“The piece [das Stück] is something other than the part [der Teil]. The part shares itself with parts in a whole. It takes part in the whole, belongs to it. The piece on the contrary is separated and indeed, as the piece, is even isolated from the other pieces. It never shares itself with these in a whole.”
Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures
Capitalist society, an oxymoron, is organised as pieces that aggregate. The pieces periodically have moments of intense activity choosing other bits to represent them. But then the representative pieces find they are owned, if they haven’t simply themselves sold themselves. The aggregate of pieces is called the demos – the people, and the periodic activity of electing representatives democracy. The representatives then make the law, which is thus in constant flux and a matter of contest between ideological parties. Because of that it is not a nomos known to all but a specialism known to lawyers who are trained to fight it in every detail.
The essential philosophy of the democratic pieces had been supplied by Democritus – whose name has nothing to do with democracy: the atom. The atom is the ultimate piece. But people had quickly moved beyond it to even more fundamental pieces, whose realities are simply unthinkable and indescribable. Nevertheless the metaphor of little pieces continues to serve.
Being concerned for the pieces, paradoxically the democratic order threw up the model of the monster, the Leviathan, in Hobbes’ inimitable phrase, ‘the mortal god’, brought about by the surrender of sovereignty to the monarch or the committee.
Muslim society is a whole comprising parts. Wholes express themselves in the parts and vice-versa. There is a conversation of the parts that permeates the whole called mutual counsel. Some limited parts of it are structured in what is called the hisba and commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong, but the truth is that it is the ethos that permeates the whole, the family, the neighbourhood, the judiciary, commerce, the fighting men and so on. The whole is a nomocracy, the nomos known to all, although some will know it better. Knowing is an activity of all, not the exclusive preserve of scholars even though there are scholars.
Part of the conversation is this activity we variously call trade and commerce, something very far from the way people today go out to “make money”, or, even worse, “real money”, in something called “the real world”.
I had thought to speak about Quran but wholes and parts are creational realities and inappropriate here. Nevertheless in every ayat of the Noble Book the same thing is happening as in each Sura and in the entire Book: Allah addresses the slave by the eternal attribute of speech that is an attribute of His Essence, in the ayat, the sura and the Book. The Book is not merely an aggregate of suras, each sura an aggregate of ayats.
And this is not an accidental interpolation, for at the core or perhaps the essence of the society based on a conversation and a counsel is the encounter of each with the Speech of the Essence. It might seem that conversation is a little familiar as a term to denote this, but they have an even more challenging word for it: munajat – intimate discourse, not meaning simply the saintly man on the mountaintop, but the everyday Muslim in his five daily prayers in the mosque or his home or wherever he finds himself. We are counselled to make our prayer an intimate discourse with the Essence not merely an empty set of rituals.
That conversation of each with the Essence is the sustainer of the nomos that has been transmitted to us from the last of the Messengers, peace be upon him, and his family and companions in Madina.