JANUARY 18, 2012: Guest Lecturer Tradition and Modernity in Islamic Thought: Afghani and Adbuh
Is modernity something we are freed by or something we are trapped by? In an anonymous chronicle European was used for the first time as a contrast with Islam. It also is a contrast to East and the Greek Orthodox Church. The implications of the use is that “We are Europeans” means that they are Christians, but that they are Latin Catholics rather than Greek Orthodox. These distinctions are crucial to what it means to be a European. In a broader sense, it is a stable of European historiography that the birth of Islam creates Europe in an economic sense because the Muslim conquest of North Africa cuts off the Mediterranean from the rest of Europe and it forced European attention northwards as they couldn’t trade as easily with regions near the Mediterranean. “Without Mohammed there would be no Charlemagne” Muslim thinkers are moving away from the notion that Europe is an active imposer of ideas and the Muslim world is the passive receiver of ideas. Instead, they were active appropriators of European ideas. At least at the beginning of the 19th century there were 2 important strands of thought that would influence the way European ideas would be challenged. 1. The idea that 19th century Europe was not medieval (they have achieved “modernity”). This started in the Renaissance with the idea to bypass the medieval scholastic structure of learning which has created ossified frozen thinking. European thinkers were going to go back to Greek and Roman classics. Amongst enlightenment thinkers this contrast with the medieval world became more strongly held because they thought the medieval world was stunted by religion and dogma, which was far from progress, science, philosophy, and free philosophical thinking. There were also ideas about the universality of humankind, meant to contrast with the notion that medieval divided the world into believers and infidels by religion. Not everyone was convinced that humankind was a universal notion, and one of the most proponent proponents of the idea of radical different between people and cultures was J. G. von Herder, who was responding to new information coming from the Americas about native Americas. He built his theories around linguistic differences (native American languages) → “Language is a grid structuring thought and molding national character.” Herder didn’t think these radical differences were unbridgeable. By not indulging in assimilation, we can bridge the radical differences, but this message was lost as the 19th century progressed. Herder’s idea is taken up by the new discipline of historical linguistics (W. bon Humboldt focused on this). Historical linguists grouped languages taxonomically into groups and family, and the most basic difference they found was that the Semitic language family (Hebrew and Muslim languages) and the Aryan Language Family (European language). Humboldt infers that with this there is a Semitic mind and an Aryan mind, or two different culture ways of thinking. It was “better” to be part of an Aryan language family that a Semitic language family because Islam, held by many of these thinkers the ultimate expression of Semitic national character was so grossly disempowered in contrast to European, which was held to stem from Ancient Greece. Ernest Renan took off from the new science of religion in an attempt to get away from sacral history. He was a populariser of this new discipline. He wrote many
books and was critical of all religious traditions. In his “Averroes et l’Averroisme” and “Islam and the Sciences” he articulate these racial divisions in a clear fashion. The conclusion he draws is that rationalism, philosophy and science were never at home in Islamic civilisation because it can never free itself from its Arab origins and its Semitic voice. It is irretrievable ant-rational and dogmatic and cared more about the five points of religious law that it did about truth, demonstration, evidence, experimentations, etc.; qualities Renan held to be Aryan qualities. He explained Muslim thinkers and accomplishments as exceptions or being of Persian origins and therefore part of the Aryan (Persian is an Indo-European language) family. His larger claim is that rationalism can’t survive in Arab soil and will wither and die. A lot of these racist ideas went hand in hand with France and Britain’s imperial projects in the Muslim world. Ex) In the Renan’s final paragraph of a lecture given at the Sorbonne, he says “Liberals who defend Islam do not know it,” “It [Islam] is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain humankind has ever formed,” “What essentially distinguishes the Muslim is the hate for science,” and that “Science creates military superiority and industrial superiority and will one day produce social superiority.” His ideas were more than racialist notions did have an impact because they were used as excuses or justifications as imperial projects that rested ultimately on military superiority and economic superiority. These ideas didn’t just stay in Europe, and were brought to the Muslim world and are circulated, because imperialism is also cultural exportation. These notions get translated by Muslim thinkers such as Rifa al-Tahtawi, and through this translation movement that 19th century Muslim will go from the medieval from the modern way of life. Europe will teach them to be modern. The Muslim renaissance means that there has to have been a period of decadence before that. Jamal al-din al-Afghani wanted to confront the intellectual challenge proposed by European ideas. There was some debate about his origins (until a few decades ago) because there was some chance he might have been from Afghanistan (a mainly Sunni country), but it turns out he is from an Iranian town (he took the last name“al-Afghani”- on as a pen name because the Afghanis were the only Muslim fighters standing their ground and successfully resisting British colonization.) He had a Shi’ite upbringing and emerged from that view towards a broader sense of being a Muslim in the face of European colonization. He received a good education in the Islamic philosophical science (some logic, metaphysics) and he travelled around the Islamic world and travelled in British India, which is the context of the first reading. In contrast to Renan, he shows the trans-cultural and trans-religious nature of science. He wanted to show no one had exclusive ownership of rationality. Modernity is predicated only not only being not medieval, but on being not Muslim, which was a dilemma for Islamic thinkers. Does modernization require Westernization? 2 Universities were being set up in Cairo. Abduh was caught up in politics, more so than Afghani, and Abduh had to go into exile following the revolt in 1882, and he went travelling and fought a theology teaching job in Beirut. Adbuh has the stature to talk about the tradition and has earned the right to speak the way he does in his simplified version of Islamic theological. Early modernists are a move away from an intimate 1st order engagement with the intellectual traditions of Islam and towards a slightly more distant 2nd order
engagement with tradition (a vision of the tradition as a whole, as a static entity, where we talk about Islamic philosophy in general, not as an entity in a time period, and a picking and choosing of particular ideas, distinctions, terms, etc.) This I what Abduh was doing in his readings (taking different ideas from different philosophers or theologists or schools of thought). He is not committed to a particular school of thought. This move between early modern Islam and late modern Islam, and from 1st to 2nd order engagement and towards a 3rd order of engagement with tradition that challenges the categories we think of tradition (What is the West? What is the Orient? What is the East?). Muslim thinkers in the 20th century engage in this attempt to rehabilitation the school of Islamic thought called the Mu’tazilism. There is no escaping European interaction due to the complexity of the relationship.