Abstract
This chapter investigates the relationship of Islam to the modern condition of civility. It argues civility to be absent from the project of early Islamic revelationism and therefore an issue in modern Islamic socio-political consciousness. The chapter brings forth the original and innovative interpretations of civility in the modern context and takes as a case study the work of Abdullahi Ahmad an-Naim. Being a student of Sudanese modernist reformist Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, an-Naim potently argues for a fundamentally ethical/spiritual understanding of the Prophetic Event that allows for a genuine socio-political Islamic contribution to civil society. His work is explored especially in relation to issues such as civil liberties, the public sphere, religion versus secularism, and political culture.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout the present chapter we employ “civility” sensu stricto, that is, as a mode of political culture that relates to the set of processes (e.g., secularization, individualization) that have shaped the political empowerment of individual agents in modernity, and not sensu lato, that is, as the set of qualities (e.g., politeness, tolerance) that such agents might and/or should exhibit. Thus we use “civility” in the sense of “political civility”.
- 2.
- 3.
We term it “foundational hierophany” because it constituted the basis or comprehensive framework for all mediation between the sacred and the social, and also “endonomous” because it was experienced neither as devoid of the sacred (i.e., as autonomous) nor as other to the sacred (i.e., as heteronomous). The hierophanic endonomy of Classical Greek political life-forms refers to their intrinsic and fundamental sacredness.
- 4.
Regarding this term, we draw on Castoriadis (1975).
- 5.
In using the term “nature” as intrinsic to the Greek worldview we are not implying that Islam has an anti-nature bent, but that in a sense it is otherworldly.
- 6.
This categorization of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is of course schematic and therefore abstract, but no less indicative of the type of historicity they presuppose and entail. Judaism’s historicity as an alternative is conditioned by its minority status; Christianity’s historicity as a successive alteration is conditioned by its status as an equivocal totality; and Islam’s historicity as a constant alternation is conditioned by its status as an unequivocal totality. To put it differently, we could render this categorization as follows: Jewish historicity is about a part that poses as a total; Christian historicity is about a total that is supposed to be a part; and finally, Islamic historicity is about a total imposed onto and through its parts. Of course all these considerations involve much broader issues that cannot possibly be dealt with in their entirety within the scope of this chapter.
- 7.
Tawhid is typically translated as “oneness”, but more popularly understood as “unity”. The matter of its translation and usage revolves around a general misapprehension of the term’s doctrinal meaning. It determines the singularity of the godhead, Allah, but not necessarily to interject that the godhead represents unity. The word for unity is wahdat (as in the case of Ibn Arabi’s wahdat al-wujud). Thus tawhid is more accurately representative of the godhead as “absolute” and “ultimate”, if we are to see the term as underlining the assertion about the monotheistic creed: Allah is one and supreme. Understood in this way, tawhid not only does not exclude individuality but on the contrary becomes the very basis of individualization in Islam through the latter’s heightened experience of Allah as the One or, otherwise, the Individual.
- 8.
To be sure, there is no universal individuality nowhere before the advent of modernity, when for the first time the understanding of the human condition is conceptualized in terms of inherent equality. If one was to look for precursors for this understanding, then Stoic cosmopolitanism and Christian anakephalaiōsis (universal salvific recapitulation in Christ) would be the most likely candidates. Nevertheless, the former was only a potentiality and the latter an emotionality towards a proper theory of universal individuality.
- 9.
As far as Islam is concerned, occasionalism is mainly associated with al-Ghazali (d. 1111) (Marmura 2005), who advocated the argument that perceived causality is about non-necessary connections. In this regard, something occurs, when it occurs and in the way it occurs, due to Allah: causes and effects do not relate inherently, but only through the power of Allah who occasions both. Thus what we refer to as occasionalism in this connection pertains to the fact that be(com)ing a Muslim individual is ultimately occasioned by Allah-the-Individual.
- 10.
This refers to Sufism, in particular to networks of Sufi lodges across the Muslim world, which in their capability of incorporating otherness are supposed to have created a heightened sense of plurality (much needed for the conceptualization of civility). Nevertheless, the latter eventually does not have the effect of leading to an equally heightened appraisal of otherness (for everything remains definitively Islamic), which indeed would be a protomodern type of development.
- 11.
We should emphasize that we highlight the difference between ijtihad and hermēneia for a number of reasons, most importantly methodological ones. For us, the latter is utilized as an analytical category that accounts for plurality, creativity, and innovativeness in Islam. In this sense, it refers to the Islamic experience from its very beginning. On the other hand, ijtihad enters the scene much later and pertains to a very specific context of Islamic experience: when the empire-like conditions of the Caliphate had been consolidated, Muslims had the “luxury”, and at the same time were compelled to ponder into what their eschatological message was supposed to stand for, since everything seemed more or less established. Moreover, one should not lose sight of the fact that ijtihad has been predominantly a legal-technical practice rather than a theological-speculative exercise.
- 12.
For the “contextualist” reference (see Duderija 2017).
- 13.
Ibn Khaldun had suggested such a distinction, though not in these exact terms, in his muqaddima . He distinguished Islamic polity from natural polity, stipulating that Sharia (for him, divinely inspired religious polity) and mulk (described as worldly derived non-religious/natural polity) have a complex relationship. At first, Revelation had no need for worldly polity, which was based on reason, because this was already contained within the divine edict. After a while, natural polity came to the foreground in the absence of both the Prophet and later on the Deputyship. Thus the reins of power were turned over, so to speak, to worldly power (kingship), and the religious and worldly polity were intermixed for a time. Finally, the two of them became separate, whereby natural polity was dominant over Islamic polity. See Ibn Khaldun, muqaddima Chapter 3, excerpt 32.
- 14.
In this respect, the Islamic semblance of civility is highly dialectical and should be conceptualized both negatively, that is, as seemingly so—since it is not real civility in Greco-Roman terms—and at the same time positively, that is, as virtually so—because it is happening in eschatological terms.
- 15.
Abdullah Yusuf Ali, 1991. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an, p. 1605.
- 16.
To be precise, the eschatological civility we are referring to on the part of Islam is only one amongst other cognate developments in modernity with regards to Christianity and Judaism. In this respect, it would perhaps be more apt to talk about Islamic eschatological civility.
- 17.
For a comprehensive introduction to Mahmoud Muhammad Taha’s thought, see Taha 1987.
- 18.
Hence an-Naim’s advocation of the secular state, within which he envisages the possibility of the flowering of a truly (multi-)religious society and, by extension, the proper realization of Islam as an ethico-religious endeavour (An-Naim 2008, pp. 1–44).
- 19.
By this we are not insinuating that in effect an-Naim ceases to be a Muslim—since self-transcendence has always been the case with the historical development of Islam—but we are certainly hinting at the possibility that his Muslim experience allows one to envision a “space” wherein Islam and Christianity (can) meet afresh and be in a mutually constructive dialogue.
- 20.
Here, presumably, we are utilizing a structure that is distinctively Christian (Cullmann 1946), but to the extent that this structure constitutes the meta-structure of modernity and has informed, from the very beginning, the eschatological Islamic experience of history, we assert that it is methodologically warranted for understanding a thinker such as an-Naim, who purports to stand firmly on the grounds of Islamic tradition and at the same time to engage genuinely with modernity.
- 21.
Just to give some examples of what an-Naim refers to while discussing these four domains, we could mention the following: the secondary or subordinate social status of women in Islam with regards to human rights; the absence of democratic procedures in issues of Islamic governance with regards to constitutional law; the problem of non-Muslims’ legal rights under Sharia with regards to criminal law; and the always precarious unbalancing of international relations in light of the priorities of Islamic assertion with regards to international law.
- 22.
In Taha, these very issues are more or less about the objective of justice in the here-and-now of despotic totalitarian Sudan, whereas in an-Naim this transforms into a wider concern of justice as civility.
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Milani, M., Adrahtas, V. (2021). The Quandary of Modernity: Islam and Civility. In: Milani, M., Adrahtas, V. (eds) Islam, Civility and Political Culture. New Directions in Islam. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_2
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