Niyya, Islamic Higher Education
and the Moral Economy
William R. Darrow
Cluett Professor of Religion, Williams
College, USA
Fulbright Senior Scholar IAIN-Sumatera Utara
Abstract
Hasan Hanafi,
di antara banyak lainnya, telah meyakinkan dengan
menunjukkan
sumber-sumber Islam dan model untuk pembentukan masyarakat sipil yang tidak
mengikuti model sekuler atau melihat aplikasi syariah yang kaku sebagai
kamuflase untuk patriarki dan kediktatoran. Didirikan pada ketegangan yang
produktif antara kekuasaan negara dan otoritas ulama 'dan lembaga-lembaga yang
menavigasi bahwa ketegangan, seperti hisbah,
diwan al-mazalim dan awqaf, Hanafi membayangkan sebuah masyarakat
sipil Islam yang diberi energi oleh kekuatan Tauhid untuk membentuk suatu umat
yang bersatu, yang
bebas dan setara, bertanggung jawab untuk satu sama lain dan juga
menerima warga non-muslim. Dalam membayangkan individu yang bebas, ia
menegaskan bahwa Islam memiliki kapasitas untuk menciptakan kepribadian manusia
yang juga satu, satu kesatuan dunia dalam perasaan dan pemikiran dengan dunia
luar untuk berkata dan bertindak. Dalam
meningkatkan saran ini sangat menarik, Hanafi memberikan kontribusi yang lebih
luas untuk teorisasi warga negara, sebuah konsep yang dalam beberapa hal
mendasar telah mendasari dalam masyarakat sipil berpikir lebih umum.
Oleh karena itu diskusi tentang bagaimana masyarakat sipil Islam dapat mendidik
anak dan mengolah atribut-atribut karakter yang menciptakan warga negara yang
bertanggungjawab.
Makalah ini akan
mempertimbangkan tiga topik untuk memajukan diskusi tentang kesatuan
kepribadian manusia, dilihat
dari sisi civil society, karakter warga negaranya. Pertama, melihat
pada karya Terry Eagleton baru-baru ini di mana ia menggambarkan catatan analisisa psikoanalitik Lacanian,
baik yang imajiner, simbolik ataupun nyata, untuk menguji pemikiran etika Barat
dan untuk meletakkan dasar untuk mengartikulasikan etika dan tanggung jawab sosial, kita akan membahas
kompleksitas yang lebih besar yang dapat berdiri di belakang gagasan Hanafi
tentang dunia batin dan sketsa bahwa dunia dalam diri kita masing-masing.
Dengan gagasan yang lebih rumit, kita kemudian akan memeriksa konsep niat, untuk
mengeksplorasi kapasitasnya dalam
menghubungkan dunia internal dan eksternal. Ada
dua
jenis niat, lahiriah dan
batiniah, yang menjadi jembatan penting untuk mengikat bersama dua dunia dan
untuk mengubah keduanya. Makalah ini kemudian akan menyimpulkan dengan sebuah
sketsa berbagai kebajikan, pribadi, intelektual, sosial dan kebajikan sipil
yang sebenarnya diperlukan untuk keberhasilan civil society dan peran apa yang bisa atau tidak bisa
dimainkan oleh pendidikan tinggi Islam untuk menumbuhkan kebajikan-kebajikan
tersebut.
Keywords:
Niyya, Islamic Higher Education, Moral Economy
Hasan Hanafi,
among many others, has convincingly demonstrated the Islamic sources and model
for the establishment of civil society that neither follows a secular model nor
sees a rigid application of sharī’a as camouflage for patriarchy and
dictatorship. Founded on a productive
tension between the powers of the state and the authority of the ‘ulama and the
institutions that navigate that tension between them such as hisba, divan al-mazalim
and awqaf, Hanafi envisions
an Islamic civil society that is energized by the power of tawhīd to establish a united ummah of
free and equal individuals, responsible
for one another and accommodating of its non-Muslim citizens as well.[1] Hanafi’s social institutional focus is
complemented by a discussion of the individual human being,
…naturally drawn toward social
solidarity. The importance of civil society derives from the need to balance the desires and needs of
the individual with the will and needs of society. Where civil society is present, an individual
is part of the body, joined to other members
to form an organic whole, as the medieval philosopher al-Farabi describes in
his virtuous city.[2]
In envisioning the free individual,
he insists that Islam has the capacity to create the human personality that is
also one, a unity of the inside world of desire and thinking with the external
world of saying and doing. In raising
this very interesting suggestion, Hanafi makes a wider contribution to
theorization of the citizen, aspects of which have in some fundamental ways
been under theorized concerning civil society thought more generally.[3] Therefore a discussion of how an Islamic
civil society can educate its young and cultivate those attributes of character
that create responsible citizens is most worthwhile. This discussion takes place however in three
contexts that may call into question Hanafi’s confident vision. The first is critique of the metaphor of
‘organism’ to conceptualize civil society and the way in which the state and
its agents can in fact undermine or co-opt civil society when so
conceptualized.[4] Envisioning civil society instead as a field
of contestation may provide a safer imaginative tool to prevent that co-option
of civil society by the state. But here we confront a second problem because
such an imaginative shift, usually involves an embrace of a cosmopolitanism
that has been under attack in recent decades from two opposing sides, those
entranced by various images of a unified and organic society, be it national,
racial or religious, and those for whom the uniformity and universalism of
‘globalizaton’ has made cosmopolitanism a vestigial idea.[5] I want to set these two issues aside and turn
instead to the implicit philosophical anthropology that Hanafi employs and
focus instead on the ‘needs and desires’ vision of the individual human being
that he predicates, deepening and elaborating it with the tools of
psychoanalysis and in conversation with the history of ethical thought in the
last three centuries.
This paper will consider three
topics to critique Hanafi’s vision of the unity of the human personality
envisioned within Islamic civil society, to underscore that the individual like
civil society is the site of contestation and that this has important
implications for the work of educating citizens in a civil society. My goal is in no way to critique or hinder
this process, but instead to make it better able to do its vital work. The three topics are; first, based on the recent work of Terry
Eagleton in which he draws upon the psychoanalytic registers of Lacanian
analysis, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, to examine the course of
Western ethical thought and to lay the groundwork for articulating and ethics
of social responsibility, we will examine the greater complexity that may stand
behind Hanafi’s notion of the inner world and to sketch that inside world of
each of us. With this more complicated
notion the self, we will then examine the Islamic concept of niyya,
intention, to explore its capacity to correlate the inside and external
worlds. The dual directionality of niyya,
outward and inward, makes it an essential bridge to tie together the two worlds
and to transform both and thus to educate the Muslim citizen. The paper will
then conclude with a some remarks concerning the approach to an ethical
education that follow. I am aware that
it is useful to distinguish here the range of virtues, personal, intellectual,
social and civic virtues that are in fact required for the success of civil
society and a fuller paper would explore that issue as well, but for this paper
I shall assume that and educational institution not only cultivates the
intellectual virtues, but also has a significant impact on the others as
well. The goal of this paper is to
prepare for a fuller discussion of what role higher Islamic learning can and
cannot play in cultivating those virtues.
I
Terry Eagleton’s Trouble with
Strangers: A Study of Ethics presents the history of Western ethical
thought from the Scottish Enlightenment to post modernism using the lens of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Transforming
the Freudian categories of the Ego, the Superego and the Id into fundamentally
linguistically Realms of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, Lacan
provided a view of the three Realms that constitute the self through their
competition and struggle with one another. While it is obviously impossible to
do justice to the complexity of this reading in these short pages, we may draw
from it a lens to view the way ethical thought has evolved in Europe in the
last three centuries and take the lesson that ethical thought evolves to address
the evolving needs of the individual and society.
Eagleton’s account begins with the
figures of the Scottish enlightenment and their focus on moral sentiments. That movement predicated benevolence as the
dominant moral sentiment, with some trepidation to be sure about its
genuineness, but as central to its vision of the moral character of care, pity,
and fellow-feeling that should dominate the individual members of society in
their relation to one another. That
humans do care for one another, feel pity for the less fortunate, and are capable of imagining themselves in
the position of those others and therefore act to alleviate suffering are all
sources for the hoped for dominant moral sentiment of benevolence. In Eagleton’s reading adds is that this
notion emerged because there was not yet a full separation of the self from the
world. Invoking Lacan’s notion of the
mirror stage, what he sees operating here is the fact that a complete border
enclosing the self has not yet been built, there is not yet a full distinction
between the inside and outside of the self that makes it possible for us to
project ourselves so directly into another person’s interior body and imagine
the ways in which we, through empathy, might experience the same inner state so
that “the inside seems inscribed on the outside.”[6] This led to the cult of sensibility that
dominated the eighteenth century and the thought of its major figures, Francis
Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, who as Irish or Scots were
all significantly on the periphery of British society. Their Imaginary of a
community in opposition to a society was certainly informed by their position
on the edge of British society, and one tragedy of their work is the way in
which their confidence in benevolence
was usurped by the incipient colonial project of the United Kingdom that was
already underway to which this philosophy lent unwittingly and ironically a
philosophical justification.
It was not, however, colonialism
that gave too much pause to these thinkers, rather it was the haunting concern
that maybe the virtue of benevolence was nothing but a disguised form of
egoism. Because, in Lacan’s terms, the
ego was not fully formed, there were problems that Eagleton suggests might be
best understood as threats to the emerging ego.
The two most telling ones were the twin moves of expansion and
contraction of the ego, expansion as one imagines the rest of the world as
oneself and contraction as the ego disappears into the other it imagines itself
to be. In the end this sentiment became
increasingly privatized into a cult of feeling, a private sphere of home and
family, but increasingly complicit in public processes of
industrialization. Eagleton concludes
that
It is no accident that the cult of
sentiment reaches its apogee among the dark Satanic
mills of the Victorians. The trek from
the generous hearted Brownlow in Oliver
Twist to the dandyish Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is one from an impassioned apologia
for feeling to a disenchanted sense that it can be part of the problem quite as much
as the solution.[7]
The move from the Imaginary to the
Symbolic is the move to the ‘open field of intersubjectivity’[8]
that is only possible after the borders of the self has firmly enclosed the
sphere of the ego. Here the operation of
empathy and sentiment are left behind.
For Lacan this is the Realm of the Name of the Father, the Law,
experienced by the self as a world of abstraction and alienation created above
all by language into which we are now forced to operate. Beyond the narcissism and infantile fantasies
of the Imaginary, it is the Realm Realism and regulation that the self
experiences as at once Other and supremely dominant over the Self.
Spinoza and Kant are the twin
representatives of this stage, each, of course, arising also in the context of
fundamentally new directions in religious thought and in the face of an
increasingly dominant rationality and consequent disenchantment of the world
and critique of traditional theological metaphysics. It is important to remind ourselves that the
rationality of the nineteenth century begins with its own circumscription. Only God is capable of pure knowledge and our
tools of rationality, vital and central as they are, are always shadowed by an
incompleteness that only God, or the Thing Itself can overcome. For Spinoza rationality rather than emotion
is however the key to self-cultivation, the essential ethical work of
constructing ourselves as individuals and cultivating true wisdom and
virtue. For Spinoza it as primarily the
virtues of self denial and ascetic simplicity attained by the re-education of
the flesh by the discipline of philosophy that is the basis for ethics. As Eagleton points out Spinoza’s is a
democratic program aimed not only at an elite, but at all human beings who by
this virtuous education will require less overt discipline and repression to
make them submit to their superiors.[9]
Kantian ethics are the supreme
example of this moment in Western thought.
His rationalist approach to ethics does not reject emotion and feelings
in the way Spinoza did because above all we can feel delight in the performance
of our moral duty and happiness as the reward for virtuous action, in the next
world if not this one. The articulation
of that duty is, however, the work of philosophy because moral principles
cannot be founded on “sensations, emotions or the pursuit of well-being.”[10] It is as duty, opposed to our inclinations or
our happiness, that we perceive our moral obligations and we recognize and
judge it by the operation of a universal law. For Kant, moral judgments like
aesthetic ones are both irreducibly specific and at the same time abstractly
universal. Eagleton argues
Moral value, for Kant as much as for
Spinoza, springs not from contemplating each other in Imaginary terms, peering at others from within the heated
interior of one’s own subjectivity. It depends rather upon regarding oneself from
the outside, from the dispassionate
vantage-point of the moral law itself—which is to say, regarding oneself as a universal subject, and thus treating
oneself as one treats all others. For
Kant, there is no hard-and-fast
distinction between aliens and intimates.
If I deal with others as though they
were myself, I also relate to myself as kind of stranger. Ethically speaking, we are most authentically ourselves when we
behave as though we were anybody or everybody.[11]
It is important to stress that the
three Lacanian registers over lap and interpenetrate one another and the notion
of a progressive movement from one to the other is deceptive. Nevertheless it
is the insight of Eagleton to see that poststructuralist and postmodernist
responses to the legacy of Western philosophy, especially in its supreme
formulations in Spinoza and Kant, represents the triumph of the Real over the
Symbolic as earlier the Symbolic triumphed over the Imaginary. For Lacan the Real is what resisted being
symbolized, universalized in the Symbolic register, a surplus or excess that
rumbles with sheer meaninglessness beneath our articulate speech. It is both a redemptive and destructive
Realm, whose primary feature Lacan named jouissance, pleasure; it is the operation of desire. This desire is in contrast with the good and
is for Lacan the only ethical universal.[12]
As Eagleton correctly points out
there is a parallel between Lacanian stages and Kierkegaard’s three stages of
life, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. While the fit is not perfect, this parallel
allows us to focus specifically on the tension of ethics and religion that is
at the heart of Kierkegaard’s meditation on Abraham, Fear and Trembling. Meditating on Kant’s distinction of duty and
happiness in a profoundly innovative manner, Kierkegaard presents the ethical
dilemma of the Absolute’s command to Abraham to kill his son in all its paradox
and terror. Happiness lies in a father’s
love for his son, duty lies in absolute obedience toward God’s command. Abraham
lives the tensions between happiness and duty,
but with the added feature that he must violate the most basic of
ethical commandments, not to kill, so that he will become in our eyes a
murderer. At the same time, however,
Abraham is willing to become the monster he will become in and after the act of
killing his son, he also is confident that he will not have to do it by virtue
of the absurd. This moves him beyond the
ethical Realm, with its universal operations, into the Realm of the religious
and makes him a man of faith. To
emphasize again to be religious is to reject the ethical in the individual
project of our lives and to live fully desiring that which is impossible
In so far as the ethical concerns
the public, universal and communitarian, the Protestant individualist Kierkegaard can find little in it worth salvaging.
As such, it is no more than collective
false consciousness. Yet in so far as it
signifies a preoccupation with inwardness,
it alludes in some obscure manner to the religious faith which transcends
it. Such
faith shatters the symmetries of the ethical, subverts the complacently
autonomous self, and represents a
scandal to all civic virtue. Its intense individual inwardness rebuffs the social and turns its back contemptuously
on mass civilization.[13]
It is, again, the embrace of a
desire that is both infinite and impossible that Abraham operates that
characterizes the post modern critique of ethics. In Lacan this is the operation of the Real,
operating with its combination of horror and pleasure that both repels and
compels.
Abraham refuses to give up on his
desire for the impossible—for a God whose commands
are at one with the decrees of the Symbolic order—in the unthinkable paradox known as ‘faith’, and it is because he
clings so tenaciously to the impossible that it comes to pass, as God stays his hand and saves his son. His acceptance
of the apparent fruitfulness of
his deed is what finally brings him through.[14]
However, it is also a central fact
for Kierkegaard’s mediation that Abraham cannot speak of what he is doing. Because to speak is to involve oneself in
language, the Realm of the universal and to declare himself a murderer. The Abraham of the Hebrew scriptures remains
silent for the three days of the journey with his son, except to answer the
son’s question of where the sacrificial offering is with an answer that is no
answer, a paradoxical statement, that “God will provide.” It is of profound
significance for me that the Qur’an’s account of this event is structured
differently in two important ways. In
the Qur’an the father does speak to tell him what he has seen in a dream, of
what will now have to happen and the son also speaks and comforts his father
and tells him that he submits to the commandment.
We shall return to this issue of
speech in the next section to reflect on the ethical dimensions of niyya.
In the end four aspects of the idea
of ethics have come to be under critique in postmodernist thought. The first is the notion of universal law and
the operation of universal rationality to apply that law. Living morally is not the work of application
of rules and the exemplification of virtues.
Second, the notion of duty and concomitant notions of discipline and
self denial as the heart of ethical action have been criticized as far too
impoverished a view of acting ethically. Third, the fundamental Realities of
the political and economic spheres in which actual ethical decisions are made. In many ways this whole analysis has been a
treatment of the idea of ‘interest’ and the recognition that the assumption
that ethical choices must be characterized by disinterestedness is both
psychologically and politically false.
Finally, in rather different forms among the prominent postmodernists,
it is the demand of the Other, both as stranger and neighbor, or be more
precise, in the collapse of that dyad that the ethical arises or may end. In
this context we face the dilemma of what might be an ethical education in the
face of these developments. The
liberation from the oppressiveness of the burden of the law, the imposition of
duty and our movement in a world of strangers all mean that it is not clear
what can or should be taught ethically.
We have explored here three related
questions of relevance for articulating a vision of the self and the
problematic in training that self morally and ethically. We have recognized that the problem of
establishing a discrete self, autonomous and separate from the world is the
first task both in the development of the child and in the development of a
notion of an ethic predicated upon a relation of selves in an intersubjective
world. Without restrained and bounded
selves there is no secure public space in which to move. Second, we have recognized the problems
inherent in conceptualizing the work of ethical reflection and the contested
places of rationality, emotion, duty, and rules. Finally, we have recognized the turbulent sea
that is the internal self, illumined by psychoanalysis, but at the same time I
would wager experienced by each of us as we explore our desires over the course
of our lives. It would be the height of
foolishness to assume that the mission of ethical training must simply be the
suppression or repression of desires because that is first impossible and
second it is clear that the harnessing of desire in fact energizes and gives
life to our activities in the world and in our actions in the intersubjective
public space. To quote Eagleton a final
time
The Symbolic may indeed be too thin
an atmosphere in which ethics can flourish.
But this is not to say that
law, politics, rights, the state and human welfare should be loftily distained as so much inevitable but soul
killing technology. Only those who are privileged enough not to require their
protection can view law and authority as inherently malign. The Symbolic order is most effective when it has
its roots in the body—in palpable
human needs and wants, rather than in abstractions.[15]
II
Given this background, we turn now
to a brief consideration to the notion of intention in Islam. Islam’s
development of the notion of niyya, gives us tools to conceptualize a
doctrine of the person that deserves more exploration. Parallel to the Jewish concept of kawwānā,
and possibly influenced by it, niyya developed in the early Islamic
centuries as the necessary precondition for the validity for acts of worship (ibādāt).
Without it an act of worship was invalid (bāṭil). As the famous hadith in Bukharī makes
clear (innama ‘l-‘amāl bi ‘l-niyya) the range of intention might extend
to all acts, but it is primarily in acts of worship that the notion has been
most fully developed. It is the
consensus of the jurists that niyya is required for the validity of ṣalāh, but there are otherwise debates
about several important issues. What is agreed is that it has four conditions,
the one who pronounces it must be Muslim, of sound mind, acquainted with the
act he wants to perform and have the purpose of performing it, i.e. be sincere.
The most important feature of the idea is that it establishes that there is a
moral or religious criterion superior to that of the law, of the external
performance of a ritually obligatory act. [16] It is the criterion for the rewards of the
believer, it and jihād are the only two actions available to Muslim
since after the recapture of Mecca, since hijra is no longer an option.
In several cases intention alone becomes a work of its own. Good intention is taken into account, even if
it is not carried out and the intention to avoid an evil act is reckoned a good
work. We note here that the notion of
intention and action do meld together in a way that still satisfies the needs
of the Imaginary. There are four features of the classical discussion of niyya
that strike me as relevant for the construction of an Islamic view of the
personality in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The first is the predication of the
division between the inside and the outside.
We have clearly moved beyond the potential fantastic expansion of the
ego typical of the mirror stage of the Imaginary into a firm notion of a
bounded self. The division might be read
as the difference between thought and action, but I think the division of
inside and outside has equally importantly the notion that the boundary of the
self has been established and that it is necessary to bring into conformity the
inside and the outside. In this we are
certainly talking about the central virtue of sincerity (ikhlās). If
there are features of the idea that blur the boundary of the self to satisfy
the needs of the Imaginary, there is also the strong assertion of the Symbolic
and the establishment of the constrained self.
The second interesting feature is
the debate among the jurists about niyya being a necessary condition for
wuḍū’, since it is argued that wuḍū’ has a rational or functional
character that might explain its reason and in that it contrasts with rituals
like ṣalāh, which are done solely for the pleasure of Allah. Rationality or functionality in short is in
some tension with niyya and where it is possible to explain an action in
terms of its rationality or usefulness niyya may not strictly speaking
be necessary. This tension remains unresolved in fiqh[17]
The other disagreement among the
jurists is whether there is a difference between ordinary and supererogatory
acts of worship. Those acts, above all
the fast of Ramadan, because of its long duration and its universal
participation and therefore the timing and expiration of niyya is
debated. The question of temporal scope
adds a diachronic issue to the understanding of niyya and leads to the
way in which the rhythm of time impinges on the individual.[18] These two controversies underline several
important points relative to our understanding of the self: a tension between
practical rationality and the excess of adoration of the divine, the
recognition that each person is situated in a larger social and temporal
context that impinges on his/her freedom of action and finally, the ways in
which the operation of the Symbolic order are always considerably more
complicated and less clear than some who would claim the Reality of moral
absolutism might acknowledge.
Finally, I note the niyya
must be spoken. If the paradigmatic
moment of the Real is either the unspoken demand of the other or the incapacity
of a person in the midst of a horrendous moral dilemma to speak, here it is
primarily speech that is confirmed as the necessary bridge between inner and
outer, between the Symbolic and the Real.
Lacan might argue that the operation of language here means that we are
still fully in the Symbolic, but I would argue that the genius of the Islamic
conceptualization allows language both to be set free and also to be tamed and
made into a tool that provides a human being with the most necessary tool both
to reconcile conflicting desires within him/herself and more importantly
receive a revelation from the Absolute.
It is, of course, in tassawuf
that the fullest development of the split between interior bātin and
exterior zāhir has been most fully developed. But there are three features of development,
while spiritual very rich make it less useful for the task I am proposing here
for the construction of an Islamic ethical analysis. First, the interior is fundamentally
privileged as the site of authenticity and sincerity, while the exterior is
dismissed and often deliberately scorned or ridiculed. Second, the exterior is still part of the
person, rather than a way to conceptualize the intersubjective world. It could in fact be perhaps too negatively
argued that there is much about the Sufi tradition that remains at the
Imaginary level, to be sure to criticize the Symbolic, but not lay the
groundwork for structuring civic life.
Finally, and of course related, Sufism predicates a spiritual elite and
leaves the remaining less cultivated people at the level of the common.
The development of niyya
outside of the area of religious acts (‘ibādāt) is not as fully
developed, but does allow us to view the issue in the larger context of other
activities. Here I think interesting work might be done to enrich the
usefulness of the concept. Hanbali and Maliki schools do extent the basic
principle contained in Bukhari’s first hadith to mu’āmalāt as well. However, there are limits to this as Saleh
has recently demonstrated. Neither
breach of contract nor abuse of rights require the judge to look at the
intention of the perpetrator, only the objective facts of their action are
necessary to make a judgment about wrongdoing.
Here we have the insistence that in a number of areas it is only the
public face that need be addressed juridically.
However, in the establishment of contracts niyya is relevant in
two important ways. First Hanbali law allows
the judge to inquire after the cause of a contract when its intention is not
clearly stated. Second, the permission to consider intention prevents the
Hanbali school from condoning legal strategems, (hiyal) which may
themselves be legal, but result in an unlawful object.[19] The tension that we saw between the public
face and the private intent is in this limited context at least maintained and
perhaps more importantly it is in recognition of the intersubjective character
of contract where the notion of niyya is still productive. To use the notion to develop further an
Islamic anthropology that attends to ties of the interior and the exterior, we
will also need to attend to these developments as well.
III
This too brief consideration of the
construction of the human personality and how the Islamic notion of niyya
has resources for addressing this more complicated vision of the human person
now has placed us in a position to examine some aspects of the ethics of
citizenship in the Islamic context and also the question of the education of
the citizen through Islamic education. I
have deliberately chosen to focus on the notion of citizen because the concept
has been seen by many as in tension with a Muslim identity. Andrew March has
recently surveyed the issue in examining the question of the Muslim’s loyalty
to a non-Muslim state.[20] His focus is on Muslim minority populations
in Europe and the U.S., but his findings can be expanded to the situation of
Muslim majority nations as well. My
argument is predicated on the basic idea that dwelling within the
intersubjective realm is what one of the things we mean by ‘civil
society.’ If the state can best be seen
as the most important instantiation of the Symbolic order, then ‘civil society’
stands over and against it as the site of the Real. It should be clear that the notion of
‘citizen’ as the name for the subject in these two realms does not strain the
dual references of the term as subject of a state and actor in pursuit of
his/her interests in the realm of ‘civil society.’
March argues that there are three
traditional sources in Islamic lawthat permit a Muslim to be citizen in a
non-Muslim context. The first are
‘statutory/deontological’ principles of the Qur’an and Sunnah requiring the
moral recognition of non-Muslims and the general attitude of treating all
persons (including non-Muslims) with justice and equity (‘adāla, qisṭ). The second tradition is the ‘contractual’ and
the example of making contracts above all guarantees of security (amān)
with non-Muslims. Third is the ‘consequentialist-utilitarian’ discourse of
Islamic law, which March characterizes as pragmatic, aimed at increasing the
welfare of the Islamic community as a whole. To these three traditional
discussions March adds a fourth more recent trend he calls
“comprehensive-qualitative” mode of ‘theorizing and theologizing the rights and
welfare of others.’ He draws
specifically on Fayṣal Malawī and recognizes the crucial role of da’wa, not
as formal conversion but as witnessing plays.
This modes, thus goes beyond
considerations of the permissible and the forbidden into the realm of what relationships
Muslims might voluntarily choose for themselves noninstrumentally. I
suggest that the evidence for this mode of theorizing moral relationships with non-Muslim societies is in
greatest evidence in some instances of the copious
references to the centrality of the Islamic mission (da’wa) to life in
non-Muslim societies, as well
as the discussions on the goodness in contributing to non-Muslim welfare because “Islam seeks to bring
benefit and improvement to all people and all races,”
based on the belief that “God has blessed and honored all the sons of Adam.[21]
Da’wa provides Muslim scholars the tools to imagine
two distinct kinds of relationship with non-Muslims; a relationship of moral
argument and a relationship of civic friendship, which Malawī calls in fact ‘āṭifa,
attachment, sympathy and affection. If da’wa legitimates Muslim
citizenship in non-Muslim society, can we not also argue that it should be the
spirit that constructs the intersubjective realm of ‘civil society’ in Muslim
majority countries, where the work of da’wa also must go on. We stress that the same notions of
volunteerism and noninstrumentality should apply in this case as well and the
explicit notion of care for others and increasing the welfare of others make
this the realm in which the Symbolic and the Real blend together.
So much then for a construction of
‘civil society,’ how must its citizens be educated? Let me conclude with three brief suggestions
that would require considerable elaboration, if there were space. I return first to the fundamentally political
character of morality. The ideal of duty
and the privileging of disinterestedness are both distractions. The claims of universalism and the insistence
on rules serve in fact to as primarily strategies of legitimation for existing
powers. It must be the work of education to delegitimize and disenchant the
negative consequences of this process. Pierre Bourdieu has articulated the
process elegantly.
But the disenchantment that
sociological analysis of the interest in disinterestedness may produce does not inevitably lead to a morality
of pure intentions. Watchful only of usurpations of universality, this morality
ignores the fact that the interest in, and the profit of the universal are indisputably the most secure vehicle of
progress toward the universal itself.[22]
He
urges a close attention to the idea of hypocrisy and a practice of deep
suspicion toward public moral claims and
specifically the appeals to universalism and rationality that often disguises
the Real desire behind them. He
concludes
In short, morality has no chance of
entering politics unless one works toward creating institutional means for a politics of morality. The official truth of the official, the cult
of public service and of devotion
to the common good, cannot resist the critique of suspicion that will endlessly uncover corruption, clientelism,
ambitiousness, and at best a private
interest in serving a public purpose. … This work of uncovering,
disenchantment, or
demystification, is anything but disenchanting. On the contrary, it can only be
accomplished in the name of
the same values of civil virtue (equality, fraternity, and especially disinterestedness and
sincerity) with which the unveiled reality is at variance.[23]
An
approach not of inculcation, but a development of critical skills of
investigation and disclosure must be first the skills we give our
students. I suspect that in fact they
already have them. Recognizing
hypocrisy, being suspicious of universalist moral claims, recognition of
interests and profits in the appearance of disinterestedness I think come
naturally to all. What we must do as
educators is nurture and validate those, explore their sources and implications
and use those moments of disenchantment not to develop an attitude of nihilism
or relativism, but instead to cultivate a more profound and developed moral
sense.
My
second suggestion focuses on training our students to understand the workings
of institutions and the operation of power.
The context of this is first of all within the economic sphere and the
hegemony of global capitalism.
Understanding the operation of power in the realms of the economy, the
nation-state, and society requires much work.
The extremist rejection of this work and construction of an ideal of the
ummah free from and resisting these trends is completely understandably,
but as the psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama has argued
One of the causes of Islamist
extremism is the catastrophic collapse of language: language was no longer able to translate for people a particularly
intense historical experience, that of
the modern era, which entails not only the scientific and industrial transformations of the world but also
the conjunction between this furious power of transformation
and the desire to an other. Yet
“Islamist” extremism is driven by and impulse
and this impulse is simply the inverse of the desire to be an other: “the
despair that wills to be Itself,”
as Kierkegaard expressed it. What is
this Self? Its identity is defined by
its origin, and its origin is bound by a framework of unique features: one religion (Islam), on language (Arabic), and
one text (the Koran), to which is often added the
national anthem here and there. The
modern era replaced the desire to be an other with
the despair that wills to be itself, enclosing us in a confrontation each of
whose terms represents the
impossible.[24]
The
construction of an originary plenitude that characterized the early ummah
is for Benslama to create a ‘torment of origin’ a never to be satisfied return
to the plenitude that once was and obviously an escape from a more judicious
confrontation and critique of the modern and understanding of the material and
immaterial forces of power that construct our world. It establishes an attitude to the
institutions of the community that leave them unexamined. The ideal of the
Medinian community still rightly has a compelling pull on Muslim, but as
Charles Tripp has pointed out
The imaginative
construction of society began by way of analogy with the faith-based community
of the ummah. Gradually, however,
in light of both the vocabulary and the metaphors
of positivist sociology, as well as of the social transformations experienced
by Muslims, it came to represent
something different, both more universal in scope and more mechanical in conception. … The very language and
analytic tools upon which they drew
were implicitly comparative in nature, laying heavy emphasis on the
universality of the underlying
functions of any human social organization.
The gaze of Muslim intellectuals
was thus to a large degree directed towards the observation of that which the functionalist model assumed must be
there. It was scarcely surprising,
therefore, that these functions were
found, but to ensure that the character of the society remained one which was inalienably Islamic, it
was necessary to recast the terms of reference in language redolent of Islam.[25]
In Benslama’s terms there are three
institutional arenas where the deeply modern desire to be an other has
operated: education, family law, and
economics (most specifically banking). The emergence first of new educational
forms, not simply in response to modernity but in a much more complicated
relation to the material forces impinging on the Islamic world is highly
significant. Here I think of Indonesia’s
development of Islamic educational institutions at the primary, secondary and
higher level is a wonderful site to examine. We must train our students to understand this sites with a critical eye,
both historically and sociologically. This is especially called for since it is
the worlds of education, shari’a courts and Islamic banking that so many of our
students will occupy. Our task must not
simply to prepare functional workers for each of these institutions, though
that is part of the work that must be done, but also give to our students the
critical skills to operate in these worlds, recognizing the ethical dilemmas
and tradeoffs that each will present and through case studies in ethical
dilemmas give students an insight into the choices and decisions they will
confront.
Finally, I return to that centrality
of the intersubjective world that I have described as ‘civil society’. That may be a useful way of viewing it, but I
would be remiss if I left it there since the most important feature of this
world is that it is where we confront others, both a neighbors and as
strangers. The discussion of civil
society in non-Muslim majority countries we engaged in above may have disguised
this, so in conclusion I return to the dyad of stranger/neighbor to emphasize
that the interaction with others, in the fully political context of civil
society is where the ethical must operate.
To quote Eagleton two more times
The ethical is a matter of how we
may live with each other most rewardingly, while the political is a question of what institutions will best promote
this end. The ends of political association, Aristotle
remarks in the Politics, are “life and the good life.” If you see
ethics and politics as separate sphers, or feel the need to retrieve the former
from the grubby clutches of the latter,
you are likely to end up denigrating the political and idealizing the ethical.
In a politically disenchanted age, the ethical is forced to abandon the polis, and take up its home
elsewhere: in art, faith transcendence, the Other, the event, the infinite, the decision or the Real.[26]
Symbolic relationships are ones
mediated by law, politics and language; and these- Lacan’s Other-are always as much media of division as of
solidarity. Such relations can easily lapse into mere utility or
contractualism. Yet in giving priority
to our relations with strangers,
the Symbolic also reminds us that this, and not literal neighbours, is the paradigm of ethical conduct, including
our behavior towards literal neighbors.
It is not that strangers
are simply friends we have not yet made, but that friends are the alien creatures we happen to know. The definitive act of love is not a
comingling of souls but taking the
place of a stranger in the queue for the gas chamber. One can die for a friend, just as one can love a stranger; but to die
for a stranger is the ultimate ethical ‘event.’[27]
I have tried in this paper to
illustrate first the complexity of the history of ethical thought, the
contested roles of rationality, emotion, rule and decision, with some attention
to their historical contexts, but more importantly using the lens of Lacanian
psychoanalysis argue for the psychological appropriateness of these tensions in
the history of ethics. Then I turned to
the Islamic notion of niyya to see what resources it might have for the
construction of a complex notion of the self.
In this my interest was initially in the isolated individual, but we saw
even in that the ways in which the intersubjective world impinged on the
isolated individual making him or her fundamentally situated in a social and
temporal context that acted independently.
This was all done to make more complicated a notion of the self in the
Islamic context and use that as a way to open up the question of what
constitutes the public self that the notion of a Muslim citizen, either in a
Muslim majority or Muslim minority country.
That led in the end to an outline of three particular implications for
the work of educating Muslim citizens. I
emphasized three points. The focus
should not be on the inculcation of rules and the assertion of the existence of
either a confidence that there is a system of laws or at least there once
was. Rather the development of the
skills of disenchantment and criticism better equip our students for the civic,
business, and personal ethical dilemmas they will face. Second, I underlined that we need also to
provide the opportunity to critically examine the material forces that
constitute power in this world, both political and economic, and to understand
the specific Muslim institutional contexts that have emerged. Finally, in attempting to displace once more
the centrality of the individual as the object of analysis, I underlined the
social and multiple character of society and most specifically the presence of
Others with whom one either interacts or whose existence must at least be
acknowledge. The binary of
neighbor/stranger allows us to break any simple distinction between us and them
in thinking about this world and recognize the way our ethical responsibilities
to the other predicate a constant movement between the feeling of kinship and
suspicion, of friend and foe, in thinking about each of our relations to our
fellow human beings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hanafi. Hasan, “Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society: A
Reflective Islamic Approach” in Hashmi. Sohail H., ed., (2002). Islamic
Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Beiner. Ronald, ed. (1995). Theorizing
Citizenship. Albany: SUNY Press.
Carens. Joseph H (2000). Culture, citizenship, and community : a
contextual exploration of justice as evenhandedness. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Brown.
Wendy (2010). “The Sacred, the Secular and the Profane” in Michael Warner, et al., Varieties of
Secularism in a Secular Age.Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sami
Zubaida. “Cosmopolitan citizenship in the Middle East” accessed July 20, 2010
from Open Democracy http://www.opendemocracy.net/sami-zubaida/cosmopolitan-citizenship-in-middle-east
Eagleton.
Terry (2009)The Trouble with Strangers; A Study of Ethics. Chichester,
West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
“Nīyya”
in H.A.R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers (1961).
Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Ibn Rushd
(1994). Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqta’id, The Distinguished
Jurists Primer trs. Professor Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee. Reading, UK: Garnet
Publishing. I.1.2.1
Saleh.
Nabil (2009). “The Role of Intention (niyya) under Saudi Arabian Hanbali
Law” in Arab Law Quarterly 23.
March. Andrew F. (2009). Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The
Search for an Overlapping Consensus. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu.
Pierre (1998). Practical Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Benslama.
Fethi (2009). Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam. trs. by Robert
Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tripp.
Charles (2006). Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[1] Hasan
Hanafi, “Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society: A Reflective Islamic
Approach” in Sohail H. Hashmi, ed., Islamic
Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), h. 56-75
[3] Citizenship has of course been well
theorized in political theory, e.g. Ronald Beiner, ed. Theorizing
Citizenship (Albany: SUNY Press 1995) Joseph H. Carens, Culture, citizenship, and community : a
contextual exploration of justice as evenhandedness (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000). What I think is under theorized is the
psychological structure of the individual agent/citizen. My thanks to my colleague Neil Roberts for
help here.
[4] Wendy
Brown, “The Sacred, the Secular and the Profane” in Michael Warner, et al., Varieties of
Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), h.
83-104
[5] Sami
Zubaida, “Cosmopolitan citizenship in the Middle East” accessed July 20, 2010
from Open Democracy http://www.opendemocracy.net/sami-zubaida/cosmopolitan-citizenship-in-middle-east
[6]
Terry Eagleton, The Trouble with Strangers; A Study of Ethics (Chichester,
West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). h. 13.
[16]
“Nīya” in H.A.R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers,
Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1961) , h. 449-450
[17]
Ibn
Rushd, Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid, The Distinguished Jurists
Primer trs. Professor Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee (Reading, UK: Garnet
Publishing, 1994) I.1.2.1 h. 3-4
[19]
Nabil Saleh, “The Role of Intention (niyya) under Saudi Arabian Hanbali
Law” in Arab Law Quarterly 23 (2009), h. 474-475
[20]
Andrew F. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an
Overlapping Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)
[21] Ibid.,
[22]
Pierre
Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998),
h. 143
[24]
Fethi Benslama, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, trs. by
Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), h. 5
[25]
Charles
Tripp, Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
[26]
Eagleton,
The Trouble with Strangers…, h. 324
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