Rejecting the Terms: Baldick contra Popovic and Veinstein

Earlier Western commentators on Islam have had few problems in deploying such terms as ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ with complete freedom, as if they were immediately self-explicable. Thus we find Professor Sir Hamilton Gibb, writing originally in 1949, stating in an initial chapter:

Elsewhere in the same volume, he entitles a chapter ‘Orthodoxy and Schism’, which discusses ‘the elaboration of orthodox theology’. He notes that ‘it would have been difficult for a contemporary to prophesy which of all these multifarious forms would emerge as the definitively orthodox or “official” version of the Islamic faith’. He goes on to recognise that ‘the establishment of an orthodox system was thus a gradual process, in which political considerations and political action played a large part (as always in the establishment of orthodox systems)’. In all this, there is little, if any, introspection on the part of Gibb as to the validity, or otherwise, of using the term ‘orthodox’, though he does admit that it carries with it the cultural baggage of ‘official’, as we have seen above. Furthermore, he suggests that the persecution of ‘the most heretical forms of Islam and more especially the gnostic and dualistic perversions’ led to ‘the definition of orthodoxy … being tightened up’.

Christian Tradition: Definitions and Distinctions

Lexically the word ‘tradition’ has several facets. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English provides four fundamental definitions:

1. Opinion or belief or custom handed down; handing down of these, from ancestors to posterity esp. orally or by practice.

2. (Theol.) Doctrine etc. supposed to have divine authority but not committed to writing, esp. (1) laws held by Pharisees to have been delivered by God to Moses, (2) oral teaching of Christ and Apostles not recorded in writing by immediate disciples, (3) words and deeds of Muhammad not in Koran.

3. Artistic or literary principle(s) based on accumulated experience or continuous usage …

4. (Law). Formal delivery.

Etymologically, the word ‘tradition’ derives from the Latin trado–tradere–tradidi–traditum meaning ‘to hand over, give up, surrender’ in the sense of ‘to hand down as any kind of inheritance to posterity’.

Theologically, tradition may embrace in Christianity both the practice of the faith as well as the faith itself, including scripture; or, more narrowly, ‘tradition may be distinguished from scripture, and taken to mean the teaching and practice of the church, not explicitly recorded in the words of the Bible, but handed down from the beginning within the Christian community’.

This is not an Introduction to Islam, nor is it a textbook. There are many excellent introductions and textbooks in the marketplace already. One notes in particular David Waines, An Introduction to Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Gerhard Endress, An Introduction to Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, The Vision of Islam: The Foundations of Muslim Faith and Practice (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1996) and John L. Esposito (ed.), Oxford History of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). All of these, in their diverse and very attractive ways, play a significant and important role in introducing student and scholar alike to one of the world's major religions.

This book is a research monograph which aims to do much more than that. It operates generally within the sphere of comparative religion and is, specifically, a comparative exploration of the role of tradition/Tradition within two distinct faiths, Islam and Christianity. Specific leitmotivs include the roles of authority, fundamentalism, the use of reason, ijtihād, and original comparisons between Islamic Salafism and Christian Lefebvrism. ‘Salafism’ refers to that strain in Islam which looks backwards to the thought, practices and traditions of the Salaf (pious ancestors); ‘Lefebvrism’ is a reference to the traditionalist thought and practices of the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905–91) who rejected much of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and what he perceived as that Council's overthrow of tradition/Tradition.

One of the things that narrative theory can learn from philosophy is a proper sense of the importance of the future. I have suggested several times already that narrative theory shows a preoccupation with memory, retrospect and the archiving of past events, and has an undeveloped potential to address questions about the present and future. The significance of the notions of ‘anticipation’ and ‘prolepsis’ is that, in different ways, they refer to this relation between the present and actual or possible futures. With philosophy as its teacher, narrative theory can turn its attention to narrative not only in its function as archive, but to the question of narrative as a mode of being.

In Heidegger's account of being, for example, the future is the all important tense. Like Derrida, Heidegger tends to view things normally understood as secondary and derivative as primary and primordial, and so it is with the relationship between time (Zeit) and temporality (Zeitlichkeit) in Being and Time. If, for a moment, we view time as a mind-independent entity and temporality as the experience of time in consciousness, or time within the condition of being, it might normally be assumed that the latter derives from the former. According to Heidegger, there is a conception of time as a series of ‘nows’ which is shared by ordinary people and philosophers from Aristotle to Bergson.

This chapter is about the anticipation of retrospection and the extended significance that this temporal loop has acquired in our world. I am going to approach the subject through three different meanings of the word prolepsis, or, since the primary significance of prolepsis is anticipation, three different types of the anticipation of retrospection. The first of these I will refer to as the narratological meaning of prolepsis: a term used by Genette and others to describe flashforward. Prolepsis, for Genette, is a moment in a narrative in which the chronological order of story events is disturbed and the narrator narrates future events out of turn. The narrative takes an excursion into its own future to reveal later events before returning to the present of the tale to proceed with the sequence. As Genette makes clear, this is far less common in narrative fiction than its counterpart, analepsis, or flashback, but it will be my contention here that prolepsis is the more rewarding analytical concept. For reasons that will become apparent, I will set aside the second meaning of prolepsis, which will receive a fuller treatment in a moment. The third meaning I will refer to as rhetorical prolepsis, to designate a phenomenon well-known to classical orators and scholars of rhetoric: the anticipation of an objection to an argument. This is a technique used to preclude objections by articulating them, and even answering them within an oration, and it will be one of the trajectories of this discussion to analyse the extended scope of this device both in contemporary fiction and the world of discourse more generally. My question for this chapter then is how the rhetorical and the narratological senses of prolepsis can be linked.

The present, as philosophy knows well, doesn't exist, and yet it is the only thing which exists. The past has been, and so is not, and the future is to be, and so is not yet. That only leaves the present. But as long as the present has duration, any duration at all, it can be divided into the bits of it that have been, and so are not, and the bits of it that are to be, and so are not yet, so that the very duration of its existence consigns it to nonexistence. The problem here is obvious: the relationship between presence and existence is logically circular, or tautological in the manner of a claim that a = a. Worse than that, the tautology is embedded in the tense structure of language, which insists that ‘has been’ and ‘will be’ are equivalent to ‘is not’, since what ‘is’ must be rendered in the present. The claim that what ‘has been’ ‘is not’ barely constitutes a claim at all, since all it does is to relive the conspiracy of being and presence which inhabits tense.

The complicity of presence and being, and its incumbent logical problems, hangs over all notions of the present, so that the analytical framework of tense acquires a metaphysical importance. In this discussion, three notions of the present are in question: the historical present, the philosophical present and the literary historical present.

In ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, Todorov distinguishes between the whodunit and the thriller on the grounds that the former is a double story and the latter a single one (2000: 139). The whodunit is double in the sense that it is the story of ‘the days of the investigation which begin with the crime, and the days of the drama which lead up to it’. The simplicity of this observation is matched only by its importance, because it means that the whodunit goes backwards as it goes forwards, or more precisely that it reconstructs the time line of the crime in the time line of the investigation. In the thriller, on the other hand, the narrative coincides with the action in a single story. The experience of reading the whodunit is characterised by curiosity, since it proceeds from effect to cause, whereas the thriller is characterised by suspense and proceeds from cause to effect.

The hermeneutic circle of presentification and depresentification with which I have been characterising the relationship between reading and living can be seen here at work in the relationship between one type of fiction and another, insofar as the whodunnit works backwards from a known outcome while the thriller proceeds forwards into an unknown future.

The previous chapters open a set of questions about the relationship between time and self-consciousness, an axis which has received too little attention within literary studies. This neglect is all the more surprising since the idea of self-consciousness itself has played such a central role in the characterisation not only of contemporary fiction but of the more general social and discursive condition of the contemporary world. In prolepsis, we find on one hand a kind of temporal self-distance – a form of reflection which involves looking back on the present, from one's own point of view or that of another – and on the other hand a kind of reversed causation, in which this future retrospect causes the event it looks back on. But can this really be thought of as reversed causation or backwards time? The purpose of this chapter is to explore this question alongside a consideration of the relationship between time, consciousness and self-consciousness.

To begin, we might revisit the question of Derridean supplementarity, formulated in Speech and Phenomena as a temporal structure in which ‘a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on’ and which in Archive Fever takes the form ‘the archive produces the event as much as it records it’. In both cases, the word ‘produces’ indicates causality, so that the later possibility or the recording archive are assigned the status of cause in spite of their posteriority.

When it comes to the internal consciousness of time, the novel picks up where philosophy leaves off. But does the novel therefore know something about time which is beyond the reach of philosophy? Perhaps knowledge of time is in some way the domain of philosophy, so that wherever it is that the novel goes with time, by being beyond the limits of philosophy, it cannot be an adventure in knowledge as such. There are two intimately related questions about knowledge involved in this. The first is the oldest question of all, the question of the relationship between philosophy and literature, and of the special kind of knowledge, if that is the right word, that literature might possess. The second is probably no younger, but has a more urgent contemporary application, and is the question of what use or value fictional narrative might hold for a philosophical understanding of time.

The idea that fiction might know something, perhaps something more than philosophy, has come back into focus recently in literary studies in a number of ways. An interesting case, particularly in relation to fictional knowledge, is Michael Wood's Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005). Wood's discussion of knowledge begins from Peter de Bolla's ‘brilliant brief statement’ of the question of knowledge in art: