Hermeneutics versus Secularism: A Strategy Called Religious Intellectualism

Christianity and the Problem of Secularism

Many consider secularism a modern phenomenon that, in the wake of the Renaissance, overcame Christianity and reduced its sphere of influence to religious categories. In other words, through this process, Christianity's hand was shortened from the domains of legislation, judiciary, politics, and executive affairs, and Christian priests were only permitted to intervene in religious and, to some extent, cultural matters. Such a belief is mostly held by non-Christian, and especially Muslim, intellectuals. However, if we wish to trace the issue of the expansion of secularism in the Christian world in an intra-textual manner, this procedure is a tradition for Christianity. It is Christ's own saying: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." The early Church Fathers also acted in the same manner, and Christianity never claimed to manage the political and worldly affairs of human society. Even during the era of the most powerful Christian popes, Christianity never formed a political government to conduct worldly affairs, and these matters always remained in the hands of the power of kings. Luther, who in the sixteenth century initiated the Protestant movement and the elimination of the Church's mediation between the people and God, was in fact claiming a return to early Christianity and the principles of Christ and the Church Fathers, not a new heresy; the reason for the widespread acceptance of Luther's Reformation movement was this traditional precedent. Therefore, Christianity had such a capacity from the beginning, and Luther revived it. Another point is that Luther's audience was the Church and the community of believers, not the general public. In fact, modernism was formed in the society of that day from several different drives—such as subjective philosophies in intellectual domains, humanistic art and mysticisms in artistic and cultural domains, bourgeois economics in economic domains, and finally the religious reform movement or Protestantism in the domain of religion—and appeared as a unified package.

The Impossibility of Christian Secularism in Islam

It is clear that between Islam and Judaism on one side and Christianity on the other, there are fundamental differences in roots, readings, and approaches. Islam and Judaism are Sharia-oriented religions, and Islam, in particular, has programs and rules for this-worldly life. Rules that, after the passing/occultation of the Prophet/the Infallible, become increasingly inflated and reproduced through jurisprudential systems due to diverse earthly needs. Whereas Christianity is a salvation-oriented and non-legalistic religion that does not have significant rules in this-worldly domains; to the extent that one of Christ's promises to his companions is "lifting the yoke of the law from their necks." Christianity, in earthly and this-worldly domains, as mentioned in section one, is unassuming and entrusts these matters to the state. Therefore, implementing the secularism that was carried out in the West based on Christianity is an impossibility in Islamic societies. Christianity was already compatible with the mold of secularism, and modernism merely actualized this mold, while Islam, due to the existence of an omnipresent Sharia, lacks such a possibility. It can be said: those who, without considering this topological situation, attempt to indigenize secularism in Islamic countries have created more futile material and spiritual costs for society than they have solved a problem for it. The hundred-year history of Iranian intellectualism confirms this statement.

From Secularism Towards Hermeneutics or Interpretation in Religious Intellectualism

3.1- What is Hermeneutics or Interpretation?

Hermeneutics was initially a discipline that took shape through the efforts of theologians and religious scholars in the course of interpreting religious texts. At first, this discipline comprised the correct rules for interpreting a text, in the sense of returning to the original and primary meaning of texts, or the exegesis of texts. Over time, however, this science moved beyond the domain of religious studies and extended into the humanities, the analysis of the problem of understanding, and even the ontological dimensions of the human world. For this reason, the nature of this discipline, its methodology, and its subject matter have become the focus of extensive philosophical analyses and inquiries. Some schools of continental philosophy do not accept the methodological nature of this discipline, while certain postmodernists question the return to an original meaning, reject the possibility of a final understanding, and believe that understanding is an event that takes shape in the thought of the interpreter in the present, not the past, in accordance with the current situation and conditions. Other Anglo-Saxon thinkers, such as Hirsch, attempt to revive the primacy of final meaning and the realist, methodological aspect of the subject while taking the interpreter's conditions into account.

Let us return to the issue. We aim to pursue a regional strategy, employing the discipline of hermeneutics, which some intellectuals in the Islamic world have founded in the face of the issue of Sharia under the title of "religious intellectualism."

A Hermeneutic Strategy for Turning Away from Secularism: The Discourse of Religious Intellectualism

In the second section, we stated that secularism is impossible in the Islamic world due to the specific topological situation of Islamic Sharia. The historical experiences of the past century confirm this. Religious intellectualism, after the Islamic Revolution, was a reaction to this matter. As a consequence, religious intellectuals tried to adapt Islamic Sharia, by adopting a suitable hermeneutic approach, to the conditions of the day while preserving its principles. Projects such as "The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Sharia" have been efforts in this direction. Thus, an attempt was made to create a new understanding of Islamic Sharia in light of modern cognitive events. This method is specific to Sharia-centered religions like Islam and is an intelligent strategy for entering and updating religious understanding in today's world while preserving principles. This experience left behind the failed strategy of secularizing the Islamic religion and, by setting aside this process, tried to update religious thought through the instillation of new interpretations. In this way, the principles of religion are fixed, but the interpreter's hand is open in interpreting the branches of religion, and they can update these rules by using categories such as the "occasion of revelation of verses" or rational reason for issuing a ruling.

One of the dangers that limits this strategy is the lack of self-awareness among religious intellectuals regarding their own discursive situation and a deviation towards secularism as a result of the resistances and failures along the path. In any case, this trend has powerful critics on both the traditionalist and secular fronts, but this is no reason to trample upon discursive principles and for the current to deviate towards secularism out of sympathy with secular intellectuals. It seems that theories such as the "Prophetic Dream" represent a deviation from the hermeneutic path of the religious intellectualism discourse towards Christian secularism. In the process of interpretation, both sides of the equation—that is, the principles of religion and the contemporary situation—must be safeguarded. Deviation towards either side derails this current, leading it towards the dead ends where both traditionalism and secularism have long been sitting in the current religious society.

A Word to Secular Critics

It seems that the greatest danger to the discourse of religious intellectualism comes from the secular intellectuals of contemporary Iranian society. They make a grave mistake in viewing religious intellectuals as their rivals. Whereas the audience of religious intellectuals consists of seminary students and the elites of religious sciences, in other words, the “community of believers.” An audience for whom secularism in the Islamic world, given the situation we described in point two, has no intellectual package to offer, and the path it has taken before them only leads to dead ends and bloody social conflicts and alignments. Religious intellectualism, on the other hand, always leaves an alternative method for the peaceful coexistence of Sharia and the requirements of the modern world. Our advice to this group of intellectuals is to at least follow the Westerners in this regard—given your claims—and not enter the specialized domain of others. Just as Luther, Descartes, Galileo, and the Medici family in the modern West each attended to the specific function of their own domain. And of course, religious intellectualism must also understand that, given the destined world before us, the audience for its intellectual package is seminary students of religious sciences and, with a little indulgence, the “community of believers.” The diversity and autonomy of different civilizational domains are among the prominent features of this destiny. Although we believe that Iranian thought has the capacity to formulate a universal reason for appropriating and, at the same time, safeguarding this diversity. Farabi once did this in confronting Western philosophy and sciences—though we were unable to benefit from its results—and why should it not happen again?

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Hermeneutics versus Secularism: A Strategy Called Religious Intellectualism

Esmail Noshad

PhD Candidate in Philosophy

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