Martha Nussbaum’s legal training and classical Greek learning are of little use in analysing the challenge that Islamists present today, writes NS Rajaram
The New Religious Intolerance
Author: Martha Nussbaum
Publisher: Harvard, £19.95
On September 11, 2001, the world woke up to the side of Islam that it had chosen to ignore for decades. Following this, the image of Islam in the West, never particularly good, took a severe beating. In the spate of writing that followed, several academics who until then had laboured in obscurity came out to explain Islam. Among these are entrepreneurs like John Esposito of Georgetown University, funded by the Saudis, followed by the likes of Diana Eck and Michael Witzel of Harvard, hoping to cash in by marketing their academic voices to polish the image of Islam. Martha Nussbaum is not among these. Her interest is in using her knowledge and expertise to analyse the various phenomena around Islam, especially intolerance.
Nussbaum works closely with Amartya Sen, with whom she has authored the book The Quality of life. Where Sen is an economist who, of late, has ventured into philosophy and history (and politics), Nussbaum is a legal scholar and philosopher trained in Classical Greek thought. She is highly regarded in these fields, holding a distinguished chair at the University of Chicago. She is not a historian, however, and looks at contemporary issues from the perspective of a classical Greek scholar and legal expert. In addition, she appears to rely heavily on Sen for information about Islam and history.
Nussbaum’s legal training and classical Greek learning are of little use in analysing the challenge that Islam presents today. Islamists regard any legal system other than the shariah (Islamic law) as illegitimate, fit to be uprooted. Against this all the legal erudition that Nussbaum can muster is a sermon in the wilderness. Relying on Sen’s version of Islam and history, she sees Muslims living in democratic countries as targets of unjustified suspicion. Astonishingly, she even justifies the incompatibility of the shariah with the First Amendment of the US Constitution. She finds the First Amendment particularly harsh on Muslim minorities for they cannot decide cases based on their religious law! There is no recognition that Islam does not separate religion and state. The prayer book is also the law book.
Her view of religious freedom also strikes one as strange. There is no mention of jihad, which is the central doctrine of Islam. Non-Muslims have no problems with fasts and prayers; it is Muslim violence while invoking its sacred scripture that is at the root of the problem. But Nussbaum avoids the question while highlighting trivial issues like hijab and dress. The book jacket with its fetching photo of a young girl in a head cover typifies the sum and substance of the book. We need read no further.
But what about the real worldIJ Osama bin laden (and other jihadis) used Islamic texts — the Quran and the Hadis — to exhort Muslims to attack non-Muslim sites from New York to Bali. Al Qaeda chief Ayman al Zawahari emphasised how Muslim legal scholars “have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries”. Nussbaum is totally ignorant of it and nowhere mentions jihad. Her version, like Sen’s, is Islam without jihad.
While it is no one’s argument that innocent Muslims should be made to suffer for the acts of terrorists, one cannot ignore the fact that jihadis cite their scripture as justification for their acts. What Nussbaum and her ilk are doing is to deny this reality and treat it simply as a philosophic and at best legal issue. The problem with this even at the legal level is that according to Islam only the shariah is legal: All other legal and political entities like the US Constitution, the Indian Constitution and their courts are illegitimate and should be overthrown to be replaced by institutions based on the shariah.
Neither Sen with his superficial reading nor Nussbaum with her legal hairsplitting can comprehend what Islam has meant and continues to mean in the real world. To see this we need to go to one of Islam’s own historians and philosophers — in fact the greatest of them, to Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). He was never in doubt about the true mission of Islam. He saw jihad as an aggressive war of expansion. As he wrote, “The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defence... Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.” And this is to be accomplished through jihad.
Where does Ibn Khaldun stand relative to acclaimed academics like Sen and NussbaumIJ Not many Indians have heard of him, but scholars outside India have recognised his greatness. British historian Arnold Toynbee called Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah “a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place”. Nor was Toynbee alone. Robert Flint, a distinguished British philosopher, wrote of Ibn Khaldun: “As a theorist on history he had no equal in any age... Plato, Aristotle and Augustine were not his peers, and all others were unworthy of being even mentioned along with him.” And this includes Nussbaum and Sen.
To understand what Islam means in our time one is better off going to a timeless master like Ibn Khaldun than spend time on the false history and pseudo-erudition peddled by the likes of Sen and Nussbaum. In summary, The New Religious Intolerance contains nothing worthwhile while totally ignoring the Old Religious Intolerance of Islam that has dominated history. It is a pointless tome burdened with a lot of name-dropping from ancient Greek sources and modern law books, both irrelevant to the subject at hand.
The reviewer is a scientist and historian