Liberal Approaches to Comprehensive Doctrines in Public Discourse and Islam

• In Event: Populism, Publicity and Public Deliberation

Abstract

Jurgen Habermas recently commented that Europe has entered into a post-secular order and that old answers to questions related to the role of religion in the public sphere need to be reevaluated. In, Between Naturalism and Religion, he comments— “Secular citizens, in their role as citizens, may neither deny that religious worldviews are in principle capable of truth nor question the right of their devout fellow citizens to couch their contributions to public discussions in religious language (2008, p. 113). Appeals to comprehensive doctrines are not going away anytime soon, even in ‘secular’ Europe, therefore new approaches or amendments to discourses on public reason need to be offered. However the efforts offered thus far seem to be incapable of being applied to societies that are deeply religious. This holds especially true of Muslim societies. Fortier argues that the position of twentieth century liberals like Rawls and Habermas who make efforts to speak of public reason as a way to avoid engagements with more intractable metaphysical claims that certain comprehensive doctrines may promote is not really feasible. March (2009b) leaves no confusions regarding the intimate connection between public reason and secularism— "Of course, political liberalism is committed to a certain form of secularism. This form holds that in modern conditions it is not reasonable to expect that all persons in a given society will be united around a religious foundation for public deliberation..." (p. 10) In fact, for the earlier Rawls, public reason disallows explicit appeals to comprehensive doctrines, even though private comprehensive doctrines are what ultimately allow for the formulation of his notion of an overlapping consensus in the first place. This paper will look at various approaches to public reason. It will engage critically with the arguments of Rawls, Habermas, and Quong on public reason and see how well they can be applied to societies situated within Islamic moral and legal frameworks. The main claim being promoted in this paper is that appeals to public reason run into serious difficulties when it comes to Islamic moral epistemology and Islamic approaches to constitutionalism and rights more generally.

Author

• Joseph Jon Kaminski, International University of Sarajevo