The Story of Reason in Islam

Sari Nusseibeh

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781503600584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In The Story of Reason in Islam, leading public intellectual and political activist Sari Nusseibeh narrates a sweeping intellectual history—a quest for knowledge inspired by the Qu'ran and its language, a quest that employed Reason in the service of Faith. Eschewing the conventional separation of Faith and Reason, he takes a fresh look at why and how Islamic reasoning evolved over time. He surveys the different Islamic schools of thought and how they dealt with major philosophical issues, showing that Reason pervaded all disciplines, from philosophy and science to language, poetry, and law. Along the way, the best known Muslim philosophers are introduced in a new light. Countering received chronologies, in this story Reason reaches its zenith in the early seventeenth century; it then trails off, its demise as sudden as its appearance. Thereafter, Reason loses out to passive belief, lifeless logic, and a self-contained legalism—in other words, to a less flexible Islam. Nusseibeh's speculations as to why this occurred focus on the fortunes and misfortunes of classical Arabic in the Islamic world. Change, he suggests, may only come from the revivification of language itself.

1

The Arabian Desert

By any measure, the changes that gripped Arabia and its surroundings in the seventh century CE are extraordinary. The major players of the day—the Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid Empires—set the course of history on a broad scale. Yet within a few decades an Arab world, previously regarded as a culturally insignificant backwater, catapulted to center stage. Besides constituting a major political power in its own right, the Arab world emerged as an intellectual powerhouse that energized a new phase in the history of civilization. A desert people—hardly in possession of a script for their language (much less adequate material for making use of such writing)—brought forth, as if by magic, scholars and intellectual giants who made invaluable contributions to intellectual history. A marginal language spoken by a marginal people transformed into a language of power—a medium bearing the most advanced scientific thought. How did this transformation occur? What sparked this intellectual revolution, the birth of reason, which ultimately produced some of the greatest minds in the history of thought and science?

The Arabian Desert had always provided a natural setting for those who sought meaning in the glory of nature and the infinitude of space. Prophets, poets, monks, hermits, pagan sects, and simple mystics roamed the vast expanse, seeking refuge from the chatter of their communities. It seems that here, in silence and emptiness, they could hear the heartbeat of the world, feel the majesty of the stars. They came to the desert in order to reflect; worshippers sought seclusion and refuge in the caves dotting the cliffs of rugged mountains; lonesome travelers devised their first poetic rhymes following the soft, rhythmic beats of camels treading along the undulating sands; from this soil, the finest lyric of Arabic literary tradition would grow.

One knows, even in today’s crowded world, how spellbinding pristine nature is. Still today, the vastness and silence of empty deserts impress nature’s majesty on those who live or journey there. One must try to picture how much more acutely this was felt by the wayfarer in times past, how the contrast between unity and difference, spatial and temporal, must have faded before his or her mind’s eye. Such collapsing of borders and categories—between earth and sky, present and past, and beholder and beheld—marks much early philosophical speculation. Under modern conditions of life, where space and time fall into smaller and shorter units—where, by any account, distances and differences seem to melt into each other more and more—this underlying coherence of the surrounding world often assumes discrete and fractured contours. But for the desert wanderer, the poet, the solitary traveler in times past, pondering the surrounding vastness, a totally different spectacle must have appeared. How much, if at all, does what one sees by day or night, scattered in time and space, possess a single essence? How much, if at all, is one human being part of the boundless expanse? Indeed, how may an individual, contemplating the stars or trudging through the scorching sands, relate her fragile existence to the sovereign majesty that governs or envelops all that surrounds her?

That said, the deserts did not stand in complete isolation; their magical and bewildering beauty was not known only to native inhabitants and the rare parties who wandered among them. In a broader view, the inner desert regions along the Mediterranean coast, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf bordered lands rich in cultures and belief systems stretching back to antiquity. Joined on all sides by one ancient civilization after another, with trade routes linking coastal and inland regions across three continents, the deserts straddling Africa and Asia bustled with echoes from outside—the reverberations of Pharaonic, Assyrian, Nabatean, Phoenician, Hittite, Greek, Roman, and Persian cultures. Later echoes included the turbulence surrounding the earliest Christian schism: the feud, associated with the Alexandrian Arius (d. 336), about whether God and Christ were one. Closer to the sixth century, the deserts heard tell, from itinerant merchants and monks, about the lives and thinking of luminaries such as St. Augustine (d. 430), the Roman-Algerian bishop and Trinitarian theologian, and Hypatia (d. 415), the Greco-Egyptian mathematician who died at the hands of an angry Christian mob.¹

One must imagine the stories and ideas that passed over routes inland and at sea, both from the surrounding Mediterranean civilizations and their colonial settlements at the periphery of the Arab world, as well as from India and Persia and farther east. Arteries of trade and communication stretched from the deserts of North African to those of Asia Minor. They reached from wondrous Ionian cities—and spiritual capitals—all the way to Mesopotamia, where churches and temples for worshipping the sun and the stars dotted what is now the Turkish-Syrian border. The paths also led south, into the “heartland” itself, the Arabian Peninsula. Onward still, they plunged into the fertile lands once ruled by the legendary Queen of Sheba. A day’s journey across the Red Sea would bring the traveler to the Horn of Africa, the seat of one of the ancient world’s most venerable kingdoms, Ethiopia. From this site, it is now believed, homo sapiens first emerged, later crossing over to Arabia and Asia Minor; at any rate, the first great empire that officially embraced Christianity—and later welcomed Muslims—flourished here.

The Arabian Peninsula stood surrounded by historical riches told and untold. This is where the biblical prophets once roamed—where Jewish, Christian, and other religious communities had long found a home. And here, in Mecca, the main center of commerce for the Arabian heartland—not far from the Red Sea and close to the desert mountains where he would receive his first revelations—was born the Muslim Prophet Muhammad (570–632). The unique and divine visions he beheld and the message he imparted sparked extraordinary events that would shape world history.

In retrospect, it should not have seemed so extraordinary that Muhammad appeared in this part of the world. People with their ears to the ground—those of the Jewish faith and others, too—knew the trading posts in the desert were teeming with rumors about the imminent arrival of the Messiah. Similar rumors had flourished in this part of the world for centuries, including the years surrounding the advent of Jesus. Around the time that Muhammad declared his mission, at least two or three other individuals also claimed to have received the prophetic gift. In addition to these men—and to say nothing of the many hermits, mystics, and monks who belonged to different Christian orders, or members of Jewish communities living across Arabia—the desert abounded in sects and communities representing more ancient religions and civilizations; they hailed from places as far away as Persia and the Indian subcontinent; they included Zoroastrians, moon worshippers, sun worshippers, Brahmins, and Manicheans.

Situated between contending empires, the Byzantine and the Sassanid, the major northern and southern Arab tribes made alliances with these two sides, respectively. Inner Arabia, then, represented a middle ground where cultures, ideas, religions, and ethnic groups encountered one another. Indeed, the northern outreaches of Arabia lay firmly within the two empires’ spheres of influence. The Sassanid Empire not only propagated Zoroastrianism, but also welcomed Nestorian Christian fathers when their seat of learning, the ancient city of Edessa (Urfa), was ordered closed by the Byzantine emperor Zeno in the late fifth century. This occurred just after the emperor in Rome acquiesced to the demand of Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria, that Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople, be deposed.

Approximately two hundred years earlier, following an even earlier Christian tradition going back to Jesus himself, Arius had proposed that God and Christ were not one. Subsequently, Alexandria and Antioch became synonymous with different schools of Christian thought. Alexandria took an increasingly strict view of Christianity and assumed a hostile stance toward other sects and cultures (including Jewish and pagan communities). Remnants of more glorious days still existed—perhaps embodied most fully by the learned, beautiful, and tragic Hypatia (350–415), whose end drew the curtain on the storied Greek tradition of scholarship. But in general neither the “pagan” sciences nor free thought were tolerated by the city’s bishops. Thus, inquisitive or otherwise restless religious scholars began to migrate; many of them went to different parts of Arabia and the northern provinces. Nestorius advanced the view, associated with church leaders at Antioch, that Mary was but a mortal woman, and her son, though an instantiation of the divine Word, not God himself. At a council held in Ephesus (431), Cyril mobilized his supporters from Egypt and other reaches of the Empire, and Nestorian doctrines were declared heretical.²

Cyril’s challenge to Nestorius represented more than a theological squabble about whether Christ is God or a human being. Many of those involved in the dispute would have felt the matter to concern the extent to which human beings may follow reason on their own (albeit with divine guidance). Nestorius’s loss in the doctrinal battle may be read as the point where an ideological period ended. When Edessa was closed, in Byzantium, dissident scholars and churchmen wandered eastward and sought refuge in Sassanid-ruled territory. They founded a new center in a small settlement called Nusaybin (Nisibis) on the plains where Syria now borders Iraq. The intellectual traditions of both pagan and early-Christian Alexandria moved there, too—away from the West, into Sassanid-held territory. In closer geographical and political proximity to Persia, what came to be known as the Eastern Church was augmented and invigorated by the intellectual dynamism of the famous Gundeshapur Academy—undoubtedly the foremost seat of secular and medical learning in its day.³

In time—and in turn—Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, and Gundeshapur played pivotal roles in the transmission of ancient Greek and Syriac science to the intellectual movement inspired by the Muslim prophet’s message. In the tenth century, the renowned philosopher Alfarabi (d. 950) reportedly told of how ancient Greek philosophy had reached him in Baghdad—a day’s ride, by mule, from Nisibis. Generations of scholars past and present put him in contact with one Youhanna bin Haylan, a Nestorian cleric under whom he studied the works of Aristotle (including the Posterior Analytics).⁴

But all that would come only later. First, conditions had to prove favorable for the rich intellectual heritage to penetrate the heartland of the Arabian Peninsula.

Long a major regional trade center on routes linking Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, Mecca emerged as a center of political, cultural, and religious life for tribes and communities throughout the region. The indigenous pagan religion focused on three goddesses said to inhabit Mecca, Medina, and Ta’if. Special places stood reserved for them within the square, black building called al-Ka‘ba. Over the ages, this ancient structure, built where a meteor was said to have fallen from the sky, had become a hallowed place of worship for the Arab tribes. Once a year, it hosted a fair to which people flocked to exchange goods, renew old friendships, make new ones, and celebrate. The fair featured a competition to select the best poems of the year. Legend holds that winning odes were inscribed in gold on sheets of Coptic cotton, then draped on the outer walls of the al-Ka‘ba for all to see. So greatly did the desert Arabs revere poetry! Over time, this tradition yielded the seven (by other accounts, ten) main pre-Islamic and early Islamic odes in the literary pantheon; their glory has not faded, even today.

A modern reader might ask where the beauty lies in the most famous ode that has been attributed to the poet-prince Imru’al-Qays. The first line simply names habitations that have ceased to exist, followed by an account of the author weeping as he calls them to mind. With a little effort, one can appreciate the depth and impact of these words by picturing how the poet felt as he passed the desert camp where his beloved had lived, the one who was the orbit of his soul and innermost being; now, he sees nothing but sifting sands—his heart’s desire has moved elsewhere, in search of better pastures. The stark contrast between presence and absence, being and nothingness, meaningfulness and emptiness, and life and death fires the passion of the verses: names that promised sense and orientation now float over the vacuous and indeterminate desert plains. Such words share, in a magical combination of elements, how past and present, seeing and imagining, and joy and sorrow are woven together.

It may seem surprising to find mention of poetry right at the beginning of a story about reason. Yet poetry is key. Affirming the priority of poetry in social and intellectual evolution is not a new idea, as we will see when discussing the Muslim philosopher, Alfarabi, who followed Aristotelian tradition on this point. But poetry is far more than just a footstep on the ladder of intellect. As the natural and immediate medium of creativity and imagination, poetry is a progenitor of reason. Breaking free from elementary locutionary forms, it evokes a world invisible to the untrained eye yet immanent to the event or object described. Such transcendence through imagination—breaking loose from the confines of immediacy and concrete reality—is nothing if not an act of freedom. Approaching these newly revealed horizons of sense, reason grows bold, makes exploratory steps, and begins to search for order as yet undiscerned. Beginning to stir, over time, it comes to make fuller and better sense of what poetry has described. But even as it does so, consciously or otherwise, imagination remains its creative spark. One can easily see how, in this light, poetry and reason form a natural pair. Without the one, the life of the other cannot be sustained.

. . .

The eleventh-century philosopher Avicenna (d. 1037) identified imagination as the medium of reason. As we will see, he was not alone in giving credit—and then free reign—to the imaginative faculty both as a source and then as a “trans-rational” medium for the cognition of reality. An entire tradition of mysticism and imaginative discourse—often expressed in poetic and allegorical form—pre-existed him and flourished after his death. Just as importantly, as we will see, imagination was the power source for advances on various intellectual and scientific fronts—including philosophy, law, the sciences, mathematics, and astronomy.

There is, however, another side to the matter. After having been sparked and then flourishing, reason may ossify—and even turn against its (unacknowledged) sire. Adherents may come to view it as both self-generating and self-sufficient—indeed, as the antithesis of the imagination. Imagination, however self-consciously expressed, whether in poetry or in new and unconventional ideas, then comes to count as the enemy of the rational establishment and the authoritative system of thought. It comes to represent potential danger and a threat to order and stability. The poet—the receiver of visions, the freethinker, the Promethean emissary of light—now qualifies as an outsider, an outcast; he grows estranged from his own community and is forced to roam alone. He is feared and despised; sometimes, he is demonized to the point of suffering incarceration and crucifixion. How often, in the story that follows, will we encounter such victims: begetters of an order that turns against its creator! One wonders whether this—the sparks thrown by imagination and their subsequent extinction—underlies the (mis)adventures of reason in Islam: on the one hand, boundless expansion, and, on the other, restrictive authoritarianism.

To this day, Muhammad’s sacred text exercises power because it counts as a “once-in-a-lifetime” miracle of Arabic poetic prose. In a world where the word was the privileged medium of imagination, its effect could in no way be overestimated. All the same, the foundations already existed in desert culture—the minds of freely roaming people attuned to beautiful language and the sentiments roused by poetry. Poets were the masters of sense. They expressed passions and articulated perceptions otherwise felt only vaguely. With paradoxical precision, they evoked the bewilderment the desert traveler experienced, the deep emotion and passion of the lover, the sorrow of the mourner, and the wounded pride of the affronted.

In the desert, the poet became the voice of his people. He magnified its virtues to other tribes, and he influenced its decisions more than any elder or merchant in the community ever could. Such was the power of words! Free-spirited poets were regarded with such awe and respect in those days that they were celebrated publicly. Such quasi-instinctive reverence, when combined with other factors, could yield still more, too. Thus, when a commanding, blue-eyed poet—who also happened to be a woman—sang of the wrongs she (or, more precisely, her camel) had experienced, one of the longest conflicts in pre-Islamic Arabia erupted. The Basous War, which derives its name from the lady in question, lasted forty years. Tellingly, when her indignant nephew spoke up to declare his readiness to fight on her behalf, the first phrase with which he addressed her was: “Ye free woman.” These honorific words reflected his respect for her as a poet and a woman of dignity. (Should we be surprised, then, to learn that records mention more than forty female poets during the pre-Islamic period—in a desert environment where girls were often buried alive at birth?)

Pre-Islamic Arabia—and even for a few years after the advent of Islam—knew, besides the famous poets identified with their tribes, the singular phenomenon of lyrical vagabonds. The Sa‘alik were outlaws one may liken, in an English context, to Robin Hood and his gang: a proud and self-possessed group of ostracized and dispossessed rebels who raided the caravans of the rich and shared the spoils with the poor. They were known equally for their daring and for their poetry, which celebrated anarchic social movement.

The two types are complementary: on the one hand, the authors of mu‘allaqat (odes), whose individualistic and romantic spirit pondered the unfathomable space linking the stars above and the earthly human passions of the desert-dweller; on the other, the social rebels whose verse challenged hierarchy and authority and indicted the inequality of human fortunes. Together, they represent the unique personality of the desert poet: simultaneously an integral component of the social order and one who stands in opposition to it. The desert poet dwells at the border and inhabits two worlds, a hybrid entity belonging both to his closely-knit tribe and to the vast and limitless space outside this group. A gifted master of his people’s everyday tongue, he also acts as the medium through which language magically transforms into an artistic tapestry of words, summoning meanings that seem to come both from under the sands and from the distant skies above.

The evocative power of poetry in desert culture and the free-spiritedness it reflects are key to understanding the cultural climate of the age when Muhammad announced the divine message. Language unquestionably represented the privileged form of expression, and poets were unquestionably the premier practitioners of the art. Both for its spellbinding imagery and because of its physically and mentally moving effects, poetry had no equal. But for all that—in spite of the power of poetic imagination, which attuned the desert mind to the power of the word, created the framework for human thought and action, and prepared the cultural grounds for what would follow—nothing could compare with the upheaval that occurred in the wake of Islam’...