CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM RESPONSE
TO THE CHALLENGE OF KNOWLEDGE:
SEPARATING THE GRAIN FROM THE CHAFF - 2
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[Background ]
[ The Problem I ]
[ The Problem II ]
Grappling With the Problem I Muhammad Iqbal, the great thinker and poet, was one
towering figure of his generation, who relished reflecting on the flight of the
Ummah. He addressed, in prose and poetry, the decline of the Ummah, but his
greatest worry and the thing that occupied most of his attention was the
intellectual decline. “During the last five hundred years” Iqbal observed,
“religious thought in Islam has been practically stationary. There was a time
when European thought received inspiration from the world of Islam. The most
remarkable phenomenon of modern history, however, is the enormous rapidity with
which the world of Islam is spiritually moving towards the West. There is
nothing wrong in this movement”, Iqbal believed, “for European culture, on its
intellectual side, is only a further development of some of the most important
phases of the culture of Islam. Our only fear”, he cautioned, “is that the
dazzling exterior of European culture may arrest our movement and we may fail
to reach the true inwardness of that culture.”(6) He attempted to reconcile
reason and revelation, physics and metaphysics in a way that went beyond
al-Ghazali, and in so doing tried to develop an epistemology which would enable
Muslims to come to grips with this dichotomy. He argues for example, “No doubt
the immediate purpose of the Qur’an in this reflective observation of nature is
to awaken in man the consciousness of that of which nature is regarded a symbol
.....It is our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things which trains
us for an intellectual vision of the non temporal .... The Qur’an opens our
eyes to the great facts of change, through the appreciation and control of
which alone it is possible to build a durable civilization.”(7) He further argues: “Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in
greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the
dogmas of science. Science may ignore a rational metaphysics; indeed it has
ignored it so far. Religion can hardly afford to ignore the search for a
reconciliation of the oppositions of experience and a justification of the
environment in which humanity finds itself. ... But to rationalize faith is not
to admit the superiority of philosophy over religion. Philosophy, no doubt, has
jurisdiction to judge religion, but what is to be judged is of such a nature
that it will not submit to the jurisdiction of philosophy except on its own
terms”.(8) “Religion is not physics or chemistry seeking an explanation of the
nature in terms of causation; it really aims at interpreting a totally
different region of human experience - religious experience - the data of which
cannot be reduced to the data of any other science. Infact it must be said in
justice to religion that it insisted on the necessity of concrete experience in
religious life long before science learnt to do so. The conflict between the
two is due not to the fact that one is, and the other is not, based on concrete
experience. Both seek concrete experience as a point of departure.”(9) Iqbal’s approach was unconventional and many of his
contemporaries may have been uncomfortable about his characteristic boldness,
which naturally attracted some criticism. Fazlur Rahman’s worry was not however
in Iqbal’s approach but in its content. While admitting that Iqbal’s was the
only systematic attempt at a coherent body of metaphysical thought informed by
the Qur’an and that Iqbal had certain basic and rare insights into the nature
of Islam as an attitude to life, Fazlur Rahman, however, felt that his work
“cannot be said to be based on Qur’anic teaching: the structural elements of
its thought are too contemporary to be an adequate basis for an ongoing Islamic
metaphysical endeavor”.(10) Well, Iqbal’s work like all other human works are
not unassailable. Iqbal himself may have looked forward to other minds who
could continue to address the issue further and had occasion to complain that
the Ummah was not producing minds who “by divine gift or by experience, possess
a keen perception of the spirit and destiny of Islam, along with an equally
keen perception of the trend of modern history.”(11) The significance of Iqbal’s contributions lie not only in the
fact that he gave fresh insight to a perennial problem but also, and more profoundly,
because he began a systematic diagnosis, that he began the construction of an
epistemology that attempted to abolish a dichotomy which had defied solution. Another scholar who seems to share much with Iqbal
is Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Nasr may not be as unique to his generation as Iqbal
was, but he is certainly a cut above many of his fellow Muslim scholars. He has
spent the best part of the last half a century waging a solo campaign against
Western scientism and humanism as well as against Muslim apathy and
complacency. Nasr lives in an age of Islamic movements, but he has chosen to
live above their immediate agendas maintaining his long term vision beyond the
little principalities the movements seem obsessed with, albeit at great cost. Nasr, a leading authority
in Sufism and the philosophy of science, is today, perhaps, the most prolific
Muslim scholar around. A great majority of his works revolve around the theme
of the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane and the crisis this has
generated, or as he would say, the plight of modern man. But in dealing with
this very important issue the thrust of Nasr’s contribution has been to restore
a unified epistemology in which both physics and metaphysics will not only
compliment each other but also, and most importantly, lead to the ultimate
reality which is at once absolute and infinite. In his words: “The sensualist and empirical epistemology, which
has dominated the horizon of Western man in the modern period, has succeeded in
reducing reality to the world experienced by the external senses, hence
limiting the meaning of reality and removing the concept of ‘reality’ as a
category pertaining to God. The consequences of this change in the very meaning
of reality has been nothing less than catastrophic, ....” The most catastrophic
effect being on the self, as he continues to argue, “In a society in which the
lower self is allowed to fall by its own weight, in which the Ultimate Self and
the way to attain it are forgotten, in which there is no higher principle than
the individual self, there cannot but be the highest degree of conflict between
limited egos which will claim for themselves absolute rights, usually in
conflict with the claims of other egos - rights which belong to the self alone.
In such a situation, even the spiritual virtue of charity become[s] sheer
sentimentality.”(12)
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