Daily
Times - Site Edition (Sunday,
April 24, 2005)
Asma Barlas
Abdolkarim Soroush rescues Islam from Muslim interpretations and practice
of it by arguing that the “last religion is already here but the last
understanding of religion has not yet arrived.” Indeed, he distinguishes
“between religion and our knowledge of religion”
In a previous article (Religious authorities in Islam, Daily Times,
December 31, 2002), I commented on how Muslims produce religious knowledge
because I believe this explains both why the knowledge is anti-women
(inasmuch as it misrepresents the Qur’an’s position on sexual equality and
women’s rights), and why most Muslims nonetheless are opposed to the idea
of rethinking it. In this context, I quoted the Iranian intellectual,
Abdolkarim Soroush, who believes that Muslim opposition to reform results
from confusing religion with their own knowledge of it; this leads them to
regard calls for change as an indictment of the religion itself rather
than of their own limited and imperfect understanding of it.
In this essay, I will explore some of the arguments Soroush makes in his
book, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (Oxford University Press,
2000) since I believe he deals compellingly with interpretive problems
confronting Muslims today. (The book is a collection of essays on
different themes which means that in order to get a composite
understanding of his position on an issue, it is necessary to connect the
arguments he makes in different contexts and essays in a way that he does
not always do himself.)
One of the issues that Soroush analyses is the relationship between theory
and practice and, more specifically, between Islam and history. He begins
by asking if there is “a connection between a theory and its historical
and practical unfolding” (76). Should we ascribe faulty practices to a
doctrine or to how its adherents interpret it? “If,” he argues, “we are
going to maintain that an actual system springing from an idea has no
relationship to the idea whatsoever, why then identify that system with
that idea at all?”
To Soroush, it seems obvious that one cannot absolve a doctrine “from the
responsibility of allowing... abuses” (78). As he says, “False
interpretations and improper conclusions, however sincerely drawn, are
still, indubitably, fruits of the doctrine” (84). This line of reasoning
leads him to conclude that Islam itself “allowed both false righteousness
and true virtue.” As he puts it, even though the “seed of religion resists
contamination... the plant that grows out of that seed opens a canopy for
the virtuous and villainous alike” (86). If this view raises some
troubling questions for Muslims, so does his assertion that if Muslims
could interpret Islam all over again, its interpretive history would “not
assume different forms or contents nor [would it] inaugurate a radically
new history” (86).
To me, this is the most questionable of Soroush’s arguments since such
historical determinacy undercuts “our view of humans as moral agents by
suggesting that we are caught merely in the ‘hinges of history’... unable
to do much about it,” as I argue in my book (Believing Women in Islam:
Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an, University of Texas
Press, 2002: 208). In the end, I am not sure that Soroush can bring
himself to embrace “a view that undermines the idea of human agency and,
with it, the idea of morality (since, in the absence of agency, one cannot
be moral)” (Barlas, 208). Thus, he expresses reservations about holding
“ideologies responsible for everything done in their name” and questions
whether “the history of a doctrine [is] identical with the doctrine” (81).
Perhaps most importantly, he rescues Islam from Muslim interpretations and
practice of it by arguing that the “last religion is already here but the
last understanding of religion has not yet arrived.” Indeed, he
distinguishes not only “between religion and our knowledge of religion,”
but also “between personal knowledge of religion and religious knowledge”
(37; 34). On the basis of these distinctions, he argues that while
religion may be perfect and complete, our knowledge of it is not.
Moreover, since knowledge is shaped by both time and culture, there is a
continual need to reform it. In fact, at the core of Soroush’s
interpretive philosophy “is the claim that religious knowledge is subject
to ‘contraction and expansion’ and that this flux is a natural part of the
history of religion” (Barlas, 2002: 208). It is the failure to recognise
this fact, he contends, that is the greatest impediment to Muslim
“revivalists” today. As he puts it, “Everywhere they turned they were
haunted by agonizing questions: What is your claim and goal anyway? What
is the ‘defect’ in religion that you propose to repair? What error or
ailment has befallen it that it has provoked this empathy and reformist
zeal? What essential subject has escaped the Prophet’s mind, what good or
evil has religion left out that now demands your help in explicating or
teasing out? And, anyway, if religion really does harbor such flaws and
faults, why are you still committed to it?” (31).
As Soroush makes clear, however, such questions arise from the failure to
realise that, “as a branch of human knowledge,” religious knowledge also
is “incomplete, impure, insufficient, and culture-bound” (32). And to the
extent that this is so, “rehabilitating religious thought; correcting
misreadings;... redirecting religion towards it essence; rectifying
misunderstandings; and tearing asunder the veils of ignorance and ill will
are among the duties of the faithful and, as such, they are part of the
history of religion” (86).
To Soroush, reforming religious knowledge means replacing “one
understanding of religion with another” (33). Such a shift in
understanding, however, presupposes a shift in how we live in the world.
For instance, accepting the Qur’anic principle of the ontic equality of
men and women means giving up systems of male privilege and how many
Muslim men would be open to that? Hence the antipathy to reform. In
Soroush’s words, the “stunning beauty of the truth... lies beyond the veil
of habits” and, sadly, too many Muslims today are enmeshed in this veil to
see the truth of the Qur’an’s teachings.
Asma Barlas is associate professor and chair of Politics at Ithaca
College, New York
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_11-2-2003_pg3_4 |