The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea by Rémi Brague, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) (LG)
Rémi Brague’s The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea is a weighty book that seeks to examine the “idea of God” across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Beginning with the Greeks and ending with our modern world, Brague sets out to challenge many of modernity’s deeply held and often unquestioned assumptions. Brague explains the notion of modernity as “an escape of the political from the domain of theology” (LG, 4). He sees a shift from the sacred to the profane: “in modern societies, law, far from being conceived of in any relation with the divine, is quite simply the rule that the human community gives itself, considering only the ends that it proposes for itself” (LG, 1). The layman has triumphed over the cleric as modernity “flatters itself that it has sent packing everything tainted with heteronomy,” or receiving laws from an outside source, rather than what Kant refers to as autonomy—”giving oneself one’s law” (LG, viii).
Why should this be? Brague in his new book offers an alternative narrative of the West and promises to elucidate the question of modernity in order to “permit us a better understanding of what modernity reproaches in the ages preceding it and with which it claims to break” (LG, viii). Along the way he aims to throw light on what he thinks dubious in the modern project—the boast of having separated the church from state, among other things—while “making the project underlying modernity more visible” (LG, viii). This modern project, according to Brague, amounts to a categorical rejection of any idea that supposes that the laws that bind our communities are of divine, as opposed to human, origin.
For Brague, the time has come to challenge the idea that societies necessarily drift or evolve “from the sacred to the profane . . . through an inexorable withdrawal of the sacred” (LG, 5). In challenging modernity’s claim to have emancipated morality from theology, the separation of the state from the church—a separation he doubts ever took place (LG, 5 & 257) except in Christianity—Brague points beyond the theological-political problem, a phrase or formula no doubt familiar to those who read this journal. He argues that to cast the question in these terms is too narrow and parochial to comprehend our modern situation (LG, 5–8). The “underlying question of the need for a divine nature or origin for the norms that govern the entire field of human conduct,” a question that Brague refers to as the “theio-practical” (LG, 256), is necessary.
Brague’s preferences for his neologism, the “theio-practical” over the commonly accepted “theo” is that the latter has the drawback of suggesting a connection between two academic fields of knowledge, theology and political science. By contrast, the theio-practical is broader in scope, an “articulation . . . of the entire genre of the practical.” It includes ethics, economics, and politics (LG, 6–7). The theio-practical, therefore, according to Brague, does justice to the fact that the divine has, historically, asserted its authority on the norms that govern all of human conduct.
For Brague, the notion of the divine law constitutes the theio-practical perfectly: “the idea . . . implies that human action, in its full breadth, receives its norm from the divine.” It is only within this framework, Brague argues, that “we can speak of ‘theocracy’ with any rigor” (LG, 7–8). What follows is an intricate and vastly historical biography or genealogy of the idea of divine law from the Greeks through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to modern secular formulations, rejecting any claim of a law that is not of human or conventional origin. The history he narrates here touches on similar themes found in his previous book, Wisdom of the World, in which Brague was interested in the “articulation of human practices with the cosmic” (LG, 257). In the present book, however, Brague is interested in the theological norms that claim to regulate human practice, “only to [be] dissociate[d] . . . subsequently” (LG, 257) in the modern age.
Islam is the explicit subject of three chapters (10, 12, and 15) of this book. Chapter 10, entitled “Islam: Law Rules,” situates Islam within the Middle Ages and deals with law and the city as its main subject. Chapter 11, “The Aims of the Law: Islam,” examines Islam in relation to the divine law within medieval thought. Chapter 15, “Judaism and Islam in the Modern Age,” brings us, as the title suggests, to modernity and examines Judaism and Islam’s development in Europe and the manner in which each of these religions was modified within “a world permeated by Christianity” (LG, 149).
The Historical Problem
In Chapter 10, Brague explicates his narrative of Islam through a chronology of historical events and political challenges that Islam faced and to which it produced its own unique solutions. The purpose of these reflections is to lay the groundwork for his broader theme: the relationship of the law to the divine in Islam, and the question of whether religious and political authority were always in tension. Throughout his book, Judaism and Christianity are used as foils to elucidate the distinguishing characteristics of Islam. Unlike Christianity, for instance, which Brague shows to have taken its secular juridical norms from its conquered pagan states, Islam “appeared on the scene of history as the religion of the Arab conquerors” (LG, 146). Rather than turning to the codes that already existed in the Syro-Mesopotamian area, Islam opted for replacing the conquered states’ legal systems with its own, fabricated entirely from its holy sources (LG, 147). Because Islam was historically infused with a conquering spirit, it could not conform or assimilate itself to the legal practices of its vanquished enemies without relaxing its hold and putting itself in danger. A new governing elite had to emerge from the conquest in order to maintain its acquisition and avoid “melting into the conquered populations and losing power.” Brague describes how “the greatest problem was thus to create an elite impermeable to the mores of the conquered. In order to do so, that elite must conform to a law totally of its own, and to that law only” (LG, 147).
Brague repeatedly characterizes Islam as possessing a conquering spirit. This no doubt has something to do with the Prophet Muhammad himself who, unlike Jesus, successfully established an empire and an Islamic city. Yet Brague never offers, as far as I can tell, a reason why Islam is possessed of such a spirit. One is led to ask why this would be a unique feature of Islam. He cannot mean that the Islamic Arabs could have adopted Roman aggression, because for Brague, Rome means largely Christianity. Perhaps the conquering spirit he speaks of is the result of an attempt to overcome the pre-Islamic tribal tensions that divided Arabs. It is a shame that so little is made by him of Ibn Khaldun’s reflections on this very issue.
According to Brague, Islam could not have assimilated the customs and a law of the vanquished out of its own sources since the Islamic elite was a minority: “conquerors had become masters of populations that were . . . more evolved and had more broadly differentiated social systems” than the new Muslims themselves. “Islam,” as he explains, “adopted a strategy that allowed it to ‘mask’ the content of” a primitive “legislation and, instead of having to acknowledge the need of borrowing it from elsewhere, to pass it off as having come from within” (LG, 147). This explains, to Brague’s thinking, the role of the hadith, the voluminous stories or accounts of Muhammad and sometimes his followers, that serve as examples of conduct. The hadith also contain explanations of how certain verses of the Qur’an came to Muhammad and provide various pronouncements on disputed questions, many of which focus on war.
The function of the hadith collections was to lend “legitimacy to a preexistent state of affairs” and “the many practices that it hoped to promote” (LG, 147). In this way, the administrative regulations of the Umayyad dynasty (660–750), along with the legal reasoning of its earliest jurists, legitimized Islamic juridical authority. “By a fiction perhaps unequaled in the history of human thought,” Islamic law could be attached to prophetic sources (LG, 147–8).
The Two Extremes
The principle of human conduct that the early Islamic jurists chose was the imitation of Muhammad and his personal power. Thus leadership of the Prophet preceded the organization of a civil society. Concentrating the notion of legitimate moral behavior in the person of Muhammad gave rise to the problem of transmission of leadership. Brague explains that two radical solutions to the problem “seemed possible: either an extreme personalization of power, or an extreme depersonalization of the law” (LG, 148).
On the one hand, Muhammad’s personal authority could be transmitted to the imam—the religious leader of the mosque or the community, who served as a model for community behavior. But this begged the question of succession. Discord and civil war followed and leadership was rendered fragile. Shi’ism offered one of the earliest solutions according to which legitimate power was transmitted from the Prophet to his descendants, “preserved from sin” and deemed to be infallible (LG, 149).
However, this was an illusion. By 750, the ruling Umayyads were threatened by the Abbasids claiming to be the only authentic Muslims. The House of Ali’ also claimed connection to the Prophet’s family. Rivals to divine rule all fashioned for themselves a rival vision of the world stitched together “on the basis of the popular Neo-Platonism of the time” (LG, 149). Shi’ism offered no better solution to the problem of succession.
Another solution to the problem detached the law from both Muhammad and the governors entirely, placing it within an impersonal class of religious scholars. This alternative consisted in making the law itself bear all the weight of legitimacy and consequently “led to the emergence of a religious authority that was not dependent on the effective authority of the caliph, but resided in the class of men of religion.” Thus scholars monopolized religious and legal power. This meant that the political power had to function outside of religion and in “accordance with its own logic” (LG, 149).
Brague, however, never defines “politics.” This is a problem since it is a complex subject. Aristotle, Burke, Rousseau, and Locke, among others, all point out that politics requires a notion of citizenship. There must also be an association of ruling and rule in turn for governance to take place. Political laws are not enough, in other words, to establish the presence of a political body. Has there ever been politics in Islam? Perhaps this helps to explain why religion, rather than politics, dominates so much of the Islamic world.
The Birth of the Sunnah and the Superfluous Caliph
The sunnah, which literally means “the trodden path,” was born out of the traditionalist “people of the hadith,” who proposed a solution to the political problem of succession. They invented the idea of sunnah, giving a new meaning to an ancient term. The notion of sunnah originally designated “the sense of what is just and appropriate.” Under Islam it came to mean rule of law “guaranteed by the authority of the Prophet” (LG, 150).
The jurist al-Shafi’i is credited with playing a decisive role in developing a science of sharia law by unifying the Qur’an and hadith. Al-Shafi’i privileged human reason in order to establish a unified code for all Muslims, as opposed to independent, regionally based legal systems. Although his thought did not gain influence until a century after his death in 820, he made an abridgment of his principles in a short treatise: “the judgment of the Prophet was that of God himself; the sunnah was to be identified with the Wisdom that the Qur’an connected to the ‘the Book’; analogy serves only in cases of necessity, to palliate the absence of tradition” (LG, 150). Quoting the noted Islamic scholar, Wael B. Hallaq, Brague summarizes Shafi’i’s position as follows:
To every act performed by a believer with which the law is concerned there corresponds a statute deriving from revealed Law. That legal statute is either given as such in the scriptural sources (Qur’an and the Sunna), which Shafi’i calls “the foundation,” or else it is possible, by means of analogous reasoning, to infer it from the foundation, which is the bearer of a latent “intelligible content.” (LG, 150)
The sunnah, Hallaq points out, the believer “must strictly equate it with the sayings, the acts, and the approbations of the Prophet alone, as reported in solidly established traditions; it is . . . no longer possible to think naively that the different living local traditions faithfully reflect the practice of the Prophet” (LG, 150).
In defending and propounding a law whose origin was held to be exclusively prophetic, however, Shafi’i’s position led to a paradox: “the stress put on the need to found law on sources that surely went back to the Prophet made it all the more profitable to put controversial hadiths into circulation.” This resulted in a proliferation of forgers who took great care in “creating irreproachable chains of transmission.” Brague here concludes that “the older the authority invoked, the later the tradition; the more perfect the chain of origins, the more the hadith is likely to be forged” (LG, 150).
The caliph’s authority is thereby rendered superfluous, since there is “no situation for which the Qur’an and the Sunna cannot furnish a rule” (LG, 150). Appeal to personal judgment outside of the religious circle of scholars was no longer necessary. The scholars and not the sovereign now held religious and legal authority. Shafi’i therefore elevated the sunnah to an objective standard capable of overruling the caliph himself and made it the dominant code in Islam.
Originally, the caliphs were held to be God’s representatives on earth, and this meant that religious and political authority resided in their persons. There was no separation. In older times, the caliphs were judges, and their judgments were law. Once the law was viewed as independent of the person of the Prophet’s successor, however, “the caliph in time became useless” (LG, 151).
There were great implications for this separation, and Ibn al-Muqaffa’ seems to have been the first to have grasped them. A Persian convert from Manichaeism, Ibn al-Muqaffa’ saw that the only way for the caliph to maintain both political power and juridical authority was to place himself as the official interpreter of the law. In 754 he proposed legislation that reserved juridical matters to the caliph al-Mansur, the second of the Abbasids, in which Ibn al-Muqaffa’ offered to write a “complete book” or a code of laws. He suggested that any gaps in interpretation between religion and law be decided by the caliph (LG, 151).
Ibn al-Muqaffa’s proposals, however, came to nothing, since he was executed two years later on “the religious accusation of crypto-Manichaeism” (LG, 151). Religious authority took the upper hand. Ibn al-Muqaffa’s failure represents, in Brague’s words, “the first divorce between the state and the law” within Islam (LG, 151–2, my emphasis).
The Mutazilite Crisis
Almost a century after the execution of Ibn al-Muqaffa’, one final attempt on the part of the caliph to reserve for himself the place of supreme arbiter of the law resulted in civil war. By 813, the caliphate, however, was on the defensive, since a majority of Muslims neither accepted its supreme authority nor the caliph’s claim to represent the incarnation of the pure Islamic community. The winning ruler, al-Ma’mun, nevertheless asserted his authority as caliph in the face of deep-seated opposition.
Civil war soon gave way to fierce theological debates that raged in Baghdad during the eighth and ninth centuries between two schools of theology, the Mutazilites and the Ash’arites. The debates focused on whether the Qur’an was created (non-eternal), as the Mutazilites believed, or uncreated (eternal), as the Ash’arites claimed. This peculiar debate was of more than mere metaphysical interest, since nothing less than the status of the Qur’an was at stake: “A created Qur’an can be interpreted; an uncreated Qur’an can only be applied.” The Mutazilites argued for a “created” Qur’an, claiming that authority charged with discerning its meaning ought to reside with the caliph. The Mutazilite caliph imposed the dogma of created scripture and reasserted the authority of his office with force through persecution of his opposition between 833 and 847 (LG, 152–3).
Eventually, however, the Ash’arites, i.e., the “traditionalists,” or the people of the hadith, established themselves through a popular backlash against the oppressive decrees of the caliph. A respected Islamic theologian, Ibn Hanbal, insisted on the supremacy of the law (tradition) over the rule of the caliphate. He introduced the possibility of militant opposition that underlies Sunni Islam today. Brague writes that “the caliphate ceased to be the one symbol of Muslim identity and the sole organizational institution” (LG, 153). This resolved the issue, ending persecution in 848. It marked the end of the caliph’s supreme power and would seem also to have ended the harmony between reason and revelation.
The Law Becomes Autonomous and Islam Stagnates
According to Brague, as the split between political and religious power became greater, the caliphate took on a purely symbolic role, proposing that it “served little other purpose than to legitimize usurpers who had risen to power by force of arms and were subsequently presented as having been delegated to hold that power” (LG, 153). Personal authority over the law became collective rather than individual. This marked a shift from a single power (the caliph) to the power of sharia, administered by doctors of the law.
Power and authority over the law, which had initially belonged to Muhammad, then the caliphs, was now split into two. There was political authority which had to give lip service to religious authority; at the same time, the religious elite, or ulama, still had to bow to secular leadership (LG, 153–4), with little mutual trust. Both sides, as Brague points out, “merely [went] through the motions.” Such social pressure on public mores “put into circulation practices with which the scholars had to compromise” (LG, 154).
It is at this point in his history of the relationship of the law to authority that Brague begins to conjecture on the causes of Islam’s slowdown or stagnation. Most historians of Islam speak of the decadence of Islam as beginning in the eleventh century, and, in particular, they tend to measure that decline in relation to Latin Christendom’s renewal in Europe. However, Islam continued to expand in Africa and Asia, becoming “the military Islam with the Arab conquest,” in contrast to Christianity, which peacefully assimilated into Roman society (LG, 154).
Suddenly everything changed, and the situation reversed. The Roman spirit of conquest seemed to equally penetrate the Christian spirit: “the Christian Empire, without ceasing to preach the faith, reached out to the north and to the east in a way that was just as political and warlike [as Islam had once been], spreading by means of a mission that was also commercial and spiritual” (LG, 154). At this point Islam seems to have stagnated in terms of cultural creativity. Why should this be?
There is no agreement on the causes of this peculiar slowdown. Brague, however, directs our attention to the relation between divinity and legislation, the problem that occupies him throughout this chapter and the book in general. He points out that although juridical activity did not cease, there was a consensus among eleventh-century Sunnism that Islam had reached its maturity, “and that any further development would represent a decline, a fear that can be perceived throughout the eleventh century” (LG, 154–5).
If we assume, as Brague clearly does, that this stagnation in cultural creativity was juridical in origin, then “it would [have been] roughly contemporary with the juridical revolution that occurred in Latin Europe in the wake of the ‘papal revolution.'” In an interesting role reversal, Christianity in Europe was evolving contrary to Islam: the traditionally Christian emphasis on eternal life switched after the “papal revolution” to an interest in worldly affairs and church reforms. Christianity and Islam, Brague points out, underwent opposite religious and economic changes at this time (LG, 154–5).
Whatever the truth of these speculations might be, an undeniable change took place within Islam: “the political was no longer an element of salvation” and “religion retired from the field of the political” (LG, 155). From the Sunni perspective, governing the state meant reigning over the people for whom paradise was already promised, rather than guiding the Muslim community toward paradise. Evidence of this shift figures in Ghazali’s works, in which he goes so far “as to propose to the head of state that he take as a model the totally nonpolitical life of a wandering dervish” (LG, 155). More will be said later about Ghazali.
According to Brague, during the twelfth century Sufi mysticism expanded, creating a “new form of social organization, independent of the state and drawn from foundations of its own” (LG, 155). There are examples: the Almoravids from Senegal took power in Andalusia at this time, and five hundred years later there was also the Safavid dynasty of Iran. One could cite other examples. Brague claims that the history of Islam can be seen “as tending toward an ever purer formulation of the dream of a kingdom of the law,” that is, one “whose principles were directly derived from revelation” (LG, 155). Brague points out here that, despite its separation, Islam indeed manifested a deep “separation of the political and the religious” (LG, 155–6). However, he qualifies the statement: “It was inscribed in facts, not in ideas. In Islam, nothing corresponds to the separation—theorized elsewhere—of the temporal and the spiritual” (LG, 155–6). I will have more to say about this issue.
According to Brague, then, the pinnacle of divine law in Islam was reached during that historical period that the West calls the “Middle Ages.” Brague further asserts that Judaism, largely apolitical, and Islam, decidedly political, both elaborated drastically divergent systems of religious law, while Christianity followed its own path, adopting from both Roman and Jewish law what fit its theology, and rejecting such unacceptable notions as the cult of the emperor.
In part five of his book, Brague shifts his focus to medieval Islamic thought and the philosophical styles elaborated by the thinkers of that time. Here he turns to the equally decisive theological questions and debates concerning divine law as an idea for the thinkers of Islam. These reflections will form the subject of my next section.
Divine Law in Medieval Islamic Thought:
On a Non-Natural and Rational Law
Brague next turns to elaborating the different ways in which divine law was conceptualized in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, with particular focus on Ghazali, Maimonides, and St. Thomas Aquinas, respectively. Throughout these discussions, of which we shall focus only on Islam, Brague is motivated by challenging modern attacks on divine law as well as understanding what he refers to as “the modern project” (LG, 158). In order to do so, Brague develops a historical account of the medieval definition of divine law. In both Judaism and Islam, he argues, the law gained central place, but in Islam the core of the law is revelation.
In Islam a human being’s relationship to God and to all creatures is regulated by prophecy, which culminates “in the gift of a law” (LG, 160). Muhammad is the messenger of God and the bearer of the Holy Qur’an, in which a right path of conduct is expressed in terms of a system of law to a community that must be informed about the proper order of the world. The basic pious attitude is one of obedience to God’s revealed law. God grants humans their moral responsibility or shar’. The object of obedience, then, is human life—a moral quality and a moral responsibility (shar’). The object of obedience, then, is not so much the law, but God’s will. Brague explains, “It is only subsequently that the law becomes a thing, hence what must be applied” (LG, 160, my emphasis). What Brague means here by the law becoming a “thing” is far from clear. What is clear, however, is that the law cannot be understood as a creation of human ingenuity or a product of reason. Legislation belongs strictly to God.
The idea according to which things have a “nature” or essence is not to be found in Islam. Nature is viewed as created by God; however, “nature” is not a valid source of law. Hence the idea of a natural law is also not to be found in Islam (LG, 160). The idea of what is “just” by nature can be found in Aristotle, for instance, but Islamic thinkers familiar with his work did not assimilate it. Al-Farabi, as Brague points out, draws a distinction between limited, cultural laws (the injunction against pork; the proper rules to butcher animals) and universal laws (to honor one’s family and kin). However, al-Farabi never grounds any of these laws in nature. Averroes, to mention another example, ignores the idea of “nature” altogether when commenting on or explicating this notion in Aristotle.
Similarly, “reason,” like the idea of “natural justice,” has no place or bearing on the content of Islamic law and therefore cannot be its foundation. For Islam, in other words, reason cannot, as it does for Plato, discover on its own the good life or regulate human conduct. Reason can only recognize the truth of the revealed law. Unlike the Greeks, moreover, questions concerning the foundations of law and the authority of the state are not relevant for Islam, since “the Law precedes the states, which exist with the sole aim of maintaining and applying the Law” (LG, 161). Consequently, Islam avoids questions concerning legislation and legislative power.
Since the law in Islam is of divine origin, it is removed from the vicissitudes of human interest. It is also perfect, demonstrating “the basis for the superiority of Islam over the paganism that preceded it, as well as over Christianity and the communities that it rules over” (LG, 161). From the perspective of Islam, the rules of conduct of Christian nations fluctuated according to rulers and circumstances. The absolute perfection of the law in Islam made it impossible to debate or analyze; consequently, the law is not a central object of reflection for Islamic philosophers, who were less concerned with the content of the law and more interested in Islam as an effective objective of morality (Sittlichkeit), rather than a moral code subject to change. Islam’s “object of reflection is a real social community, not a law. This is why the philosophers of Islam reflect more about the political community than about the law” (LG, 161–2).
Jurists and Mutakallimun
An unprecedented era came in the eight century, when Muslim thinkers began to put forward and defend, through dialectical arguments, their view that Islam was the only plausible religion. This is the discipline known as the kalam, the primary focus of which was to establish “the authenticity of the prophetic mission that had brought it into being” (LG, 164). The intrinsic quality of the Islamic law was often invoked as evidence of the superiority of the Qur’an to rival holy books. The first order of business was to make the case for the necessity for prophecy over and against those adversaries for whom unassisted reason was sufficient for the good life.
Muslim apologists tended to trace prophecy to the origin of the human species and of all human knowledge, including the arts. For example, Brague notes that any technical invention is a variety of prophecy. By the end of the eleventh century, Ghazali included medicine and astronomy in the category of revealed prophecy.
The very nature of Muslim law caused a controversy that has remained a classic feature of Islamic thought: “knowing whether the good is commanded by God because it has something like a nature that made it intrinsically worthy of having God command it, or whether, to the contrary, it is the divine commandment that makes a practice good when it would otherwise be indifferent” (LG, 164). This tension within the question of the good brought about a polemic not against reason, but about reason.
The Polemic About, and Not Against, Reason
Virtually all Islamic thinkers praised the idea of reason, but the polemic about reason centered on whether reason, or “intelligence,” plays an active role in the soul. Perhaps reason is a legislative faculty capable of discovering the good on its own. If so, then humans are self-governing. However, it could be that reason involves mere reception, in which case reason becomes the capacity to obey: “either the commandments are what reason demands, in which case they are confirmed by the law, or else they are what reason admits as possible, in which case the law renders them obligatory. Reason is thus, in both cases, the pillar on which everything rests” (LG, 165). This is how the Mutazilites came close to the notion of a natural law independent of prophecy and the will of God. Others such as al-Nazzam drew a distinction between revealed and rational commandments. There were also the mystics like Muhasibi, who understood reason as the ability to grasp that it is in “one’s interest to follow the regulations already decreed by God” (LG, 165). For the most part, however, mainstream Islam of this era “marks the reduction of reason to the instrumental level” (LG, 165), for only God is the divine legislator (see LG, 167).
Over time, Muslim thought moved away from the Mutazilites, and the rival school of al-Ash’ari dominated the intellectual climate. The Ash’arites proposed that God decides in all things, and that human intelligence is not up to the task of judging human action. Their school rejected the idea of nature or natural law; revealed law is the only authentic foundation upon which good and evil can be known. God commands what is good and he prohibits what is not: “If in extraordinary circumstances [God] should command one to lie, it must be done” (LG, 166). In the words of Juwayni:
The intellect does not indicate either that a thing is noble or that it is vile in a judgment that obligates. It is informed about what it must consider as noble and as vile only by the resources of the law (shar’) and by what tradition renders necessary. The principle of what must be said [on the subject] is that a thing is not noble by itself, by its genre, or by an attribute that belongs to it. It is possible that something may be noble or the law, while something similar to it and equivalent to it is vile according to all judgments of the attributes of the soul (LG, 166).
In other words, what is noble is decided by God only, and the purpose of God’s commandments is to reduce humankind to obedience to his will. The purpose of the law is the same as the purpose of creation, the goal of which is “the submission of creatures to God.” God asserts his superiority over his faithful by limiting their capacities, “To fulfill that purpose, incomprehensible commandments are more efficacious” and are introduced in order to formally discourage the pious from seeking “for the reasons behind the commandments” (LG, 166).
Several consequences follow. Although the law inevitably contains rational aims, they are secondary to obedience and, given God’s mysterious nature, may not even derive from Him at all. Moreover, one cannot assume that God has our best interest at heart. He may be indifferent or even wish us harm, according to Brague. Everything is a matter of faith, and since only God is the decider of human actions, anyone who thinks himself judge of His law is a polytheist.
The Philosophers
For Muslim philosophers the expression “divine law” designates revealed law specific to a human community. The term can be found often throughout the work of Averroes, Avicenna, and al-Farabi. Brague traces the manner in which these philosophers introduce their own variations on the divine law and how they go about determining whether reason is a legislative instrument for submission to God’s will. Their views are often cautiously cloaked in commentaries on Plato and Aristotle.
Al-Farabi helped to introduce the Greeks to the Islamic community. According to Brague, al-Farabi attaches to Aristotle’s notion that “man is a political animal” an “innate trait specific to humans, tied to one another in the actions they want to accomplish, and who, as a consequence, need to live . . . in relations of proximity and associations in order to reach perfections in living” (LG, 168). Following Plato and Aristotle, al-Farabi views the city as necessary for the division of labor, which effective survival necessitates, while Avicenna offers physiological reasons for this.
Avicenna attributes the development of the higher functions of the human soul to a social foundation, beginning his reflections on human psychology by distinguishing humans from the animals. From the need for a division of labor arises the need for social existence and cooperation. The human capacity to think in terms of the future gives birth to language, in which sadness and hope and the awareness of the vulgar and the noble can be expressed. In this way Avicenna offers an alternative account of the human capacity to come to knowledge of the noble and the base (LG, 169).
Certain thinkers, such as Ibn Khaldun, also proposed a restraining influence of some kind to stabilize social existence. For this reason many Islamic philosophers “do not conceive that the human species can subsist without virtues, justice first among them” (LG, 170). However, Brague also insists that justice is brought about through prophecy. He seems to ignore or overlook the many statements of Ibn Khaldun, who denies that prophecy is even necessary and finds an alternative to it in group solidarity.1 Nevertheless, Brague points out Avicenna’s preoccupation with prophecy for the continuation of the human species.
Central to Brague’s thesis is the important passage at the end of Avicenna’s Metaphysics, in which the Islamic philosopher puts forward his cosmological view of the universe and humans’ place within it. At the top of the hierarchy of sublunary beings is mankind, but the highest among these is the prophet. Brague asserts that Avicenna’s second chapter proves that men must live in communities and cannot live outside society. So, to ensure harmony, we need laws and justice. “Thus a prophet,” he concludes, “is necessary to the survival of the human species” (LG, 170).
The view that political life necessitates a need for prophecy establishes a link between religion and politics, but it also introduces the idea that “religious law has merely a political function” (LG, 170), which Brague acknowledges. There is nothing new in the idea that religious law is the instrument through which human savagery is moderated. But the crucial question is this: “What is the precise meaning and role of prophecy for Avicenna?” Unfortunately, Brague does not treat or develop this important question in detail. He moves instead to the question of the virtuous city, to which we now turn.
The Virtuous City: Ideal or Reality?
The theme of this section is the Aristotelian notion that man is a political animal and that the authentic philosophers live in actual communities in which Islam is the religion. Al-Farabi offers a detailed typology of various evil cities, “each one of which corresponds to a false or incomplete good” (LG, 170). The best city is the virtuous city, characterized by mutual aid and aims at genuine beatitude or blessedness that transcend the mutual aid to be found in the city concerned only with basic needs.
Brague insists that Avicenna makes a distinction between the public and the private that is clearer than al-Farabi’s. For Avicenna, political life (the public good) can at best establish a minimal degree of justice, but it is incapable of producing human excellence (the private good) on its own. The aim of the city cannot, therefore, be virtue, but only justice. Consequently, the aim of the just city is social stability and “the basic condition of that fulfillment.” The just city, for Avicenna, therefore, does not require the rule of “exceptional intellectual capacities,” as al-Farabi demands, but only practical intelligence (LG, 170). The wise ruler, according to al-Farabi, remains above the laws and the political realm. On the other hand, the ruler possessed of practical intelligence is “more strictly subject of the laws,” as in the case of Avicenna. For Avicenna the aim of the city is the satisfaction of bodily and material needs, not the goods of soul, such as philosophical contemplation. Wisdom is attained by an active, political life, rather than by contemplation (LG, 170–1).
Averroes (d. 1198), like al-Farabi, is ambiguous about naming any real Muslim city a virtuous city. Rather, he appears to work from Plato’s principle of equality between the sexes in the Republic when he criticizes the Almoravidian Muslim city for the practice of reducing women to the role of reproduction. He argues that such practice is useless and harmful to the political community. Moreover, when explaining the origin of Muslim domination and victory over Persia, he offers a naturalistic, as opposed to a religious, account for the success of the Muslims: they simply conquered a people who had “sunken into a peaceful slumber, as it happened for the king of the Arabs with the king of Persia” (LG, 172).
Averroes’ most audacious move, however, is his treatment of the very core of the Islamic faith: “whereas the fiction that attributes to the Prophet the qualities of a philosopher was essential to the doctrine of the Aristotelian Arabs, Averroes leaves open the question of whether or not it is necessary that the legislator be a prophet” (LG, 172). Unlike al-Farabi and Avicenna, Averroes does not offer a psychological account of prophecy, and he apparently discounts “the explanation of prophecy as an emanation of the intellect acting on the imagination” (LG, 172). He explains the decline of the earliest Arab governments by reference to Plato’s declension of the regimes in Book 8 of the Republic, rather than as a failure to follow the model provided by Muhammad and his immediate successors.
For Brague, Averroes represents, at least in his Paraphrase of [Plato’s] ‘Republic,’ “the extreme limit of Aristotelian philosophy’s ambitious flirtation with Islamic Law” (LG, 173). The phrase “divine law,” for example, is used only once in Averroes. It appears in a discussion in which Averroes seems “to hold that the divine law must be measured by the standards of ‘human law’ . . . which seem to be the ones that philosophy deduces from its own knowledge of nature and of human needs” (LG, 173, my emphasis).
The Philosopher in the City
If the good city is but an unrealizable utopia, how then ought we to live? What are these “human laws”? According to what standard of action is the philosopher to guide his or her life? Once again, Greek (pagan) political thought provides a model for Islamic thinking.
Both the Greek and the Islamic philosophers in general offer a hierarchical ordering of the members of a city. For both, monarchs belong to the common people whom they guide. The sophists and the legislators are next. The highest is the philosopher, who, unlike these types, is self-sufficient and does not need the “virtuous city in order to exist” (LG, 173). Unlike political actors, the philosopher does not depend on rhetoric. Brague points out that al-Farabi uses Plato’s allegory of the cave as an image of the city (Republic 7). Here the philosopher leaves behind the cave of political life and the disciplines of dialectic, rhetoric, and poetics within it for the realm of pure, solitary contemplation (LG, 173).
This leads to the following question: does the city need philosophy? The answer according to philosophers such as al-Farabi is no. Those who govern according to a set of pre-existing laws have no need for philosophers. But a philosopher remains a human being and as such needs the city for his basic needs. Brague asks, “Does [the philosopher] need it as a philosopher?” According to Brague, the philosopher cannot reach perfection without moving the city toward a life of virtue. Socrates, in choosing death, made a mistake: “The philosopher would do well to take inspiration from Plato . . . and from his attempts to bring to pass a better regime” (LG, 173). However, even without a city, virtuous or corrupt, he is still a philosopher.
As an example of what Brague has in mind here, he cites al-Farabi’s Platonic view of the philosopher’s responsibility toward society:
From the fact that we [the elite, or the philosophers] are political by nature, and by that token it is our duty to be tied to the mass, to love it, and to prefer to do that which profits it . . . we share with it the goods whose realization has been entrusted to us, just as it shares with us the goods whose realization has been entrusted to it: we make it see the truth in the opinions that are its in its religion, and, because it shares the truth with us, it may share with the philosophers the beatitude of philosophy, in the measure of its capacity, and that we remove from it what we see, in its arguments, opinions, and laws, to be incorrect. (LG, 174)
Who Is the Legislator?
According to philosophers such as Avicenna, the genuine philosopher can interpret the law given by the prophet of Islam. Is the supreme leader of the Islamic community—a role fulfilled by Muhammad—in Avicenna’s view thus “analogous to the Philosopher King of Plato’s Republic?” In other words, is Muhammad a philosopher? Avicenna is rather ambiguous. In fact, there was a disciple of Avicenna who saw “his teacher’s self-portrait” in the depiction of Muhammad (LG, 175). It is unfortunate, however, that Brague does not develop this thought further, especially considering the important weight it carries for his theme.
Nevertheless, the Prophet, like all prophets, communicated a public teaching designed to reach a multitude far removed from the life of theoretical speculation: “The Prophet must therefore have spoken the language of his audience.” Religious laws, like the art of medicine, have to be administered to suit the nature of the receiver. Furthermore, “The Prophet addressed the mass in . . . language that was rhetorical and poetic, but his message contains matter capable of capturing the attention of the elite and pushing it to demonstrative reasoning” (LG, 175). Like Jesus’s parables, the philosophical message is couched in simple stories.
Al-Farabi was the first to use the phrase “political philosophy” in the Arabic language. It is an expression that falls under the field of practical philosophy and is concerned with human happiness or unhappiness (LG, 175). Blessedness is the aim of human existence, but does blessedness belong only to the philosophical life? Sometimes al-Farabi insists on beatitude only in a future life. Despite his lost commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, Brague asks whether he also at times may have implied that “the only real beatitude is political” (LG, 176). The conclusion is drawn from evidence we apparently no longer have. Perhaps the life of philosophy is the only real beatitude, as al-Farabi seems to assert. After all, as Brague points out, since al-Farabi was the first to use the expression “political philosophy,” might he not have placed his faith in the possibility of the life of Socrates, about whom he had written so much? Once again, Brague brings out some interesting themes only to move on without developing them further. This is all the more frustrating given Brague’s considerable learning. In the end he concludes that “to read the philosophers, it is thus difficult to say precisely what the legislator brings, for whom he brings it, and even just who he is” (LG, 176).
Where Does the Law Come From?
Mysticism, Legalism, and the Work of Ghazali
Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Ibn Khaldun, among many others, searched for the origins of divine law and revelation in nature, as opposed to tradition or custom. They “called ‘divine’ what allowed the city to develop according to its essence, a notion foreign to Islam as we remarked earlier” (LG, 176–7). Although the harmony of religion and philosophy was the theme that these philosophers treated again and again, the idea simply never caught on among the general Islamic public, which seemed more captivated by mysticism.
Mysticism, however, could be seen as a threat to morality and the law since it tends to pass beyond them. Mystics do not feel the need to separate right from wrong in society. The fear among the more orthodox followers of Islam was that any life unregulated by the divine law led to a rejection of religious law. The specter of moral license inspired the writings of such “representatives of a moderate Sufism” like Qushayri or Ghazali, whose writings essentially argue that “true liberty is to free oneself from all that is not God” (LG, 180).
Although law and mysticism got along well at the beginning of the eleventh century, it was Ghazali (d. 1111) who was the greatest representative of the attempt to synthesize legalism and mysticism: “With Ghazali we are in the presence of one of the possible solutions to the problem . . . that of the articulation of the legal and the divine. Ghazali’s works can be seen as an attempt to give a divine dimension back to the law” (LG, 186).
According to Ghazali, there can be no human legislator of the law, for only God is legislator and capable of judging and determining the value of human action. “Others who hold authority can only give orders that derive from those given by God,” which means that the prophets only pass on laws and rules that originate in “their divine source” (LG, 183). Ghazali writes:
[The prophets] make known the rules of the Law that permit maintaining justice among men, the rules of politics that make it possible to tame them, and the criteria that permit an evaluation of the imamate and the sultanate on the basis of religious law, thus guiding them toward temporal success, without forgetting that they direct them toward religious success. (LG, 183)
In other words, the Divine Law is the only authentic “foundation of obligation” and the only basis to “know whether [an action] is good or bad. It alone allows us to distinguish between justice and violence” (LG, 183).
Prior to the Prophet Muhammad, humankind lived “in a state of legal non-subjection” (LG, 183). Since, according to Ghazali, unassisted reason is unable to discover the foundation of obligation or to discover God’s designs on its own, its use and role is limited to assuring the coherence of law. “Knowledge of the reasons behind the commandments is not within the capabilities of human nature” (LG, 183–4).
On the other hand, Ghazali’s work The Revival of the Religious Science, written at the turn of the eleventh to the twelfth century, marks Ghazali’s great attempt to bring together legalism and mysticism. For Ghazali, the law falls under a branch of knowledge concerning the things of this world, which is but a means to the afterlife. He situates the moral worth of human actions in the intentions of the actor as a way to educate those who may be tempted toward power on this earth. This move toward the interiorization of religion “came to designate an inward orientation” that remains influential to this day (LG, 184–5).
It is deep within the human heart that “the world of the Creator” is to be found, according to Ghazali: “The one who decides is the heart; the heart is attuned to slight indications for which the reasoning of reason is too narrow” (LG, 185). The science of the laws regulates only external actions where even the most competent of the doctors of the law have no access. The most important knowledge, which only God can judge, is the qualities within the heart. A human being of probity must strive to purify her heart from the dangers of religious indifference.
The emphasis on the probity of one’s intentions enables one to acquire a spiritual depth that transcends the simple routines of ritualism. The aim behind religious practice is no longer to influence the divine through prayer, but to reach a personal blessedness through an encounter with God. This move is what Brague means by Ghazali’s attempt to “breathe something of the divine into the law” (LG, 186). Believers who fulfill God’s commandments do so with a heart dominated by God. This internalized morality is what Brague refers to as Ghazali’s view of “an authentic spirituality,” founded on the notion of a God as Legislator (LG, 186).
Conclusion
The history that Brague develops here is concerned with the relationship of human practice to the divine law. His aim, among other things, is to recast the modern boast of the separation of church and state in a new light, asking “whether that separation, which has received so much praise . . . ever took place” (LG, 257). Such an alleged separation presupposes, in his mind, the existence of an initial union, which his history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is designed to call into question. He claims that religion and state authority have “crossed one another’s paths more than once, but they never merged, in spite of attempts to fit them together” (LG, 258).
Paradoxically, however, Brague concludes that “Islam is the culture within which a separation . . . has occurred” (LG, 259). He contends that Islam’s problems—both from and to the modern secularized world—defy reduction into separation versus non-separation of the political and the religious. There is a separation of sorts, he concedes, “if not a necessary one—in the realm of ideas.” Nonetheless, although in Islam “the practical has fallen out of step with the divine . . . the genus as a whole remains subject to the divine law” (LG, 259, my emphasis). It is difficult, at least for me, to make out what this means.
Earlier in his book, Brague remarked that the West has perpetuated a “legend” of non-separation in Islam, but that “this separation was gradually attained thanks to circumstances; it was inscribed in facts, not in ideas. In Islam, nothing corresponds to the separation—which was theorized elsewhere—of the temporal and the spiritual” (LG, 156, my emphasis).
Nevertheless, Brague seems to be saying that the so-called unity between religion and the politics in Islam is only a revisionist interpretation of history. At no significant point in Islam’s history was there such a harmony, much to the chagrin of those alarmed by today’s drift away from an idealized past when Islamic law alone supposedly regulated human conduct.
It seems, however, that the sections on Islam, interesting in their own right, serve as foils in developing a much larger and more controversial position on Christianity and its contribution to modern Europe. For instance, according to Brague, the modern world is the creation of the work of Descartes, Hobbes, and Malebranche, who grafted the laws of God onto a peculiarly modern understanding of nature. At first the laws seem to have had their origin in nature “which has nothing in common with man, to the point that man is incapable of understanding [nature].” “Faced with a law that contained nothing of the human,” he adds, “there arose, in reaction, a law that was nothing but human,” rather than divine or natural in origin (LG, 237). In order for the moderns to identify the law as a human invention contracted for the purpose of self-preservation, the human conscience had to be divorced from the divine. Early modern Europe was reduced, for example, to Jean Bodin’s (d. 1596) distinction between droit (right) and loi (law), where loi becomes “nothing but the commandment of the sovereign, using his power” (LG, 233–4).
Yet, Brague observes, “if the all-political law is human, the divine laws must also be . . . a product of the wiliness of certain particularly clever men. Thus Machiavelli presents recourse to God as a wise move on the part of those who want to establish laws that go beyond what is commonly accepted” (LG, 240). Modern thinkers such as Machiavelli and Montesquieu borrow religious language to couch their secular projects, according to Brague. In the spirit of Machiavelli, Montesquieu writes around 1725 that “any law, without which [society] could not exist, becomes by that token divine law” (LG, 240). This idea, Brague goes on to point out, “should perhaps be connected to the notion that the first concern of providence is the health of the state. It is where it is not divine, indeed, it is because it is not divine, that law has need of the divine (LG, 240).” The Enlightenment thinkers, in other words, revived the vocabulary of the law’s sacredness in order to introduce new meanings for old terms.
Nevertheless, Brague denies that the West is characterized by a genuine secularized spirit. Our modern identity in the West owes an unacknowledged debt to Christianity, which first made possible the idea of a law of nature. He cites St. Augustine, who in the fifth century introduced the idea of divine law as natural and knowable by all people (LG, 215). Augustine wrote, “God has written the natural law in the hearts of men,” whereby the divine law “designates both the order of the universe and legislation adapted within history to a specific state of humanity” (LG, 215). The unity of divine and natural law for Augustine provides humans with a notion of eternal law and a standard by which to measure and judge temporal laws and discern the nature of God.
Brague further asserts that the church of “the Gregorian Reform is the first institution in history that willed and understood itself to be a state.” Ecclesiastical authors of the thirteenth century were using the word status to mean “state” even long before Machiavelli, he argues (LG, 136), and next, the church gave to this status the duty of the “proper operation of the temporal community” and “justice” (LG, 136). In other words, the separation of church and state is of Christian origin, and not, as many would have it, the work of Enlightenment philosophers.
As early as the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) established the notion of the consent of the governed. In his Christian language, “all legitimate [political] authority arises from elective concordance and free submission. There is in the people a divine seed by virtue of their common birth and the equal natural right of all men so that all authority—which comes from God as does man himself—is recognized as divine when it arises from the common consent of the subjects” (LG, 138). Brague concludes from this and other sources “that the model for modern democracy and its electoral procedure was not so much Athens, where choices depended on drawing lots, but the medieval church” (LG, 138).
Whether or not Brague has understood the modern break with the medieval doctrines of natural right and redefined the meaning of government is beyond the scope of this essay. What is clear, however, is that Brague is a scholar of considerable learning. Although Brague’s learning is second to none, his ideas and arguments dart in and out too quickly and leave one wanting more. This is partly due to the scope and ambition of his book, which spans an enormous period of time and manages to present a wealth of scholarship at a breakneck speed. Rather than offer a history of ideas, particularly those of the Islamic philosophers, perhaps his next project could build off this one and offer a more philosophical treatment of his many interesting points. Those who cannot wait for such a book or essay would do well to consult this weighty book.
Khalil M. Habib
Salve Regina University
- Ibn Khaldun Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 47–8, 74–89.
