©Gabriele Marranci (2009)

(National University of Singapore, ARI)

‘Muslim’ - ‘non-Muslim’ Dialogue: Some Critical

Epistemological Observations

In this paper I wish to offer a brief, but today more necessary than ever, discussion

about what has been often referred to as ‘Muslim’- ‘non-Muslim’ dialogue, which is

part of a wider interfaith effort that, although long-standing, has increased in the

aftermath of 9/11. Mainly a religious and political effort to ‘defuse’ misunderstanding

and tension, at both national and, more rarely, international level, in recent years

academia has also contributed to the noble efforts of facilitating an often difficult

understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. Yet it is not my intention to discuss

here the role of interfaith dialogue, nor analyse the reasons for the increase of such

activities. Rather I aim to contribute to the discussion by providing a reflection starting

from logical consequences (Bateson 2002). Indeed, I think that it is essential to observe,

and make plain, what I may call the ‘epistemology’ of such endeavour and the risk,

which is often unseen, of reducing the ‘dialogue’ to cultural categories. This means,

also, to highlight some mistakes affecting the discourse, and certainly the rhetoric, of

both the popular and academic understanding of what such ‘dialogue’ between Muslims

and non-Muslims may entail. We shall see that it is fundamental, if this ‘dialogue’ is to

succeed, that those whom are involved in it distance themselves from at least three

pernicious flaws that often lurk within the very epistēmē of the ‘Muslim’- ‘non-

Muslim’ dialogue. These three main flaws are a) confusing the map with the territory; b)

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a lack of recognition that what we are discussing is a process; c) regarding the

individual actor ‘as put upon rather than “putting on”’ (Rapport 2003: 52).

After analysing and debating the epistemology informing the practice of Muslim –

non-Muslim dialogue we may face the difficult task of having to answer the ultimate

question of whether we really need to facilitate the ‘dialogue’ in terms of ‘Muslims’ and

‘non-Muslims’ or if instead we need to reconsider the effect that such rhetoric of

difference implies, even when it is aimed to reconciliation.

What is a Muslim and who is the Muslim?

I wish to recall an anecdote that happened during a workshop at The University of

Aberdeen. I was presenting a paper discussing the idea of ‘civilisation’ among some of

my Muslim respondents and how this concept has changed and reshaped during the so-

called War on Terror. During the question time, a colleague appeared to take issue with

my analysis and argument. She finished her quite polemic comment with the statement,

‘You obviously know few Muslims, and you have not yet understood Muslims as they

are!’ Although I pointed out that I was a Muslim myself, and that I have worked for the

past twelve years with ‘Muslims’ of various colours, ideas and countries, I asked her to

permit me to reply with another question, ‘What is a Muslim? Who is the Muslim?’ She

seemed confused and refused, despite my insistence, to actually answer the question.

Rather, as some scholars do in the field of Islamic Studies, my colleague retorted by

using the academic bad word, ‘Orientalist’.1 In reality, my question had, and has, a

very simple and rational answer which, despite all, seemed to surprise my own

academic audience of anthropologists: a Muslim is a human being who feels

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to be (i.e. who expresses emotional dynamics of identity pointing towards the same

selected autobiographical self) Muslim (Marranci 2008).

I could not be other than surprised that my colleagues in both anthropology and

Islamic studies found such a statement to be odd or even ‘revolutionary’. Yet a careful

understanding of how the study of Muslims and Islam has developed in the Western

world can explain such ‘surprise’. I feel that most of the work and research, as well as

political debate and policy making, on Islam and Muslims is based on a pernicious

epistemological fallacy which, like a virus, tends to perpetuate itself. It is undeniable

that this ‘perpetuation’ has some economic value for the academic world and

Machiavellian value for the political world. Furthermore, the reinforcement of such

rhetoric of ‘de-humanization’ promotes an extreme culturalist approach where the

individual becomes the material culture or even the cultural belief he or she holds.

Certainly, although not often mentioned, Max Weber is the sociological and

anthropological forebear of this dangerous fallacy. Although he never developed a

systematic sociological study of Islam, his understanding of it shows a monolithic

conceptualisation (Turner 1978). Indeed, as Turner has argued (Turner 1974), Islam

represented for Weber the antithesis of European Puritanism, especially since the

German sociologists unquestioningly accepted a Christian-apologetic view, similar to

that of Voltaire (1736/1905), of Islam as violent, hedonistic, libidinous and oppressive

towards women. The main elements, however, of what Weber saw as the failure of

Islam vis-à-vis the rampant success of European capitalism, is the alleged lack of

rationality. Turner (see 1974 and 1992) has offered a valid criticism of the several

weaknesses, and few strengths, of Weber’s take on Islam. Weber, however, was a man

of his own time. Nonetheless, we shall see below how Weber’s sociology of Islam has

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influenced, directly or indirectly, other more contemporary scholars such as Gellner

(1981) and some of his students (see for instance Shankland 2003). Yet the Weberian

legacy has also inspired much of the discussion about Islam in the post 9/11 world in the

attempt to answer the, often rhetorical rather than analytical, question of whether Islam

is compatible with the modern (western capitalist) values of human rights and

democracy.

Gellner (1981) was certainly the most Weberian of the sociologists and

anthropologists who devoted their studies to Muslim societies (or rather Islam). He,

together with Geertz, affected, and largely still influences, sociological and

anthropological studies of Islam. In his most famous work, Muslim Society,

Gellner’s central argument argues that Islam cannot change. Far from being the religion

of living Muslims with opinions, ideas, feelings, identities, Gellnerian Islam is an

essence that remains constant in its model as a result of being based on three pillars:

first, a strong eschatological scripturalism which does not offer room for any change

since Muhammad is the last prophet; second, Islam rejects a clergy and consequently

religious differentiation; and third, Islam rejects the division between church and state,

since, according to Gellner (but see also Weber for the same argument) ‘it began as a

religion of rapidly successful conquerors who soon were the state’ (1981: 100–1). Yet

the most important aspect of all is a ‘trans-ethnic’ and ‘trans-social’ characteristic of

Islam, since, Gellner has argued, it does not ‘equate faith with the beliefs of any

community or society [...] But the trans-social truth which can sit in judgement on the

social is a Book’ (1981: 101) so that no political authority can claim it. It is in this

centrality of the ‘Book’ as the ultimate authority and in the division and tension between

what Gellner has defined as high Islam (urbanised and based on scripturalism) and low

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Islam (based on kinship and the charismatic power of the saint) that the fight for

puritanism has led to the development of a religion, Islam, resistant to secularisation.

Gellner, consistent with his model, has stated also that Muslims ‘could have democracy,

or secularism, but not both’ (1981: 60). In other words, if Muslim societies have

democracy they would inevitably see secularism eroded in favour of an increasingly

Shari‘a based state. Only a dictatorship can impose a secular model of society, since it

can manipulate and control, and so limit, the role and influence of Islam within society.

One anthropologist, however, has provided the most influential template though

which much of today’s scholarship tends to view Muslims as, directly or indirectly, the

product of their faith or, even worse, their holy texts. I have not the necessary space to

summarise Geertz’s work here, nor shall I provide a new critique or defence of his

seminal study Islam Observed (see Marranci 2008). Nonetheless, I need to

emphasise here how, despite an innovative and interesting attempt to explain Islam

through a ‘comparative’ (Indonesia and Morocco) approach, Geertz ended in suggesting

that myths and sacred texts (such as the Qur’an and hadiths) fully explain Muslim

behaviour (i.e. human behaviour) and their social expressions. As in much of Geertz’s

theory of culture (1973) the ‘system of symbols’ controls humans, and in this case, since

the system of symbols is called ‘Islam’, Muslims,

If they are religious men, those everyday terms will in some way be

influenced by their religious convictions, for it is in the nature of faith,

even the most unworldly and least ethical, to claim effective sovereignty

over human behaviour. The internal fusion of world view and ethos is, or

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 so I am arguing, the heart of the religious perspective, and the job of the

sacred symbol is to bring about that fusion. (1968: 110)

Gellner and Geertz are not interested in understanding Muslims; instead they believed

to have provided— similar to Weber’s incomplete macro-sociological attempt— the

ultimate explanation of Islam as a cultural and social system. In other words, Geertz and

Gellner seem to ignore Alfred Korzybski’s simple, but cognitively significant,

observation that ‘the map is not the territory’ (1948: 58). Scholars such as Geertz and

Gellner thought that the map ‘Islam’ was similar to the map of a ‘cultural’ genome: a

reality that conditions — variations allowed — how all Muslims (or at least the ‘real’

ones) will behave, form societies and interact. Thus, knowing (scriptural) Islam means

knowing (real) Muslims, what they are and how ‘the Muslim’ is supposed to be, act and

behave.

The Categories ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ and the

Danger of ‘Culture Talk’

Essentialist views of what a Muslim (or for that matter a non-Muslim) may be can,

therefore, easily lead to what Mamdani has called in his renowned book Good

Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004) ‘Culture Talk’. We can say that, from a ‘Culture Talk’

viewpoint, culture shapes a person’s identity as a bottle shapes the water it contains.

Indeed, ‘Culture Talk assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it,

and it then explains politics as a consequence of the essence’ (Mamdani, 2004: 17).

Mamdani has pointed out how the practice of ‘Culture Talk’ has divided the world

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between moderns and premoderns; with the former being only able to conduit rather

than make culture, ‘Culture Talk’ reasoning argues that Islam and Muslims ‘made’

culture at the beginning of their history, but in the contemporary world they merely

conform to culture:

According to some, our [Muslim] culture seems to have no history, no

politics, and no debates, so that all Muslims are just plain bad. According

to others, there is a history, a politics, even debates, and there are good

Muslims and bad Muslims. In both versions, history seems to have

petrified into a lifeless custom of an antique people who inhabit antique

lands. Or could it be that culture here stands for habit, for some kind of

instinctive activity with rules that are inscribed in early founding texts,

usually religious, and mummified in early artefacts? (2004: 18)

Mamdani has rightly expressed his concerns about the political and social consequences

of understanding Muslims, and their religion, as merely a product of culture since it

reduces religion not just to politics, but also to a political category. This process, in the

best of the cases, facilitates a Manichean sociological and political division between

good and bad Muslims and I would add also Muslims and non-Muslims.

Mamdani has also correctly rejected the idea that political behaviours and

ideologies can derive solely from cultural (religious or traditional) habits and customs.

Some sociological and anthropological approaches show a similar fallacy in that they

link Muslims’ personal faith to their theological knowledge by failing to observe that

many worshipers have no theological knowledge beyond the practical aspects of their

prayers and festivities. Certainly, some Muslims may start to develop strong emotional

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and identity-derived understandings of their own religion. However, it is too great of a

leap to conclude that, because they are Muslims who take seriously their understanding

of Islam, they are the product of their own beliefs instead of the beliefs being the

product of how, as individuals (with a particular brain, in particular contexts and so on),

they make sense of their ‘feeling to be’ Muslim.

The Categories ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ and the

Danger of Civilizational Discourse.

After highlighting the epistemological risk that general categories such as ‘Muslim’ as

well as ‘non-Muslim’ may cause when raised to an inexistent ontological status, I wish

now to underline the fact that ‘Muslim’ -’non-Muslim’ can only be perceived as an

ontological dichotomy. The shift of labels to ontology is certainly not something new.

Yet we have more examples today than ever. General labels that are geographical such

as ‘west’, political such as ‘terrorism’, or religious such as ‘Muslim’, have lost their

signifying power and shifted towards ontology. For instance, a geographical—yet

relative depending upon location—term such as ‘west’ has become ‘The West’, a

civilizational, monolithic epithet, often associated with a ‘religious’ characterisation

(such as the so-called Judeo-Christian heritage of the West). Hence, there is a clear

epistemological risk that the dichotomy ‘Muslim’ -‘non-Muslim’, albeit framed by

discourse, may be read as ‘Islam’ - ‘the West’. Today, thanks to mass media

simplification, this cognitive transcription is nearly inevitable and requires an

intellectual effort to diffuse. Indeed, how many will read a ‘Muslim’-‘non-Muslim’

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dialogue as being mainly a dialogue between Muslims and Confucians, or Muslims and

Cargo Cult practitioners?

The risk of reading the category of ‘Muslim’ - ‘non Muslim’ as ‘Islam’ - ‘The

West’ has, indeed, some historical roots which go back to the European understanding

of the ‘Islamic world’ through the fear of the Ottoman Empire. It is out of this historical

context, which saw rapid European expansions and revolutions, that the discourse of

civilization found its new appeal. Although with a new connotation, which included the

idea of good manners, status of women and secular values, ‘the concept of civilization

provided a standard by which to judge societies, and during the nineteenth century,

Europeans devoted much intellectual, diplomatic, and political energy to elaborating the

criteria by which non-European societies might be judged’ (Huntington 1996: 41). One

of these tests of ‘civilization’ was, interestingly enough, the ‘status’ of women within

societies. Mill and Thomas in 1817 argued, ‘The condition of the women is one of the

most remarkable circumstances in the manners of nations. Among the rude people the

women are generally degraded; among the civilized people they are exalted’ (Mill and

Thomas 1975). These arguments supported the colonialist idea of the civilizing mission

of European colonialism. However we can observe that, though expressed in different

terms than the nineteenth-century writers Mill and Thomas, politicians justified the

2001 war in Afghanistan as also a war to free women from the barbaric and uncivilised

treatment of the Taliban (Stabile and Kumar 2005). Starobinski has suggested that the

word civilization,

gained rapid acceptance because it drew together the diverse expressions

of a pre-existing concept. That concept included such notions as

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 improvements in comfort, advances in education, politer manners,

cultivation of the arts and sciences, growth of commerce and industry, and

acquisition of material goods and luxuries. The word referred first to the

process that made individuals, nations, and all mankind civilized (a pre-

existing term) and later to the cumulative result of that process. It served

as a unifying concept. (1993: 3)

The danger of any ‘civilizational’ discourse is better exemplified by, for instance,

observing the renewed Huntingtonian argument for a clash of civilizations.

Huntington, taking inspiration from Bernard Lewis’s article ‘The Roots of Muslim

Rage’ (1990), argued that today, after the end of the cold war, we are living in a time

where culture matters more than before, and ‘the fundamental source of conflict in this

new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions

among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. […] The fault

lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future’ (1993: 22). He indicated

eight ‘major civilisations’ that will interact with each other in different ways. However,

according to him, the main conflict will be between the ‘Western civilisation’ and the

Confucian and Islamic civilisations. Huntington has emphasised that the struggle occurs

at two different levels, ‘At the micro level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between

civilizations struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other. At the

macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for relative military and

economic power, struggling over the control of international institutions and third

parties, and competitively promote their particular political and religious values’

(Huntington 1993: 29). As Starobinski has rightly observed,

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 because of the connection with the ideas of perfectibility and progress, the

word civilization denoted more than just a complex process of refinement

and mores, social organization, technical progress, and advancing

knowledge; it took on a sacred aura, owing to which it could sometimes

reinforce traditional religious values and at other times supplant them.

The history of the word civilization thus leads to this crucial observation:

once a notion takes on a sacred authority and thereby acquires the power

to mobilize, it quickly stirs up conflict between political groups or rival

schools of thought claiming to be its champions and defenders and as

such insisting on the exclusive right to propagate the new idea.

(Starobinski 1993: 17)

It is exactly within this belief of the power to shape and define ‘ideas’ and ‘values’ that

Huntington’s civilizational argument is centred. However, for Huntington, particularly

in his book The Clash of Civilizations (1996), in which the question mark of the

previous essay (Clash of Civilizations?) was removed, civilizations today can only be

defined by what he sees as religious ontologies.

According to him, the ‘Velvet Curtain of Culture’ would replace the ‘Iron Curtain’

by finding its most dangerous front in the historical, military confrontation between the

Christian civilisation and the Islamic one. We may try to understand what led

Huntington to interpret the relationship between Islam and ‘Western culture’ as a

conflictual dichotomy. It was the assumption that Islam (and at a certain level

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Confucianism), challenges the ‘perfect’ and progressive Greek-Judaeo-Christian

heritage on which all the West is, according to him, founded.

Huntington’s theory attracted the attention of academics, politicians and the mass

media. The title, in a certain sense, became more popular than the theory. Particularly

within academia, critics emphasised Huntington’s monolithic understanding of both

civilization in general as well as the idea of a unified Western culture (Pippidi and

Minreuda 2002, Fox 2001). Some scholars have rejected his theory and suggested that,

if a clash might exist, it is a clash of interests (Gerges 1999). Yet, what I am interested in

here is not Huntington’s argument per-se, but rather his intellectual dependence on an

academic tradition of political philosophy that sought to define ‘discourse’, ‘conflict’

and also ‘dialogue’, in terms of civilizational struggles between friend and foe - namely

the legacy of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. It is not possible to fully understand the

contemporary ‘state of emergency’ and ‘clash of civilizations’, and therefore the urgent

need for ‘dialogue’ between Muslims and non-Muslims to avoid such terrifying

civilizational conflict. Of course, for the political theology of Schmitt, dialogue is not

an option and only a Judeo-Christian control of the world, through the super power of

the US, can gurantee the supremacy, and hence the survival, of ‘Western civilization’.

It is apparent that today any political or academic effort to facilitate a ‘dialogue’

between Muslims and non-Muslims faces an evident risk of being an epistemological

product (or even ‘positive’ mimicry) of a Huntingtonian vision of conflict, or in the best

of cases, a lack of understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. Yet both

‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ as categories, as we have discussed at the beginning of this

paper, are just ideas, or rather maps that represent a complex territory. Indeed, how

many people define themselves, in their everyday life, as, for instance, non-Muslims?

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Without a context, how is it possible to make sense of non-Muslimness? Hence, the

only context offered by the dyad ‘Muslim’-‘non-Muslim’ is difference based on ‘what is

Muslim’, so that the non-Muslim can be defined. It is in this discourse that the

‘dialogue’ becomes ‘civilizational’, so much so that often the arguments that are part of

the ‘dialogue’ are similar to those that define the ‘civilizational status’, such as the

treatment of women and so forth.

An Epistemological Axiom: Dialogue Can Be Only

among People not Cultures

Affirming that ‘dialogue’ can only happen among individuals appears to be a

tautologically simplistic statement. Yet in a social scientific world so often affected, and

misled, by culturalist assumptions, it is not rare to see such a statement openly rejected

or underestimated. Hence, we discover that ‘cultures’ act, inform, create, and, of course,

among many other actions, engage in dialogue. This perspective amounts to a what may

be described as a peculiar social scientific animism, of which my own discipline of

anthropology has been often guilty in the past fifty years. As we were discussing at the

beginning of this paper, it was Clifford Geertz who brought the idea of ‘culture’ to its

extreme (il)logical consequences. He defined culture as a ‘control mechanism – plans,

recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for governing

behavior’ (1973: 44). In a previous version of the same article, he also emphasized that

such a ‘control mechanism’ is achieved by ‘the imposition of an arbitrary framework of

symbolic meaning upon reality’ (1964: 39). In other words, humans without culture

could not control their behaviour and would act as ungovernable, chaotic, shapeless, a-

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meaningful beings (Geertz 1964: 46). Non-humans (animals), though lacking symbols

and culture, avoid such chaos because they have natural ‘control mechanisms’ (i.e.

instincts) that substitute for culture.

However, I agree with Ingold when he observes that Geertz’s conceptualization of

culture tends to represent humans as ‘suspended in webs of significance [and] puts

humans in a kind of free-floating world in which we are ascribing significance to things

“out there”’ (Ingold 1996: 130). Geertz has presented humans as something different

from the rest of nature, as beings resembling mythological fallen angels now trapped

between the two dimensions of nature and nurture. Can we avoid the abstraction of the

Geertzian model of culture and symbols? I argue that this is possible since the issue has

been observed through the wrong – I would say – epistemology; the same, indeed,

wrong epistemology that can suggest that Muslims and non-Muslims, seen through the

lens of their ‘culture’, may have a dialogue, engage in a dialogue, or, for that matter,

reject the dialogue. People, as individuals, are more complex than being just a by-

product of their own culture, or belief since ‘perception involves the whole person, in an

active engagement with his or her environment’ (Ingold 1996: 115, but see also

Marranci 2006 and 2008).

The risk is that a dialogue based on the assumption of mental categories such as

‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ are not only bound to fail, but also to propagate such

mistaken epistemologies that are the cause today, in the aftermath of 9/11, of much

trouble in the world. Indeed, this faulty epistemology has a long-standing tradition

when applied to Muslims, whose identities have been frequently represented through

‘difference’ and as part of a ‘different’ cultural domain, which Islam, as a religion based

on written revelation, has forged. This essentialist vision of Islam, and the culturalist or

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social structuralist approach to identity privileged in many anthropological studies of

Muslim communities, has caused a dangerous differentiation between the western idea

(ideological?) of a Western self (seen as the non-Muslim per-excellence) and the

western idea (Orientalist?) of Muslim self.

Conclusions

In this paper I have tried to emphasise the epistemological problems, and their

consequences, when dialogue and understanding is based upon, and perceived through,

‘cultural’ rhetoric. It is not my intention to suggest that such noble attempts to facilitate

dialogue and stereotype reduction between members of different religions— in this case

Muslims and non-Muslims— is empty or counterproductive. By contrast, I think that it

is essential in a globalised, but still very much marked by borders and border

bureaucracy, world. Yet it is also fundamental that this effort to ‘communicate’ is

properly informed by an epistemology which recognises the individual as an active

agent within the social environment and a full actor, if not creator, within the dynamics

of symbols and discourses that we, probably by abusing shorthand, call cultures. Indeed,

the most common way in which inter-religious dialogue is understood mimics the same

vulnerability that has affected social scientific studies, and in particular anthropology.

Thus vulnus is, in other words, the tendency to regard,

the individual actor as put upon rather than ‘putting on’. I find much here

in the critique of displacement which accords with social-scientific

analysis of individual behaviour in social-cultural millieux per se:

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 ‘because’ motives are widely inferred while ‘in order to’ motives barely

figure. Questions such as how individuals deal with life, how they make

meaning in the midst of everyday life and change, suffering and good

fortune, become questions largely of social determination. (Rapport 2003:

52)

By contrast, Rapport has suggested the centrality of individuality as far as social action

is concerned, since ‘it is the individual – in individual energy, creativity, will – that the

force of the social and cultural lies’ (2003: 6; see also 1997: 2 and Hornborg 2003: 98).

It is only by paying more attention to the individual and understanding society not

as a mysterious, self-achieving, self-controlled mechanism, but rather as consisting of

the dynamics of individuals, which means to recognise the cybernetic (i.e.

communicational) property of what we call society. The main risk of continuing to

‘regard the individual actor as put upon rather than “putting on”’ is not just a flawed

social (un)science but, more perniciously, the risk of reinforcing the trends of de-

humanisation that are so common in our era. Milton (2007) has brought our attention to

an observation that we need to take on board if we want to approach the discourse

beyond the political demagogy:

First, the individual is the only entity in human society capable of

experiencing emotions and having feelings, the only seat of

consciousness, and therefore the only entity capable of learning. So, if we

are interested in how human beings come to understand the world around

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 them, we have to focus first on individuals, because societies and cultures

as whole entities do not learn—individuals do.

Second, the individual is the only entity sufficiently discrete to have an

environment [...] I suggest that entities like ‘society’, ‘culture’ and

‘population’ are too abstract to be surrounded by anything with which a

substantive relationship is possible. (Milton 2007: 71)

Cultural entities and labels such as ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ are even more abstract

than ‘society’ or even ‘culture’ per-se. It is important that we try to overcome the

epistemological trap of seeing the other— or ourselves— only though the symbols of

material culture and artificial labels. Indeed, it will be only when the ‘Muslim’ and

‘non-Muslim’ curtain of Maya is lifted, to reveal the crude flesh and bone of being just a

human among humans, that dialogue will succeed.

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Notes

1. See Varisco 2007 for a criticism of Said’s Orientalism (1978) and the often misused

word ‘Orientalist’, which is sometimes used as an ‘intellectual’ weapon that is

employed to dismiss arguments otherwise difficult to deconstruct.

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