The Genesis of the Third Way
(Dr. Shuja Alhaq was interviewed by a Lahore journal in early 2008 about his research work and construction of the Third Way. The following narrative is an improvised version of it. It is divided under seven sub-headings, namely, Conversion, Crisis of identity, Circumstances leading to the third way, A critique of Marxism, Move abroad, Recovery of the forgotten vision, Turning to the history of science)
I was born in 1952 in an urban middle class family. My father, a graduate from Murray College, Sialkot, was a civil servant. He was a deeply religious man, was quite punctual in his five time prayers and recited Quran every dawn after his prayers. I remember when I was small I would hear the recitation when I was asleep and woke up to its melodious sounds coming through my father’s lips. He also introduced me to our Islamic heritage when I was a child and told me stories from the Quran and the life of the Prophet. Though I became oblivious to it all during the intervening years, decades later when I came to the study of the Quran for my research work, I suddenly remembered my debt to my father. For there, in my unconscious, I found safe and sound the echoes of his sweet recitations of the Quran and the stories from Islamic lore.
My father was a lover of knowledge and he thought that religion was the highest form of it. Importantly, though, he did not impose on his children a strict following of his religious observances and such liberality of mind made his debt even greater. In the month of Ramadan, he would even discourage us from fasting as it would hamper our studies and as long we were studying, he would say, fasting was not an obligation for us, as learning and acquisition knowledge was our primary duty. My mother, like us children, was also rather casual in observing ritual injunctions. Still, I would pray with my father or go to the mosque along with him whenever he asked, especially for Friday prayers, which was almost a regular feature. A transformation was, however, soon to occur in 1968 when, at the age of sixteen, he sent me to Punjab University, Lahore, from where I was to complete my BA Honours and MA in philosophy in 1972-3. My introduction to philosophy and Marxism came at the same time due to the socio-political context of the time.
Conversion
Those were the heydays of late Sixties and early Seventies when Pakistan and its people, which included almost all strata of population from middle and lower classes such as workers, peasants, students, teachers, doctors, engineers and other sections of the intelligentsia, had become part of the worldwide popular movement in which socialism and Marxism, in its varied forms, were to play pivotal role. Almost as soon as I was enrolled in the department of philosophy, I became associated with a group of progressive intellectuals led by some university teachers and senior students. The group soon turned into Punjab University’s first ever left wing students’ organization which was confronted all the way by the right wing students’ organization sponsored by the much resourceful Jamaat-e Islami.
Becoming a socialist marked a radical break in my life. I questioned my father’s belief in religion being the highest form of knowledge and he was ill-disposed towards my newly found Marxist convictions and we would engage in heated debates whenever I visited home (as I was living in a university hall in Lahore). I passionately believed in modern approach towards religion which saw it as a form of superstition or false knowledge employed by the ruling classes to keep the masses in their servitude. Our passion for social justice and struggle for people’s rights ran parallel to our estrangement from religion as an outdated ideology that legitimized social inequality (which included class and gender inequality) as natural order of things. I had actually converted, for Marxism, and for that matter whole of modern thought, whether Marxism or liberalism, is a conversion from one perspective to another, not very unlike converting from one religion to another.
This is rather more the case with Marxism than liberalism, because the former demands a complete break with religion whereas the latter allows you to hang on to religion as an aspect of your private life. Still, if most people in the West manage to live on with such arrangement due to their specific Christian historical context, in the non-Western world, more especially in the Islamic world, most modern looking people live double lives, with split personalities, one devoted to religion, the other to modernity. They are seldom able to reconcile the two systems of thought that results in a confusion of mind of which they are not necessarily fully aware. The confusion is most rampant in our science classrooms where religion and science, or tradition and modernity, come into open conflict. Most teachers escape this conflict by openly professing before their students, even at the university level, that they did not believe in the scientific theories they were teaching.
My father was appalled and distressed to see his rebellious son developing into an atheist and disowning the (Islamic) religious tradition altogether in favour of a modernist, Marxist version of history. As a Marxist I was a staunch anti-imperialist and drew his attention to Western imperialism’s alliance with religion and religious parties the world over (we would call our ideological foes in the university ‘pets of American imperialism’). To this he would rebut by pointing out the continued Soviet occupation of Central Asian Muslim peoples.
Interestingly, I had no qualms with his rebuttal in that by then Sino-Soviet split within the communist world had occurred and the Marxists I had associated with happened to be in the Chinese camp. Being fervent adherents of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought’ we would often condemn American and Soviet ‘social imperialism’ in the same breath. In these discussions, I must confess, to my everlasting regret, that while my father was quite tolerant towards me, I would often be somewhat rude to him, which was unbecoming of a son towards his father. The point, in short, is that my paradigm shift, from religious to modern perspective, in its Marxist version, was complete perhaps by the end of my second year in the university (which coincided with the onset of my adulthood). I can still remember his intense disappointment when I announced that at the end of my studies I would not sit for the higher civil service examinations as I had decided teaching to be my future profession.
None of my teachers in the department at the university was a Marxist, though neither of them was die-hard religious minded either. In hindsight it was good in the sense that it helped me in learning the other side of Western thought. So I learnt Marxism not so much from my teachers in the classroom as from my senior comrades and teachers who were leading and guiding our organization (and later also from the intellectuals outside the university). Furthermore, it was a learning of Marxist philosophy in practice. My entrance into the Marxist world, that is, did not just have a theoretical ring to it, for it involved participation in active politics that soon stepped outside the perimeters of the university.
By the time I started teaching at Government College, Lahore, in 1974, I had been involved with various Marxist groups and parties working at national level. Besides associating with working classes and taking part in study circles, public demonstrations, rallies and so forth, I was also involved in street action such as selling pamphlets at Bhati Gate and other sites in Lahore. For nearly two years I was engaged in teaching work with peasants in a village about three quarters of an hour’s bus journey from Lahore. We not only believed in change through revolution but we also thought revolution was in sight. The feeling of power or transcendence that it gave us I can still remember even now.
Crisis of identity
Such faith and its accompanying emotion was not to last long though. In the early Eighties the ground began to shift from under my feet and by the middle of this decade I was in intellectual turmoil as serious doubts started assailing my Marxist worldview. When I tried to speak of these doubts with my immediate friends and colleagues, I was confronted with a blank wall. The situation once again had strong parallels with religious conversion, for my friends took my questions largely in the same way as a dissenter is taken in a religious group. I better drop such questions, it was suggested, as they were simply the consequence of some confusions of my mind. I must read the (Marxist) texts more seriously and try to overcome my petty bourgeois, middle class mentality.
I will come to those doubts and questions shortly after relating the circumstances that created them. But at the time I found myself not just in a dire intellectual isolation but in a crisis of identity. Who was I? ‘Identity depends on perspective,’ as it is said. I had abandoned fifteen or so years ago the religious perspective in which I was born and raised and now I had lost faith in my modernist, Marxist worldview. What would I do? Where would I go? It was as if I had been left with no space to stand on. Or as if I had been excluded from the world and thrown into a void. In simple words, it implied that I had to find an alternative, or the third perspective. I wondered if it was possible at all, or it was really sane to think in such terms. I have used the word ‘sanity’ of such thinking because Marxism, in whatever of its variants, at the time was the third way, in opposition to the other two reigning perspectives, namely, religious and liberal capitalist. No one in the world at the time could ever think of its fall that suddenly came a few years later in 1989. So the idea of finding yet another perspective, the fourth in fact, sounded bizarre to my friends, perhaps no less even to myself at the beginning.
What happened with the other members of my circle? I mean, did any one else face the same crisis? Well, I have not come across any. As far as I know, a few of them eventually did return to the world of religion where they had come from. The others doggedly hung on to the Marxist perspective, and even now are carrying on living in that world, speaking the same language, as if the old fight between capitalism and communism is still going on without much difference. There are still others who continue to fiddle with Marxist ideas while in all actuality they are living in a liberal, capitalist framework following all the values of money grabbing and consumption that this perspective inculcates and idolizes.
Circumstances leading to the third Way
Now what were the circumstances that contributed to my identity crisis? Well, some of them were objective, others subjective, but there were also those which can be characterized as objective-subjective. Paradoxically, at the end they pointed to the path I had to take in my search for the third perspective.
On the objective side, two factors need to be mentioned, one bearing national character, the other international. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who had played the leading role in introducing socialist ideas on popular level, increasingly became wearied of left wing groups in the country and began tilting towards religious ideology and reliance on state power as the mainstay of his power. This was a betrayal of great magnitude, for if he had to pay the great price for it personally, it also set the country on a path whose bloody consequences are still unfolding. The man he appointed as the chief of army staff was chosen by him because he was, as he described him, a true ‘momin.’ This pious Muslim would be his executioner, along with many others who had pinned their hopes of a new era on him.
In 1977 his handpicked general overthrew his government and martial law was proclaimed ostensibly with Western, American support. The new regime sought its legitimacy in Islamist, rightwing ideology and brutal repression of all progressive forces in the country was launched. Such American sponsored military regimes were not unusual in those days but what it meant for us most of all was that the dreams of a revolution would become increasingly difficult to sustain.
The new regime might not have lasted long but for a heaven sent opportunity that arrived for it in December 1979 when the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan to defend the nascent communist revolution there brought about by a small communist Afghan group which had hardly any popular roots. Pakistan’s momin dictator suddenly became the darling of the West when he offered them full scale support in their attempt to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation. It was a strange surrealist situation whereby the most powerful communist state was confronting a primitive religiously motivated people and was unable to subdue them. The grave-diggers of religion would soon find to their astonishment that at the end it were they who were to lie in the grave. On the other hand a brutally repressive, religiously fanatic, Taliban like regime in Pakistan had become the frontline state of the Western, so-called Free World. As ‘the holy war’ dragged on, for that is how it was projected by the military regime, so did the religious ideology take deeper roots in Pakistan. What was happening, after all?
On the subjective-objective side, perhaps the most decisive turn, which eventually led to the destabilization of my worldview, arrived sometime in 1974. This was my attachment with a politico-cultural group founded by Najm Hussain Syed in the same year. It followed the tragic assassination of Dr. Aziz ul Haq in 1973 who was the leader of the newly founded Young People’s Front (YPF) of which we had become active members as we came out of our student days. Dr. Aziz was almost a religious devotee of Mao, whom he always called Chairman Mao, and believed that in preparing for revolution he was truly applying his thought in Pakistani conditions. YPF was supposed to be a Marxist group that was in the process of becoming communist party.
Dr. Aziz’s assassination dashed these hopes. The gap between him and his successor, ironically, was perhaps as large as between Mao Tse Tung and Hua Ko Fing, Mao’s successor. We held on to YPF for a while before joining Najm’s group. Najm, a Marxist intellectual (and a civil servant by profession), was different if not opposed to Dr Aziz both in his way of thinking and personality. Lately he had come under the influence of Ishaq Muhammad, the leader of Mazdoor Kisaan Party (MKP) which was the leading Maoist, left-wing party in the country at the time. Ishaq Muhammad and Najm shared an unassuming appearance while the former, an elderly person with grey hair surrounding the bald top of his head, also gave the look of a peasant leader. He had some literary talents as well and wrote a couple of revolutionary plays which were enacted by his party in rural areas as part of political work.
Najm, a quiet, introvert person found his calling, at least partly, through him. MKP lacked a cultural wing comprising urban intelligentsia and Najm would deliver it, as the work suited his temperament. He organized his group around two theses which sounded persuasive to us, though they were not well taken by the orthodox Marxists who saw them as a kind of retrogressive revisionism. There is little doubt that until then we too had seen revolution in purely political terms. Our goal was the overthrow of the decadent existing system and establishment of a revolutionary state through armed struggle. This means that on the one hand we defined our role largely in terms of political-military activity while on the other hand we saw ourselves as the prospective rulers-politicians of the revolutionary state we were seeking to establish.
Najm by disposition was a kind of person who would neither be a politician nor a military leader. He spoke of the cultural dimension of revolution and argued for certain independence of the intelligentsia, or of a section of it, in relation to political, armed activity of the revolutionary party. It implied autonomy of culture from politics that was not to the liking of traditional Marxists who saw everything in political-economic terms. Najm’s second thesis was even more controversial. He posited the issue of Punjabi language and culture at the heart of all revolutionary cultural activity in Punjab. The argument was simple: if we have to reach out to our masses and activate them in the cause of revolution, we can approach them only through their language and their cultural legacy which had been suppressed by the ruling so-called Ideology of Pakistan, of which (the propagation of) Islam and Urdu were the twin pillars. In this way we became aware of cultural oppression besides the economic and political oppression. So around him assembled a group of young people of which I happened to be a founding member.
We would meet every Friday evening at his house and study classical Punjabi poets. As Najm had an excellent knowledge of classical music, he would himself compose the piece of poetry selected for the day that we would all sing together at the end of the meeting. Being active exponents of Speak Punjabi, Read Punjabi, Write Punjabi movement, we started a Punjabi magazine of which I was an editor and regular contributor. Now what is important to remember is that we read the classical texts from Farid uddin Shakarganj in the 13th century to Ghulam Farid in the 19th, not in the cultural, or religious context in which they were composed but strictly in the light of Marxist perspective.
As I mentioned earlier, Najm, as a Marxist and Punjabi nationalist, had a twin aversion for religion (Islam) and Urdu that had been jointly instrumental in the suppression of Pakistani people and depriving Punjabi people of their language and culture in particular. So we saw the classical Punjabi intellectuals in our own image, as our projection backwards, as if they were the heroes of the working classes who sought to promote class struggle the ultimate object of which was to overthrow the rule of property classes and property culture. They are commonly known as Sufis but we had little sympathy for Sufism, which we considered, along with the rest of the modernist intelligentsia, as an even more decadent side of religion.
Najm himself in his writings interpreted classical poets around the core theme of their opposition to property culture while having no truck with their Islamic context. For him they were as good as atheists like him, and all references to Islamic heritage found in the texts could be taken as metaphors with no real content affecting their modern understanding. Thus he would have nothing to do with religious history, whether Islamic or otherwise. This idea would eventually make me part company with him. How is it that we can understand our cultural heritage outside of the Islamic context? To put it another way, how can we communicate with our people going halfway, that is, by making what seemed to be an artificial separation between the Islamic and ‘secular’ parts of our tradition? Najm’s separation of culture and religion was a peculiarly modernist strand of his thinking, as I was to come to know later. It might made some sense in modern West, but to speak to our people of Farid or Bulleh Shah as an atheists or without reference to their religious milieu is meaningless, at the best, ridiculous and hypocritical, at the worst.
I think during these days my mind had become a melting pot where the boundaries between different areas of thought, normally projected as natural, were coming down. In this regard I would relate two experiences. Modern thought’s primary mainstay is its strict separation from pre-modern thought. In philosophy, too, a sharp dividing line is drawn between religion and philosophy, or between religious, mythical or non-rational thought and philosophical, rational thought. In our philosophy classrooms, therefore, we introduce this Berlin Wall to our students on the first day of their entrance. Greek thought, the great ancestor of modern thought, began with this great separation, and again, modern philosophy emerged with a similar amputation in 16th century Europe. But to me it seemed a modern fabrication. Religion and philosophy are simply two types of thought and the idea that one is thought and other not, one rational and other irrational, privileging one over the other, did not make sense to me any more. So one day, during a casual discussion in my department chairman’s office at Government College, when I questioned the rationality of this Berlin Wall, he looked at me wondering if I had lost my mind or I was just pulling his leg. Obviously I did not press my point any more.
As a purely subjective experience, I remember when I first time saw a book on the teachings of Buddha. I was really surprised to find his insights into the negative influences of property on human relations and in the making of a true human being. I wondered why Marxism had repudiated all anti-property legacy while defining itself as the chief enemy of the hegemony that property exercises over man in the age of capitalism. I was also struck by Buddha’s language that did not seem to be religious as we had understood religion by then. I wonder how thrilled I would have been if I had discovered Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching at the time, for he completely defies the divide between religion and philosophy. Anyway, I think the encounter with the Buddha for the first time kindled in me the desire to see religion and tradition myself, not from the way it had been projected to us through the modernist and religious perspectives, that is, by the champions of modernity (liberals and Marxists) on the one hand and of religion and tradition (the mullahs) on the other.
To me it seemed a natural extension of Najm’s thesis. For it is not that our classical Punjabi poets had not been studied at all. Of course they were, but in a stereotyped way. Najm was in fact arguing for the re-examination of their work. But why to stop half-way, why not to go all the way to re-examine the whole of the tradition in which their work was historically situated and in which, more importantly, our people were deeply saturated? Looking down upon religious beliefs of our people seemed to me elitist and snobbish, no less than speaking to them in Urdu. So a re-examination of our religious heritage sounded imperative to me once I came to suspect that the apparently impregnable castle of Marxist theory might be made up of sand.
My estrangement with Marxism and with Najm went almost hand in hand as it increasingly became apparent to me that his perspective was basically exclusivist. He saw things in black and white, in either/ terms. Whatever role Islam and Urdu were playing in the world around us, they were out of his world and he would have nothing to do with them. This attitude smacked of an intolerance which went well neither with his soft appearance nor with the work of those of whom he believed to be the chief contemporary representative. In the middle Eighties, after my break with him, I published two collections of poetry, in Punjabi and Urdu each, and I am sure he read none of them.
Before I come to express my questioning of Marxism, I would mention another factor which went along my association with Najm’s circle and which contributed in the growth of thinking on the lines just mentioned. When I joined Government College, Lahore, one of the papers that I was asked to teach, by irony of fate but obviously against my wishes, was History of Muslim Thought. Of the core components of this course was Sufism. I think initially I took it as my Marxist perspective told me to see it. But as the years rolled on and my acquaintance with it grew I began feeling certain intimacy with it.
Sufis’ way of thinking and looking at the world attracted me and I came to know why people were given to them. Of course there were charlatans amongst them, as there are in every discipline. But the core of their teaching lay in their open mindedness, the liberality of their mind, that is, not thinking in black and white, either/or terms. People by their natural disposition abhor extremes, something we as middle class intelligentsia fail to understand. As Marxists we talked a lot of learning from people but this is something we never learnt from them. To put it bluntly, they are really neither believers nor unbelievers, which is basically the Sufi position. We had read Bulleh Shah in Najm’s circle who says loudly that ‘I am neither a believer nor an unbeliever.’ And yet we insisted that he must be an unbeliever like us.
Later I came to read a poem of same theme by Rumi. And when I came across Buddha’s teaching as mentioned above I could not fail to notice the inner continuity between the two teachings in spite of the vast gap of time and space between them. Could it be that what we call religion or tradition had a composite structure made up of an inner and an outer traditions, the inner one being common and running through all religions?
This vague idea found support when not long after I came across a puzzling fact which I became convinced needed to be investigated and explained. It was this: How is it that both modernists (whether liberal or Marxist) and the religious ideologues (such as those who were running the brutal military regime in Pakistan then) are united in their hatred and rejection of Sufism? History showed that Sufism was the inalienable part of Islamic religion, tradition, and civilization, and yet if religious intelligentsia excluded it from the Islamic polity as un-Islamic, the modern, secular intelligentsia saw it as most contrary to modernist values in the whole body of religion. And the need for such investigation was enhanced by the fact that Sufi way of thinking was not peculiar to Islam. Rather, it was the Islamic manifestation of a mode of thought and practice which underlay all living religions. I would soon find an opportunity to go head and heel for it.
Having gone through the objective and subjective circumstances which were instrumental in shaking my Marxist perspective as a theory that claimed to explain the whole reality of our world, I must relate the issues that I raised in my circle and which marked my break with it.
A critique of Marxism
Marxism (or communism), as we know, rose in opposition to liberalism (or capitalism). Its oppositional character notwithstanding, they can be termed as the two faces of modernity. Each of them claimed to be the rightful heir, or the true embodiment of the 18th century Enlightenment that laid down the basic principles of modern age. Marxism has an epistemological and an historical structure. The former is known as dialectical materialism while the latter is called historical materialism.
Now it occurred to me that dialectical materialism was a self-contradictory doctrine. As a materialist, Marx asserts that these are material circumstances which determine consciousness. He at the same time knows that this is a determinist position that leaves no room for human intervention in the material circumstances. So he calls it mechanical materialism from which he tries to break through articulating what he calls dialectical materialism. But what is this dialectical materialism but the core pf Marxism, of the revolutionary thought that is going to make the transformation from capitalist to communist society possible! Marxism is the new knowledge, the new teaching, thought, or consciousness that we learn and teach and practice to bury the capitalist order and replace it with a new one. This is clearly not a materialist position, for it clearly implies the leading role of thought and consciousness.
My point is that once you start with the question with which Marx does and end up with the answer at which he comes, there is no way to escape from this contradiction. The ultimate question of philosophy, according to him, is: which is primary, matter or mind, body or thought? As a materialist he chooses the former as the ultimate reality while the latter is seen as its derivative or developed form. Having said that, he ends up with the derivative leading the entity whence it is derived. In truth what he seems to be doing, but like a magician trying to conceal from us, is an interaction of matter and mind which is actually not allowed by the premises, or by the ultimate question of philosophy that he himself posed and started with.
Unlike Hegel, who threw in oblivion the actual material conditions, pushing the real people who made the society out in order to let his fantastic Mind or Absolute monoplize the world picture, Marx actually synthesized, forming a bridge between mind and matter as far as he could, which is really what dialectical materialism is. But he was as unaware of it as the audience to whom he was showing his theoretical product, because both started with the premise that either mind or matter could be really real, the idea of both being real being foreign to them. This was one reason it could not survive long.
The idea of the revolutionary party, led by the revolutionary intelligentsia, again brings to relief the contradiction that he is trying to conceal. To me his whole vision of the revolutionary intelligentsia leading the revolution and then heading the revolutionary state seemed like a re-formed, modern version of Plato’s idea of an ideal state where philosophers are the rulers. But he speaks so much of materialism and then so much is made of materialist forces of history that you are almost barred from suspecting that nothing would have been possible of whatever he is saying without granting mind at least an equality with matter.
My friends felt offended when I asked them if it was not really the case that Marxism was indeed the ideology of the middle class intelligentsia, or of a section of it which sought to become the ruling class, rejecting the stance of the liberal section of intelligentsia which chose for itself a position subservient to the Capital!
After all, Marx makes it clear that proletariat is the material force of the revolution but by itself it is nothing more than an engine without the fuel, or driver, to be more precise. For by itself it is incapable of discovering the revolutionary consciousness; or, worse still, of its class consciousness, which is its self-consciousness as a class distinct from the ruling and the middle classes. Such consciousness is brought to it by the revolutionary middle class intelligentsia, to which Marx himself belonged. And finally, the communist party, led by the revolutionary intelligentsia, becomes true to its name only in so far as it can develop or become aware and equipped with classless consciousness in class society. Without classless consciousness in class society a revolutionary party has no meaning, which clearly defies the idea of the primacy of matter over consciousness.
To free himself from this self-contradiction, or in order to conceal it, you can put it the way you like, Marx brings support from his theory of historical materialism which pronounces that the course, that is, the transition from capitalist to communist society is already historically determined. This makes it a theory of historical determinism which pronounces the pre-determination of communist society, only it is not decreed by God but by history.
What apparently implies is that revolutionary intelligentsia is only facilitating the transition from capitalist to communist society. Notwithstanding the fact that it still affirms leading role of the mind, thought, knowledge or consciousness in human affairs, the theory of historical materialism was dead by the time Engels died, when it had become apparent that most advanced capitalist societies, led by Britain, Marx’s future ideal society, had defied historical determinism, had transcended the historically determined transition from capitalism to communism and the most advanced proletariat had embraced capitalism as their ideology.
The second factor which pronounced the death of the theory of historical materialism was, ironically, Leninism and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which was then hailed as the saviour of Marxism. Lenin’s revision of the theory was doubly fatal for Marxism, for on the one hand it increased even more the role of consciousness and of the revolutionary intelligentsia in the making of communism, and on the other it made a mess of the five stages theory of historical materialism (which sees history as progressing through an evolutionary sequence of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism) by introducing communism and establishing dictatorship of the proletariat in a society still in the throes of feudalism. This mess was increased even further when Mao Tse Tung came up with his revision which envisaged establishing communism in an agrarian society and where peasants would form the chief force of revolution. And he succeeded. Imagine the power of imagination. Worst still, the Afghan communists stretched the matter to the point where comedy and tragedy become indistinguishable. They went on trying to implement communism in a primitive tribal society. Ironically, when they fell into trouble, they called the Russians to their defence who had originally started the revision of Marxism. The eventual collapse of the whole enterprise in 1989 proved the hollowness of Marxism as a materialist theory of social change.
However, 1989 was still to come. When I raised these questions in the early or mid Eighties in the circle, I made little sense to them (of course 1989 was unthinkable and there was still great hope that the mighty USSR would win against all odds). Surprisingly, now, when the legacy of 1917 revolution has disappeared from Russia and the successors of Mao have incorporated capitalism into their communism, putting the final clumsy nail into its coffin, it is surprising that there are still people in the world who continue to seek succour from the deceased theory of historical materialism.
Since my critique of Marxism has a strong bearing on the construction of the third Way, I would elaborate on it a little further. I have argued that Marxism collapsed because of the fundamental flaws in the construction of its twin pillars, namely, dialectical and historical materialism. The former mixed up the relation between mind and matter, man and nature, while the latter was basically a fantastic, idealist construction which betrayed Hegel’s deep influence on Marx. However, in both, his ultimate problem lay his confinement to European experience which showed him, like all other modern thinkers, only a patch of reality and history which he took for the whole reality and history and went on to build his intellectual construction on it that was supposedly applicable to the whole world.
These constraints led Marx to further contradictions. For instance, on the one hand he is fighting for the cause of propertyless culture, to free human essence from the thrall of goods and objects, and on the other he makes economics or goods creation his and human society’s principle occupation. And again, he knows the state is a form of self-alienated society and yet believes that it can serve as midwife to a free state-less society. His alienation and rejection of the whole pre-modern tradition led him to the construction of a fantastic theory of history and on the other hand cut him off from the huge legacy of anti-property tradition, which remained largely hidden and underdeveloped in Western religious tradition due largely to Europe’s late entry into the age of civilization. His Eurocentric perspective, then, had value only as long as Europe was the world. That is how Europe believed and saw in the nineteenth century in which Marx flourished.
Move abroad
The ideas discussed so far were cooking in my head and I wanted a break from my teaching to pursue them fully. In our part of the world a teacher is never given a break from his or her work, called sabbatical in the West, usually of a year, which is meant to relax a little. Such relaxation is not an idyllic pastime. Rather it is meant variously such as to be with your self, sort out your ideas, refresh your knowledge, do your writing and so forth. So I felt tired and exhausted after being in teaching for over a decade. Various ideas roaming in my mind needed to be worked out of which I would speak to my wife more and more frequently. Then the political religious situation in the country, being dictated by Afghan War on the one hand and repressive, loudly hypocritical religious policies of the regime on the other, was too suffocating for any kind of independent thinking. The second half of the Eighties had descended as the exact opposite of the exhilarating first half of the Seventies. After a brilliant dawn the dark night had set in where you couldn’t see even yourself, your own soul.
Luckily, a reprieve for me was in store. In late 1986, perhaps in December, I happened to find in a local paper an advertisement from the British Council offering scholarships to read for a Ph D degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, especially for young lecturers. I submitted my application along with a synopsis for my prospective study of Sufism. In the following September (1987) I was in England and once my family joined me in February I was set on the path to carry out my research into the nature of Sufism in particular and of religion in general.
This research, I must make it clear, in case I have not already, was not an escape into the world of academia. The passion for social change that I had acquired from Marx in my teens and the need to own our tradition thanks to Najm were never lost to me. Religion was being brutally used in the cause of social and political repression on the on hand and of imperial domination on the other. But the reason that the operation was being carried out with such measure of success and ease lay in the fact that modern intelligentsia had left this core component of our people’s history in the hands of the mullahs, pronouncing it the ‘tradition of all the dead generations [that] weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,’ as Marx would put it. The monopoly of the religious intelligentsia over our history and cultural heritage had given them free reign to manipulate it at their will and, worse still, place it at the service of military and feudal adventurers. It had to be reclaimed. If we want to rewrite the history books for our children in the schools, we cannot throw the whole history of religion out, nor can we tell them, following the practice of our brethren in the Western universities, that all history of our ancestors is the history of fools. Ancestor worship is certainly bad, but ancestor hatred does not qualify for eulogy either.
The topic for my doctoral studies was to be Sufism with special reference to its development in the Punjab. The specification was suggested by my supervisor, Professor C. Shackle. He was of the view that I couldn’t do work on Sufism in general because of my paltry knowledge of Persian and none at all of Arabic. Furthermore, the area was too large for a PhD thesis any way. The propriety of the topic that he suggested derived from the fact that I had also a postgraduate degree in Punjabi Language and Literature (which I had obtained as a private candidate in 1975 after coming into Najm’s circle). I could add a chapter or two on the early history of Sufism prior to its advent in India drawing on the translations of the relevant Arabic sources. But the main body of my thesis had to be based on original sources.
Professor Shackle told me at the outset that he was basically a linguist and not an expert on Sufism, his own Ph D thesis being on Siraiki language and literature, which meant that his guidance would be largely restricted to methodology. Work on doctoral thesis was largely an individual effort which required a huge amount of personal initiative while spending a lot of time in seclusion, he warned me. The negative side of it was that I had to find out the necessary sources myself and if I missed any, it won’t be his fault. The positive side of it was that he left me alone to develop my own thought. I think I was happy with this arrangement because I had heard of those researchers who were rather dictated by the line of thinking of their expert supervisors.
In London I became acquainted with two Sufi communities. The first one was centered round Irena Twedie, a lady of radiant appearance of East European origin who was probably in her late sixties when I met her. She traveled to India some decades ago where she became a disciple of a Sufi master. Later she wrote a voluminous book called The Daughter of Fire about her experiences with her master that I found quite interesting and instructive. She would hold weekly meetings at her house. She would sit in a chair while we would sit around her on the floor for an hour or so, asking her different questions, sharing with her our dreams and listening to her whatever she had to say, though she wouldn’t speak much. But this association, unfortunately, did not last long.
My other association lasted for over three years. This small community of dervishes, as it was sometimes called, was led by an Iranian master who fled his country after the revolution of 1979. The clerical regime closed most of the Sufi centres after coming to power and so a large number of Sufis either went into hiding or migrated abroad. You remember the question I mentioned earlier needing to be investigated that contributed in my search for the third way, namely, why the Sufi way is rejected to the point of resentment by both the clerical and modern perspectives alike? The question becomes even more poignant when we recall that if in Iran it was the clerical regime that closed down Sufi centres, half a century earlier it was Kemal Ataturk’s modernist regime in Turkey that fell hard on the Sufis. Interesting, isn’t it?
Well, the master first went to America, accompanied by his family and small group of disciples which included some Americans too. Finally he established his khanaqah (hospice, also called zaawiya in the Arab world) in London. The lineage of the silsilah or brotherhood of which he was the current master went back to almost seven hundred years. I think I came to know of it through an American disciple of his who was also associated with SOAS.
He invited me to visit the khanaqah and see for myself if I wanted to be join the fraternity. The meetings were held every Monday and Thursday on the ground floor of a large three storey house in central London. The first thing that I noticed, and which might have been one of the sources of the wrath of the clerics, that there was no gender segregation and men and women would sit next to each other along the walls of the two adjoined rooms. The lights were dimmed at the start of the session which began with a short pre-recorded discourse by the master on the microphone or at times of some old Sufi masters which was followed by Sufi music for about twenty minutes and a meditation of half an hour. That was all. Half an hour later food was served. On the first floor there was a prayer room for those who wished to offer formal prayers.
After two or three visits I was informed that I could only continue if I had made up my mind to be formally initiated. Having deliberated deeply enough I decided to go for it. A scholarly journal on Sufism was also published by the khanaqah as many academics, especially in America, were initiated with the silsilah. A few of my articles were published in it. However, after about three years I found the master too remote, as if he had not much time for all his disciples perhaps. But the main reason for my disillusionment lay in the rather conservative mindset of the khanaqah, reluctant to embrace new ideas.
It seemed as if they were trying to preserve a remnant of the past in the modern world. I strongly had a feeling of repetition which reflected quite obviously in the poetry and discourses of the master, for instance. Only words seemed different, all else was said before. And Sufism that repeats itself, for me, is Sufism only in name. I have never called myself a Sufi because I am a Sufi and not a Sufi at the same time. Then, may be it was my own shortcoming that I did not feel much spiritual progress and worst still, the master didn’t seem interested. So I was left with no option but to separate. Needless to say, the experience was invaluable as I learnt quite few things from a first hand experience of an age old tradition.
Except for these associations I was lost to the world during my research work. I would have no contact with Pakistan for years to come. It is said of the country that in order to love it you have to leave it for abroad. But I had no love lost between us in the circumstances I left it. Once abroad, I didn’t feel like belonging to any particular land. Nomads have no passports, they say. I was largely detached from the external world anyway, spending large amount of time in the SOAS library or with books brought home and writing of course. The year 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall evidently came as a great surprise like every one else but I was (intellectually) situated much better to withstand the tremours following the fall than most others.
The disintegration of USSR, collapse of the communist world, its end as the main opposition force to capitalism and Marx’s subsequent incorporation into the capitalist order lent legitimacy and greater urgency to my work. Capitalist world order had been left with no opposition to it any more. For any thinking person on the planet it was a chilling prospect. Whatever the inconsistencies and shortcomings of ‘actually existing socialism,’ as it was called by some then, which were of course not few, for nearly a century it had not only given hopes of a just social order to the ‘wretched of the earth’ (Franz Fanon’s phrase) around the globe. It had restrained and checked the imperial ambitions and devouring instincts of the capitalist order.
Once the alternative, oppositional force was gone, capitalism assumed the posture and pretension of being a natural order, as if it was decreed by nature (divinely decreed, in the language of old). Capital was enthroned as the undisputed heavy-weight champion of the world (to use the imagery from Rocky film series of Reagon’s era). The whole world would be a market for the devotees of the Capital god where they would freely practice and promote the values of self-interest (a polite word for selfishness), profit, accumulation, consumption and a life-style bordering on naked hedonism as the ultimate end and meaning of life. Soon, in a decade’s time, the state would become an obedient servant of the new god while keeping the poor individuals under the piercing gaze of its CCTVs around the clock. This is what we now call globalization. Adam Smith, the founding theoretician of capitalism, surmised that there was ‘a certain propensity in human nature … to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.’ Perhaps he was being cautious. In the age of globalization it would be the only propensity in human nature worth promoting.
So the shock of the fall of the last citadel of resistance to Capital was not small, for its implications were quite far reaching. One of these that I just mentioned, if you remember, you would certainly like me to explain, if briefly, before coming back to the starting of my research at SOAS. Well, this is my assertion that Marx has been incorporated into the intellectual structure of liberal capitalism, a further point in my critique of him. This assimilation of the arch enemy of Capital into its ambience is indeed tragic. You know Marx, Weber and Durkheim were already known as the founding fathers of modern sociology and social theory, and therefore considered as the foremost architects of modern thought after Enlightenment. But since the disappearance of the threat of communist revolution, most Western liberal thinkers find no harm in owning Marx after subtracting the now dysfunctional political part from his intellectual corpus. As an aside, since the rise of Islamic threat in this decade they find his denunciation of religion and his devout materialism quite helpful in the furtherance of their ideology.
Above all, they find his insights into the working of capitalism quite useful. Ironically, his former enemies have cruelly dissected his most famous statement, the credo of his work, from the middle and while throwing away the subversive part of it, have mummified the first and put on show in their universities. The famous saying, if you cannot immediately recall it, is ‘Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world while the real thing is to change it.’ Look at this book, Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Modernity (2003: Blackwell), for instance, edited by R. J. Antonio, where, in the words of the General Editor, Antonio
draws our attention to the core of Marx’s writings, which were always about the inner workings, which were always about the inner workings and powerful consequences of capitalism than they were about history at large, or class revolution, or communist society, or anything else. (p. xv)
Interesting, isn’t it? The ‘core of Marx’s writings,’ we are informed, are not about revolution or communist society but about…well you see, this is Marx re-invented, whose work was not so much about changing the world as interpreting it. Antonio himself tells us in his introduction that actually ‘At the millennium, his thought has increased in force, free of the weight of communism, in a world where “neoliberal,” or deregulated, free-market capitalism has triumphed over competing post-Second World War social democratic and state-centered form of capitalism (p.20).’
Not long after starting my research I realized that I was working on a project much larger than needed for my PhD. I wanted to have full picture of the tradition, but how full? Professor Shackle respected my enthusiasm and patiently kept examining my pieces that I wrote for him. Finally he drew my attention to the fact that I had written a lot more than required and needed to select the material and submit the thesis, which I belatedly did. Obtaining my degree, I continued my researches into the history and philosophy of religion and published my findings in 1996, entitled A Forgotten Vision: A Study of Human Spirituality in the Light of the Islamic Tradition, which incorporated my doctoral thesis. So what was this forgotten vision that I had discovered?
Before going to answer this question let me remind you that at the outset it was clear to me that Sufism was part of religious history of humankind and therefore its understanding was directly linked with, if not followed from, the way you understood religion. Therefore my Ph D thesis suggested a theory of religion while history of Sufism was put forth in its evidence. It also soon became apparent to me that a theory of religion could not be substantiated through study of one religious tradition alone, and which happened to be my mother tradition. In A Forgotten Vision, then, I stated in more explicit terms the new hypothesis about the nature of tradition and traditional, religious conception of reality, and broadened the area of evidence by presenting the spiritual or core tradition of Hinduism in comparison to Sufism.
Hinduism was chosen mainly for three reasons. Firstly, I was born in the land which historically belongs to India and I thought I had a better vantage point to look at it. Secondly, further evidence for the theory should ideally come from a family of religions other than the one to which Islam belongs. Generally great living religions are broadly divided into two groups, Western and Eastern. Interestingly enough, Islam is placed in the former along with Judaism and Christianity. It is also known as Abrahamic tradition, due to the common ancestor of all of them.
Eastern tradition includes Indian and Chinese religions of which Islam is the last model. Since Hinduism is the first one in the Indian tradition (Buddhism being the second), and Islam the third of the Western, juxtaposition and comparison of the two models in support of my theory seemed attractive to me. The final reason was methodological in nature. When we trace history of Sufism from its origins and move to India and the Punjab in the 12th-13th centuries, the immediate fact that strikes us is its coming into close interaction with Hindu and other native spiritual Indian traditions. The whole subsequent development of Sufism in Punjab and India then can be evaluated properly only if we have fuller understanding of the chief native tradition with which it intermingled.
Recovery of the forgotten vision
Or
A Forgotten Vision as the founding text of the third perspective
What is this forgotten vision then, you will ask, that A Forgotten Vision (AFV) claims to have discovered? In one word, it is the discovery of the third way as the founding principle of the premodern civilizations.
Well, the four papers given below, numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6, respond to this question but for the sake of present talk I will revisit AFV. To put it succinctly, it is the discovery of the structure of premodern civilizations; and by structure I mean epistemological and social or cultural structures. It is the recovery of the vision of our ancestors; a recalling of the way the traditional man thought and lived and organized his world. With the onslaught of modernity we have forgotten the way premodern mind experienced the world that has left us a lot more poorer than we realize. It is said that man is a social animal. But as Toynbee observed, social life preceded man. Man’s distinction lies in that he is a historical being. The loss of the accumulated experience of our ancestors, which is precisely what we call our past, has a direct connection with the present disorder in the world.
Now since the rise of the post-colonial studies, which is generally associated with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), there has been a lot of stress and talk about the recovery of the past that colonialism destroyed. But nobody seems to know what that past is and what is it that we have to recover or reclaim. In most cases there is great vent of anger and frustration at such destruction but then nobody seems to know exactly what it was that was destroyed and what it is that the native culture lost at the hand of the occupant culture. With the result that in spite of a good deal of outpouring of postcolonial work, Western domination and control of the former colonies keeps intensifying rather diminishing. AFV is an attempt to locate what is it that we have lost, not just as non-Westerners but as humans, signifying that the loss is of whole humanity.
You would have heard of C. G. Jung’s famous book Modern Man in Search of Soul. This is about modern man’s loss of his past, his soul. Freud and Jung both tried to recover human past whose significance was not lost to them as students of psychology. Both, while claiming to be scientists, ventured into philosophy, religion and mythology to get into the structure of human psyche but with different motives. Freud’s object in probing the mind of the premodern human was to prove the irrationality of the past (which he understood as man’s childhood) in favour of the rationality of modernity of which he took himself to be the foremost representative and ideologue. You would have heard of his little tract The Future of an Illusion. For him religion was an illusion which needed to be aggressively overcome by the greater dissemination of science, as for Marx it was opium, a deadly addiction of the masses to be treated by the awakening of their class consciousness and their engagement in class struggle.
Jung, on the other hand, was a deeper man of spiritual inclinations. He thought that the recovery of past was necessary because it guided us in our understanding of the present, individually and collectively, which contributed in overcoming our self-alienation. Therefore his search went much deeper than Freud’s. For instance, he delved deep into alchemy which Freud would consider obnoxious. Marx and Freud’s attitude towards the past typified that of modern civilization’s in general, which is that of contempt and disconnection with it, while Jung’s was that of respect and attempt to seek reconciliation with it. But in the end he was inhibited by the cultural context of modern Europe in which he was raised and which by the turn of the twentieth century had almost completely lost the ethos of the traditional civilizations.
To put it more concretely, Europe’s drive to denounce and amputate from the religious past and redefine knowledge in scientific terms was set in motion, above all, by Francis Bacon (1561-1626), known as the first philosopher of modern science. In his writings, as J. K. Bajaj has shown, knowledge-power identity is established, and from this perspective ‘nature appears almost as an enemy, to be dissected and tortured to make it yield its secrets (A. Nandy, ed, Science, Hegemony and Violence:1990: 47).’ The scientific perspective subsequently aggressively pursued and articulated by the eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers was almost complete at the dawn of the last century. Consequently, Western man had by then nearly wholly lost the experience of the premodern man and the epistemological, or metaphysical, and social or cultural structures of traditional civilizations lay deeply buried under the newly built edifice of modernity.
In this sense AFV can be considered as a work in archeology of knowledge. This phrase immediately recalls Foucault but his excavations remained limited to uncover the power-knowledge nexus underlying modern institutions. Being a child of modernity, born in the country of the leading founders of Enlightenment, he had no clue of hidden traditional structures nor he felt any need to look for them. I am not undervaluing his work. Exposing the coercive, domineering nature of modern knowledge, all driven to power over nature and other human beings, was a work of great importance. But the point is that is how scientific knowledge was originally visualized by Bacon and that was the vision that galvanized whole Europe. Secondly, if Foucault’s archeology of knowledge brings to light knowledge-power nexus operating in all the institutions of modern West, what conclusions he draws from it? Can we combat it? Can it be otherwise? His answer was No. So you come to this horrific conclusion that knowledge is inherently coercive and domineering. The logical implication is that ignorance is heaven, knowledge is hell.
This, you know, is the perversity of the so-called postmodern critique which ends up in indictment of knowledge and eulogy of ignorance. What a sad, pathetic, or tragic, if you like, end of Enlightenment project!! The point I am trying to make is that it is only by the excavation of the traditional structure of knowledge and culture that we come to know that knowledge is not inherently evil, that man has no other tool for freedom but knowledge. And if modern man has come to this conclusion that knowledge is a tool for manipulation of man and nature, it proves only the perversity of modern knowledge, not of knowledge itself, leaving us in need of no other evidence to prove that modern knowledge’s understanding of traditional knowledge is fundamentally flawed.
But I am obviously being ahead of my argument. The debris of over two and half centuries cannot be removed with one stroke and archeological work, more so of knowledge, is proverbially time-taking and tiresome that asks for step by step movement.
To pick up the thread of my argument, we know that modern study of religion is not limited to Jung and Freud. Much work on the nature of religion and the structure of premodern society has been carried out by Western scholars from across various disciplines from archeology, anthropology, history and religious studies to sociology and psychology (and such disciplines as sociology of religion, history of religion, psychology of religion, philosophy of religion) in the past two centuries that could fill up the shelves of a multi-storey library. Did they all get it wrong? My answer is yes; modern mind’s whole study of religion, tradition and past (three terms being interchangeable) is fundamentally distorted. And this, as I said earlier, has a direct connection with the present intellectual bankruptcy of Western thought, of the crisis of the social sciences, of the disintegration of modernity as a viable social structure.
You would find my claim to discovery of the structure of premodern civilizations, which actually reflects the structure of premodern mind, almost risible especially in view of the second fact. This is the presence of the existing religious traditional intelligentsia of various religions who are supposedly the inheritors of the traditional man and society. Am I suggesting that they too do not truly represent the traditional mind? It simply defies common sense.
Well, when you are proposing a hypothesis which defies common sense you are asking for a revolution in thought and knowledge, a revolution that renders a huge amount of existing thought and knowledge, with its corresponding texts, obsolete. Therefore it is seldom that contemporary generation pays any attention to it. There are instances in both social and natural sciences, though, paradoxically, more common in latter than in former, of new theories that ask for a radical restructuring of knowledge. In the social sciences Marxism did not universally defy common sense. For many it made great sense though for the ruling ideology it did defy common sense. However, its collapse has made Western intelligentsia so wary of theory that they think it is impossible to make any generalization about social facts. Social science, in other words, is virtually dead. Social scientists of course continue to write a lot about small, regional and local but any view of the whole they consider dangerous and ‘totalitarian’. Ironically, it does not occur to them that they are thus, even though inadvertently, playing to the tune of totalitarianism of Capital and its State.
In the history of natural science common sense was twice challenged successfully at grand scale that overturned established way of thinking with momentous conclusions in the domain of knowledge. The first one was the Copernican, helio-centric theory that challenged the age old geo-centric theory whereas the second case was the revolution that the twin theories of quantum and relativity brought about in the first decade of the last century. I will say more in the last section about the intellectual and social implications of these two great upheavals.
So what is the modernist conception of religion or the so-called secular or scientific view of religious history of which much is made by the modern mind? At the heart of all thought and knowledge is the fundamental question which is made of just two words: What is? To explicate this question another word is added to it and it is put thus: What is there? That is, what is there in the world? To make the question more comprehensible it is also put as: What is real? Or what is true? That is, what is real/true in the world and what appearance/unreal/false? This is also known as the fundamental or first question of philosophy.
The question is also posed as: What exists? That is, what exists in the world? Existence, in this case, means that which exists by its own right. For instance, do the ghosts or spirits exist? Or, are the ghosts and spirits, or the non-material world real? That is, are they endowed with being? The modern mind answers this question in negative. For it, the answer to the question What is? Or What is real? Or What exists is: Only matter is, only the material world exists, only the matter and material world is real, or only that which is perceived through senses is real.
The question ‘what is?’ in all its variations is called metaphysical or ontological question as ontology discusses the problem of reality, being or truth. Ontology is at the heart of knowledge because knowledge is the knowledge of reality or truth or being. When we say that only that which is real is the source of knowledge, and that which is unreal cannot be source of knowledge, it means that if the unreal or untrue has been made the source of knowledge, it obviously is false knowledge. The problem of source of knowledge is called epistemology. So we have seen that for modern or scientific epistemology, only the physical is real and true and therefore all knowledge that is not derived from or rooted in the physical is superstition, false or illusory knowledge.
Thus, the modern mind makes its position distinct from the premodern mind by asserting, by claiming that for the latter only non-material world is, only mind exists, only the non-material, the spirit, the mind is real. Therefore all premodern knowledge, religion or tradition is false, illusory knowledge. On the basis of this distinction modern philosophy sees the whole history of thought and knowledge in terms of materialism and idealism. Thus you are either materialist or idealist, either modern or traditional, scientific or religious, either living in the present or past. This dualist structure is taken as obvious, commonplace, common sense, self-evident.
But it is this common sense that I am questioning. My argument is that this dualism is the peculiar character of modern mind and not of the mind itself and therefore we are not condemned to chose between one or the other, to be either materialist or idealist, religious or scientific. That is, the idea of the anti-thesis of matter and mind, of being and not-being, of inherent conflict and contradiction between them is only Western perception of these binaries. There is another perception to it, and which that being and non-being, and therefore all opposites, such as matter and mind, nature and man, material and non-material worlds are not in mortal conflict with each other but complimentary to each other. This in reality is the perception of the premodern mind which is foreign to the modern mind and, therefore, modern mind’s claim that for premodern mind only not-being is real is its (modern mind’s) misperception, or illusory perception of the pre-modern mind. So how did the Western man made such a historic blunder?
Well, I think it is a bit too early to pose this question and attempt to find its answer. For this was rather philosophical and abstract presentation of my position still begging many questions. So I would again take a step backward and try to put my argument in more concrete terms.
The modern view of religion and tradition is based on the modern conception of the nature of reality which in its turn is derived from the question that Enlightenment thinkers, the early founders of modernity, posed in the name of science; and which Marx and other nineteenth century architects of modernity such as Max Weber and Comte faithfully followed, namely, which of the two known forces in the following binary pairs or pairs of opposites is real or primary?
i) matter or mind/thought/consciousness/knowledge
ii) nature or man
iii) action/behaviour or thought/knowledge
iv) matter/body or spirit/soul
v) material/physical/perceptible/empirical world or
non-material, non-physical, imperceptible, spiritual world
These pairs of opposites are of course not exhaustive. Some others following the same patterns are as follows:
vi) being or not-being
vii) existence or non-existence
viii) change/relative/temporal or permanence/absolute/eternal
ix) profane or sacred
x). rational or non-rational
xi). activity or retreat
xii). analysis or synthesis
xiii). part individual or whole
xiv). individual or society
xv). Science/modernity or religion/tradition
For science, the Enlightenment thinkers concluded, matter, nature, action, body and the physical world were real or primary. The reality, or primacy, of the other half in each binary pair, or pair of opposites, was denied. In the first pair mind was reduced to secondary status since it was seen as derived from (or developed form of) matter. The same relation was established between the opposites of the second and third pairs of opposites. To put it another way, mind, thought, and man had no independent reality in relation to matter/ body, nature, and action. Theirs was a derived, secondary reality. As for the fourth and fifth pairs of opposites, the reality of the spirit, soul and non-material world was completely denied. The same absence of relation was established in the sixth to fifteenth pairs of opposites, which of course all still not exhaustive.
The identification of reality with the physical defined, above all, the identity of science and knowledge. That reality is physical is what distinguishes a modern from non-modern. There are many schools within moderns today. Initially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they would all call themselves materialists in their abhorrence for religious superstition. With the rise of Marxism, and its appropriation of materialism, and of course due to other factors, of which I cannot go into detail here, the school of empiricism became popular with most non-Marxists. Ernst Mach, the great physicist of the late nineteenth century, from whom originated the influential Vienna Circle or Logical Positivism, emerged as the vocal champion of it. Lately realism and some other schools are more in vogue. But in principle, what is common to them all is the denial of the non-physical world. That is why, as William Barrett point out, ‘with all its inherent paradoxes, scientific materialism was to become de facto the dominant mentality of the West’ since the later half of the seventeenth century (1987. Death of the Soul: Philosophical Thought from Descartes to Computer: 7). In short, whether one is an empiricist, materialist, realist, liberal, Marxist or whatever, to be modern is to be a scientific materialist, the one who, in answer to the fundamental question, What is? or What is real? says: The physical, for that is all there is in the world.
To facilitate the argument, let us call this the conception of one-sphere structure of reality since it denies the other sphere which makes this pair of opposites. Now this one-sphere structure of reality, it is important to remember, modern man projected backwards. That is, he saw his ancestor in his own image, but inversely, that is, the image was turned upside down, the traditional man was seen standing on his head. In this situation both believe in one sphere structure of reality, but with the important difference, that for one the material sphere is real, whereas for the other the non-material. How this situation came about is of course the subject of our investigation. The perception that holds the physical alone as real we have called the first perspective, while the other that holds only the non-physical alone as real we have called the second perspective.
Now if I argued above that the traditional man in reality followed the third perspective whereby physical and non-physical realms or spheres together form reality, I also suggested that modern man’s image of premodern man believing in the non-physical reality alone was his illusory perception. Here a distinction that is sometimes made between illusion and hallucination would be instructive, for if the former is caused by misinterpretation of a certain external stimulus, in the latter case the image caused is purely the construction of human mind with no external stimuli. What I am suggesting is that there were some grounds which caused Western man’s illusory perception of the past.
The immediate and most powerful stimulus was Christianity. In the light of their Christian history which, under the domination of church, had all the way emphasized the reality of the heavenly world alone, the Enlightenment thinkers and their successors in the following centuries developed the illusory perception that belief in the non-reality of the physical world was the essence of religion, that, is, of all religion, of religion itself. The Church, as we know, was the resurrected form of the deceased Roman Empire, headed by the ‘infallible’ Pope. The new regime of modernity and science established its power by subduing the decadent clerical regime and, after reforming it, coopted it into its own colonial project. Besides the centuries long corruption and despotic power of the church, Europe had just emerged from the terrible wars of religion which, too, were, like the institution of church, unknown outside the Christendom.
Now what is important to remember is that when modern Europe conquered the world, it took with it its own experience of religion with it. Having generalized his experience of religion, the white man never felt any need to see if other religions could add something to his experience of religion. And this was for two reasons. First, his ethnocentrism had taught him that he had had the experience of the highest development of religion. Since all forms were inferior to it, there was nothing to know anything more about. Secondly, the resistance of the native peoples was seen like the resistance of the religion that modern man had already overcome in Europe. So modern Europeans from Bacon to Marx were unanimous that their drive towards the non-Western world had a noble, moral purpose to it, civilizing of the natives, that is, freeing them from the illusory world (of religion, of superstition, of darkness) and bringing them into contact with the real, physical world (of science, knowledge, light, truth).
Very soon modern educational and state institutions were established in the colonized world where Western man’s experience of religion and the conclusions drawn from it, chief of which was that religion must be expunged from the public life because its ultimate subject was the non-physical, illusory world, were cultivated in the native mind. In these educational institutions a new elite was raised which was to become ally of the colonizers and which, most importantly, saw the world, its own world inclusive, through the eyes of white man. It was to these modernized elites that the Western man handed ‘independence’ when leaving for his home. We are now those elites educated in modern institutions who see the traditional man, our ancestor, in our own image, as a believer of one sphere structure of reality, but, sadly, standing on his head, taking an illusory sphere for real.
I am aware of the questions brewing in your mind, the foremost about the difference in European and non-European man’s experience of religion and the world, and I certainly am as impatient to come to them presently. But whatever happened in the past two three or four centuries, you will point out, when we now look round in our societies, and see our brethren trained in the madrassas, and the Taliban, and the clerics who have exercised great, disproportionate power in Pakistan’s affairs since independence, and the clerical regime in Iran and Suadi Arabia (where they, unlike Iran, play second fiddle to a tyrannical monarchy), all of whom claim to be the living representatives of the traditional man, Western perception of the traditional man standing on his head does sound right.
Even though some members of the contemporary religious intelligentsia may strongly contest the charge that they do not believe in the reality of physical world, the fact remains that when they speak of the absoluteness of the sharia, of the immutability of the law allegedly promulgated over a millennium ago, they do deny the reality of change and change being inherent in physical world, denial of change is tantamount to the denial of (the reality of) the physical world. The living representatives of tradition, the self-professed descendents of premodern man, then, become the living proof of the modern perception of tradition. Even though modern man’s whole researches into religion be kept aside, you will say, these living embodiments of the past testify the modern understanding of religion that it is fundamentally past ridden, that it does not encompass the experience of contemporary changing reality.
Yes, I do concede that contemporary religious man is the inverted image of modern, secular man. So how do I defend my thesis that neither the Church-dominated medieval Christianity nor the modern-day representatives of tradition and religion comprehend the premodern world which was based on two-sphere structure of reality?
There are various steps and facets of my argument. But let me briefly recapitulate my thesis that I am going to defend and which was originally presented in A Forgotten Vision. This is that the structure of traditional civilizations was not raised on the second but, on the third perspective. The chief difference between the first (modern) way and the second (modern-day or contemporary religious, traditional) way on the one hand and the third perspective on the other is that if the first two believe in the one-sphere structure of reality, the third way adheres to the two sphere structure of reality. That is, if for the first and second worldviews only one sphere of the opposites is real, the third one, believing in the unity of opposites, adheres to the reality of both spheres in each of the above mentioned pairs of opposites.
Now if I argue that modern man got the nature of religion wrong and what is being taught about religion in the classrooms of modern schools and universities is completely biased, you would at least not call my sanity into question on this account granting me the right to differ. But on the second half of this argument, that the contemporary representatives of religion too have got the tradition wrong of which they claim to be the chief custodians, I am defying common sense and do not seem to be making sense at all.
But may I remind you that this is not the only point where I defy common sense. My position seems to make little sense also on another account. For the equation of the physical and the real or the primacy of matter over mind, of nature over man, the cornerstone of the first perspective, the founding principle of scientific materialism, does not seem to need any argument to be proved, for now we all know, and with which I do not disagree at all, that nature is billions of years older than the appearance of man, mind or even life on this planet. This appears to be such an evident fact that to suggest to the contrary, whether it be from the second or the third perspective, is simply preposterous.
I think by now I have made the basic premises of the debate fairly clear, just to demonstrate that I am not shooting in the air, that I know the targets I am attacking and I am aware how formidable they are. Knowing that this by no means is just a skirmish, I have devised a two-semester course on history of knowledge that I am teaching since last year to postgraduate students in the departments of history, international relations and Pakistan studies. It is available on my other blogspot where you can have a look at its outline, reading list and exploration of its various themes.
History of knowledge is examined through its four great divisions, namely, histories of religion, of philosophy, of science and of art. History of religion is by far the largest of the four histories. A Forgotten Vision, on which I spent nearly nine years, is an exploration into philosophy and history of religion. Therefore the researches and conclusions that I draw from religious history are basically my own. Same is largely the case with philosophy which happens to be my mother discipline. However, in the history of science and art, I largely draw on the researches of other scholars. But I use their discoveries as facts from which I draw my own conclusions or which I place in the picture of the world, or what I call the software that I am seeking to construct.
I need not emphasize that all attacks on modernity have hitherto proved inconclusive for the simple reason that they did not go deep enough. They never had the whole picture in front of them in the first place. Well, they didn’t find anything interesting or useful in the history of religion but it is beyond me why no one seems to pay any attention to history of science. Science, the natural science, is the main architect of all modern structures and institutions. If you leave them unnoticed, all your shooting is in the air. I wonder why a sacred divide is being maintained between social and natural sciences, a Berlin Wall which actually does not exist any more, especially after what is known as early twentieth century scientific revolution. This revolution was led by philosopher-scientists and I cannot comprehend why philosophers and social scientists have not bothered to listen to what those philosopher-scientists had to say about our social world, about the problems of religion, philosophy and society about which they all had a lot to say.
Now before we proceed further, let us also be clear about the historical significance of the dispute presently under discussion, namely, the vision of our forefathers that AFV claims to have discovered. For it is not merely an academic issue with no bearing on our life and society. Rather, if my thesis is correct, the whole structure of our society will need to be re-ordered on the lines being suggested. In other words, I am arguing for a theory of social change with revolutionary implications. I won’t mince my words. It is, as I see it, the most radical theory of social transformation ever conceived in modern times, asking for the most revolutionary transformation in the way we think and shape and organize our social structure. In such times when the hegemony of capital and state seems unchallenged, almost totalitarian, as Christian Comeliau put it, a peaceful theory of social change promising a new era deserves, I believe, a fair hearing.
The point is simple. When we say that man is above all a historical being, it means he structures his present on his understanding of his past, his history. Now the modern man built his system of thought and social organization on the basis of his understanding of the past. But if it is proved that such understanding is based on erroneous foundations, the present order would lose its moral legitimacy. Now we know that modernity has produced a lot many critics, especially in the last century. We spoke above of Jung, and Foucault, for instance. Earlier, in the nineteenth century, romantic movement was a strong protest against its increasing mechanization and manipulating of nature. In that century, though, more pronounced were its ‘internal’ critics, led by Marx who believed that modernity would develop its human face after its transformation to communism.
Marx’s optimism and hope with the ideals of Enlightenment, science and progress (the latter is now called development) being its catchwords, was equally shared by the liberals. The buoyant mood of the last decades was described by Arnold Toynbee, perhaps the greatest historian of modern era so far, in these words:
In liberal-minded middle-class circles in democratic Western countries in a generation born round about A.D. 1860, it had seemed evident, by the close of the nineteenth century, that a triumphantly advancing Western civilization had now carried human progress to a point at which it could count on finding the Earthly Paradise just round the next corner.
But all these hopes were dashed in 1914 with the Great War as it was called then. Toynbee was one of those who could not rebuild their faith in modernity and turned him into a bitter critic of it, prophesying its doom in the near future. It was this shock which led him to embark upon his monumental twelve volume history of civilizations. He continues the above passage to describe the shock of 1914:
How was it that this generation had been so grievously disappointed? What, exactly, had gone wrong? How, through the welter of war and wickedness which the new century had brought in its train, had the political map come to be changed out of all recognition….? (A Study of History, (abridged ed) 1970: 910)
He thought history had entered into a new era, which he called post-Modern, one of the first to use this term. After the Second World War criticism of modernity became more pronounced and widespread. By the end of 1970s when it became apparent to many that Soviet socialism had nothing to deliver, the general discontentment produced post-modernism, a criticism so bitter that it denied the very possibility of knowledge, of social justice and freedom. However, there are host of other critics who would not share such relativism verging on nihilism. Still, there is little doubt that after the collapse of communism as the only opposition to capitalism, no alternative model has come up. In the absence of a creative opposition, the only force of resistance left in the field is of those who adhere to what I call the second way. But as I just said, the alternative to modernity that they offer must equally be unacceptable for the same reason that modernity is unacceptable, that is, because its understanding of history, of tradition, is as much flawed and one-sided as is modernity’s. You know what I mean? Both of them adhere to one-sphere structure of reality.
Now I have argued, firstly, that man builds his social structure in the image of his conception of reality and, secondly, his conception of reality is built on the way he sees his past. This means that modern man has raised modern structure on the basis of his understanding of reality which in its turn is raised on his understanding of the premodern man’s understanding of reality. What logically follows is that if we can demonstrate that modern man’s understanding of history is highly one-sided, so much so that his picture of premodern thought and culture is so incomplete that it completely misrepresents history, the moral and intellectual legitimacy of modernity and all its institutions would be gone. And as we discover the real, complete picture of our past, the way our ancestors thought and lived, we would know how to develop new social structures on those patterns. This is what is new in my critique, which I call a critique of modernity from non-Western perspective, a perspective which has remained hidden to Western or modern critics of modernity.
Well this, the concealment of the real epistemological and social or cultural structure of tradition from the vision of modern critics of modernity, whether of Western or non-Western origin, from Toynbee and Jung to Foucault and Edward Said, is what I call their ultimate confinement to Western perspective and which has ultimately failed them. So the third perspective not only puts forth its critique of modernity and offers an alternative thought and cultural structure, it also clarifies the inherent weakness of all the critiques of modernity offered until now and why they have failed.
The third way sets its distinction from the outset. For it questions the very question that modern perspective poses, as we saw above, as the primary question of all knowledge. The question is not, it argues, which is real and which unreal, which primary and which derivative, because, starting with this question, you inevitably end up in either the first or the second way. The question that the third way poses is: what is the relation between the opposites? This question assumes the existence of both the opposites and attempts to understand and establish the right equation between them, for it is on this equation that true life of the knower, the meaning of his life, if you like, depends.
Now we are set to probe why modern man, the thinkers of Enlightenment and their successors got the question wrong, for once they got the question wrong there was no question that they would get the answer wrong. You know where the roots of their failure in the understanding of religion lay? Interestingly the roots of their failure were the same as the roots of their adversaries’ (failure) and by their adversaries I mean not only the Christian Church but also their modern day adversaries, the most vocal of which are of course in the Islamic world, led by the Alqaida and the Taliban.
The problem is that whereas there is only one scientific tradition moving or progressing in straight line so that there is not that much difficulty in the understanding of science or scientific tradition, there is no such single religious tradition that would make your search as simple and allow you to comprehend the nature of religious tradition. In comparison to one science, there are many religions and this is still not where the whole problem lies. For each religion claims to be the only truth, the only true religion which gives each one a hard crust, so to say, under which is concealed its essence like in a nut, for instance almond or hazel nut.
But the analogy, like each religion itself, is as much wrong as it seems right. The problem is that whereas in the case of a hazel nut, even a monkey would know that the real prize lies inside, for which the shell has to be cracked, in the case of religion its most fervent and zealous devotees believe that the shell is all there is and they spend their whole lives worshipping it, would die in defending it, never for once knowing that the real thing was inside of which they had no clue whatsoever. You know why their whole lives are spent in such waste? Because you know the distinction between the shell and the kernel only if you have the experience of another religion, or of as many other religions as you can other than your own. And here is the secret why the Western man got the nature of religion wrong. For the inhabitant of Christendom, from which modern Europe emerged, was alone among the inhabitants of the great contemporary civilizations who had the least knowledge of any religion other than his own.
And thus, if Christianity was the most exclusivist of all the contemporary great religions, it was really the most underdeveloped of them all, having the hardest shell, in the form of the Church, of which there was no parallel in any other religion of the day. The shell was so hard it almost killed the seed inside. There was an Eckhart or a Boheme or some other lone soul but the Church, like a totalitarian state, made it sure that no individual experience of divinity survived in its realm.
You can imagine how Western man is going to react to this criticism. You know, even now, in spite of all his secularism and his apparent despise for religion, he still believes, like his Enlightenment and nineteenth century ancestors, that Christianity is the highest and (and for many) noblest of all religions. Now, here I am stating the second reason as to why Western scholars got the nature of religion wrong. The first reason, as stated above, is that the Christendom man and then his modern successor had only one religion to study and on which he based his whole knowledge of religion. The only other religion there was in their midst, Judaism, they had reduced into ghettos, having been made an object of racist hatred. So even experience of the only other religion that they had was also turned upside down, that is, instead of producing some breadth in their vision, it narrowed it even further, culminating into holocaust in the middle of the twentieth century. Could this holocaust happen in the heart of the bastion of modern civilization in broad daylight without a long history of degeneration of a religion and of course of its believers which had no parallels in world history?
You know, it is perhaps not quite an appropriate expression, but the truth is that modern Western man, simply wanted to have it both ways, and continues to do so unabashedly. Since the heyday of the rise of the colonial white man a myth was created, the most typical of the ‘white mythologies,’ to recall the title of a Robert Young’s book (White Mythologies: Writing History and the West: 1990), which continues to be nurtured to this day as the whole discipline of history and the historical perspective of modern Western man stands on this myth. Worst still, it is believed by all and sundry, of the modern intellectuals of the East and West alike, whether it be Eric Hobsbawm or Tariq Ali, as self-evident truth, for, in fact, the whole corpus of modern knowledge, whether liberal or Marxist, derives from it.
It states that modernity, led by the light of science, is the culmination, the highest point of all history, culture and civilization at which Europe had reached first. It provided the rationale, the moral legitimacy of all slave trade, genocides in America, plunders and violent dismantling of the traditional structures of the non-Western world. Well, this is not the whole myth, for the other half of it is still to come. I have quoted above a passage of Toynbee’s that he wrote in the 1950s. Over half a century later, I find it almost sadistic for any intellectual to tell me that modernity is indeed an ideal worth pursuing for and the Islamic world must pass through all the stations that European man passed to reach to that end, one of the foremost of which happens to be Reformation.
Tariq Ali, in his The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity (Verso: 2002) repeatedly asks for the Islamic world to pass this test in order to enter into the world of…… But the world of what? To come out of one fundamentalism in order to enter into another? To become like one whose picture appears on the cover of his book, the leader of the Reformed Christianity, of the Free World who makes Saddam Hussain appear like a toddler? Ali hardly understands that he is only mocking himself, and not Usama, the leader of un-Reformed Islam nor Bush, the leader of Reformed Christianity.
Well, you would have understood the source of his failure, which is that he is part of that fundamentalism that is called modernity. He thinks that as a Marxist he is out of it. Such ignorance is sad indeed. The illusion had some justification as long as Marxism was a force in opposition to capitalism, and seemed or suggested an alternative to the rule of Capital, but not any more. Being a public figure, his seeking of solace in such illusion appears at once tragic and comic, and such response is but natural when your ignorance turns you into a clown, so out of step with time you appear to your audience.
Not any more, I said, because now Marx has been incorporated into the Capitalist intellectual framework, as I have argued above, and especially after what seems to be Tariq Ali’s double confession that sneaks out of his statement that ‘The rise of religion is partially explained by the lack of any other alternative to the universal regime of neo-liberalism…..’(p.33) The first confession is that Marxism has ceased to be ‘an alternative to the universal regime of neo-liberalism,’ and the second is that religion is the only force in opposition to the almost totalitarian regime of neo-liberalism.
What immediately becomes apparent to the reader is that since Marxism is no more an alternative to the regime of neo-liberalism, the whole space is now occupied by the two clashing fundamentalisms and Ali’s vehement demand, with which his passage ends, that ‘We are in desperate need of an Islamic Reformation,’ leaves little doubt as to which of the two fundamentalisms his allegiance lies to, but which he sadly he can’t see; hence the cry and the laughter. This demand incurs the latter response especially because of the second confession, for he doesn’t seem to realize that what his demand amounts to is the incorporation of the last post of resistance (however negative this resistance be) into the regime of neo-liberalism, after reformation, that is, just as reformed Marx has been assimilated into the reigning regime.
Now let us turn to the myth in the making of which both Marxism and liberalism took part and for which reason I have argued that they are at the end the two faces of the fundamentalist perspective of modernity. I would also like you to keep in mind the epistemological basis we discovered of the two fundamentalisms, that is, of the modern and religious perspectives, and which is their adherence to one-sphere structure of reality which makes both of them dogmatic. Interestingly, until lately the identification of religious mind with dogmatism was accepted unreservedly, but not any more. For now even the common observer finds it as much a feature of modern mind, except that each reflects the inverse picture of the other. This exposure should not be surprising, for in their epistemology the modern and religious mind do present inverse pictures of each other, one refusing the reality of the non-physical world, the other of the physical. If there was any sense in preferring the former over the latter in the immediate past, it no longer seems sensible in the present. Hence our quest for the third perspective!!
If modernity was the apex of civilization to which the whole world had to reach in the footsteps of Europe, according to the myth, the road to this destination passed through reformation of all religions, like the one Christianity underwent in the sixteenth century. Now the second part of the myth stands on the assumption of Christianity being the model religion, as the modern Europeans understood it. As I have pointed out, there are two main problems with this assumption. Firstly, Christianity was not the highest but the lowest point in the development of higher religions. You know this has been a favourite topic for Western scholars as to why modernity or industrial revolution broke out in Europe and not elsewhere in the world. No satisfying answer has been forthcoming to resolve the enigma.
What I am suggesting is that this might not remain much of an enigma once we question the two parts of the myth, namely, the intrinsic goodness of modernity and Christianity being the model religion. Looking from the third perspective, the religious structure of premodern civilizations broke at the point where it was weakest, that is, where religion could not develop its full-blown, unified structure, well illustrated in its sharp dualism of earthly and heavenly world, on the one hand, and of church and the state, on the other. This dualism prepared the way for dualism of modern science.
Now let us recall the problem that set before myself when I started my research at SOAS. I wanted precisely to investigate the two given perspectives on religion, the secular, propounded by modernist intelligentsia, of both liberal and Marxist persuasion, and religious expounded by the religious intelligentsia. For the former there was nothing absolute in the world, so all religion like everything else belonged to the realm of the relative. This meant that religious experience was subject to space and time in which it was born, in a pre-industrial age, so it had no relevance to modern times. For the religious, on the other hand, the whole body of religion was absolute, being nothing in it that was subject to space and time. So what was the truth? Was it all relative or was it all absolute?
Well, as I said earlier, my encounter with Sufism had suggested to me the third possibility, namely, that it could be both. So I had to investigate two things. Firstly, did the Quran testify to the third perspective? And secondly, was Sufism a marginal aspect of Islam or it was widely defused in Islamic culture? You know when European scholars came into contact with Islamic Lands and Sufism in the nineteenth century, given their preconceptions about Islam as a ‘worldly’ religion, they concluded that Sufism was foreign to Islam and that it was largely imported from outside. Later in the following century this mistake was largely corrected and Sufism was accepted as an indigenous growth in Islam. Still, in spite of mushrooming of texts on Sufism by Western scholars, no work ever attempted to trace theoretical of Sufism in the Quran. I took up the challenge and opened my work with a study of the Quran to demonstrate that the third perspective was rooted in the Quran.
This was a strange discovery, for Quran is generally considered a book where all power belongs to Allah and none to man. Indeed. But this was the starting point, not the end. The third perspective starts with difference, the difference between man and God, between relative and absolute, and ends with their unity. This is the dialectic of the third perspective. Contrary to the common perception, that excludes difference from unity, understanding latter as a monolithic, undifferentiated whole, from the vantage point of third perspective (knowledge of) difference precedes (knowledge of) unity. It is the sheer gulf between man and God, the awareness of the limitless difference between the two, I being nothing and God being everything, that, finally, leads to the unity of the two, where my self ceases to exist and in me kindles His Self. When I looked into the Upanishads, I found the same doctrine of unity expounded page after page, expressed beautifully in the most well known phrase, ‘Thou art That.’
Reality, in other words, from the perspective of the Quran and the Upanishads, is at once relative and absolute, or, man and God or ultimate Self being two inseparable aspects of reality. These two aspects are represented by two currents, one emphasizing the worldly aspect while the other emphasizing the other worldly aspect. The clerics stand for the former, regulating the outward behaviour of the believer, while the Sufis model the latter, cultivating the inner world of the believer. For the former, outward signs of faith are important, for the latter they are secondary. Although there was always a tension between the two aspects, as must be the case, but there was a broad consensus that the opposites were inseparable and together formed the whole.
This consensus was achieved by Islamic, Indian and Chinese civilizations but Christian civilization failed to reach to this high point largely due to Europe’s late entry into the age of civilization. But if this what I call pluralist structure of religion has gone into oblivion because of the dominance of the first and second perspectives in modern times, Sufism’s pluralist structure too has been largely gone unappreciated. I noticed that in most popular works Sufism was seen uncritically, and writers like Annemarie Schimmel would readily applaud anyone who liked to pose as a Sufi. That is, there was no measure, no suggestion how to distinguish a Sufi from a charlatan, or what were the doctrinal differences between the various currents within Sufism.
The most important implication of the composite character of religion, it being a unity of opposites, is that the traditional social structure too is composite in its character. To put it another way, the epistemological and social structure of premodern civilizations reflect each other. If material and non-material worlds together form the epistemological structure of traditional society, the former cannot be the basis of all the institutions of society, as is the case with the modern world. Our modern world is raised around the two institutions of wealth or capital and state. All the values that govern our lives are evolved around these two institutions and our society is, as if encompassed by the two institutions. But this is not the case with the traditional society. There is a large space outside of the wealth and state and therefore the values of wealth and state do not hold monopoly over people’s lives. Property and rule over other human beings do not enjoy intrinsic value as they do in our modern society. There are clearly two role models, the king and the sufi, dervish, sant, sadhu, or sanyasi and in fact the whole society, the wealthy and the ruler inclusive, regards the latter as the ideal man, the true man.
In this sense while our modern society is culturally despotic and monolithic, the structure of traditional civilizations reflected a truly pluralist character. Modern society makes much of its political pluralism. But a little reflection will show it is little more than a show. It really sounds quite an achievement when we see it in the context of Christian history where the church monitored each man’s inner world like modern day intelligence agencies, but that was not the universal character of traditional society. To determine the epistemological and cultural structure of premodern civilizations through the model of Christianity is like studying capitalism through its development in Russia.
Well these were the major conclusions that I drew from the study of the history of religion. Now it was time to turn to the history of science.
Turning to the history of science
(To be continued)
Sunday, July 5, 2009
1. The Genesis of the Third Way
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Although I was born, in the ninety's. I faced the same existential crisis of a worldview or weltanschaaun. I was rejected by communist comrades and declared mad by my religious friends.
ReplyDeleteThe third way is the only true way.