. Hence, a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.

Arguing that within the framework of postcolonial studies the Dutch-derived term 'pluriformity' allows for a better reflection on the diversity in contemporary religious life than the more common English term 'plurality',Gunther draws on earlier research by Charles Glock and Detlef Pollack to interpret the data of her qualitative-empirical research. Reformulating Grace Davies' now seminal phrase 'Believing without Belonging' into 'Believing and Belonging', Gunther argues that identity formation is a much more precarious and subtle than often assumed. The rich material provided by dozens of interviews with adolescent Muslims evinces that, until 2001, members of Germany's four-million strong Muslim community were regarded as 'guest workers' or 'foreigners', and only designated as 'Muslims' after the events of 9/11. In processing her data into a book, Gunther intends to use the methodologies developed in empirische Bildungsforschung, because education is a key factor in religious identity formation in the contemporary world.

Malika Zerghal, a political scientist currently teaching at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago presented a very perceptive reinterpretation of Habib Bourguiba's positions on gender issues in Islam. While Tunisia's first president is generally regarded as the epithome of radical secularist reform in postcolonial North Africa, a rereading of his speeches and writings in conjunction with al-Tahir Haddad's Muslim Women in Law and Society(1930)* and Rashid al-Ghannoushi's writings of the 1970s and 1980s shows some remarkable continuities in the discourse on women's rights. In her talk 'Veiling and Unveiling: State Reforms and the Transformation of the Meaning of the Veil in Tunisia', Malika Zeghal notes how frequently Bourguiba spoke of Islam: referring to it as a religion vecu, a 'lived religion' in the sense of Bergson's Vitalisme. Her analysis shows how, in the 1920s, Bourguiba actually favoured veiling as an act of defiance against French colonialism, while in the same time frame, Haddad argued for unveiling.

Although primarily written in the vein of a 'fiqhi method', the latter parts of Haddad's book are rich in anthropological detail, stressing a point which is also taken up by Bourguiba in the post-independence period and which can be contrasted with that of Islamic activists such as Ghannoushi. While the Islamists interpret veiling as safeguarding women's modesty and honour, Haddad and the 'later Bourguiba' claim that the veil and seclusion provide an excuse for sexual debaucherie.

At the same time, Ghannoushi joins forces with Haddad and Bourguiba in regards to the need for women to be empowered and emancipated, as well as the more general need for Tunisians to recapture their cultural personality. But where Bourguiba became increasingly opposed to the Islamic tradition, Ghannoushi saw this cultural personality embodied by that very tradition. Where Bourguiba considered unveiling a precondition to move Tunisian women from 'bestiality' to humanity, Ghannoushi insists that only through veiling women can shed their 'animal-like' state.

Malika Zeghal concludes that contrary to the general perception that Bourguiba's speeches on unveiling were rather superficial, this is not the case and the Islamist discourse in Tunisia must be seen as a reaction against these speeches. It demonstrates that Islamism is not something peripheral emerging 'out of nothing', but an explicit challenge of the religious grounding of Bourguiba's policies, and clear evidence of the degree of continuity that exists between the discourses of the postcolonial state and Islamism.

In a similar vein, Souleymane Bachir Diagne's paper 'Coming to Believe' also stresses the aspect of continuity. A leading Senegalese philosopher who studied under Althusser and Derrida at the École Normale Supérieure, he currently teaches in the departments of French and philosophy at Columbia University. He has written on the philosophies of George Boole, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor, and -- most recently -- on 'philosophizing in Islam'.

Comparing the conversions of Augustine, Ghazali, Pascal and Malcolm X, Diagne challenges William James' distinction between gradual and crisis conversion as too radical and suggests to relativize the implied dichotomy. Not only is he opposed to only consider a crisis conversion as a 'true' conversion, but he doubts whether it is possible to pinpoint 'the moment' of conversion as accurately as James seems to imply. Even a crisis conversion is the outcome of a preceding sequence of events, so there has been a gradual preparation for 'the moment'. Inversely, gradual conversion usually also comes about through a sequence of key events or points of crisis. Inspired by Lyotard's analysis of the conversion of Augustine in paragraph 125 of Le Differend, Diagne argues that in spite of Augustine's adagium noli foras ire, that God is located within, it is neither the inside or outside that is important, but the quest or search in itself. He sees this also reflected in other archetypical conversions: Ghazali's intellect needed first to be in a state of perplexity before he became susceptible to the call in the night towards the light, Pascal's Nuit de Feu was conditioned by the earlier discovery that the intellectual mind finds itself in a cul-de-sac, and Malcolm X's autobiography evinces a sequence of events which prepared for the apodictic statement that he only became a genuine Muslim while performing Hajj.

In Diagne's view all these examples affirm that is not the spatial but the temporal, in a non-chronological sense, that is of key importance. The distinction between graduality and crisis is further relativized when recalling that it is often a matter of getting into the habit of believing 'and belief will come'. This brings Diagne to the final issue of agency in the conversion process, proposing to consider the Islamic notion of tauba or repentence as a kind of double agency in which the transcendent Infinite and finite man come together in the act of conversion. In response to the question whether such a 'deflationary' depiction of conversion would not turn the phenomenon into 'just another thing' and also fail in accounting for the significance of the 'external' dimension of the Transcendent revealing itself, Diagne replied that his attempt to dedramatize the supposedly crisis conversions of Augustine, Ghazali, Pascal and Malcolm X serves to stress the fluidity in our religious identities and is also partly informed by the Islamic dictum that one should not inquire or question the intentions and motivations of converts.

The final contribution to this conference was made by another scholar from Columbia University, Akeel Bilgrami, the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Heyman Institute for the Humanities and a member of the Committee on Global Thought (headed by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz). Bilgrami's thoughtful engagement with the notions of 'Value, Enchantment and Modernity' betray his grounding in the philosophy of language. Referring to the conference title, he considers 'Construction of Belief' an accurate description as it prioritizes action over belief because in Bilgrami's view, belief is an abstract construction of practice. Together with an observation made by Arkoun in his writings and earlier at the conference, that religiosity should be regarded as 'animist' in the sense that it understands God as located 'within' the universe, it forms the starting point for a meditation on the origins of modernity.

This genealogical question has only become more acute since the emergence of a discourse known as Occidentalism. Although he showed himself very critical if not dismissive of Buruma and Margalit's book of the same title (see also the post of 5 September 2009 ), he credits the authors for pointing out that the proponents of an Occidentalist reading of the history of modernity are of a similar mindset as the Orientalists who rejected Islam as backward. Why are the Muslim rethoricians of Occidentalism mimicking the Orientalists by labelling the non-Islamic West as Jahiliyya, contrasting its sinful metropolitan life with organic communities? How can rationalism, which on face value seemed to be something praiseworthy, now be vilified? How can the rights, codes and constitutions designed and developed in modern political philosophy now be demonized as the beginnings of cultural polution?

Bilgrami's diagnosis identifies two key problems in the emergence of modernity. First of all, as a corrective of Nietzsche's 'Death of God' thesis, he proposes that modernity did not proclaim his death, but exiled God outside the universe. Consequently, the imaginary faculties associated with what Arkoun calls the 'animist' understanding of religion prevalent in oral traditions are no longer available to ordinary people. This understanding of the divine 'within' the universe, which should not be confused with paganism as it also suffused pre-modern Christianity, has now been written out of intellectual history. But interestingly, dissenting voices of 'animist' understanding of God in the West have remained, for example in the philosophies of Spinoza and Newton. These two examples also show that there is no contradiction with rational sciences, because what is at stake is not how the laws of nature operate but a metaphysical question into the status of the Divine. Such a radical Enlightenment in the vein of Spinoza brings back an element of enchantment and begs the question what motivated other modern philosophers to posit a Deus Absconditus, literally a 'God put away for safety' -- safe from what?, asks Bilgrami.

It is in this context that the Occidentalist criticism of modernity starts to make sense, because this removal of God points towards sinister aspects associated with modernity's claim to hegemony, whereby rights, codes and constitutions often have a 'screening function' for cruelties perpetrated by the West in distant lands.