Abstract
This issue of Theology starts with new, very welcome articles from three previous contributors: Professor John Goldingay on novels, Professor Gerard Loughlin on orthodoxy, and Dr Matthew Cheung Salisbury on Pope Francis’s 2022 Apostolic Letter on liturgical formation. In addition, there is an innovative article from a new contributor, Andrew Millie, Professor of Criminology and Associate Head of the School of Law, Criminology and Policing, at Edge Hill University. He edited the well-received collection Criminology and Public Theology: on hope, mercy and restoration (Bristol University Press, 2020), which Dr Peter Sedgwick praised as ‘an impressive collection of articles’, especially those on probation, surveillance and ‘retributivism in justice’ (Theology, Vol. 124, no. 4, p. 294). Professor Millie writes here on criminal justice and the Lord’s Prayer. The whole area of criminology is ripe for further theological exploration, and my hope is that this article will stimulate others with comparable expertise to do just that. Finally, Dr Teofilo Pugeda contributes to the ongoing Difficult Texts series, examining pronouns for God.
In previous editorials I have enthused about the writings of the ecumenical Muslim scholar Professor Mona Siddiqui: first about her book Hospitality and Islam (Vol. 119, no. 5) and then about her collection A Theology of Gratitude (Vol. 126, no. 2). In them she showed her deep knowledge of both Islam and Christianity, finding eirenic parallels in the virtues they variously commend. Both she and Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina have been Gifford lecturers, live in the West and are commendably open to dialogue with other faith-based and secular positions, but their approaches differ significantly, as the following new book demonstrates.
Abdulaziz Sachedina,
Islamic Ethics: Fundamental Aspects of Human Conduct
(Oxford and New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2022); 214 pp.: 9780197581810, £29.99/$39.95 (hbk)
A veteran Islamic scholar, Abdulaziz Sachedina, now in his eighties, offers an intellectually complex account of Islamic ethics with many resonances for those of us currently working in Christian ethics within pluralistic societies. He and we often puzzle about whether or not faith-based ethics can have any relevance outside faith communities within the West today. The multinational Sachedina was born in Tanzania to Indian Muslim parents and studied as an undergraduate in India and Iran and, as a postgraduate, at the University of Toronto; now an American citizen, he has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975. At the outset of this book, written in maturity, he thanks his illustrious, non-Muslim colleagues at Virginia – James Childress, David Novak, David Little and Charles Mathewes – without whom he ‘would have been deprived of the fundamental comprehension of the extent of moral reasoning and the ways in which it has shaped secular modernity and its ethical backdrop’ (p. x). His focus on ‘moral reasoning’ makes his work very different from that of Mona Siddiqui, as does his avoidance of virtue ethics and very limited mentions of Christian ethics. In the online journal of his academic home in Virginia, he depicts his task as follows (rather more succinctly than in the book itself): From its inception, as a topic of research this study was searching for a reliable anchor for the historical setting and development of practical ethics closely aligned with religious practice. Could it be theological/religious ethics? Could it be Aristotelian virtue ethics away from traditional textual entanglement?
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My interest in religious ethics was sparked [in contrast] by my substantial interest in juridical studies. I wanted to investigate the relationship between juridical theology and ethics: How does ethics interrogate the cognitive validity of judicial decisions? Is it by extracting moral principles from moral and factual elements secured by rational analysis of moral experiences and judgments or by evaluating and comprehending the types of moral reasoning that revelatory sources like the Qur’an and the Sunna employ to infer the right course of action? In other words, my research was based on clarifying the intimate, and almost inevitable, relationship between law and ethics in Islam. The major obstacle to achieving this objective, as I discovered in my readings in interpretive jurisprudence, was the way Muslim jurists conceived the project of deriving valid orthopraxy without formally taking up ethics as an organically related field to analyze and acquire authentic orthopraxy.
Sachedina adopts a diffuse and disengaged way of writing in Islamic Ethics, which often makes it quite difficult to pinpoint his final normative position on particular ethical issues (if he has one). As the author of the influential Islamic Biomedical Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009), it is not at all surprising that his (fairly sparse) examples are mainly drawn from medical ethics. He includes, for example, an extended discussion about the way organ transplantation has been discussed within recent Islamic jurisprudence. Given that ‘the Prophet emphatically advised his followers to bury their dead promptly’ and that the ‘overriding concern’ of Muslim regulations ‘is to avoid giving easy permission to slit open the dead body’ (pp. 64–5), organ transplants, let alone anatomical dissections and post-mortem examinations (all of which are now routine in Western medicine and medical training), seem to be prohibited within Islam. Yet jurists in both Sunni and Shia traditions do find ways of allowing them today: ‘some jurists have relied on the principle of public good’ and ‘agree that saving life, as the Qur’an requires, makes it possible to approve the lesser evil of desecration for the larger good that such an act promises’ (p. 66).
As with Church of England bishops in the 1960s giving qualified support for legalized abortion, or many lay Catholics throughout the West using barrier and hormonal methods of contraception despite clear papal teaching against it, or lay Christians of many denominations countenancing marriage after divorce despite Mark 10.11, it does indeed appear that, in practice, legalistic ethical positions have long been tempered by ethical considerations within both Islam and Christianity (just as they were in Judaism when the Chief Rabbi attended King Charles’ coronation on the Sabbath).
On my reading of the Synoptic Gospels, that was the ethical stance that Jesus repeatedly took on some legal requirements. How interesting to find a respected Muslim scholar encouraging something similar and even arguing that ‘strict adherence to the juridical opinions of one’s preferred jurist – a kind of blind following of a religious authority … has deep roots in the self-serving ends of the religious establishment’ (p. 172). Quite so, within Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.