Rethinking secularism:

Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im in conversation

posted by The Editors



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An-Na’im: If I may, on the universality question: there is no such thing as a universal human. Being human is being specific, it is belonging to a location, a context, a gender, a class; there are all sorts of specifics about the human. So it is not what Talal called imperialist universalism, which projects its relativity into the global sphere in order to apply, for example, American law or the American institution of religious freedom throughout the world under the so-called “US International Religious Freedom Act,” which is an exclusively American project. How can this initiative be both international and American, such that Americans define what freedom of religion is for everybody else, and go out and impose sanctions, unless the President exempts a country like Saudi Arabia from the sanctions for other reasons. So the hypocrisy and double standards are very serious, but that is what we need to expose and American citizens need to confront.

Now, the idea of universality is not something to proclaim. It is not something to discover. It is something to construct; that is, I believe in constructing a universal consensus, using Rawls’s idea of overlapping consensus. Every human being is relativist by virtue of being human. She or he is of a place, a time, a culture, a set of values, and so on.  But can we come to a shared understanding of what human rights are, despite our differences as to why we come to make that commitment? So it is not a notion of the universal being already made and either brought down from natural law or proclaimed by the State Department, but it is about joining hands, joining struggles in actual solidarity. And yes, as Talal mentioned last night, it’s true that solidarity can be very dangerous, very seductive, opportunistic, and all of that. That is what the human is. We are all sorts of things—not always good, not always bad—but we have somehow to make sense of that. Solidarity, as an idea, can be hijacked, can be co-opted, yes. Human rights, as an idea, can be hijacked, can be co-opted, yes. But that is not good enough reason to give up on it. In fact, the very hijacking of the idea is a testimony to its power; as Louis Henkin says, the double standards and the hypocrisy about human rights “is the tribute of vice to virtue.” It is because the idea of human rights is attractive and because it is powerful that corporations would like to use it, governments or states would like to use it; but we need it more and we cannot give up on it because others abuse it.

Asad: Again, I am not sure that there is too much disagreement. Perhaps I am a little worried about too much confidence in human rights—that’s the main thing.

An-Na’im: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Asad: However, I want to ask you a question and also to make one comment. First of all, it’s not just the noble idea—this is my comment—of human rights, as I see it. There is an increasing material body of legal decisions and cases. So when corporations use human rights, they don’t take human rights as an idea, you know—there are particular rules and regulations, principles of interpretation and so on that they can go in and out of—that’s why they need lawyers for all this, because ordinary people wouldn’t be able to understand all the legal ramifications of human rights as a regime, why certain kinds of cases can have this or that outcome. So we already have an increasing body of law through which we decide—the courts decide—what is compatible with human rights and what is not. And then you also have this distinction, you know, between soft law and hard law, where hard law is backed by sanctions and soft law is more a matter of influence, of trying to get people to be a little more responsible towards human rights principles essentially by resorting to moral suasion. There is now an enormous legal structure of human rights, and I am not an expert on it at all and don’t want to use up the remaining years of my life trying to understand that part of it. But I think it isn’t good enough just to keep waving the flag and saying we need human rights. Yeah, okay, different things are possible in different situations—that’s fine—but there seems to me a kind of excessive, I might almost say religious, excitement about a solution which is believed to be special. I know you’ve said it is not appropriate in every way, but you do believe that it is in some sense special with regard to the transformation of the world. That leads me to my question. And it’s a real question that’s not intended to be a trap. You say you have to construct universality. What is the universe that you want to construct? Don’t say a human world because that is circular. In fact, the human has very gradually been transformed, as I suggested very briefly yesterday, its content has been historically changed and can be changed again given the technological developments and genetic engineering developments that are now available to us. The human can be almost anything. This is something we should at least think about. So what is it to construct the universe, the universal for you? What is the universe, logically speaking? What is the universe to be constructed politically?

Read a full transcript of this conversation here (pdf).

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One Response to “Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im in conversation”

  1. avatar Erol Fırtın says:

    Slavery, Secular Law and Sharia

    In this conversation, it is argued that slavery in Muslim countries was abolished through secular law and it wouldn’t be possible to disestablish it by the Sharia itself, and that if we keep to the traditional interpretation of Sharia, it is likely that we will end up with slavery again.

    The first problem with this argument is about slavery. It presumes that Sharia preaches slavery and that it is the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence that institutionalize slavery. Needless to say, slavery was already an established practice in the Arabian peninsula before the arrival of Islam. That slavery continued even after Islam did not (and does not) show that Sharia reproduced or re-affirmed the practice. Rather, in the early history of Islam we see a common practice of freeing slaves as much as possible and of treating them humanely. I don’t want to repeat the well-known advice to give the same quality of food and drink that the house-owner possesses.

    I think the issue is discussed as it is conceptualized in analyzing the historical process of slavery and its role in the ‘industrial revolution’ (or as it is problematized in the studies of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome). This is the point where the problem arises. There, we see slavery as an institution that feeds the industrialization process in England, a structural part of a historical (and modern) phenomenon. Now, a word that is loaded with such a negative background cannot be used in a different setting and context for the same purpose. Surely, the socio-economic, military, and political basis of the practice cannot be ignored. But the crucial importance should be given to its semantic background. Indeed, the word occupies a significant place in Islamic terminology. But it is used as manifestation of a different way of looking at human being. You can come across many Muslim names which start with the Arabic word ‘Gulam,’ which means slave. In a sense, every Muslim is a slave, not of another human being but of God. In fact, I am surprised that the speakers didn’t mention about the way the Qur’an approaches to human beings in a forum where the issues of Islam and human rights were discussed.

    Another problem is with the argument that the slavery was abolished by secular law, not by a change in Sharia. If it was secular law and the inherent understanding of the human rights in the secular legal system that banned the slavery, then one could argue that it has been the same secular law that made the atomic bomb possible, a bomb that there is no equivalent of in human history, built to kill the very same human beings. I don’t think that there is a primary connection between (entrance of) secular law and disestablishment of slavery in Muslim societies. European colonial powers wanted to abolish slavery in Muslim countries because this practice was reminding them of their own past. Maybe there was a psychological motive (a feeling of shame?) behind this colonial policy. The cities in Africa and South Asia that were once the colonies of European powers are now replete with factories that produce items for Western countries. Everybody knows how much a worker earns in a month in those factories. Probably, the amount is equal to the food and shelter that were given slaves in the past. Worse than this, the Gulf countries today are infamous for salaries given to South Asian workers. A ‘Muslim’ corporation gives its workers 150 dollars in a month to construct luxurious islands in the desert for the global market.

    The last point that I want to make regarding the conversation is about viewing the Sharia as human product (as a ‘human understanding of the divine’). Speakers claim that they (An Na’im, to be more precise) speak as Muslims, that is, from a Muslim perspective. From a Muslim perspective, Sharia (basically Qur’an and Sunna) is divine and Ijtihat is also divine for the reason that it ‘elicits the secrets of the divine.’ Especially beginning from the sixth century of the Muslim calender, the perspective (the way the Muslims in general and scholars in particular have looked at this world) has shifted towards this world, that is, the ideals and priorities which were directed toward the other world were superseded by the concerns of worldly interests. This time also corresponds to the emergence of the idea that the gate of ijtihad was closed. In fact, as the study of Wael B. Hallaq (1984) shows, the emergence of this idea does not mean that the Jurists were not making ijtihad. It has been the prudence and restraint that we see in most of the jurists who loudly argue the non-existence of the Mujtehids in their lifetimes. Behind this restraint, I assume that there is an awareness that their minds are gradually perplexed by the materiality of the world, that at the end led to the emergence of the idea of the gate of the Ijtihat had been closed. That the idea that Sharia (including Ijtihat) is a human product is another version of the idea that the materiality of this world precedes the dominance of other worldly perspectives in making judgments (and also in living a ‘pious life’).

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