On why the Asadian turn in Islamic studies isn't far enough

I've written before on this blog about the profound influence Talal Asad's Geneaologies of Religion had on my thinking and scholarship. As with many books that become semi-canonical in the academy, however, Geneaologies has inspired a host of lesser works, combining astute theoretical insights on the Islamic tradition with often astounding shortsightedness and naive idealism

. The critiques of liberalism, secularism and the secular nation-state by Asad, Hallaq, Saba Mahmood and others have succeeded admirably in historicizing these processes of formation and dealing with the particularist and paradoxical edge of secularism's universalist Enlightenment aspirations. 

The aforementioned theorists have been markedly less successful in critiquing  the particularist edge of their own favored discursive and governing traditions. As I've said before, dealing with the Islamic tradition as a 'tradition' doesn't solve the problem it purports to. It only circles back to it by way of a shifting battleground in the same war. For the battle over the Islamic tradition contains precisely the impulse which Asad, Hallaq and Mahmood critique so trenchantly in liberal secularism: the tendency of a governing order to define and put limits on cosmic understandings of human destiny. Secularism is certainly the western state's attempt to do that, but the theorists I mentioned don't go far enough in recognizing the paradoxical nature of attempts to govern the divine, and to place those who don't submit to that governance beyond the pale. They don't deal with the most striking instances of the Islamic tradition's own attempts to govern religious order, and the manifest shortcomings of these attempts, predicated as they are on an unsustainable line (created by the Islamic tradition) between monotheism as order, piety, rational ground and sanctity, and polytheism as shirk, rebellion, illogic and disobedience.

The irony that this is virtually the same line christocentric secularism draws between itself and islam should not be lost on the astute observer. The reasons for this are many, but at least part of it is that Christianity and Islam both are entangled with Aristotelian paradigms, that inform their approach to logic, order, being and presence. Another limitation is a shared legacy of monotheism, which drastically narrows the ability of either tradition to conceive poly or non-theistic ethical traditions. The lack of serious philosophical engagement with non-monotheistic african traditions, as well as non-theistic Asian concepts of the same, stymies them saying anything of deeper relevance to those interested in how mystical imagination can inform governance.

In point of fact, the critique of secularism is defensive. Asad and others working in the US and European academies want to create space for "piety" (as they understand it) to operate more freely in the western public sphere as well as in academia. But they have no answer at all to the problem of governance in the modern middle east or modern society more generally, especially the tension between religiously particularist modes of governance and a presumably neutral state. They have little to say on how secularism might be mystical, or how it might positively inform governance outside the United States and Europe (and what little they do say, I might add, seems to me incredibly shortsighted and privileged by their own positionality) They are able to show that the state is rarely, if ever neutral, but quite unable to conceive a theory of the self and good governance that would serve as a viable alternative to that of secular individualism. I am suggesting here that one reason they are unable is that their own visions are constrained (at least discursively) by an imagination of Abrahamic traditions as being at the center of the earth.

Their attempts to sympathize us to those with religious commitments is an important and vital project. But it leaves unanswered the vitally important questions about how a non-secular governance might look that did not discriminate among its members by religious affiliation. Such a project is vitally important in a time of seemingly ever-expanding religious bigotry at home and abroad.

Read more...

Duality and Tradition (by way of Wael Hallaq's The Impossible State)

"Many religious, mystical and other formulations are, up to a point, shrines for the relics of a completely or partially successful attempt to present and make available to various individuals and communities means for acquiring this knowledge. Like almost everything on earth, they are subject to deterioration or fossilization. They become both museums and exhibits, at one and the same time.
Because the tendency of stress discipine and group-attention without contemporaneous adjustment of other factors, many such formulations crystallized in the short or long term, and not infrequently claimed a monopoly of truth or effective ritual. This process, mirroring limited thinking patterns, frequently goes so far as to lead to a virtual destruction of the dynamic of the formulation of the school. In practice, exclusivism and dogmatism, beyond a certain point, militate against certain necessities of flexibility. There is a continuing need for regeneration.
What appears to some people as the sum total of the human heritage of philosophy or metaphysics or religion can also be viewed as heavily burdened with the wreckage or misinterpretation (through selective choice) of formulations previously operated by coherent schools. The factor causing this state of affairs is endemic in the human community."  -Idries Shah

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading the brilliant, but deeply flawed book The Impossible State, by Wael Hallaq. If you are looking for a more thorough critique of the book, you can google Dr. Lamu Abu-Odeh, who adroitly identifies some the book's major shortcomings (including its cynical reading of the modern nation-state as contrasted with the lofty idealism of something Hallaq calls "Islamic governance."). Despite its flaws, the book is a major work of scholarship and deserves serious attention. However, I will have to deflect my extended thoughts on the book to a later time. For now I would like to focus on a major ethical problem of Hallaq's book: the idealist characterization of a past ethical paradigm (what Hallaq calls 'Islamic governance.').

 In what follows, I would like to reflect briefly on the broad claim that it is both possible and desirable to "recover" precolonial ethical paradigms that were lost or fragmented by colonialism. I regard this claim as wrong. I do not mean to say that one cannot gain from studying the past, nor do I mean to deny the profound ways Western thinkers have ignored or subjugated "non-Western" traditions. What I have to say is that it is urgent that those interested in ethics and spirituality learn to see the duality in all religions and cultural traditions.

I must start with the most obvious claim. The primacy of enlightenment reason is a false absolute. In parts of the academy where I spend a great deal of time (notably Religious Studies) this is now a truism. The slow death of enlightenment reason has left intellectuals looking around for other enabling traditions, many of which were suppressed or denigrated by modernity. Understandably they find in these a source of moral guidance and clarity. But if enlightenment reason is a false absolute, there is no past tradition that contains this absolute ground of truth.

Thus I am suspicious of claims that we can find ourselves out of the duality of modernity (its violence that co exists with and is constitutive of its reason) through access to various modes of precolonial reality. I would not be so bold as to say that various premodern traditions cannot be enabling guides or fonts of moral inspiration. But there are two objections when it comes to "recovering" precolonial spiritual traditions. One is that these traditions no longer exist in their original form. There is a real sense in which modernity has rendered significant parts of these traditions obsolete or at least incomprehensible and trying to go back to 'sankofa' what has been lost leads to various forms of cult like veneration of outmoded ideas. For example, since one cannot recover the type of self these technologies worked on, the technologies themselves are obsolete. This is the significant agreement I have with Wael Hallaq's argument about sharia and the Islamic State. He argues that the Islamic State is an impossible one in the current Westphalian climate, and is thus a doomed proposition. This is a significant objection that is not readily or easily overcome. But Hallaq still seems to think it is possible to argue that "Islamic governance" was manifestly superior to the current nation-state system. I do not regard the comparison as feasible, due to an absence of any comparable data. I think it is quite likely that if we were able to go back in time to observe, we would find most of the same problems that plague our current justice system: bias, favor towards the affluent, corruption, blatant disregard for the law, etc. Hallaq, however, succumbs to the temptation to read a universal Islamic subject out of old jurist manuals. Yet he does not seem to realize the anachronism. Imagine if I were to read the universal Western subject out of John Rawl's A Theory of Justice!!  No doubt this anachronism will be less troubling for some than others, and some will regard the statement as cynical. I do not wish to advocate cynicism, but neither do I believe it healthy to persist in the illusion of being able to "go home again" (to quote Thomas Wolfe), or even the desirability to do so, were it possible.

The second objection is that modernity and what we currently know about the world has also rendered the objective descriptions of the world by past traditions obsolete. It is not merely a matter of mis-translation, or the need for new interpretation. These avoid the real ontological issue. Rather the problem is about new understandings of the objective world which render past pictures in holy books as a kind of blurred picture taken using outmoded and outdated equipment. The 'sacred' nature of a particular book ought not to blind us to this fact, although it often does. I suspect, the construction of the "sacred" is in itself an attempt to place dogma and tradition beyond the reach of reasonable doubt. The declaration of a book or a tradition as the objective and final word on reality is a tremendously tempting path for many smart, caring and dedicated activists and intellectuals. But one must ask oneself if they are dealing with things as they are or as things as they wish them to be. Finally, there is a dark side to "choosing or converting" to a single tradition. It manifests in an unwillingness to interrogate their own chosen tradition with the same acuity with which they critique modernity or atheism. Perhaps said tradition is under attack, and they feel the need to close ranks against outsiders, or perhaps it "works for them" and they do not wish to give the matter further thought. These reasons ought not to be taken lightly, but they cannot be regarded as serious arguments by the contemporary seeker.

My call again is for seeing the duality in all ethical social cultural and religious projects, and their contingent nature, including Enlightenment as well as all past religious traditions. I believe this attitude in and of itself is the appropriate ethics for our time, rather than any one tradition which needs to be (or can be) recovered and revived. I believe we have yet to investigate the possibilities of this attitude as an ethical and spiritual one. Indeed religious believers will see it as a form of unbelief, or radical skepticism which undermines their foundationalism. Our point should be that all past foundationalism is arbitrary. Once you realize the need for setting a foundation line for what you know, it becomes impossible to authentically do so, for foundationalism can only arise out of an objective conviction of the truth of something, not out of a psychological need for some foundation.

Read more...