The Economy of Conviction or Toward a New American Syncretism: Ismailiyya and its Imam as the unity of ascetic and cosmopolitan (social justice through capitalist positivism) -- Philip Simon
Familiarity
is the opiate of the human mind, and the philosophical underpinnings of the
American mind are of course, self-consciously syncretic. The evolution of
the national consciousness, though, if it is not to be rather termed decline,
must be reinvigorated as its patrimony with the spirit of syncretism if this
history which so un-self-consciously reaps the fruits of post-enlightenment
technological revolution is to be re-seeded afresh. Hunting and gathering
men discovered that crop rotation was the solution to their nomadic limits,
and the political fruits of the media-cracies' cultural legacy begs history
for past solutions to our current perceptual limits. The American syncretism
which continues to unite variously threatened and enhanced indigenous, ethnically
homogeneous cultures can be re-evaluated and harnessed and must be channeled
into and adapted to this new challenge. The beginning of this adaptation may
be seen in what is also a reconciliation, near the roots of the lately most
conspicuous example of politicized tribalism, for Islam itself offers a unique
and adaptive vision of cognitive coherence in the model of the gnostic Ismaili
sect.
Benjamin Barber's aggressive study, Jihad versus McWorld,
looks at the new commercial imperialism, the nation-state's legalistic and
pluralistic abstractions vis-a-vis the struggle of local peoples to sustain
solidarity and tradition (Barber, 232). "The yearning for a reconstructed
and remystified community was both fostered and contradicted by modern society's
cold rationalism, just as more recently Jihad has been both fostered and contradicted
by McWorld's postmodernity" (161). Rationalism to Barber has resulted
in a generalized historical discontinuity; the twists and cavorting of modern
cognition within such an incoherent context seems vaguely like the activity
of a loose fire hose. Our species' memory threads through the fabric of modernity
in a pattern no longer recognized for all its sublimity, terrifyingly sublime
as traditions may sometimes appear, but such a confused socio-cultural dilemma
in the 21st century's media-cracies has responded with the tribalist-consumerist
dialectic Barber neatly warns as the death-knell of democratic citizenry.
The will to power; the power to consume; consumption of traditions as conveniently
packaged as the finest new video release, and a world shaped by anaesthetizing
cultural imperatives becomes a war of all against all.
Capitalists often claim that "economics is a value-less
science." This is obviously not the historic moment for a worldwide hermetic,
though, and no (major) spiritual science has yet claimed souls without some
externalized four-dimensional practice or ritual. How, then, can a social
science, by all reckoning purely secular in its goals, not represent the moral
vision of the society perpetuating it? Can ascetic faith possibly combine
with cosmopolitanism, schemes of social justice hand-in-glove with sophisticated
economic exchange? Indeed the nature of both faith and material economy incline
the contemporary observer and the popular mind to estimate and define the
former by its fundamentals and the latter by its practical effects. All meaningful
change takes place at the fundament of a system, though, and in such months
as these since September 11th, 2001, when religious faith's fundamentals
tend to be inductively associated with unilateral, isolated terror, and the
politics of economy are called ever greater to account for discrepancies,
for hypocrisy and mechanistic shortsightedness, an exploration of the material
effects of spiritual belief, under-represented of late, will countermand the
non sequitur polarity with which the notion of absolute truth charges competing
religious claims, and the social Darwinism by which one notion tends to subsume
the Other. McWorld would swallow Jihad would swallow McWorld like Counts Ugolino
feeding on the heads of their neighbors for all eternity: the death of intellectual
curiosity and spiritual courage signal the decay of enlightened citizenship.
An era less stimulated by unifying theories than target markets cannot hope
to see reason as a true unifying theory of humanity, nor can juvenile swords
raised against a brainwashed juggernaut possibly find the chinks in his armour.
Who can argue that modernism and industrialization have not
bequeathed the 21st century a consumer deified by commodity fetishism?
The individual thus empowered to receive develops a perception of existence
driven to acquire new and more data, simpler because the discipline by which
conclusions are earned loses its relevance with the necessity of managing
so much information. Industrialized minds have compartmentalized, automated
so many cognitive templates that the ability to comprehend systems at their
core, the diverse nature of human relations, of human pursuits, of interactive
communion with 'other' planes of existence are left at a paucity undreamt
of by pre-television citizenries. Synthetic simplification may be a permissible
trend if a populace is to remain subjugated by consumption, but if it can
be balanced by substantive attempts to holisticize common interaction and
pursuit--prevented from becoming oversimplification, and a hollow shell
bound to implode under the mass of the fourth dimension--it must.
To date the social institution proven most effective and
efficient at redistributing values and wealth has been religion, while in
the post-industrial world great social deeds are attributed to little more
than economic capital. This redistributive legacy reflects a strength anchored
in mercantilism, however religious high-mindedness even when it was a pretext
was still a justified approach to problem-solving: mechanism's legacy has
bred a wanton utilitarianism since the Renaissance when men began to deconstruct
institutions at whose fundament were ideals, 'forms,' yet whose functionality
had grown corrupt; they learned how to deconstruct, but not how to reconstruct.
Naturally, at the heart of process development is identifying the elements
needing to be changed: the utopian experiments have failed, for all that they
were meant to be implemented not in the developing world but in the industrialized,
where class self-consciousness had matured into identity. A vision of improved
humanity, then, must needs be attempted at the moment of change-cognizance
by those to whom element-specific changes arrive naturally, not a nation in
full socio-cultural transition: revolution has proven to be less enduring
than reform.
Constructive reform, though, is a shift in orientation, which
emerges first in the personal as a trend accompanying circumstances, less
dramatically but with more conviction. And what has traditionally been the
homo sapiens’Äô most effective source of conviction? Transcendental consciousness--for
the complexity of existence defies organization--and experiential ascent above
the organization required to manage economic surplus since the cradle of civilization
first encountered it, is man's attempt to balance the synthetic taxonomies
of organized society.
It is of course incumbent upon civilized people to explore
the implication of their race, place, and context; only this awareness exposes
innovative fertilizers to a cultural anthropology pursuing natural cures for
the bruising inherent in transition from pluralistic diversity to a single
world econo-cultural society. Islamic society in particular has lent itself
to Barber's semiotic use of the spiritual struggle, jihad, as beacon to all
who would pirate the west's pax anaesthesium industralia-begotten treasures
on behalf of a conveniently revolutionary theocratic ideal. Classifying Islam's
cultural norms is a slippery slope indeed, taking into account that two predominantly
Muslim countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh, have voted women into power as
prime ministers before most western nations. Rich in academic innovation and
mercantile prosperity, "Islamic communities have nonetheless undergone
drastic declines cultural decline as the West has approached monumental degrees
of openness and luxury." And as Fareed Zakaria adds, (http://www.msnbc.com/news/639057.asp?0sp=w17b1)
"Until the 1950s, for example, Jews and Christians lived peaceably
under Muslim rule. In fact, Bernard Lewis, the pre-eminent historian of Islam,
has argued that for much of history religious minorities did better under
Muslim rulers than they did under Christian ones. All that has changed in
the past few decades. So surely the relevant question we must ask is, Why
are we in a particularly difficult phase right now? What has gone wrong in
the world of Islam that explains not the conquest of Constantinople in 1453
or the siege of Vienna of 1683 but Sept. 11, 2001?" While the Western
world struggles to understand what has gone wrong in the Islamic world to
have enabled it to foster violent ideological opposition to what the West
perceives as a fundamental belief in pluralism, the class mobility of free
enterprise, an inalienable right to vociferate and practice one's conscience,
it seems loath to struggle with the possibility that today's
geopolitical climate may not explain why Islam has attracted so many Western
converts; how its theology can provide a model of consciousness to bridge
the divide between wanton materialist consumption, myopic mechanism, and the
implemented articles of faith which comprise sincere conviction.
Shia and Sunna, the two major branches of Islamic belief,
provide a first striking example of this conceptual exchange: while Sunnism
was based primarily on ordinary men, Shiism followed the interpretations of
charismatic, hereditary Imams. The "war on terrorism" and its detractors,
however, with very few exceptions, seem to make no such distinction--there
is simply an Islamic world polarized into moderate or fanatical delegations--for
to the extent that both branches revere the concept of struggle both spiritual
and political, social and diplomatic savvy are also highly regarded. Islam
is a religious, political, and social program, none of which without the others.
The prophet Mohammed passed his nomadic followers a legacy
of unity and stability, grounded in the socio-political expression of cosmogonic
coherence. Quranic verse 6:1 says, "He has established Darkness and Light:"
whereas in Christian mystical soteriology darkness "comprehended not"
the creation of Light Islam introduced a holistic paradigm in which both emanate
from the same source, present themselves as the discursive/dialectic forces
of a harmonious creative destiny. The Shia rejected the authority of the first
three Imams as usurpers, only recognizing Ali, and separated themselves from
the majority of the Islamic community around the 10th century,
the period during which their self-awareness was first emergent. "They
were seemingly content to be a kind of permanent opposition. Since what marked
them off from Sunnites was also to a great extent their theological views,
perhaps they might be regarded as coming near to the modern view of religion
as essentially a private and not a communal matter." (Watt, 278) "So
the Imamites presumably acted in accordance with their principle of taqiyya
or concealing one's true opinions, accepted the caliphs and sultans as de
facto rulers in so far as they had power and then exerted whatever pressure
they could on them. Belief in a hidden imam, even if this belief was expressed,
was not a serious immediate threat to the regime, but in that it was the assertion
of a social and political ideal it implied a criticism of actual circumstances."
(Watt, 277). A similar socio-political habitude is prescribed by Morris Berman
in The Twilight of American Culture , what he describes as the
'monastic option' (132), a guidebook, in his own words, for disaffected Americans
who feel increasingly unable to fit into this society, and who also feel that
the culture has to change if it is to survive. The mindset he outlines requires
endless vigilance, quiet inquiry, what he calls the 'good' Enlightenment tradition--ìalways
moving against the grain, always asking us to look deeper into life (138).
His "New Monastic Individual" challenges the existing order without
a popular movement, reversing the emptiness of a moronized corporate/commercial
life (139) in pursuit of the social transformation which begins with the individual's
virtuous, optimistic integrity. This is the unity of theory and practice to
those who would theorize on social optimism.
In a spirit of uniting theory and practice, and prior to
the formal theological distinction between shiism and sunnism, one doctrinal
investigation (9th century) of primacy which took place during
the maturation period of sunni theology was regarding the nature of the quran
itself, and its state as the uncreated word of God vis-a-vis its earthly communication.
One prominent group of 9th century theologians, called by Watt
(281) the Lafziyya (from lafz, or 'utterance'), began to consider whether
or not man's utterance of the Quran is created, himself a created being, since
the words God addressed were His eternal speech. So many variances on the
solution to this problem arose that it may be one of the first polarizing
juridical issues in early Islam, but centrally the purely uncreated and eternal
energy of the word of God remained hidden behind man's experience of it. Shia
Ismaili Islam has theological grounding in a model of understanding humanity
as the corporeal expression, definition, manifestation of a metaphysical contest
among supernatural powers, but also as the unity of zahir (revelation/observance)
and batin (interpretation/esotericism), the investigation and polemicization
of which dichotomous aspects marked a distinctly formative era in the development
of Shia doctrines, and led to a doctrinalization of their unity both in intellectual
tradition and custom peculiar to the Ismaili--personified by their Imams.
"Almost all the Shia accept that the imams are those
described in the Quran as al-Rasikhun'l-Ä-ilm ("Those firmly versed in
knowledge"). The problem is whether the true meaning of the sacred word
is contained in and derived from the literal text only. Or does it depend
on some less obvious or hidden, inner powers that operate independently and
at a level above or behind the outwardly manifested scriptural symbols?"
( Walker, 62) Operating at such a level of meditative refinement, the Imam's
place as interpreter of the Quranic text necessitates his corporeal expression
of zahir, without which there is no batin; though some followers believe that
the Imam's revelation or esoteric penetration is his primary raison d'etre,
the example of zahir and batin's mystical symbiosis is both the means and
end to his pursuit of an experience of consciousness which may be called sacramental
realism, sacramental because it sees creation and human endeavor as merely
the Platonic shadows of a more perfect, mystical reality, and realist because
these shadows exist in a state of un-self-conscious cosmic struggle, an unending
battle between angels and daemons’Äìboth of whose influences must be accepted,
processed, and respected as discursive weights in the scales atop which creation
sits. Within this context Quranic admonishments dictate the fundamental principles
and bases according to which works must be done: faiths, the revelations of
mystical experience, are thus the guiding force enabling works' form to adapt,
as the hidden perfect cosmic struggle advances, to the requirements of changing
circumstances. The interpretive element to fundamental Quranic practices has
facilitated a community of believers who, since they ruled the Islamic world
(the Fatimids, so-called beause they followed only the line of Fatima through
her grandson, Ismail) have prospered in spiritual and material unity. At no
time since their empire has this been more evident than in the twentieth century
in the persons of the family Aga Khan, the current hereditary line in the
Imamate, whose immense economic prowess has been parlayed into the Aga Khan
University, a major development fund (supported by the United Nations), natural
conservations programs, and public, international discouse on nuclear non-proliferation.
"A defining exploration of the Ismaili intellectual
tradition involves the imam's interpretation (ta'wil) of the revelation (tanzil),
and whether or not the esoteric teaching he conveys adds to what is available
in the Quarn's literal meaning. A trend identified by Islamic heresiographers,
though, is the surprising preponderance of doctrines upholding the exclusivity
of the ta'wil alone and condoning neglect of the tanzil. What this suggests
is that those privy to the disclosed, inner meaning of the holy scripture
would be provided with a means to avoid the outward obligations of ordinary
Islamic duties, such as prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, and alms-tax. Thus, if
the literal wording of the law, its zahir, is replaced by its true spiritual
meaning, its batin, then only the latter applies, so that the ritual prescriptions
of Islamic law cease to be required and the person who has acquired access
to the batin, may, accordingly, stop observing them" (Walker, 63). Though
rebellious factions and civil unrest marked this tendency's having tainted
early Ismailyya, antinomianism was countermanded by the influence of al-Kirmani.
Al-Kirmani (Walker calls him the foremost Ismaili scholar and theorist of
his generation) insisted that the zahir be maintained: the arabic term ibada
means observance, veneration, adoration, service, or divine worship; Ibad
are servants, i.e., God's servants; thus Ibada is the service and veneration
due God by His servants. He refers to his own doctrine as Ahl al-ibadatayn,
which is to say "those of double observance," or "the partisans
of double veneration" (Walker, 66). Whereas, says Walker, in the standard
discussion of Ismaili doctrines the issue of greatest concern is the relationship
between the exoteric and esoteric understandings of scripture and the law,
al-Kirmani, who was a fully competent theologian, saw the larger problem which
involves matters of faith and works and whether or not being muslim (a believer)
is the same as being mu'min (a faithful and obedient servant). (67).
The soul commences its existence
empty of knowledge, tabula rasa. If, however, it finds the appropriate teacher
it begins to live a life independent of its body and its physical needs; the
road to its salvation opens. The teacher (God, Muhammed, the Imams, or their
appointed/authorized agents) begins with the things most obvious and easily
grasped, such as models and pictures, and traces them back to their theoretical
and abstract origin. But this process requires both procedures. To explain
the abstract the teacher must employ pictures and thus also move from what
is theoretical and intellectually known down into a physical reality. Conversely,
the student proceeds from the picture to the abstraction it represents. One
is zahir and the other batin (Walker, 78, 79).
The Ismaili tradition is thus a metaphysical doctrine incorporating
the spirit of modernity, which in fact spends and collects its contemplative
currency in the market of political and economic realities in an approach
which abstracts these into a vision of humanity's transcendence, but it is
a vision which remains simply abstraction without its infusion into and basis
upon cognitive adaptation to social change. Were al-Kirmani's guidance not
to have advanced it beyond antinomianism, Ismailiyya risked what Mohammed
Khatami indicts in a later movement, Sufism: "Instead of challenging
the bitterness of extant political reality and looking for a way of changing
that reality through offering alternative realities and visions, Sufism, at
least its extreme versions, resisted the dominant political order by negating
the relevance of politics and the political altogether--putting forth the
proposition that real understanding and salvation could only come from negating
all that pertains to this world, including civil society" (9). Khatami
identifies in Muslim history a stulted ability for rational thought: "People
could not think beyond authoritarianism in the sphere of politics’Ķeither
submitting to this fate, or even if they thought of combating the extant authoritarianism,
they could not find a mode of resistance other than force and the sword"
(10). That resistance to the corporate media hegemon can be reasonable, non-violent,
must be grasped before western literacy's last breath, and before playground
politics succeeds in colonizing all remaining practitioners of any lifestyle
remotely opposed to gratuitous consumption ('enemies of our way of life').
Yet as evidenced by the Ismaili Imamate in the twentieth
century, modernity is not a force in which historical discontinuity is necessarily
implicit (or prerequisite). To Mohammed Khatami (17), development as the upshot
of modernization would seem to to make the latter possible only through tradition's
dismantlement; "but these arbitrary assumptions can only satisfy the
feeble-minded who feel no responsibility for human destiny. The problem is
much too complex to be solved with simplistic solutions. Tradition cannot
be transformed through mere prescriptions, nor does modernization come about
easily, for until people themselves change, no fateful transformation will
happen in their lives, and the transformation of people is a highly complex
affair for which individuals often lack the tools." Religion as spiritual
regime, though, is primarily a self-transformative endeavour, and it is toward
this end that the example of the Imams' unifying force represents exactly
the cosmopolitan yet integral, ascetic sublimity essential to the individual's
cognitive adaptibility in a complex world of increasingly sophisticating societies.
Democratic systems of governance typify the advancement of
political philosophy to its mainstream installation of previously unknown
freedoms and social progress. Such highly organized societies require either
government or NGOs to proliferate, the latter case being an approach similar
to that of the Ismaili Imamate--open, challenging discourse and personal engagement
in the social justices fostered by economic progress--which has proven highly
effective at actualizing the goals of the Aga Khans and the Ismaili batin
through innovative zahir. Western needs differ little from the eastern (or
'Arabic' or Islamic) in this sense, in fact. For in as much as the cultural
decline addressed by reformers such as Khatami and development-minded social
consciences like the Aga Khans requires of their respective compatriots the
courage to reject a determinist approach to media-driven consumption culture,
the American mind cannot also remain shackled to this determinism (however
less cynical): it is precisely the casual complacence of anaesthetic consumerism/entertainment
addiction that makes the discourse among nations with historical continuity
and more socially progressive ones seem so farcical and kitsch.
But the Aga Khans are not fanatics:
how then have they been able to cover their goals in the fabric of their beliefs?
Perhaps as Ralph Waldo Emerson said in Brahma: Far of forgot to me is near,
shadow and sunlight are the same, the vanished gods to me appear, and one
to me are shame and fame; according to their followers the Ismaili Imams see
history through a type of mystical filter, which convinces their strenuously
united observance of both ritual regime and its realistic practical extension.
To a muslim observer this may
be seen as taqiyya: the Imams realize that no society lasts forever;
yet they also clearly realize that it would be a grave waste of consciousness
to lose engagement with the world as it is.
What can this mean to a western
follower of the example?
Firstly, the privilege of engagement in civilized democracy
will be relinquished by those whose consciences and minds are closed to its
prerequisites. The syncretic ideal is one that requires passionate openness,
unrelenting curiosity, and a perception of 'all things as one.' When President
Bush defends the American people's generosity and self-sacrifice he neglects
to apprise their corollary intellectual and spiritual passivity; their generosity
of spirit is in large part the result of plenty (as could be argued about
the Aga Khans); but more importantly, though, it is the inherited moral spirit
of participatory democracy.
A further unity of the two, reform of this passivity, is
the categorical challenge and social crisis for Americans of the 21st
century. And I suggest that, apropos to this time of war, all charismatic
leaders of the revealed religions would have had their followers internalize
the moral imperative from which war results: that (and this is an optimistic
reckoning) human conflict in the name of faith is the result of spiritual
cowardice. Mystical revelations are not meant for everyone, or occulted knowledge
would not be so-named. Superior (effective) variations of knowledge fused
with action, faith with works, inspire an observer to follow the example to
its core. Albert Einstein said in "The Goal of Human Existence"
that "our Jewish forebears, the prophets, and the old Chinese sages understood
and proclaimed that the most important factor in giving shape to our human
existence is the setting up and establishment of a goal; the goal being a
community of free and happy human beings who by constant inward endeavor strive
to liberate themselves from the inheritance of anti-social and destructive
instincts. In this effort the intellect can be the most powerful aid."
And in the Renaissance tradition--galvanized at mercantile Europe's exposure
to Islam's long-preserved spirit of classical innovation--may our intellects
more often break molds than synthesize them.
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