Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq (Part 3 of 3)
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
Shari’ah has both an inner dimension and an outer dimension. It has outward manifestations as well as an inner taste. If the major schools of Fiqh reflect both the inner and outer dimensions of the Shari’ah, it is due in no small measure to the insights offered by Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq.
Imam Ja’afar was not only a scholar of Kalam, Sunnah and Hadith, he was also a historian and a master of chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and natural sciences. One of his students Jabir ibn Hayyan, went on to distinguish himself as the foremost chemist and mathematicians of his age. The comprehensiveness and breath of scholarship exhibited by Imam Ja’afar is consistent with the Qur’anic Injunctions to study not only the sciences of the soul but also the sciences of nature and of history because in all three there are Signs of Divine patterns.
The Qur’an states: “Soon We shall show them Our Signs on the horizon and within themselves, until it is clear to them that it is indeed the Truth.” (41, 53). On the horizon means the external (zahiri) world of man (history and sociology) and the world of nature (the natural sciences). It was only after the seventeenth century that the study of Qur’an and the Sunnah was separated from a study of history and natural sciences in Islamic academies with disastrous consequences for Islamic civilization.
Imam Ja’afar lived in a period of intellectual turmoil. The rapid advance of the Omayyad armies into India, Spain and Central Asia had brought into the fold of Islam Christians, Zoroastrians, Copts, Buddhists, Hindus and Nestorians. These arrivals brought with them their own ways of looking at the transcendent and their own systems of ancient learning. Muslims scholars, in their zeal to understand and transform the Divine patterns on earth, moved with enthusiasm and vigor to learn the sciences of Greece, Egypt, Persia, India and China.
Khalifa al Mansur was a great patron of learning. He sent delegations to Constantinople, with generous gifts, to bring back the Greek works of Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy and Galen. From India came the Siddhanta of Aryabhatta, a classic Sanskrit work of astronomy and mathematics created during the reign of Gupta dynasty in northern India (319-550 CE). As the reservoir of knowledge increased so did the curiosity of people and they looked for answers to the basic questions of religion in the light of the new knowledge acquired from distant lands.
The development of Fiqh was the response of Islamic civilization to this intellectual eruption. It provided stability to the intellectual landscape and guided the Islamic community through the turbulence of competing and sometimes contradictory ideas. Imam Ja’afar was one of the intellectual giants who guided the ship of Islam through the turbulence of these ideological storms.
Imam Ja’afar taught the natural and historical sciences as well. His teachings reveal that he knew about the rotation of the earth around the sun, the existence of elements beyond the four (earth, air, water and fire) subscribed to by the Greeks. He also held discourses on the nature of light and heat that are consistent with our own modern understanding of these subjects. One of his students was the well-known chemist and mathematician Jabir ibn Hayyan. Wasil ibn Ata (d 748 CE) who is generally credited with the founding of the Mutazilah (rational) school of philosophy also studied at the halqa of Imam Ja’afar.
The question is sometimes asked as to how it is possible for a person to have knowledge of the natural and mathematical sciences which he had not learned from other teachers. Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq and his father Imam Baqir knew these subjects before the books of the Greeks and the Indians were translated into Arabic. The question is deep and requires a serious answer. The difficulty in answering the question arises from the claim by modern science and by modern man that the empirical and the rational are the only two methods of acquiring knowledge. It does not admit of acquisition of knowledge by supra-rational or transcendent means. I have dealt with this question in other essays in great detail. I will summarize my research here.
Knowledge is acquired by at least four methods: empirical, rational, intuition and infusion. The empirical is the language of observation and experimentation. It is the language of the senses and is the basis of modern science. The rational is extensional knowledge and is the language of mathematics. The rational is a servant of the empirical. Intuition is knowledge that is known to man but which he has forgotten. It is bestowed by Divine grace to those who seek it. Infusion is the language of the scriptures and is given only to the Prophets.
Human civilization is built on all four of these modes of learning. Modern man accepts the empirical and the rational, denies the language of infusion (revelation) and is fuzzy about inspiration unless it is subjected to empirical validation.
So much in human experience cannot be measured. How do you measure love? How do you attach a dollar value to the sacrifices of parents as they bring up their children? If you think these are esoteric questions, consider the following: When I was a Principal Scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope during the period 1979-1982, I was asked to design advanced composite structures which have a thermal expansion of less than one thousandth of a millionth of a wavelength of light. Those skilled in this field will immediately recognize that there are no known scientific instruments that can measure the dimensional accuracy of structures to this precision. I had to invent and devise an acceptable method with sufficient accuracy for this application. But what if the requirement was more stringent than that stated above? The task would be impossible with our present state of technology. One of the most challenging tasks in scientific research is the design of a reliable experiment. There is so much that just cannot be measured. There is much that the modern disbelieving person accepts on the basis of faith even if it is not measured. For instance, what existed before the Big Bang? And yet when a sage, a religious scholar or a great man of intuition takes a position in natural science, he is laughed at.
This has been the difficulty faced by the sages through the ages. People laughed at them because they just could not understand the wisdom of the sages. This was even more so with the Prophets. The people of Noah laughed at him when he was building the ark. The Pharaoh wanted his Chief to build a tall structure so that he could “look” at the God of Moses!
Much of the language of intuition is Ilm ul Ishara. It can be felt, alluded to but it cannot be taught. Some of it is accessible to reason, some is not. Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq was a sage. Through his training, his lineage, his piety, his unstinted character and his purified heart reflecting Divine grace, his intuition was wider than that of most people. If he predicted the movement of the earth around the sun, it was not because he necessarily learned this from the Egyptians or Greeks but because this knowledge, the Truth, is within the heart, only to be discovered by those who seek it. It is a Divine gift, given to whom He pleases.
Summarily, every human being is born with an infinite reservoir of knowledge. But man forgets and the knowledge is submerged into the subconscious. It becomes apparent and accessible to perception through conscious effort, training, striving. Divine grace favors those who strive and struggle and rewards them with the perception of that which was hitherto not perceived. That is intuition. A scientist has scientific intuition through his/her hard work. A sage acquires it through his/her heart that is illuminated by Divine grace.
We reinforce our observation by pointing out that a research committee consisting of well-known scientists from France, Germany, Italy, United States, Iran, Lebanon and England examined the scientific teachings of Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq and looked into its sources. It was called the Research Committee of Strasbourg. It confirmed the scientific basis of Imam Ja’afar but got bogged down as to its sources. The committee members, scientists as they are in the modern empirical and rational sciences cannot accept that there are other modes of learning accessible to man through Divine grace, namely, through inspiration (intuition) or revelation.
The scholarship and wisdom of Imam Ja’afar was not without its distracters. Khalifa al Mansur, who ruled from Kufa and Baghdad at that time, was a far sighted, rational monarch open to new ideas from the far corners of the earth. But there was another, less compassionate aspect to his rule. Indeed, he was in many ways a tyrant. Suspicious as he was of rival centers of power, he was intolerant of any sign of dissent.
Alarmed at the popularity of Imam Sadiq, al Mansur wanted to discredit him by showing that his knowledge was limited. He commanded Imam Abu Hanifa to formulate forty controversial questions related to Fiqh which would be asked of Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq. Imam Abu Hanifa knew that refusal to follow the Caliph’s instructions would result in public flogging or worse. Confident that Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq was more than a match for any questions put to him, Imam Abu Hanifa formulated the questions. The two imams were called into the presence of Caliph Mansur and the questions were asked of Imam Ja’afar as Sadiq. Imam Ja’afar not only answered each question, he also gave a comparative analysis of the legal opinions of the Kufa School (which later became the Hanafi Fiqh) and the Madinite School (which evolved into the Maliki Fiqh) as well as his own opinion (documented in later years as the Ja’afariya Fiqh). Satisfied, the Caliph sent the two Imams home unmolested.
The character of Imam Ja’afar was exemplary. He was pious, always engaged in remembrance of God. He emphasized the need for ethics, morality and justice in human affairs. Sufyan Ath-Thawri reports some of the Imam’s sayings: "A liar is devoid of honor; an envious person can find no comfort; and an ill-mannered one gains no respect. Place your trust in God to be a true believer; and be content with what God has given you and you will be rich. Be kind to your neighbor to be a true Muslim; and do not seek company with people who transgress the limits defined by God, because they teach you their ways. On all matters, consult only those who are God-fearing."
Imam Ja’afar taught reconciliation and brotherhood across interfaith and sectarian divides. Regarding the Sunnis he said: “Pray with their tribes, take part in their funerals, visit their sick and give them what is due to them”. Shaykh Hisham reports the following invocation of Imam Ja’afar about Abu Bakr Siddiq (r) and Omar ibn al Khattab (r): “O God, you are my witness that I love Abu Bakr and I love Omar and if what I am saying is not true may God cut me off from the intercession of Muhammad (pbuh).” How different was the approach of the great Imams from the parochial approach of today’s Shias and Sunnis who are at each other’s throats, steeped as they are in the ignorance and prejudice accumulated over centuries of self-serving historical narratives! ( www.historyofislam.com)
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