Islam's Quantum Question

Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science

Nidhal Guessoum

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857730756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

In secular Europe the veracity of modern science is almost always taken for granted. Whether they think of the evolutionary proofs of Darwin or of spectacular investigation into the boundaries of physics conducted by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, most people assume that scientific enquiry goes to the heart of fundamental truths about the universe. Yet elsewhere, science is under siege. In the USA, Christian fundamentalists contest whether evolution should be taught in schools at all. And in Muslim countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan and Malaysia, a mere 15 per cent of those recently surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be 'true' or 'probably true'. This thoughtful and passionately argued book contends absolutely to the contrary: not only that evolutionary theory does not contradict core Muslim beliefs, but that many scholars, from Islam's golden age to the present, adopted a worldview that accepted evolution as a given. Guessoum suggests that the Islamic world, just like the Christian, needs to take scientific questions - 'quantum questions' - with the utmost seriousness if it is to recover its true heritage and integrity.
In its application of a specifically Muslim perspective to important topics like cosmology, divine action and evolution, the book makes a vital contribution to debate in the disputed field of 'science and religion'.

 

part i

fundamentals (first things first): God, the Qur’an and science

I

Allah/God, philosophy and modern science

‘He is the First and the Last, the Evident and the Immanent; and He has full knowledge of all things.’

Q 57:3

‘There is nothing whatsoever like Him, and He is the One who hears and sees (all things).’

Q 42:11

the truest thing

Like all Muslims – and many non-Muslims who come across such Islamic texts – I continue to be mesmerised by the Qur’anic verses and other Islamic prose that describe God. The sheer magic beauty of the above verses, and many others like these, commands the attention of whoever comes to read them or listen to their recitation. Moreover, the portrayal of God as mysterious and obvious, transcendent and immanent, with both anthropic and unimaginable features, as pairs of opposite traits, makes one want to know God even while realising that this is an impossible goal.

This is not a book of theology in the sense of the study of God. This is a book about the relation(s) between science and Islam. But we will not understand the various issues stemming from those relations, and we will not be able to construct reasonable and fruitful views, if we do not first understand the core principles of Islam. And there is certainly no more central and solid core to Islam than God Himself, and no more important set of principles upon which Islam is built than its sacred book, the Qur’an. Moreover, these principles themselves have been largely affected by centuries of philosophical discourse and conceptual revolutions brought in by modern science.

All Islamic discourse begins with God. All Muslims are taught to start every action of their lives with ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’. Parents are told to call the Name of God in the ears of their newborns so that it could be the first word a Muslim hears in his/her life. And every toddler is trained to memorise the following short chapter of the Qur’an: ‘Say: He is Allah, the One! Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not nor was begotten; And there is none comparable unto Him’ (Q 112:1–4). Indeed, so important are these few verses that the Prophet is reported⁴ to have declared them to represent one-third of the Qur’an.

Another striking verse about God, the one known as Ayat-ul kursi (‘the Verse of the Throne’) is known and recited by heart by innumerable Muslims and hung on walls of living rooms in beautiful calligraphies. It reads: ‘Allah! There is no god but He, the Everliving, the Self-subsisting, the Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and on earth. Who is there that can intercede with Him except as He permits? He knows what is before or after or behind them, while they encompass nothing of His knowledge save what He wills. His throne does extend over the heavens and the earth, and He is never weary of preserving them. He is the Most High, the Supreme (in glory)’ (Q 2:255).

There is a famous book of Arab wisdom, al-Mustatraf, a 775-page compendium of wise statements from the Arab heritage, classified into 200 or so topics, which was written more than a thousand years ago and is still widely printed (free of copyrights) and read today. Here is how the very first chapter begins:

You must know [dear reader] that God exalted is One; He has no partner or equal; He is unique; nothing resembles Him. He is Absolute, and nothing comes close to Him (in His power). He is Eternal, past and future; there is no beginning to His existence and no end to His eternity. He is Self-sufficient, and no eternity wears Him or changes Him. He is the First and the Last, the Evident and the Immanent; He transcends materiality; nothing is like Him. He is above everything, yet His height does not make Him far from His creatures; He is indeed closer to them than their jugular veins; He witnesses all events, and He is with you wherever you may be¹.

The book goes on with such statements about God for several more paragraphs and ends this introductory section with the following quote: ‘The Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him, stated from on top of the pulpit that the truest statement ever uttered by the Arabs is that everything other than God is false’².

In this chapter’s title I have used ‘Allah’ to refer to God, yet so far in this introduction I have simply referred to Him as ‘God’. Is there any difference? For all intents and purposes, there is no difference; in fact I usually prefer to use ‘God’, if only to convey the essential fact that the God of Islam is, the way He is defined (or, more precisely, how He defines Himself), no other than what monotheistic believers and atheists mean when they use the term or refer to the concept. In fact, the word ‘Allah’ is nothing more than al-Lah, ‘the God’ in Arabic. Some scholars, however, insist that Allah is the name of God, the one He gave to Himself, and He therefore should be referred to by that name. Others add that because of some theological differences between the God of Islam and the God of Christianity, for instance, one should use Allah in order to convey one’s beliefs more accurately. As far as we are concerned here, any such theological differences are non-consequential, since we are focussing on attributes (creator, sustainer, omnipotent, omniscient etc.) that are common to all monotheistic religions.

knowing Allah

In the Muslims’ general consciousness, the existence of Allah is obvious, so obvious that hardly any discussion about it is ever conducted. For a long time, Muslim scholars adopted the position that humans know Allah by ‘instinct’ (fitrah), relying on Qur’anic verses to that effect³.

Atheism has only recently entered the vocabulary in the Islamic discourse. The whole concept is practically non-existent in the Qur’an, and the closest the Sacred Book comes to addressing it is when it refers to a group of people who denied the afterlife (‘And they say: There is nothing but our life in this world; we live and die and nothing destroys us but time; but they have no knowledge of that; they only conjecture’ (Q 45:24)); these then came to be known in Islamic parlance as dahriyyun (from dahr, time/epoch, i.e. those who believe that only ‘time’ affects us). In contrast to this disregard for the concept of atheism, the Qur’an abounds in discourse with the polytheists, making it an important goal to prove the Oneness of God (tawheed) and to display His attributes. Only very recently have Muslim scholars started to develop arguments to ‘prove’ the existence of Allah, as we shall discuss.

In every standard treatise and textbook⁴ of Islamic knowledge, the first chapter is always devoted to tawheed. This term literally means, ‘unifying’, and technically refers to the ways a Muslim is supposed to believe in and describe Allah. Tawheed is often divided into three parts: (1) tawheed of divinity (rububiyyah); (2) tawheed of attributes (as-Sifat) and (3) tawheed of ‘worshipability’ (uluhiyyah).

The first part emphasises the divine aspect of God, such as being the creator and sustainer, the giver of life and death, the lord and overseer, the omniscient and omnipotent, etc. Muslim scholars, especially orthodox ones, expound their greatest efforts on this part, trying to draw sharp lines between the acceptable and the unacceptable descriptions of God. This is the area where much theological debate took place in classical eras, particularly between the rationalist school of Mu’tazila and that of the more orthodox scholars, as I shall explain.

The second part describes God in the ‘proper way’, meaning the way it has come to us from God Himself, as revealed and recorded in the Qur’an or from the knowledge He inspired into Prophet Muhammad’s mind. This too is an area of contention, not around the attributes themselves but rather about our perception and interpretation of them. A well-known hadith (Prophetic statement) declares God to have 99 ‘beautiful names’ (asma’ Allah al-husna) and promises paradise to anyone who memorises them all⁵; in another hadith the Prophet tells us that there is a hundredth one, which grants any person entry to Paradise who utters it⁶. The list of 99 beautiful Names was actually given by the Prophet himself in another hadith⁷; it can be found in numerous references, including on many online web pages⁸, often with translations, explanations, discussions and further references. Many artists have produced beautiful works out of these 99 names (some of them can be found on the web as well⁹); many Muslim homes and mosques are adorned with hung carpets and calligraphic paintings of the 99 names. The Prophet has also mentioned that Allah has a ‘Supreme Name’ (Ismu Allah al-‘ADham); he did not state it explicitly, but from the stories relating this it appears that the Prophet meant either some special way of addressing Allah or some particular combination of His beautiful Names¹⁰.

The third part of tawheed stresses the fact that only God has features that make Him worthy of worship. As one author put it¹¹: ‘THIS creator Has Perfect Attributes [capitals in the original text]. He is the First, nothing is before Him, the Ever Living. To Him is the Final Return . . . ’; therefore, man must ‘turn to his Creator Alone’.

This conception of Allah sounds clear and straightforward until we start delving more deeply into the matter. Most contentious is the question of attributes, particularly those that have a definite anthropomorphic aspect. For example, how is one supposed to understand the many Qur’anic verses that speak of God ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’? Indeed, ‘The Seer’ and ‘The Hearer’ are two of God’s beautiful names. Or hadiths¹² that speak of God’s ‘right hand’, with which he ‘spends’ (gives), or those where God is said to speak to humans on the Day of Judgment ‘with no interpreter between them nor a screen to hide Him’?¹³ From such questions arose a serious theological dispute regarding whether humans will actually see God on the Day of Judgment¹⁴.

This question of whether humans will actually see God ‘with their own eyes’ produced the most important rift in Muslim theological history. The Mu’tazilites, who emerged in Iraq in the eighth century and quickly became – for awhile – the dominant Islamic school, attempted to inject some (early) rationalism in their understanding of theological matters and insisted that God is so beyond anything we can picture that ‘seeing’ God as well as ‘God seeing’ must be understood figuratively. In fact, they made this one of their five seminal principles of theology, alongside ‘God is One and Absolute’ and ‘God is (infinitely) Just’. But the fundamentalists rejected any such figurative and interpretative approach and insisted on upholding the Qur’anic and Prophetic statements in their literal meanings, even if sometimes we may have to declare our inability to understand them. It is true that we are limited in our understanding of all that God has revealed, but this approach leads to more complications than it helps solve the problem we have started with. This would, in fact, make us prisoners to either literal understanding of verses, more and more of which will become problematic as we come to discover the world, or to suspensions of human understanding, so often that knowledge just becomes meaningless . . .

I should also note that contemporary Muslim thinkers of the tradition known as ‘perennialist’ (more on this later), like Seyyed Hossein Nasr and William Chittick, readily acknowledge and defend the anthropomorphic conception of God. In his most recent book, Chittick puts it clearly: ‘The Islamic God is anthropomorphic, because the Islamic human is theomorphic. If God is understood in man’s image, it is because man was created in God’s image’. He further justifies this viewpoint: ‘Unless God is understood in human terms, a yawning gap will remain between the ultimate and the here and now. Re-ligio or ‘tying back’ to God is impossible without images of God and imagining God’¹⁵.

a brief review of Islamic conceptions of God

The above presentation of Allah should not mislead the reader into thinking that the Islamic conception of God is quite simple (or perhaps even simplistic). In fact, we find in Islam’s heritage huge amounts of theological discussion about God, His nature, His ‘characteristics’, and what can be known about Him and how – the whole literature of kalam (‘Islamic theology’), particularly from the classical period of the Islamic civilization.

The traditionalist (orthodox) Muslim theological position is personified by the great eleventh-century scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, perhaps the most influential Muslim thinker of all time, considering the many areas that he addressed, from his contributions to jurisprudence, theology and mysticism to his discussion of ‘beneficial and harmful’ sciences, and particularly because of the way he sharply criticised not just much of philosophy but also many areas of knowledge, and how he canonised certain approaches to Islamic issues.

After a long intellectual and spiritual journey, he came to conclude that questions relating to God and to many religious matters simply cannot be resolved through reason. Indeed, he could not even convince himself that his belief in God was not the product of psychological delusion. The usual religious arguments failed to convince him beyond doubt, for he realised that they were all based on pre-assumptions about the validity of scripture, the reality of revelation and other such beliefs. As to the theological (kalam) and philosophical discussions, arguments and counter-arguments, he found them to be no more than pure speculation. As Karen Armstrong explains: ‘[according to al-Ghazzali], it was absolutely impossible to prove God’s existence beyond reasonable doubt. The reality that we call “God” lay outside the realm of sense perception and local thought, so science and metaphysics could neither prove nor disprove the wujud [existence] of Allah’¹⁶. He ended up concluding that real belief in God can only come from a truly religious experience; indeed, though he rejected some of the extravagant mystical ways and claims, he found that purification and contemplation were the correct ways to approach God. Once that feeling of God was experienced, knowledge of Allah could be obtained from the revelation.

The way the mystics (Sufis) approach God is highly spiritual, almost antirational. In that old tradition, perpetuated today in many ‘orders’ (tariqas, or ‘ways’) led by revered sheikhs, who establish their ‘spiritual credential’ among their followers, awareness of God is achieved by contemplation and recitation of chants of particular Names of Allah and by prayers, an exercise which must be preceded by physical and spiritual purification. These exercises, which vary somewhat from one order to another, are said to lead to an experience of God, ultimately reaching a ‘dilution’ or even ‘annihilation’ (fana’) in Allah Himself. There is, in the Sufi tradition, no other way to prove the existence and presence of God to oneself; of course, one can and must read the Qur’an for guidance, enlightenment and knowledge, but true awareness and feeling of Allah must come from direct experience.

A slight variation on this approach is the ‘experiential proof’ that the Turkish thinker Said Nursi (1877–1960), who is often admiringly referred to as Badiuzzaman (t...