When Man Is God and King, To Whom Do We Submit?

The tensions between Islam and Western Humanism

Introduction

There was a time when it was considered that humans were at the center of the physical universe – that the earth was fixed in the middle and all celestial bodies revolved around it. Then, Copernicus; and all the heavens were rearranged, humanity lost its physical primacy, and the sun replaced the earth as the center of the temporal life. It is a strange irony that, at the same time, a philosophical milieu was doing the exact opposite to the moral universe.

In order of importance, perhaps the two most central fields of philosophy are epistemology and moral philosophy. The first underpins the entirety of metaphysics, whereas the second undergirds the entirety of “practical” philosophy – that is, how humans should live their lives and arrange their societies. While Copernicus was disrupting long-held assumptions about the universe and everything in it, his contemporaries were – knowingly or unknowingly – disrupting the center of the moral universe.

Over time, slowly, sometimes haphazardly and sometimes consciously, intellectuals, statesmen, and artists replaced God as the sun of the moral universe with Man. All things revolved around this new center. God only mattered in so far as He was relevant to humans; humanity – Man, as the enlightenment philosophers were accustomed to say – was the chief moral end.

While modernity was still being conceived – all things being progressively measured, quantified, categorized, and systemized – all acts began to have meaning only in so far as they contributed to the betterment of “man:” increasing his knowledge, which in turn increases his ability to understand and control. Even the idea of God, which had ruled the universe of purpose and morality, was relegated to a position of servitude. He only mattered in so far as He enriched or benefitted the lives of the humans who claimed to worship Him.

So how, then, does a philosophical tradition that centers the human as the end of all things interact with Islam, whose own tradition and milieu is to decenter and problematize human centeredness? How does a tradition of collective self-worship resolve its tension with a tradition of submission?

The Core Elements of Humanism

It's hard to talk about a “humanism” as a distinct school of Western philosophy in the same way it’s difficult to talk about oceans as distinct bodies of water or continents as distinct bodies of land. It is no doubt useful for identifying location – but it’s also a line drawing exercise of one largely connected whole. To talk about humanism is to talk Western philosophy. Almost every major philosopher of the last 400 years can be placed within a humanist tradition, even if no such distinct school exists. In that way, humanism is a projection of a modern concept onto the past – to identify a spectrum of shared assumptions and construct a school that isn’t self-aware in its existence.

At its core, humanism is a combination of three revolutions in philosophy that began in the Renaissance and crystalized in the Enlightenment: non-scriptural rationalism, decline of teleology, and a subsequent human-centered moral philosophy. The three together give birth to a milieu that centers temporal human experience and prioritizes it over all other notions of existence.

Non-scriptural Rationalism

In many ways, humanism is rooted in a core question of knowledge: how can human “know” anything without having to resort to any kind of evidence external to the person? That is, how can humans “know” without taking knowledge from each other, signs in the heavens, or scripture? The assumption, of course, is that only knowledge that is directly experienced can be true knowledge. This begins with what is known as Foundationalism, fragments into empiricism and rationalism, develops into transcendental idealism, etc. The unrecognized question for all of these schools is the essential assumption that reliability of knowledge must be internal to the human, otherwise it cannot be called knowledge.

To be sure, the Islamic tradition also functions on a kind of foundationalism – but its foundationalism also functions in defense of an externality of knowledge. It defends scripture as a source of knowledge rather than problematizing its epistemic status. Western epistemology starting from the Renaissance increasingly does the opposite – it breaks down the epistemic authority of scripture. Even communal knowledge – that is, knowledge imparted from one person to the next – is held under heavy scrutiny and is only now being rescued by the nascent field of social epistemology.

The result of this epistemological shift leads to a central question: if something cannot be known by an individual, can it be said to truly exist? And, if its existence is in question, can it then truly provide meaning?

Decline of Teleology

When scripture is disrupted a source of knowledge and materiality is affirmed as the only true locus of knowledge, the Creator God, whose hand is ever present in the world and whose design is the source of all existence, is entirely displaced as a truly knowable and certain being. The idea of all being as creation loses its internal coherence, for creation presupposes a Creator. When the Creator is thus displaced, there is no creation, only being; and being has neither direction nor intent – it is because it can be, not because it has to be due to the guiding hand of the One Who makes it be.

Practically, what this means is that enlightenment era thinkers become increasingly dismissive of a God-given design to not just the universe but individual human life and human society as well. This creates a massive vacuum: if God does not decide how humans are to live their lives and which priorities they must pursue for their societies, then what, in fact, guides human behavior – both on an individual and societal level? And if the concept of seeking the pleasure of God by being in harmony with His design falls into disuse, what replaces it? God is thus displaced as the center of the moral universe – but He has yet to be replaced.

Human-Centered Moral Philosophy

The above-mentioned problem is most vigorously tackled by Enlightenment era thinkers, who posit a slew of replacements for a God-centered moral theology to a human-centered Moral philosophy. To be sure, the amalgamation of Aristotelian virtue ethics and Catholic doctrine was not inherently theo-centric, but the justifications of virtue ethics through the divine harmony in natural law by Thomas Aquinas provided a basic justification for hedging an Aristotelian framework within a theo-centric moral ontology through the idea of creation.

Now, however, with creation firmly displaced by being, moral philosophy has to contend with the displacement of natural law arguments as well as virtue ethics. What is the ultimate good? While Enlightenment and post-enlightenment era philosophers disagreed intensely over their competing theories, a constant current emerged in their contentions: the ultimate good must be human.

This good could be the personal human; it could be the communal human; it could be the societal human; it could be the political human. In the end, however, it had to be human. This could be argued through logical contradiction, as by Kant; or by consequence, as by Mills; but it must, in the end, not be rooted in nature or in God; rather, it must be rooted in the human.

The Birth of the Modern Moral Universe

What is rooted in an epistemological project resulted in a complete reimagining of human society due to its moral philosophical implications. For humanism, which is the predominant, almost hegemonic outlook of the modern world, humans are the determiners of their own ends and the chief architects of their own moral priorities. This is because morality is not based on harmony with the will of God, but because the human replaces God as the center of the moral universe.

The implications for a religious system like Islam are immense. It is not just a difference in moral philosophy; it shakes the very core of Islamic epistemology and theology. For, if the human is knave, knight, king, and god, then to whom does one submit if not the human? What is Islam, a religion of submission to God, except a complete opposition to the dominant moral model of the world today?