Islam in a Post-Secular Society Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva ( Duke University ) Chris Chase-Dunn ( University of California-Riverside ) William Carroll ( University of Victoria ) Raewyn Connell ( University of Sydney ) Kimberlé W. Crenshaw ( University of California, la, and Columbia University ) Heidi Gottfried ( Wayne State University ) Karin Gottschall ( University of Bremen ) Mary Romero ( Arizona State University ) Alfredo Saad Filho ( University of London ) Chizuko Ueno ( University of Tokyo ) Sylvia Walby ( Lancaster University ) Volume 98 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss Islam in a Post-Secular Society Religion, Secularity and the Antagonism of Recalcitrant Faith By Dustin J. Byrd LEIDEN | BOSTON This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-4234 isbn 978-90-04-32535-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32855-6 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Dustin J. Byrd. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill nv. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Cover illustration: The “declaration of faith” ( Shahada ) in metal work. It states, “there is no god but God and Muhammad is his Prophet.” Photo by Dustin J. Byrd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Byrd, Dustin, author. Title: Islam in a post-secular society : religion, secularity, and the antagonism of recalcitrant faith / by Dustin J. Byrd. Description: Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Studies in critical social sciences, ISSN 1573-4234 ; Volume 98 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016034844 (print) | lccn 2016041442 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004325357 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004328556 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Islam and secularism--Western countries. | Secularism--Western countries. | Western countries--Religion. | Frankfurt school of sociology. | Critical theory. | Islamic philosophy. Classification: lcc BP190.5.S35 B97 2016 (print) | lcc BP190.5.S35 (ebook) | DDC 297.09--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034844 This book is dedicated to the memory of David Ward Thomas. Eternal student, devoted friend and blues man of deep faith ∵ The best of people are those that bring most benefit to the rest of mankind. – Prophet Muhammad ... Preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words. – St. Francis of Assisi ... When Philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk. – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ... Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary dispro- portionate to his work; to take from the people – often in poverty – taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one’s whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder. – Leo Tolstoy ∵ Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xix 1 Professing Islam in a Post-Secular Society 1 Introduction 1 On the Contemporary Possibility of Witnessing and Professing 3 The Post-Secular Society 6 What Does It Mean to Profess Islam? 15 Witnessing in Islam: On the Tradition of Radical Praxis 17 New Religion as Return of the Old 19 Witnessing in the Time of War 22 “Perfected Religion”: A Problematic Conception 27 Fear of Philosophical Blasphemy 39 2 Adversity in Post-Secular Europe 43 The Dialectics of Martyrdom: Death as Witnessing and Professing 43 Witnessing against Islam: The Case of Theo van Gogh 54 Je ne suis pas Charlie et je ne suis pas avec les terroristes 75 3 Finding a Common Language 90 13th Century Witnessing: Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan Malik al-Kamil 90 Different Francis, Same Mission: Witnessing with and for Muslims 103 Translation Proviso: Can We Witness and Confess in the Same Language? 114 Cognitive-Instrumental Reason, Moral-Practical Reason and Aesthetic-Expressive Reason in Religion 116 Translation Dangers 118 Secular Entrenchment 127 4 Witnessing and Professing in Prophetic and Positive Religions 135 Affirmation and Negativity: Marx 135 Affirmation and Negativity: Lenin 140 Affirmation and Negativity: Horkheimer and Adorno 143 viii contents Confronting the Post-Secular Condition 147 Prophetic and Priestly Religion 151 5 After Auschwitz: Islam in Europe 159 Violence and the Post-Secular 160 Violence and the State 161 Freud’s Unbehagen mit Marx 164 Witnessing and Professing in a Nietzschian Age of Nihilism 169 Witnessing and Professing after Auschwitz: Theodor Adorno’s Poetics 180 History and Metaphysics after Auschwitz 182 Ethics after Auschwitz 187 Witnessing the Messianic: The Case of the Martyr Walter Benjamin 190 The Place for Theology 191 Messiah, Messianic and the Historian 194 Benjamin’s Critique of Progress: Witnessing History as Barbarity 199 6 Post-Secularity and Its Discontents: The Barbaric Revolt against Barbarism 202 Absolutivity 204 Authoritarian Absolutes, Heteronomy, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria 207 Humanistic Absolutes 219 isis: Same Problem, Different Manifestation 222 American and Euro-Jihādis 239 Hegel, War and Individualism 241 isis and Western Alienation 246 Internationalism 248 Seeking Heaven at the Barrel of a Gun 251 Material Poverty or Poverty of Being? 256 Genealogy of Terror 260 Symbolic Message 266 Reign of Terror: Bourgeois and Muslim 268 The Perverse Dialectic of Apology 271 Hypocritical Apologetics and the Recovery of the Prophetic 275 7 The Globalized Post-Secular Society and the Future of Islam 282 From the West to the Rest 282 Theocracy as a Response to the Globalized Post-Secular Society 288 Post-Secular Solidarity: A Proposal for an Intra-religious Constitutionalism 303 Ecumenism and Inter-Religious Constitution Building: Modern Slavery 307 Conclusion 313 Bibliography 315 Index 329 contents ix Preface The idea for this book came about when I attended the 38th annual Future of Religion conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April of 2014. The director, Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert, of Western Michigan University’s Comparative Religion Department, has been my academic mentor, friend, and guide for over 20 years. Always faithful to the advancement of dialectical philosophy and theology, Dr. Siebert has never missed a year of the Dubrovnik conference since it was founded in 1976 at the request of Ivan Supek, a Croatian anti-fascist physicist, philosopher, and humanist author. The theme of the 2014 conference was Wit- nessing and Confessing – a perfect theme for my interests in Muslim communi- ties in Europe, relations between the West and the Muslim world, as well as my main theoretical foundation, the Critical Theory of Religion, as developed out of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society. After presenting my paper in the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, and listening to the other scholar’s valuable critiques, I chose to continue my research and expand it into a book. The result is this modest volume. To the reader, I hope my use of technical and foreign language, born out of philosophy, religion, theology and sociology, doesn’t prove to be too impen- etrable. For some this verbiage may seem like mesmerizing jargon; I assure you it is not. Certain categories, concepts, and notions (and some in languages other than English) are necessary in order to clarify, analyze, and debate the subject at hand. As philosophers dealing with complex issues that pertain to a multiplicity of cultures, wherein we both have to speak about the universal and the particular, the use of various languages to penetrate into the heart of the vexing problem is sometimes necessary. Each language provides another av- enue by which the thinker can journey into the darkest recess of the dilemma. Through our conceptual language and categories we come to understand, in- terpret, differentiate and engage the world. If we are lacking in the conceptual tools to do so, we experience the world as an untranslatable phenomenon that lacks determinacy, lacks clarity, and consequently lacks subjective importance. In this blunted form of living, existential issues are reduced to a series of ex- periences and sensations that do not find sufficient articulation in meaningful language, which essentially leaves us with an amorphous biography of random impressions and passions. However, the world becomes unlocked to many students and scholars once they’ve acquired the language and conceptions to think systematically, abstractly, dialectically, concretely, as well as through what Walter Benjamin called “constellations.” Without such philosophi- cal, theological, sociological and religious language, the status quo remains xii preface reified – it is experienced as simply “the given” and not the socially constructed and therefore mutable phenomenon that it is. Although much of mankind’s history is the product of mere nature, most of it is the product of the way man choses to be through his labor, his passions, and his will. History and society are not fixed, nor are they on an unalterable trajectory, nor are they simply the product of the natural world. Society, and therefore history, can be changed when we can first understand their internal dynamics and characteristics. If we are able to articulate our worldview, identify our disagreements, and find the courage to transcend the status quo, than we can construct better and more penetrating arguments through which social change can be imagined and actualized. In Marx’s article, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing, he calls upon his reader to (1) have courage to accept the consequences of one’s critique, and (2) to not be afraid to challenge the status quo, i.e. to be martyr material if history calls one to be such. In light of the increasing barbarity of the modern world, it may be an absolute necessity to adopt this attitude if we are to remedy the seemingly intractable ills that plague our present world. As every student of political philosophy knows, Karl Marx’s famous 11th Thesis on Feuerbach states, ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ In this quote, Marx presupposes that philosophers already have the linguistic and conceptual capabilities to interpret the world adequately – some more than others for sure – but does not slip into a state of ataraxia (ἀταραξία – tranquility) in doing so, but rather becomes maladjusted to the pathological sickness of their society. Philosophers, and consequently those who learn from philosophers, must go beyond the mere conceptualiza- tion of the world – although it is the necessary precondition – they must also contribute to a radical praxis adversus mundi (against the world) with its un- necessary injustices, and must never fuga mundi (flee the world) like cloistered mystics. This same desire to transubstantiate the world for the better was echoed in a religious form by Pope Francis in his 2013 exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) when he wrote, An authentic faith – which is never comfortable or completely personal – always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better than we found it.1 1 Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel. (Washington d.c.: usccb Communi- cations, 2013), 93. xiii preface For the critical theorist of religion and society, it is the role, some may even say the duty, of those who find themselves with the intellectual tools to see beyond the necessary appearances of the given, who have escaped Plato’s Cave, who can pierce through the façade of the mesmerizing consumer society, and see clearly through the impenetrable darkness of the night-side of neo-liberalism, to engage not only the world via thought, but through deed as well. The Slove- nian philosopher Slavoj Žižek encourages intellectuals to return to thinking, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Marxist international. For him, we need to think through the catastrophic that was communism, and to also take stock of the ingenuity of capitalism to survive its own inner-contra- dictions, catastrophes and frequent collapses. However, as right as Žižek is, and he is most assuredly correct about the need to re- think, we must also not lose sight of revolutionary and Socratic praxis. The victims of the world’s pathologi- cal exploitation and oppression – created by the distorted logic and rapacious greed of globalized neo-liberalism – are still being manufactured, still being abused, and still being oppressed, and have not the time for self-satisfying in- tellectual theorizing. Yet this is not a call for action for action’s sake. It is clear that the immediacy of unnecessary human, animal and environmental suffer- ing needs not to be rethought. As such, we should avoid a perpetual state of praxis paralysis – satisfied within ourselves to only think about the victims but do nothing concretely to stop the creation of new victims If religious believers and secular revolutionaries cannot change the world entire, or bring about the utopian Kingdom of God on earth, and must content themselves with waiting for the long-awaited and long-delayed messianic figure, we must not in our activist-slumber forget the suffering that is in the world at this very moment. Those whose suffering will never be recorded in the footnotes of history must not be forgotten, but rather their suffering must be expressed, as all perennial suffering, Adorno reminds us, has the right to be expressed, and academics are in a privileged position to articulate the suffering that today’s societies fights to mute. It may be the appropriate moment in which philosophy retires its feeling of intellectual superiority and once again learns from the prophetic religions, especially as it has been articulated today by Pope Francis, who encourages the faithful to live in solidarity with the poor, which means to ‘eliminate the struc- tural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor.’2 Pope Francis reminds us to remember that, as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by reject- ing the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by 2 Ibid., 95. xiv preface attacking structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems, or, for that matter, to any problem. Inequality is the root of social ills.3 In light of the overwhelming social degradation that is occurring around the world with the spread of values that are diametrically opposed to the pro- phetic values of mercy, solidarity, and brotherly love, Pope Francis bravely calls the world to cultivate its inner sense of fairness and justice as a countervail- ing force to the tyranny of the markets and to engage in loving praxis in the hopes of redirecting our ailing world towards a greater sense of brotherhood and equality. Critical theorists of religion share this sentiment, albeit through humanist philosophy. In the process of writing this book, I attended not only the 2014 Dubrovnik conference in Croatia, but also the Loyola University conference on Critical Theory in Rome, Italy, a week later. However, during the Dubrovnik confer- ence, I listened intently to an individual with nationalist leanings voice some of the crudest stereotypes about Muslims and their faith. Astonishingly, he boldly articulated his belief that Muslims were inherently incapable of enlight- ened thought, inherently undemocratic and unwilling to accept the superior- ity of European religious culture. No matter how much I argued against his ill- informed thesis, he remained steadfast in his narrow and shallow beliefs about a community comprised of 1.6 billion individuals. The cacophony of Muslim opinions, philosophies, cultural practices, etc., were all artificially harmonized and reduced to a single concept: the Muslim, just as the Jews had once been conceptualized as der Jude (the Jew). Once singularized, he could dismiss all the Muslims with crude generalizations and stereotypes. An echo of fascism hung thick in the cool Adriatic air. In Rome, under the shadow of the Pantheon – once dedicated to “all the gods” and now to Saint Mary and the early Christian martyrs – I was appalled to witness a tourist couple from Northern Europe berate an African immigrant trying to sell them a knock-off luxury purse. In front of their child, they yelled at him, hurled insults, and brushed him away like a vexatious fly. The pain of being belittled and disrespected in front of a child could be seen in the weary face of the already broken man who was only there trying to scratch out a mea- ger existence, most likely to send most of what he earned back home to his family in Africa. What was most poignant to witness was the tourists’ young boy, who was no more than ten years old. Without any thought, he mimicked his father’s dismissive gestures – waving away the immigrant man without 3 Ibid. , 102. xv preface ever recognizing the humanity that dwelled within him. The father clearly ap- proved of the boy’s mimetic actions as he looked down at his son with pride. Unfortunately, this abusive and dehumanizing behavior ensures a cycle of an- tagonistic relationships with the “other,” one that further entrenches already deeply held racist beliefs as well as their after-effect, a feeling of disrespect among the immigrants – especially those of Islamic faith. However, from the solidarist perspective of Pope Francis, it was in the suffering of that despised immigrant that one can find the presence of Jesus of Nazareth; he too, for Fran- cis, was dismissed by the tourists – when history offered an opportunity to express Christian agape with the suffering, dejected and despised, they instead showed cruel and cold callousness, more typical of the bourgeoisie. These two footnotes of history shows us that this kind of hatred and disgust for others is not natural, it is not inborn, and it is not genetic; it is a learned phenomenon and an acquired attitude. It results in a cycle that is blindly repeated through the generations unless people who can think critically voice their firm oppo- sition and begin to work against a world that devours itself based on small differences. Auschwitz – the inevitable outcome of pathological hatred and misguided metaphysics – begins with such inherited attitudes and gestures. In his reflection on metaphysics after the horror and terror of the Shoah, Theodor Adorno wrote, a new categorical imperative has been impose by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.4 In order to make forbidden to history that which is already forbidden in Abra- hamic morality – pathological hatred of the other – all instances of injustice must be opposed by an equal commitment to justice, mercy, and solidarity. The mass annihilation of others, rooted in a mass disgust, contempt, and hatred for their existence, must be forever eradicated as a potential for human relations. Auschwitz, which forever doomed mankind’s optimism about itself, cannot and must not be repeated. Yet, only decades after this great catastrophe, the conditions for another conflation of worldviews and peoples are already being produced in Europe, North America and the Middle East. In Europe, the ranks of anti-Immigrant political parties continue to swell while isis continues to call for lone wolf attacks on targets in the capitals of western nations. 4 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. (New York: Continuum, 1999), 365. ‘ Hitler hat den Men- schen im Stande ihrer Unfreiheit einen neuen kategorischen Imperativ aufgezwungen: ihr Denk- en und Hendeln so einzurichen, dass Auschwitz nicht sich wiederhole, nicht Ähnliches geschehe .’ xvi preface The potential for fascism and fascistic-like tendencies survived the Third Reich and are now once again being exploited within the debate about Islam in the West. The mirror image is happening among the Muslims, as the growth of extremist and terrorists groups in the Middle East continues unabated, but thankfully do not represent the vast majority of believers. Fascism has many forms and, like a cameleon, can camouflage itself in many different cultures; from the far right in Europe to isis in Syria and Iraq, the human capacity for absolute destruction of the other is swiftly becoming a renewed reality. The “new imperative” of “never again,” that resulted from fascism’s cruelty and de- struction, has gone unheard between the clamor of militaristic slogans and the battle cries of war between nations and religions. Despite the rise of the often Islamophobic and neo-Randian Tea Party in American political life, the situation has become worse in Europe. In the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, etc., political par- ties whose platform includes anti-immigrant rhetoric have made significant headways into the political system. For the first fifty years after World War ii, or the Great Patriotic War as it is called in Russia, xenophobic far-right politi- cal parties were unthinkable, fascistic policies and thoughts were unspeakable in the public sphere, but now they have been reborn with a sense of credibil- ity. Then the target was the communists and Jews, now there is a new target: the Muslims. The language that Europe thought it had left behind after wwii has reappeared and has forcefully made its way back into political discourse. The critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno already foresaw the folly of believing Europe could resign its fascistic tendencies after the catastrophe of World War ii. With the proper catalyst, all of Europe was capable of the same authoritarian and violent tendencies that were cultivated in Nazi Germany. They wrote, fascism triumphed under a crassly xenophobic, anti-cultural, collectivist ideology. Now that it has devastated the earth, nations must fight against it; there is no other way. But when all is over, a spirit of freedom need not spread across Europe; its nations may become as xenophobic, as hostile to culture, and as pseudocollectivist as the fascism against which they had to defend themselves. Even its defeat will not necessarily break the motion of the avalanche.5 5 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Frag- ments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. (Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 2002), 183. xvii preface Conversely, the Muslim community hasn’t always given their fellow European and American counterparts a sense of security, as many within the commu- nity have often contributed to the suspicion of violence that surrounds them. From rallies that fanatically condemn European culture, to terrorist acts upon European and American cities, radical Muslims – having rejected the values of European society as well as traditional Islam – have often pushed their American, Dutch, British, German, Italian, French, etc., neighbors into the anti-Islamic political parties for fear that they are losing their culture, their nation, and their way of life. This new and rabid Islamophobia draws upon a different legitimation than the neo-pagan fascism of Hitler and Mussolini; it is often clothed in the lan- guage of “defending the Enlightenment” itself. These far-right and often neo- fascist politicians and activists are drawing their legitimacy by appearing to defend what was once thought to be the universal values of the European Enlightenment, and they often have help in this endeavor from liberals and anti-religion leftists. Having traveled around Europe often in the last ten years, I’ve witnessed this growing trend firsthand and have noticed that it has only worsened as Europe has become increasingly entangled in Middle Eastern and North African affairs and as emigration from Muslim countries to Europe has increased beyond its capacity (or national will) to accommodate them. Unfor- tunately, I see that a new dark and ominous specter is forming over Europe: neo-fascist Islamophobism , or what I have defined as miso-Islamism , or “patho- logical hatred for Islam.” The hatred of Islam will spread like a virulent cancer unless people of good will, revolutionary faith and Socratic faithlessness, who are committed to the peaceful cooperation between the religious traditions and secular citizens – a being-with-each-other that is rooted in mutual recog- nition, respect and shared commitments – work together for a common goal: a more reconciled future society. Absent a discourse movement such as this, both the neo-fascist nativists of Europe and the extremist Muslims who find no real attachment to their western societies, and who dream of an “Islamic Europe,” will continue to pull western society to the political and cultural mar- gins – an unsustainable situation under any analysis. Without discourse there will be no true knowledge of the other; without knowledge there will be no po- tential for reconciliation; and without reconciliation there will only be a state of war. When examining Dr. Siebert’s time in Dubrovnik during Yugoslavia’s civil war, it’s important to note the great courage that was demonstrated as he con- tinued to travel to the Balkans during the fighting; he never missed a year de- spite the heavy bombardment that surrounded him; he refused to take sides between the Croats, the Serbs, and the Bosnian Muslims, but rather stood xviii preface steadfast for what he believed was morally right; he suffered with whomever was suffering unjustly. Dr. Siebert not only brought a penetrating philosophi- cal analysis and critical religiology to the Balkans but also cared for the physi- cal and material needs of the victims. Medicine was given to whoever was in need, regardless of their national identity and/or ethnicity, and he welcomed any discourse partner who was willing to offer their constructive and critical thoughts. Amidst the artillery shells falling on the worker owned Hotel Argen- tina, in which the conference was being held, he had the prophetic and So- cratic commitment to continue his lectures on Immanuel Kant’s most hopeful proposition for Perpetual Peace (1795). In the face of war, he embraced a revolu- tionary yet illusive peace. It is in this light – the undiminished search for a bet- ter world – that I offer this book as a small attempt to help find a way towards that more reconciled future society that Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert taught about and longed for since he was a soldier in World War ii, through the Yugoslav civil war, and until today. Dum vivimus, vivamus. 6 Dustin J. Byrd Dubrovnik, Croatia Rome, Italy 6 ‘While there is life there is hope.’