Reforming Modernity - Ethics and The New Human in The Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha by Wael B. Hallaq
Reforming Modernity - Ethics and The New Human in The Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha by Wael B. Hallaq
Reforming Modernity - Ethics and The New Human in The Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha by Wael B. Hallaq
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MODERNITY
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th or
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of Abdurrahman Taha
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WAEL B. HALLAQ
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Introduction 1
four Recasting Reason 151
Notes 279
Bibliography 331
Index 000
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[x]
AD: Al-ʿAmal al-Dīnī wa-Tajdīd al-ʿAql [Religious Praxis and the Renewal of Reason],
4th ed. Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2006.
HAF: al-Ḥaqq al-ʿArabī fil-Ikhtilāf al-Falsafī [The Arab Right to Philosophical Differ-
ence], 2nd ed. Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2006.
HIF: al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī fil-Ikhtilāf al-Fikrī [The Islamic Right to Intellectual Difference].
Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2005.
KNN: “Kayfa Nujaddid al-Naẓar fil-Turāth” [“How Do We Rethink Tradition”],
in SM, 41–57.
RD: Rūḥ al-Dīn: Min Ḍīq al-ʿAlmāniyya ilā Siʿat al-I’timāniyya [The Spirit of Religion:
From the Narrowness of Secularism to the Capaciousness of Trusteeship]. Casa-
blanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2012.
RH: Rūḥ al-Ḥadātha: al-Madkhal ilā Ta’sīs al-Ḥadātha al-Islāmiyya [The Spirit of
Modernity: A Prolegomenon to Laying the Foundations of Islamic Modernity].
Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2006. —-1
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[ xi ]
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[ xii ]
In spite of the breadth of his interests, the thread that runs throughout the
entirety of Taha’s philosophical fabric, wholly making up its warp and woof,
is indisputably the ethical thread. In all of its varied dimensions and direc-
tions, his project remains squarely lodged within what we generally call
moral philosophy.
This book focuses precisely on this thread, as Taha weaves it into his
discursive engagement with the central questions that plague modernity
both in the West and in his own Muslim lands, both taken not as geographi-
cal signifiers but as epistemological formations of the first degree. To write
about anything central is also not to write about many other things, which,
however important they may be, must be relegated to the margins. I cannot
claim that this book captures Taha’s vast project in all or even most of its
dimensions, but I have the confident hope that what I say here exposes the
central nerves by which his system of thought operates. Put differently,
and in justification of writing about a deep thinker who is still active, this
book treats the vital membranes that make his project not only possible but
also what it is. Change the constitution of these membranes, and the proj-
ect would categorically cease to be identifiable in the manner we recognize
it now. Which is also to say that although the project is ongoing, there is
already a formidable body of thought that is recognizable as a unique con-
tribution to ethics, one that we must begin to reckon with.
I should also make it clear at the outset that the astounding caliber of
this thinker is not the only reason his work has commanded my attention.
Taha’s project is relevant to me because it navigates the same terrains and
waters that have become the focus of my interest over the past two decades.
The concluding part of this book, I think, adequately demonstrates the com-
monality between our projects, and it is with this in mind that the book
should be read and interpreted. It is my hope that, whatever critique I deploy
in scrutinizing his writings, it is one that is fair and faithful to the central
tenets of his own project, which I deem, on the whole, to be sound and highly
defensible. This is also to say that in my critique of his work, I continue my
own deliberations that began with Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations
(2009) and that continued with The Impossible State (2013) and Restating Orien-
talism (2018). Any adequate appreciation of this critique presupposes close
familiarity with these works.
-1— A caveat is in order, however. I take it for granted that no work or oeuvre
0— is immune to critique, and to the extent that I regard certain issues and
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[ xiv ]
facilitated contacts with the Rabat School, among countless other forms of
support and assistance. Mustapha al-Murabit, Taha’s close associate, has
been boundlessly patient and helpful in answering my queries during
the last half-decade. Humeira Iqtidar and Sudipta Kaviraj subjected the
manuscript to a close reading and made a series of suggestions that helped
improve the book. To all these students, colleagues, and friends I am pro-
foundly grateful.
Last but not least, I owe an immense debt to Mawlānā Abdurrahman Taha
himself, who read the penultimate draft and graciously responded to it in
what is now an appendix. I have summarized his response and offered my
own critique of it in chapter 2, section 4, but will leave the final judgment of
my debate with him to the reader. It is not out of place to mention here that
at the end of his response, Taha seems to have felt compelled to make a cor-
rection to the way his name has been cited in all publications, including his
own. I learned from the response that his last name is Taha, not Abdurrah-
man, and find it felicitous that he chose to make a global correction through
this book.
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[ xvi ]
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Any self-reflective account of a system of thought must reckon with the var-
ious challenges imposed by, and particular to, that system. How does one
(re)present in a single volume the complex, multilayered, and expansive
ideas of an intellectual whose oeuvre extends over multiples volumes and a
long career? How does an author “translate” such ideas from one cultural
context to another, fundamentally different in its assumptions, presuppo-
sitions, founding principles, and outlook? What hermeneutic must be adopted
to aptly convey the subtle, age-old conceptions and technical and philosoph-
ical vocabulary of one cultural group to another? These are only some of
the issues that confront the scholar who attempts to bring the work of a phi-
losopher like Taha into conversation with the established and dominant
discourses of Western modernity.
A prolific writer, Taha has put out a steady stream of works since 1979.
After three initial volumes on ontology and logic, he embarked in 1987 on
an intellectual trajectory that has since generated twenty books, which rep-
resent, for the most part, both dense explorations of ethics and contribu-
tions to a trenchant critique of modernity.1 His Arabic combines a mastery
of modern idiom with a singularly proficient command of classical texts. And
yet, he is no ordinary philologist stuck on the interpretation of passages and —-1
phrases at the expense of the larger communal and psychoepistemic matrix —0
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[1]
that produced and was produced by the text. He is as comfortable with mod-
ern discourse as he is with the various intellectual traditions that pervaded
and defined Islam in the twelve centuries prior to the colonialist encroach-
ment on the Muslim world. His knowledge of Sharīʿa and Ṣūfism is as pene-
trating as his command of Islamic theology, logic, and linguistics and the
Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, all of which he has made relevant
to his moral philosophy and critique of modernity. In short, to read and
understand Taha requires, at a minimum, a fairly intimate familiarity with
these complex traditions, and no less with the wide-ranging discourses of a
host of mostly twentieth-century Muslim intellectuals and “reformers.”
As rooted as his work is in the Islamic tradition past and present, Taha is
also one of the shrewdest observers—and consumers—of European and Euro-
American intellectual output. He is at home with Hume and Kant, as well as
with more contemporary thinkers like G. E. Moore, Jacque Ellul, and Jürgen
Habermas. His repertoire of authorial invocations and critical engagement
is vast—from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Rousseau,
Hegel, Tocqueville, J. S. Mill, Durkheim, Weber, Levinas, Derrida, Carl Schmitt,
Paul Ricoeur, Freud, Lacan,2 and John Rawls.3 In this respect, his method of
harnessing the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions is remark-
ably akin to that of the fourteenth-century Ibn Taymiyya, who, for the sake
of deploying his devastating critique of Aristotelian logic, first digested vir-
tually the entire range of logical, philosophical, and ṣūfī traditions, capitaliz-
ing on their internal critiques and augmenting them with his own astound-
ing erudition, before turning all this back against the very tradition that
had produced this type of logic.4 For his part, and despite his conscious and
determined refusal to disconnect the premodern intellectual productions
of Islam from his systematic exposés (a position he calls waṣl, in contradis-
tinction to faṣl),5 Taha rarely allows this tradition to escape without deploy-
ing against it a critique of his own.
II
heels, that first made this form of sovereign engineering, this unprecedented
form of colonialism, possible.9
There is little doubt that the century that stretched between 1826 and
1923 witnessed the major structural demolition of Islam’s institutions, here
expansively defined. In this period, all economic, social, religious, legal, and
educational structures were either significantly or totally destroyed. The
historian Ira Lapidus did not exaggerate when he asserted that “traditional
forms of social solidarity” were “broken down,” that “guilds disappeared;
ṣūfī brotherhoods evaporated; migrants flooded from countrysides to cities
looking for work; village communities were shattered.”10 Yet, Lapidus might
as well have placed the “shattering” of village communities before the “flood-
ing” of migrants in from the countryside, because the latter was the direct
consequence of the collapse of the Sharīʿa-protected market at the hands of
the free colonial market economy, which flourished precisely because of the
economic exploitation of the colonies.11 Among other forms of economic
exploitation, the colonial theft of cotton from India and Egypt and process-
ing in Britain’s factories only to be sold cheaply in Ottoman lands led, for
instance, to the collapse of the major silk industry that deeply affected the
entire Ottoman society and its economy.12
Economic and social collapse certainly had profound and major effects
on the world of Islam and its educational institutions. What should more
directly concern us therefore is the wave of institutional destruction inau-
gurated by colonialism that culminated in an epistemic rupture—the rup-
ture that literally annihilated the forms of knowledge Islam had known for
the twelve preceding centuries (from roughly 650 to 1850). Taha, like other
contemporary Arab thinkers, inherits the realities and dilemma of these
paired phenomena. This is not the place to survey the history of this struc-
tural disfigurement in all the major polities of Islam, however, and so the
Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and North Africa must suffice to frame the colo-
nial history to which Taha is an heir.
III
real property across the Islamic world was constituted as waqf by the time
Europe began its colonialist ventures.16
By the nineteenth century, an increasingly centralized government in
Istanbul (and in Cairo under Muḥammad ʿAlī) had become the “middleman”
who secured considerable profits in the process of collecting the revenues
of the endowments and then paid out dwindling salaries for the minimal
upkeep and operation of the waqf-foundations. The back payments to the
educational sector progressively declined, reaching a near zero point by
the middle of the 1850s. Waqf money—which for centuries had belonged
to the autonomous waqfs, which used them for their own operations and
fulfillment of their mission—was now diverted to military and other state-
building projects, such as railways through which the grip of the central gov-
ernment over the periphery was enhanced. Waqf property, and the institu-
tions it supported, including those of the Sharīʿa, began to fall seriously
into ruin. Far from being a unique Ottoman phenomenon, nearly all Islamic
regions suffered a similar fate. In fact, the French campaign against Alge-
rian waqfs—a campaign designed and rationalized by French colonialism
and its handmaiden, the French Orientalist establishment—was the model
that the Ottomans were forced to emulate.17
The salarization of waqf administration constituted the first step toward
the salarization of the entire legal profession, a campaign that took effect
in the wake of the Edict of Gülhane in 1839. There was also a series of impor-
tant legal reforms that aimed at instituting new policies for judicial
appointments, including entry exams, and the regulation of court practices.
In this flurry of reform, a spate of Islamic laws and customary practices were
rapidly replaced by European codes implemented by new European-style
institutions and modes of operation. Within decades, a relentless policy of
demolish and replace had rendered the Sharīʿa no more than a fading
memory.
New European courts, exogenous legal codes, new European schools, and
conceptually foreign European administrative and other institutions came
to displace almost every sphere that the Sharīʿa, Ṣūfism, and their related
institutions had occupied. The effect of these “reforms” was not merely to
displace the Sharīʿa and the “traditional” institutions of Islam, nor was it
just to secularize them; it was to create a new subject, one who would see the
-1— world through the lens of the modern state and the nation. The “reforms”
0— constituted the effective means of accomplishing “order,” “regularity,” and
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[6]
its own doxa and fairly unique assumptions. When Ṭabarī wrote his books, the
Ikhwān al-Ṣafā their epistles, and Nawawī his lengthy treatises, they were
writing within a particular habitus and milieu for the benefit of audiences,
societies, and communities who regarded their works, albeit each within
its own genre and lineage, as tradition-based productions on a contin-
uum. These and similar works could be deciphered within a hermeneutic
tradition that went all the way back to the second Islamic century, if not
right to the very Qur’ānic and Prophetic beginnings. Any historian worth
their salt will immediately recognize the rupture that the nineteenth cen-
tury brought with it, in that around the middle of it all such works—in terms
of sheer content, epistemic construction, and style—ceased to exist. There
was no jurist writing in 1900 who could have continued in the same tradition
that the distinguished Ḥanafī jurist Ibn ʿĀbidīn (d. 1836) worked within just
seven decades earlier. One could even be justified in labeling the towering
Bājūrī (d. 1860) as a hybrid, however much his work remained anchored in
the historical Shāfiʿī tradition.
Likewise, by 1900 or thereabouts, there was not a single ṣūfī master, an
Adab writer, a Qur’ān commentator, a Ḥadīth specialist, a Mutakallim, or a
metaphysician left who could operate and produce works within the rele-
vant tradition that had thrived only a century earlier. For the forms of knowl-
edge and the modalities of their production have undergone a profound
change, not least due to the hegemonic influx of Western modes of thought.
When Faraḥ Anṭūn published his Ibn Rushd wa-Falsafatuhu (Averroes and His
Philosophy) in 1903,23 it was effectively the first work of its kind in what was
emerging at the time as the “Arab world.” Influenced by the writings of
Ernest Renan and other Orientalists, Anṭūn wrote about Ibn Rushd from
within an emerging national and cultural landscape (and, needless to add,
in defense of the rationalism of Islamo-Arab culture) but he did so from out-
side the traditional Rushdian philosophical tradition, or any other. For
Anṭūn the “Arab,” Ibn Rushd was as much an “other” as he had been for
Renan himself. Arguably, Anṭūn’s Ibn Rushd was none other than Renan’s
Averroes, not the Ibn Rushd Muslims had known during the seven centuries
prior. Likewise, Anṭūn’s reason for writing, as well as for his coverage, argu-
ment, and analytic mode, was all unprecedented, echoing Renan’s Oriental-
ist take on the philosopher.24 It should not surprise us, then, that somewhat
-1— later the distinguished modern philosopher ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī would
0— scorn the nineteenth-century Muslim authors for their lack of depth: Badawī
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IV
We would be entirely amiss to view Taha and every other modern Arab and
Muslim thinker outside of this rupture, one that categorically governed all
discourses in what is now modernity. Whereas invocations of heritage and
traditional forms of thought are common to all modern traditions, from cur-
rent Chinese and Indian discursive forms to those squarely lodged within
the European Enlightenment, the modern Muslim case is particularly remark-
able in its dealings and interactions with so-called tradition, now termed
turāth (a neologism that is by definition unknown to Islamic languages prior
to the nineteenth century).27 I say “particularly remarkable” in a sense quite
different from that advocated by many influential voices. The latter are sum-
marily captured in the metaphysical language of ʿAbd al-Ilāh Bilqazīz, who
recognizes that attachment to tradition is characteristic of all “historical
societies,” including the Indian and Chinese, but that Arab society is
“opaquely historical” due to the “density of feeling that it possesses toward
maintaining a continuing connection with its past,” so much so that “it
relives its past in its present, which is to say that it lives its present as if it
were an uninterrupted and unhalted continuation of its past.”28 This more
saturated relation to history that Bilqazīz ascribes to Arab society is a meta-
physical attribution because in it “the feeling of density” becomes the first
cause, the unmoved mover. I say “particularly remarkable,” by contrast,
because the concept of turāth in modern writings has evolved within a cul-
tural milieu whose discursive and institutional architecture was originally
governed by what might be called a structure of history governed by ethi-
cal time, a time at variance with, if not in opposition to, modern notions of
progressive, linear, and materialist historical time.
I have said much in two earlier works in exposition and critique of what
I call the theology of progress.29 Specifically, I have argued that the desig-
nation of the modern concept of progress as theological is justified by the fact —-1
that this concept is anchored in a trenchant ideology that is metaphysical —0
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Is and Ought that this tradition can be fully comprehended. One might even
put the matter in more drastic terms to convey the point: the entire appa-
ratus of Prophetic ḥadīth and of the Qur’ānic pull and the very concept of
discursive authority are only the modalities of conveyance, but hardly the ulti-
mate force of signifiers and points of reference that constituted this “tradi-
tion.” For every reference to ḥadīth or the Qur’ān is a reference to the stub-
born insistence on the unity of these signifiers. That this feature of tradition
has been missed by Graham, Asad, and several others is testimonial to the
domineering presence of the modern normativity that takes the distinction
between Fact and Value and Is and Ought for granted. The exception to this
normativity (e.g., Islam) does not then seem amenable to an explanation that
assumes the very distinction to be highly problematic and outright arbi-
trary; hence, the suppression of the real anchors of the authority that the
Muslim tradition sought to constantly reproduce. To cast the analysis of tra-
dition in these terms is to refuse the normativity of the very epistemology
that warranted the explanation in terms of authority in the first place; it is
to render this very explanation as a historicized phenomenon that itself
stands in need of explanation. It is, in other words, not only to provincial-
ize it, but also to render it seriously suspect.
At the abstract and the intellectual levels, the idea of ethical reversion
was framed in cosmological terms. God created the world as a hierarchical
chain of being, his knowledge—by which he designed the world—being the
most supreme. Divine knowledge (ʿilm), thoroughly ethical and just (ʿadl) in
its constitution, permeated this chain, having assigned to humans the duty
and responsibility of bearing this knowledge to the best of their abilities.
Human stewardship over the material and social world thus consisted of the
duty to “discover” the range and depth of this knowledge and then to apply
it to their earthly environment. This is why human beings are given the sta-
tus and function of God’s deputies on Earth, not so much as a privilege but
as a responsibility and burden—the burden to bear that body of knowledge as
ethics and justice. The Qur’ān, deployed to humans as the agent and embodi-
ment of the divine message, is nothing more than a command to ʿilm. ʿIlm is
not only the knowledge of revelation as a worldly text; it is also, and indeed
fundamentally, an unending process that engages the human mind in pon-
dering and reflecting on God’s plan and intention in the Universe. The human
engagement with ʿilm is an engagement with the divine in every way, with —-1
what it means for God to create the world, and for the world to be created, —0
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[ 13 ]
in accordance with what plan, and to what end. If true ʿilm is an exclusive
property of God, and if human ʿilm is a derivative of the original, then access-
ing the deeper and deeper dimensions of this original is a never-ending
quest—what later came to be known as ijtihād in the Sharīʿa and kashf in
Ṣūfism, defining concepts and practices of Islam from centuries.
Yet, ethical reversion with its origins in divine knowledge is a rather
abstract conception, certainly too vague for the derivation of practical eth-
ics (which we will see throughout this book to be central to Islam’s long his-
tory).40 How, in other words, was this conception translated into concrete
notions of ethics and moral practices? How, in yet other terms, was it trans-
lated from the cosmological to the epistemological, ontological, and deon-
tological? The question that arose since Islam’s first decades was not “Why
should I be moral?” 41 but rather “How should I be moral?”
In answer to this last question, early Muslims and all the generations of
the centuries that followed considered the Prophet Muhammad as the high-
est embodiment of ethical exemplarity because he was the earthly locus of
God’s message to humankind. And it is precisely because of his proximity
to revelation (i.e., his relatively intimate knowledge of God’s ʿilm) that the
Prophet’s life, as an earthly, even fallible, Sunna, acquired the status of an
ethical paradigm. In Sharīʿa, misnamed “law” in Western sources,42 he
emerges as the archetypal figure whose utterances and actions provided raw
materials for the construction of “legal” doctrine. This is Prophetic Sunna,
a sharʿī source second only to the Qur’ān.43
In Ṣūfism, a central domain44 in Islam along with Sharīʿa, the Prophetic
exemplar evolved into the theory of the Perfect Human (al-Insān al-Kāmil,
among other designations), who is the desideratum of pietistic life and liv-
ing.45 And if Sharīʿa and Ṣūfism are accepted as central domains, then we
are compelled to accept the paradigmatic presence of this ethical exemplar-
ity in all other supporting and peripheral domains, which ranged from
Adab and history to medicine and alchemy. For in these latter two, as in
mathematics, astronomy, optics, and much of the like, the idea of unravel-
ing the secrets of the universe and its working was not, as it came to be in
modernity, for the purpose of dominating and changing nature, but rather
for understanding God’s wisdom in devising the world, a wisdom that was
taken as conducive to human efforts of replicating his knowledge, ethics, and
-1— justice on Earth.
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[ 14 ]
from within the tradition itself (or, more accurately, a stratagem by which
the paradigmatic tradition is subverted by means of capitalizing on figures
and ideas located at its periphery) is merely to state the obvious. This sort
of revival has always been as much an intellectual technique as it was a juris-
tic one, and famously so. As early as Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935), for instance, this
stratagem was used to accomplish the same effects of subversion in the
domain of “law.” The relatively minor and juristically marginal concept of
necessity (ḍarūra), for instance, was made to turn the entire legal edifice
right on its head.53
The problem, then, is by no means a recent phenomenon. It began instead
with what Stephan Sheehi rightly called the “foundationalist”54 writings of
Buṭrus al-Bustānī, the famed nineteenth-century reformer who attempted
to diagnose the “causes of Arab failure” without truly understanding them.
For Bustānī, as for most Arab intellectuals of his time, “contemporary Arab
culture was in a state of decay (inḥiṭāṭ) and stagnation ( jumūd) by the nine-
teenth century.” His solution: “If the subject were to reawaken his desire
(raghbah) for knowledge (ʿulūm wa-maʿārif), then he would be compelled to
exert optimum effort (ijtihād, jahd, or saʿy) to acquire ‘modern’ knowledge.”55
But Bustānī is not alone in failing to understand what he was effectively call-
ing for, to understand, that is, that “modern knowledge” is not a neutral
project, nor is it an easy substitute for Islamic or “Arab” knowledge. He, like
Anṭūn, Arkoun, and Jābrī, did not, I think, appreciate the irrelevance of Aver-
roism to this challenge, unless, of course, the rejuvenation of Averroes was
an intentional ruse (which I doubt).56 Neither the Bustānīs nor the Jābrīs nor
the Arkouns of this intellectual formation genuinely understood the qual-
ity of the problem at hand, however much pretension they arrogated to
themselves as critics of Orientalism and some other forms of Western knowl-
edge. Insofar as I can tell, the only notable exceptions in this regard are
Taha, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Misīrī, and probably Nāṣīf Naṣṣār.57 What is instruc-
tive about this “lack of understanding and consciousness,” though, has
nothing to do with intellectual ability or ingenuity; instead, it has everything
to do with the productive power of European discursive formations. This
power is productive because, in the very processes of its operation, it con-
structs the normal and the abnormal, the legitimate and illegitimate. And
once these sovereignly determined abnormalities and illegitimacies are
identified, they can be ousted from the domain of debate and even from —-1
rationality itself. —0
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[ 17 ]
Apart from such exceptions (e.g., Taha and Misīrī), the trajectory of Arab
thought on the problematic of the turāth has changed little from Faraḥ Anṭūn
to Jābrī, regarded by many as the towering intellect of this thought today.
The difference between the two thinkers, in fact, lies not so much in their
respective outlooks as in the complexity and sophistication of argument in
the latter, for Jābrī undoubtedly demonstrates an impressive command of
the range of the turāth. But complexity and sophistication are hardly suffi-
cient conditions for, or true measures of, either qualitative innovation or
sagacious insightfulness and independence of mind. For Jābrī’s project
remains confined to a venture whose desideratum is to privilege reason—a
modern, instrumentalist, and Eurocentric conception of rationality—over
all other epistemic components and dimensions of intellectual heritage. An
account of his project is therefore essential, not only for understanding
Taha’s reactions—whose chief, though initial, target is Jābrī’s work—but also
for making sense of the deadlock that the standard thinking on the turāth
has created.
Whereas Taha’s point of departure is this deadlock, Jābrī may be said to have
perfected and sealed the fate of a narrative that does not transcend the con-
cept of instrumental and sovereign modern rationalism, a concept under
attack in Western intellectual circles since Nietzsche. In his magnum opus
Naqd al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī (Critique of Arab Reason), especially in the second volume,
Bunyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī (The Structure of Arab Reason), Jābrī identifies three cen-
tral components of historical “Arab thought,” a clearly nationalist and thus
anachronistic category for which he has been much criticized.58 Consisting
of hermeneutics (bayān),59 gnosis (ʿirfān),60 and demonstration (burhān),61
“Arab thought” is said to have suffered a crisis (azma) in the eleventh cen-
tury due to the confluence and interaction (tafāʿul) between and among these
three “epistemic regimes” (nuẓum al-maʿrifa).62 This interaction eventually
led to a situation where demonstration, Jābrī’s privileged epistemic site, was
sacrificed (ḍaḥiyya) to the legendary (usṭūrī), magical (siḥrī), and therefore
irrational nature of gnosis as well as to the defective rationality of herme-
-1— neutics, bayān.63 Structurally connected with language, bayān could not lib-
0— erate itself from scriptural constraints, and thus failed to construct a
+1—
[ 18 ]
come into a clashing encounter, that Taha’s philosophy shows its dramati-
cally qualitative difference from that of his fellow countryman. If we accept
that in the matter of the formation of subjectivity positive and negative con-
ceptions stand at the center of, and thus determine, philosophical systems,
then we might say that it is precisely here that the most fundamental and
crucial difference between Jābrī and Taha lies.
Furthermore, we hear nothing from Jābrī about the implications of
the Western self-critique for his own project. The entire repertoire of
mainly European (but specifically French) critique that Taha invokes and
harnesses—a critique that was both culturally and linguistically available
to Jābrī—is a black hole in his work, one that has the potential to render his
entire project obsolete. There is little harnessing, if at all, of the actually and
potentially powerful critique proffered by the French sociological and
anthropological schools, not to mention the lasting contributions of the
Frankfurt School. A sophisticated version of Faraḥ-A nṭūn-cum-A ḥmad-
Amīn, Jābrī remains very much caught in modernity. But Amīn, writing
several decades before Jābrī, and the even earlier Anṭūn had at least better
justifications for being so caught.
There is plenty of ground on which to critique both the historiographic
narratives and the structure of argumentation advanced by Jābrī. In fact,
much of these narratives and a number of macroarguments do not stand up
to scrutiny. Since Taha will be seen in the next chapters to unpack a num-
ber of these problematics,74 I will not dwell much longer here on Jābrī. But
Jābrī’s writings seem to represent the core problems of both Arab-Islamic
and Western conceptions of modernity that Taha interrogates. To better
appreciate the latter’s project, then, we would do well to first examine these
problems as patently exhibited in Jābrī’s simultaneously erudite and incon-
sistent al-ʿAql al-Akhlāqī al-ʿArabī (Arab Ethical Reason).75
A central idea of this work is that “the history of ethical thought in Arab
culture . . . has not been written yet.”76 This—for reasons to be made clear
in due course—is a quite remarkable declaration if we consider that Jābrī had
already published his encyclopedic duo Naqd al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī. Another repre-
sentative motif in al-ʿAql al-Akhlāqī, as in others, is that “Arab culture” has
suffered from a “crisis of value” (azmat al-qiyam) since the “Great Civil War”
in 656–61, a crisis that “opened the door” to the infiltration of “foreign
-1— values. . . . that were sought as help in the conflict that produced the crisis
0— of values.”77 Jābrī also posits that although this crisis occurred in the seventh
+1—
[ 20 ]
rationality”). This explains why throughout his works, Taha insists on the
distinction—key to his overall philosophy—between what he terms a “cul-
ture of speech” and a “culture of deed” (or praxis). (I should immediately
note that I deliberately avoid the use of the term praxeology in the render-
ing of “ ʿamal,” since praxeology tends to be concerned with the study of
human action and conduct. To study human action is one thing, to pre-
scribe it as a systematic technique of ethical cultivation is another. Praxes
is then prescriptive and performative, while praxeology is descriptive and
analytical.)
In Jābrī’s account, ṣūfī and Persian values were sources of misery and tyr-
anny, which successfully vied with the Greek “values of happiness” and
managed to dominate the scene until the eleventh century, when authors
“belatedly” began to write “works on ethics” under Greek influence.86 Quite
late in the book, Jābrī introduces yet another retarding effect on “Arab eth-
ics,” namely, the pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arab concept of murū’a, a com-
pound and complex notion involving generosity, prudence, helping others,
setting up exemplary conduct, chivalrous virtue, and the like. This he judges
as effectively nonethical, because while it has the appearance of ethical con-
duct, it largely, if not exclusively, serves self-promotion to social rank and
prestige.87 That this “Arab murū’a” was not “theoretically justified”—as Jābrī
wants ethical theory to be in order to count—may, for a moment, give us rea-
son to think that murū’a lacked a technology of the self, in the sense meant
by Ghazālī and Foucault. But this does not appear to be the case, for Jābrī
also dismisses the ṣūfī way with unwavering prejudice, utterly failing to
appreciate their techniques of subjectification, and much less the performa-
tive effects of these techniques.
The diminution of all but Greek ethics thus defines the core and substance
of Jābrī’s project. Greek ethics, he predictably tells us, “is Greek in form, but
human in content.” “Therefore,” he continues, “one can read the title of this
book as follows: How Do We Make the Science of Ethics That Was Prevalent in, and
Coming down from, Greece an Islamic Science?”88
By the time Jābrī poses this key question in al-ʿAql al-Akhlāqī, he has already
expended some 570 pages (out of a total of 630) in dismissing all discourses
but the Greek as unsuitable for consideration as ethical theories. Notably,
he has already dismissed Ghazālī and juristic discourse much as he did the
-1— Persian, ṣūfī, and “Arab” elements.89 He deems juristic discourse merely for-
0— malistic,90 and Ghazālī’s writings an opium that “had an extreme drugging
+1—
[ 22 ]
effect (takhdīr) on the system of values in Arab culture.”91 Given the bent of
these critiques, we would expect Jābrī in the remainder of his work to show
us how Greek ethics can be Islamicized.
Instead, Jābrī indulges in a relatively lengthy discussion on the Qur’ān as
being the truest manifestation of ethics, since the holy book is primarily con-
cerned with “good works” (al-ʿamal al-ṣāliḥ)92 and “public good” (maṣlaḥa).
Along with Prophetic Sunna, the Qur’ān determined “the values that have
always guided the Muslim [individual] in life.”93 “Islamic ethics” is nothing
if it is not grounded in “good works.”94 (Here, we can clearly witness the pull
of what I have called ethical reversion, a pull that eventually trapped Jābrī
in a host of paradoxes and contradictions. My point is that it is precisely
because of the hegemonic indistinction between Is and Ought95 that Jābrī’s
work is emblematic of much of Arab-Islamic thought since the late nine-
teenth century.)
Jābrī then surprises the reader further by announcing that he has finally
“discovered” an author whose work qualifies as genuine “Islamic ethics.”96
(No less surprising is the fact that at this point in the book [pp. 593ff.], “Arab
ethics” and “Arab thought” are now exchanged without explanation for
“Islamic ethics” and “Islamic thought,” respectively.) This “discovered”
author is none other than the distinguished jurist al-ʿIzz Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām
(1181–1262), whom Jābrī considers, like Shāṭibī, “a Maghribī in [genealogical]
origins” although he was born in Damascus.97 Of course, Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s
fierce opposition to, if not command over, the Mamlūk sultans makes him a
favorite of Jābrī, since this jurist, by standing up to the sultans, exhibited a
remarkable resistance to “Oriental despotism,” a notion pervasively implied
in Jābrī’s work. But the main reason for installing this particular jurist as
the paragon of ethical discourse is because his work adequately theorized
both good works and public good, which were Qur’ānic principles in the first
place. Why the Qur’ān itself, with all of the rich exegetical tradition that
Muslims produced around it, doesn’t count as an ethical theory in its own
right—as the fiqh does—is a question that Jābrī does not ask. In other words,
why get to the Qur’ān by way of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām? Nor does Jābrī ask
what distinguishes Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām from the many other jurists who came
before and after him, jurists whose works exhibited similar—if not more
considerable—contributions to “law,” ethics, and much else; this is another
question that escapes Jābrī. Instead we get a patent contradiction: “Ibn ʿAbd —-1
al-Salām’s uniqueness and originality are clearly demonstrated in [the fact] —0
—+1
[ 23 ]
that he caused a final and radical rupture with this Greek structure, adopt-
ing an Islamic structure instead.”98
Jābrī’s bone of contention with the tradition has been that in Islam or
“Arab thought” “ethics did not stand autonomously but was continuously
affiliated with fiqh [in particular] and sciences of religion in general.”99
Accordingly, and if we were to take this last assertion seriously, Ibn ʿAbd al-
Salām’s work, as an ethical project, would not fulfill Jābrī’s stipulated con-
dition, because he was a jurist, lived as a jurist, and wrote within a long and
established juristic tradition, with all that means in terms of its hermeneu-
tical production and association with Ṣūfism and much else. We then return
to square one, to ask: If the entire range of juristic and ṣūfī discourses, influ-
enced as they were by Greek, Iranian, and several other sources, was the
site of ethical theory, ethical discourse, and ethical practice (a habitus, in
effect), then why does Jābrī problematize the issue in the first place?
It seems to me that it is difficult to escape the inference that Jābrī formu-
lated a clearer conception of the issues entailed in his book only after he had
completed most of the work, hence his needless excursus on Greek ethics
and the contradictions it entailed within “Arab” thought. I think he real-
ized, belatedly, that “ethical theory” in the Islamic tradition is thoroughly
embedded in the range of “disciplinary” discourses, including Kalām, Fal-
safa, Fiqh, Uṣūl al-Fiqh, Adab, and much else. In each of these, ethics acquires
a variant incarnation, sharing much with its sister variants in other fields
of inquiry and practice. That is what Jābrī missed in his Naqd al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī,
and what he realized he had missed only toward the end of al-ʿAql al-Akhlāqī
al-ʿArabī. It is this “discovery” that compelled Jābrī to call his project in this
latter work “an adventure” (mughāmara), an admission that he makes near
the end of the work and in the introduction (likely written last).100 That
Jābrī—with all his philological and intellectual weight—egregiously erred in
his vision is nothing short of a remarkable index of the tension that mod-
ern Islamic thought experiences between the ethical pull of turāth (repre-
sented in the Qur’ān, Sunna, Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, and countless other reper-
toires of sources) and what Taha calls the “denuded rationality” of the West
(seemingly represented in Jābrī’s work by Greek rationalism).
It has been argued that modern Arab thought “articulates a subject who
perpetually recognizes a master of knowledge that precludes itself,” and that
-1— this amounts to a construction of the self “as Other[,] where the European
0— self-mediates the relationship between knowledge and Arab selfhood.” It is
+1—
[ 24 ]
only this “supplemental mediation of the European self [that] can bestow
knowledge, and thereby mastery and substantive presence, to the modern
Arab.”101 While this is undoubtedly true, it is only one side of the coin. The
other side stands in great tension with this vision, for, as we saw in Jābrī’s
al-ʿAql al-Akhlāqī al-ʿArabī, there are two selves at work: a European secular
self and an Islamic ethical self whose genealogy and thought structure orig-
inate in a nonanthropocentric and nonsecular deeper self—a self that con-
sciously rejects negative forms of liberty and embraces robust, but stateless,
positive forms.102 Jābrī’s work, the culmination of a current that began with
Buṭrus al-Bustānī and Jurjī Zaydān, and continued with Aḥmad Amīn, Ḥasan
Ḥanafī, and many others, ought to be seen not merely as the production of
an individual thinker, but rather as an intellectual blueprint, or a structure
of thought, that brings to the fore a ripe form of this dualism. Jābrī’s al-ʿAql
al-Akhlāqī is perhaps the most forceful and eloquent representation of this
binary dualism, one that Taha categorically rejects in favor of an exclu-
sive adoption of an ethical Islamic self. While this exclusivity may not be
unique, Taha’s articulation of this idea in the form of a robust philosophical
system is.
It is precisely this binary dualism that gives Taha’s project its conditions
of possibility. He appears at a point in late modernity where the fissures and
cracks in the modern project have allowed a return of the ethical, which
arrives bursting through these cracks without permission to enter. If Europe’s
hegemonic liberalism and secularism came to blot and obliterate Islamic val-
ues between 1850 and 1950, and if political Islamism appeared as a miscon-
ceived reaction to the problems of colonialism and hegemony, then Taha’s
philosophical project is the synthesis that comes after but rejects both the
thesis (colonialism) and antithesis (political Islamism). Ultimately, his is a
temporally modern project that attempts to resuscitate and harness Islamic
ethical time for what we can easily describe as a postmodern critique, an
ethical philosophy par excellence.
VI
Like the works of all systematic philosophers, each of Taha’s books is con-
structed around a particular thesis, which is then broken down into a chain —-1
of subtheses, each supported by arguments divided into further arguments —0
—+1
[ 25 ]
while avoiding, to the best of my abilities, indulging the reader in his tor-
rent of fine philosophical dissections. This act of condensation performed
for the sake of accessing his system’s key ideas is also coupled with the
omission of what I deem nonconsequential neologisms. Whenever a coined
technical term does not lead to further analysis or discussion, I have also
attempted to present its substance without burdening the reader with its
neologism.
VII
Finally, a word about the chapters and subject matter making up this book.
There are two main intellectual environments that shaped Taha’s early for-
mation, the first being the Morocco in which he grew up and to which he
returned after completing his graduate education at the Sorbonne.111 Yet this
“local” experience was not of a piece. We must think of the first part of it in
terms of living in a newly emerging nation-state, and specifically in the so-
called postcolonial environment of El-Jadida (his birthplace [1944]) and
Casablanca, where he completed his high school education.112 The second
part, after his return from France, has been dominated by his experience as
a professor in the nearby city of Rabat, an experience that has shaped his
reactions as a philosopher. He was one of the first, if not the first, to teach a
curriculum consisting of logic and philosophy of language at the University
of Muhammad V. There should have been nothing unusual about teaching
such subjects, but apparently there was, judging by the isolation to which he
was subjected for more than two decades in the 1970s and 1980s—the period
that corresponds to his near dormancy as an author.113 In those years, a
strong Left and a stronger liberal and modernizing environment can be said
to have dominated the university during the 1970s and 1980s. In his teach-
ing, Taha combined logic and philosophy of language with a considerable
dose of ṣūfī thought and its philosophy of praxis, drawing on almost a mil-
lennium’s worth of thick and extensive ṣūfī traditions in Islam. This combi-
nation made him a unique voice, which for a long time consigned him to
isolation and provoked against him subtle forms of discrimination, if not
condemnation. It is no coincidence that one of the most powerful figures in
this environment was Jābrī himself, who does not seem to have extended any —-1
support to his junior colleague. But isolation seems to have strengthened —0
—+1
[ 29 ]
Taha’s resolve rather than weaken it, as evidenced in his formidable intel-
lectual output after the mid-1990s.
The second environment is Paris, where he studied a long and extensive
range of classical Western philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers. It
would be a mistake to consider this experience less formative and powerful
than the years spent in his native country. Here, Taha does not only become
a professional logician and semiotician; he begins to unravel the threads of
Enlightenment thought and develop a critical system that continues to sus-
tain his project decades later.
Taha’s background helps us understand the manner in which his thought
radiates through what I regard as three concentric circles. The first, imme-
diate circle is what we can comfortably call the North African one, if by this
we mean to include the intellectual currents that emerged during the 1960s
and 1970s in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. There is no doubt that the
“reformist” projects in these countries, especially the first two, have been
not only vast and important, but also effective in shaping the cultural scene
in the region, a scene in which Taha grew up and which he has obviously
experienced in intimate intellectual ways. The second is the larger Arab-
Islamic circle, intellectually defined by a number of thinkers from various
quarters of the Muslim world, but more specifically by the Levantine-
Egyptian tradition that contributed to, and was almost exclusively respon-
sible for, the rise of the Nahḍa. The third circle is Euro-American modernity,
including its Enlightenment. Despite the fact that Taha has a complex, and
to some extent a problematic, relationship with the Enlightenment, this
third circle is the most defining of his thought, one that he never ceased to
interrogate, with a view to reforming and eventually, I think, to replacing it
with an ethicized alternative.
It is by keeping these circles in mind that we can understand the contours
of Taha’s larger project and thus the discursive strategy of the present work.
Chapter 1 is then concerned with the first and second concentric circles, sit-
uating Taha’s project in the arena and problematics of turāth, and outlining
his methodological and theoretical approaches. It is here that Taha draws
the blueprint of a project that continues to occupy him. Chapter 2 is con-
cerned with what he calls the spirit of modernity, the third circle and the
core of the modern project. Here, we will see both the innovative nature of
-1— our philosopher’s critique and the problematics that have distressed his
0— understanding of, and thus proposed solutions for, modernity and its
+1—
[ 30 ]
its insistence on ethics as its defining feature; (7) this ethics is inseparable
from religion, even politics; (8) Islam, as a revealed religion, can establish
this version of modernity; (9) Islamic modernity proposes (a) corrections to
Western modernity and (b) a healthier modus vivendi and modus operandi
for living in the world, not above it; and (10) to accomplish this modernity,
an essentially different concept of the human must be fostered and ulti-
mately developed.
The project thus moves forward by anchoring itself in three major sites,
which I shall call the diagnostic-etiological, the remedial-palliative, and the
technological-ethical. Pertaining to the modernity we now know, the first
of the trio is that problematic which needs to be either solved or, failing that,
abandoned; the second consists of the desiderata that make a new concept
of the human conceivable, possible; and the third prescribes the technolo-
gies required for the creation of this new subject. To be sure, “new” is my
term, for Taha argues that this is not a new but rather a “forgotten” subject,
one that needs to be revived and modified, but hardly invented.114
-1—
0—
+1—
[ 32 ]
II
There are a number of reasons for abandoning the current discourse on tra-
dition, all having to do with what Taha calls fragmenting outlooks (naẓar
tajzī’ī). First, when dealing with the traditional text (al-naṣṣ al-turāthī), the
current discourse has severely neglected the relationship between content
and method, or between substantive conclusions and the means by which
-1— they were reached: “If the means are the raison d’être of the substantive
0—
+1—
[ 38 ]
content and the method by which the latter was attained, then complete
and thorough understanding (taḥaqquq) of that content cannot be had
without a commanding knowledge of the means” (TM, 50, 54).11 If priority is
not given to means and methods over content, thinking about the tradi-
tional text will remain, as it has in modern Arab discourse, both superfi-
cial and dysfunctional.
Second, it has escaped this discourse that, neglecting the methodologi-
cal means by which content was attained, has severe consequences, which
extend beyond a deficient knowledge of the content itself. In the traditional
text, a subtext of praxis is embedded in the very structure of propositions
and judgments, which is to say that the method never abandons the func-
tion of praxis when formulating the substantive contents, conclusions, and
judgments. In other words, praxis (or what we have generally come to call
after Foucault “the technologies of the self”) is present everywhere, even in
what might first appear to be a theoretical text or an abstract intellectual
conclusion. Taha might just as well have said that praxis, as well as the body
that is the site of this praxis, is never far from the target and elaborations
of the traditional text. Indeed, they make the text, even in its theoretical
constitution. Some religious and spiritual truths “cannot be understood
until after they have been put into practice,” for “praxis (al-ʿamal al-dīnī)
opens up corridors of knowledge that would be inconceivable before engag-
ing [that] praxis.”12 As we will see throughout, this conception of praxis gov-
erns in Taha’s work.
Praxis thus makes theory possible, to such an extent that the practitio-
ner is unable to comprehend any defect in the theoretical knowledge under-
lying the praxis until praxis itself is either suspended or fails altogether. In
other words, the failure of theory is contingent on the failure of practice. It
is not therefore correct to claim that theory is the foundation and basis of
praxis, making theory prior, for this would be an all-too-categorical state-
ment that does not distinguish between necessary (ḍarūrī) and inferential
(naẓarī) knowledge.13 While the former must necessarily be recognized as a
condition for praxis, inferential knowledge cannot be regarded thus, for peo-
ple may engage in praxis without knowing the theoretical reasons that
went into making that praxis what it is. That these reasons and the entire
theoretical operation—that went into establishing the praxis—were the work
of someone else (the learned, the specialist, and the like) does not take away —-1
—0
—+1
[ 39 ]
from the fact that the layman’s praxis is not affected in the least by the
absence of that knowledge. Dualistic and dialectical, discursive tradition is
a mechanism for enunciation and operative praxis all at once.14
Taha seems to say that even the full meaning of theoretical knowledge
as well as its constitutive modalities (i.e., the very methodologies and lines
of reasoning leading to it) cannot be comprehended without praxis, for this
latter and its multilayered processes of perfection allow for a series of dis-
tensions within theoretical knowledge. And it is precisely the paucity of this
multilayered and multidimensional praxis in modern Islamic discourse that
has led not only to the discourse’s intellectual impoverishment, but also to
a severe misunderstanding of the structural modalities behind the tradi-
tional text. This is also in effect to argue that current Islamic reformist
discourse does not understand its own past, that it attempts to refashion it
while being utterly ignorant of it.
The failure of current Islamic discourse to understand this dialectical
relationship between theoretical knowledge and praxis in the traditional
text led to severe misunderstanding of the text’s contents, which is to say
that the contents have been imagined (tawahhum) to be what they are not,
because the methodological means that justified them suffered from chronic
“forgetfulness.” Yet, this shortcoming is neither a passing nor an accidental
failing, but stems rather from a fundamental lack, what Taha calls a “defi-
ciency in comprehending the modalities” (al-quṣūr fī fiqh al-āliyyāt). The defi-
ciency is represented in the absence of command over a methodology
according to which new logical and scientific procedures can yield recon-
ceptualizations, reconstructed definitions, reformulated refutative princi-
ples and arguments, as well as the elaboration of theories and argumenta-
tive sequences (TM, 51).
Third, current reformist discourse has acquired the habit of borrowing
foreign methods. While this, in itself, is not necessarily harmful, it cannot
be undertaken uncritically. To harness methods originally established and
elaborated in an altogether different cultural context requires the fulfill-
ment of certain conditions. The most important of these is total command
and profound understanding of these methods’ historicity, that is, how, why,
and when they originated in that context.15 Second, the borrower must prove
himself capable of engaging in a profound and comprehensive critique of the
-1— transplanted methods, so that once this critique is undertaken, the meth-
0— ods must be shown to retain analytical and inferential relevance for the
+1—
[ 40 ]
project. Third, transplanting these methods into the terrain of the tradi-
tional text faces the challenge of appropriateness, what might be called the
test of relevance (munāsaba). A method might be sound, but from this judg-
ment of soundness it does not follow that it is appropriate for all contexts
or needs. Once aspects of relevance are established, a detailed and careful
investigation into the successive steps through which these methods are
applied is necessary. Moreover, the effects of such an application must be
evaluated on their own, since a sound method may appear applicable in one
context but in fact may not be appropriate or relevant for yielding the
desired results in another context. In other words, the traditional text as a
“cultural” production may not be amenable to such an application (KNN,
51–52).
It may seem at first that my analysis of the article and its schematic com-
ponents is an engagement in generalities or even in vague pronouncements
about the nature of Taha’s project on the whole. Yet a wide reading in his
work will confirm that the intellectual procedures to which he alludes here
are more than adequately backed up by his extensive and detailed corpus.
What is important to note at this stage is that he does not subscribe to the
kind of unconscious methodology that tends to take the products of the
European Enlightenment for granted, and without critical inspection. In
the process of deploying his critique, he scrutinizes a wide range of writ-
ings, exempting neither the Humes, nor the Kants, nor the Habermases.
The key concepts of the Enlightenment, especially those concerned with
rationalism,16 positive and negative liberties,17 the Fact/Value and Is/Ought
distinctions,18 and an array of others, are all subjected to the test of rele-
vance, whose outlines he sets here. Yet, it is more than just this test that is
at stake. Against these concepts he marshals a number of thorough cri-
tiques, which he continues to develop in a succession of writings, critiques
that far exceed the immediate concerns of that test.
Although Enlightenment critique takes up a good deal of attention in the
later works, Taha’s concerns in this essay seem largely domestic, mostly
directed at influential intellectuals writing from his own North African con-
text.19 A major problem that engulfs their thinking is what he calls “the
brandishing of rationalism” (KNN, 52–53). The vast majority of writers on tra-
dition carry the flag of rationalism, and proclaim their projects as grounded
in the rational method. Their zeal has been so intense that “one could speak —-1
of a hidden form of idolatry that equals the conventional one.” It is curious, —0
—+1
[ 41 ]
however, that while they uphold this “rational method,” no two of them
could agree on the same conclusions with regard to the traditional text.
“Rationalism for them is nothing more than what each of them thinks, as
evidenced by the fact that their conclusions and methods contradict one
another, although they all claim to be rational. . . . In their hands, rational-
ism has become a homonym,” if not “a legend” that exceeds in its irrational
dimensions what they attach to legend itself, if not to elements of the tradi-
tion (KNN, 53–54). A careful perusal of their writings, however, shows that
they lack command of rational and logical methods, often resorting to ideas
that have become dated. In this context, Jābrī is clearly the subject of Taha’s
methodological assault.
The fragmented and fragmenting nature of current Islamic discourse on
tradition calls for a holistic approach that may require the inversion of prin-
ciples and assumptions underlying this discourse, including its forms of
rationality. There have been multiple claims for a reconsideration of tradi-
tion, including calls to rationalize it, to purify it of outdated residues, and
the like, but these all “fall under the rubric of the tired problematics of
‘authenticity and contemporaneity,’ ‘authenticity and modernity,’ or ‘con-
formity and innovation’ ” (KNN, 55).
For Taha, although there is a grain of truth in such claims as made on
the part of reformist thinkers, they are mostly characterized by “circum-
stantial hurriedness,” whereby issues are conflated and distinct forms of
thought are carelessly assimilated. “He who wishes to renew tradition must
understand it, and he who does not understand it has no means to under-
take such renewal. He who wants to rationalize it needs two things: to
understand it, and then to practice it. He who does not practice it will not
have an experiential knowledge of its benefits and harms, because a purely
theoretical knowledge of it is insufficient . . . assuming that he is capable of
attaining this knowledge in the first place” (KNN, 55). “Our first task in
rethinking tradition is therefore not to modernize it, nor to rationalize it,
but is rather an inversion of these, namely, to understand it, to develop a
command of its methods, and to ascertain its contents.” Once this is under-
taken, we will be in a position to “construct our own judgments of these
contents,” which is to say that a command of the methods will permit the
extraction of our own methods that comport with the spirit of tradition,
-1— and these in turn will inevitably lead us to identify the “contents” appro-
0— priate for our age.20
+1—
[ 42 ]
III
also that which yields benefits that transcend to the future, so that it becomes
both an ethical refinement and a devotional rapproachment.”21 It will become
clear in the next chapter that, when Taha defines modernity, the “other” is
as much the non-Muslims in the world as the “other” members of the faith.
It is precisely in this context that our philosopher attempts to subvert the
modalities of current materialist globalization to accomplish his ethical
agenda.22 He attempts to take Habermas’s philosophy of communicative
action to a new level, subjecting it to further requirements of ethical praxis,
and then turns it against the amoral, if not unethical, phenomenon of
globalization.
Deriving from the principle of tadāwul, creed—the first component of
tradition—must be systematically put into practical effect, with a view to
accomplishing the aforestated dualistic benefit (al-nafʿ al-muzdawij). There is
no meaning or import for creed “unless speech agrees with acts,” unless “dis-
course corresponds with [practical] conduct” (UNIT, 63). Yet, for creed to
function in this manner, it must be governed by three commanding precepts:
that the Sharīʿa enjoys primacy by virtue of divine governance; that this
Sharīʿa upholds the exclusivity of God’s oneness; and that divine will over
creation is absolute. At first, this stance may repel the secularist’s or
atheist’s sensibility, but we will see Taha argue (in chapter 6), not uncon-
vincingly, that transcendentalism is not just an Islamic or religionist qual-
ity; rather, secular Western modernity has developed its own forms of
transcendence, although to effects different from those brought about by
“traditional” others.23 Modernity is just as theological as any other “reli-
gion,” and its state law is just as engulfed by this theology as the Sharīʿa
was in its own theological habitat.
The second component of tradition is language, or rather the practice of
language, which must also abide by the condition of dualistic benefit, that
is, it must be beneficial to the self as well as to the other. But the practice of
language that insists on such a condition of benefit cannot obtain without
the adoption of conventional and commonly used forms of language, which
is to say that the precept of benefit accruing to the other must ensue from
the use of language according to the linguistic canons of that other. For the
Arabic language to function in this manner, it must be governed by three
commanding precepts: that it enjoys primacy by virtue of the Qur’ānic rev-
-1— elation; that the conventions of this language must be adopted; and that
0— economy of expression is necessary. The first two precepts are deployed in
+1—
[ 44 ]
on sharʿī reason. While the first and third of these precepts are interrelated
and aim to reestablish the knowledge and practice of the tradition as the
first and foremost concern, the second of the trio—the primacy of praxis
over theory—seems a novelty, if not an aberration, when set against mod-
ern forms of knowledge. This rash impression, however, must be resisted, for
modernity in this respect, as in many others, is itself an exception, if not,
itself, an aberration.26
In combating the adverse effects of the current Islamic discourse on tra-
dition, Taha couples the concept of tadāwul with that of tadākhul (interpen-
etration). The various branches and divisions in the Islamic tradition share
a set of methodological modalities according to which the tradition’s con-
tents were formulated. This shared set, which takes praxis as its primary
and defining feature, dictates a holistic approach to the tradition’s various
divisions, thereby preventing eclecticism and selective appropriation. The
tradition, in other words, must be understood as a diversity within a unity.
Accordingly, the interpenetration of a subtradition makes the entire tradi-
tion relevant, whether the subtradition is indigenous27 (ma’ṣūl) or assimilated
(manqūl), or whether it is original to Islamic soil or transplanted from non-
Islamic cultures. When the indigenous sciences (such as linguistics, Qur’ānic
exegesis, Ḥadīth, Fiqh, Ṣūfism, and Kalām) interact with one another, their
relationships are reciprocal and mutually influential, and so when two or
more of them interact, as they often do, the interaction yields an indigenous
science or a branch thereof. A notable example is the field of Uṣūl al-Fiqh, a
theoretical juristic science that largely derives from linguistics, Fiqh, and
Kalām.28
This, however, is not the case with the interaction between or among
indigenous and imported sciences. When the latter makes inroads into the
former, the resulting amalgamation is an indigenous science, whereas when
the former makes inroads into the latter, the result remains a transplanted
or foreign science. A case in point is Aristotelian logic. Since the eleventh
century, the science of Uṣūl al-Fiqh has absorbed various elements from this
logic, but the commanding epistemology and hermeneutical constitution of
this science remained uniquely sharʿī, and thus native to the tradition. By
contrast, the terminological adaptations that were introduced into Aristo-
telian logic with a view to making it accessible to the general population of
-1— Muslim scholars do not make it an Islamic science. The famous logical works
0— of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī,29 who appears to be the chief architect of this
+1—
[ 46 ]
consideration, with the ultimate thrust of making practical ethics bear upon
abstract reasoning (UNIT, 66).
It is not, I think, entirely clear how this example hits the mark. Nor is it
clear that the Maqāṣid made any inroads (tadākhul) into Uṣūl al-Fiqh, since,
historically speaking, Maqāṣid was an already-present derivative of that long-
established field. One could say that the beginnings of Shāṭibī’s theory of
Maqāṣid can be found in Ghazālī’s jurisprudence.33 Yet, the general argument
that there was a strong tendency in favor of cultivating action, praxis, and
works appears sound. It would have been more accurate to say that sever-
ally or aggregately, with or without interpenetration, the indigenous sci-
ences may have reached the heights of abstraction, requiring in the process
certain corrections that appeared in the form of Maqāṣid, inter alia. Their
ultimate goal, nevertheless, was and remained the formation of the ethical
subject, a formation that deemed praxis to include discursive practice.
The project of cultivating knowledge was not just a theoretical or epistemo-
logical activity, but one that was, as a process, imbued with ethical self-
cultivation.34 Scholarship, theorization, and interpretation were deemed to
take place in a world governed by goodness, for the interpreting moral
subject and his rational-i ntellectual apparatus (embedded in a particu-
lar psychoepistemology) presupposed the necessity of seeing the world as
requiring such goodness, the summum bonum. The doctrine of kalām al-nafs,
key to both scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge, presupposed the
moral subject, which is to say that before the subject can become an interpretive
subject, a hermeneutical agent, a prior moral drive is assumed to render
interpretation an ethical praxis.35 The very attitude that produced scholarship
was itself a moral technology, a way of living, a practice, and not merely an
intellectual-theoretical stance or interest. Even in its highest form of abstrac-
tion, knowledge was, in and of itself, a deeply psychological practice, a concrete
way of living in the world. Accordingly, the invocation of the Maqāṣid may not
be the most apt, but Taha’s larger point remains nonetheless valid.
The second form of interpenetration is what Taha calls a “proximate
external interpenetration,” which occurs when an imported science, in
part or in whole, “enters upon” one or more indigenous sciences with the
purpose of establishing itself in accordance with the tadāwul principles pre-
vailing in the indigenous science or sciences. An example of this type of
-1— interpenetration is the entry of Greek philosophy into Kalām, Aristotelian
0— logic into Uṣūl al-Fiqh, and the theories of atom and motion into Kalām and
+1—
[ 48 ]
mind Jābrī’s and Arkoun’s interpretations of Ibn Rushd, Taha can see only
one possibility in the Andalusian philosopher’s statement, namely, the final
arbiter on what “Arabic hermeneutics” must yield in the way of an interpre-
tive conclusion is demonstrative argument. An example of a less precarious
credal alignment may be found in Ghazālī’s Asās al-Qiyās, where Ghazālī made
the major Aristotelian forms of argument comport with Uṣūl al-Fiqh’s argu-
mentative structures.
The second prop is linguistic economy, a feature characteristic of the Ara-
bic language, which has long made this economy one of its desiderata. The
introduction of this prop by Taha seems at first difficult to square within
his project, and may appear as a stylistic matter and even a peripheral for-
mality. Yet, it arguably makes for a substantive point, one intimately related
to genuine naturalization of transplanted knowledge. Compact brevity must
assume a speech community, one that shares and partakes in distributed
and distributable meanings, information, and knowledge. Which is to say
that for compact brevity to do this work, its subject matter must be forms of
knowledge that are natively entrenched and socioepistemically diffused.
Linguistic compactness is thus a guarantee against the verbosity and non-
idiomaticity of translation, and of untranslatable alien concepts, by defini-
tion foreign and thus possibly irrelevant to, if not at odds with, tradition. If
translation is an intrinsically problematic cultural conception, then the
domestication of concepts and terms must be subjected to careful endoge-
nous scrutiny, which seems Taha’s main point.
To illustrate this, Taha cites the example of Ibn Ḥazm’s al-Taqrīb li-Ḥadd
al-Manṭiq,39 where the author “aligned” Aristotelian logic with the science
of bayān,40 bringing the terminology of the latter to bear upon that of the
former. Nonetheless, it is not clear how domestication of the sort Ibn Ḥazm
undertook (like Ghazālī soon after) could effect the sort of alignment that
Taha is proposing. By the standards of Ibn Taymiyya, who flourished some
two centuries after Ghazālī, such a domestication did not amount to align-
ment, because the metaphysical thrust of the theory of universals, which
underlies Aristotelian syllogistic logic, had escaped Ghazālī, among others.41
For Ibn Taymiyya, domestication led to the insinuation of metalogical and
metaphysical doctrines into Islam that contradicted what was for him the
mainstream Sunni doctrines. Thus, for the requirement of the prop of brev-
-1— ity to have any substantive import, it would still have to encounter intel-
0— lectual and credal intrusiveness potentially detrimental to the indigenous
+1—
[ 50 ]
IV
I shall not draw at this point any final conclusion from this requisite,
which could, if taken at face value, create multiple problems for Taha where
such problems need not arise. His argument should be taken to constitute a
call for dehistoricization, where the anthropology of the text is omitted
from consideration. Any such omission not only would result in misunder-
standing the text as a practically oriented ethical discourse, but would also
deprive it of its profoundly psychosocial import as a habituating means to
the ethical technology of the self. A text without context is as dangerous as
the discourse the current modernists, whom Taha is critiquing, have pro-
duced. In fact, it is precisely on this severance between text and context,
between discourse and its effects on the formation of psychosocial subjec-
tivity, that Taha is pouring the thrust of his critique. In other words, the
severance in Taha’s conception possesses a different quality and meaning:
it amounts to viewing the traditional text as inherently capable of produc-
ing ethical subjectivities, first in its original historical context, and, even
with severance, in any other. The traditional text is universalizable, pre-
cisely because the circumstances producing it can be omitted from consideration.
However, the amenability of the text to universalization assumes adept
knowledge of the methodological structures underlying its operations as a
technology of the self, that is, as a process of ethical habituation and cultivation.
To acknowledge the latter’s existence, Taha seems to say, can in no way
imply the historical particularity of the text, its spatiotemporal limited-
ness. It is because we know its power of ethical formation that we can claim
it to be universal, transcending its own historical social origins.
It is within this context that Taha deploys his critique of the prevalent
discourse among contemporary Arab thinkers. It is a critique that aims to
transcend this discourse with a view to taking on the Enlightenment tradi-
tion with all the premises it entails. Put differently, Taha is moving within
expanding circles of critical inquiry, the most immediate one being Arab dis-
course, while the largest is its dominant Western forerunner. And there is
no more auspicious point of departure for this project than what is perhaps
the most forcefully erudite discourse, that of Jābrī, whose work is regarded
by many as the most towering intellectual achievement in the contempo-
rary Arab world. Auspicious, because to demonstrate the incoherence of
Jābrī’s thought permits a point of entry to the next, wider circle, which, I
think, is Taha’s ultimate goal. Without this initial stage of internal critique, —-1
—0
—+1
[ 55 ]
Three of Jābrī’s key works fall under Taha’s scrutiny: Naḥnu wal-Turāth,47
Takwīn al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, and Bunyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, with the latter two
belonging to a larger project that Jābrī called Naqd al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī. As a whole,
this corpus can be said to fall into two major contradictions: first, between
a theoretical claim to a comprehensive approach, on the one hand, and a
practical application of a fragmentary approach, on the other; and second,
between a claim of examining methodology and an actual practice of deci-
phering substantive contents instead. In other words, Taha’s critique focuses
on the discrepancy between Jābrī’s declared intention and the way he actu-
ally implements this intention. For Jābrī does announce that, insofar as there
cannot be a true revaluation of tradition without a careful examination of
the methodologies underlying its substantive structures, there cannot be a
proper revaluation without a comprehensive approach to the tradition, con-
stituted as a whole by its interconnected and interdependent parts.
In Naḥnu wal-Turāth, for instance, Jābrī attacks the Orientalists as much
as he does Muslim scholars48 for their approach to tradition, emphatically
stating that their so-called method rests “on breaking the unity of Arabic
philosophical thought into segregated parts, each of which is reinscribed in
its Greek, Persian, or Indian origins” (TM, 30). He also laments the study of
the Arabic tradition as “continuing to labor under the spell of this fragment-
ing, insolating, and unscientific outlook, for we [Arabs] continue to regard
Fiqh, Kalām, philosophy, syntax, Adab, Ḥadīth, and Qur’ānic exegesis as sci-
ences that each have their own perfectly autonomous existence” (TM, 30). It
is well known, Jābrī further avers, that the typical Muslim scholar was ency-
clopedic in tendency, combining adeptness in several fields of study that
-1— ranged from theology, law, and philosophy to mathematics and linguistics.
0— Accordingly, such an encyclopedic topical range “could not be studied and
+1—
[ 56 ]
relations between them are cast in terms of either conflict or some sort of
partial symbiosis, but never an organic integration. In fact, when examined
closely, the relationships between and among them are cast as antagonistic
and mutually exclusive. Furthermore, there never is any symmetry between
or among them. In Jābrī’s entire project, Taha rightly points out, the gnos-
tic is systematically relegated to an inferior position (TM, 49), and is defined
as unable to rise to the level of intellectual competence or rational power
that even the hermeneutic “system” (bayān) enjoys. Indeed, in Jābrī’s work
even the hermeneutic (bayānī) lags behind the rational prowess of the demon-
strative (burhānī), which, in Jābrī’s work, unqualifiedly enjoys the highest
status. Of all the great minds that the Arab-Islamic tradition has produced
over a millennium, Ibn Rushd, a distinguished interpreter of the Aristotelian
corpus, is singled out as the paragon of demonstrative science, of genuine
rationality,54 and the best that the Islamic tradition has ever produced.55
Jābrī’s claims to holism are therefore rendered empty by virtue of his actual
analysis, which is nothing if not divisive and fragmenting.56
Taha does not leave his critique of Jābrī’s divisions at the level of gener-
alities but pursues them to a detail. Although Jābrī claims the division to be
his own discovery, he also claims it to be consistent with that of the illustri-
ous ṣūfī Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 1072), who, in his renowned Laṭā’if al-
Ishārāt, speaks of “reason, knowledge, and gnosticism” as graded stages of
intellectual experience. Qushayrī stated that “light in the beginning is the
light of reason (ʿaql), in the middle it is the light of knowledge (ʿilm), and at
the end [the highest stage] it is the light of gnosticism (ʿirfān); thus, the pos-
sessor of reason stands with burhān, the possessor of knowledge with bayān,
while he who possesses gnosis (maʿrifa) is subject to ʿayān.”57 Through detailed
analysis Taha shows that Jābrī distorted Qushayrī’s categories and in the pro-
cess created oppositions and contradictions where none had existed in this
ṣūfī’s understanding of knowledge. Just as significant, Jābrī turns Qushayrī’s
order of “attaining the light of knowledge” right on its head, because it is
abundantly clear that the category of demonstration or burhān occupies the
lowest epistemic order for Qushayrī (TM, 53).
The second contradiction Taha points out pertains to Jābrī’s formal claim
to study mechanisms and methodologies “that dictate the production of the
traditional texts one from the other, and the manner of production between
-1— and among them.” This would have required him to detail the inner struc-
0— tures of such methodological productions, subjecting them, at a second stage,
+1—
[ 58 ]
to a critique that remolds them within the spirit of their own constitu-
tion. The term used to describe this second stage is mustakhrij, a derivative
of the central juristic concept of takhrīj, which was long employed by
jurist-theoreticians and legists of Islam.58 In other words, the enterprise
requires not only the study of productive and reproductive hermeneutical
techniques and methodologies, but the remolding of these in a creative
move that can transpose them, as autonomous indigenous concepts, to a
contemporary context. What Jābrī accomplished instead is a study not of
the methodologies but of the substantive discourses through which these
methodologies were expounded. “It is one thing for a scholar to study
the methodologies themselves and another to study the discourse that
these methodologies produce, . . . this latter discourse constituting nothing
more than a preoccupation with substantive content,” which Jābrī has mis-
taken for a genuine study of hermeneutical technique and methodological
principles of derivation (TM, 33–34). In short, Taha seems to say, Jābrī has
not only limited his project to the first, elementary stage; he has also con-
fused one stage with the other. The structural interconnections between
productive methodologies and holism therefore remain outside his project,
leaving him confined to articulating the relationships between the sub-
stantive content of the texts, on the one hand, and a divisive and fragment-
ing view of the tradition, on the other.
It does not take much to explain Jābrī’s intellectual predicament. His
heavy, if not exclusive, reliance on borrowed concepts can only result in seg-
regation, since nonindigenous concepts by definition lead to faṣl, namely,
separation, fragmentation, and disruptive exogenous intrusiveness. “By
definition,” because exogenous concepts can never correspond to the tradi-
tion itself, either in part or in whole. Such concepts cannot, due to their
origins, find an organic fit within the tradition, however much this latter is
remolded and reinterpreted. Certainly, they can never fit with its herme-
neutical and methodological infrastructures (taḥtiyya; TM, 34), because
they are grounded in European modes of rationality and ideology that are
structurally constituted in binary terms of deconstruction, rupture, crisis,
and conflict, much of which acquires decidedly militaristic tones in Jābrī’s
discourse: “reconciliation,” “alliance,” “disengagement,” “defense,” “confron-
tation,” “blasting,” and “moment of explosion.”59
Yet, contradictions are not the only problem in Jābrī’s work. Driven by a —-1
narrow conception of rationality—which Taha will later dwell on as “denuded —0
—+1
[ 59 ]
and its arsenal of argumentative and discursive strategies “in order to dem-
onstrate that reason, in the final analysis, is powerless (ʿājiz)” or “insuffi-
cient.” It is “a discourse that constructs itself rationally, through [logical]
premises and conclusions,” in order to “show that when all is said and done
reason is impuissant.”71 Rational unintelligibles therefore can correspond
only to hermeneutical, burhānī unintelligibles, not demonstrative unintel-
ligibles, since hermeneutical unintelligibles are clearly more akin, in their
unintelligibility, to rational unintelligibles (TM, 47). Yet, Jābrī opts for equat-
ing rational unintelligibles with demonstrative unintelligibles, an equation
that leads to serious problems because he argues for a dialectical relation-
ship between religious intelligibles and rational unintelligibles, thereby pos-
iting a certain influence that the former exercises on the latter (TM, 46).
All this shows, Taha effectively argues, that there is a generous amount
of confusion in Jābrī’s thought, stemming as it does from a deficient concep-
tion of definition (ḥadd), a basic requirement in the construction of any
sound argument. A fundamental requirement of definition is concomitance
(iṭṭirād) between definiens and definiendum, for if strict concomitance is not
observed, the definiens may not be exclusive (māniʿ), and may thus give room
to the inclusion of attributes beyond those belonging to the definiendum.
The failure of concomitance is fatal for the formulation of logical premises,
and these, if flawed, lead to a problematic argument-structure and erroneous
conclusions—precisely the shortcomings of Jābrī’s work.
Jābrī’s typology is not limited to the misclassification of hermeneutical
rational unintelligibility, however. Confusion is also overwhelmingly pres-
ent in the gnostic category, because he is never sure whether the religious,
which he carves out as an analytical category, is not transcendent to non-
religious categories. Consistent with his statement about unintelligibles, he
patently asserts that “there has never been in ancient or recent history an
intelligible that is entirely free of the unintelligible.”72 Apart from the fact
that this claim fundamentally undermines Jābrī’s classification of traditional
knowledge into three distinct epistemic fields, it also falls into the dilemma
of drawing a distinction between demonstrative and gnostic knowledge, a
distinction in which the proclaimed superiority of the former over the lat-
ter becomes arbitrary. If demonstrative knowledge is also subjective and lia-
ble to unintelligibility, then the question arises: Why not place the herme-
neutical (bayānī) and gnostic (ʿirfānī) in positions from which they can —-1
likewise judge and pronounce on the value of demonstrative knowledge —0
—+1
[ 65 ]
violates the logical principles which [his] method claims to adopt. . . . He made
rational unintelligibles to be corresponding equivalents to that which is contrary
to religious intelligibles (naqīḍ al-maʿqūl al-dīnī), which [logically] led to the cor-
respondence between rational and religious intelligibles. He also made rational
unintelligibles to be corresponding equivalents to demonstrative unintelligibles,
while overlooking the legitimate correspondence between rational unintelli-
gibles and hermeneutical unintelligibles. By virtue of his claim of the insepara-
bility of intelligibles and unintelligibles, he then made rational unintelligibles
to be corresponding equivalents to gnostic intelligibles, thereby opening the
door for the admixture of religious intelligibility and its gnostic counterpart.
This led, on his doctrine, to the equivalence of religious intelligibles to rational
unintelligibles, which is contrary to what he had [earlier] declared to be his
given premise. (TM, 48)
VI
tradition’s overall structure has been understood will these other problems
dissipate, since a correct understanding of tradition is the basis on which
the project can logically and autonomously proceed. Interconnectedness and
interpenetration are the most salient features of the Islamic tradition, as evi-
denced in the numerous classical works concerned with classifying the tra-
ditional sciences and outlining the connections and interdependencies
between and among them. From Fārābī’s Iḥṣā’ al-ʿUlūm and Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’s
Rasā’il to Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist and Ibn Ḥazm’s Marātib al-ʿUlūm, from
Ṭāshkuprīzādeh’s Miftāḥ al-Saʿāda to Ḥajjī Khalīfa’s Kashf al-Ẓunūn, these and
numerous works, despite their different orientations, evince a strong ten-
dency to treat the sciences that constitute the tradition as mutually com-
plementary and interdependent (TM, 89–90). In Marātib al-ʿUlūm, for example,
Ibn Ḥazm declared that “ ‘Sciences are all related to each other, and one in
need of the other.’ ”74 Likewise, in Mīzān al-ʿAmal, Ghazālī offered the learner
the following advice: “ ‘The student must not plunge into the sciences all at
once, but must take care to observe the order [of the sciences], starting
from the important to the more important. He must not embark on a sci-
ence until he has attained mastery of the science that precedes it, because
sciences are structured systematically (tartīban ḍarūriyyan), some being
means to others. The successful student is the one who attends to this struc-
tured ordering.’ ”75
Yet, “structured ordering” is only one aspect of interdependency and
mutual complementarity. There is also the factor of interaction (tafāʿul)
whereby sciences interlace, intertwine, interweave, interpenetrate, and
intermesh to evince a dialectic of mutual and cross-fertilization. Anyone
who has delved into theology (Kalām) knows this science’s interconnections
with language, linguistics, and philosophy. The same is true of the interre-
lations between logic, on the one hand, and linguistics and legal theory (Uṣūl
al-Fiqh), on the other, between philosophy and theology, philosophy and
mysticism, and the all-pervasive presence of dialectic (Jadal) across these
sciences (TM, 90). Furthermore, interaction and fertilization once operated
in nearly every direction of the Islamic sciences. It can be said that both the
instrumental and the substantive sciences76 inflected and influenced each
other, often in fundamental ways. Just as logic came to reshape various legal
and theological sciences, these latter came to reshape instrumental sciences.
Similarly, grammar and linguistics had a decisive influence on legal and —-1
theological discourse, but they were also reworked by these sciences. We can —0
—+1
[ 67 ]
encyclopedism and subtle yet prolific intellectual production have long been
recognized: Kindī, Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, Ghazālī, al-Fakhr al-Rāzī, Ibn
Khaldūn, and Suyūṭī. To this list, Taha could have easily added a long list of
others of matching intellectual rigor and depth.
Thus, there can be no genuine or correct way to evaluate tradition with-
out the full recognition that interpenetration and interdependency are
among its most salient features. I have earlier noted that Taha recog-
nizes two forms of this interpenetration, the internal and external. Internal
interpenetration occurs between and among indigenous Islamic sciences,
whereas its external counterpart occurs when indigenous sciences interact
with “transmitted” or “imported” sciences, “be they Greek, Persian, or
Indian.” The “most perfect archetype of internal interpenetration” is found
in the legal theory of Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī, whereas its external exemplary
counterpart is found in the metaphysics of Ibn Rushd (TM, 92). A sound anal-
ysis of the “internal methodological mechanisms” (al-āliyyāt al-dākhiliyya)
these two thinkers developed within their respective fields permits Taha to
make the following hypothesis—“A proper evaluation of a Muslim intellec-
tual’s or a sage’s production cannot obtain without taking it to be true that
the interpenetration of his production with mainstream Islamic sciences is
much stronger (aqwā) than its interpenetration with sciences whose affin-
ity (qurb) with this mainstream is weaker.” This hypothesis should stand
until “the contrary is proven” (TM, 92).
VII
ethics would be the closest thing to what Taha called mainstream dialecti-
cal tradition. Against Jābrī, who argued that the science of Maqāṣid as elab-
orated by Shāṭibī is to be distinguished form Uṣūl al-Fiqh, Taha argues that
the Maqāṣid theory does not just “belong” to Uṣūl al-Fiqh; it does so in such
intricate, powerful, and organic ways that even the classical legal theorists
did not fully realize—a central point Taha aims to bring to sharp relief (TM,
97). In fact, Taha goes on to claim, the theory of Maqāṣid is “the axis of inter-
nal interpenetration” (TM, 97–98), a formulation which I take to mean that
the confluence of ethics and legal precepts captures what might be called
the genetic intellectual structure of the Islamic tradition.81
It is clear that Taha wants to go beyond the classical tradition, claiming
that there is more to Maqāṣid than this tradition could appreciate. Of course,
the by-product of this argument is that a fragmenting and isolationist
approach as that which Jābrī adopted would be rendered irrelevant at best
and invalid at worst. But even the traditional understanding seems to have
missed the full import of the conceptual complex that Maqāṣid represented,
a lack that has continued to cloud thinkers’ understanding of it.
There are three distinct meanings concealed within the homonymous
concept of maqṣad (singular of maqāṣid). First is the search for that which
serves an interest, or a quest or pursuit of benefit, which in the “law” is
defined in such a way as to yield communal and individual good. This sub-
stantive goal, a quest for a content signifier (maḍmūn dalālī), Taha calls maqṣūd
(= intended benefit = taḥṣīl fā’ida). Second is the mental state of intention
(niyya), understood as a conscious, deliberate quest to accomplish a good.
It is the emotive and psychological condition that underlies the will to
intend (a state Taha terms quṣūd). Third is the “rise of a legitimate motive,”
a “rationale” (ḥikma), that aims (taqṣud) to attain an ethical value. This mean-
ing, called maqṣad, speaks to the “value content of sharʿī discourse” (TM,
98–99). Students of legal theory have missed the fact that all three levels—
maqṣūdāt, quṣūdāt, and maqāṣid—are interlaced with ethical value derived
from a moral fabric, and thus exhibit the main structures of confluence
and interpenetration between legal theory and ethics.
The first category of maqṣūd represents a substantive content derived
either from a linguistic form or from a signifier issuing therefrom. In other
words, it does not entirely depend on the dictates of language as a prescrip-
-1— tion, interpreted in accordance with its apparent meaning (ẓāhir). Yet,
0— while this signifier consists of a rational operation in which language and
+1—
[ 70 ]
another, one building on top of the other, with each marshaling its strength
to bolster the subject’s intention and practice in the art of living. “The sci-
ence of Maqāṣid is then the form that the science of ethics took in order to
merge itself with the science of Uṣūl al-Fiqh” (TM, 103). But this merger is so
massive and multilayered that it is apt to call Uṣūl al-Fiqh “the Science of
the Principles of Ethics” (TM, 105).
In his critique of Jābrī’s fragmenting outlook as well as his demonstra-
tion of the interpenetration between and among Islamic sciences, especially
between the ethical and the “legal,” Taha presents compelling historical and
logical arguments. So far so good. But toward the end of his long discussion
(TM, 89–123), he regresses toward an evaluation of Shāṭibī that makes an
exception of the legal theorist’s contribution. Shāṭibī now appears as a
“renewer” (mujaddid; TM, 122), and the “father of the interlacing of ethics
with legal theory.” He is cast as having charted a path in constructing Islamic
science on the basis of mutually complementary coordination and system-
atization, a path “the likes of which we have not known either before or after
him.”86
Yet, if we accept this argument to be true, then all claims to the inter-
penetration between Uṣūl al-Fiqh and ethics fall apart, since “Uṣūl al-Fiqh”
does indeed bear the burden of a history in which it was influential on, not
to say formative of, other fields of inquiry87 in the long period between the
ninth century and the end of the eighteenth. Put tautologically, if Uṣūl al-
Fiqh is the natural abode of Maqāṣid—as Taha just argued—then Shāṭibī can-
not be seen as the innovator that Taha makes out him to be, however much
his theory exhibited particular characteristics. Nor would we be able to
account for Ghazālī’s contributions that appear to have anticipated impor-
tant aspects of Shāṭibī’s theory.88 If Shāṭibī is made to be the exceptional
luminary, then what he stands for in terms of Taha’s claims to interpene-
tration in turn becomes an exception to a dominant rule. This is precisely
what Jābrī had already done with Shāṭibī, not only by making him, together
with al-ʿIzz Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, an exception for having “founded the science
of bayān” upon demonstrative science (burhān), but also by having Shāṭibī
signify a categorical rupture with his “literalist” uṣūlī predecessors.89
According to Taha, not only Shāṭibī is considered an exception within the
legal sciences, Uṣūl al-Fiqh itself is likewise declared an exception to the
-1— other Islamic sciences. Because Kalām is deemed “abstractly theoretical”
0— (naẓarī mujarrad), for instance, Taha determines that it does not represent
+1—
[ 72 ]
the “best” of interpenetration, certainly unlike the sharʿī disciplines that are,
in addition, eminently practical (TM, 110). It is thus difficult to escape the
conclusion that Taha—here at least—u nnecessarily falls prey to the same
charge of fragmentation that he has directed against Jābrī. That Shāṭibī
“opened the path to building Islamic science” (TM, 122) in ways that perfected
the modalities of interpenetration might indeed prove useful to the proj-
ects of many modern thinkers, with Taha at the top of their list. But signal-
ing the exceptionality of Shaṭibī does very little to bolster the initial claims
Taha has made about the interpenetration that characterizes, if it does not
define, the tradition. In fact, his claims to Shāṭibī’s exceptionalism tend to
militate against his otherwise valid claims, which could have found ample
support in the view, which I have articulated elsewhere, that Shāṭibī’s theory
continues on the same epistemological path that Ghazālī had charted in Shifā’
al-Ghalīl some two and a half centuries earlier.90
If a careful, philological, and diachronic analysis of Uṣūl al-Fiqh’s tradi-
tion leads Taha to conclude that Shāṭibī’s contribution was no more than a
remarkable refinement and creative elaboration on earlier fundamental
developments within this central field, then Taha’s claims to exceptionality
cannot be taken as either serious or decisive, leaving intact his otherwise
valid claims about interpenetration. That he finally, after his brief remarks
about Shāṭibī’s exceptionality, reverts to his unqualified assertion that Uṣūl
al-Fiqh is the most representative science of the mainstream tradition91
amounts to a forceful attestation of the validity of what is most central to
his thesis.
If for Taha Shāṭibī’s legal theory is the best example of internal interpen-
etration, then Ibn Rushd’s metaphysics is the most eloquent expression of
external interpenetration. Metaphysics is an “ideal type” (namūdhaj mithālī)
of this latter interpenetration because it stands at the furthest point in meet-
ing the praxis-based requirements of the mainstream dialectical system of
the tradition (majāl al-tadāwul). On the other hand, Ibn Rushd is the most suit-
able example of this trend because he represents a case study that meets all
the necessary conditions of radical opposition to internal interpenetration
(TM, 125).
Whereas internal interpenetration between or among indigenous disci-
plines does not attend to the direction (ittijāh) that this interaction and inter-
lacing take (because it invariably contributes to the mainstream indige- —-1
nous tradition), external interpenetration imposes certain limitations and —0
—+1
[ 73 ]
thus requires particular attention to, and awareness of, the teleology con-
ceived in the interaction between an imported science and an indigenous
one. Accordingly, external interpenetration is of two kinds. The first aims
to amalgamate an imported science into a relevant indigenous counter-
part, with a teleological desideratum whose concern remains the elabora-
tion, enrichment, and strengthening of the indigenous science. This kind,
conducive to the field of tadāwul and its requirements of practice, Taha calls
“proximate external interpenetration” (tadākhul khārijī qarīb). However, if
interpenetration proceeds in the direction of subordinating the Islamic
science to the imperatives and enhancement of the imported science, then
it is another kind of an interlacing science, one that involves what he
terms “remote external interpenetration” (tadākhul khārijī baʿīd). The dual-
ism within this type of interpenetration leads him to identify the following
rule: “Whenever an indigenous science is amalgamated into an imported
science, [the result] will tend to diverge from the mainstream’s dialectical
tradition; whenever an imported science is amalgamated into an indige-
nous science, the [result] will tend to inch toward that tradition” (TM, 126).
In other words, interpenetration is decided by the governing principles of the
science that finally succeeds in arbitrating the amalgamating relationship.
In all of the vast textual space and critical attention he devotes to Ibn
Rushd,92 Taha wants to show that this Aristotelian philosopher’s sway over
the minds of so many contemporary Muslim writers93—especially over
Jābrī’s—has been detrimental to a cohesive view of tradition. Nowhere in
Taha do we find a statement that directly captures the reasons that have led
these writers to privilege Ibn Rushd, a statement that would have saved him
much of the energy he expends in showing how Ibn Rushd promotes (or is
construed as promoting) a narrow view of rationalism and, perhaps as a con-
sequence, a fragmented outlook on Islam. Instead, in page after page of
Taha’s critique we get an Ibn Rushd who did everything in his capacity to
divide the Muslim sciences, whether indigenous or imported, stripping them
of the cross-fertilization that was accomplished before his time. Instead of
continuing Ghazālī’s project in assimilating logic into Uṣūl al-Fiqh, Ibn Rushd
insidiously separated the two sciences when he abridged Ghazālī’s canoni-
cal Mustaṣfā,94 leaving the distinctive Islamic science of Uṣūl bereft of the
benefits that logic had offered it (TM, 127–28). And one is never sure, Taha
-1— rightly argues, what exactly he wanted to say in Faṣl al-Maqāl Bayna al-Ḥikma
0— wal-Sharīʿa min al-Ittiṣāl, to such an extent that the last word in the title may
+1—
[ 74 ]
well have been not Ittiṣāl (connection) but rather Infiṣāl (separation).95 In this
work, he wavers between finding correspondence and opposition, leaving a
vast number of commentators on his work in disagreement as to which of
the two paths he took, or meant to take. In either case, his position is highly
problematic, Taha avers. “If his position is one of opposition, then negating
interpenetration is evident; if his position [argues for] correspondence, then
no two [drastically different] things that exist separately can be subject to
interpenetration” (TM, 131).
That Ibn Rushd largely preached and practiced fragmentation, dividing
between and among the sciences, and mostly privileging Aristotelian phi-
losophy, needs little demonstration. But to show how Ibn Rushd went about
breaking tradition into distinct and separate fields is arguably no more
important than showing why Jābrī and so many Arab and Muslim thinkers
found Ibn Rushd the Fragmenter so appealing. What these thinkers hold dif-
fers little from the positions of a host of other Muslim scholars in the West-
ern academy, who maintain similar notions in answer to the larger ques-
tion “What is Islam?” To say that these scholars, like Jābrī and many like him,
are struggling (consciously or unconsciously) to accommodate Islam within
liberalism96 is to state the most obvious. In their narratives, the Muslim tra-
dition is as many things as liberalism is; it is, in fact, anything that liberal-
ism wants it to be! It is amenable to capitalism as much as it is to the puri-
tanistic impulses of evangelism. It is also chronically contradictory, taking
many irreconcilable forms and shapes, and, for good measure, it is also man-
ifestly ambiguous.97 It is pantheistic in part and legal in another, philosoph-
ical here and scientific there, theological and literary, hateful and loving.
So we can make of it today as we wish: a liberal reincarnation! And in line
with this hegemonic liberal culture, which had secularized Christianity by
expropriating its forms through secular humanism, Islam must be the reli-
gion of love (Ṣūfism) and rationality (Ibn Rushd), depending on the aspect
of liberalism to which a liberal Muslim finds herself inclined. For modern
Arab thinkers, the embryonically Rushdian rationality of the West frames
and centers mimesis.
In his work so far, Jābrī has reached conclusions like those of many other
scholars operating under the pull of the liberal tradition, notwithstanding
his superior philological, but still distinctly Orientalist, knowledge.98 Taha
therefore may have wasted much ink in debunking Ibn Rushd only in order —-1
to push back against the overwhelming modern Arab tendency to canonize —0
—+1
[ 75 ]
the Aristotelian philosopher. He also gives Jābrī’s act of privileging Ibn Rushd
an undue attention, for his understanding that Jābrī often resorts to con-
cepts and ideas whose time of glory has passed even in the West—their ulti-
mate progenitor (TM, 36–37)—should count as a decisive critique. But the
larger and most valuable point in Taha’s project remains his persuasive dis-
course in favor of a dialectically woven tradition, manifestly characterized
and structured by interpenetration. Persuasive, not because his diagnosis
is always historiographically and philologically sound, but because the tra-
dition itself was acutely and self-consciously aware of what it at times
regarded as even excessive interpenetration.99
By successfully flattening the Jābiriyyan edifice, which rests on the par-
adigmatic triadic categories of burhān, bayān, ʿirfān, Taha accomplishes his
primary task of attending to the smallest concentric circle. This achieved,
he directs his attention to the next circle, namely, the Enlightenment con-
cepts of reason and ethics, concepts that have dominated, if not colonized,
the minds of Arab and Muslim thinkers.
-1—
0—
+1—
[ 76 ]
Who can deny that Muslim society faces grave spiritual challenges inasmuch as
it faces material ones? Standing at the forefront of spiritual challenges is an intel-
lectual wandering represented in a great conceptual strife from which it can-
not find a way out. It continues to be flooded by ideas fashioned by other societ-
ies, [with the consequence that] it has treated these complex and recondite
ideas—not to mention their labyrinths and wiles—erratically, unable to digest
or reject them. The reality is that as long as Muslim society has not found a way
to invent its own ideas or to reinvent the ideas of others as if they were ab initio
its own, there is no hope for it to escape this intellectual confusion that has been
inflicted on the minds. (RH, 11)1
multiple Western modernities. There are French, German, English, and Amer-
ican modernities, among others. There are political, economic, and social
modernities. Differentials in modern accomplishments are evidenced even
in one and the same region, for one can observe that some of these moder-
nities have a larger share of achievement in industrialization than, say, law,
while others have been markedly more successful achievers in economics
than, say, in politics. This being the case in the West, it is of little surprise
then that modernity takes a different form with the change of its location,
especially when the location is saturated with a history, tradition, and cul-
ture drastically different from those that have prevailed in the Western
world. And “just as there is a non-Muslim modernity, there should also be a
Muslim modernity” (RH, 17). While certain modernities rested on indus-
trial or economic achievements, Muslim modernity will rest on morality
and ethics, for the “Islamic time” (al-zaman al-Islāmī) is an “ethical time.”2
Yet, the very concept of modernity (ḥadātha) appears to be entwined with
particular agents. Those who take charge of “their time” are the moderns
of the age. The Arabic root from which the term derives (Ḥ.D.Th.) connotes
the notion of substantiation in time, of happening, occurring as a new
phenomenon—hence the meaning of “new” given to the term ḥadīth. To be
truly modern is to lead this new time, to create your own substantiation of
it. “Modernity represents the rising up of any umma (community, “nation”)
to assume the duty of fulfilling the obligations of an age, this making it the
charge of the age to the exclusion of others. It has the responsibility to under-
take these obligations for the purpose of the full realization of humanity.”
Ḥadātha, “in short, is an umma taking charge of its age’s obligations.”3
Umma here appears to be a plastic concept. It refers to Muslim and non-
Muslim groupings. Muslims themselves can constitute more than one umma.
Accordingly, there can be more than one version of Islamic modernity, even
concurrently. What has obtained in the West can also obtain in the no smaller
and no less diverse Muslim world. Yet, in no case will Islamic modernity, in
any of its variants, fail to give priority to the ethical dimension, since this is
what is unique about its emergence as a modernity. Islamic modernity, Taha
seems to say, either is moral in its nature and core or is no modernity at all.
And precisely because its identity wholly consists of this element, Islamic
modernity “will rise to heights” that will surpass those moral or ethical
-1— practices present in the Western varieties of modernity. Furthermore, con-
0— sistent with his insistence on practical ethics and on praxis as the measure
+1—
[ 78 ]
of human kind, Taha’s aim is to demonstrate that the “modern act” (moder-
nity as an act or as a practice) finds its highest and most refined manifesta-
tion in Islamic practices as in no other.4 That this project may result in mul-
tiple Islamic modernities is seen as further support for his vision. Whatever
form of modernity any “variety of Islam” develops, the ethical paradigm
must always stand.
II
Taha’s conception of modernity and its sources allows for the possibility, if
not “likelihood,” that “certain principles of modernity’s spirit” (mabādi’
hādhihi al-r ūḥ aw baʿḍuhā) have materialized in past cultures, and in ways
that may have differed from what the contemporary West has accomplished.
And it is just as likely that it may materialize in still different forms in any
of man’s future societies (RH, 31).
The spirit of modernity rests on three foundations or principles, all of
which are regarded as indispensable to any modern project. The first of these
is the “principle of majority,” which one can easily argue is an iteration of
Kant’s ideas in “What Is Enlightenment?” In fact, in expounding this prin-
ciple, Taha relies on this philosopher and his tract explicitly (RH, 25). One of
modernity’s key principles is that it realizes the movement of the individ-
ual or group from a state of mental minority to a state of intellectual major-
ity, with the former described as a condition in which rational autonomy is
lacking, and where an external or higher authority is needed for guidance.
This adherence to external authority may take various forms. It may be a
willing and knowing submission to the authority of another’s thinking,
in which the results and conclusions of this thinking are adopted as one’s
own, without rational or critical scrutiny. It may also be copying another’s
way of thinking and adopting it, through processes of rational justification,
as one’s own, as if it were original to one. Finally, the imitation can be entirely
unconscious, whereby an intimate or close affinity with another’s way of see-
ing and living in the world spontaneously leads him to blind copying.
The principle of majority (mabda’ al-r ushd) thus rests on two foundations.
The first, rational autonomy, requires that each individual must legislate
for herself or himself those acts that must be commissioned and those that
must not, so much so that this self-legislation in turn becomes the founda-
tion for the formation of the individual’s subjectivity (fa-tarsakh bi-dhālika
dhātiyyatuhu). Accordingly, individuals who have attained intellectual (in
contradistinction to biological or legal) majority are free in movement and
strong in character. The second foundation is “creativity,”9 which requires
that the individual anchors his deeds and speech in new values that are
either self-invented or reinvented. In the latter case, an older value is sub-
jected to such an autonomous self-legislative process that it becomes an
entirely new one.10 Clearly, it is in this “reinvention” of older values—those
-1— that derive from the turāth—that Taha wishes to anchor his own project (RH,
0— 36–38).
+1—
[ 80 ]
made. Rather, it is critique, and not iʿtiqād, that gives meaning and original
intent to particular choices. Taha’s distinction seems to bestow a philosoph-
ical veneer upon the adage that only an examined life is worth living.
The third is the principle of universality (mabda’ al-shumūl),16 since one of
modernity’s foundations is the universalizing of particulars, whereby val-
ues of a limited scope, or values adopted by a limited and particular cultural
community, are claimed to be universal. This is accomplished through two
techniques: extensibility (tawassuʿ) and generalizability (taʿmīm). Extensibil-
ity refers to the phenomenon of mutual influence within a single modern
society, whereby a particular act or a particular achievement produces ram-
ified effects on all other areas within that society. Generalizability refers to
the transcendence of one society’s technical accomplishments and values
of freedom to other societies, resulting in the erasure of cultural and his-
torical differences between and among what are otherwise very different
societies. Due to the extraordinary pace of technical developments, gener-
alizability has gained progressive speed, leading to the new age of global-
ization (RH, 54–56).
III
European values by hook or crook to the rest of the world; and (2) could have
conceivably materialized in any “premodern” or “nonmodern” period. As a
matter of strict historical analysis, the debt that Renaissance and early mod-
ern Europe incurred to other civilizations and cultures is not to be con-
fused with the reconfiguration and particular modes of assimilation of the
borrowed elements within the large-scale production of European Enlight-
enment and modernity. These elements had obviously existed and contin-
ued to exist in other cultures—especially in Islamdom, India, and China—
long before they made inroads into Europe, but it is entirely unclear how
they could have led to the rise of modernity in these cultures before Europe
made of them something altogether different, something we have aggre-
gately come to call modernity. Thus the alleged presence of a particular
modern element in a particular historical culture can in no way constitute
evidence to the effect that premodern culture was modern (which, in fact,
is a contradiction in terms). This is so because the culture-specific structural
and epistemic use of a particular element is never an objective and invari-
able reality that possesses a predictable capacity for interaction with the sur-
rounding environment. The concept and institution of the university, for
instance, were a European borrowing from Islam, but it is hardly accurate
to argue that learning and education, supposedly the primary function
of the university, took on the same forms of knowledge and teleological
aspirations in Europe as they did in Islamdom.20 Rather, all such borrowings
possess extendable and mutable internal values that allow them to be refit-
ted, epistemologically, into drastically different structures, with the uni-
versity, again, being a prime example.21
But there is another sense in which modernity is claimed by general schol-
arship to be universal, which does not have to do with its historical roots
but rather with the processes that constituted the modern project itself.
Scholars have increasingly argued, for instance, that this project evolved
through a series of economic and material developments that required an
attendant system of coercion and discipline, one that presupposed these devel-
opments. As I have argued elsewhere, however, non-European cultures
upheld certain ethical benchmarks within their central domains, bench-
marks that set limits on what can and cannot be done.22 For the European
colonists to be able to exploit the Haitians, the Amerindians, and untold
-1— others in the manner that they did; to subjugate them as machines rather
0— than employ them as humans; to subject them to unprecedented forms of
+1—
[ 84 ]
know it (and what other do we really know?) can be ethicized, how does
this “improved globalization” serve Taha’s philosophic agenda?
One can only speculate that, for Taha, the only antidote to the morally
problematic form of current globalization is a globalized (and thus “exten-
sible” and universalized) infusion of moral content, one that is characteris-
tically Islamic in content and form (RH, 86–90). Taha thus adopts the same
characteristics of Western globalization as integral to the spirit of moder-
nity, despite the fact that modernity did not develop such potent forms
of globalization until very late. He is in effect arguing that just as Euro-
America has the right to dictate a particular vision of globalization (as an
integral part of Western modernity), so does Islam. Of course he is not advo-
cating the use of violence or any threat of it in this ethical venture, not
only because he offers a peaceful and pacifist alternative of fair and ami-
cable exchange of ideas (which he does), but also because any form of vio-
lence would clearly run against the very principles of justice and morality
he is advocating.31
However, the question remains: Why does Taha approve of globalization
as a project that necessarily entails the erasure of cultural differences
between and among what are otherwise very different societies? By slip-
ping into this position, is he uncritically accepting an ethically pernicious
practice that clearly runs against the core of his theory? Is he, in other
words, aware that what constitutes globalization is precisely its structural
makeup as an amoral, if not unethical, phenomenon? How does he, for
instance, distinguish between globalizing practices and the practices of
multinational corporations? If the globalization of late modernity is largely
the work of these corporations, then what does it mean to embark on a proj-
ect that would have as its chief aim the ethicization of the corporation? Is
there an Islamic way, any way, to ethicize the corporation? Can the corpo-
ration and along with it globalization be ethicized and survive as such? What-
ever answers are given to these questions, the challenge remains lodged in
the structural connections between globalization and the corporation (and
of course much else). If the corporation qua corporation is not ethically
sustainable, then how can one continue to advocate the legitimacy of
globalization—which largely rests on the viability of the corporation—in
the first place? I will take up some of these issues when pursuing Taha’s
-1— discourse on globalization in some detail later. For now, I return to my focus
0— on his notion of modernity’s spirit.
+1—
[ 88 ]
IV
made modernity what it is, namely, capitalist in its classic, liberal, and neo-
liberal forms, with a modern state that is presumably a sort of social con-
tract application, the pervasive practice of the principle of autonomy, and
much else.
Our consideration in the previous paragraph further calls into question
the validity of the “spirit of modernity” as a historically viable concept. As
a strict matter of history, few thinkers and scholars would be willing to risk
the claim either (1) that modernity could have developed, say, the system of
capitalism as a contingent feature of the modern project, and without its
having any structural relation to its “spirit” and principles (especially inso-
far the first principle of majority is concerned, and which Taha clearly
extends to the concept of autonomy); or (2) that, again, the system of capi-
talism is nothing more than a misapplication of the spirit and its principles,
or an altogether unintended consequence, having nothing to do with these
principles in the first place. We must therefore question the historicity of
the distinction between spirit and its historical and cultural location, on the
one hand, and between principles and their applications, on the other. And
once we do so, we must also be prepared to question whether Taha’s con-
cept of modernity’s spirit is sustainable within the content and form of his
overall project.
Nonetheless, there remains synthetic space to argue that this problem-
atic in Taha’s theory can be solved and that it is not detrimental to his over-
all philosophy. If the idea is to reform the project of modernity in Islam and
engage the rest of the world in this reform—which I believe captures our
philosopher’s ambitions—then the spirit of modernity cannot be derivable
from a uniquely European experience, much less from Kant, one of its major
proponents. To do so is to start on the wrong foot. It is to militate against
Taha’s own insistence on the continuing and continuous relevance of the
turāth as the source of the modern Islamic “self,” however much he wishes
to critique and correct that tradition’s relevance to the imperatives of the
“contemporary age.” The spirit, therefore, cannot be derived via the Euro-
pean Enlightenment and its Kants, but must, in order to yield the desired
results, ultimately be found, or anchored in, the turāth.
It is not clear, then, why a distinction between maturity and critique
should be made. If Kant is a valuable reference, he did not make such a dis-
-1— tinction, nor can such a conceptual framework for the distinction be found
0— in the terrain of the turāth.33 For Kant, the emergence out of immaturity
+1—
[ 90 ]
modernity would simply be too radical a move. This second point goes to a
tactical move as well, a way to tell his readers what he wants but keep them
listening.52 Third, his claim about confusing the spirit with application,
including the bulk of language about elision, can be turned around in favor
of the argument that the spirit is integral to the application(s). We recall that
the second and third of the spirit’s principles are critique (naqd) and uni-
versalization (shumūl). I have said enough about the entanglements of the
latter with colonialism and hegemony, and argued, along with a host of
scholars, that the theology of progress and the mission civilisatrice—both
subsumable under shumūl—are genealogically inseparable from Europe’s
assault on the world. But equally important is the second principle of cri-
tique. If the spirit of modernity is universal, as Taha is plainly arguing, then
this spirit, transhistorical and universal, must be ethical too. And if this is
the case, then at least one of the three principles of the spirit must contain,
or consist of, an ethical substance. For critique in Taha’s thought is another
word for rationalization (taʿqīl, ʿaqlana; RH, 26), and this rationalization, to
meet the standards of Islamic modernity, must be lodged in what he calls
enhanced reason (ʿaql mu’ayyad), wholly defined by the ethical dimension.
And if this is the case, then critique is the most likely candidate for bearing
this ethical charge, for it is the epistemological source of the other two prin-
ciples (which, in any case, seem to lack both ethical structure and ethical
substance).
Now, if the spirit, including necessarily its component of critique, is the
property of humanity at large, then we might ask how this critique mani-
fested itself among the builders of Western modernity. Insofar as I can tell,
there is nothing that could give manifestation to the critique other than the
set of ideas that dominated what we know by the name of Enlightenment,
ideas that I have elsewhere identified as the central domains of this intel-
lectual movement.53 And integral to these ideas, which gave articulation
to Enlightenment reason, is the paramount and commanding distinction
between Is and Ought, a distinction that defined modernity in both “spirit”
and application.54 No one can argue that there existed in Europe’s Enlight-
enment another paradigmatic discourse upholding a different, much less
antithetical conception, one that would refuse the distinction and still estab-
lish itself as the prevalent discourse. It is then safe to say that the spirit of
-1— Europe’s modernity paradigmatically embraced a concept of critique that
0— insisted on the separation of Is and Ought, a separation that Taha rejects
+1—
[ 94 ]
categorically. By his own account, this separation stands along other “uneth-
ical” separations, including the one between “state and religion,” “religion
and ethics,” and “ethics and politics” (RH, 28). Unlike other, more abstract
concepts whose relationship to reality (= application) is often difficult to dis-
cern and dissect, the idea of the separation between Is and Ought was inte-
gral to the discourse that gave manifestation to the spirit and its critique as
well as to the application of it throughout the modern project. My argument
is this: there is no way of telling what the spirit of modernity looks like outside
of discourse, and it is quite plain, I think, that there is an undeniable causal
relationship between this hegemonic and paradigmatic discursive separa-
tion (spirit) and the havoc that modernity wrought on its human popula-
tion and natural environment (application). Taha, I think, agrees that this
causal link is valid, both logically (spirit) and ontologically (application).
Taha wastes no time in asserting that the first and foremost concern for Mus-
lims is to avoid the pitfalls of the West in the way the “application” of these
principles has been performed. The faults of this application are so many
that it would seem, he says, that the modern West has been governed by a
universal law that may be called “the Law of Converting Aims to their Oppo-
sites” (RH, 32). Here he lists a series of statements by French writers highly
critical of the modern project, all to the effect that modernity is a project
that does not know how to control itself and that it leads to regression and
backwardness (if not to “barbarity,” as argued by René Guénon)55 as much
as it leads to progress.56 He cites multiple examples as evidence, chief among
them that the modern human aimed to dominate nature but nature created
effects he did not desire, such as modern diseases. There is also the threat
of nuclear destruction, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, explo-
sive population growth, environmental pollution, the Ozone hole, and much
else that is equally devastating. And whenever any of these sectors is
reformed, the consequences of the reformed field not only continue to pro-
duce negative effects; the reformers are increasingly unable to predict and
control the effects of their own work.
Likewise, Western modernity has erected a transnational capitalist sys- —-1
tem that it now cannot control, and whose fate and consequences it cannot —0
—+1
[ 95 ]
predict. It has also tried to irrevocably sever all its connections with tradi-
tional sources of authority, only to discover that these have returned in dif-
ferent forms that are more complex and convoluted than their precursors.57
What was originally intended to lead to domination over things in the world
has turned into its opposite: subordination and servitude. And what was
originally meant to lead to freedom and autonomy has instead led to depen-
dency and subjection (RH, 33).
This reversal in the Western application is one that involves a myopic
vision of what makes for a means and what constitutes an end. It is charac-
teristic of this application that in its first phases the end in the original con-
ception would be achieved by particular means. But as time passes, the
means become an end in and of themselves. The concept of change is a prime
example: change was required to accomplish certain ends, but what trans-
pired thereafter is that the means itself became an end, with the result that
change is now sought after for its own sake. The same can be said of prog-
ress, that is, progress now exists for the sake of progress, just as we are taught
to believe in “development for the sake of development.” Innovation, art, cri-
tique, capitalist accumulation of wealth, and much else have fallen into the
same pattern (RH, 33).
Given the countless ways of realizing the spirit of modernity, and given
the vulnerability of these ways to error and loss of self-control, it is abun-
dantly clear that a culture or even subculture should not copy the applica-
tion of others but should instead exert its utmost effort to find its own way
of materializing that spirit. The task is to replicate the ideals—namely, the
principles of the spirit—not to reproduce the applications of others. This also
strongly implies that the application or substantiation of the principles must
be genuine and internal ( juwwānī) to a given culture, since this engagement
constitutes its own effort to create a particular and unique form of moder-
nity for itself. Which is to say, furthermore, that the project of application
must be creative and inventive in every possible way, and must in no shape
or form involve imitating others (ittibāʿ).
The current Islamic reality, Taha avers, is nowhere close to this ideal. It
fulfills neither the condition of genuine and original (dākhilī, lit. internal)
production nor the indispensible requirements of inventiveness and cre-
ativeness. It simply imitates the Western application of the spirit’s prin-
-1— ciples, and so it is a second-rate application. This imitation does not
0— acknowledge Islam’s cultural specificity, because, in its quest to place Islam
+1—
[ 96 ]
We recall that this principle consists of two components, autonomy and cre-
ativity. The challenge here is to identify the modalities that allow a trans-
formation from imitation to creative autonomy. For it is futile to deny that
Muslims, long dazzled and seduced by the West, have delegated to this
seducer the task of thinking on their behalf, resigning their rights to this
activity in the process. This resignation, Taha argues, is accompanied by the
faulty assumption that the West can think of what is good for Muslims better
than they can. It can advance ideas that they can never form on their own.
“But this is certainly the worst kind of guardianship” (RH, 36).
This “imitating autonomy,” an oxymoron, must be ejected from the proj- —-1
ect of Muslim application, and the way to accomplish this feat is to refute —0
—+1
[ 97 ]
colonizer who decided for Muslims what they should rid themselves of and
what they should not.
In light of these three false presuppositions pertaining to questions of
guardianship, an important task is for Muslims to realize their autonomy
and explore the many creative ways it can be attained. They must find their
path to correct what the colonizer has inverted, and in the process, they
must come to understand that this colonizer is, in fact, the domineering
guardian “barring all people from exercising their right to autonomous
thinking” (RH, 37). Included among the dominated, the jurists and the
learned60 are likewise under an obligation to free themselves of this effec-
tive and coercive guardianship. Thus, it is not the jurists’ guardianship that
must be done away with, but rather the guardianship of colonial powers and
foreign hegemony. This is not easy to do, since these hegemonic powers have
implanted themselves within the very bodies of the colonized, and are able
to speak this hegemony of theirs “through our own tongue[s].” The insidi-
ousness of hegemony, Taha seems to say, goes beyond easy categorization of
where the colonizer and colonized locate themselves (RH, 37–38).
The second challenge involved in the principle of majority is to identify
the modalities that allow a transformation from an imitative to an “inno-
vative creativity.” 61 True creativity innovates even where a prior innovation
has already been achieved; it re-creates an earlier creative act, and goes
beyond the imaginative boundaries of the original. Alas, Taha laments, Mus-
lims are a far cry from creativity. When they encounter a Western product,
they can see nothing else, much less any possibility of re-creating and rein-
venting that product to suit their own needs and circumstances. They even
go further in their zeal of adoption, often investing such products with
sacred status, as if they were objects of worship (RH, 39).
To remedy this situation, Taha continues, various methods can be sug-
gested. Yet, certain presuppositions that underlie these methods must be
subjected to scrutiny. The first is that “the best form of creativity is one that
represents a complete rupture with everything.” This presupposition is
invalid because human beings cannot dissociate themselves from their own
circumstances and environment: no life is on a blank slate. Anyone who
thinks or claims they can is merely living an illusion, since it is inevitable
that they will, consciously or unconsciously, invoke elements from the recent
or distant past. Modernity, after all, is not about rupture and dissociation —-1
for their own sake, but rather about creating better human beings. On their —0
—+1
[ 99 ]
own, ruptures can never guarantee the attainment of a better human con-
dition, much less the realization of an ethically formed human. The mea-
sure of modernity is “rais[ing] humanity” to a higher ethical state, not flex-
ing those muscles that can effect severance and dissociation. Rupture
may be present without ethical improvement and ethical improvement
may obtain without rupture, which is to say that no law of concurrence can
govern the relationship between the two. “The Islamic way into modernity
may therefore resort to rupture when necessary and to continuity when
necessary, for it is a modernity of value not a modernity of time.” 62
The second presupposition is that “creativity invents need and fulfills it
as well,” a presupposition that is certainly invalid in its absolute form (RH,
40). Creativity is desirable and good if it invents spiritual and ethical needs,
for these inevitably enrich subjectivities and endow them with refined eth-
ical and artistic predispositions. However, the invention of need is far more
likely to occur in the context of life’s material aspects than in spirituality,
ethics, or art. The creative invention of need has unfortunately been mostly
the work of capitalist ventures and corporations who produce an endless
array of products that are themselves designed to increase consumption.
Since the ultimate purpose of such “creative” ventures is the garnering of
endless profit, this “creativity” should be shunned, and the second presup-
position modified accordingly (RH, 40).
The Islamic method in this sphere is to restrict these materialistic
excesses, and offset any insurmountable materialistic increase by generat-
ing an increase in spiritual and ethical needs. This is where Muslims can
show “brilliant inventiveness” and creativity (ʿabqariyya ibdāʿiyya), thereby
contributing to the construction of global modernity (fī binā’i ḥadātha
ʿālamiyya). As it stands, modernity is in dire need of filling its moral and spir-
itual gap, a gap now variably described in terms of a loss of meaning, loss of
authority, absence of purpose, lack of direction, and so on.
Finally, in the third presupposition it is held that the most genuine form
of creativity is the one through which the self flourishes most. Without
imposing on it proper restrictions, this presupposition cannot be admissi-
ble. The restrictions required here amount to the rejection of flourishing if
it means the constant and endless quest for satisfying personal desires,
without care for the interests and needs of others. Such hedonistic practices
-1— are reprehensible and inevitably detrimental to the humanity of the indi-
0— vidual as well as to social ties and society at large.
+1—
[ 100 ]
work that was imagined as capable of ending the state of war among Euro-
peans (RH, 44).65
The Islamic way to modern rationalization neither confronts nature nor
dominates it; instead, it converses with it, befriends it, and deals with it com-
passionately (yurāḥimuhā). The more its secrets are discovered, the more
there is compassion. It is not to be regarded as a sacred realm, although its
creator is to be deemed so. Though it is not sacred, nature remains the
“Mother of human kind, not its mistress” (RH, 45). “Humans came out of its
womb just as much as they came out from the womb of their own mothers;
and mothers can never be mistresses.” This notion of nature transcends the
materialist Western notion and outright refuses its trenchant instrumen-
talism. If nature is nothing like a mistress, then it cannot be used, abused,
or discarded. The Tahan conception of nature therefore goes beyond the cold
calculations of science and legal contracts. It is an ethical-spiritual concep-
tion, concomitant with the understanding that any “contract” or relation-
ship with nature must be one that transcends phenomenological reality
and one that takes account of the seen and unseen aspects of the world.66
“Islamic rationalization thus undertakes to enter an all-encompassing cosmic
covenant” (RH, 45).
The third presupposition, that “everything is amenable to critique,” is
also false because it is founded on two invalid assumptions. First, that cri-
tique is the exclusive venue through which the truth about all things in the
world is attained, when in fact the paths of knowledge cannot be so con-
strained. Another, in fact oppositional venue of knowledge is the report
(khabar),67 which in some cases can yield a degree of knowledge superior to
that generated by critique. The latter is always subject to review and reeval-
uation, and thus open to skepticism and permutation, while the former
may contain a truth beyond critique and questioning. From a secular per-
spective, Taha’s epistemic ranking of the khabar above knowledge gener-
ated by critique may appear jarring. Yet, if the khabar is taken to embody or
represent, in part or in whole, higher principles that ethical rationality deems
binding, then the secularist might find this long-standing Islamic per-
spective not only plausible, she may also have to interrogate the modernist,
especially liberal, position that advocates a mutative morality, or, as René
Guénon called it, “moralism,” 68 which bestows an ethical veneer on an
ever-changing justificatory ideology of materialist and technological —-1
“development.” 69 —0
—+1
[ 103 ]
The second presupposition is that all things in the world are phenomena,
and thus subject to critique. This, however, is a false way of seeing things,
since some parts of reality are not phenomena, such as spiritual values and
high ideals. To cast doubt on these values and principles would be counter-
productive, and so they must be trusted and laid as foundations for action.
(This claim, it must be said, should be understood in light of Taha’s insistence
that all cultures and epistemologies, including the modern Western ones,
rely on one form of transcendentalism or another.)70 The point here is that
the Islamic conception cannot limit itself to critique as the sole means for
understanding and knowledge. Inasmuch as Habermas’s theory calls for
communicative action between and among social groups, the Islamic con-
ception calls for a communicative theory between and among the various
forms of critique that differ in their nature and in accordance with the fields
in which they operate. What is deemed strong evidence or proof in one field
may be regarded as weak evidence in another, or not evidence at all in yet
another domain of inquiry. The Islamic practice of rationalization therefore
must engage a creatively internal modernity (ḥadātha dākhiliyya mubdiʿa), that
is, a culture-specific mode of reason that, in the Islamic case, qualifies instru-
mental reason and subordinates it to an expansive conception that envel-
ops it, binds it, and bestows on it added layers of spiritual and ethical values.
As we have seen, the second component of the principle of critique is dif-
ferentiation, and so the question here is, again, the manner in which imita-
tive differentiation is transformed into creative differentiation (RH, 47). Taha
begins his remarks with a critique of the Muslim “modernists” who have
overzealously imitated Western modernity in subjecting things to endless,
often unwarranted and excessive projects of differentiation. Their favorite
arenas have been the separation of modernity from tradition as well as the
separation of politics from religion.
An important aspect of the alleged segregation of modernity from tradi-
tion is that which involves the Islamic tradition and its relationship with the
spirit of modernity, as constituted by the full range of its principles. This
claim of separation between these two is false because, first, the aforemen-
tioned principles are shared, to one extent or another, by many cultures and
traditions, including the Islamic (RH, 47).71 If there are differences in the
extent to which these principles penetrated the various cultures and civi-
-1— lizations, the core of these principles and agreement on them are found
0— everywhere. It is false, second, because the Islamic achievements in science
+1—
[ 104 ]
and thought, and Europe’s debt to these achievements, make for a strong
connection between the principles of modernity’s spirit and the Islamic tra-
dition.72 And it is false, third, because even if we assume that the principles
are not found in the Islamic tradition in reality, this assumption does not
invalidate the proposition that these principles may conceivably be present
as a matter of potentiality (RH, 48).
It is, again, clear that the unnecessary adherence to what is in effect a
Kantian notion of critique has led, as the last paragraph amply demonstrates,
to profound tensions in Taha’s thesis of the spirit’s principles. The qualifica-
tions he has just introduced to describe the nature of the presence of these
principles in Islam amount to lending credence to the proposition that these
principles are an organic product of the European experience, not of the
Islamic or any other. As in the case of colonialism—apparently relevant to
Taha only insofar as it engendered an Islamic form of intellectual slavery,
and not as formative of modernity writ large—the spirit and its principles
are not critically appraised as being also formative of the application of moder-
nity and its deep structures.73
It remains clear nonetheless that the Western application and practice of
the principle of differentiation is highly problematic, and its ill effects have
been multiplied by the unreflective Islamic imitation of it—all the more rea-
son why the presuppositions underlying this principle must be subjected to
scrutiny.
The first of these presuppositions is that the separation between the insti-
tutions of modernity and religion is an absolute one. Taha here is refer-
ring to the paradigmatic secular structure of modernity that relegates reli-
gion to the private domain, to be governed and ruled over by the state and
its organs. To begin with, there is a confusion here, he says, between church
and religion, since the rupture that occurred was not with religion as such
but with the church as a political power. The church is no more the sum total
of religion than religion is the sum total of the church. This divorce from
the church does not amount to the rejection of the Christian faith, because
the clerical class that was decimated by European modernity neither
amounts to nor represents the faith itself, as evidenced in the pervasiveness
of Christianity outside Europe (RH, 48–49).
Second, it is incorrect to assume that modernity sprung up suddenly,
because it evolved through a long historical processes and was, further- —-1
more, derived from various cultural sources, ranging from the Greek to the —0
—+1
[ 105 ]
Jewish and Islamic. All these cultures were saturated with a religious
spirit, which is to say that this spirit has also infiltrated modernity, shap-
ing certain of its elements and in part defining its direction.74 Third, moder-
nity has no doubt found it necessary to draw explicitly upon religious con-
cepts, or concepts that originate within the religious realm. This borrowing
was conscious at times, but unconscious at others. Suffice it to mention as
examples the concepts of life in its positive connotation, perfection as inte-
gral to progress, brotherhood as associated with fraternity (Fr. fraternité)
and solidarity, and time as indicative of—if not governed by a conception
of—linear history.75 Fourth is the fact that among the founders of moder-
nity there obviously were men of religion, including certain leaders of the
Italian Renaissance, the Protestants who initiated the Reformation and
who are at times associated with the rise of modern capitalism, and famous
others, such as Descartes, Newton, Kant, and Hegel, whose ideas were not
devoid of “traces” of religious conceptions.76
The Islamic method of modern differentiation treats separations as pos-
sessing two attributes, the first of which is functionality (waẓīfiyya) because
these separations are not so much structural or essential (māhawiyya) as they
are useful for “playing a role” in a particular context. It is well known that
roles change with the change of structures and essences, just as they change
within the same structure or context. In other words, the “Islamic differen-
tiation” is neither systematic nor systemic, but one that may be occasioned
by particular exigencies or specific circumstances. The second attribute that
the Islamic practice of differentiation admits is reassembling ( jamʿiyya),
which is to say that distinctions and functional separations between certain
elements are not permanent and that the very elements separated in one
context may be reunited in another. The contingency of separation has been
proven even in Western modernity, where the separation, for instance,
“between the political and the economic”77 has long been abandoned, after
being subjected to much criticism (RH, 50).
The separation between the political and the religious that Taha heavily
criticizes takes the following forms within the Islamic conception and prac-
tice: First, the separation is merely one of the many separations to which
the “latest developments” in societal institutions—presumably in the
application of Western modernity—have led, and so it is not really more
-1— deserving of focus and attention than any other separation. Second, the sep-
0— aration, as already stated, is merely functional and is neither essential nor
+1—
[ 106 ]
scientific discoveries, for while these discoveries no doubt obviate the mag-
ical and the superstitious, they neither reduce nor eliminate the mysteries
of the world. If anything, Taha argues, the more developed these sciences
are, the more wondrous the secrets of the world appear and the closer the
connection one feels with one’s own humanity. It is no wonder then that the
disconnected man (al-insān al-munfaṣil) of Western modernity finds the world
to have lost all meaning, precisely because he has been disconnected from
the world’s secrets and wondrous workings (RH, 53). The consequences of
man losing confidence in the world have been immensely destructive.
Abused nature has retorted with a wave of punishments for the misdeeds
he has committed against it. This disconnection has, in addition, led to the
emergence of the phenomenon of extreme fear of death, because for this
man there is nothing that lies beyond this world and its time. The conse-
quences of this fear have had incalculable effects.
complicates and intensifies, rather than resolves, the tensions in his work.
If modernity is contingent and clearly the product of Euro-America, and if
it will pass away just as it came about, then why should Muslims bother
reforming it? This question gains added force if we take into account the
multiple problems Taha himself encounters in his adoption of modernity’s
principles. If critique, as we will see later, must rest on a form of reason
that shuns Enlightenment’s reason, and indeed considers it a stunted ver-
sion of what he proposes, then one might say that the entire archeology
and structure of modernity’s principles will necessarily fall apart in the
face of such critique. For Enlightenment reason, as paradigmatically sche-
matized in Kant’s philosophy, can in no way be isolated from the governing
Kantian principle of Mündigkeit or the (non-Kantian yet paradigmatic) con-
ception of universality.85 That Taha continues to assume modernity while
militating against it in the most profound and fundamental ways is per-
haps the greatest aporia in his work.
The second presupposition regarding extensibility—namely, that moder-
nity engenders “totalizing power” (quwwa shāmila)—is entirely false, because
the Western (practice of) modernity, being scientifically and technically
quite advanced, has garnered pervasive power for its subjects in the mate-
rialistic realm alone. This has engendered another feature, namely, the sub-
jects’ quest for more learning and knowledge is inextricably a quest for
materialistic control, with the result that they oppressed other societies and
denied them the right to move into modernity. All value has become mea-
sured by wealth and materiality, morality and ethics having been reduced
to self-interest. Self-interest has become blinding, to such an extent that the
worldview has revolved around pernicious forms of selfishness. Materialism
fares no better, having such dominance over all aspects of life that it has dis-
torted and skewed the application of modernity’s spirit. Violence has been
substituted for reason, tyranny for democracy, and legitimation of war for
the language of dialogue and communication (RH, 57n37). The deficit of this
crushing materialism is commensurate with excessive spiritual poverty,
which has led to various crises exemplified by “the return of the religious,”
“the return of the irrational,” and the like, all of which express a deep desire
for the spiritual, a desire that the Western application of modernity could
not and cannot fulfill. In Taha’s estimation, the situation in the West has
become so desperate that Westerners have resorted to the adoption of other —-1
—0
—+1
[ 111 ]
VI
It follows from this that another Islamic concept within the purview of
extensibility is called for, namely, “human corporeality follows human spir-
ituality” (RH, 58). A principle of modernity’s spirit, extensibility means that
every act or every sphere of activity in modernity must pervade other
spheres of human life, which is to say that every human activity must
pervade the spirit and soul as much as it pervades body and matter. This
inclusion becomes all the more necessary because it is often the case that
fulfilling corporeal or material needs hinges on the fulfillment of spiritual
needs, since without the soul (rūḥ) being cultivated and trained to deal
with the material and corporeal aspects of life, there is no guarantee what-
ever that the individual’s behavior will not go awry; and such widespread
disorders naturally entail wider disorders in the structure of social and
societal relations.
In Taha’s vision, then, materialistic modernity must thus be necessarily
accompanied by spiritual modernity (ḥadātha rūḥiyya), materiality and spir-
ituality being the two pillars on which the entire project rests. Noble values
such as dignity, justice, equality, freedom, tolerance, and brotherhood (or
fraternité) will surely suffer diminution and damage once they are confined
to fulfilling material interests alone. Freedom, for instance, cannot be
attained only by ridding oneself of external constraints; it is also necessary
that internal desires be made to vanish.86 Likewise, just as justice is put to
effect through an external redistribution of wealth, it must also be realized
in the distribution and redistribution of internal comprehension (madārik
dākhiliyya), which is to say that the material redistribution of wealth must
rest upon an internal, deeply psychological conviction—pervasive in both
the political and the social orders—of the spiritual soundness and necessity
of this redistribution (RH, 58).87
In this spiritualized modernity, the values of the spiritual sphere must
-1— be subjected to a “vertical” construction, with their roots planted deep into
0— the psychosocial-cum-psychoepistemic being. In this configuration, these
+1—
[ 112 ]
values are lifted up as paramount pillars, so that they are not blighted as
easily as the “horizontal” values have been. To be brought into existence,
“vertical values” (qiyam ʿamūdiyya) thus require profound reform that is
deeply rooted in the sphere of belief (īmān), the province of the spiritual (rūḥī,
rūḥānī). Verticality thus constitutes not only a corrective to the horizontal-
ity of the modern subject; it stands as the only alternative to its full and cor-
rect realization (RH, 15). Here, it is clear, I think, that Taha is arguing that
the spiritual and moral should be raised to the rank of what I have elsewhere
called a central domain, where a sphere, a system, or a value is, by rational
choice, enshrined as a paradigmatic field, to which all peripheral domains
become or are made to be subordinate.88 The central domain thus commands
the loyalty and productions of the peripheral domains. Qiyam ʿamūdiyya,
then, stand as paradigmatic and permanent values within a system that
determines and subordinates the qiyam ufuqiyya, the vertical values that are
by nature ephemeral. Once these paradigmatic values are weakened or
destroyed, the system itself will eventually cease to exist.
The third presupposition, namely, that “the essence of modernity is an
economic one,” in effect means that economics subordinate social relations
as well as all other spheres, which, in the language of paradigms, means that
economics in Western modernity is paradigmatic, commanding the central
domain, whereas other spheres, including the social and the spiritual, are
relegated to the peripheral domains. The “hegemonic control” of econom-
ics “tightly dominates the entire range of social organization, which has no
other concern but economic expansion and unlimited growth in both pro-
duction and consumption, to such an extent that no power can surpass the
power of the market and goods” (RH, 59).
The economism89 of the West has departed from the original spirit of
modernity, which takes human dignity to be most central. This sort of eco-
nomic growth becomes the ultimate end of ends, subordinating human
rights—f rom education and democracy to environment—as mere means to
that end. This economism also engenders intense forms of consumerism in
the individual and in turn fashions the hedonistic subject. Accordingly, plea-
sure becomes the measure of all things and acts in the world, leading to
well-k nown adverse behavioral effects. When pleasure becomes the gold
standard, all moral restraints lose their anchors.
From all this, the third element of extensibility ensues: “the quiddity of —-1
humanity is a moral one.”90 According to this principle, any economic act is —0
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[ 113 ]
a moral act that elevates the human stature of the actor when properly com-
missioned, and demotes his stature when omitted. But the economic act
must always be situated within a “connected” context, whereby the improve-
ment (or progress) that the subject rightly seeks in human life is limited
not to material welfare or mere accumulation of wealth but to all aspects of
life, ethical formation being the primary consideration. Moreover, related
to this progress are attention to the future and its centrality to the behav-
ior of the individual in the present. Economic progress does not hold the key
to progress, because true progress is neither shortsighted nor concerned
with immediate gratification. Rather, it lies in the future and the long term,
unhandicapped by a myopic vision that constrains vision to the present and
the past. The opening of the future as a third major sphere is the work of
religion, the fundamental source for integrating the past into present human
action, and this, in turn, into the future. Needless to say, Taha’s concept of
the future as ethical time appears to actively refute the fundamentals of the
modern theology of progress.91
In sum, the Islamic application of the principle of extensibility is of a
moral and therefore profoundly internal character, one meant to ennoble
the humanity of human kind.92 It is not a principle limited to material exten-
sibility, which, if so limited, “would bring the humans down to the level of
brutes, a demotion that characterizes the Western application of this prin-
ciple” (RH, 61).
The final consideration is the transformation from an imitative to a cre-
ative concept of generalizability, the second aspect of universality. In the
sense of “including all human beings,” Taha observes, this concept is famil-
iar to Muslims, since Islam, like all religions, calls for its own mission
throughout the world, without distinction between peoples or persons, with-
out even knowing who they are. It is to be noted that Taha does not include
universalist modern ideologies such as liberalism and Marxism among “reli-
gions,” perhaps because he does not formally regard them as real religions,
despite the fact that he often argues that we should view much of moder-
nity as a secular recasting of old religious concepts.
Be that as it may, Muslims in the age of modernity have misused the notion
of generalizability, “because they tied its fate with the issue of defending
Islam” (RH, 61). Modernity, Taha argues, was erected on the ruins of the
-1— Church in Europe, a process associated with a universalizing rejection of
0— all “traditional” religions. Defending Islam in this context meant defending
+1—
[ 114 ]
-1—
0—
+1—
[ 118 ]
There are, our writer remarks, various interpretations (qirā’āt, lit. “readings”)
of the Qur’ān that are claimed by their authors to be modern. None, how-
ever, can be truly described as modern because they are not representations
of the spirit of modernity but rather an “imitation” (taqlīd) of the Western
application of this spirit. The Western application is, as we by now know, pre-
mised upon a severance of all relationships with the past due to the deca-
dence and abuse associated with it in Europe. Europeans have developed this
into a phobia so acute that “they run away from any past, even their own
recent past, as if they are running from death” (RH, 175).1 Muslim scholars2
insist on imitating the West in its negative relationship with the past, despite
the fact that the Islamic past was quite different from its European counter-
part. The result has been a rupture, whereby current Qur’ānic commentar-
ies, in their attempts to innovate, have lost their ties to earlier ones, by which
Taha means the classical tafsīr genre and associated others.3 This severance
of ties makes their innovativeness less genuine, since, as he had argued, real
forms of creativity must ensue from, and presuppose, connectivity. In the
final analysis, severance is a matter of unreflecting imitation of Western
ways, not one of “independent ijtihād,” 4 leading to illegitimate novelties (bidaʿ)
that “erase the special characteristics of the Qur’ānic text” (RH, 176).
In their purported critical approach to the Qur’ānic verses,5 the “modern-
ists” 6 (who, henceforth, are referred to unflatteringly as “imitative interpret-
ers”) have adopted different strategies, all of which, nonetheless, are reducible
to three main elements. The first of these is critique qua critique, namely,
critique for its own sake; the second is the procedure or “coordinating mech-
anism” (al-āliyya al-tansīqiyya) through which the desideratum of critique qua
critique can be attained; and the third is the methodological operations that
need to be coordinated to achieve that same end, i.e., critique.
-1— Since modernist humanism7 is associated with secularism, Taha argues, its
0— ultimate aim is to remove the sacred (qudsiyya) from human life, at least in
+1—
[ 120 ]
the public sphere. Having been considered “sacred speech” for centuries, the
Qur’ān has become the target of such a critique, which is to say that the ulti-
mate goal has been to transpose the Qur’ānic text from the domain of the
divine—even the “mythological”8—to that of the human, this being accom-
plished through modern critique. The result, scarcely needing emphasis, has
been the opening of the text to a system of inquiry that does not recognize
the sacred (RH, 178–79).
The transformation of the text from the sacred and transcendental to the
anthropocentric was performed through various methods, some symbolic,
others substantive. At the formal and symbolic level, the conventional exal-
tations used by the pious (e.g., “the glorious Qur’ān,” or “God the exalted
said . . .”) are dropped in favor of a more secular language. Furthermore,
descriptive language has come to replace religious expressions: for exam-
ple, “Prophetic speech” is used instead of “divine speech,” and “the Qur’ānic
phenomenon (al-ẓāhira al-Qur’āniyya)” in place of “the Qur’ānic revelation.”
In the same vein, and clearly reflecting anthropocentric changes, not to say
bias, the Qur’ānic authority itself has come to be equated with human
authority. Accordingly, attestations by Muslim scholars and non-Muslims are
posited as equally credible in the critique and analysis of Qur’ānic content.
On the whole, the entire language in which these modernist readings are
cast signals the transference of the text from a unique and divinely author-
itative text into a text “like any other human text” (RH, 180).9
The effects of this humanistic approach are many, and include the dis-
sociation of the Qur’ānic text from its divine source. It is, we might say on
behalf of Taha, an act of stripping the enchanted and rendering it, in proper
Weberian terms, a disenchanted part of an equally disenchanted whole. In
this transformative and transforming process, the Qur’ān becomes entirely
dependent on the “human reader,” who is the sole source of meaning, which
is to say that the Qur’ānic meaning, like the meaning of any other text, is
made by the anthropologically constituted reading community. The only
meaning that can be extracted from the text is then what the reader iso-
lates through substantive reference to her specific educational, epistemic,
social, and political background, thus limiting the output (ḥaṣīla) of inter-
pretation to the immediate, if not exclusively materialistic, human experi-
ence and concern, as narrowly defined. This theme of “constraining” and
“narrowing down” of psychoepistemic horizons (taḍyīq) will gain, as we will —-1
see, increasing theoretical importance in Taha’s work.10 Furthermore, and —0
—+1
[ 121 ]
The ultimate purpose of this strategy is to dissipate the legal effects of the
Qur’ānic verses and to show that the text did not introduce or mean them
as fixed and immutable rules. The path generally followed to accomplish this
task is to demonstrate the intimate connection between these verses and
their own, immediate circumstances. The task is facilitated by the existence
of such Islamic fields of inquiry as Asbāb al-Nuzūl (occasions of revelation),
Naskh (abrogation), the muḥkam and mutashābah (equivocal and the univo-
cal), the Meccan and the Medinan categorization, and so forth. The mod-
ernists have exploited these discursive fields to the limit, rendering them
effective historical tools enlisted in the hermeneutical campaign to locate
the Qur’ānic legality within what they see as a foregone and archaic reality.
What was relevant at one point of historical time is no longer apposite, an
argument that removes any absolutist claim to a modern reading of the text.
This historicist location engenders relativist connections between legal
norm and historical site, allowing the modernists to engage in the produc-
tion of ambiguity as to the force and bindingness of legal norms, thereby
-1— casting doubt on them as legitimate sources of law (RH, 186). This approach is
0— also extended to the so-called rituals (ʿibādāt), claimed to have been essential
+1—
[ 124 ]
for minds less rational or critical than those of people today, which is to say
that like Qur’ānic ḥudūd (fixed penalties for adultery, intoxication, ban-
ditry, and the like) and those legal fields pertaining to contractual trans-
actions (muʿāmalāt), the “rituals” may now be regarded as both dated and
legendary (usṭūriyya).19
Having adopted a European conceptual framework, the modernist Mus-
lim exegetes (qurrā’) have endeavored to reduce the legal contents of the
Qur’ān into some eighty verses (RH, 185–86). Taha does not say more about
the roots of this phenomenon, although it makes for a fertile discussion to
explore the differences between the European and Islamic conceptions of
law, differences that provide tools with which to critique the Islamic mod-
ernists’ venture.20 Be that as it may, the modernists’ critique is generally
intended to accomplish the following: (1) to reduce the overall size of legal
content in the Qur’ān, and to subject what may be deemed “legal” to the
charges of ambiguity and imprecision that would render much of that con-
tent contingent, if not lacking binding effect; nor, on this view, can the
Qur’ānic revelation be considered integral or complete, because, had it been
so, the traditional jurists would not have complemented it with their own
rulings; (2) to relegate Qur’ānic legal injunctions to the status of recommen-
dations and spiritual guidance by depriving them of their binding legal
effects as well as of effective regulation of social life and organization; (3)
ensuing from the previous consideration, to reduce the Qur’ān to the realm
of private conscience, or to “works of the heart” but not actual, legal action;
and (4) to relegate the text and the believer’s relationship to it to the con-
fines of the private sphere, effectively the ultimate goal of such interpreta-
tion (RH, 187–88). There is nothing here that stands outside the secular.
hermeneutical task that demands a departure from within the context of their
own history and its conditions; instead, they have “reproduced the modern act as
it had occurred in another’s [i.e., European] history.”21 As their strategies reveal,
they have imitated the West down to the smallest detail, for the strategies
are entirely the product of, if not a reaction to, a particular and local his-
torical experience, one that is European to the core, and bereft of genuine
notions of universalism, to boot. The strategies are originally derivative
of the struggle the men of the Enlightenment engaged in against the men of
the Church, a struggle that intellectually led to the rise of three principles
that underlie the “European reality” (= application) of modernity, namely,
(1) human endeavor must focus on the human being himself, not on gods
and deities, a principle that permitted a winning contest against the spiri-
tual authority of the Church, (2) reason, not revelation, is the means of
action, a principle that allowed an assault against the Church’s control over
education, and (3) attachment to the world, or worldliness, was to replace
preoccupation with the eschatological, a principle that undergirded the suc-
cessful confrontation with the political authority of the Church.22
The Islamic modernists’ approach to the Qur’ān thus lacks both critical
edge and credibility: the methods are deficient as a matter of criticism, and
the conclusions are unreliable as a matter of substance. There are at least
six methodological deficiencies involved here: First, the inability to engage
with critique. The application of a particular method to a particular subject
requires justification (lit. legitimation, mashrūʿiyya), which itself entirely
depends on the test of relevance (munāsaba) between the method and the
subject or subject matter. Relevance obtains when the method maintains its
proper applicability after having been transposed into another context of
analysis, whereas the subject preserves its particularity and character
after that method has been applied to it. Since the Muslim modernists,
insofar as the test of relevance is concerned, have proven themselves unable
to critique the methods that they have imported (this critique being a pre-
requisite for their engagement and participation in modernity), they should
not have engaged in this exercise in the first place, before they have suc-
cessfully cultivated that skill of critique (RH, 190).
Second, the modernists clearly lack command over the theories and crit-
ical methods they have imported, and have only a shaky understanding of
-1— the foundations and methodological-theoretical layers upon which these
0— theories and methods rest, hence the frequent confusions in their writings
+1—
[ 126 ]
with regard to certain concepts and issues. The modernist Muslim interpret-
ers have not been careful enough even in the range of their borrowings,
having indiscriminately latched on to half-baked theories and ideas, many
of them dated. These ideas and theories are not deemed complete or ade-
quate even in their own original European contexts, and remain, as they are,
under continuous scrutiny and driven by the precariousness of trial and
error. In other words, the modernists have often adopted shoddy and flimsy
sets of ideas instead of “solid scientific23 accomplishments.”
Third, thinking that the theories and forms of analysis they have imported
from the West are invincible and superior, they condemned many of their
fellow Muslims as “backward,” “traditional,” “conventional,” and “rigid.”
When they have discovered that these theories and modes of analyses
have lost currency and have become nearly discredited, they have failed to
reconsider their own ways of thinking, and have continued with their con-
demnation of, and supremacist attitudes to, the tradition. They certainly
cannot be accused of entertaining self-doubt, which is why they would ride
the next wagon of theories and continue to level the same critical charges
without examining the inner structures of these theories and the indige-
nous historical contexts in which they were constructed. Upon scrutiny,
their arguments are easily shown to be an uncreative reiteration of the
findings of either Western scholars or classical Muslim thinkers; and when
this is not the case, theirs is a product inferior to both (RH, 191).
Fourth, in their critique of the Qur’ān, they have rather arbitrarily deter-
mined the weight to be allocated to the various voices of authority within
the classical tradition of Qur’ānic studies, elevating certain authorities and
demoting others at will. Doctrines and ideas that were deemed mainstream
and authoritative are now set aside, mostly without supporting arguments,
while those that represented minority or weak views are now elevated to
supreme positions (RH, 191).24
Fifth, they have let loose their critical method of doubt, not only subject-
ing the text to unrelenting analysis, but also casting, in the process, much
doubt on the overall utility of the Qur’ān itself, not to speak of its sacred and
integral character. A serious examination of their generalized methods of
doubt inevitably leads to the conclusion that their so-called discoveries are
related to the world of phenomena (ẓawāhir), not to that of values (qiyam).
But to attain a knowledge of reality—here erroneously equated with values— —-1
doubt and skepticism would be useless. To the contrary, faith and certainty —0
—+1
[ 127 ]
lead to true knowledge of value, and the more certain the believer is, the
more intense the value appears to her, and vice versa. Taha here appears to
be drawing on Kant’s categories of phenomena and noumena, assigning to the
latter the Arabic term qiyam (lit. values).25
All this shows, Taha argues, that the Muslim “modernists” who took up
the study of the Qur’ān belong not to modernity but rather to premodernity,
because in their very imitation of the modern they have assigned themselves
the status of wards (taḥta al-wiṣāya)—a state of utter dependence on the will
of another, which is another way of saying that this state is the opposite of
the core principle of majority, the Kantian propeller to modernity’s
Enlightenment.26
If it is granted that no modernity can be attained without majority and
creativity, then the crucial question, according to Taha, becomes “How do
we attain a creative interpretation of the Qur’ān?”
Taha insists that it is necessary to discuss two historical facts before pro-
ceeding. First, it must be posited that the Qur’ān is the raison d’être of the
Islamic umma, squarely standing behind the role this umma played in world
history. The first act of “reading” (or interpreting) the Qur’ān was the Pro-
phetic Act, which amounts to the “first modern act (al-fiʿl al-ḥadāthī al-awwal),
if we are permitted this expression” (RH, 193). In his narrative, if Muslims
are to continue to play their role in history and to contribute to it, they have
to commit the second modern act, which presupposes and requires a new
reading that re-establishes the Qur’ān’s connections and ties with the
first Prophetic Act. The challenge of creativity now, Taha asserts, is as seri-
ous as that faced during the age of the “Muḥammadan reading” (al-qirā’a
al-Muḥammadiyya).
The second fact is that which we have repeatedly mentioned, namely, the
imposition of Church authority and power over Europe and the attendant
reactions to it—a ll of which led to the European venture of “freeing the
minds” and to proceeding with a history devoid of the evils of religious wars
(RH, 194).
-1— These two historical facts reveal the oppositions between the Western
0— and Islamic modernities, oppositions dictated by two different historical
+1—
[ 128 ]
This strategy does not aim to abolish the sacred as traditional, uncreative
secular humanism does; rather, its ultimate goal is to honor human kind.
Yet, this sort of honoring requires that sacredness be removed from the
human domain, beginning with the sanctification of the individual human
or of the self. The chief characteristic of this strategy is thus the transfer-
ence of Qur’ānic verses from their divine condition to a human condition,
this being an act of honoring human kind, without bestowing on it a status
of either sanctification, sovereignty, or divinity. The mechanics of this trans-
ference do not involve or cause the weakening of religious interaction, for
the Qur’ān itself acknowledges that it was revealed in the language of the
Arab people (lit. “Arab human beings,” al-insān al-ʿArabī) and in accordance —-1
with the discursive conventions of this language, although the audience —0
—+1
[ 129 ]
matter of deciding how much epistemic sovereignty human beings are enti-
tled to enjoy.
Human texts are forms of expression, ashkāl taʿbīriyya, which I take to be
means of communicating semiotic signs and symbols between and among
people. The Qur’ānic text, on the other hand, represents communicated sub-
stances (maḍāmīn tablīghiyya), that is, unidirectional communication of
instructional content. Standing at the top of these substances is the doctri-
nal substance (al-maḍmūn al-ʿiqadī),30 a self-renewing source of enlightening
guidance (RH, 199). Unlike common human speech or text, this communi-
cative substance is capable of providing for changing forms of modern expe-
rience, because it derives from the most abstract meaning of divine unity.
Being extendable to all forms of life temporally and spatially, this meaning
is unsurpassable in its “linguistic modernism” (RH, 199). It is capable of rein-
venting itself at every turn, thus fulfilling the essential modern require-
ment of creativity.
The foregoing paragraph arguably represents language somewhat
simplistically. Human texts are not just semiotic signs or merely symbols
through which individuals and groups establish a particular mode of com-
munication. Rather, “secular” language, the site of the intersections between
power and knowledge, is largely performative and constitutive of subjects.
I think Taha would agree with this characterization. Yet, he seems to argue
that language in the secular mode transmits and foregrounds these relation-
ships of power, but does not provide the subject with ethical instruction of
the type he is advocating. Qur’ānic language is precisely the matrix that con-
tinuously reminds (dhikr, tadhkīr) the believer of the presence of first-order
ethical principles, something that secular language is inherently incapable
of providing. Constitutive secular language/text intrinsically engenders
power relationships, whereas divine language constitutes moral instruction
and effects ethical subject-formation.
“Qur’ānic mind” (al-ʿaql al-Qur’ānī) that is able not only to make sense of phe-
nomena and noumena, and even of events and moral instruction (RH, 201),
but also to connect them as complementary and dialectical pairs. Here the
Kantian dualism of phenomena and noumena is dissolved, for every Is is an
indication of and suggestive of an Ought. The expansive reason of creative
strategy seems to acquire an advantage here, precisely where the Is was arbi-
trarily fixed in the Western application as incapable of yielding the Ought.31
Invoking a premodern conception of reason, Taha recovers the qalb (lit.
heart) as the locus not only of reason, but also of all sources of human appre-
hension, including the complex and intricate ways they overlap, dialectically
interact, and complement one another.32 Qalb, in other words, represents an
all-inclusive faculty encompassing the intellective, sensory-perceptual, emo-
tional, and spiritual realms of comprehension,33 whereby sensory perception
and the intellectual and spiritual realms interconnect.
The Qur’ānic repertoire of qalb allows Taha to argue that the epistemo-
logical range of comprehending reality in this text is far wider, deeper, and
richer than anything that an instrumental or materialist intellect could
offer.34 These latter, lagging not far behind paganism, are in their very nature
narrow and simple-minded when compared with the piercing intellectual-
ism and spiritualism of divine unity. The analogy that the conformist mod-
ernists have made between the Qur’ān and humanly authored texts is there-
fore fallacious.
historical narrative the Qur’ān may cite, it is not about history in the nar-
row, linear, and factual modern sense, but rather about what that event
means, within ethical time, as an interpretive arena of the moral. The Qur’ān
is not intended to teach us history in the Western sense of historical narra-
tive and historiography, but instead to accomplish specific ethical aims and
realize certain values. The events it describes are not just events narrowly
conceived. Perhaps at the end of the day, they are not events at all, but
ethical signposts of a semiotic variety meant to guide and correct human
conduct.38
In the necessary quest to forge “the history of the future” out of the Qur’ān,
Muslims must experience the text, Taha writes, as current, as always situ-
ated in the ever-continuous nowness (rāhiniyya dā’ima) of life. Since the text’s
whole purpose is the promotion of high moral and spiritual values, the pass-
ing of time cannot affect that purpose as it does actual historical events. The
passing of time might render past events irrelevant, but supreme ethical
values shape time, since it is these values that determine how history is made,
even how it is read. The will to these values makes history, which explains
why the Qur’ānic text is “unmatched” in “its historical modernism.”39
II
Given that the applications of modernity are many, just as it is given that
social customs and ways of life are no less varied, one may compare between
and among all these versions of reality and prefer one over another. This is
Taha’s entry point to the challenging position that Islamic modernity, by the
very logic of the principle of critique inherent in modernity’s spirit, has the
right to exercise its own critical faculty upon the Western application of this
spirit.
It will be recalled that the principle of critique encompasses two elements,
rationalization (taʿqīl) and differentiation (tafṣīl). The Western application of
the former has led to the creation of instrumental reason, a narrow way
(muḍayyaq) of thinking about the world. Likewise, the Western application
of differentiation has yielded deep and absolute structural separations,
whereas the Islamic application resorts to differentiation as a merely func-
tional practice that will dissolve itself once the aim of that differentiation —-1
has been achieved.40 —0
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[ 135 ]
corporations and the state, where the former appear as renegades against
the latter’s normative law. It is eminently arguable, however, that both, not-
withstanding competition, are different organs of the same larger project
of domination, one driven by a single structure of thought.)43
In this new system, there is no truly substantive place for ethical values
and moral considerations, for these always seem to contradict the spirit and
practice of capitalist globalization. Such values rest on the all-important
Weltanschauung of sanctification (tazkiya = purification) that creates a dis-
tinction between benefit (manfaʿa) and interest (maṣlaḥa). All benefits are
interests, but not all interests are benefits. Benefits reflect moral values and
ethical practice, but interests may include materialistic greed and selfish
behavior.44 In both their modus operandi and modus vivendi, the “global-
izers” engage with interests, not benefits.45 Their interests grow and multi-
ply, but their “benefits” are nearly nonexistent; the growth they generate is
stupendous, but the “sanctification” of the wealth they embody is virtually
absent. They have come to worship economics as if it is a god who ceaselessly
bestows his bounties upon them. They are thoroughly preoccupied with
accumulating wealth, but have neglected to nurture their moral character.
Sanctification is therefore the means by which interests are made to conduce
to the shaping of human well-being, this being measured in moral, not mate-
rialistic, terms.
Second, technique. Technicalism, technology, and, in sum, technique46 are
the applied manifestations of science and knowledge. As the result and con-
sequence of knowledge, they are predicated upon it, and must thus be sub-
ordinate to it. Yet, given the context of the rationalizing regime of global-
ization, this conventional understanding of the relationship between the two
is no longer acceptable, for at least two reasons. First, the two overlap so
extensively that technique seems to subordinate knowledge and further-
more define it in terms of consumerist needs that are determined by the
corporate and international market. Knowledge has thus become a tool and
a means of technique, which dictates, through its own logic and modes of
operation, its trajectories and teleology. Second, knowledge of technique has
expanded its purview and has thus come to encompass the study of indus-
try, society, and culture in which it finds unending applications. It has forged
extensive relationships between technical progress and the development of
-1— social structures as these interact with their natural environments. Which
0— is to say that technical knowledge has infiltrated the domain of theoretical
+1—
[ 138 ]
is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and
to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,”
which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power
structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosoph-
ical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state,
and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from
the type of individualization linked to the state. We have to promote new forms
of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been
imposed on us for several centuries.48
Yet, on balance, Foucault’s project did not involve such a “promotion,” for
it was a project of diagnostics, from beginning to end. The project, put dif-
ferently, continued to labor, however brilliantly, under the weight of the
question “What are we, at present?” And it is precisely here where the dif-
ference between his project and Taha’s lies. The latter departs from the Kan-
tian/Foucauldian question, taking its answer for granted. Instead, his
question is “What can we become, and how?”
It is true, Taha argues, that the severity of the moral crises in the West
has engendered reactions that took on various shapes and guises. Among
these is the phenomenon of establishing new academic programs to teach
ethics and investigate ethical problems in a rapidly changing world. It seems
that ethics committees have been established everywhere and in every field,
and that new conventions, regulations, and by-laws on ethics have been
drafted by state agencies as well as by human rights organizations and
many others. Unprecedented discourses on ethics have been emerging
with vigor, dealing with an array of spheres, and labeled variously as “bio-
-1— ethics,” “environmental ethics,” “communication ethics,” “labor ethics,”
0—
+1—
[ 140 ]
“administrative ethics,” and so forth. There has also been a dramatic increase
in talk about the need for people to bear ethical responsibility for the whole
range of life’s activities, including the challenges of environmental pollu-
tion, the ceaseless distensions of technique, social and communal disinte-
gration, political corruption, misinformation, and the like.
Despite all these “developments,” crises in morality and ethics are on the
rise, and people “everywhere are complaining about their [own] conditions.”
But all this “goes back to the new technological-communicative-economic
system being structurally and rationally so persistent that it can withstand
all these ethical requirements and needs, and furthermore harnessing them
to serve its own interests and to perpetuate its own eternal law, namely, the
endless quest to create wealth” (RH, 85). The situation thus remains that
business and money-making subordinate morality and ethics, not the other
way around. Which is to say, Taha wants to argue, that modern economics,
technique, and communications allow for minor concessions in favor of eth-
ical corrections as means of appeasement that fortify and enhance, rather
than really reform, the current system. What must also be understood is that
a true solution to such a situation will never come from the agents who are
responsible for this situation. Which is also to say, Taha insists, that it is
extremely naïve to think that the system in its present power-base config-
uration can fix itself. Any qualitative and significant change must come from
the outside, since the “system cannot emit any ethical values other than
what it can produce itself” (RH, 86, 97).
The solution to the moral crises of the modern world must thus fulfill
three conditions: (1) it must come from outside the centers of power on which
the modern system rests; otherwise, the system will subordinate it to its own
imperatives, just as it routinely does in the case of countless institutes, con-
ventions, and organizations that promote ethical content; (2) for obvious
reasons, it must derive from sources superior to, and stronger than, the
sources of the current system; and (3) it must rest on universal ethics so
that it corresponds to the massive range of globalization and still meets its
requirement of “founding a single universal society.” And so “we need not
contemplate the matter long before we realize that there is no authority that
can fulfill these conditions except religious authority (sulṭat al-dīn). Revealed
religion is the only thing left that this system did not produce; indeed, reli-
gion produced some of this system’s features, but these have come to be —-1
—0
—+1
[ 141 ]
“globalizers,” “globe” is ill defined. “It is not, as they imagine, a single field
of relations with the semantic meaning of (the term) relations being set in
an absolute framework (iṭlāq). Rather, it is a single field of relations qualified
by ethics (akhlāq). Which is to say that the globe/world is an ethical relational
field.”55 This position is foregrounded in the thesis—elaborated, as we have
seen, in the introductory parts of Rūḥ al-Ḥadātha—that since the essence of
humanity is constituted of ethics, and since, therefore, the acts of human
beings are, in their neutral state (ṣarīḥ),56 moral, it is necessary for these
acts to be directed toward others as human beings, which means that the
other must always be assumed to be equally constituted of ethical fiber.
These definitional-conceptual boundaries entail a situation in which each
and every individual falls under moral duties toward others, just as these
others owe that individual the same measure of moral conduct. The ethi-
cal nature of human beings therefore makes individual humans (just as it
makes groups, large or small) ethically responsible toward the world in its
entirety. This is so because ethics is woven into the constitution of the
world, and extricating ourselves from this fiber is to run against our own
nature. Thus all of us are responsible, and to limit that responsibility “to a
particular society, group, or family” is out of the question (RH, 90).
Now that Islam’s burden of ethical responsibility is taken for granted, the
task of rerationalizing globalization must be thought through a number of
principles, the first of which is the principle of seeking moral surplus (ibtighā’
al-faḍl).57 As previously mentioned, the current practice of globalization has
been preoccupied with economic growth (tanmiya) and has overlooked the
principle of sanctification (tazkiya). The principle of seeking moral surplus
finds realization when “there is complementarity of the economic factor,
including that of growth, and the maintenance of a constant connection with
the spiritual horizons” (RH, 90). The Arabic term faḍl happens to be an accu-
rate expression of the principle’s content, for it means two things: (1) as
derivative of faḍīla (virtue), it expresses acts across the spectrum of life that
are characterized as virtuous; and (2) as associated with khayr (goodness),
it represents a good act or acts through which virtuousness can be attained.
In this understanding, “goods” may be regarded not merely as material
objects whose sole reason for existence is to be traded for financial or
material profit, but also as means to accomplish that which is good and
-1— moral. This second purpose of trade is precisely the “surplus” whose sub-
0— ject matter consists of both moral conduct and ethical consideration of the
+1—
[ 144 ]
other. An added benefit of this surplus is that because moral values are
fixed, they will stabilize the market and reduce its volatility (RH, 91–92).
If the principle of surplus endows goods with ethical content, then trade
in goods can be seen as a moral act. And once this situation obtains, the sig-
nificance of economic development and growth undergoes a profoundly
qualitative change, making it a double act of sanctification, one for the goods
themselves and the other for the act of trading in them. When this trans-
formation takes place in each field of economic activity and development,
the various parts making up the globalization field will interact with one
another according to this logic, “creating” in the process a “sound global
environment” and “raising humankind” to a nobler station (RH, 91).
Maintaining connection with “spiritual horizons” is not, for Taha, a rhe-
torical ploy but a deeply ingrained psychological mode of being. When peo-
ple purchase objects, their feelings of ownership and exclusive control of
these objects are the most salient characteristics that constitute the full lim-
its of the transaction. And it is precisely here where the sense of exclusivity
and thus self-centeredness and selfishness begin, and where godlike posses-
siveness finds manifestation. Attributing ultimate ownership to God as real
ownership and deeming its human equivalent as nothing more than a deriv-
ative translate into mitigating the sense of entitlement and unqualified
ownership.
With such a deeply rooted conviction of divine ownership, humans will
no longer regard material wealth and purchased objects surrounding them
as entitlements for which they necessarily need not be grateful. A deep sense
of divine ownership engenders a cognate and parallel sense of qualified
human ownership, a sense that affects the social perception of the very
object that is owned.58 The regard for the object thus acquires “thickness,”
a multilayered signification in which private ownership and right of enjoy-
ment mesh into communal sharing. To see the originary right of the object
as anchored beyond and outside of the supposedly owning subject is to
mitigate self-entitlement, objectively and perceptually. It is also to create a
social, if not psychoepistemic, bridge between the right of the self and the
right of others. This, Taha seems to imply, also engenders a double meaning
for communal and socialized economics: the redistribution of wealth here
does not end when the modes of production and their material outcomes
have been reasonably and fairly allocated to the social order. The redistri- —-1
bution continues beyond this stage so as to “thicken” it by precipitating a —0
—+1
[ 145 ]
ḥikma is that sabab yields a “caused effect” (Why does the thing desired exist?
How does it become a necessity?), whereas ḥikma aims to accomplish a par-
ticular moral goal or purpose (What is this for? To what purpose or end?).
Another way to distinguish the two is to say that the effect of sabab is
limited, monolithic, or uniform (ʿalā wajh wāḥid), but ḥikma involves consid-
eration of the larger moral landscape in which the act or thing locates itself
(RH, 93). Thus, an act or a thing may have a sabab leading to it, which is to
say, a way to bring it into existence, but this commission may not be sup-
ported by good moral reasons, in which case it should not be undertaken.
Ḥikma thus is not an operative mechanism. It represents a good reason for
an act to be brought into being, but it is equipped with no means capable of
accomplishing that end.
It is clear then, Taha continues, that moral deliberation and reflection
enable knowledge to delimit the reasons for things by rationalizing them as
moral values encompassing these things. Only then does knowledge cease
to be a mere assemblage of technical possibilities with potential to be as
harmful as they are beneficial.
As for the act’s ramified consequences (ma’āl), it is well known that every
human action has a present and a future, the present being the immediate
context in which the act originates and comes to completion as act. The
future of an act occurs after the act qua act has been performed, which is
to say that the future is the immediate and distant temporality in which the
effects of a given act unfold. Some acts yield effects that can be observed
and assessed but other acts may result in far-reaching consequences and
long-term effects that one cannot possibly observe, monitor, or even imag-
ine. “Technical man” tends to see acts as existing in the short term, never
making that crucial passage to deliberating and reflecting upon the moral
implications of acts in the long term (RH, 94). The principle of reflection
requires serious thinking about the ramified consequences of the act before
anything else, especially before succumbing to its immediate attraction or
benefit. Against the logic of technical man, an act with evident long-term
benefits ought to be commissioned, although it might have negative effects
in the short run. Conversely, an act whose short-term benefit is evident ought
not be commissioned if it can be established that its long-term effects are
harmful. Thus the epistemic criterion for this principle is thinking and
deliberation about ramified consequences, a criterion quite different from —-1
—0
—+1
[ 147 ]
-1—
0—
+1—
[ 150 ]
Recasting Reason
On more than one occasion in the last two chapters, we have seen Taha cri-
tique instrumental rationality, which has foregrounded the twentieth cen-
tury in major calamities and devastations. The way to proceed in construct-
ing what he calls the “second modernity” is to adopt a worldview constituted
by morally grounded reason, a “thick” form of reason that is brought to bear
upon the problems that have arisen in both the Western and, consequently,
the Islamic contexts. This task he attempts to accomplish in al-ʿAmal al-Dīnī
wa-Tajdīd al-ʿAql (AD),1 whose declared goal is to provide the philosophical
foundations for modern Islam’s “religious awakening” (al-yaqaẓa al-dīniyya),
equated with al-yaqaẓa al-ʿiqadiyya, a credal and spiritual awakening. With
all the vibrancy attending this awakening since the end of the nineteenth
century, it nonetheless continues to lack a rigorous methodological framing,
a productive theoretical apparatus, and proper philosophical foundations
(AD, 9). In other words, this awakening needs a prior, or preparatory, stage
of renewal, one that sets up the intellectual, methodological, and theoretical
props of a project that has thus far been largely devoid of such foundations.
In order to accomplish this task, two general conditions must obtain.
First, no comprehensive intellectual foundations can be constructed unless
experience, especially spiritual-ethical experience, is both thoroughly —-1
expounded and understood for its deep, entrenched structures. Second, this —0
—+1
[ 151 ]
precludes the very possibility of man as the end of himself.4 Expectedly, the
direction of discussion progresses from the weakest form of reason and
rationality to the strongest form, which Taha deems superior and ethically
most compelling (AD, 15). We recall that the latter standard is for him abso-
lutely unsurpassable, since the ethical is not only “the central domain”5 but
nothing less than the essence of humanity (SA, 147).6
II
The most inferior of the three forms of reason, denuded reason (al-aql al-
mujarrad),7 represents “an act by which its owner conceives an aspect of a
thing while believing this act to be true, basing his judgment (taṣdīq)8 on a
particular piece of evidence.”9 Noteworthy here is the characterization of
reason as an act intended to circumvent, if not displace, the Aristotelian and
Islamic conception of it as an essence, one that claims to qualitatively dis-
tinguish between man and animal.10 The “Greek conception” tends to objec-
tify and overdivide the world, because the tendency toward objectification
rigidifies the exercise of thought by way of casting it into a mode character-
ized by autonomy, differentiated space, identity, and individuation (tashkhīṣ).11
It tends to be divisive also because it breaks up the otherwise integral experi-
ence of the rational subject into separate and autonomous domains. Char-
acterizing reason as an essential attribute of “man” forces an artificial dis-
tinction that obviates the presence of other attributes that are equally, if
not more, weighty in the constitution of the human subject, such as praxis,
experience, and practical living. The argument for reason’s essence would
thus require granting the same status to these and other attributes, thereby
rendering this multiplicity reflective of the unity of human subject (AD, 18).12
The exercise of reason represents a type of behavior, an act, through
which a person tries to understand herself or the surroundings that she
inhabits. This is then akin to the faculty of sight, which cannot be claimed
to constitute an autonomous essence, since it is an act brought into existence
by the eye, just as reason is an act generated by a real attribute, termed
qalb in the Islamic tradition.13 The relationship of reason to qalb is analo-
gous to the relationship of vision to the eye. In the Islamic tradition, Taha
argues, reason “as an act of qalb” took on various forms, chief among being —-1
(a) comprehending the relation between two knowable objects, (b) barring —0
—+1
[ 153 ]
the reasoning subject from falling to the whim of desires that lead to harm,
and (c) retaining and holding on to that which has been procured in the
qalb.14 Reason seems to play the role of the qalb’s keeper and guard (AD, 19).
The disqualification of reason as essence has to commend it the constant
human practice of judging reason as good or bad, as beneficial or harmful
or evil. Reason is praised when its sound epistemic methods lead to a good
action, and condemned when they lead to harmful results, precisely as
humans normally behave in their commission or omission of acts. The act
of conduct (commissioning), Taha seems to say, is merely a consequent and
continuation of the prior act of rational thinking and deliberation. Theft,
for instance, follows on the heels of, and continues, the rational thinking of
the thief, just as any good conduct is the result of a prior act of reflection.
As acts, the former is judged bad, the latter good.
Reason also rests on the principle of transformation, just as any attribute
or act does. “According to this principle, it is possible to direct and influence
the qalb so that it may abandon one rational attribute in favor of another,
one that is better and more rational, or, to the contrary, one that is less ratio-
nal and thus more ignorant” (AD, 21). Reason, for Taha, thus appears to be a
highly relative attribute, never devoid of a degree of “ignorance,” however
negligible. Ignorance and its resultant evil are not lack of reason, but rea-
son that has gone awry. Needless to say, Taha’s claim is proven by an entire
century’s worth of empirical evidence, the Nazi devastation wrought on the
world being just one index among many. The Third Reich can hardly be
accused of irrationality, if one adopts the perspective of an agent who seeks
the most efficient methods to annihilate a large number of people. Reason
in this case was sound, yet unethical and evil.
Furthermore, the description of reason as generating theoretical-scientific
knowledge is not describing an essential attribute concomitant with the
qalb. If the latter was taken as the embodiment of this reason, it was due to
circumstantial and contingent situations that could have been otherwise
and in fact entirely different, this being apparently a reference to the cir-
cumstantial and contingent forms of knowledge Europe produced given its
own conditions. Such different circumstances could quite conceivably give
rise to another distinguishable rational attribute that would in turn lead to
a vastly different kind of scientific knowledge. And if this is the case, then
-1— it is equally conceivable and quite possible to invent a rational-scientific
0—
+1—
[ 154 ]
Pure mathematics consists entirely of such asseverations as that, if such and such
a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true
of that thing. . . . It’s essential not to discuss whether the proposition is really
true, and not to mention what the anything is of which it is supposed to be
true. . . . If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more par-
ticular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics
may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about,
nor whether what we are saying is true.17 —-1
—0
—+1
[ 155 ]
Second, it is widely believed that the laws of abstract reason, which logic
makes as its field of investigation, have a single nature and are thus com-
mon to, and shared by, all rational persons. However, if we contemplate the
history and reality of this discipline, we will find that this belief is unsup-
portable since logic has become occupied with countless theorems and axi-
oms, and thus with endless modes of reasoning, including mechanical and
computerized forms that have been developed as independent fields of inves-
tigation. The field of logical investigation has thus been carved up into spe-
cialized areas of knowledge, ranging from propositional to predicate logic,
from relevance to paraconsistent logics, and passing through intuitionist
and computational logics.
Although these divergent fields of knowledge purport to describe denuded
reason and the laws and rules by which it works, they have ended up con-
flicting, if not contradicting, one another. These inconsistencies are exem-
plified in non-Euclidean geometry, and in the well-k nown irreconcilability
of relativity theory with quantum mechanics (AD, 44). Such issues suffice to
cast doubt about the existence of a scientific discourse—in the strict scientific
meaning of the term—that can prove reason to be one reality that all people
share or agree upon.
Inconsistency is not the worst part of the story. With all the perceived
mathematical and mechanical accomplishments, modern man was led to the
belief that technique (tiqaniyya)18 will lead to the happiness of all humanity,
as these accomplishments of technique enable man to subdue nature in
accordance with his needs and values. Upon reflection, however, these goals
have been far from realized, since technique has permeated and overwhelmed
all aspects of social life, forming along the way “a technique universe” that
wholly engulfs and dominates humankind. Ironically, the inventions with
which modern man has aimed to subdue nature turned out to be the end of
his freedom, as he has become servile to them instead of acting as their
master.
Technique takes on a life of its own, and develops its own logic that has
become independent of human will, and its inner logic rests on two pro-
foundly harmful principles: The first is the irrational principle that “every-
thing is possible.” This principle removes any commitments, deterrents, or
limitations, be they moral, ethical, natural, or otherwise. And once man
-1— adopts this mechanical-instrumental principle, technique overtakes all that
0— lies within the scope of human endeavor, to the harmful consequences
+1—
[ 156 ]
that have been witnessed. The second is the nonmoral principle that “what is
possible must be done” or “what can be done shall be done.” This principle
entails absolving oneself of all moral restraint, the latter standing in the way
of committing certain unethical acts, such as the destruction, or changing
the nature, of creation, or the production of chemical, biological, and radio-
logical weapons, among much else. The main point here is not just the
destructive effects of technique, but the manner in which rationalism
retracts into ignorance, where action loses its moral bearings. “It is as if the
paradigm of denuded reason, in its applications and effects, carries its own
seeds of destruction” (AD, 45; but also SA, 66).
These effects of technique, described as “enslavement” (istirqāqiyya), stand
surely in the company of others, chaos (fawḍawiyya) being especially note-
worthy. The prevailing belief is that knowledge is cumulative and that one
layer of it fits on top of another, as if knowledge were like a flight of stairs,
leading us toward the highest, if not perfect, stage of knowledge. This pro-
gressive cumulative perception of knowledge is in fact belied by the actual
history of science. In reality, scientific theories do not always build on one
another, and some cause serious ruptures more than continuities—this being
an echo of the Kuhnian thesis. These theories can therefore hardly be said
to complement or support previous paradigms. Some theories, further-
more, take off on their own to ask new questions, most of which cannot be
answered within the bounds of that theory, questions that multiply and
spread in every direction, so much so that they appear to exist in a state of
chaos (khabṭ; AD, 46).
Third, and finally, are philosophical limitations. It is assumed that
denuded reason is dissociated from material forms, as if it yields universal
meanings entirely disconnected and separate from sensory matters whose
relevance ceases beyond the point of being an aid for reason to reach
abstracted forms. This, Taha insists, is far from the truth. There is a com-
plementarity between the formal sciences—regarded as nonmaterialist—and
extramental, experimental, and thus materialist sciences. The complemen-
tarity comes to view in the manner in which the formal sciences are used
to shape the results of material sciences and to formalize (ṣawrana) their sci-
entific theories. And this is explicable in terms of the nature of laws that
render abstract all rational constructs, for reliance on such laws to under-
stand things in the world rests on three operations, all of which bestow a —-1
materialist form on perceptibles (AD, 47). —0
—+1
[ 157 ]
These operations consist of the following: (1) Once the rational method is
brought to bear upon an issue, the latter is converted into, or cast as, an
analyzable and experimental phenomenon, causing an elision between
the issue’s real nature and the manner in which it was materialistically
recast. This is tantamount to creating an identity between gold holdings
and (the symbolic value of) actual currency, or to “bestowing a materialist
appearance” (taẓhīr) upon things that do not lend themselves to such a
materializing act. (2) The process of taẓhīr cannot be complete without
extrapolating the object of analysis into a spatial and temporal existence
(taḥyīz), rendering it subject to the methods of calculation, quantification,
division, and reconstruction. The effect of this process is to force measur-
ability and calculability upon that which does not lend itself to such evalu-
ations, just as no amount of medical-scientific-technological scanning can
assess the nature, quantity, or quality of the emotion of humility (khushūʿ)
in a worshiper’s prayer. And (3) knowledge acquired by denuded reason
does not result from a sudden spark of illumination, as if it were an incident
of instantaneous inspiration; rather, it is the result of methods of thinking
that rest on prior methods that in turn rest on yet prior methods, enough
to control the field of understanding and subject it to constrained forms
of calculable experiment and scrutiny. These intervening and mediating
methods (tawsīṭ) are controlled by the following principles: (a) the more
complex and subtle a thing is in its material form, the more numerous and
complicated the methods needed to understand it; and (b) an inverse of the
former principle, namely, the more extensive and corporeal the thing is,
the fewer the methods that are needed to comprehend it.
From these principles one infers that materialist methods will inevitably
be exhausted and consumed in the attempt to comprehend the complex and
subtle matters of spirituality and transcendentalism. Through its three
operations, denuded reason is thus closer to being a materializing entity
than an abstract attribute, falsely presumed to be separate from material
forms. Being engulfed in materialism, so-called denuded reason cannot
think outside material considerations, and when it encounters nonmaterial
realities, its materialistic limitations constitute obstacles that stand in the
way of cognition.
Furthermore, denuded reason has had a checkered history that reveals,
-1— in its diachronic manifestations, its weakness. A close look at knowledge sys-
0— tems shows that, periodically, theories within a system, otherwise deemed
+1—
[ 158 ]
exemplary, at one point or another become suspect, and are thus discarded
as erroneous or irrational. They are replaced by others, now deemed exem-
plary, when that status was in fact indisputably for a long time enjoyed by
those that have just been superseded. But even at their best, Taha seems to
say, logical theories and theories of denuded rationality have been unduly
obsessed with laws of noncontradiction between and among them, when in
fact this ideal need not be attained. As widely attested in the daily practices
of humans everywhere, we live according to contradictory rules, without us
being irrational in the least. Without such pliability, life would become
impossible (AD, 48–49).
Finally, denuded reason is not necessary. It is widely held that denuded
reason’s province is to prove the unity or even universality of human ratio-
nality and that it has the exclusive authority to set the criteria for this
rationality. These claims are refuted by the following two considerations:
First, the modes of reason prevailing nowadays were inherited from a spe-
cific culture and a particular history, and none of them can be foisted upon
other cultures as either inevitable or deterministic. History could have played
otherwise, and we (Muslims) could have, in another time and place, chanced
upon other systems of thought. Or, we could have invented for ourselves
another system of rationality altogether.19 Second, it is quite conceivable that
in the future a “nation” (umma) or culture may abandon these familiar forms
of rationality and invent for itself other rational forms of thought without
being influenced by denuded reason (AD, 49). Taha’s point seems to be that
each society or culture develops its own internal logic, a system of living that
attends to the rationalization of its values. And each society, governed thus
by an internal logic of its own, develops a form of reason, but no form, qua
form, can have a universal validity, for the internal logics, being always
unique, consequently yield unique forms of rationality. The question for
Taha, one would suspect, is not the form as form, and not rationality qua
rationality—these are variable and in some strong sense means to an end.
The end, the highest value in his project, is ethical formation, potentially
achievable through a variety of forms. But none of these includes denuded
reason, which is inherently incapable of such formation. On the other hand,
the Islamic solution he is attempting to provide remains one among possi-
ble others drawn from within and without Islam. And it is in the layers of
the next two forms of reason that the Islamic alternative distinguishes itself —-1
from Europe’s denuded reason. —0
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[ 159 ]
III
Taha goes to great lengths to articulate his conception of guided reason (al-
ʿaql al-musaddad).20 Superior to denuded reason, guided reason is represented
in acts through which an agent aims to bring about a benefit or to avoid a
harm by means of performing works dictated by the Moral Law (Sharʿ). The
choice of the term musaddad is quite deliberate, since more common desig-
nations such as ʿaql ghayr mustaqill or ʿaql muqayyad (nonautonomous or lim-
ited reason) possess negative connotations, likely to engender the false
impression that what we are speaking of is a sort of reason that is constricted
and constrained, reason that is incapable of opening up new frontiers and
horizons. To the contrary, guided reason is superior to denuded reason
because it is empowered by its sharʿī affiliation to stay the correct course in
articulating knowledge that leads to benefit, this being embodied in praxis
(AD, 67). This conception entails the understanding that the act must fulfill
three necessary conditions:
First, the act must accord with the Moral Law. It is insufficient for an act
to be merely intentional and “directed” (i.e., subject to tawjīh), for such an
act may nonetheless remain unguided even in the presence of these two
attributes. For despite all the intellectual efforts that the agent exercises in
choosing the best act and in investigating its implications, the act may still
be harmful to the agent herself, if not also to others. Only an act supported
by the guiding principles of the Moral Law can permit the agent to avoid
harm, always assuming she intends the act to bring benefit (AD, 58).21
Taha does not explain why the Moral Law, the Sharīʿa, should be
entrusted with such a charge. But his argument would make good sense if
we realize, as I believe he does, that the Sharīʿa historically did prove itself
capable of forming subjectivities through what he calls guided reason. But
it is also important to understand what it is in Sharīʿa’s history and char-
acter that equips it with such a capacity, one that presupposes both the
absence of arbitrariness and the presence of a spatiotemporal, diachronic-
cum-synchronic, and communal conception of higher principles. Represent-
ing values that are seen to stand above the arbitrariness of ever-changing
human predilections, the Sharīʿa regulated the entire range of the social
order, either directly through its jurists or by means of a fairly well-defined
-1— and limited delegation through the executive. It was constituted by the
0— “legislative power” par excellence, and “legislation” was both a cumulative
+1—
[ 160 ]
and collective process, which is to say that “law,” in both the moral and the
technical legal senses, was the result of a corporate-like entity, a collectivity of
juristic voices over time and space, and not subject to the will or whim of any single
jurist, ruler, or even a contemporaneous group of jurists. Thus, no one could claim
ownership of the law. And since the source of all moral-legal authority was
an anthropological-hermeneutical engagement with authorized texts by a
formally undefinable body of men of piety across regions and centuries, the
law not only was beyond political reach but also stood, as the embodiment
of these higher principles, above all human institutions (notwithstanding
its built-in structures of legal change).22
The historical record, Taha argues, is replete with evidence to show
that despite all the good intentions and best efforts to properly direct
human acts through denuded reason, the actual results of these acts have
often not been as positive as the original intentions themselves: as inti-
mated earlier, the well-intended projects to unify human reason, to ratio-
nalize the world, to bring technique into human service, and to organize
knowledge have all yielded destructive results, contrary and opposite to
the original intent. In fact, they have resulted in the fragmentation of rea-
son, an increase in irrationality, the enslavement of man by machines, and
the dissipation and scattering of knowledge (tashtīt). “If man has indeed lost
total control over those things that are closest and most familiar to him,
then what will be his condition with regard to the hidden future and those
matters most obscure and unfamiliar to him?” (AD, 59). Illusions of prog-
ress through reason have led modern man into a repetitious cycle of hope,
promise, action, and failure, only to return, with the same method, to mend
failure with another cycle of hope, promise, action, and failure. All this is
the consequence of the inability to understand the absolute necessity of a
Moral Law. Instead, this Law has become the locus of derision and criti-
cism, as if it were the source of evil.
Second, according to the Moral Law, each act must bring about a benefit.
This is also to say that it is insufficient, if not inadequate, to bring about the
benefit through other means, since these are intrinsically defective, irre-
spective of the extent of rational scrutiny deployed in justification of the
act. By contrast, acts generated by the Moral Law are safeguarded by three
characteristics or considerations: (1) Nondivine, self-made law can never rise
above material considerations of life. It will therefore always remain —-1
materialistic to the core, because it cannot adopt the ethical values that are —0
—+1
[ 161 ]
the natural lot of the Moral Law’s follower. These values are so supreme that
they subordinate material and materialistic considerations and rise above
them, making them their subsidiaries. On the contrary, values issuing from
nonmoral law remain—as they have in late modernity—bound by immedi-
ate, if not sightsighted, considerations, however lofty these might first
appear; eventually, though, they become themselves subordinated to the
dominant and dominating materialistic (if not hedonistic and base) values.
The effects of the Moral Law are to control and mitigate the “thick” and
heavy effects of materialist values by embedding them in, and managing
them through, the moral domain. (2) Benefits accruing by means of nondi-
vine law remain limited both in their desiderata and in the scope of the
means by which these desiderata are defined and implemented. Thus, ben-
efits reveal themselves to the agent applying this law only to the limited
extent that these means permit. It is implied here that such means are not
situated within a wider system of moral-spiritual values that connects these
individual benefits to a system of benefits. The Moral Law escapes this nar-
row and superficial path (saṭḥiyya), always providing depth and range for all
human acts. And (3) benefits accruing within a system of nondivine moral
law are subjective—in the sense that they are individualistic—however much
they are based on a common standard and regulated by general principles
and rules. Here, Taha is rather terse, leaving much unaccounted for. Regard-
less, his point seems to be that subjectivity (dhātiyya) in this particular
context leads to self-centeredness and selfishness, among other unseemly
qualities, because the law followed is not grounded in a cosmology that
safeguards the interests of man while at the same time preserving the inter-
ests of all other forms of life. Subjectivity, in other words, seems to breed
anthropocentrism, and this in turn breeds love for control and power. Divine
law ensures the permanent presence of higher principles that both control
and guide the subject in negotiating his subjectivity. In the Moral Law, ben-
efits are set within a communal system in which the individual attempts to
realize benefits for his own interest but with equal attention to the welfare
of the community in which she lives. Seen from the perspective of his proj-
ect as a whole, the “community” in Taha’s conception is an ever-expanding
circle that ranges from the family and immediate social community to the
global community, situated within the physical world and within a par-
-1— ticular cosmology. In this system, the realization of benefit for one is not
0— distinguished from the realization of benefit for all (AD, 61).
+1—
[ 162 ]
the top of the list, with the sciences that instruct in the art of living an ethi-
cal life at the head of these (AD, 62).24
Praxis has the effect of removing external and internal impediments, or
at least minimizing their control over and manipulation of the agent.25 And
the more the agent becomes free of such impediments, the more these works
contribute to the refinement of his perceptions and moral knowledge, and
vise versa. This process of praxis and enhancement, dialectical in nature,
works to expand (tawsīʿ) the moral horizons. Nevertheless, Taha argues that,
in their more narrowly conceived understanding of praxis, the “propo-
nents of tangible acts” (al-malmūsiyyūn) have erred in reducing praxis to
sociopolitical praxis, as if there was no activity of greater or equal value.
Fundamentally materialists, they have arrogated central importance to
this practice, and bestowed on it expansive meanings that have culminated
in its subordination to other spheres. Yet in doing so, they have forgotten
that this practice remains constrained by multiple considerations that
reflect higher values. This is to say that an adequate regard for these con-
siderations will undermine the autonomous status they have assigned their
preferred form of practice. Unlike sociopolitical practice, religious works
(ʿibāda) expand the horizons of perception and “educate” the self in higher
morals that in turn aid in ridding that self of unethical habits and beliefs.
Once this is accomplished, the moral effects percolate into lower spheres
of activity, whether political, social, or otherwise. In their loyalty to the
sociopolitical, the materialists therefore have missed a crucial link in
human behavior, one that is located between their kind of practice and
the moral resources of the agent, themselves nothing other than religious
works (AD, 64).
Furthermore, engaging works and praxis has a corrective effect on the
performing agent, directing and redirecting her to avoid perverse and harm-
ful behavior. Without designating them as such, Taha here is speaking of
the technologies of the soul and the entire range of habituating techniques
that, because of their repetitive acculturating effects on the body and mind,
act as an exemplar in the agent’s conscience, always providing a benchmark
that nags at the agent’s soul with incessant reminders of the necessity to hold
on to moral conduct and to revert back, at every turn, to the grand princi-
ples of ethical behavior that act as correctives (taṣwīb) to diversion. This he
-1— calls ta’ṣīl, the harking back to the (relevant) “original principle” (al-qāʿida
0— al-aṣliyya) of sharʿī conduct (AD, 65).
+1—
[ 164 ]
IV
This brief account of enhanced reason suffices for us to draw the conclu-
sion that Taha’s tripartite typology of reason is intended to capture the dif-
ferences (as well as incremental commonalities), respectively, between and
among the modern conception of reason, the premodern sharʿī synthesis of
reason and revelation, and the ṣūfī forms of knowledge. In other words, the
typology corresponds to what are at present modern, traditional sharʿī and
ṣūfī practices of rationality, assuming that the second and third can be cat-
egorized as necessarily differentiated fields (a point to be raised later).
However, Taha does not state the matter in these terms, although he does
devote to the matter a substantial section in which he argues that, of all
Islamic rational practices, enhanced reason acquires its most perfect form
in the ṣūfī arena (AD, 146–56). Clearly associated with Ṣūfism, enhanced rea-
son travels a considerable distance toward perfecting rational reality, since
it cultivates in the individual a special capacity to avoid certain character
faults, such as lack of humility, love of appearances, unthinking conform-
ism, indulging in (useless) abstractions, engaging in politics (tasyīs), and love
for domination and mastery.35 Which is also to say that by developing this
tripartite account of reason, Taha not only has leveled a trenchant critique
of Jābrī’s portrayal of the bayānī and ʿirfānī “epistemic regimes,” but can also
be said to have cut down Jābrī’s central claims.
Taha’s feat, then, is achieved by anchoring reason in both these domains
right in the midst of praxis, in habituation, embodiment, and a profound
technology of the soul. All Jābrī seems to see in these two regimes is their
outer and surface layers of reason, but cannot appreciate that these praxis-
based technologies are powerful performatives of a subject fully grounded
in robust conceptions of positive liberty. This, I think, is the final and high-
est measure against which an assessment of the two thinkers ought to rest.
The struggle between Taha and Jābrī is not so much about “forms of ratio-
nality” for their own sake. Rather, it is about the most profound and encom-
passing conception of reality, one that defines all of the structures, teleolo-
gies, and values of what I have been calling central domains. It is, at the end
of the day, the crucial struggle over the two “concepts of liberty,” not just
as defined in the Berlinian and liberal ways, but one that is engulfed—in the
Tahan-Jābiriyyan debate—by the oceanic weight of twelve centuries of
Islamic experience prior to colonialism, which has come down to us by the
-1— name of turāth. “Oceanic weight” because so-called positive liberty in this
0—
+1—
[ 168 ]
written word (ʿibāra), whereas the takhlīq of enhanced reason entirely relies
on the moral semiotics (ishāra) of past exemplars (AD, 185). In order to dis-
tinguish ethical from the politicized Salafism, Taha gives it the name tasal-
luf, a kind of Salafism that peruses the texts with an eye to delving into
praxis, so as to extract from the texts their moral content. He recognizes
that the texts are removed from our lives by a long stretch of history and
that, as a result, changes in the interim require us to provide new readings
of the texts. Yet, the readings do not require a direct or close study of these
texts, for these should be seen as guides to renewing the mutasallif ’s
education.40
In his Su’āl al-Akhlāq, Taha takes stock of what should constitute a defini-
tion of rationality, irrespective of the intellectual position adopted. Any def-
inition must include three criteria or standards (maʿāyīr). The first of these
is actionism (fāʿiliyya). To be dissociated from earlier uses (Weber’s, Alain
Touraine’s), this concept refers to the individual’s realization of herself
through praxis, one that ranges over the entire spectrum of her life experi-
ence and that, in the process, defines the identity of her overall conduct as
a human being. By necessity, then, these praxes must be varied, first, in their
intentions and motives and, second, in their quality and methods of imple-
mentation. And third, they must perforce be subject to the vicissitudes of
time and place (SA, 61–62). Hence, certain forms of actionism would be effec-
tive and successful, while others would be deficient (SA, 64).
The second criterion is miʿyār al-taqwīm, which may be translated as “val-
uative ennoblement,” the constant and never-ceasing search for higher val-
ues, a process whose goal is to attain the highest state of perfection possi-
ble. This is almost identical to what I have elsewhere called the “ethical
benchmark.” 41 The third criterion is the criterion of integral complemen-
tarity (miʿyār al-takāmul). The various parts and aspects of human behavior
are not separable and fragmented entities, where one act may be assigned
to a sphere unrelated to the other spheres in the life of the individual. To
the contrary, every aspect or act is related to every other, for they all stem
from one self or subjectivity (dhāt wāḥida), which combines attributes of
weakness and strength, knowledge and practice, and emotional and cerebral
knowledge.
With this cursory mapping of rationality, Taha wants to subject both the
Aristotelian and the Cartesian conceptions of reason to critique. The former —-1
—0
—+1
[ 171 ]
69–71). Yet, an intimate relationship must always exist between varied means
and higher principles, which is also to say that the latter must, at every turn,
be brought to bear upon the former. In nondenuded rationality, theory and
practice, speech and act, knowledge and action are woven together, one
being coexistent and coextensive with the other. If the higher values and
principles are ethical, and if the means to them, however varied, always con-
nect back to them and strive to serve them and bolster their meanings in
the soul, then the entire mode of existence would be grounded in enhanced
rationality (ʿaqlāniyya mu’ayyada), which religion, but not secularism, could
offer. Unity between principles and praxis, between means and ends,
between speech and act, and between theory and practice all are essential
ingredients of this rationality, a type of rationality that avoids the fragmen-
tation and shortcomings of its denuded counterpart.44
—-1
—0
—+1
[ 175 ]
the same modern place and time, these schools with their diverse doctrines
not only cannot all be true individually; they must stand in their totality as
a mass of contradictions. Yet, contradiction and incoherence are, by virtue
of these modernists’ own acknowledgment and insistence, the very stuff of
irrationality.4 In order to escape this dilemma, they must each, in turn, admit
that their form of rationality is merely one of many, and that these ratio-
nalities are by no means exhaustive, leaving the distinct possibility that
there are other ways of rationalizing the world that they have not consid-
ered (SA, 16).
Having marshaled a list of general critiques of modern Western moral
philosophy (SA, 15–25) that focus especially on Kant’s works, Taha insists on
two fundamental considerations. First, modernity has elaborated a “shal-
low morality” (akhlāqiyyāt al-saṭḥ) intended to avert the detrimental effects
of its own projects (SA, 145). Put differently, this morality is not only the
direct result of the modern operations on the world, but also a manifesta-
tion of modernity’s own conceptions and logic in the construction of solu-
tions to the problems it had created. “Modernity cannot create values and
meanings unless they are of the same species as those (governing its) reali-
ties and pehonomena.”5 And if solutions are made of the same structure that
itself caused the problem in the first place, then the harm the solutions
attempt to avert or remedy will continue to reside in—in fact infest—the
solutions themselves. A genuine and real solution to modernity’s problems
cannot therefore ensue from the structures of modernity itself. They must
both be external to it and have a superior potency that is able to supersede
the potency of modernity and its anemic solutions. Any proposed solu-
tions must go deeper than those that have come before, and must “dive into
the depths of life as well as the innermost dimensions of the human self”
(SA, 26, 145–46).
Second, and issuing from the former consideration, is the central idea that
the solutions to the modern project must find their sources in forms of ratio-
nality that lay outside the denuded forms that modernity developed and
adopted, after it had ostracized other forms. One such form, which Muslims
are entitled to advocate inasmuch as others are entitled to adopt their own
forms, is enhanced rationality, which insists on the fundamental and fore-
grounding proposition that there is no ethical life without religion and no
religion without ethics. In this context as in countless others, Taha avers the —-1
most obvious yet unaccepted claim, that if the modernists, Arabs included, —0
—+1
[ 177 ]
II
problem (SA, 35), he quickly moves on to attack the second mode, that reli-
gion is subordinate to ethics.
His chief target here is Kant, whose concepts of legislating will and
the Categorical Imperative are dismissed, and rightly so, as secularized
versions of Christian doctrine. Such objections are by now familiar, having
been made in forceful ways by philosophers such as G. E. M. Anscombe, who
showed that Kant’s notion of duty is little more than a Christian intrusion,
a leftover from religious Europe that was surreptitiously allowed to wear
an Enlightenment garb of reason within his recycled notion of the Categor-
ical Imperative.8 Kant’s method, Taha argues, is to use religion in order to
suppress it through a humanizing process, this latter involving a double-
pronged operation of substitution and analogy. Kant substitutes the con-
cept of reason for the concept of faith (īmān), the concept of human will for
that of divine will, the Categorical Imperative for divine command, human
self-legislating will for divinely ordained law, and the concept of Kingdom
of Ends for Paradise.
In Kant’s work, the suppression of religion through analogy took the form
of introducing secular equivalents to religious notions. As the source of
ethics, pure reason is derived analogically from revealed religion, so that
humans can now legislate for themselves as autonomous agents. And just as
“divine legislation” is intended to enact laws that would govern humanity
in its entirety, so is human legislation intended to be universal (SA, 39–40).
“There is no doubt that Kant constructed his secular theory of ethics on reli-
gious foundations, having, by means of substitution, manipulated these
foundations so that the human displaces God; then, he analogized the rules
of the former on the basis of the latter. This theory is secular only in appear-
ance” (SA, 40). The only difference between the two is that the human has
now been installed as the ultimate source of authority. If this is accepted,
then it necessarily follows that Kant’s claim that ethics subordinates reli-
gion is invalid. It would also follow that secular ethics is nothing other than
religious ethics in disguise (mutanakkir), making the proposition that ethics
subordinates religion false.9
The third mode in the relationship between ethics and religion is their
autonomy and separation from each other. The claim for separation derives
from the central philosophical doctrine, initially propounded by Hume, that
Is and Ought are distinct logical propositions, making it logically impossi- —-1
ble to derive the latter from the former. The doctrine’s effect has been to —0
—+1
[ 179 ]
carve out, in the Western application, an autonomous sphere for ethics, thus
isolating it altogether (especially in G. E. Moore’s system) from naturalistic
domains of knowledge. In his famous passage on the issue,10 Hume makes a
distinction between propositions that pertain to transcendental domains
and propositions that relate to human beings, this being a move that aims
to separate religious matters from other affairs of the human world, where
religion is no longer associated with moral judgments. It is one thing for a
proposition to speak of transcendental affairs and another for it to express
sensory knowledge. The latter is no more informative of the former than
the former of the latter. They are not only separate; there cannot be an
instance in which religious propositions can provide the basis for ethical
knowledge.
There are, Taha argues, a number of objections that can be made against
the Humean conclusions, which have become central to modernity’s think-
ing about religion and secularism.11 First, the separation between the reli-
gious and the ethical rests on a skewed and highly constrained understand-
ing of “religion,” because (1) it relegates the latter to the status of theory
that rests on a set of enunciative judgments (aḥkām khabariyya), and (2) it
reduces religious rules to mere suppositions formulated by man to explain
his experience in the world due to his failure to grasp the natural causes of
things. Yet the failure lies in the inability of Hume and his likes to under-
stand that religion is more akin to social structures and quasi-institutional
setups (ashbah bil-mu’assasa). It is a set of rules and norms that, in addition
to being enunciative judgments, also define behavior, praxis, and certain
modes of living in the world, because these fulfill concrete and particular
needs. They define the relationships between social and worldly existents,
attending first and foremost to the need to garner benefit and to avoid harm.
And since deontological propositions and propositional imperatives are nec-
essarily ethical in nature, religion, which these propositions conceptually
formulate, is as much ethical as it is enunciative (SA, 44).
Furthermore, ethics may subordinate religious enunciative propositions
in that the latter’s effects may be deontological and duty-inducing, effec-
tively amounting to propositional commands that require performance,
whether it be a commission or omission of an act. In other words, it is not
always the apparent meaning of an enunciative proposition, but rather its
-1— performative value that is relevant and most important. In the proposition
0— “God commands me to do such-and-such,” it is not the actual event that God
+1—
[ 180 ]
has commanded that is the most interesting or significant, for the relevance
is not limited to the test of truth-value verification. For the believer, the
enunciative value is of secondary importance at best, because for her it is
neither an epistemological nor an ontological proposition: there is no ques-
tion of the truth or falsehood of the proposition, nor is there a question as
to the existence or non-existence of the agent as the source of that proposi-
tion. Rather, Taha argues, the command inherent in the proposition—that
such and such must or must not be performed—is taken reflexively, trans-
forming the command from a second-person instruction into a first-person
sense of duty. Thus, “God commands me to do such-and-such” is metamor-
phosed in the mind of the believer into “I should do such-a nd-such.” The
proposition has in it the inherent power to transform itself from enuncia-
tion to praxis, one having an ethical thrust of the first order. Which is also
to say that this type of proposition establishes a necessary relationship (ʿalāqa
ḍarūriyya) between command and performance. However, if it were taken
to be merely enunciative, the relationship would remain probable, lacking,
strictly speaking, logical concomitance (SA, 45).
Thus, the very statement “God commands me to do such-and-such” pos-
sesses the very same meaning inherent in the statement “God makes it oblig-
atory that I do such-and-such.” There exists neither an intermediary stage
of inference nor a middle term between the two propositions. Uttering the
one would be identical to uttering the other, or at best, one would consti-
tute an exegesis or explanation of the other. The subjectivity involved in the
apprehension of the linguistic and conceptual range of such propositions
renders Hume’s Law not only arbitrary but also insufficiently inclusive, since
it fails to account for the full implications of linguistic structures.
Second, Hume is also wrong in driving a wedge between religion and eth-
ics and in claiming that ethics derives its values from moral sentiments,
feelings of approval and disapproval—e.g., esteem, praise, blame—in spec-
tators who contemplate a person’s character or action. He distinguished
between moral sentiment and reason, arguing that the latter is the slave of
passion, that it alone can be neither a motive to the will nor the source
of ethics.12
Yet, Hume’s notion of moral sentiment finds identical parallels in religious
conceptions (SA, 45–46). The Islamic concept of fiṭra, for instance, is not much
different from Hume’s idea of moral sentiment. In this tradition, fiṭra has —-1
come to denote an ethical feeling, a moral sentiment with which humans —0
—+1
[ 181 ]
metaethic. The split “does not stand as a timeless truth. . . . It makes sense
only within certain ethical outlooks.”15 Like much else in modernity, it was
made to be a sort of timeless and universal truth designed to “outrageously
fix the rules of discourse in the interests of one outlook, forcing rival
views into incoherence.”16 Like Taha, both philosophers have advocated the
contingent, contextual nature of the split, arguing not only for the possi-
bility that the distinction may altogether be false in the first place, but also
that—even if we grant it any validity—there is no moral reasoning that
can “do without modes of thinking that the split rules out.”17 This in effect
amounts to saying, as Taha repeatedly insists, that moral thinking and the
fixing of moral values and ethical considerations in modernity’s world-
view cannot be achieved while maintaining the split. Another, eminently
defensible “outlook” would be to view enunciative propositions in religion
as fully capable of combining Fact and Value, if not being wholly made of
Value (SA, 50).
As is the case with the Is/Ought distinction, the purpose of enunciative
propositions in religion is not so much to affirm or deny a predicate’s rela-
tionship to a subject, but rather to urge reflection through the information
conveyed. In other words, these propositions, more frequently than not, do
not constitute statements about a thing in particular, but rather instruct
about similar matters or themes contained in the propositions. What is sig-
nificant in these propositions is not their factual content but the allusive
power embedded in them, which in addition conveys the intention of the
proposition’s author. Here formal logical analysis of statements fails, for the
author’s status, power, or charisma determines the significance and extent
of the gripping power of the contents. In fact, the meaning of propositions
in good part lies in their power to “indicate” or “signify” their authors, for
the more a proposition “signifies” its author, the clearer the intention of the
language of that proposition, and thus the strength or weakness of its con-
tent (SA, 49).
It is a narrow modality of reasoning to think of religious propositions as
amenable to the tests of science and theoretical knowledge, for religion was
never intended to teach people how to calculate and measure reality, study
it, and subject it to various tests of truth. The major function of religious
propositions is to guide people in the use of science, scientific instruments,
and ways of studying the world. Science and its instruments and methods —-1
are open-ended spheres, amenable to every possible way of conduct. The —0
—+1
[ 183 ]
III
citizen. Here, Taha seems at one with Iris Murdoch, who averred that the
modern individual’s ethical constitution is not made by the state, since the
state does not seek to make him “good.”22 But Taha goes considerably fur-
ther: Ethics is neither a complementary quality nor a luxury, but integral to
the very constitution of the subject as a human; it is, let us recall, constitutive
of the quiddity of humanity, defining the identity of the human and of
humanity, all at once.23 “The existence of the human is not prior to ethics,
but concomitant with it” (SA, 54). This virtual maxim, one might categori-
cally state, represents the most persistent and fundamental thesis of our
thinker, consistent with his claim that the essence of humanity is not ratio-
nality but ethics. In late modernity, this is clearly a novel philosophical
position, of which Taha is fully aware.
The third belief that must be dispelled, following from the second, is the
identification of ethics as consisting of particular virtues. For instance,
there is a long tradition, extending down from Plato, that counts temper-
ance, courage, wisdom, and justice as the constitutive elements of virtue,
qualities that some thinkers have mistakenly thought to be both inclusive
and universal. But the very idea of limiting virtue and ethics to particu-
lar attributes and traits (mabda’ al-ḥaṣr) is flawed. First, ethics is coexten-
sive with human actions, since to each and every act that can be counted
there corresponds an ethical value. And since these acts are inexhaust-
ible, so are the ethical values corresponding to them. Counting or quanti-
fying them is pointless. Second, the very same ethical act may be dispensed
with at various levels, giving each level a different meaning.24 Third, far
from being a numerable quantity, ethics is the way to comprehend the
meaning of “limitlessness,” since human acts are virtually infinite, and
each act operates at countless levels of meaning and intensity. In other
words, there is no cap on moral conduct and ethical cultivation because
these endeavors gain in depth and magnitude to an indefinable and indeter-
minable extent. And fourth, the reasonableness of the human act may
be viewed or judged insofar as it possesses reasonableness in itself (min
dhātihā). But human acts can also be assessed insofar as they possess rea-
sonableness by virtue of being in the world, that is, by virtue of the effects
that all things-in-the-world exercise on them. Once an act is viewed from
the latter perspective, which Taha terms maʿqūliyya takāmuliyya (complemen-
-1— tary intelligibility), it ceases to be quantifiable or classifiable. Belonging
0—
+1—
[ 186 ]
IV
Taha here takes his time to elaborate subtle distinctions between and
among concepts that convey the general meaning of domination, including
taḥakkum, saṭwa, ba’s, and baṭsh, concepts that he employs in specific ways,
with nuanced meanings that are not to be confused with their lexical and
conventional connotations. What is worth noting in all these shades of con-
ceptual meaning is that domination is not directed only externally; it is, no
less, a self-imposed and self-inflicted feature of power. It is the domination
of man over man, and domination of the self by the self. “The ordering ratio-
nality of scientific technique is founded on the cultivation of capabilities of
possibility and command, . . . all of which are dedicated to a quest of sovereignty
over the world.” The “possibility” rests on the effective logic that what can
be done shall be done; and the “domination” is the totalistic mastery over
all things in the world, a universal and unqualified domination (SA, 116–18,
132, 142).
At this point, Taha’s reader begins to question his designation of West-
ern modernity as a civilization of speech. As the preceding paragraph abun-
dantly demonstrates, our philosopher is acutely aware of the rise in mod-
ern Europe of an unprecedented sense of sovereignty, one that affirms not
only the death of God but also the crowning of man as the ultimate lord
among beings. Since this rise to sovereignty is admittedly practical and
effectively entrenched in practice, and since this latter is closely tied to com-
mand, control, and what Scheler has articulated as a unique form of domi-
nation,28 Western modernity is hardly confined to, or characterized by,
speech, however expansive this designation may be. It would seem that if
Western modernity has anything to commend it, it is its penchant to do
everything that can be done, an attribute that Taha, as we saw, himself recog-
nizes. Yet, this does not, and cannot, preclude the characterization of this
civilization as one of speech. Indeed, everything Taha says of this attribute
and the mode of its manifestations in modernity is, I think, correct. But an
unqualified and categorical qualification of this civilization as one of speech
may appear as both partial and misleading. In fact, one could argue that the
“speech” aspect is somewhat secondary to the practical side of things,
although “speech” has undoubtedly played a crucial role in making “prac-
tice” and action possible, for “speech” is considerably performative.29
One, furthermore, can confidently say along with Taha that “speech” in
-1— Western culture has converted unethical value into a new form of ethics,30
0—
+1—
[ 190 ]
and what he might have called technologies of the soul. This is repre-
sented in the structural discrepancy between Sunday’s church worship
and Monday’s business-as-usual, which succumbs to the paradigmatically
sovereign realities on the ground. Yet, for this argument to hold, the dis-
tinction should not be one between “speech” and practice as fiʿl, a neutral
term, but rather one between speech and ʿamal, that which, in Taha’s con-
ceptual repertoire, stands for praxis, habituation, and technologies of
ethical embodiment.
Although the expression of “civilization of speech” is painted with all-
too-wide a brush, it is nonetheless difficult to see how this overgeneraliza-
tion is detrimental to Taha’s philosophy, for in his constant and consistent
emphasis on the practical side of Western modernity (which has problema-
tized his designation in the first place) there is ample and detailed acknowl-
edgment of its role in his overall thought. Modern Western civilization is a
civilization of action and deed, no doubt, but not the kind of deed and praxis
to Taha wants, and rightly so, to see. Taha would have stood on the side of
caution had he described it as a materialist civilization whose speech con-
sists of moralism. More apt, a “civilization of discursive moralism” would per
force presuppose material and materialist ambition and all the forms of fiʿl
that Taha has rightly attributed to it.
It is in the nature of procedural scientific technique to legitimize those
forms of knowledge that are amenable to its methods, on the one hand, and
to marginalize and oppress those forms that fall outside its sway and capa-
bilities. Whatever lies outside experiment, quantification, and calculability
is pushed aside and out. “It is no wonder, then, that in its quest for total sov-
ereignty, the ordering rationality of scientific technique would sever its
ties with ethics, ousting the effects of ethics’ subject matter from its objects
of inquiry and barring ethical approaches from the methods it has estab-
lished” (SA, 118). This is not to say that this rationality and its technique did
not develop its own code of ethics (which can be seen in the practice of med-
icine, business, and liberal discourse at large, all of which exemplify what a
civilization of speech means). Rather, what Taha seems to have in mind is
that the entire range of the ethical technologies of the self has been obliter-
ated from the sociology of knowledge, a claim that echoes Foucault’s monu-
mental statement that in modernity this technology has faded from mem-
-1— ory.32 This unprecedented rationality and its technique have thus replaced
0—
+1—
[ 192 ]
fear elucidates the possible relationship between irresponsibility and the human
technical project. Since technology turns human action into an irresponsible
excess of action . . . an ethics of responsibility ought to preserve “the heritage of a
past evolution.’ . . . Jonas insists on the essential solidarity of human life with the
general phenomenon of life. The complex dynamics of life’s evolution has an
ontological, transcendent and metaphysical meaning, and so the humanity—as
part of that overall adventure and evolution—has the “supreme duty to preserve
it intact.” As a consequence, mankind today is committed to acting so that
humankind tomorrow will be able to respond to the outcry of terrestrial life, that
is, it will be able to assume the ontological duty of responsibility. So this is our cur-
rent obligation towards future mankind:
[Jonas argues that] “[t]his means, in turn, that it is less the right of future men
(namely, their right to happiness, which, given the uncertain concept of ‘happi-
ness,’ would be a precarious criterion anyway) than their duty over which we
have to watch, namely, their duty to be truly human: thus over their capacity
for this duty—the capacity to even attribute it to themselves at all—which we
could possibly rob them of with the alchemy of our ‘utopian’ technology.”35
Ellul and Dominique Janicaud. Both thinkers start from the premise that
technique and technology have brought a good measure of disaster to
humanity, and agree that what was originally intended to serve humanity
has ended up oppressing and dominating it. The ferocity of this phenome-
non even permits the formulation of a dialectical law that may be called the
Law of Inversion (Qānūn al-Inqilāb): Every rationality that seeks to reach the abso-
lute limit of power will be inverted into its opposite, inversion itself marking the limit
that the power of rationality cannot transcend. Ellul, like Janicaud, thus calls for
scaling back the ambitions of both rationality and technique by means of
adopting a much needed ethic of asceticism. Clearly, such a deliberate
approach to ethics calls for refraining from the adoption of any technical
“achievement” until the effects and ramifications of this “achievement” are
shown, to the highest extent possible, to be beneficial and not harmful. This
Luddite-like skepticism must also be accompanied by a relinquishment of
the rules of conduct that have already been imposed on us by the impera-
tives of technique (SA, 128). Briefly put, these two theories call for a deliber-
ate adoption of weakness as a way of fighting back against power, itself the
embodiment of strength and force.
Taha admits that Janicaud’s scaling back on the exercise of (denuded) rea-
son and Ellul’s virtual boycott of technology and technique are steps in the
right direction, one that brings them closer to religious ethics. Yet, their the-
ories, like those of Apel and Habermas, remain shallow, especially Jani-
caud’s (SA, 129), lacking anchors in what Taha might have called moral tech-
nologies of the soul. Religion is the easiest, fastest, and most convincing
way to accomplish this ascetic stance. Religious asceticism, whose emblem
is the adoption and perfection of weakness, is precisely “the door through
which the soul is strengthened in its encounter against the temptation
of technique.” Without a structured, systemic, behavioral, psychologi-
cal, and spiritual anchor for this “withdrawal,” Ellul’s and Janicaud’s calls
would be inadequate, for they would remain lodged within a powerful sys-
tem of rationality and technique that they can only theorize about but
never transcend.
In sum, while the three theories of responsibility (Jonas), communication
(Habermas and Apel), and weakness (Ellul) claim to revise the destructive
course of the rationality of scientific technique by means of an alleged cor-
rective ethics, they remain largely embedded in the conventional morality —-1
of dominant discourse and thought. They offer too little too late (SA, 131). —0
—+1
[ 197 ]
altogether, a level of intensity that surpasses the two earlier stages. Here
sincerity of intention becomes commensurate with the truthfulness of the
performer’s speech, and the truthfulness of her act becomes commensu-
rate with her sincere intention. Thus, a single ethical act possesses a multi-
ple and multilayered constitution, with each part and layer reflecting a
particular ethical state (SA, 82).
No less crucial for enhanced ethics is its comprehensiveness (ittisāʿ), for
it is all-inclusive, all-encompassing. Every single act, large or small, is tied
to an ethical duty that must be present either internally or publicly. Ethical
duty is deeply psychological, thoroughly social, and comprehensively com-
munal and public. It manifests itself not only at the level of the relationship
between man and God, between the human being and her creator, between
the individual and the social group; it also manifests itself in all other
domains that relate to all living beings, whether sentient or insentient, mate-
rial or immaterial. Trees, insects, and stones are as significant as the con-
cepts of wealth, time, or love. The “rock that averts one from impeding the
path of another” must be viewed with awe, and the “times in which one finds
himself living” must not be cursed, for both rock and time are spiritual ener-
gies (ṭāqa rūḥiyya) that are akin to one’s sense of gratitude for the entirety
of creation and its creator. The ethical act thus encompasses everything and
anything, in the same way the Creator encompasses all his creation, for all
creatures possess specific rights, exclusively belonging to each of them,
rights that are ethical to the core (SA, 83).
Enhanced ethics, absent from the civilization of speech, also requires
relinquishing abstract thought for its own in favor of actual practice. Dis-
cursive analysis, theorization, and rhetorical language are of no use. Action,
praxis, and works are the desiderata, requiring commitment, consistency,
and unwavering regularity (SA, 84–86). In the commission of the entire range
of life’s acts, the human subject as an enhanced ethical being is formed. Eth-
ics therefore is a dialectic of performance and self-fashioning, the one gen-
erating and engendering the other. What one knows one practices, and what
is practiced is what one knows.
This integrated ethical existence may be contrasted to the fragmented
modern subject, whose knowledge of the world seems often unrelated to
courses of ethical action. Taha does not historicize these differing identi-
ties, but it is not difficult to provide an illustration. Take, for instance, a —-1
typical professor in a medieval Islamic university as compared to a typical —0
—+1
[ 201 ]
modern professor of, say, moral philosophy. In the case of the former, there
was, as a general rule, a near identity between knowledge in the “classroom”
and the personal conduct of the professor in and outside of that pedagogi-
cal context, for the criterion of moral exemplarity was enshrined, con-
sciously, as an ethic, a requirement, and a standard by which the professor
was to be judged.46 Personal rectitude (ʿadāla) and ethical predisposition,
among other morally grounded requirements, were imperative for practic-
ing the “profession,” if not for qualifying to enter its ranks in the first place.
Unethical conduct came at a price, not least in the form of biographical
accounts that would record misdemeanors, and that would remain, as they
did, a legacy for successive generations and centuries.47 The work of the
author-professor would normally gain or lose authority by virtue of these
accounts. The typical professor qua professor then was, morally and ethi-
cally, an exemplary figure, one after whom the students fashioned their own
selves, just as the professor had fashioned himself in the tradition of his
teachers, back to the Prophet, and just as the students of the students were
to do.
Compare this with the modern professor, whose personal conduct outside
the classroom is not seen to be related to what he or she teaches, much less
as a topic of ethical inspection and valuation. A professor might be teach-
ing, successfully, ethics and moral philosophy from Plato to Kant to
MacIntyre, and still be even “a successful psychopath” and a scoundrel of
sorts. As long as he has not committed a criminal offense, he would continue
to operate as a “normal” member of the profession. This example, exhibit-
ing what I have elsewhere called a “genetic slice,” 48 illustrates, I think, the
difference between what Taha calls the civilizations of speech and that of
deeds.
A central characteristic of the civilization of speech is its inability to
engender happiness in the individual, who always feels a lack, and whose
needs expand progressively without being ever satiated. Our philosopher
does not tag this dilemma in terms of negative and positive liberty, but this
is in effect what he is arguing. “If the source of misery (shaqā’) is the indi-
vidual’s feeling of deprivation and lack insofar as (material) interests and
greed are concerned, the source of happiness is his feeling of freedom
from these interests and needs, and it is well known that enhanced ethics
-1— enables the individual to free himself of all that which is not beneficial to
0— him, and to bring him closer to that which serves his higher ends” (SA, 87).49
+1—
[ 202 ]
-1—
0—
+1—
[ 204 ]
Our approach to the relationship between religion and politics has come
to distinguish itself from preceding approaches, . . . [for this approach]
is “neither historical nor political; nor is it social, legal, fiqhī, or ideologi-
cal. Rather, it is a spiritual approach . . . insisting on what the secularist has
forgotten and taking to further heights that from which the religionist
has shirked. (RD, 17)1
With these words, Taha announces the distinctiveness of his method and
argument, and indeed his project that aims to outline a new conception of
politics. As he puts it, the elaboration of the relationship between religion
and politics in his work amounts to nothing less than a “theory of human
existence, for the meaning, horizontality, and depth of this existence are
defined by virtue of this relationship” (RD, 181). His is a biting, if not devas-
tating, critique of the two discourses that have come to dominate the field
of political thought in both the West and the Muslim world. The secular West
and its imitating followers in the Muslim world are no more and no less a
target of his critical reassessment than the “political” Islamists, however
varied their ideological and intellectual shapes and colors.
Perhaps surprising to many, the critique of modern politics and political
thought—if not of the Schmittian political as a defining feature of the mod- —-1
ern project—begins in Taha’s thought with a marginalized and neglected —0
—+1
[ 205 ]
Small wonder then that the modernists (muḥdathūn) do their best to sep-
arate between the two worlds, all the while unable to forget the virtues of
the unseen. They have discretely appropriated some of its qualities, one in
particular they seem unable to dispense with. This is the quality of majesty
( jalāla), which they have renamed sovereignty (siyāda) as a way of masking
its transcendental origins. They have tenaciously clung to this conception
and have gone so far as to attribute institutions, peoples, and individuals to
it. The endless quest for it has become a signifier of autonomy and of man’s
endeavor for self-management, all of which is done under the illusion that
man can command the affairs of the world as God had commanded them
earlier. The result, as is well known, has been a misplaced sovereignty, which
has made man master and god, even a self-worshiper (RD, 25). Yet, this mod-
ernist predilection to transcendentalism is denied and suppressed, but
in the very process of suppression, it returns “as if to affirm itself with a
vengeance” (AD, 42).
This self-divination would have been impossible if it were not for the self,
since it is this faculty that specializes in attributing things in the world to
the concerns and interests of humans, to one’s self, one’s ego (AD, 93). In sec-
ular modernism, this self-attribution (nisba dhātiyya) has come to possess
an exponentially increasing power that has ultimately reached a point where
man “has become despotic without seeing it . . . and a tyrant without notic-
ing it,” which is to say that his acts of oppression have acquired a transcen-
dental quality as evidenced in the fact that they have become rationally
untenable and as incomprehensible as those that lie in the unseen. “He does
his deeds, and witnesses them now, only to [quickly] forget them by relegat-
ing them to the unseen” (RD, 25). A central concept in modernity’s way of
living in the world, sovereignty is thus the attribution of human acts to tran-
scendentalism, whether these acts pertain to the domination of the mod-
ern state or to violence and oppression, against man and nature.
Taha does not dwell on concrete examples, nor does he show the extent
of modernity’s engagement in particular events or behaviors as dimensions
of transcendentalism. But it is not difficult to invoke political theology, as
one among many such examples, to illustrate his argument. Of course, the
“return of the religious,” the vast swaths of populations who believe in magic
and spirits (including those in the West), and the irrationality of the futur-
istic and secularist doctrine of progress are likewise good examples. “The —-1
—0
—+1
[ 207 ]
the former than the “religious,” theist, or worshipper can from the latter.
In every sphere of life, the actor chooses to follow one path or the other,
according to her beliefs and needs. If the chosen path toward management
is Extranscendental, then his activity is political and ultimately geared
toward sovereign control (siyāsī/mutasayyid). By contrast, the goal of Intran-
scendentalism is ethical self-formation. The Intranscendentalist “economic
practitioner,” for instance, does not view his activity as a mode of produc-
tion ensuing from his own self (min ladunnihi) but rather as good works to
which the Giver (Rāziq)7 guides him. He does not regard the fruits of his work
as mere profit, progressively accumulating with further work and produc-
tion, but rather as a series of bounties bestowed upon him. This economic
activity, insofar as it is a form of management, is a religious activity, standing
in sharp contrast with the secularist approach. When profits and accumu-
lation of wealth are seen as means to increase one’s influence in the financial
and business community, therefore bolstering his ability to control market
prices and enabling him to successfully compete against his economic
peers, his activity is, insofar as it is a method of management, a political
activity (AD, 48).
II
With this contrast between religion and politics in mind, Taha wants to
show that a true interpretation and application of religion (that is, as a gen-
uine religious praxis) is the best method of Intranscendentalism, while poli-
tics remains its unrivaled counterpart in achieving Extranscendentalism.
Capitalizing on the indispensability for the human mind of transcen-
dence, including secular ontology (what we call political theology, theology
of progress, and the like), Taha argues that Intranscendence rests on three
principles. The first of these is fiṭra, the innate ability of humans to compre-
hend their archetypal state as one connected with an unseen world, a fact
that is anthropologically attested in societies the world over, including in
the so-called secular West. There are not many ways to explain why the
majority of people, even in the present, and despite oppressive secular dis-
course, remain, as they have been for millennia, bound to spiritualism
and belief in one form of transcendence or another. “The spirit of the —-1
human being possesses a special force (quwwa khāṣṣa), mostly resembling —0
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[ 209 ]
Weber and Bookchin)11 and the generalized self-d ivination of the modern
subject. Simultaneously, the more power accumulates in the hands of the
powerful, the more the transcendental quality of unity is transposed onto
the world of the here and now, which is to say that the political actor, in the
zenith of her power, culminates in harboring the ambition of molding real-
ity in her image, a uniform reality bent to her will, yet one with necessarily
earthly limitations that always force it to fall short of its cosmological coun-
terpart. Nonetheless, this does not detain the political actor from accumu-
lation of power, since politics, being a secular theology, creates a subject who
seeks to defy death in the absence of a truly godless world.12 What our phi-
losopher is saying without saying it is that in its full manifestations politics
is by nature and quintessentially authoritarian, despotic, oppressive, and
hegemonic, no matter what form of governance is adopted (RD, 91–131). The
difference between one attribute and the other, he seems to suggest, is
merely one of degree, not quality (RD, 128).
The fundamental relation between sovereign and subject, framed in
terms of social contract theory, is ultimately one of coercion. Once “rati-
fied,” this contract becomes a means not only of depriving the subjects of
their rights but also of extending the coercion of sovereign will to the exer-
cise of violence. The exclusive right to use this violence culminates in fear
of its threat, a state of mind governing the Extranscendentalized subject as
second nature. The sovereign is thus transformed from a party to the con-
tract to a domineering power, interested not so much in securing the
subjects’ safety as in subduing them. “Fear [of the threat] of violence thus
becomes stronger than fear of death, because he who fears death may not
fear violence, but he who fears coercion or violence a fortiori fears death”
(RD, 123).
Yet, this fear, ever present and pervasive, becomes woven into the matrix
of the subject’s psyche, by making it integral to what has been called exis-
tential threat (RD, 130). Fear of the sovereign’s power is transposed into
fear for the self and for one’s well-being, whether individual or national. It
is a totalistic fear that makes possible the citizen’s voluntary, if not will-
ing, acceptance to be led to war, where life and death are decided (RD, 125–
26). The crux of Taha’s lengthy argument in this context is that fear and
anxiety, acquiring complex and ever-changing forms, constitute one of the
fundamental bases of modern politics. Yet, pervasive fear is the function of —-1
domination as exercised by the political actor who is set up as the sovereign. —0
—+1
[ 213 ]
-1— First is the principle of “choosing an existential direction” (mabda’ al-ikhtiyār al-
0— wujūdī), according to which the human being stands between two, and only two,
+1—
[ 214 ]
existential choices: he must either bring the unseen world to bear upon the seen
(reality), thereby practicing Intranscendentalism, or bring the latter to bear on
the former, thereby practicing Extranscendentalism. Second . . . is the principle
“of dualism of human constitution” (mabda’ izdiwāj al-bunya al-insāniyya),
according to which the practice of religion is the product of the fiṭra that defines
the nature of the spirit, this latter being the foundation of Intranscendentalism.
At the same time, politics is the product of the attribution that defines the nature
of the self, this latter being the foundation of Extranscendentalism. And third,
is the principle of “choosing the method of management” (mabda’ ikhtiyār al-
manhaj al-tadbīrī), according to which the human being stands between two, and
only two, choices: either religious management or political management, because
religion and politics are not two different spheres of human life, but rather two
parallel methods for managing these spheres, in accordance with the human
being’s [type of] connection to two worlds, the seen and the unseen. (RD, 181–82)
III
The next stage in Taha’s overall argument deals with secularism’s penchant
for what he calls “the narrowing of human existence.” Secularism rests on
the separation between the seen and the unseen, thus categorically reject-
ing religion as a source of political guidance. Secularism no doubt comes in
different hues, and is not one thing. However, there is a common denomi-
nator that characterizes this complex phenomenon, in both its higher and
its lower forms, and the various degrees in between. The American experi-
ence represents the lower form, whereas the French is the highest, or “most
severe” (ashadduhā). Requiring a reevaluation of secularism, “our theory”
departs from an “expansive vision” (taṣawwur muwassaʿ) of human life and
existence. This is an “open vision” (munfatiḥ) that permits human existence
to flourish in at least two worlds, for while human beings live in one seen
world, they may also live in more than one unseen world (RD, 182). The thrust
of the argument then is this, that existential narrowness is “the gravest dis-
ease afflicting all forms of secularism.”15
Existential narrowness appears to be the function or result of a particu-
lar conception of law as a means of social governance. For this narrowness
is directly related to the general claim that it is impossible for a society to —-1
set forth its own laws without having to enact the separation (taqrīr al-faṣl) —0
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[ 215 ]
between religious and political practice (RD, 183). It is obvious that by the
nature of things man-made law must eventually serve political purposes,
whereas divinely ordained law must be tied to religious practice. Which is
also to say that the boundaries of the two modes of legal practice are ren-
dered separate and clearly distinguished from each other. The total separa-
tion is said to be due to qualitative difference between the two modes of
governance. Just as there cannot be political management (tadbīr) in religion,
there cannot be, we are told, worship in politics, meaning that religious wor-
ship (understood as technological praxis bent on ethical self-cultivation)
can never constitute the purpose or core of political practice, nor can the
latter be at the core of the former (RD, 184, 214). Yet, objections to such an
understanding abound, and their robustness cannot be denied. And it is with
a view to engaging and refuting these objections that the next few dozen
pages in Taha’s text are dedicated.
Ever since Kant laid down the principle that moral law is autonomous—
namely, the source of the moral law is autonomous free will—the practice
has been to pit autonomy against heteronomy. In both politics and ethics,
modernity has developed the conviction that the latter constitutes an exter-
nal imposition and that it was directly associated, due to the European his-
torical experience with Christianity, with religion. The religious has thus
come to stand for a legislative will that stands outside of and external to
man, whereas the political—here the perceived antonym of the religious—
has come to be associated with a legislative will internal and intrinsic to
man. Founded upon secularism, modernity thus pushed hard to disengage
itself from “external legislation,” especially in the social and political
spheres. Thus, the more a society could extricate itself from this type of leg-
islation, the more modern it was deemed. The most modern of all societies
are those that are seen to have categorically severed this link.
This conception has been integral to the widespread view that the older
a society, the more religious it is, which is to say that societies become less
religious as they “develop” throughout history. In his Le désenchantment du
monde, Marcel Gauchet argues that societies move from the primitive hunt-
ing and gathering “age of magic” to the ritualistic age of agriculture, and
from this to religious pluralism, only to culminate, still later in history, in
monotheism or theistic unity (tawḥīd). This, Taha argues, is both empirically
-1— and factually incorrect, and much evidence points to a different historical
0— picture that does not confirm Gauchet’s scheme (RD, 187). Yet, what matters
+1—
[ 216 ]
theology of progress does, that all previous historical stages are prepara-
tory phases from which we learn to avoid mistakes and on the shoulders of
which we rise to further heights. In fact, this theology is explicitly articu-
lated in Taha’s thought, and forcefully to boot. In Rūḥ al-Ḥadātha, he
declares that “premodernity . . . is [defined as] the time of falling into the
status of wardship (wiṣāya), against which modernity revolted in particu-
lar.”21 This conception re-enacts the same sense of supremacy that imbues
the modern, especially liberal, theology of progress. The conception not
only is anachronistic, but can be charged with the double act of narcissistic
self-adulation and simultaneous deprecation of the historical other. In this
narrative, furthermore, there is a subconscious, and thus a disturbingly
anachronistic, mapping of the exploitative and violent European Church
practices onto Islamic history, making the latter a virtual replica of the
former.
Furthermore, the full implications of adopting this theology must ulti-
mately lead to serious difficulties in the part of Taha’s thought that deals
with the foundational principle of creative continuity (ibdāʿ mawṣūl).22 If
premodernity is the age of wiṣāya, a clearly unqualified rendering of Kant’s
Unmündigkeit, then why does it continue to be useful to us? And if a positive
answer to this question can be managed, then how do we extricate those
valuable parts of the turāth from intellectual “immaturity”? By this logic, it
would seem difficult, if not impossible, to justify any form of historical con-
nectivity with an “immature”—and, by implication, backward and juvenile—
tradition.
IV
they have increased their autonomy by virtue of these legislative acts. Such
laws may instead introduce further restrictions upon freedoms that they
had acquired after long struggles. No wonder then that, under the pressures
of secularism, some major thinkers (Rousseau and Montesquieu, among oth-
ers) equated freedom with law in that freedom is said to be attainable by
obedience to the law, and the more obedience to the law is exercised, the
more freedom is purported to obtain. Just as no ethical freedom can be had
without total obedience to the ethical law, there cannot be political free-
dom without a categorical submission to the human political law. The prob-
lematic here is not the principle that the foundation of freedom lies in obe-
dience to the law, however paradoxical this may be, but it is the dualistic
proposition that obedience to human law is productive of freedom whereas
obedience to divine law is a form of slavery (ʿubūdiyya). That law issues from
human will can in no way mean that the quality of obedience entailed by it
is different from the quality entailed by divine law (AD, 193). Self-legislation
as such is not, therefore, a sufficient condition for autonomy.
Furthermore, autonomy may obtain, notwithstanding the absence of self-
legislation (just as self-legislation may obtain by virtue of an external act
coercing such legislating, in which case one would be operating as a legisla-
tor but without true autonomy). This is so because the ultimate measure of
freedom is the extent to which the citizen can truly and genuinely choose
what determines whether she is free or not. The wider the range of choice,
the broader the limits of freedom. Freedom thus possesses a wider range
than autonomy in legislating, for this latter itself is the object of the deci-
sion not only to self-legislate (i.e., to choose this mode of legislation) but also
to choose the law that is being legislated (this law). Otherwise, autonomy
would be meaningless.
There is yet another possibility. The citizens may find themselves in a sit-
uation in which they find it necessary to enact laws that are not of their
own making. But in choosing to adopt these laws, they regard themselves
as having exercised free agency, in which case the freedom to choose is
autonomous. Well considered and deeply reflected upon, their act of “bor-
rowing” might even be said to exceed, in terms of relevance and meaning
to their lives, what the original legislators have attained for their own inter-
ests and well-being. And if this is true, then the adoption of a higher law,
one that may even be divine, is a fortiori more justifiable, rational, and legit- —-1
imate. Taha could have historicized his logical argument, thereby giving it —0
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[ 221 ]
a sharper edge and more solidity. In the modern history of what has been
called “legal transplants,”26 this practice of borrowing law from other
nations, under the guise of sovereign will, is both extensive and undeni-
able. Thus whether the choice involves this or that law, it is nonetheless a
rational and autonomous one, all the same. Arguably, then, autonomy is
determined primarily not by the exercise of self-legislation, but rather by
the (potential) ability to choose, by possessing and exercising choice (RD,
193–94).
The second assumption in the secularist conception of law, we recall, was
that God’s will contradicts the citizens’ will. The conception is flowed due
to the misapprehension of both divine truth and divine will. Insofar as
the former is concerned, the secularists equated or analogized (tashbīh),
on the one hand, between human and divine ontologies and, on the other,
between God’s knowledge and human knowledge. The equation went so far
as to place human reason at the level of revelation, if not higher, this lead-
ing to either the humanization of God (ta’nīs al-ilāh) or the divination of the
human (ta’līh al-insān). Yet, in both cases, the transcendent is always pres-
ent, either for diminution (in God’s case) or for enhancement (in man’s case).
In all cases, however, the analogizing is shallow. Even when divine com-
prehension is acknowledged as limitless and exceeding in power any human
intellectual competence, the nonatheist secularists speak of it as if it is a
foreign, irrelevant concept, as if their inability to understand it is itself evi-
dence that God is irrelevant or that he is just not there, all of which comes
close to an effective denial of his existence.
The secularists likewise inflate their own capacities, arrogating to them-
selves a power with which they think man can own not only himself but
also all that which exists around him. “Some of them even made it their mis-
sion to shake off the [natural] limitations on man’s existence, attempting to
breach any such limitations. Yet others aspired to expand the horizons of
reason beyond any limit, just as politics or economics has been made to be.
Their fascination with man’s capabilities led them to the fantasy that one
day man will be able to rid himself of the natural constraints with which
he was born, defying the dominion of time, place, and death” (RD, 196).
There is therefore a corollary relationship between their fantastical esti-
mation of man’s power and their extreme ignorance of that which created
-1— man in the first place.
0—
+1—
[ 222 ]
interests lie. In sum, the relationship between the two wills has been seen as
conflictual and oppositional, setting up God as an adversary. How can man
challenge God as an adversary unless he sets himself up as an equal, as
another God?27
All this, Taha argues, points to the validity of the initial argument about
narrowing the horizons of man’s existence. The claim that self-legislation
is the basis of sovereignty contributes to an exponential narrowing of these
horizons. First, sovereignty, in one important sense, is a lonely place, since
it is as large as the sovereignty of weak, transient, and limited humans. By
contrast, the worshiper’s horizons are boundless, increasing their expan-
sive dimensions with the increase of, and intense dedication to, worship—
this latter is what we have called, after Foucault, the technologies of the
self. Second, the claim has the tendency to predicate autonomy on self-
legislation, which in turn further constricts the scope of this autonomy.
Should the citizen, as we have seen, be left with the ability and freedom to
choose (ikhtiyār), instead of “inventing” his own law, his freedom would be
patently increased, in quality and quantity.
(At this juncture, the reader will not have failed to notice that the term
of choice for Taha’s subject is muwāṭin, which I have generally translated,
according to customary modern usage, as “citizen.” Within the context of
Taha’s analysis, the usage is puzzling, because it a priori assumes a particu-
lar political subjectivity that is wholly the product of the nation-state,
against which, as we will see, he appears to militate. None of the authorita-
tive classical Arabic lexicons recognizes this form, assigning to the term
waṭan the nonpolitical and basic meaning of “residence in which you live.”28
Which is another way of saying that lexically and conceptually, “muwāṭin”
is a modernist epistemic creation, and thus indissociable from a particular
political and ideological genealogy that Taha is refusing in the first place.)
The claim that God’s will contradicts human will has the same effect of
constraining the field of choice. First, it makes it unlikely for man to choose
God’s will, thus precluding both the very possibility of choice and that par-
ticular possibility of knowing the quality of Intranscendentalizing. The
underlying, but undeclared, premise here is that while (liberal) secularism
pretends to open a space for freedom of conscience and action, it in fact oper-
ates to narrow the horizons of this freedom. The choice of Intranscenden-
-1— talizing, by contrast, is by nature exponentially expansive, not restrictive.
0— Second, the claim of contradiction precludes God from the possibility of
+1—
[ 224 ]
Islam may be interpreted to mean resignation to the will of God; but if that will
remains no longer other, but is accepted by the consciousness as self, then the I
can expect of itself the ability to move mountains. . . . This was the meaning of
Islam: the progressive assimilation of self to God (so far as lies in human power).
This entails acceptance of the divine will, but not as something alien. The trans-
muting of selfish purpose to the will of God need not imply a surrender of will
because the assimilation of self to God does not imply a surrender to self. On the
contrary . . . this assimilation is the meaning of man’s fulfillment qua man, the
substance of Plato’s answer to the cryptic challenge of the oracle, “Know thy-
self!” To know oneself was to see in oneself affinities to the divine and to accept
the obligation implied by such recognition to develop these affinities—to become,
in as much as was in human power, like God.31
This is insofar as humans, as humans, are concerned. God, on the other —-1
hand, Taha tells us, is seen by secularists as representing an authoritarian —0
—+1
[ 225 ]
We have already noted that man, by virtue of revealed religion, enjoys freedom
of choice in all his acts, and even in creed. If he wishes to believe in God and
obey his law, he can do so; if he wishes to renounce God and disobey his orders,
he can do so as well. He is not accountable except for those [acts] that he himself
chooses, not for what he was forced to do under duress. Furthermore, in both
this and the unseen worlds, God entrusted man with certain things, secured
from him certain covenants, offered him trusteeship, appointed him his deputy
on Earth, honored him with a grant from his spirit, and preferred him over all
other creatures—so much so that he made him his friend, loved one, and inter-
locutor. If God had entrusted man, since he created him, with all these great
responsibilities, then it would be unreasonable for him to strip man of his will
and deprive him of his freedom at the moment when he reveals unto man a law
whose purpose is nothing but to guide him to accomplish these responsibilities
in the best of fashion. The truth of the matter is that God’s connection to man is
one of absolute creation and absolute revelation of law. The absolute creator is
certainly capable of combining the existence of his sacred will with that of the
fullest, undiminished range of human will. Likewise, the absolute legislator is
certainly capable of making his laws encompass everything, whether it is [as
particular as] individual’s worship or as general as [macro]management of
human affairs; he is capable of this just as he is capable of making man create
his own laws, which would comport with those all-encompassing [divine] laws.
(RD, 201–2)
and absolute monarchism of everyone else. Yet, this should not affect Taha’s
philosophical point that secularism, as an epistemology and set of values, is
arbitrary—a quality evidenced in the various forms that it developed in Euro-
America. There are the British, American, and French secularisms, among
others, with considerable differences between and among them, the French
having taken a particularly radical form.
The arbitrariness of all this is the point that our philosopher is trying to
drive home. A central aspect of the arbitrariness is the line of separation
between religious practice and political work, one that may be described as
a paradigmatic separation.33 The secularists view these two realms of prac-
tice as mutually exclusive, making it inescapable to choose one over the
other. Deriving from this major separation is the wedge between the “pri-
vate circle” (al-dā’ira al-khāṣṣa = private sphere) and the public sphere, where
religious observance is confined to the former and where religion is regarded
as pertaining to the “private spirit” (khāṣṣat al-rūḥ), this being “a host of prac-
tices that [privately] connect the believer, within the hidden layers of his
soul, with his God.” But this conception is defective, and for a number of rea-
sons that will unfold in due course. However, one reason is worth noting
here, namely, religion can be confined to rituals and it has no bearing on
public life. This, needless to say, is a reductionist view of religion, belied by
the conception, formulated by Mircea Eliade, that the religious agent is a
“total human being,” l’homme total, not a particular, divisible, or fragmentable
being (RD, 205). Religious practice does not stop at ritual, nor can it be con-
fined to specific, limited, and restricted spiritual needs. Rather, the religious
agent is a total man because that practice extends to all spheres of his life,
including the social, economic, and educational, not to mention the domains
of diet, health, and much else.
On the other hand, the secularists claim that the state, in regulating the
public sphere, is concerned only with this sphere and that it does not inter-
fere in the private domain, which it claims to protect in the interest of pre-
serving religious freedoms. But this is a false claim, since the political man-
agement of the public sphere has far-reaching effects on all aspects of
citizens’ lives. First, there is no state that is free of ideology, however hid-
den and masked such an ideology might be at first glance. For secularism
and politics themselves are necessarily ideological, whether they claim neu-
trality toward religion (as in the United States), or whether they declare an —-1
open war against it (as it is the case of laïcism in France). —0
—+1
[ 227 ]
latter not only upholds religion as a structuring mode of its existence, but
also systemically and systematically resists secularism. The former, on the
other hand, exists within a hybridity; it promotes certain aspects of religion
while neglecting others, and it does not resist the secularist separation
between the two spheres. Moreover, this crossbred variant shares an essen-
tial feature with the secularist state: the absence of religious dialogue,
which is to say, the omission of religion as a legitimate voice in public debate
about how a society ought to live. Yet, it differs from the secular state in
another respect, in that the secular state exercises violence against its own
citizens by constraining the scope of their private existence and endlessly
exercising pressure against it. However, it does permit the citizen a certain
measure of freedom, however limited, “to exercise the right of ijtihād within
his own religion” (i.e., to live within the boundaries of the respective sphere
as the citizen sees fit). By contrast, the crossbred state imposes its religious
will on its own citizens, thus depriving them of the right to this ijtihād, and
in the process engaging in an extreme form of violence against its own citi-
zens (RD, 216).
Against confining religious values to the private domain, Taha argues that
spirituality is anything but limited, for “there is nothing more effective in
shaping the attitudes of individuals than spiritual values.” Possessing opti-
mal power in creating the necessary connection and communication
between and among individuals, these values are most able to realize com-
munal social life. But since the secularists can barely transcend the psycho-
logical values that form the basis of political values, they are unequipped to
comprehend spiritual reality (al-ḥaqīqa al-rūḥiyya). Human society and man-
agement, they erroneously think, can be perfected only when the citizen
achieves political values, no more and no less. Spiritual sociality (al-ijtimāʿ
al-r ūḥī) is more apt than psychological sociality in its competence to man-
age. This claim is again invoked as a historical argument: in its millennial
history, religion was never meant to be limited to one or another sphere of
life, but was “revealed on the grounds that [social] life can, in its entirety,
be based on it. It is a holistic system consisting of commands, prohibitions,
guidance, and instruction, all of which bring these [spiritual] values to bear
on [human] reality” (RD, 217).
The second form of management—that of society—does not belong to the
species of state management. Here, there are no special agencies or institu- —-1
tions that supervise transactions or disputes between and among religious —0
—+1
[ 229 ]
through the will to coercion. This distinction between the internal and
external amounts to a distinction between two kinds of collectivity, and
therefore two kinds of subjects, two different concepts of the human that
constitute any collectivity. The external collectivity/subject, because it is
grounded in materialism, remains fragmented and lacking coherence
because materialist interests pull it in different directions. By contrast, the
internal subjectivity manages itself as part of the group, which means that
this group’s management becomes a collectivity of self-managing selves.
There are distinct advantages to individual (i.e., internal and self-
controlled) management over its collective (i.e., external and state-controlled)
counterpart, making the former not only superior but also the original
state (al-aṣl) in the human conception of management (RD, 223). In internal
management, the individual encounters her self, examining, from different
angles, its deeds and purposes. She is more attentive and interested in
reforming her self than others, for we must assume that she cares for her-
self more than others would care for her. Here, Taha seems to say, selfish-
ness acquires a new meaning, one that transforms not a knowledge of the
self but a hedonistic love of the self into an extensive operation of care of
the self. Neither would abiding by the highest form of ethics be a luxury or
a place of pride and social prestige, since integral to the individual’s ethical
constitution is the belief (imān) that there cannot be a communal man-
agement or a collective resolution of conflict without the individual first
attaining these convictions and achieving management within her self. In
this arrangement, collective or communal management would be as suc-
cessful as the individuals—as a sum total—make it; or, put differently, it would
be as successful as the average input of all the individuals’ managements
combined.
Yet, to be whole and complete, internal management transcends the cul-
tivation of ethical interests (maṣāliḥ akhlāqiyya) with a view to attaining the
higher state of attending to the interests of the spirit (al-maṣāliḥ al-r ūḥiyya).
The most perfect form of any human transaction—which constitutes the
relations between individuals within a group—obtains not by observance of
that which is apparent (ẓāhir) but rather by a deep psychological and spiri-
tual conviction of the hidden or inner soul (bāṭin).34 When the individual dis-
putes and censures her self, she does so in order to strip herself of the will
to attribution (irādat al-nisba), which we have seen to be a challenge of the —-1
spirit against the self, for this attributing self is the source of conflict, both —0
—+1
[ 231 ]
internal (within the self) and external (in society and social collectives at
large). The more the spirit can invoke the fiṭra, the more the individual’s
transactions acquire proper order, externally as well as internally. In sum,
true management begins and ends with the individual, for without it, no
collective or communal management is possible. And since this form of man-
agement is the original of all other forms, there should be no denying that
logically and historically religion has been at the center of individual man-
agement, this belying the secularist claim that religion is nothing more
than a matter of conscience belonging to the private domain.
Yet, modern political thought and practice belie this arrangement, and
Taha seems to insinuate that what is involved here is a state of denial. Even
in secular rule, religion has been indispensable, however much it has been
transformed, reshaped, and surreptitiously smuggled into this politics. It
would seem that Rousseau was the first to suggest that religion alone is able
to give law its power to bind, to create a cohesive political community, and
to bestow on the state respect and dignity. This new religion, standing in
the service of politics, must consist, the French philosopher advocated, of
four basic elements: belief in God’s existence, belief in the hereafter, reward
and punishment, and the removal of religious zeal. These are said to be so
foundational that the violator of any one of them must be put to death (RD,
228–29). The fact of the matter, however, is that the events that lay the foun-
dations of this civic religion are revolutions, not revelations. They are polit-
ical, never religious or ethical.
The paradigmatic cases for this distinctly and uniquely modern concep-
tion are the American and French revolutions. The first led to independence
and the second to the decimation of a monarchical system of rule in Amer-
ica. But in both cases, and nearly all cases to come, the republic has emerged
as the new sacred framework for political association. The Founders, again
in both cases, came to believe that their acts, unprecedented in human his-
tory, establish the new nation and the new homeland, and constitute and
fashion the new loyal citizen. The project was carried even further, for they
also believed that they were the bearers of a universal mission, intended to
advance the interests and improve the well-being of humanity at large. In
the name of advocating so-called human rights, constitutionalism, citizen-
ship, and state, they believed that no nation could escape this fate (RD, 229).
-1— Divination, however, remained this project’s hallmark. These principles,
0— institutions, and founding documents came to be venerated by legendary
+1—
[ 232 ]
VI
If politics and sovereignty are “concomitant acts,”37 and if the font of sover-
eignty is the attributing self, then it follows that exiting sovereignty neces-
sarily entails exiting politics, and vice versa. And in order to exit both, the
self, their matrix, must be overcome. Yet “speech” (understood here as the-
oretical analysis, a method integral to what Taha calls “civilization of
speech”) alone is insufficient. The liberal remedial prescription has been
public debate and public participation in collective decision-making, but this
type of discourse does not begin to analyze the deep structures of sover-
eignty. To the contrary, because it banks on public participation, liberalism
generalizes and reinforces the love of domination and sovereignty.
On the other hand, “analytical discourse,” by which Taha means the entire
range of psychoanalysis and its discursive output (RD, 257–61), also fails
because it cannot transcend the levels of the repressed and the libido,
remaining lodged within the “circle of the self.” Inherently incapable of
accessing all but the world of desire (shahwa) and bodily sensation, this “cir-
cle must be broken” in favor of spiritual yearning, the yearning love (shawq).
With a venerable lineage in ṣūfī philosophy, the distinction between shahwa
-1— and shawq seems to govern in Taha’s thinking. “If the shahwa is the language
0— of the self, then the shawq is the language of the spirit” (RD, 264). Thus, where
+1—
[ 234 ]
of the language deployed by the theology of progress, but this would be mis-
leading. What is at stake is not a perpetual endeavor taken as a final cause
or teleology, but rather an ethical cultivation that constantly strives to main-
tain and consolidate the moral and ethical for self-transformation. Key
here is the constancy and consistency of this engagement. Radical praxis has
no temporal point of beginning and end; it is not something to be accom-
plished and then set aside. Inasmuch as it is integral to the entire range of
being, it must be continuous and concomitant to the whole length, width,
and depth of life. It is a gradual and evolving project of living, one that must
grow and, accordingly, be nourished. And if care of the spirit is a process of
cultivation grounded in contentment, then it must also meet the condition
of peacefulness. Coercion and violence have no place in this configuration
(RD, 265–68).
The means by which the spirit is cultivated as a radical praxis amount to
a process of purification (tazkiya) that rests on two foundations. The first of
these is love of worship (ḥubb al-taʿabbud), while the second is the practice
of Intranscendentalism (mumārasat al-tashhīd). Worship is the beginning of
the process in which one relinquishes sovereignty, which effectively consists
of attributing to the self a sense of mastery and domination (SA, 132, 142).
Worship dedicated to a supreme power readily admits of, and confesses
to, the sovereignty of that power. In fact, it takes this attribution of sover-
eignty to be an apodictic form of knowledge. And so once this certainty is
achieved, the individual eo ipso relinquishes the obsession with sover-
eignty and enters the domain of freedom, for the very act of existing is
itself constitutive of the attainment, or gradual attainment, of freedom.
For sovereignty—which is always sovereignty of the self—is a form of self-
worship, before it is a subjugation of the other.
The sovereign, sparing no effort to relieve his desire for domination,
begins to equate life with death, on the one hand, and the exercise of author-
ity, on the other. He no more wants to avoid death than he is willing to lose
that power over others (RD, 271). This obsession has such a sway over his
mind that he cannot imagine the world in a future in which he no longer
lives. The first stages of freedom thus take effect at the moment when self-
worship begins to wither and culminates in a true attainment of freedom
when purification has run its fullest course. In theory, the fullest extent of
-1— purification is the fullest extent of freedom that can be attained. But Taha
0—
+1—
[ 236 ]
in the process, permits faith to expel all desire for sovereignty.41 Faith thus
emerges as a master (sulṭān) that can banish all other masters, including sov-
ereignty, for “it takes a sulṭān to dethrone a sulṭān” (RD, 275). Likewise, faith
is a deterrent (wāziʿ) produced by purification and is anchored in the spirit.
Because this deterrent is spiritual and faith-based, it induces fear in the self,
just as deterring punishments induces fear in the juridical subject. But this
fear is unlike any other. It is a fear that both the self and the enemy of man
fear; it is one that bequeaths piety, for after all, the definition of piety is that
it is fear of God as well as fear by God’s enemy of this fear (of course, it is not
difficult to infer here that the enemy of God is the enemy of humanity as
ethically constituted, and vice versa). The fear on the part of God’s enemy is
engendered because this enemy has lost their sense of domination and thus
grip over mastery (RD, 275; SA, 142).
Fear of God ensues not because of the God’s omnipotence to punish or to
threaten with punishment but rather because of the constant quest, or fear
of failing, to win God’s love. To love God and be loved by God are the param-
eters that set the boundaries for the quality of ḥayā’,42 ethical modesty,
restraint, and pious reserve.43 Ḥayā’ is the precondition of worship and puri-
fication, a quality of pious humility that precludes a sense of sovereign
mastery and dominion. Compared with the fear of earthly rule (the state and
its institutions), the fear of God obviously emanates from a different origin.
Whereas the fear of state is fear of its violence and punitive measures, the
genealogy of the fear of God is in love and the care that one must take not
to lose it. Loving God is loving everything that God created, and losing this
love amounts to feeling (being?) alone in this world, the self separating, if
not isolating, itself into an antagonistic realm that stands not with, but
against, the world. Ḥayā’, worship, and purification then stand in an effec-
tive relationship of knowledge and, more importantly, embodiment. It is, one
might say, a technology not of the Foucauldian self, but of the spirit, result-
ing in a wholly formed habitus in which faith is entwined with ḥayā’ to pro-
duce humility before creation. This, one might also say, is an ontological
humility of which the modern subject is ignorant and which is precisely the
precondition for dispensing with human sovereignty and mastery over the
world (SA, 142).
By its very nature, the spirit is integral to a covenant in which the other
-1— signatory is the real sovereign. Yet, in a primeval state of existence, it enters
0— this covenant willingly, maintaining its code of ethics in what seems to be
+1—
[ 238 ]
an ideal habitat where the body (badan) and its earthly temptations have not
yet been born. But once born, the body becomes the locus of desire, thus cre-
ating not only a challenge but also a contender to the spirit. That contender
is the self, whose function, it seems, is to annul the covenant and erase its
effects. The self comes to dominate even the atavistic impulses of the fiṭra
(al-mūdaʿa fī dhākiratihi)—the primordial and original capacity for moral
disposition. The self thus draws a curtain behind which the spirit is over-
shadowed and in front of which the self claims ownership of all things (kull
al-ashyā’). While this appears to be a natural course of human experience, a
law of nature that transcends mere modernity, it is actually one that can,
in any time and place, be resisted, but only by means of the embodiment of
purification. Purification unveils the curtain of the self and brings the spirit
back to the fore (RD, 277–79).
Purification and all that which worship entails in terms of embodiment
amount to Intranscendentalism, the condition of possibility for deputyship
(khilāfa). “There is no deputyship without worship.” 44 If deputyship is an eth-
ical stewardship of the Earth, then worship and its full ethical embodiment
are the sine qua non of the right to this stewardship. Which is also to say
that this right is conditioned upon the liberation of the spirit from the
dominion of the self.
Integral to worship, purification is a performative, constructive utterance
(inshā’ī). Because of the power of the spirit, the utterance “constructs” actual
acts of purification, including what Taha calls “purificatory resistance”
(muqāwama tazkawiyya). This is not resistance with a view to seizing power,
to rebelling, or to instigating or undertaking a revolution; all these are acts
of “material violence” (ʿunf māddī)45 that replicate the structures of earthly
lordship and political sovereignty. Nor is it a “demonstrative resistance”
(muqāwama burhāniyya) in which recourse is made to forms of argument and
rhetoric of the kind used in electoral campaigns. Rather, purificatory resis-
tance consists of an internal and deep ( jadhrī) transformation within the
individual. It is a cerebral and affective resistance, all at once (muqāwama
wijdāniyya). It is a way of living worship, loving faith, and embodying pious
reserve and humility (RD, 295–96). It is a way of forming a new spirit.
Of psychoepistemic and rational-emotive constitution, muqāwama
wijdāniyya relies on disturbance (izʿāj) to do its work. Whereas rebellion
and revolution entail tumult, turmoil, violence, and upheaval (iḍṭirāb), —-1
and whereas elections entail competition between and among powerful —0
—+1
[ 239 ]
interest groups that determine the fate of everyone else, disturbance prods
and nudges with a view to moving something from one place or state to
another. Since disturbance is inherently geared to promote justice (ʿadl), it
is consistent in its motion and direction in the pursuit of just ends: it always
moves and pushes toward the attainment of a higher state. “Disturbance has
no raison d’être other than the good” (RD, 296).
Just as the good is the ontological justification of disturbance, there is no
disturbance without inziʿāj, an internal and reflexive state. If disturbance is
of psychoepistemic, rational, and emotive constitution, so is inziʿāj. And if
this is the case, then disturbance and reflexive disturbance preclude coer-
cion (ikrāh). Disturbance is an internal act (fiʿl dākhilī) urging one toward
worship and retrieval of fiṭra, an act that, by definition, pushes away the
predilection toward mastery and sovereignty in favor of implanting the
deterrents of ḥayā’. We recall that ḥayā’ is the ethical modesty, restraint,
humility, and pious reserve that engenders a fear of losing God’s love, not
fear of his wrath, a love that permeates the consciousness of the subject
and regulates the entire set of relationships with all being, be it rational,
animate, or insentient.
Here there is an obvious rejection of all modern forms of political change,
be they violent or “democratic.” Rebellion and revolution, integral to mod-
ern forms of sovereign will,46 and elections and political accommodations
all depend on external mechanisms that perpetuate the concepts of state
and politics. Even nonviolent (as they are not in coup d’états and revolu-
tions), apparently peaceful mechanisms, as elections notably are, remain
tyrannical in their substance and structure. When electoral fraud is not
involved, the strong and powerful still control the scene, and only the
wealthy and mighty can enter, or gain from, this process.
All this we know from Marx, but Taha’s alternative is compelling. The
challenge that disturbance poses is a powerful one, since its exemplar is
the emulation of God’s justice on Earth. His solution does not go through
the route of modes of production, revolution, and the externalities of liberal
suffrage. Rather, the standard and mode of disturbance are care of the world,
that care which God bestowed on his creatures, all of them. Care here is not
just “of the self” or of one’s soul. Worship and its functions are therefore
geared toward justice, whose atavistic origins, archetype, and exemplarity
-1— are God’s justice. If “disturbance is the seeking of justice through seeing
0— God’s justice,” then this “seeing” is not just a prerequisite for the attainment
+1—
[ 240 ]
of justice; it also enjoys a higher rank than the very quest for justice [occu-
pies]” (RD, 302). This is so, it seems to me, because once the state of “seeing”
(which Taha calls baṣīra, not baṣar) is attained, the distance to seeking and
achieving justice in its global sense of stewardship is short indeed. We can
also see in this philosophical articulation a fuller reply to, or critique of, such
thinkers as Hans Jonas and Karl-Otto Apel.47
VII
not grounded (idhā lam yata’assas) in major jihād. Minor jihād’s foregrounding
goes neither beyond nor deeper than the rational, whereas major jihād finds
its raison d’être in the sight of the spirit (al-istibṣār al-r ūḥī). When the jihād
fighter derives his or her motivations from this sight, his struggle achieves
its ultimate goal even if he or she dies in battle. But this is not the case of a
jihādist whose engagement in battle is grounded in reason alone. Reason here
is insufficient. It is, one suspects (as Taha does not elaborate any further on
this point), a jihād based on denuded reason, not on an enhanced one
(mu’ayyad).58
Following the mainstream premodern doctrine, Taha regards military
jihād as a defensive activity,59 namely, the fight against injustice (dafʿ al-ẓulm)
and aggression by an enemy force. Major jihād, or striving through distur-
bance, however, is a proactive quest, a transitive activity. In this form of pac-
ifist struggle, it is insufficient to rebuff injustice, to form subjectivities that
will resist oppression, tyranny, and the entire range of misdeeds. Rather, it
actively seeks to bring about justice and the good, a considerable step beyond
mere resistance. If military jihād can be achieved, as it can, without the ruler
being formed as an ethical subject, the major counterpart cannot (RD, 313).
It is a misconception that situations requiring military jihād are graver and
more demanding than those requiring the jihād of disturbance. The former
struggles against an appearance of reality, one that is materialist and con-
crete, whereas disturbance or major jihād takes on the deeper structures of
the oppression that pertains to the spirit. Taha does not tire of repeating
that harming the spirit is far more grievous and injurious than harming the
body or any material realm, since this latter harm may take place without
necessarily wreaking havoc on the spirit and the subject in its totality (RD,
313). (It is noteworthy here that Taha published Su’āl al-ʿUnf [The Question of
Violence, 2017] recently, in which he not only fleshes out the previous argu-
ments, but connects disturbance and major jihād with his theory of ḥiwār,
in which he develops a theory of the ethics of debate and communication
between individuals, communities, and “nations.”)60
In summing up his argument, Taha states:
The role of disturbance in the modern state is to extricate this state from its per-
tinacious insistence on a [form of] management that hegemonically encloses
-1— society in its entirety, which has had increasingly oppressive effects, in terms of
0— both Extranscendentalism and subjugation. And there is no way to push it out
+1—
[ 244 ]
of this management without society regaining its freedom, for society can pro-
vide the state with the energies needed to repair its management. There is no
way to liberate society from the oppressiveness of the state’s sovereignty with-
out reviving the spirit of disturbance in individuals, a spirit that requires patience
in the undertaking of purificatory work. It also requires as much autonomy
and inventiveness as it does of every individual to undertake his duty of
disturbance.
The role of spiritual disturbance is then to undertake the liberation of soci-
ety from the state, this being for the good of both. For liberating society will
renew the spirituality of its members and will allow the release of their creative
energies. The state will benefit from this renewal by relinquishing its stubborn
insistence (khurūj min al-jumūd) on what may be an oppressive management,
something that will guarantee its survival due to its ability to adapt to the chang-
ing modes of management. Disturbance for justice therefore does not aim to
destroy the state as a managing institution, but rather to corral the state, grad-
ually and according to circumstance, to adopt a [form of management] in which
worship is not given to created beings, but rather to truth alone. (RD, 314, 315)
The first and most distinctive type, drastically different from the rest, is
Ahl al-tasyīs (the “camp of politicization”), who subsume religion under the
rubric of politics. The second is Ahl al-tadyīn, the “religionists,” the advocates
of subsuming politics under religion. Third and fourth, to be dealt with later,
adopt the position of “correspondence” (taṭābuq) between politics and reli-
gion (RD, 319).
Clearly, the first camp can hardly be distinguished from that of the
secularists, secularism being an untenable position that Taha, as we have
seen, refutes and rejects categorically. The second camp builds its case
on the fundamental assumption that Islam is a comprehensive and an all-
encompassing system of value, since all aspects of human existence and
their interconnectedness fall within the mandate of its valuation. This
camp’s well-k nown slogan has for long been “Islam is [both] religion and
state” (al-Islām dīn wa-dawla), a slogan that has come to well-nigh constitute
a definition of Islam nowadays, however unjustified and however much it
represents a reaction to the secular insistence on separating state and reli-
gion. In other words, it is far from a genuine position (mawqif aṣīl) vis-à-vis
the reality of Islam’s comprehensive outlook ( jāmiʿiyyat al-Islām), for the posi-
tion is formulated in terms that regard religion as one thing and the state
as another, and “Islam” is able to bring both together, making the one com-
plement the other. Yet, this act of lumping the two together is untenable,
unless we reduce religion to private beliefs and hold the state responsi-
ble for the management of public life, which is precisely what secularism
upholds. The governing point being made here is that no qualitative or struc-
tural separation can be made between religion and management, between
“politics” and religion. They are neither complementary nor indispensable
for each other. Rather, they are one and the same in that if management is
the business and main function of the state (i.e., defining its raison d’être),
then this field of management is both integral to, and enmeshed in, religion
(mutaḍammina fī-hi). In partial support of this cardinal tenet, our author
invokes Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who argued that siyāsa (political manage-
ment) is either valid or invalid. “When valid, it is neither a partner to the
Sharīʿa nor a complement to it (qasīm) but effectively an integral part of it.
When invalid, it is contrary to and a negation of it.” 61
The Islamists have also propounded the slogan that “the Islamic state is
-1— a civic state” (“al-dawla al-Islāmiyya dawla madaniyya”), often conjoining it
0— with the slogan “al-Islām dīn wa-dawla.” They fall into contradiction when
+1—
[ 246 ]
they oppose the claim (often fiercely made, to be sure) that the Islamic state
is a religious state (al-dawla al-Islāmiyya dawla dīniyya). And so the “Islamic
state” is both civic (madaniyya) and “of religion” (as in “al-Islām dīn wa-dawla”),
but not religious (dīniyya). Their argument in favor of this assertion is that
the state, in their conception, deals with religion but is neither clerical nor
religious in the sense of a theocracy, their ultimate fear (RD, 347). This is cer-
tainly a liberal fear as well, by which the Islamists, often unknowingly sat-
urated with liberal values, are haunted. It is the very fear that created the
secular state in the first place. It will not do therefore to define the “Islamic
state” as either “civic” or “political,” because all such secularist pedigrees
of the state “explicitly mean” a form of legislation that is “autonomous of
the authoritative religious texts,” whereas “in constructing the state of
Islam,” it is “a condition” that this “legislation remains connected, even con-
strained by, divine revelation.” 62 The Islamic model, which chronologically
precedes any noticeable European intervention in human history, is exem-
plified by the formative experience in Medina, when the Prophet was the
“head of the state” (ra’īs lil-dawla), ruling by what God had revealed unto him
(RD, 352).
From this language it becomes clear that one needs to disentangle the
semantic from the structural in Taha’s conception, making important his-
torical distinctions in addition, of which Taha himself is always aware. In
The Impossible State, I have argued:
Modern Islamist discourses assume the modern state to be a neutral tool of gov-
ernance, one that can be harnessed to perform certain functions according to
the choices and dictates of its leaders. When not used for oppression, the machin-
ery of state governance can be turned by leaders into a representative of the
people’s will, determining thereby what the state will become: a liberal democ-
racy, a socialist regime, or an Islamic state implementing the values and ideals
enshrined in the Qur’ān and those that the Prophet had once realized in his
“mini-state” of Medina. The modern state is then seen by them just as logic was seen
by Aristotle and the Aristotelians, namely, as a neutral technique or instrument
guiding correct thinking about any issue or problem in the world; until, that is,
it was shown centuries after Aristotle, by Muslim intellectuals themselves,
that Aristotelian formal logic—a nd the theory of universals on which it rests—
was inherently saturated with particular metaphysical assumptions that prede- —-1
termined the nature of its premises and therefore its conclusions. The very use —0
—+1
[ 247 ]
The modern state is no different, for it comes with its own arsenal of
metaphysics and much else. It inherently produces certain distinctive effects
that are political, social, economic, cultural, epistemic, and, no less, psycho-
logical, which is to say that the state fashions particular knowledge sys-
tems that in turn determine and shape the landscape of individual and col-
lective subjectivity, and thus much of the meaning of its subjects’ lives.
As no idea or thought can come into existence outside of a human con-
text, and as no event or act can be conceivable outside time or space, the
state—as both abstract thought and concrete practice—is the product of a
unique historical experience. As a paradigm of governance, it evolved in
Europe and was later nurtured by Euro-A merica, and subsequently was
exported to the colonies and the rest of the world.63
The term dawla (taken to mean “state” in modernity) is not only a jarring
anachronism but a profoundly distorted departure from, if not an epistem-
ically violent break with, its premodern meaning and practice. In the entire
range of historical annals and political and other writings, dawla meant “the
executive branch,” the caliphal/sultanic/dynastic enforcer of the Sharīʿa and
its institutions and precepts64 (which Taha certainly recognizes). Yet, in
modernity, this “executive authority” came to dominate exclusively, with an
absolute authoritarianism to boot, this having taken place on the heels of
the colonial destruction of Sharīʿa’s institutional checks and balances in the
long stretch of the nineteenth century.65
In light of the fact that in the entire history of premodern Islam the term
dawla never meant “state” (because the state itself was not in existence in
the first place!), one is compelled to interpret Taha’s language liberally, so
to speak. Accordingly, in his conception, there is, as we have seen, such a thing
as “the state of Islam” and even “the Islamic state,” yet this “state,” despite
the designation, does not conform to any modern notion of state. Substan-
tively, its structure and content not only differ from the modern state but,
in some fundamental ways, oppose it. To say the least, the modern state is
its own community, the marshaling of juridical assaults on the private sphere
being nothing but a series of successful attempts to reengineer the tradi-
-1— tional community and familial and filial structures according to the state’s
0— own political conception of community and institutional affiliation (if one
+1—
[ 248 ]
VIII
Thus, for both the secularists and the religionists (i.e., dayyāniyyūn, the
general stock of Islamists), management has never transcended the psycho-
-1— logical, when it should have been grounded in the world of the spirit. This
0—
+1—
[ 252 ]
within the concept of care there is the presumption of the human use of the
trust. In fact this use or permission to use (idhn bil-taṣarruf) is the raison
d’être of the trust itself. “Permission” here acquires a legal connotation, for
it too is integral to the original contractual state. Permission was given pre-
cisely because the rules of care are in place. At the same time, these rules are
the conditions of possibility for “ownership” and use of the trust, both of
which are always assumed to be necessary for promoting man’s best inter-
ests. Yet, underlying all this is the categorical understanding that whatever
use is made of the trust—and man has a wide range of freedoms—“the rights
of the divine truster must be fully observed.”78
Trusteeship therefore represents a spiritual connection in which outward
ethics is grounded in an inward ethical counterpart, rendering the exter-
nality of man’s being connected with the internality of connection with God,
just as existential obligation would be grounded in Intranscendental obli-
gation so that the right of choice is coupled and intertwined with the neces-
sity of obligation (RD, 476). Which is to say that choice is not an unbounded
and autonomous act but one that navigates through the various options
inherent in, and thus defined by, the trust itself (RD, 478). Here, recognition
of bounty triggers a sense of gratitude, which guides, as it must, any course
of rational thinking and action in the management and care of the trust.79
The tension between freedom of choice (the Kantian free rational will) and
the duties of trusteeship is resolved by the recognition that the former ulti-
mately remains relative (nisbī). Man can opt for any course of action he
sees fit as long as the rules of maintenance and care are neither broken nor
compromised.
To sum up, in Taha’s view,
The case (daʿwā) for trusteeship does not separate worship from management or,
if you will, religion from politics in the manner propounded by the secularists.
Nor does it bring them together as the religionists argue. Rather, the trusteeship
position anticipates a deeper level that precedes connection and disconnection,
namely, the level of original unity (waḥda aṣliyya) whose cradle is the world of
transcendence, a unity represented in trusteeship that man bore by his choice.
There is neither connection nor disconnection between worship and manage-
ment insofar as trusteeship or choice is concerned. Unlike the secularist prin-
ciple of positivism, the principle of trusteeship requires that humankind be not —-1
—0
—+1
[ 255 ]
a sovereign, but a trusted agent who ceaselessly cares for the rights of the trust.
And contrary to the religionist principle, the trusteeship principle also requires
that humankind be not only inseparable from the divine but also committed to
the constant practice of purification. (RD, 491)
-1—
0—
+1—
[ 256 ]
If Jābrī, Arkoun, and the bulk of so-called reformers and intellectuals since
Bustānī and Riḍā have viewed Islamic and Arab thought through the prism
of crisis, Taha inverts this vision inside out and upside down.1 If this thought
is engulfed with problems, as no one would deny, then these are not intrin-
sic problems but ones genealogically caused by exogenous forces. The prob-
lems plaguing this thought originate in the Muslim world’s vulnerability to
Western hegemonic forms of knowledge. The effects of hegemony tell a story
of loss, of discontinuity, and of (inconclusive) rupture. Whereas Jābrī and his
ilk have sought to create or justify rupture (qaṭīʿa), Taha seeks the venues of
connectivity and continuity (waṣl), an approach that is central to his phi-
losophy. For Taha, therefore, Jābrī’s concept of azma (crisis) exists only in the
latter’s mind. If there is an azma to be found anywhere, and if its sources are
to be identified, then it can be located in the West, in the way Euro-America
has put the universal and presumably transhistorical principles of moder-
nity into skewed practice. The “skewing” occurs at the moment in which
man installs himself as lord over creation, engaging in a self-divination that
reifies him as an end to himself. In Taha, there is no irremediable narrative
of loss, of crisis; rather, it is a narrative of recovery, adjustment, and critical
rehabilitation. Yet, while he vies with the Islamists’ crude recovery of the —-1
past, he challenges the Western acceptance of the entrenched paradigms of —0
—+1
[ 257 ]
thought and practice as they stand, hence his incisive critique of the works
of what are otherwise his potential allies, such as Habermas and Jonas.
Pitting Taha against Jābrī does not yield only a fruitful comparison of two
considerable intellectuals. This comparative exercise is, on its own, an
undoubtedly worthwhile intellectual undertaking. But here I intend it to do
another kind of work. With his encyclopedic erudition and popularity in the
Arab world, Jābrī’s work captures a wide and entrenched representation of
a modernized and modernizing Arab thought, if not a high point, a culmi-
nation, of a trend that began at the end of the nineteenth century. In Jābrī’s
scheme, which takes for granted and operates on a large terrain of the
turāth’s landscape, the Islamic tradition is divisible into three constellations,
roughly represented by the demonstrative/philosophical, the legal/linguistic,
and the mystical/gnostic. This is Jābrī’s order of priorities. In his narrative,
the gnostic is the repressed and the irrational, as much as it is the magical
and the legendary. In other words, to him gnosis is useless and thus beyond
redemption. It represents the primitive past, the anthropologically tribal
and atavistic. By contrast, the demonstrative, the emblematic Rushdian leg-
acy that formed an integral basis of the European Renaissance, is claimed
to be the ultimate parameter and domain of truth, and if there is anything
to be salvaged in the legal/linguistic, it is to be salvaged on terms of this
demonstrative domain. This, as we have seen throughout, has been a typi-
cal attitude and approach of the long twentieth century toward things
Islamic: “reform” and revision are always seen to rest on an act of inversion,
whereby the marginal and exceptional in Islamic history are now made to
stand as the paradigmatic concepts and central domains. If Islam is to be
“reformed” and remain “Islamic,” then an Islamically defined concept must
center and frame that reform. This operation inevitably requires the mar-
shaling of the exceptional in tradition as the central in the modern, which
is to say that the operation consists of turning things on their heads. An
analogy in point would be the hypothetical of a group of capitalists who,
aiming to reform capitalism with a view to strengthening it, make a robust
concept of social responsibility and socialist redistribution of wealth the cor-
nerstone of the system, the highest priorities to which all other consider-
ations of reform must conform. In Jābrī’s scheme, as well as in the great
majority of “reformist” narratives since Riḍā, the tail always wags the dog.
-1— Taha does not tackle this narrative structure head-on, nor does he put
0— the matter in the terms I have just described. Instead, he deploys no less than
+1—
[ 258 ]
a whole system of thought that displaces the entirety of this structure. The
full weight of his project amounts to a radical inversion of Jābrī’s triadic
account, this bearing, as I will argue, tremendous implications for the forms
of knowledge that inhabited premodern Islam and that provide, to say the
least, heuristic value for a critique of modern forms of discourse. The inver-
sion is therefore not merely a critique of Jābrī and what he represented as
a leading Arab liberalizer, but in fact goes to the heart of the epistemic
constitution of modern forms of knowledge as materialist and political
phenomena.
Looked at from a bird’s-eye view, the totality of Taha’s project demands
and achieves a radical reversal of Jābrī’s triadic narrative. And there is no
better place to witness this reversal than in Taha’s central concept of ratio-
nality. Denuded reason, a feeble and potentially misguided venue, turns out
to be structurally embedded in instrumentalism, and inextricably asso-
ciated with demonstrative arguments, which, on their own (hence their
denudedness), can convert means to ends, leading, as they did over the twen-
tieth century, to achieving ends contrary to their initially declared inten-
tions. Denuded reason, a Rushdian throwback, is precisely what is to be
critiqued, to be shed. It is so denuded, Taha could have easily said, that it is
entirely myopic.
Less objectionable, guided reason seems to correspond to what both Jābrī
and Taha see as a middle-of-the-road option, although Taha distinctly
regards it as a form of reason that avoids the pitfalls of its denuded coun-
terpart. Nonetheless, guided reason can never achieve the status of the
enhanced variety. When all is said and done, enhanced reason is none other
than the mystico-epistemological venue of seeing and articulating the
world. It is one that derives from, though it does not seem to entirely rep-
licate, the gnostic, ṣūfī, and mystically pious ways of living the turāth tradi-
tion (insofar as it is the best way in which this tradition can be recon-
structed). The foregoing chapters have shown, I think, that enhanced
reason is not just a Tahan prescriptive method of how one should reason
about things in the world; far more significantly, it is the method by which
Taha himself in effect constructs his entire system of thought. His inver-
sion of Jābrī’s inversion of the world that was premodern Islam becomes at
once both a postmodern critique and a philosophical system standing on
its own. That Taha’s mystical philosophy is a radical departure from the —-1
course of Islamic reformism since Bustānī and Afghānī is beyond doubt; —0
—+1
[ 259 ]
that it represents a critical voice, rare since the beginning of the Enlighten-
ment, is even less in doubt.
Yet, we would be amiss to stop at the characterization of his project as a
mystically anchored philosophy whose chief concerns are the spiritual and
ethereal. An antidote to secularism, materialism, liberalism, and anthro-
pocentrism, Taha’s project is also profoundly political, and this not in the
usual sense of politics as institutional ways of managing society and polity,
or the public debates that accompany such arrangements. Rather, his proj-
ect is political in the sense that no sphere of human life can be segregated
from another, and that if all spheres are mere varieties within a single
unity, then there is no distinction between politics and everything else.
And if politics is everywhere, and it no doubt is, then it must, in Taha’s sys-
tem, succumb to a higher order of things, to higher priorities that render
politics subordinate. If these priorities are paradigmatically ethical, then
politics too, as a system of macromanagement (tadbīr), must be ethicized.
The inversion of the triad in Taha’s work restructures politics by way of
such subordination. One could plausibly argue that there is a distinctly lit-
tle similarity, if there is one at all, between a political system grounded in
negative liberty and another grounded in positive liberty. Yet, the use of the
concept of positive liberty to characterize both the Berlinian and the Tahan
articulations of it may not be apt at all. The inversion of the triad in favor of
a mystical outlook on life as a totality means the adoption of a robust con-
cept of positive liberty, one that is not subject to state imperatives or ideo-
logical programs. This type of liberty is what Isaiah Berlin feared most. But
Taha’s concept, in sharp contrast, does not seem to assume the state, and
one is furthermore tempted to draw the conclusion that he, in the final anal-
ysis, rejects the modern state as both concept and practice. From this par-
ticular perspective, Taha may share with Berlin a rejection of modern forms
of positive liberty, but the reasons for Taha’s rejection are, I think, different.
Berlin rejects positive liberty because it competes with negative liberty
and challenges, in a Cold War environment, the liberal way of life.2 We can
confidently predict that Taha’s rejection is not one of principle, which Ber-
lin’s is, but rather one of quality. We therefore may distinguish two subcon-
cepts of positive liberty, the first of which I shall call, invoking Althusser’s
notion of Ideological State Apparatus, the ideological concept of positive liberty,
-1— the kind Berlin opposed, whereas the second may be designated as the
0— individuated concept of positive liberty. This latter is individuated because it
+1—
[ 260 ]
general tenor of his project are to ethicize modernity and to lay down the
foundations for an ethical Muslim modernity, the specific and carefully crafted
route he pursues in order to achieve his goal is not a program of moralizing,
an alternative that at once replicates and competes with what René Guénon
described as the “moralism” of “Western barbarity.”3 This all-too-common
approach (pursued by Arkoun, Jābrī, Soroush, Abū Zayd, and countless oth-
ers active in the last century) amounts to nothing more than changing the
players while keeping the rules of the game intact. Taha’s proposal is a radi-
cal and massive overhaul of the rules themselves, of the way we play in this
world. For if Foucault is right that the subject must remain at the front and
center of our gaze in critiquing and resisting, then it is the subject and her
inner psychoepistemic and spiritual constitution that remain Taha’s most
immediate goal and target. While Foucault—ultimately a prisoner in a secu-
larist ward—was at a loss as to how (even) to begin resisting and fashioning
subversivity,4 Taha, drawing on over a millennium of actual historical expe-
rience (both material and intellectual), deploys a blueprint that heuristically
reconstructs the subject-antidote (or antidote-subject?) who is the cure for
what Charles Taylor called modernity’s malaise.5 One may even confidently
characterize this blueprint, this project, by saying that it is not as much eti-
ological as it is curative and, especially, palliative.
It is also a methodologically conscious choice that Taha’s palliatives are
deliberately antisystemic, deriving from sources that lie outside the mod-
ernist systems of knowledge and psychoepistemology. In the entirety of his
discursive project, and nearly on every page of his vast oeuvre, Taha has
made good on his insistent promise that there can be no successful pallia-
tive that epistemologically derives from the same system that causes the dis-
ease. Genealogically, then, the palliatives’ provenance must always hail
from a qualitatively different pedigree than the one generating both the dis-
ease and perhaps even its etiology. In depending on a wide array of French
and other European critics, Taha clearly accepts, at least partly, certain forms
of modern etiologies (Habermas, Ellul, Jonas, and others), but when he comes
to offer solutions, we have seen him initiate a radical departure from these
otherwise remarkable voices. I say “partly,” because Taha’s etiology refuses
to frame itself within the secular, resorting, in the end, to a psychoepiste-
mology anchored in a narrative of man’s createdness within, and depen-
-1— dence on, a world of interconnections and unity.
0—
+1—
[ 262 ]
II
what Taha describes as “love of mastery and [of] control,” the prerequisite
to materialism.
If by now this is clear, then it is not sufficient for a new concept of the
human to entertain, or settle for, the resisting subject, the subversive agent
who refuses “who we are,” “what we are.”14 To become performative, refusal
must embody itself in a normative substrate, a substructure of thought, action,
and feeling that systematically and systemically embed resistance and
refusal in a habituated psychoepistemology of humility and modesty. Taha’s
chosen term for this is ḥayā’, a philosophical term of variegated and inter-
twined meanings. I take ḥayā’ to include, in the most profound of ways, the
concept and feeling of gratitude,15 without which no modesty before, or
respect of, anything is ever possible. Nor is there gratitude without humil-
ity, or humility without modesty. If refusal and resistance are negative
approaches, then humility, modesty, and gratitude are the positive, nonde-
fensive, and self-confident modi vivendi of being in the world. A new con-
cept of the human thus generates a subject who does not recognize sover-
eignty and who cannot conceive of herself as being sovereign. Here, the
Kantian trio of free rational will (freedom, rationality, and willing) has no
place in the architecture of the new subject, who perceives herself as devoid
of the impulse to mastery and the quest for power.
Yet, to say that the new subject “conceives herself to be devoid of this
impulse” is to overstate the point and misrepresent it. The new human would
be intrinsically incapable of this mode of cognition, for to be able to concep-
tualize the meaning of sovereignty, mastery, or domination is to already be
engaged with them in one way or another. To think them, to know them, is
to entertain their possibilities and potentialities. For it is true that cogni-
tion is not only consciousness of the possible but also an inroad to the
performative.
It is my argument then that resistance and refusal, a characteristic Fou-
cauldian duo that follows on the heels of critique, are insufficient for pro-
ducing the new concept of the human I am trying to outline here.16 What is
needed instead is a new habitus and, more precisely, a new form of embodi-
ment and ethical cultivation that permit no place either for the “love of
mastery and domination” or for the very cognition of these forms of sover-
eignty. A new concept of the human thus demands new forms of accultur-
ation, education, and upbringing. The forms in this new configuration take —-1
it for granted that the subject is formed by humility, modesty, and gratitude, —0
—+1
[ 267 ]
all of which are not mere nouns and derivative descriptors, but effectively
performative as technologies of the self, or, as Taha would have it, “of the
soul.” They are not, in yet other words, mere qualities that we may preach
or admire, but they rather stand as constitutive of a world of values in
which the subject is born and nurtured, systemically, systematically, and
constitutionally. Humility is never timidity or meekness, nor is it servility
or obsequiousness.17 It is, like modesty, a world in which pride and vanity
have no central room for maneuver. If pride and vanity are human quali-
ties, which they undoubtedly are, then they are to be suppressed and kept
at bay, just as we, in the modern condition, abhor dishonesty, cunning, and
the like. If modesty is unpretentiousness, moderation, and simplicity, then
gratitude is appreciation, thankfulness, and a deep feeling of indebtedness.18
The Tahan ḥayā’ is therefore not only the antidote to sovereignty and arro-
gance, those qualities that define the modern subject; it is, in effect, a new
habitus, a performative technology, and an uncompromised way of living in
the world, not above it.
Nor is “living in the world, not above it,” just a virtuous quality that makes
for a merely desirable way of experiencing the world. Living in the world—
our fourth characteristic—is nothing short of a psychoepistemology, dictat-
ing how one qualitatively lives, and the full meaning of living in the world. A
new concept of the human recognizes the world as a unity, where all things,
sentient and insentient, stand in an interconnected whole. This, again, is not
just an outlook on the world, one that can be adopted from one external
remove or another. Rather, it is an inner, formative conception of reality, a
view from within, an outlook integral to, and internally embedded in, a con-
ception of the world as one formed by interconnections and continuity.
To say that the world is continuous is to conceive of a fabric of being that
makes everything one does, every omission and commission, relevant, and
thus effectual, to everything else. It is also to say that because this living in
the world is a psychoepistemology, continuousness and continuity are sub-
stantively made of an ethical fiber, endowed with an epistemology and ontol-
ogy of responsibility. “Epistemologically and ontologically,” because there is
no act, no speech, that can escape this cycle of continuity, this cycle of inter-
connection. In other words, whatever one does or says, or does not do or
say, has an effect on something, ad seriatum, around it, both conceptually
-1— and existentially, and if ethics is the way in which we speak of a genuine
0—
+1—
[ 268 ]
foal are equal members of the Equidae never entails assigning them the same
functions or responsibilities. Just as the mare is under the natural, instinctive
duty of caring and attending to its foal, the human is under the primordial
obligation of universal stewardship. This is the natural lot and burden of
humanity, just because it has been assigned, in the nature of things, to bear
the unique weight of ethics. This is why Taha justifiably refuses the identi-
fication of the quiddity of humanity as a merely rational species, for modern
rationality as a denuded form of reason has proven, especially in modernity,
capable of turning things into their opposites. It is, after all, modern rational-
ity that has justified and performed genocides, environmental destruction,
and innumerable forms of calamity.
The concept of continuity and continuousness in the world thus demands
bearing the burden of ethical responsibility of stewardship. But unlike Jonas
and his likes, who seem incapable of comprehending the depth of the status
of equal createdness, Taha cannot allow for this massively interconnective
link to be missed. Humility and gratitude are thus not just states of con-
sciousness; they are so crucial precisely because the human species is both
burdened and privileged (read, blessed) by the duty of trusteeship and stew-
ardship, both of which translate into care of the world. To be a steward is to
live in a world that is psychoepistemically saturated with humility and grat-
itude; it is to live in a world that does not know, much less recognize, mas-
tery and love of domination. This absence is in fact a productive presence,
for there is no empty space left by the unknowability of mastery. The space
is rather an already-f ull mental landscape that understands the necessity
and implications of what it means to be a created thing. This is the link
missed by the otherwise meritorious contributions of Jonas and others. The
very appreciation of the meaning of createdness, of man’s contingency,
ephemerality, death, and ultimate insignificance, is precisely the necessary
“thick” link that Jonas and others like him have overlooked. But as creatures
of the secularized liberal habitus, they have also missed the significance of
praxis and psychoepistemology in ethical habituation. Jonas’s fear can never,
on its own, accomplish much. It is for the most part unproductive. When the
subject engages a praxis of ethical formation, she effectively engages a set
of signifiers that bring together the communal and divine good as a unified
world of referents. It is to understand the full meaning of the summum
-1— bonum. Which is to say that the good is not a constrained notion of human
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[ 270 ]
welfare, but one that brings the individual, the community, and God into one
interconnected whole.
For Taha the trio (man, community, God) is defined in Islamic terms,
but terms that enter into a never-ceasing dialogue with the world that sur-
rounds what he wants to see—I think somewhat problematically—as an
“Islamic modernity.” Yet, the substantive contents of the trio and the praxis
entailed in generating the necessary habitus and technologies of ethical
formation are there for humanity at large to digest and implement, “each to
his own.” If Islam, like all traditional or secular religions, arrogates to itself
an especially ethical place in the world, it also insists that God created “for
each . . . [‘nation’ or community] a moral law and way of life.”20 But there is
no escaping the qualitative construction of the trio, which must obtain if
humanity is to truly exit what he calls the ills of the Western application of
modernity. That Taha may have exaggerated the qualitative difference
between spirit and application is a matter that I need not rehearse here. That
the solution resides in the desperate need for a new concept of the human
is a testimonial not only to the irreparable crises of modernity, but also to
the bankruptcy of the very structure of modernity’s ethical and epistemic
constitution.
The ultimate challenge to both Taha and his interlocutors then resides
in the last part of the trio, which is to say that the entire problem squarely
rests not only on the place of the human on Earth but, more fundamentally,
on the relationship of the human to his ontological surrounds. For it is this
relationship, with all its implications and effects, that will determine the
quality of the subject—the quality of not just “who we are” but what we must
become. As I have argued in the context of what I take to be the crises of mod-
ern knowledge, the secular grounding of humility and gratitude will always
fall short of a meaningful and effective solution to the problems at hand.21
Secular modernity is thus by definition antitranscendentalist, especially in
the Tahan meaning of Intranscendentalism. Extranscendentalism remains
the rule of the day, with modernity’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge its
own complicity in a destructive form of “transcendentalism.” On the other
hand, Taha is as stubborn in his insistence that “current” modernity’s
bankruptcy is caused precisely by the severance of the paradigmatic link
between the human and the higher powers that gave this human his raison
d’être, powers that have been in existence long before him and that will —-1
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[ 272 ]
Taha Responding
The following is Taha’s response to the penultimate draft of this work. In the final
version, I have summarized his response in chapter 2, section 4, and offered my own
critique. Passages in the text have been numbered for ease of reference, and page ci-
tations to the manuscript he read have been adjusted to reflect the published format.
] [¶2وال يخفى عليكم أين َّأس ْس ُت دعوى “الفصل بني واقع الحداثة وتطبيقاتها” عل مبادئ مخصوصة تجمع بني مقتضيات
تأس َس عليها هذا النظر ومقتضيات العمل ،جاعال من واجبي نحو القارئ جلْبه إىل العمل مبا أُ ِّ
وصل إليه؛ واملبادئ التي َّ
الفصل ثالثة:
أحدها“ ،مبدأ التقريب التداويل”؛ يقيض هذا املبدأ بالترصف يف املنقول مبا يوافق مقتضيات املجال التداويل للمتلقي،
عقيدة ولغة ومعرفة ،حتى ولو دعا ذلك إىل إدخال تغيري يف مضمون املنقول ،ألن الفائدة ليست يف أن يعلم املتلقي ما
نُقل إليه ،بل يف أن يعمل مبا علم ،وكلام زاد وصلُه بهذه املقتضيات التداولية ،زادت أسباب دخوله يف العمل باملعلوم،
خاصة بالنسبة للمتلقي العريب أو اإلسالمي الذي هو أحوج من سواه إىل أن يتدارك ما فاته؛ لذلك ،مل أتردَّد يف أن أترصَّف
يف بعض املفاهيم التي نقلتها إليه؛ وأرضب ِمثاال عل ذلك مبفهوم “الرشد”؛ ولو أن لفظه مستعار من “كانط” ،فقد
كل ناقد
ف َّرقت بني مفهوم “الرشد” ومفهوم “النقد” حيث جمع بينهام “كانط” ومن تَبِعه؛ فليس كل راشد ناقد ،وال ُّ
راشد يف مجالنا التداويل؛ وقد جاء الكالم يف هذا التقريب مبسوطا يف فصل “الرتجمة التأصيلية” من كتاب فقه الرتجمة.
] [¶3والثاين“ ،مبدأ املناسبة الظرفية”؛ يقيض هذا املبدأ مبراعاة مختلف الظروف التي تحيط باملتلقي ،بحيث يُـختار من
طرق التوصيل ما يجعله يُطيق تقبُّل ما أُلقي به إليه؛ والظروف التي دعتني إىل وضع نظرية “روح الحداثة” هي حال ُة
“سكرة” بالحداثة كانت فيها مختلف الهيئات والدوائر يف البالد تلهج بإقامة الحداثة يف جميع مرافق الحياة ،كأنها
الرشيعة الجديدة التي ال يزيغ عنها إال هالك؛ فتعيّـن عيلَّ إخراج القراء من هذه السكرة الحداثية التي استبدت بهم
أميا استبداد؛ ومل يكن من سبيل إىل ذلك إال بأن أستعمل اللغة الحداثية املألوفة لهم ،وأبارش ت َنسيب هذا املفهوم،
قدرهم عل التحرر من استبداده؛ فلو أُل ِقي إليهم بخطاب آخر ،لقابَلوه بالرفض املطلق ومزيد االستغراق يف بحيث يُ ِ
سكرتهم؛ وواضح أن واحدا من وجوه هذا التنسيب يقيض بتمييز مستويني اثنني يف الحداثة يُؤخذ بأحدهام ويُرتك
اآلخر؛ وال يقال بأين قدَّمت متطلبات املتلقي عل متطلبات الحقيقة ،ألن قصدي مل يكن إدانة كل يشء يف الحداثة ،وإمنا
جعل القراء يـميزون الصالح من الطالح يف مكتسباتها.
ُ
توصل املثقف العريب ] [¶4والثالث“ ،مبدأ توسيع نطاق التواصل الفكري”؛ يقيض هذا املبدأ بإيجاد األسباب الفكرية التي ّ
أو املسلم إىل أن يَـ ُم َّد غريه من مثقفي العامل بقدر ما يستمد منهم ،مبدعا كام يبدعون؛ ويبدو أن أفضل طريق ميكن
لهذا املثقف اتبا ُعه للوصول إىل عقولهم هو استعامل مفاهيمهم نفسها ،مع فتح آفاق فيها مل تخطر عل بالهم،
يتخذها مداخل ملعان أخالقية يستمدها من تراثه؛ وال شك أن اقتبايس ملفهوم “الحداثة” ،مع تفريقي بني جانب
الروح فيه وجانب التطبيق ،الفتا انتباه املتلقي غري العريب أو غري املسلم إىل إمكان فتح باب الحوار فيه ،إن مل يُغنِ
هذا املفهوم ،فإنه ال يُفقره أبدا ،حتى ولو ردّه هذا املتلقي ،ألنه يكون قد تص َّور مقصوده وأفقَه غري املادي ،ويف هذا
التصور خطوة نحن الغرض املطلوب؛ وهكذا ،مل أجد ح َرجا – وأنا أقصد إعادة التفكري الفلسفي يف هذا املفهوم -يف
أن أستنبط من “واقع” الحداثة نفسه ،وهو تطبيق غريب أصيل ال غبار عليه ،املفاهي َم الستة التي تتحدّد بها روحها،
أي “االستقالل” و“اإلبداع”’ و“التعقيل” و“التفصيل” و“التوسع” و“التعميم” ،متخذا إياها أدوات متكنني بأن أدخُل
موسع مع اآلخر ،فضال عن االشتغال عل الحداثة مبا يخرجها من فقرها األخالقي ،سعيا إىل أن أبثَّ يف حوار فلسفي َّ
فيها قدرا من القيم والحدود.
] [¶5بناء عل هذه املسلَّامت الثالث التي تجمع بني “التداول الخاص” و“التنسيب الظريف” و“التفاعل مع اآلخر” ،يتبني أن
الفصل بني واقع الحداثة وروحها ال ميكن أن يكون فصال مطلقا ،وإمنا هو فصل نسبي ،وبيان ذلك من الوجوه اآلتية:
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]¶2 املجسدة
أحدها ،أن املراد بـ”روح الحداثة” هو “املعاين املو ِّجهة للحداثة” ،واملرا َد بـ“واقع الحداثة” هو “املباين ِّ
للحداثة” ،بحيث تكون عالقة روحها بواقعها أشبه بعالقة املعنى باملبنى أو عالقة القيمة بالصورة؛ فكام أنه ال مبني
بغري معنى ،أو ال صورة بغري قيمة ،فكذلك ال واقع للحداثة بغري روح؛ ويف املقابل ،فكام أنه يجوز أن يوجد املعنى بغري
مبنى ،وإال فال أقل من أن يُتص َّور بدونه ،ويجوز أن توجد القيمة بغري صورة ،وإال فال أقل من أن ت ُتص َّور بدونها ،فكذلك
يجوز أن توجد روح الحداثة بغري واقعها ،وإال فال أقل من أن تُتص َّور بدونه؛ ومتى اتضح أن الروح منفصلة عن الواقع
من وجه ومتصلة به من وجه آخر ،لزم أن يكون االنفصال بينهام افرتاقا نسبيا.
] [¶6والوجه الثاين ،أن “الروح” غري “املاهية”؛ فقد مىض أن “روح اليشء” هي “املعاين املو ِّجهة له”؛ ومعلوم أن “ماهية
اليشء” هي “الخصائص املحدّدة له”؛ وشتان بني “املعاين املو ِّجهة” و“الخصائص املحددة” ،إذ األُوىل تنتُج عن تقويم
حرصت ،يف مطلع كتاب روح الحداثة ،عل ُ (أو تقييم) اليشء ،بينام الثانية تنتج عن تحديد اليشء (أو توصيفه)؛ وقد
أن أتجاوز “طريقة التعريف” التي ات ُّبعت يف بيان طبيعة الحداثة والتي أدت إىل تعدُّد تعاريفها ،بل تضاربها ،وأن
]¶3 أستبدل بها “طريقة التقويم” التي ال تهتم بطبيعة الحداثة بقدر ما تهتم بـ“وجهتها”؛ وواضح أن “الوجهة” غري
“الطبيعة” ،إذ األوىل عبارة عن االتجاه الذي يتخذه اليشء ،بينام الثانية عبارة عن البنية التي تقوم به.
والظاهر أن االعرتاض عل الفصل بني روح الحداثة وواقعها أخطأ محلَّه ،إذ تعلَّق ،أصال ،ببنية الحداثة التي مل أشتغل
نسبت صيغ العوملة
ُ عليها ،ومل يتعلق بوجهتها التي أفردتُ لها الكتاب املذكور؛ والشاهد عل ذلك أنه أُ ِخذ عيلَّ كوين
إىل روح الحداثة ولَامّ تربز هذه الصيغ إىل الوجود ،ثم ِسيق الكالم عن العوملة بلغة البنية ،ال بلغة الوجهة (ص )118؛
والصواب أن “التعميم” معنى متعلق بالوجهة ،ال بالبنية ،وهو الذي يعني روح الحداثة؛ أما “العوملة” التي هي أمر
بنيوي ،فإمنا هي عبارة عن التطبيق الغريب الحايل الذي رضبتُه مثاال عل “التعميم” الذي هو املعنى الروحي املطلوب
يل كام فعلت بالنسبة للمعاين الحداثية األخرى؛ كام أُ ِخذ عيل أين أنسب العوملة إىل اإلسالم ،مع ما يرتتب عليها من محو
للفروق الثقافية والتاريخية بني الشعوب؛ والصواب أن الذي أنسبه إىل اإلسالم ليس “البنية العوملية” ،وإمنا “الوجهة
]¶4 التعميمية” التي قد تُسفر عن تطبيق مغاير كليا للتطبيق الغريب للتعميم؛ ولعله يكون تطبيقا أخالقيا شامال ال ميحو إال
ما ثبت إرضاره باإلنسان ،سواء كان شأنا حداثيا غربيا أو إرثا ثقافيا شعبيا.
عدها عنها؛ والفطرة ،كام] [¶7والوجه الثالث ،أن أسباب التواصل مع اآلخرين تكون أقوى يف قربها من الفطرة منها يف بُ ِ
وضَّ حته يف غري ما كتاب ،عبارة عن مستودع القيم الذي ينزل من اإلنسان منزلة “الذاكرة األصلية السابقة عل الزمان”؛
والحال أن معاين روح الحداثة أقرب إىل الفطرة من خصائص املاهية الحداثية ومن مظاهر التطبيق الحدايث؛ لذلك،
فمن املمكن أن نصل ُرك َني الرشد الحدايث ،أي “االستقالل” و“اإلبداع” بـ“الحرية الفطرية” ،وهي عبارة عن حرية
خالقة؛ وأن نصل ،أيضاُ ،ركني النقد الحدايث ،أي “التعقيل” و“التفصيل” بـ“التمييز الفطري” وهو عبارة عن إدراك
عميل؛ كام ميكن أن نصل ُركني الشمول الحدايث ،أي “التوسع” و“التعميم” بـ“التعارف الفطري” الذي هو عبارة عن
اشرتاك يف املعروف؛ وهذه املعاين الفطرية تفتح ،يف املعاين الحداثية ،فضاءات اتصال أو انفصال مع التطبيق الحدايث،
قل هذا القدر إىل حد خُل ِّوه عنه.
فإن اتصلت بها ،أدرك هذا التطبيق قدرا من األخالق ،وإن انفصلت عنهاَّ ،
وبناء عل ما ُذكِر من األوجه الثالثة للتفريق بني طريف الحداثة“ :الواقع” و“الروح” ،يتبني أن هذا التفريق ال غلو فيه
]¶5 وال تكلُّف (ص ،)332إذ هو أقرب إىل “الفرق” منه إىل مطلق الفصل ،إذ الفرق عبارة عن تفاوت ال يُشعر بالتباين ،يف
حني أن الفصل قد يشعر بوجوده.
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وقد ال يكفي دفع االعرتاض عل دعوى انفصال روح الحداثة عن واقعها ،يك يُسلَّم للمدعي ِصدْق دعواه؛ فيتعني
االنتقال إىل خطوة أخرى ،وهي إيراد االعرتاضات عل الدعوى التي تضادُّها ،أي القول بـ“االرتباط العضوي” أو
“االلتحام” بني روح الحداثة وواقعها (ص)115 .؛ وهذه االعرتاضات هي كالتايل:
] [¶8االعرتاض األول ،يبدو أن القول بهذا “االلتحام” يضعنا أمام إشكاالت ثالثة؛ أحدها ،أن الحداثة تغدو ظاهرة حضارية
واحدة ال ثاين لها؛ والحال أن أهلها يقرون بثبوت االختالف بني أشكالها يف مختلف مجتمعاتهم ،ناهيك عن االختالف
فيام بينهم يف بيان محدّداتها؛ والثاين ،أن الحداثة تغدو حدثا حضاريا أ ّول ال سابق لهِ ،
وآخر ال الحق له؛ إذ أن ِم َثل هذا
االلتحام يَقرصُ وجوده عل نفسه ،شكال ومضمونا ،فال يتعدى إىل غريه ،ال بكثري ،وال بقليل؛ وهذا يبعد يف العقل تص ُّوره؛
فيقينا أن الحداثة لها أسباب يف املايض ،قد ذهبت صورها ،ولكن بقيت نتائجها ،فإنها مل تحدُث ألول وهلة من ال يشء؛
كام أن لها آثارا يف املستقبل ،مستبدل ًة بصورها صورا غريها ،فال تصري دفعة واحدة إىل ال يشء؛ والثالث ،أن الحداثة
تصري واقعا ال روح له؛ إذ يرجع القول بااللتحام بني الطرفني :الواقع والروح ،يف نهاية املطاف ،إىل القول بارتباط الواقع
بنفسه أو ارتباط بعضه ببعض ليس إال؛ وليس من شك أن هذا التصور يحجب عن الواقع الحدايث كل إمكان ملجاوزة
نفسه ،ال بطريق اإلحالة عل معناه يف سياق تحقُّقه ،وال بطريق حفظ معناه بعد ذهاب صورته.
] [¶9واالعرتاض الثاين ،الراجح أن التحام واقع الحداثة بروحها ليس ،كام يُظ ّن ،خصوصية متعلقة بالحداثة نفسها ،منظورا
إليها ككل ُمص َمت ،وإمنا هو خصوصية متعلقة بالجانب التطبيقي من الحداثة فقط؛ فام اعتُرب خاصية منسوبة إىل
روحها ما هو ،يف الحقيقة ،إال خاصية منسوبة إىل تطبيقها؛ وبيان ذلك أنه ملا كان باإلمكان وصل معاين روح الحداثة
مبعاين الفطرة ،حري ًة ومتييزا وتعارفا ،فقد وجب ،عند التطبيق ،استحضار هذه املعاين الفطرية وتقويم العنارص
التطبيقية يف ضوئها؛ فإن أمكن ر ُّد هذه العنارص إىل املعاين الفطرية ،فإن املعاين الحداثية التي هي من وراء العنارص
التطبيقية تكون توسيعا للمعاين الفطرية؛ وإذا مل يُـمكن ر ُّد هذه العنارص التطبيقية إىل املعاين الفطرية ،فإنها تُعترب
مجرد مظاهر تطبيقية ال شأن لروح الحداثة به؛ وهذا بالذات ما ال يتأىت يف سياق “نظرية االلتحام” التي تس ِّوي بني
فتنسب إىل الروح ما حقُّه أن ينسب إىل التطبيق. الروح والتطبيقُ ،
] [¶10واالعرتاض الثالث ،أن القول بااللتحام بني روح الحداثة وواقعها يفيض إىل الوقوع فيام ميكن أن نسميه بـآفة “السياقية
الجذرية”؛ فمعلوم أن “السياقية” تقوم يف ادعاء أن املعاين تختلف قيمتها من سياق إىل آخر؛ واملقصود بـ“السياقية
الجذرية” هو السياقية التي تدَّعي أنه ال وجود ألي ق ْد ٍر قيمي مشرتك بني السياقات التي تَرِد فيها هذه املعاين؛ وعل
هذا ،فمتى سلَّمنا بهذا االلتحام الحدايث ،لزم أن تكون الحداثة يف سياق معنيَّ غريَها يف سياق آخر بصورة ال ميكن معها
املقارنة بني السياقني ،ناهيك عن املفاضلة بينهام؛ والسياقية الحداثية التي تكون بهذا الوصف ت ُـخرج صاحبها إىل
“النسبية املطلقة” التي ينتفي معها وجود أي معنى حدايث كيل ،ويرتد كل معنى من معاين الحداثة إىل أسباب تطبي ِقه.
و ِمـام مىض من االعرتاضات الثالثة عل القول بااللتحام بني طريف الحداثة :الواقع والروح ،يتضح أن الغلو أو التكلف
قد يدخل عل هذا القول مبا ال يدخل به عل ضده ،أي القول باالنفصال بينهام؛ إذ يُفيض إىل النسبية املطلقة ،بينام
املرسلة” التي توجب التباين الكيل ،ألن الواقع ال يوجد إال مع تحقُّق الروح.
االنفصال ال يفيض إىل ضدها ،أي “اإلطالقية َ
] [¶11ولعيل ال أغايل إن ذهبت ،بناء عل ما تقدَّم ،إىل أن النظرية األخالقية التي تقول باالنفصال بني واقع الحداثة وروحها
تقوم بها إمكانات فكرية وعملية أوسع من النظرية األخالقية التي تقول بااللتحام بني هذين الطرفني ،إذ أنها ال تيأس
من إمكان تقويم اعوجاج الحداثة ،حتى ولو فرضنا أن تطبيقاتها الغربية ال أخالقية بصفة نهائية ،إذ يبقى دامئا يف
اإلمكان إيجاد تطبيقات لها أخرى ترعى هذا الجانب أو ذاك من األخالق ،وإال فال أقل من أنها ال تستغرق يف
—-1 الالأخالقية كام استغرقت فيها هذه التطبيقات الغربية“ ،تقدما” و“عوملة” و“رشكات” (أذكر هنا مفاهيمكم).
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وليس هذا فحسب ،بل إن نظرية االنفصال تتسع لنظرية االلتحام ،إذ تنزل نظرية االلتحام منها منزلة ما أسميه
بـ“نظرية االنفصال الحدية الدنيا”؛ فهذه النظرية تقول بوجود تطبيق واحد للحداثة يف مقابل “نظرية االنفصال
الحدية القصوى” التي تقول بوجود عدد المتناه من تطبيقاتها؛ هكذا ،يكفي أن نق ِّرر أنه ال وجود إال لتطبيق واحد
]¶8 ووحيد للحداثة ،ليك يصبح باإلمكان تفريع نظرية االلتحام من نظرية االنفصال؛ إذ عندئذ ،يصري مقتىض الواقع الحدايث
مطابقا ملقتىض الروح الحداثية ،كأمنا واقع الحداثة هو عني روحها؛ يف حني أنه ال ميكن اإلتيان بعكس هذا التفريع ،أي
تفريع نظرية االنفصال عل نظرية االلتحام؛ فيلزم أن نظرية االنفصال الحدايث أخص وأقوى من نظرية االلتحام
الحدايث.
] [¶12هذا ما حرضين وأنا أتأمل اعرتاضكم األسايس عيل ،ال طلبا لإللزام الجديل ،وال حرصا عل إقناعكم بدعواي ،وإمنا طلبا ملتعة
التواصل معكم ومقابلة االعرتاف مبثله؛ فام بذلتموه من جهد يف تت ُّبع دقائق مسطوري ،وما ُوفِّقتم فيه من نقله إال اللغة
اإلنجليزية ،وما ب َرعتم فيه من مقابالت إنجليزية ملصطلحات عربية أصيلة ،وما وقَفْتم عنده طويال من مفاهيم فلسفية
جديدة ،كل ذلك يجعلني ال أرى يف مختلف اعرتاضاتكم إال اقتناعا منكم بفائدة هذا العمل الفكري يف التصدي للطوفان
الحدايث ،مجددا لكم بالغ عرفاين مبا أوجدتم من أسباب التعاون بيننا عل دفع هذا الطوفان وإعادة تثوير اإلنسان.
]¶9 ] [¶13يبقى أن أن ِّبه عل أمر مل يَسبق أن نبهت قرايئ عليه ،وهو أين أكتب اسمي الكامل مقدِّما ،يف الرتتيب ،اسم “طه” عل
اسم “عبد الرحمن” ،عل خالف الوجه الذي ينبغي ،إذ أن اسمي الشخيص ( )First Nameهو “عبد الرحمن” ،واسمي العائيل
ترسخ يف وسطي املغريب؛ فقد ترون صواب إعادة كتابة اسمي ( )Family Nameهو “طه” ،وسبب ذلك يرجع إىل االستعامل الذي َّ
عل الصورة التالية Abdurrahman TAHA :يف العنوان ،ثم تستبدلون يف املنت اسم Tahaمكان Abdurrahmanيف كل
املواقع؛ ولعلكم تؤثرون االحتفاظ باسم Abdurrahmanيف هذه املواقع ،فال بأس من ذلك ،ألين أحب هذا االسم ولو أنه قليال ما
أُنادَى به ،إذ يُشعرين بأن الرحمة قريبة غري بعيدة.
الرباط 25 ،مايو 2018
عبد الرحمن طه
]¶10
]¶11
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Introduction
1. Obviously, this intellectual path must have originated in Taha’s mind much ear-
lier. In Tajdīd al-Manhaj, for instance, he places the beginnings of his concept of
tadāwul in the 1960s. Taha, Tajdīd al-Manhaj fī Taqwīm al-Turāth (Casablanca: al-
Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2007), 244. In a recent lecture, titled “al-Usus al-
I’timāniyya lil-Murābaṭa al-Maqdisiyya,” delivered on January 27, 2018, he iden-
tifies 1967 as the starting point of his intellectual “awakening,” after the Arab
military defeat of that year. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jvv9u6EbY0&
app=desktop.
2. Freud and Lacan, for instance, are his main interlocutors in the extensive Shurūd
Mā Baʿda al-Dahrāniyya: al-Naqd al-I’timānī lil-Khurūj min al-Akhlāq (Beirut: al-
Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ, 2016). For the range of such engagements,
see also Taha, Language Matters: A Dialogue on Language and Logic, Tabah Essay
Series (Abu Dhabi: Tabah Foundation, 2010).
3. Most of these philosophers will make an appearance in my presentation of Taha.
An idea of the extent of his engagement with several philosophers can be effi-
ciently gleaned from his concise Taʿaddudiyat al-Qiyam: Mā Madāhā? Wa-mā
Ḥudūduhā? (Marrakech: al-Maṭbaʿa wal-Wirāqa al-Waṭaniyya, 2001), in which he
defends a particular conception of “value-pluralism,” and effectively engages
with Max Weber, Isaiah Berlin, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, John Rawls
and Michael Waltzer.
4. See Wael Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians (Oxford: Clarendon,
1993), xxxix–l.
5. In Taha’s usage, waṣl is not just “connection” and “joining,” but also “continu-
ity.” Faṣl on the other hand, is an antonym of waṣl, meaning “severance” but also —-1
“discontinuousness” and “rupture.” —0
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[ 279 ]
6. M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–
1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 3 (New York: New
Press, 1994), 326–48; Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 254, 344n54.
7. On this form of sovereignty, see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, esp. chaps. 2
and 4.
8. Hallaq, 100–101, 105, and passim.
9. I have in mind such “developments” as described by Gábor Ágoston, “Firearms
and Military Adaptation: The Ottomans and the European Military Revolution,”
Journal of World History 25, no. 1 (2014), 85–124; Jonathan Grant, “Rethinking the
Ottoman ‘Decline,’ ” Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1999): 179–201. On colonial-
ism, Orientalism, and their associated sovereign forms of knowledge as dis-
tinctively modern phenomena, see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 1–137, 179–228.
On the military revolution, see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military
Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).
10. Lapidus, “Islamic Revival and Modernity: The Contemporary Movements and
the Historical Paradigms,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
40, no. 4 (1997): 444–60, at 446.
11. See Charles Issawi, “De-Industrialization and Re-Industrialization in the Mid-
dle East Since 1800,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12, no. 4 (Decem-
ber 1980): 469–79; Donald Quataert, “The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914,” in An Eco-
nomic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, ed. Halil Inalcık and
Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 759–943, at
890–91; Wael Hallaq, Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009), 396–400.
12. See works cited in previous note.
13. For an overview of these reforms, see Hallaq, Sharīʿa, 396–429.
14. Amy Singer, Charity in Islamic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 92–113.
15. Murat Çizakça, History of Philanthropic Foundations: The Islamic World from the Sev-
enteenth Century to the Present (Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2000); Henry
Cattan, “The Law of Waqf,” in Law in the Middle East, ed. Majid Khadduri and Her-
bert J. Liebesny (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 1955), 203–22; Richard
van Leeuwen, Waqfs and Urban Structures: The Case of Ottoman Damascus (Leiden:
Brill, 1999); George Makdisi, The Rise of the Colleges: Institutions of Learning in
Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Hallaq, Sharīʿa,
53–54, 126, 141–46, 150, 191, 194, 195, and passim.
16. Hallaq, Sharīʿa, 433.
17. For a detailed analysis, see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 118–25.
18. For a detailed account of these themes, see Hallaq, Sharīʿa, 357–550.
19. This, in part, is the subject of Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, esp. chaps. 2 and 4.
20. See Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 179–228. The idea here is that just as conven-
tional genocides are by definition directed at certain ethnic and racial groups,
-1— structural genocides are directed at certain systems of knowledge and certain
0— cultural institutions that can be wiped out of existence just as racial groups can
+1—
[ 280 ]
as theological, in the manner that we have come to recognize, say, political the-
ology, has been a deliberate shift in the latter, having myself been dissatisfied
with such descriptors as the “theory” or “doctrine” of progress, descriptors I
have employed in the former monograph.
30. F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 80–86, at 81, 83; see
also Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996), 323.
31. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (London: Mac-
millan, 1920), xi; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illu-
minations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–64.
32. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic, 1980), 4, 7.
33. Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 20, 25.
34. The ideological, “legislative” force of language is evident in the lexical evolu-
tion of the term. Regress, much like reversion, does not make an appearance in
several old English dictionaries (e.g., A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat, The Con-
cise Dictionary of Middle English: From A.D. 1150 To 1580 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1888]).
Even as late as the eighteenth century, the term meant “to go back; to return”
(e.g., Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language [London: n.p., 1792]). In
the twentieth century, the term acquires additional meanings, reflecting the
influence of the theology of progress. In Webster’s Third New International Diction-
ary (Springfield, MA: G. C. Merriam, 1976), the term now means “retrograde,”
“retrogression,” “retrogradation.” Online dictionaries define the nominal form
as the “action of returning to a former or less developed state.”
35. On the evolution of nostalgia as a clinical condition in modernity, see the valu-
able article by Nauman Naqvi, “The Nostalgic Subject: A Genealogy of the ‘Cri-
tique of Nostalgia,” Centro Interuniversitario per le ricerche sulla Sociologia
del Diritto e delle Instituzioni Giuridiche, Working Paper n. 23 (September 2007):
4–51.
36. Hallaq, Impossible State, 14.
37. Naqvi, “Nostalgic Subject.”
38. When used for such purposes, ethical time served as moral admonishment to
the ruler as an individual believer, however weighty his duties and responsi-
bilities were. As a typical example, see Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Tibr al-Masbūk
fī Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, ed. Aḥmad Shams al-Dīn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya,
1988), esp. 5–42. See also Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-
Naẓar wa-Taʿjīl al-Ẓafar: Fī Akhlāq al-Malik wa-Siyāsat al-Mulk (Beirut: Dār al-Nahḍa
al-ʿArabiyya, 1981), esp. 3–81.
39. For the writings of commentators on the Islamic tradition mentioned in this
paragraph, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Cus-
todians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 3–5.
40. See also Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 79–84, 115–24.
41. Hallaq, Impossible State, 110–12.
-1— 42. Hallaq, Sharīʿa, 1–12.
0—
+1—
[ 282 ]
43. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunnī Uṣūl al-Fiqh
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 36–74.
44. On central and peripheral domains, see Hallaq, Impossible State, 6–12.
45. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī, Lawāqiḥ al-Anwār al-Qudsiyya fī Bayān al-ʿUhūd al-
Muḥammadiyya, ed. Muḥammad Ibrāhīm (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya,
2005), 13–16.
46. See, for instance, ʿAqqād’s renowned ʿAbqariyyāt series in al-Majmūʿa al-Kāmila
li- Mu’allafāt al-Ustādh ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād: al-ʿAbqariyyāt al-Islāmiyya, vols.
1–4 (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Lubnānī, 1984–86); Ṭāha Ḥusayn, ʿAlā Hāmish al-Sīra
(Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1966); Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, Ḥayāt Muḥammad,
14th ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 2001); Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, Muḥammad Ṣalla Allāhu
ʿAlayhi wa-Sallam (Cairo: Dār Miṣr lil-Ṭibāʿa, n.d.).
47. Bandalī Jawzī, Min Tārīkh al-Ḥarakāt al-Fikriyya fil-Islām (Jerusalem: Manshūrāt
Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, 1977); Bilqazīz, Naqd al-Turāth, 137–58; Ḥusayn Murruwwa, al-
Nazaʿāt al-Māddiyya fil-Falsafa al-ʿArabiyya-al-Islāmiyya, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Fārābī,
2002).
48. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, chap. 2.
49. Hallaq, Sharīʿa, 125–58.
50. For a detailed discussion of Islamic nonpolitical governmentality, see Hallaq,
Restating Orientalism, 73–84; Hallaq, “Qur’ānic Constitutionalism and Moral Gov-
ernmentality: Further Notes on the Founding Principles of Islamic Society and
Polity,” Comparative Islamic Studies 8, nos. 1–2 (2012): 1–51.
51. It is one of the persistent arguments of my Impossible State that while the world
of Islam suffered systematic institutional devastation during the nineteenth
century and thereafter, the memory and practice of much of those sharʿī-ṣūfī
technologies of the self have persisted into the present.
52. See the perceptive critique of Ali Oumlil, L’histoire et son discourse: essai sur la
méthodologie d’Ibn Khaldoun (Rabat: Éditions techniques nord-a fricaines, 1979).
The value of his critique remains nonetheless burdened by the claim that his-
torical knowledge must indeed be sought but that it ought to remain ideologi-
cally neutral, which is to say that the acquisition of knowledge must stop with
understanding as a neutral act! See also the useful article by Abdelmajid Han-
noum, “Translation and the Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldun Orientalist,” His-
tory and Theory 42 (February 2003): 61–81.
53. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 214–20.
54. Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 23–25.
55. Sheehi, 25. (I have added diacritics to Sheehi’s text for the sake of my own consis-
tency in this book.) It is to be noted that for Bustānī, the Arabs began to lag
behind in the fourteenth century, when they “came to think that the acquisition
of knowledge and science . . . were a corrupt affair and a vain endeavor” (23).
56. An index in favor of averting this doubt is the intense preoccupation of Jābrī
with the Qur’ān, especially during the last phase of his life. See Jābrī, Madkhal
ilā al-Qur’ān al-Karīm: Fil-Taʿrīf bil-Qur’ān (Beirut: Markaz Dirāsāt al-Waḥda al-
ʿArabiyya, 2010); Jābrī, Fahm al-Qur’ān al-Ḥakīm: al-Tafsīr al-Wāḍiḥ Ḥasab Tartīb al-
Nuzūl, 3 vols. (Beirut: Markaz Dirāsāt al-Wāḥda al-ʿArabiyya, 2010). —-1
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[ 283 ]
57. See, in particular, Misīrī, al-Falsafa al-Māddiyya wa-Tafkīk al-Insān (Damascus: Dār
al-Fikr, 2002) and Misīrī with Fatḥī al-Turaykī, al-Ḥadātha wa-mā baʿda al-Ḥadātha
(Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 2003), 11–177; Naṣṣār, Ṭarīq al-Istiqlāl al-Falsafī: Sabīl al-Fikr
al-ʿArabī ilā al-Ḥurriyya (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa, 1975); Ghayḍān al-Sayyid ʿAlī, “al-
Istiqlāl al-Falsafī wa-Muqāwamat al-Taghrīb ʿInda Nāṣīf Naṣṣār,” Mu’minūn Bilā
Ḥudūd ([Rabat] March 18, 2016): 1–19; but also see Naṣṣār’s critique of Taha’s al-
Ḥaqq al-ʿArabī f al-Ikhtilāf al-Falsafī (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī,
2006), in “Al-Tawāṣul al-Falsafī wal-Majāl al-Tadāwulī,” al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabī 347
(December-January 2008): 8–35.
58. For Jābrī, “Arab mind” is not an “ideological slogan” but effectively “the sum
total of concepts and intellectual activities that govern, in one decisive degree
or another, the Arab human’s outlook and the manner in which he deals with
them in the sphere of acquisition, production, and reproduction of knowledge.”
This “mind” is also said to have “taken root” since “ ʿaṣr al-tadwīn,” presum-
ably during the eighth century. Jābrī, Takwīn al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī (Beirut: al-Markaz
al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1987), 70, 71. There are at least two obvious problems with
this conception. First, it is not clear why only the “Arab” suffers from this “cri-
sis” (as he often calls it, and not the “Iranian” or “Turk”). Was there a concept
of the Arab in the eighth century and down to the eighteenth? Second, and per-
haps more important, for Jābrī to maintain such a conception, he must assume
that there has existed an unchanging architecture and constitution of the
“Arab” mind over a full millennium, a ludicrous notion that defies in its implau-
sibility even the ideological “paradigm of decline.”
59. The Arabic term bayān has no exact equivalent in European languages, being a
rich matrix of discourse that evolved over several centuries in the intellectual
landscapes of Islam. Basic to the meaning is the idea that bayān is that language
through which things are made intelligible and clear, this including what we
call today semiotics (in Arabic, ʿilm al-dalāla). The Qur’ān is said to be a book of
bayān because it contains all knowledge, that is, it contains “explanations for
all things.” These explanations are always eloquent (faṣīḥ) and logical, all at
once. When God is said to have “taught humans bayān,” it is meant that he cre-
ated a species that is distinguished (infaṣalat) from the “animal kingdom” by
the fact that this species can articulate the world in language (nuṭq), and
this latter always implying that rationality and logic are integral to language.
Man as ḥayawān nāṭiq is not just “a speaking animal” but rather “a rational
animal” (nuṭq [speech] and manṭiq [logic] deriving from the same etymological
conception). Here, for lack of a better alternative, I resort to the expression
“hermeneutics,” the science of explicating and rendering intelligible all tex-
tual manifestations, linguistic structures, and what have been called “verbal
and nonverbal indicants” (dalā’il lafẓiyya/dalā’il iʿtibāriyya). Jābrī uses bayān as a
tag to capture the juristic projects within the Islamic tradition, projects that
dominated Sharīʿa as a central domain. For the semantic range of bayān, see
Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Mukarram Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, ed. ʿĀmir
Aḥmad Ḥaydar and ʿAbd al-Munʿim Ibrāhīm, 15 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
-1— ʿIlmiyya, 2009), 13:73–84; Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Fayrūzabādī,
0— al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risāla, 1998), 1182–83; for technical
+1—
[ 284 ]
101. Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 35. This essentially Hegelian analy-
sis is also invoked by both Abdallah Laroui (al-ʿArwī), and, after him, Bilqazīz.
For Laroui, see Laroui, L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine: essai critique (Paris: Fran-
çois Maspero, 1967), 33–34; and Laroui, al-ʿArab wal-Fikr al-Tārīkhī (Beirut: Dār al-
Ḥaqīqa, 1980), 183–202; Bilqazīz, Naqd al-Turāth, 26–27. It is to be noted here that
Bilqazīz’s analyses throughout his work, as exhaustive and erudite as they may
be, are plagued by the same ideologically hegemonic but latent Orientalist
effects as the very thinkers he subjects to scrutiny. For a general comparison
between Laroui’s and Taha’s conceptions of Arab consciousness of modernity,
see Abdelhalim Mahour Bacha, “al-Ḥadātha al-Gharbiyya wa-A nmāṭ al-Waʿī
bi-hā fil-Fikr al-ʿArabī al-Muʿāṣir: Dirāsa Muqārina bayna ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿArwī
wa-Ṭāha ʿAbd al-Raḥmān,” Tabayyun 6, no. 23 (Winter 2018): 103–25.
102. The qualification of “stateless” is intended to stress the qualitative difference
between the modern understanding of the concept as a product of state ideol-
ogy (e.g., the Soviet and Cuban varieties), on the one hand, and the private, per-
sonal, and communal, on the other. The latter, at least in the Islamic case, is
stateless because premodern Islam did not develop anything like the modern
state, hence the qualitative difference and dimension of positive forms of lib-
erty. As I have emphasized throughout, there is good reason to think that the
terminological designations “positive” and “negative” liberties are altogether
inadequate, but this becomes a problem that the theoretic of translation must
solve. On pre-nineteenth-century Islamic “governance” as antithetical to the
modern state, see Hallaq, Impossible State.
103. See, for instance, Taha, Fī Uṣūl al-Ḥiwār wa-Tajdīd ʿIlm al-Kalām, 4th ed. (Casa-
blanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2010); Taha, al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī fil-Ikhtilāf
al-Fikrī (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2005), 153–58; Taha, Su’āl al-
ʿUnf: Bayna al-I’timāniyya wal-Ḥiwāriyya (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-
Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ, 2017), 171–210; Taha, ʿAbd al-Malik Būminjal, al-Ibdāʿ fī Muwājahat
al-Ittibāʿ (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ, 2017), 159–97;
Ḥammū al-Naqārī, Manṭiq Tadbīr al-Ikhtilāf: Min Khilāl Aʿmāl Ṭāha ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
(Beirut: al-Shabaka al-ʿArabiyya lil-Abḥāth wal-Nashr, 2014). Needless to say, the
concept of ḥiwār in Taha’s philosophy warrants monographic attention.
104. A theme articulated in chapter 4.
105. At the time of this writing, for instance, a new three-volume work has appeared.
See Taha, Dīn al-Ḥayā’: Min al-Fiqh al-I’timārī ilā al-Fiqh al-I’timānī, 3 vols. (Beirut:
al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ, 2017).
106. Taha, Būminjal, al-Ibdāʿ, 128–31.
107. This is a major theme in his Rūḥ al-Dīn, the main concern of chapter 6.
108. I will discuss these concepts throughout chapter 6.
109. Taha, Su’āl al-Akhlāq: Musāhama fil-Naqd al-Akhlāqī lil-Ḥadātha al-Gharbiyya (Casa-
blanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2000), 115n6: “Nurīdu an nunabbih hunā
ilā annanā sawfa najtahid qadr al-imkān . . . f ī waḍʿ jihāzinā min al-mafāhīm
fī istiqlāl ʿan namaṭ al-muṣṭalaḥāt al-ajnabiyya, wa-d hālika bi-istithmār
khaṣā’iṣ al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya fil-taʿbīr wal-tablīgh wa-kadhā bil-ʿamal bil-furūq
al-latī takhtaṣṣ bi-hā al-dalālāt fī hādhihi al-lugha.” See also Raḍwān Marḥūm’s —-1
—0
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[ 287 ]
1. The article first appeared in Afkār 123 (January 1996): 5–23, and was published
as chapter 1 in Su’āl al-Manhaj: Fī Ufuq al-Ta’sīs li-Unmūdhaj Fikrī Jadīd, ed. Raḍwān
Marḥūm (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ, 2015), 41–57.
(Henceforth cited as KNN.)
2. See introduction, note 1.
3. “Al-Uṣūl al-Naẓariyya al-Takāmuliyya fil-Ishtighāl bil-Turāth,” al-ʿIlm (Febru-
-1— ary 18, 1994), published as chapter 2 in Su’āl al-Manhaj, 59–70. (Henceforth cited
0— as UNIT.)
+1—
[ 288 ]
4. KNN, 42: “Al-tathqīf ʿibāra ʿan takwīn wa-tawjīh yatimmāni bi-ḥasab qiyam waṭaniyya
marghūb fīhā wa-maṭlūb al-ʿamal bihā.” It will be noted that Taha does not define
waṭanī here, for the term in modern Arabic is somewhat equivocal and bears
connotations of either “the national” as the product of the modern nation-state
or the ethnonational that represents communal ideas and feelings of belong-
ing to a shared language and norms.
5. KNN: “Fa-takūn al-ḥaḍāra akhaṣṣ min al-thaqāfa, li-anna kull qīma insāniyya hiya qīma
waṭaniyya, wa-laysat kull qīma waṭaniyya qīma insāniyya.”
6. KNN, 43: “Inna al-t urāth al-Islāmī al-ʿArabī huwa, ʿalā al-ijmāl, ʿibāra ʿan jumlat al-
maḍāmīn wal-wasā’il al-khiṭābiyya wal-sulūkiyya allatī tuḥaddid al-wujūd al-kasbī
(aw al-intājī) lil-insān al-Muslim al-ʿArabī, ʿalā muqtaḍā qiyam makhṣūṣa bāqiya baʿḍuhā
ʿalā ḥāl al-iʿtibār wa-ṣāra baʿḍuhā ilā ḥāl al-ilghā’, in ṭumūḥan ilā al-taraqqī aw wuqūʿan
fil-taraddī.”
7. The loci classici of this concept is Qur’ān 2:286 and 33:58. See Naṣr al-Dīn b.
Muḥammad al-Samarqandī, Tafsīr al-Samarqandī al-Musammā Baḥr al-ʿUlūm, ed.
ʿAlī Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya,
1993), 1:241–42; Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī al-Musammā Jāmiʿ
al-Bayān fī Ta’wīl al-Qur’ān, 13 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005), 3:154ff.
8. See Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, al-Risāla, ed. Muḥammad Sayyid Kīlānī (Cairo:
Maṭbaʿat Muṣṭafā Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1969), 14–17. Note also Shāfiʿī’s references here
to the entwinement of ʿilm and ʿamal, which Taha will develop into a theory.
However, he does not invoke Shāfiʿī explicitly.
9. HIF = al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī fil-Ikhtilāf al-Fikrī (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-
ʿArabī, 2005).
10. Possibly, because KNN was written before the appearance of Ṭarābīshī’s major
works on the relevant issues of turāth, especially his series Naqd Naqd al-ʿAql
al-ʿArabī. See bibliography.
11. TM = Tajdīd al-Manhaj fī Taqwīm al-Turāth (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī
al-ʿArabī, 2007).
12. Taha, Rūḥ al-Dīn: Min Ḍīq al-ʿAlmāniyya ilā Siʿat al-I’timāniyya (Casablanca: al-
Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2012), 64 (henceforth cited as RD): “Inna baʿḍa al-
ḥaqā’iq al-dīniyya lā tuʿraf illā baʿda mumārasatihā wa-hākadhā fa-bi-wāsiṭat al-ʿamal
al-dīnī tanfatiḥ fil-ʿilm abwāb wa-taʿinnu āfāq lam takun takhṭur ʿalā al-bāl qabla al-
dukhūl fī-hā.”
13. “Necessary knowledge” is essentially sensory knowledge. I do not need to exer-
cise any form of thinking or reasoning to know that I am in pain when my
finger touches a flame. On these forms of knowledge and their theoretical impli-
cations, see Wael Hallaq, “On Inductive Corroboration, Probability, and Cer-
tainty in Sunnī Legal Thought,” in Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Studies in Honor
of Farhat J. Ziadeh, ed. Nicholas Heer (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1990), 3–31.
14. It is instructive here to note the depth that Taha’s work give to Talal Asad’s
notion of discursive tradition. See Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,”
Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2009): 1–30.
15. Taha puts the matter curtly yet effectively: “Al-tamakkun min asbāb hādhihi al- —-1
āliyyāt fī maṣādirihā” (KNN, 52). —0
—+1
[ 289 ]
42. For an example of this analysis, see Gil Anidjar, “The Idea of an Anthropology
of Christianity,” Interventions 11, no. 3 (2009): 367–93.
43. The first edition of this work was published in 1994. The most notable critical
work published before Tajdīd al-Manhaj was al-ʿAmal al-Dīnī wa-Tajdīd al-ʿAql, 4th ed.
(Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2006), published originally in 1989.
44. The important field of dialectic is yet to be excavated. Two pioneering works
are Larry Benjamin Miller, “Islamic Disputation Theory: A Study of the Devel-
opment of Dialectic in Islam from the Tenth Through Fourteenth Centuries”
(PhD diss., Princeton University, 1984); and Walter Young, The Dialectical Forge:
Juridical Disputation and the Evolution of Islamic Law (New York: Springer, 2017). See
also Abdessamad Belhaj, Argumentation et dialectique en Islam: formes et séquences
de la manāẓara (Louvain: Presses universitaires, 2010). Taha rearticulates the dia-
lectical method in the context of his critique of modernity in Fī Uṣūl al-Ḥiwār
wa-Tajdīd ʿIlm al-Kalām, 4th ed. (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2010).
45. On denuded rationality, see chapter 4, section 2.
46. TM, 27: “anna al-naṣṣa, bi-dhihābi asbābi intājihi al-ẓarfiyya, al-makāniyya minhā wal-
zamāniyya, yaktasib manzila maʿnawiyya mutamayyiza, wa-yaktasī rūḥāniyya
khāṣṣa tahibuhu wujūdan thaqāfiyyan mustaqillan yaṣīru bi-hi shāhidan ʿalā maʿānin
tamtadd āfāquhā ilā al-insān ḥaythumā kān.”
47. Published with the subtitle Qira’āt Muʿāṣira fī Turāthinā al-Falsafī (Beirut: al-
Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1993).
48. Interestingly, he also attacks the Arab liberals as much as he does the Arab Left.
See Jābrī, Naḥnu wal-Turāth: Qira’āt Muʿāṣira fī Turāthinā al-Falsafī (Beirut: al-Markaz
al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1993), 14–15, 57.
49. Jābrī, 58.
50. Jābrī, Bunyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī: Dirāsa Taḥlīliyya Naqdiyya li-Nuẓum al-Maʿrifa
fil-Thaqāfa al-ʿArabiyya (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1986), 88;
TM, 30.
51. Jābrī, Naḥnu wal-Turāth, 58.
52. Jābrī, Takwīn al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1987),
11–12.
53. Jābrī, Bunyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, 13ff., 251ff., 383ff.
54. For Jābrī, Ibn Rushd is superior to Ibn Sīnā because the former’s “project chiefly
rests on the separation between philosophy and religion,” with a view “to pre-
serving the special identity of each.” It is on these grounds that the Maghrib
(because it has Ibn Rushd) is deemed by Jābrī to be superior to the Mashriq
(which has only Ibn Sīnā)—a nationalist prejudice and a colonialist hangover
that Jābrī adopts without self-reflection. See Jābrī, Naḥnu wal-Turāth, 9, 213, 234.
55. On the centrality of Ibn Rushd for modernist Arab thought, see ʿAbd al-Ilāh
Bilqazīz, Naqd al-Turāth (Casablanca: Markaz Dirāsāt al-Waḥda al-ʿArabiyya,
2014), 257 and passim. It is also worth noting, after Ali Oumlil, that modernist
Arab thinkers have charged both Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun with an excessive
burden that far transcends the roles they actually played in their own times.
ʿAlī Ūmlīl, Fil-Turāth wal-Tajāwuz (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī,
-1— 1990), 39; ʿAlī Ūmlīl, L’histoire et son discourse: essai sur la méthodologie d’Ibn Khal-
0— doun (Rabat: Éditions techniques nord-africaines, 1979); and his contribution to
+1—
[ 292 ]
Tawfīq Rashīd et al., al-Falsafa wal-Ḥadātha fīl-Mashrūʿ al-Fikrī li-ʿAlī Ūmlīl (Casa-
blanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2011). Further on this in the context of
a useful account of Oumlil’s ideas, see Bilqazīz, Naqd al-Turāth, 259–60.
56. See Muḥammad Waqīdī’s analysis in Jābrī, al-Turāth wal-Ḥadātha, 265–75, esp. 267.
57. TM, 51: “Nūrun fil-bidāya huwa nūr al-ʿaql, wa-nūrun fil-waṣā’iṭ huwa nūru al-ʿilm,
wa-nūrun fil-nihāya huwa nūru al-ʿirfān; fa-ṣāḥibu al-ʿaql maʿ al-burhān, wa-ṣāḥibu
al-ʿilm maʿ al-bayān, wa-ṣāḥibu al-maʿrifa fī ḥukm al-ʿayān.” Taha footnotes this as
coming from Laṭā’if al-Ishārāt, 2:194–95 of Ibrāhīm Basyūnī’s edition (Cairo:
al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma lil-K itāb, 2000), but I could not find it there.
However, a cognate statement does appear in the same edition, at 2:90–91. See
also Abū al-Ḥasan al-Nūrī, Maqāmāt al-Qulūb, ed. Qāsim al-Sāmarrā’ī (Baghdad:
Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif, 1969), 18–19.
58. On takhrīj, see Wael Hallaq, Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 44–49; Hallaq, “Takhrīj and the
Construction of Juristic Authority,” in Studies in Islamic Legal Theory, ed. Ber-
nard G. Weiss (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 317–35.
59. TM, 35: “muṣālaḥa,” “taḥāluf,” “fakk al-irtibāṭ,” “munāṣara,” “iṣṭidām,” “ṣadd al-
hajmāt,” “tafjīr,” “laḥẓat al-infijār.”
60. See chapter 4, section 2.
61. Jābrī, Takwīn al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, 29–30.
62. Chapter 5, section 2.
63. See introduction, section 5.
64. TM, 37; Jābrī, Bunyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, 391.
65. Taha here citing Ḥasan Ḥanafī and Jābrī, Ḥiwār al-Mashriq wal-Maghrib: Naḥw
Iʿādat al-Fikr al-Qawmī al-ʿArabī (Beirut: Maktabat al-Fikr al-Jadīd, 1990), 30–31.
66. Jābrī, Bunyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, 46–48; Jābrī, Takwīn al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, 255–60. For a
translation of the debate, see Taha Abderrahmane (Taha), “Discussion entre Abū
Saʿīd al-Sīrāfī, le grammairien, et Mattā b. Yūnus, le philosophe,” Arabica 25,
no. 3 (September 1978): 310–23.
67. For distinctions between private and public reason in Kant, see Michel Foucault,
The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–83 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 36. See, more generally, Partha Chatterjee, Our Moder-
nity (Rotterdam: Sephis Codesria, 1997).
68. Taha’s argument here, however seemingly daring, is not without a venerable
pedigree, in and outside of the Islamic tradition. Speaking of the various Greek
schools of philosophy, Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael
Chase [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995]) astutely remarks that each of these
schools—the Cynics, Skeptics, Epicureans, Platonists, Stoics—represented “a
form of life defined by an ideal of wisdom,” which corresponded to a “funda-
mental inner attitude . . . a nd its manner of speaking, such as the Stoic use of
the percussive dialectic or the abundant rhetoric of the Academicians. But
above all every school practices exercises designed to ensure spiritual prog-
ress toward the ideal state of wisdom, exercises of reason that will be, for the
soul, analogous to the athlete’s training or to the application of a medical cure.
Generally, they consist, above all, of self-control and meditation. Self-control is —-1
fundamentally being attentive to one-self: an unrelaxing vigilance for the —0
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[ 293 ]
however, is not to be taken for granted, since influential thinkers such as Ibn
Taymiyya would argue that this is a simplistic distinction and that logic, in par-
ticular, is implicated in metaphysics, and therefore prejudges modalities of
argument ab initio. This, in fact, was one of his major critiques of Ghazālī, whom
he accused of approaching Aristotelian logic with certain intellectual inno-
cence. See Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians, 105–14.
77. Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī, Naḥw al-Qulūb (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub
al-ʿIlmiyya, n.d.); for various contributions on Qushayrī, see the special issue
of the Journal of Sufi Studies 2 (2013). For another instance of the interaction of
Ṣūfism with the political field, see Muḥyī al-Dīn Abū Bakr Ibn ʿArabī, al-Tadbīrāt
al-Ilāhiyya fī Iṣlāḥ al-Mamlaka al-Insāniyya, ed. ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-Kayyālī (Beirut:
Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003).
78. TM, 90; Ghazālī, Mīzān al-ʿAmal, 348: “Fa’inna al-ʿulūma kullahā mutaʿāwina
mutarābiṭa baʿḍahā bi-baʿḍ.” Emphasis in main text mine.
79. Cited by Taha from Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s al-Baṣā’ir wal-Dhakhā’ir. TM, 91.
80. See sources cited in note 44.
81. This reference to “genetic” might be enlightened by the discussion I offer in Hal-
laq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018), 9, 153, 224, 316n34.
82. Here, Taha invokes the general principle of qawāʿid that “al-ʿibra fil-taṣarrufāt
[hiya] bil-maqāṣid wal-maʿānī lā bil-alfāẓ wal-mabānī” (TM, 100). See Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn
b. Ibrāhīm Ibn Nujaym, al-Ashbāh wal-Naẓā’ir (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya,
1993), 27–55.
83. On the Medinan/Meccan revelations in Shāṭibī’s theory, see Hallaq, “The Pri-
macy of the Qur’ān in Shāṭibī’s Legal Theory,” in Islamic Studies Presenetd to
Charles J. Adams, ed. Wael Hallaq and Donald Little (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 69–90, at
75–76, 88.
84. See chapter 6, note 8.
85. On intention (niyya) in sharʿī discourse and practice, see Ibn Nujaym, al-Ashbāh
wal-Naẓā’ir, 20–26; Paul Powers, Intent in Islamic Law: Motive and Meaning in Medi-
eval Sunnī Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 32–33, 49–50.
86. TM, 122: “Uṣūlī mujaddid . . . wa-mā al-Shāṭibī ʿindanā illā aba al-tadākhul bayna ʿilm
al-akhlāq wa-ʿilm uṣūl al-fiqh, fātiḥan bi-dhālika ṭarīqan fī binā’i al-ʿilm al-Islāmī ʿalā
usus al-tansīq al-mutakāmil alladhī lā naʿlam lahu naẓīr fil-sābiq wa-lā fil-lāḥiq.”
87. For instance, ʿAlī Sāmī al-Nashshār makes the compelling argument that Uṣūl
al-Fiqh represented the methodology that undergirded and drove the entire
intellectual edifice of mainstream, indigenous Islamic sciences. See al-Nashshār,
Manāhij al-Baḥth ʿInda Mufakkirī al-Islām (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿārif, 1965), h-z (v–vii).
88. Hallaq, History of Islamic Legal Theories, 162, 168.
89. See Introduction, section 5. TM, 122, citing Jābrī, Bunyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī, 554: “Wa-
bidhālik yakūn al-Shāṭibī qad dashshana qaṭīʿa ibistimūlūjiyya ḥaqīqiyya maʿ ṭarīqat
al-Shāfiʿī wa-kulli al-uṣūliyyīn al-ladhīna jā’ū baʿdahu.”
90. Hallaq, History of Islamic Legal Theories, chap. 5, esp. 162, 168.
91. TM, 125: “ʿIlm uṣūl al-fiqh [huwa] namūdhaj mithālī lil-tadākhul al-dākhilī, idh ẓahara
annahu aqrab al-ʿulūm al-turāthiyya ilā al-qiyāmi bil-muqtaḍayāt al-naẓariyya li-majāl —-1
al-tadāwul.” —0
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[ 295 ]
92. The critique of Ibn Rushd is an extension of the extensive critique directed at
Jābrī, which occupies a significant part of Tajdīd al-Manhaj fī Taqwīm al-Turāth.
The more direct critique in relation to Ibn Rushd extends across pp. 125–233.
93. TM, 126: “Yabdū [anna Ibn Rushd huwa] ṣāḥib al-faḍl ʿalā al-muʿāṣirīn fil-qawl bil-naẓra
al-tajzī’iyya ilā al-turāth.”
94. Ibn Rushd, al-Ḍarūrī fī Uṣūl al-Fiqh aw Mukhtaṣar al-Mustaṣfā, ed. Jamāl al-Dīn al-
ʿAlawī (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1994).
95. The title may be translated as “The Decisive Discourse Regarding the Connec-
tion Between Philosophy and Sharīʿa.” The word for “connection” in this title
is ittiṣāl, but Taha suggests that it should be the rhyming term infiṣāl, i.e., sepa-
ration. In his translation of the work, George Hourani, with a bias of his own,
translates it as “harmony.”
96. An important contribution to this effect is Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
97. See the useful review by Frank Griffel, “Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity:
Two New Perspectives on Premodern (and Postclassical) Islamic Societies,”
Bustan: The Middle East Book Review 8, no. 1 (2017): 1–21.
98. For a detailed elaboration of my concept of Orientalism, see Hallaq, Restating
Orientalism.
99. Excessive in the sense that interpenetration was so extensive and deep that
certain genres lost, or nearly lost, their original identity, having been trans-
formed, under the influence of mutual dialectic, into not-so-easily identifiable
fields of discourse. See, for instance, Robert Wisnovsky, “Philosophy and The-
ology (Islam),” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, vol. 2, ed. R. Pas-
nau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 698–706; Wisnovsky, “ʿAbduh
and the Avicennian Tradition” (Ms., chapter 5, p. 50), to be published as Post-
Classical Arabic Philosophy, 1100–1900: Avicennian Metaphysics Between Arabic Logic
and Islamic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I am grate-
ful to Robert Wisnovsky for generously sharing his work with me prior to pub-
lication, and for other forms of help over the years.
focus on the English countryside. While the idea of the need for a more “global”
and longue durée approach is irreproachable, it fails to account for the unique-
ness of the capitalist structures arising in Western Europe (mainly in Britain and
the Netherlands). The Ottoman threat itself cannot be linked to that particu-
lar structure, just as the alleged “breakthrough to capitalism” already made
in medieval Buddhist China and pre-Tokugawa Japan can hardly be said to
have developed, much less articulated, the structural features that became
necessary for the rise of European capitalism. See Randall Collins, “An Asian
Route to Capitalism: Religious Economy and the Origins of Self-Transforming
Growth in Japan,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 6 (1997): 843–65. Collins
realizes that these Asian forms could not sustain the development of an
industrial revolution, a puzzle left for “further study.” Any student of Islamic
history can make similar arguments. The question that needs to be answered
is what made that differential possible, a differential that possessed exclu-
sively European roots but one that undeniably harnessed the global world as
its laboratory.
25. See works cited in notes 18, 23, and 24.
26. This argument has been made at length in Hallaq, Restating Orientalism.
27. In speaking of the conflictual binaries that Western hegemony has bequeathed
to the Muslim world, Taha enumerated the binary between “colonizer’s culture
and indigenous culture” (thaqāfat al-mustaʿmir wa-thaqāfat al-a ṣl) and between
“modernity” and “indigeneity” (al-ḥadātha wal-a ṣāla). Note here the qualitative
distinction between modernity and colonialism. Taha, al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī fil-Ikhtilāf
al-Fikrī (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2005), 86.
28. Under the subheading of “universalization” (RH, 29), Taha states that moder-
nity does not remain confined to the society in which it originally arose. The
products of modernity, including its values like the “liberation of human kind,”
travel to other societies irrespective of the historical and cultural differences
between the two sides, i.e., the exporting and importing societies: “Lā tabqā al-
ḥadātha ḥabīsat al-mujtamaʿ al-ladhī nasha’at fīh, bal anna muntajātuhā . . . tartaḥilu
ilā mā siwāh min al-mujtamaʿāt, ayyan kānat al-f urūq al-tārīkhiyya wal-thaqāfiyya
bayna al-ṭarafayn, thumma ta’khudhu ʿalā al-tadrīj fī maḥw hādhihi al-f urūq . . .
ḥattā aṣbaḥa al-irtiḥāl yaʿummu kawkabanā min aqṣāh ilā aqṣāh, fātiḥan bi-dhālika
ʿahdan jadīdan fil-ḥadātha huwa ʿahd al-ʿawlama” (emphasis mine). In a personal
communication (May 28, 2018), Taha cautioned that the erasure of cultural dif-
ferences must also meet the condition of nonhegemony, a condition lacking in
the existing form of globalization (which is “ ʿawlama muhaymina”). See also the
appendix, paragraph 6.
29. RH, 77–98, discussed in chapter 3.
30. For a detailed critique of globalization as a materialist phenomenon, see Taha,
Su’āl al-ʿAmal: Baḥth ʿan al-Uṣūl al-ʿAmaliyya fil-Fikr wal-ʿIlm (Casablanca: al-Markaz
al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2012), 209–17.
31. Amply attesting to this analysis is Taha, Su’āl al-ʿUnf: Bayna al-I’timāniyya wal-
Ḥiwāriyya (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ, 2017).
32. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New —-1
York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 74–75, 80–81, 89–90. —0
—+1
[ 299 ]
2. Taha is mostly very cautious in either generalizing his critique or naming those
whom he critiques. In such contexts, as is the case here, he often begins with
the expression “some (baʿḍ) Muslim scholars” or something similar, a mild
approach to engagement (especially if we read “baʿḍ” in its classical sense of
“one” or “a”). Noteworthy, however, is that in his discussion of the Qur’ān, he
follows a different pattern, naming specific Muslim thinkers perhaps more
freely than in any other part of his writings. Here, we encounter direct refer-
ences to, and debates with, Muhammad Arkoun, Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābrī,
Muṣṭafā Maḥmūd, Abdulkarim Soroush, Ḥasan Ḥanafī, Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd,
Ṭayyib Tīzīnī, al-Ṣādiq Bilʿīd, and others.
3. See, for instance, al-Ṣādiq Bilʿīd, al-Qur’ān wal-Tashrīʿ: Qirā’a Jadīda fī Āyāt al-Aḥkām
(Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Ḥalabī al-Ḥuqūqiyya, 2004), 30–32, 225–27.
4. RH, 176: “Ijtihādun min al-dhāt.”
5. “Verses” is used advisedly, and justified by Taha on the grounds that the mod-
ernist interpreters (but not necessarily all contemporary [muʿāṣirūn] “exegetes”)
did not engage in a systematic and complete gloss on the entirety of the Qur’ānic
text, in contrast to their premodern predecessors. See RH, 176n3, 177.
6. For a general survey but also critique of such authors, see Jīlānī Miftāḥ, al-
Ḥadāthiyyūn al-ʿArab fil-ʿUqūd al-Thalātha al-Akhīra wal-Qur’ān al-Karīm: Dirāsa
Naqdiyya (Damascus: Dār al-Nahḍa, 2006).
7. Modern Arabic coined at least two verbal nouns to convey the meaning of
“humanizing,” namely, to render something subject to the formative power of
humanism. These are ansana and ta’nīs, the latter being, I think, awkward and
lacking a ready connection to the essential meanings of humanism, since its
association with the notion of “companionship” is strong. Nonetheless, Taha
prefers to use it.
8. Citing here ʿAbd al-Majīd al-Sharafī, “among others,” who explicitly declares his
task to be “nazʿ al-mīthiyya ʿan al-naṣṣ al-dīnī bi-muḥāwalat ansanatihi bi-ʿalmanat
al-qirā’a” (RH, 178n8). For a sample of Sharafī’s approach, see Sharafī, “Fī Qirā’at
al-Turāth al-Dīnī: Al-Itqān fī ʿUlūm al-Qur’ān Namūdhajan,” in Fī Qirā’at al-Naṣṣ al-
Dīnī, ed. Kamāl ʿImrān (Tunis: al-Dār al-Tūnisiyya lil-Nashr, 1990), 11–30.
9. A great many writers and thinkers have adopted such a secularist-humanist
approach, most notable of whom is Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd. His hermeneutical
method covered not only the Qur’ān, the centerpiece of his project, but also,
and to no lesser effect, the iconic writings of Shāfiʿī, Ibn ʿArabī, and Ghazālī. See,
for instance, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, Dirāsa fī ʿUlūm al-Qur’ān (Casablanca: al-Markaz
al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2005); al-Naṣṣ, al-Naṣṣ wal-Sulṭa wal-Ḥaqīqa: Irādat al-Maʿrifa
wa-Irādat al-Haymana (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2000); al-Naṣṣ,
al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī wa-Ta’sīs al-Idyūlūjiyya al-Wasaṭiyya (Cairo: Maktabat Madbūlī,
1996). For a useful, succinct, yet uncritical account of Abū Zayd’s positions, see
ʿAbd al-Ilāh Bilqazīz, Naqd al-Turāth (Casablanca: Markaz Dirāsāt al-Waḥda al-
ʿArabiyya, 2014), 217–50.
10. See, in particular, chapter 6.
11. RH, 181n15.
-1— 12. The collection of the Qur’ān has evolved into a major concern of Orientalist
0— scholarship, which has exercised tremendous influence on modern Muslim
+1—
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thinkers who have dealt with the text. For writings on the process of collec-
tion, see, among others, M. Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1970); Harald Motzki, “The Collection of the Qur’ān:
A Reconsideration of Western Views in Light of Recent Methodological Devel-
opments,” Der Islam 78 (2001): 1–34; Hossein Modarressi, “Early Debates on the
Integrity of the Qur’ān: A Brief Survey,” Studia Islamica 77 (1993): 5–39.
13. An elaboration of this central theme may be found in Wael Hallaq, “Qurʼānic
Constitutionalism and Moral Governmentality: Further Notes on the Founding
Principles of Islamic Society and Polity,” Comparative Islamic Studies 8, nos. 1–2
(2014): 1–52; Hallaq, “Qur’ānic Magna Carta: On the Origins of the Rule of Law
in Islam,” in Magna Carta, Religion and the Rule of Law, ed. R. Griffith-Jones and
Mark Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 157–76; and Hallaq,
“Groundwork of the Moral Law: A New Look at the Qurʼān and the Genesis of
Sharīʿa,” Islamic Law and Society 16, nos. 3–4 (2009): 239–79.
14. A theme analyzed in detail in Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern
Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 73–84.
15. For an elaboration of ghaybiyya/taghyīb and tashhīd, see chapter 6.
16. Namely, in the sense I have elaborated at length in Restating Orientalism.
17. In the overall thrust of his project, I think it is clear that he recognizes their
full weight.
18. One can now speak of a scientific consensus on climate and ecological cri-
sis: colossal environmental destruction; massive colonialist and imperialist
atrocities and dehumanization; unprecedented forms of political and social
violence; the construction of lethal political identities; the poisoning of food
and water; extermination of alarming numbers of species; increasingly wor-
rying health threats; indecent disparity between rich and poor; social and
communal disintegration; the rise of narcissistic sovereign individualism; a
dramatic increase in individual and corporate sociopathologies; an alarming
spread of mental health disorders; a “growing epidemic” of suicide, and much
more. This list is certainly incomplete; all of these crises aggregately consti-
tute a phenomenon that calls attention to a revaluation of modernist, indus-
trial, capitalist, and chiefly (though not exclusively) liberal values, including
secular humanism and anthropocentrism. In this context, a series of premises
should be made explicit: (1) the ecological and environmental crisis is endemic
to the very modern system producing it, which is to say that the crisis itself is
systemic, not contingent; (2) the modern system that cohesively marshals cap-
italism, technology, industrialism, and a legal system that regulates their con-
duct is based on forms of knowledge that are claimed to be rational and thus
are far from haphazard or accidental; (3) this rationality, in its fully fledged
practical manifestations, in effect amounts to nothing short of an epistemol-
ogy, a conscious, deliberate, and fairly consistent way of understanding, inter-
preting, and living in the world; and (4) this epistemology lacks sufficient
moral and ethical restraints so as to (a) allow living in the world without—to
put it minimally—a noticeable penchant for destructiveness, and (b) success-
fully remedy (if not preempt) ecological and environmental problems as may —-1
happen to arise. See Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate —0
—+1
[ 305 ]
Change: How Do We Know We Are Not Wrong?,” in Climate Change: What It Means
for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, ed. Joseph F. C. DiMento and Pamela
Doughman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 65–99; Sanjay Seth, “ ‘Once Was
Blind but Now Can See’: Modernity and the Social Sciences,” International Politi-
cal Sociology 7 (2013): 136–51, especially at 144; Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect
Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011). As Andrew Vincent convincingly argues, it is the very values and
practices of liberal justice theory that “constitute the key environmental dan-
ger.” Vincent, “Liberalism and the Environment,” Environmental Values 7 (1998):
443–59, at 443. See also Avner de-Shalit, “Is Liberalism Environment-Friendly?,”
in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. Michael
Zimmerman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 386–406.
19. In critique of the ʿibādāt as “rituals,” see Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Poli-
tics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), 115–16.
20. For an outline of such an exploration, see sources cited in note 13.
21. Italics marked by a bold font in Arabic. RH, 189.
22. Note that in this narrative the absolutist monarchial rule over Central
and Western Europe is absent as an important element in the rise of the
Enlightenment.
23. The Arabic equivalent is ʿilmī, here used, as is often the case, not in the sense of
technical or exact science, but as sound and solid intellectual endeavors. In
the Islamic tradition, “religious,” legal-moral, Qur’ānic, and similar studies
were classified as ʿulūm (sing. ʿilm). Modern Arabic, including that of Taha, con-
tinues to retain residues of this usage. Incidentally, this linguistic-conceptual
history of the term makes for a rich field of research, implicating issues of sci-
ence and the humanities, and the preeminent relationship between Value and
Fact.
24. Further on this point, see the introduction, toward the end of section 4, and
epilogue.
25. See T. I. Oizerman, “I. Kant’s Doctrine of the ‘Things in Themselves’ and Nou-
mena,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 41, no. 3 (March 1981): 333–50.
26. RH, 193: “Qabla al-ḥadātha . . . huwa zaman al-wuqūʿ taḥta al-wiṣāya al-ladhī thārat
ʿalayhi bil-dhāt al-ḥadātha.”
27. Yet, contradictions may arise here by virtue of other assertions made to the
effect that premodernity, in Islam as elsewhere, suffered from “immaturity.”
See, for instance, RH, 193: “Qabla al-ḥadātha . . . huwa zaman al-w uqū’ taḥta al-
wiṣāya al-ladhī thārat ‘alayhi bil-dhāt al-ḥadātha.”
28. RH, 198: “Yuḥaqqiqu lil-insāni bi-dhālika asmā marātib al-takrīm, idh laysa baʿdahā
illā martabat al-ulūhiyya.”
29. I think Mohammad Hashas puts it well when writes that “Abderrahmane [Taha]
develops a new task for philosophy. While the Greeks considered that the task
of philosophy was to raise questions (Aristotle in focus), and the Europeans con-
sidered criticism its primal task (Kant in focus), Abderrahmane [Taha] believes
-1— that this age is that of ethical responsibility, so the task of philosophy is to raise
0— a responsible question (al-su’āl al-mas’ūl). When there is a question, the there is
+1—
[ 306 ]
a responsibility that follows to answer it (in Arabic, the move is from al-su’āliyyah
[questioning] to al-mas’ūliyyah [responsibility] in philosophy). Accordingly, a
question receives an ethical dimension through responsibility; if it is posed, it
has to be answered, and the feel of responsibility makes the exercise of answer-
ing ethical—‘there is no philosophising without ethics.’ ” Mohammad Hashas,
“Taha Abderrahman’s Trusteeship Paradigm: Spiritual Modernity and the
Islamic Contribution to the Formation of a Renewed Universal Civilization of
Ethos,” Oriente Moderno 95 (2015): 67–105, at 74–75.
30. See chapter 1, note 37, for the term ʿiqadī.
31. On this debate, see Charles Taylor, “Justice After Virtue,” in After MacIntyre: Crit-
ical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan
Mendus (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 16–43, at 20; John R. Searle, “How to Derive
‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’ ” Philosophical Review 73, no. 1 (January 1964): 43–58, and the
various contributions in W. D. Hudson, ed., The Is-Ought Question (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1969).
32. See chapter 4, note 13, chapter 6, note 4, and next note.
33. RH, 201: “[Al-Qalb huwa] malaka jāmiʿa . . . maṣdar kull al-idrākāt al-insāniyya fī
tadākhulihā wa-takāmulihā, ʿaqliyya kānat aw ḥissiya aw rūḥiyya.”
34. See, for instance, Qur’ān 8:2; 16:106; 26:89, 194; 48:4; 49:7; 50:33, 37; 57:16; 64:11.
35. Hallaq, Impossible State, 98ff.
36. RH, 203: “Wa-maʿlūm anna tarsīkh al-akhlāq huwa al-ghāya al-ūlā min al-biʿtha
al-Muḥammadiyya.”
37. RH, 203–4: “Ḥukmiyya jāmida . . . mundafiʿa.”
38. RH, 204: “Fa-yataʿayyan an nabḥath fil-āyāt al-Qur’āniyya, lā ʿan ʿalāmāt al-māḍī, ḥattā
nūqif ṣalāḥiyyatahā ʿalā hādhihi al-ʿalāmāt, wāqiʿīn fī tārīkhiyyatin māḍiwiyya, wa-
innamā an nabḥath fī-hā ʿalā ʿalāmāt al-ḥāḍir.” Note here that Taha’s phrase “wāqiʿīn
fī tārīkhiyyatin māḍiwiyya” bespeaks volumes of the irrelevance of history out-
side moral instruction.
39. RH, 204: “Al-Qur’ān ikhtaṣṣa bi-qiyam akhlāqiyya wa-r ūḥiyya ʿulyā, wal-qiyam lā yanāl
minhā tawālī al-zaman ka-mā yanāl min al-waqā’iʿ, bal min al-qiyam mā tanāl min al-
zaman wa-lā yanāl min-hā.”
40. RH, 74, esp. n. * (no number).
41. For a discussion of expansive rationality, or enhanced reason, see chapter 4.
42. This bracketed addition is only implied, but not explicitly stated, by Taha. How-
ever, see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 182–96.
43. This is a central argument of chapters 2 and 4 in Hallaq, Restating Orientalism.
44. Note here that Taha shifts the meaning of maṣlaḥa from its positive Shāṭibian
one—which he has endorsed—to a negative concept, often implied in modern
Arabic.
45. For a remarkable account that fleshes out and historicizes the rise of interest
in the West, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Argu-
ments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997).
46. In reference to Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New
York: Vintage, 1964), on which Taha seems to rely in his critique of technology/ —-1
technique. —0
—+1
[ 307 ]
47. Taha may be underrating the performative power of what he calls procedure.
Arguably, the “procedures” generated and made dominant by globalization,
with its materialism, consumerism, and technology of social media, possess no
weaker technologies of the self, but the crucial difference between these and
the moral technologies which he advocates is that, in the former, technologies,
ethics, and the crucial element of the “operation on one’s self ” are virtually
lacking. Procedure is indeed an external act, but it is so only to the extent that
the subject has no control over its genealogy and modes of operation. But pro-
cedure’s power to form this subject is undeniable, as Althusser aptly argued for
the case of Ideological State Apparatus. On the significance of the practice of
“operation on one’s self” in the context of Foucault’s and Althusser’s ideas, see
epilogue, section 1.
48. M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–
1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 3 (New York: New
Press, 1994), 326–48; see also Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1982–83 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 20–21.
49. RH, 86. “Single culture” here is the rendering of thaqāfa wāḥida. The other mean-
ing of thaqāfa in Arabic is “education,” but this is obviously not what the con-
text allows for. It is not trite to note here, in contrast to Taha’s claim, what the
Qur’ān (5:48) says about this point: “Li-kullin jaʿalnā min-kum shirʿatan wa-minhājā
wa-law shā’a la-jaʿalakum ummatan wāḥida” (“For each of you [“nation,” commu-
nity] we have given a moral law and way of life. Had God willed, He would have
made you one nation/community”). See also epilogue, penultimate paragraph
of section 2 and note 20 therein.
50. Cf. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mark of the Sacred, trans. M. B. De Bevoise (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2013), 90–124.
51. RH, 86–87: “Yaḥiqqu lanā an nas’al, hal yanbaghī an yarjiʿa kullu qawmin ilā mā
wajadū ʿalayhi ābā’ahum min dīn, fa-yaqtabisūna min-hu akhlāqan yadfaʿūna bi-hā
shurūra al-ʿawlama am . . . yanbaghī an yajtamiʿa sādat wa-ʿulamā’ al-aqwām
kulluhā, fa-yanẓurūna fī adyānihim wa-yastanbiṭūna min-hā mā yattafiq ʿalayhi
jamīʿuhum, wa-yakūnu hadhā al-muttafaq ʿalayh huwa al-akhlāq al-latī yataṣaddūn
bi-hā li-aḍrār al-ʿawlama ka-mā daʿā ilā dhālik baʿḍuhum fī-mā bāta yusammā bi-’ḥiwār
al-adyān’.”
52. RH, 87: “Nusammīhi bi-’dalīl al-zaman al-akhlāqī’.”
53. RH, 87: “Fī ḍabṭi sulūkihim al-ijtimāʿī wa-taḥqīq wujūdihim al-ḥaḍārī.”
54. RH, 88, ll. 9–10, and last paragraph.
55. RH, 89: “Majāl ʿilāqī akhlāqī.”
56. RH, 89: “Lammā kānat afʿāl al-insān . . . afʿālan khuluqiyya ṣarīḥa, kāna lā budda an
tattajih hādhihi al-afʿāl ilā al-ākhar bi-iʿtibārihi insānan, ayy kā’in akhlāqī.” It is to be
noted that “ṣarīḥ” here has a particular and significant meaning. It is a refer-
ence to the unadulterated act, that which is “true” to the “original” state of
human beings as moral creatures. It is the standing rule, to which exceptions
are nothing but violations of that “true existence.”
57. The concepts of faḍl and faḍl al-māl are of ancient pedigree, having been cur-
-1— rent in pre-Islamic Arabia and having continued to flourish in the charitable
0— terrains of Islam. See M. M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam:
+1—
[ 308 ]
Studies in Ancient Arab Concepts (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 176–77, 229–50. Here, Taha is
drawing heavily on the extensive premodern Islamic concepts and practices of
philanthropy.
58. A theme which Taha elaborates in RH, 92, paragraph 2.
59. RH, 95n10: “Lā yaghību ʿan fiṭnat al-qāri’ annanā nanẓur ilā al-taʿāruf hunā min jānib
dalālatihi ʿalā al-tawāṣul bi-wāsiṭat al-khiṭāb.” See also Taha, al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī fil-
Ikhtilāf al-Fikrī (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2005), 129–30, 143–45.
4. Recasting Reason
10. I occasionally render the term al-insān as “man,” although the more precise ren-
dering is “human” or “human being.” This rendering, forced by English idiom,
imposes itself as a requirement of style.
11. The theory of essences was not accepted among Muslim intellectuals across the
board. For example, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Ibn Taymiyya, perhaps the two
most towering intellectuals of their times, rejected this Porphyrian and Aris-
totelian doctrine. See Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians; Bilal Ibra-
him, “Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Ibn al-Haytham, and Aristotleian Science: Essential-
ism Versus Phenomenalism in Post-Classical Islamic Thought,” Oriens 41 (2013):
379–431.
12. See also Taha, Su’āl al-ʿAmal: Baḥth ʿan al-Uṣūl al-ʿAmaliyya fil-Fikr wal-ʿIlm (Casa-
blanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2012), 59–60.
13. Lirerally, qalb connotes “heart.” Taha deems traditional Islamic scholars to have
mostly, but unjustifiably, combined their own notion of reason as an act or a
faculty (quwwa, malaka) with the Aristotelian concept of essence ( jawhar, dhāt).
See Taha, Su’āl al-ʿAmal, 69–74.
14. AD, 19: “Al-ʿaql huwa imsāku al-qalb li-mā yaṣil ilayhi ḥattā lā yanfalit minhu.”
15. He dedicates a short chapter to these themes in AD, 25–39.
16. Perhaps the simplest explanation of the Second Incompleteness Theorem is this:
First of all, when I say “proved,” what I will mean is “proved with the aid of
the whole of math.” Now then: two plus two is four, as you well know. And, of
course, it can be proved that two plus two is four (proved, that is, with the aid
of the whole of math, as I said, though in the case of two plus two, of course
we do not need the whole of math to prove that it is four). And, as may not be
quite so clear, it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four,
as well. And it can be proved that it can be proved that it can be proved that
two plus two is four. And so on. In fact, if a claim can be proved, then it can
be proved that the claim can be proved. And that too can be proved.
Now, two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that two plus two is not
five. And it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is not five,
and so on.
Thus: it can be proved that two plus two is not five. Can it be proved as well
that two plus two is five? It would be a real blow to math, to say the least, if it
could. If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved
that five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved,
and math would be a lot of bunk.
So, we now want to ask, can it be proved that it can’t be proved that two
plus two is five? Here’s the shock: no, it can’t. Or, to hedge a bit: if it can be
proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved
as well that two plus two is five, and math is a lot of bunk. In fact, if math is
not a lot of bunk, then no claim of the form “claim X can’t be proved” can be
proved.
So, if math is not a lot of bunk, then, though it can’t be proved that two
-1— plus two is five, it can’t be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is
0— five.
+1—
[ 310 ]
By the way, in case you’d like to know: yes, it can be proved that if it can
be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved
that two plus two is five.
25. Here, Taha comes close to maintaining that works and praxis have the effect of
reducing, from the inside, the external (and internal) constrains that threaten
negative liberty, not to mention their constructive role in the promotion of pos-
itive liberty.
26. AD, 67: “Al-ʿaql al-musaddad huwa al-ʿaql al-mujarrad wa-qad dakhalahu al-ʿamal al-
sharʿī.” Notice here the significance of the processual implications of wāw al-ḥāl.
27. Here as elsewhere, Taha pits the jurists against the theologians (Mutakallimūn)
insofar as denuded and guided reasons are concerned. To what extent this com-
parative critique might revise our scholarly approach to these two groups is a
matter that deserves a separate investigation once the full range of his system
of thought becomes clearer to us. Put differently, since his entire system of
thought departs from what might be called, structurally and methodologically,
“postmodern” foundations (where a fix for modernity’s problems refuses to
operate by the logic and structural assumptions of modernity itself), it is quite
possible that his vision of “Islamic studies” might offer—consistent with his
thought—a qualitative correction to these studies as Orientalism has thus far
conceived them.
28. Taha does not make an explicit reference to such writings, but it is clear that
the themes of such a genre (together with the general critique leveled by con-
temporary Muslim liberals against the Islamists) are implicit in his narrative.
For an example of these themes, which are internal to the tradition’s praxis and
are far more intellectually sophisticated than the mere accusations of the mod-
ern Muslim liberals), see Hallaq, Impossible State, 120–22, 133–34, 217.
29. Of course, much more can be said of this issue (and Taha does offer a discus-
sion in four dense pages), but for our purposes a brief outline here should
suffice.
30. There is much to say of Taha’s classification of taqlīd, especially in the manner
that it lacks gradation and qualitative association with ijtihād, at least among
the premodern jurists, which he invokes (together with the Mutakallimūn) in
this context. For a context in which to evaluate Taha’s arguments about taqlīd
as a graded quality, see Wael Hallaq, Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic
Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–23.
31. While the meaning of mujarrad is clear enough (abstracted, denuded), the ety-
mological derivations of musaddad and mu’ayyad are less obvious. In Arabic lexi-
cal usage, the root S.D.D. connotes notions of “correctness” and “soundness.”
“Saddada al-shay’, aṣlaḥahu wa-qawwamahu.” “Al-musaddad [huwa] al-muqawwam
wal-mustaqīm.” On the other hand, A.Y.D./A.A.D. connotes “strength” and “invin-
cibility,” that which cannot be subverted, converted, or defeated. “Al-mu’ayyad
[huwa] al-shadīd wal-qawiyy.” “Ayyadahu Allāh qawwāh.” “Āda, ishtadda wa-qawiya.”
As for shadīd and shidda, they signify “ ʿizz and manaʿa,” again connoting strength
and invincibility. See Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Fayrūzabādī, al-
Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risāla, 1998), 266 (under Āda), 287 (under
Saddada). For invincibility, see Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Mukarram Ibn
Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, ed. ʿĀmir Aḥmad Ḥaydar and ʿAbd al-Munʿim Ibrāhīm,
-1— 15 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2009), 13:225–26 (under R.K.N.).
0—
+1—
[ 312 ]
32. Taha must be using the term rasm (pl. rusūm) in the conventional sense known
to Arabic logicians, which is a “definition” of a thing without identifying the
qualities that make its quiddity (māhiyya). See Muḥammad Aʿlā b. ʿAlī al-
Tahānawī, Kashshāf Iṣṭilāḥāt al-Funūn, 5 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya,
2006), 2:263–64. See also note 8.
33. See, nonetheless, chapter 5, note 3, where enhanced reason is strongly implied
to be a derivative, or a subcategory, of guided reason, however much it is supe-
rior to the latter.
34. Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-ʿĀmirī, al-Iʿlām bi-Manāqib al-Islām, ed.
Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Ghurāb (Riyad: Dār al-A ṣālah lil-Thaqāfa wal-Nashr
wal-Iʿlām, 1988). I could not locate the term mulāmasa in this work, but see
pp. 75, 101, 139.
35. For a definition of tasyīs, see AD, 184. Tasyīs is difficult to translate, and its ren-
dering as “politicization” must be understood with qualifications. For Taha,
tasyīs rests on two principles, both lying within denuded reason: (a) a histori-
cist principle that insists on epochs and eras of the human past as producing
phenomena different from, even contradictory to, one another, something that
he labels as the theory of “historical dialectics” (al-jadaliyya al-tārīkhiyya), and
(b) an exclusion, or rejection, of the past as grounds from which paradigmatic
exemplars for the present can be constructed. Tasyīs, therefore, is the antonym
of takhlīq, leading life not through political behavior but rather through exem-
plary moral conduct.
36. See epilogue, section 1.
37. A conception consistent with my arguments in Hallaq, Restating Orientalism:
A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018),
chap. 5.
38. For an enumeration of these phenomena, see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 232–
33, but the phenomena are to be understood within the overall context of that
book’s arguments.
39. For a (mostly negative) definition of politicization (tasyīs), see note 35.
40. AD, 189: “Iḥtāja al-mutasallifu lā ilā al-ta’ammul fil-nuṣūṣ mubāsharatan, bal ilā tajdīd
tarbiyatihi.”
41. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 73–84: “Both Shariʿa and Sufism, being constituted
by an ethical and moral subject matter—down from their epistemological foun-
dations and up to their social dispensations—strove toward the realization of
moral ends. Being central paradigms and performative discourses, they may
be characterized by what I call a persistent moral benchmark. Benchmarks do
not always fully succeed in implementing their desiderata in the real world, but
rather stand as reminders and standards against which reality is not only mea-
sured but pressured. A persistent benchmark is one whose pressure is greater
than those possessed by other benchmarks, especially if its matrix and source
of authority stem from a central domain. [For example], the Shariʿa held itself
short of developing any concept of limited liability. And it is easy to see why it
did so. One of the central benchmarks of the Shariʿa was the notion of sharʿi sub-
ject, one constituted by moral technologies of the self, technologies in which —-1
—0
—+1
[ 313 ]
ethical and moral liability of the individual believer, the subject, stood supreme.
This benchmark was not only operative but performative; which is to say that
it was not only applied without reticence, but in the process of its operation, it
produced subjects. The premium value in this configuration was moral account-
ability, not profit. Money and wealth were of such secondary status (despite
the great importance Islam and its Shariʿa placed on business, profit and
material wealth) that they could hardly compete with the fundamental, if not
constitutive, concept of ethical duty, moral responsibility, and general account-
ability of the private, individual person. There was no financial or material
consideration in the world, however tempting and important, that could alter
or mitigate the benchmark of individual and personal accountability, respon-
sibility and liability. This type of accountability and responsibility was irreduc-
ible and constituted the most stubborn feature of the entire culture.”
42. SA, 63: “Bayna-mā al-ṣawāb an yakūna al-ʿaql fiʿlan min al-afʿāl wa-s ulūkan min
al-sulūkāt.”
43. On the Intellects, see Dimitri Gutas, “Avicenna: The Metaphysics of the Ratio-
nal Soul,” Muslim World 102 (July-October, 2012): 417–25. On the soul in the larger
framework of Avicenna’s thought, see the eminently useful study of Robert Wis-
nowsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2003), 82–97, 133–40, but also passim (see general index).
44. Cf. the similar arguments in Muḥammad Saʿīd Rayyān, al-ʿAql fil-Islām: Ru’ya
Jadīda (Cairo: Markaz al-Ḥaḍāra al-ʿArabiyya, 2012).
saying that God would not have interfered in a scene he could have easily for-
gotten about had he not wished to introduce to it a solution. God’s intentional
interference, simply put, foregrounds an ontology of ethics, but one, as I will
argue, that is linguistic-ontological in its constitution. Needless to say, a solu-
tion by definition presupposes a problem, one that emerged in the historical
process of creation living its life, and one that pertained exclusively to humans
(Banū Ādam). It would seem at first glance as if the plan did not go as expected,
thus requiring a correction. The narrative of the Great Fall, “Abrahamic” to a
detail, appears as if it were a euphemistic treading over what might be con-
strued as a mistake in the process of creation, and that mistake was the exclu-
sive lot of humans (the Adamic era is here severely abridged and condensed
into a historical topos or narrative-imaginary). Of course, it is integral to the
attributes of God that he wills and does what he wants, and therefore a mis-
take can never be truly a mistake because he himself created the very thing
called mistake. God the Omnipotent and Omniscient cannot fall into the very
error that he himself created deliberately and on principle. The moment of the
Fall thus becomes emblematic of a more complex evolutionary narrative ush-
ering in an unprecedented consciousness that signaled the need—if not the
indispensability—of installing a moral or “legal system of justice” within that
self-conscious species.
The evolutionary narrative of correction need not stand as estranged or sep-
arable from the narrative of the Fall, for the two work together, dialectically
and severally, in their appeal to the believing, or potentially believing, audi-
ence. For the ethically inclined beings—those whose quest in life is to cultivate
moral existence—the empirical facts of the correction are of little concern, for
what truly matters is not the always-illusive acquisition of historical knowledge,
but the lesson that instructs in the ethical fashioning of mind and heart. A
moral narrative or parable may be foregrounded rationally by no other virtue
than its own ethical content. On the other hand, for those habituated in the
determining weight of empirical knowledge, the linguistic rise of the conscience
functions with the same power of conviction. The rise of the Word instanta-
neously signals the rise of the Law, that second divine attempt to bestow on
humans a regulative plan that worked well with other species but failed so
greatly in the case of Homo sapiens that a considerable and undeniable correc-
tion was called for. Thus when we deliberate over God being the Word that itself
is the source of ontology in its entirety, what is being deliberated upon is the
event of God appearing to humankind for the first time. It is then and there,
whenever and wherever that may have been, that God comes to human atten-
tion and knowledge. For without humans in this world, no knowledge of God,
or any god, could ever be possible.
But then how can a mistake, or even an indubitable cosmic plan of justice,
be created between the originating moment of existential order and the lin-
guistic end of that order. Used about a dozen times in the Qur’ān, the expres-
sion kun fa-yakūn (Be! And it is) emblematically marks this creative process, and
at once ties together the domains of language, mind, and consciousness (Q. 2:117, —-1
—0
—+1
[ 315 ]
177; 3:47, 59; 6:73; 7:144; 15:98; 16:40; 19:35; 36:82; 40:68). For behind every ani-
mal, plant, or stone in the world there are these three words, kun fa-yakūn, the
precipitators of all creation.
The common understanding of this imperative is that God’s words are cre-
ative. All he needs to do is utter what he wills, thereby bringing into existence
all that the uttered words encompass. But how can mere words, however divine
their makeup may be, create complex phenomena that far transcend this lin-
guistic simplicity? Does the divinely creative word bring about an ontological
reality ex nihilo or is there another possibility to interpret God’s initiative,
interference in, or regulation of the human world? Why did God need to create
the world in the first place, and why would he create a world in which one spe-
cies, the human, would give him so much trouble that he needed to enact for it
a series of epochal scriptural edicts that aim to correct that species’ morality
and sense of ethics? For after all God did not reveal such corrective Books unto
birds, fish, or reptiles; and the Fall (for all of its mythical and ethical thrust)
has been one exclusively reserved for humans. It would seem inescapable to
integrate the quality of “falling” into the set of properties making up the quid-
dity of being a human (precisely where the import of Taha’s definition of the
human resides). In other words, one might well ask, is there a conceptual dis-
sonance between the Word as a creative act and creation as a “becoming” in
consciousness? Or is it the very occurrence of consciousness, when the power
that is creation effectively translates into an intelligible, conscious mode of
communicative explicandum?
Rejecting the doctrine claiming Jesus Christ as the Son of God, the distin-
guished exgete Ṭabarī, among others, comments at length on Q. 2:117’s phrase
“kun fa-yakūn.” Declaring God the “creator of Earth and the Heavens,” the verse
goes on to state that “When He decrees a matter, He merely says to it: Be! And
it is.” Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī al-Musammā Jāmiʿ al-Bayān fī
Ta’wīl al-Qur’ān, 13 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005), 1:555–59. What
is at stake in this verse is that if God can be shown as able to create the world,
then it is a priori that Jesus Christ can be created without a father. However, to
reach this conclusion, several interpretive obstacles needed to be overcome, yet
obstacles that prove instructive for our own concerns.
Some hypothetical interlocutors question the conditions under which such
a command can make sense. If the thing is nonexistent, they argue, then it can-
not be commanded to come into existence; “merely saying to it” would then
not make any sense. A command always presupposes an object that can be a
recipient of the command, for a command that has no locus or receptor is not
a command at all. It is simply impossible (muḥāl al-amr min āmir illā li-ma’mūr).
In other words, if the object or recipient of command (ma’mūr) is ontologically
impossible, the command itself is rendered therewith impossible. The impos-
sibility is demonstrative, just as it is patently certain that a command is impos-
sible without a commander (muḥāl al-amr min ghayr āmir). The other possibility
is that the thing commanded is itself already existent, in which case the cre-
-1— ative order is redundant, if not meaningless, because it is logically impossible
0— to bring something already in existence into existence. (Although Ṭabarī does
+1—
[ 316 ]
not use the technical term for this logical fallacy, it was generally called, before
and after he wrote, istiḥālat taḥṣīl al-ḥāṣil; Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr
al-Ṭabarī al-Musammā Jāmiʿ al-Bayān fī Ta’wīl al-Qur’ān, 13 vols. [Beirut: Dār al-
Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005], 1:557.)
A third synthetic position seems to have been an attempt to resolve the log-
ical fallacies that engulf such claims of creation. God, on this position, knows
or conceives of all things in the world prior to their actual existence. They are
mapped out, so to speak, in God’s mind as forms of knowledge without taking
any material form; and as such, they exist only in potentiality, but not in mate-
rial existence (or, in terms of phenomenological reality, as actual construc-
tions of the human mind). Accordingly, nonexistent things that exist in God’s
knowledge before their actual creation can be said to be “analogous” (naẓā’ir)
to those things already in existence. And as being potentially capable of exist-
ing, they are susceptible to being commanded “into” existence, just as the other
actually existing existents before them were subject to the same command. In
other words, in one important sense, everything in the world already exists at
one important level, namely, in the form of divine mental existence. (The Divine
Plan of Justice is, incidentally, just an existent, like any other.) We can label this
as nonsubstantive existence, whereas the actually created world would be mate-
rial existence, even where materiality has to be extended to abstract values
and attributes. Ṭabarī labels the difference in an equally, if not more tellingly,
useful way. For him, the difference lies in the particular state in which things
exist, namely, either in a state of existence (wujūd) or in one of nonexistence
(ʿadam). But for him both states, in the final analysis, exist (Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 1:557–
58). In light of the phenomenological import of kun fa-yakūn, it is possible to
argue for a phenomenological understanding of the meaning of existence as
Ṭabarī and his mufassirūn-colleagues construed the terms of ʿadam and wujūd
(existence and nonexistence). For Ṭabarī, God merely orders things to move
from one state to another, or, as he says, “to exit” from the state of nonexistence
into that of existence (ya’muruhā bil-khurūj min ḥal al-ʿadam ilā ḥal al-wujūd), it
being assumed that the state of nonexistence is a state existing in potentia. This
would be consistent with the argument, intimated earlier, that the creation of
the world as humans know it is the “becoming” or emergence of conscious-
ness, when the power euphemized in the story of creation is in effect no more
than the “appearance” within human consciousness of what I just called a mode
of communicative explicandum. The moment of transformation is therefore
not creation ex nihilo, for that form of creation exists no more than other exis-
tents themselves do; and that moment does not, in actual effect, bring about
things from nullity. Creation is thus an act in which things appear in reality; and
since human reality is the only reality of which one can speak, this “appearance”
can be little more than the becoming of consciousness. Which is also to say that
the coming into (or of) consciousness, being a linguistic/conceptual act strictu
senso, is itself the act of creation that is concomitant with the rise of ethics. It is no won-
der then that Ṭabarī categorically declares that “words (qawl) and actual coming
into existence (kawn) are one and the same thing” (Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 1:559). Therefore, —-1
if this conception of genesis is deemed plausible (even to secularist-atheist —0
—+1
[ 317 ]
human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual
copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not
connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is,
however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses
some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and
explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems
altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from oth-
ers, which are entirely different from it . . . [I] am persuaded, that a small
attention [to this point] wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and
let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the
relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.”
11. I have analyzed this centrality in terms of paradigms, arguing that a certain
concept of reason or rationality has acquired in modernity a central domain,
creating and affecting all peripheral domains. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam,
Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), 6–12. While Taha correctly identifies the central forces of modernity, he
shies away from casting them in terms of domains and paradigms, because
perhaps he insists on the distinction between the spirit and applications of
modernity. In the theory of paradigms I construct on the basis of Carl Schmitt,
Kuhn, and Foucault, I do not draw the same sharp boundaries between spirit
and application, for on my view there is a dialectical relationship between so-
called spirit and application, hence the difficulty in creating neat boundaries
between the two.
12. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.1.1 (pp. 245–46).
13. See chapter 6, note 8.
14. On the question of Hobbes’s influence on Mandeville, see James Dean Young,
“Mandeville: A Popularizer of Hobbes,” Modern Language Notes 74, no. 1 (1959):
10–13.
15. Charles Taylor, “Justice After Virtue,” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on
the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Cambridge:
Polity, 1994), 20; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 56–61, 79–87; MacIntyre, A Short History
of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1998), 130–31, 166–71, 189–91. See also John R. Searle,
“How to Derive ‘Ought’ From ‘Is,’ ” Philosophical Review 73, no. 1 (January 1964):
43–58; and Raymond Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 170, for Nietzsche’s similar attitude to the distinction
between Is and Ought.
16. Taylor, “Justice After Virtue,” 20.
17. Taylor, 20–21.
18. On “genetic slice” as an epistemic method, see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A
Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 9, 153,
224, 316n34.
19. See, for instance, Robert G. Morrison, Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of
Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi (London: Routledge, 2007).
20. The literature on colonizing space, both popular and academic, is abundant. An
example of the feasibility of colonization may be found in a lengthy study con- —-1
ducted by nineteen scientists and sponsored by NASA and Stanford University. —0
—+1
[ 319 ]
See Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow, eds., “Space Settlements: A Design
Study,” https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/11517358?selectedversion=NBD1082782.
21. This being consistent with my argument in the epilogue with respect to tech-
niques/technologies as pliable and even mutable.
22. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Random House, 2003),
350, 357.
23. SA, 54: “Al-akhlāq laysat kamalāt, bi-maʿnā ziyādāt lā ḍarara ʿalā al-huwiyya al-
insāniyya fī tarkihā, wa-innamā hiya ḍarūrāt lā taqūm hādhihi al-huwiyya bi-dūnihā,
bi-ḥaythu idhā fuqidat hādhihi al-ḍarūrāt fuqidat al-huwiyya.”
24. Taha does not provide an example to illustrate this claim, but one can conjec-
ture that the very same amount of charitable donation possesses various lev-
els of meaning when given to a political party, to an art museum, or to an impov-
erished peasant family in a poor country. It also matters much who gives the
donation—a peasant, a billionaire.
25. In the specific context of this discourse, ḥaḍāra may also be readily translated
as “culture.” Thus, ḥaḍārat qawl/ḥaḍārat fiʿl may be rendered as “culture of
speech/culture of praxis” (or “of deed”).
26. On procedure and procedural technique, see chapter 3, section 2 (Globalization),
and note 47 therein.
27. I have pursued the issue of sovereignty over the future in Hallaq, Restating
Orientalism, 199–202.
28. Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Manfred Frings (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 28.
29. For my reservations about the categorical claim to “linguistic performativity,”
see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 61–64.
30. A prominent example in point is the fabrication of the distinction between Is
and Ought, and between Fact and Value, which becomes, with Hume (mid-
eighteenth century), an ennobled and dominant philosophical distinction
whose “practical” and material manifestations began to appear on the scene
in the late sixteenth century, if not earlier. See Hallaq, Restating Orientalism,
84–88.
31. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1976), 139–47. Arendt
remarks that “Hobbes’s deep distrust of the whole Western tradition of politi-
cal thought will not surprise us if we remember that he wanted nothing more
nor less than the justification of Tyranny which, though it has occurred many
times in Western history, has never been honored with a philosophical foun-
dation” (144). It is arguable, however, that J. S. Mill, like Kant before him, can-
not be reduced to what we have come to call a “classical liberal” affiliation, and
that his philosophy allowed for extraliberal components that seem to have been
suppressed in the interpretation of later liberal tradition. See Giorgios Varouxa-
kis, Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2013). What is more significant than what a philosopher “truly”
upheld in terms of ideas or doctrines is how he or she is canonized, and what
the philosopher is paradigmatically made to stand for.
-1— 32. M. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabi-
0— now (New York: New Press, 1994), 223–51, at 224–26.
+1—
[ 320 ]
33. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technologi-
cal Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
34. Although Jonas scholars do not seem to agree on the extent to which his con-
cept of responsibility is grounded in fear. See Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo, “The
Heuristics of Fear: Can the Ambivalence of Fear Teach Us Anything in the Tech-
nological Age?,” Ethics of Progress 6, no. 1 (2015): 225–38, at 230n10.
35. Tibaldeo, 230.
36. Further on this, see Damien Bazin, “A Reading of the Conception of Man in Hans
Jonas’ Works: Between Nature and Responsibility, an Environmental Ethics
Approach,” Éthique et économique/Ethics and Economics 2, no. 2 (2004): 1–17; Eric
Pommier, “Life and Anthropology: A Discussion Between Kantian Criticism and
Jonasian Ontology,” Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee 14 (2015): 123–36.
37. SA, 125: “Addā bihi [Jonas] ilā al-wuqūʿ f ī ḍaḥālat al-idrāk li-maʿnā al-mas’ūliyya.”
38. See, for instance, Karl-Otto Apel, “How to Ground a Universalistic Ethics of Co-
Responsibility for the Effects of Collective Actions and Activities?,” Philosophica
52, no. 2 (1993): 9–29.
39. For a critique of Habermas’s theory, see RD, 152–75.
40. In Uṣūl al-Fiqh and all juridical discourse, knowledge (ʿilm) is graded in terms
of certainty and probability, the only two categories that can engender valid-
ity in propositions. Thus, a ẓannī proposition is probably true, which is to say
that it is more likely to be true than not. This probability is graded in terms of
strength since some propositions are likely to be truer than other probably true
propositions. There is then a series of designations that describe this gradation,
ranging from mere ẓann (probability), to ghālib al-ẓann (strong probability = al-ẓann
al-ghālib = al-ẓann al-qawī), to al-ẓann al-mutākhim lil-yaqīn, a degree of probability
that is “adjacent to certainty.” Yaqīn is certainty, obviously neither divisible nor
graded.
41. SA, 130: “Li-taʿadhdhur ijtimāʿ al-siyāda ʿalā al-ṭabīʿa maʿ al-ʿamal bi-hādhihi al-
akhlāq.”
42. SA, 145–46: “Akhlāq al-saṭḥ lā tanfaʿ fil-khurūj min āfāt al-ʿumq.”
43. For an elaboration of the concept of the new human, see epilogue.
44. For a useful account of niyya, see Paul R. Powers, Intent in Islamic Law: Motive and
Meaning in Medieval Sunnī Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
45. Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī al-Kabīr, ed. ʿAlī Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd, 18 vols.
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994), 1:87–92; Powers, Intent, 32–33; Hallaq,
Impossible State, 120–22, 133–34, 217.
46. ʿAlī al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Kitāb al-Faqīh wal-Mutafaqqih, ed. Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
and ʿĀdil al-ʿAzāzī, 2 vols. (Jedda: Dār Ibn al-Jawzī, 1996), 1:26ff.; Māwardī, dab
al-Dīn wal-Dunyā (Jedda: Dār al-Minhāj, 2013), 119ff.
47. See Megan Reid, Law and Piety in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2013), 13–20.
48. On “genetic slices” as epistemological categories, see Hallaq, Restating Oriental-
ism, 9, 153, 224, 316n34. On the successful psychopath, see 192–94.
49. Elsewhere, he directly addresses the concept of negative liberty in the context
of pluralism. See Taha, Taʿaddudiyat al-Qiyam: Mā Madāha? Wa-mā Ḥudūduhā? —-1
(Marrakech: al-Maṭbaʿa wal-Wirāqa al-Waṭaniyya, 2001), 19 and passim. —0
—+1
[ 321 ]
50. As I will show in the epilogue, Taha’s concept of positive liberty does not tally
with the Berlinian one, since it is not subject to state interference. The qualifi-
cation “individuated” constitutes the difference, and points to the individual
as the autonomous agent in the exercise of positive freedom.
51. In Restating Orientalism, I reject this interpretation, ascribing to Foucault a the-
ory of exit, at least in principle. In principle, because Foucault’s project was
clearly not about finding solutions but rather was one centered on diagnosing
problems. One may even be tempted to say that Foucault was not equipped,
because of the assumptions in which he grounded himself, to offer effective or
meaningful solutions.
52. See note 50, and epilogue.
1. RD = Rūḥ al-Dīn: Min Ḍīq al-ʿAlmāniyya ilā Siʿat al-I’timāniyya (Casablanca: al-Markaz
al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2012).
2. For an incisive critique, see Gil Anidjar, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Chris-
tianity,” Interventions 11, no. 3 (2009): 367–93.
3. RD, 510: “Al-r ūḥ amrun khafiy min warā’ al-nafs, yuzʿijuhā ilā al-khayr, wa-yaṣilu
ṣāḥibuhā bil-ʿālam al-ghaybiy matā dakhala fī ʿamāli al-tazkiya wa-ḥifẓi ḥuqūqi al-
amānāt.” For a definition of “yuzʿij/izʿāj” (here roughly translated as “agitate”
or “disturb”), see RD, 511, and section 6 of this chapter.
4. Note the similarities between Taha’s views here and those of the distinguished
Ṣūfīs Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, Riyāḍat al-Nafs,
ed. Ibrāhīm Shams al-Dīn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005); Tirmidhī,
Bayān al-Farq Bayna al-Ṣadr wal-Qalb wal-Fu’ād wal-Lubb, ed. Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm
al-Sāyiḥ (Cairo: Markaz al-Kitāb lil-Nashr, n.d.), esp. at 33–34; and Muḥyī al-Dīn
Abū Bakr Ibn ʿArabī, al-Tadbīrāt al-Ilāhiyya fī Iṣlāḥ al-Mamlaka al-Insāniyya, ed.
ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-Kayyālī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 10, 26, 34–36.
However, Taha seems less inclined than, for instance, Ibn ʿArabī, to credit the
nafs with the ability to procure ethical effects and goodness.
5. AD, 51: “Al-insān muzdawij al-wujūd iḍṭirāran lā ikhtiyāran.”
6. AD, 28–31. For his definition of “man” as ethical, not rational, see chapter 5, sec-
tion 1. Further on horizontality and verticality, see Muḥammad Saʿīd Rayyān,
al-ʿAql fil-Islām: Ru’ya Jadīda (Cairo: Markaz al-Ḥaḍāra al-ʿArabiyya, 2012), 9–11.
7. Rāziq is used here in reference to one of God’s names, al-Razzāq, He who bestows
material and other benefits on humans.
8. Fiṭra meant several things, depending on the context. At a basic level, it is an
inborn original disposition through which humans perceive things in the world.
Intelligence and stupidity, and anything in between, are attributes determined
by fiṭra, which is to say that fiṭra is relative, with some people having a sharper
“disposition” than others. For Fārābī as well as for Ghazālī, as Griffel tells us, it
-1— also meant—at this level—a natural ability or talent. For Ibn Sīnā, fiṭra is a judg-
0— ment or proposition that all human beings possess in common, and are able to
+1—
[ 322 ]
18. See Amy Allen, End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical The-
ory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Hallaq, The Impossible State,
14–17; Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2018), 34, 125–26, 150–55, 209, 214–15, and passim.
19. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism.
20. For a discussion of the moral technologies of the self in the works of these two
thinkers, see Hallaq, Impossible State, 110ff.
21. Taha, Rūḥ al-Ḥadātha: al-Madkhal ilā Ta’sīs al-Ḥadātha al-Islāmiyya (Casablanca: al-
Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2006), 193: “Qabla al-ḥadātha . . . huwa zaman al-wuqū’
taḥta al-wiṣāya al-ladhī thārat ‘alayhi bil-dhāt al-ḥadātha.”
22. See Taha’s discussion of the Qur’ān in chapter 3.
23. RD, 190: “Aḥaduhumā anna waḍʿa al-dhāt lil-qawānīn huwa al-tajallī al-awwal li-irādat
al-tasayyud; wal-thānī anna irādat Allāh tataʿāraḍ maʿ irādat al-muwāṭin.” On
muwāṭana as the ethical association of individuals within a “political” frame-
work, see ʿAbd al-Salām Būzibra, Ṭāha ʿAbd al-Raḥmān wa-Naqd al-Ḥadātha (Bei-
rut: Jadawel, 2011), 234–37. In this specific context, I use “denizen,” not “citizen,”
because the political implications of Taha’s writings on citizenship as a fairly
well-defined political concept (namely, as an ideological product of the nation-
state) are ambiguous. The term denizen as mere “inhabitant or occupant of a
particular place” is pliable, allowing for a range of meanings that seem to
accommodate the ambiguity. However, see note 28 for a less ambiguous, and
therefore more problematic, use of the concept.
24. This is the thrust of Anscombe’s critique of Kant’s moral law and the Categori-
cal Imperative. See G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy
33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19, at 1–2, 5.
25. RD, 192: “Baʿda an qarrarū ʿalā wajh al-taḥakkum bi’anna al-awwal [huwa] majāl al-
taʿabbud wa-anna al-thāni[yya] majal al-tadbīr al-ʿāmm.”
26. See, for instance, John W. Cairns, “Watson, Walton, and the History of Legal
Transplants,” Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 41, no. 3 (2013):
637–96.
27. I have dealt with certain aspects of this problem in terms of a theory of evil
and hate of the self. See Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 51, 89–90, 227–28.
28. Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Mukarram Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, ed. ʿĀmir
Aḥmad Ḥaydar and ʿAbd al-Munʿim Ibrāhīm, 15 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
ʿIlmiyya, 2009), 13:557: “Al-waṭan [huwa] al-manzil, tuqīmu fīh . . . huwa mawṭin al-
insān wa-maḥalluhu” (under W.Ṭ.N.). See note 23.
29. See Goodman’s passage in the main text at note 31.
30. Ibn Ṭufayl having been a patron of the young Averroes in the caliphal court,
who is said to have encouraged the latter to put his energies into the study of
the Aristotelian corpus. See Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān:
A Philosophical Tale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4–5.
31. Goodman, Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān, 17–18 (emphasis mine).
32. Since in Islam, India, and China the “rise” of science did not generate the kinds
of reactions that it did in Catholic Europe.
-1— 33. RD, 203: “[Huwa] al-a ṣl bil-iḍāfa ilā bāqī al-ḥudūd.”
0—
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[ 324 ]
34. RD, 224: “Al-maṣāliḥ al-latī yurāʿīhā hādhā al-tadbīr al-dākhilī lā taqif ʿinda al-maṣāliḥ
al-akhlāqiyya, bal tataʿaddāhā ilā al-maṣāliḥ al-r ūḥiyya.”
35. RD, 236: “Ḥattā annahu yajūz al-qawl bi-anna kull niẓām siyāsī huwa, bil-quwwa, niẓām
muḥīt.” Taha is here using “quwwa” in the classical philosophical sense, to stand
as an antonym of “bil-fiʿl” (in actuality). See Wael Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya Against
the Greek Logicians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 80.
36. RD, 236: “Wa-k ull niẓām siyāsī qā’im, in bil-quwwa aw bil-fiʿl, ʿalā tasayyud ghayr
mutanāhī.” See also p. 239. Further on this theme, see Giorgio Agamben, State of
Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and
Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, chap. 4.
37. RD, 254: “Al-tasayyus wal-tasayyud fiʿlān mutalāzimān; fa-lā tasayyud bi-ghayri
tasayyus, wa-lā tasayyus bi-ghayri tasayyud.”
38. I am not sure I understand this qualification, since, if we go by Mauss, for
instance, “thinking,” as the habitus of the “rational modern subject,” does man-
ifest itself in a particular way of carrying the self, of behaving in and seeing
the world. See Marcel Mauss, “The Notion of Body Techniques,” in Sociology and
Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 97–123. Also available
as “Techniques of the Body,” https://monoskop.org/images/c/c4/Mauss_Marcel
_1935_1973_Techniques_of_the_Body.pdf.
39. In a related point (RD, 272), Taha argues that the sovereign, by virtue of having
been consumed by his condition as sovereign, can no longer possess the inter-
nal means or autonomy to liberate himself from this condition. Yet, he con-
tinues, liberating himself from this servitude, the sovereign is required to “go
out of his self” in order to seek the ethical techniques of practice (i.e., wor-
ship). The question that poses itself here is, is this possible in the first place,
unless the “external means” possess capacities that are commensurately exter-
nal to the self?
40. RD, 272–73: “Wa-kamāl al-iṭlāq fil-dhāt al-ilāhiyya yastalzim kamāl al-ḥurriyya fil-dhāt
al-insāniyya, dhālika anna al-taʿalluq bil-muṭlaq al-kāmil huwa taʿalluq bi-man lā
yaḥudduhu shay’, wa-lā yuʿjizuhu shay’, . . . Wa-muḥāl an takūna kalimāt Allāh al-
sābiqa wa-tashrīʿātahu al-lāḥiqa al-munazzala ilā ʿibādihi . . . athqālan ʿalā ẓuhūrihim
tunhiku qudrātahum wa-lā aghlālan fī aʿnāqihim tunhiku ḥurriyatahum, wa-innamā,
ʿalā al-ʿaksi min dhālika, jaʿalahā la-hum aṣlaḥa al-wasā’il al-latī tūṣiluhum ilā taḥrīr
anfusihim min anfusihim, faḍlan ʿan taḥrīrihā min ghayrihim.”
41. RD, 273–74. My interpretation of these pages is in fact summed up in a new sec-
tion on the next page, 275: “Ḥubb al-īmān al-ḥaṣil bil-tazkiya yaqdir ʿalā an yaṭrud
ḥubb al-sulṭān min qalb al-fard.”
42. The concept of ḥayā’ is one of the cornerstones of Taha’s project, culminating
in the publication of his three-volume work Dīn al-Ḥayā’: Min al-Fiqh al-I’timārī
ilā al-Fiqh al-I’timānī, 3 vols. (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ,
2017). The concept, however, emerges as central earlier on, being interconnected
with a range of important philosophical moments, such as that of its relation-
ship to dialogue (ḥiwār) between “nations” (umam). See Taha, al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī
fil-Ikhtilāf al-Fikrī (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2005), 153–58. On
waqāḥa as an antonym of ḥayā’, see p. 153. —-1
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[ 325 ]
43. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, 14:269, under “ḥayā’ ”: “Al-ḥayā’ [huwa] al-tawba wal-
ḥishma.” SeeʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī, al-Taʿrīfāt, ed. Muḥammad
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Marʿashlī (Beirut: Dār al-Nafā’is, 2007), 158: “Al-ḥayā’ inqibāḍ al-
nafs min shay’ wa-tarkuhu ḥadharan ʿan al-lawm fī-hi.”
44. RD, 279, 284: “Fa-lā khilāfa bi-lā taʿabbud.”
45. Taha has recently dedicated an entire book to a treatment of violence, titled
Su’al al-ʿUnf: Bayna al-I’timaniyya wal-Ḥiwāriyya (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya
lil-Fikr wal-Ibdāʿ, 2017).
46. See Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 268–69; Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Soci-
ological Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 90; Hallaq,
Impossible State, 25–28.
47. Discussed in chapter 5, section 4.
48. RD, 303: “Fa-qad tarādafat ʿalayhi alwān min al-istiʿbād al-khafī wal-akhfā, bad’an bi-
ʿibādat al-dhāt wa-intihā’an bil-tabaʿiyya lil-sūq.”
49. RD, 303–4: “Ḥattā aṣbaḥa huwa al-insān al-ladhī yataṭawwaʿ bi-ʿubūdiyyatihi,
mutawahhiman anna hādhā al-taṭuwwuʿ yajʿaluhu yatamattaʿ bi-aqṣā ḥurriyatihi.”
50. See Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (London: Verso, 2014), 232–72.
51. Althusser, 232–72; Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Struc-
ture of the Bureaucratic Field,” in State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural
Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999): 53–75.
52. RD, 304–5: “Wal-mujtamaʿ bi-ghayri mumārasatin izʿājiyya ka-lā mujtamaʿ. . . . Fa-qad
yūjad al-insān bi-dūni ḥukūmatin wa-lā tasayyudin siyāsī, wa-lākinnahu lā yūjad bi-
dūni usratin aw muḥīṭin insānī.” See also p. 306. In Rūḥ al-Ḥadātha (99–139, espe-
cially at 100, 110–11), Taha argues that the family is not just the site of social
and legal relations; it also plays a central function in the production of ethics
and human and humane values. It is, so it appears, the immediate and most aus-
picious context in which the individual can self-operate on his soul, what I
have called, on behalf of Taha, the technologies of the soul.
53. RD, 305: Disturbance “huwa al-taṣaddī lil-asfal wa-iktisāḥ mawqiʿ al-mujtamaʿ.”
54. This echoes the premodern Islamic discourse on what has come to be known
as “working for the government.” See the treatise published by Wilferd Made-
lung, “A Treatise of the Sharīf al-Murtaḍā on the Legality of Working for the
Government (Mas’ala Fī ‘l-ʿAmal Maʿa ‘l-Sulṭān),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 43, no. 1 (1980): 18–31.
55. “Hypothetical” in the sense that the identity of the interlocutor is not identi-
fied. As in the case of premodern Islamic literature, behind this hypothetical
interlocutor there often stood an actual one (e.g., a fatwā seeker or a dialecti-
cal disputant [munāẓir] in a scholarly debate), and the same may be Taha’s case
with his intellectual surrounds.
56. For an expansive treatment of jihād, see Taha, al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī, 217–73, and Taha,
Su’āl al-ʿUnf.
57. RD, 312: “Inna al-izʿāja huwa nafsuhu jihād, bal al-a ṣl fil-jihād an yaḥṣul bi-ṭarīq al-
-1— izʿāj, fa-yalzam anna al-jihād bil-quwwa innamā huwa jihād farʿī, bi-ḥaythu takūn
0—
+1—
[ 326 ]
rutbat al-jihād bil-izʿāj ashraf min rutbatihi, wal-iʿdād la-hu awjab wa-akbar min al-
iʿdād lil-jihād bil-quwwa.”
58. On the distinction between these forms of rationality, see chapter 4.
59. On the defensive nature of jihād, see Hallaq, Impossible State, 94–95.
60. A dimension of this debate-cum-communication theory is also articulated in
his Taʿaddudiyat al-Qiyam, where he categorically rejects the doctrine of the
“clash of civilizations” and “conflicting values” in favor of dialogue and debate
between and among people, communities, and “nations.” This dialogue, inte-
gral to his theory of ḥiwār, is based on the concept of taṣāduf al-qiyam (concur-
rence of values), not taṣādum al-qiyam (oppositional, conflicting values), the
Huntingtonian idea that led to what is now a political doctrine of the “clash of
civilizations.” Yet, judging from the short shrift that Taha gives to Huntington, it
appears that Taha does not take Huntington’s work to be worthy of rebuttal.
Instead, he focuses on the philosophical genealogy of the problem, identifying—
as we have seen him do in this chapter—love of power and domination, secu-
larism, and the liberal concept of education as responsible for nurturing this
aggressive Huntingtonian notion. His forceful critique is instead directed at
six major political thinkers, namely, Max Weber, Isaiah Berlin, Jürgen Haber-
mas, Karl-Otto Apel, John Rawls, and Michael Walzer. See Taha, Taʿaddudiyat
al-Qiyam: Mā Madāha? Wa-mā Ḥudūduhā? (Marrakech: al-Maṭbaʿa wal-Wirāqa
al-Waṭaniyya, 2001), 5–52, esp. at 47–52.
61. RD, 337: “Siyāsa,” Ibn Qayyim states, “[t]anqasim ilā qismayn: saḥīḥ wa-fāsid, fal-ṣaḥīḥ
qism min aqsām al-Sharīʿa lā qasīma la-hā, wal-bāṭil ḍidduhā wa-munāfīhā’.” Ibn
Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Iʿlām al-Muwaqqiʿīn ʿan Rabb al-ʿĀlamīn, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār
al-Jīl, 1998), 4:500. See also to similar effect Ibn Qayyim, al-Ṭuruq al-Ḥukmiyya
fil-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya, ed. Muḥammad al-Zuḥaylī and Bashīr Muḥammad ʿUyūn
(Beirut: Maktabat al-Mu’ayyad, 1989), 4. This slogan comes on the heels of
another, earlier distinction between the sacred and profane. Here Taha goes far
back to the premodern Islamic sources in order to object to the slogan that
“Islam is both a religion and worldly [in its concerns]” (“al-Islām dīn wa-dunyā”;
RD, 344). While this clearly is a modern formulation, it is not as clear that it was
used, in the same sense, by any premodern jurist or theologian. The fact that
Māwardī, here cited by Taha, has two books bearing the language of dīn and
dunyā as well as sulṭān and dīn (in his famous Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya wal-Wilāyāt
al-Dīniyya) is no evidence that the meaning of the modern slogan existed dur-
ing Māwardī’s eleventh century. When read carefully, and in conjunction with
Tashīl al-Naẓar wa-Taʿjīl al-Ẓafar (also by Māwardī), the dunyā/dawla spheres are
seen as Sharīʿa-regulated, only needing the enforcement of the sultanic power
(whose function is tathbīt qawāʿid al-dīn). As Ibn al-Qayyim has just noted, siyāsa
is integral to the Sharīʿa, but both undoubtedly need the enforcement of the
sultan who is under the same mandate of observance and obedience as any
other Muslim, if not more.
62. RD, 353: “Wa-innamā taʿnī, ʿalā al-akhaṣṣ, al-ijtihād al-basharī al-ladhī yaḥṣul fī istiqlāl
ʿan sulṭat al-naṣṣ al-dīnī, fī ḥīn yushtaraṭ fil-ijtihād al-basharī li-binā’ dawlat al-Islām
an yabqā mawṣūlan, bal muqayyadan bil-waḥy al-ilāhī.” —-1
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[ 327 ]
63. Hallaq, Impossible State, 154–55. On this issue at large and for the metaphysical
implications of syllogism and the theory of universals on which it rests, see Hal-
laq, Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians.
64. Hallaq, Impossible State, 62–65. See also note 61.
65. For a history of this process of destruction, or “demolish and replace,” see Hal-
laq, Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), part 3.
66. Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1983), 116–17, 174.
67. See chapter 4, section 3, at paragraph ending with note 22.
68. On the pre-Mawdūdian origins of the distinctly modern concept of ḥākimiyya,
see the insightful article of Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “The Sovereignty of God
in Modern Islamic Thought,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 25, no. 3 (2015):
389–418. On debates within the Islamist camps about Sayyid Quṭb’s concept of
ḥākimiyya, see ʿAbd al-Ghanī ʿImād, “Fī Naqd Uṭrūḥat al-Ḥākimiyya al-Ilāhiyya,”
in Al-Thāqafa al-ʿArabiyya fil-Qarn al-ʿIshrīn: Ḥaṣīla Awwaliyya, ed. Bilqazīz and
Muḥammad Jamāl Bārūt (Beirut: Markaz Dirāsāt al-Waḥda al-ʿArabiyya, 2011),
167–79.
69. I have argued for this conceptual link in Hallaq, “Groundwork of the Moral Law:
A New Look at the Qurʼān and the Genesis of Sharīʿa,” Islamic Law and Society 16,
nos. 3–4 (2009): 239–279; and Hallaq, “Qur’ānic Constitutionalism and Moral Gov-
ernmentality: Further Notes on the Founding Principles of Islamic Society and
Polity,” Comparative Islamic Studies 8, nos. 1–2 (2012): 1–51.
70. RD, 368: “Awāmiruhu al-qudsiyya la tanfakk an tatawārad min ghayr inqiṭāʿ ḥifẓan li-
ḥayāti [al-insān] fī kulli laḥẓa min laḥaẓatihā.” This view derives from a theologi-
cal position adopted by many Muslim scholars, including jurists. See Harry
Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1976), 544–51; Wael Hallaq, “On the Authoritativeness of Sunni Consensus,” Inter-
national Journal of Middle East Studies 18, no. 4 (November 1986): 427–54, at 437–
39, 443.
71. RD, 369 (and note 23 therein): “Fal-āmiriyya al-ilāhiyya hiya al-a ṣl al-awwal al-ladhī
yuraddu ilayhi kullu shay’.”
72. RD, 400: “Wa-law anna ‘al-taḥkīmiyyīn’ taʿāṭū lil-ʿamal al-tazkawī ʿalā shurūṭihi, la-
istaṭāʿū an yubdiʿū ṭarīqan fil-siyāsa lā yarā fī-hi khuṣūmuhum khaṭaran yuhaddid
sulṭānahum, li-annahu lan yakūna muṭlaqan min jinsi ʿamalihim.”
73. RD, 401n1, citing Tālqānī, Sharīʿat Madārī, Khū’ī, Sīstānī, Muḥammad Jawād
Mughanniyya, and even Muntaẓarī, who initially supported it.
74. See Aḥmad al-Narāqī, Wilāyat al-Faqīh, ed. Yāsīn al-Mūsawī (Beirut: Dār al-Taʿāruf
lil-Maṭbūʿāt, n.d.).
75. RD, 449: “Yatakawwan min ʿunṣurayn asāsiyayn humā: al-ikhtiyār al-awwal wa-
taḥammul al-amāna.” On Taha’s concept of trusteeship within an analysis of
European Islam, see Mohammed Hashas, The Idea of European Islam: Religion, Eth-
ics, Politics and Perpetual Modernity (London: Routledge, 2019), 186–204.
76. RD, 449: “Idhan tuʿaddu . . . alfāẓan mutarādifa, idh tufīdu kulluhā anna al-insāna
-1— taḥammala ḥifẓa al-aḥkāmi al-ilāhiyya, lā fī ẓāhirihā ka-awāmir fa-ḥasb bal ayḍan fī
0— bāṭinihā ka-shawāhid.”
+1—
[ 328 ]
Epilogue
16. Needless to say, this “outline” awaits further and extensive deliberations on the
meaning of critique and resistance.
17. The Tahan meanings of Ḥayā’ and my derivative concept of humility are not to
be equated or in any manner associated with the Nietzschean notions of humil-
ity as “slave morality.” Nietzsche thought that by “enshrining the ‘slave moral-
ity,’ the weak are doing exactly what the strong do: they are aiming at eminence
and superiority.” On Nietzsche’s problematic interpretation of Christian moral-
ity, see, for instance, Robert Elliot, “Humility and Magnanimity in Nietzsche
and Christianity,” Ethika Politika (May 29, 2014), https://ethikapolitika.org/2014
/05/29/humility-magnanimity-nietzsche-christianity. I owe the caution against
the reader’s possible understanding of humility in a Nietzschean fashion to my
colleague Akeel Bilgrami.
18. In reference to my discussion of the concept of gratitude in Restating Oriental-
ism, 249–58.
19. Elisabeth Anker, “The Liberalism of Horror,” Social Research 81, no. 4 (Winter
2104): 795–823; Dominico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory
Elliott (London: Verso, 2011); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2015); Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 249–58, and sources
cited therein.
20. Qur’ān, 5:48: “Li-kullin jaʿalnā min-kum shirʿatan wa-minhājā”: “Had God willed, He
would have made you one nation/community.” See also Q. 49:13. Of course, the
use here of “nation” is metaphorical and exogenous to the Qur’ān itself. I use it
to indicate what we call today, not without heavy ideological biases, “societies,”
“cultures,” even “civilizations.” It goes without saying therefore that a new con-
cept of the human that ensues, as just one variety among others, from the
Qur’ānic message does not and cannot allow for such nationalistic and politi-
cal conceptions.
21. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 249–58.
-1—
0—
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