Historical studies and truth to power

 I dislike histories where the author assumes their personal moral commitments are on the plane of the universal and metaphysical, and then spreads those assumptions all over their historical topic, a style that used to be called "whig history". One aspect that grates me is the egoism--the subtle need to communicate to the reader how much better the author understands things in hindsight than did the people who lived through the events. But there are deeper problems.

For it is surely of much greater benefit to our present to understand the specific rationale of actions later understood to be evil or harmful, then it is to make clear to a reader that they are "beyond the pale" to you in the present. This is bad historical method and is not very useful beyond demonstrating that one holds the current "right" ideas on the subject.

Detaching from snap moral judgements doesn't mean evacuating your moral commitments altogether, it means presenting them in way that respects the sensitivities of multiple readers, including those that disagree with you. For example, a western feminist scholar might disapprove ethically of "polygamy" for example. But instead of condemning it directly or negatively psychologizing those who engaged in it, that scholar could demonstrate some of its negative unintended effects and their larger social implications, without demonizing the institution and everyone part of it, as a whole.

It used to be that critical reviews could hold the tendency to whiggish moralization partially in abeyance, but anymore I wonder. I just completed an otherwise excellent book infused with this sort of moralistic rhetoric. Why do some scholars choose to write this way?

I speculate, but I think it might because I and many progressive scholars embrace an ethos of our work as "speaking truth to power", which was a concept coined in 1942 by Bayard Rustin in a pamphlet on nonviolent resistance to describe the role of a religious group. Applying it to historical studies is an inherently "whiggish idea", for it assumes that truth is out there among the masses or in the archives, merely suppressed by a powerful minority, and can simply be picked up and made visible by the scholar who tells their audience which group was right and which group was wrong.

At the same time, this imagination of "truth" must contend with a social backdrop of the loss of societal-level meta-narratives, the dissolution of truth into multiple perspective-bound truths. In the context of postmodernism, perhaps the whig style helps to broadcast and define communal boundaries within a larger community of scholars, demonstrating who is in, and who is out of a particular moral community.

Beyond speculations as to motivations, I think there are excellent and interesting ways to do morally committed history, that are more effective than placing your hand on the scale of the winners or the scale of the losers and saying, "I'm with them".

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Historical Method: A Comment on Deeper Roots

The book promised to be "what the other book (Roots) promised to be but never was. Rather than an incapacitating, sentimental Euro-centric tracing of ethnicity, the author reconnects the Americas to the culture of pre-colonial West Africa and the universal way of Islam."

My next door neighbor in Oman gave me the book in our discussions on Islamic theology and law. He has traveled widely in America, so I assume he picked it up there. Anyway, the book brought up an old, yet still relevant issue: did Africans reach America before Columbus? Before I go on, a note on methodology is in order. While I think that is highly likely that Africans did reach the Americas before Columbus (and Dr. Quick presents numerous pieces of evidence, mostly gleaned from the work of Ivan Van Sertima) there is also the problem of how admissible certain pieces of evidence are. The reasoning behind Quick and other scholars' work is that an accumulated mass of similarities must ergo equal pre-Columbian contact. Yet a word from a comparative anthropologist is most germane here:

It can never be assumed that apparent likenesses between cultures are fundamental, while obvious differences are coincidental or due to special local circumstances. The selection of similar elements from different cultures and the dismissal of differences must always be justified logically, in detail, and in both historical and functional terms. As in any scientific enterprise, we must not simply choose our facts to suit our theories but must demonstrate that the cultural similarities considered to be fundamental are similar in detail and durable, while dissimilarities must be logically explicable as easily changeable cultural features.

For example, Quick cites Ferdinand Columbus, who writes about people in northern Honduras as being "black in color. They pierce a hole in their ears large enough to insert a hen's egg." "Black in color" indeed tells us very little of these people's concrete cultural origins, and should not be taken as evidence. However their piercings might tell us a little more. Even if piercing were practiced in West Africa similar to how Columbus described (quite likely), how do we know that this practice emerged in the Americas from contact with Africa? Independent invention seems just as likely. Happily for the scholar, their are some almost irrefutable pieces of evidence relating to language and other traveler's reports which put us on firmer ground. Overall the book gives some fascinating insight into what is in many ways still an underground history. Quick ends by meditating on a dynamic that has been much studied of-late, and remains relevant to African Studies in an Indian Ocean context:

"The real challenge is to be "Mecca-centric" yet in touch with the African world, to be an authentic Muslim yet still in touch with African American spirituality, to be a moral person yet still in touch with the pulse of African American youth, and to develop Islam in America without getting lost in the crises of the Muslim world."

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Taqleed, Ijtihad, and Wujub al-nazr

You drown in an ocean of God and can't breath -Jedi Mind Tricks

Recently I have been digging into different facets of Islamic theology, and it is certainly interesting to see the early theologians having debates similar to what the early Christian theologians were debating (the nature of G-d, His attributes, free will, eternity, oneness.)

What I always find MOST interesting about these debates is the degree to which the debaters assume that all those in the conversation know how to ascertain that something is true. It is rarely questioned HOW we actually KNOW FOR CERTAIN that something is true.

Islamic theologians tried to address this systematically, but even they were limited by the ideas and ideology current at the time. Many of them borrowed heavily from Hellenistic philosophy in order to argue their theological and philosophical viewpoints. However, if one reads the average book of aqeedah, what one generally gets is not sophisticated argumentation but crude propositional logic using mostly hadith. In fact, I have found that these books are rarely encouraging believers towards the pursuit of knowledge but towards the pursuit of certainty and non-argumentation. This is disappointing but understandable, as religious scholars are often tied to state projects of social and political control and religious ideology offers a convenient prop for this. Even if said religious scholar is not tied to a state-project, he still exists within a milieu which requires him to convince his followers that he knows THE way: uncertainty is public enemy number one when it comes to religious knowledge.

After considering all this, and then reading more on the basic principles of knowing (i.e syllogistic knowledge, first order logic, etc) I came across the following concept from Jainism (an an Indian religious and intellectual tradition predating Hinduism and Buddhism):

Anekantavada--the principle of multiple viewpoints

Anekantavada is basically the idea that since everything changes, what we know to be 'true' ought to be tempered by another knowledge: that of our impermanence and extremely limited knowledge of the world. Reality itself is manifold in its manifestations. Special relativity demonstrates this is in regards to the nature of space and time: an object's experience of it may be profoundly different depending on the reference point and relative nature of motion. This is rarely present at the level of ordinary awareness, rather it becomes apparent only as one moves at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Our experience of the world presents a profound paradox which we can ignore existentially, but not philosophically. To me at least, anekantavada is like saying "Allahu 3lim."

Even math, otherwise one of the purest and clearest ways to see the world, has its own set of inherent limitations. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem shows that since any given mathematical system complex enough to contain arithmetic, contains propositions that are true but not provable from within the system, then it may be possible that no single theory will be able to explain the whole world. To extrapolate beyond the abstraction: If we consider Islam as a "system" or a "special world-system" to borrow John Voll's words, then is it not the case that there are true propositions within it that are not provable using its internal methodology. (i.e the existence of G-d). By extension, doesn't this mean that there are things outside the system which are also true but not demonstrably true within the system? This does not invalidate the system's truths, but it does inject a sense of humility into the conclusions one draws within the logic of that system. In other words, the conclusions from our system or set, have to be part of a larger set of sets (The SET OF ALL TRUTH, if you will)

I will let al-Ghazali have the last word on this one, with his criticism of the Mutazilites:

"Don't you see that when you are asleep you believe certain things and imagine certain circumstances and believe they are fixed and lasting and entertain no doubts about that being their status? Then you wake up and know that all your imaginings and beliefs were groundless and unsubstantial. So while everything you believe through sensation or intellection in your waking state may be true in relation to that state, what assurance have you that you may not suddenly experience a state which would have the same relation to your waking state as the latter has to your dreaming, and your waking state would be dreaming in relation to that new and further state. If you found yourself in such a state, you would be sure that all your rational beliefs were unsubstantial fancies."

Al-Ghazali didn't reject reasoning, he simply said that it had its limits especially in regards to attaining the WHOLE truth of a situation. Thus he indirectly pointed to the principle of multiple viewpoints.

Now let us consider the application of this viewpoint to the science of knowledge leading to right guidance:

The central debate in Islam seems to be between taqleed (following a particular authority out of respect for their knowledge) and ijtihad (making a decision, particularly a legal decision, by independent judgement). Taqleed is what we 'ordinary' humans do, while ijtihad is for those well-versed in Islamic scholarship. There is a place in Islam for both of these concepts (for example, taqleed tells me that when I want an opinion about mathematics, I don't go to any random friend but to a mathematician or math teacher. That doesn't preclude my friend the Calculus II student from offering some brilliant analysis up to his level of expertise.)

Unfortunately the two been distorted into opposite poles (like when Western critics argue that "closing the gates of ijtihad" was the cause of intellectual stagnation in the Muslim world but ignore that there are plenty of Islamic commentators who have parsed this debate in different ways, with great skill.)

My question: Why can't an ordinary person perform ijtihad? Is there anything in the Quran prohibiting this? Unequivocally, no. Therefore, I am convinced that, with the availability of modern knowledge, one can easily perform ijtihad, and indeed should. One ought to have the deepest respect for true scholars, and be quick to point out factual errors, but the arguments against ijtihad only demonstrate how scared some 'ulama are of losing their power, as well as how far some have come from the reforming message of the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him.

But even beyond ijtihad is the process of wujub al-nazar, or the obligation to reason to produce truth. Given the above limitations, proof with al-nazar will necessarily still be contained within a system (that of human thought) but it will be a larger system with more points of overlap. Whereas to reason from within ijtihad alone might also produce truth, but within a more limited system (the framework of Islamic law).

Now the question REALLY is: how does one parse out the differences between an obligation to use reasoning, and an obligation to obey the principles of a given system (Islam, for example). This is a very relevant question, especially when it comes to implementing Islamic law.
ASIDE: Please note that I don't use the word 'reason' (i.e. Western rationalism) but the word 'reasoning' to denote the process by which any group of humans produces its fundamental truth and which has produced a pretty stunning plurality of viewpoints on a range of ethical and ontological issues.
Many 'liberal' or 'modernist' Islamic scholars (I have problems with those two labels but we will address that later) have correctly pointed out that institutions which are now basically assumed to be the pillar of Islam as a 'system' are not in fact as ontologically sound as they have been purported to be and thus not to be relied on to establish the truth of a given proposition within that system. See, for example, Kassim Ahmad's Hadith: A Re-evaluation. The most shocking aspect of what Ahmad reveals is that the Prophet Muhammed himself (in an often ignored or misinterpreted hadith) clearly forbade his followers from writing down what he said.

Here is one of the reason's Prophet Muhammed's revelation was so important: he was specifically addressing the corruption and empty formalism that had arisen within the Judaic tradition due to the fact of relying on Talmudic interpretation and scholarly opinion. Using our earlier terminology, the logic of that system (Judaism) had become strained and unharmonious due to its overreliance on taqleed.

This produced a sort of disharmony between the obligation to reason speculatively towards the truth, and the opinions of past scholars. What the early Islamic scholars did, in an attempt to ensure that its system would not be corrupted along the same lines, is to try to ensure that there was a given system in place for discerning the accuracy of a given hadith. (Compare this to the Christian Church fathers decision to implement a priesthood)

But given that compilers like Bukhari didn't begin to write these down until some two centuries after the Prophet's death, isn't it ironic that Muslims would claim that the hadith are more accurate than say, the Gospels? (With a similar time lag between events and recording). I do not make this point in order to incite the ongoing battle of correct revelation; I am merely pointing out that theological controversies in Islam are a function of human limitation within that system, as is the case for Christianity, Judaism, etc. Any given system of religion will necessarily have a degree of pluralism; the question is never about eliminating that pluralism but of establishing its boundaries: how do we discern what is 'of the system' and 'not of the system'. Mathematically speaking, what is our set? And does our set harmonize with the set of sets? We are back to the principle of allahu 3lim.

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Religion and Rationality (A Note on Religious Criticism from Talal Asad)

But even if they have a religious origin, human rights are no longer based on religious reason. That alone, so it may be said, gives them a more rational foundation. Yet when people make such claims, it is not always clear what concept of rationality or religion they are employing. Nor do they always seem to recognize that the provision of epistemological foundations is itself a problematic enterprise (and one that, ironically, connects 'reason' to origin). Thus, Kantian philosophers have one concept of rationality, modern political liberals who stress pragmatic criteria have another, and psychiatrists yet a third. Philosophers and anthropologist have long been fascinated by the question of explaining apparently irrational beliefs in nonmodern cultures and premodern epochs. There is a vast literature on the subject.

Three features characterize this literature. First, natural science is usually invoked as a model for what counts as rational. But even this apparent agreement is deceptive. In fact, the debaters urge mutually incompatible concepts of rationality upon each other, partly because what is critical to the long-term succcess of the different natural sciences is itself the subject of continuing philosophical and historical debate.

Second, rationality is held to be the essence of an entire secular culture, and consequently the success of modern medicine and technology is considered the guarantee of truth shared by the culture as a whole. (This foundational claim is not to be confused with the sociological observation that science and technology are variously bound up with a range of social, economic, and political institutions.) The idea of an integrated cultural totality founded on the Truth of Science makes it difficult to understand how people come to have serious disagreements over the possibility or desirability of particular changes in a modern polity.

Third, great importance is attached to being able to assert that 'modern culture' is superior to 'non-modern cultures' as though the consequence of not being able to do so forcefully enough would lead to large scale defections from the former to the latter. Implicit in the well-advertised fear of 'relativism' is the extraordinary thought that the cultural life of human beings is the product of conscious criticism and objective choice. It is extraordinary because, although arguments are clearly important in different social situations, the reasons for a person's attachment to a given way of life cannot be reduced to an idealized model of scientific theory building.

Perhaps the feeling that secular arguments are rationally superior to religious ones is based on the belief that religious convictions are the more rigid. But there is no decisive evidence for thinking this. Religious traditions have undergone the most radical transformations over time. Divine texts may be unalterable, but the ingenuities of human interpretation are endless--quite apart from the fact that some of the conditions of human doubt and certainty are notoriously inaccessible to conscious argument. Fanatics come in all shapes and sizes among skeptics and believers alike--as do individuals of a tolerant disposition. As for the claim that among the religious, coercion replaces persuasive argument, it should not be forgotten that we owe the most terrible examples of coercion in modern times to secular totalitarian regimes--Nazism and Stalinism. The point that matters in the end, surely, is not the justification that is used (whether it be supernatural or worldly) but the behavior that is justified. On this point, it must be said that the ruthlessness of secular practice yields nothing to the ferocity of religious.

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How Do We Think About Religion?

In the spirit of the discussion going on below about religious truth, I offer the following reflections from Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines of Reason and Power in Christianity and Islam I offer these because Mr. Skeptic, you still have not addressed yourself to my (and rehenuma's) critique of the central conceit of western rationalism--that is its claim to be speaking from a place of 'objective' truth. You also did not address my critique of the free market along the same lines you criticize religion. You claim to be speaking from a postmodernist perspective. However, you also wrote:
"You can always tell which religions and belief systems actually do not have the real truths, because they are the ones that demand that you subject yourself to endless quotidian rituals and constantly recite passages from books, as though ostensibly the only way to convince one of a truth is to have them repeat it over and over and over again until one doesn't even think to challenge the habitual thought."

"Now, if truth and meaning are inherently subjective, then how is one 'always able to tell which religions and belief systems actually do not have the real truths'? I agree that truth is often constructed through discipline and instrumental power, but you are making a very interesting leap between postmodernism and rationalism. I don't think you have decided which side you are on, yet, maybe.
Anyway, lets marinate on these quotes from Asad, who draws his critique of anthropological study of religion from Geertz's definition of religion as "affirming something" ("it must if is not to consist of the mere collection of received practices and conventional sentiments we usually refer to as moralism, affirm something.") Geertz also says that religion helps man to cope with his intellectual, physical, and moral limits.

"This modest view of religion (which would have horrified the early Christian fathers or medieval churchmen) is a product of the only legitimate space allowed to Christianity by post-Enlightenment society, the right to individual belief: the human condition is full of ignorance, pain, and injustice, and religious symbols are a means of coming positively to terms with that condition. One consequence of this view would in principle render any philosophy that performs such a function into religion (to the annoyance of the nineteenth century rationalist), or alternatively, make it possible to think of religion as a more primitive , a less adult mode of coming to terms with the human condition (to the annoyance of the modern Christian). In either case, the suggestion that religion has a universal function in belief is one indication of how marginal religion has become in modern industrial societyas the site for producing disciplined knowledge and personal discipline. As such it comes to resemble the conception Marx had of religion as ideology--that is, as a mode of consciousness which is other than consciousness of reality, external to the relations of production, producing no knowledge, but expressing at once the anguish of the oppressed and a spurious consolation."
"Geertz'z treatment of religious belief, which lies at the core of his conception of religion, is a modern privatized Christian one because and to the extent that it emphasizes the priority of belief as a state of mind rather than a constituting activity in the world.

To me, religion is a way of engaging with the world, a method of practice that involves the body and is embodied in physical movement. Consider the following, also from Asad, quoting Mauss approvingly:
"According to Mauss, the human body was not be viewed simply as the passive recipient of 'cultural imprints' still less as the active source of 'natural expressions' that are 'clothed in local history and culture' as though it were a matter of an inner character expressed in a readable sign, so that the latter could be used as a means of deciphering the former. It was to be viewed as the developable means for achieving a range of human objectives, from styles of physical movement, through modes of emotional being, to kinds of spiritual experiences. This way of talking seems to avoid the Cartesian dualism of the mind and objects of the mind's perception.

So to sum up:
1) Religion as a universal concept for describing those practices which attribute divine agency to the world is a culturally conditioned definition, conditioned by our experience of religion as 'one choice among many'. This too is linked with our modern conception of the autonomous self.
2) This view of religion supported (and supports) a particular accretion of power in the modern secular states that constitute 'the West'.
3) Religion is a way of teaching bodies, it is a physical as well as a cognitive knowledge. As such, consciousness is interdependent with bodily practice. It follows then, that one 'knows' something, particularly religious truth, by DOING IT. Critiquing it as an irrational leftover of our primitive brain was and is made possible by the construction of religion as a dangerous historical object that must be confined to the private sphere as a belief, and constitutionally subordinated to the state.
So what do you think?

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Aesthetics and Afrikatalyst

My fellow artists in Afrikatalyst inspired me to write this piece about my approach to writing.

The aesthetic of my writing, at least my poetry writing, is most often attempting to invoke feelings through sound. For me, all recitations--poetry, songs, plays, and even speeches--possess two levels of meaning which are intimately interconnected. The first is the meaning we associate with our understanding of the definition of words and phrases. The second is the meaning inherent in the sound itself, the meaning of its magnetic quality of rhythm and vibration. This sound has a fluidity of meaning, a special aesthetic which is not reducible to the words.
In fact, this flexible quality of sound and the ability to manipulate its meaning is the mark of a truly great slam poet. There are a number of great writers, but we listen to those who 'magnetize' us with their words. Their concepts may be simpler than the next guy, but the way they use sound and phrasing is unparalleled. The difference is the sound, the placement of sounds in complex structural relations to each other. This is why its not just 'what' you say, but also 'how' you say it. My aesthetic is interested in the HOW. I try to use innovative rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, alliteration, and alliterative rhythm to stimulate the subconscious. The impression I strive to create is of a magnetic flow that creates energy to make you receptive to the levels and allusions of my words. Without flow and rhythm, people simply would not listen as hard.
Thanks to Monk for help with this insight. Peace and forward ever. Give thanks.
Check out Afrikatalyst's show in Baltimore...coming in September.

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