3: POST-FORMATIVE DEVELOPMENTS IN ISLAM
In Chapter 2 entitled "Sunnah and Hadith”l we treated of the emergence of the Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jama'ah.
We underlined there the most fundamental characteristic of the Ahl al-Sunnah in its genesis as consisting in an effort to synthesize extremes, to stabilize and stick to the middle path. It was undoubtedly this activity that saved the Community from evaporation and, both for its consolidation and progress, it was absolutely essential that this basic impulse of Tasannun should remain alive. When, however, Sunni Islam (i.e. the religious-political attitudes of the middle-of-the-road majority) had received an explicitly formulated content and an "orthodoxy", in a narrower sense of the term, had come into existence through the progressive formulation and elaboration of the Hadith and the legal system (both of which went hand in hand) - as shown in the last chapter - a remarkable social equilibrium and cohesion was achieved. There may have been religious societies before - and there was certainly Judaism - which achieved a tremendous degree of cohesion. But Judaism was not and is not a universal brotherhood: it is not based on any idealism, for idealism, when notUniversalized
, becomes sheer moral mockery. Buddhism and Chistianity were the two great universalistic movements, but to develop a social fabric on a positively religiously (i.e. idealistically) constituted basis seems to have been none of their concerns. Islam is the first actual movement known to history, that has taken society seriously and history meaningfully because it perceived that the betterment of this world was not a hopeless task nor just a pis aller but a task in which God and man are involved together. In the post-Islamic era, it is only Communism that has expressly and systematically set: out to mould history. But Communism, being an extreme form of modern Western humanism, and believing in the utterest relativism of values, substituted for the spiritual tyranny of the self-styled vicars of God, the naked tyranny of man over man. The example of Communism (the creed whose deflation is Occurring’ before our. own eyes) brings home to us the Islamic lesson that; whereas the betterment of this world and man stands at the very centre of the Divine interest, the positive relationship between man and man - i.e.
Society - requires the trans-human reference to God.
To Revert to Islamic history.
After the perfection of an elaborate theological, legal, political and social system, the equilibrium and consolidation that ensued created tremendous effulgence in the intellectual spiritual, scientific and generally in all the cultural idles. It is certainly not within; the scope of the present study to portray the results of this cultural exuberance and creativity which it is the rightful and ardent desire of the reawakened Muslim to recapture. What we wish to essay in the following is to prove that although the social equilibrium achieved did bestow an extraordinary fecundity and creativity on the Muslim civilization, nevertheless, this phenomenal growth was relatively short-lived because the content of this structure was invested with a halo of sacredness and exchangeability since it came to be looked upon as uniquely deducible from the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunnah. The growth and flowering of Islamic culture was, therefore, stifled at its very roots and almost at the very moment when it began to blossom. This is because the actual content of the interpretation of the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunnah, the content which we described in the previous chapters as the "living sunnah", ceased to be living sunnah, i.e., an on-going process and came to be regarded as the unique incarnation of the Will of God.
In the previous chapter we described the genesis of some of the important political, theological and moral doctrines and showed how these doctrines,Which
had originated in the"living sunnah"as a product of Islamic history acting on the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunnah, were transformed, through the medium of the Hadith, into immutable articles of Faith. Now we shall study in somewhat closer detail the workings of the same doctrine-content after it had been so transformed and what produce this had on the future of the Community. For the sake of convenience, we shall divide our enquiry into certain major fields. It should again be borne in mind that no attempt has been made for an exhaustive historical survey of these fields but shall confine ourselves to certain pertinent observations as to how the Muslim activity in these fields affected and was affected by the doctrine-content formulated through the medium of the Hadith.
THE POLITICAL ORDER
In Chapter 2 we briefly hinted at the causes that shaped the political attitudes of the vast body of the Muslims as distinguished from the Kharijites and the Shiah. Indeed, it is the emergence of these sects and their political activity, especially that of the Kharijites, that supplied Sunnism with its political content. At the outset, the Sunnis certainly mediated between the two extremes at least at the doctrinal level. Instead of the Shi'i legitimist claims, they successfully insisted on the Ijma' of the Community and its representative chief executive, the Caliph, who was, in theory, deposable. But against the Khariji rebellions and, especially, in face of the actual civil wars, the Sunnis, i.e. the majority of the Community, accentuated the idea of laissez faire and an abstention from politics. Doctrines of submissiveness to the de facto authority were given tremendous weight and in the last chapter we quoted Hadith that advocates absolute pacifism and even total isolationism has been quoted. There is little doubt that the original impulse behind all such doctrines and their protective Hadith is the common-sense principle that any law is better than lawlessness, but once the doctrine was given out and accepted as guaranteed by the Prophetic authority, it became part of the permanent furniture of Sunni Belief - the Sunnis had, for ever, become the king's party, almost any king.
Even so, the doctrine of purely political pacifism, if it had not come to be supported by certain other powerful moral and spiritual factors, might not have resulted in a simple acceptance of political opportunism. Unfortunately, however, certain other developments took place which, in course of time, came to have the effect of advocating not only political but even moral passivity. Here attention is drawn specifically to the doctrine that a person who professes "there is no god but God" enters paradise "even though he commits adultery or theft". This formula, couched in the form of a very famous Hadith
was, in the beginning, undoubtedly designed to provide a kind of a legal definition of a Muslim and to save the Community from dogmatic civil wars. But once it was accepted not only as a legal definition but also as a constituent of the substance of the creed, its actual effect was bound to be in favor of moral apathy, despite a good deal of Hadith to the contrary which could, however, never revoke the Hadith in question. The truth is that a considerable part of external solidarity of the Community was achieved at the expense of the inner density of the faith. No community can, of course, remain without the watchful guardians of its conscience, and Sunni Islam has never been without men of acute faith and conscience, who have risked and even given their lives in protest against compromises, but the fact remains - and remains fundamentally important in the history of Islam - that a combination of a deliberately cultivated political docility and a general moral passivity not only made political opportunism possible but seemed to bestow upon it a doctrinal rectitude.
The Kharijites got themselves crushed out and obliterated for all practical purposes in a long and protracted series of open and bloody conflicts with the state and the Community in general. The Shi'ah, which after its initial phase of a purely political legitimism, functioned for a time as a movement of socio-cultural protest and reform within Islam, went underground during the second and the third centuries and under suppressive pressure from without, adopted subversive tactics. When they re-emerged on the scene, especially in the form of the politically successful Isma'ili movement, they had become transformed beyond recognition by a theological structure at the centre of which stands the doctrine of Imamalogy - a clear and unmistakable influence of Gnostic-Christian ideas (that had been pushed down into a subterranean life by the force of the developing Islamic ideology) - and distinguished by the isolationist doctrine of the Taqiyah. Instead of resuming life as a healthy criticism and a constructive opposition within the broad framework of the twin principles of Ijtihad-Ijma', Shi'ism was now pressed into quite different channels: substituting for Ijma' the theoretical guidance of the infallible Imam. On the moral plane, as we shall show, Shi'ism did seek to keep certain healthier principles alive so far as the freedom and responsibility of the human will is concerned, but at the political and theological planes (which had also obvious and direct moral implications of fundamental importance), Shi'ism seemed to reach a point of no-return. Indeed, one most striking fact - a fact which no Muslim caring for a genuine reconstruction of Muslim society with a progressive content can ever afford to ignore - about the religious history of Islam is that Islam has always been subjected to extremisms, not only political but theological and moral as well. The Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jama'ah whose very genesis had been on an assumed plea of moderation, mediation and synthesis - which is an on-going process - and who, indeed, actually functioned as such a force in the earlystages,
themselves became, after the content of their system had fully developed, authoritarian, rigid and intolerant. Instead of continuing to be a synthesizing and absorbing force they became transformed into a party-among-parties with all its rejecting and exclusivist attitudes.
It took time, however, for the absolutely pacifistic attitudes of Sunnism to harden. At the time of the downfall of the Umayyad and the establishment of the 'Abbasids, the state of affairs was naturally still very liquid. Ibn al-Muqafa' (second quarter of the second century) complains that Muslims largely suffer from political extremism, one party contending that the political authority must be upset if it disobeys God or, rather, if it seeks to implement what constitutes disobedience to God, while the other party contends that the political authority must be placed by definition, as it were, beyond criticism, Ibn al-Muqafa' roundly dismisses the second group. With the first group he agrees that(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
"there is no obedience (to the ruler) in disobedience of God," but he pointedly asks, if anybody is to be obeyed in righteousness, including the political authority, and if everybody is to be disobeyed, including the political authority, in what is deemed to be not righteousness, then what is the difference between the.Political authority and non-authority?
How can, therefore, any political authority, worthy of the name,survive ?
Ibn al-Muqafa', therefore, suggests that while the dictum itself is correct, it is used as a camouflage for sedition and rebellion and, further, that whatever any particular group thinks to be the correct interpretation of the obedience or disobedience to God, it seeks to impose it on others by attempting to seize the political machinery.
It is to be remarked that Ibn al-Muqafa', while stating the view of both political extremes, does not refer to any Hadith or even alleged Hadith, either on the side of rebellions or absolute pacifism. And, indeed, no such Hadith is contained either in the Muwatta of Malik or the Athar of Abu Yusuf two eminent men of the second century. Ibn al-Muqafa certainly assumes that the state stands under the moral norms of Islam, but he insists that, in judging whether a particular state is so conforming or not, all contending groups must exercise that robust, healthy and constructive common sense which Islam did so much to inculcate and that, above all, the integrity of the Community and the stability of the state must never be lost sight of. We do not deny that pacifist Hadith was there: indeed, our analysis of the political Hadith in the last chapter has clearly shown that this Hadith was proved by Kharijism. What we are saying is that neither Ibn al-Muqafa' nor Malik nor yet Abu Yusuf makes any reference to such Hadith.
But the collectors of Hadith during the third Century zealously collected pacifist Hadith and, at the political level, pacifism henceforward is permanently erected into the dogmatic structure of Islam. A Muslim, from now on, does not possess the right of political resistance - that is to say, not only actually, but even formally and theoretically. Many students of Muslim political history and theory - both Westerners and Muslim Modernists - have postulated an increasing influence on Islam ofold
Iranian ideas of kingship, where kings were regarded as sacred and inviolate. This story does not seem true. It is true that the political authority was vested with a quasi-inviolate character and later also expressions like "the shadow of God" are used, even by the orthodox - e.g., by Ibn Taymiyah.
But when the orthodoxy contends that "even an unjust ruler ought to be obeyed" and that(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
"the Sultan is the shadow of God," we get the apparently strange result that "even an unjust ruler is the shadow of God". Since by no stretch of imagination can this extreme construction be literally attributed to orthodoxy - least of all to a man like Ibn Taymiyah, the only meaning we can attach to the phrase "shadow of God" is that of a rallying point and a guarantee for security. And when we look at the earlier insistence of the orthodoxy, couched in Hadith form,(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
to keep to the majority of the Muslims and their political authority," the meaning becomes absolutely clear. No metaphysical implications, therefore, of the Old Iranian or other equivalent doctrine of ruler ship may be read into this dictum.
However, a closer reflection will reveal that a total conformism and pacifism, no matter through what noble purpose motivated, is completely self-defeating, for it inculcates political passivity and indifference and, subsequently, a fatal sense of suspicion against the government. And this is exactly what happened in Islam. If the maintenance of the solidarity of the Community was an overall objective - as, indeed, it was and should have been - then, to ensure political stability, adequate political institutions should have been erected. The Shura, e.g., could have been developed into an effective and permanent organization. But nothing like this was achieved. The 'Ulama' continued, on the one hand, to strenuously advocate absolute obedience (and this was their concession to realism) and, on the other, to draw perfectionist pictures of an ideal caliph (which was of course a statement of idealism). There seemed no bridge between the two and whenever there is an unabridged (also seemingly unbridgeable) gap between the ideal and the real, cynicism, that most destructive poison for anysociety,
is an inevitable result. Political opportunism, which, to some extent, exists in all societies, becomes, under such cynical attitudes, the hallmark of political life.
The ground was thus prepared and justification supplied for visitation of the Muslim world from the fourth century onward by sultan after sultan and amir after amir. The decrepitude of the Baghdad Caliphate was hastened. These de facto rulers, mostly men of tremendous initiative, ability and cynical wisdom, turned, with the help of the doctrine of predeterminism (whose effects also we shall portray presently), the very principle which had fired the Khariji fanaticism, upside down: "Rule belongs to God alone (in-i'l-hukmu ilia li'llah, Qumran, VI: 57)" came to be construed as meaning that whatever political authority had come to be constituted, was so constituted through the Divine will. Amirs would rise with their mercenary hordes and make a clean sweep of vast territories, but the Muslims could do nothing -nothing, that is to say, religiously except to obey.
Under political opportunism, unstable rule is the order, stability a pure accident. This led to unsettled conditions. Destruction of property, especially urban property, is great during continuous political shifts and military movements. The Muslim urban life, during the later Middle Ages of Islam, was devastated. Since every new adventurer had to pay his soldiery and put some money in the treasury, people were heavily taxed, especially, in the first centuries of this type of political unsettlement, the urban population - the professional classes and more particularly the commercial classes. Ibn Khaldun tells us how big cities could be devastated by the whirlwinds of change in despotic rule.' Later on, when cities could no longer support the heavy taxation, the burden had to be borne by the peasantry which was, in course of time, reduced to the direst poverty. It is this heavy taxation against which Shah Wali Allah of Delhi also recorded his vigorous protest in the eighteenth century and called it anti-Islamic, since this taxation was not used for the welfare and the development of the people but to satisfy the primitive and satisfy impulses of the aristocracy.
When professional classes weaken and commerce declines in the cities, the ground beneath any cultural development worthy of the name is removed. The existence of a robust middle class is absolutely essential for any cultural development - spiritual, intellectual or artistic. We do not, of course, say that the political instability described above and unwittingly, though indirectly supported by the religious attitudes inculcated by the orthodoxy, was the only reason for the deterioration of the Islamic civilization. But we do say that it was both an extremely important factor and a major symptom of deterioration. The middle class that was produced by the equilibrium achieved after the first two centuries or so resulted in a brilliant civilization at all levels. It was intellectually and scientifically the torch-bearer of humanity; in arts its effulgence produced unrivalled masterpieces, especially in architecture and poetry: and in religious leadership, of course, it was unique. But this extraordinary creativity could not be sustained for a long enough time with a strong enough impetus to take deeper roots in society.
In political theory, then, the orthodoxy of the two political extremes, adopted the extreme of absolute obedience and conformism. (This does not and need notDeny
the fact that some exceptional religious leaders sometimes courageously withstood what they considered to be unrighteous commands of rulers.) This it did originally to preserve the integrity and safety of the Community. But the doctrine has been retained as a feature of orthodoxy even until today, long after the original needs have passed and even forgotten by the orthodoxy itself. That is to say, a genuine historical need was erected into a kind of dogma, with serious results for the politico-social Ethic of the Muslim society in the later middle Ages, where it encouraged political opportunism on the one hand and generally inculcated political apathy among the people on the other. What is imperatively required is a healthy interest in the state and a constructive criticism of the government affairs, keeping in view the overriding need of the integrity of the Community and the stability of the state.
II: THE MORAL PRINCIPLES
The same story is repeated at the moral plane on the fundamental question of human freedom and accountability. The Qur'an and the Prophet's behavior had provided an adequate framework to ensure (i) the maximum of creative human energy and (ii) the keeping of this human creativity on the right moral track. The Qur'an vividly and forcefully emphasized all those tensions that are necessary for this purpose.
It severely warned against those nihilist trends which lead man to regard himself as law unto himself and are summed up in the pregnant term "takabbur" and called upon him to submit himself to the moral law. On the other hand, it raised genuine optimism to the maximum, condemned hopelessness as one of the gravest errors, charged man with limitless potentialities and made him squarely responsible for discharging this "trust". The Qur'an is not interested in a discussion of the problem of the "freedom of the human will" or "determinism" but, on the basis of a true appreciation of the human nature, in releasing to the maximum the creative moral energy of man. The Prophet, in his deeds and sayings, was an actual paradigm of this attitude and the response he evoked from his Companions was nothing essentially otherwise.
About a century, however, after the Prophet's death, this practical moral bent gave way to fierce speculation on the problem. Every religion has, at some stage, to formulate theologically its implicit world-view, but unfortunately in the intellectual developments in Islam during the second and the third centuries a situation was created where each of the two major contending groups - the Mu'tazilah and their opponents - found themselves developing in the abstract only one term of the concrete moral tension strongly advocated by the Qur'an In order to raise the moral creativity of men, the Qur'an had emphasized the potentialities and the accountability of man - and the strict justice of God. The Mu'tazilah asserted this point and this point only, so that they became irretrievable prisoners of their own position. But in order to assert the absolute supremacy of the moral law, the Qur'an had equally emphatically stressed the Power, will and Majesty of God. The religious opponents of the Mu'tazilah, in whose eyes the latter were denuding God of all godhead and substituting a naked humanism for the essentials of religion, in their turn, accentuated the Will and Power of God only, so much so that they became mortgaged to this doctrine totally and irrevocably and, in course of time, erected determinism into an unalterable part of the orthodox creed. The "orthodoxy" was thus once again maneuvered into an extreme position. In place of the living, concrete and synthetic moral tension of the Quran and the Prophetic Sunnah we have again a conflict of pure and naked extremes. What the "orthodoxy" did was essentially to take the latter of these two extremes and instal it into its dogmatic structure. Or, rather, the "orthodoxy" came into existence on the very plea and with the very programmed of installing the omnipotence of God and impotence of man into a dogma.
In Chapter 2 attention has been drawn to the pre deterministic Hadith of the Ahl al-Sunnah and also to the opposite hadith and the terrific preponderance of the former over the latter has been pointed out. It has also been briefly hinted at the situation that forced such a formulation of Hadith. This is not the place to trace the origin and development of this problem in Islam but, as said in the last chapter, its beginnings are connected with the problem of how faith is related to acts and with the definition of a Muslim. The Umayyad state had favored determinism, for they feared that a stress on human freedom and initiative might unseat them. The doctrine that faith must be regarded as essentially independent of acts and that Acts must be judged leniently also well suited an attitude of mind that favored determinism. The doctrine of the essential independence of faith vis-à-vis acts was regarded by the majority of the Community as a necessary defense against Kharijism and was adopted in a modified form. In itself, this doctrine was harmless, indeed, necessary provided it was fully understood that it was designed to provide only an external, legal definition of a Muslim and did not describe the content of Islam as such. This unfortunately was not kept in view and the doctrine of the independence of faith of works was allowed to become not merely a formal but a real definition of a Muslim. This was undoubtedly the result of exasperation against Kharijism and other internal disputes, but it was an extreme and, in the long run, a morally suicidal measure: it was almost an exact Muslim replica of the Christian doctrine of "Justification by Faith".
This attitude of mind was bound to result in an undue easing of the religious conscience which obviously lowers the moral tension and proportionately the moral standards. Undoubtedly, there is much other Hadith that seeks to establish a positive relationship between faith and acts, between the inner state of the moral agent and its outward expression, and in the previous chapter we have also cited such Hadith. But the kind of function that the first type of Hadith was called upon to perform was definitive and, as has been just observed, its defining character was not only formal and external and, therefore, purely legal but came to be regarded as essential, i.e., it denied the essence of Islam. Its very status, therefore, conferred upon it incorrigibility, i.e. an inherent capacity for not being effectively counteracted, no matter how much emphasis is laid on the opposite, complimentary point of view, which was undoubtedly done.
But this was not all. For the orthodoxy, as we have just seen, was also compelled by the actual situation created by the Khawarij and the Mu'tazilah, especially the latter, to assert uncompromisingly the Will and Power of God in a way where they felt duty bound to rob man of all potency. As recent historical research has revealed, the Mu'tazilah were a group of Muslim intellectuals who, in an arena of great ideological conflict in the Middle East in the early centuries of Islam, had successfully defended Islam against Gnosticism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. They were no mere intellectual idlers. One of the weapons with which they had defended Islam was the doctrine of human free-will and responsibility. This doctrine they had undoubtedly derived from the Qur'an and had then sought to formulate it in terms of the current stock of philosophical ideas of Greek origin. Their intellectual tools were, however, not sufficient (any more than were those of people they were opposing outside Islam). In their actual formulations, therefore, they came to express human freedom in a way which smacked of being clearly humanistic and seemed to rob God of His godhead.
But the solution proposed and finally adopted by the orthodoxy suffered from the same disadvantage. It represented the other extreme, and when combined with the orthodox position on the question of the relationship of faith and behavior outlined above, it constituted a terribly powerful bulwark against the spiritual-moral attitude behind human initiative and creativity. Whereas in the hands of Ibn Hanbal the emphasis on the Power and Majesty of God was a simple assertion of the religious impulse, the later theologians like al-Ash'ari, al-Maturidi and especially their successors transformed it into a full-fledged theological doctrine. But their intellectual tools were no better than those of the Mu'tazilah and thus the doctrine developed one-sidedly in favor of determinism. A little later, during the fourth and the fifth centuries, the Muslim philosophers, being pure rationalists, developed determinism still further and, by an identification of causal, rational and theistic forms of determinism, produced a truly imposing deterministic structure of the universe - and of man.
The theologians, who were otherwise opposed to the teachings of the philosophers, were nevertheless not slow in availing themselves of the vast arsenal of the philosophical stock of ideas in favor of determinism, the only element rejected by them in this connection being rationalism. During the sixth century, the famous and influential theologian, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606) was a theistic predestination of a truly frightening order. For the sake of illustration, one of his highly skilful arguments advanced against human potency may be noted here. He argues
:
(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
that
in order to be able to act, the would-be agent must know exactly what he is doing ; otherwise he cannot be said to 'act'. But in order to know exactly what I am doing, e.g., when I am said to move my finger, I must know the consequences of this act. But when I move my finger, an infinite series of motions is initiated (both in my body and outside it) which I can never possibly know. I cannot, therefore, be said even to be able to move my finger. The motion of my finger is, therefore, an event which is created by God, or, rather, God had created it in eternity in His infinite Wisdom and Knowledge.
Most Sufi theosophs carried the doctrine to much greater lengths and, in fact, transformed it completely under their utterly monistic world-view: instead of saying, "Every act or occurrence is created by God," they ended up by saying, "Every act or occurrence is God" through the intermediate statement, "Every act or occurrence is a manifestation of God". Not only was there no agent besides God, there was justnothing
besides Him. The effects of this development on the moral texture of the Community shall deal with a little more fully in the next section. The fact is that the chief property of the spiritual and intellectual life of the Muslims approximately from the seventh century onward is fatalism and the moral-psychological attitude that goes with it. We do not deny the obvious fact that the Muslim normally went on working for his living - e.g., a peasant tilled his land and did not sit down in the conviction that if God had pre-written that his crop should grow then he had to do nothing.
But what we do say is, and this is, surely, the problem here at the practical level, that the Muslim's initiative, intellectually and physically, became severely proscribed until it was almost numbed.
Thus, we see once again that a particular extreme solution, designed for a particular extreme ailment at a particular juncture of Islamic religious history, became a permanent feature of the orthodox content of Islam, and, further, that this extreme solution became extremer and extremer as century after century passed. Ibn Taymiyah (d. 728), in his critique of Muslim extremists on this very point wrote:
(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
"It ought to be known that on this point many groups of theologians and Sufis have erred and have adopted a position which is, actually, worse than that of the Mu'tazilah and other upholders of the freedom of the will (which the theologians and Sufis had sought to remedy).
For, the upholders of the freedom of the will (at least)emphasize
the Command (of God, i.e. the moral imperative) . and command good and forbid evil. But they were misled on the question of Divine Omnipotence and thought that the affirmation of a Universal Divine Will and Power would rob God of Justice and Wisdom - but they were mistaken. These were then confronted by a number of 'Ulama (i.e. of the Orthodoxy), pious men and theologians and Sufis who affirmed the absolute Power of God . which was so far so good. But they let go the side of command and prohibition (i.e. the moral side) . and became like those Associationists (Mushrikun) who (as the Qur'an informs us) told the Prophet 'If God had so willed, we would not Have committed shirk Therefore, although The Mu'tazilah did resemble the Zoroastrians in so far as they affirmed an agent other than God for what they believed to be evil this other group resembled the Associationists (Mushrikun), who are much worse than the Zoroastrians."
The two great reformers of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi of seventeenth century and Shah Waliy Allah of the eighteenth century, also made this a fundamental point in their attempts at a reconstruction of the spiritual and moral foundations of the Community. Since, however, their endeavors on the problem are related to Sufistic background, something will be said of them in the following section. But despite the influential voice of these reformers who were opposed in their own times - Ibn Taymiyah (who died in prison) and Sirhindi (who almost died in prison) having been especially bitterly opposed - it is abundantly evident from the foregoing brief sketch that the doctrine of predestination has been the rule in our life, the opposite has been the exception and the weight of this doctrine has been so great in all its manifestations that it has undoubtedly numbed the initiative of the Community as a whole. Apart from the Kharijites.and the Mu'tazilah, both of which groups became extinct in Islamic history, the Shi'ah were the only major group that insisted on freedom of the human will in its creed. But this item of creed has been rendered practically ineffectual and defunct in Shi'ism itself because Shi'ism completely disregarded the majority of the Community and chose to develop on its own lines and also because freedom of the will is rather pointless in an authoritarian system of Imamalogy and alongside of the doctrine of Taqiyah.
III: SPIRITUAL LIFE: SUFISM
We are not here concerned with the history of Sufism, much less with the entire content of Sufi Thought and practice but only with certain of its major features as they stand related to our present argument. This argument as it has built up so far says (1) that in order to face certain particular historical exigencies of an extreme nature, our orthodoxy was led, during its early, formative phase, to adopt certain more or less extreme remedialmeasures ;
but (2) that since the door of re-thinking (Ijtihad) was closed ; after this period, these early measures became part of the permanent content of our orthodox structure. It has been endeavored to demonstrate that in the politico-social sphere and, more particularly at the moral plane, the combined effects of some of the doctrines regarded as fundamental by our orthodoxy did have, and could not fail to have, disastrous consequences for the moral constitution of the Community; its political attitude was a strong contributory cause of inducing political cynicism which is so patently evident in our political life; its moral emphases could lead only to pessimism. Where cynicism and pessimism are allowed to grow, life itself revolts and seeks other avenues of self-expression and self-fulfillment - healthy or not-so-healthy. We shall now briefly try to establish two points: (a) that Sufism, in the beginning, was a moral spiritual protest against certain developments of politico-doctrinal nature within the Community; but (b) That after things ossified in the manner described above, Sufism took over as a movement of popular religion and from the sixth-seventh centuries (twelfth thirteenth centuries of the Christian era) established itself with its peculiar ethos not only as a religion within religion but as a religion above religion.
It must be repeated that we are not here concerned with analyzing the content of Sufism historically and tracing its elements to foreign sources. It need not be denied and, indeed, it is convinced that the Sufi Movement came under certain fundamental influences from without, especially in its later stages of development. Nor is this in itself bad: every movement assimilates elements that come its way in the course of its expansion. But we are here concerned strictly with a functional enquiry: the overall build-up, operation and legacy of Sufism within Islam.
That among the Companions of the Prophet there must have been those whose natural bent of mind was more towards contemplation and introversion should, we submit, be accepted even though later Sufi assertions about Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, Abu Hurayrah and others may not be acceptable as historical truth.
But the emphasis of such Companions on inner life and devotion could not have constituted a "way of life" independent of the society building ethos of the Community at large - on the contrary, it must have helped deepen the moral consciousness involved in that ethos, as, indeed, was the case pre-eminently with the Prophet himself whose religious experience itself issued out in the form of the Islamic movement. It would be a simple oddity to attribute to any one of the Companions anything like, say, the ecstasies of an Abu Yazid al-Bistami or the theosophic lyrics of an Ibn 'Arabi. But a little later a vigorous movement of asceticism gets underway and is in full swing during the second century. The great name of Hasan al-Basri is also associated with it. It is essentially a moral movement, emphasizing and re-emphasizing the exteriorization, deepening and purification of the moral motive and warning man of the awful responsibility that life lays on his shoulders. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with this for the Qur'an and the Prophet fully supports it. But unfortunately as this movement proceeded, it exhibited all the symptoms of an extreme reaction. It developed a one-sided Zuhd, an excessive preoccupation with world-negation, an uninterested spirituality and then gradually a formal system of moral gymnastics. This certainly could not be supported by; indeed it ran directly counter to, the Qur'an and the Sunnah. For the Qur'an and the Sunnah had called upon Muslims to forgo comfort and, if necessary, property "in the Path of Allah" i.e., to build something higher and positive - a socio-moral order. But the new Zuhd taught the Muslim not to possess anything; you obviously cannot forgo or spend anything which you do not possess. As for the "Path of Allah", its Sufi interpretation soon unfolded itself as we shall presently see. What had happened?
It seems that this phenomenon can be adequately understood only as a severe and extreme reaction to certain developments within Islam. The first of these developments is the breakdown of effective political leadership and authority after 'Ali, when, under chaotic conditions, the early Umayyads, the Khawarij, the Shi'ah, the partisans of 'Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr and others put forward their warring claims. The most important positive idea that took birth at this juncture was that of the "integral Community" or Jama'ah which we discussed in the previous chapter. But another strong sentiment that asserted itself and inadvertently sought to negate the very idea of Jama'ah is emphatically individualistic and isolationist in character. We also alluded to this in Chapter 2 and pointed to the considerable isolationist Hadith that came into circulation in this connection - Hadith that asks every individual to "mind his own business" and not to "take part in the affairs of the public," i.e. politics and government. In this connection a Hadith which we quoted from al-Bukhari's Sahih recommending retirement to a mountain-pass and "leaving people alone" is specially recalled. Indeed, the entire body of that Hadith which lies commonly diffused in our Hadith Collections and which, in slightly varying forms of language, defines a Muslim as -
(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
"one
from whose tongue and hands other Muslims are safe" is rooted in this very background of unbridled and irresponsible politics and civil wars. Sensitive Spirits could not have remained unaffected by these conditions; but the way they reacted was the advocacy of a withdrawal of the soul inward from the external world, after an initial period of Puritanism and asceticism. That there were already in the Middle East equivalent attitudes spread by other religions - notably Christianity and Buddhism - and that influences from these must have come into Islam at some stage, must be accepted. The problem, however, is; what prepared certain circles among the Muslims to accept such an attitude to life despite the Qur'an and theSunnah ?
Nor is this question really answered by stating what is essentially true, viz. that many of the new converts in the Fertile Crescent became Muslims more or less externally only and that inwardly they were either unable or unwilling to shed their previous spiritual make-up.For the question remains: why were these converts or their progenies even later not consolidated into a genuinely Islamic attitude to life?
- -on the contrary, the world-denying spirit becomes stronger with the passage of time.
Out of the failure of political life to meet adequately the proper inner aspirations of the people, Messianism developed rapidly in Islam. In one form, these Messianic hopes simply took over the doctrine of the "Second Advent" of Jesus, from Christianity. The orthodoxy in course of time adopted it. In another form, which seems to have taken birth in Shi’i Circles but came into Sunnism through the activity of early Sufis, these millennial aspirations are expressed in the doctrine of the Mahdi - the figure who will finally effect the victory of justice and Islam over tyranny and injustice. That this doctrine came into Islam through the Sufis is made certain by the fact that the beginnings of Sufism are clearly connected with the early popular preachers - known by various names - who used Messianism in their sermons to satisfy the politically disillusioned and morally starved masses. In the beginning, the two doctrines - that of the re-appearance of Jesus and that of the Mahdi - are quite distinct, since their historical sources are quite different, but later the two figures are brought together, although not entirely successfully.
What is important for us at present is the effect of this Messianism on the general morale of the Community. Of course Messianism is itself the result of a low pitch of morale as was the case with the Jews during their exile. But once accepted strictly, it accentuates hopelessness. Combined with other moral and material factors described before, it is exactly this hopelessness that was perpetuated by Mssianism in Islam. What it really amounts to is that history is declared to be irredeemable and a kind of hope or rather consolation is developed about something (the Mahdi or the Messiah) which although it pretends to be historical, has, nevertheless nothing to do with history but in reality with what might be called "trans-history". That is to say, what really matters is the consolation itself and not any historical fact. It is both interesting and highly instructive to note in this connection that in order to make room for a Messianic figure the earlier materials of Hadith itself were forced in a new direction. In Chapter 2 we have discussed a Hadith about Ijma' quoted by al-Shafi'i according to which the Prophet said:
(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
"Honour my Companions, then those who follow them and then those who follow these latter. Then falsehood will spread… “As we commented upon this Hadith, this is a clear attempt at declaring religiously authoritative the results of the activity of the first three generations of the Muslims - the "Companions," the "Successors" and the "Successors of the Successors". Now, this Hadith does not contain the slightest hint about Messianism. Later, however, other versions of the same Hadith become current, e.g.(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
The best generation is mine (khayr al-quruni qarni), then those who followthem ..
, etc."
These are then given a decidedly Messianic twist. This is because it must be accepted that history is going, and is bound to go, from bad to worse and is, indeed, doomed, if a Messiah is to come.
But Sufism could not remain content even with a "trans-historic" event when this became part of common doctrine. It enacted yet a diferent piece, this time not a trans-historic one but a purely spiritual, meta-historic one. It constructed an invisible hierarchy of "averting" saints with the "Pole" (Qutb) at its pinnacle. But for this ever-present hierarchy,' it taught, the whole universe would collapse. Again, we do not know exactly whether Shi’ism influenced Sufism or vice versa, but we do know that about the same time the Shi'i concept of the "absent (gha'ib) Imam" was being transformed theologically into that of a "hidden power" as opposed to the actual, visible political power which was in the hands of the Sunnis. This transformation was efected by extremer Shi'i sects. But in whichever direction the inluence lay, it is quite obvious that Sufism, through this doctrine, was efecting the withdrawal of the soul from the external world to an invisible realm, this withdrawal being not merely at the individual but at the collective level. This doctrine too, although it was never oficially accepted by the orthodoxy, gained wide recognition not only from the masses but even at the hands of the 'Ulama as the 'Ulama' slowly became helpless against, and began to succumb to Sufism.
This problem of the mutual relationship between the 'Ulama' and their activity on the one hand and the forces represented by the sufis on the other was the second fundamental factor, besides the political developments, in providing the real impetus to Sufism. Islam, as a texture of moral-social life, demanded its formulation in legal terms. The Prophet and the early leaders of Islam had laid the foundations of a legal pattern but the working out of this pattern into a system was achieved only later. Achieved it had to be, for the vastly increased needs of administration after expansion imperatively demanded this; and, in fact, the legal system of Islam was the first Islamic discipline to mature. But many people, to whom the inwardness and personalization of religion appeared as the very soul of religion, looked askance at this impersonal legal structure as an adequate expression of Islam. The lawyers, of course, had made every effort to keep the moral impulse alive in the law, so much so that a modern Western scholar has described this law as a "discussion on the duties of Muslims".
Nevertheless, law can regulate only the "externals". Who shall be the guardian of the inner tribunal of conscience in man if the 'Ulama's task was mainly to give legal decisions? The Sufis claimed to be precisely such people.
The 'Ulama' were naturally suspicious of this claim, for the guardianship of the conscience or the "heart", they rightly insisted, was not a matter open to inspection, and they warned against such an exclusive doctorship of the soul. But it is equally true that the 'Ulama' failed to diagnose the real source of strength behind the Sufi protests and claims; they ought to have attempted to integrate into the orthodox structure itself what Sufism fundamentally stood for the life of the heart in so far as it makes human personality truly moral. The 'Ulama" did not do so, but it was probably under their and similar criticisms of the utter privacy and lawlessness of the early sufi procedure that the Sufis began to systematize their experiences in terms of what are called "Stations (Maqamat)" ;
a moral-spiritual itinerary of the soul beginning usually with "repentance (Tawbah)" which in sufi terminology means renunciation of the world. But thesufi
method did not remain purely moral for long but gradually became submerged under the ideal of ecstasy and the results were not just moral puriication but rather tall Sufi claims which became very frequent and improper and were called "Shatahat". These, indeed, ran exactly counter to the very ideal of moral puriication and, in fact, one of the great representatives of the Sufi movement, Mansor al-Hallaj (i.e. a wool-carder), had to pay with his life at the beginning of the fourth century.
The 'Ulama' certainly could not be expected to share this particular goal of the sufis - an ecstatic obliteration of the self. But things did not stop there. Soon after the Fiqh systems, the Muslims developed the science of Kalam or theology as a necessary weapon to defend Islam on the arena of warring ideologies. Exactly as a parallel to this, the Sufis now claimed not only an inner path of "purification" or even ecstasy but a unique way of inner knowledge, a gnose-ma'rifah, which they radically opposed to the reason of the rationalists and the 'Un of the 'Ulama', this latter being bound up inform with the former. The 'Ulama' again failed to recognize the genuine element in the Sufi claim. They rightly pointed out that thesufi
Ma'rifah was condemned to privacy and that each man's Ma'rifah would be his own. But what was needed was an adequate framework which would rehabilitate the Sufi "intuition" into reason by bringing out the true nature of the latter as both perceptive and formulative. In this way, the Sufi "intuition" should have been made chargeable with publicity, so to say, and accountable to true reason, as must be the case in the nature of things.
As it was, however, the 'Ulama' failed to do so, while the attempts of some of the sober and orthodox sufis to devise a set of antithetical and complementary categories
to do justice both to the fact of inner experience and its outward testing and formulation did not actually prove adequate and did not bear much fruit until a person of the originality and perception of Shaykh, Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1035/1625) appeared.
By that time a terrible fundamental damage had already been done. But before things came to this pass, Islam had witnessed a profound attempt at reformation and integration of the spiritual and the formal elements in Muslim life, an attempt which truly activated, for a time, the forces of inner regeneration in the Muslim Community. This was the work of al-Ghazali (d. 606/1111). He told the 'Ulama in clear terms that, unless reinvested with fresh meaning, their theology and law - although to be respected - must remain an. empty shell: on the other hand, he forcefully tried to bring home to the Sufi that his experiences could not be allowed to wander and that the content of these experiences must submit to a test other than the experience itself, viz. the values of Islam.
But barely a century after al-Ghazali, about the time whensufism
becomes a mass phenomenon, Ibn 'Arabi (d. 638/1240) and after him his followers, develop a doctrine that is out and out pantheistic and issue it in the name of mystic intuition. As we have also pointed out in another place,
this theosophic sufism was nothing more or less than pure philosophy masquerading under the name of sufism - a movement which had begun with the ideal of moral ediication. The fact is that philosophy, after it had been attacked by al-Ghazali, went underground and reappeared in the name of theosophic intuitionism. The pantheistic content of this theosophy apart, the greatest disservice that it did to the intellectual life of the Community was the sharp cleavage it made between what it called "Reason" and "Kashf" and claimed the latter for itself in order to seek security under its supposedly unassailable citadel whereas "Reason" was declared to be absolutely fallible. Now, whenever the organic relationship between perceptive and formulative reason is thus cut in a society, it can never hope to keep alive any intellectual tradition of a high calibre.
As for the doctrine of pantheism, there can be no doubt about its nihilistic effects upon the moral tension of the ego. So long as pantheism remains a purely intellectual afair, it does; not matter very much religiously; and at the intellectual level it may be opposed by other theories. But once it grips the moral fibre of a society as it did affect the Sufis generally in the later Muslim Middle Ages and, through them, the masses it cannot fail to sap it. When one sings with 'Iraqi:
"When He divulged His secret Himself, Why should He blame poor ‘Iraqi?”
or says with the formulator of the famous aphorism : 'He Himself is the jug, Himself the jug-maker, and Himself the jug-clay'(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
, one has given up the very idea of the moral struggle and cannot but proclaim, and proclaim seriously with all its consequences, "All is He (hamah ust)".
It is against this moral degeneration originating from pantheism that certain valiant spirits fought with a considerable and increasing success among the educated classes of Muslims from Ibn Taymiyah in the fourteenth century to Muhammad Iqbal in the twentieth. Ibn Taymiyah's virulent campaign against pantheistic sufism is well known, although it is a seious error,
commonly committed, to regard him as an enemy of all expressions of sufism. But the most brilliant analysis of the various types of pantheism and its most acute criticism from an ethical standpoint was the achievement of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (Mujaddid-i Alf-i Thani). His work demonstrates, through a genuine dialectic of religious experience, the true organic nature of the inner experience and the reality of the external world, necessitating a subsumption of the former to the latter, of the intuitive perception to the moral order. Sirhindi thereby proved the supreme status of Shari'ah the moral command of God. A century and a half later, Shah Waliy Allah of Delhi gave a new solution by accepting the premises of Ibn 'Arabi but by reinstating at the same time the full reality of the moral order within this framework.
Despite the eforts of these few outstanding personalities, however, Sufism, as a vehement expression of popular religion, has reigned supreme in Islam. The truth is that since the twelfth century since the establishment of the popular Sufi orders or Tariqahs - mass religion, surcharged with primitive emotionalism, expressing itself through systematic techniques of suggestion and auto-suggestion and both supporting and supported by veritable congeries of superstitions, swamped Islam from the one end of the world to the other. Where is the efort to build a moral-social order on earth - the unmistakable stand of pristine Islam? Instead, we have the Shaykh and his authority, an endless mythology of saints, miracles, and tombs, hypnotization and self-hypnotization and, indeed, crass charlatanism and sheer exploitation of the poor and the ignorant.
Sufism, at bottom, undoubtedly speaks to certain fundamental religious needs of man. What is required is to discern these necessary elements, to disentangle them from the emotional and sociological debris and to reintegrate them into a uniform, "integral" Islam. Since Ijtihad and Ijma' - the effective framework of Islamic thinking - came to an early stop, the inner integrity of Islam was destroyed, each element forcing its own way out in a direction it pleased or happened to take and thus parallel, indeed mutually opposed "Islams" developed throughout the later centuries. We have briefly seen above the main course that Sufistic Islam took and why. We shall next discuss the philosophical movement and the system of education and then attempt to draw certain overall conclusions.
IV: THE PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT
The philosophical movement in Islam, whose fruits constitute one of the richest treasures of the Islamic intellectual culture and whose influence on the Western thought was so deep, palpable and enduring, was a continuity of the Mu'tazilites' experiences of rationalistic thinking duing the second, third and the fourth centuries. The first great Muslim philosopher, al-Kindl (d. circa 260/873) had undoubtedly a Mu'tazilah background. The Mu'tazilah rationalism, however, can hardly be described as purely philosophical for in its main scope it was confined to theological problems. They were, e.g. keenly interested in the problem of free-will but the centre of gravity of their thought was not this problem philosophically or absolutely speaking but largely in so far as it affected the concept of God, i.e., whether free-will was or was not compatible with the idea of a Just God.
With the philosophers a wholly new era of Muslim civilization opens and one of the most billiant chapters of all human thought as well. Free, absolutely free, activity of human reason extends its' field at once to all corners of existence and life. It studies unfettered analyses and judges the data of all the physical, biological and human sciences. The Muslim philosophers include in their philosophical works, treatises on movement and space, the soul, the plants and the animals, astronomy, mathematics, music, and metaphysics. Very often a philosopher is also a great doctor and a scientist like al-Razi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. The physical sciences treated of by the philosophers - unless they happen to be experimental scientists also - are not, strictly speaking, "scientiic" but rather philosophical. None the less, their works even in these fields are masterpieces of fine, speculative and strictly logical reasoning and they accepted whatever conclusions seemed to follow from this rational activity. Our concern just now, however, is only with that part of their teaching which impinges directly on religion and therefore interacted at points violently with the orthodox creed with tragic results immediately for philosophy but in the long run for orthodoxy itself. Let us turn at once to the religious aspects of the philosopher's thought.
The most fundamental fact about the religious thought of the philosophers - especially Ibn Sina whose doctrines have been historically the most important (because they were for the first time elaborated into a full-fledged system) - is that on all the points where the frontiers of religion and rational thought met, the two neither reached utterly different results nor yet were they identical but seemed to run parallel to one another.
This happened not just on one point but all along the line where the traditional theology and philosophy faced one another. From this fact of systematic parallelism, the philosophers made the saltus mortalis and concluded (1) that philosophy and religion were ultimately tackling exactly the same questions, dealing with exactly the same facts and in exactly the same way, (2) that the Prophet was, therefore, primarily a philosopher, but (3) that since the Prophet's addressees were not the intellectual elite but the masses, who could not understand the philosophic truth, the Prophetic Revelation naturally catered for their needs and "talked down" to their level in terms intelligible to them.
Religion had taught that the world was created by God by His sheer command "Be!" Man's reason has, for ages, been vexed by trying to understand how the world could be created out of nothing and how it could have been created in time. Although Aristotle is the first philosopher to have actually declared the cosmos as such to be eternal, i.e, uncreated, philosophers have usually assented to this view. Purely rationally speaking, however, an eternity of the world in the past is also quite inconceivable and full of absurdities and in Medieval times a process started in philosophy, which culminated in Kant but to which al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd and Thomas Aquinas had made no small contributions in their own way, declaring the problem to be rationally insoluble - a great philosophic tragedy, indeed. Ibn Sina had elaborated his own solution to this problem. By a very intricate process of thought which we have expounded elsewhere,
Ibn Sina effected a fundamental change both in the Aristotelian concept of the movement of the universe and the Neoplatonic concept of emanation and, having arrived at his theory of existence, he declared (1) that both the universe as a whole and everything therein derived its existence directly from God and (2) that the world as a whole was, nevertheless, eternal and was not "created" by God at any moment of time although it depends on God. He contended that the genuinely religious stake (which was absolutely rational) in this whole problem was not that the world should be "created out of nothing at a time"(hadith) but that the world should be contingent, dependent upon God (mumkin).
Ibn Sina thereby explicitly accused the orthodox theologians of lack of discernment of the genuinely religious demands and of confusing the issues rationally. Whatever the philosophical mechanics of this theory of Ibn Sina, its net result is that God is the "ground" of the Universe and explains the latter; without Him the world would be "groundless," unintelligible, irrational.
This problem and its solution provided Ibn Sina with the guiding and crucial experience for his philosophic thought on all the problems of traditional religion and proved decisive for his philosophic attitude to this whole sensitive region which he took very seriously. He came to realize that religion was not at all wrong, as against atheism and "naturalism," in asserting the idea of a God of Supreme Being; further, it was also essentially right in asserting that this world depended on this God. And yet - Ibn Sina was equally led to believe - religion was most certainly incorrect if it literally asserted, as it seems to do, the creatio exnihilo of the world. The perilous belief, therefore, became firmly implanted in his mind that religious and philosophical truths are identically thesame ;
only religion, since it is not limited to the few but is for all, necessarily accommodates itself to the level of mass intelligence and is, therefore, a kind of philosophy for the masses and does not tell the naked truth but talks in parables. A century later, his great successor, Ibn Rushd, in his Fasl al-Maqal, put forward a semi-similar, semi-different view and came very near to asserting a theory of "two truths" - a religious one and a rational one. This theory of the "double truth" later became famous in the thirteenth-century Europe where it still falsely continues to be attributed to Siger of Brabantia, a famous thirteenth-century follower of Ibn Rushd's philosophy at the Pais University, whose doctrines were severely "condemned" by Thomas Aquinas. Actually, no one known to history has ever asserted this theory of "double truth".
Once this principle of parallelism between religion and philosophy was apparently accepted, it did not fail to be confirmed on many other points. Religion had taught that there would be a Day of Reckoning when bodies shall be resurrected. The philosophers, especially al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, rejected the idea of a physical resurrection on several grounds. Ibn Sina, who accepted physical resurrection in his ordinary philosophical works "on the basis of the Shari'ah" wrote a special, esoteric treatise al-Risalah al-Adhawiyah (so called because he wrote it in one morning), where he declared the whole idea of a physical resurrection "to be impossible". But the philosophers firmly believed in the survival of the soul and therefore in a spiritual hereafter with its psychic pleasures and pains. Al-Farabi believed in the survival only of "good souls”; bad souls, according to him, simply get annihilated; he, therefore, only speaks of spiritual bliss and not of punishment in the Hereafter.18 Here again Ibn Sina was struck by the philosophy-religion parallelism : his philosophy had confirmed that there was an after-life ; religion taught resurrection of the flesh in the Hereafter; religion had to do this because it is aimed at the masses of "dullards" ; otherwise religion is no more than philosophy.
It must, of course, be borne in mind that the parallelism that seems to emerge on all these fateful points between philosophy and religion is the result of the conscious approach of the philosophers towards religion. Otherwise, other philosophic views would have been possible- It would have been, for example, possible to hold that neither soul nor body can survive or be resurrected. On the other hand, if the philosophers had been a littlemore bold
and Islam-minded it might not have been altogether impossible to hold philosophically that the body -is resurrectible in some sense and that without it the soul means nothing. Indeed, Ibn Sina sometimes almost comes close to asserting a quasi-physical resurrection for "undeveloped souls".
But it is not this particular theory or that of the philosophers that constituted the serious problem for Islam, even though al-Ghazali apparently thought that the philosophical doctrine of the eternity of the world was the most seious problem for Islam raised by the rationalists, since he devotes a lion's share of his Tahafut al-Fulasifah to this question. What was really most serious, and something to ■ which al-Ghazali devotes precious little space in his refutation of the philosophers, is what the phenomenon of religion-philosophy parallelism led the philosophers to believe with regard to the mutual relationship of religion and philosophy. In particular, the most capital mistake made by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina was to assimilate religious or moral truth to intellectual or "natural" truth. In their theory of knowledge, when they, treat of religious cognition their statements, which are at points very profound and original, simply make no distinction whatsoever between higher religio-moral cognition and other forms of intellectual cognition. For them, a moral pinciple is, in its cognitive aspects, exactly like a mathematical proposition. They do not realize that religio-moral experience, although it certainly has a cognitive element, radically differs from other forms of cognition in the sense that it is full of authority, meaning and imperiousness for the subject whereas ordinary form of cognition is simply informative. A man who has a genuinely religious experience is automatically transformed by that experience.Because of.
this
failure to recognize this diference and taking their stand firmly, on the phenomenon of parallelism, the philosophers assimilated the Prophet to the philosopher, the prophetic experience to intellectual cognition (plus, of course, the capacity to inluence people, which a philosopher does not possess). This line of thought further confirmed them in their thoroughly Hellenized idea of God - as a principle which "explains" this world, rather than a Creator who directs thisworld ;
as an intellectual formula rather than as a moral and dynamic imperative.
This was really, and at bottom, the centre of conflict between the Hellenizing philosophers and the representatives of the Islamic tradition. This conflict was felt and sensed by al-Ghazali and more especially by Ibn Taymiyah in-his Kitab al-Nubuwwat where the philosophers' 'inactive' principle is opposed to the acting. Commanding God of the Qur'an.
But the conflict, although it was thus felt, was never fully and consciously formulated. If it had been formulated clearly with its implications, the wholesale attack on philosophy as such by the orthodoxy would perhaps not have occurred. It would have then been seen that, after all, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina's type of thought is not the only philosophy that is possible ; that certain failures may have characterized this particular philosophy, but philosophy as such need not be strangled and, indeed, that orthodoxy itself rested on certain assumptions which it would do well to intellectually formulate.
The truth, however, is that even the philosophers were not really aware of the centre of conlict between their thought and revealed religion. We have outlined just above their failure to develop a theory of knowledge that would do justice to religious facts and moral cognition. Indeed, when one scans the entire work of the Muslim philosophers, one is struck by the peculiar inattention shown to ethics. Certain treatises of certain minor philosophers on morals do not add up to much. It is widely believed by modern Western scholars that this is because the philosophers were afraid of producing a rival system of "do's" and "don'ts" to the Shari'ah and so they left morals and the practical life to the Shari'ah. There may be some truth in this, although it needs to be added that the philosophers were most probably too enamoured of their metaphysical heights to condescend to climb down to ethics. Yet, if only they had made the very assumptions of the Shariah-law itself an object of serious study and thought, they might have come out with quite a different philosophy and the orthodoxy might have in turn been the richer for it instead of starving itself intellectually and ultimately spiritually by a one-sided unthinking attack on philosophy.
Intellectual liberalism is of the essence of a great and advancing culture. But for allowing latitude to the mind of man and trusting basically in its goodness, soundness and sanity, modern culture should commit suicide not merely in its liberal aspects but also in its conservative side. For conservatism can remain meaningful and enlightened only when there isliberalism ;
should conservatism become unenlightened (i.e., fail to see why it should be conservative, on what points and to what extent it should exert the pressure), the entire culture must decay. This is what unfortunately happened in Islam. If an al-Farabi or an Ibn Sina had outraged, on certain points, the dogmatic theology and perhaps exceeded in interpreting the Qur'an, the orthodoxy, in al-Ghazali and others afterwards, equally outraged humanity as such including its own very being, by condemning all philosophy as such and its necessary instrument, the human reason.
One striking fact about the phenomenon of the rise of philosophy in Islam is that it was sporadic and individual and never took the form of a movement or a tradition expressing itself through established schools of thought. It was much too short-lived and took no enduring roots as a high-level, original thought-activity. There must have been several Socio-economic and political reasons for the early death of philosophy as, for example, the political instability we have already described earlier. But one most fundamental and palpable reason is the fact that the orthodoxy, after the attack upon philosophy by al-Ghazali. Proscribed it completely and did not allow it to grow any further, or rather destroyed the very conditions for its growth. The orthodox treatment of philosophy is strongly reminiscent of their treatment of the doctrines of the Mu'tazilah. Just as the 'Ulama' had founded the science of Kalam to counter Mu'tazilah rationalism, so now they expanded the contents of Kalam-theology to reckon with the theses of the philosophers. We shall presently have a closer look at the contents of this extended Kalam. At about the same time the orthodox also developed fully their system of education and elaborated curricula after a process of ad hoc and sporadic teaching, whose beginnings reach back into the earliest times of Islam. Once they assumed firm control of education and schools and established Kalam into a kind of pseudo-substitute for the genuine intellectualism, which only philosophic thought couldenerate, philosophy was efectively outlawed from the Muslim world.
Thus, the only places where thinkers could be engineered, viz., the madrasahs were, from the very time of their systematic foundation in the world of Islam, swept bare of pure thought. Nevertheless, although there was no room for any high level teaching of philosophy in the madrasahs, certain lesser and introductory compendia and commentaries were often taught to sharpen the minds of the pupils. Even outside the madrasahs a certain amount of interest in philosophical commentaries did remain. Although all this never added up to very much in terms of original thought, it did keep the tension alive, and the orthodox, especially their right wing, kept up unabated pressure against this "anti-Shari'ah" branch of learning. An ingenious and satirical poem written by Abd al-'Aziz al-Pahraraw], an able scholar with a fluent pen but hitherto unknown to the world of scholarship (he belonged to the small village of Pahrar near Multan and died as late as 1239/1823-24), illustrates this orthodox attitude to philosophy very efectively. The poem reads:
(Arabic sentence is here please see pdf for the Arabic sentence)
The author then goes on to admonish the "philosophy stricken" scholars to treat their "rational ailment" with " 'ilm al-Shar' - i.e. the Sahih and Hasan Hadiths from the Prophet". For their interest and because they make a satirical play on the titles of some well known philosophy texts and compendia, we give here a translation of the above verses:
"O the 'Ulama of India!may
you live long !
And, through God's grace, your affliction removed.
You hope, by rational knowledge, to attain to bliss;
I am, indeed, fearful lest your hopes come to naught.
For there is no "Guidance"18 in Athir's works,
Nor any hope of your "Recovery"18 in the
"Allusions" of Ibn Sina,
The "Commentary of Sadr"9 is no opener of the breasts -
Indeed, it augments the restlessness of your minds.
The “Brilliant Sun".10 even when it shines is
without
light;
It has rendered your intelligence obscure and dark.
As for your "Sullam",21
it is only good for descending ;
It offers little basis for ascension to heights.
You adopted infidel sciences as God's Command
as
though
The Greek philosophers were your prophets."
V: CHARACTER OF EDUCATION
The orthodox attitude to philosophy and to the "rational sciences" in general leads us directly to a brief examination of the origin, development and nature of the Muslim educational system and its contents. Our intention is neither to survey the growth of educational institutions in Islam nor to portray exhaustively the syllabi that were taught therein but to characterize, in broad terms, the Muslims' concept of knowledge, as it developed, in order to bring out its historical interaction with Islam.
The Qur'an has frequently used the term 'ilm' and its derivatives in the general and comprehensive sense of "knowledge" whether it is through learning or thinking or experience, etc. It follows from this that this would be the sense in which this word was used during the Prophet's time. In the generations after the Companions, however, Islam began to grow as a tradition. There is evidence that 'ilm began to be used for knowledge which one acquires by learning, more particularly of the past generations (the Prophet, the Companions, etc.) while the exercise of understanding and thought on these traditional materials was termed ' fiqh ' (literally : understanding). The fact is not of small interest that the 'ilm-fiqh pair corresponds in this early usage almost exactly to the Hadlth-Sunnah pair; Hadith being the traditional materials while Sunnah being the deductions, on the basis of thought, from these materials."2 This fact constitutes one of the strongest arguments - if we still need any - to prove that Sunnah for the early generations ofMuslims,
was not just the Sunnah of the Prophet but included all the legal points, decisions, etc. deduced from it by rational thought.
The essential point we wish to make here is that the term 'ilm ' had early on received a traditionalist rather than a rational bias in Islamic history. Connected with this meaning of the term 'ilm', i.e., of tradition and especially of what the Prophet was reported to have said or done, is the famous phrase "talab al-'ilm" or "seeking of knowledge". Although later on in Islam, and especially in modern times, the phrase has acquired a general application once again, it cannot be historically'doubted that it arose among the traditionalist circles with a definite meaning:
talab al-'ilm meant a long and arduous process of travelling from place to place and country to country, sitting at the feet of a traditionalist master and acquiring from him his store of tradition. Later on and in other circles the application of the term "knowledge" widens, e.g. in the well-known adage:
"Knowledge is of two kinds: that of religious matters and that of human bodies (i.e., medicine)."
As for the term "fiqh" we have seen that early on it was used to signify thought, understanding, etc., i.e., a process. Later, however, when the legal system grew, this term came to be applied to law, not so much as a process of understanding legal issues but as a body of legal knowledge, the concrete result of legal thought. Still later, after the fourth century or thereabouts, the term "fiqh" ceased altogether to have any reference to understanding or thought which, indeed, came to be forbidden, and was exclusively reserved for the body of legal knowledge produced by the earlier generations. There is also some evidence that when Kalam-theology was formulated, sometimes the word ‘ilm’ was applied to it exclusively in contradistinction to 'fiqh '. Thus, the meanings given to these terms in the early stages came to be almost reversed but not permanently.
Orthodox Muslims did not develop systematic higher education in the early centuries. Their schools were only of a primary level where children were taught the Qur an, reading and writing and also often the rudiments of arithmetic. The higher education centredaround
personalities rather than colleges. Pupils would move from one renowned Shaykh to another and obtain certiicates. The subjects studied were exclusively traditional. For lack of organization, there was no method of systematic feeding of this higher education from the primary stages: the two were entirely separate. The first important place of learning created by the central government under al-Ma'mun's orders - the famous "Bayt al-Hikmah" or the "House of Wisdom" at Baghdad was captured by the Mu'tazilah rationalists and, in fact, the arm of the state was virulently turned against the orthodoxy. Similarly, the Shi'ah made organised efforts to propagate their views and created schools, the most famous of which, al-Azhar, established by the Fatimids, came under the orthodox control only after the Ayyobids overthrew the Fatimids.
From these experiences and challenges from different groups, the orthodox 'Ulama' learnt the lesson and set about to organize and control education. The first really great orthodox college was created by the Saljuq wazir Nizam al-Mulk in the eleventh century (A.C.) at which the illustrious al-Ghazali served also as professor. This was the crucial, formative stage of the Muslim higher education. But at the same time occurred the philosophic movement discussed in the last section. The philosophers, who were also almost invariably scientists and scientiic thinkers, were attacked by the orthodoxy. This rendered the orthodoxy's attitude especially towards positive knowledge on the whole extremely unhealthy. The result was that the 'Ulama' were able to save intact their heritage which, in its basic structure of ideas, is undoubtedly faithful to Islam, but at a great cost: it robbed the orthodox content of education and thought of the very breath of life. No structure of ideas can ever hope to make good or even command respect for a long time - let alone be fruitful - unless it is in constant interaction with living, growing stream of positive and scientiic thought. It is a sheer delusion to imagine that by stifling free, positive thought one can save religion for by doing so, religion itself gets starved and impoverished. The result was that after a few centuries, the real "Dark Ages" of Islam, the orthodoxy was left with little more than an empty shell, a threadbare formal structure with hardly any content.
Al-Ghazali, in his Munqidh, had protested that since the philosophers were also scientists and since some of their philosophical theses conflicted with religion, many ignorant people took pride in wantonly rejecting even their scientiic propositions which were obviously true. In this statement, al-Ghazali had shown remarkable power of discernment and had rebuked the cheap defenders of religion against reason. But al-Ghazali also used the same argument the other way around and said that since many people were impressed by the scientiic thought of the philosophers, they also began to look upon their philosophical theses as indubitable truth and gave unqualiied credence to them. This statement too was absolutely correct. But from this, al-Ghazali drew the fatal conclusion that, therefore, people should be discouraged from studying even the scientiic works of the philosophers. This was the first blow the orthodoxy explicitly and formally dealt to positive knowledge and ultimately also to itself and it was subsequently echoed by innumerable representatives of the orthodoxy down the ages.
The brilliant 8th/14th century jurist, al-Shatibi, lays it down as a fundamental principle in his Kitab al-Muwafaqat that purely intellectual disciplines such as philosophic thought must not be cultivated since they are not related to action and are, therefore, dangerous. He outright rejects the plea that even pure thought is necessary for ultimately it does affect the formulation of the objectives of human action.
He categorically denies that reason has any primary role in law-making or even in the formulation of the moral imperatives,
even though he himself has exercised a great deal of rational power in fixing the "goals of the Shari'ah (aghrad al-Shari'ah)". Ibn Taymiyah's vituperations against philosophy and rationalism in general are well known. Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, the important seventeenth-century reformer and original thinker, to whose work we have briefly alluded before in these pages,
himself unreservedly condemns both philosophy and the sciences. Philosophers he ridicules; about arithmetic he says that one should not waste time on it but only learn enough to calculate shares of inheritance and to determine the direction of the Ka'bah. Geometry he declares to be most useless: what good is it, he asks, to know that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles? “We could multiply the catalogue of the orthodox condemnations of positive thought and science but the illustrations given here should suffice.
The names cited here are august; indeed, these personalities have made positive contributions to the spiritual history of Islam whose importance may be said to range between 'immense' and 'capital'. Yet, towards positive knowledge their attitude can be characterized only as fatal. In their criticisms of actual philosophers and of actual products of reason one must agree. We ourselves have underlined the excesses to which certain philosophical doctrines had gone. But when the orthodoxy condemned - generation after generation - human reason as such, this extreme and wholesale attack was not only not healthy but downright suicidal. Free-thought, by its very nature, is bound to exceed on certain points; it is a consequence of its very life. Its remedy is not to stifle it but to keep on criticizing it. Intellectualism is something so frail that in shackles it surely dies. In other words "free-thought" and "thought" have exactly the same meaning; you cannot remove freedom and then hope that thought would survive. In sum, even in this field what happened in Islam was what we have repeatedly noticed in Section II of this chapter as happening to Islam in general: Islam was subjected to extremes and the orthodoxy, as though by some inexorable law felt impelled to crush positive thought out of existence. A very hard and fast distinction was thus made between the Shari'ah and the non-Shari'ah sciences or the "religious" and the secular fields of learning, which caused an incalculable deterioration in the quality and standards of Islamic education and thought itself.
It is essential to observe the principle of integration of knowledge in order to keep thought and education healthy (to some extent this is also the danger in the present age of specialization which is being kept in check so far only by the presence of a small number of outstanding people who are both specialists and thinkers). Having effectively banished the rational and scientiic disciplines, the 'Ulama' incorporated certain elements of philosophy, especially logic, in their theology as a preparatory science or as an "instrumental" science. In face of the philosophical theses impinging on religion, the scope of Kalam was further enlarged to include formal treatments of those theses - such as Prophethood, Resurrection of the bodies, Creation, etc. Henceforward the doctrine of atomism in physics becomes a part and parcel of Muslim kalam-theology since, it was thought that, atomism does not require causation and hence allowed for the direct Finger of God to interfere in every event. All this is clearly set out in the theological work of al-Shahrastani, the first formal theologian that appeared after al-Ghazali’s attack on the philosophers.
As we pointed out in Section III of this chapter, philosophy, when attacked by the orthodox 'Ulama', went underground and, so far as much of its content was concerned, it found a spacious home within theosophicsufism
. In Sufism it even cut itself loose from the checks that reason had imposed upon it. Now,sufism
was, as a whole, strongly opposed to education and threw its massive weight on the wholesale abandonment of intellectual culture in the interests of its spiritual "path". Such an attitude, when resticted to an infinitesimal minoity, may not be harmful but sincesufism
became a mass movement since the twelfth century, its effects have been simply devastating on the intellectual life of Islam. Since the twelfth century, the best and most creative minds of Islam have been drifting away from the orthodox system of education tosufism
. One has only to pick up any collection ofsufi
biogrophies to see how many people "left formal, external education" and joined the sufi ranks. The 'Ulama' were left with little more than dry bones, the real currents of life having escaped their system and taken their own way - far more dangerous than that of the Mu'tazilites or the philosophers.
But within the religious system, which thus came to constitute both the entire scope and the sole preserve of the madrasahs, there remained cuious fundamental inconsistencies both among the Sunnis and the Shi’ah - inconsistencies which could have been removed only by further growth through a critical and constructive Free-thought. On one important point such contradiction in the Sunni system was pinpointed by Ibn Taymiyah himself. While protesting against the doctrine of determinism in Sunni theology (Kalam), he pointed out that one and the same person, when he is a theologian, believes in a rigorous determinism and impotency of the human will, but when he behaves a Faqih - either in the capacity of a Qadi or a Mufti, he has to assume freedom and efficacy of the human will.
This is a fundamental anomaly and yet theology is supposed to be an intellectual defence of the creed and the postulates of Fiqh as the "crown of the Shari'ah `
Sciences".
Such a position is surely a result of the fact that intellectualism was never owned and integrated into the religious system. Indeed, it was spurned under the claim of the "self-suficiency of the Sh ariah- sciences, especially of their crown."-9 But the Shi'ah system is even more anomalous. It is to be admitted in all fairness that the Shi'ah law puts greater emphasis on the "intention" of the agent on several points than many other schools of Sunni law and this seems to be a consequence of their theology which espouses freedom of the human will. But, to begin with, what value do human mind, conscience and free-will have alongside of an infallible Imam? An infallible Imam, strictly speaking, does not need humans but automatons as his instruments. Secondly, it is strange that the Shi'ah emphasis on human freedom did not lead to any new legal postulates and principles and, in the field of legal thought, the Shi'ah are not at all any diferent from the Sunnis. It is, indeed, a curious phenomenon of Muslim religious history that even the Mu'tazilah who claimed to derive moral imperatives (husnwa
qubh - right and wrong) directly from reason did not differ in legal matters at all from the rest of the Community, although law is no more than application of morals to a society. We are not, of course, supporting the Mu'tazilah stand on morals but simply noting and trying to analyse and understand contradictions. For us, a rational understanding of the Qur'an and the Sunnah is the only reliable method for arriving at moral imperatives and legal enactments.
But quite apart from the content of these sciences and what was taught, the question as to how it was taught is equally important. Here we find that the emphasis was placed on books rather than on subjects or disciplines. A pupil learnt not Fiqh but Hidayah or some other work; he studied or rather went through al-Baydawi and not the science of Qur'anic exegesis as such, and so on. This method, which was quite congenial to the general intellectual temper, further strengthened the process of learning things by rote rather than grasping them by understanding, criticizing them and analysing them. There were occasional criticisms
of this educational system, especially of its content by eminent men but to no avail. This does not mean that Islam did not produce men of original thought and of high intellectual calibre verging on genius even in the later centuries. But their number has been very few, indeed; and they rose through their own native ability rather than having been engineered in the madrasahs. Nor do we wish to say that a good educational system always produces geniuses: intellectual prodigies are, indeed, relatively a rare commodity. But the function of a good educational system is to keep the normal intellectual level high enough both in the interests of the normal products to realize the best in them and to give a "take-off" advantage to the exceptionally gifted ones. The trouble with the Muslim system was that its normal standards were kept at a very low point so that it neither produced good normalities nor afforded a "take-off" advantage to the exceptional cases as they deserved. Indeed, many a modern scholar have been led by this phenomenon to ask the question whether intellectual barrenness is not a concomitant of Islam, and a few more dogmatic ones have even answered it in the affirmative.
CONCLUSION
In the foregoing chapters we have sketched out the fundamental developments in the rise and evolution of Islamic methodology, i.e., the framework of principles within which Islamic thinking takes place. These pinciples are (besides, of course, the Qur'an) Sunnah, Ijtihad and Ijma'. We found that, in early history, the latter two concepts were intimately bound up not only with one another but also with the concept of Sunnah which, starting from the Sunnah of the Prophet, became an on-going creative process of interpretation and elaboration which was given the sanction of Ijma'. This process of creativity stopped, however, grinding slowly to a standstill when this living Sunnah began to be cast in Hadith form and attributed to the Prophet. In this process, the internal diferences of opinion on legal, moral and political issues played a decisive ro1e. The process, which began perhaps around the turn of the first and the second centuries, gathered a terrific momentum during the second century and reached its fruition in the third century. So strong was the power of this movement that the older schools of legal opinion based on free-thought had to accept al-Shafi'i's contention that even an isolated Hadith, attested only by one chain of narrators, must be given overriding authority over rational personal opinion and even practice or Ijma. Al-Shafi'i is asked as to why he sets the criterion for establishing the authenticity of Hadith lower than for establishing evidence in a court since in the latter case at least two witnesses are usually required while, for Hadith, al-Shafi was prepared to accept the evidence only of one person. Al-Shafi's reply is that whereas in a court case witnesses may be interested in the issue one way or the other and, in any case, their evidence produces consequences that may affect some people adversely and others favourably, this presumption does not exist with regard to the Prophetic Hadith in which people would be only objectively interested and whereby the entire Community uniformly affected.
Since this reply is patently unsatisfactory in view of the obvious fact that people are motivated to give currency to their views by involving the Prophetic authority, wherever possible, it only reveals the force of the Hadlth-movement itself.
After all, the possible views on political, moral and legal matters had been projected back to the Prophet, a battle of ideas began within Islam which was finally resolved by the eforts of the Ahl al-Hadlth who, throughout the third century, collected Hadith that largely expressed the views of the majority and as such may be regarded as expressing, as a whole, the spirit of the Prophetic teaching. It is these views of the "middle-of-the-road" majority (Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jama'ah), with a certain marginal latitude towards the right and the left, that, thanks to the activity of the Ahl al-Hadlth, crystallized the "orthodox" point of view and led, during the fourth century - at the hands of al-Ash'ari and al-Maturid - to the formulation of the orthodox creed and theology. This entire development, remarkable for the cohesion of its internal structure, resulted in creating a sense of equilibrium and balance that is probably unique in the history of mankind in its gigantic dimensions. It was this fact that was responsible for the sudden lowering of the brilliant Muslim civilization.
But the basis on which this equilibrium had been built did not allow further growth and development. In every society, of course, there must be an element of conservatism for mere social change and growth cannot even take place without the controlling hand which supplies the element of continuity amidst change. But just as no society can live on mere change, similarly no society can survive for long by mere conservatism. And yet the very basal structure of the Islamic methodology, as it developed, made for nothing but conservatism. The content of the Muslim system, backed as it was by the Hadith, came to have the character of an eternal truth, unchangeable and irrevisable. Yet, as we have shown, this content arose actually in history and has its full signiicance only within that historical, situational context. Divorced from that situation and eternalized, it blocked and could not fail to block progress in all the spheres of life reviewed by us briefly in the last part: political and moral principles, spiritual life, intellectual activity and education. When the orthodoxy thus incarcerated itself, unhealthy and un-Islamic forces took over and swept across the entire body of the Muslim world.
Since the eighteenth century, Muslim society has been gripped by an acute sense of deterioration and failure, often varying on a crisis. During the eighteenth century, various movements started in diferent parts of the Muslim world to regenerate Muslim society. This continued during the nineteenth century. The essential diagnosis arrived at by the leaders of these reform movements asserts that Muslims have reached this stage through ceasing to be "pure" Muslims since the purity of pristine Islam has been compromised within-Islamic accretions both in doctrine and practice. In so far as these efforts have gone to liberate Islam from the numbingMedieval
influences, their influence has been certainly salutary in activating Creative forces and in this connection the term "Ijtihad" has once again assumed great importance, at least in theory. To begin with, these very movements (and especially that of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab in the Arabian Peninsula), which are now regarded generally as good orthodoxy, were attacked bitterly by the conservative medieval forces and the echoes of this struggle are still far from being dead. Indeed, a very large part of Islam still sufers from those very superstitious and un-Islamic accretions against which these movements rose in revolt.
But even where these movements have been successful, they have hardly solved the problem of deterioration facing the Muslim society, although their influence may be largely taken to have prepared the ground for such a solution. The reason for their failure is that they take "pristine Islam" i.e., the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunnah, in too simple, narrow and static terms. In sum, they believe that if the Muslims were to "follow," i.e., repeat and reproduce exactly what their seventh-century fore fathers did, they would recover their rightful position "with God", i.e., both in this world and the next. But the big question is • how can a piece of history be literally repeated? The only sense, therefore, that this dictum can yield is that Muslims must perform and enact in the twentieth century that whose moral and spiritual dimensions match those of the Muslims' performance in the seventh and eighth centuries. But this means not just a simple "return" to the Qur'an and the Sunnah as they were acted in the past but a true understanding of them that would give us guidance today. A simple return to the past is, of course, a return to the graves. And when we go back to the early Muslim generations, this process of a living understanding of the Qur'an and the Sunnah is exactly what we find there.
Since the nineteenth century, the Muslim world has felt the impact of the West- first political and then cultural. The political hegemony of the West has largely receded and, in parts, is still receding although the secuing of political ends through economic ascendency is now the rule of the day. But the real problem of the Muslim society is to assimilate, adapt, modify and reject the forces generated within its own fabric by the introduction of new institutions - of education, of industry, of communication, etc. - according as these forces are purely good, necessary evils, or positively harmful. The new forces have an ethic of their own and a simple return to the past is certainly no way to solve this problemunless we want to delude ourselves. But recourse to the Qur'an and Sunnah in order to get therefrom an understanding of, and guidance for, solving our new problems will undoubtedly meet the situation. This is because the Qur'an and the Prophet's activity guided and were actually involved in society-building. Besides, therefore, certain general principles that lie enunciated in the Qur'an and certain Prophetic precepts, their actual handling of social situations is fraught with meaning for us. But the meaning is not that we should repeat that very situation now, which is an absurd task, but rather to draw lessons from this concrete historic paradigm.
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Author: Dr. Fazlur Rahman
