Wael Hallaq Quotes

All things in this world are historical.

حينما تُشَّرع الدولة اجراءات قاسية أو جائرة لا يتحتم على القضاة أن يطبقوا القانون فحسب - وهو لزاما عليهم بصفتهم قضاة- بل يتحتم عليهم اضفاء بنية من الشرعية على الدولة أثناء عملية تطبيق القانون ذاتها

الارادة السيادية لا تعرف الا ذاتها و لا تقبل مرجعية أخرى الا نفسها و عندما يتغير تفكيرها يتغير قانونها!!

Humanism is not a science, but religion. . . . Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. —John Gray, Straw Dogs In

If we live in a world of states, and if out-of-state existence is impossible, then we all must live as national citizens. We are the nation, and the nation is us. This is as fundamental as it is an inescapable reality. Nationalism engulfs both the individual and the collective; it produces the 'I' and 'We' dialectically and separately. Not only does nationalism produce the community and its individual members: it is itself the community and its realized individual subjects, for without these there is no nationalism. "Leading sociologists and philosophers have emphasized the pervasive presence of the community in individual consciousnesses, where the social bond is an essential part of the self. It is not only that the 'I' is a member of the 'We,' but, more importantly, that the 'We' is a necessary member of the 'I.' It is an axiom of sociological theory, writes Scheler, that all human knowledge 'precedes levels of self-contagiousness of one's self-value. There is no "I" without "We." The "We" is filled with contents prior to the "I." ' Likewise, Mannheim emphasizes ideas and thought structures as functions of social relations that exist within the group, excluding the possibility of any ideas arising independently of socially shared meanings. The social reality of nationalism not only generates meanings but is itself a 'context of meaning'; hence our insistence that nationalism constitutes and is constituted by the community as a social order. 'It is senseless to pose questions such as whether the mind is socially determined, as though the mind and society each posses a substance of their own' [citing Pressler and Dasilva's Sociology]. The profound implications of the individual's embeddedness in the national community is that the community's ethos is prior and therefore historically determinative of all socioepistemic phenomena. And if thought structures are predetermined by intellectual history, by society's inheritance of historical forms of knowledge, then those structures are also a priori predetermined by the linguistic structures in which this history is enveloped, cast, and framed. Like law, nationalism is everywhere: it creates the community and shapes world history even before nationalism comes into it.

Minor segments of earlier history may have been rescued or 'retrieved' -- e.g. Greek 'democracy,' Aristotle, the Magna Carta, etc. -- but these remain subservient, if not instrumental, to the imperatives of the modern historical narrative and to the progress of 'Western civilization.' African and Asia, in most cases, continue to struggle in order to catch up, in the process not only forgoeing the privilege of drawing on their own traditions and historical experiences that shaped who they were and, partly, who they have become but also letting themselves be drawn into devastating wars, poverty, disease and the destruction of their natural environment. Modernity, whose hegemonic discourse is determined by the institutions and intellectuals of the powerful modern West, has not offered a fair shake to two-thirds of the world's population, who have lost their history and, with it, their organic ways of existence.

‎"The indictment [the Western/modern question, 'Why be moral?'] also issued from a gross underrating of the 'moral' force that was regarded within the Islamic tradition as an essential and integral part of the 'law.' At the foundation of this underrating stood the observer's ideological judgement about religion (at least the Islamic religion), a judgment of repugnance, especially when religion as a moral and theological force is seen to be fused with law. The judgement, in other words, undercuts a proper apprehension of the role of modernity as a legal form, of its power and force. Historical evidence [in modernity/Enlightenment thought and its intellectual progeny] was thus made to fit into what makes sense to us, not what made sense to a culture that defined itself -- systematically, teleologically, and existentially -- in different terms. This entrenched repugnance for the religious -- at least in this case to the 'Islamic' in Muslim societies -- amounted, in legal terms, to the foreclosure of the possibility of considering the force of the moral within the realm of the legal, and vice versa. Theistic teleology, eschatology, and socially grounded moral gain, status, honor, shame, and much else of a similar type were reduced in importance, if not totally set aside, in favor of other explanations that 'fit better' within our preferred, but distinctively modern, countermoral systems of value. History was brought down to us, to the epistemological here and now, according to our own terms, when in theory no one denies that it was our historiographical set of terms that ought to have been subordinated to the imperatives of historical writing.

Guénon’s analytical project then not only exceeds that of Said in its diagnostic force of Orientalist and Western scholarship and its genealogy, but also offers possible solutions for the future that only match the depth of his diagnostics. If I am interested in briefly dwelling on these proposed reforms, it is not for their actual value for my overall argument as such, although, I think, we would do poorly to dismiss them out of hand. Their value instead lies in further explicating and pinning to the ground the deep structures of Orientalism and its intimate and dialectical ties to modernity as a new phenomenon in human history. Because Said navigated mainly at the conventional political level, and shirking -unknowingly to be sure- the engagement of the full weight of “undercurrents” in Europe that gave rise to the unique phenomenon called Orientalism, he had nothing to offer in the way of a solution other than comforting words aimed perhaps at engendering a glimmer of hope, but little else.

كان للمجتمع الإسلامي من شمال أفريقيا والأندلس إلى جاوة وسمرقند نصيبٌ من البؤس. فقد كان له من غزوه واحتلوه، كما كان له متمردوه ونشّالوه ولصوصه وقطّاع طرقه، بل وقضاته الفاسدون أحيانًا(64). لكن القانون الأخلاقي كان مهيمنًا دائمًا بلا منازع، كما سنرى، واستمرت خطاباته وممارساته النموذجية في تأكيد نفسها بالإنتاج المستمر لنظامٍ معين(65). ولطالما أَمْكَنَ للواقع الاجتماعي المضطرب متمثلاً في الطفل المظلوم والتاجر المسروق والفلاح المرهق بالضرائب أن يعتمد على نظامٍ أخلاقي مهيمن سعى بكلّ جهده للتعامل مع ذلك الواقع. أما كونه لم يكن ناجحًا على الدوام فهي حقيقةٌ بداهية فالنجاح الكامل ليس من حظ أي مجتمعٍ في الماضي أو في الحاضر. ولكن الفاعلية النموذجية للاتجاه الأخلاقي أمر ليس محل شك(66). لطالما سعى النموذج، مثله مثل قواعده القانونية الخاصة والفنية، إلى تحقيق تلك الغاية الأخلاقية، ففشل أحيانًا ونجح في أغلب الأحيان، وذلك بالتحديد هو ما جعله نظامًا نموذجيًا.

وفي نظر فيبر، تمثل الحرية الفردية وتقرير المصير المستقل والعقلاني وهو ما أعاد ماركيز وصفه بـ«اللاحرية الديمقراطية»(532) توترًا ضخمًا بين النظام الأخلاقي/الروحاني وعالم المادة والمادية، أي بين أخلاقية الاهتمام بالذات وأخلاقية إرضاء الذات. هكذا تغدو قيمة الحياة خارجيةً لا داخلية. وهي تولي أهمية عظمى للانضباط والكفاءة والعمل، وهذه ثلاثةٌ من بين الدروس الكثيرة التي غرستها الدولة في مواطنيها كطبيعةٍ ثانيةٍ لهم. فمثلما أعمل من أجل العمل(533)، ومثلما يسعى مال الرأسمالية إلى تكديس الثروة، فإن الدولة توجد من أجل نفسها، وتديم نفسها لمجرد إدامة نفسها(534). وكان فيبر قد رأى في زعم التقدم الذي تزعمه الحداثة مفهومًا يضاهي «إنتاج الثروة وتراكمها والسيطرة على الطبيعة... إضافةً إلى فكرة تحرير الذات العقلانية»(535). بيد أن ثمن التقدم كان ما دعاه فيبر «الحرمان الروحاني»(536) (disenchantment)، وهو شعورٌ عميقٌ بالضياع، ضياع المقدس وضياع حالة الاكتمال ضياع الإرساء الروحي للذات في العالم والطبيعة وفي ما دعوته نظرةً كونيةً أخلاقية (Moral Cosmology).

Tamamen medenileşmiş insanların devlet sistemlerinin sınırları içinde yaşadığı ve öyle olmayanların (elbette bunlar Avrupa dışında yaşıyordu) aşağı derecedeki "insanımsı(!)" olan "kabile" toplumlarına ait oldukları kanaati, bütün Avrupa'da yaygındı. Bu inanç çeşitli biçimler aldı; hatta onlardan biri olan Hegelci düşünce o kadar ileri gitti ki adeta devleti mitleştirdi ve ona dört bir yana sirayet eden ahlaki bir yapı vasfı kazandırdı.