The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Robert Reilly)
– Highlight Loc. 2001-83
Dehellenization of Islam
The “intruding sciences” would intrude in Islam no more. They were expelled. As a result, notes Professor Joel Kraemer of the University of Chicago, “the assimilation of the Greek heritage in the Orient may be termed a ‘tragic sterility.’”10 professor of Arabic and Near Eastern studies G. E. von Grunebaum stated, “The far-reaching importance of the Greek contribution to Islamic cultures should not lead one to suppose that it effected a fundamental change in its vitality or its concept of man. There are few traces of the Greek spirit in the human ideal within even those sects which, like the [Shiite] Isma’iliyya, were most open to the influence of the Greek element in the interest of its own theologico-philosophic system.” Thus, he concluded, “The fundamental structure of Islamic thinking has been left untouched by Hellenistic influence.”11
Here are two more critical assessments of the results of al-Ghazali’s success from twentieth-century Muslims. “While the fierce debates between those believing in free will (the Qadarites) and the predestinarians (the Jabrias) were generally resolved in favor of the former,” Pervez Hoodbhoy avers, “the gradual hegemony of fatalistic Ash’arite doctrines mortally weakened . . . Islamic society and led to a withering away of its scientific spirit. Ash’arite dogma insisted on the denial of any connection between cause and effect—and therefore repudiated rational thought.”12
Fazlur Rahman concurs that the earlier disputes concerning predestination were not fatally injurious, “but with Ash’arism a totally new era of belief dawned upon Muslims. From then on, they could not act in reality; human action, indeed, became a mere metaphor devoid of any real meaning. Al-Ashari explicitly stated that even a waking person cannot speak in reality. . . . The truth is that Ash’arism held its sway right up until the twentieth century and holds sway even now in the citadels of Islamic conservatism.”13 The deadening effects, says Rahman, included the loss of human initiative, activity, and imagination—a devastating tally, as we shall see when we examine the state of the Arab world today.
The damage was evident in immediate aftermath of al-Ghazali’s triumph. In Testament, Al Fakhr al-Razi, a critic of Avicenna and twelfth-century follower of al-Ghazali, stated reason’s obituary in the following terms: “I have explored the ways of kalam and the methods of philosophy, and I did not see in them a benefit that compares with the benefit I found in the Qur’an. For the latter hurries us to acknowledge that greatness and majesty belong only to Allah, precluding us from involvement into the explication of objections and contentions. This is for no other reason than because human minds find themselves deadened in those deep, vexing exercises and obscure way [of kalam and philosophy].”14
Further calcification was evident in the early thirteenth century. Ibn-as-Salah (d. 1251), the head of the Dar al-Hadith al-Ashrafiya in Damascus, one of the most prestigious institutions for the study of Hadith in the Islamic world, was asked if it was permissible to study or teach philosophy and logic, the latter of which al-Ghazali had at least allowed. He responded with a fatwa in which he described philosophy as “the foundation of folly, the cause of all confusion, all errors and all heresy. The person who occupies himself with it becomes colourblind to the beauties of religious law, supported by brilliant proofs. . . . As far as logic is concerned, it is a means of access to philosophy. Now the means of access to something bad is also bad. . . . All those who give evidence of pursuing the teachings of philosophy must be confronted with the following alternatives: either execution by the sword, or conversion to Islam, so that the land may be protected and the traces of those people and their sciences may be eradicated.”15
The degeneration continued with Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), who profoundly influenced Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, the strict Hanbalite form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia and whose thought has been resuscitated by the Islamists today. Ibn Taymiyya said that man’s job is simply to obey. Submit. Reason plays no role. According to Lebanese scholar Majid Fakhry, he “insured the victory of Neo-Hanbalism over scholastic theology and philosophy.”16 Al-Ghazali’s more finely tempered view becomes lost, and now even theology becomes a path to perdition. Ibn Taymiyya did to theology what al-Ghazali did to philosophy; he exiled it. He cited predecessors who had devoted their lives to these sciences, but who later recanted, such as Al-Shahrastani, who “confessed that it was folly to discuss theology.” He relished Abu Yusuf, “who said that he who would seek knowledge by the help of scholastic theology (kalam) would turn into an atheist,” and Imam Shafi’i, who held that “theologians should be beaten with shoes and palm-branches, and paraded through the city so that people may know the consequence of the study of theology.”17
The narrowing of knowledge is evident in the jurist Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi’s (d. 1388) pronouncement that “investigation into any question which is not a basis for an action is not recommended by any proof from the Shari’a. By act I mean both mental and physical acts.” Al-Shatibi added: “And so is the case with every branch of learning that claims a relationship with the Shari’a but does not (directly) benefit action, nor was it known to the Arabs.”18 In other words, the only thing worth knowing is whether a specific action is, according to the Shari’a: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged, or forbidden. The rest is irrelevant.
In the seventeenth century, Turkish author Katib Chelebi (d. 1657) complained of further decay: “But many unintelligent people . . . remained as inert as rocks, frozen in blind imitation of the ancients. Without deliberation, they rejected and repudiated the new sciences. They passed for learned men, while all the time they were ignoramuses, fond of disparaging what they called ‘the philosophical science,’ and knowing nothing of earth or sky. The admonition ‘Have they not contemplated the kingdom of Heaven and Earth?’ (Qur’an, VII, 184) made no impression on them; they thought ‘contemplating the world and the firmament’ meant staring at them like a cow.”19
More recently, Georges Tarabishi, a prominent liberal Syrian intellectual living in France, spoke directly to Fazlur Rahman’s accusation of intellectual suicide, with which this book began. In a January 2008 interview with the London Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, he said: “Philosophy is a product of the mind. [But] what prevails today in Arab culture is the [Arab] mentality [instead of the critical mind]. Thus, I could almost say that it is impossible today for Arab philosophy to exist. Perhaps there is some degree of generalization in this sentence—but nonetheless, give me one single example of an Arab philosopher worthy of the name. And I do not exempt myself from this judgment. This is saddening, since we know that what created Western modernity was first and foremost philosophy. Should we not attribute the failure of Arab modernism, at least in part, to the absence of Arab philosophers?“20
What, then, of the achievements of Muslim philosophy in Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi, al-Kindi, al-Khawarizmi, and al-Farabi? Reformist thinker Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, a current member of the Saudi Shura Council, responds, “These [achievements] are not of our own making, and those exceptional individuals were not the product of Arab culture, but rather Greek culture. They are outside our cultural mainstream and we treated them as though they were foreign elements. Therefore we don’t deserve to take pride in them since we rejected them and fought their ideas. Conversely, when Europe learned from them it benefited from a body of knowledge which was originally its own because they were an extension of Greek culture, which is the source of the whole of Western civilization.”21
In fact, the rejection continues to this day. Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi states that “because rational disciplines had not been institutionalized in classical Islam, the adoption of the Greek legacy had no lasting effect on Islamic civilization.”22 Indeed, “contemporary Islamic fundamentalists denounce not only cultural modernity, but even the Islamic rationalism of Averroes and Avicenna, scholars who had defined the heights of Islamic civilization.”23
The contemporary Egyptian reformist thinker Tarek Heggy neatly summarizes the conflict and its outcome: “The world of Islam was the scene of a battle of ideas between Abu Hamid Al-Ghazzali (Algazel) [sic], a strict traditionalist who did not believe the human mind capable of grasping the Truth as ordained by God, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who championed the primacy of reason. The exponents of these two schools waged a bitter battle. . . . But despite his [Averroes’s] spirited defense [of rationality], the outcome of the battle was clearly in Al-Ghazzali’s favour, and the great majority of Islamic jurists adopted his ideas, interpreting the precepts of Islamic law by appeal to the authority of tradition and spurning deductive reasoning altogether. Islamic jurisprudence was dominated by the Mutakallimun, or dialectical theologians, who asserted the primacy of tradition (naql), as advocated by Al-Ghazzali, over that of reason (‘aql), as advocated by Ibn Rushd.”24
Al-Ghazali’s influence was, and is, so important that a modern thinker of Fazlur Rahman’s stature could say that “without his work . . . philosophic rationalism might well have made a clean sweep of the Islamic ethos.”25 One can only imagine how different the world would have been had that happened.
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The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Robert Reilly)
– Highlight Loc. 3744-80
Notes
Chapter 5: The Unfortunate Victory of al-Ghazali and the Dehellenization of Islam
10. Joel Kraemer, “Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 104.1 (1984): 143.
11. Ibid., see footnote 37.
12. Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, 120.
13. Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam, 60.
14. G. F. Haddad, “Al Fakhr al-Razi,” at http://www.sunnah.org/history/scholars/al_fakhr_al_razi.htm.
15. Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, 103.
16. Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 323.
17. Serajul Haque, “Ibn Taimiyah,” in Sharif, A History of Muslim Philosophy, ch. 41, 799, at http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/hmp/index.html.
18. Rahman, Islam, 108.
19. Ibid., 187.
20. MEMRI, at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP206708.
21. Ibrahim al-Buleihi, Ukkaz, April 23, 2009, at http://www.elaph.com/Web/NewsPapers/2009/4/433121.htm.
22. Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 71.
23. Ibid.
24. Tarek Heggy, at, www.alwaref.org/en/islamic-culture/157-rise-militant-islam, May 6, 2009.
25. Rahman, Islam, 110.