God and Logic in Islam
God and Logic in Islam
God and Logic in Islam
This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life.
Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only
on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamen-
talism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy, theology, and education
since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval
Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamen-
talists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life
and its replacement by more modern but far shallower forms of thought.
The resources of this Islamic scholarly current, however, remain an integral
part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The
future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism.
JOHN WALBRIDGE
Indiana University
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,
Sao Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City
C John Walbridge 2011
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for
external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Frances, with love,
and to the memory of Elaine Wright.
The first thing God created was mind.
a hadith
Contents
Illustrations page xi
Introduction 1
xi
Preface and Acknowledgements
I have written this book with three readers in mind: the educated Western
reader whose knowledge of Islam may be no more than impressions
formed from television and newspapers; the Muslim reader troubled by
the misfortunes of his community in the modern world; and the scholar
of Islamic studies. They have, unfortunately, quite different needs, and I
hope that each will be tolerant of the needs of the others.
I have tried to write this book in a way that will be understandable
to an educated Western reader without specialized knowledge of Islam.
I have therefore avoided assuming much knowledge about Islam and in
particular extensive use of Arabic words and names. I have usually defined
technical Islamic terms and identified names when they first occur. I also
give brief definitions and identifications in the index. However, there are
inevitably places where I have to deal in technicalities, for which I ask the
patience of the nonspecialist. For my Muslim readers, this is essentially a
theological work, a plea to reexamine the riches of the Islamic rationalist
tradition in light of the needs of the modern Islamic community. For
my scholarly reader, this book is a reminder of what I hope he already
knows the central importance of rationalism, and particularly scholastic
rationalism, in the Islamic intellectual synthesis.
This book represents ideas that have developed over the course of my
career, going back to my first undergraduate Islamic studies paper. It
took this specific shape as a byproduct of work that I conducted first
in Pakistan on the role of logic in Islamic education and later in Turkey
on the relation of Islamic science and medicine to philosophy. These
projects were generously funded by several organizations, including the
Fulbright program, which allowed me to spend a year each in Pakistan
xiii
xiv PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Arabic terms are spelled with slight modifications according to the system
commonly used by scholars of the Middle East. It will be familiar to
specialists. In the occasional cases where I am citing names or terms
from other Islamic languages, I treat them as Arabic for simplicity unless
they have established equivalents in English. I also frequently omit the
al- from Arabic names, again for simplicity.
In a work such as this, Arabic terminology and names are unavoidable,
but I have tried to keep it accessible to a general reader, at least a patient
one. Whenever possible, I use English equivalents rather than Arabic
terms. Almost any translation of an Islamic religious term can be objected
to as imprecise, but on the whole I think it is better to use a term that
the reader starts out understanding, explaining how it differs from its
usual sense, rather than start with a term the reader does not know and
try to explain the meaning to him or her from scratch. I include brief
definitions of terms and names in the index, which the reader can use as
a glossary. I also explain terms and identify people at first mention. Dates
are given only according to the Common Era except in the case of books
whose publication dates are given according to the Islamic calendar.
One term deserves special comment: fundamentalist. It is widely
used but is subject to objections. It is, after all, a term for a specific trend
in modern American Protestantism. It is now used in Arabic us.u lya a
calque from English, but it is not a term accepted by the people to whom
it is applied. I use it in a very specific sense: those modern adherents of a
religion who wish to return to the original textual roots, bypassing in the
process the medieval high religious syntheses. I thus use it for the Islamic
groups who tend to refer to themselves as Salaf, followers of the salaf,
xv
xvi SPELLING, NAMES, AND SOURCES
this book is an argument for a single proposition, that islamic
intellectual life has been characterized by reason in the service of a non-
rational revealed code of conduct.
The non-rational revealed code of conduct is the Shara, the Law of
God, which occupies the same position of primacy in Islamic intellectual
life that theology does in Christianity. I do not wish to say that the Shara
is irrational or contrary to reason or beyond reason, these being issues
on which Muslims themselves disagreed only that the Shara is given
and that Muslims by and large did not think that the reasons for any
particular command of God need be accessible to the human mind.1
Whereas the foundation of Islam was the revelation given to
Muh.ammad, which thus is fundamentally beyond reason, reason was
1
For a slightly different account of the role of reason in Islamic civilization with a
stress on political philosophy, see Muh.sin Mahdi, The Rational Tradition in Islam,
in Farhad Daftary, ed. Intellectual Traditions in Islam (London: I. B. Tauris and the
Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2000), pp. 4365. In a book that arrived too late for me to
use systematically, Jeffry R. Halverson, Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim
Brotherhood, Asharism, and Political Sunnism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
makes a similar argument. He argues that by the end of the middle ages athar thought,
the term he uses where I would use literalism or fundamentalism, had succeeded
in replacing rational theology with uncritical literalist creeds, with unfortunate effects
for Islamic religious thought.
4 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
the tool normally chosen by Muslims for the explication of this revela-
tion from the time when Companions of the Prophet still lived down
to the dawning of our day. This legacy of rational methodology is to var-
ious degrees ignored by Muslims, both modernist and fundamentalist
(though they are not as different as we might believe) and by outsiders
seeking to understand Islam. This book is thus a reminder to my Muslim
friends and readers that the core intellectual tradition of Islam is deeply
rational, though based on revelation. This tradition has been largely
rejected by modern Muslims, or at least ignored by them. Non-Muslims
are usually unaware of it and thus misunderstand Islam.
I chose the word caliphate in my subtitle for the relationship of rea-
son to the content of revelation to indicate that reason served revelation
and thus was secondary to it. Khalfa, caliph, comes from a root mean-
ing to follow, in the sense of coming afterwards. It has two major uses in
Islamic religious thought. First, the Quran says that man is Gods caliph
on earth. Second, it is the title used by the first rulers of the Islamic world
after the death of the Prophet Muh.ammad and by occasional later rulers,
such as the Ottoman sultans, who were able to claim universal authority
or legitimate succession from earlier caliphs. Abu Bakr, Muh.ammads
first successor, chose the title khalfat Rasul Allah, successor of the Mes-
senger of God, in an act of political modesty. Later rulers sometimes
styled themselves khalfat Allah, Caliph of God, to some disapproval
from the pious.2 The title caliph was also used by Sufi leaders who had
been granted a considerable degree of authority of the heads of their
orders. In all of these cases, caliph implies authority under sovereignty
granted by another and higher authority. This, it seemed to me, was a
fair term to characterize the role of reason in Islam.
There have been many who have either denied that reason plays a
central role in Islamic intellectual life or objected to its doing so. In
our troubled times, many non-Muslims see Islam as an inherently anti-
rational force, pointing to a supposed failure to adapt to the modern
world (What went wrong?), a cult of martyrdom, well-publicized
examples of bizarre applications of Islamic law, and a general modern
secular suspicion of religion as an organizing principle of human life, par-
ticularly of social and political life. Within Islam, there have always been
2
Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. Khalfa.
INTRODUCTION 5
critics of the role of reason in the religious sciences. The hadith literature,
as we will see, arose in part as a reaction to the incipient rationalism of
early Islamic legal scholarship. The great fourteenth-century fundamen-
talist reformer Ibn Taymya hated reason wherever it expressed itself in
Islamic intellectual life. In modern Islam, the traditional legal scholars,
with their intricate systems of scholastic reasoning, have been condemned
by both modernists, who with some justice considered their legal systems
to be medieval and obsolete, and the exponents of Islamic revival, heavily
influenced by the hadith and the criticisms of Ibn Taymya.
My contention in this book is that the logic of the central ideas of
Islamic life as they were launched by the Prophet and the earliest gener-
ation of Muslims drove relentlessly toward a situation in which religious
knowledge was placed in a rational context, with reason providing the
organizing principles for bodies of knowledge whose origin was non-
rational. This book is my argument for this proposition.
many modern fundamentalist islamic movements are active-
ly hostile to this tradition of rationalism. The thoughtful observer of Islam
will notice the damage done to the integrity of Islamic intellectual life
by this disregard of the careful analysis of the heritage of Muh.ammads
revelation performed by fifty or more generations of Islamic scholars. The
result is a plethora of arbitrary personal interpretations of the Quran,
the hadith, and Islamic law. The damage done is plain for all to see.
I am a Protestant and, in particular, an Anglican. My ancestors came
to America three and a half centuries ago escaping religious war and per-
secution, fundamentalists fleeing persecution by other fundamentalists
and sometimes persecuting yet other sectarians in the New World with
whom they disagreed. The Reformation had broken the religious unity
of the Western Christian world, opening the gates for floods of personal
interpretations of Christian doctrine and the Bible. The wounds are not
yet healed in Christendom. The Anglicans attempt to walk a tightrope,
open to the reforms and new ideas of the Reformation yet remaining
loyal to the ancient tradition of the Church Universal and never admit-
ting the finality of Christian division or condemning those who follow
other ways. It is a path I commend to my Muslim friends. I do not wish
on them the two centuries of war that drove my ancestors across the sea
6 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
1
The article is Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy, How Islam Lost Its Way: Yesterdays Achieve-
ments Were Golden: Today, Reason Has Been Eclipsed, Washington Post, December 30,
2001. The argument is presented in more detail in Hoodbhoys Islam and Science: Reli-
gious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1990).
9
10 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
The influence of Salaf Islam has grown steadily, in good part because
the Salafs have a point: the foundations of Islam are the Quran and
the life and practice of the Prophet, everything after them being human
speculation grounded in the intellectual and social conditions of the
times when Islamic scholars wrote. Nonetheless, most non-Muslims,
however sympathetic they might be to Islam, would see the Quran and
sunna, the practice of the Prophet, as being in some sense the product
of the social and religious context of seventh-century Arabia. Certainly,
the amount of religious information and text preserved from the time
of the Prophet is finite. The Quran is a single, not especially large book,
and the hadith that have any claim to be considered authentic number
no more than a few tens of thousands. Restricting the foundations of
religion and society to these few books seems to non-Muslims a rejection
of independent reason.
We also note the overwhelming presence of mysticism in Islamic life
from about the year 1000 c.e. up through the nineteenth century. Mys-
ticism, too, is anti- or non-rational. Sufism, the usual term for Islamic
mysticism, produced sophisticated intellectuals like Rum and Ibn Arab
but also innumerable enthusiasts, charlatans, and wandering dervishes.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, both colonial administra-
tors and modernizing Islamic reformers saw Sufism as a prime example
of the superstition that needed to be extirpated before Islam could be
reformed. Salafs, by and large, still think so.
On the other hand, there is a case to be made for the compatibility
of Islam and reason. Most Muslims are perfectly able to conduct their
lives in a constructive way in the modern world. Even a country like Iran,
despite its revolutionary break with certain aspects of modernity in the
name of Islam, has continued to modernize in most senses. Apart from
Tehrans new metro system, the consolidation of the revolution has led,
for example, to an efflorescence of Islamic software in Iran. Also, if we
look back, we can see that certain rationalistic endeavors did flourish in
medieval Islam. There was a tradition of philosophy, originating with
the Greeks but continuing to our own day, particularly in Iran. Until
about 1500, Islamic science was the most advanced in the world, and it
seems beyond question that Islamic science, as transmitted to medieval
Europe, played a critical role in preparing the ground for the Scientific
12 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
2
George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Transfor-
mations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology; Cambridge: MIT Press,
2007), pp. 193232; F. Jamil Ragep, Copernicus and his Islamic Predecessors: Some
Historical Remarks, History of Science 14 (2007), pp. 6581.
THE PROBLEM OF REASON IN ISLAM 13
Muslims, and in turn, the intellectual life of later centuries was shaped
by the choices made by earlier generations.3
I do not wish to assert that there was some essential intellectual deter-
minism at work in Islamic intellectual life, but rather that the nature of
Muh.ammads experience opened some options and tended to foreclose
others. The characteristic legalism of Islam was present from the time
of the Prophet, so it is no accident that Muslim legal scholars in every
age enjoyed a prestige that was never shared by Christian canon lawyers.
The form that this legalism took was shaped by decisions made by the
earliest generations of Muslims about how to respond to the withdrawal
of the direct divine guidance that the Prophet had formerly provided.
Some intellectual approaches, like scholastic legalism and mysticism,
prospered; others, like Farabs attempt to make rationalistic political
philosophy the central organizing principle of Islam, failed. Still oth-
ers, like Greek logic and metaphysics, faltered but eventually found their
place. Greek philosophy was never accepted as the mistress of the sciences
but eventually found respectability as the handmaid of legal dialectic and
mystical speculation.
The ideas that shaped Islamic life had an inner logic that defined
the options open to Muslim intellectuals and thus channeled Islamic
intellectual life in particular directions. The issue was not a lack of
freedom for individual creativity or other alternatives, but rather that
those whose efforts cut across the grain of the formative ideas of Islamic
society, like Farab and the early philosophers, did not shape the cen-
tral core of Islamic thought. Those who could make their intellec-
tual creativity flow into channels that the founding ideas of Islam had
opened won enduring influence. Such thinkers included Ghazal, who
saw that the place for logic was in the legal curriculum, and Suhraward,
3
This point is elegantly made by Marshall Hodgson in The Venture of Islam: Conscience
and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 3439, where he incisively criticizes various essentializing
interpretations of Islamic history (p. 37): Accordingly, it is wise to posit as a basic
principle, and any deviation from which must bear the burden of proof, that every
generation makes its own decisions. . . . A generation is not bound by the attitudes of
its ancestors, as such, though it must reckon with their consequences and may indeed
find itself severely limited by those consequences in the range of choices among which
it can decide.
14 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
who saw that the natural role of philosophy was as the interpreter of
mysticism.
The interrelationships among the disciplines of thought were different
than in Latin Christendom but, as in medieval Europe, reason in due
course came to serve faith.
But what, we may ask, do we mean by reason?
2
1
Systematic investigations of the concepts of reason and rationality in a global sense are
rare, with philosophical investigations tending to focus on reasoning, epistemology,
or practical reason as it relates to ethics. Thus, for example, Kants Critique of Pure
Reason is an epistemological critique of rationalist metaphysics, with the rationalism
he is critiquing being a method of conducting metaphysics. An exception is Robert
Audi, The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), although he is building a theory of rationality, rather
than surveying its history, as I am. There is a series of related articles in The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1998), s.v. Rational Beliefs by
Christopher Cherniak; Rationalism by Peter J. Markie on the European rationalists;
Rationality and Cultural Relativism by Lawrence H. Simon; Rationality of Belief
by Jonathan E. Adler; and Rationality, Practical by Jean Hampton, but these do not
develop a coherent theory of rationality and reason as a whole.
15
16 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
The problem with reason and rationality is that reason is, to a great
extent, in the eye of the beholder, particularly with respect to starting
points. A well-grounded premise can be very different in different times
and places and even among individuals in the same time, place, and social
setting. Nevertheless, the overall notion seems sound: One can imagine
Aquinas, Descartes, Voltaire, and Bentham agreeing that our beliefs and
actions ought to be systematically based on well-grounded premises and
sound and valid arguments, but they would disagree completely on what
constitutes a reasonable starting point for such arguments and for lives
of reason in general. It is these differences that I intend to explore as a
way of clarifying the nature of the commitment or hostility to reason and
rationality in the intellectual life of Islamic civilization.
18 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
2
The reader will excuse me for counting the ancient Greeks as part of Western civiliza-
tion, because they are equally intellectual forebears of Islamic civilization as well as of
the semi-Western Orthodox cultures of Byzantium and Russia. In fact, the Greeks seem
more Middle Eastern to me than European. Nevertheless, whatever other intellectual
descendents they may have, they were unquestionably intellectual ancestors to the
modern West, and it is in that sense that I have appropriated them here to the history
of Western intellectual life. Their role in the intellectual ancestry of Islamic civilization
is discussed in chapters 4 through 7.
3
I leave aside China and India, which were too far away to affect the intellectual foun-
dations of either Western European or Islamic civilization, but they are worthy of a
separate investigation, which I am utterly unqualified to do.
THE DIVERSITY OF REASON 19
Strange and beautiful and sometimes truly spiritual as it may have been,
it was not reason. The Persians and Egyptians developed successful and
orderly administrative systems, but an orderly bureaucracy devoted to the
service of a monarchy is not a sufficient basis for saying that a civilization
follows an ideal of reason. Only the Greeks conceived the project of
explaining the universe and its contents from rational first principles and
then organizing their lives accordingly.
The Greeks associated this rationalistic project with the word logos,
a term of protean ambiguity derived from the verb legein, to speak.
It famously occupies several pages in the largest Greek-English dictio-
nary and bears meanings such as word, argument, speech, principle,
logic, inner nature, and theory, among others. The English word logic
is derived from it; the Arabic mant.iq, logic, is a literal translation. In
philosophical contexts, logos tends to be used in three senses: first, for
the inner nature of something; second, for the theory explaining it; and
third, for the verbal exposition of its theory. The Stoics developed the
concept of logos most elaborately, but the notion was at the foundation
of Greek philosophy from the beginning: There is a rational structure to
the universe and its operation, this inner rationality can be understood
by theory, and this theory can be expressed in speech.
The most remarkable aspect of this enterprise was that it operated
under very few constraints. From the beginning, Greek philosophers did
not feel constrained by conventional religious views, so their systems
ranged from sophisticated intellectual mysticism to unabashed materi-
alism. There were occasional prosecutions, such as when Anaxagoras
was run out of Athens for encouraging atheism by teaching that the
sun was a hot rock. Satirists also found them a delightful target, but
mostly they were respectfully left to elaborate their quite contradictory
theories, following reason where it led them. (Socrates was executed not
because of his philosophical views but because of the number of his
students who betrayed Athenian democracy.) They may have disagreed
about conclusions, but they agreed that they were engaged in an attempt
to understand the logos of the universe and express the logos of thought
through logoi of speech. Thus, from the very beginning, philosophy oper-
ated under the assumption that its overarching methodological principle
was the supremacy of reason, however reason might be understood. It
is difficult to know why this was the case. One factor was certainly the
20 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
degree to which the violent and adulterous gods of Olympus had lost
their hold on the individual conscience, leaving both a spiritual hunger
for something loftier and an absence of compelling religious orthodoxy.
It is likely that the political fragmentation of classical Greece also played
a role.
4
Two instructive works on the emergence of Christian thought in the context of Late
Antique philosophy are Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical
Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966), and Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of
Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993).
THE DIVERSITY OF REASON 21
of the scholastic to explain how this could be made compatible with the
Aristotelian theory of material substances.5
Enlightenment Reason
Under this heading I will include both the rationalism of seventeenth-
century European philosophy and eighteenth-century Enlightenment
thought properly speaking. The common feature of both is a rejection of
inherited authority and a confidence in the autonomous power of human
reason. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy is
largely a reaction against scholasticism. Reason came first, and although
many Enlightenment thinkers wished to preserve Christianity, this had
to be done through reason alone. Others, like Voltaire and Jefferson, were
quite content to reject Christianity in whole or in part. Moreover, there
was an optimism about the capacities of reason. Descartes believed that
by considering the nature of thought alone, he could rationally recon-
struct human knowledge on an unassailable basis. The Enlightenment
political philosophers believed that by careful and rational consideration
of human nature, they could provide the ideological bases for a new
and improved, just, humane, and stable society. Thus, Enlightenment
thought is characterized by a rejection of inherited authority, whether
religious or political, and by a boundless faith in the capacities of human
reason when freed from the inherited fetters of religious and political
authority.
Scientific Reason
I might have included the rise of scientific rationality with Enlightenment
reason, for they occurred at the same time and were often advocated by
5
On scholasticism in a comparative context, see Jose Ignacio Cabezon, ed., Scholasti-
cism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). The
chapter on Islamic scholasticism, Daniel A. Madigan, The Search for Islams True
Scholasticism, deals mainly with early theology, though it does discuss Islamic law as
a scholastic genre. It does not deal with later theology and legal education, where the
comparisons with European scholasticism are most marked. For a survey of scholas-
ticism and the problem of reason in Europe, see Edward Grant, God and Reason in
the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Grant is a leading
advocate of the view that modern science is grounded in the medieval traditions of
scholastic rationalism; see p. 97, n. 13 below.
22 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
the same people. In this respect, we might take into account such figures
as Benjamin Franklin, a great scientist and a hero of Enlightenment
political thought. Nevertheless, they are different enough to consider
separately.
There is still debate about the nature of science and what exactly it was
that changed during the Scientific Revolution, which took place between
the time of Copernicus, whose theory of heliocentrism was published
in 1543, and the publication of Newtons Principia Mathematica in 1687.
It is now clear that a number of elements contributed to the drastic
change in scientific thought during this period: a general shift from
Aristotelian science, the increased use and prestige of experiment and
empirical methods, and the use of mathematics in scientific theory.6 Per-
haps most fundamental was the shift of emphasis that made the natural
world the most basic problem of philosophy. Increasingly, whatever could
not be explained by the methods of empirical and mathematical natural
philosophy came to be seen as unknowable, unimportant, or nonsensi-
cal, especially once the practical successes of the new science had won
enormous prestige for physical science and its methods. Philosophically,
science has retained its influence, spawning regular attempts to reform
philosophy and sometimes other areas of life along scientific lines.7 Much
of twentieth-century intellectual life was dominated by attempts to apply
scientific methods to other areas of life. Although the attempt to reduce
philosophy to mathematical logic and science was ultimately a failure,
science remains the most prestigious claimant to the crown of reason.
and politics. Their basic assumption was that the goal of all ethical, social,
and political activity is the increase in the sum total of human happiness,
the greatest good for the greatest number, a philosophy they called
Utilitarianism. Benthams philosophy had a certain inhumanity, some
serious philosophical problems, and an insensitivity to cultural diversity.
The influence of Utilitarianism has ebbed and flowed in the two centuries
since, but it can be taken as representative of a post-Enlightenment West-
ern tendency, particularly in the social sciences, to define rationality as
the practical organization of society: economic and productive efficiency,
a well-organized bureaucracy, and the like. This view of rationality as the
practical now has an influence on the day-to-day world greater than any
other greater, on the whole, even than science.
Relativism
At about the time that Bentham was crafting his chilly humanitarianism,
the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant was preparing the ground for
the most philosophically influential modern view of reason: relativism.
Kant was dealing with the purely philosophical questions of why so lit-
tle real progress had been made in metaphysics and how to answer the
skeptical objections to the validity of all rational knowledge made by the
British empiricists John Locke and David Hume. His Copernican Rev-
olution, as he called it, reversed the priority of knowledge and truth. He
asserted that such principles as the law of causality and the permanence
of substance were universally valid not because they were truths that we
discover in the world but because they were the concepts that our mind
uses to organize experience. They were thus subjectively but not objec-
tively valid. Kants system foundered on technical philosophical shoals,
but other philosophers took up his insight that the world we experience
is shaped by the contents of our own minds. Philosophers, especially
in Germany, turned from seeking eternal rational truth to studying the
nature of human subjectivity. Hegel, who was a young man when Kant
died, worked out an intricate system in which history was the unfolding
of various aspects of the human spirit. In the work of Marx, human
subjectivity was the product of the individuals class in the economic
structure. Hegelian ideas of the relativity of truth then shaped the social
sciences that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well
24 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
The West also produced two great antirationalist movements, both still
major influences on Western thought and culture, one a reaction to
medieval scholasticism and the other a reaction to the Enlightenment
and scientific reason.
Protestant Textualism
The medieval Catholic Church relied on three sources of knowledge:
scripture, tradition, and reason. Of these, scripture was perhaps the
least important in practice. The church knew that the bread and
wine of the Eucharist became the body and blood of Christ, not
because scripture clearly said so or because reason could prove it, but
because the church believed it and had born witness to it in the liturgy for
more than a thousand years. The enormous structure of church doctrine,
ritual, practice, government, and law rested on very tenuous scriptural
foundations. When the church hierarchy fell into disrepute because of
its blatant corruption, reformers challenged the bases of its authority. In
the sixteenth century, this blossomed into a schism that would later be
known as the Protestant Reformation. The Protestants disagreed among
themselves about many things, but in general they privileged scripture
over all other sources of knowledge, whether religious or secular. They
tended to reject the tradition of the church when it could not be jus-
tified by the clear text of the Bible, invoking the principle Scripture
alone. The result was various forms of scriptural literalism that are
influential to the present day. Originally, the focus of Protestantism was
anti-Catholicism, but Protestant ideas about scripture could justify the
rejection of other religions, other sects of Protestantism, certain aspects
THE DIVERSITY OF REASON 25
Romanticism
Romanticism, the second great Western antirationalistic movement and
a reaction to the sunny reasonableness of the Enlightenment, is a move-
ment with artistic roots. The Romantics saw modern society as having
lost touch with the emotional and irrational, or subrational, aspects of
life. Romanticism was characterized by an interest in untamed nature as
opposed to the rational study of nature characteristic of such Enlight-
enment figures as Dr. Franklin. Its founders exalted the primitive, the
emotional, the ecstatic, the Dionysian. They were fascinated by heroes
and outlaws. They produced good art and murky philosophy. As a clear
movement, Romanticism rose and fell quickly, but its legitimization of
the irrational survived, regularly reappearing in art, having a major influ-
ence in psychology, and spawning such phenomena as the counterculture
of the 1960s and modern environmentalism.
8
See, for example, John Wesleys appeals to men of reason and religion or the folksy
commonsense arguments of C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity.
26 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
9
I discuss this conflict in more detail in Chapter 9.
THE DIVERSITY OF REASON 27
11
See Chapters 5 to 8.
THE DIVERSITY OF REASON 29
The medical historian Ibn al-Qift., writing in the first half of the thir-
teenth century, reports that a certain John the Grammarian was the
Jacobite bishop in Alexandria when the Muslim general Amr b. al-As .
conquered Egypt in the mid-seventh century. John had rejected the usual
Christian beliefs about the Trinity which we may suppose means the
Greek Orthodox views in favor of a doctrine that Amr found more
acceptable. When the Arabs seized the city,
John appealed to Amr, Today you have seized everything in Alexandria and
taken possession of all the booty in it. I do not dispute your right to what of
it is useful to you, but we have a better right to that which is of no use to you,
so order it to be returned. Amr said to him, What is it that you need?
John replied, The books of philosophy in the royal libraries. You have put
a guard over them. We need them and they are of no use to you.
Amr was astonished at Johns demand and replied, I can give no orders
without asking the permission of the Commander of the Faithful, Umar b.
al-Khat.t.a b. He wrote to Umar and informed him of what John had said,
as mentioned above, and asked him what he should do about the matter. A
letter came back from Umar saying, As for the books that you mention, if
what is in them is in agreement with the Book of God, then what is in the
30
EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND OF GOD 31
Book of God makes them unnecessary, but if what is in them contradicts the
Book of God, then there is no need for them and you should undertake to
destroy them. Amr began distributing them among the baths of Alexandria
to burn in their furnaces. I was told that the number of baths in those days,
but I have forgotten. They are said to have burned for six months. Hearken
to what has been said and be astonished!1
This story is not true, as has been known since the time of Gibbon. The
Alexandrian Library was already in decline at the time of the Roman
conquest in the first century b.c.e., when Caesars army accidentally
burned part of it, and the suppression of paganism in the fourth century
seems to have led to the loss of whatever may have been left. Libraries are
fragile things, vulnerable to fire, political instability, dishonesty, insects,
and leaky roofs. What interests me about this story is that it was told
by a Muslim about the Caliph Umar. Something about it must have
resonated with Muslim memories of the character of Umar and early
Islamic attitudes toward revelation.
The order attributed to Umar does not represent Islamic doctrine,
whether now, or in the Middle Ages, or in the age of the Prophet. Muslims
have never thought that all knowledge was in the Quran, except perhaps
in some symbolic sense. The Quran itself said, Obey God and His
Messenger, meaning the Quran and the Prophet, and a widely quoted
hadith urged Muslims to Seek knowledge, if even in China. The Prophet
sought advice on worldly matters from more experienced followers. Mus-
lim legal scholars have disagreed on the number of sources of sacred law
(the usual number being four), but they have never thought that the
Quran was sufficient in itself. In practice, they have depended more
on the legal tradition itself, supplemented by the hadith, the recorded
sayings and actions of the Prophet. Ibn al-Qift. would have known all
of this, as would the Syrian Christian historian Barhebraeus, who was
mostly responsible for this story becoming known in Europe. What, then,
makes this a good story, one worth repeating by a scholar who certainly
1
Al b. Yusuf al-Qift., Tarkh al-H
. ukama, ed. Julius Lippert (Leipzig: Dieterichsche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1903; reprint, Publications of the Institute for the History of
Arabic-Islamic Science; Islamic Philosophy, vol. 2; Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the
History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 1999), pp. 3546. The story is still repeated, but no
informed historian now believes it.
32 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
would not have been in sympathy with the willful destruction of ancient
books of secular knowledge?
The answer is, of course, that Muslims did tend to think of revelation
as encompassing all truth, or at least all of the highest kind of truth.
This story portrays it more starkly than Muslim scholars usually would,
but there was an absoluteness to Umars Islam Umar being a man of
notoriously stern and ascetic piety that makes the story plausible. The
premise that underlies it is that absolute knowledge, knowledge of the
highest order, can only be obtained through revelation. In particular,
the knowledge that a Muslim must have to achieve salvation can be had
only empirically, through a precise knowledge of the life and career of
a single man, the Prophet Muh.ammad, and the book that was revealed
through him. Muslims undertook to acquire this salvific knowledge by
gathering and evaluating of every scrap of knowledge, or purported
knowledge, about the life and career of the Prophet and those who
knew him. This enterprise is chiefly embodied in two Islamic intellectual
disciplines: the science of hadith, which is the study of the reports of the
sayings and doings of the Prophet and those around him, and the science
of fiqh, the body of law inferred from the Quran and the Prophets
instructions and example. This project is essentially empirical or, to
be more exact, historical. Its methods are the collection of individual
anecdotes; the weighing, classifying, and collating of this historical data;
and then very cautiously the inference of their underlying spiritual
and legal meanings so as to be able to deduce the law applying in new
cases.
The intellectual presuppositions of these two enterprises have deter-
mined the relation between reason and Islamic thought to the present.
This tradition happens to come from the S.ah.h. of Bukhar, the most
prestigious of the six authoritative Sunni hadith collections, and reports
the famous five pillars of Islam, but hadith can deal with almost any
conceivable religious subject. Another hadith, selected quite at random,
concerns a problem arising from the animal sacrifice made during the
H. ajj pilgrimage:
On the authority of Al [the Prophets cousin and son-in-law and the fourth
Caliph], The Messenger of God, may God bless him and give him peace,
ordered me to take care of his fattened [sacrificial] camels and to give their
meat, hides, and trappings as alms, but not to give anything to the butcher,
saying that we would pay him ourselves.4
networks of scholars. It is also obvious that after a century or two, not all
of the stories in circulation would be reliable. People surely mixed things
up or gave their ancestors a more glorious role in the rise of Islam than
perhaps they deserved. They might attribute to the Prophet what actually
was said by some other early Muslim teacher. Scholars attributed to the
Prophet what he ought to have said but did not get around to mentioning.
Preachers invented entertaining and edifying stories. Sectarians put their
doctrines into the Prophets mouth to give them authority. By the time
the collection of hadith got underway in earnest in the second Islamic
century, it was obvious that a large majority of stories in circulation about
the Prophet were either spurious or of uncertain reliability.
The tool that the hadith scholars devised to sort out the precious
wheat from the abundant chaff was the isnad. If they could show that
Ibn Umar, Ikrima, H . anz.ala, and Ubayd Allah were all men of sound
faith, good memory, and reliable scholarship and that each had studied
with his predecessor, or at least could have, then we would know with
reasonable confidence that the report attested by this chain of authorities
could be relied on. If, however, Ikrima had been born after the death
of Ibn Umar or H . anz.ala was a heretic or Ubayd Allah a notorious
forger of hadith or a man of unreliable memory, then we could reject
the hadith as lacking authority. This led to the compilation of a fresh
mass of historical data, as it had become necessary to know the dates,
teachers and students, travels, and reliability of everyone who appeared
in the isnad of a hadith along with the hadith and isnads that their
names appeared in. The result was that the compilations of hadith were
supplemented by enormous reference books: biographical dictionaries
of the Companions of the Prophet and early scholars, commentaries on
the hadith collections, and analyses of special problems, such as defective
isnads. The synthesis of this enormously complex mass of detail was still
going on seven or eight hundred years after the death of the Prophet.
However, from the point of view of most Muslim scholars, the issue
was put to rest in the ninth century with the acceptance of six hadith
collections as authoritative, including two that were compiled according
to particularly exacting standards. A similar process resulted in several
comparable authoritative collections of Shiite hadith. And that was that,
for a famous hadith assured Muslim scholars that they would never reach
consensus on an error.
36 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
The matn, the actual text transmitted in the hadith, could also be sub-
jected to historical evaluation, but for the most part the hadith scholars
concentrated on the chain of authorities. Ibn al-S.alah.s standard work
on the principles of hadith criticism concentrates almost entirely on the
isnad, apart from some incidental issues like rare words in the text. The
historian Ibn Khalduns account of the sciences connected with hadith
also ignores the evaluation of the plausibility of the text. Medieval schol-
ars did occasionally question the content of hadith judging, for example,
that hadith in praise of particular places were likely to be forgeries but
they did not reject hadith for legal or theological anachronisms, which
Western scholars of hadith and Islamic legal history consider to be certain
evidences of forgery. The great jurist Shafi rejected rational critique of
the content of the hadith text on principle: No one is authorized to apply
reasoning (li-ma) or questioning (kayf ) or anything tainted by personal
opinion (ray) to a tradition from the Prophet.5
Modern Western scholars generally have seen the issue differently.6 It
is clear that the thousands of hadith with their libraries of supporting
detail can shed great light on the religious thought of the period in
which they originated. But what period, Western scholars have asked,
was that? It certainly was not usually the time of the Prophet, since
even the medieval Muslim scholars agreed that most hadith could not
be authentic and that they originated during the legal and doctrinal
controversies of the first two Islamic centuries. Thus, Bukhar, the author
of the most respected of the hadith collections, is said to have collected
5
Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1950), 12021, citing his book, Ikhtilaf al-H
. adth, contradictory hadith.
6
For a review of the Western academic debates between skeptics and defenders of the
hadith literature, see the introduction to Harold Motzki, ed., H . adth: Origins and
Developments, The Formation of the Classical Islamic World (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate
Variorum, 2004); the volume is a collection of classic articles on the hadith, most
dealing with issues of authenticity. Motzki himself believes that some hadith can be
identified dating from the seventh century; see his The Question of the Authenticity
of Muslim Traditions Reconsidered: A Review Article, in Herbert Berg, ed., Method
and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins (Islamic History and Civilization, Studies
and Texts 49; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003), pp. 21157. Herbert Berg, The Development of
Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the Formative Period,
ed. Andrew Rippin, Curzon Studies in the Quran (Richmond, Surrey, U.K.: Curzon,
2000), gives another summary of the state of Western scholarship on the issue, coming
down on the side of the skeptics after reviewing the exegetical hadith attributed to Ibn
Abbas, a younger companion of the Prophet who became a famous scholar in later
decades, and finding that these hadith do not share common patterns of content.
EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND OF GOD 37
have been answered thus far. Whereas some recent Western scholars have
been willing to date the origins of the hadith literature to as early as the
late seventh century, many others remain skeptical, placing the origin of
the hadith in the eighth or even the ninth century.
However, my major concern is not the historical origin or historicity
of the hadith literature as we know it, but the underlying epistemological
premises on which the methods of hadith scholarship are based and how
these relate to other manifestations of intellectual life in classical Islamic
civilization.
1) Only through revelation can the will of God for mankind be known
fully or perhaps, be known at all.
2) Revelation is a historically contingent event.
8
Ibn Khaldun, 1.924; trans. Rosenthal, 1.1525.
40 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
From these assumptions, we can conclude that the historian for this
is what the hadith scholar essentially is should transmit unchanged
the word-for-word accounts of eyewitnesses. Any revision, synthesis, or
analysis will only reduce the reliability of the account. Whereas a modern
historian would consider analysis and synthesis a way of producing an
account more reliable than any of a collection of partial or biased sources,
the hadith scholar would see such an enterprise as simply the production
of yet another account, one that, unlike the eyewitness accounts, has no
claim to embody direct knowledge of the event.
What this means can be seen in its application by historians. Consider
a passage from T.abars History of Nations and Kings, the most important
and comprehensive early history of Islam, written in the tenth century
and employing the methods of the hadith scholars. It reports an incident
that supposedly took place a few years after the death of the Prophet
involving the Caliph Umar, the same who was later said to have ordered
the burning of the books of the library of Alexandria to heat the citys
bath water:
As for his private needs, his livelihood, and the livelihood of his family,
neither more nor less; their garments and his garments for the winter and
9
For the Shiah, Gods will can also be known through the Imams, the infallible appointed
successors of the Prophet, and thus hadith can also originate with them, but the result
is much the same.
EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND OF GOD 41
the summer; two riding beasts for his jihad, for attending to his needs,
and for carrying him to his pilgrimage. . . .
These two versions of what is obviously the same story are followed by
three others: a short version in which someone else asks the question
and Umar replies, mentioning moderately good conditions, the two
garments, and the two riding beasts; a much longer version, in which
some other Companions of the Prophet ask Umars daughter to ask the
question of her father, eliciting a long reply about the austerity of the
time of the Prophet; and a fifth, quite different version talking at some
length about the rightful shares of the various groups entitled to part of
the spoil. There is no attempt to reconcile the various versions; they are
just listed in succession. A modern historian would probably dismiss the
longer accounts as expansions by later writers critical of the luxury of
Umayyad and early Abbasid times and would see the kernel of the story
as a policy instituted in Umars time about what claim the caliph had
on the public purse for his personal needs, perhaps wondering if these
accounts incorporated an actual document from that time. T.abar simply
presumes that whatever historical knowledge we may have of this event
is in these five accounts and that to tamper with them or choose from
among them is to risk the loss of irreplaceable historical data. And the
hadith scholars would be in full agreement with him quite naturally,
10
Muh.ammad b. Jarr T.abar, Tarkh al-Rusul wal-Muluk, ed. M. J. de Goeje et al.
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 18791901); The Battle of Al-Qadisiyyah and the Conquest of Syria
and Palestine, trans. Yohanan Friedmann, SUNY Series in near Eastern Studies (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 241518, with slight modifications of the translation. The ten
dense volumes of the original Arabic are translated in forty volumes in this series. The
history begins with the creation of the world and continues to the authors own time.
42 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
Classification as Codification
The hadith literature, consisting as it does of thousands upon thousands
of discrete atomic units, must be put into order before it can be used.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways of arranging hadith: by the isnads,
that is, by the sources from which they are supposed to derive, and by
the contents of the matns. Hadith collections arranged according to the
first method are called musnads; those arranged according to the second
method are said to be mus.annaf or mudawwan, that is, arranged by
subject. Obviously, the first method suits the needs of hadith scholars,
who are interested in establishing the authenticity of particular hadith
by reference to its transmitters; the second is more useful to readers
wishing to use the hadith to establish the Prophets views or practices
on a particular subject. The six authoritative collections of hadith are all
topically arranged, although the Musnad of Ah.mad ibn H . anbal enjoys
11
11
Ibn H. anbal (780855) was a hadith scholar, the eponymous founder of the H.anbal legal
school, and one of the great figures of textual literalism in Islam. A vigorous advocate
of the authority of the hadith against legal rationalism, he also opposed the Mutazila
in theology, in particular their doctrine of the createdness of the Quran. Christopher
Melchert, Ah.mad ibn H . anbal (Makers of the Muslim World; Oxford: OneWorld, 2006.
Laoust, H., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), s.v. Ah.mad b.
H. anbal.
44 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
Those who have handled the sciences have been either Empiricists or Ratio-
nalists. Empiricists, like ants, merely collect things and use them. The Ratio-
nalists, like spiders, spin webs out of themselves. The middle way is that of
the bee, which gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field,
but then transforms and digests it by a power of its own.12
With regard to the first premise, although it is not likely that any
hadith scholar would hold that the hadith are absolutely self-sufficient
as a source of religious knowledge, the whole point was that if there
was a text available with a claim to carry the authority of the Prophet, it
should take precedence over other kinds of evidence. This notion is firmly
implanted in Islamic intellectual culture, even though most of the legal
schools were unwilling to accept this principle in so uncompromising a
form.
With regard to the second premise, classification is never neutral, a
point that was clear even to later Islamic scholars. The fifteenth-century
scholar Suyut. writes in the introduction to his commentary on Bukhars
S.ah.h.:
12
Novum Organum 1, aph. 95.
46 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
what is indicated by it, so that one can cite it as proof, even though it does
not rise to being its condition.13
Moreover, Bukhar gives headings for his chapters: verses of the Quran
and fragments of hadith, some of which are not included in the S.ah.h.
because they are defective in some way or another. In some cases, there is
a chapter heading with no hadith underneath it, meaning that Bukhar
had found no sound hadith to support his point. These headings are
more than neutral titles, as Suyut. indicates, because they are sometimes
broader, narrower, or different than the meanings of the hadith that
follow. Thus, they indicate Bukhars own view of how the hadith should
be interpreted. This has led to the remark that the headings contain his
fiqh his legal theory.14
The process by which hadith collections edged toward becoming fiqh
culminates with the Sunan works, hadith collections devoted to legal
hadith that not only are arranged by topic but whose very criteria of
inclusion are loosened, legal hadith not uncommonly falling into the
lesser category of h.asan.
13
Jalal al-Dn Abd al-Rah.man al-Suyut., al-Tawshh. Sharh. al-Jami al-S.ah.h., ed. Rid.wan
Jami Rid.wan (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd, 1419/1998), 1.47.
14
S.iddq, H
. adth Literature, pp. 5657.
EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND OF GOD 47
The legal schools arose out of the legal traditions of the various impor-
tant Muslim centers, notably Medina. The Malik school of Malik b. Anas
(whose Muwat..ta15 contains so many hadith that it enjoys a status not
far below those of the six authoritative hadith collections) was associ-
ated with the customary practice of Medina and traced its origins to the
judicial rulings of the Caliph Umar. The hadith, at least as a discipline,
arose later than the legal tradition and to some extent as a reaction to
it.16 Early legal texts, which can be dated with considerably more confi-
dence than the hadith, are important sources for dating the rise of hadith,
both as a discipline and as a genre, because these texts contain hadith
in an obviously immature form, with improper, incomplete, or missing
isnads.
From the point of view of the early legal schools, the hadith scholars
were demanding that hadith reports resting on the authority of one
or two people supplant the authority of well-established community
and scholarly traditions dating back to the time of the Prophet. There
are a number of anecdotes in which Malik criticizes legal scholars who
presumed to prefer the authority of hadith to community tradition
for example, when he excoriated Abu Yusuf, a pupil of Abu H . anfa, for
presuming to demand hadith in support of the form of the call to prayer
used in Medina: The call to the prayer has been done [here] every day
15
Aisha Bewley, trans., Al-Muwatta of Imam Malik ibn Anas (London: Kegan Paul, 1989).
16
The classical work on the intellectual transition to dependence on hadith is Schacht,
The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Schacht accepted Ignaz Goldzihers denial
of the overall authenticity of the hadith and constructed an account of the rise of Islamic
jurisprudence in which Shafi (d. 820) played a key role in the transition from the eighth
century jurisprudence based on local custom and Umayyad administrative practice to
the classical legal schools, with their reliance on hadith and scholastic methods. Some
more recent scholars have argued that it is possible to push our knowledge of Islamic
jurisprudence back into the seventh century and recover the teachings of some of the
younger Companions of the Prophet, but this remains controversial, and Schachts
view of Islamic legal history is still prevalent among Western scholars. Schachts view
is also incorporated in the many articles on law that he wrote for the second edition
of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, notably s.v. Fiqh. A recent survey of the literature is
Christopher Melchert, The Early History of Islamic Law, in Method and Theory in the
Study of Islamic Origins, ed. Herbert Berg, (Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and
Texts; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003). Norman Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) is a close study of sample texts from early Islamic
legal compendia. Calder, one of the most skeptical of the skeptics, argues that all of
these texts evolved over a period of time, usually well after the death of the putative
author. Not everyone finds this plausible, but the closely analyzed sample passages are
an excellent introduction to the style and method of early Islamic legal texts.
48 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
five times a day in front of witnesses, and sons have inherited it from
their fathers since the time of the Messenger of God, may God bless him
and grant him peace. Does this need So-and-so from so-and-so? When
Abu Yusuf presumed to question the amount of a .sa , a particular dry
measure, Malik sent the people in the room out to bring back examples
of the measure to show to the impertinent visitor.17
Second, inference as a source of Islamic law was well-established by
the time the hadith scholars became a serious influence, enough so
that the supporters of hadith scornfully dubbed their opponents ahl
al-ray, people of opinion. It is unquestionably the case that the so-
called Ancient Schools of law, those predating the work of Shafi at
the beginning of the ninth century, were more inclined to use personal
opinion as a basis of law, although, as we have seen, they also relied on
sunna of a more diffuse nature than the supporters of hadith were willing
to concede. This set the stage for a controversy that may be taken as an
archetype for later Islamic controversies between supporters of a religious
system incorporating both rationalism and custom and reformers who
sought return to the text.
The problem facing any Islamic legal scholar is the new case. For
Sunnis, there could be no new information about Gods will for mankind
after the death of the Prophet in 632. What remained were the text of
the Quran, the Companions memories of the Prophets words and
actions, and the ongoing custom of the community established by the
Prophet. Some sources report that as early as the time of the first Caliphs,
newly appointed governors and judges were given advice about how to
handle the legal cases that came before them, and there is no reason to
doubt that certain of the Companions developed a reputation for legal
knowledge and practical wisdom.18 However, it was the lawyers of the
Ancient Schools who first faced the problem head-on. The oldest sources
show us what we would expect to find: cases decided by a combination of
17
Yasin Dutton, The Origins of Islamic Law (Culture and Civilization in the Middle
East (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999), pp. 4243. The translation of the quotation is
slightly modified. Abu H. anfa (d. 767) was the eponymous founder of the H . anaf legal
school. Abu Yusuf al-Kuf (d. 807) was his pupil and somewhat more reliant on hadith
than his teacher.
18
Baghaw, Mishkat al-Mas.a bh. 2.26.7, ed. Fazlul Karim, vol. 2, pp. 60814, gives a repre-
sentative selection of hadith on the administration of justice.
EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND OF GOD 49
citations from the Quran and references to the customary practice of the
community and the opinions of the Prophet, respected Companions, and
later individuals with reputations for knowledge, all analyzed and decided
according to informal reasoning, analogy, and practical common sense.
By the time of the earliest surviving specialized legal texts, some degree of
methodological self-consciousness had entered Islamic legal discussions,
with Medina, Mecca, Iraq, and Syria being the most important centers
and having slightly varying views.19
This balance was disturbed in the eighth century by the emergence
of an assertive community of hadith scholars demanding that sunna be
determined by reference to hadith, not by reference to local legal tradition
and customary practice. From a legal point of view, there were problems
with the hadith scholars demand. In the nature of things, hadith repre-
sented the testimony of only one or a few individuals. Even if the hadith
were accepted as authentic, was it reasonable to overturn the tradition
of Medina, a legal tradition established by the Prophet himself, on the
basis of isolated reports of what he might have said or done in the pres-
ence of, at most, a handful of people? Nevertheless, the argument of the
hadith scholars carried great weight in an Islamic context, as indeed it still
does. If a hadith represents what the Prophet said, ought we not to obey
it? The argument for textual literalism is simple perhaps simplistic
but it has never been an easy one for Islamic scholars committed to more
complex intellectual systems to answer. Thus, from the time of Shafi, the
legal scholar most responsible for making hadith the chief and almost the
only determinant of sunna, Muslims have tended to understand sunna
and hadith as being more or less synonymous, and hadith have assumed
19
This is the view of Schacht, which recently has been challenged by Wael Hallaq, From
Regional to Personal Schools of Law? A Reevaluation, Islamic Law and Society 8/1
(2001), pp. 126, and idem, The Origins and Development of Islamic Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 15079. Hallaq argues that, although there cer-
tainly were clumps of legal scholars in the early Muslim cities, these regional groups
were not distinguished by characteristic doctrines. The point is not of particular impor-
tance to us, because there certainly was a shift in doctrine between earlier (seventh to
eighth century) and later (eighth to ninth century) legal scholars, and the term Ancient
Schools is convenient for referring to the earlier period. For general introductions to
Islamic law and its historiography, see Wael B. Hallaq, Shara: Theory, Practice, Trans-
formations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); idem, The Origins and
Development of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
50 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
the nature of God and how His unity and transcendence were to be harmo-
nized with His attributes and anthropomorphic Quranic verses;
free will, providence, and predestination;
whether a Muslim who has committed a grave sin remains a Muslim;
the nature of the Quran.
Husayn Mahmud (Cairo: al-Ans.a r, 1397/1977), pp. 2.22, 141240; trans. Walter C. Klein
(American Oriental Series 19; New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1940), pp. 50, 88
130. On this earlier period in Islamic theology, see W. Montgomery Watt, trans., Islamic
Creeds: A Selection (Islamic Surveys; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994);
A. J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and Historical Development (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1932); and Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the
Kalam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). General histories of Islamic theol-
ogy are usually mainly devoted to the earlier period and include Winter, ed., Cambridge
Companion to Classical Islamic Theology; Tilman Nagel, The History of Islamic Theology,
trans. Thomas Thornton (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000); and Josef van
Ess, The Flowering of Muslim Theology, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006). Early primary sources available in English include Abul-H.asan
al-Ashar, The Theology of al-Ashar: The Arabic Texts of al-Ashars Kitab al-Luma
and Risalat Istih.san al-Khawd. f Ilm al-Kalam, ed. and trans. Richard Joseph McCarthy
(Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1953), and idem, al-Ibana, trans. Klein.
Abu H . a mid al-Ghazal, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael E. Marmura
21
(Islamic Translation Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1997; al-
Ghazalis Tahafut al-Falasifah: Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Sabih Ahmad
Kamali (Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963. Ghazali explains his atti-
tudes towards philosophy, theology, and mysticism in his famous autobiography,
al-Munqidh min al-D . alal, ed. Abd al-H. alm Mah.mud (5th ed. [Cairo]: al-Kitab al-
H. adtha, 1385/1965); trans. W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazal
(Ethical and Religious Classics of East and West; London: George Allen and Unwin,
1953) and in Richard Joseph McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment (Library of Classical
Arabic Literature; Boston: Twayne, 1980). The last translation is reprinted with only the
Munqidh and associated notes but different pagination as Al-Ghazals Path to Sufism
(Louisville, Ky.: Fons Vitae, 2000).
22
See pp. 1179 below.
EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND OF GOD 53
Still, there were always critics to protest the intrusion of rational meth-
ods into disciplines supposedly founded on the Word of God and His
Prophet. Ibn Qudama (11461223), a Syrian H . anbal, condemned the
whole enterprise of Kalam theology.23 The Sufi theologian Ibn Arab
(11651240), however strange many of his interpretations of the Quran
and hadith may seem, was insistent that every aspect of the text be
understood literally and taken seriously, and his works may be seen as a
literalist counterreaction to both philosophy and the Asharite theology
of his time.24 The fourteenth-century reformer Ibn Taymya (12631328)
vehemently criticized the rationalist legal theory and theology of his time,
although he found few supporters until much later.25 In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the Akhbar school in Shiite law argued that
even dubious reports from the Prophet and the Imams should be pre-
ferred to the personal reasoning of the scholars of the rationalist Us.u l
school.26 Finally, much modern Islamic thought may be understood as a
reassertion of the literal understanding of the Quran and hadith against
the scholastic traditions of the madrasas.
To this we might add the discipline of Arabic grammar, which is linked
with both law and Mutazlite theology. Arabic grammarians employed
a thoroughly rationalistic methodology that was subject to occasional,
usually unsuccessful antirationalist criticism. The twelfth-century gram-
matical empiricist Ibn Mad.a , for example, rejected the use of hypotheti-
cal grammatical entities in favor of description of linguistic practice and
criticized excessive reliance on analogy. We should not be surprised then
23
Ibn Qudama, Censure of Speculative Theology: An Edition and Translation of Ibn
Qudamas Tah.rm an-Naz.ar f Kutub Ahl al-Kalam, ed. and trans. George Makdisi
(E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, n.s., 23; Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust,
1962).
24
Michel Chokiewicz, An Ocean without a Shore: Ibn Arabi, the Book, and the Law, trans.
David Steight (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). On Ibn Arab, see pp. 935 below.
25
H. Laoust, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v., Ibn Taymiyya, Tak. al-Dn
Ah.mad. Ibn Taymya, Kitab Al-Iman: Book of Faith, trans. Salman Al-Ani and Shadia
Ahmad Tel (Bloomington, Ind.: Iman, 1999) is a translation of one of his books dealing
with epistemological issues.
26
Momen, Moojan, An Introduction to Shii Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver
Shiism (Oxford: G. Ronald, 1985), pp. 11718. Andrew J. Newman, The Nature of the
Akhbar/Us.u l Dispute in Late Safawid Iran, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies, 55/1 (1992), pp. 2251.
54 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
there was, in short, a characteristic pattern in which indi-
vidual Islamic disciplines came to be dominated by various forms of
scholastic rationalism and then were challenged by critics advocating a
literalist return to the sources. However, the literalism either was co-
opted by a renewed rationalism, as in the case of the incorporation
of hadith into fiqh or the philosophical interpretations of Ibn Arabs
literalist Sufi metaphysics, or was no more than a source of problems to
answer, as in Ibn Mad.a s critique of rationalism in Arabic grammar. In
virtually every one of the Islamic religious sciences, the mature form of the
discipline was characterized by a thoroughgoing scholastic rationalism.
This Islamic scholasticism, its relation to logic, its expression in the
Islamic educational system, and its decline in recent times will be the
subjects of later chapters. Similar reassertions of the literal interpretation
of the sacred texts have taken place throughout Islamic history.
27
Ah.mad b. Abd al-Rah.man Ibn Mad.a , Kitab al-Radd ala l-Nuh.a t ([Cairo], Dar al-
Fikr al-Arab 1366/1947); trans. with commentary by Ronald G. Wolfe, Ibn Mad.a al-
Qurt.ub and the Book in Refutation of the Grammarians, (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana
University, 1984); Kojiro Nakamura, Ibn Mad.a s Criticism of Arabic Grammarians.
Orient (Tokyo) 10 (1974), 89113. The intricacies of the full scholastic formulation of
Arabic grammar may be seen in Mortimer Sloper Howell, A Grammar of the Clas-
sical Arabic Language, Translated and Compiled from the Works of the Most Approved
Native or Naturalized Authors, 4 vols. (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh
government press, 18831911; reprinted New Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1990). An
accessible introduction to the work of the greatest figure in the history of Arabic gram-
mar is M. B. Carter, Sibawayh (Makers of Islamic Civilization; New York: I. B. Tauris,
2004).
4
There is a famous story that one night the philosopher Aristotle appeared
to the Caliph Mamun in a dream telling him to seek what was good
according to reason. This dream, we are told, was one of the reasons
that the caliph initiated a project to translate Greek scientific literature
into Arabic. The caliph then wrote to the Byzantine emperor asking
for manuscripts to translate. Although at first reluctant, the emperor
eventually complied, and a delegation was dispatched from Baghdad to
acquire the manuscripts. Perhaps the books were not easily found, for
we are told that the Byzantine Christians had suppressed the study of the
ancient philosophy in its full form and that one of the ambassadors had
to press the emperor for permission to break into a temple library that
had been locked since the conversion of Constantine. After that, as the
Fihrist states, [B]ooks on philosophy and other ancient sciences became
plentiful in this country.1
1
Ibn al-Nadm, al-Fihrist, ed. Yusuf Al T.awl (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmya, 1416/
1996), pp. 3978; The Fihrist of al-Nadm: a Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture,
trans. Bayard Dodge (Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies 83; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 5836. The Fihrist is a catalog made
by a Baghdad bookseller of all the books that he knew of in Arabic. The seventh
book of this work is the most extensive source on the translation movement, with
long lists of authors and books translated. Most of these translations are now lost,
which is particularly unfortunate because in many cases we no longer have the Greek
originals either. Part 1, chapter 1, deals with translations, and part 7 deals with logic,
philosophy, and science. For a survey of the translation movement and its political,
intellectual, and social context, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture:
the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd
4th/8th10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998). A more recent summary is Cristina
dAncona, Greek into Arabic, in Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, eds., The
Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
55
56 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
There are very good reasons to doubt aspects of this story, but it is
certainly true that in the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslim officials and
scholars made a concerted effort to commission Arabic translations of the
major works of foreign science and philosophy, especially Greek science
and philosophy. There were also translations from Middle Persian, mainly
works on astronomy, astrology, and practical and political wisdom, some
of them originally written in Sanskrit. We can hardly doubt that the rulers
and officials paying for this enterprise were most interested in science
and medicine, disciplines with immediate practical import, but Greek
science required Greek philosophy to be understood properly, so a great
many philosophical texts, including virtually all the works of Aristotle
and a very large selection of commentaries, were translated. Like Muslim
rulers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they discovered that the
importing of foreign technological knowledge brought with it foreign
modes of thought.
There is much that we do not know about this process and why
particular books were translated and others were not. The scholars from
Baghdad did not simply take the works in popular among the Byzantine
Greeks at that time; philosophy and science were at a very low point in
Byzantium during that century. Instead, they often went back to classics
that had passed out of common circulation translating, for example,
Ptolemys Almagest instead of simpler works that were widely read in the
ninth century. In fact, there is reason to think that Islamic demand for
these works was a major factor in bringing them back into circulation
in Byzantium and thus assuring the survival of the Greek originals.2
From philosophy, they mostly took Aristotle and his sober commentators
in place of more religious and colorful Neoplatonic works of a later
2005), pp. 1031. Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. Emile and
Jenny Marmorstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), is a collection of
annotated translations of Arabic translations and discussions of Greek texts.
2
Saliba, Islamic Science, pp. 173, gives a detailed critique of the medieval accounts and
modern interpretations of the translation movement and argues that the beginnings of
the movement must be situated in the later Umayyad bureaucracy and that the choice
of books, the technical knowledge required to do the translations, and the quality of
the Islamic scientific literature of the early period implies that Islamic scientists took a
much more active and creative role much earlier than generally has been understood.
Dimitri Gutas, Geometry and the Rebirth of Philosophy in Arabic with al-Kind,
in Words, Texts, and Concepts Cruising the Mediterranean Sea: Studies on the Sources,
Contents, and Influences of Islamic Civilization and Arabic Philosophy and Science, ed.
R. Arnzen and J. Thielmann (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 139. Leuven: Uitgeverij
Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies, 2004), pp. 196209.
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 57
the stories of the violent, adulterous gods of Mount Olympus very seri-
ously, leading one modern scholar to write a book entitled Did the Greeks
Believe Their Myths?4 The old cults survived mostly as state religions of
the various city-states Athena as the patron goddess of Athens being
the best-known. The result seems to have been a widespread spiritual
hunger in this period filled by a variety of competing phenomena, of
which philosophy was one.5
The early Greek philosophers dealt with the decline of traditional reli-
gion in one of two ways. In the first approach, they might leave aside the
question of religion almost entirely. Thus, the Ionian physicists sought
explanations of the universe and its phenomena that were, broadly speak-
ing, physical or at least rationalistic. Gods might have found their places
in such explanations, but they were part of the universe and thus con-
tained within a larger explanatory system. Likewise, the Sophists left aside
questions of religion and ethics in favor or rhetoric and politics. The other
approach was that of the so-called Italian School Pythagoras, Empe-
docles, Parmenides, and their followers. They were creating philosoph-
ical religions with beliefs, taboos, and worship practices Parmenides
poem of the goddess and Pythagoras religious order are two examples.6
4
Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagi-
nation, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
5
See, for example, Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Lit-
erature, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Harper, 1953; reprint New York: Dover,
1982), pp. 2342; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lec-
tures 25; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), pp. 179235; F. M. Cornford,
From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York:
Harper, 1957), pp. 11123; W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1952); Franz Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman
Paganism (Chicago: Open Court, 1911; reprinted New York: Dover, 1956); Martha C.
Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Martin
Classical Lectures, n.s., 2; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
6
The enduring spiritual significance of this Italian philosophical tradition is argued
by Peter Kingsley in a series of increasingly passionate books. He argues that our
understanding of the Italian school of pre-Socratic philosophy is utterly wrong, largely
because of Aristotles tendentious interpretations, and that the tradition of Pythago-
ras, Empedocles, and Parmenides needs to be understood as a religious and mystical
journey, quite alien to the abstract and cerebral philosophizing of Aristotle and his
intellectual heirs down to our day; see his Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic:
Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); In the Dark
Places of Wisdom (Inverness, Calif.: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999); and Reality (Inver-
ness, Calif.: The Golden Sufi Center, 2003). The most recent editions of the fragments
of Parmenides poem with English translations are A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of
Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 59
This latter approach had clear connections with the mystery cults that
were becoming increasingly popular in the Greek world.7
These two approaches converged in the three greatest figures of ancient
philosophy: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates seems to have started
like an Ionian physicist, if we are to take seriously Aristophanes cari-
cature of him in The Clouds, but he moved on to make ethical issues
central in the philosophical enterprise, giving them a vaguely religious
context. However, because he wrote nothing, it is difficult to pin down
his contribution with precision, other than to know that he gathered
around him a brilliant circle of disciples.
With Plato and Aristotle, we are on firmer ground. Biographical
sources, both Greek and Islamic, link Plato to both the Ionians and
the Italians. Muslim sources refer to him as the Divine (al-ilah). If
this designation is fair, it suits the elderly Plato of the Timaeus and the
so-called Unwritten Teachings better than the younger Plato of the
early dialogues, concerned mainly with ethics, or the middle dialogues,
which are preoccupied with the metaphysics of the Forms, epistemology,
and politics. The most strikingly religious aspect of Platos thought is a
metaphysical and epistemological mysticism that becomes increasingly
prominent in his later dialogues. First, there is the distinction between
Being and Becoming, the notion that the things of this world are imper-
fect copies of ideal Forms. To truly know, one must somehow become
free of this world and behold the ideal with spiritual ideas unclouded
by matter. This is most vividly portrayed in the allegory of the cave in
the Republic, in which those who think this world is the true reality are
compared to those who sit fettered in a cave, mistaking the shadows they
see on the wall of the cave for the true realities. Only after they break their
fetters and emerge from the cave are they able to see things for what they
really are.8 Other myths in the Republic and elsewhere pick up this theme
in various ways. Toward the end of his life, Platos Unwritten Teachings
seem to have carried this further, positing a system of ideal numbers that
are the true reality. This system had or certainly can be interpreted as
having a strongly mystical and religious character, and its full doctrine
was reserved for the elect.9 For non-philosophers, religion was a matter
of beneficial lies.10
After Platos death, his philosophy generated a variety of successors.
The most important was Aristotlianism, which had little in the way
of religion in it, although its epistemology carried over some critical
elements from Plato. Aristotle seems not to have been religious at all, and
his philosophy is entirely concerned with the rational categorization and
explanation of the natural and human worlds. To be sure, there are gods
in his metaphysics, but in exactly the number fifty-five or forty-seven
required to explain the motions of the heavens.11 They are motors, not
objects of worship.
8
Plato, Republic, book 7, 514a to 517b.
9
This is the view of the Tubingen school, which is not universally accepted. Two author-
itative expositions of the Unwritten Doctrines are Hans Joachim Kramer, Plato and
the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the Principles and Unwritten
Doctrine of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents, trans. John R. Catan
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), and Giovanni Reale, Toward a New Interpretation of Plato,
ed. and trans. John R. Catan and Richard Davies (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). The
Tubingen argument is that the accounts of Platos philosophy in early and presum-
ably well-informed sources, notably Aristotle, differ greatly from the contents of the
dialogues. Citing Platos warning in the Phaedrus, Epistle VII, and other places against
placing true philosophy in writing and historical references to his lecture On the Good,
the Tubingen school argues that there was a final Theory of the Principles, in which
Plato attempted to solve the problems left unresolved in his later dialogues. Regardless
of the details of the Tubingen schools reconstruction of this unwritten system, it is
clear that the Plato of the Neoplatonists and of the Islamic philosophers had strong
religious and mystical interests.
10
Plato, Laws, book 2, 663d.
11
Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 12.8, 1074a.
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 61
had been holy writings before, but the new scriptures the Avesta of the
Zoroastrians, the Hebrew Bible of the Jews, the Greek New Testament
of the Christians, and the seven books of Mani made claims that
transcended older oracular texts, echoing the absoluteness of the claims
of the Prophets who had revealed the teachings contained in these books.
A technical innovation, the codex or bound book, gave greater rhetorical
power to the phenomenon. The follower of one of these religions could
point to the book and claim that all truth was between the two boards,
to use the Islamic term.
Philosophers and Revealed Religion. The philosophers ignored the phe-
nomenon of revealed religion as long as they could. They were the last
intellectually significant defenders of ancient paganism, providing pagan
education until their schools were closed and their professors banished
in the sixth century. In the end, philosophy was reconciled to revealed
religion, and specifically to Christianity, not because the philosophers
were converted or saw fit to develop a philosophy of religion explaining
the new forms of revealed religion, but because young Christians were
educated by philosophers and applied philosophy to the explication and
defense of Christian doctrines. Education in the Roman world was insep-
arably bound up with philosophy and the pre-Christian Greek classics.
Long into the Byzantine period, elite education retained a largely pagan
syllabus. There were occasional efforts to Christianize the syllabus
with paraphrases of the Bible in the style of Homer, for example but
these efforts were the failures that they deserved to be. Moreover, young
Christians studied with pagan professors. Saint John Chysostom, the
golden-mouthed, the greatest preacher of Constantinople, was a stu-
dent of the pagan rhetorician Libanius, whose other prominent student
was the Emperor Julian the Apostate. Ancient Christian writers could
no more ignore philosophy than modern theologians can ignore science,
nor did they wish to. Instead, in a long and rancorous process, they
harnessed Greek philosophy to the service of Christian theology, thereby
giving to Christian doctrine a much higher degree of intellectual clarity
and probably also encouraging the tendency of Christianity to focus on
doctrine as the central aspect of the religion.12
12
On the transition from pagan philosophy to Christian theology, see, for example,
Christopher Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1994) and Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture.
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 63
know on his own but through ignorance or neglect had not figured out
for himself, or were they things that in principle were beyond human
knowledge and that thus could only be known by revelation? What was
it about prophets that made them prophets? Did they differ from other
human beings in some fundamental way, and if so, how? And how were
scriptures, and particularly the Quran, to be understood? Obviously, not
everything in the Quran could be taken literally, but how, then, were its
symbols to be interpreted, and what in the Quran could be understood
symbolically? And what of the practical teachings of prophetic religion,
the specific laws and rituals? How did they relate to human law and
rational ethics?
In Kinds day, Islamic theology had begun to address such issues,
but not yet in ways that philosophers would find satisfactory. As we
have seen, a bitter theological debate was raging about the nature of
Gods attributes, especially the more anthropomorphic ones, like Gods
hand or footstool, between literalists associated with hadith scholars like
Ah.mad ibn H . anbal and the more rationalist Mutazilite theologians. In
theology, a compromise was worked out by Ashar that inclined more to
the beliefs of the literalists. Likewise, there was a bitter debate about the
nature of the Quran, with Ashar eventually coming down on the side of
those who had staunchly defended the puzzling doctrine that the Quran
was uncreated. The other great debates of early Islamic theology the
questions of the imamate, leadership of the community after Muh.ammad
and the question of free will and predestination did not greatly concern
the philosophers. As for the practical teachings of Islam, that was the
territory of the legal scholars, the fuqaha, who for the most part showed
little interest in the question of the rational grounds of the Divine Law,
being content to consider it the will of God.
For a philosopher, the critical issues were the relation of God to the
universe that is, whether or not He was a knowable part of being;
whether the content of revelation could be known independently by
reason; and the psychology of prophethood. Kind made little more
than a start on these issues. He did begin the characteristic Muslim
philosophical approach to religion, holding that the truths attained by
philosophy and revelation were essentially the same and, therefore, that
the Quran could be interpreted in the light of philosophical doctrine. He
seems to have wavered in his approach, sometimes describing revelation
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 67
fa ra bs philosophy of religion
Abu Nas.r al-Farab was born around 870, at about the time Kind died
and the translation movement was drawing to a close. He died in 950,
18
Ivry, Al-Kindis Metaphysics, pp. 2829, citing a passage from Kinds On the Number
of the Books of Aristotle; Adamson, Al-Kind, in Adamson and Taylor, Cambridge
Companion to Arabic Philosophy, pp. 4648; Atiyeh, Al-Kindi, pp. 1629; Adamson,
Al-Kind, pp. 4245.
19
Paul E. Walker, The Ismals, in Adamson and Taylor, Cambridge Companion to
Arabic Philosophy, pp. 7291. On the Ismailis in general, see Farhad Daftary, The
Ismals: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007). An impressive number of Ismaili philosophical texts have been published
in translation, most by the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, as well as studies of
a number of major Ismaili philosophers. On early Ismaili intellectual life in general,
see Heinz Halm, The Fatimids and their Traditions of Learning (Ismaili Heritage Series
2; London: I. B. Tauris and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 1997).
20
Walker, The Ismals, in Adamson and Taylor, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic
Philosophy, p. 77. On this work in general, see Godefroid de Callatay, Ikhwan al-Safa:
A Brotherhood of Idealists on the Fringe of Orthodox Islam (Makers of the Muslim World;
Oxford: One World, 2005) and Ian Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the
Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-S.afa), 2nd ed. (London: RoutledgeCurzon,
2002).
68 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
forty years before the birth of Ibn Sna. He was best known for his exper-
tise in logic and music and for a puzzling political philosophy, the details
and significance of which are still matters of intense controversy. On
the one hand, readers notice the precision of his writing, the exacting
care with which each word is chosen and each sentence structured. The
style is nearly mathematical and utterly clear. On the other hand, the
more closely his political works are studied, the more curious they seem,
with shifts of emphasis in the way the same subject is discussed in dif-
ferent works, seeming contradictions left unexplained, and assertions
made that do not seem to fit with other works.21 For example, in his
Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle Farab cites the so-
called Theology of Aristotle to prove a point about Aristotles agreement
with Plato, yet he does not list the Theology among Aristotles works in
his Philosophy of Aristotle.22 With the possible exception of Ibn Rushd
(Averroes), Farab, with his expert knowledge of Aristotles works, was
the Islamic philosopher most likely to know that the Theology was not
authentically Aristotelian it is actually an adaptation of selections from
Plotinus and its absence from the Philosophy of Aristotle tends to con-
firm that he did know it was not authentic. Why, then, did he cite it as
21
Recent interpretations of Farabs political writings include Majid Fakhry, Al-Farabi,
Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism: His Life, Works and Influence (Great Islamic Thinkers;
Oxford: OneWorld, 2002); Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philoso-
phy of Alfarabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi
and the Foundations of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001); Joshua Parens, An Islamic Philosophy of Virtuous Religions: Introducing
Alfarabi (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006); and idem, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabis
Summary of Platos Laws (SUNY Series in Middle Eastern Studies; Albany: SUNY
Press, 1995). English readers are unusually fortunate in that most of Farabs politi-
cal works are available in good English translations. More general works on Islamic
political thought include Charles E. Butterworth, ed., The Political Aspects of Islamic
Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi (Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs
27; Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1992); Patri-
cia Crone, Gods Rule: Government and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004); and Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory
Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
22
Farab, The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine
and Aristotle, in Alfarabi: The Political Writings, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Agora
Editions; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 1556, 161, 164; idem, The Phi-
losophy of Aristotle, the Parts of his Philosophy, the Ranks of Order of its Parts, the
Position from which He Started, and the One He Reached, in Alfarabis Philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle, rev. ed.; trans. Muhsin Mahdi (Agora Editions; Cornell University
Press, 1969).
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 69
23
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952),
particularly chap. 1, which discusses the role of Farab in shaping Strauss thought, and
chap. 2, which lays out his theory of exoteric books and writing between the lines;
idem, On a Forgotten Kind of Writing, in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other
Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 22132.
24
Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, ed., Medieval Political Philosophy, trans. Muhsin
Mahdi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963) pp. 8485, based on Francesco Gabrieli,
ed., Alfarabius Compendium Legum Platonis (London: Warburg Institute 1952), p. 4.
For Strauss view, see his How Farab Read Platos Laws, Melanges Louis Massignon,
vol. 3 (Damascus: Institut Francais de Damas, 1957), pp. 31944; reprinted in Islamic
Philosophy, vol. 4, pp. 297322.
70 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
contains Farabs own opinions or that these opinions are identical with
philosophical truth, only that they are opinions appropriately held by the
inhabitants of a virtuous city.25 The difficulties of constructing a compre-
hensive Straussian interpretation of Farabs system are obvious, but the
alternatives are not attractive either constructing a theory of Farabs
philosophical development in which the various works can be seen as rep-
resenting different stages or simply admitting defeat and acknowledging
gross contradictions in his philosophy.
Whatever the difficulties in understanding the nuances of Farabs
thought, the situation is clear enough in its overall outlines, particularly
in the light of Farabs followers in the western Islamic lands Ibn Bajja,
Ibn T.ufayl, Ibn Rushd, and the great Jewish scholar, Maimonides, each
of whom has left Farabian expositions of the philosophy of religion.
In particular, we have Farabs own Book of Religion, which is a sort of
programmatic key to his philosophy of politics and religion.26
When seeking to develop a philosophy of religion or a religious phi-
losophy, a philosophers first decision is which branch of philosophy to
place it in. If we think that religion tells us what to believe and how to
behave, with the behavior grounded in the belief, it would seem natural
to make metaphysics the point of contact between philosophy and reli-
gion, with ethics playing a subordinate role by grounding religious laws
and practices. Perhaps religion teaches the same things as metaphysics,
or some of the same things, or the same things expressed differently for
a different audience. Perhaps what the philosopher knows by reason,
the prophet knows by revelation. Another possibility is that religion and
revelation tell us things that are beyond the power of reason. In Christian
thought, this view is associated with such philosopher-theologians as
Thomas Aquinas and the handmaid theory, the doctrine that philoso-
phy can assist theology but cannot discover everything known through
revelation. Christian examples of truths knowable only through rev-
elation would include such doctrines as the transubstantiation of the
host in the Eucharist. Although this approach can be used to clarify the
25
Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundations of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 1567.
26
Muhsin Mahdi, ed., Alfarabis Book of Religion and Related Texts (Beirut: Dar El-
Machreq, 1965), pp. 4376; Charles E. Butterworth, trans., Alfarabi: The Political Writ-
ings, pp. 93113. Butterworth is a leading advocate of the Straussian approach to Farab.
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 71
27
Farab, Platos Laws, 1.1, trans. Muhsin Mahdi, in Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political
Philosophy, p. 85.
72 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
Later, he remarks that milla and dn, the usual Islamic term for religion,
are almost synonymous, as are shara, divine law, and sunna, religious
custom, and that because legislated opinions can also be considered part
of the shara, all four terms can be considered synonymous.33 There is
an obvious connection of both the discussion of political science in The
Enumeration of the Sciences and the beginning of The Book of Religion to
the opening of Aristotles analysis of happiness and political regimes at
the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Religion, then, is a branch of philosophy that presumes to be able to
analyze the bases of the beliefs and laws of religious communities. Farab
says this directly in The Book of Religion:
The practical things in religion are those whose universals are in practi-
cal philosophy. . . . The theoretical opinions that are in religion have their
demonstrative proofs in theoretical philosophy and are taken in religion
without demonstrative proofs.
Therefore, the two parts of which religion consists [that is, opinions and
actions] are subordinate to philosophy. . . . Therefore, the kingly craft respon-
sible for what the virtuous religion consists of is subordinate to philosophy.34
The first existent is the first cause of the existence of all other beings. It is free
of all sorts of deficiency. . . . Its existence is the best and most primal existence,
and no other existence can be better or prior to its existence. . . . Its existence
and substance cannot be tainted by any non-being or contradiction, these
being characteristic of what is below the sphere of the Moon. . . . Its existence
has no end or purpose. . . . 38
beginning in time. He also could not infer the specific religious practices
laid down by the prophet on the neighboring island, but these were mat-
ters of practical wisdom, to be acquired only by association with society.40
H. ayy could deduce these matters because, for Farab and his school, God
is mind, and His intellection governs the creation and ordering of the
universe and, as we will see, our knowledge of it.
40
Ibn T.ufayl, H
. ayy ibn Yaqz.a n, ed. Gautier, pp. 8188, 1456; trans. Goodman, pp. 1304,
1601.
41
Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies,
Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 79
geometry. There are many difficulties with the theory, but Aristotelians
labored, century after century, to solve them.
Muslim Aristotelians usually maintained that perceptions of individ-
uals are only the occasion for the occurrence of the universal concepts
in the rational mind; the intelligibles are actually emanated from the
Active Intellect upon a human intellect that has been prepared for their
reception by perception of the individual instances of the universal. The
Active Intellect is commonly identified with the lowest of the celestial
intellects, that of the moon, but because the intelligibles are thought to
descend from higher to lower intellects, for all practical purposes, we
acquire our knowledge of universals through mediated contact with the
mind of God. As our mind becomes more practiced in intellection, this
process happens more readily.42
The prophet, according to Farab and the philosophers influenced by
him, is a human being whose mind is uniquely capable of this process,
who receives all the intelligibles without effort, more or less in a single
rush of intuition. Unlike the philosopher, the prophet also possesses a
particularly strong imaginative faculty, which enables him to express the
intelligibles in imaginative forms understandable to all levels of men.
Finally, Farab also attributes a level of practical wisdom to the prophet,
but in general it is the epistemological side of prophethood that receives
the most attention in Farabs school.43
42
For Farabs theory of intellect, see his Risala f l-Aql, ed. Maurice Bouyges (Bibliotheca
Arabic Scholasticorum, serie arabe 8.1; Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1938); partial
trans. by Arthur Hyman in Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic,
and Jewish Traditions, 2nd ed., ed. Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1973), pp. 21121. The theory is worked out in greater detail and clarity by Ibn
Sna; see Ibn Sna, al-Shifa: al-T.abyat 6: al-Nafs, ed. George Anawati and Sad Zayid
(Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Arabya: al-Haya al-Mis.rya al-Amma lil-Kitab, 1960 [1963]),
pp. 181220; idem, Kitab al-Najat, ed. Majid Fakhry (Beirut: Dar al-Af aq al-Jadda,
1405/1985), pp. 20222; Fazlur Rahman, ed., Avicennas De Anima (Arabic Text) [Kitab
al-Shifa: al-T.abyat: al-Nafs] (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 4551;
idem, trans., Avicennas Psychology: An English Translation of Kitab al-Najat, Book II,
Chapter VI . . . (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 3256.
43
Farabs theory of prophecy is scattered through his works; see the summary by Ibrahim
Madkour, Al-Farab, in M. M. Sharif, ed., A History of Muslim Philosophy (Lahore:
Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963), pp. 4617, and Mahdi, Alfarabi, pp. 5758, 131
9, and passim. The Farabian view of prophecy is more clearly laid out by Ibn Sna; see,
for example, James Winston Morris, The Philosopher-Prophet in Avicennas Political
Philosophy, in Charles Butterworth, ed., The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy
(Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 27; Cambridge: Harvard Center for Middle
Eastern Studies, 1992), pp. 15298; Ibn Sna, al-Nafs, pp. 20820; al-Shifa, al-Ilahyat,
80 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
ed. George Anawati and George Zayid (Cairo: al-Haya al-Amma li-Shuun al-Mat.a bi
al-Amrya, 1380/1960) 10.23, pp. 4416; Michael E. Marmura, ed. and trans., The
Metaphysics of the Healing (Islamic Translation Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young
University Press, 2005), pp. 3649. See also Richard Walzer, Al-Farabs Theory of
Prophecy and Divination, Journal of Hellenic Studies 77 (1957), pp. 1428.
44
See, for example, Mahdi, Alfarabi, pp. 14770; Fakhry, Al-Farab, pp. 8891; Ibn Sna,
al-Najat, pp. 20506; Rahman, trans., Avicennas Psychology, pp. 3334.
45
Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, pp. 1334.
46
Gautier, ed., pp. 1455; Goodman, trans., p. 161; Colville, trans., pp. 6162.
47
Ibn Rushd, Fas.l al-Maqal, ed. and trans. Butterworth, pp. 2632.
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 81
48
Al-Farab, Ih..sa , pp. 1308; trans. Butterworth, pp. 8084.
49
Farab, Ih..sa al-Ulum, ed. Amn, pp. 7985.
50
Farab, Ih..sa al-Ulum, ed. Amn, pp. 10709; trans. Butterworth, pp. 8081; idem, Kitab
al-Milla, ed. Mahdi, para. 710, pp. 4852; trans. Butterworth, pp. 99101.
82 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
51
He was known in North Africa for his study of disagreements among legal schools,
Bidayat al-Mujtahid wa-Nihayat al-Muqtas.id (n.p.: Dar al-Fikr, n.d.); Imran Ahsan
Khan Nyazee, trans., The Distinguished Jurists Primer, 2 vols. (Great Books of Islamic
Civilization; Reading: Garnet, U.K., 1994). It is a long and deeply learned weighing of
the evidence having nothing to do with philosophy.
52
Ibn Rushd, Fas.l al-Maqal, ed. and trans. Butterworth, pp. 2627.
53
Ibn T.ufayl, H
. ayy ibn Yaqz.a n, ed. Gautier, pp. 14854; trans. Goodman, pp. 1625; trans.
Colville, pp. 6265.
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 83
pointing out, with some justice, that a good deal of Greek logic was actu-
ally Greek grammar, with the copula and its Indo-European peculiar-
ities and tacit metaphysical presumptions.54 The Asharite theologians,
deeply suspicious of any compromise on the absolute power of God,
denounced the naturalism of the philosophical conception of nature,
criticizing both natures and natural causation of every sort. The clear-
est and most intelligent attack on philosophy was that of Ghazal in his
autobiography, The Deliverer from Error, and in his Incoherence of the
Philosophers. In the former work, he correctly points out that the rigor
and certitude that the ancients had achieved in mathematics was not car-
ried over into metaphysics, whose doctrines were hotly debated among
the philosophers themselves.55 In the Incoherence, he attempts to show
that the views of the philosophers on some twenty important points were
wrong or indefensible, even on the assumption of the philosophers own
presuppositions. Ghazal sometimes seems to be stretching a point in the
seventeen heretical doctrines held by the philosophers, but he insists that
three philosophical doctrines are completely incompatible with Islam:
their view that the universe has no beginning in time, which seems to
imply that God is not its creator; their denial of the bodily resurrection;
and their view that God knows only universals, not particulars, thus mak-
ing individual reward, punishment, and divine providence impossible.56
Ibn Rushd attempts to defend the philosophers in his Incoherence of the
Incoherence, a point by point refutation of Ghazals work, and in the
54
See the dialogue between the Christian logician Matta b. Yunus, the teacher of Farab,
. ayyan Tawh.d, al-Imta wal-
and the grammarian Abu Sad Sraf, recorded in Abu H
Muanasa, ed. Ah.mad Amn and Ah.mad al-Zayn (Cairo: Lajnat al-Talf, 193944),
1:10828; trans. D. S. Margoliouth, The Merits of Logic and Grammar, Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society (1905), 11129. A French translation, along with analysis and
translations of related texts, is A. Elemrani-Jamal, Logique aristotelicienne et grammaire
arabe: etudes et documents (Etudes Musulmanes 26; Paris: Librairie Philosophique J.
Vrin, 1983), pp. 14963.
55
Ghazal, al-Munqidh, ed. Mah.mud, pp. 10007; trans. Watt, Faith and Practice,
pp. 3738; trans. McCarthy, Freedom, pp. 7475.
56
Al-Ghazal, Tahfut al-Falasifa, ed. Sulayman Dunya (Dhakhair al-Arab 15, 2nd ed.;
Cairo: Dar al-Maarif, n.d.), pp. 67, 7273, 2935; Al-Ghazalis Tahafut al-Falasifa
[Incoherence of the Philosophers], trans. Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Pakistan Philosophi-
cal Congress Publication no. 3; Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963), pp. 8,
1112, 24950; Michael E. Marmura, ed. and trans., The Incoherence of the Philosophers
(Islamic Translation Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1997), pp. 7,
1011.
84 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
The Decisive Treatise, but his rebuttal did not satisfy more traditional
theologians.57
However, it seems to me that the real objections were to the Farabian
theory of religion as a part of political philosophy rather than to philos-
ophy as such. After all, later Islamic philosophers and theologians held
variations of these doctrines and others that were sometimes far stranger,
particularly under Sufi influence. Farabs theory, no matter how philo-
sophically reasonable it might seem, diminished revealed religion in a
way that few serious Muslims, then or now, could accept.
First, Farab had made religion subordinate to philosophy, thus deny-
ing religion its transcendence. It was no longer the most profound win-
dow through which human beings could contemplate the absolute; it was
only a Platonic likely story, a beneficial lie told for the benefit of those
incapable of doing metaphysics on their own.
Second, the God of the philosophers lacked spiritual vitality. Whatever
else the God of the Quran might be, He was, as Ibn Arab rightly
saw, both transcendent mighty and awe inspiring, hidden by veils of
light and darkness beyond human conception and imminent, deeply
involved in the smallest affairs of human beings. The God of the Farabian
philosophers, begotten of the One beyond being of Platonic number
mysticism and of the Aristotelian mover of the spheres, was too abstract
and inhuman to be identified with the merciful and terrifyingly distant
and omnipresent God of the Quran.
Third, the notion of the prophet as philosopher was scarcely credible,
nor did it do justice to the central spiritual fact of prophecy, at least
in Judaism and Islam: that God chooses an ordinary man to bear the
burden of delivering his message to an ignorant humanity. To make him
into a philosopher who happened to have an unusual knack for making
philosophical doctrines appealing to the masses demeaned the Prophet
and anyway was historically and theologically preposterous.
Finally, the notion that the Quran needed to be treated as a sym-
bolic document, correctly understood only in the light of philosoph-
ical demonstration, did not do justice to the text of the Holy Book.
57
Ibn Rushd, Tahafut al-Tahafut, ed. Sulayman Dunya (Dhakhair al-Arab 37; 2nd ed.;
2 vols.; Cairo: Dar al-Maarif bi-Mis.r, 1969); Simon van den Bergh, trans. Averroes
Tahafut al-Tahafut (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, n.s., 19; 2 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1954); Fas.l al-Maqal, ed. and trans. Butterworth, p. 12.
ABIAN
THE FAILURE OF THE FAR SYNTHESIS OF RELIGION 85
Sophisticated Muslims might know perfectly well that God could not
possibly mount a throne like an earthly king, but few Muslims would
be comfortable with the notion that Gods throne was just a symbol for
some part of the skies known better to the astronomers. A symbol in
scripture must have some reality in itself, not just be a sign for some
natural entity. We may compare the Farabian philosophers with Ibn
Arab, whose tawl, esoteric interpretation, of scripture was far more
outrageous than anything the philosophers had dreamed of but whose
interpretations carried power and conviction because of his burning
belief that every jot and tittle of the Quran carried uncountable layers of
meaning that no ordinary human being could ever completely grasp.
as an historical matter, fa ra bian political philosophy died in
Islam with Ibn Rushd. Farabs books were still sometimes read and
copied. Copies of his works are not uncommon in manuscript philosoph-
ical anthologies. I found a translation of his Aphorisms of the Statesman
included in an early fourteenth-century philosophical encyclopedia as an
example of political philosophy conducted from a purely rational point
of view, but even then it was a curiosity, not a relic of a living movement.58
It seems to me that it failed not because of its enemies other, much
more successful movements in Islam had more enemies but because
it lacked appeal to serious Muslims. And it lacked appeal because it did
not do justice to the Islamic view of God, religion, revelation, and the
Quran.
58
Qut.b al-Dn Shraz, Durrat al-Taj li-Ghurrat al-Dubaj: Bakhsh-i H. ikmat-i Amal wa-
Sayr wa-Suluk, ed. Mahdukht Banu Huma (Tehran: Intisharat-i Ilm wa-Firhang,
1369/1990), pp. 7996. I discuss this text in John Walbridge, The Political Thought of
Qub al-Dn al-Shraz, in Butterworth, ed., Political Aspects, pp. 3513.
5
The final third of the twelfth century was a decisive turning point in the
history and the historiography of Islamic philosophy. The last great figure
of the tradition of Islamic Aristotelianism, Ibn Rushd, was writing his
commentaries on Aristotle and died in 1198. He was to have enormous
influence, but in Europe, not in the Islamic world. His death marked
a break in Western Europes knowledge of Islamic thought, for he was
the last medieval Islamic writer of real significance to be translated into
Latin in the Middle Ages. Thus, his death is influential in the West-
ern historiography of Islamic philosophy because, until recently, it was
assumed that he was the last philosopher of consequence in the Islamic
world, an attitude that even today is not altogether dead. Ibn Rushds
old age coincided with the adulthood and premature death of Shihab al-
Dn Yah.ya Suhraward (11541191), the philosopher-mystic responsible
for popularizing Neoplatonism as an alternative to the Aristotelianism
of Ibn Sna. His masterwork, The Philosophy of Illumination, was com-
pleted in 1186. Ibn Rushds old age also coincided with the youth of
the third great intellectual figure of this period, Muh.yil-Dn Ibn Arab
(11651240), the greatest of all Muslim mystical theologians. He actually
had met Ibn Rushd as a teenager and was beginning serious mystical
study at about the time that Suhraward was writing The Philosophy
of Illumination. Ibn Rushd represented the past of Islamic philosophy,
the Farabian political philosophy of religion; Suhraward and Ibn Arab
represented its future and, in particular, the alliance with mysticism that
was to give metaphysics and philosophical psychology a lasting place in
the Islamic world.
86
MYSTICISM, POSTCLASSICAL ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY 87
develop. By the end of the twelfth century, Sufism was no longer separate
from Islamic religious life in general. For most of the last millennium,
adult male Muslims normally have been initiated members of at least
one Sufi order, a state of affairs that still prevails in many parts of the
Islamic world. The shrines of Sufi saints were the locus of much of
womens devotional life. The orders often played important political,
social, and economic roles with their control of endowments and links
with guilds and other groups within the larger society. Occasionally, Sufi
masters were political rulers; everywhere they were important figures
in local, provincial, and national life. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, they sometimes were centers of resistance to European colonial
rule.2
The growth of Sufi influence in religious, social, and political life had
an impact on intellectual and literary life as well. In the Persianate areas,
the vast region stretching from the Balkans through Turkey and Iran to
India, Persian was cultivated as the language of gentlemen, and Persian
culture enjoyed enormous prestige. Masses of Sufi poetry were written
in Persian and other vernacular languages, and non-Sufi poetry drew
heavily on Sufi themes. Thus, in Persian and Persianate poetry, it became
almost impossible to distinguish secular love poetry from Sufi devotional
poetry, as they shared the same symbols and themes.3
Late in the eleventh century, a promising legal scholar and popular
teacher in Baghdad, Abu H . a mid Ghazal, suffered a crisis of faith in which
he fell into doubt about all the certainties of the Islamic doctrines he had
been teaching. We have met him already as a critic of the philosophy
of Farab and Ibn Sna. In his spare time, he furiously studied the chief
claimants to knowledge of divine things in his time and place: Kalam
2
The classic account of the Sufi orders is J. Spencer Trimmingham, The Sufi Orders
in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Examples of the numerous stud-
ies of Sufi orders from an historical or anthropological point of view are Dina Le
Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbands in the Ottoman World, 14501700 (SUNY Series
in Medieval Middle East History; Albany: SUNY Press, 2005); Carl W. Ernst, Eter-
nal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (SUNY
Series in Muslim Spirituality in South Asia; Albany: SUNY Press, 1992); Vincent
J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998); Frances Trix, The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,
2009).
3
A representative collection of studies of Persian and Persianate Sufism is Leonard
Lewisohn, ed., The Heritage of Sufism, 3 vols. (Oxford: OneWorld, 1999).
MYSTICISM, POSTCLASSICAL ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY 89
Suhraward
The problem of mysticism first arrives in Islamic philosophy in a seri-
ous way in the works of Ibn Sna. In contrast to Farabs treatment
of religion under political philosophy, Ibn Sna tended to deal with
the subject as an appendix to metaphysics, although some aspects of
prophecy are treated under psychology. Thus, the metaphysics of his
4
For his intellectual autobiography, see Ghazal, Munqidh; trans. Watt, Faith and Practice;
trans. McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment. Ghazals Ih.ya Ulum al-Dn, 5 vols., ed. Abd
Allah Khalid (Beirut: Dar al-Arqam, 1998) and dozens of other editions; trans. Fazlul
Karim, Gazzalis Ihya Ulum-id-Din: The Revival of Religious Learnings, 4 vols. in 5
(Dacca: F. K. Islam Mission Trust, 1971). Many of the forty books of the Ih.ya have been
published separately in English translation.
90 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
largest surviving philosophical work, the Healing, ends with a tenth chap-
ter dealing with various religious topics, as well as with ethics and political
philosophy.5
However, the key figure in the introduction of mysticism into Islamic
philosophy was the colorful twelfth-century philosopher Shihab al-Dn
Suhraward. He was educated in the Aristotelianism of Ibn Sna, which
he refers to as the Peripatetic philosophy. Born in northwestern Iran near
the town of Zanjan, he wandered in search of teachers and then patrons.
We cannot trace his travels exactly, but he studied as far south and east as
Isfahan and then traveled among the petty kingdoms of eastern Anatolia
before reaching Damascus near the time of its conquest by Saladin. He
settled in Aleppo in about 1182. There his alchemical and magical skills
drew the attention of Saladins teenaged son, al-Malik al-Z.a hir, who had,
in the traditional way, been made governor of the city to gain political
experience. Suhraward cut a strange figure. Rejecting the conventional
scholarly path of endowed posts in madrasas and mosques, he wore
dervish dress so shabby that he was mistaken for a donkey driver. When
he arrived in Aleppo, the director of the madrasa where he was staying
tactfully had his young son take him a set of presentable clothes. The
prince became his disciple, and the more conventional scholars became
jealous. Saladin became alarmed at the prospect of his son, the governor
of an important city solidly astride his lines of communication to the
east, being under the influence of a magician of uncertain orthodoxy
and loyalty at a time when the Third Crusade was bearing down on his
5
There is a scholarly debate about the interpretation of this series of developments. One
group of modern scholars of Islamic philosophy believes that Ibn Sna himself for-
mulated a Neoplatonic mystical philosophy, which he called the Oriental wisdom.
This seems to put too much stress on a few passages of his philosophy. Moreover,
there is reason to think that his later philosophy was Oriental because it belonged
to the philosophers of eastern Iran and differed from that of the Occidentals, which
is to say, Farab and the other philosophers of Baghdad. At the other extreme, those
scholars of Islamic philosophy whose interests are confined to the period from Kind
to Ibn Rushd are inclined to see the postclassical Islamic philosophers as mystics rather
than philosophers and to deny to Sufi theologians like Ibn Arab any philosophical
relevance. This seems to me to be the application of a Proscrustean or rather Aris-
totelian bed to the philosophers of Islam. In my view, Ibn Sna was a thoroughgoing
Aristotelian, apart from the use of a mildly Neoplatonic pyramidal cosmology, and the
most original and interesting period of Islamic philosophy began with Suhraward and
culminated in the so-called School of Isfahan in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Iran.
MYSTICISM, POSTCLASSICAL ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY 91
6
On the circumstances of Suhrawards death, see Hossein Ziai, The Source and Nature
of Authority: A Study of al-Suhrawards Political Doctrine, in Political Aspects, ed.
Butterworth, pp. 30444, and Walbridge, Leaven, pp. 20110.
7
Suhraward, The Philosophy of Illumination, ed. and trans. John Walbridge and Hossein
Ziai (Islamic Translation Series; Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1999),
p. 2, paras. 34). This interpretation of Suhrawards views summarizes the argument in
John Walbridge, The Science of Mystic Lights: Qutb al-Din Shirazi and the Illuminationist
Tradition in Islamic Philosophy (Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 26; Cambridge,
Mass.: Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, 1992), idem, The Wisdom of the Mystic East:
Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism (SUNY Series on Islam; Albany: SUNY Press,
2001), and idem, Leaven.
92 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
8
Mehdi Hairi Yazdi, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by
Presence (SUNY Series in Islam; Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
MYSTICISM, POSTCLASSICAL ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY 93
Ibn Arab
Ibn Arab was the converse of Suhraward a mystic who made mysticism
philosophical. He was an Andalusian of an old Arab family and another
colorful and unconventional character. He was born in Murcia in Spain
in 1165, the son of a government official from an elite Arab family.9 In
one of those ironies of history, he actually knew Ibn Rushd, his father
being a friend of the philosopher.
One day when I was in Cordoba, I went to visit its judge Abul-Wald
Ibn Rushd [Averroes]. He had wished to meet me because he had been
astonished at the things he had heard that God had revealed to me during my
retreats. My father sent me to him on the pretext of some business with him
so that he could meet me, he being one of my fathers friends. At the time
I was a youth who had yet to grow a beard or mustache. When I came in, he
rose from his place with the greatest affection and respect, hugged me, and
said, Yes! I replied, Yes. He was even more pleased with me because I had
understood him. I then perceived why he was pleased and said, No! He was
dismayed, flushed, and doubted his own opinion. What, he said, have you
all discovered through unveiling and the divine emanation? Is it the same as
what we have found through reason (naz.ar)? I replied, Yes, no. Between
the yes and the no, spirits take flight from matter and heads are severed from
bodies. He turned pale and was seized with trembling. He sat down, saying,
There is no power or might save in God! For he had understood what I
was hinting at. . . . Later he asked my father if he could see me again so that
he could submit his views to us so as to see whether they were compatible or
not, for he was one of the masters of thought and rational speculation, but
he thanked God that he lived in a time in which he could see one who went
into a retreat ignorant and emerged with such knowledge, yet without any
study, investigation, or reading. I have shown that such a thing can be, he
said, but I had not seen any who had attained it. . . . I wanted to see him
again, so God in His mercy sent me a vision in which, as it were, there was
a thin curtain between us so that I could see him but he could not see me
9
There is a good spiritual biography, based largely on autobiographical comments in
his own works: Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn Arab, trans.
Peter Kingsley (Golden Palm Series; Cambridge, U.K.: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993).
94 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
and was unaware of me, being busy about his own work. I did not see him
again until the year 1199 in the city of Marrakesh. He was being carried back
to Cordoba, where he is buried. His coffin was on one side of the beast and
to balance it they had put an equal weight of his writings. . . . I recited this
verse:
William C. Chittick and James W. Morris (vol. 1), trans. Cyrille Chodkiewicz and
Denis Gril (vol. 2) (New York: Pir Press, 20022004). William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path
of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabs Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989)
and idem, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-Arabs Cosmology (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1998) are topically collected extracts from al-Futuh.a t with commentary.
However, his system is most easily approached through a shorter work summarizing
his system, the Fus.u .s al-H . ikam, The Bezels of Wisdom, ed. Abul-Ala Aff (Cairo:
al-Bab al-H
. alab, 1946). There are two translations made directly from the Arabic: R.
W. J. Austin, trans., Ibn al Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom (Classics of Western Spirituality;
New York: Paulist Press, 1980) and Caner K. Dagli, trans., The Ringstones of Wisdom
(Great Books of the Islamic World; Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2004). This work was
commonly read with the aid of commentaries, one of which is available in English:
Ismail Hakki Bursevis Translation of, and Commentary on Fusus al Hikam, 4 vols.,
trans. Bulent Rauf (Oxford: Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, 19861991). A number of
his other works are also now available in translation.
Incidentally, his family name is properly Ibn al-Arab, son of the Arab, which
refers to the familys descent from one of the first conquering Arab families in Spain. He
is more usually called Ibn Arab without the article to avoid confusion with another
scholar of the same name. He is also referred to be the titles Muh.y l-Dn, Reviver
of the Faith, and al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Sheikh.
12
The metaphysical dispute, to simplify it greatly, was between those who thought the
universe was composed of discrete concrete entities, the primacy of essence, and those
who thought it was ultimately a single substrate infinitely differentiated, the primacy
of existence.
96 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
Scientific Revolution itself took place amidst the religious warfare of the
Reformation.
The second theory, positing an innate Islamic hostility toward science,
has similar problems. Those advocating it tend to contrast European
scholastic rationalism with a supposed antirationalism in Islam. As evi-
dence, they cite a small set of well-known texts, especially Ghazals
Deliverer from Error, in which Muslim theologians condemn science and
philosophy. Because of this hostility, they claim, natural science and
mathematics were excluded from the madrasa curriculum. But it is dif-
ficult to argue that Ghazals book was either typical or decisive, and the
pinnacle of Islamic astronomy came after, not before, Ghazal. Few other
such texts exist, and in contrast to the situation in Europe, prosecutions
for heresy were rare. The Islamic world produced no martyrs for sci-
ence like Bruno and Galileo. Muslims, by and large, cared more about
whether people practiced the laws of Islam than about the nuances of
their beliefs. Moreover, as later recorded curricula show, science actu-
ally was taught in the madrasas along with logic, natural philosophy,
and metaphysics. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were all widely
taught on a basic level at least. Mathematics was needed to divide inher-
itances, which religious lawyers were required to do, and astronomy was
needed for mosque timekeeping. Manuscripts on geometry, arithmetic,
algebra, basic astronomy, advanced mathematical astronomy, and the
construction and use of astrolabes are common. Manuscript anthologies
of madrasa textbooks routinely contain works on astronomy and math-
ematics. Medical manuscripts are everywhere. As we will see in Chapter
9, Islamic reformers, Islamic revivalists, and colonial administrators of
the nineteenth century were united in their complaints that madrasa
education was too rationalistic and scholastic.
The question of the appeal of science can be settled by examining
vernacular-language literature. Iranian and Turkish scientists commonly
wrote more popular though still sometimes quite technical versions
of their scientific works in Persian or Turkish. The patrons of scientific
works were often highly placed court officials, and the biographies of
Islamic scientists demonstrate the importance of the court as a locus
of scientific patronage and interest. Recent bibliographical studies show
that as late as the Ottoman period, there were large numbers of scientists
100 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
15
Ekmeleddin Ihsano glu et al., Osmanl Astronomi Literaturu Tarihi [History of Ottoman
Astronomical Literature], 2 vols. (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1997), lists works by 582 Ottoman
authors as well as more than two hundred anonymous works. Similar bibliographies
have been published on Ottoman medicine, mathematics, geography, and military
science. See Cemil Aydn, Beyond Culturalism? An Overview of the Historiography on
Ottoman Science in Turkey, in Ekmeleddin Ihsano glu, Kostas Chatis, and Efthymios
Nicoladis, Multicultural Science in the Ottoman Empire (De Diversis Artibus 69, n.s.,
32; Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), pp. 20115.
MYSTICISM, POSTCLASSICAL ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY 101
while islamic philosophers were turning away from the
natural world as a central concern of philosophy, philosophical rational-
ism was becoming central to the curriculum of the madrasas, particularly
in the form of a semantically oriented logic, and rationalistic methods
MYSTICISM, POSTCLASSICAL ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY 103
were transforming both Islamic legal thought and Kalam theology. This
philosophical turn in the religious sciences is the subject of Chapters 6
and 7. At this point, we turn from examining science and mysticism in
a very general way to looking closely at logic, the discipline central to
scholastic rationalism in Islamic civilization.
PART TWO
1 a al-Mant.iqya wa-H
Shaykh Al Shibl Kashif al-Ghit.a , Naqd al-Ar . all Mushkilatiha,
vol. 1 (Beirut: Muassasat al-Numan, n.d.), p. 6. He may be paraphrasing Ibn Khaldun
or some source used by Ibn Khaldun. And, in fact, the logic of hypotheticals comes
from the Stoics through galen.
107
108 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
2
Nicholas Rescher, The Development of Arabic Logic (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1964), p. 73.
3
See pp. 823, n. 54.
4
Ghazal, al-Munqidh, ed. Mah.mud, pp. 9899; trans. Watt, p. 35; trans. McCarthy,
pp. 7475.
WHERE IS ISLAMIC LOGIC? 109
Generally, the ideas about any science vary over time; even the content of
a well-defined science may completely change. . . . This is especially true of
logic, for logic has no unique definition. We do not know exactly what logic
is. . . . Thus the history of logic should comprise all the factors which have
contributed to its development. Logic is the whole of its own becoming. . . . 7
2b3) categories, 2b4) sentences, and 2b5) reasoning.8 Most of these areas
would not be considered part of logic by modern logicians, and only the
sciences of meaning would be considered to belong even to philosophy.
Islamic philosophers would exclude the theory of music from logic and
exclude grammar and the physiology of speech from philosophy entirely.
Nonetheless, the Stoics notion of the close relation between speech and
thought gave them warrant for defining logic as they did. Others might
define the scope of logic differently or apportion its possible subjects in
other ways.
So perhaps mant.iq is not the whole of Islamic logic but rather the name
of a particular tradition of Islamic logic, and the indigenous traditions of
Islamic thought might supply other logics. Where, then, would we find
these other logics? I think that there are four plausible major candidates:
1) Arabic grammar;
2) Arabic rhetoric;
3) Us.u l al-fiqh, the science of the principles of the deduction of Islamic
law; and
4) Kalam, Islamic dogmatic theology.
arabic grammar
Grammar, we may recall, was classed by the Stoics as a part of logic, one
of the branches of the science of speech. The Stoics, moreover, were
interested in kinds of sentences other than simple declarative proposi-
tions: questions, imperatives, oaths, requests, and so on. Much the same
happened in medieval European logic, which grew to embrace a rich
range of issues arising from the nature and relations of thoughts, words,
and concepts.10
For Islamic scholars, grammar was a fundamental discipline, the com-
mon possession and affliction of even the lowliest student. Arabic is an
intensely grammatical language, much as are Latin and Greek (and Per-
sian and English are not), so the understanding and skillful use of Arabic
required a precise mastery of Arabic grammar. The structure of the lan-
guage is such that Arabic grammar is singularly logical, with meaningful
triliteral roots combining with meaningful morphological forms to create
words whose meanings can often be deduced by knowing only meaning
of the root and the meaning of the word form: istaktaba combines a root
k-t-b, which means writing with a morphological form that means to
ask for [the meaning of the root], thus yielding dictate. Although the
morphological system is complex, it is almost completely regular, and
the resulting grammar is nearly a deductive system.
While student textbooks might be no more than lists of rules, Ara-
bic grammar as presented in advanced texts starts with reflection on
the nature of words and meanings, the distinctions among the parts
9
Walbridge, Science of Mystic Lights, pp. 17891.
10
For introductions to these issues, see Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pin-
borg, and Eleonore Stump, eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 99382, and Paul Vincent Spade,
Thoughts, Words, and Things: An Introduction to Late Mediaeval Logic and Semantic
Theory, http://pvspade.com/Logic/index.html.
112 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
of speech, and the various categories within each. It is the same sort
of semantic analysis that is the starting point of Islamic logic. There
can be little doubt that much of the advanced Islamic thought on
semantics, the nature of propositions, and even categories took place
in the context of grammar rather than logic. Likewise, grammarians
could import logical terms and analyses into their grammatical analy-
sis. For example, the thirteenth-century grammarian Muwaffaq al-Dn
Yash b. Al, commenting on a manual of grammar by Zamakhshar,
writes:
actually was Greek grammar. For the first few Islamic centuries, most
Muslim scholars were content to assume that grammar equipped a man
with what he needed to think and speak correctly.
arabic rhetoric
There are actually two distinct forms of rhetoric among the Islamic
sciences. One is a branch of logic, one of the five arts of applied
inference. It differs from the other four arts demonstration or scientific
reasoning, dialectic, poetics, and sophistics in that it uses premises that
convince but are not necessarily either certain or generally accepted. We
have met it already in the Farabian explanation of the difference between
scripture and true philosophical texts, scripture being the rhetorical
presentation of philosophical truth in a way that is comprehensible to
everyone. This philosophical rhetoric is derived from the Rhetoric of
Aristotle. It was not a widely cultivated discipline in the Islamic world. Ibn
Sna has a volume on rhetoric in his Healing and Ibn Rushd commented
on Aristotles Rhetoric, but few later writers dealt with it at any length,
and there is no reason to suppose that it was influential as a discipline. It
was certainly virtually ignored in the teaching of logic in the madrasas.
A far more vigorous discipline was Arabic rhetoric, known as balagha,
eloquence, with its three branches of maan, notions; bayan, modes
of presentation; and bad, tropes. Balagha was a practical science,
intended to guide authors of poetry and prose, and it arose naturally
from Arabic literature. Nonetheless, it has aspects that are related to
logic. First, the logicians claim rhetoric as a part of logic, although the
applied and linguistically grounded rhetoric of ilm al-balagha certainly
belongs to the linguistic rather than the rational sciences. Second, the
classification of tropes, forms of metaphor, kinds of sentences, and the
like inevitably touch on more general logical concerns. Third, in the stan-
dard manual of Arabic rhetoric, Sakkaks Miftah. al-Ulum [key to the
sciences], one of the divisions concerns argument and its forms. In fact,
it is a manual of logic not very different in content and organization from
the standard logical textbooks. The first commentator on this book was
the scientist philosopher Qut.b al-Dn Shraz.13
13
Walbridge, Science of Mystic Lights, pp. 23, 25, 189.
114 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
us.u l al-fiqh
This is the science of the principles of religious law, the rules by which
the details of Islamic religious law are deduced.14 Like the law of Judaism,
Islamic law is in principle complete, revealed in its entirety through
the Quran and the life and practice of Muh.ammad. Legislation, the
making of wholly new Islamic law, ceased with the death of Muh.ammad.
Therefore, any expansion of the law to meet new circumstances and
problems must be done by interpreting materials dating from the time of
the Prophet. The various sects and legal schools of Islam differ somewhat
on the details of how this is to be done, but virtually all agree that new
law must be deduced from the sources of existing Islamic law. As we saw
in Chapter 3, there was considerable disagreement at first as to how this
ought to be done and it is virtually certain that much of the material
purporting to originate with the Prophet actually reflects legal debates
during the first two centuries of Islam but by the year 1000 or so, there
was broad consensus on the intellectual methods that could appropriately
be used to explicate the law. The science expounding these rules is us.u l
al-fiqh. Refinements were later made, but the general pattern was clear.
By the late eleventh century, Islamic legal scholars were conscious
that there was a close relationship between us.u l al-fiqh and logic. Ghazal
(d. 1111), the great theologian whose work marks a watershed in a number
of areas of Islamic thought, is considered the first to have incorporated
logic systematically into the Islamic sciences, although the ground had
been prepared at least a generation earlier.15 Ghazal went on to write two
manuals of logic, one of which drew its examples from the Quran. In his
manual of us.u l al-fiqh, al-Mustas.fa f Ilm al-Us.u l, The Purification of
the Science of Jurisprudence, Ghazal treats logic in some detail, spend-
ing forty pages discussing essential definition, demonstration (h.add,
burhan,) and related topics.16 He denies that this logical introduction, a
14
On the discipline of us.u l al-fiqh, see Wael B. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories:
An Introduction to Sunn Us.u l al-Fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Bernard G. Weiss, The Search for Gods Law: Islamic Jurisprudence in the Writings of
Sayf al-Dn al-Amid (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1992).
15
Kashif al-Ghit.a , Naqd, p. 6. On logic in Ghazals Munqidh, his intellectual biography,
see p. 83 below. He says that logic is theologically unobjectionable, except insofar as it
gives students unjustified confidence in the metaphysical views of the philosophers.
16
Ghazal, Mustas.fa f Ilm al-Us.u l, vol. 1 (Cairo: al-Mat.baa al-Amrya, 1322/1904),
pp. 1055. They are half-pages, actually, because the book is printed with another work
on us.u l al-fiqh.
WHERE IS ISLAMIC LOGIC? 115
summary of his two manuals of logic, forms a proper part of us.u l al-fiqh,
explaining that logic is necessary for all theoretical sciences. The student
is therefore free not to copy this part of the book.17 Ghazal was a pioneer
in using logic in us.u l al-fiqh, and later works do not usually contain
full expositions of elementary logic. They would have been unnecessary,
because us.u l al-fiqh was an advanced subject, and the Islamic colleges
from the thirteenth century forward commonly taught logic starting
with the first year of theological studies. Nonetheless, the spoor of logic
is easily found in the use of characteristic logical terms and doctrines
such as conception and assent (tas.awwur, tas.dq).
Not everybody approved of this development. In his book The Refu-
tation of the Logicians, the great fourteenth-century fundamentalist Ibn
Taymya commented acidly:
[Essential definition] enters the discussions of those who deal with the
principles of religion and fiqh after Abu H. a mid [Ghazal] at the end of the
fifth/[eleventh] century and the beginning of the sixth/[twelfth]. Abu Hamid
placed a logical introduction at the beginning of the Purification and claimed
that the sciences of whoever did not possess that knowledge were unreliable.
On that subject he composed The Touchstone of Speculation and The Gauge of
Knowledge [Ghazals two manuals of logic], and his confidence in it increased
steadily. More astonishing than that is the fact that he wrote a book named
The Just Scales in which he claimed to have learned logic from the prophets
but actually he learned it from Ibn Sna, and Ibn Sna learned it from the
books of Aristotle. Those who wrote about the principles of jurisprudence
after Abu H. a mid talked about definitions according to the method of the
practitioners of Greek logic.18
Ibn Taymya was right, of course, but he was on the losing side of this
debate. By his time, as we have seen, theology students were routinely
taught logic in preparation for advanced legal study.
However, this only demonstrates that people who practiced us.u l al-
fiqh were expected to know logic; the interesting question is what sort
17
Ghazal, Mustas.fa, 1.10.
18
Ibn Taymya, Kitab al-Radd ala al-Mant.iqyn (Riasat Idarat al-Buh.u th al-Ilmya
wal-Ifta wal-Dawa wal-Irshad; Mecca: al-Maktaba al-Imdadya, 1404/1984), pp. 14
15. Ibn Taymya, although an advocate of the narrowest sort of literalism, knew the
Islamic and philosophical sciences inside out and, what is more, knew exactly where all
the bodies were buried. His critiques of philosophy and logic are extremely interesting.
There is a translation of one of his shorter refutations of logic: Wael B. Hallaq, trans.,
Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
116 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
of logical thinking took place within the discipline of us.u l al-fiqh apart
from elements directly imported from traditional logic. Us.u l al-fiqh or
jurisprudence is the science of the rules for deducing law and thus is
the logic of Islamic law. It has two aspects that clearly can be considered
logical in some plausible sense: the proper interpretation of religious
texts and the deduction of obligations. The first relates to semantics and
philosophical rhetoric, the second to inference, particularly analogy, and
to deonitic logic.
In his book The Upshot of the Science of Jurisprudence, Fakhr al-Dn
Raz (11491209) discusses how the various divisions of us.u l al-fiqh arise
from the nature of the subject matter:
You have learned that us.u l al-fiqh is an expression for all the methods of fiqh
and the method of inference in them and what can be deduced by them. These
methods are either rational or traditional. I myself think that the rational
methods are only valid if endorsed by traditional methods. . . . These are the
divisions of us.u l al-fiqh:
kala m
Kalam is Islamic theology literally, talk about religious topics. Of all
the major disciplines of the Islamic religious sciences, with the possible
exception of mysticism, Kalam changed the most in its history. It arose
from the arguments that occurred in the first generations of Islam, when
Muslims realized that the implications of Islamic doctrines were not nec-
essarily clear and that the varying interpretations of the Quran might
have different theological and practical consequences. The older sur-
viving theological texts are somewhat random collections of doctrines,
creeds supported without great system by proof texts and simple rational
arguments. Writing his Highlights of the Polemic against Deviators and
Innovations in the first third of the tenth century, al-Ashar, after two
paragraphs of introduction, launches straight into a commonsense proof
that God is the creator of the world:
Q. What is the proof that creation has a maker who made it and a governor
who wisely ordered it?
A. The proof is that the completely mature man was originally semen, then
a clot, then a small lump, then flesh and bone and blood. Now we know very
well that he did not translate himself from state to state. For we see that at
the peak of his physical and mental maturity he is unable to produce hearing
and sight for himself, or to create a bodily member for himself. . . . 20
20
Al-Ashar, Kitab al-Luma, trans. Richard J. McCarthy, The Theology of al-Ashar
(Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1953), p. 6.
118 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
21
Abu Mans.u r al-Maturd, Kitab al-Tawh.d, ed. Bekir Topaloglu and Muhammed Aruci
(Istanbul: ISAM, 2005), pp. 1124.
22
Ala al-Dn al-Samarqand al-Usmand, Lubab al-Kalam, ed. M. Sait Uzervarl (Istan-
bul: ISAM, 2005), pp. 3350. Al-Juwayn, A Guide to Conclusive Proofs for the Principles
of Belief: Kitab al-Irshad ila Qawa.ti al-Adilla f Us.u l al-Itiqad, trans. Paul E. Walker
(Great Books of Islamic Civilization; Reading, U.K.: Garnett, 2000).
23
Sad al-Dn al-Taftazan, Sharh. al-Maqa.sid, 5 vols. in 4, ed. and comm. Abd al-Rah.man
Umayra (n.p., al-Sharf al-Rid.a , 1989). The extensive commentary in this edition is
modern in date but traditional in its methods and content.
WHERE IS ISLAMIC LOGIC? 119
period. It is also clear that the concerns of this discipline embraced much
that might be considered to belong to logic.24
24
Halverson, Theology and Creed, pp. 33, 445, cites Ibn Khaldun as saying that Kalam had
become unnecessary in his time and that in any case it had been thoroughly infiltrated
by philosophy. Halverson argues that this transition to philosophically-oriented Kalam
made the discipline irrelevant in later Islamic thought, thus leaving modern Islam
without an active tradition of rational theology. While it is difficult to judge the relative
importance of Kalam theology in the last few centuries, it certainly is the case that
Islamic law is studied much more commonly and that both popular expositions and
advanced works of Kalam are far less commonly published than works on other major
areas of Islamic thought. The relevant passage of Ibn Khalduns Muqaddima is 3.2743,
trans. Rosenthal, 3.3455.
25
Paul Vincent Spade, personal communication, January 8, 1998. On the universities and
their role in the development of logic and natural philosophy, see Grant, Foundations
of Modern Science, pp. 3351, 1724.
120 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
development took place within the lines laid out by established disci-
plines and practices of teaching. Logic retained the generally Aristotelian
form it had been given by Ibn Sna, and advances took the form of the
discovery of new problems to be resolved by clarifications and further
distinctions. The situation was rather different in fiqh and Kalam. In
both disciplines, there were major reformulations of their foundations
without fundamental changes in the actual content of their subjects.
The process happened earlier in fiqh, with the rise of us.u l al-fiqh as
a distinct discipline. The latter discipline rigorously grounded the legal
rules established by early generations of Islamic legal scholars through an
elaborate analysis of language, legal inference, and evidence. The process
occurred later in Kalam in response to the challenge of philosophy. By
the fourteenth century, Kalam works had come to be dominated by umur
amma, general matters, elaborate epistemological and philosophical
discussions providing the basis for the traditional theological doctrines.
Looking at the problem superficially, as most historians of logic have
done, it appears that logic in the Islamic world stalled after Ibn Sna,
endlessly repeating the same doctrines through commentaries and super-
commentaries. This, I believe, misses three important points:
First, the content of the commentaries and supercommentaries is
virtually unknown to modern scholarship. The twentieth century Iraqi
logician, Al Kashif al-Ghit.a , identifies some five hundred points of
dispute in the traditional logic dealing with almost every significant
topic discussed.26 A disciplinary tradition that has engaged intelligent
men for over a thousand years is not likely to be completely sterile.
Second, as we have seen, much analysis that we or the Stoics, or
the medieval Latins would consider to be logic was practiced in other
disciplines, notably Arabic linguistics and the principles of jurisprudence.
Any sound analysis of Islamic achievements in logic, considered in a larger
sense, must examine what was done in those disciplines.
Third, for our purposes, the critical point is not whether logic devel-
oped or not; what is important is that it was central to Islamic intellectual
life and education. That is the subject of the next chapter.
26
See p. 107 n. 1 above.
7
As we have seen, what the Stoics and the medieval Europeans consid-
ered to be logic is, in Islamic intellectual life, spread across a number
of disciplines, including legal theory, grammar, and literary rhetoric.
Nevertheless, logic in its narrow Aristotelian sense played an important
role in Islamic intellectual life. This tradition of study and teaching of
logic is interesting and important in its own right, but it is also an espe-
cially good illustration of the role of scholastic rationalism in Islamic
intellectual culture, particularly in education.
For some seven hundred years, seminaries across the Islamic world
have required that students take a rigorous course of traditional logic.
Instruction was based on a series of short textbooks, explicated through
commentaries and glosses. The textbooks of this school logic reflected
the essentially oral quality of instruction in the seminaries. Given that the
seminary training equipped students to explicate Islamic law from sacred
texts, it is not surprising that the emphasis of the school logic was on
semantics. The school logic was closely linked with philosophical logic,
which differed from it in emphasis, and with the disciplines of the prin-
ciples of jurisprudence and Arabic linguistics. Despite some influence
from Western logic, the school logic is still taught as a basic part of the
curriculum in Islamic seminaries in Egypt, Iran, and the Subcontinent.
in the mantle of the prophet, roy mottahedehs wonderful
book on religion and politics in modern Iran, there is a description of
the ten-year-old seminarian Ali Hashemi attending his first classes on
logic. The students sit cross-legged in a circle around their teacher, who
121
122 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
reads from a large book, the Commentary of Mulla Abdullah, about the
distinction between conception and assent. The students the brighter
ones, at least pepper the teacher with questions and objections, which
the teacher uses to bring out the subtler aspects of the text.1 The scene took
place in Qom in Iran in the early 1950s, but it might have taken place
in any major Islamic seminary between Cairo and Hyderabad at any
time since the fourteenth century and, with the names and some details
changed, could equally well have taken place in a medieval European
university. Logic seems to have become a regular subject of instruction
in Islamic institutions of higher education about 1300, at least in the
more sophisticated centers of learning, and it continued even in areas
like Egypt and North Africa, where interest in philosophy had virtually
died out.
The effort devoted to logic in the seminaries was considerable. For
example, in the first four years of the eight-year program in the religious
college in Deoband in India in the 1880s, one of the three daily lessons was
devoted to logic. Eighteen texts were studied, including several series of
text, commentary, and supercommentary.2 Intellectually, this tradition
centered on a series of short, standard textbooks, each the subject of
hundreds of commentaries. Most of the commentaries were intended
for students or were actually student exercises themselves, but some were
major works of scholarship. The tradition remained sufficiently vigorous
that scores of editions of major and minor texts were printed in the second
half of the nineteenth century, as soon as printing came to be accepted in
Islamic countries. Elementary texts were published for students, just as
in earlier generations scribes had prepared copies for purchase by them,
1
Mottahedeh, Mantle, pp. 6978. The Commentary of Mulla Abdullah is the Sharh.
Tahdhb al-Mant.iq of Najm al-Dn Abd Allah al-Yazd (d. 1015/1606), a commentary
on a short logic textbook by Sad al-Dn Taftazan (d. 792/1392), a well-known author
of textbooks and commentaries in several fields, including logic.
2
On the curriculum of the seminaries in recent times, see, for Egypt, J. Herworth-
Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Luzac,
1938), pp. 4165; for Iran, Seyyed Hossain Nasr, The Traditional Texts Used in the
Persian Madrasahs, in Mohamed Taher, ed., Encyclopaedic Survey of Islamic Culture,
vol. 3: Educational Developments in Muslim World (New Delhi: Anmol Publications,
1997), pp. 5673, esp. 6567, and Aqiqi Bakhshayeshi, Ten Decades of Ulamas Strug-
gle, trans. Alaedin Pazrgadi and ed. G. S. Radhkrishna (Tehran: Islamic Propagation
Organization, 1405/1985), pp. 17580, 2589); and for India, G. W. Leitner, History of
Indigenous Education in the Punjab since Annexation and in 1882 (1882; reprinted Delhi:
Amar Prakashan, 1982), pp. 7279.
THE LONG AFTERNOON OF ISLAMIC LOGIC 123
That judgment might be warranted in part, although no one has yet seen
fit to demonstrate it, but as we have seen, it neglects three points: first,
the evidence of intellectual development within Islamic logic; second,
the intellectual question of where we should draw the boundary lines of
Islamic logic, and finally, the sociological question of why this kind of
logic was taught for so long.
entries/arabic-islamic-language, Feb. 14, 2010, deals with some points at which the
earlier school logicians broke with Ibn Sna. Reschers work is mainly a catalog of the
major Islamic logicians through about 1500 but is nonetheless the only attempt to write
a book-length history of Islamic logic. I wish I could say that it was outdated, but I do
not know of any work that attempts to supercede it. Rescher also wrote or co-authored a
number of other articles and monographs on various aspects of Islamic logic, especially
modal logic. Most recent research on Islamic logic has been devoted either to editions,
translations, or explications of particular texts, almost all from earlier than the period
I discuss here, or to the discussion of particular problems. An exception to this pattern
is Khaled El-Rouwayheb, Sunni Muslim Scholars on the Status of Logic, 15001800,
Islamic Law and Society 11.2 (2004), pp. 21332. Al Sam al-Nashshar, Manahij al-Bah.th
inda Mufakkir al-Islam waktishaf al-Minhaj al-Ilm f l-Alam al-Islam [Research
methods of the thinkers of Islam and an investigation of scientific method in the
Islamic world], 2nd ed. (Cairo Dar al-Maarif, 1965), discusses the whole question of
research methodology in the mature Islamic sciences, dealing with both logic proper
and the applied logic of such disciplines of law, theology, and rhetoric. Kashif al-Ghit.a ,
Naqd, is a survey of the disputed points in the school logic, an essential reference for
anyone studying the subject, and is a complement to Muh.ammad-Rida al-Muz.affar, al-
Mant.iq (Baghdad: al-Tafayyud., 1367/1948, and reprinted several times in Najaf, Qum,
and Beirut), which has been for some decades the standard textbook for students
studying logic in the Shiite seminaries in Iraq and is apparently also used in Iran. On
the adoption of the rational sciences in Islamic education, see Sonja Brentjes, On the
Location of the Ancient or Rational Science in Islamic Educational Landscapes (AH
5001100), Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 4.1 (2002), pp. 4771.
THE LONG AFTERNOON OF ISLAMIC LOGIC 125
5
The translation movement was discussed on pp. 5557, and n. 1 above. On the trans-
lations of Aristotle, see F. E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs (New York Studies in Near
Eastern Civilization, no. 1; New York: NYU Press, 1968), and Aristoteles Arabus: The
Oriental Translations and Commentaries on the Aristotelian Corpus (New York Univer-
sity Department of Classics Monographs on Mediterranean Antiquity; Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1968).
6
See pp. 823, n. 54 above.
7
See p. 83, nn. 556 above.
8
Hossein Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawards H . ikmat al-Ishraq
(Brown University Judaic Studies Series 97; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990).
9
See p. 115, n. 18 above.
126 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
10
There are many editions, of which the most accessible is Sulayman Dunya, ed. (Cairo:
Dar al-Maarif, 1960).
11
See p. 98 above. On the observatory, see Parvz Varjavand, Kavush-i Ras.d-khana-i
Maragha [Excavation of the Maragha observatory] (Tehran: Amr Kabr, 1366 Sh./1987).
On one of T.u ss students, see Walbridge, Science, chap. 1.
12
Rescher, Development, pp. 19799, from which other bibliographical references may be
traced. A very thorough compilation of the information on T.u s is Mudarris Rid.aw,
ar-i Khwaja Nas.r al-Dn al-T.u s (Intisharat 282; Tehran: Tehran Univer-
Ah.wal wa-Ath
sity Press, 1334/1955). Manuscripts of T.u ss works on many subjects are abundant.
13
Asas al-Iqtibas, ed. Mudarris Rid.aw (Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tihran 12; Tehran:
Khurdad, 1324/1947).
THE LONG AFTERNOON OF ISLAMIC LOGIC 127
H. ikmat al-Ayn, the Wisdom of the Source. Abhar (d. 1264) is best
14
14
Rescher, Development, pp. 20304.
15
Rescher, Development, pp. 1967.
16
Rescher, Development, p. 195.
17
Rescher, Development, pp. 21516.
18
See p. 118 above.
19
On Taftazan, see Rescher, Development, pp. 21718. On Jurjan, see Rescher, Develop-
ment, pp. 2223.
128 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
20
But see Khaled El-Rouayheb, Was There a Revival of Logical Studies in Eighteenth
Century Egypt? Die Welt des Islams 45.1 (2005), pp. 119.
21
al-Majmu al-Mushtamil ala Sharh. Qut.b al-Dn . . . , 2 vols. (Cairo: Faraj Allah Zak
al-Kurd, 1323/1905).
THE LONG AFTERNOON OF ISLAMIC LOGIC 129
from one as Illustration 1.22 There were also works published in vernacu-
lar Islamic languages, either as introductions or as trots. Persian manuals
of logic were published in Iran in the twentieth century and in India,
where Persian was the language of the educated, in the nineteenth. In
India, Urdu translations and commentaries increasingly appeared in the
twentieth century as Persian passed out of common use and the standards
of Arabic instruction declined. In Cairo, works on logic in the Islamic
languages of Southeast Asia were published for the benefit of students
from those distant lands.23 The old lithographs continue to be reprinted
for use in the seminaries, and original works occasionally are still pub-
lished. To this day, theology students in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and India
are taught this form of logic as a basic part of their training.
22
Majmuah-yi Mant.iq [Anthology on logic] (Lucknow: Munsh Naval Kishore, October
1876/Ramadan 1293). This collection is described in John Walbridge, A Nineteenth
Century Indo-Persian Logic Textbook, Islamic Studies (Islamabad) 42:4 (Winter 2003),
pp. 68793.
23
I owe this information to Michael Feener.
24
Abdullah Tasbihi has described to me seeing villagers in Siyalkot, once a major Indian
center of paper manufacture, gather the straw and other vegetable matter left behind
by flooding to use for papermaking.
130 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
25
Franz Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship (Analecta Orien-
talia 24; Rome: Pontificium Institutem Biblicum, 1947), p. 61.
132 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
word and explain it. The student would gloss difficult words and phrases
between the lines and write more extended comments in the margins.26
The students might then collate these marginal notes taken down from
their teachers dictation and publish them in his name as a commentary
usually called a h.a shiya, gloss.
This process sounds mind-numbingly dull, but in the hands of a skillful
teacher it clearly was not. Students were encouraged to raise difficulties
or objections, to which the teacher or other students would respond. A
students status in the eyes of his teachers and other students was largely
dependent on his ability to hold his own in this lively cut-and-thrust.
Written commentaries were often used to supplement the underlying
text. These would not be memorized, but they did serve to explain
and amplify the original textbook for students in their private study
and provide texts for more advanced study of the material. Like modern
textbooks, they also served to extend the reach of the most gifted teachers.
Because the curriculum tended to visit the same topics repeatedly in
greater depth, a succession of commentaries and supercommentaries
was often used to accommodate students at different levels and probably
also as teachers guides. The most famous such series in logic was Katibs
Sun Book, with Tah.tans Qut.b, Jurjans supercommentary Mr Qut.b,
and Siyalkuts Gloss, commonly accompanied in India by Mr Zahids
Gloss on the Qut.b, and Bihars Gloss on Mr Zahid. Read together, such
collections of texts are a written imitation of the lively debate in the
seminary classroom and a preparation for the student who had to be able
to engage successfully in that debate. There is also a genre of textbooks
on debating techniques or dialectic. They are far less common, but they
had the same pattern of textbooks and supercommentaries. Most likely,
they were intended for the use of more advanced students who would
make their careers teaching in the seminaries or perhaps in the royal
courts, both arenas where debates were a popular entertainment. As far
as I know, disputations in this format are no longer held, but the rules of
disputation are reflected in the arguments in texts on us.u l al-fiqh.27
26
See Illustration 2 for a sample. Illustration 3 shows how this form was adapted to
lithographed textbooks.
27
A fact pointed out to me by Khalil Abdur-Rashid. On disputation theory and its
history, see Larry Benjamin Miller, Islamic Disputation Theory: A Study of the Devel-
opment of Dialectic in Islam from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Centuries, Ph.D.
dissertation, Princeton University, 1984.
134 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
Such texts were the product of an educational system that was narrow
but intellectually challenging. Mottahedeh points out that many of the
leading intellectuals of modern Iran were the product of this sort of
education and remarks that although many of them rejected traditional
religion, they invariably remembered their religious education with great
fondness.28
This list includes two works that are not considered part of the Organon
in the Greek tradition: the Rhetoric and the Poetics. The last five comprise
the Five Arts of the applied syllogism. Whereas the Prior Analytics deals
with the syllogism in general, the Islamic logicians assumed that each of
the remaining books Posterior Analytics, Topics, Rhetoric, Sophistical
Refutations, and Poetics dealt with syllogisms using a different kind
of premise and thus yielding a different kind of conclusion. These are
28
Mottahedeh, p. 109 and passim.
136 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
34
Ahmad Hasan, Analogical Reasoning in Islamic Jurisprudence: A Study of the Juridical
Principle of Qiyas (Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 1986). Encyclopaedia of Islam,
2nd ed., s.v., K.iyas.
35
This is particularly true when qiyas, analogy, is used; see Hasan, Analogical Reasoning,
pp. 2425. For a discussion of whether fiqh is a demonstrative science, see Shihab al-Dn
Ah.mad Abd al-Mawjud
al-Quraf, Nafais al-Us.u l f Sharh. al-Wus.u l, vol. 1, ed. Adil
and Al Muh.ammad Maud. (Mecca: Nizar Mus.t.afa al-Baz 1418/1997), pp. 139ff.
36
M. G. Zubaid Ahmad, The Contribution of India to Arabic Literature from Ancient Times
to 1857 (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1967), p. 133.
THE LONG AFTERNOON OF ISLAMIC LOGIC 139
The school logic is a subset of the logic of the philosophers, but the two
differ in emphasis and goals. The school logic never frees itself entirely
from its pedagogical purposes. The school logicians also have little inter-
est in the metaphysical implications of logic. Partly this reflects the ped-
agogical purposes of the school logic, but it probably also reflects the
criticisms made of philosophy by Ghazal and many others. Philosoph-
ical logic texts generally were part of the larger philosophical summas
that the Islamic philosophers tended to write. They also are far more
likely to involve arguments about basic logical principles. Suhraward,
for example, rejected essential definition and condemned advanced logic
as useless shuffling of words. Philosophical logicians also were interested
in aspects of logic with metaphysical implications, such as the categories.
Finally, philosophical logic was commonly harder, with advanced dis-
cussions of such matters as modal logic. Still, this distinction can be
overemphasized, because authors could and did write in both modes
for example, Katib and Tah.tan.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the school logic was related
to other disciplines, particularly us.u l al-fiqh, Kalam, and the Arabic
linguistic sciences. The close relationship of logic to these disciplines,
especially to grammar, is seen in the number of occasions when these
works are found in the same manuscripts or are published together in the
nineteenth-century lithographs. This reflects not only their intellectual
kinship but also the fact that students were studying the subjects at the
same time.
inner life capable of engaging the interest of teachers and students for
century after century.
Recognition in the school tradition of developments in modern logic
has been slow and incomplete. External signs of Western influence appear
very slowly. In the nineteenth-century Indian lithographs on logic and
other seminary subjects, we find numbered notes connecting glosses
to the text, although this device had been used less systematically in
manuscripts. Eventually, copyright notices begin to appear in lithographs
that otherwise are imitations of manuscripts written two centuries ear-
lier. A subcommittee was appointed at Punjab University in Lahore in
the 1890s to devise standard Arab equivalents of the English vocabulary
of traditional logic; the members were Indian scholars clearly at home
with both Islamic and European traditional logic and with both Arabic
and English, but the European logic they were dealing with was Aris-
totelian logic not very different from their own, not the mathematical
logic beginning to develop in Germany and England.37 By the middle of
the twentieth century, Iranian logic books sometimes provided English
equivalents of Arabic logical terms. Books on recent developments in
Western logic begin appearing in Islamic languages in increasing num-
bers throughout the twentieth century, although such works had little
direct influence on the teaching in the seminaries. Their authors were
Western educated and usually not that familiar with logic as practiced
in the seminaries. As a result, their works seem not to have addressed
the concerns of the seminary logicians. The situation was somewhat bet-
ter in Iran, where seminary-trained philosophers taught in the modern
universities, but to this day in Pakistan, for example, there is almost no
contact between the traditional logicians and philosophers of the semi-
naries and the Western-oriented logicians in the philosophy departments
of the colleges and universities.
I cannot resist closing with one unusual exception to this pattern, the
Iraqi Shiite Ayatollah Muh.ammad-Baqir al-S.adr (d. 1980). He was edu-
cated and taught in Najaf, the Shiite university town in central Iraq that
is the chief modern rival of Qom, the Iranian center of Shiite scholar-
ship. S.adr, of the first generation of seminarians to have also received a
37
Chaudhri Ali Gauhar, Glossary of Logical Terms, bound with supporting documents,
Punjab University Library, Oriental Division manuscripts, catalog number Ar h II.45.
THE LONG AFTERNOON OF ISLAMIC LOGIC 141
logic, even when grounded in philosophical reason or reve-
lation passed down with all the fidelity scholars are capable of, does not
guarantee agreement. There were certainly religious issues on which Mus-
lims were willing to risk schism, but there were far more issues on which
reasonable men could disagree, issues that were of intrinsic importance
but over which sincere men could not justify dividing the community.
And therein lies the remarkable tale of the Islamic institutionalization of
disagreement.
38
Falsafatuna, many editions; Our Philosophy, trans. Shams C. Inati (London: Muham-
madi Trust and KPI, 1987). Iqtis.a duna [Our economics], many editions.
39
Al-Usus al-Mant.iqya lil-Istiqra, published in many editions.
8
Asking questions and disagreeing about their answers is at the heart of the
Islamic experience. The first believers and, equally important, the first
unbelievers came to the Prophet with questions. A significant portion
of the Quran and an even larger portion of the hadith consist of answers
to those questions. After the Prophets death, the believers came with
their questions to those who had known the Prophet. Later they came
to those who knew the stories passed down from the first generation of
believers or who were the bearers of the accumulated religious wisdom of
the Islamic community. And still they come with their questions to those
who are reputed to have knowledge. But the answers they are given are
not always the same. And therein lies one of the puzzles and achievements
of medieval Islamic civilization.
three phenomena each in its way relating to the role of
disagreement in Islamic society, have puzzled me. Each relates to the same
underlying feature of the Islamic religion in its premodern expression: a
willingness to institutionalize permanent disagreement.
The first two questions are the subject of this chapter; the third is
addressed in Chapters 9 and 10.
1
Jalal al-Dn al-Suyut., Ikhtilaf al-Madhahib, ed. Abd al-Qayyum b. Muh.ammad-Shaf
al-Bastaw (Cairo: Dar al-Itis.a m, 1989), pp. 1920.
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF DISAGREEMENT 145
2
Some indication of the range of such disagreements can be had from Ibn Rushd,
Bidayat, trans. Nyazee, Distinguished Jurists Primer. See also Hallaq, Shara, pp. 6071
and passim, and idem, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Themes in Islamic
Law 1; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 15077.
146 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
ways. There were also some differences in wording between the various
versions as well as a few larger differences. There was a disagreement,
for example, about whether the Fatih.a, an important prayer that forms
the first chapter of the Quran, the last two chapters, and two other
similar short prayers were properly part of the Quran. Uthman, the
third caliph, is said to have become concerned because disagreements
had arisen about the exact text of the Quran and because so many
of the Companions of the Prophet who had memorized parts of the
Quran had been killed in battle. He appointed a committee to prepare
an official edition of the Quran, and the other versions were destroyed.
This, according to the medieval Islamic accounts, is how we came to
have the Quran that exists today ma bayn al-d.affayn, what is between
the two covers, to use the medieval expression. Although few seriously
questioned the authenticity of Uthmans Quran, the Arabic script of the
seventh century lacked the dots and vowel signs of modern Arabic, so
there was considerable disagreement about the exact text of the Quran
in the early centuries. These mostly concerned rather minor points that
usually did not affect the meaning, such as whether a given verb was
masculine or feminine, active or passive. Such matters could be settled
only by the dots and vowel markings that were only invented later. There
were also some disagreements about grammar and pronunciation based
on scholarly disagreement about the exact nature of the Arabic in which
the Quran was revealed. Finally, there were occasional disagreements
about what the underlying Uthmanic text actually had been. All of these
issues are discussed in great deal in the medieval manuals of the sciences
of the Quran and qiraat, readings that is, Quranic textual variants.
In the end, Muslim scholars came to a remarkable compromise, agree-
ing that there were seven equally authoritative readings of the Quran,
each of which had two slightly different versions. Three additional read-
ings were of slightly lesser authority, and four more of still less authority
than those. This diversity was said to be a sign of Gods bounty to Mus-
lims, and all of the seven versions were and are considered to be authentic
and to derive from the Prophet. To this day, there are Quran reciters who
can chant the Holy Book according to all seven versions.3
3
The matter of the editing of the Quran and the seven qiraat is a matter of considerable
historical and theological controversy, and virtually every point of the account I have
given could be and has been challenged on historical or theological grounds. My
148 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
account is mostly based on the accounts of jam al-Quran, the editing of the Quran,
in the medieval Islamic manuals of Quranic sciences, of which Suyut.s al-Itqan f
Ulum al-Quran is the best known. An account of the history of Western scholarship
on the matter is found in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v., K.uran 3. Western
scholars have disagreed among themselves, placing the origins of the final text of the
Quran anywhere from the Prophets lifetime to the ninth century, with most thinking
that the emergence of the final text of the Quran was a more gradual process than was
portrayed in the various (and inconsistent) medieval accounts of the collection of the
Quran in the caliphates of Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman.
Whereas the background to Uthmans Quran can be disputed, there is little doubt
about the historicity of the Seven Readings. These were popularized by Ibn Mujahid
in the tenth century as a way of bringing order to the very complex disputes among
schools of Quran reciters. An interesting account of an attempt to make recordings of
all ten versions and the resulting controversy is found in Labb as-Sad, The Recited
Koran: A History of the First Recorded Version, trans. Bernard Weiss, M. A. Rauf, and
Morroe Berger (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1975). Nowadays, however, the reading used
in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is favored almost everywhere, partly because of massive
distribution of high-quality printed Qurans by Saudi Arabia, and printed copies of
the Quran using other readings are uncommon in most places.
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF DISAGREEMENT 149
small group of individuals with the legal training to ascertain Islamic law
for themselves the mujtahids and a much larger number of people
who do not have such training or who do but choose not to use it
the muqallids. Now, at any given time there might be hundreds of Shiite
mujtahids, but in practice, only a few of them will give legal rulings to
others. Each muqallid is under an obligation to seek out the most learned
of the mujtahids for such legal advice as he needs. An individual who is
followed by a significant number of muqallids is called a marja taqld
a source of emulation, as it is sometimes translated. Now we return
to our theme: Shiites are not bothered by the fact that there may be a
number of such supreme maraji, and an individual believer may follow
any one of them he chooses. The Iranian government, for example, has
pressed the claim of Ayatollah Khamanei as marja but has been unable
to prevent pious Iranians from following maraji who live in Iraq or even
maraji who are in disfavor or imprisoned in Iran.4
Contrary conclusions in different disciplines. The thirteenth-century
Iranian scientist and scholar Qut.b al-Dn Shraz, the Allama, very
learned, as he was later known, wrote in a number of disciplines, both
rational and religious. Although a philosopher, a scientist, and a great
scholar, he seems to have been quite content to pursue these disciplines
independently, without harmonizing their conclusions or fitting them
into a single larger intellectual framework. In particular, toward the end
of his life he wrote a large survey of the sciences in Persian called The Pearly
Crown, much of it consisting of translated extracts from Arabic works of
other authors. The bulk of this work was a survey of philosophy, science,
and mathematics. Later, he added a long appendix in which he treated
ethics and political science, fiqh, Kalam theology, and mystical practice
and theology. This work contains three comprehensive and incompatible
accounts of the nature of the universe: one philosophical, following
Ibn Sna, Suhraward, and the Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammuna; one
4
On the institution of the marja taqld, see Ahmad Kazemi Mousavi, Religious Authority
in Shiite Islam: From the Office of Mufti to the Institution of Marja (Kuala Lumpur:
International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1996); Moojan Momen,
An Introduction to Shii Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiism (Oxford:
George Ronald, 1985), pp. 184207. On the actual functioning of the institution, see
several articles in Linda S. Walbridge, ed., The Most Learned of the Shia: The Institution
of the Marja Taqlid (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), particularly chap. 8 and
12 by Talib Aziz and chap. 13 by Linda S. Walbridge.
150 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
atomistic, following the Kalam of Fakhr al-Dn Raz; and one monistic,
following the wah.dat al-wujud tradition of Ibn Arab. There were also
two accounts of politics, one based on the Iranian practical tradition of
the mirrors for princes literature and one Platonic, a translation of a
work by Farab. Qut.b al-Dn seems to have simply thought that it was
natural that pursuing the truth using different methods would produce
different results.5
The study of Ghazals thought has been hindered by similar difficul-
ties. His works in different disciplines seem almost to have been written
by different people. The authenticity of The Niche for Lights, an essay on
mystical metaphysics, has been questioned because some of its doctrines
do not appear elsewhere in Ghazals works.6 There are also inconsisten-
cies between his use of and his attacks on logic, philosophy, and theology.
So who is the real Ghazal? All of them, it seems.
i could give more examples, but these are sufficient for our
purposes. The point is that medieval Muslims were content to accept
equally authoritative versions of things that we might think could have
only one correct version: Islamic law, the text of the Quran, authoritative
collections of the Prophets sayings, even accounts of the nature of real-
ity. The principle applied also to leadership. In Europe there is always,
in theory, a rightful holder of any post a rightful king of Scotland, for
example. In Islam, except theoretically among Shiites, this is not the case.
There are rulers in Islam, and there are religious obligations that apply
specifically to rulers, but there is no rightful ruler before he becomes
ruler. Instead, a rightful ruler is a man who has come to power, who has
the minimum qualifications of sound body and mind, and who rules
according to Islamic standards. It is a remarkable phenomenon: a will-
ingness to tolerate equally authoritative alternative versions of religious
truth.
5
Qut.b al-Dn Shraz, Durrat al-Taj li-Ghurrat al-Dubaj: Bakhsh, 1, ed. Sayyid
Muh.ammad Mishkat (5 vols. in 1; Tehran: Majlis, 13171320/19391942), on philosophy;
Bakhsh 2, ed. H . asan Mishkan T.abas (Tehran: Majlis, 1324/1946), covering arithmetic,
astronomy, and music; Bakhsh-i H . ikmat-i Amal wa-Sayr wa-Suluk, ed. Mahdukht
Banu Huma, on practical philosophy and mysticism.
6
Al-Ghazal, The Niche for Lights, trans. David Buchman (Islamic Translation Series;
Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1998).
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF DISAGREEMENT 151
which Islam found itself. No religious scholar could doubt that there was
a true and single Law revealed by God to the Prophet Muh.ammad, but
our knowledge of the Law is imperfect. Fiqh is a delicate web of infer-
ences whose strength comes from a deep understanding of the texts on
which it is based and from the efforts of dozens of generations of scholars
patiently weighing and piecing together thousands of bits of evidence,
employing all the tools of Arabic linguistics and rhetorical and logical
analysis. An education in which logic and linguistics are studied dialecti-
cally may have sharpened the mind of the student, but it also taught him
a good deal of humility as he sought to divine the will of God. Sincere
disagreement under such circumstances is inevitable and shows only that
we are servants before God, not His privileged counselors.
the madrasa system, with its rationalistic curriculum, pros-
pered for some six centuries, dominating religious education in the
Islamic world and deeply influencing parallel systems of education. In the
nineteenth century, it abruptly collided with the forces of modernism
colonial administrators, Christian missionaries, Muslim reformers, and
Muslim revivalists. Where it survived at all, it was usually a shadow of
its former self, reduced in wealth and prestige and often warped by the
conflicting demands of modernism and its own past. Islamic education
was swept up in a debate embracing European colonial administrators
and intellectuals and parents in virtually every Islamic country. It was a
debate that the madrasa professors were ill equipped to participate in.
PART THREE
1
Leitner, Indigenous Education. On returning to England, he established the Oriental
Institute in Woking, which did not survive him. He died in Bonn in 1899.
157
158 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
with modern science and other European subjects. They decided that the
most practical solution would be to establish a modest English language
college and university system that would begin training Indians for roles
in the civil service and technical professions like medicine and engineer-
ing and that also would supply teachers for the soon-to-be-improved
vernacular educational systems. The system promptly metastasized and
by the early 1880s was grinding out masses of unemployable semiliterates
who considered it beneath their dignity to take any but the government
desk jobs they were unqualified to fill. It was a problem that has not been
wholly solved to this day. In the meantime, the traditional educational
systems collapsed as parents struggled to get their children into the more
prestigious English schools.2
In 1882, the British educational authorities in the Punjab, an area that
had been under British control for less than forty years, sent out a request
for interested parties to submit memos with recommendations for deal-
ing with what already was a crisis. Leitners massive book was his response.
In damning detail and dripping sarcasm, he demonstrated, district by
district, that in less than four decades, British educational administra-
tion in the Punjab had reduced the number of children attending school
by more than a third.3 Leitner pointed out that there had been seven
educational systems functioning in the Punjab before British rule: ele-
mentary and advanced Islamic schools, using Arabic and Persian, which
was the scholastic madrasa system that we have discussed in previous
chapters; Hindu and Sikh schools, using Sanskrit and classical Punjabi;
aristocratic tutorial schools, using Persian and catering to the traditional
political elites, mostly but not entirely Muslim; and several vernacular
2
Syed Mahmood, A History of English Education in India (Aligarth: M.A.O. College,
1895), gives a more sympathetic account of English education in India, with extensive
citations of documents and earlier writers. He was the son of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan,
a famous Indian educational reformer. In general, the documentation of education in
British is extensive and lucid, making it a particularly rewarding case study of education
in the era of imperialism.
3
Leitner, Indigenous Education, p. i. The case is documented in the 200 pages of part I of
the book. Part II consists of detailed district-by-district statistics on education, part III
is a summary of the statistics, part IV notes on part I, and part V lists teachers and other
indigenous intellectuals in the Punjab. There are also fifty pages of extracts from British
Indian government documents relating to Punjab education and seven appendices on
various relevant topics, including ninety-three pages of samples of various alphabets
and scripts used in western India. The book is a mine of information.
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SCHOLASTIC REASON IN ISLAM 159
leitners experience was not unique. what lifts leitners book
above the level of a particularly entertaining documentation of colonial
administrative incompetence is his analysis of the earlier educational
systems and the process by which they were undermined and replaced
with a dysfunctional modern system. Although there were some features
peculiar to India the caste system, for example, led to universities pro-
ducing engineers unwilling to work with machinery and doctors unwill-
ing to touch patients the general pattern was duplicated to one degree
or another across the Islamic world and, I suspect, in other areas that
came under the influence of European colonial administrations. In the
period from 1757, when the Battle of Plassy put a large Islamic population
under British control, through the years following World War I, when
the British and French occupied the remaining Ottoman territories in
the Arab parts of the Middle East and the Soviet Union consolidated
its control over Central Asia, virtually all of the Islamic world came
under direct or indirect European control, resulting in the supplanting
of traditional education by systems modeled on Western systems. Even
in areas that were not occupied by the Europeans, such as Iran and
the central Ottoman lands prior to World War I, governments desper-
ate to protect themselves against superior European military technol-
ogy began establishing European-style schools or adding European ele-
ments to existing schools. Iran, which managed to maintain a precarious
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SCHOLASTIC REASON IN ISLAM 161
world and that what had gone wrong had something to do with Islam.
It was more difficult to determine what this something was. There were
four possibilities. First, Islam as such was incompatible with modernity
and needed to be discarded, at least as the practical basis of the actions of
the community. Second, Islam could be the basis of a successful society
if it were modernized and made compatible with modern conditions.
Third, Muslims needed to restore Islam to the pure form of the early cen-
turies, thereby recreating the conditions for its original success. Fourth,
things could stay as they were, which not surprisingly was usually the
option preferred by the Islamic clergy. Thus, the traditional educational
institutions were also being battered from three sides by intellectual rivals
who criticized the foundations of the intellectual world that the Islamic
clergy had constructed over the centuries.
Opposition from modernists. The suspicion with which colonial admin-
istrators viewed the Islamic clergy, their schools, their scholastic system
of thought, and even the religion of Islam itself is scarcely surprising.
Traditional Islam was a world largely closed to Europeans, who also saw
the Muslims, with some justice, as being especially prone to disloyalty
to the colonial state. British administrators in India tended to believe
that Muslims had been mainly responsible for the bloody revolt in 1857,
which the British called the Indian Mutiny and which nationalist histo-
rians now call the War of Independence. Although the evidence is not
entirely clear for the Indian Mutiny, it certainly is true that Muslims
fought long and bloody wars of resistance in many places, sometimes
led and almost always encouraged by clerics. As far as many colonial
administrators were concerned, the Islamic religious establishment and
the masses who followed them should be modernized into harmlessness
as quickly as possible.
Administrators were not motivated only by political concerns; they
genuinely believed, with good reason, that the old educational system
needed to be modernized. Ptolemaic astronomy, Galenic medicine, and
Aristotelian physics were still taught in the madrasas.5 The madrasas
almost never taught the modern European languages that were required
5
Leitner, Indigenous Education, pp. 74, 7678, which lists such books as Chaghmns
s Khula.sat al-H
manual of astronomy, Ptolemys Almagest, Amil . isab, Summary of
Arithmetic on arithmetic, and Ibn Snas Canon of Medicine and its commentaries as
works studied at Deoband or the older madrasas. The textbooks of natural philosophy
and metaphysics also all predated serious intellectual contact with modern Europe.
164 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
for good jobs. Few of those involved with educational issues in the
colonial-era states, even in places like Iran and Turkey that were not
occupied, doubted that major reforms were needed. The question was
how.
One of the most interesting expressions of this debate took place
in British India in the 1820s and 1830s and is known as the Anglicist-
Orientalist controversy.6 The British had first come to India as traders
in the seventeenth century at a time when the wealth and power of the
Mogul Empire dwarfed that of any contemporary European state. It is
clear from their writings that they viewed the Moguls with some awe.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, with British power firmly
established, Englishmen in India still did not necessarily see themselves as
inherently superior to the Indians. The British not uncommonly married
into Indian families of appropriate social status. After 1757, the British
East India Company ruled a large part of northeastern India as a corporate
contractor to the Mogul emperor, a situation that nominally continued
until the Indian Mutiny a century later. Men like Warren Hastings, the
dominant political figure in British India at that time, saw it as natural that
the British should behave as the heirs of the old Mogul state, patronizing
the traditional arts, scholarship, and institutions, and even managing
Hindu religious festivals. He professionalized the British Indian civil
service, requiring officials to know Persian, the traditional language of
administration; developing law codes based on the older Hindu and
Muslim legal systems;7 and generally behaving like a proper Indian ruler.
In return, the Indians initially treated the British as they did any other
new foreign rulers, attempting to civilize them and expecting the British
to learn to behave in a proper Indian manner. A Parsi poet in Bombay
spent years writing a three-volume epic poem in Persian doggerel called
the George-Nameh,which recounted the British conquest of India. The
British authorities in Calcutta printed it, and although he received a polite
letter from the young Queen Victoria, he never received the generous
6
The key documents can be found in Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, The Great Indian
Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 17811843
(London Studies on South Asia 18; Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999).
7
For a critique of this enterprise of legal reform in India, see Hallaq, Shara, pp. 37195.
The two following chapters of his book deal with similar legal issues in the colonial
and modern Middle East.
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SCHOLASTIC REASON IN ISLAM 165
8
James Mill, The History of British India, 6 vols. (London: Baldwick and Craddock,
1829).
9
Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994),
and Martin I. Moir, Douglas M. Peers, and Lynn Zastoupil, eds., J. S. Mills encounter
with India (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). For Mills papers relating to
India, see John Stuart Mill, Writings on India, ed. John M. Robson, Martin Moir, and
Zawahir Moir (Collected works of John Stuart Mill 30; London: Routledge, 1990),
particularly pp. 1418 on education.
10
Wilberforces efforts to open India to evangelization recur repeatedly in his biography;
Robert Isaac and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, vol. 2 (London:
John Murray, 1839), pp. 2428, 17072, 392ff.
166 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the orien-
talists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that
a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native litera-
ture of India and Arabia. . . . The question now before us is simply whether,
when it is in our power to teach this language [English, in colleges], we
shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books
on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when
we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal
confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the worse,
and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we
shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SCHOLASTIC REASON IN ISLAM 167
11
Zaspoutil and Moir, Debate, pp. 1656; for the full document, see pp. 16272. There is
a good deal more in the same vein. On Macaulay in India, see John Clive, Macaulay:
The Shaping of the Historian (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 289478.
168 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
12
Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis: The Defence, Rethinking and Rejection of Sufism
in the Modern World (Richmond: Curzon, 1999).
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SCHOLASTIC REASON IN ISLAM 169
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thus were a long
period of retreat for the traditional clergy and their scholastic rational-
ism. Much of their financial and social support was lost with the collapse
of older social and political orders. Secularists saw them as a barrier to
modernization, while committed Muslims, both those who wished to
bring Islam into harmony with modern Western norms and those who
wished to restore the purity of early medieval Islam, criticized the clergy
for their failure to respond successfully to the challenges of modernism.
Indeed, the traditional clergy had found it difficult to respond to moder-
nity with the same success with which they had faced the challenges of
empire a thousand years earlier. The reasons for this, and the particular
issues they face, are discussed in Chapter 10.
10
That said, the observer cannot fail to sense that something has changed.
In the Middle Ages, the Islamic acceptance of institutionalized disagree-
ment took place in the context of a general consensus about the structure
and functioning of Islamic society. In the contemporary Islamic world,
the range of disagreement is far broader, and there is not even agree-
ment about the extent to which disagreement should be tolerated. I take
Pakistan as my usual example, because in many ways it is an extreme case
in which the phenomena I am discussing can be clearly seen. There are
strong, or at least loud, voices opposing the toleration of even the degree
of disagreement institutionalized by the consensus of the learned in pre-
modern times recognition of other madhhabs and de facto acceptance
of Shiism, for example. Awareness and tolerance of this institutionalized
diversity is also slipping away in more subtle ways. Beyond these issues
is one even larger: the legitimacy of culture, Islamic or otherwise, not
derived from the norms of universal Islam.
Let us consider some concrete examples. Pakistani Islamiyat textbooks
based on the government Islamic studies curriculum typically do not
mention the existence of the four legal schools or the complex and
tentative way in which Islamic law is actually deduced. Instead, they
portray a legal system that sprang full-grown and uniform from the
brows of the Companions of the Prophet. To students taught from such
textbooks, disagreement about matters of Islamic law can appear only to
be motivated by perversity. Likewise, the Islamiyat books are generally
legalistic and Sunni in orientation and have little to say about the other
traditions of Islam: ignoring Shiism and the great issues of early Islam
that gave rise to it and ignoring even Sufism, the dominant spiritual
tradition in Pakistan.1 Such curricula and textbooks would be comical
1
Islamiyat is the term used in Pakistan for the required Islamic studies courses in
schools and colleges. Local publishers produce cram books based on the official cur-
riculum. These books shamelessly plagiarize each other and are riddled with errors
of fact, interpretation, and omission. An example of this dismal genre is S. M. Dogar,
comp. and ed., Towards Islamyat for C.S.S. Banking and Finance Service Commission,
Public Service Commission, and Other Competitive Exams (Lahore: Dogar [ca. 2000]).
This particular book is intended for candidates seeking to enter the civil service elite,
which makes its failings more serious, though in fairness to the hack responsible for
the book, he was only following the official syllabus. The treatment of other religions
is even worse; the author is under the impression that Roman Catholics consider the
Virgin Mary to be a member of the Trinity (p. 45) and that Christians are divided into
three sects: Orientalists, Roman Catholics, and Protestants (p. 46).
172 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
were it not for the fact that when students trained by them confront
Muslims of other varieties, they almost inevitably view such people as
willfully perverting the true Islam.
A more general example is the effort to adopt Islamic law as the basic
law of the state. This is not, as one might suppose, the restoration of a
situation that existed during the Middle Ages. An early form of Islamic
law prevailed, of course, under the Prophet and during the reigns of the
first four caliphs, but Islamic law in its fully developed form emerged
only in the eighth and ninth centuries. Islamic law almost never bound
the state and was never the only law of the state for a variety of good
reasons. Few rulers were willing to deliver the conduct of the legal system
completely into the hands of the clergy, nor were the clergy willing to
relinquish their legal authority to rulers of very uncertain piety. The bulk
of Islamic law was concerned with religious practices that had nothing
to do with the state, and most of the rest was law governing voluntary
contracts between individuals, such as sales and marriages. Many areas
of law of close concern to the state were barely dealt with in Islamic law,
notably criminal law and taxation. In each area of the Islamic world,
there was also customary law, usually in several different forms and often
predating Islam. Whatever religious scholars may have wished, important
areas of life such as taxation and landlord-tenant relations were generally
governed by customary law, not Islamic law. Finally, the enforcement
of one legal school by the state would do violence to the consciences of
clergy and ordinary believers who followed another school.
There were religious courts of varying degrees of authority, and a
pious ruler, like any other conscientious believer, would attempt to act in
accordance with Islamic norms, if only to bolster his usually very uncer-
tain legitimacy. Even a ruler whose conscience was not much troubled by
Islam probably the majority would try not to offend the sensibilities
of the pious unnecessarily. Nonetheless, the state followed its own neces-
sities and enforced its own laws. As a result, attempts to convert Islamic
law into the law of the state were rare and generally not very successful or
long lasting for example, the British attempt to administer a legal system
for Muslims based on H . anaf law in Bengal in the eighteenth century, a
system that is an ancestor of the legal system of modern Pakistan. In both
British Bengal and Pakistan, well-intentioned attempts to base the law of
the state on Islamic law ran afoul of disagreements about the content of
A CHAOS OF CERTITUDES 173
Islamic law and the tendency of state legal systems to evolve according to
their own inner logic. This happened even in Ottoman Turkey, probably
the most successful example of the use of Islamic law as the basis of a
complete legal system.
The greatest source of disagreement in the Islamic world is culture
not directly derived from the Islam of the old books. I am not talking
here about Western and global culture, but about the diverse local cul-
tures of the Islamic lands. The classic example is Iran, where two distinct
cultural traditions have coexisted for fourteen centuries: an Islamic cul-
ture, whose focus is religious and universalist, and an Iranian culture
embodied in the Persian language, Persian poetry, and the nationalist
traditions of the Iranian monarchy. These two traditions are very differ-
ent and have always coexisted in a tension that is more often fruitful than
destructive. Analogous situations exist in all Islamic countries, where
the local culture may express itself in ways that have nothing to do
with Islam the kite-flying holiday of Basant in Lahore, for example,
whose origins are probably Hindu but which is now a purely secular
holiday. The local culture may also take a religious form, resulting in
local Islamic cultural features, such as the colorful Sufi shrine culture
of Punjab and Sindh or the strict segregation of women practiced by
the tribal peoples of Afghanistan, the North-West Frontier Province, and
Balochistan.
I will return to these topics, but for the moment I remark only that
attempts to use Islam as a tool to revitalize Islamic society have made
these underlying issues objects of greater controversy.
The rise of neo-H. anbalism. A rigorous and literalist Islam deriving from
the H. anbal tradition and its Wahhab offshoot has become increasingly
influential. This movement, commonly called Salaf, of the pious
forefathers, is characterized by a literal interpretation of Islamic texts
and a degree of intolerance both toward other Islamic legal schools and
toward cultural traits, whether Islamic or Western, not based on Islamic
tradition. From the beginning, the H . anbals generally preferred to follow
the letter of the text rather than reason in deriving law. Although the
H. anbals in the past were the smallest of the madhhabs, they are becoming
increasingly influential. Partly this results from the historical accident
that Saudi Arabia is predominantly H . anbal, and the Saudis, both the
government and individuals, have generously supported Islamic causes
around the world, thus spreading the influence of H . anbal thought.
There is another reason, however, for H.anbal influence in the modern
world. As literalists, the H. anbals can offer the simple and very convincing
argument that something ought to be done or not done because there is
a Quranic verse or a hadith that commands or forbids it. The argument
that the Quran and the hadith are the only legitimate sources of Islamic
practice is almost as compelling that something not commanded by the
Quran or hadith ought not to be done. Most Muslim scholars throughout
the centuries have rejected these arguments, holding that individual texts
must be understood within a much larger textual, intellectual, and social
context. However, the arguments against the Hanbali position are not
simple ones and can only be understood on the basis of the complex
intellectual heritage of medieval Islam. And so, the Hanbali argument
tends to prevail in popular debate.
latter including family law. Areas of direct concern to the state, such as
criminal law and taxation, continued to be handled by the state, so that
their treatment in Islamic law is rudimentary. It is no accident that the
most successful instance of modern application of Islamic law has been in
banking, the so-called Islamic economics, because in medieval times,
Islamic law was the legal system governing relations among merchants,
and thus it had a highly developed system of contract law.
But more fundamental is the question of whose law is to be applied.
In premodern times, Islamic law was essentially a voluntary legal system,
much like the systems of accepted practices and professional ethics that
govern the dealings of businesses within particular industries. Merchants
agreed to accept the jurisdiction of a particular legal school when they
went to a legal scholar to have a contract drafted or a dispute mediated.
And, of course, there were four major Sunni systems of law, along with
the legal systems of the various other Islamic sects. Moreover, there is the
problem of the legal rights of non-Muslims. Are they to be governed by
their own legal systems or by an Islamic legal system whose authority they
do not recognize? And what about the problem of legislation? Traditional
Islamic law did not recognize human legislation as a source of law, but
it is difficult to conceive of a modern legal system that does not involve
new legislation. One can scarcely imagine deducing all the complexities
of modern law commercial and environmental regulation, to take two
examples from the materials of the Quran, hadith, and medieval legal
consensus.
Any Islamization of the law of the state would have to take account
of these difficulties, problems for which there is no obvious solution in
traditional Islamic legal thought.
Pluralism and toleration. Closely related is the problem of pluralism.
Earlier Islamic societies dealt fairly well with the question of pluralism,
usually through some variety of what in Ottoman contexts is called the
millet system. Two assumptions made this possible, both problematic
in modern or, for that matter, in modern Islamist contexts. First,
religious and ethnic communities had the right to live according to their
own laws and customs. Jews and Christians should be allowed to live
according to Jewish or Christian laws, with their internal disputes being
settled by Jewish or Christian leaders. Shiites in a Sunni society should
be able to live by Shiite law, more or less independent of the Sunni
A CHAOS OF CERTITUDES 179
own a slave or take four wives, and even in the classical period of Islamic
law these practices were tolerated as social necessities rather than positive
goods.
More difficult are cases where Islamic law is in direct conflict with
contemporary sensibilities or practical needs. Examples include the pro-
hibition of giving or taking interest, a fundamental feature of modern
financial systems, or the restrictions on the rights of women and minori-
ties. In the former case, a whole discipline of Islamic economics has
developed to allow participation in modern economic life while observ-
ing the letter of the medieval law.
Most difficult are the cases of legal norms that unquestionably have
their bases in the Quran and the instructions of the Prophet. An example
might be the h.ajj pilgrimage, held each year in a specific ten-day period,
sometimes in the middle of summer. In the nineteenth century, perhaps
seventy thousand pilgrims went in a good year; now there are three
million annually, and the number increases every year, even though
they are restricted by the Saudi government. Mass deaths from fire and
stampede have become routine. The obvious solution would be to allow
the obligation of h.ajj to be fulfilled by pilgrimage at any time of the year,
but it is very difficult to know how this would be justified under Islamic
law. For Salafs, the list of such non-negotiable difficulties in Islamic law is
longer, because they are likely to reject some of the practical compromises
developed in the Middle Ages.
So how are adjustments to be made? There have been several app-
roaches. Many Muslims simply ignore the issues, observing such aspects
of the law as are relevant to their conditions and ignoring the rest, but
that is hardly an intellectual solution. Others, such as the Taliban of
Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, the Wahhabs of Saudi Arabia, cling
to the letter of the law as they understand it, at the cost of modernity
when necessary. By contrast, the government of the Islamic Republic of
Iran has often invoked the principle of practical necessity to get around
legal difficulties. Others the Islamic economists and, perhaps we should
add, the couturiers of Cairo, Karachi, and Istanbul have argued that
the resources of traditional Islamic law can be adapted perfectly well to
modern conditions and have produced mortgages, bank accounts, and
womens high fashion compatible with Islamic legal standards. Then
A CHAOS OF CERTITUDES 183
there are both modernists and fundamentalists who argue that the com-
plexities of medieval Islamic legal thought should be discarded outright.
The modern Turkish Republic and, in practice, many other Islamic states
have followed the usual medieval practice of restricting Islamic law to
private life to one degree or another. Still others advocate reopening the
gate of ijtihad, reverting to the situation in the first centuries of Islamic
history and allowing legal scholars to revisit closed legal issues. The fact
that those advocating such a reopening are commonly advocating some
idiosyncratic personal interpretation or government ideology should,
however, give reformers pause.
thus, coming to the end of our story, we see reason now
reason in its protean Western form playing an ambiguous role in
the Islamic community. On the one hand, the ulama, the clergy, the
traditional guardians of scholastic reason, have been marginalized by
advocates of other conceptions of reason. On the other hand, the mod-
ernists have rejected the scholastic conception of reason, with its narrow
focus on the exposition of revealed texts. Instead, the modernists appeal
to a scientific or utilitarian conception of reason in which religion and
revelation, like everything else, are to be judged on the basis of verifia-
bility and practical utility. On the other side, the new fundamentalists
demand consistency in the systematic imitation of the Islamic law of the
Muslim community of Medina in the seventh century. Although Muslim
legal scholars considered this approach as early as the eighth century and
found it wanting, it has a powerful appeal in an age of mass literacy and
technical education. The resultant fundamentalism has its analogues in
the other great religious traditions, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism
in particular.
All of these approaches have obvious difficulties, so none has been
wholly successful. In a sense, part of the difficulty is that the rationalism
or, at least, the concern for consistency of the modern world sits
uneasily with the delicate compromises with inconsistency and disagree-
ment found in the medieval Islamic legal system and the larger medieval
Islamic religious synthesis.
As a non-Muslim, it is not my place to say which of these positions is
right or wrong or what Muslims ought to do to restore the unity of their
184 GOD AND LOGIC IN ISLAM
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Abhar, Athr al-Dn, logician, Eisagoge, Arab Sciences, 112. See also Religious Sciences
1267, 131 Arabic, in India, 158; script, 39, 131
Abu Bakr, caliph, 4 Aristotle, and Islamic philosophy, 22, 76,
Abu H . anfa, founder of legal school, 478 913, 956, 125; and logic, 107, 115, 1367;
Abu Yusuf al-Kuf, student of Abu H . anfa, and religion, 60, 63, 65; and science, 96,
478 101; Works of: De Anima, 78; De
Afghanistan, 170 Interpretatione, 135; Nicomachean Ethics,
Ahl al-Ray, people of opinion, early legal 75; Organon, 125, 135; Poetics, 57, 135;
scholars, 48 Politics, 64; Posterior Analytics, 135; Prior
Ah.mad b. H . anbal, hadith scholar, 43, 51, 66 Analytics, 124, 135; Rhetoric, 113, 135, 138;
Ahmad Khan, Sir Syed, Indian educationist, Sophistical Refutations, 135; Topics, 135;
158 translations, 56, 135
Akhbars, literalist Shiite legal school, 53 Aristotle, pseudo-, Theology of Aristotle, 68,
Alchemy, 90, 97 69
Alcohol, and minorities, 179 Art, and romanticism, 25
Alexander the Great, and philosophy, 64 Arts, Five, forms of inference, 107, 113, 1357
Alexandria Library, burning of, 3031 Ashar, Abul-H. asan, theologian, 9, 512;
Al b. Ab T.a lib, 146, 148 Highlights of the Polemic against Deviators
Allah, 94. See also God and Innovations, 117
Allegorical Interpretation, 72, 76, 80, 85, 94. Asharism, theological school, 53, 66, 76, 83,
See also Interpretation 125
Al-. See following element Astronomy, Greek, 567; European, 97, 101;
America, Muslims in, 184, 185 Islamic, 989, 101, 110, 126, 167
, Baha al-Dn, mathematician,
Amil Atomism, Kalam, 125
Khula.sat al-H . isab, Summary of Augustine, Saint, City of God, 64
Arithmetic, 163 Avempace. See Ibn Bajja
Amr Kabr, cent. Iranian prime minister, 167 Averroes. See Ibn Rushd
Amr b. al-As . , Arab general, 3031 Avesta, 62
Anachronism, in hadith, 36, 39 Avicenna. See Ibn Sna
Analogy, in law, 4950, 1167, 138 al-Azhar University, 128
Ancient Schools, of Islamic law, 4850
Anglicans, 5 Baathists, and Islam, 170
Anglicist-Orientalist Debate, 26, 1647 Bacon, Francis, on classification, 445
Anthropomorphism, in Quran, 51 Balagha. See Rhetoric
Antisemitism, Islamic, 9 Barhebraeus, Eastern Christian historian, 31
Aquinas, Thomas, 17, 70, 76, 123 Being and Becoming, in Plato, 59
203
204 INDEX
Ibn al-Nadm, bibliographer, al-Fihrist, 55 Iran, 11, 189, 128, 1612, 173; philosophy in,
Ibn al-Qift., on Alexandria library, 30 903; logic textbooks, 128, 140; education
Ibn al-S.alah., hadith scholar, Sciences of the in, 1213, 135, 1601, 174; Islamic Republic,
Hadith, 36 16970, 182
Ibn Bajja, Spanish Islamic philosopher, 70, Iraq, 49, 174
73 Irrationality 17
Ibn Kammuna, Jewish philosopher, 149 Islamism, 173
Ibn Khaldun, 36, 107, 119 Islamiyat, Pakistani religious curriculum,
Ibn Mad.a , grammarian, Refutation of the 171
Grammarians, 534 Ismailis, 67, 89
Ibn Mujahid, Quran textual scholar, 147 Isnad, chain of authorities of hadith, 345, 37,
Ibn Qudama, theologian, Censure of 39, 434, 47; in classifying hadith, 43
Speculative Theology, 53 Istanbul, logic textbooks printed in, 128
Ibn Rushd, 68, 82, 86, 934; as Farabian Italian School, Greek philosophers, 58, 92
political philosopher, 70, 73, 85; works:
commentary on Aristotles Rhetoric, 113; Jefferson, Thomas, 21
The Decisive Treatise, 73, 75, 76, 80, 81, 84; Jesus Christ, 24
Incoherence of the Incoherence, 83 Jews, 18, 178
Ibn Sna, 67, 72, 77, 889, 101, 149; John Chrysostom, Byzantine preacher, 62
Aristotelianism of, 901, 95; logic of, 115, John the Grammarian, Byzantine
120, 125, 135, 136; works: Canon of Medicine, philosopher, 3031
163; The Healing, 113, 124, 136; Hints and Judaism, 61
Admonitions, 1257, 135 Judges, as source of law, 48
Ibn Taymya, 5, 53; on logic, 9, 115, 125 Jurisprudence. See Us.u l al-Fiqh
Ibn T.ufayl, Spanish philosopher, H . ayy ibn Jurists, 13, 71, 812
Yaqz.a n, 70, 738, 80, 82 Jurjan, Sharf, author of textbooks, 110, 127,
Ijma, consensus, as source of authority, 35, 128; Mr Qut.b, 133
1434, 178, 181 Justice, and Mutazilites, 51
Ijtihad, independent legal judgment, 1834 Juwayn, Imam al-H . aramayn, theologian, A
Ikhwan al-S.afa. See Epistles of the Brethren of Guide to Conclusive Proofs for the Principles
Purity of Belief, 118
Il-Khanids, Mongol rulers, and science, 98
Illuminationism, Neoplatonic philosophical Kalam, 81, 89, 120, 152; and rationalism,
school, 91 5053, 103; and philosophy, 57, 66, 72, 149;
Imagination, and prophecy, 79, 80 and logic, 108, 110, 1179, 139. See also
Imamate, 66 Theology
India, 18, 128; British, 163, 172; education in, Kant, Immanuel, and relativism, 23
26, 157, 15860, 1647, 174; logic in Kashif al-Ghit.a , Al, modern Islamic
curriculum, 1212, 1289 logician, 120
Indonesia, 174, 184 Katib, Najm al-Dn Dabran, logician, 139;
Inference, 110; in Islamic law, 423, 48 works: H . ikmat al-Ayn, 127; Shamsya,
Institutions, and logic, 11920 1268, 131, 133, 136
Intellects, 769, 92 Khalfa. See Caliph
Interest and Usury, 182 Khamanei, Ali, Iranian supreme leader, 149
Internet, 176 Kind, Abu Yusuf Yaqub, philosopher, 647
Interpretation, of Quran and hadith, 5, 117, Kingly Craft, 75
152, 184; of Bible 176. See also Allegorical Kingsley, Peter, historian of philosophy, 58
Interpretation Kneale, William and Martha, The
Intuition, 72, 92 Development of Logic, 109
Ionian physicists, Greek philosophers, and Knowledge, 3132, 92. See also Epistemology
religion, 58 Kurd, Faraj Allah Zak, Cairo publisher, 128
INDEX 207
Laity, in contemporary Islam, 174 Madrasas, 90, 146, 158, 1612, 174; curricula,
Languages, European, in madrasas, 1634 96, 989, 113, 1212, 142, 151, 1523; science
Latin, translations from Arabic, 86 in, 98, 163
Law, and religion, 701, 81; and philosophy, Magic, 61, 90, 97
75, 78, 89; in colonial states, 162, 164 Mahdi, Muhsin, on Farab, 69
Law, Islamic, 152; and scholasticism, 278; Mahmut III, Ottoman Sultan, 167
sources of, 31, 37, 138, 145; and philosophy, Mahood, Syed, Indian educationist, A
28, 66, 73; Shiite, 1489; contemporary History of English Education in India, 158
attitudes to, 1713, 17683 Maimonides, Jewish philosopher, 70, 73
Lawgiver, Virtuous, 72, 75 Malik b. Anas, legal scholar, al-Muwat..ta, 44,
Legal Scholars, Islamic, 13, 71, 812 478
Legal Schools, Islamic, 47, 152, 1712; diversity Maliks, legal school, 47
of, 114, 14246, 150 Mani, Manichaeism, 612
Legalism, Islamic, 13 Mant.iq, logic, 19, 107, 110
Legislation, as source of law, 114, 178, 181 Manuscripts, 2, 129, 131; Islamic scientific,
Legitimacy, political, 150, 172 99100
Leitner, Gottlieb Wilhelm, British Indian Maragha Observatory, 98, 126
educationist, History of Indigenous Maraji Taqld, Shiite legal authorities, 1489
Education in the Punjab to the Year 1882, Martyrdom, 4, 10
15760, 162 Marx, Karl; Marxism, 23, 27
Libanius, Byzantine rhetorician, 62 Mathematics, 99; and philosophy, 789, 83,
Lies, Beneficial, and Plato, 60, 84 110, 149; and science, 22, 96
Light, in metaphysics, 92 Matn, text of hadith, 34, 36, 43
Linguistics, Stoic, 109 Matta b. Yunus, logician, 83, 108
Linguistics, Arabic, 108, 112, 153; and logic, Maturd, theologian, Book of Monotheism,
108, 139. See also Grammar, Arabic; 118
Rhetoric, Arabic Mecca, site of legal school, 49
Literacy, and Islamic reform, 168 Medicine, 567, 99, 110; and Indian eduation,
Literalism, Christian, 24; Islamic, 43, 49, 66, 158, 160, 162, 166
1689, 175, 182; and Ibn Arab, 53, 94 Medina, and legal schools, 47, 49
Lithographs, of textbooks, 129, 131, 140 Mesopotamians, and reason, 18
Liturgy, 24, 87 Metaphysics, 13; and philosophy, 70, 89, 92;
Locke, John, empiricist philosopher, 23 in madrasa curriculum, 96, 99, 163
Logic, and reason, 167 Middle East, Ancient, and reason, 18, 19
Logic, Greek, 123, 19, 107; Stoic, 10910, 120 Middle Persian, translations from, 56
Logic, Islamic, historiography of, 109, 123; Mih.na, persecution of H . anbals, 51
philosophical, 68, 81, 107, 121, 135, 139; Mill, James, Utilitarian, History of British
critics of, 115, 125; and grammar, 823, 108, India, 165
112; and religious sciences, 11419; school Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarian, 165
logic, 109, 120, 126, 137, 139; teaching of, 121, Milla, religious community, 71, 75
122, 129, 131, 138, 139; in madrasa Millet System, self-government by religious
curriculum, 96, 99, 102, 1512 minorities, 178
Logic, Medieval European, 111, 11921 Mind. See Intellect
Logic, Modern, 22, 121, 140 Minorities, in Islamic law, 28, 182
Logos, 18, 19, 20, 25, 28 Missionaries, and colonial education, 153,
162, 165, 167
Mamun, Caliph, and translation movement, Modernists, Modernity, 5; and traditional
55 scholarship, 153, 1834; and Islam, 1623,
Macaulay, Thomas, Indian official, Minute 168, 170, 176
on Indian Education, 166 Mogul Empire, and British, 1645
Madhhabs. See Legal Schools Monarchy, and political philosophy, 64
208 INDEX
Printing, 1, 25, 1001, 122, 128 religious sciences, 3840, 43; Islamic
Prophecy, Prophets, 612, 65; and philosophy, philosophers on, 667, 72, 93
70, 78, 84, 89; and psychology, 72, 78, Reciprocity, in interreligious relations, 179
Propositions, in logic, 1101, 1356 Reform, Reformers, 11, 28, 1523, 167
Protestantism, Protestant Reformation, 5, Reformation. See Protestantism, Protestant
181; textualism, 18, 246, 176; and Scientific Reformation
Revolution, 99, 101; and Islamic Relativism, 18, 23, 24, 267
fundamentalism, 10, 28, 168 Religion, and relativism, 24; philosophy of,
Providence, 50 57, 70, 89; revealed, 612, 71; Greek, 20,
Psychology; and philosophy, 72, 89; and 5760; Farab on, 712, 75, 84
prophecy, 7880 Religion, Comparative, 24, 26
Ptolemy, Almagest, 56, 163 Religious Sciences, 108, 110; as scholasticism,
Punjab, 1578, 173 12, 278
Punjab University, 140, 157 Revelation, 32, 3940; and reason, 38, 657,
Punjabi, 1589 70, 89
Pythagoras, 58, 91 Revivalism, Islamic, 153, 163
Rhetoric, 58, 113; and religious sciences, 801,
Qad.s, Islamic judges, as source of law, 48 116, 152; and logic, 81, 10811, 121, 135;
Qiraat, variant readings of Quran, 1423, balagha, Arabic rhetoric, 113, 138
1467, 150 Rights, individual and communal, 27
Qiyas, 4950, 1167, 138 Roman Catholic Church, 26, 96
Qom, Iranian religious center, 122, 140, 152, Romanticism, 156, 18, 245
162 Rum, Jalal al-Dn, Sufi poet, 11
Questions, in Islamic religious life, 142 Russell, Bertrand, logician, 123; Human
Quran, 2, 10, 160; authority of, 11, 31, 42, 46, Knowledge, 141
489, 142, 1445, 175, 178; and reason, 38,
656; interpretation of, 845, 117; Sad, Persian poet, Gulistan, 159
theological issues, 501, 66, 77, 84; and S.adr, Muh.ammad-Baqir, modern Shiite
Sufism, 53, 87, 94; modern issues, 37, 167, theologian, The Logical Bases of Induction,
179, 181, 184; diversity of texts of, 1423, 1401
1467, 150; commentaries, 1101 S.ah.h., sound hadith, 44
Qut.b al-Dn al-Shraz, 110; Commentary on Saints, Ibn Arab on, 94
the Key to the Sciences, 113 Sakkak, rhetorician, The Key to the Sciences,
113
Ray, 48, 50. See also Ahl al-Ray, Opinion Saladin, and Suhraward, 901
Ramad.a n, customs of, 180 Salaf, pious forefathers, xv
Rasail Ikhwan al-S.afa, 67 Salafs, 11; and Protestantism, 10, 28; on law,
Rasul, prophet, 65 176, 182; in contemporary Islam, 1689, 175
Rational Sciences, 110, 112, 126, 130 Saliba, George, historian of science, 56
Rationalism, 6, 9, 102; in Islamic law, 48, 50 Sanskrit, 158
Rationalists, Francis Bacon on, 45 Saudi Arabia, 169, 175, 182
Rationality, 156, 2527 Schacht, Josef, historian of Islamic law, on
Raz, Fakhr al-Dn, theologian, 52, 150; origins of legal schools, 47
works: commentary on Ibn Snas Hints Schism, 145
and Admonitions, 126; The Upshot of the Scholarship, Islamic, 184
Science of Jurisprudence, 116 Scholasticism, Christian, 18, 201, 24, 26, 99;
Readings, Variant, in Quran, 1423, 1467, and religious sciences, 12, 278, 50, 52, 99,
150 112, 118; and logic, 121, 129; and Islamic
Reason, Western conceptions of, 156, 2527; reform, 168, 184
as source of Christian doctrine, 245; in School of Isfahan, philosophical movement,
Islam, 3, 101, 183; and God, 38, 76; and 90, 102
210 INDEX
Science, and reason, 18, 212, 256; Greek, and post-classical Islamic philosophy, 89,
556; Medieval, 97; and Islamic reform, 95, 149; The Philosophy of Illumination, 86,
1667 91, 92, 135
Science, Islamic, history of, 556, 65, 98, Sunan, hadith collections on law, 46
1012, 149; in madrasas, 99, 163; Islamic Sunna, custom of Islamic community, 75;
attitudes to, 989; and Scientific and hadith, 46, 49, 50; as source of
Revolution, 112, 97 authority, 11, 42, 48, 144
Sciences, classification of, 74, 112 Sunnis, 44
Sciences, Rational and Religious. See Suyut., Jalal al-Dn, religious scholar, 456
Rational Sciences, Religious Sciences Syllogism, 1356
Scientific Revolution, 112, 22, 967, 1001 Symbolism, and philosophy, 72, 76, 82
Scripture, 24, 62; Farab on, 72, 80 Syria, site of legal school, 49
Sect, firqa, 144 Syriac, logic texts in, 124
Secularism, 4, 25, 176, 180
Semantics, in Islamic logic, 107, 116, 121, 1367 Tawl. See Allegorical Interpretation
Seminaries, Islamic. See Madrasas T.abar, historian, 402
Sexual Freedom, 27 Taftazan, Sad al-Dn, religious scholar,
Shafi, founder of legal school, 4750, 52 1278; works: Intentions, 118; Tahdhb
Shara, 3, 28, 46, 71, 75, 177. See also Fiqh, al-Mant.iq, 122
Law, Revelation, Prophecy, Us.u l Tah.tan, Qut.b al-Dn, logician, 139; Qut.b,
al-Fiqh 1278, 133
Shiism, 53, 67, 89, 128; and hadith, 35, 44; law, Taliban, Afghanistan, 170
27, 146, 1489; in Sunni societies, 171, 1789 Taxation, in Islamic law, 172, 178
Shraz, Qut.b al-Dn, scientist, The Pearly Teaching, and textbooks, 133
Crown, 149, 150 Technology, and religion, 25, 28
Shrines, 88, 1801 Tehran University, 162
Sihalaw, Niz.a m al-Dn, Mogul religious Terms, in logic, 1356
scholar, and Dars-i Niz.a m, 151 Terrorism, 910
Sikhs 158 Textbooks, of Arabic grammar, 1112; of
Sin, in Islamic theology, 50 logic, 1212, 1269, 131, 133, 1357, 13940
Sindh, Sufism in, 173 Textualism, Protestant, 18, 2428. See also
Sraf, debate on logic, 83, 108 Literalism
Siyalkut, Abd al-H. akm, Supercommentary Theology, Theologians, and philosophy, 72,
on the Shamsya, 128, 133 812, 89; Christian, 2021, 28, 50, 623, 118.
Slavery, 1812 See also Kalam
Social Sciences, 234, 27 Thomas Aquinas, 17, 70, 76, 123
Socrates, 19, 59 Toleration, in Islam, 17880
Software, Islamic, 11 Tradition, Christian, 24, 26
Sophistics, in logic, 81, 113, 135 Transcendence, of God, 501
Sophists, 58 Translation Movement, 9, 557, 64, 107
Southeast Asian Languages, textbooks in, 129 Tribes, customs and laws of, 179
Spain, Farabs influence in, 723 Trinity, and philosophy, 63
State, and Islamic law, 172 Truth, relativity of, 23, 24
Stoics, 63; logic of, 19, 107, 10911, 121 Tubingen School, on Plato, 60
Strauss, Leo, political philosopher, 6970 Turkey, 152, 174, 183. See also Ottoman Empire
Subjectivity, and reason, 23 Turkish, scientific texts in, 9899
Succession, as theological issue, 145 T.u s, Nas.r al-Dn, philosopher and
Sufism, 878, 92, 14950, 151; modern theologian, 52, 98; works: The Basis of
attitudes to, 11, 1678, 171, 173. See also Acquisition, 126, 1367; commentary on
Mysticism Ibn Snas Hints and Admonitions, 126
Suhraward, Shihab al-Dn Yah.ya, and logic,
1256, 135, 139; and mysticism, 14, 95, 102; Ulama. See Clergy
INDEX 211