A Dialogue with Islam

Anita Mir

Introduction

‘As Christians,’ said Pascal Masih OP, at the 2005 Journée Roman Dominican (JRD), ‘we think of Jesus as the Truth and the Way. Are we now saying that we do not have the Truth, but “a” truth?’ Masih’s question is at the heart of what I want to here discuss. If religion upholds absolute values, what is its position vis–a vis-modernity—whose governing principles are secularism and relativism? Secondly, how can one religious group discourse with another (say, Christians and Muslim) without clashing, and hence closing the door for all future possible dialogue, or on the other hand, without being so accommodating that either or both groups disavows to their being any substantial points of difference between the two? And lastly, who are the participants of this discourse? By this I mean, what authority do they have to represent a body of Christians and a body of Muslims?

As scholars such as Fred Halliday note, there is no one single phenomenon which can be addressed by the term ‘Islam’; it is amorphous and exists in many socio-political forms.(1) For instance, there are important differences in how Islam is understood and experienced in countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These differences are not only with regard to what is considered, in each context, to be an orthodoxy of belief, but also, what is deemed to be permissible practice, so that in the former, we observe certain ritual practices which have been shaped by interaction with other religions, and which, in a Saudi Arabian context, might be considered un-Islamic. Similarly, Islam as it is experienced in a majority Muslim country is distinct from how it is experienced in a country in which it is the minority religion, or indeed, in a country which is avowedly secular. The following argument refers to a body of Western critique of “Islam” and Muslims as it/they exist in Muslim states.

A fear of Modernity?

The modernity project, if one may call it such, is the end of a development arch which has its roots in the Enlightenment. Says the anthropologist, Talal Asad,

It was in Europe’s eighteenth century that the older Christian attitudes toward historical time (salvational expectation) were combined with the newer, secular practices (rational prediction) to give us our modern idea of progress.(2)

Modernity may mean a number of things to a number of people: it is varyingly associated with man’s power to control nature; a rational, scientific perspective and the concept of non-divinised progress. We are here interested in understanding its relevance to the relation between the state and its citizenry. In this context, modernity is an ethos which exists within a secular space and in which rights, rather than duties, predominate in the citizen’s relationship to the state. It is often said that Muslims have failed to embrace modernity (although this clearly does not apply to the accruements of modernity)(3) and that Muslim countries’ unwillingness to engage with modernity is based on the fear that Islam, like Christianity before it, will lose its central significance in peoples’ lives. I think a connection is sometimes also made between secularisation and isolation, so that a secular model is seen to whittle away at the value of community—an important structural support in societies in which, sometimes, little else works.  It is further argued that the secular model is one that is not applicable to Islam, for there is, and can be, no essential separation between dunya/the world and deen/religion. Historically valid though this is, I would like to posit that with the end of the rule of the Caliphs (alternatively seen as the end of the governship of the “rightly guided caliphs” who succeeded the Prophet, or the Caliphates which emerged subsequently—the last of which was the Umayyad Caliphate—and which was overthrown in 1492) this idea lost its status as a dominating idea, and like the concept of Zion, became one which was associated with a particular period in time (for Islam, it was a period in the past; for Jews, it was a period yet to come—at the end of time). Much to the chagrin of certain ulamã who held that Islam could not be contained within geographical boundaries, this concept was revived towards the end of the imperial period and gave birth to the idea of  ‘Muslim’ states.(4) In this paper I will be arguing that there is an alternative to the struggle between ‘theocratic’ and ‘secularist’ models; this model is one that before the birth of the new states, was a distinctive feature of the Middle East and Asia; it is pluralism. My contention is that the form of pluralism as it existed in these regions is distinct from the form of pluralism we associate with the West. In the West, as we all know, we have seen a continuing movement towards secularisation.(5) In many countries and regions of the East, on the other hand (not only those which are predominately Muslim) a connection to God continues to shape individual and community sensibilities.

 To put the case simply: pluralism is tolerance for a set of mutually accepted values. The scientific perspective of the post-Enlightenment West and the religious perspective of the East produce two different, and one might say, incompatible categories of pluralism: political pluralism and religious pluralism. If we now turn our attention to the specific case of Muslim countries, we see that this older model of pluralism is being submerged under a mono-identity. For me, pluralism in the context of the Middle East and Asia does not only refer to a tolerance for other religions, but also for disparate sects of Islam. Huntington’s now infamous Clash of Civilisations theory failed, I think, to take into account the fact that in an ideological war, it is not only the outsider who is the enemy, but also the insider who fails to conform to particular precepts. (6) And as we have recently seen in a number of Muslim states, the more entrenched the concept of orthodoxy becomes, the wider too grows the belt of those deemed kafirs/infidels.

Before we turn to the second of our questions—what form of discourse is possible and desirable between Christians and Muslims, I would like to address this question of the insider envisaged as enemy: it relates to our third question regarding who the participants in this discourse might be.

Participants in discourse

The present and most visibly public face of Islam is by and large radical. I do not think dialogue is possible with adherents of this viewpoint as their objective is one which seeks individual salvation via means of collective destruction of what lies outside their imaginative borders. Radical Islam is unrecognisable to the majority of Muslims who call themselves moderate Muslims. This last category is a broad one and includes those who practice the tenets of the faith, those who do not abide by all the five pillars of Islam, or even by one of the pillars of Islam and yet follow its social customs, and perhaps also those who are Muslim in name only.(7) I think it is healthy for a society to have such adherents to a faith because they are sceptical and ask questions. When questions are asked about a religion, that religion remains vital. It is this majority, I would argue, who should enter into a dialogue with the other, but also with one another. It has thus far remained largely silent (though this too is perhaps changing) with the result that the radicalisation of Islam has re-fashioned both the private and public spheres (and by this I mean strictly the public-political space). We therefore find an increased number of people joining right wing sectarian groups, an Islamisation of dress codes, of social assembly, and perhaps more subtly of all, a change in the use of language. One can understand the radicalisation of Islam as motivated by political ends (the scholarship on the Wahabism of Islam, how it has encroached upon local identities of Islam, is immense), or more benignly, as a search for moral/spiritual authority

I would like to here focus on this second aspect. In certain manifestations of Islam, for instance, Ismailism, Shi’ism and indeed in Sufism, the concept of an imam, leader or guide has remained paramount. In the majority Muslim world though, whilst the concept is accepted as a valid one, a person’s relation to his religion has to a great extent been individual. Perhaps it is now time for Islam to become an organisational religion.

In Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Allama Iqbal quotes the Turkish poet, Ziya as saying that the concept of the khalifa need not be one man; it could equally be an assembly. Iqbal likens such an assembly to the League of Nations, or what today we would call the United Nations. Within such an assembly I would add, cultural and regional differences would and should be greatly esteemed, for they would point to how religion interacts with culture, and with other religions.(8)

To my mind, the primary service this organisational khalifa could offer would be to function as a place of enquiry. Although the Qur’an has been regarded as open to interpretation, to analysis, as well as having been used as the platform for other forms of inquiry (both theological and non-theological—and here I am thinking particularly of the Medieval period), the demise of a tradition of scholarship has led to the idea that the Qur’an is inaccessible to interpretation and should, therefore, be read literally. Karen Armstrong says:

The last thing anyone should attempt is to read the Qur’an straight through from cover to cover, because it was designed to be recited aloud… Much of the remaining is derived from sound patterns that link one passage with another, so that Muslims who hear extracts chanted aloud thousands of times in the course of a lifetime acquire a tacit understanding that one teaching is always qualified and supplemented by other tests and cannot be seen in isolation. The words that they hear again and again are not “holy war”, but “kindness”, “courtesy”, “peace”, “justice” and “compassion”.(9)

Armstrong emphasises that such enquiry should take place within a community of learning. Without such shared enquiry, what emerges is the use of indiscriminate selections of certain passages to define a religion, passages which outside of the context in which they were placed, take on new meaning. For instance, the young British Muslims who, having read that they should only submit to Allah’s will, refused to vote in the recent elections and impeded others from voting. They were unable to distinguish between a submission before God—which is not, and here we move briefly to theology—a renunciation of will, but its right activation; and concord to the norms of the society in which they lived. The latter is not by any definition of the word a ‘submission’. Without enquiry, man’s credulity towards questionable doctrines and ideas increases. And instead of facts, thinking and reflection there emerges superstition and hearsay.

For such a khalifa as the one we are suggesting to emerge, then, other things must happen. Muslims need to re-evaluate both the period referred to as the “golden age of Islam” and their interaction with the Christian West, including, of course, the period of imperialism. For some Muslims the demise of the former is a direct consequence of the latter. This becomes, in the hands of fundamentalists, one of the weapons of ideas which are used to augment hatred against the West.

While the concept of such a khlaifa is trans-national, changes too would have to be made at the national level. The first and most important of these changes, is, I would argue, an end to the concept of an ideological state. The question of whether the radical militant forces which have emerged in the Middle East and Asia should be incorporated, by means of election, into the political system, is one that is still open to debate. The two opposing lines of arguments are: the views of this group will be tempered by the political system and, their past actions should not be so easily absolved. Each country has to decide which path it will take.

I think it is important that stronger ideas of national identity evolve, but these need be national identities which are, as we have said, pluralistic. To a Western audience, the idea of a “strong nation” might prove unamenable, given that such identities in pre-war thinking led, disastrously, to totalitarianism and the mass murder of Jews, gypsies and peasants. To Simone Weil’s argument that the nation has become the supreme form of collectivity, we would contend that it could become one form of collectivity with which other forms co-exist—arguably, there would be tensions, but none, hopefully, that could not be resolved.(10)

Our emphasis, then, would not be on an exclusive, but an inclusive idea of identity; for instance, one that is not fixed by religion, race etc, but perhaps by something which is potentially open to all, such as Herder suggested—an association for the land and language.(11)

Earlier, we said that some leaders of the religious right had questioned whether Islam could be contained within a national identity: it was, they argued, trans-national and trans-historical. One is left to wonder whether the inculcation of an anti-nationalistic sentiment has firstly, been successful, and secondly, whether affiliation to the “nation” has been replaced by an affiliation to an idealised and long defunct centre of Islam. Perhaps this, as well as the steady pool of money that has been fed into countries, can, to some extent, explain the mass movement of Wahabism across the region of the “Muslim world” and also the appeal of men such as Osama bin Laden. Now that the search for authority has been initiated, it has to be fed. My argument is that this search for authority be fed by a constructive, enquiring agency, rather than a destructive one.

It is only, then, I believe that Islam—from a position of assuredness—will be ready to interact with Christianity. Do I think such an engagement is possible? My work looks at what I am beginning to see as the theologically similar approaches of two mystical poets: one a Catholic, the other a Sufi. What joins them is a shared heritage that they each, in their own ways, directly and indirectly learnt from a period and place in which there was real engagement between Christianity and Islam—al Andalus, in the Middle Ages. There is, then, if this is part of what we are seeking, a model for engagement we can turn to.

The encounter with the “other”

I would now like to briefly address the last of the questions with which I began this paper: the effects of the encounter with the other on individual Christians and individual Muslims. This is not only a question I have asked, and am asking myself, but also one that was, I realised, relevant for Dominicans studying Islam.

By studying the other I do not mean an empirical analysis, or indeed a fundamentalist style analysis, which looks at the other only with the objective of finding what is wrong, corrupt and implausible. If one admires, respects, and comes to love the thing one is studying, and if that thing is not only an objective idea, but an idea whose resonance is subjectively experienced, i.e. religion— then what happens to one’s position of belief as it was held prior to the encounter? Can it ever be reclaimed? Should it be reclaimed? And how dangerous for one’s bond to one’s own religious tradition is this?  I think there is a real danger, and that this is to be understood on two counts: Firstly, this is to do with the personal tumult this can throw one into. Secondly, empathy may lead us to understand the other from a position relational to our own, with the result that we ether miss or ignore what is different. And although commonality is to be valued, should not also be difference? The challenge is, I think, a difficult one: how to look at the other not from our own perspective and from our own religious tradition, but from its own perspective and tradition and yet, throughout, to remain assured within our own faith. Perhaps this is the real test of encounter.

-This is an amended version of a paper given at the JRD, 2005. I would like to thank other participants for their critique.

(1)  Fred Halliday: Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003) 2.

(2) Talal Asad, Geneaologies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 19.

(3) See S. Parvez Mansoor’s Historical Order, Rational State or Moral Community, Association of MuslimSocial Scientists: Proceedings,Twenty First Annual Conference,ed. Herndon, Virginia, 1993.

(4)See the work ofMaulana Abul Ala Maudidi,

(5) The American experience is, in many ways, unique.

(6) Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs (Florida: Council on Foreign Relations, Summer 1993).

(7) Khaled Ahmed calls those Muslims who do not follow the prescriptive of Islam, but may follow some or all of the rituals, ‘cultural Muslims’. The Friday Times, 2004.

(8) Allama Mohammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: Iqbal Academy: 1989) 124-126.

(9) Karen Armstrong, ‘Unholy Strictures’, Guardian Weekly, August 19-25, 2005.

(10) Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (New York: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1987) 95.

(11) See Isaiah Berlin, The Cooked Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana Press, 1991) 40.