By Javaid Iqbal Bhat - Greater Kashmir - Srinigar, India
Monday, April 2, 2007
"The greater world around Muslims had become a closed book. What is more they had no wish to open the book and read. They had long ceased to follow the Prophet’s injunction to “seek knowledge even as far as China.” Islam was afflicted with intellectual rigor mortis. The French religious writer Ernest Renan spoke of an ‘iron circle’ enclosing the head of the faithful in the Orient and Africa, making them impervious to fresh ideas and incapable of accepting anything new".
(Walker, Benjamin. Foundations of Islam: The Making of a World Faith 346)
It was a daunting task for Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan to build up a scientific temper in an atmosphere hostile to science and averse to exploration
He may not have succeeded in reinterpreting and implementing the core tenets of Islam as per the needs of the compulsive circumstances; however it is indubitable that Sir Sayyid’s life and writings have been subjected to contending interpretations.
For both Muslims as well as non-Muslims he is the repository of a difficult heritage. There are not few in the subcontinent for whom he remains the progenitor of Partition; for a lot more he nurtured the irrevocable Bidad (a reprehensible religious innovation) and thus sprinkled salt on the wounds of south Asian Muslims who had not yet recovered from the agony engendered by the dispossession of power and privilege.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), another modernist in his own vein, who earned no less a number of vilifying sobriquets from some parts of his own community than Sir Sayyid for venturing to chalk out a fresh pathway for the south Asian Muslims, was eloquent in his praise of the latter. Iqbal believed that “Khan was the first Muslim to react to the modern age”. These words of admiration come from one who himself went out of his way braving formidable odds in an attempt to help his disoriented community in reclaiming the lost glories.
Iqbal had understood what it involved to be a modernist in a condition when the person is besieged by conventional certitudes and unbending conservatism. Therefore, if Iqbal is recognized as the “most daring intellectual modernist the Muslim world has produced”, one wonders, how much daring was demanded of an individual in the middle of nineteenth century when Indians particularly the Muslims with an immediate memory of their rule had not yet reconciled to the ways and manners of the colonial powers. The gradual consolidation of the British rule in India estranged Muslims. They withdrew into smaller towns and villages with the desire to remain with their unadulterated traditions. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan saw this gulf between the Qaum and British, and resolved to bring about a rapprochement.
Each big enterprise begins with something big happening to the self from where the idea originates.
(...)
My argument in this paper is that Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s comfortable relationship with science and its technological productions (which, in effect, meant the British as well. Generally, the presence and continuation of science was identified with the presence and continuation of the occupier, the British. Hence the distance from the British meant the distance from science. SSAK succeeded in delinking the occupation as distinct from the scientific advancements.
When exactly the predominant use of reason went dormant in the history of Islamic thought is unclear. The Mongol invasions serve as a crucial signifier in that the blow to the Islamic civilisation was so powerful that the onset of the conservative strain became inevitable. One of its tangible damaging effects was the sense of loss nurtured for a long period of time. In this process the bold confidence in the intellectual domain characterized by the intrepid al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd took a backseat, and the mystical strains came to the fore.
However, even before this, the dim beginning of a transition from the traditional path of reason, is visible in the lifetime of Ibn Ghazzali(1058-1111). He, towards the end of his life, went out of his way to criticize both al-Arabi and Ibn Sina, and supported the epistemological use of mysticism for the divine gnosis.
For him only mystics can know God for they were above the world of metaphor. He believed, and this belief gained momentum with his proceeding years, that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated with logic or rational proof. In his Al Mundiqh min al-dalal (The Deliverance from Error) he argued:
"Neither Falsafah nor Kalam could satisfy somebody who was in danger of losing his faith".
He himself had been brought to the brink of skepticism (safsafah) when he realized that it was absolutely impossible to prove God’s existence beyond reasonable doubt. The reality we call “God” lay outside the realm of sense perception and logical thought, so science and metaphysics could neither prove nor disprove the wujud (existence) of al-Lah. For those who are not blessed with the special mystical or prophetic talent, al-Ghazzali devised a discipline to enable Muslims to cultivate a consciousness of God’s reality in the minutiae of daily life.
Ghazzali’s inscription of mysticism as a valid means of bringing about the closeness between God and man got further boost with the coming of the advocates of shariah in the fourteenth century. The most popular among these Ahmad ibn Taymiyah (d.1328) of Damascus wanted to take shariah to all circumstances in which Muslims were likely to find themselves.
The zeal for shariah drove him to attack Falsafah, Kalam and even the moderate asherism. He tried to recover the original sources, the Quran and the Hadith, and strip them off the subsequent accretions. “I have examined,” he would argue “all the theological and philosophical methods and found them incapable of curing any ills or of quenching any thirst. For me the best method is that of the Quran” .
Not content with this reversion, his pupil al-Jawziyah added Sufism to the list of reprehensible innovations and condemned it for diverging from the literalist interpretations of Quran. We will soon know how SSAK in his plea for reforms and as a sign of the resurgence of the spirit of reason, would return to the sacred Book, not for establishing the validity of the literalist exegesis but to inculcate a recognizance of its sediment meanings.
(...)
The colonial encounter between the Islamic world and the first world produced, among other things, a group of intellectuals across centuries who were marked as modernists. This group included Abdul Wahab (1703-1792), Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani also known as-Sayyid Muhammad Ibn Safdar al-Husayn (1839-1897), SSAK, Sayyid Qutb (1906 ?-1966), Hassan al Banna (1906-1949), and Muhammad Iqbal. In the face of the irreversible march of scientific advancements to which they became witness due to the presence of the colonial powers in whose institutions they became manifest, they did not, unlike many of the contemporaries, merely seek solace in the glories of their triumphant ancestors.
Instead of indulging their nostalgia for which the temptation was strong, they returned to their religion for a closer reappraisal of what they thought was true and immutable. These thinkers came off the traditional highway of the Islamic thought and introduced new milestones in directions unheard of in the past and in the face of an advancing western scientific thought.
Though rationalistic thinking has its own tradition in Islam in the form of the elaborate expositions al-Farabi (870-950), who initiated the rationalistic philosophical interpretation in the intellectually salubrious environs of Andalus, Ibn-Sina (980-1037), Ibn-Bajjah(1106-1138), Ibn-Khaldun(1332-1406), Ibn al Arabi(1165-1240), al-Ghazzali(1058-1111) etc.
They nurtured an alternative rational philosophical thinking on some of the basic propositions as revelation, philosophy and Kalam; yet, the colonial positioning of the powerful and the powerless made it possible to revise the importance of rationalism and empiricism. The thinkers saw these two entities behind the colonial advance. And thus called for a new rationalistic approach in theological thought.
(To be concluded)
Javaid Iqbal Bhat is a Research Scholar from Centre for English Studies JNU, New Delhi
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
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Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Rationalism, mysticism, science: Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan
By Javaid Iqbal Bhat - Greater Kashmir - Srinigar, India
Monday, April 2, 2007
"The greater world around Muslims had become a closed book. What is more they had no wish to open the book and read. They had long ceased to follow the Prophet’s injunction to “seek knowledge even as far as China.” Islam was afflicted with intellectual rigor mortis. The French religious writer Ernest Renan spoke of an ‘iron circle’ enclosing the head of the faithful in the Orient and Africa, making them impervious to fresh ideas and incapable of accepting anything new".
(Walker, Benjamin. Foundations of Islam: The Making of a World Faith 346)
It was a daunting task for Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan to build up a scientific temper in an atmosphere hostile to science and averse to exploration
He may not have succeeded in reinterpreting and implementing the core tenets of Islam as per the needs of the compulsive circumstances; however it is indubitable that Sir Sayyid’s life and writings have been subjected to contending interpretations.
For both Muslims as well as non-Muslims he is the repository of a difficult heritage. There are not few in the subcontinent for whom he remains the progenitor of Partition; for a lot more he nurtured the irrevocable Bidad (a reprehensible religious innovation) and thus sprinkled salt on the wounds of south Asian Muslims who had not yet recovered from the agony engendered by the dispossession of power and privilege.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), another modernist in his own vein, who earned no less a number of vilifying sobriquets from some parts of his own community than Sir Sayyid for venturing to chalk out a fresh pathway for the south Asian Muslims, was eloquent in his praise of the latter. Iqbal believed that “Khan was the first Muslim to react to the modern age”. These words of admiration come from one who himself went out of his way braving formidable odds in an attempt to help his disoriented community in reclaiming the lost glories.
Iqbal had understood what it involved to be a modernist in a condition when the person is besieged by conventional certitudes and unbending conservatism. Therefore, if Iqbal is recognized as the “most daring intellectual modernist the Muslim world has produced”, one wonders, how much daring was demanded of an individual in the middle of nineteenth century when Indians particularly the Muslims with an immediate memory of their rule had not yet reconciled to the ways and manners of the colonial powers. The gradual consolidation of the British rule in India estranged Muslims. They withdrew into smaller towns and villages with the desire to remain with their unadulterated traditions. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan saw this gulf between the Qaum and British, and resolved to bring about a rapprochement.
Each big enterprise begins with something big happening to the self from where the idea originates.
(...)
My argument in this paper is that Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s comfortable relationship with science and its technological productions (which, in effect, meant the British as well. Generally, the presence and continuation of science was identified with the presence and continuation of the occupier, the British. Hence the distance from the British meant the distance from science. SSAK succeeded in delinking the occupation as distinct from the scientific advancements.
When exactly the predominant use of reason went dormant in the history of Islamic thought is unclear. The Mongol invasions serve as a crucial signifier in that the blow to the Islamic civilisation was so powerful that the onset of the conservative strain became inevitable. One of its tangible damaging effects was the sense of loss nurtured for a long period of time. In this process the bold confidence in the intellectual domain characterized by the intrepid al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd took a backseat, and the mystical strains came to the fore.
However, even before this, the dim beginning of a transition from the traditional path of reason, is visible in the lifetime of Ibn Ghazzali(1058-1111). He, towards the end of his life, went out of his way to criticize both al-Arabi and Ibn Sina, and supported the epistemological use of mysticism for the divine gnosis.
For him only mystics can know God for they were above the world of metaphor. He believed, and this belief gained momentum with his proceeding years, that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated with logic or rational proof. In his Al Mundiqh min al-dalal (The Deliverance from Error) he argued:
"Neither Falsafah nor Kalam could satisfy somebody who was in danger of losing his faith".
He himself had been brought to the brink of skepticism (safsafah) when he realized that it was absolutely impossible to prove God’s existence beyond reasonable doubt. The reality we call “God” lay outside the realm of sense perception and logical thought, so science and metaphysics could neither prove nor disprove the wujud (existence) of al-Lah. For those who are not blessed with the special mystical or prophetic talent, al-Ghazzali devised a discipline to enable Muslims to cultivate a consciousness of God’s reality in the minutiae of daily life.
Ghazzali’s inscription of mysticism as a valid means of bringing about the closeness between God and man got further boost with the coming of the advocates of shariah in the fourteenth century. The most popular among these Ahmad ibn Taymiyah (d.1328) of Damascus wanted to take shariah to all circumstances in which Muslims were likely to find themselves.
The zeal for shariah drove him to attack Falsafah, Kalam and even the moderate asherism. He tried to recover the original sources, the Quran and the Hadith, and strip them off the subsequent accretions. “I have examined,” he would argue “all the theological and philosophical methods and found them incapable of curing any ills or of quenching any thirst. For me the best method is that of the Quran” .
Not content with this reversion, his pupil al-Jawziyah added Sufism to the list of reprehensible innovations and condemned it for diverging from the literalist interpretations of Quran. We will soon know how SSAK in his plea for reforms and as a sign of the resurgence of the spirit of reason, would return to the sacred Book, not for establishing the validity of the literalist exegesis but to inculcate a recognizance of its sediment meanings.
(...)
The colonial encounter between the Islamic world and the first world produced, among other things, a group of intellectuals across centuries who were marked as modernists. This group included Abdul Wahab (1703-1792), Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani also known as-Sayyid Muhammad Ibn Safdar al-Husayn (1839-1897), SSAK, Sayyid Qutb (1906 ?-1966), Hassan al Banna (1906-1949), and Muhammad Iqbal. In the face of the irreversible march of scientific advancements to which they became witness due to the presence of the colonial powers in whose institutions they became manifest, they did not, unlike many of the contemporaries, merely seek solace in the glories of their triumphant ancestors.
Instead of indulging their nostalgia for which the temptation was strong, they returned to their religion for a closer reappraisal of what they thought was true and immutable. These thinkers came off the traditional highway of the Islamic thought and introduced new milestones in directions unheard of in the past and in the face of an advancing western scientific thought.
Though rationalistic thinking has its own tradition in Islam in the form of the elaborate expositions al-Farabi (870-950), who initiated the rationalistic philosophical interpretation in the intellectually salubrious environs of Andalus, Ibn-Sina (980-1037), Ibn-Bajjah(1106-1138), Ibn-Khaldun(1332-1406), Ibn al Arabi(1165-1240), al-Ghazzali(1058-1111) etc.
They nurtured an alternative rational philosophical thinking on some of the basic propositions as revelation, philosophy and Kalam; yet, the colonial positioning of the powerful and the powerless made it possible to revise the importance of rationalism and empiricism. The thinkers saw these two entities behind the colonial advance. And thus called for a new rationalistic approach in theological thought.
(To be concluded)
Javaid Iqbal Bhat is a Research Scholar from Centre for English Studies JNU, New Delhi
Monday, April 2, 2007
"The greater world around Muslims had become a closed book. What is more they had no wish to open the book and read. They had long ceased to follow the Prophet’s injunction to “seek knowledge even as far as China.” Islam was afflicted with intellectual rigor mortis. The French religious writer Ernest Renan spoke of an ‘iron circle’ enclosing the head of the faithful in the Orient and Africa, making them impervious to fresh ideas and incapable of accepting anything new".
(Walker, Benjamin. Foundations of Islam: The Making of a World Faith 346)
It was a daunting task for Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan to build up a scientific temper in an atmosphere hostile to science and averse to exploration
He may not have succeeded in reinterpreting and implementing the core tenets of Islam as per the needs of the compulsive circumstances; however it is indubitable that Sir Sayyid’s life and writings have been subjected to contending interpretations.
For both Muslims as well as non-Muslims he is the repository of a difficult heritage. There are not few in the subcontinent for whom he remains the progenitor of Partition; for a lot more he nurtured the irrevocable Bidad (a reprehensible religious innovation) and thus sprinkled salt on the wounds of south Asian Muslims who had not yet recovered from the agony engendered by the dispossession of power and privilege.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), another modernist in his own vein, who earned no less a number of vilifying sobriquets from some parts of his own community than Sir Sayyid for venturing to chalk out a fresh pathway for the south Asian Muslims, was eloquent in his praise of the latter. Iqbal believed that “Khan was the first Muslim to react to the modern age”. These words of admiration come from one who himself went out of his way braving formidable odds in an attempt to help his disoriented community in reclaiming the lost glories.
Iqbal had understood what it involved to be a modernist in a condition when the person is besieged by conventional certitudes and unbending conservatism. Therefore, if Iqbal is recognized as the “most daring intellectual modernist the Muslim world has produced”, one wonders, how much daring was demanded of an individual in the middle of nineteenth century when Indians particularly the Muslims with an immediate memory of their rule had not yet reconciled to the ways and manners of the colonial powers. The gradual consolidation of the British rule in India estranged Muslims. They withdrew into smaller towns and villages with the desire to remain with their unadulterated traditions. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan saw this gulf between the Qaum and British, and resolved to bring about a rapprochement.
Each big enterprise begins with something big happening to the self from where the idea originates.
(...)
My argument in this paper is that Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s comfortable relationship with science and its technological productions (which, in effect, meant the British as well. Generally, the presence and continuation of science was identified with the presence and continuation of the occupier, the British. Hence the distance from the British meant the distance from science. SSAK succeeded in delinking the occupation as distinct from the scientific advancements.
When exactly the predominant use of reason went dormant in the history of Islamic thought is unclear. The Mongol invasions serve as a crucial signifier in that the blow to the Islamic civilisation was so powerful that the onset of the conservative strain became inevitable. One of its tangible damaging effects was the sense of loss nurtured for a long period of time. In this process the bold confidence in the intellectual domain characterized by the intrepid al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd took a backseat, and the mystical strains came to the fore.
However, even before this, the dim beginning of a transition from the traditional path of reason, is visible in the lifetime of Ibn Ghazzali(1058-1111). He, towards the end of his life, went out of his way to criticize both al-Arabi and Ibn Sina, and supported the epistemological use of mysticism for the divine gnosis.
For him only mystics can know God for they were above the world of metaphor. He believed, and this belief gained momentum with his proceeding years, that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated with logic or rational proof. In his Al Mundiqh min al-dalal (The Deliverance from Error) he argued:
"Neither Falsafah nor Kalam could satisfy somebody who was in danger of losing his faith".
He himself had been brought to the brink of skepticism (safsafah) when he realized that it was absolutely impossible to prove God’s existence beyond reasonable doubt. The reality we call “God” lay outside the realm of sense perception and logical thought, so science and metaphysics could neither prove nor disprove the wujud (existence) of al-Lah. For those who are not blessed with the special mystical or prophetic talent, al-Ghazzali devised a discipline to enable Muslims to cultivate a consciousness of God’s reality in the minutiae of daily life.
Ghazzali’s inscription of mysticism as a valid means of bringing about the closeness between God and man got further boost with the coming of the advocates of shariah in the fourteenth century. The most popular among these Ahmad ibn Taymiyah (d.1328) of Damascus wanted to take shariah to all circumstances in which Muslims were likely to find themselves.
The zeal for shariah drove him to attack Falsafah, Kalam and even the moderate asherism. He tried to recover the original sources, the Quran and the Hadith, and strip them off the subsequent accretions. “I have examined,” he would argue “all the theological and philosophical methods and found them incapable of curing any ills or of quenching any thirst. For me the best method is that of the Quran” .
Not content with this reversion, his pupil al-Jawziyah added Sufism to the list of reprehensible innovations and condemned it for diverging from the literalist interpretations of Quran. We will soon know how SSAK in his plea for reforms and as a sign of the resurgence of the spirit of reason, would return to the sacred Book, not for establishing the validity of the literalist exegesis but to inculcate a recognizance of its sediment meanings.
(...)
The colonial encounter between the Islamic world and the first world produced, among other things, a group of intellectuals across centuries who were marked as modernists. This group included Abdul Wahab (1703-1792), Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani also known as-Sayyid Muhammad Ibn Safdar al-Husayn (1839-1897), SSAK, Sayyid Qutb (1906 ?-1966), Hassan al Banna (1906-1949), and Muhammad Iqbal. In the face of the irreversible march of scientific advancements to which they became witness due to the presence of the colonial powers in whose institutions they became manifest, they did not, unlike many of the contemporaries, merely seek solace in the glories of their triumphant ancestors.
Instead of indulging their nostalgia for which the temptation was strong, they returned to their religion for a closer reappraisal of what they thought was true and immutable. These thinkers came off the traditional highway of the Islamic thought and introduced new milestones in directions unheard of in the past and in the face of an advancing western scientific thought.
Though rationalistic thinking has its own tradition in Islam in the form of the elaborate expositions al-Farabi (870-950), who initiated the rationalistic philosophical interpretation in the intellectually salubrious environs of Andalus, Ibn-Sina (980-1037), Ibn-Bajjah(1106-1138), Ibn-Khaldun(1332-1406), Ibn al Arabi(1165-1240), al-Ghazzali(1058-1111) etc.
They nurtured an alternative rational philosophical thinking on some of the basic propositions as revelation, philosophy and Kalam; yet, the colonial positioning of the powerful and the powerless made it possible to revise the importance of rationalism and empiricism. The thinkers saw these two entities behind the colonial advance. And thus called for a new rationalistic approach in theological thought.
(To be concluded)
Javaid Iqbal Bhat is a Research Scholar from Centre for English Studies JNU, New Delhi
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