Paradox as Decolonization: Ali Shariati's Islamic Lawgiver (original) (raw)

In this treatise, I try to trace a certain logic of self-destruction at work in the Irano-Islamic constructs of sovereignty and sacrality. I use the word "construct" here to refer, not only to the religio-political terms and figures such as Hijab or Hanif, but also to an architectural construct like Kaaba, as well as a fundamental Islamic oath, namely, Shahada etc., insofar as all of them manifestly display a perfect homology in their very constitution. As hopefully will become clear throughout the text, such a structural homology consists in a self-immolatory tendency, for the analysis of which I believe to have outlined in this work, with the help of Hegel, Bataille, and Lacan, a theoretical framework called 'monanarchy'. Such a self-destructive tendency, according to my reading, almost automatically takes the form of a cyclic movement in which an abstract position, a sanctimonious beyond or an above-the-law, turns immediately into its absolute opposite, into a below-the-law, into something obscene or abject, which, in turn, is predisposed, in its very exclusion, to an above or beyond, ad infinitum. In line with my own lived experience, what interests me the most is this very 'turn', its logic and destiny, as well as its secret intentions and unsayable desires; a turn or inversion, which, historically speaking, has always presented itself in the form of endless, ahistorical re-turns. By "lived experience", I am referring here to a damaged life bearing the traces of two proper names: Iran and Islam, names which are not totally absent either from Hegel’s or Bataille’s oeuvre. As will be noticed, however, my main point of reference throughout the text is for the most part Islam. This is not only in view of the fact that, as I am writing these lines, a forty-two-year-old Islamic government is in power in Iran; it is also not only because "Islam, or a certain Islam [is] the only religious or theocratic culture that can still, in fact or in principle, inspire and declare any resistance to democracy", which makes Islam (according to Derrida, with whom I totally agree on this point) "the greatest, if not the only, political issue of the future, the most urgent question of what remains to come for what is still called the political" ; my focus on Islam is also a result of the fact that I find myself in absolute agreement with Hegel's conclusive analysis of the luminous essence in the Phenomenology (the nucleus of which consists in a powerful critique of the evil of immediacy, as also reflected in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History as well as his Lectures on Fine Arts, whenever Persia/Iran is at stake). It is in fact Hegel's succinct discussion of Islam under the cryptic name "the black stone", in the penultimate chapter of the Phenomenology, that I believe proves problematic. What I intend to do is to propose another deconstruction of Islam, one in which not "the black stone" (Hajar al-Aswad) but Kaaba itself (the "inessential casing", as Hegel calls it) comes to the fore. Against Hegel, I argue for the essentiality of that "inessential casing", insisting upon its elemental emptiness, to which Hegel seemingly did not attend. Almost half of the present text is dedicated to a close reading of Hegel's Phenomenology, as I believe it is here that the most powerful analysis of athymia (spiritlessness, what Aristotle had attributed, in his Politics, to the people of the Orient) meets the most philosophically rich critique of dualism and immediacy. Islamic themes and concepts are briefly referred to in the early chapters to prepare the scene for their detailed analysis in the later sections. The first four chapters, "Monanarchy: Hegel’s Seesaw and the Dialectic of Inversion", "Spirit or the Letter?", "Phenomenology of Inversion: Vortices, Vertigoes, Tumblings", and "Inaversions: Philosophy, Community, Sovereignty", provide the theoretical framework needed to trace the logic of self-destruction. In the fifth chapter, "The Sun and the Stone: Of the Uroboric Revel", I discuss Hegel's view of religion, both in general and with regard to Zoroastrianism and Islam. A critical point of divergence in this chapter leads me toward a deconstruction of the figure of Hanif in a rather brief segment titled "The Hanif Turn: Disavowal and Mon-atheism". In the last three chapters, I will attempt at a deconstruction of such Islamic phenomena as Hijab, Kaaba, Hanif, tahannof, Shahada, Hegira, takfir etc. They go respectively as follows: "Of Mechanised Hearts: Deconstructing Islam with Bataille", and "Inside the Box, Behind the Veil: objet petit a", to which is added a conclusion on Islam and Fascism. The penultimate chapter, in which I provide a Lacanian-psychoanalytical reading of Kaaba, Hijab etc., was added to the project much later, when I realised that not only almost all the Hegelian moments of re-turn that I had traced (under such names as monanarchy, inaversion, vortex, vertigo, Schaukelsystem etc.) could well be read from a psychoanalytical standpoint, either Freudian or Lacanian, but that psychoanalysis was indispensable even to an understanding of what Bataille has to say concerning the structural similarities between Islam and fascism. Albeit being a latecomer, it is this chapter that contains what, to me, were no less than fundamental discoveries. To conclude, my main concern is thus to trace, in the Irano-Islamic constructs of sovereinty and sacrality, the non-step or circular path of a self-destructive movement, which produces, as if automatically or mechanically, cruelty, duplicity, and death. In a word, this text strives to be a philosophical diagnosis of the vertiginous, suicidal tendency of constructions so abstract and pure, so high above, so sovereign or sacred, that always already turn, or will have turned from the very beginning, perhaps not so miraculously, into pure bestiality and depravity. In step with the above, as if in an invisible parenthesis long enough to run through the whole text, two Arabic words will also be there haunting the text, two words which I came upon completely by chance a few years ago: aqral and aqlaf. Both words used to be frequent in Islamic texts, Arabic and Persian, and both alluded as anathematising, excoriating epithets to the uncircumcised, those who, as a result of impurity, could not be touched or traded with, for they represented the abject or the obscene, the irredeemably impure (Najis), those who, by the same token, were excommunicated from Ummah (the community of Muslims). The words are not etymologically related, but they both are ambivalent and, curiously enough, in their ambivalence equivalent: other than the uncircumcised, irreverent or impious, both aqral and aqlaf also indicate exuberance, superabundance, plethora, a year of good harvest, luxurious life, bounteous times, eudaemonia etc. How is one to explain this perfectly equivalent ambivalence? How do these two apparently opposed values — one associated with sovereignty, with a more-than-life in life, the other with the abject and the excluded — come together, not once, but in two separate words? Can the uncircumcised, the outcast, live a luxurious, happy life? How can he be seen — from within a gathered self, e.g., from the perspective of an Ummah — as both above and below, damned yet prosperous? What is that which the prodigal sovereign and the excreted outlaw share? And why does this inverted relation find its exact counterpart in the sacred world — that is, between the pure and the impure? Is it safe to say that a certain movement of self-subversion is inherent to both sovereignty and sacrality? …