Reading and Reform

‘Anything from the sound of a word to the colour of a leaf to the feel of a piece of skin,’ wrote the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, can ‘serve to dramatise and crystallise a human being’s sense of self-identity’. Indeed, ‘any seemingly random constellation of such things can set the tone for a human life’ and act as ‘an unconditional commandment to whose service a life may be devoted’. No one else needs to comprehend why such a commandment may be deemed unconditional; it is enough that one person accepts it as such. From this realisation, Rorty continued, came Freud’s great insight that every human life is ‘the working out of a sophisticated idiosyncratic fantasy’. I will attempt, in what follows, to redescribe religion as Rortian ‘cultural politics’, and then enlist the result in a critical modernist effort to reimagine the global Muslim community, the ummah, as ‘an alliance without an institution’. In all candour, it is the working out of this sophisticated idiosyncratic fantasy that has occupied my life for the better part of three decades.

When I chose to study the philosophy and classical languages of Western Europe, as an undergraduate, I had hoped to get in touch with my cultural roots. I had been taught that ancient Greece and Rome is where I would find them. What I found instead were two fascinating but, as far as I could tell, alien civilisations. One might think that the Greeks’ remarkable accomplishments in moral and political philosophy, poetry, and scientific rationality would have spared them an inferiority complex; but so long as Asia cast its shadow over the eastern Mediterranean, they could not be satisfied. Eventually, a Macedonian would attempt to assert Greek cultural superiority over Asia—through military conquest—only to find in a vanquished Iran a civilisation of enviable splendour. 

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