By Nicholas A Biniaris
Dionysius
of Halicarnassus wrote that "history is philosophy through paradigm",
[1] while Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his Philosophy of History lectures
said philosophy can view history as a unified narrative with a central theme.
Hegel
asserted that history's central theme is the march of Geist to freedom. Upon
this Hegelian sweeping vision, Marx built his own sweeping narrative as did
Francis Fukuyama after 1989.
Hegel may
have been a better student of history than his epigones because he didn't
dabble in actual social-economic-political problems but formed his own
conceptual tools to approach his subject in a theoretical way.
He also
called Islam the "Enlightenment of the East". According to Hegel, the
East gave freedom to one, the emperor, the Satrap; the Hellenes had given
freedom to some, the free citizens of Polis; and the Reformation and the
Enlightenment gave freedom to all.
Has Islam
given freedom to all? In a sense, Hegel was right in the context of Asian
imperiums. Islam gave to the faithful a saying in the Mosque, a canon, the
Koran, to judge the ruler. But nothing actually changed from the practices of
Eastern despotism. Islam didn't produce free citizens as political agents but
kept the subjects of Asiatic empires subject to the will of the one.
Hegel got
it all wrong. His ad hoc reading of history, as a philosophical research
project had lost track of reality and a sense of historical proportion.
Today, the
West, as the inheritor of a Christian culture, and the Muslim world, the
faithful ones, are in a protracted conflict. Christianity, a religion of a
Middle Eastern origin with Egyptian-Jewish roots, turned from an activistic
conception of the beyond, Resurrection and Last Judgment, to a strong political
force when Constantine the Great adopted it as the official religion of the
Roman Empire; it turned to a universal one with the emperor getting the title
of "Equal-to-the-Apostle".
However,
the Christian salvational universalism was arrested on 636 AD at the battle of
Yarmouk River in Syria where the nascent Arab-Muslim Revolution defeated the
Byzantine Imperial Army. [2] It was the most decisive battle of the last two
millenniums as present history points to.
Prophet
Mohammed, as an original thinker and revolutionary, transformed the
religious-political imaginary of the Arabs in just two decades, destroying the
idols of the tribes at Mekka and placing the beyond in the hands of a single
creator who has no involvement in human affairs.
His
epigones moved out of the confined area of Arabia and conquered by the sword
the Middle East and North Africa, the cradle of Christianity which withered
from Asia and Africa with the exception of Asia Minor and Ethiopia.
Islam
became a universal religion, spreading in Asia, destroying central Asia
Buddhism, the Zoroastrians, Shamanism, and attempted even to destroy Hinduism.
Christianity had to wait another nine centuries to become a universal church
through the rise of its military might and its imperial expansion. However,
Asia remained non-Christian, with Islam, Hinduism, Chinese
Confucianism-Buddhism and a minute Russian Orthodox Church.
The second
phase of the Christian universalism was the proselytization of the Russians
through the Greek Orthodox Church. The third was the schism of the Christian
Church to Western and Eastern dogmas. The universal church was divided between
an emerging politically confident Europe versus a Byzantium besieged by Islam.
The fourth
and most crucial transformation of the religious grounding of Europe was the
Reformation. This last event contemporaneous with printing and in the middle of
the Copernican Revolution ended, many years later, with the Westphalian Treaty
of 1648.
One of the
results of this religious Reformation was an unintended historically political
transformation: the subsequent emergence of the nation state. This was the road
traveled by the European Geist of the religious-political subject towards what
is today an individualistic, liberal, capitalistic, technological and affluent
secular social subject.
The
transformation of the social-religious to the secular-political lasted for
several centuries and is still in progress. The accomplishment was tolerance,
and even indifference, towards the religious as part of the public discourse,
which was focused on the social, economic and political demands of the
individual.
Enlightenment and Islam
Was Islam
the Enlightenment of the East? The Enlightenment in the West established
natural theology and destroyed faith as a universal category of social
interaction. On the contrary, to the East, Islam unequivocally established a
religious-social imaginary.
The Ummah
[or community of Muslim people] was the testimony of Islam to the social as a
political affiliation of the Dar al Islam (House of Faith) versus the Dar al
Harb (House of War) or Garb (House of West in the Ottoman period). The
distinction of Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb is a legal one. A state with a
Muslim minority but with an Islamic legal system is a Dar al Islam as well.
Islam is a
system of religious orthopraxy, not of orthodoxy. This basic fact is what keeps
Islam in a state of suspension versus the political democratic orthopraxy of
the West. What is lacking from the edifice of Islam is a theological
philosophical skepticism that raises the crucial distinction between the
secular and the religious.
For Islam,
orthopraxy towards the religious sanctifies the political. The Reformation in
Europe ended up with a Christian subject internalizing the role of faith as a
personal engagement with God and not as redemption expected from the Church of
Rome assumed to be the political underpinning of salvation.
The Muslim
world suffered its first transformation through a political rift, the
Sunni-Shi'ite conflict. This rift was at times exacerbated and or defused
through the universal Islamic state of the various caliphates, but it was never
resolved through a Westphalian-type treaty acknowledging the political and
religious inclusion of the two distinct expressions of Islam.
Islam's
political edifice, contrary to its initial endogenous Arabian phase, the four
elected caliphs' period, became Imperial and hereditary. Actually, all up to
the 9th century, Islam was the incubator of new ideas, science, philosophy and
art.
Its
religious-political subject as a new historical-social construct absorbed and
cultivated ancient Greek, Persian, and Hindu traditions and inspired creative
tensions in the areas of its expansion. This was arrested most probably by the
tradition of its own religious-political foundations.
In Central
Asia and India, the Mogul imperial family, in the 16th century, attempted a
grant synthesis of religions by its efforts to reconcile the vast and diverse
populations of its domain. It failed, but it was a historical paradigmatic
failure that marked the difficulties of reconciling dogmas and cultural
"otherness" in cases where the social-political imaginary was based
upon religion, in empires of subjects.
This would
change radically with the emergence of the social-political, a self-contained
notion, as it occurred through the great political revolutions in England,
America, France and even Russia and China.
The
involvement of the West with the Muslim world is an old and tumultuous one.
Today, an ancient world immersed in traditionalism and a
patriarchal-hierarchical society is consciously or unconsciously trying to cope
with a fast-changing human environment that demands adjustment and
reconciliation with forces unleashed by the West. The complexity of this
conflict confuses the means and ends of the combatants, with the pen or with
arms.
In recent
decades, we have experienced a rise in what is called Islamic fundamentalism
and the subsequent practice of terror as a political instrument to attack the
West or to eliminate the "other", identified as heretical Islam.
What the
religious-political Muslim subject reinvented was revolutionary tactics from
the past: intolerance, war against Dar al Garb, martyrdom, jihad. Osama bin
Laden's legacy and al-Qaeda as a Muslim political movement is still playing a
huge role in this transformation.
The same
holds for the Muslim Brotherhood as a political expression of change inside
Islam. Al-Qaeda proclaimed a political agenda: the caliphate and the liberation
of all Muslim soils from the heathen. This agenda is a contribution to the
political discourse for the ongoing Muslim transformation that may shape the
future of these masses if and when all other efforts fail to achieve even
limited aims and expectations.
The Salafist
movement, as a new regressive effort of proselytization of young Muslim
activists in the West, is an ideological approach that is perhaps politically
controlled by the Saudis as another counter-Reformation movement versus a more
secular approach by those Muslims living in the West.
We observe
various other moves on the chessboard of the Muslim world. The Boko Haram
movement in Nigeria is becoming a serious threat to that country's cohesion.
Similar movements occur in other African states as in Mali. Hence, Islam
appears as a global religious-political movement.
What is
also global is firstly the liberal, technological, economic challenge of the
West, secondly the challenge of the Chinese paradigm and also the rise of
Hinduism and Buddhism. The last three challenges are endogenous to Asia, the
area where Islam will face its actual test. Because it is there where no public
opinion, politically correct journalism and a preoccupation with world opinion
can stop a grassroots clash among these neighbors as the case is in Myanmar,
Thailand and Philippines. Islam's preoccupation with the West is probably its
most serious shortcoming.
There are
parts of the Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian, Pakistani and even Saudi
societies that are struggling for a real down-up Reformation, trying to assess
their rights and demands as citizens. If we look carefully at the Philosophy of
History, the transformation of the Western paradigm, from the Christian to the
secular and the scientific, was not a smooth one.
A
transformation of Muslim societies to the secular and the scientific will take
time and considerable pain. We observe this in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Mali, and
Egypt, and in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. These societies' demands
are complex: economic, political, social, emancipatory, national, and even
aesthetic. But what is the underlying substratum is Islam and its overbearing
presence in the conduct of the individual's life.
The ontological versus the epistemological
What is
also important for this overcoming of tradition for the Muslims is the Turkish
transformation, which is at the crossroads between the religious-secular divide.
Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, as an Islamic scholar and an influential political
agent, has defended the thesis that the foundation of the social in Islam is
the ontico-religious reality that forms the basis for the new Islamic
social-political paradigm.
This holds,
as he says, in contradistinction to the West's priority of the epistemological,
which means an insatiable quest for knowledge of the mundane and an all
pervasive skepticism. Davutoglu's thesis is that the social-political should be
subject to the religious-ontological imaginary so that a new conceptual and
political reality can stand equipotentially along the dominant Western one.
Davutoglu
defends a society that has as priority of its social-political imaginary a God
and His revealed commands, but at the same time this edifice is amenable to a
democratic political order. This is a new universal project, whereas the West
after the collapse of its universal Christian Church has proposed a new
paradigm: the universal rights of people qua human beings.
This
project supervenes upon the Hellenic model for rights qua citizens. The
universality of the West's ideological discourse is as confused as the proposed
Islamic paradigm. Universalism, as an ideological proposal, was an
imperialistic concept religiously inspired.
Today, the
West is trying to project a secular universalism founded upon the political
advent of democracy. This neo-democracy (the term is a pun) is a mass-democracy
that constitutes a magma of skepticism, egoism, instant gratification,
hedonism, illiteracy as an effect of the ocular of mass entertainment and an
all-out effort to liberate ourselves from history.
What is
lacking is the structure and the tools to supersede scarcity, traditions,
nostalgia, the social as creative self-reflection and even nationalism as a
limit to globalization; in short mass-democracy cannot formulate any policy
whatsoever, except the use of force.
Can an
Islamist model produce citizens and rights which will shape a
"better" individual and governance than the Western one? Up to this
day, the Islamic historical paradigm exhibits signs of dystopia among a modern
and post-modern world. In a detailed comparison with the Western one, it fails
to adapt even to the necessary social or economic demands of the Islamic masses
themselves.
As
philosophers, we are bound to make the biggest of mistakes if we propose a
definitive narrative of human praxis versus the contingency of our existence.
On the other hand, history as praxis is a human drama with too many innocent
victims and pain. To cross this valley of tears, we may seek redemption not
solely through history but also through our own acts of humanity.
Notes:
1. Hellene
rhetor, historian and grammarian 60BC-7AD?
2. The
Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade operates in Syria.
