CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM RESPONSE
TO THE CHALLENGE OF KNOWLEDGE:
SEPARATING THE GRAIN FROM THE CHAFF - 3
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[Background ]
[ The Problem I ]
[ The Problem II ]
Grappling With the Problem II Thoroughly grounded in both the Islamic as well as the Western intellectual
tradition, Nasr has always, as he continues to do, made the most severe
criticisms against Western epistemology, criticism which cannot be ignored. He
continues to warn the West not against refusing Islam but against resisting and
opposing the sacred and the consequences of the spiritual crisis that this
generates, as of the toll this will take, not on the West alone, but on the
whole of humanity. He also cautions the East in general and Muslims in
particular against blindly copying the West especially in this era of rapid
industrialisation and calls for discernment. “If this discernment is not used”,
Nasr warns, ‘Oriental societies will continue to eat the bread crumbs and the
refuse left from the banquet table and possibly the “last supper” of the
industrialised world’.(13) Nasr’s solution seem to lie in a two pronged attack
in which both the Islamic as well as Western epistemology have to be thoroughly
revised and restored so that the balance between the sacred and the mundane can
be achieved. The significance of Nasr’s efforts lies in the fact that he
operates on the frontiers of knowledge and not from the rear and he cannot
therefore be ignored by the experts. It is also significant that Nasr’s concern
reaches out for humanity as a whole, rather than just Muslim Ummah alone. This
may look too ecumenical for some, but it does allows him not only a larger audience
but re-establishes Islam’s concern for humanity and, therefore, corrects an
impression that contemporary Muslim parochialism has created. His criticism of
the West is not because they do not apply Islam but because they pose a danger
to the whole of humanity, in echoing this concern Nasr unfolds an aspect
of Islam’s message which has been
buried in the debris of Muslim past, an aspect which is crucial if Islam is to
be a hope for humanity. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas is one very
interesting contemporary scholar in more ways than one. He has spent the best
part of his life time addressing this problem of dichotomy in knowledge. A
philosopher, a linguist with a strong Sufi vision and taste, al-Attas has
provided an unusual insight into what he will prefer to call westernisation and
which to him is the source of secularisation. One of the gravest consequences
of secularisation, and the root of our problems as Muslims today, Al-Attas
believes, is the loss of Adab, what
Nasr calls desacrilisation of knowledge.
“The chief characteristic symptoms of loss of Adab within the community”,
al-Attas believes, “is the process of levelling.” By levelling he means “the
levelling of every one, in the mind and the attitude, to the same level of the
leveller. This mental and attitudinal process, which impinges upon action, is
perpetrated through the encouragement of false leaders who wish to demolish
legitimate authority and valid hierarchy so that they and their like might
thrive. This Jahili streak of individualism, of immanent arrogance and
obstinacy, as he calls it, led what he calls the Modernist and Reformers of our
times, including those who masquerade as Ulama’, to censure “the great ulama of
the past and men of spiritual discernment who contributed so much to the
knowledge of Islam”. Al-Attas is not saying that the ulama should not be
criticised, rather, as he put, “No doubt it is possible to concede that the
critics of the great and learned were in the past at least themselves great and
learned in their own way, but it is a mistake to put them together on the same
level - the more so to place the lesser above the greater in rank as happens in
the estimation of our age of greater confusion.”(14) The solution al-Attas proposes, rather predictably,
is a return to what he keeps referring to as adab, but this is not adab as
it is widely understood today. Rather, this is an adab which with the Islamization of a large part of the world
during the Abbasids period, “was further evolved to extend itself beyond Arab
literature and culture to include the human sciences and disciplines of other
Muslim peoples, notably the Persians, and even to draw into its ambit the
literatures, sciences and philosophies of other civilisations such as the
Indian and Greek”. But then as al-Attas admits, “during the Abbasi period also,
the restriction of the Islamised meaning of adab,
which was in the process of unfolding itself, had begun - no doubt due, among
other causes, to the urbanity that prevailed, and the attendant officialdom and
bureaucracy”.(15) This may mean that the concept of adab itself, has to first
be Islamised. It is under the ambience of this reislamised adab, as it were, that the Islamization of knowledge is to be
undertaken. Al-Attas then proceeded to argue that “since in Islam the purpose
of seeking knowledge is ultimately to become a good man, as we have described,
and not a good citizen of a secular state, the system of education in Islam
must reflect man and not the state.” Since the university represents the
highest level of learning, designed to reflect the universal, true to his Sufi
background, al-Attas believes the university must be a reflection of not just
any man but the Universal Perfect Man (al-Insan
al-Kamil), which in Islam is realised “only in the sacred person of the
holy prophet”.(16) With man at the centre, al-Attas suggested the familiar dual
categorisation of fard ayn and fard kifaya and a matching schemata of
man, knowledge and the university.(17) While the religious sciences constitute
the fard Ayn, the rational
intellectual and philosophical sciences constitute the fard kifaya. It is this latter category that apparently needs to be
Islamised, each branch, al-Attas insists, “must be imbued with Islamic elements
and key concepts ...this process constitutes its Islamization”.(18)
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