The QOTD, on the limits of reason:

“The third problem, that of conflict between knowledge and rationality… is often called the dilemma of ultimate commitment and the problem of presuppositions.

The problem is crucial, not only because no one has seemed able to solve it but because the Christian commitment of many Protestants depends upon the assumption that it cannot be solved. For the argument provides a rational excuse for irrational commitment… It argues that (1) for certain logical reasons, rationality is so limited that everyone must make a dogmatic irrational commitment; (2) therefore, the Christian has a right to make whatever commitment he pleases; and (3) therefore, no one has a right to criticize him (or anyone else) for making such a commitment…

No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: ‘How do you now?’, ‘Give me a reason’, or ‘Prove it!’ When such challenges are accepted by citing further reasons which entail those under challenge, these may be questioned in turn. And so on forever. If the burden of proof or rational justification is perpetually shifted to a higher-order premise or reason, the contention originally questioned is never effectively defended… An infinite regress is created.

To justify the original contention, one would eventually have to stop at something not open to question for which one does not and need not provide justificatory reasons. These would be the halting points for rational discussion… However, if all men do not cease their questioning at the same point - if ultimate standards are perceived not to be certain or if different people deem conflicting ‘ultimate’ standards to be certain - then ‘ultimate relativism’ results. Some way of arbitrating rationally among competing ultimate stopping points by appeal to a common standard is now excluded in principle. If these ultimate statements are matters of contention, then there will be no Archimedes’ lever with which to decide among competing sets of ultimate standards. Indeed, even if everyone did subjectively happen to stop at the same place or accept the same standard, there still would be no way to prove rationally that this universal subjective standard led to objectively true statements about the world…

Obviously, one cannot, without arguing in a circle, justify the rationality of a standard of rationality by appealing to that standard… The limits of rational argument within any particular way of life seem, then, to be defined by reference to that object or belief in respect to which commitment is made or imposed, in respect to which argument is brought to a close. Thus reason is relativized to one’s halting place or standards, and cannot arbitrate among different standards. Different halting places - i.e., standards, criteria, presuppositions, conventions, dogmas, articles of faith - are taken by different individuals and define irreconcilable communities. Whatever may explain how such differences arise, reason can never dissipate them.

– W.W. Bartley, III, The Retreat to Comitment, pg. 72-74.

The QOTD, on postmodernism:

“Postmodernists nearly all reject classical foundationalism; in this they concur with most Christian thinkers and most contemporary philosophers. Momentously enough, however, many postmodernists apparently believe that the demise of classical foundationalism implies something far more startling: that there is no such thing as truth at all, no way things really are. Why make that leap, when as a matter of logic it clearly doesn’t follow? For various reasons, no doubt. Prominent among those reasons is a sort of Promethean desire not to live in a world we have not ourselves constituted or structured. With the early Heidegger, a postmodern may refuse to feel at home in any world he hasn’t himself created. Now some of this may be a bit hard to take seriously (it may seem less Promethean defiance than foolish posturing); so here is another possible reason. As I pointed out (above, p. 73), classical foundationalism arose out of uncertainty, conflict, and clamorous (and rancorous) disagreement; it emerged at a time when everyone did what was right (epistemically speaking) in his own eyes. Now life without sure and secure foundations is frightening and unnerving; hence Descartes’s fateful effort to find a sure and solid footing for the beliefs with which he found himself. (Hence also Kant’s similar effort to find an irrefragable foundation for science.)

Such Christian thinkers as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Kuyper, however, recognize that there aren’t any certain foundations of the sort Descartes sought—or, if there are, they are exceedingly slim, and there is no way to transfer their certainty to our important non-foundational beliefs about material objects, the past, other persons, and the like. This is a stance that requires a certain epistemic hardihood: there is, indeed, such a thing as truth; the stakes are, indeed, very high (it matters greatly whether you believe the truth); but there is no way to be sure that you have the truth; there is no sure and certain method of attaining truth by starting from beliefs about which you can’t be mistaken and moving infallibly to the rest of your beliefs. Furthermore, many others reject what seems to you to be most important. This is life under uncertainty, life under epistemic risk and fallibility. I believe a thousand things, and many of them are things others—others of great acuity and seriousness—do not believe. Indeed, many of the beliefs that mean the most to me are of that sort. I realize I can be seriously, dreadfully, fatally wrong, and wrong about what it is enormously important to be right. That is simply the human condition: my response must be finally, ‘Here I stand; this is the way the world looks to me.’

There is, however, another sort of reaction possible here. If it is painful to live at risk, under the gun, with uncertainty but high stakes, maybe the thing to do is just reduce or reject the stakes. If, for example, there just isn’t any such thing as truth, then clearly one can’t go wrong by believing what is false or failing to believe what is true. If we reject the very idea of truth, we needn’t feel anxious about whether we’ve got it. So the thing to do is dispense with the search for truth and retreat into projects of some other sort: self-creation and self-redefinition as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, or Rortian irony, mockery, as with Derrida. So taken, postmodernism is a kind of failure of epistemic nerve.”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 436-37.

The QOTD, echoing Quine, on the impossibility of bare empiricist epistemology:

Indeed, there is a connection between belief and perception of beauty (and similar qualities) that goes much deeper than Weinberg suggests. As Leibniz and many since have noted, there are ordinarily many different theories or beliefs compatible with our evidence. If we plot our data on Cartesian coordinates, we will be able to draw as many lines as we please through the points we plot, and we could project any of the appropriately related hypotheses. All emeralds so far examined have been green; if so, however, they have also all been grue, where an emerald is grue if either it is examined before 2050 a.d. (bringing Goodman up to date) and is found to be green, or is not so examined and is blue. [390] So (instead of projecting that all emeralds are green) we could project that all emeralds are grue, thus concluding that emeralds not observed before 2050 are blue. The sun has come up every morning so far; we form the belief that it comes up every day and will also come up tomorrow. We could have formed quite a different belief, however: where T is today, we could have formed the belief that the sun comes up every day prior to T and never after T. Why do we accept the hypotheses we do; why do we project green rather than grue, and the hypothesis that the sun will continue to come up rather than the one according to which it won’t? Why do we project simple hypotheses rather than complex ones? Not because we have evidence that simpler hypotheses are more likely to be correct than complex ones; for, for any alleged evidence for this conclusion, there will be a more complex inference from the same data for the denial of this conclusion. So why do we do it?

Because we find simple beliefs (whatever precisely simplicity is) more natural and more attractive than complex beliefs. Only a madman would project grue or its partner in crime, bleen. [391] Messy, complex beliefs are ugly, disgusting, weird, repellent: we dislike them and therefore reject them. We may hope that the world is in fact such that simplicity (at least simplicity of a certain sort and in certain areas) is a mark of truth; but we have no hope whatever of establishing that in a way that doesn’t already rely upon simplicity. For suppose we note that in the last one thousand cases the simplest hypothesis has turned out to be true. Where t is the present, say that a belief is simplex’ if it is formed before t and simple, or after t and complex; what we will have observed, so far, is that simplex beliefs tend to be true. But that means that from now on we should go for complex beliefs.

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 309-10.

The QOTD, echoing Stanley Fish:

“It is no good falling back on ’science’ as having disproved the possibility of resurrection. Any real scientist will tell you that science observes what normally happens; the Christian case is precisely that what happened to Jesus is not what normally happens.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, pg. 124.

The QOTD:

“Grasping the nettle — proposing, as a historical statement, that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was empty because his body had been transformed into a new mode of physicality — will of course evoke howls of protest from those for whom the closed world of Enlightenment theory renders any such thing impossible from the start. But if Christianity is only going to be allowed to rent an apartment in the Enlightenment’s housing scheme, and on its terms, we are, to borrow Paul’s phrase, of all people the most to be pitied — especially as the Enlightenment itself is rumored to be bankrupt and to be facing serious charges of fraud.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pg. 121-22.

The QOTD, on evidence:

“Turning to the gospels, we find all the puzzles of which readers have been aware for centuries (not simply with the rise of modern scholarship). The stories of Easter morning in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20 are notoriously difficult to harmonize. We shall never be sure how many women went in what order to the tomb, at what point two or more male disciples went as well, how many angels they all saw, where or in what order the appearances of Jesus took place. But, as many have pointed out, it is precisely this imprecision, coupled with the breathless quality of the narratives, that gives them not only their unique flavor but also their particular value. Despite the scorn of some, lawyers and judges have regularly declared that this is precisely the state of the evidence they find in a great many cases: this is what eyewitness looks and sounds like. And in such cases the surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened; rather, they mean that the witnesses have not been in collusion.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pg. 121-22.

The QOTD, on protest movements:

It is easy also to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. ‘To protest’ and its Latin predecessors and French cognates are originally as often or more often positive as negative; to protest was once to bear witness to something and only as a consequence of that allegiance to bear witness against something else.

But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability [e.g., the fact that both rights and utility are a matching pair of incommensurate fictions] ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestor can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that the protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 71.

The QOTD, on empiricism:

“Aubrey’s error was… to suppose that the observer can confront a fact face-to-face without any theoretical interpretation interposing itself. That this was an error, although a pertinacious and long-lived one, is now largely agreed upon by philosophers of science. The twentieth-century observer looks into the night sky and sees stars and planets; some earlier observers saw instead chinks in a sphere through which the light beyond could be observed. What each observer takes himself or herself to perceive is identified and has to be identified by theory-laden concepts. Perceivers without concepts, as Kant almost said, are blind. Empiricist philosophers have contended that common to the modern and the medieval observer is that which each really sees or saw, prior to all theory and interpretation, namely many small light patches against a dark surface; and it is at the very least clear that what both saw can be so described. But if all our experience were to be characterized exclusively in terms of this bare sensory type of description — a type of description which it is certainly useful for a variety of special purposes to resort to from time to time — we would be confronted with not only an uninterpreted, but an uninterpretable world, with not merely a world not yet comprehended by theory but with a world that never could be comprehended by theory. A world of textures, shapes, smells, sensations, sounds and nothing more invites no questions and gives no grounds for furnishing any answers.

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 79-80.

The QOTD, on comfortable furniture:

Even Chinese emperors had to sit on a throne on which I would not think of remaining for more than five minutes, and for that matter the English kings were just as badly off… [But] Now I have discovered a formula regarding the comparative comfort of furniture. The formula may be stated in very simple terms: the lower a chair is, the more comfortable it becomes. Many people have sat down on a certain chair in a friend’s home and wondered why it was so cozy. Before the discovery of this formula, I used to think that students of interior decoration probably had a mathematical formula for the proportion between height and width and angle of inclination of chairs which conduced to the maximum comfort of sitters. Since the discovery of this formula, I have found that it is simpler than that. Take any Chinese redwood furniture and saw off its legs a few inches, and it immediately becomes more comfortable; and if you saw off another few inches, then it becomes still more comfortable. The logical conclusion of this is, of course, that one is most comfortable when one is lying perfectly flat on a bed. The matter is as simple as that.

– Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, pg. 207-08.

The QOTD, on rationality and relativism:

What historical enquiry discloses is the situatedness of all enquiry, the extent to which what are taken to be the standards of truth and of rational justification in the contexts of practice vary from one time and place to another. If one adds to that disclosure, as I have done, a denial that there are available to any rational agent whatsoever standards of truth and of rational justification such that appeal to them could be sufficient to resolve fundamental moral, scientific, or metaphysical disputes in a conclusive way, then it may seem that an accusation of relativism has been invited… so let me once again identify what it is that enables, indeed requires me to reject relativism.

The Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition of the virtues is, like some, although not all other moral traditions, a tradition of enquiry. It is characteristic of traditions of enquiry that they claim truth for their central theses and soundness for their central arguments. Were it otherwise, they would find it difficult either to characterize the aim and object of their enquiries or to give reasons for their conclusions. But, since they are and have been at odds with one another in their standards of rational justification – indeed the question of what those standards should be is among the matters that principally divide them – and since each has its own standards internal to itself, disputes between them seem to be systematically unsettleable, even although the contending parties may share both respect for the requirements of logic and a core, but minimal conception of truth. Examples of such rival traditions that are palpably at odds in this way are the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, the kind of Buddhism whose greatest philosophical name is Nagarjuna, and modern European and North American utilitarianism.

How then, if at all, might the protagonists of one of these traditions hope to defeat the claims of any of its rivals? A necessary first step would be for them to come to understand what it is to think in the terms prescribed by that particular rival tradition, to learn how to think as if one were a convinced adherent of that rival tradition. To do this requires the exercise of a capacity for philosophical imagination that is often lacking. A second step is to identify, from the standpoint of the adherents of that rival tradition, its crucially important unresolved issues and unsolved problems – unresolved and unsolved by the standards of that tradition – which now confront those adherents and to enquire how progress might be made in moving towards their resolution and solution. It is when, in spite of systematic enquiry, issues and problems that are of crucial importance to some tradition remain unresolved and unsolved that a question arises about it, namely, just why it is that progress in this area is no longer being made. Is it perhaps because that tradition lacks the resources to address those issues and solve those problems and is unable to acquire them so long as it remains faithful to its own standard and presuppositions? Is it perhaps that constraints imposed by those standards and deriving from those presuppositions themselves prevent the formulation or reformulation of those issues and problems so that they can be adequately addressed an solved? And , if the answer to those two questions is ‘Yes’, is it perhaps the case that it is only from the standpoint of some rival tradition that this predicament can be understood and from the resources of that same rival tradition that the means of overcoming this predicament can be found?

When the adherents of a tradition are able through such acts of imagination and questioning to interrogate some particular rival tradition, it is always possible that they may be able to conclude, indeed that they may be compelled to conclude, that tit is only from the standpoint of their own tradition that the difficulties of that rival tradition can be adequately understood and overcome. It is only if the central theses of their own tradition are true and its arguments sound, that this rival tradition can be expected to encounter just those difficulties that it has encountered and that its lack of conceptual, normative, and other resources to deal with these difficulties can be explained. So it is possible for one such tradition to defeat another in respect of the adequacy of its claims to truth and to rational justification, even though there are no neutral standards available by appeal to which any rational agent whatsoever could determine which tradition is superior to which.

Yet, just because there are no such neutral standards, the protagonists of a defeated tradition may not recognize, and may not be able to recognize, that such a defeat has occurred. They may well recognize that they confront problems of their own to which no fully satisfactory solution has as yet been advanced, but it may be that nothing compels them to go any further than this. They will still take themselves to have excellent reasons for rejecting any invitation to adopt the standpoint of any other rival and incompatible tradition, even in imagination, for if the basic principles that they now assert are true and rationally justified, as they take them to be, then those assertions advanced by adherents of rival traditions that are incompatible with their own must be false and must lack rational justification. So they will continue – perhaps indefinitely – to defend their own positions and to proceed with their own enquiries, unable to recognize that those enquiries are in fact condemned to sterility and frustration…. And it is also true that such an enquiry may not in fact lead to any definitive outcome, so that the issues dividing those rival traditions may remain undecided. Yet what matters most is that such issues can on occasion be decided, and this in a way that makes it evident that the claims of such rival traditions from the outset presuppose the falsity of relativism. As do I and as must any serious enquirer.

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, third edition, pp. xii-xv.

While I was out of town, it seems that Popp tagged me with the “One Book” Meme:

1. One book that changed your life:

The Trouble with Principle, by Stanley Fish.

This book, coupled with Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism (which is a paper, not a book, and was therefore disqualified) radically altered my thinking. And ideas, as the saying goes, have consequences. At the moment, those consequences are particularly pressing, and in fact I may be writing about that at some length in the near future.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:

Excluding only the Bible, I’ve never read a book more than once.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:

Does God Exist?, by Hans Kung. That would keep me busy for a good while.

4. One book that made you laugh:

Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis.

5. One book that made you cry:

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner.

6. One book you wish had been written:

You know, I really can’t think of a book that I’d want to see written. There’s no shortage of stories out there, thank God.

7. One book you wish had never been written:

Das Kapital, by Marx.

The book itself is insightful, but so much damage has been done in its name that it’s difficult to argue that we wouldn’t be better off, on the whole, without it.

Also, anything by Hegel. Bah.

8. One book you’re currently reading:

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Wittgenstein.

10. Tag others: If you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged.

What follows is my review of the highly-acclaimed comic book series Preacher, issues one through sixty-six excluding the Specials.

Summary Judgment: If you’re Southern, disgruntled with Christianity, and sexist, then you might enjoy this series. Otherwise, give it a miss.

So I just finished the renown comic book series Preacher, written by Garth Ennis. Frankly, I cannot see why it’s often mentioned in the same breath as the “great” graphic novels, such as the Sandman or the Watchmen. Preacher is reasonably well written, I’ll grant you that; while that certainly puts it head and shoulders above most comic book series, I just don’t think it’s well written enough to justify it’s popularity and critical acclaim. My guess is that people mistook all the sex, violence, profanity and nearly constant displays of human failure for depth and insight.

SPOILERS follow, so don’t read further if you don’t want to be SPOILED! (more…)

I haven’t read comic books* since I was about eight years old. I quickly outgrew (or so I thought) the soap opera drama, the never-ending plotlines and the constant retconning. The recent surge of comic books movies didn’t do much to change that, mostly because many of those movies have been pretty crappy (the X-men and, to a lesser extent, Spider Man movies excluded of course).

* Neil Gaiman’s Sandman doesn’t count, and neither does Transmetropolitan. These are graphic novels, not comic books. Big difference.

But then I heard that the Astonishing X-Men comics were being written by none other than Joss Whedon**, and that the Amazing Spider-Man comics were being written by J. Michael Straczynski (the genius behind the TV cult classic Babylon 5)! Two of my favorite TV writers had moved to comic books - maybe I should give them another try? I picked up the first issue of both series.

** For the painfully sheltered, Whedon wrote the upcoming movie Serenity and created the TV classics Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly.

I quickly stopped reading Spider-Man, because while the writing was good, I just don’t like Spidey as a character (I don’t care much for his movies for the same reason). But we’re now up to issue #10 of the Astonishing X-men, and despite some early misgivings, I’m really enjoying the series.

My first emotion, as I walked into the store that first time, was relief: comic book geeks have not changed at all. There aren’t many things in life that you can always count on; it’s nice to know that nerdiness is one of life’s few timeless certainties.

Regarding the x-men books themselves, let me just say that John Cassidy’s artwork is leaps and bounds beyond the comic book art I remember from my youth. It’s just amazing.

While I had some severe initial misgivings about the “sentient danger room” plot, I have to say that it’s turning out okay after all. I’m a little tolerant because, after all these years, it’s really hard to do something original with the X-men, and also Whedon is apparently under fairly strict instructions as to what direction the story is to take. (I’d elaborate, but it involves the history of the x-men, and if you’re a comic book fan you either already know about this or will go google it, and if you’re not then you’re probably not interested).

Anyway, the point of this is to alert some additional fans of Firefly and Buffy (and B5, I suppose) that TV isn’t the only medium in which your favorite writers are working.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in getting back into comics (or graphic novels) as an adult, here’s my current list (there’s nothing a nerd likes more than making a list) of the Top 10 Essential Comics:

1) The Sandman. You will never look at comic books the same again.
2) Transmetropolitan
3) Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits
4) Midnight Nation (Also by JMS! And far better than his work on Spidey).
5) Sin City
6) 1602
7) The Dark Knight Returns/Strikes Again
8) The Watchmen
9) Sleeper
10) Miracleman

This is the ninth and final entry in my series on Islamic law and democracy. (I have decided to shorten the conclusion and to include it with this entry). The first post in the series (and an index of the entire series) can be found here. On Thursday, I examined the role of human interpretation in Islamic law. Today, I will consider the relationship between Islam, democracy, and the modern Nation-State.

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

Though contemporary Muslim democrats differ in their approach to grounding democracy in Islamic law, many of them, in Professor Noah Feldman’s estimation, “agree that democracy requires much more than elections; it must also incorporate the basic rights necessary to make it both liberal and egalitarian: free speech, free association, freedom of conscience, and equality across race, religion, and gender”. Similarly, Professor Leonard Binder has famously argued that the Islamic world cannot be democratic because of a “cluster of absences”: the missing concept of liberty, the lack of autonomous corporate instutions, the absence of a self-confident middle class, and so on. This is not a unique argument: it was once argued that Catholicism could not be reconciled with democracy because only nations with a Protestant majority would respect popular sovereignty. (more…)

This is the eighth post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. On Monday, I examined the Islamic concept of a contract between the ruler and the ruled. Today, I will briefly turn to the proper role of interpretation in Islamic law. The ninth entry in this series, examining the relationship between Islamic law and the modern nation-state, will be posted on Monday or Tuesday.

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

This series began with a discussion of the alleged contradiction between popular sovereignty in a democracy and the Islamic conception of divine sovereignty. Nevertheless, it is undeniably clear that, in practice, the people retain some sort of de facto “sovereignty”, in some meaning of that word. It is therefore very important to note that, among contemporary Muslims, it is generally the extent of popular sovereignty and not its existence that is debated. As Muhammad Khatimi has put it: (more…)

This is the seventh post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. Last Thursday, I examined the proper scope and nature of Shari’ah. Today, I will briefly turn to the Islamic concept of a contract between the ruler and the ruled. The eighth entry in this series, examining the role of interpretation in Islamic law and theology, will be posted on Wednesday. (The dispute over the role of interpretation is probably the most fundamental and most important argument in this whole discussion, so if you’re only going to read one entry, read Wednesday’s).

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

Some contemporary Muslims have also grounded acceptance of democracy in classical Islamic law by appealing to the notion of a contract between the temporal sovereign and the people. This is consistent with Islamic theology, which held that the power of the state authorities must be based on a contract (‘aqd) between the ruler and the people (ahl al-hall wa al-‘aqd, or the people who have the power of contract). The people must give their consent (bay’a) or acquiescence to the ruler, which is received in return for the promise to discharge the terms of the contract. (more…)

This is the sixth post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. On Tuesday, I reexamined the fundamentalist argument about God’s sovereignty, suggesting that, in certain circumstances, the sovereignty of God and the sovereignty of the people need not conflict. Today, I will examine the proper place and scope of God’s law within the polity. The seventh entry in this series, considering the Islamic contract between the ruler and the ruled, will be posted on Monday.

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

So we have already seen that, in certain, limited circumstances, God’s sovereignty and popular sovereignty are not as contradictory (either normatively or in substance) as they facially appeared. We also saw, however, that such arguments were incomplete and not entirely satisfactory. Shari’ah, after all, is often portrayed by Islamists and Western enemies of Islam alike as comprehensive (or overly restrictive) and unchanging (or rigid). What room does that leave for popular sovereignty?

Viewing the issue from a different perspective, then, perhaps democracy and Islam might be made compatible if Shari’ah is not seen as a comprehensive source of law that attempts to unilaterally regulate all human interaction. (more…)

This is the fifth post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. On Friday, I discussed the historical election of the caliphate. Today, I will return to the original objection of the fundamentalists: that, in Islam, God’s law must be supreme. The sixth entry in this series, considering the proper scope of Shari’ah (God’s law) in an Islamic community, will be posted on Thursday or Friday.

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

The Substantive Primacy of Shari’ah Reexamined:

Rather than focusing on a reinterpretation of shura or on the election of the caliphate, some contemporary Muslims have conceptualized an authentically Islamic democracy in terms of the primacy of Shari’ah. Mawdudi, for example, is said to have believed that “if democracy is conceived as a limited form of popular sovereignty, restricted and directed by God’s law, there is no incompatibility with Islam”. Similarly, Hasan Turabi emphasized the necessary supremacy of Shari’ah in Islamic government, arguing that: (more…)

This is the fourth post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. On Tuesday, I discussed the Islamic concept of “shura”, or consultation, and concluded that shura could not by itself support the idea of an authentically Islamic democracy. Today, I will turn to the second argument advanced by the Young Ottomans, which was grounded in the historical election of the caliphate. The fifth entry in this series, reexamining the fundamentalist argument that Shari’ah (God’s law) must be sovereign, will be posted on Monday.

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

The Young Ottomans’ next argument noted that Abu Bakr, cousin of the Prophet and the first Rightly Guided Caliph, was chosen by the acclamation of the Muslim community assembled together after the death of the Prophet. Since that time, the classical Sunni theory of the caliphate had always maintained the fiction that the caliph was elected by the leading men of the community, although the manner of election and the number of electors were exteremely ambiguous. Within the umma (community of believers), they pointed out, all are on equal footing. Though the ruler performs a different function, it is the umma as a whole that choose the ruler. Thus, the Young Ottomans argued that, taken together, the principle of shura and the election of the caliphate demonstrated that Islam was, and always had been, fundamentally democratic, and that “all the intervening centuries of autocratic rule had been a tragic diversion from the true path”.

Turning to Islamic legal history, Abu Bakr himself is reputed to have said that “God has left people to manage their own affairs so that they will choose a leader who will serve their interests”. Even Abu Bakr, however, circumvented this method of choosing a successor by nominating Umar (the second Rightly Guided Caliph) without consultation. Further, the Islamic conception of political leadership changed over time. When the caliphs eventually lost their effective power, for example, jurists such as Al-Mawardi reconciled the king-making activities of the Buyids with the principle of election by declaring (with al-Ash’ari before him) that an election was valid even if only one elector was present. Obviously, this is not the most democratic of beliefs. Similarly, when the caliphate finally ceased to exist independently, the jurists transferred the concept of the caliphate to the sultanate, requiring only that the sultan acknowledged the universality of Shari’ah (in principle if not always in practice).

While the Mu’tazili scholar Abu Bakr al-Asam claimed that the community as a whole retained the right to elect the caliph, with each person individually giving his consent, almost all the other classical jurists argued that the right to choose the caliph resided with those who had the power (shawka) to ensure the obedience of the public at large. Thus, it is not at all clear that the historical practice of electing the caliph reflects a recognition that contemporary democratic theory can be authentically Islamic.

Though the arguments of the Young Ottomans, when examined carefully through the lens of classical Islamic law, seem to be unpersuasive, this does not mean that Islam and democracy cannot be reconciled. On Monday, then, we will return to the fundamentalist argument that Shari’ah must possess both symbolic and substantive sovereignty in any Islamic form of government.

This is the third post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. Yesterday, I briefly discussed the alleged substantive contradiction between Shari’ah (God’s law) and democracy. Today, I will address the first historical attempt at reconciliation between Islam and democracy, which was grounded (in part) in the Islamic concept of “shura”. The next entry in this series, dealing with the historical election of the caliphate, will be posted on Friday.

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

The Young Ottomans, a group of Istanbul writers in the 1860’s, were perhaps the first group of Muslims to claim that Shari’ah was compatible with modern democracy. In fact, the Young Ottomans went further, claiming that Islamic law, correctly understood, required some form of constitutional government. They argued for a return to the spirit of classical Islam, which recognized the sovereignty of the people and the principle of government by consultation. (more…)