UNDERSTANDING ISLAM AND THE VIOLENCE

Abstract

UDK 28:17

This article reflects upon the significance of a critical approach towards those concepts within Muslim interpretative tradition and intellectual history, which directly or indirectly offer “logistic support” to violence, by answering three questions that could provide for a radical criticism of an entire corps of Muslim interpretation of Islam:

• What is it, within the entire Muslim interpretation of Islam that gave priority to the law over the ethics?
• Why is it that political thought has not developed within the Muslim thought?
• Why Muslim hermeneutic tradition perverted the role of intellect?

A radical “turn” of Muslim thought, regarding primacy of legal, in Muslim classical as well as modern history, could comprise of opening towards what, in defining his mission, God’s Messenger Muhammad s.w.s., named ethical. Such a “turn" requires a significant effort, taking on the responsibility for the other which requires such an attitude upon which, as stated in the Qur’an, Habil (Abel) can say to his brother Qabil (Cain): ‘If you should raise your hand against me to kill me, indeed, I shall not raise my hand against you to kill you’ (5:31) Suffering from the lack of political thought in Muslim intellectual history, Muslim advocates of an ‘Islamic discourse’ by giving supremacy to a fact within one, metaphysical order of things (God) over a ‘fact’ from an entirely different, political, order of things (political will of citizens) are rejecting democratic concept of governance, and, in attempt to ‘Islamise’ democracy, which means to limit it by providing a ‘higher’ (theocratic) instance, resort to non-democratic solutions which as a rule leads to usurpation of that ‘higher’ instance and to violence that makes the content of every kind of usurpation. To overcome misunderstanding concerning the legitimacy of reason within the interpretive tradition of Islam it is necessary that every reference (from our side) to the Qur’an is actually a reference to (our) understanding of the Qur’an. Otherwise, referring to the Qur’an with a presumption of beholding God’s perspective represents a totalitarian impulse that easily ends in violence.