Signs from Allah: History, Science and the Soul in Islam
17.The Rise and Fall of Philosophy and Its Impact on Religion and Science (Part 1)
By Prof Dr Nazeer Ahmed, PhD
Concord, CA
Summary: The Muslims came upon Greek rational philosophy, adopted it as their own and developed it (760-845 CE). The Darul Hikmah in Baghdad became a center of excellence for the amalgamation of human knowledge where works of Greek philosophers, Indian astronomers as well as Chinese and Zoroastrian sages were translated and developed.
The rationalists, called the Mu’tazalites, overextended their reach, applied it to the attributes of God and the Qur’an, fell flat on their face, and were rejected by the orthodox ulema. The resulting intellectual convulsions gave birth to the Hanbali School of Fiqh as a protest movement (800-850 CE) and the advent of Asharite ideas (the atomistic theories of time, 900-950 CE) which influenced the giants of Islamic intellectual landscape, from Imam Al Ghazzali (d 1111 CE) to Allama Iqbal (d 1938 CE). Empirical science flourished (800-1200 CE) as a sequel to the defeat of deductive philosophy and the affirmation of inductive empirical approach.
As the Muslim armies captured Syria, Egypt and North Africa, they became custodians of not just the people of those countries, but their ideas as well. Most of these lands had been under Eastern Roman or Byzantine control where Greek thought was dominant. Historically, the term “Greek thought” is applied to the collective wisdom and classical thinking of the people of the eastern Mediterranean, which includes a broad geographical arc extending from Athens in Greece through Anatolia, Syria, Egypt and Libya. Some historians have maintained that much of Greek thought was inherited from the Egyptians and is hence African in origin. Greek civilization extolled the nobility of man and placed human reason at the apex of creation. Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid and Archimedes are some of the household names from the galaxy of thinkers produced by this civilization. The enduring achievement of Greek thought was that it perfected the rational process and left its lasting legacy for humankind.
The Muslims were the first inheritors of Greek thought. It was through the Muslims, more specifically Moorish Spain, 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, while about the same time, Muslims turned away from rational thought towards more esoteric and intuitive thinking.
The early Muslims not only adopted the rational approach but set out with enthusiasm to explain their own beliefs in rational terms. Questions relating to the nature of man, his relationship to creation, his obligations and responsibilities, as also the nature of Divine attributes were tackled. No Muslim scholar would embark on an intellectual effort unless his approach had a basis in the Qur’an. The rationalists saw a justification for their approach in Qur’anic verses (“Behold! In the creation of the heavens and the earth . . . There are indeed signs for a people who are wise”, Qur’an, 2:164) and in the Sunnah of the Prophet. The Qur’an invites human reason to witness the majesty of creation and reflect on its meaning and understand the transcendence that suffuses it. The philosophical sciences that evolved as a result of this effort are referred to as Kalam (discourse, usually a religious discourse). Sometimes, Kalam is vaguely translated as Theology, but Theology as a science never caught on in Islamic learning as it did in Christianity, because the Muslims strove and succeeded in preserving the transcendence of God expressed as Tawhid. Christianity adopted the position that God is knowable in person and is hence accessible to human perception. The Muslims, despite the philosophical challenges of the Greeks, succeeded in maintaining the position that God is knowable by His names, attributes and through the majesty of His creation, whereas His transcendence is hidden by His light.
The first Islamic scholar who tackled questions of Islamic belief from a rational perspective was Al Juhani (d. 699). Note that the rational approach places human reason at the apex of creation and makes the world “knowable”. Al Juhani maintained that men and women not only have the capacity to know creation through their reason, but also have the capacity to act as free agents. He maintained that belief is the result of knowledge and understanding. Indeed, humankind has the moral imperative to understand God’s creation. Man, as a rational being, is mandated not only to understand the world, but also to act on it using his free will. Thus, Al Juhani’s views bestowed upon humankind reason and responsibility. Heaven and hell were consequences of human action. This school of philosophy was known as the Qadariya School (root word q-d-r, meaning power or free will. The Qadariya School of philosophy is not to be confused with the Qadariya Sufi brotherhood, named after Shaykh Abdul Qader Jeelani of Baghdad, in the 12th century and then spread throughout the Islamic world).
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. This was unacceptable to the Muslim mind. Reaction from the more orthodox quarters was bound to surface and this happened with the emergence of the Qida (pre-destination) School. The founder of this School was 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. Like the Qadariya School, the Qida School sought its justification in the Qur’an (“Say! I have no power over any good or harm to myself except as God wills”, Qur’an, 7:188) and the Sunnah of the Prophet.
Wasil ibn Ata (d. 749) combined, developed and articulated the Qadariya Schools into a coherent philosophy, which came to be known as the Mu’tazilah School. We may also look upon the Mu’tazilah School as the philosophical response of Islamic civilization to the challenge of Greek rational thought. The principles of the Mu’tazilah School were:
• The Uniqueness of God or Tawhid (“Say! He is God, the One; God, the Eternal, Absolute; He begets not, nor is He begotten; and there is none like unto Him”, Qur’an, 112:1-5),
• The free will of man (“If it had been thy Lord’s Will, they would all have believed, all who are on earth! Will thou then compel mankind, against their will, to believe!”, Qur’an, 10:99),
• The principle of human responsibility and of reward and punishment as a consequence of human action (“On no soul does God place a burden greater than it can bear”, Qur’an, 2:286),
• The moral imperative to enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong (“You are the most noble of people, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong and believing in God”, Qur’an, 3:110).
The Mu’tazilites applied these principles to the issues of relationships of man to man, of man to the created world and of man to God. By placing man at the center of creation, they sought to make him the architect of his own fortunes and emphasized his moral imperative to fashion the world in the image of God’s command.
Caliph Mamun adopted the Mu’tazilite School as the official dogma of the Empire. From Caliph Mansur to Caliph Al Mutawakkil (747-845), the Mu’tazilites enjoyed official patronage. It was during this period that a Dar ul Hikmah (House of Wisdom) was established in Baghdad and books of Greek philosophy, Indian astronomy and Chinese technology were translated into Arabic. Learning flourished and Baghdad became the intellectual capital of the world.
The undoing of the Mu’tazilites was their excessive zeal and their inability to comprehend the limits of the methodology they championed. With official sanction, they punished those ulema who disagreed with them and tried to silence all opposition. They also overextended their deductive methodology to attributes of God and of the Qur’an. In Islam, God is unique and there is none like unto Him. Therefore, the Mu’tazilites argued, the Qur’an cannot both be part of Him and apart from Him. To preserve the uniqueness of God (Tawhid), they placed the Qur’an in the created space. In other words, they said that the Qur’an was “created”.
The position that the Qur’an was “created” (as the Mu’tazalites postulated) caused a great deal of division and confusion among Muslims. Furthermore, by maintaining that reward and punishment flowed mechanistically from human action, they left their flank exposed for an intellectual attack from the ulema. If humans are automatically rewarded for their good deeds and automatically punished for their evil, then where is the need for Divine Grace? This deterministic approach was repugnant to Muslims and a revolt was inevitable.
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