Islamic
Intellectualism
by Murad
Hofmann
It is risky enough to predict the future, and even
riskier if done without first looking at the past. It is from the patterns and
lessons of history that we can form assumptions about the future. This being
so, several valuable deductions can be made from Islamic history.
First Thesis: Islamic history has always has had an
intellectual component. In the Qur'an, Allah (subhanahu
wa ta‘ala)
instructs people to observe, ponder, think, reflect, and use rationality to
understand the world and their position in it. In fact, the Qur'an is the only
“holy” script that makes such an appeal. Consequently, from its inception,
Islam has been a rational religion par excellence. It was this rational
appeal and the intellectual reasonableness of its doctrine that account for the
fast and vast expansion of Islam during its first century.
Second Thesis: Islam, from the beginning, encouraged and
demanded intellectual activity and training. Islam is a religion, not a
philosophy, and Prophet Muhammad (sal Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) was a Messenger
and not a theology professor. Nevertheless, Islam demanded and demands
intellectual activities. Early on, these activities mainly took the form of
collecting, scrutinizing, and systematizing the Revelation and prophetic
Tradition -- the Sunnah. In this
context, Hasan alBasri,
Malik b. Anas, Ibn Ishaq, al-Bukhari, at-Tabari and others developed historiography, linguistics,
and jurisprudence to unprecedented levels.
In the Islamic civilizations of Damascus, Baghdad,
Lahore, Cordoba, Seville, Granada, al-Fustat, Kairouan, and Fez, Muslims became the custodians of the
Greek intellectual miracle. Furthermore, they developed and innovated
the classical heritage, ultimately producing their own unique, intellectual
tradition. The European intellectual exploits as of the Renaissance would have
been unthinkable without an Ibn Sina,
Ibn Rushd, al-Biruni, al-Khawarizmi, ar-Razi, lbn al-Haytham, ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun.
It would be a mistake to claim that people like Ibn Hanbal, al-Ash‘ari, Ibn Hazm
and Ibn Taymiyya were not
intellectual because they arrived at orthodox conclusions and opinions. Ibn Hanbal did try to protect
Muslim doctrine from Greek philosophy. Al-Ash‘ari,
through his radical critic of epistemology, did deny the feasibility of
metaphysical deductions. Ibn Hazm
did reject the utility of qiyas and tafsir in certain situations. Ibn
Tayrniyya did abhor that Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism
had gained a foothold within Islam via Sufi circles. Nevertheless, they
all employed intellectual analyses to arrive at their conclusions and opinions,
thus perpetuating the intellectual tradition of Islam.
Western Orientalists are wrong to insinuate that Islam
ever was monolithic. Rather, it was pluralistic in practice and intellectual
thought. Except for tawhid and the finality of
the prophethood of Muhammad, almost everything,
including the modalities of the other four pillars of faith, was open to
discussion. Within Islamic Jurisprudence, half a dozen schools of law (madhahib) not only developed, but also as in Makkah, taught simultaneously, an intellectual feat unknown
to any other system of law.
The notion of taqlid --
in and by itself not at all irrational -- did considerable damage by stifling
innovation even outside of
‘aqida, ‘ibada
and mu‘amalat. Nevertheless, during the
reign of taqlid, the Muslim world never
stopped developing intellectually as exemplified by Ibn
‘Arabi, al-Sirhindi, Shah Waliullah, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
In philosophy, intellectual battles were fierce. This is
clear when one reads al-Ghazali’s devastating
critique of philosophy (at-Tahafut al-Falsafiya) and the equally opinionated reply by Ibn Rushd (at-Tahafut at-Tahafut). How
refreshing and how reassuring that diversity of opinion, as our Prophet put it,
can be a blessing. Needless to say, if Ibn Rushd lived and wrote today, some contemporary Muslim
fanatic would probably stifle his views in the name of Allah.
Third Thesis: Lack of pluralism means decadence: Islam has
always been pluralistic. The conflicts between A‘isha
and ‘Ali, Mu‘awiyya and ‘Ali, and ‘Ali and the Kharijiyya were not only intense but bloody. So were the
conflicts between ‘Ummayads and ‘Abbasids, the Mutazila and Ash‘ariyya, Sunnis
and and Shi‘is, ‘Ibadi and ‘Alawi Muslims, not to mention the bloody
suppression of Sufi extremism as in the case of al-Hallaj.
These attempts to make Islam monolithic resulted not only in the destruction of
much intellectual pluralism; they also ushered in a phase of decadence from
which we have only recently begun to awaken.
Muslim decadence also resulted from other causes,
including the cultural devastations wrought by the Mongol onslaught and the
Catholic Reconquista in Spain. Political and economic insecurity drove Muslims underground
intellectually. Religion was privatized, popularized, and made rigid in the
most marginal details. In this way, Islam managed to survive both Western and
Soviet colonization. This is the good news. The bad news, however, is that in
this defensive mode, Islam became politically irrelevant and almost Talmudic in
its over-legalization. In the process, Sufism, too, degenerated into a
folksy sort of Islam whose original ritualism was ritualized.
Another contributing factor to Islamic decadence was political
oppression. Despotism and suppression of religious critique by despotic rulers
became and remained the rule in the Islamic world. By developing their own
administrative penal law (at ta’zir), the
rulers emancipated themselves not only from their ‘ulama,
but from the shari’ah itself. Censorship
turned into dependency until finally, in the 20th century, the ‘ulama were rejected by the Islamic movements of the
youth.
This being the past, what is the present?
For the first time ever, the contemporary world
has been culturally colonized by a single civilization, the Occident. This
process, under way since the late Renaissance, found its intellectual bearings
in the European Enlightenment, also known as Project Modernity. Having origins
in Europe and perpetuation in America, Occidental thought, technology,
products, and mores dominate the globe. The world has come to use one language,
English. Neither Greek, Latin nor Arabic ever came
close to that feat.
Since superior civilizations always spread, this is not
wholly peculiar, except in scope. What is peculiar, devastatingly so, is that
the Occidental ideology, the first ideology based entirely on atheistic
assumptions, is becoming global as well. Kant's critique of metaphysics and his
dismantling of the proofs of God, Marx’s defamation of religion as “opiate for
the people", and the ruthless Social-Darwinism propagated by Nietzsche are
now common currency, as has been proven by the disasters of WWI, Stalinism, the
Holocaust, WWII, Maoism, and ethnic cleansing.
The modern scene is, however, also characterized by
post-Newtonian Physics, ushered in by Planck, Einstein, Hahn, and Heisenberg;
new mathematics, ushered in by Frege, new
microbiology and medicine, and new communications technology.
This being the present, what is the future of Islam in
the 21st century?
First Assumption: Given the communications revolution, Islam,
always intended to be universal, will become universal. Muslim intellectuals
have already invaded the Internet.
Second Assumption: English will become Islam’s major language
for da’wah.
Third Assumption: Muslim scholarship
will move west. Scientists always seek an academic environment conducive to
their research, and this gives an enormous advantage to places where academic
freedom is guaranteed and where one is not persecuted for publishing unwelcome
views. There has been already an exodus of qualified Muslims scientists to
Europe, the U.S. and Canada. In 1999, the first Nobel Prize in natural sciences
conferred on a Sunni Muslim, was given to an Egyptian working in Germany and
the U.S.
Fourth Assumption: Lay intellectuals will become increasingly
important. In the past, the corruptibility of some ‘ulama
and their marriage with governments lead to the prominence of lay reformers.
Al-Afghani, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid
Qutb, Muhammad Asad,
Mohammad Iqbal, Abul-Ala Maududi, Abbas Madani and other
leaders of Islamic movements were not products of traditional ‘ulama training. This trend is bound to grow, restoring
to Islam the old ideal of a religion free from sacramental clergy and an
institutionalized “church.”
Fifth Assumption: Muslims will produce “Occidentalists.”
In the time of the Prophet, Muslims had access to Jews and Christians, and
knowledge about the other monotheistic religions was locally available. Later
this changed, and the Occident and Orient grew apart. Christian Orientalists,
ever since John of Damascus, started to defame Islam. Muslims lacked Christian
specialists until the 20th century when Christians started to convert to Islam
in large numbers.
Sixth Assumption: Muslims will tackle the Sunnah
issue. Muslims obviously don't have a Qur'an problem, but they do have a Sunnah problem. Goldziher,
Margoliuth, and Schacht were not justified in being
sweepingly skeptical, but they were also not entirely wrong in asserting that
parts of the body of ahadith are questionable.
Dr. Fazlur Rahman, in his
book Islamic Methodology in History, identified a major cause of this when he
pointed out that from the time of al-Shafi‘i, Muslims
felt obliged to project the entire living Sunnah
back to the Prophet. Equipped with new methodologies for historical critique,
including computer-based linguistic analysis, 21st century Muslim intellectuals
should be able to reestablish maximum authenticity for most of their Sunnah.
Seventh Assumption: If the Sunnah
challenge is met, Muslim intellectuals will develop convincing models, ones
that include human and women’s rights, for an Islamic State and economy. Since
Prophet Muhammad dictated the Constitutional of Madinah,
Muslims rarely had to make an intellectual effort to cope with issues of state
and government. Al-Mawardi and Nizam
al-Mulk are cases in point. Today's intellectuals
face a different challenge. They must develop from scratch the theoretical
bases of an Islamic “democracy,” i.e., a state that is neither a theocracy in
the Shi‘i sense, a monarchy, or a community
without Shari’ah. They must tackle the
intellectual challenge of integrating Western notions of human rights into the
framework of Islamic jurisprudence. Part of this challenge involves restoration
of women’s rights worldwide and reinterpretation of the Qur’an 4:3, 4:34, and
2:228.
Eighth Assumption: Muslim intellectuals will develop guidance
for Muslim dhimmi. The presence of
millions of Muslims in non-Muslim countries is a new problem in Islamic
history. Only India, under British rule, experienced a problem of this
magnitude. These Muslims need to know how to behave under a non-Muslim law,
especially on issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance, burial, halal
slaughtering and riba. We need nothing
less than a madhhab for emigrant Muslims.
Ninth Assumption: Western intellectual Muslims will develop
new modes of da’wah. For 200 years, the
Muslim world experienced the consequences of the military, industrial, and
commercial terms of the Age of Reason, without understanding Western
rationalism, scientism, and progressiveness. Today, due to colonial education
and Muslim immigration to the West, we have a growing number of Muslim
intellectuals who can understand Western ideology on its own ground and by its
own rules. These intellectuals are equipped to dismantle the fundamental
delusions of Enlightenment rationalism and its over-confidence in the
rationality, maturity, and independence of man. In other words, through
understanding the Western ideology, they can dethrone “sovereign” man and
reinstall faith in God in full accordance with the foundational assumptions of
modern philosophy and science. Muslim intellectuals must start from Descartes,
Kant, Hume and Comte, but avoid arriving at Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche.
Their task is to re-ground faith by pointing out the irrationality of atheism,
the ambivalence of agnosticism, and the probability and plausibility of the
existence of God, i.e., the rationality of faith.
Tenth Assumption: Muslim intellectuals will stop acting
apologetically. This necessarily presupposes the existence of, and in turn will
produce, Muslim intellectuals who are assertive and proactive, rather than
apologetic and reactive.
Eleventh Assumption: Muslim intellectuals need is to be
intellectual. Muslim intellectuals have a very special role to play, but this
does mean that they all must become Muslim activists. Quite the contrary! It
would be a major contribution toward the expansion of Islam if a Muslim
intellectual did no more than quietly demonstrate that one can be a successful
academic and simultaneously, a convinced and practicing Muslim. The importance
of this is witnessed by a common reaction that myself and other Muslim reverts
receive: "How can one of us, obviously well educated
and not stupid, opt for that religion!"
Twelfth Assumption: Islam will become the dominant
religion of the 21st century. If my eleven assumptions are correct,
my final assumption is that, Allah willing, thanks to the impact of Muslim
intellectuals, Islam may well become the dominant religion of the 21st
century, at least in North America and parts of Europe, with enormous
repercussions on the rest of the globe.
Posted November 15, 2003. This article was
printed in the September/October 2003 issue of "Islamic Horizons"