Hanblecheyapi

The most powerful moments in life, as abd noted (post: The Mercy of Human Company, 12.27.05), are experienced alone. It is at such moments that the importance of human company is most apparent. Yet, just as others can be a crutch in times of need, consistent dependence on them can be debilitating to personal and spiritual growth.

The Dakota Indians, understanding this concept well, considered enforced loneliness to be a rite of passage to manhood. Hanblecheyapi, a journey each adolescent male took, involved fasting, ingesting hallucinogens, seeking spiritual guidance, and seclusion in the wilderness for days on end. Maturity was more than responsibility, loss of innocence, or age: it involved a very personal spiritual connection with a Higher Being that needed to be cultivated in solitude.

Perhaps the most intense period of personal growth I experienced was while studying abroad in France. It was not the clichéd afternoons sipping tea at cafés, nor the touristy gawking at paintings I was assured were worth the admissions price; it was my first time living with neither friends nor family. Although no hanblecheyapi, the solitude helped me become less of a knee-jerk thinker and more sensitive to differences in people, and I hope cultivated a more informed personal relationship with Allah (swt).

Ingesting of hallucinogens aside, much of hanblecheyapi is reflected in our faith. The suppression of worldly desires through fasting and the seeking of guidance from the knowledgeable are common to both traditions. It is the solitude, however, that underlines the spiritual experience in both. Just as the Prophet (saw) would meditate in seclusion, Dakota youths would isolate themselves in the wilderness. And just as the Prophet (saw) rushed back to Khadija (ra) after Gabriel (as) first approached him, we turn to our loved ones for the mercy of their company after our most intense spiritual experiences.

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No Good. No Evil.

It is a mistaken belief that the world is divided into Good and Evil. Not only is such a notion incorrect, it is simplistic. There is definitely good. There is definitely evil. But, much what what we consider to be “evil” is a matter of perception anyways; “evil” is our own construction. “Good,” however, is always from God.

Rather, the world is divided into choices. These choices are either driven by a sentiment about the afterlife, or they are driven by a sentiment about this worldy life. All of the choices you have made in the past day fall into either of these two categories.

There are those individuals who are driven with a love for elements in this worldly life and a consequent general disregard for the afterlife.

There are those individuals who are driven with a hatred for elements in this worldly life, and may attempt to compensate for that hatred by insincerely seeking the afterlife. Meaning, I have met plenty of Islamic activists whose personalities seem to betray their islamicness. They don’t present themselves as people who are seeking the afterlife. Rather, they present themselves — especially through their consistencies — as people just running from this world. And, they are running from one part of this world to another part of this world. They just keep running away.

There are indeed those individuals who see nothing in this world, except for their opportunities related to the afterlife. I know they are there. If you find one, let me know.

And, as a result of these outlooks, we each make choices. The temperature of the water of your shower. The amount of water you let run until you reach that temperature. The water you may turn off when you are soaping yourself.

Think of the choices you’ve made in the past day. Think of the difficult choices you’ve made over the course of your life. Which ones were driven by sentiments about the afterlife? Honestly.

Do not hate this worldly life; disconnect yourself from your desires for elements in it. Look at a fistful of gold as being no different in value than a fistful of mud. But, seek to find fulfillment in the Qur’an.

Do not hate this worldly life. Know that it is a prison, but it is a prison in which your choices dictate your afterlife. And, all you get is one shot.

So, there are a few lessons here:

1- Look at the world as a series of choices.

2- Look within yourself to find the motivations for your own choices.

3- Look at this world for what it really is for you: it is your servant in laying the groundwork for your own afterlife.

Now, among those who make their choices based on sentiments about the afterlife, there are select few who seek something in particular in that afterlife: God. Those people, we will — God willing — explore on another day.

Take control of your choices.

May God bless you.

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Snitching

In December 2004, NBA star Carmelo Anthony was seen on a DVD titled "Stop Snitching" that threatened violence on police informers in black communities. Raising a firestorm, Anthony’s presence brought media attention to what is now a thriving underground movement. "Stop Snitching" t-shirts, sold widely in urban areas, are seen by most government officials as an attempt to foil the War on Drugs. Boston mayor Thomas Menino, for example, has threatened removal of all such t-shirts from store shelves.

The current "Stop Snitching" campaign brings to the fore a tension that has always existed in American democracy: do people ultimately decide what is good for the collective or the government the people have created? A healthy disregard for authority is a key element of American identity: the United States was formed through rebellion, and such sentiment was encouraged even after the new government was formed. Thomas Jefferson, for example, noted in 1787, "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive." The underlying principle – the government cannot always be correct in defining what is good for the collective – applies well to snitching.

Some examples are obvious in hindsight: it is standard belief, for example, that McCarthyism overreached and a refusal to inform during the Red Scare has come to be seen as noble. Mark McGwire’s recent stonewalling in the Congressional hearings on steroid use in professional baseball, on the other hand, aroused no sympathy. The current "Stop Snitching" campaign lies somewhere in the middle, and Alexandra Natapoff's recent Slate piece "Bait and Snitch" (http://www.slate.com/id/2132092) outlines the negative effects of informers on their communities.

The ambiguous morality of snitching is well captured by a few lines of a poem written by Mary MacArthur to her son Douglas MacArthur in 1901, then a West Point cadet being asked to tell on his classmates in a hazing incident gone too far.

"Remember the world will be quick with its blame
If shadow or shame ever darken your name.
Like mother like son is saying so true
The world will judge largely of mother by you.
Be this then your task, if task it shall be
To force this proud world to do homage to me."

The poem acknowledges the role of public opinion in deciding what is right or wrong – but counsels to ignore it, do what is fundamentally correct and then force public opinion through sheer will to acquiesce. Of course, there is no advice on whether to snitch or not, for that is a very personal decision.

The Islamic response echoes Mary MacArthur's, albeit removes the democratic reliance on public opinion. The only audience is God, and with a non-Caliphate government, to snitch or not to snitch is again a very personal decision. Further understanding of the Islamic perspective of the issue would also yield useful insight into the differences between Islamic governance and American democracy in terms of legitimacy of authority, the good of the collective, and the importance of conformity.

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The Mercy of Human Company

We enter and leave the world alone. The most powerful moments in life--the discovery or loss of meaning, the confrontation with mortality or with the prospect of immortality--are utterly personal experiences. At the end of the day, the things of this world are so many flies buzzing around your head. Even so (and perhaps especially so), the company of others makes the most difficult moments bearable. If you've woken up from a nightmare and sought the silent reassurance of a loved one, you know what I mean.

Aristotle argues that in the highest form of friendship a friend is "another self". Such a relationship can only mature from the long-term company of those who are your intellectual and moral peers, and is therefore restricted to at best a handful of friends. Pleasure and utility are the motivation for lesser forms of friendship, but here they are united with the mutual pursuit of the good. This is a very appealing idea to me, and gives me hope that there are other people who, via a similar itinerary of thoughts and passions, will see life as I see it. As we know from our own tradition, believers are mirrors to one another.

If that is the peak of friendship, there is also a vale. Two people who have nothing in common but blood and argument can nevertheless share something that escapes words or thoughts. Because these attachments are unconditional and nonnegotiable, no exchange is required. When I first had thoughts about the end of the world, I would fall asleep clutching and unclutching my mother's hand to let her know I was still alive. Even now, I am glad I live with my brother because he will sit with me in silence until the moment has passed.

With time, relationships that are conceived in reciprocal desire can also take on this character. Susan Sarandon's character in "Moonlight Mile" describes why she sticks out a difficult marriage in something like the following words:

"When I go to bed at night, I stick out my hand. I know when I do, no matter how cold the damn thing is, no matter how difficult it might feel, no matter how desperately we want to kill each other it's gonna be met by this warm body on the other side. To pull me out of my head, quiet the voices, save me from myself... without ever having to ask. Every night, 31 years. Every night there's my hand and every night he never lets me down."

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Background to "Bombing Without Moonlight"

This is a brief sketch of the philosophical background to Sidi Abdal-Hakim Murad's Oct 2004 article, "Bombing Without Moonlight", with a few suggestions for further reading. The original article can be read here, and I did a summary and outline in an earlier post. My own comments and questions will inshaAllah follow in a third and final post on this article.

Background

Abdal-Hakim Murad (aka Tim Winter) recasts the debate about Islam and violence as a conversation between the children (liberals) and different stepchildren (neoconservative as well as Muslim radicals) of the European Enlightenment. This is a complex argument and requires some background in the history of Western philosophy. As contested as this history is, my notes are necessarily an act of interpretation. For the sake of simplicity, I also leave out the impact of Judaism, Islam, the Renaissance and postmodernism (Islam and postmodernism are the more egregious oversights, and I may have to come back to them depending on feedback).

The Western philosophical tradition has been punctuated by three defining moments. Socrates is often taken as the starting point of Western philosophy; his student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle are definitive of the classical period. Christianity injects something fundamentally new to this tradition. A synthesis of Christian and classical thought is definitive of the premodern (i.e., classical + medieval) period. The Enlightenment rejects both premodern philosophy and religion, and is definitive of the modern period. Insofar as philosophy is a conversation about possibilities, these are not simply historical periods that succeed each other, but can be seen as alternative paradigms that have been more or less compelling at different points in time.

The Enlightenment sets science in opposition to religion and other structures of traditional authority, and seeks to establish society on entirely rational foundations. Universal reason replaces myth, faith, custom et al. Contemporary liberals are the inheritors of this political project. Individual agency is central: the greater the realm of individual freedoms and the greater the equality between individuals, the better a society we have.

Critics of the Enlightenment have taken different forms: political and social conservatives, theologians, Marxists, feminists and others. Depending on the critic, liberalism is either too much or not enough of a good thing. Some of these critics are in fact beneficiaries of the Enlightenment—hence the idea of the Enlightenment’s stepchildren.

What does this have to do with the ethics of suicide militancy? If you are interested in figuring out what sort of thinking produces suicide militancy, it may be sufficient to look at whom suicide bombers read at night, whom those thinkers read and so on. AH Murad does some of that in his article. But if you are also interested in what sort of thinking makes it possible, and furthermore what sort of thinking can effectively combat it, then you need to look at the wider history of philosophy. From this perspective, the following narrative may be instructive:

Socratic philosophy introduced a tension between the good and one’s own—i.e., what is good for my family, tribe or city vs. what is objectively good. Monotheism radicalized this tension by making us all accountable to a just God and not to our particular communities. The Enlightenment took this yet a step further by enshrining reason as the basis of community, while severing its link to divine accountability. Of course, if universal reason is thrown into doubt (either because the truth does not exist or because the official version of the truth marginalizes other points of view), you have neither custom nor faith to fall back on. That’s where we stand today.

Suggested Reading

AH Murad. "Faith in the Future: Islam after the Enlightenment" and “Unpacking Islam”

John Gray. Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern
(discussed in AH Murad’s article)

Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind
(a brilliant, provocative history and indictment of American liberalism)

Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
(a good introduction to the type of postmodernism Murad opposes)

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Learning from a Bigot

When I hear about accusations of misogyny against figures in the Islamic tradition, I find it instructive to compare this to my reactions to unpalatable statements from giants in the history of Western philosophy. Talking about a different intellectual tradition has the advantage of unpacking the issue at hand with minimal offense. So when a discussion about a major classical Islamic scholar's views on women came up on the MEISGS (Middle East and Islamic Studies Graduate Students) discussion list, that's the approach I took.

When I come across a statement from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche or Heidegger that rubs me the wrong way, I ask myself two questions:

1) Why is this offensive to me?

I see two possibilities here: a) because it conflicts with my fundamental convictions, and b) because it conflicts with the fundamental assumptions of the intellectual culture I live in. Usually it's both, but I'm surprised at how often it's the second. Insofar as the prevailing intellectual culture is liberalism, the real criteria of taking offense are equality and freedom. Nietzsche's misogyny pales in comparison to his blasphemy, but only one of them is
considered seriously offensive to the 'intelligent' reader.

2) How does it affect my ability to take this scholar seriously?

People typically go one of two ways here:

a) since this person is my hero, i'll either agree with what he just said or pretend he never said it;
b) this person is a mysogynist, racist, classist homophobe and is therefore no longer worth reading (the dead white man critique, the Muslim version of which is "I'm not going to take my deen from a bigot")

In commenting on Heidegger's Nazism, I remember Wendy Doniger (a University of Chicago scholar on religion) suggesting a third approach:

c) without condoning his less palatable views, we should "glide past" them in order to benefit from his other, more important, views.

This approach makes it possible to learn from people we cannot afford to remove from our shelf (Heidegger is arguably the most significant philosopher of the twentieth century), but is nevertheless unsatisfying to me. I would rather like to think it possible to:

d) confront these statements regardless of the discomfort in creates us. We may ultimately disagree with them--which may lead us back to (b) or (c). But I think it's telling how often the problem we have with a text (returning to my first question) is its disagreement with liberalism's fundamental assumptions. What do you do with Plato's inegalitarianism when it's central to his worldview--i.e., that equality is simply incompatible with human excellence? You can't embrace it, you can't ignore it, you can't dismiss it, and you can't glide past it (particularly if Plato is your favorite philosopher). Perhaps, just perhaps, you can learn something from it.

So what does all of this have to do with classical Islamic scholarship? I haven't thought this through past the connections that are immediately evident. At the risk of saying something highly offensive or problematic, let me nonetheless share the following provisional thoughts. As was pointed out by others on the discussion list, it's not enough to say that Shaykh X is one of the most respected and beloved figures in our tradition (which he may well be, but this doesn't make him immune from criticism). If I want to take his normative claims seriously, simply attributing them to his specific time and culture seems like another cop-out.

By the same token, however, I can't possibly reject every pejorative statement in a tradition that extends well beyond liberalism's presuppositions. Taking offense is necessarily a subjective matter, and to take someone's normative claims seriously also requires me to scrutinize my own reactions. (Why must everything be reduced to freedom and equality?)

Again, I don't know where this ultimately takes us, but it does indicate the nub of the problem.

(I'm reminded here of the pastor (one of Eddie Murphy's many characters) in Coming to America: "I love the Lord! I love the Lord! And if lovin' the Lord is wrong, I don't wanna be right!")

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Outline of "Bombing Without Moonlight"

This is a summary and outline of "Bombing Without Moonlight", an Oct 2004 article by Sidi Abdal-Hakim Murad (TJ Winter) on the theoretical backdrop of suicidal terrorism. Since it has come up in several conversations, I'm going to give it a shot. Dense material, but worth unpacking. Once I've outlined its main points, I want to proceed to some questions and comments (in a separate post).

(Incidentally, the article's first section on Amnesia dovetails nicely with AR Vrungeli's "Numbed by News" post.)

The full article can be viewed at masud.co.uk. Some comments on this article can be found on the Mind, Body, Soul blog, with a critique and response on the related blogs Stray Reflections and Noor e Madinah, respectively.

For the sake of simplicity, I am writing between the lines on several occasions here...


Summary

We live in the moment, and forget the lessons of the past. Contrary to popular impression, suicidal militancy neither begins in nor belongs to the Islamic tradition. As the logical extreme of contemporary Islamist politics, it is a thoroughly modern phenomenon and has a rich lineage in Western thought itself. By the same token, traditional religion provides a more effective antidote to this phenomenon than do the primary Western combatants in the 'war of ideas.' The first of these, neoconservative belligerence, is a veiled anti-Semitism (now directed against Muslims) that shares the dualistic worldview of Islamism. The second of these, (post)modern liberalism, cannot offer a code of ethics that categorically rejects suicidal militancy. Since it has no defense for why human beings are ends in themselves, the ethical is suspended when push comes to shove, and human beings become soft targets in the game of war. The theoretical backdrop of suicidal militancy is therefore a quarrel between the Enlightenment (represented by liberals) and its stepchildren (conservatives and Islamists). The only way out of this mess is an appropriately pluralist, tolerant and intellectual form of traditional religion.


I. Amnesia

1. We live in an era of "occasionalism", where the demands of the present crowd out the past (and thereby the continuity of tradition). This is "cemented" (caused? accompanied? exacerbated?) by trends in philosophy (postmodernism), economics (late capitalism), popular culture (Hollywood) and science (physics and neurology). In different ways, all of these trends erode human identity and dignity.

2. Journalism is the dominant form of discourse in such a culture, and it distorts the popular view of religion. The soundbytes that make it through are either the news of the moment, scriptural excerpts shorn of context, or the ways in which religion conflicts with modern (secular) beliefs.

3. In this "frankly primitive condition," one might think that history has come to an end--i.e., that we have consensus or closure on the fundamental questions that used to generate conflict. The (violent) resurgence of religion therefore comes as a surprise.

4. Suicidal militancy is nevertheless disconnected from religious tradition, and is in fact thoroughly (post?)modern. Fundamentalists (whether Muslim or their Christian critics) represent a reaction to the postmodern crisis of identity, but are as much a product of their environment.

II. Sunna Contra Gentiles
(a play on St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles)

1. Insofar as identity construction requires an Other, we are falling back into the anti-Semitism that has traditionally defined the Christian view of Judaism. In Western eyes, Muslims are the new Jews.

2. Protagonists on both sides have adopted a dualistic worldview in which you are with us or against us. This colors politics, theology, intra- and interfaith relations. In the Muslim case, it applies to both the politics of those inspired by Syed Qutb and the religion of those inspired by Ibn Taymiyyah.

3. Islamists recognize that the autocratic Muslim regimes they oppose are thoroughly modern, secular client states of an American hegemon. (What they don't recognize is that) they themselves are modern too. They are not rooted in the Islamic tradition, and view it "as so much deadwood." Western-educated and modern in their outlook, they take both their spiritual and material "armament" from modernity. They seek to replace one hegemony with another.

4. We cannot respond to Islamism through violent reprisals by the West, but rather a counter-reformation from traditional Islam. Sunni Islam has classically adopted a cosmopolitan stance towards differences within and outside the faith. Following this line, classically trained ulama have been more conciliatory toward colonial rule, and "insurrectionism" has been the exception rather than the rule.

III. Jus in Bello
(international legal term for rules of war; literally, "just in war")

1. The West is insufficiently equipped to win the war of ideas. Neither missionary zeal nor secular liberalism can remake the Islamists.

2. There is greater historical evidence in the Christian tradition than in the Islamic one for validating soft targets in conflict. The modern record includes Britain's 'terror bombing' of German cities to sap civilian morale in WWII and America's nuclear farewell to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

3. Secular liberalism suspends ethics in times of necessity. The English were unrepentant in targeting civilians, and the opposition from the Church was negligible (contrary to just war theory).

IV. Samson Terroristes
(a play on John Milton's "Samson Agonistes")

1. Nor are the origins of suicidal militancy very recent. Arab suicide bombers have Hindu, Buddhist and Shinto antecedents, whether or not Muslims acknowledge this lineage. The Western lineage is at least as colorful, and extends from pagan antiquity through early Jewish and Christian thought: Achilles, Ajax and Marcus Aurelius; Saul, Jonah, Job, Razis and, of course, Samson; the tradition of Christian martyrdom beginning with Jesus himself.

2. In contrast to Islam, where suicidal militancy is explicitly condemned by the tradition, this has been a "recurrent possibility of Europe's heritage." The glorification of suicide into modern times can be tracked by the representation of Samson as the archetypal suicide-hero--in Augustine, Aquinas, Milton, Wagner, Handel, the French composer Saint-Saens and the Zionist novelist Jabotinsky. In times of crisis, conventional restrictions are suspended and suicidal militancy enters stage right.

3. The contemporary Muslim penchant for conspiracy theories also has Western roots. This kind of thinking is "historically unusual for Muslims" and contrary to Islamic teachings. Indeed, Islam should make the calamities of this world appear small; it is almost giving Jews too much credit to blame everything on a Zionist conspiracy.

4. Impoverished of monotheism, secular politics succumb to instrumental reasoning, to the justification of unsavory means by utilitarian ends. The rage of Islamists betrays their resemblance to Nietzsche, Marx and company, insofar as they suspend ethical considerations in moments of crisis. Theists recognize, however, that the ethical is "needed most when most under strain."

5. The political ideology and totalitarian ambitions of Islamists (e.g., Qutb and Mawdudi) are inspired by Western secular politics. They seek to collapse the productive tension between political and religious authority that was the heart of medieval Sunni politics. The resurgence of Islam that they represent is in fact an extension of the modern attack on (traditional) religion.

6. The failure of such an Islamism can be taken as a divine sign that it is a perversion of Islamic ideals.

V. Dies Irae (misnumbered VI. in the paper)
(Latin hymn; literally, "the day of wrath")

1. The uncertainty of Islamism's future can be compared to that of (Foucauldian) postmodernism. On the one hand, we might expect the zealotry of Islamic extremism to run its course and deflate from internal dissension. On the other, Islamism's "porosity" to (susceptibility to? sustenance by? correlation with?) Enlightenment thought gives it a continuing appeal as long as the worst ills of modernity are apparent to its critics.

2. In the latter case, successful opposition will require no less than a restoration (reconstruction?) of traditional religion (in a form that is pluralistic, earth- and Other-friendly) that returns accountability and moral dignity to human beings. Indeed, self-judgment (i.e., a transcendent standpoint by which we can assess the moral permissibility of our actions) is the "greatest and most irreplaceable gift of the Abrahamic religions."

3. (Returning to the opening theme of human identity), the philosophical debates surrounding genetic engineering remind us that liberalism has no solid notion of human self. The Kantian (=liberal) notion of the self is only coherent because it is a carry-over from the Christian concept of the soul (why else are we to be treated as moral beings in a way that nonhuman animals are not?). Jurgen Habermas (arguably the most significant Enlightenment thinker today and a successor of Kant) accepts this paternity but is nevertheless willing to extend liberal ethics into an age without religion.

4. John Gray (author of Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern) takes the more pessimistic view that the possibility of a universal code of ethics 'died with God'. He follows Schopenhauer (a critic of the Enlightenment) in this regard, who showed the emptiness of Kant's position and stripped us of the illusion that human life is any more meaningful than animal life. But this takes us down the slippery slope that Martin Heidegger (Nazi philosopher) has already slipped on: in the face of spiritual alienation, we turn to the tribe. This confluence of science and (tribal) spirit leads to fascism.

5. As the points above suggest, the liberalism of the Enlightenment is a failed project. In opposing it, however, Islamism is vulnerable to the trajectory that Heidegger and the Nazis took. So are its most vehement critics--as can be seen by the rise of the far right across Europe. The most dangerous possibility ahead of us is a quarrel between these two stepchildren of the Enlightenment.

6. We need some other way out. (Post)modern liberalism is not equipped to combat suicidal militancy. Acknowledging liberalism's debt to monotheism, we must restore (reconstruct?) traditional religion as the true antidote to the worst ills of our times. Only a vamped up tradition--pluralist, tolerant, and accountable before God--can save us from ourselves.

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