1 WAS HEGEL AN ISLAMOPHOBE? AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? Are Hegel’s views on Islam indicative of any discursive tendencies in modern European views of Islam in world history? What does those views tell us about the universality and atemporality of idealism (a view of reality as dependent on human perception) as a philosophical discourse? If Hegel’s concept of Islam is predicated on the ‘Orient’ – in the sense this notion was understood, and practiced, in nineteenth-century Europe– how valid is this Hegelian legacy if employed by modern and contemporary scholars in re-examining Islam after September 11 and why should it matter now? While answering these questions will not restore to intellectual history what was lost on the battleground of Eurocentrism, it would still help pinpoint the domains of power in which a hegemonic culture was mapped and its history was imagined and constructed. The task here is not to label Hegelian thought with Eurocentrism but to interrogate the intellectual premises that contributed to the emergence of the Eurocentric and Orientalist elements in his thought.1 Let us begin by asking a clarifying question: why Hegel? Before attempting to answer this question, it is important to emphasize that a clarification is not the same as a justification and that embarking on ‘understanding’ Hegel does not mean proving or conceding that he is right. There is always a haunting and dynamic duality at work in every Hegelian sentence, which makes it difficult to qualify him. The intricacy of his thought does not make process easier and may indeed tip the scale of our interpretive task one way or the other. Whatever the assessment of Hegel’s philosophical position on Islam might be, there will always be room for second and third readings and a window for doubt in order not to fall into the vicious trap of misunderstanding again. But this does not mean that we should not start somewhere. A major difficulty in grasping Hegel’s concept of history is that to him the real is not what is out there in the phenomenological world. Geist (the mind or the spirit) is the only reality for Hegel. Everything that takes place in the physical world must be brought into relationship with the mind/spirit; even revolutions must happen in the mind first: “World history begins with its universal goal: the fulfillment of the concept of spirit. The goal is the inner, indeed innermost unconscious drive, and the entire business of world history is the work if 2 bringing it into consciousness.”2 History for Hegel is therefore first and foremost a mental process, an evolvement of self-consciousness and perception as the mind opens itself through human history and civilization. Hegel died in 1831, leaving behind him a corpus of idealist philosophy that was to require centuries of unpacking and interpretations. Thanks to Hegel, an academic discipline of history rose to unparalleled heights in nineteenthcentury Europe. Hegel left a tremendous impact on modern liberals, including Marx, who was a devout member of the Young Hegelians as a youth and deeply influenced by the new historical vein in Hegel’s philosophy. Later on, Hegel’s views on Islam as a religion that seeks “world dominion” while lacking particularity or nationalist inclinations would serve as a ground for Marx’s analysis of Islam.3 Hegel believed that the state is a “primordial institution of human life, like the family,” and that it was “closer to the divine order than anything else on earth and therefore has the power to demand compliance.”4 Hegel also revolutionized transcendental philosophy through a radical self-critique of epistemology. In opposition to Kant, Hegel was able to demonstrate the phenomenological self-reflection of knowledge as the necessary radicalization of the critique of reason.5 This radicalization resulted in a crucial moment in modern European thought when philosophy broke off the borders of its closed academic circles to become a commentary on the history of the world. In other words, theory and reality, transcendentalism and phenomenology, converged at this historic juncture. Or, to put it in Hegel’s language, the rational-freedom became real. While there is a direct relationship between power and knowledge, it is worth inquire about the bases and sources of that knowledge – not just how complete, but also how cryptic and obscure it can be. Only with closer attention to the production of the historical episteme and the narratives associated with it do we begin to discern not only the anecdotes and fantasies but also the politics that envelop the very source of such knowledge. Hegel is not an exception to this rule and his use of terms like “absolutism” and the “Orient” has an intriguing historical context to it that is worth investigating further. The Roots of Hegel’s Absolutism In his intriguing work Lineages of the Absolutist State, Perry Anderson dissect this Foucauldian duality with reference to Hegel, albeit indirectly, through undertaking a topic many historians would shy away from: identifying blind 3 spots in historical Marxism and philosophical Marxism, while attempting to synthesize both in an unrivaled comprehensive attempt to reexamine the European continent’s modern political history, East and West, from the lenses of absolutism. To do so, he undertakes a radical historical contextualization of the spheres of knowledge in nineteenth-century Europe. What Anderson modestly refers to as “a comprehensive survey of the nature and development of the Absolutist Sate in Europe” turns out to be not just a survey, but an indepth and thorough double-punch critique of Marxist empiricists who often neglect theory and Marxist philosophers who engage in the theoretical issues of historical materialism without paying much attention to the events of history.6 Anderson’s study of “history from above,” and of the “particular” and the “general” of Europe’s lineages of absolutism, sheds significant light on “the first international State system in the modern world” 7 in a comprehensive way that help us understand and situate the discursive practices that informed Hegel’s philosophy of world history, although Hegel himself is not a major aspect of Anderson’s critique. According to Anderson, the issue that the serious historian must face is not only to detect forces and patterns of events at work in the formation of political thought, but also to resist chronological convenience and dominant customs of historiographic monism. Anderson thus writes his work against the grain of structured historiography, with its “common departure and common conclusion, spanned by a single stretch of time.”8 The traditional view held by Marxism has been that history is a series of class struggles ultimately rooted in economic conflict, though these struggles may take political forms. These economic conflicts take place between an exploiting class and an exploited class. Pointing attention to the infamous ambiguity of Marx when it comes to the definition of ‘class’ and its retroactive applicability, Anderson contends that as much as “history from below” is beneficial to both Marxist and non-Marxist historians, “secular struggle between classes is ultimately resolved at the political—not at the economic or cultural—level of society.”9 To examine this “political level,” he introduces a typology rather than a chronology of absolutism, one in which “periodization” is no longer the only criterion for historical judgment and should not obfuscate the similarities in the patterns and forces at work that produce the absolutist state in Europe. Spanish absolutism, for example, ended in the late sixteenth century; England’s lasted till the end of the mid seventeenth, and France’s till the end of the eighteenth, while Prussia’s made it till the end of the nineteenth, and 4 Russia’s was only overthrown in the twentieth century. Still, Anderson maintains, such absolutisms share a common ground: recurrent absolutism. Anderson’s point is that despite the temporal spacing of absolutism, there are essential thematic factors to be considered before we submit ourselves to truncated theories of history that reduce it to class struggle. In the case of Europe, and for the benefit of our approach to Hegel, these factors include the accumulation of capital, religious movements and reformations, formation of nations, the advent of industrialization, and the expansion of overseas imperialism. For the present context, it is most relevant to focus on some of the important questions that Anderson’s study implicitly raises: why did Europe generate “monarchy,” to use Montesquieu’s terms, whereas the Orient, or the Asiatic, is only capable of producing “despotism”? What is so specific and unique to European forms of political domination? Why does Europe tend to dismiss its Eastern part when it writes its history? Was a warped line of Eurocentrism drawn in the public texts of the Enlightenment? If so, how did this attempt at demarcation influence the field of European intellectual history? It is easy to see why an ‘advanced’ Western Europe would want to sever itself from the Continent’s ‘backward’ regions. Still, Anderson confronts us again with the lamentable fact that historical research on Europe focused either on single countries or limited periods, and that historiography was conducted mainly within national bounds. For Anderson, as long as we are unwilling to interpret Western Europe’s political thought in a comparative relationship to Eastern Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, historical research, Marxist or not, will remain confined to limited national frames. Anderson’s contextual critique of absolutism is crucial for understanding how Hegel built his philosophy of world history and how he treated Islam and its tradition in his dialectical thinking, but also, and more importantly, how ‘Europe’ constructed its history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Anderson cleverly juxtaposes the genealogy of Europe’s classical engagement with Greece and especially with its ‘feudal’ system and systematic segregation from the House of Islam, he puts into question the very foundations and formative premises of Europe’s nineteenth-century socio-political and cultural heritage, making one wonder whether Western Europe’s early nineteenthcentury patronage of Greek nationalists against the Ottomans was an untimely sign of Orientalist animosity towards an Islamic state that happened to be in 5 the heart of Europe. Anderson’s line of argument seems to lead to this conclusion. For example, he confronts the question of how it came about that “the Ottoman State, occupant of South-Eastern Europe for five hundred years, camped in the continent without ever becoming naturalized into its social or political system.”10 The Ottoman Empire, continues Anderson, “always remained largely a stranger to European culture, as an Islamic intrusion into Christendom, and has posed intractable problems of presentation to unitary histories of the continent to this day.”11 According to Anderson, the investigation into Western Europe’s absolutism could benefit from comparisons with Eastern Europe, one in which the formation of Ottoman rule certainly stands out as a key example with which to contrast European absolutism for multiple reasons: the physical presence of Islam in Europe, the long history of military conflict between Islam and Christendom, and the selfunderstanding of Europe in relation to the “Orient.” The significance of understanding Europe’s perception of itself in relationship to Turkey is particularly important for the positioning of Islam within the matrix of its intellectual history. In Anderson’s view, it was Machiavelli in early sixteenth-century Italy who, in two central passages of The Prince (published 1532), was “the first theorist to use the Ottoman State as the antithesis of a European monarchy” by explicitly condemning the Porte’s autocratic bureaucracy.12 A few decades later, Machiavelli was followed by Jean Bodin who, in his Six Livres de la République (1576) describes the King of the Turks as the “Grand Seignior,” a term used to describe despotism avant la lettre, due to his dictatorship and sole complete ownership of property. Another important blow dealt to the Ottomans was in early seventeenth-century England at the hands of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). In The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1632), Bacon distinguishes Europe from Turkey by emphasizing the latter’s social absence of “hereditary aristocracy” that characterized European rule: “a monarchy where there is no nobility at all, is ever a pure and absolute tyranny, as that of the Turks.”13 The legacy of this distinction, argues Anderson, continued in figures like James Harrington and François Bernier who criticized Ottoman economy. In fact, it was in the Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) that Harrington further widened the gulf of distinction by arguing that unlike Europe, the economic foundations of the Ottoman Empire were based on matters of land monopoly.14 Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire (1671), the work that is known to have invented racial classifications as such,15 cemented Harrington’s views and added a 6 scathing eye-witness travelogue of the Islamic empire as “barbaric” and “uncivilized,” where cronyism, favoritism, and land monopoly roamed unchecked. Bernier’s account was the first to dwell on a relationship between biology and mental development and to leave a palpable mark on eighteenthcentury European historiography and influence such major thinkers like the Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755). Despite Montesquieu’s famous opposition to slavery and colonial expansion,16 he still saw a sharp distinction between Europe and Islam as embodied in the Ottoman Empire: “There is no despotism so injurious as that whose prince declares himself propertier of all landed estates and heir of all subjects: the consequence is always the abandonment of cultivation, and if the ruler interferes in trade, the ruin of every industry.”17 In addition, Montesquieu went on to bestow a sense of geographical conditioning and atmospheric doom, fashionable at the time, on all Asians and Orientals.18 Montesquieu’s reputation as an ‘enlightened’ thinker was in every way conducive to making his De l’Esprit de Lois (1758) Europe’s first geo-political gospel of Orientalism. Although it was the despotic practices and corrupt reputation of the Ottoman Sultan, “Grand Seignior,” that triggered Europe’s antagonism, this particularity did not prevent Muslim subjects and Islam in general from becoming the public target of Western enmity. With political despotism, economic corruption, geographical fatalism now the fortifying walls separating Europe from Islam, Europe left the Orient with only a few branches of knowledge to claim as their own. Soon intellectual history would decide the battle, as Hegel, the inheritor of the Enlightenment and of Montesquieu’s binarisms, would use history to widen the gap of disparity between Europe and the rest of the world. Now, if this indeed was the episteme that granted Islam entrance into Hegel’s philosophy of world history, and if one were to speak about the ideals of this history and grant oneself axiomatically the position of thinking and deciding those ideals, how are we to judge the validity of such ideals, especially when they were formed and informed by concepts of racial and economic supremacy? Situating Islam in Hegelian thought Theodor Adorno once said of Hegel that his “genius relies in his mediatory philosophy and in his attempt to define the spirit that prevails over mankind but also prevails in them.”19 Paul de Man also confirms the existence of unconscious Hegelianism in all of us: 7 Whether we know it or not, or like it, or not, most of us are Hegelians and quite orthodox ones at that. We are Hegelian when we reflect on literary history in terms of an articulation between a Hellenic and a Christian era, or between the Hebraic and the Hellenic world. We are Hegelian when we try to systematize the relationships between the various art forms or genre according to different modes of representation. Or when we try to conceive of historical periodization as a development of a collective or individual consciousness.”20 To both Adorno and de Man, then, Hegelian thought is an all-inclusive philosophical space in which currents of thought have been collected and preserved. Contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy have also assumed this position of comprehensive totalization. Take for instance Adorno’s provocative reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history as consciously paradoxical: “It is characteristic of Hegel’s thinking that he really wants to have it all ways: that he really wants to include everything, even things that simply cannot be reconciled. By this, I mean that he adopts the standpoint of the universal. He tends always to claim, ideologically and in a conformist spirit, that the universal is in the right. But equally, almost as an afterthought, he would also like to be credited with wanting fair play for the individual. Incidentally, this comment applies with equal force to the entire Hegelian macro-structure since the whole point of his philosophy is that it not only teaches absolute identity, but also believes that non-identity – in other words, the very thing that cannot be included in identity – should somehow be incorporated into the concept of identity in the course of its elaboration.”21 In this passage Adorno touches upon the core of Hegelian thinking, namely its antithetical inclusion or dialectical dynamism. According to this formula, Hegel has already accounted for everything, and even the opposite of his thought is a necessary component of the thought process. In other words, there is no outside Hegel.22 And it is specifically in this context that we must examine his philosophy. On the one hand, there is the claim of universalism, the idea that Hegel’s philosophy transcends time and space and is therefore a valid source of a better understanding of everything, including religion. On the other hand, there is a phenomenological world with Haiti on the far horizon 8 and the Ottoman Empire next door, shelled in its own political, economic and cultural “absolutism,” to insist on Anderson’s term. This phenomenality of the “non-European Other” poses the following inevitable questions to transcendental philosophy: was Hegel’s presentation of Islam done in a manner typical of the compartmentalizing thought of 19th century Europe? While there may not be a straightforward answer to this question that will satisfy both the abstract Hegelian and the material Marxian23, one thing is clear: Islam is manifest in Hegel’s concept of religion not as a religion, but as a constituted “absolutism” serving the One. The way in which Islam is explained in Hegel’s philosophy is not explored in a contextual or documentary fashion. Instead, it takes place within an already-constituted framework of Hellenistic Christianity in which already thought-of human beings behave in different manners towards an already-designed sphere of knowledge. In this particular sphere, Islam functions as a form of “fanaticism” to Hegel. We may say that this reductive view of Islam is roughly analogous to so-called subjective economics of thought, or to be more precise, a utility theory24 that seeks unity through marginalization of its Others, one in which an understanding of a scalled “alien” religion from the perspective of an already constituted idealist society is reached without properly inquiring into the way in which this understanding has been constructed in the first place. At the very least, Hegel’s analysis of Islam is lacking in philosophical reflection, making Hegel appear to a seasoned and educated reader as a stereotypical representative of his own age: a while European male concerned with the way in which an existing mind relates to already-established facts. However, Hegel is not to be excused from ignoring the purely subjective nature of history. To his credit, Hegel knew more about the history of world religion than most of his contemporaries, but it is not certain to what extent he was indeed versatile in the available literature on Islam. Islam and the Arab world represent a palpable epistemological lacuna and reference to Islam is made carefully and tersely, as it is the case with Parts II and III of Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. In these two Parts, Islam appears as an existing adversary to Christianity. There are also sporadic and almost repetitive allusions to Islam in other lectures, such as Philosophy of World History, Philosophy of Art, and History of Philosophy. In all of those scattered references, Hegel pays more attention to a dominant or received impression of Islam without attending to its original texts, subsequent developments, or contemporary living expressions, or even careful documentation of his sources, quoting from memory sometimes: 9 Religions have purpose—universal as necessity itself, but at the same time empirical, external, and political in character. Islamic religion, we are told, also has a world dominion as its purpose, but of a spiritual rather than a political character.25 This “world dominion” in Islam, we soon find out, is motivated by what Hegel sometimes refers to as “nationality,” and sometimes the “particularity of religion,” but the word he often repeats is “fanaticism,” a trait that he believes, not surprisingly for us now, to be also found in Judaism, albeit conditionally. The following quote is an example of what Hegel believes to be a fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity: In Islam it is only being a believer that matters. This is not obstinacy but fanaticism, because although nationality (natural associations), family connections, homeland, etc. remain (limited connections, stable relationships are permitted), the service of the One basically involves the un-limitedness and instability of all subsistence. (God’s acceptance has occurred once and for all, and what replaces reconciliation or redemption is something that had implicitly happened, a choice, an election by grace involving no freedom. We have here a view grounded on power, a blind election, not an election made from the point of freedom.26 Two words stand out in this extract: fanaticism and freedom. To be sure, Hegel has a special use for fanaticism that is not equivalent to the dominant use of the word today. He defines fanaticism as “passion for an abstraction, for an abstract thought, which relates as negating force to the existing object/thought.”27 Fanaticism, in other words, is as an obligation to bring other people to the form of worship or religion. The fanatic in Hegel means the practical, the passionate, the particular, the zealous, the proselytizer. So when Hegel says that “fanaticism” is the goal of Islam, he means that the single purpose of this religion is raised to a universal purpose, and only in its obligation to spread and propagate itself does it become fanatical. But then he also argues that fanaticism is found among the Jews and appears only when their possessions or religion comes under attack, though without the proselytizing impulse that defines Islam: Jewish particularity, however, is not polemical because there is no obligation to convert other people to the God of Israel. While others 10 are called upon to glorify the Lord, this is not a goal, as in Islam, which is pursued with fanaticism. Judaism has become fanatical only when attacked, only when its existence has been threatened.28 This quote is a perfect example of Hegel’s non-historcial and unstudied assessment of Judaism. Some Jewish factions did encourage proselytizing well into the second and third centuries if not later, but the dominance of Christianity in the Roman world made such efforts increasingly difficult. While we have less information about active missionizing to pre-Islamic polytheists outside of the Pax Romana, the near universalism of Islam within a generation after Muhammad had a similar stultifying effect on Judaism as the Roman adoption of Christianity. Thus, it seems, Jews got out of the missionizing business largely because the other, more politically-dominant, monotheistic (Abrahamic) religions would simply not allow it.29 Hegel makes no reference to Christianity, the missing third in the Abrahamic chain, in relationship to fanaticism. On the contrary, Hegel’s Christianity is a religion of freedom, whereas Judaism and Islam are religions of commandments as such, where service is not rational for its own sake: In any religion, such as Judaism or Islam, where God is comprehended only under the abstract category of the One, this human lack of freedom is the real basis, and humanity’s relationship to God takes the form of a heavy yoke of onerous service. True liberation is to be found in Christianity, in the Trinity.30 As for the second term, Hegel bases his theory of world history on the concept of freedom. To Hegel, history itself is a development towards absolute freedom: “It is this final goal—freedom—toward which all the world’s history has been working. It is this goal to which all the sacrifices have been brought upon the broad altar of the earth in the long flow of time.”31 Let us consider this more carefully. Freedom is based on -- in fact constituted by -- human reason. Hegel’s “goal,” then, means that freedom comes only after history, that history is the development of human freedom, and that human freedom is man’s consciousness of this freedom. This is how Hegel accounts for the master-slave aufhebung (dialectic): in order to freedom to be achieved, it must pass through the secular world of bondage and unfreedom. In other words, freedom is not really freedom, but rather the consciousness of it. This consciousness is what brings totality to life. But if this understanding of freedom as conscious ‘understanding’ can be told with bias and dematerialization, then Hegel’s project of universal freedom invites many 11 questions. Why, one might curiously ask, does Christianity have freedom while Judaism and Islam do not? How do we understand and where do we locate this freedom if it only exists in relationship and as a relationship to the real? Part of understanding freedom in Christianity and part of Hegel’s entire philosophical project, especially in the History of Religion, is to prove the existence of freedom in Christianity and Greek religion through its lack in all other world religions. In other words, freedom is defined negatively, which could also mean, to use Hegel against Hegel, that freedom is not really ‘free.’ There is thus a crucial element in Hegel’s dialectical thought worthy of critical attention. Hegel bases his whole logic on the hypothesis that everything which exists can only be itself in relation, and – ultimately – as the relation to its Other. In this manner of thinking Hegel’s definition of freedom can also be counterintuitive. If Christianity can be defined by its difference from Islam, how then is Christianity “freedom” when the basic premise of its freedom can only be understood through its difference from other religions? Hegel has a good explanation for this. As previously argued, history to Hegel is a dialectical movement in the direction of freedom. This notion somehow allows him to single out Greek and Christian religions as centers for this freedom. Comparing Christianity and Greece to some Oriental religions, mostly Chinese and Indian, which he heaps together, Hegel writes: In the Eastern religions the first condition is that only the one substance shall, as such, be true, and that the individual neither can attain to any value in as far as he attains himself as against the being in and for itself. In the Greek and Christian religion, on the other hand, the subject knows himself to be free and must be maintained as such; and because the individual this way makes himself independent, it is undoubtedly much more different for Thought to free itself from this individuality and to constitute itself in the independence.32 This theory of freedom as a status, one in which history will reach an end according to Hegel, is highly vulnerable. How Hegel is able to equate Greece with Christianity and to connect both to freedom is a complex and convoluted process that took many twists and turns. Without having to dwell on Hegel’s Grecianization of Christianity, it is still quite legitimate to interrogate the validity of Hegel’s definition of freedom. The most vexed question is how we come to experience this freedom not just as a physical state of “being free,” but also on the level of the mind. Freedom is a receding telos and not an end in itself, part of a coveted form of life that might not exist to us in the manner 12 Hegel conceives of it. Freedom, if we can grasp it, is only there in very limited activities and for a very brief time. “Regardless of what happens,” argues JeanLuc Nancy, “it will be a question of bringing an experience of ‘freedom’ to light as a theme and putting it at stake as a praxis of thought.” 33 In other words, freedom must result from a confrontation with a phenomenological given, or as Nancy puts it, “the testing of something real,” the object of thinking and not thinking in itself, whose seizure “will always be illegitimate.”34 There is something dangerous and risky about freedom, and that is why we can easily fall into a guilt trap when we have too much ‘freedom.’ Even that which in our societies we call enjoyment – sports, fun, recreation, vacation, time-off, unwinding – all such terms have become labels of our consumer culture. Above all, freedom is a subjective experience, one that is reduced to the possibility of staying alive.35 The questions we must ask are whether a philosophy of world history is possible without a seemingly impossible totalizations; whether a definition of an essentially subjective experience like freedom is possible without Hegel’s Euronormative ‘fanaticism’ that surrounds and restricts its access to Christian Europe and ancient Greece; and whether we can find pacifying epistemologies to help us arrive at the objectivity of the spirit, without committing a grave mistake against reason by finding meaning where it is quite possible that none exists. This disposition towards Euronormativism, however, is not the most striking in Hegel’s work. Rather, it is the brutal calculation with which he dismisses all things Arab, Islamic, and “Oriental,” Take, for example, his view on Arab philosophy: The Arabians, moreover, made a point for the most part of studying the writings of Aristotle very diligently, and of availing themselves more especially both of his metaphysical and logical writings, and also of his Physics; they occupied themselves particularly with multiplying commentaries on Aristotle, and developing still further the abstract logical element there present. Many of these commentaries are still extant. Works of this kind are known in the West, and have been even translated into Latin and printed; but much good is not to be got from them.36 This obvious contempt for “Arabian” work on Aristotle reveals two facts. First, the denigration of a “non-European” culture as superfluous and useless in its translations and interpretation of Aristotle; and secondly, the claiming of Aristotle’s philosophical heritage as Western intellectual property. Two other 13 important nineteenth-century factors in understanding the deeper implications of the dismissal of Islam in relationship to the Greek tradition in Hegel’s philosophy—note how Hegel cleverly uses the word Arabian here— are xenophobia and monopoly of tradition. A further, equally important component that we can detect in Hegel concerns the geopolitics that Anderson’s Montesquieu established and Europe uncritically adopted. The irony is that Eurocentrism and Euronormativism are themselves specifically geopolitical constructs and calculated moves designed to insert the newly established idea of Europe (although such geopolitical categorization is neither adequate nor precise in capturing the constitutional complexity of European politics). Yet this philosophically supported geopolitics took place in a cultural context completely different from the one that surrounded the events of September 11. The primary relevance here is not the scholastic environment of nineteenth-century German philosophy or European epistemology in general (a topic frequently discussed by Edward Said and others) but the vicissitudes of European supremacy at the moment of the colonial turn in epistemology.37 Hegel in Post-September 11 Islamophobia Why then is a study of Hegel’s theory on Islam pertinent now? In order to answer this question, let us examine some minor threads of the ramifications of Hegel’s philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Albert Hourani reminds us that “most of the historians and historical thinkers of the nineteenth century were children of Hegel,” and that “the general concepts which he represented could be developed in many different ways, with differing emphases.”38 This is why Hegel matters to an understanding of Islam in modern European thought. But what gets elided in this understanding, as usual, is context. Yet precisely in this context the Germanic, or in this case, the Prussian nation in which Hegel lived and practiced his philosophy of world history, was able to envision for itself an inverted telos, a future in the past, and to find its spirit, so to speak, in the older imperial theme of the Holy Roman Empire, and thus its own identification with ancient Rome. This religio-philosophical bond with older empires and Greek philosophy—we have seen how Islam was removed from the frame—also played out in the German classical engagement with Greece and especially with the movement of Greek independence. 14 Let us consider a variation on this theme in a recent study of Hegel and Islam. Weighing in on Hegel’s philosophy of history, Jean-Joseph Goux’s “Untimely Islam: September 11th and the Philosophies of History” sets out to explain the historical differences and the different historicities (views of history as progressive, regressive, teleological, circular, or finite) that distinguish Judaism and Christianity from Islam. A specialist in postmodern French philosophy, aesthetic theories, and socio-symbolic interpretation, Goux analyzes the “untimeliness” of Islam in the philosophies of history in this essay. Since our study of Hegel is not solely from the inside, that is, not an expository or a “continuist approach” like Goux’s, it will be useful to address the unexamined context in Goux’s analysis of Hegel in the following paragraphs.39 Like many scholars attempting to understand the happenings of September 11, Goux undertakes an in-depth critical revision of Islam’s position in history, a position informed (he argues) by Christianity’s entrance into its third millennium: It is important, I think, to take a step back from an event whose media impact, obsessive visual presence in our memories, and shortterm political effects run the risk of depriving us of an interpretative framework. It seems to me that what is required to overcome 9/11’s obnubilating and obfuscating effect (which is part of terrorism) is the theoretical and speculative distance offered by the philosophies of History.40 Goux's argument is resourceful, but as he goes on it seems to be an cryptic exercise in Hegelian dialecticism. Drawing on a strong concatenation of European thought on Islam (Turgot, Condorcet, Hegel) and taking the terrorist attacks of September 11th as a springboard for his critical assessment, Goux compares Islam to the West in order to expose “the many violent conflicts that occur all along the “fault lines” between Islam and the West, which as he emphasizes, “are not merely the expression of another type of historicity that is destined to remain foreign to us,” but are also symptoms of “a profound disruption in the traditional and secular relationship to historicity within Islam itself.”41 Such “profound disruption” derives, as Goux continues, from the awkwardness with which Western philosophies of history have treated Islam. Hence the need for Hegel: 15 Thinking the Arab-Muslim world in the context of a philosophy of History, assigning it a determinant place in the successive stages of a universal evolution conceived as gradual or progressive, proved to be awkward for thinkers such as Turgot or Condorcet, who, since the Enlightenment, have endeavored to conceive the movement of human societies as a whole. The thinker who confronted this difficulty most lucidly was Hegel. And it was only by a seemingly arbitrary chronological contortion—both highly significant and rich in consequences—that Hegel was able to tackle this problem.42 Goux’s point is well taken. There is no gainsaying that Hegel found a place for Islam within universal history in a way that his predecessors did not or could not. But in order to understand how Hegel “tackle[d] this problem,” it is crucial to explore the fields of force that made Hegel’s understanding of Islam necessary at that particular time in European history. To Goux, Hegel offers a quatrain theory of universal history which positions world ideas in light of Geist (mind, spirit) according to the logic of internal necessity. In this classification, the worlf of Islam falls under Hegel’s fourth category. Together with the “Germanic World,” Islam belongs to the last stage of Geist. The first category/stage, the “Oriental Empire,” includes China, Egypt, and Persia; then comes the “Greek World” of ethical freedom, which represents the adolescence of humanity. The third category includes the “Roman World” and “Christianity,” both representing the now-predictable principle of abstract universality: As the highest intuition of the One, Islam thus occupies a rather high position in Hegelian History; it belongs to the fourth and final stage of Spirit in the tableau of Universal History. It therefore has nothing to do with the Orient (in the Hegelian sense), which represents the childhood or dawn of History. Islam belongs to the Western Spirit, to the age in which this Spirit arrives at or returns to unity. Yet, this is not its ultimate position, for as we mentioned above, this fourth stage includes a bifurcation, a divergence that unfavorably distinguishes Islam from a Christianity having reached the fully-realized version of itself: Protestantism.43 This argument may well be convincing, but it should not be seen as clinching the question of historical differential in the “Christianity-Europe” Hegelian dialectic. In addressing the ‘bifurcation’ in Hegel’s fourth stage of human history, Goux explains Islam’s devotion to ‘Oneness’ with its relinquishment 16 of, or indifference to, the secular world. This Hegelian ‘indifference’ is what distinguishes Islam from Christianity. Christianity, Goux argues, as he continues to interpret Hegel, is unique in the sense that its consciousness and subjectivity create a different, more positive relationship to the secular world, one that is interested in lifting it up from its primitivism and barbarism: Whence this divergence? Islam remains within the abstraction of spirituality. One must fear and honor God, the One, and adhere to this abstraction. God is an absolute in the face of whom man has no other end, no particularity, nothing individual. This entails an indifferent attitude toward the secular world, which is left to its primitivism and its barbarism, and which remains foreign to Spirit and does not reach the consciousness of rational organization. . . . This is where the divergence with Christianity appears. In Christianity, the consciousness and will of Subjectivity as the divine personality appear in the world as an individual subject. This consciousness then develops itself until it reigns as true Spirit. Thus in Christianity the spiritual goal can be realized in the secular world.44 In Goux’s analysis, Christianity is a vivid representation of God on earth, although divinity in Hegel is a much more complex category than Goux implies in his essay. According to Goux, it is this representation of human divinity, so to speak—both in its power and vulnerability—that Islam lacks and that makes Christianity realizable in the secular world. Using this postulate, Goux goes on to explain what could have otherwise been “a violent offense to chronology, a kind of outrageous anomaly” in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Goux argues that Hegel deliberately puts Islam on a deceptively elevated stage, only to reveal the religion’s disinterestedness in the secular world. But this argument forgets that Hegel’s reference to Islam is epistemologically illinformed and overlooks the fact that Hegel is a phenomenological dialectical thinker when he approaches the seemingly abstract notion of Islam. Goux’s approach to Islam invites some interesting questions. Why should one believe that there could have been a distortion and anomaly in Hegel’s categorization of Islam? Why would Islam’s commitment to an abstract deincarnated “Oneness,” its “centeredness” around “the abstraction of spirituality,” and its “fear of God” be interpreted as an “indifferent attitude towards the secular world”? What does the ‘secular world’ mean to Hegel? Moreover, if “indifference” to the ‘secular world’ does indeed exist in Islam, what does this “indifference” imply and how is it different from the Judeo- 17 Christian perception of the material world? Goux argues that Christianity, or Hegel’s understanding of Christianity, breaks away from Islam precisely because of the former’s attention to worldliness. In Hegel, Islam’s opposition to “barbarism,” though a latecomer among monotheistic religions, still “develops more quickly than Christianity—which needed all of eight centuries before it grew into a worldly form.”45 Likewise, “the principle of the Germanic world became a concrete reality only through the Germanic nations.”46 This means that Islam is not on a different plane from the Germanic world, as Goux claims. In fact, the two examples of the fourth stage of world history explain and complement each other. The fourth stage is not solely Germanic, but medieval as well. Islam’s medievalness, Hegel explains, is like old age in nature, but which must not be taken as natural weakness of dotage, since it is the realm of the Spirit. The medieval Germanic stage of world history is “the old age of the Spirit in its complete ripeness, in which Spirit returns to unity with itself, but as Spirit.”47 Hegel defines Islam in this sense as absolute freedom, as “the enlightenment of the oriental world.”48 Moreover, Islam becomes the West (in the Hegelian sense of the West, i.e., consciousness of Geist as a free spirit). It is important here to emphasize that the secular world in Hegel is also the world of “brutal barbarism,” which the Spirit finds itself in and “builds up as an implicitly organic outward being” to reach “freedom,” the one and only goal of world history.49 If Islam is not “indifferent” to the secular world, but is indeed freedom from the ecclesiastical authority of the “Church” or the “State,” does this leave us with the possibility that Goux misunderstood Hegel, or that Hegel’s philosophical views on Islam are far less epistemologically damaging than Goux’s? Is Islam better off misunderstood by Hegel than by Goux? After all, Hegel wrote about Islam in a different atmosphere and did not use a terrorist event as a springboard for his critique.50 The answer to above questions is no. Like many scholars who specialize in Western philosophy, Goux offers a well-meaning attempt to find in the Hegelian idea of world history an answer to Islam’s “collision” with the Western world today, arguing that such an answer derives from a philosophical discourse that Goux knows very well and believes is capable of encapsulating the totality of the human experience. Goux’s invocation of Hegel’s engagement with Islam derives from an urgent need to account for a dangerous collision of two temporalities: 18 This collision-effect or untimely upsurge that has often been produced—and even more so today—in the relations between the West and the Arab-Muslim world are rooted in and separated by two very different relationships to narrative and to History. It is thus important in this context to address the two-fold question of Islam in History and History in Islam. This question is, of course, too large to be appropriately addressed in an essay. Nonetheless, six years after the events of September 11th, the question deserves at least to be posed. We ought to add that, beyond the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the many violent conflicts that occur all along the “fault lines” are not merely the expression of another type of historicity that is destined to remain foreign to us; that are also perhaps the symptom of a profound disruption in the traditional and secular relationship to historicity within Islam itself.51 In all good intent, Goux wishes to take a moderate position between extremes. But exactly what type of question is a “question of Islam in History and History in Islam?” Does Goux refer to Islam in Hegelian history? World history? Or does he speak about Islam in history in general? And what type of history? Intellectual? Universal? Anthropological? How does a vague question about Islam in history immediately conflict with a vaguer question about “history in Islam?” Does it even follow that Goux’s reference to September 11 is an “example” of “untimely Islam,” as he proposes? To read Goux’s text as an instance of ideological discourse is to attribute a political force to it. Rather than resorting to speculative philosophies of history that are foundationally suspect, let alone empirically impossible to prove, one must ask harder questions about whether or not Hegel’s offers an unparalleled and detached transcendental single philosophy on Islam or whether he himself is an integrated set of practical knowledge that can neither be understood nor understand itself outside of its particular context. Are we then to understand Islam as a religion that cares only for the vertical (heaven) at the expense of the horizontal (worldly future) and takes the past as an example to follow, abandoning any care for earth and its inhabitants — hence September 11? Are we to infer from Goux’s so-called ‘Hegelian’ interpretation that Islam is a religion lacking a worldly or secular telos and therefore heedless of life and its beings? The real burden that philosophy places on us is not to invoke, erroneously that is, a theory of intellectual history sunk in Eurocentrism and apply it anachronistically to an event that has nothing to with Islam.— but to embrace the postulate that sources within “Western philosophy” are indeed responsible for producing this divide in the first place. 19 This said, Goux’s argument is not necessarily culture-specific. It does not state as fact a world that is inhabited by self-contained and uniform cultural identities, each possessing a separate value, although his structuralist analysis of Hegel falls within this “fault line.” Nor does it presume that Hegel’s philosophy distinctively expresses a “Western” form of historical reason that is impenetrable to the Islamic ‘Other.’ Herein lies the illusionary synecdoche and the confusion of the part (Hegel/Europe/bin Laden) for the whole (the world/Islam). The danger in this metonymic ‘symbolist’ mode of thought that Goux adopts is that even a truncated ‘philosophical’ reading of September 11 requires a historical context, and one should not rely only on a ‘formalist application’ of Hegel without a radical contextualization of Hegel himself. To give Goux the benefit of the doubt, his analogy is perhaps exercised in good faith and perhaps even from a deeper conviction than a so-called ‘universal’ theory of intellectual history accepted in his intellectual circle that supposedly has all the answers to today’s global problems. This view—that the future is always already accounted for in some sacred past (be it religion or philosophy)—makes some scholars feel comfortable, that an all-inclusive theory like Hegel’s is capable of explaining fundamentalism today. But it is precisely this faith in the unconditional recyclability and infinite applicability of the philosophical tradition that is alarming. There is no safe anachronistic theory of this sort, and therefore no escape from repeating the same set of misconceptions if we treat derivatives as if they were substance merely because this is the only way we have been taught to think and this is the only language that we think we understand. Notes 1 Some recent studies have traced elements of racism and bias in Hegelian philosophy as well as post-Hegelian thought. Susan Buck Morss, for instance, has convincingly debunked Hegel’s position on slavery and exposed his racial bias, taking the philosopher down from the ivory tower of idealism to the realism of street-talk, coffee shop gatherings, and morning newspaper culture. See Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). See also “Hegel and Haiti”: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Summer, 2000), pp. 821-865. Ian Almond has also dwelt on Hegel’s philosophy and its persistent continuity in works of contemporary thinkers like Slavoj Žižek. See Ian Almond, “Iraq and the Hegelian Legacy of Žižek’s Islam,” The New Orientalists: Postmodern Presentations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) 176-195. See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1968). In his book, Fanon interrogates European philosophy to expose European (white) hegemony. He uses both Marx and Freud to re-interpret Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in order to theorize the necessity of violent struggle by 20 Third World nations. According to Fanon, who worked and lived in Algeria during the French occupation, colonized nations seek to overcome colonialism as well the duplicitous humanism of Western Europe, so that they could attain equal recognition in terms of their own cultural values. 2 G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company), p. 27. 3 For more on Hegel’s influence on Marx’s views on Islam, see Rosalind C. Morris, “Theses on the Questions of War: History Media, Terror”: Social Text 20.3 (2002) 149-175. 4 Here we must clarify Hegel’s reference to Christianity. For Hegel, Catholicism became a reactionary and conservative force that was chained by traditional and institutional “medievalism.” If anything, Hegel was in favor of Lutheranism because it leaves room for academic contemplation and penetrative analysis of the universe. On Hegel’s views on Christianity and Catholicism, see Lawrence S. Stepelevich, “Hegel and Roman Catholicism”: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 673- 691. 5 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit; see also Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 3-24, and George Mosse, The Culture of Western Europe (Westview Press, 1988), pp.148-158. 6 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), p. 7. 7 Ibid., p. 11. 8 Ibid., p. 10. 9 Ibid., p. 11. 10 Ibid., p. 397. 11 Ibid. 12 “The entire Turkish empire is ruled by one master, and all other men are his servants; he divided his kingdom into sandjaks and dispatched various administrators to govern them, whom he transfers and changes at his pleasure . . . They are slaves, bounden by him.” Il Principe e Discorsi, pp.26-7. Quoted from Anderson, p. 397. 13 Ibid., p. 398. 14 Islam was no doubt a subject of heated historical debates among many intellectuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth –centuries. On the one hand, Humphrey Prideaux’s The True Nature of Imposture Revealed in the Life of the Impostor Mohammad (1697) is a remarkable example of this derisive historiographic polemic. On the other, a work like Henry Stubbe’s An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism with the Life of Mahomet and a Vindication of Him and His Religion from the Calumnies of Christians (1676) expresses respect for Islam and favorably likens it to elements in Christianity. In his book, Stubbe described Muḥammad as a “political genius.” The difference of course is in circulation. Whereas Prideaux’s work circulated widely in Europe and North America, Stubbe’s work remained unpublished. For more on the political turmoil and place of Islam in constitutional debates in eighteenth-century Europe and America, see Denise A. Spellberg, “Could a Muslim be President: An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate,” Eighteenth-Century Studies vol. 39, no. 4 (2006): 485–506; see also Albert Hourani, “Islam and the Philosophers of History”: Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (April, 1967), pp. 206-268. 15 See Siep Stuurman, “François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification”: History Workshop Journal, No. 50 (Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 1-21. 21 16 Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 240. 17 Anderson, p. 400. Said, Orientalism, p. 119. 18 19 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Trans. Rodney Livingston (Malden: Polity Press.), p. 26. 20 Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics” (1964): Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 92. 21 Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, p. 65. 22 Among strong advocates of Hegelian accomplishment and domination is the French theorist Maurice Blanchot who argues that in Hegel “philosophy comes together and accomplishes itself.” Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 4; see also Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992). 23 Despite the claim of many writers like Adorno, de Man, and Maurice Blanchot that there is no outside Hegel, Marx attempts to position himself differently by critiquing Hegel for making the individual a property of the state. Moreover, according to Marx, Hegel turned man into an abstract category. Marx, who saw humans as concrete individuals forming social forces, believed that it was erroneous of Hegel to treat humans as if they were a categorical type. However, Marx’s theory of ‘capital’ is impossible without the Hegelian dialectic. To bridge this divide, the term ‘Hegelian Marxists’ emerged to address critics who benefit from both streams, including Georg Lukács, Arthur Koestler, and Harold Laski. See Sidney Hook's From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (New York: Columbia UP, 1994); Herbert Marcuse, Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Humanity Books, 1999); Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Spirit (Cornell: Cornell UP, 1980). 24 I mean by this term a theory that, instead of discarding its Others, employs them in order to further distinguish itself (i.e. in opposition to them). Such theories thus work by utilizing their Others in the service of self-definition. A prominent example of this type of theory is Augustine of Hippo’s explanation of why the Jews had become dispersed on the earth and yet still survived. He wrote that the presence of Jews should serve as a negative example to guide the Christians in their behavior: “it will be readily apparent to believing Christians from the survival of the Jews, how those who killed the Lord when proudly empowered have merited subjection.” Augustine, Contra Faustum, 12.12, pp. 341-42. Cited in Cohen, J. Living Letters of the Law. Berkeley: University of California Press (1999), p. 29. I am grateful to Rachel Friedman for bringing this reference to my attention. 25 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, Determinate Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 55. My italics. 26 Ibid., p. 158. 27 The German reads definition of den Fanatismus reads: “Begeisterung für ein Abstraktes, für einen abstrakten Gedanken, der negierend sich zum Bestehenden verhält” (passion for an abstraction, for an abstract thought, which relates as negating force to the existing object/thought). I am indebted to my colleague Volker Langbehn for assisting me with this translation. 28 29 Ibid., p. 50. See Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford UP, 1994) and Shaye Cohen The Beginnings of Jewishness (University of California Press, 2001). 30 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, p. 156. 22 31 Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), p. 22. 32 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simon Vol. I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892), pp. 118-19. 33 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), p. 20. 34 Ibid., p. 20. 35 See Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, pp. 5-9. 36 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, p. 34. 37 See Tsenay Serequeberhan, 1989. “The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”: International Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989), pp. 301–318. 38 Hourani, “Islam and the Philosophers of History,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Apr., 1967), p. 246. 39 I borrow the term “continuist” from Gayatri Spivak, who employs it to critique Goux’s isomorphic analogy of Freud, Lacan, and Marx in connection to the development of money-form and the psychological account of the emergence of genital sexuality in his work Numismatiques. See Gayatri Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value”: Diacritics, Vol. 15, No. 4, Marx after Derrida (Winter, 1985), pp. 73-93. 40 Jean-Joseph Goux, “Untimely Islam: September 11th and the Philosophies of History”: SubStance No. 115, Vol. 37, no. 1, 2008), pp 54-55. 41 Ibid., p.56. 42 Ibid., p. 55. 43 Ibid., pp. 57-58. 44 Ibid., p. 58. 45 Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 98. 46 Ibid., p. 98. 47 Ibid., p. 97. 48 Ibid., p. 98. 49 Ibid., p. 98. 50 Note that Hegel did the same thing with Christianity- dissociating it from the Crusades. 51 Goux, “Untimely Islam: September 11th and the Philosophies of History,” pp. 55-56.