Dr Mohammad Mehdi Mojahedi (Mofid University)
As far as the interwoven intellectual and socio-political developments in the Muslim world, particularly, in contemporary Middle East and West Asia, are concerned, there have been streams of intellectual dialogues and sets of socio-political exchanges in progress between Muslim societies on the one side and the globalising modernity on the other. With this in mind, my research, after completing my PhD and postdoctoral research, has constituted a threefold programme addressing the following focal question.
“How has the ongoing dialogue between the Muslim heritage of scholarship and the modern humanities and social sciences been influencing and influenced by the simultaneous socio-political exchanges between Muslim societies and the globalising modernity?”
I have approached this focal and life-long question from three points of departure: firstly, epistemological and methodological foundations; secondly, critiquing the normative and politico-philosophical facets of the globalising modernity; and thirdly, critiquing the Muslim heritage of political, legal and social thought. However, I tried to make these three trajectories of research converge in a multidisciplinary way.
At the most fundamental level, I studied diverse forms of monism and pluralism to establish a more reliable epistemological and methodological ground for embarking upon the two other fields of studies. I have given several lectures and taught courses on this topic, particularly in my MA courses on methodology. In addition, I developed several papers and co-authored a book entitled Monism or Pluralism? on this topic differentiating between pluralism and relativism on the one hand, and distinguishing disguised and hidden monism from pluralism on the other. In chapter eight of Religion, International Relations and Development Cooperation that appeared in 2007, as a contributor, I tried to elaborate on the implications of holding a critical pluralist attitude for studying the relationship between Muslim cultures and modern issues and questions like democracy and human rights. Among other contributors to the book were Abdullahi A. An-Na`im, Peter L. Berger, Riffat Hassan, Thomas Pogge, Jonathan Fox and Scott M. Thomas.
Critiquing the normative and political facets of the globalising modernity has been a core component of my research projects during the past three years, particularly during my stay at University College London (UCL) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA) from 2008 onwards. Drawing on the outcomes of the previous stage, I tried to understand how human rights and democracy, their mechanisms, politics, institutions and instruments have been conceived of by different scholars and intellectuals in the Muslim world. I tried to understand critically how human rights promotion policies and democratisation projects have backfired in the region due to uncritical understanding of human rights and democracy underlying them. Nowadays, I am trying to propose an alternative way of thinking about the dynamics of change in the region drawing on the “politics of small things” and the theories of democratisation from within. My research will appear as two papers in academic journals and contributions to two upcoming books. Drawing on this phase of my research, I am finalising also a Persian course book on human rights.
The critique of Muslim culture and heritage of scholarship constitutes the third facet of my research programme. My MA thesis, PhD dissertation and postdoctoral research were parts of this dimension of my grand research programme. In my MA thesis, I examined the idea of the Islamisation of knowledge and its critical weaknesses. In my PhD dissertation, I criticised the ideologised and politicised Shiite classical theory of authority in the works of Ayatollah Khomeini. I tried to trace back the roots of this form of politicised Shiite Islam in an unusual marriage of classical legal thought with the modern way of ideological political leadership. My postdoctoral research at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Studies) gave me the opportunity of working with late Nasr-Hamid Abu-Zayd, a preeminent professor of Islamic Studies and an Egyptian intellectual, on the parallel streams of politicisation of the interpretations of the holy texts among Jews, Christians and Muslims. I developed chapters of an English course book entitled Authority in Shiite Islam during my research leave in London. In addition to this, I published a number of papers criticising the theory of education in the context of politicised Islam in Iran.
Drawing on these three trajectories of research, I will be focussing on the historicity of violence in the Intellectual history of Islam. In fact, through focussing on this area, I have been trying to make my past studies converged towards a more thematic study of a topic, which seems of strategic relevance to my major question. In studying violence, I found a unique relevance to the intersection of my three streams of research. The outcome of my first move towards this direction has been a paper entitled “Fiqh and the Politics of Violence: From Discursive Indifference to Discursive Legitimisation.”
Violence unthought in the Muslim legal tradition: From a historical point of view, the Islamic legal system (fiqh), given all of its internal diversities, has not been a violence-sensitive legal discourse. In other words, violence per se This explains why it cannot be shown that a Muslim jurist, even on a single occasion, has argued for or against a certain legal opinion on the basis of how that opinion could be violence-provocative or violence-preventive. Therefore, violence had still remained “unthought” until quite recently. has not ever been considered as an independent subject of study or at least among the criteria used for developing arguments or counter-arguments in this discourse.
Violence unthinkable in the Muslim legal tradition: On the other hand, the concept of violence has been subject to huge transformations over time. These transformations have been rooted for the most part in the discursive shifts and diversities of the people’s lifestyles influenced by and reflected in contemporaneous legal, political and ethical schools of thought. Those changes have been since at least two centuries ago for the most part secular. Therefore, the perception of violence has been constantly subject to transformation. What we perceive nowadays as an instance of violence could have been so embedded in the cultures and everyday lifestyles of people yesterday that it would not trigger any sense of violence, thus “unthinkable.”
Civilisation of fiqh: Violence, especially as a bad personal quality of normal people and rulers (yet not as a systemic characteristic of a political rule or legal system), has been discussed vastly in Muslim moral and ethical scholarship. But it was the discourse of fiqh that took form in close affinity with the power relations of the formative and medieval periods of the Muslim civilisations. Fiqh as the constitutive power-oriented element of the formation and expansion of Muslim civilisations became gradually so dominant that it overshadowed and marginalised other discourses, which potentially were violence-sensitive –including partially anti-violent discourses of Muslim ethics and mysticism, as well as partially non-violent discourses of Muslim philosophy.
The relevance of the study: In the past thirty years, and particularly in the post-9/11 era, Muslim ideologies, societies and communities have been viewed as one of the main sources of threats against international peace and security, especially opposing the Western models of politics, culture and economy. Central to this perception of threat is a certain account of violence. Accordingly, this study I believe serves the following twofold purposes.
My point of departure is the simple observation that Muslim legal discourse does not perceive of violence in the same way that it has been perceived of in legal and political discourses in the globalising modernity in the contemporary time. This conceptual discrepancy, when not understood and recognised considerately, nullifies any possibilities of critical dialogues to take place in this regard. Furthermore, without that sort of understanding, preventing violence will be reduced to a set of technical and mechanical security measures, while the conceptual dynamism of reproducing violence in new forms will remain untouched and still functioning.
On the other hand, Muslim societies will not be able to internalise the underlying values of democracy, human rights, peace and security, unless they can think self-critically about the internal obstacles they have to overcome.
Main question: Drawing inter alia on these historical observations and assumptions, the main question of my future research is:
“How did the Muslim discourse of law become violence-sensitive in contemporary time?”
Main sub-questions: To approach this major question, I analyse two more concrete and distinct questions:
1.1. How did the emergence of politicised Islam, on the one hand, lead certain Muslim jurists to start justifying and/or legitimising systematic violence?
1.2. How did this justification and legitimisation of violence by certain Muslim jurists, on the other hand, cause other groups of Muslim jurists to try to demarcate anew the distinction lines between justified/legitimate and unjustified/illegitimate types of violence?
