Morality in The Public Sphere: Islamic Ethics and The Common Good

MORALITY IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ISLAMIC ETHICS AND THE COMMON GOOD Ebrahim Moosa

The Muis Occasional Papers Series

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THE MUIS ACADEMY OCCASIONAL PAPERS SERIES Represents individual lectures delivered by scholars who were invited under the Muis Visiting Scholars Programme. The aim of this series is to shape the local discourses on Islam and the Singapore Muslim Identity.

MORALITY IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ISLAMIC ETHICS AND THE COMMON GOOD Ebrahim Moosa

Muis Academy The Occasional Paper Series Paper No. 12

Other Titles in the Series: 1. Muslims in Secular States: Between Isolationists and Participants in the West

by Abdullah Saeed 2. Contemporary Islamic Intellectual History: A Theoretical Perspective

by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’ 3. Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities

by Khaled Abou El Fadl 4. Religious Values in Plural Societies

by Chandra Muzaffar 5. Islam in Southeast Asia: Between Tolerance and Radicalism

by Azyumardi Azra 6. A Framework for Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam

by Mohammed Abu-Nimer 7. Civic Responsibility in Political Society: An Islamic Paradigm

by Abdulaziz Sachedina 8. The Construction of Gender in Islamic Legal Thought and Strategies for Reform

by Ziba Mir-Hosseini 9. Basis for Interfaith Dialogue: Prospects and Challenges

by Mahmoud M. Ayoub 10. Sharīʿah, Ethical Goals and the Modern Society

by Jasser Auda 11. Religious Extremism, Islamophobia and Reactive Co-Radicalization

by Douglas Pratt

Copyright © 2017 Muis Academy, Singapore Published by Muis Academy, Singapore Designed and Printed by HoBee Print The following is an edited transcript of a Public Lecture on ‘Morality in the Public Sphere: Harnessing Islamic Ethics for the Common Good’ delivered at Muis Auditorium on 22 July 2016.

The views represented here do not necessarily reflect the views of Muis Academy, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS), or its partners.

ISBN: 978-981-11-5645-8

MORALITY IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ISLAMIC ETHICS AND THE COMMON GOOD Ebrahim Moosa

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SETTING THE CONTEXT Good evening.

Allow me to begin by sending salutations and blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad.

I would like to thank you for coming this evening. Allow me to also thank Ambassador Ong Keng Yong for his warm welcome and for the collaboration of RSIS and Muis Academy. Dr Hannan and his colleagues have been really warm hosts. I have learnt a great deal about the developments of Muis and its leadership in developing thought leaders and ideas for Singapore. I have also learnt a great deal about how people in Singapore are dealing with a number of challenging issues. I go away from here with positive impressions about your community. I firmly believe that you have a lot to offer to the world.

Tonight, I would like to talk about Morality and the Public Sphere. When you talk about Morality and the Public Sphere in Muslim societies, you are talking about conversations or discourse that happen in different contexts in various parts of the world. If we were to look at the map of the global Muslim population in 2014, we would see that Muslims are concentrated in North Africa, South Saharan Africa, East Asia, and different parts of the Middle East, and there are dispersion of Muslim communities in Europe, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

Thus, to speak about Islam and Public Morality, we need to be aware of the differing contexts. My sharing will be about details, issues and topics that are mostly from South African, Indian and American contexts – for I was born and raised in South Africa, studied in India, worked as a journalist in Europe; and for the last 17 years I have been teaching in different American universities. It is from these contexts that I will share with you that Islam is lived through Muslims as a ‘community of discourse.’

In other words, it is a community of conversations that are marked by the conditions under which Muslims live.

There is an entire spectrum of conditions – from stable peaceful societies to unstable ones and from well-governed states that uphold the dignity of human beings to failed states that dehumanise decent people – and it is within such contexts that Islam is lived and its discourse develops.

In addition, Muslims as a ‘community of discourse,’ would refer to everything that Muslims do: from their written practices, gestures, behaviours, writings, to the various cultural backgrounds they come from. This would inevitably mean that there would be a multiplicity of communities, interpreters, and audiences that an observer would encounter.

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DEFINING SHARĪʿAH A basic concept of Islamic thought that comes to mind when contemplating Morality and Islam is Sharīʿah. These are the norms which were revealed to Prophet Muhammad or developed through the Prophet’s own practice. However, Islamic norms (Sharīʿah and its interpretations) have also been ‘constructed’ over the centuries – mostly by men – but now, increasingly women are also participating in this understanding of what Sharīʿah is and what norms should be applied. Thus, Sharīʿah is an amalgam of moral and ethical norms that are divinely inspired and understood by human beings.

Literally, Sharīʿah means a path to a water source. And just as significant as water is to human existence, norms are important for the flourishing of human society.

A society requires norms and values to flourish. Therefore the imagery of water and the imagery of a nourishing place are so important.

How Sharīʿah developed and how it continues to develop over time is a long story.

However, one of the ways to interpret Islamic morality is to think of Sharīʿah as a set of ‘higher ethical objectives’ which scholars refer to as a purpose-oriented (Maqāsidi) understanding of Sharīʿah. It is understood as the preservation of faith, life, intellect, property, and family.

LAW AND BEYOND People tend to think of Sharīʿah as Islamic Law but that does not encompass the full meaning of the concept. Islamic Law is confined to the West’s perception of what they encountered during the colonial period. When colonisers came to the Muslim world they saw that Muslims were applying specific norms and thus they observed, “They have a judge (Qāḍī), whose duty was to hand out instructions and make decisions, so that must be law!” While the Qāḍī hands down rules and regulations and should the Qāḍī be appointed by the State and have enforcement powers, then those rules and regulations would have the force of law. So, yes, in some sense, it is law. However, only a small segment of Sharīʿah is law that can be enforced by the State.

So for instance, rules and regulations regarding capital crimes or enforcement of marriages and divorces or inheritance matters require some kind of State authority and in that sense it is law. However, the obligation to fast, or pray, or do what is morally good, is not enforced. Thus many things that are deemed as part of Islamic ‘law’ that were handed down from the Divine and cast in stone were only in reality,

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developed through years of human understanding of the divinely inspired, broad guidelines for human flourishing. This understanding of morality and Islam is known as the “Higher Objective of Islamic Norms” (Maqāsid al-Sharīʿah).

Another historical interpretation of Sharīʿah that carries on till this day is the centrality of Justice as a cornerstone of Islamic norms and morality. It is evident that, historically, Muslim societies prioritised the value of Justice. For instance, the Ottomans built what is known as the Tower of Justice and it remains standing to this day in Turkey. At the Red Fort, a Mughal piece of architecture in New Delhi, we can see the Scales of Justice. These examples of emblems show that the value of Justice is inherent in Muslim psyche and civilisation.

And here I would like to take this opportunity to emphasise the idea that material culture is a crucial medium to manifest or represent civilizational art and architecture. Briefly, I firmly believe that art and architecture, in material culture, is the representation of certain forms of aesthetics and beauty that are part of Islamic tradition but a part that, unfortunately, is largely lost today.

KNOWLEDGE AND LIVED EXPERIENCE When we talk about Morality and Islam, what is or is not deemed as morality depends on how we frame ‘knowledge.’ Scholars use the term ‘epistemology’. It literally means the theory of knowledge. All moral traditions, be they divinely or secularly inspired, have to grow within a framework of knowledge – a holistic environment of understanding. For a moral tradition to make sense, it requires a coherent body of information that we can attach ourselves to. However, our holistic environment of knowledge changes over time. Changing contexts alter what we consider to be knowledge.

Thus knowledge develops and grows and we become beneficiaries of repositories of past knowledge but we, ourselves, because of our changing experiences, have to become co-creators of this knowledge environment. When Muslims fail to analyse and take into consideration their contemporary lived experiences, then their understanding of the questions of morals and values remains anchored in practices that are no longer part of their knowledge environment. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges among the many that we face, is how can Muslims create a knowledge tradition that they can own, that can truly reflect their current lived experience; so that the moral and ethical values are representative of the world in which they are living and not the world that has already passed; and neither should it be so futuristic that they also cannot live in it?

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This is the real question about epistemology and often scholars discuss the methods of, and the struggle with, figuring out our lived epistemology.

It requires critical thinking and independent reasoning (ijtihād). In order to develop knowledge, there is a need to think. There is no easy way out of this struggle to figuring out our knowledge environment and there are no short-cuts. The requirement is to keep thinking, critically, creatively and deeply.

THE COMMON GOOD What are the conceptions of Morality, Justice, Good Life, and the Common Good? I would argue that these conceptions, for instance, the Common Good, would depend on the time and place. The Common Good of 7th Century Arabia might, in abstraction, be similar to what we have in Singapore today, or America, or Pakistan. But in practice, it would be entirely different because the manifestation of certain values takes the shape of the place and time and environment, so it is a question of how morals are constructed, understood and applied and its many conditions.

Thus far, I have discussed the ethical approach to Sharīʿah, where I spoke about the five purposes of Sharīʿah. However, as mentioned previously, this is not the only formulation of what people imagine as Sharīʿah.

Sharīʿah is more firmly understood as a detailed scholarly canon of traditions – akin to a very thick telephone directory with a lot of details. Imagine the publication of hundreds of telephone directories by many scholars over the centuries. Each scholar includes in his edition detailed elaborations relevant for their time and place and his interpretation of Sharīʿah – imagine how large that repository of information becomes?

Oftentimes, modern Muslims look into ancient classical learned books and detailed texts and manuscripts – they can be as old as 500, 600, 900 years old, yet they still have currency and are reprinted with fresh modern covers. I refer to those books as telephone directories. However, you are aware that a telephone directory is usable for just a year, or sometimes less because people move and you have to get a new directory and you have to update it. Therefore scholars wrote a great many books because they had to keep updating the canon. They kept interpreting a new understanding for every generation, and different scholars from different parts of the world made multiple interpretation of the same text, even though it addressed the same era. Thus, in the Islamic tradition, there were multiple schools of thought that made it possible for people to interpret what Islam meant and what Islamic values and morality meant at a particular time and place.

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CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES Muslims, in the present, feel so beholden to these ancient books that they cannot move beyond those contributions to fresher understandings of what tradition, in the present, ought to look like. Unfortunately, we are caught up in a backward-looking mode, although every scholar, from past generations, was forward-looking and updated their ‘telephone directories’ so that past Muslim communities enjoyed these updated references.

Today’s challenge is that we need our own updated ‘telephone directory,’ not just in terms of content, but also in terms of medium. We might not even need a physical directory: people now Google all their queries. Thus we need a different way of understanding the past and a creative way of presentation in order to make the present a meaningful one, where the lived experience of Muslims today can also be part of the repository of tradition and the knowledge environment.

We have to adopt only the usable parts of that tradition. Teachings that remain relevant to our current lived experience are part of the inherited continuity, but there are going to be certain aspects of this tradition that are irrelevant, obsolete and this should be discontinued. For instance, the question of slavery is part of the discontinuity, the understanding of society as patriarchal is increasingly becoming something that Muslims no longer relate to nor aspire to maintain, and there are a whole range of other kinds of practices that have already been discontinued.

What needs to continue are those foundational teachings of Islam that have to do with salvation – the five pillars that defines a Muslim – and these do not change. Muslims today and till the end of time, will need to make the declaration of faith in a Singular God and Prophet Muhammad as His Messenger; they will be obligated to pray five times a day, fast in Ramadhan; give alms (Zakāt), and go for a Pilgrimage to Mecca.

Those are the core tenets that hold the multiplicity of Islamic communities together.

Muslims have, over time, held on to those but continued to differ on other aspects of the divinely inspired guidance: on how to, for instance, do business, or what sort of political systems they should develop, implement or partake in. They would disagree about financial practices – one school of law would say this and another school of law would say something else. They might not disagree on what is forbidden in business, but they would have different ways of interpreting everything subservient to that.

PURPOSE-ORIENTED SHARĪʿAH To overcome the challenge of having to reimagine the Sharīʿah in a different way, I propose that one should imagine Sharīʿah as the Taj Mahal. Then Sharīʿah is seen as a beautiful piece of architecture in which those five purposes that were listed earlier become the kind of key manifestation of it and a value-based framework is offered for specific creative outcomes.

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But as you know, the Taj Mahal – like the telephone directory – is also something that has been constructed. And so there is a need to find the real and the usable live ‘wiring’ within the Taj Mahal, and connect it to the canonical tradition. It is important to make the connection between the purpose-oriented Sharīʿah and the very detailed understanding of the Sharīʿah.

Unfortunately, while this idea of Sharīʿah is gaining currency in many Muslim judicial systems, it is often only used as a slogan, as a feel-good narrative, without becoming the centrepiece of fatwa formulation and deeper discussions of significant issues in Muslim life. Many scholars, trained in that tradition, still struggle to relate to the live and connected Taj Mahal version. Therefore, the labour ahead of Muslim scholars remains: how do we create a usable and a mobile set of principles and rules, inspired by the classical tradition but that can also give foundation to the Taj Mahal? Furthermore, it cannot be just the five objectives but it must become more expansive, it must have details, it must be able to stand on its own legs just as those classical textbooks stood because they had deep foundations. So it is a question of how to create foundations without breaking with the past.

Muhammad Iqbal, the great pre-partition Indian thinker talked about this. Muslims need to reinterpret Islam entirely, and yet without breaking from the past. I think in the area of law, morality and ethics in particular, this is entirely doable in a very interesting way, provided we invest in the resources needed to make this possible.

For instance, the common good can be easily derived through this ethical orientation of the Sharīʿah that thinks about the preservation of religion, life, intellect, property and family. A prominent Muslim thinker, Yusuf al-Qardhawi, talks about public interest or the public good (Maṣlaḥah). And in Islam the public good is precisely captured by those five objectives, but you can easily extend the list, as long as you can justify it is as public good or common good, and this is precisely where the work has been done. Therefore, reconceptualization becomes easy for scholars, like Qardhawi, who have signed on to the purpose- or goal-oriented interpretation of Sharīʿah even though he is deeply learned in classical interpretations and hovers between the two.

Not all traditional scholars will accept this framework as easily as does al-Qardhawi.

For many, it remains controversial.

Jurists in Indonesia, India or parts of the Middle East are sceptical about this purposeoriented Sharīʿah, because to them, there are detailed rules and regulations within the traditions that need to be respected to the letter and thus implemented in their entirety – even though they would admit that the context is now different. Unfortunately, imposing anachronistic, out-dated rules diminishes the value of what Islamic Ethics is truly about. It becomes a fantasy or a caricature of the original masterpiece.

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GOOD GOVERNANCE VERSUS DESPOTISM Advancing the common good is directly related to the question of governance and good governance promotes the common good. However, in failed states, everything else falls apart. Historically, Muslims thought that one night without proper governance is worse than a hundred years of tyranny and oppression, because they valued stability.

Today, while we do not accept oppression nor do we accept instability, the key issue is good governance. It need not be modelled after Liberal Democracy, but what is required is good governance. You cannot advance – neither in morality nor in the public good without a stable environment that is based on good governance.

Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1838 – 1897) was an important figure of the Islamic renaissance and the Islamic revival in the late 19th and 20th Century. He created a team of people that worked with him, among them is Mohammad Abduh (1849 - 1905) who became a very prominent scholar in Egypt as well as Rashid Rida (1865 – 1935) – who was a student of Muhammad Abduh. These scholars became worldwide influencers. Afghani always pointed out the challenge of Muslims in the late 19th century as being external colonisation and internal despotism.

Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakībī (1855 – 1902), young lawyer from Syria, wrote a very important book in which he discussed a possible way to defeat despotism. He believed that despotism and subjugation, which are antithetical to Islam, succeeded because despots controlled education and knowledge production. And therefore, when this knowledge production is distorted by the objectives of despotism, everything goes wrong and everything gets altered as a result. He made a detailed compelling analysis of that. He was thinking mostly about Ottoman despotism. He felt that the Ottomans were really holding back the development of Syria, where he lived, and hindering them from moving forward in their lives.

This has continued well into the 20th Century with the reigns of despots, such as Saddam Hussein, Ben Ali, and Mubarak. On the question of authority, it only becomes helpful if there is a certain kind of accountability. But if you only have people who treat countries as their fiefdom; when there is corruption; when there are all kinds of harmful things taking place, then that is when the situation deteriorates. And all these people may have started off with good intentions but slowly and gradually the lack of accountability resulted in them becoming some of the worst despots the region have seen, with the result that external factors come in to “correct” the situations such as Saddam Hussein’s actions against Kuwait – first against Iran and then against Kuwait. Saddam then becomes the mortal enemy of the United States and then we have the unjustified invasion of Iraq under George Bush ’s administration. Because of these historical conditions but also because of the subjugation of Shi’as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, a strong Shi’ite opposition was established and led largely by Shi’ites in exile. They mobilised international opinion against Saddam Hussein, with the result that today Iraq is so unstable that it also destabilises the entire region.

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NURTURING THE GOOD IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE So despotism might seem attractive for some time, and for its beneficiaries, but over time it can have disastrous effects on the lives of millions of people. Therefore it is crucial that vibrant societies always have a public sphere. Public spheres differ from one place to another. But in a public sphere, people talk and explore important questions, such as, “Who am I? What is my place? How do I organise myself in this public sphere? What is my opinion? What do I contribute? How do I shape the public?”

Newspapers, magazines and forums become crucial platforms for discussion and the exchange of ideas. You can also have religious communities, different kinds of organisations participating in the public sphere too or others social actors – the more actors participates the more vibrant the social space. This is a safe space that is separate from the state, the economy and the family. According to Jurgen Habermas – who has been the major spokesperson in articulating what the public sphere is – he believes it is space where individuals engage with each other, as private citizens, to understand the components and the principles of the common good and to define what that is for their context. This is very important, and this is something that vibrant societies continuously engage in and talk about on a daily basis and through which they improve themselves.

What is the motivation for us to do the good, to encourage others to do good and to dissuade others from doing what is harmful (al-ʾamr bi almaʿarūf wa al-nahy ʿan almunkar)? Although this has been part of Muslim tradition for a long time but it had a different manifestations in different times. For example, when the uprising happened against Mubarak in Egypt they were peaceful. It was about seeking a better leader.

Now, under no circumstances does any government, historically and even today, allow people to use violence against them. Once you use violence you lose the battle, so violence is strictly prohibited in Islam against political authority. You turn the sword or the gun against political authority, you are sure to be dead. That is something seen as intolerable; it is seen as rebellion. But through the public sphere you can give counsel (naṣiḥah) to political rulers or if you go out to the streets then you give advice as the people in Egypt did. The rulers’ obligation should have been to acknowledge the people’s sentiments and to respond accordingly. But if instead the rulers put the police and army onto these people and cause them harm or even kill them, then turmoil will ensue. Unfortunately, people do not understand that commanding the good and forbidding the harmful is a responsibility of every individual; it is part of how individuals can enter the public sphere but it must be done in a peaceful manner.

Once it loses that peaceful component, it turns into rebellion and you lose your objectives. And whenever things have been peaceful, you have better dividends than when things have not been peaceful.

Today we have different a situation – and so unfortunately, some of the religious clerics in Egypt did not understand that, and until the last minute they were still supporting Mubarak and not coming to the side of the masses who wanted a change and transformation after 30 years or more of misrule by a very elite group of people 9

in Egypt. And that also applies in other places, but in other places, of course, peaceful protests have been decimated by gunfire and they have been quashed. The new public sphere obviously today is no longer through pamphlets and soapboxes but the Internet has become a very vital medium where people exchanging views and mobilising through cyber technology.

And that is what happened in the Arab Spring or when we saw that President Erdogan, from his holiday resort, was using his iPhone, which makes it into the Pocket Sphere.

Today we can actually be very effective with this piece of technology and communicate with millions of people as he did, and very influential people always do this. People tweet to send out messages and influence other. And so now we have the Pocket Sphere, and we saw this as people were thanking social media after the Arab Spring.

HUMAN DIGNITY AND THE IMPERATIVE FOR MORAL, SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL MATURITY What is the core message today in the Public Sphere about the Common Good? What is the priority issue for discussions in the public sphere? For me, and given this state of the world – not only Muslim society but even the state of world affairs – I believe that the fundamental teaching of Islam that ought to be highlighted today is human dignity.

Affirming human dignity is at the centre of the creation of the human being in Islam.

The Qur’ān explicitly says “And We have certainly honoured [conferred dignity upon] the children of Adam” (Q: 17:70) This should be the cry from the heart of every Muslim, of every human being, that it is human dignity that is the core message. Everything we do: from building stable societies, from creating technologies, from building homes, from giving people shelter, working hard and labouring to bring food on the table, is done to enable human flourishing. All that is done in order to celebrate the human being and the dignity of the human being.

Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), a great Muslim mystic, poet and philosopher said it beautifully when he said,

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‫راينا مقام البيت *** من قدر اإلنسان‬

We saw the Kaʿaba’s station comparable to the human’s value Ibn ‘Arabi looks at the Kaʿaba, and contemplates: no matter all of the great blessings of the sacred environment of the Kaʿaba, which is the holiest point of orientation for Muslim’s prayers, worship and pilgrimage located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and the ‘House’ that Prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael built when given the command

by Allah, how can you ever compare that sacred place to the value of a human being?

For Ibn ‘Arabi, the value of a human being exceeds everything, even the most sacred of space because the sacred space is, itself created for the celebration of the human being.

When Abraham, (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) succeeded in his test when he was commanded to sacrifice his son and he showed willingness preparedness in a public space to fulfil the command - Allah (glorified and exalted be He) called to him saying, “O Abraham! You have fulfilled the vision.”

Indeed, we thus reward those who do right. (Q: 37:104 – 105) And We left (this blessing) for him among generations (to come) in later times. Peace and blessing be upon Abraham (Q: 37: 108 – 109) The Kaʿaba thus becomes a sacred place where we acknowledge and celebrate his loyalty and his dedication to the Divine. Despite that sacredness, it is about the human being and the value of a human being. Without this human being, that sacred place has very little relevance; it is just another space. It is the human being that makes it valuable.

And therefore, we have to think about human dignity, and it is astounding that the Qur’ānic verse that mentions the honour bestowed upon the Children of Adam, also gives three pointers on how to advance human dignity. Allah says, “And We have certainly honoured [conferred dignity upon] the children of Adam and carried them on the land and sea and provided for them of the good things and preferred them over much of what We have created, with [definite] preference” (Q: 17:70) Firstly, the verse states that Allah has taken human beings to oceans and land. I believe, that this is to demonstrate two kinds of habitats that human beings have today. We can even make it in the skies and we can make it elsewhere – we might possibly be able to build those habitats on the Moon or on Mars in a couple of centuries, or decades I

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believe. The optimism is there – that we are able to imagine the possibilities of human flourishing. Both human flourishing and human development are crucial to human dignity. Without all facets of developments – industrial, technological, social and cultural development, the human being cannot be nourished. So what we call human development in the broadest sense is actually crucial to human dignity.

Secondly, the verse says that Allah has provided for us of the good things. Every conceivable thing that is ‘good’ is Good, so the Qur’ān is extremely broad and nonspecific. It is non-specific for the reason that human beings can access these things and so the Qur’ān puts a lot of trust in the ability of human beings to discover the ‘good’ for themselves. It does not detail all the ‘good’ for you. It gives you a few ‘goods’ but the rest of the ‘good’ is something you have to figure it out. Islam is not a faith that makes you into an infantile; it does not encourage that you have to remain in a state of infancy, but it requires that you exert effort and progress to levels of moral, social and intellectual maturity.

And the third aspect of this verse is that it talks about giving you the capacity to excel in every possible way. When you excel, when you discover the good, and when you find places to flourish, you are fulfilling the very core message of human dignity – and this is what is so important. Human dignity is one of the interests of Steven Pinker, a language psychologist, who says that one of the concerns of the person – besides the integrity of the body and personal property – is your self-worth, which everyone is obligated to respect, including you.

The way we measure human dignity is through self-worth and honour. Sometimes, we think about honour in a very negative way. Some people kill their sisters because they feel that their family’s honour has been tainted. But to kill people in the name of some kind of ‘honour,’ is wrong. This is a misguided and perverted understanding of ‘honour.’ Human dignity is at the core of honour and while it is an intrinsic and innate essence for all of us, nonetheless, there is a need to create the conditions for human dignity to flourish, so that other people can recognise it and respect it.

THE DIGNITY DEFICIT AND THE NEED FOR REFORM In my analysis – and some of the problems that we are facing in different parts of the Muslim world but also, I think, in a country like America – is also what I would call a deficit of dignity, the poverty of dignity: that people who are extremely wealthy or come from good homes still feel that they are not worth anything, or they lack selfworth, that people are not respecting them and because of that lack of self-respect, they do horrendous acts in order to demonstrate that they have some kind of ‘machoness,’ and that they have some kind of authority.

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You know this already, in the likes of Osama bin Laden. This is someone who is a millionaire or even richer. In a recent interview that I have given to a Bangladeshi newspaper, I talked, at length, about how these rich elite Muslims are among the bigger challenges. Because they have a great deal of knowledge and qualifications, in the worldly sense, but they do not have fulfilment; they do not find dignity. Because if they found dignity, they would not be able to do the horrendous acts that they do.

As I said earlier, if an ethics, based on experience, and a morality which is inherent in Islam, is deployed; then that could be the antidote to radicalism. One of the areas in which we have to really work on, in order to fulfil that, is in the area of education, and in the reform of education. So human dignity education should happen in all schools, from 8 to 12, but also in universities, in our mosques, in every public space. We should not allow for just any kind of teaching that comes out of Islamic institutions, it must be tested at the level of human dignity: Does this further human dignity or does it detract from human dignity?

We should remember that we are required to be actors and not spectators. If we want to reverse the deficit of dignity, remember this verse of the Qur’ān that says, “Be conscious of and guard yourself against an affliction or a trial that shall fall exclusively on the wrong doer among you” (Q: 8:25) So beware that there is going to be a catastrophe, because of the wrongdoing of the few, but it is not only going to affect the wrongdoers, rather it is going to affect the entire community. It will bring down the entire ship. If you allow someone at the bottom of the ship to make a hole, the whole ship will go down.

There are tremendous numbers of pathologies that are arising out of the deficit of dignity. One of the things I talk a great deal about – is engaging in a tremendous number of conspiracy theories. When you cannot diagnose a problem and everything is a product of Israel and America and the CIA, how are you going to know anything that happens? I mean, they must be extremely powerful – and if I were Israel and America, I would be extremely proud that I can control the entire world like this. But of course, this is the thinking of the powerless and these kinds of notions of conspiracy theories that are hugely detrimental are injurious to their own self-worth. But you defame others, and you think others do not defame you and think about you that way.

You think that you can just throw out defamations on other people that it will not boomerang on you? This is the lack of intelligence that we find in different places.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY, ART AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS In order to make human flourishing possible, I believe that we have to take seriously the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Each one of those goals should be part of our curriculum to understand how human flourishing can take place; each one can be backed up with Islamic teachings and values. Each one of those – water, gender equality, there are 17 of them – should be the important things in our lives. I think that curricula and syllabi in schools and universities should be doing this kind of work. And also asking how to internalise this, and how to develop excellence; how to develop habits? What is ethics? Ethics is about developing certain kinds of habits. It is about certain kinds of practices and these kinds of practices need to be internalised.

In Muslim societies, there is lot of work going on. And despite this depressing environment that we see in different parts of the world – because of the news and because it is globalized, one could get depressed and think the whole of the Muslim world is awash with terrorism, but that is not true. There are people doing good work every day, getting up and taking care of their families, giving money in charity, doing relief work, there are people that engage in groups like Islamic Relief that has now become one of the most powerful relief agencies in the world. And you will find people here in your own community doing enormous amounts of work using their wealth, their talent, their ability, their time, in order to make the world a better place.

In Tehran, we can see how people are doing certain kinds of work using art and architecture. And one of the things I insist on is that you must have artistic features in your environment that are beautiful: the external environment influences the internal environment, and therefore we talk about that as the basis of maṣlaḥah – of public interest – or the basis of this purposeful interpretation of the Sharīʿah. The 13th century thinker, Izz al-Dīn ibn Abd al-Salām al-Sulami (1182 - 1262) pointed out that the ethical outcomes of the Sharīʿah, the public good in the Sharīʿah, is based on the idea of Iḥsān. Iḥsān means excellence. But Iḥsān is also from the root word “h-s-n,” which means, beauty. So whatever is excellent must be beautiful, and if it is not beautiful then it is not properly applied. Therefore, Iḥsān is about creating beautiful environments: trees and gardens and architecture, so that human beings can experience beauty and that external beauty can also work on the internal side of human existence.

In the same vein, human flourishing also means that sometimes, when people are baiting you and calling you a terrorist, that you can respond to that in a non-violent way and show them that peace is more important.

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MOVING FORWARD Ethics as a Remedy In summation, these are the things I think we should do. We should be focusing on ethics, for the Prophet’s message focused on ethics. He said, “I was sent to perfect humanity’s noblest morality.” 1 When ‘Āīsha was asked, “Can you summarise Muhammad’s practice in one line?” She said, “His character was the Qur’ān.” And so the main idea of Islamic values is ethics.

But as you can see, the Prophet says, “I’ve been sent to ‘perfect,’ the ethical.” In other words, the Prophet assumes that there is already ethical practice in communities. All he has to do is lead it to its perfection. And so every society has ethical material. You do not have to take ethical material from Mars. You do not need al-Ghazālī to tell you what it is, or Ibn Rushd or some big-name Muslim thinker to tell you. You know what is good; you know what is intuitively good, what is ethically right.

Every time you go to al-Ghazālī or Ibn Rushd or any great thinker from the past, they take you to back to their cultural world with their specifics and it might not be the right ethical remedy that you are looking for. No teaching can be tolerated, no practice can be tolerated that violates human dignity as is it understood today. You should be instructing your Fatwa committees everywhere around the world that no Fatwa should be issued if it violates human dignity. There should no longer be highly embarrassing crazy fatwas come out from Fatwa committees in India and Egypt and Syria and other places, that make the front page of the New York Times, that really make Muslims look as if they have never pondered these issues. These are not only detrimental to Muslim dignity but also to Muslim pride. Diagnosis of our current issues should be rational not conspiratorial.

Uphold Dignity of Others The dignity of others is just as important. I say the way you begin to build your own dignity is the way you talk about your neighbours at the dinner table. If you talk about your neighbours as the Jew, the Hindu, the Chinese, as the infidel other ‘kāfir,’ then, that is the beginning. When you see, at age 23 or 24, that kid who went to a good school turns out to be a terrorist – then investigate his history and you will see that often times, in the domestic environment, these kinds of dehumanising activities had taken place. We mock it, we joke about it but it is dehumanising, and it becomes very easy from that to become the victim of senseless people encouraging you to do evil.

Defaming people based on their race or religion is contrary to human dignity.

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Muwatta Malik: Book of Good Character 15

Religious Literacy There is a crucial dire need to upgrade literacy of the not only the public, on ethical issues and human dignity, but also Muslim theologians. Today, this is one of the biggest challenges all over the Muslim world, and one of the pieces of good news here is that your religious leadership – Muis Academy and other people – have recognised that these deficits have to be corrected, and so they have tried very hard to expand the knowledge base of Muslim clerics and Muslim theologians, to understand the world so that the teachings and the advocacy that they do will be in the world in which they are living, and not of another world of the past.

Inclusive Humanities Discipline While upgrading of the literacy of Muslim theologians broadly is crucial, there is also the need for the humanities. The study of the humanities humanises us. Often times we study the poetry of Jalāl al-Din Rūmī (1207 – 1273) but we quote Rūmī just in order to quote Rūmī. We study al-Mutanabbi, and classical thinkers of the Muslim past. We need to pause on the page of al-Mutanabbi and think with him: how and why did he talk about beauty or friendship. How does Rūmī give us wisdom? How we can utilise that wisdom, of Ibn ‘Arabi, today, in a way where we can begin to find in the humanities tradition, how we (Muslims) are also represented, how our past is also represented?

Then we become part of the system need not think, “I am only reading Dante,” but “who is Dante? And what if I do not really like him – are there alternative views?”

In that case, when the humanities is inclusive of thinkers from other civilisations, including the Muslim ones, then you can then make comparisons between Dante and other thinkers, and maybe connect the dots of the beauty in what people, over different times and from different civilisations, have written and talked about. The Bhagavad Gita and all other traditions – have all talked about similar kinds of good, and you should build your society on the wealth of these traditions. And therefore the study of humanities and art and architecture is so important.

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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Q: Thank you for your talk. I am Mark Woodward from Arizona State University from the US. I am really taken by what you said about dignity and the importance of stressing that, but my question is that I think speaking here in this audience tonight, is rather much like what some American clergy would call “preaching to the choir.” What would your suggestions be for strategies to carry this message forward to the general Muslim population? The type of people who do not have a great deal of either religious or secular education.

A: Thank you very much, thank you for your presence. I guess it is the choir that have to take the message to those who are not part of the choir. So at least, we need a choir, but more than that, we need an army to take this message; one person cannot do so himself/herself. So, efficiency requires that it is the choir that picks up this message and takes it seriously. But more importantly, I think the question you are asking is that how does one bring this to the next level, that is my advocacy. I believe that communities, like many people in Singapore, but other communities, begin to make this as part of their day-to-day operation, as part of their own personal narrative, that you become an exemplar to other communities and in that way, it will catch on.

Q: Hi, I am Muhammad Amin and I’m from a Junior College here. My question is, if human dignity is the central value or ethic in Islam, then why is it that it seems that we have differed so far from our fitrah, our natural disposition, as ethical human beings? I mean, if you say that this is the central message which I fully agree then why is it that we do not seem to be coming anywhere near that and in fact we have gone far from it – for instance by looking at what ISIS is doing. Thank you.

A: Yes, human dignity is so important, and you seem to agree. Why have we deviated from our God-given orientation or fitrah? Maybe for a variety of reasons – such as certain forms of socialization; or that in the formation of Islamic education, religious teachings, theology and the interpretation of ethics – religious scholars have been oblivious to this; or that the notion of what is human dignity changes over time. So, for instance, in the medieval world, they thought of slavery and patriarchy and a certain kind of organisation of a hierarchical way as normal and dignified. The question is that we have now moved into terrains where the knowledge base has altered our understanding of Self and the Other and our world, that we can no longer subscribe to a hierarchical understanding of human beings, of free people and slaves and women and that kind of hierarchy, that we now think of things in a kind of egalitarian fashion. We think about the Other as an extension of the self in the modern world: the Other is now deeply othered.

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So a whole variety of shifts that is taking place in the world that which we are living in. Which means that the meaning of human dignity and the manifestations of human dignity, also differs. So for instance, I can give you an example of an 11th Century scholar who talks says, “A human being has dignity even if that person is a non-believer, not a believer.”

Then, two lines after that statement, he comes across a question - in his world, when there is a war between the Islamic empire and the non-Muslim adversary - and that is in the context of a worldview that divided the world as the ‘land of Islam’ and the ‘land of war’ - if a prisoner of war in a ‘the land of war’ converts to Islam, does that person get freedom? He says no, because you are a prisoner of war converting to Islam. A prisoner of war (in his understanding) has a particular status, they can either be enslaved, or ransomed, or freed, or, if they are dangerous, executed – that is under the classical law.

Then he tries very hard to explain that an enslaved person who becomes a Muslim still cannot be freed, given the rules of war. However, he says that his dignity is attached to a certain element of his soul – his nafs ḥayawāniyyah. In other words, he goes through a whole lot of thinking to still justify that even the slave has dignity. Of course, in his world he could not understand that for us, slavery would be antithetical to human dignity, but in his world slavery worked with his notion of human dignity. So clearly, human dignity undergoes change.

The challenge for Muslim thinkers all along, has been precisely: how to rethink Fiqh and Sharīʿah, so that we are able to implement the idea of human dignity under the changed circumstances and what does human dignity mean today? That is the crucial thing. And that also relates to Professor Wood’s question which is that how does this happen? It has to be something that religious scholars need to take seriously, and if they internalize it, then this message can spread. So it works in concentric circles with people, when consensus takes place, and consensusbuilding is a difficult thing. It comes through education.

A hundred years ago, talking about women’s dignity and women’s autonomy was a very difficult conversation. To talk about women being educated outside the domestic sphere, in Muslim society, was seen as heresy when Qasim Amin and other people wrote about this issue; but today, people’s attitudes have shifted - so these things take time. Today we think it natural that a woman should be educated outside the domestic sphere, at the public school, at the university, at the college; it is almost natural. We do not think about it but 150 years ago, this was unthinkable in Muslim societies.

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Q: At the start of the talk you mentioned that Sharīʿah is not the law and it is only applicable to law when it comes to certain issues like capital punishment.

So would you like to share more about capital punishment and Ḥudūd?

A: My view is that Ḥudūd and the kinds of capital punishments are part of a template of 7th Century Arabia; of certain kinds of customary practices that the Qur’ān also included as part of its teachings. But 500 Qur’ānic verses deal with rules and regulations, those rules and regulations are very custom, society-specific and time specific. If you look at the history of Islam, these rules were implemented or found in the law books mainly as a deterrent, and the application of these were extremely difficult. I have yet to come across, for instance, readings that says, “Today 30 people’s hands were chopped off in Baghdad because they were thieves.” Or that Ḥudūd was applied for, say, sexual offences. It is very difficult to prove, only if a person is crazy enough to confess and the tradition tells you do not confess, rather repent. That is what the tradition teaches you.

Historically, it played the role of a deterrent but often times, in today’s world, Muslims would like to show that they are Muslims on steroids, or they are SuperMuslims; the first thing they do is to talk about Ḥudūd. And often times, they want to chop off the hands, of poor people, who are hungry, whose hands should never be cut off – in places like Nigeria, and Zamfara state and other places. I do not know what happens in your region, but (in these places) they cut off the hands of poor people. But those who steal from the state coffers, their hands are never cut off. So there is a wrong application of even that good intention.

These issues are questions of history and time: all of them are not always enforceable. All of them are not really meant to be enforced. They serve as deterrents. And I think Muslims who are brave enough like, Tariq Ramadan, and others have argued that some of these Ḥudūd penalties need to be suspended, they then get into trouble by Muslim orthodox clerics.

My research has shown that a very prominent 18th Century Indian thinker, Shah Walī Allāh (1703 – 1762), in his book entitled, “Ḥujat Allāh al-Bālighah,” talked about the early communities and how they subscribed to these rules because these rules worked for them. It was part of their culture, history and practice. But the later communities only followed these rules because they wanted to belong to this order. And therefore, you have to go easy in implementing these slogans, symbols, and emblems of Muslim communities, not necessarily of Islam. Therefore, you must go easy and not be so harsh in implementing the Ḥudūd.

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Scholars, like Shah Walī Allāh, have already meditated on these issues, put it in very subtle ways in some of their books, and that requires further reflection by those implementing or contemplating this. However, Ḥudūd is certainly not the number one issue today in terms of human dignity. Chopping off someone’s hand, bodily punishments, will not be something that we will be advocating when we take human dignity into consideration. Notions of human dignity over time have changed, bodily infliction and bodily punishment are not something that is compatible with our understanding of human dignity and that certainly will not be one of the things on my agenda.

Q: Picking up from that, as we speak about human dignity, as we are speaking about traditions and how we deal with our traditions - we can agree that because of human dignity, Ḥudūd may not be applicable today but the text is there, it is in the Qur’ān, it is in our traditions. How do we deal with this?

A: One of the things that we know, is that every verse in the Qur’ān is not actionable. Only super ignorant Salafīs understand the Qur’ān like that, literally.

Muslims historically, and in the canonical tradition, have never understood every verse of the Qur’ān to be actionable, and especially the rules and regulations (aḥkām) verses. There are 500 verses that says, for instance, if you engage in a credit transaction write it down, it is a commandment, write it down. No Muslim jurist will say that if you have an oral agreement on a credit transaction, that it is not legal, not legitimate so there is a very complicated hermeneutic.

Similarly, no medieval scholar has said that Ḥudūd is not applicable, no medieval scholar has said that, and it will be wrong of me to even say that. What I am saying is that some of these practices, for instance, the question of women’s testimony.

The Qur’ān talks about two women’s testimonies are equal to that of one man, and Muslim jurists today have made a lot of effort to explain that even that statement is only for commercial transactions. So immediately that verse becomes specified, that the criteria for women’s testimony is about qualification, who is qualified to make the judgement? So why are we not able to apply our mind on the issue of Ḥudūd, and other controversial Qur’ānic verses intelligently and in the light of human dignity?

That is what is required. I will not be the first one to accept that the understanding of the Qur’ān changes with time. Some people can be extremely upset and say you’re denying the text (naṣṣ) of the Qur’ān. It is not a denial of the naṣṣ of the Qur’ān, rather, it is an understanding of the naṣṣ of the Qur’ān. You have to understand the nasṣ of the Qur’ān in the light of other verses in the Qur’ān, and now this naṣṣ means something different.

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So the naṣṣ does not mean that we have to become amoral, that we must become sexually licentious. On the Ḥudūd, there are other ways to punish people for stealing; there are other ways to discipline people engaged in acts of public immorality. That is what these Ḥudūd laws are about, to regulate public immorality.

It is not that God takes pleasure out of beating people to a pulp, or executing people. That is not Islam’s teachings. These are deterrent teachings and it is time that we get on to that page and understood what it means. Having said that, this is not moving away from the values that God has advocated. The values still remain but the application of that changes over time, and the question is how to do that?

So today, for instance, when people steal we imprison them, or we ask them to refund the people from whom they have taken money from. There is various methods within a criminal justice system. So Ḥudūd is even applicable in places like Singapore through laws, you have certain boundaries; your laws are your Ḥudūd (boundaries or limits). These are the limit ḥad (pl. Ḥudūd). In America too we have Ḥudūd, but we do not call it Ḥudūd, we call it, the law, legislature from Congress, if you trespass against certain rules and regulations then you are in trouble, and you are in violation. Now Muslims have made the only medium of Islam to be Ḥudūd, or some Muslims rather. It is time to unlearn that and learn that the real meaning of Islam is the ethical.

Q: Thank you for your sharing. I am Muhd Khairul, also from a Junior College in Singapore. You just mentioned that we need to unlearn Ḥudūd and learn about the true ethics of humanity so I am just curious. My question is a bit more specific: what specific reforms would you advocate about the Islamic education system and education systems in general too, to learn about human dignity and ethics?

A: Thank you. I think you might have better ideas than I do. Perhaps, you have been thinking about this already. I do not claim to have always the answer, but here are my thoughts on how educational reforms can be made. These thoughts are based on my experience in India’s traditional Madrasahs, where I was a student for a long time. One of the key things that I have learnt is that one should be trained on how to ask questions. It is one of the things in which humanities education helps you, and why I am such a strong believer in humanities education.

Social science, science, and Mathematics are also important, they help you to think about things in a beautiful way, to solve problems. But humanities helps you to think through and to think differently.

How to ask questions outside the box? How do you come up with things that Leonardo did; or how do you ask questions like important thinkers like Ibn Ḥazm (994 – 1064) did. How to be a Muslim jurist who also does literature. What it requires is a certain degree of interrogation through asking questions.

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The other thing is that we need to think about is harvesting of the human experience – which contains questions on how we think emotively. How we have thought emotively is captured in our poetry, literature and art. We must bring that back because that is the beauty of the tradition. And how are we going to do this reform, particularly for Muslim clerics? I would say that if I had to do my education all over again - and at 17 or 18 I was extremely enthusiastic, and I wanted to know what the true Islam is. I thought for myself that true Islam must be at the hands of very pious and very traditional scholars. If I got the chance all over again, I would want to study with those scholars again but with a difference.

I would want to have a four year foundational education in Arabic literature, in humanities, in social sciences so I can have a foundation to then interpret – because I spent six years in India experimenting with all kinds of things, I had to learn lot of things and unlearn a lot of things in my life.

We need an educational system in which we do not reinvent the wheel and work on a common base. I mean, I experimented with Islamism when the Afghan war just began, if I was not so critical and sceptical in my own way, I could have ended up being a mujāhidīn fighting the Soviets, if I lost my head. It is a question of how one gets carried away, and that the educational system must give you certain capacities to think.

For instance, a couple of days ago, during Ramadan, in the mosque which I attend, the Imām made a supplication at the end of the tarāwīḥ prayers about the destruction of Bashar al-Assad. He is calling for the help of fighters (mujahidin) in Syria, and I want to know from him, who exactly are the mujahidin in Syria? People become so emotive, because in Syria every group is worse than the other; I want to know who the mujahidin are? I am not saying Bashar al-Assad is a good guy but one must be careful of what they say emotively, one can get carried away with emotive power without thinking.

I would say a foundational education needs the humanities and Islamic humanities.

Muslim clerics must know about Ibn al-Khaldūn, Ibn Sīnaʾ, Durkheim, Weber, and how the modern economy functions. One need not become an expert in economics, but just to know how; the rudimentary elements of economics is sufficient, for one to understand how values are created, how values change through economic transformation, how all these things happen. That’s what I think a cleric’s education should be.

What the education of a six-year-old should be, I leave it to experts who know how to craft that, but I would say that they can find innovative ways to bring those messages through. There are a lot of things in the tradition that are antithetical to human dignity and we need to vet those things and we need to check those things and those things can be done in very easy ways.

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Q: Thank you, Professor. You mentioned that the Sharīʿah law is like updating telephone directory, right? So how do we decide which fragments of the Sharīʿah law are relevant in today’s world, given that we as individuals, go through different experiences and have different perspectives of what is ethical and what is not.

A: This might not be the job of every layperson, but even a layperson should use their critical intelligence whether it may be the Imām who is giving the speech or someone sitting next to you, talking to you about world affairs or Muslim affairs and tells you the most ridiculous stories or accounts that are dehumanising other people, you must be able to have the moral strength to say, “You are talking absolute nonsense, and I will leave this meeting right now because you are talking about crazy things, and I do not want to be a part of this.” And it might have to be the end of friendship. But you have to take a stance. The problem why things do not change is, we want to be so nice that we are not prepared to take a position, we have to take a position on some things that dehumanises other people.

For instance, in the United States if you use the ‘n-word’ about people, you will immediately be chastised. You cannot use a racial epithet. We consider that to be immoral to use that. Then why is not deemed immoral when we talk about world events in conspiratorial ways, and say X and Y is to blame? It is demeaning, it is dehumanizing; it is not a joke.

The work that needs to be done about fragments of the Sharīʿah - which ones to use, which ones not to use? That is work for experts; scholars can do that. Communities can also be part of that conversation, we can broaden the conversation. In South Africa, when we had and developed a democratic order, when we decided about questions about the rights and obligations of religious communities, it is both the work of experts and also conversations, and feedback from communities. Our constitution was written in that way: experts wrote the constitution, but then they went to the ground and people talked about it and debated it and gave it feedback, so who is going to do what? We did assign and hire experts to do the work.

First you must have the resolution to do that, but if we are worried about which fragments to go in and out from the onset, we are never going to go on. So think about the problem itself, if it is a genuine problem, sign on to it and get down to work. Then, as your studies, investigation progresses, you will know which fragments go in, which go out. But if you are doubtful of this project in and of itself – if it even has value, then this is not a project for you, then it is somebody else’s task.

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I do think and I do advocate it to be a project, to think through the past tradition, what part of this is usable and what is no longer usable; I gave you the example of how a scholar talks about, and thinks about how a person who’s not part of Muslim faith also has human dignity, how he struggles. It shows you a map; that people even in the age of slavery talked about human dignity. In that way, it becomes the thread by which you craft a new kind of narrative, and it is there that you need to go because the Muslim discursive tradition is extremely rich.

Unfortunately, Muslims today are by and large ignorant about our past. There has been a kind of systematic unlearning, and there is also something called ‘learned ignorance,’ so people who know little think they know everything, and that too is part of the problem. Learning brings about humility, and unfortunately in some areas of the world, people who go and study, once they finish their four- or sixyear degree, they think that they have learnt everything. But that is only the beginning of learning, it is only the beginning of questioning. And so part of the problem is that it should be lifelong learning for everybody, for clerics as well as laypeople as well as specialists, and that is where the answer lies.

Q: Al-Salām ʿalaykum. My name is Imran. I just joined RSIS. I am doing Asian Studies. Before this, I am a sociologist and I am also studying Arabic and traditional Islamic studies, and so I am really interested in this talk.

My question is regarding Islamic ethics in a modern secular society.

Is there a limit to how far Islamic ethics can be applicable or supported by the establishment given that the environment of secularism promotes more of a materialistic outlook? So I have in mind issues like the LGBT – and looking at it through Islamic ethics, we are more essentialist on the nature of men and women, and I think, for example our Prime Minister has stated that we are not ready to accept LGBT, so the agenda is clear for now. But there is a difference.

On the Islamic side we are more of “this is wrong but we respect you for your beliefs”; then on the secular side “you are free to believe what you want to.”

So how do we address this difference?

A: The question that was raised about the issue of secularism and materialism and Islamic ethics, and the environment that Islamic ethics has been advocating, I would take that to be a genuine anxiety. And it is a genuine anxiety insofar as people feel tormented that their values are something very specific, very unique, and very different from that of the others. At some levels, on some values, those will be different. But there are several other values where there will be an overlapping consensus between a secularist, a materialist, an atheist, a Hindu, a Buddhist; and all people of other religious traditions. You will all have a certain amount of agreement. Even if sometimes the practices are

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identical, the motivations come from different places. And so, I would basically say that the questions of the ethical for a devout believer and a Muslim is not only about achieving the dividends in this world but also the dividends in the afterworld.

This is the transcendent component to it. But it doesn’t mean that you do short shrift of the work in this world, and say that I am waiting for my reward in the afterworld. You have to excel in this world to get excellence in the other world.

But the idea of the relationality to the afterworld is a very critical one, a crucial one and often times we do not understand that if we fail in this world, it is not the end of the journey.

About LGBTQ and those kinds of issues, these are hot-button issues for all religious communities. They are not easy to solve. We have long traditions on them. But the minimal plea is how we deal, humanely, with individuals who belong to that community. We are not talking about legislation. We are talking about humanity.

That is one of the big challenges, and the question here is that – it is not as if we discovered LGBTQ communities in the 21st Century, it has been part of humanity’s legacy for a long time. So we might want to look at the historical archive to see how this has been dealt with and how various societies have dealt with them.

You are going to have to sort out how you are going to deal with LGBTQ communities. 20 years, 100 years, 50 years ago we had the same kind of questions about the standards of women in Islam. So long as you have the determination, you will come up with the answers. So on the question about the secular and the materialistic, often times these become kind of obstacles to thinking rather than engaging in the thinking process itself.

In Singapore, you are going to have varieties, and you are going to be competing with secular viewpoints and other viewpoints; therefore you need to have a resilient view and you have to strengthen your position with correct diagnose and appeals that are relevant to your times. At the end of the day, a secular, a materialist, a Buddhist and a Muslim views, on some issues, may be identical.

Is there a problem with that? Unless you think that there is a special Islamic DNA in ethics that is going to be different from others? There might be some particularities, certain kinds of boundaries that Islam has but on many issues the good is very common. Thus why we are talking about the common good.

So I think that anxiety should not be there.

Q: Thank you very much. I am Akmal from the National University of Singapore. My question is really about the title of the forum on morality in the

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public sphere. I wonder if you have any advice you could give to Muslims in Singapore or more generally about how can they express themselves in the public sphere. Because increasingly I think Muslims have been called upon to speak out, to speak about what is happening in the Muslim world. Are there guidelines that you would suggest on how to speak up?

A: The guidelines about how to talk in the public sphere, I think to talk in the public sphere one has to be honest about oneself and the community we are talking about. One must also talk about the causes on the mega-level, but there are also times when you invoke the mega-thing and when you do not invoke it.

For instance, if after 9/11, I speak to an American audience and say, “Of course, 9/11 happened, because America has done all these wrong things,� I am not going to be effective in my messaging. Even though the analysis of what might have caused these terrorists to act this way is correct - but nothing justifies killing 3,000 people because someone else had made grave mistakes in Afghanistan or oppressed Palestinians or supported Israel. Nothing justifies killing 3,000 people.

So, the mega-questions are always in the background, but there are some times when we have to articulate it, and sometimes you do not articulate it, but honesty is important.

Talk truth to power, when voicing in public discourse and engaging in the public sphere, one must keep the trust with the audience too, and sometimes one must give your audience the bad news. And the bad news is not always portrayed nicely. One of the big problems with Muslims engaging in public sphere activism is that they want to keep their audiences happy. They do not want to give bad news, because they want to have many followers on social media.

I have been having stand-up arguments with colleagues in the UK and in France, where I say you are not giving very critical analysis of the internal problems in Muslim communities. Speak about these internal problems very openly and publicly. If we speak about these things openly, yes, some Islamophobes are going to latch on, but at least, they are going to latch on to the right issues and not confuse you with someone who is trying to convert the whole of France to Islam.

I do think that we have very poor analysis, and therefore it requires certain kinds of commitment, certain kinds of honesty and a certain kind of conviction to operate in the public sphere. Otherwise, we are just writing beautiful words and no one learns anything from what we are saying.

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Q: Thank you very much for the presentation. My name is Mr Chew, I am a retiree. Just out of curiosity, (you say) Islam is a religion of morality. But however, given the way it is going, it seems that it is being politicised, and how do you reconcile between the teaching of Islam and going into politics and as what you have mentioned, there are many hands going into the public coffer. So how is that being reconciled? Thank you.

A: I will be remiss if I do not tell this story. There is a scholar called Abd al-Qādir al-Jazā’irī (1808 – 1883). He worked in Algeria in the 1830s. He was a Ṣūfī Shaykh, a religious leader and a man who combatted and fought the French occupation in Algeria. When he lost the battle against the French, they captured him. He made a deal with the French for them to honour certain things. Instead they broke the agreement, and they put him in a French prison under abject conditions. Now this was a man of deep piety and religiosity, who also understood the political. And when he was arrested and caught, he said I was doing my best but God wished something else for me. He did not say to all those people that he left behind, that each one of you must become a suicide bomber and destroy every Frenchman that you see in Algeria. This requires a certain kind of understanding of the present moment and possibilities of attainment, there is a limit to what you can attain in a day and the rest you have to leave for another day, for another time and for another power.

Finally, when the French had corrected on their promise, they put Abd al-Qādir alJazā’irī in exile in Damascus. In Damascus there was an uprising happening against the French occupation there. And in this uprising, local Syrians slaughtered many French people in the mayhem of the violent uprising. Abd al-Qādir al-Jazā’irī and his family stood guardian over their neighbourhood and they saved 3,000 French lives. This is the ethical that Islam talks about: that you show compassion even to your most serious and most violent of enemies; that you have to transcend your anger; that you must go beyond your limits to show the humanity of the others.

This is a page that every schoolbook should have, and talk about, and should talk about Islamic humanity and Islamic dignity.

I thank you very much for your attention.

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Scholar’s Profile

Ebrahim Moosa A professor of Islamic Studies in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in Notre Dame’s Department of History; a senior faculty member in the Keough School of Global Affairs, where he leads a new initiative in Global Religion and Human Development; and co-director of Contending Modernities, the global research initiative examining the interaction between religious and secular forces in the world.

Moosa previously taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town (1989-1998) and in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University (1998-2001).

Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006) and editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism. In 2005 Moosa was named a Carnegie Scholar to pursue research on Islamic seminaries of South Asia.

His book What Is a Madrasa? (North Carolina Press, 2015). His publications include the co-edited book The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring (Georgetown University Press, 2015); Islam in the Modern World (Routledge, 2014) and, Muslim Family Law in SubSaharan Africa: Colonial Legacies and Post-Colonial Challenges, (Amsterdam University Press, Spring, 2010).

Born in South Africa, Moosa earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Cape Town. Prior to that he earned a degree in Islamic and Arabic studies from Darul Ulum Nadwatul `Ulama in Lucknow, India. He also has a B.A. degree from Kanpur University and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the City University in London.

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OUR VISION

A Muslim Community of Excellence that is religiously profound and socially progressive, which thrives in a multi-religious society, secular state and globalised world.

OUR MISSION

To broaden and deepen the Singapore Muslim Community’s understanding and practice of Islam, while enhancing the well-being of the nation.

OUR PRIORITY To set the Islamic Agenda, shape Religious Life and forge the Singapore Muslim Identity.