Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Notion of Political Adab

This paper extends the emphasis on contingency and context in Islamic ethical traditions into the distinctly modern context of late 19th century Khedival Egypt. I draw attention to the way Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s engagement with Islamic ethical traditions was shaped by his practice in addressing the broad social and political questions of his context to do with nation-building and political journalism. As a bureaucrat and state publicist, he took pre-modern Islamic ethical concepts into the emerging discursive field of the modern state and the public sphere in Egypt. Looking at a series of newspaper articles for the state newspaper, al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣriyya, I show how he articulated an ethics of citizenship by defining a modern civic notion of adab that he called “political adab.” He conceived of this adab as the answer to the problem of how a unified nation emerges from the condition of “freedom” by which journalists and the reading public at the time were conceptualizing the politics of the ʿUrābī revolution in late 1881. This was a “freedom” of the public sphere that allowed for free speech and the power of public opinion to shape governance. ‘Political adab’ would be the virtue or situational skill, internalized in each participant in the public sphere, that would regulate this freedom, ensuring that it produces unity rather than anarchy. I argue that adab here enshrined ʿAbduh’s holistic approach to nation-building; Egypt with political rights would be a nation in which the very idea of the nation is comprehensively embedded—through adab—in people’s lives, animating their “souls”. This was a politics conceived not as a self-standing domain, but as growing out of society, becoming thereby an authentic unity and self-regulating “life”. In developing this vision, ʿAbduh was amplifying pre-modern meanings of adab implying wide breadth of knowledge, good taste, and the virtues, labelled in the paper as ‘comprehensivness,’ ‘consensus’ and ‘habitus.’ Keywords: Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Adab, Freedom, Nation, Politics, Egypt

Ethical Turn in Legal Analogy

Al-Ghazālī’s articulation that the purposes of the divine Law (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa) are to attain maṣlaḥa for the five necessary elements of human existence was not only novel but had long-lasting influence on the way Muslim jurists understood the procedure of analogy (qiyās). The correctness of the ratio legis was determinable by its consequences in bringing about maṣlaḥa. This shift was possible only by intellectual shifts in understanding the relationship between ethics and law. This paper traces the development in conceptions of ethics and its impact on the procedure of analogy in three 5th/11th century predecessors of al-Ghazālī, namely al-Baṣrī, al-Dabbūsī, and al-Juwaynī. It shows that al-Ghazālī’s definition of the purposes of the Law was developed based on previous conceptual shifts in the ratio legis from being a sign for the ruling to reflecting the ethical content of the divine injunction.

“As Time Grows Older, the Qurʾān Grows Younger”

This article explores the role of ambiguity in the Qurʾān. It examines the concept of ambiguity, its ethical function in literature, and its reception in the tafsīr tradition with special reference to Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) exegetical programme. Further, and by way of focusing on the narrative genre of the Qurʾān, the article analyses a Qurʾānic pericope, Q. 12:52-53, to illustrate the extent to which ambiguity impacts on the text, and what that means for the ethical teaching of Qurʾānic narratives. Without denying that ambiguity is located in the reader too, the article argues that ambiguity resides in the Qurʾānic text itself, and that this ambiguity has the function of expanding the Qurʾān’s interpretive universe and ethical potential.

New Perspectives on Ethics in Islam [Introduction]

Introduction to the themed issue

Consult Your Heart

In this article, I explore the authority of the heart (qalb) as a potential locus for the individual moral knowledge and normativity in Islamic ethics. To do so, I discuss the two ḥadīths that ostensibly suggest one’s “self” as a source of moral judgment. These ḥadīths raise renewed questions about the sources of moral judgment, the nature of moral judgment and the ethical capacity of the “self” (conscience)—“consult your heart and consult your self …”; “righteousness is good conduct, and sin is that which rankles in your chest and which you would hate for other people to look upon.” There are rich debates in the Islamic tradition on the place and authority of the bāṭin (inward) in generating moral knowledge, which correspond to contemporary discourses in Western ethics on the place of conscience in the moral formation of the individual. In this article, I argue that although Islamic legal tradition as a discipline has focused on qualified external actions of individuals and the ijtihād (independent legal reasoning) of mujtahids (jurists), it did not ignore the authority of the bāṭin for moral assessment and the ijtihād of common individuals. I propose that the inward dimension has always occupied an important space within the interdisciplinary field of Islamic ethics but has been overshadowed by the overarching theological disputes between the Muʿtazilīs and Ashʿarīs over the sources of knowledge. The article starts by exploring the relevant aḥādīth (reports) and their interpretation in ḥadīth commentaries, followed by an analysis of discussions in the fields of Islamic jurisprudence and Sufism.

Psychology and Ethical Epistemology

We examine a hitherto unstudied debate, turning on the epistemology of value judgements, between Ashʿarīs and Baṣran Muʿtazilīs of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī countered Muʿtazilī ethical realism, here defended by al-Malāḥimī, by developing an emotive subjectivism underpinned by increasingly sophisticated psychological accounts of ethical motivation. Value judgements, they maintained, arise not from knowledge of some ethical attributes of acts themselves, but from subjective inclinations, which are often elusive because they can be unconscious or indirect. We also argue against the widespread notion that Ashʿarīs espoused an anti-rationalist ethics, and we show that they were not only ethical rationalists, but also the more innovative side in this debate.

Philosophy in the Narrative Mode

Histories of Arabic and Islamic philosophy tend to focus on texts which are systematic in nature and conventionally classified as philosophy or related scholarly disciplines. Philosophical principles, however, are also defining features of texts associated with other genres. Within the larger field of philosophy, this might be especially true of ethics and within the larger body of literature this might be especially the case for stories. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the very purpose of storytelling is to reinforce and disseminate moral conventions. Likewise, the moral philosopher can be conceptualized as a homo narrans.The aim of this contribution is to apply the approach to narratives as a mode of debating ethical or moral principles to biographies of Alexander the Great. More than any other figure of the classical world, Alexander was religiously validated in the Islamic tradition due to his quasi-prophetic status as the ‘man with the two horns’ in the Qur’an. He appears prominently in the larger orbit of Arabic and Islamic philosophy as interlocutor and disciple of Aristotle and is adduced anecdotally in philosophical literature as an example to teach larger lessons of life. As a world conqueror, he provided an attractive model for those who sought to reconcile philosophical insight with worldly ambition.Focusing on biographies of Alexander, this article explores ethical principles which are inscribed in this body of literature and thus reads the texts as a narrativized form of philosophy. The analysis is comparative in two ways. Biographies of different periods and regions of the Islamicate world will be discussed, but comparisons with pre-Islamic biographies of Alexander (notably Roman biographies and the Alexander Romance) are included as well.

Can Reading Animate Justice?

In this study, I make audible a conversation in Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) on the meaning and application of justice. Without assuming that Alf Layla constituted an organized whole, the study identifies, in the frame narrative and the first two chains of stories—all three understood to belong to the earliest bundle—a debate on the coincidence of successful interpretation and just rulership. By the end of these tales, i.e., by the twenty-seventh night, a complete tale is told. In these stories, I propose, Alf Layla adopts an attitude that privileges multiplicity over singular interpretation, in a fashion that affirms thecontingency of ethical questions. The popularity of Alf Layla and the afterlives it enjoyed up to our present times—in the Arab world and the West—need not eclipse or substitute the Arabo-Islamic character the work came to exhibit, and the ethical questions it set out to address. In what has been read as fate, arbitrary logic, enchantment, magic, irrational thinking, and nocturnal dreamlike narratives, I suggest we can equally speak of a concern for justice. The study looks at Alf Layla’s affinity with advice literature, but stresses the need to read it as a work of (semipopular) literature that pays witness to societal debates on justice. Alf Layla, I suggest, belongs to Islamic culture in that the act of reading has been construed within hermeneutics that are largely informed by the ethical implication knowledge sharing entails. In how the stories find resolution to the crisis of the king, Alf Layla understands justice as an artificial and communal enterprise. The stories, more urgently, seem to suggest reading gears us towards a concern for the greater good. Keywords: The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights, 1001 Nights, Alf Layla wa-Layla), Adab, Justice, Rulership, Readership, Advice Literature, Interpretation, Multiplicity, Legitimacy

Interplay of Religion and Philosophy in al-Tawḥīdī’s Political Thought and Practical Ethics

Although modern scholars tend to be sceptical of the role of religion in the formation of ethical and political thought in the Būyid period (334/945–440/1048), this article argues that both philosophy and religion, as envisioned by al-Tawḥīdī and his contemporaries, played an integral role in its creation. The analysis shows that modern concepts such as ‘humanism’ and ‘political philosophy,’ as applied to these authors and their texts, are not felicitous to the social and intellectual contexts in which they were produced. Through analysing al-Tawḥīdī’s ethical and political thought, certain modern assumed dichotomies, including scientific enquiry versus religious teaching, theoretical ethics versus practical ethics, and the social versus the personal, are reconsidered. The article argues that a contextual approach to al-Tawḥīdī and his peers should consider the encyclopaedic system of knowledge that shaped their thought and the interdisciplinary nature of their work where religious, philosophical, and literary elements are intertwined. The article highlights al-Tawḥīdī’s political thought, his active role as an intellectual and his attempt to disseminate knowledge based on two main beliefs: the role of knowledge linked to action in social life and reform, and a solid sense of the religious and moral responsibility of the scholar to offer advice to the leaders of the community. The concepts that he uses, such as maḥabba (love) and ṣadāqa (friendship) with its four foundational components, namely the soul (nafs), intellect (ʿaql), nature (ṭabīʿa), and morals (khulq), addressed social and political challenges in Būyid society and produced alternative moral and intellectual responses to sectarianism, social disintegration and the decline in morality, which were characteristic of the Būyid era. Keywords: Ethical political thought, Būyid, Humanism, Political philosophy, ʿIlm (Knowledge), ʿAmal (action), Ṣadāqa (friendship), al-Tawḥīdī, Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ

Place of Virtue Ethics within the Post-Classical Discourse on ḥikma

Preserved in what seems to be a unique manuscript at the Bodleian Library, al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā (The Soul and the Spirit together with an Explanation of Their Faculties) of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) is a curious book. At the beginning, the author decribes the text as part of the philosophical sciences (as opposed to the religious ones) and clarifies that it deals with ʿilm al-akhlāq, meaning Aristotelian virtue ethics. The text is divided into two parts, the first explaining subjects of philosophical psychology, such as the nature of the soul, its faculties, and its survival after the death of the body. The second part explains how one can “treat” or “heal” the soul from certain negative character traits or vices. In both parts, the book makes liberal use of quotations from the Qur’an, from prophetical ḥadīth, and from sayings by other prophets and sages. This is quite unlike any other “book on philosophy” that Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī wrote.The article explains the distinction between philosophical and non-philosophical books in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and what it means for a book to belong to the former group. Al-Rāzī’s works in the theoretical fields of philosophy (logic, the natural sciences, metaphysics, and theology) do not use evidence derived from revelation and hardly ever refer to it. The relationship between revelation and the practical disciplines of philosophy (among them ethics), however, is different from the relation between revelation and theoretical philosophy. This difference leads in Avicenna to an almost complete abandonment of the practical disciplines. In authors who follow Avicenna in his Farabian approach to the relationship between philosophy and revelation, it leads to hybrid works such as al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā that follow a philosophical agenda but employ means and strategies that mimic and imitate revelation.