The Final Imperative: An Islamic Theology of Liberation

By Shabbir Akhtar

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0947792937
• ISBN13: 9780947792930
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Bellew Publishing
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Solid, Simple, Deep, Powerful, Terrifying

Shabbir Akhtar is a British cleric who belongs in a sort of broad way to the ideological circle of Sayyid Qutb (there's a chapter on Qutb in his book), about whom someone wrote a really scary article in the New York Times Magazine some weeks ago. I haven't read either Qutb's book, In the Shade of the Qur'an, or the longer version of the magazine article that was just published. But Akhtar's book confirms my suspicions that we are not only not winning the ideological war, we are losing it. To those of us who have some feeling for this country, or for the project of enlightenment, broadly conceived, or for the idea of democratic governance, this is more than troubling.Akhtar's book is a cutting polemic against the vague liberal Christian ethic that advocates religion's abstention from politics and that condemns any religious involvement in politics as ultimately corrupt. It's so powerful and so ready to confront Christianity on its own terms that he doesn't even mention the way in which this seemingly pure religious ethic quietly serves rather horrific political ends until the end of the book, when the (theological) substance of the argument is already made.Instead he advocates an Islamic ethic of engagement with power, which is both very interesting and also, I think, very difficult to contest from any standpoint. The basic claim that Islam is politically responsible whereas Christianity is not is, I think, fallacious, but certainly the sort of Christianity that is advocated by most liberals today falls for his critique. It's almost reminiscent of Slavoj Zizek:"Islam certainly presupposes human beings -- ordinary, fallible, human, all too human. And the involvement with power is, as Christian critics rightly insist, characteristic of Islam. But isn't it similarly true of all viable ideologies? Perhaps Muslims are frank about their willingness to employ force, duly constrained by moral scruple derived from religious revelation. Perhaps Christians lack candour here."Perhaps the reason we call suicide bombers "murderers" and "cowards" is that we are too frightened to face bravery on its own terms or draw the sorts of lines that you need to draw to see the difference between killing and murder. Perhaps the reason we need to cast the World Trade Center bombing as a horrific act of barbarism is that in the age of precision bombing and zero-casualty warfare we are terrified of any act whose decisiveness belongs to war. Perhaps.In any case this book is powerful enough and rich enough to inspire such melancholy ruminations. It should be read not merely because it is of interest -- beyond geopolitics, that is; for instance, Akhtar makes some very perceptive observations about the existence of a Judeo-Islamic, not Judeo-Christian, tradition, observations which in some ways answer the short-sightedness of some writers on the split between Judaism and Christianity (I think of Zizek again) -- but it should also be read by every serious student of philosophy tod