Islamic Ethos and the Specter of Modernity (Anthem Middle East Studies) - Softcover

Vahdat, Farzin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783084375 ISBN 13: 9781783084371

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2015

Synopsis

Drawing on the work of Hegel, this book proposes a framework for understanding modernity in the Muslim world and analyzes the discourse of prominent Muslim thinkers and political leaders. Chapter by chapter, the book undertakes a close textual analysis of the works of Mohammad Iqbal, Abul Ala Maududi , Sayyid Qutb , Fatima Mernissi, Mehdi Haeri Yazdi, Mohammad Mojtaehd Shabestari, Mohammad Khatami, Seyyed Hussein Nasr and Mohamad Arkoun, drawing conclusions about contemporary Islamic thought with reference to some of the most significant markers of modernity.

About this title

About the Author

Farzin Vahdat is a sociologist working on conditions and notions of modernity and their applications to Iran, Islam and the Muslim world. Vahdat has taught at Tufts, Harvard and Yale Universities, as well as Vassar College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Islamic Ethos and the Specter of Modernity

By Farzin Vahdat

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2015 Farzin Vahdat
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78308-437-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
A Note on Transliteration, 
Introduction, 
Chapter One Sir Muhammad Iqbal: The Dialectician of Muslim Authenticity, 
Chapter Two Sayyid Abul 'Ala Maududi: A Theorist of Disciplinary Patriarchal State, 
Chapter Three An Islamic Totality in the Ideology of Sayyid Qutb, 
Chapter Four Fatima Mernissi: Women, Islam, Modernity and Democracy, 
Chapter Five Mehdi Haeri Yazdi and the Discourse of Modernity, 
Chapter Six Postrevolutionary Islamic Modernity in Iran: The Intersubjective Hermeneutics of Mohamad Mojtahed Shabestari, 
Chapter Seven Religious Modernity in Iran: Dilemmas of Islamic Democracy in the Discourse of Mohammad Khatami, 
Chapter Eight Seyyed Hossein Nasr: An Islamic Romantic?, 
Chapter Nine Mohammed Arkoun and the Idea of Liberal Democracy in Muslim Lands, 
Conclusion, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

SIR MUHAMMAD IQBAL: THE DIALECTICIAN OF MUSLIM AUTHENTICITY

Muhammad Iqbal, who was knighted by the British in 1922, was one of the most important intellectual architects of the Islamic revival in the twentieth century. While he wrote most of his considerable output as Persian poetry, he neither considered himself a poet, nor could he easily engage in a conversation in Persian. By his own admission, his thought was vastly influenced by European philosophy, and yet his discourse is one of the largest and most profound bodies of work attempting to construct a Muslim selfhood ever produced. To be sure, Iqbal's discourse is replete with tensions and contradictions, but as I will try to show below, these contradictions are not primarily the result of his mixing European philosophy and Islamic thought, and therefore he should not be accused of bad eclecticism. As with many other social and political philosophers, some of these contradictions were the consequences of the development of his thought in their different stages. But many other contrarieties in his writings, as I argue below, were caused by his attempt to construct an Islamic subjectivity that he wished to build by invoking the monotheistic Godhead. Like many of his Islamist cohorts, Iqbal insisted that human agency is possible only if it is derived from the Divine Agency; and this, I will argue, is at the core of some of the most elemental tensions in his thought. However, this is not to dismiss the significance of his discourse in the creation of Muslim selfhood and agency. In the history of Western modernity, a very similar process of projecting the desired attributes of human empowerment and agency onto an image of a powerful omniscient God and then re-appropriating these attributes for humans has laid the foundations of the modern world in the West. A very analogous process has been at work in the Islamic world since mid-nineteenth century, producing dialectical tensions in the discourses of most of its prominent modernist thinkers, and the work of Iqbal is no exception in this regard. In fact, this type of contradiction is a source of dynamism in the Islamic world, which carries within itself the seeds of major changes in the cultures and polities of the Muslim regions involved.

Iqbal himself viewed his role as very much akin to that of "prophecy." Thus, in one of his most important works, Javidnameh, he prophesied a resurrection for the East wherein "jewels" would emerge from its rocks and its mountains would be shaken. In the same book he asserted that if the intention of "poetry" is forging of human subjects [adam gari], then poesy is the heir to prophethood.

Muhammad Iqbal was born, apparently in 1877, at Sialkot, a border town in Punjab and near Kashmir, now an area of contention between Pakistan and India. Iqbal's grandfather Shaikh Rafiq left the ancestral village of Looehar in Kashmir some time after 1857 and settled in Sialkot, working as peddler of Kashmiri shawls. Iqbal's father, Shaikh Nur Muhammad, was a pious Muslim and while not formally educated, was close to Sufi orders and interested in mystical pursuits. He made a living as a tailor and embroiderer. Iqbal's mother, Imam Bibi, was also devout, came from a working class family and, beyond an elementary knowledge of the Qur'an, had no formal education. Iqbal's father's business experienced some ups and downs, but on the whole, Sheikh Nur Muhammad's income was not sufficient to support a proper education for the children. Only the fact that Iqbal's elder brother acquired training as an engineer by joining the British Indian Army and then secured a supervisory job in the same army catapulted the family into the middle class and paved the way for Iqbal's education.

Iqbal graduated from high school in 1892, having already been tutored by a religious scholar who was well versed in Arabic and Persian literatures. A year later Iqbal entered the Scotch Mission College, a junior college that had been established in 1889 in Sialkot by European missionaries. As he graduated from high school, his parents married him to Karim Bibi. This marriage was a source of unhappiness and frustration for Iqbal, and he eventually broke it off in 1916. Having excelled in his studies, in 1895 Iqbal's father, encouraged by his teachers, decided to send him to Government College, a prestigious institution in Lahore. He graduated cum laude from Government College, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897, and was awarded a scholarship toward a Master's degree in philosophy. At about the same time, his talents in poetry began to be recognized, and by the time he received his Master's degree in 1899, his reputation as a talented young poet was established among the intellectual circles of Lahore.

One of Iqbal's British professors at the Government College, Sir Thomas Arnold, a scholar of Islam and of modern Western philosophy, had a lasting influence on him. It was with Arnold's guidance and friendship that Iqbal developed the interest and preliminary skills to combine Islamic and modern Western ideas. It was also Arnold who persuaded Iqbal to pursue further post-graduate studies in Europe.

From the time of his graduation until 1905, Iqbal engaged in some junior academic positions and tried to enter the legal profession in Lahore. But he found the academic career unsatisfactory and failed the preliminary examinations for a career in law. In 1905, with the financial and moral support of his brother, Iqbal left India for England, where he studied to qualify for the Bar. He also enrolled in an undergraduate program at the Trinity College of Cambridge University, although he had already obtained a master's degree in India. Apparently Iqbal wished to benefit from the lectures of John McTaggart and James Ward, two Hegel scholars, as well as those of prominent scholars of Iran and the Persian language, Edward G. Browne and Reynold A. Nicholson, all of whom were in Cambridge at that time. At the same time, Iqbal made an arrangement with Munich University in Germany to submit a dissertation on Philosophy for a doctoral degree. His dissertation, which was accepted for the fulfillment of his doctorate in 1907, was published a year later in London under the title The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, which laid the foundations for much of his subsequent intellectual output.

During the years that Iqbal spent in Europe, he met and befriended 'Atiya Begum Faizee, a wellborn young and educated Indian Muslim woman with a free spirit. They seem to have developed close intellectual and romantic bonds, but for unexplained reasons, they did not marry. After Iqbal's return to India in 1908, however, his family arranged a second marriage to Sardar Begum. This marriage seems to have gone sour because of anonymous letters Iqbal received tarnishing Sardar Begum's character. Eventually Iqbal's suspicions lifted; he married Sardar Begum and the couple had three children. Back in India, Iqbal started a professional career as an attorney at law with his British law degree while declining academic appointments, apparently because he thought an academic career would restrict his intellectual autonomy and because of its meager financial rewards. Yet his law practice, which officially existed until 1934, never thrived either, mostly because of Iqbal's lack of enthusiasm while he tried to maintain sufficient leisure time for his intellectual activities. Iqbal wrote most of his philosophical works after he settled in India in the form of poetry and in the Persian language. One of the most seminal of these books was asrar-i khudi (Secrets of the Self), published in 1915. Two years after this book was translated into English by Nicholson, in 1922, and while the significance of his thought had already became known in Europe, Iqbal was knighted by the British government. Iqbal visited Europe twice more in 1931 and 1932, when he met with diverse individuals as Henry Bergson, the Spanish scholar of Islamic thought Miguel Asin Palacios and the French orientalist and scholar of Sufism, Louis Massignon. In Italy he also met with Benito Mussolini before he invaded Ethiopia. In October and November 1933, Iqbal visited Afghanistan at the invitation of Muhammad Nadir Shah. It was after this journey that his health started to deteriorate gradually, and he died on April 20, 1938 in Lahore.

A New Muslim Subjectivity: The Self as the Pivot of the Universe

In his groundbreaking work the Secrets of the Self, Iqbal asserted that the very "form of existence" is there because of human selfhood. It is because of human selfhood that the world reveals itself to us and the power and firmness that underlies the movement of the universe is a result of human selfhood. The Persian term that Iqbal used to render the concept of selfhood was Khudi, literally meaning "I-ness" or selfhood. To be sure this term was not a neologism coined by Iqbal, but had been relatively rarely used in classical Persian literature. When it had been used, Khudi and its various synonyms had strong negative connotations of selfishness, narrow self-interest and egotism. Similarly, Iqbal was not the first person who used the concept of selfhood in a positive light, but his treatment of the concept remains the most elaborate among the various Muslim thinkers of modernity.

What Iqbal meant by the notion of selfhood was very closely related to the notion of subjectivity that is often considered to be the foundation of modern world. He used the term subjectivity in his early work, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, which is basically an étude in Iranian thought seen through the lens of Western philosophy that he had been studying in Europe. Nevertheless, what Iqbal had in mind by the notion of selfhood or Khudi is closely related to the idea of human subjectivity and agency. Khudi for Iqbal was synonymous with will and volition. As early as The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, Iqbal wrote, "The Semitic formula of salvation can be briefly stated in the words 'Transform your will' — which signifies that the Semitic looks upon will as the essence of the human soul." The ability of the individual to make moral decisions through volition was a basic tenet of Islam according to Iqbal. "It is therefore evident," he wrote, "that Islam, so to speak, transvaluates the moral values of the ancient world and declares the preservation and intensification of the sense of human personality to be the ultimate ground of all ethical activities." As such, subjectivity was real for Iqbal. Even though one may assume that the entire universe does not exist in its materiality, and that it is all but an illusion, Iqbal postulated, Khudi is not delusion. And once it reaches the state of maturity, subjectivity becomes indelible.

Goal achievment was another very important attribute of selfhood for Iqbal. Thus he wrote in a poem:

    Life is preserved by purpose;
    Because of the goal its caravan-bell tinkles.
    Life is latent in seeking ...
    Rise, O thou
    Rise O thou who art strange to Life's mystery.
    Rise intoxicated with the wine of purpose
    A purpose shining as the dawn,
    A blazing fire to all that is other than God,
    Wining, captivating, enchanting men's hearts,
    A destroyer of ancient falsehood,
    Fraught with turmoil, an embodiment of the Last Day.
    We live by forming purposes
    We glow with the sunbeam of desire.

What motivates humans to seek goals is, according to Iqbal, desire (arezoo). It is quite possible that Iqbal chose this concept under the influence of the Hegelian notion of Desire (Begierde). Again we see that Iqbal took a concept such as arezoo, which traditionally was considered a cognate of the notions of appetite and lust and disparaged, and gave it a new and positive meaning. Desire for Iqbal was what gave life to the material world and motivated the subject. It is the desire that give birth to understanding ('aql), social organization, customs, laws and novelties of sciences. In a word, desire is the very foundation of the preservation of the self, and without cultivating desire in our hearts, we will be trampled by others.

As such, Iqbal believed in the domination of nature by humans. He posited that humans were originally enmeshed in nature from which they have to extricate themselves. Humans have been associated with nature for thousands of years and this association has caused them alienation from selfhood and subjectivity. As such, our destiny is to overcome the idol of nature, which we have carved out ourselves, and shatter it. The self in Iqbal's philosophy could even lasso the sun and the moon:

    Drunk with selfhood like a wave
    Plunge into the stormy lave;
    Who commanded thee to sit
    With thy skirts about thy feet?
    Let the tiger be thy prey:
    Leave the mead and flowers gay,
    Out toward the mountain press,
    Tent thee in the wilderness.
    Cast thy strangling rope on high,
    Circle sun and moon in sky,
    Seize a star from heaven's sphere,
    Stitch it on thy sleeve to wear.

In his Javidnameh, Iqbal proposed that since the entire heavens and the earth, are the property of God, the moon and the Pleiades are human hereditament. The earth and the heavens are to obey the commands of the subject: "If you say do this, don't do that, they'd oblige." As early as 1932, long before the United States sent exploratory missions to the moon, Iqbal was suggesting that sooner or later we would observe the moon's conditions and its caves and mountains.

In a similar vein, Iqbal believed that whatever is not human is for conquest and nothing more. In his Rumuz-i Bikhudi (Mysteries of Selflessness), which was published in 1918 and was meant to complement the Secrets of the Self, Iqbal declared that conquest of the Other is deeply rooted in human psyche,

    O You! Who has a Covenant
    With the Invisible Being,
    And who, like a Flood,
    Is free from the boundary
    Of a Shore!

    Now, grow from the Soil
    Of this Garden,
    Like a Plant!
    Attach your Heart
    To the Invisible Being,
    And fight against
    The visible world!

    The visible things
    Of the world,
    Describe the Power of the Invisible,
    And they become a Preface
    To its conquest!

    Every thing Other
    Exists here to be conquered,
    And its breast is a Target
    For your Arrow! [...]
    Are you a dew drop?
    Then possess the Sun!

    If you can work wonders,
    Then melt this Lion of ice
    With your warm Breath!

    Whoever was able
    To conquer the visible things,
    He built a world
    From a single mote!

What underlies the notion of conquest for Iqbal is the notion of power. For him, power is the "manifestation" (shu'ar) of conquest, as conquest and domination are signs of strength. In this view, life is nothing but power. Power even determines right and wrong:

    Life is the seed and power the crop:
    Power explains the mystery of truth and falsehood
    A claimant, if he be possessed of power,
    Needs no arguments for his claim.
    Falsehood derives from power the authority of truth.
    And falsifying truth deems itself true.
    Its creative word transforms poison into nectar;
    It says to Good, "Thou art bad," and Good becomes Evil

On the other hand, power makes humans ethical, respecting the subjectivity of others. In a lecture that Iqbal delivered in 1908, he contended that weakness is the cause of evil, and that once a person develops a keen appreciation of his or her own sense of selfhood, he or she will, "respect the personalities of others and become perfectly virtuous." Islam, he argued, in contrast to Christianity and Buddhism, does not approve of "self-renunciation, poverty and slavish obedience," which are concealed "under the beautiful name of humility and unworldliness." In his 1930 book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, which was a collection of six lectures he had delivered in Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh, Iqbal invoked the Qur'an to say that it is natural for the self to maintain itself, and that to do so it seeks knowledge, self-multiplication and power. This was so, Iqbal argued, because the very first sura, or chapter of the Qur'an that was revealed to the Prophet, relates to the human need for knowledge and the second to the desire for power and the propagation of the human species.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783084375
• ISBN 13: 9781783084371
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306