Jihad or Ijtihad Read online

  There is no doubt that our scripture may be easily reconciled with modern scientific truth. If any of our co-religionists hold the doctrine of the plurality of worlds, he is not liable to be burnt like Bruno, according to our holy precepts. I can indeed discover some hints in the first verse at the beginning of our scripture about the plurality of the worlds; as when it says: ‘Praise be to God the Governor or Supporter of the Worlds.’

  Besides emphasizing plurality, Obaidullah believed that there is no contradiction between modern science and Islam. He further writes that ‘supposing that there exists any contradiction between the modern scientific truths and our scripture, we should consult our sacred writings for our moral instruction and guidance towards salvation, not for scientific investigations’. Ubedi was also of the view that learning spread in the world through cross-civilizational contributions and centres of excellence have been shifting all the time:

  The age of Arabian learning continued in its blooming youth about five hundred years, till the great eruption of the Moghuls, when learning fled for refuge to the Persians, Tartars, and Scythians, and was coeval with the darkest and the most slothful period of European annals; but since the sun of science in the West began to rise, the lamp of Oriental learning began to be gradually extinguished. Thus rise and fall is to be seen in the scientific world, as elsewhere.

  Ubedi also touches upon the progress of modern science, commenting briefly on the contributions of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, etc. and the significant change they brought about in the human perception of nature and the cosmic world. He traces the evolution of astronomical understanding and the gradual shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. He begins with Copernicus, saying that he had completed the experimental enquiries necessary for proving his theory by the year 1530. ‘Through fear of prejudiced persons, especially the bigoted teachers of religion, Copernicus acted with only necessary caution, when he hesitated to publish the work which had cost him the labour of so many years.’ Ubedi informs his readers in India that it was only in the 1870s that Copernicus could publish his work and a copy of the book reached him just a few hours before he died. The theory of Copernicus upon the heliocentric system was thus brought before the world, but on account of the death of the author, and the abstruseness of the contents of the book, it was visited with no marks of reprobation from any quarter. Moving ahead, Ubedi discusses the battle waged by Bruno and Galileo, defending the new cosmological findings against the Papal authority. While Bruno was being burnt alive for his heresies, ‘his tormentors jocosely observed, as the flames shut him out for ever from view, that he had gone to the imaginary worlds he had so wickedly feigned’. Later, the telescope of Galileo forever settled the question by showing that the expected phases do actually exist. These circumstances and also the subsequent discovery of comets and numerous other planets overthrew the dogmatic conception about the existence of the heavens as solid crystalline orbs. Galileo was condemned and imprisoned for his ‘sinful and detestable errors and heresies’, finally dying of fever in 1642. However, Ubedi writes, notwithstanding the opposition and obstacles being laid in the way of the revival of this true system, it gradually became the object of popular reception and at last the received doctrine to the whole scientific world. In this context, he also quotes from an American poet, William Cullen Bryant:

  Truth crushed to earth will rise again

  The eternal years of God are hers,

  While error, wounded, writhes with pain

  And dies among her worshippers.

  Thus, according to Ubedi, the result of the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo was to bring the earth to her real position of subordination and to give sublime views of the universe. Ubedi also touches upon the advancements made by Kepler and Newton. He begins by stating that Kepler was the first to try to discover a general law for the motion of the planets. After Kepler came the great mathematician of Europe, Sir Isaac Newton, whose position in methodizing the Copernican doctrine by physical laws is like that of Aristotle in regulating the Ptolemaic system. ‘Therefore, in my humble opinion, Copernicus is the Ptolemy of the heliocentric doctrine and Newton is its Aristotle (emphasis added). Newton, through his great physical discovery of the law of gravitation, gave much assistance to the popularity of this system, and through him the whole planetary system was discovered to be governed by mathematical rules. This nineteenth-century Islamic interlocutor did not feel outraged at the mathematization of science,63 but rather saw it as advancement over existing knowledge. For him, modern science was developed in the West on the foundations laid by the Arabs in the early centuries, with significant contributions from Chinese, Indian and other civilizations. There was surely an incipient critique of Eurocentrism here but no indication at all that modern science needed to be replaced by Islamic science or that modern science is incompatible with Islamic values and ethics. This is in contrast to the self-righteous Islamic engagement with modern science today, where Islamic theological doctrine is used to confront modern scientific theories and Islamic science is proposed as an alternative to the modern ‘Christian’ science of the West.

  Ubedi goes on to list the following seven causes for the philosophical reformation and scientific progress of Europe:

  1. Discovery of America and knowledge of the Antipodes, which gave a mortal blow to the dogmatic conception of the theological philosophers of the day.

  2. Circumnavigation of the earth by Magellan and other navigators.

  3. Revival of the heliocentric doctrine, by which the real position of our small globe and that of man has been discovered, and by which the ecclesiastical ideas have been completely overthrown.

  4. The rise of the spirit of criticism in Europe.

  5. The restoration of original Greek literature and of philosophy in Italy.

  6. The invention of printing by Gutenberg through which the discoveries of one came to the knowledge of another and a revolution was made in the communication of knowledge which rendered the influence of the pulpit secondary.

  7. Luther’s religious reformation.64

  It is remarkable that as an Islamic scholar, Ubedi did not restrain himself within the parameters of his faith; rather he transcended it to acknowledge the European scientific development and the factors that made it possible. For instance, he was among the first few Islamic scholars to shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism. Even Syed Ahmed, the Muslim modernist par excellence, remained sceptical in his shift to heliocentrism.

  Obaidullah, like Syed Ahmed before him, found it futile to regard the Quran as a work of science; for them the crux of their belief was that ‘the real purpose of religion is to improve morality’. Let scientific truths be established by observation and experiment, they believed, and not by attempting to interpret a religious text as a book of science.65 Obaidullah, going back to the history of science in Islamic civilization, wrote that:

  ‘when Aristotleian philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy were introduced in the Mohammedan schools, their absurd doctrines seemed to be irreconcilable with the Islamitic [sic] religious precepts; therefore our divines, thinking it dangerous to the faith, were compelled to defend revelation with great difficulty, but on the introduction of the European inductive philosophy there is no apprehension of this kind. Our sacred faith, whose essential part is Theism or natural religion, being little shaken by the Western experimental philosophy, which is only a copy of nature and by which the existence, unity, power and wisdom of that Sole being are proved, will rather gain greater strength, than was possible by means of Grecian philosophy which caused a great controversy and the division of sects. We ought to regard Aristotle and Ptolemy as greater enemies to our faith than Copernicus and Newton.’66

  Contrast this with Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s views today that find no consistency between Islam and modern science. He relentlessly castigates those ‘modernistic Muslim apologetic writings, which would go to any extreme to placate modernism and would pay any
price to show that Islam is "modern" after all and that in contrast to Christianity is not in conflict with "science"’.67 He finds that the modernistic writings claiming compatibility between Islam and the science of Galileo and Newton are flawed because they wilfully distort the meaning of the Arabic word ilm (knowledge), whose pursuit is religious duty, into signifying the quest for science and secular learning. This is false because ilm refers to knowledge of God, not to knowledge of the profane. It is the central tenet of Nasr’s thesis based on tawhid or divine unity which means that duality is not possible in Islam so knowledge can only be one, as delivered by God.

  Here, I would like to go back to Karamat Ali again, who believed 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 are severally good and bad.’68 He even says that ‘all matters, sacred or secular, have come to our notice through their [prophets’] instrumentality’. Thus despite being a believer and practioner of tawhid, Karamat Ali was able to make a distinction between secular and religious learning and also reiterate their significance for the believer. We can find instances of such distinction even in fourteenth-century Islam, where Ulugh Beg (1393-1449) praises the secular sciences because they overstep religious and linguistic boundaries.69 Sayili concludes that it amounts to considering the universal validity and objectiveness of scientific truth as a criterion for its superiority. He was conscious of the fact that such a view was rare to find but he did discover a manuscript of the thirteenth century where the author, Muayyad al Din al Urdi, wrote:

  Intellects are in agreement and minds are in accord as to the excellence of science and the worthiness of scientists. Through science happiness is obtained and ranks are elevated; it sharpens the intellect and strengthens it; it increases sagacity and augments perspicuity. It is by it that the indolent is embellished and the obscure is rendered illustrious, and it is with its help that true is distinguished from false. All this is especially true for those sciences whose object of investigation is demonstrative and whose principles are indisputable and self-evident. Indeed, this kind of science is common to people of different religions and does not show variation with the passage of time or change of location.70

  Going back to Hossein Nasr, he, as a matter of fact, contradicts the famous saying of the Prophet himself where the Prophet exhorted the believers of Islam ‘to pursue knowledge even unto China’. What was this knowledge, which the Muslims were supposed to pursue? It was certainly not only knowledge about God, and the Prophet never really meant it to be so. It is only the sectarian interpreters today who try to make this distinction between knowledge and ilm. Zakaullah wrote on this issue more than a hundred years ago when he said, ‘God has given human beings the ability to discover and comprehend the real world. This ability is called reason (aql) and understanding of the real world through reason leads to knowledge.’71 Zakaullah and his contemporaries in the nineteenth century knew that neither the Quran nor the Prophet limited the followers to mere text and traditions of Islam: they were surely the core of Islam but the dynamism in Islam was also dependent on human reason. The nineteenth-century interlocutors may not be as sophisticated as our present-day ideologues but they knew their Islam well enough. Emphasizing the cultural diversity of science, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s remarks, though in a different context, are relevant to both Islamists as well as proponents of Eurocentrism. While talking about science, mathematics and culture, he referred to

  the difficulty in deciding what exactly the origin of an idea or an object is. Sometimes a thing may come, proximately, from the West, but its earlier origin may have involved non-Western influences in a crucial way. This is particularly the case when we talk about science or mathematics, since these subjects absorbed the contributions of many different societies and cultures. To the immediate recipient, the arriving ideas and beliefs may look identifiably Western’, since they are brought in by people from the west, and yet these ideas and beliefs may not be, in any sense, specifically Western in nature or in origin.72

  One is reminded of the exhortation of Al-Kindi who asked the believers ‘not to be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us’.73

  4

  Modern Science and Islamic Essentialism

  He who travels in search of knowledge, to him God shows the way to paradise.

  —Prophet Mohammad

  When that command has been widely obeyed, Islam has flourished. Contact with new intellectual environments has been the continual safeguard of progressive Muhammadanism.

  —C.F. Andrews

  It may sound banal to say that science in Islam was part of a pluralist project. It soared during a period marked by state-sponsored freethinking and borrowing from all possible sources available at the time. Nobody can dispute the fact that the early Muslim civilization was heir to a rich and diverse intellectual stock—Roman, Greek, Indian and Persian—accomplishing a unique synthesis of ideas in all branches of knowledge. Von Grunebaum is certainly right in saying that the ‘stupendous rise of this civilization between 750 and 950 AD was the result of the spontaneous collaboration of the best minds of all the Empire’s nationalities’.1 The intermingling of cultures, disciplines and peoples contributed to the internationality of Islamic science.2 Abdus Salam, the Nobel Laureate, also had an ‘ecumenical picture of science’ in mind when he wrote in 1988: ‘My own view has always been that science is the shared creation and joint heritage of all mankind and that as long as a society encourages it, science will continue to flourish in that society.’3 This can also be an effective antidote, using the expression from JJ. Clarke, ‘to the Eurocentric narrowness of intellectual historiography’, a dominant paradigm during the past few centuries. It is this cross-civilizational perspective that will help to displace the reigning myth of the ‘Greek miracle’ and not the essentialist distancing from modern science. The scientific efflorescence of the eighth-thirteenth centuries was possible because reason and critical thinking are central to Islam. The Prophet himself left behind several of his sayings (hadises) where search and promotion of knowledge took precedence over religious rituals. I again take recourse to an oft-quoted saying of the Prophet where he exhorted the believers to ‘seek knowledge even unto China’. Let me remind the present-day Islamists that sixth/seventh-century China had neither Muslims nor any religious madrasa; however, China was the foremost centre of scientific learning.4 C.F. Andrews puts it beautifully when he says that one of the principles

  which finds its place in the Quran itself is that knowledge is to be sought by Musalmans. In accordance with this principle it has become an established fact of history that progress and enlightenment have resulted, when Muhammadan culture has come into close contact with an intellectual environment other that its own.5

  The Prophet of Islam consciously encouraged the believers to borrow ideas and expand the horizon of knowledge from all possible sources. He even said once that ‘he who travels in search of knowledge, to him God shows the way to Paradise’. The wisdom of the command of Muhammad to his followers to ‘get knowledge wherever it is to be found has been verified by experience’, observes Andrews again. ‘When that command has been widely obeyed Islam has flourished. Contact with new intellectual environments has been the continual safeguard of progressive Muhammadanism.’6 The Prophet never qualified that one has to travel only within Darul Islam and not elsewhere. There is no instance where the Prophet insists that the Quran has to be the only source of scientific knowledge. The finality being espoused today came in from the eleventh century onwards, when freethinkers like the Mu’tazilites lost to the Asharites led by none other than Al-Ghazali. This led to a decisive break between the two phases of Islam—an early phase where eclecticism was the spirit while the latter phase was marked by closure, where inward-looking Islam was projected as the true face of the religion.

  It is unfortunate that this latter phase is being g
lorified, and Islamic civilization, including its science, is being proudly projected as a monolith, solely dependent on Quranic revelation. Today’s fundamentalists take a deliberately antiquated stance: either scientific observation and theory must be made to fit the unalterable text of the scriptures, or it must be shown that those scriptures anticipated modern scientific findings. Given that the Quran did not anticipate or cannot legitimate many modern discoveries, it becomes necessary to disaffirm those discoveries, and to divide science itself along cultural lines—that is, to fabricate an Islamic science consistent with the Quran in opposition to a ‘Western’ science unsuitable for Islamic societies because its epistemology is basically in conflict with the Islamic view.7 Suffocating from the loss of pluralism and progressive thought, which were distinctive traits of the Muslim past, how long will the global Muslim community (ummah) continue to suffer after the foreclosure of the gates of reasoned argument (ijtihad) a millennium ago?8 We have reached a point where some of us are ready to disown our past; the contributions of believers are being thrown out as works of heretics. Literalism has so profoundly taken over a section of Muslim scholars that they are ready to rewrite their history of science in the light of this ill-conceived Islam.

  SYED AHMED KHAN’S REFORMIST MOVEMENT

  I want to discuss the attempts of one such group called the Muslim Association for the Advancement of Science (MAAS) based in Aligarh, India. It is an irony that such an exercise is being carried out from Aligarh, a centre for Muslim reform and modernization led by Syed Ahmed Khan in the nineteenth century. He aimed at turning out ‘free-spirited, intellectually accomplished, emotionally mature generations of young Muslims whose self-definitions would reflect liberation from the control of religious and traditional sources of loyalty and an unchallenged commitment to such underlying features of modernism as science and the ideal of progress’9 Syed Ahmed countered such isolationist forces during his movement by attempting to convey that ‘there is not a single nation in the world which acquired excellence, material progress and spiritual happiness entirely by virtue of its own efforts’.10 He felt that prejudice (taassub) and progress do not go together. Munshi Zakaullah, a close associate of Syed Ahmed and a mathematician, was of the view that ‘the early Muslims (Arabs) did not hesitate to learn from others. They accepted non-Muslims and non-Arabs as their teachers and through their invention and researches they expanded the frontiers of knowledge and achieved the privilege of being teachers to other communities.’ Syed Ahmed’s reformist movement from Aligarh put forth a refreshingly modern interpretation of Quranic verses, which, despite some opposition from the orthodox ulema, was accepted by Muslims by and large. Multiple readings of the Quran were much more acceptable in the nineteenth century than today. Early modernists like Maulvi Karamat Ali, who preceded Syed Ahmed, could comfortably reconcile Islam with modern science and did not see any antagonism between the two.11 The nineteenth-century intellectuals and religious leaders confronted a situation where the evangelicals and the Company officials were attempting to undermine local religious beliefs—both Muslim as well as Hindu—using modern science. By the end of the nineteenth century they reckoned with the futility of the enterprise.12 In fact, the first generation of Indian scientists and intellectuals of a relatively progressive persuasion legitimated the pursuit of modern science by neutralizing the idea that modern science was Western. They argued that while science was morally worthwhile and economically beneficial, this science revealed to us the laws that governed the external world. But there was another science that the Eastern religions had grasped that revealed to us the inner world of man. This separation of the two realms enabled them to protect science from religion and to shield their own culture from the cultural imperialism of the colonizers.13