Literature and Theology 2011 Nazry Bahrawi 329 46

F I C T I O N A L I S I N G T H E U T O P I A N

I M P U L S E A S P O S T - S E C U L A R

I S L A M : A N E A S T - W E S T

O D Y S S E Y

Nazry Bahrawi

Abstract

This essay offers a counterview to the postulation that humanity’s utopian

propensity is a secular undertaking bereft of divine inspiration. This domin-

ant interpretation in utopian theory renders utopianism in the religious

non-Western world inconceivable. Invoking Islam’s post-secular leanings,

I argue that the utopian desire is replete with theological underpinnings.

Engaging first with pro-religious discourses on the utopian impulse by

Ernst Bloch and Nurcholish Madjid, I will then theorise a literary mode

of reading framed by Fredric Jameson’s ‘utopology’ and Bloch’s ‘concrete

utopia’. I will demonstrate in faith-based fiction an interpretation of Islam

that is ‘this-worldly’ and ‘rational’—qualities that uphold utopianism as a

secular, European phenomenon. Finally, I posit that Islam’s post-secular

condition must also be seen as a postcolonial one.

I . INTRODUCTI ON

In the critical study of literary utopias, it has been proposed that the propensity

to imagine the good life is an inherently rationalistic endeavour devoid of

divine inspiration. Such an argument implies utopianism as a thoroughly

human undertaking that inadvertently reiterates Friedrich Nietzche’s in/

famous dictum, God is dead. Thus spoke Krishan Kumar. Kumar’s treatise is

premised on the stipulation that utopianism is a modern phenomenon that

began with the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516,1 an assumption

that is not unorthodox among scholars vying to map the evolution of utopian

thought. Indeed, Roland Schaer in his introduction to a volume of essays on

utopian narratives also asserts that ‘the history of utopia necessarily begins with

Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK.

Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Literature & Theology, Vol. 25. No. 3, September 2011, pp. 329–346

doi:10.1093/litthe/frr016 Advance Access publication 14 April 2011

Literature & Theology # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press 2011; all rights reserved.

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Thomas More’.2 Having missed out on the chance to secularise itself as the

West did following the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the religious

non-West is without utopianism. As I will demonstrate, the common strain

of thought running through this implicitly Eurocentric3 postulation is the

relegation of the sacred to a marginal position.

Contrary to this tract, this essay will argue that theology could indeed

play a central role in shaping utopian impulses. Theoretically, this alternative

perspective is inspired by Ernst Bloch’s readings of ‘this-worldliness’ and

‘rationalism’ as utopian impulses in Christian theology. In the Muslim

world, this Blochian discourse finds its parallel in Nurcholish Madjid’s dem-

onstration of similar qualities in the practice of Islamic theology in Indonesia.

As an attempt at decolonising traces of Eurocentrism in utopian theory, I will

outline the case for a literary mode of reading utopianism in fiction that

transcends the sacred/secular dichotomy, situating this endeavour within the

theoretical framework of Fredric Jameson’s notion of ‘utopology’ and Bloch’s

‘concrete utopia’. Applying these concepts to a reading of two Islamic

faith-based short stories from Egypt and Indonesia, namely, Naguib

Mahfouz’s Zaabalawi and Ali Akbar Navis’ The Fall and Decline of Our Local

Mosque, I will then unveil utopian tropes in Islam that coincide with

Western conceptions of the utopian impulse. Finally, I shall consider the

wider implications of this treatise for postcolonial and utopian theory if the

post-secular condition is found to be just as prevalent in the tenets of other

world religions.

The term post-secular here connotes a reaction against the secular compul-

sion to privatise religion, an idea that is perhaps best vocalised by William

James when he describes religion as

the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they

stand themselves in relation to whatever they may consider divine.4 [emphasis

mine]

Such a view of secularity upholds the binarism of the church/state, sacred/

profane and faith/reason dichotomies. This last pairing, as the next section

shows, is encapsulated in Kumar’s utopianism. In the 21st century, this brand

of secularism gained fervour with the rise of New Atheism, an anti-religion

movement whose champions include Richard Dawkins and Christopher

Hitchens. Its hostility to faith is grounded in the ideology of scientific natur-

alism, which professes the belief that science trumps theology,5 lending cre-

dence to the faith/reason dichotomy. On the contrary, the post-secular

condition, Vincent Geoghegan argues, is not simply an antagonistic negation

of secularism but ‘a recognition that the achievements of the secular will not

be lost by a more nuanced approach to religion’.6 Post-secularism deconstructs

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the binaries outlined above through a process of hybridisation. Theological

humanism, I argue below, exemplifies this condition best.

A final qualification must be expressed. This article could be critiqued as a

transposition of Western values on an Eastern tradition, a position articulated

by Muhsin Mahdi when he writes of modern Muslims:

We become enchanted with the modern West through our education and

studies in modern European culture, and we try to look at Islam through this

perspective.7

While there is merit in upholding the kind of autonomous analysis implied

in Mahdi’s quote, it is imprecise to see this essay as a transposition of values.

Rather, it qualifies better as a comparative discourse between two great reli-

gious traditions and their engagement with utopian theory. This essay’s

postcolonial slant is hinged on its attempt at ridding utopianism from traces

of Eurocentrism, yet it also tries to seek some consistency in the way theol-

ogies respond to a common challenge. In doing so, it is more accurate to

position this article as an interfaith dialogue.

I I . THE DOMINANT TREATISE: UTOPIANISM AS GODLESS EUROPE

To begin is to inspect more closely the treatise favouring reason over faith in

utopianism. Kumar points out that every other vision of the ideal society that

came before More’s, including the Christian idea of paradise, is only a ‘pre-

history’ of utopia.8 Similarly, Schaer posits that the modern utopia must be ‘set

[. . .] apart from its precursors’, naming biblical tradition as one such forerun-

ner.9 Hinged on the central argument that utopia is steeped in humanistic

principles, Schaer describes utopianism as an attempt at imagining ‘the ideal

society achieved solely by human means’ [emphases mine], one that requires no

intervention from a divine being.10 More comprehensively, Kumar reasons

that utopianism develops out of the uniquely European experience of

Renaissance humanism11 as ‘a secular variety of social thought’.12 Here, he

posits several observations from More’s Utopia. For instance, the Buthrescas as

Utopia’s resident monks are not its majority inhabitants. Indeed, most

Utopians rather ‘take the pursuit of pleasure to be the chief or best part of

human happiness’ even as they admire the austerity of their ‘religious men’.13

One can detect a tendency here to connote in utopianism a sense of

‘this-worldliness’ as opposed to ‘other-worldliness’ that corresponds to Saint

Augustine’s polemical distinction between the City of Man and the City of

God.14 Believing that utopia is a preoccupation with the former and not the

latter, Kumar argues that non-Western societies are utopia-deficient because

‘they have mostly been dominated by religious systems of thought’.15 In other

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words, utopianism could only take root in a post-Christendom psyche. It is

important to note that Kumar’s definition of the secular is premised on a

dichotomy of reason and faith that coincides with a strict differentiation of

the secular and the profane. While this is not blatantly expressed by Schaer, it

could be posited to be an implicit assumption informing his analysis of uto-

pianism. Even as both scholars recognise that aspects of Christian doctrines

have had some influence, utopianism to the likes of Kumar and Schaer is in its

essence defined by the primacy of reason over faith.

Given that the secularisation discourse has now wandered into post-secular

territory as earlier underscored, Kumar and Schaer’s secularism by way of its

atheistic humanism is limiting, even destructive. That is, its view that human-

ity alone is responsible for human flourishing qualifies as the kind of ‘over-

humanisation’ theorised by David E. Klemm and William Schweiker. Secular

humanism of this kind, they argue, has not only advanced knowledge but also

led to pollution, the proliferation of wars, as well as unjust distribution of

goods like medicine and clean water.16 In a post-secular age, one could argue

that the utopian impulse is perhaps better invested in the notion of ‘theo-

logical humanism’. This, postulates Klemm and Schweiker, does more than

just uphold human flourishing. By appealing to what they argue is a natural

propensity in humanity for ‘transcendent otherness and a force of mystery’17

(or, the divine), theological humanism mitigates the excesses associated with

secular humanism by developing a conscience of humankind’s limitations by

positing humanity as a ‘thing in-between’18—not quite other-worldly, but

neither quite this-worldly. Indeed, Bloch and Madjid’s readings of religious

utopianism in Christianity and Islam below suggest a strong leaning towards

theological humanism in the way these assume humanity as straddling be-

tween two worlds through the hybridisation of faith (other-worldly) and

reason (this-worldly).

But first, one must further articulate the problem. Kumar and Schaer are

not the only utopian scholars to marginalise the role of the sacred in theorising

utopia. Ruth Levitas observes that, among the scholars who had produced

comprehensive surveys of 20th-century compendiums on utopia, few had

argued for the link between utopia and religion.19 Yet recent developments

in the critical scholarship on literary utopias reveal a nascent attempt at deco-

lonising traces of Eurocentrism that reflect inklings of postcolonial theory at

play.20 Such studies subscribe to a ubiquitous view of utopianism that is best

vocalised by Lyman Tower Sargent when he proposes that ‘not every culture

appears to have utopias brought about through human effort that predate

knowledge of More’s Utopia’, adding that utopias could also be found in

‘China, India, Buddhist and Islamic cultures’.21 Although short on details,

Sargent’s choice to emphasise the non-Western faiths of Islam and

Buddhism advances an important point: religions and utopianism need not

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be strange bedfellows. Herein lies a potentially formidable formula that could

unravel the clandestine Eurocentrism that is still largely inherent in the dis-

course of literary utopias today.

Take Ralph Pordzik’s The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia (2001), for instance.

Despite its extensive survey of literary works from Australia, Canada, India,

Ireland, Nigeria, Scotland and South Africa, his research has been criticised by

Tom Moylan as being limited primarily to former white settler colonies rather

than the ‘non-European cultures of Asia, Africa and the Americas’.22 While

innovative, Pordzik’s postcolonial literary strategy to posit heterotopia, here

defined as the hybridisation of formalistic elements found in utopian and

dystopian Western novels as the common feature in new utopian writings

in English, is limited to fiction that takes as their bearing classic works of

literary utopia in the Western world. This, however, ignores the scores of

non-Western fiction, even those translated, which in the first place do not

engage in a dialectics of formalism with the Western genre of literary utopia.

To truly determine if utopianism is prevalent in largely nativised non-

English-speaking postcolonial communities as opposed to pseudo-white

English-speaking societies would require engaging the very core assumption

of Kumar and Schaer’s utopianism. This, to reiterate an earlier point, could be

surmised as the notion that religions are irrational and other-worldly. There is,

in fact, strong cases to be made, and that have been variously made, for

subscribing to the counterview that religions like Christianity and Islam are

logical and very much bound to this world.

I I I . THE COUNTERVIEW: ERNST BLOCH’S FAITH IN

RELIGIOUS UTOPIANISM

At this juncture, it is necessary to explore the correlation between religion and

the utopian impulse, or as it is sometimes known, utopian desire or utopian

wish. This essay defines the latter as the human motivation to live the good

life. This is a subset of utopianism, which denotes the entirety (philosophy and

praxis) of the quest for betterment. Bloch lends credence to the postulation

that the two are not mutually exclusive when he makes an unconventional

but important point about Karl Marx’s view of religion—that is, even as

religion is the opiate of the people, Marx also sees it as ‘the heart of a heartless

world and the spirit of spiritless conditions’, as Levitas highlights.23

For Bloch, religion contains within it ‘utopia as goal and aspiration so long

as reality fell short of the conditions for a truly human existence’.24Although

Bloch’s treatise has been largely directed at the Judeo-Christian tradition, the

same could also be found in Islam, as explored later. Bloch detects a trace of

this-worldliness in the apocalyptic narrative related to three figures within

Christianity: Jesus Christ himself, the medieval Italian abbot Joachim of


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Fiore and the 15th-century German theologian and revolutionary Thomas

Munzer. In the personage of Jesus Christ, Bloch draws out utopian impulses in

the discourse on Jesus as the ‘Son of Man’. Considering that the Christian

messianic narrative posits that Jesus is to return and rule over a newly chris-

tened Christianised world, Bloch argues that this description of his status as the

‘Son of Man’ as opposed to ‘Son of God’ should not be taken as a metaphor

suggesting that he is ‘modest or powerless’ but rather ‘a figure of all-conquer-

ing strength’.25 In other words, this description places humanity on equal

terms with God, especially when one considers the biblical notion that

Adam—as a representative of humanity—is created in the image of God,

argues Geoghegan.26

Hence, the return of Jesus as the ‘Son of Man’ to rule over a kingdom on

Earth after a tumultuous End-Time struggle could be read, according to

Bloch, as ‘the realisation that Man can be better, and more important, than

his God’.27 It posits that heaven on Earth is foremost an anthropocentric

concept, and a real possibility. In the figure of Joachim, Bloch finds yet

more evidence of a Christian narrative emphasising the human over the

divine. Joachim had theorised the doctrine of the three kingdoms, namely,

the past kingdom of the Father defined by the Old Testament, the present

kingdom of the Son defined by the New Testament and the ‘Third Kingdom’

that is to come. As Geoghegan points out, Bloch argues that Joachim’s idea of

the Third Kingdom is ‘a terrestrial concept and not merely a heavenly event’

for it revives the ‘Son of Man’ initiative, which if seen from a Marxist per-

spective posits the poor as the greatest beneficiaries from the return of Jesus.28

To entrench his point that the Christian apocalyptic narrative necessitates the

establishment of a this-worldly ideal society, Bloch argues that the Nazi ideol-

ogy of the ‘Third Reich’ as an empire on Earth for the so-called Aryan race

could be seen as a perversion of Joachim’s ‘Third Kingdom’ doctrine.29

Similarly in Munzer, Bloch sees a political rebel who, like Joachim, had

latched on to religious apocalyptic narratives in a bid to ‘aspire humanity to

the divine’ so that ‘earth can be transformed into heavenly dimensions’, argues

Geoghegan.30 Munzer was not only a theologian, but also a political rebel

who became a leader of Germany’s Peasants’ War, which saw militant peasants

revolt against state authorities to protest their poor economic and social con-

ditions as well as register their religious disagreements against the Roman

Catholic Church. While at first supportive of Protestant founder Martin

Luther’s challenge against the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church

during the Reformation, Munzer later suffered a falling out with the

former because of their disagreements on several beliefs such as infant baptism,

which Luther supports and Munzer disagrees with.

Another common link that Bloch sees between Joachim and Munzer is a

sense of cosmopolitanism that permeates their religious doctrines. According

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to Geoghegan, Bloch sees the two sharing ‘a tolerant and internationalist

definition, embracing Jew and pagan and people of all creeds’.31As Bloch

himself writes:

According to Thomas Munzer’s great supra-Christian definition, the future

kingdom will be formed ‘of all chosen ones among all scatterings of races of every

kind of faith’ . . . ‘You should know’, says Munzer . . . ‘that they ascribe this

doctrine to the Abbot Joachim and call it an eternal gospel with great scorn’.32

These Joachite-inspired utopian impulses to establish a cosmopolitan,

this-worldly society in 14th-century Germany had led Munzer to lend his

political support to the Anabaptists (a minority Christian group whose mem-

bers share his views on infant baptism) and partook in the Peasants’ War. One

could even argue that this cosmopolitan spirit was also present in More’s ideal

society in Utopia which is populated by a motley group of believers who

comprise not only the monastic Buthrescas but also those who worship the

constellations, all living peacefully together in a cosmopolitan, multi-religious

society. Yet to say utopianism is limited to the Christian tradition is to repro-

duce the Eurocentrism that is already prevalent in the critical study of literary

utopias. Ridding utopian theory of Eurocentrism hinges on whether a

Blochian-type discourse on religion’s sense of this-worldliness exists in the

non-Western world. There is hope if one scours through the tracts of 20th-

century Islamic thought.

IV. BLOCH’S EASTERN PARALLEL: NURCHOLISH MADJ ID’S

ISLAMI C UTOPIANISM

Like Christianity, Islam as a non-Western faith is also not averse to utopian

impulses. The case of Indonesia’s postcolonial national philosophy, the

Pancasila (Five Principles), is instructive. As a set of five well-defined precepts

on nationalism, the Pancasila is outlined as (i) the belief in One God, (ii) a just

and civilised humanity, (iii) the unity of Indonesia, (iv) guided democracy and

(v) social justice. With the exception of the first principle, this philosophy is

primarily couched along secular values that seem to support the ideas of

pluralism and humanism. Indeed, this is the view of Indonesian intellectual

Nurcholish Madjid who argues for a religious-secular hybridism by equating

its purpose to the Medina Constitution, an agreement drafted by Islam’s

prophet Muhammad between Muslims of Medina (then known as Yathrib)

and non-Muslim groups to institutionalise what has been hailed as Islam’s first

ideal society.33

Despite the Pancasila’s claim to the utopian virtue of pluralism that is also

prevalent in More’s imagining of the ideal society when the latter writes of


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Utopia as being inhabited by those who ‘worship for God the sun, some the

moon, some some other of the planets’,34 Madjid recognises that the first

principle of the Pancasila—that is, the belief in One God—could prove prob-

lematic to believers of non-Abrahamic faiths such as Confucianism and even

atheists.35 He proposes a counterview against this exclusivist tendency by

appealing to the principle of religious freedom as captured in the Qu’ranic

verse on non-coercion that reads: ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion’.36

He writes:

[A]lthough Islam summons people to believe in One God through persuasive

calls [. . .], it also teaches that there should be no compulsion in religion . . . .[A]s

far as Islam is concerned, preaching the principle of non-coercion and religious

freedom is in like with Pancasila, in particular its first principle, belief in One

God.37

Here, Madjid argues that the Pancasila’s first principle is only exclusivist if it

is read superficially. If one accepts the totality of Islam as a way of life, then this

first principle is in truth a case for upholding religious freedom. Here, we see a

conflation of the sacred and the secular (or, the post-secular) in the Pancasila

that does not conform to Kumar’s strict delineation of the two spheres.

Lending credence to the amalgamation of the two, Madjid argues that ‘the

most urgent task for Muslims [in Indonesia] is to improve and spread the

understanding of universal humanity from Islamic teachings’ (emphasis

mine).38 By appealing to the notion of universal humanity, Madjid is lending

credence to the humanistic feature of utopianism that Kumar has identified.

Madjid also believes that the utopian impulse in humanity has its genesis in

the Qu’ran. This is represented in the pursuit for betterment in one’s spiritual

and material life—an injunction that can be derived from several verses, he

argues.39 One verse extols God’s preference for those desiring ‘good in this

world and good in the hereafter’,40 while another urges Muslims to ‘seek,

with the (wealth) which God has bestowed on thee, the home of the here-

after, (and) not forget thy portion in this world.’41Madjid’s postulation

lends credence to the idea that humanity is a ‘thing in-between’, a central

tenet of theological humanism.

Islamic humanism as a recognition of human action in the divine is also

traceable to the doctrine of al-insan al-kamil (the Perfect Human) as concep-

tualised by the 10th-century Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi who argues that hu-

manity embodies divine attributes, for we were created in God’s image.

Humanity’s reason for being therefore is ‘to strive towards the highest per-

fection’ known as ‘the station of no station’ (maqam la maqam), posits

Roy Jackson.42 This idea that recurs throughout Islamic theology henceforth,

such as in the poems of the 11th-century Turkish mystic Jalal Ad-din Rumi,

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the 14th-century Indian Mughal emperor Akbar as well as the revolutionary

tracts of 20th-century founders of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah

Khomeini and Ali Shariati as well as Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal,

is a clear indication of utopianism that recognises the primacy of human

effort.43

The eschatological influences on Christianity’s utopian impulses are mir-

rored in Islam through Fazlur Rahman’s reading of re-creation in the

End-Time discourse of several Qu’ranic verses.44 One pertinent verse reads:

‘The day when the Earth shall be transmuted into something else and the

heavens as well.’45 According to Rahman, this emphasis on re-creation, as

opposed to total annihilation, emphasises continuity between the heavenly

and the earthly in the Islamic End-Time discourse. Together, these posit the

idea that ‘this earth will be transformed into a Garden which will be enjoyed by

its ‘‘inheritors’’ ’.46 That conflation of worlds and its implicit emphasis on

deeds in the here-and-now if a Muslim wishes to inherit that heavenly

space coincide with this paper’s reading of religious utopian impulses.

Taken holistically, the factors addressed in this section account for the

post-secular condition in Islam.

V. ISLAM’S POST-SECULAR CONDITION AS A

POSTCOLONIAL STRATEGY

Before a literary analysis can even be conducted, one fundamental question

needs to be addressed: how does narrative, as a literary device, work in the

service of the utopian impulse? One response can be found in the parallel

between literature as an exercise in fictionalising and Bloch’s reading of the

utopian impulse as a Not-Yet phenomenon. As Geoghegan points out, Bloch’s

notion assumes that that the world is not predetermined, but driven by pos-

sibilities.47 This, in turn, feeds the desire to visualise other worlds. In this, the

utopian impulse shares with the exercise of fictionalising a proclivity for the

act of imagining. One can argue here that this close connection between

utopianism and literary narrative is best exemplified by the existence of uto-

pian literature as a genre. Another response relates to the idea that literary

narratives possess the power to persuade. As rhetoric, literary narratives, writes

James Phelan, assume that

texts are designed by authors . . . to affect readers in particular ways, that those

designs are conveyed through the words, techniques, structures, forms, and

dialogic relations of texts as well as the genres and conventions readers use to

understand them.48

Such rhetorical devices accord literary narratives the power to induce

change in their audience, a feature that also characterises the utopian impulse.


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Seen in this light, literary narratives are not just ‘one of the possible manifest-

ations of utopian thought’ as Fatima Viera argues;49 they could very well be its

most ideal vehicle for carrying out that transformative function.

We begin then our theoretical venture to fashion a literary strategy of

reading Islamic utopian impulses by revisiting Madjid. His reading of

post-secular Islam as a theology that transcends the sacred/secular dichotomy

challenges the strict binarism that forms the bedrock assumption of hitherto

Eurocentric conceptions of utopianism. Before it could be claimed that

post-secular Islam also denotes a postcolonial condition, another theoretical

parameter must also be clarified, that is, the notion of utopian impulses. Here,

there is merit in consulting Fredric Jameson’s nuanced distinction between

utopian programme and utopian impulse. Jameson argues that the former

could be constituted as a specific plan aimed at ‘the realisation of a Utopia’

that could include something as ambitious as a social revolution or as un-

assuming as a design for a utopian space in a building or garden.50 He traces

them to the likes of ‘utopian planners’ such as More who authored Utopia and

Charles Fourier, a French utopian socialist philosopher whose ideas on social-

ism had inspired the establishment of small utopian communities in parts of

America during the 17th century.51 Utopian impulse, on the other hand, is

something quite distinct. Jameson writes:

The interpretation of the Utopian impulse . . . necessarily deals with fragments; it

is not symbolic but allegorical: it does not correspond to a plan or praxis, it

expresses Utopian desire and invests in a variety of unexpected and disguised,

concealed, distorted ways.52

In the above quotation, Jameson posits that utopian desire, unlike a utopian

programme that is easily discernible, exists in the in-between spaces where it is

habitually shrouded in secrecy. Jameson argues that such impulses could be

linked to the efforts of ‘utopian interpreters’ like Bloch who does not peddle a

utopian vision but analyses impulses directed at imagining the good life.

Because utopian desire is often implicitly embedded in texts, Jameson calls

for a new interpretative strategy at uncovering utopian desire, or as he de-

scribes it, a scholarly undertaking that hones in on identifying ‘Utopian clues

and traces in the landscape of the real’.53

This begs the question: If a hermeneutic were required, what would such

an initiative entail for one to unearth these clandestine utopian impulses?

Here, there is merit in revisiting Jameson’s idea of ‘utopology’, a term that

he professes to use rather cautiously to denote the ‘structural inversion’ of

Foucault’s idea of ‘genealogy’—that is, a way of reading history that factors in

issues of power relations and alternative interpretations so as to question the

truism of received historical narratives.54 In a similar manner, Jameson wishes

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to unlock ‘an alternative Utopian future’ by embracing a pseudo-genealogical

outlook in theorising utopian desire.55 It is a method that requires challenging

all that is taken as given in speculating about the future. Summarising its

subversive philosophy, Jameson writes:

The operation itself . . . consists in a prodigious effort to [. . .] declare positive

things which are clearly negative in our world, to affirm that dystopia is in reality

Utopia if examined closely, to isolate specific features in our empirical present so as to

read them as components of a different system.56 [emphases mine]

These guiding principles, especially those captured in the italicised lines, act

as a means through which the utopian interpreter’s critical eye could be

trained to unearth the unseen in cultural production. If done properly,

Jameson’s own utopian hope is that such an utopology would revive,

among other things, ‘organs of political and historical and social imagination

which have virtually atrophied for lack of use’.57 This point is extremely

pertinent to the designs of this article because it considers religion as one

such political/social/historical phenomenon that has been relegated to the

margins of society in an age of post-secularism.

Bloch’s perspectives on the utopian impulse are also edifying. Making a

distinction between what could be distinguished as abstract and concrete

utopia, Bloch expresses his affinity for the latter while condemning the

former. He is critical of abstract utopia because he finds such impulses escapist

in the way the desire for a better life is not bolstered by a will to change the

status quo. Consequently, Bloch approves of a concrete utopia because he sees

in it an aim to establish a possible future. This is to say that if abstract utopia

could be described as wishful thinking, then concrete utopia could be ex-

pressed as willful thinking, argues Levitas in summarising Bloch’s treatise.58

Fashioning Jameson’s treatise as a postcolonial literary lens would justify a

mode of reading faith-based literary texts that do not assume the generic guise

of Western literary utopias so as to unearth the unapparent utopian impulses in

religion. Such a strategy should also incorporate a Blochian slant to uncover

utopian impulses that express the ideals of a concrete utopia. Ideally speaking,

a postcolonial literary lens centred on religious utopian impulses should em-

brace the view that the desire for a better way of being is a realistic initiative

that could result in a transformed future, not one that performs a compensa-

tory function.

The term ‘faith-based fiction’ is here used to denote works of fiction that

engage explicitly or implicitly with theological themes. Examples of

faith-based fiction that are blatantly religious include The Screwtape Letters

(1942) by C.S. Lewis in the West and Robohnya Surau Kami (The Decline

and Fall of Our Local Mosque) (1956) by Indonesian writer Ali Akbar Navis


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in the Muslim world. Meanwhile, faith-based fiction that deals with religious

themes in a less obvious manner, sometimes also described as allegorical reli-

gious fiction, include Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) from the

West and Naguib Mahfouz’s Zaabalawi (1963) from Islamic cultures. The next

section will analyse the said Navis and Mahfouz’s short stories to exemplify how

a literary lens centred on religious utopian impulses could encompass both types

of faith-based fiction in the non-English-speaking part of the Muslim world in a

bid to unveil hitherto clandestine impulses in Islam.

VI . UNLOCKING UTOPIAN IMPULSES IN ISLAMI C

FAITH-BASED FICTION

In his celebrated 1956 short story Robohnya Surau Kami (The Decline and Fall of

Our Local Mosque), Indonesian author Navis narrativises the unexpected sui-

cide of Kakek (grandfather), an elderly caretaker of a surau (small Islamic prayer

house) in an unnamed Indonesian village. Kakek took his own life after fellow

villager Ajo Sidi recounts to him a fantastical story about the afterlife of Haji

Saleh, a pious man who had expected to gain entry into heaven for dedicating

his entire life to the worship of God but was instead condemned to hell.

Incorporating a reading couched along the reason/faith dichotomy into this

story unveils Navis’ views about the nature of religious utopian impulses. One

instance is instructive. When Saleh led other hell-bound devout men to con-

front God about this seeming injustice, he was repudiated by God such:

‘. . . I gave you a rich country. But you were lazy. You preferred contemplation.

It was easier, it didn’t raise a sweat and required no exertion. I told you to work

and pray. You only prayed.’59

With God as his mouthpiece, Navis here makes a strong case for positing a

rational sense of ‘this-worldliness’ as an Islamic utopian impulse. Indeed, this

abstract is replete with a consummative thinking favouring human invention

over divine intervention consistent with the anthropocentrism of Ibn Arabi’s

notion of ‘al-insan al-kamil’ and Bloch’s reading of the ‘Son of Man’ doctrine.

The appeal to reason of this religious utopian impulse is further entrenched

by the symbolic depiction of a God ignoramus whose incessant interrogation

of Saleh’s inactions decentres the Islamic (in fact, Abrahamic) notion of divine

omniscience as depicted in the following excerpt:

‘You didn’t mind being poor?’

‘No Lord, we preferred it.’

‘You didn’t mind that your descendants would be poor too?’

‘No, Lord. They may be poor but they know the Koran by heart —’

‘But it means nothing to them as it means nothing to you?’

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‘Oh no, Lord!’

‘Then why do you remain in poverty, making no provision for others to come?

You let others steal your property, while you fought amongst yourselves, you

deceived and oppressed each other. [. . .] You thought I wanted praise, that I was

intoxicated by your worship of Me, so you did nothing but praise Me and glorify

My holy name. You must go back to Hell! . . .’60

Here, God’s omniscience is being challenged not on the basis of not know-

ing what happened but why it happened. Positing that even God needs to

subscribe to deductive reasoning reminiscent of Aristotelian logic to reach a

valid conclusion, Navis lends credence to the possibility that Islam is not

‘emotive’ but rationalistic. This is contrary to Kumar’s assertion that religious

systems of thought in non-Western societies are irrational. In Navis’ opinion

then, the Islamic-sanctioned pursuit of perfection is one given to the primacy

of human agency and driven by humanity’s use of its God-given intellect.

Mahfouz’s Zaabalawi advances a like-minded treatise. The story revolves

around the unnamed protagonist’s fruitless quest to meet with the titular

character Zaabalawi, a pious but elusive saint with a legendary skill for

curing ‘worries and troubles’61 presumably of the metaphysical kind. A uto-

pian sense of this-worldliness in faith could be gleaned from the characters

who had been healed by Zaabalawi. This is best exemplified in the personage

of Sheikh Qamar, a highly successful religious lawyer. When the protagonist

visits Qamar to enquire after Zaabalawi, he was struck by the material wealth

of the latter. Mahfouz peppers this significant encounter by appealing to a

diction of capitalistic terms. The protagonist sees Qamar as a man ‘well satis-

fied with himself and with his worldly possessions’ who owns both highly

prized corporeal properties such as ‘a fine leather-upholstered chair’ and

‘costly carpet’, as well as incorporeal goods like his ‘valuable time’.62 Then

when the protagonist asks Qamar of Zabalaawi’s whereabouts, the lawyer,

who was initially warm because he believed the former to be a ‘prospective

client’, assumes a languorous disposition despite the fact that Qamar himself

had once held Zaabalawi in high regards as evidenced from his description of

the latter as ‘a man of miracles’.63 If one accepts the reading that posits

Zaabalawi as a symbol for God and faith,64 the irony of Qamar’s turn of

heart belies a deeper message. That is, Mahfouz seemingly suggests that the

only way to achieving this-worldly success is by first seeking faith. Qamar who

was once probably also suffering from the same metaphysical ailment afflicting

the protagonist is now living the good life. Others who had been touched by

Zaabalawi had also achieved some measure of terrestrial gain. The calligrapher

Hassanein created some of his best drawings while the composer Sheikh

Gad created a beautiful melody in the company of Zaabalawi.


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Another event is significant. After two unhelpful encounters, the crucial

strategy that finally led to the protagonist’s successful meeting with Zaabalawi,

albeit in a drunken stupor, is one defined by logical deduction. This is sym-

bolically represented by a well-defined map presented to the protagonist by a

local sheikh, or cleric. The sheikh’s advice here is instructive:

May God come to your aid! But why don’t you go about it systematically? He

spread out a sheet of paper on the desk and drew on it with unexpected speed and

skill until he had made a full plan of the district, showing all the various quarters,

lanes, alleyways, and squares. [emphasis mine]65

Like Navis’ depiction of a logical God, this excerpt suggests that Mahfouz

too subverts the idea that religion is irrational in the way he depicts how a man

of religious standing employs reason to solve the protagonist’s hitherto

dead-end quest. Thus, a strong undercurrent running through both short

stories is the proposition that desire for perfection in Islam transcends the

post-Enlightenment reason/faith polarisation.

VI I . CONCLUSION

In theory as in praxis, this essay implies that utopian impulses are born from

a strong religious impetus if one factors in the post-secular condition.

This paper’s analysis of faith-based fiction from Muslim cultures supports

this hypothesis in regard to Islam. Could it also be true of other world reli-

gions in the non-West? The discourses of Ashis Nandy and Zhang Longxi on

Hinduism and Confucianism suggest so. Nandy argues that a third world

utopian impulse is driven by a need to banish suffering, adding that

Mahatma Gandhi’s practice of Hinduism is aimed at empowering both the

colonised and the coloniser.66 Meanwhile, Zhang extracts this-worldly ideals

in Confucianism, thus acknowledging the role of human action and intellect

in the quest for betterment.67

If it could be likewise demonstrated in faith-based fiction in other world

religions that the post-secular condition influences the utopian impulse, one

could argue for a new facet to postcolonial theory that departs from the

spectre of polemics that has long haunted this mode of reading. Just as religions

should not be beholden to a strict separation of reason and faith, so too should

postcolonialism re-theorise its clearly defined boundaries of the coloniser/

colonised and centre/margin-type dichotomies. Yet such an undertaking

must not just reiterate Homi K. Bhabha’s notions of ‘hybridity’68 and ‘mim-

icry’,69 which still assume the very hierarchical binarism they seek to subvert.

Rather, in the wise words of Nandy, it is to opt to become a ‘non-player’ in

an othering game.70

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Yet another, possibly more far-reaching, implication that this exercise has

raised is the possibility of theorising a utopian theology within the discourse of

contemporary utopian studies. As this essay suggests through its analysis of

post-secular Islam, this is an endeavour that could inject fresh perspectives into

our contemporary understanding of humanity’s quest for the good life.

REFERENCES

1 K. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in

Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1997), p. 20.2 R. Schaer, ‘Utopia, Space, Time,

History’ in R. Schaer, G. Claeys and

L.T. Sargent (eds), N. Benabid (trans.),

Utopia: The Search of the Ideal Society in

the Western World (New York, Oxford:

New York Public Library, Oxford

University Press, 2000), p. 3.3 The term ‘Eurocentrism’ is not here used

to depict Western civilisations as a homo-

geneous entity. Rather, it must be

viewed as a concept in postcolonial

theory that refers to the idea of ‘the

bad’ in terms of hegemony as described

by Neil Lazarus in the podcast

‘Postcolonialism: An Interdisciplinary

Dialogue, Part 1’, Thinking Aloud, (host)

Noorlinah Mohamed, (Coventry:

University of Warwick), 1 July 2010.

MP3 file. 2 July 2010. This paper defines

‘the bad’ of Eurocentrism as a type of

thinking among some scholars of utopia

that utopianism can only exist in the

West because of the continent’s unique

experience of the Renaissance and

Enlightenment. It does not assume a

monolithic West that is thoroughly

oppressive.4 W. James, The Varieties of Religious

Experience: A Study in Human Nature

(New York: The Modern Library,

1929), pp. 31–2. However, Geoghegan

argues that such an interpretation of

James is inaccurate in that the latter was

not denying the social dimensions of re-

ligion. Rather, James was uninterested in

exploring it. See V. Geoghegan, ‘Utopia

and the Memory of Religion’ in M.J.

Griffin and T. Moylan (eds) Exploring

the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian

Thought and Practice, (Bern: Peter Lang,

2007), p. 105.5 For a summary of the main tenets of sci-

entific naturalism, see J.F. Haught,

‘Introduction’, God and the New Atheism:

A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris,

Hitchens, (Louisville, KY: Westminster

John Knox Press, 2008).6 V. Geoghegan, ‘Religious Narrative,

Post-secularism and Utopia’, Critical

Review of International Social and Political

Philosophy 3 (2000) 206. Geoghegan was

referring to Philip Blond’s conception of

post-secular philosophy as the endeavour

to ‘bring an end to the secular’ in

P. Blond (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Post-

Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophyand

Theology (London, New York:

Routledge, 1998), p. 54.7 M. Mahdi, ‘The Rational Tradition in

Islam’ in Farhad Daftary (ed.) Intellectual

Traditions in Islam (London, New York:

I.B. Tauris, 2001), p. 62. A similar debate

relates to the idea of comparative litera-

ture. Here, Gayatri C. Spivak and Susan

Bassnett espouse oppositional views on

the virtues of a West-East comparative

literary analysis. In short, Spivak believes

this indicates an instance of hegemony,

while Bassnett argues that this juxtapos-

ition need not necessarily be seen such

if issues discussed are pertinent to both

cultures. See G.C. Spivak, Death of a

Discipline (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2003) and S. Bassnett,

‘Reflections on Comparative Literature


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in the Twenty-First Century’, Compara-

tive Critical Studies 3 (2006) 3–11.8 K. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, p. 20.9 R. Schaer, Utopia: The Search of the Ideal

Society in the Western World, p. 3–4.10 Ibid., p. 3.11 Ibid.12 K. Kumar, Utopianism, F. Parkin (ed.)

(Milton Keynes, Open University Press:

1991), p. 3513 K. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, p. 20–1.14 The 4th-century Christian theologian

Saint Augustine of Hippo distinguishes

between two types of realms, the City

of God and the City of Man, as a

means of separating between predestined

Believers who would receive God’s grace

in the Hereafter (City of God) and ‘the

unchosen, the reprobate, doomed to

damnation without hope of reprieve’ as

members of the Earthly City, or City of

Man in I. Adams and R.W. Dyson, Fifty

Major Political Thinkers, (London:

Routledge, 2003), p. 21. Gray believes

this categorisation entrenches the view

that the good life is only achievable in

‘a realm out of time’ in J. Gray’s Black

Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of

Utopia. (New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 2007), p. 8.15 K. Kumar, Utopianism, p. 35.16 See D.E. Klemm and W. Schweiker,

Religion and the Human Future: An Essay

on Theological Humanism (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2008), p. 14.17 Ibid., p. 168.18 Ibid., pp. 26–7.19 See R. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia

(New York: Phillip Allen, 1990). An ex-

ception, Levitas argues, is Joyce Oramel

Hertzler’s The History of Utopian Thought

(1965) which devotes an entire section to

identifying instances of utopianism in the

Hebrew Bible. While a similar line of

argument could also be detected in the

works of Arthur Leslie Morton’s The

English Utopia (1952), Paul Bloomfield’s

Imaginary Worlds (1932) as well as Glenn

Robert Negley and John Max Patrick’s

The Quest for Utopia (1952), these works

treat the connection between religion

and utopia in a cursory manner. With

Negley and Patrick’s book, for instance,

divinely inspired utopian ideas such as

Eden, New Jerusalem and notions of

Islamic paradises were ‘mentioned in pas-

sing but is not, according to their defin-

ition, part of utopia proper’, posits Levitas

(p. 33), thus echoing Kumar’s views.20 See R. Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial

Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the

Utopian Novel in New English Literatures

(Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001)

who reads literary utopias from former

colonies such as Canada and Australia in

light of heterotopia, which upholds the

conflation of utopia and dystopia literary

conventions. Other works on

non-Western utopianism include Ana

M.M. Martinho, ‘Utopian Eyes and

Dystopian Writings in Angolan

Literature’, Research in African Literatures

38 (Spring 2007) 46–53 and A.

Erritouni, ‘Apartheid Inequality and

Post-apartheid Utopia in Nadine

Gordimer’s July’s People’, Research in

African Literatures 37 (Winter 2006) 68–84.21 L.T. Sargent, ‘Utopian Traditions:

Themes and Variations’ in Utopia: The

Search of the Ideal Society in the Western

World, p. 8.22 T. Moylan, ‘Utopia, the Postcolonial and

the Postmodern: A Review of Ralph

Pordzik. The Quest for Postcolonial

Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to

the Utopian Novel in New English

Literatures’, Science Fiction Studies 29

(2002) 265.23 R. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 98.24 Ibid.25 E. Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The

Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom

(New York: Herder and Herder, 1972),

p. 146.26 V. Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (London:

Routledge, 1996), p. 88.27 Bloch cited in ibid., p. 89.28 Ibid., p. 91.

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29 Ibid. See also, J. Gray’s Black Mass:

Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of

Utopia, p. 67. Gray makes the same ob-

servation, adding that another religious

turn in the Nazi utopian ‘Third Reich’

project could be surmised in its aversion

against the Jews as a form of

demonology.30 V. Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, p. 92.31 Ibid.32 Cited in ibid.33 N. Madjid, ‘Our Political Ideals’, The

True Face of Islam: Essays on Islam and

Modernity in Indonesia (1984, Jakarta:

Voice Centre Indonesia, 2003), p. 183.34 T. More, Utopia (1516, London: Penguin

Books, 2003), p. 113.35 N. Madjid, ‘Our Political Ideals’, p. 192.36 Qu’ran 2:246.37 N. Madjid, ‘Our Political Ideals’, p. 193.38 Ibid., p. 198.39 See N. Madjid, ‘Reinvigorating

Religious Understanding in the

Indonesian Muslim Community’ in

Charles Kurzman (ed.) Liberal Islam: A

Sourcebook (New York, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1998), p. 292.40 Qu’ran 2: 201.41 Qu’ran 28: 77.42 R. Jackson, Fifty Key Figures in Islam

(London: Routledge, 2006), p. 114.43 Ibid., p. 255.44 F. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qu’ran,

(Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1980),

p. 111. Incidentally, Rahman was

Madjid’s supervisor when the latter was

undertaking doctoral research at the

University of Chicago. This is pertinent

to the argument because it suggests a

continuity of critical ideas between these

two Islamic scholars.45 Qu’ran 14: 48. Rahman also points to

other Qu’ranic verses that touch on the

idea of re-creation such as 56: 60–2, 29:

20, 14: 19 and others.46 F. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qu’ran,

p. 111.47 V. Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, pp. 31–2.

48 J. Phelan, ‘Narrative as Rhetoric and

Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever:

Progression, Configuration and the

Ethics of Surprise’ in W. Jost and W.

Olmsted (eds) A Companion to Rhetoric

and Rhetorical Criticism (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2004), p. 341.49 F. Vieira, ‘The Concept of Utopia’ in

G. Claeys (ed.) The Cambridge Companion

to Utopian Literature (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 7.50 F. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic,

(London: Verso, 2009), p. 415.51 For Jameson, utopian planners are indi-

viduals responsible for visualising an

all-encompassing plan at realising the

ideal society. More and Fourier qualify

as such individuals in the way they each

respectively painted a comprehensive

vision of that ideal society—More did

this through his book Utopia which de-

scribes an imaginary island-state as a

flourishing cosmopolitan society under

the leadership of a philosopher-king,

while Fourier captures it through his

idea of the ‘phalanxes’, a multi-level

commune where the rich (who occupy

the topmost floor) and poor (residing

at the ground floor) lived harmoni-

ously based on the principle of

cooperation.52 Ibid.53 Ibid.54 F. Jameson, p. 433.55 Ibid., p. 434.56 Ibid.57 Ibid.58 R. Levitas, ‘Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch

on Abstract and Concrete Utopia’ in J.D.

Owen and T. Moylan (eds) Not Yet:

Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London: Verso,

1997), p. 67.59 A.A. Navis, ‘The Fall and Decline of Our

Local Mosque’ in H. Aveling (ed. and trans.)

From Surabaya to Armageddon: Indonesian

Short Stories (Singapore: Heinemenn

Educational Books, 1976), p. 125.60 Ibid., pp. 124–5.


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61 N. Mahfouz, ‘Zaabalawi’ in L. Beverly

(ed.), D. Johnson-Davies (trans.) Short

Stories: A Portable Anthology, (1967)

(New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s,

2001), p. 303.62 Ibid., p. 304.63 Ibid.64 See H. Gordon, ‘Flight From Freedom’,

in Naguib Mahfouz’s Egypt: Existential

Themes in His Writings (Westport:

Greenwood Publishing, 1990), pp. 23–7.65 N.Mahfouz, ‘Zaabalawi’, p. 306.66 A. Nandy, ‘Towards a Third World

Utopia’, Bonfire of Creeds: The Essential

Ashis Nandy (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2004), p. 452.67 L. Zhang, ‘The Utopian Vision, East and

West’ in Allegoresis: Reading Canonical

Literature East and West (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2005), p. 174–6.68 H.K. Bhabha, ‘The Commitment to

Theory’ in The Location of Culture

(London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 37–8.69 H.K.Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The

Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, ibid.,

pp. 86–9.70 A. Nandy, ‘Towards a Third World

Utopia’, p. 452.

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