Political Freedom as an Islamic Value

Share Embed


Descrição do Produto

DRAFT - Decosimo

The following is the text of my presentation delivered at the 2016 Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics Annual Meeting, an audience of Islam scholars. It is a rough draft prepared for oral delivery. As such it has been minimally proofread and the citations aren’t perfectly consistent in style or always complete. Several remarks to readers have been appended in brackets in the footnotes. Not for citation or attribution without permission.

Political Freedom as an Islamic Value David Decosimo Boston University Few matters are more contested in contemporary politics than the relation of Islam to the West. And few values are more closely identified with the West than political freedom. Many Muslim and secular fundamentalists would have us believe that Islam is incompatible with or even antithetical to political freedom. If political freedom is incompatible with Islam, then there is a fundamental opposition between Islam and the West. Such claims are echoed by countless others, often with devastating results.1 This paper aims to call this basic narrative into question. In doing so, I face an uphill battle, for it is not only non-experts who depict political freedom as non- or even un-Islamic. One of the most learned Islam scholars of our day – one from whom I have learned a great deal – has recently argued that political freedom is not an Islamic value.2 As he has it, Muslim interest in political liberty represents, at best, an embrace of alien principles, at worst, a betrayal of Islam. If Professor Michael Cook is right about this, the outlook for global affairs is even bleaker than it already seems and efforts to argue that political freedom is an Islamic value are an exercise in wishful thinking. But political freedom is indeed an Islamic value. More specifically, political liberty considered as security against domination is an Islamic value. That is the claim of this paper. I believe that Cook’s claim that political freedom is not an Islamic value rests on unexamined assumptions about what political freedom is. By clarifying the differences among three kinds of                                                                                                                 1

Scholars like Talal Asad offer more sophisticated versions of the same basic view, with a twist: the ideology of socalled ‘political freedom’ was invented in the modern West and then imposed by imperial force and colonial power on non-Western societies. Political freedom remains an ideological tool – an operation of state power claiming neutrality even as it marginalizes and disempowers non-Western peoples and traditions. 2 Michael Cook, “Is Political Freedom and Islamic Value?” in ed. Quentin Skinner, Freedom and the Construction of Europe: Volume II, 283-310 (Cambridge UP, 2013).

1

DRAFT - Decosimo

political freedom that have mattered to Western thinkers, I try to explain why Cook has reached a misleading conclusion about Islam. He is right to think that Islamic tradition is largely silent on or resistant to the sort of political freedom he seems to have in mind. He has not shown, however, that political freedom as such is not an Islamic value. We move in three steps. First, I show how Cook conceives of freedom in an essentialized, overly narrow way. Next, I show how some of Cook’s evidence supports not his denial of the place of political freedom in Islam but my affirmation. Finally, I elucidate some philosophical issues relevant to Cook’s conclusions and those that other interpreters might be tempted to draw. But first, a brief word about the very idea of an “Islamic value.” For Cook and me both, to speak of an Islamic value is only to speak of a value important to Muslim figures and communities in virtue of Muslim commitments, practices, texts, traditions, and so on. In this sense, we can say that a certain sort of love is an important Christian value, a certain sort of humor a value of the Marx brothers, and a certain sort of cheerful longsuffering (or masochism) a value of Cubs fans. None of this suggests that Islam has an essence, is static, is not diverse, or anything of the sort. I can say more in the Q&A. But on to step one – Cook’s conception of freedom. Cook’s Conception of Freedom Cook denies that freedom is an Islamic value. But we need to consider just what this freedom is that has nothing to do with Islam. I’ll show that several features mark Cook’s conception. When we recognize these features, we recognize that his conception of freedom is but one among many. Not only that, it is an unusually narrow vision. Failing to find this particular conception, Cook claims Islam has no conception. But this is mistaken. Lacking a vision of freedom that few aside from Cook identify as freedom is hardly the same thing as lacking a vision of freedom.

2

DRAFT - Decosimo

We can distinguish three broad paradigms of political freedom: positive, liberal, and republican. Each has important and vibrant historical legacies. Each claims proponents such as Plato and Paul, Hobbes and Rawls, Sallust and Milton. Cook’s vision fits within the liberal strand. Yet even within that strand it is marginal. Should Islam fail to endorse this conception it would join much of political philosophy and any religion I can think of. Still, suppose we simply identified Cook’s conception with the liberal paradigm. This would be a massive concession and an injustice to liberals. But suppose we did so. Even so, it remains that there are two rival paradigms of freedom. Cook neglects these altogether. Yet we find proponents of these other paradigms throughout the history of Islam. That is my claim. First, consider the paradigms – positive, liberal, and republican. These are rival visions of freedom. They are linked in regarding unfreedom as having something to do with the thwarting of agency or self and freedom as having something to do with the capacity to effect the shape, character, and direction of our lives and communities. They are rival because they disagree about what exactly this means – what is real freedom, its imitation, and something else altogether.3                                                                                                                 3

As I note below, there are longstanding disputes about how best to understand the relationships among these paradigms. For classic statements see, e.g., Isaiah Berlin “Two Concepts of Liberty” (2002) and Quentin Skinner “A Third Concept” (2006). One important debate concerns whether in speaking of these visions we are dealing with genuinely distinct concepts of freedom (whatever exactly that means) or, instead, with a single conception that admits of importantly distinct species. The most well-known version of this latter view is Gerald MacCallum “Negative and Positive Freedom”(1967) which contends that all freedom-talk is formally structured by a relation among (a) an agent, (b) some constraining or preventing factor, and (c) a doing, becoming, or achieving of the agent (314). Competing visions of freedom are best understood on this view as debates about which constraints are most salient. Charles Taylor “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty” (1979) resists this analysis and other efforts to deny that there are in fact two ‘concepts’ of freedom, and he anchors his resistance in a distinction between ‘exercise’ concepts of freedom – on which freedom requires the actualization of certain capacities or achievement of certain goals and which he associates with positive liberty – and ‘opportunity’ concepts of freedom – on which freedom requires the mere opportunity to do such and such, whether one is able to do it or not. More recent, debates continue to explore these issues: see, e.g., Eric Nelson “Liberty: One Concept too Many?” (2005), John Christman “Saving Positive Freedom” (2005), and more recently Gideon Elford “Reclaiming Two Concepts of Liberty” (2012). For our purposes, we can leave these disputes aside, for (a) no one denies that these visions are importantly distinct, however the precise character of that distinction is best named and (b) Cook’s conception is very much particular to and representative of one particular vision (or conception) to the exclusion of other visions. That is, even assuming there is but one conception of freedom admitting of distinct emphases or species, Cook does not bring in view that single conception or whatever is held in common among all

3

DRAFT - Decosimo

Positive liberty, familiar from ancient sources and the likes of Rousseau, grasps freedom in terms of self-mastery and collective action. Freedom is realized in attaining the human good which requires escaping bondage to the lower self and/or to false visions of the good. True freedom is the capacity to pursue and attain the true human end. The paradigm of unfreedom here is the addict. Someone enslaved to passion and in thrall of something less than the true final end. Whatever external constraints do or don’t obtain, she is not free to do as she judges best. She is not free even to recognize what is best. A political community is free here when it enables members to attain the highest human good. And often it is held that this good is partly constituted by the subordination of self to the collective will. Liberal liberty, whose proponents include Hobbes, Locke, and Rawls, conceive freedom in terms non-interference. To be free is to be unfettered in our action by external constraints. What matters is whether others interfere with my capacity to do as I choose. The paradigm is the prisoner. Whether by chains or walls, the prisoner is physically constrained from doing as he chooses. Here, a polity is free when all can do as they please so long as they do not interfere with others so doing. It is hard for me to imagine anyone denying that Islam, like many religious traditions, shows affinity for positive liberty. While we may join most recent theorists in regarding positive liberty with suspicion for the ways it can seem to authorize paternalism, collectivism, or oppression in the name of “helping” citizens attain their higher selves, it is a vision of political freedom nonetheless – however unsatisfactory. And it seems to me perfectly clear that there is ample evidence that this vision has been an Islamic value. Even if only this is the case, then Cook’s claims are mistaken. Most of this paper pursues the much more interesting claim that a third vision of liberty – republican liberty – is also an Islamic value.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                species but instead just one species (or one version of one species) of freedom with all its distinctive features and to the exclusion of others.

4

DRAFT - Decosimo

Republicanism finds expression in the likes of Cicero, Italian city-states, and the American founders. Here, liberty is freedom from mastery, security against domination, not being subject to another’s whims.4 The paradigm of unfreedom on this view is the slave. The slave lives under the master’s power, in fear of what the master might do. The master may not interfere, he may not beat or chain her, but he can. And the slave lives in perpetual terror of this fact. This is domination. Republicans conceive freedom as nondomination. A person is dominated when someone is in position to exercise arbitrary power over her. If power is the capacity to effect change worth caring about (Stout 2010), we need to explain two other features of this conception: arbitrariness and position. The power is arbitrary when, for instance, it fails to meet a reciprocity test (e.g., dominator would not trade places with dominated); it is not governed by norms that are the required for or constitutive of relations of mutual respect; the power differential lacks a rational basis, unlike that between teacher/student or parent/child; the dominator is not accountable to the dominated or her representatives; and so on.5 Power differentials alone do not constitute domination. Other things equal, bosses, teachers, and parents do not count as dominating employees, students, and children in virtue of their superior power. Rather, domination pertains to power differentials that are arbitrary in the ways just detailed. The positional component names the fact that, even under a benevolent master, a slave is hardly free, for he lives under perpetual threat that the master could at will effect                                                                                                                 4

Like negative liberty, republican liberty is freedom from something – not interference, however, but domination, the arbitrary exercise of power. With positive liberty, republicanism focuses on mastery, though not the lofty ideal of self-mastery but the more modest and basic aim of not being mastered by another. 5 On my view, republican liberty is holistic, pragmatic, social, and dialectical. Part of what that means is that I understand arbitrariness in non-foundationalist terms and the examples and considerations mentioned above as but several among a whole host of considerations in view of which we might deliberate about whether some power asymmetry ought to be regarded as arbitrary or not. A foundationalist vision of arbitrariness and republican liberty, in contrast, would pursue a set of necessary and sufficient conditions or thought experiment(s) in virtue of which everyone or some group (e.g. ‘all reasonable people’) would be constrained to regard such and such conditions as constituting domination. It renders republicanism a version of contract theory in which arbitrariness and determinations about it play role in it analogous to the roles played by, e.g., reasonableness and the veil of ignorance in Rawlsian liberalism. I explicate this distinction elsewhere but for elucidation in another context see Stout, Democracy and Tradition (2004), 82-85 and chapter 7.

5

DRAFT - Decosimo

violence with impunity. Whether the master actually harms the slave, he can and this constitutes a deep form of unfreedom. On the liberal view, so long as the master does not interfere, the slave is free. Republicans highlight another key difference. For liberals, interference violates freedom. It is permitted only to prevent worse forms of interference. So, the law compromises my freedom to steal your car in order to preserve everyone’s freedom to enjoy their property.6 As interfering, law compromises freedom but is permitted in view of preventing still more or worse interference. Republicans see the matter differently. There is no compromise of freedom here. There is not, because this interference is itself non-arbitrary and so non-dominating. There is good reason for it. As non-dominating it is no violation of freedom. For republicans, laws do not compromise freedom but help constitute it. There is a vital point here. It concerns the difference between republican and liberal attitudes toward families, religious communities, and the like. These are high interference relationships. They bind us in webs of obligation.7 They require sacrifice. They prescribe limits. For liberals they are thus relations of unfreedom – tolerated, at best. For republicans, they need not be relations of unfreedom at all, for they need not be dominating.8 For republicans, such relations are not tolerated but celebrated – both because they help foster a society where liberty is prized and enjoyed and because they express and realize the good of mutuality and non-domination.

                                                                                                                6

Thus Rawls: “liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty” (50) or Berlin “Law is always a ‘fetter’…even if it protects you from being bound in chains that are heavier” (cited in Pettit, Republicanism) For a certain sort of liberalism, the state is the only legitimate “interferer” so it seeks to monopolize interfering power – whether by eliminating relations rival to the citizen/state relation or in the name of freedom doing as much as possible to “protect” the individual from any sources of interference other than the state. 7 Relationships birth and impose norms, e.g., insofar as the ongoing participation in and very existence of the relationship depends on fulfilling the norms associated with the relational roles. E.g: “He was a teacher/father/ friend in name only.” 8 To be sure they can become dominating – to the extent that the power asymmetry or their exercise become arbitrary – e.g., the parent who abuses his child, the priest or imam who will not suffer any correction or accountability.

6

DRAFT - Decosimo

These are ideal types and there are longstanding debates about how best to describe the nature of these differences but no one doubts their reality or importance, the distinctness of these visions. Now, consider three features of Cook’s account of freedom. First, it is essentialized and extremely narrow.9 Cook holds that there is a single Western vision of freedom. He calls it “the” Western theory of freedom. On one page, her refers to “the European idea of freedom” five times (296). There are two issues here. First, as we’ve just seen, there are at least three rival visions that have animated Western political thought. And even within these vision there is a great deal of very important diversity. Most simply, there is no more a single Western vision of freedom than there is just one vision of beauty or justice.10 Further, Cook identifies this Western vision of freedom with political freedom as such. But even if there were one Western vision, it would hardly follows that this was the only vision possible.11 Second, Cook portrays freedom as hyper-individualistic and “selfish.” European freedom is “an individualistic paradise” (295). It “makes a virtue of selfishness” (296) and helped cause the                                                                                                                 9

In calling it essentialized, I mean that he supposes there is something like an essence to political freedom (or at least political freedom in the West) – an inner core that, despite surface differences, constitutes it as a single, stable, particular thing in all times and places, irrespective of context or history. What approach betrays such commitment? The assumption of a single, core concept operative and basically unchanged in the West (though perhaps developing in the sense of unfolding from the inner core), the search for just that concept in other traditions, with indifference or inattention to the possibility of analogous or closely-(or distantly-)related or family-resemblance concepts, and so on. If the particular language of ‘essentialism’ is objectionable, I’m happy to leave it aside, having clarified (and above showed) what I have in mind. For helpful reflections on essentialism, see Stout, “On Some Uses of the Term Religion” (unpublished paper). 10 Nor does it change matters to appeal to “common sense” or “what most people” mean, for there’s hardly consensus on such things today (witness disputes internal to the American Republican party, let alone between Republicans and Democrats), much less is there such consensus across European history! 11 Side note – We find in different traditions, different ways of imagining all sorts of ideals and values, along with values that may be new to us. One promise of comparative work or work in traditions other than those with which we are most familiar is the transformation and discovery that can ensue: we discover a new way of imagining the conceptual space, new ways of configuring social roles and relations, new ways of relating or conceiving values, new goods to love, and so on. We can be more or less attuned to these possibilities depending on the way in which we approach comparative efforts – and a great deal of energy in religious studies has rightly been expended on trying imagine the most suitable ways to approach this or that comparative effort. Cook’s method in this chapter, however, thanks to both the narrowness of the conception of freedom for which he searches, the tendency to make a great deal hang on the presence or absence of Arabic words typically translated as ‘freedom,’ the unidirectional, non dialectical character of the effort (i.e. no openness to that ways Muslim political thought on freedom-related matters might transform ‘Western’ conceptions), and other features can seem to sharply limit the possibilities for the sort of illumination that the best comparative work promises.

7

DRAFT - Decosimo

rise of “European individualism” (296). Unsurprisingly, Cook find this in sharp tension with Islam. For Cook, political freedom is inherently individualistic and anti-communitarian, encouraging selfishness. While such a vision fits within liberalism, it is alien to positive and republican visions alike. Indeed, both of these are distinguished by their rejection of such hyper-individualism. Positive visions are regularly critiqued for failing to sufficiently value individual autonomy. And, republicans understand their theory as inescapably social – wedding liberal and communitarian values, republican freedom is a relationship. Finally, Cook depicts political freedom as amoral and even licentious. Political freedom is “the right to do as one pleases” (306; 296), “freedom to…do ungodly things” (307) and to overthrow the Qur’an or God’s law. Again, this is antithetical to positive and republican liberty alike. Doing whatever one wants – unless one wants what is truly good – is what positive liberty identifies as bondage. And republicans do not locate freedom in license but protection from arbitrary power. Being constrained from doing evil is does not compromise republican liberty; it helps constitute it. Indeed, Cook’s conception here stands as marginal even relative to many liberal conceptions. No less a liberal than Locke explicitly contrasts liberty with license and explains “that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from [dangers] and precipices.”12 Here, Cook has staked out and claimed as universal a position that even many liberals reject.13 Is it any surprise that he does not find it in Islam?                                                                                                                 12

Second Treatise, paragraph 57, (cited in Ian Carter, “Positive and Negative Freedom,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) 13 Throughout the chapter Cook mentions the ‘master/slave paradigm’ and a connection between freedom and not being a slave, and he consistently uses that language (e.g. ‘the metaphor of slavery’), but, language notwithstanding, he does not in any way or at any point work with such a conception or bring it into focus. Instead, as we’ve just seen, he works with a hyper-individualistic negative/liberal conception of freedom – one he describes as being connected to freedom from slavery. It’s republican sounding rhetoric but strictly liberal substance. Particularly striking in this regard is his claim that a focus on the master/slave paradigm actually encourages hyper-individualism. Yet this is close to the opposite of the way it has functioned in republicanism. Indeed, recent work on republicanism shows how republicanism’s communitarian character is rooted precisely in this paradigm. For republican liberty is not primarily about what happens to me but what is liable to happen to any of all those that bear relevant markers – of race, class, gender, and so on – in virtue of which they are subject to arbitrary power. So, to use an example Pettit formulates – if I am a very well-treated wife in a society in which there are no protections against spousal abuse and where, say, many

8

DRAFT - Decosimo

Cook’s treatment of John Milton epitomize the problems (308). Cook cites Milton’s claim that freedom requires submission only to “such laws as [we] choose” as showing radical disagreement between Christianity and Islam on freedom. Yet in Eikonoklastes, where Milton says this, his point is to critique tyranny. Charles the first has idolatrously substituted his will for God’s, and Milton appeals to divine law. My point is not to fault Cook for misreading Milton. It is that in Milton we have a seminal republican who regards obedience to God as constitutive of freedom and sees rulers as bound to legislate in accord with God’s law. We have, in other words, arguments that parallel countless Muslim figures, not least al-Ghazālī, as I have shown elsewhere. There are deep differences between Islam and Christianity. But what Cook cites to evidence a rift on freedom is actually a signal case of resonance. In sum, Cook assumes there is a single Western conception of political freedom. He identifies it with freedom as such. His conception is actually a hyper-indivualist, licentious version of liberal freedom. Failing to find this in Islam, Cook claims political freedom is not an Islamic value. Clearly, this argument does not succeed. A Republican Vision in Cook’s Sources In this section, I want to show how some of the evidence Cook adduces to show that political freedom finds no place in Islam actually shows just the opposite. They display concern for republican freedom springing from Islamic sources.14                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 women are badly treated, than whatever happens to me, I am nonetheless unfree, for in virtue of my woman-hood I’m liable to arbitrary power. So, I have strong reason to identify with and care about women generally – my freedom is inextricably bound up with theirs, for so long as women are subject to arbitrary power, so am I. And Pettit sketches the ways in which such circles of concern can and ought to radiate outward. Republican liberty weds focus on self, society, and other for its conception of freedom is social through and through. There is a centrifugal force to republican liberty – a push away from mere self-regard. On further misunderstanding of the slavery language/metaphor, see the concluding paragraphs below and see his remark the modern Muslims realize “that the European idea of freedom meant much more than not being a slave” (300) – implying his own neglect that this idea, properly understood, is the very core of republican liberty. 14 In that I’m drawing on the very evidence Cook cites, my project is a form of immanent critique – that’s also why I don’t, e.g., cite sources authored by women or others who often experienced themselves as dominated within Muslim traditions. That such sources are absent from Cook’s account might be grounds on which someone might want to criticize that account or find it inadequate, but here I’m meeting Cook on his terms – precisely in regard to the evidence

9

DRAFT - Decosimo

We’ll consider two examples: Abu Bakr and the 20th century Islamist Mawdūdī. In a recent article, I’ve shown how al-Ghazālī displays deep republican leanings – through the place of reciprocity and accountability in his political thought and, especially, in his doctrine of ḥisba.15 I can say more in the Q&A. But these three figures span the history of Islam. They are hardly marginal to the tradition. We see in each a commitment to freedom as non-domination. First, Abu Bakr. And here, we are considering the early Islamic community’s selfunderstanding as much and anything. But this answers to our aims for what we get is precisely a vision of what that community values. Abu Bakr, Cook says, was “self-consciously not a despot” (292). This understates things. Upon becoming Caliph, he famously demands that the people always correct him if he does wrong and only obey him if his commands reflect God’s.16 These are quintessentially republican commitments: accountability and rule of law. Preventing domination requires ensuring that power is not arbitrary but duly constrained. Accountability constrains power by making its possessor answerable for what he does. Rule of law constrains power by grounding it in and limiting to determinate, objective, transparent, and just standards. Such governance is not a matter of self-interest or caprice, but of clear public standards that seem just to those under them and apply to the ruler as much as the people. Should the caliph transgress either in behavior or legislation he will be both disobeyed and censured. In the most extreme case, he will lose not only his office but his life. Jeremy Waldron has distinguished between forensic accountability and agent accountability.17 Forensic accountability is accountability to an external standard: one holds another to account against a standard governing both. Think of one company suing another for contract                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 he has chosen. Doing so has the added benefit of suggesting something of the importance of ongoing dialogue between Islamists and political philosophers. 15 Decosimo, “An Umma of Accountability: Al-Ghazālī against Domination,” Soundings 98.3, 2015: 260-288. 16 As Cook explains “it is for his subjects to judge the Caliph’s performance of his duties” (292). 17 “Accountability: Fundamental to Democracy,” unpublished: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2410812

10

DRAFT - Decosimo

violations or your student citing the syllabus against you. Agent accountability is accountability to a principle by an agent. The agent is charged with acting on the principle’s behalf to serve the principle’s interests. The principle can ask the agent to give an accounting for himself, and she can judge and, even dismiss him, depending on his performance. Think of firing a realtor who never listens or voting a lazy chump out of office. The early caliphate displays both forms of accountability. Most obviously, forensic – ruler and people are accountable to God’s law. But agent accountability too, for, in the speech and other stories, Abu Bakr is shown to regard himself accountable to the people’s interests and subject to their evaluation and judgment. Agent accountability is a special hallmark of republican liberty. Now, whether Abu Bakr actually gave his speech is beside the point. Our concern is with values and valuing. Precisely what is valued here and central to the Muslim community’s founding story o is a vision of mutual accountability under rule of law. Republicans have a name for this. They call it freedom. Our second case, Mawdūdī.18 Mawdūdī trumpets Abu Bakr and the early community’s “democratic spirit.”19 Accountability was at the core and rule of law was such, Mawdūdī says, “that the Caliph could lose a suit against a Christian.” Beyond his interpretation and endorsement of this vision, Mawdūdī developed a doctrine of the Caliphate of all believers. “Every believer is khalifa min allah, Caliph of God.” Thus, in designating someone Caliph, the community invests him with their collective authority. They lend him the Caliphal authority each bears in his own right. And this is lending, for at any point the community can reclaim that authority, authority that is always properly their own to give and take. Thus, the community must constantly judge the Caliph,                                                                                                                 18

[Throughout much of this section, I’m working through some of the very evidence and in a number of cases the same remarks that Cook adduces. But for this oral presentation, I’ve not noted all the cases where Cook cites the text. Additionally, in several cases, for ease of reading for my oral presentation, I’ve not included ellipsis. Nonetheless, in all cases, the substance of the Mawdūdī quotations is unmodified and drawn directly from, “Political Theory of Islam” in The Islamic Law and Constitution, trans. and ed. by Khurshid Ahmad, (Lahore, Islamic Publications Ltd.: n.d.), 12352.] 19 This is Cook’s characterization.

11

DRAFT - Decosimo

ensuring he is stewarding their authority well by serving the common good. If he is not or they judge the self-accounting he owes them unsatisfactory, they must dismiss him. This is agent accountability par excellence. It is republicanism par excellence. “Democratic accountability,” Waldron says, “is predicated on a fundamental republican idea: the business of government is public business. It adds to that the following democratic idea: the public…is entitled to supervise conduct of government business, because it is their business conducted in their name.”20 And here is James Madison: “Before the exercise of power can make officials forget to whom they owe that power, they will be compelled to anticipate the moment when that power will cease, when its exercise will be reviewed, and when they must descend to the level from which they were raised; there forever to remain unless their performance established their title to its renewal.”21 The similarities here to Mawdūdī’s vision are astounding. They go further. Building on the central doctrine that God alone is Lord and thus that no human is another’s master, Mawdūdī puts domination near the core of his political thought. Treating Abraham’s argument with the infidel king in Surah 2:258, he explains, “The question…[was] who should have the right to claim the obedience of men… What [the king] demanded was…no objection…[to] the absoluteness of his authority over his subjects… He could do whatever he liked with [them]; he had absolute power to [kill] or to spare them” (131). With republicans, Mawdūdī regards domination as a matter of unconstrained power, power that won’t admit questioning, let alone limits. “All…who exercise unqualified dominion…are essentially claimants to godhood… And those who serve and obey them admit their godhood even if they do not say so by word of mouth” (132). Domination is idolatry. Dominators make themselves gods. The claim is usually implicit enacted in the ruler’s conduct and, eventually, the dispositions and ethical life of a people. “Whenever…domination                                                                                                                 20 21

“Accountability,” 20. Cited in Waldron, “Accountability,” p13, [Adapted for clarity for oral presentation.]

12

DRAFT - Decosimo

(rabubiyyat)…[is] established [t]he human soul is inevitably deprived of its natural freedom; and man’s mind and heart and…growth and development…[are] arrested” (134). Domination stultifies. It breeds docility and fear, self-censorship and flattery. As Quentin Skinner puts it, “servitude breeds servility.”22 Domination produces certain sorts of subjects – slavish ones. For survival demands conformity, silence, flattery. Imagine a society without laws against abuse, a wife horrendously beaten and violated by her husband. He never touches her again. But he can. And she knows it. She lives in perpetual terror that he might. How will she behave? She studies her abuser’s psychology, devotes herself to pleasing him, obsessively striving to ensure everything is always “just right.” This is a crippling, stunted life. Consider three examples. In Ready and Easy Way, Milton explains that a republic aims for the flourishing and virtue of its people. What a tyrant wants from the people is wealth, which he can fleece from them, but also sheepishness of mind, servility. “Tyrants want the people well fleec't, for thir own shearing and the supplie of regal prodigalitie; but also softest, vitiousest, servilest, easiest to be kept under; not only in fleece, but in minde also sheepishest.” Where tyrants want the people like sheep so as to shear them of goods and have them docile, Milton and Mawdūdī want polities the produce virtuous citizens and leaders who serve rather rob. This is what his doctrine of the universal caliphate supplies. (It also explains why he makes so much of Abu Bakr’s frugal, monitored allowance from the public treasury.) When James Cone criticizes so-called “Uncle Toms,” he has flattery and docility in view, the way servile behavior degrades black dignity and sustains white domination. And when he prohibits whites from using that term, it’s because white domination makes such servility tempting in the first place. Mary Wollstonecraft notes that women are told that to be well-treated, they must show their husbands “docility, meekness, respectful observance, study their humours, and give soft                                                                                                                 22

Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” 260.

13

DRAFT - Decosimo

answers in a flowing voice.” “Is this not,” she asks, “the portrait of a house slave” a “drudge whose being is absorbed in that of a tyrant”?23 This is the very dynamic Mawdūdī identifies. “The root-cause of all evil…in the world is…domination,” he says (133). “The only remedy [is] the repudiation and renunciation…of all masters [save] God” (135). The proclamation of God’s exclusive Lordship, Islam’s message, is thus “a charter of liberty and freedom” (136). The prophets “aimed at the demolition of man’s supremacy over man… to deliver man from this…slavery, …this exploitation of the weak by the strong. Their object was to thrust back into their proper limits those who had over-stepped…and to raise to the proper level those who had been forced down” (135). Here, Mawdūdī explicitly identifies domination with slavery, security against domination with liberty, and liberty’s achievement with constraining the powerful and empowering the weak. To do this is to secure freedom. Domination destroys slave and master alike. Robbing the master of real relationship, securing him in delusional idolatry. Thus, Lincoln says, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” Thus, Mawdūdī says, “[the prophets] endeavored to evolve a social organization based on human equality in which man should be neither the slave nor the master of his fellow-beings” (135). To teach Islam, to teach God’s Lordship, is to teach liberty and to proclaim all human mastery idolatry. For Mawdūdī, political freedom is not just compatible with Islam, it near Islam’s very heart. To be clear, there are unanswered questions in all of this about the scope of liberty – the place of non-Muslims, women, and slaves. There are also vital questions about the difference made to the character of this liberty by conceptions of God’s nature and divine law. These are vital questions. But these are not questions about whether freedom is an Islamic value. They are                                                                                                                 23

Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli, 176-77 [adapted for clarity for oral presentation], Cambridge UP, 1995

14

DRAFT - Decosimo

questions about who is candidate to enjoy freedom and how best to describe it given different theologies of the God who constitutes it. I can say more in Q&A, but for most of Western history only some restricted class – males or whites – were candidates to enjoy republican liberty. The expansion of who enjoys liberty is a democratic modification of republicanism, not a change in the idea of liberty as non-domination.24 On the theological question, a great deal hangs on whether divine law is regarded as arbitrary and, if so, by whom and in what sense. Still, for many, it is obvious that God’s authority is non-arbitrary. Even for voluntarists like al-Juwayni, God is God. What better reason could there be for his authority over us? Interpretation, Implicit Values, and Attribution In this final section, I want to consider some broader philosophically-inflected interpretive issues that further trouble Cook’s claims. They also have broader significance for interpretive work, in Islam and generally. At one level, Cook’s misstep is already clear. Identifying freedom with hyper-liberalism he misses the republicanism animating his evidence. But there’s another set of problems, one relating to interpretation. I can only touch on this. Cook claims that any notion of political freedom in Islam is, at best, entirely implicit. This is part of why he thinks it’s not an Islamic value. But having an explicitly formulated concept is not necessary to count as valuing whatever that concept names. Imagine a community that loves softball, chess, cards against humanity, and hockey but lacks the concept game. They lack the concept in this sense – they neither have a word or phrase corresponding to game nor have they explicitly recognized or theorized the commonalities and links that connect their softball-practices to their chess-practices, hockeypractices, and so on. Those links really are there – for there are salient similarities in their practices of softball, hockey, and so on and in their concepts of these things – but the links not yet been

                                                                                                                24

On this point see, Stout, Blessed Are the Organized.

15

DRAFT - Decosimo

named or recognized. Despite this, it will still be the case that they value and love games and that love of games is one of their values. Their failing to describe it that way will not change this. Notice too that this is not merely an act of recasting their commitments in relation to what we know but in ways they do not or could not recognize. That is, it is not merely a case in which, because of what the word game means in English, it is true to say that they love games, even though they have no concept of games. Instead, it is an act of making explicit what they themselves are already committed to and could or would recognize but have not. The concept is already circulating beneath the surface of their practices and just needs a bit of conversation to call it forth. Call the first approach corrective interpretation. Call this second approach dialogical interpretation.25 Corrective interpretation sets the facts – as we see them – alongside the claims of the text and interprets accordingly, adding and correcting along the way. Dialogical interpretation, in contrast, does not depart from the subjects’ substantive commitments but considers what they would assent to given what they do assent to. Matters get complex quickly but consider the claims: “Abu Bakr believes H20 is thirst-quenching” and “Stephen Hawking believes H20 is thirst quenching.” Both of these claims are true but they are also very importantly different. Hawking has the concept H20 and as rich an understanding of it as anyone. Abu Bakr does not – explicitly or implicitly, he is nowhere close to having the concept. To say that Abu Bakr believes H20 is thirst-quenching is an act of corrective interpretation. If pre-modern Islam stood to freedom as Abu Bakr stands to H20 it would be true that freedom is an Islamic value and enough to show Cook’s claim mistaken but doing so would be exclusively an act of corrective interpretation.                                                                                                                 25

The distinction I draw here is related to but not identical to that between de dicto and de rei interpretation. It might be best understood as a distinction within de dicto interpretive approaches, but whether that’s so I’m at least confident that what I’m calling ‘dialogical’ interpretation ought to be regarded as a species of de dicto interpretation. There’s more to explore here, however. And there are also differences among the various examples/cases I’m considering (i.e. game example, the freedom issue, and the two H20 cases), but these don’t bear on the basic point I’m making. For more on all this, see, e.g., Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 94-111 (but note that I’m using ‘dialogue’ here to refer to different cases/practices than those Brandom brings in view in his talk of dialogue. The closest he comes to treating the sort of case we have in view in that text is the bottom of 96.). [[There’s more that I’d like to say here…]]]

16

DRAFT - Decosimo

Our situation is different, the tradition’s relation to freedom stronger. Freedom is an Islamic value in the stronger sense these figures are already committed to and could readily know themselves to be committed to freedom. That is how I read Mawdūdī in relation to the classical inheritance – he is making explicit what he sees as implicit all along.26 I said one need not have an explicitly formulated value to count as committed to it and sketched how this could be so. Happily this is even more obviously true in our case. For here a community does explicitly theorize, condemn, reject, and disvalue one thing – domination. And domination, the very thing they disvalue, is itself precisely the antithesis of that which remains implicit and unarticulated: liberty. If I explicitly reject and disvalue not-X, necessarily I approve and value X. This is so regardless of whether or not I ever explicitly conceptualize X in distinction from not-X. To hate slavery just is to love slavery’s negation. Slavery’s negation is freedom. Hating slavery is loving freedom. If I rail against domination, name it as arbitrary power, call certain                                                                                                                 26

Cook, in contrast and without offering explanation as to his reasoning or sources on this point, claims that what we see is Mawdūdī is from the West, something ‘exogenous’ to the tradition: Mawdūdī “import[s] the European idea of freedom” (306; and on ‘endogenous’/‘exogenous’ see 298-99). And ‘in the present state of the world certain Western values are highly prestigious, and under these conditions it almost inevitably becomes an unacknowledged part of the Islamist agenda to find counterparts of these values in the Islamic heritage” (301n78). Certainly such a dynamic is plausible, but the claim needs evidence. More than that, it and the analysis of Mawdūdī and the other modern figures the chapter treats presume the very things in question. First, these figures do not themselves constitute any sort of evidence for the presence of political freedom as an Islamic value but instead are only examples of borrowing from the West. And second, having already decided that pre-modern traditions evince no concern for political freedom, their finding in the early tradition just such values cannot actually be such finding at all but rather is merely an eisegetical effort to vindicate what are certainly not Islamic values as being such. These figures are either self-deceived or engaged in dressing up alien values in Islamic garb. What they cannot be doing is actually unearthing or developing their tradition. In can only mention this point, but there is, in all this and especially the conceptions of endogenous/exogenous at play in the chapter, a certain conception of what a tradition is and how a tradition grows or develops that is very different from the way in which I and many others regard the constitution and development of traditions and the relation of some tradition to rival traditions. On this view, every tradition is always already in dialogue with and partly constituted by interaction with all sorts of ‘outsider’ or ‘exogenous’ tradition – there is not period in which a tradition (at least one as significant as Islam, Judaism, democracy, modernism, etc.) isn’t already interacting with and shaped by other traditions or, at least, ideas, practices, communities, and/or individuals that do not themselves fit within the tradition. To think otherwise, as the chapter functionally does, is, ironically to accept the self-narration of certain (usually conservative) religious communities that posit a pure, untainted beginning, a time before which outside corruption (usually precipitated by insider laxity) had crept in. While it could hardly be clearer from his other scholarship that Cook well understands this point about the dialogical, dialectical character of traditions and their constant changing through and engagement with ‘outside/r’ elements or rival traditions, this familiarity seems absent in the chapter at hand. For important accounts of traditions understood in the terms I’m sketching see, e.g., MacIntyre’s trilogy, Stout, Democracy and Tradition (2004) (which corrects MacIntyre’s account in a host of important ways), and Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, esp. “Introduction” (2002).

17

DRAFT - Decosimo

political arrangements slavish, and theorize and idealize a community in which no one is dominated, then I value freedom. This is so whether I ever use that word or not. If I love nondomination, I am loving republican liberty. Conclusion Perhaps nowhere is Cook’s difficulty clearer than in a note where he mentions Cicero’s remark that we are slaves to the law in order that we may be free (307n126). That remark captures the essence of republican liberty. In the note, Cook quickly mentions that perhaps, for Islam slavery to God might be like slavery to the law in Cicero’s sense. He immediately dismisses the idea. No, he says, and with a claim that would shock Cicero, he adds: besides God’s rule is more constricting than human law. For Cicero, republicans, and countless Jews, Christians, and Muslims, little could be more confused or untrue than that. Law constitutes liberty, and no law more perfectly than God’s. In closing consider Patricia Crone’s remark about pre-modern Muslims: “the choice as they saw it was not between slavery and freedom, but…between slavery to other human beings and slavery to God.”27 Cook cites this and thinks it correct.28 Freedom means hyper-individualist licentiousness. Slavery to God has nothing to do with this. So freedom is not an Islamic value. Crone herself seems to be making a more circumspect point – pre-modern Muslims did not have an explicit concept of political freedom, so they saw their options as between two forms of bondage, two types of slavery. It is clear why I think Cook is mistaken. But I think Crone is mistaken here too – or at least speaking in a very misleading way. Yes, the concept of political freedom was rarely if ever explicit in the tradition. But what both Cook and Crone seem to miss is the tradition’s implicit identification of service to God with freedom. For Cook and Crone freedom stands in contrast –

                                                                                                                27 28

Crone, God’s Rule, 315. I cite the claim too, though without registering my dissent in “Umma of Accountability.”

18

DRAFT - Decosimo

even opposition – to service to God. Or else it is not so much as on the menu of options. The burden of this paper has been to show that this is not so. For the figures and tradition I’ve considered, domination, subjection to arbitrary power, slavery, is a grave evil. It is something to be avoided. Avoidance of domination is, most simply, pursuit of freedom. Service to God is nothing if not such security, such liberty. It is not that one must choose between two forms of domination – domination by men or domination by God. Rather one must choose between domination and liberty, slavery to men or slavery to God. But slavery to God is freedom. Both in that very relationship and, more obviously still, in what it means for political community, relations to fellow humans. So, yes, the choice always was between slavery to men and slavery to God. But, as they saw it, that was a choice between slavery and freedom.

Appendix [One feature of Cook’s chapter that I can’t consider here is his articulation of what he takes to be a three-step process by which “the” Western conception of freedom arose and developed in correspondence to the development and evolution of various political communities (296-8). He presents the schema as though it is noncontroversial and familiar. (For my part it is not only novel but seems very controversial and somewhat idiosyncratic.) In any case, he proceeds on the apparent conviction that the comparison between the West and Islam or the search for “the” Western conception will require finding parallel, corresponding steps in the shape of social/civic organization in Islamic history (see 298, esp.). It’s not entirely clear to me how he understands the relation between the steps and the development of the conceptions, in terms of whether or in what way there is causality. But the absence of the corresponding steps within the development of Islam seems, in Cook’s view, to add to the case against the possibility of political freedom being an Islamic value. Overall, the chapter’s comparative methodology, insofar as I understand it, is one that strikes me as itself somewhat problematic – it seems overly and unnecessarily complex and abstract in virtue of the way in which it seems to imagine the work of comparison, and, in my view, it overestimates the kind, scope, and depth of commonality necessary in order to constitute interesting disagreement between traditions or similarities worth caring about. Specifically, it seems to imagine that comparison (and perhaps similarity) in some sense requires just the sort of formal schema the chapter sketches (including generalizations about how societies tend to develop). Absent from the chapter is engagement with the rich, extensive work done in religious studies over the past fifty years concerning comparative methodology. While comparativists in religious studies have arguably been overly concerned with matters of method, Cook’s chapter and future comparative efforts might be enriched by engagement with this work.]

19

Lihat lebih banyak...

Comentários

Copyright © 2017 DADOSPDF Inc.