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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Chella Ward
Foreign listeners, and welcome back to Radio Reorient, the podcast where we explore the Islamosphere and illuminate the post Western. Your hosts this season are Chella Ward, Claudia Radovan, Amina Isa Das, and me, Saeed Khan.
- [01:53]
Claudia Radovan
Today we're going to be listening to the second part of the interview with Sherman Jackson with our host Saman Syed and his Amir. Building on the conversation we began in the previous episode.
- [02:04]
Unidentified Host/Moderator
Second half discusses religious pluralism, the modern state and the secular, and the relationship between Sharia and the political.
- [02:11]
Unidentified Commentator
So without further ado, let's listen into the second part of this fascinating conversation.
- [02:17]
Saman Syed
Assalamu alaikum, dear listeners. Welcome to this episode with Professor Said and Professor Jackson. We will be engaging with mostly the second part of Professor Jackson's work, the Islamic secular. So, Professor Jackson, I just want to go straight into it and actually really tease out that mostly bit, because I'm going to ask you a question now from the first part of your book. So in the later part of chapter one, you take issue with Ahmed's idea of the pretext. So you describe it as Ahmad showing this to be autonomous and it being used against God. What would you say to a reading that sees the pretext as the fullest extent of God's truth with a capital T, which surely cannot be contained in a single work.
- [03:08]
Sherman Jackson
Well, first of all, first of all, I mean, there's a lot in what you said. If it's a pretext, a pre. Reality, I don't know what else you might want to call it. What does it come from? Is it independent of God? Does it. Does it quote, unquote, predate God? I mean, and if we're talking about. If we're talking about God's revelation, I think that one of the things that we have to be, in my mind, very careful about is the distinction between what some theologians, most famously bintaymiyya, but even Asharis such as Al Qarafi have a similar take that, you know, we must be very careful about the distinction between God's ontological sovereignty, that is to say, God being author of everything that comes into existence, and then God's what you might want to call Shari sovereignty. In other words, what God dictates to us as humans in terms of what we should and should not do. And the two realms are not coterminous necessarily. I think that's an assumption that's often made, but I think it's an erroneous assumption. And I think that's an assumption that is somewhat pushed by a certain inclination towards a realist moral ontology whereby we can learn what's good and what's bad and not just what's good and what's bad, because we can learn what's good and what's bad, but through experience, I conduct myself in my interactions with you in a certain way, and I learn that that produces negative consequences. So I learned that that's a bad act to do in my relationship with you. But what we can't learn necessarily, and this has been the tradition of Muslim theologians outside the Maltazilites for over a millennium, that does not necessarily tell us what God will reward and punish. And so we're talking about God's sort of Shari sovereignty, God's right authority to tell us what we must do, must not do, what he will reward, what he won't reward, what he'll punish, what he won't punish. And to assume that that's coterminous with the cosmos, I think is a mistake. And I think that what I saw Ahmed as doing, again, was fusing the two. In other words, assuming that ontology tells us what or can tell us what God wants and what God does not want, and because it can do that, we don't necessarily need to be dependent upon what God says in the form of revelation, we can go around what God says to this pretext, this sort of pre existent ontology, and through a reading of that ontology arrive at this knowledge and wisdom and truth in terms of what God will hold us accountable for. Now, I mean, I'm going to be fair here. I mean, and let me just say two things. First of all, I depict my own approach as more of a nominalist approach. But I want to be clear that by nominalism I'm simply talking about the fact that God is not bound by any kind of pre existing ontology in terms of what he dictates as the rules by which he holds humanity accountable. That's all I mean by nominalism. In other words, you know, there's nothing in the essence of pork, let's say, that makes it nejus, it's nejis, because, you know, God has decided that this is a virtually impure substance and that's it. So my nominalism is that God has the right to name what God wants to name. As such, nominalism can be taken in a lot of other different directions which I'm not dealing with. I mean, we could have that discussion if you like, but that's not my focus with regard to nominalism. And so again, my most fundamental issue with Shahab was, you know, Rahimahullah with his realist ontology. Now again, you know, philosophers have been arguing about realism and nominalism, you know, forever. And I'm not taking an overly dogmatic position here, except on the point that I just raised. And that is that God is not dependent upon, does not answer to any pre existing ontology in terms of what God can dictate as the code of conduct by which we as human beings become responsible. Now Ahmad seems to want to, and he talks about the totalizing understanding of Islam as law. I mean, and he sees that law as coterminous with the ontology that he invokes. And if that's the case, I mean, we're just stuck. We can't get out of that. And because he sees it in those terms, he has to find a way to get around the Fuqaha, to get around what he calls the Fuqaha jurisprudence. On my reading of him, I see him as doing that by invoking this pretext which does not come from the same place as revelation, which predates revelation and according to him, you know, reflects the same truth as revelation. Even if it did, that's, I mean, truth, you know, water freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit is truth. That's fine, but there's nothing in that fact that binds me shut down to any particular kind of behavior. So, So I can't. I. I can't derive, you know, the. I'm avoiding the word moral because as you can see in the book, I have my issues with that word in terms of being a description of shitty or shitty as big in the morality. But in terms of what we do or do not do. I mean, water freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit does not speak for itself in terms of what I should do or not do vis a vis water.
- [09:35]
Professor Halak
I think this is a really, really important point and need to emphasize because as you say, that ontology of the divine cannot determine from us our behavior, because in a way it also negates the notion of the finitude of the human, that we space the behavior of the ontology of divine. So it becomes a really, really problematic things. And I think, as you kind of allude to here and in your work as well, that the notion of the pretext then almost becomes a kind of recovery of the natural law, the idea of the kind of very enlightenment, that this is basically what reality itself is, and therefore we are simply corresponding and reacting to the shape of reality, which leaves us with no human intervention. Because in a way, what it does is simply say that the reality will determine what we can.
- [10:25]
Sherman Jackson
It's the art.
- [10:26]
Professor Halak
Yeah, yeah.
- [10:27]
Sherman Jackson
Well, that's another issue I take up with Professor Halak.
- [10:32]
Professor Halak
Well, this is why I wanted to move to the next section there. But we might move there because a little bit later on, just for our readers, when you start discussing the impossible state, I think in a very elegant and a very succinct manner, you carry out a threefold critique of the idea of Halak's idea of the impossible state. And part of it, I think, has a similar kind of. A similar kind of starting point as your critique of Ahmed's work to some extent. And I think here, particularly the notion of the Sharia and its boundedness, and maybe what we could do is, if you could say a little bit about why you think that idea of the Sharia as simply being reducible to law and our imagination of what the law is, is very, very specific. All of us have the experience of law as set of specific legal codes which operate in regulating our lives, which don't necessarily have anything else to do with anything else in a way that they exist in a particular terrain and we kind of more or less know about them and we work through them. And maybe you could say something about the difference between the sharia in the way that you conceive it and the problem that you have when it's sort of represented very narrowly as simply law itself in the modern sense.
- [11:51]
Sherman Jackson
Well, I'm not. I mean, my issue with Professor Halak, and let me say that, you know, he's a major figure. He's made his contributions to the, you know, the study of Islamic law. I simply happen to disagree with him. But that takes nothing away from, you know, what he has contributed to the overall discourse. Having said that much, I read him in a way, in a sense, the opposite of what you just articulated. First of all, my problem is not so much with quote, unquote, reducing Sharia to law, although I'm not sure I would entirely do that. But that's not my problem. My problem is distending Sharia to the point that Sharia and Islam become coterminous. And therefore, if Sharia is law, then Islam is law, and there's nothing else to contemplate outside the dictates of do this, don't do that. You know, where does efficiency come in? Where does cultural production come in? Where does the way we think about how we're going to structure a modern state within the parameters of the permissible as defined by Sharia? If Islam is nothing but dictates, then we're left trying to construct tenure procedures on the basis of concrete, direct dictates of Sharia. I think that's ludicrous, and I think that that's, quite frankly, twisted Muslims into pretzels because it doesn't work and it won't work. So my issue with Professor Halak is he has an undifferentiated understanding of Sharia, and it is, in a sense, a totalizing in its jurisdiction. Jurisdiction and therefore the equivalent of Islam. I'm saying that Sharia is bounded in the way that we spoke about last week. That is to say that even if Sharia has a hukam for everything, excuse me, in human existence, right. The hukam itself does not necessarily tell us everything we need to know in order to properly instantiate Islam as a lived reality. Right? And so, for example, the example that I give, I think, is in chapter two, you know, and I discuss it in context of my discussion of Professor Halaq. You know, Sharia can tell us that riba interest is haram. It can tell us that, or, you know, uncertainty in what's being bought or sold is haram, okay? So we have parameters of what would make for permissible commercial interactions, all right, or even for a permissible economic structure, all right? But it tells us Nothing about what the details of that economic structure should be. How do we go about constructing a five year plan? How do we ensure that that five year plan will actually bring maximum profit at minimal cost, et cetera, et cetera. All these kinds of things have to be contemplated in a way that cannot be drawn directly or explicitly from Sharia, not even by Qiyaz. And so there is a whole realm of activity that even within the parameters of Sharia, that is the permissible we still have to contemplate in terms of those details. But now if Sharia is understood to be totalizing in the sense of providing concrete answers for everything that we face, then we have a problem. And that's where my difference with Professor Halaq comes in. I don't see Sharia as coterminous with Islam. I see that there are all kinds of things that are non Shari, all right? And the non Sharia. And this is the point of the Islamic secular, the non Shari is not non Islamic. It is not non religious. What is totalizing in my view is the watchful adjudicative gaze of the God of Islam.
- [16:15]
Professor Halak
This is really interesting because the two points that I just draw to. One is for example in Asma Balas book Unreading the Quran, she talks about that God cannot commit Zulum and we then are faced as Muslims with the occurrence of Zulum. And the problem is that we know from even sort of recent examples like the American Constitution forbids torture, but we know that you can actually define what torture is and that can be changed. So in a way the question about even what, what these categories mean in their particular context and how they can be determined is something that is not. We can't read that off from the Sharia itself. It requires something outside that. So I think that, well, well I.
- [16:59]
Sherman Jackson
Mean those are ongoing, constant parts of a Sharia discourse.
- [17:05]
Professor Halak
Yeah.
- [17:05]
Sherman Jackson
And I think that, and I think that you know, this is what it's really unfair to the classical, the pre modern jurists because they are seen as the ones who are so rigid and inflexible in their deliberations. An important fact. I think it's more us in our reading of them who are rigid and inflexible. The problem that many of them had with Taqlid was not Taqlid itself in the form of what American law will call stari decisive precedent, but in the fact that Taqlib assumed that a single articulation which is necessarily embedded in space and time could provide for every Muslim every place, every time. That's the issue that they had with Taqlid, and for that reason, you had to continually ongoingly reprocess, you know, the rules of sharia, so that they were consistent with assessments of facts, all right? Many of which could not be determined by gurla mat themselves. They would have to go to experts in, you know, matters of fact. So there's a much more sophisticated process that goes along with this that they were very aware of. But now, since, I mean, in the modern world, I mean, you know, we have, you know, widespread literacy, unprecedented levels of general literacy, all right? And so that means that everybody, and I don't mean literally everybody, of course, but huge proportions of humanity can read, and therefore, they can read about Islamic law. They can even read some of these texts. The question, do they know what they're reading? Is a general reading of these texts enough to deliver us into an understanding of what's really going on with that tradition as a process of ongoing negotiations about how we should approach sociopolitical reality? I mean, I remember, you know, I remember taking constitutional law at my university's law school, and all of a sudden, you know, 30 pages would take me four or five hours now because they had to be read in a very different kind of way. Right? I mean, you're looking for precedents. You're looking for key language and all these kinds of things. So I learned. I was learning how to read legal texts legally, all right? Of course, I was literally before I could read them, but I did not know what I was reading. I did not know everything that was on that page. And so, you know, we do have this problem where, you know, Muslims have been alienated from their own tradition because their understanding is that that tradition is the proximate. The proximate cause for where we are here. Now, let me say that all traditions, you know, they ebb and they flow. Look at us now in terms of. Well, you're on the other side of the pond. But, you know, many Americans feel now that, you know, American democracy is at a low in terms of delivering on the promise of democracy and actually constituting what a democracy is supposed to be about. So you have high points, you have low points. I'm not denying you have the same thing in the Islamic legal tradition. But I think that to say we're here now, and therefore, that had to be the cause, and therefore, that's all part of the problem. We need to just get over it. I think that's a mistake.
- [20:42]
Professor Halak
But that's also another element here, because what we're talking about is Also a deliberate attempt by the colonization of many of Muslim areas to actually blame the past for their conjunction. And we have seen, you know, deliberate efforts to for example, in Al. What was it now in Algeria and other parts where madrasa as the entire Sharia system was uprooted, it was marginalized, it was taken away from any kind of living tradition that it may have had. And as a result we have also this kind of a broad kind of orientalist project which simply says that it was the tradition of Islam which is responsible for their fallen state, if you want to put it like this. And therefore what we need to do to modernize is to erase that tradition and build something anew. Now the reason I mention this is because one of the things that you make the point very, very clear is that the notion of the modern state that Halak, and to be fair to him others also use is was which seems to rupture the idea of the continuity, or at least the theoretical continuity between the pre modern Islamic political arrangements or Islamic political societies, if you want to call them states. And in the sense that in both ways, and you make this very, very clear and use this fantastic metaphor about the wetness of water not being telling you whether it only applies to cold water, not for hot water, that the idea of the state itself as a specific arrangement is actually not very well thought out in Halak's work anyway because he doesn't really spend too much time on it. But it does read the problem that what would an Islamic order be like? If you're saying that it was impossible, then what was possible before and whether that was, and I can guess from your answer and from what you've already said before and what you've written that that's the Islamic order which existed was not itself completely determined by Sharia. Absolutely. While we have orientalist readings which say well that's a corruption, maybe you could for our listeners tell us a little bit about the pre Islamic, the pre modern political arrangements or political society which we would understand as being.
- [23:01]
Sherman Jackson
Well, let me just say this. I think, I mean no one would argue with the idea that modernity and modernity is not just a time period. Modernity consists of a number of developments, the modern state being one. And this whole notion of sovereignty, which is a very modern notion quite frankly, and I think one that we take for granted a little too much. You know, capitalism, you know, changes in epistemology, et cetera, Modernity has been a challenge for Islam, no question about that. Okay, but the idea that Islam Muslims never faced any Modernities before. It's just ludicrous. Right. What do you think the Arabians coming out of the Arabian desert confronted when they went into Syria, Iraq, et cetera? Right. What happens when the Mongols come? What happens even when Timor link comes? I mean, my point being that this is an ongoing negotiation with reality through the application and testing of principles to arrive at new consensuses on where we are and where we should be, where we want to go.
- [24:18]
Professor Halak
No, I think that's really, really well.
- [24:20]
Sherman Jackson
Made because dictated these things were not. I'm sorry, these things were not dictated in their entirety by Sharia. There was a lot of non shardly deliberation that went into that. And to give you a sense of, of, you know, something you may be able to hang your hat on if you take a book like Tajid Dina Suqis. All right. And this is a work about, you know, how we go about structuring our societies politically in all of the political institutions and substantive institutions that we need to make that work. And he lays them out what needs to be done here, there and there and there. I mean, so many of these institutions have Turkish names. They were adopted over from things that the Turks were doing before and become a part of the Islamic political order, institutionalized political institutions in Islam. I mean, this idea that Islam never appropriated anything from anywhere else, all right. Processed it and made it Islamic. All right. I just, I don't know where that comes from. We essentialize Islam. It cripples the ability to move through space and time successfully. It always has Muslims in a frame of mind that they are capitulating rather than appropriating. And I think that's a very bad psychological deficit to be operating from.
- [25:56]
Saman Syed
Thank you for that, Professor Jackson. I think I want to shift the focus now to your engagement with Professor Naim's work is Islam and the Secular State. And you deal with this in chapter five and you argue that Anaim's usage of the terms religious and secular, and I'm quoting here, manifest an unresolved tension between his secular and religious commitments. Can you explain this unresolved tension for our listeners? What is this tension?
- [26:27]
Sherman Jackson
Well, I think that again, my major point is that Professor Naim, and he's not alone in this regard. That's part of my argument in the book, sees first of all, Islam and Sharia as being basically coterminous, although Naim does make some exceptions to that. But at any rate, we're talking about a discourse that is Shar I through and through. There is no distinction between Sharia and non Shari. Because of that, because of that, we have religion and Sharia as being conterminous. And therefore this, to an extent that we need or we feel we need to regulate religion, we need to regulate Sharia. And to the extent that we need to regulate Sharia, Sharia regulate religion. And yet his argument is that, well, no, only Sharia needs to really be regulated. And religion, as long as it's not tied to Sharia in the sense that it carries any kind of coercive authority, that's fine. But unless we are able to recognize what is Shari that is dictated and what is non Shari not sharply dictated in religion, then what's the difference? In other words, all religion becomes potentially coercive. All right? And you know, Professor Naim, he even says things like, okay, we will allow a politics. That is to say that, you know, Muslims in society can debate their issues, they can bring their religious sensibilities to that debate, and they can even arrive at the conclusion that we want this Sharia rule applied by the state. He says that's perfectly fine. But then he reaches certain points where he says, well, no, that's not fine, all right? Because not all people would be in agreement with that consensus. So there are these kinds of tensions. And part of my argument with Professor Naim is two. One is that by not distinguishing between what is Sharia and what is non Sharia, Sharia becomes the entire problem. And that means that you have to marginalize Sharia or the social political welfare of the state and society will be at risk. That's one argument. The other argument is that part of the apparatus of the modern state, as commonly understood, is that the modern state is legally monistic. There's a one size fits all law uniformly applied across the board. And this is supposed to be the modern state. Well, some, and I would argue, Professor Naim, retroject that notion back into premodern Islam. Who has some point of fact that was not the case. All kinds of religious minorities had all kinds of rights to do all kinds of things that Muslims did not have the right to do. And this was not a trouble, it was not a bother to the Muslim state. Its, quote, unquote, sovereignty, and I use that word cautiously, its sovereignty was not challenged by the fact that Christians can drink, eat pork, you know, Jews can deal in interests, et cetera, et cetera. So the idea that if you have Sharia as part of the state apparatus, then religious minorities are just toast. That is based on the understanding that all states have to operate in accordance with this legal monism, but it's not the habit of the premodern Muslim state. And there's no reason why some contemplation of these legally pluralistic states could not be contemplated in the modern world. In fact, they have, and there are some, such as India, South Africa and others, that do allow a genuine legal pluralism within their boundaries. So part of what I think is missing is alternatives to the conceptualization of the modern state. And part of my argument, Professor Halak, is that the modern state is not simply one thing. It can be a number of things. And how Muslims see fit to adjust that, that's entirely up to them. I see no contradiction, no categorical contradiction between Islam and those adjustments.
- [31:04]
Professor Halak
That's very clear. I mean, I think just to push a little bit further on this point, because I think it's a really important point, to what extent do you feel that part of the problem is not just the mono, as you pointed out, the legal monolith of that, but also a rather almost kind of enlightenment Whiggish history of democracy and liberalism, et cetera. So even the kind of weight that's put on consensus or the idea that things. You could have a consensus in the United States for the genocide of Native Americans, you did have a consensus of that among the. So in a sense that the idea of liberal democracy or democracy without violence or without inequity is also slightly problematic and without the idea that it was somehow ultimately plural. And there's work, for example, by Michael Mann, talking about the relationship between genocide and democracy itself, that it works towards this kind of homogenization. And as you point out, firstly, the early Islamic state, For the first 300 years, Muslims were a minority. Secondly, the existence of so many diverse communities and their persistence even after a thousand years of Muslim rule shows that there was not this kind of effort consistently.
- [32:26]
Sherman Jackson
Yeah, right. There was not so there homogenizing effort. I mean, I mean, just imagine, I mean, you know, a place like Iraq, Syria, these are central lands of Islam, took over 250 years before they were simple majority Muslim. Yeah, that's older than the United States of America.
- [32:44]
Professor Halak
Professor Jackson, just to add to that, one of the examples that I use in my work is if you look at Iraq and you look at England, England and Iraq became under continuous Christian and Muslim rule about the same time. However, if you went to Iraq, even now you would find heterogeneous Jews sustainable communities, communities that are not just little ethnographic pieces. If you go to England, the only pre Christian, there are no pre Christian communities The only religious diversity has come basically 19th and 20th century immigration mainly. There are no Druids except at heavy metal concerts and things like that. There's no sustainable community as pre Christians. So if they're a question of tolerance, and that's not just that England and Iraq are unique, they're actually symbolic of the way in which previous in Christian lands and under Muslim lands, the assistance of minorities is far less than the popular imagination would allow.
- [33:46]
Sherman Jackson
Of course. Of course. And that goes beyond the simple principle of tolerance. We're talking about some very fundamental structural differences. The Muslim state did not see a similar need to homogenize in ways that others seem to think. I mean, you know, look at where religion is in the modern world today. That comes out of a history of Europe where religious intolerance and just inability to get along the attempt to homogenize states religiously, I mean, led to all these problems. Of course we have issues in the history of Islam, but nothing along the lines of some St. Bartholomew's Day massacre or anything like that. So we don't give rise to the need for a homogenizing state as the means of sort of securing peace. That proved to be the case elsewhere. And so what I'm coming to is that I think that there is a lack of political imagination on the part of many Muslims in terms of how we go about thinking about the modern state. And part of that lack of imagination is based on the fact that we begin our political thinking in the 18th century and in the 18th century west and we don't have any real resources other than some very romantic notions about, well, what could an understanding, not in terms of what they actually did, but in terms of some of the principles and the structural frameworks upon which alternative ways of political organization could be imagined and built today.
- [35:34]
Saman Syed
Right.
- [35:36]
Sherman Jackson
The fact that you could be.
- [35:40]
Professor Halak
You.
- [35:40]
Sherman Jackson
Know, you know, a Christian in Baghdad, you know, a Jew in Cairo, a Zoroastrian and Shiraz for a thousand years, but you could not be any of those things in London or Paris or the Chesapeake Bay up until the 1920th century. I mean, as standing communities.
- [36:02]
Professor Halak
Okay.
- [36:03]
Saman Syed
I think I want to kind of come back to something that you mentioned in your answer both to myself and to Professor Said's follow up question regards to name you call and I. It's the idea of coercion, especially with regards to the consequences of that question, that Anaim seems to kind of focus on quite a lot in the book. You know, he says that any state implementation of Sharia would, you know, spoil religious piety and would read hypocrisy. I just want to ask what your thoughts are regarding this. I think you devote quite a bit of time to it in the book. So I just want you to kind of, for our listeners, just to explain why you don't necessarily agree with that.
- [36:44]
Sherman Jackson
Well, let me just say this. I think that one of the major takeaway points from what I did say in my engagement with Professor Naim is this, is that, you know, when he talks about coercion, he seems to have in mind one form of coercion only sort of physical coercion. And he doesn't pay, in my view, ample attention to all of the various forms of non physical coercion that operate in society. Take what's happening right now. How free are many of us to express our views about what's going on right now without fear of loss of something, job promotion, what have you? Now, why these are not recognized as regimes of coercion is sort of beyond me. All right, but my point with Professor Naim is that he seems to suggest that if we get rid of physical coercion, and by the way, I don't know of any political order that could operate without, without physical coercion, all right, there will be threats to the public order. You will have to raise power against them and to coerce those who do not want to respect that order to respect it, period. But my real point is that he seems to be implying that if we get rid of Sharia, we will have a coercion free society, all right? But that coercion free society will, will still include all of those non physical forms of coercion, all right, that circumscribe and in many instances undermine the vitality of people's lives. I mean, really present them with crises of conscience because of what they are not allowed to say or do. And so my point to him is that if we want to talk about coercion, let's talk about it across the board on the one hand. And then number two, I mean, let's just get serious about, you know, what real political order consists in.
- [38:59]
Saman Syed
Okay? I think we could continue for quite a while. I mean, I think there's a lot in the work. Alhamdulillah, it's a brilliant, brilliant work.
- [39:08]
Sherman Jackson
Can I say this?
- [39:10]
Saman Syed
Yeah.
- [39:12]
Sherman Jackson
It'S a political work. But you know, I try very hard to make my points and to make my points directly, fully, in some cases, maybe even stridently, but without sort of deprecating those with whose ideas I disagree. And I hope that comes through in the book, I think you can be very straightforward with your criticisms without being ad hominem and without lowering the standard of discourse within the field. So although I have my disagreements with Professor Naim, I respect his work. Respect is not necessarily agreement. The same with Professor Halat, the same with Professor March. And I just want to make that point clear.
- [40:11]
Professor Halak
I think that comes across really well. I mean, I think one of the things you could actually, as an author, one of the best things you can actually do is actually engage with their work. And that doesn't mean to agree with it necessarily, but I mean, it's also to engage with it and give it the respect it use by also disagreeing with it and debating with it. And I think the book is in its own merits. It builds its arguments through these debates. So both it's respectful, but also I think it generates something new. And I think that's something that come across in our conversation, that it's not simply a commentary in a way. It is actually a work which is very needed at this moment in time. And I think it's really important because we are at a stage in which the articulation between Islam and the nature of politics is being sort of pushed back into the idea that we shouldn't. Islam has got nothing to do with politics. This could kind of should be forced back into it. And the world that we see around us, we are unable to act in concert in. Against that because this is something that is. We're being put away for. Sabur is the order of the day. And while I've got nothing against Sabr, it also doesn't mean you shouldn't use.
- [41:25]
Sherman Jackson
I think you're absolutely right for some, and I think you're absolutely right. And this is what I had in mind when I spoke of. I mean, there is a real lack of imagination, but part of that in and of itself, you know, is. Is. Is based in, you know, you have to access. You know, T.S. eliot says something, maybe we can end on this. T.S. eliot said, you know, if you want tradition, you must be prepared to go and get it, because you cannot simply rest confident that what has been handed down to you in the name of tradition is actually that tradition. It's been handed down over the last hundred years or so, which has not only been handed down by Muslims. Part of how we understand our own tradition has to deal with how others have understood it. And so if you want tradition, you have to be prepared to go and get it. All right? And I think we need an enterprise that prepares more and more of our people, not just scholars, all right? To establish some kind of intimacy with their own tradition where their political, social, cultural, intellectual imagination can be enriched and driven to new heights.
- [42:33]
Professor Halak
I think that's a fantastic way to end, and I think that is a broader project that many of us are involved in, is trying to recover not the tradition itself, in a way recover the tradition, but also recovering the imagination, using our own language to dream our dreams in a way. And I think that's really, really important. And I think we will recommend to our listeners that you should go out and buy the book and read the book, because I think it does all of what you've said, and we've only been able to scratch the surface of it, but I think it would be a lot of great study going forward.
- [43:09]
Sherman Jackson
Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I appreciate this opportunity to come and exchange with you. It's been fun and I've learned some things myself. Thank you very much.
- [43:17]
Claudia Radovan
You're listening to Radio Reorient, the Decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network. This is Radio Reorient exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post Western. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism? Now let's discuss what we've heard with.
- [43:34]
Chella Ward
Saeed Khan, Claudia, Radovan Hizamiya, and me, Chella Ward.
- [43:39]
Claudia Radovan
There are so many different ideas in that episode. We could start, I think, in a number of different places. But the one that seemed to me to keep recurring throughout the conversation was the question of the role of the Sharia in the political, and all sorts of questions around the boundedness of Sharia, the sacredness of Sharia, the question of whether Sharia is always sacred or can sometimes be secular. And one thing that that left me thinking was about the way that the Sharia becomes a kind of touch point for Islamophobia, especially in the West. That seems to be this kind of fear that Islamophobes have, and it comes out also in anti migrant and anti refugee discourses, this kind of fear of the Sharia takeover. Right. The idea that there are going to be so many Muslims in Europe one day that, you know, those who are not Muslim will be forced to operate under Sharia law. And there are a number of different assumptions encoded into that. Right. There's the assumption, for instance, that usually that Sharia law would be less favorable towards women and religious minorities. You know, that there's assumptions that Sharia law is going to be harsher than other legal systems. There's Assumptions that it's going to involve capital punishment more regularly than other kinds of legal systems, that it's brutal, that it's bloodthirsty. There are all these kinds of ways of positioning Sharia laws almost as if it were this kind of pre modern vengeful system. And we could I think, connect that up with the way of positioning Muslimness in time as something that sort of got stuck in time. Muslimness is kind of always medieval and never get, gets to be kind of seen as, as fully participant in, in making modernity. But Sharia becomes in a way a sort of icon of that, of those aspects of, of Islamophobic discourses. So I'm wondering, you know, why do you think it is that Sharia plays such an important role in, in this conversation about the political? How should we think about that?
- [45:44]
Chella Ward
Well, I think that's exactly what, what Jackson is exploring in, in the book is. It's about boundaries or boundedness. And just like as you have mentioned before, how tall Assad looks at the formations of the secular, the Western notion of the secular is always that it is in competition, in contradiction, or really in conflict with the sacred. And what Jackson is saying is two things. Number one is that that's really not the case in his Islamic secular, that these are complementary phenomena that work with actually one another. But it also speaks to what I would argue is another misinterpretation about Sharia. And this is actually something that happens unfortunately by a lot of Muslims and that is to equate Islam with the Sharia as this huge corpus of laws. And of course it's not difficult to understand why this would happen. Because Sharia draws from the primary sacred sources of Islam. It draws from the Quran and of course the Sunnah. But it is not then wise or even required to equate Sharia with the sacred in all ways. There may be some inspiration, there may be some, some moral point of reference that, that it creates. But for example, during the Ottoman era you had laws that were certainly what would be called Shari laws, those that were directly enforced as a product of what the Quran or the Sunnah had prescribed or proscribed. But then the Sultan had the authority to indulge in three different legal categories. There was the Kanun, there was the Adat, and then there is the or. Now these were of course, quote unquote, man made. And they were in some ways also ones that could be countermanded or succeeded by future sultans. Are those considered to be sacred because they have some emanations coming from the Sharia. I don't know if anybody would go ahead and make that claim. At the same time, of course, Muslims would probably be a little bit skittish to call those secular laws. They would say, well, maybe they're not sacred in our understanding of the sacred, but using the S word that we associate so much with the west is, is perhaps going a bit too far. And what Jackson is talking about, particularly when it comes to the political, as as you mentioned, Chella, is that if you see the Sharia as not requiring you to regard all of it as being sacred, that means it's no longer off limits and it allows Muslims to revisit it, to re examine it, to reinterpret it and to re legislate it for what are contemporary challenges that are facing Muslim communities.
- [48:48]
Claudia Radovan
I'm thinking about how that we see that practice in action all the time, actually, you know, this kind of reinterpretation. And I hope this example doesn't come across as, you know too now for this conversation, which is obviously historically and historiographically very wide ranging. But I was thinking, oh, I'm thinking a lot recently about the way that the drinking of Coca Cola has almost become more un Islamic, let's say, than the drinking of wine. You know, because, because it's one of the targets of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and because it's such a global company, there is almost now a global community of, of Muslims who will not touch Coca Cola products. Of course, that, that's not all Muslims, you know, of course not everybody is on board with, with the, the boycott. But when you go to the kinds of establishments, whether you're, you know, in St. Denis or you're in Bradford or you're in Istanbul, when you go to establishments that are run by Muslims, predominantly for Muslims, let's say halal restaurants and those kinds of things, it's really very difficult to get hold of Coca Cola products. So there's a sort of rule that has been made among Muslims as a community, you know, that, that we will observe this boycott. And I think that that tells us something really interesting about the way that political Muslimness works. Because no one is saying that Allah subhanahu wa ta' ala said don't drink Coca Cola. Right. Nobody is finding some kind of Quranic reference that they're interpreting as, you know, a divinely sanctioned boycott of Coca Cola. But I think if you ask the vast majority of those Muslims why do they not drink Coca Cola, something like our brothers and sisters in Palestine would come up Right. There would be some connection probably with, with Masjid Al Aqsa, probably with the Muslimness of those brothers and sisters in Palestine. So in that sense, you know, this is a rule that has come about in a very contemporary community, but it's come, it's come about organized around Muslimness as a political community. The idea of the automatic. So in that sense, it's not distinct from the divine, it's not totally separate from the divine. But, but nobody would probably argue that it is in itself, in its current instantiation, divinely sanctioned, exactly the way that we understand it now. So I think that's, I guess, my way of thinking through that tension.
- [51:17]
Unidentified Commentator
I think that that draws on a number of really interesting points. And I mean, I can't pretend to have the depth of knowledge on the, on the Sharia that Sherman Jackson does. But if we think in a contemporary sense, especially, I mean, from a UK perspective and other European contexts as well, the kind of horror surrounding the idea of Sharia law, and as was mentioned at the start, this idea of a kind of medieval way of organizing society and the examples that are always given are things like the sort of the more extreme end of chopping someone's hand off for theft and similar examples. It's always these particular examples that seem to come up. But I think that kind of approach forgets again when we refer back to part one, this idea of what is actually secular and how unaware we are in the UK as an example of how much of legislation and everyday life is still inflected with what we would call quite traditional Christian values. Even around conversations around things like sexuality, same sex relationships, laws around abortion and such for many, many years. In some cases, it's still ongoing. Those ideas around those issues are still very much inflected with notions that we would associate with very traditional Christian approaches.
- [52:54]
Unidentified Host/Moderator
Absolutely. Claudia, I think I agree with you in the sense that it seems like Sharia has become like this dog whistle terminology. And at the same time, simultaneously much of the legal frameworks we're using and working with, but also frameworks that are being employed to limit rights and equality for people across society, whether that's for people needing abortion, wanting abortion, or LGBTQ rights, et cetera, they're very much, as you say, bounded up in Christian principles. So really we're not seeing this separation. I think really we could continue talking for quite some time about all of this. It's actually brought out so many pertinent themes, but we're going to have to wrap up there. It's a fantastic start to the season. And a great thank you to Professor Jackson, to the listeners, and to my co host, Saeed Khan, Claudia Radhavan Chella Ward, thank you ever so much. And I hope you join us on the next episode. Salaam alaikum.