The “Metaphysical Monster” and Muslim Theology William James, Sherman Jackson, and the Problem of Black Suffering
Main Article Content
Keywords
Islamic theology, Blackamerican Muslims, William James, pragmatism
Abstract
By placing Blackamerican Muslim theologian Sherman A. Jackson’s work, especially his Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, in conversation with the work of American pragmatist William James, I explore the pragmatic dimensions of Islamic thought through an examination of Jackson’s account of classical Islamic theology put forward in response to the problem of Black suffering. In doing so, I argue that Jackson’s account both parallels and challenges a Jamesian account of religion. It parallels James in that it speaks of the “practical effectiveness” of the “web of beliefs” constituting Islamic doctrines of God in inculcating certain habits of seeing and acting in the world that best deal with the challenges of “black experience”; however, in this process, the category of “experience” itself and its role in the verification of belief is thoroughly interrogated. In his critical engagement with Black philosopher of religion William R.
Jones, Jackson exposes the uncritical role played by “experience” in Jones’ thought, a charge which will be made of James as well. In making this argument about Jackson, I hope to provide an example of a Muslim theologian who makes explicit the pragmatic dimensions of religious doctrine, demonstrating that thick theological discourse can be practical.
There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.
—G.K. Chesterton, “Heretics”
References
Endnotes
1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (New York, NY: Random House,
Inc., 1994), 487.
2 Ibid., 470.
3 After presenting Cardinal John Henry Newman’s discussions of the attributes of
God, James concludes by writing, “I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical
determinations farther, into the mysteries of God’s Trinity, for example.”
Ibid., 482.
4 See James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1970); James Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology,
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971); Major Jones, The Color of God: The Concept
of God in Afro-American Thought, (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1987); Delores S. Williams,
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1993); Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation,
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999); J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account,
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your
Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015),
just to name a few.
5 It is important to note that Jackson’s interpretation of Jones is a contested one.
For example, scholar of Blackamerican religious thought William David Hart has
challenged Jackson’s reading of Jones, claiming that Jackson takes “humanocentric
theism” to be Jones’ normative position (as opposed to the “secular humanism”
which Jones in fact prefers) as well as challenging Jackson’s argument that Jones
uncritically valorized secular Euro-centric conceptions of autonomy in his critiques
of Black Christian theodicies. The former critique may be found in Hart, “‘One
Percenters’: Black Atheists, Secular Humanists, and Naturalists,” The South Atlantic
Quarterly 112/4 (2013), 681-82, while the latter critique was made at a panel at the
2014 American Academy of Religion conference. There, Hart specifically referenced
Jones’ concept of “multievidentiality” to demonstrate that his notion of experience
was anything but uncritical. More will be said about both charges in what follows,
but I should state that my primary objective in this article is the analysis of how
Jackson draws on classical Islamic theology to address issues around Black theodicy
raised by Jones rather than the assessment of Jackson’s critical engagement with
Jones. Such an adjudication lies beyond the purview of this article.
6 James, 542.
7 Ibid., 470. In the distinction between experience and language which seems to
undergird this claim, James parts ways with the pragmatism of Charles Sanders
Peirce. Louis Menand captures well this aspect of Peirce’s thought when he writes
that for Peirce, “[t]here are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are
themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all….For
HOUSTON: THE “ME TAPHYSICAL MONSTER” AND MUSLIM THEOLOGY 35
Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the making of signs,
and of the making of signs there is no end….There is no exit from the dictionary.
Peirce didn’t simply think that language is like that. He thought that the universe
is like that.” Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 2001), 364.
8 Ibid., 475.
9 Ibid., 484-485. It was in this passage that James first introduced the “pragmatic”
thought of Peirce to wider audiences, and this mention along with other references
to Peirce’s work, ignited an interest in the thought of Peirce which had heretofore
not existed. Although James gave his Gifford lectures, later to be published as the
Varieties, in 1902, this quoted passage from Peirce’s writings was taken from his
1878 essay, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” published in Popular Science Monthly.
10 Ibid., 487. As will be discussed later in the paper, that “vital conversation with the
unseen divine” for James takes the form of personal, mystical experience.
11 Ibid., 486.
12 Ibid., 487.
13 Ibid., 488.
14 Ibid.
15 In making this point, Hauerwas admits that he is not claiming that James would have
had such an example in mind when making such a statement. Stanley Hauerwas,
With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology, (Grand
Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 67. Quoted from James “Pragmatism: A New Name
for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” Pragmatism and Other Writings, edited with an
introduction and notes by Giles Gunn, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 36.
16 Also key to Hauerwas’ engagement with James is his critique of the implicit dualism
found in the primacy of “feeling” found in James’ account of religion which
fails to adequately recognize the linguistic dimensions of thought and experience.
It is this emphasis on “feeling” as the deepest source of religion that leads James
to pronounce much philosophical and theological discourse a series of “formulas”
or “over-beliefs” which are “secondary products.” James, Varieties, 559. Although
James admits that “over-beliefs” are “the most interesting and valuable things”
about an individual, he still believes them to be unnecessary accretions that prevent
one from grasping the true heart of religion which is grounded in “feeling.”
The dualism Hauerwas detects lies in this emphasis on “feeling” which leads to his
attempts to extrapolate “kernels” of emotional experience from religious systems’
socio-linguistically derived categories. Such a practice presents issues because this
“distinction between religious experience and ‘over-beliefs’…depends on a problematic
distinction between ‘experience’ and language.” Hauerwas, With the Grain
of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology, 55.
17 James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, 40.
36 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISL AM AND SOCIE TY 40:3-4
18 We will return to this topic below in the discussion of the relationship between truth and “verification” in James’ thought. For James, an idea can be deemed true to the extent that harmonizes with one’s experience of the world and aids in the navigation of that world. As will be discussed, this raises the question of the status and nature of the category of “experience” itself, a category that is far from neutral.
19 Ibid., 47.
20 Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17.
21 Ibid., 19.
22 Jackson distinguishes “traditional (white) theodicy” in which “suffering has been thought of in highly individualistic (if impersonal) terms and as being almost senselessly random” from “black theodicy” which “rejects this impersonal…random framework as being oblivious to and incapable of accommodating the reality of ‘ethnic suffering,’ where a ‘discrete and insular’ group is singled out for suffering that is at once ‘enormous, mal-distributed and transgenerational.” Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 23.
25 Ibid., 6.
26 Ibid., 4.
27 Ibid., 13-14.
28 Ibid., 14-15; 158.
29 Ibid., 52.
30 Although Jackson places Ashʿarites, Māturīdites, and Traditionalists in the same category as privileging divine omnipotence over divine omnibenevolence, it should be noted that both Māturīdites and Traditionalists, each in their own manners, affirmed elements of both in their doctrines of God, a point even affirmed by Jackson in his discussion of both schools (Māturīdites, 109-13; Traditionalists, 143-47). I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing my attention to this point.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 In this discussion of Muʿtazilite “reason,” Jackson subverts its claims to universal rationality by pointing out that “[t]o be sure, ‘reason’ did not refer to the plain dictates of the human faculties. It included a battery of assumptions, premises and circumscriptions fashioned out of the legacy of late antiquity, especially Aristotle, alongside various ‘Middle Eastern’ and Central Asian complements and competitors.” Ibid., 49.
34 Ibid.
HOUSTON: THE “ME TAPHYSICAL MONSTER” AND MUSLIM THEOLOGY 37
35 Ibid., 53.
36 Ibid., 52.
37 Ibid., 55.
38 Jones also offers “secular humanism” as another alternative for what he believes to be a viable black theodicy of liberation. While he prefers this model, he admits that theism is so heavily anchored in the Black community that a purely secular approach is futile. Thus, his belief that “humanocentric theism” is the next best option. Ibid., 14.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 15.
41 Ibid., 64.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 71. Quoted from Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. It should also be noted that Niebuhr’s own thought was greatly influenced by pragmatism. See Mark L. Haas, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Christian Pragmatism’: A Principled Alternative to Consequentialism,” The Review of Politics, 61/4 (1999), 605–36 and Mark Douglas, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Two Pragmatisms,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 22/3 (2001), 221–40.
44 Ibid.
45 Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, 71.
46 William James, “The Will to Believe,” Pragmatism and Other Writings, edited with an introduction and notes by Giles Gunn, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 214.
47 Ibid. James also writes, “[b]ut in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by believing a premature theory need be faced” Ibid., 211.
48 James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 164.
49 James, “The Will to Believe,” 233.
50 Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, 105.
51 Ibid., 106.
52 Ibid., 107.
53 Ibid., 109.
54 Ibid., 110.
55 Ibid., 115.
56 Ibid., 118. Quote from Qurʾān 2:193.
38 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISL AM AND SOCIE T Y 40:3-4
57 Ibid., 120.
58 Ibid. Jackson quoting Jones.
59 Ibid., 121.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 122.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 123. Nandy even goes so far as to defend a preference for a consciousness
produced by oppression over one produced by power. Jackson quotes him as stating,
“[b]etween the modern master and the non-modern slave, one must choose the
slave, not because one should voluntarily choose poverty or admit the superiority
of suffering, not only because the slave is oppressed, not even because he works
(which Marx said made him less alienated than the master). One must choose the
slave because he represents a higher-order cognition which perforce includes the
master as human, whereas the master’s cognition has to exclude the slave except
as ‘thing.’” Quote taken from Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self
Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), xv-xvi.
66 Ibid.
67 James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 88.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 89.
70 Ibid., 90.
71 Ibid., 91.
72 James, “The Meaning of Truth,” 155. He also writes that “[a]ll the sanctions of a law
of truth lie in the very texture of experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete
truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences
most profitably combine.”
73 James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 106. Elsewhere
in his “Pragmatism” lectures, James writes that, “[t]emperaments with their cravings
and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will” and
“[w]e measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the flavor
of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.” Ibid., 21. Of course this
recognition of the role of “feeling” in the philosophic enterprise by James led him
to develop strong sympathies for the “humanistic” conception of truth advocated
by F.C.S. Schiller and John Dewey which thought of the “true” as the more “satisfactory.”
James, “The Meaning of Truth,” 148.
74 Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, 91.
HOUSTON: THE “ME TAPHYSICAL MONSTER” AND MUSLIM THEOLOGY 39
75 Ibid., 95.
76 Ibid., 96.
77 Ibid., 96-7.
78 Ibid., 66.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 161.
82 Ibid., 161-62. This conception of theology as a publicly negotiated discourse resonates in interesting ways with Jackson’s more recent discussions of what he terms the “Islamic secular.” Jackson defines the “Islamic secular” as those forms of knowledge not grounded in “the scriptural sources of Sharia nor their proper extension via the tools enshrined by Islamic legal methodology (uṣūl al-fiqh).” Drawing on the Sunni intellectual tradition generally, and Egyptian Maliki jurist Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (d. 684/1285) specifically, he distinguishes the sharʿī realm governed by legal rulings (aḥkām) from the non-sharʿī realm where legitimate judgments may be made according to a variety of epistemologies, from public administration to modern medicine to cultural production. This latter sphere is considered “secular” in the sense that its norms are not derived from incontrovertible legal rulings; however, this does not mean that it lies beyond the purview of Islam itself. Rather it means that judgments made in this “secular” sphere rely on Islamic or non-Islamic epistemologies and norms which may be contested. Thus, when it comes to public matters, non-sharʿī judgments may be challenged by the community (ummah) if they are not deemed to serve the common good. In highlighting this resonance, I do not intend to conflate Jackson’s description of Muslim theology and his conception of the “Islamic secular,” as if the latter were a form of theological discourse. I make this observation only to foreground the degree to which both may be characterized as public, dialogical, and within an Islamic framework, epistemically open. Sherman A. Jackson, “The Islamic Secular,” American Journal of Islam and Society, 34/2 (2017), 1–38.
83 Ibid., 162.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 163.
88 Ibid.
89 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 543.
90 Ibid., 542.
91 Ibid., 557. In his identification of the role played by the subconscious, James writes, “[l]et me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side,
40 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISL AM AND SOCIE T Y 40:3-4
the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its
hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.” Here the subconscious
mediates the “more” with which one feels connected in religious experiences
by acting as the arena, psychological in this case, in which the “more” produces its
effects.
92 Ibid., 561.
93 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging words and
insightful comments. As a result of implementing their recommended revisions,
my article has been undoubtedly improved.
1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (New York, NY: Random House,
Inc., 1994), 487.
2 Ibid., 470.
3 After presenting Cardinal John Henry Newman’s discussions of the attributes of
God, James concludes by writing, “I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical
determinations farther, into the mysteries of God’s Trinity, for example.”
Ibid., 482.
4 See James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1970); James Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology,
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971); Major Jones, The Color of God: The Concept
of God in Afro-American Thought, (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1987); Delores S. Williams,
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1993); Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation,
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999); J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account,
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your
Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015),
just to name a few.
5 It is important to note that Jackson’s interpretation of Jones is a contested one.
For example, scholar of Blackamerican religious thought William David Hart has
challenged Jackson’s reading of Jones, claiming that Jackson takes “humanocentric
theism” to be Jones’ normative position (as opposed to the “secular humanism”
which Jones in fact prefers) as well as challenging Jackson’s argument that Jones
uncritically valorized secular Euro-centric conceptions of autonomy in his critiques
of Black Christian theodicies. The former critique may be found in Hart, “‘One
Percenters’: Black Atheists, Secular Humanists, and Naturalists,” The South Atlantic
Quarterly 112/4 (2013), 681-82, while the latter critique was made at a panel at the
2014 American Academy of Religion conference. There, Hart specifically referenced
Jones’ concept of “multievidentiality” to demonstrate that his notion of experience
was anything but uncritical. More will be said about both charges in what follows,
but I should state that my primary objective in this article is the analysis of how
Jackson draws on classical Islamic theology to address issues around Black theodicy
raised by Jones rather than the assessment of Jackson’s critical engagement with
Jones. Such an adjudication lies beyond the purview of this article.
6 James, 542.
7 Ibid., 470. In the distinction between experience and language which seems to
undergird this claim, James parts ways with the pragmatism of Charles Sanders
Peirce. Louis Menand captures well this aspect of Peirce’s thought when he writes
that for Peirce, “[t]here are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are
themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all….For
HOUSTON: THE “ME TAPHYSICAL MONSTER” AND MUSLIM THEOLOGY 35
Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the making of signs,
and of the making of signs there is no end….There is no exit from the dictionary.
Peirce didn’t simply think that language is like that. He thought that the universe
is like that.” Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 2001), 364.
8 Ibid., 475.
9 Ibid., 484-485. It was in this passage that James first introduced the “pragmatic”
thought of Peirce to wider audiences, and this mention along with other references
to Peirce’s work, ignited an interest in the thought of Peirce which had heretofore
not existed. Although James gave his Gifford lectures, later to be published as the
Varieties, in 1902, this quoted passage from Peirce’s writings was taken from his
1878 essay, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” published in Popular Science Monthly.
10 Ibid., 487. As will be discussed later in the paper, that “vital conversation with the
unseen divine” for James takes the form of personal, mystical experience.
11 Ibid., 486.
12 Ibid., 487.
13 Ibid., 488.
14 Ibid.
15 In making this point, Hauerwas admits that he is not claiming that James would have
had such an example in mind when making such a statement. Stanley Hauerwas,
With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology, (Grand
Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 67. Quoted from James “Pragmatism: A New Name
for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” Pragmatism and Other Writings, edited with an
introduction and notes by Giles Gunn, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 36.
16 Also key to Hauerwas’ engagement with James is his critique of the implicit dualism
found in the primacy of “feeling” found in James’ account of religion which
fails to adequately recognize the linguistic dimensions of thought and experience.
It is this emphasis on “feeling” as the deepest source of religion that leads James
to pronounce much philosophical and theological discourse a series of “formulas”
or “over-beliefs” which are “secondary products.” James, Varieties, 559. Although
James admits that “over-beliefs” are “the most interesting and valuable things”
about an individual, he still believes them to be unnecessary accretions that prevent
one from grasping the true heart of religion which is grounded in “feeling.”
The dualism Hauerwas detects lies in this emphasis on “feeling” which leads to his
attempts to extrapolate “kernels” of emotional experience from religious systems’
socio-linguistically derived categories. Such a practice presents issues because this
“distinction between religious experience and ‘over-beliefs’…depends on a problematic
distinction between ‘experience’ and language.” Hauerwas, With the Grain
of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology, 55.
17 James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, 40.
36 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISL AM AND SOCIE TY 40:3-4
18 We will return to this topic below in the discussion of the relationship between truth and “verification” in James’ thought. For James, an idea can be deemed true to the extent that harmonizes with one’s experience of the world and aids in the navigation of that world. As will be discussed, this raises the question of the status and nature of the category of “experience” itself, a category that is far from neutral.
19 Ibid., 47.
20 Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17.
21 Ibid., 19.
22 Jackson distinguishes “traditional (white) theodicy” in which “suffering has been thought of in highly individualistic (if impersonal) terms and as being almost senselessly random” from “black theodicy” which “rejects this impersonal…random framework as being oblivious to and incapable of accommodating the reality of ‘ethnic suffering,’ where a ‘discrete and insular’ group is singled out for suffering that is at once ‘enormous, mal-distributed and transgenerational.” Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 23.
25 Ibid., 6.
26 Ibid., 4.
27 Ibid., 13-14.
28 Ibid., 14-15; 158.
29 Ibid., 52.
30 Although Jackson places Ashʿarites, Māturīdites, and Traditionalists in the same category as privileging divine omnipotence over divine omnibenevolence, it should be noted that both Māturīdites and Traditionalists, each in their own manners, affirmed elements of both in their doctrines of God, a point even affirmed by Jackson in his discussion of both schools (Māturīdites, 109-13; Traditionalists, 143-47). I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing my attention to this point.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 In this discussion of Muʿtazilite “reason,” Jackson subverts its claims to universal rationality by pointing out that “[t]o be sure, ‘reason’ did not refer to the plain dictates of the human faculties. It included a battery of assumptions, premises and circumscriptions fashioned out of the legacy of late antiquity, especially Aristotle, alongside various ‘Middle Eastern’ and Central Asian complements and competitors.” Ibid., 49.
34 Ibid.
HOUSTON: THE “ME TAPHYSICAL MONSTER” AND MUSLIM THEOLOGY 37
35 Ibid., 53.
36 Ibid., 52.
37 Ibid., 55.
38 Jones also offers “secular humanism” as another alternative for what he believes to be a viable black theodicy of liberation. While he prefers this model, he admits that theism is so heavily anchored in the Black community that a purely secular approach is futile. Thus, his belief that “humanocentric theism” is the next best option. Ibid., 14.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 15.
41 Ibid., 64.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 71. Quoted from Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. It should also be noted that Niebuhr’s own thought was greatly influenced by pragmatism. See Mark L. Haas, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Christian Pragmatism’: A Principled Alternative to Consequentialism,” The Review of Politics, 61/4 (1999), 605–36 and Mark Douglas, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Two Pragmatisms,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 22/3 (2001), 221–40.
44 Ibid.
45 Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, 71.
46 William James, “The Will to Believe,” Pragmatism and Other Writings, edited with an introduction and notes by Giles Gunn, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 214.
47 Ibid. James also writes, “[b]ut in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by believing a premature theory need be faced” Ibid., 211.
48 James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 164.
49 James, “The Will to Believe,” 233.
50 Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, 105.
51 Ibid., 106.
52 Ibid., 107.
53 Ibid., 109.
54 Ibid., 110.
55 Ibid., 115.
56 Ibid., 118. Quote from Qurʾān 2:193.
38 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISL AM AND SOCIE T Y 40:3-4
57 Ibid., 120.
58 Ibid. Jackson quoting Jones.
59 Ibid., 121.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 122.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 123. Nandy even goes so far as to defend a preference for a consciousness
produced by oppression over one produced by power. Jackson quotes him as stating,
“[b]etween the modern master and the non-modern slave, one must choose the
slave, not because one should voluntarily choose poverty or admit the superiority
of suffering, not only because the slave is oppressed, not even because he works
(which Marx said made him less alienated than the master). One must choose the
slave because he represents a higher-order cognition which perforce includes the
master as human, whereas the master’s cognition has to exclude the slave except
as ‘thing.’” Quote taken from Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self
Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), xv-xvi.
66 Ibid.
67 James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 88.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 89.
70 Ibid., 90.
71 Ibid., 91.
72 James, “The Meaning of Truth,” 155. He also writes that “[a]ll the sanctions of a law
of truth lie in the very texture of experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete
truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences
most profitably combine.”
73 James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” 106. Elsewhere
in his “Pragmatism” lectures, James writes that, “[t]emperaments with their cravings
and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will” and
“[w]e measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the flavor
of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.” Ibid., 21. Of course this
recognition of the role of “feeling” in the philosophic enterprise by James led him
to develop strong sympathies for the “humanistic” conception of truth advocated
by F.C.S. Schiller and John Dewey which thought of the “true” as the more “satisfactory.”
James, “The Meaning of Truth,” 148.
74 Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, 91.
HOUSTON: THE “ME TAPHYSICAL MONSTER” AND MUSLIM THEOLOGY 39
75 Ibid., 95.
76 Ibid., 96.
77 Ibid., 96-7.
78 Ibid., 66.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 161.
82 Ibid., 161-62. This conception of theology as a publicly negotiated discourse resonates in interesting ways with Jackson’s more recent discussions of what he terms the “Islamic secular.” Jackson defines the “Islamic secular” as those forms of knowledge not grounded in “the scriptural sources of Sharia nor their proper extension via the tools enshrined by Islamic legal methodology (uṣūl al-fiqh).” Drawing on the Sunni intellectual tradition generally, and Egyptian Maliki jurist Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (d. 684/1285) specifically, he distinguishes the sharʿī realm governed by legal rulings (aḥkām) from the non-sharʿī realm where legitimate judgments may be made according to a variety of epistemologies, from public administration to modern medicine to cultural production. This latter sphere is considered “secular” in the sense that its norms are not derived from incontrovertible legal rulings; however, this does not mean that it lies beyond the purview of Islam itself. Rather it means that judgments made in this “secular” sphere rely on Islamic or non-Islamic epistemologies and norms which may be contested. Thus, when it comes to public matters, non-sharʿī judgments may be challenged by the community (ummah) if they are not deemed to serve the common good. In highlighting this resonance, I do not intend to conflate Jackson’s description of Muslim theology and his conception of the “Islamic secular,” as if the latter were a form of theological discourse. I make this observation only to foreground the degree to which both may be characterized as public, dialogical, and within an Islamic framework, epistemically open. Sherman A. Jackson, “The Islamic Secular,” American Journal of Islam and Society, 34/2 (2017), 1–38.
83 Ibid., 162.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 163.
88 Ibid.
89 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 543.
90 Ibid., 542.
91 Ibid., 557. In his identification of the role played by the subconscious, James writes, “[l]et me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side,
40 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISL AM AND SOCIE T Y 40:3-4
the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its
hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.” Here the subconscious
mediates the “more” with which one feels connected in religious experiences
by acting as the arena, psychological in this case, in which the “more” produces its
effects.
92 Ibid., 561.
93 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging words and
insightful comments. As a result of implementing their recommended revisions,
my article has been undoubtedly improved.
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Published
Nov 13, 2023
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Houston, S. (2023). The “Metaphysical Monster” and Muslim Theology: William James, Sherman Jackson, and the Problem of Black Suffering. American Journal of Islam and Society, 40(3-4), 6–40. https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v40i3-4.3267
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