Appeared in Islamonline and Islam21. Reproduced also by GusDur.Net. (Official Page of
K.H. Abdurrahman Wahid (former President of Indonesia)
Faith beyond Political
Correctness:
Islam’s Commitment to
Humanity
The ultimate vision
of Islam is transcendent: it is a moral doctrine, not a secular ideology. Islam
takes the measure of the human condition from the perspective of the eternal
and fosters a faith whose truth stretches beyond the realm of existence and
time. Only through a commitment to the ultimate transcendence does the human
world, the world of history and politics, acquire whatever meaning that it
seeks. For the human world can have no claim to being sui generic, whether existentially or morally. Man’s existence
is a gift, and his/her morality a commitment. Morality is an obligation, a
contractual agreement that has been freely negotiated by Man himself and not a
burden arbitrarily imposed upon him. Existence and morality are therefore
indissoluble in the Islamic perspective. Just as we cannot will ourselves into
existence, we cannot annul the moral contract either. We may, of course, if we
are foolish or haughty, disregard the stipulations of our agreement, but
dissolve it, we cannot. The is of the human condition, accordingly in the Islamic scheme
of things, is never bereft of the ought
of the transcendence. The world of politics and history, whatever their
legitimacy and import, can never be the be-all and end-all of the Islamic
commitment.
Unfortunately, this sterling truth of our faith, the rationale behind Islam’s
trans-political stake in the politics of humanity, is being eclipsed by the
spread of a modern form of nihilism, both indigenous and foreign, that accepts
no calling higher than the self-realization of the political will. According to
its secular gospel, there are no transcendent values: whatever cannot be
measured by the yardstick of politics has no validity, whatever cannot be
poured into the sacramental chalice of politics has no healing power. The ultimate
gift of this secular consciousness is the loss of the transcendental vision.
Either it afflicts us as a home-grown messianic politics that is totally bereft
of political reason or it terrorizes us as the scourge of a ruthless Empire
that only lives by the logic of force. Gone not only is the erstwhile morality
of faith that never submitted to the amoral claims of state-sovereignty, but
also the hope of the enlightened for a unified humanity and eternal peace.
Because of the clash of the two secular fundamentalisms, an indigenous one that
abjures the promise of the here-after for the rewards of the here-now and a
foreign one that sees its own project as the End, the measure of our humanity
is again the grisly logic of Realpolitik and its unedifying elevation
of the law of the jungle. Ours is the Hobesian
nightmare of might triumphing over right.
Given the situation, when any commitment to staying within the ideational ambit
of Islam, simply cherishing it as personal faith, has become a matter of considerable
personal liability, it is imperative that Muslim introspection and
self-criticism refocuses on the primordial covenant between Man and God, the raison d'être of the humanity’s mission in history and the fount
of Islamic humanism. Though this reclaiming of our spiritual moorings may not
convince our extremists to renounce their parochial vision, nor may it cure the
powers- hat-be of their hubris, but it may at least save us from the misery of
impotent rage, self-pity and breast-beating; it may even persuade some of us to
desist from the acts of senseless violence and self-immolation. We may also
realize that it is not our faith that bears the responsibility for the
spiritual callousness and moral depravity of our times. No, cracking under the
onslaught of ungodly forces and confounded by the demons of nihilism, we
ourselves seem to be renouncing our primordial commitment to humanity for a
defeatist and suicidal politics of immediate return.
To speak of Man in the Islamic vein is not only to confront the sanctimony of
the secular will-to-power; it is also to realize the poverty of modernity’s
image of man. For as soon as we envision man in transcendental terms, we become
conscious of the enormous ideational gulf that separates traditional discourses
from the modern ones. For man, from the vantage point of any philosophical or
theological discourse, is a given, a precept rather than a concept; it is
through man that the world - cosmos, physis, nature - acquires its meaning and form. The very raison d'être of modern science, and the incontestable premise
of its epistemology, on the other hand, is the rejection of all anthropocentric
visions and principles. Needless to say that the Islamic perspective on
politics and culture, emanate as it does from the Islamic image of Man, is
irredeemably anthropocentric.
Islam’s anthropological vision devolves from its belief about ‘the ultimate
scheme of things’, about the totality of being of which God, Allah in the language of the Qur’anic
revelation, is the creator. The ‘ultimate’ in the Islamic worldview, thus, is
trans-cosmological; it stretches beyond the world of men and stars (Al-Qur’an:
2:255). It also follows that the pre-eminence of the political and the claim of
its sovereignty, which is taken for granted by every modern discourse, is found
problematic when examined from the Islam’s trans-historical vantage-point.
Any discussion of Islamic humanism presupposes that we reach back to the
original message of the revelation, for the true image of homo islamicus has become obscured as
much by the heartless positivism of modernity--as by the mindless literalism of
the Islamic tradition itself. We must start by reiterating the centrality of
transcendence in the Islamic scheme of things. Islam without a commitment to
the Ultimate beyond, affirmed in the testimony of faith as the Unique God
(Allah), would not be Islam at all. Thus, for all the sanctity and existential
necessity of the historical Muslim community, Islam is not coterminous with it.
Nor is the historical community, indeed the world of history itself, the
ultimate locus of the Muslim’s loyalty. There’s no equivalent to the secular
maxim, ‘My country right or wrong’, in Islamic ethics. The Muslim’s loyalty to
any historical order, perforce political, is always conditional: it is always
deferential to the obligation of ‘enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong’
(3:103).
The very notion of faith, Islam (Surrender to God)
presupposes a trans-historical and transcendent disposition of man (fitra) (30:30). Humanity and
not nation or state is thus essential to the Islamic vision. Whatever politics
that emanates from the historical existence of the Muslim community may
therefore never renounce the goal of human unity; it may never become an end in
itself and fall prey to the logic of self-deification that is the essence of
secular ideologies. Conscience (Din) and not Empire (Dawla) constitutes the
Muslim’s primary pathway to humanity. It is in the delineation of this ideal
that the Qur’an categorically affirms the ‘unity in diversity’ of the human
creature, and upholds the supremacy of the moral over all other emblems of
distinction or pride:
O mankind, We have created you male and
female, and appointed you races and tribes, that you may know one another.
Surely, the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most godfearing of you..’ (49:13)
As befits the transcendental worldview of the Qur’an, the addressee of its
discourse is a universal, archetypical and trans-historical human being. Even
the covenant that God has with man is primordial and is contracted prior to the
advent of the historical time. Man enters his/her historical existence only
after submitting to the sovereignty of God:
And when thy Lord took from the Children of Adam,
from their loins, their seed, and made them testify touching themselves,
‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said: ‘yes, we testify…’ (7:172).
The Qur’anic image of man, it must be underlined, is
transcendental without being anti-historical. Like every other being and
non-being, man is a creation of God. Yet, his status is special on two
accounts: ontologically, because he has been
infused with God’s spirit (15:29; 38:72: 32:9), and morally, because he is God’s Deputy and the custodian of
his creation on earth (2:30ff; 7:11ff; 20:116ff). It is through the story of
the birth of Adam that Qur’an alludes to, what may be regarded from our human
point of view, as the most significant act of creation. Adam, from the Qur’anic account, may be envisaged in both transcendental
and immanentist terms; both as the primordial,
eternal man and as the individual, historical human being. The ‘transcendence’
of Adam, which is reflected in his intelligence (‘aql) and which endows him
with rational faculty and moral judgment, must therefore be
seen in conjunction with his ‘immanence’, his mission in history. For Adam has
on his own accord accepted the challenge of creating a just moral order on
earth, an enterprise described by the Qur’an as ‘Trust’ (Amana). (33:72)
Man acts thus as the intermediary between nature and morality, between a
blissful, albeit non-reflexive and amoral, state of animal existence and a
voluntary assent to the demands of a higher calling. For the Muslim mind,
further, the immensity of space and matter is a symbol of the Transcendent reality:
all this plenitude of being and immanence points beyond itself. Significantly,
then, it is the soul (Intellect) of man which, as a repository of Divine signs,
mediates between the natural world and the transcendent truth beyond, and
assures man of his ultimate felicity:
We shall show them our signs in the horizons
and in their souls, till it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. (41:53)
One must not confound this transcendental perspective with the biological one
of modern science and construe Adam as an emblem of Homo sapiens (in the manner of Lucy!), or reduce man’s being to
atoms and genes. Of course, it is licit to speak of man in concrete biological
terms, as the Qur’an itself employs biological images and metaphors (23:12-14;
cf. also 32:8), but it is only within the ‘grand paradigm’ of transcendence
that the quintessentially spiritual and moral nature of Adam’s mission can be
contemplated, and perhaps apprehended.
Adam, the first man, who stands for all humanity has also been recognized in
Islam as the first prophet, a fact which is construed that mankind throughout
its earthly sojourn has never been without divine guidance. Significantly, when
the Qur’an speaks of historical men and women, especially former prophets, it
does so without the least regard to chronology and does not make any
distinction between former prophets. The unity and identity of divine guidance,
available to all prophets and preached by all of them, renders all historical,
ethnic and geographical distinctions superfluous. Here again we encounter a
transcendent vision that is inimical to the politically sectarian views of
humanity as ‘sovereign states’. It demolishes all the idols of ethnic pride,
cultural hierarchy and religious exclusiveness.
Most significantly, the Qur’anic designation of Adam
as the Representative or Vicegerent (Khalifa) of God is pre-eminently moral in scope and
purpose. It presents a conceptual scheme that mediates between transcendence
and immanence, that bridges the gap between the de facto and the de jure, the is and the ought,
of the human situation - without invoking the ontological language of
incarnation. Man is denied the attribute of ‘sovereignty’ but given all the
freedom, royal power and ‘pontifical’ responsibility that are the privileges of
the Viceroy. In moral terms, it is tantamount to denying man the right to be ‘a
norm unto himself’ and a source of his own values. The Qur’anic
view of Adam’s khilafa is a supremely
humanistic doctrine, without the hubris and arrogance of errant humanism which
according to the critics of modernity is its bane and the source of its
nihilism.
Though there is no ontological relationship between God and Adam in the manner
of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation, the Qur’anic
Adam does appear to have some functional resemblance to Jesus in being a bridge
between transcendence and immanence; except that Adam’s role, as mentioned
earlier, can only be conceived in moral terms. (Cf.: 3:58). In Christian
theology, Jesus is referred to as the ‘Second Adam’, redeeming mankind of the
sin that the first Adam had committed. Apparently, due to the absence of the
Original Sin in Islam, the first Adam retains the functions which in
Christianity are the preserve of the second. Little wonder, the individual
human being’s relationship to Adam, not only the biological fact of belonging
to his progeny but also the moral obligation devolving from Adam’s covenant
with God, his assumption of the trust of moralizing nature, has become the
emblem of Islam’s humanism.
Returning to our own times, we must not become too depressed by the treason of
our intellectuals! We do know that when, at the mock tribunal of ‘civilization
and human rights’, the discourse of Islamic raison
d’état that is the
pride of the guardians of the sacred law (fiqh) is indicted for not
possessing a moral vision transcending the self-interests of a parochial
political community (the Ummah of in the eyes of our
critics), all that we can do is to recoil in horror at this unseemly spectacle
of ‘victor’s justice’. Very little in the way of an exposition of Islam’s
transcendent – and ineluctably moral - vision is ever proffered by official
Islam. All that these beneficiaries of our historical order, whose authority
and power both have been crushed to naught by the juggernaut of modernity, can
conjure is a lame apology of the status quo! Islam for them is nothing but a
frozen moment in time, a provincial culture rather than a universal faith. Any
conscientious believer may, however, notice that the legalistic discourse of
our tradition does not do justice to the moral vision of the Qur’an. And
neither does the parochial politics of ‘revivalism’ which lacks both the
jurist’s method of instrumental reasoning and his concern for the common good (Maslaha)!
But, even more crucially, the Muslim has no reason to be impressed by
modernity’s claims about the humanity of its order. Indeed, for the Muslim, any
vision of man, any semblance of a moral and philosophical doctrine of humanism,
remains specious so long as it does not measure man against a reality that is
greater than man himself. It is here, in acknowledging man’s subordination to a
moral law, infinitely more universal and legitimate than the ones prevailing in
our, perforce parochial, political constituencies, that the incompatibility of
Islamic khilafa and secular
sovereignty is fully revealed. Islamic conscience, a gift of theocentric faith, is never hostage to the Muslim political
order, or any political order for that matter, in the manner of the secularist.
For the latter, the political order is the be-all and end-all of all historical
existence. In the final resort, the secular doctrine of ‘state sovereignty’
removes all distinction between morality (universal, in the Kantian mode) and
politics (parochial, in the constrictive sense of political correctness!).
For all its sanctimony, modern civilization provides no evidence, not even in
theory, that it aspires to overarch the pernicious divide of morality and
politics, that it possesses a universal vision which identifies the
self-interest of its own political community with the wellbeing of humanity.
All that the theory and practice of modern politics offers is a compelling
vindication of the creed of Realpolitik (which upholds that humanity has no claim to any
common good or universal morality) and a return of the Empire. Whatever the
pain of this insight, our search for a meaningful, moral existence must
continue. It is the Muslim’s duty to delineate the Qur’anic
vision of the Khilafa of Adam in such a way
that mankind’s collective responsibility for the moral ordering of the single
human world becomes the paramount focus of the socio-political discourse.
Ends