Jihad or Ijtihad

  Science must, therefore, be Islamic. Any scientific theory that is in opposition to the Quran will not be accepted. It is not a good science. Science becomes good automatically when it is in accordance with the Quranic text. But the Quran is not a book of science. A large number of Islamic scholars from Karamat Ali and Syed Ahmed Khan to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad have reiterated this fact again and again. You cannot reject a theory of science because the Quran does not validate it; it has its validation from empirical evidence.2

  Most of the proponents of Islamic science mentioned above have serious disagreements in their approach towards formulating the Islamic science of their choice. But they do share some presuppositions and Leif Stenberg has highlighted them in his work.3 Four of the common presuppositions are:

  1. The Crisis: A general theme in most of the writings is that science as it is performed in Europe is in a crisis. They often cite the philosophers and other critiques of science like those of Illich, Hegel, Heidegger, Feyerabend, etc. to legitimize their case for an alternative Islamic science.

  2. The Neutrality of Science: All of them agree that science is not neutral and that it is Western in character, and therefore bound to a certain culture. Therefore, it is possible to create an Islamic science. The same argument is used by those who talk of Hindu science or even Third World science. One of the latter’s most vocal advocates is Susantha Goonatilake, a Sri Lankan intellectual who passionately believes that the most profound sources of wisdom are to be found in the distant past.4

  3. History: Most of them agree that the early Islamic history should be seen as a sacred and normative history.

  4. Terminology: They base their position on a set of terms picked out from the Islamic tradition.

  Maurice Bucaille, as I have already pointed out, is an important proponent of Islamic science who attempts to match science with the Quran. His famous exegesis, The Bible, The Quran and Science, was translated into various languages and became a bestseller in the Islamic world. He takes the position that the Quran contains all scientific knowledge and it is for science and scientists to discover this knowledge. He tries to read all the modern scientific discoveries in the Quranic text, without bothering about the implications when new scientific theories, contradicting previous ones, compel the exegetes to perform new contortions to do the refitting. The Quran cannot be altered, being the revealed word of God, while science is notorious in pushing its own theories into the dustbin of history once new advancements are reported. Besides all the rhetoric, which motivates most of these Islamic interlocutors, no concrete example is yet available where Islamic science is being practised, including Saudi Arabia, despite its involvement in funding a large number of such projects. This thesis received a great boost from the well-funded Saudi project called ‘Scientific Miracles in the Quran’. The project was based on empirical work, involving comparisons of those verses of the Quran that deal with astronomy and embryology with the latest discoveries of modern science. Thus everything from relativity, quantum mechanics, and big bang theory to embryology was ‘discovered’ in the Quran. Unfortunately, this toxic combination of religious literalism and ‘science’ is now the most popular version of Islamic science.

  The Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, as referred to frequently in most of the chapters of the book, is by far the most sophisticated articulator of Islamic science. His perception of Islamic science is best described as mystic fundamentalism, where science becomes subordinate to higher levels of existence, consciousness and modes of knowing. Here science ceases to be a problem-solving enterprise or objective enquiry and becomes a mystical quest to understand the Absolute. He also assumes that nature is sacred and intuition plays an important role in acquiring scientific knowledge. ‘A truly Islamic science’, Nasr argues, ‘cannot but derive ultimately from the intellect which is Divine and not human reason … The seat of intellect is the heart rather than the head, and reason is no more than its reflection upon the mental plane.’5 This flight into the world of imagination may prove difficult to quantify. More important, however, is that it reverses the main thrust of science in the classical period of Islam, in which reason is treated as a faculty with no separate existence outside human physical existence.6 For Nasr and his followers like Osman Bakar in Malaysia and William Chittick in the US, all science in Muslim civilization is ‘sacred science’, tracing its roots to the Greek neo-Platonists. He has carefully chosen subjects of study such as the occult, alchemy and astrology while exploring the history of science in Islam. All three of them can be easily linked with his ‘sacred science’ project compared to the exact sciences, which he has mostly ignored. It is rather ironic that Islam, after saving Europe from its dark ages by preserving and taking forward scientific basics from ancient Greece, is being pushed back into obscurantism and mysticism.

  Ismail R. Faruqi, the American Palestinian scholar, was another key player. He dealt with the Islamization of social sciences in particular but inspired many to do the same for natural sciences as well. He spent considerable time and energy in defining the concept of ummah, with a belief that the global Muslim community was some sort of a monolith beyond race, geography, language, history or any combination of these. ‘The ummah is trans-local, trans-racial, trans-geographical,’ he said. Once this construction of the community was complete, the ummah required Islamization of social as well as natural sciences, preceded by the weeding out of secularism from the entire corpus of human knowledge so that it could serve the goals of Islam. In 1981 Ismail Faruqi brought together some Arab scholars and businessmen in Lugano, Switzerland, and after a two-week interaction concluded that ‘the evil in the system is located in the new universities of the Muslim world which have been adopted after the western model’. So this ‘evil’ needs to be removed and it is possible only by ‘reshaping all the disciplines of modernity from an Islamic point of view’. Thus an institution was created for the job called the International Institute of Islamic Thought (HIT), based in Washington with a 25 million dollar endowment from some Saudi businessmen. Next year, in 1982, Ismail al-Faruqi published his manifesto: Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Workplan. Though the manifesto suddenly attracted huge attention all over the Islamic world, Ziauddin Sardar called it ‘a pretty mediocre work’. He quotes a longish passage from the manifesto, where Faruqi articulates the depression of Islam:

  The world-ummah of Islam stands presently on the lowest rung of the ladder of nations. In this century, no other nation has been subjected to comparable defeat or humiliation. Muslims were defeated, massacred, robbed of their land and wealth, of their life and hope. They were double-crossed, colonized and exploited; proselytised and forcefully or bribefully converted to other faiths … All this happened in practically every country and corner of the Muslim world. Victims of injustice and aggression on every count, the Muslims were nonetheless vilified and denigrated in the representations of all nations. They enjoy the worst possible ‘image’ in the world today. In the mass media of the world, the ‘Muslim’ is stereotyped as aggressive, destructive, lawless, terrorist, uncivilized, fanatic, fundamentalist, archaic and anachronistic … The fact that the ummah counts over a billion, that its territories are the vastest and the richest, that its potential in human, material and geo-political resources is the greatest, and finally that its faith—Islam—is an integral, beneficial, world-affirming and realistic religion, makes the defeat, the humiliation and the misrepresentation of Muslims all the more intolerable.7

  Faruqi seems to be completely unaware or consciously oblivious to the fact that the expansion of Europe into the non-West was part of the grand imperialist design. It did not happen to the Muslim world alone; that is, colonization was not conceived merely to insult and subdue the Islamic world. Most of the non-Western world from Africa and Asia to Latin America, was colonized, and a huge chunk of it was surely non-Muslim. The colonization was preceded by the orientalization of the non-West, which has been the subject of the classic Orientalism by Edw
ard Said. While Said limited himself to the Maghreb, South Asia was similarly caricatured during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The British undermined the ancient Indian culture to legitimize its colonization, dubbing it intellectually incapable of producing anything worthwhile. One of the most empathetic orientalists, William Jones, declared that with regard to their accomplishments in the sciences, Asiatics were ‘mere children’ when compared with Europeans. There was in fact a patronizing, if not condescending, undercurrent in much of the British writing on Indian sciences in this period.8 There were a few in India who sought to fight this absurdity with a call to revive the ancient Indian past. To counter colonial intellectual and cultural hegemonism, quite a few Indian intellectuals and scientists such as P.C. Ray, B.N. Seal and Benoy Sarkar used the epithet Hindu in some of their major works, yet it just remained a cultural expression.9 There was no revivalism though all of them were committed to challenging the colonial misreading of the ancient past. On the contrary they attempted to emphasize that ‘the tendencies of the Oriental mind have not been essentially distinct from those of the Occidental mind’.10 Even today, no serious Indian scientist/scholar has ever put forth an essentialist position on science, though some fringe elements do campaign for a Hindu-centric perception of knowledge.11 Unfortunately, within Islam, the loony fringe is not fringe any more; it is almost a pivot around which most of Islamic life revolves. In a recent survey, 67 per cent of Pakistanis voted for an Islamization that covers all aspects of life—intellectual, political, social and cultural. The beginnings of this perversion can be traced to President Zia-ul-Haq, who blessed Ismail Faruqi’s project, putting the newly established Islamic University in Islamabad at his disposal.

  Ziauddin Sardar, a British Muslim intellectual of Pakistani origin, is a prolific writer and radio broadcaster who has written extensively on the relationship between East and West, Islam, information futures of the world and the present of the West as a manifestation or consequence of modernity12 He has been a critic of modern science and has aligned himself with all those who talk of alternative science or are even anti-science. Sardar and his group are called the Ijmalis, and have a huge following among the expatriate Muslim community in the Euro-American world.

  Now let me begin with two quotes from Sardar to explain briefly his perspective on Islamic science’ where he goes on to say that ‘modern science is distinctively Western. All over the globe all significant science is Western in style and method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the scientist … It is the embodiment of Western ethos and has its formation in Western intellectual culture.’13 Sardar continues elsewhere to distinguish the so-called Islamic science by saying that Islamic science is based on a set of entirely different assumptions about the relationship between man and man, man and nature, the universe, time and space. Because the axioms of Islamic science are different from those of Western science, and its methods of knowing are more open and all-encompassing, it is a science with its own identity and character.’ But my point is that Sardar can see and observe modern science in theory and practice and critique it but Islamic science is just a web of words and a Utopia. We already have tomes available on the idea but not one example of a laboratory practicing it. Sardar even links his model of Islamic science with the following ten Islamic values: tawheed (unity), khilafah (trusteeship), ibadah (worship), ilm (knowledge), halal (praiseworthy) and haram (blameworthy), adl (justice), and zulm (tyranny), and istislah (public interest) and dhiya (waste). The proposed model in which Sardar claims that it ‘replaces the linear, enlightenment thinking which is the basis of modern science with a system of knowing that is based on accountability and social responsibility’, is very popular.14 However, the ten values of Sardar’s model are completely arbitrary; they derive from his own personal and unhinged understanding of Islam, and there are no references whatsoever in classical Islamic scientific or religious sources that relate these religious values to the practice of science.15

  Let me acknowledge the fact that Sardar is a bit of an enigma for me and unlike most others, defies any categorization. I tend to agree with him, particularly when he concedes in his several writings that Islamic fundamentalism, political or otherwise, has blighted Islam no end. We can actually see him swaying from one end to another, depending on the changing political scenario within the Islamic world. He was among those who were enthused by the Iran revolution in 1979 and visualized it as the beginning of Islamic resurgence. Writing in 1980, he said, ‘The current interest in Islamic science is undoubtedly due to the re-emergence of the Muslim people in the 20th century, the arrival of Islam as a force in international relations and as a power in Muslim societies themselves.’16 He was also involved in the Islamic Science Summit in 1983, which was proposed and planned by the Hamdard Foundation of Pakistan and sponsored by the Jeddah-based Islamic Secretariat. The whole of the 1980s witnessed an increasing involvement of intellectuals like Sardar in articulating an essentialized version of scientific knowledge, based on Quran and hadis. Sardar himself termed the decade of the 1980s

  the age of the Conference. During this decade conferences were being held on every conceivable subject—from economics and education to information science, technology transfer, youth and the New International Order—in every Muslim capital… Each conference, no matter what the subject, resolved itself into an amorphous plaint about the state and fate of the ummah.17

  However, he soon realized that ‘all conferences signally failed to produce practical programmes for solving the malaise of the ummah’. Even Islamic science could not be articulated as a concrete alternative to modern science, despite intense deliberations in diverse conferences all over the world. It continues to be a mere deception till today.

  These high profile ideologues of Islamic science have their followers in India as well, though their voice is not strong enough to be heard outside a limited circle. However, they do organize orientation camps and since 1985, have been regularly bringing out a journal called the Journal of Islamic Science from Aligarh.18 This journal has served as an active platform in the region to articulate the case for Islamic science’.

  Using my nineteenth and early twentieth century archives on Islamic modernists like Maulana Karamat Ali, Syed Ahmed Khan, Jamaluddin al-Afghani, Obaidullah Ubedi, Munshi Zakaullah and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, I have tried to examine the complex relationship between modern science, Islam and European colonial expansion into the non-West. I have also tried to contrast the sectarianism of the contemporary ideologues with the cross-civilizational perspective of the early modernists. If one investigates the dissemination of modern science and the social discourses of the nineteenth century infected by the scientific imperialism of the times, a close connection is revealed between science, politics and culture. Colonialism unleashed a process which exposed Indian intellectuals, with diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, to modern scientific ideas. In other words, the reception of modern science, embedded in the rationalizing discourse of Baconian epistemology, by the Indian people was not solely responsible for the erosion of indigenous knowledge traditions. The erosion of the traditional norms of Indian society was more a consequence of colonial encounter than one triggered by the impact of the tenets of the scientific method a la Bacon or modern science per se.19

  For Islam in particular, European imperialist expansion into the Islamic world was the central concern of the Islamist intellectuals and most of their reactions were motivated by the colonial presence. However, this engagement was diverse. The late Eqbal Ahmad outlined three main trends in this engagement: restorationist, reconstructionist and pragmatist.20 The chapters in this book deal with science, Islam and colonialism within the broad framework sketched out by Eqbal Ahmad. The first can be easily equated with revivalism where attempts were made to restore the pristine purity of Islam and modern advancements in knowledge were viewed with suspicion. This trend was not so acute during the nineteenth century, but is certainly very pronounced these da
ys all over the Islamic world.21 The latter two constitute some of the dissenting voices within Islam where attempts were made to engage with the Western onslaught within the available colonial constraints during the nineteenth century. The need to acquire new knowledge, the lack of which was held responsible for the colonial subjugation, became a battle cry for all nineteenth-century groups except for a small section of the ulema who called for the revival of the Islamic spiritual and ethical norms. Their attempt to justify modern science on religious grounds was meant to serve a double purpose: first, to defend ‘true’ Islam from the intellectual onslaughts of Orientalism and in the Arab world, to defend it from the highly secularized and Westernized Arab Christian thinkers who appealed to modern science as the basis of their rejection of the traditional and religious worldview; and second, to liberate ‘true’ Islam from the clutches of the religious establishment, who, in the name of safeguarding the shariah and the traditional legacy, resisted ijtihad and maintained a negative attitude towards modern civilization of which science is one of the major fruits.22

  Syed Ahmed was preoccupied with the dismal state of Muslim education in the post 1857 scenario and thus found British cooperation indispensable. Rammohan Roy could talk of reform and modernization through British collaboration in the early decades of the nineteenth century23 but Syed Ahmed had to cope with the emerging nationalism and its compulsions in post 1857 India. Here, let me digress a little and refer to Mahendra Lai Sircar, one of the contemporaries of Syed Ahmed, who founded a science institution on nationalist lines called the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) in Calcutta in 1876. He made a passionate plea to his countrymen and to the colonial government to come forward and help in establishing an institution of science on nationalist lines, which he felt was indispensable for the regeneration of India. Let me give a longish quote from his pamphlet to present the arguments he made: