Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam > Status Update

For Kant, criticism is intended as an alternative to religious authority, not as a means of reinforcing it. But this difference is attributable, at least in part, to the fact that in Enlightenment Europe, religious authority was already in retreat. Political authority, of course, was not.
However, Kant insisted that the freedom to criticize everything should not interfere with the duty to obey political authority.

Ghība is strongly condemned in Islamic moral theology, so it is not surprising that the letter writers dismissed this analogy as absurd. But the point of likening moral criticism addressed publicly to the king to the sin of backbiting in private was, of course, to suggest malicious intent, a feature that irretrievably damages the
integrity of nasīha.

It is said that some of the King’s supporters who commented on the original letter by word of mouth claimed that the manner in which it
was delivered rendered this so-called nashīha (morally corrective dicourse) into something close to ghība—that is, speaking of someone’s
faults in his or her absence (and by extension also calumniating or slandering someone).

Into which category does a given new behavior fall? Is it really new, or is it an analogue of
something whose classification is not in dispute? The application of these categories to behavior engaged in by one’s fellow Muslims often
involves an elaborate work of reconceptualizing the context itself in ways that aim to be plausible to a Muslim audience

Islamic legal-moral tradition contains a graded scheme for classifying behavior—wājib
(mandatory), mandūb (recommended), mubūh (permitted), makrūh (disapproved), harām (forbidden). This classification forces specific
questions onto people who belong to that tradition:

According to Lipsius (Oestreich 1982), the influential religious skeptic writing at the end of the sixteenth century, the prince should follow
any policy that would secure civil peace regardless of moral or legal scruples. If religious diversity could be forcibly eliminated, so much the
better, Lipsius urged; if that was impossible, then religious toleration should be enforced by the state.

Intellectual and moral maturity, Kant tells us, consists in the ability “to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another”. This individualistic conception of understanding presupposes a space of freedom in which the mature individual can make use of his
own reason in opposition to that of others

Skillnaden mellan privat och publik skuldbeläggning, straffets roll kontrasterad med självbestraffningens.

to the trials imposed by him, and to the exhortations of his prophets. Hence paideia—or disciplina—acquired a strong sense of chastisement, correction, and the penalty inflicted for a fault.

In the Bible, disciplina is the normal Latin translation of the Greek word paideia. In the Hellenic world, paideia meant the physical,
intellectual, and moral cultivation of the person. In the Old Testament context it was used to convey a very different notion of education—
divine education directed not at an individual but at an entire people and achieved through submission to God’s law,