Constructing Civility: The Human Good in Christian and Islamic Political Theologies by Richard S. Park

Author:Richard S. Park [Park, Richard S.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2017-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

“INCLUSIVE POLITICAL THEOLOGY”

Sachedina is another Muslim scholar who recognizes the need and argues for a radical recovery of a more pluralist Islamic political theology (al-kalām al-siyāsī):12 “The most critical challenge facing the traditional leadership [ʿulamāʾ] is to search for an inclusive political theology that no longer discriminates by faith to determine an individual’s rights and duties. . . . [For this challenge to be met, a] major shift has to occur from a juridical to a theological-ontological status of human personhood.” Sachedina’s overarching contention is that in order for Muslim communities to articulate a pluralistic Islamic political theology, what needs recovering is the original ethical Quranic vision that acknowledges the universal and equal dignity of human persons qua human persons; and that prerequisite to this recovery is a radical reevaluation of the juridical tradition that has eclipsed this more fundamental moral Islamic vision. In what follows, building on Sachedina’s work, I consider several crucial ideas essential to overcoming what Sachedina refers to as “the restrictive provisions of the Islamic juridical heritage”—that is, crucial ways in which the juridical tradition has undermined the prospect of a pluralistic political theology. Central to this discussion are considerations of (1) the historical displacement of the more rationalist Muʿtazilī theological ethics by the revelationist Ashʿarī tradition; and (2) the subsequent need for a recovery of a robust view of human teleology in Islamic ethics. This reappraisal of Islamic theological ethics is needed in order to articulate a pluralistic political theology, which in turn is needed for the task of constructing public civility in Islamic contexts.

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