Written by By S Parvez Manzoor These are difficult times for Muslims; times of inquisition and persecution, times of genocidal frenzy and crusading fury. In the pursuit of primal passions and atavistic vengeance, the powers-that-be now stand utterly naked, without even the proverbial fig-leaf of morality and decency. For exacting a tribal revenge on an old foe, they are ritually slaughtering all the ideals of Enlightenment, including the perfunctory lip-service to the rhetoric of humanity. Paradoxically, the earlier victim of the secular mans bid for self-glory was the Christian faith, and he fought that battle in the name of humanity and enlightenment! For us, these are also the times of impotent rage and breast-beating, times of senseless violence and self-immolation. But, most lamentably, we ourselves are responsible for transforming them into times of spiritual callousness and moral depravity. Cracking under the onslaught of ungodly forces and confounded by the demons of nihilism, we seem to be renouncing our primordial commitment to humanity for a defeatist and suicidal politics of immediate return.
Then there is the treason of our intellectuals! When, at the mock tribunal of civilization and human rights, the discourse of Islamic raison détat 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 victors justice. Very little in the way of an exposition of Islams transcendent and ineluctably moral - vision is 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. Islamic humanism, unfortunately, is a much neglected subject and the true image of homo islamicus has been obscured as much by the heartless positivism of modernity as by the mindless literalism of the Islamic tradition itself. The absence of any proper and balanced study and the abundance of polemical and highly politicized tracts make this enterprise quite daunting. What follows here cannot therefore be regarded but as exploratory. Given the moral duplicity of the reigning orthodoxy of secularism, and the myopic intellectual vision of traditional Islam, it is imperative that we reiterate 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 Muslims loyalty. Theres no equivalent to the secular maxim, My country right or wrong, in Islamic ethics. The Muslims 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 and end in itself and become prey to the logic of self-deification that is the essence of secular ideologies. Mission (Din) and not Empire (Dawla) constitutes the Muslims pathway to humanity. It is in the delineation of this ideal that the Quran 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 Quran, 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 Quranic image of man, it must also 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 Gods spirit (15:29; 38:72: 32:9), and morally, because he is Gods 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 Quran alludes to, what may be regarded from our human point of view, the most significant act of creation. Adam, from the Quranic 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 Quran as Trust (Amana). (33:72) 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 mans being to atoms and genes. Of course, it is licit to speak of man in concrete biological terms, as the Quran 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 Adams creation and 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 Quran 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 Quranic 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 Quranic view of Adams khilafa is a supremely humanistic doctrine, without the hubris and arrogance of errant humanism that 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 Quranic Adam does appear to have some functional resemblance to Jesus in being a bridge between transcendence and immanence; except that Adams 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 (or, at least, of a strong version of it) in Islam, the first Adam retains the functions which in Christianity are the preserve of the second. Little wonder, the individual human beings relationship to Adam, not only the biological fact of belonging to his progeny, but also the moral obligation devolving from Adams covenant with God, his assumption of the trust of moralizing nature, has become the emblem of Islams humanism. Existentialism is a humanism, Sartre once proclaimed so clamorously in defence of his teaching. A believer may, of course, question the validity of Sartres claim that issues from the deepest fount of his atheistic philosophy and metaphysics. 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 transcendent reality that is greater than man himself. It is here, in acknowledging mans 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 Theo centric 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. Despite the insufferable pain of this insight, our search for a meaningful, moral existence must continue. It is the Muslims duty to delineate the Quranic vision of the Khilafa of Adam in such a way that mankinds collective responsibility for the moral ordering of the single human world becomes the paramount focus of the socio-political discourse. S Parvez Manzoor :( PhD) Author, Writer & Researcher- Stockholm-Sweden saiyed shahbazi www.shahbazcenter.org
