Jihad Or Ijtihad : Religious Orthodoxy And Modern Science In Contemporary Islam

169 Pages·2013·0.92 MB·English

by  S. Irfan Habib

Jihad or Ijtihad?
Religious Orthodoxy and Modern
Science in Contemporary Islam
S. IRFAN HABIB
To Atiya, my wife, in whom I see an apt example of a Muslim
whose world is open to new ideas, who is eclectic and assimilative of
anything good from any religion or culture.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface
1. Introduction
Heterogeneity and Early Science in Islam
2. Reconciling Science with Islam in the Nineteenth Century
3. What is ‘Islamic’ in Islamic Science?
Some Insights from Nineteenth-Century India
4. Modern Science and Islamic Essentialism
5. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
Striving for a Composite and Pluralist India
6. Conclusion
Articulating for Islamic Science: An Essentialist Project
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
his book is not in any way about the history of science in Islam, though
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there are a number of instances when I had to journey into Islamic history.
The need to do so was to explain several contemporary concerns and issues.
But my focus here is to engage with some serious fundamentalist formulations,
about science in Islam, that are being peddled as Islamic science’. And this is not
being done simply to question the Eurocentrism of modern science but also to
inform believers that modern science does not conform to their Islamic faith and
values’, thus an urgent need for an Islamically (sic) validated science, whatever
that means.
Let me also point out that I have more issues with Islamism than Islam per se.
I see Islamism as a political ideology, with political not theological objectives,
though it masquerades as resurgent Islam. In a postcolonial context, it has
grounded itself as a valid political, as well as intellectual, response, reading
people’s frustrations with callous governments and cynicism regarding the
future. While science and technology have brought about light and darkness
simultaneously, Islamist interlocutors emphasize merely its darker side. They
delink Islam from modern science and its manifestations—negative or positive.
As an alternative, they advocate Quran and hadis-centric science, ignoring the
fact that the Prophet emphasized the use of reason for the pursuit of knowledge,
in fact, even to understand the Book. The captives taken from the Battle of
"Badr", were freed on different conditions. One of the conditions was that if a
prisoner could educate ten Muslims he would win his emancipation. Note that
these prisoners were not Muslims and so were not supposed to impart knowledge
based on the Quran or hadis. This was possible during the Prophet’s time and
had his approval.
It is strange, and ironic as well, that early contributors to science and
philosophy in Islam never felt the need to wed science with religion. While
today, in the words of Ahmad Dallal, ‘when Muslim participation in the
production of the universal culture of science is dwindling, they call for bringing
the two together.’
There are even attempts to establish that the Quran and hadis are the true
sources of all valid scientific knowledge for believers. Again, early
commentators never felt the need to ‘advocate an understanding of the Quran as
a source of scientific knowledge.’
Most of the chapters in this book try to contrast the position of Muslim
modernists of the 19th century with those of the present-day ideologues. Despite
being practicing Muslims, we seldom find anyone from the 19th century
promoting the Quran as a book of science. Rather, most believe that the Quran
just inspires believers to pursue knowledge. They were convinced that scientific
knowledge, like anything else in cultures and civilizations, evolves and
progresses through exchange with each other and not merely within exclusive
domains.
The title of the book is not to provoke. Both jihad and ijtihad are at the core
of Islam. While the former is the most misunderstood and misused term ever, the
latter has been forgotten. The real jihad was defined by the Prophet himself
when he said after his return from a battle: ‘We return from the lesser jihad to
the greater jihad, the more difficult and crucial effort to conquer the forces of
evil in oneself and in one’s own society in all the details of daily life.’
Yet, we all know how jihad is perceived today. The gradual disappearance of
ijtihad, or independent and rational thinking, was initially confined to legal
matters but later expanded to include other areas as well. By the nineteenth
century, particularly after colonization, scholars felt that the lack of ijtehad had
led to intellectual stagnation. The poet/philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, for
instance, saw ijtihad as the catalyst for Islam’s intellectual resurgence, whereas
the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad Abduh, considered it a break from
traditional scholarship. Today, even a proponent of Islamic science, Ziauddin
Sardar, concedes that with the disappearance of ijtihad, science in Islam has
become a matter of history.
New Delhi
S. IRFAN HABIB
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Introduction
Heterogeneity and Early Science in Islam
began thinking of and writing these essays almost ten years ago. They are
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imbued with my sense of discomfort at the growing fundamentalism in Islam
and in the world generally. The mess in global politics can be held partially
responsible for the emergence of this perversion called political Islam, which has
successfully purged it of all humanitarian and pluralist values. This caricatured
Islam is reflected in the realm of the history of science as well, which prompted
me to dwell upon the Islam and science debate. Some writings on the
Islamization of science that I read were couched in scholarly phraseology and
hence did not succinctly explain the methodology of this process called
Islamization. Further readings revealed that there are several ways of arriving at
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this magical entity termed Islamic science’— something that can apparently
relieve the Islamic world from the grip of the monster called modern science.
The fundamental premise of all the players in the game, despite their inner
differences, is that modern science is not neutral: it is ‘Western’ in character and
spirit, so it is bound to a certain culture. This opens up the possibility of creating
an Islamic science. It may be possible to create an Islamic science if Muslim
scientists produce some original work. However, this sort of symbolization is
apocryphal.
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Modern science is sometimes called Western science because it was
developed by those living in the West. These included Christians, Jews, atheists
and others. In our times, significant contributions have been made by Chinese,
Japanese, Russian and Indian scientists, and a Pakistani one who was denigrated
in his own country because he did not belong to ‘mainstream’ Islam. It is this
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pluralism that needs to be reinstated once Eurocentrism, which has held sway
since colonization, is displaced. The crucial lesson to learn is from the rise and
decline of the history of science in Islamic civilization itself.
It is difficult to find an Islamic scholar who will not vouch for Islam’s
seminal contribution to science and yet reiterate that Islam is not in conflict with
science. They invariably hark back to the early centuries of Islam to establish the
veracity of their claims and flaunt names from Islam’s history of science such as
Al-Khawarizmi, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, al-Razi and Omar
Khayyam. No one can dispute the fact that these scholars, along with several
others, significantly contributed to scientific creativity in Islamic civilization and
should be credited with helping the flowering of modern science in the West. It
was through the Arab philosophers and scientists that the rich patrimony of
Greek learning reached the leading lights of modern rationalism. The father of
modern scientific research, Roger Bacon, was a disciple of the Arabs. By virtue
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of patronage at the highest level during the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the
foundations of rational and natural sciences were laid when the House of
Wisdom (Bait’ul’Hikmah), which welcomed scholars of all creeds, religions and
beliefs, was established.
However, all those who make such claims—and rightly so— forget that this
particular phase in Islamic history was marked predominantly by the Mu’tazilite
school of philosophy, which was based on freethinking and rationalism. It was
an ecumenical setting for science, where savants of nearly all creeds and origins
worked towards a common purpose. And this was not something new, it was a
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long established pre-Islamic tradition in the Near East, where translation of
scientific and philosophical texts from Greek to Syriac took place and then some
scholars rendered it into Arabic as well. According to A.I. Sabra, ‘the translation
movement in the early Abbasid period was not a sideline affair conducted by a
few individuals working in the dark under threat of being found out and
thwarted.’ He calls it a massive movement which took place in broad daylight
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under the protection and active patronage of the Abbasid rulers. Indeed, in terms
of intensity, scope, concentration and concertedness, it had had no precedent in
the history of the Middle East or of the world. Large libraries for books on
‘philosophical sciences’ (hikma, or al-ulum al’hikmiyya) were created,
embassies were sent out in search of Greek manuscripts, and scholars (Christians
and Sabians) were employed to perform the task of translation, all of this at the
instigation and with the financial and moral support of the Abbasid caliphs.
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Commenting on the translation movement undertaken in Baghdad, Dimitri Gutas
says ‘On a broader and more fundamental level, its significance lies in that it
demonstrated for the first time in history that scientific and philosophical
thought are international, not bound to a specific language or culture.’
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One more crucial aspect, which needs to be highlighted, is the role that
should be assigned to Islam during this spurt of scientific efflorescence.
Apparently because of the importance of that role in world intellectual history
many scholars have been led to look at the medieval Islamic period as a period
of reception, preservation and transmission … Sabra points out that reception
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here may be used as an harmless and value-free category but it does not really
describe the event adequately. ‘Reception’ might connote a passive receiving of
something being pressed upon the receiver, and this might reinforce the image of
Islamic civilization as a receptacle or repository of Greek learning. But this is
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not what happened; "the transmission of ancient science to Islam would be better
characterized as an act of appropriation performed by the so-called receiver.
Greek science was not thrust upon Muslim society any more than it was upon
Renaissance Europe. What the Muslims of the eighth and ninth centuries did was
to seek out, take hold of and finally make their own a legacy which appeared to
them laden with a variety of practical and spiritual benefits … ‘"Reception" is, at
best, a pale description of that enormously creative act.’
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George Sarton, the father of the modern history of science, also strongly felt
that Muslim intervention was not just concerned with rehabilitating Greek texts,
but, according to him ‘they did not simply transmit ancient knowledge, they
created a new one’. Going further and placing Islamic triumph in the context of
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his own time (early twentieth century), Sarton says:
The superiority of Muslim culture, say in the eleventh century, was so great that we can understand their
intellectual pride. It is easy to imagine their doctors speaking of the western barbarians almost in the same
spirit as ours do of the ‘Orientals’. If there had been some ferocious eugenists among the Muslims; they
might have suggested some means of breeding out all the western Christians and the Greeks because of
their hopeless backwardness.13
Sarton imagines that those among his contemporaries who condemn the East and
lionize the West lack an understanding of science, for it is in science that Islam
reveals its strength. Given the present state of Islam, it is difficult to believe what
Sarton wrote in the early twentieth century about Islam’s accomplishments in
science, and one even wonders at the appearance of free thinking so early in its
history. One simple explanation is that when Islam expanded into foreign lands
outside Arabia, Muslims came into contact with Egyptians, Syrians and Greeks
living in these regions. Greek philosophy and rational sciences existed in these
lands and naturally influenced the early Muslims. Their blind faith in divine
revelation was thus confronted by rational thought and many began to question
the viability of the dogmas in the divine scriptures. Such an experience was quite
new to the Muslims who were intellectually challenged to reconcile some of the
implausible scriptural texts with reason. Most of the scientific accomplishments
of Islamic civilization can be unquestionably located during this phase, when
ijtihad or independent reasoning was the prerogative of the lay believer. This
glorious era in the history of scientific accomplishments gradually came to a
close from the eleventh century onwards, and ijtihad or freethinking became
suspect and regarded as harmful to the future of Islam. The Quran as it was
revealed to Prophet Mohammed is available to us, even today. But the religious
leadership among Muslims, the hidden church or the invisible Vatican, does not
allow us to engage with the revelation on our own terms. We are free to recite
but not to interpret. There are some other reasons for the decline but this
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particular factor had an impact on the very spirit of Islam; taqlid (following
established tradition) became the reigning paradigm and continues even today.
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If we look at the history of the rise and fall of civilizations, their science
included, then the decline of science in Islam is not really unusual. Most of the
other major civilizations met with the same fate, including the Greek,
erroneously considered the genesis of modern Western science. The growth of
knowledge has occurred through shifting centres of excellence. No civilization
or geographical area has been able to sustain its vitality for more than a couple
of centuries. Islam played its part by enhancing the dignity of Greek science and
also by enriching it materially. In the words of the Turkish historian of science
Aydin Sayili, ‘when the torch of science went to another society which was
eager to cultivate it, its very passage to a new environment with fresh
possibilities of development for science constituted a change favourable to its
progress’.
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Islamic contributions by way of translation from Arabic to Latin were indeed
indispensable. It was through this century of translation that the torch of science
passed from Islam to Europe. The outline of the history of Islamic science’ in
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