Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840

Epilogue: Postcolonial Reflections

Epilogue Postcolonial Reflections Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only. . . . A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house! Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [I]t seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British Law, we need a fair amount of “deconstruction ” of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of Sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment. Rowan Williams, Archbishop’s Lecture-Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams could not foresee that his reflections on the selective accommodation of the Shar’ia within the framework of UK statutory law would erupt into an international controversy the day after he delivered his foundational lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice on February 2008. The Anglican clergy, British politicians, and media pundits demanded his immediate resignation because he speculated that the equitable principles shared by British and Islamic law may allow competing jurisdictions in which Muslim citizens could opt to have some cases heard in a Shar’ia rather than English law court. Notorious for his liberal views, Rowan Williams had touched on a sensitive cultural nerve when—in the spirit of Derrida’s Abrahamic supplement—he called for the need to deconstruct the imaginary opposition between Islam and the Enlightenment. He not only reawakened post-9/11 xenophobic fears about 224   Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 Muslim immigrant communities living in the UK and abroad, but also recalled, unknowingly and ironically, the centuries-old arguments of radical freethinkers who saw Islamic law as compatible with English republican ideals. The Archbishop ’s critics repressed this alternative intellectual history, as emblematized in the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali’s emphatic response: “English Law is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and our notions of human freedoms derive from that tradition. It would be impossible to introduce a tradition like Shar’ia into this corpus without fundamentally affecting its integrity.”1 Like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, the Bishop relies on the “clash of civilizations” story to explain why Islam is fundamentally antithetical to Western (Judeo-Christian) democracy. In offering a counternarrative to the “clash of civilizations” story that has framed post-9/11 accounts of Islam,this book seeks to discredit the false Eurocentric assumption that English law and democratic thought are exclusively rooted in Judeo-Christian history. The eighteenth century abounds with remarkable British writers—such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Edmund Burke, Walter Savage Landor, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley— who treated Islam as a theological, legalistic, and philosophical framework for defining constitutional liberty. This epilogue considers how Islamic republicanism was reinvented in British India between Thomas Carlyle’s belated defense of Mahomet and Rowan Williams’ controversial remarks. In terms of literary chronology, Carlyle’s heroic Mahomet marks both the culmination and end of the discourse of Islamic republicanism that I have been tracing in this book. In his 1840 lectures, published as On Heroes, HeroWorship , and the Heroic in History, Carlyle asks his British audience to imagine Mahomet as a “Prophet-hero” who belongs in the pantheon of virtuous republicans alongside Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell, and Napoleon. This topic could be publicly addressed for the first time due, in part, to the 1828 repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which removed the civil and legal disabilities that had suppressed radical Protestant expression (chapter 1), and to imperial Britain’s increasing interaction with Islamic universalism in South and Southeast Asia.2 Carlyle casts the Prophet’s universal teachings as an antidote to the secular age’s social, economic, and political ills. He vindicates him from the“impostor”charge and instead praises him as a republican legislator who founded “a kind of Christianity ” free from idol worship, capitalist greed, and an autocratic priesthood. The Prophet introduced “change and progress” in “the universal condition and thoughts of men” comparable to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation (54, 37). Epilogue   225 Unfortunately for Carlyle, the Prophet cannot offer a viable remedy for mid nineteenth-century industrial modernity, because his portrayal of this “wild...