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Bauman, Z (1993)
Postmodern Ethics
(London: Blackwell)
Love and Reason: Reflections on Levinas, Empire and Islam
One of the illusions of Empire is that its people are free. On the face of it,
the argument in favour of freedom looks convincing. Democracy offers not just
government by consent and the vote for men and women alike, but a host of
other freedoms which were unimaginable to the European peasant and plebeian of
Medieval Europe. Residence is no longer regulated by the mores of patronage,
class or clan; instead, personal wealth, building regulations and the
practicalities of work and education are the crucial factors in choosing where
to live. Citizens can decide their employment, education allowing, with little
or even no reference to how ones father or mother earned his or her
livelihood. Many other rights are guaranteed in principle – freedom of
thought, conscience and religion; freedom of expression and association;
freedom from discrimination; and the right to a fair trial, as long as the
person is not an enemy of the Imperium, of course.
At the heart of this concept of freedom is the notion of order, based not on
coercion, as was often the unhappy reality in pre-modern societies, but of
reason, of rationality. Indeed, with the regularity of salah, governments of
the free-market nations and their media allies prostrate themselves before the
sacred horse of reason, in their ritual abusing of nation states who continue
to coerce their citizens with naked violence, a posture that conveniently
turns their back (and eyes) away from their own Guantánamos and imperial
histories. They bring order, they bring calculated decision making, and they
bring a new tyranny – profit and utility. This is what Empire has being doing
since the so-called Enlightenment and quite possibly it will continue to do
much the same until – God willing - there is another.
Regrettably, Muslims have often been overly keen to either kiss the sacred
stone of Western rationality, or in a fit of reactionary pique, reject it with
the same terrified crowing that charms more than a few of our brethren to
worship (in retrograde parody) a 7th century Idyll, where trapped discontented
youth still live and dream of ripping the guts out of modernity with the
gleeful abandon of a Taliban unspooling cassette tape. For those who embraced
modern rationalism, and its utilitarian ideologues such as Herbert Spencer,
the defining word was freedom, “man’s independence of thought, will and deed,
so long as he remains within the bounds of laws and respects morality.”1
Reason and morality, even in the reforming feminist writings of Qasim Amin,
are inextricably intertwined, as they are in the great West. In this analysis,
the Qur’an is like a late-comer to a theatre which it full, squeezing its tiny
rahla onto the front row alongside modernity’s intellectual icons. Like Iqbal
in London, devotees of reason coo at the order its dissecting, categorical
logic brings, and even in the midst of their darkest strop, these devotees
fantasise that one day, educated and morally renewed, all Muslims will share
in reason’s order, wealth and power, as we did of olde. Like lovers to their
warning mothers, our devotees are deaf as the Idyllists to that articulate,
sceptical, experienced voice that surrounds Lord reason, not in its political
and material manifestations, but in its very idea. Freedom, say the critics,
is one of reason’s big fibs, if you mean ethical freedom. Because genuinely
moral acts are dangerously antithetical to rationality, order and control.
Dangerously, it might be said, partly because governments continue to assert
that citizens released from the grip of state control would inevitably invoke
anarchy, and partly because the bare bones of such a thesis is open to gross
misinterpretation. Indeed, it might seem the European intelligentsia have
already taken ethical individualism to its logical dead end. The outcome of
the supremely individualistic Situationiste Internationale, founded in 1957,
mutated from a campaign to transform everyday life into an art form into a
rejection of everything but the pursuit of joy, sending its most ardent
dogmatists wandering aimlessly through the streets and into the dark caverns
of madness. Its icons, Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, liberated themselves not
from the oppression of history, as they claimed, but from any sense of
responsibility for others.
Yet taking responsibility for ‘the other’ is precisely what defines the
ethical act, without self-interest, without hope of profit or use for society.
The most articulate proponent of this ethical understanding was Emmanuelle
Levinas (1906–1995), a French philosopher influenced by the phenomenology of
Husserl and Heidegger, and also by the Talmud. For Levinas, the moral act
originated from an impulse that transcended reason, passion, even the idea of
being, having no intention other than to serve itself. Unlike reason, it does
not seek to control or order. This is the selfless love of the human caress;
the love of Christ, of al-Hallaj, who manufactured their own deaths to deliver
humanity not from sin, but in order to fulfil the ultimate quest – the saving
of human souls. Muslims berate the American soldiers who flushed a Qur’an down the
toilet. But who would dare to stand in the middle of the mosque and
desecrate a Qur’an, in order to bring another to true worship?
Prophets and saints who lay down their lives to bring others closer to Allah
stand upon the fault line of law and love, a universal tension which I would
suggest is implicit to the Qur’an itself. It is at this rupture that the truth
about freedom emerges, not in the malls of consumer choice. Freedom is to
transcend the state of sleep which is conformity and indifference. In this
understanding, when al-Qur’an speaks of no compulsion in religion, it is to
remind us that there can be no law that enforces the act of love. Similarly,
when al-Qur’an mentions most are rebellious, it is to remind us that the
Muslim is frequently forgetful and distracted from the selfless care of his
lover, her mother, his neighbour, her friend. Answering the call of the
minaret, in this world-view, is a pilgrimage to where love is increasingly
possible. Love cannot express itself in silent abandon without a mind
disciplined to see clearly, a worshipful heart which seeks constant
forgiveness, and a hand open in charity. It requires an always greater
humanity. Reason, profit and utility are aliens here.
Allah knows better.
1Qasim Amin (1900)
al-Mar’a al-jadida (The New Woman), cited in Hourani (1983, p.167)
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