Jihad or Ijtihad Read online

Alas! That our nobility, so devoted to music, should have neglected it so far as not to carry it to that perfection when it would melt and soften the human heart. Had they taken this trouble, it would have become necessary to them to direct their attention towards mathematics. It is a matter of pain and regret that they should hear as well as learn music from ignorant buffoons.

  Karamat Ali, despite being a maulvi and a teacher in a madarsa, did not find anything un-Islamic in learning and teaching music. He believed rather that ‘all knowledge, in so far as it comes under the head of art, science and learning, is good. But the application and the results of the several departments of knowledge can be both good and bad.’ For him, ‘Music might be classed under the head of those arts and sciences, whose results have been misused and whose application has been perverted, for though music owes its origin to geometry, arithmetic and physics in some degree, still it serves only as an accompaniment to criminal and sensual pleasures’.35 Thus, Karamat Ali saw music as science, but had strong views regarding its pursuit. He did not perceive it as something un-Islamic. When Islam is believed to be a complete religion, which caters to all the genuine human instincts, then music cannot be prohibited as it will be contrary to the more balanced view of Islam. Our Islamists today are simply disturbing this equilibrium—tilting the balance towards Islamism and, in the process, defacing Islam.

  M. Riaz Kirmani, the present editor of the journal, comes out with another alternative term for Islamic science, calling it ‘ilm al-mashiyah’.36 He finds this term closer to Islam but takes it further away from science by bringing in the role of the Creator and also acknowledging other sources of knowledge. The term ‘mashiyati means Allah’s will so through ‘ilm al-mashiyati Kirmani intends to carry out the study of Allah’s will operative in the affairs of the universe, be it nature or society. He accepts revelation as a source, which may provide paradigms for the generation and application of science.37 Most of the essentialist projects are self-righteous; they deride the arrogance of modern science but drag in the Quran and Allah to humble not only science but also other religions: the Church fought the battle with ‘science’ on false grounds and lost the battle. The Church lost because they do not have the Scripture in the original form. They polluted Divine Guidance with facts against Truth.38 It ends with a final statement that ‘we have got al-Furqan, the criterion (of right and wrong) which is the essence of all scriptures in original form’, meaning thereby that all other knowledges and faiths are mere falsehoods.

  This so-called Islamic position is un-Islamic as it lacks Islamic humility, which is the very cornerstone of Quranic philosophy as well as central to the Prophet’s own conduct. The Quranic term for humility is khushu. The opposite of humility is arrogance (kibr in Quranic terminology). The Quran speaks of Satan (iblis) as the arrogant one who refused to obey God’s command to show humility towards His creatures. In other words, one may consider the absence of humility tantamount to arrogance, which is not an angelic but a satanic attribute. Arrogance defines its own boundaries, foreclosing new possibilities of knowledge. Further, the Quran states that arrogance leads to tyranny (zulm).39 Besides, this exclusivist exercise to define science in terms of Quranic revelation and Allah’s will go to undermine the very enterprise of science. In Islamic science, rationality is not denied but in case of contradiction it is revelation that will prevail over rationality.40 In this case it is no more the pursuit of the unknown but merely the rediscovery of knowledge, including scientific knowledge, already revealed in the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet.

  LACK OF SYMBOLIC INTERPRETATION

  None of the present-day Islamic aficionados care to read the Quran and Prophetic traditions symbolically, using their intelligence for interpretation, as repeatedly urged in the Holy Book. According to it, Muslims are to cultivate a sacramental or symbolic attitude:

  Verily, in the creation of the heavens and of the earth and the succession of night and day and in the ships that speed through the sea with what is useful to man; and in the waters which God sends down from the sky, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and causing all manner of living creatures to multiply thereon; and in the change of the winds, and the clouds that run their appointed courses between sky and earth: (in all this) there are messages (ayat) indeed for a people who use their reason.41

  The Quran nowhere insists on the literal interpretation of the text; rather, it constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the ‘signs’ or ‘messages’ of God. Muslims are not to abdicate their reason but to look at the world attentively and with curiosity. It was this attitude that later enabled Muslims to build a fine tradition of natural science, which has never been seen as large a danger to religion as in Christianity.42 Munshi Zakaullah wrote that ‘God has given human beings the ability called reason to discover and comprehend the real world, and the application of this ability by human beings leads to the creation of knowledge.’43 For him reason is the fountainhead or source of knowledge. As a matter of fact, reason is to knowledge what the sun is to light and the eye to vision.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr begins one of his articles, Islam and the Environmental Crisis’, with the observation, ‘When one looks at the Islamic world today, one sees blatant signs of the environmental crisis in nearly every country; from the air pollution of Cairo and Tehran to the erosion of the hills of Yemen to the deforestation of many areas of Malaysia and Bangladesh.’44 But why should one look at the Muslim world alone to locate environmental crisis? Is the crisis any less in Brazil or Mexico, countries with no Muslim population at all, or in India, a country with a substantial Muslim population? Does religion really matter in such ‘secular’ crises? I find this essentialization of the various science and technology related crises extremely problematic and questionable. Nasr even goes to the extent of claiming that the Islamic world has refused ‘to surrender completely to the dicta of the machine despite the attempt of the leaders of that world to introduce Western technology as much as and as soon as possible’. It is difficult to comprehend the Islamic world Nasr has in mind. For me all those Islamic nations which use petro-dollars are unabashedly enjoying the fruits of ‘Western technology’. They have certainly not kept away from science and its progressive politics that the regimes ‘fear’ to introduce. It is only the impoverished Islamic regimes of Africa and Asia which have been deprived of the fruits of modern technological developments, and it is sheer lack of resources and not Islam that has kept them away. I am sure Nasr is talking about these Islamic nations when he says that Islam continues to live as a powerful religious and spiritual force and its view of nature and the natural environment still has a hold upon the mind and soul of its adherents, especially in less modernized areas and also in some of the deeper attitudes toward nature.’ Does Nasr have Islamic countries like Afghanistan in mind? Islam is certainly visible there in its crudest possible form, but what about the basic amenities and security of the believers? I have no doubt that the West has to share the blame for the mess but that is not the whole truth. Muslim intellectuals like Nasr and several others have propounded a self-righteous worldview of Islam, which means a return to the basics or fundamentals of Islam: that nature, in its various manifestations, can be saved from the rapacity from the rapacity of modern science only by categorical distancing, as no amount of protestation on the part of the Muslim modernist ‘will prevent this kind of science from corroding the foundations of the citadel of Islamic faith’.45

  WAR OF RHETORIC

  There is one detailed article, by S.B.M. Zain, in one of the issues of the journal that tries to highlight the inner tensions and contrasts of the various schools of Islamic science. It begins with Maurice Bucaille and his Quran- and Hadis-centred Islamic science; moves to Waqar Husaini and his Husainism, the Islamic science developed through imitative-innovative assimilation of modern science based on the Shariah; next is Seyyed Hossein Nasr and his Sufistic, sacred and mystical Islamic science; and the last important school of Is
lamic science referred to is the Ijmalist’s view led by Ziauddin Sardar. All these positions can be viewed as a wish list of the Islamic enthusiasts while the author laments in the end that ‘most Muslim scientists unfortunately still subscribe to or believe in this positivistic-universal-value-free view of science and technology’.46 The whole debate looks like an endless war of rhetoric among Muslims and against the West where orthodoxy and totalitarian puritanism seems to have won over reason and scepticism.

  Let me end this discussion with the Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam and see how he managed to broach the Western antinomy of science and religion. Salam successfully argued from a conception that kept the scientific and religious domains distinct. Though all his scientific presentations began in the name of Allah it was never a constraint to his pursuit of science. Salam’s biographer Jagjit Singh writes that for Salam ‘… science and religion refer to different worlds; religion to the inner world of the human mind and science to the outer world of matter. To explore his inner world of "soul" and Allah one needs faith and to explore the outer world of matter, reason.’47 While speaking at a UNESCO conference on April 27, 1984, Salam began by saying: ‘Let me say at the outset that I am a believer as well as a practising Muslim. I am a Muslim because I believe in the spiritual message of the Holy Quran. As a scientist, the Quran speaks to me in that it emphasizes reflection on the Laws of Nature, with examples drawn from cosmology, physics, and medicine, as signs for all men.’ He later continues and points out that ‘seven hundred and fifty verses of the Quran (almost one-eighth of the Book) exhort believers to study Nature, to reflect, to make the best use of reason in their search for the ultimate and to make the acquiring of knowledge and scientific comprehension part of the community’s life.’ Salam ended his lecture with an interesting and apt episode from the history of science in Islam, which was about the death of Al Beruni as reported by one of his contemporaries. It goes like this : 1 heard Al Beruni was dying. I hurried to his house for a last look; one could see that he would not survive long. When they told him about my coming, he opened his eyes and said: Are you so and so? I said: Yes. He said: I am told you know the solution to a knotty problem in the laws of inheritance of Islam. And he alluded to a well-known puzzle which had baffled the Faqihs in the past. I said: Abu Raihan, at this time? And Al Beruni replied: Don’t you think it is better that I should die knowing, rather than ignorant? With sorrow in my heart, I told him of my resolution, and then took my leave. I had not yet crossed the portals of his house when the cry arose from inside: Al Beruni is dead.’ Salam wanted to convey the importance of the acquisition of knowledge in Islam and what better way to do that than narrate the last episode in the life of one of most outstanding intellectuals in the history of Islam. Thus, on both science as well as religion, one would agree with Salam, who was not only a successful scientist but also a practising Muslim instead of those who misinterpret both. Salam’s notion of ilm was not merely sacred knowledge about God but also about the profane. He believed in the Prophet’s exhortations to seek knowledge even unto China, quite unlike our essentialist interlocutors for Islamic science whose myopia does not take them beyond the Quran and Sunnah.

  A recent study dubs all nineteenth-century reformist exhortations to pursue modern science reductionist because the word ‘ilm was conveniently used to produce a new strand of Islam and science discourse.48 In that case, is it not reductionism to limit ilm to mean merely knowledge about God? If that was the Prophet’s idea then why did the Prophet make this distinction in his famous saying ‘To listen to the instructions of science and learning for one hour is more meritorious than standing up in prayer for a thousand nights’?49 The Prophet of Islam exhorted his newfound followers to pursue both the sacred as well as the secular and both the exercises for him were ultimately a search for the Truth of God. The concept of ilm or knowledge is being misread and misinterpreted by a large number of Islamic scholars and activists today in the same manner as the notion of jihad is being hijacked and trivialized by some Islamic extremists.50 Both are akin to the vandalization of the core edifice of Islam where ilm and jihad occupied a central place.

  5

  Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

  Striving for a Composite and Pluralist India

  A truly liberal and humanitarian education may transform the outlook of the people and set it on the path of progress and prosperity, while an ill-conceived or unscientific system might destroy all the hopes which have been cherished by generations of pioneers in the cause of national freedom.

  —Abul Kalam Azad

  Our present difficulties, unlike those of Europe, are not the creations of materialistic zealots but of religious fanatics.

  —Abul Kalam Azad

  Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is, by any reckoning, a key figure in twentieth-century Indian history. His erudition and training in the traditional Islamic sciences and his robust intellect put him on a high pedestal even among his towering contemporaries. He began his career as a skilful journalist, with a remarkably insightful eye on a large number of burning issues. One of the issues he held dear was education, especially scientific and technical education, which he felt was indispensable for the development of a country colonized and exploited for over 150 years. This commitment of Azad’s can be amply seen in the pages of his journal Al-Hilal, as early as the second decade of the twentieth century. He systematically pursued education as a discipline from a very early age. Basically, his involvement with the Aligarh movement and the Nadwat al-Ulema of Lucknow gave him an opportunity to articulate his views on educational affairs.

  In 1916, he explicitly asserted his having studied, over a period of a decade or so, the problem in its entirety, and claimed to have developed ‘a critical-cum-creative insight’1 into the discipline of education. One of the major early influences on Azad was Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth/fifteenth-century Moroccan philosopher, historian and traveller, who inspired Azad to question the traditional methods of teaching as well as the curriculum. Maulana Azad agreed with him in holding that what led to stagnation in religious and secular learning was an unquestioning acceptance of theology. He found education to be the sole means of rectifying this error.2 Azad found the curricula in the Islamic madarsas fundamentally narrow and with a significant omission— mathematics, which is the basis of science and technology.3 Another notable influence, in the context of science and education, was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who attracted Azad towards modern education and modern science for Muslims; however, he later got out of the community concerns alone due to his commitment to anti-imperialist and nationalist politics. He admitted in his writings such as Azad ki Kahani (published again in 1992) that Sir Syed’s writings brought about an intense revolution in his thought, both in his religious and intellectual life.4 With the intoxication of Sir Syed’s writings, Azad went through the stages as in his father’s dictum: ‘The way to apostasy in the present age is through wahhabiyat to nechariyat.’5 Among the nineteenth-century Islamic thinkers and reformists, Azad was not impressed by Syed Ahmed alone; he was surprisingly in agreement with Sir Syed’s bete noir Jamaluddin al-Afghani and his disciple Muhammad Abduh as well. Azad wanted to imbibe the best from both and in this he found that al-Afghani was all for modern scientific and technical education and was also critical of those ulema who urged the community to keep away from anything that had to do with the British.

  In one of his letters in Ghubar-i Khatir, a collection of letters written from Ahmednager Fort prison between 1942 and 1945— one of the most interesting collections of his writings, which deals with issues other than religion and politics—he comments upon the education system and syllabi in the context of his own education in late nineteenth-century India, particularly the Islamic madarsas: It was an outdated system of education which had become barren from every point of view—teaching methods defective, worthless subjects of study, deficient in the selection of books, defective way of reading and calligraphy.’ If this is what Maulana Azad felt about the Islamic madarsas more
than one hundred years ago, we can well imagine the urgency and necessity of radical reform in the contemporary system of education. He also felt that if the chronology were separated then what is left of the Nizamiya syllabus, it is only Islamic lore and philosophy. The books to which Islamic education is confined … give no vision for change or innovation. If philosophy is divested of logic the only thing left is the history of ancient philosophy that is a memorial to the exertions of a past age although the sphere of knowledge has expanded far beyond that. He is critical of even Al Azhar, (an institution founded in the tenth century and which continues to be one of the most important Islamic universities) and calls its syllabus poor. Expressing a sense of relief at the fact that he did not have to depend on these madarsas for his early education, he writes: ‘Just imagine if I had stopped there and had not gone in search of new knowledge with a new curiosity what my plight would have been! Obviously my early education would not have given me anything except a stagnant mind, a total stranger to reality.’

  Maulana’s own experience in early education and his breaking away from the traditional methods is revealing and can be instructive in our own attempts to rethink the Islamic educational system. The present-day Islamic enthusiasts can learn a lesson or two from the insights of this scholar—both from his writings against conformism and conservatism and his questioning of his own family’s intellectual and religious inheritance. Maulana Azad writes further in the same letter:

  Nothing is a greater hindrance to the growth of a mind than its conservative beliefs. No other power binds it as do the shackles of conformity … At times so strong is the grip of inherited beliefs that education and environment also cannot loosen it. Education would give it a new paint but never enter the inner belief structure where the influence of race, family and centuries old traditions continue to operate.