Humility as moral commitment

In the above, I sketched out some of the elements of the view of humility, taken as a virtue regulating the proper attitude to the self and its merits, that emerges from the works of a number of writers, including al-Ghazalι.

Yet looking at these same ethical works, one finds another conception of humility at work that cannot be entirely assimilated to this one. Rather than having a reflexive attitude (a relation to the self) at its core, the core of this other conception is a relation to authority, particularly reli­gious or supernatural authority. Discussing pride in the Revival, al-Ghazalι distinguishes between three types of pride: one directed toward God, another directed toward God's human emissaries or representatives, and a third toward other human beings (1937—8, 11: 1949—52).The third is the reflexive one we considered above, and al-Ghazalι declares it the least important of the three. In fact, one of the reasons he gives for considering it a vice (in addition to the ones mentioned above) is the fact that it leads to pride in the first two senses. It makes us more likely to reject the truth claims of God's human emissaries and thereby prevents us from accepting God's authority. This point reflects the influence of the scriptures in shaping ethical discourse about this virtue. In the Qur'an, many critical references to pride occur in the context of condemning those who resist God's message (e.g. Q: 16:22, 25:21).

If al-Ghazalι puts the point with reference to the vice, pride, Ibn Qayyim frames it more directly with reference to the virtue, humility.

The conjunction between humility and obedience, to be sure, will not be unfamiliar. These virtues have often been drawn together across their history, not just in the Christian context, where they epitomised the ethic of monastic communities, but also in the ancient world. In one of the few seemingly positive references to humility in ancient philosophy, in Plato's Laws, humility is linked to adherence to justice and the divine law, while pride leads to the rejection of guidance and authority (716a-b). Ibn Qayyim, it may be noted, does not present humility as a virtue separate from obedience and leading to the latter. Rather, humility just is a form of obedi- ence.Yet his distinction between two types of humility maps on to what we would be inclined to describe, as a matter of ordinary language, as a distinction between “humility” and “obedi- ence."And having drawn this distinction, he makes clear that the first type entails (yastalzimu) the second (and not vice versa) (2010b: 659).

On one level, this causal link may not seem self-evident. Holding another person in high esteem and thinking poorly of yourself by comparison seems to be a very different thing from doing what that person tells you. But the gap closes up if we focus on the features that justify the feelings of esteem and admiration. If you admire a person for their creativity, that may not necessarily give you reasons to take their opinion about how you should lead your life more broadly, though you may seek out their view on occasions where you think that a knack for thinking outside the box is what's especially required.

The features you admire in a person may thus provide you with a range of different motives for accepting their judgement.Yet this account of the relations between humility-in-our-sense and obedience-in-our-sense (humility 1 and humility 2 on Ibn Qayyim's terms) is ultimately on the wrong track as a way of approaching the present case. This is clear from the fact that while this model may explain why you should “give consideration,” even special consideration, to another's judgement, it is harder to see how it could be used to explain why you should obey them and take orders as against advice from them. The concepts of obedience and disobedi­ence, as one Mu'tazilite theologian points out, involve a reference to status or rank (rutba). They presuppose that the person disobeying occupies an inferior status relative to the person being disobeyed (Mankdim Shashdiw 1965: 611). Hence you can disobey the king or your father, but you can't disobey a friend or a child.

The description under which you esteem or venerate God (“humility 1") and which induces obedience to his command (“humility 2") is not, in the first instance,⁸ a particular attribute, such as God's wisdom or benevolence—though these attributes play a crucial role in helping you rationally appropriate the religious life and thereby sustain your relationship to it. (“God has good reasons for commanding me to do certain things: he knows they're good for me.") It is God's status as the sovereign or master (rabb) or proprietor (malik) of your being, relative to whom your own status as a human being is that of a subject or subordinate (abd).To acquiesce in God's command is to acknowledge this differential status and to accept one's servitude (‘ubudiyya). As sovereign, God has a claim to obedience that cannot be reduced to the claims created by poten­tially other-regarding (hence anthropocentric) attributes such as wisdom and benevolence.

So humility in this second sense is based on a recognition of status relations (God/human, sovereign/subject). But it is worth underlining a point that is implicit in this conception, and is already made obvious if we systematically resort to the English “obedience” to translate what is a single Arabic term in our writers. Unlike the first kind of humility we considered, which focuses on self-assessment and looks backward to existing features of the self, this kind of humil­ity looks forward in a more fundamental way. It is a conative quality, which takes shape as a sense of commitment to adhering to a set of evaluative standards as expressed in God's Law. We see this even more clearly if we consider the vice that Ibn Qayyim opposes to humility in the Book of the Spirit. Ibn Qayyim's concern, interestingly, is not with the vice that represents the extreme of excessively high (usually populated by pride) but on the vice representing the opposite end of excessively low. He calls it “self-abasement” or “abjectness” (mahana).⁹The idea that there could be such a thing as being too humble may seem to us surprising given the emphasis on radical under-estimation that shapes the attitudes to self-assessment we surveyed. Yet Ibn Qayyim's understanding of this particular vice has a tellingly different focus.The abject person, he writes, is one who “sacrifices and demeans his soul in the pursuit of its pleasures and appetites” (2010b: 658). Abjectness is thus a vice that involves failure to master inferior desires—an idea that evi­dently presupposes acceptance of an evaluative standard that ranks desires as inferior or superior and tells us that certain desires ought to be mastered.

In answering the question “Is there such a thing as being too humble?” Ibn Qayyim's focus, I just suggested, is not on self-assessment (on the question whether one could ever think too little of oneself) but on moral commitment and self-command.Yet a closer examination of his remarks may make us wonder whether that is entirely correct. Ibn Qayyim speaks of not “sac­rificing” one's soul and of “demeaning” it. His choice of words implies an ascription of value, and it is not the value attaching to the moral standards themselves. If we wished to unpack the point, we might in fact venture to say the following. Some kind of value is being attached to the self or soul that seems to stand in an explanatory relation to the kind of self-mastery being more directly valorised. It is because we value our soul that we ought to value self-mastery and hold ourselves to these moral standards.

Here, I would suggest, we have the kernel of a more positive relation to the self that forms the counterweight of the austere view of humility found among the writers we have considered. And while we just saw it reflected in the description of a vice, it receives more direct expression in the account given by a number of writers for a positive virtue.Al-Raghib refers to this virtue using the Arabic term ' izza, while Ibn Qayyim refers to it as sharaf al-nafs¹ Both terms could be translated as “a sense of dignity,”“a sense of honour,” or even “pride.” Putting aside delicate dif­ferences between their accounts, both writers present it as a virtue that concerns self-worth, and take self-worth to be expressed in the moral standards to which a person holds himself. A sense of dignity, Ibn Qayyim writes, involves “preserving oneself from base things, vices (radha 'il), and the kinds of desires that bring ruin to men, so that one exalts oneself above them” (2010b: 656). In al-Raghib's words, it is a matter of “holding oneself above anything that inflicts a blemish upon a person” (2007: 215).

Although self-assessment is evidently at stake in this virtue, it will be clear that the concept of self-worth it mobilises is rather different from the one that underpinned our earlier discussion of how Muslim thinkers approach a person's relationship to her merits. Rather than looking back­ward, to existing merits, it looks forward, to the acquisition of merits and indeed the avoidance of demerits.A while ago, the philosopher Elizabeth Telfer drew a distinction between two kinds of self-respect, which she called “estimative” and “conative.”The former is a favourable attitude to the self that is grounded in one's “modes of conduct and qualities of character” and more broadly in the sense that one “attains at least some minimum standard."The latter is different, and is evidenced in common expressions such as “Self-respect prevented me from acting that way" or “He did it out of self-respect." Rather than being explained by past behaviour and suc­cess in meeting relevant standards, self-respect here explains behaviour and motivates efforts to uphold standards. Self-respect in this second sense is “roughly a desire not to behave in a manner unworthy oneself, or a disposition which prevents one from behaving in a manner unworthy of oneself" (Telfer 1968: 114-15).

The kind of virtue that Ibn Qayyim and al-Raghib describe can be helpfully compared to this second concept of self-respect. This is a relationship to self-worth that achieves its highest expression in a commitment to certain standards about how one should act and about the kind of person one should be. As such, it does not involve an escape from the human condition of servitude but the fullest realisation of it. God's claim of mastery over our being takes shape as a claim that we exercise self-mastery. It is in this kind ofJanus-faced mastery, which looks above (to God, accepting his governance) and below (to the self, imposing governance to its inferior parts) that human dignity is to be realized.Al-Raghib again puts it clearly:“The dignity (sharaf) of created beings lies in manifesting their servitude" (2007: 214). In obedience, the truest humil­ity and the best kind of pride coincide.

Notes

1 By contrast, the definition offered by Yahya ibn 'Adl (d. 974) in his Refinement of Character (1978: 88), which otherwise has much in common with al-Raghib's, is more amenable to this broader construal.

2 Surprisingly, al-Ghazall himself offers a view of this kind at one point in the Revival: al-Ghazall 1937-8, 11: 1987-88. SeeVasalou 2019: 46-7 for discussion. The same applies to Yahya ibn 'Adl (1978: 88); though a Christian, his work was influential in the Muslim context.

3 For further discussion of al-Ghazall's view of humility, see Schillinger 2012,Vasalou 2019, part 1, and Sherif 1975: 53-6.

4 This is the question that frames Norvin Richards' discussion of humility in Richards 1988, and it made waves in the form given to it by Julia Driver in her analysis of modesty as a virtue of ignorance (Driver 2001, chapter 2).

5 I have in mind some of Nussbaum's remarks in Nussbaum 1990, chapter 15. See also Vasalou 2018.

6 My analogy is loosely based on al-Ghazall 1937-8, 12: 2228-29. For al-Ghazall's extended discussion of this point, see 1937-8, 11: 1992-7, and also Vasalou 2019: 43-4.

7 Cf. al-Ghazall's telling characterisation of the pride of the learned man: “he views himself as having a higher status and greater merit than others with God/in God's eyes” ('inda Allah ta'ala a''la wa-afdal minhum) (1937-8, 11: 1953).

8 I add the rider because the issue is far more complex taken as a broader question about what motivates obedience of the religious Law. God's more anthropocentric (“beautiful”) features partner more subtly with his self-centric (“sublime”) features in answering this question. For a wedge into this nuance, see al-Ghazall's discussion of types of obligation in 1937-38, 2: 385-86, and my discussion of the two standpoints on God in Vasalou 2016, chapter 4, esp. 176-7.

9 Compare Ibn Qayyim 2010a: 596, where humility is designated the virtuous mean relative to the vice of abjectness on the one end and pride on the other.

10 The terminological difference shouldn't be magnified; Ibn Qayyim himselfjuxtaposes the two terms elsewhere as if they were interchangeable. See e.g. 2010a: 597, where he focuses on 'izza as the virtue term.

References

Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr. (1971) Aphorisms of the Statesman/Fusul muntaza'a. Edited by Fauzi M. Najjar. Beirut: Dar El-Mashreq.

Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid. (1937—38 [1356—57 ah]) The Revival of the Religious Sciences/Ihyad 'ulum al-din. 16 vols. Cairo: Lajnat Nashr al-Thaqafa al-Islamiyya.

Driver, Julia. (2001) Uneasy Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hume, David. (1975) Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd ed. Edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon.

Hume, David. (1978) Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr. (2010a) Passages of the Wayfarers/Madarij al-saUkln. Edited by Shu'ayb al-Arna’ut. Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risala.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr. (2010b [1432 ah]) The Book of the Spirit/Kitab al-Ruh. Edited by Muhammad Ajmal Ayyub al-Islahi. Mecca: Dar 'Alam al-Fawa’id.

Al-Makki, Abu Talib. (2001) Nourishment of the Heart/Qut al-qulub. 3 vols. Edited by Mahmud bin Ibrahim bin Muhammad al-Radwani. Cairo: Maktabat Dar al-Turath.

Mankdim Shashdiw, Ahmad ibn al-Husayn. (1965) The Five Principles Expounded/Sharh al-usul al-khamsa. Edited by 'Abd al-Karim 'Uthman. Cairo: Maktabat Wahba.

Nussbaum, Martha C. (1990) Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Al-Raghib al-Isfahani, Abu’l-Qasim ibn Muhammad. (2007) The Pathway to the Noble Traits of the Religious Law/Kitab al-DharTa ila makarim al-sharTa. Edited by Abu’l-Yazid Abu Zayd al-'Ajami. Cairo: Dar al-Salam.

Richards, Norvin. (1988) “Is Humility A Virtue?” American Philosophical Quarterly, 25, 253—59.

Roberts, Robert C. and Cleveland,W Scott. (2016) “Humility From a Philosophical Point of View.” In: Handbook of Humility: Theory, Research, and Applications, edited by Everett L. Worthington, Jr., Don E. Davis and Joshua N. Hook, 33—46. London: Routledge.

Schillinger, James. (2012) “Intellectual Humility and Interreligious Dialogue Between Christians and Muslims.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 23(3), 363—80.

Sherif, Mohamed Ahmed. (1975) Ghazalf's Theory f Virtue.Albany, NY:State University of NewYork Press.

Telfer, Elizabeth. (1968) “Self-Respect.” The Philosophical Quarterly, 18(71), 114—21.

Vasalou, Sophia. (2016) Ibn Taymiyya's Theological Ethics. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Vasalou, Sophia. (2018) “Virtue, Human and Divine.” Renovatio, 2(1), 17—12.

Vasalou, Sophia. (2019) Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yahya ibn 'Adi. (1978) The Refinement of Character/Tahdhib al-akhlaq. Edited by Naji al-Takriti. Beirut and Paris: Editions Oueidat.