提到必須重新理解Shaira的意義。一方面指出穆斯林統治者誤用Sharia概念，另一方面批評部分穆斯林學者，因為害怕遭到西方人士的誤解，而自我審查，否認伊斯蘭的普世原則。
In the West, the idea of Sharia calls
up all the darkest images of Islam: repression of women, physical punishments,
stoning and all other such things. It has reached the extent that
many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of
frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the mere mention
of the word.
It is true that scholars of law and jurisprudence
have almost naturally restricted the meaning to their own field of study, that
dictators have used it for repressive and cruel purposes, and that the ideal of
the Sharia
has been most betrayed by Muslims themselves, but this
should not prevent us from studying this central notion in the Islamic universe
of reference and trying to understand in what ways it has remained fundamental
and active in the Muslim consciousness through the ages.
If the idea of “establishing rules” is indeed contained in the
notion of Sharia (from the root sha-ra-a),
this translation does not convey the fullness of the way it is understood
unless its more general and fundamental meaning is referred to: “the path that
leads to the spring.” We have pointed out the tone of Islamic
terminology, which systematically reflects a corpus of reference that sets a
certain way of speaking of God, of defining the human being and of
understanding the relationship between them by means of Revelation. We have
seen that this corpus of reference is, for the Muslim consciousness, where the
universal is formulated: God, human nature, which makes itself human by turning
in on itself and recognizing the “need of Him,” reason, active and fed by
humility, and, finally, Revelation, which confirms, corrects, and exerts a
guiding influence.
Just as the shahada is
the expression, in the here and now, of individual faithfulness to the original
covenant by means of a testimony that is a “return to oneself” (a return
to the fitra,
to the original breath breathed into us by God), so the Sharia is the expression of individual
and collective faithfulness, in time, for those who are trying in awareness to
draw near to the ideal of the Source that is God. In other words, and in light
of all that has been said in the first chapter, the shahada translates the idea of “being
Muslim,” and the Sharia shows
us “how to be and remain Muslim.” This means, to put it in yet
another way and extend our reflection, that the Sharia is not only the expression of
the universal principles of Islam but the framework and the thinking that makes
for their actualization in human history. There
can be no Sharia
without a corpus of fundamental principles that set, beyond the
contingencies of time, a point of reference for faithfulness to the divine
will. This corpus of principles, as we have seen, is a fundamental given
of the Islamic universe of reference, which asserts, in the
midst of postmodernism, that all is not relative, that there does indeed exist
a universal, for it is a God, an only God, who has revealed timeless
principles, which, while not preventing reason from being active and creative,
protect it from getting bogged down in the contradictions and incoherences of
the absolute relativity of everything.
By inviting Muslims to accept pluralism by a purely
rationalistic approach, to express their faithfulness in a purely private way,
or to define themselves in terms of minorities, some
commentators have thought to ward off the danger of Islamic universality, which
they perceive as inevitably totalitarian. Is this
not how the West understands the quasi summons to have to affirm one’s “faith”
in the autonomy of reason in order to prove one’s open-mindedness or one’s firm
support for the “universal values of the West”; or the new
fashion of apologetic for a Sufism so interior that it has become
disincarnated, almost invisible, or a fac¸ade with only blurred links to Islam;
or, again, stigmatization and the exercise of constant pressure on Muslims
driven to adopt the monochrome reaction of minorities on the defensive,
obsessed with their only right—to be—and with their differentness? This
is all happening as if, in order to ward off the “necessarily expansionist”
universality of Islam, either Islam must be refused its claim to universality
or Muslims must be pressed to accept this exercise in wholesale relativization.
(西方文明可以視為普世價值，但將伊斯蘭視為普世價值則引起諸多爭議。)
Some Muslim intellectuals have accepted the imposition of these
game rules. Others have opposed it and continue to oppose it by rejecting the
West per se, with all it has produced, because it has forgotten God or because
all that takes place there is Promethean, if not “satanic.” Between
these two extremes, there is a way, I believe, to change the terms of the
debate: if, for Muslims, it is a matter of rejecting the insidious
process of the relativization of their universal values, it is also incumbent
on them to explain clearly in what sense, and how, those values respect
diversity and relativity. If the Way to faithfulness, the Sharia,
is the corpus of reference in which Islamic universality is written down, it is
urgent and imperative to say how it is structured and how it expresses the
absolute, and rationality, and the relation to time, progress, the Other, and,
more broadly, difference. At a deeper level, the intuition that must feed this
refusal of relativization and this presentation of the fundamental principles
of Islam in the heart of the Western world is the conviction that this is the
only true way to produce an authentic dialogue of civilizations and that this
is now more necessary than ever. With globalization at hand, the fear is that
the West—helped by an intangible Westernization of the world—will engage in a
“dialogical monologue” or an “interactive monologue” with civilizations
different only in name but so denatured or so exotic that their members are
reduced, taking the good years with the bad, to discussing their survival and
not the richness of their otherness. Muslims have the means to enter into this
debate on an equal footing, and they should do so, and find debating partners
ready for this worthy, enriching, and essential confrontation of ideas and
ideals.
