Why Muslims who had discovered the "wisdom of Greeks" much earlier than the Europeans failed to establish rationalism in their socities?Here's a brief overview of the mind-boggling battle of ideas whose arena was the medieval Muslim world, and whose result was the defeat of the progressives at the hands of "holier than thou"establishment.
The content is of provocative nature. Readers' discretion is strongly advised! Especially for true believers. :)
Umar
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Science factions
By Sara Hasan
"It is significant that the desire to create an alternative world, tomodify or augment the real world through the act of writing isinimical to the Islamic worldview. The Prophet (PBUH) is he who hascompleted a world-view; thus the word heresy in Arabic is synonymouswith the verb `to innovate' or `to begin'. Islam views the world as aplenum (full), capable of neither diminishment nor amplification."
Thus Edward Said rationalises the absence of the novel in Arabicliterature, in his book Beginnings, intention & method. Saidconsidered novels to be – among other things – "aesthetic objectsthat fill gaps in an incomplete world". And according to him, Arabicstories like those in the Arabian nights are merely "ornamental,variations on the world, not completions of it; neither are they…designed to illustrate… ways in which the world can be viewed and changed".
The Arabic word for `beginning' is al ibitida; for `innovation' is alibtidaa or al bidaa; and for `heretic' is al mubtadiaa. The Arabic scholar and scientist who explained the Arabic terms to me agreedwith Said's etymological explanation. But can one extend Said's argument from literature to science, and draw a similar conclusion:that the desire to create an alternative world, to modify or augmentthe real world through scientific innovation is against the Islamicworldview? He shook his head. On the contrary, he said, Islamemphasises the acquisition of ilm (`knowledge'). He saw no conflictin the acquisition of new (novel) knowledge and the practice ofIslam.
Physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, however, has a different opinion. "Ilm hasil karo. You are urged to acquire knowledge. Not to create it," he says. Hoodbhoy is speaking at a panel discussion on `What is holdingback science in Pakistan' organised by Sarmad Abbasi at the LahoreUniversity of Management Sciences. He reasons that Muslims are askedto discover knowledge that is already there, in the Book. They are not urged to create new knowledge outside the Book. Like Said,Hoodbhoy refers to Islam's completed worldview, and uses it to rationalise the absence of a tradition of innovative science inPakistan.
To my Arabic scholar friend, though, the distinction between discovery and creation of knowledge is cosmetic. For him, one creates knowledge in that one brings it from unknowing to knowing. One discovers it in the sense that all knowledge belongs to Allah. A secular scientist of my acquaintance uses a similar explanation: knowledge lies in nature; we create models to understand nature;models are creations of the human mind, which in turn is a creation of nature. So one could argue that the mind is actually acquiringknowledge, not creating it from nothing. The two words – acquiring and creating – become mere word play, or a difference in outlook.
So if creating and discovering knowledge come to the same thing,where lies the problem with science and learning in the Islamicworld? Perhaps it's in the method and scope of enquiry that ispermitted and encouraged. In a despotic Islamic state, life ismediated by scripture – the Quran, Sunnah and Hadith, where Sunnah isthe traditions of the Prophet Muhammad's (pbuh) life, and the Hadith are his narrations and approvals. Muslim life is informed by these sources; no action or information can depart from theirprescriptions, everything must subscribe to the perfect worldview inthe Quran. So the critical issue for Muslims is not whether the scriptures ought to be interpreted literally or metaphorically, but whether they allow other worldviews that explain the nature and functioning of the universe. In other words, do they allow exploration beyond the worldview of the Quran?
Today most Muslim majority states enforce a limiting orthodoxy, yetthis was not always the case with Muslims. During the heyday of Islam, in the 9-13th centuries AD, the Quran was a subject of debateby a rationalist group of Muslim thinkers, the Mutazilites. In this time Muslims were the main innovators of science, philosophy and medicine in the world.
The movement got its start with Wasil ibn Ata, a freethinker, who proposed the concept of "the station between the two stations" when discussing whether a major sinner is a believer or an unbeliever. He concluded that a Muslim who commits a major sin is no longer abeliever, nor is he a kafir, but he is in an intermediate station between kufr and imaan – that of fisq (`transgression'). Imam HasanBasri, in whose mosque the discussion had begun, expelled Ata and his logical kind. They became known as al mutazila, the secessionists.
The leading Mutazilite thinkers, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina andIbn Rushd (known to the West as Averroës, 1126-98), held that reason alone is sufficient to understand the nature of Allah and existence, and to guide man's moral and ethical actions. They used Aristotelian logic in their discourses and prized independent thought. Al-Nazzam made the radical proclamation that doubt was the first absolute requirement of knowledge.
Mutazili theology became the court belief of the Abbasid caliphate inthe 9th century. Despite this official patronage, however, it remained an elite preoccupation, and never gained popular support. As an orthodox response to Mutazilism, Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari founded the Asharite school of theology. But the man credited for truly demolishing the liberal Mutazili philosophy and re-establishing theorthodox creed which has subsequently become the heritage of Sunni Islam, was Abu Hamid Al-Ghazzali (1059-1111).
A war of ideologies ensued between the two contending schools – the theologian Al-Ghazzali, and the rationalist Ibn Rushd. Al-Ghazzali wrote the popular attack on rationalism, The incoherence of the philosophers to which Ibn Rushd responded with The incoherence of the incoherence. Unfortunately, not even its catchy title could win IbnRushd mass appeal – his famous statement that "to say that philosophers are incoherent is itself an incoherent statement" was just too sophisticated for the layperson. Thus Al-Ghazzali prevailed over Ibn Rushd, with far-reaching consequences on Muslim intellectual history.
The new interpreters of Islam, the Asharites, promoted revelation over reason and Allah's will over free will; they taught that the acquisition of knowledge meant only the study of Islamic theology,and discouraged the study of the natural sciences.
With Asharite domination, much of the Arab world's innovation in science and technology came to an end. They generated a fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) based on taqlid (imitation), suppressing theMutazilite stress on ijtihad which allowed open inquiry. The Asharites did not reject ijtihad amongst the learned, but theydiscouraged its application by the public. The loss of the application of ijtihad in law indirectly led to its ebb from philosophy and science. Most historians now think that this caused Muslim societies to stagnate, of which the symbolic moment came in1492, with the final fall of Muslim Spain.
The regression of Muslim intellectual life continues unabated. Where they lost, the West gained. The development of the scientific method,which contributed to the Western Enlightenment ironically had its roots in the ijtihad and isna (citation) of mediaeval Muslim scholars. Today, of 1.4 billion Muslims in the world (20 percent ofthe world's population) only three have had the distinction of receiving the Nobel Prize for their contributions to their subjects –Najib Mahfouz for literature, Ahmed Zewail for chemistry, and Abdus Salam for physics. Of the three, the two scientists, Zewail andSalam, conducted their research in foreign lands, and one, Abdus Salam, was legally considered a non-Muslim by his own Pakistani government.
Ten centuries ago Muslims opted to follow the orthodox teachings of Al-Ghazzali over the rational philosophy of Ibn Rushd. Is it now time to review unproductive choices? To reinstate ijtihad over taqlid, and encourage free intellectual transgressions over forced containment?
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