Short notices

Abstract

Afifi Al-Akiti and Joshua Hordern (eds) ‘New Conversations in Islamic and Christian Political Thought’, Part 1, The Muslim World: Special Issue Vol. 106, no. 2 (April 2016), pp. 209–403: ISSN 002074909

Afifi Al-Akiti and Joshua Hordern (eds) ‘New Conversations in Islamic and Christian Political Thought’, Part 2, Studies in Christian Ethics: Special Issue Vol. 29, no. 2 (May 2016), pp. 129–223; ISSN 09539468

Unusually for Short Notices, I want to single out two special issues of journals for comment and to point to two recent books that are related to them and a third that could be useful. As their subtitle indicates, both special issues come from a single Oxford project of ‘conversations’ about Christian and Islamic political thought. Both editors are based at Oxford University: Afifi Al-Akiti is at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Joshua Hordern is at Manchester Harris College. They prefer the word ‘conversation’ to ‘comparative study’ because ‘this enquiry is not comparing two alien traditions without any common sources but is alert to how conversation between Christian political thought (from West and East) and the similarly complex (and marginalised) political traditions of Islam show political problems in a new light’ (SCE, p. 132). What the editors have succeeded in doing is bringing together a rich variety of scholars, some from quite conservative Christian and Islamic theological traditions, to explore points of contact (and dissimilarity) especially among those pre-modern scholars who grappled theologically with similar sociopolitical contexts (such as medieval Spain before the Muslims were expelled in the late fifteenth century) and issues such as ‘legitimate authority’. They argue that this form of study offers a challenge to the ‘narrow canon of Western liberalism’ and ‘opens up a distinct area of investigation, with its own large body of historic texts and scholarship to be studied on its own [Islamic and Christian] terms’. The results are fascinating, albeit, at this stage, quite brief and diffuse. They are also spread between two journals, one American (The Muslim World is produced by Hartford Seminary, Connecticut) and the other British. Being published in a single book might have made them more accessible and more capable of being systematically ordered. Nevertheless, there are perceptive offerings in both journals from, among others, Robin Lovin, Sajjad Rizvi, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Mohammad Fadel and Jonathan Chaplin.

Two theologians who have done much to advance this ‘conversation’ at greater length are Mona Siddiqui and John Hare (although neither contributed to the Oxford project). In an earlier editorial (Theology 119, no. 5, 2016) I praised Mona Siddiqui’s Hospitality and Islam (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2015) so I do not need to do so again here. At present, she is writing up her Gifford Lectures that will doubtless take the conversation further – as does especially the following:

John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); 336 pp.: 9780199602018, £65.00/$110.00 (hbk)

This book is deeply impressive. Many readers will already know and value his early book The Moral Gap (Oxford University Press, 1996) where his conversation partners were Christian theologians and Kantian philosophers. However in God’s Command John Hare (the son of the distinguished moral philosopher the late R. M. Hare) has extended his conversation partners to include three key medieval Islamic scholars (‘Abd al-Jabbar, Al-Ash‘ari and Al-Maturidi) and three twentieth-century Jewish scholars (Marvin Fox, David Novak and Franz Rosenzweig). As he explains:

Despite reservations, I have undertaken this part of the project because the concept of divine command is central outside the Christian tradition as well as within it, and there is a great deal to be learnt from the comparison. Within medieval Islam, and within contemporary Jewish appropriations of medieval Judaism, there is very much the same range of options in understanding the relation between a sovereign God who gives us commands and our own reason, as we try to determine how to live our lives. This book assumes, without arguing for it, that the three Abrahamic faiths worship the same God, though they say very different things about this God. (pp. 184–5)

Once this splendid book is published as a paperback, it will be well worth buying. In the meantime, borrow it, if you can, from a library.

Oliver Leaman, The Qur’an: A Philosophical Guide (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); 317 pp.: 9781474216180, £17.99/$24.95 (pbk)

Oliver Leaman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky and writes prolifically about Islamic thought. Here he offers a guide, which presumes little previous knowledge, to the interpretation of some of the key texts of the Qur’an. For example, he takes the Qur’anic text ‘Do not take life, which God has made sacred, except with just cause …’ (17.33) and outlines the way that various Islamic jurists have interpreted it in the context of war, suicide and now euthanasia. On the latter, he offers hints about how it might possibly be accommodated for those with incurable suffering. This is not a particularly systematic guide or a part of the broader conversation between Islamic and Christian theologians, but it does indirectly offer this conversation some hints. For example, that hermeneutics is manifestly an ongoing feature of Islam just as it is for the other two Abrahamic faiths – Ben Sargent’s article in this issue of Theology on ‘mind the gap’ (between sacred texts and their practical application) applies to all thoughtful Christian, Islamic and Jewish theologians. Only fundamentalists are likely to think otherwise.