An absence of religion? Translating the non-identity of dm as Islamic bios
How should we think of religion beyond modernity, then, in a space where its underlying (Western) ideology is absent? This question puts back in our discussion the central message of Bhaskar’s Dialectic (1993; see section 1.3.1).
‘At the core of Dialectic is the concept of absence. [...] Bhaskar sets great store by the need to think of absence. Very early in Dialectic, he writes that “by the time we are through, I would like the reader to see the positive as a tiny, but important, ripple on a surface of a sea of negativity” (DPF: 5)’ (Norrie, 2009, p. 23).Comparative lawyers acting as ‘fish always in the sea’ with ‘no consciousness of being wet’ (Ainsworth, 1996, see foregoing) should replace the ocean of sense that they posit by applying their own legal paradigms with Bhaskar’s invitation to immerse our-selves in a ‘sea of negativity.’ In this reversed approach, it is the recognition of the primacy of absence that becomes crucial for an emancipation from the positum of our being (on this point specifically, see later, section 2.5). This moves from ‘real non-identity (its first moment - 1M)’ to the second edge (2E) of negativity (or negation) with an ‘emphasis on the spatio-temporal character, the becoming, of being’ (Norrie, 2009, p. 22), both in the third level (3L) of totality and the fourth dimension (4D) of transformative praxis (or agency), with a corresponding passage ‘from thinking about the entities or products of social life to thinking about the process of their production, from “product” to “process”, from being to becoming’ (ibidem).
The primacy of non-identity, the One Ring of our journey, implies a process of thinking of Islam as absence of (Western) religion. Moving from the ‘sea of negativity’ by way of approximation in interpreting the phrase ‘sacred Law of Islam,’ we can note again how, for ancient Roman jurists, sacrum was a legal attribute describing what belongs to the gods (sacrum est...
quidquid est, quod deorum habetur, writes the jurist Gaius Trebatius Testa, 1st century BC), and for this reason, removed from the free use of men (see Agamben, previously quoted). For the Romans, something was sacer not ‘by nature’ (the physis of the Greeks) but through procedures of customary and normative order (nomos) recognised within the human community;12 hence, the sacrificium rendered something sacred not by natural law but by means of a human order. On a related stage, the religiosum referred to the scrupulous observance of rituals (towards gods, the dead, or ancestors); homo religiosus was the contrary of homo negligens, the one who is careless, unconcerned about rituals. Therefore, religion was not really meant to link men to gods, as an etymology from religare, ‘to bind (again),’ may imply - although this interpretation became later prevalent in Christian circles. It was the scrupulous observance, the re-legere, ‘reading again’ through ‘careful consideration,’13 of the separation between the sacred, property of gods, and the profane, property of men.14[R]elegere... indicates the stance of scrupulousness and attention that must be adopted in relations with the gods, the uneasy hesitation... before forms - and formulae - that must be observed in order to respect the separation between the sacred and the profane. Religio is not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indifference towards the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but “negligence,” that is, a behavior that is free and “distracted” (that is to say, released from the religio of norms).
(Agamben, 2007, pp. 74-75)
While the current term ‘religion’ can translate the religio of the Romans as later embraced by Christianity by combining both the idea of religare and relegere, the concept becomes much more elusive in the Muslim world. Here, different terms can render its meaning: from Islam itself in the sense of ‘sub-
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mission of man to God’ (the idea of religare) to Sari‘ah, the Right Path, the Way-to-be-followed; from madhhab (the Way-of-going along Sari‘ah, the ‘legal school,’ the ‘doctrine’ as observance of the tradition - here, the idea of relegere becomes prevalent) to din, which is commonly used to mean ‘the religion of Islam’ in Western scholarship.
But, as Louis Gardet observes, din itself has in fact three distinct meanings: ‘(1) judgement, retribution; (2) custom, usage; (3) religion. The first refers to the Hebraeo-Aramaic root, the second to the Arabic root dana, dayn (debt, money owning), the third to the Pehlevi den (revelation, religion)’ (Gardet, 2012).The movement ‘from world to world’ that belongs to the practice of translation reveals here all the difficulties in the background of ‘saying almost the same thing’ (Eco, 2003). The Arabic word din does not say exactly something related to relegere (a meaning that belongs more to madhhab, ‘legal doctrine’), nor to religare (to bind bilaterally). Rather, what unites men to God in Islam is a unilateral judgement by which the human being is assessed; hence, the idea of retribution both as a ‘direction,’ Sari‘ah, and ‘decision,’ hukm, for human action (see the following, section 2.4.4). It is a relation of obligation, of debt (dayn), that implies the submission of the believer (muslim as the ‘one who is submitted’) in the revelation (the Pehlevi den) of Islam; not by chance, the Day of the Last Judgment is named yawm ad-din. Din gathers elements of ‘obligation, direction, submission, retribution’ (Gardet, 2012) related to a divine judgment of human actions which spans, in a general sense, both religion in terms of ‘faith’ towards a divine retribution and of ‘creed’ in a submission, Islam, which provides direction, Sari‘ah.
This translation [din as ‘religion’] is not in doubt. But the concept signified by din does not match exactly the usual concept of religion.........................................
Religio first evokes what connects the man to God [in the sense of religare]·; and din, the obligations that God imposes to His “rational creature” (ashab al-‘uqul...). Now, the first of these obligations is to submit and surrender to Him. Being the etymological sense of islam the surrender (to God), the well-known Qur’anic verse acquires its full sense:
“This day I have perfected your religion (din) and completed My favour upon you, and I have approved for you Islam as religion (din)” [Q.
5: 3].(Gardet, ibidem)
The approximated translation of din into religion, in the light of the previous passages, leads us to consider (1) what kind of relationship subsists in Islam between the religious and the secular, and (2) in what sense God’s revelation has perfected men and women’s din.
As far as the first point is concerned, the Muslim world has always known the formula din wa-dunya, which may suggest the existence of an original Islamic distinction of the religious/secular. Gardet (2012) renders the couple as a synthesis between spiritual and temporal life, where religion takes primacy over the secular in the world. In this regard, we should note how, in the Qur’an, the notion of dunya (in the sense of ‘earthly concerns’) is coupled with akhirah, ‘the Hereafter:’ ‘And ordain for us the good in this world [al-dunya] and in the Hereafter [al-akhirah] (Q. 7:156); ‘You [my Lord] are my Protector in this world [al-dunya] and the Hereafter [al-akhirah] (Q. 12:101). In both couples (din wa-dunya, dunya wa-akhirah), there is no opposition between the two terms; the temporal world is not distinct from spirituality, and the ‘ordered life’ that connotes Islamic din spans both the eternal akhirah and the temporal dunya. On this matter, Gardet quotes the French orientalist Henry Laoust with regard to the doctrine by Ibn Taymiyya: ‘Religion (din) is intimately connected [as a tool of good government] to the temporal (dunya).’ Consequently, the couple din wa-dunya should be disregarded as equivalent to the dichotomy religious/secular that characterises the separation sacred/profane in Western religio. Rather, din wa-dunya expresses an idea of unity, the two sides of the same coin: an ordered life that covers both the eternal and the temporal and that has been perfected for Muslim believers by the revelation of Islam (Q. 5:3).
Within this background, to grasp the full sense of the perfection of din in Islam, we should move away, I believe, from the Roman idea of religio (and the derived concept of ‘Christian religion’ as fully grounded on rationales of visual separation) to what ancient Greek philosophers described as bios - i.e.
‘the way of living of a single person or a human group.’ Bios referred to ‘the formulas, the modalities of living’ and in this meaning mirrors the ‘ordered life’ that characterises, in a general sense, the notion of din, the way of living a good life from a Muslim perspective. But, compared to the Greek world, where bios was paired with zof,15 in Islam, the correlated concept becomes dunya; namely, the ‘temporal,’ with its earthly concerns. It is by means of din, the perfected way of living an ‘Islamic bios’ that the human being, whose secular existence occurs necessarily in this world, dunya, can pursue salvation in the eternity of the other world, al-akhirah. In this sense, the religion of Islam qualifies the proper Muslim lifestyle (din) as (the right) way of living (bios) for the person - while Arabic sources use the different word milla to describe the social community in terms of ‘religious community.’ Hence, we find the couple din wa-milla in Ibn Hanbal and al-Baqillam (Gardet, 2012), as distinguished from madhhab, the religio-normative ‘doctrine’ to follow, and from the more general term ummah, which refers to ‘community’ as a collective nation of people (hence, the community par excellence, that of Muslim people: ummah al-Isldm).There are numerous verses in the Qur’an that relate to the religion of Islam as ordered life (din) (see previously quoted, Q. 5:3). Regarding God’s ‘teaching of din,’ Muslim scholars traditionally refer to the pivotal hadith of Gabriel,16 which gathers within the correct Islamic lifestyle (din): ‘a) the contents of faith (imdn), b) the practice of isldm (lit. the “surrender” to God), and c) ihsdn or internalisation of the faith (“to worship God as you are seeing Him”)’ (Gardet, 2012). On the authority of ‘Umar, the hadith says
One day we were sitting in the company of Allah’s Apostle... when there appeared before us a man dressed in pure white clothes, his hair extraordinarily black.... At last, he sat with the Apostle.
He knelt before him, placed his palms on his thighs, and said: “Muhammad, inform me about al-Isldm? The Messenger of Allah said: “Al-Isldm implies that you testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and you establish prayer, pay zakdt, observe the fast of Ramaddn, and perform pilgrimage if you are solvent enough.” The inquirer said: “You have told the truth”. It amazed us that he would put the question and then he would himself verify the truth. The inquirer said: “Inform me about imdn” The Prophet replied: “That you affirm your faith in Allah, in His angels, in His Books, in His Apostles, in the Day of Judgment, and you affirm your faith in the Divine Decree about good and evil.” The inquirer said: “You have told the truth.” The inquirer again said: “Inform me about al-ihsdn.” The Prophet said: “That you worship Allah as if you are seeing Him, for though you don’t see Him, He, verily, sees you”.... Then the inquirer went on his way but I stayed with the Prophet for a long while. He then, said to me: “ ‘Umar, do you know who this inquirer was?”.... “He was Gabriel. He came to you [to] teach you your religion [ 'atdkum yu‘allimukum dinakum].”(Moad, 2007, pp. 136-137)17
In the light of this hadith, Edward Omar Moad proposes a comparison between Islamic and Western religious ethics following Frederick Carney’s categorisation (1983) in ‘the hypothesis that the ethic consists of an obligation, a virtue and a value component’ (Moad, 2007, p. 135). Accordingly, he describes the religion of Islam as composed of the three fundamental elements mentioned in the hadith, where the categories of isldm, imdn, and ihsdn are respectively juxtaposed with the concepts of ‘obligation,’ ‘value,’ and ‘virtue’ (on the intersection between religion and ethics in Islam a classic source remains Izutsu,
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1966). Moad also suggests that Sari‘ah (lit. ‘a way to water’) should not be translated as ‘Islamic law’ but in relation both to the obligation component (the normative dimension) and the entire structure of the Islamic ethic.
A Shari‘ah shows you what you ought to do (“walk this way”) to access the source of that which you need (water) in order to bring about the desired state (satiety and purity). In the concrete imagery invoked in the original meaning of the term “shari‘ah,” then, we find represented an obligation component: the path, the traveling of which is what ought to be done. We also find a value component: the water, an object the value and importance of which is that in virtue of which the proposition that the path ought to be taken is valid. Lastly, we find a virtue component: the state of satiety and purity that the water promises for a thirsty traveler, representing a human change toward being the kind of person the being of which is ideal.
(Moad, 2007, pp. 140-141; italics in the original text)
Within the space of the revelation of Islam, where Sari‘ah becomes the core of Islamic bios and fiqh its normative understanding, a distinction was upheld in Muslim jurisprudence between the ritual ‘acts of worship’ (fiqh al-‘ibadat - e.g. the formalities of prayer or the rites of pilgrimage) and the non-ritual ‘worldly transactions’ (fiqh al-mu‘amalat - of which the contract, ‘aqd, is a paradigmatic example).
But does this imply any religious/secular separation in Islam that may reflect a sacred/profane distinction as in Western tradition? In fact, in the domain of din, any human temporal action can assume the value of worshipping God in a movement of religere that brings together this world (dunya) and the hereafter (al-akhirah) when the obligation of surrendering to God is related to the virtue of Muslim living. This observance (relegere) characterises both the ritual and the non-ritual nature that belong respectively to ‘ibadat and mu‘amalat. Hence, absenting profanation, both ‘ibadat and mu‘amalat are sacred: ‘[r]itual and secular concerns coexist in Islamic law... [and] the law may deem a prayer invalid or a sale reprehensible [... just as] it distinguishes carefully between the ritual (non-secular) and the non-ritual (secular)’ (Abd-Allah, 2008, pp. 240-241). As we will see better in Chapter 3 (section 3.4.3), it is the intention (niyya) of the believer to devote the action to God that makes it an act of worship (‘ibadah), in the same way that human intellect (‘aql) qualifies the validity of the action in the context of mu‘amalat (for a critical discussion see section 3.6). Hence,
Islamic law... distinguishes carefully between the ritual (non-secular) and the non-ritual (secular). Ritual acts require a good intention [niyya].... Non-ritual acts need only conform to the formal provisions of the law, although any valid non-ritual acts can be transformed into an act of worship in the sight of God if it is performed with a religious intention. Thus, a commercial enterprise undertaken with the aim of alleviating poverty for God’s sake would be elevated to an act of immense religious merit.... An important maxim states that “the foundational principle [of the law] is to have rationales (al-asl al-ta‘lit)". Ritual matters are an exception to this rule because of their intrinsic connection to the spiritual realm.
(Abd-Allah, 2008, p. 241)
2.4.
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