Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that there is an important structural similarity between the Liberal Pluralism of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and (a very broad ‘Modernist’ construal of) Political Islam. This structural similarity, so I argue, showcases an important problem concerning what I call higher-order disagreement – a problem that plagues Rawls’ early version of Liberal Pluralism, a Liberalist understanding of Political Islam, as well as Rawls’ “later” political conception of Liberal Pluralism. I end by suggesting how Medieval Islamic Philosophy (as articulated by al-Farabi, especially) may have given us the intellectual resources to solve this issue and towards articulating a “perfectionist” conception of Liberalism that is true to what the later Rawls calls “the fact of reasonable pluralism.” In short, then, it is from Islamic Philosophy where we can find the resources for fixing some of the conceptual problems with pluralism in the Rawlsian tradition.
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- 1.
Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162.
- 2.
Famously, we are also meant to choose certain principles of social justice (e.g. Rawls’ famous “difference principle”). This may be a further point where Rawls’ conception of justice may be lined to a classical Islamic one; as Hashas puts it: “European Islam seeks and defends social justice, which is originally a classical “Islamic” value that correlates with the idea of justice in Rawls’ work.” Mohammed Hashas, The Idea of a European Islam: Religion, Ethics, and Perpetual Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 21.
- 3.
For a useful account of the thought of the two central, founding figures of the Modernist movement see Elie Kedourie Afghani and ‘Abduh : And Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008).
- 4.
“The modernist-apologists Islamized modernity as a means to make the case for the feasibility and desirability of an Islamic revelation-based society that was guided by reason and freedom no less, and in fact more, than the doubt-based West. The modernist-apologists Islamized modernity as a means of making a case for the possibility of modernizing Muslim societies without relinquishing revelation as the foundation of the mind and of social life. They argued that whereas Christianity is an irrational faith, the truths of Islam can and must be ascertained through reason, and thus embracing them is not a matter of blindly adhering to traditional metaphysical beliefs, but of abiding by the dictates of logical thinking. They further argued that whereas Christianity is hostile to science and to freedom, Islam encourages and protects both…” Uriya Shavit, Scientific and Political Freedom in Islam: A Critical Reading of the Modernist-Apologetic School (New York: Routledge, 2017), 11. See also Abdullah Saeed and Hassan Saeed , Freedom of Religion, Apostacy, and Islam (Farnham, Ashgate, 2004).
- 5.
I do not wish to claim that Qutb is paradigmatic of the Modernist reform movement or the figure to turn to for a pluralistic conception of Islam (as I mention he is usually considered to be an exclusivist). But I think that something important is learnt when we see that we see parallels even in Qutb between Political Islam and the early Rawls. See also Andrew F. March, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019) and Sayed Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty : The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (New York, Routledge, 2006).
- 6.
Sayyid Qutb, Milestones [1964] (London: Islamic Book Service, 2006), 61.
- 7.
John Rawls , A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 193.
- 8.
Ibid, 186.
- 9.
Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an (Fi Zilal al-Qur’an), Vol. II., trans. Adil Salahi (Markfield: The Islamic Foundation, 2015).
- 10.
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique, trans. Aziz Abbasi (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1996), 124.
- 11.
In 1888 on having returned from France, reported here: Ahmed Hasan, “Democracy, Religion and Moral Values: A Road Map Toward Political Transformation in Egypt”, Foreign Policy, July 2nd, 2011, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/07/02/democracy-religion-and-moral-values-a-road-map-toward-political-transformation-in-egypt/ (Accessed 15 July 2020).
- 12.
See also Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
- 13.
Qutb , In the Shade of the Qur’an, Vol. II.
- 14.
Cf. Rik Peels and Anthony Booth, “Why Responsible Belief is Permissible Belief” Analytic Philosophy 55:1 (2014), 198–207, for an account of how reasonable disagreement is always made possible by appeal to higher-order disagreement (aka a defence of ‘epistemic permissibility’).
- 15.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 56–58.
- 16.
Rawls Political Liberalism, 56.
- 17.
Rawls does mention a number of other reasons to accept the “burdens of judgement” including that “evidence – empirical and scientific – bearing on [a given] case is conflicting and complex, and this hard to assess and evaluate” and “to some extent (how great we cannot tell) the way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped by our total experience, our whole course of life up to now; and our total experiences must always differ” (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56–57). In my view, though I do not have the space to argue for this claim here, none of the reasons he lists here are fully independent from the problem of second-order disagreement, such that if the latter were not a problem there would be no reason to accept what Rawls calls “the burdens of judgement”.
- 18.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 81–86.
- 19.
Martha Nussbaum, “Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39:1 (2011), 9.
- 20.
Finlayson, however, takes this feature to make Rawls’ account invulnerable to the familiar criticism from Quong I mentioned earlier; James Gordon Finlayson, The Habermas-Rawls Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
- 21.
Though this thought is obviously circular: legitimacy is a non-ideal condition because legitimacy is about consent, not belief.
- 22.
Ralph Lerner. Averroes on Plato’s Republic (Translated, with an Introduction and notes by Ralph Lerner) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 79, 1–8.
- 23.
Anthony Booth, Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 24.
Lerner, Averroes on Plato’s Republic: 30.22–32.22.
- 25.
Ibid, 25.14–23.
- 26.
For an articulation of the opposing anti-evidentialist view as found in al-Ghazali, see Zain Ali, Faith, Philosophy and the Reflective Muslim (New York: Palgrave, 2013).
- 27.
Joseph Raz, A Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
- 28.
Indeed, as Nussbaum notes, many objectors to Raz’s view dislike it precisely on the grounds that it ends up looking like a form of religion: “It is because many people think that Raz’s sort of comprehensive liberalism is the only viable form of liberalism that they also think that liberalism is not neutral about the good life, but is a form of religion in its own right.” Nussbaum, “Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism,” 2011, 35.
- 29.
See Hashas, The idea of European Islam, 2019, for an account of how an Islamic political conception of justice may be considered a reasonable comprehensive doctrine and so up for consideration as a doctrine worthy of overlapping consensus.
- 30.
Finlayson, The Habermas-Rawls Debate, 2019, 27.
- 31.
He says, “Absolute certainty is: [1] to believe of something that it is thus or not this; [2] to agree that it corresponds and is not opposed to the existence of the thing externally; [3] to know that it corresponds to it; and [4] that it is not possible that it not correspond to it or that it be opposed to it; and, further [5] that there does not exist anything opposed to it at any time; and [6] and that all of this does not happen accidentally, but essentially.” Al-Farabi in Sharāʿiṭ al-Yaqīn; see Booth, Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief, op. cit, 2016, 43; see also, Rafiq Al-ʿAjam and Majid Fakhry, eds., Al-Manṭiq ʿInda al-Fārābī [Logic in the Work of al-Farabi], 4 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Machreq 1986).
- 32.
Fabienne Peter, Political legitimacy under epistemic constraints: why public reasons matter, in Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg, eds. Political Legitimacy, NOMOS LX (61) (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 147–173.
- 33.
This is a version, I think, of the Quongian objection with respect to public reason accounts making us vulnerable to the demands of the unjust.
- 34.
Booth, Islamic Philosophy and The Ethics of Belief, 2016.
- 35.
For his political writings see Charles Butterworth Alfarabi: The Political Writings. Trans. Charles Butterworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), and Charles Butterworth Alfarabi: The Political Writings, Volume II. Trans. Charles Butterworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). See also Mushin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001) for an excellent overview.
- 36.
Though, for a noble exception, see Muhammed Ali Khalidi, Al-Fārābi on the Democratic City, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11:3 (2003): 379–394.
- 37.
As I have argued in Booth, Analytic Islamic Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). I take Islamic medieval philosophy itself to be a precursor to Political Islam – though I think it was often also misunderstood by people working under the banner of ‘Modernism’ and by people at the more radical end such as Qutb.
References
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Booth, A. (2021). Rawlsian Liberal Pluralism and Political Islam: Friends or Foes?. In: Hashas, M. (eds) Pluralism in Islamic Contexts - Ethics, Politics and Modern Challenges. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66089-5_14
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