Abstract
This paper overviews the meanings of especially religious pluralism in the Islamic intellectual and political tradition, past and present, with reference to some major scholarly works in tafsīr, theology, and philosophy. First, before highlighting the importance of pluralism in modern studies of religion, from both historical and theological perspectives, brief reference to some classical “Islamic” texts on inter-and-intra comparative religions will be mentioned, not only to show that comparative religions and religious pluralism as scholarly disciplines are not inexistent in the tradition, but most importantly to show that religious pluralism could flourish in premodern times even when the episteme was dominantly “religious” - to use the terms here with reservations. The point here is that the plurality of interpreting one tradition, and the neutral or biased interpretations of other traditions, is a confirmation of religious pluralism, however problematic this confirmation might be in the political or theological spheres. Second, with reference to a few recent works in the field of “Islamic” intellectual history, tentative definitions on what Islam, Islamic, plurality, pluralism, and pluralization mean will be introduced. Third, examples of how pluralism is examined in contemporary Islamic thought are provided.
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Notes
- 1.
“Arab” here is used as an inclusive linguistic tool and not as a racial or ethnic reference since most important cultural texts were written in this language, though Persian, Turkish and Urdu, to name these, were also important languages of the major Islamic cultural centers in different periods of times and locations during the cultured era of the civilization. As to the use of the term “Islamic” for “Islamic civilization”, and as will be argued here, I in no way mean that everything that was produced in this civilization was related to or bound by strict understandings of religion; “Islamic” here is plural and inclusive of “religious” and “secular” – i.e. secular-religious - achievements or thoughts; and this inclusion includes failures, exclusions, and various minor, non-mainstrean traditions of the whole tradition.
- 2.
Communities have often found ways to co-exist despite political divisions among the modern nation states in the Middle East; see the recent work of Ussama Makdisi which tries to challenge the idea that the region has been in endless conflicts and wars during the twentieth century: The Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019); and Firat Oruc, ed., Sites of Pluralism: Community Politics in the Middle East (London: C. Hurst and Co., UK, and Oxford University Press in US, 2019).
- 3.
Scholarship building on the heritage of Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), and the important literature of postcolonial theory are highly relevant here; knowledge production norms related to this epistemic world, and beyond, are revisited in the recent work of Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
- 4.
Ali Oumlil, Fī sharʻiyat al-ikhtilāf [On the Legitimacy of Difference] (Beirut: dār at-ṭalīʻa, 1991).
- 5.
Akbar S. Ahmed, “Al-Beruni: The First Anthropologist,” Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAIN) 60 (1984), 9–10.
- 6.
Tāj al-Dīn Muhammad al-Shahrastānī, Al-Milal wa al-niḥal [Sects and Creeds], Abdelaziz Mohammed al-Wakil, 3 vols (Cairo: mu’assasat al-halabi, 1968).
- 7.
Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2d ed. (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1991) 11.
- 8.
Hilman Latief, “Comparative Religion in Medieval Muslim Literature,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 23:4 (Fall 2006), 48.
- 9.
Ibn Ḥazm, Al-Faṣl fī al-milal wa al-ahwā’ wa al niḥal [The Decisive Word on Sects, Heterodoxies, and Denominations], vol. 1, 2nd ed., Mohammed Ibrahim Nasr, and Abderrahman Omaira, eds. (Beirut: Dar al-Jil, 1996)
- 10.
George C. Anawati says “In contrast to Ibn Ḥazm, the author (Shahrastānī) does not aim at refuting errors, but merely strives to state the doctrines as objectively as possible.” Georges C. Anawati, “Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism,” in The Legacy of Islam, ed. Joseph Schacht with C. E. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) 362.
- 11.
In Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi, “Islam, Christians, and the West,” in Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi, ed., World Religions and Islam: A Critical Survey Part I (New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2003) 149; see the introduction of Rosenthal for a general account of the place of historiography in Islamic classical scholarship: A History of Muslim Historiography, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1968).
- 12.
Abū al-Hassan al-Ash‘arī, Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn wa ikhtilāf al-muṣallīn [Discourses of the Proponents of Islam and the Differences among the Worshippers], 2 vols., ed. Mohammed Muhy ed-Din Abdelhamid (Seida, Beirut: al-Maktaba al-‘aṣriyya, 1999).
- 13.
‘Abd al Qāhir al-Baghdādī, Al-Farq bayna al-firaq , ed. Mohammed Othman al-Khisht (Cairo: Maktabat Ibn Sina, n.d.).
- 14.
Talal Asad , “Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith’s “The Meaning and End of Religion,” History of Religions, Vol. 40, No. 3 (February 2001), 205–222.
- 15.
“Dīn” has the same linguistic root of the word “dayn”, which means “debt” in Arabic; and “acceptance of faith” in the Islamic tradition is a “debt”, or an “amāna”, that the “believer” and human beings in general have to maintain (See Qur’an 33:72).
- 16.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1964), 140.
- 17.
Ibid, 147.
- 18.
“Islam is in every sense a great affair,” in Smith, On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies (Mouton Publishing: The Hague, New York, 1981) 4 (In Chapter 1, “Islamic History as a Concept”).
- 19.
Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 1964, 148.
- 20.
Smith defines faith as follows: “Without yet knowing what it is, we may nontheless affirm with confidence that there is some personal and inner quality in the life of some men, and to it we give the name faith, in relation to which overt observables are for those men religiously significant.” Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 1964, 155.
- 21.
Ibid, 156.
- 22.
Ibid, 161.
- 23.
Ibid, 168.
- 24.
Ibid, 197.
- 25.
Ibid, 168.
- 26.
Ibid, 171.
- 27.
Ibid, 172.
- 28.
Ibid, 172.
- 29.
Ibid, 178.
- 30.
Ibid, 180.
- 31.
John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985) 31, 39.
- 32.
Ibid, 31.
- 33.
Alan Race also introduced this distinction apparently a little earlier in print, but I stick to Hick here since there is a lineage in his thought based on the work of Smith, an important scholar of Islam, the focus of this volume. See Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (London: SCM Press, 1983).
- 34.
Ibid, 31.
- 35.
Ibid, 33.
- 36.
Hick says, “From the pluralist point of view, Yahweh and Shiva are not rival gods, or rival claimants to be the one and only God, but rather too different concrete historical personae in terms of which the ultimate divine Reality is present and responded to by different large historical communities within different strands of the human story.” Ibid, 42.
- 37.
Ibid, 34.
- 38.
Ibid, 35.
- 39.
Ibid, 39.
- 40.
Ibid, 39.
- 41.
Ibid, 44.
- 42.
Ibid, 43–44.
- 43.
Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1/3: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1974) 57–60.
- 44.
Ahmad S. Dallal reads eighteenth century Islamic thought on reform before the Napoleonic campaign and argues that there was a profound reformist-modernist work being done within the tradition by important scholars. This argument needs to be scrutinized, since it helps in revisiting the history of ideas of this tradition and the common nomenclature related to it, which are sometimes essentialist. See: Ahmad S. Dallal, Islam Without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth Century Islamic Thought (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2018).
- 45.
In Arabic language, it is erroneous to refer to inanimate objects or irrational beings with the adjective “Muslim”; “Muslim” is for rational animates (human beings) only; “Islamic” is for acts or objects. One cannot force such a distinction on other languages, but the roots are important to bear in mind. For instance, in Italian, it is common to refer to Muslims as “Islamici,” and we know in current times that “islamici” is closer to meaning to “Islamists” in English; when Italian TVs and media outlets refer to ordinary Muslims as “Islamici” in headlines, it appears accusative, although not so in serious Italian scholarship which is now gradually using “Musulmani” instead of “Islamici” to refer to ordinary Muslims.
- 46.
See for example: Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World : A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
- 47.
In contemporary liberal political theory, besides the concepts of multiculturalism, recognition, reasonable pluralism, etc., that have been heavilty studied for the last three decades, Alessandro Ferrara speaks of “hyperpluralism” and the way to secure it for reformed [Rawlsian] political liberalism: The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 48.
Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) 72–73.
- 49.
Ibid, 98.
- 50.
Ibid, 97.
- 51.
As narrated by al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) in Thomas Bauer, Thaqāfat al-iltibās: naḥwa tārīkhin ākhar li al-islām [The Culture of Ambiguity: Towards another History of Islam], trans. Rida Qurb (Beirut: matbū‘āt al-jamal, 2017) 209. The German original title is Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams. The English translation is planned for 2021.
- 52.
Ibid, 210.
- 53.
Bauer , Thaqāfat al-iltibās [The Culture of Ambiguity], 2017, 8.
For instance, he says that he hardly found that ḥudūd legal sanctions were applied by jurists throughout the centuries during all his years of the study of Islamic law and history of Islamic societies, with the exception of one case in some Ottoman village in the sixteenth century, a case of stoning an adulterer, a case verdict which some other judges did not agree with. For another discipline, he says that Ibn Nebātta (d. 1366) and Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), for example, had a secular view of world history (Bauer, 393–400).
- 54.
Wael Hallaq , Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
- 55.
Adnan Aslan, Religious Pluralism in the Christian and Islamic Philosophy: The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr [1994] (London: Routledge, 2004) xii-xiii. (Aslan’s first name is also found written as Ednan in some publications).
- 56.
Ibid, 2004, xiii.
- 57.
Ibid, 203.
- 58.
Ibid, 204. In an interview Aslan made with Nasr and Hick in Birmingham, at Hick’s house on 25th October 1994, Nasr said: “I do not believe that science can guide theology”, to which Hick replies in the affirmative: “I can agree with that.”
- 59.
Aslan , Religious Pluralism, 2004, 187–193. Aslan quotes Isma‘il Raji al-Faruqi (d. 1986) saying: “no religion in the world has yet made belief in the truth of other religions a necessary condition of its own faith and witness” (Aslan, 193). On this note, it should be noted that al-Faruqi was active on interreligious dialogue and interfaith theology, and attempted theorizing a critical world theology in “Meta–Religion: Towards A Critical World Theology,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 1 (September 1986).13–57.
- 60.
Aslan, Religious Pluralism, 2004, 195.
- 61.
Ibid, 196–200-
- 62.
On the theme of tolerance and recognition, see: Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. and intr. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Anna Elizabetta Galleotti, Toleration as Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 63.
Abdulaziz Sachedina, “Advancing Religious Pluralism in Islam,” Religion Compass 4/4 (2010): 228.
- 64.
Abdulaziz Sachedina, Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 138.
- 65.
Ibid, 15.
- 66.
Sachedina, “Advancing Religious Pluralism in Islam,” 223.
- 67.
Sachedina , “Advancing Religious Pluralism in Islam,” 227–228; Sachedina, Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, 8.
- 68.
Sachedina, Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, 135.
- 69.
Ibid, 137.
- 70.
Ibid, 12.
- 71.
Ibid, 14.
- 72.
Ibid, 7.
- 73.
Sachedina, “Advancing Religious Pluralism in Islam,” 225; he also says “These historical and scripture-based precedents should lead the contemporary Muslim societies to institutionalize pluralism without having to succumb to secularize Islam and severe its connection to the transcendence founded upon God-centered pluralism.” 224.
- 74.
Sachedina , “Advancing Religious Pluralism in Islam,” 224.
- 75.
Sachedina , Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, 19–21; Sachedina, “Advancing Religious Pluralism in Islam,” 230.
- 76.
Sachedina, “Advancing Religious Pluralism in Islam,” 231.
- 77.
Abdolkarim Soroush, The Expansion of Prophetic Experience: Essays on Historicity, Contingency and Plurality in Religion, trans., Nilou Mobasser, ed., Forough Jahanbakhsh (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
- 78.
Mohammed Hashas, “Abdolkarim Soroush: A Neo-Mu’tazilite that Buries Classical Islamic Political Theology,” Studia Islamica 109 (2014), 161.
- 79.
See “Two Concepts of Liberty” (first delivered as a lecture in Oxford in 1958), in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). Simply, negative liberty means the absence of obstacles, constrains or interference from someone or some people in the practice of choice or action, while positive liberty means the presence of something or someone in the practice of such a choice or action; the first is freedom from while the second is freedom to. Negative liberty is impacted by external factors, while positive liberty is impacted by internal factors, psychological/internal ones.
- 80.
Soroush , The Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 2009, 137.
- 81.
Soroush outlines fourteen points that can help in deconstructing historical Islam to reach its essence, goal and spirit:
Religion does not have an Aristotelian essence or nature; it is the Prophet who has certain goals. These goals are religion’s essentials. In order to express and attain these intentions and to have them understood, the Prophet seeks the assistance of (1) a particular language, (2) particular concepts and (3) particular methods (fiqh and ethics). All of this occurs in a particular (4) time and (5) place (geographical and cultural) and for (6) a particular people with particular physical and mental capacities. The purveyor of religion is faced with specific (7) reactions and (8) questions and, in response to them, gives (9) specific answers. The flow of religion over the course of time in turn gives rise to events, moving some people to (10) acquiesce and others to (11) repudiate. Believers and unbelievers fall into (12) particular relationships with each other and religion; they fight battles or create civilizations, (13) engage in comprehending and expanding religious ideas and experiences or (14) wrecking and undermining them. (Ibid, 90–91)
- 82.
Ibid, 152; 160–161. In the same line of thought, he says “We have no other option but to accept plurality.” He also uses the term “rational modesty” and “critical rationalism” to express the same point (Ibid, 156–157).
- 83.
Ibid, 156.
- 84.
Ibid, 146.
- 85.
See for instance the case of apartheid, race, and religion in the South African context as analyzed theologically by Farid Esack, Qur’an, Liberation, Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997).
- 86.
Soroush , The Expansion of Prophetic Experience, 152.
- 87.
Soroush and Kadivar, “Religious Pluralism: Kadivar, Soroush Debate,” April ninth, 2008, https://drsoroush.com/en/religious-pluralism-kadivar-soroush-debate/
- 88.
Soroush says, “[L]ike the Mu‘tazilites, I believe that human reason discovers them [i.e. moral values] as evident and can, therefore, establish a revelation-independent reason.” Soroush, I am a Neo-Muʿtazilite, interviewed by Matin Ghaffarian, July 2008, http://www.drsoroush.com/English/ Interviews/E-INT-Neo-Mutazilite_July2008.html; Mohammed Hashas “Abdolkarim Soroush: A Neo-Mu’tazilite that Buries Classical Islamic Political Theology,” Studia Islamica 109 (2014), 161.
- 89.
See Abdallah Laroui, Al-Sunna wa al-iṣlāḥ [Tradition and Reform, 2008] - Dīn al-fiṭra: J.J. Rousseau [Natural Religion: J.J. Rousseau] [Collected Works] (Casablanca: al-markaz ath-thaqafi li al-kitab, 2018) 202. Laroui says in this book that marks a different stage in his philosophical project of modernization: “Al-Qur’ān huwwa al-āya, huwwa al- ḥayāt, huwwa an-nūr. Man lam yuḥyihi al-Qur’ān fa huwa ilā al-abadi mayyit [The Qur’an is the sign, the life, the light. He whom the Qur’an does not move is forever dead].” Laroui, Al-Sunna wa al-iṣlāḥ, 115.
- 90.
Taha Abderrahmane, “Ta‘addudiyat al-qiyam: mā madāhā wa mā ḥudūduhā?” [The Pluralism of Values: Scope and Limits] Inaugural Speech, n.3 (Marrakech: Qadi Ayyad University, Faculty of Letters, 2001); Rūḥ al-dīn [The Spirit of Religion: From the Narrowness of Secularism to the Openness of Trusteeship] (Beirut and Casablanca: al-markaz al-ṯaqāfī al-ʻarabī, 2012).
- 91.
See, for instance: Elizabeth S. Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), Enlightenment on the Eve of the Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Georges Corm, Arab Political Thought: Past and Present (London: Hurst Publishers, 2020).
- 92.
Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Occasional Paper, Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (1986), 17.
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Hashas, M. (2021). Introduction: Islam, Muslims, and Religious Pluralism: Concepts, Scope and Limits. 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_1
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