Faith vs. Reason: Can There Be An Islamic Philosophy? - Abdal Hakim Murad

have you all made an announcement okay yeah with your permission okay smell a rahmani raheem alhamdulillah what's all that was salam o allah rasool allah where he was happy he won and wallah I want to kick off this morning by making a plea I have a lot to say today and I'm not going to be leaving any time for questions so if you have any any questions post the thought that you should not understand everything I say but just in case please store them up for Wednesday because at least half an hour towards the end of that lecture I will be leaving free specifically for questions on any subject now the reason I'm entering this plea is not because the questions might prove too much for me although it would not be the first time that it happened but because I have been landed with rather a lot to set before you today the administrators god bless them have asked me to speak about Islamic theology and about Islamic mysticism in the course of a single morning these are in essence two two most important subjects that we'll be looking at so I have my work cut out and I just don't ask you to sit back and and just follow me as an audience this morning you're going to be rather like camp those of us who are being driven by Jon across some of the more difficult mountains of New Mexico yesterday we just had to sit back and trust that we were safely heading towards some kind of coherent destination this lecture is going to be a bit like that anyway I want to start with an obscure fact about the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant one of the lesser known facts about can't is that his doctoral certificate dated 1755 bears at the top the unmistakable Arabic words this Miller he rahmanir rahim' these words which are of course the first verse of the holy quran now who on earth could have scribbled these in and for what obscure purpose is a teasing little problem that is occupied the leisure time of intellectual historians for many years did the anonymous graffiti artist who knows perhaps even can't himself intend to suggest that there was any kind of congruence between his proto idealistic philosophy and the teachings of the Arabian prophet or is the gesture as is more usually held some kind of ironic joke which upholds philosophy as necessarily the polar opposite of revelation well probably we'll never know we don't know who put back those words in and for what reason but for our purposes today the question is surely quite a teasing one if God has defined reality in the Koran with the hadith providing as it were an apparatus of detailed footnotes what use could anybody have for reason after all if God had intended and created the reason in order to penetrate the ultimate secrets of existence and the heavens and the earth he wouldn't probably have bothered to provide revelation in the first place but more simply can there be an Islamic philosophy or an Islamic philosophical theology or does the mind exist simply to work out some of the marginal entailments of the revealed law with the heart given the job of accenting to the revelation and thus of knowing God well there are lot of Muslims particularly today who had find the presence of the Quranic words on Kant certificate particularly horrifying after all Kant was the one who made Hegel possible the man who floated these great metaphysical balloons to fill the spaces left by receding theology and the job of philosophy in the 20th century basically has been to pop those balloons leaving us in most cases with not very much now this anti philosophical judgment would be shared interestingly enough by mystics and by textual literalists alike the book and the heart propose an epistemology a means of acquiring knowledge that is guaranteed by Almighty God the mind however seems to be too governed by its conditions and its training in space and time and by the ego to be reliable after all the Koran itself begins by recounting how an angel fell from grace by using his mind to define God refusing to bow before Adam the angel who later became Satan said I am better than him you have created me from fire and created him from mere clay so the very existence of the principle of evil in the world this Quranic text seems to be suggesting comes from the use or the abuse of the intellect it's an interesting comparison incidentally that the the Bible starts out with the narrative of the physical creation of the world whereas the Quran if you set aside the preliminary first chapter which is essentially a kind of introductory prayer the second chapter of the Quran begins with the narrative of the the creation of the human soul and the human being - the first 30 or 40 verses of the second chapter if you want to to check it out and this view has been quite widespread you can't really use reason to determine ultimate truths for instance there's a very famous Syrian theologian following the literalist Hanbali school of law called eben Kodama he died in 12:23 very representative of this literalist tendency and he wrote a whole book called the center of dialectical theology which was all about how wicked and blasphemous it is to use the mind in order to attempt to penetrate the divine secrets so he says we must renounce the evilness of theology as shown in its condemnation by our religious leaders who are universally agreed that its advocates are partisans of heretical innovations and abominable error a piece of medieval rhetoric there but fairly characteristic of a certain type of literalist polemic against any use of Reason in religious discourse that kind of attitude was fairly common among Stalin that the religious scholars and we can click clearly see that it was even more common amongst the Britain non-intellectual masses God and His Prophet didn't use philosophy so how can we have the temerity to do so so perhaps we should acquiesce in the polemical Muslim position that you often hear in sessions of dialogue for instance that blames the modern world seen as godless hubris on a readiness to follow the mind that grew from medieval Christian intellectualism one of the big contrasts between the intellectual history of Christianity and that of Islam is that in Christianity the crown of the intellectual disciplines was always theology that was the central Christian intellectual concern whereas in Islam although there was as I'll go on to explain forms of sophisticated theology nonetheless their existence was always somewhat marginal they were taught and continue to be taught in the great Orthodox faculties of learning but the principal Muslim intellectual endeavor has traditionally been mysticism rather than theology so in classical Christianity again these a huge generalizations but in this context we have to rely on them in classical Christianity theology is at the center of our struggle to know God in classical Islam mysticism is at the center and this year volume of the literature generated by each tradition bears disarmed so to get back to this this polemical point that you'll sometimes hear you'll find a lot of Muslims today contemplating the lack of intellectual moorings of modernity or what we nowadays term post modernity and hurt also by the paradox of the bright brazen triumph of modernity point to the huge intellectual energy which Christians traditionally invested in philosophical theology as the clue to the emergence of that enlightenment rationalism which ultimately left let the Greek genie out of out of the bottle it was the Christians according to this view that released the genie the Muslims always kept it corked up so the Muslims of the wise ones who rejected the the excessive use of pure reason following either the scriptures or the of mystical speculation or quite frequently both put together now obviously you don't need to know too much about medieval Christian intellectual history to realize that this polemic actually misrepresents the classical Christian Scholastic position it is true that they relied on the intellect but their definition of the term intellect was quite different to the one we use today for them Rati oh the use of ratiocination dialectics some taking place in in the mind was a path principally to the articulation and not to the discovery of truth the truth for the Christian scholastics was located in the thing that they called the intellect which unlike our modern definition actually included several other phenomena notably the intuitive divinely inspired capacity to to discover truth providential intuition as part of the Faculty of intellect nowadays we exclude it so we find for instance in dan t he tells Beatrice towards the close of the Divine Comedy now do I see that never made the intellect be sated unless that truth do shine upon it um so philosophy in medieval Christendom were famously the handmaid of theology there were some who tried to promote it beyond its ability the medieval ABBA roasts particularly of Padua were those who thought that if revelation and reason collide then reason has to be given given priority number of avarice such as siger of Brabant great term medieval Christian theology the theologian were actually smacked down for doing this and interesting ly the aburrá ISM that they were bringing in came from the Islamic world um Averroes was of course people rushed the famous philosopher and Malachy jurist of Cordoba anyway so what I'm saying is that this traditional Muslim critique actually it misunderstands what the the scholastic were doing but it does reciprocate in quite an interesting way the the mirror image of this which was the classical or early modern Christian repudiation or interrogation of Islamic Rees we're told particularly by 19th century Orientalists such as Elaine on earnest Elaine are one of the great intellectuals of 19th century France and also by a number of orientalists in the present century that Islam cannot foster a reason based theology because Islam emphasizes practice and not thought the very word Islam itself these people would tell us implies a kind of blind unthinking submission to the inscrutable will of God and what the religious leaders require is not orthodoxy so much as orthopraxy in other words practicing in the right way not believing in the right way orthodoxy in Islam being limited to assent to a very few elementary propositions perhaps even just the two propositions enshrined in the Shahada itself now this traditional European assumption is I think that Islam is a kind of regrettable lapse into Judaic formalism and it has a dude a ik type of God who is so transcendent that the mind simply cannot reach him and hence this kind of religion is suited to less intellectually gifted people desert dwellers for whom the images that the sky is very clearly distinguished from the earth the triune Christian God is an intellectual stimulus and a challenge whereas Allah or Yahweh is unknowable and hence all these devotees can do is to busy themselves with discussing the laws in some kind of casuist Acorah v'n para say ik russian so we have a kind of double smugness in recent debate between Islam and Christendom some Muslims and some Christians purveying the image of a uniformly non-intellectual Aslam however recent scholarship very thankfully has managed to overturn this image and this overturning has come about in two ways firstly we have thanks to research in the archives a growing realization that medieval Muslims did in fact do a lot of genuine and profound theologizing but that given the way in which knowledge ordered in classical Islamic civilization this theology doesn't always appear where a westerner would expect to find it so books on theology might be quite small creedal statements but in fact you find a lot of what Christians would regard as theological issues discussed for instance in books on jurisprudence the preliminary chapters on Islamic jurisprudence often contain issues on what is the nature of man who is actually required to follow the law who has a sold who doesn't and so forth similarly of course a lot of theological discussion took place and the flourishing traditions of Islamic mysticism secondly there has been a lot of research being done into islamic formal theology itself which goes under the name of Kalam one of the key technical terms in Islamic studies Kalam Klam which simply means speech and it became applied to theology because one of the early discussions that the Kalam theologians were interested in was the question of God's speech ayiva Quran is it created in time or has it always existed so Kalam means systematic theology rationalizing theology and we know that classical Islamic thought did not so much make war on the Greeks as enlist at least some of them as allies so this medieval color tradition is not just some kind of scriptural list piety platitudes rephrasing that the Jews of Scripture but actually Bill's in many cases are very sophisticated and internally coherent metaphysical superstructure which in many ways operates in a kind of register that's not too far from that of medieval Christian scholasticism now I'll be talking about both of these traditions today the Kalam ie the theological dimension of Islam and mysticism in due course but before I can do this and get on to the real subject of today's which is naming these two areas of Eman and F Sen mentioned in the hadith of Gabriel I want to backtrack a little bit historically and investigate and Gris tell the narrative of the early Muslim community because Islamic theology like Christian theology is something that can only be understood in terms of its historical background and the processes which which brought it about remember that right at the beginning of Islam there was no systematic theology and there was no systematic mysticism in the forms that later became normative in Islam and this famous hadith of Gabriel which I passed around my first lecture does allude to the legitimacy of levels that transcend the pure outward forms of Islam that which we know and his friends would consider to be normative Islam or prac see the five pillars etc because the hadith of Gabriel which is unanimously accepted as canonical by the Muslims explains explicitly that there are higher dimensions there is a level of Eman which means confident faithful trust in the existence and goodness of God and SN which means excellence explicitly defined in this hadith is meaning spiritual excellence now these things obviously exist concentric lis both in individuals and in society and the hadith makes this quite clear it's easy to practice the output rituals of a religion you can be a very stupid person or a bad person and still practice Islam well you can pray five times a day fast etc so you can exist in this realm however a smaller number of human beings are able to move up to the second area of Eman and actually internalize the meanings of these outward practices so that they become true believers and do it sincerely for God of those people again a smaller minority will be called to the level of SN which leads to sainthood itself the ultimate goal of religious practice in all religions selflessness absolute goodness and living joyously in the presence of God so these things exist concentric Li now you may remember that I pointed out that in fact less than 10% of the Quran is concerned with those things that we were put in the outward outer most of these circles the area of of Islam in fact some people say that only about 80 or 90 of the verses of the Quran which are about six and a half thousand altogether are actually to do with do's and don'ts which is a good antidote to those who would regard the Koran is primarily a legalistic document in fact we find a lot more about these higher areas eman in particular is is constantly referred to in the Quran and there are also many mystical allusions so one of the interesting things about classical Islamic literature is that you will find more a higher percentage of Quranic illusions in doctrinal and particularly in classical mystical texts then you will find in the texts that are simply about practice and law

Channel: Islam On Demand

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Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2013