Jihad or Ijtihad

  57. Some such prominent scholars are Maryam Jameelah (Islam and Modernism, 1977); S.H. Nasr (Science and Civilization in Islam, 1968, and An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrine, 1978); and Ziauddin Sardar (Explorations in Islamic Science, 1989). In these works, the characteristics of Western and Islamic science have been debated and compared with a great deal of fervour. I wonder which ‘Islamic’ science and which ‘Western’ science is being talked about or compared. Is it the science of the Islamic renaissance of the eighth-thirteenth centuries? So far we have little evidence of Islamic science being practised today. What is being promoted in the name of Islamic science in Pakistan has been clearly discussed by Pervez Hoodbhoy (1991).

  58. Cited in Malik 1980, pp. 275-6.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Hoodbhoy 1991, p. 59.

  61. Keddie 1968.

  62. However, Ihsanoglu feels that there was not much conflict between religion and science during the first half of the nineteenth century. In the works of several Turkish scholars there is no mention of any religion vs. science controversy; on the contrary, one comes across expressions to the effect that in the golden age of Islam, religion was the motivating factor in the progress of science. Ihsanoglu even goes to the extent of saying that it is difficult to suppose the existence of anyone who defended the old sciences against physics, chemistry, astronomy and other branches of modern science (Ihsanoglu 1987, p. 240)

  63. Ibid., p. 42.

  64. Hourani 1962, p. 108.

  65. Keddie 1968, p. 55.

  66. Maqalat’i-Jamaliyyeh, pp. 75-87, cited in ibid.

  67. Cultural nationalism is a fashion with a particular genre of scholars and politicians these days, involving the careful sifting of intellectual and cultural icons and ideas. Jamaluddin al-Afghani’s formulation of cultural nationalism came close to what the Bengali bhadralok intelligentsia, such as P.C. Ray and Benoy Kumar Sarkar, found suitable a decade later in their attempts to articulate the emerging nationalist aspirations.

  68. ‘On Teaching and Learning’, pp. 101-2, cited after Keddie 1968.

  69. Ahmad 1969, p. 489.

  70. All quotes here are from Keddie 1968, pp. 60, 106.

  71. Scott 1996, p. 76.

  72. Sayili 1988, p. 414.

  73. ‘On Teaching and Learning’, cited in Keddie 1968, p. 107.

  74. Maqalat’i-Jamaliyyeh, cited in ibid., pp. 130-1.

  75. Hafiza as-Saut is an Arabic term meaning ‘preserver of sound’, which could refer to either the phonograph or, possibly, the telephone. Since both were invented in the United States in 1876-77, and al-Afghani was writing in a princely state in South India in 1880-81, one sees the eagerness with which he followed modern Western inventions.

  76. Dallal, Ahmad, 2010, Islam, Science and the Challenge of History, Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 161.

  77. Cited in Ibid.

  78. Edward Said observes that ‘the number of travelers from the Islamic East to Europe between 1800 and 1900 is miniscule when compared with the other direction’ (Said 1985, p. 204).

  79. Ibid., p. 149.

  80. Renan quotes here are from Keddie 1968, p. 92.

  81. Renan 1883, p. 85.

  82. Renan, cited in Keddie 1968, p. 93.

  83. Ibid., p. 184.

  84. Roy 1938, p. 69.

  85. Montgomery 2000, p. 74.

  86. Needham 1954-2008.

  87. Rashedl984.

  88. Sabral988.

  89. The al-Afghani quotes here are from Keddie 1968, pp. 185, 183, 87.

  90. Whitejrl968,p.99.

  91. Sayili 1988, p. 414. The articulation of Islamic science today conveniently ignores the eleventh/twelfth century binary categorization of Islamic sciences, meant to be theological and juridical in nature, and the aw ail sciences, including the Greek secular sciences that later came to be known as European sciences. Nasr’s concept of tauhid, or the unity of knowledge, is centred only around the former, leaving the awail sciences outside the purview of his definition of Islamic sciences today. This seems an interesting case of selective amnesia, where one very important chapter of the history of Islam is deliberately overlooked to serve the contemporary political and psychological needs of some expatriate Muslim intellectuals.

  92. Keddie 1968, p. 187.

  93. Ibid, p. 172.

  94. Quotes from Ahmad 1960, pp. 66, 60.

  95. Mamdani 2005, pp. 45-6.

  96. Ibid., p. 58.

  97. Hoodbhoy 1991, p. 63.

  98. Islamcentrism means looking at the history of science merely from the vantage point of Islam, ignoring or undermining the contribution of other civilizations and cultures to the corpus of scientific and technological knowledge. This is akin to Eurocentrism, which sees modern science as the product of the Greek miracle with all other cultures reduced to insignificance.

  3. What is ‘Islamic’ in Islamic Science?

  1. A shorter version of this chapter was presented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and also at Recherches en Epistemologie et Histoire des Sciences et des Institutions Scientifiques, Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

  2. Harding 1998, p. 34.

  3. Eisenstadt and Schuchter 1998, pp. 1-8.

  4. Al-Azmeh 1993.

  5. Abdus Salam in the foreword to Hoodbhoy 1991, p. ix.

  6. Huntington 1996.

  7. Overbye 2001.

  8. Ubedi 1877.

  9. Some of the prominent intellectuals who had been arguing for Islamic science are S.H. Nasr, Ziauddin Sardar, Osman Bakar, Pervez Manzoor and others. However, this is not a homogenous group and we find quite a few differences in their perceptions of Islamic science.

  10. Cited in The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2011, p. 4.

  11. Hoodbhoy 1991, p. 74

  12. This aspect was emphasized by Lynn White, Jr. in the much discussed paper ‘The Historical Roots of Ecological Crisis’ (1968). Most of the Islamists refer to this work while dealing with this issue.

  13. Goonatilake 1999, p. 7.

  14. We can talk about two major institutions founded by the modernist reformers. The first was the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, established by Syed Ahmed Khan in 1877; it became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. The second significant institution was Jamia Millia Islamia, founded in 1920, which is today one of the major modern universities in Delhi. However, some critics say even today that Jamia’s ‘Islamic character was never strong and it remains a futile experiment’ (Iqbal 2002, p. 253). I feel this futility has served the institution well and will do so in future too; the lack of a strong Islamic character has been a boon and not a bane for Jamia Millia Islamia.

  15. Bakar 1998, p. 16. Even this past, perceived as unadulterated, was not really so. This most sought-after and pristine Islamic past had its illustrious Nestorian Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Chinese and Buddhist contributors, who were welcomed by the liberal Caliphs of Baghdad to engage in the production of this corpus of scientific knowledge, which later came to be called Islamic science. Today many try to forget or deliberately overlook its multicultural and multi-religious origins.

  16. Al-Azm 1994, p. 117.

  17. For a detailed account of this issue see chapter 2.

  18. Zakaullah 1900c, pp. 5-6.

  19. Zakaullah 1900c, p. 3.

  20. Andrews 1929, p. 97.

  21. Habib and Raina 1989, p. 599.

  22. Quoted in Von Grunebaum 1970, p. 97.

  23. Zakaullah 1900a, p. 19.

  24. Jamal, p. 172.

  25. Cited in Hasan 2005. p. 61.

  26. Andrews 1911, p. 356.

  27. Andrews 1929, p. 59.

  28. Zakaullah 1900b, p. 2.

  29. This is how Delhi College was popularly known in the mid-ninteenth century.

  30. Hasan 2005, pp. 156-7, 123.

  31. Jaunpur, today an insignificant town in Uttar Pradesh, was an important cultural and intellectual centre during the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. M
ulla Mahmud Jaunpuri was a well-known scholar of the town; his book Shams I Bazegha remained influential among traditional scholars till the late nineteenth century. Jamaluddin al-Afghani also took note of this book in his India writings in the 1880s.

  32. Karamat AH, Ma’akhiz-i-Uloom, or, A Treatise on the Origin of the Sciences, 1867 (in Persian). Ubaydi and Amir AH translated this work into English in 1867.

  33. Karamat AH, Mubda-i-Uloom, or, A Treatise on the Origin of Knowledge, translated into English by Moonshee Ayenooddeen Ahmud, 1870.

  34. Ibid., p. 78.

  35. Karamat AH expressed shock at music lovers’ ignorance of mathematics in his country and Persia, where he travelled during the 1830s. While in Persia, a nobleman and private steward of the king wanted to learn music from him, ‘but as they were unacquainted with mathematics, they could not understand the other science, so in the end I had to teach them mathematics first.’

  36. Ibid., pp. 40-2. Karamat AH, 1867

  37. For instance, Maurice Bucaille, one of the foremost articulators of Islamic science and author of an exegesis called The Bible, The Quran and Science (1980), concluded that unlike the Bible, the Quran is invariably correct in the description of natural phenomena and that it anticipated all major discoveries of modern science.

  38. Ibid., p. 32, Karamat Ali, 1870.

  39. Sardar 2001, p. 8.

  40. A Pakistani neuropsychiatrist called A.A. Abbasi authored a book titled The Quran and Mental Hygiene where he described finding in the Quran modern cures for diabetes, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers, rheumatism, arthritis, asthma and paralysis. In the end these claims could not go beyond intellectual amusement. Another Pakistani nuclear engineer suggested that the jinns, whom God made out of fire, should be used as a source of energy to combat the energy crisis.

  41. Sardar 1989, pp. 35-6.

  42. Ali 1867, pp. 15-22.

  43. Ali 1867, p. 46.

  44. Bernal 1987, p. 2.

  45. Ibid., p. 76. Karamat Ali 1867.

  46. Cited in Kedourie 1980, p. 39.

  47. Ibid., p. 73. Karamat Ali, 1867.

  48. Ibid., pp. 76-7.

  49. Keddie 1968, p. 185.

  50. Sayili 1988, p. 416.

  51. We can see a similar thinking among the nineteenth-century Chinese intellectuals, who were exposed to Western science during the sixteenth century as a result of the Jesuit missions. Some of them opposed it as alien and uncouth, but others believed that it had preserved the vestiges of an older native tradition, ‘augmented and cultivated’ in the West when the chain of transmission within China had been broken (Wright 1998, p. 657).

  52. Dhombres 1990, p. 200.

  53. Fakir 1992, p. 191.

  54. Ali 1870, p. 4.

  55. Ali 1867, p. 24.

  56. Keddie 1968, pp. 103, 185.

  57. Bakar 1998, p. 215.

  58. Overbye2001.

  59. Salam in Hoodbhoy, 1991.

  60. Bakar 1998, p. 218.

  61. Sardar 1980, p. 215.

  62. All Ubedi quotes that follow are from this essay.

  63. Nasr observes how at the end of the twentieth century Newton gave birth to a new science ‘which discovered much in the realm of quantity, but at the expense of forgetting the traditional world view and neglecting the spiritual dimension of nature—a forgetfulness with dire consequences whose extremely bitter fruits are only now being fully tasted’ (Nasr 1987, p. 13).

  64. Ubedi 1877, p. 45.

  65. Hoodbhoy 1991, pp. 68-9.

  66. Ubedi 1877, p. 48.

  67. Nasr 1982, p. 176.

  68. Ali 1867, p. 29.

  69. Cited in Sayili 1988, p. 11

  70. Cited in Sayili 1988, p. 11.

  71. Zakaullah 1900d, p. 2.

  72. Sen 1998.

  73. Loo 1996, p. 290. Al-Kindi was a distinguished ninth-century rationalist philosopher and scientist who was publicly flogged for resisting the tide of Islamic fundamentalism.

  4. Modern Science and Islamic Essentialism

  1. Von Grunebaum 1953, p. 201.

  2. Lindberg 1978, p. 14.

  3. Hasan and Lai 1984, pp. 242-243.

  4. Needham 1954. This multi-volume ongoing project, which unfolded the rich scientific heritage of Chinese civilization, was initiated by Needham in the 1950s.

  5. Andrews 1911, pp. 351-7.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Kaiwar 1992, p. 40.

  8. Anees 2001.

  9. Hasan 2004, p. 102.

  10. Habib 2000 (chapter 2 of this book).

  11. Habib 2004.

  12. Raina and Habib 2004; Gosling 1976.

  13. Raina 2005, pp. 66-67.

  14. Andrews 1911, p. 356.

  15. Iqbal 2002. He has discussed this issue as colonized discourse in chapter nine with a title "The Colonized Discourse"

  16. Ibid., p. 243.

  17. Nandy 1995.

  18. Baber 2006, pp. 39-40.

  19. Ibid., p. 40.

  20. Bakar 1998. As has been discussed earlier in the book, this past, perceived as unadulterated, was not really so. This most sought after and pristine Islamic past had its illustrious Nestorian Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Chinese and Buddhist contributors, who were welcomed by the liberal Caliphs of Baghdad to engage in the production of this corpus of scientific knowledge, which later came to be called Islamic science. Today many try to forget or deliberately overlook its multicultural and multi-religious origins.

  21. Anees and Davies 1988, p. 249.

  22. Sardar2004.

  23. Nasrl988.

  24. Sardar 2004, p. 122

  25. Kirmani 1990.

  26. All quotes from Nasr in this section are from Nasr 1987.

  27. Lindberg and Numbers 2003, pp. 1-2.

  28. All quotes and paraphrasing from Rehman in this section are from Rehman 1987.

  29. Hoodbhoy 1991, p. xiii.

  30. Ahmad 1990, p. 26.

  31. Khilnani 2002, p.1

  32. Cited in ibid. p. 1

  33. Husaini 1986.

  34. Husaini 1985.

  35. Ali 1867, pp. 78, 29.

  36. Kirmani 1987.

  37. Ahmad 1990, p. 27.

  38. Khan 1990, p. 14.

  39. Anees 2001.

  40. Rehman 1987, p. 54.

  41. Quranic verse as cited in Armstrong 1999, pp. 167-8.

  42. Armstrong 1999, p. 168.

  43. Zakaullah 1900d, p. 2.

  44. All quotes from Nasr in this section are from Nasr 1990.

  45. Al-Azm 1994, p. 116.

  46. Zain 1990, p. 70.

  47. Singh 1992, p. 157.

  48. Iqbal 2002, p. 244.

  49. Ali 1978, p. 362.

  50. The notion of jihad in Islam is not so simple and easy as it is being made out to be to serve narrow and devious political objectives. Jihad in Arabic means to strive, which has nothing to do with violence. It is a multi-layered concept—not one-dimensional as it is projected now. The greater jihad or jihad-i-akbar is to control one’s greed and selfish desires and the lesser jihad or jihad-i-asghar is war with the sword in defence of Islam.

  5. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

  1. Azad, p. 121

  2. Abduh 1973, p. 19.

  3. Azad, p. 121.

  4. Douglas 1988, p. 51.

  5. Nechariyat was an expression used by the detractors of Sir Syed to explain his belief in nature and his followers were thus dubbed as necharis (followers of nature).

  6. Azad, pp. 104, 105, 107.

  7. Saiyidain 1990, p. 64.

  8. Abduh 1973, p. 24.

  9. Al-Bdagh, 25 February 1916, pp. 10-11.

  10. Al-Hilal, 5 August 1927.

  11. Abduh 1973, p. 25.

  12. Azad 1959, p. 208.

  13. Saiyidain 1990, pp. 66, 68.

  14. Press Conference, 18 February 1947 (Azad 1959, pp. 1, 2).

  15. Andrews 1929, p. 97.

  16. Convocation Address at Patna University, 21 December 1947, Azad, 1959.

  17. Azad 1921, p. 50,
cited in Abduh 1973, p. 94.

  18. Presidential address, Indian National Congress, March 1940, Ramgarh, p. 31.

  19. The Constituent Assembly, 1948, p. 1952.

  20. Douglas 1988, p. 249.

  21. Kaiwar 1992, p. 40.

  22. Azad’s letter to Hakeem Mohammad Ali Tabeeb, 11 June 1902 (Ram 1991, pp. 22-3).

  23. Convocation address at the Aligarh Muslim University, 20 February 1949 (Azad 1959, p. 76).

  24. Shaz 2008, p. 66.

  25. Al-Hilal, 29 July 1914. In his strident criticism of the ossified system of education Azad wrote: ‘Today madarsas do exist, teachers do teach, students do learn, and there is also a specific curriculum in practice; but in spite of all this, education has been suffering from the backwardness over which we have lamented to the extent of becoming ridiculous’ (cited in Abduh 1973, p. 62).

  26. Abduh 1973, p. 67.

  27. Al-Hilal, 23 April 1913, cited in ibid., pp. 67-8.

  28. Cited in Douglas 1988, p. 151.

  29. Cited in ibid., p. 153.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Inaugural speech at the Symposium on the Concept of Man and the Philosophy of Education in the East and West, New Delhi, 13 December 1951 (Azad 1959, p. 185).

  32. Azad 1959, p. 48.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid., p. 50.

  35. Hameed 1998, p. 247.

  36. Joommal 1985.

  37. Azad, pp. 259, 253-4.

  38. Hameed 1998, pp. 251, 256, 265.