Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion: Aufhaben and Tajdīd, and the Potential for Renovatio and Renewal

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Chapter 3 Towards a Dialectical Critique of Religion: Aufhaben and Tajdīd, and the Potential for Renovatio and Renewal

Dustin J. Byrd

The Critical Theory of Religion, as initiated by Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal, and later developed by Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rudolf J. Siebert, has predomi- nately remained concerned with what is commonly understood as the “West- ern” religions, i.e. Judaism and Christianity. However, the dialectical approach to those two traditions can also be applied to the youngest of the Abrahamic religions: Islam. In this essay, I will attempt to interrogate Islam, both its theol- ogy and history, through the critical lenses that have been developed by the Frankfurt School’s unique form of philosophy, Critical Theory, demonstrating that Islam can still serve as a source for critical and emancipatory semantic and semiotic materials, from which the “non-believing” modern citizen can still draw meaningful substance and sustenance. By demonstrating that Islam can be determinately negated (aufheben) without being destroyed, I address the critics of Critical Theory, ala Imam Hamza Yusuf, an esteemed American Muslim scholar, and the late conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton (d. 2020), who maintain that Critical Theory is solely about deconstruction (ab- stract negation), and therefore almost uniformly damaging to Western civiliza- tion. In this essay, I claim that they are both failing to see the dialectical logic in Critical Theory’s negativity, which includes both negation and preservation. The failure to see the Hegelian logic of aufheben, which is at the core of Critical Theory, distorts their picture of what Critical Theory is. Additionally, it distorts their perception of Critical Theory’s relationship to religion, thus blocking Is- lam’s contribution to the morally-formed democratic society that Imam Ham- za Yusuf and Roger Scruton would certainly advocate. From the outset, I will admit I am a long-time student of Imam Hamza Yu- suf, and still find his mission to bring tajdīd (renewal) – or “renovatio” – to contemporary Islam highly insightful and, from the perspective of the ummah (Muslim community), desperately needed. On the other hand, while at times I find myself in agreement with the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, especially his diagnoses of the ills of modernity and the dogmatism and

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ethnomasochism of certain forms of liberal-left thought, I find his reading of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, written primarily in his book Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, to be superficial, woefully inadequate, and at times dishonest. In his attempt to lump the Frankfurt School in with other leftist philosophies, especially post-modernism and deconstructionism, he ascribes certain positions to them that are mistaken, especially in the realm of religion. This essay is meant as a rebuttal to Scruton’s claims, showing clearly the dialectical – both negation and preservation – in the Frankfurt School’s philosophy of religion and how it can serve to further the goals of Imam Hamza Yusuf’s tajdīd of the sane society, especially in the West.

1 Delineating “Critical Theory”

In his book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, Scruton ar- gues that his journey through the pantheon of Left-wing thinkers demonstrated to him that they actually produce no alternatives to the world as it is – “only negatives.”1 Under the meta-label “Critical Theory,” Scruton includes non- Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, such as Sartre and Foucault, Lacan and Gramsci. It is true that all these “Leftist” thinkers share certain influences, such as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and even Friedrich Nietzsche, and in some cases they even influenced each other, it is wrong to assume that they all have the same basic underlying logic, especially when it comes to religion.2 On the face of it, the Frankfurt School, which he claims to be post-War Germany’s “new idol,” is portrayed as being wholly secular, following the Hegelian Left’s understanding that religion, whether psychologically (Ludwig Feuerbach),

1 Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 273. 2 As this is not a book review, but rather an attempt to critique the critic of Critical Theory, I will stick to a strict definition of Critical Theory – a school of thought that began with a cohort of German-Jewish intellectuals in between the two World Wars, as well as those scholars whose intellectual lineage follow directly from those original Frankfurt School thinkers, ala Jürgen Habermas and Rudolf J. Siebert. I understand that this definition of “critical theory” is not universally accepted, as non-Frankfurt School scholars have often placed them- selves within the meta-label of critical theory. Nevertheless, for the sake of coherency in this essay, I must disregard their protests and remain steadfast in my delineation of what is and what is not Critical Theory, in the original sense. This is especially important when it comes to religion, as many other left-wing philosophers, sociologists, and intellectuals who often work under the title of “critical theory,” have a drastically different relationship to religion than the original Frankfurt School scholars.