The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

populism and authoritarianism that have been resurgent in recent years. Kaminski’s conclusion is that Islam and liberalism have fundamental ontological incompatibilities. They are fundamentally divided on the conceptualization and hierarchy between the religious and the worldly (dīnī and dunyāwī). Secularism, a core condition of possibility for liberalism, is completely alien from Islam and even the Arabic language (except as a modern loan word). In the end, liberalism is inextricable from its Enlightenment origins, which will never be compatible with a religion that remains tied to its founding miraculous moment in the past. What is to be done in the face of these intractable, core disagreements about the nature of reality and the source of moral knowledge? Kaminski closes by calling for a more generalized ethos of tolerance. Without becoming liberals, Muslims would do well to recognize the historical fact of pluralism and not expect universal adherence to Islam to be the precondition for pursuing justice and cooperation in the world. Indeed, both Kaminski’s opening salvo and conclusion are more liberal than perhaps the general tenor of the book would suggest. He closes by calling for greater individual commitment to practices of toleration and pluralism based on the view that ‘moral progress is ultimately made at the individual level and this begins by recognizing everyone’s inherent moral worth,’ averring that this would be the position of both John Rawls and the Prophet Muh ammad. Indeed, his basic stance on the encounter between Islam and liberalism seems to be that since ‘generalized lower-order similarities between Islam and liberalism should be seen primarily as incidental to rather than indicative of any deeper discursive congruence’ we should avoid the search for a foundational metaphysical agreement between Islam and liberalism and instead search for tangible, concrete, and specific points of consensus and conciliation. This is, without a doubt, both reflective of common sense but also the most we can hope for if both liberals and Muslims are going to retain a coherent, integral, and defensible understanding of and commitment to their own traditions.