Nietzsche and Islam (review)

Roy Jackson's Nietzsche and Islam constitutes an ambitious effort to show how Nietzsche's hermeneutical and perspectivalist epistemological stance might enable contemporary Islam to revive its Arab essence through a recovery of the authentic meanings of its key paradigms. In so doing Jackson contends that Islam might utilize secularization to better contend with modernity. The book courageously deals with self-generated involutional aporias that drain mainstream Islamic discourses of life-affirming potential. Jackson also considers misunderstandings between the Islamic world and the West, addressing the "clash of civilizations" thesis, perceptions of Islam in our post-9/11 world, and their effects within the Islamic cultural realm (6, 11).

Jackson argues that Nietzsche may be understood as a religious philosopher of sorts, one whose religiosity "rests in his lack of 'faith' in the secular order to provide humanity with any meaningful existence" (13). In this context Jackson announces his hope that "Islam . . . learn from Nietzsche's religiosity and embrace a 'living God' that does not perceive secularization as an enemy," an aim motivated by the need to "save" Islam from its own Platonic tendencies by fostering a pluralist, "liberal" stance toward its truth claims to broaden interpretation of its main principles (13).

Jackson understands "Islam as an Arabic phenomenon" (9), whose central paradigms include the Qur'an, the prophet Muhammad, Medina as the first "Islamic state," and the four "Rightly-Guided" caliphs, which Jackson argues are indispensable to a revitalization of the Muslim faith (19–20). He offers a quasi-genealogical assessment of major interpretations of the Qur'an while interrogating salient terms and concepts to illuminate the development of Islam's dominant doctrines and controversies arising therefrom. Utilizing Nietzsche's exegetical method, Islamic scholars might manifest the lost soul of Islam through reanalysis of its sacred text. Citing the "strong tradition within Islam of hermeneutics," Jackson attributes the "emergence of tafsir and ta'wil (explanation and elaboration) as a science" to "the willingness of Islamic scholars to not only elaborate on the work of their predecessors but to reject it" (71). His historical-critical approach contrasts the significance of Jahiliyya—the state of ignorance that prevailed in the Arab world before the advent of Muhammad—with the present, in which knowledge of God is vanishing (101–2). This informs his diagnosis of the malady enervating the contemporary soul of Islam, a condition to be overcome through physiopsychological tranquility provided by the word of the Prophet, a harmony once discernable as the Weltanschauung of the Muslim world that is no longer experienced due to doctrinal inflexibility (102).

Jackson contends that Nietzsche's interpretive framework equips Islamic scholars to reevaluate received understandings of the "golden age narrative" that conveyed "the utopic vision of 'Transhistorical Islam'" and shows how it is "relevant to contemporary Islamic discourse" (20) and how the myth of it may be overcome to enhance Islam (138, 145). He considers how an Übermenschlich individual (a new amir?) might utilize historical interpretations to legislate against normatively homogenizing "Transhistorical Islam" as a Gesetzgeber for a renewed Muslim state capable of providing the faithful freedom to live according to shahada, "in oneness and unity with God." Unlike the "unworkable idealized archetype" of the Rashidun, or Islamic caliphate (145), Jackson's rehabilitated Islam would foster community in a "relationship . . . beyond state boundaries," unperturbed by outside authority (161).

Jackson is persuaded that an Islamic revival—or renaissance—could be initiated through the application of Nietzsche's hermeneutics, to renew the essence of Islam against self-generated myths that keep it "safe" in the estimation of its conservative arbiters. Against the culture of conformity its traditional authorities enforce, "Islam, in its essence, is rebellious, revolutionary, and concerned with reform and renewal. . . . In Nietzschean terms, we have created idols from our will to truth, yet the essence of Islam is, in fact, to shatter these idols" (108). He therefore argues that a genuinely agonistic form of Islam could transfigure the faith to attain the nomocratic politics befitting the true Muslim nation, the dar al-Islam or House of Islam, wherein religious...