Freedom Before and After Muhammad
By John Taylor; 2009 Aug 23, Asma 04, 166 BE
Pre-Islamic Ideas about Freedom
Yesterday we started examining freedom in the dimension of politics. We looked at how Ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman thinkers worked out some basic principles of freedom, such as open access to information and letting nature take its course. The spiritual principle of "Let go, let God," gradually become the economic and political doctrine of the invisible hand, or Laissez Faire. However, I ignored one huge elephant in the room, slavery, which I will acknowledge today.
Slavery was surely the greatest burden that the Ancient world had to bear on the path to political freedom. Full and universal freedom was and still is utterly inconceivable as long as the institution of slavery exists in any of its many forms.
The Jewish law had built into its calendar certain mechanisms for the gradual removal of slavery. All Jewish slaves were to be freed in the Jubilee year, which took place every seven sabbaticals, or the fiftieth year. Since in the Ancient world slavery was both motive and fruit of wars of conquest, it was clear that the only complete end to slavery could happen at least fifty years after governments put a permanent end to war. This, it was prophesied, would come about with the advent of a Messiah, the "Prince of Peace."
The revelation of Christ cracked the foundation of slavery with its teachings about spirit, love and sacrifice. "The truth," Jesus declared, "will set you free." Conversely, what does not free, is not based upon truth. In order to be free, His actions demonstrated, we must voluntarily give up what we have. This is of the essence of love. God Himself made this sacrifice when He allowed the One titled His Son to suffer, be crucified and thus become a "ransom for many." (Matt 20:28) A ransom is a monetary equivalent for a person that is paid for the release of a slave or prisoner of war. Although this ultimate sacrifice offered a spiritual and theoretical solution to slavery, practical application was vitiated by corrupting factors such as clericalism, monasticism and asceticism. The latter two especially offered flight from the world as an alternative to the admittedly daunting practical mission of establishing peace and full manumission of slaves.
Freedom and Islam
The advent of Islam offered certain correctives to some of the corruptive factors that had crept into Christianity, such as asceticism, monasticism and the doctrine that an infinite God could literally have a son. But most of all, Islam addressed the one aspect of slavery that the ancients had always ignored, and which had kept them from paying the issue due attention: the question of social justice.
The Qur'an held up the rule of God as our ultimate exemplar in matters involving freedom. "Allah bears witness that there is no god but He ... maintaining His creation with justice..." (Qur'an 3:18, Shakir) Yes, the truth will set you free, but first we must examine how truth operates in nature. Once we understand that we have another powerful dimension in which to understand freedom: science. All the basic characteristics of modern science were collected together and first applied under Islamic civilization.
Like the Jewish scriptures, Islamic law included measures for gradual elimination of slavery; and like Christianity and other earlier religions, corruption prevented the practical ideal from being applied in practice. Slavery and serfdom persisted in Islamic lands and Muslim slave traders were the most notorious in the world for many centuries. Nonetheless, the teachings and ideals set forth in the Qur'an are noteworthy and its powerful emphasis on monotheism and divine justice changed the moral reflexes of civilization forever.
The Qur'an goes further towards complete manumission than any previous religious teaching. It assures that subject peoples of Islam would not be permanently enslaved or oppressed, as still happens in "undeveloped" countries today. They were to be treated equitably and, if they or their forebears converted, they had a chance at complete equality with other Muslims.
"Allah does not forbid you respecting those who have not made war against you on account of (your) religion ... show them kindness and deal with them justly; surely Allah loves the doers of justice." (Qur'an 60:8, Shakir)
So great was the emphasis on justice in Islam that when the first, great Iron Curtain fell, after almost a thousand years of obscurantism and isolationism, Muslims were surprised to find the very word "freedom" used frequently in Western lands. Orientalist Bernard Lewis describes what happened.
"The first Egyptian student mission went to France in 1826. Their chaplain, a sheikh from al-Azhar, learned a great deal (probably more than his student wards) and wrote a remarkable book about Paris. In it he discusses the National Assembly and the freedom of the press, among other things, and makes the very astute observation that the French, when they speak of freedom, mean roughly what Muslims are getting at when they talk of justice. With this insight, he cuts right to the heart of a key difference between European political culture and its Islamic counterpart."
"To Muslims, the use of `freedom' as a political term was an imported novelty, dating only from the time of the French Revolution and General Napoleon Bonaparte's arrival in Egypt in 1798. Before that, it had only legal and social connotations, and meant simply the condition of not being a slave. For Muslim thinkers, as the sheikh from al-Azhar implied, justice is the ideal, the touchstone by which one distinguishes good governments from bad." (Bernard Lewis, `Islam and Liberal Democracy: A Historical Overview,' Journal of Democracy 7.2, 1996, 52-63, at: http://calliope.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v007/7.2lewis.html)
This is born out by an examination of the Qur'an. It has by my count only one or three mentions of the word `freedom', depending on the translation, as opposed to 27 or 41 mentions of justice. The few mentions that do occur of freedom are all to do with the condition of not being a slave. This lack of emphasis on freedom as a value in itself is, I suppose, a consequence of the complete legal equality that Islam sets up among believers. Any disputes among Muslims are resolved first by establishing peace and order, then by rectifying any unfairness at the root of the violence. There was to be no respecting persons, no prior consideration of social or religious rank.
"And if two parties of the believers quarrel, make peace between them; but if one of them acts wrongfully towards the other, fight that which acts wrongfully until it returns to Allah's command; then if it returns, make peace between them with justice and act equitably; surely Allah loves those who act equitably." (Qur'an 49:9, Shakir)
The very name "Islam" means submission to God, which from a superficial view seems to be pretty much the converse of the wholy political and unfettered freedom prevalent in the West. Even heaven is depicted in the Qur'an as a place where a Muslim abides in an order of just rulings among angels.
"And you shall see the angels going round about the throne glorifying the praise of their Lord; and judgment shall be given between them with justice, and it shall be said: All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the worlds." (Qur'an 39:75, Shakir)
This does not depict a place where believers do whatever they please. The big difference is that in heaven God distributes absolute justice Himself, whereas here we rely upon imperfect, relative approximations to justice by fallible mortals.
It is interesting to note that even after the Revelations of the Bab and Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Baha in His first, great statement on reform and the political implications of religion, did not deviate from the Islamic emphasis on divine justice and morality as prime delimiters of personal freedom.
"Not until discipline, order and good government reach the degree where an individual, even if he should put forth his utmost efforts to do so, would still find himself unable to deviate by so much as a hair's breadth from righteousness, can the desired reforms be regarded as fully established." (Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 16)
Compare this to the definition of freedom given, for example, in the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man,
"Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law." (Article #4)
This is both broader and narrower than the strict, justice-bound freedom advocated by Islam and `Abdu'l-Baha. It is narrower in that it restricts itself wholly to the delimited, bounded realm of law and politics. But it is also broader because it leaves the individual completely free to do as she pleases, irrespective even of God's wishes. The Declaration places total reliance on law and external sanctions to limit human freedom, leaving only an invisible hand of Laissez Faire to work out our destinies. It can be seen why this purely political concept of freedom left enough wiggle room for vested interests to continue their highly profitable "peculiar institution" of slavery for the better part of a century after the American and French declarations of rights had been promulgated.
Even today, long after chattel slavery has been largely abolished in most countries, the vast majority of humans are as cruelly fettered by poverty as any slave of Ancient Rome. It is our thesis in these essays that the only way we are ever to free everybody will be to apply all three dimensions of freedom, political, religious and scientific. To quote the statement that set this series rolling:
"Just as we inhabit space that can be mapped in three dimensions, every choice we make in our lives must negotiate a position in three dimensions of freedom: religious, scientific and political."
We will continue next time with an overview of modern thought on political freedom.
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