Jihad or Ijtihad Page 6
the borrowings have been far more extensive and important for the development of modern sciences than the conventional histories reveal. It is not only the so-called ‘complex’ cultures of China, India and others in East Asian and Islamic societies that have provided resources for European sciences and technologies, but also the so-called ‘simpler’ cultures of Africa, pre-Columbian Americas, and others that were encountered by Europeans during their Voyages of Discovery.2
However, some of these insights later get into serious relativist positions where modern science itself is reduced merely to local knowledge, paving the way for and justifying diverse other essentialisms. This sentiment is contrary to the thinking of some of the present-day enthusiasts, who, in the name of questioning Eurocentrism, are putting forward a religiously motivated alternative. Eurocentrism should be questioned to bring out the civilizational and cultural diversity of modern science and not in order to replace it with another centrism called Islamic science or Hindu science. A large number of Islamist intellectuals have proposed binaries like tradition/modernity and Islamic science/ modern (Western) science. Here Islamic science is merely confined to tradition while modern science is projected as an exclusive preserve of modernity, which is not only Western but also Christian in spirit and inspiration. One may bring in the issue of multiple modernities, saying that Western modernity is not the only modernity and one need not conform to its norms in order to be called modern.3 Actually a search for an alternative modernity can be well meaning if it is sought in terms of a civilizational alternative instead of an alternative clothed in religion.4
Unfortunately, most of the proponents of the Islamic alternative have emphasized the Islamicity of their civilization, rather than its cultural distinctiveness. The latter may include several other religious denominations that helped construct Islamic civilization, including its Islamic science. All those who are looking for a religiously and not culturally motivated Islamic science’ are doing a great disservice to science in Muslim countries.5 This pernicious exercise, which began a few decades ago, has acquired dangerous and ugly connotations, leading some to talk in terms of a clash of civilizations.6 Eurocentrism, a creation of an essentialist thinking process, is being challenged by diverse essentialisms equally condemnable.
As pointed out by the well-known historian of science A.I. Sabra, ‘Civilizations don’t just clash. They can learn from each other. Islam is a good example of that.’ The intellectual meeting of Arabia and Greece was one of the greatest events in history, he says, with enormous scale and consequences, not just for Islam but for Europe and the world.7 Most of the Islamists repeatedly talk about modern science’s debt to Islamic civilization but they seldom say a word about the Arabs’ scientific debt to the pre-Islamic ancient civilizations from the so-called jahiliya phase. Can any Islamist tell us what the source of Islamic science was? Was it the Quran or Hadis or did it come straight through the divine intervention of angels?
Arab civilization did not see the light of science till the middle of the eighth century. There was hardly any science during the Prophet’s time or even during the period of the Khulafa-i-Rashedins (The Khalifas of the Right Way). It was during the reign of the liberal Muslim Abbasid and later Ottoman kings that science flowered in Islam. This was possible because the Abbasids welcomed Greek, Indian, Chinese and other sciences and got all these works translated into Arabic. Most of these scientists and translators who gathered in Baghdad were Arab Christians, Jews, Muslims and even Hindus and Buddhists from India, and were sincere participants in the project called Islamic civilization. The nineteenth-century interlocutors, some of whom I am going to discuss in this paper, seem to be aware of this cross-civilizational character of science in Islamic civilization. Modern science, for them, was a culmination of the perpetually shifting centres of science in history. One of them, Maulvi Obaidullah Ubedi (1834-1885), wrote in his 1877 essay in Calcutta that the Abbasid caliphs were declared patrons of Christian and Jewish scholars, ‘who resided at this time in great numbers at Baghdad and in other parts of the Mahomedan dominions’8. Their plurality of vision and cross-cultural perspective is in contrast to what is being propounded today in the name of Islamic science.
The current formulations of some expatriate Islamic intellectuals (mostly based in the Euro-American universities with a following back home in countries like Malaysia and India) should be viewed in the context of general intolerance at a political level, within Islam as well as elsewhere.9 It is compounded due to the disillusionment with the proclaimed objectives of science, more so with technology and its direct role in developmental projects. Western science, Sardar has written, ‘is inherently destructive, and it does not, and cannot, fulfill the needs of Muslim societies’. But why is it destructive for Muslim societies alone?10 Such obvious questions need an answer. It is a fact that the S&T application has led to the dehumanization and robotization of society, yet this is not an insight, by any stretch of imagination, which has emanated from a particular faith. All those who argue for a science based on religion begin with a critique of modern science, questioning the value-free nature of science, emphasizing the destructive nature of certain of its products. The fact that the practice of modern science has created serious problems for human society was not a discovery of born-again fundamentalists.11 There have been critiques of science from within the community of practising scientists as well as from Marxists and anarchists like Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) and others. In the name of critical perspective, some of the current interlocutors are pushing for a sectarian agenda, making modern science look like a monolithic European product with a Christian ethic.12 In the name of indigenous knowledge traditions, the religious essentialists are attempting to foreground one dominant tradition and threatening in the process the very idea of cultural pluralism. More importantly in this porous world, fundamentalist projects based only on a priori assumptions are doomed.13
IMPERIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE
What I propose to do in this chapter is to look at some of the nineteenth-century Indian Islamic intellectuals and see how they perceived modern science and contrast their inclusivist approach with the exclusivism and sectarianism of the present-day enthusiasts. The nineteenth-century intellectuals were faced with the brutal onslaught of mercantile imperialism and reduced to civilizational nothingness due to a concerted Orientalist discourse preceding colonization. Yet some of them tried making a distinction between the imperialist project and its concerns and the project of modern science. They were bitter critics of imperialism all over the Islamic world but were not prepared to disown modern science. Most of these Islamic intellectuals were reformers, who held modern science a chief weapon to fight against Muslim backwardness. However, imperialism also led to revivalism, where a small segment of the traditional ulema called for a revival of the Islamic spiritual and ethical norms, rather than acquisition of Western science, as a cure. They were the ulema, the so-called custodians of Islam, who refused to make a distinction between imperialist threat and the new knowledge, the knowledge that had enabled the West to subjugate the entire Muslim world. They believed that Islam needed to be saved from Western cultural baggage, which they perceived as a greater threat to the Islamic way of life. They countered the modernist reformers and their institutions with their alternative Islamic ones: Dar al-Ulum at Deoband, founded in the 1860s, followed soon by Nadwat al-Ulama at Lucknow, established by Shibli Nomani in 1894. Both the institutions remained committed to Islamic religious education, resisting the reformers’ attempts to secularize education and defending Islam against Western cultural and intellectual assault. Till today there is hardly any change in their curriculum and programme and the results are there for all to see. The reformers may not be experts on science or religion, as they have been accused; however, the institutions they founded served Islam more productively and continue to do so even today.14
The postcolonial Islamic societies are faced w
ith some real as well as perceived Western cultural and intellectual hegemonization even now. This is being misused by some ideologues of Islamic science to dub modern science part of the ‘evil’ colonial baggage to be accepted at one’s own peril. For them, modern science is an epistemological as well as cultural break from an earlier, unadulterated Islamic past.15 Let me digress a bit and cite Sadik J. Al-Azm, a Syrian philosopher and human rights advocate, who wrote that this negative attitude towards modern science becomes even more striking (and interesting) when we remind ourselves of the lengths to which earlier Muslim latitudinarians and modernists went to reconcile Islam with science. Their main strategy was to naturalize science Islamically by first singing its praises and privileging the kind of knowledge it yields, and then arguing (a) that Europe had borrowed the scientific method from Islam in the first place (via Spain), (b) that nothing in modern scientific knowledge and discoveries really contradicts true Islam, and (c) that when such seeming contradictions arise they can easily be mediated and resolved to the satisfaction of both sides by an improved understanding of the profounder meaning of Islam’s scriptures and essential teachings. Needless to say, the current radical Islamists follow the exact opposite strategy of privileging Islam alone (or a certain conception of it), to the deliberate denigration and exclusion of science.16 As a matter of fact, there is no antipathy between science and Islam; it is being created today to bolster an image of Islam which conforms to the needs of those so-called defenders of Islam who want to fight Western hegemonization through such flawed binaries.
In this chapter, I will mainly deal with Maulvi Karamat Ali Jaunpuri, Maulvi Obaidullah Ubedi, Munshi Zakaullah and Syed Jamaluddin al-Afghani. None of them were just reformers; the first two were Calcutta-based Islamic scholars and teachers, Zakaullah was one of the pillars of the Delhi Renaissance and a mathematician while al-Afghani is a well-known pan-Islamist, who spent a few eventful years in India in the 1880s. Let me point out that they raised questions at a very rudimentary level, attempting to convey the feeling that modern civilization, represented by the Euro-American world, was the outcome of joint human effort, cutting across cultural or religious barriers. We may not be justified in locating the current understanding of multiculturalism or Needhamian ecumenism in their writings, yet they did have a vision of knowledge, which was premised on the cross-cultural exchange of ideas through the ages. In doing so they saw the Islamic civilizational contribution as an important component of modern science and did not feel the necessity of carving out a lone furrow premised on a religious distinction.17
Munshi Zakaullah, who represents the efflorescence of ‘New Learning’ in nineteenth-century Delhi, wrote extensively on subjects like the understanding of knowledge within the East, particularly Islam and its role in the cross-civilizational progress of modern science. He firmly believed that knowledge cannot be grounded in any particular religion or culture, that it is in fact universal. Zakaullah was a favourite student of Master Ramchandra, the celebrated science and mathematics teacher at Delhi College in the 1840s and 50s. A man deeply rooted in the traditional culture of Delhi, he revered this tradition in part, but was simultaneously convinced of the possibility of a bright future if modern knowledge was systematically cultivated. His position is sufficiently explicit in the following lines:
I believe that it is ignorance to dub the ancient sciences or the Eastern sciences irrelevant. And this ignorance is further compounded if the modern Western sciences are not preferred over the ancient or Eastern sciences … The truth is that the light of Eastern science is surrounded by an ever-increasing darkness. But, being our own, this light gives us pleasure and its darkness is soothing … Comparatively, darkness around the light of Western science is much less. Yet it dazzles our eyes and it is so alien that we are unable to see anything else. We need to be accustomed to this light. Once this happens, we will be able to witness the splendours of nature and the miracles of human ingenuity.18
Most of the intellectuals of nineteenth-century India were passing through a phase of transition where the past was invoked for ‘historical guidelines in their heritage appropriate to a society in transition’. They had to confront a vibrant European culture, which had gone through tremendous socio-cultural and material changes during the preceding three centuries. Among all these achievements of Europe, science and its marvels occupied the prime spot in the imagination of the Indian intellectuals. Zakaullah could not escape that and he was compelled to give an edge to the contemporaneous advancements in scientific knowledge over those of the past. In his admiration for the period, he wrote: ‘The nineteenth century had been an auspicious century because the Euro-Americans, through their inventions and innovations, and borrowings from the arts and crafts of their predecessors, had made unprecedented progress. Such a development we have not witnessed or even dreamt of in any other century.’19
Here he seems to be voicing the global nineteenth-century view that this century had been the greatest landmark in the history of human progress. He was convinced that ‘without a full acceptance of the results of modern science and a full knowledge of them also, the East must inevitably fall behind the West, and the doors of all future progress be closed’.20 He never felt the need to locate scientific knowledge within the Quran or hadis; in fact, he was rather candid about accepting the progress of Europe and wanted the East to inexorably follow its lead.
Zakaullah and other cultural figures of north India, such as Ghalib, Nazir Ahmad and Altaf Hussain Hali, acknowledged the achievements of modern Europe, particularly its scientific and technological advancements. Hali in his Musaddas pointedly referred to the fact that the results of Western science and art have been evident in India for the past century. But he believed that prejudice had veiled our sight, so that we could not see the radiance of the truth. Thus ‘the dominant critique was a result of the exposure of the Indian intelligentsia to Western ways and Western learning through whose eyes the native Indian would have appeared aberrant’.21 Commenting upon the prevalent understanding, Hali wrote:
The opinions of the ancient Greeks are engraved upon our minds, now if truth were revealed from heaven we would not believe it. Those who cling fast to that philosophy today, who sing the praises of Avicenna’s Shifa and the Almagest, lay their foreheads on Aristotle’s threshold, and follow blindly in Plato’s footsteps, are no whit better than the oxen at the oil press who spend their lives walking round and round, and finish up where they began.22
Moreover, Zakaullah had internalized the ideology of scientism, which had been gaining ground in Europe since the seventeenth century. Expressing his commitment, he wrote: Science is that knowledge which has truth, an absolute truth and nothing but the truth.23 This scientism which, he felt, clashed with the narrow-minded, tradition-bound ideas of the East, was represented in most of Zakaullah’s writings. To keep abreast with the changing times, he advised people to look at ideas and facts through reason and simultaneously carry on with their love for tradition.24 He contested the general contempt ascribed to the new values because, according to him, blind faith in conventions takes one away from the realization of truth. What did he mean by truth? For him, as pointed out earlier, modern science represented the ultimate truth. (This may not be acceptable today but we have to keep Zakaullah’s nineteenth-century colonial context in mind.)
Zakaullah left behind an insight for the present-day Islamists who do not want to see any merit in modern science, and who, based on their misreading of Islam, see it as alien. He was convinced that Muslims can rightfully pursue modern science as they have contributed to its progress in its early stages. At an emotional moment in Delhi, referring to Muslim rule in Spain when Cordova emerged as a centre of light and learning, he asked Europe for payment for the debt you owe to us on account of what we did for you in the Middle Ages’ (see epigraph).25 Zakaullah saw Islam as a faith fully compatible with science, locating its backwardness in the socio-economic conditions of its followers. C.F. Andrews, his biographer, ad
ded: ‘There was more than kindly humour in such a phrase; there was the recognition of the truth: that knowledge is a universal possession, now held by one race, now held by another for the good of all’.26 Andrews cited the Prophet’s famous hadis, ‘Get knowledge, wherever it is to be found, even as far as China’, and remarked that this ‘great sentence has been the means, in every age, of breaking down the barriers which have separated Islam from alien cultures. This principle, underlying Islam, accounts for the fact that assimilation of fresh knowledge has been one of its distinguishing marks throughout its history, and is still visible today.’27 Zakaullah was explicit in acknowledging that Muslims had eagerly learnt from other cultures and religions without hesitation when he wrote: ‘The early Muslims (Arabs) did not hesitate to learn from others. They accepted non-Muslims and non-Arabs as their teachers and, through their inventions and research, expanded the frontiers of knowledge and achieved the privilege of being teachers to other communities.’28 This plurality of vision, the core of early Islam, faces a serious challenge all over the contemporary Islamic world. The articulation for Islamic science today is based on the negation of this plurality, which was central to its early scientific efflorescence.
Zakaullah’s intellectual and pedagogic endeavours were a remarkable combination of the past and the present. Though firmly rooted in the indigenous culture, he was conscious of the modern challenges and the imperatives of transcending the traditional outlook. For him, this transformation was conceivable without disowning the past. An open and progressive approach meant for him assimilation of modern science and modern technical knowledge. He was one of those intellectuals of the nineteenth century who took infinite pride in the achievements of Indian civilization, stretching as it did back to the Vedas and Upanishads, yet he was the first to admit the degeneracy and decay that had taken place, and the need for a fresh current of air from outside. His commitment to modern science convinced him to give precedence to the present over the past. For him it was impossible to imagine a bright future without assimilating modern knowledge, for he was sure that the mere past was not enough to facilitate the transformation to modernity. For most nineteenth-century intellectuals, this respect for India’s past was incorporated with a programme of cultural nationalism, which, they felt, was needed to regenerate indigenous culture.