Discussing Islam and Modernity

Hiwar ‘ala ‘ard muhayyida: Wajhan li-wajh [Dialogue on a Neutral Ground: Face to Face], edited by Khalid al-‘Abbud. 195 pages. Damascus: al-Ahali, 1997. 200 Syrian lira.

Al-Islam wa-l-‘asr. Tahdiyyat wa afaq [Islam and Modernity: Challenges and Horizons], edited by ‘Abd-al-Wahid ‘Alwani. 244 pages. Damascus, Dar al-Fikr, 1998.

These two books reflect the emerging ‘dialogue’ (hiwar) in Syrian public life between represen­tatives of the traditionally strong leftist-secularist intelligentsia and the increasingly influential Islamic one. This wave has been mounting since 1990, and has probably reached its zenith with these two publications and the public debates surrounding them. The focus of the secular­ist/Islamic dialogue is Islam as a civilizational tradition more than as a specifically political force.

The interest of the Asad regime in allowing the dialogue might have been to manifest its power of mediation between these two political and intellectual tendencies, neither of which was completely eclipsed under Ba‘th rule. The ‘cultural’ stake of the state authorities might be to restore a collective regard for the Arab-Islamic heritage in the era prior to an inevitable compromise with Israel. But this dialogue has never been fully controllable by the ruling elite, so it suggests the specific interests of its participants and moderators, how they are contribut­ing to the creation of a new, composite public that cuts across sectarian and class interests and has an increasingly self-reflexive awareness of what shapes the Islamic tradition. The emerging dialogue also suggests procedures of rational debates that are beginning to move beyond Islam as a topic to embrace a wider spectrum of public issues.

Between them, these two books present four ‘stars’ of the hiwar: Two of these are in the book edited by Khalid al-‘Abbud: Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, a frequent visitor to Damascus and a ‘radical’ Shi‘i cleric; and Muhammad Shahrur, a ‘liberal’ civil engineer and, until his retirement last year, a faculty member at the University of Damascus. Two other leaders in this dialogue contribute to the book edited by ‘Abd-al-Wahid ‘Alwani: the Salafi television preacher and university professor Muhammad Sa‘id Ramadan al-Buti; and the Marxist philosopher Tayyib Tizini. Thus these two books offer different juxtapositions of ‘ulama' and secularly trained thinkers.

The organizing principle of ‘Abbud’s volume reflects a strongly standardized framework for comparison. The editor prepared a questionnaire and asked several Arab intellectuals of the Syrian-Lebanese (“Greater” Syria) area to answer its standardized questions. In addition to Fadlallah and Shahrur, two other thinkers responded: Hadi ‘Alawi and Nasr Shammali. The editor's aim in using a questionnaire was to create a neutral platform (‘ard muhayyida)—or a common ‘metalanguage’—to write about Islam. ‘Enlightenment’ for ‘Abbud is achieved exactly by this method (pp. 11-12). The universalist enlightenment tradition tells us that one cannot accept the tutorship of any established authority. However, in the Syrian dialogue every participant in the public dialogue is willing, as a matter of method, to start from the sacred text. Why this consensus on the text? Because the text is present in social practice and regulates old and new social arrangements. In this sense, it is an important source of practical reason. Bypassing the text would mean violating accepted social practice and thereby derail an enlightened consensus on method.

The first dialogue (Fadlallah versus Shahrur) is more immediately political, the second (al-Buti versus Tizini) privileges an historical and theoretical approach. Fadlallah and Shahrur situate the Qur’an and Islam in the polity. Al-Buti and Tizini’s context is social reality and human history at large. The two exchanges correspond to different stages in a wider debate. Fadlallah advocates the shari‘a as the medium for an all-encompassing justice. He claims that Islam has a rich historical repertoire for articulating common interest in different domains, especially at the level of legislation. Nevertheless, he admits that Islam is one factor among others in determin­ing shared interest (pp. 61-66). Shahrur pledges the superiority of the individual over the social dimension in Islam, and advocates several simultaneous social contracts, including human rights, citizenship, and political articulation. These contracts have to be embodied in the ethical covenant of Islam (a covenant with God); this blueprint implies a desacralization of traditional customs that are not part of the sacred text and of the ethical covenant based on it (pp. 94-98). Shahrur’s reply appears the most daring politically, in spite of Fadlallah’s propagation of ‘political Islam:’ an ambiguous label that is neither part of the Islamic tradition nor of its currents of reform, but is a novel construction tied up to the shaky constitutional achievements of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as in response to the Western Huntingtonian fears of Islam as an anti-Western political factor.

For ‘Abbud, hostility to enlightenment is not inherent in the text but in the repeated un­holy alliances in Islamic history between the guardians of the text and political authorities (pp. 15-19). Here we approach a twofold problem that participants in this dialogue have to tackle in order for the Prophetic tradition once again to produce emancipating knowledge. Text-based tradition and socio-political structures have to be analyzed historically. Of the four authors, Tizini offers the sharpest intellectual critique (pp. 75-81 and 104-14; compare Tizini’s work on the influence of kalam on Arab-Islamic falsafa). He is the most outspoken in rejecting the simple truth that Muhammad’s Medina was the only era of Islamic enlightenment. Tizini contends that Islam is intrinsically both a civilizing tradition and an order-system (nizam).

Al-Buti counters this view by claiming a basic autonomy of the Prophetic tradition from its social-structural conditions (pp. 22-28 and 177-89). Tizini maintains that the Qur’an that we humans know and act upon, unlike the celestial one, is ipso facto part of social reality and subordinated to social consciousness. As a result, even the best interpreter of tradition, an outstanding mufassir or mujtahid, cannot claim a monopoly over the social understanding and practice of religion and cannot account for the complex social practice of Islam either! Al-Buti replies by acknowledging complexity and even fragmentation, but reaffirming the logic of the Islamic tradition: this lies in faith in the efforts to approximate the divinely inspired Qur’an. The approximation of divine will is historically nurtured by an articulate discursive and institutional structure grounded on doctrine and education (al-islam al-i‘tiqadi wa-l-tarbawi).

The bone of contention between Tizini and al-Buti is not the alternative between unity and complexity in Islam, but between its social embeddedness and its social autonomy. From a social-scientific viewpoint, both are important. We would say that embeddedness is inescap­able, but if through it we would reduce the Qur’an and tradition to social structure, we would not have a tradition anymore and we could not explain many phenomena related to Islam. This is clearly the blind alley that Tizini does not want to enter, and here the argument of al-Buti retains a kernel of inviolability to all kinds of structuralist arguments.

What is noteworthy is that the al-Buti/Tizini book offers solid foundations for a common language between the lay philosopher and the guardian of the tradition through its architecture of statements and cross-replies by both authors. In spite of being located at a higher level of abstraction, this latter dialogue has been a crude piece of lived cultural politics in Syrian society. The book is the outcome of a public talk show between al-Buti and Tizini that was due to take place at the University of Damascus in the spring of 1998, on invitation from the students’ union and the Ba‘th party. Tens of thousands mostly young people flowed in by bus from all over Syria. The unanticipated size of the crowd, episodes of hostility toward female students, and even minor clashes between supporters of both intellectual leaders prompted the authori­ties to cancel the event. The talk took place one and a half months later at the Damascus fair with a selected audience of fifty people for each side, and was broadcast on TV.

The Islamic tradition, weakly held in check by Arab nationalist elites, has a trajectory of its own that is more complex than the challenge of those elites by militant Islamists. The hiwar is a momentous struggle for situating, in history and in present-day societies, the legitimate embedding of the sacred word within modern social and political institutions. This dialogue is valuable because it departs from the obsession with reconstructing a unitary and consensual Arab-Islamic-humanist tradition (an aspiration that still encumbers the long introduction by al-‘Abbud, in contrast to the more sober words of ‘Alwany). This obsession still lurks behind the dialogue in that it seems to satisfy the hyperrationalist, politically correct intent of separating the rational from the irrational, the viable from the unfeasible in the composite Islamic heritage.

The promising moments of the dialogue are oriented toward a test of major and un­touched lines of conflict about the legitimacy of the moral guidance of Islam over the polity, and about the viability of a political regulation of the legal boundaries of religious norms. By unearthing these complex stakes, the dialogue contributes to creating a new, composite public that cuts across the middle and popular classes. The claim to the primacy of reason remains central, but grows out of passionate participation and a concern for the social underpinnings of Islam.

Armando Salvatore
Humboldt University, Berlin

Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity, by Armando Salvatore. xxvi + 283 pages, notes, index. Reading, UK: Ithaca Books. £45.00 (Cloth); £21 (Paper). Chicago: Paul & Company, Publishers. $45.00 (Cloth); $21.00 (Paper) ISBN 086-372-1966; 086-372-2733

This rewarding but difficult book has two organizing arguments. The first of these (pp. 3-63) takes the idea of communicative systems as the basis for political discourse and practice—a perspective most closely associated with the writings of Jürgen Habermas and developed almost exclusively on the basis of the European historical experience since the seventeenth century. Salvatore adapts and extends this approach to the emergence of modernity in the Arab world.

Salvatore suggests that the modern construction of Islam and Muslim values as a public norm operates through strategies of ‘staging virtue’—a notion inspired by Michael Warner’s narrative of the emergence of a public sphere in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[1] ‘Virtue’ here means a set of competencies that cultural (and, in Salvatore’s argument, religious elites) are called on to craft, refashion, and promote in order to appeal to a ‘public.’ Thus the emergence of the ‘modern’ era from the prior ‘Axial-age’—Salvatore’s argument assumes familiarity with the ‘insider’ language of contemporary sociology—is “the emergence of groups of specialists charged with mediating between the grass roots production of communicative order and the moulding, fixation and articulation of the very concept of order” (p. 11). For Salvatore, these discourses create a ‘public subjectivity,’ encompassing traditions of religious, moral, and legal discourses. The resulting patterns of membership and citizenship rest on particular sets of competencies stylized as moral endowments and codified as obligations and rights.

Habermas, Michael Warner, and others focusing on Europe and North America assume that the Enlightenment was forged “by fully secularized, privatized individuals highly motivated in discussing questions of common good within an increasingly structured public sphere” (p. 26). Notwithstanding Kant’s idealized version of modernity, Salvatore suggests that the Enlightenment is instead a lengthy evolution in which, at any given historical moment, there was a “large spectrum” of attitudes concerning religion (p. 26). In the West, the modern state demanded a special legitimation for itself, contributing to the privatization of religion or the emergence of a ‘civil religion.’

In the Arab-Muslim world, the state has been less successful in securing legitimization, making it especially useful to distinguish between the ‘official’ sphere and the ‘public’ one. Salvatore suggests that we look not just for equivalents to the European tradition, but the possibility of an Islamic publicness, one entailing an irreducible historical tension between the idea of a religious public sphere and the “authoritarian shell of the existing states” (p. 60). He argues that ‘neo-Sufi’ discourse, for instance, formulates the discourse of “a disembedded, human Reason¼through a vocabulary drawn from the Islamic tradition.” Compared with Western models of reasoning, neo-Sufi discourse offers “a less spectacular, but similarly functional affirmation of at least the subjective conditions of intellectual modernity” (p. 43).

Of particular importance, he points to the emergence in the last two decades of ‘new’ Islamic intellectuals, distinct from ‘ulama and ‘secular’ intellectuals, who are the “most original social product of an increasingly generalized access to secondary and higher education.” These ‘new’ intellectuals have expanded the public sphere beyond the limits of a previously restricted intellectual elite and have “deepened the normative import of public discourse, which has increasingly to cope with the interest and values of a large spectrum of individuals and autonomous social groups” (p. 47). However, Salvatore’s book says little about these new articulators of Islamic values. Nonetheless, this first of his two organizing arguments depicting the uneven but incremental emergence of a public sphere in the Muslim world and the inherent role of talk about Islam in the process of ‘staging virtue’ is both promising and persuasive.[2]

Unfortunately, Salvatore suggests that readers “less interested in these theoretical problems” skip this first section and proceed directly to the remaining three-fourths of the book, which offers “complex interpretive contentions about Islam and politics in the form of a hermeneutic chain formed by seven circles (and represented by seven authors)” (p. x).

This second organizing framework, what Salvatore considers the book’s “methodological hub” (p. ix), is a “genealogical perspective” to political Islam, “a powerful instrument for disciplining the research effort and enhancing its transparency” (p. xxiv). In practice—Salvatore stresses that the genealogical approach is not a “fully-fledged method”—the genealogical approach entails Salvatore’s discerning the fields in which both Western interpreters of Islam and their Arab-Muslim counterparts have written and argued over the past two centuries.

Claims of Orientalist ‘essentialism’ and Islamist ‘authenticity’ notwithstanding, Salvatore argues that these two fields of historical and interpretive discourse have been in sustained tension with one another. Hence he selects chains of interpretation in both circles—including Abdallah Laroui, Sayyid Qutb, Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri, Mohammed Arkoun, and Hasan Hanafi among contemporary Arab thinkers—and a succession of Western counterparts, including Gustave von Grunebaum, and Max Weber. The direct intersection is clear in some cases—Abduh’s dialogues with Renan, for example, and von Grunebaum’s influence on Laroui. Salvatore organizes his discussion into a series of seven ‘hermeneutic circles,’ each represented by one writer and arranged along a continuum from “linear, monodimensional hermeneutics primarily centred on an essentialized view of Islam ‘as such’, where the political is considered derivative of religion, to the opening of a bidimensional hermeneutic field, where the political acquires the status of an additional and autonomous dimension grounded on a concern of the observer” (p. 117). These include ‘late-classic orientalism,’ the Islamic revival, and a ‘standard Islamist conflation’ between religion (din) and state (dawla).

Salvatore is consistently interesting in his discussion of specific writers and successive stages of ‘orientalist’ discourse. The purpose of the hermeneutic ‘instrument’ is to achieve transparency, he writes, but the following stricture, one of the four criteria of the approach, suggests anything but clarity: “[T]he postponement of a first formulation of the problem to the moment when the historical analysis of displacements in problematization patterns has helped to dissolve the subjective impression of the ‘effect’” (p. xxiv).

Salvatore acknowledges the arbitrariness of this approach, even the possibility of misunderstanding it as a “void exercise in sociometaphysics” (p. xviii). His definition of intellectuals as “the modern producers of publicly relevant meaning, who invoke scholarly traditions often constructed for the task of the moment” (p. xviii), points to the necessity of situating the various circles, hermeneutic fields, and transcultural spaces in specific social and political contexts. The argument is occasionally given anchors in time such as “the 1973 crisis” (p. 163), and his comments on the particulars of each author’s argument is consistently interesting. At the same time, however, he excludes issues such as “the manipulation or rejection of such discourse at the level of social agency,” saying that such a task “probably transcends the investigative capacities of social sciences at large” (p. xix).

In the book’s concluding paragraph, Salvatore notes that the “related hermeneutic field” of political Islam is “barely permeable to the creative influence of grass roots communicative action” (p. 253). Yet it is this very development, as he acknowledges, that is the most distinctive characteristic of the past two decades (pp. 46-47). As Charles Taylor and others (including Stuart Hall) suggest, political and religious discourse and practices are carried out against the backdrop of an underlying framework of values and practices embedded in a “social imaginary”—the implicit, often background understandings against which the beliefs and practices in any given society are formulated.[3] Political Islam is understood against this backdrop, and the thinkers of the various hermeneutic seven circles can also be usefully situated against the contexts in which their ideas are argued and discussed.

Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity is on occasion overly demanding on those less familiar than Salvatore with the universes of contemporary sociological thought, and both Western and Arab-Muslim writings on Islam. In these respects, the book still shows traces of the doctoral dissertation from which it emerged. For those with patience, however, this complex work is rewarding and insightful, suggesting the task ahead to make thinking about Islam more central to the sociology of knowledge.

Dale F. Eickelman
Dartmouth College

[1] Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
[2] For a later elaboration of this argument, see Armando Salvatore, “Staging Virtue: The Disembodiment of Self-Correctness and the Making of Islam as a Public Norm,” in Islam: Motor or Challenge of Modernity, ed. Georg Stauth (Hamburg: LIT, 1998), pp. 87-120.
[3] Charles Taylor, “Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 14 (1993): 218-19.