Jihad or Ijtihad Read online

  Encounter with Ernest Kenan

  Jamaluddin al-Afghani’s pragmatism is best reflected in his exchanges with the French Islamist and Orientalist Ernest Renan in Paris, al-Afghani was one of the few Asiatics who travelled to Europe at the time and had firsthand experience of studying and understanding the European perception of other people and religions, particularly Islam.78 He was in Paris in 1883, just a few days before Renan delivered his lecture on Islam and Science’ at the Sorbonne, published subsequently in Journal des Debats in its 29 March 1883 issue. The same journal carried al-Afghani’s ‘Answer to Renan’ on 18 May 1883. Renan’s lecture was an articulation of the nineteenth-century racist and Orientalist construction of Islam and the Arab world. It can be better understood by looking at his other speeches.

  The Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race, by virtue of its simplicity. This race—if I dare to use the analogy— is to the Indo-European family what a pencil sketch is to painting; it lacks that variety, that amplitude, that abundance of life which is the condition of perfectibility … the Semitic nations … have never been able to achieve true maturity.79

  Thus, for him, Islam as a Semitic religion and the Arabs as a Semitic race were too simple and trivial to make any meaningful contribution to the growth of science and philosophy. He was convinced that the Semitic Oriental sensibility had never reached the heights attained by the Indo-Germanic races. What is generally called Arab science and philosophy is really Greek and Persian. Renan’s argument buttressed the Orientalist theory of origins— that the Indo-European race is the source of science and philosophy. His first meeting with al-Afghani produced on him a Vivid impression’:

  Sheikh Jemmal-Eddin is an Afghan [read not an Arab] entirely divorced from the prejudices of Islam; he belongs to those energetic races of Iran, near India, where the Aryan spirit lives so energetically under the superficial layer of official Islam… Sheikh Jemmal-Eddin is the best case of ethnic protest against religious conquest that one could cite …

  It is ironic that Renan saw al-Afghani, a venerated pan-Islamist of the Muslim world, as an ideal example of ethnic protest against the Islamic manacle. Renan further felt ‘while I was talking with him, that I had before me, restored to life, one of my old acquaintances—Avicenna, Averroes, or another of those great infidels who represented for five centuries the tradition of the human mind’80. Renan’s second point was that Islam was essentially hostile to science. This hostility was dominant during Arab rule and continued under the Turks, and was only temporarily and precariously overcome during a short period when the Greek and Persian influences were strong. Here again, Renan harks back to his argument of Indo-European racial superiority and its contribution to Islamic intellectual tradition, howsoever trivial that tradition was. Renan’s hostility towards Islam should not be confused with his general atheism. He made it explicit that Islam, because it unites the spiritual and temporal realms and makes dogma rule in both, is ‘the heaviest chain that humanity has ever borne’.81 In a later article, Renan expressed another strong view:

  The human mind must be freed of all supernatural belief if it wishes to work on its essential work, which is the construction of positive science. This does not imply violent destruction or brusque rupture. The Christian does not have to abandon Christianity nor the Muslim Islam. The enlightened parties of Christianity and Islam should arrive at that state of benevolent indifference where religious beliefs become inoffensive. This has happened in about half the Christian countries; let us hope that it will happen in Islam.82

  Did al-Afghani find all this criticism outrageous? Given his reputation as a pan-Islamist and a defender of Islam against the inroads made by Western imperialism, he should have condemned outright Renan’s rancour against Islam. On the contrary, al-Afghani agreed with most of Renan’s criticism. However, he did disagree with Renan on two counts—first the racist conclusion that Arabs by nature and temperament were inimical to science and philosophy, and second, that Islam as a whole was essentially hostile to science. Countering Renan’s first point, al-Afghani began by saying that it was an undeniable fact that

  the Arab people, while it was still in the state of barbarism, rushed into the road of intellectual and scientific progress with a rapidity only equaled by the speed of its conquests, since in the space of a century, it acquired and assimilated almost all the Greek and Persian sciences…just as it extended its domination from the Arabian peninsula up to the mountains of the Himalaya and the summit of the Pyrenees.83

  al-Afghani continued by saying that the Greeks and Romans had built great monuments to science and advanced the frontiers of civilization for many centuries, but all that had collapsed and their most precious books had been relegated to oblivion. Though originally ignorant and barbaric, the Arabs took up what had been abandoned by the ‘civilized nations’, rekindled the extinguished sciences, developed them and gave them a brilliance they had never had previously. It is a historical fact that the age of Arabic learning lasted about 500 years, and coincided with the darkest period of European history.84

  Till recently, the Arabs had been credited with merely transmitting the Greek legacy to Europe, without introducing any significant epistemological advancement in what they received from the Greeks. This period has commonly been spoken of as one of ‘preservation’ and ‘safekeeping’. Islamic culture—itself a vast territory of peoples and cultures—is said to have ‘rescued’ the heritage of Greek science and held it intact, perhaps even making a few additions to it here and there, till the West was finally prepared to ‘recover’ it in full, as the rightful heir.85 This nineteenth-century Orientalist and racist inheritance continued in the history of science till Joseph Needham,86 Roshdi Rashed,87 A.I. Sabra88 and many others intervened with their extensive researches in China and the Islamic world.

  One could understand the use of racist categories in the legitimation of imperialism but the postcolonial situation requires a cross-cultural and cross-civilizational perspective to comprehend the true character of modern science. Even in the 1880s, however, al-Afghani saw through the Orientalist programme when he countered Renan by saying that the Arabs who usurped these sciences by right of conquest ‘developed, extended, clarified, perfected, completed and coordinated with a perfect taste and a rare precision and exactitude’. He argued further that Byzantium and Rome were closer to the French, German and the English than they were to the Arabs, whose capital was Baghdad, yet all the scientific treasure remained buried underneath till the Arab civilization lit up with its reflections the summits of the Pyrenees.

  The Europeans welcomed Aristotle, who had emigrated and become Arab; but they did not think of him at all when he was Greek and their neighbour. Is there not in this another proof, no less evident, of the intellectual superiority of the Arabs and of their natural attachment to philosophy?

  While he rejected the racism of Renan’s argument in the first case, al-Afghani had no major disagreement on the second point. He conceded that Islam did stifle the growth of science but preferred to take an evolutionist view, saying that the modern Western intellectual climate was superior because Christianity had had an evolutionary head start on Islam:

  All religions are intolerant, each one in its way. The Christian religion, I mean the society that follows its inspirations and its teachings, and is formed in its image, has emerged from the first period to which I have just alluded; thenceforth free and independent, it seems to advance rapidly on the road of progress and science, whereas Muslim society has not yet freed itself from the tutelage of religion …

  In truth, the Muslim society has tried to stifle science and stop its progress.

  al-Afghani pointed out that Christianity had also stifled science in the past, and the Catholic church continued to do so, yet he was in full agreement with Renan that a believing Muslim was a slave to dogma and, in fact, expressed himself much more strongly:

  A true believer must, in fact, turn from the path of studies that have for their
object scientific truth … Yoked, like an ox to the plow, to the dogma whose slave he is, he must walk eternally in the furrow that has been traced for him in advance by the interpreters of the law. Convinced, besides, that his religion contains in itself all morality and all sciences, he attaches himself resolutely to it and makes no effort to go beyond … What would be the benefit of seeking truth when he believes he possesses it all?… Wherefore he despises science.89

  Though al-Afghani rejected the racist side of Renan’s argument and brought in an evolutionary thesis, he found it permissible to ask himself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such light on the world, suddenly extinguished itself; why this torch had not been relit since; and why the Arab world still remained buried in profound darkness. Close to one hundred years later, Lynn White, Jr. expressed a similar view in his Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered: ‘The Arabic-speaking civilization knew what science was and was proficient in it. For four hundred years, science was one of its major concerns. But a crystallization of other values occurred in the late eleventh century which shifted the whole focus of Islamic culture. Science was abandoned, and abandoned deliberately.’90

  Aydin Sayili points out that Islam was remarkable for its achievements in the organization and systematization of education. The ‘abundance of public libraries and schools, even of the madarsas, i.e., the schools of higher education, bears witness to this attitude … ‘ However, apart from certain exceptional cases which occurred especially in the thirteenth and later centuries, the madarsas as well as other institutions of instruction in Islam were devoted almost solely to the cultivation and dissemination of the Islamic sciences. The awail sciences and philosophy were left out of the madarsa curriculum.91 However, after highlighting the regenerative role of Islam in the cultivation of science and its subsequent abandonment and repression under the latter Islamic regimes, al-Afghani concluded his response to Renan with a general statement, saying: ‘Religions, by whatever names they are called, all resemble each other. No agreement and no reconciliation is possible between these religions and philosophy (read sciences also as al-Afghani uses the terms interchangeably). Religion imposes on man its faith and its belief, whereas philosophy frees him totally or in part.’92

  Renan’s condescending rejoinder to al-Afghani, published in the Journal des Debats on 19 May 1883, stated that ‘there was nothing more instructive than studying the ideas of an enlightened Asiatic, in their original and sincere form’. He found in them a rationalism which gave him hope that ‘if religions divide men, Reason brings them together; and that there is only one Reason’. Renan agreed with al-Afghani and admitted that ‘he may have appeared unjust to the Sheikh’ in singling out Islam for his attack by stating, ‘Christianity in this respect is not superior to Islam. This is beyond doubt. Galileo was no better treated by Catholicism than Averroes by Islam.’93

  DIVERGENCE AND CONVERGENCE

  We can see in this short account of Syed Ahmed Khan and Jamaluddin al-Afghani a deep divergence on political issues and a startling convergence on several points related to their perception of modern science. Both the divergence as well convergence can be located in their respective political and social contexts. Syed Ahmed Khan was rooted in Indian politics and history and thus confronted the issue of science and Islam as an Indian citizen, bound by the constraints and demands of the country’s politics and history, al-Afghani was a nomad in politics, with an equal eye for the politics of India, Egypt, Turkey and wherever else a substantial Muslim population was oppressed by British imperialism.

  Syed Ahmed avoided confrontationist politics in his dealings with the colonial government, believing that the Muslims in India could be redeemed only through cooperation with the British. For him 1857 was ‘the end of the medieval phase of Indian Muslim revivalism … The "archaic" resistance had failed … Syed Ahmad turned to "futuristic" adjustment, to alignment with the dynamics of modernism and to rehabilitation within the opportunities provided by the unchallengeable foreign rule. This implied a rejection of revivalism.’

  Thus, Syed Ahmed’s reconciliation of science with Islam was within a collaborative and reformative framework, and the consistency with which he pursued this policy ‘widened the gulf between him and the neo-revivalist political consciousness of Indian Islam inspired by the political convulsions of the contemporary world of Islam’, al-Afghani, on the other hand, represented these ‘political convulsions’ and his efforts at reconciling science with Islam were grounded in this framework. Being an anti-imperialist and pan-Islamist, the British to him were like ‘a dragon which had swallowed twenty million people, and drunk up the waters of the Ganges and the Indus, but was still unsatiated and ready to devour the rest of the world and to consume the waters of the Nile and the Oxus’. al-Afghani’s political message caught the imagination of the majority of the Indian Muslim community, particularly the orthodox religious leadership of Dar al-Ulum at Deoband and Nadwat al-Ulama at Lucknow. His bitter denunciation of Syed Ahmed Khan’s reformist modernism and reinterpretation of the Quran further strengthened these forces, al-Afghani expected ‘the Ulema to arrive at a consensus of ijtihad, needed for adjustment with a world in which initiative of progress was in the hands of non-Muslims’.94 He had great expectations of the ulema, and wanted them to come forward and meet the challenge of modern science. Syed Ahmed Khan, despairing of the capacity of the ulema, at least in India, to rise to the occasion, took the burden of ijtihad on himself. This was considered an encroachment by the religious leadership and made his reformist programme not only controversial but unacceptable to a large number of people. While Syed Ahmed and others were enamoured by Western modernity and saw Britain and France as benign bearers of progress, al-Afghani highlighted modernity’s contradictory impact. His religious vision came to be informed by a very modern dilemma. On the one hand, Muslims needed modern science, which they would have to learn from Europe. On the other, this very necessity was proof’ of our inferiority and decadence’, for ‘we civilize ourselves by imitating the Europeans’, al-Afghani had located the centre of this historical dilemma in a society that had been subjected to colonialism: if being modern meant, above all, free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation?95

  There is one more point of convergence between al-Afghani and Syed Ahmed: both believed Islam to be capable of an evolutionary process in accord with the present and the future history of mankind. The difference between them, as always, is that ‘the Indo-Muslim ‘modernist’ was always concerned with the particular, the concrete, the detailed; while his adversary with the general, the generalised and the emotionally surcharged abstract’.96

  Unfortunately, political Islam remained dominant in the nineteenth century and everything else was subservient to its political context. The future of science and civilization in Islam depends critically on whether the silent majority reasserts itself and snatches back control of civil society, or whether it buckles under the ferocious onslaught of nascent revivalism.97 For the moment, all seems to be lost in the race to replace Eurocentrism in science with Islamcentrism,98 which is as arbitrary and undemocratic as the former.

  3

  What is ‘Islamic’ in Islamic Science?

  Some Insights from Nineteenth-Century India1

  To speak metaphorically, when philosophy was transplanted into our schools, it was in its infancy; there it was brought up into boyhood by the exertions of the Arabian discoverers; and it was afterwards removed into the European schools where it reached maturity through the experimental discoveries of Leonardo, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Francis Bacon &c.

  —Maulvi Obaidullah El Obaidi

  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 wel
l as learn music from ignorant buffoons.

  —Maulvi Karamat Ali

  We are asking back from Europe today some payment for the debt you owe to us on account of what we did for you in the Middle Ages. Students from Oxford and Cambridge used to go to Spain to learn from us science and mathematics; now we come to you instead.

  —Munshi Zakaullah

  Let me start with an analogy from Mohammad Wakil, a Pakistani columnist, who asked us to imagine a cable with many coloured wires inside it, conducting power, knowledge and information. This cable, he said, represents contemporary civilization. It was created in many lands and by many hands: pagan, Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Tao, etc. Each of them contributed to this civilization’s science and art. Somewhere inside this cable of civilization is a green Islamic wire that is sparking furiously because of a weak connection. It is seeking to re-establish its internally damaged circuit. It is also seeking to reconnect with the flow of information, knowledge and power that inspires contemporary civilization. Western nations may remain keen on claiming exclusive ownership of this contemporary civilization. However, this civilization cannot be copyrighted and patented by any single, monolithic superpower or by any other exclusivist formation centred on religion or culture. Even the feminist Sandra Harding begins by acknowledging that