What is Religion and How Flexible is It?

Intl 440 / Murat Somer ©

• What is religion?

– Magic?

– Supernatural and mysterious

– Social ideology?

• Durkheim:

•

• “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which united into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

• R is simultaneously based in:

• Sacred(God*)

• Social (god)

• *: or sacred axioms like the four Noble Truths and Nirvana-

Salvation in Buddhism

• Durkheim: Religion cannot be based in supernatural (assumes there is a natural order) or mystery (should offer order and predictaibility for social life, not arbitrariness)

• Kierkegaard: Religion needs to be unbelievable so that it can become believable: “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

• How can R based in the sacred reinvent itself to adapt to social change?

• How can people reinterpret religion to make room for modern values (such as gender equality, democracy, secularism, human rights) and pluralism?

• Bayat: Muslims and Christians adapt to democracy, not Islam or Christianity. But:

• Theological constraints

• Political constraints

Religion as Text

• Each major Eurasian traditon has some authoritative text.

• Ancient Greeks – Homer

• Jews and Christians – Bible

• Muslims - Koran

• Zoroastrians – Avesta

• Hindus – Vedas

• Buddhists – Tripitaka

• How can any religion reinterpret its authoritative text (Cook)?

• Athetizing: question the authenticity of a specific part of text. Claim it is spurious.

• Abrogation: play one principle against another • Read text metaphorically • The phenomenion of soft belief: residual

religiosity (only believe those aspects not disproved by science)

• Higher criticism of the Bible: philologically interpret holy text just like literature, any other text from the past

• Cook claims:

• Islamic world least affected in the world by soft belief and higher criticism of the Bible, espcially the latter

Question of “creation” 1. Holy text uncreated: direct word of the Divine, literal

interpretation. Only athetizing possible. 2. Holy text created by the Divine to engage a historical

society: athetizing; metaphorical reading; abrogation;

transposition. All deals with the explicit meanings of the text.

3. Holy text created as a cultural product of a historical

society: athetizing; metaphorical reading; abrogation; higher

criticism of the Bible (hermeneutics, deconstruction, also seeks the hidden meaning of the text, the intentions of the “author”)

• Cook: “Traditional Islam has not been resistant to the notion that the revelation reflected the milieu in which it was revealed….But TI could never have made the leap from the idea of a scripture which engages the society in which it was revealed to the notion of one which is a product of it.”

• Cook: Higher criticism of the Koran is not acceptable in Islam

• But there were exceptions (İnalcık):

• İmam Ghazali: Everything has one visible-outer (zahr) and one invisible-interior (batıni) appearence.

• => every verse in the Quran has one literal-visible and one hidden-batıni meaning

• Fakhruddin Razi used philosophy, sophism and a combination of Ash’ari and Mu’tazilla schools in interpreting the Quran.

• Most Sunni ulama rejected Razi’s interpretations but was widely used in Ottoman Turkey

• Mu’tazilla (rationalist) school: Quran created

How do we interpret the Quran?

• Is Quran created?

• Which view would be preferred by states?

• The debate between the Muslim theologian and jurist Ibn Hanbal (780-855) and the Caliphs l-Ma’mun and al-Mu’tasim

• The Caliphs wanted to uphold the Mu’tazila view that the Koran was created. Ibn Hanbal opposed this view and was called before Mihna (Inquisition)

• Quran uncreated and inimitable.

– Tabari: “whoever claims otherwise, you can shed his blood.”

• Similar debates in Hinduism and Christianity.

• Early Muslim period: Muslim jurists used both qiyas (analogical deduction) and taqlid (precedence) in ijtihad (independent reasoning to interpret the Koran).

• Early 900s: Most Sunni jurists agreed

• Closing of the door of ijtihad. Only taqlid from then on.

• Piscatori: “But a great sea-change began to set in from 18th century on.”

• Traditionalist Akhbari school (Iran): “any individual’s judgment fallible.”

• Usuli school (Iran): “learned people can interpret and offer opinions.”

• Muhammad al-Wahhab (Arabia): “Muslims have been passive. Go back to original principles. Taqlid wrong.”

• Al Sadia al-Mahdi: “Taqlid has undermined the vitality of Muslims and opened them to foreign domination.”

Open the door of ijtihad • Martaza Ansari • Jamal al-Din al-Afghani • Muhammad Ab’duh • Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi • Muhammad Iqbal • Hasan al-Banna • Isma’il Mazhar • Ali Suavi • Namık Kemal • Abdullah Cevdet • Musa Kazım • Ziya Gökalp • İsmail Bey Garpinskii • Halide Edip Adıvar

• Examples:

• Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah (1947): Quran is literature in a sense which abandoned the claim that they embodied literal historical truth. God’s concern was to move the Arabs of the day to embrace Islam

• Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1992): Quran “cultural product” reflecting historically specific aspects of the culture and language of the time

• Cook: How do modern commentators of the Koran respond to the challenges of modern times (e.g. positive science, religious pluralism, gender equality?)

• Play one verse against another

• Accept the principle but limit its practice

Example 1: Science

• Koran as science book (risky)

• Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida and Sayyid Qutb:

• Koranic text as metaphor

• Metamorphosis implies social exclusion

• God’s custom implies natural law

Example 2: religious pluralism

1. The sword verse: “slay the polytheists..” (Q9:5)

2. The tribute verse: peace with “people of the book” who pay a tribute. (Q9:29)

3. “There is no compussion in religion. Rectitude has become clear from error.” (Q2: 256)

Fundamentalists focus on 1 and 2, modernists on 3.

• Catholic Church: opposition to religious pluralism and liberal political principles until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s..

• “Give to Ceasar to what is Ceasar’s and to God what is God’s” (Matt 22:21)

• Vs.

• “You could have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:10)

• Lapidus: religious and political institutions in Muslim countries are separate in practice but maybe not in theory

Example 3: gender equality

• Modernists claim men are superior to women and husbands superior to their wifes.. but this does not apply to everything.. Not to faith, or property rights for example..

• Ambiguity similar to Southern Baptists’ declaration on family life in 1989: wives should “graciously submit” to the “servant authority” of their husbands.

• But justification of full equality would require higher criticism of the Koran?

• Why do male Islamist modernists abrogation vis-a-vis religious pluralism but not vis-a-vis gender equality?

Example 4: Democracy

• God is the abolute sovereign

• “and seek their counsel in the matter.” (3:159)

• “And (Muslims’ affairs are decided in) consultation among them.” (42:38)

Kurzman

• Traditional Islam

• Modernist Islam ( c.a. 1840 – 1950)

• Secularism (c.a. 1950 – 1970) and Islamic revivalism (c.a. 1950 - )

• Liberal Islam?

New answers to:

• Who can speak for Islam?

• Why speak now?

• What to speak?

• How to speak?

Modernist Legacy

• To what extent has Islamic modernism affected the subsequent developments throughout the Islamic world?

– Iranian Revolution

– Pan Arab nationalism

– Turkey