If individualism is understood narrowly as a component of liberal political theory, where the central concern is the protection of negative or positive liberties of individuals against the coercive powers of the state, the effort to mine the main genres of premodern Islamic political writing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish for individualism will yield only slim pickings. After all, liberalism, like the modern scientific method, was a specifically early modern European development, and it would be naïve to look for its counterparts in earlier eras, in Europe itself, or in other cultures. If, however, individualism is viewed more generally as a cluster of ideas and social practices that collectively characterize Euro-American modernity, then one can find elements of individualistic thinking in premodern Islamic intellectual traditions.
Religious scholarship contained a robust notion of the individual. In kalām (theology), even though the metaphysical dimensions of individuality (namely, the issue of the nature of the human soul) remained contested, there was consensus on the personal nature of salvation/damnation. On the thorny question of human agency, however, the postclassical mainstream divided into the minimalist Ash‘aris (nominal agency) and the maximalist Maturidis as well as Twelver Shi‘is (real ownership of actions), with plenty of room for individual accountability for human actions. In fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), the language of moral and legal obligation was regnant over any discourse of rights and liberties, but Muslim jurists built elaborate protections around “civil rights”—such as the rights to life, dignity, property, and personal relationships—that were often individual in nature. These protections were not conceptualized as “rights” of individuals against the state but as “claims” of private individuals against other private people; nevertheless, they did act as barriers against governmental encroachment on the private lives of individuals. The jurists displayed their individualist moral leanings also in the emphasis they placed on intention in ethical assessment of human actions, as well as on personal conviction in matters of faith. On balance, the edifice of fiqh was built on an assumption of personal accountability and entitlement, and in this connection, the refusal of jurists to recognize corporate bodies as legal entities was a natural consequence of the foundations of fiqh in human individuality. In Sufism (taṣawwuf), the early discovery of, and preoccupation with, the self led to intense scrutiny of inner motivations, emotions, and states as well as to development of such methods of cultivating the self as spiritual invocation (dhikr) and retreats (khalwa). Mystics debated the relative merits of inwardness and self-consciousness versus social action, which are all integral parts of modern discussions of subjectivity in the context of individualism. Regardless of many mystics’ final assessment of the salvific worth of individuality, the emphasis they placed on “personal experiential verification” of religious truths was probably the most individualistic element of Sufism: godliness could only be “realized” (taḥqīq) through personal experience, which necessitated direct and sustained efforts of self-cultivation on the part of each human individual.
Outside the world of religious scholarship, views and approaches that placed a high premium on the individual also abounded. In falsafa (philosophy), the nature of the human soul was hotly debated early on, but after Ibn Sina, it became normal to accept the immortality of individual souls (pace Ibn Rushd, who believed that individual souls would be submerged into the world soul after physical death) and to render the happiness of individuals contingent on proper cultivation and care of the self through the exercise of the rational faculty. In the careers and intellectual output of natural philosophers and scientists, individualistic tendencies in the form of skepticism toward received truths and a predilection for personal verification of knowledge claims are palpable, albeit understudied from the perspective of cultural history. Other cultural elites, including secretaries, administrators, writers, poets, artists, and even secular rulers themselves, displayed even more striking forms of individualistic tendencies. The intensely personal nature of the poetic voices of practically all the major poets of the many Islamic literary traditions (from Abu Nuwas and Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri in Arabic to Sa‘di and Hafiz in Persian, from Baki and Galib in Ottoman Turkish to Ghalib and Mir Dard in Urdu), the highly developed genre of autobiographical narrative among Mughal emperors, the unmistakable personal virtuosity of Timurid and Safavid visual artists like Bihzad, the long career of the Ottoman architect Sinan, the independence of spirit shining through the works of Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta, and the ever playful but uncompromisingly personal narrative of the maverick Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi stand as randomly listed yet meaningful testimony for the individualistic riches that can be mined on these fronts.
It is, therefore, no exaggeration to state that premodern Islamic cultures provided ample venues for expression and development of individualistic tendencies at the personal level, and awareness of one’s own worth as affirmation of individuality was not uncommon among the cultural elites. Yet before the colonial era, such avenues for construction of individuality were not directed toward the formation of overtly political ideologies of individualism. It may be speculated that since religious authorities had succeeded early on in Islamic history in erecting relatively secure legal and moral foundations for the exercise of personal freedoms at the level of civil society, there was little acute need to defend individual liberties either against the government, whose regular breach of such civil claims were already viewed as illegitimate, or against any corporate entities like cities or business corporations, which did not exist. It is only in the colonial and postcolonial eras, with the rapid erosion of the vibrant civil societies of the premodern period in the face of the growing power of the modern interventionist state, that new calls are heard for individual liberties in the form of citizens’ and human rights.
See also freedom; modernity; rights
Further Reading
Amin Banani and Speros Vryonis, eds., Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam, 1977; Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, 2000; Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Freedom of Expression in Islam, 1997; Bernd Radtke, “How Can Man Reach the Mystical Union: Ibn Ṭufayl and the Divine Spark,” in The World of Ibn Ṭufayl, edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, 1996; Dwight F. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, 2001; Tzvetan Teofanov, “Canon and Individuality in Old Arabic Poetry,” Proceedings of the 17th-Congress of the UAAI, 1997, 256–71.
AHMET T. KARAMUSTAFA