The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies has published The DistressedMoral Consciousness: The Conflict Between the Human and the Religious in Islamic Heritage (424 pages). In the book, Chafik Mohammed Graiguer examines the interplay between the ethical and religious dimensions of morality in Islam, focusing on the conflict within the Muslim psyche between universality (moral values that transcend religious particularities) and autonomy (the human capacity for self-regulation and appealing to reason for guidance). This conflict has produced a distraught moral consciousness, torn between obedience to religious commands and adherence to specific religious doctrines on the one hand, and guidance by reason, with an embrace of universal human values, on the other.
Graiguer’s book demonstrates that ethics are based on human values such as reason, virtue, happiness, and utility; by contrast, religion is based on divine commands and laws, which integrate ethics as a component of the religious way of life. Therefore, the ethical does not correlate perfectly with the religious. The former strives for human perfection and virtue, while the latter demands fear of God and obedience, prioritizing worship and belief in the unseen. In religious terms, moral virtue is not an end in itself, but a means of worshipping God, falling within the theory of divine commands and making obedience a supreme value in and of itself. In contrast, philosophy links virtue to reason and personal autonomy. Furthermore, religion is a collective, community-based practice within a distinct human group, which weakens its universal character, even if Islam alludes to universality in some instances, through the concept of mercy for all humankind. This tension between the particularities of a community and the universality of humanism has led Islamic scholars to examine the possibility of ruling on actions prior to religious law, to test the possibility of a shared human morality.
Many studies have addressed this tension. Most notable are the works of Majid Fakhri, who categorised thinkers into those with a textual ethic and those with a philosophical ethic based on Greek reasoning, highlighting the varying degrees of their adherence to those texts. George Hourani, for his part, focused on the independence of reason in moral judgment, presenting the conflict between the rationalist Mu’tazilites and the voluntarist Ash’arites. Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri explored the realm of values in Arab heritage through a classification based on values, not figures, as the core of moral thought. Despite their differing methodologies, all these studies reflect a persistent tension between the religious and the ethical.
Graiguer’s book recalls that Al-Jabri divided the Arab moral mind into five value systems: Greek happiness, Persian obedience, Sufi obliteration of the self, Arab chivalry, and the Islamic notion of maṣlaḥa – ensuring that rules promote the material and spiritual welfare of individuals and society. He argued that these legacies competed for influence over Islam, but his conclusions were biased or incomplete. When addressing the Greek tradition, he emphasised humanism while neglecting the religious dimension. He restricted the notion of Persian values to obedience, ignoring that tradition’s cultural openness. In the Arab tradition, he highlighted chivalry as a worldly value that could conflict with religious ideals. In the Sufi tradition, he focused excessively on annihilation of the self, while overlooking other influential values. Regarding purely Islamic tradition, he considered maṣlaḥa the central value. Nevertheless, the relationship between reason and religion remained a point of contention.
This volume discusses the notion of the “distressed moral consciousness” as a tension within the Muslim soul, between secular human values and religious ones governed. This tension has left the Muslim conscience in a state of perpetual schism between belonging to the “religious community” and openness to the “universal human horizon.” From the outset, the ethical question has remained: Are good and evil subjective? Or are they divinely ordained? Furthermore, is independent reason possible?
The Distressed Moral Consciousness asserts that the core of the tension between the ethical and the religious revolves around the principles of universality and autonomy. Religion confines ethics to the particularities of the religious community, weakening freedom of self-regulation through the principle of obedience. This has resulted in a distressed moral consciousness that distinguishes the religious community from the universally human, reducing ethics to piety and obedience rather than internal harmonisation with the moral law inherent to the individual.
The book underlines the contemporary relevance of these questions: How can a Muslim accept the virtue of the other and engage in a universal ethical dialogue with him on issues of freedom, justice, and human rights? How can a modern moral consciousness be built upon individual autonomy? The culture of obedience, long intertwined with ethics and politics in the Islamic experience, continues to help explain the setbacks in the democratic experiment, while the core demands of the Arab Spring were fundamentally ethical demands for self-determination. Thus, it becomes clear that there is no separation between ethics and politics. The absence of individual moral autonomy continues to undermine the political autonomy of the ummah.
