God and Logic in Islam
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God and Logic
in Islam
The Caliphate
of Reason
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god
and logic in islam
This
book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life.
Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only
on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism,
have characterized Islamic law, philosophy, theology, and education since the
medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational
tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a
general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement
by more modern but far shallower forms of thought. The resources of this
Islamic scholarly current, however, remain an integral part of the Islamic
intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of
Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism.
John Walbridge is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and
Cultures at Indiana University. He is the author of nine books on Islam and
Arabic culture, including four books on Islamic philosophy, two of which are The
Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism (2001)
and Suhrawardi, the Philosophy of Illumination (with Hossein Ziai, 1999).
God and Logic in Islam
The Caliphate of Reason
JOHN WALBRIDGE
Indiana
University
Cambridge
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University
Press
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Information on this
title: www.cambridge.org/9780521195348
© John Walbridge 2011
This publication is in
copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2011
Printed in the United
States of America
A catalog recordfor
this publication is available from the British Library.
Library ofCongress
Cataloging in Publication data
Walbridge, John.
God and logic in Islam :
the caliphate of reason / John Walbridge.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical
references and index.
ISBN 978-O-52I-I9534-8
1. Reason. 2.
Islamic philosophy. 3. Logic. 4. Faith and reason - Islam.
B745.R4W35
ooi.O9i7z67-dc22
ISBN 978-0-521-19534-8 Hardback
To
Frances, with love,
and to the memory of Elaine Wright.
The first thing God created was mind.
a hadith
Illustrations page xi
Preface and Acknowledgements xiii
Spelling, Names, and Sources xv
Introduction i
part one: the formation of the
Islamic tradition
OF
REASON
1
The Problem of Reason in Islam: Is Islam a Non-Rational
Religion and Civilization? 9
The Definition of Reason and Rationality 16
Western Conceptions of Reason 18
Logos and Rationality among the Greeks 18
Scholasticism: Reason as the Tool of Theology 20
Enlightenment Reason 21
Scientific Reason 21
Utilitarian Reason and Practical Rationality 22
Relativism 23
Protestant Textualism 24
Romanticism 25
The Civil War of Reason in the West 25
Islam and Western Conceptions of Reason 27
3
Empirical Knowledge of the Mind of God 30
The Enterprise of Hadith Collection 32
The Historicity of the Hadith 34
The Intellectual World of the Hadith Scholars 38
The Authority of the Hadith 42
Classification as Codification 43
The Historical Priority of Fiqh to Hadith 46
Literalist Challenge and Rationalist Cooption 50
4
The Failure of the Farabian Synthesis of Religion
and Philosophy 55
Philosophy and Religion before Islam 57
The
First Encounter of Islam with Philosophy:
From the Syrians to Kindi 64
Farabi’s Philosophy of Religion 67
Religion Subsumed within Philosophy 74
God as Intellect and the Intelligibility of God 76
Prophecy as a Matter of Psychology 78
The Symbolic Interpretation of Scripture 80
The Role of Fiqh and Kalam 81
The Failure of the Farabian Political Philosophy of
Religion 82
5
Mysticism, Postclassical Islamic Philosophy, and the Rise
and
Fall of Islamic Science 86
The Emergence of Mysticism 87
Mysticism and Philosophy 89
Suhrawardi 89
Ibn ‘Arabi 93
Aristotelianism in the Madrasas 95
The “Failure” of Islamic Science 96
part two: logic, education, and
doubt
6
Where Is Islamic Logic? The Triumph of Scholastic
Rationalism in Islamic Education 107
“Where Is Islamic Logic?” 107
Arabic Grammar 111
Arabic Rhetoric 113
Usul al-Fiqh 114
Kalam 117
Institutions and the Boundaries of Logic 119
7
The Long Afternoon of Islamic Logic 121
Islamic Logic to the Thirteenth Century 124
The Textbooks and Their Commentaries 126
The Educational Use of the School Logic Texts 129
Content of the School Logic 135
The Modernization of the School Logic 139
8
The Institutionalization of Disagreement 142
The Classical Islamic Attitude to Disagreement 143
An Education of Form without Content 151
PART three: THE FALL AND
THE FUTURE OF ISLAMIC
RATIONALISM
9
The Decline and Fall of Scholastic Reason in Islam 157
The Collapse of Traditional Education 157
“What Went Wrong?” 162
10
A Chaos of Certitudes: The Future of Islamic Reason 170
Disagreement in the Contemporary Islamic World 173
The Great Issues 175
Selected Bibliography 187
Index
1
A page from a lithographed logic textbook. page 130
2
A manuscript showing a student’s interlinear and marginal
notes. 132
3
A commentary in a lithographed textbook. 134
I have written this book with three readers in mind: the
educated Western reader whose knowledge of Islam may be no more than
impressions formed from television and newspapers; the Muslim reader troubled
by the misfortunes of his community in the modern world; and the scholar of
Islamic studies. They have, unfortunately, quite different needs, and I hope
that each will be tolerant of the needs of the others.
I
have tried to write this book in a way that will be understandable to an
educated Western reader without specialized knowledge of Islam. I have
therefore avoided assuming much knowledge about Islam and in particular
extensive use of Arabic words and names. I have usually defined technical
Islamic terms and identified names when they first occur. I also give brief definitions
and identifications in the index. However, there are inevitably places where I
have to deal in technicalities, for which I ask the patience of the
nonspecialist. For my Muslim readers, this is essentially a theological work, a
plea to reexamine the riches of the Islamic rationalist tradition in light of
the needs of the modern Islamic community. For my scholarly reader, this book
is a reminder of what I hope he already knows - the central importance of
rationalism, and particularly scholastic rationalism, in the Islamic
intellectual synthesis.
This
book represents ideas that have developed over the course of my career, going
back to my first undergraduate Islamic studies paper. It took this specific
shape as a byproduct of work that I conducted first in Pakistan on the role of
logic in Islamic education and later in Turkey on the relation of Islamic
science and medicine to philosophy. These projects were generously funded by
several organizations, including the Fulbright program, which allowed me to spend
a year each in Pakistan and Turkey; the American Institute of Pakistan Studies;
the American Research Institute in Turkey; the American Philosophical Society;
the Guggenheim Foundation; and Indiana University. Some sections were first
published in the journal Islamic Studies, and I gratefully acknowledge their permission to reprint
material from these articles and even more their support of my work on the role
of logic in Islamic education, particularly the encouragement of Dr. Zafar
Ishaq Ansari. Considerable parts of the book were first presented as lectures
at Punjab University in Lahore and the Islam Arastirmalari Merkezi in Üsküdar,
Turkey. The latter also provided me with a fellowship that allowed me access to
their excellent research library, as well as office space, research support,
and - not least - sociable, intellectually stimulating, and delicious lunches.
In particular, I would like to thank my chief hosts there, Drs. Nuri Tinaz and
Aydin Topologlu. I would also like to thank the librarians at Punjab
University, the Ganj-Bakhsh Library in Islamabad, the wonderful Suleymaniye
Library in Istanbul, the ISAM library, and the Indiana University Libraries.
Though
I have discussed these ideas with various people over the years, I would like
to particularly thank my friend, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the
History and Philosophy of Science Edward Grant, who somewhat inadvertently
started me thinking about the relation of science and reason in Islamic
civilization and whose books on the role of reason and science in medieval
Europe have been a model for my decidedly more modest contribution.
As
always, I owe thanks to my family for their support and forbearance - my sons,
John and Nathaniel, who put up with my scholarly research and long trips
abroad, and my late wife, Linda Strickland Walbridge, who accompanied and
supported me for most of my career. Finally, I owe special thanks to my wife,
Frances Trix, who entered and brightened my life at the end of a very difficult
period, interpreted for me in Turkish libraries, sat through the lectures that
were the penultimate form of this work, and has encouraged me in all that I
have done these last seven years.
Arabic terms are spelled with slight modifications according
to the system commonly used by scholars of the Middle East. It will be familiar
to specialists. In the occasional cases where I am citing names or terms from
other Islamic languages, I treat them as Arabic for simplicity unless they have
established equivalents in English. I also frequently omit the “al-” from
Arabic names, again for simplicity.
In a
work such as this, Arabic terminology and names are unavoidable, but I have
tried to keep it accessible to a general reader, at least a patient one. Whenever
possible, I use English equivalents rather than Arabic terms. Almost any
translation of an Islamic religious term can be objected to as imprecise, but
on the whole I think it is better to use a term that the reader starts out
understanding, explaining how it differs from its usual sense, rather than
start with a term the reader does not know and try to explain the meaning to
him or her from scratch. I include brief definitions of terms and names in the
index, which the reader can use as a glossary. I also explain terms and
identify people at first mention. Dates are given only according to the Common
Era except in the case of books whose publication dates are given according to
the Islamic calendar.
One
term deserves special comment: “fundamentalist.” It is widely used but is
subject to objections. It is, after all, a term for a specific trend in modern
American Protestantism. It is now used in Arabic - usUliya - a calque from English, but it is not a term
accepted by the people to whom it is applied. I use it in a very specific
sense: those modern adherents of a religion who wish to return to the original
textual roots, bypassing in the process the medieval high religious syntheses.
I thus use it for the Islamic groups who tend to refer to themselves as Salafi,
followers of the salaf, the
pious forefathers, as well as for analogous modern Christian groups - and for
my Puritan ancestors who came to America fleeing the wrath of the Stuart kings.
A
book such as this takes place through the accretion of knowledge over many
years. The notes mainly document specific points and quotations and do not
necessarily include all of the sources I have consulted, particularly for facts
that will be generally known by specialists. For more general sources, the
reader should consult the bibliography, where I give a summary of the sources I
have used and books that the interested reader might wish to consult.
The visitor to an Islamic bookstore is struck by the
orderly rows of Arabic sets, usually handsomely bound in rich colors with
calligraphic titles framed in arabesque and stamped in gold or silver.
Nowadays, the title commonly runs boldly across the spines of all the volumes.
A wellrun bookstore will have these works sorted by discipline: commentaries
on the Qur’an; collections of the reported words and deeds of the Prophet and
his Companions, with their commentaries; Islamic law, both rulings and studies
of the principles to be followed in deducing law; theology; large biographical
dictionaries of individuals of various classes, most commonly scholars;
histories and geographies; and Arabic grammars and dictionaries.
The
casual visitor may be excused the suspicion that sometimes these sets serve a
decorative purpose. He may have visited a mosque and noticed that the imam’s
office walls were lined with such sets and that they showed few signs of use.
Watching visitors he may also observe that it is the decorative Qur’ans and
popular tracts that sell most briskly.
Nevertheless,
he would be unwise to dismiss the imposing sets as mere pretentious ornament.
Scholars wrote these books for a purpose. They are, moreover, mostly old books,
written between five and twelve centuries ago. The age of printing did not
start in Islamic countries until the nineteenth century, so that even the
younger works survived fifteen or more generations being copied and recopied by
hand, defying the threats of damp, fire, neglect, and white ants. Even this
understates the effort that went into their preservation, for a work written in
the fifteenth century most likely represents the synthesis of a succession of
earlier works written during the previous seven or eight hundred years.
A
knowledgeable visitor would also understand that the sustained effort of copying
books that might take many weeks to read - let alone write out by hand - was
done with great care, with copied manuscripts checked against oral transmission
accompanied by oral commentary. The precision with which this had to be done
varied by discipline, but for the core religious subjects, a student could not
simply buy a copy of a book; he had to copy it out under the supervision of a
scholar who himself had learned the work from a teacher. When a scholar copied
a collection of hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet and his Companions,
under the supervision of his teacher, he became the latest link in a chain of
teachers and students, generation from generation, back to the days of the
scholars who first collected these sayings soon after the deaths of the last
Companions of the Prophet. A scholar’s most precious possessions were the books
he had copied under the supervision of his teachers and the licenses that his
teachers had given him to teach these books.
If
our casual visitor saw fit to leaf through the books, he would notice that many
include commentary in the margins or at the foot of the page. Often the books
themselves are commentaries, with the original texts interspersed through the
page. If he is lucky, he will stumble on a reprint of one of the old
lithographic editions, in which commentary, supercommentary, and glosses by
various authors snake around the page and between the words of the text in
elegant confusion, so that text ultimately being commented on may be
represented by only a few words on each page. If his interest were piqued and
he visited an Islamic manuscript library, he could see this process at work in
the dusty books: a humble student’s manuscript in which the carefully written
text is surrounded by notes taken in class or a scholar’s manuscript with a
carefully crafted commentary and glosses and corrections and variant readings
in the margin. He would quickly realize that thousands of such commentaries and
supercommentaries exist explaining the works commonly studied, and that few of
them have been printed.
This
is not, our visitor might reflect, the Islam that he sees in newspapers or on
television, a fanatical devotion to the arbitrary interpretation of a single
text, the Qur’an, preached shrilly and politically to excited throngs at
prayer. It is something else, a cooler, a thoughtful and earnest intellectual
world, a scholastic world much like the traditional study of the Torah and
Talmud in Jewish yeshivas or the study of Aristotle and theology in medieval
European universities. It is not modern - in the sense that it is not secular
and does not address the post-Enlightenment intellectual world of the modern
West - but it also is not modern in that it is not the absolutist
fundamentalism of much modern religion, Islamic or otherwise.
And,
he might think to himself, the popular tracts addressing current issues are
cheaply printed and carelessly bound, stacked in racks to be sold to those
without the training to understand the old, long, difficult Arabic books. It is
the dry works of Islamic scholasticism that are treated with respect.
Everything about them - the color of their bindings, the care of their editing
and printing, the increasingly high quality of the paper, the elegance of their
design, their respectful placement - indicates that these books, second only to
the lavishly printed copies of the Qur’an, are important.
Why,
we might ask, is this so?
THIS BOOK IS AN ARGUMENT
FOR A SINGLE PROPOSITION, THAT ISLAMIC intellectual life has been
characterized by reason in the service of a non- rational revealed code of
conduct.
The
“non-rational revealed code of conduct” is the Shari'a, the Law of God, which
occupies the same position of primacy in Islamic intellectual life that
theology does in Christianity. I do not wish to say that the Shari'a is
irrational or contrary to reason or beyond reason, these being issues on which
Muslims themselves disagreed - only that the Shari'a is given and that Muslims
by and large did not think that the reasons for any particular command of God
need be accessible to the human mind.1
Whereas
the foundation of Islam was the revelation given to Muh. ammad,
which thus is fundamentally beyond reason, reason was [1] the tool normally chosen by
Muslims for the explication of this revelation - from the time when Companions
of the Prophet still lived down to the dawning of our day. This legacy of
rational methodology is to various degrees ignored by Muslims, both modernist
and fundamentalist (though they are not as different as we might believe) and
by outsiders seeking to understand Islam. This book is thus a reminder to my
Muslim friends and readers that the core intellectual tradition of Islam is
deeply rational, though based on revelation. This tradition has been largely
rejected by modern Muslims, or at least ignored by them. Non-Muslims are
usually unaware of it and thus misunderstand Islam.
I
chose the word “caliphate” in my subtitle for the relationship of reason to
the content of revelation to indicate that reason served revelation and thus
was secondary to it. Khalifa, “caliph,” comes from a root meaning “to
follow,” in the sense of coming afterwards. It has two major uses in Islamic
religious thought. First, the Qur’an says that man is God’s caliph on earth.
Second, it is the title used by the first rulers of the Islamic world after the
death of the Prophet Muhammad and by occasional later rulers, such as the
Ottoman sultans, who were able to claim universal authority or legitimate
succession from earlier caliphs. Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s first successor, chose
the title khalifat Rasul Allah, “successor of the Messenger of God,” in an act
of political modesty. Later rulers sometimes styled themselves khalifat Allah,
“Caliph of God,” to some disapproval from the pious.[2] The title “caliph” was also
used by Sufi leaders who had been granted a considerable degree of authority of
the heads of their orders. In all of these cases, “caliph” implies authority
under sovereignty granted by another and higher authority. This, it seemed to
me, was a fair term to characterize the role of reason in Islam.
There
have been many who have either denied that reason plays a central role in
Islamic intellectual life or objected to its doing so. In our troubled times,
many non-Muslims see Islam as an inherently anti- rational force, pointing to a
supposed failure to adapt to the modern world (“What went wrong?”), a cult of
martyrdom, well-publicized examples of bizarre applications of Islamic law, and
a general modern secular suspicion of religion as an organizing principle of
human life, particularly of social and political life. Within Islam, there
have always been critics of the role of reason in the religious sciences. The
hadith literature, as we will see, arose in part as a reaction to the incipient
rationalism of early Islamic legal scholarship. The great fourteenth-century
fundamentalist reformer Ibn Taymiya hated reason wherever it expressed itself
in Islamic intellectual life. In modern Islam, the traditional legal scholars,
with their intricate systems of scholastic reasoning, have been condemned by
both modernists, who with some justice considered their legal systems to be
medieval and obsolete, and the exponents of Islamic revival, heavily influenced
by the hadith and the criticisms of Ibn Taymiya.
My
contention in this book is that the logic of the central ideas of Islamic life
as they were launched by the Prophet and the earliest generation of Muslims
drove relentlessly toward a situation in which religious knowledge was placed
in a rational context, with reason providing the organizing principles for
bodies of knowledge whose origin was non- rational. This book is my argument
for this proposition.
MANY MODERN
“FUNDAMENTALIST” ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS ARE ACTIVEly hostile to this tradition of rationalism. The thoughtful
observer ofIslam will notice the damage done to the integrity of Islamic
intellectual life by this disregard of the careful analysis of the heritage of
Muhammad’s revelation performed by fifty or more generations of Islamic
scholars. The result is a plethora of arbitrary personal interpretations of the
Qur’an, the hadith, and Islamic law. The damage done is plain for all to see.
I am
a Protestant and, in particular, an Anglican. My ancestors came to America
three and a half centuries ago escaping religious war and persecution,
fundamentalists fleeing persecution by other fundamentalists and sometimes
persecuting yet other sectarians in the New World with whom they disagreed. The
Reformation had broken the religious unity of the Western Christian world,
opening the gates for floods of personal interpretations of Christian doctrine
and the Bible. The wounds are not yet healed in Christendom. The Anglicans
attempt to walk a tightrope, open to the reforms and new ideas of the
Reformation yet remaining loyal to the ancient tradition of the Church
Universal and never admitting the finality of Christian division or condemning
those who follow other ways. It is a path I commend to my Muslim friends. I do
not wish on them the two centuries of war that drove my ancestors across the
sea into the American wilderness or the five centuries of unhealed divisions
that Western Christians have endured in conflict over the tradition of the
ancient and medieval Church. Moreover, the poverty of much modern Islamic thought
compared with the subtlety and richness of the medieval Islamic intellectual
tradition leads me to think that the solution to the problems facing
contemporary Islam lies, at least in part, in reclaiming an older and more
intellectually rigorous tradition of Islamic thought.
For
my non-Muslim readers, my task is historical: to show the richness of
pre-modern Islamic scholastic rationalism. Many modern expressions of Islam do
not deserve much respect, but fortunately they are also not the best - or even,
historically speaking, up to the average - that Islam can produce. Islam is
another path from Christianity, a path in which the spiritual experiences of a
single man, Muhammad, the son of ‘Abd Allah, a merchant of the town of Mecca in
the seventh century, are taken as normative. During the fourteen centuries
since then, serious Muslims have undertaken to preserve that experience, using
all the scholarly tools at their disposal and devoting every resource of reason
to explicating that experience and its ethical, legal, and spiritual
implications. By doing so, they hoped that as individuals and as a community
they might know how to live a life pleasing to God and righteous among men. It
is, from a Christian point of view, an act of terrifying bravery, and it
deserves our respect.
PART ONE
The Problem of Reason in Islam: Is Islam a
Non-Rational Religion and Civilization?
In a widely circulated article on the state of the Islamic
world in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, the Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy
argued that a thousand years ago, there was an Islamic golden age of reason and
science under the ‘Abbasids, a period in which theology was dominated by the
rationalist Mu‘tazilites and science and philosophy by translations of Greek
works. This age of tolerance and creativity, Hoodbhoy claimed, came to an
abrupt end when Ghazali attacked logic and science in the name of an
antirationalist Ash‘arite theology. Thereafter, the Islamic world settled into
a dogmatic slumber that has not yet ended, as evidenced by the miserable state
of science in the Islamic world.1 A variation of this view stresses
Ghazâlï’s defense of Sufism as the source of his antirationalistic position. Of
course, the picture could be reversed, with the early centuries of Islam being
seen as a time when advocates of pagan rationalism challenged the young Islamic
revelation, only to be defeated by defenders of orthodoxy like Ghazali, leaving
the stage open for a purer Islam based on the practice of the Prophet, not the
fallible speculations of human philosophers and scientists. This is the view of
Ibn Taymiya and his modern followers.
Outside
perceptions of Islam are more negative. The Western view of Islam is dominated
by media coverage that stresses terrorism, a supposed innate Islamic hostility
to the modern Western world in general and to America and the Jews in
particular, headscarves as a tool for [3] the oppression of women, and
violent responses to trivial offenses like tasteless cartoons. However shallow
this view of Islam might be, there are serious intellectual arguments against
the compatibility of Islam and reason, some of them made by Muslims themselves.
There
is first the phenomenon of “Islamic fundamentalism” itself. This term can be
used in several ways or rejected entirely. In chapter ten, I will use it to
refer to a specific religious response to the medieval Islamic heritage, one
very similar to that of my Puritan ancestors. However, I will use it here, as
the Western press tends to use it, to refer to all the problems of Islamic
civilization in the modern world, and especially to its maladaptations: the
terrorism, suicide bombings, bizarre fatwas, obsessions about women’s dress,
and so on. The cult of martyrdom, with its willingness to kill innocents for a
religious ideal that seems unconvincing to non-Muslims, would seem to indicate
a failure to engage rationally with the larger modern world. These acts -
monstrous, pitiable, or simply embarrassing - are done in the name of Islam.
Their irrationality seems obvious to outsiders, and so it would seem to follow
that Islam itself is irrational or antirational.
We
could, and probably should, dismiss such phenomena as suicide bombers as more a
product of the stresses of the modern world than of Islam as a religion, but a
form of antirationalism has explicit defenders within Islam. The twentieth
century saw the rise of a new kind of Islamic fundamentalism that is often
referred to as Salafi - that is, following the example of the salaf, the pious forefathers of the first generations
of Islam. The Salafis, diverse though they most certainly are, seek to go back
to the pure truth of early Islam before it was corrupted by the scholastic
speculations of medieval Islamic scholars. They are doing something very
similar to what my Protestant ancestors did when they sought to rid
Christianity of the encrustations of medieval theological speculation and
post-Apostolic religious doctrine and custom in order to return to the pure
spirituality of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the practice of the primitive
church. Despite their claim to go back to the roots of Islam, they are, like their
Christian fundamentalist counterparts, a modern phenomenon, the product of the
mass education that allows a technician or engineer to have direct access to
the Qur’an and the other foundational texts of Islam.
The
influence of Salafi Islam has grown steadily, in good part because the Salafis
have a point: the foundations of Islam are the Qur’an and the life and practice
of the Prophet, everything after them being human speculation grounded in the
intellectual and social conditions of the times when Islamic scholars wrote.
Nonetheless, most non-Muslims, however sympathetic they might be to Islam,
would see the Qur’an and sunna, the practice of the Prophet, as being in some
sense the product of the social and religious context of seventh-century
Arabia. Certainly, the amount of religious information and text preserved from
the time of the Prophet is finite. The Qur’an is a single, not especially large
book, and the hadith that have any claim to be considered authentic number no
more than a few tens of thousands. Restricting the foundations of religion and
society to these few books seems to non-Muslims a rejection of independent
reason.
We
also note the overwhelming presence of mysticism in Islamic life from about the
year 1000 c.e. up through the nineteenth century. Mysticism,
too, is anti- or non-rational. Sufism, the usual term for Islamic mysticism,
produced sophisticated intellectuals like Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabi but also
innumerable enthusiasts, charlatans, and wandering dervishes. In the second
half of the nineteenth century, both colonial administrators and modernizing
Islamic reformers saw Sufism as a prime example of the superstition that needed
to be extirpated before Islam could be reformed. Salafis, by and large, still
think so.
On
the other hand, there is a case to be made for the compatibility of Islam and
reason. Most Muslims are perfectly able to conduct their lives in a
constructive way in the modern world. Even a country like Iran, despite its
revolutionary break with certain aspects of modernity in the name of Islam, has
continued to modernize in most senses. Apart from Tehran’s new metro system,
the consolidation of the revolution has led, for example, to an efflorescence
of Islamic software in Iran. Also, if we look back, we can see that certain
rationalistic endeavors did flourish in medieval Islam. There was a tradition
of philosophy, originating with the Greeks but continuing to our own day,
particularly in Iran. Until about 1500, Islamic science was the most advanced in the world, and
it seems beyond question that Islamic science, as transmitted to medieval
Europe, played a critical role in preparing the ground for the Scientific
Revolution. We now know, for example, that Copernicus borrowed much of the
mathematics of his heliocentric system (though not the idea of heliocentrism as
such) from Islamic astronomers.[4]
Most
important, the Islamic religious sciences in their mature form represent a kind
of scholasticism, the mode of study in which reason is employed to explicate
religious texts. This kind of scholasticism is the basis of postclassical
Islamic religious education, wherein students are rigorously trained in
Aristotelian logic, the tool used in more advanced subjects like jurisprudence.
It is
my belief that such rationalism was basic to Islamic intellectual culture in
its classical and postclassical forms. Chapters three through eight of this
book are devoted to showing precisely what I mean by this: what was the nature
of Islamic rationalism, particularly scholastic rationalism, how it developed,
and what were its strengths and limitations. The final chapter of this book
deals with the enemies of this kind of reason, its decline and fall, and the
role it might play in the development of Islamic thought in the modern world.
There
is an ontological issue here that I wish to clarify. I do not believe in a
“Muslim mind” or in “Islam” as an autonomous and eternal entity. The human
world consists of individual human beings and their individual thoughts and
actions. Nevertheless, ideas have power and their own logic, though historical
circumstances shape and constrain the expression of those ideas. The Islamic
religion came into being from the religious experience of a single man, the
Prophet Muhammad. What shaped that spiritual experience is a question for a
different historical inquiry, but that experience had a particular quality
expressed in a set of ideas passed on and given more specific form by the
personalities and experiences of the men and women around him. Those ideas have
shaped and limited the possibilities available to Muslim intellectuals down to
our own day. Much happened later, but the unfolding of Islamic intellectual
life grew in large part, although not exclusively, from the potentialities
inherent in the complex of ideas inherited by the earliest generations of
Muslims, and in turn, the intellectual life of later centuries was shaped by
the choices made by earlier generations.[5]
I do
not wish to assert that there was some essential intellectual determinism at
work in Islamic intellectual life, but rather that the nature of Muhammad’s
experience opened some options and tended to foreclose others. The
characteristic legalism of Islam was present from the time of the Prophet, so
it is no accident that Muslim legal scholars in every age enjoyed a prestige
that was never shared by Christian canon lawyers. The form that this legalism
took was shaped by decisions made by the earliest generations of Muslims about
how to respond to the withdrawal of the direct divine guidance that the Prophet
had formerly provided. Some intellectual approaches, like scholastic legalism
and mysticism, prospered; others, like Farabi’s attempt to make rationalistic
political philosophy the central organizing principle of Islam, failed. Still
others, like Greek logic and metaphysics, faltered but eventually found their
place. Greek philosophy was never accepted as the mistress of the sciences but
eventually found respectability as the handmaid of legal dialectic and mystical
speculation.
The
ideas that shaped Islamic life had an inner logic that defined the options open
to Muslim intellectuals and thus channeled Islamic intellectual life in
particular directions. The issue was not a lack of freedom for individual
creativity or other alternatives, but rather that those whose efforts cut
across the grain of the formative ideas of Islamic society, like Farabi and the
early philosophers, did not shape the central core of Islamic thought. Those
who could make their intellectual creativity flow into channels that the
founding ideas of Islam had opened won enduring influence. Such thinkers
included Ghazali, who saw that the place for logic was in the legal curriculum,
and Suhrawardi, who saw that the natural role of philosophy was as the interpreter
of mysticism.
The
interrelationships among the disciplines of thought were different than in
Latin Christendom but, as in medieval Europe, reason in due course came to
serve faith.
But
what, we may ask, do we mean by reason?
Reason and rationality are difficult conceptions to pin
down. Encyclopedias of philosophy tend not to have specific articles devoted
to them.1 When we look at what specific philosophers mean by reason
and rationality, it quickly becomes obvious that they mean many different
things. Most of the time philosophers claim to follow reason and rational
methods, but it often seems that “rational” is no more than a philosopher’s
assertion that his methods and conclusions are obviously correct.
Consider
that in the Enlightenment, “reason” meant a substitution of individual thought
for inherited religious authority; for the medieval European philosophers it
was a supplement to revelation; and for the Utilitarians it was the practical
ideal of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Modern relativism
denies that reason can reach ultimate truth, and Romanticism rejects it in
favor of a prerational experience of [6] the world. It is not
difficult to identify comparable competing notions of rationality in Islamic
civilization. Clearly we are not dealing with a single, unambiguous concept.
Therefore, if we are going to talk about reason in Islamic civilization, we
need to make clear exactly which form - or, more likely, forms - of reason we
are talking about.
Western
ideas about reason are not the standard against which Islamic reason should be
judged - there is, in any case, no single Western conception of reason to use
as a touchstone - but Western intellectual history is diverse and thus
unequalled as a point of comparison. The relationship of the West with reason
has been complex and troubled and has generated a number of different
conceptions of reason and the rational, as well as several antirationalist
schools of thought. An outside point of reference will allow us to look at
Islamic conceptions of reason with fresh eyes. We can ask of the hadith not
whether they are authentic or what their authority is in relation to other
pillars of Islamic law and doctrine, but what do the choice of hadith and the
way they were structured and classified tell us about how early Muslims
understood the search for religious truth and legal authority. Likewise, we can
ask of Islamic law what are the assumptions of its methods, of mysticism what
is the significance of the intricate treatises of mystical theology, and so on.
THE DEFINITION OF REASON AND RATIONALITY
Butfirstweneedameta-definitionofreasonand rationality,
onebywhich we can consider the various conceptions of reason we will encounter.
For the moment, I will take the two as more or less synonymous, with the
distinction being that reason is abstract and rationality is the exercise of
reason in thought or action. I will take the following as a working definition:
Reason
or rationality is the systematic and controlling use of beliefs, arguments, or
actions based on well-grounded premises and valid arguments such that another
person who has access to the same information and can understand the argument
correctly ought to agree that the premises are well-grounded, that the logic is
sound, and that the resultant beliefs, arguments, or actions are correct.
The critical ingredients are:
1)
well-grounded premises: that the factual bases and principles the
rational person uses are known to be correct or can be accepted as correct for
good reasons;
2)
sound logic: that these principles are used in accordance
with the laws of logic; and
3)
systematic and controlling
resort to reason: that such use
of well- grounded principles and sound logic is the basic method by which the
person determines his beliefs, makes his arguments, or decides on his actions.
To clarify, let me give some corresponding examples of what
would qualify as unreason or irrationality by this definition:
1)
The premises and principles used might be in themselves
irrational or non-rational, as in a metaphysical system developed by a madman
or, much more commonly, as in actions based on authority, unexamined beliefs,
or emotions.
2)
The logic used might be fallacious, sophistical, or
rhetorical, either because the individual did not care to think clearly, was
unable to do so, or sought to deceive others or himself.
3)
Such rational methods might be used occasionally but not
systematically within the larger context of the individual’s intellectual or
practical life.
The problem with reason and rationality is that reason is,
to a great extent, in the eye of the beholder, particularly with respect to
starting points. A well-grounded premise can be very different in different
times and places and even among individuals in the same time, place, and social
setting. Nevertheless, the overall notion seems sound: One can imagine Aquinas,
Descartes, Voltaire, and Bentham agreeing that our beliefs and actions ought to
be systematically based on well-grounded premises and sound and valid
arguments, but they would disagree completely on what constitutes a reasonable
starting point for such arguments and for lives of reason in general. It is
these differences that I intend to explore as a way of clarifying the nature of
the commitment or hostility to reason and rationality in the intellectual life
of Islamic civilization.
In this chapter, I consider six conceptions of reason that
seem to me to have operated in Western civilization - the logos doctrine of the Greeks,[7] medieval
scholasticism, scientific reason, Enlightenment reason, Utilitarian reason,
and relativism - and two antirationalist reactions, Protestant textualism and
Romanticism. I then discuss some of the conflicts between these conceptions of
reason in Western intellectual history. I close with some suggestions about how
these varying conceptions of reason and the tensions and conflicts among them
might relate to the Islamic experience. This history could have been analyzed
differently, and I have not dealt with all the subtleties, either of Western or
Islamic intellectual history. Nevertheless, a simple set of categories is
needed to make sense of the Islamic experience of reason. I think this one is
more or less satisfactory.
Logos and Rationality among the Greeks
The Western ideal of reason derives from ancient Greece. No
other ancient civilization in the greater Mediterranean region developed
anything like it.[8]
The practical and spiritual accomplishments of the Mesopotamians, the
Egyptians, the Jews, and the Iranians were enormous, but they were certainly
not based on reason in as we understand it. They were all religious and
authoritarian cultures. The Jews followed their jealous God because of the
mighty deeds He did when He led them out of Egypt and because He was vengeful
when spurned or offended. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians treated their kings
like gods and their gods like kings. A deeply mythological religious life
permeated the ancient Middle East. Strange and beautiful and sometimes truly
spiritual as it may have been, it was not reason. The Persians and Egyptians
developed successful and orderly administrative systems, but an orderly
bureaucracy devoted to the service of a monarchy is not a sufficient basis for
saying that a civilization follows an ideal of reason. Only the Greeks
conceived the project of explaining the universe and its contents from rational
first principles and then organizing their lives accordingly.
The
Greeks associated this rationalistic project with the word logos, a term of protean ambiguity derived from the
verb legein, “to
speak.” It famously occupies several pages in the largest Greek-English dictionary
and bears meanings such as word, argument, speech, principle, logic, inner
nature, and theory, among others. The English word “logic” is derived from it;
the Arabic mantiq, logic, is
a literal translation. In philosophical contexts, logos tends to be used in three senses: first, for
the inner nature of something; second, for the theory explaining it; and third,
for the verbal exposition of its theory. The Stoics developed the concept of logos most elaborately, but the notion was at the
foundation of Greek philosophy from the beginning: There is a rational
structure to the universe and its operation, this inner rationality can be
understood by theory, and this theory can be expressed in speech.
The
most remarkable aspect of this enterprise was that it operated under very few
constraints. From the beginning, Greek philosophers did not feel constrained by
conventional religious views, so their systems ranged from sophisticated
intellectual mysticism to unabashed materialism. There were occasional
prosecutions, such as when Anaxagoras was run out of Athens for encouraging
atheism by teaching that the sun was a hot rock. Satirists also found them a
delightful target, but mostly they were respectfully left to elaborate their
quite contradictory theories, following reason where it led them. (Socrates was
executed not because of his philosophical views but because of the number of
his students who betrayed Athenian democracy.) They may have disagreed about
conclusions, but they agreed that they were engaged in an attempt to understand
the logos of the
universe and express the logos of thought through logoi of speech. Thus, from the very beginning,
philosophy operated under the assumption that its overarching methodological
principle was the supremacy of reason, however reason might be understood. It
is difficult to know why this was the case. One factor was certainly the degree
to which the violent and adulterous gods of Olympus had lost their hold on the
individual conscience, leaving both a spiritual hunger for something loftier
and an absence of compelling religious orthodoxy. It is likely that the political
fragmentation of classical Greece also played a role.
Scholasticism: Reason as the Tool of Theology
Revealed religion eventually overthrew the intellectual and
educational supremacy of Greek philosophy. The philosophers of the Greek and
Hellenistic periods could not, by the very nature of their enterprise, meet the
spiritual needs of the masses of people. By the time of the Roman Empire, those
spiritual needs were increasingly met by a variety of international cults,
mostly of Oriental origin, of which only Christianity need concern us.
Christianity was a religion of doctrine, its early history rent with disputes
about the nature of Christ and the Godhead. The doctrinal assertiveness of
Christianity put it into collision with the philosophers, their chief rivals in
the business of explaining the universe. Christians quickly learned to cast
their theology in philosophical terms - indeed, they learned to do so from the
pagan philosophers who so often were their teachers. By about the tenth
century, a new rational model had emerged: scholasticism.[9]
Scholasticism
thus is a product of the maturity of Christian theology. The scholastic
philosopher-theologians knew what they believed; they knew philosophy - usually
Aristotelianism - and were interested in pressing reason as far as it would go
in the justification and explication of Christian doctrine. But revelation was
supreme: If there was a religious doctrine that clashed with philosophy, the
scholastic theologian had to work out some sort of reconciliation. To take a
famous example, in the Eucharist, the bread and wine change into the body and
blood of Christ - but of course they still appear to be bread and wine. It was
the business of the scholastic to explain how this could be made compatible
with the Aristotelian theory of material substances.[10]
Under this heading I will include both the rationalism of
seventeenthcentury European philosophy and eighteenth-century Enlightenment
thought properly speaking. The common feature of both is a rejection of
inherited authority and a confidence in the autonomous power of human reason.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy is largely a reaction
against scholasticism. Reason came first, and although many Enlightenment
thinkers wished to preserve Christianity, this had to be done through reason
alone. Others, like Voltaire and Jefferson, were quite content to reject
Christianity in whole or in part. Moreover, there was an optimism about the
capacities of reason. Descartes believed that by considering the nature of
thought alone, he could rationally reconstruct human knowledge on an
unassailable basis. The Enlightenment political philosophers believed that by
careful and rational consideration of human nature, they could provide the
ideological bases for a new and improved, just, humane, and stable society.
Thus, Enlightenment thought is characterized by a rejection of inherited
authority, whether religious or political, and by a boundless faith in the
capacities of human reason when freed from the inherited fetters of religious
and political authority.
I might have included the rise of scientific rationality
with Enlightenment reason, for they occurred at the same time and were often
advocated by the same people. In this respect, we might take into account such
figures as Benjamin Franklin, a great scientist and a hero of Enlightenment
political thought. Nevertheless, they are different enough to consider
separately.
There
is still debate about the nature of science and what exactly it was that
changed during the Scientific Revolution, which took place between the time of
Copernicus, whose theory of heliocentrism was published in 1543, and the publication of Newton’s Principia
Mathematica in 1687. It is now clear that a number of elements
contributed to the drastic change in scientific thought during this period: a
general shift from Aristotelian science, the increased use and prestige of
experiment and empirical methods, and the use of mathematics in scientific theory.[11]
Perhaps most fundamental was the shift of emphasis that made the natural world
the most basic problem of philosophy. Increasingly, whatever could not be
explained by the methods of empirical and mathematical natural philosophy came
to be seen as unknowable, unimportant, or nonsensical, especially once the
practical successes of the new science had won enormous prestige for physical
science and its methods. Philosophically, science has retained its influence,
spawning regular attempts to reform philosophy and sometimes other areas of
life along scientific lines.[12]
Much of twentieth-century intellectual life was dominated by attempts to apply
scientific methods to other areas of life. Although the attempt to reduce
philosophy to mathematical logic and science was ultimately a failure, science
remains the most prestigious claimant to the crown of reason.
Utilitarian Reason and Practical Rationality
In the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham and his
followers attempted to apply scientific methods to the problems of ethics,
society, and politics. Their basic assumption was that the goal of all ethical,
social, and political activity is the increase in the sum total of human
happiness, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” a philosophy they
called “Utilitarianism.” Bentham’s philosophy had a certain inhumanity, some
serious philosophical problems, and an insensitivity to cultural diversity. The
influence of Utilitarianism has ebbed and flowed in the two centuries since,
but it can be taken as representative of a post-Enlightenment Western
tendency, particularly in the social sciences, to define rationality as the
practical organization of society: economic and productive efficiency, a
well-organized bureaucracy, and the like. This view of rationality as the
practical now has an influence on the day-to-day world greater than any other -
greater, on the whole, even than science.
At about the time that Bentham was crafting his chilly
humanitarianism, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant was preparing the
ground for the most philosophically influential modern view of reason:
relativism. Kant was dealing with the purely philosophical questions of why so
little real progress had been made in metaphysics and how to answer the
skeptical objections to the validity of all rational knowledge made by the
British empiricists John Locke and David Hume. His “Copernican Revolution,” as
he called it, reversed the priority of knowledge and truth. He asserted that
such principles as the law of causality and the permanence of substance were
universally valid not because they were truths that we discover in the world
but because they were the concepts that our mind uses to organize experience.
They were thus subjectively but not objectively valid. Kant’s system foundered
on technical philosophical shoals, but other philosophers took up his insight
that the world we experience is shaped by the contents of our own minds.
Philosophers, especially in Germany, turned from seeking eternal rational truth
to studying the nature of human subjectivity. Hegel, who was a young man when
Kant died, worked out an intricate system in which history was the unfolding of
various aspects of the human spirit. In the work of Marx, human subjectivity
was the product of the individual’s class in the economic structure. Hegelian
ideas of the relativity of truth then shaped the social sciences that emerged
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the new discipline of
comparative religion. If truth was simply a function of where and when one
lived and how one was educated, then no culture or religion was inherently
superior to another; each was equally true and had to be understood in its own
terms.
The
rise of relativism put enormous pressure on religion, forcing religious
communities to choose between acknowledging the truth of all other religions or
rejecting modern thought and its scholarly understanding of religion.
The West also produced two great antirationalist movements,
both still major influences on Western thought and culture, one a reaction to
medieval scholasticism and the other a reaction to the Enlightenment and
scientific reason.
The medieval Catholic Church relied on three sources of
knowledge: scripture, tradition, and reason. Of these, scripture was perhaps
the least important in practice. The church knew that the bread and wine of the
Eucharist became the body and blood of Christ, not because scripture clearly
said so or because reason could prove it, but because the church believed it
and had born witness to it in the liturgy for more than a thousand years. The
enormous structure of church doctrine, ritual, practice, government, and law
rested on very tenuous scriptural foundations. When the church hierarchy fell
into disrepute because of its blatant corruption, reformers challenged the
bases of its authority. In the sixteenth century, this blossomed into a schism
that would later be known as the Protestant Reformation. The Protestants
disagreed among themselves about many things, but in general they privileged
scripture over all other sources of knowledge, whether religious or secular.
They tended to reject the tradition of the church when it could not be justified
by the clear text of the Bible, invoking the principle “Scripture alone.” The
result was various forms of scriptural literalism that are influential to the
present day. Originally, the focus of Protestantism was anti-Catholicism, but
Protestant ideas about scripture could justify the rejection of other
religions, other sects of Protestantism, certain aspects of science - notably
biology and geology - secular scholarship, and the secularization of culture.
Although
Protestants are exceedingly diverse, the original guiding impetus and the
reality of much of Protestantism is antirationalist, denying reason an
independent role in finding religious truth and making reason’s legitimacy in
other areas of thought contingent on harmony with scripture. Nevertheless,
Protestantism has often claimed the mantle of reason, whether in the somewhat
scholastic sense of providing the most reasonable explanation of scripture or
in the sense of presenting a fundamentally reasonable account of God and the
world.[13]
Certainly, Protestants developed the art of religious polemics to a very high
order and have put the products of modern technology and technical rationality
to very effective use, starting with the printing press.
Romanticism, the second great Western antirationalistic
movement and a reaction to the sunny reasonableness of the Enlightenment, is a
movement with artistic roots. The Romantics saw modern society as having lost
touch with the emotional and irrational, or subrational, aspects of life.
Romanticism was characterized by an interest in untamed nature as opposed to
the rational study of nature characteristic of such Enlightenment figures as
Dr. Franklin. Its founders exalted the primitive, the emotional, the ecstatic,
the Dionysian. They were fascinated by heroes and outlaws. They produced good
art and murky philosophy. As a clear movement, Romanticism rose and fell
quickly, but its legitimization of the irrational survived, regularly
reappearing in art, having a major influence in psychology, and spawning such
phenomena as the counterculture of the 1960s and modern environmentalism.
THE CIVIL WAR OF REASON IN THE WEST
Even excluding Greek ideas about logos, at least five distinct notions of reason and
two ideals of nonreason are at work in the modern West - and none of the seven
is monolithic. It is not surprising then that Western intellectual life has
been in more or less continual civil war for almost five hundred years. I will
list a sampling of four of the most important intellectual conflicts between
rival conceptions of reason and nonreason, but conflicts could be identified
between any pair of these conceptions.
Scholasticism versus Protestant textualism.
This conflict literally resulted in civil war for about two hundred years. The
issue, simply stated, is what the source of religious knowledge is. Is it the
pure revelation as expressed in Bible, literally understood in its every verse,
as the more extreme Protestants would have it, or is it the whole tradition of
the Roman Catholic Church: the Bible, the church’s tradition of belief and
worship, and the accumulation of two thousand years of pious reflection and
intellectual examination of scripture and tradition? The Protestant answer is
clear and simple; the Catholic answer richer and more subtle.
Science versus religion. This is not simply a matter of whether the
account of creation in Genesis is to be taken as infallible history, symbol, or
primitive myth; it also concerns what credit is to be given to the fruits of
secular academic study of the Bible and the history of religion. This conflict
began at least as early as Copernicus and continues to this day, especially in
the United States.
Relativism versus Utilitarianism and Protestant
textualism. In the first half
of the nineteenth century, India was the scene of an intellectual conflict
between the so-called “Anglicists” and “Orientalists.” The Anglicists were
those who wished to modernize India by introducing modern higher education in
English, the better thereby to eliminate the undesirable aspects of Indian
culture and religion, including Islam. This was a project dear to the heart of
the Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who had himself undertaken to produce a new
secular legal code for India. The Orientalists were those who wished to
cultivate Indian culture and held that any modernization must move forward
within the limits imposed by that culture. The evangelical Protestants of
Britain had made common cause with the Utilitarians, seeing Indian culture,
both Hindu and Muslim, as a barrier to the spread of Christianity. The
Orientalists were scholars and old Indian hands who saw their rivals’ project -
correctly, as it turned out - as a threat to British control of India.[14]
The rights of man versus the rights of the
community. Enlightenment reason stressed the rights of the
individual as a rational moral and political actor. Relativist thinkers,
whether Marxists, with their emphasis on class conflict, or modern social
scientists, with their respect for cultural differences, have tended to come
down on the side of the rights of communities, as have nationalists, who are
generally romantics to the core. Defenders of the moral integrity of the
community have come into conflict with advocates of the rights of the
individual in such areas as sexual freedom. In past decades, the split has
tended to be between conservatives supporting individual rights and liberals
supporting community rights, but these lines are sometimes reversed. Right now,
the conservative movement in the United States is divided between social
conservatives, who support community rights - in their case, community
standards of morality - and economic conservatives and libertarians, who
support, respectively, the economic and social rights of individuals.
To
these conflicts we could add others: Protestant textualism versus romanticism
on morality, scholasticism and Protestantism versus relativism on the
authority of religion, and so on. We must not imagine that a commitment to
reason guarantees agreement, even in the broadest sense, for the West has
harbored conceptions of reason utterly at variance with each other.
ISLAM AND WESTERN CONCEPTIONS OF REASON
At this point I would like to sketch some ways in which
these conceptions of reason may illuminate debates in Islam. After all, none of
these conceptions necessarily need be Western, and Western ideas now influence
the intellectual atmosphere of the entire world.
Scholasticism and the Islamic religious sciences. No one familiar with European scholasticism
will fail to recognize their kinship with the Islamic religious sciences,
especially Islamic law. There is the same notion of revelation as the ultimate
source of authority to be expounded in a highly rationalistic manner. Indeed,
it has been observed that the world’s last scholastics work and teach in the
Shi'ite academies of Iran.[15]
Nevertheless, the focus of European scholastics was a theological philosophy
that is now largely obsolete, but the focus of the modern Muslim scholastics is
law, which continues to be relevant.
Protestant textualism and Islamic revivalism. It is now almost trite to compare groups like
the Salafis to the early Protestants. Both revolted against a decayed
scholastic tradition in the name of a return to scripture. Like the early
Protestants and many modern fundamentalist Christian churches, they draw their
strength from the newly educated and deploy the tools of modern technology in
support of a religious ideology that purports to be a return to the original
purity of their faith. Alnd like the early Protestants, their movement has been
accompanied by violence.
The ideal of the logos, scholasticism, and the
fate of philosophy in Islam. Islam
met Greek philosophy fairly early in its history, oddly enough in a largely
pagan form, and faced similar conflicts between reason and revelation.
However, the history of philosophy in Islam was very different from its history
in Christianity. The greatest figures of the early centuries of Islamic
philosophy proposed a Platonic political philosophy as a way of understanding
religion and revelation, an effort that failed decisively. Then, not unlike
what occurred in medieval European thought, philosophy made common cause with
mysticism and sacred law to achieve a permanent place in Islamic religious
education.11
The Enlightenment, relativism, Utilitarianism,
and the Sharia. Islamic law
continued largely unchanged into the nineteenth century, when it was abruptly
displaced in most places by European codes imposed by colonial administrators.
Sharl‘a law then remained largely irrelevant (and thus largely unchanged) for
another century until the rise of political Islam in the 1970s, when various movements sought to reimpose the
Sharl‘a as a cure - often seen as a more or less miraculous cure - for the
problems of Muslim societies. But the Sharl‘a had faced neither the questions about
the rights of individuals raised by Enlightenment political thinkers nor the
issues of legal reform raised by the Utilitarians nor the demands for the
rights of minority communities raised by those committed to a relativistic
pluralism.
In
the following chapters, these conceptions are in the background as I survey
debates about reason within Islam. I look first at the role [16]
of reason and anti-reason in Islamic law. I then look at two attempts to
incorporate philosophy into Islam, the first associated with Farabi and his
political philosophy and the second with Suhrawardi and his use of mysticism
within a Neoplatonic system. In the latter context, I discuss the role of
science in medieval Islam and offer some suggestions as to why the Scientific
Revolution did not occur in the Islamic world. I then return to the question of
scholasticism and the Islamic religious sciences, examining the way in which
reason, particularly in the form of logic, was systematically incorporated into
the mature Islamic religious sciences. I also examine the more specific
question of how medieval Islamic religious scholars handled the problem of
disagreement. Finally, I look at the last two centuries: the rejection of the
old Islamic tradition of scholasticism in favor of a new textual literalism and
a Western-style secularism. I conclude by examining some of the intellectual
discontents of contemporary Islam and how earlier Islamic notions of reason
might guide the debates of Muslim thinkers in the twenty-first century.
Empirical Knowledge of the Mind of God
The medical historian Ibn al-Qifti, writing in the first
half of the thirteenth century, reports that a certain John the Grammarian was
the Jacobite bishop in Alexandria when the Muslim general ‘Amr b. al-‘Às
conquered Egypt in the mid-seventh century. John had rejected the usual
Christian beliefs about the Trinity - which we may suppose means the Greek
Orthodox views - in favor of a doctrine that ‘Amr found more acceptable. When
the Arabs seized the city,
John
appealed to ‘Amr, “Today you have seized everything in Alexandria and taken
possession of all the booty in it. I do not dispute your right to what of it is
useful to you, but we have a better right to that which is of no use to you, so
order it to be returned.” ‘Amr said to him, “What is it that you need?” John
replied, “The books of philosophy in the royal libraries. You have put a guard
over them. We need them and they are of no use to you.”
John then explained that Ptolemy Philadelphus had
established the library at great cost and effort, eventually accumulating 450,120 books.
When his librarian told him that there nonetheless remained a great many more
books in countries from India to Rome, Ptolemy was astonished and ordered him
to continue collecting. Every ruler of Alexandria since that time had
faithfully maintained the library’s collection.
‘Amr
was astonished at John’s demand and replied, “I can give no orders without
asking the permission of the Commander of the Faithful, ‘Umar b. al-Khattab.”
He wrote to ‘Umar and informed him of what John had said, as mentioned above,
and asked him what he should do about the matter. A letter came back from ‘Umar
saying, “As for the books that you mention, if what is in them is in agreement
with the Book of God, then what is in the Book of God makes them unnecessary,
but if what is in them contradicts the Book of God, then there is no need for
them and you should undertake to destroy them.” ‘Amr began distributing them
among the baths of Alexandria to burn in their furnaces. I was told that the
number of baths in those days, but I have forgotten. They are said to have
burned for six months. Hearken to what has been said and be astonished![17]
This story is not true, as has been known since the time of
Gibbon. The Alexandrian Library was already in decline at the time of the Roman
conquest in the first century b.c.e., when Caesar’s army
accidentally burned part of it, and the suppression of paganism in the fourth
century seems to have led to the loss of whatever may have been left. Libraries
are fragile things, vulnerable to fire, political instability, dishonesty,
insects, and leaky roofs. What interests me about this story is that it was
told by a Muslim about the Caliph ‘Umar. Something about it must have resonated
with Muslim memories of the character of ‘Umar and early Islamic attitudes
toward revelation.
The
order attributed to ‘Umar does not represent Islamic doctrine, whether now, or
in the Middle Ages, or in the age of the Prophet. Muslims have never thought
that all knowledge was in the Qur’an, except perhaps in some symbolic sense.
The Qur’an itself said, “Obey God and His Messenger,” meaning the Qur’an and
the Prophet, and a widely quoted hadith urged Muslims to “Seek knowledge, if
even in China.” The Prophet sought advice on worldly matters from more
experienced followers. Muslim legal scholars have disagreed on the number of
sources of sacred law (the usual number being four), but they have never
thought that the Qur’an was sufficient in itself. In practice, they have
depended more on the legal tradition itself, supplemented by the hadith, the
recorded sayings and actions of the Prophet. Ibn al-Qifti would have known all
of this, as would the Syrian Christian historian Barhebraeus, who was mostly
responsible for this story becoming known in Europe. What, then, makes this a
good story, one worth repeating by a scholar who certainly would not have been
in sympathy with the willful destruction of ancient books of secular knowledge?
The
answer is, of course, that Muslims did tend to think of revelation as
encompassing all truth, or at least all of the highest kind of truth. This
story portrays it more starkly than Muslim scholars usually would, but there
was an absoluteness to ‘Umar’s Islam - ‘Umar being a man of notoriously stern
and ascetic piety - that makes the story plausible. The premise that underlies
it is that absolute knowledge, knowledge of the highest order, can only be
obtained through revelation. In particular, the knowledge that a Muslim must
have to achieve salvation can be had only empirically, through a precise
knowledge of the life and career of a single man, the Prophet Muhammad, and the
book that was revealed through him. Muslims undertook to acquire this salvific
knowledge by gathering and evaluating of every scrap of knowledge, or purported
knowledge, about the life and career of the Prophet and those who knew him.
This enterprise is chiefly embodied in two Islamic intellectual disciplines:
the science of hadith, which is the study of the reports of the sayings and
doings of the Prophet and those around him, and the science of fiqh,
the body of law inferred from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s instructions and
example. This project is essentially empirical or, to be more exact,
historical. Its methods are the collection of individual anecdotes; the
weighing, classifying, and collating of this historical data; and then - very
cautiously - the inference of their underlying spiritual and legal meanings so
as to be able to deduce the law applying in new cases.
The
intellectual presuppositions of these two enterprises have determined the
relation between reason and Islamic thought to the present.
THE ENTERPRISE OF HADITH COLLECTION
A hadith (hadith, “news” or “story”) is an anecdote reporting
something that the Prophet said, did, or did not do, that someone said or did
in his presence without his objecting, or that one of his knowledgeable
Companions said or did.[18]
A typical example is:
‘Ubayd
Allah b. Müsâ related to us, “Hanzala b. Abi Sufyan informed us on the
authority of ‘Ikrima b. Khalid on the authority of Ibn ‘Umar, ‘The Messenger of
God, may God bless him and give him peace, said, “Islam is built upon five
things: the testimony that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His
prophet, prayer, giving alms, pilgrimage, and the Ramadan fast.”’”3
This tradition happens to come from the Sahïh of Bukhari, the most prestigious of the six
authoritative Sunni hadith collections, and reports the famous five pillars of
Islam, but hadith can deal with almost any conceivable religious subject.
Another hadith, selected quite at random, concerns a problem arising from the
animal sacrifice made during the Hajj pilgrimage:
On
the authority of‘All [the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law and the fourth
Caliph], “The Messenger of God, may God bless him and give him peace, ordered
me to take care of his fattened [sacrificial] camels and to give their meat,
hides, and trappings as alms, but not to give anything to the butcher, saying
that we would pay him ourselves.”4
an informed
Muslim point of view is Muhammad Zubayr Siddiql, Hadïth Literature: Its Origin, Development, and Special
Features, ed. Abdal Hakim Murad (Cambridge, England: Islamic Texts Society,
1993). The classic Muslim
summary of the science of hadith is ‘Uthman b. ‘Abd alRahman al-Shahrazuri,
known as Ibn al Salah, Kitab
Ma‘rifatAnwa‘ Tlm al-Hadïth, commonly known as al-Muqaddima, ed. Nur al-Dln ‘Itr as ‘Ulum al l.ladatl'i (Damascus: al-Maktaba
al-‘Ilmiya, 1387/1966) and ed. ‘A’isha ‘Abd al-Rahman as Muqaddamat Ibn al-Salah wa-Mahasin al-Istilah (Dhakha’ir
al-‘Arab 64; . . . . •••'
2nd ed.; Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1989); trans. Eerick Dickinson, rev. Muneer Fareed,
as An Introduction to the
Science of the Hadïth (Great Books of Islamic Civilization; Reading:
Garnet, U.K., 2006). Briefer
traditional accounts of the Muslim hadith sciences are found in Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddima VI.10; trans. Franz Rosenthal, vol. 2, pp. 447-63, and Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah al-IHakim
al-Nisaburi, al-Madkhal ila
Ma‘rifat al-Iklïl, trans. James Robson as An Introduction to the Science of Tradition (London, Royal
Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1953). The classical collections of hadith are now
available in English in translations of various qualities. There are too many
important collections of hadith to cite here, even when restricted to those
available in English translation, but two important and representative
collections of hadith are cited in notes 3 and 4
below.
3
al-Bukhari, al-Sahïh (Beirut: Dar Haya’
al-Turath al-‘Arabi, n.d.), Kitab al-Iman 2, 1.9. There are many other Arabic editions as well as
English translations by Muhammad Muhsin Khan, The Translation of the Meanings of Sahïh al-Bukharï (Gujranwala,
Taleem-ul-Quran Trust, 1971-), and
Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad, English
Translation of Sahih al-Bukhari (Lahore: Ahmadiyya Anjuman
Isha‘at-i-Islam, [19561-1962), both reprinted several times.
4
Baghawi, Mishkat al-Masabïh 36.7.121, in Maulana Fazlul Karim, ed. and trans., Al- Hadis: An English Translation and Commentary
of Mishkat-ul-Masabih. (Calcutta: Because early Islamic
historians used a similar format, there is no clear line between hadith and
historical reports about the Prophet’s life. Muslim scholars collected
hundreds of thousands of such reports during the first three centuries of
Islamic history, compiling them according to various principles.
All
hadith share a common format. They begin with a chain of authorities, the isnad or support. In principle, each of the
individuals mentioned should have personally heard the hadith in question from
the mouth of his predecessor, going back to the Prophet himself. In the case of
the first hadith I quoted, we are to believe that Ibn ‘Umar, who was a young
man during the Prophet’s later years, heard him say, “Islam is built on five
things...” and then told the story to ‘Ikrima, who told it to Hanzala, who told
it to ‘Ubayd Allah, who told it to Bukhari, each of the five men being careful
to pass on the exact wording of the story as he heard it from the chain of
previous authorities. The actual content of the hadith is called the matn, text, and naturally can be supported by more
than one isnad, as more
than one person may have heard the Prophet say the same thing and more than one
person may have heard each of the authorities.
There
are two underlying issues here: the historical problem of the reliability of
these reports and the legal and theological problem of the presuppositions of
the whole enterprise. I am mainly interested in the legal and theological
issue, since that is what shaped Islamic thought in the long run, but I will
mention the historical issue first.
The career of Muhammad changed the lives of those he came
into contact with, whether through their conversion to Islam, the disruption
of traditional Arabian society, or the new horizons that the rise of Islam
opened to the Arabs. There cannot be the slightest doubt that people who had
known the Prophet told stories about him to those who had not and that these
stories were passed down in families, in communities, and in
Muhammadi Press, 1938-1940; often
reprinted), 3.621. This is a compilation made at about the
beginning of the twelfth century, in which the hadith from all of the
recognized collections are included without full chains of authority. The
translation is my own. There is also a full translation by James Robson
(Lahore, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1960-1964, and reprinted
several times). networks of scholars. It is also obvious that after a
century or two, not all of the stories in circulation would be reliable. People
surely mixed things up or gave their ancestors a more glorious role in the rise
of Islam than perhaps they deserved. They might attribute to the Prophet what
actually was said by some other early Muslim teacher. Scholars attributed to
the Prophet what he ought to have said but did not get around to mentioning.
Preachers invented entertaining and edifying stories. Sectarians put their
doctrines into the Prophet’s mouth to give them authority. By the time the
collection of hadith got underway in earnest in the second Islamic century, it
was obvious that a large majority of stories in circulation about the Prophet
were either spurious or of uncertain reliability.
The
tool that the hadith scholars devised to sort out the precious wheat from the
abundant chaff was the isnad. If they could show that Ibn ‘Umar, ‘Ikrima, Hanzala, and
‘Ubayd Allah were all men of sound faith, good memory, and reliable scholarship
and that each had studied with his predecessor, or at least could have, then we
would know with reasonable confidence that the report attested by this chain of
authorities could be relied on. If, however, ‘Ikrima had been born after the
death of Ibn ‘Umar or Hanzala was a heretic or ‘Ubayd Allah a notorious forger
of hadith or a man of unreliable memory, then we could reject the hadith as
lacking authority. This led to the compilation of a fresh mass of historical
data, as it had become necessary to know the dates, teachers and students,
travels, and reliability of everyone who appeared in the isnad of a hadith along with the hadith and isnads that their names appeared in. The result was
that the compilations of hadith were supplemented by enormous reference books:
biographical dictionaries of the Companions of the Prophet and early scholars,
commentaries on the hadith collections, and analyses of special problems, such
as defective isnads. The
synthesis of this enormously complex mass of detail was still going on seven or
eight hundred years after the death of the Prophet. However, from the point of
view of most Muslim scholars, the issue was put to rest in the ninth century
with the acceptance of six hadith collections as authoritative, including two
that were compiled according to particularly exacting standards. A similar
process resulted in several comparable authoritative collections of Shi‘ite
hadith. And that was that, for a famous hadith assured Muslim scholars that
they would never reach consensus on an error.
The matn, the actual text transmitted in the hadith,
could also be subjected to historical evaluation, but for the most part the
hadith scholars concentrated on the chain of authorities. Ibn al-Salah’s
standard work on the principles of hadith criticism concentrates almost
entirely on the isnad, apart
from some incidental issues like rare words in the text. The historian Ibn
Khaldun’s account of the sciences connected with hadith also ignores the
evaluation of the plausibility of the text. Medieval scholars did occasionally
question the content of hadith - judging, for example, that hadith in praise of
particular places were likely to be forgeries - but they did not reject hadith
for legal or theological anachronisms, which Western scholars of hadith and
Islamic legal history consider to be certain evidences of forgery. The great
jurist Shafi‘i rejected rational critique of the content of the hadith text on
principle: “No one is authorized to apply reasoning (li-ma)
or questioning (kayf) or anything tainted by personal opinion (ra’y)
to a tradition from the Prophet.”[19]
Modern
Western scholars generally have seen the issue differently.[20] It is clear that the
thousands of hadith with their libraries of supporting detail can shed great
light on the religious thought of the period in which they originated. But what
period, Western scholars have asked, was that? It certainly was not usually the
time of the Prophet, since even the medieval Muslim scholars agreed that most
hadith could not be authentic and that they originated during the legal and
doctrinal controversies of the first two Islamic centuries. Thus, Bukhari, the
author of the most respected of the hadith collections, is said to have
collected several hundred thousand traditions, only seven thousand of which
were sufficiently reliable to be included in his collection. Western scholars
soon despaired of isolating a body of hadith genuinely coming from the Prophet.
In practice, they have tended to accept the biographical hadith as authentic,
at least when considered as a whole. Despite some attempts at biblical-style
source criticism applied to the hadith and even the Qur’an, the general
narrative of the Prophet’s life as seen through biographical hadith seems
coherent and plausible enough; without it, we would be able to say almost
nothing about the Prophet and his career. However, there have been few Western
scholars willing to concede that any significant number of hadith on theological
and legal subjects can be known with confidence to be authentic. It simply is
not credible that large numbers of remarks of the Prophet survive that by happy
chance happen to address theological and legal issues of the later seventh and
eighth centuries. Scholars who then have investigated the issue in detail have
found many problems with the structure of isnads. The writing of hadith started late, but written
sources do survive, starting about a century before the great compilations.
When compared with the standard collections, the hadith found in these early
collections have less-complete isnads and show signs of being in an intermediate stage of
development. Hadith attributed to the Prophet in later collections are
attributed to a Companion of the Prophet in the older collections. Weaker isnads are later replaced with stronger ones. The matns of hadith in later collections are sometimes
found to be concatenations of texts from several earlier hadith. All of these
defects were known to Muslim hadith critics - indeed, there is an elaborate set
of technical terms for them in Arabic - but Western scholars are much less
sanguine about the possibility of sifting out a residue of authentic tradition
going back to the Prophet.
However,
when Western scholars did attempt to trace the origin of the hadith in the
religious controversies of the first two or three centuries of Islam, they were
not much more successful than the Muslim scholars because there is no agreement
among Western scholars about how to date the hadith. Various techniques have
been developed based on their ideological content or the structure of their isnads,
but none has won universal acceptance. Not surprisingly, modern Muslim scholars
have attempted to defend the authenticity of the authoritative hadith literature,
but it does not seem to me that the criticisms of the Western scholars have
been answered thus far. Whereas some recent Western scholars have been willing
to date the origins of the hadith literature to as early as the late seventh
century, many others remain skeptical, placing the origin of the hadith in the
eighth or even the ninth century.
However,
my major concern is not the historical origin or historicity of the hadith
literature as we know it, but the underlying epistemological premises on which
the methods of hadith scholarship are based and how these relate to other
manifestations of intellectual life in classical Islamic civilization.
THE INTELLECTUAL WORLD OF THE HADITH SCHOLARS
At the basis of the hadith scholars’ intellectual project
are two assumptions. First, it is impossible to deduce the will of God
rationally; it can only be known through such revelation as God chooses to send
to mankind.
One
might think otherwise. Medieval Christian thinkers often divided religiously
relevant knowledge into that which can be known by reason alone, that which can
be known by revelation alone, and that which can be known by both. The ancient
philosophers were inclined to think that everything worth knowing can be known
by reason. The Qur’an itself, with its statement, “We will show them Our signs
in the horizons and in themselves,” gives ground for belief that some part of
God’s mind can be known through contemplation of nature and introspection, a
theme that reemerges in Sufi thought in the form of a doctrine of God’s
self-revelation in the whole of the universe and the human heart.[21]
Nevertheless, some things obviously can only be known by revelation, the
number and times of the daily prayers being a classic example. The hadith
scholars chose to take this class of religious knowledge as paradigmatic.
The second assumption of the hadith scholars was that the
historically contingent can be known only by report. This, of course, is
largely true. Thedateofthe BattleofQâdisïyacannotbededuced by reason;itcan only
be known through the reports of eyewitnesses. Language and linguistic phenomena
fall into the same category. Again, it is possible to disagree and argue that
reason has a role to play in the form of rational criticism of historical accounts. We may judge the
plausibility of an account in relation to other accounts of the same or similar
events. We may make judgments on the basis of inherent plausibility, as Ibn
Khaldun did with biblical accounts of the numbers of Israelites in the
wilderness.[22]
We can weigh evidence for and against an account. Modern historiography uses
such techniques to evaluate the claims for various kinds of historical data.
But
this is not what the hadith scholars did, with the major exception of their
evaluations of the reliability of the individuals named in an isnad. The most obvious application of rational
criticism to hadith would be to reject anachronistic narratives, the hadith
that obviously refer to events or controversies after the death of the Prophet.
This is a basic tool of the Western scholars who have attempted to test the
authenticity of hadith or have tried to use hadith to illuminate religious
controversies in the first two or three centuries of Islam. Against such criticisms,
the hadith scholars could reply that the Prophet Muhammad was a prophet,
someone who knew the future, and that it is thus perfectly reasonable that the
revelation should include explicit foreshadowings of what would happen to the
Muslim community in times to come. A second intrusion of the miraculous into
hadith historiography is the assumption that all the Companions of the Prophet
were reliable for the purposes of hadith transmission. To this we might add
that the hadith scholars made their work more difficult by their pronounced
aversion to reliance on written texts, a dislike partially justified by the
defective nature of the early Arabic script. A written text might be used, but
it had to be authorized by an oral transmission. Finally, they would not accept
custom as evidence of revelation - that is, they would not accept the argument
that “this is how we have always done it, so it must be what the Prophet told
us to do.” There had to be an oral report originating in the Prophet’s time to
confirm it.
All
this yields a set of assumptions, narrow but consistent, made by the hadith
scholars:
1)
Only through revelation can the will of God for mankind be
known fully - or perhaps, be known at all.
2)
Revelation is a historically contingent event.
3)
The revelation of Islam was manifested through the Qur’an
and the words and actions of one man, the Prophet Muhammad, and ended with his
death.[23]
4)
Facts about the revelation to Muhammad can only be known
through the reports of eyewitnesses to his words and deeds, not by reason.
5)
The only way of knowing that these reports of unique and
miraculous events are reliable is through continuous oral transmission through
reliable transmitters.
From these assumptions, we can conclude that the historian
- for this is what the hadith scholar essentially is - should transmit
unchanged the word-for-word accounts of eyewitnesses. Any revision, synthesis,
or analysis will only reduce the reliability of the account. Whereas a modern
historian would consider analysis and synthesis a way of producing an account
more reliable than any of a collection of partial or biased sources, the hadith
scholar would see such an enterprise as simply the production of yet another
account, one that, unlike the eyewitness accounts, has no claim to embody
direct knowledge of the event.
What this means can be seen in its application by
historians. Consider a passage from Tabari’s History of Nations and
Kings, the most important and
comprehensive early history of Islam, written in the tenth century and employing
the methods of the hadith scholars. It reports an incident that supposedly took
place a few years after the death of the Prophet involving the Caliph ‘Umar,
the same who was later said to have ordered the burning of the books of the
library of Alexandria to heat the city’s bath water:
Al-Sari
wrote to me on the authority of Shu‘ayb on Sayf on Muhammad, al- Muhallab,
Talha, ‘Amr, and Sa‘id: When God granted victory to the Muslims, Rustam was
killed. When the news of the victory in Syria reached ‘Umar, he assembled the
Muslims and said: “How much of this property can the leader legally keep?” All
of them said:
As for his private needs, his livelihood, and
the livelihood of his family, neither more nor less; their garments and his
garments for the winter and the summer; two riding beasts for his jihad,
for attending to his needs, and for carrying him to his pilgrimage....
Al-Sari wrote to me on the authority of Shu‘ayb on Sayf on
‘Ubayd Allah b. ‘Umar: When ‘Umar received the news about the conquest of Qâdisïya
and Damascus, he assembled the people in Medina and said, “I was formerly a
merchant, and God provided sufficiently for my family by means of my commerce.
Now you have made me preoccupied with your affairs. What do you think, how much
of this property can I legally keep?” The people suggested a large amount,
while ‘All remained silent. ‘Umar said, “What do you say, O ‘All?”, and ‘All
replied, “What will keep you and your family in moderately good condition, but
you have no right to this property beyond that.” The people said: “The right
words are the words of [‘Ali] ibnAbi Tfalib.”[24]
These two versions of what is obviously the same story are
followed by three others: a short version in which someone else asks the
question and ‘Umar replies, mentioning moderately good conditions, the two
garments, and the two riding beasts; a much longer version, in which some other
Companions of the Prophet ask ‘Umar’s daughter to ask the question of her
father, eliciting a long reply about the austerity of the time of the Prophet;
and a fifth, quite different version talking at some length about the rightful
shares of the various groups entitled to part of the spoil. There is no attempt
to reconcile the various versions; they are just listed in succession. A modern
historian would probably dismiss the longer accounts as expansions by later
writers critical of the luxury of Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid times and would
see the kernel of the story as a policy instituted in ‘Umar’s time about what
claim the caliph had on the public purse for his personal needs, perhaps
wondering if these accounts incorporated an actual document from that time.
'Tabari simply presumes that whatever historical knowledge we may have of this
event is in these five accounts and that to tamper with them or choose from
among them is to risk the loss of irreplaceable historical data. And the hadith
scholars would be in full agreement with him - quite naturally, as Tabari
himself was also a distinguished hadith scholar, the author of a famous commentary
on the Qur’an that is almost entirely a collection ofhadith.
The
result of these assumptions has been the largest sustained biographical
enterprise in human history. If the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and actions are
the model that Muslims must follow, then every scrap of information about his
life is potentially of importance: his words, his actions, and even the things
he saw others doing and did not object to. Such information can be known
through the reports of those who knew him and, to some extent, by their later
conduct and words. The validity of these reports in turn can only be known by
evaluating the reliability of those who transmitted them, resulting in the
existence of an enormous secondary biographical literature.
The
hadith methodology leads us to expect a particular approach to determining
Islamic law. Everyone agrees that, in practice, the main source of Islamic law
is the example of the Prophet. The Qur’an has some explicit legal content, and
the commentators were able to squeeze out a little more by close study of the
text, but even such basic features of Islamic law as the requirement to pray
five times a day are missing from the Qur’an. Thus, we would expect that the
hadith would fill in the gap. Hadith scholars tended to agree, but not everyone
did. And therein lies one of the great controversies of early Islam: the
authority of these transmitted reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds in
relation to community tradition, inference, and personal opinion in the
derivation of Islamic law.
The point of collecting the hadith, and indeed the point of
Islamic religious knowledge in general, is to know what one ought to do in the
circumstances in which one finds oneself - in other words, the application of
revealed law to particular circumstances and to new kinds of cases. It is not
necessary to assume that hadith are the only tool for the application and
extension of the sacred law. One might suppose that the customary practice of
the Muslim community or some part of it was a better guide than reports
attributed to what inevitably was a small minority of the Prophet’s Companions.
One might also use inference and reason based on known principles of law or
practical realities. Both methods were used by Islamic legal scholars, and as
we shall see, there is little reason to doubt that historically, such methods
of discovering law predated the systematic collection and use of hadith. It is
also clear that the exaltation of hadith as a source of law actually represents
a reaction to the reliance on community tradition, reason, and personal
opinion. The argument made by the hadith scholars, who insisted that the
revealed texts should take precedence over human reasoning as sources of
Islamic law and belief, has been repeated in various forms throughout Islamic
history. Always the results have been ambiguous. Reason is made to defer to the
text of revelation but soon comes to govern how the text is to be understood,
the caliph in the realm of sacred text.
Classification as Codification
The hadith literature, consisting as it does of thousands
upon thousands of discrete atomic units, must be put into order before it can
be used. There are, broadly speaking, two ways of arranging hadith: by the isnads, that is, by the sources from which they are
supposed to derive, and by the contents of the matns. Hadith collections arranged according to the
first method are called musnads; those arranged according to the second method
are said to be musannaf or mudawwan, that is, arranged by subject. Obviously, the
first method suits the needs of hadith scholars, who are interested in
establishing the authenticity of particular hadith by reference to its
transmitters; the second is more useful to readers wishing to use the hadith to
establish the Prophet’s views or practices on a particular subject. The six
authoritative collections of hadith are all topically arranged, although the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal11 enjoys a
status not far below the six. [25]
The musannaf hadith collections are all arranged in similar
order, roughly following the standard order of manuals of Islamic law. The
earliest important collections of hadith actually were manuals of law, as in
the case of the Muwatta of
Malik b. Anas (d. 796), a legal
compilation containing many hadith dating from the century before the six
standard collections. These compilations may or may not begin with faith or a
related topic, but then they move on to treat purity, prayer, and the other
standard legal topics, along with some nonlegal topics like the excellences of
the Qur’an. Hadith are inserted under the appropriate heading - sometimes under
more than one if the author’s plan allows and if the content of a hadith fits
logically under more than one head. The most famous of the collections, the Sahïh of Bukhari (d. 870), starts most chapters with an introductory
text, either a verse from the Qur’an or a fragment of a hadith, that
establishes the subject and indicates the context within which the following
hadith should be understood. As a rule, there is no commentary apart from
technical references to isnïds
and variant readings. It all
conveys a tone of dispassionate, empirical neutrality.
Yet
if we ask what the presuppositions are that underlie these compilations and
their organization, the matter is not so neutral. First, these collections
represent selections, small fractions of the hadith material that was actually
available. Bukhari, for example, chose 2,602 hadith out of
a supposed 600,000 that he had collected. All six of the standard
Sunni collections contain a little fewer than twenty thousand hadith among
them. Although some of the criteria used to choose hadith are nominally neutral
- the exclusion of hadith with isnads featuring known fabricators of hadith, for example -
others are not. Shi'ites tend to be excluded from Sunni collections, and vice
versa. Some criteria for inclusion or exclusion of narrators disguise
ideological differences within Sunni Islam. Four of the collections include hasan (“good”) hadith, those which do not meet the
exacting criteria of sahïh (“sound”) hadith. The justification for inclusion of hasan hadith seems to be, in good part, that hadith
dealing with legal matters fall disproportionately into this category.
But
here I am concerned with another problem. Classification introduces
presuppositions that generally cannot be justified from within the corpus of
texts being classified. Francis Bacon, the great philosopher of empirical
science of early modern England, reflected on the relationship between
collected data and science:
Those
who have handled the sciences have been either Empiricists or Rationalists.
Empiricists, like ants, merely collect things and use them. The Rationalists,
like spiders, spin webs out of themselves. The middle way is that of the bee,
which gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but then
transforms and digests it by a power of its own.[26]
There is unquestionably an antlike quality to the hadith
scholars. Consider two premises that underlie the collection of hadith and
their compilation in classified compilations:
1)
The hadith are perspicuous - that is, their meaning is
clear.
2)
The classification is neutral. It does not affect the
understanding of the hadith because it is obvious what question a given hadith
answers or is relevant to.
With
regard to the first premise, although it is not likely that any hadith scholar
would hold that the hadith are absolutely self-sufficient as a source of
religious knowledge, the whole point was that if there was a text available
with a claim to carry the authority of the Prophet, it should take precedence
over other kinds of evidence. This notion is firmly implanted in Islamic
intellectual culture, even though most of the legal schools were unwilling to
accept this principle in so uncompromising a form.
With
regard to the second premise, classification is never neutral, a point that was
clear even to later Islamic scholars. The fifteenth-century scholar Suyütï
writes in the introduction to his commentary on Bukhari’s Sahih: . . .
Bukhari,
however, distributes the hadith in chapters appropriate for each, though that
hadith may be obvious or may be obscure. The application of the obscure hadith
may be direct, implicit, related to something general, pointing to a
disagreement with an opponent, or indicating that one of the paths of that
hadith contains that which will yield what is intended. Even though the wording
of the text does not mention it, the context points to what is indicated by it,
so that one can cite it as proof, even though it does not rise to being its
condition.[27]
Moreover, Bukhari gives headings for his chapters: verses
of the Qur’an and fragments of hadith, some of which are not included in the Sahih because they are defective in some way or
another. In some cases, there is a chapter heading with no hadith underneath
it, meaning that Bukhari had found no sound hadith to support his point. These
headings are more than neutral titles, as Suyütï indicates, because they are
sometimes broader, narrower, or different than the meanings of the hadith that
follow. Thus, they indicate Bukhari’s own view of how the hadith should be
interpreted. This has led to the remark that the headings contain his fiqh - his legal theory.[28]
The
process by which hadith collections edged toward becoming fiqh culminates with the Sunan works, hadith collections devoted to legal
hadith that not only are arranged by topic but whose very criteria of inclusion
are loosened, legal hadith not uncommonly falling into the lesser category of hasan.
THE HISTORICAL PRIORITY OF fiQH TO HADITH
Fiqh,
literally “understanding,” is Islamic law as expounded by human scholars, and
books of fiqh are books of
legal rules. Fiqh is to be
distinguished from the shana, the law as God intended it; from usul al-fiqh, “the principles of fiqh,” the rules governing the deduction of the law by
scholars; and from the sunna, the custom of the community coming ultimately from
Muhammad - that is, the shari‘a in practice. In terms of the principles of mature Islamic
jurisprudence, the hadith come before fiqh, because hadith are supposed to be
the main embodiment of the sunna.
There is a dispute here between
modern Western scholars of Islam and defenders of the traditional Islamic view
of Islamic legal history. Western scholars, who in general have been unwilling
to accept the traditional account of the transmission of the hadith from
Muhammad, have also questioned the traditional account of the dependence of fiqh on hadith.
The legal schools arose out of the legal traditions of the
various important Muslim centers, notably Medina. The Maliki school of Malik
b. Anas (whose Muwatta[29] contains so many hadith that it enjoys a status
not far below those of the six authoritative hadith collections) was associated
with the customary practice of Medina and traced its origins to the judicial
rulings of the Caliph ‘Umar. The hadith, at least as a discipline, arose later
than the legal tradition and to some extent as a reaction to it.[30]
Early legal texts, which can be dated with considerably more confidence than
the hadith, are important sources for dating the rise of hadith, both as a
discipline and as a genre, because these texts contain hadith in an obviously
immature form, with improper, incomplete, or missing isnads.
From
the point of view of the early legal schools, the hadith scholars were
demanding that hadith reports resting on the authority of one or two people
supplant the authority of well-established community and scholarly traditions
dating back to the time of the Prophet. There are a number of anecdotes in
which Malik criticizes legal scholars who presumed to prefer the authority of
hadith to community tradition - for example, when he excoriated Abu Yusuf, a
pupil of Abu Hamfa, for presuming to demand hadith in support of the form of
the call to prayer used in Medina: “The call to the prayer has been done [here]
every day five times a day in front of witnesses, and sons have inherited it
from their fathers since the time of the Messenger of God, may God bless him
and grant him peace. Does this need ‘So-and-so from so-and-so’?” When Abu Yusuf
presumed to question the amount of a sa’, a particular dry measure, Malik sent the people
in the room out to bring back examples of the measure to show to the
impertinent visitor.[31]
Second,
inference as a source of Islamic law was well-established by the time the
hadith scholars became a serious influence, enough so that the supporters of
hadith scornfully dubbed their opponents ahl al-ra’y, “people of opinion.” It is unquestionably the
case that the so- called “Ancient Schools” of law, those predating the work of
Shafi‘i at the beginning of the ninth century, were more inclined to use
personal opinion as a basis of law, although, as we have seen, they also relied
on sunna of a more
diffuse nature than the supporters of hadith were willing to concede. This set
the stage for a controversy that may be taken as an archetypefor
laterlslamiccontroversiesbetweensupportersofareligious system incorporating both
rationalism and custom and reformers who sought return to the text.
The
problem facing any Islamic legal scholar is the new case. For Sunnis, there
could be no new information about God’s will for mankind after the death of the
Prophet in 632. What remained
were the text of the Qur’an, the Companions’ memories of the Prophet’s words
and actions, and the ongoing custom of the community established by the
Prophet. Some sources report that as early as the time of the first Caliphs,
newly appointed governors and judges were given advice about how to handle the
legal cases that came before them, and there is no reason to doubt that certain
of the Companions developed a reputation for legal knowledge and practical
wisdom.[32]
However, it was the lawyers of the Ancient Schools who first faced the problem
head-on. The oldest sources show us what we would expect to find: cases decided
by a combination of citations from the Qur’an and references to the customary
practice of the community and the opinions of the Prophet, respected
Companions, and later individuals with reputations for knowledge, all analyzed
and decided according to informal reasoning, analogy, and practical common
sense. By the time of the earliest surviving specialized legal texts, some
degree of methodological self-consciousness had entered Islamic legal
discussions, with Medina, Mecca, Iraq, and Syria being the most important
centers and having slightly varying views.[33]
This
balance was disturbed in the eighth century by the emergence of an assertive
community of hadith scholars demanding that sunna be determined by reference to hadith, not by
reference to local legal tradition and customary practice. From a legal point
of view, there were problems with the hadith scholars’ demand. In the nature of
things, hadith represented the testimony of only one or a few individuals.
Even if the hadith were accepted as authentic, was it reasonable to overturn
the tradition of Medina, a legal tradition established by the Prophet himself,
on the basis of isolated reports of what he might have said or done in the presence
of, at most, a handful of people? Nevertheless, the argument of the hadith
scholars carried great weight in an Islamic context, as indeed it still does.
If a hadith represents what the Prophet said, ought we not to obey it? The
argument for textual literalism is simple - perhaps simplistic - but it has
never been an easy one for Islamic scholars committed to more complex
intellectual systems to answer. Thus, from the time of Shafi‘1, the legal scholar
most responsible for making hadith the chief and almost the only determinant of
sunna, Muslims have tended to understand sunna and hadith as being more or less synonymous, and
hadith have assumed a status in practice, although perhaps not in theory, almost
equal to that of the Qur’an.
LITERALIST CHALLENGE AND RATIONALIST COOPTION
During the course of the ninth century, hadith gained
acceptance as a source of Islamic law, largely supplanting more diffuse
conceptions of sunna. Although the chief collections of hadith won a
sort of canonical status, in the long run the results were not altogether as
the early hadith scholars might have wished. The process of the rationalization
of the sacred law continued relentlessly, with Shafi‘i himself providing much of
the impetus. Ra’y,
personal opinion, the term with which the hadith scholars had tarred the
Ancient Schools, largely vanished from the vocabulary of the jurisprudents, but
qiyas, analogy, took its place. This process
culminated in the emergence of usUl al-fiqh, the principles of jurisprudence, as a separate discipline,
probably in the eleventh century. This discipline represented a highly
rationalistic legal scholasticism, and I return to it in chapter six in the
context of logic.
A
similar process occurred in the discipline of Kalam theology. The term Kalam means “speech” or “discussion” and was used to
refer to the debates about Islamic doctrine. These debates emerged in parallel
with Islamic legal thought, although they never were as central to Islamic
intellectual life as theology was in Christianity. The early debates dealt with
issues that rose naturally from the nature of the Qur’anic revelation and the
Muslim experience:
the
nature of God and how His unity and transcendence were to be harmonized with
His attributes and anthropomorphic Qur’anic verses;
free
will, providence, and predestination;
whether
a Muslim who has committed a grave sin remains a Muslim; the nature of the
Qur’an.
Questions of predestination and the status of the
unrepentant sinner were particularly charged because they had implications for
the legitimacy of the caliphs. The earliest Kalam debates seem to have involved
unsophisticated discussion using citations from the Qur’an and commonsensical
arguments.
The
theological counterpart to the Ancient Schools of law was the Mu‘tazila, a
school that arose in the eighth century and had its greatest prominence in the
ninth before gradually fading into extinction over several centuries. The
central concerns of the Mu‘tazila theologians are shown in the name they gave
themselves, ahl al-‘adl wa’l-tawhïd, “the people of justice and monotheism.” Their chief
theological concern was to protect the unity, transcendence, and justice of
God. Thus, they denied the separate reality of attributes in God on the grounds
that these would compromise His unity. From this followed their notorious
doctrine that the Qur’an was created, not eternal. Anthropomorphic verses of
the Qur’an were to be explained as metaphorical. God’s justice implied human
free will and the denial of predestination. His will was necessarily in
accordance with justice - not, as their opponents would usually insist, that
what He willed was justice by definition. The relatively crude rationalism of
the Mu‘tazila received official support during the ninth century, including a
systematic purge of its opponents known as the Mihna, “the trial” or “persecution.”
The
most vehement opponents of the Mu‘tazila were the same hadith scholars who were
opposing rationalism in law. The great traditionist Ahmad ibn JHanbal was
imprisoned, flogged, and threatened with death when he refused to accept the
doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an. Despite official support from the
‘Abbasid caliphs, the tide soon turned against the Mu‘tazila. As with rationalism
in law, rationalism in theology went against the grain of popular Islamic
sentiment. Neither the word of God nor the words of the Prophet were to be
explained away in so cavalier a fashion. Nevertheless, the Mu‘tazila had
identified genuine problems that the theology of the hadith scholars could not
resolve, and it was left to Abu’l-Hasan Ash‘ari (873-935),
a convert from Mu‘tazilism, to formulate a response that combined the
dialectical sophistication of the Mu‘tazila with the reassuring literalism of
the hadith scholars. The anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Qur’an were
to be accepted bi-la kayf-
without asking how - and the paradoxes to God’s power and human free will
ultimately made it impossible for man to comprehend the will and justice of
God.[34]
Nevertheless,
just as Shafi‘i’s incorporation of hadith into Islamic law prepared the way for
a renewed legal rationalism, Ash‘ari’s anti-Mu‘tazali theology employed
increasingly scholastic methods. Philosophers were becoming prominent in Islamic
intellectual life at about the time of al-Ash‘ari. At the end of the eleventh
century, the great lawyer, theologian, and mystic Abu Hamid Ghazali felt
obliged to provide a definitive Ash‘arite response to the philosophers in a
work entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers.21 The book arguedthat twenty philosophical
doctrines were either heretical or outright unbelief. Regardless of Ghazali’s
intentions, his work set the stage for the massive incorporation of arguments
and concepts derived from or informed by philosophy. The new theology, as it
emerged in the thirteenth century with figures such as Fakhr al-Din Razi and
Nasir al-Din 5Tûsï, was characterized by a thoroughgoing scholastic rationalism
that far transcended anything the Mu‘tazila had attempted.22
Husayn Mahmud (Cairo:
al-Ansar, 1397/1977), pp. 2.22,141-240; trans. Walter
C. Klein (American Oriental Series 19; New Haven:
American Oriental Society, 1940), pp. 50,88130. On this earlier period in Islamic
theology, see W. Montgomery Watt, trans., Islamic Creeds: A Selection (Islamic Surveys;
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994); A. J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and Historical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1932); and Harry
Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy
of the Kalam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). General histories of Islamic theology
are usually mainly devoted to the earlier period and include Winter, ed., Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic
Theology; Tilman Nagel, The
History of Islamic Theology, trans. Thomas Thornton (Princeton: Markus Wiener
Publishers, 2000); and Josef
van Ess, The Flowering of Muslim
Theology, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Early primary sources available in
English include Abu’l-Hasan al-Ash‘ari, The Theology of al-Ash‘ari: The Arabic Texts of
al-Ash‘ari’s Kitab al-Luma‘ and Risalat
Istihsan al-Khawd fi ‘Ilm al-Kalam, ed. and trans. Richard Joseph McCarthy
(Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1953), and idem, al-Ibana, trans. Klein.
21
Abü Hamid al-Ghazall, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael
E. Marmura (Islamic Translation Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University
Press, 1997; al- Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifah: Incoherence
of the Philosophers, trans. Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Lahore: Pakistan
Philosophical Congress, 1963. Ghazali
explains his attitudes towards philosophy, theology, and mysticism in his
famous autobiography, al-Munqidh
min al-Dalal, ed. ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud (5th ed. [Cairo]: al-Kitab al- Hadltha, 1385/1965); trans. W.
Montgomery Watt, The Faith and
Practice ofal-Ghazali (Ethical and Religious Classics of East and West;
London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953) and in
Richard Joseph McCarthy, Freedom
and Fulfillment (Library of Classical Arabic Literature; Boston: Twayne, 1980). The last translation is reprinted with
only the Munqidh and associated
notes but different pagination as Al-Ghazali’s
Path to Sufism (Louisville, Ky.: Fons Vitae, 2000).
Still,
there were always critics to protest the intrusion of rational methods into
disciplines supposedly founded on the Word of God and His Prophet. Ibn Qudama (1146-1223),
a Syrian JHanbali, condemned the whole enterprise of Kalam theology.[35]
The Sufi theologian Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), however strange many of his interpretations
of the Qur’an and hadith may seem, was insistent that every aspect of the text
be understood literally and taken seriously, and his works may be seen as a
literalist counterreaction to both philosophy and the Ash‘arite theology of his
time.[36]
The fourteenth-century reformer Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328)
vehemently criticized the rationalist legal theory and theology of his time,
although he found few supporters until much later.[37] In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the Akhbari school in Shi‘ite law argued that even
dubious reports from the Prophet and the Imams should be preferred to the
personal reasoning of the scholars of the rationalist Usuli school.[38]
Finally, much modern Islamic thought maybe understood as a reassertion of the
literal understanding of the Qur’an and hadith against the scholastic
traditions of the madrasas.
To
this we might add the discipline of Arabic grammar, which is linked with both
law and Mu‘tazlite theology. Arabic grammarians employed a thoroughly
rationalistic methodology that was subject to occasional, usually unsuccessful
antirationalist criticism. The twelfth-century grammatical empiricist Ibn
Mada’, for example, rejected the use of hypothetical grammatical entities in
favor of description of linguistic practice and criticized excessive reliance
on analogy. We should not be surprised then to discover that in law he was a
Zahiri - a “literalist” - a follower of a *
school that fiercely criticized the use of
analogy*[39]
THERE WAS, IN SHORT, A
CHARACTERISTIC PATTERN IN WHICH INDIvidual
Islamic disciplines came to be dominated by various forms of scholastic
rationalism and then were challenged by critics advocating a literalist return
to the sources* However, the literalism either was coopted by a renewed
rationalism, as in the case of the incorporation of hadith into fiqh or the philosophical interpretations of Ibn
‘Arabi’s literalist Sufi metaphysics, or was no more than a source of problems to
answer, as in Ibn Mada’s critique of rationalism in Arabic grammar* In
virtually every one of the Islamic religious sciences, the mature form of the
discipline was characterized by a thoroughgoing scholastic rationalism* This
Islamic scholasticism, its relation to logic, its expression in the Islamic
educational system, and its decline in recent times will be the subjects of
later chapters* Similar reassertions of the literal interpretation of the
sacred texts have taken place throughout Islamic history*
The Failure of the Farabian Synthesis
of Religion and Philosophy
There is a famous story that one night the philosopher
Aristotle appeared to the Caliph Ma’mUn in a dream telling him to seek what was
good according to reason. This dream, we are told, was one of the reasons that
the caliph initiated a project to translate Greek scientific literature into
Arabic. The caliph then wrote to the Byzantine emperor asking for manuscripts
to translate. Although at first reluctant, the emperor eventually complied, and
a delegation was dispatched from Baghdad to acquire the manuscripts. Perhaps
the books were not easily found, for we are told that the Byzantine Christians
had suppressed the study of the ancient philosophy in its full form and that
one of the ambassadors had to press the emperor for permission to break into a
temple library that had been locked since the conversion of Constantine. After
that, as the Fihriststates,
“ [B]ooks on philosophy and other ancient sciences became plentiful in this
country.”1 [40]
There
are very good reasons to doubt aspects of this story, but it is certainly true
that in the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslim officials and scholars made a
concerted effort to commission Arabic translations of the major works of
foreign science and philosophy, especially Greek science and philosophy. There
were also translations from Middle Persian, mainly works on astronomy,
astrology, and practical and political wisdom, some of them originally written
in Sanskrit. We can hardly doubt that the rulers and officials paying for this
enterprise were most interested in science and medicine, disciplines with
immediate practical import, but Greek science required Greek philosophy to be
understood properly, so a great many philosophical texts, including virtually
all the works of Aristotle and a very large selection of commentaries, were
translated. Like Muslim rulers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they
discovered that the importing of foreign technological knowledge brought with
it foreign modes of thought.
There
is much that we do not know about this process and why particular books were
translated and others were not. The scholars from Baghdad did not simply take
the works in popular among the Byzantine Greeks at that time; philosophy and
science were at a very low point in Byzantium during that century. Instead,
they often went back to classics that had passed out of common circulation -
translating, for example, Ptolemy’s Almagest instead of simpler works that were widely read
in the ninth century. In fact, there is reason to think that Islamic demand for
these works was a major factor in bringing them back into circulation in
Byzantium and thus assuring the survival of the Greek originals.2 From
philosophy, they mostly took Aristotle and his sober commentators in place of
more religious and colorful Neoplatonic works of a later
2005), pp. 10-31. Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. Emile
and Jenny Marmorstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), is a collection of annotated
translations of Arabic translations and discussions of Greek texts.
2
Saliba, Islamic Science, pp. 1-73, gives a
detailed critique of the medieval accounts and modern interpretations of the
translation movement and argues that the beginnings of the movement must be
situated in the later Umayyad bureaucracy and that the choice of books, the
technical knowledge required to do the translations, and the quality of the
Islamic scientific literature of the early period implies that Islamic
scientists took a much more active and creative role much earlier than
generally has been understood. Dimitri Gutas, “Geometry and the Rebirth of
Philosophy in Arabic with al-Kindi,” in Words, Texts, and Concepts Cruising the Mediterranean Sea:
Studies on the Sources, Contents, and Influences of Islamic Civilization and
Arabic Philosophy and Science, ed. R. Arnzen and J.
Thielmann (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 139. Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement
Oosterse Studies, 2004), pp. 196-209.
“ “
period. Most important, they took pagan philosophical works
instead of Christian ones.
For
scholars from a civilization organized around a revealed religion, Greek
philosophy posed problems and puzzles. It could scarcely be ignored, for it
provided the only comprehensive, rational explanation of the universe available
to the nations bordering the Mediterranean. This was especially true because it
was integrated almost seamlessly with ancient science, and together the two
disciplines provided a full explanation of the natural, mathematical, and
supernatural realms. The compelling strength of this synthesis is demonstrated
by the fact that it remained the dominant explanatory system in the western
half of the old world until the seventeenth century. Indeed, parts of the
ancient philosophical-scientific synthesis survive in modern science and philosophy
like fragments of old buildings incorporated into the structure of a modern
city: the axiomatic method in mathematics, the logic of categorical
propositions, the hierarchical system of biological taxonomy, and the logic of
diagnosis in medicine. The dogmatic theology of early Islam and the traditional
medicine and astronomy of the ancient Arabs were naïve by comparison.
On
the other hand, there were puzzling gaps and incomprehensible aspects in
ancient philosophy. Some were trivial; Islamicate scholars could make little
sense of Aristotle’s Poetics because they did not understand the genres of Greek
drama, a situation elegantly portrayed in a short story by the Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges.[41]
Two more important areas are of concern to us: the incompatibility of Greek
political philosophy with medieval political realities and the lack of an
adequate philosophy of religion. As we will see, it was the philosopher
Farabi’s genius that made the first of these puzzles the solution to the other.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION BEFORE ISLAM
Greek philosophy arose in a period when the traditional worship
of the Olympian gods was losing its appeal. Intellectuals of the fifth and
fourth centuries b.c.e. may have admired Homer as a poet, but they did not take
the stories of the violent, adulterous gods of Mount
Olympus very seriously, leading one modern scholar to write a book entitled Did the Greeks
Believe Their Myths?[42] The old cults survived mostly as state
religions of the various city-states - Athena as the patron goddess of Athens
being the best-known. The result seems to have been a widespread spiritual
hunger in this period filled by a variety of competing phenomena, of which
philosophy was one.[43]
The
early Greek philosophers dealt with the decline of traditional religion in one
of two ways. In the first approach, they might leave aside the question of
religion almost entirely. Thus, the Ionian physicists sought explanations of
the universe and its phenomena that were, broadly speaking, physical or at
least rationalistic. Gods might have found their places in such explanations,
but they were part of the universe and thus contained within a larger
explanatory system. Likewise, the Sophists left aside questions of religion and
ethics in favor or rhetoric and politics. The other approach was that of the
so-called “Italian School” - Pythagoras, Empedocles, Parmenides, and their
followers. They were creating philosophical religions with beliefs, taboos,
and worship practices - Parmenides’ poem of the goddess and Pythagoras’
religious order are two examples.[44]
“ “
This latter approach had clear connections with the mystery
cults that were becoming increasingly popular in the Greek world.7
These two approaches converged in the three greatest
figures of ancient philosophy: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates seems
to have started like an Ionian physicist, if we are to take seriously
Aristophanes’ caricature of him in The Clouds,
but he moved on to make ethical issues central in the philosophical enterprise,
giving them a vaguely religious context. However, because he wrote nothing, it
is difficult to pin down his contribution with precision, other than to know
that he gathered around him a brilliant circle of disciples.
With Plato and Aristotle, we are on firmer ground.
Biographical sources, both Greek and Islamic, link Plato to both the Ionians
and the Italians. Muslim sources refer to him as “the Divine” (al-ilahi). If this designation is fair, it suits the
elderly Plato of the Timaeus and the so-called “Unwritten Teachings” better than the
younger Plato of the early dialogues, concerned mainly with ethics, or the
middle dialogues, which are preoccupied with the metaphysics of the Forms,
epistemology, and politics. The most strikingly religious aspect of Plato’s
thought is a metaphysical and epistemological mysticism that becomes
increasingly prominent in his later dialogues. First, there is the distinction
between Being and Becoming, the notion that the things of this world are imperfect
copies of ideal Forms. To truly know, one must somehow become
a Commentary (Phronesis suppl. vol. iii.; Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1986); D. Gallop, Parmenides of Elea: Fragments (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1984); G. S. Kirk,
J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The
Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 263-85. On the
Pythagorean tradition, see W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1: The
Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1962), pp. 146-72; Charles H. Kahn,
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans:
A Brief History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001); Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, comp. and trans., The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library: An
Anthology of Ancient Writings which Relate to Pythagoras and Pythagorean Philosophy (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Phanes, 1987). On the
Islamic philosophical reception of the Italian school, see John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardi and the
Heritage of the Greeks (SUNY Series in Islam; Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), particularly chaps. 5 and 6.
7
The subject of the
so-called “mystery religions” is too complex to deal with here, but the
nineteenth-century notion of the ancient Greeks as exponents of pure
rationality has been thoroughly undermined by books such as E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather
Classical Lectures 25; Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1951), and W. K. C.
Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek
Religions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952).
free of this world and behold the ideal with spiritual
ideas unclouded by matter. This is most vividly portrayed in the allegory of
the cave in the Republic, in which those who think this world is the true
reality are compared to those who sit fettered in a cave, mistaking the shadows
they see on the wall of the cave for the true realities. Only after they break
their fetters and emerge from the cave are they able to see things for what
they really are.[45]
Other myths in the Republic and elsewhere pick up this theme in various ways. Toward
the end of his life, Plato’s “Unwritten Teachings” seem to have carried this
further, positing a system of ideal numbers that are the true reality. This
system had - or certainly can be interpreted as having - a strongly mystical
and religious character, and its full doctrine was reserved for the elect.[46]
For non-philosophers, religion was a matter of “beneficial lies.”[47]
[48]
After
Plato’s death, his philosophy generated a variety of successors. The most
important was Aristotlianism, which had little in the way of religion in it,
although its epistemology carried over some critical elements from Plato.
Aristotle seems not to have been religious at all, and his philosophy is
entirely concerned with the rational categorization and explanation of the
natural and human worlds. To be sure, there are gods in his metaphysics, but in
exactly the number - fifty-five or forty-seven - required to explain the
motions of the heavens.11 They are motors, not objects of worship.
Second
only to Aristotelianism, and probably more important in ancient times, was
Neoplatonism, a movement founded by Plotinus, who developed the mystical and
religious aspects of Plato’s thought in a system based on emanation from the
One beyond being. The extent to which Neoplatonism was Platonic can be debated,
depending mainly on the stress one wishes to place on the various aspects of
Plato’s dialogues and the unwritten teachings attributed to him in other
sources. The Neoplatonists considered themselves simply as Platonists, and
their interpretation of Platonism was the dominant one into early modern times.
The Neoplatonists were unquestionably religious, being deeply interested in
mysticism, magic, the occult, and Oriental cults.
Revealed
religion first appeared as a major intellectual force in the Mediterranean
world in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. There were at least
four significant revealed religions of relevance to us: Zoroastrianism, whose
influence in the Roman world was mostly indirect; Judaism, which at that time
was a more aggressively proselytizing religion than it would later become;
Christianity; and Manichaeism, a dualistic gnostic cult that for some centuries
was Christianity’s most dangerous rival. These religions incorporated certain
innovations. They were all, in one sense or another, monotheistic or at least
dualistic, representing a supreme God whose claims on man’s allegiance were
exclusive and incompatible with the worship of other gods. In this they
differed radically from the pagan religions that had preceded them, religions
that had been perfectly comfortable with the notion that different gods might
be worshipped in different places or that the same gods might be worshipped
under different names and in different ways in different countries. A pagan
traveler would worship the local gods as a matter of prudence and etiquette,
just as he would observe local laws and local table manners. Imperial officials
did so as a matter of policy. The revealed religions would not permit such
casual blending of cults.
Second,
revealed religions had prophets, men who claimed to deliver the supreme truth
from God to men, laying down doctrines that all should believe and laws that
all should follow. This was not entirely unprecedented. The ancient religions
had had their own prophets and lawgivers, and many cities claimed that a
divinized lawgiver had given them their laws, but the absoluteness and
universality of the claims of the monotheistic prophets were new. Finally,
there was scripture. There had been holy writings before, but the new
scriptures - the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Hebrew Bible of the Jews, the
Greek New Testament of the Christians, and the seven books of Mani - made
claims that transcended older oracular texts, echoing the absoluteness of the
claims of the Prophets who had revealed the teachings contained in these books.
A technical innovation, the codex or bound book, gave greater rhetorical power
to the phenomenon. The follower of one of these religions could point to the
book and claim that all truth was “between the two boards,” to use the Islamic
term.
Philosophers and Revealed Religion. The philosophers ignored the phenomenon of
revealed religion as long as they could. They were the last intellectually
significant defenders of ancient paganism, providing pagan education until
their schools were closed and their professors banished in the sixth century.
In the end, philosophy was reconciled to revealed religion, and specifically to
Christianity, not because the philosophers were converted or saw fit to develop
a philosophy of religion explaining the new forms of revealed religion, but
because young Christians were educated by philosophers and applied philosophy
to the explication and defense of Christian doctrines. Education in the Roman
world was inseparably bound up with philosophy and the pre-Christian Greek
classics. Long into the Byzantine period, elite education retained a largely
pagan syllabus. There were occasional efforts to Christianize the syllabus -
with paraphrases of the Bible in the style of Homer, for example - but these
efforts were the failures that they deserved to be. Moreover, young Christians
studied with pagan professors. Saint John Chysostom, the “golden-mouthed,” the
greatest preacher of Constantinople, was a student of the pagan rhetorician
Libanius, whose other prominent student was the Emperor Julian the Apostate.
Ancient Christian writers could no more ignore philosophy than modern
theologians can ignore science, nor did they wish to. Instead, in a long and
rancorous process, they harnessed Greek philosophy to the service of Christian
theology, thereby giving to Christian doctrine a much higher degree of
intellectual clarity and probably also encouraging the tendency of Christianity
to focus on doctrine as the central aspect of the religion.[49]
In
the centuries prior to the rise of philosophy in Islam, Christian philosophers
and theologians had tended to favor Platonism and Stoicism. The reasons were
clear enough: The fundamental Platonic distinction between the material and the
intelligible fit well with the Christian notion of a realm of God and the
spirit. Platonic and Stoic ethical ideals were compatible with Christian
distrust of the bodily passions. The Neoplatonic “One beyond being” could
easily be identified with the God of the Christians and Jews. Neoplatonic
notions of emanation could be used to expound the doctrine of the Trinity. The
influence of philosophy on Christian thought may go back as far as Saint Paul,
who evidently had a Greek education in addition to his rabbinic training. The
legitimacy of this approach can be seen in the works of pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite. His book was a thoroughly Neoplatonic exposition of Christian
theology attributed, falsely, to a convert of Saint Paul in Athens.[50]
Christianity, in short, grew up with philosophy, and although there were
many specific disputes between Christians and philosophers - one might consider
the Neoplatonist Hypatia of Alexandria, lynched by a mob of indignant
Christians she had humiliated in theological debate - Christian writers could
neither ignore it nor fail to employ it.[51] And the form they were most
comfortable with was the most religious of the ancient systems, Neoplatonism.
The Decline of Greek Political Philosophy.
While philosophy’s concern with religion had grown during Hellenistic and Roman
times, its interest in politics had dwindled. There had been a brief golden age
of political philosophy in fourth century b.c.e. Athens. Plato had
written two major works on political philosophy - the Republic and the Laws - and Aristotle had written one, the Politics. Several other of Plato’s dialogues treat
political themes. The Republic and the Laws are both attempts to design an ideal city, and Plato’s disastrous
venture into Sicilian politics, described in dismal detail in his Seventh Epistle,
was an attempt to put his political ideas into practice. The Politics of the more worldly Aristotle is an analysis of
political life and a taxonomy of the possible types of political regime. Both
men focused on the city, the polis, because that was the dominant political form of ancient
Greece. Almost immediately, however, this form of political organization fell
into irrelevance when Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander of Macedon, conquered all of
Greece, most of the known world, and significant parts of the unknown world.
The succeeding Hellenistic age and the Roman period that followed it were ages
of kingdoms and empires. It would be two millennia before democracy reemerged
as a political system, and even oligarchies were extremely rare. Not only did
the dominance of monarchical empires make Aristotle’s careful classification
of kinds of regimes into a historical curiosity, but also the whole arena of
the political became largely irrelevant for the philosopher. Apart from members
of the court, few people could play any meaningful political role, and the
notion that the state could be a means to develop virtue was frankly ludicrous.
Ethics flourished as a philosophical discipline, but the only truly great work
of political thought produced in the Hellenistic or Roman periods was Saint
Augustine’s City of God, and
its politics were theological. The Republic came to be valued mostly as a work of metaphysics and for
its allegorical myths, and the Laws and the Politics were little read for more than a thousand years.
THE FIRST ENCOUNTER OF ISLAM WITH PHILOSOPHY:
FROM THE SYRIANS TO KINDÏ
The first great exponent of Greek philosophy in Islam was
Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub al-Kindi (ca. 801-66), an Arab aristocrat in Baghdad who was deeply
involved with the translation movement.[52] To judge by his surviving
books and the titles of the many others now lost, Kindi wielded
THE FAILURE OF THE
FARABIAN SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 65 considerable expertise in science and philosophy. In
attempting to construct a philosophical theology, Kindi did not have much to
work with. By his time, Islamic thought had developed to a considerable degree
but not, for the most part, in ways that were helpful to a philosopher’s
project. The Qur’anic images of God and prophecy, the fundamental issues for a
Muslim attempting to construct a philosophy of religion, were vivid but not
philosophical or theological. God in the Qur’an, like God in the Bible, was
both transcendent and personal, a figure of surpassing might, mercy, knowledge,
and care for the beings of the world He had created, but He was not defined or
analyzed in a rigorous theological or philosophical manner. There was much that
was suggestive in the Qur’anic account of God, particularly the attributes or
names by which He was described, but it was unclear how He should be explained
in terms of the concepts used in the philosophical tradition. The situation
with prophecy was even more difficult. The overarching image used to explain
prophecy in the Qur’an and in early Islamic thought was the messenger, rasul, a very ordinary concept, as the old Arabic
dictionaries make clear: someone who carries a message from one person to
another, as from a lover to his beloved.16 Muhammad was simply a
human being who had been told something by God - the message of Islam and the
words of its most important embodiment, the Qur’an - and who then faithfully
conveyed this message to his people. Prophecy was simply the process by which
God “taught man what he knew not” by means of a chosen human being.17
From a philosopher’s point of view, the Qur’an had left
many critical questions unanswered: Was God part of the universe, as Aristotle
and the Timaeus would seem
to indicate, or was He beyond being, as the Neoplatonists would have it? What
sorts of things did God teach through prophecy that man did not know? Were they
things that man could
philosophy, the only
relatively comprehensive synthetic and philosophically sophisticated study of
his thought is Peter Adamson, Al-Kindi (Great
Medieval Thinkers; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
16
Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, 8 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863-1893; often
reprinted), 3.1081, quoting a pre-Islamic poet of the Hudhayl
tribe: “Had there been in my heart as much as a nail-paring of love for another
than thee, my messengers had come to her.”
17
Qur’an 96.5; on Muhammad
as a man charged with a message, see 3.144, 5.99, and many
other passages.
know on his own but through ignorance or neglect had not
figured out for himself, or were they things that in principle were beyond
human knowledge and that thus could only be known by revelation? What was it
about prophets that made them prophets? Did they differ from other human beings
in some fundamental way, and if so, how? And how were scriptures, and
particularly the Qur’an, to be understood? Obviously, not everything in the
Qur’an could be taken literally, but how, then, were its symbols to be interpreted,
and what in the Qur’an could be understood symbolically? And what of the
practical teachings of prophetic religion, the specific laws and rituals? How
did they relate to human law and rational ethics?
In
Kindi’s day, Islamic theology had begun to address such issues, but not yet in
ways that philosophers would find satisfactory. As we have seen, a bitter
theological debate was raging about the nature of God’s attributes, especially
the more anthropomorphic ones, like God’s hand or footstool, between literalists
associated with hadith scholars like Ahmad ibn fdanbal and the more rationalist
Mu‘tazilite theologians. In theology, a compromise was worked out by Ash‘ari
that inclined more to the beliefs of the literalists. Likewise, there was a
bitter debate about the nature of the Qur’an, with Ash‘ari eventually coming
down on the side of those who had staunchly defended the puzzling doctrine that
the Qur’an was uncreated. The other great debates of early Islamic theology -
the questions of the imamate, leadership of the community after Muhammad and
the question of free will and predestination - did not greatly concern the
philosophers. As for the practical teachings of Islam, that was the territory
of the legal scholars, the fuqaha, who for the most part showed little interest in the
question of the rational grounds of the Divine Law, being content to consider
it the will of God.
For a
philosopher, the critical issues were the relation of God to the universe -
that is, whether or not He was a knowable part of being; whether the content of
revelation could be known independently by reason; and the psychology of
prophethood. Kindi made little more than a start on these issues. He did begin
the characteristic Muslim philosophical approach to religion, holding that the
truths attained by philosophy and revelation were essentially the same and,
therefore, that the Qur’an could be interpreted in the light of philosophical
doctrine. He seems to have wavered in his approach, sometimes describing
revelation
THE FAILURE OF THE
FARABIAN SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 67 and philosophy as different methods of reaching the same
truth and sometimes conceding that revelation can attain truths inaccessible to
philosophy, thus placing theology above philosophy.[53]
At
this point, we must mention another attempt to integrate philosophy with
Islam: that of the Fatimid Isma‘ilis. They were an esoteric Shi'ite sect that
emerged into history at the beginning of the tenth century with the
establishment of a regime in North Africa. For several centuries, their center
was Egypt, from which they ran an aggressive campaign of religious propaganda
in the central and eastern Islamic lands. Early Isma'ili thought had come out
of a highly mythological strain of Shi'ism, and the Isma'ili theologians of the
Fatimid period had seen fit to recast this exotic doctrine in the form of a
Neoplatonic philosophy.[54]
By and large, however, this philosophical tradition did not have a great deal
of influence on non-Isma'ili thought, although it is interesting to note that
the father of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) had Isma'ili connections. The exception was a
philosophical encyclopedia, The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, which has affinities with early Isma'ili
thought but cannot be shown definitely to be a product of the Isma'ilis
themselves.[55]
FÂRÂBï’s PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Abu Nasr al-Farabi was born around 870, at about the time Kindi died and the
translation movement was drawing to a close. He died in 950,
forty years before the birth of Ibn Sina. He was best known
for his expertise in logic and music and for a puzzling political philosophy,
the details and significance of which are still matters of intense controversy.
On the one hand, readers notice the precision of his writing, the exacting care
with which each word is chosen and each sentence structured. The style is
nearly mathematical and utterly clear. On the other hand, the more closely his
political works are studied, the more curious they seem, with shifts of
emphasis in the way the same subject is discussed in different works, seeming
contradictions left unexplained, and assertions made that do not seem to fit
with other works.[56]
For example, in his Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Plato and
Aristotle Farabi cites the so-
called Theology of Aristotle to prove a point about Aristotle’s agreement with Plato, yet he does
not list the Theology
among Aristotle’s works in his Philosophy of Aristotle.[57] With the possible exception of Ibn Rushd
(Averroes), Farabi, with his expert knowledge of Aristotle’s works, was the
Islamic philosopher most likely to know that the Theology was not authentically Aristotelian - it is
actually an adaptation of selections from Plotinus - and its absence from the Philosophy of
Aristotle tends to confirm
that he did know it was not authentic. Why, then, did he cite it as
“ “ -
THE FAILURE OF THE
FARABIAN SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 69
a genuine work of Aristotle? Muslim philosophers seem to
have known there was something strange about Farabi’s political works, so they
do not often cite them.
Recent
scholarship on Farabi’s political thought has been dominated by the influence
of the great historian of political philosophy, Leo Strauss. Strauss made a
famous argument in an essay, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” that
thinkers in cultures dominated by an oppressive ideological regime often write
in ways that seem inoffensive to the casual reader but whose true and more
dangerous meanings can be discovered by the intelligent and thoughtful reader.[58]
Farabi stated that this was the case for Plato, whom he compared to the ascetic
sage who escaped from the city of a tyrannical king by pretending to be a
drunken vagabond pretending to be that sage. In this way, he was able to leave
the city without interference. “The wise Plato,” Farabi tells us, “did not feel
free to reveal and uncover the sciences for all men. Therefore he followed the
practice of using symbols, riddles, obscurity, and difficulty, so that science
would not fall into the hands of those who do not deserve it and be deformed,
or into the hands of one who does not know its worth or who uses it
improperly.”[59]
If
Strauss was correct, then Farabi must be read with the greatest of care,
because a given passage may well not represent his considered views at all but
may be deliberately misleading, or intended for a general rather than
philosophical audience, or be understandable only on the basis of the unstated
conclusions of premises that he may have given elsewhere, or be misleading in
some other way. As Muhsin Mahdi, a student of Strauss and the most important of
the Straussian interpreters of Farabi, observed, the title of his famous book,
The
Principles of the Opinions of the people of the Virtuous City, does not imply that it
contains Farabi’s own opinions or that these opinions are
identical with philosophical truth, only that they are opinions appropriately
held by the inhabitants of a virtuous city.[60] The difficulties of
constructing a comprehensive Straussian interpretation of Farabi’s system are
obvious, but the alternatives are not attractive either - constructing a theory
of Farabi’s philosophicaldevelopment in whichthe variousworks canbeseenasrep-
resenting different stages or simply admitting defeat and acknowledging gross
contradictions in his philosophy.
Whatever
the difficulties in understanding the nuances of Farabi’s thought, the
situation is clear enough in its overall outlines, particularly in the light of
Farabi’s followers in the western Islamic lands - Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn
Rushd, and the great Jewish scholar, Maimonides, each of whom has left Fârâbian
expositions of the philosophy of religion. In particular, we have Farabi’s own Book of
Religion, which is a sort of
programmatic key to his philosophy of politics and religion.[61]
When
seeking to develop a philosophy of religion or a religious philosophy, a
philosopher’s first decision is which branch of philosophy to place it in. If
we think that religion tells us what to believe and how to behave, with the
behavior grounded in the belief, it would seem natural to make metaphysics the
point of contact between philosophy and religion, with ethics playing a subordinate
role by grounding religious laws and practices. Perhaps religion teaches the
same things as metaphysics, or some of the same things, or the same things
expressed differently for a different audience. Perhaps what the philosopher
knows by reason, the prophet knows by revelation. Another possibility is that
religion and revelation tell us things that are beyond the power of reason. In
Christian thought, this view is associated with such philosopher-theologians as
Thomas Aquinas and the “handmaid theory,” the doctrine that philosophy can
assist theology but cannot discover everything known through revelation.
Christian examples of truths knowable only through revelation would include
such doctrines as the transubstantiation of the host in the Eucharist. Although
this approach can be used to clarify the
“ “
THE FAILURE OF THE
FARABIAN SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 71 relationships between specific religious and philosophical
doctrines, it does not in itself provide a particularly good framework for
explaining the phenomenon of religion itself. After all, why should religion
and philosophy overlap in this way, and indeed, why should there be such a
thing as religion at all, if truth is accessible to unaided reason, or even if
it is not? Since the rise of revealed religions, philosophers had been so
concerned with the relation of philosophical truth with the doctrines claimed
as truth by religion that they had rarely stopped to ask themselves this
question. Farabi’s particular genius was that he thought to do so.
Farabi
identified revealed religions with the city-state of the ancient political
philosophers. This made sense both from the point of view of ancient political
philosophy and from the point ofview of Islam, although his habit of referring
to the “virtuous city” when he obviously meant “true religion” must have
sounded odd to medieval Islamic ears. Ancient political philosophy discussed
the nature and varieties of constitutions, the founding laws of ancient cities.
Their authors were often seen as divine or were divinized after their deaths.
Farabi’s summary of Plato’s Laws mentions that the laws of the city in question were laid
down by a god.[62]
The laws of the ancient cities were, moreover, similar in scope to
Islamic law and usually contained provisions about a state religion. Religion
was very much within the mandate of the ancient lawgiver. Muslims, too,
commonly referred to their religion as a shana, a divine law, and referred to their community
as an umma, nation. (Farabi used the term milla, religious community.) This approach had the
powerful advantage of leaving aside the question of the truth or falsity of
particular religions, something harder to do if the analytical categories are
complexes of beliefs. Rightly guided and erring religions are religious
communities and can be analyzed as a class.
This
choice of category naturally shaped Faaraabai’s analysis. The questions
relating to philosophy of religion had become political questions. Laws and
legislated beliefs were to be analyzed in terms of their role in furthering the
goals of the community, not their inherent truth or falsehood. That role in
turn was seen in the context of the well-being of the
community as a whole, not personal salvation. The notion of
the true faith is replaced by the virtuous city, an easier concept to deal
with.
Farabi,
having made philosophy of religion a branch ofpolitical philosophy, went on to
work out the implications of his theory. First, religion is subsumed within
philosophy as a part of political philosophy. Second, the content of religion,
in terms of both doctrine and law, is to be understood as the product of
reason, and therefore God Himself is to be understood in terms of intellect.
Third, the phenomenon of prophecy is to be addressed within the discipline of
philosophical psychology. Fourth, scripture is to be understood as a statement
of philosophical truths suitable for the understanding of ordinary people.
Fifth, the disciplines expounding religious doctrine and law - Kalam and fiqh,
in Islamic terms - are subordinate to philosophy.
To
briefly summarize Farabi’s theory, a virtuous religion is a system of beliefs
and laws given by a lawgiver who has an unusual intellectual and imaginative
gift for grasping rational truths intuitively and expressing them symbolically
in a way that is comprehensible and convincing to those normally unable to
understand unvarnished statements of philosophical doctrines. Religion thus is
an expression of philosophical truth suitable for the understandings and
circumstances of a particular community. Therefore, when the expressions of
the scripture given by the lawgiver are not in literal accordance with
philosophical truth, someone capable of philosophical understanding should
interpret them allegorically to bring them into accordance with philosophical
truth. The theologian, however, is responsible for defending the lawgiver’s
teachings and does not necessarily need to understand that, in many cases, the
lawgiver’s expressions are allegorical. The ordinary people, in any case,
should not be told this, because to do so will weaken their faith without
advancing their understanding. The jurist does something analogous in terms of
carrying on the original intention of the lawgiver after his death. In any
case, the philosopher will understand the philosophical truths beyond the
doctrines defended by the theologian and the laws expounded by the jurists, but
as a general matter, he should keep his superior understanding to himself lest
it disturb those incapable of understanding philosophical truth.
Although
Farabi influenced Ibn Sina in eleventh-century Iran, his theory was most
influential in Islamic Spain, with its influence reaching a peak in four
twelfth-century philosophers: Ibn Bajja (Avempace to the Latins), Ibn Tufayl,
Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar. Ibn Khaldun,
the fourteenth-century sociologist and historian, may be considered the last
great representative of the school. All were men of political experience and
philosophical sophistication, and each in his way was concerned with the
problem of accommodating religion within a broadly Aristotelian philosophical
framework. In what follows, I compare the decidedly confusing complex of
Farabi’s political writings with two classic statements of Fârâbian philosophy
of religion, Ibn Rushd’s Decisive Treatise and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
Ibn
Rushd’s text is probably the only legal opinion to ever establish itself as a
philosophical classic.[63]
Ibn Rushd was a practicing Islamic jurist, qualified to issue fatwas, legal
opinions; he was actually better known among Muslims for his large book on the
disagreements among the Islamic legal schools. The Decisive Treatise is a legal brief on whether the study of logic
and philosophy is allowed or prohibited by Islamic law and what conditions
might be attached to it. We should not be surprised to find that this study is
obligatory, although, in good lawyerly fashion, he attaches restrictions. In
the course of his legal analysis, he expounds his view of the relationship
between religion and philosophy and between philosophy and dogmatic theology,
Kalam.
Ibn
Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan is
a philosophical novel in which Farabi’s theory of the relation between
philosophy and religion is acted out.[64] The hero, Hayy,
is raised on a desert island without contact with other human beings. Through
sheer intelligence and without language, he is able to deduce the nature of the
universe and its component parts.
When he comes in contact with another human being, a mystic
who came from a neighboring island to meditate in solitude, he learns about
religion. Finding religion to be rational truth oddly mixed with fables and
metaphors, Hayy persuades his new friend to take him back to his home island so
he can teach the people a purified form of religion based on his own, more
abstract philosophy. The missionary voyage is not a success; Hayy realizes he
must repudiate his public assertions; and he and his friend retreat to their
desert island to end their lives in contemplation.
Religion Subsumed within Philosophy
One of Farabi’s most popular works is a little treatise
entitled The Enumeration of the Sciences, written, so he tells us, for the student wishing to learn
a science or to learn the rank of a science, for the person who needs to test
another’s knowledge of the sciences, or simply for one who wishes to appear
knowledgeable.[65]
Farabi’s organization of the sciences did not become normative in either
Islamic philosophy or Islamic scholarship generally, being supplanted by the
superior organization of a similar work by Ibn Smâ, but it is the starting
point for understanding how he conceived the relationship between religion and
philosophy.
Farabi
divided the sciences into five classes: language, logic, mathematics, physics
and metaphysics, and politics. He explains that political science deals with
voluntary actions, the moral dispositions that lead to them, and the ends for
which they are pursued. Some are pursued for the sake of ultimate happiness,
whereas others are pursued for the sake of that which is imagined to be
happiness. The true happiness pertains to the life to come. These actions leading
to true or imagined happiness are established by a rulership that leads to
them.[66]
The reference to the goal of the virtuous regime being happiness in another
life establishes a link with religion; this is confirmed by the definition of
religion in Farabi’s Book of Religion:
“Religion”
(al-milla) is opinions and actions laid down and determined by
conditions and that are decreed for the group by their first leader, who
intends to acquire by their observance of them some specific goal for them or
by them. The group maybe a tribe, a city, a region, a great nation (umma), or
many nations. If their first leader is virtuous and his leadership is virtuous
in reality, then what he intends to acquire by what he decrees is the ultimate
happiness and that religion is a virtuous religion.[67]
Later, he remarks that milla and din, the usual Islamic term for religion, are almost
synonymous, as are shana, divine law, and sunna, religious custom, and that because legislated
opinions can also be considered part of the shana, all four terms can be considered synonymous.[68]
There is an obvious connection of both the discussion of political science in The Enumeration
of the Sciences and the
beginning of The Book of Religion to the opening of Aristotle’s analysis of happiness and
political regimes at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Religion,
then, is a branch of philosophy that presumes to be able to analyze the bases
of the beliefs and laws of religious communities. Farabi says this directly in The Book of
Religion:
The
practical things in religion are those whose universals are in practical
philosophy.... The theoretical opinions that are in religion have their
demonstrative proofs in theoretical philosophy and are taken in religion
without demonstrative proofs.
Therefore,
the two parts of which religion consists [that is, opinions and actions] are
subordinate to philosophy.... Therefore, the kingly craft responsible for what
the virtuous religion consists of is subordinate to philosophy.[69]
This point is confirmed in the two texts I cite as
corroboration of the nature of the Farabian synthesis, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Ibn Rushd’s Decisive Treatise.
In
the former, when Absal, the aspiring hermit from a neighboring island,
befriends Hayy and teaches him his language, Hayy tells him about his
philosophical discoveries. “Absal had no doubt that all the traditions of his
religion about God, his angels, bibles and prophets, Judgment Day, Heaven and
Hell were symbolic representations of these things that Hayy Ibn Yaqzan had
seen for himself. The eyes of his heart were unclosed. His mind caught fire.
Reason and tradition were at one within him.”[70] Although Absal
had seen in Hayy’s philosophy the true meaning of the religious symbols of his
religion, Hayy saw these symbols as a faithful description of supernatural
reality but also as a barrier that deluded the followers of that religion into
understanding its teachings in corporeal ways. The symbols were true insofar as
they corresponded to philosophical truth, but not otherwise. Likewise, Ibn
Rushd makes clear that it is demonstration - that is, philosophy - by which
religious truths can be understood completely.[71] If the conclusions of
demonstrative philosophy differ from the apparent meaning of scripture, then
the scriptural passages must be interpreted allegorically, an interpretive
method whose legitimacy is universally accepted by Islamic scholars.[72]
God as Intellect and the Intelligibility of God
A correlate of this view of the relation between philosophy
and religion is the intelligibility of the supernatural - that God must be or
must act through mind or intellect and be knowable by concepts. This represents
an Aristotelian standpoint between two positions that put God beyond reason: on
the one hand, a notion ofan utterly unintelligible first principle such as a
more absolute interpretation of Plotinus’ One beyond being or Ibn ‘Arabi’s
Absolute, and on the other, the Ash‘arite view of a God who is in no sense
bound by reason. This is a position that the philosophers
“ “
THE FAILURE OF THE FARABIAN
SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 77 scarcely
think to argue for, because it is a fundamental presumption of their enterprise
that the universe can be grasped by reason.
For
Farabi, God, the first principle of the universe, is mind or intellect thinking
itself, a notion with obvious Aristotelian roots. Moreover, the first emanation
from this entity is also an intellect, which knows both itself and God and is
the source of all beings below it. Below is a chain of other intellects
associated with the celestial spheres, going down to the Active Intellect,
which is associated with the sphere of the moon and is the cause of human
intellection. Not only is God intellect, but He is also most knowable in terms
of philosophical concepts. Consider the opening of Farabi’s The Principles
of the Opinions of the people of the Virtuous City.
The
first existent is the first cause of the existence of all other beings. It is
free of all sorts of deficiency.... Its existence is the best and most primal
existence, and no other existence can be better or prior to its existence....
Its existence and substance cannot be tainted by any non-being or
contradiction, these being characteristic of what is below the sphere of the
Moon.... Its existence has no end or purpose....[73]
This kind of analysis of reaches an elegant peak in Ibn
Sina’s account of God as the utterly simple entity whose essence it is to
exist, the Necessary Existent. The correlate is that the universe and God’s
activity within it are knowable by rational, philosophical means. This is very
different from the Qur’anic account, in which God is a personality whose
actions are ultimately inscrutable. It is also very different from the Absolute
of Ibn ‘Arabi, the Sufi theologian, which can be comprehended only by metaphor
and ultimately is inaccessible even to mystical experience.[74]
This
point is vividly illustrated by Ibn T. ufayl. H. ayy is
able to ascertain almost all the basic religious truths about the universe
either by his unaided reason or by the mystical insight acquired from practices
to which reason led him - a sort of self-induced revelation. The main exception
was his inability to deduce whether or not the universe had a
beginning in time. He also could not infer the specific
religious practices laid down by the prophet on the neighboring island, but
these were matters of practical wisdom, to be acquired only by association
with society.[75]
Hayy could deduce these matters because, for Farabi and his school, God
is mind, and His intellection governs the creation and ordering of the universe
- and, as we will see, our knowledge of it.
Prophecy as a Matter of Psychology
The Islamic philosophical tradition, and the Fârâbians in
particular, tended to explain prophecy in terms of psychology and epistemology.
Their theory goes back to the Aristotelian epistemology of De Anima 3.4-5 as it was understood by the Late Antique
commentators.[76]
The basic problem in theory of knowledge for Aristotle and his followers was
how we can move from perception of individuals to necessary knowledge of
abstract intelligibles. The mathematical concept of the triangle, for example,
differs from any individual material triangle, so how can we know the
properties of a mathematical triangle when we have never encountered anything
other than specific, imperfect triangles? Likewise, natural kinds - Aristotle
was usually thinking of biological species - are known through perception of
individual members of the species, yet the concept of the species has a
universality and necessity that no single perception of an individual member of
that species possesses. Aristotle and his followers thought that we recognize
the ideas of triangle and horse after coming into contact with particular
triangles and horses. These concepts are more than simply the average of the
individuals; they are realities. Thus, our perception of individuals is not a
sufficient cause for our knowledge of the universal. A residual influence of
Plato’s theory of Forms is obvious. In yet another trace of Plato, true
knowledge is only of universals, not of individuals. The theory is an awkward
synthesis of Aristotle’s temperamental empiricism, Plato’s idealism, and
notions of science drawn from the axiomatic methods of mathematics,
particularly
geometry. There are many difficulties with the theory, but
Aristotelians labored, century after century, to solve them.
Muslim
Aristotelians usually maintained that perceptions of individuals are only the
occasion for the occurrence of the universal concepts in the rational mind; the
intelligibles are actually emanated from the Active Intellect upon a human
intellect that has been prepared for their reception by perception of the
individual instances of the universal. The Active Intellect is commonly
identified with the lowest of the celestial intellects, that of the moon, but
because the intelligibles are thought to descend from higher to lower
intellects, for all practical purposes, we acquire our knowledge of universals
through mediated contact with the mind of God. As our mind becomes more
practiced in intellection, this process happens more readily.42
The
prophet, according to Farabi and the philosophers influenced by him, is a human
being whose mind is uniquely capable of this process, who receives all the
intelligibles without effort, more or less in a single rush of intuition.
Unlike the philosopher, the prophet also possesses a particularly strong
imaginative faculty, which enables him to express the intelligibles in
imaginative forms understandable to all levels of men. Finally, Farabi also
attributes a level of practical wisdom to the prophet, but in general it is the
epistemological side of prophethood that receives the most attention in Farabi’s
school.43
42
For Farabi’s theory
ofintellect, see his Risalafl’l-‘Aql, ed. Maurice
Bouyges (Bibliotheca Arabic Scholasticorum, série arabe 8.1; Beirut:
Imprimerie Catholique, 1938); partial
trans. by Arthur Hyman in Philosophy
in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions, 2nd ed., ed. Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973), pp. 211-21. The theory is
worked out in greater detail and clarity by Ibn Sina; see Ibn Sina, al-Shifa:al-Tabî‘îyat6: al-Nafs, ed. George
Anawati and Sa‘Id Zayid (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-‘Arablya: al-Hay’a al-Misriya
al-‘Amma li’l-Kitab, i960 [1963]), pp. 181-220; idem, Kitab al-Najat, ed. Majid Fakhry (Beirut:
Dar al-Afaq al-JadIda, 1405/1985), pp. 202-22; Fazlur
Rahman, ed., Avicenna’s De Anima
(Arabic Text) [Kitab al-Shifa’:
al-Tabí'íyat: al-Nafs] (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 45-51; idem, trans., Avicenna’s Psychology: An English Translation of Kitab
al-Najat, Book II, Chapter VI... (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 32-56.
43
Farabi’s theory of
prophecy is scattered through his works; see the summary by Ibrahim Madkour,
“Al-Farabi,” in M. M. Sharif, ed., A History of Muslim Philosophy (Lahore: Pakistan
Philosophical Congress, 1963), pp. 461-7, and Mahdi, Alfarabi, pp. 57-58,1319, and passim. The Farabian view of
prophecy is more clearly laid out by Ibn Sina; see, for example, James Winston
Morris, “The Philosopher-Prophet in Avicenna’s Political Philosophy,” in
Charles Butterworth, ed., The
Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy (Harvard Middle Eastern
Monographs 27; Cambridge:
Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1992), pp. 152-98; Ibn Sina, al-Nafs, pp. 208-20; al-Shifâ’,
al-Ilâhiyât,
This
implies that the prophet is a kind of philosopher, distinguished by the natural
talents of near-instantaneous grasp of the intelligibles and a powerful faculty
of imagination.44 This is very different from the usual Islamic view
of the prophet as someone given a message from God, not least because prophecy
becomes a natural rather than a supernatural phenomenon.
The Symbolic Interpretation of Scripture
In the Farabian view, scripture is essentially an
imaginative rhetorical phenomenon, a way in which philosophical truths are cast
in a form that will be convincing to people without the ability to follow
philosophical argument.45 Hayy, as we have seen, found this
puzzling, failing to understand why the prophet, who obviously knew
philosophical truth in its pure form, chose to express it in terms of corporeal
symbols.46 Ibn Rushd discusses this difficulty carefully,
distinguishing what must be taken literally by everyone from what must be
understood symbolically, and explaining that when the literal meaning of
scripture is incompatible with the truth as demonstrated philosophically, the
philosophical truth must prevail. The literal text of scripture must then be
“interpreted” (ta’wïl), although this interpretation will be known only to those
of the “demonstrative class.” Demonstration - philosophical proof - is the ultimate
standard by which the meaning of scripture is to be understood, although most
people should not be told this lest their faith in the truth of scripture and
revelation be shaken.47
This
implies an esoteric doctrine in which the true meaning of religion is known only
to those capable of grasping it as philosophy.
ed. George Anawati and
George Zayid (Cairo: al-Hay’a al‘/\ mma li-Shu’un al-Matabi‘ al-Amlrlya, 1380/1960) 10.2-3, pp. 441-6; Michael E. Marmura, ed. and trans., The Metaphysics of the Healing (Islamic
Translation Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), pp. 364-9. See also
Richard Walzer, “Al-Farabís Theory of Prophecy and Divination,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 77 (1957), pp. 142-8.
44
See, for example, Mahdi, Alfarabi, pp. 147-70; Fakhry, Al-Farabï, pp. 88-91; Ibn Slna, al-Najat, pp. 205-06; Rahman,
trans., Avicenna’s Psychology, pp. 33-34.
45
Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political
Philosophy, pp. 133-4.
46
Gautier, ed., pp. 145-5; Goodman,
trans., p. 161; Colville,
trans., pp. 61-62.
47
Ibn Rushd, Fasl al-Maqal, ed. and trans.
Butterworth, pp. 26-32.
The Role of Fiqh and Kalam
A correlate of Farabi’s view of the relation between
philosophy and religious teachings and between philosophical explication and
scripture is that theologians and religious jurists are subordinate to
philosophers.[77]
This is grounded, among other things, in the way he reorganized the
disciplines of logic into nine disciplines: four formal, dealing with terms,
categories, propositions, and syllogism; and five substantive, dealing with -
in decreasing order of authority - scientific or philosophical demonstration,
dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, and sophistry. A philosopher is the one who knows
things demonstratively, which is to say that he knows them through valid proofs
based on premises known with certainty to be true. Dialectic, on the other
hand, is argument from premises that are accepted as true by the other party,
whether or not they can be known to be true with certainty. In this case, such
premises would be drawn from scripture or generally accepted belief. Rhetoric
has an even lower standard of proof, requiring only that the argument sway the
listener and implying no special expertise in the person being convinced.[78]
Theologians are those who use dialectic to understand religion and use
dialectic and rhetoric to defend it; hence, the curious Islamic term for
dogmatic theology: Kalam, which literally means speech or argument. Jurists
occupy a somewhat analogous position in relation to the laws laid down by the
founder of the community; it is their job to explicate the law in such a way
that the founder’s intentions are preserved intact as time passes and new types
of case arise. They need to be able to reason correctly from the evidences of
the founder’s intentions, but they do not need to understand the universals
that lie beyond the particulars of the legislation they interpret, which
philosophers can do. Thus, theologians and jurists are both subordinate to the
philosopher.[79]
In his legal judgment, Ibn Rushd lays out careful rules delimiting the scope
of theologians and jurists. It is possible for a theologian or jurist to also
be a philosopher. Ibn Rushd himself was a qualified jurist, as witnessed by the
fact that he explains these issues in a fatwa.[80] He also seems to concede
that Ghazali was a philosopher - although not a good one - as well as a
theologian and jurist. Nevertheless, it is not necessary for either the
theologian or the jurist to be a philosopher or to know what philosophy has to
say about the real meanings of religious symbols or laws, and if he is not, he
should not be told.[81]
The
issue is displayed more vividly by Ibn TTufayl, who shows the disastrous
results of Hayy’s attempts to substitute philosophy for theology and religious
law. He shakes the faith of some, angers others, and in the end publicly (and
insincerely) disavows his philosophical opinions, then retreats with his friend
to his desert island. He has realized just in time that any attempt to reveal
the truth in its literal form to members of either the dialectical class - the
theologians and jurists - or the rhetorical class - the common people - either
will shake their faith and lead them into heresy or irreligion or rouse them to
anger against the philosophers.[82]
Farabi
and his followers would divide the Muslim community into three classes, each of
which for its own good should remain unaware of the true nature and beliefs of
the classes above it. The true meaning of Islam can only be known to a small
class of philosophers of the demonstrative class of men.
THE FAILURE OF THE FÂRÂBIAN POLITICAL
Although there is every reason to believe in the sincerity
of the Islam of men like Farabi and Ibn Rushd, it is not surprising that
religious scholars greeted their theory of religion without enthusiasm. These
scholars had long since sharpened their dialectical tools in conflict with the
rationalist Mu‘tazila. The grammarians took on the task of deflating logic,
the ultimate basis of the philosophers’ pretensions to higher knowledge,
“ “ —
THE FAILURE OF THE
FARABIAN SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 83 pointing out, with some justice, that a good deal of Greek
logic was actually Greek grammar, with the copula and its Indo-European
peculiarities and tacit metaphysical presumptions.[83] The Ash‘arite theologians,
deeply suspicious of any compromise on the absolute power of God, denounced the
naturalism of the philosophical conception of nature, criticizing both
“natures” and natural causation of every sort. The clearest and most intelligent
attack on philosophy was that of Ghazali in his autobiography, The Deliverer
from Error, and in his Incoherence of
the Philosophers. In the former
work, he correctly points out that the rigor and certitude that the ancients
had achieved in mathematics was not carried over into metaphysics, whose
doctrines were hotly debated among the philosophers themselves.[84]
In the Incoherence, he attempts to show that the views of the
philosophers on some twenty important points were wrong or indefensible, even
on the assumption of the philosophers’ own presuppositions. Ghazali sometimes
seems to be stretching a point in the seventeen heretical doctrines held by the
philosophers, but he insists that three philosophical doctrines are completely
incompatible with Islam: their view that the universe has no beginning in time,
which seems to imply that God is not its creator; their denial of the bodily
resurrection; and their view that God knows only universals, not particulars,
thus making individual reward, punishment, and divine providence impossible.[85]
Ibn Rushd attempts to defend the philosophers in his Incoherence of
the Incoherence, a point by
point refutation of Ghazâlï’s work, and in the
The Decisive Treatise, but his rebuttal did not satisfy more
traditional theologians.[86]
However,
it seems to me that the real objections were to the Farabian theory of religion
as a part of political philosophy rather than to philosophy as such. After
all, later Islamic philosophers and theologians held variations of these
doctrines and others that were sometimes far stranger, particularly under Sufi
influence. Farabi’s theory, no matter how philosophically reasonable it might
seem, diminished revealed religion in a way that few serious Muslims, then or
now, could accept.
First,
Farabi had made religion subordinate to philosophy, thus denying religion its
transcendence. It was no longer the most profound window through which human
beings could contemplate the absolute; it was only a Platonic likely story, a
beneficial lie told for the benefit of those incapable of doing metaphysics on
their own.
Second,
the God of the philosophers lacked spiritual vitality. Whatever else the God of
the Qur’an might be, He was, as Ibn ‘Arabi rightly saw, both transcendent -
mighty and awe inspiring, hidden by veils of light and darkness beyond human
conception - and imminent, deeply involved in the smallest affairs of human
beings. The God of the Farabian philosophers, begotten of the One beyond being
of Platonic number mysticism and of the Aristotelian mover of the spheres, was
too abstract and inhuman to be identified with the merciful and terrifyingly
distant and omnipresent God of the Qur’an.
Third,
the notion of the prophet as philosopher was scarcely credible, nor did it do
justice to the central spiritual fact of prophecy, at least in Judaism and
Islam: that God chooses an ordinary man to bear the burden of delivering his
message to an ignorant humanity. To make him into a philosopher who happened to
have an unusual knack for making philosophical doctrines appealing to the
masses demeaned the Prophet - and anyway was historically and theologically
preposterous.
Finally,
the notion that the Qur’an needed to be treated as a symbolic document,
correctly understood only in the light of philosophical demonstration, did not
do justice to the text of the Holy Book.
Sophisticated Muslims might know perfectly well that God
could not possibly mount a throne like an earthly king, but few Muslims would
be comfortable with the notion that God’s throne was just a symbol for some
part of the skies known better to the astronomers. A symbol in scripture must
have some reality in itself, not just be a sign for some natural entity. We may
compare the Fârâbian philosophers with Ibn ‘Arabi, whose ta’wïl, esoteric interpretation, of scripture was far
more outrageous than anything the philosophers had dreamed of but whose
interpretations carried power and conviction because of his burning belief that
every jot and tittle of the Qur’an carried uncountable layers of meaning that
no ordinary human being could ever completely grasp.
AS AN HISTORICAL MATTER,
FÂRÂBIAN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY DIED IN Islam with Ibn Rushd. Farabi’s books were still sometimes read and
copied. Copies of his works are not uncommon in manuscript philosophical
anthologies. I found a translation of his Aphorisms of the Statesman
included in an early
fourteenth-century philosophical encyclopedia as an example of political
philosophy conducted from a purely rational point of view, but even then it was
a curiosity, not a relic of a living movement.58 It seems to me that
it failed not because of its enemies - other, much more successful movements in
Islam had more enemies - but because it lacked appeal to serious Muslims. And
it lacked appeal because it did not do justice to the Islamic view of God,
religion, revelation, and the Qur’aan.
58
Qutb al-Din ShlrazI, Durrat al-Taj li-Ghurrat al-Dubaj: Bakhsh-i
Hikmat-i Amalïwa- Sayr wa-SulUk, ed. Mahdukht Band Huma’i (Tehran:
Intisharat-i ‘Ilmi wa-Firhangi, 1369/1990), pp. 79-96. I discuss
this text in John Walbridge, “The Political Thought of Qub al-Din al-Shîrazî,”
in Butterworth, ed., Political
Aspects, pp. 351-3.
Mysticism, Postclassical Islamic Philosophy,
and the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science
The final third of the twelfth century was a decisive
turning point in the history and the historiography of Islamic philosophy. The
last great figure of the tradition of Islamic Aristotelianism, Ibn Rushd, was
writing his commentaries on Aristotle and died in 1198. He was to have enormous influence, but in
Europe, not in the Islamic world. His death marked a break in Western Europe’s
knowledge of Islamic thought, for he was the last medieval Islamic writer of
real significance to be translated into Latin in the Middle Ages. Thus, his
death is influential in the Western historiography of Islamic philosophy
because, until recently, it was assumed that he was the last philosopher of
consequence in the Islamic world, an attitude that even today is not altogether
dead. Ibn Rushd’s old age coincided with the adulthood and premature death of
Shihab al- Din Yahya Suhrawardi (1154-1191), the philosopher-mystic responsible for
popularizing Neoplatonism as an alternative to the Aristotelianism of Ibn Sina.
His masterwork, The Philosophy of Illumination, was completed in 1186. Ibn Rushd’s old age also coincided with the
youth of the third great intellectual figure of this period, Muhyi’l-Din Ibn
‘Arabi (1165-1240), the greatest of all Muslim mystical
theologians. He actually had met Ibn Rushd as a teenager and was beginning
serious mystical study at about the time that Suhrawardi was writing The
Philosophy of Illumination. Ibn Rushd represented the past of Islamic
philosophy, the Farabian political philosophy of religion; Suhrawardi and Ibn
‘Arabi represented its future and, in particular, the alliance with mysticism
that was to give metaphysics and philosophical psychology a lasting place in
the Islamic world.
The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, say that their school goes
back to the time of the Prophet. In a sense, they are certainly right, because
the Qur’an and the hadith, particularly the so-called hadith qudsï,
the “holy traditions,” those which purport to relate the words of God,
sometimes have a strongly mystical quality. As a matter of documented history,
however, Sufism emerged from a tradition of asceticism and pietism in about the
eighth century and became an organized and self-conscious movement at more or
less the same time that the disciplines of the Islamic religious sciences were
assuming their mature forms. The oldest surviving systematic Sufi texts date
from around the end of the ninth century and systematic manuals of Sufism from
the late tenth.1 By the twelfth century, Sufism was crystallizing into
organized monastic orders, although they differed from other monastic
traditions in that laymen were commonly active members, even if they were not
necessarily “professional” Sufis. These orders played an enormous role in the
religious and social life of Islamic society up to the twentieth century. They
are still central to religious life in much of the Islamic world. With mosque
worship frozen in the form of the daily prayers fixed by the Prophet, it was in
the context of the Sufi orders that Islamic devotional and liturgical life
continued to
1 The literature
of Sufism is enormous. On Sufism in general, see the Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Julian
Baldick, Mystical Islam: An Introduction
to Sufism (New York University Studies in Near Eastern Civilization 13; New York: NYU Press, 1989); and Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), among many other introductions and
surveys. On Muhammad and his Companions as the founders of Sufism, see ‘All b.
‘Uthman Hujwlrl, Kashf
al-Mahjub, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series 17; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1911, and often reprinted), pp. 70-82; Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions, pp. 24-30; and more
generally Annemarie Schimmel, And
Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Studies in
Religion; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). A selection of early Islamic mystical
literature is found in Michael Sells, ed. and trans., Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur’an, Mi‘raj,
Poetic and Theological Writing (Classics of Western Spirituality; New
York: Paulist Press, 1996). A number of
classical Sufi manuals are available in English translation, usually abridged:
Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjüb, trans.
Nicholson; Abu ’l-Qasim al-Qushayri, al-Risala al-Qushayrïya, trans. Alexander D.
Knysh, as Al-Qushayri’s Epistle
on Sufism (Great Books of Islamic Civilization; Reading: Garnet, 2007); and Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi, Kitab al-Ta‘arruf li-Ahl Madh- hab al-Tasawwuf, trans. Arthur
J. Arberry, as The Doctrine of
the Sufïs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), among others. develop. By the end of the
twelfth century, Sufism was no longer separate from Islamic religious life in
general. For most of the last millennium, adult male Muslims normally have been
initiated members of at least one Sufi order, a state of affairs that still
prevails in many parts of the Islamic world. The shrines of Sufi saints were
the locus of much of women’s devotional life. The orders often played important
political, social, and economic roles with their control of endowments and
links with guilds and other groups within the larger society. Occasionally,
Sufi masters were political rulers; everywhere they were important figures in
local, provincial, and national life. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, they sometimes were centers of resistance to European colonial rule.2
The
growth of Sufi influence in religious, social, and political life had an impact
on intellectual and literary life as well. In the Persianate areas, the vast
region stretching from the Balkans through Turkey and Iran to India, Persian
was cultivated as the language of gentlemen, and Persian culture enjoyed
enormous prestige. Masses of Sufi poetry were written in Persian and other
vernacular languages, and non-Sufi poetry drew heavily on Sufi themes. Thus, in
Persian and Persianate poetry, it became almost impossible to distinguish
secular love poetry from Sufi devotional poetry, as they shared the same
symbols and themes.3
Late
in the eleventh century, a promising legal scholar and popular teacher in
Baghdad, Abu Hamid Ghazâlï, suffered a crisis of faith in which he fell into
doubt about all the certainties of the Islamic doctrines he had been teaching.
We have met him already as a critic of the philosophy of Farabi and Ibn Sina.
In his spare time, he furiously studied the chief claimants to knowledge of
divine things in his time and place: Kalam
2
The classic account of the
Sufi orders is J. Spencer Trimmingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1971). Examples of
the numerous studies of Sufi orders from an historical or anthropological
point of view are Dina Le Gall, A
Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandts in the Ottoman World, 1450-1700 (SUNY Series
in Medieval Middle East History; Albany: SUNY Press, 2005); Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a
South Asian Sufi Center (SUNY Series in Muslim Spirituality in South Asia;
Albany: SUNY Press, 1992); Vincent J.
Cornell, Realm of the Saint:
Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1998); Frances
Trix, The Sufi Journey of Baba
Rexheb (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology, 2009).
3
A representative
collection of studies of Persian and Persianate Sufism is Leonard Lewisohn,
ed., The Heritage of Sufism, 3 vols. (Oxford: OneWorld, 1999). theology, philosophy, the
esoteric Shi‘ism of the Isma‘ilis, and Sufism. He found the first three to be
wanting but found peace and certainty in Sufism. Retiring to his home town, he
wrote his greatest work, The Revival of the Sciences
of Religion, an
explanation of Islamic law in which the legal concepts are explained in terms
of Sufism.[87]
Although Ghazâlï can scarcely be given credit for an intellectual development
that probably was inevitable, he does symbolize the integration of mysticism
into the mainstream of Islamic intellectual life.
By the twelfth century, Sufi writers were beginning to move
from practical and devotional literature to speculative mystical theology. If
this theology is not philosophy as such, it certainly can be analyzed in
philosophical terms. As we have seen, the philosophy of religion was the
fundamental problem faced by Islamic philosophers trying to apply Greek
philosophy in a setting dominated by a monotheistic revealed religion. Whereas
for the Farabian tradition, the basic problem was explaining revelation and
religious law, the problem of mysticism increasingly became central to later
Islamic philosophers. At first, mysticism was a phenomenon for philosophers to
explain, but eventually it also became a philosophical tool central to the
metaphysics and epistemology of the postclassical Islamic philosophers.
The problem of mysticism first arrives in Islamic
philosophy in a serious way in the works of Ibn Sina. In contrast to Farabi’s
treatment of religion under political philosophy, Ibn Sina tended to deal with
the subject as an appendix to metaphysics, although some aspects of prophecy
are treated under psychology. Thus, the metaphysics of his largest surviving
philosophical work, the Healing, ends with a tenth chapter dealing with various
religious topics, as well as with ethics and political philosophy.[88]
However,
the key figure in the introduction of mysticism into Islamic philosophy was the
colorful twelfth-century philosopher Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi. He was educated
in the Aristotelianism of Ibn Sina, which he refers to as the Peripatetic
philosophy. Born in northwestern Iran near the town of Zanjan, he wandered in
search of teachers and then patrons. We cannot trace his travels exactly, but
he studied as far south and east as Isfahan and then traveled among the petty
kingdoms of eastern Anatolia before reaching Damascus near the time of its
conquest by Saladin. He settled in Aleppo in about 1182. There his alchemical and magical skills drew
the attention of Saladin’s teenaged son, al-Malik al-iZahir, who had, in the
traditional way, been made governor of the city to gain political experience.
Suhrawardi cut a strange figure. Rejecting the conventional scholarly path of
endowed posts in madrasas and
mosques, he wore dervish dress so shabby that he was mistaken for a donkey
driver. When he arrived in Aleppo, the director of the madrasa where he was staying tactfully had his young
son take him a set of presentable clothes. The prince became his disciple, and
the more conventional scholars became jealous. Saladin became alarmed at the
prospect of his son, the governor of an important city solidly astride his
lines of communication to the east, being under the influence of a magician of
uncertain orthodoxy and loyalty at a time when the Third Crusade was bearing
down on his newly conquered province of Palestine. He ordered his son to
execute Suhrawardi, and his son reluctantly obeyed.[89]
At
some time during his wanderings, Suhrawardi had rejected the Avicennan
Peripatetic philosophy of his training in favor of a mystically oriented
Neoplatonism, a conversion he attributed to a dream of Aristotle. Despite the
exotica of Suhrawardi’s life - the dervish dress, the public displays of magic,
the invocation of visions and mystical experiences, and the mystical
allegories that are now his most widely read works - he was nonetheless a
philosopher who developed a coherent philosophical system based on argument and
who expounded it in the normal philosophical language of Farabi and Ibn Sina.
The later Islamic philosophers treated him as a philosopher, discussing him as
an innovative philosophical critic, an epistemologist, and a metaphysician. His
philosophical school came to be known as Illuminationism and was the point of
departure for the later Iranian philosophical tradition.
Suhrawardi’s
philosophical development is preserved in his writings. In his most famous
work, the Hikmat al-Ishraq, The Philosophy of Illumination,
he reports that his works consist of juvenalia, “other works,” in which we may
include his allegories, works according to Peripatetic principles, and finally The Philosophy
of Illumination itself, which
has “another method and a shorter path to knowledge.” This last, he makes
clear, is the path of Plato, Empedocles, Pythagoras, and the ancient sages of
the Oriental nations.[90]
This appeal to occult ancient wisdom has greatly muddied the modern study of
his thought, although as a rule, later Islamic philosophers were more
clear-eyed about the matter. He had something philosophically precise in mind.
Earlier in his career, he had struggled with the problem of epistemology in the
Peripatetic philosophy. Evidently, Aristotle had learned in the afterlife that
his rejection of his teacher Plato’s views had been a mistake, for in a dream
he counseled Suhrawardi that the true philosophy was that of Plato and the
Muslim mystics. In particular, Aristotle explained what came to be called the
theory of knowledge by presence. Any true knowledge, whether sensible or
intellectual, involved the unmediated presence of the known before the knower.
In the case of sensation, this involved the rejection of the two common
theories of vision, intromission and extramission, in favor of a theory in
which light made the visible object manifest to a sound eye that was in its
unveiled presence. Suhrawardi also allowed a kind of intellectual intuition
that explained knowledge of metaphysical entities.[91]
Suhrawardi
expresses his theory most strikingly in The Philosophy of
Illumination. Following a
critique of key doctrines of Peripatetic philosophy, he expounds a system of
metaphysics and cosmology in which light and darkness are the ingredients of
the universe. Light can be either an accident in something that is substantial
but dark, which is our visible light, or it can be substantial in itself -
abstract light, which is mind, whether embodied like animals, human beings, and
the celestial bodies, or beyond need of body, like God and the angelic minds.
Substantial light is the cause of being and change in the corporeal universe.
The properly prepared mystic can intuit this substantial light and thus behold
the glory of God and His angels.
His
system is thus Neoplatonic in its structure, nominalist in its treatment of
universals, and empiricist in its methods, at least if one is willing to
concede that mystical intuition counts as empirical experience. What is most
important for our purposes is that he adopted mysticism as a philosophical
tool, something characteristic of that part of the Platonic tradition that we
refer to as “Neoplatonic,” although, as Suhrawardi correctly insists, it has
its roots in Plato’s own thought and ultimately in the Presocratics of the
Italian school. This use of mysticism as a legitimate philosophical tool has
remained characteristic of most of the Islamic philosophical tradition from his
day on. Iranian philosophers still expound systems owing allegiance to
Suhrawardi in the theological academies and universities of contemporary Iran.
Peripatetic philosophy is also taught in Iran but, following Suhrawardi’s own
recommendation, usually as a propaedeutic to the various forms of
Illuminationist philosophy derived from or reacting to The Philosophy
of Illumination.
Ibn ‘Arabi
Ibn ‘Arabiwas theconverseofSuhrawardi - a mystic
who made mysticism philosophical. He was an Andalusian of an old Arab family
and another colorful and unconventional character. He was born in Murcia in
Spain in 1165, the son of a government official from an elite
Arab family.[92] In one
of those ironies of history, he actually knew Ibn Rushd, his father being a
friend of the philosopher.
One
day when I was in Cordoba, I went to visit its judge Abû’l-Walïd Ibn Rushd
[Averroes]. He had wished to meet me because he had been astonished at the
things he had heard that God had revealed to me during my retreats. My father
sent me to him on the pretext of some business with him so that he could meet
me, he being one of my father’s friends. At the time I was a youth who had yet
to grow a beard or mustache. When I came in, he rose from his place with the
greatest affection and respect, hugged me, and said, “Yes!” I replied, “Yes.”
He was even more pleased with me because I had understood him. I then perceived
why he was pleased and said, “No!” He was dismayed, flushed, and doubted his
own opinion. “What,” he said, “have you all discovered through unveiling and
the divine emanation? Is it the same as what we have found through reason (nazar)?”
I replied, “Yes, no. Between the yes and the no, spirits take flight from
matter and heads are severed from bodies.” He turned pale and was seized with
trembling. He sat down, saying, “There is no power or might save in God!” For
he had understood what I was hinting at.... Later he asked my father if he
could see me again so that he could submit his views to us so as to see whether
they were compatible or not, for he was one of the masters of thought and
rational speculation, but he thanked God that he lived in a time in which he
could see one who went into a retreat ignorant and emerged with such knowledge,
yet without any study, investigation, or reading. “I have shown that such a
thing can be,” he said, “but I had not seen any who had attained it....” I
wanted to see him again, so God in His mercy sent me a vision in which, as it
were, there was a thin curtain between us so that I could see him but he could
not see me and was unaware of me, being busy about his own work. I did not see
him again until the year 1199 in
the city of Marrakesh. He was being carried back to Cordoba, where he is
buried. His coffin was on one side of the beast and to balance it they had put
an equal weight of his writings.... I recited this verse:
This
is the Imam and those are his works.
Would
that I knew if his hopes were fulfilled!10
Whether or not we believe the details of the story, there
is no reason to doubt that the two met, and the story captures the gist of the
differences between the old Aristotelian rationalist and the young mystic.
Ibn
‘Arabi’s writings are voluminous and difficult, but his basic idea can be
expressed simply enough. The universe is the self-manifestation of God to
Himself. Thus, every being in the universe is an expression of some aspect of
God, a notion that Ibn ‘Arabi finds in the Qur’anic verse, “Whithersoever you
turn, there is the face of God.” God’s ultimate essence is unknown and
unknowable, but He manifests Himself in various ways and on various levels: in
His names and attributes, of which “Allah” is the highest, including all the
others; in the beings of the universe, which are the expressions of the names
and attributes of God; in the souls of the saints; and in particular in the
Prophet Muhammad and in the “Seal of the Saints” - Ibn ‘Arabi himself - and in
the Book of God. There are also degrees of relation to God, with what is
comprehensible to those of higher degrees being beyond those of lower degree.
Thus, the Qur’an can be understood on various levels, depending on the
spiritual attainments of its readers, but in all cases, the Word of God is to
be understood literally, although his notion of the literal sense is often very
far from ours or from the understanding of more conventional religious
scholars. The task of the mystic is to recognize the face of God wherever he
encounters it and to acquire ever deeper mystical insight and thus ever higher
spiritual stations, leading perhaps to the highest human station, that of the
Perfect (or complete) Man, he who perfectly manifests all the names and
attributes of God.11
10
Ibn ‘Arabi, al-FutUhat al-Makkïya (Beirut: Dar
Sadir, n.d., a reprint of the Bulaq edition), vol. 1, pp. 153-4.
11
The fullest expression of
Ibn ‘Arabi’s system is the enormous and sprawling al-FutUhat al-Makkïya, of which no complete
translation exists. Two volumes of extracts have been published: Ibn al-‘Arabl,
The Meccan Revelations, ed. Michel
Chodkiewicz, trans.
The result was a complex system of deep philosophical
interest. Ibn ‘Arabi himself had little use for philosophy or philosophers,
being if anything an Ash‘arite theologian in matters of metaphysics, and he
made no use of arguments that conventional philosophers would recognize.
Nevertheless, the philosophical significance of his system was obvious.
Certainly by the time of the flourishing of philosophy in seventeenthcentury
Iran, Ibn ‘Arabi was a philosophical influence too great for any serious
Islamic philosopher to ignore. Thus, postclassical - or perhaps we should say,
“mature” - Islamic philosophy could trace its origins to three roots: the
Aristotelianism of Ibn Smâ, the Neoplatonism of Suhrawardi, and the monism of
Ibn ‘Arabi. Iranian philosophers tended to see the issue as a disagreement
between the advocates of the primacy of essence (Suhrawardi) and the advocates
of the primacy of existence (Ibn ‘Arabi), with some residual Peripatetics.12
Aristotelianism in the Madrasas
In fact, Peripatetic philosophy was already firmly
entrenched in Islamic education. In a development parallel to the domestication
of mysticism,
William C. Chittick and
James W. Morris (vol. i), trans.
Cyrille Chodkiewicz and Denis Gril (vol. 2) (New York: Pir Press, 2002-2004). William C.
Chittick, The Sufi Path of
Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1989) and idem, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn
al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998) are topically collected extracts from al-Futuhat with commentary. However,
his system is most easily approached through a shorter work summarizing his
system, the Fusus al-Hikam, The
Bezels of Wisdom, ed. Abu’l-‘Ala’ ‘Aflfl (Cairo: al-Babi al-Idalabî, 1946). There are two translations made directly
from the Arabic: R. W. J. Austin, trans., Ibn al Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom (Classics of
Western Spirituality; New York: Paulist Press, 1980) and Caner K. Dagli, trans., The Ringstones of Wisdom (Great Books of
the Islamic World; Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2004). This work was commonly read with the aid of
commentaries, one of which is available in English: Ismail Hakki Bursevi’s Translation of, and Commentary on
Fusus al - Hikam,
4 vols.,
trans. Bulent Rauf (Oxford: Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 1986-1991). A number of
his other works are also now available in translation.
Incidentally,
his family name is properly “Ibn al-‘Arab¡,” “son of the Arab,” which refers to
the family’s descent from one of the first conquering Arab families in Spain.
He is more usually called “Ibn ‘Arabi” without the article to avoid confusion
with another scholar of the same name. He is also referred to be the titles
“Muhyi ’l-Dln,” “Reviver of the Faith,” and “al-Shaykh al-Akbar,” “the Greatest
Sheikh.”
12
The metaphysical dispute,
to simplify it greatly, was between those who thought the universe was composed
of discrete concrete entities, the primacy of essence, and those who thought it
was ultimately a single substrate infinitely differentiated, the primacy of
existence.
logic and Avicennan natural philosophy and metaphysics were
being allowed into the madrasa, an institution that became increasingly important
from the eleventh century on. In Europe, universities had been founded in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the coincidence of their need for a
curriculum and the arrival of the new translations of Aristotle had led to
Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy becoming basic subjects in the
curricula of the new universities. Something similar occurred in the Islamic
world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At the beginning of the twelfth
century, Ghazali had included an introduction on logic in his work on the
principles of jurisprudence. Later scholars did not follow his example because
there was no need; logic had become a basic part of the curriculum of the madrasas. The most important basic textbooks of logic
were composed in the thirteenth century; although there were later works, they
were imitations of the thirteenthcentury models. I return to the role of logic
and philosophy in madrasa education
in Chapters 6 and 7.
THE “failure”
OF ISLAMIC SCIENCE
Between 1550 and
1700
in Western Europe, something
extraordinary happened to science, a process known as the Scientific
Revolution. Prior to this, science had not greatly changed from what it had
been among the Greeks: a system of thought based mostly on theory rather than
on experiment and developing slowly and without much regard for practical
application. After this period, science was recognizably what it is today: a
constantly developing system of thought based on experiment and mathematics and
generating a rapidly developing technology. This scientific and technical
prowess is certainly a major factor in the conquest of the world undertaken by
Europeans between 1492 and 1936. Unfortunately, it has not turned out to be easy
to understand what caused this event or even what it was. It was certainly not
just that Galileo dropped objects of differing weights from the Tower of Pisa,
saw that they fell at the same rate, realized that Aristotle must have been
wrong, and thereby broke with the inherited authority of Aristotle and the
church. The process was considerably more complicated than that, involving at
least two more or less distinct histories: one involving the mathematization of
science, especially physics, running from Galileo’s experiments to Newton’s
physics and including also the development of heliocentric astronomy, and the
other making experimental methods central to chemistry and biology, a process
with embarrassing roots in alchemy and magic.
But however the nature of the Scientific Revolution is
understood, there is also the problem of understanding its causes. There have
been many theories offered in the last century and a half since the emergence
of the history of science as an academic discipline. These have varied in a
number of ways - in what sciences are taken as central to the Scientific
Revolution, for example - but they can be grouped into two broad families,
depending on whether they understand the Scientific Revolution as a break with
earlier scientific history or as a continuation of something that started
earlier. The latter group of theories see the Scientific Revolution as the
culmination of developments in medieval European science: early experiments
with using mathematics in physical problems, thought experiments and
philosophical speculation about the natural world, and the like. Scholars
offering such theories can point, for example, to continuities between late
medieval natural philosophy and Galileo’s terminology.13
However, any theory that bases the rise of modern science
on medieval developments must then explain why the Scientific Revolution did
not take place in the Islamic world, a problem also faced by historians of
Islamic science. After all, Islamic scientists read the same Greek scientific
texts as medieval Europeans, and they were sometimes even the channel by which
these texts passed to the Europeans. In a number of cases, scientific texts
originally composed in Arabic were important influences on medieval European
science. Science was a systematic enterprise in the Islamic world several
centuries before it began in Western Europe. The Islamic world in the Middle
Ages and early modern periods was richer and generally more stable than Western
Europe, and there is good reason to think that Islamic science remained more
advanced than European science to at least 1500. The influence of Islamic mathematical
astronomy on Copernicus, for example, is now well established.14
Why, then, did
13
In what follows, I have
been most influenced by Grant, Foundations
of Modern Science, and Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China,
and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), though I disagree with their treatment
of Islam. My taxonomy of theories of the origins of modern science is mainly
based on Cohen, Scientific
Revolution; see p. 22, n. 6 above.
Islamic scientists not go on to create a scientific
revolution of their own? “What went wrong?” (One might also ask, “What went
right in Europe?” but that points to the theories arguing that the Scientific
Revolution represented a break, not a continuity.)
Various
theories have been offered. Perhaps successive barbarian invasions of the
Middle East by Turkic and Mongol hordes exhausted the economic and cultural
resources of the Islamic world, thus draining Islamic science of the resources
that it needed to flourish. Other theories posit an Islamic hostility toward
the rational sciences, leading to their exclusion from the madrasas and the persecution of Islamic scientists.
Finally, it has been suggested that science generally failed to capture the
imagination of Muslim intellectuals. None of these theories is particularly
convincing. The problem with most of the discussions of Islam and the
Scientific Revolution is that they have been conducted by historians of
medieval European science dependent on a very narrow range of Islamic sources.
In this they have not been much aided by historians of Islamic science, who
have been overwhelmed by the number of unread and unedited medieval Islamic
scientific texts and have understandably been reluctant to generalize about the
larger questions of the role of science in Islamic civilization and the causes
of its ultimate failure.
The
barbarian invasion theory is undermined by the fact that one of the greatest
efflorescences of Islamic science took place precisely under the barbarians who
had inflicted the greatest damage on Islamic civilization: the Mongol
Il-Khanid state, which supported the Maragha observatory in the third quarter
of the thirteenth century. Nasir al-Din Tusi, the great Shi'ite philosopher and
scientist, was able to convince the Il-Khan Hülegü to underwrite the
compilation of a new set of astronomical tables to allow more accurate
astrological predictions. These funds allowed Tusi to bring together the finest
team of scientists ever assembled in the Islamic world. These astronomers and
mathematicians revolutionized Islamic mathematical astronomy, creating a
tradition of mathematical astronomy that lasted for at least two hundred and
fifty years in the Islamic world and were the source for Copernicus’s mathematical
methods. Finally, although Western Europe was largely free of barbarian
invasions, at least after the Vikings had become rulers rather than plunderers,
the Middle Ages saw constant feudal warfare, and the Scientific Revolution
itself took place amidst the religious warfare of the Reformation.
The
second theory, positing an innate Islamic hostility toward science, has similar
problems. Those advocating it tend to contrast European scholastic rationalism
with a supposed antirationalism in Islam. As evidence, they cite a small set
of well-known texts, especially Ghazali’s Deliverer from Error,
in which Muslim theologians condemn science and philosophy. Because of this
hostility, they claim, natural science and mathematics were excluded from the madrasa curriculum. But it is difficult to argue that
Ghazali’s book was either typical or decisive, and the pinnacle of Islamic
astronomy came after, not before, Ghazali. Few other such texts exist, and in
contrast to the situation in Europe, prosecutions for heresy were rare. The
Islamic world produced no martyrs for science like Bruno and Galileo. Muslims,
by and large, cared more about whether people practiced the laws of Islam than
about the nuances of their beliefs. Moreover, as later recorded curricula show,
science actually was taught in the madrasas along with logic, natural philosophy, and
metaphysics. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were all widely taught - on a
basic level at least. Mathematics was needed to divide inheritances, which
religious lawyers were required to do, and astronomy was needed for mosque
timekeeping. Manuscripts on geometry, arithmetic, algebra, basic astronomy,
advanced mathematical astronomy, and the construction and use of astrolabes are
common. Manuscript anthologies of madrasa textbooks routinely contain works on astronomy and mathematics.
Medical manuscripts are everywhere. As we will see in Chapter 9, Islamic reformers, Islamic revivalists, and
colonial administrators of the nineteenth century were united in their
complaints that madrasa education
was too rationalistic and scholastic.
The
question of the appeal of science can be settled by examining vernacular-language
literature. Iranian and Turkish scientists commonly wrote more popular - though
still sometimes quite technical - versions of their scientific works in Persian
or Turkish. The patrons of scientific works were often highly placed court officials,
and the biographies of Islamic scientists demonstrate the importance of the
court as a locus of scientific patronage and interest. Recent bibliographical
studies show that as late as the Ottoman period, there were large numbers of
scientists writing and practicing.[93] Royal libraries in Istanbul
included elegant new copies of classic scientific works like those of Galen.
Works such as bestiaries were popular. Encyclopedias composed for the education
and use of officials included chapters on scientific topics that an educated
man was clearly expected to be conversant with.
What,
then, accounts for the absence of a scientific revolution in Islam? Without a
well-established explanation of the causes, or even of the nature, of the
Scientific Revolution in Europe, there can be no definite answer. Some
observations can be made, however, and I will make a suggestion for a partial
explanation.
First,
it seems likely that the explanation of the Scientific Revolution involves
something extraordinary that happened in Europe rather than something that
failed to happen in the Islamic world - or in India or China, for that matter.
This has something in common with another great historiographical puzzle:
Whywas Western Europe, a small and politically divided peninsula of Eurasia,
able in the course of four centuries to move from relative insignificance to
almost total dominance of the world? While older explanations invoked “decline”
or “decadence” in traditional states like China and the Ottoman Empire, it has
become increasingly clear that these traditional states continued to function
much as they always had but that the statesmen in charge of these regimes, some
of them very able men indeed, struggled to cope with the accelerating and
indeed unprecedented growth of European innovation and power, power whose
sources they attempted, usually more or less unsuccessfully, to duplicate and
employ on their own behalf. We have to feel sorry for them, as we still do not
clearly understand what, for example, allowed a small island state like Britain
to become the world’s strongest power and maintain its position for a century.
There
have been a number of suggestions proposed to account for the Scientific
Revolution in terms of European exceptionalism: the printing press, the nature
of the medieval European university curriculum, the Protestant Reformationwith
its rejection of inherited authority, or simply the accumulation of a critical
mass of scientific knowledge and expertise, enabling the scientific enterprise
to snowball and produce technical innovations that encouraged more scientific
research. The explanations for the absence of an Islamic scientific revolution
would be the converse of these: the Islamic failure, for reasons that also
require explanation, to adopt the printing press until the nineteenth century,
the absence of an institution that made scientific research a central activity,
the comparative continuity of Islamic religious life, or a more scattered
scientific community.
I suggest that mysticism played a role in directing the
attention of Islamic scholars and philosophers away from physical science. It
should not be forgotten that for the most part, science in both the Islamic
world and medieval Europe was an outgrowth of philosophy. It has, in fact, been
remarked that fields make the transition from being philosophy to being science
when they are able to produce solid and agreed-upon results. From Aristotle
through Ibn Sina up to the early modern scientists, areas like biology,
astronomy, mineralogy, and so forth were seen as branches of philosophy, and
the term “natural philosophy” was used for science in general as late as the
nineteenth century.16 In the Islamic world, for at least five
hundred years philosophers were typically also scientists, either physicians
or astronomers or both, typically with broader interests including other
branches of science. This was less the case in medieval Europe, where
philosophers typically were theologians by profession. Nevertheless,
philosophers in Europe and the Islamic world had moved in quite different
directions by the seventeenth century. In Europe, philosopher-scientists had
turned away from their theological heritage and had begun to make the study of
the natural world central to their intellectual investigation. It is not
obvious why they should have done this. To be sure, the astronomers obviously
were doing something with great implications for metaphysics and theology, but
it is not clear why
16
Edward Grant analyzes the
relationships among natural philosophy, which is the portion of philosophy
giving philosophical explanations of natural phenomena; early mathematical
sciences like astronomy and statics; and modern science, which merges
mathematical description and causal explanation, in his AHistory ofNaturalPhilosophy from the Ancient
World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Galileo’s attempt to describe the motion of falling bodies
mathematically should have been seen in its time as anything other than an
eccentric project showing the cleverness of a single scientist in solving a
problem that was in itself trivial, not unlike Islamic mathematicians’ delight
in creating ever-larger magic squares. Yet Galileo’s project did have enormous
implications both in practical terms - the excellence of European artillery had
much to do with their conquest of the world - and in the philosophical
understanding of the universe.
Muslim
philosophers had turned in another direction, pursuing the philosophical
understanding of the experience of the soul in the direct presence of the
Godhead. On the face of it, this must have seemed a promising project.
Suhrawardi had shown how to use mysticism systematically as a philosophical
tool, and Ibn ‘Arabi had shown how to understand the inner and outer life of
man as the experience of God in every aspect of the world. This approach to
philosophy reached its peak in the School of Isfahan, the philosophers of Iran
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They pursued a subtle scholastic
investigation of the depths of the human spirit, developing intricate systems
combining the phenomenological experience of reality with the exposition of
the teachings and scriptures of Islam. The traditional forms of Islamic science
continued to be practiced, but, so far as anyone knows, Muslim scholars
produced nothing to compete with the productions of European scientists after
about the year 1550.
Not
everyone thinks that Muslims were wrong to prefer mystical contemplation to
mathematical physics and the resultant superior artillery. There are many in
both the Islamic and Christian worlds who see the turn away from the spirit
towards the intensive study of the material world as a catastrophe for the
inner life of Western man. But that is not a question for a historian to
answer. What can be said is that the centrality of mysticism in Islamic
society set Islam on a very different path intellectually from that of the
West.
WHILE ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS
WERE TURNING AWAY FROM THE natural
world as a central concern of philosophy, philosophical rationalism was
becoming central to the curriculum of the madrasas,
particularly in the form of a semantically oriented logic, and rationalistic
methods were transforming both Islamic legal thought and Kalam theology. This
philosophical turn in the religious sciences is the subject of Chapters 6 and 7.
At this point, we turn from examining science and mysticism in a very general
way to looking closely at logic, the discipline central to scholastic
rationalism in Islamic civilization.
PART TWO
LOGIC, EDUCATION, AND DOUBT
Where Is Islamic Logic? The Triumph of
Scholastic
Rationalism in Islamic Education
By this question, I ask what books contain the analyses
made by learned, non-Westernized Muslims, usually writing in Arabic, that are
comparable with what in the West is called “logic” - in particular, those that
are comparable with what the medieval West called logic.
“Why,
surely in books of logic,” we would likely say, by which we would mean the
discipline learned by the Muslims from Aristotle and his commentators, a
discipline known in Arabic as ‘ilm al-mantiq, “the science of speech.”
But
by even posing the question explicitly, we begin to have doubts. The translations
of scientific and philosophical texts from Greek and Syriac into Arabic were
mostly done in the ninth century, and it was not until the tenth century that
indigenous Islamic logicians began to appear. The logic that they promulgated
and that was carried on for century after century is generally held to have
remained very close to its Greek models. Even a modern Islamic logician can
observe, “To the subjects studied in logic, the modern [i.e., Islamic]
logicians added semantics [lit., “the investigation and classification of
terms”] and the hypothetical proposition and syllogism. They omitted the study
of the ten categories and neglected almost completely the five arts [material
logic].”[94]
Modern critics dismiss the later logic - by which they mean everything but the
first three centuries - as sterile reworking of familiar material, “the age of
the schoolmasters,” to use the derisive phrase of a modern historian.[95]
The supposed “ossification” of Islamic logic, especially in the later
Middle Ages, would be in stark contrast to the extraordinary developments in
European logic in roughly the same period.
But
this is strange. The medieval Muslims were profound students of language and of
law, so it seems hardly credible that they would not have gone on to reflect on
the rules of thought and the relations among thought, argument, language, and
things. By the middle of the tenth century, all of the major indigenous Islamic
sciences had two or three centuries of vigorous development behind them and had
assumed something like their permanent form, including strictly religious
sciences like Kalam theology and law and linguistic sciences like Arabic grammar,
philology, prosody, and rhetoric. We would expect that during this period of
independent development, Muslim theoreticians in the various disciplines
surely would have systematically pondered the nature of thought and the methods
of right reasoning. Indeed, some early Islamic critics of logic insisted that
such was the case - that their own disciplines supplied systematic canons of
reasoning that made Greek logic redundant or counterproductive. The grammarian
Sïrâfï, in his famous debate with the Christian logician Matta b. Yunus in the
tenth century, criticized logic from two directions.[96] On the one hand, he
complained that logic was actually Greek grammar and that for one to speak correctly
in Arabic - even to reason correctly in Arabic - it was necessary to know
Arabic grammar and the meanings of the words of the Arabic language. On the
other hand, there were no really useful universal laws of thought. To reason
correctly, one had to know the principles of the individual sciences. For
Sïrâfï, logic was Greek grammar and therefore not useful to Arabic-speaking
Muslims. Ghazali also held that logic was redundant, although he accepted its
validity.[97]
His complaint was that it was not new and that much the same material was found
in the introductions to books of dogmatic theology, where it was known as nazar, “investigation.”
Further
doubts arise if we look at attempts to write the history of logic in general.
The historians of logic have had considerable disagreements about what properly
belongs to their subject matter. William and Martha Kneale, in their
magisterial The Development of Logic, stated that their task was “to record the first
appearances of those ideas which seem to us most important in the logic of our
day.” They believed that they had written “an account of the growth of logic,
rather than an attempt to chronicle all that past scholars, good and bad, have
said about their science.”[98]1.
M. Bocheliski conceived his task in a similar way - to collect the texts and
ideas that prefigure the results of modern mathematical logic.[99]
The Romanian historian of logic, Anton Dumitriu, objected to these procedures:
Generally,
the ideas about any science vary over time; even the content of a well-defined
science may completely change.... This is especially true of logic, for logic
has no unique definition. We do not know exactly what logic is.... Thus the history
of logic should comprise all the factors which have contributed to its
development. Logic is the whole of its own becoming....[100]
He goes on to protest that limiting the history oflogic to
the prefigurations of modern formal logic distorts or omits much that was most
important to the logicians of the past. It is perhaps for this reason that his
book is twice the length of the Kneales’. Dumitriu is telling us that it is
unwise to begin with premature assumptions about what constitutes logic in any
given intellectual tradition.
An
example is his account of Stoic logic. Stoic logic, he tells us, is divided
into 1) rhetoric and 2) dialectics. Dialectics, in turn, is divided
into 2a) the sciences of
speech and 2b) the sciences of
meaning. The sciences of speech are divided into 2a1) the physiology
of speech, 2a2) grammar, 2aj) poetics, and 2aq)
the theory of music. The sciences of meaning are divided into the theories of 2bi)
criteria, 2b2) concepts, 2bj) categories, 2b4)
sentences, and 2bs) reasoning.[101] Most of these areas would
not be considered part of logic by modern logicians, and only the “sciences of
meaning” would be considered to belong even to philosophy. Islamic philosophers
would exclude the theory of music from logic and exclude grammar and the physiology
of speech from philosophy entirely. Nonetheless, the Stoics’ notion of the
close relation between speech and thought gave them warrant for defining logic
as they did. Others might define the scope of logic differently or apportion
its possible subjects in other ways.
So perhaps mantiq is not the whole of Islamic logic but rather the name of a
particular tradition of Islamic logic, and the indigenous traditions of Islamic
thought might supply other logics. Where, then, would we find these other logics?
I think that there are four plausible major candidates:
3)
Usul al-fiqh, the science ofthe principles ofthe deduction
ofIslamic law; and
4)
Kalam, Islamic dogmatic theology.
That these traditions might be linked, especially in the
postclassical period, is shown by the fact that the authors of the standard
texts in each of these fields usually also wrote on the others. For example,
the great writer of textbooks al-Sharif al-Jurjani (1339-1413),
who would be classed as a faqih, a scholar of religious law, wrote original works, glosses,
or commentaries on popular works of Qur’an commentary, hadith, Arabic grammar
and rhetoric, logic, philosophy, Kalam theology, Islamic law, disputation
theory, and astronomy, among other subjects. Two of his elementary textbooks on
logic in Persian were still in use in India in the nineteenth century. There
were many others like him, and in later centuries it would be unusual for a
major religious scholar not to have also written on the rational sciences. Even
Qutb al-Din Shirazi - the leading Islamic scientist at the end of the
thirteenth century, a man whose reputation was based on his writings on
astronomy, medicine, and mathematics - also wrote extensively on the “Arab
sciences,” including a huge commentary on the
Qur’an, glosses on another famous commentary, a specialized
work on apparent contradictions in the Qur’an, and a widely read commentary on
a famous textbook of Arabic rhetoric.9 Biographical dictionaries of
later Islamic scholars routinely note that individuals were “expert in both
transmitted and rational sciences.”
Grammar, we may recall, was classed by the Stoics as a part
of logic, one of the branches of the “science of speech.” The Stoics, moreover,
were interested in kinds of sentences other than simple declarative propositions:
questions, imperatives, oaths, requests, and so on. Much the same happened in
medieval European logic, which grew to embrace a rich range of issues arising
from the nature and relations of thoughts, words, and concepts.10
For Islamic scholars, grammar was a fundamental discipline,
the common possession and affliction of even the lowliest student. Arabic is
an intensely grammatical language, much as are Latin and Greek (and Persian
and English are not), so the understanding and skillful use of Arabic required
a precise mastery of Arabic grammar. The structure of the language is such
that Arabic grammar is singularly logical, with meaningful triliteral roots
combining with meaningful morphological forms to create words whose meanings
can often be deduced by knowing only meaning of the root and the meaning of the
word form: istaktaba combines
a root k-t-b, which means “writing” with a morphological form
that means “to ask for [the meaning of the root],” thus yielding “dictate.”
Although the morphological system is complex, it is almost completely regular,
and the resulting grammar is nearly a deductive system.
While student textbooks might be no more than lists of
rules, Arabic grammar as presented in advanced texts starts with reflection on
the nature of words and meanings, the distinctions among the parts
9
Walbridge, Science of Mystic Lights, pp. 178-91.
10
For introductions to these
issues, see Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pin- borg, and Eleonore Stump,
eds., The Cambridge History of
Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 99-382, and Paul
Vincent Spade, Thoughts, Words,
and Things: An Introduction to Late Mediaeval Logic and Semantic Theory, http://pvspade.com/Logic/index.html. of speech, and the various categories
within each. It is the same sort of semantic analysis that is the starting
point of Islamic logic. There can be little doubt that much of the advanced
Islamic thought on semantics, the nature of propositions, and even categories
took place in the context of grammar rather than logic. Likewise, grammarians
could import logical terms and analyses into their grammatical analysis. For
example, the thirteenth-century grammarian Muwaffaq al-Din Ya‘ish b. ‘Ali,
commenting on a manual of grammar by Zamakhshari, writes:
The
author [Zamakhshari] writes: “A word is an expression indicating a single
meaning by convention. It is a genus embracing three species - the noun, the
verb, and the particle....” When they wish to indicate the reality of a thing
and distinguish it essentially from everything else, they define it by an
essential definition [hadd].11
Almost all the technical terms - expression, indicate,
meaning, convention, genus, species, definition, define, essentially - come
directly from logic. The commentator proceeds to analyze the definition of
“word” in terms of the logical categories of genus and differentia. The substance
of the analysis also seems to reflect logical concepts. When we examine the
literature of Arabic grammar, we find the same apparatus of textbook,
commentary, supercommentary, and glosses that was used for logic, with the same
scholastic structure of statements of general principle, objections, and
resolution by further distinction and finer analysis.[102] [103]
Nonetheless,
it must be admitted that it would not have occurred to an Islamic logician to
categorize grammar as a part of logic. The reason is that in most Islamic
schemes for the division of the sciences, the main distinction is between the
sciences known by transmission, the so-called “Arab sciences” and those known
by reason. All the linguistic sciences, grammar included, belong in the first
category, while logic belongs in the second. Still, as Sïrâfï insisted, logic
and grammar are analogous in that both deal with the proper use of speech, and
he maintained that logic actually was Greek grammar. For the first few Islamic
centuries, most Muslim scholars were content to assume that grammar equipped a
man with what he needed to think and speak correctly.
There are actually two distinct forms of rhetoric among the
Islamic sciences. One is a branch of logic, one of the “five arts” of applied
inference. It differs from the other four arts - demonstration or scientific
reasoning, dialectic, poetics, and sophistics - in that it uses premises that
convince but are not necessarily either certain or generally accepted. We have
met it already in the Farabian explanation of the difference between scripture
and true philosophical texts, scripture being the rhetorical presentation of
philosophical truth in a way that is comprehensible to everyone. This philosophical
rhetoric is derived from the Rhetoric of Aristotle. It was not a widely cultivated discipline in
the Islamic world. Ibn Sma has a volume on rhetoric in his Healing and Ibn Rushd commented on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but few later writers dealt with it at any
length, and there is no reason to suppose that it was influential as a
discipline. It was certainly virtually ignored in the teaching of logic in the madrasas.
A far
more vigorous discipline was Arabic rhetoric, known as balagha, “eloquence,” with its three branches of madam, “notions”; bayan, “modes of presentation”; and badl, “tropes.” Balagha was a practical science, intended to guide
authors of poetry and prose, and it arose naturally from Arabic literature.
Nonetheless, it has aspects that are related to logic. First, the logicians
claim rhetoric as a part of logic, although the applied and linguistically
grounded rhetoric of ‘ilm al-balagha certainly belongs to the linguistic rather than the
rational sciences. Second, the classification of tropes, forms of metaphor,
kinds of sentences, and the like inevitably touch on more general logical
concerns. Third, in the standard manual of Arabic rhetoric, Sakkaki’s Miftah al-Ulüm [key to the sciences], one of the divisions
concerns argument and its forms. In fact, it is a manual of logic not very
different in content and organization from the standard logical textbooks. The
first commentator on this book was the scientist philosopher Qutb al-Din
Shirazi.[104]
This is the science of the “principles of religious law,”
the rules by which the details of Islamic religious law are deduced.[105]
Like the law of Judaism, Islamic law is in principle complete, revealed in its
entirety through the Qur’an and the life and practice of Muhammad. Legislation,
the making of wholly new Islamic law, ceased with the death of Muhammad.
Therefore, any expansion of the law to meet new circumstances and problems must
be done by interpreting materials dating from the time of the Prophet. The
various sects and legal schools of Islam differ somewhat on the details of how
this is to be done, but virtually all agree that new law must be deduced from
the sources of existing Islamic law. As we saw in Chapter 3, there was considerable disagreement at first
as to how this ought to be done - and it is virtually certain that much of the
material purporting to originate with the Prophet actually reflects legal
debates during the first two centuries of Islam - but by the year 1000 or so, there was broad consensus on the
intellectual methods that could appropriately be used to explicate the law. The
science expounding these rules is usul al-fiqh. Refinements were later made, but the general pattern was
clear.
By
the late eleventh century, Islamic legal scholars were conscious that there was
a close relationship between usul al-fiqh and logic. Ghazali (d. 1111), the great theologian whose work marks a
watershed in a number of areas of Islamic thought, is considered the first to
have incorporated logic systematically into the Islamic sciences, although the
ground had been prepared at least a generation earlier.[106] Ghazali went on to write
two manuals of logic, one of which drew its examples from the Qur’an. In his
manual of usul al-fiqh, al-Mustasfa fit ‘Ilm al-Usul, “The Purification of the Science of
Jurisprudence,” Ghazali treats logic in some detail, spending forty pages
discussing essential definition, demonstration (hadd, burhan,)
and related topics.[107]
He denies that this logical introduction, a summary of his two manuals of
logic, forms a proper part of usul al-fiqh, explaining that logic is necessary for all theoretical
sciences. The student is therefore free not to copy this part of the book.[108]
Ghazali was a pioneer in using logic in usul al-fiqh, and later works do not usually contain full
expositions of elementary logic. They would have been unnecessary, because usUl al-fiqh was an advanced subject, and the Islamic
colleges from the thirteenth century forward commonly taught logic starting
with the first year of theological studies. Nonetheless, the spoor of logic is
easily found in the use of characteristic logical terms and doctrines such as
conception and assent (tasawwur, tasdïq).
Not
everybody approved of this development. In his book The Refutation of the
Logicians, the great
fourteenth-century fundamentalist Ibn Taymiya commented acidly:
[Essential
definition] enters the discussions of those who deal with the principles of
religion and fiqh after Abu Hamid [Ghazali] at the end of the
fifth/[eleventh] century and the beginning of the sixth/[twelfth]. Abu Hamid
placed a logical introduction at the beginning of the Purification and
claimed that the sciences of whoever did not possess that knowledge were
unreliable. On that subject he composed The Touchstone of Speculation
and The Gauge of Knowledge [Ghazalï’s two manuals of logic], and his
confidence in it increased steadily. More astonishing than that is the fact
that he wrote a book named The Just Scales in which he claimed to have
learned logic from the prophets - but actually he learned it from Ibn Sina, and
Ibn Sina learned it from the books of Aristotle. Those who wrote about the
principles of jurisprudence after Abu Hamid talked about definitions according
to the method of the practitioners of Greek logic.[109]
Ibn Taymiya was right, of course, but he was on the losing
side of this debate. By his time, as we have seen, theology students were
routinely taught logic in preparation for advanced legal study.
However,
this only demonstrates that people who practiced usul al- fiqh were expected to know logic; the interesting
question is what sort of logical thinking took place within the discipline of usul al-fiqh apart from elements directly imported from
traditional logic. Usul al-fiqh or jurisprudence is the science of the rules for deducing
law and thus is the logic of Islamic law. It has two aspects that clearly can
be considered logical in some plausible sense: the proper interpretation of
religious texts and the deduction of obligations. The first relates to
semantics and philosophical rhetoric, the second to inference, particularly
analogy, and to deonitic logic.
In
his book The Upshot of the Science of Jurisprudence, Fakhr al-Din Razi (1149-1209)
discusses how the various divisions of usul al-fiqh arise from the nature of the subject matter:
You
have learned that usul al-fiqh is an expression for all the methods offiqh
and the method of inference in them and what can be deduced by them. These
methods are either rational or traditional. I myself think that the rational
methods are only valid if endorsed by traditional methods.... These are the
divisions of usul al-fiqh:
First,
semantics [lughat, lit., “words”]; second, command and prohibition;
third, the general and specific; fourth, the ambiguous and unambiguous; fifth,
actions; sixth, abrogation; seventh, consensus; eighth, reports [of the
Prophet’s words and deeds]; ninth, analogy; tenth, probabilities [tarajth]; eleventh,
independent judgment [ijtihad]; twelfth, issuing legal opinions;
thirteenth, differences of opinion about proper methods of legal reasoning.19
A number of these headings are distinctly logical,
certainly logical within the broad sense laid out by the Stoics in their
science of speech and thought. The first book is on semantics and deals both
with general questions of language and rhetorical questions like metaphor. The
material is obviously borrowed from both logic and rhetoric. The bulk of usul al-fiqh consists in the elaboration of an applied
five-value deonitic logic quite systematically expounded. It treats such
questions as the levels of obligation (commanded, recommended, indifferent,
discouraged, prohibited), the degree of certainty required for establishing
duties, the effect of doubt or contradictory evidence on an obligation, and the
relationships between individual and collective duties, among others.
19
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, alMiihsul fl ‘Um al-Usul, vol. 1, ed. Taha Jabir Fayyad al- ‘Alwani
(Lajnatal-Buhuth 13; Riyad:
Jami‘at al-Imam Muhammad b. Sa‘udal-Islamiya, 1399/1979), pp. 223, 226-7. On semantic
analysis in Sunni usul, see Sukrija
(Husejn) Ramic, Language and the
Interpretation of Islamic Law (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2003).
It deals, moreover, with modes of inference, particularly
analogy [qiyas], which is
the most important method for establishing law in new situations.
Muslim
scholars were perfectly well aware that usul al-fiqh had connections to logic - it seems to have been
the main reason that logic was taught in the seminaries - and in logical texts
they sometimes remark on particularly important connections such as the use of
analogy and lesser levels of certainty in legal reasoning. They imported
logical terms and concepts into usUl al-fiqh, but they seem not to have done the opposite - that is,
explicated legal reasoning as such within logical texts. For this reason, the
connection between the two disciplines is not necessarily obvious if only the
specifically logical texts are considered.
KALÀM
Kalam is Islamic theology - literally, “talk”
about religious topics. Of all the major disciplines of the Islamic religious
sciences, with the possible exception of mysticism, Kalam changed the most in
its history. It arose from the arguments that occurred in the first generations
of Islam, when Muslims realized that the implications of Islamic doctrines were
not necessarily clear and that the varying interpretations of the Qur’an might
have different theological and practical consequences. The older surviving
theological texts are somewhat random collections of doctrines, creeds
supported without great system by proof texts and simple rational arguments.
Writing his Highlights of
the Polemic against Deviators and Innovations in the first third of the tenth century, al-Ash‘ari, after
two paragraphs of introduction, launches straight into a commonsense proof that
God is the creator of the world:
Q.
What is the proof that creation has a maker who made it and a governor who
wisely ordered it?
A.
The proof is that the completely mature man was originally semen, then a clot,
then a small lump, then flesh and bone and blood. Now we know very well that he
did not translate himself from state to state. For we see that at the peak of
his physical and mental maturity he is unable to produce hearing and sight for
himself, or to create a bodily member for himself....[110]
The
argument is a simple elaboration of two Qur’anic verses citing the development
of the embryo as evidence of God’s power. Maturïdï, writing about a century
later in his Book ofMonotheism, felt the need to begin with an introduction on
epistemology, but it occupies only fifteen pages of a six-hundred-page book.[111]
Maturïdï’s follower Usmandi, writing a much smaller book a century later near
the middle of the twelfth century, devotes about a tenth of a two-hundred-page
book to epistemological issues. A similar book by the Ash‘arite Imam
al-Haramayn Juwayni, writing at about the same time, has a comparable format.[112]
Sometime
around 1300, the situation
changed completely. Large, systematic theological treatises appeared, the bulk
of which consisted of discussions of inference and metaphysics, with obvious
heavy influences from philosophy. An example is Sa‘d al-Din Taftazani’s Intentions,[113] a work that later scholars frequently wrote
commentaries on. Taftazani’s Kalam is now largely concerned with what
theologians referred to as umur ‘âmma, “general matters.” In this case, most of the book is
almost indistinguishable from philosophy, with the first four “Intentions” dealing
with first principles, general entities, the temporal and eternal, and atoms.
The fifth Intention is devoted to “the divine” but is heavily influenced by
philosophy, as evidenced by such things as its use of the term “Necessary
Being” to refer to God. Only the sixth Intention, on “things known by report,”
deals with what the early Kalaam theologians would have recognized as the
characteristic subjects of their discipline. In the three centuries after
Ghazali, philosophy had moved from being a rival of Kalam theology to a central
concern and source of inspiration. The content and methods of this later
Islamic theology are not well understood by modern scholars, but it is clear
that by the fourteenth century, Kalaam had become a full-blown scholastic
discipline not unlike the philosophical theology cultivated by European
philosopher-theologians of the same period. It is also clear that the concerns
of this discipline embraced much that might be considered to belong to logic.[114]
INSTITUTIONS AND THE BOUNDARIES OF LOGIC
It is interesting to reflect on why logical thinking,
especially with regard to the disciplines within which it was pursued,
developed so differently in Islam than in medieval Christian Europe. Much of
the reason seemingly has to do with institutional arrangements.
In
the medieval European university, there was a strict division between what
Masters of Arts were allowed to teach to undergraduates and what could be
taught to doctoral students in the faculties of theology. The Masters of Arts -
graduate students in modern terms - could teach logic and natural philosophy to
undergraduates. They were forbidden to teach or write about the very much more
sensitive theological topics. This seems to have had two effects on the
development of logic and natural philosophy in medieval Europe. First, these
two disciplines were much more intensively cultivated than they would have
been without such restrictions. Bright young scholars were forced to focus
their attention on logic and not on issues like the Trinity, which only the
professors of theology were allowed to teach and write on. Second, these
younger scholars expanded the boundaries of logic, developing new branches of
logic dealing with questions like the philosophy of language and topics that we
would consider epistemology or even metaphysics.[115]
The
situation was very different in the Islamic world, where few institutional
rules restricted what young scholars could write or teach. Instead, development
took place within the lines laid out by established disciplines and practices
of teaching. Logic retained the generally Aristotelian form it had been given
by Ibn Sina, and advances took the form of the discovery of new problems to be
resolved by clarifications and further distinctions. The situation was rather
different in fiqh and
Kalam. In both disciplines, there were major reformulations of their
foundations without fundamental changes in the actual content of their
subjects. The process happened earlier in fiqh,
with the rise of usul al-fiqh
as a distinct discipline. The latter discipline rigorously grounded the legal
rules established by early generations of Islamic legal scholars through an
elaborate analysis of language, legal inference, and evidence. The process
occurred later in Kalam in response to the challenge of philosophy. By the
fourteenth century, Kalam works had come to be dominated by umUr ‘mma, “general matters,” elaborate epistemological
and philosophical discussions providing the basis for the traditional
theological doctrines.
Looking
at the problem superficially, as most historians of logic have done, it appears
that logic in the Islamic world stalled after Ibn Sina, endlessly repeating the
same doctrines through commentaries and supercommentaries. This, I believe,
misses three important points:
First,
the content of the commentaries and supercommentaries is virtually unknown to
modern scholarship. The twentieth century Iraqi logician, ‘Ali Kashif
al-Ghita’, identifies some five hundred points of dispute in the traditional
logic dealing with almost every significant topic discussed.26 A
disciplinary tradition that has engaged intelligent men for over a thousand
years is not likely to be completely sterile.
Second,
as we have seen, much analysis that we - or the Stoics, or the medieval Latins
- would consider to be logic was practiced in other disciplines, notably Arabic
linguistics and the principles of jurisprudence. Anysoundanalysisof
Islamicachievementsinlogic,consideredinalarger sense, must examine what was
done in those disciplines.
Third,
for our purposes, the critical point is not whether logic developed or not;
what is important is that it was central to Islamic intellectual life and
education. That is the subject of the next chapter.
The Long Afternoon of Islamic Logic
As we have seen, what the Stoics and the medieval Europeans
considered to be logic is, in Islamic intellectual life, spread across a
number of disciplines, including legal theory, grammar, and literary rhetoric.
Nevertheless, logic in its narrow Aristotelian sense played an important role
in Islamic intellectual life. This tradition of study and teaching of logic is
interesting and important in its own right, but it is also an especially good
illustration of the role of scholastic rationalism in Islamic intellectual
culture, particularly in education.
For
some seven hundred years, seminaries across the Islamic world have required
that students take a rigorous course of traditional logic. Instruction was
based on a series of short textbooks, explicated through commentaries and
glosses. The textbooks of this “school logic” reflected the essentially oral
quality of instruction in the seminaries. Given that the seminary training
equipped students to explicate Islamic law from sacred texts, it is not
surprising that the emphasis of the school logic was on semantics. The school
logic was closely linked with philosophical logic, which differed from it in
emphasis, and with the disciplines of the principles of jurisprudence and
Arabic linguistics. Despite some influence from Western logic, the school logic
is still taught as a basic part of the curriculum in Islamic seminaries in
Egypt, Iran, and the Subcontinent.
in
the mantle of the prophet,
roy mottahedeh’s wonderful book on
religion and politics in modern Iran, there is a description of the
ten-year-old seminarian Ali Hashemi attending his first classes on logic. The
students sit cross-legged in a circle around their teacher, who reads from a
large book, the Commentary of Mulla Abdullah, about the distinction between conception and assent. The
students - the brighter ones, at least - pepper the teacher with questions and
objections, which the teacher uses to bring out the subtler aspects ofthe text.1
The scene took place in Qom in Iran in the early 1950s, but it might have taken place in any major
Islamic seminary between Cairo and Hyderabad at any time since the fourteenth
century and, with the names and some details changed, could equally well have
taken place in a medieval European university. Logic seems to have become a
regular subject of instruction in Islamic institutions of higher education
about 1300, at least in the
more sophisticated centers of learning, and it continued even in areas like
Egypt and North Africa, where interest in philosophy had virtually died out.
The
effort devoted to logic in the seminaries was considerable. For example, in the
first four years of the eight-year program in the religious college in Deoband
in India in the 1880s, one of the
three daily lessons was devoted to logic. Eighteen texts were studied,
including several series of text, commentary, and supercommentary.[116]
[117]
Intellectually, this tradition centered on a series of short, standard
textbooks, each the subject of hundreds of commentaries. Most of the
commentaries were intended for students or were actually student exercises
themselves, but some were major works of scholarship. The tradition remained
sufficiently vigorous that scores of editions of major and minor texts were
printed in the second half of the nineteenth century, as soon as printing came
to be accepted in Islamic countries. Elementary texts were published for
students, just as in earlier generations scribes had prepared copies for purchase
by them, and major commentaries were published, obviously for scholarly use.
Many of these texts are still being reprinted for student use.
Traditionally
this material is dismissed as hopelessly arid - and it is indeed dry - but
surely a school of logic whose earliest members were contemporaries of Thomas
Aquinas and whose most recent members have seen Russell buried is worthy of
attention, as a sociological phenomenon if nothing else. This tradition must
have spoken in some way to the many generations of students and teachers who
passed it on - Mottahedeh documents its influence on a series of major
intellectuals of modern Iran - but how? Was it an archaic relic preserved in
the curriculum out of misplaced academic conservatism, like Latin in the
British public schools? Was it a tool for sharpening the minds and memories of
aspiring jurisconsults, as an enthusiastic young logic teacher from a Pakistani
seminary once told me? Did it aid in debate? Was it used in jurisprudence? Did
it introduce students to philosophy? Did it aid the teachers in their own
scholarly research? Surely all of these are true to some degree, but how should
we weight these factors, and what were the details?
Historians
of philosophy or logic oriented toward the European tradition - Kneale and
Kneale or Dumitriu, for example - have nothing to say about later Islamic logic
because they are working mainly from the Latin sources, and no Arabic logical
works after Ibn Rushd were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages.[118]
The historians of Islamic logic, repelled by the mass of commentaries and
supercommentaries, unpublished or in hard-to-read lithographs and old Bulaq
editions, dismiss the period - two-thirds of the history of Islamic logic! - as
a period of stagnation.[119]
That judgment might be warranted in part, although no one
has yet seen fit to demonstrate it, but as we have seen, it neglects three
points: first, the evidence of intellectual development within Islamic logic;
second, the intellectual question of where we should draw the boundary lines of
Islamic logic, and finally, the sociological question of why this kind of logic
was taught for so long.
ISLAMIC LOGIC TO THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
The school logic - as I call it to distinguish it from the
philosophical logic found in texts like Ibn Sïnâ’s Healing and the logical elements of disciplines like
grammar and jurisprudence - is largely Aristotelian logic as systematized by
Ibn Sïnâ. Obviously there is more to it, but this is the central fact of the
history of Islamic logic.
The pagan philosophical schools in the Byzantine Empire
were finally closed in the early sixth century. Early Islamic sources tell us
that thereafter, the most important practitioners of Greek logic were the
Syriacspeaking Christians, who taught logic up to Prior Analytics 1.7 in
their seminaries. Islamic logic began in the middle of the eighth century with
entries/arabic-islamic-language,
Feb. 14, 2010, deals with some points at which the earlier
school logicians broke with Ibn Sina. Rescher’s work is mainly a catalog of the
major Islamic logicians through about 1500 but is nonetheless the only attempt to write a book-length history
of Islamic logic. I wish I could say that it was outdated, but I do not know of
any work that attempts to supercede it. Rescher also wrote or co-authored a
number of other articles and monographs on various aspects of Islamic logic,
especially modal logic. Most recent research on Islamic logic has been devoted
either to editions, translations, or explications of particular texts, almost
all from earlier than the period I discuss here, or to the discussion of
particular problems. An exception to this pattern is Khaled El-Rouwayheb,
“Sunni Muslim Scholars on the Status of Logic, 1500-1800,” Islamic Law and Society 11.2
(2004), pp. 213-32. ‘All Sami
al-Nashshar, Manahij alBahth
‘inda Mufakkirî al-Islam wa’ktishaf al-Minhaj al-‘Ilmi fl ’l-‘Alam al-Islami [Research
methods of the thinkers of Islam and an investigation of scientific method in
the Islamic world], 2nd ed. (Cairo
Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1965), discusses
the whole question of research methodology in the mature Islamic sciences,
dealing with both logic proper and the applied logic of such disciplines of
law, theology, and rhetoric. Kashif alGhila’, Naqd, is a survey of the disputed points in the school
logic, an essential reference for anyone studying the subject, and is a
complement to Muhammad-Rida al-Muzaffar, al- Mantiq (Baghdad: al-Tafayyud, 1367/1948, and reprinted
several times in Najaf, Qum, and Beirut), which has been for some decades the
standard textbook for students studying logic in the Shi‘ite seminaries in Iraq
and is apparently also used in Iran. On the adoption of the rational sciences
in Islamic education, see Sonja Brentjes, “On the Location of the Ancient or
‘Rational” Science in Islamic Educational Landscapes (AH 500-1100),” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith
Studies 4.1 (2002), pp. 47-71. the
earliest translations of Aristotle’s logical works, but it really was not
firmly established until about the end of the ninth century, when high-quality
translations of all of Aristotle’s logical works and many of their Greek
commentaries were in circulation. Most were done by Syriac-speaking Christian
scholars. The tenth century saw attempts to assimilate this material into
Islamic intellectual culture, with the highlight being Farabi’s commentaries
on and popular adaptations of the books comprising Aristotle’s Organon.
It
was Ibn Sina, writing in the early eleventh century, who gave Islamic logic its
definitive shape. Even in Arabic, Aristotle was Aristotle, and not easy
reading. Ibn Sina had a happy gift for clarity, system, and lucid Arabic, and
his works replaced Aristotle’s in the Islamic world. Today, only one full
manuscript of the Organon survives in Arabic, and almost all the Arabic
translations of Greek commentaries are lost, but manuscripts of Ibn Sina and
his commentators choke the libraries of the East.[120]
The
three centuries following Ibn Sina’s death saw several determined attacks on
his logic, both by supporters and opponents of logic. We have already seen the
attacks of the grammarian Sirafi[121] and the theologian
Ghazali.[122]
The mystical philosopher Suhrawardi (d. 1191), the younger contemporary of Averroes,
rejected the essentialism of Aristotelian logic on epistemological and
metaphysical grounds, although his criticisms and proposed simplification of
logic do not seem to have been influential.[123] Suhrawardi’s attacks were
extended in the early fourteenth century by Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328), the greatest fundamentalist of Islamic
history, who attacked logic in the name of a radical nominalism and atomism
derived from the Ash‘arite theologians.[124]
However,
the tide had already turned more than half a century before Ibn Taymiya. Two
influential commentaries on Ibn Sina’s Hints and Admonitions, an aphoristic textbook of philosophy, had
reestablished Ibn Sina’s popularity. The first, by the theologian Fakhr al-Din
Razi (d. 1209), a schoolmate of
Suhrawardi, was critical of Ibn Sina but nonetheless helped make philosophy a
respectable object of study for theologians. The second, by the great
thirteenth-century philosopher and scientist Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274), answered Razi’s criticisms and became the
object of innumerable glosses and supercommentaries.[125] [126] It is Tusi’s circle that
is the starting point of the school logic.
THE TEXTBOOKS AND THEIR COMMENTARIES
Tusiwas oneofthose whomadecommoncause with theMongolinvaders
in the 1250s, and he was
rewarded with a lavish grant to establish an observatory at Maragha, at that
time the capital of the Mongol state in Iran.11 Although the
observatory’s main business was astronomy, the whole range of the rational sciences
were studied and taught there, including logic.[127]
Tusi had written extensively on philosophical logic,
including a manual of philosophical logic in Persian, The Basis of
Acquistion,[128] the commentary on the logic of Ibn Sina’s Hints, and several other works. Although these were
popular, they did not come into use for teaching. However, several short
summaries of logic by Tusi’s contemporaries did achieve lasting popularity and
have remained the basis, directly or indirectly, for most logic teaching in
Islamic seminaries to the present. These logicians were Najm al-Din Dabiran
Katibi Qazwini, Athir al-Din Abhari, and - of somewhat less importance - Siraj
al-Din Urmawi. Katibi (d. 1276)
is best known for his Shamsiya, “the Sun Epistle,” an introduction to logic, as well as
for an equally influential textbook of philosophy, Hikmat al-Ayn, “the Wisdom of the Source.”[129] Abhari (d. 1264) is best known for his Isâghüjï, “Eisagoge,” an immensely popular elementary
introduction to logic, but he, too, wrote other short texts that also have
remained popular, along with a manual of philosophy, Hidayat
al-Hikma, “The Guidance of
Wisdom.”[130]
The last of the three, Siraj al- Din Urmawi (1198-1283)
is somewhat less important, but his manual of logic, Matali‘
al-Anwar, “the Dawning Places
of Lights,” drew some commentators.[131]
The
fact that three scholars working at the same time produced similar textbooks
indicates that there was a need for works of this kind in instruction. Their
lasting popularity was secured through the works of several scholars writing in
the fourteenth and early fifteen centuries. The first was Qutb al-Din Razi (d. 1365), known as Tahtani, “who lives downstairs,” to
distinguish him from another Qutb al-Din who lived upstairs in the same
seminary. Tahtani wrote popular commentaries on several of these textbooks, of
which the most important was a commentary on the Shamsïya,
known affectionately to generations of students as Qutbï. He also wrote the standard supercommentary on
Ibn Sina’s Hints dealing with
the disagreements between Tusi’s and Razi’s commentaries.[132]
Later
in the fourteenth century, his work was taken up by two gifted writers of
textbooks, Sharif Jurjani (d. 1340)
and Sa‘d al-Din Taftazani (d. 1390).[133]
Each produced popular supercommentaries on several of the earlier textbooks as
well as short textbooks of their own that in turn became objects of
commentaries, supercommentaries, and glosses. Jurjani’s textbooks, The Larger and The Smaller, were written in Persian. This was a sign of
the increasing Iranization of philosophy and logic, as previously, works in the
vernacular had always been written for laymen, not for scholars or students,
who were expected to work in academic Arabic. Both Taftazani and Jurjani also
wrote popular textbooks on other subjects, such as grammar.[134] After this, the
bibliographical trail becomes too complicated to recount in detail, with the
commentaries and supercommentaries numbering in the hundreds.
The
next major event is the conversion of Iran to Shi‘ism in the sixteenth
century, which split the tradition into Iranian and Indian branches (though the
two branches continued to influence each other). Many Sunni Iranian scholars
immigrated to India to escape persecution, and they were followed by Shi'ite
scholars seeking to make their fortunes in that land of fabulous wealth and
urbane princes. Although the seminarians in Iran and India continued to study
the same underlying textbooks, they increasingly did so through different
commentaries. Whether logical doctrines also diverged is not yet clear, but
the logicians of Shi'ite Iran are still viewed with grudging respect by their
Sunni Indian peers. Logic was also taught in the great Islamic university of
al-Azhar in Cairo and presumably in other places as well, but it seems to have
been a less vigorous tradition.[135]
When the learned Cairo publisher Faraj Allah Zaki Kurdi printed a two-volume
anthology of logic for use at al-Azhar at the beginning of the twentieth
century, his main texts were the Shamsiya, the early commentary by Tahtani, and supercommentaries by
Jurjani, Taftazani, and the seventeenth-century Indian 'Abd al-Hakim Siyalkuti.
He was able to include only two Egyptian works, a supercommentary of some merit
by Disûqï and notes by the then Grand Shaykh of Azhar. The latter were probably
written at the request of the publisher - presumably they would have guaranteed
classroom adoption - but they are no more than puerile glosses of difficult
words, a small but telling indication of the standard of logical scholarship in
the leading Sunni Arab institution of Islamic learning.[136]
Whenprinting
finally came into common use in the middle ofthe nineteenth century, the
standard logical texts were published, mainly for the use of students. I have
already mentioned one such collection published in Cairo; there were many
others, as well as the beautiful lithographed collections published in Tehran,
Istanbul, and all the major centers of Islamic publishing in India,
particularly Delhi, Lucknow, Cawnpore, and Lahore. Scores of collections were
published. I reproduce a sample page from one as Illustration 1.[137] There were also works
published in vernacular Islamic languages, either as introductions or as
trots. Persian manuals of logic were published in Iran in the twentieth century
and in India, where Persian was the language of the educated, in the
nineteenth. In India, Urdu translations and commentaries increasingly appeared
in the twentieth century as Persian passed out of common use and the standards
of Arabic instruction declined. In Cairo, works on logic in the Islamic
languages of Southeast Asia were published for the benefit of students from
those distant lands.[138]
The old lithographs continue to be reprinted for use in the seminaries, and
original works occasionally are still published. To this day, theology
students in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and India are taught this form of logic as
a basic part of their training.
THE EDUCATIONAL USE OF THE SCHOOL LOGIC TEXTS
The theology students and professors who have always been
the primary users of these texts were and are scholastics, and their use of
these texts reflects scholastic methods of teaching. Two factors have been
mainly responsible for determining the form and use of these texts: the limitations
of manuscripts and the Islamic preference for the oral transmission of
knowledge.
Few now appreciate the practical difficulties faced by
those who wished to preserve and transmit knowledge in the age of manuscripts.
Scholars had the choice of making their own copies of books they needed,
commissioning copies from professional scribes (or their own students), or
buying them from booksellers. Paper was handmade and therefore expensive.[139]
Whatever the source, a book was expensive in time, money, or both. Moreover, a
scholarly book had to be carefully checked before it could be used, preferably
by reading it to someone who had authoritative knowledge of that text or by
correcting it from the dictation of such a
person. Citing a book without checking it in one of these
ways was an academic sin roughly akin to the modern offense of copying
footnotes without verifying the reference personally. Understandably, there was
a strong preference for books that were concise, comprehensive, and current.
For that reason, earlier texts tended to disappear, replaced by more complete
and up-to-date works incorporating their contents.[140]
Second,
Muslim scholars have always preferred the oral transmission of knowledge. This
has roots in the particular history of Islamic religious learning, where the
hadith were transmitted orally. It also has to do with the ambiguity of the
Arabic script, particularly in its earlier forms, and with a shrewd evaluation
of the limitations of manuscripts and of the written transmission of knowledge
generally. The aversion to the use of written texts was not quite as strong in
the rational sciences like logic and philosophy, because one can in theory
deduce the correct reading for oneself, but pedagogical considerations and
academic traditions encouraged oral transmission even in these fields. The
Islamic logicians who taught in the seminaries were in full agreement with
Plato that philosophy must be learned through discussion. The occasional
Islamic autodidact was a faintly ridiculous figure, however impressive his
achievements might have been.
The
form of the school texts reflects these circumstances and prejudices, and the
manuscripts and lithographs show clearly how these texts were produced and
used. The basic text was the short textbook, such as the Sun Book of Katibi or the Eisagoge of Abhari. These are typically about ten to
twenty pages in length (I translated the Eisagoge in a day), so they are delphic in their
terseness. The student might buy the text in the market or, more likely, take
it down in dictation in class and copy it out fair at home. He also might very
well memorize it verbatim, which explains why some of these textbooks were
rewritten as verse. In manuscripts, this primary text was often written with
only eight or ten lines per page, with a space of up to a centimeter between
lines and wide margins. This deviation from the usual manuscript principle of
never wasting paper allowed the classroom use of the text as a notebook. The
teacher would go through the text line by line - indeed, word by
2.
A manuscript showing a student’s interlinear and marginal notes.
word - and explain it. The student would gloss difficult
words and phrases between the lines and write more extended comments in the margins.26
The students might then collate these marginal notes taken down from
their teacher’s dictation and publish them in his name as a commentary -
usually called a hashiya,
“gloss.”
This process sounds mind-numbingly dull, but in the hands
of a skillful teacher it clearly was not. Students were encouraged to raise
difficulties or objections, to which the teacher or other students would
respond. A student’s status in the eyes of his teachers and other students was
largely dependent on his ability to hold his own in this lively cut-and-thrust.
Written commentaries were often used to supplement the
underlying text. These would not be memorized, but they did serve to explain
and amplify the original textbook for students in their private study and
provide texts for more advanced study of the material. Like modern textbooks,
they also served to extend the reach of the most gifted teachers. Because the
curriculum tended to visit the same topics repeatedly in greater depth, a
succession of commentaries and supercommentaries was often used to accommodate
students at different levels and probably also as teachers’ guides. The most
famous such series in logic was Katibi’s Sun Book, with Tahtani’s Qutbi, Jurjânï’s supercommentary Mir Qutbi, and Siyalkuti’s Gloss, commonly accompanied in India by Mir Zahid’s Gloss on the Qutbi, and Bihârï’s Gloss on Mir Zahid. Read together, such collections
of texts are a written imitation of the lively debate in the seminary classroom
and a preparation for the student who had to be able to engage successfully in
that debate. There is also a genre of textbooks on debating techniques or
dialectic. They are far less common, but they had the same pattern of textbooks
and supercommentaries. Most likely, they were intended for the use of more
advanced students who would make their careers teaching in the seminaries or
perhaps in the royal courts, both arenas where debates were a popular
entertainment. As far as I know, disputations in this format are no longer
held, but the rules of disputation are reflected in the arguments in texts on usul al-fiqh.27
26
See Illustration 2 for a sample. Illustration 3 shows how this form was adapted to lithographed
textbooks.
27
A fact pointed out to me
by Khalil Abdur-Rashid. On disputation theory and its history, see Larry
Benjamin Miller, “Islamic Disputation Theory: A Study of the Development of
Dialectic in Islam from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Centuries,” Ph.D.
dissertation, Princeton University, 1984.
28
3. A commentary in a lithographed textbook.
Such texts were the product of an educational system that
was narrow but intellectually challenging. Mottahedeh points out that many of
the leading intellectuals of modern Iran were the product of this sort of
education and remarks that although many of them rejected traditional religion,
they invariably remembered their religious education with great fondness.[141]
As in other areas of Islamic philosophy, the outline of
Islamic logic was set by Ibn Sïnâ, and it is almost certain that the school
logic texts are modeled directly on the logic of Ibn Sina’s last major work,
the Hints and Admonitions. Despite some efforts to impose new organization
on the subject, notably by Ghazali in his Mi‘yar al-‘Ilm,
“the Gauge of
Knowledge,” and by Suhrawardi in his Philosophy of
Illumination, Ibn Sina’s
pattern for the most part stuck.
In philosophical encyclopedias, logic comprises nine major
topics, all except one corresponding to a work of Aristotle:
Terms: Porphyry’s Eisagoge
Categories: Categories
Propositions: De Interpretatione
Syllogism: Prior Analytics
Demonstration and essential definition: Posterior
Analytics
Dialectic: Topics
Rhetoric: Rhetoric
Sophistry: Sophistical Refutations
Poetics: Poetics
This list includes two works that are not considered part
of the Organon in the
Greek tradition: the Rhetoric and the Poetics. The last five comprise the “Five Arts” of the applied
syllogism. Whereas the Prior Analytics deals with the syllogism in general, the Islamic logicians
assumed that each of the remaining books - Posterior Analytics,
Topics, Rhetoric, Sophistical Refutations, and Poetics - dealt with syllogisms using a different kind of premise
and thus yielding a different kind of conclusion. These are respectively
certain, generally accepted, convincing, fallacious, and imaginative premises.
They yield demonstrative, dialectical, rhetorical, false, and poetic
conclusions. The logic of Ibn Sina’s most important work, the Healing, thus consists of nine volumes, each treating
one of these subjects. TusT’s Basis of Acquisition follows exactly the same outline.
The
school logicians modify this pattern somewhat. They begin with the premise that
all knowledge is either conception or assent, the subject of Ali Hashemi’s
memorable first logic class. The former is a notion in the mind and the latter
a notion accompanied by an affirmative or a negative judgment. These are terms
and propositions. This distinction is not unique to the school logicians; it is
found in Aristotle and Ibn Sïnâ and is also the starting point of Tûsï’s Basis. They then divide their works in accordance with
this division, with chapters on terms, propositions, syllogisms, and the five
arts.
After
making the initial distinction between conception and assent, the school
logicians turn to the question of semantics, the various ways in which a word
can indicate its meaning. After distinguishing universal and particular terms,
they next treat Porphyry’s five predicables - genus, species, differentia,
property, and common accident - accepting in the process the Aristotelian
distinction of essential and accidental predicates. They conclude their
discussion of terms with the kinds of definitions, accepting the Aristotelian
essential definition, although the existence and legitimacy of such definitions
were hotly disputed points in Islamic philosophy. The categories are generally
not treated, at least not in the elementary textbooks,because they are more a
metaphysical than a logical problem.
The
second division of school logic dealt with propositions, both categorical and
hypothetical. The more advanced books, such as the Shamsiya,
dealt with modals, necessary or contingent propositions, but most of the
textbooks did not, even though Islamic logicians had a highly developed theory
of temporal and modal logic.29 This section also dealt with such
topics as conversion, contradiction and contrariety, and the square of
opposition.
29
Nicholas Rescher, Temporal Modalities inArabicLogic (Foundations
of Language, Suppl. Series 2; Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1967); idem, “The
Theory of Temporal Modalities in Arabic Logic and Philosophy,” in idem, Studies in Arabic Philosophy (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), pp. 81-110; idem, and
Arnold van der Nat, “The Arabic Theory of Temporal Modal Syllogistic,” in
George F. Hourani, ed., Essays
on Islamic Philosophy and Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), pp. 189-21.
The
third division dealt with categorical and hypothetical syllogisms. If the
particular text has discussed modal propositions, there is likely to be some
reference to modal syllogisms, but not in full detail. The works end with brief
reference to the “matter” of syllogisms, which is to say the five arts, dealing
mainly with the kinds of premises used in demonstration. In a twenty-page text,
this subject is likely to occupy no more than a page or two and is clearly an
afterthought. The Islamic logicians themselves observed that the standard texts
of their tradition added a much more detailed discussion of semantics to the
Aristotelian logic, dropped the categories, and reduced the discussion of the
five arts to a minimum.30
This
general pattern seems to have gone unchallenged throughout the long history of
the school logic. There were certainly disagreements, but they took place in
the supercommentaries and dealt with details, not with the basic structure of
the logical system. The content of these debates will have to be ascertained by
tediously combing through the commentaries, which has not yet been done.31
One example of a point of disagreement, easy to identify because it happened to
be the subject of a separate treatise, was the status of the fourth figure of
the syllogism, unrecognized by Aristotle but advocated by some later logicians.32
We know somewhat more about the debates on logic carried on in works of
philosophy, but it is not clear whether these same debates were also carried on
by the school logicians.
The
structure of the textbooks makes quite clear the logical interests of the
authors and students. Above all, they were interested in semantics, in the
relationship between words and meanings. Semantics and the classification of
terms, corresponding to the Eisagoge, occupies about 5 percent of Tûsï’s Basis, a philosophical text. It occupies a quarter of Katibi’s Shamsiya and a third of Abhari’s Eisagoge. It is also clearly a matter of creative
thought; one elementary text identifies nine distinct ways in which a word can
relate to a thing.33 Apart from that, the school logicians seem to
be primarily interested in conveying enough logic to avoid simple errors of
inference. The Five Arts, which one might think were the point of logic, are
given no more than a kiss and a promise,
30
Kashif al-Ghita’, Naqd, p. 6. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimat al-‘Allama Ibn Khaldun, 4th ed., vol. 3 (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Ilm!ya, 1978), pp. 188-9; trans.
Rosenthal, pp. 142-3.
31
Except by Kashif
al-Ghita’, Naqd.
32
Risala fl Intaj al-Shikl al-Rabi‘, “Essay on the
validity of the fourth figure of the syllogism,” pp. 83-84, in Majmu‘ah-yi Mantiq, pp. 83-84.
33
In Majmui‘ah-yi Man.tiq, p. 120, margin.
with such attention as there is going to demonstration. In
fact, the most important form of argument in Islamic law is analogy, which is
not a syllogism at all and whose legitimacy has been the subject of bitter
debate among Islamic lawyers throughout the centuries.[142]
The
reason for this choice of topics seems plain. The school logic texts were
mainly intended for students studying Islamic law. They were not being trained
as philosophers. Although some would become preachers, rhetorical training was
done in other ways - and the Islamic rhetoricians, heirs of the sophisticated
Arabic tradition of rhetorical analysis, had little use for advice from
Aristotle. What the students of law needed above all else was an understanding
of how words and meanings were related. Islamic legal theory has as its most
basic assumption the proposition that law is to be deduced from religious
texts, not made by human legislators. The Islamic legal scholars had to squeeze
meanings from the dry husks of the ancient texts and to do so in a way that was
not arbitrary, even if it could not always be absolutely certain. They were perfectly
well aware that Islamic law, as they expounded it, was not a system of
unchallengeable truths but rather a tissue of informed conjecture (zann).[143] Thus, they had little need of demonstration,
which set too high an ideal, nor did they need to be able to distinguish
between levels of logical authority.
And,
in fact, the ability of the Islamic lawyer to use his logic to make subtle
distinctions of meaning and dubious inferences is proverbial and often a
subject for ridicules. It is told, for example, that a very poor young theology
student, home for the holidays, sat down with his father to share an egg for
dinner. “What are you learning these days?” the father asked. “Logic.” “What is
that?” “It is a science,” said the son, “by which I can prove that this one egg
is two.” The young man proceeded to prove his point by high-sounding and quite
incomprehensible arguments. “I am very glad,” said his father, “that you have
proved the existence of two eggs in this dish. I shall take this one, and you
can take the other.”[144]
The
school logic is a subset of the logic of the philosophers, but the two differ
in emphasis and goals. The school logic never frees itself entirely from its
pedagogical purposes. The school logicians also have little interest in the
metaphysical implications of logic. Partly this reflects the pedagogical
purposes of the school logic, but it probably also reflects the criticisms made
of philosophy by Ghazali and many others. Philosophical logic texts generally
were part of the larger philosophical summas that the Islamic philosophers tended to write.
They also are far more likely to involve arguments about basic logical
principles. Suhrawardi, for example, rejected essential definition and
condemned advanced logic as useless shuffling of words. Philosophical logicians
also were interested in aspects of logic with metaphysical implications, such
as the categories. Finally, philosophical logic was commonly harder, with
advanced discussions of such matters as modal logic. Still, this distinction
can be overemphasized, because authors could and did write in both modes - for
example, Katibi and Tahtani.
As
discussed in the previous chapter, the school logic was related to other
disciplines, particularly usUl al-fiqh, Kalam, and the Arabic linguistic sciences. The close
relationship of logic to these disciplines, especially to grammar, is seen in
the number of occasions when these works are found in the same manuscripts or
are published together in the nineteenth-century lithographs. This reflects not
only their intellectual kinship but also the fact that students were studying
the subjects at the same time.
THE MODERNIZATION OF THE SCHOOL LOGIC
The school logic was a stable tradition that lasted for a
very long time, nearly eight centuries thus far. Its preferred literary genre -
the commentary on a textbook - tends to conceal its inner tensions and
debates, giving it a surface uniformity. Certainly its long survival and the
continuing popularity of its earliest texts indicate that change came slowly
and in the form of further distinctions and clarifications rather than fundamental
reformulation. Yet the debates characteristic of instruction in this form of
logic, the hundreds of commentaries written on the standard texts, and the long
popularity of the tradition indicate that it had a lively inner life capable of
engaging the interest of teachers and students for century after century.
Recognition
in the school tradition of developments in modern logic has been slow and
incomplete. External signs ofWestern influence appear very slowly. In the
nineteenth-century Indian lithographs on logic and other seminary subjects, we
find numbered notes connecting glosses to the text, although this device had
been used less systematically in manuscripts. Eventually, copyright notices
begin to appear in lithographs that otherwise are imitations of manuscripts
written two centuries earlier. A subcommittee was appointed at Punjab
University in Lahore in the 1890s
to devise standard Arab equivalents of the English vocabulary of traditional
logic; the members were Indian scholars clearly at home with both Islamic and
European traditional logic and with both Arabic and English, but the European
logic they were dealing with was Aristotelian logic not very different from
their own, not the mathematical logic beginning to develop in Germany and
England.[145]
By the middle of the twentieth century, Iranian logic books sometimes provided
English equivalents of Arabic logical terms. Books on recent developments in
Western logic begin appearing in Islamic languages in increasing numbers
throughout the twentieth century, although such works had little direct
influence on the teaching in the seminaries. Their authors were Western
educated and usually not that familiar with logic as practiced in the
seminaries. As a result, their works seem not to have addressed the concerns of
the seminary logicians. The situation was somewhat better in Iran, where
seminary-trained philosophers taught in the modern universities, but to this
day in Pakistan, for example, there is almost no contact between the
traditional logicians and philosophers of the seminaries and the
Western-oriented logicians in the philosophy departments of the colleges and
universities.
I
cannot resist closing with one unusual exception to this pattern, the Iraqi
Shi'ite Ayatollah Muhammad-Baqir al-Sadr (d. 1980). He was educated and taught in Najaf, the
Shi'ite university town in central Iraq that is the chief modern rival of Qom,
the Iranian center of Shi'ite scholarship. Sadr, of the first generation of
seminarians to have also received a modern education, wrote very influential
attacks on Marxism and liberal capitalism from an Islamic perspective.38
Later, he seems to have become convinced that the traditional Islamic
Neoplatonism did not give a satisfactory basis for religion, so he rejected
the “realist” underpinnings of his early work and began constructing a system that
he called “Subjectivism.” The only surviving fruit of this effort - he was
shot by Saddam Hussein in 1980 after
Iranian propaganda broadcasts acclaimed him as “the Khomeini of Iraq” - was The Logical
Bases of Induction,39 in which he attempts to deal with the
epistemological challenge of the British empiricists. The centerpiece of the
book is an elaborate proof in which he tries to show, using the theory of
probability from Russell’s Human Knowledge, that a
belief in God is presupposed when one chooses to act on any other piece of
knowledge. The book has been a great puzzlement to the traditional logicians of
the seminaries, who are particularly baffled by its detailed discussion of
probability. And Russell, we may safely assume, would have been much more
comfortable with the abstract and semantically oriented school logic.
LOGIC, EVEN WHEN GROUNDED
IN PHILOSOPHICAL REASON OR REVElation
passed down with all the fidelity scholars are capable of, does not guarantee
agreement. There were certainly religious issues on which Muslims were willing
to risk schism, but there were far more issues on which reasonable men could
disagree, issues that were of intrinsic importance but over which sincere men
could not justify dividing the community. And therein lies the remarkable tale
of the Islamic institutionalization of disagreement.
38
Falsafatuna, many editions; Our Philosophy, trans. Shams
C. Inati (London: Muham- madi Trust and KPI, 1987). Iqtisaduna [Our
economics], many editions.
39
Al-Usus al-Mantiqiya li’l-Istiqra’, published in
many editions.
The Institutionalization of Disagreement
Asking questions and disagreeing about their answers is at
the heart of the Islamic experience. The first believers - and, equally
important, the first unbelievers - came to the Prophet with questions. A
significant portion of the Qur’an and an even larger portion of the hadith
consist of answers to those questions. After the Prophet’s death, the believers
came with their questions to those who had known the Prophet. Later they came
to those who knew the stories passed down from the first generation of
believers or who were the bearers of the accumulated religious wisdom of the
Islamic community. And still they come with their questions to those who are
reputed to have knowledge. But the answers they are given are not always the
same. And therein lies one of the puzzles and achievements of medieval Islamic
civilization.
three
phenomena - each in its way relating to the role
of disagreement in Islamic society,
have puzzled me. Each relates to the same underlying feature of the Islamic
religion in its premodern expression: a willingness to institutionalize
permanent disagreement.
1)
Why did Muslim scholars endorse diversity in matters that
would seem to have only one right answer: legal schools, texts of the Qur’an
authoritative collections of hadith, and the like?
2)
Why did Muslims adopt a curriculum for training clergy that
stressed form over content, an educational method that stressed interpretive
methods that only a handful of scholars would actually have practical use for?
3)
Why is it that Muslims were successful in generating a
consensus about the relation of religion and society in the Middle Ages but
have been unsuccessful in doing so in modern times?
The first two questions are the subject of this chapter;
the third is addressed in Chapters 9 and 10.
THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC ATTITUDE TO DISAGREEMENT
Islam is a religion of unity and of law, yet medieval
Muslims came to tolerate systematic and institutionalized disagreement. There
are a number of examples of such permanent disagreement.
The four madhhabs. Muslims,
being human beings, disagreed with each other even in the time of the Prophet,
but disagreement posed no intellectual problem in those glorious days: Issues
could simply be put to the Prophet himself, and he would settle them. Islam
faced its first great crisis very early in the first fitna, the civil war that followed the murder of the
Caliph ‘Uthman. Muslim armies faced each other in battle over the gravest of
religious issues: the nature of leadership after the Prophet. Other fitnas followed. Many were battles for leadership,
often in protest at corrupt rule, but there were also intellectual fitnas. Early Muslims argued about the nature and
content of Islamic law, about the fundamental beliefs of Islam, about the text
of the Qur’an, and about which hadith were to be accepted and which to be
rejected as unreliable or forged.
It
was not until the emergence of distinct legal schools two centuries or so after
the Prophet’s death that the question of disagreement became a serious
intellectual problem. Before that, there certainly had been disagreements
among eminent Muslim scholars, but the issues had been argued on the assumption
that only one party could be right and the others must therefore be wrong - in
other words, without asking questions about the nature and causes of
disagreement as such. Gradually, though, fair-minded scholars realized that
they risked splitting Islam over fine points of law on which there could be
honest disagreement. Unwilling to do so, they conceded that disagreement over
points of law and other religious issues was going to be a permanent feature of
Islam.
This
tolerance of difference of opinion is expressed in a hadith: “Whatever has
been brought to you in the Book of God, do it; there is no excuse for failing
to do so. If it is not in the Book of God, then follow my sunna. If
there is no sunna from me,
follow what my Companions say, for my Companions are like the stars in the sky,
so whatever you take from them will be guidance to you. The disagreement of my
Companions is a mercy to you.”[146]
This hadith is certainly spurious, as are similar hadith justifying diversity
of Qur’anic texts, but it is nonetheless valuable. Like most spurious hadiths,
it reflects a legal or theological position that someone felt strongly enough
about to put it into the mouth of the Prophet.
Although
a spurious hadith might not be legally decisive, a consensus of the learned (ijma‘) certainly was, and a consensus eventually
formed that four major legal schools, madhhabs, all were legitimate, as were the various trends
of opinion within each school. In practice, Twelver Shi'ite law tended to be
accepted as well, although there was not as much intellectual contact between
Shi'ite and Sunni scholars. It was quite common for scholars of one madhhab to study and comment on works from another madhhab. There was occasional friction, but scholars
rarely called into question the Islamic legitimacy of scholars of other madhhabs. Even the term madhhab indicates this tolerance. It is a noun of place
from a root meaning “to go” and thus means “approach,” “method,” or “way of
proceeding.” They did not use the word firqa, “sect,” which would have carried a more
derogatory connotation. This approach of accepting permanent disagreement was
then used in other areas of Islamic scholarship and thought.
There
seem to have been two factors leading to such tolerance of diversity. On the
one hand, Muslims have always placed great value on unity. The Muslims are one umma, one nation, and no Muslim is entirely
comfortable with an outright split in the community. The Islamic community was
united politically for only about a century, even ignoring several civil wars,
but the yearning for a restoration of that unity is still of real political
importance; there is no Christian or Buddhist equivalent of the Organization of
Islamic Conference, the modern umbrella organization of Islamic states.
Likewise, Muslim scholars are uncomfortable with using schism as a way to
resolve disputes. Certainly, Muslims have failed to live up to this ideal of
unity, but the ideal is real and carries some power nonetheless.
However,
the nature of the Islamic religion made disagreement a continuing fact of
life. Islam is a religion of law; in principle, every possible human action
falls into one of five categories of legal acceptance or condemnation.
Moreover, as we have seen, after the death of the Prophet, the wellsprings of
the law were closed; all future legal questions would have to be answered by
applying fallible human reason to the Qur’an and the community’s memories of
the words and actions of the Prophet and his Companions. Under such
circumstances, honest disagreement was inevitable. Islamic scholars were
constantly faced with the problem of deciding what the Prophet would have told
them to do about problems that had not arisen during his lifetime - and the
most fundamental such problem was precisely how to resolve such disputes about
what the Prophet would have said.
Obviously,
many thought that some disagreements were important enough to call into
question the legitimacy of an opponent’s faith - the question of free will and
predestination was sometimes one such issue; the identity of the Prophet’s
rightful successor was another - but equally obviously, one could not call
another scholar an unbeliever over a disagreement about a fine point of
contract law. And so a characteristically Islamic compromise emerged. Islamic
law became the domain of opinion. A believer was obliged to make a sincere
effort to ascertain the law and follow it, either by studying it deeply himself
or by following the best judgment of someone who had made such a study for
himself. God would reward his good intentions if he was in error and would
reward him additionally if he had correctly divined the law and followed it. By
the twelfth century, the various Islamic sciences had assumed their permanent
forms, in which institutionalized disagreement and diversity were central.[147]
Medieval
Muslims were able to maintain religious unity by this device of systematically
tolerating diversity and disagreement within a certain range. This tolerance
was based on an honest understanding of the tentativeness of each of the great
legal schools, as well as of the scope for disagreement in other areas of
Islamic religious scholarship. Eventually, the understanding of the bases of this
disagreement became, in effect, the central theme of Islamic education. The
fact that Islamic law influenced the state but was not usually enforced by the
state allowed diversity of legal opinion and practice to continue without
violating the consciences of individual scholars and thus forcing schism. The
fact that travel was slow and Muslims isolated from each other made such
tolerance easier to maintain, especially because there was usually a tolerance
of local custom.
The madhhabs do not differ greatly, even if Shi‘ism is
included, but they arose out of deep controversies in early Islam about the
sources and methods of Islamic jurisprudence. The differences can matter;
Hanbalis and Hanafis differ, for example, on the question of whether a woman
can marry without the permission of her guardian. It is an issue that has
troubled Pakistanis on occasion. Nevertheless, even though the madhhabs claim to reflect the divine law as revealed to
Muhammad, by about the eleventh century, Muslims seemed quite comfortable with
the notion that there were at least four equally acceptable versions of Islamic
law. Mosque complexes containing madrasas for each of the schools were built. Scholars of one school
wrote commentaries on works of another school. Diversity in divine law had
become institutionalized.
The seven readings of the Qur’an.
The most startling example of Islamic tolerance of diversity relates to the
text of the Qur’an. The Holy Book was revealed to Muhammad in sections ranging
in length from a few lines to a few pages. Most scholars, medieval and modern,
think that it had not been fully edited at the time of the Prophet’s death.
Although it seems certain that some chapters took their present form under the
Prophet’s hand, there is much evidence that he did not himself compile all of
the revelations into their present form and order. Most serious early Muslims
had memorized parts of the Qur’an; a few are reported to have had their own
written collections. As a result, there were several different versions of the
Qur’an in circulation after the Prophet’s death; ‘All, the Prophet’s
son-in-law, is said to have had a copy of the Qur’an in which the chapters were
in chronological order, and some other Companions of the Prophet had copies in
which the chapters were arranged in other ways. There were also some
differences in wording between the various versions as well as a few larger
differences. There was a disagreement, for example, about whether the Patilla,
an important prayer that forms the first chapter of the Qur’an, the last two
chapters, and two other similar short prayers were properly part of the Qur’an.
‘Uthman, the third caliph, is said to have become concerned because
disagreements had arisen about the exact text of the Qur’an and because so many
of the Companions of the Prophet who had memorized parts of the Qur’an had been
killed in battle. He appointed a committee to prepare an official edition of
the Qur’an, and the other versions were destroyed. This, according to the
medieval Islamic accounts, is how we came to have the Qur’an that exists today - ma bayn
al-daffayn, “what is between
the two covers,” to use the medieval expression. Although few seriously
questioned the authenticity of‘Uthman’s Qur’an, the Arabic script of the
seventh century lacked the dots and vowel signs of modern Arabic, so there was
considerable disagreement about the exact text of the Qur’an in the early
centuries. These mostly concerned rather minor points that usually did not
affect the meaning, such as whether a given verb was masculine or feminine,
active or passive. Such matters could be settled only by the dots and vowel
markings that were only invented later. There were also some disagreements
about grammar and pronunciation based on scholarly disagreement about the exact
nature of the Arabic in which the Qur’an was revealed. Finally, there were
occasional disagreements about what the underlying ‘Uthmanic text actually had
been. All of these issues are discussed in great deal in the medieval manuals
of the sciences of the Qur’an and qira’at, “readings” - that is, Qur’anic textual variants.
In
the end, Muslim scholars came to a remarkable compromise, agreeing that there
were seven equally authoritative readings of the Qur’aan, each of which had two
slightly different versions. Three additional readings were of slightly lesser
authority, and four more of still less authority than those. This diversity was
said to be a sign of God’s bounty to Muslims, and all of the seven versions
were and are considered to be authentic and to derive from the Prophet. To this
day, there are Qur’aan reciters who can chant the Holy Book according to all
seven versions.[148]
Six books ofhadith.
As we saw in Chapter 3, it is commonly
accepted that vast numbers ofhadith were forged in the early centuries of
Islam, so it is scarcely surprising that there was a great deal of disagreement
about exactly which hadith were authentic. Early Muslim scholars developed
various ways of dealing with this embarrassment of riches. Again, they agreed
to disagree. Two rival collections ofhadith were accepted as having the highest
authority, and four others were also accepted as being authoritative in a
slightly lesser degree. Shi'ites have their own alternative collections of
hadith.
The maraji' al-taqlid in Shi‘ism. Shi'ite law works slightly differently than
Sunni law, although the content is much the same. Shi'ites believe that the
Prophet passed some significant portion of his spiritual and religious
authority by inheritance to 'All b. Abi Talib, his cousin and son-in-law, and
that 'All passed it on to a line of his descendants, the last of whom vanished
in the ninth century but who is generally believed to be alive and in
occultation. Thus, in principle, Shi'ites remain in the position that all
Muslims were during the time of the Prophet of being able to ascertain the
sacred law directly. In practice, though, the Hidden Imam rarely reveals
himself, and Shi'ites are left to their own devices in legal matters in his
absence. Each Shi'ite - like any other Muslim - is obliged to make a good-faith
effort to ascertain the relevant Islamic law in any situation and to follow it.
The Shi'ite community is divided into a
account is mostly based on
the accounts of jam‘ al-Qur’an, “the editing
of the Qur’an,” in the medieval Islamic manuals of Qur’anic sciences, of which
Suyutl’s al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum
al-Qur’an is the best known. An account of the history of Western
scholarship on the matter is found in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v., “Kur’an” 3. Western scholars have disagreed among themselves, placing
the origins of the final text of the Qur’an anywhere from the Prophet’s
lifetime to the ninth century, with most thinking that the emergence of the
final text of the Qur’an was a more gradual process than was portrayed in the various
(and inconsistent) medieval accounts of the collection of the Qur’an in the
caliphates of Abu Bakr, 'Umar, and 'Uthman.
Whereas the
background to 'Uthman’s Qur’an can be disputed, there is little doubt about the
historicity of the Seven Readings. These were popularized by Ibn Mujahid in the
tenth century as a way of bringing order to the very complex disputes among
schools of Qur’an reciters. An interesting account of an attempt to make
recordings of all ten versions and the resulting controversy is found in Lablb
as-Sa'id, The Recited Koran: A
History of the First Recorded Version, trans. Bernard Weiss, M.
A. Rauf, and Morroe Berger (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1975). Nowadays, however, the reading used in Egypt
and Saudi Arabia is favored almost everywhere, partly because of massive
distribution of high-quality printed Qur’ans by Saudi Arabia, and printed
copies of the Qur’an using other readings are uncommon in most places. small
group of individuals with the legal training to ascertain Islamic law for themselves
- the mujtahids - and a much larger
number of people who do not have such training or who do but choose not to use
it - the muqallids.
Now, at any given time there might be hundreds of Shi'ite mujtahids,
but in practice, only a few of them will give legal rulings to others. Each muqallid is
under an obligation to seek out the most learned of the mujtahids for
such legal advice as he needs. An individual who is followed by a significant
number of muqallids is
called a marja‘ taqlîd - a
“source of emulation,” as it is sometimes translated. Now we return to our
theme: Shi'ites are not bothered by the fact that there may be a number of such
supreme maraji, and
an individual believer may follow any one of them he chooses. The Iranian
government, for example, has pressed the claim of Ayatollah Khamane’i as marja‘ but
has been unable to prevent pious Iranians from following maraji who
live in Iraq or even maraji who
are in disfavor or imprisoned in Iran.[149]
Contrary conclusions in different disciplines. The thirteenth-century Iranian scientist and
scholar Qutb al-Din Shirazi, the 'Allama, “very learned,” as he was later
known, wrote in a number of disciplines, both rational and religious. Although
a philosopher, a scientist, and a great scholar, he seems to have been quite
content to pursue these disciplines independently, without harmonizing their
conclusions or fitting them into a single larger intellectual framework. In
particular, toward the end of his life he wrote a large survey of the sciences
in Persian called ThePearly Crown, much of it consisting of translated extracts from Arabic works of other
authors. The bulk of this work was a survey of philosophy, science, and
mathematics. Later, he added a long appendix in which he treated ethics and
political science, fiqh, Kalam theology, and mystical practice and theology. This
work contains three comprehensive and incompatible accounts of the nature of
the universe: one philosophical, following Ibn Sïnâ, Suhrawardi, and the Jewish
philosopher Ibn Kammuna; one atomistic, following the Kalam of Fakhr al-Din
Razi; and one monistic, following the wahdat al-wujud tradition of Ibn ‘Arabi. There were also two
accounts of politics, one based on the Iranian practical tradition of the
mirrors for princes literature and one Platonic, a translation of a work by
Farabi. Qutb al-Din seems to have simply thought that it was natural that
pursuing the truth using different methods would produce different results.[150]
The
study of Ghazali’s thought has been hindered by similar difficulties. His
works in different disciplines seem almost to have been written by different
people. The authenticity of The Niche for Lights, an essay on mystical metaphysics, has been questioned
because some of its doctrines do not appear elsewhere in Ghazali’s works.[151]
There are also inconsistencies between his use of and his attacks on logic,
philosophy, and theology. So who is the real Ghazali? All of them, it seems.
I COULD GIVE MORE
EXAMPLES, BUT THESE ARE SUFFICIENT FOR OUR purposes. The point is that medieval Muslims were content
to accept equally authoritative versions of things that we might think could
have only one correct version: Islamic law, the text of the Qur’an,
authoritative collections of the Prophet’s sayings, even accounts of the nature
of reality. The principle applied also to leadership. In Europe there is
always, in theory, a rightful holder of any post - a rightful king of Scotland,
for example. In Islam, except theoretically among Shi‘ites, this is not the
case. There are rulers in Islam, and there are religious obligations that apply
specifically to rulers, but there is no rightful ruler before he becomes ruler.
Instead, a rightful ruler is a man who has come to power, who has the minimum
qualifications of sound body and mind, and who rules according to Islamic
standards. It is a remarkable phenomenon: a willingness to tolerate equally
authoritative alternative versions of religious truth.
An
even more radical interpretation of disagreement swept the Islamic world in the
thirteenth century: Ibn ‘Arabi’s theory of wahdat al-wujud, the oneness of existence, which is discussed in
Chapter 5. Ibn ‘Arabi argued
that all beings are manifestations of some aspect of God. Human beings, unlike
other creatures, can progress toward God, but except for a handful of saints
and prophets, we inevitably see God from a limited and idiosyncratic
perspective, which is, however, our own particular way of understanding God.
There is not really any right or wrong in these perspectives, only varying
degrees of deficiency and completeness. Thus, Sufis have recognized the
legitimacy of varying spiritual paths based on the diverse temperaments of
human beings.
AN EDUCATION OF FORM WITHOUT CONTENT
Although the superficial substantive content of the Islamic
sciences has changed little in the last thousand years, the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries saw two major new influences on the way they were
understood: formal logic and Ibn ‘Arabi’s theory of wahdat al-wujud. It was logic that was to shape the way the
Islamic sciences would be studied in coming centuries. Greek logic and
philosophy had reached the Islamic world too late and remained controversial
for too long for them to have more than an indirect role in shaping the Islamic
sciences. However, they came to be central to the teaching of the religious
sciences.
We
have already discussed the role of logic in education and the way it was
taught. Among the Muslims of South Asia, the curriculum within which this
logical instruction was embedded was known as the Dars-i Nizami.
This curriculum was devised in the beginning of the eighteenth century by the
Indian Muslim scholar Nizam al-Din Sihalawi. It was not an innovation on his
part, as it was based on versions of an Islamic curriculum that date back to
about the thirteenth century. Nizam al- Dain’s curriculum stressed dialectical
skill. The student was expected to spend a great deal of time studying
traditional logic, Arabic grammar, and rhetoric. As we have seen, instruction
was based on a set of extremely concise textbooks, supplemented by a series of
commentaries and supercommentaries. Classes consisted of detailed explorations
of the difficulties implicit in the texts, with students and teachers competing
to raise and resolve difficulties. Its most remarkable feature was that it
contained relatively little study of religion as such; Islamic law, Qur’an
interpretation, and hadith were rather neglected. This last feature was much
criticized by Muslim reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and
as a result, the Dars-i Nizami has been partially supplanted by new curricula
like that of Deoband, which place more stress on primary religious texts and
less on logic.
But
why should Muslims have adopted such a curriculum? It was not the result of
some accident of historical development in India, because very similar
curricula had been in use earlier throughout much of the Islamic world and are
still used in places like Qom in Iran and the faculties of divinity in modern
Turkish universities. For now, I simply observe that the central goal of the
Dars-i Nizami curriculum was to teach the student how to understand texts
through a deep knowledge of logic, the inner workings of language, and
rhetoric. It did not focus on teaching the sacred texts themselves to the
students or explaining to the students what these texts meant. This did have
the virtue that the Dars-i Nizami and its .
cousins could be pan-Islamic curricula that Shi'ites and
Sunnis of any of the four madhhabs could equally well study. Thus, Shi'ite texts on logic and
even on theology were taught in Sunni madrasas.
So
far as I know, the Islamic scholars of that time do not explain the reasons
for this turn toward logic. Something similar happened in Europe in about the
same period, partly because of the intellectual excitement at the rediscovery
of Greek philosophy and partly because university authorities did not want
undergraduates studying or graduate students teaching theology, the central
intellectual discipline of medieval Christianity. As we saw in Chapter 6, younger scholars in medieval European
universities focused their attentions on problems of Aristotelian logic and
natural philosophy. Perhaps similar forces were at work in the Islamic world.
Islamic law, Qur’an interpretation, hadith, and traditional Kalam were mature
disciplines, whereas the applications of logic, the new rhetoric, and
philosophy to their foundations were new and exciting areas of research. Yet
this does not explain the long-term popularity of the curricula like the Dars-i Nizami,
in which logic, dialectic, and the profound study of language were and are
central.
Whatever
the conscious reasons for adopting a curriculum that stressed the methods of
Islamic research over the content of Islamic law and belief, the fact is that
the curriculum suited the situation in which Islam found itself. No religious
scholar could doubt that there was a true and single Law revealed by God to the
Prophet Muhammad, but our knowledge of the Law is imperfect. Fiqh is a delicate web of inferences whose strength
comes from a deep understanding of the texts on which it is based and from the
efforts of dozens of generations of scholars patiently weighing and piecing
together thousands of bits of evidence, employing all the tools of Arabic
linguistics and rhetorical and logical analysis. An education in which logic
and linguistics are studied dialectically may have sharpened the mind of the
student, but it also taught him a good deal of humility as he sought to divine
the will of God. Sincere disagreement under such circumstances is inevitable
and shows only that we are servants before God, not His privileged counselors.
THE MADRASA SYSTEM, WITH
ITS RATIONALISTIC CURRICULUM, PROSpered
for some six centuries, dominating religious education in the Islamic world and
deeply influencing parallel systems of education. In the nineteenth century, it
abruptly collided with the forces of modernism - colonial administrators,
Christian missionaries, Muslim reformers, and Muslim revivalists. Where it
survived at all, it was usually a shadow of its former self, reduced in wealth
and prestige and often warped by the conflicting demands of modernism and its
own past. Islamic education was swept up in a debate embracing European
colonial administrators and intellectuals and parents in virtually every
Islamic country. It was a debate that the madrasa professors were ill equipped to participate in.
PART THREE
The Decline and Fall of Scholastic Reason in
Islam
the collapse of
traditional education
In 1882,
Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, the extremely disagreeable Hungarian principal of
Government College, Lahore, published a fat book, stuffed with lists and
statistics, entitled History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab to
the Year 1882.[152] Leitner was a brilliant linguist with a career
that was strange evenby the standards of the eccentrics of British India. He
was born in Budapest in 1840 to
a Jewish family and moved to Turkey in 1847. By the time he was fifteen, he knew Turkish,
Arabic, and a wide range of European languages, which led to his appointment as
an interpreter in the British army with the rank of colonel during the Crimean
War when he was still only fifteen. By the age of twenty-one, he was a
professor at King’s College, London, three years after entering as a student.
He received his doctorate at Freiburg in 1862. In 1864 he was appointed the first principal of Government College,
Lahore, the nucleus of the future University of the Punjab, the first
university in northwestern India. Leitner would disappear for months at a time
into the mountains, collecting material for other fat books on the languages
and cultures of the isolated valleys of the Afghan frontier. This book,
however, was part of another project, a feud that Leitner was conducting with
the director of public instruction of the Punjab. (The latter drowned soon
after, swept away while crossing a flooded river, to Leitner’s barely concealed
satisfaction.) Some decades earlier, the British had faced the decision of how
to modernize education in the traditional Hindu and Muslim schools and improve
their curricula with modern science and other European subjects. They decided
that the most practical solution would be to establish a modest English
language college and university system that would begin training Indians for
roles in the civil service and technical professions like medicine and engineering
and that also would supply teachers for the soon-to-be-improved vernacular
educational systems. The system promptly metastasized and by the early 1880s was grinding out masses of unemployable
semiliterates who considered it beneath their dignity to take any but the
government desk jobs they were unqualified to fill. It was a problem that has
not been wholly solved to this day. In the meantime, the traditional
educational systems collapsed as parents struggled to get their children into
the more prestigious English schools.[153]
In 1882, the British educational authorities in the
Punjab, an area that had been under British control for less than forty years,
sent out a request for interested parties to submit memos with recommendations
for deal- ingwith what already was a crisis. Leitner’s massivebookwas his
response. In damning detail and dripping sarcasm, he demonstrated, district by
district, that in less than four decades, British educational administration
in the Punjab had reduced the number of children attending school by more than
a third.[154]
Leitner pointed out that there had been seven educational systems functioning
in the Punjab before British rule: elementary and advanced Islamic schools,
using Arabic and Persian, which was the scholastic madrasa system that we have discussed in previous
chapters; Hindu and Sikh schools, using Sanskrit and classical Punjabi;
aristocratic tutorial schools, using Persian and catering to the traditional
political elites, mostly but not entirely Muslim; and several vernacular
systems. We can concentrate on the Arabic Islamic and Persian aristocratic
systems, but Leitner considered the others to be essentially the same. He
argued that each was a traditional literary educational system, precisely
analogous to the curriculum of Latin and Greek classics that formed the basis
of most European education at the time. At the core of the curriculum were a
classical language and a set of prestigious classics. The elementary school
pupil began by learning the classical language from his own vernacular, usually
Punjabi or Urdu in this region. As he grew, he would gradually work his way
through the curriculum of classics, mastering the books that had been the basis
of education for centuries. The books studied were either religious or
didactic, and there was a strongly moralistic element to the instruction.
Thus,the first serious book the student studying in the Persian system would
read was Sa'di’s Gulistan, a
collection of stories and fables providing moral guidance for life. Later books
would tell tales of kings and their good and bad deeds, valuable guidance for
someone who might eventually be one of what the British referred to as the
“Chiefs of the Punjab.” A boy in the Islamic schools might, if he was bright
and interested, go on to be a professional cleric, but if not, he could return
to take over his father’s shop or farm, with the right to wear a turban and
receive respect as a local leader of the Islamic community. In either case, he
would emerge literate and able to use one of the prestigious classical
languages and to read and write in his own vernacular language. Instruction in
modern science was beside the point as far as Leitner was concerned; the point
of the traditional educational systems was to produce cultivated, moral
individuals who would become responsible members of their own communities.
There was even a system of female education.
There
was another problem. The new educational system had produced a breach between
generations. Whereas a boy coming home from school would once have discussed
his Sa'di with a father who had fond memories of his own study of the same
classic, now the strange English books (usually only extracts of mediocre
English works, as Leitner pointed out) set the boy apart from his father,
uncles, and their friends. What was worse, because everyone knew that the
English education was undertaken with the ultimate goal of getting a
government desk job, the former student could no longer return with dignity to
his father’s store or workshop, as his father or grandfather would have done.
These unemployable young men were quickly becoming a nuisance to all concerned.
Finally,
the arrival of the new system had effectively destroyed support for the old
systems. In the past, a landlord might have hired a teacher for his son and
allowed his tenants’ sons to attend the classes, a local cleric would have
taught Qur’an in his mosque, and a wealthy merchant or aristocrat would have
endowed a school to announce his status, but now education was seen as the
responsibility of the government, and anyway few families wanted the old
education anymore. Now the landlords and the prosperous merchants sent their
sons to Leitner’s college in Lahore, and the village mulla found that no one
was interested in his Qur’an classes. Popular support for traditional education
dried up, and the government was unable to fill the gap. By 1882, seven old and respected educational systems
had been replaced by one failing system.
leitner’s
experience was not unique. what lifts leitner’s book above the level of a particularly entertaining
documentation of colonial administrative incompetence is his analysis of the
earlier educational systems and the process by which they were undermined and
replaced with a dysfunctional modern system. Although there were some features
peculiar to India - the caste system, for example, led to universities producing
engineers unwilling to work with machinery and doctors unwilling to touch
patients - the general pattern was duplicated to one degree or another across
the Islamic world and, I suspect, in other areas that came under the influence
of European colonial administrations. In the period from 1757, when the Battle of Plassy put a large Islamic
population under British control, through the years following World War I, when
the British and French occupied the remaining Ottoman territories in the Arab
parts of the Middle East and the Soviet Union consolidated its control over
Central Asia, virtually all of the Islamic world came under direct or indirect
European control, resulting in the supplanting of traditional education by
systems modeled on Western systems. Even in areas that were not occupied by the
Europeans, such as Iran and the central Ottoman lands prior to World War I,
governments desperate to protect themselves against superior European military
technology began establishing European-style schools or adding European elements
to existing schools. Iran, which managed to maintain a precarious independence
through deft exploitation of the jealousies of the Great Powers, established a
polytechnic university in 1851.4
Egypt and Ottoman Turkey had begun educational reforms even earlier. In
countries thatwere actually occupied by Europeans, colonial administrators
withdrew support from the traditional systems in favor of modern, usually
mediocre systems intended to produce clerks and technicians for the colonial
administration. Although the details varied in different countries, several
factors came together to destroy or marginalize the traditional educational
systems.
Withdrawal of traditional sources of support. With European domination came change in
political and economic structures and elites. Education in most of the Islamic
world had been a matter of charity and an auxiliary activity of religious
institutions. Elementary education was typically conducted by poor clerics.
More advanced religious education was performed in madrasas,
institutions typically endowed by wealthy individuals as acts of conspicuous
piety. To the extent that there was secular education, such as the aristocratic
Persian system in India, it was an activity commissioned by aristocrats or
occasionally by the state, as in the palace schools of the Ottoman Empire. This
system of support collapsed during the colonial era, even in states that were
not formally annexed by one of the European powers. The old elites that had
provided the endowments supporting traditional education were supplanted or
co-opted, and in either case they no longer provided new endowments for madrasas. The large landholdings belonging to Islamic
charitable endowments mostly did not survive the colonial period, being broken
up by the state or simply passing unnoticed into the hands of individuals, a
sort of colonial fencing of the commons. In 1963 in Iran, the program to break up the
landholdings of the great Shi'ite religious institutions in the name of land
reform triggered a near revolution, which slowed but did not stop the process.
Deprived of their traditional sources of support and isolated from the
mainstream of elite society, the traditional educational systems withered.
It
was true that the European administrators saw education as a proper function of
the state, but the resources they allotted did not begin to fill the needs, nor
did they usually think it necessary to provide a European
4
Mottahedeh, Mantle, is largely about the
tensions between the madrasa system and the
modern educational system; in particular, see pp. 60-68 on the
educational reformer ‘Isa Sadiq.
quality of education for the masses - just sufficient
education to train such workers as were needed for the middle ranks of the
colonial society. Often, missionary schools provided the best available
education-insome places they still do - but they could not come close to
filling the demand. And, as Leitner also noted, because the state saw itself as
the proper social institution to provide education, wealthy individuals, for
the most part, no longer saw the need to support it voluntarily. The result was
typically a weak state educational system, unable to meet constantly growing
demand for places or to produce high-quality graduates, supplemented by a small
number of elite schools, usually founded by missionaries, to which the elites
sent their own children. To the extent that the traditional schools survived,
it was only in the social classes most isolated from the modern colonial
society.
Superior opportunities for graduates of the new
schools. Demand also dwindled
for the traditional education. Students dreaming of a prestigious job in the
colonial administration needed to know the language of the imperial power,
which often remained important even after states regained independence.
Persian, once the key to a position in the Mogul administration, was still a
viable literary language in India in the first third of the twentieth century,
but it was dead even in Pakistan by 1950, replaced by English and Urdu. Prestigious and well-paying
professions like engineering and medicine were open only to the graduates of
the new schools. Students interested in law went to modern law schools, not madrasas.
In Iran, the process was so sudden that the legal profession in Iran in the
middle of the twentieth century was dominated by men who had begun their
education in the madrasas of
Qom and completed them at Tehran University or European law schools. The
tradition of Islamic learning was kept alive by the small number of students
still attracted by religion, but the days were over in which a good madrasa education was the gateway to a respected career
as a cleric or judge. The traditional schools were not just starved of money;
they were also starved of talent.
But ideas also mattered, not just institutions and their
social bases of support. An Islamic world that had once been powerful and
successful was now weak and poor. Its rise to power obviously had to do with
Islam. It was painfully clear that something had gone very wrong in the Muslim
world and that what had gone wrong had something to do with Islam. It was more
difficult to determine what this something was. There were four possibilities.
First, Islam as such was incompatible with modernity and needed to be
discarded, at least as the practical basis of the actions of the community.
Second, Islam could be the basis of a successful society if it were modernized
and made compatible with modern conditions. Third, Muslims needed to restore
Islam to the pure form of the early centuries, thereby recreating the
conditions for its original success. Fourth, things could stay as they were,
which not surprisingly was usually the option preferred by the Islamic clergy.
Thus, the traditional educational institutions were also being battered from
three sides by intellectual rivals who criticized the foundations of the
intellectual world that the Islamic clergy had constructed over the centuries.
Opposition from modernists. The suspicion with which colonial administrators
viewed the Islamic clergy, their schools, their scholastic system of thought,
and even the religion of Islam itself is scarcely surprising. Traditional Islam
was a world largely closed to Europeans, who also saw the Muslims, with some
justice, as being especially prone to disloyalty to the colonial state. British
administrators in India tended to believe that Muslims had been mainly
responsible for the bloody revolt in 1857, which the British called the Indian Mutiny and which
nationalist historians now call the War of Independence. Although the evidence
is not entirely clear for the Indian Mutiny, it certainly is true that Muslims
fought long and bloody wars of resistance in many places, sometimes led and
almost always encouraged by clerics. As far as many colonial administrators
were concerned, the Islamic religious establishment and the masses who followed
them should be modernized into harmlessness as quickly as possible.
Administrators
were not motivated only by political concerns; they genuinely believed, with
good reason, that the old educational system needed to be modernized. Ptolemaic
astronomy, Galenic medicine, and Aristotelian physics were still taught in the madrasas.[155] The madrasas almost never taught the modern European
languages that were required for good jobs. Few of those involved with
educational issues in the colonial-era states, even in places like Iran and
Turkey that were not occupied, doubted that major reforms were needed. The
question was how.
One
of the most interesting expressions of this debate took place in British India
in the 1820s and 1830s and is known as the Anglicist- Orientalist
controversy.[156]
The British had first come to India as traders in the seventeenth century at a
time when the wealth and power of the Mogul Empire dwarfed that of any
contemporary European state. It is clear from their writings that they viewed
the Moguls with some awe. By the second half of the eighteenth century, with
British power firmly established, Englishmen in India still did not necessarily
see themselves as inherently superior to the Indians. The British not
uncommonly married into Indian families of appropriate social status. After 1757, the British East India Company ruled a large
part of northeastern India as a corporate contractor to the Mogul emperor, a
situation that nominally continued until the Indian Mutiny a century later. Men
like Warren Hastings, the dominant political figure in British India at that
time, saw it as natural that the British should behave as the heirs of the old
Mogul state, patronizing the traditional arts, scholarship, and institutions,
and even managing Hindu religious festivals. He professionalized the British
Indian civil service, requiring officials to know Persian, the traditional
language of administration; developing law codes based on the older Hindu and
Muslim legal systems;[157]
and generally behaving like a proper Indian ruler. In return, the Indians
initially treated the British as they did any other new foreign rulers, attempting
to civilize them and expecting the British to learn to behave in a proper
Indian manner. A Parsi poet in Bombay spent years writing a three-volume epic
poem in Persian doggerel called the George-Nameh,which recounted the British conquest of India. The British
authorities in Calcutta printed it, and although he received a polite letter
from the young Queen Victoria, he never received the generous reward that he
doubtless expected. It was an unsettling sign of change in the wind.
India
House, the administrative headquarters of the British East India Company was
dominated for forty years by James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, both
disciples of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the Utilitarian school of
philosophy. The Utilitarians were interested in efficiency, science, and
modernity. James Mill saw Indian culture as obsolete and barbarous, and wrote a
history of India that to a modern reader is stunning in its narrowness and
bigotry.[158]
The chapters on Islamic and Hindu culture denounce every aspect of Indian
civilization in the harshest of terms. Mill was most certainly not interested
in inheriting the cultural responsibilities of the old Persianate Mogul Empire.
More to our point, neither he nor his more famous son were interested in
supporting traditional education in India. Their views - and James Mill’s History of
British India - were
incorporated into the curriculum of the East India Company’s training school
in Haileybury, Hertfordshire, where they shaped the views of two generations of
British administrators in India.[159]
The
Utilitarians found unlikely allies in evangelical Christian groups that sought
to evangelize India and were horrified at the thought of the British Indian
government managing “pagan” festivals while refusing to allow missionaries into
the country. They, too, saw traditional culture as an obstacle to
modernization, which they thought would eliminate superstition and thus open
the way for the Christianization of India. William Wilberforce, better known as
an antislavery crusader, considered the opening of India to missionaries a
more important goal and went so far as to pay the debts Jeremy Bentham had
incurred by his experimental “panopticon” prison.[160] These two groups formed
the core of the “Anglicists,” those advocating support of English-medium
education to the exclusion of vernacular traditional institutions. They were
effectively joined by large numbers of middle-class Indian families,
particularly Hindus, who saw modern English education as the path to success
for their children.
The
Anglicists were opposed by the “Orientalists,” the old disciples of Warren
Hastings, who insisted that India could only be successfully governed in Indian
terms and that any attempt to impose British culture on the Indians would
endanger the British position there. On an ethical level, they questioned
whether the British had any right to impose their culture on peoples who
clearly had no interest in accepting it. British Indian law should be based on
older Indian legal systems, not on Jeremy Bentham’s ideal code of rational
utility. More generally, they saw Indian culture as valuable in its own right,
with arts, literatures, and cultural ways that should be preserved. The “old
India hands,” familiar with the dangers posed by religious conflict in India,
tended to side with the Orientalists.
Time
and the tides of European thought were with the Anglicists. The old
Orientalists were retiring, replaced by young Anglicists trained at Haileybury.
The British were becoming more confident in their cultural superiority.
Respectable Englishmen no longer married respectable Indian girls, nor, after
the memsahibs arrived in India, did they any longer keep Indian mistresses in
little houses behind their bungalows. In 1835, Thomas Macaulay, later a famous writer and
historian but then a young official spending a miserable four years in India,
wrote a “Minute on Indian Education,” in which he summarized with devastating
clarity the case for English education:
I am
quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists
themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of
India and Arabia.... The question now before us is simply whether, when it is
in our power to teach this language [English, in colleges], we shall teach
languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject
which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach European
science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they
differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can
patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the
public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier,
astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school,
history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years
long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.[161]
The Anglicists won. Persian was abolished as the official
language of administration, English was made the language of higher education,
missionaries were allowed into India, and - just as the old India hands had
predicted - fears of forcible Christianization prompted a disastrous revolt two
decades later.
Yet
it was not just colonial administrators who supported the modernization of
education at the expense of the traditional system; many thoughtful Muslims did
too. By the second half of the nineteenth century, there were individuals in
many parts of the Islamic world familiar with Western thought and often with
Western languages. Some were political figures anxious to modernize Islamic
armies and states to protect their independence from European encroachments -
reforming statesmen like the Ottoman sultan Mahmut III and the Iranian prime
minister Amir Kabir. More interesting for us are religious scholars who sought
to protect Islam from the challenges of Christianity and secularism by
reforming its intellectual structures and demonstrating that these were
compatible with the highest forms of Western thought and science. Usually they
argued in one way or another that the astronomy amusing to English schoolgirls
was not integral to Islamic thought but merely a particular cultural expression
of Islam representing a corruption of its true fundamentals. Often they argued
that various doctrines of modern science or commonplaces of modern European
thought were implicitly present in the Qur’an and the teaching of the Prophet.
Islam would be seen to be compatible with modern science - as much as or more
so than Christianity - if only it could be modernized and cleansed of the
accretions of forty generations of scholastic speculations. Not unnaturally,
such reformers usually fell into conflict with the traditional clergy, whose
obdurate medievalism they saw as the chief factor preventing this reform from
taking hold. Sufism also roused their ire because they saw it as a mass of
superstitious practices with little warrant in the original texts of Islam -
and certainly the Sufism of wandering dervishes could not be displayed in
respectable European company.[162]
Opposition from Islamic anti-modernists. The traditional scholastic system of Islamic
thought also came under attack from antimodernist reformers drawing the
opposite conclusion: If Islam was strong before and weak now, Muslims must
return to the Islam of the earliest Muslims and abandon the accretions of
recent centuries. There was great weight to their argument - that what the
Messenger of God said ought to be done, and doing what he did not do is
suspect. With the rise of mass literacy in the Islamic world and the
publication of the Qur’an and hadith in the major Islamic and European
languages, the basic Islamic texts have become available to ordinary Muslims of
middling education. The Salafis’ argument that these books should be the direct
source of authority is convincing, particularly because the great texts of
Islamic law are not accessible in the same way. A plain text in the Qur’an or
hadith is clear to a modern reader; the subtle contextualizing of that same
text in the light of the nuances of other texts, their relative authority, and
the debates of dozens of generations of scholars is not clear. Like the
Protestants of Reformation Europe, modern Salafis and modern educated Muslims
of every sort can read for themselves and create their own paths in ignorance
of or indifference to the subtle dialectical speculations of the medieval
scholars. Much the same is true of their attitude toward Sufism. The warm and
diverse spirituality of Sufism is rooted only indirectly in the foundational
Islamic texts. The consensus of many generations of scholars that Sufism
represents the inner dimension of Islam carries little weight in the face of
arguments that the Qur’an and hadith do not directly command Sufi practices.
The prevalence of modern technical education works in favor of the Salafis, as
it has for fundamentalists in Christianity and other religious traditions.
People trained to apply practical rules to the solution of technical problems
find it easy to transfer that approach to the solution of religious problems,
and nothing in their education equips them to deal with, or even notice, the
subtle ambiguities of bodies of religious literature.
Thus,
in Islamic contexts it is the Salafis, the Islamic variety of fundamentalists,
whose arguments usually set the agenda. This tendency was powerfully reinforced
by the accident that the fabulously wealthy Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had for its
state religion a puritanical reform movement within the strictest and most
literalist of the legal schools, the Wahhabi branch of the Hanbali legal
school, thus giving generous funding to a particularly rigorous form of
literalism. Other factors have played roles as well. For example, in most
Islamic states, the clerical establishment is closely bound to the government,
or at least visibly coopted by it. Thus, when nationalist movements failed to
deliver on their promises in the newly independent states in the Islamic world,
Islamic movements arose as political alternatives. These movements typically
reflected a Salafi literalism suspicious of the clerical tradition. Only in
Iran did the clergy lead in politico-religious revolution, but there the organized
clergy typically had kept their distance from the government and had major
scholarly centers in Iraq outside the Iranian government’s reach.
THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES THUS WERE A LONG period
of retreat for the traditional clergy and their scholastic rationalism. Much
of their financial and social support was lost with the collapse of older
social and political orders. Secularists saw them as a barrier to
modernization, while committed Muslims, both those who wished to bring Islam
into harmony with modern Western norms and those who wished to restore the
purity of early medieval Islam, criticized the clergy for their failure to
respond successfully to the challenges of modernism. Indeed, the traditional
clergy had found it difficult to respond to modernity with the same success
with which they had faced the challenges of empire a thousand years earlier.
The reasons for this, and the particular issues they face, are discussed in
Chapter 10.
10
A Chaos of Certitudes: The Future of Islamic
Reason
The informed observer looking at the situation of the
Islamic world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is inevitably struck
by the depths of disagreements about the nature and future course of Islam and
the vehement certainty with which positions are held. My interest here is
particularly with individuals and groups who are actively concerned with Islam
and its future, those who are in one sense or another intellectually engaged
with Islam and are convinced that the solutions to the problems facing Islam
are also the solutions to the problems facing Islamic societies. In other
words, they hold that Islam - or at least, Islam correctly understood and
correctly practiced - is the solution to the problems of Islamic society.
Such
a formulation takes in a very wide range of opinion - revolutionary Iran;
Taliban Afghanistan; proponents of Islamic legal, political, social, and
economic systems of many sorts; and Islamic modernists. The answer also can be
negative, as with those who see Islam as currently practiced or Islam and
religion in general as obstacles to development. It does not include all shades
of opinion, as there are political groups in the Islamic world that are secular
in orientation and for whom Islam is simply a feature of their culture - for
example, the Arab Baathists and many of the Palestinian nationalist groups.
Still, most thoughtful people in the Islamic world are probably convinced that
Islam in one way or another is central to the political, economic, and social
futures of their countries. It is easy enough to understand why they should
think so. The Islamic religion was the direct cause of the rise of Islamic
societies, so it is natural for Muslims to look to Islam for explanations and
solutions when things go wrong.
That
said, the observer cannot fail to sense that something has changed. In the
Middle Ages, the Islamic acceptance of institutionalized disagreement took
place in the context of a general consensus about the structure and functioning
of Islamic society. In the contemporary Islamic world, the range of
disagreement is far broader, and there is not even agreement about the extent
to which disagreement should be tolerated. I take Pakistan as my usual example,
because in many ways it is an extreme case in which the phenomena I am
discussing can be clearly seen. There are strong, or at least loud, voices
opposing the toleration of even the degree of disagreement institutionalized by
the consensus of the learned in premodern times - recognition of other madhhabs and de facto acceptance of Shi‘ism, for
example. Awareness and tolerance of this institutionalized diversity is also
slipping away in more subtle ways. Beyond these issues is one even larger: the
legitimacy of culture, Islamic or otherwise, not derived from the norms of
universal Islam.
Let
us consider some concrete examples. Pakistani Islamiyat textbooks based on the
government Islamic studies curriculum typically do not mention the existence of
the four legal schools or the complex and tentative way in which Islamic law is
actually deduced. Instead, they portray a legal system that sprang full-grown
and uniform from the brows of the Companions of the Prophet. To students taught
from such textbooks, disagreement about matters of Islamic law can appear only to
be motivated by perversity. Likewise, the Islamiyat books are generally
legalistic and Sunni in orientation and have little to say about the other
traditions of Islam: ignoring Shi‘ism and the great issues of early Islam that
gave rise to it and ignoring even Sufism, the dominant spiritual tradition in
Pakistan.[163]
Such curricula and textbooks would be comical were it not for the fact that
when students trained by them confront Muslims of other varieties, they almost
inevitably view such people as willfully perverting the true Islam.
A
more general example is the effort to adopt Islamic law as the basic law of the
state. This is not, as one might suppose, the restoration of a situation that
existed during the Middle Ages. An early form of Islamic law prevailed, of
course, under the Prophet and during the reigns of the first four caliphs, but
Islamic law in its fully developed form emerged only in the eighth and ninth
centuries. Islamic law almost never bound the state and was never the only law
of the state for a variety of good reasons. Few rulers were willing to deliver
the conduct of the legal system completely into the hands of the clergy, nor
were the clergy willing to relinquish their legal authority to rulers of very
uncertain piety. The bulk of Islamic law was concerned with religious practices
that had nothing to do with the state, and most of the rest was law governing
voluntary contracts between individuals, such as sales and marriages. Many
areas of law of close concern to the state were barely dealt with in Islamic
law, notably criminal law and taxation. In each area of the Islamic world,
there was also customary law, usually in several different forms and often
predating Islam. Whatever religious scholars may have wished, important areas
of life such as taxation and landlord-tenant relations were generally governed
by customary law, not Islamic law. Finally, the enforcement of one legal school
by the state would do violence to the consciences of clergy and ordinary
believers who followed another school.
There
were religious courts of varying degrees of authority, and a pious ruler, like
any other conscientious believer, would attempt to act in accordance with
Islamic norms, if only to bolster his usually very uncertain legitimacy. Even
a ruler whose conscience was not much troubled by Islam - probably the majority
- would try not to offend the sensibilities of the pious unnecessarily.
Nonetheless, the state followed its own necessities and enforced its own laws.
As a result, attempts to convert Islamic law into the law of the state were
rare and generally not very successful or long lasting-for example, the British
attempt to administer a legal system for Muslims based on Hanafi law in Bengal
in the eighteenth century, a system that is an ancestor of the legal system of
modern Pakistan. In both British Bengal and Pakistan, well-intentioned attempts
to base the law of the state on Islamic law ran afoul of disagreements about
the content of
Islamic law and the tendency of state legal systems to
evolve according to their own inner logic. This happened even in Ottoman
Turkey, probably the most successful example of the use of Islamic law as the
basis of a complete legal system.
The
greatest source of disagreement in the Islamic world is culture not directly
derived from the Islam of the old books. I am not talking here about Western
and global culture, but about the diverse local cultures of the Islamic lands.
The classic example is Iran, where two distinct cultural traditions have
coexisted for fourteen centuries: an Islamic culture, whose focus is religious
and universalist, and an Iranian culture embodied in the Persian language,
Persian poetry, and the nationalist traditions of the Iranian monarchy. These
two traditions are very different and have always coexisted in a tension that
is more often fruitful than destructive. Analogous situations exist in all
Islamic countries, where the local culture may express itself in ways that have
nothing to do with Islam - the kite-flying holiday of Basant in Lahore, for
example, whose origins are probably Hindu but which is now a purely secular
holiday. The local culture may also take a religious form, resulting in local
Islamic cultural features, such as the colorful Sufi shrine culture of Punjab
and Sindh or the strict segregation of women practiced by the tribal peoples of
Afghanistan, the North-West Frontier Province, and Balochistan.
I
will return to these topics, but for the moment I remark only that attempts to
use Islam as a tool to revitalize Islamic society have made these underlying
issues objects of greater controversy.
DISAGREEMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC WORLD
During the past two centuries, the old ways of handling
disagreement among Muslims broke down. Old quarrels reemerged with new vehemence,
and disagreements of new sorts arose. I will offer some explanations for this
fact and then close by suggesting some directions from which a new resolution
might come. The reader will understand and, I hope, forgive me for simplifying
and nearly caricaturing the positions I am discussing. In trying to bring out
certain underlying common themes of contemporary Islamic thought, I inevitably
must neglect the complexities of the various positions and debates.
The breakdown of traditional education. As we saw in Chapter 9, colonialism, modernization, and secularism have done
great damage to the Islamic educational system. Modern states, colonial and
otherwise, have withdrawn the traditional sources of support for Islamic
education. Talented students who once might have become clergy go to modern
schools and universities, seeking more lucrative careers. Traditions of
learning have been broken in many places, as madrasas and other centers of learning have closed or
gone through bad times. In some countries, Islamic education has been co-opted
by other forces in society, as in Indonesia, where well-funded government
“Islamic institutes” were founded to train government religious officials who
know official ideology far better than they know Arabic.[164] As far as I can tell, only
Iran, Iraq, India, Egypt, and Turkey have managed to preserve vigorous and
continuous traditions of higher level Islamic education and scholarship.
The role of the educated laity.
More people in the Islamic world are literate than ever before in history, and
the major Islamic source texts are available in inexpensive printed editions in
all the major Islamic and European languages. The traditionalism and
dialectical subtlety of the medieval Islamic scholars and many modern clerics
do not answer the questions that an engineer or doctor might bring to Islam.
Increasingly, Muslims with modern educations are reexamining the Islamic
sources for themselves, bringing fresh questions and answers and much practical
energy to the material but also bringing a naivete about the nature and
interpretation of the primary Islamic texts.
Ease of communications. Muslims of every school and sect now live as a
single community, so that Malaysia and Nigeria are now in closer contact than
Multan and Shiraz were two hundred years ago. It is not surprising that Muslims
accustomed to thinking of the practices of their own community as the Islamic
norm should be shocked by other Islamic communities that behave very
differently. The resulting conflicts are played out wherever Muslims of diverse
backgrounds are thrust together, whether in the great cities of the Islamic
world, swollen with migrants from the countryside, or in the mosques of Western
cities and university towns.
The rise of neo-Hanbalism. A
rigorous and literalist Islam deriving from the Hanbali tradition and its
Wahhabi offshoot has become increasingly influential. This movement, commonly
called “Salafi,” “of the pious forefathers,” is characterized by a literal
interpretation of Islamic texts and a degree of intolerance both toward other
Islamic legal schools and toward cultural traits, whether Islamic or Western,
not based on Islamic tradition. From the beginning, the Hanbalis generally
preferred to follow the letter of the text rather than reason in deriving law.
Although the Hanbalis in the past were the smallest of the madhhabs, they are becoming increasingly influential.
Partly this results from the historical accident that Saudi Arabia is
predominantly Hanbali, and the Saudis, both the government and individuals,
have generously supported Islamic causes around the world, thus spreading the
influence of Hanbali thought.
There
is another reason, however, for Hanbali influence in the modern world. As
literalists, the Hanbalis can offer the simple and very convincing argument
that something ought to be done or not done because there is a Qur’anic verse
or a hadith that commands or forbids it. The argument that the Qur’an and the
hadith are the only legitimate sources of Islamic practice is almost as
compelling - that something not commanded by the Qur’an or hadith ought not to
be done. Most Muslim scholars throughout the centuries have rejected these
arguments, holding that individual texts must be understood within a much
larger textual, intellectual, and social context. However, the arguments
against the Hanbali position are not simple ones and can only be understood on
the basis of the complex intellectual heritage of medieval Islam. And so, the
Hanbali argument tends to prevail in popular debate.
I have been discussing the historical and sociological
factors creating tension within the Islamic world, but there are also genuine
intellectual issues that will need to be addressed, issues not easily solved
given the nature and history of the Islamic intellectual synthesis. I will
define these issues briefly in turn and then return to the question of the role
that Islamic rationalism might play in the future of Islam in the modern world.
Doubt, uncertainty, and disagreement.
Christian intellectual historians have occasionally observed that medieval
interpreters of the Bible were more open to alternative interpretations and
alternative methodologies of interpretation than modern Christians are. Both
conservative Protestant and secular “scientific” biblical interpretation would
have struck a medieval theologian as narrow and naïve. An analogous situation
exists with Islamic law, where contemporary Muslims project a degree of certitude
onto their understandings of Islamic law that medieval legal scholars would
have found ludicrous (and often wrong in specifics). There is something about
modern societies that leads its people to project the certitudes of their
technical manuals and bureaucratic systems onto the complex and contradictory
histories of their religious traditions. Medieval Muslim scholars knew that
even in their times, certainty about the subtleties of religious belief and law
was not attainable - only goodfaith opinion.
The
situation has become very much worse in the last century. First, the range of
possible opinions is greater. Muslims of every variety are now in contact with
each other and also with ideas from outside Islam. Half a millennium ago, a
Hanafi jurist needed only to consider the range of Hanafi opinion, a school of
thought whose legitimacy was long established by consensus, although if he was
clever and adventurous, he might have played with ideas from other schools.
Now, the legitimacy of his school can be challenged; other notions of Islamic
orthodoxy are in play; educated laymen and governments are experimenting with
making legal decisions on their own; and Western ideas about law, society, and
religion are likely to challenge his notions. On the other hand, Muslims
themselves have become more willing to question the legitimacy of each other’s
views, so that our poor Hanafi might be challenged both by Salafi
neo-fundamentalists denying the legitimacy of any but the strictest form of law
and by modernists and secularists who see his tradition as medieval, outdated,
and obscurantist. And now all of these disputes are also played out on the
Internet, where intellectual exchanges that might once have been worked out
among specialists over many decades are debated within days or hours by
enthusiastic lay Muslims.
Fewer
are now willing to acknowledge a range of possible legitimate opinion. As in
the Roman Catholic Church of the fifteenth century, the old tradition of unity
is straining to hold Muslims together in a single community.
The enforcement of Islamic law.
Modern Islamist thought generally has taken as a truism the notion that the
problems of the Islamic world need to be dealt with by a return to true Islamic
principles. Because Islam is a religion of law, Islamist groups have demanded
the application and enforcement of Islamic law, usually in place of secular
legal systems. On coming to power, regimes owing allegiance to an Islamic
ideology have attempted to apply Islamic law. This has proven more difficult
than its proponents have expected. Criminal law, the obvious starting point, is
poorly developed in classical Islamic legal thought. Moreover, local or tribal
customs are commonly confused with Islamic law, so practices like honor
killings have sometimes been presented as the application of Islamic law.
Attempts to Islamize legal systems have often been done hastily and
opportunistically, such as with the Islamization program in Pakistan in the 1980s. Finally, judges and lawyers, usually amateurs
at best in Islamic law, have not been skillful in applying Islamic law under
modern conditions. I once asked a Pakistani judge, a man with an excellent
British legal education, how he handled Shari'a cases. He told me that he had
various collections of hadith (in English translation) and that he would look
through them until he found something that applied. None of the actual attempts
to Islamize legal systems have been particularly successful, and some have been
indefensible. In Pakistan, for example, the Hudood Laws, the Islamized criminal
laws hastily implemented during the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, have had the
unintended result that women who file complaints of rape are sometimes
prosecuted for adultery if they cannot produce enough corroborating
eyewitnesses. The result has been that outsiders have come to see the Shari'a
as a backward and repressive legal system.
Leaving
aside poor implementation, there are several underlying difficulties
associated with using Islamic law as the legal system of a modern state.
First, Islamic law was formulated by applying the practice of Muhammad’s
community to conditions in the eighth- and ninth-century Middle East. Although
it continued to develop into early modern times, it has not changed to reflect
conditions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Second, as we have
seen, it is uneven as a legal system since it largely dealt with two areas -
religious obligations and contracts, the latter including family law. Areas of
direct concern to the state, such as criminal law and taxation, continued to be
handled by the state, so that their treatment in Islamic law is rudimentary. It
is no accident that the most successful instance of modern application of
Islamic law has been in banking, the so-called “Islamic economics,” because in
medieval times, Islamic law was the legal system governing relations among
merchants, and thus it had a highly developed system of contract law.
But
more fundamental is the question of whose law is to be applied. In premodern
times, Islamic law was essentially a voluntary legal system, much like the
systems of accepted practices and professional ethics that govern the dealings
of businesses within particular industries. Merchants agreed to accept the
jurisdiction of a particular legal school when they went to a legal scholar to
have a contract drafted or a dispute mediated. And, of course, there were four
major Sunni systems of law, along with the legal systems of the various other
Islamic sects. Moreover, there is the problem of the legal rights of
non-Muslims. Are they to be governed by their own legal systems or by an
Islamic legal system whose authority they do not recognize? And what about the
problem of legislation? Traditional Islamic law did not recognize human
legislation as a source of law, but it is difficult to conceive of a modern
legal system that does not involve new legislation. One can scarcely imagine
deducing all the complexities of modern law - commercial and environmental
regulation, to take two examples - from the materials of the Qur’an, hadith,
and medieval legal consensus.
Any
Islamization of the law of the state would have to take account of these
difficulties, problems for which there is no obvious solution in traditional
Islamic legal thought.
Pluralism and toleration. Closely
related is the problem of pluralism. Earlier Islamic societies dealt fairly
well with the question of pluralism, usually through some variety of what in
Ottoman contexts is called the millet system. Two assumptions made this possible, both
problematic in modern - or, for that matter, in modern Islamist - contexts.
First, religious and ethnic communities had the right to live according to
their own laws and customs. Jews and Christians should be allowed to live
according to Jewish or Christian laws, with their internal disputes being
settled by Jewish or Christian leaders. Shi'ites in a Sunni society should be
able to live by Shi'ite law, more or less independent of the Sunni authorities.
Tribes should be allowed to live according to tribal custom, and so on. Second,
the ultimate authority was a Muslim ruling class to which each of these
communities was collectively responsible through its leaders.
Neither
of these assumptions holds under modern conditions. The modern state assumes
that all of its subjects are citizens subject to the same laws, an assumption
that Islamist political thought implicitly shares, so non-Muslims and Muslim
minorities should be governed by the Islamic laws of the majority. Thus in
Iran, Christian women are required to obey dress and behavior codes based on a
particular understanding of Islamic law, one not shared even by all Iranian
Muslim women. In Pakistan, Christians and Hindus are subject to draconian laws
prohibiting blasphemy against the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad. Where
accommodations are made, such as allowing alcohol for Jews and Christians but
not for Muslims, social and legal problems immediately result. In Pakistan, for
example, some Christians make a living by buying their legal allotment of
alcohol and immediate reselling it to Muslims. The moral effects are
unwholesome for both communities.
Second,
the notion that the ruling class is to be made up only of Muslims is scarcely
acceptable under modern conditions. It often seems natural to Muslims that the
leadership of a predominately Muslim country should be restricted to Muslims.
Muslims often assume, for example, that the president of the United States must
by law be a Christian - an assumption, it is only fair to say, that is shared
by many American Christians. Nonetheless, no matter how realistic such
restrictions are in practice, they are deeply offensive to minorities.
Finally,
there are fundamental issues of reciprocity. Muslims often cite the protections
guaranteed to non-Muslim monotheists as evidence of Islamic tolerance of other
religions - which they certainly were, under medieval conditions. However, the
notion that religious rights are to be granted by the sufferance of an Islamic
majority is not likely to be acceptable to minorities in the modern world.
Non-Muslims resent the Islamic law that a male Muslim may marry a Christian or
Jewish woman but a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man, and there are
other similar asymmetries. In practice, attempts at mutual understanding
between Muslims and other religions often founder over issues of reciprocity.
Muslims rightly insist that they should have full civil rights in non-Muslim
countries, which few question, but when the discussion turns to whether
Christian groups have the right to evangelize or build churches in Muslim
countries, it is frequently difficult for Muslims to see the parallel.
In
short, Muslims have not developed ways of dealing intellectually, socially, or
politically with religious diversity in the modern world.
The legitimacy of custom and local practice.
Like any other great religious community, the Islamic world contains
innumerable local traditions associated with religion. I am not talking about
distinct sects like Shi‘ism but about the innumerable local variations in
customs associated with religion that vary by country, town, valley, ethnic
group, tribe, class, neighborhood, or family. Some customs are simply variant
ways of expressing a universal Islamic ritual or value, such as the special
foods that each Islamic community associates with the Ramadan fast or the
particular ways in which circumcisions are celebrated. Some predate Islam, such
as the veneration of the shrines of the Patriarchs in the Holy Land. Others are
quite modern, such as the television serials that are now firmly associated
with Ramadan in the Arab world. Some represent a greater strictness than the
Islam of the old books would require, such as the Afghan restrictions on women
and the intolerance of divorce among the Lebanese Shi'ites. Many represent
laxity, such as the not-uncommon assumption that strict veiling is less
important for an unmarried girl than for a married woman or a woman who has
been on pilgrimage. A great many are associated with Sufism and its local
expressions, the extraordinarily diverse rituals associated with the shrines
of saints in almost every Islamic country being the most conspicuous example.
Such rituals often include music and dance and many other practices that are
surely not commanded by the Shari'a. Above all, these complexes of customs are
different in each place.
Nowadays,
the legitimacy of such local customs is under attack from three directions.
First, Muslims from all over the world have been thrown together, and what are
normal Islamic practices for people who have lived with them for generations
may seem to be bizarre and un-Islamic aberrations to those from elsewhere.
This conflict plays out wherever Muslims from different countries are brought
together, such as in the mosques of America. Second, from a modern, secular
point of view, such practices often appear primitive and superstitious, which
they sometimes are.
Third, the neo-fundamentalist movements deeply distrust
local practices on the ground that they have no warrant in the Qur’an or
hadith, which is also very often true. On the other hand, much of the cultural
richness of Islam is bound up in the local practices - music to take the most
obvious example, or plain religious fun.
How
much latitude for local diversity will be allowed as Islam comes to terms with
modern condition? The Protestant Reformation destroyed much of the cultural
richness of the old local medieval piety with its veneration of relics and
local saints, but Protestantism, with its austere reformed churches, did not go
on to produce much in the way of great religious art. The cost of this
“purification” was enormous: in blood, in culture, and in lost works of art.
Muslims have already seen the desecration of shrines by neo-fundamentalists in
places like Iraq, Algeria, and Pakistan. Obviously, modern conditions will
drive Muslims toward a more uniform international Islam, but what will be the
balance between the local and the universal? It is a question that Muslims have
barely begun to ask themselves, much less answer.
Changing the law. Islam has a sophisticated legal system that came to
maturity a thousand years ago. As issues were settled, they fell under the
heading of ijma‘, consensus,
the doctrine that the community of Muh. ammad could never agree on
an error. After the community of scholars had come to consensus on an issue,
the matter was closed and as firmly established as if the ruling had come from
the mouth of the Prophet himself. This approach allowed Muslim legal scholars
to settle new issues, but it also prevented them from revisiting old ones, so
for most of the last millennium, Muslim legal scholars have been engaged in
dealing with fine points of settled law rather than in developing new law.
Above all, there is no mechanism in Islamic law for new legislation. Yet there
are innumerable areas in Islamic law where - in the view of an outsider, at
least - change would seem to be needed to accommodate modern conditions. These
are of varying sorts, posing various degrees of legal difficulty.
Perhaps
the simplest issues are those where well-established Islamic law allows or
tolerates but does not command something incompatible with modern conditions or
sensibilities, slavery and polygamy being obvious examples. These can be
forbidden without doing great violence to the integrity of Islamic law. After
all, no Muslim was ever required to own a slave or take four wives, and even in
the classical period of Islamic law these practices were tolerated as social
necessities rather than positive goods.
More
difficult are cases where Islamic law is in direct conflict with contemporary
sensibilities or practical needs. Examples include the prohibition of giving
or taking interest, a fundamental feature of modern financial systems, or the
restrictions on the rights of women and minorities. In the former case, a
whole discipline of Islamic economics has developed to allow participation in
modern economic life while observing the letter of the medieval law.
Most
difficult are the cases of legal norms that unquestionably have their bases in
the Qur’an and the instructions of the Prophet. An example might be the hajj pilgrimage, held each year in a specific
ten-day period, sometimes in the middle of summer. In the nineteenth century,
perhaps seventy thousand pilgrims went in a good year; now there are three
million annually, and the number increases every year, even though they are
restricted by the Saudi government. Mass deaths from fire and stampede have
become routine. The obvious solution would be to allow the obligation of hajj to be fulfilled by pilgrimage at any time of
the year, but it is very difficult to know how this would be justified under
Islamic law. For Salafis, the list of such non-negotiable difficulties in
Islamic law is longer, because they are likely to reject some of the practical
compromises developed in the Middle Ages.
So
how are adjustments to be made? There have been several approaches. Many
Muslims simply ignore the issues, observing such aspects of the law as are
relevant to their conditions and ignoring the rest, but that is hardly an
intellectual solution. Others, such as the Taliban of Afghanistan and, to a
lesser extent, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, cling to the letter of the law as
they understand it, at the cost of modernity when necessary. By contrast, the
government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has often invoked the principle of practical
necessity to get around legal difficulties. Others - the Islamic economists
and, perhaps we should add, the couturiers of Cairo, Karachi, and Istanbul -
have argued that the resources of traditional Islamic law can be adapted
perfectly well to modern conditions and have produced mortgages, bank accounts,
and women’s high fashion compatible with Islamic legal standards. Then there
are both modernists and fundamentalists who argue that the complexities of
medieval Islamic legal thought should be discarded outright. The modern Turkish
Republic and, in practice, many other Islamic states have followed the usual
medieval practice of restricting Islamic law to private life to one degree or
another. Still others advocate “reopening the gate of ijtihâd," reverting to the situation in the first
centuries of Islamic history and allowing legal scholars to revisit closed
legal issues. The fact that those advocating such a reopening are commonly
advocating some idiosyncratic personal interpretation or government ideology
should, however, give reformers pause.
THUS, COMING TO THE END OF
OUR STORY, WE SEE REASON - NOW reason
in its protean Western form - playing an ambiguous role in the Islamic
community. On the one hand, the ‘ulama’, the clergy, the traditional guardians of scholastic
reason, have been marginalized by advocates of other conceptions of reason. On
the other hand, the modernists have rejected the scholastic conception of
reason, with its narrow focus on the exposition of revealed texts. Instead, the
modernists appeal to a scientific or utilitarian conception of reason in which
religion and revelation, like everything else, are to be judged on the basis of
verifiability and practical utility. On the other side, the new fundamentalists
demand consistency in the systematic imitation of the Islamic law of the Muslim
community of Medina in the seventh century. Although Muslim legal scholars
considered this approach as early as the eighth century and found it wanting,
it has a powerful appeal in an age of mass literacy and technical education.
The resultant fundamentalism has its analogues in the other great religious
traditions, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism in particular.
All
of these approaches have obvious difficulties, so none has been wholly
successful. In a sense, part of the difficulty is that the rationalism - or, at
least, the concern for consistency - of the modern world sits uneasily with the
delicate compromises with inconsistency and disagreement found in the medieval
Islamic legal system and the larger medieval Islamic religious synthesis.
As a
non-Muslim, it is not my place to say which of these positions is right or
wrong or what Muslims ought to do to restore the unity of their community.
However, I close by suggesting two quite different sources that I think are
likely to be needed to resolve these issues.
First,
the Islamic learned tradition cannot be disregarded. It is easy to be impatient
with traditional Islamic scholarship. It is old, narrow, often hidebound, and
slow to deal with current issues. Many of the issues it has debated strike even
sympathetic Muslims as rather silly. In fact, both Muslim modernists and many
so-called fundamentalist groups have rejected the learned tradition. In Egypt,
for example, both secularists and the revolutionary Islamic parties are
suspicious of the traditionalist clergy of al-Azhar University. However, I do
not think the Islamic learned tradition can be lightly discarded. The medieval
clergy had a profound understanding of how Islamic law and teaching could be
extracted from the materials available to them. They understood the limitations
of their own reasoning, and they knew the Islamic tradition intimately. They
taught a responsible humility before the sources of their tradition. Most of
all, they understood the necessity and limitations of interpretation in
deriving Islamic law and teaching.
Fundamentalists
and modernists are, it seems to me, united against the traditional clergy and
the medieval Islamic learned tradition in a willingness to interpret texts
naively in a way that imposes idiosyncratic interpretations on them.
Disagreements arise whose basis is no more than the limited understanding of a
single reader of the Qur’an and the hadith. Such interpretations can even be
cynical, as in Indonesia, where students in government Islamic colleges under
the Suharto regime were taught to do “ijtihad” - by which was explicitly meant
finding Islamic justifications for government policies. Without the Islamic
learned tradition, the Qur’an and the hadith will become nothing more than a
screen on which Muslims of varying temperaments will project their own
preconceptions, personal proclivities, and prejudices.
Second,
I think the Muslims living in the Americas are likely to play a key role in the
renewal of the Islamic consensus. Though comparatively small in numbers, they
are quickly evolving into a vigorous and successful community. As a minority
in an alien cultural setting, they have had to ask themselves new questions
about the meaning and nature of Islam. As a minority of very diverse origins,
they do not have the luxury of preserving the divisions of the societies they
came from. Mosques, whose congregations might come from a score of countries
across the Islamic world, have to face issues of diversity, cultural
difference, modernism, unity, and the role of women, and to do so while trying
to win acceptance from a larger non-Muslim society that usually has not been
very sympathetic. Clergy have had to learn to play new roles and to deal with
new problems. Muslim communities in American or European cities are microcosms
of the Islamic world in a larger international society. I suspect that the
lessons they are learning will prove invaluable to the Islamic lands of the Old
World.
The bibliography contains mainly material that
might be of interest to a general reader with a preference for works in
English, a language that my readers presumably know. All works cited in the notes
are also included. For the convenience of readers who might wish to read
further in particular areas, the bibliography is divided by topics arranged
roughly in the order in which they appear in the book.
GENERAL
REFERENCES on islam, ISLAMIC
HISTORY,
AND historiography
Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd ed. Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1960-2008.
Hodgson,
Marshall. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 3 vols. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Ibn Khaldun. al-Muqaddima: Les
prolégomènes d’Ebn Khaldoun. 3 vols. Edited by
E. M. Quatremère. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1858.
-------- . al-Muqaddima. Edited by Nasr al-Hurînî.
Bulaq, 1274/1857.
--- . The Muqaddimah:
An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. Bollingen
Series 43. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.
Ibn al-Nadlm. al-Fihrist. Edited by
Yusuf ‘All Tawil. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiya, 1416/1996.
--- . Translated
by Bayard Dodge. The Fihrist of al-Nadm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim
Culture. Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies 83. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970.
Rosenthal,
Franz. The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship. Analecta Orientalia
24. Rome:
Pontificium Institutem Biblicum, 1947.
'Tabari,
Muhammad b. Jarir. Tarikh al-Rusul wal-Muluk. Edited by M.
J. de Goeje et al. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1879-1901.
--- . Edited by
Ehsan Yarshater. The History of al-Tabari. 40 vols. SUNY
Series in Near Eastern Studies. Albany: SUNY Press, 1985-2007.
Tashkubrlzadah,
Ahmad b. Mustafa. Miftah al-Sa‘ada wa-Misbah al-Siyada f . . .. . ..
Mawduat al-‘Ulum. Hyderabad,
Deccan: Da’irat al-Ma‘arif al-Nizamiyah, 19111937.
REASON AND RATIONALISM
Audi, Robert. The
Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Cabezón, Jose
Ignacio, ed. Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspective. Albany: SUNY
Press, 1998.
Mahdi, Muhsin.
“The Rational Tradition in Islam.” In Intellectual Traditions in
Islam, edited by Farhad Daftary, 43-65. London: I. B. Tauris and
the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2000.
Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Strauss, Leo. Persecution and
the Art of Writing. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952.
----- . What Is
Political Philosophy? and Other Studies. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1959.
CLASSICAL AND
EARLY CHRISTIAN THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
Chadwick,
Henry. Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in
Justin, Clement, and Origen. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966.
Cornford, F. M.
From
Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation. New York:
Harper, 1957.
Coxon, A. H. The Fragments
of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, Translation, the Ancient
Testimonia and a Commentary. Phronesis suppl., vol. iii.
Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1986.
Cumont, Franz. The Oriental
Religions in Roman Paganism. Chicago: Open Court, 1911; reprinted New
York: Dover, 1956.
Pseudo-Dionysius.
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Ritter. 2 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991.
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Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and
the Irrational. Sather Classical Lectures 25. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1951.
Gallop, D. Parmenides of Elea:
Fragments. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Guthrie,
Kenneth Sylvan, comp. and trans. The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library: An
Anthology of Ancient Writings which Relate to Pythagoras and Pythagorean
Philosophy. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Phanes, 1987.
Guthrie, W. K.
C. History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 1: The Earlier
Presocratics and the Pythagoreans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Guthrie, W. K.
C. Orpheus and Greek Religion. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1952.
Kahn, Charles
H. Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 2001.
Kingsley,
Peter. Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean
Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
-------- . In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness,
Calif.: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999.
-------- . Reality. Inverness,
Calif.: The Golden Sufi Center, 2003.
Kirk, G. S., J.
E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Kramer, Hans
Joachim. Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of
the Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the
Fundamental Documents. Translated by John R. Catan. Albany: SUNY
Press, 1990.
Nussbaum,
Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Martin
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Peters, F. E. Aristoteles
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Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968.
--- . Aristotle and
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Reale,
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Rosenthal,
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Snell, Bruno. The Discovery
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Stead,
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Veyne, Paul. Did the Greeks
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--- . Translated
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A. “Muslim’s Introduction to His Sahih., Translated and
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--- . Studies on the
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--- . “The
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al-Sa‘id,
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T» • ' A 1 • • / T T • \ T 1.1
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Abhari, Athir al-Din, logician, Eisagoge, 126-7,131
Abu
Bakr, caliph, 4
Abu
Hanifa, founder of legal school, 47-8
Abu Yusuf al-KUfi, student of Abu Hanifa, .
47-8
Afghanistan,
170
Ahl al-Raf, people of opinion, early legal scholars, 48
Ahmad
b. Hanbal, hadith scholar, 43, 51, 66
Ahmad Khan, Sir Syed, Indian educationist, 158
Akhbaris,
literalist Shi‘ite legal school, 53
Alchemy,
90, 97
Alcohol,
and minorities, 179
Alexander
the Great, and philosophy, 64
Alexandria
Library, burning of, 30-31
‘Ali
b. Abi 'Talib, 146,148
Allah,
94. See also God
Allegorical
Interpretation, 72, 76, 80, 85,94.
See also
Interpretation
Al-.
See following element
America,
Muslims in, 184,185
Amili, Baha’ al-Din, mathematician, Khulasat
al-Hisab, “Summary of
Arithmetic,” 163
Amir
Kabir, cent. Iranian prime minister, 167
‘Amr
b. al-‘Às, Arab general, 30-31
Anachronism,
in hadith, 36, 39
Analogy,
in law, 49-50,116-7,138
Ancient
Schools, ofIslamic law, 48-50
Anglicans,
5
Anglicist-OrientalistDebate,
26,164-7
Anthropomorphism,
in Qur’an, 51
Antisemitism,
Islamic, 9
Aquinas,
Thomas, 17, 70, 76,123
Arab
Sciences, 112. See also Religious Sciences Arabic, in India, 158; script, 39,131 Aristotle,
and Islamic philosophy, 22, 76, 91-3,95-6,125;
and logic, 107,115,136-7; and religion, 60, 63, 65; and science, 96, 101;
Works of: De Anima, 78; De Interpretatione, 135; Nicomachean Ethics, 75; Organon, 125, 135; Poetics,
57, 135; Politics, 64; Posterior Analytics, 135; Prior Analytics, 124,135; Rhetoric, 113,135,138; Sophistical Refutations, 135; Topics, 135; translations, 56, 135
Aristotle, pseudo-, Theology of Aristotle,
68, 69
Art,
and romanticism, 25
Arts,
Five, forms of inference, 107,113,135-7 Ash‘ari, Abu’l-Hasan, theologian, 9, 51-2;
Highlights of the Polemic against Deviators and Innovations, 117
Ash‘arism, theological school, 53, 66, 76, 83, 125
Astronomy, Greek, 56-7; European, 97,101;
Islamic, 98-9, 101, 110, 126, 167
Atomism,
Kalam, 125
Augustine,
Saint, City of God, 64
Avempace.
See Ibn Bajja Averroes. See Ibn Rushd
Avesta,
62
Avicenna.
See Ibn Sina
al-Azhar
University, 128
Baathists,
and Islam, 170
Bacon,
Francis, on classification, 44-5 Balagha. See
Rhetoric
Barhebraeus,
Eastern Christian historian, 31 Being
and Becoming, in Plato, 59
Bentham, Jeremy, Utilitarian philosopher, 17, 22-3, 26,165
Bible,
24, 26, 62,176
Bihari,
Muhibb Allah, Gloss on MtrZahid, 133
Bi-la
kayf, “without asking
how,” 51
Biographical
Dictionaries, Islamic, 35,111
Biology,
97,101
Blasphemy,
and religious minorities, 179
Bochenski,
I. M., on history of logic, 109
Bookstores,
Islamic, 1-3
Borges,
Jose Luis, Argentine writer, 57
British
India. See India, Pakistan
Bruno,
Giordano, and Scientific Revolution,
99
Bukhari,
al-Sahth, 33, 44-6
Bureaucratic
Rationality, 23
Byzantine
Empire, 55-6
Caliph,
Caliphate, definition, 4
Caste
System, and Indian education, 160 Categories,
in logic, 107,110,135-6
Catholicism.
See Roman Catholic Church
Causation,
83
Chaghmini,
astronomer, 163
Chemistry,
and Scientific Revolution, 97
China,
18
Christianity,
20-1, 61-2, 165, 167, 178-80
Circumcision,
180
Citizenship,
and minorities, 179
City,
in political philosophy, 64, 71-2, 74
Classification,
of hadith, 43-46
Clergy,
169, 183, 185
Codex,
and scripture, 62
Collation,
of manuscripts, 129, 131
Colonialism,
and education, 153,160-2;
and
Islam, 163,169; and Sufism, 11, 88 Commentaries,
112; on logic textbooks,
120-3, 127-9, 131, 133, 137, 139
Companions of the Prophet, 35, 39,147; and hadith, 43; and law, 47-9,144-5,171
Comparative
Religion, 24, 26
Conception
and Assent, in school logic, 136
Concepts,
in Stoic logic, 109
Consensus,
Ijma, authority of, 35,143-4,178,
181
Constitutions,
and religion, 71
Contracts,
in Islamic law, 172, 177-8
Copernicus,
Nicolaus, 12, 22, 26, 97-8
Courts,
Religious, 172
Courts,
Royal and science, 99
Criminal
Law, 172, 177-8
Culture,
Local. See Custom
Curricula,
madrasa, 133,142,151-2
Custom, Local, in contemporary Islam, 49, 171, 173, 177, 180-1
Dars-i
Nizamt, madrasa curriculum, 151-2
Debate.
See Dialectic
Definition,
Essential, 135-6
Demonstration, in logic, 81,113,135,138;
of religious doctrines, 75-6, 80, 84, 110
Deoband,
madrasa, 122, 152, 163
Descartes,
Rene, 17
Dialectic,
logical discipline, 81, 109, 113, 135;
debating technique, 133
Didactic
Literature, in education, 159
Dtn, Religion, 75
Dionysius
the Areopagite, pseudo-, 63
Disagreement,
116, 141-53, 171-77
Disputation.
See Dialectic
Disüqï, Supercommentary on the Shamstya, 128
Diversity,
in Islam, 180-1
Divorce,
180
Doctrine,
in Christianity, 24, 62
Dumitriu,
Anton, on history of logic, 109
Duties,
in usul al-fiqh, 116
East
India Company, British, 164-5
Economics,
Islamic, 178, 182
Education,
10, 28, 62, 146, 153, 174;
colonial,
157-69
Eggs,
existence of, 138
Egypt, 18-9, 128, 184;
education in, 121-2, 161, 174
Emanation,
in metaphysics, 63, 77
Empedocles,
Greek philosopher, 58, 91
Empiricism,
23, 45, 92
Engineering, in Indian education, 158, 160, 162
English Language, in India, 158-9, 162, 164, 166-67
Enlightenment,
15, 18, 21, 24, 27-8
Environmentalism,
25
Epistemology,
78, 89, 92
Epistles
of the Brethren of Purity, 67
Esotericism,
72, 82, 85, 94
Eternity
of the World, 83
Eucharist,
24, 70
Europe,
96, 100
Evangelical
Christians, and India, 165
Experiment,
and science, 22, 97
Faith
and reason, 14
Family
Law, 178
Farabi, Abü Nasr, 67, 91;
political philosophy of, 13, 68-85,150; on religion, 57, 82, 89; works: Aphorisms ofthe Statesman, 85; commentaries on Organon, 125; Book of Religion, 70, 75; The
Enumeration ofthe Sciences, 74-5; Philosophy
of Aristotle, 68;
Principles ofthe Opinions ofthe Inhabitants ofthe Virtuous
City, 69-70, 77;
Reconciliation ofthe Philosophies ofPlato and Aristotle, 68; Summary ofPlato’s Laws, 71
Fashion,
Women’s, 182
Fatimids,
and philosophy, 67
Fatwas,
legal rulings, 82
Fiqh, 32, 72, 120, 149; and hadith, 43, 46-50; and logic, 108, 110;
and rationalism, 103, 153
Firqa, sect, 144
Fitna, civil war, 143
Five
Arts, forms of inference, 107,113,135-7
Forms,
Platonic, 59, 78
Franklin,
Benjamin, 22, 25
Free
Will, 50-1, 66, 145
Fündamentalism, Fündamentalists, 10, 28, 168-9,183-4;
definition, xv
Galileo, and Scientific Revolution, 96, 97,99, 102
General Matters, umur ‘ammo, in Kalam, 118, 120
Gensis,
Book of, 26
Geography,
in Indian education, 167
Geometry,
79
Ghazali, Abü Hamid, 9, 82, 88-9,125,139;
on logic, 13-4, 96,108,114-5; works: The Deliverer from Error, 52, 83, 99; Gauge of Knowledge, 115,135; The
Incoherence ofthe Philosophers, 52, 83; The
Just Scales, 115;
The Niche for Lights, 150; The Purification of the Science of Jurisprudence, 114, 115; The
Revival of the Sciences of Religion, 89; The Touchstone of Speculation, 115
Gibbon,
Edward, on Alexandria library, 31
Glosses,
on textbooks, 133
Gnosticism,
and Christianity, 61
God, 61, 63, 65, 84, 87, 92,94,151;
in Islamic theology, 50, 83; attributes of, 50-1, 56, 66, 94; as intellect, 72, 76-9, 84
Gods,
Aristotle on, 60
Goldziher, Ignaz, Orientalist, on authenticity
of hadith, 47
Government
College, Lahore, 157
Governors,
Arab, and law, 48
Grammar, Arabic, 127, 147, 152; Greek, 83, 108-10; and logic, 53, 82,108,110-3,121, 124, 139
Greek,
translations from, 9, 55-7, 64, 107 Greeks,
Ancient, 18-20
Hadith, definition, 32; study of, 2,11, 32,43, 131,152; reliability of, 36,143-4;
classification of, 43-46; collections, 33, 35, 44, 50,148,150;
as source of law, 42, 46-50, 142,175,178; and rationalism, 5,110; and Sufism, 53, 87;
modern views, 168,177,181, 184
Hadith
qudst, sayings
attributed to God, 87 Haileybury,
East India Company school, 165-6
Hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca, 182
Hallaq, Wael, on origins of legal schools, 49
Hanafis,
legal school, 146,172,176
Hanbalis,
legal school, 43,146,169,175
Handmaid
theory, 70
Happiness,
and virtuous city, 74-5
Hasan, “good” hadith, 44, 46
Hashiya, glosses, 133
Hastings, Warren, British Indian official, 164
Hegel,
Georg, and relativism, 23
Hidden
Imam, and Shi‘ite law, 148
Higher
Education, in British India, 158 Hindus,
158, 166, 179
Historiography,
Islamic, 34, 38-40
History,
in Indian education, 166-7
Hodgson,
Marshall, Islamic historian, 13 Hoodbhoy,
Pervez, Pakistani physicist, on
Islamic science, 9
Hudood
Laws, Pakistan, 177
Hülegü, Il-Khan, Mongol ruler, patron of Tusi, 98
Hume,
David, empiricist philosopher, 23
Hypatia of Alexandria, pagan Greek philosopher, 63
Hypotheticals,
in Islamic logic, 107
Ibn ‘Arabi, 11, 53;
and Ibn Rushd, 86, 93-4; on
God, 76-7, 84-5; and later Islamic philosophy, 95, 102, 150-1
Ibn
al-Nadim, bibliographer, al-Fihrist, 55
Ibn
al-Qifti, on Alexandria library, 30
Ibn al-Salah, hadith scholar, Sciences of the
Hadith, 36
Ibn Bajja, Spanish Islamic philosopher, 70, 73
Ibn
Kammuna, Jewish philosopher, 149
Ibn
Khaldun, 36,107,119
Ibn Mada’, grammarian, Refutation of the
Grammarians, 53-4
Ibn
Mujahid, Qur’an textual scholar, 147
Ibn Qudama, theologian, Censure of
Speculative Theology, 53
Ibn Rushd, 68, 82, 86,93-4; as Farabian political philosopher, 70, 73, 85; works: commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric,
113; The Decisive Treatise, 73, 75, 76, 80, 81, 84;
Incoherence of the Incoherence, 83
Ibn
Sina, 67, 72, 77, 88-9,101,149;
Aristotelianism of, 90-1,95; logic of, 115, 120,125,135,136; works: Canon of Medicine, 163; The Healing, 113,124,136; Hints and Admonitions, 125-7, 135
Ibn
Taymiya, 5, 53; on logic, 9,115,125
Ibn
Tufayl, Spanish philosopher, Hayy ibn
Yaqzan, 70, 73-8, 80, 82
Ijma\ consensus, as source of authority, 35, 143-4, 178, 181
Ijtihad, independent legal judgment, 183-4
Ikhwan al-Safa. See Epistles of the Brethren of Purity
Il-Khanids,
Mongol rulers, and science, 98
Illuminationism, Neoplatonic philosophical
school, 91
Imagination,
and prophecy, 79, 80
Imamate,
66
India, 18,128; British, 163,172;
education in, 26, 157, 158-60, 164-7, 174;
logic in curriculum, 121-2, 128-9
Indonesia,
174, 184
Inference,
110; in Islamic law, 42-3, 48
Institutions,
and logic, 119-20
Intellects,
76-9, 92
Interest
and Usury, 182
Internet,
176
Interpretation, of Qur’an and hadith, 5,117, 152,184;
of Bible 176. See also
Allegorical Interpretation
Intuition,
72, 92
Ionian physicists, Greek philosophers, and
religion, 58
Iran, 11, 18-9, 128, 161-2, 173; philosophy in, 90-3; logic textbooks,
128,140;
education in, 121-3, 135, 160-1, 174; Islamic Republic, 169-70, 182
Iraq,
49,174
Irrationality
17
Islamism,
173
Islamiyat,
Pakistani religious curriculum,
171
Isma‘ilis,
67, 89
Isnad, chain of authorities ofhadith, 34-5,37, 39, 43-4, 47; in classifying hadith, 43
Istanbul,
logic textbooks printed in, 128
Italian
School, Greek philosophers, 58, 92
Jefferson,
Thomas, 21
Jesus
Christ, 24
Jews,
18, 178
John
Chrysostom, Byzantine preacher, 62
John the Grammarian, Byzantine philosopher, 30-31
Judaism,
61
Judges,
as source of law, 48
Jurisprudence.
See Usul al-Fiqh
Jurists,
13, 71, 81-2
Jurjani, Sharif, author of textbooks, 110,127, 128; Mïr Qutbl, 133
Justice,
and Mu‘tazilites, 51
Juwayni,
Imam al-Haramayn, theologian, A
Guide to Conclusive Proofs for the Principles of Belief, 118
Kalam, 81, 89,120,152;
and rationalism, 50-53, 103;
and philosophy, 57, 66, 72, 149; and logic, 108,110,117-9,139. See also
Theology
Kant,
Immanuel, and relativism, 23
Kashif al-Ghita’, ‘Ali, modern Islamic logician,
120
Katibi,
Najm al-Din Dabiran, logician, 139;
works: IHikmat al-Ayn, 127; Shamslya, 126-8, 131, 133, 136
Khalifa. See Caliph
Khamane’i,
Ali, Iranian supreme leader, 149
Kindi,
Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub, philosopher, 64-7
Kingly
Craft, 75
Kingsley,
Peter, historian of philosophy, 58
Kneale,
William and Martha, The
Development ofLogic, 109
Knowledge,
31-32, 92. See also Epistemology
Kurdi,
Faraj Allah Zaki, Cairo publisher, 128
Laity,
in contemporary Islam, 174
Languages,
European, in madrasas, 163-4 Latin,
translations from Arabic, 86
Law, and religion, 70-1, 81; and philosophy, 75, 78, 89; in colonial states, 162,164
Law, Islamic, 152; and scholasticism, 27-8; sources of, 31, 37, 138, 145;
and philosophy, 28, 66, 73;
Shi‘ite, 148-9; contemporary attitudes to, 171-3, 176-83
Lawgiver,
Virtuous, 72, 75
Legal
Scholars, Islamic, 13, 71, 81-2
Legal Schools, Islamic, 47,152,171-2;
diversity of, 114, 142-46, 150
Legalism,
Islamic, 13
Legislation,
as source of law, 114, 178, 181
Legitimacy,
political, 150, 172
Leitner, Gottlieb Wilhelm, British Indian
educationist, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab to the Year 1882, 157-60, 162
Libanius,
Byzantine rhetorician, 62 Lies,
Beneficial, and Plato, 60, 84 Light, in metaphysics, 92
Linguistics,
Stoic, 109
Linguistics, Arabic, 108,112,153; and logic, 108,139.
See also Grammar, Arabic;
Rhetoric, Arabic
Literacy,
and Islamic reform, 168
Literalism, Christian, 24; Islamic, 43, 49, 66, 168-9,175,182;
and Ibn ‘Arabi, 53,94
Lithographs,
of textbooks, 129,131,140
Liturgy,
24, 87
Locke,
John, empiricist philosopher, 23
Logic,
and reason, 16-7
Logic,
Greek, 12-3,19,107; Stoic, 109-10,120
Logic, Islamic, historiography of, 109, 123;
philosophical, 68, 81, 107, 121, 135, 139; critics of, 115, 125;
and grammar, 82-3, 108, 112; and religious sciences, 114-19;
school logic, 109, 120, 126, 137, 139;
teaching of, 121, 122,129,131,138,139; in madrasa curriculum, 96, 99, 102, 151-2
Logic,
Medieval European, 111,119-21
Logic,
Modern, 22,121,140
Logos, 18,19, 20, 25, 28
Ma’mun, Caliph, and translation movement, 55
Macaulay, Thomas, Indian official, “Minute on
Indian Education,” 166
Madhhabs. See Legal Schools
Madrasas, 90, 146, 158, 161-2, 174; curricula, 96, 98-9,113,121-2,142,151,152-3;
science in, 98, 163
Magic,
61, 90, 97
Mahdi,
Muhsin, on Farabi, 69
Mahmut
III, Ottoman Sultan, 167
Mahood,
Syed, Indian educationist, A
History of English Education in India, 158
Maimonides,
Jewish philosopher, 70, 73
Malikb. Anas, legal scholar, al-Muwatta’, 44, 47-8
Malikis,
legal school, 47
Mani,
Manichaeism, 61-2
Mantiq, logic, 19,107,110
Manuscripts, 2, 129, 131; Islamic scientific, 99-100
Maragha
Observatory, 98,126
Maraji
Taqltd, Shi‘ite legal
authorities, 148-9
Martyrdom,
4, 10
Marx,
Karl; Marxism, 23, 27
Mathematics, 99; and philosophy, 78-9, 83, 110, 149; and science, 22, 96
Matn, text of hadith, 34, 36, 43
Matta
b. Yünus, logician, 83,108
Maturidi, theologian, Book ofMonotheism, 118
Mecca,
site of legal school, 49
Medicine, 56-7, 99, 110;
and Indian eduation, 158, 160, 162, 166
Medina,
and legal schools, 47, 49
Mesopotamians,
and reason, 18
Metaphysics,
13; and philosophy, 70, 89, 92;
in madrasa curriculum, 96, 99, 163
Middle
East, Ancient, and reason, 18, 19
Middle
Persian, translations from, 56
Mihna, persecution of Hanbalis, 51
Mill,
James, Utilitarian, History of British
India, 165
Mill,
John Stuart, Utilitarian, 165
Milla, religious community, 71, 75
Millet System, self-government by religious minorities, 178
Mind.
See Intellect
Minorities,
in Islamic law, 28, 182
Missionaries, and colonial education, 153, 162, 165, 167
Modernists, Modernity, 5; and traditional scholarship, 153,183-4; and Islam, 162-3, 168, 170, 176
Mogul
Empire, and British, 164-5
Monarchy,
and political philosophy, 64
Mongols,
and Islamic science, 98,126
Monotheism,
50-1, 61
Moon,
intellect and sphere of, 77, 79
Mu‘tazilites,
and rationalism, 9, 51, 66;
criticisms of, 43, 82
Mudawwan, hadith collection organized by subject, 43
Muh. ammad, Prophet of Islam, 65, 94, 168, 179;
as spiritual ideal, 6, 12; and hadith, 34, 37, 39, 42;
as source of Islamic law, 40,49, 142-3, 145-6
Mujtahids, Shi‘ite legal scholars, 149. See also Maraji" Taqlîd
Muqallid, in Shi‘ite law, 149
Musannaf, hadith collection organized by subject, 43-4
Music,
68, 109, 180-1
Musnad, hadith collection organized by isnad, 43
Mutiny,
Indian, and Islam, 163, 167
Muwaffaq al-Din Ya‘ish b. ‘Ali, grammarian, 112
Mystery
religions, Greek, 59
Mysticism, 11, 13;
and philosophy, 28, 61, 77, 86-95,102; and Islamic science, 101. See also Sufism
Myth,
Greek, 58
Najaf,
Iraq, logic taught in, 140
Nationalism,
27,169,173
Natural Philosophy, 97,101,119; in madrasas, 96, 99, 163
Nature,
22, 25, 101
Necessary
Existent, as God, 77
Necessity,
in Islamic law, 182
Neoplatonism,
56, 61, 63, 65, 67, 90, 92, 95.
See also
Plotinus
Newton,
Isaac, 22, 96
Nominalism,
92
Non-Muslims,
in Islamic law, 178
North
Africa, madrasa curricula, 122
Occult,
and Neoplatonists, 61
One,
as Neoplatonic God, 76, 84
Opinion,
in Islamic law, 43, 48, 50, 145
Orality,
Oral Transmission, 39,40,129,130-1
Orders,
Sufi, 87-8
Organization
of Islamic Conference, 144
Oriental
Institute, Woking, 157
Oriental
Religions and Sages, 61, 91
Orientalists.
See Anglicist-Orientalist Debate
Orthopraxy,
in Islam, 99
Ottoman
Empire, 161, 173; science in, 99-100
Paganism,
Ancient, 28, 61-2
Pakistan,
140, 146, 162, 171-2, 177, 179, 181
Palestinians,
170
Paper,
129
Parmenides,
Greek philosopher, 58
Patronage,
of science, 99
Paul,
Saint, and philosophy, 63
Perception,
79
Perfect
Man, Ibn ‘Arabi on, 94
Predicables,
Five, 136
Peripateticism.
See Aristotelianism
Persian Language, 88,173; logic and
science in, 99, 110, 129;
in India, 158-9, 161-2, 164, 167
Philosophers,
and prophets, 72, 80
Philosophy, European, in Indian education, 166
Philosophy, Greek, 19, 28, 30; and revealed religion, 55, 57-61, 63
Philosophy, Islamic, 11, 28, 81,101,131; and Kalam, 52,118,122; and Sufism, 89, 95;
postclassical, 86, 90-1, 110, 149
Philosophy,
Medieval European, 15, 76, 86
Philosophy,
Practical, and religion, 75
Physics,
96, 102
Pilgrimage,
180, 182
Pillars
of Islam, Five, 33
Plato, 59-61, 69, 91-92, 131;
political philosophy of, 63-5; Works: Laws, 63, 71;
Republic, 63; Seventh Epistle, 64; Timaeus, 59, 65;
Unwritten teachings, 59, 61
Platonism.
See Neoplatonism
Plotinus, 76; Theology ofAristotle, 68-9.
See also Neoplatonism
Pluralism,
28, 178-80
Poetics,
in logic, 81, 109, 113, 135
Poetry,
Sufi, 88
Polis, city, 64, 71-2, 74
Political Philosophy, 21, 28, 71,149-50; Farabi, 68, 74, 89; Greek, 57, 63, 64
Political
Rights, of non-Muslims, 179
Polygamy,
181-2
Polytheism,
61
Porphyry,
Greek philosopher, Eisagoge, 135-7
Predestination,
50-1, 55, 66
Premises,
Logical, 17, 136
Presocratics,
92
Primacy,
of essence or existence, 95
Printing,
1, 25,100-1,122,128
Prophecy, Prophets, 61-2, 65; and philosophy, 70, 78, 84, 89;
and psychology, 72, 78,
Propositions,
in logic, 110-1,135-6 Protestantism, Protestant Reformation, 5, 181;
textualism, 18, 24-6,176; and Scientific Revolution, 99,101;
and Islamic fundamentalism, 10, 28, 168
Providence,
50
Psychology; and philosophy, 72, 89;
and prophecy, 78-80
Ptolemy,
Almagest, 56,163
Punjab,
157-8,173
Punjab
University, 140,157
Punjabi,
158-9
Pythagoras,
58, 91
Qadis, Islamic judges, as source of law, 48 Qira’at, variant readings of Qur’an, 142-3, 146-7, 150
Qiyâs, 49-50,116-7,138
Qom, Iranian religious center, 122, 140, 152, 162
Questions,
in Islamic religious life, 142 Qur’an,
2,10,160; authority of, 11,31,42, 46, 48-9,142,144-5,175,178; and reason, 38, 65-6; interpretation of, 84-5, 117; theological issues, 50-1, 66, 77, 84; and Sufism, 53, 87, 94; modern issues, 37,167, 179, 181, 184; diversity of texts of, 142-3, 146-7, 150; commentaries, 110-1
Qutb al-Din al-Shïrâzï, 110; Commentary on the Key to the Sciences, 113
Ra’y, 48, 50.
See also Ahl al-Ra’y,
Opinion Ramadan, customs of, 180
Rasa’
il Ikhwan al-Safa, 67
Rasul, prophet, 65
Rational
Sciences, 110, 112, 126, 130
Rationalism,
6, 9,102; in Islamic law, 48, 50
Rationalists,
Francis Bacon on, 45 Rationality, 15-6, 25-27
Razi, Fakhr al-Din, theologian, 52,150;
works: commentary on Ibn Sina’s Hints and Admonitions, 126; The Upshot of the Science of Jurisprudence, 116
Readings, Variant, in Qur’an, 142-3,146-7, 150
Reason, Western conceptions of, 15-6, 25-27;
as source of Christian doctrine, 24-5; in Islam, 3,10-1,183;
and God, 38, 76; and religious sciences, 38-40, 43; Islamic philosophers on, 66-7, 72, 93
Reciprocity,
in interreligious relations, 179
Reform,
Reformers, 11, 28, 152-3, 167
Reformation.
See Protestantism, Protestant
Reformation
Relativism,
18, 23, 24, 26-7
Religion, and relativism, 24; philosophy of, 57, 70, 89; revealed, 61-2, 71; Greek, 20, 57-60; Farabi on, 71-2, 75, 84
Religion,
Comparative, 24, 26
Religious Sciences, 108,110;
as scholasticism, 12, 27-8
Revelation, 32, 39-40; and reason, 38, 65-7, 70, 89
Revivalism,
Islamic, 153, 163
Rhetoric, 58,113; and
religious sciences, 80-1, 116,152; and logic, 81,108-11,121,135;
balagha, Arabic rhetoric, 113,138
Rights,
individual and communal, 27
Roman
Catholic Church, 26, 96
Romanticism,
15-6, 18, 24-5
Rumi,
Jalal al-Din, Sufi poet, 11
Russell,
Bertrand, logician, 123; Human
Knowledge, 141
Sa‘di,
Persian poet, Gulistan, 159
Sadr, Muhammad-Baqir, modern Shi‘ite theologian,
The Logical Bases of Induction, 140-1
Sahih, sound hadith, 44
Saints,
Ibn ‘Arabi on, 94
Sakkaki, rhetorician, The Key to the Sciences, 113
Saladin,
and Suhrawardi, 90-1
Salaf, pious forefathers, xv
Salafis, 11; and Protestantism, 10, 28;
on law, 176, 182; in contemporary Islam, 168-9, 175
Saliba,
George, historian of science, 56
Sanskrit,
158
Saudi
Arabia, 169, 175, 182
Schacht, Josef, historian of Islamic law, on
origins of legal schools, 47
Schism,
145
Scholarship,
Islamic, 184
Scholasticism, Christian, 18, 20-1, 24, 26, 99;
and religious sciences, 12, 27-8, 50, 52, 99, 112,118; and logic, 121,129;
and Islamic reform, 168, 184
School of Isfahan, philosophical movement, 90, 102
Science, and reason, 18, 21-2, 25-6; Greek, 55-6; Medieval, 97; and Islamic reform, 166-7
Science, Islamic, history of, 55-6, 65, 98, 101-2,149; in madrasas, 99,163;
Islamic attitudes to, 98-9; and Scientific Revolution, 11-2, 97
Sciences,
classification of, 74, 112
Sciences,
Rational and Religious. See
Rational Sciences, Religious Sciences
Scientific
Revolution, 11-2, 22, 96-7, 100-1
Scripture,
24, 62;
Farabi on, 72, 80
Sect,
firqa, 144
Secularism,
4, 25, 176, 180
Semantics,
in Islamic logic, 107, 116, 121, 136-7
Seminaries,
Islamic. See Madrasas
Sexual
Freedom, 27
Shafi‘i,
founder of legal school, 47-50, 52
Sharia,
3, 28, 46, 71, 75,177.
See also Fiqh,
Law, Revelation, Prophecy, Usul al-Fiqh
Shi‘ism, 53, 67, 89,128;
and hadith, 35,44; law, 27, 146, 148-9; in
Sunni societies, 171, 178-9
Shirazi, Qutb al-Din, scientist, The Pearly
Crown, 149,150
Shrines,
88, 180-1
Sihalawi, Nizam al-Din, Mogul religious scholar,
and Dars-i Nizami, 151
Sikhs
158
Sin,
in Islamic theology, 50
Sindh,
Sufism in, 173
Sirafi,
debate on logic, 83,108
Siyalkuti, ‘Abd al-Hakim, Supercommentary on
the Shamsiya, 128,133
Slavery,
181-2
Social
Sciences, 23-4, 27
Socrates,
19, 59
Software,
Islamic, 11
Sophistics,
in logic, 81, 113, 135
Sophists,
58
Southeast
Asian Languages, textbooks in, 129
Spain,
Farabi’s influence in, 72-3
State,
and Islamic law, 172
Stoics,
63; logic of, 19,107,109-11,121
Strauss,
Leo, political philosopher, 69-70
Subjectivity,
and reason, 23
Succession,
as theological issue, 145
Sufism, 87-8,92,149-50,151;
modern attitudes to, 11,167-8,171,173.
See also Mysticism
Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya, and logic, 125-6, 135, 139;
and mysticism, 14, 95, 102;
and post-classical Islamic philosophy, 89, 95,149; The Philosophy of Illumination, 86, 91, 92, 135
Sunan, hadith collections on law, 46
Sunna, custom of Islamic community, 75; and hadith, 46, 49, 50; as source of authority, 11, 42, 48, 144
Sunnis,
44
Suyuti,
Jalal al-Din, religious scholar, 45-6
Syllogism,
135-6
Symbolism,
and philosophy, 72, 76, 82
Syria,
site of legal school, 49
Syriac,
logic texts in, 124
Ta’wll. See Allegorical Interpretation
'Tabari,
historian, 40-2
Taftazani, Sa‘d al-Din, religious scholar, 127-8;
works: Intentions, 118; Tahdhib al-Mantiq, 122
Tahtani, Qutb al-Din, logician, 139; Qutbi, 127-8, 133
Taliban,
Afghanistan, 170
Taxation,
in Islamic law, 172, 178
Teaching,
and textbooks, 133
Technology,
and religion, 25, 28
Tehran
University, 162
Terms,
in logic, 135-6
Terrorism,
9-10
Textbooks, of Arabic grammar, 111-2; of
logic, 121-2, 126-9, 131, 133, 135-7, 139-40
Textualism, Protestant, 18, 24-28. See also Literalism
Theology, Theologians, and philosophy, 72, 81-2, 89;
Christian, 20-21, 28, 50, 62-3,118.
See also Kalam
Thomas
Aquinas, 17, 70, 76,123
Toleration,
in Islam, 178-80
Tradition,
Christian, 24, 26
Transcendence,
of God, 50-1
Translation
Movement, 9, 55-7, 64, 107
Tribes,
customs and laws of, 179
Trinity,
and philosophy, 63
Truth,
relativity of, 23, 24
Tübingen
School, on Plato, 60
Turkey,
152,174,183. See also Ottoman Empire
Turkish,
scientific texts in, 98-99
Tusi, Nasir al-Din, philosopher and theologian, 52,98;
works: The Basis of Acquisition, 126,136-7; commentary on Ibn Sina’s Hints and
Admonitions, 126
‘Ulama’.
See Clergy
‘Umar
b. al-Khattab, 31-32,40, 47
Umayyad
Empire, 47, 56
Umma, Islamic community, 71, 75,144
Umür ‘^mma, “general matters,” in Kalam, 118,120
United
States, 9; Muslims of, 184-5
Unity,
as Islamic ideal, 144; of God, 50
Universals,
78
Universities,
96,101;
medieval curriculum,
119, 152
Unreason,
17
Urdu,
129, 159, 162
Urmawi, Siraj al-Din, logician, Matali
al-Anwar, 126-7
Usmandi,
theologian, Lubab al-Kalam, 118
Usul
al-Fiqh, 46, 50,120,133; and logic, 12,
110, 114-7, 121, 124, 139
Usülïs,
Shi‘ite legal school, 53
Usülïya, fundamentalism, xv
‘Uthman
b. ‘Affan, caliph, 147
Utilitarianism, 165; and reason, 15,18, 22-3, 26
Veiling,
9,180
Vernacular
Languages, 88, 99,127,129,158-9
Virtuous
City. See City
Vision,
92
Voltaire,
17, 21
Wahdat
al-Wujüd, oneness of
being, 151
Wahhabis,
169,175,182. See also Hanbalis,
Salafis
Wesley,
John, Methodist preacher, 25
Wilberforce,
William, evangelical leader, 165
Will,
of God, and revelation, 39
Wisdom,
Practical, 79
Women,
9-10, 159, 173, 179-80, 182
Worship,
Sufi, 87
Writing,
Islamic attitudes towards, 39
Yazdi,
Najm al-Din ‘Abd Allah, logician,
Sharh Tahdhîb al-Mantiq, 122
Zahid,
Mir, Indian logician, gloss on Qutbî,
133
Zahiris,
literalist legal school, 54
Zamakhshari,
grammarian, 112
Zann, informed conjecture, 138
Zia-ul-Haq,
president of Pakistan, 177
Zoroastrianism,
61
[1] For a slightly different account of the role of
reason in Islamic civilization with a stress on political philosophy, see
Muhsin Mahdi, “The Rational Tradition in Islam,” in Farhad Daftary, ed. Intellectual
Traditions in Islam (London: I.
B. Tauris and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2000), pp. 43-65. In a book that
arrived too late for me to use systematically, Jeffry R. Halverson, Theology and
Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood, Ash‘arism, and Political Sunnism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), makes a similar argument. He argues that by
the end of the middle ages athari thought, the term he uses where I would use “literalism”
or “fundamentalism,” had succeeded in replacing rational theology with
uncritical literalist creeds, with unfortunate effects for Islamic religious
thought.
[2] Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. “Khalifa.”
[3] The
article is Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy, “How Islam Lost Its Way: Yesterday’s
Achievements Were Golden: Today, Reason Has Been Eclipsed,” Washington
Post, December 30, 2001.
The argument is presented in more detail in Hoodbhoy’s Islam and
Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1990).
[4] George
Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Transformations: Studies in the History of
Science and Technology; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 193-232; F. Jamil
Ragep, “Copernicus and his Islamic Predecessors: Some Historical Remarks,” History of
Science 14 (2007), pp. 65-81.
[5] This
point is elegantly made by Marshall Hodgson in The Venture of Islam:
Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. i: The Classical
Age of Islam (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1974),
pp. 34-39,
where he incisively criticizes various essentializing interpretations of
Islamic history (p. 37):
“Accordingly, it is wise to posit as a basic principle, and any deviation from
which must bear the burden of proof, that every generation makes its
own decisions A generation is not bound by the attitudes of
its ancestors, as such, though it must reckon
with their consequences and may indeed find itself severely limited by those
consequences in the range of choices among which it can decide.”
[6] Systematic
investigations of the concepts of reason and rationality in a global sense are
rare, with philosophical investigations tending to focus on reasoning,
epistemology, or practical reason as it relates to ethics. Thus, for example,
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an epistemological critique of rationalist metaphysics,
with the rationalism he is critiquing being a method of conducting metaphysics.
An exception is Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and
Substance of Rationality
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), although he is building a theory of rationality, rather
than surveying its history, as I am. There is a series of related articles in The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New
York: Routledge, 1998), s.v.
“Rational Beliefs” by Christopher Cherniak; “Rationalism” by Peter J. Markie on
the European rationalists; “Rationality and Cultural Relativism” by Lawrence H.
Simon; “Rationality of Belief” by Jonathan E. Adler; and “Rationality,
Practical” by Jean Hampton, but these do not develop a coherent theory of
rationality and reason as a whole.
[7] The
reader will excuse me for counting the ancient Greeks as part of Western
civilization, because they are equally intellectual forebears of Islamic
civilization as well as of the semi-Western Orthodox cultures of Byzantium and
Russia. In fact, the Greeks seem more Middle Eastern to me than European.
Nevertheless, whatever other intellectual descendents they may have, they were
unquestionably intellectual ancestors to the modern West, and it is in that
sense that I have appropriated them here to the history of Western intellectual
life. Their role in the intellectual ancestry of Islamic civilization is discussed
in chapters 4 through 7.
[8] I leave
aside China and India, which were too far away to affect the intellectual foundations
of either Western European or Islamic civilization, but they are worthy of a
separate investigation, which I am utterly unqualified to do.
[9] Two
instructive works on the emergence of Christian thought in the context of Late
Antique philosophy are Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought
and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), and Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity
and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian
Encounterwith Hellenism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
[10] On
scholasticism in a comparative context, see Josié Ignacio Cabezon, ed., Scholasticism:
Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). The chapter on Islamic scholasticism, Daniel
A. Madigan, “The Search for Islam’s True Scholasticism,” deals mainly with
early theology, though it does discuss Islamic law as a scholastic genre. It
does not deal with later theology and legal education, where the comparisons
with European scholasticism are most marked. For a survey of scholasticism and
the problem of reason in Europe, see Edward Grant, God and Reason in the
Middle Ages (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Grant is a leading advocate of the view that modern science is grounded in the
medieval traditions of scholastic rationalism; see p. 97, n. 13 below.
[11] The
exceedingly complicated historiography of the Scientific Revolution and the competing
theories of its nature are summarized, at least through 1990, in H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific
Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). His own theory will be found in his How Modern
Science Came Into the World
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2010). On the relation of these theories to Islamic
science, see chapter 5, pp. 96-102,
below.
[12] For one
example, see Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). He claimed to have found and applied a
scientific approach to philosophy that eliminates the speculation and guesswork
characteristic of earlier philosophy.
[13] See, for
example, John Wesley’s “appeals to men of reason and religion” or the folksy
commonsense arguments of C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
[14] I discuss
this conflict in more detail in Chapter 9.
[15] Roy
Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 8.
The book is a wonderfully vivid portrait of the lives of modern Iranian Shi'ite
scholastics.
[16] See
Chapters 5 to 8.
[17] ‘All b.
Yusuf al-Qifti, Tarikh al-Hukama’, ed. Julius Lippert (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung,
1903; reprint, Publications of the Institute for the
History of Arabic-Islamic Science; Islamic Philosophy, vol. 2; Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History
of Arabic-Islamic Science, 1999),
pp. 354-6.
The story is still repeated, but no informed historian now believes it.
[18] A recent
survey of the hadith literature, both primary and secondary, with recommendations
for further reading is Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy
in the Medieval and Modern World
(Oxford: OneWorld, 2009). A survey
of the literature from
[19] Joseph
Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 120-21, citing his
book, Ikhtilaf al-Hadith,
“contradictory hadith.”
[20] For a
review of the Western academic debates between skeptics and defenders of the
hadith literature, see the introduction to Harold Motzki, ed., Hadith: Origins
and Developments, The Formation of the Classical Islamic World
(Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 2004); the volume is a collection of classic articles on the
hadith, most dealing with issues of authenticity. Motzki himself believes that
some hadith can be identified dating from the seventh century; see his “The
Question of the Authenticity of Muslim Traditions Reconsidered: A Review
Article,” in Herbert Berg, ed., Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic
Origins (Islamic History and
Civilization, Studies and Texts 49;
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003), pp. 211-57.
Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity
of Muslim Literature from the Formative Period, ed.
Andrew Rippin, Curzon Studies in the Qur’an (Richmond, Surrey, U.K.: Curzon, 2000), gives another summary ofthe state of Western
scholarship on the issue, coming down on the side of the skeptics after
reviewing the exegetical hadith attributed to Ibn ‘Abbas, a younger companion
of the Prophet who became a famous scholar in later decades, and finding that
these hadith do not share common patterns of content.
[21] Qur’an 41.53.
Ibn ‘Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam,
ed. A. A. ‘Aflfl (Beirut: Dar
al-Kitab al-‘Arabl, 1946), p. 53;trans.R.W. J.Austin, The Bezels of
Wisdom (Classics ofWestern
Spirituality; New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 54.
[22] Ibn
Khaldun, 1.9-24; trans. Rosenthal, 1.15-25.
[23] For the
Shi‘ah, God’s will can also be known through the Imams, the infallible
appointed successors of the Prophet, and thus hadith can also originate with
them, but the result is much the same.
[24] Muhammad
b. Jarir Tabari, Tartkh al-Rusul wa’l-Mulük, ed. M. J. de Goeje et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1879-1901);
The
Battle of Al-Qadisiyyah and the Conquest of Syria and Palestine,
trans. Yohanan Friedmann, SUNY Series in near Eastern Studies (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1992), pp. 2415-18,
with slight modifications of the translation. The ten dense volumes of the
original Arabic are translated in forty volumes in this series. The history
begins with the creation of the world and continues to the author’s own time.
[25] Ibn
Hanbal (780-855) was a hadith scholar, the eponymous founder of
the Hanball legal school, and one of the great figures of textual literalism in
Islam. A vigorous advocate of the authority of the hadith against legal
rationalism, he also opposed the Mu‘tazila in theology, in particular their
doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an. Christopher Melchert, Ahmad ibn
Hanbal (Makers of the Muslim
World; Oxford: OneWorld, 2006.
Laoust, H., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, i960), s.v. “Ahmad b. Hanbal.”
[26] Novum Organum 1, aph. 95.
[27] Jalal
al-Din ‘Abdal-Rahman alSuyuli, al-Tawshih Sharh al-Jami‘ al-Sahih, ed. Ridwan
. /. «^^ ••• .
Jami‘ Ridwan (Riyadh:
Maktabat al-Rushd, 1419/1998), 1.47.
[28] Siddlql,
“Hadith Literature,” pp. 56-57.
[29] Aisha
Bewley, trans., Al-Muwatta of Imam Malik ibn Anas (London: Kegan Paul, 1989).
[30] The
classical work on the intellectual transition to dependence on hadith is
Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Schacht
accepted Ignaz Goldziher’s denial of the overall authenticity of the hadith and
constructed an account of the rise of Islamic jurisprudence in which Shafi‘i(d.
820) played akey role in the transition from the
eighth century jurisprudence based on local custom and Umayyad administrative
practice to the classical legal schools, with their reliance on hadith and
scholastic methods. Some more recent scholars have argued that it is possible
to push our knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence back into the seventh century
and recover the teachings of some of the younger Companions of the Prophet, but
this remains controversial, and Schacht’s view of Islamic legal history is
still prevalent among Western scholars. Schacht’s view is also incorporated in
the many articles on law that he wrote for the second edition of The
Encyclopaedia of Islam, notably
s.v. “Fiqh.” A recent survey of the literature is Christopher Melchert, “The
Early History of Islamic Law,” in Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic
Origins, ed. Herbert Berg, (Islamic History
and Civilization: Studies and Texts; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003). Norman Calder, Studies in Early Muslim
Jurisprudence (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993) is a close
study of sample texts from early Islamic legal compendia. Calder, one of the
most skeptical of the skeptics, argues that all of these texts evolved over a
period of time, usually well after the death of the putative author. Not
everyone finds this plausible, but the closely analyzed sample passages are an
excellent introduction to the style and method of early Islamic legal texts.
[31] Yasin
Dutton, The Origins of Islamic Law (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East (Richmond,
Surrey: Curzon, 1999), pp. 42-43.
The translation of the quotation is slightly modified. Abu Idanlfa (d. 767) was the eponymous founder of the Idanafl legal
school. Abu Yusuf al-Kufi (d. 807)
was his pupil and somewhat more reliant on hadith than his teacher.
[32] Baghawi,
Mishkat
al-Masablh 2.26.7,
ed. Fazlul Karim, vol. 2,
pp. 608-14,
gives a representative selection of hadith on the administration of justice.
[33] This is
the view of Schacht, which recently has been challenged by Wael Hallaq, “From
Regional to Personal Schools of Law? A Reevaluation,” Islamic Law and
Society 8/1 (2001),
pp. 1-26,
and idem, The Origins and
Development of Islamic Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 150-79. Hallaq argues
that, although there certainly were clumps of legal scholars in the early
Muslim cities, these regional groups were not distinguished by characteristic
doctrines. The point is not of particular importance to us, because there
certainly was a shift in doctrine between earlier (seventh to eighth century)
and later (eighth to ninth century) legal scholars, and the term “Ancient Schools”
is convenient for referring to the earlier period. For general introductions to
Islamic law and its historiography, see Wael B. Hallaq, Sharïa: Theory,
Practice, Transformations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); idem, The Origins and Development
of Islamic Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[34] On bi-la kayf,
see Khalid Blankinship, “The Early Creed,” in Tim Winter, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 53; Abu’l-Hasan Ash‘ari, al-Ibana ‘an Usul al-Diyana, ed. Fawqlya
[35] Ibn
Qudama, Censure of Speculative Theology: An Edition and Translation of Ibn
Qudama’s Tahrim anNazar fi
Kutub Ahl al-Kalam, ed. and trans. George Makdisi (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial
Series, n.s., 23; Cambridge: E. J.
W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 1962).
[36] Michel
Chokiewicz, An Ocean without a Shore: Ibn Arabi, the Book, and the Law, trans. David Steight (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). On Ibn ‘Arabi, see pp. 93-5 below.
[37] H.
Laoust, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v., “Ibn Taymiyya, Taki al-Din Ah mad.” Ibn
Taymiya, Kitab Al-Iman: Book of Faith, trans. Salman Al-Ani and Shadia Ahmad Tel (Bloomington,
Ind.: Iman, 1999) is a translation
ofoneofhis books dealing with epistemological issues.
[38] Momen,
Moojan, An Introduction to Shi’i Islam: The History and Doctrines of
Twelver Shi’ism (Oxford: G.
Ronald, 1985), pp. 117-18.
Andrew J. Newman, “The Nature of the Akhbari/Usuli Dispute in Late Safawid
Iran,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 55/1 (1992), pp. 22-51.
[39] Ahmad b*
‘Abd al Rahman Ibn Mada’, Kitab al-Radd ‘ala ’l-Nuhat ([Cairo], Dar al- Fikr al-‘Arabi 1366/1947);
trans* with commentary by Ronald G* Wolfe, “Ibn Mada’ al- Qurtubi and the Book
in Refutation of the Grammarians,” (Ph*D* dissertation, Indiana University, 1984); Kojiro Nakamura, “Ibn Mada’s Criticism of
Arabic Grammarians*” Orient (Tokyo) 10 (1974), 89-113* The intricacies
of the full scholastic formulation of Arabic grammar may be seen in Mortimer
Sloper Howell, A Grammar of the Classical Arabic Language, Translated and
Compiled from the Works of the Most Approved Native or Naturalized Authors, 4 vols* (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh
government press, 1883-1911; reprinted New Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1990)* An accessible introduction to the work of the
greatest figure in the history of Arabic grammar is M* B* Carter, Sibawayh (Makers of Islamic Civilization; New York: I*
B* Tauris, 2004)*
[40] Ibn
al-Nadim, al-Fihrist, ed.
Yusuf ‘Ali "Tawil (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiya, 1416/ 1996),
pp. 397-8; The Fihrist of
al-Nadim: a Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, trans. Bayard Dodge (Records of Civilization:
Sources and Studies 83; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970),
vol. 2, pp. 583-6.
The Fihrist is a
catalog made by a Baghdad bookseller of all the books that he knew of in
Arabic. The seventh book of this work is the most extensive source on the
translation movement, with long lists of authors and books translated. Most of
these translations are now lost, which is particularly unfortunate because in
many cases we no longer have the Greek originals either. Part 1, chapter 1, deals with translations, and part 7 deals with logic, philosophy, and science. For a
survey of the translation movement and its political, intellectual, and social
context, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: the Graeco-Arabic
Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd- 4th/8th-ioth Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998). A more recent summary is Cristina d’Ancona,
“Greek into Arabic,” in Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, eds., The Cambridge
Companion to Arabic Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
[41] Jorge
Luis Borges, “La busca de Averroes,” in El Aleph (Buenes Aires: Emece Editores, 1949); “Averroës’ Search,” trans. James E. Irby, in
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 148-55; trans. Andrew
Hurley, in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 235-41.
[42] Paul
Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the
Constitutive Imagination,
trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[43] See, for
example, Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and
Literature, trans. T. G.
Rosenmeyer (New York: Harper, 1953;
reprint New York: Dover, 1982),
pp. 23-42;
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures 25; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), pp. 179-235; F. M.
Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western
Speculation (New York: Harper, 1957), pp. 111-23; W. K. C.
Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952); Franz Cumont, The Oriental Religions in
Roman Paganism (Chicago: Open
Court, 1911; reprinted New
York: Dover, 1956); Martha C.
Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Martin Classical Lectures, n.s., 2; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
[44] The
enduring spiritual significance of this Italian philosophical tradition is
argued by Peter Kingsley in a series of increasingly passionate books. He
argues that our understanding of the Italian school of pre-Socratic philosophy
is utterly wrong, largely because of Aristotle’s tendentious interpretations,
and that the tradition of Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Parmenides needs to be
understood as a religious and mystical journey, quite alien to the abstract and
cerebral philosophizing of Aristotle and his intellectual heirs down to our
day; see his Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and
Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995); In the Dark
Places of Wisdom (Inverness,
Calif.: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999);
and Reality (Inverness,
Calif.: The Golden Sufi Center, 2003).
The most recent editions of the fragments of Parmenides’ poem with English
translations are A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with
Introduction, Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and
[45] Plato, Republic,
book 7,514a to 517b.
[46] This is
the view of the Tübingen school, which is not universally accepted. Two authoritative
expositions of the “Unwritten Doctrines” are Hans Joachim Kramer, Plato and the
Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the Principles and
Unwritten Doctrine of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents, trans. John R. Catan (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), and Giovanni Reale, Toward a New
Interpretation of Plato, ed.
and trans. John R. Catan and Richard Davies (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). The Tübingen argument is that the accounts of
Plato’s philosophy in early and presumably well-informed sources, notably
Aristotle, differ greatly from the contents of the dialogues. Citing Plato’s
warning in the Phaedrus, Epistle VII, and other places against placing true philosophy in
writing and historical references to his lecture On the Good, the Tübingen school argues that there was a
final “Theory of the Principles,” in which Plato attempted to solve the problems
left unresolved in his later dialogues. Regardless of the details of the Tua
bingen school’s reconstruction of this unwritten system, it is clear that the
Plato of the Neoplatonists and of the Islamic philosophers had strong religious
and mystical interests.
[47] Plato, Laws,
book 2, 663d.
[48] Aristotle,
Metaphysics,
book 12.8,1074a.
[49] On the
transition from pagan philosophy to Christian theology, see, for example,
Christopher Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Pelikan, Christianity and Classical
Culture.
[50] Acts 17.34.
Pseudo-Dionysius, Corpus Dionysiacum, 2 vols., ed. B. R.
Suchla, G. Heil, and A. M. Ritter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991); idem, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem (The Classics
of Western Spirituality; Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1987). They consist of four short books - The Divine
Names, The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and Mystical Theology - and ten letters. They were written in the
fifth or sixth century.
[51] In
addition to the works cited already, see Edward Grant, The Foundations
of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and
Intellectual Contexts
(Cambridge History of Science; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1-17, on the relations among early Christianity,
pagan thought, and science.
[52] Peter
Adamson, “Al-Kindi and the Reception of Greek Philosophy,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Arabic Philosophy,
pp. 32-51;
idem, Al-Kindi (Great
Medieval Thinkers; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); George N. Atiyeh, Al-Kindi: The Philosopher
of the Arabs (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1968; reprinted
several times; Alfred Ivry, Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1974). Though there have been many studies of Kindi,
his works, and aspects of his thought, including some particularly good work on
the translations that were his source for Aristotelian and Neoplatonic
[53] Ivry, Al-Kindi’s
Metaphysics, pp. 28-29, citing a passage
from Kindi’s On the Number of the Books of Aristotle; Adamson, “Al-Kindl,” in Adamson and Taylor, Cambridge
Companion to Arabic Philosophy,
pp. 46-48;
Atiyeh, Al-Kindi, pp. 16-29; Adamson, Al-Kindi,
pp. 42-45.
[54] Paul E.
Walker, “The Isma'ilis,” in Adamson and Taylor, Cambridge Companion to
Arabic Philosophy, pp. 72-91.
On the Isma'ilis in general, see Farhad Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their
History and Doctrines, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). An impressive number of Isma'ili
philosophical texts have been published in translation, most by the Institute
of Ismaili Studies in London, as well as studies of a number of major Isma'ili
philosophers. On early Isma'ili intellectual life in general, see Heinz Halm, The Fatimids
and their Traditions of Learning
(Ismaili Heritage Series 2;
London: I. B. Tauris and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 1997).
[55] Walker,
“The Isma'ilis,” in Adamson and Taylor, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic
Philosophy, p. 77. On this work in
general, see Godefroid de Callatay, Ikhwan al-Safa’:
ABrotherhood of Idealists on the Fringe of Orthodox Islam (Makers of the Muslim World; Oxford: One World,
2005) and Ian Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists: An
Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’), 2nded. (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002).
[56] Recent
interpretations of Farabi’s political writings include Majid Fakhry, Al-Farabi,
Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism: His Life, Works and Influence (Great Islamic Thinkers; Oxford: OneWorld, 2002); Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence:
ThePolitical Philosophy ofAlfarabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the
Foundations of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Joshua Parens, An Islamic Philosophy of
Virtuous Religions: Introducing Alfarabi (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006); and idem, Metaphysics as Rhetoric:
Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s “Laws” (SUNY Series in Middle Eastern Studies; Albany: SUNY
Press, 1995). English readers
are unusually fortunate in that most of Farabi’s political works are available
in good English translations. More general works on Islamic political thought
include Charles E. Butterworth, ed., The Political Aspects of
Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi (Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 27; Cambridge: Harvard University Center for
Middle Eastern Studies, 1992);
Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Political
Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
[57] Farabi,
“The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and
Aristotle,” in Alfarabi: The Political Writings, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Agora Editions; Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001),
pp. 155-6, 161, 164;
idem, “The Philosophy of Aristotle, the Parts of his Philosophy, the Ranks of
Order of its Parts, the Position from which He Started, and the One He
Reached,” in Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, rev. ed.; trans. Muhsin Mahdi (Agora Editions;
Cornell University Press, 1969).
[58] Leo
Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952), particularly chap. 1, which discusses the role of Farabi in shaping Strauss’
thought, and chap. 2, which lays out
his theory of “exoteric books” and “writing between the lines”; idem, “On a
Forgotten Kind of Writing,” in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other
Studies (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1959),
pp. 221-32.
[59] Ralph
Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, ed., Medieval Political Philosophy, trans. Muhsin Mahdi (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1963) pp. 84-85,
based on Francesco Gabrieli, ed., Alfarabius Compendium Legum Platonis (London: Warburg Institute 1952), p. 4.
For Strauss’ view, see his “How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws,” Mélanges Louis
Massignon, vol. 3 (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1957), pp. 319-44; reprinted in Islamic
Philosophy, vol. 4,
pp. 297-322.
[60] Muhsin
S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundations of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 156-7.
[61] Muhsin
Mahdi, ed., Alfarabi’s Book of Religion and Related Texts (Beirut: Dar El- Machreq, 1965), pp. 43-76; Charles E.
Butterworth, trans., Alfarabi: The Political Writings, pp. 93-113. Butterworth is a
leading advocate of the Straussian approach to Farabi.
[62] Farabi, Plato’s Laws, 1.1, trans. Muhsin Mahdi, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political
Philosophy, p. 85.
[63] Ibn
Rushd, Fasl al-Maqal, in The Book of the
Decisive Treatise Determining the Connection between the Law and Wisdom and
Epistle Dedicatory, ed. and trans. Charles Butterworth (Islamic
Translation Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2001); George F. Hourani, trans., On the Harmony
of Religion and Philosophy (E.
J. W. Gibb Memorial Series; London: Luzac, 1976); reprinted in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval
Political Philosophy, pp. 163-86.
[64] Léon
Gauthier, ed., Hayy ben Yaqdhan, roman philosophique d’Ibn Thofail, Texte
arabe et traduction francaise, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1936); Lenn Evan Goodman, trans., Ibn Tufayl’s
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: Gee Tee Bee, 1996); Jim Colville, trans., Two Andalucian Philosophers, pp. 3-72. More adventurous readers might be interested
in the three early English translations: George Keith in 1674, George Ashwell in 1686, and George Ockley in 1708. Their translations related to the interest of
Quakers and others in the possibility of sound faith through individual
inspiration.
[65] Farabi, Ihsa’ al-‘UlUm, ed. ‘Uthman Muhammad Amin, 3rd ed. (Cairo: Maktabat al- Anglu al-Misriya, 1968). The fifth chapter on political philosophy has
been translated twice: by Fauzi M. Najjar, “Alfarabi, The Enumeration
of the Sciences,” in Lerner and
Mahdi, pp. 22-30, and Charles Butterworth, “Enumeration of the
Sciences,” in Charles Butterworth, trans., Alfarabi, The Political
Writings: Selected Aphorisms and Other Texts
(Agora Editions: Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001).
‘Uthman Amin, ed., Ihgi' al- ‘Ulum, 3rd
ed. (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anglu al-Misriya, 1968). The text is analyzed with great precision in
Mahdi, Alfarabi, pp. 65-96.
[66] Farabi, Ihsa’ al-‘Ulum, ed. Amin, pp. 64-66; trans. Lerner
and Mahdi, p. 24; Butterworth,
trans., Alfarabi: The Political Writings, pp. 76-77.
[67] Alfarabi’s Book
of Religion (my translation),
p. 43; cf. Butterworth, trans., in Alfarabi: The
Political Writings, p. 93.
[68] Butterworth,
trans., Alfarabi’s Book of Religion, p. 46; in Alfarabi: The Political
Writings, p. 96.
[69] Butterworth,
trans., Alfarabi’s Book of Religion, pp. 46-47;
in Alfarabi: The Political Writings, pp. 97-98.
[70] Ibn
Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan,
ed. Gautier, p. 144; trans.
Goodman, p. 160.
[71] This is
the very first point treated in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, Part One, Q. 1, Art. 1,
Obj. 1: “It seems that,
besides philosophical science, we have no need of any further knowledge. For
man should not seek to know what is above reason: Seek not the things that
are too high for thee (Ecclus.
iii.22). But whatever is not above reason is fully
treated of in philosophical science. Therefore any other knowledge besides
philosophical science is superfluous.” Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1920), vol. 1, pp. 1-2. Aquinas, of course, rejects the doctrine of
the self-sufficiency of philosophy.
[72] Butterworth,
ed. and trans., Averroes, Fasl al-Maqal, pp. 3-4, 8-10.
[73] AlFarabi,
Mabadi’
Ara' Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila,
ed. Albayr Naslrl Nadir (Beirut. al- Mashriq, 1968), pp. 37-38; Richard Walzer,
ed. and trans., Al-Farabi on the Perfect State (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 56-59. For a summary, see
Fakhry, Al-Farabi, pp. 77-83,
who points out that this is a break with the Neoplatonic notion of the One as
beyond intellect.
[74] Toshihiko
Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical
Concepts (Berkeley. University
of California Press, 1983), pp. 23-35.
[75] Ibn
Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan,
ed. Gautier, pp. 81-88,145-6; trans. Goodman, pp. 130-4, 160-1.
[76] Herbert
A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their
Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[77] Al-Farabi,
Ihsa’, pp. 130-8; trans.
Butterworth, pp. 80-84.
[78] Farabi, Ihsn'al-‘Ulum, ed. Amin, pp. 79-85.
[79] Farabi, Ihsa’al-‘Ulum, ed. Amin, pp. 107-09;
trans. Butterworth, pp. 80-81; idem, Kitab al-Milla, ed. Mahdi, para. 7-10, pp. 48-52; trans.
Butterworth, pp. 99-101.
[80] He was
known in North Africa for his study of disagreements among legal schools, Bidayat
al-Mujtahid wa-Nihayat al-Muqtasid (n.p.: Dar al-Fikr, n.d.); Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, trans., The
Distinguished Jurist’s Primer, 2 vols. (Great Books of Islamic Civilization;
Reading: Garnet, U.K., 1994).
It is a long and deeply learned weighing of the evidence having nothing to do
with philosophy.
[81] Ibn
Rushd, Fasl al-Maqal, ed.
and trans. Butterworth, pp. 26-27.
[82] Ibn
Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan,
ed. Gautier, pp. 148-54; trans. Goodman, pp. 162-5;
trans.
Colville, pp. 62-65.
[83] See the
dialogue between the Christian logician Matta b. Yunus, the teacher of Farabi,
and the grammarian Abu Sa‘ld Si rah, recorded in Abu Hayyan Tawhidi, al-Imta‘ wa’l-
Mu’anasa, ed. Ahmad Amin and
Ahmad alZayn (Cairo: Lajnat al-Ta’lif, 1939-44), 1:108-28; trans. D. S. Margoliouth, “The Merits of Logic
and Grammar,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1905),
111-29. A
French translation, along with analysis and translations of related texts, is
A. Elemrani-Jamal, Logique aristotélicienne et grammaire arabe:
études et documents (Etudes
Musulmanes 26; Paris: Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 1983),
pp. 149-63.
[84] Ghazali,
al-Munqidh, ed. Mahmud, pp. 100-07;
trans. Watt, Faith and Practice, pp. 37-38; trans. McCarthy, Freedom, pp. 74-75.
[85] AlGhazali,
Tahfut
al-Falasifa, ed. Sulayman Dunya (Dhakha’ir al-‘Arab 15, 2nd
ed.; Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, n.d.), pp. 67, 72-73, 293-5; Al-Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifa
[Incoherence of the Philosophers], trans. Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Pakistan Philosophical Congress Publication
no. 3; Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963), pp. 8,
11-12, 249-50;
Michael E. Marmura, ed. and trans., The Incoherence of the
Philosophers (Islamic Translation
Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1997), pp. 7,
10-11.
[86] Ibn
Rushd, Tahafut al-Tahafut,
ed. Sulayman Dunya (Dhakha’ir al-‘Arab 37; 2nd
ed.;
2 vols.; Cairo: Dar
al-Ma‘arif bi-Misr, 1969); Simon van
den Bergh, trans. Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, n.s., 19; 2 vols.;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); Fasl al-Maqal, ed. and trans. Butterworth, p. 12.
[87] For his
intellectual autobiography, see Ghazali, Munqidh; trans. Watt, Faith and Practice; trans. McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment. Ghazali’s Ihya’ ‘UlUm al-Din, 5 vols., ed. ‘Abd Allah Khalidi (Beirut: Dar
al-Arqam, 1998) and dozens of
other editions; trans. Fazlul Karim, Gazzali’s Ihya
Ulum-id-Din: The Revival of Religious Learnings, 4 vols.
in 5
(Dacca: F. K. Islam Mission Trust, 1971). Many of the forty books of the Ihyii’ have been published separately in English
translation.
[88] There is
a scholarly debate about the interpretation of this series of developments. One
group of modern scholars of Islamic philosophy believes that Ibn Sina himself
formulated a Neoplatonic mystical philosophy, which he called the “Oriental
wisdom.” This seems to put too much stress on a few passages of his philosophy.
Moreover, there is reason to think that his later philosophy was “Oriental”
because it belonged to the philosophers of eastern Iran and differed from that
of the Occidentals, which is to say, Farabi and the other philosophers of
Baghdad. At the other extreme, those scholars of Islamic philosophy whose
interests are confined to the period from Kindi to Ibn Rushd are inclined to
see the postclassical Islamic philosophers as mystics rather than philosophers
and to deny to Sufi theologians like Ibn ‘Arabi any philosophical relevance.
This seems to me to be the application of a Proscrustean - or rather Aristotelian
- bed to the philosophers of Islam. In my view, Ibn Sina was a thoroughgoing
Aristotelian, apart from the use of a mildly Neoplatonic pyramidal cosmology,
and the most original and interesting period of Islamic philosophy began with
Suhrawardi and culminated in the so-called School of Isfahan in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Iran.
[89] On the
circumstances of Suhrawardi’s death, see Hossein Ziai, “The Source and Nature
of Authority: A Study of al-Suhrawardi’s Political Doctrine, in Political
Aspects, ed. Butterworth, pp. 304-44,
and Walbridge, Leaven, pp. 201-10.
[90] Suhrawardi,
The
Philosophy of Illumination, ed.
and trans. John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Islamic Translation Series; Provo,
Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), p. 2,
paras. 3-4). This interpretation of Suhrawardi’s views
summarizes the argument in John Walbridge, The Science ofMysticLights:
Qutb al-Din Shirazi and the Illuminationist Tradition in Islamic Philosophy (Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 26; Cambridge, Mass.: Centre for Middle Eastern
Studies, 1992), idem, The Wisdom of
the Mystic East: Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism (SUNY Series on Islam; Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), and idem, Leaven.
[91] Mehdi
Ha’iri Yazdi, The
Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by
Presence (SUNY Series in Islam; Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
[92] There is
a good spiritual biography, based largely on autobiographical comments in his
own works: Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn Arabi, trans. Peter Kingsley (Golden Palm Series;
Cambridge, U.K.: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993).
[93] EkmeleddinIhsanogluetal.,
Osmanli
Astronomi Literatürü Tarihi
[History of Ottoman Astronomical Literature], 2 vols. (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1997), lists works by 582 Ottoman authors as well as more than two hundred
anonymous works. Similar bibliographies have been published on Ottoman
medicine, mathematics, geography, and military science. See Cemil Aydin,
“Beyond Culturalism? An Overview ofthe Historiography on Ottoman Science in
Turkey,” in Ekmeleddin íhsanoglu, Kostas Chatis, and Efthymios Nicolaidis, Multicultural
Science in the Ottoman Empire
(De Diversis Artibus 69, n.s., 32; Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), pp. 201-15.
[94] Shaykh
‘Ali Shibl Kashif al-Ghita’, Naqd al Ara’ al-Manfiqlya wa-Hall Mushkilatiha, vol.
i (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Nu‘man, n.d.), p. 6. He may be paraphrasing Ibn Khaldun or some
source used by Ibn Khaldun. And, in fact, the logic of hypotheticals comes from
the Stoics through galen.
[95] Nicholas
Rescher, The Development of Arabic Logic (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1964), p. 73.
[96] See pp. 82-3, n.
54.
[97] Ghazali, al-Munqidh, ed. Mahmud, pp. 98-99; trans. Watt,
p. 35; trans. McCarthy, pp. 74-75.
[98] William
and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. v.
[99] Joseph M.
Bochenski, A History of Formal Logic, 2nd ed., trans. Ivo
Thomas (New York, Chelsea Pub. Co. [1970]), pp. 2-4.
[100] Anton
Dumitriu, History of Logic, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1991), p. ix.
[101] Dumitriu,
vol. 1, p. 222.
[102] Sharh al-Mufassal,
vol. i ([Cairo]: Idarat al-Tiba‘a al-Munlrlya, n.d.),p.
18.
. .
. .
[103] The
standard reference grammar of Arabic in English is William Wright, A Grammar of
the Arabic Language, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898, and often reprinted), but Wright is a
prescriptive grammar. A better introduction to the spirit of Arab grammatical
analysis is Howell, A Grammar of the Classical Arabic Language.
[104] Walbridge,
Science of
Mystic Lights, pp. 23, 25,189.
[105] On the
discipline of usul al-fiqh, see Wael B. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal
Theories: An Introduction to Sunnt Usul al-Fiqh
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bernard G. Weiss, The Search for God’s Law: Islamic
Jurisprudence in the Writings of Sayfal-Dtn al-Amidt (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah
Press, 1992).
[106] Kashif
alGhila’, Naqd, p. 6. On logic in Ghazali’s Munqidh, his intellectual biography, see p. 83 below. He says that logic is theologically
unobjectionable, except insofar as it gives students unjustified confidence in
the metaphysical views of the philosophers.
[107] Ghazali, Mustasfa fl
‘Ilm al-Usul, vol. 1 (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-Amirlya, 1322/1904), pp. 10-55.
They are half-pages, actually, because the book is printed with another work on
usul
al-fiqh.
[108] Ghazali, Mustasfa, 1.10.
[109] Ibn
Taymiya, Kitab al-Radd ‘ala al-Mantiqïyïn (Ri’asat Idarat al-Buhuth al-‘Ilm!ya wa’l-Ifta’ wa’l-Da‘wa
wa’l-Irshad; Mecca: al-Maktaba al-Imdadiya, 1404/1984),
pp. 1415.
Ibn Taymiya, although an advocate of the narrowest sort of literalism, knew the
Islamic and philosophical sciences inside out and, what is more, knew exactly
where all the bodies were buried. His critiques of philosophy and logic are
extremely interesting. There is a translation of one of his shorter refutations
of logic: Wael B. Hallaq, trans., Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
[110] Al-Ash‘ari,
Kitab
al-Luma‘, trans. Richard J. McCarthy,
The
Theology of al-Ash‘ari (Beirut:
Imprimérie Catholique, 1953),
p. 6.
[111] Abu Mansur
al-Maturidi, Kitab alTiiwhid, ed. Bekir Topaloglu and Muhammed Aruçi (Istanbul: ÍSAM, 2005), pp. 11-24.
[112] ‘Ala’
al-Din al-Samarqand! al-Usmandi, Lubab al-Kalam, ed. M. Sait Üzervarli (Istanbul: ÍSAM, 2005), pp. 33-50. Al-Juwayni, A Guide to
Conclusive Proofs for the Principles of Belief: Kitab al-Irshad ila Qawati‘
al-Adilla fl Usul al-I‘tiqad,
trans. Paul E. Walker (Great Books of Islamic Civilization; Reading, U.K.:
Garnett, 2000).
[113] Sa‘d
al-Din al-Taftazani, Sharh al-Maqasid, 5 vols. in 4, ed. and comm. ‘Abd alRah man ‘Umayra (n.p., al-Sharif
al-Rida, 1989). The extensive
commentary in this edition is modern in date but traditional in its methods and
content.
[114] Halverson,
Theology
and Creed, pp. 33,44-5, cites Ibn Khaldun as saying that Kalam had
become unnecessary in his time and that in any case it had been thoroughly
infiltrated by philosophy. Halverson argues that this transition to
philosophically-oriented Kalam made the discipline irrelevant in later Islamic
thought, thus leaving modern Islam without an active tradition of rational
theology. While it is difficult to judge the relative importance of Kalam
theology in the last few centuries, it certainly is the case that Islamic law
is studied much more commonly and that both popular expositions and advanced
works of Kalam are far less commonly published than works on other major areas
of Islamic thought. The relevant passage of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima is 3.27-43,
trans. Rosenthal, 3.34-55.
[115] Paul
Vincent Spade, personal communication, January 8,1998. On the
universities and their role in the development of logic and natural philosophy,
see Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, pp. 33-51,172-4.
[116] Mottahedeh,
Mantle, pp. 69-78. “The Commentary of
Mulla Abdullah” is the Sharh Tahdhib al-Mantiq of Najm al-Din ‘Abd Allah al-Yazdi (d. 1015/1606),
a commentary on a short logic textbook by Sa‘d al-Din TaftazanI (d. 792/1392),
a well-known author of textbooks and commentaries in several fields, including
logic.
[117] On the
curriculum of the seminaries in recent times, see, for Egypt, J. Herworth-
Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Luzac, 1938), pp. 41-65; for Iran, Seyyed
Hossain Nasr, “The Traditional Texts Used in the Persian Madrasahs,” in Mohamed
Taher, ed., Encyclopaedic Survey of Islamic Culture, vol. 3:
Educational
Developments in Muslim World
(New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1997),
pp. 56-73,
esp. 65-67, and Aqiqi Bakhshayeshi, Ten Decades of
Ulama’s Struggle, trans.
Alaedin Pazrgadi and ed. G. S. Radhkrishna (Tehran: Islamic Propagation
Organization, 1405/1985), pp. 175-80, 258-9);
and for India, G. W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab
since Annexation and in 1882 (1882;
reprinted Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1982),
pp. 72-79.
[118] Kneale and
Kneale, Development, have nothing on Islamic logic apart from
several references to doctrines of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd discussed by European
logicians. Dumitriu, History, vol. 2,
pp. 19-36,
has a little more.
[119] This is
the view of Rescher, Development, pp. 73-75, 80-82, whose account of Islamic logic stops with the
fifteenth century; of R. Arnaldez, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; s.v.,
“Mantiq,” whose account goes up to Ghazall (d. 1111), and Shams Inati, “Logic,” in Seyyed Hossein
Nasr and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy, vol.
2 (Routledge History of World Philosophies I:i; London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 80223, whose account
stops with Avicenna, nine hundred and fifty years ago. Tony Street, “Arabic
Logic,” in Dov M. Gabbay, Handbook of the History of Logic,
vol. 1 (Amsterdam:
Elsevier, 2004-). Greek, Indian,
and Arabic Logic, attempts to
deal with the doctrinal development of philosophical logic between Ibn Sina and
the fourteenth century but has little to say about the school logic. Idem, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, s.v., “Arabic and
Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic,” http://plato.stanford.edu/
[120] The
translation movement was discussed on pp. 55-57, and n. 1 above. On the translations of Aristotle, see F.
E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs (New York Studies in Near Eastern Civilization, no. 1; New York: NYU Press, 1968), and Aristoteles Arabus: The
Oriental Translations and Commentaries on the Aristotelian Corpus (New York University Department of Classics
Monographs on Mediterranean Antiquity; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968).
[121] See pp. 82-3, n.
54
above.
[122] See p. 83, nn. 55-6 above.
[123] Hossein
Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardi’s “IHikmat
al-Ishraq” (Brown University
Judaic Studies Series 97;
Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990).
[124] See p. 115, n. 18 above.
[125] There are
many editions, of which the most accessible is Sulayman Dunya, ed. (Cairo: Dar
al-Ma‘arif, i960).
[126] See p. 98 above. On the observatory, see Parviz Varjavand,
Kavush-i
Rasd-khana-i Maragha
[Excavation ofthe Maragha observatory] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1366 Sh./1987). On one of Tusi’s students, see Walbridge, Science, chap. 1.
[127] Rescher, Development, pp. 197-99, from which
other bibliographical references may be traced. A very thorough compilation of
the information on T. ui sii is Mudarris Rid. awii, Ahwal
wa-Athar-i Khwaja Nasir al-Din al-TUsi (Intisharat 282;
Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1334/1955).
Manuscripts of Tusi’s works on many subjects are abundant.
[128] Asas
al-Iqtibas, ed. Mudarris Ridawi
(Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tihran 12;
Tehran: Khurdad, 1324/1947).
[129] Rescher, Development, pp. 203-04.
[130] Rescher, Development, pp. 196-7.
[131] Rescher, Development, p. 195.
[132] Rescher, Development, pp. 215-16.
[133] See p. 118 above.
[134] On
Taftazani, see Rescher, Development, pp. 217-18. On Jurjani, see Rescher, Development, pp. 222-3.
[135] But see
Khaled El-Rouayheb, “Was There a Revival of Logical Studies in Eighteenth
Century Egypt?” Die Welt des Islams 45.1 (2005), pp. 1-19.
[136] al-MajmU‘
al-Mushtamil ‘ala Shark Qutb al-Din..., 2 vols. (Cairo:
Faraj Allah Zaki al-Kurdl, 1323/1905).
[137] MajmU‘ah-yi
Mantiq [Anthology on logic]
(Lucknow: Munshl Naval Kishore, October 1876/Ramadan 1293). This collection is described in John
Walbridge, “A Nineteenth Century Indo-Persian Logic Textbook,” Islamic Studies (Islamabad) 42:4 (Winter 2003), pp. 687-93.
[138] I owe
this information to Michael Feener.
[139] Abdullah
Tasbihi has described to me seeing villagers in Siyalkot, once a major Indian
center of paper manufacture, gather the straw and other vegetable matter left
behind by flooding to use for papermaking.
[140] Franz
Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship (Analecta Orientalia 24; Rome: Pontificium Institutem Biblicum, 1947), p. 61.
[141] Mottahedeh,
p. 109 and passim.
[142] Ahmad
Hasan, Analogical Reasoning in Islamic Jurisprudence: A Study of the
Juridical Principle ofQiyas
(Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 1986). Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v., “Kiyas.”
[143] This is
particularly true when qiyas, analogy, is used; see Hasan, Analogical Reasoning, pp.
24-25.
Fora discussion of whether fiqh is a demonstrative science, see Shihab al-Din al-Qurafi, Nafa’is al-Usul
fiSharh al-Wusul, vol. 1, ed. ‘Adil Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mawjud and ‘All
Muhammad Ma‘ud (Mecca: Nizar Mustafa al-Baz 1418/1997),
pp. 139ft
[144] M. G.
ZubaidAhmad, The Contribution of India to Arabic Literature from Ancient
Times to 1857 (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1967), p. 133.
[145] Chaudhri
Ali Gauhar, “Glossary of Logical Terms,” bound with supporting documents,
Punjab University
Library, Oriental Division manuscripts, catalog number Ar h II.45.
[146] Jalal
al-Din al-Suyuti, Ikhtilaf al-Madhahib, ed. 'Abd al-Qayyumb. MuhammadShafi' al-Bastawl (Cairo: Dar
al-I'tisam, 1989), pp. 19-20.
[147] Some
indication of the range of such disagreements can be had from Ibn Rushd, Bidayat, trans. Nyazee, Distinguished Jurist’s
Primer. See also Hallaq, Shari'a, pp. 60-71 and passim, and
idem, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Themes in Islamic Law 1; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 150-77.
[148] The matter
of the editing of the Qur’an and the seven qira’at is a matter of considerable historical and
theological controversy, and virtually every point of the account I have given
could be and has been challenged on historical or theological grounds. My
[149] On the
institution of the marja' taqlîd, see Ahmad Kazemi Mousavi, Religious Authority in
Shi'ite Islam: From the Office of Mufti to the Institution ofMarja' (Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of
Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1996); Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi'i
Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi'ism (Oxford: George Ronald, 1985), pp. 184-207. On the
actual functioning of the institution, see several articles in Linda S.
Walbridge, ed., The Most Learned oftheShi'a: The Institution of the Marja' Taqlid (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), particularly
chap. 8 and 12 by Talib Aziz and chap. 13 by Linda S. Walbridge.
[150] Qutb al-Din
Shirazi, Durrat al-Taj li-Ghurrat al-Dubaj: Bakhsh, i,
ed. Sayyid Muhammad Mishkat (5 vols.
in 1; Tehran: Majlis, 1317-1320/1939-1942),
on philosophy; Bakhsh 2,
ed. Idasan Mishkan 'I'abasi (Tehran: Majlis, 1324/1946),
covering arithmetic, astronomy, and music; Bakhsh-i Hikmali ‘Amali
wa-Sayr wa-Suluk, ed. Mahdukht
Banu Huma’i, on practical philosophy and mysticism.
[151] Al-Ghazali,
The
Niche for Lights, trans. David
Buchman (Islamic Translation Series; Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1998).
[152] Leitner, Indigenous
Education. On returning to England, he established the
Oriental Institute in Woking, which did not survive him. He died in Bonn in 1899.
[153] Syed
Mahmood, A History of English Education in India (Aligarth: M.A.O. College, 1895), gives a more sympathetic account of English
education in India, with extensive citations of documents and earlier writers.
He was the son of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a famous Indian educational reformer. In
general, the documentation of education in British is extensive and lucid,
making it a particularly rewarding case study of education in the era of
imperialism.
[154] Leitner, Indigenous
Education, p. i. The case is
documented in the 200 pages of part
I of the book. Part II consists of detailed district-by-district statistics on
education, part III is a summary of the statistics, part IV notes on part I,
and part V lists teachers and other indigenous intellectuals in the Punjab.
There are also fifty pages of extracts from British Indian government documents
relating to Punjab education and seven appendices on various relevant topics,
including ninety-three pages of samples of various alphabets and scripts used
in western India. The book is a mine of information.
[155] Leitner, Indigenous
Education, pp. 74, 76-78, which lists such books as Chaghmlnl’s manual
of astronomy, Ptolemy’s Almagest, ‘Àmilï’s Khulasat al-Hisab, “Summary
of Arithmetic” on arithmetic,
and Ibn Slna’s Canon of Medicine and its commentaries as works studied at Deoband or the
older madrasas. The textbooks of natural philosophy and
metaphysics also all predated serious intellectual contact with modern Europe.
[156] The key
documents can be found in Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, The Great
Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist
Controversy, 1781-1843 (London Studies on South Asia 18; Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999).
[157] For a
critique of this enterprise of legal reform in India, see Hallaq, Sharfa, pp. 371-95. The two
following chapters of his book deal with similar legal issues in the colonial
and modern Middle East.
[158] James
Mill, The History of British India, 6 vols.
(London: Baldwick and Craddock, 1829).
[159] Lynn
Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), and Martin I. Moir, Douglas M. Peers, and
Lynn Zastoupil, eds., J. S. Mill’s encounter with India (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). For Mill’s papers relating to India, see John
Stuart Mill, Writings on India, ed. John M. Robson, Martin Moir, and Zawahir Moir
(Collected works of John Stuart Mill 30; London: Routledge, 1990),
particularly pp. 141-8 on education.
[160] Wilberforce’s
efforts to open India to evangelization recur repeatedly in his biography;
Robert Isaac and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William
Wilberforce, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1839),
pp. 24-28,170-72, 392ft
[161] Zaspoutil
and Moir, Debate, pp. 165-6;
for the full document, see pp. 162-72. There is a good deal more in the same vein. On
Macaulay in India, see John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 289-478.
[162] Elizabeth
Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis: The Defence, Rethinking and Rejection of
Sufism in the Modern World
(Richmond: Curzon, 1999).
[163] “Islamiyat” is the term used in Pakistan for
the required Islamic studies courses in schools and colleges. Local publishers
produce cram books based on the official curriculum. These books shamelessly
plagiarize each other and are riddled with errors of fact, interpretation, and
omission. An example of this dismal genre is S. M. Dogar, comp. and ed., Towards
Islamyat for C.S.S. Banking and Finance Service Commission, Public Service
Commission, and Other Competitive Exams (Lahore: Dogar [ca. 2000]). This particular book is intended for
candidates seeking to enter the civil service elite, which makes its failings
more serious, though in fairness to the hack responsible for the book, he was
only following the official syllabus. The treatment of other religions is even
worse; the author is under the impression that Roman Catholics consider the
Virgin Mary to be a member of the Trinity (p. 45) and that Christians are divided into three sects:
Orientalists, Roman Catholics, and Protestants (p. 46).
[164] For an analysis of the cooption of Islam by the
Indonesian government, see Linda S. Walbridge, “Indonesia: The Islamic
Potential,” Dialogue (London,
England), June 1998, pp. 4-5.
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