Islam

A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation

Imran Aijaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138910225
• eBook ISBN: 9781317436591
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Islam as a religion and a way of life guides millions of people around the world and has a significant impact on worldly affairs. To many Muslims, however, a philosophical understanding or assessment of Islamic belief is seen as a feeble and religiously inappropriate attempt to understand matters that are beyond rational comprehension. Islam: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation explores this issue in detail, by guiding readers through a careful study of the relationship between faith and reason in Islam. In particular, it pays close attention to religious objections to philosophizing about Islam, arguments for and against Islamic belief, and the rationality of Islamic belief in light of contemporary philosophical issues, such as problems of religious diversity, evil and religious doubt.

This text is ideal for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students seeking an objective, philosophical introduction to Islam, a subject of increasing interest in classrooms around the world.

1 Can Islam be investigated philosophically?

1. Fideism as an obstacle to a philosophical investigation of Islam

“It should be known,” wrote the 14th-century Tunisian polymath, Ibn Khaldun, in his Prolegomena (Muqaddimah), “that the [opinion] the [philosophers] hold is wrong in all its aspects.”¹ In drawing up his list of the sacred and profane sciences in the sixth chapter of this work, he offers a summary refutation of philosophy that makes several points about the inadequacy of the discipline. Here is a specimen of his refutation:

The great philosopher Plato said that no certainty can be achieved with regard to the Divine, and one can state about the Divine only what is most suitable and proper that is, conjectures. If, after all the toil and trouble, we find only conjectures, the (conjectures) that we had at the beginning may as well suffice us. What use, then, do these sciences and the pursuit of them have? We want certainty about the existentia that are beyond sensual perception while, in their (philosophy), (those conjectures) are the limit that human thinking can reach.²

Ibn Khaldun’s dismissal of philosophy provides a fairly accurate representation of the prevailing Muslim attitude towards it today, about six and a half centuries after he penned his criticisms. Any attempt to investigate Islam philosophically runs the risk of being met with skepticism and resistance from Muslims who are unsympathetic, if not downright opposed, to philosophical inquiry into their faith. Philosophy is seen as religiously inappropriate, as misguided, as a source of confusion and error, as a feeble human attempt to understand matters that are and always will be beyond rational comprehension (at least during our early existence), etc. Such reasons principally stem from a more basic commitment to fideism, which the contemporary Islamic philosopher Shabbir Akhtar defines as “the theological doctrine according to which faith does not stand in need of rational justification; faith is indeed, in religious domains, the arbiter of reason and its pretensions.”³

As I have noted in the Preface, it is important for contemporary Muslims to take philosophical investigations of their faith seriously and to engage with them. If, however, fideism does indeed have a legitimate basis in Islam, it is difficult to see how this can happen. A critical assessment of Islamic fideism will therefore be important in urging Muslims to give due consideration to philosophical investigations of Islam.

2. Faith and reason in Islam: a brief historical outline

Throughout the history of Western philosophy and its interaction with the Abrahamic religions, much has been said about the legitimacy, role and scope of philosophical reflection about religious matters. In this chapter, I will provide only a very brief historical outline of some key positions regarding the relationship between faith and reason that were adopted by Muslim thinkers throughout Islamic history. This outline will provide a useful framework for my subsequent discussion and assessment of Islamic fideism.

Within mainstream Sunni Islam, one can identify two broad stances on the relationship between faith and reason, which I shall call anti-rationalistic fideism and theistic rationalism. Anti-rationalistic fideism can be divided into two further stances, which I shall call traditionalist fideism and scholastic fideism. Let me explain these labels. By ‘anti-rationalistic fideism’, I shall mean the view that revelation precedes reason in determining the truth of religious (Islamic) belief. By contrast, I shall define ‘theistic rationalism’ as the view that reason precedes revelation in determining the truth of religious (Islamic) belief. Thus understood, anti-rationalistic fideism and theistic rationalism are distinct and mutually exclusive views; the truth of one entails the falsity of the other.

The difference between anti-rationalistic fideism and theistic rationalism can be helpfully clarified using Binyamin Abrahamov’s distinction between ‘rationalism’ and ‘rationality’ in a theological context:

[T]he term rationalism … means the tendency to consider reason the principal device or one of the principal devices to reach the truth in religion, and the preference of reason to revelation and tradition in dealing with some theological matters, mainly when a conflict arises between them … The term ‘rationalism’ must be distinguished from ‘rationality’ which means treating any issue by using reason, but without giving reason priority. Rationality turns to rationalism when reason is prior to revelation.⁴

Anti-rationalistic fideism is not, then, anti-rational but anti-rationalistic. Although he rejects the priority of reason over revelation, it remains an open question whether the anti-rationalistic fideist is interested in using reason in discussions about religious truth. Those anti-rationalistic fideists who showed little or no interest in reason when discussing the truth about religious matters I shall call adherents of ‘traditionalist fideism’, based on Abrahamov’s definition of ‘traditionalists’ as “those who regarded religious knowledge as deriving from the Revelation (the Qur’an), the Tradition (the Sunna) and the Consensus (ijmā’) and preferred these sources to reason in treating religious matters.”⁵ By contrast, the anti-rationalistic fideists who incorporated reason significantly into their discussions of the truth about religious matters I shall call adherents of ‘scholastic fideism’.

The threads of thought that constitute traditionalist fideism in Islam can be found in the works of the four famous Imams of the Sunni tradition: Abu Hanifah (d. 767), Malik b. Anas (d. 795), al-Shafi’i (d. 820) and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), and, later, among those who would follow their juridical schools of law (madhahib). Of these four schools, those who followed Ibn Hanbal – the Hanabilah – showed perhaps the fiercest opposition to any sort of philosophical inquiry in relation to Islamic belief. For Ibn Hanbal, religious faith primarily involves submitting to religious authority. Attempts to systematically reason out religious doctrine in any way are prohibited:

Whoever asserts that he does not approve of uncritical faith … and that he will not follow others in matters of faith, that one has made a sinful utterance in the eyes of God and His Apostle (may God bless him and grant him salvation). By such an attitude he aims at the invalidation of tradition, the degrading of knowledge and sunnah. He is concerned only with subjective opinion, speculative theology (kalām), innovation and dissension.⁶

This basic view, formulated by Ibn Hanbal over a thousand years ago, is still dominant in Muslim societies today and is the cornerstone of Islamic ‘orthodoxy’. As Wesley Williams observes, “[a]s the patron saint of the traditionalists, [Ibn Hanbal’s] dogmatic views would eventually become the shibboleth of Sunni ‘orthodoxy’.”⁷ Following Ibn Hanbal, several famous thinkers belonging to his school composed polemical treatises censuring speculative reasoning about religious matters and urging the faithful to adhere or return to his simple religious creed. As examples, we can mention ‘Abd Allah al-Ansari al-Harawi’s (d. 1088) Condemnation of Speculative Theology and Its Advocates (Dhamm al-kalam wa-ahlih),⁸ Muwaffaq ad-Din b. Qudama’s (d. 1223) A Thesis on Prohibiting the Study of Works by the Partisans of Speculative Theology (Mas’ala fi tahrim an-nazar fi kutb ahl al-kalam),⁹ and Ibn Taymiyyah’s (d. 1327) Refutation of the Logicians (Al-Radd ‘ala ‘l-Mantiqiyin).¹⁰

The roots of scholastic fideism go back to a group of early Muslim thinkers known as the Mu’tazilites, whose origins are obscure. According to the dominant traditional account, the reason that the Mu’tazilites were so called can be traced to the figure of al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), a famous and important Muslim thinker who debated several theological issues among a circle of scholars who had gathered in Basra, Iraq. One of the scholars of that circle was Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748), generally credited as being the founder of the Mu’tazilites, who eventually ‘broke off’ (i’tazala) from al-Hasan. It is supposedly to this act of ‘withdrawal’ that the label ‘Mu’tazilites’ is in reference to.¹¹ In all of their theological discussions, the starting point for the Mu’tazilites is reason as opposed to revelation. As D. Gimaret observes,

[T]he Mu’tazilites are incontestably rationalists, in the true sense of the term, in that they consider that certain awarenesses [sic] are accessible to man by means of his intelligence alone, in the absence of, or prior to, any revelation.¹²

According to the Mu’tazilites, among the things that may be known by reason independently of revelation are the existence of God, various aspects of the Divine Nature and the truthfulness of Muhammad’s Prophethood.¹³ Essentially, on their view, the truth of Islamic theism can be known through reason alone. Consider, as an example to contrast the views of Ibn Hanbal with, what ‘Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1025), one of the last great thinkers of the Mu’tazilite school, says in the opening of his Book of the Five Fundamentals (Kitab al-Usul al-khamsa):

1. If it is asked: What is the first duty that God imposes upon you? Say to him: Speculative reasoning (al-nazar) which leads to knowledge of God, because He is not known intuitively (daruratan) nor by the senses (bi l-mushahada). Thus, He must be known by reflection and speculation.¹⁴

For ‘Abd al-Jabbar, then, acquiring knowledge of God through speculative reasoning is our first important duty. In explaining this duty, no appeal is made to sources of religious authority, for example, the Qur’an.

The Mu’tazilites were clearly adherents of theistic rationalism. Given that, on their view, reason precedes revelation in determining the truth about religious belief, they were certainly not anti-rationalistic fideists. In addition to prioritizing reason over revelation in theological discussions, the Mu’tazilites were known for applying reason to religio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Can Islam be investigated philosophically?
• 2 Classical traditionalist fideism in Islam
• 3 Classical scholastic fideism in Islam
• 4 Contemporary fideism in Islam
• 5 Rationalist arguments for Islamic belief
• 6 Religious doubt, Islamic faith and the Skeptical Muslim
• Index