Defenders of Reason in Islam

Mu'tazililism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol

Richard C. Martin, Mark Woodward, Dwi S. Atmaja

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781786070241
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

This clearly written text explores the rational theology of Islam, the conflict between the "defenders of God" and the "defenders of reason", and the controversy's historical roots.

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Introduction

A Tale of Two Texts

In the late 1970s, the Indonesian modernist theologian Harun Nasution published a pamphlet in defense of a medieval Muslim “rationalist” theological school known as the Mu‘tazila. This was somewhat unusual. Although Mu‘tazili theology is discussed, sometimes positively, by modern Muslim scholars, very few have identified themselves with Mu‘tazilism to the extent that Nasution has. Mu‘tazili rationalists had taught doctrines about divine unity, the historical context of revelation, and ethical answerability to God that ran counter to the religious beliefs held by most Muslims. Nonetheless, Mu‘tazili intellectualism enjoyed the patronage of numerous caliphs and viziers during the first two and a half centuries of the Abbasid Age (viz. 800–1050). After the heyday of the school in the ninth and tenth centuries, Mu‘tazili dominance in theological discourse (kalam) began to wane, giving way to more centrist and populist discourses, such as those of the Ash‘ari and Maturidi theologians (mutakallimun), and the Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafi‘i jurisconsults (fuquha’).

Theological rationalism did not altogether disappear in Islamic thought, however. Shi‘i theologians continued to dictate and comment on medieval Mu‘tazili texts as part of their madrasa curriculum.¹ After the eleventh century and the influence of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) in particular, Aristotelian philosophical method rivaled the more disputational practices of the mutakallimun. With the emergence of Islamic modernist thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, Mu‘tazili rationalism began to enjoy a revival of interest among Sunni Muslim intellectuals. During this past century, the discovery of several Mu‘tazili manuscripts hibernating in Middle Eastern libraries has led to an increase of scholarly interest in Mu‘tazili texts by both Western and Muslim scholars. The former have tended to interest themselves in Mu‘tazili parallels with, and origins in, Christian and Hellenistic sources. The latter have often seen in the Mu‘tazili texts an indigenous rationalism that could be revived in the service of adapting Islam to the modern world. Although both motivations are pertinent to this study, the latter comes into focus especially in Parts II and III below.

The current study is structured by two short expositions of Mu‘tazili doctrine, one dictated in Arabic in Iran toward the end of the tenth century, and the other written, as we have indicated, by Harun Nasution in Bahasa Indonesia in the late 1970s. In his pamphlet on Mu‘tazilism, Nasution several times cites a theologian, Qadi ‘Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1024). Indeed, Nasution specifically cites a work attributed to ‘Abd al-Jabbar that had been published in Egypt in 1965 under the title Shark al-usul al-khamsa (Commentary on the five fundamentals [of theology]). In addition to Nasution’s text, this study also presents the original treatise at the basis of the commentary, ‘Abd al- Jabbar’s Kitab al-usul al-khamsa (Book on the five fundamentals). These two texts, ‘Abd al-Jabbar’s original treatise and Harun Nasution’s modernist commentary, form the two textual and historical foci of this study.

The identification, translation, and general significance of these two texts, considered together as examples of Mu‘tazili thought and separately as discourses belonging to quite different historical moments, form the subject matter of Parts I and II (chapters 2 through 9) below. The rest of this chapter and the next set the stage for considering the specific matters of text and context by discussing the history of Mu‘tazilism and, more generally, the conflict between rationalism and traditionalism in Islam. Part III considers further the archeology of Mu‘tazilism by modernist Muslim intellectuals – scholars who do not necessarily refer to themselves as Mu‘tazilites, as Harun Nasution does, but who nonetheless find in the rationalism for which the Mu‘tazili theologians are remembered a counterpoise to Islamist, including fundamentalist, movements.

From the Project of Orientalism to the Fundamentalism Project

Harun Nasution’s text, as well as the works of other modernist Muslim scholars we shall discuss in Part III below, raises the question of Orientalism – the colonial and postcolonial project to recover and reconstruct the classical religions and civilizations of colonial subjects. That Orientalist scholarship was political in motivation and effect was argued lucidly in 1963 by the Egyptian Marxist intellectual Anwar Abdel Malek.² Fifteen years later, criticism of Orientalism itself became a “project” that jolted academe and reverberated throughout the social sciences and humanities with the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism.³ Said characterized the discourse of Orientalism in a well-known passage that is itself polemical and rhetorical:

The Orientalist surveys the Orient from above, with the aim of getting hold of the whole sprawling panorama before him – culture, religion, mind, history, society. To do this he must see every detail through the device of a set of reductive categories (the Semites, the Muslim mind, the Orient, and so forth). Since these categories are primarily schematic and efficient ones, and since it is more or less assumed that no Oriental can know himself the way an Orientalist can, any vision of the Orient ultimately comes to rely for its coherence and force on the person, institution, or discourse whose property it is . . . [W]e have noted how in the history of ideas about the Near Orient in the West these ideas have maintained themselves regardless of any evidence disputing them. (Indeed, we can argue that these ideas produce evidence that proves their validity.)⁴

More recently, Peter van der Veer has carried the critique of the Orientalist project a step further. Speaking of the work of Sanskritists and other Orientalists working on the South Asia subcontinent, van der Veer has argued:

Orientalists brought modern philological methods and concepts to bear on India’s past. In critical editions of Hindu scriptures they replaced a fragmented, largely oral set of traditions with an unchanging, homogenized written canon. The critical editions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana as well as the ongoing Purana-projects show this process of selection and unification very well. In that way a “history,” established by modern science, came to replace a traditional “past.”⁵

Van der Veer makes the case that Western Orientalists working in South Asia fastened onto the Brahmanical textual tradition, thus privileging a view of South Asian religion held by the Brahmin “caste” (itself a social concept that is prominent in Orientalist scholarship). Thus, the Orientalist project in India, he concludes, was the construction of a “Hindu” historical and textual tradition. This in turn became an (unintended) scriptural focus for Hindu (and Muslim) communalism based on religious nationalism. In short, contemporary religious fundamentalism has constructed its militant “Hindu” identity in part from materials provided by Orientalist scholarship.

Is the Orientalist project similarly linked with Islamic revivalist movements (referred to in general as usuliyun “fundamentalists” and islamiyun “Islamists”)? A complete analysis of that question goes beyond the scope of this book, although a brief exploration of the issue is relevant. Clearly, the debate about modern Islamic identity, which engages in critiques of Orientalism and the West more generally, also utilizes Orientalist scholarship; indeed, contemporary Islamic discourse about modernity utilizes and itself engages in the Orientalist project of renovating the Islamic past through the publication of critical editions of traditional texts. Harun Nasution’s text, The Mu‘tazila and Rational Philosophy in chapter 9 below, indicates in its footnotes not only a reliance on Orientalist editions but also includes Nasution’s own scholarly approval of interpretations of the Mu‘tazila by such well-known Protestant Christian Orientalists as D. B. MacDonald and A. J. Wensinck. Indeed, Muslim discourse about Islam and modernity includes both Islamist efforts to reestablish the society of the first righteous generations (salafiya) as well as the modernist call for adapting Islam to the exigencies of the modern age. Both aspects of this discourse are historically, if not also logically, post-Orientalist. We argue that historians of religion must then ask the question: what was the “pre-Orientalist” background or the broader intellectual context of Orientalism? This brings us from the project of Orientalism to the science of religion (Religionswissenschaft).

Van der Veer’s characterization above of the Orientalism project as “a ‘history,’ established by modern science,” is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century turn toward the optimism that society, culture, and religion could be studied scientifically. The anti-Orientalist criticism of Western scholarship on Islam has, from the beginning, focused a great deal of attention on philology as the discipline par excellence of Orientalism. However, to paraphrase a remark that Karl Barth made about Adolf Harnack and nineteenth-century biblical criticism, critics who look deep into the well of Orientalismusforschung will find the face of F. Max Müller staring back at them. The crucial decade when the “turn” took place, as Eric Sharpe has shown, was from 1859 to 1869:

The decade began, of course, with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Before its end, Herbert Spencer was well started on his elaborate System of Synthetic Philosophy, Thomas Huxley had confronted Bishop Wilberforce before the British Association in the name of science, E. B. Tylor had launched his theory of “animism” . . . and an expatriate German philologist resident in Oxford, Friederich Max Müller, had begun to publish a definitive edition of the Sanskrit text of the Rig Veda . . . and suggested to the English-speaking world that, so far from science and religion being irreconcilable opposites, there might be a “Science of Religion” which would do justice to both. In short, comparative religion (at first a synonym for the science of religion) did not exist by 1859; by 1869 it did.⁶

The scholarly conceit that the study of religion consists in a science or in sciences that explain the “data of religion” has led communities of scholars in the academy, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (and to a lesser extent the American Academy of Religion), to isolate problems in the study of religion for special attention. The “problem” to receive the most attention in the last decade has come to be known, rather uneasily, by the rubric “fundamentalism.” Like Orientalism, fundamentalism is linked to colonialism. In much of the world, fundamentalism is construed as a postcolonial phenomenon and thus can be analyzed comparatively across traditions. In short, fundamentalism is now a “project” of the academy. We agree with those scholars associated with the Fundamentalism Project who hold that fundamentalist-like movements should also be compared historically with similar movements and conflicts within universal religious traditions, such as Islam. We disagree with the narrower claim that fundamentalism is primarily explicable as an intellectual and social phenomenon of modernity. The faultiness of the claim in general is that virtually no contemporary or recent social phenomena can be excluded from it, and thus it loses its explanatory power. Nonetheless, the conditions of modernity have clearly altered the rationalism/traditionalism conflict. We will describe and assess the influence of modernity on the “spirit of Mu‘tazilism” and rationalism in the later chapters of this book.

What little general interest there has been in the academy in the Mu‘tazila, rationalism, or Islamic modernism has been almost entirely eclipsed by journalists and scholars who like to fret in public about the causes and effects of Islamic fundamentalism. Muslim rationalist and modernist theologians, by and large, have not provided the media with sound bites and video footage for the evening news. Thus, before we attempt to discuss the complex relationship between rationalism and traditionalism, we must examine the role of Western (and Muslim) neo-Orientalism in editing out all but the Islamist movements when modern Islamic thought and movements come under discussion in Western public discourse.

Recently, scholars in religious studies have attempted to recapture ground taken by political scientists, the media, and Washington think tanks regarding the explanation and interpretation of religious fundamentalism, especially in its more violent expressions. Two of the earliest such attempts appeared in 1987 (Lionel Caplan, ed., Studies in Religious Fundamentalism and Richard T. Antoun and Mary Elaine Hegland, eds., Studies in Religious Fundamentalism). Two years later, Bruce B. Lawrence published the first edition of his very influential study titled Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (1989). The main title of Lawrence’s book has inspired the title of the present volume. The greatest expression of the new scholarly focus on fundamentalism is the multi-volume Fundamentalism Project, a study involving dozens of scholars, under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and edited by Chicago historian Martin E. Marty and his associate R. Scott Appleby; the first volume appeared in 1991.⁷

An important contribution of these studies is the attempt to analyze religious phenomena comparatively. The Fundamentalism Project directors, Marty and Appleby, asked contributing scholars to determine whether or not a family of resemblances existed among fundamentalist-like religious movements around the world. By the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Style
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: A Tale of Two Texts
• Part I ‘Abd al-Jabbar and Classical Mu‘tazilism
• Part II Harun Nasution and Modern Mu‘tazilism
• Part III Mu‘tazilism and (Post) Modernity
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index