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Poetry & Islam: An Introduction, Part 2

 

Rābi‘a al-‘Adawīya (c. 95/714—185/801) of Basra was an ascetic and mystic who penned poetry dominated by the themes of “suffering in love” and “selfless love” (of God). Hers was a mystic vision enthralled by the prospect of eventual union with the Divine:

O Beloved of hearts, I have none like unto Thee,

Therefore have pity this day on the sinner

who comes to Thee.

O my Hope and my Rest and My Delight,

the heart can love none other but Thee. (Qtd. in Smith: 78-79)

While her poetry is fairly pedestrian, Rābi‘a’s rather austere love mysticism set the tone and temper for much of the Arabic poetry that immediately followed her in the tradition of “sober” Sufism. The high watermark of mystical love poetry in Arabic is found in the work of ‘Umar ibn al-Fārid (576/1181—632/1235), an Egyptian Sufi fond of solitary life in the deserts of Egypt and the Western Arabian Peninsula. Crowned by Renard as the “master of the Arabic mystical ode” and compared by Homerin to “another great poet of mystical love, the Spanish monk John of the Cross (1542—1591),” Ibn al-Fārid is renowned for his Wine Ode (al-Khamrīya), and the Greater T-Rhyming Ode (at-Tā’īyat al-kubrā), otherwise known as the Ode on Spiritual Sojourning (Nazm as-sulūk), the former relying on the imagery of wine, love and the beloved as metaphors artfully combined with the act of recollection, and served up as an elaborate mystical code operating tantalizingly beneath the surface of a poetic language shorn of any overt mystical (Sufi) references.

Other forms of Islamic verse are unabashedly didactic in function, the best-known genre of which is the mathnawī, exemplified in the Persian poetry of ‘Attar, Rūmī, Mawlāna ‘Abd ar-Rahmān Jāmī (817/1414—898/1492), and Abū’l-Majd Majdūd Sanā’ī (d. 525/1131). Rūmī’s Dīwān-i Shams-i Tabrizī  (Collected Poems of Shams al-Dīn of Tabriz) gathers together all of his lyric poetry (ghazals, tarjī‘āt, and rubā‘īyāt), described “as a collection of individual and separate crystallizations and concretizations of spiritual states undergone on the path to God. The overall ‘feeling’ of the Dīwān is one of spiritual intoxication and ecstatic love” (Chittick: 6). By contrast, Rūmī’s Mathnawī is comparatively sober, addressed to those with a temperament for contemplative reflection upon existential and metaphysical questions, in effect, providing the reader with a rational elaboration of the theoretical and practical dimensions of Sufi spirituality in a palatable because poetic guise. Thus the ever-popular Mathnawī is in part a sophisticated commentary in poetic form on the mystical “states” (hāl/ahwāl) and “stations” (maqam/maqāmāt) unique to Islamic mysticism.

Perhaps the first mystical work in the didactic genre was Sanā’ī’s The Hidden Garden of Ultimate Reality and the Revealed Law of the Path (Hadīqat al-haqīqa), a poem with considerable influence on both ‘Attār and Rūmī. Although Sanā’ī manages to cover a motley of topics and while the organizing narrative principle has been generously described as on the order of a “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the aesthetic whole, in this case, is not greater than the sum of its parts, thereby revealing a risk intrinsic to didactic poetry (religious or not): pedagogic function may trump aesthetic form (Donald Kuspit makes this argument with regard to the ‘post-aesthetic’ art world in which the work of art becomes a ‘bully pulpit’ rather than providing us with an ‘aesthetic and contemplative alternative’ to ‘the ugliness and injustice of the world’ in The End of Art, 2004). And while not equal in poetic excellence to, say, Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, what he lacks in aesthetic unity Sanā’ī makes up for in rather proud religious purpose:

Of all the poets major and minor

Only I know the words of the Prophet.

My poetry is commentary on the religion and the law,

And that is what the truthful poet does.

Of all the poets, only I

am the Prophet’s, by Almighty God…

I am the slave of the religion, obedient to piety,

A truth telling poet am I, coveting nothing.

(Qtd. by Dabashi in Lewisohn: 171)

In fairness to Sanā’ī, we might consider Schimmel’s assessment that his “poetic skills are much more conspicuous in his lyrics and his panegyrics on the Prophet, a genre which he seems to have introduced into Persian literature,” as well as Mahmood Jamal’s reminder that Sanā’ī “was probably the first poet to use such verse forms as the qasidah, the ghazal and the masnavi to explore Sufi ideas.” And the unsettling characterization of  Sanā’ī’s “proud religious purpose” may have motivated at least one response to the following final verses from Farīd al-Din ‘Attār’s celebrated mystical epic, the Mantiq al-tayr (The Conference of the Birds):

This book is the adornment of time, offering a portion to both

elite and common.

If a frozen piece of ice saw this book, it would happily emerge

from the veil like the sun.

My poetry has a marvelous property, since it gives more results

every time.

If it’s easy for you to read a lot, it will certainly be sweeter for you

every time.

This veiled bride in a teasing mood only gradually lets the veil fall

open.

Till the resurrection, no one as selfless as I will ever write verse with

pen on paper.

I am casting forth pearls from the ocean of reality. My words are

finished and this is the sign.

If I praise myself a lot, how can that praise please anyone else?

But the expert himself knows my value, because the light of my

moon is not hidden.

These lines are in fact missing from the well-known English translation of the epic poem by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (1984). In the Introduction, Davis notes that they have translated the entire poem “with the exception of the invocation and the epilogue. The invocation, a traditional prelude to long narrative poems in Persian, consists of praise of God, of the Prophet [Muhammad] and of the founders of Islam. [….] The epilogue, again a traditional feature of such poems, consists largely of self-praise and is a distinct anticlimax after a poem devoted to the notion of passing beyond the Self.” One wonders if that is sufficient justification for omitting the end of the poem (or the invocation for that matter!).

In his essay, “On Losing One’s Head: Hallājian Motifs and Authorial Identity in Poems Ascribed to ‘Attār,” Carl Ernst well captures the puzzlement that invariably follows reflection on such lines from renowned Sufi poets like Sanā’ī ‘and ‘Attār. Discussing the aforementioned epilogue from the Mantiq al-tayr, Ernst writes that

 

“This passage is remarkable for the boast it contains in which ‘Attār claims that no one has ever annihilated his ego as successfully as he. Conjoined as it is with a bold advertisement of the quality of ‘Attār’s literary works, this paradoxical boast of ego-annihilation raises a difficult question regarding the nature of authorship of Sufi writings. If the goal of the Sufi is the annihilation of the self, what sort of self may be ascribed to the authors of the central writings of Sufism? As ‘Attār himself remarked in comparing Hallāj’s utterances with Moses’ encounter with the burning bush on Sinai, it was not the bush that spoke, but God. ‘Attār’s declaration is a specimen of the rhetoric of sainthood which permitted the spiritual elite to engage in a boasting contest (mufākhara) to demonstrate the extent of God’s favours to them.”(Ernst in Lewisohn and Shackle, eds., 2006: 330-343)

 

Familiarity with this “boasting” rhetoric of sainthood should temper if not eliminate the descriptive reaction I had above to the epilogue from Sanā’ī’s Hadiqa al-haqīqa, enabling one to appreciate why the omission of the epilogue from the Mantiq al-tayr might be troubling. With Ernst, we need to consider the extent to which the Sufism incorporated the pre-Islamic Arabic tradition of mufākhara into “its earliest dialogical pronouncements,” a fact “explicitly recognized in early Sufi manuals of conduct,” and thus “what is distinctive about the Sufi rhetoric of sainthood is that unabashed boasting is permitted and even encouraged as a means of indicating one’s direct contact with God” (Ernst 1996: 45 and 146 respectively). Thus what at first glance appears as grandiose self-praise, the very antithesis of selflessness, turns out to be a refrain from the traditional rhetoric of sainthood, one in which we witness “the flickering of the authorial ego in the storm of divinity.”

And yet alongside the boasting rhetoric of mystic poets one finds the following lines from ‘Attār’s Mantiq al-tayr, similar to the disparaging comments Rūmī came to write about his own poetry:

With his dying breath that sage of faith [Sanā’ī] said,

‘If only I knew long before this

How more honorable is listening to speaking,

When would I have wasted my life with words?’

If words were as fine as gold,

Still, they would be inferior to unuttered words!

Doing it is the lot of true men!

Alas, my fate was just talking about it.

Such sentiment, perhaps instinctively appreciated by the unlettered but pious and “practical” man, and arguably the perspective of the true mystic, contains an implicit appreciation of the limitations of reason, in particular of the—in the end—spiritual constraints of both theology and philosophy (especially a rationalist metaphysics), when viewed through the supernal light of Divine silence as understood in the Sufi tradition. Put differently, words, or reason, can only “point” or indirectly refer to that kind of apophatic mystical (or simply religious) experience which has, I think, been plausibly if not persuasively characterized as a “pure consciousness event” (PCE) or consciousness without an object (see the titles by Forman and the discussion in Gellman below), involving a peculiar form of cognitive or para-cognitive (hence not irrational) form of “knowing” or awareness (as non-propositional knowledge) said to encompass one’s entire being and thus beyond subject-object duality. Nonpropositional knowledge is quintessentially a special type of experiential knowledge, what might be called an intuitive “knowledge by acquaintance” or “knowledge by presence” (rather than ‘knowledge by description’), although not in the Russellian sense (in which case it is an immediate, non-cognitive sensual or empirical knowledge prior to conceptual articulation), but as that phrase was understood, say, by the founder of the Illuminationist school of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (549/1154-587/1191) (See Hossein Ziai’s essay on  Suhrawardī in Nasr and Leaman, eds. 1996: 434-464).

While mystical experience on the order of a PCE is said to involve non-propositional knowledge or understanding in the first instance, it is not non-cognitive in as much as such experience is often used to affirm, or re-affirm (or rationally ‘ground’), existing religious propositions, such as “God exists.” In a non-theistic context, consider for example the Buddha’s experience of the “unconditioned,” that is, nibbāna (Skt., nirvāna), a spiritual experience that appears to exemplify a PCE. And yet this “experience” of nibbāna is what gives existential certainty or accords ontological license to (what are, after all, ‘conditioned’) religious propositions in the Buddhist tradition, propositions articulated in such doctrines as The Four Noble Truths, anattā (no-self) (Skt., anātman), and paticca-samuppāda (‘dependent origination’) (Skt., pratitya-samutpāda). Thus ex post reflection, which is necessarily connected to one’s ex ante propositional religious understanding (e.g., Siddhattha Gotama’s antecedent beliefs in kamma, samsāra, and the possibility of moksa or mukti), entails propositional presuppositions and assumptions, and typically claims of religious knowledge, at least insofar as we view the PCE as a type of “religious- or realisation-discovery” in the manner outlined by James Kellenberger:

 

“A part of what one discovers in making the religious discovery is that some key religious proposition is true, even though what one comes to understand with religious understanding may reach beyond the import of expressible propositions. However, allowing that a part, perhaps even the most significant part, of what is discovered cannot be expressed as a  proposition should not lessen our insistence that…knowledge is attained when the religious discovery is made and at least part of that knowledge is the knowledge that key religious propositions are true.” (Kellenberger 1985: 169-170)

 

The PCE thus represents, as it were, a liminal space between ex ante religious understanding (the result of religious training and education) and ex post religious knowledge, serving to accord existential certainty or metaphysical conviction to religious belief(s). PCE or apophatic mystical experience is an archetypal (or at least one important) type of (religious) “realisation-discovery:”

 

“Those who make realisation-discoveries come to see the significance of the familiar as that which establishes what they had not thought or had not fully realised or had even denied. Their discoveries, if they are discoveries, involve gaining an appreciation of a grounding of their new or old belief, and this grounding is evidential [yet not in a scientific or conventional rational sense]. It is distinct from a psychological cause for one’s belief (such as, fear or desire), and it is distinct from pragmatic reasons for acting as though a belief were true.” (Kellenberger: 109)

 

It is the description of this rarefied form of mystical experience as a type of religious “realisation-discovery” or spiritual “gnosis” that enables us to agree with Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s judgment that “Sufism is at the highest level a path of knowldege” (ma‘rifah or, in Persian, ‘irfān), a knowledge at once “illuminative and unitive,” the “highest object” (so to speak) of which is God, or “the Truth.” Such knowledge is thought to be in some sense self-certifying or self-authenticating (it cannot be wholly such, given the larger epistemic context of a specific religious tradition, which routinely relies on intra-religious criteria for assessing the authenticity of claims to mystical experience), bringing with it a conviction of absolute certainty: “[T]here is the truth of certainty (haqq al-yaqīn)—or again, what can also be understood as certainty of truth—which is like being consumed by the fire and gaining the highest certainty of it by ‘becoming’ the fire” (Nasr 2007: 31). This fire is thought to consume highly individuated or personal and subjective awareness or states of consciousness, a process that is otherwise called self-denial or dying-to-self in theistic traditions, prompting the question: who or what is now exeperiencing the “certainty of truth?” One begins to confront the questions and issues that likewise arise in Advaita Vedānta epistemology and metaphysics with regard to the relation between Brahman, ultimate reality, and the individual self (jīva), the former understood as some sort of universal (hence de-individuated) consciousness, the experiential realization of which (bear in mind that brahmānubhava is not experience in the conventional sense, as it signifies a ‘context-free’ state of consciousness) is the goal of the jñāna yogi. The relevance of the comparison is made clear from an Upanisadic commentary by Śankara in which he to resorts to the (above) “fire” metaphor: “It is not possible for the knower to know the knower, just as the fire cannot burn the fire. There is no knower other than brahman to whom brahman can be a separate object of knowledge (‘a knowable’)” (Ram-Prasad 2001: 173). The Advaitic solution (assuming for the moment that ‘brahman’ is a placeholder for ‘God’) is patently anathema to Islamic theology, for the claim is made that the self of ordinary consciousness is, in the end, not different from the universal consciousness that is Brahman! We need only consider the consequences of Mansūr al-Hallāj’s ecstatic theopathic utterances (shathīyāt), most vividly, “anā’l-Haqq” (‘I am the Truth’ or ‘I am the Real’), to see the sorts of issues that arise in any extended discussion of this kind of mysticism within Islam.

The foregoing introduction is but a “taste” (dhawq) of poetry in the Islamic tradition, with no mention of the works of such incomparable or inimitable Sufis as Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallāj (244/857—309/922) (with whom Sufi poetry, according to Schimmel, ‘reached its first climax’) or Muhyī ad-Dīn ibn al-’Arabī (560/1165—638/1240) (whose poetry, in Schimmel’s words, is marked by a ‘theosophical’ or ‘gnostic’ rather than a ‘voluntaristic’ approach). Nor have we broached the subject of Islamic poetry not of Arabic or Persian provenance: for example, in Turkic dialects, or Urdu, Bengali, Malay, and so forth. Also untouched is modern and contemporary Islamic poetry (or modern ‘secular’ Arabic poetry, for that matter, which is not unrelated to its religious counterpart, as evidenced in the work of the late Abdul Wahad al-Bayati), such as that produced by the remarkable Indo-Pakistani polymath, Muhammad Iqbāl (1877-1938) who, one suspects, is insufficiently appreciated outside the Indian subcontinent.

Although it is true, as Oliver Leaman has pointed out, that comparatively little poetry in the history of the Islamic world has been religious, a “tradition of religious poetry which is genuinely successful in Islamic culture is Sufi verse, and this continues to be written and developed with variable degrees of success” (Leaman 2004: 84-85). It is to that tradition we will turn in more detail in our forthcoming posts on poetry in Islam.

 

References & Further Reading:

• Anun-Nasr, Jamil M. Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Islamic Religious Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
• Adonis (‘Alī Ahmad Sa‘īd) (Catherine Cobham, trans.). An Introduction to Arabic Poetics. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990.
• Allen, Roger. The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres and Criticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Attar, Farid ud-Din (Afkham Darbandi, trans.). The Conference of the Birds. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
• Badawi, M.M. A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
• Banani, Amin, Richard Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh, eds. Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmī. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Black, Deborah L. ‘Al-Fārābī,’ in Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996: 178-197.
• Browne, E.G. A Literary History of Persia, 4 Vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983.
• Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabī’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.
• Dabashi, Hamid. ‘Historical Conditions of Persian Sufism during the Seljuk Period,’ in Leonard Lewisohn, ed., The Heritage of Sufism, Vol. 1: Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi (700-1300). Oxford, England: Oneworld, 1999: 137-174.
• de Bruijn, J.T.P. ‘Comparative Notes on Sanā’ī and ‘Attār,’ in Lewisohn, ed. (above): 361-379.
• Ernst, Carl W. Ruzbihan Baqli: Mysticism and the Rhetoric of Sainthood in Persian Sufism. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996.
• Fideler, David and Sabrineh Fideler, trans. and ed. Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006.
• Forman, Robert K.C. Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.
• Forman, Robert K.C., ed. The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Gellman, Jerome. ‘Mysticism,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/mysticism/
• Goodman, Lenn E. Islamic Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Homerin, Th. Emil. From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint: Ibn al-Fārid, His Verse, and His Shrine. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001.
• Ibn al-Fārid, ‘Umar ibn ‘Alī (Th. Emil Homerin, trans.). ‘Umar Ibn al-Farīd: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life. New York: Paulist Press, 2001.
• Iqbal, Muhammad (Mustansir Mir, trans.). Tulip in the Desert: A Selection of the Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999.
• Jamal, Mahmood (trans. and ed.). Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi. London: Penguin Classics/Books, 2009.
• Jayussi, Salma Khadra, ed. Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
• Kellenberger, James. The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.
• Leaman, Oliver. Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.
• Leaman, Oliver, ed. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy, 2 Vols (A-I and J-Z). London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2006.
• Lewis, Franklin D. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West—The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalāl al-Din Rumi. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2000.
• Lewisohn, Leonard and Christopher Shackle, eds. Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight. London: I.B. Tauris, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, 2006.
• Massignon, Louis (Herbert Mason, trans.). The Passion of al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, 4 Vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Lings, Martin. Sufi Poems: A Mediaeval Anthology. Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society (bilingual ed.), 2005.
• Mir, Mustansir. Iqbal (Makers of Islamic Civilization). London: I.B. Tauris, in association with the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, 2006.
• Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. “Islamic Aesthetics,” in Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe, eds. A Companion to World Philosophies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997: 448-459.
• Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. New York: HarperOne, 2007.
• Nasr, Seyyed Hossein and Oliver Leaman, eds. History of Islamic Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Nicholson, Reynold A. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1994 (1921, Cambridge University Press).
• Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Knowledge and Liberation in Classical Indian Thought. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
• Renard, John. Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.
• Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn (A.J. Arberry, trans.). Mystical Poems of Rūmī 1: First Selection, Poems 1-200. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
• Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn (A.J. Arberry, trans.). Mystical Poems of Rūmī 2:Second Selection, Poems 201-400. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1963.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. I am Wind, You are Fire: The Life and Work of Rumi. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1992.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalāloddin Rumi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993 (1978).
• Schimmel, Annemarie. As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2^nd ed., 2001.
• Singh, Iqbal. The Ardent Pilgrim: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Mohammed Iqbal. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Smith, Margaret. Muslim Women Mystics: The Life and Work of Rābi‘a and Other Women Mystics in Islam. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2001 ed. (1928).
• Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1971.
• Upton, Charles. Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi‘a. New York: PIR Press, 1988.

Poetry & Islam: An Introduction, Part 1

[At Steve Shiffrin’s suggestion, I am cross-posting (albeit slightly modified) the following from an earlier series at The Literary Table blog.]

 

Any discussion of the role of poetry (shi‘r) in Islam must perforce treat the importance of poetry during the jāhiliyya (the pre-Islamic period of comparative ethical and spiritual ignorance), the Arabic word used by Muslims to designate their history prior to the advent of the Qur’ānic revelations. In the jargon of social science, the meaning and function of poetry was, and to some extent still is, contested. This accounts for its apparent ambiguous status in Islamic history, such ambiguity in turn traceable to poetry’s exalted standing during the jāhiliyya.

Pre-Islamic poetry is animated by the Bedouin ethos of the desert in which the tribal poet (shā‘ir) is a “singing witness” to the collective’s customs and traditions, to its wars and heroic exploits. The poet provides the tribe with a somewhat idealized mirror image of itself. The poet’s inventiveness therefore is concentrated in the manner and diversity of expression, as the poem’s subject matter remains constant and predictable:

 

“In the earliest stages of the literary tradition the emergence within a tribe of the Arabian peninsula of a truly gifted poet was a cause for great rejoicing, as ibn Rashīq notes; the presence of such a figure was a matter of supreme importance, in that words were the most effective of weapons. The poet would rouse the tribe with eulogies (madīh) extolling the chivalry and generosity of its leaders and men; would remind them of the fallen heroes in elegies (marthiya), a category in which women poets seem to have played a prominent role; and, deadliest of verbal weapons, would cast aspersions on the qualities of many tribes, their leaders and womenfolk, in vicious lampoons (hijā’).” (Allen: 109)

 

Eulogies during the jāhiliyya celebrated such virtues as valor, endurance, patience, loyalty and generosity, as well as the preeminent tribal virtue: solidarity (‘asabiyya). The panegyric to tribal leaders was often peppered with aphorisms (hikma, s. hikam) that reflected the largely secular worldview of tribal life. So-called vagabond poets (su‘luk) performed on the periphery of tribal society, expressing preferences for antinomian if not misanthropic beliefs and behavior, including the privations of solitary life in an unforgiving desert environment. Lastly, we find itinerant court poets whose number and importance increased as Islam flourished in cultural centers beyond the Arabian peninsula: in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Qayrawān, Fez, and Cordoba, for example.

For some Muslims, however, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was emblematic of “the days and ways of barbarism” (Goodman). Whatever degree of truth in this characterization, it should not preclude an appreciation of continuity in poetic expression and themes after the jāhiliyya, even if the Bedouin poetry of the Arabian desert was subject to an Islamic transformation and transvaluation that belies whatever Muslim animus was aimed at poetry as such. For instance, pre-Islamic poetry was born in song and its fundamental orality was nurtured within a predominantly audio-visual culture (for an explanation, see Adonis). Poetic recitation is frequently compared to singing birds, and its meter, rhythm and melody to birdsong. Thus it is not surprising the Khūrāsanī poet and hagiographer, Farīd ad-Dīn ‘Attār, uses birds as metaphors for spiritual experience and the mystical quest in his delightfully didactic and allegorical mathnawī (lit. ‘doubled,’ rhyming couplets), The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-tayr). After ‘Attār, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (604/1207—672/1273) writes of the falcon as a symbol of the soul; the equation soul=bird is, however, hardly unique to Islam. A transvaluation of the vagabond poets’ “truest friends,” namely the wolf and the hyena, might be inferred from Indian and Persian miniatures that show the Muslim saint or mystic sleeping or sitting among (now) tamed wild animals. More conspicuously, the language of profane or erotic love was used by poets like Muhammad Shams ad-Dīn Hāfiz (726/1325—791/1389) and Rūmī, and before them, by Rabi`a al-`Adawiyya  (95 [or 99]/714 [or 717-8]—185/801) to poetically convey the relationship of love between human beings and God, between lover and the Beloved. Rabi`a represents the pinnacle of the Basran tradition of women’s ascetic spirituality within Islam and within Sufism she is considered one of the (if not the) earliest exponents and dramatic exemplars of “love-mysticism” (for a succinct analysis, see Leaman: 99-104).

The preferred poetic form of the jāhiliyya was the qasīda (ode), one of the three principal types of lyric poetry, the others being the ghazal (short lyric love poem) and the rubā‘ī (or quatrain), each of which underwent the spiritual transformation of secular topics and themes typified by the qasīda:

 

“The classic genre begins with a section (nasīb [the amatory prologue of this polythematic ode]) in which the lover expresses a longing for the departed beloved…. Then the poet describes the subject’s quest and concludes with the lover boasting ironically of how he has succeeded in exiling her from his memory. Muslim poets transformed both the themes and the three-part structure of the qasīda form, adapting the genre to specifically religious and mystical purposes.” (Renard, 1996: 110)

 

Islam is emphatic that Muhammad, as God’s Messenger and Seal of the Prophets, was no tribal bard moved by the jinn (s. jinnī, intelligent, usually invisible beings), those fiery spirits thought to have inspired, in the manner of the Greek muse, pre-Islamic Bedouin poets. And Muslims rightly argue the Qur’ān’s literary qualities transcend those of even the best poetry. The need for the Qur’ān to distance itself from pagan poetry was quickened by the fact the Arabic word for poetry (shi‘r) comes from a verb that means “to know” and “to perceive.” So while we might interpret this to imply that all knowledge is, in some sense, poetry, for Muslim authorities this meant rather that the knowledge revealed in the Qur’ān was in direct and urgent competition with the poetic articulation of the Bedouin worldview. And it hardly helped matters that poets were often the most dangerous and implacable foes of the Prophet. Still, and strictly speaking, poetry is not forbidden in Islam, although “as a patterned mode of discourse where pattern is a vehicle of art and art can militate for autonomy and for control of content, poetry is clearly suspect” (Goodman: 34).

From a sūra in the Qur’ān titled “The Poets,” we learn that “only those who are lost in error follow the poets” (26: 224), and elsewhere that “We have not taught the Prophet poetry, nor would he ever have been a poet” (36: 69), hence in spite of the transparent and eloquent poetic qualities of the Qur’ān, its words are unequivocally “not the words of a poet” (69: 40-41). Yet, and importantly, the Qur’ān also refers to those poets “who believe, do good deeds, and remember God often” (26: 227). Hadīth (pl. ahādīth, reports or traditions of the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions) literature is less nuanced, tending to view poetry with prima facie suspicion or questionable acceptability. Muhammad himself was not above finding wisdom in poetry, nor immune from enchantment by its aesthetic elegance. What is more, the Qur’ān effects a transition from the poet’s oral culture of inexplicable intuition and improvisation to a literary culture that privileges study and contemplation, a reasoned scrutiny of culture’s contents (as Oliver Leaman reminds us, ‘There are many references to the importance of reason in the Qur’ān, and Islam seems to take pride, at least in its early years, in presenting itself as highly rational.’). This transition might also be seen as a change “from a point of view which made contact with the pagan surface of existence to one which reached into its metaphysical depths” (Adonis: 37). It’s no small irony that Qur’ānic exegesis and studies gave birth to a vigorous literary criticism and incipient science of religious aesthetics, all the while indirectly stimulating poetic production and opening up new vistas in poetry.

Poetry finds philosophical sanction in the work of the first truly systematic thinker in Islamic philosophy (falsafa), Abū Nasr Muhammad al-Fārābī (c. 256-7/870—339/950). Al-Fārābī’s Peripatetic and Neoplatonic infused Islamic philosophy understands the music of poetic speech as “superior to all other music in its evocative powers and the effects it produces” (Adonis: 24). The philosopher’s views on this score have family resemblance to a Confucian perspective on The Odes, and Plato’s rationale, in the Laws, for making music an integral component of education (padeia) in the widest sense, insofar as its pleasurable nature is essential in the training of children to become habituated to virtue (aretē). Specifically, in The Great Treatise on Music (Kitāb al-Mūsīqā al-Kabir), al-Fārābī argues that “Because many moral stances and actions are the result of the emotions and of the visions conjured up by the imagination, these perfect tunes have a beneficial effect on attitudes and morals and encourage listeners to acquire all the mental attributes, such as wisdom and knowledge of the sciences” (Qtd. In Adonis: 25).

Al-Fārābī proceeds to accord poetry a unique epistemological end: takhyīl, or calling to mind the imaginative depiction of an object:  “This theory of imaginative evocation was to become the cornerstone of subsequent Islamic interpretations of poetic imitation, and through it psychological…underpinnings it became the means whereby the emotive and cognitive appeal of poetry and poetic discourse could be explained, and its role in philosophy and religion established” (Black in Nasr and Leaman: 182-183).

In short, poetry is, like prophecy, and for the philosopher, a product of the interplay between intellect and the mimetic capacities of imagination, although only philosophy provides the syllogistic (logical) demonstration of truths that prophecy and poetry communicate by symbolic and figurative means. What’s compelling about this theory is that it permits what are otherwise rarefied truths known with “certainty” by the philosopher to be communicated to masses possessing neither the taste nor the talent for philosophy. The intuitive reason and vision of the heart central to the poetic enterprise is now blessed with Islamic philosophical vindication, whatever a democratic sensibility may conclude about the possible condescending or patronizing character of this analysis. This Peripatetic (mashshā’ī) approach to poetry, which is largely concerned with the logical nature or structure of poetic discourse, competes in the Islamic tradition with the vindication of poetry provided by the Iluminationist (ishrāqī) philosophical school which serves, in turn, to illuminate Sufi verse.

 

References & Further Reading will appear in the second post.

Glen Beck and Joe McCarthy

The impropriety of Glen Beck speaking in Washington in a rally that purported to be in the tradition of Martin Luther King is palpable, if not obscene. This is the same Glen Beck who has asked Americans to leave social justice churches. Beck later backed off, claiming that he did not mean by this that it is wrong for churches to help the poor. Rather he meant that any form of social justice that uses taxation to redistribute is Marxist. It fails to respect property rights in an effort to help the poor and that in the eyes of Beck is wrong. On this account, Martin Luther King was a Marxist; so are mainline Protestant churches, so is the Catholic Church (which given its historical obsession with opposing Marxism must come as a surprise). On this preposterous account, the United States has been a Marxist nation for some time. Make no mistake: Glen Beck is the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy. And the “neutral” press reports on him as if he is not a madman, contributing to the further corruption of the public sphere.

After his rally, Beck insisted that President Obama sees the world through the eyes of “Marxist” liberation theology (I only wish). This claim has produced some interesting responses. One is from James Martin, S.J., at the Huffington Post who espouses liberation theology as developed in Latin America. (Unfortunately, the last Pope did much to undermine the liberation movement though he did endorse the preferential option for the poor). The other from Kevin Lee at Mirror of Justice suggests that attention needs to be paid to the distinctive characteristics of black liberation theology as developed in the United States. Both are worth reading.

That was then: Catholics in America. This is now: Muslims in America.

What Notre Dame historians John McGreevy and Scott Appleby--who identify themselves "[a]s historians of American Catholicism, and Catholics"--have to say about "the Mosque Controversy", here, is well worth considering.

"The American River Ganges," Thomas Nast's 1875 cartoon showing Catholic priests as crocodiles attacking the United States to devour the nation's school children.

On the Papacy and the Third Reich

This is worth reading, here.

Is this any way to run a church--even the Roman Catholic Church--any longer (if indeed it ever was)?!

Some readers of ReligiousLeftLaw may be interested in this, from The Tablet, 28 August 2010:

"Worship and Power," by Philip Endean, SJ [who  teaches theology at the University of Oxford. The understanding of Vatican II here draws on the magisterial work of John O’Malley SJ, What Happened at
Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2008).]

Bit by bit, the Catholic Church has been edging towards the moment when the new English translation of the Roman Missal will be in use in English-speaking countries around the globe. On 30 April 2010 the Holy See gave its recognitio to what was thought to be the final text, while on 20 August the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released an updated version of the Ordinary with confirmation that Americans will start using it in Advent 2011. Yet the text is apparently still being revised in Rome. Matters remain unclear.

There are problems here about what counts as good translation. There are also serious questions about how authority is being exercised. In some ways, there are overlaps with the clerical-abuse scandal. Of course, the objective damage done by bad liturgy is as nothing to the moral wrong of children being violated. But in both cases authority has dealt high-handedly and secretively with the sacred, the intimate, the vulnerable. High officialdom has been evasive; lesser authority has tacitly colluded. What the situation needed was salutary English plain speaking.

How the new translation came about is now well known: the rejection of a 1998 version by Rome (despite the overwhelming support of the anglophone bishops' conferences); the changing of the translation ground rules with the Congregation for Divine Worship's (CDW) 2001 instruction, Liturgiam Authenticam; and the sacking of the staff of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (Icel).

The published accounts of this process by Bishop Maurice Taylor, then the episcopal chairman of Icel, are all the more telling for their dignified and charitable understatement. But "abusive" would not be too strong a word to describe the exercise of authority here.

The best advocacy for the new translation that I have seen, from Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Canberra and Goulburn - who has also written well on the abuse crisis - refers to "an extraordinary level of consultation" in the preparation of the new translation. Perhaps, but I was myself involved in a couple of peripheral ways, and I was instructed to maintain strict secrecy when, through my then provincial, I was asked to comment on a draft of the Ordinary.

Crucially, nothing that challenged Liturgiam Authenticam seems to have been taken seriously. Even Archbishop Coleridge has to concede that the process of producing this document, "which provided the hermeneutical base of the new translations, was confidential". Bishop Taylor notes that his fellow bishops had overwhelmingly passed the 1998 translation, but let the CDW proceed "without any complaint or question".

This situation hardly inspires confidence or trust. Given that there are also strong objective arguments against Liturgiam Authenticam, we have a serious problem. How are responsible Catholics to cope? The standard answer to that question is: "trust the authority of the Church's office-holders; give them the benefit of the doubt; make the best of the situation." But it is just such moves that have proved so catastrophic in matters to do with sexual abuse. Why are we to suppose them appropriate in this liturgical context?

[Read the rest here.]

Recommended Reading

Carlos A. Ball, FROM THE CLOSET TO THE COURTROOM: FIVE LGBT RIGHTS LAWSUITS THAT HAVE CHANGED OUR NATION, Beacon Press, Forthcoming

Carlos Ball writes:

During the second half of the twentieth century, social movements in the United States increasingly turned to the courts to advance their causes. The LGBT rights movement has been no exception. Since the late 1970s, that movement and its lawyers have aggressively pursued a judicial strategy aimed at challenging laws and policies that discriminate against LGBT people.

My book "From The Closet to the Courtroom: Five LGBT Rights Lawsuits That Have Changed Our Nation" (Beacon Press, 2010) tells the human and legal stories behind these leading gay rights cases: Braschi v. Stahl Associates (1989); Nabozny v. Podlesny (1996); Romer v. Evans (1996); Baehr v. Lewin (1993); and Lawrence v. Texas (2003).

I argue in my book that these five lawsuits have played a crucial role in creating the necessary social and political conditions that today provide LGBT people with the opportunity to lead lives that are both open and dignified. In doing so, the lawsuits have compelled the country to account for the interests and hopes of LGBT people.

A key part of the story that I tell in my book is played by LGBT rights attorneys. Over the last twenty years, no group of lawyers has helped to transform the United States more than LGBT rights attorneys, and yet their collective accomplishments have received relatively little attention. My book seeks to remedy that by exploring how a band of largely unheralded civil rights lawyers have attained remarkable legal victories through skill, creativity, and perseverance.

Those interested in reading the Introduction to the book can download this document here.

Guns and Originalism

I taught the District of Columbia v. Heller case yesterday (this term’s gun case comes much later) which used the Second Amendment to strike down a District law restricting the possession of handguns and requiring lawfully owned firearms to be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock in the home.

The case richly illustrates some of the problems associated with originalism. Justice Scalia famously argues that the constitutional interpretation of a clause should be based on the original public understanding of the provision. Let us suppose that his interpretation of the clause in the case is correct. In other words, let us suppose that the clause was concerned not only with the use of arms for militias, but also for hunting and personal safety.

Although Scalia is opposed to balancing, he does not think that the right to bear arms is an absolute. He lists a number of restrictions that can be placed on the use of guns. So far as I can tell, he does not connect these permissible restrictions to the original public understanding. He instead says they are “longstanding prohibitions.” The one I find particularly interesting is his approval of laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings. I leave aside the question whether that was part of the original public understanding. My concern is the negative implication of Scalia’s point. Is he suggesting that people have an absolute right to carry guns anywhere, but sensitive places?  Can I and everyone else wear a gun in the grocery store, the subway, Central Park? Are we constitutionally bound to return to the good old days of the Wild West? How, by the way do we distinguish between places that are sensitive and those that are not? Do we use the original understanding? Alan Gura, the winning attorney in Heller, is contending in litigation that the District of Columbia’s ban on the public carrying of guns is unconstitutional. See here. If we apply the original public understanding of the amendment, he may be right, but doing that would be a form of constitutional madness.

One final point: Justice Scalia’s methodology calls for applying the public understanding to determine the original expected applications. This is in contrast, for example, to the approach recommended by Jack Balkin of Yale. Balkin, an originalist, would apply the equal protection clause in terms of the general principle of equality, but would not be bound by the specific applications expected by the original understanding. Conceptions of equality and other constitutional principles can mature in Balkin’s approach. I want to connect this dispute to the application of the Second Amendment to handguns. When Scalia confronts the issue he asks not about the original public understanding, but observes that handguns are the current weapon of choice in the home. If the right to bear arms protects the current weapon of choice as opposed to the weapons specifically associated with the original public understanding, we have left Scalia and entered the land of Balkin.  Without commenting on how I would approach and decide Heller, I think that the original public understanding approach is not consistently followed in Heller and has little to recommend it.   

Glenn Beck is going to "reclaim the civil rights movement" -- since, as he puts it, "we were the people that did it in the first place." [UPDATED]

Hmm.  Read about it, here.

[UPDATED:  See this, in The Atlantic.]

KnowNothingism: Isn't that something U.S. Catholics should know something about?

KnowNothingism (and the Know Nothings who practice it) is alive and well in the USA today.  Read all about it, here.

Sufi Poetry at The Literary Table

At The Literary Table I have the first in a series of planned posts on “Sufi Poetry.” This was preceded by a four-part installment (a ‘propaedeutic’) on “Islam and Poetry,” the links to which are found in the above post.  

 

The image is a Mughal period depiction of the Basmala or Bismillah. This phrase is recited before each sūrah in the Qur’ān save the ninth, and is used in a number of contexts by Muslims. The Basmala is therefore recited several times a day as part of Muslim daily prayers (salāt). It reads as follows:

bismi-llāhi r-rahmāni r-rahīm

In the name of God, Merciful to All, Compassionate to Each!

Or,

In the name of God, most Compassionate, most Merciful.

Or,

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Caring.

Or,

In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy.

Or,

In the name of God, most Gracious, most Merciful.

Or,

In the name of God, most Gracious, most Compassionate.

Or,

In the name of God, the Infinitely Good, the All-Merciful.

 

Republicans, Deficits, and the Wealthy

The Republicans, who drive up deficits when their Presidents are in office by extravagant military spending, now cite the need for fiscal restraint. So, by their lights, we cannot extend employment benefits or afford health care even for children because it would drive up the deficit. But there are some things more important than providing for the downtrodden and providing health care. It is important for the Republicans that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy even if it means deepening the deficit.

In fact, they are using it as a campaign issue – characterizing the refusal to extend the Bush tax cuts (which would take us back to the taxes of the Clinton administration) as a tax increase. The Republicans do not care that this, according to Robert Reich, would amount to a $36 billion cost to the treasury, $ 31 billion of which would go to billionaires.

On his blog, Robert Reich maintains that instead of helping the top 3% of the economic heap, “Democrats should propose eliminating payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income, and making up the revenue loss by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000.

 

“This would give the economy an immediate boost by adding to the paychecks of just about every working American. 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. And because lower-income people would get most of the benefit, it’s likely to be spent.”

 

He advises that we call it the People’s Tax cut and ask Republicans why they are against it.

 

Disclosures in Corporate Political Ads

In his weekly radio address, President criticized the Republicans for trying to block a bill that would require disclosures in corporate political advertisements. The legislation would require banks and insurance companies, for example, to reveal their sponsorship of a political ad without hiding behind a name like Citizens for Better Government. Disclosures would force corporations to take responsibility for their actions and to give some thought to whether their endorsement of political candidates would cause some consumers to stop purchasing their goods or services. They also would communicate a deeper understanding of how the political process works. Of course, the Republicans oppose the legislation. They are without shame.

I have long thought that the press underreports the way money works in politics. The press needs to give us much more information about the appeals candidates make to corporations to get money and the way corporations in which industries divide in supporting candidates. This might tell us more about the positions of candidates than what they tell us in speeches.

Perhaps, the blogs and the websites can fill the gap if the press continues to report on the political horse races at the expense of political economy.

Football and Cooperation with Evil

We constantly face decisions as to how much we are willing to cooperate with evil. Will we wear clothes produced in sweatshop conditions? Will we consume meat and dairy products produced in ways that are cruel to animals? Will we indeed be entertained by watching brutality? What do we think of those who attend dog fights? What do we think of those who issue bloodthirsty calls at boxing matches?

Now comes Lisa Fullam at dotcommonweal. She argues: "Now it’s inescapably clear that football has long-term neurological sequelae that include syndromes that mimic Alzheimer’s and ALS. (See today’s Boston Globe for one such report.) This is trickier–it seems that getting clonked in the head is unavoidable in the sport. Helmets don’t seem to help. And the problem isn’t only among the pros, where the guys clonking each other are often 300-plus lbs. of solid muscle, but even among high schoolers.

"My question isn’t whether football should be banned. My question is whether, knowing this about the long-term risks, it is ethical to watch it, knowing that those brilliant young athletes have a many-times multiplied risk of truly horrific neurological complications in their futures."

MoveOn, Target, and Our Corrupted Public Sphere

MSNBC will not air an ad by MoveOn urging a boycott of Target because of its political contribution to a candidate for governor in Minnesota who opposes same sex marriage. According to MSNBC, the ad was refused because it attacks an individual corporation, which is contrary to its policy for ads. See Politics Daily.

Of course, it is. The business plan of MSNBC (along with broadcasters and cable companies that accept ads) is to promote an advertising environment designed to be business friendly, an environment that will promote materialism. When the major communications media are organized to promote a uniform message as a central part of their business plan, the public sphere is corrupted

The Place of Human Animals in the World

Sam Candler at the Daily Episcopalian observes something he say has long been recognized in First Nation lore: human beings are outsiders on this earth. Among all animals, we are the only beings who are not needed by another species (except for our domesticated animals).  We surely have the power to make the world worse for animals and we regularly do. In terms of our place in the environment, Candler says, "If we are not being the actual food for some of our earthly neighbors, maybe we are meant to provide something like true stewardship. Maybe Genesis 1:26-28 really means that we are to provide, not dominion over the earth in a rowdy, tyrannical, irresponsible way, but, rather, true stewardship and tender care of the earth. Maybe the earth itself really needs our husbandry in a conserving way, not in a consuming, self-rewarding way. Eugene Peterson, in The Message (2002), translates Genesis 1:28 as 'Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.'"

If that is our purpose, we have a lot of changes to make.

Mosques and Military Funerals

We can be grateful for the accelerating chorus of commentary to the effect that there is a constitutional right to build a mosque near the site of the world trade center attacks even if it is offensive to many people. One should not confuse this right with the idea that there is an absolute right to offend people through speech.

The question is nicely presented to the Supreme Court in Snyder v. Phelps this term. Phelps and his church group appeared at a military funeral (some distance from it, but close enough to be seen) carrying signs saying “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags.” As Mike Dorf sardonically observes this morning, “The fallen Marine, Mathew Snyder, was not gay, but [Phelps’ church] believes that 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are God's punishment for America's failure to address sin.  Lovely.” See Dorf on Law here.

The lower court found that Phelps was guilty of intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy. The Fourth Circuit, knowing more about crazy ways to apply the First Amendment than common sense, reversed. The Fourth Circuit is supported in many briefs by people with  absolutist views (which I regard as a First Amendment fetish) including Eugene Volokh, Martin Redish, and Nadine Strossen.

In Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, The Court held that the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress could not be applied to a public figure without a showing that the statement in question was a knowing or reckless falsehood. The Fourth Circuit’s extension of Falwell is likely to be disapproved by the Court and rightly so. It will be a dark day if the Court declares that the torts of intentional infliction of emotional distress  or invasion of privacy have secretly been unconstitutional all this time.

Differences Between Muslims

Asma Assaruddin, author of The First Muslims: History and Memory, and a Professor of Islamic Studies at Indiana Bloomington, has a nice essay here in which she argues that the differences between Muslims (which she elaborates) are more consequential than the differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. Her conclusion: "These different approaches to the central issues of our time allow for radically different world-views to emerge among Muslims, based on whether the past is conceived as a frozen, mythic entity available for wholesale replication today or as offering a repertoire of enduring universal values and possible courses of actions, mediated by contemporary contingencies. In my opinion, the future of Islam as a lived, dynamic, and nurturing religion for the 21st century hinges on the liberal world-view gaining ground among Muslims. I am cautiously optimistic that this will happen because that is the more historically credible and morally compelling alternative . . . unless external political events, over which Muslims have little control, pre-empt this likely trajectory."

She argues that the hardliners or absolutists want to duplicate the past, but the moderates and liberals look to the past and ask why Muslims acted the way they did and try to determine how those purposes play out in the present.

Kagan and Anti-Semitism

Over at Religion Dispatches, Gordon Newby shows how portions of the right used thinly disguised, and sometimes undisguised, anti-semitic appeals in opposing the Kagan nomination. It is well worth reading.  I was no fan of the Kagan nomination, but I did not buy for the moment the Republican's "concern" that she lacked judicial experience. The Kagan nomination simply exhibited another example of Republican obstructionism. I wonder whether the Democrats will play the same game when a Republican President occupies the White House.  Part of me hopes so. Indeed, after Bush v. Gore, the Democrats played an obstructionist role - though they were less blatant. On the other hand, the Republican have set an example that could produce a permanently disfunctional Congress. I do not see a way out except to consign the filibuster and other such customs to the trash heap.

The Professional Left

As everyone by now knows, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently attacked the "professional left" a phrase worthy of Glenn Beck. He did not define the professional left except to mock them by saying that they would not be satisfied without the Canadian health care system (how true), the abolition of the Defense Department (a lot fewer here - but think of how our economy might be if it were vastly scaled down and we shifted the money to building infrastructure like a high speed rail system), and would not even be satisfied with Dennis Kucinich. If Robert Gibbs thought that there was political mileage in attacking the Democratic base, he truly is a moron. The Obama administration has already projected moderation ad nauseam. Expressing its frustrations at the left will simply limit a flow of funds and volunteers. 

I imagine there is justifiable frustration with those Democrats who believe the health care bill should not have been passed without a public option. From what I can tell, the public option never had a chance of getting through. And it is difficult for those on the left to know which compromises were necessary in domestic legislation and which were not (though for my money continuing two counterproductive wars at enormous expense in money and human lives is clearly a mark against the Obama administration).

What mystifies me is how little the Obama administration had done to wage war on the do nothing, obstructionist moral lepers who purport to represent the Republicans in Congress. Presumably, as election season gets in high gear, things will change on this front, but it is long past due. In my view, Obama's failure in this regard has heavily contributed to his unpopularity. We already know that Harry Truman knew how to run against do nothings. And, by the way, does anyone think that Hilary Clinton would have breathed anything other than fire in mentioning the pack of Congressional special interest lackeys in the Republican party. If Obama does not stop playing above the fray in a DIsneyland of bipartisan politics, he will deserve the fate, he will get in the mid-term elections.

"Progressive" Catholic parish in St. Louis is in trouble

Perhaps I should say "dissident" Catholic parish is in trouble.  Whatever.  For the interesting story--in the New York Times, under the headline "Renegade Priest Leads a Split St. Louis Parish"--click here.

As a periodic resident of San Diego (fall semesters), I am aware of, though have not visited, an "unofficial" Catholic parish, aptly named "Mary Magdalene Apostle:  Catholic Community San Diego", the pastor of which is a woman priest.  Check it out, here.  I wonder how many such parishes there are in the United States.

The parish to which my family and I belonged in Evanston, Illinois, named "St. Nicholas", was "official" but pretty progressive nonetheless.  Whether it is still so, I don't know; my family and I left Chicago thirteen years ago this summer.  Our older child--Daniel--turned eight that summer (1997).  In a surprising (to me) twist of fate, Daniel, who just turned twenty-one, is now back in Evanston, where, next month, he will begin his junior year (Northwestern.)

National Defense and Jobs

In a post on Wednesday, Robert Reich observes that our defense  budget contains our only long-run jobs program, a program that nurtures obsolete weapons and many other things we do not need for the purpose of keeping some nearly four million people employed.

Reich scores this as nothing less than insane. He wonders: " Wouldn’t it be better to have a jobs program that created things we really need — like light-rail trains, better school facilities, public parks, water and sewer systems, and non-carbon energy sources — than things we don’t, like obsolete weapons systems? . . .

"Maybe . . . the way to convince Republicans and blue-dog Democrats to spend more federal dollars putting Americans back, and working on things we genuinely need: Call it the National Defense Full Employment Act."

It's a shame that President Obama chose the likes of Larry Summers to advise him on the economy rather than Robert Reich and Paul Krugman.

Partnership, Domestic Partnership, Civil Marriage, and Commonlaw Marriage

Rick Garnet and David Nikol posted nice, thought-provoking sets of comments to my recent post on marriage over at Mirror of Justice.  I commend them to all RLL readers.  It occurs to me that RLL readers might also be interested in a somewhat modified and more fully elaborated rendition of my attempts there at replying.

Rick asks, among other things, whether a priciple per which states cannot rationally deny thinly defined civil marriage rights to same-sex partners might not also prohibit states from denying such rights to larger family units.  David, for his part, points out among other things that marriage in past times used to be more a matter of state than a matter of religious concern.  He also suggests that polygamy is at least one form of non-nuclear familial arrangement that is socially harmful.  In consequence, Rick and David severally take issue with my suggestions that (1) we perhaps ought to distinguish sharply in law between civil union and ecclesial marriage, with the former contoured by Equal Protection law and the latter enjoying far-reaching autonomy under Free Exercise Law, and (2) that one upshot of proposition 1 would be that the state might best be viewed as obligated not to restrict civil unions even to couples, let alone to heterosexual couples.  I've a few tentative thoughts in response:

First, I don't know much about what role marriage or its analogues played in earlier religious traditions or in the earlier phases of presently continuing religious traditions.  Nor do I know much about the political, as sometimes problematically distinguished from the religious, history of marriage many centuries or several millennia back. I am under the impression, however, that ecclesial courts handled marriage and family law matters in the not so distant past, with the 'king's' courts handling matters of more unambiguously state-style concern.  (Didn't Chancery, for example, handle these matters in England?)  I also believe, in any event, that a liberal polity such as our own aspires to be, in which all citizens are to be taken for autonomous moral equals irrespective of their faith commitments, bears a special burden of justification when it pursues policies that tend, and especially policies that intendedly tend, to support or encourage some living arrangements over others.  Even a very retro-minded type (as I myself tend to be in some contexts), for example, might well be troubled by state favoring of 'nuclear' families over 'extended' families.  And certainly a liberally minded type (as I tend even more strongly to be), by way of another example, will be troubled by state judgements to the effect that 'blood is thicker than water,' or any cognate judgement that systematically favors conjugal unions over more 'intentional' family arrangements, including such as are larger than 'nuclear.'

Second, I'm no expert on polygamy, and certainly I don't like the idea of 'two [or n] girls for every boy,' as I guess Jan and Dean had it in the beach movie days.  After all, the corrollary would seem to be 'half [or 1/n] a boy for every girl,' which seems in potential at least to be a bit inequitable, to say the least.  It is interesting, however, that this form of familial arrangement seems to have prevailed in the earlier days during which the Bible was composed, rendering it something of a puzzle that self-described 'Christian conservatives' have racked up so nasty and bigoted a track-record in the 19th century persecution of Mormons in the US.  In any event, my own (very much provisional) tendency is simply to think of polygamy and polyandry as matters of vigilently enforced contract law, in which the informed consent of the truly autonomous contracting parties would constitute the principal legal - not to mention ethical - question raised by any arrangment.  Presumably many who have been engaged in latterday polygamous or polyanderous familial arrangements would be found to have been illegitimately exploited under such a regime, since so many seem to have been pushed into those arrangements prior to having formed autonomous selves.  But so long as the law took the autonomy and equal bargaining power requirements truly seriously, I'd see little obvious reason categorically to prohibit non-nuclear familial arrangments tout court.  (Didn't Fannie Flagg's novel, 'Fried Green Tomatoes,' involve a less problematic such arrangement?  I've not read the novel, but seem to recall being told that it did.)

Another, third thought in effect generalizes the view that I think might be implicit in the first two: One feature that I think constitutive of the peculiar genius of the commonlaw of (business) partnership is the fact that a p'ship can simply evolve into being, out of the temporally extended behavior of the parties to a p'ship-like relation.  There need be no formal agreement in writing or even in speech.  People can 'fall into' partnership, as I often think of it.  It occurred to me last night, in thinking more on this subject, that the old institution of 'commonlaw marriage' might then have constituted a straightforward counterpart in the realm of domestic arrangement.  I'll have to ask Eduardo's, Steve's and my splendid colleague, Cynthia Bowman, for further clarification on this, as she's truly expert on the subject.  But in any event, if the speculation is correct, then just as a commonlaw business p'ship can include more than two p'ners, perhaps a commonlaw domestic p'ship should be able to do so as well, so long as the 'capacity to consent' is as verifiably present in the one case as in the other.  And if so, then there would seem no reason not to permit statutory domestic p'ship to do likewise, again as in the case of (now statutory) business p'ship.  The potential legal and moral issues involved seem to be much the same, after all -- all of them straightforward contractual issues so far as 'internal,' governance relations are concerned, and straightforward tort and b'ruptcy issues so far as 'external,' third party relations are concerned.  It's all about the special vulnerabilities to which people internal and external to p'ships become prone in virtue of the p'ship relation itself.  It's not clear to me that such vulnerabilities can only be dealt with by categorically requiring all p'ships to have no more than two members, let alone to heterosexual members.  The only possible argument to the contrary that comes to mind would sound in the infeasibility, as an adminstrative matter, of effectively policing the bona fide informed consent of the putatively autonomous parties.  (Note that a similar argument seems to be proferred by opponents of doctor-assisted suicide.  The claim is that it's just not feasible for the state to ensure bona fide consent.  Is this true?  It seems to me this might constitute the proverbial $64k question here.)

That segues into a fouth and final thought for now.  As just noted, business p'ship law is largely about the obligations the p'ners incur to one another and to third parties by dint of the relations inter se that they fall into, given that those relations give rise to new vulnerabilities.  Presumably commonlaw marriage and domestic p'ship law have been and would be largely the same, at least in part, irrespective of the number of parties to the 'relational contract' involved.  Insofar as presentday domestic p'ship law is instead about benefits from fellow p'ners and from third parties to which p'ners become entitled by dint of their relations to their p'ners (inheritance, insurance, hospital visitation rights, etc.), well, that's long been statutorily determined on an ad hoc basis, so far as I can tell.  I see no reason why that would not continue, with various commonsense adjustments made in response to unanticipated problems that arise in the face of the sundry alternative domestic arrangements that might develop, were we to recognize domestic p'ships that included more than the now most familiar dyadic and 'nuclear familial' forms.

Thoughts?

The Crisis of the Family

The Huffington Post hosts a column by John W. Whitehead on the breakdown of the family. DIvorce has declined from 60% to 40%, but the decline is misleading. Co-habitation is on the increase and marriage rates have declined. Nearly 40% of American children are born out of wedlock and there are nearly 10 million unwed mothers.

The results of this breakdown are not heartening. As Whitehead notes, "Sociologist Paul Amato estimates that if the United States enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960, the nation would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, approximately 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, and approximately 70,000 fewer suicides every year."

The evidence seems to indicate that membership in Christian religious organizations (at least) has little impact on the likelihood of divorce. Evangelical divorce rates, for example, are comparable to those of non-Christians. As Whitehead points out, Christian organizations have spent some $40 million to protect the family by attacking same sex marriage. If those organizations took a serious look at the plight of the family, perhaps they could find a more efficient use of their money.

Electronic Entertainment and Spirituality

One of the many themes of the late Father Robert Smith in his sermons was the difficulty of leading a spiritual life in a world that “entertains us to death” (a phrase, I borrow from Neil Postman’s excellent book of some years ago -Entertaining Us to Death). Father Smith was referring to our addiction to television, computers, i-pods and other electronic devices. He worried that we no longer knew how to think deeply, how to pay attention, how to be alone, how to contemplate, how to pray.

At Christian Century, Stephanie Paulsell exhibits similar concerns, citing research showing that our addiction to computers has physically changed our brains and reflecting on the impact for our spiritual lives. It is worth reading I think. It should make us wonder whether we check our e-mail and surf the web many more times a day than we should.

Cardinal O'Brien of Edinburgh on US's 'Culture of Vengeance'

My guess is that many RLL readers will find food for thought in the trenchant observations made this past weekend by Cardinal O'Brien of Edinburgh.  I'm not well acquainted with the Cardinal, but certainly experience considerable sympathy with the claim that the US is included among 'invidious company' where its penal regime is concerned. 

Cardinal O'Brien's observations are reported here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-10905562

Cross posted at Mirror of Justice

Prop 8 Case's Ratio Decidiendi

Mike Dorf has a characteristically illuminating analysis of the Prop 8 decision over at Dorf on Law, as well as (at fuller length) on Findlaw.  The first is located, and the second is accessible, here: http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2010/08/rationality-review.html .

Mike agrees with the outcome, but is troubled by the means by which the Judge got there.  

For what my own higly inexpert opinion is worth, I continue to wonder why we do not treat civil union as the apt civil category, and treat marriage solely as the religious category that I've always thought it to be.  In such case it would be hard - for me, at any rate - to see denial of civil union to any couple, of sound mind that has reached the age of consent, as capable of surviving rationality review.  And it would be just as hard - for me, at any rate - to see any justification for state interference with ecclesial organizations' defining their more specific conceptions of the separate category of marriage in what ever manner was consistent with their theologies.  But I've written at some length on this already, so I won't belabor the point here.

Here's a post from last November, complete with amusing video clip from a wonderful film: http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2009/11/tale-of-two-marriages.html .

Cross posted at Mirror of Justice

Bloggingheads: Progressive Faith

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of Christianity Today and Frances Kissling of RH Reality Check discuss the impact of the religious left ... here.

Religion Without Spirituality

It has long occurred to me that the doctrines of heaven and hell can undermine spirituality. If one lives a life primarily to avoid hell and to gain access to heaven, one is in danger of leading an individualistic, instrumentalist and egoistic life. I can recall, however, the late Father Robert Smith arguing to me that the notion of heaven was not consumerist in any way. Properly understood, the desire for heaven was a desire to be close to God. The goal is to live a life trying to be close to God, and it is natural to hope that an afterlife deepens that connection. So understood, the religious and spiritual fuse.

On Torture...and Happiness

Owing to their length, I’ve decided to post my two comments to Steve’s post below, “Spiritual, But Not Religious.”

 

There may be more than a correlation between churchgoing and approval of torture, at least if one finds the argument in God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (1996) by Timothy Gorringe persuasive:

“In Anselm’s day, at the end of the eleventh century, the life of a stag was worth more than that of a serf, but, although he was sensitive to the needs of ‘Christ’s poor,’ Anselm nowhere adverts to the fact. [....] Bishops and archbishops [Anselm was the Archbishop of Canterbury] could hardly read Scripture except from the position of those who exercise power.”

During the Middle Ages it was not unusual for the “Christ of doctrine [to be] far removed from the Galilean preacher, with his teachings about forgiveness, and who mingled with the poor, [as] ideas about the number of fallen angels took the place of concrete attention to the miseries and oppressions of the poor.” Satisfaction atonement theory, otherwise and perhaps better known on this side of the Atlantic as “substitution” theory, was both influenced by and influenced penal thinking in Europe: “satisfaction theory emerged, in the eleventh century, at exactly the same time as the criminal law took shape. The two reacted upon each other: theology drew on legal notions and legal discussion, as the history of satisfaction doctrine makes clear, and law turned to theology for metaphysical justification.” To make a long story short and vivid, “passion theology” on the order of Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ (2004), fashioned a “rhetoric of redeeming blood [that] found concrete expression in the London hanged:”

“The rites and symbols of Christianity have been the means by which Western culture has sought to master the intractable features of human existence. These intractable features have included, at their centre, wickedness, guilt and punishment. The practical business of punishing offenders ‘takes place within a cultural space which is already laden with meanings and which lends itself easily to symbolic use.’ Christianity was wheeled in to validate the legal process through the taking of oaths (on a book which absolutely forbids them, as Tolstoy caustically noted), through assize sermons, and through the ministrations of chaplains at the gallows. In the prison Tolstoy describes in Resurrection ‘hung the customary appurtenance of all places of barbarity—a large image of Christ, as it were in mockery of his teaching.’ The suffering Christ, an icon of the wickedness of judicial punishment, became the focus of its legality, and the need for the offender to suffer as he did. An image of torture provided the central construal of the cultural space within which punishment took place.”

 

And I wonder if those on the Left who are said to be unhappy are expressing their keen sense of the gap between the “is” and the “ought,” between the seemingly insurmountable abyss that exists between our ideals and values and the awful reality of everyday life for many people on this planet, of the ubiquity of sufferings that are commonplace despite the feeble and farcical attempts to make things appear otherwise. Is it not the case that as we come to better appreciate the nature of the Good, it appears ever more remote and elusive, as if it’s mocking our endeavors, however sincere, to make it incarnate, to realize it here and now. Is it any surprise, then, that happiness, whatever that is, is equally remote and elusive? With the fairly large number of (avowed or apparently) happy idiots, fools, zealots, and hypocrites (in the Hobbesian sense) running around these days one might rightly infer that this “happiness thing” is not worth the attention most of us devote to its pursuit. All the more so if happiness is one of those mental states—like spontaneity—that are best thought of as by-products, meaning that their direct pursuit entails a pragmatic contradiction, that the quest for happiness is self-defeating, that happiness may come about through the attainment or pursuit of other states or ends such that if we entertain the thought that our efforts will make us happy, we’re bound to be disappointed, to never in fact achieve happiness in any deep or enduring sense.

In any case, and relatedly, I find the literature on happiness to be rather disappointing, the concept invariably a slippery and interminably vague notion (hence the resort to stipulative or persuasive definitions) despite the power it holds over our lives. Our actions betray a confidence bordering on arrogance that we have knowledge of, at least, what our happiness consists in, thus social scientists give credence to subjective reports of well-being, despite the likelihood these reports are suffused with the distortions of self-deception, wishful thinking, states of denial, and so forth. To be sure, happiness has an ineluctably subjective dimension, but the surveys of subjective well-being are perhaps better, alas, at recording a sense of what the converse of happiness consists, in other words, of the pervasiveness of depression, sadness, anxiety, discomfort, pain and suffering. It’s interesting that the Greek concept of eudaimonia is often rendered as “happiness,” although not a few philosophers express unease with this translation, in part owing to the sundry connotations that the term “happiness” has acquired over time, to the wildly different meanings people attach to happiness. Yet the dissatisfaction may reveal something about the true meaning of happiness captured by this Greek concept.

 
Although I’ve yet to read it, I’m hoping Sissela Bok’s latest book may be of some help: Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (2010).

Spiritual, But Not Religious

A survey reported at Immanent Frame discloses that those who identify as spiritual, but not religious are not much different in demographics from those who identify as religious. On the other hand, they are overwhelming Democratic and take positions that are decidedly on the left of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, they are far more likely than those who consider themselves to be religious to be unhappy with their lives.

Conservatives often triumphantly suggest that people who share their views are churchgoers. The latter is true, but the triumphant strain is unwarranted. As a book I am currently reading by Brian McLaren mentions: Churchgoing is correlated with approval of torture.

More on the Plight of the Liberal Catholic

Cathy Kaveny believes, rightly I think, that the Catholic Church is in the midst of an acute crisis, a crisis that is underestimated by the hierarchy. In a post at dotcommonweal, she points to yet another liberal Catholic, an Illinois appellate judge who is in anguish about whether she should stay in the Church. That judge expresses the hope that the hierarchy would excommunicate her and make the choice for her. See here.

 

The comments to Cathy’s post are well worth reading for those interested in the plight of the liberal Catholic. Most of those who comment empathize with the Judge’s plight and have resolved it in various ways (leaving, staying to fight, staying but not receiving communion). One of my favorite comments is by David Nickol, “It seems to me to all boil down to a very basic decision. If you believe that the Church is so messed up that it can’t be what it claims to be — an organization to represent Jesus on earth, guided by the Holy Spirit, and indefectible — then you leave. If you believe the claims the Church makes about itself, then you stay.

 

“It surprises me to hear almost no discussion among Catholics about whether or not the Church’s behavior is evidence that it can’t be the divinely guided institution that it claims to be.

 

“Are the claims the Church makes about itself credible? If so, go to Mass every week, go to confession, etc., etc., and don’t read the newspapers.”

 

Gerard Bradley on Judge Walker's Bias

ND Law Prof. Gerard Bradley has a puzzling opinion piece up on Fox News in which he insinuates that Judge Walker might have been biased in the Prop. 8 case because he is in a long-term committed gay relationship (whether it is true that Judge Walker is gay or is in a long-term relationship I have no idea, though I'll stipulate for the purposes of this brief post that it is) and might himself want to marry.  I say "insinuate" because Bradley never comes out and says that Judge Walker decided the case the way he did because of his relationship, though it seems to be the clear upshot of his piece. 

My puzzlement is twofold.  First, I don't quite understand what Bradley is saying, because he expressly says that he is not arguing that Judge Walker should have recused himself: 

I am not saying that Judge Walker should have refused [sic] himself in Perry v. Schwarzenegger.  I am not saying so because nowhere (as far as I know) has Judge Walker volunteered or been made to answer questions about how the outcome of that case would affect his interest (whatever it is) in marrying, and thus his interest in the manifold tangible and intangible benefits of doing so. 

That is a conversation worth having. 

And, sadly, it is quite too late to have it.

So his point is not that Judge Walker should have recused himself, but that it would have been worth having a conversation about his possible bias because Judge Walker is in a committed gay relationship.  On the other hand, Bradley asserts that "I do not doubt that Judge Walker made up his mind about Prop 8 before the trial began."  So he does seem to have a great deal of confidence that Judge Walker was in fact biased and, if so, he should have recused himself. 

My second source of puzzlement is why Bradley thinks this is a conversation we need to have had in the absence of any actual evidence of improper bias -- apart from Bradley's certainty and the authority of conservative commentator Ed Whelan, whom Bradley also cites.  Here's my question:  by Bradley's logic, would a white judge with children be subject to recusal  from hearing a challenge to an affirmative action program (or at least a "discussion" about his biases) because he might not want his children to be disadvantaged by such programs or is this the sort of insinuation of bias that is only valid against minorities?

Gingrich and Islam

Newt Gingrich, who is considering a run for the Presidency in 2012, recently gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in which he condemns not only violent forms of militant Islam, but also the cultural integration of Muslims in the west. In response, Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, here, compares the bigoted approach of Gingrich to that of Joseph McCarthy.

Gingrich may think that this form of the politics of fear and anger will unite the various wings of the Republic Party. Perhaps he is right. But I doubt it. Not even George W. Bush went down this disreputable road.

Catholic Liberals, the Bishops, and the Eucharist

Over at Mirror of Justice, Rick Garnett maintains that liberal Catholics have no good reason to be discouraged in their Church. He insists they are welcome in the halls of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But in a little noticed development in 2006, on the same day the Bishops reaffirmed their positions on homosexuality and birth control the Bishops said (see here):

“To give selective assent to the teachings of the Church not only deprives us of her life- giving message, but also seriously endangers our communion with her. "If a Catholic in his or her personal or professional life were knowingly and obstinately to reject the defined doctrines of the Church, or knowingly and obstinately to repudiate her definitive teaching on moral issues, however, he or she would seriously diminish his or her communion with the Church. Reception of Holy Communion in such a situation would not accord with the nature of the Eucharistic celebration, so that he or she should refrain.”  

The Bishops were clear about their authority and the requirement to submit to it: “Bishops who teach in communion with the Roman Pontiff are to be revered by all as witnesses of divine and Catholic truth; the faithful, for their part, are obliged to submit to their bishops’ decision, made in the name of Christ, in matters of faith and morals, and to adhere to it with a ready and respectful allegiance of mind.”  

It is not clear to me whether the Bishops are rejecting the long held view that Catholics are bound to follow their conscience. Probably not, though their message seems to give that impression. I think instead they are saying follow your conscience, but if you selectively assent to Church teachings you have separated yourself from the Church and should not receive the Eucharist.

Surely, on some issues this would make sense. But I would be interested to know whether those Catholics who reject the Church’s teaching on homosexuality and/or birth control should be discouraged from receiving the Eucharist under this teaching. Are they not involved in selective adherence to Church doctrine? Was the reaffirmation of the teachings on the same day as the Bishops decried selective adherence to Church teachings a juxtaposition not noticed by the Bishops?  

Meanwhile millions of Catholics continue to receive the Eucharist despite their selective adherence to Church positions on a wide variety of ethical issues. In practice, they pay no attention to the Bishops whose overreaching undermines their authority at the same time they proclaim it.    

NYC Mosque Stupidity

(Cross-posted at dotCommonweal) There is lots of stupid floating around the opposition to the proposed mosque and community center a few blocks away from Ground Zero.  This excellent speech by Mayor Bloomberg highlights just a few of the most salient points.  Here's an excerpt:

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

Go read the whole thing, which includes a very moving account of the history of religious freedom in New York.  It speaks to what is best in us, as Americans.  I chose this particular excerpt, because it highlights just a few of the strange contradictions in the opposition to the mosque, particularly insofar as that opposition is primarily (but clearly not exclusively, as the ADL's position demonstrates) concentrated on the political right. 

(1) Private property rights -- conservatives usually think you are entitled to do what you want with your private property and are not normally sympathetic to the use of tools like historic preservation laws to block development.  Yet, in this case, they have been looking for any tool to block these private owners from building a center on their private land.  How long before they call for the city to use eminent domain power to block the construction of the Mosque? 

(2) Our constitution protects religious exercise.  Gathering and worship are core elements of that right.  Conservatives have been pretty adamant  in recent years about protecting the autonomy of religious groups.  Although the First Amendment doesn't guarantee you the right to get land use approval to build a place of worship,  it clearly protects you from having adverse land use decisions made just because the majority does not like your religion.  (See, e.g., Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah)  Conservatives by and large supported the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act ("RLUIPA"), a federal statute that arguably provides religious organizations with a huge leg up in the land use process, particularly when it comes to the construction of places of worship.  And yet, in this case, these commitments have been thrown to the wayside by a number of leading conservative figures.

(3) Localism -- Conservatives have often argued that land use questions are primarily matters of local concern.  They have been at the forefront of opposing federal (and even state) interventions into the land use arena, particularly when federal or state governments have done so in an effort to protect the environment or mandate inclusionary land use policies.  At its worst, this defense of localism has been a proxy for discussions about race and class.  But, at its best, it has been built around a defense of localism as an affirmative conservative value rooted in questions of associational freedom and subsidiarity.  In this case, however, the local community (NYC and, more specifically, the residents of lower Manhattan) has embraced the proposed development while the voices opposing the construction of the mosque and community center have disproportionately been from outside NYC and even outside the region.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure what to make of this entire issue.  I suppose if opposition to the mosque were limited to the fringe of the far religious right, I'd chalk it up as a fairly unsurprising manifestation of that group's unfortunate authoritarian and theocratic tendencies.  But many of the voices raised in opposition to the mosque (Giuliani, Gingrich, Limbaugh, etc.) are not people I particularly associate with religious conservatism.   I'm sure this will sound like concern trolling coming from me, but I think this mosque episode goes to the heart of what's troubling about the contemporary political landscape on the right.  The rise of a kind of visceral, racialized identity politics on the right, even among seemingly mainstream conservative figures (or at least people treated as such by the media, such as Gingrich and Guiliani), is more than a little frightening.  And there seems to be no core conservative principle that is not subject to being jettisoned to rile up the base or gain some short-term political advantage.  I have no idea where all this is headed, but it doesn't seem like it's going to have a happy ending.  I feel like all I can do is watch and worry.

Catholic Lawyers and Divorce

A Catholic organization named Mary's Advocates is petitioning the Bishop of Cleveland to condemn those Catholic lawyers who represent clients in divorce proceedings. See here.They suggest that such lawyers are in grave manifest sin and have removed themselves from the communion of the Church. I suppose it follows that judges who approve divorces are similarly sinful. And what of prosecutors who ask for and judges who affirm capital punishment sentences? Perhaps zealotry has a silver lining.

Ann Rice and Christianity

On Facebook, Ann Rice has announced that she continues to follow Christ, but is no longer a Christian. On July 28, she said, “For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten ...years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.  

Five minutes later, she elaborated, “As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."  

The next day she said this: “My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.”  

The response has been enormous. Thousands responded in one way or another on Facebook. The United Church of Christ invited her to become a member, because it believed its understanding of Christianity matches hers. But Rice has arrived at the conclusion that organized religion is not for her.

Joseph Bottums at First Things heaped sarcasm on her decision. In a post that exuded superiority, Bottoms criticized her for exhibiting a sense of superiority. I cannot help but thinking that Bottom’s post exhibits a form of argumentation that is itself not Christian.  

It would be the rare Christian liberal who did not understand the impetus for Rice’s position. Although conservative Christians are a minority of  Christians – at least in the United States, the media has constructed an image of Christians that is decidedly in the conservative mold. Conservative Christians and the mass media have given Christianity a bad name – at least from the perspective of progressives. For them, it is necessary to say, “I am a Christian – but” Or, as I am often forced to say, “I am a Catholic – but.” In the case of Catholicism, the ordinary citizen and the traditional Catholic thinks that what the Vatican says defines Catholicism – even though the vast majority of American Catholics as a matter of conscience reject many solemn Vatican pronouncements and the ordinary citizen is generally unaware of the Church's many Christian commitment's to social justice or the Church's non-resistance to science.  

In the end, although I admire Rice, in the end, I do not agree. I do not think the term Christianity should be ceded to anti-feminists and anti-gays. Enormous progress has been made in this area within Christian sects in the past few decades (although, if I may resort to euphemism, Rice’s former Catholic home has registered less progress on both fronts). The tide of history runs against conservatives on these issues.  

Even more important, a major strand of Christianity from the progressive perspective is to fight for social justice and in most cases that is best done with others. Moreover, Christianity is all about loving, supporting, and helping others. That is less easy to accomplish in an isolated mode.   Of course, Rice is in a position to do much as a prophet. But I do not think most followers of Christ should take the individualistic road she recommends.              

Sharī‘ah: An Introduction

 

The following is an introduction to the concept (and conceptions) of Sharī‘ah in the Islamic tradition. No doubt some of what follows is eminently arguable but I think it no less true for all that!

 

Sharī‘ah: literally, something like “the way,” or “the path to the watering hole (or spring),” refers to divine law or God’s will in Islam. “The word occurs only once in the Qur’ān and it is used in contradistinction with hawā (whimsical desire):” [To Muhammad] “Then we set you upon a pathway of faith” (or ‘Thus we put you on the right way of religion’) (45:18).* Historically, the term Sharī‘ah refers to all the elements of a proper, i.e. righteous life; this includes moral behavior, proper respect towards Allāh, correct belief, personal piety, and so on. In other words, it means the right way to live one’s life as a Muslim in conformity to God’s will. In more recent times, the scope of its reference has narrowed to that which falls under the rubric of Islamic law (fiqh), but there is a logical, conceptual and practical difference between Sharī‘ah and fiqh. The latter involves the human process of understanding and implementing the divine law as positive law in Islamic polities. It is a serious (religious, epistemological, ontological, ethical…) yet common mistake to conflate Sharī‘ah and fiqh, or to use these terms as synonyms, particularly when we appreciate the metaphysical or theological nuances of the former concept apart from its positivization through the rituals and laws of the Islamic world throughout history. The Sharī‘ah, writes Khaled Abou El Fadl, “is God’s Will in an ideal and abstract fashion, but the fiqh is the product of the human attempt to understand God’s Will. In this sense, the Sharī‘ah is always fair, just and equitable, but the fiqh is only an attempt at reaching the ideals and purposes of Sharī‘ah (maqāsid al-Sharī‘ah). [….] The conceptual distinction between Sharī‘ah and fiqh is the product of a recognition of the inevitable failures of human efforts at understanding the purposes or intentions of God.” This distinction is important if only because “the tendency to overlegalize Islam is common across the board in the writings of both Muslims and Orientalists” (Mohammad Hashim Kamali). Put differently, Sharī’ah is directly conveyed by means of revelation, while fiqh is primarily in reference to the Islamic corpus juris, the latter largely a subset of the former (it is not, strictly speaking, wholly a subset of the former insofar as forms of law that pre-date Islam or were concurrent with Islamic civilization found their way into the legal reasoning and fiqh of the legal schools).

The metaphysical and theological function of Sharī’ah is here analogous to that of Natural Law intimations and formulations among the Stoics and later religious and secular Natural Law doctrine as it developed from Grotius. Recently, Abdullahi An-Na‘im has made the provocative argument that “precisely because sharī‘a is supposed to be binding on Muslims out of religious conviction, a believer cannot be religiously bound except by what he or she personally believes to be a valid interpretation of the relevant texts of the Qur’ān and Sunnah. Yet, given the diversity of opinions among Muslim jurists, whatever the state elects to enforce as positive law is bound to be deemed an invalid interpretation of Islamic sources by some of the Muslim citizens of the state.” While perhaps formulated too much in “Protestant” terms insofar as it appears not to set constraints on the range of “legal” interpretation, it enables us to appreciate the fact that any legal system or positivization is liable to a principled (and thus reasoned) and “transcendental” critique insofar as human law(s) never fully embodies or instantiates justice, goodness, or God’s will. Moreover, such “objections to the enforcement of sharī‘a through positive law and the notion of an Islamic state do not, of course, preclude Muslims from personally conforming with every aspect of sharī‘a as it is understood at that time and that place by any particular individual.”

On this understanding, the function of Sharī‘ah is not unlike a Platonic Form, at least in its “bedrock version” as outlined by T.K. Seung in Intuition and Construction: The Foundation of Normative Theory (1993) or as discussed in the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch (especially in The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992); keeping in mind that Murdoch takes the trouble to distinguish Plato’s conception of the Good from the theist’s God):

“The Good is distant and apart, and yet it is a source of energy, it is an active principle of truthful cognition and moral understanding in the soul, the inspiration and love-object of Eros. It is not a logical universal, or a Person, it is sui generis. It is a ‘reality principle’ whereby we find our way about the world.”

Intuition and construction are two integral processes intrinsic to the functional role of Platonic Forms (or ‘Ideas,’ ‘Archetypes,’ etc.). Platonic Forms—like the Sharī‘ah—are fairly indeterminate, while nonetheless serving as normative, intuitive, and largely nonpropositional foundations (in theory, accessible to any Muslim) for constructing (propositional, hence legal) models as guides for determinate social realities, thus, for example, (the Form) Justice is only the normative foundation for constructing principled models of determinate social orders, none of which fully realizes Justice or the Good or God’s will, and all of which endeavor to approach Justice (or the Good or God’s will), succeeding by degrees (analogous if not related to the manner in which virtue ethics views our capacity for self-understanding in conjunction with perfectibilist psychological and moral growth).** In addition, writes Murdoch (again, assuming Sharī‘ah is here analogous in function to the Platonic Good),

“Our pilgrimage (in the direction of reality, good) is not experienced only in high, broad or general ways (such as in increased understanding of mathematics or justice), it is experienced in all our most minute relations with our surrounding world [what the Muslim reminds us is created by God and placed in our trust] wherein our apprehensions (perceptions) of the minutest things (spoons, stones, leaves, scraps of rubbish, tiny gestures, etc., etc.) are also capable of being deeper, more benevolent, more just (etc., etc.).”

What is more, the attempt to instantiate or embody the model is never wholly successful, given the nature of the human condition and the model’s idealized qualities in reference to the Form itself: “The indeterminacy of Platonic Forms makes them flexible standards, and their flexibility assures their eternal durability.” Sharī‘ah is like the Platonic Form in being universal, abstract, and indeterminate, and thus cannot directly serve as a normative standard (i.e., any interpretation of the Divine Will needs religiously rationalized and principled justification by way of textual hermeneutics and exegesis). This is perhaps one reason Norman Calder writes that, “in modern academic analysis of Islamic law, the word Sharī‘ah is of little use: what we can study and describe is always fiqh.” Fiqh represents a Platonic-like endeavor to translate Sharī‘ah into direct, concrete, and normative models for particular contexts.

As with Platonic intuitionism in which all human beings have access to Platonic Forms, all Muslims, as noted by An-‘Naim above, have access to Sharī‘ah, indeed, they are under a spiritual obligation to attempt to understand (and live by that understanding) the divine law. Such understanding is necessarily partial and fallible and may vary (within the constraints of Islamic hermeneutics) according to the individual (for every Muslim is in possession of moral autonomy and is ontologically unique): “Indeterminacy and relativity are inseparable in the domain of realization.” The divine nature of Sharī‘ah means that it retains a normatively transcendent and evaluative function whatever the extent of its positivization as fiqh. In other words, law as such, or positive law, cannot exhaust the evaluative function of divine law as one’s understanding of same can always deepen, one’s intuitive discernment can always be keener. As a transcendent (nonpropositional) guide for action, and despite its integral relation to Islamic law, Sharī‘ah should not be confused or conflated with any of its specific principled and propositional constructions by way of fiqh, or any political proposal for a putatively Islamic state. Nonetheless, fiqh can serve as an aid in coming to understand divine law insofar as it enables us to obtain further, dialectical insight into that which both animates and transcends positive law. Discursive reasoning and rational understanding, in other words, and in this case intrinsic to the Islamic science of jurisprudence, are part and parcel of the process of filling out intuitive or nonpropositional insight into divine law and represent our current understanding and embodiments of divine law in legalistic jurisprudential terms. That is to say, there is a dialectical relation between divine and human law that represents, in epistemic and metaphysical terms, a dialectic between propositional knowledge and “knowledge by acquaintance” in a Platonic sense, or “knowledge by presence” after Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī: “The insight that transcends words cannot be attained except by means of words; what cannot be spoken of becomes manifest in the very act of speaking.” Like Socrates in the agora, Islamic scholars (jurists, theologians and philosophers) as well as conscientious Muslims can examine and rationally refute propositions that claim to fully or finally capture the nature or essence of the Divine Will, that pretend to fully embody or “positivize” the Sharī‘ah. The jurist’s fallible, limited, and historical understanding of Sharī‘ah, in other words, is evidenced by his facility with ’usūl al-fiqh: how he has arrived at the determination of law, rather than simply and solely the result, that is, the legal determination or ruling itself, or, in the case of furū‘ al-fiqh, the persuasiveness of the arguments explicating the concepts and rules that relate to religious rituals and ethico-religious conduct in the widest sense.

And it is fitra, the Islamic term that designates our primordial inclination or general predisposition to the Good as a constituent feature of human nature, that allows individual qua individuals, to have insight into the Divine Will (and thus functions like soul memory in Platonic thought: permitting individual intuitive awareness, however dim or partial, into the Good; this insight is what Socrates set out to awaken in the interlocutors of the dialectical dialogues). In fact, fitra can serve as the Islamic equivalent of individual conscience, according individuals in effect the right of principled objection to interpretations of Sharī‘ah that violate their sincere and sustained endeavors (made in the context of the Islamic tradition) to realize this dispositional awareness of ‘the Good,’ the Divine Will or Sharī‘a. Recall too that with regard to the positivization Sharī‘a there is a distinction between religious, moral, and juridical obligations.

Consider now the following critical comments from Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi, an avowed “legal realist,” from his blog, Islamic Law in Our Times: A Realistic Assessment of Islamic Law in Today’s World (http://muslimlawprof.org/), as it helps us see the difference between concern with the conceptual, metaphysical and theological, and focus on the empirical or positive, as well as how, in practice, the normative may be embodied or entangled in, or even conflated with the descriptive:

“In Islamic studies departments, there’s this notion of shari‘a as this sort of idealized, highly stylized logic driven system that is sort of somewhere in the sky that nobody can see, and then there’s fiqh, which is any given juristic interpretation of this beauty written down on paper always with the flaws of that jurist, and then there’s actual law, which bears no necessary relationship to either. [….] Certainly shari‘a and fiqh, the ideal and then the imperfect reflection of the ideal (still not real) is a favorite of this group, their law review articles go to great lengths to explain the difference between the two, because one must understand how this all works, this lovely thing up there in the sky, its shadow in the academy and then if you’re lucky they’ll attempt to relate all of that to reality in a way that is, ummm, perplexing. [….] [A]s with any law or rule of social order, when you want to understand what the shari‘a is, you have to see what the shari‘a  actually does.  What role in the social order?  How?  Who has the authority to declare it?  Where and when does it conflict with national law and how do Muslims of various sorts react to that?  Where is it important to most?  Where do some care and not others? THAT is law.”

This is reminiscent of a Holmesian-like attitude toward natural law or the positivist preoccupation of Legal Realism. I think Hamoudi is mistaken, however, in claiming that this idealized and stylized system conceives of Sharī‘ah and fiqh as bereft of any “necessary relation” to actual legal processes and systems. What frequently occurs here is something akin if not identical to the conceptual analyses one finds in analytical jurisprudence (of the sort wrongly lamented by Brian Leiter in his quest to ‘naturalize’ jurisprudence), which makes it essential to a normative understanding of positivistic models or descriptions of Islamic law in “actually existing Islamic societies.”

We should carefully consider the following point made by Abdullahi An-Na‘im:

“When observed voluntarily, Sharī‘ah plays a fundamental role in shaping and developing ethical norms and values that can be reflected in general legislation  and public policy through the democratic political process.”

But I’m not sure it’s therefore true that “…Sharī‘a principles cannot be enacted and enforced by the state as public law and public policy solely on the grounds that they are believed to be part of Sharī‘a. If such enactment is attempted, the outcome will necessarily be the political will of the state and not the religious law of Islam. The fact that ruling elites sometimes make such claims to legitimize their control of the state in the name of Islam does not mean that such claims are true. The fact that the state is not a religious institution is the historical experience and current political reality of Islamic societies. [….] [D]ispelling the dangerous illusion of an Islamic state that can enforce Sharī‘a is necessary for legitimizing and implementing the principles and institutions of constitutionalism, human rights, and citizenship in Islamic societies.” Abdullahi An-Na‘im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharī‘a (2008).

An-Na‘im is thinking largely here of the historical experience of non-democratic “Islamic” regimes invoking Sharī‘ah by way of political legitimation. But it may be that in majority Muslim countries today Sharī‘ah may function (or in theory, could function) in constitutions by way of legitimating democratic principles, methods, and processes, as well as human rights generally (an argument made by Noah Feldman). For instance, Sharī‘ah is said to have as an overarching aim protection of five fundamental “interests:” life, faith, property, intellect and family (cf. the list of basic or fundamental goods found in the Natural Law tradition from Aquinas to Finnis, Grisez and Murphy). In such cases Sharī‘ah principles would be at a level of abstraction and generality that assures the democratic polity is not in violation of basic Islamic values and reinforce the notion that there is nothing inherently undemocratic about Islam qua Islam, that Muslims can be—with good conscience and conscientiously—at once Muslims and democrats.

I don’t think there need be any inherent conflict—let alone contradiction—between Sharī‘ah and democratic theory and praxis, provided we adhere to the aforementioned distinctions. While this may be true, we should not ignore the historical (and perhaps not surprising) fact that, in the words of Mohammad Hashim Kamali, “with reference to justice and basic rights…the traditional fiqh in the areas of al-ahkām al-sultāniyyah (principles of government) and siyāsah shar‘iyyah (Sharī‘ah) has fallen short of reflecting the Qur’ān’s comprehensive conception of justice in the sphere particularly of rights and liberties.”

 

*Please see Mohammad Hashim Kamali's Shari‘a Law: An Introduction (2008).

**For elaboration, please see Francisco J. Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (1998).

 

For further reading, see the titles under Jurisprudence in this bibliography for Islamic Studies.