Beyond certainty: theologies of difference

Pakistani policymakers carefully sieve out ambiguity and methodological uncertainty from the variegated history of the Islamic tradition. Rather than as a dynamic, often co-operative contestation, they take it as a fixed, fossilised, and timeless object — one to be deployed as instrument to fill politically expedient needs. While certainty is certainly not only an issue in the domain of religion, situating it as a religious problem eases our entry into this conversation. It is a well-established argument in the academic study of religion that Islam as a pre-modern tradition was remarkably open to polyvalent interpretations of religious injunctions. Difference in interpretation made it possible for the emergence of relatively stable multi-ethnic and multi-religious Islamic states. The millet “system”, last instituted by the Ottomans — despite its shortcomings — ensured that distinct religious communities were not necessarily always viewed through the lens of a majority or minority binary but rather as independently existing groups that could, to a certain extent, manage their distinct communal affairs.

The German scholar of Islam, Thomas Bauer, in his Kultur der Ambiguität, underscores the exceptional flexibility and ambiguity that pervaded across pre-modern Islamic societies as manifest in the interpretative space afforded in mediums like law, Quranic exegesis, and literature, among others. This ambiguity, this ikhtilaf, made space for the coexistence of competing discourses and understandings of religion; ikhtilaf does not negate tawhid, or the unity of scripture for it concerns itself with practice, and not necessarily with essence of belief. Ikhtilaf is a mercy that seeks to ameliorate the intractability of human disagreement. Traditionally, one could not simply get away with an emaciated understanding of a Prophetic narrative or a Quranic verse; disagreements based on linguistics, authenticity, and methods in proofs and principle (usul al-fiqh) would mediate the practicalities of man’s relation to divinity. It was harder for the possessed, like those who killed Priyantha, to instrumentalise devotion as compensation for a viciousness based in an anti-intellectualism and a brutal callousness towards goodness.

Wael Hallaq has argued for the impossibility of a modern “Islamic state” which he deems an oxymoron; with modernity and colonial rule, the shari’a was to be truncated and contorted to fit within logics necessary to sustain the modern state — there could be no happy union of the Islamic and the state. If we accept Hallaq’s premise, what can we do? As a starting point, we must do some hammering of our own, not of destructive prescriptions rooted in condescension for our fellow man, but like that of Nietzsche; we, too, must “philosophise with a hammer” so that we may break the hollow idols that animate the hearts and minds of those men who render life unlivable. It would be a mistake to read Nietzsche as the thinker who just broke things apart. We must remember that not all hammers break, some build. He asks us now: “If our hardness will not flash and cut and cleave: how could you everjoin with me in — creating?” How could we?

To be spiritual but not religious in our society is an understandable response to an assault on religion that has truncated its definition, but it need not be like this. Asking what constitutes “religion” is, for better or worse, a rather trite debate academically. Yet, within the boundaries of lived experience, an expansive vocabulary of what it means to be religious remains elusive. Yet, this project of expansion must take great care in not bifurcating the tradition into the binaries like mystical/legal or liberal/orthodox; these fragmentations are not only historically untenable, but they are also actively harmful in the realm of the political, one that is tightly fused with the social, cultural, and the theological. It is also not enough to label popular understandings of religion as historical fabrications; whatever disseminates into popular imagination enters historical memory — it becomes an uncharitable truth for those who believe it to be.

But is certainty, a belief in yaqeen, not part of our spiritual inheritance? To demand absolute certainty is not the same as an understanding of being united in the acknowledgement of a shared mutual knowledge; neither is it akin to a rejection of certain knowledge. Imam al-Haddad (d. 1720), hailing from the blessed Hadramawt valley of Yemen, a direct descendant of our Prophet (PBUH), considered a great sage for the times, and a mujaddid (reviver) of the twelfth Islamic century, reminds us of what it means to be spiritually certain, a state not antithetical to the juridical or theological uncertainty enshrined in our historical tradition; he declares certainty as “power, firmness and stability of faith”, a state accessed by a commitment to listen to God’s word with a heart not possessed by demons; it is a calmness embodied by “looking at the kingdom of the heavens and the earth” and knowing that we are in good hands, and even if the world may burn around us, we need not make it worse. The highest form of spiritual certainty is the state of kashf, the uncovering of what lies beyond the veil: beyond the obvious, and the material. Those who commit crimes in God’s name stand in diametric opposition to this state; blinded, they cannot see good for what it is.

In his meditation on certainty, Wittgenstein cautions us to remember that “a doubt that doubted everything” would hardly remain a doubt much longer. In honour of the late bell hooks, who gave us much, let us then strive for a knowledge “that breaks through silences”, and hope for a hope that smashes the walls they have erected “to block our vision of ourselves, of our futures”. Let us be certain and doubtful about the right things. If we are to truly be a land of the pure, we must make the spectrum of those we love impure.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1^st, 2022.

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