Jihad or Ijtihad Page 2

  The practice of monasticism begins in Western Christendom during this period, where monks and nuns committed themselves to lives of manual labour, contemplation and worship and also took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, as well as of residency for life in the monastery. Because of the requirement that every monk and nun be literate enough to read the Bible and other devotional literature, monasteries developed their own schools to teach reading and writing; they also established scriptoria, where the necessary books were produced by copyists. These two features of monastic life contributed crucially to the preservation of literacy and learning through a very dangerous period of European history. Augustine also set down the centrality of reasoning quite loosely within the parameters of Christianity, saying just as you would be ill advised to avoid all speaking because some speaking is false, so you must not avoid all reasoning because some reasoning is false’. This, one can say, was the early attempt within Christianity to reconcile science and religion, followed by fervent missionary involvement in translations of scientific texts from Arabic to Latin. Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, embarked on an ambitious and delicate project of finding a method ‘to deal with an intellectual heritage that was simultaneously dangerous and indispensable, how to salvage it and put it to work without condoning its intolerable theological consequences, how to discipline it without emasculating it’.23

  Meanwhile, in Islam, a reaction had set in where independent thinking or ijtihad, which was the hallmark of the Golden Age of science in early Islam, became suspect from the tenth/eleventh century onwards. All foreign scientific and philosophical accretions that had enriched Islamic civilization were dubbed un-Islamic and heretical. At the same time a dichotomy also set in, dividing knowledge broadly into two categories: the awail sciences or foreign sciences which were products of the human mind and the Islamic sciences based on the revealed truth, that is, those that sprang out of the Muslim religion or were closely connected with it.24 This binary did not stop here. It had its qualitative angle as well. The Islamic sciences were called the praiseworthy sciences while the awail sciences were termed blameworthy sciences. Let us not forget that awail sciences included all that was part of the glorious heritage of scientific excellence in Islam, while Islamic sciences dealt with literary and religious studies. What we need today in Islam is the revival of the so-called blameworthy sciences for only they can rescue the Islamic nations from the abyss of underdevelopment and backwardness they have fallen into.

  We should not ignore the fact that most of today’s Islamic nations had been colonized in the nineteenth century and the postcolonial vision is coloured by the tensions of hegemonization. According to the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabi, colonization was not the basic cause of Muslim decline, as many Muslim scholars have argued. It was the phenomenon of colonizability, which had set in centuries before, that made the Muslim world ripe for colonization.25 Muzaffar Iqbal adds another dimension to the problem in his recent work called Islam and Science. He says that till the advent of colonization in the nineteenth century, ‘the Islam and science discourse had been rooted within the larger Islamic intellectual tradition; now it acquired a new dimension because one of the two entities of the discourse, science, had a matrix situated outside the Islamic tradition’.26 This statement contradicts Islamic history itself: science flowered in Islamic civilization through active borrowings from alien and faraway cultures, irrespective of religion and language. The retort of scholars of Iqbal’s ilk to this is that the earlier exchange was possible because that foreign ‘material had come into a living tradition, through an active process of appropriation’ while the ‘new science, on the other hand, came to a tradition that was neither actively seeking it, nor was able to appropriate it into its own matrix’. It had ceased to be a living tradition almost 400 years before the trauma of colonization. The nineteenth century interface between colonized cultures and the colonizing West was mired in the unequal competition between these two worlds and the victory of European colonial powers was viewed, or at least flaunted by the victors, as a civilizational triumph.27

  Rashid Shaz, in his recent work, has also dealt with the issue of Islamic science in an interesting and insightful manner. He attempts to highlight the fact that the clergy in early Islam had no special place and the believers were expected to interpret the Book on their own. He writes:

  The first generation of Muslims had certainly no access to the compendiums of fiqh or the books of rijal, nor were they aware of exegetical maneuvering … For them, Quran was a book of guidance in plain and simple language. God had conveyed to them what He wanted to, leaving nothing for the clergy to interpret.28

  Most of the present-day interpolations are later accretions by the huge vested interests that came into being a few decades after the birth of Islam. I do not wish to get into theological issues but this aspect needs to be explored as it is crucial to our understanding of the rise and fall of science in Islamic civilization. The civil strife that engulfed the world of the nascent faith after the murder of the third Caliph Usman was conducive to those who wanted to dilute the divine message. From this period onward, we see the sudden emergence of a host of public entertaining intellectuals, the qassas and pseudo-scholars of prophetic traditions who wanted to change Islam from within. After this unfortunate development, it became almost impossible to distinguish between true and false traditions. The birth of shard sciences occurred in this social milieu. This abrupt and unplanned development of knowledge in Islam later had a devastating impact on the Muslim mind. The division of knowledge into shard and non-shard sciences, or into Islamic and secular, not only created a social role for the clergy, it also blocked the emergence of scientific and rational thinking among Muslims.29 For Shaz, this was the beginning of ‘the Vaticanization of Islam’ where some ulema of Islam even claimed to be the deputies of the prophet and repositories of all prophetic knowledge. While the division of knowledge into shard and non-shard sciences helped to curb the influence of Greek sciences,

  it also sent the rational thinking to a permanent exile outside the boundaries of sharei knowledge. Even a major portion of the Quran that urges Muslims to explore and take command of the natural world went beyond the scope of sharei sciences… This brought the Muslim mind to a blind alley from where it has yet to be rescued despite the elapse of some twelve centuries.

  The history of Islam refers to several innovations, bida, within Islam that had serious implications for the faith; I feel the above development was also a bida that severely impacted the intellectual history of Islam. According to Shaz,

  the Quran created a rational mind urging the faithful to reflect on the cosmic wonders. The natural world was declared a subject of study for all those seeking knowledge. And those astounded by the signs of God were called as real scholars. This was the original Quranic paradigm of knowledge and signpost for future revolution. Had the Muslim mind operated within this paradigm the study of natural sciences would certainly have come to us as a religious obligation.30

  Sadly, it did not happen and the original Quranic spirit was vulgarized to an extent that science and rational thinking became almost alien to the faith.

  This brief account of the rise and fall of science in Islamic civilization is only a backdrop as I do not deal in detail with these issues in the following five essays. I am concerned here with the tensions of colonization, followed by the complexities of the postcolonial scenario, which, unfortunately, has led to essentialism of a very dubious nature. We see, as mentioned in the beginning, a large number of postcolonial Islamic intellectuals getting into cultural relativism to counter ‘Western science’ with their religion-inspired Islamic science’. This regrettable ‘aspect of colonialism and the imperative desire to neutralize a pervasive Eurocentrism has restricted the likelihood of the emergence of an ecumenical version of the history of science’31 in most postcolonial non-Western societies. We have examples from the precolonial phase where a more rational and objective reaction c
ould be discerned not only in the modernist reformers but in Islamic scholars as well. They could perceive a cross-civilizational vision for modern science where contributions of Islam could be historically and philosophically located, without any abjuration of modern science. We also have examples in the postcolonial phase as well, where an Islamic scholar and nationalist like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad could engage with modernity and science without delving into religious or cultural essentialism. The need today is not only to fight against Eurocentrism but also to counter the enemy within, namely, the proliferating fundamentalism within global Islamic communities.

  Another major issue is the question of Islam and modernity. Its dilemma is nowhere more pronounced than in the Muslim perception and assimilation of modern science and technology. While the self-absorbed theocracy deems it fit to exploit the instruments of modernity in the furtherance of its own agenda, at the same time it does not consider it unethical to condemn the sources of modernity in the most virulent terms.32 They hark back to the past for some intellectual and philosophical sustenance but enthusiastically use modern technological advancements to promote their cause. Most of them cannot be dubbed old-fashioned anti-modernists who wish to take their societies to some primitive pre-scientific age; rather, they can be called, to borrow an expression from Jeffery Herf, ‘reactionary modernists’33 who love technology but fear science for its accompanying rationalism, secularism and individualism.

  2

  Reconciling Science with Islam in the Nineteenth Century

  The Quran does not prove that the earth is stationary, nor does it prove that the earth is in motion. Similarly, it cannot be proved from the Quran that the sun is stationary. The Holy Quran was not concerned with these problems of astronomy; because the progress in human knowledge was to decide such matters itself … the real purpose of a religion is to improve morality …

  —Syed Ahmed Khan

  The strangest thing of all is that our ulema these days have divided science into two parts. One they call Muslim science and one European science. Because of this they forbid others to teach some of the useful sciences. How very strange it is that the Muslims study those sciences that are ascribed to Aristotle with the greatest delight, as if Aristotle were one of the pillars of the Muslims. However, if the discussion relates to Galileo, Newton and Kepler, they consider them infidels.

  —Sayyid Jamaluddin al-Afghani

  The resurgence of political Islam today is marked by a call for the Islamization of sciences. Western imperialism has generated a reaction against certain sciences which are seen as un-Islamic.1 Here, it would be useful to go back to a nineteenth century debate on reconciling science with Islam. Through the work of two important figures, Syed Ahmed Khan and Jamaluddin al-Afghani, we observe a concern with the multicultural nature of modern science and the crucial contribution of Islam to its progress.

  The reconciliation of science with Islam in nineteenth-century India is enmeshed with the broader issue of locating the place of modern science within many colonial societies. It is not an easy task, and becomes all the more problematic if the introduction of science is visualized not merely as a passive process of diffusion but as a struggle for subversion and cultural redefinition of scientific knowledge.2 The recipient cultures, particularly those like India that had a centuries-old civilizational history, confronted modern science armed with their own stock of knowledge. Besides, India being a multi-religious society, the process of cultural encounter was all the more colourful and complex. The two major religious streams, Hinduism and Islam, engaged with modern scientific knowledge from the vantage points of their own political and cultural contexts, not always in isolation from each other. Within Hinduism, the Western-educated middle-class intelligentsia took the lead in advocating the critical assimilation of modern science as well as in making it a morally legitimate activity.3 A similar attempt was made within Islam by some reformers and intellectuals. However, the two responses were qualitatively different. The former was led, as just stated, by a Western-educated modern elite socialized through colonial education into ‘British colonial values’ which later ended up subverting those values. Within Indian Islam, there was no equivalent of a modern elite; rather, most of the interlocutors were grounded in an Orientalist intellectual context, where exposure to Western education and culture was minimal. The relatively early exposure of Bengal to British influence could produce a Rammohan Roy, followed by a host of others who could press for reform within Hinduism and for the legitimation of modern science. Nothing similar occurred within the Muslim community, though sporadic attempts were made during the early nineteenth century.

  Mirza Abu Talib Londony (1752-1806) a thinker, traveller and historian who visited Europe between 1799 and 1803 and recorded his impressions in a travelogue, for instance, pleaded for the acquisition of modern scientific knowledge and emphasized ‘the significance of economic factors in both the rise and fall of states’.4 Another example is Maulvi Karamat Ali (d.1873) who was born in Jaunpur but spent most of his active life in Calcutta. His outlook on Islam and its relation to the world at large forms a radical departure from that of the majority of the ulema of his time. Karamat Ali welcomed the establishment of Western institutions in India and, according to Garcin de Tassy, even competed for the Sir Charles Trevelyan Prize for the best Indian essay on ‘The Influence of the Greeks and Arabs on the Renaissance in Europe’. For the lack of an English translation, however, his essay was not accepted.5 Hinting at the cross-cultural character of modern science, Karamat Ali held that

  Muslims had developed Greek sciences into modern sciences and transmitted them to Europe through their centres of education in Spain. This process of cultural and intellectual diffusion, he noted, had resulted in the 19th century scientific discoveries of Europe from which the Muslims of India could justly benefit without any sense of inferiority.6

  Abdur Rahim Dahri (1785-1853) (known as Dahri, that is, non-believer or sceptic, because of his unorthodox views) also emphasized the need for Muslims to take to the new learning from the West. He wrote a booklet titled Arzdasht dar Bab-i-Zarurat Tarviz-i-Zaban-i-Angrezi-o-Ulum Firang (An Appeal for the Study and Dissemination of the English Language and Western Learning).7 Abdul Latif (1828-1893) founded the Muhammedan Literary Society in the 1860s in Bengal. He delivered lectures on the accessibility of European science and technology, and denied that Islam opposed the study of such subjects. In his estimation, the glorious periods of Islamic history had been characterized by the flowering of rationalism and science, whereas the Muslim decline had stemmed from ignorance of this intellectual heritage.8 After the uprising of 1857, he felt, like Syed Ahmed Khan, the need to bring his co-religionists more into harmony with English institutions of learning.

  The overall Muslim reaction, however, was very different. While the professional middle-class Hindu perceived the shift from Mughal to English rule as one more departure in its history, the Muslim viewed it as a calamity. The British were usurpers, and anything associated with them, including modern science, was to be looked upon with apprehension. ‘European science’ was seen as the enemy’s ruse to subvert Islamic religion and culture. A combination of hurt pride, defiance and conservatism led the Muslims to reject modern learning.9 What the battle of Plassey in 175710 did to the Muslims of Bengal and the east, the 1857 uprising11 did to the Muslims of the north. It was only in the later half of the nineteenth century that realization of the need for modern learning dawned, and attempts were made to bridge the gap.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Islamic response to modern science was broadly along the same lines as David Kopf describes for the early nineteenth century Bengali bhadralok: revivalist, revitalist and complete Westernization.12 Within Indian Islam as well as in the Arab world, the reactions varied. The Wahabi response to modern science was to reject anything Western, including Western ideas, seeing a return to early puritanical Islam as the only remedy for their stagnant society.13 Others attempted to adapt
Islam to the modern techniques as well as sciences of the West. Still others advocated complete Westernization as the only means for achieving progress.

  Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898) was a reformist Indian modernizer who founded the Aligarh Muslim University, while Jamaluddin al-Afghani (1838-1897) was a peripatetic pan-Islamist and anti-imperialist14 who spent a few years in India during the 1880s. Both tried to adapt Islam to the modern techniques as well as sciences of the West, and thus they fit into the second category of responses. However, they pursued different strategies to realize this objective. Syed Ahmed inaugurated a school of revitalists, or reconstructionists (as Pervez Hoodbhoy puts it in his recent work), who were convinced that some adjustment was needed in order to equip Islam to face the challenges of modern civilization, particularly modern science. He was ably supported in this task of reconstruction by Munshi Zakaullah15(1832-1911) and Syed Amir Ali16(1849-1928). Jamaluddin al-Afghani, on the other hand, was a pragmatist who advocated the use of pan-lslamism as an ideological bulwark against imperialism. This commitment to anti-imperialism however forced him to ignore pan-lslamism in India and to emphasize the unity of Muslims and Hindus to strengthen the emerging nationalism. Yet he could not overlook the imperative of cultivating modern science and technology and criticized the orthodoxy within Indian Islam for being retrograde in its outlook. Within this framework, al-Afghani preferred to ignore theological interventions and believed that Islam as a faith was well equipped to deal with the demands of modern science. This was his position while dealing with the umma, the community of believers, al-Afghani’s pragmatism took him to the other extreme when confronted with the academic and philosophical world, for example in his exchanges with the famous French Orientalist and Islamist, Ernest Renan. This will be taken up in detail at the end of the chapter.