Beyond State, Nation, and Identity:
Cross-Border Convergences in Islamic Public Philosophy

Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies

Georgetown University

This paper provides a summary of an emergent, increasingly popular style of interpreting Islam in various especially Middle Eastern contexts. The observed trend clusters around ideas addressing primarily the developmental failures of the postcolonial state, the authoritarian-bent of secular nationalism and, most interestingly, the fluid meaning of an Islamic identity itself in the global matrix of interactive cultures. This style of interpretation is condensed in the writings of such public intellectuals as Abdolkarim Soroush (Iran), Muhammad Shahrur (Syria), and Hasan Hanafi (Egypt), among many others. Working independently of each other and in very different contexts, these figures seem to be arriving today at remarkably similar and highly original conclusions regarding the place of Islam in social modernity. Their popular appeal can be measured by how many books they sell, their presence in the media and the public sphere, attendance at their lectures, and political groupings inspired by their thought.

The popularity of such views seems related to the fact that while they are offered from a committed religious perspective, they are not offered as apologia of Islam—i.e. they resemble neither the defensive commentaries such as those encountered today among some Muslim liberals, nor the religious establishment’s tentative, haphazard adjustment to modernity. Rather, this trend offers active new possibilities of interpretation. It converges on a distinction between an essential and timeless Islam on the one hand, and the variety of ways by which a human society may approach the faith given the limits of its spatiotemporal horizons, on the other. Thus the new public philosophers tend to reject notions of “essence” and, in doing so, make Islam into an ideology well-suited for the modernist tasks once associated with the authoritarian developmental state or secular nationalism. The synergy with “modernity” offered through this style of interpretation derives from its rejection of orthodoxy, claims to finality of knowledge, broad social philosophical probity, strong justification for diversity in approaches to questions of faith, and moving Islam beyond the symbolism of ritual and, in some instances, even identity.