Social Origins Of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse

FIVE. The Discourse and the Path

‘Ilm al-Kalam, or scholasticism (literarily, “the science of speech”) was one of the most foundational components of early Islamic philosophy, as it began to take form a little less than a century after the death of the prophet.1 The centrality of language analysis to many Islamic systems of thought is one of the most striking historical features of the intellectual offshoots of the faith. A leading commentator has expressed bewilderment , in the context of contemporary debates in literary theory, at how little is known of the fact that many of the contours of the lines of thought regarding language and representation under discussion today can already be discerned in debates surrounding Qur’anic exegesis some ten centuries ago.2 There is little question that the relationship between language, representation , and truth has been a central and recurrent feature of Islamic civilization since its inception. A common argument—which for Muslims became one ground for the miraculous nature of the revelation—was that the literary plain through which the Qur’an expressed itself emanated from a temporal context prefigured by the experience of poetry, which then highlighted the idea of the form of speaking as a venue of truth. For Muslims, the literary superiority of the Qur’an to the odes itself proved its 115 five The Discourse and the Path Do you not see how God compares a good word to a good tree? Its roots are firm and its branches are in the sky. —Qur’an 14: 26 unmatchability by human means (i‘jaz). In other words, for the Arabs to whom Islam was first disclosed, the field of language was itself the field of the miracle, in the same way that, as some classical commentators have noted, medicine was the field of the miracle in the age of Jesus, who had to prove his credentials by miraculous healing, or magic was in the age of Moses, who likewise had to prove his credentials through that venue of truth production.3 In one of the few contemporary studies to revisit such a notion of discursive centrality to Islamic thought, Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid seems to endorse this same ancient point of view by asserting that the Islamic civilization can be regarded primarily as a “civilization of the text.”4 In some classical as well as much of contemporary orientalist scholarship , examining a language-oriented civilizational frame has entailed following a rather narrow path of meticulous but largely inert philological deductions, in a way that obscured the philosophical and sociohistorical complexities surrounding discourse production. With rare exceptions, the field has remained largely closed to the contemporary advances in the philosophy and cultural studies of discourse production that have bene- fited so many other fields of inquiry. There are a few exceptions, such as Mohammed Arkoun, who argues for a multilevel approach to the Qur’an, more richly embedded in contemporary philosophical and anthropological debates. The three approaches selected by Arkoun for illustration include a linguistic one, where emphasis is placed on detecting deep, orderly structures; an anthropological approach, which would be oriented toward a different level of structure, namely, the mythological one; and a historical approach, which would be oriented toward and advised by the philosophy of history as it pertains to this field, already referenced by the traditional genre of asbab an-nuzul (grounds of Revelation).5 The examination of the full scope of this langauge-oriented focus within Islamic culture and philosophy is well beyond the limited scope of this chapter. Rather, the emphasis here will be confined to the foundational period, and more specifically I will focus on some important transformations in representation between jahili (pre-Islamic) and Qur’anic forms, especially in the context of the odes. The exposition cannot, needless to say, be exhaustive, but I hope that it will illustrate some major ideological and expressive attitudes toward being, representation, and the 116 • The Discourse and the Path recording of items of value, particuarly as they relate to sociological shifts in lifestyle and mentalities. forms, codes, words In both the Qur’an and poetic speech, the form of expression assumes paramount importance, since it first indicates the classification of the speech. It was after that primary classification that the “substance” of the speech could then be introduced. It is such a form that, for instance, allows an ode like that of al-Harith to be counted...