Mysticism in contemporary Islamic political thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush.

• Author: von Heyking, John
• Position: Essay

"You know, I've had enough of big ideas." (2) Whether due to Western-style schemes of "development," Marxism, nationalism, secularism, or Islamism, the Islamic world has suffered its share of ideological activism. What these ideologies share is a "big idea," or ideology, that purports to transform the Islamic world into a modern post-industrial economy, Marxist utopia, collection of nations, liberal democracy, and caliphate, respectively. Today, Muslims find themselves torn between some version of secularism that wishes to remove "irrational" Islam from public life, and an Islamism that wishes to direct the totalizing political control of Islam into all facets of public and private life. Things are more complicated in Iran, where one finds an unpopular clerical establishment confronted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's millenarian faith in the return of the Twelfth Imam. In Turkey, a Turkish prosecutor, with the support of Islamists and secular nationalists, charged its top novelist, Orhan Pamuk, who later would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, with defaming the Turkish nation for comments he made about Turkey's historic mistreatment of Kurds and Armenians; the charges were subsequently dropped. (3)

One does not need to be an "orientalist" suffering post-colonialist Schadenfreude to recognize an eerie sense of unreality in these phenomena. The West has had no shortage of ideological "big ideas" that owe more to the imagination than to political philosophy. Political philosopher Eric Voegelin calls such ideologies "secondary realities" which involve a refusal to perceive things as they are. They are not simply subjectively held opinions, distorted by the "prejudices" we all bring to our understanding of the world. "Prejudice," after all, is nothing more than pre-judged data, that is, opinion. Ideology understood as "secondary reality" differs in kind because it involves a desire to rearrange the world according to one's will. Such willfulness, taken to its extreme, resembles more the conspiracy theorist who sees things when there is nothing to see, or the erotically obsessed who thinks his beloved reciprocates his love when she does not, than the prejudiced "orientalist" who more modestly brings along his cultural baggage to understand inadequately a foreign culture. The ideologue resembles more Plato's tyrant, whose imagination has destroyed his intellect, than the prisoner of the cave. An example from the Muslim world is Sayyid Qutb's distortion of Islam, where its traditional praxis gets transformed into the esoteric knowledge of a revolutionary vanguard, or when the statement, "there is no coercion in Islam," presupposes the revolutionary vanguard has already eliminated a field of action in which it might be possible to choose to become a Muslim. Ideology, understood as secondary reality, is about intellectual trickery, and, as such, it makes rational discourse with ideological activists extraordinarily difficult. (4)

Western attention is usually drawn toward Islamists and less often to the efforts among Muslims to theorize more authentically about their own existence. Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush analyze the ideological movements of their societies in terms comparable to Voegelin's, and experiment with mysticism, not as an escape from the ideological furnace, but as a means of recapturing a more authentic experience of reality characterized by existential openness.

Pamuk's impatience regarding "big ideas," seen in the epigraph of this essay, captures a promising though vulnerable sentiment one finds among intelligentsia in the Muslim world. Pamuk's novel, Snow (published in English in 2004), documents how "big ideas" convulse his Turkish homeland, where Islamists and secularists indulge in ideological fantasies that leave little to no room for a moderate and rationally informed political existence. (5) The main character, Ka, is a mystical poet whose meditations serve as experiments in personal existence amidst ideological rubble. He strives to transcend Islamists and secularists, and to serve as a bridge between Turkey and the West. Ka strives for personal nonideological existence in a globalized world.

Mentioned by Time magazine as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world, Soroush refigures the Sufi writings of the poet Rumi to experiment with mysticism as a way of transcending Iranian Islamism and Western secularism. (6) Whereas Ka's mysticism is apophatic (to use a term derived from Christianity), Soroush's mysticism is noetic in that it takes the form of a life of reason reaching out to the divine in a manner not unlike Augustine's account of the soul that stretches toward God. Soroush engages in a type of Socratic questioning that takes "dialogue" as its central form of existence, in which flashes of noetic insight appear among the interstices of the spoken word. Faith takes the form of reason reaching out; the activity of reason, not necessarily its conclusions, is the work of faith. Dialogue is thus communal and provides the existential basis for a religious community to take democratic form.

Soroush is more optimistic of the possibility of democracy in a (reformed) Shiite Islamic society than is Ka. (7) Both have comparable views on the nature of ideology as a secondary reality. Both experiment with mysticism to regain commonsense experience of the world, distorted neither by Islamist ideological fantasies, nor by a groundless secularism and relativism. This article demonstrates that the association of mysticism with common sense is not as oxymoronic as it sounds. While both share mysticism as an attempt to move past those secondary realities, Soroush's noetic mysticism is more successful. Even so, while it issues in a "dialogic" view of society that would sustain democracy, Soroush's Sufi mysticism, like that of Ka, is individualistic as he fails to provide what might be called a phenomenology of friendship that can fulfill the traditional Islamic demand for communal religious existence. (8)

Ideology as Secondary Reality

Both Pamuk and Soroush treat ideology, not simply as opinion, but as a libidinous refusal to perceive reality. In Snow, ideology takes the form of dream worlds, nihilism, and theatrics, whereas Soroush refers to ideology as "those ideas that have causes but no reasons" (94). Like Plato who speaks of misology (Republic 411d), ideology for Soroush is a "hatred of reason" (93).

Snow tells the story of Ka, a Turk living in Germany who has returned home and spends a few days in Kars, a small town near the Armenian frontier. A snowstorm has closed off the town from the outside world. He tells the locals he is writing a story about Kars for a German newspaper, which enables him to interact with a host of the town's characters, including Blue, the Islamist leader, Kadife, his girlfriend who defies the secularist school authorities by insisting on wearing a headscarf (though she had initially regarded it as a stunt), her sister, Ypek, to whom Ka swears his love, and Sunay Zaim, a Kamalist vaudeville artist who stages a play-within-a-play coup that constitutes the centerpiece of the novel's presentation of secondary realities.

Snow is itself an ambivalent symbol of purgation and mysterious cosmic order, but also of intellectual oblivion that represents the secondary reality in which Turkey is convulsed:

As [Ka] watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in the world. Soon afterward, he felt something else that he had not known for quite a long time and fell asleep in his seat (4). And so begins the story. Ka succumbs to sleep in order to enter Kars, which, separated from the world because of the snowstorm, constitutes a microcosm of Turkey and the Islamic world.

Ka confronts the dream world of Kars immediately upon arriving and meets Serdar Bey, who runs the local newspaper. Bey has already written an article about that evening's performance by Sunay Zaim, whose variety show, it turns out, will also include a reading by Ka of his poem, "Snow":

"I don't have a poem called, 'Snow,' and I'm not going to the theater this evening. Your newspaper will look like it's made a mistake." "Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. They fear us not because we are journalists but because we can predict the future; you should see how amazed they are when things do happen only because we've written them. And quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is about. I know you won't want to stand in the way of our being modern--you don't want to break our hearts--so that is why I am sure you will write a poem called 'Snow' and then come to the theater to read it" (29). For Bey, and possibly for Ka, being modern entails being swept up by forces whose end-points are predetermined by the forces of history and by ruling powers. In the West, we have seen this idea expressed by ideological and totalitarian movements where leaders portray themselves as prophets who go about ensuring their prophecies come true. For example, Aum Shakiro "prophesized" the Tokyo subway attacks before he attacked them, and Adolph Hitler "prophesized" the greed of Jewish bankers would lead to their extermination while he was exterminating the Jews. (9)

Feeding the dream world is the tendency of the inhabitants of Kars to display characteristics of the mass man or manque (Michael Oakeshott's term). Blue tells Ka: "To be a true Westerner, a person must first become an individual, and then they go on to say that in Turkey, there are no individuals!" (324). While Blue, the Islamist leader, equates "individual" with "Western" (and thus...