Jihad or Ijtihad Page 9

  THE COLONIAL IMPACT

  We also need to keep in mind that most of these reformers and modernists who espoused the cause of modern science were not scientists themselves and quite a few were not even trained in Western education. The need to acquire new knowledge, the lack of which was held responsible for the colonial subjugation, became a battle cry for all nineteenth-century groups except for a small section of the ulema who called for the revival of Islamic spiritual and ethical norms. Munshi Zakaullah’s avowal while attending the Delhi Durbar that he felt degraded by bowing before a foreign ruler and his reference to Muslim rule in Spain when Cordova emerged as a centre of light and learning makes a profound statement about his notion of knowledge, quite at odds with the present-day understanding. In this, ‘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,’14 as his friend and biographer C.F. Andrews explains it. Now the same engagement with modern science is being dubbed ‘colonized discourse’ by some scholars.15

  In a recent work, Muzaffar Iqbal goes into the early years of Islam to conclude that ‘unlike the Islam and science nexus that had developed naturally in the eighth century… the new discourse is strained, labored and carries the burden assigned to Islam in the discourse: the legitimization of the modernists’ agenda’.16 And this is not true of Islamists alone; we have our own anti-modernists like Ashis Nandy, who find modern science devilish and against the very spirit of Indian’ civilization. Like Muzaffar Iqbal, they also end up dubbing scientists such as J.C. Bose colonized minds.17 The irony of Nandy’s obsession with colonialism, the ‘West’ and the ‘imperialism of categories’ is that his project grants too much power to the very ideas and institutions that he wants to challenge.18 Aqeel Bilgrami’s reference to the ‘neurotic obsession with the Western and colonial determination of their present condition’ and his remark that ‘it will prove a final victory for imperialism that after all the humiliations it has visited … it lingered in our psyches in the form of genuine self-understanding to make self-criticism and free, unreactive agency impossible’,19 though made in a different context, is not irrelevant for the kind of project Nandy, Iqbal and others have embarked upon. There is no doubt that the colonial presence conditioned most of the responses but that does not mean that it cannot be viewed on its own terms and that each time we raise the issue of science and Islam we need to get back to the so-called Golden Age of science in Islam—almost a millennium apart from the colonial period.

  It is all part of history that most non-European cultures were on the defensive when it came to confronting post-Enlightenment Europe and colonization further closed their options. Even today, the postcolonial Islamic societies are faced with some real as well as perceived Western cultural and intellectual hegemonization. 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.20 For the proponents of Islamic science, modern science ‘is not universally verifiable, for its self imposed empirical limitations put it outside the pale of a unified system of knowledge’. They find it ‘subjective rather than objective since it is coloured by the social, cultural and historical values of the society by which it is manufactured and distributed’.21 This is their critique of the Eurocentric history of science, and Islamic science is proposed as an alternative to modern science, which they see as embedded in a particular culture and epistemology not compatible with Islamic values. This particular culture has thrown up an exploitative and unethical science to which they posit what they consider the valid alternative of Islamic science. It is a tragic fact of history that modern techno-science has been an active agent in the global European conquest, which has brought devastating consequences for nature as well as for colonized cultures. On this count, criticism of modern science is nothing new; rather, it has grown from within science itself. However, this sectarian, religion-inspired criticism of modern science rides piggyback on some valid critiques of it. A project like the MAAS is one such critique, which is inspired by an antipathy towards modern science, viewed as Western science inspired by Christian ideals and values.

  EFFECTS OF THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION

  The 1980s saw a shift in global Islamic politics as well as its self-perception. The major cause for this change was the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. For Ziauddin Sardar ‘the beginning of the 1980s—with OPEC power at its peak, the Iranian Revolution and a growing consciousness in Muslim societies of their cultural identity—was a period of particular optimism in the Muslim world’.22 It unleashed an aggressive search for Islamic identity in all spheres of life, and also led to the founding of Islamic essentialist institutions and platforms in sciences as well as social sciences. Ismail R. al-Faruqi, an eminent professor of Islamic studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, initiated a movement among Muslim scholars to Islamize knowledge. A number of Saudi businessmen came forward with a 25 million dollar endowment to establish the International Institute of Islamic Thought (HIT) in 1981 and the following year, Faruqi published his manifesto: Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Workplan. The next step was the launching of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences in 1984. M. Zaki Kirmani, who was the all India president of the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) till 1981, founded the Centre for Studies on Science (CSOS) in 1982 at Aligarh, along with those who thought Islamically’ about science and related issues. This was followed by the formation of MA AS in 1983 for cultivating similar ideas among working scientists. Kirmani’s major initiative came in 1985 when he started publishing the MAAS Journal of Islamic Science and remained its editor till 1998. His prime motivation, in his own words, was to visualize ‘a strong philosophical and sociological base for science, which could be developed and articulated on the basis of Quranic thoughts’. S.H. Nasr spoke about it in 1987 at the MIT Muslim Students Association, hailing it ‘as a unique institution founded by 20 or 30 scientists … who want to absorb, first, Islamic science, then to absorb Western science as well’. Nasr even declared that MAAS has been founded at the initiative of the Aligarh University, which he calls ‘a major Islamic university whose Islamicity is now very much threatened’.23 The statements are misleading: neither does MAAS have anything to do with the university nor is AMU an Islamic university. AMU is a secular institution, primarily aimed at the education and progress of the Muslim community, yet open to all. A perusal of some of the issues of JIS makes it clear that the objective was not really to absorb ‘Islamic science’ or ‘Western science’ but to articulate an epistemologically distinct category called ‘Islamic science’—a Utopia that exists only in the imagination of its protagonists. Now Sardar also seems to be disenchanted with the ‘Muslim optimism’ of the 1980s. He had imagined that this cultural revival would work towards seeing that ‘the history of science in Muslim civilization was given its due importance and rightful place in the overall scheme of the history of science’. However, the early 90s saw a definite shift away from Sardar’s hopes and ‘towards more obscurantist and dangerous directions. The Islamic science discourse now follows the way of the Taliban.’24 The issues of JIS are replete with articles imagining ‘Islamic science’ as a viable alternative to modern science.25

  ‘ISLAMIC SCIENCE’

  I would like to begin with a discussion of Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s piece in one of the early issues of the Journal of Islamic Science titled ‘Islamic Science and Western Science: Common Heritage, Diverse Destinies’.26 He begins by highlighting the early inheritances of Islam from diverse cultures like Greek sciences and philosophy, Sassanid astronomy and pharmacology, Indian sciences, especially medicine, astronomy and mathematics, etc. Arab scientists also obtained knowledge of certain aspects of Babylonian science that were not even transmitted to the Greeks. Not all of these strands of the sciences of antiquity r
eached the Christian West. But the fact remains that both were heirs to the sciences of the same world and their knowledge of the natural order, concept of law, causality and general cosmology drew from the same sources though each developed these inherited concepts differently. This diverse inheritance was imbibed and further developed by scholars under the gaze of the vibrant newfound faith.

  Until a few years ago, it was a widely accepted belief that the Islamic civilization merely translated the Greek scientific knowledge into Arabic and transmitted it to Europe, its rightful inheritor, at the opportune moment. Nasr and others are justified in questioning the Eurocentrism behind this erroneous belief. It should be conceded that Islamic civilization improved, perfected and developed the received knowledge within the parameters of available competence. No one civilization has ever perfected knowledge in the past. Islam played its crucial role in transmitting the scientific knowledge it had perfected, which was enthusiastically received in the West and further developed, leading to the birth of modern science. Nasr and others who try to make a qualitative distinction between the sciences during the Islamic phase and the later modern sciences should also make a distinction between Islamic and pre-Islamic knowledge. If we concede with some pride that knowledge went through a qualitative change after Islamic intervention, then we should be psychologically and historically prepared to accept that the West played a similar role in advancing the scientific knowledge they had borrowed from Islam. Instead, scholars like Nasr get into theological niceties to emphasize the divergence between the early science under Islam and the later modern science under Christianity. Nasr almost valorizes the fact that neither Islam nor China produced a Descartes or Galileo but Europe did, which led to the destruction of

  the vision of the traditional cosmos in the West and which blinded Western man to the comparative value of what was lost and what was gained in that process which transformed Europe from the land of traditional Christian civilization to the citadel of the first civilization in historic times based on the negation of the traditional worldview.

  However, this characterization is not wholly true. We know that a large majority of contributors to science were professing Christians. Even today, according to a recent survey, approximately 40 per cent of American scientists profess belief in ‘a God to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer’.271 feel Nasr should keep in mind the radical shift within Islam, from the eleventh/twelfth century onwards, both theological as well as political, a shift that was no longer conducive to independent thinking. Getting into philosophical and theological delusions will not help to displace Eurocentrism, reigning since the heydays of imperialist expansion. We have to read the next paper in JIS to find how deplorable and suicidal is the path being trodden by some Islamic scholar today.

  The article, by Kaleemur Rehman, is titled ‘Preface to Islamic Science’ and begins by pronouncing most of the contributors to the Islamic Golden Age of science heretics, who were either Mu’tazilites (freethinkers) or agnostics.28 Rehman says:

  Many of them studied and practiced music … Al-Razi did not believe in revelations. Farabi depended on pure reason (and not shariyah) for discriminating between good and bad. Al-Kindi denied divine attributes. Ibn-Sina did not believe in Maad jismani (resurrection of the body)… There was a gradual loss of Islamic values from the society.

  He finds it regrettable that ‘no two Muslim philosophers agreed with each other as far as sources of knowledge were concerned. For each of them the source of knowledge was different …’ Rehman is not prepared to concede that it is this diversity of the early Islamic civilization that enabled it to contribute so richly to the cumulative growth of modern science. He also refers to some of the early commentators (mufassireen) of the Quran who committed grave errors by saying that there is a river in the sky from where the clouds collect water and bring it to the earth. He concludes that the Muslim science of Al-Kindi et al. was a product of such chaotic times and information pollution that it could hardly be called a science with Islamic inspiration. There is no disagreement here; the early scientists of Islamic civilization were neither looking for anything exclusively Islamic in their science nor had they anything to do with the weird commentaries of the Quran by some early commentators, which have done serious damage; this exercise (of reading science in the Quran) continues even now. However, I am more concerned with the ‘information pollution’ caused by some Muslim scientists, not merely by commentators on the Quran, who want to harness the firepower of jinns to solve the energy crisis today.29 The paper advises that ‘those who are responsible for shaping the science based on Islamic values should be very careful not to base their epistemology and methodology on the examples derived from the works of medieval Muslim scientists and philosophers … the Islamic science’s structure should be based from the beginning on Quran and Sunnah’.

  The shift referred to by Sardar had three main components and they are reflected in the papers published in JIS. The first is based on the fundamentalist idea that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, can be found in the Quran. This thesis got a boost from the well-funded Saudi project on ‘Scientific Miracles in the Quran’. The second component can best be described as mystical fundamentalism. And the last is the rhetoric of Islamic values. JIS harps upon Islamic ethics and morality without substantiating how that can be realized in concrete terms. Islamic science can be properly cultivated only by those inspired by the faith and values of Islam. Its exclusivism becomes obvious when Rais Ahmad approvingly cites Anees and Davies:

  Islamic science is an integral part of Islam as a complete way of life, the only framework within which it can be defined; it cannot be inculcated in isolation from the mainstream of the Islamic intellectual and moral landscape. Islamic science that is a subspecies of Islam (and not of science) generates a worldview within the overall framework of Islamic values.30

  While talking of morality and faith, I am reminded of Jawaharlal Nehru who argued for the possibility of morality and ethics beyond religious faith.

  When religion is being held up as a unique source of faith, we need to remind ourselves that there are other firm foundations upon which we can build moral and ethical projects, in both private and public life … In our own recent history, there is perhaps no better practical instance of the effort to find a non-religious bedrock for morality than that of Nehru himself.31

  Explaining his position on faith, Nehru wrote to Gandhi in 1933:

  Religion is not familiar ground for me, and as I have grown older, I have definitely drifted away from it. I have something else in its place, something older than just intellect and reason, which gives me strength and hope. Apart from this indefinable and indefinite urge, which may have just a tinge of religion in it and yet is wholly different from it, I have grown entirely to rely on the workings of the mind. Perhaps they are weak supports to rely upon, but search as I will, I can see no better ones.32

  MODERNIST REFORMERS

  Another protagonist of Islamic science S.W.A. Husaini goes a step further by rejecting the term Islamic science in favour of Sharriyah science and pleads that Sharia rules be applied where it is applicable in the acquisition of rational knowledge. He proposes the development of a Shariyyah philosophy of science, Shariyyah history of science, Shariyyah sociology of science and Shariyyah policy of science.33 For him, Shariyyah science meant the total exclusion of some disciplines like numerology, alchemy and music.34 Contrast this approach with that of the late nineteenth-century Indian modernist reformer and maulvi based in Calcutta, Karamat Ali, who was a teacher at a madarsa and also an expert in music. The quote in his Ma’akhiz-i-Uloom, alluded to earlier, bears repetition: