Usual practice requires that in order to examine the same question in an Islamic context, we must necessarily start from the Qur'ānic data complemented by that of the prophetic Tradition, the teachings of the salaf al-⋅āliḥ (Pious Ancestors) and the reforming doctors included in the profession of orthodox faith (‘aqīda) peculiar to every community (ahl al-sunna wa al-jamā‘a, ahl al-'i⋅ma wal-l-'adāla, etc). Thus, the articles of faith adopted by orthodoxy are excluded from any critical work, in the sense in which the philosophical, then historicist, sociological and anthropological thought in Europe has continued, since the thirteenth century, to submit the contents of the Christian faith to increasingly radical interrogation and revisions. This is the meaning of the famous scholastic formula fides quarens intellectum. One can even go back to the Evangelists and the earliest apostles such as Paul, to retrace the long, uninterrupted history down to the present day, of an educational tension between the postures and categorizations of Greek thought on the one hand, and religious semantics and the symbolic capital of the Semitic tradition on the other hand. Jesus of Nazareth in effect, expressed himself in Aramaic within the synagogue and the already long and strongly crystallized tradition in the Hebrew Bible, whereas the Evangellists, accepted as reliable transmitters of the Christian message, expressed themselves in Greek.

Islamic tradition is characterized, on the other hand, by a remarkable linguistic — hence cultural — continuity in the transmission and usage of the fundamental sacred texts (at least until the eleventh century, in the case of the doctrinal literature entirely written in Arabic after the Qur'ān) and an increasing discontinuity of the cultural, political and intellectual fields that contain all the problems that had been thought or suppressed, related to what I prefer to call ‘believing’ in order to propound, in the very choice of the concept, the theme which theologians of the three monotheistic religions have long developed and defended under the name of ‘faith’. To explain this choice, it should be recalled rapidly here that the most harmful discontinuity, not only for religious thought, but for the general evolution of societies linked to the Islamic fact,¹ as essential referent of law, politics, ethics and social issues, is the rejection to the point of the lasting elimination of the philosophical attitude after the death of Ibn Rushd (1198). The disputatio (munāẓara) sustained by him with al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) at 80 years’ distance remained, as we know, a dead letter on the Islamic side, whereas Christian Europe, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, enthusiastically welcomed what became Latin Averroism. The discontinuity gradually came to affect theological thought, exegetic practice, the elaboration (istinbāṭ) of legal qualifications (aḥkām), political thought and historiography. Efforts made by liberal researchers and intellectuals, particularly of Arabic expression, between 1830–1940, have been too ephemeral, fragmented, often polemical and apologetic, intellectually limited and scientifically inadequate to be capable of simultaneously tackling the internal weakness of Muslim scholarship, the weight of neglected oral cultures and the challenges of a modernity mediated by an arrogant colonial regime that rejected, dismissed and alienated a large part of Muslim scholarly productions. It is under these historical conditions that the post-colonial national states promoted a process of (re-)building ‘national’ identities. The intellectual, cultural and spiritual history of all societies freed from colonial domination in the years 1950–60 remains to be written in a critical and factual manner, as well as to be considered in a long-term perspective and with the most appropriate tools and methodologies of historical psychology and sociology.

It is to this complex task, that is so lengthy, hence necessarily collective, that I am trying to contribute since I have asked the question about humanism in the Arab-Islamic contexts (see my Humanisme arabe au IVe/Xe siècle) and that of a plural, open rereading of the Qur'ān (see Comment lire le Coran?, text published in 1970, reproduced in Lectures du Coran). In tackling today the question of believing, I would like to provide a new illustration of the programme of a Critique of Islamic Reason, including a central problem already discussed in the Qur'ān, with the illuminating distinction between imān translated as ‘faith’ and islām denounced in sūra 49 as superficial submission, or even applied to norms and external conducts of adherence to a group of Muslims in formation (sūra 49). Since this problem has become a discriminating, theological point (maṭlab, mas'ala) from the first doctrinal confrontations, I will try to reactivate an old discussion in a framework of thought and with the theoretical objectives required by the current practices of critical knowledge. The possibility could be mooted of either of a refoundation (i'ādat al-ta'⋅īl) of the classical discipline of the Sources-Fundamentals (‘ilm al-u⋅ūl) in both their aspects, theological and legalistic), or of a re-working of what is obviously a contribution to the philosophy of the religion, using Islam as an example that has hardly been considered until now. At this stage, I would prefer to avoid speaking of an Islamic theology, for reasons which I shall specify later. I will certainly not go through the completion of such an enterprise in this essay. I will take the first indispensable steps along a path to which other researchers-thinkers will venture, I hope, to contribute supplements, additions, readjustments, confirmations and even invalidations. I have already explained in the introduction, the theoretical aims I had in mind when I confronted the three competing and conflicting postures of reason: the religious, the scientific and the philosophical. The confrontation is historical, and in no way normative. I avoid any value judgements, asserting the superiority of one posture over the other; which is why I suspend, rather than ignore or eliminate, as an historian, all of the theological, dogmatic assessments of orthodox or heretical belief. It is more enlightening to evaluate the cognitive consequences of the exclusive use made of one posture, while totally ignoring the necessity to consider the relevant teachings proposed by the others. I know how impatient believers as well as the defenders of the secularized culture of disbelief are to affirm their strong certitudes. When confronting each other both sides are intellectually arrogant. That is why I am defending a pluralistic, open epistemology that goes beyond the contradictory debates on the one-sided truth, or the right of each individual to hold on to his ‘difference’, without caring about the ideological dimensions implicit in each ‘difference’, or ‘identity’ currently based on emotional ties. Pluralistic epistemology will lead to a new approach to what is called fundamentalism. The latter attitude of mind is not generated only by religious reason; it can also be found in classical metaphysics practised in the name of philosophy, or in modern ideologies defended by a so-called scientific reason. As I have said in several contexts, I wish to illustrate and employ an emerging reason that is capable of emancipation from all forms, levels, types of institutionalized ignorance.

At first sight, the literature that I consulted might be thought to be too external to the subject matter. What connection is there between believing in Islamic contexts and an anthropology of the political and the religious spheres in Islam (J. Dakhlia), the civil war in Algeria, the approaches of social history applied essentially to Western societies, or even a dictionary of theology explicitly reserved for the Christian faith? In fact, strong links can be found between the books I have explored and the question of the subject and belief on which I am focusing in this chapter.

My first strategic option is to subvert, in the cognitive and intellectual sense, the religious field as it continues to be monopolized contentiously by fundamentalist theologians, political entrepreneurs who manipulate the religious-political beliefs and options to mobilize individual imaginary and collective national forces. Such a subverting task also concerns the social sciences as far as they continue to practice either an ethnographic description of religious rituals and beliefs, or reduce religious reasoning to its fundamentalist exercise. Examples of this subversion are provided in the works of P. Gisel and P. Evrard, P. Ricœur and A. LaCoque, J. Y. Lacoste (to a lesser extent) and many others who should be mentioned, even in Islamic studies like Uri Rubin, J. van Ess, A. Neuwirth, M. Lecker and many others mentioned in the Bibliography. These works enrich the exploration of the religious field while confronting with rigour the most recent and fruitful contributions of different currents of thought which have continued since the nineteenth century, to discuss, criticise, correct and challenge the prevailing approaches. We know how all the works of P. Ricœur aim at putting together again, re-articulating, and re-appropriating domains of reflexive thought and knowledge accumulated by the social sciences such as history, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. P. Gisel forms part of the same critical dialectic of influence, which incorporates all the currents of thought likely to stimulate research and radicalize the theoretical advances on the subject of believing, finding its roots in the experiences of individuals and societies. However, P. Ricœur tries to appear as a philosopher, whereas P. Gisel, professor of theology at Lausanne University, adheres explicitly to this discipline. Le dictionnaire de théologie by J. Y. Lacoste is, in this respect, an eloquent sign of the progress made towards an interactive practice of theology and philosophy, which is very new and very promising, both recognizing humbly to be indebted to social sciences, whereas these latter less easily renounce a sovereignty which is still inadequately established, particularly in respect of anything relating to the interpretation of religious phenomenon.

It is true that the subversion of the religious field in order to restore it to its own determinants and irreducible functions, cannot be conducted properly without the intervention of the social sciences when they consent, in return, to integrate in the same interactive practice, the questioning and the resistance of theology and philosophy. We will convince ourselves of the relevance of this requirement by reading the work, which is both a manifesto and a programme, edited by the late B. Lepetit, one of the initiators and brilliant practitioners of an ‘alternative social history’. The normative, edifying speculations of the theology of belief would be ineffectual if they failed to integrate the methods of sourcing and the levels of manifestation of beliefs in the institution and society as expounded by the historian J. Revel in his contribution to the book in question.

Two objections of unequal importance ought to be considered here. The first, apologetic and ideological in nature, deserves to be raised because it comes from a sociologically important current of militant Muslim demands for an ‘Islamisation of the sciences’, or, according to the title of a recent work by the Moroccan Abdessalam Yacine, an ‘Islamisation of modernity’. The founding idea is that Islam is not only a system of static beliefs and non-beliefs, dogmatically received and applied; it is also a thought provided with all the principles, methodologies, discursive procedures and conceptual tools of investigation and control for establishing and re-establishing, whenever necessary, the validity and legitimacies of all the orders of existence of man. This whole, recapitulated, duly transmitted and correctly instrumentalized in the great, living Islamic Tradition, is irreducible to any other and cannot be influenced, conditioned or deviated from by any other. Nevertheless, all the cognitive systems and models of historical action produced by modern Europe to promote and legitimize the hegemony of the West over the rest of the world, have sought and continue to seek the destitution and eventually the elimination of the irreplaceable Islamic tradition of thought and action. There is no simple mimetic rivalry in these arguments for constructing a hegemonic model in opposition to that from which one seeks to free oneself, then protect oneself. There is the claim of an ontological privilege which establishes the intellectual, scientific, ethical, political and legal validity of all the products of history acknowledged by Islam.

The instigators of this militant attitude do not give themselves the means of perceiving and avoiding the obvious amalgamation which they make between a historically legitimate struggle against a real situation of sub-jugation and an operation of validation which rests entirely on a believing, itself to be exempt from all scientific and philosophical examination. This is an excellent example of a subject of research that begins to take charge of the new social history in the Western sphere, but which is abandoned to the narrative and factual reporting of political scientists in the case of ‘radical Islam’. The concept of ontological privilege finds numerous applications in all religious communities adn even, with the correctives imposed by the secularization of thought, among modern utopian movements such as scientific socialism and Communist salvation by the proletariat. The reference to God, guarantor of ontological privilege, is in fact taken from the traditional institutional, theological and spiritual contexts in order to be adjusted to fit the structures of a social imaginary constructed with constant amalgamation between a scientific rationality that has been cobbled together and a belief system rooted in the unplumbed depths of an eventful, polymorphic, savage religious belief.

This situation is caused by the lack of a guiding hand of authority. All this should be retained as a not yet duly explored historical, sociological, anthropological and psychological domain of realities, because social sciences as applied to Islamic studies, too often remain dependent on the categorizations, the periodizations and problematizations of classical Islamology.² The second objection is more difficult to deal with because it comes from recognized researchers who occupy positions of power in prestigious academic institutions. It is pointless today to go back over the reluctance, and even open resistance shown yesterday by classical Islamicists and political scientists. Better to devote one's attention to the efforts of the few researchers-thinkers who try to detect the methodological shortcomings and the implicit or explicit ideology involved in the erudite accumulation of knowledge. It is well known that a large part of the narrative and descriptive literature about classical and contemporary Islam, is too dependent upon the written documents used to present what is given in the all-embracing name ‘Islam’. For this reason, this type of erudition contributes to the maintenance and spread of ideology implicit in the primary texts that are used without being deconstructed with the tools and procedures of critical discourse analysis. This implicit ideological solidarity between a type of scholarship and current expressions of Muslims as protagonists in society, is particularly evident in the material recently produced on the subject of so-called fundamentalist Islam. I include in these remarks the writings of Muslim scholars who add their own political or religious gloss on the shortcomings of erudite Western descriptive scholarship.³

I will content myself with pointing here to the Maghreb as a relevant example to illustrate the previous observations. I have retained the works of F. Colonna and of J. Dakhlia (see the Bibliography) because they are recent and their authors are very much involved in the epistemological and methodological approaches, writing, problematizations and cognitive options which have become emblematic of the masters of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). I have myself been won over by this innovative school of Annales, because it has provided many decisive illustrations of a successful combination between erudite research, pluralist methodology, historical epistemology and constant critical reassessment The history of thought in the Maghreb region of North Africa has not yet sufficiently benefitted from the type of scholarship represented by the school of Annales and the general history of this particular area also remains rather neglected so that it is difficult to explore what I have called since 1976 ‘the modes of presence of Arabic thought in the Muslim West’ (in Critique de la raison islamique, Paris, 1984; see also ‘Langues, société et religion dans le Maghreb indépendant’, in Les cultures du Maghreb, L'Harmattan, Paris, 1995).

The questions of conjuncture, scale, modalities, processes of expansion, assimilation, oblivion and elimination, so essential in the works of social history are only partially and incidentally applied to the study of belief in connection with the learned frameworks of religious thought which are in constant interaction with the oral cultures in Berber, as well as in colloquial Arabic expression Generally speaking, much that pertains to theology and religious law is not dealt with as object of social history and cultural anthropology. Where it is, it is for the purpose of repeating the orthodox categorizations and definitions, without prior deconstruction of the dominant Malekite orthodoxy in its learned formulations and diverse appropriations in the popular forms of lived ‘religion’ (which needs redefining each time in a microsocial history).⁴ I will return elsewhere to dwell at greater length on the works of J. Dakhlia and F. Colonna which contribute useful elements to an investigation of the horizons and limits of thought in the Maghreb. I note in passing that there is not yet any comprehensive presentation of a critical history of thought in the Maghreb which takes into account the Latin, Arabic, Berber and French expressions of thought. The nationalist option only retains the line of development of Arabic expression, without resolving the problem of the Maghrebian appropriations of the themes, problems, fields of reality and disciplines dependent on this line. It is clear that any such investigation in a particular historical, linguistic and cultural area, could make an important contribution to the issues of belief in Islamic contexts.

Believing thus defined has the advantage of encompassing all the types and levels of belief and, in particular, this modality called ‘faith’ that is more narrowly linked to the assent required by the self-referring discourse which is transformed into fundamental texts and canons of the Scriptures (I prefer to use the technical expression ‘Officialclosedcorpus’) of the great religions. Since the concept of faith is already developed in founding texts such as the Bible, the Gospels and the Qur'ān, I think it necessary to place it at critical distance with the help of a more comprehensive concept which makes it possible to place faith among all the modalities and levels of believing. This is what also fashioned Islamic thought, as will be demonstrated, with the concepts of i'tiqīd distinguished from īmān. In the Christian domain, there is the recent example given by P. Gisel who, in a very stimulating book, preferred to reflect on what he calls L'excès du croire (Paris, 1990) where the concept of faith intervenes incidentally, each time to be consolidated theologically. My objective is different, because I do not seek to use the expanding field of analysis of believing in order to reconstruct an Islamic theology by submitting it, as in the classical period, to interactivity with philosophical reflection and the repeated challenges of the social sciences. I have said that the existence of an Islamic theology remains problematic, not only because the very notion is disputed from outside, but because I have long been trying to open a debate in the framework of a comparative approach to the three so called revealed religions.

Before beginning this discussion, it is necessary to examine the possibilities of appropriation of French terminology strongly marked by philosophical and historical criticism and Arabic terminology with its strong orthodox Islamic system of connotations. A philological investigation in to the words themselves will not suffice. It is essential on the Islamic side, to specify the protocols of reading the founding texts on the one hand, and the orthodox doctrinal literature on the other hand It is on this point that my views vary as much from the traditional protocols which continue to establish themselves in the believing community as from the historicist and philologist approaches of Islamicists who declare that they stand by the exercise of a cold erudition, indifferent to the social constructs of all belief. Clearly, it is not easy to name the second category with precision The dividing line does not, in effect, separate Muslims from non-Muslims; Muslims who would, needless to say, be believers and Orientalists or Islamicists who would be non believers, even hostile to Islam according to the heresiographical perception conveyed today by ideological classification. We know of the active role of Christian Islamicists and Jewish believers who, epistemologically, share with the Muslims the theological premises of defence of ‘faith’ in a same God, a revealed given, the same exigencies of obedience to the Law supported by the same hope of salvation. There is thus a third category which has not yet received any particular denomination, or a fully recognised place in the institutions of the administration of activities peculiar to the believing communities on the one hand, and the secularized, academic world on the other. I dare not speak of researchers-thinkers, because all researchers are supposed to accompany their activities with an accumulation of learning and of critical and interrogative thought. Nevertheless, I do not think it would be unfair to point out the multiple and very significant differences between the intellectual postures and the writings of researchers-thinkers such as Paul Ricœur, J. Le Goff, Cl. Geertz, P. Bourdieu, J. P. Vernant and Others, and those of erudite historians such as M. Cook, J. Van Ess, B. Lewis, W. Madelung, to mention only a few well-known names.

The ‘believing’ reading has given birth to numerous corpora of belief, diverse and rich in historical content. Its theological posture ought to be restored in us options, procedures, and historically determined horizons as well as in its works of culture and civilization. It is in this work of linguistic, historical, sociological and anthropological restitution that the rights and intellectual responsibilities of the critical reading intervene. It is necessary to accept as objects of history, psychological analysis and historical anthropology what the ‘believing’ reading calls God, prophetic function, the revealed and revealing Word, the sacred, retribution, prayer, trust in God, and so on. Historians have already used all this religious vocabulary; but they have presented it in a scientific culture based on a prejudice in favour of rationality which has long been that of Aristotelian categorization, continued and restored by the reason of the Enlightenment whose strategies, argumentation and themes aimed precisely at the substitution of its ‘scientific’ sovereignty to that of religious reason under the institutional figure of the theological magisterium of clerics (bishops, pastors, rabbis, imāms). We have to deal with a bone of contention in which not all the files are open; those which are open are awaiting a more equitable instruction. This is the initial stage of the work which falls to the researchers-thinkers. Defining the cognitive status of religious discourse and the type of human subject which it is constructing, firstly requires an unlearning of the biased teachings of the culture based on the prejudice of rationality. This will be done by restoring to the culture of the marvellous its place and functions before they are dismissed under the precepts of Aristotelian science (the triumph of the logocentric tradition) and completed by nineteenth-century scientist and historicist positivism.

Beyond the two protocols of reading which continue to prevail concurrently, I have already pointed out in the Introduction to what must to be a third way which fully integrates the most fruitful exigencies of the historico-anthropological and linguistic approach, the practices and productions of ‘believing’ reading treated as objects of cultural and social history; the whole coming to sustain and establish a new interactive practice of philosophy of the religious fact, a comparative theology within the monotheistic framework open to subsequent expansion, and social and religious sciences. One of the strong and promising points of this orientation is the opening up of a cognitive field in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam would be dealt with on an equal footing, using the considerable resources already gathered by historians of the ancient Near East (biblical studies, semitic studies, societies, cultures and civilizations, always including the Arab and Islamic dimension with all the Judeo-Christian, Semitic and Greco-Latin legacies, as well as with all the theological schemes and frameworks which continue to be practised and reactivated under the pressures of contemporary political violence, as systems of self-foundation and self-promotion of various communities. It is here that I am going to let J. Y. Lacoste speak who, in the foreword to his Dictionnaire abovementioned, justifies the field that theology must cover in the following terms:

I would be the last to describe this position as apologetic, particularly after having read the whole of the work. I retain on the contrary, the heuristic incentives of a definition which deserves to be taken seriously by historians of philosophical and theological thought in what I have long been called the Greco-Semitic sphere and which I prefer to call today the cultural Mediterranean space. With this geo-historical concept, as developed by F. Braudel, we can develop a retrospective strategy to reread and rewrite the entire history of thought without excluding or putting aside the important contributions of classical Islamic thought. This approach would not only reassess our fragmented presentation of the history of philosophy, theology and sciences, but it would change the contemporary ideological climate in which the so-called ‘Islam and the West’ are opposed, and the Mediterranean area more and more marginalized with its various contributions to the shaping of European thought since Middle Ages. As an historian of Islamic thought, I agree with J. Y. Lacoste that theology as ‘an alliance between Greek logos and the Christian restructuring operation of the Jewish experience’ differs, in effect, from the line followed by Jewish thought as well as that developed by Islamic thought which cannot be reduced to kalām. This discipline cannot be correctly evaluated if it is excised from what has been called religious sciences (‘ulūm dīniyya) especially exegesis, the sources of religion and the sources of law (u⋅ūl al-dïn and u⋅ūl al-fiqh), historiography and even adab in its specific dimensions during the classical period.⁶ Where kalām has been driven towards a polemical defence of the emerging Islam facing the already established religions such as Manicheism, Judaism, Christianity, and the promoters of Greek philosophy, it is right to present it as a ‘defensive apology’ to use L. Gardet's expression; but major works — especially the massive contribution of Joseph van Ess on Theology und Gesellschaft im 2 und 3 jahrhubdert Hidschra — have totally changed the old interpretation adopted by J.Y. Lacoste. By so doing, this author confirms two observations: like many Christian authors, he prefers to use an obsolete literature on kalām to strengthen the uniqueness of Christian theology compared to Jewish and Islamic developments of the same discipline; in his desire to throw down the intellectual gauntlet, he supports my former call for a new reading of history of thought in the wider, encompassing perspective of Mediterranean area.

The truly important question to be considered in this context is to find out to what extent the required conditions for the development of a modern Islamic theology are available today and if not, what should be done to introduce Islam into the philosophical, ethical, spiritual and scientific debates which govern any relevant attempt to bring Islamic life and thought up to the level of the contemporary challenges. There is a discipline called ‘ilm al-kaläm whose specialists are known as mutakallimūn; but its field has remained narrow, and its subject contested by philosophers on the one hand and by the strongly traditional scholastic trends on the other, especially the ḥanbali line which imposes faith without asking how (bilā kayf). Some authors have preferred to use the expression ‘sources of religion’ (u⋅ūl al-dīn) to link the discipline to another, less negatively connoted and called ‘sources of law’ (u⋅ūl al-fiqh). Muḥammad ‘Abdu attempted to reactivate a theology named tawḥīd in his essay on The oneness of God (Risīlat al-tawḥīd). The term lāhūt whether preceded or not by ‘ilm, allows the formation of the adjective lāhūtī but, as coined and used by Christian Arabs, it could not be retained by Muslims for obvious reasons of contamination by Christian ideas. We are thus faced with a conceptual field that is considered suspect, distorted by religious science and awaiting a sufficiently strong, innovative and relevant conceptualization in order to receive a declinable name and indisputable scientific status. The expansion of the fatwā genre — a jurisprudential consultation on miscellaneous cases — to which several contemporary ‘ulamā’ owe their fame, underlines the loss of relevance in current Islam to theological activity, even in its classical form. The contrast is striking with the exuberant, historical continuity and the intellectual and spiritual fecundity eminently attested to by the Dictionnaire devoted by J. Y. Lacoste to Christian theology.

This author appears to have needlessly succumbed to a normative temptation in his restrictive definition of theology. However, I retain it because the summarizing and well-documented articles of the Dictionnaire impose the undeniable oneness of a historical course of thought in Europe. I only regret the weakness of the contributions on the theology of religious pluralism and the lack of interest in the comparative approach of the three monotheist religions which emerged in the ancient Near East. Recognizing all this and without any mimicry or idea of reproducing a model, I will put forward the following heuristic propositions for the possibility of an Islamic theology which would put an end to the reservations which it has raised among Muslims and non-Muslims, and impose its irreducible pertinence in the current debates on the functions of religion and the re-creation of religious believing currently in operation everywhere:

Those who criticize me for giving more place to the setting up of theoretical and methodological frameworks than to substantial monographs can measure to what extent Islamic studies suffer from weakness, rather the absence of theoretical and epistemological debates fitting, of course, into concrete historical, sociological and anthropological frameworks. We are well aware that the accumulation of scholarly knowledge (which remains, as I have said, an indispensable step) docs not necessarily generate critical, inventive, liberating thought. I consider, as regards belief in Islamic contexts, that constructive criticism would go further and reach more reliable conclusions if the basic tools were available, such as a scientific encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān, a reliable historical dictionary of the Arabic language, historical lexicons of the theological, philosophical, legal, historiographical and linguistic terminologies. We still lack critical editions with reliable indexes of outstanding works, such as the commentaries of the Qur'ān, the large collections of the ḥadīth, the Mughnī of ‘Abd al-Jabbār, the Iḥyā’ of al-Ghazālī, the Kitāb al-umm of al-Shafi'ī, and so on.

That is not all. To these major obstacles peculiar to the situation of Islamic studies which one hopes is temporary, may be added all the difficulties linked to the global forces at work in our history since the apparent triumph of the free market culture legitimized by liberal philosophy. More than ever, the culture of disbelief (cf. Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialise Religious Devotion, New York, 1993), everywhere imposes its pressures to the extent of making derisory and obsolete all the efforts for a critical appropriation of the culture of belief. What is now called a ‘knowledgesociety’ in the sense of information technologies, has replaced industrialised-industrialising societies. The forces linked to tele-techno-scientific reason determine more and more closely the exercise of critical reason in the field of the human and social sciences which should normally keep throughout their practice, the responsibility of expressing the constraining rights, obligations and ethical rules for individuals, citizens, communities, civil societies and states. We speak more currently on human rights than on moral, civic, intellectual responsibilities; it is difficult to point out either to the ethics of responsibility or to the ethics of conviction, according to Max Weber's distinction. How all these pressures and changes affect believing and how the weakening process of believing strengthens the impossibility to articulate any constraining ethical discourse?

Is the project of an adequate knowledge of a social programme and mechanisms of production of any society compatible with the assertion of an independent, critical subject capable of knowledge of self? The social sciences always call upon anthropological assumptions which they attempt to cover with a veil of objective pseudo-science, just like the religious discourses which they had dismissed were covering all the norms, beliefs, values, with a sacred veil by means of which all the norms had been internalized by the believer as proceeding from divine commandments. This critique of the hidden ideological role of the social sciences does not abnegate the positive knowledge which they continue to accumulate. It aims to underline the urgency of the radicalization of the theoretical reflection and the broadening of the historical, sociological and anthropological scope of their investigations to avoid the exclusive focus on the example of Western societies; an urgency made greater still in the present context of globalization decided, planed and guided exclusively by the Western systems of thinking, knowing, judging and acting. The self-promoting West does not even integrate in its geopolitical strategies the imposition of its world vision and ‘universal’ values, to counter the negative or positive perceptions other peoples and cultures are developing towards its policy.

All the so-called metaphysical postulates are hard to determine if at all; for this reason, they cannot operate as they did for centuries in all traditional cultures. In democratic contexts, a group of privileged protagonists elected by universal suffrage, chosen for their expert achievements, or following the secret interplay of influences, exercise the monopoly of competence-decision in the determinant spheres of political, economic, and monetary matters. Only the laws of the marketplace, calculation of national interests, and geopolitical strategies of competing protagonists can deflect the sense of justice or greater oppression, the short-term or medium-term choices. It will be noted, in effect, that the forces of globalization at work hardly leave any room for the planetary debate on the choices of civilization. These latter are reduced to the opposition of ‘values’, removed from the generalized critical resumption and put forward in discourses of identity, produced concurrently the protagonists of dominant societies and by those in search of emancipation.

It is true that in the social sciences one also observes increased interventions to reactivate and enrich the debate on the question of the ‘subject’ (see bibliography, Penser le sujet: Autour d'A. Touraine). It is a matter of containing the pretensions of conservative religious movements, closed to the achievements of intellectual modernity, as well as of the various groups and communities struggling for identity, nationalist and religious rights. If religions have to make a return to history, they will have to take into account all the achievements, intellectual and scientific conquests of modernity and secularized culture and law since the first political revolutions in Europe. They will not monopolize again, as the so-called Islam used by the post-colonial states is doing, the control of institutions and instances in which the construction and destiny of the human subject are decided independently. Any subject, any society builds itself through a complex dialectal play of social mechanisms under the governance of a rule of law. This is the most precious product of modern philosophical, political reason, prior to the eighteenth century; no religious system of belief and ethical values had ever achieved what the Enlightenment did in Europe until today. Yet not all contemporary societies and cultures have fully benefitted from this conquest. The given sociological, cultural and political facts are not seriously considered by those hegemonic Western societies which are conducting the process of globalization according to their own historical pace. The conceptual and theoretical matrix constructed in Europe during the classical age of modernity (1700–1940) should be revised and up-dated with regard to historical action, social agents and the interaction between each social agent and the prevailing system of historical action.

This revision should be extended to each contemporary society with its specific political regime. Action is the product of norms and values internalized by the group and, to various degrees, by every member (person/individual/citizen) according to the dominant theology or political philosophy. Through institutionalization, these values become roles, patterns or models of perception-action-judgement. The social order proceeds neither exclusively from divine decree, nor from the social contract, but flows from the levels of internalization of representations specific to each group of protagonists Thus, classical sociology, from Durkheim to Parsons, is a social philosophy which imposes a representations of the protagonist and modern morality. God is no longer outside of us, but in each individual who will be all the more independent if he can master the norms, thus escaping from the control of the group (which he will try hard to convert, in fact, to his particular norms). Depending on whether the protagonist defines himself as an individual citizen or a person with a spiritual vocation, there will be an individual/person/society dialectic in the space of citizenship regulated by the laws in force, or between the person and the spiritual community in the framework of what I call the societies of the Book-book. This protagonist exists insofar as modern society exists as such, that is to say, as a system of inequality more or less regulated in a spirit of justice and dignity of the citizen; a system in which the beliefs, conduct positions of class are defined by their effectiveness (pragmatism, functionality).

It can be seen how classical sociology and its current outcomes have exposed social mechanisms and systems of norms and representations which construct the subject in interaction with social groups. At the same times, this sociology has substituted for the ancient idea of fate or destiny, those of necessity and hazard which in the long run, govern all human existence. Man understands himself as an individualized, historical subject who acts and thinks only within the limits of compulsion objectified by linguistics, sociology, psychology and history. We spoke of disintegration or re-composition of believing. Now we understand better why it is preferable to leave this theoretical difficulty open. As long as there is an obvious need to perform other analyses, and incorporate new questions, we will suspend any leap into an untenable choice. We will return to the examination of the metamorphoses of believing in Islamic contexts that have so long been postponed and begin by applying to the Qur'ān in its received version as the Official Closed Corpus, the protocol of reading proposed for all founding holy Texts as well as the secondary texts derived therefrom. We will question thereafter the current practices of societies in which the two competing models of control of belief and subsequent production of history confront each other.

Chronologically, the dividing line before and after the Official Closed Corpuses or collections of traditions can be traced with the help of the following dates The four founders of Sunnï schools of fiqh: Abū ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), Mīlik ibn Anas (d. 179/795), al-Shāfi'ī (d. 204/820), Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855); the authors of the biography of Muḥammad (Sīra): Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/768), Ibn Hishām (d. 219/834); the authors of the six collections of hadith: al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870), Muslim (d. 261/875), Ibn Māja (d. 273/886), Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistänī (d. 279/889), al-ṭirmīdī (d. 279/892), al-Na⋅ā'ī (d. 303/915); the professions of faith such as those of Ibn Baṭṭa (d. 387/997), al-Barbahārī (d. 329/941); Qur'ānic exegesis and historiography: ṭabarī (d. 310/923). The Imāmī Shī'ites have their own collections with Kulaynī (d. 329/940): al-Kāfī; Ibn Bābūye (d. 381/991): Man lā yaḥzuruh al-faqīh and al-'aqīda al-imāmiyya; Abū Ja'far al-ṭūsī (d. 460/1068), al-Shaykh al-Mufīd (d. 413/1023) author of the sīra of the twelve Imāms in Kitab al-irshād; the two sharīfs al-Rāḍī (d. 404/1014) and al-Murtaḍa (d. 437/1045). For the Ismā'ilī branch, we will recall al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān (d. 363/974) author of the Da'āim al-islām.

The dates-limits are 150/767–437/1045. We will note the chronological priority of Sunnī jurists and theologians in relation with the demands of the Umayyād, then ‘Abbasid state; the fiqh defined by Ghazālī as qānūn al-siyāsa, the Canon of the conduct of every faithful submitted to legal responsibility (mukallaf) towards himself, his family, his city, his community and finally God, will also receive a primacy as Instance of spiritual authority (ḥukm] differentiated from the instance of power (sulṭa), to assure the doctrinal magisterium (martabat al-ijtihād) and control of orthodox believing. It is this Instance linked to the caliphate in place, but independent of it in law, which decides on the integration or rejection of schools, movements of thought such as Sufism, Mu'tazilism and branches of Shī'ism. The Imāmīya succeeded in imposing its particular collection with a slight historical time lag; the Ismā'ilī Shī'a had once the advantage of Fātimid support for establishing the contents of their believing. The Sunnī magisterium eventually incorporated a moderate Sufism which was within the limits laid down by the Qur'ān, the Sunna, the ijmā‘, three Source-Foundations whose appropriate usage is defined by two normative disciplines, the u⋅ūl al-fiqh inaugurated by the Risīla of al-Shāfi'ī and the u⋅ūl al-dīn with al-Ash'arī (d. 324/935) and Abū Man⋅ūr al-Baghdādī, (d. 429–1038).

But the crucial moment for the composition and diffusion of the secondary corpora established as the second a⋅l, Source-Foundation of the Islamic Instance of religious authority, is situated between 855 and 923 for the Sunnī, 940–991 for the imāmiya. Al-ṭabarī is an even more decisive reference, because he represents the culmination of an evolution which terminates with him and the point of departure of a scholastic knowledge which continues to establish itself down to the present day for that which affects religious thought and orthodox control of believing.

Let us specify a crucial point. The composition, diffusion and consecration the written corpora have allowed the setting up of a supreme Instance, from which, from every community, learned ‘ulamā’ draw intangible definitions of the ideal conduct and means of validation and reactivation of orthodox believing. There have thus come into being over a period of time a continuity of the normative field embodying Qur'ānic statements, episodes of the exemplary life of the Prophet (sīra) and his Companions — in particular ‘Alī and the twelve (or seven) imāms) for the Shī’ites — and teachings which form the ḥadīth or prophetic Tradition. In situations of everyday life, and in frequent conversations, believers invariably cite Qur'ānic verses, ḥadith compiled as short accounts and fragments of the life of the great symbolical Figures integrated into the greater Corpus of belief. This means that the believing experienced ignores the distinctions of the historian, sociologist and psychologist analyst between the Qur'ān as chronological series of oral statements, then as the Official Closed Corpus, the secondary corpora elaborated by the interpreting communities for the purpose of integrating into the relatively open Corpus of belief everything that appears as innovation, heterogeneous conduct (hid'a) imposed by historical evolution or socio-cultural diversity. The discipline of u⋅ūl al-fiqh codified the formal techniques of this integration of profane history into the Corpus of belief in which there appear only orthodox knowledge, individual and collective conduct, duly legitimized, that is to say linked by a common determinant (the famous ‘illa of theological-legal reasoning) to categorizations of all human experience perceived as divinely rooted (al-aḥkām al-shar'iyya). That is why the corpus juris which grew into the essential referents for the exercise of justice in the believing city, eventually brought a ‘reasoned’ confirmation to the entire Corpus of belief. This latter functions, in fact, as the receptacle of a continuous collective work of construction and validation of believing. This receptacle, static in the number of texts collected, remains alive, indefinitely productive as to the existential usages which the protagonists make of it to reinterpret their profane experience in the sense of devoted obedience (ṭā'a) to the divine Law. One uses for this purpose discursive techniques of integration, or better, cancellation of concrete and profane historicity in order to vest it in the framework of History of Salvation. These techniques, well analysed by P. Ricœur in Temps et récit, are in operation in the founding narratives using literary devices for the accounts of transfiguration, appropriation, insertion of the profane in the sacred.

We are thus placed before four corpora differentiated by the analyst, namely, the Qur'ān in its two aspects oral and textual, the ḥadīth in its Sunni, Shī'ī and Khārijī versions, both oral and textual, the corpus juris and the great common Corpus of belief. But I the experience of the believers, these four function in an indivisible, convergent and interdependent manner as a totalizing system of norms, references and representations which cement the unity of every community in a shared true believing. It must not be forgotten that committing the texts to writing never abolishes a return to oral usages in ritual performances, in everyday conversation and educational practices. Under such conditions, how should a critical approach be conducted of every corpus differentiated without reducing the practical functional bearing of what can be called, like for other religious traditions, the living Islamic Tradition? I think we can avoid this methodological pitfall by maintaining a constant toeing and froing between the overall Corpus of belief as we have just defined it and the corpora which sustain it and perpetuate its religious ethos which is inseparable from the historical dynamics of the societies of the Book-book.

At the stage of the primary statements, it is not possible for us to proceed to an exegesis of the Qur'ān by the Qur'ān (Tafsīr al-Qur'ān bil-Qur'ān) as this would be recommended as the surest way, after the availability of the Official Closed Corpus, with its arbitrary chronological arrangement of the sūras and verses. The historical reading restores the real conditions of the contemporary situation in which the addresses reacted on successive statements in a chronological order whose reconstitution remains uncertain. It is thus difficult for us to locate the stages and mechanisms of the reading and construction of a believing in a process of emergence. The non-historical, even non-theological reading, would permit to differentiate īmān and islām from sūra9 where it is said: ‘But God has endeared the Faith (imān) to you, and has made it beautiful in your hearts, and He has made hateful to you unbelief, wickedness, and rebellion’ (Verse 7). islām is a term difficult to translate, because it is subjected to a conceptual effort which historians limit to the period after the Hijra (see my article islām in the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān). It happens that sūra 49 is classified as 114 in modern attempts at chronological classification. It thus reflects on the final state of the conceptual work of the two notions īmān and islām. In the current state of the discussion, it is only possible to put forward remarks suggestive of a plausible progression of the construction of believing in the twenty years of Qur'ānic preaching. When testing the three classifications of the standard Egyptian edition of 1925, by Nöldeke-Schally, and R. Bell, N. Robinson followed the development of two themes, namely, the female companions of the faithful admitted to paradise and the names Allāh and Raḥmān. In the twelve occurrences of the former theme, some speak of young virgins with firms breasts and large black eyes, others simply of purified spouses (azwāj muṭahhara). The Egyptian edition does not make it possible to establish any development of this theme. Nöldeke-Schally and R. Bell stress that the first description only occurs in the Meccan sūras, and the second in the Medinan. The same applies for Allah and Raḥmān. For ‘Lord’ in all the early sūras, the name used is rabb; whereas Rāhmān and Allah are used concurrently in the second Meccan period; afterwards, Allah establishes Himself progressively as the only one addressee of believing and obedience to the exclusion of all other designations.⁷

Respect for chronology of the Qur'ānic enunciations makes it easier to reinforce recurrent polemics against numerous opponents and the social and political positions of the groups involved. The current Arabic lexicon has been thoroughly revised in the direction of what will subsequently become a Qur'ānic axiology whose commanding power over thought and action, continues to establish itself under diverse historical, socio-cultural and psychological forms. I will come back to this concept of Qur'ānic axiology which I have already defined without linking it sufficiently to the historical and sociological contexts of its reception and the changing impact on the local forms of believing (see my Islam: Morale et politique, UNESCO, 1986, pp. 23–45). The vocabulary applied to groups of protagonists in rivalry, conveys the genesis of a historical paradigmatic drama. These are, as in any story, oriented towards the quest for a highly desirable result, auxiliary protagonists and opponent protagonists. The primary Meccan statements define, firstly in visionary terms, the ultimate object of the quest and the situation for the purpose of transforming: a ‘Lord of the tribes’ (rabb al-'ālamīn)⁸ progressively restored as transcendent partner, creator, active, protagonist and protector of man (al-insān); a community of well-guided believers (umma), personally bound by a pact of devoted obedience (tā'a) only to the Commandments of the rabb, transformed into Allah, and of Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdallah who became the Faithful Messenger of Allah. The opponents of this quest comprise the category of kuffār (ungrateful, deniers of the bountifulness of the Lord, later opposed as infidels in the highly elaborated pair: kāfir/mū'min in which the conduct of infidelity serves to emphasise pure, warm, staunch faith (īmān), on any account, of the true believers (mū'minūn); the category of munāfiqūn dissimulators, hypocrites who adhere by calculation to the group of the auxiliaries; the category of A'rāb, Arabs of the desert, who refuse openly to join the Cause of God and His Messenger, thereby displaying the most arrogant infidelity (ashaddu kufran); the category of mushrikūn, associators, polytheists, that is to say the Arabian religion which is the subject of all the Qur'ānic enterprise of redefinition, transformation and reorientation towards what became dīn al-islām, the religion of Islam; the category of ahl al-Kitāb, Peoples of the Book, previous recipients of the bountifulness and guidance (hudā) of God and the Messengers, but who persist in denying the final initiative of God to re-establish in His eternal Truth, the Covenant, which they had betrayed and broken.

As regards the auxiliaries, the form ⋅aḥāha, Companions, first disciples, does not appear in the Qur'ān. This category will be later constructed and expanded upon. It is about the muhājirūn, the early converts who renounced their former parental and clan solidarities in order to follow Muḥammad to Medina; ‘those who have received the faith’ (al-ladhīna āmanū), distinguished, as we have seen, from those who showed an external, revocable adhesion to Islam. It can be said that at all the stages of its development and in all circumstances, the Qur'ānic discourse designates the new believing which will decide the immediate fate and the final salvation of all the protagonists invited or summoned depending on the case, to listen, open their hearts, recognize (ta'qilūn) the convincing, speaking signs which give rise to thinking and contemplating (āyāt bayyināt) and which are proposed to them. The introduction of intrigue underlines the dramatic tension of the confrontation and uncertain result — at least before the return to Mecca — of the battle between good and evil, error and salutary knowledge (‘ilm), straying and divine guidance with, at the end of the trajectory, the inevitable, irrefutable final judgement determining the eternal damnation or salvation of every soul (or ‘person’ as we would say today).

This analytical presentation of the semiotic structure which underlies all Qur'ānic statements must not cause one to lost sight of the progressive construct of believing by repeated touches, additions, corrections, radicalizations, concessions and ruptures right down to firm, victorious, discriminating and prescriptive proclamations of the sūrat al-Tawha classified 113 or 114, and al-Mā'ida classified 112 or 116. We will retain a decisive feature of the rhetoric and semantic work of the discourse: temporal, spatial, factual and personal designations are systematically avoided. The groups of protagonists are transformed into protagonists of a spiritual drama. The political and social situations and what is actually at stake are sublimated into paradigms of conduct and recurrent choices inexorably involving the ultimate destiny of every soul (person) confronted at the same time with temptations, constraints and solidarities of the immediate life (al-Dunyā, or ‘society’ as we would call it today) and with the exigent internalized look of a God whose self-presentation and self-attestation are already so insistent and so diversified within the limits of the founding discourse that will undergo expansion and metamorphoses that are difficult to determine.

Before proceeding to the examination of the orthodox Corpus of belief, let us dwell further on sūra 49. Its chronological place already allowed contemporary users to refer eventually to the previous verses memorized, as it established itself after the formation and circulation of the Mu⋅ḥaf. We can thus get an idea of the stage of construction and functioning of belief after some twenty years of teaching and action in order to promote the umma of the ‘brothers’ in God.

It is interesting to note that at this stage, the working of the concepts of īmān and islām is far from being complete. That is why it is difficult to translate the two terms. The firmly established usage is to translate īmān by faith and islām by submission to God. But the English terms, as much as the Arabic terms, convey contents which owe much to the doctrinal workings and religious experiences lived as much in Christian and Jewish contexts prior to the Qur'ān as in Muslim contexts after the Qur'ān. Before deciding, let us allow sūra 49 to speak.

Of the eighteen verses, five begin with the frequent formula yā ayyuhā-l- ladhīna āmanā: ‘O you who believe’! directly appealing to the category of mū'minūn, translated as believers. R. Blachère feels he must be more explicit in translating īmān in the verse 15 by ‘ceux qui out reçu la foi’ (those who have received the faith). Several distinctive features of īmān are specified:

Never to anticipate — by making one's particular initiative prevail — over the instance of God and His Messenger; not to raise the voice or raise the tone instance of God and His Messenger; not to raise the voice or raise the tone before the Prophet as one usually does with ordinary associates; not to interrupt the Prophet from outside, but wait at his door should he wish to come out; to mistrust false information insinuated by the wicked; to take into account the presence of the Messenger as an enlightened guide and not to expect him to follow the hazardous decisions of everyone; to know how to reconcile two factions among the believers who are at war; to eventually fight the one who transgresses until they return to the order defined by God; the believers can only be brothers and restore peace among them; not engage in malicious conjectures, mocking comments, malicious gossip either among men or among women; not to claim to give lessons to God on what religion is; not to remind as a favour extended to the Prophet the act of obedience to Islam (aslama). To all these imperatives of social ethics and personal control, are added definitions of greater religious and political significance in the verses 13, 14 already cited as an epigraph and 15:

We understand clearly the tension between a vision of man and society which resists change and a pedagogical, patient, benevolent work of improving what we would call today the human condition. I am aware that this concept may be anachronistic for the historical stage of the two modes which clash in this emergent Islam. However, how can it be denied that beyond a new ethico-political code of social bond, verses 13–15 take the first sure steps, easily identifiable for subsequent developments of a spiritual theology of the human person and even of a philosophical subject, if the philosophical attitude had not been eliminated from the Islamic field of thought? In the background of the encouragement addressed to the believers, we also guess that the new ethos of the human subject which the prophetic discourse seeks to implant in hearts, will remain for long an emancipatory utopia which will later sustain the nostalgic quest for a lost Inaugurating Moment, or, today, the revolutionary assertion of an Islamic model of civilization superior to all others.

If we accept this historical reading of sūra 49, we can translate īmān as the act of loyalty to a pact that binds two parties, and islām as the act of obedience to a socio-political and religious body in the process of institutionalization. The verbal form āmana means to guarantee security against any turnaround, or renunciation of an engagement undertaken. This meaning is better expressed by the concept of tawakkul, entrusting oneself to God, as a mark of confidence in a being not only reliable, but worthy of all the marks of devotion, recognition and devoted obedience. However, one should not lose sight of the fact that faithfulness thus defined is not constructed directly and exclusively in relation to a God who is still Himself in the process of self-attestation. This refined representation of faith will only establish itself much later after the gradual working of sublimation of the ‘Word of God’ through mystical experiences; codification of the professions of faith, definition of legal qualifications, all concurring in the cancellation of the historicity of Qur'ānic discourse and given to be recited, read, and experienced as the eternal Word revealed by a transcendent God.

Sūra 9, also late (classed 115), shows the taking root of āmana, in the security sought in a pact. Barā'atun min Allahi wa rasīlih is a denunciation of accord (‘ahd) with the unconverted tribes (al-mushrikūn, designation of religious exclusion) to whom a delay of three months (al-ashuru-l-ḥurum) is granted for performing the act of obedience (islām) or they run the risk of being fought against (verse 5, of the sword). The term tawba, retained as one of the two titles of the sūra, is translated as repentance, returning to God, whereas on the social terrain meant by sūra 9, it is a matter of surrendering matched by a tactical delay (the well-known dahā’) which makes it possible to exercise a power henceforth acquired under the attributes of the authority which wins hearts. It will be remembered that this definition of a discourse which acts on the sociality of the protagonists in order to transform it, while incorporating into its semantic, rhetorical and semiotic articulation, the structural data of this sociality. One cannot speak of disguising of reality to construct a crude ideology of struggle (as is the case with modern ideological discourses). As has been seen, the believing under construction transforms the condition of a small group by opening it to the horizons of meaning and action whose historical productivity is widely illustrated by spectacular expansions and recurrences. The work of Islamization of history will be different on this major point from the work accomplished by what one can now call prophetic discourse, for what I have just said about sūras 49 and 9 is found in the Bible and the Gospels. The discourse of the different religious sciences and the Islamic institutionalization of the religious will, trap the protagonists in a mimetic escalation for conquering and retaining the monopoly of the administration of the codified Islamic model at will be seen in the orthodox Corpus of belief.

Let us conclude this discourse by recalling that the French term foi — from the Latin fides, fidere — went through the same developments with Christianity. At the Qur'ānic stage, we retain the word ‘faith’ provided we do not project on to it all the expansions and definitions which were spread afterwards by the different users of the prophetic discourse and which became dispersed, fragmented and decontextualized texts while being collected in the Official Closed Corpus. It is for this reason that we shall come back to the word and the concept of believing. It alone will make it possible to give the modalities, levels of expression, and types of actualisation of what the terminology will call īmān and I'tiqād, their rightful place, the first being supposed to refer to the contents and attitudes of faith required by God, the second insisting further on the distinction between what the faithful is considered to accept as true (l-iqti⋅ād fi-l-i'tiqīd of Ghazālī as well as all the professions of faith which dogmatically define the articles of faith) and what pertains to a condemnable credibility either by critical reason or the managers of orthodoxy.

The approach I am defending is different from what has been done so far by means of a strict division of labour between ethnographers or ethnologists specializing in the description of ‘societies without writing’ according to the Levi-Strauss definition and learned elites in control of orthodox belief. My contention has been always that the historical development of both oral and written cultures is dominated by a dialectic tension between two organized structural forces opposing the state (the political centralizing force) with writing, learned elites and orthodoxy (religious and political) on side and fragmented societies (tribes, clans and patriarchal families), oral ‘dialects’ and cultures, ‘heterodoxies’ condemned by the learned managers of the sacred on the other. This dialectic can be correctly observed and adequately interpreted only if the tools and methodologies of history are merged, using written documents and ethno-sociology, local dialects and investigation of all these groups with their specific collective memories. There are very few works in which the boundaries of specialization are truly merged in order to completely change representations and interpretations of belief and the teaching offered to the believer. On the contrary, macro-theories on the clash of cultures presented by political scientists are currently overwhelmingly successful all over the world, despite the fact that they spread a dangerous, ideological polarization of backward, obscurantist, anti-humanist cultures and religions that threaten enlightened, advanced, humanist ‘values’.

To these difficulties of ideological nature are added all the obstacles inherent in the documentary resources available to any historian who has been converted to the approach to belief that I am proposing, one which combines the curiosities of historical sociology and psychology, These obstacles include the voluntary destruction of valuable documents such as the incomplete Mu⋅ḥafs of the Qur'ān, in order to ensure the triumph of a single Official Closed Corpus, or all those writings that are considered heterodox; the oblivion generated by the ideological pressures of selection and accidental loss and the great number of manuscripts dispersed throughout the world that have not yet found competent scientific editors. There are also published texts but they are in a form that makes them unusable for scholarly research and delays in research due to scholastic conservatism, indifference, caution and the taboos that still surround the critical study of belief. This situation has contributed to an expansion of the extent of the unthought that has accumulated in the oral and written expressions of Islamic belief while these same various political and social forces have manipulated belief in both its popular, oral and learned, written expressions. The content of belief has become more and more politicized, remote from the spiritual and ethical values inherited from the past. For the last thirty years, new channels of information, school education programmes and official political discourse have supported forms and functions of belief which could be described as being simultaneously ‘revolutionary’, conservative and ritualistic. The best interpretation of this radical transformation is provided by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, as opposed to any from an ‘Islamicist’, neither a classical Islamicist working on major classical texts nor a so-called expert in political, fundamentalist Islam. In his Islam Observed first published in 1967 that was only translated into French in 1992 under the title Observer l'Islam: Changements religieux au Maroc et en Indonésie, Clifford Geertz expounded on the issue of belief while exploring two regions at opposite ends of the geographical spread of Islam, Java and Morocco. Little has been done to follow his example and it is worth indicating the epistemic and intellectual reasons for this fact, though I cannot embark on this direction in the present work.

After having examined ‘the Jewish parallel’ of hostility to the writing down the oral Torah, the author concludes:

Besides the use of primary sources to continue to open up a thorny domain, the author allows me, by the very importance of his contribution, to better characterize two complementary approaches to the same subject of study, namely, orality and writing in the transmission of religious tradition. It will have been noted that Cook clearly fits into a long line of scientific authorities who share his position on the subject of the dual problem of authenticity and the question of influence, and thus the origin, of one tradition in relation to another. It is certainly valuable to consolidate, as he does here, the idea of the shared cognitive space of the rabbinic tradition and the Islamic tradition. However, as I have often repeated since the writing in the 1960s of my book L'humanisme arabe au IVe/Xe siècle, one should not remain mired in this treatment, which is helpful albeit historicist, of the question of orality and writing when the fecundity of the issues and analyses of social and cultural anthropology are well-known. I prefer to clarify here the connection between the question treated by Cook and believing as an object of historical, sociological and anthropological investigation. What is the meaning of the shared insistence of the two traditions, Jewish and Islamic, on the specific status of the Qur'ān and of the written Torah preserved in written corpora and the fact that the oral Tradition should not be written down or, ‘it could fall and cause to fall into the wrong hand?’ Cook lists several plausible reasons for this hostility. There is the fear of the ahl al-ra'y that the free development of legalistic reasoning would be stopped, resistance to efforts by the Umayyads to fix the Tradition in writing, persistence of ‘a remnant of the barbaric (sic) past of the Arabs of the Jāhiliyya’ (pp. 491–8). Historicist reasoning cannot include the question of belief as one of the important signposts in the system of thought commanded by orality to the system governed by writing. All that I have said about the concept of the ‘societies of the Book-book’ reveals its relevance to the continuous struggle between orality and writing at several levels of social, political and cultural life. I have linked together the Book ‘the Heavenly well-preserved Book’ spoken to audiences by the voice of the Messenger and fixed thereafter in writing in a codex (ma⋅āḥif) and, inseparably, the book as a material invention of civilization supposing technical progress to produce paper, to improve the alphabet, to edit the works, etc. There is also the intervention of the state with its needs for archives, historiography, codes of law, the learned elites who would assume the control of the language, and the transmission of learning, hence the orthodoxies.⁹ This is really what happens with the rapid emergence of the imperial state and its expansion with the ‘Abbasids. Belief, which had just been provided with its most general statements in the prophetic discourse, cannot escape the increasingly unequal struggles between two systems of thought, that is to say of production and social control of the ‘true’ meaning. The importance of meaning, of symbolic capital, of spiritual authority and of political power implied in the struggle between the ‘savage mind’ (‘la pensée sauvage’) and domesticated civilized written culture, are already developed in the Meccan and Medinan Qur_ān under the opposing concepts of Jāhiliyya and ‘ilm, polytheistic false knowledge and true religious knowledge. This anthropological dichotomy has spread throughout conquered societies and is still spreading through the fundamentalist discourses and ritual expressions of ‘Islam’. The main issue is to explain the development of belief from its expressions in traditional societies from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, and then during the initial impact of modernity on Muslim society prior to 1940. The most brutal shift took place in the second half of the twentieth century and lead to the present clashes in several places between the two forces which has been termed jihād versus McWorld. These historical stages will be reviewed in all the necessary detail, focusing on the sociological expansion and the psychological expression of belief, especially in the contexts of the wars of liberation against colonial rule (1950–1967) and the policy of the post-colonial regimes.

Despite this official written, ‘learned’ Islam, a popular Islamic culture developed under the leadership of many local saints who were able to share the dialects, beliefs and customs of the various ethnic groups which the remote government was unable to control politically An ethno-sociological survey is needed of this neglected but exuberant Islam, so often condemned as ‘superstitious’ and illiterate by the official ‘orthodox’ Islam concentrated in the urban, social classes. It is true that popular belief was based on the culture of miraculous, the imaginary representations of supernatural powers, invisible beings such as those called jinnis (genies or djinns) in the Qur'ān the cosmic forces. There was even a clear-cut dividing line between the language and culture transmitted by women through their daughters and those of the menfolk who were reluctant to share what was labelled as ‘childish’ belief. I can bear witness myself of what was being taught by men and women in Kabyle society in Algeria until the late 1930s and the 1940s. The most significant, noticeable fact is that everywhere, popular Islam was taught as an animist, naive, ritualistic system of belief, overlaid with superficial elements of the Islamic creed. It was entirely devoid of any kind of theological thought or intellectual rationalization. Sociologically, this form of religious life was far more widespread and dominant than the learned level described and studied by historians who pay no attention to that other ‘Islam’ that is left for the ethnographers to deal with.

During the period under consideration, the intellectual field in the whole Muslim area has been shrinking, even in the urban contexts in which some scholarly activities were carried on in the line of the religious sciences practiced during the classical period of Islamic thought Historians used to speak of the decay and ankylosis of this entire period; they paid greater attention to political and military history than to intellectual and literary production. That is why scientific information about the historical process of disintegration, impoverishment and underdevelopment of religious and cultural life in Muslim societies until the nineteenth century is so sorely lacking, and as far as Islam as a spiritual and ethical legacy is concerned, this could be said to remain true even today. Islamic thought has been isolated from the richest intellectual and scientific achievements of the classical period; it has remained indifferent, suspicious, if not clearly hostile, to all the revolutionary discoveries, inventions and intellectual shifts in Europe in the name of modernity. Even during the period known in the Arab world as the Renaissance (Nahḍa) that lasted from 1830 to 1940, intellectuals and scholars failed to introduce and spread a sustainable sense of the spirit of modernity; the most significant improvements and writings produced at that time were to be forgotten, condemned and rejected as the result of ‘intellectual aggression’ (al-ghazw al-fikri) of colonialism when the national struggle for liberation began post-1945.

It is true that the majority of Muslim intellectuals, artists and scholars have remained silent. Few of them have participated in the heated ideological debates that take place at an international level. Those who dare to declare their position in the face of so many tragedies express a preference for the discourse of victimization rather than of self-criticism extended to the whole history of Islamic thought, as I am trying to do in this book. No one author has ever thought of choosing as a subject a long-term retrospective examination of the cultural, social, linguistic and political genesis and consequences of the Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought. Many intellectuals share with the conservative ‘ulamā’ the apologetic response that claims that Islam is spiritually, ethically, legalistically, intellectually, scientifically, and culturally self-sufficient; such a position gives room for any type, any level of the unthinkable or the unthought. It is pointless to compare the historical development of Islamic thought to the rapid progress into modernity made in Europe in all fields of thought and knowledge or to maintain that a particular aspect of modernity should be ‘islamicized’ in order to make it relevant to the specific principles and values promoted by Islam since the Qur'ānic Revelation …

The idea of devoting a chapter to belief and the shaping of the human mind has been forced upon me by the civil war in Algeria that has been continuing for ten years at the time of writing. The explicit ‘arguments’ used by the promoters of such a collective tragedy to ‘legitimize’ the assassination of so many innocent victims are related to ‘Islam’. My point is not to discover the identities of the real perpetrators responsible for what are clearly crimes. This point is frequently discussed among the protagonists The more urgent task is to identify the roots of the mental shift which has so adversely affected Algerian society. What I call the ‘mental shift’ is the subject of research which needs still to be defined and made acceptable to scholarship as currently applied to Islamic studies. The irrational dimension of human psychology, both on the individual and the collective level, is not incorporated, as such, in any programme of multi-disciplinary research. This means that contemporary societies are raising unprecedented issues, outside the scope of academic rationalization of individual and collective psychology My contention is that all the events that have taken place in so-called Muslim societies cannot be ‘explained’ or made comprehensible on the basis of what is currently known, taught, claimed and disseminated about ‘Islam’.

I promised to return to the subject of Qur'ānic axiology, of which there are two types with two different functions. The first can only be defined with the help of a comparative analysis of the prophetic discourse in its three manifestations: biblical, evangelical and Qur'ānic. It seeks to define the cognitive status of this discourse and its commanding functions of thought and conduct of believing protagonists in societies of the Book-book. This is what I have attempted in the work already mentioned The second forms part of literature of which the corpus of belief consists. Several works by Ghazālī come into this category, especially ‘The Jewels of the Qur'ān’, Jawāhir al-Qur'ān. It is an eloquent example of spiritual sublimation of the Qur'ān transformed into text, while being restored by faith to its theological status of the eternal, vivifying Word of God. It is no longer a question of historical reading of the verses in their first oral delivery, nor grammatical, lexicographical and historical exegesis for theological, legalalistic or simply linguistic ends, nor of projective readings in which volatile or militant subjectivities are scattered. It is a matter of the methodical bringing together of the totality of verses to identify fragments, places, themes, objectives and subtleties of meaning which must act as supports to spiritual exercises to bring the faithful nearer to God. It is this sort of school textbook which will sustain and guide the religious pedagogy of the founders and heads of brotherhoods of local saints entrusted with upholding an Islamic ethos of popular religion through the centuries. The selected verses from the sūrat Yasīn, al-Ikhlā⋅, al-Fātiḥa, āyat al-kursī (the verse of the Throne) are called jewels because they give to think, to meditate, to elevate the soul, to strengthen the conscious of the human subject. They are all most known, and most frequently recited and invoked in popular devotion down to the present day. We can thus dismiss speculative theologies and doctrinal confrontations that have been more or less infiltrated by procedures of syllogistic reasoning, rhetorical tournaments and abstract argumentation so remote from the oral culture and popular ritualization of believing. The well-known Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn of the same al-Ghazālī is a more extensive work going in the same direction of stabilizing an orthodox believing deliberately oriented towards a spiritual Islam. The Malkite fuqahā’ of Andalusia and the Maghreb condemned it, thus taking a step towards scholastic, ritualist and Maraboutic Islam which predominated until the emergence of salafī reformation and nationalist movements.

In his Philosophy of Human Nature, D. Hume deserved credit for shifting the question of belief from the field of philosophy of the voluntarist, rational subject to that of philosophical anthropology and a moral theory of conduct. The English concept belief receives a more positive and comprehensive extension than that of its corresponding French croyance: ‘le belief voisine avec l'impression qui désigne l'événement constitutif de la vie de l'esprit avec l'aide qui dérive de l'impression, avec l'habitude ou coutume qui joue le rôle d'un principe général d'ordre, en particular dans l'instauration des idées abstraites et des règles générales’ (P. Ricœur, op. cit.). Kant also introduces a decisive step into the integration of faith-belief in the Critique of Pure Reason and practical reason. He shifts the point of relevance of faith towards the universal ethical imperative in order to free it from a dogmatic theology which establishes the existence of God with ‘proofs’ that are too weak. This task is pursued in a text whose title heralds a new horizon of intelligibility: Religion in the Limits of the Simple Reason (La religion dans les limites de la simple raison). The frontiers between religious faith administered by the doctrinal Magisterium of the Church and the faith-belief object of philosophical critique, become clearer, while rich possibilities of reciprocal exchanges and fertilization open up. The German concept of glauben covers the compound faith-belief, whereas French continues to separate them. Much later, still in Germany, Ernst Troeltsch integrates the challenges of philological historicism in a theology of ‘la religion dans la limites de la conscience historique’ (cf. Pierre Gisel, L'inititutionnalisation moderne de la religion, in Revue de l'histoire des religions, 1997, 2, pp. 153–82). It is interesting to observe the differences which thus become apparent between European intellectual sensibilities driven by the same spiritual and cultural given, but with different political practices; and one must observe the fate of these significant differences in the new political space of the European Union now in process of construction.

What happens to these philosophical advances on the status of faith-belief in our context of a ‘sur-modernité’ (to use the expression coined by M. Augé) which generates more and more disposable thought, like the gadgets sold in supermarkets? We saw how Christian theology takes control of this question. In Islamic contexts, there is not yet a rethinking of faith-belief and the construction of the subject, nor have functional alternatives been proposed to models of historical action advocated by indistinctly political and religious entrepreneurs. The masters of power display an Islamic believing that claims to be more ‘enlightened’ than that of their opponents who pretend to follow a more original, more authentic, more legitimating believing. However, the two types of protagonists are historically, theologically and spiritually at equal distance from a faith-belief re-examined in the perspectives and with the exigencies which I am proposing here. People who are receptive to this type of investigation amount to few isolated individuals, without the power of decision and without the means of intervention to take over, at least in relatively informed circles, the elementary contributions of the social sciences and the philosophical revival of the religious fact. When A. Touraine explains that the human subject of modernity is ‘the secularized descendant of religion’ (Critique de la modernité, p. 249), Christians and lay people find issues to debate and motivations for sharing the strategies of the author aiming to elucidate the games and stakes of secularization in rivalry with the religion of yesterday and today. The same proposition is without historical, cultural and sociological significance in Islamic contexts that are dominated by fantasized forms of the political and religious believing, the status of the person, the individual citizen, the state, the community, civil society and several themes I am considering in this book. The small minority of researchers, teachers, writers and artists who could adapt the proposition to the particular situations of then respective societies, constitute a socio-cultural enclave which communicates easily with the audience of A. Touraine than with those whom it ought to reach first.

Let us recall briefly that western Christianity had been at the same time a source, a protagonist, a beneficiary and an opponent in the modern adventure of human subject in Europe. This latter produced three fundamental novelties in the construction of the subject-protagonist, protagonist-subject of history: 1) the revolutionary fact conjugating the philosophical conquest of the independence of the subject; 2) the promotion and protection of this conquest by the institution of a legally constituted sate with a civil society as contractual party (democratic founding the social bond); 3) involvement of a state and a bourgeois class of entrepreneurs in the economy. The national fact mobilizes the civic faith of individual citizens in an imaginary of progress made credible by scientific and technological conquests, thus substituting the hope of immediate liberation of the human condition in the eschatological hope of traditional religion. The postulate of rational man, sustained by classical metaphysics, operates concurrently with theologies already heavily influenced by widepsread Greek philosophy, illustrated by the social sciences which have accompanied the strategies of expansion and development of bourgeois conquerors taken over by protagonists of liberal economy on global scale.

We know in what brief historical circumstances and under what pressures of ideology of development/underdevelopment, free world/communist world/third world, the revolutionary fact, the national fact and the postulate of rational man were introduced in non-European cultures regulated by other religions. We would need a new Max Weber, benefiting from all the theoretical discussions raised by the famous thesis on the links of cause to effect between Protestantism and the rise of modern Europe, to set out to analyse in a wider and better documented historical and anthropological perspective, the connections between religious fact, as source of ideation and tool of production of history on the one hand, and on the other hand, the imperatives of development according to competing models of ‘scientific socialism’ and liberal capitalism from 1945 to 1989. Material as well as intellectual modernity, long dominated by the desire for power of the two superpowers, has still not been subjected, outside its places of birth and continual deployment, to adequate appropriations to make cultural and religious traditions fruitful in depth or deliver them from their obsolete ideological burdens. In this historical and philosophical perspective, it can be said that neither Christian thought, nor modernity with universalist assertion have risen to the dignity of privilege which current opinion attaches to the religious and secular axes of the European exception. And it cannot even be said today that liberal philosophy, triumphant since the collapse of its Marxist rival, shows more eagerness to take charge of tragedies caused outside Europe and in Europe itself by a modernity which contents itself with preaching about the conditions of its passage to post-modernity, as it has done since the nineteenth century on its mission of transmission of a so-called humanist civilization of progress to the colonies.

It can be understood that contemporary philosophy refuses or confesses effectively the impossibility of thinking of the truth as being ontologically, logically and conceptually based or founded. It ventures to defend the idea that truth remains a fundamental question, because all the work of the human and social sciences — to say nothing of upheavals introduced by biology in the very definition of the human person — tends to dissolve all the fundamentals used by theologies and philosophies in all traditions of thought. Henceforth, neither believing, nor its most defended modality, faith, can claim to rest on indisputable fundamentals as they did easily before the passage to an epistemology that rebelled against all foundationalist thought and hence, necessarily dependant on hermeneutical strategies. Dissolution of the foundations, relativity of values and subjectivity of interpretations are so many constraints which orient thought towards the production of disposable explanations, ideas and theories which last the time of a political majority installed in power by a popular sovereignty, itself volatile, changing with the passions of the moment when it is invited to cast a vote. Backward peoples and primitive cultures are required to convert to this representative, elective democracy while they are experiencing a serious crisis of legitimacy that affects all the domains and levels of believing. There is a belief in what works perfectly, that is to say produces all the expected results within a given period of time. This pragmatic believing is gradually invading faith in even the most remote regions or societies in the world. Can resistance to the continuous disintegration of the subject organize itself into what sociologists redefine under the old name of ‘mystical’ that which simultaneously encompasses the experience of great witnesses of spiritual life and a new problematization of the subject? Here is a programme definition which, if taken seriously, would bring about a redistribution of urgency in the research programmes of the social sciences and a more relevant radicalisation of their theoretical constructs:

It remains for us to examine the very possibility of ‘a subject finally habilitated’ and if the answer is positive, we must verify the relevance of avenues offered at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to the emergence of such a subject. As always, we must evaluate the gaps which, in Islamic contexts, will further delay the full participation in the global work of authorization of the subject, which means his emancipation from the mechanical solidarities imposed by the Islamic fact in its current expressions since 1945.

It is true that we are just beginning to rethink in the same time the cognitive status of traditional religions and the limits of scientific knowledge. We dot that under the pressure for many, the total indifference of many others, while millions of peoples reduced to penury and excluded from the increasing comfort provided by the new economies, are either driven to despair or to reactivated hope and belief that only traditional religions or even new sects can liberate them or alienate more dangerously their mind. The World Bank has just published a detailed report on the various social and psychological consequences of the increasing effects of poverty on human dignity through the world (see The voice of the poor, 2000). The inquiry covers 60 countries and 60,000 individuals who have expressed their own experience of poverty: dislocation of families, selling of children, alienation of abandoned women with small children, absence of social security and isolation of the élites who are more oriented towards the prosperous societies of the West than to solidarity with their own people. Entrepreneurs invest their money outside their own countries because many regimes do not secure the required stability and confidence for important economic projects. The Realpolitik of the richest and most powerful nation-states are doing more to unbalance the situation than prevent or correct it.

Under such pressures and political indifference, there is no place for positive functions of religious believing. Rather, religious references are used by many social and political protagonists to legitimize violence against all those groups and decision-makers who preach democracy without democratic culture and modernity without modern intellectual tools and frameworks of constructive criticism. In this perspective, the theoretical discussions about the elimination and return or the rehabilitation of the human subject are totally irrelevant for all the poorest societies neglected by their own states, abandoned by their own élites and deprived of their own historical memories and cultural traditional systems of values. This does not mean that it is useless for those thinkers who contribute from the viewpoint of each cultural tradition to the protection and emancipation of the human condition facing new threats and challenges through this phase of globalization.¹¹

My ambition in presenting the evolution of believing in Islamic contexts is precisely to show how the contemporary philosophical trends and the practice of social sciences are more closely related to the specific concerns of western hegemonic societies than to the urgent needs of the marginalized cultures, the dominated societies, the excluded peoples. The paths indicated by liberal American philosophy (Ch. Taylor, Mc Intyre, R. Rorty, J. Rawls) certainly provoke interesting questions relating to practical issues such as justice, multi-cultural education, immigration, cultural clashes, human rights and oppressive regimes … But the hegemonic position of the USA in relation to the rest of the world including the European Union, is not yet accepted as a decisive issue for scientific research and the philosophical quest for meaning, and not only for the world political, economic, financial order. Research and thinking are conducted as if the rest of the word has either to follow, to learn and contribute to the solutions, the results agreed upon in the hegemonic role of western civilization, or to remain unconcerned and doomed to decay and domination It is here that, for many Muslims, the doctrine of jihād compensates by its political mobilization the weakness of its theology. This important aspect of the ongoing globalization leads us to the question of Violence, Sacred and Truth which we have already examined in the chapter on Revelation Undoubtedly, violence is reaching an unprecedented intensity and scale in all contemporary societies, rich and poor, highly developed and underdeveloped, democratic and oppressive. How this phenomenon is related to the disintegration and the re-composition of believing? Does it favour a positive reassessment of traditional religions, or does it accelerate the rejection of religious references more than it ever did in the time of the ‘religious wars’ supported by the sacralizing doctrines on the ‘just war’ or ‘holy war’? As far as Islam is concerned, we have shown in several essays that it is more threatened in its spiritual future than Christianity, because very few thinkers are devoting relevant intellectual and scientific attention to limiting the negative impact of the large political manipulations imposed by the ongoing struggles for power in all Muslim societies. The will to power is more than ever delaying, disturbing and falsifying the critical quest for an uncertain and unreliable contingent meaning.