Rationality in Premodern Islamic Public Discourse — Epoche C2
Between 833 and roughly 848 the ʿAbbāsid caliphs required judges, court witnesses and transmitters of Prophetic tradition to affirm under examination that the Qurʾān was created in time rather than co-eternal with God, and dismissed, imprisoned or flogged those who would not. This is the miḥna , conventionally rendered "inquisition" though the word means simply "testing". It is the single best-documented episode of premodern Islamic public argument, and it is the case on which any claim about deliberation in that society has to be tried, because it has everything such a claim needs: a contested proposition with a determinate content, two sides with articulated reasons, an institutional setting, and a political outcome. The framework it is usually tried against is Jürgen Habermas's account of the bourgeois public sphere, and the usual verdict is that the framework is Eurocentric and the case therefore inadmissible. That verdict concedes too much and explains too little. The stronger procedure is to take Habermas's criteria seriously as criteria — he states three, and they are specific enough to test — and to ask which of them the ʿAbbāsid case meets, which it fails, and where it does something his scheme has no place for. The answer, argued below, is that it meets the first in an unexpected institutional form, fails the third about as badly as Habermas's own European case does on Nancy Fraser's showing, and inverts the second outright. One preliminary correction. Discussions of this comparison sometimes set the miḥna against a supposed contrast between the pre-Islamic jāhiliyya and the Islamic era. That contrast is a category error here: jāhiliyya is a theological periodisation internal to Islamic self-description, and it has no bearing on whether ninth-century Baghdad supported rational-critical debate. The relevant binary in the reception of Habermas is between modern Europe and everywhere else, and that is the one to be examined. What Habermas actually argues Habermas's book is not a celebration and this matters for how it can be used. Its argument has two movements. The first reconstructs the emergence, in Britain, France and the German states across the eighteenth century, of a domain between the household and the state in which private persons came together as a public to reason about the exercise of authority — with coffee houses, salons, table societies and above all the periodical press as its material base. The second movement is a decline narrative: as state and society interpenetrate through the welfare apparatus, and as the press becomes an industry with public relations attached, the culture-debating public becomes a culture-consuming one and the sphere is "refeudalised" into a stage for the display of authority. Citing Habermas as a witness to the endurance of open debate therefore gets him backwards. He is a witness to its institutional fragility. The three criteria he sets out for the institutions of that sphere are the usable part of the account: Disregard of status. Social rank is bracketed within the discussion; what counts is the argument, and a conversation among equals is preserved as a fiction with real procedural force. The domain of common concern. Matters formerly under the interpretive monopoly of church and state authorities are made problematic — opened to question by persons with no official standing to question them. Inclusivity. The public is in principle unclosed; anyone able to acquire the cultural goods in question may join it. Fraser's critique, which Habermas has largely accepted, is that criterion one and criterion three were never satisfied in the European case either. The bracketing of status was itself a mark of distinction and functioned to exclude; women and the propertyless were excluded not incidentally but constitutively; and the singular "the public sphere" conceals a plurality of competing publics, including subaltern ones formed by those the official public shut out. The consequence for the present comparison is important. The choice is not between an idealised Europe and a deficient elsewhere, but between two actual configurations, each of which fails its own advertisement in specific ways. The institutional base in ninth-century Iraq A public sphere in Habermas's sense requires a material base independent of the state, and it is here that the ʿAbbāsid case has usually been assessed carelessly, in both directions. The chronology has to be kept straight. The great endowed college — the madrasa , of which the Niẓāmiyya of Baghdad, founded in 1067, is the emblem — postdates the miḥna by more than two centuries. George Makdisi's study of these institutions establishes what made them autonomous: the waqf , a perpetual charitable endowment whose property is legally inalienable and whose income is administered under the founder's deed by a trustee answerable to the judge, not to the treasury. A professorship so funded does not depend on a ruler's continuing favour. But that structure cannot be projected back onto 833. What existed in the ninth century was thinner and still not negligible: the study circle ( ḥalqa ) in the congregational mosque, which required no licence and no salary; the private sessions ( majālis ) held by viziers and notables, where theologians of rival confessions argued in front of a patron; and a book trade. Paper manufacture had reached Iraq by the late eighth century — a manufactory in Baghdad is reported around 794 — and with it came the warrāqūn , the professional copyists and stationers who occupied their own market quarter. Reproduction also went through the dictation session ( imlāʾ ), in which a shaykh dictated and the whole assembly wrote simultaneously: the nearest premodern analogue to an edition. The attendance figures reported for celebrated sessions in the biographical literature are conventional and cannot be checked, and nothing here should rest on them. The comparison to draw is therefore not "press or no