What is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity

An underlying theoretical point of this paper has been that if fundamental commitments and the questions of cultural identity that they bring with them (What is an X?) are understood in terms of functional analyses of the kind I have tried to give in the case of Islamic identity today, then there is scope to see these commitments as susceptible to various criticisms in the particular context of a conflict in which they might figure. All this seems to me to offer far more scope and interest to moral philosophy than Williams allows it, even after granting to Williams the validity of the central role he gives to the idea of fundamental commitment and the validity of his critique of traditional moral philosophy. The paper has studied the question "What is a Muslim?" in the dialectic of a conflict arising out of a concern for Islamic Reform. The conflict is one that arises because of moderate Muslims' fundamental commitment to a doctrine which contains features that are often effectively invoked by the absolutists whom moderate Muslims fundamentally oppose. If a full analysis of the commitment reveals its defensive function which have disabled Muslims from a creative and powerful opposition to the absolutists, and if, moreover, this function of the commitment is diagnosed as itself based on a deep but common philosophical fallacy, it should be possible then for moderate Muslims to think there way out of this conflict and to transform the nature of their commitment to Islam, so that it is not disabling in that way. The question of identity, "What is a Muslim?", then, will get very different answers before and after this dialectic about reform has played itself out. The dialectic, thus, preserves the negotiability of the concept of identity and the methodological points I began with, at the same time as it situates and explains the urgency and fascination that such questions hold for us.