Islam and the Challenge and Opportunity of Religious Pluralism

For Islam that requires affirming all revealed traditions/scriptures, known and unknown, as a condition for being a Muslim and has nurtured a civilization that assimilated/engaged with diverse religious/cultural forms and has, relatively, better record of peaceful coexistence with other traditions and great textual and other resources for building impressive non-exclusivist approaches as in Sufis, poets and Muslim sages, certain pluralistic ideas in the air today present an opportunity and not an embarrassment. The following is a selection from certain influential pluralists that echo Islamic tradition’s respect for difference without degenerating into groundless relativism that leaves no room for the Absolute and the emphasis on uniqueness and special access to truth of diverse traditions.  (It is ironic that exclusivist fundamentalism should have grown in Islamic lands in last two centuries and it is noteworthy that we can trace it to certain pathologies in colonial politics and Orientalist skepticism of Sufism’s integral connection with Islam). 

    John Hick, a prominent pluralist, argues that a viable religious hypothesis must account for the fact, of which “we have become irreversibly aware in the present century, as the result of anthropological, sociological, and psychological studies and the work of philosophy of language,” that there is no one universal pattern for the interpretation of human experience, but rather a range of significantly different patterns or conceptual schemes “which have developed within the major cultural streams.”  Seen in this light, a “pluralistic theory becomes inevitable.”

    Today there is a widely shared scholarly conviction articulated long back by Simone Weil that “the archetypal poetries of people everywhere restate the same truths in different metaphoric languages” and her sense of myth as “the special gospel of the poor, a treasury of insights into the Beauty of the World, which Providence has bestowed on poverty alone, but which, in our uprooted world, the alienated oppressed can no longer decipher for themselves.” If myths are saving truths as such mythologists as Campbell and authorities on traditions such as Ananada Coomaraswamy have  argued and huge number of communities/people have lived on the diet of myths and they couldn’t be arguably lost, we have another formidable argument against exclusivism given structure of myths is shared across traditions and communities.

Regarding Weil it has aptly been observed (as we note in Leslie Fielder’s Introduction to her Waiting for God, Toward the end of her life, the mystic vision came to her almost daily, and she did not have to wonder (in such matters, she liked to say, one does not believe or disbelieve; one knows or does not know) if there were salvation outside an organized sect; she was a living witness that the visible Church and the invisible congregation of the saints are never one.” She has clearly stated why exclusivism is indefensible. She had number of arguments as well to substantiate her conviction:

"You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India, and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive.”

And

It is said that Buddha made a vow to raise to himself, in the Land of Purity, all those who pronounced his name with the desire of being saved by him; and that because of this vow the recitation of the name of the Lord really has the power of transforming the soul. Religion is nothing else but this promise of God. Every religious practice, every rite, all liturgy is a form of the recitation of the name of the Lord and in principle should have a real virtue, the virtue of saving whoever devotes himself to performing it with desire.

…some have no faith, and the others have faith exclusively in one religion and only bestow upon the others the sort of attention we give to strangely shaped shells. There are others again who think they are capable of impartiality because they have only a vague religiosity which they can turn indifferently in any direction, whereas, on the contrary, most often, perhaps always, the soul that has reached the highest realms of spirituality is confirmed in its love of the tradition that served it as a ladder.

    Panikkar’s presupposition regarding revelation as coming almost equally through other religions and even beyond the boundaries of religion in the depths of the human person” and echoes of traditional expositions of Revelation and Intellection constitute compelling case for bridging philosophy and religion or philosophy and mysticism (Hellenism with religions such as Christianity and Islam) and reaching out to those who think intellection and mystical experience are alien or Greek to them and can’t relate to them existentially.

    A great number of major Christian theologians and philosophers (most Jewish intellectuals/scholars had already) have renounced exclusivism in face of staggering scholarship showing its problematic character. Would Muslims follow suit? Psychology, anthropology, history, literature all provide enough grounds for convincing anyone that people will never consent to leave ancestral religions now on mass scale and even if they convert they carry previous baggage with them earning them labels they are still Hindus even after 700 years of conversion (as is the much rehearsed charge against Kashmiri Muslims) and the like. The project of one religion, as against one Din, seems so far doomed and is arguably against all scriptures when not read atomistically.

    Exclusivist thesis sits uncomfortably with the notion of wisdom or hikmah as a gift from God that constitutes felicity. Sages have independent access to truth and come converge with prophets independently. Shah Waliullah has elaborated this thesis – penultimate chapter of Ismail Shaheed’s Abaqat states this succinctly. Exclusivists don’t understand intellection and thus authority of sages and shared ground of prophetic and sagely claims. The prophets don’t bring new things, only remind us of what we know deep down. Distinction between faith and belief in Smith, Pannikar and many other theologians and modern philosophers of religion amounts to rejection of philosophical and theological grounding of exclusivism which privileges the latter at the cost of the former. Other points to be noted are:

• “. . . truth is pluralistic because reality itself is pluralistic, not being an objectifiable entity. We subjects are also part of it. We are not only spectators of the Real, we are also co-actors and even co-authors of it. This is precisely our human dignity.”
• “No theory can be absolutely universal, because theory, the contemplation of truth, is neither a universal contemplation, nor is (theoretical) “truth” all that there is to Reality.”
• Thus, any theory that presents itself as “universal” cannot be so. First, every theory is bound to its starting-point—there does not exist any 360–degree vision or global perspective. Secondly, theory as such already approaches reality from a limited perspective.  There is indeed no presuppositionless philosophy as has been stated by philosophers across traditions and we find a sort of perspectivism/may be ism – syadvada – articulated by diverse traditions and one could readily see  Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Foucault echoing certain insights well known in traditions as diverse as Jainism and Sufism to critique various exclusivisms.
• Who can claim to scan hearts of others and thus judge? Isn’t it indecent to speculate or dismiss before even hearing what we have not been deeply concerned about in academic or intellectual matters? (Many don’t care to read, for instance, Pannikar or AKC or Smart or Smith or their likes but feel free to offer unsolicited comments.)
• Schuon’s assertion that Revelation is intellection of the masses or objectivation of Universal Intellect or the perspective presented by the author of Hayy bin Yaqzan or Iqbal and Muslim philosophers in general and mystics of various hues  all converge on the point that saving content of Revelation and intellection is in principle accessible to all and sundry. Revelation is also not restricted to transmitted oral or written words but gets capsulated in number of key cultural institutions especially in traditional cultures.  transmitted can’t be restricted in particular communities, persons.
  

    We find pluralistic/inclusivist arguments based on readings of Islamic canon as distinguished from inclusivism in many modern scholars that haven’t been satisfactorily engaged by exclusivists. We find exclusivism cornered by newer developments in philosophy of religions, studies on mysticism, mythology, anthropology, comparative religion besides various approaches to canon that have precedent in classical scholarship as well. Exclusivism is modified or qualified by it major advocates and the central problem of restricting salvation to accident of particular religion/accident of birth being circumvented. In the end it boils down to conceding room for non-exclusivist reading.