Realm of Truth: Establishing Islam from the Top-DownI don't think I agree with my brother's reasoning in the section dealing with oppression against one's self. While it makes sense in regards to something like consuming alcohol, where the person punished has an opportunity to learn from their mistake, it makes little sense as a justification for the execution of apostates. If the duty is to prevent them from oppressing themselves, sending them headlong into the hell fire without delay or with only a minimal chance to reflect seems to be the opposite of what one should do. If it is the ruling in the Shariah that one should deal with x case in y way, then it is obligatory to proceed in this manner. Coming up with 'bad reasons for what we already believe' does no one any good.
I also have a question about the agenda of the intellectual revolutionaries. While we can take it on faith that there are good arguments against every kaffir ideology, I see little reason to believe that those arguments will all be articulated at any particular stage in our history. This leaves us in the uncomfortable position of having at any given point in time arguments that we cannot answer. The human intellect can be both quite clever and as sharp as a knife, especially when it is poised to destroy an argument. I sincerely doubt that the 'ulema of any _particular_ point in time will be able to answer every argument that is put forth against the Sunni understanding of Islam. What, then, is to be the response? Bad arguments that have an appearance of soundness, official censorship and/or persecution of those making the arguments, or silence? Do we differentiate between those who speak from within Islam and those who speak from without? Do we clamp down on atheists and Christians, but leave Shias, Pervaizis and Modernists alone? At any given point it would seem that there is going to be a resort to the use of force
with either no accompanying rational justification or
one which will be erroneous. How then do we defend this? Do we just revel in our own social or political power, seeing power as its own justification? Do we just claim that Islam is a socio-culturo-political singularity which has a set of justifications internal to it but no communicable, 'public' external justification?
If I am being obscure here, I apologize. I've just noticed that it seems that we often to have our cake and eat it, too. We want to be able to look at the mores of the kuffar and condemn them from a universal standpoint, a standpoint which is rationally binding on everyone, regardless of their religion. On the other hand, when some (on the surface) unsavory aspect of Islamic practice is pointed out to us, we are quick to retreat into ethical skepticism, maintaining that moral norms can only be derived from authentic divine textual sources using a valid juristic methodology. But if this is the case, how one earth can we sit in judgement on the kuffar in respect to their practices (as opposed to their beliefs)? If the only way we know that gender mixing is wrong is via correct interpetation of a certain religious text, how on earth can we expect the kuffar to act as if they had this knowledge? It's in their previous religious scriptures? These people are ignorant of their scriptures and have been for generations. In addition, the scriptures themselves are corrupt and the interpretive schemas applied to them of doubtful validity. If we want to make an argument against their behavior based upon some supposedly universal ethical norm, we then cannot deny that these norms exist when we are exposed to criticism. I am not trying to be pointlessly negative.
I just percieve a conundrum, a paradox. Perhaps we are not taking our beliefs seriously in our behaviors? But we want to denounce horrible crimes in a universalist manner, correct? When we condemn Srebenrica, we aren't simply saying that it is against the Qu'ran or the Sunnah, we are saying that the massacre transgressed any canon of proper behavior to which a rational being can give assent. We want our protests to have more content than the statement "as muslims, we believe that it is wrong to massacre people." We surely want to say that "it is wrong to massacre people" and to affirm this as a universerally binding ethical truth. But we cannot do this once we retreat into the subjectivity of
special revelation; we lose our ability to present a conscientious protest against injustice. We surely cannot condmen people for transgressing bounds laid down in texts written in a difficult language and fully understood only by a small elite. Likewise any condemnation of specific actions is only going to seem like the result of sectarian prejudice if we do not have some way to appeal to universal concepts.
How can we pull ourselves out of this hole? Or must we? Is our duty simply to state what the relevant Islamic norm is without attempting to give a sound justification of this norm? Perhaps we should not be trying to do what we would like to in this instance; we should not try to make statements which imply the existence of universally binding ethical norms. But this seems to limit the power and effectiveness of our message, does it not?
