Early in the latter half of the last century, Ali Ahmed Said Esber, known by his pen name Adonis, embarked on an ambitious study of the roots of “conformity versus innovation” in Arab-Islamic culture. He wanted to identify the ideological structures that had shaped these antitheses. Adonis relates that he set about studying Arab poetry from the jahiliya, or pre-Islamic, period to World War I, but discovered that this did not help explain the conformity of Arab life. He then turned to the religious perspective for answers, especially as he had decided it was impossible to understand the Arab poetic vision independent of religion. “Poetry is part of Arab civilisation as a whole. But poetry per se cannot explain [this civilisation] to the extent that religion can,” he said. This conviction was an opportunity for him to identify “the static and the dynamic” in Arab-Islamic civilisation. In his four-volume work The Static and the Dynamic, which began life as a doctoral thesis, Adonis defines the “static” in Arab culture as “an idea, grounded in the text, that takes the permanence of that text as an argument for its own permanence, both conceptually and evaluatively, and thus imposes itself as the sole correct meaning of the text and the one that rests upon its cognitive authority.” The “dynamic” in Arab culture, on the other hand, is “either an idea that is also grounded in the text, but is interpreted in such a way as to render the text adaptable to reality and external changes, or an idea that does not take the text as an authority but relies instead primarily on the intellect and not on textual transmission.” Adonis also held that the boundary between the static and the dynamic was not rigid. “What I have called ‘static' does not imply that it has not undergone any changes either in theory or in practice over the course of history or that what I have called ‘dynamic' does not also contain some unchanging elements,” he explained. “My intention has been to stress the dominant characteristic and the one that most prevails either in the direction of stasis, as compared to dynamism, or in one direction as compared to the other.” Adonis's definition thus creates terms that enable us to study cultural phenomena independently of their material base. This has stirred up considerable criticism, particularly among those Marxist critics who regard culture as part of the “superstructure” that can only be understood as being built upon a material “infrastructure” or base. Adonis devotes the first part of his project to studying the manifestations of the static and the dynamic from the rise of Islam to the middle of the second century in the hijri calendar. These manifestations were shaped by religion and poetry at the beginning of the Islamic calling and the first succession to the Prophet, and then by politics and the general culture. The static elements manifested themselves in asabiya (tribal chauvinism), politics, language and poetry and the Sunna (traditions of the Prophet) and jurisprudence, while the dynamic took the form of revolutionary, intellectual and poetic movements and political-economic freethinking. In the second part of the project, he discusses the static in the concepts of the traditional, the Sunna, consensus, heretical innovation, the theorisation of religio-political principles, and linguistic and poetic principles. As for dynamism, it took the form of such revolutionary movements as the Qaramita and Zinj, the experimental approach, the finality of prophethood, the prioritisation of reason over transmission (as espoused by the Mu'tazilites, a movement in early Islam) and the prioritisation of the truth over Sharia, and the hidden over the visible as manifested in Sufism and the theory of the imamate. The third part is dedicated to a study of exponents of the older heritage of Islamic jurisprudence and then to jurists of the age of the Arab revival in the context of what they described as the “shock of the modern.” The historical jurists studied are Abdel-Jabar Al-Mu'tazili, Abu Hamed Al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiya and Al-Farabi. Those from the modern era are Mohamed bin Abdel-Wahab, Mohamed Abdou, Rashid Rida and Abdel-Rahman Al-Kawakibi. In the fourth part, in a series of essays, Adonis discusses Arab poetry. CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES: Adonis's project is significant in that it differentiates between modernism and Salafism conceptually rather than chronologically. In the past there were modernising elements associated with dynamism and change in the Arab world, just as in the present there are Salafist elements associated with stasis. Salafism, Adonis writes, “is an extension of the static. It proceeds from the premise that knowledge is complete in the text and its transmission, rendering modernity pointless because of a language that has already attained a marvel of unsurpassable perfection, thereby nullifying the need for both other ideas and innovation.” According to the Salafist outlook, what society needs is to make the past perpetually present. Modernity, by contrast, “is an extension of the dynamic in Arab culture. It proceeds from the premise of a deficiency, or a lack of knowledge, in the past that can be compensated for by the introduction of some new idea or item of knowledge from one or other foreign languages, or by creativity and innovation. As a result, it is an acknowledgement of the unknown and the acceptance of the infiniteness of knowledge.” Adonis believes that the Salafists are inclined to a form of ethnocentrism similar to Eurocentrism. To them, the Islamic nation is the centre of the world, having borne the seal of the Prophetic revelations. Accordingly, they reject the other, just as some Europeans who regard their continent as the centre of world civilisation deny the contemporary and even the past contributions of others to European civilisation. At the same time, Adonis does not restrict the concept of modernity to what is coming out of the West at present. Indeed, he probes its roots in our Arab-Islamic culture and history by tracing three fundamental components of the modern vision: unrestricted creative freedom, the open-endedness of knowledge and discovery, and the acknowledgement of differences and plurality. In his analysis of the origins of conformity and stasis in “the succession to the Prophet and politics in the Arab world,” Adonis begins with an incident known as the Saqifah which occurred immediately after the death of the Prophet and revolved around a dispute between the Ansar (supporters of the Prophet Mohamed from Medina) and the Muhajirin (Muslim emigrants from Mecca who came to Medina to fight for the cause of the Prophet) over who would succeed to the leadership of the Muslims. In Adonis's opinion, that dispute took three forms: one was based on a purely religious priority, namely the precedence of the Ansar because they were the first to convert to and champion Islam; the second was grounded in a combined religious and tribal priority, namely the precedence of the Quraysh, the clan of the Prophet; and the third emanated from a tribal priority and was based on the plurality of the leadership. Thus, the authority of the caliphate was born in a political-religious-tribal cradle, although its founders presented it as being derived from God. In addition, asabiya (tribal chauvinism) can be considered violence in the name of the tribe, “for consensus became violence in the name of the group and authority violence in the name of religion.” The later Umayyad caliphate grounded its exercise of power on the argument that it acted on behalf of God in order to safeguard the faith and administer the affairs of the world. It claimed that it was the Great Imamate and the all-embracing foundation, and hence any attempt to oppose it was a form of apostasy. The factional power struggle that ensued came to revolve around interpretations of the Qur'an and the Sunna, with the prevailing faction propounding the established interpretations while the losers proposed new understandings of Islam that suited their lives, needs and ambitions. The latter expressed the dynamism in Muslim society, contrary to the ideas of those in power that expressed stasis. As for the concept of conformity in the Sunna and Islamic jurisprudence, Adonis maintains that we can detect it in a number of phenomena. He cites, for example, the cases of Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq and Omar Ibn Al-Khattab. The former demonstrated this quality in the first speech he addressed to the Muslim community after he was confirmed as the first successor, or caliph, to the Prophet, in completing the expedition of Osama bin Zayd, which had been commanded by the Prophet to punish the Byzantine Empire, and in the campaigns known as the Ridda Wars (Wars of Apostasy). Omar Ibn Al-Khattab, the second caliph, exhibited conformity through the manner in which he conducted the Battle of Yarmouk and in his emulation of the Prophet's asceticism and rejection of injustice. Adonis adds that the desire to emulate the Sunna (in other words, the traits, practices and teachings of the Prophet Mohamed) gave rise to a movement to study it and acquire as much knowledge as possible about it. This in turn gave rise to the outlook that those who had memorised the most from the Qur'an and the Sunna were the most knowledgeable in general. The history of the emulation of the Sunna reveals that it was complete in matters pertaining to rights of worship, while personal opinion prevailed in matters pertaining to politics. Adonis also observes how conformity was manifested in poetry and criticism and in the use of poetry as an ideological instrument to combat jahiliya, or pre-Islamic, ideas. The Prophet, he writes, retained the main kernel of the role of poetry in tribal life and of the relationship between the poet and the tribe. However, he gave new substance to this kernel. He elevated the role of poetry from the framework of tribal virtues to religious ones, and he transformed the relationship between the poet and the tribe to the relationship between the poet and the Islamic state. Thus, poetry acquired a moral and a social function associated with the creed and interests of the state. It could therefore no longer be regarded in and of itself in terms of its beauty or charm, but rather had to be assessed in terms of the ideas it conveyed and the benefits it brought to society. The Companions of the Prophet adhered to the Prophet's outlook on poetry. THE IMPORTANCE OF POETRY: Adonis holds that originality and dynamism in Muslim society were to be found in revolutionary, intellectual and poetic movements. He identifies the beginning of the first in the kernel of opposition to authority that arose in the era of the Caliph Othman Ibn Affan among the disadvantaged and marginalised, as opposed to the beneficiaries of authority who formed the kernel of its defenders. It was at this point that politics began to assert itself in the lives of the Muslims more than ever before. Economic conditions fed this phenomenon, as Muslim society had become divided into two classes: the exploiters, who sided with the government, and the exploited, who had no alternative but to oppose it. Two trends would then emerge, the first taking the concepts of the Quraysh, the Sunna and the Jama'a (Muslim community) as absolutes and the other keen to tend to the needs and welfare of the people, without for all that ignoring the Sunna or the Quraysh. The later trend argued that eligibility to rule did not stem just from conformity with the Sunna or affiliation to the Quraysh, but also from the ability to understand the needs of the people and the desire to rule justly. This trend gained impetus in the Umayyad era, as was exemplified by the efforts of Abu Dhar Al-Ghifari to fight disparity and champion the humanity of man. It was he who, according to Adonis, lay the first bricks in the theoretical edifice of justice and equality. Accordingly, his positions formed the seed from which the revolutionary movement, on the one hand, and the rationalist exegetical movement, on the other, grew. The Kharijites emerged from this trend. They questioned the theory of the imamate or caliphate, with respect to both the requirement of being affiliated to the Quraysh and of obedience. They developed a theory that justified the removal of the unjust imam and replaced the need to be affiliated to the Quraysh as a requirement for eligibility to rule with the principle of worthiness, thereby rendering all Muslims theoretically equal in their eligibility for the imamate. Ali Ibn Abi Taleb stressed, as a qualification for eligibility to becoming caliph, effort and energy in observing the Qur'an and the Sunna. He attached little importance to the Quraysh affiliation, instead stressing the principle of the public declaration of allegiance as a means to confirming the succession. In addition, he refused to adhere literally to the actions and behaviour of Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq and Omar Ibn Al-Khattab. The revolutionary movements that began to emerge around the fourth hijri decade offered a great opportunity for the emergence of transformative elements. Groups opposed to Umayyad rule continually surfaced. They were epitomised, in chronological order, by Suleiman Ibn Sarf, Qays Ibn Saad Ibn Abada, Hajar Ibn Oday, Mukhtar Al-Thaqafi, Saleh Ibn Musarrah Al-Tamimi, Matraf Ibn Al-Maghira, Abdel-Rahman Ibn Al-Asha'th, Zayd Ibn Ali Ibn Hussein, Al-Hareth Ibn Sarij, Abu Hamza Al-Hariji and, lastly, Abu Muslim Al-Kharasani, who ushered the Abbasids into power. The murder of Al-Hussein Ibn Ali was a critical phase in which the opposition moved from theory to action, writes Adonis. It should be mentioned that all the above-mentioned movements called for a return to true Islamic faith in order to resist Umayyad tyranny and establish social justice. They all presented themselves as the most faithful to the Sunna and Jama'a and the most averse to sinful innovation. They also contributed to establishing a principle that held that criticising or changing society could only take place through the exercise of the revolutionary process. In so doing, they essentially negated all that prevailed in their aspiration for something better and they elevated achievement of aspiration over evangelism in the Islamic vision. As a consequence, the question of how to realise the faith, or how to realise oneself in accordance with the faith, became the question that most preoccupied the people. CONFLICT OF MEANINGS: In tandem with the political conflict and its related realms, there arose a conflict in the realm of meanings and their ramifications. The revolutionary movements were accompanied by intellectual ones. The Kharijites blended theory with practice and faith with action. The Murji'ites, a theological school opposed to the Kharijites, held that God alone had the power to judge people and the world, a stance that put paid to the problem of determining who was a believer and who was a heretic, thereby enabling people to direct the focus of their concerns on day-to-day life. To Adonis, the latter movement constituted a revolution against the formal outward modes of religious practice. There also emerged opponents to the theological theory of necessary obedience on which Umayyad rule rested. Al-Hassan Al-Basri emphasised the freedom of human will. In the climate of the rise of the Shia movement, there also arose the theory of the imamate, which substituted the knowledge of the imam for the rational tools of analogy and informed opinion. To the theorists of this school, the knowledge of the imam was a divinely derived intuitive knowledge that could discern what lay deep in the soul or beyond the visible horizon, and it was this type of knowledge that qualified the imam to govern. It was a form of divine mandate that endowed the imam with the quality of infallibility. In the realm of Arab poetry, dynamism took the form of rebellion against the oral model of poetry and the then current poetic and rhetorical conventions and was informed by opposition to the ruling authorities. Adonis cites numerous examples, most notably Amru' Al-Qays, who rebelled against the tribe and prevailing tribal values, and departed from the styles and modes of expression that had prevailed in jahiliya (pre-Islamic) poetry. Another example was Amr Ibn Al-Ward, who also rebelled against blood ties or tribalism and emphasised the celebration of humankind regardless of colour, gender or wealth. There were also the Kharijite poets who gave ideological substance to their theological and political outlooks. Among them were Amr Ibn Al-Hassin, Habib Ibn Khidra Al-Hilali and Ziyad Al-A'sam. Some poets also rebelled against traditional attitudes toward women, such as Amr Ibn Abi Rabi'a and Jamil Ibn Muammar. To further elucidate the notion of conformity or stasis in Arab culture, Adonis turns to Al-Shafie in jurisprudence and Al-Asma'i and Al-Jahiz in literature. Al-Shafie, he writes, regarded all thought that did not conform to the Prophetic Sunna as “nonsense” and all independent theological investigation as “destructive.” He despised the practice of scholastic theology, which he regarded as proof of detachment from the faith. In his view, people were duty bound and their existence on earth was meant as a trial of faith. What was required of them was constant obedience, which meant that the exercise of freedom was a form of disobedience or moral lapse. Al-Asma'i and Al-Jahiz, on the other hand, portrayed everything new as a variation on or a reparation of the old, or as a reproduction of the old in some new form or another. They thus developed the notion that thought was the contemplation by the self of the self. The Arabs at this time, it seems, knew only the metaphysical dimensions of thought, namely religion, and its rhetorical expression, namely the Arabic language. It was an outlook that expressed a Salafist culture and upheld the political and societal regime. With regard to the forces of originality and dynamism in this culture, Adonis sees them epitomised in the revolution of the Zinj (255-270 AH) and the Qaramita Movement that began in 264 AH. The former was a slave rebellion that held out the promise of a dignified life in which slaves would come to possess the wealth of their masters. The second, which spread from Bahrain and Yemen to Egypt and North Africa, was a kind of collective movement that aimed to generate the material conditions appropriate to human life, conditions that were more permanent than those that were then currently existing and that did not need to depend on the generosity of the Abbasid caliphate. The Qarmatians claimed the right to depose an unjust caliph and the notion that Islam embraced more than its Arabian roots. Their means of putting theory into practice involved relying on the oppressed as a social base and the primary material for political and religious action, and they adopted ideas of collective property known as ilfa. Some orientalists have regarded this material economic dimension in Qaramita theology and practice as the first seeds of union action in the Islamic world. The dynamic also manifests itself, according to Adonis, in what he termed the “experimental method” and the “nullification” of prophethood. He identified this trend in the works of Ibn Muqaffa', which were devoid of religiosity and focused on the purely literary; in the opinions of Ibn Al-Rawandi, who held that the intellect was the source of knowledge and action and prioritised the intellect over prophecy; and in the views of Mohamed bin Zakariya Al-Razi, who also held that the intellect was the source of knowledge and therefore should receive priority. Adonis also saw evidence of dynamism and originality in the history of Arab thought in the scientific, experimental method pioneered by Jaber Ibn Hayan, who measured the invisible on the basis of the visible and substituted quantitative ratios for qualitative properties in order to explain phenomena. In the realm of poetry, contrary to Al-Asma'i and Al-Jahiz, both Abu Nuwas and Abu Tamam, in Adonis's opinion, created new foundations for Arab poetry. Writing, for them, was not a variation on what already existed, or an attempt to improve on it, but was instead a creative process of an entirely different order. Similarly, he saw Sufism, with its emphasis on the ultimate truth rather than on Sharia law, and its focus on the inner spiritual life of man and his freedom to establish a special relationship with God, as a source of dynamism. RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY: In the third volume of The Static and the Dynamic, Adonis attempted to analyse the authority of the religious heritage in the output of the jurists Abdel-Jabar, Al-Ghazali, Al-Farabi and Ibn Taymiya, with an eye to determining the extent to which the intellect, or reason, operates in their thinking. Of the four, Al-Farabi most champions reason, Adonis feels, as he is the most inclined to philosophy and to rational emphases in education. He also alludes to the social and intellectual functions of poetry and rhetoric when he describes these as a means to instruct the people in theoretical and practical matters that have been scientifically proven to be true. Next follows Abdel-Jabar, who asserts that revealed religion necessitates rational knowledge, as what is complete in religion is scripture, but not intellectual revelation. The least in favour of the intellect, in Adonis's opinion, is Ibn Taymiya, who was the most vigorous in his stance against modernising trends and innovation, which he attributed to a fallacious understanding of scripture. This mediaeval theologian held that the root of wandering from the true path lay in attempting to search for the truth in sources other than the Qur'an and the Sunna. The theologian and philosopher Al-Ghazali also held that the powers of the intellect were too limited to be used independently of the Qur'an and the Sunna. Thinking was a process of using the intellect in order to arrive at knowledge, but any knowledge that conflicted from the true path was to be abominated. The role of the intellect was to guide the faithful to the truth of the Prophet and the understanding of his Sunna. Apart from that, the intellect should be left to one side and the faithful should conform to scripture as the intellect is in itself deficient. Al-Ghazali also held that intellectual activity was restricted to the acquisition of knowledge of what was already known and knowledge that did not contradict it. Such opinions, in Adonis's view, have become a “secondary text” that has replaced the first, the text of revelation, as it has become impossible today to circumvent this “secondary text” in our own reading and develop our own understanding from the first text alone. However, he does not restrict his investigation into the static and the dynamic in Arab culture to the Islamic-Arab heritage. In a major section of his project he moves to the modern era in order to study the continuation of this duality as embodied in the works of Mohamed Ibn Abdel-Wahab, Mohamed Abdou, Rashid Rida and Abdel-Rahman Al-Kawakibi. In his opinion, the views of Abdel-Wahab are merely a reiteration of classical Islamic theology, jurisprudence and exegesis. Abdel-Wahab did little more than organise and classify this material, although his treatment of the concept of tawhid (the unity of God), the central concept for him, reveals the scant importance he attached to human affairs in the lower world. Mohamed Abdou, on the other hand, Adonis believed, was responsible for a modern, renovating and reconciliatory Islamic vision. The element of renovation entailed the application of scriptural interpretation in accordance with contemporary conditions and Abdou's contention that Islam possessed no clerical authority and that the ruler in Muslim society had to be considered a civil ruler in all respects. Since the ummah, or Muslim community, had placed the ruler in power, it had the right to control him. Abdou held that if the workings of the individual intellect conflicted with the authority of transmitted interpretations, the findings of the former should prevail. As for the element of reconciliation in Abdou's thought, it is exemplified by his assertion that the civil nature of authority in Islam does not conflict with the existence of canonical texts and by his criticism of what he termed the prevalent jahiliya (state of ignorance) of his times in the understanding of the faith. Abdou held that religious revelation and historical evolution could be reconciled, which is to say that the Qur'an could be interpreted to suit society's march of progress with the aim of controlling material advancement and steering it to the benefit of all mankind and specifically to mankind's spiritual benefit. According to Adonis, the best description of Rashid Rida's outlook was furnished by Rida himself when he described his Qur'anic exegesis as “Salafist, antique, urbane, contemporary, advisory, social and political.” As these words suggest, Rida proceeds from the roots of Islam in the revelation of the Qur'an and the Sunna to formulate a clearer understanding of contemporary problems and, in particular, those that arose in the Islamic world's confrontation with the West. Rida does not so much advocate Islamic reformation as the need to understand such problems in the light of Islam as it actually is. As a result, producing an Islamic renaissance is easy, since it simply entails a return to the correct version of Islam. This theological view is essentially an extension of the Salafism for which Al-Ghazali laid the foundations, and which were then bolstered and tightened up by the theological system of Ibn Taymiya. Adonis categorised Al-Kawakibi, who pursued a critical approach motivated by his opposition to dictatorship, as a reformist thinker. This late-19th-century Islamic philosopher diagnosed the ills of the present in the Islamic world and concluded that the central cause was widespread ignorance. He blamed rulers, Islamic jurists and all other authorities for being remiss in taking the types of action that would lead to a renaissance. Al-Kawakibi attributed the deterioration of society to a shift from a democratic, socialist, representational polity to a near-absolute monarchical order, infighting among Muslims themselves and a deep-rooted ignorance among their corrupt rulers. He held that the task of contemporary intellectuals was to acquaint themselves deeply with their society and the way it had developed out of the past to the present. With this in mind, intellectuals should examine the diverse and dynamic reality surrounding them, Al-Kawakibi felt, rather than worry about the lexicon of Western terminology. He urged Muslims to acquire sources of strength, economically, scientifically, militarily and politically. Consistent with his activist outlook, he held that the Qur'anic text was open to interpretations that suited modern and changing realities and that transcended the doctrinaire outlook that imprisoned the text within a single perspective and excluded other outlooks. To Adonis, Al-Kawakibi epitomised all that was dynamic and innovative in Arab culture, and was thus the polar opposite of Abdel-Wahab, who epitomised all that was unchanging and conformist. WAYS FORWARD: Adonis concludes his project with an appeal not to separate the Arab modernising drive from international modernising currents. Interaction and exchange have always been intrinsic properties of Arab culture since its birth, he says. More significantly, the desire to separate, whether in the name of authenticity or in the name of heritage, is in the final analysis against both authenticity and heritage. The task of re-evaluating Arab culture, Adonis writes, requires a re-evaluation of the classical material, re-evaluation of the concepts and theories that have been generated from it, and a re-evaluation of these re-evaluations. It also requires an examination of the Arab world's current cultural production and, in light of all this, of the possible Arab culture to come. Adonis stresses that such processes must occur on the basis of several principles. The first is the need to radically and comprehensively change Arab society, including the very foundations of its constituent parts, by changing the ways the Arabs think and live. The second is the need to devise a definition of culture that is more profound and comprehensive than the traditional concepts that currently prevail, enabling the culture to exercise freedom in various forms and at various levels, so that it extends beyond the meeting of needs and becomes a response to wishes and aspirations. The third is to stress the need to not depend exclusively on ideological conflict and political change to transcend the inherited culture. The fourth entails a search for the roots from which the relationships that represent to the Arab people the totality of their ways of life and thought will stem, as changing Arab culture will necessitate the creation of a new environment that is totally different from the one that currently exists. How is such a new environment to be created? Adonis responds, indirectly, to this question through his call to reassess Arab culture independently from religious or doctrinal perspectives and to regard theological thinking itself as a form of cultural production. No institution, he says, whether social, political or cultural, should be allowed to claim the heritage as its own legacy or have an exclusive right to permitting or prohibiting styles of thought or action in the name of this heritage. Institutions are no more than intermediaries, while the heritage is neither complete in itself nor an absolute. It is not an authority to be obeyed, but instead is more like a cultural field in which ordinary human beings have worked and produced, made mistakes or been proved correct, and created and innovated. As a result, today we have the right to produce our own cultural and social field, as best suits the circumstances of our age and best addresses its needs. Towards this end, it is also our right to examine the original text, grounded in revelation, and to read it with fresh eyes in light of our own developing circumstances. It is also our right to remove from our path texts produced by the classical jurists centuries ago, to which many today want to keep us bound. The writer is a novelist and socio-political researcher.
