Gianni Vattimo on Secularisation and Islam

Abstract

To clarify Vattimo’s position on secularism and Islam, I first discuss his view that secularisation as kenosis and caritas entails the nihilistic vocation of Being, as expressed in our postmodern world where there appear to be no facts, only interpretations. I then survey some of Vattimo’s negative judgements of Islam, which appear to be out of keeping with his own disavowal of “modern” ideals such as “progress” and “grand narratives.” After analysing Islam’s turbulent history of secularism, I suggest the need for Islamic secularism for its own religious and political reasons. Vattimo’s theory of secularisation helps to identify not only what Islam should avoid in pursuing its own secularisation (an Enlightenment notion of subjectivity), but also what it can emphasise within its own tradition as a stimulus towards secularisation: the Golden Rule. This rule, if presented by influential imams as spiritually and as ethically open to the other as possible, may lead through action-based dialogue to a form of reciprocal listening that is the core of Vattimo’s notion of secularism, but which is based, at the same time, on the awareness of the gulf between the transcendence of Allah and the finitude and fallibility of human politico-religious institutions.

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and Santiago Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” in The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 65.

2. Alfonso Berardinelli and Juliet Vale, “From Postmodernism to Mutation: How the Twentieth Century Draws to a Close,” Diogenes 47 (1999): 94.

3. Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. David Webb and Luca D’Isanto (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 33.

4. Vattimo, Belief, 41.

5. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, trans. and intro. Jon Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 10.

6. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), chap. 1.

7. Gianni Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in Zabala, The Future of Religion, 43–54.

8. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 19.

9. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 171–76.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” in Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 48.

11. Gianni Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 57.

12. Vattimo, Belief, 55, 95.

13. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 6.

14. Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 108–9.

15. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 46–47.

16. Marta Frascati-Lochhead, Kenosis and Feminist Theology: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 155.

17. Luca D’Isanto, “Introduction,” in Vattimo, Belief, 11.

18. Gianni Vattimo, “After Onto-Theology: Philosophy between Science and Religion,” in Religion after Metaphysics, ed. Mark Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 35.

19. Vattimo, Belief, 63.

20. Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard and Slavoj Žižek (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 20.

21. Vattimo, Belief, 66. See also Gianni Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” in After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 42.

22. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 106–7. See also Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. Roman J. Betanzos (Detroit, MI: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1979), 229.

23. See, in particular, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, ed. Pierpaolo Antonello, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

24. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 31.

25. Vattimo, After Christianity, 78.

26. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 32.

27. Vattimo, “Toward a Nonreligious Christianity,” 42.

28. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, ed. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (Cambridge 1988), 257–82.

29. Vattimo, After Christianity, 95. I use chador rather than the more general hijab because this is the term used in the translated version of Vattimo’s text.

30. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104.3 (2002): 786.

31. Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” 786. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16.2 (2001): 202–35.

32. Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” 72.

33. Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, 115.

34. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” 266–67.

35. Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” 72–73.

36. Gianni Vattimo, “Our Savage Brother,” La Stampa, 18 February 1989. Quoted in Dario Antiseri, The Weak Thought and its Strength (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996), 69.

37. Ashley Woodward, “The Verwindung of Capital: On the Philosophy and Politics of Gianni Vattimo,” Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 13.1 (2009): 97.

38. Nader Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–4, 143, 144, 20.

39. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4.

40. Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, 135–36, 137, 139, 134.

41. Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, 161–62, 164.

42. Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

43. Sajjad Idris, “Reflections on Mawdūdī and Human Rights,” The Muslim World 93.3–4 (July/October 2003): 549.

44. Vattimo, “Our Savage Brother.”

45. Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala, “What is Religion’s Future After Metaphysics?” 73.

46. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, chap. 1.

47. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 2, 3–4.

48. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Joan Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), chap. 1.

49. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 96.

50. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 99, 101.

51. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 97.

52. Abdolkarim Soroush, “The Sense and Essence of Secularism,” in Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, ed. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 54–68.

53. Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘, “Introduction,” in Fouad Zakariyya, Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement (London: Pluto Press, 2005), xvi.

54. Abu-Rabi‘, “Introduction,” xvi.

55. An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 24.

56. Al-Arba’un al-Nawawiyya, An-Nawawi’s Forty Hadith, trans. Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies (Damascus: The Holy Koran Publishing House, 1976), 56.

57. Mahmoud Mohammad Taha, “The Second Message of Islam,” in Liberal Islam, ed. Charles Kuzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 277.

58. Oddbjørn Leirvik, “Aw qāla: ‘Li-jārihi’: Some Observations on Brotherhood and Neighbourly Love in Islamic Tradition,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 21.4 (2010): 357–72.

59. Idris, “Reflections on Mawdūdī and Human Rights,” 550.

60. An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 12.

61. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25–26, 79.

62. Liyakatali Takim, “From Conversion to Conversation: Interfaith Dialogue in Post 9–11 America,” The Muslim World 94: 3 (2004): 352.

63. “York Mosque praised for offering EDL protestors tea,” last modified 28 May, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-22689552

64. Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 157.

65. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, 31–32.

66. Gavin Hyman, “Must a Post-metaphysical Political Theology Repudiate Transcendence? The case of Gianni Vattimo,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 8.3 (2007): 124–34.

67. Vattimo and Girard, “Christianity and Modernity,” in Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, 40.