Reforming Modernity, by Wael B. Hallaq (introduction)

REFORMING MODERNITY Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha

wael b. hallaq

Introduction

I Any self-­reflective account of a system of thought must reckon with the various 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 multiple volumes and a long career? How does an author “translate” such ideas from one cultural context to another, fundamentally different in its assumptions, presuppositions, founding principles, and outlook? What hermeneutic must be adopted to aptly convey the subtle, age-­old conceptions and technical and philosophical 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 philosopher 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 represent, for the most part, both dense explorations of ethics and contributions 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 phrases at the expense of the larger communal and psychoepistemic matrix [1]

Introduction that produced and was produced by the text. He is as comfortable with modern discourse as he is with the various intellectual traditions that pervaded and defined Islam in the twelve centuries prior to the colonialist encroachment on the Muslim world. His knowledge of Sharīʿa and Ṣūfism is as penetrating as his command of Islamic theology, logic, 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 remarkably akin to that of the fourteenth-­century Ibn Taymiyya, who, for the sake of deploying his devastating critique of Aristotelian logic, first digested virtually the entire range of logical, philosophical, and ṣūfī traditions, capitalizing on their internal critiques and augmenting them with his own astounding 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 contradistinction to faṣl),5 Taha rarely allows this tradition to escape without deploying against it a critique of his own.

II It is my contention that for us to understand Taha’s philosophy, to understand his place in the genealogy of Arab-­Islamic thought and in modernity at large, we must first comprehend the historical conditions of possibility that make his project intelligible. Just as a Michel Foucault or a Carl Schmitt [2]

Introduction cannot be taken for granted as a specifically historical-­intellectual phenomenon, neither can Taha. Foucault and Schmitt are obviously as much products of a particular age dominated by unprecedented structures of power as they are its manifestations. If Foucault taught us how to analyze systems of power, it is because the last three or four centuries produced a systemic biopower that placed a demand on us to make intelligible a new form of subject—­ the essence of his project.6 Likewise, if Schmitt articulated a sinister distinction between enemy and friend, and identified the state of exception, it is because we have come to inhabit and witness a new age of the political, one that produced our need for a Schmitt in the first place. And just as there could have been no Schmitt or Foucault to come out of sixteenth-­century Europe, let alone before, no Taha could have emerged in the early or mid-­twentieth century. Which leads us to ask: What made this philosopher, as philosophical phenomenon and temporality, possible in the first place?

To begin to understand Taha’s project, we have to revisit the history of the early nineteenth century. Of course, the origins of the nineteenth century in Islam—­as a particular human and political experience—­stretch further back to a historical dualism. On the one hand, the nineteenth century represents the dying breaths of the cultural, institutional, and intellectual world called “Islam,” a world that had forged a place among empires and intellectual and material cultures on its own terms. By the end of the century, only a residue of this world survived. If I characterize the nineteenth century as dualistic, then I do so because I take seriously the role of the Islamic experience and its residue in the making of that century. Just as Europe had trenchant critics of the drastic changes wrought by the early modern project, the Islamic world too offered its own critical resistance to, and reflection on, modernity’s onslaught.

On the other hand, as lived and experienced by Muslims, the nineteenth century brought with it a hitherto-­unfamiliar form of sovereign engineering,7 one that rapidly transformed the cultural, institutional, and epistemological landscapes of Islam. As I have shown elsewhere, the genealogy of this form of sovereign power lies in sixteenth-­ and seventeenth-­century Europe, but the full effects of this power were to materialize in the Islamic world only after Europe had first subjected itself to its influence,8 and after the military and administrative-­juridical techniques of this power—­the sine qua non of colonialism—­had been perfected. In effect, it was the so-­called military revolution, and the new concept of juridicality that followed on its [3]

Introduction 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 “flooding” 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 processing 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 inaugurated by colonialism that culminated in an epistemic rupture—­the rupture 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 dilemmas of these paired phenomena. This is not the place to survey the history of this structural disfigurement in all the major polities of Islam, however, and so the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and North Africa must suffice to frame the colonial history to which Taha is an heir.

III At the end of the eighteenth century, as a result of crushing military defeats at the hands of the Russians, the Ottoman Empire undertook a wave of military reforms, which appeared to achieve their desired results in 1826. The [4]

Introduction same year, the Ottomans embarked on a course of reform unparalleled in the entire legal and educational history of Islam. Once the traditional army units had been eliminated, the Istanbul government decreed that the major waqfs of the empire were to be placed under the control of the new Imperial Ministry of Endowments, which meant that within a few years the incomes of these waqfs were to be seized.13 The magnitude of this event should not be underestimated. For centuries in Muslim lands, the institution of waqf had effectively cemented the relationships between and among the human, physical, educational, and economic elements within society and, to some extent, polity. A thoroughly pious institution, waqf meant offering aid and support to the needy; it formed the substrate and matrix of philanthropy in Islam, playing an important, if not central, role in the redistribution of wealth. Through waqf, the well-­to-­do gave up their property “for the sake of God,” a pietistically charitable act that meant offering aid and support to the needy, among other segments of society. This form of charity was defined in a broad sense and ordained by the Qur’ān as integral to the ethical formation and constitution of the individual. It also provided for distribution of wealth within the family, affording care for its members, and preventing the fragmentation of family property.14 The promotion of education through waqf represented one of the best forms of engaging in good works, essential for Islam’s social welfare and ethos of cultivating the moral technologies of the self. Education and cultivation of knowledge in Islam were not just vocations; they were acts of piety and devotion, ethical engagements par excellence. A considerable proportion of charitable trusts were thus directed at madrasas (colleges), although waqf provided significant contributions toward building mosques, colleges, ṣūfī orders, hospitals, public fountains, soup kitchens, travelers’ lodges, street lighting, and a variety of public works, notably bridges.15 The list of social services provided for by waqfs is expansive. A substantial part of the budget intended for such philanthropies was dedicated to the maintenance, daily operational costs, and renovation of waqf properties. A typical waqf consisted of a mosque and rental property (e.g., shops), the rent from which supported the operation and maintenance of the mosque and its madrasa, including professorial salaries and “dormitories.” The volume of property dedicated to waqf across Islamic regions is staggering. It is estimated that by the eighteenth century, more than half of real property in the empire was consecrated as waqf. Depending on the region, an estimated 40 to 60 percent of all [5]

Introduction 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 government over the periphery was enhanced. Waqf property, and the institutions 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 Algerian 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 important 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 world through the lens of the modern state and the nation. The “reforms” constituted the effective means of accomplishing “order,” “regularity,” and [6]

Introduction “law,” all of which stood in opposition to the steadily diminishing Sharīʿa culture, which was perceived as lacking on these counts. They imposed a regimenting practice, and reflected highly modern notions of discipline, law, inspection, and incarceration.18 As intimated earlier, the French led both the substantive and the ideological attack on the waqf. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they had managed to break up the Algerian legal and ṣūfī classes, reducing the traditional legal system and its education to a marginal position in a near-­ exact parallel with the Ottoman scene (for both arenas of displacement were the result of the same ideological campaign). The Moroccan Rif was soon to follow. Deprived of their resources due to the expropriation and centralization of waqfs and to various French administrative and educational reforms that changed the structure of the Sharīʿa, the ulama (as well as the Ṣūfīs) were subjected to a qualitative diminishment in the very pedagogy and hermeneutical practice that defined their functions. As happened in other colonial contexts, the socioepistemic mechanisms that reproduced the legal profession largely ceased to exist, and in its place a European system of legal reproduction was installed, with new courts, new types of jurists, and an unprecedented phenomenon of lawyering.

All this is to say that a new epistemology had emerged, a new way of not only conceptualizing the world, but also living in it.19 The death of ʿilm-­ education, of the traditional scholarly circle (ḥalaqa), and of the madrasa signaled the effective extinction of an entire sociology of knowledge, of a hermeneutic that governed the production of a particular kind of knowledge.

The destruction of this system was so colossal that one is compelled to describe it as a structural genocide, the annihilation of an entire apparatus of knowledge understood as both a system and a particular way of living in the world.20 It is important to recognize that while Orientalism was instrumental in this new formation, it was nothing more than a handmaiden—­an arm, so to speak—­of the larger European discursive formation that operated as a totality on what we call the Orient.21 With this structural genocide came the extinction of a particular, perhaps even a unique, form of psychoepistemology,22 one that entailed not only a way of learning and passing down knowledge, but also a deliberate way of living reflectively and of acting with particular intent—­activities that formed the subject. In other words, this was the death of a habitus, of a particular way of honing the self within a communal and socioepistemically shared environment, with [7]

Introduction 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 continuum. 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 century 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 relevant tradition that had thrived only a century earlier. For the forms of knowledge and the modalities of their production had 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 outside 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, argument, and analytic mode, was all unprecedented, echoing Renan’s Orientalist take on the philosopher.24 It should not surprise us, then, that somewhat later the distinguished modern philosopher ʿAbd al-­Raḥmān Badawī would scorn the nineteenth-­century Muslim authors for their lack of depth: Badawī [8]

Introduction apparently failed to recognize the shift in the nature of intellectual production as the breakdown of the epistemic system in its entirety.25 If all this is not indicative of an epistemic rupture and paradigmatic shift par excellence, then I do not know what is.26

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 current Chinese and Indian discursive forms to those squarely lodged within the European Enlightenment, the modern Muslim case is particularly remarkable 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 summarily 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 metaphysical 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 cultural milieu whose discursive and institutional architecture was originally governed by what might be called a structure of history governed by ethical 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 designation of the modern concept of progress as theological is justified by the fact that this concept is anchored in a trenchant ideology that is metaphysical [9]

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Praise for

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— ROXANNE L. EUBEN, University of Pennsylvania

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