Is Islam an Ethnic, Ethical, or Juridical Monotheism? Reflections on Revelation, Reason, and Power

REFORMING MODERNITY, by Wael Hallaq. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 360pp. ISBN: 9780231193887.

THE IDEA OF EUROPEAN ISLAM, by Mohammed Hashas. New York: Routledge, 2019, 312pp. ISBN: 9781138093843.

THINKING THROUGH REVELATION, by Robert Dobie. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 2019, 314pp. ISBN: 9780813231334.

ARAB POLITICAL THOUGHT, by Georges Corm. London: Hurst & Co., 2020, 368pp. ISBN: 9781849048163.

THE LAW OF WAR AND PEACE IN ISLAM, by Muhammad Munir. Islamabad: Iqbal International Institute, 2019, 560pp. ISBN: 139781495506495.

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The Qur’an reveals historical Islam to be a revival of primordial islam (submission to the divine will) and a restoration of Abraham’s legacy. The advent of the Qur’an marks Islam as an eschatologically climactic faith which ends history. Non-Muslims dismiss such claims as unempirical and ahistorical. While one may see Judaism as ethnic and Christianity as ethical monotheisms respectively, it is harder to classify Islam, the last universal faith. The quintet of books above shall help us to explore this question by scrutinising the nexus of law, ethics and political power, a guerrilla training terrain for the alert Muslim mind.

The law-ethics relationship is intricate. What is legal can be unethical: think of unjust laws. The ethical, if legally enforced, is merely legal. And the ethically good can be illegal in the unjust state. In an age before nation states, empires were based on faith allied with power. Here what was humane and ethical was also legal and political, and all were merely different expressions of the absolute will of God. For us today, the divine command view – any action is good or right solely because God orders it - reduces ethics to revealed law.

Three threads bind together these five otherwise disparate works: coercive external imposition, whether as welcome corrective measure or as interference and intervention, the intellectual temptation to reduce one reality to an alleged underlying equivalent, and finally, in my view, the misguided secular dogma of the desirability of perpetual progress in every area of human endeavour. The myth of perpetual progress harms humanity for in some departments of life, we do not need progress but rather a regress.

Revelation and colonization are external and coercive. Islam, for example, is a revelation that, uniquely, caused a revolution. The historical context is an Arabian Peninsula, free of colonial occupation, in which a decisive civil war among Arab tribes led to the permanent triumph of Islam, a twin birth of faith and empire. For us today, the political context is, as we shall note presently, supplied by a secular politically motivated typology of contemporary Muslim solidarities and groupings.