Abrahamic Humanism

In 2007, a conference on the "New Humanism" was held at Harvard University. Among the panel discussions presented at the conference was one entitled "Toward an Abrahamic Humanism?" The discussants included Rabbi Sherwin Wine of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, the Rev. Dr. William Murray (a Unitarian Universalist) who presented a "post-Christian" perspective, and Salmon Rushdie, who spoke about secular Islam on the Indian sub-continent.

I did not attend the conference, but what I can gather from reading a published synopsis of the panel discussions, the underlying presumption of the conference participants appears to be one in which religion is "essentialized" for the purpose of distinguishing it from culture, and then ignored for the purpose of privileging culture over this essentialized construction. Robert F. Shedinger has recently given a name to this sort of rhetorical maneuver: he calls it a "discourse of domestication." Among their various uses, discourses of domestication compartmentalize religion and thereby render it "harmless" for the convenience of those who wish human religiosity would, once and for all, just go away (see Chapter Two of Shedinger's Was Jesus Muslim? Questioning Categories in the Study of Religion, Fortress Press, 2009).

Would that it were that easy!

As anyone who has spent any time thinking seriously about religion as a human phenomenon will attest, no clear cut distinctions between religion and culture ever survive the trial of counter-examples. Simply put, the behaviors that we tend to name "religious" are facets of human culture; de-contextualized as "religion," they tend to reduce to theology. But theology is a rarefied product of the interpretation of sacred texts in the light of Greek philosophical concepts. It is, in other words, an aspect of European intellectual history and, specifically, composes the dogmatics of the Christian churches.

It strikes me that a more productive approach to the articulation of a "new humanism" would be one that is informed by the historic role of religious scholarship in the invention of the "old" humanism. And if one is intrigued by the notion of an "Abrahamic Humanism," a good place to start would be George Makdisi's magisterial The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh University Press, 1990).

The downside of informing one's humanism with Makdisi's scholarship is that it not only makes the simplistic distinction between religion and culture untenable, it also reveals the rhetorical distancing of humanism from religiosity to be equally problematic.

Those who wish to call themselves "humanists" while turning their backs upon religiosity have not only cut themselves off from the roots of the humanistic traditions, they have cut themselves off from a characteristic aspect of historical human being. Their vaunted humanism is best described as an a-humanism, if not an anti-humanism.

I suggest that they need to re-think their entire project.

The Bridge of Criticism

Back in 1970, the historian Peter Gay wrote a brilliant little book entitled The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues Among Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire on the Enlightenment. Gay chose these three figures to discuss among themselves the meaning of the Enlightenment because Gibbon had at one time mused that he might write a dialogue (trialogue?) in which these three "mutually acknowledge" the inherent risks involved in thinking critically about religion in public. Gay's book takes up this topic and many others--including the often overlooked Enlightenment roots of Romanticism. At one point in the conversation, Voltaire confesses that "...the more I read the Romantics, the more I find myself in them--certainly in the English Romantics, less so in the French, in the Germans not at all" (p. 113).

Radical Enlightenment

No honest Romantic ought ever to forget or deny that Romanticism is a child (unruly, to be sure) of the European Enlightenment; that the philosophe Rousseau "fathered" Romanticism; that Kant kept a portrait of Rousseau in his study; that Spinoza and Montaigne are well established members of the Romantic pantheon as strong precursors, alongside the Rabelais critically admired by Voltaire...

What Hath Karamustafa Wrought?

Ahmet T. Karamustafa's God's Unruly Friends accomplishes what all scholarship in the study of religion must accomplish (to be considered competent, in my view): it exercises the religious imagination and challenges the reader to expand her notion of what constitutes a particular expression of human religiosity (in this case, "dervish piety").

What Karamustafa shows us in his study is that certain forms of "dervish piety" in the Islamic Middle Period (1200-1550) were practiced outside--and as a criticism--of institutionalized religious practices.

Once we have learned to appreciate "dervish piety" as a particular, local expression of a more general, human phenomenon, we can see how such figures as Socrates and Diogenes of Sinope represented pre-Islamic expressions of this peculiar mode (and why they came to be revered, even regarded as "prophets," by certain Muslim intellectuals).

Moreover, we can move forward in time (for the arrow of time points where we aim it) and recognize other figures such as Walt Whitman, the later Tolstoy, or many other anarchists as "practitioners" of "deviant" renunciation and, depending upon the rationale they offer for their modus vivendi, ask whether, or to what extent, their protests represent branches of the dervish family tree.

When the artificial barriers that we have constructed to separate ourselves from the Muslim "other" begin to crumble, then Islamic Studies emerges in our academic practices as the new humanism. It is then that we learn to say with the Roman poet Terence:

Homo sum, nihil humani alienum a me puto.

The Dervishes Return the Favor

If Middle Period Muslim Dervishes may be viewed as enacting the Romantic temper, may not modern Romantics be viewed, in turn, as enacting a Dervish sensibility? Consider this from the "deathbed edition" of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

A Persian Lesson

For his o'erarching and last lesson the greybeard sufi,
In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.

"Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of
the rest,
Allah is all, all, all - is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes - yet Allah,
Allah, Allah is there.

"Has the estray wander'd far? Is the reason - why strangely
hidden?
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire
world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of
every life;
The something never still'd - never entirely gone? the invisi-
ble need of every seed?

"It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one
exception."

Walt Whitman: Romantic poet and great American Dervish.

God's Unruly Friends

With Pater's flexible definition of Romanticism, one can ask whether it makes sense to consider Dervish groups in the Islamic Middle Period (1200-1550) as Muslim Romantics. In his book, God's Unruly Friends, Ahmet Karamustafa compares these Dervish groups to "hippies" (though I think perhaps "proto-punks" might provide a more accurate analogy). In either case, what we are dealing with is a form of social and cultural protest that emerges when certain ideals (political and religious) are compromised and/or sacrificed for the sake of institutional exigencies and expedience.

Karamustafa points to the "normalization" or "mainstreaming" (not his terms) of Sufism during the period in question. He writes that Sufism (originally a protest movement against the rise of Muslim kingship after the death of 'Ali Ibn Abu Talib, the last Caliph who had been a member of the Prophet Muhammad's inner circle) and Sunnism entered into "close if not untroubled alliance" and, consequently, "became the major constituents of the new Islamic social order that emerged after the disintegration of the universalist 'Abbasid dispensation" (Karamustafa, p. 98).

Put simply, there were those in the Islamic community who regarded this new alliance as a form of "selling out." Whereas previously, Sufi identification had been a sign of political disaffection and, consequently, a little dangerous, it was now no longer considered as such. "The entrenchment of Sufism in society in the form of ubiquitous social institutions refranchised the dormant other-worldly trends of renunciation and anarchist individualism within Sufism" with the result that "deviant renunciation ... reclaimed its place on the agenda of Islamic religiosity as the active negation of institutional Sufism" (ibid, 99).

In Pater's terms, Sufism had traded its Romantic strangeness in order to become a more or less "known quantity" in the ordinary Muslim religious imagination. Thus domesticated, it could be accepted as "classically" Islamic. This new status provoked the Dervish reactions of "deviant renunciation" and "anarchist individualism"--a re-assertion of Sufi piety in its renegade incarnation.

Karamustafa wonders "aloud" if "the same forces that generated the movements of deviant renunciation from within institutional Sufism were not also at work in other aspects of Islamic religiosity during the same period" (ibid, 100). My reading of Marshall Hodgson's Venture of Islam and L. Carl Brown's Religion and State suggest that the answer to this query is an emphatic yes. With the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 (followed by subsequent waves of nomadic conquerors), the "separation of powers" that had naturally evolved in Islamdom during the period of Muslim kingship was fatally compromised. The cultural institutions of Muslim civil society (e.g., mosques, schools, public baths, etc.) that had been privately endowed and administered independent of the palace were increasingly drawn into its orbit and oversight. This change occurred as the Mongol's imposed their own "top-down" or vertical and militarized social structure upon all of Islamdom. Developed in the conditions of nomadism, the Mongol form of social organization entailed a command structure that was very successful in terms of efficiency, and promoted continual expansionism that translated, over time, into the rise of the three great "gunpowder empires" of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran, and Timurid India. What was lost in the process, however, was the independence of the scholar-class from state co-optation.

Karamustafa points to the disaffection of figures such as Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328) from the "mainstream" 'ulema as evidence for a broader social and cultural reaction than that found among Dervish groups (although it must be remembered that Ibn Taymiya himself had Sufi affiliations). I would suggest that the roots of Dervish disaffection ran deeper and broader than discontent with the increasing social acceptability of the Sufi tariqas. Their protest was that of the Romantic consciousness which bridles whenever and wherever it feels that liberties it considers innate are betrayed and curtailed by human interference with divine legislation.

Pater on the Romantic Temper

In his now canonical essay “Romanticism” published in Macmillan’s Magazine 35 (1876-1877), literary critic Walter Pater argued that the human repertoire of responses to the found world tends to oscillate between “classical” and “romantic” modes, i.e., between responses which privilege, respectively, the familiar and known over the unfamiliar and unknown and those which privilege the latter over the former. The conclusion one may draw from Pater’s formulation is that the particular concentration and constellation of Romanticisms that dominated late 18th and 19th century European culture was exceptional, but not unique. Romanticisms did not begin and end then and there. Indeed, they had been present within European literature in embryonic form in such works as Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The cultural transformation that occurred in the late 18th century, and throughout the 19th, was one in which Romanticisms ceased from being phenomena that waxed and waned but resisted complete occlusion to phenomena that wax and wane and are impossible to completely avoid.