Sarah Bakewell is what you might call a non-organised humanist. That is not to say she is disorganised (far from it), but that she has developed her conception of humanism individually, over many years and to a large extent independently of the official humanist ‘movement’. Her previous books include a biography of Montaigne, a narrative study of Sartre and the existentialists, and two ‘true stories’ of eighteenth and nineteenth-century adventurers.

Bakewell’s latest book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, published by Chatto & Windus in March, represents her attempt to synthesise at least three distinct ‘humanist’ trends of thought that emerged, primarily in Europe, between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries: the literary culture of Petrarch and the Renaissance umanisti; the philosophical humanism of Voltaire and the Enlightenment; and the expressly non-religious, scientifically inclined humanism of figures like TH Huxley and those involved in early organised humanism.

Humanly Possible has already attracted attention. Bakewell has been profiled by the New York Times; her book has been reviewed by the philosopher Julian Baggini and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and featured on BBC Radio 4. She also gave this year’s Rosalind Franklin lecture, held annually by Humanists UK, on the topic of humanist women.

I interviewed Sarah Bakewell in the British Library. Over a cup of tea, we explored some of her ideas in depth – from the relationship between humanistic and scientific humanisms to how to find meaning without religion.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How does Humanly Possible relate to your previous books, as well as to your own intellectual development?

Sarah Bakewell: It definitely grew out of the previous two books. The spark was thinking about Montaigne as a humanist, and what role the humanist tradition played in his education and his attitude, but also how he rebelled against and reinvented it, and was much less reverent towards it compared to other people of his father’s generation. And humanism was connected with existentialism: Jean Paul Sartre famously gave a lecture after the end of the Second World War, saying that ‘existentialism is a humanism’ – then he kept changing his mind about it.

I also wanted to understand more about the connections between the different forms of humanism and their development in different eras and contexts. Thirdly, it was about what humanism meant to me. I have always been a humanist, although for years I did not use the label.

Are there any translations in the pipeline?

Yes. There are a dozen or so on their way, including German, Italian, French, and two Chinese editions – one for Taiwan and one for China.

Will the one for China be censored?

One publisher, who I did not go with in the end, said that any mention of religion would need to be cut, which is strange in a book about humanism. It was different compared to the last book, where none of this came up. I think there has been a shift in how much publishers feel they have to self-censor. But there were certain compromises that I would not and did not make.

Was religion a part of your life growing up?

No. My background was absolutely atheist. My parents were non-religious. My father was brought up as a Baptist and he rebelled against that when he was a teenager, and had the whole church praying for his soul as a result. My mother was never a believer. So I was lucky in that I did not have to go through that painful, challenging process of rejecting what you have been brought up with. My grandmother, the Baptist one, did hope that she might be able to get me interested in religion. She sent me a children’s pictorial Bible, which I loved because it had great stories, like fairy tales, with beautiful illustrations. But I never took it literally.

Would you now consider yourself agnostic, atheist or something else?

Theoretically, I am inclined to say agnostic, simply because you cannot prove a negative. But I am more of an atheist by personal conviction. There are parts of what institutional religion does that appal me. But there are parts that I respect, because religious activity is a form of human activity and artistic creation. I enjoy going into churches, and even reading religious books sometimes. I love the beauty that can be found in religious traditions.

But for me, the real beauty comes from contemplating the universe, what we know about it and what we might still discover, the scale of what we see in the night sky and how it might all work. The desire to find out more about the universe inspires me much more than religious traditions.

When did you first start using the label ‘humanist’ for yourself?

About 15 years ago. Definitely before I started writing this book. I have never been much of a joiner of organisations, but I did join Humanists UK when I started writing it. Labels are not something I usually feel very drawn to using. I think that might be true of many humanists, who by disposition want something subtler and more individual.

How much of your research was in the UK and how much elsewhere?

A lot of it was in the British Library, where we are now sitting, as well as the Warburg Institute, the London Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. I spend a lot of time in Italy anyway [Bakewell’s wife, Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni, is Italian]. I did not do much research in Italian libraries, but I did try to find out more about the places where the humanists of the early modern era lived. Padua stands out, because it was important for university life and education, particularly in the history of medicine. Chapter 4 of the book is about medicine and humanism. In the medical university at Padua you can stand in the Anatomical Theatre [built in 1595] and imagine what it would have been like to be a medical student, seeing the anatomising of a body – a process which is of course so important for good medical education, and thus for better medicine, and thus for better human welfare.

Petrarch, who is the main character of Chapter 1, lived close to Padua towards the end of his life, and was involved with the university and the local community. I also visited Avignon, where Petrarch grew up, and Paris. I spent a few days in Chartres. The cathedral there has got nothing to do with humanism in the non-religious sense, but it had everything to do with the flowering of education and a proto-scholarly humanism that started there and in other French centres before it started in Italy. It gives you such a different perspective when you are in a place. I visited Basel, which was the closest Erasmus came came to having a home – in fact, he spent most of his time travelling around and said that ‘My home is wherever I keep my library.’ Which sums him up, really.

Your focus is primarily from fourteenth to late twentieth-century Europe. Why did you choose this period, and those specific starting and finishing points?

Petrarch marks the beginning of the self-consciously modern revival of classical learning in Europe. He saw himself as bringing the light back from the classical world and starting a moral as well as an intellectual revival. In that sense, he is often called the first humanist, so it seemed a sensible place to start. The story tends to focus mainly on Europe, with some reaching in other directions, particularly to America. That was deliberate, because I needed to impose some kind of structure, limit and coherence. The people involved were influenced by each other, read each other, and responded to each other’s work.

I thought about ending with a more substantial survey of where humanism is now. But this has already been written about by others, and it is still very much a live story, changing and developing. I did not think I could do it justice unless I had a large section on it. And I am more of a historian by temperament.

You read philosophy at university. It seems to me that you are a little ruthless with Plato and Aristotle, writing that they ‘were (in most respects) not very humanistic’, and preferring Democritus, a fragmentary Presocratic, and the obscure sophist Protagoras. What made you take this approach?

From the fragments that we have of Protagoras, he and Democritus were in many respects proto-humanists, in the tradition of materialist philosophy. There is one fragment of Protagoras which says, ‘as to the gods, I know nothing about them’. This and other Presocratic sources suggest that, because we cannot know anything about the gods, it is not worth spending time worrying about them. There is a similar tradition of materialism in ancient India.

Your book talks about Cicero’s idea of humane studies, including in his speech in defence of Archias, where he identifies a ‘common bond’ between the ‘arts that concern humanity’. How far are these ideas a starting point for Renaissance humanism?

The Ciceronian idea of the ‘human and literary studies’ is really at the foundation of Renaissance humanism. This interest in Cicero was kick-started by Petrarch, who really admired Cicero, although he did criticise him as well. But others came along after him who thought Cicero was an almost godlike figure and could not be questioned, and that his style in Latin should be imitated absolutely. There was a tension between the kind of humanists who were obsessed with classical models and the ones that were more questioning and critical.

You point out that Renaissance humanists like Petrarch were concerned about literary style even when writing in an emotional state or about distressing topics. Is this an idea that would be worth considering for modern humanists?

We still recognise the importance of speaking and writing in an articulate way, though it does not go under the name of eloquence any more. But sometimes we are suspicious of the veneer of polished speaking. There is the idea, which started with the Romantics, that beautiful words mean nothing, and just cover up authentic feelings. This idea was alien to the Renaissance humanists, who would have said that deep feeling should be communicated as powerfully as possible. They also took from classical literature the idea that real eloquence must always be allied to virtue, or goodness.

We seem to have a double standard. On the one hand, we – at least I – do not trust the likes of Boris Johnson, who uses Latin quotations elegantly and is educated in the tradition of eloquence and classical reference, without that necessarily being a reflection of goodness or honesty. On the other hand, we can also be judgemental about people who do not express themselves very fluently.

Among the people you mention in your ‘Acknowledgements’ is Andrew Copson, the CEO of Humanists UK. To what extent did you consult with him or any humanist organisations during your research and writing?

I talked to Andrew, who was very helpful, and to one or two other humanists. Almost as a matter of principle, though, I mainly worked with my own idea of what I wanted to write. I did not not want to feel that I was presenting a view of humanism that was officially sanctioned by humanist organisations. Although I did include Humanist International’s Declaration of Modern Humanism (2022) as an appendix.

Is there anything in the 2022 Declaration (the latest version of the Amsterdam Declaration of 1952) that you would disagree with or want to modify?

No. One change I agree with is the emphasis on the need for humanism to involve respect and concern for the rest of the natural world and for other species, not only for human beings. There is a misconception out there that humanism is the same thing as anthropocentrism and that it implies not caring about other species.

Why should humanists care about other species?

On the simplest level, because we cannot survive without them. We are of this planet, and woven into the biodiversity around us. The general humanist approach also involves a sense of responsibility for the impact we can have on the planet. We have considerable powers technologically and by sheer force of numbers; I think we need to own up to that responsibility.

You identify ‘freethinking, enquiry and hope’ as consistent aspects of humanism throughout your period of study. Why these three?

These three points apply to all the widely divergent forms of humanism that I discuss in the book – not just modern humanism of the secular or non-religious sort, but also the scholarly and literary humanism of the Renaissance and the philosophical interest in human well-being and dignity of the Enlightenment.

To what extent can we really talk about a single humanism running through all these different threads?

I tackle that in the opening pages of the book. It is there in the word: they are all practices or ways of thinking which have the human realm as the centre of their concern – whether culture, literature and the studies of the humanities, or human nature and well-being. And modern humanism involves a sense of morality and meaning that comes from human relationships and human concerns.

I mean ‘freethinking’ in the broadest sense of not taking anything on authority alone – whether that be the authority of religious institutions or political ones. ‘Enquiry’ is linked to that, but it involves asking questions and undertaking intellectual investigations in a more active sense – something many of the humanists did with gusto.

‘Hope’ is a little different. We cannot just be naïvely optimistic, but a humanist does have some sense that we can use our faculties and talents and our abilities to improve the well-being of other people and of other living things, to achieve a better politics, to solve our problems to as large an extent as we can. It was well summed up by Bertrand Russell, who features towards the end of the book precisely for what he said about the need to have hope in ourselves. Today, many people are in despair over the state of the world. But I think that losing hope is an abdication of responsibility and also risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have to have some sense that we are capable of using our best abilities constructively.

Your book focuses primarily on individuals who were humanist in different ways. Was your choice of characters a personal one, or were you influenced by other accounts of humanism?

I was influenced by who I was interested in and who had something new to contribute. I tried to ensure that everybody that features in the book advances the story in some way, or stands for a wider process. I did not want to write a reference book merely listing lots of names, but something that was fun to read.

You use photographs to illustrate some of your main characters. Where did you find them, and why did you decide to add this pictorial element?

I took many of them from picture libraries. I wanted to have images to make it easier on the eye, but I did not want it to be just portraits. I tried to choose images that were a bit different or unexpected. In a few cases, there are contemporary political cartoons of people, rather than portraits, and in other cases, pictures of title pages or manuscripts that illuminate the text in some way.

Did you make any surprising discoveries during the course of your research?

There were a lot of things that were surprising to me, because when I write books, I find out a lot as I go along. I think that is more fun for the reader too, because we are going along together. Some of the characters were more interesting than I expected them to be – for example, Matthew Arnold, who wrote Culture and Anarchy, which I had had on my shelves for years but never read because I thought it would be boring. He is conservative and Victorian sometimes, but his writing is interesting, and he is endearing and enjoyable from a humanist point of view – I warmed to him. Wilhelm von Humboldt is another character who was full of surprises, not least his kinky fantasy life.

Your book discusses the debate Matthew Arnold had with TH Huxley about the relative importance of the humanities and literary studies versus the sciences. In 1959, CP Snow revived this debate with his Rede lecture on the ‘two cultures’. These days, it seems, if anything, too easy for scientists to take pot shots at the humanities for their irrelevance, lack of rigour or stagnation in the morass of literary theory. How far can the literary and scientific approaches to life, or more specifically literary and scientific humanism, be reconciled?

The clue to it is, again, in that idea of human studies. The universe is physical; we are physical beings. Some people would see that as invalidating all of the ‘human studies’ or humanities, as if they are somehow irrelevant because they do not correspond to how the universe is. But human studies are not irrelevant to us, because we are human beings. We are social and cultural by our nature, and so the human realm is enormously interesting to us. It is the sea in which we swim all the time – it is language, culture, communication, society, politics. The two cultures are connected, I think, not contradictory.

You say you like contemplating the universe. This reminds me of Kant’s idea of sublimity: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’. Is there an argument that the scientific perspective is fundamentally inhuman because its focus is on the very big and the very small, on the objective and not the subjective human experience? Isn’t the human, from the scientific point of view, just a collection of processes or cells or atoms?

Yes, but the paradox is that the science that we do, the ability to visualise and study the very large or the very small, is a human activity. There is no getting away from the human, for us. One of the things that is fascinating about science as a human activity is that it does try to set aside human preconceptions, perspectives, prejudices, and to work from the evidence – and that is a truly impressive thing to do. But even that – working out scientific methods, testing hypotheses, looking for falsifications and evidence – is still a human activity.

At the end of the book, you briefly mention posthumanism and transhumanism. How might the development of technologies like artificial intelligence affect humanism, and what it means to be a human, in the future?

This is a difficult question, because we do not know where we are going and things are moving very fast. We are already closely integrated with our technology, and are likely to be ever more so. Is there a line that we would one day cross, when we would no longer be the same? Have we crossed it already? I do not know the answer to that because it is all developing under our noses. I am wary of simplistic answers as to whether there will always be some human ‘essence’. I really do not know.

Your book was published in March this year, and you have said elsewhere that you spent about six years writing it. Those years were also a very eventful period in Britain. Did the turbulent political atmosphere have an effect on your book?

It was quite dramatic because I started working on it in early 2016, and then Brexit happened, and Trump. Since then, there have been all sorts of further blows to our sense of confidence in human common sense, if you like. I tried to keep reminding myself of what Bertrand Russell and others have said, that the greater the challenge to our sense of hope in ourselves, the more we actually need that hope – and the more we need a sense of faith in ourselves and in our processes, in our better political institutions, legal protections, free press, and the ability to talk openly about issues and to establish effective media of communication between countries. Altogether, we need more of our good qualities rather than just giving up on them.

Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] also experienced growing up in a hopeful time and then having to realise that things would not always simply get better and better. That is not how human history has ever gone. There will always be complications, steps backwards, obstacles and wrong moves, but it is wiser to expect that and not to be naïvely optimistic. And, as always, it is up to us. If things are going to be even a bit better in this world, we are going to have to do it.

Does the humanist have a natural political stance? Or should humanists today subscribe to any particular political views about anything?

No. I do not think there is any inevitable connection with any particular political viewpoint. In the nineteenth century, Humboldt and Mill were classical liberals, but Matthew Arnold, whose views about culture and education had much in common with theirs, was a small ‘c’ conservative. I am more interested in how the humanist dimension works with various political positions.

Where would you put yourself on the political spectrum?

I would say I am a humanist liberal.

Does the humanist today have a moral obligation to be involved in any sort of political campaigning or activism, or can they live a quiet life?

Personally, I live a fairly quiet life – I am not a political activist. That is just me. So I have to say that it is not necessary to be politically active in order to be a humanist! But looking through history, a lot of humanists were politically active, or became so. Bertrand Russell, for example, started as a scholarly logician, mathematician and philosopher, but was politicised by the First World War and decided from then on to write political material as well, and campaign for political causes. Renaissance humanists were often engaged with the politics of their city and their environment. Humanists are often drawn to political activity because it goes with the idea that it is up to us to make the world that we want to have.

You emphasise the importance of freethinking and enquiry to humanism – which leads naturally to the question of how important you think free speech is today, and where you would draw the line. How far should free enquiry go?

I am drawn to the free speech end of that continuum: I think things should be talked about. If we are ever going to say that something should not be talked about, we had better give a very good reason why not. There are certain things that disturb me when I hear them said, but I am not sure that the best method of stopping people from saying them is just to silence them. I would want to ask why people might be saying those things, what that implies about us as a society, and where we should go from there.

Your book is full of references to happiness, human fulfilment, and the need for connections between people. Is writing a way in which you make connections?

There is a relationship with the reader. But part of the nature of writing is that you do not know what everybody who reads it thinks or wants to say back to you. I think that is as it should be. It is nice to hear back from readers, but that is not the primary reason why I write. It is a way of discovering things for myself as I go along, and taking other readers with me. It is like walking along a path together, but without knowing who the readers are – that is part of the appeal. I like the idea that people could make something out of the book that I would never dream of.

A recurring motif in the book is the idea that humanists can, in a sense, live on in their writings after they are dead. Is this also a motivation for you?

No. Most of the things that any individual does gradually fade away out of view after they are dead. Even those we think of as timeless classics – Plato and Aristotle and Protagoras – it is too early to say whether they are all going to endure. They became fragments. There would be an egocentric arrogance in thinking that somehow your words are going to live on. But I do spend a lot of time pottering around in second-hand bookshops and libraries and picking up obscure and forgotten books from a hundred years ago or more. I love the idea of reading something that has not survived in more than a few copies, and yet finding the voice of the author still talking to you.

You talk about hope as an ingredient of humanism. In the very long term, of course, the earth will probably be swallowed by the sun, and the human race may well have died out long before then. Where can humanists find hope, given that, on a cosmic scale, we are, by all appearances, so fundamentally meaningless?

On that scale, I do think we are completely meaningless and forgettable, as is everything to do with this planet and the very fact that we have existed at all. But we have got much more immediate things to worry about, and we could find ourselves disappearing a lot sooner than that. We are still a very young species – dinosaurs were around for an enormously longer time than we have been. Also I do not believe in God, so even if I wanted to find meaning there, that is not an option. Would I be happier if I had this great sense of meaning? No, because to me it would not be a genuine source of meaning. Actually, I find it exhilarating to think about the size of the universe. The fact that we are tiny does not bother me.

Final question: what is your next project?

I have not got one yet. I am having a little interlude to see what might arise next. And even if I did have one, like most writers, I probably would not want to talk about it.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell, was published on 30 March 2023 by Chatto & Windus.

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As W.H. Auden put it, ‘If the criterion of art were its power to incite to action, Goebbels would be one of the greatest artists of all time.’ Were this true, we would be living through a modern-day Renaissance.

However, as Jed Perl argues in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (Knopf, 2022), this is certainly not the case.

The so-called ‘culture wars’ are a polarising force. The media would have us believe that the woke ‘Left’  want to abolish ‘art proper’ for ideological propaganda, whilst the elitist ‘Right’ strive to preserve a clearly defined concept of art accessible to only the privileged.

Perl counters these inflammatory and amorphous positions by reasserting the universal nature of art. He does this by proposing the idea that art is independent from politics. In its own separate realm, he suggests, art is characterised by a dynamic relationship between authority and freedom. This argument – not entirely original, but uniquely crafted for the current artistic climate – provides a nuance on seemingly polarised positions.

A cursory read of Authority and Freedom is not recommended. Although some terms are difficult to grasp with immediate fluency, it is not possible to fully grasp the central thesis without them. Paramount to this is Perl’s concept of ‘form’, which he uses to distinguish the different types of art (fine art, poetry, fictive prose, music etc.). Within these categories of form, there are certain laws that we must learn if we are to communicate as artists. For example, we can only achieve resemblance in a portrait in oils if we first master the medium itself: untutored amateurs dabble with oil paintings at their peril.

Once we have mastered ‘form’ – the different rules that distinguish and characterise the distinct types of art  – then we can begin to communicate our innermost thoughts and perceptions. In this way, engagement with form ultimately provides the means for free human expression.

Form is therefore the limit to but also the measure of freedom, constituting a boundary within which creativity thrives: ‘Artistic freedom always involves engaging with some idea of order, which becomes an authority that the artist understands and acknowledges but to which the artist doesn’t necessarily entirely submit.’ For example, musicians exercise freedom within the constraints of musical scores: ‘Interpretations, even in classical music, vary dramatically.’ Perl also illustrates this point in the context of drama: ‘Every performance of King Lear is an exploration of the possibilities of King Lear.’

Perl’s argument becomes especially pertinent to contemporary debates once this fundamental understanding of ‘form’ is grasped. Why, for example, should Western artists not allowed to appropriate work from other cultures? The artistic practice of pastiche without borders or chronology is a free exploration and affirmation of form, independent of politics.

To embark upon an imaginative joyride journey of form is exhilarating: it is a way of delving into the past to embellish artworks with glorious past treasures. Art’s magical power – the ‘irresponsible, irrepressible, liberating’ sensation – should not be circumscribed by any political filter. We cannot force someone to feel happy, sad or neutral. Emotions are immediate and inwardly uncontrollable – and this is the universal human condition.

The tension between authority and freedom (the ‘lifeblood of the arts’) is natural to this human spirit. If the rhythm of this careful balance is tipped too much either way by the dominance of authority and the erosion of freedom, or vice versa, then artistic quality  is compromised. To this end, we should be suspicious of attempts to impose ideological rules on the arts: of the prohibition on certain authors against creating certain characters, or of the retrospective editing of books by ‘sensitivity readers’.

Used as a tool of authority, art becomes thinly veiled propaganda concealed beneath a moralistic mask. Perl criticises ‘the insistence that works of art … are validated (or invalidated) by the extent to which they line up (or fail to line up with) our current social and political concerns’. An observation by the American novelist Flannery O’Connor illustrates this idea: ‘“art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end.”’ However, crucially, this is not to say that art cannot have an impact on the real world. O’Conner continues, ‘“If you do manage to use it [art] successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first.”’ In this vein, Perl argues that art proper is neither elitist nor alienated from real life. Rather, its independence is the key to its relevance because it is implicit and timeless. To make art requires courage. The discipline of form provides a space for free exploration of thought and feeling. Once completed, the artwork is severed from the umbilical cord of its creator and thrown into the world to live its separate life.

Artistic creation is therefore the exercise of godlike powers. In recent years, however, the idea of the ‘Great Artist’– understood to be a singular creative genius – has been criticised and ‘deconstructed’. Calls for the redistribution of power have underpinned a shift towards artistic collectives (seen, for example, in the sharing of the Turner Prize), an emphasis on oppressed identities as conferring the prime artistic value, and the conflation of the artist’s moral behaviour with the aesthetic value of their work.

To counter this trend, Perl redefines the artist as a creator: a single-minded individual who dutifully dedicates themselves to art because it is a calling that comes from within, rather than a political programme imposed from without. Immune from transient whims and demands, the artist pursues a lifelong vocation to become fluent in a language which is uniquely their own, but comprehensible to all.  

Both historically and at present, this artistic vocation is typically an option only for those who can escape the daily demands of reality – or, at least, be willing or able to take short-term risks, including the absorption of associated costs. When immediate demands or material limitations invoke too much authority, that crucial alchemical balance is poisoned, and the creative flow is interrupted.

However, Perl does not suggest that only the elite can produce ‘great’ art. Thankfully, given the current emphasis on ideologically-driven equality, diversity, and inclusion policies, there is another way forward. By recognising and removing the obstacles which impede uninterrupted artistic creation and the academic exploration of form, we can revive ‘great’ art in a way that is more widely accessible than ever before.

The removal of such barriers amounts to the recovery of human agency, and faith in the idea that everyone has something valuable to express.

The diverse examples and voices Perl invokes add support to this message, even if they obfuscate the book’s already diffuse structure. If we are living at a time when art has been desecrated by the demand for political relevance, artists must be mobilised with a manifesto or call to action. Towards such a manifesto, Perl’s book offers no easy assistance. Indeed, this is the great paradox: Perl argues that the immediate relevance of art is a risk to its applicability, but his beautifully written text is itself very artful.  

Theoretical intricacies aside, the artist or general arts enthusiast will surely be left with a changed perspective. Perl’s short book is a refreshing take on culture today built on the authority of the past, all the while providing guidance for the future.

This paradox reinstates the central question: should art be revered for its didactic power, or does its greatness inhere within its implicit and timeless potential? Perhaps it is up to the reader to decide.

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Religious dogma inevitably hinders progress. Theological codification, in turn, institutionalises societal decay. Today, nowhere is this more starkly visible than in Muslim communities.

Much of what ails the Muslim world today is rooted in Islamic text. From the subjugation of women to violence against freethought, many of the human rights abuses in Muslim-majority countries are justified via Islamic scripture and jurisprudence.

Democracy remains sidelined in these countries, with even aspiring secular states granting constitutional sovereignty to Islam. The glaring lack of modern Muslim contributions to science, technology and global development owes much to the Quranic undermining of the value of life in this world, in turn upholding a fixation with a collectively imagined ‘afterlife’.

Yet merely stating these obvious, not to mention ominous, realities can get critics accused of ‘Islamophobia’, even when the critics themselves come from within Muslim communities. This refusal by the community at large to acknowledge the symptoms naturally hinders any cure for the ailment: the imposition of Islam on Muslims.

Vedic faiths such as Hinduism allow for intrinsic dissenting space within the religious domain, while some Christian and Jewish traditions have been able to forge identities that are not bound by literal adherence to their scriptures. Muslims, meanwhile, are forced to accept absolute Islamic authority, even if they individually lack canonical devotion – leading lives in accordance with the scriptures – or ritual practice. This approach not only sustains Islamic inertia in Muslim communities, it intrinsically views any irreverence of Islam as something alien.

From Taslima Nasrin to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, many of the staunchest critics of Islam from within the tradition have not only had their books banned in Muslim countries, they have been discredited as outcasts. Their own critiques of Islam seem to reciprocate this rejection by betraying the parlance of an outsider, sometimes showing the same disdain for Muslims as they would for Islam. Salman Rushdie, the attack on whom in August was another grim reminder of the price of mocking Islam, has long been pigeonholed as a ‘blasphemer of Muhammad’, despite decades’worth of writings about the Indian subcontinent, including its multi-pronged identity crises.

The security threats facing Rushdie over four decades explain why those Muslim-heritage authors who have focused the entirety of their writings on the rejection of Islam, such as Ibn Warraq and other vocal ex-Muslims, have had to use pseudonyms to dodge Islamic blasphemy codes and the violence that inevitably follows. These authors too are dismissed as unrepresentative voices, even as anonymous atheism escalates across Muslim countries. This has meant that the overwhelming majority of the writing and scholarship on Islam that is produced worldwide, including in the West, continues to be done from within the confines of the religion.

A common theme among these contemporary thinkers arguing for Islamic modernity, including Reza Aslan, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Shahab Ahmed and Mustafa Akyol, is the endeavour to stretch the restrictive boundaries of Islam, but not to erase them. Even when thinkers such as Abdolkarim Soroush challenge scriptural authority, they do so from the perspective of human fallibility, not as a rejection of divinity: in other words, they justify contentious Islamic commandments in terms of the limitations of human comprehension and not in terms of the absence of a supernatural origin. Thus Muslim authors, from Islamists to modernists, continue to treat almost identically held Islamic doctrines as the starting point of their arguments. This is also why the ‘Medina state’, traditionally the first Islamic regime built by Muhammad, continues to be presented as a superlative embodiment of both an Islamic and a secular realm by the ideologically antipodal advocates of the same religion.

The treatment of the much touted ‘Golden Age of Islam’ is no different. There is no doubt of the significance of Arab and Muslim contributions towards science and philosophy between the 9^th and 15^th centuries AD, but that had little do with Islamic scriptures. All attributions of scientific advancement of that time to the Quran or Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) depend on a kind of ‘Texas sharpshooter fallacy’, with the credit being claimed after the inventions and discoveries had been made.

Meanwhile, many of the practitioners of Islamic thought and jurisprudence, such as Abu Hanifa, Maalik Ibn Anas, Ibn Idrees Shafiee, Ahmad ibn Hambal, Ibn Abi Aqil, and Ibn al-Junayd, continue to be identically venerated as absolute authorities in Sunni and Shia Islam, and much of today’s Islamist hegemony is rooted in their writings and the schools of thought they founded. Yet it was the rationalist, not the religious, philosophy that was the most noteworthy contribution of the early Muslim authors to global thought. For which, many of the humanist Muslim philosophers were targeted as heretics.

A paradigm case is the 12^th century philosopher Ibn Rushd, Latinised as Averroes, who has been dubbed by many the father of Western secular thought. Rushd argued for pluralism in Islamic jurisprudence. His challenge to Islamic orthodoxy resulted in his being banished from Cordoba. Thus, while Ibn Rushd continued to inspire Western philosophy and political thought in the Middle Ages, his works remained largely sidelined in the Muslim world until the 19^th century.

Like Ibn Rushd, many early Muslim rationalists, such as Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi, were deemed heretics. Most notable among their critics were Al-Ghazali and Ibn-e-Tamiyyah – two of the theologians that have had the longest-lasting impact on Muslim thought and continue to be cited to substantiate Islamist politics. Similarly shunned were the Muʿtazila, the rationalists that challenged Quranic literalism and sought to subordinate theology to reason between the 8^th and 10^th centuries in what today is Iraq, inspiring modern liberal theologians like Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd.

Looking at the fate of even those rational thinkers of the time who did not explicitly reject Islam or theism, and who were largely looking to reconcile science and reason, it is clear that irreverent scepticism and freethought were not exactly embraced even in the celebrated periods of Islamic rule.

Today, it is common in the Islamic world to eulogise past empires from the Ummayad to the Ottoman, as well as the ‘Golden Age of Islam’. But this narrative betrays an academic revisionism which enforces an Islamophilic understanding of the Muslim past and present. This reintepretation of history is taking place, while at the same time the cultural relativist narratives of Orientalism and ‘Islamophobia’ are used to silence criticism or enquiry into Islam for ideological reasons. Intellectual progress in the Muslim world is currently hindered by scholarly bias in favour of Islam and its history, where making the obvious link between jihadism and Islam, or probing the veracity of claims in Islamic tradition, is deemed to be targeting Muslims as a whole. To change this, Muslim heritage thinkers not only need to embrace rationalism, but also to rekindle irreverence for Islam. In fact, the long history of Muslim countries contains many examples of irreverence and the questioning of religion.

One notable example was the 9^th-century philosopher, Abu Bakr al-Razi, a deist who criticised Islam and mocked the very idea of Quranic revelations. In Fi al-Nubuwwat (On Prophecies) he challenges the Quranic claim that a text like it cannot be produced:

‘Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly… You are talking about a work [the Quran] which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanation.’

Al-Razi’s contemporary Ibn Al-Rawandi was an outspoken antitheist, described by historians as someone who upheld ‘atheistic ideas, the negation of Allah, the denial of Quranic prophecy, and the vilification of the prophets’. His Kitab al-Zumurrud (The Book of the Emerald) is presented as a theological dialogue in which he is a participant, called ‘the heretic’, arguing that ‘Muhammad’s own presuppositions and systems show that religious traditions are not trustworthy. The Jews and Christians say that Jesus really died, but the Quran contradicts them.’

Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri, a renowned 10^th-century poet and anti-religion deist, used parody and sarcasm in his assault on Islam, even satirising the Quran in Al-Fuṣul wa al-Ghayat (‘Paragraphs and Periods’). A famous couplet of his in Arabic is translated as:

‘Muslims are stumbling, Christians all astray,
Jews wildered, Magians far on error’s way.
We mortals are composed of two great schools
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.’

Abu Nuwas also used satire in his poetry in the 8^th century, not just to target the Abbasid Caliphate, but even to express mockery for Islamic scriptures via homoeroticism. In one exchange he is reported to have used Quranic verses to woo a male lover.

As with much of early Islamic history, there is debate over the accuracy of the reported heresies that many of these dissidents, and others like them, were charged with. Their successors have often attributed their blasphemies to lies made up by rivals, or sectarian attacks, so as to sanitise those critiques that could be reconciled with Islam.

Conversely, there also are question marks over the sincerity – not to mention authenticity – of those rationalists who worked within boundaries of permitted Islam. Conflating deism or pantheism with Islamic characteristics could simply have been a means to avoid being censored and attacked, or even to make their ideas palatable for realms immersed in Islamic theology. The Egyptian philosopher Abdel Rahman Badawi argued in ‘From the History of Atheism in Islam’ that some sceptics steered clear of targeting belief in Allah as a whole, since it made their works likelier to be banished. This was the case with many anti-theistic ideas of the time that have only managed to survive till today via literature that counters those critiques.

Today, the ideological self-confinement of Muslim thought within Islamic boundaries is likewise an exercise in self-preservation and acceptability. Certainly, the attempt to reconcile religion with modernity can aid progress in Muslim countries. For example, it should not require complete rejection of Islam for aspiring Muslim scientists to deny the Quranic description of a flat earth, as long interpreted by Islamic scholars, even as recently as the 20^th and 21^st centuries. However, to seek to confine all intellectual enquiry within the bounds of Islam, however widely interpreted, is to prevent ideological pluralism. This in turn will keep Muslim freethought outside the realms of acceptability. In other words, as long as enquiry in Muslim countries is required to be sanctioned by religion, it will be limited in what it can achieve.

The authorities who hinder freethinking about Islam in this way, whether through sharia enforcement or via the ‘liberal’ denial of space for Islamic dissent, are actively suppressing the progress of Muslim thought. In doing so, they are hindering the intellectual growth of a quarter of the global population. It is only through unabashed irreverence and unapologetic rejection that Islam will find its due place in the modern world. That will finally allow Muslims to collectively embrace secular laws, to make intellectual progress on a par with other advanced countries, and to conduct their lives free from the hindrance of theological doctrine.

Today, however, whether in Islamist theocratic regimes like Iran, the now ostensibly liberalising Arab monarchies, or the heavily Islamised (though officially secular) democracies such as Indonesia, Islam remains a source of absolute power in the vast majority of Muslim states. The first step on the path to Muslim freethought needs to be a root-and-branch reform of the Islamic regimes themselves.  

The post The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought appeared first on The Freethinker.

What motivated you to make this film?

It was a personal journey. I was a reckless, irrational individual mainly because I was brought up in an orthodox religious family. I was groomed in a system where everything is holy and a religious significance was attributed to the mundane events of everyday life. My ‘Damascene conversion’ was not from atheism to belief, but the other way round and more slowly. Through constant questioning of my childhood beliefs, seeking answers and analysing empirically, I started feeling liberated from the worldview with which I grew up. I would say that this intellectual enlightenment is what motivated me to make this film. I started viewing the world in the light of rationalism and realised there are so many people, especially in India, who are chained to religious dogma and its associated stigmas. They too need liberation. Film is the most popular form of art. As a filmmaker, I considered it was my responsibility to share my experiences and spread the importance of rationalism in today’s political context.

How long has it been in the making, and what was it like to direct?

We started the production of Vivesini in 2019 November, and had planned to complete it by April 2020 – but then the pandemic hit. We ultimately finished production in 2021 and completed the film in 2022. It was an enjoyable experience to direct Vivesini. I also had the responsibility of ensuring that the film did not come across as propaganda. I believe in art and not in propaganda, because I see art as something that welcomes everyone with open arms, regardless of their beliefs and associations. I think I have done justice to the central idea, which is the importance of rationalism, without disregarding the requirements of mainstream cinema.

Can you tell us a bit about the actors and why you chose them?

There are five main characters in the film, including the protagonist, Shakthi. All the other four characters act as a catalyst to her. For Jayaraman, I originally had two actors in mind. In the end, I was delighted to recruit the actor Nasser, who is based in Chennai, and already had a similar outlook on life to Jayaraman. Nasser has been the focal point of Vivesini ever since.

For the character of Clara, I had few figures in mind, all of whom were activists. In particular, I wanted a tall, dark personality who could resonate with the ideas of Clara Zetkin. I met Mekha Rajan and briefed her about this character. We had already worked together on another project before, so I knew her strengths. Mekha was known for her sweet on-screen demeanour and was very popular among television viewers, thanks to the many adverts in which she was cast either as a doting mother or a devout wife. This was the main reason why I chose her – because Clara is exactly the opposite.

Kavya, who plays Shakthi, had no major experience of working in a film before. But her confidence and the audition she gave for Shakthi were tremendous. I was looking for a pair of eyes that were constantly searching for answers and a sense of exhaustion in her expression from that constant searching. We were able to capture that mood throughout. Kavya really identified with Shakthi’s journey, and this is reflected on screen. 

Vanessa Stevenson played the cameo role of Alice Walker. I had worked with Vanessa during my postgraduate days in Kent. The main challenge I faced while writing Alice’s part was the number of stunt sequences involved. So I needed an actor who could trust me when she was required to hang thirty feet off the ground from an industrial crane. Vanessa, an experienced actor from London, did just that. And she is so convincing as Alice Walker.

For Charles Aniefuna, we had initially shortlisted an actor from Hollywood. But due to a last-minute date clash he withdrew, and we had to look for an African American actor with considerable experience. When Gary Cordice sent in his reel I was thrilled, because he was exactly the figure I had in mind. However, he was British, with a strong British accent. We worked on his American accent for three months and finally took him on board. Charles Aniefuna’s ancestors are from Africa and his great-grandfather was a tribal leader of a clan. Charles carries the same passion and spirit about nature that his ancestors had. I saw all of this in Gary.

How did you come up with the plot?

I come from a place where writers, journalists, academics and intellectuals who express rationalist views are threatened and even killed by religious mobs in the name of protecting their religious beliefs. To take but one among so many instances, when my state’s elected representative, M. Karunanidhi, once remarked that a deity was a fictional mythological character, the right-wing politician Ram Vilas Vedanti suggested that it would be praiseworthy to behead him and cut out his tongue. Other extremist religious organisations endorsed this view.

The far-right political narrative has been on the rise across the world in the last few years; it especially seems to have started targeting science, free speech, free thought, and radical and secular ideas. Look at the recent attack on Salman Rushdie, or several recent attacks on Indian rationalists. When these irrationalist forces seep into power structures like the legislature, judiciary and constitutional framework, then they can push human civilisation back by several centuries, and have a particularly negative effect on women and, in India, people from the lower castes.

To answer your question on how I came up with the plot, I see the plot in terms, as it were, of a fall from a cliff. And I am standing on the edge of the cliff called ‘society’, and these social issues keep bombarding me one after the other, pushing me off the cliff, and I eventually landed on this plot. This plot is my destination. My journey as an individual seeking answers has made me land here.

What are the key things you would like your viewers to take away from it?

Above all, I want them to be persuaded of the importance of rational thinking and free thought, the value of standing against oppression in any form, and the importance of welcoming progressive ideas that can liberate humanity from the restrictions of narrow religious worldviews. But there are also other themes that I hope the viewers will be able to absorb – in particular, the way in which anthropology can help us understand human development over thousands of years, and the need to liberate ourselves from the religious beliefs, rituals and customs that arose at an early stage of humanity’s development.

Where does the title come from, and what is the connection with the Freethinker?

As a result of globalisation, the world has grown smaller. Technology, infrastructure, culture, recipes, fashion, and so forth reaches the other side of the world almost instantly – whether for better or worse. Almost 140 years ago, a progressive, radical freethought movement travelled thousands of miles from London to British Madras (now Chennai) in less than a year, without the internet. In 1881, G.W. Foote founded the Freethinker. In 1882, the magazine inspired a group of people in British-ruled Madras to start a progressive journal called The Thinker in English and Tattuva Vivesni in Tamil. ‘Athipakkam’ Venkatachalam (a rationalist who took the name of his village as his first name) was the leading contributor to Tattuva Vivesini. This journal was published from 1882 to 1888, after which it disappeared for lack of patronage.

In 2019, I made Vivesini, which talks about the resurgence of rationalism in Chennai, and in which a fictional character, ‘Jayaraman’ was presented as Athipakkam Venkatachalam’s great grandson. Alice Walker, a fictional character whose great-grandmother (in the film) worked with Charles Bradlaugh, revives the spirit of enlightenment in Shakthi. In July 2022, the very first private screening of Vivesini was held in Conway Hall, in the presence of members of the National Secular Society, of which Bradlaugh was the first president, and the editor of the Freethinker. I am delighted to witness the reconnection of the Freethinker magazine and Tattuva Vivesini through the art of cinema. For me, this symbolises the resurgence of enlightenment in Chennai.

How prevalent is superstition in southern India today?

Superstition is part and parcel of any average Indian’s outlook. For instance, numerous events, from taking the oath in the legislative assembly, to launching rockets or even writing the code for a new piece of software, are required to be done on an ‘auspicious’ date and even at an ‘auspicious’ time of day. We make the most important and crucial life decisions based on superstitious beliefs. We look to auspicious dates, days and times even for things like medical procedures. But in recent years there has been a movement to reinterpret these superstitions and irrational beliefs as ‘science’ – a sort of ‘science’ that is thousands of years old and was in use by our ancestors. Any scientific explanation or objection to these practices is considered blasphemous, and critics are likely to face retribution from religious leaders.

For you, how is freethought connected to political activism?

Vivesini considers some of the ways in which free thought can lead to political activism. Shakthi is brought up by a rationalist father who advocates freethought. But it is not until she is grown up and starts to ask questions that she frees herself of illusions about what happened to her parents in the past, and ends up as an activist, as they were.

Thinking freely, rationally and without being constrained by religious superstition can lead to political secularism. Historically, the freethought, rationalist and secularist movements have fought for the separation of church and state, paved the way for industrialisation and been criticised by religious leaders for questioning the established order. In our era, political activism plays an important role in creating consciousness about environmentalism, the decentralisation of power, sustainable energy, gender equality and so on. And where there is freethought there is political activism. 

What is the future of secularism in south India?

The British rule of India was marked by many shadows. However, I see introduction of freethought and progressive, reformist ideas as the silver lining during this period. The rationalist movement started by the Madras Secular Society gained further momentum during the Dravidian movement. Just as the work of Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), a progressive filmmaker from Bengal, reflected the years of social reform in Bengal, the Dravidian school of reformism gave birth to Dravidian cinema, which started propagating secularist and rationalist ideas through films.

Southern India, especially Tamil Nadu, has always been receptive to progressive ideas, and it continues to do so. Here in Tamil Nadu, the representatives of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a rational political party, still consciously follow Charles Bradlaugh’s example of refusing to take a religious oath when assuming office. Four Chief Ministers who hail from the Dravidian movement, C.N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M.G. Ramachandran and M.K. Stalin, have followed this secular method of taking the oath.

What’s next after Vivesini – do you have plans for a sequel?

I am first planning to screen Vivesini at certain universities and educational institutions in the UK and US, and then release it commercially in India. I have no plans for a sequel, but am looking at producing films that can break the current trend in the Indian film industry, which, although technically and aesthetically advanced, is presenting increasingly regressive ideas that go back to pre-modern times. This reflects the current mood in national politics, in which people in power are reintroducing ancient religious beliefs and adapting them to present circumstances. Anything that was preached or followed or propagated centuries ago is not automatically holy. We tend to associate ideas that are thousands of years old with sanctity. But I would argue that such ideas were formed when humankind was in its childhood stage; we are now, as it were, in humanity’s middle age and fighting the trauma we had during our childhood. But the point is that these beliefs are primitive and should not be venerated merely because they are very old. To break this pattern, I am looking at injecting progressive thoughts into people’s minds through my films.

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The post The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan appeared first on The Freethinker.