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The Modern Islamic World

On 29 March 1883 Ernest Renan lectured at the Sorbonne on Islam and science. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī replied in the Journal des Débats on 18 May. Religions, he wrote, “se ressemblent toutes. Aucune entente ni aucune réconciliation ne sont possibles entre ces religions et la philosophie. La religion impose à l’homme sa foi et sa croyance, tandis que la philosophie l’en affranchit totalement ou en partie”: are all alike; no agreement and no reconciliation are possible between these religions and philosophy; religion imposes its faith and belief on man, while philosophy frees him from them wholly or in part. “Toutes les fois que la religion aura le dessus, elle éliminera la philosophie … le triomphe ne sera pas pour la libre pensée, parce que la raison déplaît à la foule”: whenever religion has the upper hand it will eliminate philosophy, and the triumph will not be free thought’s, because reason displeases the crowd. Yet Muslim society “arrivera un jour à briser ses liens”, will one day break its bonds, as Christian society did. And to Renan’s account of the past: “Les Européens ont fait bon accueil à Aristote, émigré et devenu arabe ; mais ils ne songeaient nullement à lui quand il était grec et leur voisin”, the Europeans welcomed Aristotle once he had emigrated and become Arab, but gave him no thought when he was Greek and their neighbour.

Muḥammad ʿAbduh, in The Theology of Unity (Risālat al-tawḥīd), from lectures given in Beirut, put reason inside religion: “Islam supervened, to present its case to reason, to call on mind and intelligence for action”. Against those who held “that reason and religion had nothing in common”: “if that claim were to be allowed, religion would not be a means whereby man could be guided”. Of the old philosophers he wrote that “the only concern of philosophic rationalists was to gain knowledge”, and that most were moved by “an admiration for all that derived from the Greek philosophers … and with it a too precipitate inclination to accept their authority” (tr. Musaʿad and Cragg).

Muhammad Iqbal set out, in lectures given in Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh, “to reconstruct Muslim religious philosophy with due regard to the philosophical traditions of Islam and the more recent developments in the various domains of human knowledge” (The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, preface). Of philosophy itself: “The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places”. And he judged the Greek inheritance against the Qurʾān: “while Greek philosophy very much broadened the outlook of Muslim thinkers, it, on the whole, obscured their vision of the Quran”; “the spirit of the Quran was essentially anti-classical” (V).

Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Rāziq, in his Introduction to the History of Islamic Philosophy (Tamhīd li-taʾrīkh al-falsafa al-islāmiyya), written while he taught at the Egyptian University, proposed “a return to Islamic rational reflection in its first simplicity, and tracing its stages”, against Western scholars who traced it to non-Arab sources and Muslim scholars who “weigh philosophy on the scale of religion”. His thesis was that it began at home: independent legal reasoning, ijtihād bi-l-raʾy, “is the first thing that sprouted of rational reflection among the Muslims … and in its precincts ripened a philosophical science, uṣūl al-fiqh”, the principles of jurisprudence, “before Greek philosophy did its work”. He held that the study of Islamic philosophy should include it beside kalām and Sufism.

Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī (1936–2010), in his Critique of Arab Reason (Naqd al-ʿaql al-ʿarabī), sorted the tradition’s ways of knowing into three systems, bayān, rhetoric or linguistic analysis, ʿirfān, gnosticism, and burhān, deductive reasoning (in Mohammed Hashas’s glosses), held that the first two dominated the culture while demonstration, strongest in the Maghreb, ended with Ibn Rushd and, after him, Ibn Khaldūn, and called for an epistemological break. For Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Mullā Ṣadrā “sought to unify the knowledge received through burhân or demonstration, ‘irfân or contemplation, intellectual intuition and gnosis and Qur’ân … thereby giving full expression to philosophy cultivated in the land of prophecy” (Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present, 2006, as quoted by Acar).