Gijs Kruijtzer’s Justifying Transgression is a study on “how people deal with inconvenient rules” and “how… they square their going around or against the rules with being and remaining members of their communities” (XI) over the course of the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period in both the Islamic and Christian worlds. Specifically, he focuses on approaches to justifying sodomy, usury, and adultery among Christians in Latin Europe and Muslims in the Persianate Islamic East. Kruijtzer notes that from the 1200s both regions saw a progressive codification of divine law and three centuries later a “splitting into two halves of both of these worlds on the basis or religious adherence” (5), with the Protestant Reformation shattering the formal religious consensus in Latin Europe and with the establishment of Sunni and Shi’i principalities in the Islamicate East. What makes these two regions—regarded in the canonical historical tradition as civilizationally distinct—eminently comparable is that thinkers in both based their arguments and strategies on the same suppositions regarding the nature of Law and its relation to God’s revelation. More to the point, both Islam and Christianity venerated the same deity: the God of Abraham, and shared deep scriptural, theological, and intellectual affinities. In fact, the present reviewer would go so far as to say that in many contexts Christianity and Islam can be seen as two interpretations of the same religion, and each as representing cultural manifestations of a single broad Western culture which spanned the Indus to the Atlantic and beyond.
Having established the comparative framework in the Introduction, Kruijtzer proceeds through his triad of transgression with a chapter each on sodomy, idolatry, and usury. In each case, one might assume that the transgressive nature of the act was so evident that its practice would be universally condemned and punished. What we see, however, is quite a bit more nuanced. Jurists, theologians, and literati (who often had a vested and personal interest in these practices) argued as to how each of these sins should be defined, what the exceptions were to the rules, and how they could be atoned for if violated. Jurists often took a strictly uncompromising tone, seeing their mission as holding the moral line to ensure that social comportment conformed to God’s mandate and stave off the dangers that illicit and immoral behavior might spread if left unchecked. Rulers, whose legitimacy was grounded in their role as defenders of orthodoxy, at times took decisive action to curtail and punish transgressions, but at others they might turn a blind eye to, or tacitly or even openly approve of them. Thus, each of the three chapters follows a similar structure, first introducing the matter at hand and looking at how it was defined by jurists and theologians, and then moving through topics including “enforcement,” “circumvention,” “exception,” “compensation,” and “stridency” separately for the Persianate and Latin European worlds.
For each chapter, Kruijtzer draws on a rich and diverse range of sources, including literature and poetry, jurisprudence, and theological, philosophical, and scientific texts written in Arabic Persian, Latin, and European vernaculars. One of the more surprising aspects of the study is the great diversity of opinion in both the Latin and Persianate worlds, and the lengths that contemporary scholars and thinkers went to justify—often quite colorfully, emphatically, and unabashedly—each of these practices to rationalize their way out of censure. In many ways, the Latinate and Persianate worlds were distinct in terms of their political institutions, juridical cultures, and doctrinal foundations, but we see in Kruijtzer’s study how similar arguments were adopted to justify or condemn these transgressions. Currents of antinomianism, legalism, scriptural literalism, and parallel hermeneutical strategies were deployed by thinkers in both of these worlds. For example, proponents of sodomy (which is, here, for the most part, masculine same-sex desire and intercourse) sought to define the transgression as narrowly as possible in a technical and legal sense to evade censure or to couch their position under the cover of Platonic or esoteric discourse. Many saw themselves as constituting a sort of gnostic elite to whom the laws of social morality broadcast to the plebes simply did not apply. When it came to idolatry, authorities in both of these worlds focused on the role and position of images, whether they pertained to the public or private sphere, and where they were, in fact, serving as objects of veneration. As for usury, its practice, however much derided by moralists, was recognized broadly as a “necessary evil,” without which these economies and the political regimes which they supported simply could not function. Here, it was often the rulers who were forced to thread the moral and political needle, protecting their subjects against abusive creditors using the language of piety, while ensuring the availability of credit through strategic compromise.
The concluding chapter, “Patterns and Trends,” underlines the parallel developments that took place at these two ends of this wider West. What is revealed is a sort of Manichean struggle between two distinct temperaments: the “authoritarians” and “libertarians”—or for contemporaries, “the strict” and the “flexible.” The former are those determined to enforce the divine mandate without exception and who use the justification of divine law to enforce social uniformity. The latter represent the freethinking antinomians who conceived of moral propriety as pertaining to the realm of the individual and tended to see the divine manifested in the diversity of Creation. Clearly, no single confessional denomination can be seen as either intrinsically repressive or essentially enlightened, because these strands coursed through the various interpretations of both Christianity and Islam. Similar dichotomies can be observed in the conception of public versus private space, and between those of advocated for a rigorous and uncompromising legal “formalism” grounded in the letter of the law versus its discontents, who might take a position akin to “no harm, no foul.” Which of these approaches gained traction politically and institutionally in any given moment depended on broader political and social circumstances. In a short coda, “The Ethics of Exception,” Kruijtzer takes his conclusions to the present, by way of Popper’s notion of the “open society,” present-day academia’s nostalgic antinomianism, and Hannah Arendt’s ruminations on individual moral responsibility in the face of the rigorous, narrow and coercive implementation of law.
This is a highly original and thought-provoking study, relevant as much to our world today as the five pre-modern centuries that are the formal subject of the book. This reviewer was reading the final pages just the results from the 2024 US elections were coming in, and it was hard to ignore the congruences between the cultural and political landscape today and the centuries long struggle between the “flexible” and the “strict” (or, at least, the purportedly strict), or the role that the specter of an outside threat has in galvanizing the authoritarian camp [BH1] [BAC2]. Beyond the merits of the study itself as an important contribution to our understanding of the development of public morality in the broader West, Justifying Transgression serves as a model for works of comparative history and cultural studies, particular in view of Kruijtzer’s even-handed approach which avoids the structural Eurocentrism which characterizes so many comparative studies. Furthermore, it serves as an eloquent, if indirect, argument for seeing the West not merely as an expression of European Christian or Judeo-Christian (to use an anachronistic and ill-conceived but sticky category) culture, but as a manifestation of an Abrahamic cultural sphere that included Dar al-Islam, and is therefore as much African and West Asian as European, and which had in the pre-Modern era, the Mediterranean as its vital center.
