Authors: Vincent J. Cornell
Voices of Islam (257 page)
Transitions in the ‘‘Progress’’ of Civilization
127
engage people with whom one disagrees. Second, I fear that once progressive practices of Islam are institutionalized and imposed from the top, it will have a number of deleterious effects. Like the well-intentioned labors of Muslim modernists a century ago, progressive Muslims run the risk of becoming serv- ants of power. The state-driven modernizing of Islam has turned Muslim modernists into partners and servants of the most brutal authoritarian regimes from Egypt to Pakistan, and from Tunisia to Indonesia. Muslim pro- gressives might have to consider the value of entering the democratic base of their societies rather than placating elites. Needless to say, this is much easier said than done and a great deal more thought has to be invested to configure the most effective strategies. Third, Muslim progressives must avoid running the risk of appearing to confect some version of a civilizing mission for Muslims. Showing vigilance for the designs of power to co-opt progressives for Neo-conservative, imperialist, or nationalist projects, be they Islamic or non-Islamic is a fi step. Continuous self-critique and debate will help us avoid repeating the missteps that our well-meaning predecessors committed.
Critical or progressive approaches to the practice of Islam, especially questions directed at the knowledge traditions together with their relevant answers, are determined by specifi contexts. In fact, the context is an undeniable part of the question of practice; it imprints itself on the tradition. To provide prescriptive answers from outside that specific context would be a colonizing posture to be avoided at all costs. Yet, it is an altogether different matter if people in one context wish to learn from the experiences of another context in order not to reinvent the wheel in analogous issues. In such a case, when people do accept the insights derived from another experience, then they do so voluntarily without dictation from outside and they own the idea and practice as their own.
By allowing the interpretation and practice of Islam to be context-driven one also ensures a robust diversity and pluralism. But more importantly, it takes the experiences of each context seriously. While the idea and practice of Islam were inspired by nonhistorical impulses of prophecy and revelation, everything after that initial moment occurs in the full light of history. For this reason it is imperative that Islamic norms be informed by peoples’ historical experiences. Thus, if interfaith dialogue and solidarity, and gender justice were burning issues in the South Africa of the 1980s, to cite one example, then it does not mean that these would be the same priorities in the twenty-first century. Hypothetically, Muslims in Egypt may well deem politi- cal pluralism and justice to be their urgent priorities, while in America wom- en’s access to mosques and the right to religious leadership might be regarded as urgent.
Often practices and experiences are not driven by clear-cut theories and policies that are applied in sanitized environments. To the contrary, practices are produced in much messier contexts and contingent circumstances. In recounting the experiences of Muslim progressives in South Africa,
128
Voices of Change
I observed that theoretical reflection was a luxury and more often than not, practical necessity, common sense, and ethical vision coupled with a certain pragmatism informed our practices in that specifi theater of struggle. Theory usually occurs after practice, just like the disciplines of legal theory (
usul al-fi
) and the theory of theology (
usul al-din
or
‘ilm al-kalam
) emerged as theoretical reflections after the practice of law, ethics and specula- tive theology had been in vogue for some time.
Theory is necessary for several reasons. One of the more obvious needs for theory is to provide some intellectual coherence and social intelligibility to existing practices. Theory has the ability to finesse and sharpen the rationales underlying practices and also to refine practices. And, theory makes complicated ideas and experiences accessible and digestible for pedagogical ends. Universality of ideas and practices combined with the brevity of abstraction facilitates easy transmission from one context to another. Evidently, the plurality of theories inherited from the past and those manu- factured in the present constitute tangible evidence of the different Muslim experiences that need to be sustained at all costs if one wishes to avoid totali- tarian outcomes in religious thought.
A plurality of experiences is borne due to differences in knowledge. The fallibility of human knowledge is made manifest in the inescapable diversity and hybridity of knowledge. Fallibility is an imperfection but a necessary one that makes the search for knowledge imperative. No wonder that some of the best exemplars of the Islamic tradition starting from the Prophet, the Companions to later figures like Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111
CE
), Abu al-Walid Ibn Rushd (d. 1198
CE
), Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi (d. 1240
CE
) made a virtue of intellectual promiscuity. Ghazali demonstrated this diversity in his monumental writings, pressing the value of in-between space (
dihliz
) of daily living and refl on.
11
The spatial metaphor of a threshold or portal, a
dihliz
—an intermediate portal separating the Persian home from its exterior—is also a productive dialogical space. From Ghazali and countless others we learn how intellectual productivity was enhanced at the interstices of cultures. Ghazali imagined and theorized all thought and practice to be a continuous dialogical movement between the inner and the outer; the esoteric and the exoteric; body and spirit in a productive fashion. He did not configure the dialogic in a simplistic binary relation but imagined these to be the polarities of a force field.
Suspended within this force field was the subject diligently tending to the needs of both matter and spirit. Underlying all our critical activity is a com- plex hybridity and fuzziness, despite our every pretension to smooth it out. And while over the longer duration we can sometimes observe dramatic shifts in knowledge, on most occasions we pass through transitions, creases, and folds in knowledge and time.
The perpetual quest is to seek emergent knowledge arising out of our struggles and transitions for alternative futures. We do know one thing
Transitions in the ‘‘Progress’’ of Civilization
129
taught by experience: that the dominant paradigms need to be continuously contested with alternative ways of knowing, different types of knowledge and models for society building. The future, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos pointed out, has become a personal question for us, a question of life and death.
12
In order to pursue such futures we also need to resort to the past not as a ready-made solution, but as a creative problem susceptible to open- ing up new possibilities. ‘‘Certainly we need history,’’ Nietzsche wrote. ‘‘But our need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge,’’ he continued, adding: ‘‘
.. .
[W]e require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts.’’
13
Both Ghazali and Ibn Arabi, just like Nietzsche later, were compelled to reread the past as a prophecy that would change the present. Unfortunately, too many thinkers have understood the progress of civilization in stoutly economistic terms linking the division of labor to the development of society. It may well be part of the truth, but certainly not the whole of the truth. But it is the prophetic activity dedicated to life that we seek in its intensities. A life premised on balance and distribution is necessary in order to avoid the nihilistic end that beckons without it. The progress we make in giving shape to that prophetic spirit—a life of practice and will to power—opens up the
possibilities
of new histories, not their inevitability and least of all the end of history, which is in reality a disguised theology of eschatology unique to a certain Christian worldview, but not necessarily shared by all. It is precisely because of the possibility of history and the will to power that Fukuyama’s end of history prophecy, now running aground in the ruins of Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush mountains as well as in the ashes of the World Trade Center in New York, proves that he was so grotesquely wrong. The neoconservatives and liberal capitalists who are riding the crest of history for now are confi about the inevitability of progress. But will their terminus also signal the crash of civilization? For those who view history as a continuous struggle, a gift carrying the possibilities of progress, the culti- vation of civilization remains inviting and utterly tempting.
14
NOTES
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(London, U.K.: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).Ernest Lee Tuveson,
Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress
(Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), 5.Farid Esack,
Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism: Towards an Islamic Perspective of Inter-Religious Solidarity against Oppression
(Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publications, 1997).130
Voices of ChangeWalter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in
Illuminations: Essays and Refl ctions,
ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 257–258.
5. Ibid., 260–261.
Pierre Bourdieu,
The Logic of Practice,
trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 73.T.S. Eliot, ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ in
Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot,ed. Frank Kermode (London, U.K.: Faber & Faber, 1975), 38.
Bourdieu,
Logic of Practice.Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time,
trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, U.K.: The MIT Press, 1985), 246.Donald Wesling, ‘‘Michael Serres, Bruno Latour, and the Edges of Historical Periods,’’
CLIO: Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History
26, no. 2 (1997): 200.Ebrahim Moosa,
Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination
(Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).Boaventura de Sousa Santos,
Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition
(New York and London, U.K.: Routledge, 1995).Friedrich Nietzsche,
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 7.
Ahmet Karamustafa, ‘‘Islam: A Civilizational Project in Progress,’’ in
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism
, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld, 2003).
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