It is important to keep such data in mind if one is to correctly apply the difficult question of person within Islamic Tradition and various contexts. The historical, geopolitical and anthropological field under the impact of what I call the ‘Islamic fact’, is so vast and varied that analysts have thus far preferred to use the misleading global term ‘Islam’. Even today, Islamic contexts encompass a number of peoples and groups that do not use writing and are thus more closely attached to the oral than to the written tradition, tied to behaviour, institutions and identities appropriate to the stage of ‘practical sense’ rather than that of the modern nation-state. So where and when, given all these facts, is one to identify the historical manifestations and the legal, political and cultural expressions of the person in Islamic contexts? What status has the human person been accorded, finally, after more than fifteen centuries of political experiment, the creation and practices of law and doctrinal teachings referring more or less correctly to ‘Islam’ and its Tradition?

Why, it may be asked, should we speak of Islamic ‘Tradition’, with a capital ‘T’? And how is this Tradition to encompass, in practice, all the different historical, cultural and ethno-linguistic contexts in which it has been shaped and applied? Tradition is informed and conditioned by changing backgrounds, teaching, guiding and conditioning these backgrounds in return. This interaction is translated into the self-entitlement of each Muslim community to incarnate and monopolize the authentic expression of the ‘orthodox’ Tradition. The Sunnī majority calls itself ‘the holders of the (authentic) Tradition and unified community’ (ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamā'a); the Imāmī Shī'a opposes to this claim, and names itself ‘the holders of the infallibility of the Imām and the Justice’ (ahl al-'i⋅ma wa-l-'adāla). All the other groups are rejected as ‘sects’, ‘heretics’ and ‘separate factions’ according to the dogmatic definition of the ‘orthodox’ Tradition. Sociological and ethnological definition of the groups shows that there is no Tradition with capital ‘T’, but traditions that are more-or-less influenced by the scriptural tradition developed under the impact of four ideological forces: a central state, writing, learned written culture and thought — orthodoxy. The dialectic tension develops everywhere, in all contexts between the sacred Tradition and local, ethnographic traditions. In this sense, there are as many ‘Islams’ with their specific traditions as there are ethno-socio-cultural and linguistic environments sharing a long historical collective memory. One can speak of an Indonesian, Turkish, Uzbeki, Senegalese, Iranian or Indian Islam only in the sense that there is a centralized state that tries to achieve the unification of the nation and/or the community. The affirmation, promotion, protection or oppression and negation of the person will then depend on the social structures, the collective representations and the scale of values enforced by each central power or leading authority in limited communities such as brotherhoods, clans and tribes.

The Islamic Tradition that is shared by all Muslims, whatever their linguistic, cultural or historical background, entails three great and binding foundational sources (u⋅ūl al-dīn and u⋅ūl al-fiqh): the Qur'ān; the Prophetic traditions or ḥadith (to which are added the teachings of the twelve or seven imāms in the case of the Twelver Shī'ites and Ismā'ilis respectively); and the religious law, or shari'a, accepted as the legal codification of God's commandments by virtue of the technical work, known as ijtihād, undertaken by jurist-theologians. These three foundational sources were theoretically defined, in the hierarchical order set out above, during the period (c. 661–950) in which Islamic thought was formed; in other words, all the texts, teachings and doctrinal education laid down within this scripture-based Tradition, belong to a period of the general history of thought which is styled mediaeval. We shall return to the problems raised by the sequence of historical periods or stages (periodization) as it has been fixed by Western historians of civilizations from the sixteenth century onwards. For the moment, let us bear in mind that Tradition, so defined, can be written with a capital ‘T’ because it has always and everywhere sought to impose its supremacy, disregarding and, where possible, eradicating all previous local traditions, because these belong to the period that the Qur'ān calls Jāhiliyya, the state of ignorance of the true religion (dīn al-ḥaqq) as defined by God, for the last time, in the Revelation transmitted through the Prophet Muḥammad. This theological definition of Tradition, which is bound to supersede all others, naturally disregards the concepts of tradition and custom as these have been developed by ethnography and cultural anthropology since the nineteenth century. The old tensions between the scripture-based Tradition of the jurist-theologians and local traditions is today complicated by all the questioning which critical history, along with the various social sciences, has introduced into the study of every religious tradition, beginning with the traditions of Judaism and Christianity, which have been the direct focus of the ceaselessly renewed challenges of modernity. The capital ‘T’ also reflects the way in which present-day Muslim thought resists the most indisputable teachings of modernity, in the name of a ‘true religion’ which no longer allows itself to be questioned, even in terms of the educational tensions of its own past, when doctrinal pluralism was tolerated.

Neither ‘noble’ Tradition, having a universal value in the eyes of believers, nor local traditions reduced to residual functions by the combined action of learned ‘orthodox’ religion and the absence of a modern polity, have, as yet, benefited from the explanations and the historical alternatives provided by critical intellectual modernity (which I contrast with the politics of traditionalization imposed by the post-colonial states, upheld as these states are by untrained, conformist bureaucracies and the merchant classes who proved to be unable to enhance a sustainable economic development. The social and professional categories are isolated from each other, because the state itself is based on patrimonial mechanisms and cannot initiate a long-term political perspective, including a concrete, relevant plan aimed at the construction of a democratic arena of citizenship. European examples have shown how the legal and institutional emergence of the individual as a citizen fully protected by the rule of law, is a fundamental step in the complex process leading to the optimal formation of a person with humanistic attitudes. Immediately after the independence, gained in the late 1950s and 1960s, the emerging ‘national’ states could engage in the long, historical process of building a modern arena of citizenship similar to that of the Europeans who are engaged in building a larger entity of European citizenship beyond the limits of the nation-state. The so-called national élites were not acquainted, however, with the philosophy of the person underlying the modern democratic culture. They have never mastered the historical and intellectual conditions in which the learned, written Islamic Tradition has been developed and translated into mediaeval institutions. That is why the status of the human person including women, as defined in the Qur'ān, in the Prophetic traditions and in the legal codes received and applied as the ‘Divine Law’ (sharī'a), has barely begun to open itself to the necessary revisions and discussions inaugurated in Christian Europe, with the emergence, in the sixteenth century, of a humanist reason open to the pagan cultures of Graeco-Roman Antiquity and increasingly desirous of carving out its philosophical autonomy in the face of the dogmatic sovereignty of theological reason. This development continued with the reasoning of the Enlightenment, the philosophy of human rights and the establishment of a democratic rule of law, bound by renewable contract, within a civil society from which political sovereignty derives. This is how the citizen-individual, protected both in his relationships with other citizens and in the free legalistic construction of his private person, emerges as a human subject. The legal freedoms guaranteed by the rule of law do not, naturally, abolish the sociological, economic and linguistic constraints that strictly condition the construction and path of any human subject.

Contemporary Islamic discourse proceeds through a formal annexation of modern ‘values’ and principles, with the aid of an arbitrary selection of ‘holy’, sacralizing texts from the Qur'ān and ḥadīth, wrenched from their historical and cultural contexts so as to better serve their apologetic purpose. For this reason, I find myself unable to follow the lead of so many others in the operation of ‘proving’ that every modern development in the legal, political and philosophical status of the individual-citizen-person in Europe, is already clearly stated and prescribed in the three corpora of Islamic Tradition that have already been mentioned. The fact is that present-day social frameworks of perception, interpretation and knowledge within the societies called Muslim, better reflect the imaginary representations of the ‘true religion’ and of the overall Muslim community for which Salvation is promised, rather than support any scientific critique of all the alienating, apologetic and ideological instrumentalization of a so-called Islamic Model, as the historic alternative to the Western, secular, ‘atheistic’, ‘materialist’ model. In this connection, the place and role of the nationalist discourse of liberation was begun in the 1950s, but was replaced in the 1980s and expanded by fundamentalist discourse in terms of a phantasmagoric representation of the collective and individual self. It should be noted, nevertheless, that Muslims are not the only ones to practice this ideological patchwork in order to safeguard the validity of the living religious Tradition in the face of the competing model provided by modernity, which constructs the destiny of a human person without God. We are witnessing, rather, a situation in which each religious community strives to outbid the other in imposing its chronological precedence and its spiritual primacy, affirming and implementing such modern concepts as freedom of conscience, tolerance in matters of religious freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of association and the vocation of the human person to exercise full autonomy, more particularly in the fulfilment of individual spiritual destiny.

This is a very old debate between the three monotheistic religions, philosophical reasoning in its Greek version, and Roman law as it extended through the Mediterranean basin. Classical Islam underwent this intellectual experience during the period corresponding to the High Middle Ages in Europe. What marks the difference from Christianity and, to a lesser degree, Judaism, is that in Islamic contexts, philosophical reasoning was eliminated after the thirteenth century, while in Europe, it developed more and more influential interventions in support of the construction of a centralized, powerful state together with the rise of a civil society thanks to the economic, cultural and intellectual contributions made by the capitalist bourgeoisie.

The increasingly powerful role of the bourgeoisie in Europe led to new contradictions such as the exploitation of the labour force and the development of a formal, abstract discourse about so-called humanist values. The social revolutions of the nineteenth century generated this perversion of the philosophy of human rights in European societies, that even spread to the colonized countries. The historical effect of the social, economic and political developments in Europe on colonial societies needs to be clarified, because it continues to determine many essential consequences concerning the status of the person in so-called Muslim societies. How did Marxist-Communist ideology contribute its theories of alienation to economic and political practices during the crucial period of the first emergence of so-called nation-states in Islamic contexts? How did so-called leading ‘élites’ impose alien concepts, false cultural frameworks and a totalitarian bureaucracy on the peasantry and why were pastoral societies submitted to a brutal uprooting policy? This chapter of history should be written under the following title: the perverting effects of modernity transferred during the Cold War through Marxist-Communist and liberal-bourgeois channels.

A comparative, critical history of religions and modern secular ideologies is beginning to show how annexations in reverse — modern ideologies clothing traditional religious discourse on human person in secular atheist expressions — have also taken place in connection with the promotion of human rights and democratic values. The ideas of fraternity and equality, the moral and spiritual presentation of man as inspired, elevated by a free spirit or soul, who thus bears responsibility irrespective of ethnic divides, mechanical and social solidarities, illegitimate allegiances are all basic themes appealing to the promotion of the person and have already been presented in what I called prophetic discourse, to encompass the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. The theoretical discussion of the chronological anteriority of the prophetic discourse to promote the spiritual and ethical status of the human person has, as usual, been more effectively studied, relatively speaking, on the Jewish and Christian side than under Islam, to which the questioning and new curiosity of the social sciences have always been tardily applied. Furthermore, Islam is suspected both by the two rival religions and modern secular thought, to be not only deprived of concerns about human person, but to have introduced into its system of beliefs and non-beliefs, negative teachings about the status of women in particular. We thus need to remedy the conceptual displacements and the various misunderstandings, nourished by two mental frameworks and cultural systems which perpetuate a mutual exclusion between two imaginary entities called ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’.

Let us try and establish the critical course which will, today, lead to the crucial question of the person being adopted globally from the viewpoint of a humanism which should go beyond all those traditions of thought prior to the new cognitive practices which must accompany the historical process of globalization, without rejecting or seeking to invalidate them. It will obviously be necessary to examine the various contemporary Islamic contexts in order to determine how far they hold back or favour the emergence of an autonomous person, free in his choices and commitments to lead his own existence in solidarity with his society and change in the modern world. This will show that the person's course of life and contexts of socialization, the interactive relationship between the person and the group (patriarchal family, clan, village, district, community of orthodox believers) and the status finally accorded to the person in Islamic Tradition: all these basic elements of the traditional societies have been irreversibly upset since the end of World War II and the beginning of the struggles for national liberation. There is thus a before and an after in the political, institutional, semantic, sociological and anthropological development of the person in Islamic contexts. The study of the before places us within the perspective of the long period that begins with the appearance of the Qur'ānic fact and continues, with perceptible differences, but a profoundly marked structural and epidemic continuity, up to around 1940. The after constrains us to work within the short period in which brutal revolutions, violent upheavals and rapid disintegration of every traditional code whether customary, legal, semantic, semiotic or anthropological, have followed one another without preparation or transition, within a highly compressed time frame in which a number of heterogeneous temporalities are seen to clash. We shall refrain, therefore, from any static presentation of a ‘paradigmatic Islam’, unchanged and unchangeable since its foundation by a divine ‘Revelation’. On the contrary, we are dealing with the concept of the person as one of the important issues to test the unthought and the unthinkable in contemporary Islamic thought.

As has already been explained, the term ‘Qur’ān’ is too loaded with theological content to serve as an operational concept for a critical reassessment and prospective redefinition of Islamic Tradition as a whole. By speaking of Qur'ānic fact, in the same way as one would speak of biological fact or historical fact, I wish to set at a critical distance all the doctrinal constructions, theological-legalistic, literary, rhetorical and exegetical definitions and procedures that have been commonly regarded as indisputable since the open Qur'ānic discourse was turned into the Official Closed Corpus. Just when this shift occurred it is difficult to say exactly. One can only indicate some chronological points of reference, such as the two monumental works — History and Tafsīr — of al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923), the Risāla of al-Shāfi'ī (d. 204/820) and the collections of ḥadīth completed by Bukhārī (d. 256/870), Muslim (d. 261/875), Kulaynī (d. 329/940), Ibn Bābawayh (d. 381/991) and Abū Ja'far al-ṭūsī (d. 460/1068).

The works left by all these authors are decisive landmarks in the slow historical process whereby concurrent Islamic orthodoxies were constructed with mythical narratives, theological and legal systems and political institutions. The collections of ḥadīth swiftly became, in their turn, closed official corpora, assuming the second rank in the hierarchy of foundational sources (u⋅ūl) defined as such by Shāfi'ī for an exegetically trustworthy development of the Law which would henceforth be styled divine (shari'a). As collective creations, the Prophetic and Imāmī traditions reflect the slow linguistic, cultural and psycho-sociological processes leading to the establishment of a Muslim ethos in the anthropological sense, as defined by Cl. Geertz (see the quotation at the beginning of this chapter). They are informative, too, about the interactions between the teachings of a Qur'ānic corpus that is in the process of closure and the ethno-cultural data proper to the various circles in which the Qur'ānic verses have been used as the ultimate authoritative propositions on all aspects and levels of existence — the physical world, human existence and all created beings. The Muslim ethos in process of formation, does not have an equal impact for every group within a vast historical area comprising, for instance, ancient Iran, the Berber regions, the Iberian Peninsula, the huge Turkish lands, Central and South-east Asia and Africa. Even after the establishment of closed official corpora and their circulation in written and oral form, the penetration of the Muslim ethos was never to be either generalized in extent and depth for all the groups, nor irreversible in time, nor totally in conformity with the ideal orthodox definition perpetuated in spiritual, ethical and narrative literature.

The ideal orthodox definition of the person in global Islam takes no account either of the historical and sociological dimensions, or of the anthropological problematization that I have set out above. Actually, the Qur'ān read by generations of the faithful as an Official Closed Corpus and a liturgical discourse, does not function linguistically, culturally or semiotically, either as it did at its stage of open oral delivery up to the death of the Prophet, or as it did at the second stage of a corpus in process of collection and written conveyance in a Mu⋅ḥaf which was subsequently declared closed. Such were the numerous steps involved in the formation of the Muslim ethos. When we take into account all these concrete aspects of the Qur'ānic discourse, any attempt to create a Qur'ānic concept of person leads to two possibilities. Either one ends up with a more or less coherent lexicological construction based on the occurrences of insān, nās, nafs, rūḥ, wajh, ‘aql, fiqh, lubb and other related notions elaborated in the corpus as a whole; or one follows the diachronic developments of the concept in various and changing contexts. Believers do not care about these academic distinctions and procedures; their reading obeys only the declarations and the statements validated by ‘orthodox’ faith and empirical collective memory. The construction of the person is pursued in daily empirical life with oral quotations from all verses to illustrate an immediate behaviour, reaction, discussion or event. The Muslim ethos is nurtured by this endless confrontation between the sacred and sacralizing, ideal, normative ‘Word of God’, expanded in the sīra of the Prophet as the incarnation of the noblest ethos (makārim al-akhlāq), and current personal and collective existence. This spontaneous, emotional integration of the sacred word into everyday life by believers should not lead to a disregard of the intellectual and socio-historical costs involved, to the extent that such a reading perpetuates both the alienation of the person and the conditions within which a scholastic culture, giving rise to institutionalized ignorance, can expand.

This is just what has occurred in a number of Islamic contexts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards. I insist, in this connection, on the reversibility of the conditions whereby the person is promoted in Islamic contexts. The humanistic figure of the adīb, open to diverse cultural currents between the ninth and eleventh centuries (c. 800–1030), disappeared along with the social, political and cultural conditions which made him possible.² A similar process can be seen with the figure of the mystic, who, at the same period, combined a rich personal experience of the divine with a considerable mastery of poetic and intellectual language, whereby this experience was recorded in major works. I am thinking, for example, of Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857), whose name refers to his critical self-examination (muḥāsabat al-nafs). This kind of mystical figure was transformed, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries onwards, into a minor scholar who was to Islamize social groups in several societies that maintained an oral tradition and gather around himself disciples called brothers (ikhwān), finally establishing the Marabout dynasties governing quite powerful brotherhoods. We shall see later whether we ought to speak of regression or of a crisis of mutation with respect to the status of the person in the phase of national struggles for liberation and of Islamist opposition geared to seizing power.

Let us now briefly consider the means and mental tools provided by Qur'ānic discourse for the construction of a new person with a spiritual vocation, clearly opposed to the old anonymous member of a clan, or even a patriarchal family, whose religious horizons are limited to the local divinities in the Jāhiliyya. Jāhiliyya. This is worked out in the Qur'ān as a polemic concept pairing Jāhiliyya/'ilm-islām. It evokes the anthropological concept of ‘savage, undomesticated thought’ as opposed to ‘domesticated thought’; but the opposition became a theological device for condemning a polytheistic culture and society and expanding the true religion revealed in the Qur'ān. I have shown in a long essay how Qur'ānic discourse associates with the terms nafs, rūḥ, ins, insān, wajh a rich vocabulary of perception and discursive activity³ to construct, according to its appropriate spiritual perspectives, what it calls ‘man’ the son of Adam. It will be shown that the spiritual vocation and ethico-political definition of man at the Qur'ānic stage, masks the contents which are similar to, if not identical with, those found in the biblical and evangelical corpora. It is for this reason that I have introduced the concept of ‘prophetic discourse’ which, at its initial oral stage, utilizes the same conceptual background and system of connotations running from the Biblical stage to our modern ethical definitions. This is particularly evidenced by the sign-symbol wajh, face. It is used seventy-two times in the Qur'ān to refer to the Face of God and man seeking this Face, desiring it and ‘dedicating his own face to God’ (aslama wajhahu li-llāh). ‘Face’ is the richest, still-living metonymy in all European and Semitic languages and all cultures related to Mediterranean area. There is the expression ‘loosing face’; in Arabic, benediction and curse, good and bad wishes are expressed by red/black face.⁴ The following are some samples of verses often selected to assess an attitude, a behaviour or a judgment according to the ethico-spiritual scale of values concretely defined in the Qur'ān and expanded, as I have said, in the Muslim/Mediterranean ethos. Today, the quoted verses and many others are also currently used to annex modern values by placing them under the authority of the Word of God and Islamic tradition:

One could list an infinite number of statements in which the dialogue between God and man, man and God, develops within every register of discourse and within every sphere of knowledge and action. The Ten Commandments are represented in the most diverse contexts as the means to snatch man from the grip of blindness, violence, the ‘uncultured’ life (Jāhiliyya) and the constraints of the group, including parents who refuse to enter into the new Alliance (mithāq): ‘That is part of what your Lord has revealed to you of wisdom’ (17, 39). The verses quoted as a sample cannot, as has been said, reveal their true meanings, in the sense demanded by the historian, unless we duly consider the actual circumstances in which they were originally articulated in Mecca or Medina. This rule incumbent upon the historian is, of course, systematically disregarded by believers concerned only with norms immediately applicable to their empirical behaviour. According to the particular contingency faced, the development of a conversation or the necessities of a line of argument, they will invoke, with equal conviction, verse 9, 5 to legitimize jihād or other verses that are more peaceful and more geared towards the promotion of the positive aspects of the person. The Qur'ān as experienced has always had priority over the Qur'ān as analysed, expounded and known; yet the latter must retain primacy over the former if we are to limit the drift of the social and religious imaginary and reject manipulations performed with ideological ends in mind. This fight between priority and primacy lies at the heart of the history of all the founding texts, and, consequently, the meaning and the effects of sense (effets de sens) that always condition the construction and action of the person. Apart from the reading of the jurists, who are concerned to derive the laws and status they promulgate as part of an Islamic body of law (sharī'a) applicable to all, learned commentaries have had hardly any influence on common belief and individual acceptance of the Qur'ān, which is closely bound up with emotional ties, subjective expectations and group constraints on the expression of personal identity than with any learned exegesis. Memorized verses are at the disposal of all and are invoked spontaneously, without any concern for the original context, to utter a prayer, give thanks, meditate on the inner equivalence between a situation as experienced and its beautiful, concise, eternally true expression in the Word of the Most High. The person, as a human being faced with the vicissitudes of existence, constructs himself, blossoms out or else founders in alienation, according to his degree of nearness to Qur'ānic discourse in general (millions of Muslims do not speak Arabic and, even among Arabic-speakers, most do not have access to the archaic Qur'ānic language) and, according to the use he makes of scattered texts, knitted into the here and now of daily existence.

Note once more the relevance of the concept of ‘prophetic discourse’, which allows these analyses to be applied to all persons trained within the framework of identity associated with the long tradition of the teaching of the prophets from Abraham to Muḥammad, a tradition expressed linguistically in the same discourse of mythic structure, and using the same religious symbolism, the same metaphorical organization, to bring about ‘the man of the Alliance’ with a Living, Speaking God, one who acts upon temporal history so as to enrich and broaden, in terms of a benevolent pedagogy, the reciprocity of the man-God and God-man perspectives. Thanks to the revelatory richness of ‘prophetic discourse’, man raises himself to the dignity of person through internalizing God as an inner protagonist, with the help of prayer, thanksgiving and a meditative deciphering of all the signs (āyāt) of creation and of that mark of Benevolent Care whereby man is singled out among all creatures to receive the heavy responsibility of directing a just order as ‘God's representative on earth’. All this leads to the emergence of a consciousness of self in relation to the Absolute of a God who is the ultimate Criterion and inevitable Referent for all the various activities of the ‘person-creature’. The change to be wrought by modernity to this mode of the awakening and realization of consciousness of self will lie in moving on from the ‘person-creature’ of God, bound to Him by a debt of sense and a loving acceptance of His commandments, to the ‘person-individual-citizen’, bound to the state by a social and legal contract.

In the case of ‘Islam’, the dialectic of the ‘Qur’ānic fact’ and the ‘Islamic fact’ remains to be defined. It presupposes the identification of the ‘Qur’ānic fact’ as a historical, linguistic, discursive stage different from the subsequent stage called Islamic fact with all the political, theological, juridical, mystical, literary and historiographical expansions, elaborations and doctrinal disputes. This distinction does not mean an endorsement of the theological status of the Qur'ān as the Revelation remaining above human history; both Qur'ānic fact and Islamic fact should be examined as components of concrete history; but they are different both in the intrinsic content of each fact and in the way they are received by their advocates, how they are interpreted and used to produce the concrete history. These differences need to be clearly identified in order to banish the current ideological confusions produced by believers and many interpreters of Qur'ān and Islam. Believers especially speak indiscriminately of the Word of God, Revelation, Qur'ān and Islam.

At the stage of the ‘Qur’ānic fact’, God presents Himself to man in a discourse articulated in the Arabic language. He sets Himself to perceive, receive and listen as the Person par excellence, possessing a fullness of fundamental attributes whose acquisition is only effectively possible for man through what mystics and philosophers have long called ta'alluh, ‘the imitation of God’. Man must strive to attain the level of perfection embodied by God who reveals Himself in order to guide man in the fulfilment of this essential Desire, the celebrated ‘ishq,⁵ that powerful motive for the moral, spiritual and intellectual search for the status of person (or, as it was known, Perfect Man, al-insān al-kāmil). Prophetic discourse was the inexhaustible spring wherein the saints, the friends of God, the servants of God and the great witnesses to spirituality found the living metaphors, fruitful symbols and myths of their experience of the divine. It runs through the history of many societies and cultures; and it is above political partisanship that is not based on the ‘true religion’ (the problems posed by this concept have been discussed in modern philosophy, but not definitively resolved). It relies, above all, on the trusting quest, dedicated to achieving the greatest closeness to the Altogether Other (expressed in the ritual phrase al-lahu akbar) and in the spiritual witness perpetuated for mankind by virtue of this search as unshakeable value.

The ‘Islamic fact’ retains and exploits this dimension of the ‘Qur’ānic fact’ as an area of sanctification, of spiritualization, transcendentalization, ontologization, mythologization, ideologization through all the doctrinal schemes, all the legalistic, ethical and cultural codes, all the systems of legitimation put in place by the ‘ulamā’. The ‘Islamic fact’, like the Christian, Jewish and Buddhist fact, or any other, cannot be dissociated from the exercise of political power in that the state, in all its historical forms, attempts to direct for its own benefit the spiritual ethos of the ‘Qur’ānic fact’, yet the Qur'ānic fact's connection with the ‘Islamic fact’ (notably ethical and legal codes) resists any total, irreversible annexation. It is the great moments and most pertinent areas of this ongoing psychological, existential tension that witness the affirmations, protests and resistance by those most conscious of the recurrent factors of a confrontation complicated by the claims of ‘modern identity’, as defined by Charles Taylor in his Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.

It is to the ‘Islamic fact’ that the development and historical action of what is called Muslim law should be linked, especially the aspect that is applied as positive law (fiqh). In practice, the role of ‘Qur’ānic fact’ boils down to operations of sacralization, indeed of divinization, of corpora of norms that have been transformed into religious law (sharī'a). We are now conscious of the fact that the formation of the schools of law (madhāhib) continued up to the fourth/tenth century; and it was from the ninth century that the work of sacralization came to be seen as a religious necessity, to restrict the infiltration of local customs and practices as well as strengthen the legitimacy of the central ‘Islamic’ state. The inroads that prophetic discourse attempted to make with regard to the emancipation of the person in law, have been only partially successful, either in time or space, since kinship solidarities continue to this day to interfere with the modern construction of the social bond and the emergence of a civil society, the rule of law and the person-individual-citizen as interactive dimensions of the human subject in the historical march towards intellectual, spiritual, ethical and political modernity, all linked indissolubly together. I have given a particularly enlightening example of the manipulations of Qur'ānic discourse itself, provided by jurists anxious to circumvent provisions considered too subversive for the customary order that preserved the force of patriarchal and clan solidarities in those key ethno-cultural areas in which the power of the new Islamic state, first Umayyād then ‘Abbasid, was exercised.⁶ After the triumph of what I have called the Official Closed Corpus, Islamic Tradition ratified all the faits accomplis of exegesis and of the corpora juris and accepted them as orthodox. For this reason, one cannot, today, either return to an open Qur'ānic corpus or easily liberate the person from the kinds of status defined in that part of private law called personal status, al-aḥwāl al-shak⋅iyya. The fait accompli of the closed official corpus remains historically irreversible, unless Mu⋅ḥafs can be discovered that are contemporary with the first official Mu⋅ḥaf, and this is unlikely to happen. In the meantime, the corpora juris declared orthodox, continue to be perceived and experienced by the community of believers as legal categorizations (aḥkām) correctly derived from Qur'ānic verses.

In the light of these explanations, one may better appreciate the need to rediscover what I venture to call ‘spiritual responsibility’, as a means of resistance, on the part of the human spirit, against the operations of reason itself as the latter works with the ‘unthinkables’ and ‘unthoughts’ of each socio-cultural environment and each historical period. I know how the concept of spirituality is dismissed within a scientific mindset which stresses the alienating functions of religion and a positivist, biological approach to the human person. I am introducing the concept of spiritual responsibility, not to reactivate the idealistic claims for religious spiritualism, but to problematize the current reference made to the ‘dignity of human person’ in the declarations of many national committees for ethics that investigate the new threats posed by biotechnology and biology. This is recognized as a legitimate field of research with a view to rehabilitating and reactivating a concern lost as much in Islamic thought as in modem thought, that of the ethics of the person. I shall proceed with this heuristic definition in mind.

An application of this definition to the concept of person, as sanctioned by the law of the fuqahā’, makes it possible to detect the limitations of the legal status that is typical of the mediaeval mindset, prior to the emergence of legal modernity; a legal modernity made possible by progress in scientific and philosophical thought as well as economic and technological development, that occurred first in Europe. In Muslim law, the full-blown status of person is reserved for the orthodox Muslim who is male, free (as opposed to being a slave) and entitled in law to respect the rights of God and human rights. Children, slaves and non-Muslims are potentially entitled to gain access to this status (the child when he reaches the age of responsibility (mukallaf), the slave when freed, the non-Muslims when converted). Woman, however, while raised to a spiritual dignity equal to that of man, is kept in an inferior ritual and legal status, since the Qur'ān itself did not succeed in removing all the taboos and restrictions weighing on the female condition in what it called the Jāhiliyya. It is a historical fact that all religions have perpetuated not only unthinkables and unthoughts with respect to the spiritual and legal status of the human person, but even in sacralized forms of religious status which continue, even now, to feed exclusions, schisms, inquisitions, persecutions, ‘sacred’ violence, claims and conquests in the name of a God whom living traditions have, in fact, linked arbitrarily to mechanical solidarities, strategies of power and all the constraints of the ‘imaginary production’ of societies. Modernity may have abolished slavery, may have opened a space of citizenship in which distinctions between faiths are disregarded; but it has not yet finished the slow work of emancipation of the female condition and of the protection of the rights of the child.

It should be added that the theologies of ‘true religion’ — which is both a Qur'ānic and a biblical concept, adopted and developed by the three monotheistic religions, though Hegel attempted to give it a philosophical status — continue to disseminate their teachings and to erode the frontiers of the thinkable and unthinkable with regard to the status of the person. For its part, philosophical and scientific thought is less concerned to integrate the postures of theological thought and religious beliefs into its field of critical enquiry; in view of the extraordinary discoveries of biology and the neurosciences. Philosophers now prefer to shy away from any challenging posture about the changing status of human person. Even in the most secular societies, competition remains open between a ‘humanism’ centred on God, on whom man's salvation depends in this world and the next, and a ‘humanism’ centred exclusively on man. Note that the first borrows more from the second than the second from the first; but it should be added that the second increasingly distances itself from the classic concept of humanism, as the tele-techno-scientific reason behind the processes of globalization, is asserting its hegemony over the theological and philosophical stages of reason. The concept of humanism itself is so disputed, however, that it has almost fallen into disuse.⁷ The status of the person thus finds itself fought over from several points of reference, ancient, traditional or new, while current debates and social scientific research fail to provide all the necessary enlightenment.

In contemporary Islamic contexts, the crisis of the status of the person is even more difficult to deal with. The rules of fraternity, solidarity and respect for the life and property of persons, already insisted upon in the Qur'ān and later in the whole living Tradition (turāth), are ‘applied’ with tragic rigour in the generalized context of national and international terrorism. I prefer to abstain from any comment on a phenomenon which throws into crisis every type of ethics and every system of legitimation, old and new: I refer to terrorism everywhere that is presented today as the only path left for a human group to attain or re-attain ‘identities’ wrested by other dominant nations, groups or powers. The various persecutions, imposed by the inquisitions at the time of theological certainty, have been taken up today, with the same sense of conscious justification, by the terrorist phenomenon. In both cases, it will be noted that the conflict of interpretations rests on the same, still surviving contradiction, namely that innocent persons are physically destroyed so that the self-proclaimed rights of other persons can be vindicated. We are not really concerned here with the political movements, ideological shifts, clans and factions, ideals and causes, which lead to such a radical negation of the human person; the main issue about terrorism is that the protection of human person should prevail in all circumstances, regardless of the ideological claims expounded in order to ‘legitimize’ a terrorist action. I know that this ethical principle cannot withstand the structural violence expanding in the world with the arbitrary forces operating in favour of a so-called international order. The logic of war is implicit in the economic and monetary ‘order’ imposed on the whole world. The human person is suffering a great deal from a semantic disorder that is affecting all cultures and all levels of existence under outdated international law.

These trajectories and frameworks of realization of the human person on the world scale naturally impinge upon all Islamic contexts, in that the Islamic fact has practically imposed its priority as a platform of resistance against the ‘cultural aggression’ (ghazw fikrī) of the West or ‘Westoxication’. The Qur'ān is quoted, but less involved as such in the battle. Not only is the distinction between Qur'ānic fact and Islamic fact, outlined above, unthinkable, but the terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamic Law’ have come to vaguely denote a populist brand of theological axiology, ritualization of collective behaviour, principles of political commitment and militant practices observed with the same ritual punctiliousness as religious obligations in the proper sense. We have, in this way, a complete system, sociologically and psychologically most efficient, for the education of a new human being who views himself as radically and authentically ‘Muslim’, the bearer of the one true message of salvation for all mankind, responsible for the historical action necessary to block the devilish forces of modernization and secularization. Here are the lines of force of what I have just called populist brand of theological axiology. This terminology is dictated neither by a theological reasoning, that is more intellectually trustworthy, to which future reference would need to be made, nor by a philosophical or scientific reasoning laying claim to a role of absolute normative authority. It is merely a matter of broaching a typology of the social actors, of the kinds of discourse they produce, of regimes embodying truth, which they seek to impose through political, legal and economic institutions. I indicated earlier that populist culture, along with the theological axiology it conveys, has already led to political successes that make a mockery, in any substantial sociological or psychological sense, of what is called learned culture, the postures of philosophical and scientific reason. This inversion of ‘values’ spiritual, moral and intellectual on the one hand, political, economic and technological on the other, has been an incontrovertible fact of the history of thought, and therefore of the conditions within which the human subject is shaped and develops, ever since ‘material civilization’ in the historical Braudelian sense of the term, first imposed its hegemony on the world.

I shall start with a remarkable series broadcast by the Qatari al-Jazīra television network under the general title Religious Law and Life (al-Shari'a wa-l-ḥayāt). The guest on the evening of 28 December, 1997, was Professor ‘Adnan Zarzur, the author of a number of learned works on Islamic thought. He gave a concise, perfectly orthodox definition, one accepted by all contemporary Muslims, of the theological status of the Qur'ān and of the procedures whereby all its verses are interpreted so as not only to base (ta'⋅īl) the thoughts and behaviour of believers in the divine Word, but to ensure the cognitive validity of all the divine statements vis-à-vis all forms of knowledge, present and future, up to the final Day of Judgement. As the ultimate manifestation of Revelation, the Qur'ān has divided the history of salvation, which embodies our chronological history on earth, into a before and an after of the year 632, to define the theological-legal status of every human act according to the limits (ḥudūd) fixed by God Himself in the legislative verses. The far more numerous verses speaking of the creation of worlds and beings are signs provided for the spiritual meditation and the reflection of believers so as to integrate, within their individual consciousness, the nature of the Being of God, the meanings of the actions He has undertaken and the everlasting scope of His teaching. Within this theological perspective, the term turāth, used to denote the classical cultural heritage bequeathed by what historians call the civilization of classical Islam, referring more specifically to the profane, mundane dimension of Arab classical culture including, of course, Islamic tradition.

The sum of the sacred texts collected in the Qur'ān and ḥadīth, authenticated by the authorized transmitters and correctly interpreted by competent, recognized exegetes, form the Divine Body of Authority (al-marji'iyya) to which every subsequent product of human activity on earth must be referred, so as to determine its theological and legal status according to the five legal categorizations (obligatory, forbidden, recommendable, reprehensible, permitted). This referral of the whole of human history on earth to a tribunal decreed to be divine, although its members are mere mortals, elevated post factum to the rank of infallible Imāms (for the Shī'ites) or authoritative duly qualified doctors (a'imma mujtahidūn) (for the Sunnīs), is to be continuously applicable through History of Salvation.

There is, in this formulation, an undeniable inner coherence which satisfies religious reasoning, a kind of reasoning indivisible from what anthropologists call ‘the social imaginary’. Reason invoked in the course of theological enquiry is indifferent to all the reasonings of the human and social sciences. On the other hand, it is highly attentive and stringent regarding all the discursive operations made necessary by the collection and authentification of the official corpora it will pronounce closed. Once the process of dogmatic closure has been achieved, this same reasoning will, for the protection and everlasting preservation of the ‘faith’, use the ready-prepared arsenal of axiological postures, methodological practices, argumentative proceedings, rhetorical forms and strategies of selection, insertion, rejection and total destruction of facts prior to and following on from the time of closure. Thenceforth, what the human and social sciences call ‘representations’, images that each individual or collective subject possesses of itself, will dwell within the sphere of the unthinkable. It can be seen here how the unthinkable and the unthought trace a psychological dividing line between two mental configurations structured by two cognitive practices which, once systematized, permit the reproduction of two differentiated frameworks of the formation and development of the person.

I do not know how far Professor Zarzur would share these analyses, which, it will be seen, endeavour to problematie the two concurrent cognitive practices, and try never to affirm, even implicitly, the handling of concepts and the primacy of one or the other. I am speaking, alternately, the language of the social sciences and that of dogmatic theological reason, so as to transfer both alike to a cognitive practice whose legitimacy and productivity will emerge as this confrontation develops. The dogmatic posture makes no corresponding concession to concurrent kinds of discourse. Thus, in his presentation of theological axiology through a powerful media outlet, even someone like Professor Zarzur consigned to silence all the discussions set up between the multiple schools before the closure of the official corpora and the construction of an orthodox turāth, on the strength of which he gives a warning that is both theological and ‘scientific’ to the regime of religious truth as such; a regime that functions for millions of Muslims throughout the world (a good many listeners to the series take part in the discussion from Europe). This is a measure of the sociological dimension, political weight and historical scope of what I have called the populist brand of theological axiology.

What turn might the programme — or rather the very numerous programmes in the same style — have taken if Professor Zarzur, or any other teacher and scholar of his calibre, had been confronted with an advocate of the (still largely utopian) project of a critique of Islamic reason such as I have been working on in all my writings since the 1970s? The problem of communicability between the two mental configurations and the cognitive systems they generate and reproduce would then arise; and, if communication proved possible to the fullest extent, then, the unthinkables and the unthoughts accumulated on both sides would be incorporated and examined within a necessarily new space of the thinkable; reason, imagination, the imaginary and memory would receive different statuses, entering another psychological dimension, thus generating new regimes embodying what continues, globally, to be called truth. I stress, with sadness, that neither the western media, nor those of Muslim countries, nor even the universities and research institutions, have considered organizing, encouraging and multiplying activities which would hasten the emergence of a new thinking to give more opportunity for the rise of a new human person.

While awaiting a time when this utopia is accorded an initial concrete realization, there is a need to explain why the dominant Islamic discourse has taken on such broad proportions and mobilizes so many fervent militants. I shall merely list the most decisive factors. The internal factors include the demographic growth which, in a short period of time, has considerably expanded the sociological bases of a social imaginary fed both by the nationalistic discourse of the anti-colonial struggle and the Islamist discourse regarding the ‘refounding’ of an ‘identity’ betrayed by secular ‘élites’; the use of the media and public education for the purposes of ideological conditioning by one-party states that are voluntarist, militarist and devoid of democratic culture; recourse to a policy of ‘traditionalization’ aggravating the split between the modern and the ‘religious’ construct of the human being; the uprooting of peasant or nomadic populations, who flock to the cities where traditional customary and cultural codes disintegrate, being replaced by a populist social imaginary that is simultaneously isolated from the urban élites and from those witnesses (increasingly rare and marginalized) to an Islamic tradition concerned with obedience to the sole authority (ḥukm) of God and, as such, being independent vis-à-vis every type of power. I make a distinction here between, on the one hand, ‘ulamā’ who are adept at handling the media, who lend their assistance to the policy of traditionalization and add their substantial weight to the ‘populist’ imaginary, and, on the other, intellectuals, teachers, scholars, essayists, writers and artists who strive, in their respective spheres, to introduce a modern culture of perception, interpretation and creative interaction between a reconsidered Islamic tradition and a self-critical modernity. Unfortunately, this latter current of thought and action exists only precariously, since its proponents are dispersed throughout the world, far from the sociological terrain that is now virtually abandoned to the mechanical forces of the factors enumerated above.

The external factors comprise, basically, the continuous pressures of economic and technological modernity on all those societies which have never taken part, at any stage, in the production and direction of this modernity. All the political ‘élites’ who have assumed control in these societies since the 1950s have taken immediate steps to ensure the acquisition of power in the practical sense of the term (through military disciplines, police networks for the control of the whole national territory, heavy industry and technological tools) over the development of the means for searching for sense. The imbalance created by this policy has been aggravated all the more rapidly in that modernity, has accelerated the rhythms of change in all fields of the historical production of societies. Thus it is that historical research into the past of each society is the most urgent kind of research for restraining and correcting the excesses of ideological manipulation, but it is also the most neglected. The perverse effects of material modernity continue to feed global rejections of modernity as a project of liberation for the human condition, while the legitimate needs of a vast population everywhere demand recourse to modern means of production and trade. The internal and external factors do not act separately; rather, the historical dialectic of the forces of modernity has a multipling effect on the increasingly ungovernable interaction of all the factors.

I have, I hope, sufficiently shown how the ‘Qur’ānic fact’, the ‘Islamic fact’ and ‘modern identity’ face one another, challenge one another and exclude one another; how they condition one another in their expressions and in their struggles for survival and hegemony. I have, I hope, sufficiently pointed out the gaping chasm that separates the respective protagonists advocating open competition between the model called Islamic and the other called Western in producing the history of mankind for the third millennium. There remains the problem of listing the resources and present orientations whereby a ‘modern identity’ seeks to open the way to the historical solidarity of mankind, to put an end to the cultural and intellectual systems of reciprocal exclusion which continue to legitimize civil wars, structural violence, systems of inequality and hegemonic conquests, under the pretext of the historical necessities of globalization.

‘Modern identity’ is a historical given as massive, and as broadly encompassing in its definitions and applications, as ‘religious identity’ in its various forms. This is why they compete for the privilege of leading man towards his ‘true’ salvation. It should be clear by now that my position in the face of this age-old rivalry, disfigured by wars and costly revolutions, can be summed up in three verbs: infringe, displace, transcend. I have described at length the methodological and epistemological scope of these three cognitive operations as applied to the writing of the history of societies fashioned by the ‘Islamic fact’; I refer the reader to the relevant study in Arabica, 1, 1996, republished in Penser l'Islam aujourd'hui, 2002. I note that Christian theology is witnessing significant moves towards the displacement and transcendence of questions and solutions bequeathed by a two-thousand-year-old practice of living Tradition whose frontiers are now infringed. I am thinking especially of the recent work by Father J. Dupuy entitled Vers une théologie chrétienne du pluralisme religieux (Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism). The interest of this orientation of religious thought in the face of the productive or arrogant challenges posed by ‘modern identity’, lies in its demonstration of the possibility and promise of a systematic problematization of the two identities by one another. It should not be forgotten that the reason of the Enlightenment liberated mankind from what Voltaire called a ‘wild beast’ (meaning the dogmatic theological reasoning employed by the institution of the Church as a way of wielding its power over souls and bodies). By the same token, this reasoning ratified recourse to the violence of war in order to impose a new political legitimacy — a historical fact which is not without bearing on the barbarous instances of violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on what has been stated here about ‘modern’ terrorism. The establishment of the revolutionary violence of the modern political symbolism, in place of the religious symbolism now declared obsolete, has driven back into the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages, i.e., into ignorance, the unthought, and indeed the unthinkable, about numerous questions of an anthropological and philosophical nature. The so-called return of God, following the vaunted declaration of His death, must not mean a return to mythologized ‘values’ and illusory visions of the ‘perfect man’, but the opening of new spaces of intelligibility and more reliable possibilities for the emancipation of the human condition.

I realize the need to delve further and more deeply into the exploration of an Islamic consciousness as yet unreconstructed by the positive contributions of modernity. For this reason I have, for some years now, been working on expanding the space of thinking in Islamic thought. We cannot continue to invoke formal kinds of humanism taught by the great religious and philosophical texts, while treating violence as a manifestation which is exceptional, which simply happens to occur within archaic societies, or imperfectly integrated sections of civilized societies, or committed by wayward individuals who are immediately condemned or brushed aside in the name of a dominant morality and an effective law. Violence is a driving force inherent in the human being and in social life; there are always, within each person, quite strong and recurrent tensions between impulses to violence and aspirations for Good, Beauty and Truth. Sura 2, 253, quoted earlier, provides a very simple reminder of this dual aspect of man. In his attempts to check the ravages of violence, man has long had recourse to what is still called the ‘sacred’, referring things to a substantial reality endowed with effective powers, when it is really rather a matter of rituals and procedures of sacralization aimed at shielding individuals, places and periods of time from profanation and sacrilege through violence. Sacrifices are instituted to turn the effects of violence toward a category of human being, toward a part of the human body, toward animals or natural elements. These functional and notional bonds are woven between Violence, Sacred and Truth, just as clearly stated in sura 9, 5 analysed previously in Chapter 2. This objectification of interactions between realities still being posed and experienced as powers external to man, simultaneously shows the person moving on to a new stage of knowledge and self-realization.

Struggles for respect for the rights of man, woman and child are joined in every country and every regime in which Islam, Islamic Tradition and sharī'a remain points of reference that are impossible to bypass. The spiritual, moral and cultural wholeness of the person can be ensured only by way of a democratic regime, a rule of law, monarchical or republican, according to the history of each country, and a civil society recognized as a partner from which the sovereignty of the state derives. It has been conclusively shown, since the 1950s, that movement towards these institutions is more strongly conditioned by the acquisition and diffusion of a culture of democracy than by material prosperity, which nevertheless remains a trump card when managed with the democratic participation of all the participants. I have shown the decisive role played by the philosophical postulates which, implicitly or explicitly, govern all religious, legal, moral and political thought. For this reason, I would maintain that there is no viable democracy without open, free, fruitful, critical debate, initiated in each society; and these debates cannot attain the humanistic aims of democracy unless they incorporate philosophical interrogation on the prevailing systems of thought used by competing protagonists. We know the extent to which a dogmatic religious attitude or modern ideological mindsets exclude philosophical education and interest; and we are familiar, too, with the weakness, or often the total absence, of the teaching of philosophy not only in the educational systems introduced by post-colonial regimes, but also in the secondary schools of several Western societies. If we add to this the total absence, everywhere, of a teaching of theology founded on a critique of theological reason, it can clearly be appreciated what the kind of educational programme should be introduced as a matter of urgency, in order to create the modern intellectual and cultural conditions for the emergence and optimum development of the person in Islamic contexts and elsewhere.