The Pope,
the Christians and the Muslims
Let the Dialogue Begin (Part 5 of 7)
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
As
Muslims, we respect Christian beliefs and we expect
that they respect ours. The purpose of these series
of articles is to start a dialogue between civilizations.
It is not to engage in a debate about theological
controversies.
There is no conflict of civilizations between
Christianity and Islam. Both claim their legacy
from the Abrahamic tradition, and have to a large
extent a shared historical experience. While the
responses of the two to the older civilizations
of the Mediterranean and the Middle East have
been different, there has also been a large measure
of interlacing and mutual borrowing. An understanding
of how they confronted and accommodated the earlier
Greek civilization provides valuable insights
about how to construct a dialogue as we move forward.
The classical Islamic civilization (seventh to
twelfth centuries) was both rational and empirical.
The rigidity that one sees in modern times is
a product of historical developments in the thirteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Correspondingly, the
separation of the sacred and the secular, and
the dissociation of reason from dogma in the Christian
West, is a product of historical developments
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Pope Benedict XVI desires a dialogue across cultures
based on Logos. Greek is a powerful classical
language. The term Logos has multiple meanings.
It may mean “Word”, “Intelligence”,
“Divine Thought”, “Reason”,
“Discourse” or “Saying”.
Catholic theology sometimes interprets this to
mean “Pre-incarnate Christ”. I have
used the term in these articles in its most commonly
understood sense “Reason”, “Discourse”
or “Rational Thought”. Our intent
is to examine the assumptions, the processes and
the limitations of the rational approach as it
applies to the profound questions facing humankind,
and to ask if it is adequate as the basis for
inter-civilization dialogue. We will conclude
this series by proposing our common humanity as
the basis for dialogue and an invitation to universal
human rights based on mutual respect, tolerance,
coexistence, individual dignity and social justice.
Christianity was confronted with Greek rational
thought twice. The first encounter, during the
first to third centuries, bequeathed to Christian
theology the doctrine of Trinity. The second encounter,
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, resulted
in a separation of the cosmos into the sacred
and the profane, and the birth of the modern secular
culture.
Similarly, Islam was confronted with Greek rational
thought twice. In the first encounter, during
the eighth and ninth centuries, the Islamic world
first elevated rational thought to be the governing
philosophy of its civilization and then demoted
it to a junior partner in its approach to knowledge.
The second encounter, in the fourteenth century,
resulted in the complete triumph of Sufism over
rational thought. In this article we review, briefly,
the encounter of Islam with Greek rational thought.
The Muslims were the first inheritors of Greek
thought in its fullness. It was through the Muslims,
more specifically the Spanish Muslims, that rational
thought reached the Latin West. And it was only
after the 12th century that the West woke up from
its slumber and adopted the Greek civilization
as its own.
The first Islamic scholar who tackled questions
of Islamic belief from a rational perspective
was Al Juhani (d 699). The rational approach places
human reason at the apex of the pyramid of knowledge
and postulates that the world is knowable. Al
Juhani maintained that men and women not only
have the capacity to know creation through reason,
but also have the capacity to act as free agents.
In his approach, heaven and hell were consequences
of human action. This school of philosophy became
known as the Qadariya school.
The Qadariya approach, when pushed to the limit,
takes God out of the picture of human affairs
in as much as it makes heaven and hell mechanistic
and solely predicated upon human action. Reaction
from the orthodox quarters was bound to surface
and this happened with the emergence of the Qida
school advanced by Ibn Safwan (d 745). According
to Ibn Safwan all power belongs to God, and man
is predetermined in his actions, good and evil,
as well as his destination towards heaven or hell.
The battle lines were now drawn. Both Imam Ja’afar
as Sadiq (d 765) and Imam Abu Haneefa (d 762)
were aware of the arguments of Qida (predestination)
and Qadr (free will) but stayed clear of its controversies.
Wasil ibn Ata (d 749) developed, integrated and
articulated the Qadariya school into a coherent
philosophy, which came to be known as the Mu’tazilah
school. We may look upon the Mu’tazilah
school as the first response of Islamic civilization
to the challenge of Greek thought. The Mu’tazilah
assumptions were: (1) the uniqueness of God, (2)
the free will of man (3) the principle of human
responsibility and of reward and punishment as
a consequence of human action, (4) the moral imperative
to enjoin what is right and forbid what is evil,
(5) the principle of cause and effect, (6) the
principle of before and after, and (7) God knows
the general but not the particulars.
The Caliph al Mansur (d 775), who ruled an empire
covering an arc of earth from the borders of China
to Southern France, adopted the Mu’tazalite
school as the official dogma of the empire. From
Caliph Mansur to Caliph al Mutawakkil (d 861)
the Mu’tazalite guided the intellectual
ship of Islam. Al Mansur established a school
of translation, the Baitul Hikmah (the house of
wisdom) in Baghdad (765), wherein books of Greek
philosophy, Hindu astronomy and Chinese technology
were translated into Arabic. The scholars who
were engaged in the work of translation included
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus.
From Greece came the works of Socrates, Aristotle,
Plato, Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid,
Ptolemy, Demosthenes and Pythagoras. From India
arrived a delegation with the Siddhanta of Brahmagupta.
Indian numerals, the concept of zero and Ayurvedic
medicine. From China came the technologies of
paper making, silk and porcelain. The Zoroastrians
brought in the disciplines of administration,
agriculture and irrigation. The Muslims learned
from these sources and gave to the world algebra,
chemistry, sociology, empirical science and the
concept of infinity. Learning flourished and Baghdad
became the intellectual capital of the world.
The philosopher al Kindi (d 873), whom the Pope
quoted in his speech of September 12, was a Mu’tazalite
who worked at the court of Baghdad during this
time.
The undoing of the Mu’tazalites was their
excessive zeal and their inability to comprehend
the limitations of the methodology they championed.
They assumed that reason had a reach larger than
revelation. They attempted to apply the rational
approach to the attributes of God and his Word
without a sufficient understanding of the mystery
of time. In Islam, God is unique and there is
none like unto Him. Therefore, the Mu’tazalites
argued, the Qur’an cannot both be part of
Him and apart from Him. To preserve the uniqueness
of God, they concluded that the Qur’an was
created in time. Furthermore, by maintaining that
reward and punishment flowed mechanistically from
human action, they left their flank exposed for
an intellectual attack. If humans are automatically
rewarded for their deeds, then where is the need
for divine intervention?
The idea of the “createdness” of the
Qur’an was repugnant to the Muslims. The
usuli ulema (meaning, the scholars who based their
position on sound principles) challenged this
position. The best known among these was Imam
Hanbal (d 855), founder of the Hanbali school
of jurisprudence. To preserve their privileged
position in the courts of Baghdad, the Mu’tazalites
turned hostile and encouraged the Caliphs to apply
the whip to the dissenting ulema. Imam Hanbal
was flogged and jailed. But the ulema did not
relent. Faced with determined and growing opposition,
the Caliph Mutawakkil repudiated the Mu’tazalite
doctrine (765). Thereafter, the rationalists were
persecuted and their properties were confiscated.
The rational approach was not banished from the
Islamic world but became a supportive methodology
in the explosive growth of empirical science that
followed the defeat of the Mu’tazalites.
The Muslim mind gave up the speculative approach
of the classical Greeks and instead used reason
to extend the reach of empirical observation,
measurement and induction.
It was this integration of the rational and the
empirical that produced the classical Islamic
civilization. The mathematician al Khwarizmi (d
840), the physician al Razi (d 930), the historian
al Masudi (d 957), the scientist ibn Sina (d 1037),
the historian al Baruni (d 1048), the mathematician
Omar Khayyam (d 1123), the geographer al Idrisi
(d 1166), and the empiricist Nasiruddin al Tusi
(d1274) were among the galaxy of integrationists
(al Hakims) produced by this age. These savants
used both the deductive (meaning, philosophical
as in Greek philosophy) and inductive (meaning,
based on observation and measurement as in modern
science) tools in their works. They constructed
the edifice of science which was later bequeathed
to Europe and is still the basis of scientific
thought today.
The intellectual challenge to the rational method
came towards the end of the eleventh century.
Al Gazzali (d 1111), perhaps the greatest dialectician
produced by Islam, waged a two-pronged battle
against the esotericism of the Ismailis (at a
time when Sunni Islam was engaged in a fierce
struggle with the Fatimids for political-military
primacy) and the deductive philosophy of the Mu’tazalites.
In his “Tahaffuz al Falasafa” (Repudiation
of the Philosophers) Al Gazzali argued against
the principles of “cause and effect”
and “before and after”. According
to him, consequences were not a result of antecedents
but merely a reflection of a changed state which
was inherent in the material acted upon. He also
sought to give a secure place to tasawwuf within
the fold of orthodox Islam.
The debate was not over yet. In an age when the
concepts of time were still mired in Greek classical
thought, the debates about “cause and effect”
and “before and after” went on. Ibn
Rushd (d 1196), the great philosopher of the Maghrib,
took up the intellectual challenge of defending
the rational turf against Al Gazzali’s broadside.
In his “Tahaffuz al Tahaffuz” (Repudiation
of the Repudiated) he sought to defend rationalism
against the orthodoxy of al Gazzali.
This lively intellectual debate was interrupted
by the simultaneous onslaught of the Crusaders
and the Mongols on the world of Islam. (To be
continued).
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