The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. I, 1991 15 

Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing 
Cultures: Shaping A Discourse 

Mona Abul-Fad1 

Contrasting Epistemics 

“why ifafish came to me and told me he was going on a journey, I should 
say, With what porpoise?”’ “Don’t you mean burpose’?” said Alice. 
“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an ofended tone. 

(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland) 

Consider this analogy: There was a man beneath a tree. He wished to collect 
his thoughts, but the sparrows disturbed him with their chirping. He would 
chase them with his stick and then resume his train of thought, but the sparrows 
would come back and he would have to scare them away. . . Eventually 
someone told him: %is is like being a slave at the wheel going round and 
round forever. Ifyou want to escape the vicious circle, you shouldfell the tree: 

I m h  al Ghazlli, 
(fiyii’ ‘Uliim a1 Din) 

Cultural Parodies: Shaping a Discourse 

Abstract 

It has been the practice for the dominant paradigm to set the terms of 
rational discourse and for the “Other” to defer in reverence - if it wanted to 
be admitted to the circle of respectability. In this case, the tables are turned 

MOM Abul-Fad1 directs the Research Project on Western Thought at the International 
Institute of Islamic Thought, Herndon, Virginia and is the chairperson of the Political Science 
Discipline Council of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. 



16 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

and the dominant paradigm, which is secularist, is viewed critically through 
the lens of a re-emerging tuwhidi paradigm. The purpose is not to engage 
in a test of will or vision, but to lay the ground for a discourse which can 
accommodate a genuine diversity-in-dignity for all, and which would include 
Self and Other in a re-formed world of inter-relatedness developed through 
new categories and points of reference. In a common human heritage rich 
in communicable symbols and transitive experiences, cultivating the terms 
of a hermeneutic of mutuality is imminent. Its objectives would be to redefine 
and assure worldly morality and rationality at higher levels of reality. Only 
then can the self-imposed constraints, constrictions, and anomalies which 
are inherent in the prevailing culture be transcended. The context for shaping 
this discourse can be as broad and encompassing or as concrete and particular 
as the response in the concurrent fields of the humanities and the social sciences 
will admit. 

Following on a theme already introduced in a previous issue of NZSS 
addressing Contrasting Epistemics, we take the initiative to launch such a 
discourse. We select our examples from a range of options in popular culture 
and social theory, and pave the way for bridging the schisms and the 
anachronisms which have long divided Islam and the West. 

1 
Introduction 

The prevailing secularist culture identified with modernity and with the 
historical Occident subverts morality to power and principles to expedience. 
Unchecked in its morbid dynamism, it has become a global threat as its 
influence spreads to englobe every other culture, and its voice rules. Into 
this glut, a deadly silence falls, a silence which goes unnoticed in the distraction 
that attends a virtual monopoly of discourse. Dominance cannot be equated 
with truth, although it no doubt benefits from the old confusion of right with 
might. What is needed is to lay the woof and warp for a new discourse, 
one immune to its own perversities. Minds fed on the myths of the dominant 
culture need to be provoked into rethinking their complacencies, and weaned 
to the idea that whatever the culture which might prevail at any given moment, 
there is always another possibility, an alternative to understanding and to 
virtue. The possibility for recovery and renewal, whatever the cultural 
givendconstructs might be, is a function of this openness and orientation 
which goes beyond the Self to embrace the Other. 

This is where a Contrasting Episteme is advocated as an approach to 
and a strategy for bridging cultures and for laying the foundations for a dynamic 



Mona Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 17 

of critical reflection and reconstruction. It is inspired by a hermeneutic of 
mutuality which takes difference as a dialectic for convergence. Contrasts 
can be conducted at any level of discourse and within any of its strands. 
The purpose, however, is to launch it at a foundational level which addresses 
the major presuppositions of cognition and affection, and to proceed from 
there to see how the ground rules for a reshaping discourse can deveIop. 
There are three major assumptions which condition this premise: (1) Present 
civilization is at a crossroads, as it must deal with the existing chasm between 
its material accomplishments and its moral failures; (2) It is not enough to 
critique the prevailing culture, but the challenge is to transform it; and (3) 
The sources for meeting such a challenge cannot be reinvented from the debris 
of extant cultures, but must be sought in the transcendent. 

Two basic culture types are projected to take their distinct stance from 
an outlook and understanding of the fundamental categories of existence: 
man, nature, and life. Are these essentially autonomous or dependent 
categories? In the one case we encounter a culture mode that takes its bearings 
from a horizontal axis, while in the other the bearings are projected onto 
a vertical axis. The dominant paradigm today has been shaped against the 
horizontal axis, whereas the rawhidl episteme, which is the subject of recall 
and recollection from the depths of a universal and generic human history, 
evokes the vertical axis. Modes of thought and apprehension are projected 
into their socio-cultural and historical plane in terms of variants of an Oscillating 
Culture-type and of a Median Culture-type. One further caution should be 
noted here: Muslims and Islam are not interchangeable conceptual referents, 
and the Oscillating Culture and the West are not immutable conflates. With 
the predicament of modernity, the Oscillating Culture is a common but not 
invincible fate, and the Median Culture is the source for a wholesome recovery 
and renewal/reconstruction for all those with a stake in the future of humanity. 

We have already explored some implications of these assumptions and 
have introduced certain concepts suggesting areas in which new perspectives 
could be developed. Social theory as a vocation was proposed to re-orient 
attitudes in the field? A hermeneutic of mutuality was predicated on an ethos 
of renunciation and reconciliation that paved the way for transcending the 
Self/Other dichotomy. This was referred to as engaging in a co-substantiating 
mode of discourse.2 In this presentation, another forum for developing these 
concepts is sought as the resources of a contrasting episteme and of its 
instrumental culture-types are further mined. The focus is on the elements 
of a cultural discourse that is critical of the dominant secularist culture, 

'Mona Abul-Fadl, "Contrasting Epistemics: Tawhid, the Vocationist, and Social Science," 

2Mona Abul-Fadl, "The Art, the Artifact, and the Artist" in Where East Meets West, 
MISS 7(1):15-38. 

forthcoming. 



18 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

understood here essentially in terms of a diminishing and diminished sense 
of value and a pervasive disorientation. Interest shifts to modes of discourse. 
A vocabulary for the recognition of the malaise and its articulation is sought 
both within the Western tradition and from Muslim sources. One lesson of 
an integrated and synthetic approach is to see continuities not simply within 
each tradition, but also among historically differentiated traditions. Another 
lesson is to see how enriching for the current discourse in the West it might 
be to become attentive to other voices. A third lesson is to suggest that in 
recovering a voice from the Muslim tradition in particular, that discourse 
can be significantly enlightened because reason in the Muslim tradition was 
not subverted by pretensions to autonomy or by indulgences in excess. In 
that tradition one could doubt without being cynical; and one could hope 
without abandoning reason. Above all, the alternative to rationality was not 
absurdity. Common sense was grounded in a jfitric and empirical/pragmatic 
sensibility reinforced by the pervasive principled convictions in a revelation 
which provided the impetus to the individual and to the group at all levels 
of activity and creativity. This, in brief, is what commands attention to voices 
articulated in the Muslim tradition. 

In the makings of an intercultural discourse, the parameters of rationality 
are implicitly invoked, as are the boundaries between the humanities and 
the social sciences. The implication is that social sciences must be grounded 
in a discourse that is morally conscious, and that the humanities must reinterpret 
their material and domain so as to become historically relevant. This too 
is a lesson which cannot be learned in isolation or deliberated upon in a 
presumptuous self-sufficiency. A hermeneutic of mutuality would sharpen 
the sensibilities of areas of complementarity and enrich perspectives on the 
human condition and its potential for morality. The above lessons are significant 
in themselves and can be demonstrated in any number of ways by recourse 
to sophisticated and specialized arguments. The presentation here, however, 
opts for a simplicity and a directness in the illustrations it selects as it moves 
from one plane to another to show how evolving a discourse in the perspective 
of a Contrasting Episteme can reveal much that is pertinent within each 
tradition. At the same time, it points to the direction where convergence can 
be a virtue, as it invites a critical reflection of the dominant paradigm. The 
background to this reading relies on techniques as much as on the interface 
of culture types and modes of discourse. Its aim is to show the range and 
possibilities which are inherent in such a perspective. 



Mona Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 19 

2 
Parables, Metaphors, and Heroes Re-Membered 

A Contrasting Episteme would be a timely check against the random 
distortions which might have occurred in cultural encounters in the past. 
It would also contribute significantly to re-locating the distorted elements 
of the misrepresented culture to the benefit of the modem encounter. An 
example may illustrate this point. The negative transfiguration of Ibn Ffayl's 
hero into Daniel Defoe's precursor of homo ecomrnzkus is an eloquent testimony 
to what happens when one party appropriates to itself the prerogative of 
interpreting the tradition of the Other-and in the process manages to 
completely deform it.3 Obviously, it would be naive to contend that Crusoe 
on his desert island was delibemtely conceived in the mold of Hayy Ibn Yaqm, 
nor is it even adequate to speak of a reductionist dermnsJigurution of roles 
and images between a homo supiens and a homo fuber. This would be too 
crude for intellectual justice, and it would also miss the point of the nuanced 
readings within the respective traditions. Yet, because Ibn >fayl's story could 
be seen to epitomize much that is significant from the perspective of a 
Contrasting Episteme, a brief account may yield some refreshing insights 
which could be followed up elsewhere. 

Hayy Ibn Yaqzin, the living, son of He who is ever-awake, ever-watchful 
(which is the literal meaning of this hero's name), found himself on an island 
deserted of all human habitation. His very conception and survival were a 
token of a providential care. (He was, it will be recalled, nurtured by a doe 
that had lost her cub and that had chanced upon the suckling babe just at 
the right moment.) As he grew into consciousness, he became steadily aware 
of the qualities of a divine sustaining presence until he was led, through his 
yearning and untiring search, into an encounter with it. In substance and 
in form, the story was entirely consistent with the worldview of the culture 
which spawned it, and it was conspicuously representative of the mood of 
its times. After all, Hayy Ibn Yaqq5n did not reach the highest truth through 
mere contemplation, nor through the tireless speculations of the philosophes. 

3As Will Durant observes, "Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (1107-1185 A.C.) [the Andalusian 
philosopher-scholar] found time to write, among more technical works, the most remarkable 
philosophical romance in medieval literature . . . and (through Ockley's English translation 
in 1708) may have suggested Robinson Crusoe to Defoe." From me Age o f h i t h  quoted in 
M. Fazlurahman Ansari, me Qurhnic Fowrdations and Structure of Mmlim Society (Karachi: 
World Federation of Islamic Missions, 1977), 1:211. Very few of those working on Crusoe 
would recall such a possibility, as is shown by default in one of the more recent studies on 
the subject which is construed in a hermeneutically meaningful context. See Bernard McGrene. 
Beyond Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 



20 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

Rather, it was through his active and practical involvement in his daily mun- 
dane surroundings that his journey began from a concrete and visible world 
to the reality beyond it. It began with a systematic, patient, and persistent 
curiosity that took him through a fascinating progression of stages in prac- 
tical and intellectual inquiry, engaging him in a full-fledged exercise of first 
his sensory perceptions, and then his rational faculties, and leading to the 
ultimate discovery of the extrasensory with the consummation of the 
“theosophical.” It was a journey in interiority and self-transcendence where 
the leitmotiv, demonstrated at every turn, was that the world of the visible 
pointed to a world beyond it. This in fact was the summation included in 
al Ghazdts own highly original theory of knowledge, and al Ghazdi was 
the grand synthesizer of a tradition conceived in the pale of the Median Culture. 
Only by seeing the story of Ibn %fay1 within its cultural tradition is it possi- 
ble to grasp its integrating and synthetic dimensions and bring them to bear 
on a retrospective reading of both modernity and the Muslim legacy. 

In acknowledging the genuine intellectual contribution of a1 Ghaziili and 
his peers, it would be wrong to attribute the synthesis to their genius or to 
their ingenuity and to overlook its elements in the culture they breathed. The 
culture which became the hallmark of Muslim civilization was certainly a 
historical product of its times open to the spectrum of influences at play from 
within “constituent” and surrounding cultures as assumed in Hodgson’s 
“Islamicate.” But, what was genuine and unique about it was constituted by 
an ideal core in which it was originally conceived and which continued to 
sustain it. The Taw@5 Episteme was the node, or nexus, and sustaining mode, 
or operational parameter and frame, within which the divergent influences 
crystallized and modulated. The closer the great thinkers proximated this 
core, the more authentic their expression. In this sense, the ideal-typical culture 
that corresponded to the Tawhidi Episteme was a median culture favoring 
a proportion and measure, aversive of excess ( W r a h  a1 minin, mazfijuhii 
ul ilidil). The actual historical culture as it was lived and experienced at 
any given moment was a proximation to this “median” that might vary in 
degree, but not in kind. Its lapses were behavioral rather than structural, 
and its deviations could be addressed from within the system. The unitary 
sources and their homogeneity, their internal coherence and integrity, secured 
stability and continuity for the ideal core as a mainstay of both episteme 
and culture, and was ultimately reflected in practice. 

The giants in that tradition were great to the extent that they were capable 
of articulating aspects of that core culture. Even the controversial faliisifah 
were representative of the tradition to the extent that they were conditioned 
by the persistent dimensions in the ideal core as they interacted within the 
“Islamicate.” What distinguished the great synthesizers or system-builders 
in the cultural history of Islam, however, was their ability to identify and 



MOM Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 21 

formulate the elements intrinsic to that core in a manner that replicated the 
integrality of the whole. In this sense, injiqhi jurisprudence, al S M i  became 
the instantiation and expression of a synthesis which was already there defin- 
ing the field of action. It might have been popularized, fragmented, and dif- 
fuse, but it was nonetheless intrinsic to the habits of mind and thought 
engendered through the Median Culture. In the same way, a Fakhr al Din 
al R h i ,  an Ibn Hazm, an al Shitibi, or an Ibn Taym-yah, each in his own 
way and in his respective field of knowledge and expertise, left his indelible 
marks. Each brought together the elements of knowledge accumulated to his 
time and welded the disparate arguments into a systematic whole, thereby 
producing a rationalizing and integrating totality whereby the rationale and 
logic provided there could assure a systemic coherence to the parts. 

The great synthesizers or system-builders all belonged to the same great 
tradition embodying a distinctive way of knowing in its sources, modes, and 
conceptions. Each would leave his imprint on the paths crossed, beginning 
with the monumental contribution to laying the foundations of a jiqhi 
jurisprudence by I& al Shlfi‘i and ending up, five centuries later, in a 
science of human culture and civilization with Ibn Khaldiin. The range of 
rationality spanned the ethical and regulative premises that structured the 
bounds and solidarity of the political community to the principles that shaped 
its historical consciousness of itself. 

A discourse shaped in the perspective of a Contrasting Episteme is 
deferential to the internal logic of cultures and seeks to relate the elements 
to the whole with an eye on ulteriority. Ibn Tufayl’s account invoked a re- 
interpretation of the culture which spawned it to the benefit of recovering 
elements of the median (cf. wusu[iyuh) which could be meaningful in 
reassessing the culture of modernity. In such a medium, impetus is given 
to a range of rationality seeking comprehensionkomprehensiveness within 
a radius set by an integrating center. Ibn Yaqzin’s ascent to interiority was 
not bought at the expense of negating the external: and for every step of 
the way the medium of access called for measure and proportion. In the 
same way, the growing complexity of the edifice of learning in the Muslim 
legacy was accompanied by its centripetal tendencies. The “mid-point” is 
institutionalized to assure a verticality to expansiveness and to serve as a 
check on fragmentation and dissipation. 

3 
The Oscillating Culture Refined 

In launching the discourse, a preliminary distinction was made between 
two culture types: an Oscillating Culture and a Median Culture, with the 



22 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

former identified with a secular humanist paradigm of knowledge and the 
latter projecting and instantiating a Tawhidi Episteme. The task is to reassess 
the one in terms of the other so as to highlight dimensions which might other- 
wise be missed. Internal reflection and criticism are reinforced by a cross- 
reflexive citique which is to be ultimately relegated to a higher court of 
appeal (historylpraxis or a new discursive tradition). In the meantime, a co- 
substantiating mode calls for reading a culture from within, with the purpose 
of gaining common ground. The following illustration further clarifies this 
technique. 

From the tawhidi premise which informs a Contrasting Episteme, the 
secular humanist dynamic was projected as being subject to fluctuations, 
animated by polarities, and given to excess. It is interesting to see that evidence 
for such a reading can be found from very different sources exclusively 
developed within that secularist culture mode. Contemporary critical self- 
assessments in the West perceive the force of this pendular rhythm within 
their intellectual tradition; they recognize the antinomies and admit the 
inclinations to excess. Some will even see in the irreconcilable tensions which 
feed that tradition a source of vitality, and will support their various theoretical 
predications on the purging fires of these counter-flexing surges. For those 
within the Oscillating Culture, it is hard to conceive of the historical process 
or the human condition in any other way. The scourge of a horizontal axis 
in an episteme lies in its perennial want of measure and, indeed, in a persistent 
elusiveness to all measure. 

In the event of reading the Oscillating Culture from within, as a co- 
substantiating mode would require, one can take any moment to illustrate 
its thrust. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s perspicuous reflection on the Western 
intellectual tradition is as authentic and original as one can get. Its force 
and resonance come from its context as much as from its content. & Dialectic 
of Enlightenment, where the criticism of enlightened reason is developed, 
was written in the 1930s in an attempt to explain how fascism could have 
developed in a nation that was seemingly the embodiment of liberal ideals. 
The fact that they were so easily displaced by giving way to irrationality 
seemed to be an indictment of more than a particular conception of rationality 
(“instrumental reason”); it seemed to be an indictment of an entire intellectual 
tradition. At about the same period, the Marxist humanist critic George Lukas 
was already wrestling with the problematic of the vulnerability of reason 
and the rationalization/bureaucratization processes attending it. While liberating 
man’s productive powers, they saw man himself enslaved by being reduced 
to his relations of exchange (“the reification of social relations”). Adorno 
and Horkheimer took up this critique and radicalized it as they traced this 
process of reification back to a flaw at the core of the Western idea of reason. 
This flaw is represented in various ways, but in accounting for it, the critics 



Mona Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 23 

unknowingly assume the vocationist perspective. In Alford‘s words, it is that 
Western reason f inds no midpoint between idealism and realism: 

Reason and its object are divided into two realms. Noble ideals, 
values, discourse over the good life . . . are removed to the abstract 
realm of the intellect and the spirit. Like religion, which is an 
instance of these ideals, these themes are often applauded in the 
abstract. However, precisely because these values come to be seen 
as an expression of our “higher” selves, they are disconnected from 
the everyday material world. The material world in turn is given 
over to crass materialism that brooks no opposition to the 
contingently giver4 

Our own construct of the culture-mode associated with the positivism 
episteme, whether in its humanist or naturalist variants, derives from our 
understanding of this schizomorphic structure of perceptions which 
undergirds the Western tradition. It is hardly surprising that this structure 
should be projected in social theory and that it should provide the “meeting 
ground” among the heterogeneous elements from both the left and the right 
of the spectrum as will be noted below. More significant, however, is that 
the “midpoint” can neither be sought from a culture which deifies subjectivi- 
ty, such as is the case with modernity, nor can it be secured under an order 
that mistakes its own shadows for objectivity. Only a vertical axis can assure 
the human psyche and the social order alike that necessary point of fixity 
around which the whole can cohere, and to which the parts can relate. Only 
then is it possible to conceive of some reliable measure which can reduce 
the vulnerability of “instrumental reason” that is at the root of modem 
rationalism. 

There is a moral to maintaining the above distinction between culture- 
types and epistemic bearings which could be usefully drawn upon for making 
other inferences in social theory5 According to the Oxford dictionary, “moral” 
is an adjective concerned with character as well as a noun designating a moral 
lesson. It is in this latter sense that the West will need to reach beyond itself 
if it is to circumvent or overcome its oscillations. Clearly, opinions vary on 
this score. There are those who maintain the incommensurability of traditions 
and defend their circularity and closure. Others confess to a certain obduracy 

*This insightful passage is abstracted by C. Fred Alford from Dialectic of Enlightenment. 
See  his Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas ( h p a :  University Presses 
of Florida, 1985), 16-17. 

%ee MOM Abul-Fadl, “Contemporary Social Theory: A Critique.” Paper presented at 
the 18th AMSS Annual Conference, Detroit, Michigan, 26-28 October 1990. 

bAs with Heidegger’s remarks in an interview with Der Spiegel 214:62 cited in David 
Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 231 ff. 



24 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

within the tradition which makes it difficult to communicate with the Other, 
whose right to differ is only grudgingly conceded in muted tolerance.’ The 
periodic interest in a mystique of the Orient may well be taken to point to 
a hovering consciousness in the Western mind which goes beyond mere 
curiosity to defy its own diffidence. Admittedly, this impetus is more often 
associated with a romantic drive which strikes at the height of a bout of 
excessive rationalism, as with a Goethe in the eighteenth century or a Fritjof 
Capra in our own times. * However, unless this orientalizing compulsion takes 
its cue from substantative rather than spatial moorings, the search will be 
in vain. Failing that essential act of self-transcendence, the West will remain 
hostage to its own grand, but tragic, tradition. 

4 
Back to the Lobster Quadrille and to Jai 

In its present incarnation, this predicament is played out in the conflic- 
ting pulls between the splintering shafts of a post-modernity and the sterility 
of a self-eulogizing neo-Conservatism. The literature in the social sciences 
and the metatheoretical debates they occasion can be diagnosed in such a 
perspective. The essence of this conflict can perhaps be best conveyed in 
an idiom that draws on an elemental and unpretentious chord in the Western 
experience which can easily be shared by others. In the case of the flight 
from modernity, we remember the poor and wretched Hans of the Alsatian 
folktale who is forever frustrated in his elations: he knows not what he wants, 
yet wants it badly all the same, and spares naught in a pursuit from which 
he knows there can be little gain. He is the paragon of a modernity deprecated 
for its emptiness and directionlessness as much as for its insatiable appetite 
for “more and more.”9 In the case of the nostalgia for the past, we recall 
the perplexity of little Alice in Wonderland as she puzzled over the meaning 
of the Lobster Quadrille among a dozen other perplexities she encountered 
in her metamorphosis: she wondered whether in a world of so much 

’Ibid., UO-31. Kolb remarks that “We (the West) can enter into a dialogue with the other 
traditions, but this is a matter that requires more delicacy of intellectual touch than is typical 
of Western attempts to understand others.” On the other hand, some critics from the “Orient” 
are critical of those more sympathetic attempts to read into their tradition. Cf. Claude Al- 
varez, %k Have Been Here Before,” Inquiry (April 1987): 39-42, commenting on Fritjof Capra’s 
m e  Tao of Physics (London: Flamingo, 1975, 1986). 

OFor a provocative, and perhaps somewhat unjustified critique by an avant-garde Indian 
intellectual of the nostalgic turn taken by Capra in his works 7he Tao of Physics and m e  
Turning Point, see Claude Alvarez, “We Have Been Here Before,” Znquiry/&r. 

9Zhe Critique of Pure Modernity, op. cit., passim. 



Mona Abul-Fadl Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 25 

“nonsensical common sense” an- would ever be normal again. Or perhaps, 
after all, the modem West has finally arrived with all its sequence of “ends” 
in history, philosophy, and metaphysics to the point where Alice found herself 
at the beginning of her journey. There she had stopped at the signposts to 
figure out whichever way to go, not quite knowing her destination, but hoping 
all the same that in the end she would get somewhere?O 

The global nature of the modern world extends the predicament of the 
Oscillating Culture beyond its original bounds and confirms Heidegger‘s insight 
on the debasing potential of Westernizatiodmoderization. Partly as a result 
of a universal imposition, and partly as a response to their own malleability 
in a manipulative global amoral economy, Muslims, like many An/Other 
in the Third World, are ineluctably caught in a catch-up game. In some ways, 
they have ended up more confounded than their counterparts in the West, 
who have at least come to doubt some of the virtues of their own prodigy. 
Entrammelled in their infatuated pursuit, they cannot venture to reflect upon 
the gains, or indeed, upon whether in the struggle for survival, selfhood 
itself has become a computable value worth its pain. The modem Muslim 
has more often than not turned himself/herself into a shadow chasing shadows 
in a breathless Monty Python shadow play. 

Asked where his ears were, so the tale in the Muslim legacy goes, the 
simple and conscientious Juhl heaved a sigh, caught his breath and, in 
painstaking precision, turned to wind his right arm around the back of his 
head in order to point to the lobe of his left ear. Or, again, wherever the 
roads or lanes run into a holy maze, Juhl’s tortuous sense of geography comes 
to mind. The moral is that sometimes we search far and wide to arrive at 
a truth or to discover our destination, when in fact it is right there before 
us. Juhi was no simpleton. In fact, he was a bujjah, a learned scholar, who 
travelled up and down the land to entertain and instruct. There is much that 
can be learned from folk wisdom about the episteme, and one does not have 
to delve into the “serpentine windings’’ (Kant) of philosophy for instruction. 
This evokes some of the frequently missed nuances in our own intellectual 
heritage. 

Ibn Khaldiin had contrasted the gruffness of the Bedouin culture with 
the refinement that was brought about in the course of civil living. In doing 
so, he was not deploying the contrast to demean the essential dignity and 
inborn wisdom that went with it. Rather, his whole point was that culture 

T h i s  stance clearly evokes themes associated with the post-positivist re-turn analogous 
to the Voegelinian category of anamnesis, or the Gadamerian remembrance, the Heideggerian 
forgetfulness and retrieval, or what Leo Strauss addresses in his essay on ‘Progress and Return,” 
first published in Modern Judaism 1 (1981). Lewis Carroll was clearly no ordinary author 
writing stories for children, and by every count, his style dealt in paradigms as the very 
title of his books suggest: i‘%hrough the Looking Glass might outlast many a post-modernist tract. 



26 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

could build and edify on the stock of nature but, at the same time, that culture 
could also become the victim of its own accomplishments and lose sight of 
qualities that were essential to its survival and nobility (which could be 
paralleled to the contemporary concern for “humanization” in the face of 
the threats of rationalization and bureaucratization). The intervening layers 
of acculturation, as we might now say, could easily come between man and 
his $pic nature. In this way, the cultivation of the sciences as conceived by 
Ibn Khaldiin in the state of ‘urnriin was not simply a corollary to this state, 
but it was also a way of ensuring that created insiin, homo supiens, did not 
lose some of its essential insights by the inevitable distancing that ensued. 
Yet, there was little that could safeguard the sciences from a potentially 
corrupting/stultifying momentum implicit in their rationalization and 
institutionalization; these were conditions essential to their initial edification, 
but could ultimately defeat their purpose as they came between the access 
to knowledge and the pursuit of truth. Aspects of a$fit;ric nature, reinforcing 
a basic common sense and jitric values - including primary solidarities - 
were more in evidence in the life of the nomads if only on account of a 
diminished sophistication in the conditions of their existence. 

Yet, this muted note constitutes a subtle shade in Ibn Khaldiin’s writing 
which frequently evades modern readers who tend to de-contextualize author 
and text alike and so distort their rationality?l In suggesting a relationship 
between the mode of thought and the material existence of the group, Ibn 
Khaldiin was at the same time working on his anthropological/sociological 
philosophy from a host of other premises about human nature and the laws 
of God in creation, subsuming such categories as $truh and sunnuh. These 
have no place in the reductionist grid of a materialist sensibility which pervades 
the Oscillating Culture at the moment of the Khaldiinist revival. A Contrasting 
Episteme conscious of the intrinsic and the common can highlight them for 
the cultural encounter. 

From Culture Trpes to Modes of Discourse 

The trouble with social scientists and most professionals who are, by 
definition, “modern,” is that they are overtrained. In their surfeit, they have 
not only lost much of their humor, but also a good deal of a plain stock 

“An exampie of a recent critical reading of Ibn Khaldun placing him in the heart of 
his tradition is found in Aziz Azmeh’s work which is, unfortunately, marred by its own rnodern- 
ist bias in taking a stance on the question of the “historicity” of the text. In relocating Ibn 
Khaldun in the context of a historical tradition, he strives to rehabilitate the thinker only 
to discard a culture. See his Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies (London: Croorn Helm, 
1986), chapter 1, for an interpretation of the metaphysical foundations of Arabic thought. 



Mona Abul-Fad1 n Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures - 

of common sense. The idea that a Contrasting Episteme can constitute its 
own approach and that it calls for improvising techniques and modes as well 
as concepts provides a refreshing opportunity to break out of conventional 
modes. At a time when rationalism itself has become a suspect category- 
and Janus-faced at that-there is every need to turn to alternative sources 
of understanding and knowledge, and to explore other modes of expression 
to this end. 

The indirectness implicit in the recourse to parables, metaphors, and 
symbolism has nothing to do with the mental passes, impasses, and blind 
alleys which might be the privilege of the intellect as well as the bane of 
philosophy. Its point, as the Juhi technique illustrates, is to induce reflection 
and to tap indigenous sources that stimulate rather than pre-empt reasoning. 
It is a mode of reasoning where a seemingly irrelevant digression can, by 
way of association, dissociation, and other such processes, drive home a 
substantial point; one is enlightened in a practical manner about the same 
truths in a given culture. Conversely, the philosophic mode is frequently 
conducive to a type of empty circular reasoning which ends up obfuscating 
the point it sets out to elucidate. This was what a1 Ghazdi discovered after 
his own peregrinations in the field and, not unlike Hume after him, he 
demonstrated how the ways of unaided human reason ended up distracting 
rather than enlightening the human mind.’2 The testimony of Fakhr al Din 
a1 Rizi (d. 606 A.H.) to this effect is made just as poignantly as the rigorous 
theologian waxes poetic.13 When, towards the end of his life, he laments the 
mediocrity and vanity of a knowledge sought through an “instrumental reason,” 
a1 Rsizi sounds the notes which have echoed throughout a tradition before 

12His two classic tracts, Tahifit a1 Fahsifah (In Refutation of the Philosophers) and A1 
Munqidh min a1 Dald (A Refuge from Straying), both containing the rational arguments which 
question the validity of the ways of the philosophers of his times, might stand to benefit from 
a sociology of knowledge perspective which would not lose sight of their general validity, 
but at the same time give proper due to the historical context to which they were addressed. 
This is an area where a re-formed social theory can have more to contribute than the conven- 
tional static approaches applied from theology, philosophy, and orientalism which are scarce- 
ly relevant to an active life-world impregnatedhmpregnating tradition like the Islamic. The 
image popularized in the orientalist litany of Islamic civilizationkulture as stagnant, stylized. 
and moribund would in retrospect tell us more about the methodology than the subject matter. 

13When rendered into English, the general meaning of that moment of light which arrived 
shortly before his death would be something to this effect: YReasonS bold ventures at long 
last come to a halt/ And man> vain labors in the end come to naught/ Petty, petty is the 
gain indeed, of a life long mnsomed to the meed (= research/ and scholarship)/ Where the 
end yield is little more than so it was said this and thus it was said that!” A1 Mahsil, edited 
by T i h i  Jibir A1 ‘Alwini, vol. 1. 



28 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

him?4 Like the intent of al G h d i ,  here too there is no foundation to disparage 
reason, but rather to remind us of its limits. The gist of the Muslim legacy 
confirms that which common sense and integrity would concede in any 
tradition: just as words tend to lose their meaning when they are abused, 
so too the abuse of reason ends up turning it into a means of distraction 
leading away from truth and reality. It is the task of a Contrasting Episteme 
being used as a strategy to alert one to the pitfalls in shaping the discourse. 

A Sutfeit in Reason Spells a Counter3'eit 

In this way, it is hardly to be wondered at how rationalism in the modem 
West was periodically subverted by the anti-reason it engendered - culminating 
in its first Nietzschean moment and now, nearly a century later, in a second 
incarnation. This is one lesson to be learned from a common experience: 
to conserve the value of reason, one must avoid its indulgence. In the Oscillating 
Culture, prudence counsels a restraint which can hardly be observed given 
the absence of a universally accepted alternativehpplement to the very reason 
and empirical experience upon which prudence draws. In contrast, in the 
Median Culture, this is a counsel that is easier heeded. Through the ubiquity 
of revelation, mechanisms are inbuilt into that culture to diffuse the excesses 
that might occur. But, what if reason is indulged to saturation and taxed 
beyond measure, as in modernity? It is then that the recourse to an element 
of playfulness, to humor, to the crude, the simple, and the primitive can 
serve to enlighten where the distended intellect may fail, or where the over- 
exposed senses have been dulled. Advocating an economy of enlightenment 
that taps the unconventional and assumes compactness in its mode of delivery 
can have a significant role to play in self-understanding as well as in the 
field of cross-cultural encounter. It can secure a measure of understanding 
and reciprocity which no amount of purely intellectual exchange could hope 
to secure. 

14The rhyming couplets have been variously attributed to jurists and 'ulama like Juwayni 
and Shahrash-, respectively, of the fifth and fourth centuries A.H. Of course, reason as 
$1 in the Muslim tradition was hardly the kind of "instrumental" reason implicit in the 
understanding of modem rationality in a horizontal episteme. For a learned incursion into 
the distinctions between levels and kinds of a "transcendental" rationality, see S. H. Nasr, 
7nteIlect and Intuition: Their Relationship from an Islamic perspective," in The Islamic Council 
of Europe Zslam and Contempomry Society (London and New York: Longman, 1982), 36-45. 
On the other hand, an incisive and succinct redefining of the relationship between a positive 
rationality and a Qur'anic rationality was summed up in Al Rizi's Wqiyzh (Will), which subse- 
quently came to be reflected in the course of the debates on revelation and reason in the 
Islamic tradition. 



Mona Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and F’arodiiing Cultures 29 

This invokes a touch of irony, as the logic which questions the range 
of reason and searches for ways to circumvent its limits evokes the aesthetic 
option in the post-modemist ~chools?~ How could a Contrasting Episteme 
evolved in the tawhid mood converge on common grounds and lend a 
credibility to that with which it can ultimately share little of substance? This 
would be to miss the point, in much the same way as the point al Ghazdi 
had made in the past was missed by his contemporaries and those who hllowed. 

To recapitulate on the example of al Ghazdi and see how easy it is to 
distort a tradition, one need only reflect on a few key statements which might 
be helpful in reconstructing the modem dispersed and fractured psyche. First, 
there is no question that rationality is not a rule unto itself; it is part of a 
kingdom whose essence is justice and measure, where every relationship 
must be given its due. Foremost in the world of human cognition is the rela- 
tionship between human reason and divine revelation. There is a need to 
seek out the sources, define relationships, and avoid the confusion between 
means and ends. His reminder seems particularly timely to a posterity that 
lives the anguish of modernity and looks in vain for the elements of retrieval 
and renewal: 

The like of Reason is that of the sound, unailing vision, and the 
like of the Qur’an is that of a brilliant radiating sun; neither can 
do without the other, except for those who are fools. He who denies 
Reason and confines himself to the light of the Qur’an is just like 
one who exposes himself to the sunlight only to close his eyes. 
There is no difference between such and the blind. Reason in the 
presence of revelation is a light upon light, and whoever sees with 
only one eye is tethered to the yoke of vanity (mutadallil bi hQbl 
a1 ghuriir)?6 

T h e  prominent place given the aesthetic dimension in the modern sensibility in the 
West lies in its perception of the artistic as the domain to be contrasted par excellence with 
reason. As such, it is seen to constitute the only space where a true spontaneity, freedom, 
and reconciliation can be attained away from the constraints and frustrations associated with 
rationality. This is the strain underlying the Nietzschean periodic revival whether in its radical 
expression, as with Herbert Marcuse’s works like Ems and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 
[1955] 1962) or with the later “anarchists” of post-modernity who are indulging in a “poetics 
of rejoicing” reminiscent of Zarathustra’s moment of ecstatic inspiration where “Mid-day and 
Eternity” drown out consciousness in his “drunken song.” See Lowith’s comment in the appen- 
dix to his volume Meaning in History: A lheological Implication of the Philosophy of History 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 214-22; cf. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Feminist 
Political Rhetoric and Women’s Studies,” in me Rhetoric ofthe Human Sciences, ed. J. Nelson 
et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1987). 

16Economy/Al Iq t i :df i  a1 Itiqcid. Various scholars in a commemorative volume on al 
G h d i  address different aspects of his epistemology and ethics. The excerpts here are my 
translation of their Arabic original in Y k u f  QaradZwi’s authoritative and insightful overview 



30 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

A world-affirming knowledge must be a knowledge that is as open to 
the transcendent as it is open to the range of time. This is what he means 
when he classifies types of knowledge and predicates validity on it: “. . . 
As for those learned in the knowledge of the Hereafter,” he points out in 
his f iy i i?  ‘ U Z h  aZ Din, “the meaning they attach to validity is acceptance, 
and by acceptance they mean attainment of the goal.” In this sense, there 
is a confident note of affirmation accompanied by a knowledge of 
purposefulness. Rationality plays different roles according to different contexts 
and ranges of deployment. When it is not an instrument for discernment, 
it is necessarily associated with restraint and subordinated to higher values. 
This is what he means when he maintains that there are areas and situations 
which might not be commensurable with reason and where, consequently, 
rationality might be put aside “. . . and the natural self deflected from where 
its comfort lies.” To all being, there is a dimension of interiority as well as 
externality, and this is a fact that has its implications for rationality and validity. 
Its acknowledgment is a condition for openness and measures, for the language 
of reason is not a language of renunciation and negation; rather it is one 
of receptivity and anticipation: “For those to whom God opens the door, 
the material and visible world is but the threshold of the invisible, angelic 
universe.” Above all, in his appeal to a rationality that goes beyond externality 
and instrumentality, without renouncing or deprecating either as long as they 
occupy their space with measure, a1 Ghazili takes his point of departure 
in an address found in his AZ Munqidh that is inclusive, addressed to all, 
and not confined to its immediate audience or to its times: ‘Assuredly, there 
was in the age of the philosophers, as indeed there is in every age, a group 
of those godly men, of whom God never denudes the world.’’ The kind of 
measured and proportioned rationality advocated by a1 Ghazili is thus also 
shown to be a truly universal rationality that can be sought by all, although 
admittedly its effective appropriation remains ultimately contingent on an 
act of grace. 

A1 Ghazili strove towards a synthesis that brought together dimensions 
of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular, the 
transcendental and the immanent in a way which bears directly on the meaning 
of a Contrasting Episteme and which reinforces the co-substantiative mode 
of a cross-cultural discourse. It teaches that to admit the limits of human 
rationality is not to denounce reason any more than cultivating other sensibilities 
is to suggest its abdication. 

of a l  Ghazr?Fs thought in the context of times and tradition. M. K. I. Gaafar, ed., A1 Imim 
a1 Ghaz~X on the Occasion of the Ninth Centenary of His Death (Qatar: Qatar University, 
1986), (Arabic) 17-83. A compact selection from the Master deemed to bring out the mystical 
dimensions is found in Muhtar Holland, trans., A1 GhaGlT, Inner Dimensions of Islamic Wor- 
ship. (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1986). 



Mona Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and F’arodizing Cultures 31 

In turning to alternative modes of expression by tapping other levels of 
communication, we seek to enhance our ”communicative competencies” in 
a Habermasian sense. The purpose is to explore theJieldS ofpossibility available 
in the modem situation which, notwithstanding its perceived impositions and 
dehumanizing implications, has the merit of affording the experience of a 
shared g10bality:~ This is the situation of a controversial modernity. In it, 
there is a need to expand the shared terrain between consciousnesses bred 
on divergent epistemes. A “tuw&& instinct” would tap such a fund of shared 
human experience which, while assuming a variety of forms, would 
nevertheless retain in its essence a commonality inferred from a residual shared 
sensibility. This instinct moves the evolving hermeneutic towards a new science 
of culture which is more aligned to a “reconstructive,” rather than a 
“nomothetic,” science. To invoke the terms and the hope echoed in 
contemporary philosophy of science debates is not beyond the pale, as Mary 
Hesse suggests in her work.ls 

Recovering the Rational and Reconsidering Its Rationale 

It is this residual essence of a common$[ric sensibility which is conserved 
in the more spontaneous modes of expression which pervade any culture. 
The “rational,” as a stance or as a moment of deliberate and calculated 
expression, does not exhaust the spectrum of potential communication and 
understanding. To this extent, there is nothing ironic about the shared 
understanding between admittedly strange bedfellows of the human and cultural 
potential: an Islamic and a post-modernist stance would appear to converge. 
Where the taw&& approach differs, though, is in the ends for which it invokes 
the spontaneous levels of expression. The discourse is not intended as an 
indulgence in an open-ended and directionless enterprise, a “purposeless 
purposefulness,” which is simply endured to keep a conversation going, as 
some would propose.19 Its telos constitutes a significant feature inspired by 

“The debate on modernity constitutes a fertile ground for a critical reflection which goes 
beyond the bounds of “cultures,” and is often used to bring together common strands in a 
conversation which goes on in the East and the West. Cf. L. Binder’s approach and theoretical 
premises in his Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Theories (Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 1988). Also C. F. Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse 
and Habermus (Gainesville. FL: University Presses of Florida, 1985), and David Kolb, The 
Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 

ls“Science and Objectivity.” In J. B. Thompson and D. Held, eds., Habermas: Critical 
Debates (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 98-115. 

19This seems to be the position of someone like Strauss in making the case for a “return” 
to the Socratic Way (see below). Cf. Richard Rorty’s version of “edifying philosophy” which 
similarly seeks to keep the conversation going as an end in itself, rather than as a means 



32 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

the Qur’anic ethos, and has its attendant implications for socializing the 
individual to the physical and social environment and for integrating the 
individual psyche. The recurrent reminder in the Qur’an rules that the world, 
including the life-world, has not been created by God in jest.20 

With this in mind, turning to JuhG or to a timeless character in Alice 
in Wonderland can be used time and again to reinforce a point of reason, 
not to disparage it.21 The limits of rationality refers to a specific kind of 
rationality, an instrumental, or a technical, or a positivist rationality, but it 
is not invoked to question a standing principle of coherence without which 
no sense or meaning could hold. The levity, then, and its justification as 
a relevant and valid medium in shaping a cultural hermeneutic, is not to 
entertain frivolity in a context where the stakes are decidedly high. Quite 
the contrary, the “playfulness” is as much an ontological as it is a psychological 
therapy,22 in an age where the modern mind and temper have experienced 
the erosion of much of theirflric sensibility. The latter is a category which 
could be proximated to the Humean “common sense” or to a Thomistic 
“connaturality’y each in its own way capturing dimensions of that sensibility 
but not reducible to it. 

In any event, it is hardly surprising that this playfulness should become 
a characteristic disposition in the post-modern movement to the extent that 
it is a genuine development-although there it understandably takes on a most 
cynical turn.23 Given the conflicting sources of the tradition and its 
confrontational mind-cast, this profound strain of cynicism is ineluctable. 
It invokes the deep sense of tragedy and the untiring encounters with irony 
and paradox which bind the Zarathustras of modernity to their counterparts 
in antiquity. This is another significant qualification which sets such playfulness 

of finding an objective truth, the existence of which is anyway questioned. See his Philosophy 
and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). In his most recent 
work, he qualifies the temper of that conversation and distinguishes between its tenor in a 
“public” as opposed to a “private” space. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 

Z@”ot without purpose did We create heaven and earth and all between: That were the 
thought of unbelievers!” (3827); “We created not the heavens, earth, and all between them 
in idle sport!” (44:38); “Did ye then think that We had created you in jest and that you would 
not be brought to Us (for account)?!” (23:115). Rather, for those of understanding and true 
perception, they can see the signs that are in creation, and it is those who turn to God in 
their devotions with the invocation “Our Lord! Not for naught have You created all this! . . .” 
(3:lW-191); for as God reminds us, He has created everything in measure. (15:85) 

W f .  Edward Wakeling, The Logic of Lewis Carroll: A Study of Lewis Carroll’s Contribu- 
tion to Logic (Luton, U.K.: Edward Wakeling, 1978). 

W f .  Erich Franzke, Fairy Tales in Psychothempy: 7he Creative Use of Old and New 
Tales, trans. Joseph Smith (Toronto, Lewiston, N.Y.: H. Huber, 1989). 

W a r r y  Brodsky, “Post-modernity and Politics” in Philosophy Today 31 (Winter 1987). 



Mona Abul-Fadl Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 33 

apart from a disposition which retains its pristine innocence, unperturbed 
by the tribulations and trials of a changing world. In the tuw!&fz episteme, 
the world remains intrinsically unadulterated, much as an effable human nature 
retains its essential innocence and perfectibility. 

In the above discussion, we have addressed aspects of the Oscillating 
Culture in a general, diffuse context, t a k q  our examples from unconventional 
sources and explaining why. The point so far has been to deploy a Contrasting 
Episteme as a strategy for probing features of the Oscillating Culture. Pervasive 
elements from the tuw&fz perspective have been woven into the text with 
this end in mind. On another plane, the dilemmas posed by the Oscillating 
Culture may be inferred from the current debate on modernity which, while 
essentially philosophical, affects the modem disciplines. In what follows, 
the theme of the Oscillating Culture will be traced in the echoes of this debate 
in social thought and in circles of modernist theosophy. 

How can we relate a fragment to an image of the whole? In plotting 
the terrain of the Oscillating Culture in the modern West, we will resort 
to a stylized synoptic sketch of its spatial contours and allow for an 
oversimplification in cultural geography and substantial topography. German 
sociology remains at the commanding heights of a tradition which runs through 
Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the contemporary radicals. At the same time, some 
of the most engaged defense of modernity comes from it.24 In its depth and 
fecundity it is unrivalled, although it is perhaps only matched in vitality by 
the French. Those are the great system-builders or synthesizers in the Western 
tradition: evidently, their “syntheses” are of a radically different variety from 
those we referred to above in discussing the Median Culture. Here too, the 
difference is due less to individual eccentricities -even in a case like 
Nietzsche-than to intrinsic cultural proclivities. The context is the unfolding 
debate in the 1930s in the Frankfurter School.z5 Its development through 
a phase of Negative Dialectics to its current more liberal and constructive 
phase with Habermas is best seen against its counterpart in a less structured 
parallel discourse engaging a heterogeneous breed of post-structuralists, 

24Br~ht’s perceptive account of the philosophical and “deep turn“ inherent in the German 
tradition, as it might be. contrasted with the more empiricist and pragmatist Anglo-American 
strains, are relevant to our account here. See Berthold Brecht, Political Theory: The Founda- 
tions of Twentieth Century Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). 

25See above references to Adorno and Horkheimer. 



34 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

anarchists, and critical genealogists in post-1968 France. 26 There, the most 
virulent forms of anti-humanism have found their ramified and creative 
expressions. The spin-off of the cataclysms on the Continent may typically 
be gauged at the terminal point of the Western heritage, in the American 
intellectual fringes of what is otherwise an essentially pragmatic and 
streamlined current. 

In this fragment of another refracted moment, we abstract from the length 
and breadth of a dynamic tradition to point to the directions for identifying 
the forms assumed by the Oscillating Culture today and to locate the dilemmas 
it poses. Underlined throughout are the potentials and limitations of a culture 
and a tradition which take their bearings from a horizontal axis. 

Strauss, Habermas, and the Socratic Way 

Once again we will run into a sequel of such parodies which are the 
consistent by-product of this modal temperament. Here, we might inquire 
into the turn taken in an odd partnership between Jurgen Habermas and Leo 
Strauss. On first impulse, it could be suggested that little binds two of the 
great minds in contemporary Western thought other than the fact that they 
might both share an opposing prespective on the Western tradition; however, 
the very notion of sharing their differences might strike a note of anomaly. 
The one speaks for a critical post-Marxist tradition, while the other opines 
for a Classical rationalism. The one takes his position from a commitment 
to a materialist dialectic which strives to accommodate the non-material 
dimensions of existence, while the other conducts his reflections in terms 
which interrelate the esoteric to the exoteric. The former addresses the 
technological dimensions of modernity in terms of their social relevance, 
while the latter constructs his discourse round the antithesis of modernity 
and would fain take it in any context other than that of the passive interlocutor 
which bears correction in the light of its precursors. Yet, to confound anomalies, 
the most articulate and imaginative representative of the radical tradition in 
sociology today ends up on a par with the advocate of the return to Classicism; 
both see the greatest stake in any given system in preserving the techniques 
for an open society. The plea in the one and the other is for consolidating 
the tottering foundations of community in the modem West. For all the 
differences in points of departure and the respective structures and textures 

26See Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensCe 68: essai sur 15mti-humanisme contem- 
pomine (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) and Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Illinois: 
Open Court, 1986), especially chapter 1 as d background for contrasting the different concep- 
tions in the Continental and AngleAmerican usages. 



Mona Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 35 

of discourse, and notwithstanding the different temperaments and appr~aches,~~ 
both end up sharing a basic ambivalence concerning the goals and purpose 
of social organization. Neither is demonstrably capable of covincingly 
grounding continuity. This inability reflects the constraints inherent in the 
model to which they both consciously or otherwise defer. This model is rooted 
in what Irving Stone has called the “Socratic Way.” 

The Socratic Way opens the path to a healthy skepticism in the eyes 
of its defendants and sympathizers, and to open sedition and amorality in 
the eyes of executioners and critics. But, according to Socrates’ biographer, 
nobody really knew, to recall the Mock Turtle and Alice in our opening 
epigram, exactly what the “porpoise” was. “The various followers of Socrates 
disagreed,” we are told, “often as violently as modern scholars, as to just 
what Socrates had taught them, even and especially on the nature of virtue.”28 
The most the Socratic Way could point to was an awareness of the existence 
of a morality, or a source of good- “out there” or “deep within” was another 
matter-and it demonstrated a way, the bios theoretikos, to strive to discover 
it. There was no assurance that it would be discovered. Other than force 
of example, there was also nothing to compel its pursuit and, beyond that, 
there was no way of knowing that we knew really was. The dilemma of the 
Oscillating Culture then would seem to be neither in its want of virtue nor 
in its want of reason, but rather in its inability to temperately or otherwise 
define either virtue or reason. 

This, nonetheless, is still the same route which Strauss and his students 
point to in appealing to a revival of the old humane republican rationalism 
and in invoking a moral awareness of the Natural Law. This, in their view, 
was the surety that would countercheck the assault of a moral relativism and 
guide society to the civic sensibility it needs to survive. It is a similar faith 
in another secularized version of the Holy Trinity incarnate - Reason, Science, 
and Progress-which would appear to have inspired the Enlightenment at 
its height and which, for all the discredit and abuse it has since fallen into, 
still continues to inspire models of rational and legitimate communities, 
notwithstanding their failure to materiali~e.~~ It is, yet again, the same source 

27Strauss is heavily steeped in esotericism, and it is this which accounts for the elusive quality 
of his work and ideas, and br the deep controversy he raises. It is this esotericism which induced 
J. A. PococKs censure of Strauss. Political Iheory 3:3 (August 1975): 38441.  For a recent 
complimentary inteqmtation of his ideas which attempts to grapple with this dimension see Shadia 
Dru~y, Ihe Political I&as ofLeo S t m s  (New York St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 

281. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1988), 14. 
z9While the pagan roots of modernity have been periodically revisited, only recently is 

the debt of modernity to its theological wellsprings coming into focus. Among the many such 
reinterpretations of the founders of modem thought, one critic contends that the essential 
Hegel would be completely missed outside a metaphysical appreciation of its Christology. 
See Paul Lakeland, The Politics of Salvation: The Hegelian Idea of the State (Albany, NY 
State University of New York Press, 1985). 



36 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

and rationality which animates and drives the Habermasian search for an 
Ideal Speech Community, whose strategy and justification are founded on 
assumptions which can hardly be entertained outside a secular rational 
framework perennially in quest of its delusive center. As to what these values 
are, or as to what the standards of arbitration should be, or as to questions 
of moral compulsion and the obligation to act and in what interest or to what 
purpose, these are the questions which philosophy may raise and speculate 
about and for which it can well provide the rhetoric and the logic, but for 
which it can offer precious little beyond the shadows of a learnedly hollow 
speculation. Learning is no consolation for ignorance in an arena where the 
stakes are high, where the mortal answers are sought and found wanting. 
This is not because there are no conclusive answers to be had, as some would 
like us to believe, but because such answers are beyond the logic and rhetoric 
devised by human reason. The range of human rationality does not obliterate 
what lies beyond it; rather it confirms the necessity and the validity of an 
alternative mode of access to a vital and integral reality. 

Philosophy is as much of a science in the sense that Sheldon Wolin and 
others contend.3o It is an objective means to accessing that which is relative 
and, as such, it can only itself remain open and relative, without claiming 
to partake of the Absolute or striving beyond opening doors that might at 
best converge onto a higher court of appeal. Even the difference with the 
natural sciences might be conceived of as one of difference in domain and 
methodology rather than in kind. Reason, which provides the enlightenment 
required to know about values and goals, is paralleled by the sensory apparatus 
and its adjunct processes to command the physical/phenomenological world. 
Reason, whether of the ancients or of the moderns, remains more of an 
instrumental resource in the quest for reliable knowledge, rather than a 
substantial source for such. The moment it is transposed into a source as 
well as a means, then one is not far from conflating means and ends, and 
one is left on the verge of a new destructive transfiguration. Even reinter- 
preting the Cartesian meditations against the Classical contemplations might 
yield more in common than is ~upposed.~’ The Socratic My, like the scientific 

’ 

“Political Theory as a Vocation” in APSR and relevant compact contouring of the 
scientific elements in philosophy by Ellis Sandoz, The  Philosophical Science of Politics beyond 
Behavioralism” in The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science, ed. G. Graham 
and G. Carey (New York: David McKay Co., 1972), 289 ff. 

31There is even more in common between classical and scholastic rationalism than there 
is between modern rationalism, and either insofar as reason became egocentrically reflexive 
in the latter rather than reflective and extended beyond itself. This deformation occurred with 
the Cartesian shift in the ontological premise, substituting man for God/Good at the center 
of the life-world, thereby launching the epochal breach with premodernity. For an overview 
of the genealogy of the individualist approach to the institutional problem, see Stanley Tqlor, 
Conceptions oflnsriturions Md the Theory of Knowledge (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 



Mona Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and parodking Cultures 37 

method, may help us ask more questions than we can answer; but even the 
questions call for a frame of reference which was derived from the Tradition, 
and hence lies beyond the Way. If the questions went beyond knowing and 
being to belief and action, such as a tuwbidi frame of reference would entail, 
then the Socratic Way would have very little to say. Ultimately, it deals with 
the category of the Ought in a surreal id  and imposed manner, while the 
categories of belief and action are embedded in the matrix of the life-world. 
It is not surprising that the oldest disciple of Socrates, Antisthenes, should 
have been the founder of Cynicism. Just as in the modern school, anticipating 
anti-rationalist currents, David Hume has deftly turned the instruments of 
reason to their own detriment. In a coup de main reminiscent of al Ghazdi 
six centuries earlier, he too questioned the validity of reason on its own grounds 
as an instrument of reliable knowledge. Significantly, Hume’s philosophy arose 
from his preoccupation with moral questions. His position that all knowledge 
in the ethical sphere was ultimately a matter of opinion was tantamount to 
denying the possibility of ever knowing with any reliability what constituted 
the good and the truth. This kind of radical skepticism is the point at which 
two traditions diverge. 

Explaining Divergencies 

This divergence between two traditions is hardly due to the apparent 
fact that one tradition takes its bearings from human reason and the other 
from divine revelation. Such a formulation could mislead, and ultimately 
confirm the kind of antinomies which, from the tuwhidi median, can only 
constitute misguided and self-imposed man-made constraints. Far from any 
presumed incompatibility between reason and faith as some authorities might 
claim, these antinomies result from the meaning or perception attached to 
each category in the respective traditions. An understanding along Straussian 
lines, for example, which seeks to salvage the crisis of modem rationalism 
by reinterpreting the framework for rationality and virtue as it does, could 
hardly be reconciled with corresponding conceptions in the Median Culture.32 
In seeking to accommodate philosophy to practicality, Strauss may have hoped 

Pubs., 1988), 87 ff. (Briefly, the individual emerged as a metaphysical entity discrete and 
independent with the Augustinian tradition. Descartes moved him to the ontological center 
and by the nineteenth century, he was firmly established as the rational, free, autonomous, 
self-sufficient fictive entity of the liberal tradition.) 

3zSee above-cited excerpts from A1 Ghazai. The discussion here draws on the essays 
by Leo Strauss (collected and edited by Thomas Pangle in his me Rebirth of Classical Political 
Rationalism: An Introduction to the nought of Leo Stmuss (Chicago: Chicago University 
Press, 1989). 



38 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

to attenuate the excesses of the bios theoretikos but, in undermining the 
eschatological plane, he was hardly insulating society from its own dispersions. 
Ethics cannot be exclusively the domain of reason any more than of a fickle 
opinion without engendering the kind of forces that degenerate into either 
doctrinal tyranny and absolutism or moral anarchy and nihilism. Relegating 
revealed religion, or “supra-rational piety,” to a secondary or subordinate role 
in society might be a counsel of prudence in certain situations, but it can 
hardly prescribe a universal norm for the just society.33 Strauss, an avid student 
of medieval philosophy in the Islamic world, could have learned some lessons 
there if he had chosen to do so instead of reproducing the Muslim tradition 
in the light of its Jewish  reflection^.^^ This is a fallacy cautioned against by 
a hermeneutic of mutuality on account of its distortive and obstructive 
consequences. 

The Way of Yaq@n: Recognition and Measure 

To return briefly to the sequel of Hayy Ibn Yaqqin’s discovery of his 
interiority would seem apt at this point. In the wake of his renewed Commitment 
to the Way he had come by in his autonomous search for the Truth, Ibn 
>fay1 narrates how his hero eventually came to learn of the existence of 
another way to the Truth. This came about through a mediated revelation, 
through prophets and scripture, such as he would be instructed about upon 
a chance visit to a neighboring island which, unlike his desert island, was 
inhabited territory. Upon close inquiry, he came to endorse this Way as valid 
and true. Despite his initial resistance and his firm conviction that there was 
only that one way which he had personally experienced, he retained an open 
mind. He had the good sense to distinguish states and contexts, and not to 
rush into dogmatic assertions or rash generalizations, such as would evade 
anyone who has not the elements of a sage within him. Even where he missed 
a point, he retained the openness to learn and to admit the limits and the 
bounds of the autonomous Way-which was assumed in reason and intellect. 
He conceded to the wisdom and the necessity of that other Way: that of 
Revelation and Shari‘ah as the ultimate in the scales of an order of creation 
that was anchored in a providential justice and compassion. 

With such encounters, we can see how there is much to be learned by 
example and by an engaged reflection from a legacy bred in the Median Culture. 
Even the controversial fuliisifah who had so freely appropriated the legacy 

331bid., Introduction, p. xxi. 
34See Oliver Leaman’s provocative article, ”Does the Interpretation of Medieval Muslim 

Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” in IJMES 15 (1984). 



MOM Abul-Fadl Beyond Cultural Parodies and parodking Cultures 39 

of Classical Greece would have more to contribute on the relationship of 
reason and revelation than many a tale in the Odyssey or the Peloponnesiun 
Wars. In the context of modernity, as this debate grows more urgent, an 
exposure to the Other could be particularly beneficial, provided it is conducted 
in the modal perspectives of a Contrasting Episteme. That such urgency is 
anticipated to grow is a consequence of the nature of the problems of a high 
modernity which simultaneously feeds on an ethic of re-membering and dis- 
membering as rationality and values are brought into the balance. As the 
leap outside the self-imposed confines is taken, those who venture forward 
are likely to find themselves in a more hospitable and fertile terrain with 
more to offer than any imaginable, or “unthought of,” Archimedean point 
could suggest. In the meantime, however, the search for a midpoint continues 
within the confines of the Oscillating Culture. 

6 
Modernity Revisited 

There is no want of valiant endeavors to reconcile science to philosophy, 
or faith to reason, or the ideal to the material in a culture whose history 
is predicated on a polarity of tensions in these very domains. The valiance 
is due to the realization that the tradition is perennially ensnared in a chain 
of self-inflicted conflicts and paradoxes where its articulation in contemporary 
social theory is merely a variation on a theme. Jacques Maritain, the “integral 
humanist” and one of the powerful influences in contemporary philosophy, 
is admirably qualified for the task of this reconciliation. By upbringing and 
training a convinced Thomist, and by temperament open and enlightened, 
his work lies at a vital juncture in the quest for a spiritual reconciliation 
within the modern West. In gn objective reading of the culture he esteems, 
he attributes the malaise to the disproportionate growth in the dimensions 
of human knowledge, with progress in the “empirico-logical” dimension 
achieved at the cost of the spiritual and the philosophical. There would be 
little sense in this context to simply expound lost truths, for in a market 
inundated by facts, these would be hardly distinguishable from any other 
data on the screen. The point is to cultivate the discriminating sensibilities 
and to restore the faculties of an ailing vision through rehabilitating a distinctive 
mode of philosophical discourse and recovering the sources necessary for 
alimenting it. This mode would have to go beyond conventional philosophy- 
which is divisive and plagued with the schism it breeds - to a new conciliatory 
variant. This too might be another useful lesson to observe in devising the 
logistics for a Contrasting Episteme. But it is above all suggestive of the 
current temper in the Oscillating Culture. 

This temper should not be obfuscated by the occasional bold and brazen 



40 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. I, 1991 

exaltations which revel in the contradictions and antagonisms that plague a 
culture and its conscience and see in them “the secret of the vitality of the 
West.”35 Going to the roots of the Western tradition brings us back to Leo 
Strauss, who dissects it in a more radical and ruthless manner than Maritain’s 
temper would allow. It is instructive for what it tells us of the inherent 
characteristics which pertain to an Oscillating Culture, notwithstanding the 
typically Straussian equivocation of making a virtue of necessity and of hailing 
the problematic character of a tradition as its glory. That tradition is rooted 
in two ultimately incompatible sources: the Hebrew and the Greek, together 
projecting the unresolvable tension between faith and reason. It is from this 
problematic perspective that the prospects for synthesis dim. The whole history 
of the West can be interpreted in terms of an ever-repeated attempt to achieve 
a compromise between these two antagonistic principles. But all these attempts 
are doomed to failure, in this view, “because the Western tradition does not 
allow of a synthesis of its two elements, but only of their tension.” Reading 
between the lines, one can see how the master of eloquent silences conflates 
a logic and forecloses possibilities. There is no doubt that the tensiotls and 
inconsistencies are there at the sources of the tradition, and that the repeated 
attempts at syntheses are sought in vain. The futility is not because of an 
inherent, or a categorical incompatibility between faith and reason, as the 
Master presumes, but because of how this misguided assumption has attended 
its actualization again and again in that particular historical tradition. 

Notwithstanding such learned presumptions, there is that inner compulsion 
shared by all cultures by virtue of their human constituency, and which urges 
on the quest for that synthesis or “wholesomeness” represented in that middle- 
most ground. The question is not one of entropy, but of a kinetic balance 
and reconciliation. There is an intuitive awareness that a modus vivendi is 
needed, and that this calls for attenuating the polarities which fracture the 
inner and the outer order, the psyche and the community. Tradition, with 
its threshold of underlying myths and certitudes, had provided a residual 
matrix for this attenuation and for reducing the insecurities inherent in the 
nature and momentum of an Oscillating Culture. Yet, modernity has 
progressively barred the access to tradition and has eroded those very certitudes 
which have conventionally been derived from metaphysical insights and 
revealed religion. Only these could credibly assure the necessary reference 
point for effecting the reintegration within the psyche at the individual level, 
and within the community at the aggregate level. 

The search for a “third dimension’’ in a formula that would go beyond 
the antagonisms continues. In philosophy, it is the search for “cooperation” 

35“Thu~dide~:  The Meaning of Political History.” See Thomas Pangle, op. cit., pp. ?2-73 
from which other quotations in this paragraph are also taken. 



MOM Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodizing Cultures 41 

among mutually hostile and incompatible options, such as is advocated in 
the style of an integral humanism. In the social sciences, echoes of the end 
of ideology debate of the 1960s periodically resurface. The search is for a 
pragmatic basis of a rapprochement between socialism and liberalism as an 
acknowledgment of the essential historical and philosophical affinities between 
them as much as for a concession to the political realities of the times. Some 
of the more original initiatives to reinterpret modernity, and to reformulate 
modem society accordingly, include attempts to advance social theory itself 
beyond terminal and polarized categories like “capitalism” and “rationalism” 
to a potentially more unifying and integrated paradigm constructed on a scaf- 
folding of “interpenetrating” ca teg~r ies .~~ The idea is to overcome the reduc- 
tionist and materialist propensities associated with the triumphant positivism 
that had attended the inception of modernity. Yet, there is little in the resources 
of a tradition embedded in the Oscillating Culture to assure the outcome 
of this quest. 

The momentum of an Oscillating Culture ensures it its basic patterns. 
It is either embattled in its persistent antagonisms, along the lines of Hume’s 
“opposing monstrosities,” or in the event it renounces reason but still maintains 
a faith in finding reason and value in existence itself, it has little to fall back 
upon other than a common sense which is rooted in a system of experience 
in permanent mutation. Any attempt to escape the dilemmas generated in 
the one degenerates into a tyranny of dogmas and absolutes. Conversely, the 
other option verges on an indiscriminate and irreverent amoralism which 
is the inevitable outcome of an absolute relativism. Neither is conducive to 
an enduring system of meaningful human association. This is not without 
its implications for social theory, as that area of the episteme immediately 
concerned with the life-world. In the event, social theory becomes a banal 
record of the status quo when it is not a futile inquiry into a sequence of 
quixotic, problem-provoking solutions. 

36Cf. Richard Munch, Understunding Modernity: T w r d  a New Perspective Going Beyond 
Durkheim and Weber (New York: Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1988). At the same time 
the more specialized accounts of the adaptation of specific religious communities to moderni- 
ty are significant in the insights they provide on both the traits of an epoch as well as on 
the less conspicuous role of historically “interested groups” in their development. Jacob Katz, 
for example, highlights the role of Moses Mendelsohn in securing access for German Jews 
to an emergent Geisteselite under cover of “intellectual vindication” in his Toward Modernity: 
7he European Jewish Model (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Pubs., 1986), 11. Concepts 
like “assimilation” and “tolerance” (just as much as “emancipation” and “civic society”) need 
to be examined in the context of a sub-tradition that emphasized exclusiveness and otherness, 
not only on account of its undeniable historical influence in shaping the Western tradition 
in general, but more particularly for its prominence in shaping “modernity” itself-not just 
“adapting” to it. 



42 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

7 

If we were to sum up the thrust of the Oscillating Culture as it is 
demonstrated in the Western tradition, we would be inclined to agree with 
a neo-conservative reading rather than with a post-modernist The notion 
of the morally good life may well be seen to unite the conversation of the 
West. To this extent, there is some validity in extending the critical reading 
of Lakatos in the history of science to interpreting culture and civilization. 
Unlike the Kuhnian account, it stresses continuity rather than rupture. A 
rawhi@ reading would underline the elements of morality and continuity that 
exist within the Western tradition, but it would see the validity of such elements 
as generic to a human culturekondition irrespective of its provenance. What 
might be conceded to the West might be more its inability to agree upon 
a reliable way of ascertaining what constitutes the good and what constitutes 
morality. The breaks and ruptures in its tradition reflect the moral dilemmas 
it faces, and a post-modernist account would be more representative in this 
case. Again, this "failing" is not specific to the West, but it is contingent 
on a generic culture-type which is defined by its sources and modes, not 
by its ethnicities and temporalities. Quite the contrary, on the strength of 
a Contrasting Episteme, there is more evidence to indicate that there is no 
want of orientation and inclination within the Oscillating Culture-type for 
the human response which strives toward the median option of balance and 
temperance under a variety of initiatives and appellations. 

This option, however, remains an elusive target within that culture- 
medium. Thus, the crisis in social theory is likely to persist, notwithstanding 
the attempts to resolve it. Ultimately, it is a crisis which goes beyond sociology. 
Its resolution may be possible at certain levels, among constituent pockets 
of the culture, or at an individual level. However, as long as the Oscillating 
Culture is by definition pivoted on a horizontal axis, the affliction is structural. 
In the parable of a1 Ghazdi, the tree must be felled if the vicious circle is 
to be broken and modern man is to escape his self-inflicted exile into a state 
of perpetual distraction and ultimate destruction. By acceding to the authority 
of an external source of knowledge and by accepting the need and relevance 
of moral guidance from a source beyond the self and the created universe, 
the tradition is credibly reinforced. In renouncing its pretenses to a false 
and misconceived autonomy, the dominant tradition can refurbish its authentic 
reserves and develop its own momentum in proximating a median option 
in its own terms. The point, however, is not merely to make room for external 

37Philip Roth, "Pblitics and Epistemology: Rorty, MacIntyre and the Ends of Philosophy," 
in History of the Human Sciences 212 (June 1989). 



MOM Abul-Fad1 Beyond Cultural Parodies and Parodking Cultures 43 

knowledge and guidance, but also to cultivate an objective methodology of 
accessing its sources. It is here that the historical lessons available in the 
Median Culture can become an indispensable and positive wellspring of 
reinforcement. This latter process can serve as a catalyst to reviving tradition 
and become a vector to new patterns of civilization. 

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