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Chapter Two: The Cognitive Status and Normative Functions of Revelation
The Example of the Qur'ān
It befitted not to a man that God should address him except by revelation (waḥy) or from behind a veil, or He sends a messenger to reveal what He will by His leave. Lo! He is exalted, wise.
And thus, We have revealed to you (Muḥammad) a Spirit of Our Command while you did not know what the Book is, nor what the faith. But We have made it a light whereby We guide whom We will of Our worshipers. And lo! you verily guide unto a right path.
Qur'ān, 42, 51–52.
Le mythe est un palais idéologique construit avec les gravats d'un discours social ancien.
Cl. Lévi-Strauss
Le monde contemporain est ainsi doublement hostile aux processus de vérité… Le système: culture-technique-gestion-sexualité, qui a l'immense mérite d'être homogène au marché et dont tous les termes, du reste, désignent une rubrique de la représentation marchande, est le recouvrement nominal moderne du système art-science-politique-amour, lequel identifie typologiquement les procédures de vérité.
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme, pp. 12–3.
The theological status of what monotheist believers call Revelation has for centuries been the ultimate source of their life and simultaneously a subject of heated controversy and exegesis. Among Muslims, the Mu'tazilī and Ḥanafī schools initiated the famous debate on the theory of God's created speech and tried to impose it as the official dogma, with the strong support of the caliphs al-Ma'mūn and al-Wāthiq. The struggle reached the level of an inquisition ( miḥna) against the Ḥanbalī school and its leader Ibn Ḥanbal who expressed a simple, but clear-cut theological principle stating that ‘there is no point in obeying a human being in matters entailing a rebellion against the Creator’ ( lā ṭā'ata li-makhlūq fī ma'⋅iyati-l-khāliq). The Mu'tazilī and Ḥanafī approach had a promising theoretical potential; but ‘it was outlawed by the edicts issued by the caliph al-Qādir in 420/1029 in the presence of shurafā’, jurisconsults who heard the reading of the edicts and signed it’. 1 Not only has the Sunnī position defended in the Qādirī creed prevailed until today, but it closed the debate on a key issue for religious life and thought in so many ‘Muslim’ societies in the world. I do not know of any Muslim thinker who has dared to reopen a debate stopped by political decision, while the theological principle defended against al-Ma'mūn's and al-Wāthiq's inquisition, ought to require the disputatio ( munāẓara) to remain open among the ‘ulamā’ who fulfil the conditions of ijtihād. Even linguistic analysis and literary criticism applied to Qur'ānic Discourse have recently been condemned as a blasphemy against the established orthodox status of the whole Qur'ān as the literal articulation of the Word of God named Revelation. 2 Precise ritual obligations are incumbent upon every Muslim who takes in his hands the volume called Mu⋅ḥaf in which the revealed Word of God has been collected and written down and these also apply if he recites or reads the whole text, or a fragment thereof. Any quotation therefrom should be preceded by the explicit statement ‘God, the exalted, says’ and end with: ‘God the exalted, uttered the Truth’ Three recent books among many should be mentioned to support the fact that the received idea of Revelation has been placed in the realm of the unthinkable in Islamic tradition since eleventh century. ‘Unthinkable’ in this context means that the theological, orthodox status of the Revelation as articulated by the Prophet and incorporated contemporaneously or later in the Mu⋅ḥhaf under the official supervision of the caliph ‘Uthmān, cannot be a matter for any critical inquiry; this status is protected by the universal consensus (ijmā’) of all Muslims since imāmī Shī'ī and Sunnī communities came to an agreement after a long discussion on the authenticity of the Mu⋅ḥaf. The first book is The Prolegomena to the Qur'ān, by al-Sayyid Abū-l-Qāsim al-Khū'ī, translated with an introduction by A. A. Sachedina; the second is al-Kitāb wal-Qur'ān; Qirā'a mu'ā⋅ira, written by a Syrian engineer named Muḥammad Shaḥrūr and the third is al-Qur'ān wa-l-tashrī': Qirā'a jadīda fī āyīt al-aḥkām, presented as a new reading of the legislative verses by al-Ṣādiq Bal'īd, a Tunisian professor of law at Tunis University.
The Prolegomena is the most authoritative of these works, because its author, al-Khū'ī, was a highly talented Ayatollah in Najaf during his long life (1899–1992). He does not mention any modern scholar who wrote about the history of the Qur'ān as a text, or about the concept of Revelation as it developed in the Jewish and Christian traditions; he shows no interest in any comparative approach to the Holy Scriptures, although this question has been repeatedly discussed at many international conferences since Vatican II; he states as follows in the preface to the first edition:
It behoves a true Muslim — rather every thinker — to apply himself to understanding the Qur'ān, clarifying its mysteries and acquiring its illuminations; for it is the Book that guarantees the establishment of peace, happiness and order for human beings, and promotes their prosperity and helps them attain it. The Qur'ān is, moreover, a reference book for the lexicographer, a guide for the grammarian, a competent authority for the jurist, a model for the man of letters, a goal of persistent search for the sage, an instructor for the preacher and aspiration for the moralist. From it are derived the social sciences and public administration; on it are based religious sciences; from its guidance are discovered the secrets of the universe and the laws of nature. The Qur'ān is the eternal miracle of the everlasting religion. It is the exalted and lofty order for the equally exalted and lofty sharī'a [p. 26].
Exactly the same apologia, the same fervent support of shared beliefs among all believers can be found in hundreds of books written on the same subject, ever since the oral transmission of the religious tradition started to be collected and written down by mediaeval scholars. The most striking feature of this deeply rooted discourse is the conviction, understandable in the Middle Ages, but less sustainable in the contemporary multicultural context, that the Qur'ān is the ultimate work of reference for all human beings; that it contains every answer, every solution needed by human beings at all times and in all places; that it is beyond any type, any impact of what we call today historicity.
I do not know how M. Shaḥrūr moved from the field of engineering to the very different field of Islamic studies. It has been noted that since the nineteenth century, Muslim scientists who specialise in the practical sciences are easily able to write best sellers showing that the Qur'ān clearly foresaw all the scientific discoveries made in Europe by savants, from Galileo and Kepler to the present day! The French physician Maurice Bucaille indulged in this apologetic genre. The Algerian engineer, Malek Bennabi, imposed himself in the late 1950s as a major Muslim thinker with a very superficial essay entitled the Qur'ānic Phenomenon, still widely read and quoted. Like many other authors, M. Shaḥrūr uses fragments of contemporary scientific knowledge (mixing practical and social sciences) to re-assess as ‘indisputable scientific statements’ the divine authenticity and universal validity of the Qur'ān as the Book of Revelation in the Arabic language. Revelation is not questioned or analysed, but is once again re-assessed for Muslims whose faith might be shaken by modern scientific thought.
Al-Ṣādiq Bal'īd tries to test the authority in law of the legislative verses with few references to modern literature on the critique of juridical reason. He takes the opportunity of the rather favourable Tunisian political climate to discuss the modernization of Islamic law, to reaffirm facts and positions that Western scholarship has been proposing for decades, namely that the so-called legislative verses were aimed at a tribalist society, not at modern political and juridical systems; the primary concern of the Qur'ān is the spiritual education of mankind, not the foundation of a political regime, and the definition of a new code of laws; the Qur'ān does not provide believers with a political model. Consequently, the author does not even use a political vocabulary as the apologia have done since the emergence of Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. The apologetic discourse is totally anachronistic, remote from any concept of the historicity of meaning. This kind of elementary criticism is, of course, needed in the present climate, that is dominated sociologically and threatened politically by the fundamentalist, dogmatic, militant use and abuse of the Qur'ānic texts; but it says more about the intellectural regression of Islamic thought in the last 50 years than about the emergence of new trends, new postures of a more radical criticism of the basic issues which I am trying to introduce, or reactivate as a contribution to the specific tasks of what I call ‘emerging reasoning. 3My purpose is not to develop a ‘modern’ theology of Revelation and enable believers to intellectually harmonize the expression of their faith with the general crisis of meaning in the present context of globalization. I would have done so, had Islamic thought prepared the scientific conditions for such a difficult task, beginning in the nineteenth century. Catholic and Protestant Christianity have themselves resisted intellectual modernity, especially under Pope Pius IX who, on 8 December 1864, published the encyclical Quanta cura accompanied by the Syllabus of errors disseminated by modern thought. It is only with Vatican II that Catholic theology began to rethink and integrate the scientific and intellectual achievements of modernity. Like Islam, Orthodox Christianity and orthodox trends in Judaism are still resistant to the necessity of reassessing the concept of Revelation and other topoi or themes of traditional theology. That is why it can be said that attempts at delving deep into the problem of the concept of Revelation, as it developed in the three monotheistic religions, remain a project for the future. 4 My ambition has been always to do that, starting from the example of Islam which is either neglected or presented separately from the theological endeavour developed in the Judeo-Christian line of thought. To encompass all the aspects of the subject, I shall start with a phenomenological analysis of the orthodox definition of Revelation as received and lived by all Muslims since the tenth-eleventh centuries. On this factual basis, I shall make more explicit the linguistic, anthropological and historical dimensions of the concept in order to open new possibilities for the clarification of its cognitive status. This search will be conducted using two anthropological triangles: Revelation, History and Truth; Violence, Sacred and Truth; and rethinking the itinerary from ahl al-kitāb to the societies of the Book-book.1. A Phenomenological Approach
The simplest definition of Revelation in Islamic contexts is given in two ritual expressions used currently by every Muslim when he quotes fragments of the Qur'ān: he starts with ‘God the Exalted says …’, and ends with ‘God the Magnificent is right’. There is no room for discussion of the authorship, the divine status of the content of the quoted text, the relevance of the quotation to the subject or the circumstances to which it is referred. Before the late 1950s, quotations in a written text or in everyday conversations were mainly from approved sources, who not only had a good command of the Qur'ānic text, but also of its exegesis. A major sociological change affected this practice when religious teaching was introduced into state-run elementary schools. Badly trained teachers taught small children a wild, uncontrolled, fantasmatical ‘exegesis’; the media played a major part in this phenomenon, increasing the demands of a populist religion. This important aspect of what is presented as ‘the return of religion’, actually refers to the disintegration of spiritual discourse and the trivialization of the Qur'ān itself.
A very simplified version of the theology of Revelation has been made available to illiterate believers, ever since the tenth-century, when traditionalist schools delivered sermons consisting of accessible short propositions on what should be believed and what should be rejected. I have shown the importance of this oral, populist delivery of a simplified orthodox creed in the way in which Islamic faith continues to be shaped until today. 5 This didactic tradition prevailed for centuries; the Word of God was used to support the beliefs, customs and cultural mores of many ethno-linguistic groups in many societies to which ‘Islam’ spread. These groups, in Indonesia, India, China, Africa and central Asia, do not even have access to the Arabic original of the Qur'ān; they relate to God, Muḥhammad and the Qur'ān through ritualistic recitation of the shortest chapters ( sūra) of the Qur'ān and the mythological narratives about angels and prophets who play then part in the transmission of Revelation; these narratives are recited to children and adults in the native local dialects. 6This is the psychological experience of all illiterate social groups converted to a learned religion based on a Book, a sanctified language and written tradition. Islam and Christianity have spread all over the world, to a much greater extent than the other major religions; they have established the authority of the revealed Book through two different channels, the learned written tradition based on the knowledge of the ‘elected’ language — Arabic, Greek, and Latin before the theological admission of the modern languages — and training in a theological conceptualization of the orthodox faith, the interface between simplified theological elements of the new religion and the popular oral cultures expressed in local dialects. Secularism and modern reasoning have introduced a new fault-line that everywhere divides, at all levels of culture and conceptualisation, those who accept the spiritual content and function of Revelation and those who reject it as ‘scientifically’ or empirically obsolete.
Let us return to the basic theological propositions shared by all Muslims about Revelation:
- God has communicated His will to mankind (His human creatures) through the prophets. To do this, He used Arabic, a human language that the people could understand, but, in the case of the final manifestation made through the Prophet Muhammad, He articulated the sentences in His own syntax, rhetoric and vocabulary. The task of the Prophet-Messenger was only to utter a discourse revealed or unveiled to him by God as part of His uncreated, infinite, co-eternal Speech. Tradition has emphasized the role of the angel Gabriel as the intermediary between God and the Prophet Muḥammad.
- The Revelation provided by the Qur'ān, through Muḥammad, is ultimate and supreme; it completes and confirms the previous revelations made through Moses and Jesus; it also corrects the altered texts (taḥrīf) of the Torah (the Hebrew Scripture, called tawrāt) and the Gospels. It contains all the answers, instructions and standards needed by human in order to guide, illuminate and organize their life on earth, in the perspective of the eternal life (history of salvation, religious obligations, rituals, celebrations, legal and ethical norms, true knowledge, representations of and relations with creatures, the skies, physical phenomena, cosmos, and so on).
- The Revelation manifested in the Qur'ān is exhaustive as far as the needs of believers are concerned (and potentially for all mankind, as traditionalists assert to this day, according to fundamentalist assertions). Yet it does not exhaust the entire Word of God preserved in the Heavenly Book (the archetypal Book = Umm al-Kitāb; the preserved Table = al-lawḥ al-maḥfūz). The concept of the Heavenly Book presented so strongly in the Qur'ān, is one of the ancient symbols of the religious imagery shared throughout the ancient Middle East, as is clearly shown in the still-valid studies of G. Widengren (Muḥammad, the Apostle of God and His Ascension; Uppsala, 1951 and The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book, Uppsala, 1954.) We shall come back to this point later, because it has not been incorporated frequently or accurately enough in the classical theory of Revelation.
- The collection of the Qur'ān into a written version preserved in a physical, commonly used book (Mu⋅ḥaf), was a delicate operation, that had already been scrupulously performed in the time of the Prophet and completed with all the necessary supervision under the righteous Caliphs, with a special role devoted to ‘Uthmān. The Qur'ān memorized, recited, read and explained by Muslims, ever since the Mu⋅ḥaf Uthmān was circulated, is the authentic, reliable, full version of Revelation given through Muhammad.
- The Qur'ānic Revelation is the Right Law (sharī'a) ordered by God to be adhered to scrupulously by believers as a sign of recognition of the debt of meaning due to God and His Messenger who elevated human creatures to the dignity of being trusted with the Revelation. Legal, ethical and political norms are derived from the divine Law through the intellectual and spiritual endeavour of trained ‘ulamā’; no one human being can ever change the social and political order built upon and maintained through these norms.
- The tension between this divine status of Revelation, its human destination and the modern conception of positive law, political and social order reached a climax under the many post-colonial regimes who imposed Islam as a state religion, while at the same time granting an increasing amount of room to secularizing legislation. This contradiction is often discussed in relation to the family code of conduct still governed by Qur'ānic precepts. More and more women are claiming the abolition of the existing so-called reformed codes and this is going to happen sooner or later. The problem of Revelation will then be reduced to its historical and psychological dimensions, as has already happened in the case of Christianity.
All these propositions are the result of a long historical process of development and teaching; their textual basis in the Qur'ān itself was not immediately accepted by the contemporaries of Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdallah (the historical genealogical name of the social activist who became the prophet Muḥammad) when he started to deliver his message in Mecca. In an article written some years ago and entitled The problem of the divine authenticity of the Qur'ān (see Lectures du Coran), I showed how the possibility of divine revelation was passionately debated, rejected and even negated by several opponent groups in Mecca. This social, political and cultural fact has been theologized and transformed by Qur'ānic Discourse into a polemical theme between the first small group of believers and the infidels who negate God and His generous initiative. At this historical stage, Qur'ānic Discourse was expressed linguistically in what linguistics experts describe as a performative discourse. Not only does the author of the discourse actualize what he enunciates, but anyone who recites the discourse re-actualizes its content (see Oswald Ducrot: Quand dire, c'est faire). The whole Qur'ānic Discount promotes itself, by using linguistic devices, to the status of the revealed Word of God, while opponents were calling it a lie, an invention of Satan to destroy the existing customs, beliefs and social order. It would be seen today as an expression of power similar to many previous versions in the Near East. A systematic historical reading of Qur'ānic Discourse, independent from all the later commentators as well as from the Orientalist translators and interpreters, has been attempted recently in the previously mentioned thesis by J. Chabbi, Le Seigneur des tribus: L'Islam de Mahomet. We shall see how this historical evidence, enhanced by the linguistic and semiotic analysis of Qur'ānic discourse leads to the heuristic proposition that:
What is received, taught, interpreted and lived as Revelation in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions needs to be revisited, re-read and re-interpreted as a social, linguistic and literary construct enhanced and consolidated over time by shared historical solidarity, a sense of belonging to a common history of salvation. This heuristic proposition will be submitted to every conceivable verification. From now on, I should explain why it priortizes the methodological approach; this means that we suspend any theological statements about Qur'ānic Discourse as the word of God until all of the linguistic, semiotic, historical and anthropological problems raised by the Qur'ān, as a text, are clarified. I say ‘suspend’, rather than ‘disqualife’, ‘ignore’ or ‘eliminate’, as modern linguists and historians arrogantly do when they refuse even to listen to the rightful demands of believers who are rejected in a non-scientific category. By so doing, they substitute and oppose a positivist, pseudo-scientific, self-promoting interpretation to the dogmatic, theological one which, over the centuries, has imposed its own form of arrogant sell-entitlement to the exclusive Truth. I am not denying, however, that the positivist, philologist scholars contributed to taking the first necessary methodological step towards a more encompassing intelligibility of the religious discourse in general.
These propositions imply the coexistence in the same word Revelation of two levels currently assumed and confused in the most commonly used expression ‘the word of God’ ( Kalāmu-llāb). The Qur'ānic Discourse itself insists upon the distinction between the infinite, eternal, divine Word, as preserved in the Archetypal Book ( Umm al-Kitāb) and the revelation ( waḥy) sent down to the earth ( tanzīl) as the manifest, visible, utterable, readable fragment of the infinite, inexhaustible Word of God which is, in that sense, one of His attributes. This differentiation present in the theory of God's created Speech, is virtually ignored in the current, simplified representation of the Qur'ān as being altogether the Word of God, the Revelation, the Holy Book, the Mu⋅ḥaf, the sacred Law. The idea that Revelation is totally given by God and has been delivered to the people through angels and prophets became for Jews, Christians and Muslims the central organizational representation of ‘the true religion’ ( dīn al-ḥaqq). Muslims add to this that the verses expressed in Arabic are the original words and syntactic articulation of God Himself, referring, assigning a status and commanding all forms of life, human beings, worlds and objects ontologically rooted in His creative initiative. This representation explicitly or indirectly influences all the historical and cultural dimensions of the societies who have been converted to the religion in question. In that sense, these societies can be analysed and understood as the societies of the Book-book; 7 they represent themselves as divinely guided, organized and governed according to the divine Law revealed in the Book, protected and enforced by the caliph, the sulṭān, the king, the local emīr, the emperor or the pope, spoken and interpreted in the priestly tongue of the rabbis, priests or ulamā. In all its normative teachings, the Book is integrated in its two levels — the Heavenly Book which corresponds in Christian terminology to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the manifested, physical Book (the Bible, the Qur'ān, the Gospels) containing the ‘authentic Word of God’ made accessible in human language. A point of theology should be clarified here. Christians refuse a comparison of the Bible and the Gospels to Jesus Christ as the Son of God, not in the genealogical, biological sense denounced in the Qur'ān, but as God incarnate; for the same reason, Muslims refute a comparison of the divine status of the Qur'ān with the human condition and authorship of Jesus son of Mary. If we pursue these comparisons, we should say Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdullah to assess the place assigned to him in his recognized social, political genealogy, just as the Qur'ān says Jesus son of Mary, insisting on his blood ties and denying the theological status claimed for him by Christians; according to the literary theory of the aesthetic of reception, the entity confronting Jesus Christ would thus be the Qur'ān — the Book containing the revealed Word of God. Jesus Christ, as the incarnate Word of God, is the equivalent of the speaking Mu⋅ḥaf in which the Word of God has been incarnated. These comparisons are relevant for the historian, the sociologist and the anthropologist, but certainly not for the believers who are educated in a substantialist, essentialist language and stick to it as long as they do not discover the critical, analytical, deconstructive use of language. This discrepancy refers, in fact, to what historians of thought describe as a ‘cognitive shift’ and ‘epistemological rupture’. That is why there continuous battle among theologians over the meaning of symbols and metaphors. Should they be read literally or metaphorically as the revealed discourse? In Islam, the Ḥanbalī school imposed the rejection of all metaphorical interpretations of the Word of God, irrespective of the consequences of such a position on the more universalist issue of the interface between language and thought. The fundamentalist posture in religion amounts to a philosophical option concerning the genesis of meaning through the interaction of language and thought; the vast philosophical expanse opened up by the revealed Word of God for a continuously renewed thinkable, is closed and reduced to the unthinkable. That is exactly what has happened in the case of the debate opened by Mu'tazilī thinkers. It can also be seen how wrong those historians are who consider the only aspect of the thinkable as the historical development of a tradition of thought; they argue that they have no written document for the unthinkable for it to be introduced as a constitutive element of the systems and ideas studied. This fundamental issue will be discussed at greater length in the following paragraphs.
A comparative history of theologies is not possible if we refuse to incorporate the analysis of the cognitive strategies developed within each tradition reflecting the self-promotion and self-entitlement of each community to possess the ‘authentic’ ‘integral’ version of the revealed Truth. I am not saying that the selections or options created by each tradition lead only to negative results. No one would deny the spiritual fecundity of the major theological themes chosen by Christianity — Incarnation, Redemption, Resurrection, Crucifixion, the Eucharist. The monotheistic line defended by Islam has its own original wealth of resources but for centuries, each tradition turned the theological options promoted by the ‘enemy’ into polemical issues. Each tradition maintained in the unthinkable all that has been taught as the most precious thinkable by the ‘other’. If a comparative history were to be written of the theological systems developed for each community, we would be faced with the necessity to rethink the whole issue of religious Truth, True/altered Revelation, living traditions and the related substantialist, essentialist vocabulary used by theological thought as well as by classical metaphysics, dating back to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and their extensive legacies.
On this theoretical basis, the phenomenological description of facts can be continued. Whatever the original receptacle and transmitter of the initial Revelation, the oral enunciation uttered initially by the mediator — called Messenger, Prophet, God's incarnate — between God and mankind, was written down afterwards on parchment or paper to become an ordinary book which could be stored, opened, read and interpreted. The book itself has become ‘Holywrit’ through an historical process, which means that it has been sacralized and sanctified by a number of rituals, discursive manipulations and methods of exegesis related to many concrete and known, or knowable, political, social and cultural circumstances. Many problems have been created due to this transformation of the Word of God (represented in God's speech itself as being eternal, transcendent, infinite and inexhaustible by any human effort) into an ordinary, physical book yet one that simultaneously enjoys a ‘theological’ status, the status of sacralized scripture, sacralized law (canon law and sharī'a), sacralized ethics, transcendent/transcendental knowledge. More scientific evidence has been provided of the process and the linguistic, literary devices of sacralization, transcendantalization and ontologization in the case of the Bible and the Gospels, but not yet for the Qur'ān, just because the political, cultural and educational conditions are still operating against such a work in Islamic contexts.
Through this theological terminology, it can be seen how basic symbolic categorizations can be determined (the heavenly Word of God, incarnation/enunciation of God through a human individual or an elected language; communication of the Word of God to the people through a mediator) which have been elaborated in different cultural contexts, using different languages with different connotations (Arabic, Hebrew on the one hand, Greek and Latin on the other) in order to differentiate the communities through the differentiation of the religious patterns. This leads to the following decisive lessons.
Theological developments continue to disregard the anthropological categories and the historical contingent dimension of the social, cultural and political contexts in which the ‘divine’, intangible, dogmatic ‘truths’ are expressed. From this viewpoint, theological systems fulfil the same ideological function as the Berlin Wall, although it might, and in some aspects did provide the communities on either side with an enriching, enhancing, enabling symbolic culture. The walls remain solid between the communities because we have not yet developed the relevant cognitive strategies that could be used to demolish the walls and explore the real anthropological, cultural, philosophical space in a cross-cultural interpretation of all inherited, present and future symbolic systems of representation. Not only do the walls remain solid, but they are strengthened, rebuilt even, if I may say so, under the impact of three major events that occurred in the twentieth century, namely, the appalling catastrophe of the Holocaust, the official atheism imposed by the Communist regimes for 70 years and the creation of Israel state by the colonial, secularized European states regardless of the rich concentration of the conflictual symbolic/religious expressions in the Holy Land/Promised Land/Land of the three sacred/sanctified collective memories. My contention is that traditional religions have been used and are still going to be used as political refuges and eventually springboards to accede to power. As long as this historical pressure is maintained on religions, the most open theology, the most illuminating scholarship will not succeed in balancing the impact of religious/sectarian representations as a mobilizing ideological force. Thus, we meet another theoretical issue: is it ever possible to free religious discourse in general, the discourse labelled and received as Revelation in particular, from their function as the enunciation and representation of God's Supreme Authority transferred to the power of royalty, the caliph, the sultān or the president?
Let me explain what I am doing. I am extracting veiled, implicit, nonperceived issues, principles, themes from a system of thought, regardless of the consequences for my religion, my historical, cultural solidarities with my (Muslim) community; but I know that all other communities will be equally challenged by the theoretical issues I am raising about the concept of Revelation that has been simplified, narrowed, rejected and finally abandoned by scientific, enlightened reason, to the ‘managers of the sacred’. I am displacing old issues from their logocentric, dualist, literal, essentialist, philological, historicist, positivist, scientist frameworks of intelligibility and interpretation to a pluralist, multifaceted problematization of the very complex, not yet deconstructed notion of Revelation as a common, constraining frame of reference for all the societies of the Book-book. It is important to show how all the discourses derived from the revealed Word of God, aiming to interpret and apply His commandments, contributed to shaping the anthropological structures of the religious, political and social imaginaries ( imaginaires). Deconstructing these structures is the task of the historian who is able to retrace the psychological, cultural, political process initiated by the impact of Revelation, carried on through the recurrent rivalry between the driving forces in the two related fields — the quest for meaning and the will-to power. 8 Aziz al-Aẓmeh has just produced a fine and relevant analysis of this historical process as it has been pursued in different Near Eastern civilizations and expanded throughout the Mediterranean lands with what he calls Muslim, Christian and Pagan polities. 9When I use the term imaginary, I do not want to dismiss from any rationalist viewpoint, the source of knowledge used in each religious tradition. I wish rather to introduce an anthropological category in order to explain how the perception of reality and all the subsequent languages used to refer to these realities, are transferred from the rational, analytical framework into the imaginary sphere of mental representation and emotional adhesion. In its own way, imagination is a faculty of knowledge; the imaginary participates in this activity as a receptacle of images and a powerful social force for the reactivation of these images as sublime truths, incontrovertible values for which the group accepts the supreme sacrifice. Members of the group who have died for the sake of the common values become martyrs and add sacrificial, sanctifying dimensions to these values. Through this historical, social, psychological process, collective memory is enriched, social imaginaire is tested and kept alive, but the relevant, critical, rational identification of the real stakes engaged in the actual history of the group are minimized, obscured and delayed. The cognitive and epistemological shift I am suggesting should be extended to the Islamic example is the one already applied to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but still delayed, rejected and even prohibited when Revelation itself is included in the plan of investigation:
Of special relevance here is the late Mediterranean — West Asian (or Near Eastern) civilization belt, which had a particular coherence in terms both of spatial and temporal continuity. This belt was constituted by Hellenistic and Romano-Byzantine representations and institutions, which were themselves fully complicit with so-called oriental notions of royalty and divinity that circulated in the ancient Near East of the Persians and the Babylonians and, somewhat more remotely, the Egyptians… [A. al-Aẓmeh, op. cit. p. x]
Before moving on to the successive transformations in the Muslim tradition, more evidence should be taken from the Qur'ān itself about the notion of Revelation that would later be manipulated by authorized and unauthorized agents with more or less relevant questions, tools and methodologies for all kinds of purposes. I have already shown this in several essays collected in my Lectures du Coran (2nd ed., Tunis, 1991). I shall take here the example of sūra 96 because it makes it possible to discover more facts and definitions presented in the orthodox Islamic tradition.
The Blood Clot (Arberry translation)
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
Recite: In the Name of thy Lord who created,
created Man of a blood clot.
Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous,
who taught by the Pen,
taught the Man that he knew not.
No indeed; surely Man waxes insolent,
for he thinks himself self-sufficient.
Surely unto thy Lord is the Returning.
What thinkest thou? He who forbids
a servant when he prays —
What thinkest thou? If he were upon guidance
or bade to God-fearing —
What thinkest thou? If he cries lies, and turns away —
Did he know that God sees?
No indeed; surely, if he gives not over,
We shall seize him by the forelock,
a lying, sinful forelock.
So let him call on his concourse!
We shall call on the guards of Hell.
No indeed; do thou not obey him,
and bow thyself and draw nigh.
According to the classical exegesis, this sūra, numbered 96 in the Mu⋅ḥaf, it the first ‘revelation’ brought to Muhammad on Mount Hīra by the angel Gabriel, identified with the spirit ( al-rūḥ). The angel asked him three times ‘Read (or preach) in the Name of your Lord!’ And Muḥammad answered ‘I do not know how to read/preach’. This story is a literary account of the process used for the transmission of Revelation from God to the people viā Muḥammad. Gabriel is constantly going from God (the heaven) to Muḥammad (the earth) to bring revelations, just as he came to Jesus and other prophets in the Bible. Thus, Gabriel guarantees the authenticity of the Revelation in the line starting with Adam and ending with Muḥammad. The numerous narrations reported in the Qi⋅as al-anbiyā' (narrations on the prophets), especially those collected by the two converted Jews, Ka'b al-Ahba and Wahb ibn Munabbih, provide the mythological background that explain the circumstances in which each verse (oral fragment or, as to use the linguistic term, a textual unit) of the Qur'ān was revealed. These narrative show the strong relationship between interpretations of the Qur'ān and the religious imaginaire which prevailed during the first three centuries of th Hijra in the Near Eastern ‘sectarian milieu’.10 The sense of the marvellous, as psycho-cultural category, is displayed in all the narrations and projected or the Qur'ānic Discourse itself. The perception of Revelation continues to be dominated to this day by this sense of the marvellous and supernatural power as a basic cultural foundation for the mythical knowledge 11 which believers call religious truth. The sūra itself suggests the major themes of Revelation and the linguistic articulation of its discourse. God appears as the central figure; He organizes the whole discourse, grammatically, rhetorically and semantically. But there are two other protagonists, the Prophet to whom the commandment is addressed, and man, the object and the final destitution for all the initiatives expressed by the numerous verbs. The grammatical structure of the sūrā indicates the personal relationship between we, thy (Muḥammad), you (believers), they (people) and he (man) which institutes the basic, constant space of communication and meaning in the whole Qur'ānic Discourse. All the narrations (qi⋅as), the norms, themes, controversies, explanations, teachings and events expressed over twenty years as God's speech, are articulated within a strict hierarchy around these two, God as the ontological origin and the ultimate destination for the supplications of all the creatures, activities, meanings and events on this earth and the Prophet/Messenger (Muḥammad) as the mediator between God and man. Man (insān) is the elect, invited to submit his life to the Creator. There is a permanent tension between God (we) and man/people (he, they). Revelation is intended to invite man and guide him towards the ‘Right Path’ leading to eternal Salvation. Those who oppose rebellion and revolt against God are addressed in the third person and asked to come to a better understanding of their fixed status and destiny. This is not a static dualist opposition, but a continuous dialectic tension through which a consciousness of culpability emerges. Man is thus transformed into a conscious, reflecting subject of ethics and law, responsible for each thought, action and initiative he produces in his life.
Three other major aspects of the Qur'ānic Discourse should be added, namely 1) its metaphoric organization; 2) its semiotic structure; 3) its intertextuality.
Here again, the example of the Qur'ān has been especially neglected, both by Muslim scholarship and Orientalist erudition. Very few attempts have been made to apply modern linguistic tools and conceptualization to Qur'ānic Discourse without any concession to the theological vocabulary. Orthodox exegesis is still limited by the traditional definition of the metaphor as a simple rhetorical device used to embellish the style; the words are taken at their literal, lexicographical face value, not in the system of connotations described for the Bible as The Great Code by Northrope Frye. Even the words leading to anthropomorphic interpretations such as ‘God sat on the throne’, ‘God taught by the Pen’, and ‘God is the Hearer’ are rather received in their literal meaning. They generate theological polemical debates which are utterly remote from the rigorous linguistic analysis. The philological studies favoured by Orientalists have also neglected to develop and apply to the religious discourse a modern theory of metaphor and metonymy. This epistemological failure is evident in the classical works of Th. Nöldeke, R. Blachère, J. Wansbrough, D. Masson, R. Paret and many others. All the translations in European languages reflect the theological options of their models, the Muslim exegetes. J. Chabbi made a strong point against this attitude which has contributed to the extension beyond Islamic Tradition of a conservative, irrelevant theological paradigm. But she, too, failed to point to the general theory of the Great Code applied to all religious discourses. 12
- It is easy to show how ancient commentators have totally discarded the evident metaphoric value of expressions such as ‘Who taught by the pen’, ‘Did he not know that God sees?’, ‘We shall seize him by the forelock, a lying, sinful forelock’, ‘the guards of Hell’ in sūra 96 and elsewhere. How can it be determined which of these phrases or words are metaphorical and which are to be taken literally? The esoteric tradition of interpretation (bāṭiniyya) has produced a tremendous body of literature about the Pen, God who sees, and guards of Hell; but this shows only how Qur'ānic Discourse has been and still can be used as a pretext for Gnostic speculation and course, as a source of inspiration for ⋅ūfī experiences of the divine The monumental work of Ibn ‘ArAbū represents an autonomous corpus which illustrates the potential expansion of Qur'ānic Discourse as received by a creative imagination. But this dimension itself needs to be analysed as a corpus of texts in the perspective of the wider intertextuality of Qur'ānic Discourse before and after its emergence in cultural and religious history. Philosophers also have allegorized Qur'ānic Discourse, but failed to propose a relevant theory of metaphor and metonymy. This lacuna represents another long chapter on the unthinkable — because of the existential and political priority given to theology and law — and the resulting unthought in contemporary Islamic thought. Years ago, I planned myself to devote a monograph to the ‘Metaphoric organization of Qur'ānic Discourse’, but I could never find the required time to complete this project which would be the work of a lifetime.
- The same remarks can be made about the semiotic analysis of the Qur'ānic Discourse; when, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Paris school of semiotic studies initiated a laboratory for the study of the religions of the Book, few students turned their attention to the Qur'ān. When the theoretical debate rehabilitated the role of the human subject in the genesis of meaning against structuralists who proclaimed the ‘deathofMan’ after the ‘death of God’, the example of the Qur'ān was even more neglected. The return to the subject (le sujet humain) favours spiritualist speculations and detracts from linguistic analysis as a necessary first methodological step, before any exegesis could be undertaken to elaborate a law or a dogma which would be enforced by an established political regime or religious authority. I maintain that semiotic analysis is still of primary interest, especially for all authoritative religious basic texts. It provides a unique opportunity to practise an excellent methodological exercise designed to master all the linguistic levels through which meaning is generated. This methodological step also has an epistemological dimension; it is of crucial importance in the conquest of an intellectual, critical objectivity concerning the authorship and the cognitive status of Qur'ānic Discourse and of course, all similar, sacred texts promoted to foundational functionality by human beings in their governance of other human beings.
When linguistic semiotic analysis is correctly performed, it does not necessarily lead to the negation of the free subject in the genesis and identification of meaning. The discovery was soon made as to how the entire discourse is expressed according to a technique of persuasion, disputatio and institutionalization. In semiotic terminology, it can be said that each textual unit 13 in the Qur'ānic Discourse is built on sequences of events articulated as a dramatic structure recapitulated in the diagrams on pages 98 and 99. To fully grasp the intentions and the theoretical contents of the two diagrams, use should be made of the abovementioned Dictionnaire by Greimas and Courtès; English readers can also use The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 2nd edition, 1998. I must insist, however, on the methodological and epistemological lessons that can be learned from the semiotic structure which commands all the types of discourse represented in the Qur'ān (prophetic, wise, narrative, liturgical, legislative, persuasive, polemical, ironical) and all the levels of meaning of each textual unit. One has to use the very abstract, technical terminology of semiotics, not for the sake of complexity or ‘Parisian mode’ as many Anglo-Saxon scholars use to say ironically, but in order to perform a specific intellectual task. To consider merely the functions fulfilled by each protagonist that produce an outcome through dramatic opposition, we need to entirely avoid the current vocabulary heavily loaded as it has been over the centuries with theological, uncritical connotations. Historically, theological discourse as well as legalistic elaborations labelled as the Divine Law ( shari'a), are derived from the Qur'ānic Discourse, though they are not part of it; they are more closely related to the historical and cultural contexts in which the authors worked and projected back their interpretations on the Qur'ānic texts they sollicited. Historians have shown how many layers of representations related to the ideological needs of each generation, are included in the chain of transmission ( isnād), and how each layer is projected back on the symbolic idealized figures of Muhammad, ‘Alī, Ḥusayn, Ibn ‘Abbās, the Companions, the imāms and various local saints; how many verses of the Qur'ān are themselves interpolated in the narrative literature to construct the so-called divine foundations ( u⋅ūl) of the Islamic living tradition and divine Islamic Law. All these operations are called semiotic manipulations: they are semiotic because they shape new dramatic narrative frameworks all of which are based on arbitrary decontextualization and recontextualization. For this reason, the so-called asbāb al-nuzūl, currently used as historical evidence of the contexts in which the verses have been revealed, are totally misleading because they belong to the new contexts developed for the needs of the collective memory — the so-called living tradition — of each Islamic schism ( firqa). Each firqa, including the so-called Sunnī/Orthodox, one strives for its own entitlement to represent the Orthodox, Righteous Community. 14 This is the methodological condition for showing how ‘God’, ‘Revelation’, ‘Messenger’, ‘prophet’, Qur'ān, sunna and shari'a came to exist as consistent, living characters in the flesh and the ultimate imperative authorities who shaped the commanding structure of Islamic thought and the historical development of the societies of the Book-book. Needless to say all this deconstructive presentation of the constructed collective memories applies equally to Jewish and Christian memories in their own so-called living traditions. In several essays, I have made a clear distinction between two aspects of the linguistic status of the Qur'ānic Discourse: the oral status with its specific protocol of communication including oral delivery of specific material, physical conditions, specific semiological signs, tools and mechanisms, in order to generate meaning, with the immediate audience reaction of acceptance or rejection, enthusiasm or anger; and the written status, or the Qur'ān as text. The oral status survives in the liturgy recited by the believers, as well as in the frequent quotations from the texts in the vernacular. These two types of oral usage are both linguistically different from the first oral delivery by Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah of successive sequences or discrete units over a twenty-year period. This original oral delivery is irreversibly out of reach for the modern historian; the tradition has collected many short reports on the circumstances in which one or a sequence of verses are supposed to have been delivered (asbāb al-nuzūl). In the Mu⋅ḥaf as it is, the whole text cannot even be edited in chronological order — if a reliable chronology could ever be achieved — of what I call the discrete textual units. A huge literature has been devoted to this matter; the search should continue, especially if there is a chance of finding older authentic manuscripts. Since the Official Closed Corpus has been imposed, Muslims are reluctant to consider the possibility of editing the Qur'ān, even if only for the purpose of attempting to raise the important issues not only of the rough chronology of the surates, but more fundamentally of the original textual units which remain very difficult to identify. 15The written text is read by all Muslims within the incontrovertible protocol of faith, or what all the great commentators would call with al-Khū'i, the Prolegomena to the Qur'ān, or the premises agreed upon and never subject to discussion. There are theological, legalistic, mystical, literalist and esoteric commentaries or readings in the tradition of scholarship that are proper to each school (Sunnī, imāmī, Ismā'ilī, Mu'tazilī, Ash'arī, Ḥanbalī…). The contemporary commentators are all dependent on the classical authors in their approaches and their doctrinal options; no one has ever suggested a historical or philosophical deconstruction of the system of postulates and premises perpetuated as an intangible dogmatic posture of what I have called Islamic reason (in Critique de la raison islamique, Paris, 1984). Since we are obliged to read a text, we first need a general theory of what we call a text; 16 this is what I am developing. Three interacting cognitive directions should be combined in the new perspective of scientific reasoning which has, as I have shown, epistemological postures that are different from all the previous ones adopted by reasoning in all known cultural contexts, including the present hegemonic tele-techno-scientific reasoning. There are three interactive protocols for reading the Qur'ān as text in that perspective, the historical-anthropological, the linguistic-semiotic and the theological-exegetic. Methodologically, the theological-exegetic reading should be attempted only on the new critical basis established by the two first approaches. This means that all the axiological principles, postulates and themes which have predominated thus far in all systems of thought, should be intellectually and culturally subverted.
- As to the third point, intertextuality refers to the horizontal historical reading of Qur'ānic Discourse in the perspective of the very longue durée (to use the famous conceptualization of F. Braudel) including not only the Old Testament and the Gospels, two other major corpuses which are present in the Qur'ānic Discourse, but also the collective religious and cultural memories of the ancient Near East. Sūra 18 (the Cave) is an illuminating example of the wide intertextuality at work in the Qur'ānic Discourse. Three narrations (the People of the Cave, the Gilgamesh Legend and the novel of Alexander the Great), refer to the most ancient cultural imaginary (imaginaire) common to the Ancient Near East. These are combined in a single chapter (sūra) to corroborate and illustrate the transmission of the same, eternal divine Message. In each of the narrations, which are strictly expressed in the basic semiotic structure described below, there is the emergence of the protagonist who received the Message, used its knowledge and with it, changed the course and the ultimate significance of human existence which would thereafter be totally related to God and His teachings. Here we face many theoretical issues referring to the epistemological postulates of the late Formgeschichte and its philological procedures, the approach used in literary criticism, the semiotic theory of the structural genesis of meaning and the perspectives opened up by the anthropological definition of myth quoted as epigraph to this chapter. All these theoretical problems with the cognitive frameworks in which they have been articulated and interpreted, need to be carefully revisited, re-discussed, reassessed or declared obsolete with the new postures and tools of emerging reason.
How can one express, for example, the vertical faithful reading according to the tanzīl metaphor — the descent of the Word of God from the Heaven — in combination with the horizontal, temporal, spatial positivist option imposed by modern historical criticism with particular focus on the radical historicity of everything related to human existence, including religious matters? Mediaeval exegesis included many references to narratives, reports, names of prophets and literary heroes borrowed from sources and memories external to Arab, Qur'ānic tradition. 17 This common practice did not affect the divine status of the Revelation, although an opposition has been developed to the use of Isrā'iliyyāt literature. The concept of historicity, as it has been developed in modern historicism, remained unthinkable for the classical exegesis, as did historiographical thought. Mythical narratives are currently confused with isolated historical facts. Today, some commentators try to restrict the effect in law of legislative verses, arguing that they were revealed in spirit and for the specific requirements of Arabian society in the time of the Prophet. In the mind of these reformers, a pragmatic interpretation of the legislative verses should not entail any revision of the traditional theology of Revelation. All the contradictions, the ideological bricolage and the scientific lacuna of contemporary Islamic thought are concentrated in this, as yet unthought, opposition between the horizontal/vertical reading of the Qur'ān as a ‘revealed’ text (no longer an oral discourse). In recent years, Qur'ānic studies in Western scholarship have started to extend their scientific curiosity to dimensions of Revelation thus far neglected. The most recent examples to illustrate this development are Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur'ān, edited by Issa J. Boullata; Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the Formative Period; Meir M. Bar-Asher, Scripture and Exegesis in Early imāmī Shī'ism, and G. R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History. The new interpretations and materials provided by such studies will certainly enhance the kind of inquiry I am proposing here. I plan to show elsewhere how this scholarship is distancing itself further and further from classical Islamology, without deeply sharing all the concerns about the cognitive status and existential functions of the religious phenomenon (le fait religieux). Let us go further in this direction and explore the tools, the theoretical frameworks and the horizons of meaning proposed by emerging reasoning, as applied to religious studies in general.
2. Revelation, History, Truth
In 1973, I published an article entitled ‘Révélation, Vérité et Histoire d'après l'œuvre de Ghazālī’ (in Essais sur la pensée islamique, Paris 1973). My ambition was to emancipate Islamic thought from the historiographical, theological framework developed and propagated during the Classical Islamic period, and was, from the thirteenth century onwards, fragmented and impoverished by Muslim scholasticism, then reactivated later in a linear, narrative, descriptive transcription by classical Orientalist erudition. I tried to test the relevance of A. Kardiner's and R. Linton's anthropological theories about the study of thought, society and history in Islamic contexts since the emergence of the Qur'ānic phenomenon. The work of al-Ghazālī is undoubtedly the richest example that could have been chosen for this new theoretical exploration. I continue to defend the project with the necessary revisions and corrections required by cultural and social anthropology. Once again, I must point to the contemptuous attitude of those ‘Orientalists’ who remain reluctant to participate in any theoretical, epistemological discussion which could affect the orthodox, established academic rules still considered to be valid for Islamic studies. I could mention many examples of this trend, just as I did to illustrate the innovative trend.
An amendment is in order here to the proposed sequence used above of Revelation, Truth and History. History should perhaps be placed in the middle, due to the continuous interaction between the activities of mind and history. The mind endeavours to identify the truth and is incarnate in history; but this activity has been developed as part of history's revelatory function, obliging the human mind to recognize how it can be driven by false knowledge, uncontrolled beliefs, arbitrary constructions and dangerous options that are more closely related to emotional interpretations, the will to power and the urges of desire, than to what is given and defended as the Truth, the Just, the Righteous and the unjust. History shapes the lives of activists who are not equally conscious of the origins, mechanisms and consequences of their individual and collective actions. Revealed texts, teachings of the prophets, bodies of law, orthodox exegesis and historiographical, heresiographical literature, all of them written constructs of scholarship and culture, converge in what the wider community knows, uses and protects as its living Tradition. In that sense, tradition is the receptacle of all truths resulting from the existential experiences shared by the ‘orthodox’, properly guided wider community; all the truths integrated in the living tradition are necessarily rooted in the absolute, ontological, substantial, intangible, anhistorical Truth. History as a revelatory existential process, enlightened by and rooted in the revealed Word of God, generating a perception of Truth that is psychologically different from the contingent, changing, relative truths defined in modern cognitive systems ever since the intellectual, ontological shift occurred from religious reasoning to scientific and philosophical reasoning. Modern social sciences attempt to interpret the invisible historical dialectic that it constantly at work between Revelation and Truth under the pressures of History. This dialectic interaction cannot be perceived by activists, whether believers or non-believers, as long as the substantialist, idealist metaphysical framework of interpretation is not confronted — though not necessarily replaced — by the heuristic philosophy that accepts the agenda I have assigned to emerging reason in the introduction to this book. To this agenda, I should add the following topoï (les lieux de la connaissance) that are specially required by the critical reassessment of all religious living traditions. I have defined these topoi as the heuristic introduction to the critique of religious reason through the example of Islamic reason.
- The cognitive triangle of Language, History, Thought. This triangle includes the abovementioned Revelation, History and Truth, as a particular field of a more inclusive issue.
- The theological-philosophical triangle of Faith, Reason, Truth. The mediaeval disputes over this triangle neither included nor correctly defined the revelatory function of language and history to show how theology should be the study of expressions of faith under the pressures of lived history.
- The hermeneutic triangle of Time, Narratives and the Ultimate Absolute Truth according to the metaphysical definition, or how to break out of the classical hermeneutic circle, by understanding to believe, believing to understand.
- The empirical triangle of Mind, Society and Power (authority). In Islamic thought, this triangle has been known and discussed as Dīn, Dunyā, Dawla, or Religion, Society, Polity (and politics).
- The anthropological triangle of Violence, Sacred, Truth. Sūra 9 provides an excellent example for studying this triangle as it is revealed in the Qur'ān.
- The philosophical-anthropological triangle or the social institution of mind and the imaginary institution of society in the form of Rationality, Irrationality, Imagnary (imaginaire). This triangle is particularly relevant to the quest for Revelation, History, Truth. The irrational and imaginary dimensions of mind have been negated by classical theology and metaphysics because man is created in the image of God and man strives to resemble God (ta'alluh of mystics and neoplatonicians). The operative forces of the irrational and the imaginary remained and still remain hidden, unknown, unthought of even in our most sophisticated, rationalistic, scientific culture.
Of all these topois, Islamic thought has been, since the nineteenth century, the most successful at maintaining the illusion that it can contribute to debate about itself only within the cognitive frame of reformation (i⋅lāḥ). Ṭāha Ḥussein, Salāma Mūsa, ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq are among those who have attempted to generate fruitful discussions, but failed to initiate a lasting school of research and teaching. Even during the period described as the socalled Liberal Age (1830–1940), philological and historical criticism was never able to attain the level of historical, literary and linguistic studies that existed in Europe from 1700 to 1950. Religious reason always transferred the debates from their scientific framework to a theological and ethico-legal evaluation. After 1945, a new ideological shift was imposed by the nationalist struggle for political liberation. The precarious progress achieved in some fields and disciplines during the Age of Liberalism was rejected as the product of bourgeois thought and culture. The paradigm of ‘engaged literature and thought’ imported by Marxist-Communist ‘intellectuals’, prevailed until the Islamic paradigm defended by fundamentalist movements, replaced it. The rapid sociological expansion of that ideological-mythological framework in the last thirty years, was concurrent with the emergence of new social categories generated by demographic, economic and political pressures. It is more difficult than ever to divert the powerful social-religious-political imaginary world from its populist representations and ‘values’ into a scientifically based, critical reasoning. The transmission of new knowledge with the processes of reasoning that it requires is not yet correctly taught in schools, to say nothing of the powerful impact on the social imaginary (imaginaire social) and the ideological representations spread everywhere by the media and official political ‘culture’.
3. Violence, Sacred, Truth
I mentioned that I have included two major subjects of inquiry to illustrate my agenda for a Critique of Islamic Reason, a monograph on the Metaphoric Organisation of Qur'ānic Discourse; and An Anthropological Redding of Sūra 9 — al-Tawba — to show how Violent, Sacred, Truth are three interrelated, interactive forces which command the articulation of meaning and the definition of the all embracing legitimacy in the religious discourse as exemplified in the Qur'ān and other Holy Scriptures. I have devoted too much time and energy to developing these important approaches in the many lectures I have delivered all over the world. The project is delayed, but I still hope to achieve it. I did my best to encourage some of my students to embark in these two directions, but I always received the same answers. Muslims are reluctant to approach the Qur'ān through concepts perceived as ‘dangerous’ in the present ideological climate; non-Muslims have accepted the heuristic approach, but have found it too difficult to complete their work within the sort of time frame required for a thesis.
Using the conceptual triangle of Violence, Sacred, Truth, we can go further in our attempt to think the major ‘unthought’ in classical and contemporary Islamic thought, the historicity of religious discourse in relation to the more generic historiographical discourse. Historicity has been at the centre of the development of modern thought since the eighteenth century. It refers simultaneously to the expanding practice of critical history as an all-embracing discipline among the social sciences and to the impact of this discipline on philosophical inquiry, especially in the work of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) J.G. Herder (1744–1803), W. Dilthey (1833–1911), M. Heidegger (1889–1976), J. P. Sartre, R. Aron, P. Ricœur and many others. Mentioning this line of thought and giving the example of so many European thinkers while dealing with the Qur'ān as a Revelation, in itself constitutes blasphemy for all those Muslims who cannot grasp the idea that historicity is not just an intellectual game invented by Westerners for Westerners, but concerns the human condition since the emergence of man on this earth. There is no other way of interpreting any type, any level of what we call Revelation outside the historicity of its emergence, its development through history and its changing functions under the pressures of history as we have already shown. In this context, it must be repeated that historicity would not have been the major ‘unthought’ in Islamic thought today, had not all political regimes since the Sunnī reaction initiated in 848 by the caliph Mutawakkil, contributed to the elimination of philosophy, including Mu'tazili theology, especially as it concerns God's created speech. This ‘unthought’ is clearly generated by the political support given to the ‘orthodox’ Sunnī, Imāmī, Ismā'ilī, khārijī forms of Islam.
Historicity basically means that an event actually happened and is not mere mental imagery as is usual in legends, mythological narratives and ideological constructs. Philosophically, this definition can lead to two different scientific practices, namely, positivist historicism and the radical historicity of the human mind itself that is inseparable from its socio-historical institution. Historicism has imposes and still imposes its view that only events, facts and individuals whose real existence is evidenced in authentic documents, can be accepted as the subject of real history; thus excluding all the collective beliefs and representations which activate the collective imaginary and are determinant forces sustaining the historical dynamic. The positivist posture of reasoning has ignored or misunderstood the anthropological status of the imagination as a creative faculty in all artistic activities and political visions, but also as a receptacle for the collective beliefs and representations acting as the social imaginary and the collective memory. Similarly, literalist exegesis and dogmatic theology have rejected metaphorical and symbolic functioning that are the most dynamic, creative linguistic tools that can be used, particularly in religious discourse. Rethinking the issue of Revelation in the anthropological and philosophical perspectives opened up by historicity against historicism, would certainly enable Islamic thought to share the concerns of the modern reassessment of knowledge and let it rediscover the pre-emptive contributions of Mu'tazili thought, as well as philosophical explorations on prophetic imagination and discourse (I refer to both Avicenna and Averroes).
Sūra 9 offers the best opportunity to reconsider the concept of Revelation with its immanent historical dimension and not merely as a transcendental, substantial, eternal entity above human history, although it is meant to guide it. By its style, its polemical tone, its social, legal and political themes and even its length, this sūra shows how the new community, after the reconquest of Mecca (if the received chronology is to be confirmed), is now engaged in the process of institutionalization and incarnating the word of God in human concrete history. It can break the previous pacts contracted with its opponents and impose its new conditions under the threat of war against all those polytheists who reject the Law of God and His Messenger (verses 1–5; the filth verse is called ‘the sabre verse’). The Bedouins who refuse to participate to the Just War (jihād) in the Way traced by God, are severely condemned; the Peoples of the Book are subjugated and required to pay the jizya tax. Social groups are thus categorized politically and theologically, the dividing line being religious in principle, but political in fact. Only those who return to God, or surrender in political terms (tawba), who pray publicly with the community and pay religious alms, are recognized as full members of the Community chosen for salvation, and are also allowed to enjoy social privilege and protection and benefit from equal political rights in the new emerging polity.
Let us define further the characteristics of historicity made explicit throughout the sūra. It includes the history of events produced by and for the nascent community of believers (mū'minūn) between 610 and 632, the dynamic of the changes introduced into Arab society over the same period and the mythical-historical consciousness that made it possible to link concrete earthly history with the History of Salvation, which has remained the driving force of so-called Muslim history until the present day. We know how much the contemporary history of ‘Muslim’ societies owes to the recurrent dynamic of this consciousness, but the fact that Qur'ānic Discourse can transcend and sanctify the most profane and commonplace history in this way, should not be allowed to obscure or obliterate the radically contingent nature of the events that were the pretext for its appearance. In other words, it is essential to be aware of the disproportionality between the initial contingency that gave rise to the discourse and the inexhaustible dynamism of the mythical-historical consciousness that draws nourishment from it. This point of view is altogether decisive for the exegesis of all the fundamental religious text and especially for sūra 9 in which the profane, the normative, the political and the contingent reduce divine intervention to a series of formal admonitions. The fact remains, however, that the historicity illustrated by the sūra is very precisely the relationship between truth and time, knowing that Qur'ānic time consists of the finite time of earthly life deeply and constantly linked to the infinite time of eternal life. Celestial time thus serves as the obligatory framework and reference point for terrestrial time as a duration experienced and is not merely a theological or philosophic concept Qur'ānic time is fully existential time in duration, chronology and spirituality Every instant lived through is filled with the presence of the God who speaks, judges and acts in the Qur'ān, and is then reactivated in the ‘heart’ of every believer as he performs his daily religious practices, meditation, rememorization (dhikr) of the History of Salvation and liturgical recitation of the revealed Word, as well as his ethical and legal conduct in accordance with the normative standards (aḥkām) laid down by God.
This reveals the source of all the misunderstandings and misleading commentaries that result from a positivist and historicist reading. To take into account only chronological time, containing the facts — events, biographies — as the ‘modern’ historian tries to do (in other words, cutting them off from the existential temporal framework of the mode of understanding founded by the Qur'ān and, more generally, the sacred writings of living religious traditions), is to refuse to penetrate that specific historicity, understood and experienced as the relationship to the Truth incessantly renewed in a time filled with religious experience, in contrast to the splintered, numbered, finite time of secular existence (the political, the worldly and the profane). It is also true that the two temporal modes affect one another, engendering confusion between religious, political and worldly processes, the three Ds in Arabic: Dīn, Dunyā and Dawla. Instead of redrawing the frontiers and connecting points between these domains after centuries of confusion, so-called ‘modern’ Islam has allowed the state to encroach progressively on religion, the political function becoming hypertrophied and tending to monopolize control of the religious function, in order to compensate for glaring deficiencies in its legitimacy. Where separation has been successfully achieved (for example in the lay or secular regimes of Europe) chronological time, economic time measured in terms of profit and loss, has chased into the privacy of each individual's consciousness the homogeneous time of the hope of Solvation. It should be added that this eschatological time is overlaid with all sorts of mythological inputs that it would take a historical psychology of exegesis to define. Today, Qur'ānic time is pulverized into a mass of social and ideological times whose common characteristic is that they empty historicity of the truth gained from experience of the divine and that of the unschooled exegesis universally attempted by militants working to set up a political regime arbitrarily called ‘Islamic’. The arbitrary nature of exegetic manipulations resides in their total indifference to theological research practised as ‘the faith tested through the trial of time’ (a definition produced by M. D. Chenu: la foi mise à l'épreuve du temps); and in total ignorance of the intellectual, scientific and spiritual preconditions required from the exegetes and doctors of Law ( a'imma mujtahidūn; see The Qur'ān: Formative Interpretation, ed. A. Rippin, Variorum, Ashgate, 1999). Unschooled exegesis today includes such examples as that produced by the murderers of the Trappists at Tibhirines in Algeria, who quoted verse 29 of sūra 9 to ‘legitimize’ an act that is contrary to all the Qur'ā'n's teaching on the subject of the ahl al-kitāb. The murderers of President Sādāt did the same thing. This means that this ‘exegesis’ cannot simply be rejected as a cheap way of getting rid of some of the deviations caused by ignorance; that would be tantamount to saying that the violence committed by such people cannot affect either the society of which they are members or (in particular) the Qur'ānic message they use as the supreme instance of authority. 18A more all-embracing approach would be to take these social and politico-religious practices into account in order to radicalize the deconstructive analysis of the relationship between Violence, Sacred and Truth. The basic question would then become: what is the meaning of religious discourse to the various activists who refer to it as the divine instance of supreme authority whose articulations of meaning are beyond all argument, all discussion, and therefore demand immediate, loving obedience. This question gives rise to a second one: how can human subjects be made to integrate the subtle, but crucial distinction between assumptions of meaning (effets de sens) and substantial, objective, intellectually constraining meaning differentiated from significance. These distinctions are currently made by the practitioners of discourse analysis, but they remain foreign, too abstract and ineffectual among those who have not received linguistic training. The modern system of education fails to spread scientific knowledge and critical postures of mind about empirical, current knowledge based on beliefs and common sense (le bon sens), just as the theologians of ancient times kept the masses away from any exposure to theological discourse which might disturb their genuine, spontanuous ‘faith’. At the same time, every individual citizen is entitled, according to democratic principles, to express his ‘difference’, his ‘identity’ by free assent or dissent in every debate, in many socio-cultural and linguistic environments. The combination of the lack of controlled information and the right to interfer in any debate, produces all of the conditions required for an expansion of social discourse based on semantic disorder which extends into the field of Qur'ānic exegesis and debates concerning the so-called Islamic Law. I have personally experienced this expandic semantic disorder with several different large audiences in Muslim and Western contexts when I lectured and had to respond to all types and levels of objection, rejection, confusing mixtures of subjective beliefs, ideological representations and irrational statements presented as undisputable as undisputable ascertained knowledge.
When all these facts are taken into account, reading sūra 9 or any other text received and used as an authoritative, fundamental reference, becomes a more complex task than the simple exegetic effort (ijtihād) performed by the classical exegetes and jurists. But a new conflict then arises. The believer expects and requires the explicit, reliable delivery of the ‘true’ meaning of the verses to illuminate and guide his practical conduct, secure his existence within the community and ensure his personal salvation. This existential priority that cannot countenance the slow, uncertain and potentially subversive quest of reflective hermeneutics, thus ensuring that practical preeminence of improvised, uncritical, arbitrary so-called exegesis more politically than religiously driven. In all formerly colonial societies, religions reveal their ambiguous historical function more than in any previous context. On the one hand, they aim explicitly to promote the dignity of the individual, while on the other, they are a powerful, efficient tool used by militant leaders to sacralize, ritualize and ideologize collective representations, political institutions and social, moral and legal orders. Verse 5 of sura 9, known as the verse of the sabre in classical exegesis, is a good example for illustrating the previous observations.
When the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters (al-mushrikūn) wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent (tābū) and take to prayer and render the alms payment, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful.
It is obvious why this verse feeds the unthinking zeal of literal-minded believers, and why it embarrasses those who have been won over by modern notions of human rights, religious freedom, tolerance and free inquiry. Either it is to be applied to the letter at all times and in all places to maintain the idea of jihād as a just and purifying war effort in order to achieve the advent, spread and longevity of the revealed Truth, eternal and sanctifying; or it has to be bypassed and relativized by reference to other verses that are more pacific and more favourable to an apologetic development of human rights from the Qur'ān's point of view. 19 In both cases, the concerns, ideas and political passions dominating contemporary history especially since 1979 (the year of the victory of the Iranian Revolution) and 1989 (when the Cold War was replaced by the ‘End of History’) are being projected on to the Qur'ān, and the historicity of both the Qur'ānic text and of our own time is denied by fundamentalist militants in a single combined act of reading a religious text and interpreting the veiled, hidden historical meaning as the ongoing process of globalization. How can the search for new horizons of meaning be emancipated from the theological assumptions and prejudices of classical exegesis, the confusing, misleading manipulations of the contemporary semantic disorder and, last but not least, the arbitrary fragmentation of the subjects of knowledge imposed by an academic establishment which continues to disregard the ideological interaction between religious imaginary and the present hegemonic pressures of the law of the marketplace and liberal philosophy? I have begun with this verse 5 because, even in sūra 9, all of which is devoted to the assertion of political, social and cultural victory, it represents the extreme peak of violence in the service of the ‘rights of God’ (ḥuqūq Allah) who Himself is presented as the Ally of the chosen group. It is in this sense that violence is sublimated at the outset into a sacrificial act performed as the expression of grateful obedience required under the Pact of Alliance (‘ahd, mīthāq) reactivated and reformulated in the Qur'ān. Violence is designated indirectly in the verse through the verbs kill, besiege, capture, ambush, all references to standard military operations in Bedouin razzia; it is not named directly by the term ‘unf, which would have required the opening of the very kind of legitimacy debate that is being embarked upon here. The invocation of God and His Messenger suffices to sacralize the whole vocabulary of war and persuade the believer that he is acting for the Cause. This confrontation between a good Cause supported by an absolute Referent (God, Nation, Country, Honour) and crimes against society committed by perpetrators who are remote from this Referent, is present, with varying degrees of awareness, in all human conflicts. It is always in the name of Right-Truth-Justice — al-ḥaqq in the Qur'ān — that a given group fights opponents mired in injustice, denial of Truth and the Law. Violence as a legitimate response to aggression against the revealed Truth is not given a theological justification in the Qur'ān; it is an option that is amply justified in Arab poetic tradition long before the Qur'ān. The well-known contrast between glory and ignominy (maḥāsin/mathālib), virtue and vice (faḍā'il/ naqā'i⋅) outlined in the rich concept of ‘irḍ, code of honour that confers an ethical and political status on warrior violence, internalized from childhood by everyone. So it would be anachronistic to try to introduce a theological aporia into the verses of sūra 9 that call for just combat in the name of God and his Messenger. The historical restitution of the semantic and anthropological content of the verses should precede examination of the theological aporia, which can only concern the wish displayed by contemporary militants to apply these same verses in our own modern ethical, law-abiding and political context. Pope John Paul II pronounced in Rome on 12 March 2000 a public mea culpa covering all the violence, persecution and failures to live up to the Gospel committed by Christians throughout the history of the Church. This is an act of high theological significance in our modern culture, which reflects on violence usurping philosophical principles and legalistic criteria that were literally unthinkable to all the generations of believers until Vatican II at the earliest. The mea culpa can be extended to all the earlier generations in the time of the history of salvation, but not in that of the history of ideas and systems of thought, for every period of thought is marked by the limitations of the unthinkable and the unthought. Agents of the Inquisition and Galileo's judges, were among the many who were and are incapable of thinking that they apply the effects of meaning of the Gospel rather than the Will of God (which they nevertheless thought would remain forever mysterious to humankind).
The task of reflective hermeneutics is not to emphasize the historicity of the verses in order to suspend their application in the modern context. This interpretative strategy is used by certain commentators who want to alter some of the precepts of family law in particular, while preserving the divine status of Revelation. The objective of a consistent critique of religious reason is to use all the resources of intelligibility provided by the human and social sciences to remove the issue of Revelation from the episteme and epistemological posture associated with the dogmatic spirit to the fields of analysis and interpretation opened up by emergent reason. This research strategy should lead to the acceptance of an expanded, more relevant cognitive status in the context of an explanatory theory of the religious phenomenon, via the liberation that teaches that individual religion is able to achieve its own interpretative tradition. So no more time should be wasted on those apologetic contortions dissimulating calls for the violence of the so-called jihād a⋅ghar (or minor jihād) behind the nobility of major spiritual combat, preached by mystics under the advantageous name of jihād akbar (or major jihād). Similarly, let us have nothing more to do with those misleading comparisons between the clemency of the juridical status of the dhimmīs in Islam and the intransigent crudity of Christian theology in its attitudes to Jews and Muslims. What has to be achieved is a definitive exit from the socalled religious regime of Truth based on the Violence, Sacred, Truth conceptual triangle, itself ensconced in the prophetic discourse. Religious belief should also be delivered from the functional duality maintained hitherto between the liturgical function of the recited sacred text and the normative function of the rule of law derived from the Official Closed Corpuses by the doctors of law.
This duality, which people have to live with but which is not open to criticism, refers back to the very different parameters of each human subject's private experience of the divine on the one hand, and a political regime's attempts to legitimize its codes of law by citing transcendental authority on the other. Here, the theoretical and practical need to distinguish between the religious and secular parameters and maintain their autonomy, becomes apparent. Presented in this way, the distinction goes well beyond the ideological, intellectually sterile opposition between clericalism and anti-clericalism in the name of a secularization that reduces the religious to a residue of emancipatory history and falsifies the relationship between meaning and power. This combative secularism employed in the service of a specific political project — construction in France of a Republic that is ‘one and indivisible’ — neglects one of its own founding principles, that of philosophic openness to the study of all human channels for the production of meaning. By ‘privatizing’ religion, through its elimination from the teaching syllabus in state schools in the name of ‘national education’, the French Republic's ‘compulsory, secular and free’ principles for schooling equally all citizens has generated a lack of religious culture and abandoned religious affairs to the exclusive responsibility of the various ‘churches’. This has resulted in the impossibility of developing a critical scientific inquiry directed at the religious phenomenon. Instead of this emancipating knowledge, the so-called secular schooling has enhanced among the citizens what sociologists describe as ‘the culture of disbelief’, at a time when the question of the religious phenomenon, as I am trying to define it in this book, has become one of great political urgency, all the greater in that it was thought to have been dealt with for good by the progress of positivist scientific knowledge since the nineteenth century.
4. Back to Semiotic Analysis 20Despite the reservations expressed above on the semiotic moment of reflective hermeneutics, it is still useful to recall the educational value of a methodological exercise enabling the intemperate intrusion of theological reasoning to be suspended. Thus, in the case of verse 5 which we are still considering, it is worth remembering that it cannot be read outside the structure of individual relations or the framework of communication common to all Qur'ānic Discourse (with a few adjustments, this framework can even be generalized to apply to prophetic discourse in the Bible and the Gospels). The communicative activity (le faire communicative) contains and orients all the other modes of action, stacked one inside the other in a hierarchy that analysis should describe by signposting the enunciative couplings and uncouplings. We know that God as the Subject-Transmitter (Allah) fulfils several actantial roles: initially an ‘I’ external to the text, but nevertheless the source of all the pronouncements and an ‘I-We’ involved at all levels of discourse, channelled through the Prophet-Messenger-Annunciator, through the latter's mediation in terrestrial history. Making these roles and functions explicit as they emerge in the discourse enables us to pay attention to the mechanisms for the articulation of meaning and the acceptance of this meaning by those it is intended to reach. This is how the new mode of belief will be constructed, linguistically as will, psychologically, the new human subject called upon to internalize that belief (and open his heart to the word of life, as the Qur'ān puts it).
So it is the revelatory power of prophetic discourse that transforms belief and the subject in the time lived through by those protagonists who are ceaselessly confronted in action and the discourse that accompanies prophetic discourse will transform it into paradigms of human existence, first at the level of the groups initially involved, later for all the groups and peoples drawn into the same processes of ‘conversion’. In effect, it is from the repeated, active, current intervention of the I-We, reinforced by the recitation, reading and interpretation of the Qur'ānic Discourse, that the religious imaginary takes on a consistency and receives an energy projecting it towards the bottomless I of the protagonist subject, external to and transcending the discourse and at the same time constantly present. There is a Sendes (S.A.I) and a Recipient (S.) of communicative, narrative, referential, cognitive, legislative, performative discourses. He is in a relationship of Alliance with a primary Recipient — Muhammad — who also has a dual status, being the relay-recipient of (S.A.2 + Aer.2) and (Aer.2), driven by the (wordless) force of the utterances transmitted and thus responsible for the actualization of the message thanks to the involvement of the collective recipient (S.A.3), referred to as qawm, al-nās or mū'minūn according to the changing situations in the Discourse). This is a third complex protagonist-subject. Ideally, it consists of Adam and his status bound to the Creator (S.A.1) by the primordial Pact (mīthāq); concretely, it consists first of the inhabitants of Mecca, then of Medina, then of the Hijāz, then of the Dār al-islām which should extend progressively to cover the inhabited earth under the process outlined in verse 5; even more precisely, according to the same verse (S.A.3), in fact includes adjuvants (an⋅ār), more commonly known as believers (mū'minūn), and their opponents, the polytheists (mushrikūn), hypocrites (munāfiqūn), the depraved (fāsiqun), Jews (yahūd) and Christians (na⋅ārā).
The System of Production of the Societies of the Book-book
Inaugurating Event (Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad) →→→ terrestrial history (th) →→→ History of Salvation (HS)
- God (Allah) announces a judgment or delivers a message.
- Some of those addressed by Allah refuse to listen to his message; some hear it and refuse to believe in it; some accept the message as knowledge, but refuse to follow it in worship and in daily life; and only few well-inspired persons fully accept the message: they are the believers, the party of God (Ḥizbullāh).
- The day of Judgment will surely come. The believers are rewarded with salvation, while the rebels are punished and rejected by God.
- Disciples-Witnesses transmit the authentic wording of the revealed Word of God and the following generations pursue the transmission inside the Umma with its schismatic communities referring to differentiated living Traditions with their appropriate collective memories.
- Historical building process of Official Closed Corpora used as the intangible founding Sources of the divine law (Shari'a, Canon Law, the interwoven complex Tora-Halakha-Midrash).
- Interpretative corpora produced by Interpreting communities (Sunnī, Imāmī, Ismā'ilī, Ibādī, Zaydī, Nu⋅ayrī, ‘Alawī …) using selection, elimination, crystallization, mythologization, sacralization in their hermeneutic strategies.
This paradigmatic structure is represented in the following diagrams.
| S.A. = Subject-Actent |
Aer = Addresser |
Aee = Addressee |
The reader should not become discouraged or irritated by a technical terminology which may appear pretentious and pointless, especially in its English translation. As I have said, its purpose is educational, to bring out the fundamental and irreducible mechanisms of all linguistic and semiotic articulation of meaning for a communication whose adequacy is measured by the number of those it succeeds in convincing. Apart from that, the terminology needs to be technical, being intended to liberate the hearer/reader from the standard associations that inevitably arise from the received vocabulary of orthodox belief. Without this strategy of pedagogic liberation, the theological presuppositions of pre-critical belief will constitute epistemological obstacles to the decisive operation of critical distancing from religious reason.
The diagram enables verse 5 to be read as a micro narrative within the macro frame-narrative (récit-cadre) represented by the basic narrative of the initial Alliance (mīthāq) linking God with Adam (see sūra 99), a narrative that is repeated and expanded upon in several of the episodes that constitute the History of Salvation (a history of vanished peoples and the role of the prophets according to the actantial diagram presented above).
S.A.3 in Mecca and Medina includes opponents who reject the Alliance. A struggle is therefore necessary in order to transform rejection into acceptance. We thus return to the narrative route common to the whole of the Qur'änic Discourse and, through its example, the prophetic discourse:
- Situation to be transformed (reduce all categories of opponents);
- heroes of the operation (S.A.1 and adjuvants or helpers, an⋅ār);
- varying fortunes of the struggle;
- recognition or the stage of the transformed situation (victory of Islam).
In verse 5, protagonist S.A.2 — the enunciator — is not manifested grammatically, but he reappears in the next verse (if an idolater seeks …); Protagonist-Subject 1 may, as here, address imperatives (kill, arrest, besiege, ambush) directly to S.A.3, which necessarily includes S.A.1. In this way, the actantial unity of S.A.1, S.A.2 and S.A.3, or the Party of Haqq — the True-Good-Just (History of Salvation) in opposition to the party of the False-Bad-Unjust (opponents designated by use of the third person: they, them) is stressed. It should be noted that all opponents are designated by a single name — ‘polytheists’ — and that they are consigned brutally and totally to misfortune, negation and death without any justification of this condemnation being supplied, at least in the immediate context. In fact, the whole of the Qur'änic Discourse, internalized and lived out as the revealed Word, provides ample justification. Two social and jursiprudential categories — believers versus idolaters — take emerge at the level of grammatical articulation; the discriminatory value of the whole sūra is tawba, used as one of its two names (the other is al-barā'a), is in the way it decides the fate of opponents by classifying them under salvation or damnation, reward or punishment, life or death in the religious register; and under freedom or subservience (see verse 29 on payment of the jizya), integration or exclusion, honour or dishonour, victory or defeat in the social, political context. Here, as throughout the Qur'ānic Discourse, however, the religious function acts as a dictatorship of purpose (la dictature de la fin); in the injunctive, normative, trenchant forms of the discourse that can clearly be seen as the first movement towards what was to become the systematic construction of orthodox doctrines and codes of law in the service of a centralizing political power. It would take but a short time under the caliphs, imāms, sultāns, emīrs and today's ‘presidential’ leaders for dictatorship of political purpose to be substituted for the dictatorship of purpose that the Qur'ānic Discourse projected as primarily religious and only secondarily secular. The religious science developed in all political contexts since the Umayyād dynasty has invariably accentuated the primacy of religious acceptance of Qur'ānic Discourse while demoting, minimizing and taking a negative view of any intrusion of wordly or political ends.
To show more clearly how the text of sūra 9 helps establish a more precise idea of the mode of articulation of worldly and political purposes with the religious purpose defined as the quest for eternal salvation, all we need do is spell out the real content of the vocabulary organized into semantic constellations around the central concept of Tawba. The following extract is a brief inventory giving an idea of what I mean by ‘semantic constellations’; 21
- Mu'minūn/kāfirūn, fā⋅iqūn, qawmun lā ya'lamūn;
- ⋅alāt, zakāt, ⋅adaqa, qurubāt, jizya, maghram;
- Masjid ḥarām, bayt Allah, masjid Allah/masjid ḍirār;
- Amr Allah, Allah ghafūr raḥīm, tawwāb, kalām Allah, Sabīl Allah, riḍwān;
- Al-asburu-l-ḥurum, nasī'm marra aw marratayn;
- Al-yawm al-akhīr, janna, daraja ‘ind Allah, najas, nār, khizy, fawz, īahāra;
- Tijāra, kanz, dhahab, fiḍḍa, amwāl, awlād, ikhwān, azwāj, ‘ashīra, fitna, qa'ada/kharaja, jahada, nafara, na⋅ara, junūdullah;
- Aghniyā, ūlū-l-ṭawl, al-mu ‘adhdhirūn min al-a'rāb, sakhara, iztahza'a, al-muhājirūn, an⋅ār, al-ladhīna-ttaba 'ūhum bi-iḥsān;
- Sayyi’, khasira, habatat a'mālubum, ‘aduww, qatala, ḥāraba, akhadha, ghilza;
- ‘amal ⋅āliḥ, ṭā'a, ḥudūd Allah, barā'a, ‘ahd, istajāra/awliyā’, nūr Allah, alhūda, al-dīn al-ḥaqq, al-dīn al-qayyim, ‘ālam al-ghayb wal-shabāda, rabb al-'arsh al-'aẓīm.
The list could be extended and the whole vocabulary of the sūra classified in semantic constellations but the groups shown here are sufficient to highlight some of the problems of exegesis and some of the mechanisms for the production of meaning. Overall, the vocabulary and style of the sūra are on a denotative level giving immediate comprehension; there are very few live metaphors, the kind of semantic innovations so frequent in other types of discourse such as narrative, transmission of knowledge, liturgical or revelatory. Here we see indications of time, of place, of concrete social groups (yawm ḥunayn, masjid ḍirār, masjid ḥarām, ūlū-l-ṭawl, al-a'rāb, etc.). Similarly, the mimetic rivalry between competing groups centred on issues symbolic of power is clearly expressed in the contrast between the noxious and impious mosque and the holy mosque, the manipulated pagan calendar (nasï’) and the calendar established by God ‘the day He created heaven and earth …’, alms given in order to be closer to God (⋅adaqa, qurubāt) and humiliating tributes (maghram, jizya), pacts respected in imitation of the Holy Alliance and pacts broken for material reasons …
These oppositions enter into the more general dialectic of the construction of the Self (= the actantial solidarity I-thou-you) and the Other (they, them); initially a social and political dialectic, changing as it develops into a semiotic and semantic apparatus with a great power of sublimation, sacralization and ontologization of the ordinary experience of the protagonists indicated in the discourse. It is this constant passage from an actual social-historical process to paradigmatic utterances of existential import (establishing ideal objectives for human existence) that gives the Qur'ānic Discourse an inexhaustible supply of energy in socio-historical situations similar to those that lay behind the original formulation. Here lies the revelatory power of the prophetic discourse; the revelatory function discernible in the linguistic mechanisms of the discourse served as a concrete basis for the theological construct of the concept of Revelation. The literature about the i'jāz or inimitable linguistic status of the Qur'ānic Discourse, had an intuitive grasp of this revelatory function, but made it into an apologetic rather than a systematic investigation of language.
At this stage of the analysis, it is appropriate to add some nuances to the actantial diagram suggested above. In effect, the emerging self, anxious to ensure its social and political security in the short term, still included some unreliable individuals — hypocrites and the depraved (munāfiqūn, fā⋅iqūn) — who were fomenting discord (fitna), secretly rejoicing over reverses suffered by the transforming hero (the Messenger) and watching for opportunities to revert to the previous self, to clan and tribal loyalties in a polytheistic/idolatrous setting, before the imposition of the tawba, experienced as capitulation to a victorious group rather than as sincere conversion to a religion of salvation (the difference between aslama and āmana as expounded in sūra 49).
We now perceive the dual value of the tawba. In the social-historical process to which it refers, at the beginning, it means the unconditional surrender of opponents, or at best a ‘peace with honour’ enabling yesterday's opponent to become a zealous combatant for the absolute triumph of the Self. 22 The primary signs of capitulation are prayer and the alms levy, two acts presented as exclusively religious, but which have a determinant function of social and political integration. Praying publicly behind the Prophet or with a group of Muslims, paying a tax that, by changing its name (from maghram to ⋅adaqa or zakāt), takes on a religious significance while still fulfilling the same socio-political function, meant breaking with traditional loyalties, leaving fathers, wives, children and chattels behind in order to join a new group. This is how the refusal of the Bedouin to engage in jihād can be explained. Although the jihād was presented as a struggle on behalf of God, in practice it was fought using tactics (siege, ambush, murder, capture, looting) and objectives (conquest, expansion and consolidation of the state) that are commonplace in confrontations between social groups of all sizes (in this case, the Arab tribes and clans, before the conquests extended the same phenomenon with the same stakes to many other peoples). The Protagonist Subject-Sender-Recipient (Allah) assigns roles and statuses and decides on the integration or exclusion of individuals or groups, through an ideal definition of the tawba in which its dual aspects, sacred and profane, religious and secular, can be perceived. The conscious of the believers is reshaped by positive values and actions tracing a dividing line with negative beliefs and solidarity:
The true believers, both men and women, are friends to one another. They enjoin what is just and forbid what is evil; they attend to their prayers, render the alms levy and obey God and His apostle. On these God will have mercy. God is mighty and wise.
God has promised the men and women who believe in Him gardens watered by running streams, in which they shall abide for ever: goodly mansions in the gardens of Eden: and, what is more, they shall have grace in God's sight. That is the supreme triumph [Verses 71 and 72].
The men and women believers are a social group defined firstly by the mutual support they owe one another and their communion in the same gestures of allegiance to a governance — the Prophet — legitimized by an Authority, God. They have a clear understanding of good and evil, since they enjoin one and forbid the other; they are bonded to God by a Pact. In exchange for their obedience, they are to receive eternal Salvation, presaged by succour (na⋅r) here on earth.
The religious face of the tawha consists of a collection of images or representations that organizes a cosmic imagery of flowing streams and goodly mansions in gardens that are impossible to place in our empirical space-time. God's approval, also promised, materializes only insofar as it is mediated by the approval of the Prophet and the whole group. We now come to the profane and empirical face of the tawba: obedience to an established political power, to ethical, legal and cultural standards wholly acceptable to members of the group since they effectively create and promote them.. Throughout history, tawba defined in this way was to represent the decisive procedure and the obligatory route for the re-integration of a deviant Muslim into the community. Thus, for example, the Ḥanbalite thinker Ibn ‘Aqīl was subjected to the ritual ordeal of public retraction of the deviant positions of which he was accused.
The same Authority that defines and organizes the Self also designates the Other: ‘those … who do not forbid what God and His apostle have forbidden’ (verse 29). What is at issue here is a social and cultural integration — one could even call it semiological, in view of the external signs of obedience — through the ethical-juridical standards and ritual behaviour that define the domains of the permitted and the forbidden. All areas of existence are affected by this regulation: pure and impure (rijs, najas-ṭahāra), sacred and profane (masjid ḥarām, ḍirār, ashhur ḥurum, ‘ām), meaning and power, wealth and poverty, righteousness and deviation, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, earth and heaven, and so on. None of these areas is defined in itself independently; each presupposes all the others with, however, the intangible hierarchy of God with all His attributes, the Prophet — enunciator, mediator and guide, and the believers, recipients of benefits and grateful servants. These three levels of manifestation correspond to three differentiated roles of the Protagonist Subject-Sender-Receiver whose presence fulfils the destiny of creatures and of all Creation (in secular terms, the world, mankind and its history). They all come together in ‘the religion of Truth’, ‘the straight religion’, Islam — connected to the system of connotations generated by the tawba — the final version of the religion approved by God for all men.
This last paragraph is unsatisfying to read. When we use the Qur'ānic vocabulary directly, we depart from the deconstructive meta-language of semiotics and re-introduce all the determinations accumulated over centuries of usage of this vocabulary and the commentaries thereon. It should not be forgotten that this vocabulary has a concrete history which became increasingly obscure to believers with their collective memory forged by a literature that is far more closely concerned with the religious transfiguration of profane history into the Inaugural Moment of the descent of Revelation than with unearthing the reality actually experienced in this Inaugural Moment itself. All historiography thus came to be contained within a grand design of an outline-narrative which is essentially mythical and theological. 23 As I have said elsewhere, this point of view is crucial: it is the only one that makes us use a combination of linguistic, semiotic, historical, sociological, anthropological and philosophical analyses, thus delineating the area of a new form of interpretative thought on the religious phenomenon, one which is never cut off from the other constituents of global socio-historical reality. Thus, in sūra 9 and many other passages in the Qur'ān, the concepts of ‘religion of Truth’, ‘straight religion’ and ‘Islam’ are involved in the social dialectic animated by protagonists whose horizons of meaning and immediate interests are divergent and serving to raise the bidding on the same stakes of truth and salvation defended by competing groups — Jews, Christians, idolaters, infidels, hypocrites — whose names are marked by strategies of integration or exclusion according to their response to calls that have become warnings for the tawba. The concept of One God is reworked, not for the sake of its own content, but to repudiate, from the outset, the way in which it is used by other Peoples of the Book. ‘The Jews say Ezra is the son of God, while the Christians say the Messiah is the son of God. Such are their assertions, by which they imitate the infidels of old. God confound them! How perverse they are!” (verse 30).
The debate concerns the Authority behind the legitimacy of the Prophet's power and that of the believers; it requires Jews and Christians to correct their errors ( tawba) in the same way as the idolaters/polytheists must do. Henceforth, power can belong only to God (redefined correctly by the Protagonist Subject-Sender-Receiver founder of the new Alliance) and the Prophet (currently waging a struggle on all fronts, military, political, cultural and symbolic; this is the meaning of the jihād of salvation, to which believers are called and which is rejected by the lukewarm, the hesitant, the perjurer). The believers themselves are ranked by the date of their commitment to ‘the struggle for God’. This continued in several forms and was to be codified by jurists who would trace the frontiers between the land of Islam and the land of war ( Dār al-islām/Dār al-ḥarb). ‘God has said’ would introduce all authoritative arguments to settle conflicts between the categories of protagonists already singled out in sūra 9. We can thus see how returning to the social and political determinants of the Qur'ānic Discourse obliges us to expose two operations fundamental to any ideational-ideological discourse. In order to ‘absolutize’ the purpose being proposed to the social protagonists, the mediator of that purpose must also be absolutized (in this case the religion of Truth and Righteousness taught and approved by the true God). The operation to absolutize the purpose would undergo a surreptitious ideological drift when the functions assumed grammatically, semiotically and historically by the protagonists named God and His Messenger were transferred to a multiplicity of human mediators who, in practice, took over these roles. I refer to all the doctors of the Law, all the exegetes, all the historiographers, all the judges ( quḍāt) who would later interpret ‘the word of God’, gloss over it and amplify it indefinitely under the pressures of changing historical, cultural and social contexts despite the persistence of the compulsory connotations of grammatical and semiotic constraints, of the constantly recited and read Qur'ānic Discourse. 24 The change can even be said to amount to an obliteration of Protagonist-Subject-Sender, whose representation in the imagination of believers undergoes constant transformations that only an analytic historian could identify and explain in an objective fashion. At the Qur'ānic stage, Allah is presented as a protagonist constantly present in the daily life of the Prophet and the believers. This is attested by the number of occurrences of the name of Allah and His representative attributes as the grammatical subject of verbs. While the word ‘Islam’ only appears seven times; 25 the ratio is spectacularly inverted — in favour of what I call the portmanteau-word ‘Islam’ — in contemporary Islamic discourse, amplified by ideological commentators and other essayists in the West. What this means is that the concept of God as developed in the Qur'ān does not escape the workings of history as regards religious awareness and religious life. This is another explicit finding of our reading of sūra 9, but one which orthodox Islamic discourse continues to maintain in the category of ‘the unthought’. The question of mediation is acknowledged, but never thought out adequately, by the orthodoxies born of the great ideologies that have tranformed history. The entire monotheistic tradition recognizes the mediation of the Prophets, and of ‘authorized’ clerics, to actualize the revealed Word of God, but this recognition remains on the level of the representation of faith, or rather making the religious imaginary inseparable from the social imaginary. That is why more attention has been paid to speculation on prophetology rather than to the study of two mediating factors of all human existence, namely, language in its different modes of the effectuation of thought (semiological universes), and social history in which the work of history interacts with that of the mind. This is not to claim that the exegetic and theological tradition has totally ignored these two mediating factors; but it has dealt with them using the modes of intelligibility appropriate to essentialist, substantialist, idealistic and literalist thought, unable to incorporate the dialectic of the anthropological triangles defined above. In his Universal History, as in his Commentary, al-Ṭabarī collects all the outline-narratives 26 inspired by the mythical, pious vision of the Sūra of the Prophet in order to place each verse ‘historically’. Not only do the narratives create the illusion of an historical reconstruction of the circumstances of the Revelation ( ashāb al-nuzūl), but they made it difficult to gain access to social history in its initial mediating function, since the most banal events are often transfigured into miraculous acts or used as paradigmatic or theological/juridical teachings. We have already shown that a modern reading should not arbitrarily dismiss mythical narratives, as positivist thought has long dismissed what it calls legends, fables or popular tales. It is right to include such material as an object of historical psychology, in order to take account of the historicity of reason, imagination and imaginary and of the collective memory. All readings by believers enrich the historian's documentation by helping to restore the religious anthropology appropriate to each socio-historic context. In its way, the Qur'ānic Discourse itself effects a believer's reading of the long tradition that the History of Salvation represents for the peoples of the Book; it contributes its own creative dynamic by reshuffling the symbolism that underlies that tradition. To this end, it builds up in successive brushstrokes the spiritual standing of the Prophet-Messenger who plays a part in the final transformation of the Alliance. On several occasions, he is asked not to allow himself to be impressed by the fortunes and progeny of the opponents. The power of the transforming hero is then sublimated, for he himself ‘ has not a friend, nor any support but God’, he ‘ suffers neither from thirst, nor exhaustion, nor hunger’ (verse 120). When the worst comes to the worst, ‘ If they give no heed, say: “God is all-sufficient for me. There is no god but Him. In Him I have put my trust. He is the Lord of the Glorious Throne.’” (verse 129). Any believer would seek to appropriate the content and horizons of hope opened by this verse; it is characteristic of the believer's existential reading of the Qur'ān whose formulation responds specifically to the believers’ expectation of the indefinite renewal of hope in situations of disarray or insecurity, during ordeals and especially when facing the inevitability of death. Muslims following the cortege of someone who has died — whatever his social rank during his life — repeat the verse: ‘To God we belong; to Him we inevitably return’. The ritual recitation does not necessarily imply meditative internalization of the content; but the declaration conveys an idea of the extent to which meditative and consistent thought about death has departed from our culture of disbelief.
If, in the context of sūra 9, we notice injunctions which seem rather to suggest a position of strength for the transforming hero, it is because Mecca has been re-conquered and the safety of the community is more certain. Thus, the Messenger/hero can, and should abstain from praying for some of the dead, from paying his respects at the graveside of those who have ‘remained sinners to the last’ (verse 84). He should refuse to associate them with the struggle even if they ask it; he agrees to kill them, fight them without mercy, force them to pay tribute as a sign of their inferior position. Preaching addressed to the ‘heart’, to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, has given way to discriminatory and intransigent political conduct for the purpose of establishing the loyalty, commitment and behaviour patterns required by a new system of values in the process of consolidation. Reference to this system explains the dismissal of the solidarities practised by the enemy in the polytheist context and the extremely high value placed on the break with parents, children, clan, wealth and the immediate life in order to recast the social bond on different foundations. Praying for the dead is a public act that consecrates not only each person's integration into the group, but a new spiritual communion between the group's individual members, all equally called to join in the History of Salvation. The interdiction on praying for ‘dead sinners’ thus aims to trace a political frontier as a necessary precondition for entry into the History of Salvation, the ultimate objective of all the transformations sought in the sūra and the whole prophetic discourse: to deconsecrate the old solidarities while consecrating the new ones.
The same happens with goods and chattels. The adversary's goods are deconsecrated, and reconsecrated when they become the property of believers who ‘purify’ them through the zakāt or ⋅adaqa into help for the poor, orphans and travellers. The socio-political dimension is still inseparable from the legitimizing religious authority; the more so since the beneficiaries listed in verse 60 result socially from the conditions of war and recruitment imposed on the party of the believers. Objectively, then, what was happening was a confrontation between two systems of solidarity underlying two competing regimes of thruth. Despite its contingent and profane origins, the system that was to become ‘Islamic’ would retain, thanks to the Qur'ān and its amplification through exegesis, a sacred and sacralyzing value. 27Still more significant is the way in which the status of the individual is treated in the context of the struggle for undisputed power. Just as believers, men and women, are raised to an ideal level of material, legal, ethical and spiritual dignity, so infidels, sinners, hypocrites and Bedouins are consigned to death, indignity, impurity, eternal punishment and the status of non-persons, for they dare to ‘makemerry’ and ‘scoff’ when a sūra is revealed (verses 64–65); they build a rival mosque to counter and destroy the new religious symbolism; they are liars who unilaterally violate signed pacts; they refuse to recognize the new sanctity and continue to assert the validity of the sanctity inherited from their forefathers … For such as these, even God's pardon is withheld; the tawba solution is not possible because we are still at the stage in which some of the believers are susceptible to these sowers of discord, defiance and revolt (verse 47).
A modern social science interpretation of these events is that they were just a run-of-the-mill ideological dichotomy between social groups competing for control of the symbolic capital essential for the legitimization of power and authority. Perhaps that is the case, but the explanation is still reductive if it does not incorporate the dimension of hope as a motivating force and a theme of fulfilment for the spirit across inescapable material constraints. It is also reductive on a more specific point in the quest that has sent us on this journey with the aid of sūra 9. We are trying to shift the concept of Revelation and take it beyond the naïve representation that theologies have given it and into a more concrete and objective, though not reductive, understanding. After all that has been shown, it is important to bear in mind that in the stage of the Qur'ānic Discourse, the dynamic of consecration/deconsecration takes precedence over discrimination between the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure, salvation and damnation, virtue and sin, good and evil, all of which, once religion has become confused with the state, will be established, codified and fixed in ritual repetition and sovereign application of the law. At the stage of sūra 9, though, all the signs can still be inverted, even after the reconquest of the holy space of Mecca. This dynamic, which is experienced and made perfectly explicit in the vocabulary, syntax and rhetoric of Qur'ānic Discourse, marks the irreducible difference between what I have called Qur'ānic fact and Islamic fact: 28 Spiritual tension reaches out towards an anticipated Absolute and the ritual and legal codification of dividing lines that are traced and imposed by an Imperial state, or a multitude of local regimes all laying claim to the same inaugural message. Anyone who, despite all the above, is still inclined to judge the Qur'ān and Islam in terms of the modern definition of human dignity unaffected by racial, confessional or ideological distinctions, should remember one rule of scholarship and one intangible reality. The rule, sometimes violated even by professional historians, is the one forbidding the use of anachronism to manipulate the past for ideological ends. It is, of course, totally ignored by apologists and militants. The reality to which I refer is the persistence of that same rigidity, the same rejection of the individual in our modern settings, although this is now used for the polemical reasons generated by any pursuit of power. It is more precise and more fertile to say that sūra 9 enables us to measure the full anthropological extent of the conceptual triangle chosen as the title ‘Violence, Sacred and Truth’. Religious wars, nationalist and ‘patriotic’ intra-European wars, wars of colonial liberation, ‘just wars’ in the Gulf, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Algeria, Iran-Iraq, and so on, are all illustrations in so-called ‘modern’ contexts of the dialectic, exemplified in sūra 9, between the three anthropological invariable forces: violence, sacred and truth.
The recurrent strength of what we can now call the existential Qur'ānic Paradigm resides, on the one hand, in the structural and ideological exemplarity of the situation of conflict eventually overcome in Mecca and Medina and, on the other hand, in the force of suggestion, representation, sublimation, transfiguration and upheaval possessed by the articulations of meaning specific to the prophetic discourse. 29 The dimensions of an unexceptional episode of history have been expanded semantically, rhetorically and semiotically to provide access to an Absolute, experienced by each believer as an internal reference, structuring a religious consciousness. The historical process of the emergence, consolidation and spread of that consciousness has not yet been made the subject of research but one can only marvel at the rapidity and scale of the conquests achieved under the aegis of such a fragile community, just as one can only wonder at the capacity of the early Christians to resist persecution. One hardly dares mention the role of the spiritual, for that cannot be measured in the same way as the size of an army and the effectiveness of different methods of warfare. In the same way, the utterances and explosions of violence of Islamic movements are reported today in the forceful style of the media with the aim of reinforcing collective hostility to a barbarian religion, rather than problematizing Violence and Truth as an anthropological dimension of all human societies. We know how the media and classical Orientalist discourse prefer to interpret the ‘other’ in the cognitive framework of the Manichean pattern, instead of contributing to the epistemological shift proposed by the defenders of a radical criticism applied equally to all cultures and traditions of thought, including those pretending to be an achieved model for all the others. The struggle for hegemony between the cognitive models cannot be separated through ongoing political competition between social groups in the same society as well as by the nation-states on the geopolitical level. The most recent example of the struggle is provided by the well-known, redeeming role of an industrial proletariat dogmatically opposed to the corrupt and oppressive action of the capitalist bourgeoisie. This is nothing more than a ‘modern’ version — an atheist one, of course — of the semiotic actantial model of the prophetic discourse, of which the Qur'ān is an Arabic-language variant introduced in a cultural context already steeped in the messianic preaching common to all the peoples of the Book. So no one should be surprised by the consonances between Islam and socialism now being emphasized in the so-called Arab socialist revolution, followed and defeated by the so-called Islamic Revolution initiated by Khomeini. We have already seen how the Qur'ān introduces all the ingredients and themes of a recurrent ‘revolutionary’ ideology, including the redistribution of wealth to protect the rights of the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the weak and uprooted, unconditional fraternity between believer-militants; absolute equity of the leader of the City-Umma in protecting the rights of all by enforcing respect for God's rights; incessant struggle against all figures of oppression, untruth or error (Pharaoh, Tāghāt, immoral cities). The dominant themes are those of mythical consciousness and the regenerators of collective hope thanks to the periodic appearance of ‘Masters of the Hour’ ( mawlā-l-sā'a) — Prophets, imāms, mahdīs, reformers, chefs historiques, leaders, fūhrers, za'īm, and so on. 5. From Ahl al-Kitāb to the Societies of the Book-book
5.1 The Ahl al-Kitāb
We need to go further in our attempt to reassess the concept of Revelation beyond the theological, communitarian, apologetic, polemical perspectives inherited from the past. To cross the boundaries still maintained against the evidence provided by reliable contributions of the social sciences, I shall propose the route from ahl al-Kitāb to what I call the societies of the Book-book.
The ahl al-Kitāb, Peoples of the Book, are the Jews and Christians with whom Muḥammad had to deal in Mecca and Medina. They are mentioned in the Qur'ān as the possessors of the earlier Revelation given through Abraham, Moses, Jesus son of Mary and others. The Qur'ān repeats with insistence that they believe in God and His Messengers and they should have no fear about their destiny in the hereafter. Abraham was ‘neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a pure Muslim’ which means, in the context, a believer totally devoted to God. But the Qur'ān also represents this category of believers in another way. Jews and Christians were opposed to Muḥammad and his claim to be a prophet, and they refused to accept the Qur'ān as the ultimate manifestation of the Word of God to the elected people. After the reconquest of Mecca, the emerging Muslim community felt more secure as is clearly shown in sūra 9, so that it was thus able to face ahl al-kitāb with more assurance about its vocation to be the truly elected community who accepted the totality of Revelation, while Jews and Christians had both committed a capital sin by altering, mutilating and deviating from the Word of God (taḥrif). This means that Muslims are now in charge of keeping, transmitting and applying the Word of God in its entirety and its authentic wholeness. There is no place for discussion or competition concerning the symbolic content concentrated within the themes received and developed by all three interpreting communities: Revelation, the Word of God, prophetology, Messengers, Holy Scripture, Alliance (Covenant), eschatology, etc. It is a great pity that there is insufficient documentation on the detailed issues and discussions to which only short allusions are to be found in the Qur'ān. Ahl al-kitāb are likened other people who went astray and eventually ignored the authentic and complete version of the Revelation, revealed from Abraham to Muḥammad. Thus, a new image of the Revelation is imposed through an insistent polemic in the Qur'ān: Jews and Christians have altered the scriptures and preverted their meaning (taḥrīf); they do not follow the Law of God and they are uncircumcized in their hearts. Through this religious polemic, a dogmatic definition of the Holy Scriptures is elaborated on the basis of the ‘arguments’ exchanged in the political and cultural climate of Medina from 622 to 632. The elements of this definition in the Qur'ān can be summarized as follows:
- Jews and Christians are recognized as those for whom the message of the Heavenly Book is intended30, but they have refused to recognize the Qur'ān as the ultimate Revelation emanating from this Heavenly Book.
- The Book (Kitāb) is identified with the collected Qur'ān (Mu⋅ḥaf), and later the Mu⋅ḥaf would be compared with the uncreated Heavenly Book (the Qur'ān speaks of umm al-Kitāb, The Archetype Book).
- Muslims are integrated into the wider spiritual community of believers in the line of Abraham that lasted without discontinuity until Muḥammad. Ahl al-Kitāb, are admitted into this community with restrictions. Islām is the true religion, the one and only religion of the truth (al-dīn al-ḥaqq), explicitly agreed by Allah.
- At the end of the Qur'ānic Revelation, sūrat al-Tawba assigned a special theological and legal status to ahl al-Kitāb who would become ahl al-dhimma in the Islamic polity. Because they have distorted the Scriptures, they are required to pay a poll tax: ‘Fight the ones among those who were given the Book, who do not believe in God nor in the Last Day, nor forbid whatever God and His messenger have forbidden, nor profess the True Religion, until they pay the poll tax of their own accord and act submissively’. (9, 29).
This vocabulary will be largely used later in the polemical literature against ahl al-kitāb and also by the jurists in order to expand upon the status of the ‘protected people’ (ahl al-dhimma).
- A more rigid boundary is established between ahl al-kitāb, who are enlightened by the knowledge (‘ilm) delivered in the Book, and the (ummiyyūn, jāhiliyya), people of ignorance, pagans who remain untouched by the Qur'ānic ‘ilm. Here we meet again the process already explained of the sacralization and transcendentalization of secular history. Political and social issues particular to groups in a very limited space and time (Medina and Mecca between 612–632) are transferred to a ‘sacred’, ‘transcendental’ level by the Qur'ānic Discourse. Should we consider this as a current practice of men in society who sublimate ordinary events to show the way to the absolute? Or is it legitimate to return to positive history and to demythologize religious history, as R. Bultmann and others in the historicist climate of Western culture, have attempted to do since the nineteenth century?
The rationality implied by the demythologizing thesis is already present in the extensive and innovative works of Ibn Hazm (eleventh century) on the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. 31 This thought-provoking, talented polemicist was able to make use of much more reliable information than any of our contemporary so-called ‘ ulamā’ who still ignore the philological method of classical historians, to say nothing of the multi-disciplinary practice of the ‘new history’ ( La nouvelle histoire, illustrated since 1930 by the French school of Annales). The issue of the taḥrif, for example, has not yet been considrered in its two most significant outreaches:
- as a critical history of the texts or the oral transmission actually used in sixth-seventh century Arabia by Jews and Christians;
- as the crystallization in Muslim religious imagery of the ideal authenticity of the Scriptures as exemplified exclusively in the Qur'ān. The whole image of the ahl al-kitāb, with all the polemical controversies used against them on the central issue of the revealed Book and its authenticity, says more about the distortion of the history of salvation as it is presented in the Qur'ān and the apologetic building of the ‘best community ever manifested among people’, than it does about the central issue of the cognitive status of Revelation as we have attempted to problematize it for the first time in the history of monotheistic religious thought. Instead of focusing on the content and scope of the Truth transmitted in the Revelation, the polemic inaugurated in the Qur'ān itself turned the spotlight on ritual expression and taboos such as prohibitions concerning food, circumcision, fasting, collective prayer on Friday, the Sabbath and Sunday so as to differentiate the visible attributes of each self-promoting community. This function of Revelation can be described as mimetic rivalries (surenchère mimétique) operating on the common symbols and myths used in the prophetic discourse since its Biblical manifestations.
This cumbersome heritage of representations and polemical confrontations nurtured religious imaginary, rather than any rational endeavour to deepen the revelatory power of prophetic discourse as a vehicle for this same regime of truth, beyond its ideological instrumentalization, in order to promote communities in competition for power and religious foundations of divine Law. From the wars between Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate to the Crusades, from the struggle between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe, to colonial domination and the wars of liberation, and the ongoing struggle for the Holy Land between Palestine and Israel, the ideological framework set by the Holy Scriptures continues to support, motivate and legitimize the rivalry for power with a perverting interpretation of what all protagonists call ‘Revelation’. The current dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims has not yet moved on from the stultified, stereotyped, dogmatic themes bequeathed by the ancient polemical literature on Jesus son of Mary, the alteration of Scripture, the trinity translated as three Gods, the legal status of ahl al-Kitāb, etc. Let us see if the concept of the societies of the Book-book can help to make a cognitive leap to overcome all these mental, psychological obstacles.
5.2. Societies of the Book-book
The literature of Revelation is all the more cumbersome since it repeats orthodox beliefs that date back to the Middle Ages, especially in the case of Islam and Judaism. In this respect, I have substituted the concept of ‘societies of the Book-book’ to that of ‘peoples of the Book’ (ahl al-Kitāb introduced by the Qur'ān), as has been shown, in order to place the new religion in the spiritual perspective of the history of salvation and to show the possibility of breaking free from the confines of dogmatism by displacing the theologically loaded concept of ahl al-Kitāb to the sociological, linguistic, cultural framework of intelligibility aimed with the concept of societies of the Book-book. Shifting from the theological framework to the cognitive strategies of social sciences does not mean totally dismissing once and for all, the theological legacy which to this day conditions the mentalities of the three monotheistic communities in relation to issues concerning the ‘true religion’, the authentic Revelation and the right way to salvation traced by God Himself. Methodologically speaking, we need to make a detour through the social sciences in order to expand upon the problematization of both concepts, ahl al-Kitāb and societies of the Book-book. I have tested several times the cognitive fecundity of such a detour in many meetings, seminars and conferences between Jews, Christians and Muslims (dialogues and trialogues)
All believers and non-believers can pursue a search for the common cognitive ground of historical, linguistic, anthropological and cultural inquiries about the genesis, the use made by each theological tradition of the concept of the Book and its interpretations. We know how Christians and Muslims stick to their theological vision of God as a Trinity strongly negated by the Qur'ān with its belief in the oneness of God. If we displace this opposition to the cognitive framework proposed by the societies of the Book-book, many important dimensions and points ignored thus far, rendered unthinkable within the inherited framework of dogma, will appear in a new light and be seen to have other horizons of meaning. The apologetic defensive posture is then replaced by a critical, methodical, epistemological inquiry into the religious phenomenon itself, beyond the contingent, limited disputes inside each religion and between different versions of monotheist common ground.
The objective is first to show that the theological concept of the heavenly Book with a capital B, or the Holy Scriptures, is inseparable from the cultural, historical, and anthropological concept of book with small b, a material, civilizing artefact that permitted the shift from oral to written culture, illiteracy to literacy. Religions, as well as the state, benefited from this material, cultural and intellectual shift. This functional solidarity between the Book and the book on the one hand, the state which made religion into an instrument for political goals, is suggested by the expression Book-book. As soon as the state gains consistency, as is the case with the Umayyād dynasty in Damascus in 661, or with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity, religion is subordinated to politics with the assistance of clerics who produce books designed to expand upon the teachings of the Book. In Christianity, as in Judaism and Islam, the cultural expansion of the book means the promotion of handwriting and reading as indispensable means of access to knowledge and power, inseparably, to the detriment of oral culture in which access to knowledge is equally open to all, even slaves. It is through the book that the class of clerics expands and becomes all powerful since the clergy, rabbis and ‘ulama’, manage the power of sacralization conferred by the Book by producing books that record all of the codes that govern society, not only the body of laws but also the semantic, semiotic, historiographical, rhetorical and grammatical codes …
This functional connection between books in general and the Book is clearly demonstrated in the very production of the Gospels. The Evangelists chose to write in the Greek language, culturally more enabling and with a greater spread of speakers, in order to convey the message that Jesus of Nazareth delivered in Aramaic, a dialect of a Semitic language whose literary heritage cannot be compared with that of Greek at that time. Is it not indicative of the tremendous effect of the book on the Book that theologians who were social protagonists concerned with effectiveness, so rapidly and totally abandoned the original form of the Message in Aramaic? Let no one suppose that I want to put forward surreptitiously the apologetic argument of a superiority of the Qur'ān which has always been transmitted in the language of its first utterance. No, let us keep well within the anthropological field of struggle between the oral reasoning resting on unwritten cultures, on peasant, mountain-dwelling or nomadic groups, politically scattered and the graphic reasoning (see the works of J. Goody) opposing its categories, definitions, and order thanks to the functional solidarity of the four forces that eventually dominate all of the social fields — the state, scholarship (clerics) and orthodoxy. 32It is the combined interplay of these four forces that accommodated the heavenly Book, al-kitāb, in a rich symbolic elaboration referring back to the religious vision of the ancient Near East, to the political and cultural functions attached to what I have called the Official Closed Corpus which becomes, in fact, a book like all others, a material object produced by the technology of a new civilization (writing, alphabet, paper, binding, etc), but maintained on a fixed level of sacredness and protected by a power that is, in essence, political (the Church or the Caliphate as temporal institutions). This transformation of the Book into books sold in bookshops and preserved in libraries, had and still has continuous retroactive effects on the Book which should require a theological reassessment within each community. That is what the Mu‘tazili school did at one time, with its theory of God's created speech. In every community, theologians devoted most of their attention to maintaining the Official Closed Corpus as a material book on the transcendental level of the heavenly Book, recited, read and interpreted as the irreplaceable imprint of the Word of God. The willingness to sublimate the book to the dignity of the Book reaches its greatest distortion and manipulation when it asserts that one can do without the Gospels and go straight to the Revelation made in the person of Christ, or that the Mu⋅ḥaf, a volume containing the totality of Qur'ānic statements, itself participates in the uncreated nature of the Qur'ān as the Word of God.
These processes of distortion of the concrete reality that are designed to offer transcendental and timeless archetypes to the collective psyche, and not only to the religious conscious, take place in societies in which believers are proactive, contributing to the interplay between the book and the Book. That is why we intend to concentrate on the societies in which the transformations and manipulations are currently taking place and can be observed, described and interpreted, instead of restricting all these concrete operations and facts to the abstract debates among ‘believers’. The concept of societies of the Book-book thus aims to restore the complexity of the linguistic, sociological, political and cultural dimensions to the global phenomenon of the intensely sublimated Book; in other words, we historicize what has been systematically dehistoricized, until the nineteenth century, despite the work of critical history of the Formgechichte and the Sitz im Leben type. The Book is studied as a dynamic force capable of reviving mental energy, as an ontological space in which collective imaginaries can project all the eschatological visions, the existential hopes, the daily aspirations, the symbolic constructed figures of the History of Salvation. All these projections are contemplated, lived and repeatedly recollected as the culmination of terrestrial history designed by God as the way leading back to Him. The processes and mental mechanisms, the driving internalized forces that I am describing have more to do with individual and social psychology, cultural frameworks of representation, communication and political strategies for reaching positions of power, than with theology which is itself a mere discursive activity devoted to sublimation, transfiguration, ontologization, sacralization, distortion and dehistoricization. In this perspective, modern theology should start from a radical criticism of all its inherited constructs, as has been done for the deconstruction of classical metaphysics inherited from the Aristotelian logocentric tradition. The relevance of this criticism can be extended to the present discourse on human rights which is a secularized version of the psyche of emancipation after the collapse of the psyche of scientific progress nurtured by positivisi sciences since the nineteenth century.
‘Believers’ will object that by thus removing the pre-eminence and priority of theology, in the defence, illustration and construction of the ‘faith’, one fails to put religious truth into perspective and distorts the balance of the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the immanent, eternal salvation and short-term successes. This common objection can be seen to contain a persistently dichotomous, bipolar thought which has long been the undisputed foundation of theological and philosophical systems of thought in the Greco-Semitic sphere of thinking. The strategy of knowledge required by the societies of the Book-book incites rather to notice, describe, and deconstruct the mechanisms of sacralization, transcendantalization, ontologization, theologization, mythologization, ideologization, deification, canonisation, dehistoricization, etc. which are still sustaining the construction of all types and levels of legitimacy in social, religious and political life. Traditional faith keeps retreating back to fixed essences, intangible values, indisputable principles and postulates against the powerful evidence of the accelerated shifts, the ongoing upheavals and the irreversible leaps imposed by modern history. Is there a way in which to validate a ‘Modern’ faith without incorporating the new conditions assigned by history to the genesis, metamorphoses and radical contingency of meaning through social and historical dialectic? I leave this question open for the believers as well as the unbelievers in the hope that both will find it possible to share their different perspectives in their joint endeavour. Some theologians agree, for example, to think and research in the perspectives proposed by freethinkers such as M. Focault. 33Let us take the example of the prophetic function as it is implemented in the three monotheistic experiences. Like the Qur'ānic Revelation, the prophet Muḥammad has been routinely excluded from the status of prophet which is reserved for the prophets of the Bible in Christian and Jewish traditions. This elimination is possible in the framework of Aristotelian logic based on the principles of identity, contradiction and third excluded (le tiers exclu); it becomes arbitrary when one moves on into pluralist reasoning, including all the existential complexity of human life and evolving psychology, emotional ties and affective commitment. In terms of historical, cultural, and anthropological analysis, the prophetic function must be deciphered in way that anthropologists use for the emergence of civilizing heroes in social groups, or ‘The production of great men’ according to Maurice Godelier's book entitled La production des grands hommes. The prophet differs from these heroes by the attitudes and the discourse that he uses and the psycho-social impulses that he sets in motion. He relies on the complex phenomenon of ‘Revelation’ and raises messianic hope in the group. If one suspends the theological definitions imposed for these religious concepts, one can easily recognize in the prophetic function several components of the historico-psycho-sociological mechanisms leading to the emergence of heroes, leaders and ‘great men’ in different social groups. If there are specific characteristics of the prophetic function, they should be identified with more precision in the study of the phenomenon of Revelation and the messianic hope operating in the societies of the Book-book. In our modern sophisticated, rational societies, references to prophetic teachings and functions are still alive, disseminated and recurrent; they have even been elevated to the historical role of an alternative Model to the modern democratic, liberal, tele-techno-scientific model. On the contrary, the ‘greatmen’ and heroes described by anthropologists in archaic societies have no place, no relevance in our modern societies. In that perspective, we should ask how and why societies of the Book-book continue to survive and even challenge modern secularized societies with their so-called outdated beliefs, value systems and world vision.
In order to further develop the concept of the societies of the Book-book, it is worth comparing the way in which the Prophet is portrayed in traditional, pre-modern societies and the societies in which traditional beliefs and references interact with modern values, postulates and attitudes of mind. The prophet in Christianity has been presented as an elected partner, messenger and obedient servant of God. Jesus is God incarnate and the Son of Man in the same person. Muḥammad is presented in the Qur'ān as a man like other men; but the tradition has elevated him above the ordinary human condition. Like other prophets, he is someone who is inspired, a visionary, a sage, a guide, a powerful mind able to penetrate the mysteries and go beyond the limits of human knowledge, thanks to the constant illumination granted to him by God.
This exceptional psychological configuration is reincarnated periodically in new prophets or messengers. There is thus a continuity of the model presented in the conduct of peoples, though it is never imposed, unlike the power incarnate in the state (in the person of the emperor, king, caliph or sulṭan) and restrictive for all. The prophet is obeyed by virtue of the ‘debt of meaning’ which each member of the group contracts by listening to his ‘word of life’ whose truth is guaranteed by God. This totality of concepts, names and mechanisms covering a specific area of communication and action, are combined in the Revelation, itself inseparable from the prophetic function. Revelation is not a normative word descended from heaven to constrain men to reproduce indefinitely the same rituals of obedience and action. It is a proposal of meanings for existence, revisable (see the abrogating and abrogated verses in the Qur'ān) and interpretable within the framework of the Covenant freely consented between man and God.
The deviations and ideological drifts sustained by Revelation and prophetic function thus defined, can be measured when they become preferential instruments for legitimating all types of political regimes (imperial, royal, caliphate, imamate, emirate, sultanate). The British, American and French Revolutions imposed radical, irreversible ruptures with the religious hierarchy between the legitimizing authority and the legitimate power of the state. Rules of legitimacy were secularized; the sovereignty of peoples replacing the supreme authority of the divine Law. Or, to be more specific, the reason of the Enlightenment, in the words of Roland Barthes concerning Voltaire, has given its struggles the pace of a feast: Peoples promoted to the status of equal citizens strove resolutely for progress, liberty, an end to superstition and doctrinal absolutism perpetuated by religious beliefs and clerical institutions. Today, reason is in a more sceptical and critical position. It strives to return to the euphoria of the Enlightenment, but it cannot pass over in silence the resounding setbacks it has suffered since the nineteenth century: colonial domination, Communist despotism, Nazism, the creation and abandonment of the Third world, the dismissal of ethical and spiritual concerns, the support of the selfish individual citizen to the detriment of the person, the triumph of pragmatic liberal philosophy using the mechanisms of the free market, the destructive genesis of meaning, and so on.
One can no more return to the prophetic model because its historicity, its role in contingent action, discourses and institutions, has become evident. Nevertheless, it can also be objectively recognized that, at the time of the Enlightenment, prophetic discourse was not replaced and that in that capacity, it continues to make sense even in the present context that has been so radically changed by technology. The anomy of the mega polis and semantic disorder within hegemonic reasoning, entails the intellectual collapse of all satellite reasoning. Prophetic discourse, just as when it was first expressed, creates ‘debt of meaning’ for one who is able to regenerate the internal movement of the obedient conscience, because it is recognizing — in the sense of recollecting (which is the meaning of the verb ya'qilūn, ta'qilūn in the Qur'ān). The reciprocity of consciences asserts itself, feels and builds itself in this relationship of meaning-recognition, that the prohetic discourse initiates and sustains. It is at this level, I think, that we can interpret one of the functions aimed through the ‘return of religion’, after reason of Enlightenment has produced a belief in an irreversible historical setting in which religious belief and culture are definitively superseded by scientific, objective knowledge and the imaginary of progress. However, today as yesterday, the strategies for the conquest of power constantly monopolize the positive effectiveness and the profound impact of prophetic discourse in favour of systems of domination, exploitation, marginalization, elimination and hegemonic expansion.
The prophetic function and the discourse that expounds it can be exercised only in a cognitive and institutional context that favours mythical narrative over history, the spiritual destiny of the soul over the material nature of the body, the eschatological hope over the precariousness of life on earth, the supernatural element in natural creatures doomed to death and corruption, the imaginary representatios over the positive and rational realities, the sacred as force for the regulation of violence over the profane as a space for the dispersion of meaning and contention for power, wealth and material values. The state function that has nevertheless submitted religion to its control (not to say the civil organization of the clergy and the subservience of the ulamā’ in Islam), has inverted all the hierarchies postulated by the prophets, while preserving and spreading the ideological appearance of a conformity to God's instruction. This inversion currently extends through the sociological impact of fundamentalist movements, a harmful ideological crisis.
To complete the characterization of the prophetic function, it is necessary to evoke the messianic hope sustained during the course of centuries by the appearance of prophets, messiahs, mahdīs, saints, saviours, etc. The Messiah is not a figure of the history of salvation peculiar to the Bible; it is more a constituent force of the whole communal, national and ethno-cultural conscience striving for the appropriation of values of justice, security, knowledge and salvation. Messianism is a power for the transformation of the entire history of the world through an irrepressible wait that implies a radical reorganization of the current unjust order in the name of the Just order that will institute the Messiah (the Mahdī, or the Imām in Islam). Messianism binds indissolubly faith and justice, faith in the absolute novelty of the Time of Justice which heralds, here and now, the Time of Eternal Salvation; the demand for justice which feeds on all forms of oppression, domination and the crushing of the human condition which is nevertheless promised eternal life, a joining with God — the itti⋅āl according to the ⋅ūfī. The messianic vision advocated by revealed religions has introduced, or has been transformed into a linear concept of terrestrial history extended by the history of salvation; it has perpetuated, even into modern times, this invincible hope whose negative aspect has been called the ‘opium of the people’, while the positive aspect maintains man above downfalls inflicted by violence, ignorance, alienation and injustice.
In Islam, there have been numerous, recurrent messianic movements that have had variable impacts on societies as different as Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Senegal and the mediaeval Maghreb. Everywhere, the Mahdī, ‘ Master of the Hour’ is awaited with fervour and has sustained this ethos for religious and political faith which still mobilizes the feverish masses behind imāms or leaders who are far removed from the innocence of faith of the former ‘messengers’ or ‘inspired ones’. But here, one cannot overlook the use made by Marxism of the messianic hope: the proletariat had to work to the decline of the state, exploiter capitalism and all superstructures where the rights of man get tangled up. A thought called modern, scientist, and liberating, has used thus a reputable religious paradigm to gain political power and monopolize it in conditions and for results that are known. This example shows clearly that it is the social protagonists that generate the paradigms of thought and action, decide their use, their maintenance or their elimination. In other words, the analyst has to question the position that he must hold when faced with apparently autonomous phenomena of a religious or political nature and modernity. The latter, in particular, is often understood and used in the West to discredit ‘traditional’, archaic or ‘primitive’ cultures and ideas. It can also become an obstacle to critical knowledge. There is even a current of theological thought in the United States that believes that it is possible to speak of postmodernity while the concept of modernity is far from being operative, despite the wealth of literature devoted to the subject. I merely mention here the difficulty of highlighting the injustice done to Islamic thought when confronted with so-called modernity. 34 Beyond all differences between Christianity and Islam emphasized by theologians, the most revitalizing for relecting on societies of the Book-book has nothing theological about it. It is part of the historical relationship of each religion as compared to modern reasoning which has become hegemonic: Christianity has been constrained to face some intellectual and scientific challenges and to adapt its doctrines to irreversible achievements of critical thought; Islam, however, has either ignored these challenges (as it has ignored philological and historical criticism), or rejected the explicitly positive contributions of Orientalist scholarship by linking it systematically to ‘colonialist, imperialist’ scholarship. There has been no move away from the framework of ideology of struggle for political liberation that could make one lose sight of the intellectual achievements of human mind through the scientific revolutions and cognitive leaps achieved since the emergence of the modern critical posture of reason. Islamic thought cannot look critically at its historical trajectory and its doctrinal constructs without going through a comparative critical study of the three competing interpretations of the common cognitive framwork of monotheism. This new attitude requires Jewish and Christian traditions of thought to also agree to confront their own dogmatic versions of the True Religion and adapt them to the modern radical criticism of the religious phenomenon in the history of human cultures and systems of interpretation. In its expansionist phase, classical Islamic thought was confident enough in its intellectual dynamic creativity to integrate into its explorations foreign culture and thinking from Greece, Mesopotamia, Iran and India. It lost its intellectual pluralist, humanist momentum from the thirteenth century onwards; a trend that was reinforced in the nineteenth century and even more so after the emergence of the post-colonial nation-states. The ideology of so-called political liberation has almost eliminated, weakened, perverted and distorted all forms and levels of intellectual and cultural emancipation. In the current climate of chaotic struggle, Jewish thought has yet to be positioned in this context. The role of Jewish thought is one about which I have hardly spoken not because I disregard it, or minimize its high relevance to the subject, but for reasons of prudence. It is difficult, indeed, to evaluate disparities between the geopolitical solidarity of the State of Israel with the hegemonic supremacy of the West and such efforts of Jewish thought to preserve its independence with regard to the living Jewish tradition. As far as this tradition is concerned, its orthodox expressions would situate it rather in the same fundamentalist trend developed in Islamic thought. To my knkowledge, no attempt has been made in the cognitive perspective I am proposing here, to deconstruct the common system of representation and cognitive strategy used in the three monotheist communities to perpetuate their mutual exclusion from access to the privilege of the True election provided by the True religion.
The issues of our contemporary history cannot be confined, of course, to the internal monotheistic disputes and wars that have been prolonged, aggravated and too often instrumentalized by the Western secularized Model of Historical Action (MHA). Our critique of the cognitive status of Revelation should be extended to all other religions in Asia and Africa, including those secular religions described by Raymond Aron during the Cold War. In this perspective, I refer to the geopolitical and geoeconomic force which is mapping the whole world and controlling standard frameworks, tools and modes of thinking and acting. To face the intellectual responsibilities related to this new historical threat to the right of human mind to struggle for meaning, I refer to the plan outlined by Alain Badiou in his thought-provoking essay on St. Paul's cognitive posture differentiated from its later clerical, theological interpretations. I know that this philosophical answer will remain purely intellectual speculation, as long as it is not translated into the pragmatic language of the economic and tele-techno-scientific reason. This is the common, universal obstacle opposed to any quest for meaning not supported by the effectiveness of the will to power. In the present geopolitical map of the competing wills to power, there is no chance for Islamic thought to achieve the intellectual and spiritual breakthrough hoped, claimed, viewed and explained by isolated, disdained, if not threatening voices emerging from the outer periphery.
There is no doubt that in such an historical situation, one should radicalize critical thinking to an even greater extent, not only with regard to the religious phenomenon which is often more an imaginary, wild, protesting force than a coherent, organized, rational vision of an alternative Model of Historical Action (MHA), mainly in relation to the global system of ‘ functional consumed culture-technology-management-sexuality’ which covers, dominates and tends to obliterate the weakened system of art-science-governance-love according to Alain Badiou. 35 What is commonly called the ‘modern’ mind has taken over from traditional religion in order to implant the idea that man has a vocation for progress, good, intelligence and mastery of things, the establishment of justice, and dissemination of recognition of man by man. The ideology of human rights peddles everywhere, just as religion once did, the certainty of universalization of scientific, political, and economic conquest that western Europe has had the historical privilege to achive for the first time. Cain, murderer of his brother Abel, was the first to proclaim: ‘ There is neither justice, nor judge’. Sociologists and anthropologists prefer to approach societies as systems of inequalities in which judicial constructs try, here and there, to reduce. When invited to speak on the subject of forgiveness, Pierre Legendre chooses to start from the unforgivable, in order to be able to better stick to ‘ the principle of life itself in our kind’ and ‘ by concern to have in view the horizon of precariousness, uncertainty and despair’, 36 as imposed by the critique of current reason. I add, for my part, that this pessimistic philosophy generated by the deconstruction of all conceptual, institutional, and imaginary settings inherited in all cultures, must be retained only as a methodological strategy intended to liberate the human mind from the increasingly alienating pressures of mythologies, fictions and illusions, or at least to lessen the disastrous effects thereof, especially in those societies lumped together as ‘the rest of the world' since the triumph of one leading liberal civilized world. In spite of its strong and highly visible ideological presence, the so-called Muslim world — with the exception of the petrodollar countries — belongs to the former Third World characterized as the underdeveloped or developing world. The functions of religion in the process of global development are not adequately identified by relevant sociological, anthropological, historical enquiries. Precarious, fragmented economic development is reflected in the new social, psychological and ideological roles assigned to religion; the genuine spiritual, ethical ethos maintained for centuries in traditional societies, is more and more weakened, replaced by ritualistic mobilization of believers, social support for marginalized groups, and a discourse of hope and confidence to fill the gap created by absent and oppressive states and their empty ‘national catechisms’. The detailed explanations presented on page 97 have, I hope, provided an anthropological framework for studying the historical genesis, the cognitive status and the ideological functions of the living traditions in the societies of the Book-book. What I have said so far is just an introduction to an important book devoted to the complex issues I have raised in this chapter. We need to state here that the six levels of production of meaning and historical action enumerated on page 97, have never been clearly articulated as objects for deconstruction and critical assessment by any type or style of scholarship, ‘modern’ or traditional. The levels in question concern mutatis mutandis, the discursive practices and systems of representation common to the three so-called ‘revealed’ religions. After the emergence and expansion of the European Enlightenment, more so in the present expanded context of globalization, the coherence of the religious imaginary, thus constructed, and the contents and functions of the three sacred-sacralizing living traditions, experienced two types of disintegration:
- For religions dominated by the ideology of struggle against colonial and imperialist domination since 1945, the disintegration continues to be brutal, under the pressures of an accelerated history, ill-perceived and incorrectly evaluated in all its consequences, in the immediate and longterm perspectives. Just after the emergence of post-colonial states — including Israel — the ideological euphoria of liberation helped conceal the cultural and social cost to be paid for later economic, institutional, political, cultural, educational, intellectual failures. Religious authority, related to the horizons of meaning and spiritual creativity of the human experience of the divine, has been and continues to be practically deleted by the opposite face of religion as the clerical institutionalization of political struggle for power; in other words, the will to power with its intrinsic violence, has deviated from and overridden any quest for meaning or pretension to reach it and give it a sustainable status.
- A specific status is claimed for Western European Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant manifestations. It is currently accepted and agreed that, since its inception, Christianity has clearly separated the Realm of God from the domain of Cesar. I shall not begin here a discussion on this point, which refers to the opposite position attributed to Islam, constantly presented as a religion which has confused, since its first expressions in the Qur'an itself, the religious and political spheres. I shall make two provisional remarks:
2.1. Orthodox Christianity, since the schism in the Church (1094), has followed the same patterns as Islam because it has been less involved with the challenges of modernity than Catholicism and Protestantism in Western Europe and North America. The long and dramatic rupture imposed by Communist regimes has forced the Orthodox Church to develop an ideology of resistance just as Islam and Judaism did and are still obliged to do, more for political purposes than a spiritual and ethical revival.
2.2. Luther's protest emerged from within the Catholic Church as the first intellectual claim of religious freedom; Protestantism was thus born with the more decisive struggle of reason and its autonomy vis-à-vis the doctrinal Magisterium of the Church. The Catholic Church resisted the challenges of modernity, but many catholic intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, politicians, contributed to the modernization, and finally the conversion of Catholic thought to the positive emancipating aspects of intellectual modernity. But for some scholars, the specific status of Christianity is not limited to its historical privilege of being linked with the conquests and development of modernity; according to Marcel Gauchet, Christianity is the only religion leading out of religion; for René Girard, Christianity is the only religion offering a way out of mimic violence. These two statements require more comparative inquiry and theoretical confrontations; they merit an important debate on the essence and the functions of religion. What I have said about violence, sacred and Truth is, of course, a modest contribution to that debate through the example of Islam. Gauchet, like many scholars, ignores that Islam is theologically Protestant and politically Catholic. A commentary on this definition would show the necessity to re-examine the issue of religion and politics in the three monothestic religions.
To conclude this chapter, I shall just add the following remark: the dialectic tension between the Book and the book is clearly translated in the present tension between religion and politis, spiritual autority and political power, divine Law and secularized (laïc) law, mythical truth and historical knowledge … These interacting concepts are often used to point out the contradictions, the polemical oppositions developed by their respective defenders. The opposition has reached the level of mutual exclusion through physical violence, between fundamentalist defenders of the rule of God and the modern secular defenders of the rule of law, democratic values and human rights, presented as the specific ‘values’ of the ‘West’ versus ‘Islam’. What I have tried to suggest in this chapter is the necessity to excavate new fields of research an critical thinking on the stakes not yet perceived, not considered because they are hiding in-between the many concepts currently instrumentalized for ideological polarization.
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