Академия Корана:Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān/Islam

M. Arkoun, "Islam" in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: J. D. McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

The infinitive of the fourth form of the Arabic triliteral root s-l-m meaning «to submit», «to surrender», it also designates the monotheistic faith (q.v.) and practice observed by the followers of Muḥammad and exhorted by the Qurʾān.

Preliminary considerations

To restrict the notion of islām to that which emerges for the first time within the qurʾānic pronouncements, it is necessary to be clear about the problems that this limitation implies. It is misleading to gather and analyse all the verses that contain the forms islām or muslim(ūn) in an effort to arrive at an «objective» definition then deemed adequate to convey a qurʾānic Islam which can impose itself upon believers and researchers as the ultimate and obligatory referent. Particularly is this so if that definition is used to measure and to judge the changes and additions introduced over time in diverse historical and socio-cultural contexts. W.C. Smith(Meaning and end) already lamented the insufficiency of this exercise using the lens of a historian of religions who was interested in the identification of the origin and durable spiritual level which constitute the specific valence of each religion. Smith used this identification to distinguish the changing functions — positive and negative — assigned by the social actors to that which they universally call their religion. About twenty-five years ago, a student of Smith’s explored, in a finely detailed study, the semantic shifts which the term islām has undergone over many centuries of exegetical amplification (J. Smith, Historical and semantic). This work complements the earlier investigations of Lidzbarski (Salām und islām), Künstlinger (‘Islām,’ ‘muslim,’ ‘aslama’ im Kurān), Ringgren(Islam, ʿaslama and Muslim), Robson (‘Islam’ as a term), Izutsu (Ethico-religious concepts in the Qurʾān), and W.C. Smith himself (Historical development).

Using careful philological analysis it should be possible to follow already at the qurʾānic stage the progressive elaboration of the notion of islām according to the chronological order of the verses in their original contexts (see chronology and the qurʾān; form and structure of the qurʾān). Yet in the absence of complete accord about the chronological classifications proposed for the sūras and a fortiori for the verses, one may not employ this perspective except for the rare cases where there are relatively reliable and coherent indices upon which to base such judgments. One knows how the collective concurrent memories were construed during the first Islamic centuries and how this mythological and ideological appropriation informed what was to become the paradigm of the earthly history and the salvation history of the Muslim community (umma, see community and society in the qurʾān; history and the qurʾān). This historical-mythical paradigm still operates at the beginning of the twenty-first century with an ideological force that is sustained by the modern media. The historian needs, therefore, to employ strategies of intervention in order to disentangle the mythical, ideological and historical strands in the documentation ascribed to the period of the emergence and formation of that which continues to be universally and indiscriminately termed «Islam».

It is not clear whether academic historians see anything more than the satisfaction of a scientific curiosity when they put themselves to the task of defining the distinctive traits of islām within the strict limits of the qurʾānic corpus (see contemporary critical practices and the qurʾān). Against this attitude, there is that of traditionalist Muslim theologians who use the foundational text to shore up the doctrinal constructions necessary to reinforce the orthodoxy demanded of the believers (see theology and the qurʾān; exegesis of the qurʾān: classical and medieval; exegesis of the qurʾān: early modern and contemporary). There is, however, a third position which seeks to open a new space of intelligibility within the reality of lived religion by circumventing the epistemological postulations implicit in the two preceding approaches. In the case of Islam, as in Catholic and Protestant theology, the «scientific» and the confessional perspectives are no longer adequate for defining the problematics and the themes favorable to an interactive research (cf. Le dictionnaire de théologie). From this third perspective, it suffices to establish that what can be called the qurʾānic stage, the instantiation of a new religion, is a complex historical process engaging simultaneously social, political (see politics and the qurʾān), cultural, and normative factors. These are entangled with ritual, customs, ethics, familial structures (see family; tribes and clans; kinship), competing structures of the imagination and the collective interactive memory of such entities as Jews, Christians, Sabians (q.v.), polytheists (frequently termed «pagans»), and all cultural groups of the ancient Near East (see jews and judaism; christians and christianity; polytheism and atheism; belief and unbelief; pre-islamic arabia and the qurʾān). All these modes and manifestations of the historical existence of such social groups in Arabia are not only present in the qurʾānic discourse but transformed. They have been sublimated, uprooted from their local conditions to constitute an «existential paradigm» of the human condition. Divested of its particularity, this qurʾānic paradigm is capable of producing and informing individual and collective existence within the most diverse cultural and historical contexts. As with the biblical discourse of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the qurʾānic discourse generates the results obtained by combining mechanisms for precise linguistic articulation of the meaning with the diverse effects of changing historical situations. In both textual corpora the narrative, rhetorical, stylistic and literary processes are so complex and highly elaborated that recent methods of discourse analysis have yet to prove sufficient for the task of clarifying their interaction. These approaches — to say nothing of the classical theories of the inimitability (q.v.; iʿjāz) of the Qurʾān — have yet to explain adequately the genesis, the effects and the place of the Qurʾān within linguistic and semiotic usages (see semiotics and nature in the qurʾān; language of the qurʾān).

The term «paradigm» is an appropriate designation for its qurʾānic manifestation because this manifestation became inscribed in a long history where the homologous paradigms of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism (see magians), and Manichaeism had already assumed a place within the cultural and religious space of the Mediterranean. The term «existential paradigm» is more natural and workable than that of «religion», for it frees the intellectual task from the conceptual constraint imposed by those systems of belief and nonbelief which shape in a subtle fashion, often unconsciously, the interpretation of the facts within each living religious tradition. Further, this terminology allows the inclusion within the arena of critical assessment of all the inherited systems, paradigms or models of historical action produced by modern reason in its struggle to liberate itself from the oppressive dogmatics of traditional institutional religions. To follow the developments within the qurʾānic discourse of the social and linguistic construction of the categories of «believers» and «nonbelievers», as these relate to what would be called «Islam», is to establish the historicity of the new religion. It is to do this on the basis of the first pronouncements of that which the believing tradition would theorize under the name of «Word of God» (q.v.), revealed through Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh, imposing himself progressively by his action and by the qurʾānic discourse, as the Prophet (al-nabī, see prophets and prophethood) and messenger (q.v.; rasūl) of God. That is to say that the initial choice of the historical method to define Islam on strictly qurʾānic grounds is not innocent. It proceeds from a methodological and epistemological premise characteristic of modern reason and introduces a break with the axial vision, insisting that the entire qurʾānic discourse instilled the properly believing attitude in the heart (q.v.) of the first listeners. For all subsequent generations this Qurʾān-centric understanding of «Islam» creates the drama of the decision — to accept or reject the covenant of divine alliance (mīthāq, see contracts and alliances) — on which would depend the realization of the entire individual existence of the Muslim person. Without having the benefit, as did western Christianity, of new possibilities for the emancipation of the human condition such as those opened by the existential paradigm constructed by modernity or by a more efficacious alternative than that presented by the traditional religions, Muslims continue to live the drama of that decision within a deadly violence where, additionally, the «unthinkable and unthought» of the two opposing paradigms are interpreted as mutually exclusive.

The theologies, the philosophies, and the still hesitant and partial problematics of the social sciences have begun to take charge of the historical drama of the human condition despite being complicated by the alternative opened by modernity: the choice is no longer simply between passing earthly existence in absolute fidelity to the debt of signification forged within the eternal covenant contracted with a living, merciful God and savior (or a wise founder like Buddha), or the radical refusal of that pact. It is not only between the fallibility of reason and the solitude of a destiny beyond the horizon of hope. Within the thought world of modernity, for many people God has become a useless hypothesis. This version of modernity insists that humans take responsibility for their destiny and substitutes an image of progress by science for the image of eternal salvation guaranteed by a loving and compassionate God.

Qurʾānic Islam

In a book issued in 1972 (The spiritual background of early Islam. Studies in early Arab concepts), M. M. Bravmann brought together fourteen articles which he had published between 1945 and 1971. With regard to the domain of Islamic studies, this work, as well as that cited earlier, is very representative of the epistemological attitude that governed historical writing in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century until the 1970s. The author does his utmost to rediscover the conceptual contents of the Qurʾān, namely terms like islām, īmān (see faith), dīn (see religion), dunyā (see world), sunna (q.v.), sīra (see sīra and the qurʾān), ʿilm (see knowledge and learning), bayʿa (see oaths and pledges), etc., in the period of emerging Islam. Investigation of the etymologies of a semantically rich vocabulary is very useful as long as one does not content oneself with deceptive substrata. The danger of such research lies in the tendency to rest content with partial or fossilized meanings that are only poorly related to the living continuation of a no-longer extant language and society. This type of erudition has made progress, however, as can be illustrated with reference to the rich works of M.J. Kister and his followers on the transition from « jāhiliyya (see age of ignorance) to Islām». In this latter body of work one finds an orientation towards a social, political and cultural history that could finally make a historical-anthropological reading of the Qurʾān possible. (See also my remarks on the recent work of J. Chabbi, Le seigneur des tribus. L’islam de Mahomet, Paris 1997 in the article contemporary critical practices and the qurʾān.) Aiming at such an objective is, in itself, a sign of immense progress toward a critical approach that can explain not only a nascent religion and its generative terminology but also the moment and the paradigm of human creativity in its struggle for conceptual emancipation.

Confining oneself to an examination of the occurrences of the word islām or muslim within the strict limits of the qurʾānic corpus avoids neither the fallibility of that exercise itself nor the methodological quandaries inherent in every quest for origins. This is even more the case when the mind remains focused on a definition of the religion that emerged subsequent to the qurʾānic corpus and its society and in which the paradigms forged within the anthropological scope were redefined. I have explained that the «closed official corpus» of the canonical codex (muṣḥaf, q.v.) poses methodological problems that are different from those linked to qurʾānic discourse at the time of its first oral enunciation (see collection of the qurʾān; codices of the qurʾān; orality). Because it has never respected this differentiation, the philological exploitation of the «closed official corpus» concurs, though with greater care for chronological constraints, with the cognitive attitude of traditional Muslim exegesis (tafsīr al-Qurʾān bi-l-Qurʾān).

M. M. Bravmann, for example, assures us that the word islām has meant confronting death (see death and the dead), sacrificing one’s life for a higher goal and thus, by extension, defending one’s honor (q.v.), and giving oneself unconditionally to God (see path or way; jihād). These two motivations cannot be treated on the same level but must be interrelated. More complexly, then, the term means dying for the honor(ʿirḍ) of the clan because the mechanical solidarity in a command group appears in the Qurʾān both as a springboard from which to substitute the attachment to the clan with the quest for God and as an obstacle to this substitution.

q 49:14 and 17 unveil this deceptive use of a semantic equation with the confrontation of death by opposing the word islām, which is stigmatized as an outward, tactical and revocable adherence to the noble cause of God and his messenger, to the word īmān, which signifies a sincere and definitive conversion of the heart to a cause that is differentiated from that of the clan (see belief and unbelief; hypocrites and hypocrisy). This is why the expression «he submitted his face (q.v.) to God» (aslama wajhahu lillāhi) recurs often as a summons to give one’s self only to God. The verb «to submit» (aslama) occurs twenty-two times; muslim, pl. muslimūn a total of forty-two times, including one instance of the dual and two attestations of the feminine plural, muslimāt, to designate female «Muslims»; islām appears seven times. The contrast with the attestations of the various derivatives of the root letters ʾ-m-n, signifying «belief, faith», is striking: īmān (seventeen times), āmanū (258), muʾminūn (166, of which nineteen are the feminine plural, muʾmināt). Islam as the sacrifice of one’s life is still demanded, as those who avoid going into combat are denounced according to a code of honor that opposes courage (q.v.), valiancy and the wish to die as a hero (see martyr) to cowardice, treason, and fleeing from battle (qaʿada, see war; expeditions and battles; virtues and vices).

One will note that these clear-cut definitions of islām and īmān, as well as of the conditions of the endeavor (jihād) for God, appear in two late sūras: in q 49, which is classified as the 106th in the chronological order of revelation, and q 9, classified as the 113th. The interrelation of the two concepts during the whole period of the revelation depended on the changing contexts and protagonists in Mecca (q.v.) and Medina (q.v.). In Mecca, where Muḥammad faced opposition from the polytheists, defined as those who «associated» anything with the one God (mushrikūn), it was necessary to stress the belief in a single God; facing the Jewish adversaries in Medina (al-rabbāniyyūn), however, it was important to construct a founding story for the new religious community in order to insert it into the biblical series of revelations (see scripture and the qurʾān) that were made to Abraham (q.v.), to Moses (q.v.), and to Jesus (q.v.) son of Mary (q.v.; see also opposition to muḥammad). It is in this Islamic re-appropriation of these great religious figures that the emerging religion takes on the dimension of a religious space for a community that has slowly become differentiated from other rival communities engaged in a mimetic combat over the control of the same symbolic capital. For the mushrikūn, this symbolic capital is centered on the Meccan pantheon while for Jews and Christians it is focused on the previous biblical revelations. In order to reshape the figure of Abraham, the Qurʾān uses the term millat Ibrāhīm rather than the word islām, whose signification is still in the course of construction. Milla refers to a group whose members necessarily share the same beliefs. This term will later be reused to designate the various confessional communities in the Ottoman Empire. In q 3:67, Abraham is linked to the pure religion, Ḥanīfism (see ḥanīf), that is devoid of any deviation: «Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a ḥanīf muslim». Within this context in which a corrected and redressed version (quite different from the «altered» versions of the Christians and the Jews) of the history of the « People of the Book» (q.v.; see also book) is constructed, the word muslim cannot be translated simply as «Muslim» in the now common meaning of the word, since it does not yet have a social and doctrinal basis. Its meaning in this passage is indeed a reference to that internal submission of faith which is contracted in the alliance (mīthāq) with God. In the frequently cited verses «religion, in the eye of God, is Islam» (q 3:19); or «The will to profess a religion other than Islam will not be accepted» (q 3:85), it is necessary to preserve the original, fundamental meaning of islām as an internalized religious attitude that is well symbolized by the conduct of the qurʾānic Abraham. To consecrate at this stage the equivalence of the Abrahamic islām with that which the sciences and institutions termed Islamic would later construe, is to relegate to the «unthinkable» all of the problems associated with the passage from the human experience of the divine («l’expérience humaine du divin», title of a work of M. Meslin) to the institutionalized, ritualized, religious orthodoxy of the «managers of the sacred» (gestionnaires du sacré). In order to avoid this long leap within the ideological instrumentalization of the religious reality, it is preferable to speak of the religion emerging at the level of the qurʾānic discourse in its initial mode of enunciation.

There is no room here to evaluate the role of the normative pronouncements which, already in the qurʾānic discourse, engage the experience of the divine with the trajectory of ritualization, of the sacralizing institution (see ritual and the qurʾān). Rather, I signal the importance of analyzing the process by which, at the level of the «closed official corpus», that institutionalization comes to function as the conceptualization of Islam that is exploited by the jurists (see law and the qurʾān), the theolgians, the exegetes, the mystics (see ṣūfism and the qurʾān) and all varieties of social actors.

It is worth remembering that, at the stage of its oral enunciation, the qurʾānic discourse attaches more importance to recitations of the foundation of a new collective memory, one that is prepared to receive a system of beliefs and of non-beliefs that is both similar to and differentiated from those of competing communities, than to the doctrinal development of orthodoxy. This was done by later generations. The literary composition of these stories has exerted a decisive semantic influence on Arabic vocabulary (see arabic language; grammar and the qurʾān). In its enhanced contents the language was fortified to support the new system of values and recast as a language that bears an earthly history which is entirely inscribed within the horizon of a history of salvation (q.v.) already familiar to the People of the Book. One should also bear in mind that these founding stories, as well as the indeterminate state of the conceptual tools within the qurʾānic stage, make possible many starting points for symbolic, semantic, conceptual and, finally, existential codes. It is necessary to verify, therefore, the degree of spiritual, ethical, social, juridical and political relevance for this coding that future actors will «choose», or which will be imposed upon diverse groups who constitute themselves as «interpretive communities». This type of investigation has been neither conceived nor adopted by the historians, the exegetes or the contemporary theologians of critical modernity. One can, a fortiori, absolve the medieval jurists of blame for not integrating this task, which was unthinkable to them, into their claim to root (taʾṣīl) legal qualifications (aḥkām) in the Word of God, which would transform profane and contingent behavior into the categories of licit or illicit works compatible with the notion of a final judgment (see last judgment; good deeds; evil deeds; lawful and unlawful; record of human actions). Now, however, there is enough of the conceptual diversity necessary for the radicalization of a critique of Islamic reason that can be undertaken within a broader and more historically, sociologically and anthropologically sensitive perspective.

Bibliography

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