Some thirty years ago, Akeel Bilgrami wrote an article for the EPW titled 'What is a Muslim'? Since then much has changed. The Taliban won, lost and has won power once again. Pakistan appears to have become more Islamic while Bangladesh which has risen much higher economically is a little less so than 20 years ago. Elsewhere the tide has ebbed and flowed. What is missing from the picture is any role for the 'moderate Muslim' of left-liberal sensibilities. Why is this so? The founders of Pakistan were moderate Muslims as were Maulana Azad in India and Mossadegh in Iran and a host of other such figures elsewhere. There was also an Islamic Socialist tradition- Iqbal the Poet Prophet of Pakistan and Bashani, the Red Maulana, in what would become Bangladesh, not to mention various leaders in the Seventies ranging from the urbane Bhutto in Pakistan to the charismatic but weird Gaddaffi in Libya. Why can we no longer spot any such figures on the horizon?
Can Bilgrami provide us a clue?
This paper studies the question 'What is a Muslim?' in the dialectic of a conflict arising out of a concern for Islamic reform. The conflict is one that arises because of moderate Muslims' fundamental commitment to a doctrine which contains features that are often effectively invoked by the absolutists. If a full analysis of the commitment reveals its defensive function which has disabled Muslims from a creative opposition to the absolutists, and if, moreover, this function of the commitment is diagnosed as itself based on a deep but common philosophical fallacy, it should be possible then for moderate Muslims to think their way out of this conflict and to transform the nature of their commitment to Islam, so that it is not disabling in that way.
So, moderate Muslims had made a philosophical mistake. Fix that mistake and they'd no longer be on the defensive. What is that mistake? It has to do with 'fundamental commitment'. I suppose 'fundamentalists' will always appear to have more of this than a moderate or a pragmatic. This suggests an easy fix. Moderates should have moderate commitments. Leave fundamental commitment to the fundamentalist and hypocritical commitment to the hypocrites and idiotic commitment to the idiots. Problem solved.
IN recent years, the concept of identity has had its corset removed and hangs loosely and precariously in the domain of culture and politics.
Only if the domain of culture and politics are its genitals. But there is nothing precarious about this spreading paunch. The mot juste is 'hideously' not 'precariously'.
This is largely a result of a gradual realisation in theoretical work in these subjects that Local contexts of study determine our individuation of cultural phenomena quite variously, and that it is much too tidy and distorting to demand, or proceed as if there were stricter criteria for their identification.
Yet, for 'identification' for any specific purpose there always are stricter criteria- e.g. do they favor or are they opposed to such and such military intervention by such and such power?
The point cannot be dismissed as some arcane, post-modern development in the theory of culture. It accurately captures the experience of individuals and communities. I recall that some years ago in India, almost to my surprise; I heard the words 'I am a Muslim' on my lips. It is not just to meet a theoretical demand that I had better specify the context. I was looking for paying-guest accommodation in a neighbourhood with a predominantly lower middle class Hindu population hostile to Muslims. A landlord who was interviewing me asked me what my religion was. It seemed hardly to matter that I found Islamic theological doctrine wholly non-credible, that I had grown up in a home dominated by the views of an irreligious father, and that I had then for some years adopted the customary aggressive secular stance of those with communist leanings. It still seemed the only self-respecting thing to say in that context. It was clear to me that I was, without strain or artificiality, a Muslim for about five minutes.
So, Bilgrami understood the particular purpose for which the landlord was asking the question and answered it in a 'self respecting' way. After all, some of his ancestors were great Islamic scholars and there is such a thing as Islamic Socialism. Had he been a Hindu left-liberal of the right caste, he'd get the flat. But he was a Muslim. So he had to look elsewhere.
That is how negotiable the concept of identity can be.
Actually, it suggests non-negotiability. The landlord wanted a non-Muslim tenant perhaps because he himself was afraid of defying the local bigots. It would have done no good to offer to be less Muslim and more of a Marathi manoos.
Lying behind and consolidating the contextualisation of 'identity' is a somewhat more abstract point. Quine has argued that the concept of identity occupies the minds of theorists only in the primitive stages of Inquiry.
So 'identity' is a Tarskian primitive not defined in relation to previously defined concepts.
In this phase one is prone to anxiety over one's lack of exact criteira of identity of given phenomena, anxieties which are often released in strict stipulations or in taxonomical theorising, which one then sheds as investigations become more theoretically sophisticated. Quine was concerned primarily with the phenomena and concepts studied by natural science, but the point, it seems to me, is no less valid, for questions such as 'What is a Muslim?', 'What is an Indian?' and so on.
Why? Human beings have ways of taxonomising or otherwise defining identity. Inanimate objects don't. The question 'who is Muslim' has been exhaustively dealt with by lawyers and judges and Parliamentary statues. It is a very important matter because it affects inheritance rights and marriage rights and can even impact property rights. The same is true of 'Who is an Indian?' In the final analysis, Judges decide.
No doubt, when Europeans first encountered other races they might have referred to them all as 'Indians'. They may have thought Hindus and Buddhists were a species of 'Moor' or Muslim. But once they learned a little of the languages of these strange peoples they accepted their own systems of classification. They began to distinguish between different types of Muslims- Sunnis, Shias, Zaydis, Nizaris etc- and different types of Indians- e.g. 'dot Indians' vs 'feather Indians'.
As inquiry advances, the absence of strict criteria needs no longer be seen as a sign of one's confusion.
Ignorance led to loose criteria- 'e.g. Indian equals darker complexioned foreigner'- to tighter, more informative, criteria 'East Indian Brahmin' or 'Red Indian Apache'.
It is justified by the fact that the concept in question ('Muslimness', 'Indianness', as it might be, or ''electron', 'the unconscious'...) is to be understood as having a place in a more or less systematic theory, with its own particular role in the inferences and transformations that the theory sanctions.
This is not necessarily so. The concept may be wholly descriptive as may the inferences made on that basis- e.g. the Apache is found in America. The Brahmin is found in India.
This point is not the same as the point about the local and contextual nature of these concepts, but it allows one to embrace their Ideality with some methodological right.
Why embrace ideality? It is enough to know that Apaches are native to America to say 'this man is Apache and thus an American national.'
If, after all, these concepts depend on their place in a network of theory,
then they are not Tarskian primitives. They are artefacts of the theory.
then shifts in theory due to cultural difference or historical change will shift the inferential place and role of the concepts without any anxieties about losing our hold over them.
Yet that is exactly what happens. Consider the term 'subaltern'. For Gramsci it meant industrial proletariat or the soon to be industrial proletariat in the villages. For Ranajit Guha it may have meant the tribal who might evade the fate of sinking to the level of the peasant proprietor, let alone that of the wage-slave proletariat. There is a story of a French-Egyptian savant who was appointed Planning Commissioner of a Revolutionary African Republic. His big problem was that soldiers burnt up the paper currency because they had no notion of fiat money. Clearly mobilising the industrial proletariat to take a vanguard role in collectivisation would have to wait. Also, those soldiers have now made off with my boots which they are cooking and eating. Althusser may kindly advise.
One might think that these methodological observations should have made us realise that our obsession with questions such as 'What is a Muslim?' is irrational;
It is rational to be obsessed with staying alive and remaining virtuous and inheriting Paradise.
and, as with all neuroses, that the realisation should by itself be the basis of cure.
According to a fraudulent and obviously stupid theory.
The context of my own interest in the question of Islamic identity is shaped by a prior political interest in the reform of Islam.
This involved changing the Personal law for Muslims, improving the functioning of Waqfs, increasing representation of women etc, etc. Was Bilgrami actually engaged in such things?
The truth is many Muslim states have done smart 'mechanism design' on the basis of what went before and what mimetic targets were available, and thus have risen rapidly in terms of human development indices and life-chances and socio-economic dynamism. Religious fundamentalists in Islam- as in other religions- can focus of defeating addiction and the psychological malaises associated with materialistic obsessions. Only in those countries where there was some political or geopolitical reason for conflict did 'fundamentalism' become a bogeyman for, first the Soviets, and then, later on, the Western alliance.
The fact is some 'reformist' movements in Islam were stupid or crazy. They wanted to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Muslims were fully capable of taking a 'first person' or 'autonomous' view of themselves and get on with sensible mechanism design and the choice of appropriate mimetic targets.
Sadly, Bilgrami and his ilk were neither smart nor sensible. His type of 'moderate Muslim' was no Muslim but a Moral imbecile simply.
The fate of a reformist movement within Islam would depend on the extent to which Muslim populations will consider the details of their identification with Islam as negotiable, in the face of other values which they also cherish.
History shows that 'Muslim populations' like other populations adapt to what is enforceable by the State or else display a variety of life-styles absent any mimetic or coercive reason to do otherwise.
There may be some for whom Islam is nothing short of a monolithic commitment, overriding all other commitments, whenever history or personal encounter poses a conflict.
It ceases to be so after you are killed.
But I think it is safe to say, despite a familiar tradition of colonial and post-colonial caricature in western representations of Islam, that such an absolutist project is the exception in a highly diverse and internally conflicted religious community.
Because people die when they are shot or are stabbed.
For the most part, there is no reason to doubt thai Muslims, even devout Muslims, will and do take their commitment to Islam not only as one among other values, but also as something which is itself differentiated internally into a number of, in principle, negotiable detailed commitments.
Or, in principle, non-negotiable detailed observances in the absence of which you get beaten or killed. Whether commitments exist is irrelevant when there are effective coercive mechanisms at work. Negotiation has little scope if it gets you beaten or killed.
If so; there is a pressing question that arises for anybody interested in the reform of Islam, What are the difficulties that recent absolutist assertions or re-assertions of Islamic identity pose for the prospect of Islamic social and legal reform?
Getting killed. That's the difficulty involved. Bilgrami would get short shrift from ISIS or the Taliban if he turns up to argue the case for substituting a nice Gay Pride parade for the observance of Ramadan.
Like most questions about the determinants of culture,
one of which has to do with being killed, beaten or incarcerated if you display the wrong sort of culture
this question can also be posed from the opposite direction: to what extent is the relative absence of reformist thinking among moderate Muslims responsible for the susceptibility of Islamic polities to constant threat from powerful minoirty movements which would have it that Islamic identity is, for the most part, non-negotiable?
Fuck 'reformist thinking'. Either the moderates can kill or incarcerate the fundamentalists or they themselves have to run away or conform in a hypocritical manner.
The complexity of this pair of questions does not lie merely in the conflict between a minority of Islamic absolutists (or 'fundamentalists' as they arc sometimes misleadingly called) and the far larger class of Muslim moderates who oppose their vision of an anti-secular polity based on Islamic personal and public law (the Sharia).
It is now obvious that this is a matter where coercive power is of the essence. If the moderates have a superior coercive mechanism or are allied with those who do, then they can prevail. Philosophical arguments- however stupid- are quite useless here. One may be tempted to say 'if the moderates had carried out enough reform, then the fundamentalists would not have been able to attract support.' This is true only if reform led to economic gains such that the moderates could pay for a vastly superior coercive mechanism which they used to beat, kill and incarcerate fundamentalists any and every time they ran amok.
There is widespread today a more interesting conflict within the hearts of moderate Muslims themselves, a conflict made the more excruciating because it is not always explicitly acknowledged by them. This is the tension generated by their opposition to Islamic absolutism on the one one hand, on the other, their faith in a religion which is defined upon detailed commitments with regard to the polity, commitments which Islamic absolutists constantly invoke to their own advantage
This conflict would not exist if fundamentalists kept getting gunned down by the security forces. If your 'detailed commitments' get you killed immediately, you don't have them either because you want to live or because you are a corpse.
In the last few years it has become clear to me that this internal conflict within the moderate Muslim will not be resolved in favour of the former unless he or she sees through to the need for a reform of the faith.
How the fuck do women in Kabul get the Taliban to stop fucking them up just by seeing 'the need for reform'? Does Bilgrami stop getting old because he sees the need for being youthful? Does death disappear if you realise the need to stay alive?
But this requires a capacity to criticise one or other detail or even central features of one's fundamental commitments.
I'm fundamentally committed to staying alive. I have the capacity to criticise this commitment on the basis that there's nothing I can do to stop ageing and thus am bound to die. So I give up this stupid fundamental commitment in favour of getting resurrected in Paradise by following a particular creed to the best of my ability under prevailing circumstances.
Bilgrami doesn't get that only living people can have fundamental commitments. They must give them up if they are obviously incompossible with the real world in which we have to live.
It therefore requires a careful scrutiny—in part philosophical—of what the specific demands and consequences of one's particular commitments are in specific historical or personal circumstances.
They involve staying alive. This may involve pretending to have various fundamental commitments till one can safely run away or else kill those who imposed that necessity.
There is a tradition of political and moral thought which might bethought to finesse these detailed tasks because it assumes that philosophical truth is on the side of the secular and the liberal ideal, and that a full grasp of the objectivity of this ideal will itself provide the basis for a deep and destructive philosophical critique of absolutism.
It is predicated on being able to kill absolutists if they try to kill you for not conforming.
From this point of view, and to put it more crudely than it deserves, philosophical argument by itself will give one the right to describe the conflict within moderate Muslims as a conflict between moral truth and falsity.
The moderate Muslim may have to lie his fucking head off so as to prevent the absolutist cutting it off. But if the moderates gain coercive power and prevail over the absolutists by killing them, then they can indulge in philosophical argument to their heart's content. Not otherwise.
I have not yet come across the philosophical argument which would support this claim, and so will proceed on the assumption that liberal and secular values have no purely philosophical justification which puts them outside the realm of essentially contested substantive moral and political values.
But they have a pragmatic justification if they are superior at creating resources for coercive measures against those who seek to impose different values. Philosophy has no difficulty with finding crazy justifications for anything which pays it and keeps it from having its fucking head chopped off.
They happen to be my values and my commitments but I will not pretend that philosophical ethics affords them a more objective status than the values of those who reject them or other values that I myself espouse.
Philosophical ethics could do so by adopting a pragmatic meta-ethics.
This position is, to some extent, a specific application of Bernard Williams's critique of some of the more ambitious claims of traditional 'Ethical Theory'. The targets of Williams's argument are philosophical theories (e g, utilitarianism, Kantian theories) which offer principles that stand outside a man or woman's fundamental projects and commitments (such as Islam, say, or even more immediate commitments to one's family, lovers, close friends, deep and driving intellectual or artistic interests...), principles whose justification depends on considerations that make no specific reference to those commitments, principles which would in fact, when called upon, be the basis for assessing and adjudicating between those commitments.
But no such basis would arise if those concerned had been decapitated or bludgeoned to death meanwhile. Existential considerations- not Satrean shite- determine whether Philosophy can proceed as an activity. 'Falsafiya' is not highly regarded by the Salafi.
Bilgrami mentions Greek tragedy. But no fucking tragedy would occur if the protagonist could kill anyone or anything which fucked with him and repel death and defeat in an infallible manner.
Though he never spelt out explicitly and in detail what he has in mind by fundamental commitments, Williams says enough for us to infer that they lead up to the existentialist idea (and even perhaps ideal) of authenticity.
Which you lose once your head is cut off. Existentialism is about continuing to exist. Existential considerations determine whether moderates or absolutists prevail not on the basis on better philosophical arguments but on the basis of killing and chasing opponents away.
And it is this connection between a person's fundamental commitments and the idea of the authentic self that explains the persistence of questions, about identity (questions such as "What is a Muslim?') despite an acknowledgement of the radical negotiability of the concept of identity.
Such considerations may arise in Hinduism or Buddhism. However, in Islam there have always been coercive mechanisms which determine what will be normative in a particular territory. Negotiability is done on the battlefield. Those better at killing prevail. True, things may have appeared different in India during the Raj but once people like Zia had taken over Pakistan, it was clear that Islam would either be of a relatively moderate sort enforced by the Army or a relatively absolutist sort enforced by jihadis. Hindu dominated Indian regions will have another trajectory. But Muslims have come to be hated as never before over the last two decades. The 'moderate' is a hypocrite. He takes a quiet pride in the doings of his fundamentalist co-religionist, unless he himself, not the kuffar, is the victim.
Consider the following-
A way to expound this theoretical connection is to look to the sorts of effects brought upon a person by his or her abandoning— or the prospect of abandoning—such commitments. I once shared a flat with a close friend, who was an appallingly successful drug-dealer.
This stupid and evil bastard was close friends with a drug pusher. He even shared a flat with him- a foolish and dangerous thing to do because he was making himself an accessory to a crime and also a target for rival drug gangs. Them guys shoot your friends to get you to change your supplier.
He had made far more money than I thought was decent, and it was money made on the steady destruction of people's lives, some of whom were talented, even brilliant minds in the university.
Still, this was a 'close friend'. Fuck would he have one if the flat-mate was a cannibal? Married him?
One day, while he was out, the police arrived at the door and asked me if I had any suspicion that he was a dealer They said that they did not have sufficient evidence to produce a warrant and search the place, but they were morally certain that he was guilty, and all they needed was for his room-mate to express the slightest suspicion. That would give them enough to legally search his premises. I had long quarrelled intensely with my friend about his cynical profiteering from drugs and had come to find him utterly reprehensible in this respect. But faced with the question from the police, I found myself turning them away.
So the guy lied to the police and became an accessory to the crime. Here, in nuce, we have the problem with the moderate Muslim. He wants things both ways. To be pals with the drug-dealer and cover for him while pretending to loathe his trade. He may object to being viewed as an accessory to crime, yet that is what he is. His identity is based on fraud.
Conflicts of this kind are not by any means unusual, nor is the sort of decision that I made. The right description to put on my decision, in the context of the present discussion, is that I could not abandon the fundamental commitment to friendship, even in the face of thorough and deep moral pressure from within my own moral values.
Very true. If the drug-dealer revealed himself to also be a cannibal, Bilgrami would have immediately married him and started cooking human livers for his brekkie. That's the sort of 'moral values' this cretin is displaying.
Bilgrami is a moral imbecile. Elsewhere he tells a story of his dad and him finding a wallet on a Bombay beach. They needed to turn it over to the police. Some clerk may have lost his pay-packet. There was a Balraj Sahni film on this theme at around that time. Father and son didn't take money from the wallet. They just left it there. I am tempted to say this was 'casteist' behavior. We are of the caste which does not steal. Let someone of inferior caste do so. Yet there are many Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and Communists who, finding the wallet, would either try to find the address of the owner by looking inside it or else turn it in at the police station even if this means having to hang around for an hour to ensure that a proper inventory is taken and the SHO does what is required.
Here one finds oneself saying that what this amounts to is that I placed the value friendship over the sorts of values that made me disapprove of his drug-dealing; and there is nothing false about saying it.
Sadly, there is something terribly false- or there is a type of moral imbecility- in saying it. Friendship is not propinquity. A true friend would not just berate the drug-dealer. He'd move out even if this meant having to occupy much less salubrious quarters. He might arrange an intervention by a priest or social reformer. He would warn young people to have nothing to do with this man. No doubt, he'd get beaten up by the suppliers. But that might do the trick. Seeing his friend in hospital might be the great moral turning point in the drug-dealer's life.
Bilgrami may have been a charming enough flat-mate. He may be remembered by the drug-dealer as an affectionate enough acquaintance. But the fellow lacked 'bottom'. He got hooked on some meretricious 'philosophy' and ended up peddling it to kids. Maybe he made less money than the drug-dealer. But would the drug-dealer want him to teach his kids? Perhaps. His children may be cretins and thus incapable of doing medicine or law. Let them do a PhD in worthless shite. Maybe they can move product among their rich asshole friends.
But I suggest that it is not all that it amounts to. The suggestion is not that one could never give up a fundamental commitment. That is not what is 'fundamental' about it. One can imagine oneself allowing the police in, even if one had a fundamental commitment to one's close friends. What makes the difference is the kind of effect that the relinquishing of a commitment would have upon one, I think it would be fair to say that for many people, in such a conflict their betrayal of friendship would amount, in their own self-conception, to something of a different order of wrong (though not necessarily moral wrong, certainly not wrong from the point of view of utilitarian principles) than a betrayal of the values which take profiteering from destructive drugs to be reprehensible.
The reason you don't let the police in is because you are afraid they will charge you with being an accomplice. The fact is they need your testimony against your friend who would similarly be being pressured to frame you. Ideally, you get put away for possession with intent while the drug-dealer begins a long and profitable career as an informant.
The 'moderate' may be shrewd and his proclivity to pretend to be running with the hares while hunting with the hounds a perfectly understandable and rational strategy, but we despise the cunt if he starts virtue signalling. The word 'munafiqat' sums up our attitude towards him. We can imagine a situation where we ally with the fundamentalists. But why ally with the moderate? He will virtue signal like crazy and then fuck off leaving you in the lurch.
'What is a Muslim?' is an insulting question. Muslims are not a 'what'. They are people who build their lives on the five pillars of Islam. No doubt, some may sin. Some may backslide. Some may be lax and morally lazy. But there can be no question that their religion does not inculcate the moral imbecility Bilgrami displays. Is Western philosophy at fault for this outcome? Yes. The guy got credentials in that shite without ever being taught how to reason or even think with any degree of clarity or common sense.
Thirty years after Bilgrami's article was published, we can safely say a Muslim is a person like Abdul Sattar Edhi. A moral imbecile is a person like Akeel Bilgrami. The Taliban may have won but they may now go in the direction of Edhi. That would be a good outcome. However, if our own public intellectuals continue down the Gadarene path of Bilgrami's mentors, our own fate, in the West, will be miserable indeed.
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