I Bear Witness, therefore, I am a Muslim:Shahada as Muslim Witnessness in Shariati’s Thought

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Muselmann has become a term peculiarly devoid of its common referential value, and does not necessarily signify the Muslim. Rather, as derived from lager jargon and publicized by Victor E. Frankl, Primo Levi, and Giorgio Agamben, it denotes those in Nazi concentration camps, who had lost the will to live, the mute, the downright passive prisoner. In current literature, the Muselmann is a coincidentia oppositorum; while mute, and precisely because of that, she is a complete witness: a moribund living testimony of trauma. In Witnessness (2010), Robert Harvey dwells on the Muselmann to seek a way to give voice to the speechless. A term he coins for the concept of the state of being a witness, witnessness, Harvey contends, is a common human capacity, which like reason and imagination is mediated through reading. For instance, by reading of the unspeakable terrors that tormented a traumatic subject, any reader can become a witness “by proxy.” In this manner, Harvey compellingly argues for a universal ethics based on empathy. In this article, through the said concepts, I want to ask above all: What of the Muslim herself? How does she define her own bearing of witness?

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Foremost, shahada is one of the five pillars of Islam. Unlike its English counterpart (martyrdom), which has lost its original Greek double-meaning, shahada in Arabic, still refers both to martyrdom and witnessing. In his oeuvre, Ali Shariati, frequently plays on this double meaning of the term. In stark contrast to the concept of the Muselmann, his notion of a Muslim witness/martyr is not a subject of radical passivity or muteness, but one whose witnessing/martyrdom is expressly the cause of a Muslim emancipation which leads to active citizenry. Shariati develops this notion in his mystical writings, named Kaviriat. In this paper, I argue that Shariati’s shahada (or witnessness) is linked to “civil mysticism” or “erfan-e madani” (A. Manoochehri), considering that for Shariati mysticism is a critique which one might call resistance, a bond between theory and praxis, an opposition to the status quo, and ultimately “the culture of resistance”.

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In this paper, through Harvey’s notion of witnessness, I propose to understand Shariati’s project for the ideal Muslim subjectivity as inherently tied to a Muslim witnessness; that is, I will explore how in his Kaviriat, Shariati demonstrates that any Muslim can be a witness/martyr “by proxy,” and as such, not only opposed to passivity, but also both civically engaged and socially responsible. At a time when Muslim-majority societies have become subjected to reinforced Islamophobia from without and regressive discourses of Islamism from within, revisiting Shariati’s notions of witnessness in the light of his civil mysticism is an ethical/empathic take on his vision towards an indigenous emancipatory discourse, which can lead to an indigenous democratic socialism.

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