Slow paths to sacred callings.

Are there universal moral laws that bind all humanity? Are some things just right and wrong? In a polarized world, can we hope to agree on moral issues? Christians and Muslims have long histories of discussing the existence of a “natural law.” But where do they differ? Join us for a fascinating discussion of these and many other issues as we meet with two experts on natural law, Micah Watson of Calvin University and Anver Emon of the University of Toronto.
Matthew Kaemingk:
The topic for today is natural law in both Islam and in Christianity, and more specifically within Evangelicalism. And we’ve got two excellent guests to guide us in this conversation. We have professor Anver Eman from the University of Toronto. He is a professor of law and history within their faculty of law. He’s also the director of the Institute of Islamic Studies. So we have a Canadian in the house.
And crossing the border, we have Dr. Micah Watson, who is from Calvin University, where he’s a professor of politics. He also directs the Henry Institute, which focuses on faith and politics there at Calvin University. And Micah is also the co-author of a brand new book on natural law called Hopeful Realism. I’ve got it right here. Well, first of all, welcome gentlemen. It’s great to have you both.
Anver Emon:
Thanks for having us.
Micah Watson:
Thank you.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So the topic today is natural law and really for those of us who are new to this topic, of course, where we want to start off with, which is a basic definition or a basic understanding of what this is. And I don’t want to start with the assumption that actually Muslims and Christians agree on this. And in fact, Muslims and Christians I would imagine disagree with one another exactly on what natural law is and how useful it is. But I wonder if we might start with Micah Watson. Micah, can you talk us through just a little bit of a basic understanding maybe if you have a story that gives us a basic understanding of how an Evangelical might come to this belief in natural law and how it might be used?
Micah Watson:
Yeah, thanks. And thanks, I just want to echo my gratitude to be here and be part of this conversation. I think it’s really important, so grateful for this podcast, grateful for all of you letting me join you.
So I think one way that an Evangelical Christian might get at the idea of natural law is thinking about a couple things. One is, very straightforward idea, just how are we supposed to live? Is there a blueprint for human nature or a way that human beings flourish? And, two, how do we do that with others who may not share our religious convictions? They may share some moral convictions and they may differ on some moral convictions. And how do we have access to that blueprint or that way of figuring out how we can flourish and live together?
So in terms of an entry point, there’s a lot of natural law stuff out there. There’s a lot of confusing debates. My entry point from my students is Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham jail. And I won’t spend too much time on that, but in that he basically answers the charge, “Hey, you guys say we should obey Brown v. Board and we should listen to the law, and yet here you are in jail because you’ve broken a law for a parade permit.” And he basically quotes Augustine and Aquinas, two of these kind of giants of Christian thought, with the statement that an unjust law is no law at all. And then he goes forward with the question, how do we determine what’s an unjust law and a just law? And he basically says, an unjust law is that which impedes human flourishing and a just law is one that encourages it.
So I think for Evangelical Christians, and I think this could be shared even outside that tribe, if you like, natural law basically posits two things. One, there is a way that human beings can flourish and there are ways that we can not flourish and actually damage ourselves, just like if you put milk into a gas tank, that car’s not going to run very well. So in the same way, if you act in certain ways as a human being, you’re not going to flourish very well. So one is just there is a way for us to flourish. And the second aspect of natural law is human beings as such can know that. As Christians, we believe the Bible is God’s revelation to us. And in that he will give us a lot as to that blueprint or instructions or an owner’s manual, if you will. But the Scriptures talk about even folks outside of the Bible, outside of Christianity, having access to truth about how we can live. And so that shared access is really important if we’re going to be sharing a society with folks who don’t share our faith.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, so before I jump over to Dr. Eman, to hear about the Islamic side of this discourse, I wonder if you might start out with just a few biblical scriptures that you would point to to sort of ground this understanding of a natural moral law that sort of touches all human beings.
Micah Watson:
Yeah, I think there’s quite a few in what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, and there’s quite a few in the Christian scriptures, the New Testament as well. Romans, chapter one and two, Paul there talks about everyone being able to know God by what he has done. There’s a certain knowledge there, and I hesitate to say this because I know Matt, you are an actual theologian and I’m in a politics department, so I’ll welcome your help on this. Jesus says, “You who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children. Let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and praise your father in heaven.” That’s a witnessing passage and it’s implying that even folks who see Christians’ good deeds can know what good is and recognize, “Ah, there’s something there that I should find attractive.” How can they do that if the only way to know what’s good is through a direct Christian witness?
In the Old Testament, there’s scores of passages. Every time the prophets are sent out to a non-Jewish audience and telling them to repent, think about Jonah going to Nineveh, they don’t say, “Hey, we didn’t get the Torah. We don’t have this Mosaic law, so we can’t be doing anything wrong.” No, they know that they have done something wrong and can do better because the law is written in their heart. So the other example I’ll end with is when Cain is kicked out of the garden and he’s going to have to wander, he says to God, “Anyone who sees me and knows that I killed my brother is not going to like me. That’s going to be hard for me.” Which implies, this is obviously way before the Mosaic law, that human beings as such can know that murdering your brother is wrong and they’re going to give him a hard time about it.
So I actually think that the Scriptures presuppose that human beings made in the image of God, image bearers, imago Dei, part of what that means is access to some level of knowledge, “Hey, there’s good things that we can do to live well and there’s ways that we can mistreat ourselves and each other and we can know some of that.”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah. This idea that God’s law is somehow written on our heart and it haunts us. You can try to suppress it, but we have this sort of moral conscience that certain things are right and wrong. Okay, so over to you, Dr. Eman. And I know that you’ve interacted with Christians on these subjects before, as well. How do you typically start by maybe talking about the ways in which Christian and Muslim understandings intersect or diverge? Help us understand from the Muslim side how you all have historically approached this question of natural law.
Anver Emon:
Well, so I think it’s a little bit complicated. It’s somewhat controversial, right? So when I wrote about this in 2010, I wrote about an idea, the idea of can you reason to the law? I’m a lawyer, I’m a law professor. I think about these in that context. But what became very clear to me as I was writing and thereafter was that natural law theory cuts across multiple disciplines in both historical Islamic terms, but also contemporary university terms.
There’s theology, there’s philosophy, there’s law, and having to disentangle that is intellectually challenging. But at the same time, I think it’s also partially one of the reasons why it’s not a common idea among most Muslims. Moreover, because natural law is so associated popularly with someone like Aquinas, it seemed to fall outside the Islamic tradition. So even trying to talk about is there an Islamic natural law tradition is controversial from a post-colonial perspective, from a post-imperial perspective. And so that’s the first hurdle.
Even when you get past that hurdle, then the question is really one of it boils down to how do we understand God. Is God just? And the theological question that Muslims had to ask historically was, is God held to a standard of justice? And if so, what does that mean about his omnipotence? So if you look at God … if you look at natural law only through the lens of theology, then the question is how did Muslims historically come down on this issue? And as it turned out historically the theology was one of God’s omnipotent, he’s actually above standards of justice. That became the dominant orthodoxy from the 10th century onward, which created somewhat hostile … in now it’s a somewhat hostile perspective to take towards natural law.
For me, the question really comes through, I’m less interested in theology, I’m more interested in, okay, but we still have things to do in the world. We have decisions to make in the world. We have policies to create for human betterment and can thinking legally about this tradition help us? And so what I’ve shown or what I try to show was that actually there’s two strains of natural law thinking in Islamic thought. There’s the one that starts with a theological assumption that God is subject to a standard of rational justice and therefore we can reason in that case from the world around us to a rule of law, to a rule of Islamic law. That’s what I call hard natural law theory, that unless there’s a source scriptural text that’s contrary, we can reason and come to a rule. That’s a hard version.
The softer version is, well, God is above any standards of justice. It just so happens out of his mercy, he happens to govern in a way consistent with the goodness for humanity. And so we can still reason legally to a conclusion of law in the absence of scripture. That’s key. And so we can still get there. And that is a softer version of natural law theory. And so in many ways, that’s how, in my view, historical jurists manage the theological controversies. Because theology, if you get your theology wrong, you’re out. You’re in the world of heterodoxy. But in the world of law, you could disagree among Islamic jurists, but no one’s thrown out. That’s not the space of heterodoxy. That’s just good legal argument. You get two lawyers in the room and there’ll be three different positions. And that’s where I think if we think about Islamic natural law theory as this space of legal analysis, not theological one, there’s space to play. Then the question is how do you come up with ideas? How do you reason? And that’s a larger conversation, but that’s sort of maybe a starting point for us for this conversation.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So I hear the theological and the legal. What about the internal conscience? Is there a sense for Muslims that every human being has a moral conscience, that certain things are right and wrong, that an internal sense of murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, lying, that this is sort of internal to a human being across history and culture? Is that within the Islamic tradition as well in any way?
Anver Emon:
I mean, I think that to a certain degree, some of these things become common sense. And so I don’t want to say they’re uniquely Christian or they’re uniquely Islamic or they’re uniquely rabbinic in that certain way. There’s a certain common sense that gets enshrined and gets captured in scriptural text. So for instance, to kill a human being, to kill one is to kill all, right? There’s verses in the Quran that speak to this. So I do think that you have these scriptural corroborations of what you’re suggesting, but I also want to be mindful that natural law, at least in the Islamic context, when we think about it from a legal perspective, a lot of it is trying to balance what I think subjectively is true versus the larger purposes of law. And so when we think of natural law, on the one hand, this conversation might be focusing on the natural part, but the law part’s really important. And we think about what work that word is doing. For me, it’s not just simply about what do I sincerely believe, it’s like how do we work together collectively towards a shared idea? And of course, we have to first get to that shared idea.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, so Dr. Eman, I just want to clarify something that you sort of touched on there, that if God is the most just, that’s one of his fundamental attributes, and that’s how we as Muslims understand him, what would scholars and theologians say to the question of if God is the most just, is he then capable of committing injustice or asking his creation to commit injustice? I mean, there’s something inherently self-contradictory there. And I think for a lot of us modern Muslims, we take some kind of solace in that understanding that a just God would not ask his creation or allow them to hit their wives or something like that, or mistreat women, or things that we as moderns now know are unacceptable. We can kind of reason accordingly that we have a sort of intuitive sense of what is just and what is not.
And so that’s obviously a very controversial debate and it divided two of the main groups in Islamic theology and interpretation, the Mu’tazalites and the Ash’arites. We don’t have to get into all that. But do you think that there is a kind of modern desire for especially Muslims in America and Canada and places like that, that we can resolve our discomfort with certain traditional things that were okay back in the day, but now we can say, “Well, they’re not okay because now we know better?”
Anver Emon:
Well, I think that you see that all over the place. I think that if you look at Muslims, the way they organise, the way they come together, they don’t all agree, they all will have different views on a whole range of issues, just like we see in the general public. I think the problem that we have to make sure we don’t … the trap that we should not fall into is presuming that Muslims, wherever they might think on the spectrum politically in Canada and the US, are so saturated with Islamness, right?
Oftentimes we think of religious people as, we sometimes collapse them with their textual tradition or their religious tradition, when in fact they’re oftentimes just going through their ordinary everyday just like the rest of us. And so I’m a little bit hesitant to say, “Well, does natural law offer us a way to think through some of these challenges?” But I can tell you in working with, I’ve had the privilege of working with many Muslim organizations and communities here in Canada, and you definitely sense a desire for social betterment on a number of platforms, whether it’s gender, whether it’s children, whether it’s youth justice or whatnot. But of course, like every community, they’re going to disagree on how to get there. They’re going to disagree on the lines, and they’re going to dispute over inherited orthodoxies all the time, which they do.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, and another point I just wanted to raise here to kind of contextualize all this is I think that unlike various Christian traditions where there’s this notion of original sin, I think we can say that in Islam there is a doctrine of original goodness, also known as the fitrah or the innate human disposition or human nature, and that we are born good, and then it’s our parents, family, society, political context, leaders that corrupt us thereafter. And that part of the challenge in Islam is to return to our innate disposition, if you will. And this is I think a major theme in 20th century Islamic political thought.
Rashid Rida, one of the great kind of contemporary modern theologians really kind of emphasizes this point that Islam is the religion of reason. It’s the religion of innate disposition. And I think that that is drawing, even if he doesn’t kind of use the terminology, on natural law concepts, that even if we don’t have, and sometimes I think in the Islamic tradition, people will hypothesize about what if someone’s on an island where there’s no revelation or access to revelation, they can still reach certain truths by using their original goodness and their nature to find what is true and what is just, and of course that is a real, I think, problem in history is that not everyone has access to revelation. So there has to be an answer to the question of, well, what if someone’s part of a tribe in the middle of nowhere? Do we really want to claim that they’re cut off from God or they don’t have access to salvation or Heaven or Paradise just because of their circumstances? We can say no. Well, they can still incline towards God without revelation. But feel free to take issue with anything I’ve said there. I just want to put some of that out there.
Anver Emon:
Look, there’s a long history of all of these issues around whether we can attribute a standard of justice to God. What is the role of evolving standards of human justice relative to God’s scriptural revelations? All of these having to do with the primacy of the Quranic text as a central site of religious thinking. So that’s one issue that is always going to be, I think, present with us, even though the early debates resolved themselves by the 12th, 13th, and 14th century into more shared positions.
I do think that we’re moving away, at least from the Islamic legal tradition, we’re moving away from natural law thinking and more to the long story, the long history of Islamic philosophy. So you talked about living on an island without revelation. I mean, this is the famous story of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, right? So a medieval story about imagining someone in this state of nature and reasoning to the good. You’ve talked about ideas around fitrah, this idea of an inherent conscience, which is certainly part of the psychological, like philosophy of psychology literature. And so I think that those are resources available. But if we’re talking to sort of your everyday Muslim, I’m not sure how often people pick up that volume or pick up their ibn Sina. It’s probably not a common feature. So it’s good that we have podcasts like this to explore themes of this nature.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s right. I mean, gosh, this podcast is just a gift from above, I think. So Dr. Watson, we’ve heard these Muslims going back and forth here for a while. So let’s jump in and I’d love to hear from you. Anything surprise you or anything you want to poke on or push on from Dr. Eman and the Islamic perspective?
Micah Watson:
A couple things came to mind. I appreciated Dr. Eman’s talking about the law being really important. It strikes me natural law was not very well represented in American law schools prior to World War II. Legal positivism really held sway, which is the idea that law … it’s almost a voluntarist approach to what law is from a human perspective that would match the voluntarist perspective of God just saying what the law is and changing his mind. But I think World War II really changed that insofar as we had this question afterwards, what do we do at Nuremberg? How can we try German Nazi officials for acts that they did given that the legal system allowed for it in Germany?
And after that happened, some of the texts used in law schools from some legal positivists changed and kind of acknowledged the natural law tradition because you kind of had this idea of crimes against humanity, which implies that all human beings can know that there are certain things one ought not do and can be held accountable to it. So that’d be one area where I would just echo and agree when it comes to law, natural law, it’s not ever held sway in the last however many years, and a law professor will know about that better than I do, but it has made something of a comeback, at least as being a player at the table.
And the other area where we can see that is with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is a remarkable development happening after World War II, in which you have a pretty robust statement on a number of things about human flourishing that are signed by countries that are very different in terms of what their people believe about God, about where people come from. So that would be an area of commonality, and I would suggest a pretty rich area to say this is where natural law thinking was quite important, remains important.
Of course, one of the differences is the notion of were human beings originally created good or the doctrine or teaching of original sin. I teach at Calvin, so I’m contractually obliged to bring up the fall every so often and talk about human depravity. And I do think that may be an area of some commonality insofar as the Christian tradition is that Adam and Eve were good at first and then fell, and we’ve all inherited that. But then there is also that inheritance of sin, of fallenness, that’s always baked in such that it would temper our hopes for what we think natural law might be able to do.
So that’s one of the key points of the book that I’ve been a part of recently, Matt, you so kindly mentioned, which is we do think that natural law as a concept, as a reality, as a truth, can give people from different backgrounds, Muslims and Christians and secular folks and Hindus, a way to talk about what it looks like to live well in their community. I live in Michigan, not far away is Flint and massive water crisis there in the last few years. We can all agree human beings need that physical good to survive. So I would say that’s an area where there’s some room for some good back and forth about what human beings are really like. Is that fallenness baked in such that we’re not going to quite get past that on this side of the eschaton, or I should say on this side of Heaven? Or is that something that if we did progress enough with society that we could get past some of those? I think that’d be an area of a fruitful disagreement perhaps.
Shadi Hamid:
I’d be curious, Dr. Eman, from a Muslim perspective, how do you view the question of fallenness and inherent inherited sin and human depravity? How would you describe the Islamic orthodox position on falling from grace, so to speak? And I think another interesting thing is that Muslims in the West, I think we take on some of this language and we use it in everyday discussion because we’re part of a Christianity-infused society. So we’ll just say things like, “Oh, fall from grace,” and we don’t really think about where exactly that’s coming from theologically or scripturally. But yet, tell us a little bit about fallenness from an Islamic perspective.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And just to kind of add to that question. So within Christianity, one of our challenges is this belief that sin sort of covers our eyes or it dulls our senses and it dulls our conscience, so we can create a sense of noise, of moral noise, where we cannot hear God’s law or we obfuscate God’s law, and so we become numb to what God wants for us or how God has designed us. And so, yeah, there might be a natural law, but we’re going to disagree or we’re going to twist that because of our evilness. I too am curious of a sort of Muslim reaction to that understanding of human corruption and the corruption of human reason.
Anver Emon:
Well, so I mean, this is an interesting question. I actually have never thought about specifically the Christian doctrine of the fall from grace. But one way to approach it from the Islamic tradition is to think about sin and the nature of sin. And one of the ways that I understand it, and again I’m coming at it from a legal perspective, so I’m not so much philosophical or theological, but what has fascinated me is the way in which the law, if you pick up a book of Islamic law, it starts with purification rituals, then it goes to the rules on prayer, then it goes to the rules on charity-giving or fasting and so on and so forth. These core pillars. And these are not things that we in the secular West would call law. We would call them ritual. But they read and are articulated in a manner consistent with the same book, but the chapters on contracts or personal injury or the criminal law or judicial procedure.
And so when we think about the scope and scale, what we have is these are the guidelines. Departure from them is a path to sin. And so one of the things that I think is important, because we’ve talked about conscience, we’ve talked about internal fitrah, but I want to emphasize in the Islamic tradition and the late Saba Mahmood really emphasized this in her work on piety, is that actually we have a tendency, given sort of our Christian inheritances in the Latin West, so in North America and Europe, that we tend to think inward and find sincerity internally, which then translates into our external acts. Her argument was actually performance of ritual practice is how you cultivate the soul. So it’s outside in. And she wanted to subvert this tendency that she thought was certainly part of a larger Christian inheritance around sincerity and belief as if that is the site of sincerity.
Now, she’s working ethnographically with a select group of women in Egypt. But one of the things that I think helps us think through this challenge is that we have a huge tradition in which we have traditions from the prophet, however problematic they might be, but his practice becomes a model of what one should aspire to be. You have legal traditions that I identified doctrinally, what does it mean to perform the rituals of religion appropriately? And then you have the easy move into what we would call more formal law-like behavior. And so this external framework creates a practice-oriented approach, conformity with which contributes to the cultivation of the soul internally. And so I would want to look at it in that sort of dynamic way and just reverse the polarity with respect to what we’ve talked about in the Christian context.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I think this is really important, this kind of Protestant conception that faith, internal faith, is the first step justified by faith alone, kind of contrast with good works, to kind of oversimplify. But I think there is this sense in Islam, but I think I’m also starting to hear it from some converts to Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, is that even if you don’t believe everything about Catholic doctrine, you can act as if you believe and you do the ritual, you do the work, so to speak. You participate in community and then perhaps God can open up your heart to kind of the full spectrum of belief. So I think that goes nicely along with Saba Mahmood’s idea of outside in rather than inside out.
Micah Watson:
It’s like the medicine can work if you take it, even if you’re not consciously making the medicine work.
Anver Emon:
Or another way of putting it is fake it till you make it.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Yes, indeed. To be fair, I think all of us have challenges where our belief on maybe specific issues or kind of doctrinal debates might not be as strong as we want them to be, but that shouldn’t keep us from necessarily doing the ritual. So we shouldn’t say, “Well, oh, I had this doubt today, therefore I’m not going to do my daily five prayers.” No, you still do the daily five prayers. And then this idea that you always have to meet God halfway, you have to run to him for him to be able to run to you and kind of absorb you into his grace and mercy, if you will. So I just think that’s a practical way of looking at religion is that if we’re always waiting for the kind of perfect belief and perfect kind of internal composition, then we’re maybe postponing things or we’re just finding ways to wait.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I want to try to pivot this into politics, contemporary politics for a moment here. I’ll start with Dr. Watson, then switch over to Dr. Eman. So we’re living in a moment of tribal politics, of tribalism, and one of the ways that Shadi talks about is politics is very existential, so political debates are less over policy and marginal tax rates and the specific design of healthcare, it’s really over conflicts over ways of life and a belief that if this person is elected, my people are in danger, that my way of life is in danger, this election is existential. Or here in the United States, this is the most important election of our lifetime. And maybe this is the last election. This is your last chance.
And so my question for both of you is in this time of polarization, in this time of tribes and tribalism, what is natural law for and what do you see the voice of natural law being in this particular moment of deep division and demonization? What can an attentiveness to law and lawfulness offer? So why do you continue to write and speak about these things in this particular moment? And also if you could speak specifically as an Evangelical within your own Evangelical community and all the ways that American Evangelicals contribute to peace and understanding and gracious-
Micah Watson:
Yeah, we’re in a good moment. Yeah, I think Evangelicalism, and I’m just so grateful we have not had to get into the definitional morass of figuring out what that is, but it is something, it’s rather convoluted, particularly politically, to the point where people mean by it now, effectively, someone’s a supporter of a certain political figure that I won’t name.
So Princeton University had for decades a Princeton Evangelical Fellowship and they had to change the name to Princeton Christian Fellowship because everyone heard it, thought it was a MAGA outfit recently. So the term has certainly become less than helpful. Evangelicals, unlike our Catholic friends, we don’t have a magisterium, we don’t have a place you can go and say, “Here’s the position and here’s what we believe.” Even if not everyone follows it, at least there’s this clear answer. Some Evangelicals make the mistake of thinking that what natural law is is merely a translation device to take what we know is true from Scripture and be able to translate it so that our Muslim or secular or agnostic or whoever our friends, we can make the case for what we think Scripture says.
And I actually think that the main reason that Evangelicals should care about natural law is because it points to a reality about who we are as human beings that makes living together well or at least better than we otherwise would possible. So when it comes to the Apostle Paul says, “As far as it is up to you, live at peace with everyone.” Well, how do we do that? How do we do that if we have this tribalistic moment where we are tempted to say, Evangelicals in particular, this country has changed so much and my particular tribe is now threatened by this, that, or the other? And I think what natural law can do along with what we believe to be divine law, right? Coupled with those things. I wouldn’t want to say natural law by itself does much of anything, but when people of sincere religious conviction who believe that others outside of their faith can have some knowledge of the good such that we can partner on common projects … in Michigan, there’s conservative Christians and conservative Muslims are both resistant to some of what we would call the excesses of the LGBTQ movement. There’s a commonality there. The religious reasoning there is different, but the political and the moral, there’s a commonality there.
And then hopefully there’s also, in that political difference, also recognition that even folks we disagree with on the other side of this issue deserve respect, dignity, and have a standing as fellow citizens that we interact with well. Anyway, so I guess I would say natural law is important because it gives us a way to interact with others who we disagree with on some things, but we can agree with on what it looks like to live well or share a community well or share a common political space well.
I also share personally for me growing up, I did not think much of, didn’t give a lot of thought to what it looked like to share my country with Muslims or from other folks. And then as I got into school, in grad school, that became more of a reality. One of the most moving things for me was seeing a photo of a grave in Arlington of a soldier who had died in the American military who didn’t have a star of David or a cross, indicated this was a Muslim American who given his life or his country. And for me, I said, “Oh, as different as we might be on some important things, there’s some things clearly that we have in common if we both can buy into our country together in certain ways.”
Shadi Hamid:
The LGBTQ example I think is an interesting one because I think it points to some of the limits of natural law reasoning because you talked earlier about human flourishing and that if we can only find common ground through this idea of human flourishing, and there’s this kind of standard that if something contributes to human flourishing, good. If it doesn’t contribute to human flourishing, bad. But part of the problem in a very divided society like ours where the divides are foundational, is that we no longer agree on what human flourishing even is. So one person’s human flourishing is another person’s decadence.
And I think that in that sense, we don’t really have shared moral truths anymore or it’s very hard to get to them. So when people talk about trying to find common ground and a common vision, it seems somewhat almost impossible to come to a conception of the common good when our starting premises and first principles are so divergent. So I think there’s a real limit here to using our intuition to come to essential truths.
Micah Watson:
And it’s particularly appropriate, of course, to mention this in the week that Alasdair MacIntyre has passed away, whose After Virtue book made that point so well, that we have these … that on the level of ideas and opening premises, there are some incommensurable starting points from which we’re not going to cross that bridge with folks. All I would say, I guess, natural law, I would say, is more than an intuition. It’s more than relying on what our conscience tells us because our consciences can be shaped and be changed. And if we were to go back to when I mentioned the Letter from Birmingham Jail, we would say natural law had teachings about what it looks like to be human and why race should not be a basis of discrimination, but it was as contested then. And yet I still think natural law would’ve been helpful then, and was helpful, to try and think about how to address that issue.
It was also misused, I should say that as well. Of course, natural law was also misused when it came to race. So I would say it’s true that in this moment on matters of sexuality, it’s super contested, and there’s no guarantee that natural law is going to be this silver bullet. I should have said that earlier. It’s not an argumentive silver bullet, but it is a way to have a conversation that may or may not lead to a consensus, but it’s at least a way of talking as opposed to the tribal just bickering and kind of name-calling. And so much of what we see in our not-so-civil discourse today.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I will point out that my esteemed colleague, Shadi Hamid, just published a really beautiful and powerful essay in the Washington Post on why we must call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. And he is making, I would argue, a natural law argument that this is universally understood as a moral wrong. And I think you kind of demonstrated that, Shadi.
But to Dr. Eman, the same question. Muslims in America and in Canada can have a tribal mentality as well. And I wonder if you might talk about what might the gift of natural law be for the Islamic community in North America as they think about engaging with non-Muslims around these kinds of things?
Anver Emon:
Well, so I’m also a historian, so one of the things that I can’t ignore is that someone like ibn Khaldun, writing in the Islamic tradition a kind of early form of sociologist, identified tribalism as a core organizational feature of all societies. And if I take him seriously, I want to suggest that the tribalism that we’re seeing now is not any different than the tribalisms we’ve always seen. It’s just the scale is different, it’s more local. Before it was the Cold War. That seemed bigger. We have the war on terror, also a tribalism.
The problem, though, is that every tribe wants to use their version of the truth to then control state resources. That’s the distinction, right? It’s like I want to take my truth and control what state resources are, how they get deployed, and who they benefit and which tribes get it. And I think it’s that piece about the resources of the state, competing for the resources of the state is where we need to think about what natural law can do.
And to me, remember in the Islamic tradition, natural law was controversial and still controversial because it’s the idea of being able to articulate a rule of God where God has not spoken. And what made people nervous, and I think still makes people very nervous about that, who am I to articulate a rule of God? And when you look at the way medieval jurists who embraced natural law, the way they would do it, they would argue very carefully. It’s the discipline, it’s the rigor, it’s the proof. And I would actually say that whether it’s natural law or something else, we’ve lost in a lot of political discourse a commitment to rigor, a commitment to discipline.
Truthiness prevails, alternative facts prevail. We’re now using these sorts of ideas now as if they’re real things. And now I’m more interested in the latest tweet by a president than a policy paper from the Congressional Research Service. And I think we just have to decide if we want to be disciplined or not. Natural law, at least as a legal process, is a disciplined mode of reasoning. And that discipline is hard. It’s a lot of work. I’m not sure if people are up for that kind of work. I think a lot of really good people are, and that’s the kind of work that I think natural law allows us to pursue, whether it’s for Muslims or Christians. But natural law as an idea is really about discipline.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So I bet all the money in my pockets Dr. Watson has something to say about that internal concern about speaking for God and that desire for reverence for God’s freedom. What does that look like in the Christian tradition in terms of the resistance that you sense are just historically about declaring this is God’s law and I have it in my hands?
Micah Watson:
There’s a great … one of my favorite pieces by one of my heroes is C.S. Lewis, and he has a piece called a Meditation on the Third Commandment. The Third Commandment is, as he understands, not to take the Lord’s name in vain. And so when anyone says, “Thus saith the Lord,” about a prudential political matter, like we need a bicameral legislature or the tax rate should be 30% and this is what God would have us do, he likens that to almost kind of a blasphemy. And this is why he opposes Christian political parties. And that’s something that Christians themselves disagree with. I think that Christian political parties are really problematic because a party, to be operative, has to have policy positions on things that are contestable. In our human finitude, there’s going to be different things that people of good will can disagree on as to how to reach a goal.
So yeah, you’re right, Dr. Kaemingk. Certainly I hearken to that concern. The trick is there’s also times where it’s like, okay, there’s something going on that is wicked and has to be stopped. And we mentioned a little bit … we could mention slavery. It’s really tough for Christians to make a full-throated argument against slavery from the Bible alone. I’m sure folks have tried to do it, and there is a passage about slave traders being on a bad list, but slavery is accommodated to some extent, without equating the practice of slavery in those times with what chattel slavery looked like in the United States.
And so while at the same … while I don’t want Christians … Christians and other folks who believe in God should be very wary of saying, “I’m speaking for God.” We don’t want a David Koresh kind of situation. At the other side, scriptures speak about justice all the time and don’t always spell out all the ways in which justice can be violated. And so the cry for protecting the marginalized and protecting the widow and welcoming the stranger, I think that we can say God has called us to do those things while disagreeing about what are the means by which we do them.
To quote Lewis again, he says, “The Bible gives us ends, but it’s almost as if God has left it up to us to use our reason, to use natural law, to figure out what might be those best means.” So in the Old Testament, for example, there’s this instruction, “Don’t take up everything from the field. Leave some of the produce out so that the poor can get those things.” Well, if you live in an urban society, that instruction doesn’t make a lot of sense. And yet the motive, the moral, the end of caring for the least of these, of caring for the poor, strikes me that is what God would have us do and we should say so while leaving room to debate what’s the best way we can try and care for those who need help.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. At this point I want to bring up an interesting example of how some of this can play out in modern politics. And then, Dr. Eman, I’d be curious how you would respond, that during the Arab Spring, when Islamist political parties were briefly in power in a variety of countries, including in Egypt, it was interesting to see how they were able to shift on things that seemed somewhat, at least to some people, settled in Islamic law, and how, because the political context was changing, they were able to change their position on the law in short order. And one of the examples was the prohibition on interest or usury and how generally Islamist parties have been against anything that kind of smacks of interest-bearing loans and that sort of thing. But some of these parties were able to make a kind of innovative argument that loans from the IMF and the World Bank and other international organizations could be justified in the name of the general interest or the general welfare, known in Arabic as maslahah.
And so it’s interesting that how you can use a kind of focus on objectives, like what is good for the ummah, what is good for society, and you can be very pragmatic and then change a law or a ruling accordingly. Now, this obviously opened up some of these groups to a lot of criticism that they’ll just do whatever is in their own self-interest and they’ll then retroactively find an Islamic justification for it. But I wanted to use this example to get to, I think, two tools in the Islamic toolbox that are natural law-adjacent, which is what I just mentioned, the idea of the general interest or the public welfare, and also this idea of the maqasid of the Sharia or the objectives of the Sharia, that a law or a ruling in the Islamic tradition should serve one of five objectives. And the five are religion, life, intellect, lineage, and property. So in other words, each law, it can’t just be this kind of disembodied law, you have to show how it’s tied to these broader objectives. So with that as some background, I’m curious, Dr. Eman, if you can help us understand these two ideas of public welfare and the objectives of the Sharia.
Anver Emon:
So in the beginning of the conversation, I talked about hard and soft natural law theorists, right? The ones who wanted to maintain God’s omnipotence created a workaround regarding natural law, making it more soft. Those are the same folks that also came up with a methodology. They came up with a, “Well, when I do need to reason to the law, how do I do it?” And they’re the ones that came up with this maqasid idea. So maqasid is an Arabic word. It refers to general purposes or principles or objectives. In this case, objectives of the law. There’s the five that Shadi has mentioned. And key to the methodology they created was ranking public values or public welfare in order of necessity, need, or sort of more edificatory. And they would say, “Look, if we can find a public value that fulfills one of these five purposes and it’s necessary, then we can use our soft natural law theory to rule in favor of it.”
And so that’s the framework. So one, I would even say it’s a adjacent to natural law. It’s actually deep within. It becomes the methodology of soft natural law theorists. So that’s number one. Historically, it was actually meant to limit and narrow the scope of reasoning. So they didn’t want to create a slippery slope of people talking for God. And so the fact that now you have … and Muslim modernists writing, you mentioned Rashid Rida, Mohammad Abduh, others in the end of the 19th, early 20th century, they grabbed onto this as a vehicle for thinking about the future of Islamic law in Muslim settings. So the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood or the Ikhwan or whichever party could make this argument is not at all surprising to me that they can make the argument not just simply as a matter of economic pragmatism, but a matter of Islamic law, is completely consistent with the historical tradition.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Dr. Watson, as we wrap up, I’m wondering if you could name just for us one specific political issue that Evangelicals are engaging that you think a natural law approach could be really helpful to them if they would pay a bit more attention. Of course, we’ve talked about natural law is not a silver bullet, that it can’t fix everything or change everyone’s mind, but it can be helpful. Is there a particular issue that Evangelicals are wrestling with in political life where you just think to yourself, “Gosh, it would be really helpful if they would lean more on this natural law tradition as they’re engaging politically”?
Micah Watson:
So there’s a few, I think one place where it’s actually working, it’s doing some good right now, is with environmental issues. That’s where I think it’s working well insofar as Evangelicals can believe that God has called us to be stewards of his creation, and yet those who aren’t Evangelicals can also recognize that we need clean water, we need to protect our resources, and so there’s common cause there. So I want to say that’s an area where I think it’s promising right now.
An area where I think it could do a lot of good is with religious liberty. There is among some of my fellow Christians, I believe unfortunate, religious liberty is religious liberty for those who are right about what the religion is. And I think that if you look at religious liberty as a way that human beings can flourish, that it’s good for people as such to wrestle with what does it mean to believe in the divine? Is there a God? What is God like? What has God called me to do? There’s a natural … and here I’m not only, this isn’t just drawing from an Evangelical approach to natural law. I should just acknowledge my sources. I’m drawing here from some of my teachers that are new natural law folks like John Finnis or Robert George, that religion itself, the activity of thinking about the ultimate and what that requires of us, is a natural human good that people should have the freedom to engage in.
And if that’s true, and I think it is, then Evangelical Christians, I think, would have a healthier approach to what it looks like to live in a religiously pluralistic society right now. So with these questions of should Christians be making religious liberty arguments for our fellow citizens who are Muslims who might want to build a mosque or look for ways to practice their faith when those practices might be squelched by some public policy? And I think the answer is a hearty yes.
And natural law allows us to talk about why that’s the case while also still recognizing there’s important religious differences there that true Muslims and true Christians should hold to and then debate about it and have those good arguments using our country’s protection of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
So I think natural law for Evangelicals would help us understand better why religious liberty is a good for all people, even if we think other folks might be mistaken about where their practice of religious liberty leads them, as they might think we’re mistaken. That natural law is a good way to help us think through those things.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. Dr. Eman. I wonder, as we wrap up, if you have any final thoughts or encouragement for our Muslim listeners of how they might continue to grow in their understanding of this natural law tradition, ways that they might continue to explore this, or just places where you hope these conversations go within the Islamic community around natural law. What are your hopes for this?
Anver Emon:
I think that part of the challenge that I think many in the community will face is the fact that most forms of Muslim-based education really centre around scripture, scriptural readings, and lines of authority and a tradition that is very much oriented around the passing on of knowledge from a master to a student and so on. And the challenge there is that, well, how do I think through complicated problems of the day. Not all of which have historical precedent in the Islamic historical register? How do you talk about social security? How do you talk about capital gains tax? How do you talk about these issues? These are sometimes very technical issues that are also part of our modern landscape. And the real challenge is, and what I hope that they’ll find in natural law, is an opportunity and an invitation to think not just in terms of the historical tradition that has been passed, but also proactively on their own, embracing the idea that reason is a gift from God, that reasoning through complicated problems can be devotional, and that in doing so, we achieve a level of truth that we can share that isn’t limited by our tribe. And that’s what I would hope natural law, at least for the Islamic perspective, can provide.
Shadi Hamid:
Amen to that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s a wonderful place to end. Both faith and reason being gifts from God that we must steward well. And I think I can say confidently that we have pushed one another in our faith and in our reasoning today, and I want to thank both of our guests. Thank you so much for your time today, but also just for your lives of scholarship in stepping into these difficult questions of faith and politics, and it’s just been awesome, awesome to have you.
And friends, thank you so much for listening and being a part of the Zealots of the Gate community. If you like what you’ve heard, please do subscribe. Leave us a rating wherever you go. All of the stars, whether it be five, 10 or whatever. You can check out this podcast’s intellectual seedbed at Comment.org. Comment Magazine publishes amazing and illuminating essays on faith, politics, and culture.
Dr. Eman, you’ll be happy to know that Comment magazine comes from Canada. And, hey, Shadi and I would love to hear from you, so you can connect with us over at Twitter at Shadi Hamid or at Matthew Kaemingk. And you can also write to us, send us an email. Our address is zealots@comment.org. And you can expect a sincere exchange.
Friends, Zealots at the Gate, as I mentioned, is hosted by Comment Magazine. It’s produced by Allie Crummy. Audience strategy by Matt Crummy. And Editorial Direction by the lovely Ms. Anne Snyder. Until next time, I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Thanks so much for joining us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
See you.
Shadi Hamid is a columnist and editorial board member at The Washington Post and an assistant research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary.
Matthew Kaemingk is the Richard John Mouw Assistant Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary where he also serves as the Director of the Richard John Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Micah Watson is the Paul Henry Chair for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University, where he also directs the politics, philosophy, and economics program.
Anver Emon is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Islamic Law and History and director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto.
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