Islam, Liberalism, and Ontology

A Critical Re-evaluation

Joseph J. Kaminski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367539856
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000372243
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Metafisica filosofica

This book offers comparative ontologies of both Islam and liberalism as discourses more broadly construed.

The author argues that, despite recent efforts to speak of overlapping consensuses and discursive congruence, the fundamental categories that constitute "Islam" and "Liberalism" remain very different, and that these differences should be taken seriously. Thus far, no recent scholarly works have explicitly or meticulously broken down where these differences lie. The author rigorously explores questions related to rights, moral epistemologies, the role of religion in the public sphere, and more general approaches to legal discourse, via primary and canonical sources constitutive of both Islam and liberalism. He then goes on to articulate why communitarian modes of thought are better suited for engaging with Islam and contemporary socio-political modes of organization than liberalism is.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, Islam, liberalism, and communitarianism.

1

Introduction

In 2017, Mustafa Akyol and Shadi Hamid participated in a CATO roundtable discussion on the topic of liberalism and Islam.¹ Akyol, a prominent Turkish neoliberal journalist and a well-known proponent of Islamic liberalism, argued that Muslims could come to embrace liberalism under certain conditions. He posited that so long as progressive interpretations of Islamic doctrine and texts were offered, liberalism could eventually come to take root. For him this reality was true regarding all religions, and he gave the examples of the late eighteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment, also known as the haskala [השכלה], and the thought of Moses Mendelssohn along with references to earlier reform-minded groups within Islam such as the Muʿtazila and the Murjiʾa as demonstrative of alternative interpretations of mainstream orthodoxy. He then moved more into the language of contemporary political science, most specifically the language of democratization and its prerequisites, echoing many of the points originally made around half a century earlier by the likes of Seymour Lipset (1959) who emphasized the need for certain levels of economic development, along with pre-existing institutions, and socio-political stability for liberal democracy to succeed, noting that much of this is still missing throughout the Muslim world.

Following Akyol’s brief talk, Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and expert on Middle Eastern affairs, offered his rebuttal, arguing that while he is sympathetic to Akyol’s more liberal understanding of Islam, he is nonetheless much more pessimistic on the prospects of an enduring “Islamic liberalism” emerging anytime soon. He speaks from his own personal experience, arguing that most Muslims do not want to risk their spiritual well-being and embrace liberal or non-traditional positions. He then briefly goes on to discuss his argument in Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), which posits that Islam is exceptional compared to Christianity, especially regarding law, politics, and governance. Unlike Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) was also a statesman and formalized laws were essential in Islam’s early formation. One of the ways faith is expressed within Islam is by observing divine law or the Sharīʿa. Law within Islam, according to Hamid, always has some punitive dimension which very well may stand in opposition to more liberal understandings of the function of law. Hamid’s claim here was perhaps the only real allusion to the higher-order conflicts between Islam and liberalism in the entire seminar, and it was not really elaborated upon in a systematic manner. He ended his talk by arguing that we would be amiss to argue that liberalism is the natural human disposition. He references Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which contends that Western Enlightenment institutions themselves resocialize people against their more natural communal instincts and help foster a type of individualistic liberalism. Hamid agrees with Fukuyama and contends that we are more inclined toward illiberal ideas, especially in places dominated by illiberal norms and institutions.

What was missing from this timely, yet intellectually underwhelming and incomplete, roundtable discussion was any type of deeper reflective engagement with the fundamental ontological assumptions and claims of both Islam and liberalism as discourses more broadly construed. This often seems to be the case today regarding many scholarly and popular media discussions about Islam and its relationship to liberalism. In the aforementioned case, Akyol’s argument hinged upon unorthodox [shādhdh] (re)interpretations and political development while Hamid’s primarily focused upon individuals being averse to embracing unorthodox views and possessing a natural predisposition, exacerbated by dysfunctional institutions and rampant corruption, toward illiberal ideals.

What this work offers

This manuscript offers a thorough investigation of the relationship between Islam and liberalism at a conceptual level. Devji and Kazmi (2017, p. 1) argue that

as a historical and variable phenomenon, liberalism does not in fact possess a normative definition but constitutes a family of shifting and overlapping ideas having to do with the freedoms of property and contract, speech and movement, or of rights and representation.

While liberalism may not possess a universally assented to normative definition it certainly has a normative dimension that can be drawn out from the ideas of its most prominent thinkers. Arguing against the likes of John Rawls and more in line with Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Bhikhu Parekh, I argue that one cannot deny the normative dimension or the constellation of basic general assumptions that permeates liberalism as both an Enlightenment phenomenon and as a political phenomenon.²

The main argument pushed forth throughout this manuscript is that liberalism—Enlightenment or political—and Islam operate on fundamentally different baseline assumptions about the nature of reality itself. The stark differences regarding the overarching ontology of both discourses make reconciling them very problematic. Generalized lower-order similarities between Islam and liberalism should be seen primarily as incidental to rather than indicative of any deeper discursive congruence. This work also seeks to open the door to more serious scholarly inquiry regarding an alternative discursive framework—namely what widely falls under the umbrella of communitarianism—to help modern policy-makers and theorists frame future social and political debates that will transpire in Muslim-majority countries, especially those transitioning out of autocracy and/or civil war.

Arguing that Islam and liberalism are not reconcilable at a higher-order level is not necessarily a contentious claim to make; this work is not trying sell itself as offering a controversial and radically new argument on this matter. Other scholars have made this basic point before even though more recently, as noted above, some scholars have sought to challenge this position. The provocative late Bernard Lewis (2010, p. 63) frankly, yet reasonably, argued that the question is not “whether liberal democracy is compatible with Islamic fundamentalism—clearly it is not—but whether it is compatible with Islam itself,” and further notes that “[l]iberal democracy, however far it may have traveled, however much it may have been transformed, is in its origins a product of the West.” What differentiates this work from others that have alluded to Lewis’s point here is that this project offers a rigorous critical analysis and deep investigation of the basic categories and constructs that comprise “Islam” and “liberalism” via a clearly defined methodological mode of inquiry. Rather than just making this basic point via a spattering of references and anecdotes, this book seeks to address it in a meticulous and measured manner via primary and canonical sources that comprise each discourse. It ultimately hopes to serve as a useful asset for those studying comparative political theory or the relationship between international politics and religion.

Reconciling liberal thought with Islam—a brief overview

The first real efforts to reconcile what one could call modern “Western” or liberal thought with Islam occurred during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire. Regarding what came to be known as the Islamic modernist movement, Charles Kurzman (2002, p. 4) contends:

One defining characteristic of this movement was the self-conscious adoption of “modern” values—that is, values that authors explicitly associated with the modern world, especially rationality, science, constitutionalism, and certain forms of human equality. Thus this movement was not simply “modern” (a feature of modernity) but also “modernist” (a proponent of modernity).

The notion of modernity and a definitive answer to what the modern mindset looks like is an issue that is still hotly debated and remains unresolved. The contemporary Canadian political theorist Nikolas Kompridis (2006, p. 38) offers a useful intervention contending that the modern or modernist worldview is one that is open “to the novelty of the future [that] keeps perpetually open the possibility of a future different from the past, a possibility that contains the promise of a break with the past, and the promise of a new beginning.” It is important to point out that by their very nature, almost all religious movements—at least within the Abrahamic tradition—will never be fully modern vis-à-vis the characterization of the modern mindset offered by Kompridis. A complete break with the past is not even possible for a religion like Islam for a litany of reasons that will be discussed in the forthcoming chapters.³

Despite the fact that Islam will never be fully “modern” under Kompridis’s characterization, breaks with the past and new beginnings—to one degree or another—were all common themes in the thought of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformist scholars such as Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905 C.E./1323 A.H.), Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (d. 1897 C.E./1314 A.H.), and Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935 C.E./1354 A.H.). These reform-minded scholars sought to offer new ways for the rapidly declining Muslim world to keep pace with the rising West. They emphasized rationalism and moderation in both thought and practice. Qurʾān (2004) 13:11 nicely encapsulates their understanding of man’s relationship with the Creator: “Verily never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change it themselves.”⁴ Muslims could not just simply wait around until divine intervention arrived to save the day. They all believed that Muslims had to take heed of their own worldly affairs; otherwise Allah would leave them heedless.

ʿAbduh emphasized the importance of free thought and dissenting opinion. He argued that both helped propel the West to global domination. Noting the Muslim world’s decline over the centuries due to rampant corruption and socio-economic stagnation, much of ʿAbduh’s writings called for major reforms [iṣlāḥ] and theological renewal [tajdīd]. Al-Afghānī was also critical of the many injustices that plagued the Muslim world during his time. He argued that Muslims needed to re-embrace the notion of shūrā or consultation as it was practiced during the Prophet Muhammad’s (ﷺ) time except in a manner befitting modern conditions. He felt that when properly operationalized, shūrā would serve as an essential tool for combating tyranny and despotism. Riḍā, like ʿAbduh and Al-Afghānī, also called for Muslims to reject taqlīd which he understood primarily as uncritical, blind obedience to earlier rulings. Instead he encouraged Muslims to think critically and to read and evaluate primary Islamic sources themselves. Like Al-Afghānī, Riḍā also sought to engage in a mode of democratic Islamic politics that rested on consultation rather than on autocratic whims.

Another prominent reformist scholar of this era was Khayr al-Dīn al-Tūnisī. Al-Tūnisī (also known as Khayr al-Dīn al-Pasha) was the Grand Vizier [Sadrazam] under Sultan Abdülhamit II. His most important work, The Surest Path to Knowledge Regarding the Condition of Countries [Aqwam al-Masālik fī Ma’rifat Aḥwāl al-Mamālik], which was published in 1867 C.E./1299 A.H.,⁵ argued that the Muslim world must look toward the more successful European states for guidance regarding how to handle administrative affairs. The two main tasks he sought to highlight were the need to modernize and improve the condition of the community of Muslim believers and the need to stop denigrating and ignoring contributions from non-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on transliterations, Qurʾān referencing, and ṣalawāt
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Setting the table: Liberalism and its enlightenment origins
• 3 “Liberalisms”: Exploring the deep familial relationship between comprehensive liberalism and political liberalism
• 4 “Islams”: Rethinking the question “what is Islam?” and rearticulating it as a coherent discursive tradition despite the multiplicity of local traditions
• 5 Comparing the liberal and Islamic approaches to moral epistemology and human rights
• 6 Comparing the liberal and Islamic approaches to the role of religion in the public sphere
• 7 Comparing the Liberal and Islamic approaches to law
• 8 A communitarian alternative for modern Islamic societies?
• 9 Conclusion
• Index