The One Ring of law-religion and the return to the Arab Girl (and ourselves)
Both at the end of Chapters 1 and 2, the reader was invited to wait for the final destination of our journey, not in the discovery of the ‘place’ of the Islamic contract, but rather, of a new way of saying it by listening to the echo of the Islamic revelation.
Indeed, if, in the Islamic tradition, spoken words are associated ‘with presence, truth, and justice,’ in contrast to written words (the place of ‘absence, falsehood, and injustice:’ see the foregoing), the acoustic epistemology that has fuelled our research, on the one hand, implicitly negates the recipe of Marcel Proust’s ‘only true voyage of discovery,’ which ‘would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another’ (Proust, 2006, p. 657). To explore the city of the ‘aqd, an alternative medium of understanding grounded on the need for listening rather than seeing must be followed: not the ‘eye,’ but an oral-aural medium.
On the other hand, the cultural connotations of Western visual epistemology (McLuhan, 1989) have been essential for the practice of translation, comparison, and contextualisation in this book, without which its research could not have been undertaken. If non-identity constitutes the core of dialectic (Bhaskar, 1993), that process of negation was specifically required to embrace the totality of the Islamic contract in its divergences and multiplicity (Ahmed, 2016), as well as the recognition of its transformative praxis, moving from The Two Towers (Ch. 3) to the bridge of Babel in-time (Ch. 4). In this respect, as we have seen, if the ‘aqd was a specific societal discourse in Muslim medieval trade, the invention of modern Islamic law (Buskens and Dupret, 2015) ‘decisively repositioned [Sari‘ah] within nation-state frameworks’ (Messick, 1993, p. 253), from the ‘bodies’ of Muslim believers to the corpus of ‘the codified and legislated form of law’ (ibidem), where the primacy of the eye as medium of understanding prevails.
Considering all this, a final homage to the Arab Girl can sketch the ultimate meaning of our research.
To the extent to which her ‘improper body’ has been ‘re-phrased’ in the acoustic space of Islam - negating its visuality as an expression of Western culture and a representation of Orientalism -, we should be aware that the visual code of modernity, against which we have fought, has been paradoxically reaffirmed in the pages of this book. The absence, falsehood, and injustice of written words have ‘re-placed,’ in this book, the presence, truth, and justice of spoken words, not only through the tools of comparison (and thus the necessary dialectic between the positum of Western law and the absence of fiqh) but also through the very medium through which the contents of this search have been communicated (that of written pages). Reflecting the same paradox, the reader may rightly complain that all of Chapter 3 has been structured in the form of a ‘body’ that was absent in the tradition of fiqh.
These apparent fallacies, however, can be resolved (and justified) in the light of the dialectical perspective to which our research has been devoted.
It is well-known that the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings concludes with the One Ring being destroyed, the Hobbits returning to the Shire after the great battle of Middle-Earth, and the various human kingdoms united under Aragorn. But each story has its own ending, and the story of the ‘aqd has quite a different one. If the non-identity of law-religion requires that the One Ring should not be destroyed, but rather, carried again (and again) in comparative studies, the traveller, immersed in the culture of Western modernity, cannot escape from the canons of visuality in narrating, from a dialectical perspective, the acoustic story of the ‘aqd.
Far from being a declaration of defeat to modernity, it seems to me that this conclusion can offer an implicit invitation to the reader to engage in further reflection about ourselves and the others.
In the end, if the city of the ‘aqd that this book has explored can itself be ‘read’ as a cultural construct, as was the Arab Girl, ‘listening to’ its contents (i.e. by actively engaging with the rationales of an acoustic space) may render its message in the language of Islam: a language of presence, truth, and justice for the Muslim believer.Fully adhering to the fourth dimension of Bhaskar’s dialectics (4D), the transformative praxis that implies ‘the capacity for practical human agency to change the world’ (Norrie, 2009, p. 12), my wish is that this search will contribute to a process of becoming in the representation of Muslim societies, grounded on a better understanding of the Western pre-assumptions in ‘looking at’ this world through the visual perspective of modernity. In the constellation of opportunities that the non-identity East-West can open up, not only will re-orienting the ‘aqd towards ‘listening’ to the law and religion of Islam offer a more precise account of the rationales underpinning fiqh tradition, but it will also provide the travellers with better orientation within their visual culture, by locating their own ‘map’ in the space of modernity.
Knowing ourselves better through the ‘aqd, in this dialectical process of self-discovery and becoming, may be the most precious gift that the Arab Girl has given to her guests. A Ring that the reader should keep as a memory of this journey and a lucky charm for future adventures.