A Moroccan Philosopher in Indonesia: The Influence of Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri on Indonesian Islamic Thinking

Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri

On 19 February 2015, I gave an invited public lecture about the influence of the Moroccan philosopher Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri (1936-2010) on Islamic thinking in Indonesia. The text below is a slightly adapted version of that presentation, which consisted of two parts: First, an introduction to the philosopher al-Jabiri and his ideas, followed by an explanation of the appeal of his thinking for Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia.

Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri a philosopher and his thought

Al-Jabiri’s fame rests on his so-called Critique of Arab Reason project, laid down in a set of writings published between 1980 and 1990; a decade of intense philosophical labors squeezed in between periods of more politically engaged activity.

 Personal background

Before taking a more detailed look at these writings of the 1980s, I will highlight a few relevant aspects of Al-Jabiri’s life. Al-Jabiri comes from Figuig, on the Moroccan-Algerian border – a disputed area that was later the scene of the so-called ‘War of the Sand’ between the two newly independent countries in the early 1960s. Already during his high school years Al-Jabiri became politically active in the Istiqlal Party. His political mentor at the time was Mehdi Ben Barka, who arranged for him to begin writing for the Istiqlal periodical Al-Alam. Al-Jabiri followed Ben Barka when the latter split from the party to found the UNFP in 1959. Because of his involvement in leftist politics, Al-Jabiri was incarcerated for a few months in 1963. He continued his activities in the UNFP also after the mysterious disappearance of Ben Barka in 1965. In 1975 he joined the USFP as it split from UNFP and became a member of its politburo.

Alongside his political work, in 1958 Al-Jabiri had begun studying philosophy at the universities in Damascus and Rabat. In the mid-sixties, when he was working on his doctorate, while also teaching philosophy at high schools and helping with the writing of a number of textbooks. These books were quite influential in shaping the thoughts of students during the late sixties and early seventies. They  emphasized the relationship between culture and society, and the significance of knowledge and education to effectuate social change. Thus they prefigure Al-Jabiri’s later scholarly preoccupation with epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) and its impact on history and politics.

Al-Jabiri was very much influenced by the Moroccan-born geographer and historian Yves Lacoste, especially the latter's Marxist interpretation of Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World (1965). He was so impressed by this study that he decided to make the 14^th-century courtier and scholar the subject of his own doctoral research. In his findings, al-Jabiri presents this medieval North African statesman and savant’s theory of the rise and fall of civilizations as a structural and systemic alternative to the Ash‛ari projection of history, through which Ibn Khaldun nevertheless managed to keep his admiration for Ghazali’s Sufism intact

In this endeavour he was intellectually mentored by one of Morocco’s leading philosophers at the time, M. Aziz Lahbabi:  who would oversee Al-Jabiri’s first doctoral thesis on Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history, which was submitted in 1967. Another philosopher, Najib Baladi, directed Al-Jabiri’s further research for the so-called doctorat d’état; a degree somewhat comparable to the German Habilitation. This resulted in the publication of Al-Jabiri's first monograph, appearing in 1971 under the title The Thought of Ibn Khaldun: Asabiyya and State: Theoretical Outlines of Khaldunian Thinking about Islamic History.

Aside from his academic career as a lecturer and later professor of philosophy at Université Mohammed V in Rabat, throughout the 1970s, Al-Jabiri remained preoccupied with his political work in the UNFP and USFP. However, from 1980 onwards he decided to concentrate more on systematically writing down his ideas regarding the relationship between knowledge and power in the development of Islamic thinking.

Heritage Thinking

With this, Al-Jabiri became one of the so-called heritage thinkers or turathiyyun. This phenomenon of heritage thinking came up in the 1970s, so simultaneous with the much better known Islamic resurgence that advocates explicitly political agendas. Initially this was referred to as Islamic fundamentalism, but now we generally call it Islamism.

However, the motivations behind the rise of Islamism and the emergence of heritage thinking are the same: Disillusionment with other, imported, ideologies, such as Nationalism, Panarabism, Marxism etc. By way of alternative, Muslims returned to their religious and cultural roots in Islam. Some chose to become puritan revivalists, focusing either on personal piety or translating their renewed focus on Islam into political, i.e. Islamist agendas. This manifested itself in different shapes and forms, ranging from gaining influence and power via the ballot box to the most extreme forms of violent action. These interpretations are grounded in literalist readings and understandings of Islamic Scriptures, Qur'an and Sunna. And because the proponents of this approach claim that they are thus reviving the legacy of Al-Salaf al-Salih, the pious ancestors, they are called Salafis.

By contrast, the heritage thinkers advocate not only a more comprehensive understanding of Islam as a civilization, but also a critical and self-reflective examination of the text corpus of traditional Islamic learning. Intellectually, this places heritage thinkers on the opposite side of the intellectual spectrum from the Salafis. Their challenge of uncritical and eclectic use by Salafis of only certain aspects of the earliest Islamic tradition makes the heritage thinkers in effect an intellectual counterforce to Salafi religious puritanism and Islamism.

Critiques of Arab Reason

In 1980 and 1982, Al-Jabiri published his first two text collections on the Arab-Islamic heritage. We and our heritage and Contemporary Arab Discourse. In these texts he challenges the shortcomings of the existing readings of the Islamic tradition, namely: Fundamentalist, Liberal and Marxist readings. According to Al-Jabiri, all three fail both methodologically as well as in terms of vision. All three see themselves as extensions of the Islamic tradition, but with Marxists and Liberals being hindered by erroneous linear or teleological projections for the future, while fundamentalists and traditionalists consider themselves the sole custodians of what they have constructed as being the tradition, while they are in fact locked up within this constructed tradition. Heritage thinkers, by contrast, embrace the tradition without being taken over by it. Instead, they subject Islamic regimes of knowledge to a critical examination.

In Al-Jabiri’s case he emphatically moves away from modernity as a linear projection or a fixed historical trajectory that civilizations must follow. As Muslims grapple with modernity, they should not imagine that – like Western civilization -- they have to chronologically pass through consecutive phases of renaissance, enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity like the West did. The current situation is such that these are all coexistent and intertwined. This also means that there is no single modernity only a plurality of modernities. Al-Jabiri also makes point of stressing that: 'Modernity is not a refutation of or break with the past, but an upgrade of the way we relate with tradition'; modernization is not an 'end in itself', but tied to the 'rise of the critical mind', and an impetus aimed at 'changing mentalities'.

In his writings from the early 1980s, the core argument of his future epistemological thinking about heritage is also already discernible: Namely that knowledge consists of two aspects: A cognitive field and an ideological content. The cognitive field, in turn, consists of the material knowledge or substance  and of a thinking apparatus. From today’s perspective, other than its historical value the substance of philosophical and scientific knowledge from Arab-Islamic past is useless, but the thinking apparatus, or systemic and methodological aspects of thinking through which this substance came into being, remains of interest to Al-Jabiri’s project. Therefore Arab Muslims must rid themselves of ideologically or emotionally informed conceptions of tradition and its substance as an absolute reality that stands outside time, and instead come to terms with tradition as relative and historicized.

The only way to achieve that is through what Gaston Bachelard called an 'epistemological break', not with the tradition, but away from an understanding of tradition that is locked up within itself. Methodological cues for his own alternative interpretation of heritage, al-Jabiri found in the work of structuralists like Ferdinand Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean Piaget, as well as in the writings of poststructuralist philosophers such as Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. From them he learned that reason can no longer be conceived in Cartesian terms as a coherent, conscious and transcendent process. Instead, reason is more accurately described as a collective understanding shaped by culture and by what Piaget called the ‘cognitive unconsciousness’.

In the 1980s, Al-Jabiri unpacked all this in great detail in what he called his Critique of Arab reason project: At the core of this philosophical project is a trilogy of books, dealing with the formation, structure and the political dimensions of Arab reason.

·         Takwin al-Aql al-Arabi: a historical study of the formation of Arab-Islamic thinking

·         Bunya al-Aql al-Arabi: a structural analysis of the epistemological order of Arab culture

·         Al-Aql al-Siyasi al-Arabi: an ideology critique

                                                                                                                      

The historical analysis focuses on the so-called or Asr al-Tadwin ‘period of recording or codification’ during which ‘acceptable’ ways of  thinking about Islam, both in terms of content and methodology, were determined. This heralded a period of decline, because instead of encouraging the production of new discursive forms, the tradition ended up only reproducing existing knowledge. In his structural analysis, Al-Jabiri distinguishes three different thinking apparatus, systems of knowledge or epistemes. For this he used Arabic descriptor, namely:

·         bayani or discursive reasoning

·         irfani or gnosticism and intuitive thinking

·         burhani or reasoning through the use of demonstrative proof.

Bayani thinking is based on explications of texts drawing on Arabic grammar and rhetoric, and the literary legacy derived from pre-Islamic times. It is applied in philology and linguistics, Qur’anic exegesis, legal thinking or fiqh, and theology or kalam. A figure like the legal scholar Al-Shafi’i looms large over this way of thinking, especially in terms of the limitations he set on  ijtihad or independent reasoning, by restricting it to reasoning by analogy. Rather than rationalist methods such as inductive or deductive reasoning language remains the sole point of reference in bayani thinking. Pointing back to the historical study, Al-Jabiri contends that bayani thinking has eventually prevailed through the work of grammarians, jurists and theologians. Eventually, it became the definitive mode of thinking about religion in traditional Islamic learning thanks to the work of al-Ghazali,

As for irfani or gnostic thinking, its origins too predate Islam, but it then continues to develop in Islamic contexts. It is not only found in astrology, alchemy, magic, theosophy, illuminationism, and strands of Shia thinking, but also in aspects of the work of Ibn Sina, who is generally hailed as a key contributor to philosophical thinking in Islam. Irfan or gnosticism is based on a dichotomy between manifest (zahir) and hidden (batin) meanings of realities, including scripture. Al-Jabiri pronounces a rather harsh judgment, when he insists that due to the combined influences of Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali, and thus of irfani and bayani thinking, the ’irrational’ (not the same as unreasonable) has dominated thinking in the Eastern parts of Muslim world.

While there have been early examples of burhani or ‘rationalist’ in the East, such as the philosophies of al-Kindi,  the Muʽtazila  and al-Farabi during the Abbasid Caliphate of Al-Ma’mun, in Al-Jabiri's mind the restoration of rationalism is associated with the 11-13^th century thinkers of the Muslim west. Al-Jabiri’s heroes from this classical era are: Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd, Al-Shatibi, and Ibn Khaldun.

However, things are not always as straightforward with this preferred list as Al-Jabiri might suggest: For example, Ibn Hazm was a Zahiri legal scholar. Zahirism was pretty strict in its interpretations of the scriptural texts, but also intellectually regimented and I think that is what attracted Al-Jabiri. Moreover what Ibn Hazm also argues is that anything that is not restricted by text, is left to reason and free choice

In regards to Ibn Rushd  it must be noted that he actually did his work under the puritan and repressive rule of the Almohads. Although some of its emirs and viziers had an interest in philosophy, we should not forget that Almohad comes from the name  Al-Muwahhidun, the upholders of the Unity of God (Tawhid), which is – incidentally – the same name the Wahhabis of Arabia use for themselves. The affinities between the two extend not only to intellectual outlook but also to the political enforcement of their interpretations of Islam.

Here, I will only highlight a few aspects of Ibn Rushd’s thinking that underpin Al-Jabiri’s appreciation for Ibn Rushd and consider him as the epitome of critical and realistic rationalism, on grounds of:  His commentaries on Aristotle; his persistent upholding of the law of cause and effect in scientific and philosophical thinking;  and -- in relation to religious and metaphysical questions -- the establishment of a harmony between the bayani proofs of revelation and the demonstrative proofs of philosophical truth that do not pose a threat to the teachings of Islam.

Al-Shatibi’s work has been very important for a reinterpretation of the casuistry into which jurisprudence or fiqh had descended during and after the period of recording. His advocacy of more attention for the Higher Purposes of Sharia or Maqasid al-Shari’a offered an opportunity to rethink what the aims or objectives of Islamic law are supposed to be. By re-establishing these as the most general points of departure for  Islamic legal thinking it becomes possible to distinguish between the unchangeable and contingent aspects of Islamic law.

So Al-Jabiri not only privileges the burhani epistemological system over the much less rigorous bayani approach and in his view outright irrational irfani ways of thinking; when it comes to individual thinkers, he also has a preference for individuals from what are now Spain and Morocco. In advocating the importance of the Muslim west and the figure of Ibn Rushd in particular, he has used terms such as ‘Andalusian Resurgence’ and the statement that ‘the future can only be Averroist’. 

The  impact of the ideas of Al-Jabiri

The ideas of the heritage thinkers are erudite and sophisticated, and their appeal is limited to those echelons of Muslim societies with that have attained the highest levels of education in the humanities and social sciences. Salafi thinking by contrast holds greater appeal for professionals (engineers, doctors, lawyers) and students and scholars of the natural sciences. Given the still rather limited numbers of people in the Muslim world who make it into higher education, heritage thinking only influences a fraction of Muslim societies. However, demographics also show that most Muslim countries have a ‘youth bulge’ – as middle classes grow and the numbers of people entering education increase accordingly, I believe heritage thinking will become more important over the next generation or so.

A further and probably more problematic obstruction to the spread of heritage thinking in the present day is the continuing repression of the freedom of thought and expression in many Muslim countries, and the concomitant attempts by a religious state bureaucracy wishing to control what is taught about Islam.

Influence in Indonesia

In this respect, the situation in Indonesia is different from many MENA countries. To find an explanation for the appeal and purchase heritage thinkers like Al-Jabiri have in Indonesia, it is necessary to have some background knowledge of  how Islam operates or is allowed to function in Indonesia, and in particular what shaped the socio-political and intellectual climate.

Islam in Indonesia: Historical Background

Indonesia is located on the far eastern periphery of the historical Dar al-Islam, and it forms part of a wider equatorial Islamic island world that also includes Malaysia and Brunei, as well as the southern provinces of Thailand and the Philippines, and that is home to a distinct Malay-Muslim culture. However, Islam only began to make inroads among the local populations relatively late in the history of the Islamic expansion.  In contrast to many other parts of the Muslim world, Islam did not arrive through conquest, but through peaceful means: Centuries- or even millennia-old trade routes across the Indian Ocean were used by missionary figures, often associated with transnational Sufi orders that held the social fabric of the Muslim world-at-large together after the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-13^th century.

Because of this geographical remoteness of the so-called “heartlands” of the Muslim world and this late conversion it is tempting to see Southeast Asians as superficial Muslims, with Islam only a “thin veneer” over older deposits of Indian religions and indigenous animism. That view is wrong. A growing body of scholarship on the history of Islam in Southeast Asia shows that since Islam’s arrival, the religion has firmly rooted in the region through extensive and intensive networking between Southeast Asia and centres of Islamic learning in South Asia and the Middle East. Travelers from the other side of the Indian Ocean and native scholars from Southeast Asia both played an important role in this process. That means that throughout the centuries, Muslims from what is now Indonesia were well acquainted and conversant with developments elsewhere. So also  the ideas of 19^th-century Islamic reformism and pan-Islamism advocated and spread by figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida caught on with the Muslim populations of what was then called Dutch East Indies.

As a result, Southeast Asian Muslim societies experienced a division between Muslims who continued to adhere to traditional Sunni Islam, remaining part of the Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jama’a. In Indonesia and elsewhere in the region this tradition consisted of the Shafi’i Law School, Maturidi kalam or theology, and the sober Sufism of al-Ghazali, all filtered through localized cultural practices. On the other hand, there were the proponents of Islamic reformism, both in its puritan and in its modernist guises. These reformists referred to themselves as kaum muda, or the 'young group' or 'young people', in contrast to the traditionalists, whom they called kaum tua or ‘old people’. It is a division that has remained valid until today and – as will be explained later -- that also has a bearing on the reception of heritage thinkers such as Al-Jabiri.

The Dutch colonial authorities were very wary of such influences and came down heavily on any politicized manifestations of Islamic reformism. Although all Islamic activities were closely monitored and activists were kept under surveillance, the one area that the colonial authorities allowed to develop for the purpose of the emancipation of the Indies’ Muslim population was education and da’wa or dakwah in Malay. This formed part of the Ethische Politiek (1901-1942): a redefinition of colonial policy designed to give select elements of the colonized population a modest stake in political administration and equip other segments of society for making a contribution to the development of the economy and society. This has resulted in a phenomenon that makes Indonesia rather unique in the Muslim world, which remains important until now and which will also play a part in the future reception of the ideas of the likes of Al-Jabiri: the emergence of Islamic mass organizations.

The Islamic modernists were the first to take advantage of this opportunity, establishing two organizations: In 1912, Ahmad Dahlan,, the Imam the main mosque of the Sultanate of Yogyakarta, founded the Muhammadiyah. Inspired by the thinking of Muhammad Abduh it is now the most important modernist Muslim mass organization. In order to meet this challenge and to counter competition for influence over Indonesia’s Muslims, the traditionalists responded in 1926 with the founding of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). The NU is a much looser organization than the Muhammadiyah, relying on extensive but informal networks centering around Islamic boarding schools called pesantren, that bind scholars together through family connections and highly personalized teacher (called kyai) - pupils (murid) relations not dissimilar to that of Sufi orders.

Indonesia’s Muslim mass organizations not only predate Middle Eastern Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood or South Asia’s Tablighi Jamaat by a good decade, it also dwarfs them in terms of the numbers of followers they can mobilize. In present-day Indonesia, both the Muhammadiyah and NU have constituencies numbering in the tens of millions.

Like the Dutch, also Indonesia’s postcolonial governments have made efforts to keep Islam at arm’s length of the political process. Since 1945, Indonesian constitutions have never made any reference to Islam. Attempts to introduce a reference to Islamic law into the constitution were sabotaged by the secular nationalists led by president Suharto. While Indonesia recognises that its population is in majority Muslim, it does not identify as an Islamic state. Instead, the country has emphasized its ethnic and religious diversity through the Pancasila or doctrine of five principles – the first one of which states that every Indonesian must believe in a Supreme Being – but without further specification

Except for the first decade of independence, when Indonesia briefly experimented with liberal democracy, Islamic parties were not able to operate freely. From 1960 until 1998, they were actually outlawed, except for the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP) -- that was tolerated by Suharto’s New Order regime from the 1970s onwards as a symbolic opposition party in the electoral charades and rubber stamp parliament that was allowed to function during those years.

After taking power, New Order regime envisaged a role for Muslim professionals in its new economic development policies, and a number of Muslim intellectuals saw this as a window of opportunity to advocate the expansion of the Islamic education system and proposing a constructive role for Muslim activists in developing the country. This presented the interesting spectacle of a vast expansion of a network of State Islamic higher education institutes (called IAINs in Indonesian), in a country that still refuses to identify as an Islamic state.

The key figures in this process, were two senior intellectuals, Abdul Mukti Ali, who served as Minister of Religious Affairs (1973-1978) and Harun Nasution, the rector of the IAIN in Jakarta, and the leader of the largest Muslim student union, Nurcholish Madjid. They formed part of a newly emerging Muslim intelligentsia combining a secular state education with Islamic learning, often complemented with postgraduate studies abroad to obtain advanced degrees, in particular in places such McGill University in Montreal and the University of Chicago.

The IAINs began promoting an interpretation of Islam that was very different from either the traditionalist form of Islam prevailing among Indonesia’s rural peasantry or the reformist tendencies found among pious urban Muslims. Drawing on the historicized interpretation of Islam by scholars such as the American-Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman, who acted as supervisor and adviser to numerous Indonesian postgraduate students,  in Indonesia this came to be referred to as cultural, civil, and even cosmopolitan Islam.

In 1983, promoting this cultural Islam became government policy through the so-called the Reaktualisasi or Reactualizaition Agenda. For ten years this policy was coordinated and directed by Religious Affairs Minister Munawir Sjadzali, a former Muslim diplomat with a political science degree from Johns Hopkins University. This shift in policy was part of an important political reorientation on the highest government level.  As part of the Reactualization Agenda, the Islamic education system was expanded further, and the writings of heritage thinkers started appearing in the IAIN curricula and reading lists. Also growing oil revenues ensured the availability of money to send talented young scholars in larger numbers overseas for postgraduate studies, not only in the Middle East, but also in North America, Australia and Europe. 

The growing appetite for new ideas on religion, and Islam in particular, also led to the emergence of a large translation and publication industry of works on Islam, religion and politics. As intellectual omnivores, Indonesia’s Muslims were not only interested in the writings of Arabic-speaking Muslim intellectuals, but also in the work of Western scholars on Islam, as well as the ideas of postmodern philosophers and postcolonial theorists. These respective literatures reflect the scholarly interests of the heritage thinkers, and the critiques they have written of both Islamic thinking and Western scholarship about Islam.

                                             

Heritage thinking in Indonesia

I must point out that Indonesian Muslims are not just interested in al-Jabiri, but also in the other heritage thinkers from that generation, including Mohammad Arkoun, Hasan Hanafi, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. Together they form what I call the Arab quartet that has left a distinct mark on contemporary Islamic thinking in Indonesia. In first instance, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hanafi and Arkoun were better known in Indonesia than Al-Jabiri.  For example, the leader of the NU in 1980s, Abdurrahman Wahid also known as Gus Dur introduced, Hanafi’s notion of the ‘Islamic Left’ in Indonesia. Thus we find that the leader of the largest traditionalist Muslim organization promotes a set of ideas that many modernists in the Muhammadiyah considered too progressive!

For the purpose of today’s lecture, I will concentrate on the attraction of Al-Jabiri for certain Indonesian Muslim intellectuals. In fact, given the way Al-Jabiri used to privilege the ideas of thinkers from the supposedly “rational” West of the Muslim world, it is somewhat surprising and puzzling what appeal such a Maghribi 'chauvinist' thinker holds for Muslims from the allegedly 'irrational' East

Al-Jabiri’s breakthrough coincided with the regime change of 1998-1999, when President Suharto’s cozying up to the Muslims provided to be too little and too late to avert the inevitable. The aging president was forced to step down  and the two leaders of the largest Muslim mass organisations in the country rose to the highest offices in the land, with Abdurrahman Wahid from the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama becoming president and Amien Rais of the modernist Muhammadiyah taking the position of Speaker of the National Assembly.  It is in this vibrant -- and to a degree also unstable and even polarized -- milieu that the ideas of Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri found root.

Al-Jabiri, Young NU Cadres and Islamic Post-Traditionalism

Two figures from younger generations of NU cadres and intellectuals, called Anak Muda NU were instrumental to opening up Indonesia Muslim thinking to the ideas of Al-Jabiri: Said Aqil Siradj, who is now the General Chairman of the NU; and Ahmad Baso, a young writer who was the first to translate some of Al-Jabiri’s writings from Arabic into Indonesian.

Said Aqil Siradj

Said Aqil Siradj used Al-Jabiri’s ideas for a book in which he reinterpreted the notion of Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jama’ah (in Indonesian abbreviated to Aswaja). Instead of understanding it as a historical school of thought or mazhab, Siradj interpreted it as a  manhaj or method. In his view Manhaj Taqlid did not mean blind imitation. Rather it meant a method of thinking, in other words an Manhaj al-Fikr or epistemology which in fact accommodated a lot of different approaches.  For the later he drew inspiration from NU leader Abdurrahman Wahid, who quoted a saying of the prophet that 'difference within the Umma is a blessing' – to promote intellectual debate in the NU.

It was also Said Aqil Siradj who introduced Ahmad Baso to Al-Jabiri’s writings, and thus motivate Baso into producing the first Indonesian translation of a number of essays by Al-Jabiri, which were published under the title Post Traditionalisme Islam or Islamic Post-Traditionalism. From then on Islamic Post-Traditionalism became a new term of reference for a way of critical thinking about Indonesian Islam among young NU cadres and intellectuals. In his introduction to the translated essays, Baso says that al-Jabiri’s return to the tradition is not a matter of picking and choosing, but a holistic appropriation for the purpose of analyzing Arab-Islamic thought in its theological, linguistic, juridical as well as philosophical and mystical aspects. This is an approach that fits with the  NU’s mission of rethinking Aswaja as defined by Siradj and Gus Dur

In Baso’s interpretation of al-Jabiri bayani or discursive thinking is more at odds with its irfani or gnostic counterpart than with burhani or demonstrative reason. The reason for this affinity between discursive and demonstrative reason is that the Qur’an, Islam’s core textual point of reference, recognizes and encourages the use of human reason.  However, Irfan, or Gnosticism, by contrast calls into question the independent role for the human intellect. According to Baso, this is why Al-Jabiri calls irfani thinking 'irrational'. It is understandable that as an NU intellectual subscribing to the Shafi’i Mazhab, Maturidi theology and Ghazalian Sufism, Baso has reservations against Al-Jabiri’s outright dismissal of the spiritual legacy of the Muslim East.

Ahmad Baso

But what Baso finds valuable is Al-Jabiri’s use of French poststructuralism and postmodernism because it can help Indonesian Muslim intellectuals in developing critiques of their own turath or heritage. Baso also draws attention to Al-Jabiri calibration of different types of reason on the basis of their shurut as-sihha, or ‘preconditions of validity’ (syarat-syarat keabsahan in Indonesian). In Baso’s view that procedure that is comparable to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, who also investigated the conditions that make human rational activity possible.

By bringing the philosophy of al-Jabiri into the discourse of Islamic Post-Traditionalism, Baso claims that he is continuing Abdurrahman Wahid’s pioneering efforts of introducing Indonesian audiences to Arab-Islamic heritage thinking about political action, such as nationalism, indigenization (pribumisasi), secularization, and feminism. Al-Jabiri’s concern with text criticism and discourse analyse will make thinking about heritage and tradition in the NU intellectually more rigorous. It shows an awareness that ‘language is not just a world-disclosing, but also a world-constituting exercise, producing a discourse and a new reality in terms of politics, religion, and imagination.  Baso also sees Islamic Post-Traditionalism as a‘new cultural strategy’ modelled after the articulation of the voices of marginal people by intellectuals from South Asia who are involved in subaltern studies.  Al-Jabiri helps the new NU intelligentsia to become organic intellectuals centered on NGOs engaged in emancipating rural and newly urbanized Muslims through grassroots level initiatives.

As a translator of Al-Jabiri’s writings, Ahmad Baso observes that Al-Jabiri provides a strategy, an “epistemological rupture” and paradigmatic revolution that will overturn current Western-inspired modernist-liberal ideologies and replace them with Indonesian Islamic alternatives. Through the ideas derived from Al-Jabiri, Ahmad Baso and other Anak Muda NU see themselves as continuing the anti-essentialist and non-reductive social ethics of their mentor Abdurrahman Wahid, which was grounded in Pribumisasi Islam – that is the ‘indigenization Islam’ into culturally specific contexts of Indonesia.

At the same time, however, Baso is acutely aware that the NU’s holistic framework with it strong Sufi dimensions, stands in tense relationship to al-Jabiri’s unambiguous privileging of rational (burhani) thinking. This shows also that Baso is no uncritical admirer of al-Jabiri, but – on the contrary – very acutely aware of ‘nationalistic’ tendencies that seem to infuse al-Jabiri’s interest in the philosophies of the Muslim West, or Maghreb. As a Moroccan, al-Jabiri’s preference for the intellectual heritage of the Maghreb may indeed lay him open to the charge of chauvinism.

All this attention for heritage thinking among NU intellectuals strengthens the impression that traditionalist Indonesian Muslims are more progressive than their modernist counterparts. This may be the case to some degree, but also in the Muhammadiyah one finds an interest in the ideas of Al-Jabiri. It forms part of a re-appreciation for the cultural context of religions by certain Islamic modernists in Indonesia.

Al-Jabiri and Indonesia’s Muslim Modernists

One such figure is M. Amin Abdullah, a leading figure in the Muhammadiyah and philosopher trained in Turkey, who eventually became rector the State Islamic University in Yogyakarta. Building on his research from the early 1990s, in The Study of Religion; Normativity or Historicity? In which he argues that contemporary Islamic philosophy has to come to terms with its Western counterpart, but at the same retain the normativity of Islam’s doctrine. Too often this is interpreted as an ‘intellectual invasion', or al-ghazwu al-fikry,  and this makes it difficult to change the resulting ‘reactive-defensive-emotional’ response into a ‘proactive-conceptual-argumentative’ one which was pioneered by heritage thinkers such as al-Jabiri.

M. Amin Abdullah

It forms the starting point for a new philosophy of education and a new curriculum for the study of Islam which Amin Abdullah explored in another book called Islamic Studies in Higher Education, An Integrative-Interconnective Approach. Here Abdullah proposes comprehensive approach to the study of religions as an open and interdisciplinary field, which looks at Islam as a living religion. It seeks to examine Islam through a civilizational lens by using both traditional religious and modern secular disciplines in combination with an ethical-philosophical approach that does not pretend to be value-free

Amin Abdullah draws predominantly from the triptych of the bayani, burhani, and irfani epistemes which Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri had developed in his Critique of Arab Reason. He says that Al-Jabiri’s critical approach covers a domain that is very similar to that of Western philosophy of science, and it is for that reason that Amin Abdullah proposes something that has not been tried before in Islamic Studies.: Applying the findings of leading philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos, to the study of Islam.

Amin Abdullah considers the dialectical historiographical meta-method of Lakatos particularly relevant because it formulates an alternative that navigates between the falsification process outlined by Popper and Kuhn’s paradigm shift. The distinctive aspect of Lakatos’s research programme is that it consists of a ‘hard core', corresponding to Kuhn’s paradigm, and a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses meant to defend the core from being challenged and undermined – or from being falsified, as Popper would call it.

Transposing these concepts of these concepts of the philosophy of science to Islamic studies, the field’s core is ‘normative Islam’ transmitted through traditional Islamic learning, while ‘historical Islam’ forms the ‘protective belt’. It is the conflation of the two that prevents a critical study of Islam.

This is Amin Abdullah’s plan as far as methodology and research agenda for a philosophy of Islamic sciences goes, but – as mentioned earlier – the aim of this new way of studying Islam is not just epistemological but also axiological: Namely To help find the fundamental value lying behind the Islamic doctrine. The new way of doing Islamic studies on the basis of the findings of the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge requires a new research programme combining linguistic-historical, philosophical-theological, and sociological-anthropological approaches, offered by the historical, structural, and ideological analyses found in Al-Jabiri’s Critique of Islamic Reason.

The main challenge of this comprehensive research programme is how to reconcile the absolute truth claims of the disciplines of traditional Islamic learning representing religious knowledge with relativized truths claims and the scepticism of the modern humanities and social sciences, which produce knowledge about religion(s) by taking them as social phenomena. Navigating between extreme absolutes and relativities, the outcome of Abdullah’s negotiation between religious sciences, on the one hand, and the human sciences on the other is the ‘relatively absolute’ approach.

Amin Abdullah also explains that transcending the bipolarity of religion and science as two separate entities with their own formal-material concerns, research methodologies, criteria for truth or validity, and functionality means  that a new foundation needs to be found for the epistemological unity of religious and positivist-secular knowledge of, what Abdullah calls,  Etika Tauhidik -- an ‘Ethics grounded in Transcendent Unity’. This clearly resonates with Ibn Rushd’s conclusion that revealed and demonstrative scientific and philosophical truths are not incompatible.

For Amin Abdullah, Al-Jabiri’s bayani, irfani and burhani systems of thought provide the structure for transforming contemporary multidisciplinary Islamic studies into a twenty first-century version of al-Ghazali’s equally comprehensive approach to conventional eleventh-century religious sciences. It creates a dialogue between the two in order to ‘humanize’ Islamic learning rather than ‘Islamize’ knowledge. The triangulation of Al-Jabiri’s critique of discursive, gnostic, and demonstrative reason connects the domains of textual-normative and contextual-historical-empirical analyses and offers the circularity which defines the desired dynamical hermeneutics of Abdullah’s integrative-interconnective approach.

Conclusion

Here we have then a few examples of the use of al-Jabiri’s philosophy by Indonesian Muslim intellectuals from NU and Muhammadiyah backgrounds for their own respective agendas.

However, the fact that a Moroccan rationalist philosopher appeals to both of them, seems to show that Al-Jabiri’s thinking has brought about a kind of meeting of the minds between Islamic traditionalism and modernism that transcends a almost two-centuries old divide.

Is there a right not to feel insulted? Or freedom to offend? A critical Muslim's view

The Paris shootings of 7 January 2015, at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and in a kosher supermarket, have rekindled the debates on how contemporary multi-cultural societies can reconcile the freedom of speech and expression with respect for other people's beliefs and convictions.

The Malaysian-born British activist and academic Farouk Peru, who divides his time between the Muslim Institute in London, pursuing postgraduate studies at King's College London, and maintaining the Quranology Blog, responded with a provocatively titled and thought-provoking essay, published under the title "Why I support the freedom to offend me". Originally published on The Malaysian Insider website, it deserves to be posted her in full:

"I grew up in a culture of ultra-reverence. As Malay Muslims who grew up in Malaysia, we had more than just a healthy respect for our religious elders. In retrospect, I would even say that we idolised them. Even polite criticism towards these men (never women) of God was frowned upon.

They were self-proclaimed inheritors of the Prophet and so going against them was tantamount to betraying the Prophet himself. This is why the irreverence on the level displayed by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would have been a massive culture shock to my adolescent self.

The Charlie Hebdo massacre was blamed on irreverence. I say “blamed” rather than “caused” because that’s just an excuse. What really caused the massacre were firing guns. These people could not handle the irreverence towards their faith shown by Charlie Hebdo.

In 2011, Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and was firebombed as a result. Irreverence was something they peddled and did so with pride.

The irreverence people show to our respective religions act as a test of faith. To me, the people who meted out these violent reactions towards Charlie Hebdo failed their tests.

Of all the human endeavours in life, religion is the one towards which we should expect the most irreverence. Why? Because its very fundamental manoeuvre is to sell something intangible. It promises salvation if you believe and practise. Yet this salvation isn’t visible. So how can religionists expect submission and docility from those who disagree with them?

Judging from the past cartoons Charlie Hebdo published about Prophet Muhammad, they aimed to offend the Muslims. Of course they did. But who really determines if they succeed or otherwise? We do.

The Muslim themselves. We have a choice of whether to take offence or not. I choose not to. Those cartoons do not represent Prophet Muhammad to me so why on earth would I be offended?

Instead, Muslims should take these cartoons and any other form of criticism towards Islam, the Quran and Prophet Muhammad as a challenge to their faith. Why should we have the privilege of being shielded from criticism? What gives us the special right to be exempt when we ourselves criticise other faiths and ideologies?

If we would be truly just, we would have to censor the Quran itself because it denigrates the status of Jesus – thought to be God and/or son of God by Christians – to a mere Prophet. Why is it all right for us to criticise a major religious figure yet we expect sanctity from the rest of the world towards our founder?

We should take any form of criticism, even mockery and satire to be a test of our faith. Ask ourselves, why would these critics and satirists publish their work? Is there any truth to what they say?

Oftentimes, their mockery has some loose relations with elements in our tradition. We should also ask, why did they interpret Islam in that way?

Has it something to do with us and the way we ourselves practise the faith? If we practised Islam in the right way, should any person have the moral right to insult us? These are all pertinent questions to ask.

Let's not pretend as if they are impossible to fathom.

This is why I support the freedom to offend me. It is a freedom, not a necessity. The people who seek that freedom may have legitimate grievances with my beliefs.

If so, I should investigate these grievances to see whether or not they have a point and if so, is it perhaps my interpretation which is at fault. If not, then they are not forcing me to swallow their fruits of expression. I have every right and prerogative to simply not buy their newspaper, open the webpage or listen to them.

We human beings – as the "earth as spaceship” analogy goes – have to live in a shared space. As such, we cannot afford to be hypersensitive but must rather instead by magnanimous and show good will towards people. It may be that the criticism masks deeper resentments with which we must engage with love, kindness and compassion."

This opinion article appeared first on the website of the Malaysian Insider – January 9, 2015.

grew up in a culture of ultra-reverence. As Malay Muslims who grew up in Malaysia, we had more than just a healthy respect for our religious elders. In retrospect, I would even say that we idolised them. Even polite criticism towards these men (never women) of God was frowned upon.
They were self-proclaimed inheritors of the Prophet and so going against them was tantamount to betraying the Prophet himself. This is why the irreverence on the level displayed by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would have been a massive culture shock to my adolescent self.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre was blamed on irreverence. I say “blamed” rather than “caused” because that’s just an excuse. What really caused the massacre were people firing guns. These people could not handle the irreverence towards their faith shown by Charlie Hebdo.

In 2011, Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and was firebombed as a result. Irreverence was something they peddled and did so with pride. The irreverence people show to our respective religions act as a test of faith. To me, the people who meted out these violent reactions towards Charlie Hebdo failed their tests.
Of all the human endeavours in life, religion is the one towards which we should expect the most irreverence. Why? Because its very fundamental manoeuvre is to sell something intangible. It promises salvation if you believe and practise. Yet this salvation isn’t visible. So how can religionists expect submission and docility from those who disagree with them?
Judging from the past cartoons Charlie Hebdo published about Prophet Muhammad, they aimed to offend the Muslims. Of course they did. But who really determines if they succeed or otherwise? We do.
The Muslims themselves. We have a choice of whether to take offence or not. I choose not to. Those cartoons do not represent Prophet Muhammad to me so why on earth would I be offended?
Instead, Muslims should take these cartoons and any other form of criticism towards Islam, the Quran and Prophet Muhammad as a challenge to their faith. Why should we have the privilege of being shielded from criticism? What gives us the special right to be exempt when we ourselves criticise other faiths and ideologies?
If we would be truly just, we would have to censor the Quran itself because it denigrates the status of Jesus – thought to be God and/or son of God by Christians – to a mere Prophet. Why is it all right for us to criticise a major religious figure yet we expect sanctity from the rest of the world towards our founder?
We should take any form of criticism, even mockery and satire to be a test of our faith. Ask ourselves, why would these critics and satirists publish their work? Is there any truth to what they say?
Oftentimes, their mockery has some loose relations with elements in our tradition. We should also ask, why did they interpret Islam in that way?
Has it something to do with us and the way we ourselves practise the faith? If we practised Islam in the right way, should any person have the moral right to insult us? These are all pertinent questions to ask.
Let's not pretend as if they are impossible to fathom.
This is why I support the freedom to offend me. It is a freedom, not a necessity. The people who seek that freedom may have legitimate grievances with my beliefs.
If so, I should investigate these grievances to see whether or not they have a point and if so, is it perhaps my interpretation which is at fault. If not, then they are not forcing me to swallow their fruits of expression. I have every right and prerogative to simply not buy their newspaper, open the webpage or listen to them.
We human beings – as the "earth as spaceship” analogy goes – have to live in a shared space. As such, we cannot afford to be hypersensitive but must rather instead by magnanimous and show good will towards people. It may be that the criticism masks deeper resentments with which we must engage with love, kindness and compassion. – January 9, 2015.
- See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/why-i-support-the-freedom-to-offend-me-farouk-a.-peru#sthash.Fr9TMmUk.dpuf

grew up in a culture of ultra-reverence. As Malay Muslims who grew up in Malaysia, we had more than just a healthy respect for our religious elders. In retrospect, I would even say that we idolised them. Even polite criticism towards these men (never women) of God was frowned upon.
They were self-proclaimed inheritors of the Prophet and so going against them was tantamount to betraying the Prophet himself. This is why the irreverence on the level displayed by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would have been a massive culture shock to my adolescent self.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre was blamed on irreverence. I say “blamed” rather than “caused” because that’s just an excuse. What really caused the massacre were people firing guns. These people could not handle the irreverence towards their faith shown by Charlie Hebdo.

In 2011, Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and was firebombed as a result. Irreverence was something they peddled and did so with pride. The irreverence people show to our respective religions act as a test of faith. To me, the people who meted out these violent reactions towards Charlie Hebdo failed their tests.
Of all the human endeavours in life, religion is the one towards which we should expect the most irreverence. Why? Because its very fundamental manoeuvre is to sell something intangible. It promises salvation if you believe and practise. Yet this salvation isn’t visible. So how can religionists expect submission and docility from those who disagree with them?
Judging from the past cartoons Charlie Hebdo published about Prophet Muhammad, they aimed to offend the Muslims. Of course they did. But who really determines if they succeed or otherwise? We do.
The Muslims themselves. We have a choice of whether to take offence or not. I choose not to. Those cartoons do not represent Prophet Muhammad to me so why on earth would I be offended?
Instead, Muslims should take these cartoons and any other form of criticism towards Islam, the Quran and Prophet Muhammad as a challenge to their faith. Why should we have the privilege of being shielded from criticism? What gives us the special right to be exempt when we ourselves criticise other faiths and ideologies?
If we would be truly just, we would have to censor the Quran itself because it denigrates the status of Jesus – thought to be God and/or son of God by Christians – to a mere Prophet. Why is it all right for us to criticise a major religious figure yet we expect sanctity from the rest of the world towards our founder?
We should take any form of criticism, even mockery and satire to be a test of our faith. Ask ourselves, why would these critics and satirists publish their work? Is there any truth to what they say?
Oftentimes, their mockery has some loose relations with elements in our tradition. We should also ask, why did they interpret Islam in that way?
Has it something to do with us and the way we ourselves practise the faith? If we practised Islam in the right way, should any person have the moral right to insult us? These are all pertinent questions to ask.
Let's not pretend as if they are impossible to fathom.
This is why I support the freedom to offend me. It is a freedom, not a necessity. The people who seek that freedom may have legitimate grievances with my beliefs.
If so, I should investigate these grievances to see whether or not they have a point and if so, is it perhaps my interpretation which is at fault. If not, then they are not forcing me to swallow their fruits of expression. I have every right and prerogative to simply not buy their newspaper, open the webpage or listen to them.
We human beings – as the "earth as spaceship” analogy goes – have to live in a shared space. As such, we cannot afford to be hypersensitive but must rather instead by magnanimous and show good will towards people. It may be that the criticism masks deeper resentments with which we must engage with love, kindness and compassion. – January 9, 2015.
- See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/why-i-support-the-freedom-to-offend-me-farouk-a.-peru#sthash.Fr9TMmUk.dpuf

grew up in a culture of ultra-reverence. As Malay Muslims who grew up in Malaysia, we had more than just a healthy respect for our religious elders. In retrospect, I would even say that we idolised them. Even polite criticism towards these men (never women) of God was frowned upon.
They were self-proclaimed inheritors of the Prophet and so going against them was tantamount to betraying the Prophet himself. This is why the irreverence on the level displayed by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would have been a massive culture shock to my adolescent self.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre was blamed on irreverence. I say “blamed” rather than “caused” because that’s just an excuse. What really caused the massacre were people firing guns. These people could not handle the irreverence towards their faith shown by Charlie Hebdo.

In 2011, Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and was firebombed as a result. Irreverence was something they peddled and did so with pride. The irreverence people show to our respective religions act as a test of faith. To me, the people who meted out these violent reactions towards Charlie Hebdo failed their tests.
Of all the human endeavours in life, religion is the one towards which we should expect the most irreverence. Why? Because its very fundamental manoeuvre is to sell something intangible. It promises salvation if you believe and practise. Yet this salvation isn’t visible. So how can religionists expect submission and docility from those who disagree with them?
Judging from the past cartoons Charlie Hebdo published about Prophet Muhammad, they aimed to offend the Muslims. Of course they did. But who really determines if they succeed or otherwise? We do.
The Muslims themselves. We have a choice of whether to take offence or not. I choose not to. Those cartoons do not represent Prophet Muhammad to me so why on earth would I be offended?
Instead, Muslims should take these cartoons and any other form of criticism towards Islam, the Quran and Prophet Muhammad as a challenge to their faith. Why should we have the privilege of being shielded from criticism? What gives us the special right to be exempt when we ourselves criticise other faiths and ideologies?
If we would be truly just, we would have to censor the Quran itself because it denigrates the status of Jesus – thought to be God and/or son of God by Christians – to a mere Prophet. Why is it all right for us to criticise a major religious figure yet we expect sanctity from the rest of the world towards our founder?
We should take any form of criticism, even mockery and satire to be a test of our faith. Ask ourselves, why would these critics and satirists publish their work? Is there any truth to what they say?
Oftentimes, their mockery has some loose relations with elements in our tradition. We should also ask, why did they interpret Islam in that way?
Has it something to do with us and the way we ourselves practise the faith? If we practised Islam in the right way, should any person have the moral right to insult us? These are all pertinent questions to ask.
Let's not pretend as if they are impossible to fathom.
This is why I support the freedom to offend me. It is a freedom, not a necessity. The people who seek that freedom may have legitimate grievances with my beliefs.
If so, I should investigate these grievances to see whether or not they have a point and if so, is it perhaps my interpretation which is at fault. If not, then they are not forcing me to swallow their fruits of expression. I have every right and prerogative to simply not buy their newspaper, open the webpage or listen to them.
We human beings – as the "earth as spaceship” analogy goes – have to live in a shared space. As such, we cannot afford to be hypersensitive but must rather instead by magnanimous and show good will towards people. It may be that the criticism masks deeper resentments with which we must engage with love, kindness and compassion. – January 9, 2015.
- See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/why-i-support-the-freedom-to-offend-me-farouk-a.-peru#sthash.Fr9TMmUk.dpuf

Has Sunni Islam as a 'Community of the Middle' died?

Herunder are some excerpts from an article that appeared in The Islamic Monthly. It is from the hand of Mohammad Fadel. An established scholar, currently associated with the University of Toronto, Fadel is also a prolific author and critical debater on things Islamic.

Mohammad Fadel

In the intriguingly entitled 'ISIS, Islamophobia, and the End of Sunnism', he criticizes both media-savvy Islam (or religion in general) bashers such as Bill Maher and Sam Harris, but also presents an introspection into the shortcomings of the Muslim intelligentsia

Saying that their description of Islamic doctrines is reductionist is not responsive to the legitimate concern that certainly some Muslims hold to the doctrines that Harris and Maher criticize, nor does it provide an answer to the question that many people genuinely wish to know, namely, what is the content of authoritative Islamic teaching regarding a familiar range of contentious issues that are held to be important by mainstream liberals?

In a lucid and boldly argued piece, Fadel not only takes 'new atheists' to task for the misconceived views of Islam, but puts the blame also on Muslim intellectuals. He criticizes the latter for failing to come up with convincing counter arguments as a result of their own uncritical rehashing of outdated texts and over-reliance on authority figures from the past.

The profound weakness, or even the non-existence, of a credible institutional expression of Islamic teachings in the modern world means there is no source from which an outsider (or even Muslims) can know what authoritative Islamic teaching is. In the absence of such an expression, one can hardly blame non-Muslims — who wish to “know” what Muslims believe — for turning to the same sources that Muslims themselves do, such as pre-modern treatises of Islamic law that continue to be taught in seminaries in the Muslim world and are also  used by Muslims in the West.

While appreciative of the argument that there is no such thing as 'Islam', and that it makes more sense to talk of 'Muslims', it is methodologically impossible to give exhaustive representative accounts that accurately reflect the full diversity of opinion among the believers:

Such an empirical investigation, at its extreme, would require surveying of millions of Muslim individuals all over the world before conclusions about Islam could be reached. Not only would such a study be practically impossible, we generally don’t demand such precision in empirical studies before we accept the results of social scientific studies

Pointing at the cheap shots taken by new atheists such as Sam Harris, Fadel observes:

It is a trivial exercise to pick up standard works of Islamic law and find ideas that are repugnant to the modern world. But, it is also a trivial exercise to pick up classics of Western philosophy and law and find the same thing. Even Thomas Jefferson the most egalitarian of America’s founders, expressed views on gender equality that would disqualify him today from entering public office, or might even get him dismissed from a public office were he to express them openly. 

It is not just a matter of 'tit-for-tat' in debating the likes of Harris and Maher, the  lack of critical engagement with the Islamic heritage on the part of Muslims themselves is preventing any real tangible change in the generally deplorable political condition of the Muslim world. For example, in relation to the contentious issue of the application of Islamic law, Fadel observes:

..if Sunni Muslims are too indifferent to their law that they fail to articulate a meaningful expression of its content in the modern world, then the best that Sunnis can plead in their own defense is that historical Islamic law is irrelevant to their beliefs and actions. But it is this very nihilism that produces the ethical and political vacuum that authoritarian political regimes, corrupt oligarchies and religious millenarians have filled and created the political circumstances justifying Islamophobia.

Why, after more than a century of theological and legal reform that has generally moved toward greater recognition of rights of women and non-Muslims, for example, has a brutally atavistic movement like ISIS found a home (even if one hopes it is only temporary) in the Nile-to-Oxus region, which was once called the heartland of the Islamic world by the great American historian of Islam, Marshall Hodgson? In my opinion, this is not because a reified Islam is teaching Muslims to reject liberal values as such, but is a simple and predictable reflection of the fact that political orders prevailing in the Islamic heartland have no interest in promoting liberalizing political values. 

Cutting to the heart of the matter, according to Fadel's diagnosis, Sunni Islam has failed to live up to its claim as representing the umma-alwasat -- the 'community of the middle':

Sunnism was historically a centrist tradition that rejected the messianism of Shiʿism and the unforgiving puritanism of the Khawārij. Its centrism, however, was not born of a kind of ad hoc reasoning that called on Muslims simply to take middle positions between extremes. It was a centrism based on firm adherence to certain moral principles, including rejection of armed rebellion with a refusal to recognize as valid the illegal conduct of rulers; a readiness to overlook moral shortcomings of individuals constituting the community, whether rulers or ruled, combined with an insistence on holding each person accountable before the law for their conduct

The consequences are dire, because in his conclusion Mohammad Fadel minces no words:

In short, the political theology of Sunnism was centered on the sovereignty of law and respect for authority (not power as such). The historical tradition of Sunnism, however, assumed a certain kind of relationship between political leaders, religious leaders and the public that no longer exists and will not return. Until a new political theology is established that adapts the historical principles of Sunnism to the realities of a democratic age, we can continue to expect the persistence of groups like ISIS and the Islamophobic New Atheists. 

For the full article, click here

Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946-2014): The disloyal loyalty of a critical Muslim

The French-Tunisian literary writer and essayist Abdelwahab Meddeb passed away on 6 November. Born into a North-African family of religious scholars, he moved to France in his youth to pursue a literary career. In the course of his life he became increasingly fascinated with his Muslim roots, but re-interpreted these in his own original manner. His re-readings of the Islamic heritage were often considered controversial by Muslim traditionalists and certainly outrageous and unacceptable to narrow-minded literalists on the reactionary side of the Muslim spectrum. Earlier posts about Meddeb and his work on this blog can be found here and here and here. The following excerpts are taken from an obituary that appeared on the Qantara website. 

Meddeb's act of crossing boundaries did not extinguish or deny the traces of his roots, which remained for him a powerful reference point and source of creative interplay. Again and again, Meddeb made reference to his dual ancestry in the East and the West, especially in the light of his origins in the Maghreb, which from an Arab perspective is the "West". He saw himself as a decidedly secular, Arab-European cosmopolitan individual whose chief concern was a revival of the intellectual convergence of the Islamic, Jewish and Christian history of thought that had been lost for centuries.

He set himself the long-term task of carving out an image of Islam that does not accentuate dogma and norm, but divergence, and of issuing insistent reminders of the critical, bold and even blasphemous thought that has also existed within Islam and among Muslim thinkers.
In this regard he saw points for launching a fruitful dialogue between the freedoms of the Western modern age and the polyphonic, multicultural legacy of Islamic societies.

Meddeb never tired of bemoaning the cultural amnesia fostered by westernisation and fundamentalism, a condition that affects both Western and Islamic societies in equal measure. What remains is the fatal polarisation of totally entrenched identities perpetuated by phantasms of supposed purity and clarity that are blind to history.
Like few others, Abdelwahab Meddeb made a convincing case for the argument that creativity, development and vitality are only possible through free thought, the crossing of boundaries and "disloyal loyalty" – and not through rigid morals, the pressure to conform, or the other extreme of denial and contemptuous rejection of tradition.

The full obituary can be read here.

For those who read French, here are a few excerpts from the 'In Memoriam' that appeared in Le Monde

 « Je porte en moi la maladie de l’islam », disait-il encore [...]Une position singulière, qui lui valut d’avoir des adversaires dans chaque camp. Mais aussi de nombreux amis et soutiens, tels l’islamologue Christian Jambet, le philosophe Jean-Luc Nancy, l’historien d’art Jean-Hubert Martin, l’essayiste Olivier Mongin, ancien directeur d’Esprit, qui lui proposa d’entrer dans le comité de rédaction de la revue. Ou encore le musicien Michel Portal, qui vint jouer Mozart et Schubert et improviser à la clarinette dans sa chambre d’hôpital, afin d’apaiser les souffrances de cet irréductible amoureux des arts. 

The rest can be read here.

French philosopher and friend Jean-Luc Nancy wrote an hommage, in which he noted that:

Tu es parti pour ton dernier voyage, Abdelwahab. Comme tous tes voyages il a déjà son retour en lui [...] De tous tes voyages tu reviens, à Paris, Tunis ou Tanger, à Rome, Le Caire, Berlin ou Résafé (souviens toi) parce que dans tous tu rencontres le retour éternel du même, de ce même qui n’est jamais identique, chaque fois nouveauté d’une même présence, chaque fois inscription d’un trait de la même présence. Dans la suite de tes poèmes son nom est Aya, une femme, quelqu’une, toutes, nous tous. « Tu es parti avec le poème / et tu resteras avec nous à jamais » - c’est toujours toi qui le dis et nous le récitons avec toi.»

Just three weeks before his death, Abdelwahab Meddeb recorded his last radio contribution for Medi Radio, where he had a series on Islamic civilization, broadcasted every Saturday evening. His last meditation can be heard here.

Hasan Hanafi on the Arab Spring and Muslim ambiguities towards Secularism

In a brief interview with Moncef Slimi on the aftermath of the Arab Spring posted on the Qantara Website, the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi made some interesting observations on Muslim attitudes towards secularism.

Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi

In response to the question whether it is possible at all to establish a secular order in Muslim countries without religious reforms, he noted that  'in the Arab world that's partically impossible. The concept of secularism is generally rejected by the majority of the population'. The reasons for that are the long-time effects of the defeat of the 1882 uprising of Egyptian officers led by Ahmad Urabi (1841-1911) against British tutelage; the impact of Ataturk's hardcore laicism and abolition of the caliphate in 1924; as well as the continuous and continuing repression of progressive Muslim intellectuals by successive autocratic Arab nationalist regimes.

In effect, Hanafi thinks that Muslims -- and Arabs in particular -- need to start from scratch, returning to the ideas of the nineteenth-century Islamic reformers Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905).

We should remember the reformist legacy of this movement, and realise that back then, the rejection of worldly thought was a reflexive reaction by influential progressive thinkers to the failure of efforts by the Islamic peoples to achieve liberation from European colonialism. 

This also corresponds to the points of departure of Hanafi's own lifelong mission for defining and establishing an Islamic way of progressive thinking. Known as the Heritage and Renewal Project, the evolution of this project is discussed in great detail in my book Cosmopolitans and Heretics. Where al-Afghani and Abduh represent the first and second phases of trailblazing and breaking ground for the development of an Islamic philosophical method, Hanafi sees himself as following in the footsteps of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), taking up and implementing the final and third phase of this reform process which the poet and philosopher from British India had laid out in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

Throughout his career, Hanafi has oscillated between this philosophical project and more engaged writings on current affairs in the Arab world. In the interview, he brings up the hostility of many Arab regimes against religious activism, even if it is strictly intellectual. These state interventions are not helpful in moving the Arab world forward:

The aggressive banning of religion from the public sphere by the state, and the introduction of a kind of "State Islam", is not going to lead us out of this dilemma. The tension between religion and politics would remain even then. 

Religious reforms in the Muslim world will need to take place within their appropriate context and its own terms, because as Hanafi observes:

Islam actually has no structures like the Church. Neither the Sunni Al-Azhar University nor the International Union of Muslim Scholars functions as an authority for the whole of Islam. In my view, the only Islamic authority comes from open, unbiased, scholarly discourse. And this is why is it quite simply structurally impossible for Islam to undergo the same kind of reforms as other faiths. 

To read the full interview click here

For some earlier critical observations on the role of Muslim intellectuals such as Hanafi in the Arab uprisings, read the post of 31 July 2011.