1. Introduction
Islamic Logic is often used as a label for Arabic logic which flourished between 900 and 1500. Indeed a rich literature on logic and philosophy has been produced which merits descriptions like Arabic Logic, Arabic School of Logic, and perhaps less plausible Islamic Logic. Many scholarly works have been written about that period and aspect of Arabic culture as well including the reception of Aristotelian logic.
Using Islamic Logic primarily as a pointer to a part of the history of logic is in marked contrast with the common usage of the phrase “Islamic Finance”, nowadays mainly perceived as an indication for a modern and thriving phenomenon which must not be understood through its centuries old historic roots but instead should preferably be understood as a form of Jihad.
Consequential to the reception of Aristotelian logic, the logic of syllogisms has been criticized by Islamic scholars. The ample existence of this criticism may lead one to believe that Islam has been and perhaps still is rather pessimistic about logic.
That far reaching conclusion, however, becomes less defensible if one imagines that these critical scholars simply saw no plausible way for Greek logicians to arrive at the universally quantified assertions from which they went onwards with reasoning by means of instantiation as incorporated in various syllogisms (see RuthMas
[30]). Universally quantified assertions cannot be “sensed” and for that reason they can be constructions of the individual mind only, thus lacking the required “objectivity” so it was argued. That a modern scientific process may generate universally quantified assertions which are considered objectively valid was unknown in the days when syllogistic logic came under attack of Arabic scholars.
Their criticism need not be construed as an outcome of religious contemplation.
Fortunately (for Islamic scholars) the revealed sources, which wereunaccessible
to ancient Greek scholars, codified after having been made available through prophecy, could produce fully reliable universally quantified assertions. This observation, perhaps more adequately understood as a design decision about the basis of logical reasoning, then provided a clever way to solve a pressing problem in the philosophy of science, but nowadays it represents an outdated view. A modern perspective on science, with its method for generating universally quantified statements acceptable for entire communities rather than for single individuals only, implies that formalized logic can be accepted more easily, and implies that the mechanics of reasoning need not be made exclusively dependent on the existence of revealed sources. Summing up these arguments I see no reason to believe that Islam is nowadays intrinsically hostile towards methodical reasoning on the basis of large collections of assumptions, neither do I believe that Islam is committed to the viewpoint that only assertions obtained directly or indirectly from revealed sources can be both universal and valid. In addition there is no compelling reason why a systematic investigation of reasoning processes (that is logic as a branch of mathematics, science and philosophy) should be considered incompatible with Islam. Nevertheless the contemporary tolerance of Islam towards logic seems not to have given rise to any specific developments that may foster the usability of logic for Islam.
Most developments of applied logic remain within a limited set of domains: computing (very significant), mathematics (limited), physics (very limited),economics
(marginal but growing alongside the explosion of electronic trade), law (still marginal but steadily growing), linguistics (large but perhaps on the way back), psychology (marginal and perhaps even declining), and philosophy (marginal and stable).
Now there is no technical reason why applications of logic to religion and in particular to some specific religion cannot be developed. Of course a logician may be unwilling to work towards progress in that direction, but however distant religion may be considered from science that distance by itself cannot rule out a potential for applications of logic in that direction.
This
paper analyses a perspective for an application of logic within Islam from a position outside Islam.
1.1 Logic applied to a specific religion
If one accepts that logic may be applied to or within a religion in spite of the fact that logic is a constituent of science and philosophy whereas religion is not, there are still many ways in which this kind of application can be conceived. I will refrain from an attempt to survey these options and focus on one particular view only which likely to be specific for Islam.
Working towards a definite and applicable form of Islamic Logic may be conceived of as an instance ofIslamization
of modernity, with conventional formal logic considered modern.Islamization
of modernity also underlies Islamic Finance. ThroughIslamization
of the logic of legal argument, and successive application of that logic for structuring legal reasoning, legal arguments may become more transparent and more convincing, thereby promoting underlying values of Islam in a novel fashion. In this way Islamic Logic may be considered a potential manifestation of Jihad.
1.2 Usage of language
In this text I will avoid Arabic terms as much as possible based on the hypothesis that the fundamental content of Islam is international and language independent. Unavoidably translations are used, for instance instead ofShari’ah
I will use Islamic Legal Process, and instead of Allah I will write God.
1.3 The problematic status of speculative thought
Writing this paper has proven difficult for various reasons. First of all there is no way that I can take into account or even become aware of the enormous literature which has been accumulated regarding the topics that will be covered. Now specialization is a major tool for fighting the enemy of amateurism in research, and reliable claims of novelty are usually based on equally reliable accounts of relevant prior art. But I feel the need to arrive at a comprehensive picture and the objective to achieve some form of completeness when writing this paper has taken priority over scholarly precision concerning the search for backwards pointers to prior art.
Moreover there is a speculative aspect about any development aiming at relating a classical part of science and philosophy (in this case logic) with any form of religion. If one intends to argue that such connections may provide an advantage the story may become even more speculative. Most work on Islamic Finance and Islamic Logic that I have seen avoids speculation by making use of a descriptive style: historical work describes what people did in the past and how we may find out about that, anthropological work looks at I will not make use of a translation of the term Islam. Instead an attempt is made in this paper to provide a working definition of Islam. The translation “submission (to God’s will)” as given by Wikipedia can be used for the purposes of this paper, however.
how small communities deal with some body of methods and concepts, sociological work considers the development of communities at large and economic work takes measurable streams of goods, products and services into account. I try to write about a modernization of Islamic logic with the additional constraint that, although being an outsider, I need to understand and trust the full story including a rationale of Islam and the role that logic may play in that context.
1.4 About the external position
Being an outsider to Islam, and writing from that position, must not primarily be valued as providing a tool for arriving at an objective perspective and for avoiding speculative thoughts.
Rather taking the external position reflects a fact of the matter which I must in addition take into account without knowing in advance to what extent it simplifies or complicates the task at hand. Working from inside Islam and working from outside Islam provides an author with different interfaces of operational options. An author cannot freely choose and change his position in this respect, as if taking an inside Islamic perspective (from an outsider’s initial position) were conceivable as merely a tailor made and methodologically legitimate anthropological style of work, which can be dispensed with after the planned research activity has been completed, thereby returning to the initial outsider position.
An undeniable obligation for an outsider is to be sufficiently critical. Have I overlooked intrinsic problems of Islam (seen from an outsider’s perspective) that should have been mentioned in this paper? Am I participating in not seeing what needs to be seen? Of course I don’t think so myself. I will return to this difficult issue in the concluding section of the paper. The computer scientist C.A.R. Hoare wrote:
inside
every large program is a small program struggling to get out.
This remarkable observation is meaningful (and useful) even if the large program contains many design and programming errors. Transposing Hoare’s observation from the science of computer programming to the study of religions I obtain:
inside
a complex religion is a clear core struggling to get out and to become visible and comprehensible from an outsider’s position.
This holds true to a considerable extent in spite of mistakes enacted in the name of that religion. Thus the outsider’s position to a religion may be compared with the informed programmer’s view on a large program written by an unknown software engineering team:
find the core which is struggling to get out, and don’t be distracted from that task by the discovery of programming errors because the existence of programming errors is a statistical fact which cannot undermine the validity of Hoare’s observation.
1.5 Novelty remains to be seen
No claim of novelty of any assertion put forward in this paper can be reliably based on the author’s grasp of the body of published and grey literature relevant for that particular assertion. Even in very confined areas of mathematical logic and the theory of computing it has proven strikingly difficult to find out what has been done by other authors before.
To the best of my knowledge the proposed description of Real Islamic Logic is new in objective, in form, and in content. The stratified description of Islam seems to be new.
The focus on autonomous parallel legal processing as a key strength worth of preservation and enhancement of the Islamic Legal Process may be new. The excursion in the final section towards an additional (new) argument for assuming the existence of God may alsoconsititute
an original contribution.