"You know, I've had enough of big ideas." (2)
Whether due
to Western-style schemes of
"development," Marxism,
nationalism, secularism, or
Islamism, the Islamic world has
suffered its share of
ideological activism. What these
ideologies share is a "big
idea," or ideology, that
purports to transform the
Islamic world into a modern
post-industrial economy, Marxist
utopia, collection of nations,
liberal democracy, and
caliphate, respectively. Today,
Muslims find themselves torn
between some version of
secularism that wishes to remove
"irrational" Islam from public
life, and an Islamism that
wishes to direct the totalizing
political control of Islam into
all facets of public and private
life. Things are more
complicated in Iran, where one
finds an unpopular clerical
establishment confronted by
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
millenarian faith in the return
of the Twelfth Imam. In Turkey,
a Turkish prosecutor, with the
support of Islamists and secular
nationalists, charged its top
novelist, Orhan Pamuk, who later
would win the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2006, with
defaming the Turkish nation for
comments he made about Turkey's
historic mistreatment of Kurds
and Armenians; the charges were
subsequently dropped. (3)
One does not
need to be an "orientalist"
suffering post-colonialist
Schadenfreude to recognize an
eerie sense of unreality in
these phenomena. The West has
had no shortage of ideological
"big ideas" that owe more to the
imagination than to political
philosophy. Political
philosopher Eric Voegelin calls
such ideologies "secondary
realities" which involve a
refusal to perceive things as
they are. They are not simply
subjectively held opinions,
distorted by the "prejudices" we
all bring to our understanding
of the world. "Prejudice," after
all, is nothing more than
pre-judged data, that is,
opinion. Ideology understood as
"secondary reality" differs in
kind because it involves a
desire to rearrange the world
according to one's will. Such
willfulness, taken to its
extreme, resembles more the
conspiracy theorist who sees
things when there is nothing to
see, or the erotically obsessed
who thinks his beloved
reciprocates his love when she
does not, than the prejudiced
"orientalist" who more modestly
brings along his cultural
baggage to understand
inadequately a foreign culture.
The ideologue resembles more
Plato's tyrant, whose
imagination has destroyed his
intellect, than the prisoner of
the cave. An example from the
Muslim world is Sayyid Qutb's
distortion of Islam, where its
traditional praxis gets
transformed into the esoteric
knowledge of a revolutionary
vanguard, or when the statement,
"there is no coercion in Islam,"
presupposes the revolutionary
vanguard has already eliminated
a field of action in which it
might be possible to choose to
become a Muslim. Ideology,
understood as secondary reality,
is about intellectual trickery,
and, as such, it makes rational
discourse with ideological
activists extraordinarily
difficult. (4)
Western
attention is usually drawn
toward Islamists and less often
to the efforts among Muslims to
theorize more authentically
about their own existence.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and
Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim
Soroush analyze the ideological
movements of their societies in
terms comparable to Voegelin's,
and experiment with mysticism,
not as an escape from the
ideological furnace, but as a
means of recapturing a more
authentic experience of reality
characterized by existential
openness.
Pamuk's
impatience regarding "big
ideas," seen in the epigraph of
this essay, captures a promising
though vulnerable sentiment one
finds among intelligentsia in
the Muslim world. Pamuk's novel,
Snow (published in English in
2004), documents how "big ideas"
convulse his Turkish homeland,
where Islamists and secularists
indulge in ideological fantasies
that leave little to no room for
a moderate and rationally
informed political existence.
(5) The main character, Ka, is a
mystical poet whose meditations
serve as experiments in personal
existence amidst ideological
rubble. He strives to transcend
Islamists and secularists, and
to serve as a bridge between
Turkey and the West. Ka strives
for personal nonideological
existence in a globalized world.
Mentioned by
Time magazine as one of the top
100 most influential people in
the world, Soroush refigures the
Sufi writings of the poet Rumi
to experiment with mysticism as
a way of transcending Iranian
Islamism and Western secularism.
(6) Whereas Ka's mysticism is
apophatic (to use a term derived
from Christianity), Soroush's
mysticism is noetic in that it
takes the form of a life of
reason reaching out to the
divine in a manner not unlike
Augustine's account of the soul
that stretches toward God.
Soroush engages in a type of
Socratic questioning that takes
"dialogue" as its central form
of existence, in which flashes
of noetic insight appear among
the interstices of the spoken
word. Faith takes the form of
reason reaching out; the
activity of reason, not
necessarily its conclusions, is
the work of faith. Dialogue is
thus communal and provides the
existential basis for a
religious community to take
democratic form.
Soroush is
more optimistic of the
possibility of democracy in a
(reformed) Shiite Islamic
society than is Ka. (7) Both
have comparable views on the
nature of ideology as a
secondary reality. Both
experiment with mysticism to
regain commonsense experience of
the world, distorted neither by
Islamist ideological fantasies,
nor by a groundless secularism
and relativism. This article
demonstrates that the
association of mysticism with
common sense is not as
oxymoronic as it sounds. While
both share mysticism as an
attempt to move past those
secondary realities, Soroush's
noetic mysticism is more
successful. Even so, while it
issues in a "dialogic" view of
society that would sustain
democracy, Soroush's Sufi
mysticism, like that of Ka, is
individualistic as he fails to
provide what might be called a
phenomenology of friendship that
can fulfill the traditional
Islamic demand for communal
religious existence. (8)
Ideology as
Secondary Reality
Both Pamuk
and Soroush treat ideology, not
simply as opinion, but as a
libidinous refusal to perceive
reality. In Snow, ideology takes
the form of dream worlds,
nihilism, and theatrics, whereas
Soroush refers to ideology as
"those ideas that have causes
but no reasons" (94). Like Plato
who speaks of misology (Republic
411d), ideology for Soroush is a
"hatred of reason" (93).
Snow tells
the story of Ka, a Turk living
in Germany who has returned home
and spends a few days in Kars, a
small town near the Armenian
frontier. A snowstorm has closed
off the town from the outside
world. He tells the locals he is
writing a story about Kars for a
German newspaper, which enables
him to interact with a host of
the town's characters, including
Blue, the Islamist leader,
Kadife, his girlfriend who
defies the secularist school
authorities by insisting on
wearing a headscarf (though she
had initially regarded it as a
stunt), her sister, Ypek, to
whom Ka swears his love, and
Sunay Zaim, a Kamalist
vaudeville artist who stages a
play-within-a-play coup that
constitutes the centerpiece of
the novel's presentation of
secondary realities.
Snow is
itself an ambivalent symbol of
purgation and mysterious cosmic
order, but also of intellectual
oblivion that represents the
secondary reality in which
Turkey is convulsed:
As [Ka] watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and
silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler fell into a
long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence
and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself
at home in the world. Soon afterward, he felt something else that he
had not known for quite a long time and fell asleep in his seat (4).
And so begins
the story. Ka succumbs to sleep
in order to enter Kars, which,
separated from the world because
of the snowstorm, constitutes a
microcosm of Turkey and the
Islamic world.
Ka confronts
the dream world of Kars
immediately upon arriving and
meets Serdar Bey, who runs the
local newspaper. Bey has already
written an article about that
evening's performance by Sunay
Zaim, whose variety show, it
turns out, will also include a
reading by Ka of his poem,
"Snow":
"I don't have a poem called, 'Snow,' and I'm not going to the
theater this evening. Your newspaper will look like it's made a
mistake."
"Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the
news before it happens. They fear us not because we are journalists
but because we can predict the future; you should see how amazed they
are when things do happen only because we've written them. And quite
a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This
is what modern journalism is about. I know you won't want to stand in
the way of our being modern--you don't want to break our hearts--so
that is why I am sure you will write a poem called 'Snow' and then
come to the theater to read it" (29).
For Bey, and
possibly for Ka, being modern
entails being swept up by forces
whose end-points are
predetermined by the forces of
history and by ruling powers. In
the West, we have seen this idea
expressed by ideological and
totalitarian movements where
leaders portray themselves as
prophets who go about ensuring
their prophecies come true. For
example, Aum Shakiro
"prophesized" the Tokyo subway
attacks before he attacked them,
and Adolph Hitler "prophesized"
the greed of Jewish bankers
would lead to their
extermination while he was
exterminating the Jews. (9)
Feeding the
dream world is the tendency of
the inhabitants of Kars to
display characteristics of the
mass man or manque (Michael
Oakeshott's term). Blue tells
Ka: "To be a true Westerner, a
person must first become an
individual, and then they go on
to say that in Turkey, there are
no individuals!" (324). While
Blue, the Islamist leader,
equates "individual" with
"Western" (and thus rejects it),
one also sees in Kars's
residents the inability to
sustain individual personalities
and agency. This can be seen in
Ka's conversation with two
schoolboys, Fazil and Necip, who
worry that Westernization leads
them unknowingly to atheism.
Necip tells Ka a story about a
school director (an allusion to
the school director of Kars whom
an Islamist assassinates) who
learns from a dervish that he
has the "disease" of atheism:
"'It seems you've lost your
faith in God,' he said. 'What's
worse, you don't even know it,
and as if that weren't bad
enough, you're even proud of not
knowing it!'" (81). The author
is dealing with secondary
reality, or imaginative
oblivion, because one can hardly
be proud of something one does
not know. The boys' anxiety over
unknowingly becoming atheists
expresses an absence of freewill
and personal agency
characteristic of mass man. They
lack personal agency, and an
awareness of this lack, because
they fear being powerless to
prevent themselves from becoming
atheists.
The boys ask
Ka whether he is an atheist:
"I don't know," said Ka.
"Then tell me this: Do you or don't you believe that God Almighty
created the universe and everything in it, even the snow that is
swirling down from the sky?"
"The snow reminds me of God," said Ka.
"Yes, but do you believe that God created snow?" Mesut insisted.
There was a silence. Ka watched the black dog run through the door
to the platform to frolic in the snow under the dim halo of neon
light.
"You're not giving me an answer," said Mesut. "If a person knows and
loves God, he never doubts God's existence. It seems to me that you're
not giving me an answer because you're too timid to admit that you're
an atheist. But we knew this already. That's why I wanted to ask you a
question on my friend Fazil's behalf. Do you suffer the same terrible
pangs as the poor atheist in the story? Do you want to kill yourself?"
(83).
The boys'
questioning is drawn from a
mixture of common sense and
ideological paranoia, as well as
anxiety about their own faith.
Their assumption that atheism
implies the negation of their
own existence has its parallels
in Western "mainstream"
theologies including Augustine
and Anselm. One might also
compare the boys to the Nikolai
Stavrogin character in
Dostoevsky's Possessed, for whom
atheists are necessarily
suicidal. (10) Even so, they
think religious faith must lack
any of the frailty and even
doubt one finds in those Western
thinkers, or even in Ka. Belief
must be absolutely certain;
anything else entails a desire
for suicide. (11) It is
therefore unsurprising the boys
fear unknowingly becoming
atheists. Bizarrely, the desire
to know God with certainty, and
the fear of unknowingly slipping
into atheism, that is, nonbeing,
go together in this dream world.
They possess the lust for
certainty characteristic of mass
man because they lack personal
agency that would enable them to
live with doubt and to
acknowledge their human frailty.
Many of the
characters, most notably Koa,
possess disordered erotic
longings, characterized by a
desperate and servile obsession
for beloveds that lead the
characters to disregard the
consequences of their actions:
"Ypek still knew that Ka was
madly in love and already bound
to her like a hapless
five-year-old who can't bear to
be apart from his mother. She
also knew that he wanted to take
her to Germany not merely to
share his happy home in
Frankfurt; his far greater hope
was that, when they were far
away from all these eyes in
Kars, he would know for sure
that he possessed her
absolutely" (330). Treating
one's beloved as a helpless
child treats his mother is
consistent with desiring her
absolutely. Again: "During his
last four years, which he
dedicated to remorse and regret,
Ka would admit to himself that
those given to verbal abuse are
often obsessed by a need to know
how much their lovers loved
them--it had been that way
throughout his life. Even as he
taunted her in his broken voice
that she wanted Blue, that she
loved him more, his concern was
to see not so much how Ypek
answered him as how much
patience she would expend for
his sake" (362). The narrator
describes Ka back in Germany,
broken and alone, and obsessed
with a pornographic actress who
resembles his beloved Ypek, and
with the servile manner she
pleasures men on screen (260).
Ultimately,
Snow's characters, especially
Ka, live in a fluctuating cosmos
in which the polar extremities
of existence--perfect happiness
and utter misery, bliss and
despair, life and death,
immortality and mortality, love
and hate, and good and
evil--coexist in their
immediacy, as if compressed
together:
Ka had always shied away from happiness for fear of the pain that
might follow, so we already know that his most intense emotions came
not when he was happy but when he was beset by the certainty that this
happiness would soon be lost to him.... Love equaled pain.... Heaven
and hell were in the same place. In those same streets he had played
soccer, gathered mulberries, and collected those player trading cards
you got with chewing gum; it was precisely because the dogs turned the
scene of these childish joys into a living hell that he felt the joys
so keenly (340-41).
Ka
experiences reality as a flux of
extremes, not with the virtues
of patience and hope, but with
an inordinate hope for
perfection that sits
side-by-side with an inordinate
fear of, and perhaps even hope
for, destruction. Ka finds
happiness impossible because he
expects pain immediately to
follow. This explains why he cut
short the happiest moment of his
life, when he finally made love
to Ypek (262).
Nor do Ka' s
sentiments involve simply his
own personal existence. They are
associated with his perception
of the world's fate: "It was not
enough to be convinced that
their own fortunes were still on
course; they had to believe all
the misery around them had been
extinguished to keep a shadow
from falling over their own
happiness" (341). "To live in
indecision, to waver between
defeat and a new life, offered
as much pleasure as pain. The
ease with which they could hold
each other and cry this way made
Ka love her all the more, but
even in the bitter contentment
of this tearful embrace a part
of him was already calculating
his next move and remained alert
to the sounds from the street"
(361). Ka is the most "modern"
character in the book, as
evidenced by his highly
individualistic religiosity
(described below). He views his
life and the world as sheer
contingency or flux, which is
summarized by his constant
expectation of pain following
pleasure, and of unhappiness
following happiness (though not
the reverse). This betrays a
fundamental distrust not only in
himself and others, but also in
the world. His sentiment
compares with St. Augustine's
observation that one lives a
life of despair who thinks
history moves in cycles, where
one expects happiness always to
give way to unhappiness, and
friends to become enemies. (12)
Personal and social existence is
impossible.
The staged
coup serves as the play within
this play. The staged coup is
precipitated by a performance of
a Kemalist play, "My Father or
My Scarf," by Sunay Zaim's wife,
Funda Eser, who was also known
for her career of "gratuitous
belly dancing" (146). The short
play was popular among
westernizing officials in the
1930s who wished to liberate
women from the head scarf. Eser
portrays a woman deliberating
whether to remove the veil. In
its conclusion, she bums the
veil on stage which provokes the
audience into spasms of
screaming and violence:
But now, no one could hear anything above the booing and catcalls and
angry whistles from the religious high school boys. Despite the
guilty, fearful silence at the front of the auditorium, few could hear
what Funda Eser was saying: that when the angry girl tore the scarf
off her head, she was not just making a statement about people or
about national dress, she was talking about our souls, because the
scarf, the fez, the turban, and the headdress were symbols of the
reactionary darkness of our souls, from which we should liberate
ourselves and run to join the modern nations of the West. This
provoked a taunt from the back rows that the entire auditorium heard
very clearly.
"So why not take everything off and run to Europe stark naked?"
(151-52).
Eser's play
reveals the irreconcilable
divide between the secularists
and the Islamists. The
secularists promise freedom but
one that is meaningless, as the
catcall concerning running
"stark naked" expresses. The
Islamists promise community
based on an identity, but
without freedom. The dark and
noisy theater signifies that the
two sides can only "communicate"
in terms of screams and
provocative images. There is no
possibility for reasonable
persuasion.
Violence is
at the bottom of such a society,
and so it is only natural that
the military uses the chaos in
the theater as an opportunity to
stage a coup. What gives the
play, and the audience, the
character of a secondary reality
is that the military actually
gets onto stage and proceeds to
shoot audience members, who are
not merely looking on in
disbelief. Rather, they are
incapable of believing that they
are getting shot:
A retired civil servant in the front row stood up to applaud. A few
others sitting nearby joined in. There was scattered applause from the
back, from people presumably in the habit of clapping at anything--or
perhaps they were scared. The rest of the hall was silent as ice. Like
someone waking up following a long bender, a few even seemed relaxed
and allowed themselves weak smiles. It was if they'd decided that the
dead bodies before their eyes belonged to the dream world of the
stage; a number of those who had ducked for cover now had their heads
in the air but then cowered again at the sound of Sunay's voice
(160-61).
The "dream
world" of the stage and of the
audience imitates the dream
world of society. People who
fail to experience themselves as
individuals fail to perceive the
reality in which they find
themselves. Later, Ka tells
Sunay Zaim: "I know that you
staged this coup not just for
the sake of politics but also as
a thing of beauty and in the
name of art" (333). Sunay Zaim
simply perfects the technique of
creating the secondary reality
that others in society accept.
No one knows or cares for the
difference between reality and
imagination, which, as argued in
the next section, is a
distinction Ka the poet
ultimately fails to confront.
Pamuk
associates ideology with
disordered erotic desire. For
his part, Soroush devotes most
of his attention to criticizing
competing philosophical and
religious interpretations of
religion and politics on the
basis of reason. Even so, his
analysis of ideology as
intellectual corruption and
libidinous desire compares with
Pamuk's critique, although
Soroush's critique of ideology
takes up less space in his
writings. He characterizes
ideology as a "hatred of reason"
and "those ideas that have
causes but no reasons" (93-94):
In this sense ideology is the veil of reason; it is the enemy of
rationality and clarity. It contradicts objectivity and forces one to
see the world through a single narrow aperture even if the result is a
distorted view of the world. Idealism and dogmatism often accompany an
ideology, but its core is the quality that conceals its falseness by
placing it above rational discourse. One can only dote on an ideology
or be infatuated by it; one can never rationally evaluate it. No
reasons can be properly adduced for a false idea. If we try to find
rational grounds or reasons for ideologies, they too must be flawed.
The only thing to do at this juncture is to look for the causes and
the origins of the idea in question. Here we can trace the interests
and advantages of various groups in so far as they constitute the
causes of certain ideas. This points to the ideological nature of
ideas or, in Marxist parlance, to their "class origins." With this
definition the fight against ideology cannot be a rational one because
ideology is by definition antirational. To fight an ideology, then,
becomes an actual and concrete struggle. Because ideology has no
rational grounds, any effort to eliminate its causes must be
extrarational and ideational (94-95).
This passage
is at once combative and
restrained. It is combative
because Soroush describes
ideology as a perversion of
reason, which is necessarily a
corruption of the human person
himself. For this reason he
treats ideology in terms of
al-Ghazzali's theory of
obliviousness (ghaflat)
according to which one
perversely justifies an action
knowing full well its injustice
(42-43). To be an ideologue, a
"hater of reason," means to hate
oneself. The logical consequence
is not dissimilar to that which
Necip and Fazil fear is the
consequence of atheism. This
passage is also restrained
because Soroush does not
specifically identify the
Iranian examples of said "hatred
of reason," although it is
fairly clear from this and other
parts of his writings that he
regards the revolutionaries in
this light. (13) Indeed, the
mutual corruption of religion
and politics under Iran's
clerical regime is the main
target of his pen.
Ka's
Mysticism
Snow is the
central mystical symbol for Ka.
It represents the mystery of
existence and nonexistence. Its
crystalline structure represents
cosmic order; the thick blanket
it lays onto Kars represents
both the cleansing that
retrieves one's innocence as
well as oblivion. Snow is an
ambivalent symbol of order
amidst ideological disorder
that, however, does not entirely
save Ka. The novel begins with
Ka traveling to Kars in a
snowstorm whose silence
intimates the inner peace for
which he yearned but would fail
to obtain. This is indicated by
the fact that it led him to
sleep and to the dream world
that represented both his hopes
and the drama that would unfold
in Kars: "cleansed by memories
of innocence and childhood, he
succumbed to optimism and dared
to believe himself at home in
this world" (4). While the
snowflake will be significant
for its structure, Ka indicates
that the silence of snow is more
important: "What brings me close
to God is the silence of the
snow" (60).
Ka becomes a
medium for his poems while in
Kars. Like a mystical dervish,
he simply receives them from a
mysterious divine source. He
does not entirely understand
them but he understands they
reflect a pattern of events in
his life. He indicates that his
experience of God is more
Western than Islamic: "As Ka
knew from the beginning, in this
[Islamic] part of the world
faith in God was not something
achieved by thinking sublime
thoughts and stretching one's
creative powers to their outer
limits; nor was it something one
could do alone; above all it
meant joining a mosque, becoming
part of a community" (60-61).
Explaining Western (and
specifically European)
sensibilities to an Islamist, Ka
states: "'The idea of a solitary
westernized individual whose
faith in God is private is very
threatening to you. An atheist
who belongs to a community is
far easier for you to trust than
a solitary man who believes in
God. For you, a solitary man is
far more wretched and sinful
than a nonbeliever" (61). In an
interview, Pamuk explains that
"The hero of the book does have
a genuine longing for religious
experience. But his concept of
God is very Western. He is
interested in the individual
experience, not in the communal
experience envisaged by Islam."
(14) One should correct Pamuk
because Ka's solipsistic
mysticism resembles more the
modern than the traditional
Western experience of God. It is
closer to William James's sense
of religious experience, the
moment of the "cusp," as Charles
Taylor describes it, "about what
it's like to stand in that open
space and feel the winds pulling
you now here, now there." (15)
His mysticism is not medieval in
the sense of a fides quaerens
intellectum, which at least in
the Augustinian sense turns the
soul toward the ordinate love of
neighbor (Alypius is near
Augustine in the garden, and
plays a crucial role in the
drama of Augustine's conversion
(16)). Even so, Muslims view
religion as communal, as ritual,
and as law. As Sunay tells Ka,
"even if you did believe in God,
it would make no sense to
believe alone.... It's only by
eating what they eat, living
where they live, laughing at the
same jokes, and getting angry
whenever they do that you can
believe in their God. If you're
living an utterly different
life, you can't be worshiping
the same God they are. God is
fair enough to know it's not a
question of reason or logic but
how you live your life" (204).
Blue, the Islamist, makes the
same point: "In a place like
this, if you worship God as a
European, you're bound to be a
laughingstock. Then you cannot
even believe you believe. You
don't belong to this country;
you're not even a Turk anymore.
First try to be like everyone
else. Then try to believe in
God" (327). As Necip's fears
show, belief is impossible,
whether or not one belongs to a
community. Snow portrays
individualistic and communal
forms of belief as untenable.
(17)
In his
Sufi-modernist manner, so Ka
turns inward and receives his
poems from the hidden depths:
"He believed himself to be but
the medium, the amanuensis"
(377). But the amanuensis, the
recipient of divine revelation,
also engages in anamnesis
because the poems, even though
he is not their author, reflect
the patterns of his life. Ka
explains the anamnetic nature of
the snowflake:
Once a six-pronged snowflake crystallizes, it takes between eight and
ten minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape,
and vanish; when, with further inquiry, he discovered that the form of
each snowflake is determined by the temperature, the direction and
strength of the wind, the altitude of the cloud, and any number of
other mysterious forces, Ka decided that snowflakes have much in
common with people. It was a snowflake that inspired "I, Ka," the poem
he wrote sitting in the Kars public library, and later, when he was to
arrange all nineteen titles for his new collection, Snow, he would
assign "I, Ka" to the center point of that same snowflake (375-76).
The snowflake
is a symbol of order and
disorder, of genesis and of
destruction. Its crystalline
structure indicates a cosmic
intelligence, but one that
appears to humans at least as
random, determined as it is by
the contingencies of temperature
and the direction and strength
of the wind. Ka sees humans as
hopeful icons of order in an
otherwise chaotic expanse. His
modern sentiments are not unlike
those of Alexis de Tocqueville:
"man comes from nothing,
traverses time, and is going to
disappear forever into the bosom
of God. One sees him for only a
moment wandering, lost, between
the limits of two abysses." (18)
Ka's nineteen
poems are mapped onto the
snowflake, which has three axes:
memory, imagination, and reason
(Ka said he was inspired by
Bacon's tree of knowledge) (261,
376). The snowflake, while an
expression of cosmic order, also
reflects the fluctuating
extremities of existence that Ka
experiences. The reason axis
contains poems of order and
happiness on one point, but the
other point contains poems of
suffering. The memory axis
contains poems referring to
childhood memories and relating
to some of the events of his
visit to Kars, including Necip's
anxious fears of atheism and the
night of the coup. The
imagination axis contains a poem
on love adjacent to one on
jealousy, and a poem on
happiness adjacent to a poem on
suicide. These poems came to him
"as if someone were whispering
the poems into his ears" but he
did not hear them when he
returned to Frankfurt (257). Ka,
the exile, could find a
semblance of happiness only in
Kars, which itself is the dream
world fraught with ideological
deformations. The snowflake is
an ambiguous symbol of a tenuous
cosmic order that, ultimately,
Ka fails to grasp. Indeed, the
deformation resides deep inside
Ka's soul. After reflecting on
the manner in which the poems
reflect actual events in Kars,
the narrator and Ka's friend,
Orhan (an autobiographical
reference?), tries to retrace
Ka's final thoughts when he
betrayed Blue, the Islamist, to
the police:
I lay down on the bed and imagined Ka's thoughts as he struggled to
look Z Demirkol in the eye.... What sorrow I felt to imagine my friend
pointing out the building in the distance. Or was it something worse?
Could it be that the writer clerk was secretly delighted at the fall
of the sublime poet? The thought induced such self-loathing I forced
myself to think about something else (419).
Just as Necip
was horrified at the
self-destruction brought on by
an atheism he could not control,
so too is Orhan horrified at the
thought that Ka's suffering the
fluctuating extremes of
existence compelled him to
destroy himself, to reject
willfully the happiness that he
could have enjoyed.
The
psychodrama of Kars, replayed in
Ka's soul and in the crowded
theater, displays the dead end
of secularism and Islamism. Snow
provides a bleak picture of the
spiritual state of the Islamic
world, with no apparent way out
from the dead ends of secularism
and Islamism. Human contact is
made impossible by the
ideological dreams of both, but
Ka's "western" mysticism and the
ritualistic customs of the
Muslims also result in a dead
end.
As noted
above, Pamuk has stated that the
novel's bleak outlook does not
reflect his own views. The
openness and tolerance he
foresees seems rooted in the
promise of openness of the
Justice and Development Party's
"Muslimhood model," which, as
Elizabeth H. Prodromou
describes, "assumes that
religious freedom and,
particularly the possibility for
Muslim ideas and actors to
engage in public life, are not
only compatible with, but
necessary for, Turkish
democratization and integration
into the EU." (19) The
"Muslimhood model" is an attempt
to cut between Kemalist militant
secularism and Islamism, whose
success Prodromou reports is
imperiled by various factors
including the JDP's core
constituencies.
Snow suggests
that the Islamic world would do
better if it avoided the cosmic
questions in the form of
world-transforming ideologies in
favor of common sense. Its
characters suffer because of
immoderation. The lack of
moderation among the characters
of Snow causes their suffering:
Ka because of his unrealistic
demand for perfect happiness and
his deformed erotic attachments
to Ypek, Sunay Zaim for his
artistic revolution, and Blue
for his Islamism. Ka finds peace
in his observation of the
worldly and everyday joy of
falling snow. The novel suggests
that the Muslim world would have
a better future if people tended
more to the every day and to
common sense. Pamuk argues as
such: "You know, I've had enough
of big ideas. I've been
over-exposed to them in my
over-politicised country.
Literature is my reaction to
this, an attempt to turn the
game around, and invest it with
a certain humour, a certain
distance. I want to tell the
reader: Don't take everything so
damned seriously. Isn't life
beautiful? Pay attention to
life's details. The most
important thing in life is
happiness, and the possibility
to survive in this intolerant
society we have created." (20)
In his earlier book My Name is
Red he strove to capture the
essence of life in its minor
details, including manuscript
illuminations and the texture of
the city. (21)
For Pamuk the
novelist, happiness resides in
contemplating "life's hidden
geometry," those interstices of
reality that individuals
experience in their
particularity. It is for this
reason he regards reading novels
as an inherently philosophical
exercise:
For it is by reading novels, stories and myths that we come to
understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is
fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled and hidden by
our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel
that allows us to ask who we really are.... We know that the thing we
have been reading is both the product of the author's imagination and
of this world into which he has taken us. Novels are neither wholly
imaginary nor wholly real. To read a novel is to confront both its
author's imagination and the real world whose surface we have been
scratching with such fretful curiosity. (22)
Self-knowledge depends on one's
ability to practice sympathy, to
put oneself in someone else's
place. Reading a novel enables
one imaginatively to experience,
vicariously and in reality, the
thoughts, emotions, and
experiences of others through
their particular and specific
actions. Self-knowledge is
gained by interacting with the
concrete experiences of others.
His approach resembles the view
of others who, following Alexis
de Tocqueville, regard
literature as the particularly
democratic mode of public
philosophy. (23)
If being an
author literally means being an
auctoritas, the term the Romans
used to refer to founders of
cities, then Pamuk regards
himself as the founder of a new
mode and order through the
medium of the novel:
Sometimes, I try to conjure up, one by one, a multitude of readers
hidden away in corners and nestled in their armchairs with their
novels; I try also to imagine the geography of their everyday lives.
Then, before my eyes, thousands, tens of thousands of readers will
take shape, stretching far and wide across the streets of the city,
and as they read, they dream the author's dreams, and imagine his
heroes into being, and see his world.... As I imagine all these
readers using their imaginations to put themselves in someone else's
place, as I conjure up their worlds, street by street, neighbourhood
by neighbourhood, all across the city, a moment arrives when I realise
that I am really thinking of a society, a group of people, an entire
nation--say what you will--imagining itself into being. Modern
societies, tribes, and nations do their deepest thinking about
themselves through reading novels; through reading novels, they are
able to argue about who they are; so even if we have picked up a novel
hoping only to divert ourselves, and relax, and escape the boredom of
everyday life, we begin, without realising, to conjure up the
collectivity, the nation, the society to which we belong. (24)
There is no
reason to stop with the nation,
as Pamuk does, as the political
unit envisaged by the author's
founding. The sentimental bonds
of democracy, as Tocqueville
foresaw, could imaginatively
encompass the human species.
Even so, Pamuk envisages a
political unit based on the
sympathy of individuals toward
others, as exercised through the
reading and contemplation of
novels. It is necessarily
democracy, modeled after Europe
and the European Union, just as
the novel is, for Pamuk,
Europe's greatest artistic
achievement.
While Pamuk
states that he and Ka have "more
than a little in common," they
follow different paths. Ka's
mysticism ultimately aggravates
the threats that the psychology
of mass man places on his
selfhood. Pamuk sees the art of
the novel, which explores
"life's hidden geometry," as the
means to promote personal agency
and self-knowledge for modern
democracy. The snowflake of the
novelist is superior to the
snowflake of the amanuensis.
Soroush's
Noetic Mysticism
While Snow
dismisses mysticism as Western,
Abdolkarim Soroush embraces it
as the salve for the Islamic
world. Soroush is the pen name
for Husayn Haj Farajullah
Dabbagh. (25) In Farsi, the name
means "divine muse" (157), which
suggests Soroush understands
himself as a dervish medium in
terms similar to Ka. The
fundamental, and determining,
difference between the two is
that Soroush's mysticism is
noetic, resembling in many ways
the noetic mysticism of Plato
and Augustine. His noetic
mysticism makes him better
equipped to transcend the
ideological deformations of
modernity and the Islamic world.
However, like Ka, his mysticism
is ultimately solitary, making
it insufficiently robust to
accomplish its task.
Soroush's
mysticism provides the basis for
his "Hermeneutical Expansion and
Contraction" theory of the
Shari'ah, which can be
summarized by his view that
religion is permanent while
religious knowledge varies in
time and place. Religion is
mystical and seemingly ineffable
while religious knowledge gets
expressed in whatever
philosophical terminology and
insights are available at a
given time. The bulk of
Soroush's writings detail the
interaction of religious
knowledge with other forms of
knowledge, including political
philosophy. He argues that
religious knowledge depends on
these other forms of knowledge,
going so far as to argue that
religious knowledge must
incorporate notions of human
rights and democracy, not to
mention the latest insights of
biology, physics, and other
physical sciences.
His
understanding of religion is
more difficult to understand
because it is unclear how
religious knowledge is about
religion when it is informed by
lower sciences. In order to
avoid the paradox of having a
serenely ineffable and
unknowable religion become
irrelevant to life on account of
its incommunicability, Soroush
provides what may be called a
"dialogic" model of the
interaction of religion and
religious knowledge, which is
anchored in ineffable mystical
insight not unlike that
described by Plato in his
Seventh Letter or Augustine in
the Confessions and De
Trinitate.
Like Western
Protestants as well as political
philosophers including John
Locke, Soroush criticizes
ritualism as getting in the way
of true religious experience.
His theory of expansion and
contraction, where contraction
signifies clearing away
"useless" rituals that hinder
truth, is based on the esoteric
tradition of seeing three stages
of religion: Shari'ah (rituals
and laws), tariqah (the truth
path), and haqiqah (the inner
dimension). Earlier revivalists
and sages "did not countenance
the eclipse of truth of religion
behind a parade of rituals, nor
did they appreciate a religion
restricted to the strictures of
appearance" (27). By this
esoteric standard, religion is
more pure, or contracted, in the
form of haqiqah. Soroush appeals
to the Sufi mystic Rumi as his
authority on mystical knowledge,
though his characterization of
haqiqah as the "inner dimension"
is intelligible to Westerners
steeped in the traditions of
modern religious experience, as
represented by the likes of
Locke, Tocqueville, and William
James. And so, he writes: "We
have communal actions and
rituals, but not communal
faiths. Expressions of faith are
public but the essence of faith
is mysterious and private"
(140). He quotes Rumi: "Faith,
too, is hostile to partnership
for as Rumi avers: 'Hail love,
the splendid destroyer of
partnerships'" (141). Just as
there is no coerced faith and
love, there appears to be no
collective faith and love.
The theory of
expansion and contraction of
religious interpretation moves
on three levels: kalam (Islamic
theology), usul (applied logic
in religious jurisprudence), and
irfan (esoteric knowledge) (34).
Irfan is both ineffable
knowledge as well as the basis
for his hermeneutic and dialogic
theory. It provides a mystical
viewpoint beyond individual
religions, as he indicates by
citing Rumi: "The difference
among Moslems, Zoroastrians, and
Jews/Emanate, O learned one,
from their various points of
views" (35). It consists not in
axiomatic forms of knowledge,
but rather in the opening of the
soul in the sense of Augustine's
intentio animi: "For the
believers, religion quickens the
blaze of the sublime quest,
delivers from inner attachments,
grants ascent above earthly
concerns, opens the heart's
aperture toward the sun of
truth, and induces a sense of
utter wonder in the face of
mystery of existence, so that
one may hear the call of
Ho-val-Haq (God is the Truth)
from every particle of the
universe" (36-7). One might
compare his description of
ascent with one of Augustine's
famous ascents in the
Confessions, as well as his
description of how Creation
calls out that it was created.
(26) Or quoting Rumi again:
"Renditions of tongue reveal the
core/But silent love reveals
more" (88).
Unlike Ka,
Soroush must be considered a
noetic mystic because of the
activity of reason that defines
the human person (reason
informed by love). Soroush
emphasizes the activity of
reason that seeks over the
product of reason (what it
knows): "We can have two visions
of reason: reason as destination
and reason as path. The first
sees reason as the source and
repository of truths. The second
sees it as a critical, dynamic,
yet forbearing force that
meticulously seeks truth by
negotiating tortuous paths of
trial and error.... Here it is
not enough to attain truth; the
manner of its attainment is
equally important.... Our
mission as rational human beings
is to search actively for the
truth. This view attaches more
value to earning a modest living
in a small trade than to finding
a treasure in the wilderness"
(89-90). This "modest living" is
conducted by inquiring into the
empirical materials that
surround one at any given time.
In other words, irfan depends on
kalam (theology) and usul
(jurisprudence), but also the
entirety of religious knowledge
depends on other areas of human
knowledge, including history and
the sciences. Lower levels of
knowledge give "content" to
higher levels, including the
highest, irfan, which itself has
no content in the sense of
containing truth in
prepositional form. Soroush's
understanding is thus closer to
the noetic mysticism of Plato
and the divided line, or
Augustine who follows Plato,
than to the apophatic mysticism
of Ka.
Irfan
informs, and is informed by, the
lower levels of knowledge in the
manner that an Aristotelian
would see habitus informing
virtuous action (128). Habitus
constitutes the manner of
acting, not the contents of
acting. Thus, Soroush accords
greater weight to habits of
practical judgment than to
formulating rules of behavior
(105-121). Like Aristotle,
Soroush thinks that before
humans follow rules and reasons,
they act via mimesis, after
exemplars of virtue: "Humanity
takes pride in the few who have
reached those lofty peaks.
Indeed we love humanity for the
sake of these few exemplars"
(93).
The habitus
of irfan informs democracy and
constitutes the substance of
religious democratic government.
Like Tocqueville's analysis of
the United States, Soroush
distinguishes the secular
institutions of democracy from
its civic culture, which needs
to be religious and which he
identifies with intellectual
dynamism: "Religious society is
based upon a free and invisible
faith and dynamic and varied
understanding" (142). Moreover,
he expresses skepticism toward
liberal Muslims who attempt to
defend democracy with Qur'anic
concepts like consultation
(shura), consensus of the
faithful (ijma'), and oath of
loyalty to a ruler (bei'at):
"Rather, the discourse on
religious government should
commence with a discussion of
human rights, justice, and
restriction of power (all
extrareligious issues)" (132).
This is in keeping with his
theory of expansion and
contraction, and his appeal to
natural justice, where religious
knowledge begins with
contemporary symbols of order
and disorder. Democracy in Islam
cannot derive from the Qur'an;
democracy must be a habit that
springs from its own sources.
Religion must be maintained as a civilizational habit, and this
religiosity must accord with habits of practical reasoning:
In order to remain religious, they, of course, need to establish
religion as the guide and arbiter of their problems and conflicts.
But, in order to remain democratic, they need dynamically to absorb an
adjudicative understanding of religion, in accordance with the
dictates of collective "reason." Securing the Creator's approval
entails religious awareness that is leavened by a more authentic and
humane understanding of religiosity and that endeavors to guide the
people in accordance with these ideals. In thus averting a radically
relativistic version of liberalism, rational and informed religiosity
can thrive in conjunction with a democracy sheltered by common sense,
thereby fulfilling one of the prerequisites of a democratic religious
government (128).
Democratic
government presupposes habits of
thought that include the
exercise of practical judgment,
which in its collective and
political form is called "common
sense":
Preconditions for democratizing religious government is historicizing
and energizing the religious understanding by underscoring the role of
reason in it. By reason, I do not mean a form of isolated individual
reason, but a collective reason arising from the kind of public
participation and human experience that are available only through
democratic methods. For democratic governments, "common sense" is the
arbiter of society's antagonisms and difficulties; religious
governments assign this arbitration to religion, while dictatorships
leave it in the hand of one powerful individual (127).
Soroush
describes "common sense" in
noetically differentiated
form--it is the habit of
practical reason by the man
whose soul is open to reality as
symbolized by irfan. (27)
Society is not saved by
ideologies or "great ideas" but
by the hard-won civilizational
habits of intellectual and moral
virtue.
Soroush is
not uncritical of the West. He
remains aware of the Western
liberal crisis of moral
relativism and technological
consciousness (seen in its
reduction of man to "pure
potential," as in the case of
Karl Marx [66-7]). Even so, he
points out to his Muslim
audience that democratic habits
in fact make Western democracies
more godly than their own: "The
free societies are closer to the
prophets than the totalitarian
ones" (103). Part of the reason
for this is that Western wealth
provides for leisure and thus,
higher pursuits. Soroush knows
how much Westerners abuse
leisure, which is why he
observes that Westerns may have
external (political) freedom,
but they have largely abandoned
internal freedom of the soul
(103-04). His praise of wealth
is directed against the romantic
view of poverty in his own
society (and that of Sufi). Just
as wealth induces greed, no less
does poverty induce greed and
envy (46-47). Besides, echoing
Aristotle, wealth enables one to
practice magnificence and
generosity. Soroush may have too
much confidence in man's power
to resist the worst of
modernity. However, he views the
problems facing Muslims as more
pressing, and attempts to
prepare Muslims with the
appropriate religious,
political, intellectual, and
moral habits to engage with
modernity.
Soroush's
noetic mysticism goes to
considerable lengths to bring
Islam into constructive
engagement with modernity. As
Fred Dallmayr notes, "Soroush's
text makes a contribution to a
major conundrum that has
beleaguered Islam as well as
other religions throughout the
course of their historical
development: the dilemma of the
relation of reason and faith."
(28) There are reasons to be
skeptical that he will have
great success, however. His
reliance on Sufism over and
against the Qur'anic text, while
philosophically defensible as a
way of promoting the exercise of
practical reason among Muslims,
falls short of providing a
public defense of practical
reason that would have to derive
at least in part from Qur'anic
sources. He faces the same
possible fate that L. Carl Brown
observes of medieval
philosophers like Alfarabi and
Averroes: their esoteric
philosophy produced brilliant
ideas but had little public
impact. (29) The historicity of
religious knowledge that irfan
discovers conflicts with the
widespread belief that the
Qur'an is the infallible,
uncreated word of God, and that
Muhammad was not at all
influenced by the Bible stories
he heard from Nestorian
Christians during his life as a
merchant. (30)
On a related
point, the centrality of
esoteric knowledge, while in
principle open to everyone
willing to work hard enough to
attain it, is difficult to
reconcile with his defense of
democracy. This is especially so
since he characterizes
democracy, even religious
democracy, in terms not unlike
John Stuart Mill's debate-club
view of democracy. Religious
democracy, like Mill's view of
democracy, needs widespread
habits of intellectual curiosity
and, indeed, philosophizing.
Like Mill, Soroush overlooks
some of the inherent tensions
between the life of philosophy
and that of politics. However,
perhaps Soroush can be forgiven
on this point because his
immediate concern is simply to
promote the exercise of
practical (and theoretical)
wisdom in Muslim societies.
Finally,
Soroush's understanding of
haqiqah is in tension with his
demand for democracy to be
sustained by its "common sense"
because it is unclear how common
objects of love, to borrow
Augustine's phrase, are to be
shared when the ascent of the
soul is one of increasing
interiorization. Soroush fails
to provide the reader with what
may be called a phenomenology of
friendship capable of explaining
the acts of loving and sharing.
One might think he has the model
of the Sufi fraternities in
mind, though he does not make
explicit use of them. He is
therefore in danger of falling
into the same trap into which Ka
falls. This is hardly conducive
to habits of democratic
self-government. Pamuk, for his
part, dismisses Sufism as a
withdrawal into the self
characteristic of quietist
imperial subjects. (31) This
critique is perhaps too harsh
because Soroush's Sufism is a
reconstructed one and he
explicitly rejects certain basic
tenets, including its political
quietism. Perhaps it would be
more appropriate to compare
Soroush's individualistic
mystical knowledge with that of
someone like a John Locke, whose
Socinian theology made him
latitudinarian when it came to
the institutional arrangement of
the church. In the Letter on
Toleration, Locke cites
Matthew's Gospel when he defines
a church as the meeting of any
two in Christ's name. Locke did
not give actual arrangements
much further thought. So too
with Soroush.
Conclusion
Pamuk and
Soroush experiment with
different forms of mysticism as
ways of transcending the
ideological swamp afflicting
many parts of the Islamic world.
In Pamuk's novel Snow, Ka plays
the role of a dervish, the
medium of poems he himself does
not write. These poems point to
a cosmic order that is intimated
in the structure of a snowflake
that promises Ka redemption from
life's fluctuating extremes:
extremes consisting of
disordered erotic attachments
and ultimately an inordinate and
impossible desire for perfect
happiness. But perhaps Ka is too
passive because ultimately the
disorder is too deep in his
soul, and it prevents him from
making the necessary choices to
obtain a happy life. By
contrast, Pamuk the auctoritas
sees the novel as the
appropriate manner to
contemplate and create selfhood
and community in the modern
world because the novel enables
individuals to develop their
personalities through
sympathetic engagements with
specific characters and this
activity forms a suitable basis
for community.
Soroush
experiments more successfully
with noetic mysticism that
enables him to engage more
directly and effectively with
the ideologies of his time. He
issues a more direct challenge
to Muslims, and one perhaps for
which they are unprepared, as
evidenced by Soroush's exile to
many visiting professorships in
Western universities. (32) His
call for Muslims to
philosophize, while noble, is
perhaps too rash because it
overlooks the deep tensions in
the Islamic world between piety
and thought, and between thought
and politics more generally. He
might pay greater attention to
the noetic sources within
Qur'anic orthodoxy as a more
effective way of reforming the
minds of his fellow Muslims, as
St. Thomas Aquinas magnified the
noetic sources of his own
tradition when he wrote his
Summa Contra Gentiles. Even so,
one might justly accuse any
philosopher who publicizes his
views of being rash.
Ultimately,
the achievement of both Pamuk
and Soroush is to defend common
sense. Both are skeptical of
"big ideas" in the form of
world-transforming ideologies.
As a novelist, Pamuk seeks
happiness in the interstices of
life's moments and details. As a
thinker who might be prone to
"big ideas," Soroush emphasizes
the priority of the activity of
thinking over its conclusions.
The attention of both to "life's
hidden geometry" makes them
intellectual and moral models
for Muslims and for Westerners
alike.
John von
Heyking
University of
Lethbridge
JOHN VON
HEYKING is Associate Professor
of Political Science at the
University of Lethbridge in
Canada.
(1) Previous
drafts of this article were
delivered to the Eric Voegelin
Society at the Annual Meeting of
the American Political Science
Association, and at the
University of Wisconsin
Political Philosophy Colloquium.
I thank Richard Avramenko and H.
Lee Cheek for their comments.
(2) Orhan
Pamuk, interviewed by Jorg Lau,
"The Turkish Trauma," Die Zeit,
14 April 2005. Translated and
reposted at:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/115.html
(accessed: July 25, 2006).
(3) Paul
Hughes, "Iran Gripped by
President's Devotion to 12th
Imam," National Post (Toronto),
November 18, 2005, A13; John von
Heyking, "Ahmadinejad's Doomsday
Dreams," Globe and Mail
(Toronto), December 19, 2005,
A17; Orhan Pamuk, "On Trial,"
The New Yorker, December 19,
2005
(http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051219ta_talk_pamuk);
Stephen Kinzer, "In Turkey, the
Novelist as Lightning Rod," New
York Times, October 23, 2005;
"Turkish Court Dismisses Case
Against Author," Globe and Mail,
January 23, 2006, A15.
(4) For
details, see Eric Voegelin,
"Wisdom and the Magic of the
Extreme: A Meditation,"
Published Essays, 1966-1985, The
Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, vol. 12, ed. Ellis
Sandoz (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 1990),
315-75; see also his "On Debate
and Existence," in the same
volume, 36-51. On Qutb's views
of Islam as a movement to be led
by an ideological vanguard, see
Milestones, trans. unknown
(Cedar Rapids, IA: Mother Mosque
Foundation, n.d.), 12, 27, 47,
59, 101. See Roxanne Euben,
Enemy in the Mirror (Princeton:
Princeton University Press,
1999), 75.
(5) Orhan
Pamuk, Snow: A Novel, trans.
Maureen Freely (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2004).
(6) Time,
April 18, 2005, 88. The bulk of
my analysis derives from
Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason,
Freedom, and Democracy in Islam:
Essential Writings of Abdolkarim
Soroush, trans. Mahmoud Sadri
and Ahmad Sadri (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
Additional writings and
interviews can be found on his
personal website:
../../.
(7) In the
Die Zeit interview, Pamuk
vigorously distinguishes the
pessimistic conclusions about
Islam and democracy drawn in the
novel from his own more
optimistic view: "It is an
appalling distortion to apply my
realism to my political
convictions. I see the future of
Turkey in Europe as a
prosperous, tolerant, democratic
country among others. My novel
is about a specific period in
time. In the ten years which
have passed since that period,
the country has changed a lot.
If you lay aside for one moment
the reactions to my comments
about our past, it's clear that
we are living in a different
Turkey today." This paper
focuses on Pamuk's poetic
presentation in Snow, with
references to Pamuk's own views,
drawn from interviews, as the
argument unfolds.
(8) Robert
Sokolowski offers a
phenomenology of friendship in
the Western Aristotelian context
("Phenomenology of Friendship,"
Review of Metaphysics, 55 (March
2002): 451-70). See also Jules
Toner, Love and Friendship,
(Milwaukee, WI: Marquette
University Press, 2003).
(9) Barry
Cooper, New Political Religions,
Or an Analysis of Modern
Terrorism (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2004), 14,
64-65; Hannah Arendt,
Totalitarianism (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
2001), 47.
(10) Pamuk
acknowledged his debt to
Dostoevsky in his November 2005
acceptance speech for the Peace
Prize of the German Book Trade
("In Kars and Frankfurt," trans.
Maureen Freely,
http://www.nrc.nl/redactie/Doc/pamuk.doc)
(accessed: July 24, 2006). See
also Richard Avramenko,
"Bedeviled by Boredom: A
Voegelinian Reading of
Dostoevsky's Possessed,"
Humanitas, XVII(1-2) 2004:
108-38.
(11) Alexis
de Tocqueville explains mass
man's desire for existential
certainty: "When there is no
authority in religion or in
politics, men are soon
frightened by the limitless
independence with which they are
faced. They are worried and worn
out by the constant restlessness
of everything. With everything
on the move in the realm of the
mind, they want the material
order at least to be firm and
stable, and as they cannot
accept their ancient beliefs
again, they hand themselves over
to a master." Democracy in
America, trans. Harvey Mansfield
and Delba Winthrop (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
2000), 2.2.5.
(12) City of
God, XII.14.
(13) It is
noteworthy that, in the Iranian
presidential election, he
supported Mehdi Karrubi, a soft
spoken, unassuming cleric who
was the Speaker of the reformist
dominated Sixth Parliament:
"since [Karrubi] has no enemies
and no friends, he will be
situated fittingly to negotiate
with all factions productively."
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, "What's
the Matter with Iran? How the
Reformists Lost the Presidency,"
The Journal of Turkish Weekly,
June 2005
(http://www.turkishweekly.net/comments.php?id=1412
(accessed July 26, 2006). One
smells here the type of ironic
praise that Alexis de
Tocqueville once bestowed on
Louis Napolean: "a genius for
whom circumstances had pushed
his mediocrity to such a
height." Alexis de Tocqueville,
Recollections: The French
Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P.
Mayer and A. P. Kerr (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1987), 225.
(14) Quoted
in Lau, "The Turkish Trauma."
(15) Charles
Taylor, Varieties of Religion
Today (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 59.
(16) For
details, see John von Heyking,
"The Luminous Path of
Friendship: Augustine's Account
of Friendship and Political
Order," in Friendship and
Politics: Essays in Political
Thought, eds., John von Heyking
and Richard Avramenko,
unpublished manuscript. For its
political implications, see John
von Heyking, Augustine and
Politics as Longing in the World
(Columbia, MO: University of
Missouri Press, 2001).
(17) The
novel equates communal faith
with legalism, with ritual as
something to be followed
blindly. One requires a more
robust understanding of the
figurative nature of ritual to
get by this impasse found in
this novel.
(18)
Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, 2.1.17.
(19)
Elizabeth H. Prodromou, "Turkey
Between Secularism and
Fundamentalism?: The 'Muslim
Model' and the Greek Orthodox
Minority," The Brandywine Review
of Faith and International
Affairs, 3(1) Spring 2005, 11.
(20) Lau,
"The Turkish Trauma."
(21) My Name
is Red (New York: Vintage,
2002). In a 2003 BBC interview,
he explains: "City life, urban
life, living in big cities, in
fact, is living in a galaxy of
unimportant, random, stupid,
absurd images. But your look
gives a strange, mysterious
meaning to these little details
of streets, asphalt or
cobblestone roads,
advertisements, letters, all the
little details of bus stops, or
chimneys, windows. All these
things constitute a texture of a
city, and each city in that
fashion is very different"
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3131585.stm)
(accessed: July 24, 2006).
(22) Pamuk,
"In Kars and Frankfurt," no
pagination.
(23) See
Patrick J. Deenen and Joseph
Romance, "Introduction: The Art
of Democratic Literature," in
Democracy's Literature: Politics
and Fiction in America, eds.,
Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph
Romance, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, Inc.,
2005), 1-7.
(24) Pamuk,
"In Kars and Frankfurt," no
pagination.
(25) Laura
Secor, "The Democrat: Iran's
leading reformist intellectual
tries to reconcile religious
duties and human rights," Boston
Globe, March 14, 2004
(../../English/On_DrSoroush/E-CMO-20040314-1.html)
(accessed: July 24, 2006).
(26) "I asked
the whole frame of the universe
about my God and it answered me:
'I am not He, but He made me'"
(Augustine, Confessions, trans.
F. J. Sheed, (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1993), X.6, p. 177.
(27) "[Common
sense] is the habit of judgment
and conduct of a man formed by
ratio; one could say it is the
habit of an Aristotelian
spoudaios without the luminosity
of the knowledge concerning the
ratio as the source of his
rational judgment and conduct.
Common sense is a civilizational
habit that presupposes noetic
experience, without the man of
this habit himself possessing
differentiated knowledge of
noesis." Eric Voegelin,
Anamnesis: On the Theory of
History and Politics, Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 6,
trans. M. J. Hanak, ed. David
Walsh (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2002), 411.
(28) Fred
Dallmayr, Dialogue Among
Civilizations: Some Exemplary
Voices (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2002), 183.
(29) L. Carl
Brown, Religion and State: The
Muslim Approach to Politics (New
York: Columbia University Press,
2000), 57.
(30) Salman
Rushdie, "The Right Time for an
Islamic Reformation," Washington
Post, August 7, 2005, B07
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501483.html)
(accessed: July 24, 2006). On
debates concerning the
historicity of the Qur'an and
their political significance,
see Cooper, New Political
Religions, 185-98.
(31) "The
reaction to this traumatic loss
of empire was to retreat into
oneself. Faced with the
challenge of Western thinking,
people tend to focus on
themselves and chant like a
Sufi: we are different, we will
always be different and we are
proud to be different" (Quoted
in Lau, "The Turkish Trauma.").
(32) In the
Sunni context, one laments the
silencing of liberal scholar
Sayyid Mahmud al-Qimany in
Egypt, which followed Al Azhar's
banning of his books (David
Warren, "Marching," Ottawa
Citizen, August 6, 2005
(http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?artID=496)
(accessed: July 24, 2006).
Citation Details
Title:
Mysticism in contemporary
Islamic political thought: Orhan
Pamuk and Abdolkarim
Soroush.(Essay)
Author: John
von Heyking
Publication:
Humanitas
(Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22,
2006
Publisher:
Thomson Gale
Volume: 19
Issue: 1-2
Page: 71(26) |