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Dear friends,

See the following response I sent to Rolla when he asked me to forward the above along to Farhan. My reflection perhaps helps to give some additional context to Iqbal’s constructive postmodern approach in Islam in distinction with many of the deconstructive approaches that are more prevalent nowadays.

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Re: Mohamed Abdou—his work is quite interesting. If you are interested in engaging a bit more, there’s an podcast interview with him via the New Books Network Islamic Studies podcast. Here’s a link: https://newbooksnetwork.com/islam-and-anarchism

Abdou really forcefully aligns Islam with a radical anarchist politics, as well as a contemporary intersectional vision of social justice from what I’ve seen of his work. I find these to be somewhat idiosyncratic allegiances replete with various tensions, though I know there is a lot of this kind of work going on in Islamic studies departments in the West. To me, this represents a deconstructive postmodern approach to Islam, as the scholars are problematizing the tradition, looking critically at the way power relations of religious authority have upheld heteronormative, patriarchal, anti-black perspectives, etc. The classic sorts of postmodern moves that are employed out of a drive for a more just and harmonious pluralistic world. But conversely, these scholars seem to avoid getting into difficult questions of religious truth and looking to carry forward the enchantment and expansiveness of traditional perspectives, albeit in a new, transfigured form. As such, when I engage with this type of work, I certainly recognize the Islamicity of what is being presented, and see the connections being made, but I can’t help but feel its a form of the tradition that has been hollowed out in some respect—that there aren’t stable ontological or normative frameworks for grounding the tradition. After all, if classic Islamic orthodoxies are so replete with problematic power relations that enable myriad forms of bigotry, why remain attached to the tradition at all, beyond a sort of idiosyncratic personal nostalgia? It seems that these types of Islamic postmodernists are either stuck with flat traditionalist answers for their allegiance to the tradition, or that they slip into an unexamined nihilistic relativism, where religious affiliation can’t be seen as anything deeper than a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon.

Iqbal, and scholars following in his footsteps such as Farhan, seem to be taking a constructive postmodern approach instead. Even the title of Iqbal’s major work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, clues us in to this alternative approach. Iqbal is deeply cosmopolitan and broadminded in drawing in myriad Islamic and Western sources to inform his project, while always keeping the Qur’anic text as a touchstone. He presents a dynamic and enchanted picture of the history of Islamic theological thinking in conversation with developments of Western philosophy and religion. He deconstructs much of the edifice of the Islamic classical tradition(s), yes, but in pursuit of a more coherent vision for the religion. Rather than the at times crude metrics of identifying problematic power relations as used by the deconstructive postmodernists, Iqbal is very nuanced in his estimations of various thinkers and movements in intellectual history, finding the essential insights in their work which we may want to sheppard forward, while discarding aspects of their thinking that leave something to be desired.

But, even though I find the constructive postmodern project of Iqbal and others much more promising as an overall approach to religion (Islam) in our contemporary moment, there’s certainly plenty of room for the insights and contributions of the deconstructive postmodern scholars as well. I find their deep engagement with postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories often yielding promising results, and their overall vision of justice as a guiding principle is certainly admirable and a stance which demands greater integration in traditional religious circles. But I remain critically aware that without the sort of deeper framework for reform and evolution of religious thinking that the constructive postmodernists provide, it is likely that we’ll just see mounting sectarianism as the traditionalists and deconstructive postmodernists clash with one another, unable to resolve the fundamental differences between their basic approaches to religion.

Daryl,

Thanks so much for putting this on our radar!

I was able to find the Amazon link. Here it is: https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Experience-Companion-Whiteheads-Philosophy-ebook/dp/B07L16GRCN/ref=sr_1_1?crid=MGZ7EAYGP5BH&keywords=the+metaphysics+of+experience+kraus&qid=1663794594&sprefix=the+metaphysics+of+experience+kraus%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-1

Jared

Mike, thanks so much for sharing this excellent resource! Definitely a perfect companion to our own close reading of the text.

Here’s a link to the Probing Process and Reality course: https://cobb.institute/learning-lab/probing-process-and-reality/

Jared

Gwen,

Very interesting question. I would agree with others that this is simply a product of Whitehead’s own era rather than something he was positively attached to. And there’s certainly much in Whitehead of that sort, which we may want to leave behind in our own era.

One important point here, though, is to return to Whitehead’s discussion of ultimates and think of God in light of this schema. Rather than God-as-male being the single ultimate reality, for Whitehead creativity and the cosmos itself are likewise equally ultimate, so even if we retained a masculine gendered picture of God, this gendered perspective would not be as fundamental as it can seem in much traditional Christian theology, where God alone is ultimate.

Process theology after Whitehead has explored this question more deeply and explicitly, offering a number of different perspectives on how to move beyond this baggage from the tradition. I’ve definitely seen some womanist process theology which explores using female pronouns for God, whereas others endeavor to simply exit this kind of gendering game all together when it comes to God as ultimate, so they simply use the proper name “God” rather than any pronouns.