Islam has become less rational
since its medieval Golden Age. What went wrong?
There is no central doctrinal authority in Islam. The
result is a wide range of Islamic thought. The rise of conservative revivalist
movements, such as Salafism, can be attributed to the disillusionment caused by
the decline of the Islamic world and the failure of modernization efforts. These
movements seek to return Islam to its perceived roots and have gained
popularity among those seeking social reform and religious renewal. Stupendous
intellectual resources already exist in Islam, as does the tradition of debate.
These are the ingredients that can help reconcile Islam to the modern world.
In 833 AD, the Abbasid Caliph, al-Mamun, was at the
height of his power. He ruled a vast empire, and a clear majority of the world’s
Muslims considered him the leader of the faithful. However, there was a problem.
While he enjoyed considerable influence on questions of religious law and
doctrine, the highest human authority in Islam wasn’t the caliph but an
amorphous group of respected scholars, the ulema, who were supposed to reach a
consensus on contentious issues.
Membership of the ulema wasn’t by official
appointment, but by something approaching popular acclamation. And, on some
seminal matters, consensus proved impossible. For example, rationalist
theologians, the Mutazilites, believed humans have free will. Ranged against
them were some of the experts on Sharia law, who insisted that God had
determined all things, including who was destined for hell. This meant debates
could continue without agreement for centuries.
Al-Mamun wasn’t happy about this. He wanted to
enforce his right to adjudicate on religious controversies but instead found
himself having to negotiate with the various factions. It was time to press the
issue. As it happened, he enjoyed the support of the Mutazilites and so picked
one question upon which they agreed against the majority of the ulema: Is the
Koran eternal, or was it created by God?
Most Muslims said that the Arabic text of the holy
book had always existed in the mind of the deity. For all eternity, he knew
exactly what the political situation in 7th century
Islamic Inquisition
Mercy wasn’t at the forefront of al-Mamun’s mind
when he sought to impose his will on the ulema. He issued a proclamation that
the Koran was created and insisted everyone consent to it. The most
distinguished religious and legal scholars were hauled in for questioning. Those
who refused to accept the caliph’s position were tortured and imprisoned until
they recanted. The episode is called the mihna, meaning “trial” or “ordeal” in
Arabic but often translated as “inquisition.” In this case, the inquisitors
were on the side of rationalism and their victims were religious conservatives
refusing to disown traditional dogma. Resistance to the caliph was led by Ahmad
ibn Hanbal, a venerable expert on Sharia law, whose day job was running a
bakery.
Al-Mamun died on campaign within months of
instituting the mihna, so it was left to his successors to enforce his ordinance.
Many of the ulema backed down, but not ibn Hanbal. Despite being beaten until
he passed out and interrogated by the caliph in person, he refused to admit the
Koran is created. Too influential to be ignored and too stubborn to recant, ibn
Hanbal eventually forced the caliphs to accept defeat. After about 15 years,
they wound down the mihna. There would never be a central doctrinal authority
in Islam.
No central authority
As for ibn Hanbal, he is recognized as the founder
of one of the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence. Sharia law is based on
the Koran (which doesn’t actually contain very much legal material) and the
hadiths — that is, sayings of the prophet Muhammad and his companions. Each
hadith is a snippet of a conversation, often involving Muhammad responding to a
query from one of his followers. If the Prophet said it, it’s authoritative and
enjoys the force of law. The trouble was, by ibn Hanbal’s time, fake hadiths
had been proliferating as they were invented to support various agendas. He
took it upon himself to collate the authentic hadiths, supporting their
authority by showing how they had been passed down to his own day.
Ibn Hanbal was not the only collector of hadiths. There
are at least six canonical collections, not to mention several thousand sayings
dismissed as poorly authenticated. Sharia is far from being a single edifice. Any
recognized scholar can issue an opinion, or fatwa, and whether any other
scholar concurs is up to him. Today, you can seek a fatwa to address a particular
concern over the internet. And if you don’t like the result, you can ask
someone else. Consensus remains elusive, although Muslims do now agree the
Koran is uncreated.
A wide variety of Islamic thought
It’s the sheer variety of Islamic thought that takes
many Westerners by surprise. Without a Muslim version of the pope to delineate
heresy from orthodoxy, the ulema have been left to argue it out among
themselves. Sometimes rulers would get involved and lend their authority to
favored scholars. But even then, dissenters could simply move to a more
favorable jurisdiction. Indeed, the biographies of famous thinkers like
Avicenna and al-Ghazali are full of peregrinations from one part of the Muslim
world to another, as they sought patronage or just to be left alone.
The Shia, who dominate in
Islam has also absorbed outside influences. The translation
movement, whereby a huge stock of Persian, Sanskrit, and Greek writing was
rendered in Arabic under the Abbasid caliphate, brought governance, science,
and medicine to a Muslim audience. All three subjects thrived as they were
turned to issues like administration, the calendar, and good health. Today,
medieval Muslim mathematicians and natural philosophers are rightfully
celebrated, even if some exaggerations about their achievements have crept into
the record. More controversially, pseudoscience like astrology was perennially
popular. One caliph used a crack squad of astrologers to determine the most
auspicious time to lay the foundation stone of his new capital of
Foreign science and philosophy
Areas of knowledge that had originated outside the
Islamic world were called the “foreign sciences.” This was not necessarily
detrimental to their position in society even if they had to fight for their
corner in the bazaar of ideas. For instance, the Brethren of Purity were a 10th-century
sect from
Philosophy, called falsafa in Arabic, built on the
thought of Greek sages, especially Aristotle, whose work had been translated
under the Abbasids. Its greatest exponent was Avicenna, the medieval Persian
polymath whose achievements laid the foundation for almost all subsequent
Muslim philosophy. Within Islam itself, falsafa had to jostle with theology and
law for academic kudos. (Some Arab thinkers celebrated in the West, such as
Averroes, were much less influential among Muslims.)
While it is true that falsafa and foreign sciences
like astronomy were opposed by traditionalists, the critique misses the point: Pretty
much every Muslim thinker aroused opposition from other scholars somewhere. Throwing
fatwas at opponents was part and parcel of debate. Nor should we forget that,
for centuries after the Islamic conquests, the majority of the people ruled by
the caliphs were not Muslims at all. Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Zoroastrians
may have been second-class citizens, but that did not put a stop to their
intellectual life.
Yet today, despite the range of Islamic thought,
few would deny that Muslim countries are generally more socially and
religiously conservative than the West — a reversal of the position in the
Middle Ages. What happened?
An attack on rationality
A superficial and flippant answer might be “nothing
much.” The big changes took place in the West rather than the East, which
stayed much the same. But there is more to it than that.
The failure of the mihna meant that caliphs would
never enjoy the dogmatic authority of medieval popes. But it was also a
humiliation for the Mutazilite rationalists, whose influence deteriorated over
the following decades. Meanwhile, the triumphant followers of ibn Hanbal and
other scholars pushed their twin agendas of determinism and Koranic literalism.
In place of the disgraced Mutazilites, new Ashari and Maturidi schools of
theology, each named after their 10th-century founders, came to represent Sunni
orthodoxy. While the Maturidis, in particular, were sympathetic toward falsafa,
both schools reflected a significant move away from the rationalism of their
Mutazilite predecessors. Thus, as consensus among the ulema coalesced slowly
over the centuries, it inclined toward conservatism. In any case,
traditionalists maintained their hold over Muslim laypeople, who never showed
much interest in highfalutin speculative divinity.
By far, the most renowned of the Ashari theologians
is al-Ghazali. In 1095, he was a confidant of sultans and viziers but then left
his well-paid job as a teacher in
Al-Ghazali has been blamed for diverting Islamic
thought toward mysticism and religious obscurantism. In truth, he is hard to
pigeonhole. Western scholars in the Middle Ages thought he was a devoted
follower of Avicenna because a summary of the latter’s thought circulated under
the name of Algazel. In the Muslim world, his most influential work is the
enormous Revival of the Religious Sciences, a complete guide to Muslim ethics
and ritual intended to integrate Sufi practice with Sunni belief. Not everyone
was impressed. In a fine example of the tensions among different parts of the
ulema, the authorities in
While al-Ghazali’s reputation as the destroyer of
philosophy in the Muslim world is unfair, there is little doubt that
rationalism remained a minority pursuit. Al-Ghazali himself was hardly the most
conservative of the medieval ulema. The 14th-century polemicist ibn Taymiyyah
made him look like a dripping wet liberal. Ibn Taymiyyah railed against Sufism,
philosophy, and any kind of religious novelty (by which he meant something that
was less than 600 years old). From his base in
Nostalgia meets reality
The term ibn Taymiyyah used for the earliest
Muslims who composed the hadiths was “the pious predecessors,” or al-salaf al-salah
in Arabic, so his modern admirers are called Salafists. Salafism seeks to
return Islam to its roots, inspired by nostalgia for an imaginary past that
even Muslim history makes clear never existed.
An early Salafist movement was Wahhabism, founded
during the 18th century as a joint venture between the cleric Abd al-Wahhab and
the Arabian warlord Muhammad bin Saud. Reacting against the decadence of the
Since Islam is such a broad church, why is it that
these conservative revivalists have become so successful? To find the answer,
we need to remember that until the 18th century, a Muslim would have been
justified in thinking that Islam was ordained by God to convert the whole world.
Despite local setbacks, such as the reconquest of
However, by the 1800s, it was impossible to
maintain the dream of superiority. In July 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded
Despots and stability, not democracy and liberalism
Nineteenth-century Muslim modernists, such as
While there are few democratic institutions in the
Islamic world, we have seen that authority within Islam itself is broadly
spread among those ulema who have acquired a certain level of prestige among
their peers and the people. The failure of modernism (as evidenced most
recently by the collapse of the so-called Arab Spring) has meant religion has
been the main outlet for protest. Politicized Islam pursues the twin goals of
social reform and religious renewal. The most prominent example is the Muslim
Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna. The Brotherhood
combines a demand for social justice with a fundamentalist theology. It was
clear threat to
Preoccupied with the struggle against Nazism and
then Communism, the West valued stability over democracy in the Muslim world,
leading it to support despotic regimes such as the military juntas in
Modernization is possible
So, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the
solutions to the Muslim world’s problems will have to come from within. Glib
assertions that Islam needs a Reformation are misguided, not least because
Salafism itself is analogous to the return to the Bible and early Church
Fathers advocated by the first Protestants. And the 17th-century European wars
of religion are not an example anyone would like to see followed.
Instead, advocates for reform need to have patience.
Religious consensus, developed over the centuries, has never been in the gift
of rulers like Caliph al-Mamun. It can only change gradually and has always had
to accommodate the views of common folk. This means that until ordinary people
living in Muslim countries feel their lives are being improved by modernity,
they are likely to remain suspicious of liberalism. More democracy will
probably mean more Islamists in power.
Luckily, stupendous intellectual resources already
exist in Islam, as does the tradition of debate. These are the ingredients that
can help reconcile Islam to the modern world. It’s a process that has been
going on quietly for many years. But it will take time to come to fruition.
https://bigthink.com/the-past/islam-rationality-modernity/
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