Jihad or Ijtihad

  But for the present we should deem ourselves fortunate indeed, if we enjoy the same liberty of thought and action as any Englishman does. This would be enjoying more liberty in fact than a Hindu ever did in his own golden ages. Nothing in our opinion, could be greater tyranny than the monopolizing of learning by one section or caste of the community, which prevailed in India even in the most ancient times. Let us thank heaven then, that though nominally under a foreign power, that foreign power is really more friendly towards us than one we could call our own ever was…24

  Sircar, like Syed Ahmed Khan, was moved by the state of decline in science and learning and did not hesitate to thank the ‘inherent generosity that flows through every British heart’ in removing all possible hurdles and to hope that soon there would be few areas in which ‘a native of India will differ from a native of England’. Syed Ahmed’s faith in modern scientific education and British generosity was no different from Sircar’s and some other bhadralok intellectuals of late nineteenth-century Bengal.

  Despite his radical and sometimes even overenthusiastic interpretations of Quranic verses, Syed Ahmed did open up a new world for a community tormented by decades of depression and lack of self-confidence. He certainly cannot be held responsible for the decline in the community’s fortunes, a crime of which he was accused by Muzaffar Iqbal: ‘he [Syed Ahmed] led them upon a path that made no sense of their history and heritage and that led to the eclipse of the tradition of learning and excellence that had been the hallmark of Islamic civilization for more than a millennium’.25 If we telescope our present-day Islamism into the nineteenth century, then surely modernist reformers like Syed Ahmed will fail the test. Islam was under siege even during his time, with the expansion of Europe into the Islamic world. Yet, he, as well as others like Karamat Ali, Zakaullah and Ubaidi, never took refuge in Islam for colonial India’s political, social and intellectual failures against the British. They emphasized that Islam came in as a modernist movement, which expanded into diverse cultures, with cross-civilizational inputs in its intellectual and philosophical foundations. Most of these modernist reformers were deeply religious men; however, they never perceived Islam as a monolith, and saw science in Islamic civilization as cross-civilizational as well. Going by the eclectic tradition of Islam, they felt that ‘only by contact with a fresh and younger civilization could life and vigour flow back into … the community and into India as a whole’.26

  Jamaluddin al-Afghani, despite being a pan-Islamist and anti-imperialist, had nothing but praise for modern science. He, as elaborated upon in one of the chapters, was categorical in his criticism of those who were attempting to divide science into Muslim science and modern science. He used a cross-civilizational perspective to locate the Islamic contributions to modern science. For him scientific and technical progress over the centuries was a common heritage of mankind, which should not be appropriated by any one culture or geographical area. The non-West was denied this share due to colonial machinations from the nineteenth century onwards. Thus the Islamic world needs to claim the privilege of being a legitimate intellectual contributor to the corpus called modern science. Besides, he was also critical of the ulema who defended the traditional curriculum, in vogue for centuries, in order to keep the Muslims away from modern education, including modern science. Here I am reminded of another important Muslim intellectual and theologian from Egypt called Al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), who was a teacher at Al-Azhar, the oldest seminary in Islam founded in the tenth century in Cairo. He was part of the prestigious mission sent by Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, to study and report on life and progress in France. He wrote in detail about all he saw but I would like to cite a short passage which is relevant here. He realized how much the Islamic world had fallen behind Europe in the sciences and believed that the former had a duty and a right to recover this knowledge, given that Western advances since the Renaissance had been built on medieval Islam’s progress in the sciences. He argued that the Ottomans were only calling in the West’s debts to Islamic science by borrowing European advances in modern technology.27 This understanding is not very different from the other nineteenth century modernists and reformers referred to earlier.

  The present-day Islamists like Osman Bakar concede that the modernist reformers helped to facilitate the adoption of modern science among Muslims; however, these Islamists raise some questions as well. For example, they say: But what about its negative aspects or religious implications? Are there not also areas of conflict between Islam and modern science? And if there is such a conflict, what kind of attitude should the Muslim mind adopt?28 However, one has to ask another set of questions: Is the faith of the believer so fickle that it is threatened by modern science, which is a creation of the human mind and not divinely ordained? Why can’t believers pursue their laboratory science, as Abdus Salam and several others did, and also keep their faith in place? Why is it essential to drag science into Islamic theological issues? Ahmed Dallal is right when he comments that the basic problem with both Sardar and Nasr is that they use metaphysics to trample over science and history.29 Most of the other religions of the world have either reconciled their beliefs with modern scientific developments or have just ignored this binary as irrelevant to their belief. Moreover, science is no more a holy cow that cannot be critiqued and there are sufficient critical evaluations among scientists as well as philosophers of science available. Instead, our Islamists strive to look for an alternative to modern science and propose Islamic science as a valid alternative ‘that would incorporate a traditional Muslim perspective into its study of nature’.30 Similarly, Nasr hopes for a revival of the traditional Muslim religious sciences, including the more occult and metaphysical sciences, in order to reintroduce a sense of the sacred into modern science.31 Such views are surely attractive, particularly for the believers, but the idea of rebuilding science with Muslim foundations is not really convincing. Most such ideas proposed by Islamic enthusiasts do not make much contact with actual, productive science. Also, they fail to visualize the universal, international and open-ended nature of science. In a globalized world, where lives are getting more and more intertwined as well as interdependent, tensions notwithstanding, this autarchic and claustrophobic Islamic worldview looks out of sync. Ahmad Dallal, while concluding his book, also said ‘when confronted with the realities of modernity, including not just highly complex technologies but also developed and complex ethical debates about science and technology, Muslims cannot formulate their views on science in isolation from the world around them, nor is it desirable for them to do so.’32 Most of the challenges Islam confronts today were not faced by it in its classical period. To put it simply, we cannot look for medieval solutions to modern questions; unfortunately, most of the participants in this debate on Islamic science are doing just that.

  Science in Islamic civilization (Islamic here is being used as a cultural category, not a religious one) needs to be explored and given its due credit in the global history of science. And it is equally true of Indian as well as Chinese contributions to the corpus of world scientific knowledge. Joseph Needham has done it for China in his multi-volume ongoing project Science and Civilization in China, adding new dimensions to the historiography of world science. A Needhamian path can help unravel science in Islamic civilization as well and instil the necessary confidence to pursue modern science among the believers. A search for an exclusive Islamic science, which exists only in the imagination of its proponents, will lead to the marginalization of science in Islam—not its Islamization.

  Notes

  1. Introduction

  1. These include Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam (1968) and Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (1976); Ziauddin Sardar, Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (1985) and Explorations in Islamic Science (1989); Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Work Plan (1982); S.W.A. Husaini, Islamic Science and the Public Policies: Lessons from History of Scienc
e (1985); Maurice Bucaille, The Bible, the Quran and Science (1980).

  2. Gill 2005.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Roy 1938, p. 70.

  5. Pyenson 2005, p. 110

  6. A.I. Sabra, The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement, History of Science, xxv, 1987, p. 228.

  7. Franz Rosenthal, The classical heritage in Islam, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965, esp pp. 1-14, cited in A.I. Sabra, ibid.

  8. Gutas, Dimitri, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and early Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries), first published in 1998 and republished in 2005, New York. p. 192.

  9. A.I. Sabra, op.cit, 1987, p. 225.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid. pp. 225-226.

  12. Sarton 1956, p. 86, cited after ibid., p. 110.

  13. Ibid, p. 89.

  14. Shaz 2008, p. 126.

  15. Sardar2004.

  16. Sayili 1988, p. 411.

  17. Watt 2000; Rashed 1989.

  18. Sabra 1988, p. 81.

  19. Cohen 1994, p. 385.

  20. Sabra 1988, p. 83.

  21. Cohen 1994, pp. 385-6.

  22. Sayili 1988, p. 415.

  23. Lindberg 2003, pp. 19, 13-14, 22.

  24. Sayili 1988, p. 414.

  25. Cited in Sardar, p. 28.

  26. Iqbal 2002, p. 213.

  27. Adas 1990; Pyenson 1993.

  28. Shaz 2008, p. 132.

  29. Ibid., p. 133.

  30. Ibid., pp. 135, 132.

  31. Raina 2003, p. 120.

  32. Anees 2003.

  33. Herf 1984, p. 1.

  2. Reconciling Science with Islam in the Nineteenth Century

  1. Sardar 1997.

  2. Raina, and Habib 1996, pp. 14-15

  3. Ibid.

  4. Sankhdher 1970-71, p. 214.

  5. De Tassy 1870, p. 162.

  6. Ali 1867, pp. 15-22.

  7. Ashraf 1982, p. 215.

  8. Syed 1988, p. 38.

  9. Hoodbhoy 1991, pp. 125-6.

  10. The year in which Lord Clive defeated the Nawabs of Bengal and established British suzerainty over the whole of East India. The Muslims, in particular the aristocracy and the professionals associated with the courts of the Nawabs, took it as a personal and professional loss.

  11. In 1857, a large number of Indian soldiers in the British army revolted against the Company and reinstated Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah as their ruler. This came as a shock to the British for several reasons, particularly because it reflected the combined strength of the Hindus and Muslims. While the Hindus did not take long to recover from the trauma of defeat at the hands of the Raj, the Muslims were much slower in recovering owing to the treatment meted out to them by the British in accordance with their divide and rule politics.

  12. Kopf 1970, pp. 7-48.

  13. This was the conservative response of those Indian Muslims, who, bereft of power and glory, sought refuge in religion. They believed that their present ruin was the result of their moving away from ‘true faith’, and that the revival of Islam as it flourished during the Prophet’s time would restore to them their intellectual as well as political glory. For more detail see Ahmad 1976, pp. 20-1.

  14. Some scholars put both Syed Ahmed and al-Afghani in the broad category of revivalists. This may seem appropriate to those who see any attempt to go back to tradition or indigenous sources of inspiration as an exercise in revivalism. Such a categorization is, however, flawed on more than one count. Syed Ahmed looked for ways to synthesize modernity with tradition and came under constant attack from the revivalists for betraying the cause of Islam and for being apologetic in his formulations, al-Afghani is much too problematic and complex a profile to fit into any one category. A pan-Islamist, he was a heretic in Turkey, an anti-imperialist in India where he attacked the views of Syed Ahmed Khan. He was a radical modernizer when confronted with the apathy of the entrenched orthodoxy and its opposition to modern science and technology, but appeared in a different avatar in Paris during his exchanges with Ernest Renan.

  15. Munshi Zakaullah was a product of Delhi College and the favourite student of Master Ramchandra, a well-known mathematician and teacher of science. Zakaullah himself was a mathematician and a scholar of Persian and Urdu who spent most of his life advocating the cause of modern science through the local language. He was deeply influenced by Syed Ahmed Khan’s personality and programme, and was a frontline leader of the Aligarh Movement.

  16. Syed Amir Ali was one of those rare Muslim intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had a grounding in modern education. A barrister trained in England, Amir Ali was an enthusiastic supporter of Syed Ahmed Khan’s programme. He wrote extensively to prove that true Islam is revolutionary, rational and progress oriented. His magnum opus The Spirit of Islam, first published in 1891, was read avidly throughout the Muslim world.

  17. Baljon Jr 1964, p. 7.

  18. The Indologist Garcin De Tassy translated this archaeological work into French. This attracted the attention of European scholars to Syed Ahmed’s work and he was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London.

  19. Syed Ahmed approached several people, including the famous Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, to contribute to the introduction of his edited version of Ain-i-Akbari. Ghalib saw his work as futile, wallowing in the past, and wrote thus to Syed Ahmed: ‘Look at the Sahibs of England … They have gone far ahead of our oriental forbears. Wind and wave they have rendered useless. They are sailing their ships under fire and steam. They are creating music without the help of mizrab (plucker). With their magic, words fly through the air like birds … Cities are being lighted without oil lamps. This new law makes all other laws obsolete. Why must you pick up straws out of old, time-swept barns while a treasure-trove of pearls lies at your feet?’ (Hyder andjafril970,p.28).

  20. Syed Ahmed’s efforts were broadly similar to those of Rammohan Roy in the 1810s and 1820s. However, any attempt at reconciliation in the latter half of the nineteenth century was fated to clash with rising nationalist aspirations.

  21. This famous saying of the Prophet has often been used in the past to encourage the community of believers to realize the significance of learning.

  22. Ikram 1958, pp. 424-6.

  23. The seventeenth-century French traveller and physician Francois Bernier refers to Danishmand Khan’s interests in modern science and philosophy: Astronomy, geography, and anatomy are his favourite subjects and he reads with avidity the works of Gassendy and Descartes’ (Bernier 1989, p. 353).

  24. Nizami 1966, pp. 14-15.

  25. Khan 1963, vol. 1, pp. 97-8.

  26. Hoodbhoy 1991, p. 56.

  27. Khan 1963, vol. x, pp. xx.

  28. Throll 1978, pp. 168-70.

  29. Hoodbhoy 1991, pp. 68-9.

  30. Ihsanoglu 1987, p. 247.

  31. These quotes are from Bausani 1974, pp. 25-6.

  32. Baljon Jr 1964, pp. 138-9.

  33. Hali 1979, cited in Baljon 1964, p. 108.

  34. Graham, p. 202.

  35. Habib 1985, p. 310.

  36. Baljon 1964, p. 109.

  37. Malik 1980, p. 274.

  38. Aydin Sayili, historian of science of Turkish origin and the author of the famous The Observatory in Islam and its Place in the General History of the Observatory (1988), refers in detail to this failed reconciliation between Islam and Greek philosophy which surfaced as a battle between the Mu’tazilas and the Asharites, ending finally in the defeat of the former. In Christian Europe a reconciliation between Greek philosophy and religion was achieved, but not so in Islamic civilization. Clergymen, from their position in either society as leaders of society, were the obvious candidates to digest Greek learning. So they did in Christendom, but not in Islam, where awail sciences were either ignored or actively opposed by orthodox theologians, despite the interest displayed by the Abbasid Caliphs.

  39. Hoodbhoy 19
91, p. 97.

  40. Hali 1979, pp. 247-71.

  41. Al-Faruqi 1968, p. 25.

  42. Why Syed Ahmed preferred Waliullah over others is clear from the following lines of an article published in Islamic Culture in 1947: ‘He (i.e. the latter) was fully convinced of this fact, that once the conception of Muslims about the teachings of the Quran was put on a sound rational basis, all other reforms, economic or otherwise, would follow as the night follows the day … He realised in his heart of hearts that in order to raise his decadent community a critical and intelligent study of Hadith was essential as a supplement to that of Quran… (he) denounced in strongest terms possible the Taqlid Jamid, blind following, at any of the Madhahib-i-Arabia, the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence’ (cited in Baljon Jr 1964, p. 141).

  43. Khaliql993.

  44. Iqbal 1974, p. 126.

  45. Ijtihad meant the interpretation of Islamic principles in the context of the times, which was contrary to taqlid, which meant the tyrannical acceptance of tradition. Mu’tazilites followed ijtihad in their interpretation of Islam and were ultimately countered by an Asharite reaction in the eleventh/twelfth centuries, leading to the supremacy of taqlid. Ziauddin Sardar feels that henceforth ‘Islamic science truly became a matter of history’ (Sardar 1980, pp. 212-16).

  46. Khaliq 1993, p. 3.

  47. Masud 1924, p. 55.

  48. Nizami 1966, p. 113.

  49. Malik 1980, p. 175.

  50. It is ironical that Al Beruni, an outstanding representative of Islam’s excellence in science in the eleventh century, made a similar statement about Indians whom he called haughty, vain and reluctant to believe that they can learn something from others.

  51. Khan 1870, pp. 1-2.

  52. Zakaullah 1900, pp. 1-2.

  53. Khan 1870, pp. 1-2.

  54. Ekinga 1999, p 103.

  55. Malik 1980, p. 178.

  56. See the work of Hungarian Islamist, Ignaz Goldziher, on the reaction of the religious orthodoxy to ulum-al-awail (Goldziher 1981 [1916]). In a more recent work, Dimitri Gutas questions the above thesis put forth by Ignaz Goldziher, where he raises the issue of orthodoxy in Islam and the myth of "Islamic" opposition to the Greek sciences. One may agree with Gutas on Goldziher’s sweeping generalizations but even a more nuanced position of Gutas cannot completely establish that there was not a strong anti-rationalist thinking which emerged within Islam from 10th/11th century onwards. And of course Islam neither was nor is a monolith so there were others like the Fatimids, ardent Ismailis, in Egypt, who were great patrons of Greek sciences and philosophy, ulum-ul-awail, which literally flourished during their time. However, the anti-rationalism of Hanbalis manifested itself among the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia, who could be seen as neo-Hanbalis and this had a negative impact on the pursuit of scientific knowledge within Islam during the past two hundred years or more. In any case, my own concerns are more contemporary, going back to the 19th century and the articulation of "Islamic science" by some enthusiasts today