Ethics in the Realist Idealism of Rabat School: Al-Fassi, Lahbabi, and Taha
This chapter introduces aspects of moral philosophy in contemporary Rabat School. Three influential figures of the school are comparatively read as champions of “realist idealism”: Allal al-Fassi (1910-1974), Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (1922-1993), and Abderrahmane Taha (b. 1944). Each of the three is introduced through a major concept from his overall works: the concept of “original disposition” for al-Fassi, “Muslim personalism,” for Lahbabi, and “trusteeship paradigm” for Taha. These concepts are taken as their major contribution to the question of ethics and how they can change the individual and society, and by implication human societies at large. To understand the three moralist readings above, they need to be contextualized first, which the first part of the chapter does. While these three major figures are read as “realist idealists,” since they underline the rational in sharia classical law prescriptions, and its overall objectives in the light of reading the ethical message of the Quran and Prophetic experience, their counterparts are the “idealists” or “traditionalist,” and the “rationalists” or the “liberals.” The chapter then shows how al-Fassi and Lahbabi emphacize the applied ethics of sharia and Quranic ethos for collective social change, while Taha shows how he emphacizes individual change first through “spiritual self-criticism,” a target he considers the primal remedy to correct the errors of unethical modernity that Muslims, like the rest of the world, have been contaminated with, besides their own internal unethical practices.