Islam with Alfredo
Alfredo knows alot about Islamic law. Like many law books, the one on his table initially looked appealing but after a page or two turned out to be ladened with the same rarified, stultifiying, inhumane jargon one might find in the legal language games of the West. What difference must there really be between the two spheres of Law I wondered.
Ok, in the West you don't get your hand chooped off for stealing, nor do public executions happen, as they still do in Saudi Arabia. In the West, thank God, you can even publically defy the bearded one in the sky, or even deny he exists, without losing your stride or your life. But not so long ago in the West you could be hanged for stealing an apple, so let's not rest too comfortably on our laurels.
In both systems of law the same sense of the sovereignty of an abstract, impersonal, inhumane 'other' is noted. In both systems the Law is a God, second only to the uber-God of all Gods, Money. But don't think I'm an antinomian anarchist, please. In both systems this Law is necessary because human beings (that would be you and I) cannot be trusted to live together, without our egos, in a blissful communion of illimitable love. The Law indeed is an old and sorry story. St.Paul's best efforts to transport us beyond its crushing vigour have apparently failed. Now we seem destined to languish forever, in varying degrees of unquestioning self-righteousness, in the arms of its accusatory zeal. And now, as we get rid of God, we don't even have the counter-weight of divinely instituted mercy to restrain the dark rapacity of dark hearts. A case in point is the so called 'criminal record'. Even though, granted, alot of our punishments are gentler than they were, because of this record, this branding on your soul, after you have been punished, you continue to be punished for a possibly permanent period of time thereafter, unless your conviction is deemed to be 'spent'. Even if it is 'spent', however, your past misdemeanour remains a source of shame you had better keep quiet about. Nobody will be impressed very much if you refer to your past crime, your own guilt, as a reason to be forgiving towards another, on the principle that you too are not 'without sin', as Jesus would put it, and so are not entitled to throw stones.
In both systems of law the same sense of the sovereignty of an abstract, impersonal, inhumane 'other' is noted. In both systems the Law is a God, second only to the uber-God of all Gods, Money. But don't think I'm an antinomian anarchist, please. In both systems this Law is necessary because human beings (that would be you and I) cannot be trusted to live together, without our egos, in a blissful communion of illimitable love. The Law indeed is an old and sorry story. St.Paul's best efforts to transport us beyond its crushing vigour have apparently failed. Now we seem destined to languish forever, in varying degrees of unquestioning self-righteousness, in the arms of its accusatory zeal. And now, as we get rid of God, we don't even have the counter-weight of divinely instituted mercy to restrain the dark rapacity of dark hearts. A case in point is the so called 'criminal record'. Even though, granted, alot of our punishments are gentler than they were, because of this record, this branding on your soul, after you have been punished, you continue to be punished for a possibly permanent period of time thereafter, unless your conviction is deemed to be 'spent'. Even if it is 'spent', however, your past misdemeanour remains a source of shame you had better keep quiet about. Nobody will be impressed very much if you refer to your past crime, your own guilt, as a reason to be forgiving towards another, on the principle that you too are not 'without sin', as Jesus would put it, and so are not entitled to throw stones.
In case you're wondering, no, I don't have a criminal record. But so what if I did? Well, actually quite alot what, and that's the problem. That's what I'm saying. The unoffical, implicit stigma of the record hangs around like a stain long after the formal operations of state revenge have been exacted and laid to rest.
Probably I could have made quite a good lawyer. My fastidious, categorising mind, might have done well, picking over the bodies of the accused. If I'd become a lawyer, who knows, I might even be earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year by now. Ample money then to finance proper travelling, provided of course I had the energy to do interesting things with my miniscule allowances of holiday.
Actually, despite what I say, I've always found the law interesting, as a theoretical entity, anyway - even though the dead, flattening discourse it wraps itself up in always does its best to shoo me off to more fertile realms.
So I asked Alfredo about Sharia law. Sharia law is often in our newspapers. Its implementation in a state, one might want to say, is the defining characteristic of an Islamist state, as opposed to a state (such as Turkey for example) in which the prevailing cultural consensus is Islamic but which bases itself on a less stringent, less exactling interpretation of Islamic law, usually combined with legal traditions from the non-Islamic world. According to Wikipedia (the possibly trustworthy) unambiguously Sharia states comprise only Saudi Arabia and Iran, though Afghanistan, Libya and Sudan come pretty close. The rest of the Islamic world seems to operate what it calls a 'dual system', which separates the realm of the religious from the secular and has separate courts for each.
The basic question I wanted to put to Alfredo was whether you can dispense with Sharia law on the basis of the Koran, whether you can be a non-Sharia Muslim, or a non-Sharia Islamic state while still being loyal to the Koran?
Obviously, I am no expert. Alfredo basically said you couldn't and no doubt he would have many a Muslim applauding him. What he said was that the Five Pillars of Islam (Praying 5 times a day, giving money to the poor, going to Mecca, believing Muhammad is the Prophet of God, and fasting during Ramadam) are rooted in the Koran. Well, that indeed is no doubt true, but is the Koran identical with Sharia, does the Koran encapsulate the fulness of Sharia? One thinks not. And Wikipedia seems to agree:
'There is no strictly static codified set of laws of sharia. Sharia is more of a system of devising laws, based on the Qur'an (the religious text of Islam), hadith (sayings of Muhammad), ijma, qiyas and centuries of debate, interpretation and precedent.'
I won't go into the details of these exotic sounding words, about which I know little. But it seems to back up what I thought about how there has been much besides the Koran that has determined Sharia. One might want to call that simply history or culture or tradition, the unfolding of minds thinking about legal matters over many centuries, in various contexts.
Why was I thinking along these lines? Because to me, when I think about the Five Pillars of Islam (which are clearly, specifically Koranic) I think: Hmmmm, well, that doesn't sound too harsh, too exacting does it; but that when I think about the minutae of Sharia as an extended regimen, I go a bit giddy. And in my giddiness I think 'Phew, is all this really necessary, is all this really what Muhammad wanted? Are we sure?'
I am not a Muslim and as such you would be right to think this is 'none of my business', as the cliche goes. But the desire to live in a harmonious world in which all people love each other, don't judge one another, and don't heap extraneous burdens on one another under the liberal blessedness of the Sun - this I consider most certainly to be my business. That desire is my business, and I'm not sure why it shouldn't be other people's business too.
Obviously, if people want to live under Sharia and to know from it what they should do in multiple spheres in the privacy of their self-relations and their relations with others, this is their right and they surely have the freedom to do so. Lots of people, after all, join the army and a myriad of non-Islamic cults to get the same existential certainties against the gaping rigours of the void. But surely, it's something else to suppose, if you don't actually want to live like this, that you have to live like this because the creator of the Universe said so unambiguously through both his Archangel Gabriel and human articulator, Muhammad. If you think the latter, it becomes rather important, I would think, to be certain that Sharia is Koranic, and only Koranic, because the Koran is the only unambiguous text detailing that direct, monumental divine message. After all, even the Hadith, the life example and words of the Prophet, are open to interpetations. And additionally, how a man lived hundred of years ago is not the same as the voice of God, I am supposing. The Koran, after all, so it is believed, is the actual word of God, passively received by the mind of Muhammad, undoctored by any contributing, moulding shaping input on his part. Can the same, one might ask, be said for his behaviour?
You would not be misguided if you discerned echoes in my thinking of the Protestant cast of mind in the context of the Christian revelation. That too was rooted in the wonderment: Is all this tradition really what Jesus was about? They concluded no, and I was wondering with Alfredo whether a similar protesting, reforming turn of mind might be actionable within the broad framework of Islam as laid down in the Koran.
Of course, in a broad sense I don't care that much about this personally, since I'm not a Muslim. Alfredo, it seemed, cared even less, preferring to angle for a basic deconstruction of Islamic law altogether, along with the entirety of the religion itself. Such one would expect from an atheist after all, so there's no surprise there.
My concern, actually, is rooted in a curiosity to see if it's possible to reassure Muslims that compromise or negotiation with the 'forms of life' as Wittgenstein would put it, of the non-Islamic world, be that Eastern or Western, is not incompatible with their religion as understood by the Koran. It is after all tricky to liberate people from restrictive forms of life (if indeed they would like to be liberated, and therein may lie the rub) by criticising the foundational axiom -namely God - that underlies the religion that itself enshrines those forms of life. That has been the policy of the essentially materialistic influenecs that have entered the world of Islam in the past few hundred years. These were brought first by the West in its post 'Enlightenment' expansionist bossiness, then later from within the Muslim mind itself they were reproduced, in the secularist-nationalist, even communist-atheistic manifestations of the twentieth century.
I say it's tricky, of course, becuse it gets the believers backs up, since they feel, not without reason, that the most precious thing in their emotional life, namely God, is being marginalised if not less equivocably trashed. And the reaction to that is fundamentalism and the ossification of the mind in defensive forms of rigidity and fear, masquerading as condemnation of the 'other', undertaken in a spirit of self-preservation, of everything except the simplest, most foundational interpretations of Islam. From the earliest days of Wahhabism to contemporary Al-Quaeda, after all, what is fundamentalism if divorced from its fear of the West. I'm not sure that there is such a fundamentalism.
It would be less tricky to reconcile the Islamic mind to expansiveness and a freer interpretation of sanctioned behaviour if the God of Islam is not attacked at all, if one can present the idea that God never wanted all this restrictiveness in the first place. I'm not saying that this is either easy or that it can be done, I am just wondering if it can be done. And if Sharia is indeed extra-Koranic, or post-Koranic, then to my mind this would suggest that it would be more possible than it would otherwise be.
I suppose, broadly, what I think about Islam should be understood in the context of my globalist concern to attempt, however forlornly and hopelessly this may be, to somehow understand what the hell humanity in its relation to transcendent reality has been up to in the past three to four thousand years. I have various ideas, touching on Ancient Israel, Greek philosophy and the meditative spirtualities of the non-Islamic east, and the Christian orthodox and heretical churches. Particularly interesting to me is the significance of the so-called 'Axial Age' of the middle of the first millenium BC, when, as Karen Armstrong and others say, so much changed in the mental, spiritual life of humanity. My suspicion is that the aeon that was then introduced is crumbling all around us today and that this might explain the confusions and disparate, apparently incompatible ideologies of the contemporary world. But until now I've never really thought much about Islam and how it fits in with my working hypothesis.
Of course, it is a relatively very young religion (though you wouldn't catch a devout Muslim saying that, since he'd say Islam is the restoration of the pure Abrahamic faith that Judaism and Christainity were degenerations from). Its only 1,400 years old, after all.
Everything I write is not intended to offend Muslims. But I am interestd in what I read recently about the connection Islam may have with our glistening friend the Moon. Yes, the Moon, the spherical eye of beautiful, solicitous eeiriness that bedecks our sky by night. For one, Islam keeps a lunar calender, as does Judaism for that matter. Maybe they are both somehow lunar. But what I read more than this (and of course what I read could be wrong?) is that the Arabs, including Muhammad, that embraced Islam were formerly Moon worshippers, that the name of their God was 'Al-ilah' (similar to Allah) and that the enjoined practices of that Moon religion bear a striking resemblance to the Five Pillars of Islam. This is either wrong or it is right.
Beyond that I think about Ishmael, the older son of Abraham and the spiritual, if not literal ancestor of the Arabs. Jews and Muslims disagree starkly about who Abraham's most significant son was. Jews say it was Isaac, Muslims Ishamel. Muslims say that Abraham went with Ishamael to Mecca and blessed and made sacred the Kaaba, the rock that is now the most sacred shrine of Islam's most sacred city. Jews don't mention this in their Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament and which they call the Tannakh. This book, in Genesis, writes of Isaac and the promises he received to be a light and a blessing to the world.
It would be less tricky to reconcile the Islamic mind to expansiveness and a freer interpretation of sanctioned behaviour if the God of Islam is not attacked at all, if one can present the idea that God never wanted all this restrictiveness in the first place. I'm not saying that this is either easy or that it can be done, I am just wondering if it can be done. And if Sharia is indeed extra-Koranic, or post-Koranic, then to my mind this would suggest that it would be more possible than it would otherwise be.
I suppose, broadly, what I think about Islam should be understood in the context of my globalist concern to attempt, however forlornly and hopelessly this may be, to somehow understand what the hell humanity in its relation to transcendent reality has been up to in the past three to four thousand years. I have various ideas, touching on Ancient Israel, Greek philosophy and the meditative spirtualities of the non-Islamic east, and the Christian orthodox and heretical churches. Particularly interesting to me is the significance of the so-called 'Axial Age' of the middle of the first millenium BC, when, as Karen Armstrong and others say, so much changed in the mental, spiritual life of humanity. My suspicion is that the aeon that was then introduced is crumbling all around us today and that this might explain the confusions and disparate, apparently incompatible ideologies of the contemporary world. But until now I've never really thought much about Islam and how it fits in with my working hypothesis.
Of course, it is a relatively very young religion (though you wouldn't catch a devout Muslim saying that, since he'd say Islam is the restoration of the pure Abrahamic faith that Judaism and Christainity were degenerations from). Its only 1,400 years old, after all.
Everything I write is not intended to offend Muslims. But I am interestd in what I read recently about the connection Islam may have with our glistening friend the Moon. Yes, the Moon, the spherical eye of beautiful, solicitous eeiriness that bedecks our sky by night. For one, Islam keeps a lunar calender, as does Judaism for that matter. Maybe they are both somehow lunar. But what I read more than this (and of course what I read could be wrong?) is that the Arabs, including Muhammad, that embraced Islam were formerly Moon worshippers, that the name of their God was 'Al-ilah' (similar to Allah) and that the enjoined practices of that Moon religion bear a striking resemblance to the Five Pillars of Islam. This is either wrong or it is right.
Beyond that I think about Ishmael, the older son of Abraham and the spiritual, if not literal ancestor of the Arabs. Jews and Muslims disagree starkly about who Abraham's most significant son was. Jews say it was Isaac, Muslims Ishamel. Muslims say that Abraham went with Ishamael to Mecca and blessed and made sacred the Kaaba, the rock that is now the most sacred shrine of Islam's most sacred city. Jews don't mention this in their Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament and which they call the Tannakh. This book, in Genesis, writes of Isaac and the promises he received to be a light and a blessing to the world.
What I'm thinking is why can't both accounts be true, even though they're different. Abraham got around, after all, he lived a long time. After all, Genesis is clear that Ishmael was not a bad egg. He himself gets a blessing, even though its not as good as the one that Isaac gets (well, the Bible is a Hebrew text after all).
Ultimately in a way I agree with Alfredo, and with John Lennon: it would be good to see the back of religion, though my argumentation would be different. I'd meditate on the ethical humiliations it has so often wrought on God's sacredness by making him so often an exquisitely partial, bigoted old man in the sky; on the ways in which it has been, yes, and still is far too often, a justification for cruelty and hatred, let alone the prohibiting of the free, joyful life beneath the Sun. But I'm not persuaded the Godlessness is either intellectually viable (God may well exist) or wise (Think Stalin, think Mao, think the tyranny of the machines).
To me it is precisely because God exists that religion is merely temporary. Religion is but a bridge across an abyss, as I have written before. And who needs the bridge when you've got to the other side, or if God has got to yours.
Ultimately in a way I agree with Alfredo, and with John Lennon: it would be good to see the back of religion, though my argumentation would be different. I'd meditate on the ethical humiliations it has so often wrought on God's sacredness by making him so often an exquisitely partial, bigoted old man in the sky; on the ways in which it has been, yes, and still is far too often, a justification for cruelty and hatred, let alone the prohibiting of the free, joyful life beneath the Sun. But I'm not persuaded the Godlessness is either intellectually viable (God may well exist) or wise (Think Stalin, think Mao, think the tyranny of the machines).
To me it is precisely because God exists that religion is merely temporary. Religion is but a bridge across an abyss, as I have written before. And who needs the bridge when you've got to the other side, or if God has got to yours.
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