I recently attended a lecture by Khaled Abou El Fadl on the subject of Islam and Democracy. It was an electrifying lecture; I very much regret not having taken a notebook along, but I never do for things like that, so there you go.
To summarize the bits that stood out for me:
He began by discussing the mass of "potentialities" that exist between the Koran and its reader (and therefore between the Muslim and God; the Koran is considered the direct word of God as revealed to Muhammad, from beginning to end, and in that particular order). He argued that this individual relationship is fundamental to the practice of Islam, and that any human being or state that demands "submission" by Muslims to any given reading of the Koran violates that relationship and therefore Islam itself. His repeated use of the word "submission" in the sense of submission to any person or state claiming Islamic "authority" is highly significant, given that the word "Islam" means "the submission", or "the surrender," to God. In other words, he didn’t come right and call, for example, the mullahs of Iran blasphemous, but this is pretty darn close. He located this interpretation firmly in Islamic sources; to me the most powerful illustration was (I assume) an ahadith in which the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali orders several of the soldiers serving under him in the Prophet’s jihad to commit suicide. Although suicide is clearly condemned in the teachings of the Prophet, they prepare to do so. At the last moment, Ali interrupts them, and takes them to Muhammad, who tells them that this was a test, and that they are never to allow any earthly authority to override their own ethical judgments based on the word of God.
He mentioned what he described as a startling ignorance on the part of even well-educated Muslims of their own history; apparently the history of Islamic civilization as taught in most Middle Eastern universities today usually begins and ends with the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs (i.e., those drawn from within Mohammed’s own community and family in the 40 years or so after his death), at most supplemented in some cases by the Abbasid Dynasty which immediately followed. If I understood correctly, he attributes some of what he described as the "childishness" of trying to recreate this past in the modern political context ("The West will be defeated, and Islam will burst forth, and then watch out!") to this ignorance of how Islamic civilization has unfolded and changed over the intervening 1400 years. (It’s a significant erasure to be sure, given the great diversity of ethnicities, cultures, sects, and governments that have been gathered under the banner of Islam over those years. As a practical matter I can’t help but wonder how the last hundred years are explained at all without reference to the decline of the Ottomans). He seemed particularly pained at the way the focus on the Western "conspiracy" against Islam leads Muslims in the Middle East to study Western history to the exclusion of their own.
He discussed at length the way that treating Islam as itself a civilization or political ideology empties it of its ethical and aesthetic meaning. Strikingly, he began this part of the lecture by saying something on the order of "I utterly reject … I think I am ready to come out and say this now … I utterly reject any interpretation of Islam that denies its aesthetic qualities," and then launched into a critique of the work of Muhammad Jalal Kishk (whose work was summarized at length in a long quote I swiped from Fouad Ajami in an earlier entry). When I Abou el Fadl’s bio (linked above) the next day I was surprised to learn that Kishk had been a "beloved" teacher of Abou el Fadl’s, then later permitted his scholarship to be bought and paid for by the Saudis. (This perhaps explains at least the peculiarly pragmatic, completely politicized quality of his Wahhabist ideas which I found so startling when I read them. I can’t help but wonder if Kishk so deftly conceals any spiritual connection to Islam in his writings on Islam as a method of keeping at least one thing for himself.)
But for me, the most interesting part of the talk was elicited by a question from the audience. It went right to the heart of something I’ve been wondering about lately, which is the question of how the authority of the law is derived for Muslims in the Middle East, if not from the Koran. It occurred to me in the course of reading Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey (which I may never finish; it’s heavy going, written for other historians rather than a general audience), when Lewis mentioned that one of the reasons the French Revolution furnished the primary idea of Western democracy in Turkey rather than the American Revolution is that it was entirely secular, and thus could not be understood as some incursion of Christendom on Islamic soil. (The probably more important reason is that, in the process of trying to discover how to defeat the French militarily, the Ottomans had recruited a number of French scholars and military men in order to learn the methods of the enemy; as a result, for many years if Turks spoke a foreign language at all, it was French). The irony is that the American Revolution, for all of its God talk, was not really all that specifically Christian. As I understand it, the founders’ notion of natural law was based more on empirical observation and reasoning than Christian theology. Their particular understanding of human nature included God in the sense that God created human beings and therefore created this nature that they were observing and attempting to accommodate in a governmental system. (As an aside to a seminarian friend of mine, who was lately complaining about having to defend her unprovable faith to secular humanists, I point out that the American notions of human rights and the moral quality of human freedom are ultimately articles of faith as well. They can certainly also be defended by their social utility, but such a defense make them contingent rather than universal, whereas the notion of "rights" denies contingency and is instead absolute. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Man is endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights …" Whether you think the fast move in that phrase is in the "self-evident" or in the "Creator" is probably a matter of your own predispositions.) Anyway, I think you can see how such an evolution would be somewhat less than persuasive to people who are habituated to the notion of law being derived directly from the word of God.
I couldn’t hear the questioner distinctly, but the gist of the question was whether a democratic government shouldn’t somehow have God at its head, rather than simply authorizing people to do whatever they wanted. It was apparent that he’d heard this question before, based on the assumption that democracy must be inherently amoral and therefore dangerous. His answer was startling in its simplicity: "God IS the Sovereign. This is a simple empirical fact. No human government can either enable the sovereignty of God, or undermine it." He then discussed the way that democratic government must be underpinned by moral concerns based on God’s law, but he reiterated that attempting to derive one interpretation of God’s law in order to codify it and impose it on others violates the freedom of conscience that is essential to the ethical meaning of the Islamic faith. He pointed to the Christian values underlying the American practice of democracy as an example of how this works, despite the strict separation of church and state. (He pointed out, however, that this separation is an "oddity" in Western democracies, one based on our own peculiar history that is not duplicated in other functioning democracies).
It turns out that we have a couple of his books at the library, so I checked them out, including Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women. I’ve gone a little bit into it, and already I think I probably don’t fully understand his position regarding the practice of Islamic law. He does clearly state that he is a believing Muslim, and thinks the will of God can be found in the Koran, and is worth searching for from within the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence. I don’t know if he regards this as a practice that would enrich a secular legal discourse, or if he still sees Islamic law as something that has a role in jurisprudence if not in legislation. I don’t know if I’ll find out immediately either; on the one hand, this book was evidently written just for me, but on the other, it is legal theory, and though the writing is lucid enough, the concepts are difficult. It’s a 10 minutes per page kind of deal, and its structure is front-loaded with theory. The actual case law on women is in the final two chapters; I’ve already peeked and I don’t think I’ll be able to understand it properly without the theory. Unfortunately, I also further peeked and read the short summaries of the tortured, horrifically misogynist decisions he's critiquing, and I just gotta read the smackdown. What to do?
by Katerina Dalacoura.