The Balance Sheet of Western Philosophy in this Century
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mohammad
Jun 25, 2005, 7:44:55 AM6/25/05
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By Roger Garaudy
Today, Western philosophy is all too close to its origins because it
has never really answered the questions that brought about its birth.
These ques-tions are: What is the meaning of life and death? What is
the source and what is the vocation of our freedom? How are we to act
in order to fulfill the pat-terns of God? Such essential questions of
philosophy are raised only by man, and properly so. For only man cannot
live without raising them.
In nature, every being has a place and a function which are not of its
own choosing. Every creature is subject to the law of God: a stone must
fall when released, a plant must grow when nourished, an animal must
follow its instinct. All of them obey and fulfill this divine law
without choice or question.
With man, however, a new realm begins. He is the only creature that God
has endowed with the choice of either disobeying or fulfilling that law
after a free, deliberate, and responsible decision.
The Qur'an says: "We have offered Our trust to the heavens, to earth
and mountains. But they all rejected it in fear and trembling. Only man
arose to accept and carry that trust. He alone is unjust and ignorant
(33:72)."
It was thus that human history began, a history that man himself makes,
unlike all other creatures which fulfill the law of necessity.
In order to regain this lost unity, that is to say, in order to
integrate himself into the whole of creation and thus give his life and
death their place and meaning in the divine order, man created all
sorts of myths. But he also received divine assistance through the
revelations brought by the prophets of every people.
In the sixth century before Christ, throughout Asia, the great myths of
Mesopotamia and Egypt, the wise sayings of the Upanishads of India, and
those of Chinese Taoism raised and considered the basic problems of the
ultimate reality of this world, its meaning and significance, our role
in it,and our possible action.
It was man's first attempt to reach a satisfactory answer to the
question of relations between man and nature, between man and God. In
the Near East, where the great revelations of the Book of God had taken
place, in which the divine answers to human questions were given, the
sages deliberated over the basic problems with great concentration.
One of those sages, Heraclitus, had already proclaimed in the sixth
century B.C. that
"All things are one."
"The Law is to follow the will of the One."
"Wisdom consists in a single thing only, namely: to know the
thought that governs and orders everything."
Similarly, the Hariifs had come very close to these answers in their
search for the will of God.
Under these circumstances came the first "secession" (withdrawing) of
the West. Consuming involvement in trade had caused man to lose contact
with nature nature being cultivated through slaves. Likeise, the fierce
commercial competition among the cities, and among the citizens of
each city, caused men to lose sight of the divine unity.
It was then the fashion to deny any absolute, to assume man's
self-sufficiency, and to proclaim him "the measure of all things." By
rejecting both transcendence and community at once, human society was
turned into an arena of confrontation among individuals and groups
driven by their will to growth and their will to power.
The first philosophers of the West, the sophists of Athens, gave us the
first formulation of this moral. "The good," they said, "consists in
having the strongest desires as well as the means to satisfy them."
Obviously, this law of the jungle continues to this day to characterize
Western societies bent upon growth as well as maintaining "the balance
of terror."
Such was the birth of philosophy in the West in the fifth century B.C.
It was an occasion that prompted Socrates to seek new foundations for
moral knowledge which, he thought, might save man from the impending
chaos and downfall of Athens, from its total moral disintegration. As
he saw it, the problem was one of finding a principle for making
value judgements, a principle that was viable enough to withstand the
array of happenstance answers given by the sophists.
One of Socrates' disciplines, Plato, in pursuit of the same objective,
elevated the search for knowledge of virtue and politics to a science.
But that science, in his view, consisted of relating reasons and
concepts together in necessary, unbreakable bonds.
This conception of science leaves no room whatsoever for faith, which
was relegated to a position of inferior knowledge. Nor does it leave
any room for love. For what is called "Platonic love" is not the love
of other persons but of an intellectual search for a total truth. Nor
does it leave any room for beauty. Indeed, Plato chased the poets out
of his ideal republic because their creative imagination was deemed by
him to be a menace to the established, order.
This reductionist conception of reason, which deprives man of his
noblest dimensions (faith, love, beauty) radically separated the soul
from the body, the sensory from the intelligible. And this is still the
most salient characteristic of Western philosophy.
It is a kind of lame rationalism, this Greek philosophizing, which robs
man of his essential dimensions, of love, of beauty, and of faith. The
philosophy's dualism of soul and body, of the sensory and the
intelligible, has brought sterility to Western thinking since Plato and
Aristotle. Moreover, it impoverished religion by pretending to bring it
within the framework of Greek philosophy, as it did with Judaism at the
hands of Ibn Maymun (Maimonides), with Chritianity through St. Thomas
Aquinas, and with Islam in the hands of Ibn Rushd.
There was a time when the West might have cut itself loose from this
reductionist conception of reason. That moment came when, from the
Muslim University of Qurtubah-from the tenth to the thirteenth
centuries-a new vision shone over Europe. In this Islamic view,
reason in its full dimensions was being taught and advocated.
First, the natural sciences cultivated the experimental method and,
through it, enabled Arab-Islamic thought to break away from the
speculative thinking of the Greeks. When that science moved to the
Europe of the Middle Ages, it degenerated into scholasticism. The Islam
experimental and mathematical sciences enabled the Muslims to discover
a new order of relations among things within the chains of necessary
causality.
Second, Islamic philosophy, which studied purposes as against science
which studies causes, was able to establish, in line with Qur'anic
teaching, the role of every object and every event as a sign of divine
presence and action. Islamic philosophy was able to institute a way
of thinking regained for life its meaning and purpose by means of
determining things and events as happenings in a divine scheme.
Third, faith was understood by Muslims not as a limitation of either
science or wisdom; on the contrary, faith worked their continuation and
perfection. By moving from cause to effect and from effect to a new
cause, science could never reach a first and satisfying cause.
Likewise, philosophy, by moving from end to end and purpose to purpose,
could never arrive by itself to a final end or purpose. For their
proper exercise, both natural sciences and Islamic philosophy require
the presence of faith so that they may know their proper limits. In
this sense, faith could well be the culmination of science and wisdom
given the axioms and postulates of scientific and moral inquiry.
Indeed, faith is reason without frontiers or limits.
In the face of these Muslim breakthroughs, the West made another
secession instead of following the new light provided by Islam. This
retreat of the West was marked by Bacon, Descartes, and Auguste Comte.
Roger Bacon, who is regarded in the West as the father of the
experimental method in the natural sciences, admitted that his major
work and achievement was borrowed from a translation of the Optics of
Ibn al Haytham, who taught the subject at Qurtubah. He separated
experimental science however, from the Islamic legacy of learning,
which included morality and faith as well.
Likewise, Descartes proclaimed unequivocally that one must separate the
problems of morality and faith from the domain of reason. In his
truncated view, ends or purposes and transcendence have nothing to do
with reason. In his twenty-eighth "meditation", he wrote that it is
futile to ask the question why God did a certain thing. One should only
ask how he did it. Since Descartes, the West has stopped asking why
questions. Its interest is solely in the how. How to make an atom bomb?
Never, why should one make an atom bomb?
As to transcendence, it has lost its reason and ground when one
pretends that existence has for ultimate evidence the proposition "I
think, therefore I am" and'.that the existence of any object will have
to come at the tail end of a process of reasoning that moves from that
base through a chain of deductive syllogisms. Indeed, transcendence
is lost forever when through a contemptuous ontological proof of God,
one claims that one can deduce the existence of all real
things-including God-by arguing from the reality of thought to a
presumed reality of being. Revelation and its whole claim for faith
thus becomes futile and useless when the existence of God could be the
conclusion of logical reasoning.
This line of Western thinging led to the positivism of Auguste Comte.
Positivism, or the denial of reality to anything not perceived through
the senses or not measurable by mathematics, has become the tacit
postulate of all that goes under the name of "modern science" or
"Western science." This attitude has unfortunately pervaded all the
human sciences (the humanities and social sciences) since Comte as
well. All of them rest on the ultimate premise that man is just another
object of nature, not unlike the objects that physics, chemistry, and
biology study.
The postulates of this positivism are three:
1. Every scientific truth, being an exact and definitive copy of
natural reality, precludes that any of the fundamental notions of
science be subject to doubt. Progress of knowledge is hence an
accumulation of these truths.
2. Every reality, whether natural or human, is susceptible to be
studied by one and the same method, of which physics and mathematics
are the ideal paradigm.
3. It follows that all problems, including those of morality,
politics, and society, can indeed be solved by the same method.
With these postulates, science has become scientism, technology has
become technocracy, and politics has become Machiavelianism.
The disadvantages of this positivistic conception of science become
especially exacerbated when the method is applied to the sciences of
man. They are not sciences since they take no account of the
specificity of their object. They apply to man the methods that fit the
knowledge and manipulation of things.
A typical example of this bungling is the discipline of Western
economics. It is not a science but an ideology of justification of a
given social system which regards man as //he were an animal. The
so-called classical economics taught in all the universities of the
West, and unfortunately elsewhere as well, hides behind mathematical
equations its fundamental axiom. This axiom is that man is merely a
producer and consumer of goods and that man is moved solely by his
individual self-interest. This Western notion of man as homo economicus
is the diametrical opposite of the notion of man in Islam. Whenever we
send our sons and daughters to study in the West, we send them
unknowingly to learn militant atheism. For it is not possible to
treat economics scientifically when one abstracts man and denudes him
of his specificity, of his transcendent dimension, of his morality and
values. To give our students intellectual armament with which to
defend themselves against this sad state of knowledge at the present
time is what Isma'fl al Faruqi calls "Islamization of the Disciplines."
In fact, all the mutations of the twentieth century demonstrate the
false premises and postulates of positivistic science. In the natural
sciences, the changes in physics since the emergence of the relativity
and quantum theories have rendered questionable all the conceptions
once held eternal and necessary, of space and time, of determinism, of
the relation of matter to energy, of the subject to the object of
knowledge.
In politics-history in the making-atomic weaponry and the invasion of
space, on the one hand, and the end of colonialism, on the other, have
rendered questionable all the values that were once necessary and
untouchable in that domain. Equally questionable have become the values
of nations and armies, of order and revolution, indeed, of the whole
West with its progress, its hegemony, and the false universalism of its
culture.
The double accomplishment of atomic armament and the conquest of space
has given birth to the "absolute weapon," that is to say, to the
possibility of hitting any objective with missiles fired from any base
on earth, or to that of destroying the earth and all life with the
present stockpile of weapons equaling one million times .the bomb
dropped on Hiroshima.
The disequilibrium is growing, indeed it has become prodigious,
between the United States and Europe, where meat and butter are kept
in cold storage, and a so-called Third World where millions of humans
are dying of starvation and malnutrition.
These are only two examples, among many, that prove that surrender to
the logical implications of Western culture or to its peculiar brand of
growth and development after five centuries of Western hegemony does
lead and has led the entire planet Earth to the brink of suicide.
Islam can bring to the world a different future, as it did to Qurtubah
and Madinah. It can do so through its eternal message of transcendence
and um-mah. In fact, Islam is the only faith capable of effectively
countering the fatal implications of Western dominion. Against
positivism, it gives us transcendence; against individualism, it gives
us the ummah.
Today, Islam has opportunities for spreading far greater than those it
enjoyed at its height in the seventh and eighth centuries. But Islam
must be presented not as a religion among others. Rather, it must be
seen as the point of convergence of the faith that upholds the world,
as the climax of all forces leading toward that ideal faith.
Islam did not conquer the world by military feats. Rather, it achieved
its glorious victory over the world through a cultural revolution which
gave a new purpose for living and a new life to the human masses
populating the disintegrating empires of those days.
The Prophet (SAAS) never claimed that he was creating a new religion.
Rather, he called all humans to submit to God as the Hanifs of old did,
beginning with Adam, the first human and the first prophet, with the
purpose of actualizing the Divine plan on earth.
When God sent those early messengers of the purpose of showing mankind
"the straight path," He chose men capable of reaching and convincing
the millions. He did so by treating every culture on the level and in
the language proper to it. Allah (SWT) did not send doctors of law or
philosophers to convey the message-neither an Ibn Maymun, nor an
Ibn Rushd, nor a St. Thomas Aquinas. He sent a shepherd like Amos, a
carpenter like Jesus (AS), an illiterate tradesman like Muhammad
(SAAS). Nor did He charge them with conveying the complete science of
an encyclopedia. God sent His messengers to all men, including the
ignorant, to teach the meaning of life, to call for submission to the
plans and patterns of God, to exercise their responsibility as God's
vicegerents (khilafah) on earth.
Primordial Islam has known well how to integrate the cultures of all
peoples, from Byzantium and Greece to Persia and India. It did so in a
creative and selective manner, while critically assessing other
cultures. In this century, living, dynamic Islam must do likewise.
We, the Muslims, ought to exercise the same creative effort as did
our ancestors.
As far as the natural sciences are concerned, the problem today is that
of the "transfer of technology." These transfers are never as innocent
as they look. Often, they bring into the Muslim world the life and
thought styles of the West. And in all cases, they help perpetuate
Muslim dependence upon the West, upon the West's research centers, upon
its experts and professional cadres. They determine the future course
of Muslim development, and make Muslim countries dependent upon the
West's philosophy underlying Western science and technology.
Hence it is crucial, in this, as in other domains, to avoid two errors:
blind copying of the West and outright rejection of everything Western.
We should acquire Western science and technology selectively,
creatively, and critically.
First, our adoption must be selective. The countries of the West
developed their science and technology to satisfy their own peculiar
needs, given their own historical circumstances and style of living.
These are not the same on other continents of the world. It is not
evident, for example, that in industrial technology the greatest
priority must always be accorded to the economizing of labor resources.
Likewise, in the fields of medicine and pharmacology, Western peoples
have their own rhythms of life and their own habits of feeding. These
particular conditions dictate that in the West priority be assigned to
cardiovascular diseases, just as the nervous tensions and breakdowns
which Western life presents demands tranquilizers. In areas where the
majority of the population is constantly undernourished and lives on
the land as farmers, medical and pharmaceutical research, as well as
hospital needs, are obviously different.
Second, our adoption of science and technology must be critical.
Transfer of technology always implies a tacit adoption of modes of
living and thinking, of the mentality of development, the philosophy
of positivism, which is the antidote of faith. It brings in its trail
an individualism destructive to the social fabric of the ummah. This
phenomenon is more obvious when the matter imported into the Muslim
world consists of films and television series, of books and other
publications. Let us remember that Hollywood does not constitute
modernity but decadence. It is the disintegration of life. It is not by
accident that those countries that are the most "developed" and the
richest- like the United States and Sweden-have the highest
incidence of teenage suicide. Those countries where people seek death
because they have no reason to live, would they be the educators of
mankind?
When I travel through the Maghrib cities still under the influence of
French culture, it upsets me when people ask me for information about
Western existentialists, Western structuralists, the so-called new
philosophers, who have absolutely nothing to contribute to the future
of humanity.
Let us repeat it once and for all: modernization is not Westernization.
This does not mean that we Muslims have nothing to learn from the West.
For example, when a Muslim learns from Immanuel Kant and his disciples
that all that he says about God, nature, man, and history is something
human, susceptible to criticism and revision, something that must be
relative and conditional, that Muslim has learned a major truth about
humanity. This truth is the other side of another truth that Muslims
have contributed to humanity, namely, that although it is God Himself
who dictated the Qur'an, it is nonetheless humans who read, understand,
and comment upon it. Their word can never be of the same status as His
word. Humans are the products of history, of their problems and needs,
of their time and environment. It is therefore always a difficult task
to distinguish what is divine and eternal from what is human and
relative.
Third, our adoption of Western science and technology must be creative.
Wholly new branches of scientific and technological development should
arise out of the specific needs of each country or region, and be fed
by its own local resources. Whether it be a matter of energy resources,
or the artificial production of foodstuffs for animal growth, the
United States' monopoly on these industries must be broken.
It is hence not necessary, for the da'wah of Islam to succeed in the
modern world, that we should produce a new "philosophy." For such would
entail the risk of producing a philosophy not unlike that of the Middle
Ages, one borrowed from the Greek tradition or one following the
lines of Christian systematic and scholastic theology.
Nor is there any need for us to produce one commentary after another,
without end, on books of law that were designed to solve the social
problems of a former epoch. At any rate, there is nothing, in the old
books, to prevent us from making our own creative and fresh
contributions.
In my humble opinion, the major task confronting the Muslims today is
to rediscover the majestic simplicity of the message of Islam, to
present it to the new century in compensation for all the wealth of
values that the West had caused humanity to lose. We must recapture,
for the benefit of future generations, the conviction of Islam that the
world and history do have meaning and constitute a single unity. It is
indeed the personal responsibility of each one of us to acknowledge
this meaning and unity by our unconditional submission to the call of
Allah (SWT), just as Sayyidina Ibrahim (AS) did.
As far as philosophy is concerned, the central problem for Muslims
today is not the integration into the Islamic view of the philosophy
of Aristotle and the Greeks, which in the past ha'd swayed the Muslims
from the straight path, nor of that which has dominated the modern West
since the Renaissance, which has only deepened man's doubt of his own
significance and even driven him to despair.
On the contrary, the Muslim thinker today needs to learn from Western
philosophy nothing but its critical methodology, which is really its
essential core from Socrates to Galileo, from Kant to Husserl. The
Muslim thinker needs to go back to the period of the first "secession"
of the West (the sixth century B.C.) when human thought first posed the
fundamental issues of life: 1) the relation of man to God, to other
men, and to nature; and 2) the meaning and purpose of life, of death,
of history, of the necessary significance that attaches itself to them
because they are the acts and dispositions of Allah (SWT). Such
science, philosophy, and wisdom never preclude revelation or our need
for the same. On the contrary, they invoke and demand it to specify
both their axioms and their limits.
In loyalty to the highest traditions, the faith and culture of Islam
cannot be isolated from the world out of our fear to learn from others.
This can only bring division and narrow-mindedness. Indeed, the faith
and culture of Islam will be enriched and modernized not only by
openness to the West, but to all that is human and universal.
Let us come to our final and essential point. We do not wish for Islam
to be presented as one religion among many. Rather, we must seek to
present it as the primordial religion ("al Din," not simply "din"), the
culmination and apogee and conclusion of all other revelations. Allah
(SWT) has ordered us in the Qur'an to honor all prophets. The message
the Muslim is expected to convey to the People of the Book (which
enjoys a tremendous penetrative power), testifies to his understanding
of and respect for the earlier revelations. It should always show the
culmination of that tradition of divine revelations in Muhammad
(SAAS).
The knowledge of the other religions is a Muslim's duty. In the lands
of Asia and the Near East, how could any Muslim be a stranger to the
Vedas and Upanishads, to the first sages of Taoism, to the teachings of
the Buddha, of Heraclitus and Zoroaster, of Jeremiah and Jesus? How
could he fail to command such mastery of the origins, of how the
divine messages were corrupted and falsified by their followers; or how
the Qur'an preserved for the benefit of mankind all the best that those
earlier messages had contained? Indeed, how could the Muslims fail to
present the fact that the Qur'anic revelation developed the seeds of
earlier revelations to their fullest Perfection?
The greater dangers for Muslim thinkers today, is to succumb to a false
sense of self-sufficiency, of triumphalism, or self-isolation. The
certainty and conviction of the truth of our faith should not be a
product of our ignorance °f others, but rather of our full knowledge
of them.
If we can avoid these dangers, a non-Muslim convert to Islam will not
feel a lapse from his past religious development but a culmination and
realization of it. This is the first condition of viability of our
da'wah: to impart to each an awareness of this living continuity of
divine revelations and religious life.
The second condition is to prove ourselves capable of solving the
problems that the West is incapable of solving. We need to discover
new forms of growth and development, a culture that does not lead to
human destruction but to the flowering of humanity.
For this, it is of capital importance not to read the words of Allah in
the Qur'an with the eyes of the "dead", that is to say, with the eyes
of those who may have found the straight path but went no further than
to solve the problems of their own time and localities. We must read
the Qur'an with eyes fixed on the solutions of our problems and with
minds and wills determined to discharge our responsibilities as the
vicegerents of Allah (SWT) on earth. We must, in short, find answers to
our own problems in light of the eternal message of the Qur'an.
To be faithful to our ancestors is not to preserve the ashes of their
fire but to transmit its flame.
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Today, Western philosophy is all too close to its origins because it
has never really answered the questions that brought about its birth.
These ques-tions are: What is the meaning of life and death? What is
the source and what is the vocation of our freedom? How are we to act
in order to fulfill the pat-terns of God? Such essential questions of
philosophy are raised only by man, and properly so. For only man cannot
live without raising them.
In nature, every being has a place and a function which are not of its
own choosing. Every creature is subject to the law of God: a stone must
fall when released, a plant must grow when nourished, an animal must
follow its instinct. All of them obey and fulfill this divine law
without choice or question.
With man, however, a new realm begins. He is the only creature that God
has endowed with the choice of either disobeying or fulfilling that law
after a free, deliberate, and responsible decision.
The Qur'an says: "We have offered Our trust to the heavens, to earth
and mountains. But they all rejected it in fear and trembling. Only man
arose to accept and carry that trust. He alone is unjust and ignorant
(33:72)."
It was thus that human history began, a history that man himself makes,
unlike all other creatures which fulfill the law of necessity.
In order to regain this lost unity, that is to say, in order to
integrate himself into the whole of creation and thus give his life and
death their place and meaning in the divine order, man created all
sorts of myths. But he also received divine assistance through the
revelations brought by the prophets of every people.
In the sixth century before Christ, throughout Asia, the great myths of
Mesopotamia and Egypt, the wise sayings of the Upanishads of India, and
those of Chinese Taoism raised and considered the basic problems of the
ultimate reality of this world, its meaning and significance, our role
in it,and our possible action.
It was man's first attempt to reach a satisfactory answer to the
question of relations between man and nature, between man and God. In
the Near East, where the great revelations of the Book of God had taken
place, in which the divine answers to human questions were given, the
sages deliberated over the basic problems with great concentration.
One of those sages, Heraclitus, had already proclaimed in the sixth
century B.C. that
"All things are one."
"The Law is to follow the will of the One."
"Wisdom consists in a single thing only, namely: to know the
thought that governs and orders everything."
Similarly, the Hariifs had come very close to these answers in their
search for the will of God.
Under these circumstances came the first "secession" (withdrawing) of
the West. Consuming involvement in trade had caused man to lose contact
with nature nature being cultivated through slaves. Likeise, the fierce
commercial competition among the cities, and among the citizens of
each city, caused men to lose sight of the divine unity.
It was then the fashion to deny any absolute, to assume man's
self-sufficiency, and to proclaim him "the measure of all things." By
rejecting both transcendence and community at once, human society was
turned into an arena of confrontation among individuals and groups
driven by their will to growth and their will to power.
The first philosophers of the West, the sophists of Athens, gave us the
first formulation of this moral. "The good," they said, "consists in
having the strongest desires as well as the means to satisfy them."
Obviously, this law of the jungle continues to this day to characterize
Western societies bent upon growth as well as maintaining "the balance
of terror."
Such was the birth of philosophy in the West in the fifth century B.C.
It was an occasion that prompted Socrates to seek new foundations for
moral knowledge which, he thought, might save man from the impending
chaos and downfall of Athens, from its total moral disintegration. As
he saw it, the problem was one of finding a principle for making
value judgements, a principle that was viable enough to withstand the
array of happenstance answers given by the sophists.
One of Socrates' disciplines, Plato, in pursuit of the same objective,
elevated the search for knowledge of virtue and politics to a science.
But that science, in his view, consisted of relating reasons and
concepts together in necessary, unbreakable bonds.
This conception of science leaves no room whatsoever for faith, which
was relegated to a position of inferior knowledge. Nor does it leave
any room for love. For what is called "Platonic love" is not the love
of other persons but of an intellectual search for a total truth. Nor
does it leave any room for beauty. Indeed, Plato chased the poets out
of his ideal republic because their creative imagination was deemed by
him to be a menace to the established, order.
This reductionist conception of reason, which deprives man of his
noblest dimensions (faith, love, beauty) radically separated the soul
from the body, the sensory from the intelligible. And this is still the
most salient characteristic of Western philosophy.
It is a kind of lame rationalism, this Greek philosophizing, which robs
man of his essential dimensions, of love, of beauty, and of faith. The
philosophy's dualism of soul and body, of the sensory and the
intelligible, has brought sterility to Western thinking since Plato and
Aristotle. Moreover, it impoverished religion by pretending to bring it
within the framework of Greek philosophy, as it did with Judaism at the
hands of Ibn Maymun (Maimonides), with Chritianity through St. Thomas
Aquinas, and with Islam in the hands of Ibn Rushd.
There was a time when the West might have cut itself loose from this
reductionist conception of reason. That moment came when, from the
Muslim University of Qurtubah-from the tenth to the thirteenth
centuries-a new vision shone over Europe. In this Islamic view,
reason in its full dimensions was being taught and advocated.
First, the natural sciences cultivated the experimental method and,
through it, enabled Arab-Islamic thought to break away from the
speculative thinking of the Greeks. When that science moved to the
Europe of the Middle Ages, it degenerated into scholasticism. The Islam
experimental and mathematical sciences enabled the Muslims to discover
a new order of relations among things within the chains of necessary
causality.
Second, Islamic philosophy, which studied purposes as against science
which studies causes, was able to establish, in line with Qur'anic
teaching, the role of every object and every event as a sign of divine
presence and action. Islamic philosophy was able to institute a way
of thinking regained for life its meaning and purpose by means of
determining things and events as happenings in a divine scheme.
Third, faith was understood by Muslims not as a limitation of either
science or wisdom; on the contrary, faith worked their continuation and
perfection. By moving from cause to effect and from effect to a new
cause, science could never reach a first and satisfying cause.
Likewise, philosophy, by moving from end to end and purpose to purpose,
could never arrive by itself to a final end or purpose. For their
proper exercise, both natural sciences and Islamic philosophy require
the presence of faith so that they may know their proper limits. In
this sense, faith could well be the culmination of science and wisdom
given the axioms and postulates of scientific and moral inquiry.
Indeed, faith is reason without frontiers or limits.
In the face of these Muslim breakthroughs, the West made another
secession instead of following the new light provided by Islam. This
retreat of the West was marked by Bacon, Descartes, and Auguste Comte.
Roger Bacon, who is regarded in the West as the father of the
experimental method in the natural sciences, admitted that his major
work and achievement was borrowed from a translation of the Optics of
Ibn al Haytham, who taught the subject at Qurtubah. He separated
experimental science however, from the Islamic legacy of learning,
which included morality and faith as well.
Likewise, Descartes proclaimed unequivocally that one must separate the
problems of morality and faith from the domain of reason. In his
truncated view, ends or purposes and transcendence have nothing to do
with reason. In his twenty-eighth "meditation", he wrote that it is
futile to ask the question why God did a certain thing. One should only
ask how he did it. Since Descartes, the West has stopped asking why
questions. Its interest is solely in the how. How to make an atom bomb?
Never, why should one make an atom bomb?
As to transcendence, it has lost its reason and ground when one
pretends that existence has for ultimate evidence the proposition "I
think, therefore I am" and'.that the existence of any object will have
to come at the tail end of a process of reasoning that moves from that
base through a chain of deductive syllogisms. Indeed, transcendence
is lost forever when through a contemptuous ontological proof of God,
one claims that one can deduce the existence of all real
things-including God-by arguing from the reality of thought to a
presumed reality of being. Revelation and its whole claim for faith
thus becomes futile and useless when the existence of God could be the
conclusion of logical reasoning.
This line of Western thinging led to the positivism of Auguste Comte.
Positivism, or the denial of reality to anything not perceived through
the senses or not measurable by mathematics, has become the tacit
postulate of all that goes under the name of "modern science" or
"Western science." This attitude has unfortunately pervaded all the
human sciences (the humanities and social sciences) since Comte as
well. All of them rest on the ultimate premise that man is just another
object of nature, not unlike the objects that physics, chemistry, and
biology study.
The postulates of this positivism are three:
1. Every scientific truth, being an exact and definitive copy of
natural reality, precludes that any of the fundamental notions of
science be subject to doubt. Progress of knowledge is hence an
accumulation of these truths.
2. Every reality, whether natural or human, is susceptible to be
studied by one and the same method, of which physics and mathematics
are the ideal paradigm.
3. It follows that all problems, including those of morality,
politics, and society, can indeed be solved by the same method.
With these postulates, science has become scientism, technology has
become technocracy, and politics has become Machiavelianism.
The disadvantages of this positivistic conception of science become
especially exacerbated when the method is applied to the sciences of
man. They are not sciences since they take no account of the
specificity of their object. They apply to man the methods that fit the
knowledge and manipulation of things.
A typical example of this bungling is the discipline of Western
economics. It is not a science but an ideology of justification of a
given social system which regards man as //he were an animal. The
so-called classical economics taught in all the universities of the
West, and unfortunately elsewhere as well, hides behind mathematical
equations its fundamental axiom. This axiom is that man is merely a
producer and consumer of goods and that man is moved solely by his
individual self-interest. This Western notion of man as homo economicus
is the diametrical opposite of the notion of man in Islam. Whenever we
send our sons and daughters to study in the West, we send them
unknowingly to learn militant atheism. For it is not possible to
treat economics scientifically when one abstracts man and denudes him
of his specificity, of his transcendent dimension, of his morality and
values. To give our students intellectual armament with which to
defend themselves against this sad state of knowledge at the present
time is what Isma'fl al Faruqi calls "Islamization of the Disciplines."
In fact, all the mutations of the twentieth century demonstrate the
false premises and postulates of positivistic science. In the natural
sciences, the changes in physics since the emergence of the relativity
and quantum theories have rendered questionable all the conceptions
once held eternal and necessary, of space and time, of determinism, of
the relation of matter to energy, of the subject to the object of
knowledge.
In politics-history in the making-atomic weaponry and the invasion of
space, on the one hand, and the end of colonialism, on the other, have
rendered questionable all the values that were once necessary and
untouchable in that domain. Equally questionable have become the values
of nations and armies, of order and revolution, indeed, of the whole
West with its progress, its hegemony, and the false universalism of its
culture.
The double accomplishment of atomic armament and the conquest of space
has given birth to the "absolute weapon," that is to say, to the
possibility of hitting any objective with missiles fired from any base
on earth, or to that of destroying the earth and all life with the
present stockpile of weapons equaling one million times .the bomb
dropped on Hiroshima.
The disequilibrium is growing, indeed it has become prodigious,
between the United States and Europe, where meat and butter are kept
in cold storage, and a so-called Third World where millions of humans
are dying of starvation and malnutrition.
These are only two examples, among many, that prove that surrender to
the logical implications of Western culture or to its peculiar brand of
growth and development after five centuries of Western hegemony does
lead and has led the entire planet Earth to the brink of suicide.
Islam can bring to the world a different future, as it did to Qurtubah
and Madinah. It can do so through its eternal message of transcendence
and um-mah. In fact, Islam is the only faith capable of effectively
countering the fatal implications of Western dominion. Against
positivism, it gives us transcendence; against individualism, it gives
us the ummah.
Today, Islam has opportunities for spreading far greater than those it
enjoyed at its height in the seventh and eighth centuries. But Islam
must be presented not as a religion among others. Rather, it must be
seen as the point of convergence of the faith that upholds the world,
as the climax of all forces leading toward that ideal faith.
Islam did not conquer the world by military feats. Rather, it achieved
its glorious victory over the world through a cultural revolution which
gave a new purpose for living and a new life to the human masses
populating the disintegrating empires of those days.
The Prophet (SAAS) never claimed that he was creating a new religion.
Rather, he called all humans to submit to God as the Hanifs of old did,
beginning with Adam, the first human and the first prophet, with the
purpose of actualizing the Divine plan on earth.
When God sent those early messengers of the purpose of showing mankind
"the straight path," He chose men capable of reaching and convincing
the millions. He did so by treating every culture on the level and in
the language proper to it. Allah (SWT) did not send doctors of law or
philosophers to convey the message-neither an Ibn Maymun, nor an
Ibn Rushd, nor a St. Thomas Aquinas. He sent a shepherd like Amos, a
carpenter like Jesus (AS), an illiterate tradesman like Muhammad
(SAAS). Nor did He charge them with conveying the complete science of
an encyclopedia. God sent His messengers to all men, including the
ignorant, to teach the meaning of life, to call for submission to the
plans and patterns of God, to exercise their responsibility as God's
vicegerents (khilafah) on earth.
Primordial Islam has known well how to integrate the cultures of all
peoples, from Byzantium and Greece to Persia and India. It did so in a
creative and selective manner, while critically assessing other
cultures. In this century, living, dynamic Islam must do likewise.
We, the Muslims, ought to exercise the same creative effort as did
our ancestors.
As far as the natural sciences are concerned, the problem today is that
of the "transfer of technology." These transfers are never as innocent
as they look. Often, they bring into the Muslim world the life and
thought styles of the West. And in all cases, they help perpetuate
Muslim dependence upon the West, upon the West's research centers, upon
its experts and professional cadres. They determine the future course
of Muslim development, and make Muslim countries dependent upon the
West's philosophy underlying Western science and technology.
Hence it is crucial, in this, as in other domains, to avoid two errors:
blind copying of the West and outright rejection of everything Western.
We should acquire Western science and technology selectively,
creatively, and critically.
First, our adoption must be selective. The countries of the West
developed their science and technology to satisfy their own peculiar
needs, given their own historical circumstances and style of living.
These are not the same on other continents of the world. It is not
evident, for example, that in industrial technology the greatest
priority must always be accorded to the economizing of labor resources.
Likewise, in the fields of medicine and pharmacology, Western peoples
have their own rhythms of life and their own habits of feeding. These
particular conditions dictate that in the West priority be assigned to
cardiovascular diseases, just as the nervous tensions and breakdowns
which Western life presents demands tranquilizers. In areas where the
majority of the population is constantly undernourished and lives on
the land as farmers, medical and pharmaceutical research, as well as
hospital needs, are obviously different.
Second, our adoption of science and technology must be critical.
Transfer of technology always implies a tacit adoption of modes of
living and thinking, of the mentality of development, the philosophy
of positivism, which is the antidote of faith. It brings in its trail
an individualism destructive to the social fabric of the ummah. This
phenomenon is more obvious when the matter imported into the Muslim
world consists of films and television series, of books and other
publications. Let us remember that Hollywood does not constitute
modernity but decadence. It is the disintegration of life. It is not by
accident that those countries that are the most "developed" and the
richest- like the United States and Sweden-have the highest
incidence of teenage suicide. Those countries where people seek death
because they have no reason to live, would they be the educators of
mankind?
When I travel through the Maghrib cities still under the influence of
French culture, it upsets me when people ask me for information about
Western existentialists, Western structuralists, the so-called new
philosophers, who have absolutely nothing to contribute to the future
of humanity.
Let us repeat it once and for all: modernization is not Westernization.
This does not mean that we Muslims have nothing to learn from the West.
For example, when a Muslim learns from Immanuel Kant and his disciples
that all that he says about God, nature, man, and history is something
human, susceptible to criticism and revision, something that must be
relative and conditional, that Muslim has learned a major truth about
humanity. This truth is the other side of another truth that Muslims
have contributed to humanity, namely, that although it is God Himself
who dictated the Qur'an, it is nonetheless humans who read, understand,
and comment upon it. Their word can never be of the same status as His
word. Humans are the products of history, of their problems and needs,
of their time and environment. It is therefore always a difficult task
to distinguish what is divine and eternal from what is human and
relative.
Third, our adoption of Western science and technology must be creative.
Wholly new branches of scientific and technological development should
arise out of the specific needs of each country or region, and be fed
by its own local resources. Whether it be a matter of energy resources,
or the artificial production of foodstuffs for animal growth, the
United States' monopoly on these industries must be broken.
It is hence not necessary, for the da'wah of Islam to succeed in the
modern world, that we should produce a new "philosophy." For such would
entail the risk of producing a philosophy not unlike that of the Middle
Ages, one borrowed from the Greek tradition or one following the
lines of Christian systematic and scholastic theology.
Nor is there any need for us to produce one commentary after another,
without end, on books of law that were designed to solve the social
problems of a former epoch. At any rate, there is nothing, in the old
books, to prevent us from making our own creative and fresh
contributions.
In my humble opinion, the major task confronting the Muslims today is
to rediscover the majestic simplicity of the message of Islam, to
present it to the new century in compensation for all the wealth of
values that the West had caused humanity to lose. We must recapture,
for the benefit of future generations, the conviction of Islam that the
world and history do have meaning and constitute a single unity. It is
indeed the personal responsibility of each one of us to acknowledge
this meaning and unity by our unconditional submission to the call of
Allah (SWT), just as Sayyidina Ibrahim (AS) did.
As far as philosophy is concerned, the central problem for Muslims
today is not the integration into the Islamic view of the philosophy
of Aristotle and the Greeks, which in the past ha'd swayed the Muslims
from the straight path, nor of that which has dominated the modern West
since the Renaissance, which has only deepened man's doubt of his own
significance and even driven him to despair.
On the contrary, the Muslim thinker today needs to learn from Western
philosophy nothing but its critical methodology, which is really its
essential core from Socrates to Galileo, from Kant to Husserl. The
Muslim thinker needs to go back to the period of the first "secession"
of the West (the sixth century B.C.) when human thought first posed the
fundamental issues of life: 1) the relation of man to God, to other
men, and to nature; and 2) the meaning and purpose of life, of death,
of history, of the necessary significance that attaches itself to them
because they are the acts and dispositions of Allah (SWT). Such
science, philosophy, and wisdom never preclude revelation or our need
for the same. On the contrary, they invoke and demand it to specify
both their axioms and their limits.
In loyalty to the highest traditions, the faith and culture of Islam
cannot be isolated from the world out of our fear to learn from others.
This can only bring division and narrow-mindedness. Indeed, the faith
and culture of Islam will be enriched and modernized not only by
openness to the West, but to all that is human and universal.
Let us come to our final and essential point. We do not wish for Islam
to be presented as one religion among many. Rather, we must seek to
present it as the primordial religion ("al Din," not simply "din"), the
culmination and apogee and conclusion of all other revelations. Allah
(SWT) has ordered us in the Qur'an to honor all prophets. The message
the Muslim is expected to convey to the People of the Book (which
enjoys a tremendous penetrative power), testifies to his understanding
of and respect for the earlier revelations. It should always show the
culmination of that tradition of divine revelations in Muhammad
(SAAS).
The knowledge of the other religions is a Muslim's duty. In the lands
of Asia and the Near East, how could any Muslim be a stranger to the
Vedas and Upanishads, to the first sages of Taoism, to the teachings of
the Buddha, of Heraclitus and Zoroaster, of Jeremiah and Jesus? How
could he fail to command such mastery of the origins, of how the
divine messages were corrupted and falsified by their followers; or how
the Qur'an preserved for the benefit of mankind all the best that those
earlier messages had contained? Indeed, how could the Muslims fail to
present the fact that the Qur'anic revelation developed the seeds of
earlier revelations to their fullest Perfection?
The greater dangers for Muslim thinkers today, is to succumb to a false
sense of self-sufficiency, of triumphalism, or self-isolation. The
certainty and conviction of the truth of our faith should not be a
product of our ignorance °f others, but rather of our full knowledge
of them.
If we can avoid these dangers, a non-Muslim convert to Islam will not
feel a lapse from his past religious development but a culmination and
realization of it. This is the first condition of viability of our
da'wah: to impart to each an awareness of this living continuity of
divine revelations and religious life.
The second condition is to prove ourselves capable of solving the
problems that the West is incapable of solving. We need to discover
new forms of growth and development, a culture that does not lead to
human destruction but to the flowering of humanity.
For this, it is of capital importance not to read the words of Allah in
the Qur'an with the eyes of the "dead", that is to say, with the eyes
of those who may have found the straight path but went no further than
to solve the problems of their own time and localities. We must read
the Qur'an with eyes fixed on the solutions of our problems and with
minds and wills determined to discharge our responsibilities as the
vicegerents of Allah (SWT) on earth. We must, in short, find answers to
our own problems in light of the eternal message of the Qur'an.
To be faithful to our ancestors is not to preserve the ashes of their
fire but to transmit its flame.
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