The Authoritative and the Authoritarian

This Conference thrives on the provocation of complexity. Muslims, nowadays, are provoked by complexity. This Conference exists, marginalized by obscurity. Muslims are obscured by their marginality. Meanings and concepts are aggravated by words and phrases. Ideas are imprisoned by the very words that express them. This Conference is injected in the midst of clichés, sales pitches, and gross oversimplifications. Chaos and complexity are the stuff of creation, but order and stability is the craving of life. The authoritative directs the complex and stabilizes the chaotic, but the authoritarian dooms all to death.
    Your book, The Authoritative and the Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses, has been published and you remember the days when you thought that a single book could change the world. You remember your short jalabiyya, and patchy beard, your miswak in the upper pocket a re-affirmation of power and triumph. The sparkling white head cover limited your range of vision and provided you with such unencumbered clarity. Back then a single book, Riyad al-Salihin (The Gardens of the Righteous) symbolized all the world had to say to you and all that you had to say to others. Parts of Hayat al-Sahaba (The Lives of the Companions) would be read in the mosque and visions of a perfectly ordered, perfectly structured society would relieve the stresses of your mind. When you bought a copy of Sahih al-Bukhari, you believed that all the problems and answers of existence were contained therein. Any contradiction was a challenge and any challenge was a negation of your existence. Everytime you would assure yourself, "I will commit the whole of Bukhari to memory and then..."
    You remember a world stremlined into self-invented categories --- simple and yielding to a perfect causality. You believed that if you do your du'a' well on Friday, the rest of the week would be perfect, but if you would forget a single verse or phrase, then the order would unfold and collapse. A simple world --- an authoritarian world, comfortable with its delusions, submerged in immaturity.
    You remember the day you seized your sister's cassette tapes and destroyed them. Music is haram,  you declared. When your mother punished you, you declared that your mother was living in haram as well. Your mother never listened to music either. The only thing she listened to was Qur'an, but you did not get the point. It took you years to get the point.
    What a world --- a world streamlined and in its dimensions, fed by ignorance and sheltered by arrogance. An authoritarian world where you are the authority. A world where the magnificence of God is represented through the authoritarian voice of a self-righteous self. A world where the Divine voice becomes imprisoned by a human voice and the human voice ascends to the throne. An essentially God-less world.
    Now years later, you publish The Authoritative and the Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses. God's Will must be discovered through its evidence and signs. The voices aspiring to comprehend the Divine Will are authoritative indicators, but they never become the embodiment of the Divine. These voices might be authoritative but they must never become authoritarian. Riyad al-Salihin and Sahih al-Bukhari are raw materials --- raw indicators to the Will of the Divine. The materials could be used to construct either the authoritative or the authoritarian. If the authoritarian is constructed, the text is rendered subservient and submerged into its representer and reader. If the authoritative is constructed, the text survives unencumbered and unlimited by its representer and reader.
    It was the endless spew of contemporary oral gyrations that once rendered your world uni-dimensional and linear. But the day came when you abandoned the contemporary apologetics and the rot of the modern decay in Islamic discourses and embraced the wonders of a bygone civilization. You read Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayni (d. 478/1084) explaining that the purpose of a Shari'a inquiry is not to reach the  right result but the inquiry itself. You read Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505) arguing that God's Will is not the ruling reached but the search for the ruling. The result of a search is not the point --- the point is the search. A life consumed by the search for the Divine Will is the divine Will and is the ultimate morality.
    In short, you grew up and your conscience grew. You are no longer as threatened, but you are no longer as confident and secure. You realize that while we seek to discover the Divine will, we never come to embody it. While we search the truth, we are not the truth. From this came the Conference, from this came the book. The child of the Conference, for the sake of the Conference, in the way of Allah --- May He accept.

May 1997
Khaled Abou El Fadl
Conference of the Books
Chapter 13.