Mirrors and Magic: Fifth Business, Islam in Pakistan, Solaris

Mirrors and Magic: Fifth Business, Islam in Pakistan, Solaris 

"We don't know what to do with other worlds: we don't need other worlds. We need a mirror."

-Solaris

What are we looking for? And would we know if we found it?

I recently read and/or watched a number of works that raise this question, in rather different ways. All three also reflect on a related question: is our desire ultimately for something other, or only for ourselves? Is our desire ultimately for truth, for reality, or can it be fulfilled in illusion? Is there something out there?

This is a question central to modernity; and even more central in the much-advertised age of AI. AI, as I have again and again emphasized in this space, is mostly false advertising, and even then mostly not new. Nevertheless, it is not without its genuine effects. The rise of Large Language Models has, thus far, done little or nothing to increase economic productivity, encourage creativity, aid discovery, increase leisure, manifest a generalized god-like intelligence, or accomplish any other goal touted by its creators to garner venture capital. It has, however, helped a few kids commit suicide, driven a few more insane, and successfully imprisoned a growing number of people in obsessive intellectual and faux-religious and faux-personal relationships with mirrors. And that is not without significance. 

Hence, in this issue of my patented "Three Extremely Different Works of Art in Different Mediums Reviewed Together According to A Philosophical or Social Theme" (TM) series, I will be examining two books and a film that all, I think, ultimately center on this same all-too-human problem, this same disconnect between what we think we are looking for and what we actually encounter, out there in the world: between our desire for the other, and the comforting, imprisoning facsimile of the mirror. 

Fifth Business

I recently read Fifth Business, the most famous novel by the most famous Canadian novelist of the 20th century that no one in America has apparently heard of, Robertson Davies, because of a film that was never made.

In the early 1980s, in between his succès d'estime directorial debut, Time after Time, in which H.G. Wells pursues Jack the Ripper into the 1970s and falls in love, and his blockbuster hit Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, in which Captain Kirk realizes he is a bad person and Spock dies, Nicholas Meyer spent several years desperately trying to get some studio somewhere to fund his dream project of directing an adaptation of Fifth Business, for which he had written a script (re)named Conjuring. This effort ultimately failed, and no film adaptation of Fifth Business has ever been filmed. However, during my childhood of reading endless behind-the-scenes books by and about the Star Trek films and television shows, I naturally read Nicholas Meyer's account of his fruitless effort numerous times in William Shatner's Star Trek Memories, as well as in Meyer's own memoir View from the Bridge, as well as in shorter interview segments in the unauthorized Captains' Logs. And just as naturally, the name Fifth Business and the basic concept of the novel (something about magic) fixed itself indelibly into my brain, never to depart from it until, in a recent trip to the library looking for more things to read (which ultimately included, besides Davies' novel, an academic volume on Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change, another academic volume on Religion in the Bosnian War, and a Mike Hammer collection) it popped back into my head, I checked the library catalogue: and the rest is, as they say, history. 

The above paragraph only distantly approximates the actual lived experience of being inside my head, but is nonetheless very well suited to the experience of reading Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. As my brother recently informed me, apparently at some point in his life Martin Scorsese said that the most personal art is always the most experimental: and this applies well to Fifth Business, which is quite openly a novel based around Robertson Davies' childhood, upbringing, interests, obsessions, and views of himself. Like all such art, or at least most such remotely successful art, the novel does not approximate very directly to his actual life on paper; but when the details are sanded out, the basic perspective on the world of an overly literate teacher, scholar, and writer raised Calvinist in a small Canadian town and obsessed with (in no particular order) magic, illusions, folklore, Catholicism, miracles, saints, sex, acting, and Jungian psychology shines through all the stronger. 

I think I have reached a point in my life and reading career where I am exceptionally tired of novels where neurotic older men reflect on their lives. Nevertheless, there is a reason, I think, why Fifth Business became Davies' most famous and popular novel: and that is that the novel itself is to a large extent engaged in interrogating its narrator and his obsessions, and that those obsessions have to do with far more interesting topics than the usual sexual fixations, tragic self-regard, and wounded pride typical of the genre.

Those factors are certainly present, however, as we see our hero go off to WW1, be wounded in action, have his first sexual relationship with an Englishwoman, return home to his small town to grudgingly receive a hero's welcome, and then spend the rest of his life having various desultory relationships with women while avoiding intimacy, teaching at a boy's school, pursuing a scholarly career in hagiology, and being financially patronized by a successful, wealthy politician whom he despises. 

As that summary indicates, our hero is not necessarily a particularly nice or virtuous man, nor is his life on paper a particularly interesting one: taken merely on these terms, the novel would slot in nicely along with many other "historical"-cum-psychological bildungsromans about how diverting but ultimately trivial it is to be a small, unpleasant man who believes in nothing while living through the events of a past time period. 

What raises Fifth Business head-and-shoulders above nearly every book in its genre I can think of, though, is the surreal, transcendental nature of its actual central plot and preoccupations.

Put simply, our young narrator becomes obsessed, as a small boy, with the young wife of the town's Baptist pastor, after a snowball hurled by a friend at him instead misses and hits Mrs. Dempster, causing her to give birth prematurely and thereafter become, in the eyes of the town, "simple" and incapable of carrying out the tasks necessary to her social position. Our narrator, however, ultimately comes to believe that Mrs. Dempster is a saint, somehow in touch with a mysterious transcendent reserve of goodness and power. He begins, therefore, chronicling her apparent miracles: the first of which is her apparent raising of his brother from the dead. Before this, though, Mrs. Dempster is caught obligingly having sex with a tramp, scandalizing the town and leading to her complete shunning by its inhabitants: but when our narrator eventually tracks down the tramp, he avers that his encounter with her changed his life, bringing him back to himself and causing him to embark on a career as a revivalist, Evangelical minister. Finally, while fighting in WW1, the narrator improbably survives a mortar hit and near-death experience in a ruined Church underneath a statue of the Virgin Mary which he believes resembles Mrs. Dempster. 

All of this sets our narrator on a lifelong journey to understand, academically and psychologically, the concept of sanctity. It does not, however, lead to him becoming Catholic: in large part because of a pivotal conversation with his local priest, who tells him that Catholicism requires commitment, and "Mother Church is not a lady to be flirted with." Hence, our narrator's exploration of saints is ultimately not in terms of religious practice, but Jungian psychological archetypes, historical and mythical origins and narratives, and academic categorizations and classifications--a route that even he appears to find mostly unappealing. In the process, he encounters a well-drawn, colorful Bollandist Jesuit character who cheerfully derides his Protestantism as essentially atheistic and pagan but encourages him to view his Mrs. Dempster as a saint regardless. 

Realistically enough, though, our hero's refusal to commit to religion leads to an ever-increasing interest in magic. This is, in terms both of the book and real life, eminently logical. As even our narrator acknowledges, the question of whether Mrs. Dempster is a saint is first and foremost a question of her actual, objective relationship with an equally actual and objective God. Having abandoned this question as unanswerable given his refusal to try genuine commitment (either to women or to the Church), our hero instead turns inexorably to studying his own interest in that question. 

If the question of what a saint is cannot be answered, one can instead ask the question of what is it about saints that attract mankind psychologically, fascinate diverse peoples and cultures, make humanity turn saints into patrons and emblems and symbols and tell increasingly legendary stories about them. Eventually, given sufficient dishonesty and avoidance of commitment, one might, perhaps, stop seeing the difference between these two questions at all. Then in turn, when one has tried and failed to understand the question of what about saints makes them compelling or powerful apart from their actual sanctity, one might begin to consider instead the question of whether, or how, these same effects might be achieved apart from actual sanctity--which is to say, falsely and deceptively and illusionistically. 

It is for this reason, above all else, that our narrator gradually turns from the study of saints to the study of magicians--a turn embodied appropriately in the death of Mrs. Dempster and an increasingly close relationship with her adult son Paul, who as a small child was taught about saints by our narrator before running away to join the circus, and now is a traveling magician addressed by the stage name "Magnus Eisengrim." When our narrator, an old man nearing retirement, encounters Magnus after many decades, he is entranced by the effectiveness of his well-worn illusions, which both he and Magnus ascribe to the narrator's reading of hagiographies to him as a young boy. Drawn in by his professional appreciation of Magnus' talents, his continuing fascination with Magnus' dead mother, and by a new romantic and sexual obsession with a performer in Magnus' troupe, the narrator begins traveling with him and lending his talents to improving his show and writing a fantastical, fictionalized life of its focus. 

In effect, then, our hero uses what he has learned from hagiography to become an advertiser, using the tropes and effects of sanctity to create deceptive illusions for the benefit of Magnus' financial and career success. 

In the process, he falls sexually and personally under the control of Magnus' androgynous, bisexual manager Leisl, whom he calls the Devil. It is this Devil, in particular, who ultimately urges the narrator to refocus his attention from Mrs. Dempster and sanctity, to the question of his own role and identity. 

In the process, Liesl offers him a theatrical, narrativistic encapsulation of his life in the phrase "Fifth Business"--a term that in itself probably constitutes the largest impact of the novel on general literary and popular culture. This phrase is allegedly drawn from the world of historical British theatrical productions, and is quoted as such in the book's epigraph: yet Davies ultimately admitted that he had entirely made up both the concept and the quote. Nevertheless, the meaning of the phrase Fifth Business--or rather, the interpretation and application of this meaning by Liesl and the narrator, as expressed in his eventual actions--ultimately forms the core of the novel's climax. 

Put simply, a Fifth Business is a minor theatrical role, usually played by a less important actor, which cannot be easily categorized in terms of standard character types or roles, but which is nonetheless ultimately pivotal to the resolution of the play's plot. 

Fifth Business characters would include, for instance, the shepherd in Oedipus Rex who appears on stage only briefly to reveal the secret of the King's parentage; or the character of Strato in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who appears onstage for several scenes but never speaks a word until he, alone of Brutus' companions, loyally stays with him til the end, listens to his final monologue, holds the sword for him as he kills himself, and then tells Antony and Octavian about it afterwards. 

As these examples reveal, a Fifth Business character does not slot easily into any particular personal archetype: they are not a protagonist, or an antagonist, or a love interest, or a best friend, or a father or mother or child. Nevertheless, they are the character often chosen by authors when they need to bring a plot to its final conclusion in a manner both impersonal and inexorable: whether that involves providing a key piece of information, or performing a necessary action, or merely giving the protagonist someone to talk to.

As a narrativist concept, Fifth Business is a useful tool: as the interpretation for our narrator's life, however, it seems to me more of a trap. Our narrator, in his fascination with Mrs. Dempster, has by the end of the novel passed through a number of stages, each of which seems to me to represent a clear descent: from an interest in saints, to an interest in saints in psychological and academic terms, to an interest in magic and illusion, to an interest merely in theater. The cleverness of Leisl's interpretation, it seems to me, is that it hinges on an act of deliberate and calculated deception: she tells him that he must, for the first time in his life, consider not sanctity or magic, but himself, but then in the same breath gives him an interpretation of himself that poses him, not as a human person, or even as a psychological object, but merely as a secondary figure in a plot.

The meaning of our narrator's life, then, according to this Devil, is not found in sanctity or salvation or God. Indeed, the meaning of our narrator's life is not found even in himself, his goals or beliefs or hopes or desires or choices, but merely in the plot he serves. This is, I think, in reality one of the most common lies of the Devil--and in real life as in the novel, one of the most practically effective ways, in many different terms, to manipulate someone into doing anything at all. 

Still, if our narrator is Fifth Business, there must in fact be a significant and fascinating plot that his life, seemingly obscure and insignificant, exists to service. And this plot must contain, at the very least, a protagonist and an antagonist. It is thus that our narrator, inspired by Liesl, comes to his own conclusions on these topics, and is inspired by them to take action.

The protagonist, he ultimately concludes, is Paul Dempster, alias Magnus Eisengrim, a premature child born to an idiot because of a snowball thrown at his pregnant mother, raised on stories of saints, reared in a circus, and ultimately triumphant as a magician. Our narrator's life-long obsession with his mother, involvement in his birth and childhood, and fascination with magic makes this an easy choice for our narrator--as is the fact that he had already written a fictional life of this person as somebody else.

The antagonist, on the other hand, is Percy Boyd Staunton, the thrower of the snowball--our narrator's childhood friend whose life ultimately took a very different, but deeply intertwined course. Both men went to war, and returned heroes, though only our narrator actually did anything heroic, at least in his own eyes. In the process, though, "Boy" (as he becomes known) stole our narrator's girlfriend, Leola, the prettiest girl in town, married her, and embarked on a wildly successful career in business and politics. In the process, Leola was replaced, first by a series of clandestine mistresses, then by a second, more high-society wife after Leola's mental breakdown and death from attempted suicide and self-induced pneumonia. Nevertheless, Boy only ever rose higher and higher, funding WW2, profiting handsomely, and ultimately becoming Governor-General of Canada. All the while, our narrator, an obscure teacher and academic, remained Boy's constant companion and advisor, being patronized and funded by him in his research, being shown off as a genius and conversationalist to charm his friends, and all the while despising and hating Boy with all his heart.

In terms of the novel, it is easy to simply take the choices of protagonist and antagonist on faith--to see them as somehow inevitable, archetypal, existing objectively and apart from our narrator's choices and perceptions, and all along genuinely the plot in which he played a minor role, and the meaning of his life. Yet we might notice that our narrator's choice of plot, and of protagonist and antagonist, is for all that entirely based on his own obsessions, his own likes and dislikes, and even his own buried desires--not to mention his deeply rooted desire to avoid responsibility for his own actions.

Hence, it is our hero who brings protagonist and antagonist, who have never met since both were children, together again, and reveals to both of them a key piece of information, and provides to one of them a crucial object: leading, in rapid fashion, to a final event both violent and disturbing.

And yet, in our narrator's mind, he remains all the while not the driver of events at all, but merely Fifth Business. In this, he finds his ultimate conclusion on his life, and passes it on to us.

And yet, I firmly believe, he has been deceived. He has looked for reality, and found only a mirror; and then looked in a mirror, and found, not himself, but a distorted image of a stranger, urging him to action. And then, in turn, he has tried to deceive us: just as we are all, most of us, deceived day by day, by a devil or by a magician or merely by ourselves. 

Whatever else we are, we are not figures in a plot written by the Devil: whatever else we are, we are not Fifth Business. Regardless of how obscure or unassuming we may seem in our own or others' eyes, regardless of our avoidance of commitment to women or God, regardless of our obsessions with psychology and magic and advertisements and illusions, in the end, on the last day, we will all be judged as protagonists. 

Islam in Pakistan

For the last several decades, the government, intelligentsia, and intelligence services of the United States of America have been engaged in a remarkable, totalizing engagement with the Muslim world. 

As I speak, the only "foreign policy" news story to receive any attention from either the press or the general public is the war of Israel on Gaza, which at the moment centers on an (apparently successful) effort by the President of the United States to collectively rally all the Arab nations behind his own peace plan. Until the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, there were nearly two decades in which America's only bona fides militarily-occupied colonies were the pastoral homeland of the Pashtun and the Kurds, and the Mesopotamian heart of the former Abbasid Caliphate, both overwhelmingly Muslim.

This engagement, though, has gone far, far beyond any mere question of colonies as such. Arguably even more important than either misadventure is the ongoing relationship between Washington and the oil-rich states of the Arabian peninsula, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates among them. The "global war on terror" spawned in 2001 coalesced largely as a alliance between American military and economic power on the one hand, and secularizing and militaristic Muslim governments the world over on the other, against their own radicals, populists, religious institutions, and peoples. The scope of this relationship has been, for most of that time, nearly unlimited, involving in most of its exponents the ambition, not merely to understand Islam and Muslims, but to truly and permanently alter Muslim religion and politics, removing every trace of alleged violence and bringing them into full alignment with American secular political and cultural power.

By certain straightforward benchmarks (the continuing prevalence of anti-Muslim sentiment in America and Europe alike, the continuing prevalence of Islamic terrorism in Africa and the Middle East, and so on), it may be said that this effort has failed. Yet in 2025, as Trump leads the Arab nations to his tune like an orange-toupeed Pied Piper, there is a stronger argument than ever to be made that not only that America has succeeded in altering Muslim religion and politics to remarkable degrees, but also that its engagement with Islam is not going anywhere, indeed has barely begun. The global power of America is more bound up with the structure of Islamic political and religious life than ever before; and Islamic political and religious structures are in turn more dependent on American global power than ever before. If we blur the details, one could look and see, hindsight-wise, a simple transition whereby the self-conscious position of the British Empire in the 19th century as the world-wide patron of Islam has been seamlessly passed to its successor, the American Empire.

And yet here is the rub: that for all the stated ambitions of American political leaders and American intelligentsia alike, the actual understanding of Islam routinely shown by America and Americans has been shockingly, astonishingly poor. From Bush's lauding of Islam as a religion of peace to Obama's encouraging of an Islamic reformation through Trump's attacks on "Radical Islamic Terrorism," the specificity and insight of American politician's treatment of Muslim religion has been, to say the least, lacking. 

What is perhaps more surprising, though, the broader engagement with Islam by political and cultural intellectuals alike has been, and continues to be, shockingly poor, centering mostly on endless, childish debates over whether Islam is "inherently violent"--which is a bit like asking if Buddhism is inherently sleepy, or Hinduism inherently spicy. A slight acquaintance with the world and human history might indicate to people that violence is not a univocal category, Islam not a single institution or culture, and worlds like "inherently" simply out of place in discussions of the manifold ways in which religious rituals, laws, beliefs, institutions, or authorities lead people to take action or refrain from it.

Nevertheless, that there are commonalities between historical and contemporary Islamic societies, and differences between them and historically-Christian and/or "modern Western" societies, is not easy to dispute: that there is a profound and consequential shared history between Islamic societies and "modern Western" societies is just as difficult to dispute, and if anything more important to remember. This shared history, though, has very little to do with the complex relationship between Medieval Christian and Muslim civilizations, and (despite the puzzlingly frequent invocations by modern American Presidents) nothing at all to do with the Crusades. What must be understood before can one even begin to come to grips with contemporary realities of Islam--and what almost no one among "modern Western" intelligentsia has apparently ever come to grips with--are the colonial-Imperial, nationalistic, intellectual, ideological, and economic relationships that, taken together, have shaped every aspect of modern Islamic states and their relationships with Western powers.

Islam in Pakistan is a recent academic monograph by Muhammed Qasim Zaman that, while in a sense narrow in focus, is nonetheless remarkably comprehensive in laying out the chief elements making for the historical, increasing, and growing crisis of modern Islamic, post-colonial states and societies. That such a crisis exists would appear clear given the frequent civil wars, revolts, revolutions, protest movements, and foreign wars that mark more or less every Islamic state from Africa to Asia to the Middle East and back again over the past decades. 

Indeed, it is the crisis of Islamic modernity, and not a political or religious conflict between Islamic states and the West, let alone a pervasive "Clash of Civilizations," that is, in my judgment, the correct basic paradigm for reflecting on the contemporary relationship between Islam and America. And in this, Zaman's extensive profile of the successes and woes of a single modern, post-colonial Islamic state is a better starting point for reflection than a hundred studies of early Islamic history or modern Islamist terrorism.

Yet merely to say that a crisis exists is not to say anything about what has caused that crisis, not to mention how severe or deeply-rooted this crisis is or how likely it is to continue or get better or worse. For that, we require, not merely a historical account, but a true intellectual paradigm. And the real strength of Zaman's book is that he does not merely lay out the crises of Islam within the modern Pakistani state, but attempt to provide underlying causes for these crises.

While it is difficult to summarize such a lengthy (and excellent) study, I would categorize Zaman's argument under a few headings: (1) the intellectual failure of Islamic modernist thought, (2) the political failures of post-colonial Islamic states, (3) the deliberate destruction of popular Islamic piety, (4) the overwhelming growth in power and prevalence of Islamic juridical authorities, and (5) the less exponential but still notable growth in Islamist movements.

If I had to summarize the overall picture of this book, as it struck me, a relative academic novice on this topic, it might be this: that, in contrast to the demand of modern Western intellectuals for an "Islamic Reformation," Islam is and has been deep in the grip of a series of transformations strongly parallel to that of the actual historical Christian Reformation.

By the Reformation here, I do not so much mean Reformation qua Protestantism as Reformation qua historical era affecting Christendom as a whole, Protestant and Catholic nations alike. This was an era that saw the weakening or destruction of older, pan-Christian and international institutions, the exponential growth in power of secularizing national governments, their increasingly forceful coopting and regulation of religious institutions and seizure of religious property, the rise and growing influence of new, extremely divided and disorganized groupings of intellectual religious elites, the deliberate destruction of popular piety and religious institutions by the above forces, and a cascading series of revolts, wars, and economic disruptions. 

In this regard, one might simply note that the 20th century has seen not the weakening, but the actual destruction of previous pan-Islamic institutions like the Caliphate, the entire coming into existence sui generis of new, secular-Islamic national governments and their increasingly forceful coopting and regulation of religious institutions and seizure of religious property, the rise and growing influence of a new, much more divided and disorganized array of Islamic ulama and ad hoc religious-intellectual elites, the deliberate destruction of popular piety and religious institutions by the above forces, and a resulting, cascading series of revolts, wars, and economic disruptions. 

Naturally, this parallel is not intended to be a complete one, or to possess primary explanatory force. The differences between historical Christendom and historical Islamic societies are naturally too large to allow for this: to mention only a few among innumerable causative differences, the Caliphate never at any time possessed the kind of independent, pan-Islamic religious force of the Papacy, nor was historical Christendom ever subjected to the kind of pervasive foreign domination, dissolution, and reconstruction characteristic of European colonialism. 

It is for this reason, above all, that Zaman's overriding focus on the lost promise of Islamic modernism is most interesting. The author is clearly highly sympathetic to the coterie of Islamic intellectuals that attempted, both before and after the founding of the state of Pakistan, to construct a new, enduring synthesis of historical Islamic religion and politics on the one hand with democracy, equality, secularism, nationalism, science, technology, and, in short, modernity on the other. 

In this, as in many other areas, it is easy for contemporary Westerners to overlook the profound popular optimism and even utopianism that characterized the emergence of post-colonial states in the 20th century and especially after WW2. Despite the often cynical retrospectives one finds today, it was not merely Oxford-trained colonial officials, Marxist or Americanist secularists, and racist nationalists who put their faith in the ability of new centralized governments, industrial and agricultural apparatuses, and educational systems to seamlessly integrate Western technological and organizational power with age-old religious and civilizational wisdom. These were utopian visions that really did capture the imaginations of the masses throughout what is now the Third World, flourishing, importantly, both in self-consciously modernizing and Westernizing states and movements and in self-consciously anti-colonial and anti-Western states and movements. 

The State of Pakistan, it may safely be said, was wholly the creation of precisely these trends, and its founding and early governments were consequently dominated by intellectuals who defended and elaborated upon these positions. As Zaman lays it out in a series of in-depth profiles, these intellectuals were very far from the cringing servants of Western thought or hard-nosed secularizers they are sometimes made out to be. Rather, in keeping with the general tenor of the post-colonial moment, they self-confidently proclaimed the true unity of Islam with all the positive aspects--moral and political as well as technological--of apparently Western and European modernity, while pitting Islam, as a force of religious and cultural authenticity and store of wisdom, against what they saw as the harmful, inhuman, racist, and anti-spiritual aspects of that same modernity. 

Broadly speaking, these intellectuals generally argued that historical Islam was not merely a religion in the Western sense, but an enduring synthesis of profound religious belief, ethical insight, and (democratic) political practice, in no need of being altered or reformed in the light of any Western or Christian principle. Though Islamic societies had suffered intellectual and moral decline at the hands of European powers and the benighted Ottoman Empire, they believed that, once freed from the colonial yoke, this synthesis would naturally and of itself give rise to truly modern societies marked by the same profound justice and peace, social harmony and religious tolerance, characteristic of Islam at is height, societies that would once again become the envy of the rest of the world.

Nevertheless, for all Zaman's sympathy for these self-confident trailblazers, his acknowledgment of their ultimate failure to either substantively shape the political realities of Pakistan, or to win over the Islamic masses, is equally unsparing. For this failure Zaman gives two reasons that are, in the end, deeply intertwined.

The first is the universal contempt these Islamic modernizers bore for the existing juridical-religious authorities of Pakistani society. While certainly not "Protestant" in the sense of clinging to a literal interpretation of the Quran above all else, these intellectuals generally took it for granted that the modern ulama (i.e. clerical-juridical authorities) of Pakistan, the Medieval schools of jurisprudence from which they claimed descent, and the extensive textual traditions they drew on, were all more or less corrupt, contemptible, and not worth engaging with in depth. 

As Zaman lays it out, these intellectuals were certainly creative and detailed in their use of general Islamic principles and fundamental authorities to justify modernizing political and ethical arrangements; and similarly, when particular disagreements emerged between them and the ulama on points of law or practice, they were quite adept at appealing to the Quran, hadith, and historical Islamic polities alike to justify both general developments in Islamic law and specific deviances from past practice. 

Nevertheless, taken as a whole, these intellectuals showed little interest in justifying their projects deeply and in detail in ways that people trained in madrasas according to traditional jurisprudence would find convincing. Zama portrays this as an intellectual and almost a moral failure: but from my perspective it is difficult to disentangle from these thinkers' basic assumptions, which centered on the absolute need to create truly modern, truly Islamic states on the one hand, and the corruption and contemptibility of existing Islamic juridical authorities on the other. There can be little doubt that both conclusions appeared to most of these intellectuals as merely obvious.

Zama's second charge against the Islamic modernists, on the other hand, is impossible to disentangle from my second factor above: the general failure of post-colonial Islamic states to fulfill their promises and popular mandates. As Zaman again and again points out regretfully, the failure of Islamic modernists to capture the Muslim masses of Pakistan cannot be easily separated from the ubiquitous decision of modernizing intellectuals to personally associate themselves with, and publicly justify, brutal, repressive, governments and their actions.

As a matter of fact, the state of Pakistan, far from constituting a kind of miraculous emblem of the superiority of Islamic ethical-political traditions to those of the West, began dominated by a tiny coterie of Urdu-speaking, colonial military officers and their families, subordinate to and dependent on the new global hegemon the United States of America, continued through a genocidal civil war leading to the breaking of the state in two along ethnic lines, and since then has largely oscillated between a series of dictatorial civilian and military governments, all upheld and funded and armed by America. Along the way, nearly all the initial promises made by the government to its people--including universal education, economic prosperity, anti-colonial unity, and pan-Islamist brotherhood--have been reneged upon. Pakistan was not founded as an ethnic-national homeland, but as an idealistic, pan-Islamic state breaking free from colonial exploitation and open to all Muslims of all languages and cultures: yet it ended as a militaristic, ethnic, indelibly colonial state.

While failing to establish a stable, prosperous society, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (as it is officially known)--or rather, the military and political elite at its core--has nonetheless taken frequently extreme (if frequently unsuccessful) steps towards consolidating their own unchallenged power over the huge, disparate territory they nominally control. Among the more unexpected effects of these efforts at consolidation has been the nearly complete destruction of the popular religious life of South Asian Muslims as it existed both before and during the colonial era: a religious life largely centered, not on madrasas or other "central" juridical and clerical institutions, but on "Sufi" orders, shrines, and saints, and the festivals, music, dancing, invocations, rituals, and pietistic practices that went along with them.

The term "Sufi" is one of the most abused and over-applied terms in the Islamic lexicon. In most Western understanding, it is defined largely by reference to Christian and Catholic monasticism and asceticism, and applied willy-nilly to virtually every Islamic phenomenon not directly mandated by the Quran or central religious laws. As a matter of fact, Sufi "orders" have historically borne very little resemblance to Catholic religious orders: most were well-armed military bands led by hereditary dynasties of "saints," and the sort of ascesis as they engaged in was as much about initiation and dividing insiders from outsiders (as, for instance, by ritualistically worshiping the leader of the order and/or engaging in acts otherwise forbidden by Islam) as training their members in an intellectual-religious concept of virtue. 

Nevertheless, as such authors, for instance, as Azfar Moin have argued, Sufi orders have served as core religious and political institutions of the Muslim world in many times and places, especially during times of crisis or in the absence of stable Islamic states--and also often acted as the germs of Islamic states and dynasties themselves. Perhaps more importantly for the world of colonial South Asia, they also established numerous shrines, usually centering on the tombs of famous saints or founders of orders, created popular festivals centering on these shrines, offered exorcisms and talismans and practices for health and wellbeing and salvation, and fostered significant artistic production, poetry and music and singing and dancing, both for mystical striving and popular celebration. 

Still, as this brief summary indicates, it would be in some ways more natural to simply see popular Islam as Sufism, particularly in pre-modern and colonial contexts, than to carefully mark it off as a domain separate from the pristine Scriptural and juridical religion of Islam. Indeed, there is a significant scholarly faction that seeks to drastically recontextualize or even debunk the very idea of pre-modern Islam as a single religious domain defined with reference to Scriptural and juridical traditions, seeing this "Islam" as merely one textualized, elite, and often relatively powerless discourse within a civilizational space shaped much more by Sufi and astrological and Neo-Platonic and Mongol and Turkic and Byzantine and pre-Islamic Arabic concepts and practices and institutions. 

While I would not myself go so far, until one grasps the breadth and vitality of Islamic popular life and piety, one cannot properly understand the shift in Islamic practice and culture over the past century, characterized by the gradual subordination and extinction of nearly all these traditions in favor of a thoroughly "reformed," which is to say clericalized and juridicized, form of Islam.

The reason for this massive shift is complex and highly debated. Zaman's own account highlights a few overlapping factors, including the vast financial and media influence of the Salafi (i.e. Scriptural-reformist) government of Saudi Arabia, which began its statehood by deliberately destroying popular shrines in its territory and proscribing popular practices, and the increasing targeting of popular shrines, festivals, and practices for proscription and violent attack by Islamist parties and militant groups. 

There are two factors in particular, though, that Zaman makes central, but which are rarely acknowledged as such in Western consciousness. 

One that he especially emphasizes is the large-scale seizure by the Pakistani government of the hereditary and institutional properties belonging to Sufi shrines and orders alike, and the concomitant attempts to regulate and profit from the practices at these shrines. As Zaman argues, among Islamic institutions, popular shrines have proven uniquely vulnerable to government cooption, for a variety of intertwined reasons: the size and antiquity of their holdings, their lack of legal and juridical protections, their connections with local elites and networks targeted by the central government, and their lack of connections with central-governmental and broader Arab and Islamic elites and networks. Along with financial devastation and cooption has come a strong pressure from juridical-clerical authorities and Islamists to regulate or outright ban practices associated with these shrines, from the alleged "immorality" of allowing women to participate in shrine festivities as ritual singers and dancers to, at times, the kinds of veneration and invocation granted to saints and holy figures tout court. 

Though Zaman does not highlight it, there are likely also more basic modern, technological, and cultural reasons behind the downfall of popular piety, including the decline of traditional communities and networks that supported these practices, the use of mass media and the Internet to spread Salafi and other textualized reformist forms of Islam, the pressure of Western culture, religion, and intellectual critique and the concomitant growth of simplistic, defensive, apologetic forms of Islamic self-definition, and the tendency of the basically abstract, simplified, and textual nature of modern communication to favor more abstract, simplified, and textual (and therefore Scriptural-juridical) forms of Islam. 

Nevertheless, what is perhaps most important, and most surprising to many Western observers, this decline has emphatically not been accompanied by a general decline in Islamic institutions in Pakistan. Indeed, as Zaman shows in depth, the most remarkable phenomenon in contemporary Pakistani Islam has in fact been a massive, exponential growth in the number of madrasas (i.e. religious-juridical educational institutions) in Pakistan, vastly surpassing those present during the colonial period and increasing at ever faster rates over the past decades of general instability and pressure brought on by the American-led "War on Terror." 

As Zaman acknowledges, this fact comes as a great surprise to most Western and scholarly observers, and seems to defy nearly all conventional wisdom, both about cultural and political secularization, and about the modern state. Madrasas are by their very nature institutions aimed, not at ordinary Muslims, but at training a small elite of clerics (the ulama) in the highly technical, complex, and idealized discourses of Medieval Islamic jurisprudence. These discourses were quite detached from the reality of law and governance already in most Medieval Islamic states, and did not necessarily guarantee political power or influence to those educated in them--in the modern state of Pakistan, they have even less to do with the realities of rulership, and are even more detached from political power. For, as Zaman chronicles in great detail, despite significant efforts, the ulama have again and again failed to gain a central place for themselves or classical shari'a law in the Pakistani government, and have in the process frequently attracted the ire not just of Islamic modernist intellectuals, but, much more consequentially, of the secularizing military elites who patronized them.

Nor, indeed, have the ulama of Pakistan grown more modernizing in their approach to Islamic tradition; indeed, they have not even adopted a purified, reformist version of Islamic law like the Salafis. Their discourses remain firmly rooted in the classical Medieval schools of Islam--in particular the Hanafi school, as interpreted in two local variants, the Deobandi and Barelvi--continuing to reject and castigate the Saudis, for all their money and pan-Islamic institutional and media influence, as heretical "Wahabis." While the relatively stricter and less populist Deobandi movement has, as Zaman points out, gained proportionately in representation and influence, the contrasting Barelvi movement, which fervently defends more controversial popular practices and castigates the Deobandi as Salafis, remains strong and has grown alongside its rivals. In contrast to Islamic modernists, the ulama continue to maintain the necessity of a fully classical shari'a law, including such things as child marriage and drastic corporal and capital punishment.

For the Islamic modernist intellectuals, it was obvious that the modernization and reform of Islam would mean the dwindling and eventual disappearance of the ulama as it existed in their own time. This has not happened: indeed, nearly the opposite appears to have happened. Why is this?

As Zaman chronicles it, part of the story seems to be that the ulama have simply grown to occupy territory vacated by the failure of their rivals: the Islamic modernists, the popular shrines, and the Pakistani state alike. In particular, the Pakistani state's promise of popular education, and failure to provide that coveted education to its people, appears to have given the madrasas a new, popular reach and effectiveness--one increased by the growing willingness of madrasas to provide Western-style education and certifications alongside, rather than in preference to, a more traditional jurisprudential education. Then, too, the very growth of madrasas in itself has functioned as a surprisingly effective jobs program, with madrasa graduates seeking out and building institutions to employ them to train even more madrasa graduates. 

Perhaps most fundamentally, though, as Zaman points out, the madrasas have proven remarkably and stubbornly resistant to government control--in large part because they continue to be largely funded by grassroots donations, both from within and outside of Pakistan, rather than by hereditary lands or Saudi money. As popular and Sufi religious practice has declined, then, madrasas have been the main beneficiary of the continuing religiosity of the common people.

The paradoxical result, however, is that modern Islamic life and practice, both in Pakistan and elsewhere, is in fact more "orthodox," intellectual, and tied to Scriptural and classical-textual sources than at any previous time in Muslim history. It is also much barer, more abstracted, less aestheticized, less artistic, less emotive, less devotional, and much less tied to ordinary people's needs and concerns.

Whether or not this shift is connected causally with the rise of Islamist political parties and militaristic groups is a much bigger question that neither I, nor the author of this study, is equipped to answer. As Zama chronicles it, the rise of Islamism--which, narrowly defined, centers on the (novel) proposition that only God (and not any state) is or can be sovereign in a political sense, and hence that only shari'a law, understood in a narrow Scriptural sense, constitutes binding law, and therefore only a fully shari'a-based government can claim the obedience of Muslims--is best understood, as Zama explains, as a reaction to the failures of the post-colonial Pakistani state, and indeed the failures of post-colonial Muslim states more generally. The main Islamist political party in Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, has been a reliable thorn in the side of the Pakistani government for many decades, with recurrent waves of protest and repression coming and going like the tides.

At the same time, though, as Zama points out, the growth of militant activity and "terrorism" is not necessarily or exclusively tied to intellectual Islamism. Indeed, the Taliban (whose name means "students") emerged not out of the Jamaat-e-Islami, but out of the Deobandi madrasas of Pakistan, and was largely funded and encouraged by both the Pakistani government and their American patrons as a weapon against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Likewise, unlike Al-Qaeda and ISIS, the Taliban remains resolutely Deobandi in orientation, and in juridical terms is not particularly radical other than in actually attempting to apply the conclusions of Deobandi jurisprudence to a large modern state. 

Similarly, the Pakistani government has repeatedly gone back and forth between sponsoring militant activity for its own political purposes, and using repression of such militant activity as a pretext for cracking down on both rival religious and political institutions and the tribal networks that continue to govern large parts of Pakistan. Even the American government's relationship with Islamic militancy is much more complex than it might first appear--visible most clearly, perhaps, in the jihadist groups of the Syrian Civil War recruited, funded, and supported, and now sanated and legitimized, by the United States, even as the American government castigates and wages war on otherwise similar groups like the Houthis and Hamas.

It is for this reason above all, perhaps, that Pakistani ulama have generally refused, over many decades, to clearly condemn either militant activity in general, the specific tactics of terrorism, targeting of civilians, and suicide bombing, and the legitimacy of jihad against unbelievers and heretical or secularizing Muslims. Indeed, as Zama points out, explicit defenses of terrorism, suicide bombing, and militant activity have regularly issued from the pens of prominent Pakistani ulama and madrasas, while condemnations elicited by the government have mostly come grudgingly and in highly qualified forms. 

On the other hand, as Zaman highlights with regret, the Pakistani military's willingness to utilize militant activity for their own purposes, not least to justify their own violence in response, means they have largely failed to make any kind of coherent counter-narrative or argument in terms of Islamic tradition against such terrorism, with the only frequently repeated claim being merely that it is solely state violence, and not violence by non-state actors, that can legitimately count as jihad. It is precisely because of that, I would suggest, that Pakistani ulama have overwhelmingly come to believe that to condemn non-state Islamic militancy tout court would be as good as to legitimize the repressive violence of the Pakistani state, and in the process give up one of their only possible weapons against that state should it attempt their wholesale conquest or destruction.

The degree of summarizing here is perhaps excessive, but appears to me necessary to get a clear sense of the sheer complexity and many-sided nature of post-colonial Islam in Pakistan. 

Yet when Westerners over the past decades have looked at Islam--have looked even at Pakistani Islam, so bound up with American's Imperial projects in Afghanistan and elsewhere--they have seen something remarkably simple, remarkably easy to understand in Western terms, and remarkably easy to reform along lines beneficial to American colonial and military interests. Within Pakistani Islam, there are good, non-violent, progressive, "modern" people and beliefs, inevitably weakening and decline, and bad, violent, regressive, "pre-modern" people and beliefs, inevitably growing and strengthening except where held down by violence and repression. 

Yet as Zaman's authoritative tome tells us quite cogently, what we see in Pakistan is emphatically not an embryonic modernization of a backward society, "tribal" or "religious" or "Muslim": it is, rather, the ruins of a great, progressive, modernizing, colonial and post-colonial project--a project that failed. Both ostensible traditionalists and ostensible liberals are equally caught up in the terms and legacy of this project, equally incapable of escaping into the abstract utopias of textual-juridical Islam and post-colonial progress alike. And in this story, the role played by Western and European powers, in colonizing and ruling South Asia, in the genocidal disaster of Partition, in eighty years of American patronage and propping up and funding and arming and unleashing of the Pakistani military and allied militants on neighboring states and its own people.

Hence, if Westerners, Americans, even American Presidents and soldiers and businessmen, want to truly engage with, and truly encounter, Islam as it exists in much of the post-colonial world, they must, like the narrator of Fifth Business, be willing both to hear the story, and to accept their own decisive place in it. If one were to accept the narratives of many Western leaders and academics, the role of modern Western states in the history of Pakistan, the Middle East, and Islam is in fact something very closely approximating that of Fifth Business: a complete stranger wandering onstage near the close to resolve the plot by providing modernity and defeating terrorism. To say that that is hardly a more appropriate role for America than for Davies' narrator would be to utter the understatement of the millennium.

Still, if modern Western states can hardly claim a detached innocence viz a vis modern Islam, the temptation to treat it only as a mirror of our own preoccupations remains. At present writing, we in the West are obsessed with secularism versus religion, diversity versus unity, justice versus authenticity, nationalism versus internationalism: and, most of the time, engagements with Islam merely constitute hopeful or pessimistic projections of those concerns onto a more or less blank space. If Islam can modernize, then perhaps Christian bodies can modernize; if Islamic states cannot find room for ethnic or religious minorities, then perhaps modern Western states cannot either; if abstracted justice and human rights can ultimately coexist with traditional Islamic cultural values, then perhaps they can coexist with traditional Christian cultural values; if Islamic states and societies cannot live in peace with non-Islamic states and societies, then perhaps modern states and societies cannot live in peace with each other; and so on and so forth. 

Yet I confess that, for me, these questions are mostly uninteresting, because unanswerable. The differences between modern post-colonial Islamic states and modern Western states, not just in religion but in basic social organization and historical formation, are much too vast to allow for the easy drawing of conclusions from one to the other. Whatever else Islam is for the West, it is not a mirror.

Still, as I have suggested above, there is, I believe, one legitimate sense in which post-colonial Islam can serve as a mirror of the modern, American West: and that is to show us our sins.

Solaris

The film Solaris by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky centers, in a much more literal way, on precisely this concept of the other as a mirror for the self--a mirror that not only reveals our self to our self, but also tests our ability to look past ourselves and see and acknowledge the other as other.

On the face of it, this film, based on a novel that I have not read, is a straightforward science-fictional tale of exploration and first contact--but like Fifth Business, it ultimately transcends its generic focus in a direction that is indelibly personal and religious. 

The plot is easy to recount: out somewhere in space, the human race has built a space station around a planet they call Solaris, a planet covered with a strange, shifting ocean that many believe to be alive. When our hero, a middle-aged scientist named Dr. Kelvin, is sent to this space station to evaluate its situation, he finds that one of the three scientists stationed there has committed suicide, and the others appear to be on the verge of madness. The source of their condition is the recurring appearance on the station of figures from their pasts, figures seemingly related to sources of guilt or regret in their lives: which for our protagonist quickly manifests itself as a version of his dead wife, who committed suicide after he abandoned her. As the other scientists tell him, though, these apparitions are not mere figments of their imaginations: they are, rather, physical entities, created out of the alive, and possibly sentient, ocean below them, and based upon their own reflected thoughts.

Here, then, we have in essence a straightforward "high concept" science fiction story. Nevertheless, it is in how Tarkovsky portrays this situation, and its psychological effect on the various characters, that ultimately gives the film its meaning. For, very quickly, an enormous, unbridgeable gap emerges between the ways in which the three scientists treat their apparitions--a gap that tracks with the archetypal personalities and sins of the three men.

First, and most simply, there is the dead scientist, Dr. Gibarian, whose apparition is that of a teenaged girl: confronted by this reminder of a sin of his past, he kills himself. 

Dr. Sartorius, meanwhile, is a more self-confident, focused experimenter who believes, as he puts it, that "Man was created by nature to explore it," condemned to try to find truth, but burdened with knowledge. His apparition, as we see it only briefly, is a bizarre, stunted dwarf--most likely, an implied past victim of his urge for experimentation. In response to the apparitions of the "guests," Sartorius experiments on them, too, without regard for their safety, in the hopes of finding their true nature and purpose. 

Dr. Snaut, on the other hand, is more philosophical, but also more pessimistic. He has fundamentally lost faith in the entire quest of science, exploration, and, indeed, human life itself. As he puts it in the monologue quoted above:

"We have no interest in conquering any cosmos...we want to extend the earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don't know what to do with other worlds: we don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it. We're in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears."

In other words, Snaut acknowledges that humanity is in fact defined by desire for the truly other: but he believes that ultimately, we cannot achieve the object of our desire, not so much because of its otherness as because of our own, deeply rooted fear of reality and otherness as such. What we in fact want when we strive for true knowledge of reality is not another person, not another reality, but only a mirror of ourselves.

In keeping with this solipsistic focus, Snaut's own apparition, it is implied, is another person that he feared, that he did not need, and that he consequently murdered: and when his visitor shows up, he murders them again--and, most likely, again and again and again.

Our protagonist, though, Dr. Kelvin, ultimately stands apart from the other scientists by his choice to accept the image of his dead wife, Hari. At first, this is seemingly only out of desire, or more likely guilt; but, over time, as he keeps her with him, protects her from the other scientist's depredations, talks to her about himself and humanity and Solaris, and ultimately confesses to her his own actions that led to his wife's suicide, he comes to see Hari, not merely as a memory, but as a person--not his wife, but someone else, someone other, whom, as he expresses it, he has in fact come to love more genuinely than his actual, human wife.

All the while, his fellow scientists treat Kelvin as a fool, a sap, deceived and driven mad by a remote alien intelligence with what are in effect only mirrors. In response, though, Hari asserts that she is not a mirror: that while she may be in origins something truly alien, that while she in fact originated from Kelvin's memories, she is nonetheless something capable of being known and loved, capable of knowing itself, and therefore not a mirror, but a person.

It is here that the film takes on a valence that is, to me, inescapably both religious and Christian. Confronted with the cruelty of the other scientists, who insist to her that she is not a person, Hari kills herself once again. Kelvin, though, falls ill and has a vision of his mother, who washes him clean of his wounds and filth. When he awakes, he finds that his fellow scientists have beamed his brain patterns into the ocean, and the apparitions have ceased.

Then, in the film's final, surreally transcendent, scene, Kelvin descends to the surface of Solaris, to a replica of his childhood home, overflowing with water from every surface. Then he weeps, falls to his knees, and embraces his own father.

The film Solaris, then, ultimately emerges as a parable--about humanity, about knowledge, about memory and guilt, about encounter with the other, and about salvation. Man has gone out into the cosmos, and encountered an alien entity beyond him: and this alien entity has chosen to confront him with his own mirrored guilt and shame. Each character has chosen how to deal with this mirrored guilt: some by repeating and embracing their sins, and some by repenting of them. The scientist, guilty of sacrificing other persons for the sake of abstract knowledge, does so again. The philosopher, guilty of sacrificing other persons to his own fear and despair, does so again. But the sinner, guilty of sacrificing other persons to his own indifference and cruelty, sees in the mirror of another person what he has done, and chooses not to repeat it. He regards the mirror, not as a mirror, but as a person, is washed of his sins, and ultimately embraces the truly alien other, not as a stranger, but as a father.

For the truth is that there is no true contradiction between other and mirror. Indeed, in the truest sense, we can only see ourselves in something other to ourselves, can only know ourselves in and through another person. 

The infant knows itself first, not as a random bundle of sensations or biological needs, but as the thing seen and known and loved by its parents; it learns what it is, its humanity and physicality and needs, from them, and also learns who it is, a human person made to loved and be loved, through them. And what is true for us as infants remains true, to ever greater degrees, throughout our lives: that we find only in others our desires, our actions, our goodness and truth and beauty and love. 

What we see in a physical mirror is merely an image, which we most often misinterpret or overlay with our own worries and concerns and preoccupations and images from films and the Internet. It is what we see in the eyes of others that is our actual self, in which we believe, and out of which we act. What is true for human persons is even more true for God: and it is the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of Christ hanging on the Cross that will be our self and our destiny for all eternity.

Yet for all that, to truly see ourselves in the other, we cannot treat the other only as a mirror, merely as a thing that exists to tell us about ourselves. The other reveals the self truly precisely to the extent that it is grasped as truly other. When we interpret the other merely in terms of ourselves--by which we mean merely our own distorted, absurd images of ourselves--we fail entirely to see the ways in which the other reveals us: reveals us as beautiful or ugly, as kind or cruel, as liberating or oppressive, as saving or tempting, as healing or wounding, as nurturing or suffocating, as directing or dominating, as giving life or taking it, as right or wrong, as good or evil. Our images of ourselves from ourselves are mere static objects, utterly contradictory to the reality of our minds and hearts; the images of ourselves from the other, though, are truly persons, defined by relation.

It is impossible to know any of this if one does not recognize that the other has a mind and heart, wishes and needs and fears and desires and dependencies, truly other, and truly different, to one's own. It is equally impossible to know any of this if one has for a mirror, not another person, but only an artifact, an object, without a will or desires of its own; and this remains true whether the artifact is a work of art or a material possession or an abstract system or an emblem of status or a dream or an idol or an AI chatbot.  

Of course, most of us will never encounter the alien replica of our dead wife on a space station over an intelligent ocean. Nor will most of us, at least, spend time in madrasas in Pakistan, or direct Middle East foreign policy for the US Government. And, finally, most of us will hopefully not embrace magic and illusion and the role of Fifth Business at the instigation of the Devil.

Nevertheless, how we relate, not only by conscious choice but in our unconscious habits and desires and reactions and likes and dislikes, with the persons in our lives, is, when you come down to it, perhaps the most critical thing in all our lives, and the most intimate truth of our selves. 

The defining question for our identity, in other words, is not what role we are playing in the plot: it is how we are relating to the other characters, and to the author. We are all mirrors of something.