If "tacit atheism" and its variants are peculiarly modern, Rée's observation on the need to engage beyond easy dichotomies with the travails of existence could have been voiced in a bracing moment in Andalusia more than eight centuries ago, when Ibn Rushd al-Qurtubi wrote his impassioned defence of reason for the faithful Muslim. Like many of his contemporaries, Ibn Rushd -- known as Averroës in the West -- took on orthodoxy's guardians with weapons fashioned by Aristotle and Plato in pursuit of civic and personal salvation. True, his love of order in matters of politics and thought (rather Canadian in its relentlessness) may have had to do with a career spent as a judge. But it spilled into a worldview where reason and virtue were inseparable as they were indispensable and on a terrain familiar with political violence.

Among his cohorts was Ibn Tufayl, who famously authored a tale in which a child marooned on an uninhabited island develops for himself an entire system of ethics with a spiritual core -- in contrast to the orthodox system on a neighbouring island where society cherishes appearances and material goods above all else. There was Sharif al-Idrisi, doyen of geographers, who travelled as far as Britain and influenced legions with new ways of depicting the known world. Ibn Rushd himself was also a stout defender of earlier visionaries for whom religion was a carrier of messages on living the examined life, not a normative blueprint for passive compliance. That's quite a liberation for a judge.

Alas, the guardians of orthodoxy trumped the neo-Aristotelians in medieval Islam, but the "liberal" heritage lived on. Still to come was Ibn Khaldun, whose cycles of civilizational rise and decline made religion integral to civic culture, not a sui generis category. There would also be colonial-era movers and shakers in the vein of Jamal al-Din Afghani, Muhammed 'Abduh, Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal, who strove to hitch scientific and sociopolitical insights to an unfolding modernity where sacred and secular were unsundered. The venture played itself out too in art and architecture, where creativity roamed freely to accommodate public as well as private esthetics, spaces and uses: mosques bordered by sculpted gardens with social as well as spiritual functions, porcelains with sacred inscriptions to thrill the eye, grand oriental clocks fitted with European chimes to call the faithful to prayer. The fluid boundaries of that endlessly creative universe are sketched in Orhan Pamuk's stunning historical novel My Name is Red (2001).

It also bears recalling that when medieval Europe and the Mediterranean were swept by waves of the bubonic plague that claimed countless lives, Muslims spurned the common superstition that the epidemics were a curse rather than a public health challenge. For they already had the legacy of Ibn al-Nafis, al-Razi (Rhazes) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), physicians whose works eventually influenced Europe and whose ethos was shared by the polymath and mystic Nasir al-Din Tusi for whom the human soul was distinguished by the gift and burdens of reason.

There is a contemporary twist to that legacy, even more intriguing in view of the prevailing portrayal of Islam in the western media. The Globe and Mail recently headlined an episode from a global biotechnology conference in Toronto, "Islamic scholars wade into debate on stem cells."[2] It turned out that Muslim health professionals were prepared to be more liberal than their North American counterparts in the approach to research cloning of cells for new therapies, pursuant to their reading of Islamic norms as more permissive than Christian teachings on harvesting stem cells from embryos. Given the stakes at hand, the bioethical implications surely can't be lost on researchers, legislators and opinion-makers the world over.

You can't have a civilizational outlook of this kind without critical reason, and if there's a teleology appended to that reason, it can engender an ethic as empowering -- if not more -- than anything in the "secular domain" (qua universe apart, which it is not for Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and many Christians and Jews). Even a scholarly commentator like Lenn Goodman lapses into the notion that Islam gives us an ethos in which God's commands are ends in themselves and open the door to "anti-rationalism" -- a tendency he finds typical of scriptural legal systems.[3] This entirely misses what most Muslims have understood most of the time: that the endowment of reason bears an obligation to constantly interpret divine and human norms in questing for a reasonable zeitgeist. On the flip side, it would be untenable to idealize the advent of secular humanism as impelled by rational benevolence, unrelieved by the coarsest appetites for power and profit.[4]

Muslims have often been dogmatic about their shari'a and other aspects of faith -- which says absolutely nothing about faithful vistas being inherently antirational. Fazlur Rahman, one of Islam's leading twentieth-century thinkers, lamented the rigor mortis that gripped a once-dynamic culture of law built on ethics, leaving us a shari'a whose readings are often outmoded. That is cast by another leading intellectual, Mohammed Arkoun, as part of a tendency to favour a "closed official corpus" -- be it the Qur'an, the Hebrew Bible or other scripture -- to foreclose the analytical reason that gave us faith-civilizations in the first place.[5] The turns of history that gave us these upshots are of a piece with those that have rendered secular regimes oppressive -- like the ideology that allowed a "liberal" U.S. Constitution to treat African-Americans as less than fully human, and today's corporate culture whose grip on nations has spawned deep malaise over some of globalization's socioeconomic effects.

I hasten to add this is not a summons to resacralize the public sphere, if that's taken to mean undoing the separation of Church and State at the core of pluralist democracy. Fencing off Church and State institutionally is a modern fait accompli to be cherished on behalf of civil society across geopolitical frontiers. But this cornerstone of constitutional law (and splendid redoubt of religious liberty) is not to be confused with the realms of sacred and secular, whose intertwining is also a fait accompli for most of the world's citizens. Trite as the distinction should be, it warps portrayals of Islam even in the "elite" commentaries of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. Amidst all the talk of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, the Aga Khan, Imam of the Ismaili Muslims, sought to put the canard away in a speech at Brown University in the United States:

For all Muslims the concepts of Din and Duniya, Faith and World, are inextricably linked, more so than in any other monotheistic religion. The corollary is that in a perfect world, all political and social action on the part of Muslims would always be pursued within the ethical framework of the Faith. But this is not yet a perfect world. The West, nonetheless, must no longer confuse the link in Islam between spiritual and temporal, with that between state and church.[6]

Indeed, back when Kemal Atatürk put Turkey on a western secular track, the eminent Egyptian religious and legal scholar 'Abd al-Raziq asserted that Muslim theology, law and history did not offer prescriptions for political arrangements while celebrating the nexus of sacred and secular.[7] This nexus imparts substance to a moral, and certainly to a Muslim, ethos: you don't park a faithful conscience in a private chamber each time you enter public space (quite aside from the fact that privatization already poses enough challenges for public policy!). Manifestly, civic culture is nourished by a social conscience that rests on ethical commitments from a faith-inspired ethos in which tolerant engagement is prized.

Meanwhile here in the West, Stephen Carter argued in The Culture of Disbelief (1993) that the separation of Church and State had drifted into a divorce of morality and politics, especially at the expense of the ethical ideals of smaller faith communities. And Charles Taylor warns today that a stubbornly exclusionary view of the "secular" in relation to all else extracts a huge price in civic and personal integrity[8] -- a point that should be seen in conjunction with Robert Putnam's chronicling of the decline of civic bonds in the West in his Bowling Alone (2000).

It comes as no surprise that civic ethics as seen by contemporary public intellectuals like John Ralston Saul and Peter Singer sit poorly with anything beyond secular norms of accountability and integrity. Saul contends in his bestselling On Equilibrium (2001) that ethical norms today are unrelated to morals, which resonates with the British commentator Joan Smith's view that human rights are the only legitimate guide to civic propriety in the wake of declining respect for institutional religion.[9] Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life (2000) is rather more sophisticated, on topics ranging from abortion and animal welfare to ecology and poverty. He seeks to treat ethics as "entirely independent of religion," because Judeo-Christian norms are felt to legitimize a malign dominance over our environment by deeming humans as ipso facto unique. When it comes to grounding his ethos, however, Singer argues for reciprocity of treatment and avoidance of pain and suffering as if these were rationalizable through secular rationality alone, without profound links to faith traditions.

It is telling that public intellectuals in the Muslim context are rowshanfekran, a Persian term that captures the essence of what these women and men are expected to do -- couple the pursuit of enlightenment, rowshan, with intellectual endeavour, fekr. Secular and sacred, modernity and tradition are conjoined in quests for social and political change. Luminaries include Mohsen Kadivar, Ali Montazeri and Abdolkarim Soroush in Iran, Nurcolish Madjid, Chandra Muzaffar and Zainah Anwar in Southeast Asia, Nasrine Gross and Sima Samar in Afghanistan, Sadiq al-'Azm and Muhammad Shahrur in Syria, the Maghreb's Rachid Gannouchi, Tahar Jelloun and Fatima Mernissi, Pakistan's Asma Jahangir, South Africa's Abdulkader Tayob and Nigeria's Ayesha Imam -- all pressing for accountable civic polities underpinned by robust ethical fidelities. They could certainly use better guarantees of civil liberties, whose fragility has landed Saad Eddin Ibrahim in jail in Egypt where (as elsewhere) the rule of law and separation of Mosque and State have some way to go.

Ironically, their confrères in the diaspora -- Hamza Yusuf, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Mahnaz Afkhami, Bassam Tibi, Ebrahim Moosa, Nasr Abu Zayd, Ziba Mir-Hosseini -- find themselves in a milieu that can only see them as "secular Muslims." More so in the chill since September 11, 2001, as the integrity of the rule of law in the West itself is often thrown into question.[10] One recalls that, at the very moment Hamza Yusuf was a guest at the White House conferring with George Bush about that day's events, the FBI raided his residence in a crackdown on "radical Muslims." On the other hand, there are diaspora voices counselling a postmodern identity rooted in the Western secular mould. The acclaimed (Christian) Lebanese-French novelist Amin Maalouf is adamant on this score in his In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (2000):

It is not enough now to separate Church and State: what has to do with religion must be kept apart from what has do with identity. And if we want that amalgam to stop feeding fanaticism, terror and ethnic wars, we must find other ways of satisfying the need for identity... If affiliation to a "global tribe" is to be left behind, it can only be for a much wider allegiance, with a fuller vision of humanity... It seems to me that the wind of globalization, while it could certainly lead us to disaster, could also lead us to success.

The fears are familiar, not least to Muslims who know of the harrowing experiences of religio-ethnic nationalism in Bosnia, India and Israeli-occupied Palestine. What's less convincing is the assumption that such tragedies have to do mainly with religion -- rather than the abject failure of civic mechanisms to resolve conflicts arising from acute sociopolitical injustice. If the logic of the rule of law prevailed in meeting legitimate grievances over basic rights in the Balkans, Kashmir, Gujarat and Palestine (or Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka), would religio-ethnic identities find extremist expression? It's disingenuous to insist that civic culture be guided solely by secular rules and to expect no backlash from the aggrieved when these fall woefully short of delivering. Maalouf's fuller vision of humanity won't be conjured up by the wind of globalization unless it ushers in more effective modes of conflict resolution; the prospects depend on that wind blowing from ethically sensitive and humane wellsprings, not the other way round.

This brings us full circle to whether an exclusively secular humanism can sustain civic cultures with meaningful ethical affinities. The evidence is unpromising, judging not only by the state of public life in the most established democracies, but also by the sheer scale of "secular" ravages in the past century, from the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism to Vietnam, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Rwanda-Burundi. Moreover, the idea that non-Western peoples would (or could) abruptly jettison their lifeworlds of sacred and secular in the name of postmodern identities bereft of local roots is fanciful. The latter identities have enough of a challenge coping with the implications of recent breakthroughs in genomics that raise basic questions about who we are, and whether we're headed hubristically into a "posthuman future."[11] With secular ideologies found wanting the pendulum may be swinging the other way, as several scholars observe in the recent book Religion Returns to the Public Square.[12]

What this adds up to is the need for a transnational ethic that embraces a plurality of civic commitments, religious and secular. We need to acknowledge the parochialism of liberal paradigms of distributive justice, security and identity that always seem to stop at the water's edge, as well as the imperative of attaching faith-inspired civic norms to civil rights safeguards in light of historical experience.[13] Precisely because the moment for such an ethic now presses itself on us, argues Richard Falk, it can provoke "fear, foreboding, and a retreat into the closed and rigid structures of the past, both a traditionalist past and a blinkered secularism."[14] Falk has been at the forefront of advocacy for conflict-resolution modes beyond the U.S.-centric status quo that has ill served so many across the world. And he reminds secular fundamentalists that fairness and nonviolence must not only be tactical or pragmatic but foundational, like Gandhi's satyagraha.

But what of traditionalists who defy an inclusive ethos by purporting to draw on scripture? That's where the rowshanfekran come into their own, invoking critiques rooted in indigenous norms with clear legitimacy, linked to a past that is a locus not of imitation but of civic heritages beyond parochial fetters. Maalouf himself notes that at the end of the nineteenth century Istanbul, a premier Muslim city, had a non-Muslim majority population whose diversity was unmatched by London or Paris. Much earlier, Moorish Spain knew more than five centuries of Christian, Jewish and Muslim synergy that fostered Maimonides and Ibn Rushd before the fateful Reconquista and its Inquisition. Among the legacies of an age when Córdoba had a matchless library of 40,000 volumes is the opus of al-Farabi -- a Renaissance man long before the Renaissance -- called The Virtuous City.[15] Inspired by Plato's Republic, it depicts a society built on civic reason stemming from the faith-in-action of individuals mindful of the greater welfare of the community, which in turn has solemn obligations towards the less privileged.

Again, consider the no less illustrious rowshanfekr Hamid al-Kirmani in eleventh-century Egypt, who conceived of a city and state imbued with a culture of informed faith -- coupling individual reverence for law and social order with a graceful appreciation of the esotericism of the Qur'an and Prophetic wisdom. Kirmani titled his work The Comfort of Reason, and it conveys the pluralist civility of the Fatimid regime in which members of the Jewish, Shi'a and Sunni Muslim communities dominated the highest offices and intelligentsia.

It's impossible to overstate the continuity, intellectual and intuitive, of the streams of pluralist experience wending through overlapping heritages against the tides of insularity. This isn't merely about episodic links, like the establishment of Istanbul's first printing press in 1492 (not long after Gutenberg's invention) by Jews fleeing the Reconquista and finding succour in another Muslim domain poised for a brilliant epoch. Or the mastery of papermaking techniques by Persians and Arabs in the wake of Islam's eighth-century conquest of Central Asia (where paper travelled the Silk Road), and the eventual imbibing of those techniques in Europe via Moorish Spain. Without that crucial benefit, Gutenberg's press would have had to rely on stiff, expensive parchment, likely delaying the vital impact of printing on Western modernity.[16]

There's a larger point here. Scripture and its attendant civilization at the outset signalled that esthetics, ethics, human and physical sciences, no less than philosophy and theology, were exercises in discerning "the signs," ayat, in a Great Game. Ayat are also the verses of the Qur'an; and they exhort the reader time and again with, "Perhaps you may exert your mind!" or "They might perchance reflect!" or "What! Would you not reason out?" Once while being told of the manifold pieties of a particular Muslim, Muhammad interjected, "But how is his reason?" Undeterred, the narrator held forth until interrupted again with the same query -- and so it continued until the Prophet finally got through. This sense of the rational turns pluralist in the Qur'anic verse, "We have formed you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another," (49:13) and in the flat injunction against "coercion in matters of faith" (2:256). It exalts individual life with "Whoever slays an innocent soul... it is as though he slays all of humanity" (5:32).[17]

Civility here is not only intertwined with, but a condition of, professed faith. This is understandably ignored not only by religious miltants like Al Qaeda, but also by commentators like Lewis and Huntington who breathlessly sketch an "Islam" wedded to self-serving notions of jihad. Which is on a par with a perspective that would cast the latest invasion and occupation of Iraq -- led by an American president who flaunts his evangelical beliefs -- as proof of Christianity's irrespressibly violent crusading tendencies.

If the pulse and drift of the streams of humane reason have often appeared as mere ripples in our shared histories, they never ceased to flow. They've brought forth, to cite Rée again, "liturgies and buildings and open spaces that may help us see our griefs and perplexities in their indissoluble individuality, but without forgetting their continuities with those of other people and other generations." Amid the mélange of globalization and postmodernity unfolding on an anxious populace, our landscapes would surely be more parched and dreary without those streams and ripples, temples and minaret-calls. With apologies for trespassing on those inert domains marked "do not disturb."