Fitra, “The Human” and the “Non-Human”: From Colonial Humanism, To A Decolonial Islamic Ecology in Southwest Asia (Copy)
Fitrah, “The Human” and the “Non-Human”: From Colonial Humanism, To
A Decolonial Islamic Ecology in Southwest Asia
“What is by common consent called the human sciences have their own drama . . . All these discoveries, all these inquiries lead only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing—and that he must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from the other “animals.” . . . This amounts to nothing more nor less than man’s surrender. . . . Having reflected on that, I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I turn my back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism. . . . And truly what is to be done is to set man free.”
-Franz Fanon
When I asked her to speak about her late husband, my great grandmother told me, “He was more than just the best thinker and professor, he was the best life partner and the best teacher (murabbi) there was.” My Jiddo (grandfather), Dr. Adnan Subei, was a professor in psychology at the University of Damascus and a beloved figure in my familial history. As a writer and thinker growing up as a Syrian nation-state emerged from the ill-fated French mandate, Jiddo Adnan primarily concerned himself with reimagining a better future for the new nation. In doing so, he often drew on Islamic epistemologies, European philosophy, and scientific discovery. Yet, as my great grandmother keenly reminds me, his calm wit and soothing demeanor extended far beyond the confines of the academy: he was, above all else, a murabbi, a teacher principally concerned with nurturing the youth and fostering an embodied conduct in accordance with a deep “Divine Wisdom.”
One of Jiddo’s most significant intellectual commitments as an academic and murabbi was the painstaking process of defining “the human.” As a Syrian thinker, Jiddo’s quest of articulating the human beyond the colonial terms of Enlightenment thought has enormous political, social, and spiritual consequences shared with much of the postcolonial world. Unsurprisingly, the book at the center of this paper, Fitrat Allah fi Khalqih (The Fitrah of Allah in Creation), emerges in Syria at a time where many of his distant peers also took upon the question of (re)defining the human. Most notably, Jiddo’s writings find a kindred relationship with the work of Jamaican novelist and intellectual Sylvia Wynter, who coined the term “overrepresentation of Man” in 2003. The colonial project of defining “Man,” according to Wynter, creates the racialized and animalized subhuman “Other”—in the project of the Enlightenment, the secular “human” is distinguished against the irrational, animalized “subhuman.” Although, like Wynter, Jiddo seeks to fundamentally undermine secular humanism from a subaltern context, his critique of the Enlightenment ultimately reinscribes the overrepresentation of Man in Islamic terms. Yet, rather than dismissing Jiddo’s writings altogether as falling into a modernist trap, his conceptions of fitrah and tawhid as they relate to plant life and animal life allow room to imagine emancipatory political possibilities for the human and non-human in South West Asia.
Directly engaging with Jiddo’s writings pierces the fog surrounding thinkers from non-Western spheres, who are often not taken seriously or considered worth engaging in the Western academy—even as the academy comes to terms with the colonial power dynamics of its own knowledge production. Facing criticism from indigenous writers and thinkers, Western academics have increasingly thought of ways to meaningfully “decolonize” their academic practices. In the current-day context of a growing climate crisis, for instance, academics increasingly resort to a post-humanist “Ontological Turn” in hopes of disrupting the Anthropocene. The Ontological Turn encompasses “breathless ‘realisations’ that animals, the climate, water, ‘atmospheres’ and non-human presences like ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency, that ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ ‘human’ and ‘animal’ may not be so separate after all.” However, as Zoe Todd argues, the Ontological Turn in Western academia continues to sidestep indigenous worldviews and epistemologies, considered unworthy of citation or engagement. Engaging with Jiddo’s writings, as of yet untranslated into any other language but its original Arabic, pushes forward the “citational rebellion” articulated by Zoe Todd and Sarah Ahmed. Reading the hitherto unacknowledged writings of a Syrian thinker opens up the possibility of framing the so-called Ontological Turn at a specific site of knowledge production—namely, the postcolonial Syrian university.
In postcolonial contexts, defining the human holds considerable stakes, raising critical questions about the supposedly universal human-animal distinction and its accompanying taxonomies, steeped in colonial relationships of power. In his preface to The Order of Things, Michel Foucault complicates the pseudo-universalism of empiricism and scientific taxonomy by pointing out their emergence from a specific episteme rooted in European relationships of power. However, if Foucault destabilizes the human-animal divide by pointing to the ambiguous foundations of its construction, Sylvia Wynter goes beyond Foucault’s critique by specifically naming said power structure: the European colonial venture. Wynter traces the figure of Man from the Renaissance through European colonial ventures in the Americas, until the most recent iteration of Man as secular in Enlightenment thought. For Wynter, the overrepresentation of Man means conflating a “globally hegemonic ethnoclass” of “Man” with the “Human.” As such, the colonial system places its subhuman, “irrational animal” colonized subjects in a space of Otherness with non-human beings, maintaining the primacy of Western Man as an ontologically superior ruler. Indeed, in the postcolonial context, Man becomes the subject of intense competition, as the previously deemed “animals” seize the opportunity to assert their position as “Men.”
Specifically in the Levantine context, the colonial construction of Man defined the agenda of Syrian nation-building and political-economy, from late Ottoman colonial encounters, to the post-mandate period and the current refugee crisis. While the figure of Western Man entered South West Asian knowledge systems most profoundly after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, its political implications in the Levantine context became especially pronounced during the post-WWI French and British mandate systems. The British Mandate in Palestine, Iraq and Jordan and the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon created artificial nation-state borders in the name of emancipating the Levante from the Ottoman “sick man of Europe” and closer towards civilization and modernity. After Syrian independence from French rule in 1946 and the eventual ascendance of the military side of the Ba’ath regime in 1970, the move towards modernization progressed further. The nascent Syrian nation-state and its borders with occupied Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon gradually became impermeable realities. Consequently, the figure of Man as defined in Enlightenment discourse occupied central stage in the Levantine political economy, as modernization implied replacing a “backwards” human subjectivity for the “modern human.” As a consequence of increased liberalization and economic development in post-1980s Syria, destructive agricultural policies disenfranchised Syria’s historic rural classes to concentrate power in the hands of a rising neo-bourgeoisie and an increasingly powerful secret police state. In response, grassroots protests erupted in 2011 to demand political accountability and economic justice. The state responded with indiscriminate violence, as Syria escalated into a war with various global actors and complex power dynamics, resulting in the mass migration of Syrian refugees. This complex postcolonial Syrian history points to the urgency of rethinking the category of secular human, both in a historical sense and in the present-moment.
Given the intense politicization of the human question, it would appear disheartening at first to read Jiddo’s stated apolitical approach to his writings on the human, opting instead to focus on akhlaq (conduct)—however, his seemingly apolitical approach contains deep critiques of the the realm of politics in Syria. A few years before Fitrat Allah fi Khalqih, Jiddo wrote Akhlaq Al-Islam, in which he directly rejects the realm of politics from his analysis. According to Jiddo, the political human is purely a self-interested one, whereas he is more invested in fostering a human subjectivity entwined with akhlaq, or an embodied conduct that goes beyond the human presented in rational choice political paradigms. Jiddo’s dismissal of the political sphere serves a twofold purpose: it renders his writings safe from government censorship, a pronounced issue in Ba’athist Syria, while also implicitly critiquing the central tenets of contemporary politics. As Saba Mahmood points out, participants in the Islamic Revival that began in the 1970s throughout the Middle East primarily concerned themselves with “the retraining of ethical sensibilities so as to create a new social and moral order,” itself a deeply political project. As such, Jiddo’s role of creating a new human subject irrespective of the state’s political subjectivity should be seen as a political project in itself.
In fact, counter to Jiddo’s claims of writing about depoliticized religious conduct, a strong current of political critique runs through the early chapters of Fitrat Allah fi Khalqih—namely, a critique of globalization and US hegemony, what he calls the “religion” of global capitalism. In the second chapter of Fitrat Allah, Jiddo writes about the place of religion the world, arguing that “[Even] in contemporary societies, there are things that are worshipped such as money, which although is not a God, is still worshipped. Businessmen and ‘the people of money’ make orders, create rules, and have scary threats of violence,” thus making capitalism itself no less a religion than any formalized religious institution. Specifically, Jiddo takes aim at the “claims of globalization, nothing but a religion that they [the West] have called ‘the free market,’ and it is not a ‘market’ but rather an arrogance with a dominion that knows no boundaries on the people of the earth.” Jiddo’s scathing critique of global capitalism further pronounces the politics around his attempt to redefine the human, a human unbound by the “religion” of “the people of money.”
Jiddo extends his critique of global capitalism deeper into history by approaching the “materialism” of European Enlightenment thought, particularly taking aim at Charles Darwin’s evolutionary schema. Jiddo locates the history of European secular thought as a “reaction” to “the arrogance of the church,” specifically the violence committed at the hands of the Catholic Holy Office of Inquisition.” In place of the arrogance of the church, however, Jiddo posits that “a new arrogance” emerged in response, “the arrogance of the materialists, who venerated the material and denied the spirit.” Specifically singling out Charles Darwin, Jiddo takes ire with the arrogance of empiricism and the Darwinian evolutionary schema, which Jiddo argues reduces the human to an “animal” and denies the existence of “the spirit.” As a consequence of Darwin and “the materialists,” the animalized human becomes wholly preoccupied with material gain, that which he can see, feel and measure, at the expense of the immaterial. In other words,“If they [the West] discover a new law or learn something new, they say “we have achieved [military] victory over this and that,” as if the world were a wild animal that does not care about humanity and as if the mind were a warfare weapon with the mission of struggling and returning violence onto Being. As if knowledge only derives its value if it enriches the Human or adds to his wealth.”
In place of European veneration of the material, Jiddo identifies Islam to be Fitrah, articulated as a primordial state of Being in accordance with Divine Wisdom that is shared between humans, animals, plants, and other forms of life. At first, Jiddo includes Islam among a list of religions that includes capitalism, idol-worship, Christianity, Judaism, as well as other unnamed religions that exist throughout the world. However, soon after, Jiddo articulates Islam as being beyond simply another “religion” among religions, but a disposition and state of Being he associates with Fitrah. Jiddo defines Fitrah as a primordial state in accordance with Divine Wisdom, as knowledge that mortal beings have “before they learn anything.” Throughout the rest of the book, Jiddo attempts to show how Fitrah functions not only in the human being, but in other mortal beings belonging in the categories of “plant life” and “animal life” as well. Jiddo reminds readers of a Qur’anic verse that proclaims the abilities of all sentient Beings to invoke the name of Allah in worship (tasbih), as all human and non-human beings “live on land, are created on land, die on land, and return to Allah from land.” Therefore, Fitrah cannot be reductively translated as “human nature,” for the nature would have to be shared with more than just the “human.”
By extending the realm of Fitra to include both the human and the non-human, Jiddo also shows how certain plant life and animal life behave in ways that are “similar to humans,” fundamentally undermining the human arrogance underpinning materialism. Jiddo cites studies by the ulama, a linguistic slippage between traditional religious clergy (the historic use of the word ulama) and Western scientists. Jiddo’s slippage reveals his deep admiration for scientific epistemology and the wonders of plant life and animal life it has “discovered.” A bulk of the book draws upon these studies to marvel at plant life and animal life, deemed “signs of the Creator.” Plants, for instance, have their own personalities and feelings, which they express in languages that humans cannot always understand. They also have the ability to climb (as in vines) and parachute (as in certain kinds of seeds). Similarly, animals communicate, heal one another, and express emotions to one another and to humans, oftentimes even exceeding human capabilities. Concluding his reflections on plant life and animal life, Jiddo writes, “Nothing we can find in the human does not have a precedent in animals or plants. As we deepen our look into the files of life, we will see beautiful, wise designs that are similar to what human beings create and assume that they are uniquely gifted in creating.” Because all mortal beings are endowed with the Fitrah of life, non-human beings have the capacity to humble humanity with abilities that question the unique arrogance of the human.
However, despite the shared Fitrah between human and non-human beings, Jiddo does not conflate the human with the non-human, even portraying animals as markedly debased to respond to the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm. When Jiddo describes plant and animal behavior, he gestures towards their Divinely-designed Fitrah only insofar as they fit their own needs for survival. For example, when describing the sensations and feelings of insects, Jiddo concedes that insects can sense far more than a human being ever could. From this information, Jiddo deduces that Divine Wisdom allows for insects, as well as all other mortal creatures, to have “just the amount of senses and needs that their lives demand.” It follows, then, that the human Fitrah can also be designed by Allah in such a way that separates the human from the animal or the plant. To that end, Jiddo finds an ontological superiority in the human, whose Fitrah allows them to stand and walk upright as a bipedal being. Jiddo’s belief in the ontological superiority of Man cannot be separated from his attempt to respond to the Darwinian claim of the human as an “evolved” animal. Unlike animals who move with a “prone back” (a Qur’anic reference), the human walks upright in accordance with their unique Fitrah, a sign of human ontological superiority.
As such, while animals and plants become just signs of the existence of a Divine Power, the human becomes the khalifa (successor) and “master” of the earth, ultimately not too far off from the overrepresented Man critiqued by Sylvia Wynter. The descriptor khalifa emerges from the Qur’anic creation story, where Allah created Adam and vested within him the role of “successor,” to the disdain of the angels. However, the word also carries with it the khilafah, or Caliphate, a historical formation of power engulfing most of the premodern Islamicate. Therefore, the ontological description of man as khalifa, though not necessarily intended as such in the original text of the Qur’an, inevitably implies a formation of absolutist power vested in the human due to the historical baggage of the term. Indeed, Jiddo understands man as khalifa to imply that “Humans have qualities like justice and goodness and beauty and the sacred, animals do not. Humans feel the need to deliver a message and create civilization/modernity (hadarah) and elevation (irtiqa’) that he must do in order to become the khalifa of Allah.” This view of “the human” reinforces the ontological principle of human superiority permeating secular humanism, even as it critiques its “secularity” by imposing the premise of a Divine Reality. As a result, though Jiddo has his finger on the same pulse as his postcolonial peer Sylvia Wynter, his answer to the colonial construction of “the human” reinforces the core ontological principle that Wynter attempts to disrupt. Indeed, Jiddo even reiterates the colonial value judgments of “civilization” (hadarah) and “primitive knowledge/society” (mujtama’at/’ulum bida’iyah) in many of his writings.
However, one would be mistaken to simply add Jiddo onto a list of thinkers who fell into the trap of reiterating the terms of colonial knowledge—there is space to articulate radical political possibilities for the human and non-human between the lines of Jiddo’s writings. Embracing the limitations of Jiddo’s critiques, as well as the many contradictions inherent to most of his generational peers, invites a more generous reading of writers and thinkers from the colonial periphery. Many postcolonial theorists like Edward Said, Talal Asad, and Joseph Massad have cogently shed light on how South West Asian thinkers in the shadow of the colonial encounter often reiterate the modernist underpinnings of colonial knowledge, even as they seek to disrupt it or respond to it. Whether conceiving of themselves as “secular” or “Islamic,” 19th and 20th century thinkers on both sides of the flimsy Enlightenment religious/secular distinction inherited and reproduced the categories of civilization, nation, and of course, Man himself. However, to reductively toss Jiddo onto that lengthy list is to perhaps miss the point of his writings entirely—seeking to create a new human subjectivity beyond the pale of postcolonial Syrian politics. We would be remiss not to seek out the political and social possibilities opened up by his politics and his ontological precepts—to take his writings as a critical point of departure, rather than the end of the conversation.
Jiddo’s commitment to tawhid, for instance, can be deeply expanded when placed into dialogue with recent liberation exegeses of the Qur’an, which posit a Divine Being as an ultimate intermediary in human and non-human relationships to eradicate the figure of Man altogether. Tawhid, the doctrine of “Oneness of Allah,” according to Jiddo, necessitates that “no human deserves to have any dominion over other human beings… and there is no difference between tribes and peoples in nearness to Allah.” Similarly, recent feminist and decolonial exegeses of the Qur’an draw heavily on the theme of tawhid that my grandfather pulls from in his writings. Animal liberationist Qur’anic exegete Sarra Tlili takes Jiddo’s invocation of tawhid even further: if the human does not deserve to have dominion over other human beings, the same applies to non-human beings who are similarly described in the Qur’an as “peoples” and “tribes” themselves. Tlili argues against an ontological inferiority of animals by drawing on medieval Islamic exegetes Ibn Kathir, Al-Qurtubi, Al-Tabari, and Al-Razi, tracing views of animal inferiority back to the the Neoplatonic Great Chain of Being rather than the text of the Qur’an itself. Animals, like humans according to Tlili, are portrayed in the Qur’an as possessing great intellectual and emotional depth, as accountable beings capable of injustice, and as being capable of turning towards the Divine in prayer. On that last point, Jiddo certainly would not disagree. He writes,
“There cannot be a world designed with greater wisdom than our world, everything in it was created within a unified Being, harmonious and complete from the atom to the jar. And everything in between was created with a limited capacity and balanced out with care, and everything prays (yusabbih) to Allah and praises him. Everything confirms that there is no being except that they were created for a purpose enmeshed with the totality of Being.”
Taken in conversation with Tlili’s exegesis, the “totality of Being” would eradicate the figure of “Man” altogether, whose dominion has far extended the parameters of conscious and responsible relationality to human beings, non-human beings, and the Divine.
Additionally, Jiddo’s deep love for plant life, clearly favored over the animal in his book, points towards a greater embrace of indigenous South West Asian knowledge, a source of decolonial possibility. When Jiddo writes about plants as opposed to animals, his tone is noticeably more loving and awestruck. Considering that Darwin’s evolutionary paradigm posits human beings as a descendent of animals and not of plants, it may not be so surprising that Jiddo is more willing to bring the plant ontologically closer to the human than he would the animal. However, a deeper underlying reason pertains to Jiddo’s proximity to plant life. When writing about the feelings of plants, Jiddo argues that they are affected by their sense of place and their relationships to their indigenous human caretakers who have maintained them for multiple generations, employing Syrian proverbs as he describes these relationships. He argues that human caretakers must express their feelings towards their plants and even sing them songs, that plants are saddened when their human caretakers travel away even if their essential needs of water and soil are still met by other humans. In the context of Jiddo’s hometown of Damascus, where copious plant life and urban gardening run abound, Jiddo’s close relationship with plants comes as no surprise. Recent efforts to tap into indigenous South West Asian and North African knowledge, particularly as it pertains to plant life, can only further expand upon Jiddo’s deeply loving relationship to recover knowledge discredited through colonial epistemicide.
Seeking to engage Jiddo’s writings to break with the citational politics of Western academia reveals the contradictory impulses inherent in postcolonial writing. Putting Jiddo’s writings in conversation with Sylvia Wynter reveals a contradictory impulse at the center of Fitrat Allah fi Khalqih: while seeking to upend the coloniality of secular Man, Jiddo nevertheless reinscribes the ontological superiority of Man. Yet, rather than brushing aside his writings as “not decolonial enough,” a more critical engagement with his writings takes Fitrat Allah fi Khalqih as a starting point and not as a foregone conclusion. Such an engagement arises from the spirit of continuing Jiddo’s praxis as a murabbi, nurturing a new human subjectivity beyond the confines of modern Syrian politics. At a time where South West Asia and North Africa continue to be dominated by the politics of imperialism, colonial nation-states and borders, and repressive neo-bourgeois elites, ongoing redefinitions of the human beyond the colonial specter of Man cannot be more pertinent. Animals and plants, rather than belonging to a space of Otherness to Man, can become a source of new social and political possibility, where the overdetermined dominion of Man is abolished altogether.
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