Emerging reason

By Aziz Ali Dad

Followers of Islam are certainly perplexed why their lives are being turned into hell for some self-claimed saviours of Islam to go to heaven. The situation should have triggered some soul searching, but despite the gruesome incidents of murder and mayhem of innocent people in Pakistan, no attempt is made to analyze the subject of reason and religion in late modernity beyond the confines of tried and tested theoretical frameworks, ideologies and precedent postures.

In fact, modern-day Islam is not a manifestation of an essentialist form that drew its inspiration from the mysterious past. Rather, it is a cumulative result of the interface of sacred and Muslims with modern times. Because of the cohabitation of Islam in modern space and time for more than two centuries, Islam of today is inextricably intertwined with modern processes and institutions. The existence of sacred in the modern life-world of Muslims has given birth to a mindset, institutional practices, ethos and path that do not necessarily follow the linear path of Western modernity.

Fundamentalist forces attain more power by employing modernity, and progressives lose grounds by denying religion as a social reality

However, it does not mean that modernity has not influenced Islam. On the contrary, contemporary Islam is more influenced by modernity than the golden past. Unlike the common perception of mutual exclusiveness of religion and modernity, the religion of Islam has managed to survive the onslaught of modernity by unconsciously accommodating some aspects of modernity. As a result, the fundamentalist forces attain more power by overtly employing modernity, and progressives lose grounds by denying religion as a social reality.

Given its understanding and acceptance of modernity, the progressive section of our society is in a better position to engage religion with modernity. Engagement of Islam with the philosophical discourse of modernity can help in the emergence of the Muslim narrative within the meta-narrative of modernity. Contrary to liberal perception, fundamentalists thrive on the very separation of state and religion because it makes religion their sole property through which they can make inroads into power. Hence, their perpetual monopoly on the discourse of religion and the role of thought police in the intellectual domain remains intact.

Today Muslims live in a different world than the world at the dawn of modernity. The world of today is dominated by cultural, economic and technological globalization. Modern communication has brought together peoples from different social, religious and cultural backgrounds in a single space and time. The shrinking of space and intermingling of diverse cultures has helped create new consciousness and movements around the globe. That is why Karen Armstrong claims that fundamentalism could have taken root in no time other than our own.

The main challenge for making social, political and economic arrangements for peaceful coexistence in the age of globalization is the absence of a common language for heterogeneous cultures. It is the absence of common language and dialogue in the age of global media that foments violence and substantiates the culture of stereotypes. There is something deeply wrong with our civilization of communication as wars are increasing despite the proliferation of talk in every corner of the world.

Violence in our world is a manifestation of the shifting of social, economic and cultural tectonic plates that are underlying beneath the apparently solid crust of religion. In order to survive, ideological adherents of religion have to abandon their solid ground and adopt ways of seeing reality through a new paradigm. So the question arises here is: how to disturb the status quo that has resulted in intellectual impoverishment of religion on the one hand, and caused bloodshed of its followers and minorities on the other? We can extricate religion from violence by getting rid of the fear of ‘others’ and change. We fear that any interaction of religion with secularism, other religions, cultures and ideas will obliterate it.

Modern history proves such a fear unfounded as Jewish intelligentsia, despite being a minority in secular Europe, has been actively engaged in intellectual endeavours in the secular domain since the dawn of modernity. It is because of the intellectual endeavours of Walter Benjamin, that Jewish Cabala (mysticism) has been introduced into Marxism. Ernst Bloch’s ideas are driven to reinstate the spirit of utopia in Marxist theory, Emmanuel Levinas engaged with the issue of inter-subjective relations and Martin Buber with the interface between ‘I and Thou’. Creative imagining and embracing of ‘Others’ by these contributors helped in the reinterpretation of religious symbols and imaginary in the secular world. Now Judaism feels at home in the modern secular world.

Pakistan is also inhabited by different minority groups, but we have made life difficult for them by committing atrocities and discriminating in every sphere of life. If we manage to accommodate others in our mental and spiritual space, then any atrocity against ‘others’ by our brethren will generate empathy. According to Martin Buber the essential character of ‘I-Thou’ is the melting of the between, so that an individual stands in a direct relationship with another ‘I’. Even if I am incapable of precluding my zealous fraternity from a brutal act, I still hate it because this melting has already occurred within my being that has been altered by another being.

We remain apathetic to the brutalities committed against minorities in Pakistan because we have been divested of ‘others’ through a narrative and institutional arrangements that deem ‘others’ less human than ‘us’. Therefore, collectively we are divided when it comes to issuing of violence committed in the name of religion. After WW2 German thinkers critically reevaluated every dimension of German culture to ascertain the causes of the descending of their society into fascism.  It paved the way for the emergence of a new society and the opening up of ‘objectively new possibilities’ in Germany.

It has become a part of our idiosyncrasy to shy away from thinking through new issues and challenges. For the emergence of a new self and creation of an alternate world, the intervention of intellectuals at every stage of knowledge production and dissemination, and sites of power in self, state and society is indispensable. Professor Muhammed Arkoun thinks that “intellectual and spiritual subversion” and deconstruction of existing systems of immobile thought among Muslims will pave the way for ‘Emerging Reason’.

In Pakistan, we tend to reduce rational voices to silence and seek refuge in personalities who claim to be divine guardians on the earth. Deconstruction of the regimes of truth will enable us to tackle the ever-increasing change by learning anew and acquainting over selves with the multiplicity of origins of our ‘Being the world”. To break the regimes of truth we ought to allow the critical reason to create ripples in stagnant religious thought. We should also allow the reason to blossom in its multiple hues in response to particular requirements instead of binding it to the shackles of hegemonic and deterministic reason. It will open space for the emergence of ‘multiple modernities’ in diverse cultural contexts in the age of globalization. Modernity can take roots in a local context only by diversifying its manifestations. At the same time, Muslims have to muster the courage to face disenchantment and embrace change by breaking the orthodoxies and maintaining regimes of truth to keep their unthinking followers away from the truth.