loose two forces: creativity and chaos. Free from the shackles of blind faith,
leaving nothing as sacred, and challenging all established meaning in society,
caused creativity to flourish. Yet, by desacralizing establishing meaning, chaos
ensued. That disappearance of meaning, then, implanted a ‘doubt’ in all that
was and how it was understood. Taylor mentions that ‘once society no longer
has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are not
longer grounded in the order of things or Will of God, they are in a sense up for
grabs’. 18 Yet, interestingly enough, that loss of meaning had the unintended consequence of searching for ‘True’ knowledge. That, specifically, led to the
development of the modern occidental field of epistemology. Of course, how
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could it not? If neither religious text, nor the guardians of it, controlled
understanding, then the field was open to new interpretations.
At that moment, occidental epistemology began to deal with such questions
as ‘What can I know?’ and ‘How can I distinguish between those things that
I am justified in believing over those things that I am not justified in believing? ’19
Accordingly, two dominant and diverging paths in occidental epistemology
began which persist to the present-day: ‘we might be able to know the truth’ –
plausibility – or ‘we are unable to know anything’ – denial. The ‘plausibility’
of knowing assesses the way we understand knowledge, its source, its acquisition,
and how we make valid knowledge claims. The ‘denial’ of knowing, or
The theory of knowledge and Qur’anic epistemology 39
skepticism, insists that sustained reflection about knowledge will eventually
generate a skeptical attitude toward any claims of certainty, that there are ‘no
absolutes’, and that ‘all knowledge is relative’. Interestingly, both trends in
contemporary occidental epistemology set the tone for learning in Western
civilization: the repugnance of certainty.
Plausibility
From one standpoint, modern occidental epistemology follows a logic that we
describe as the ‘plausibility’ of knowing. Because epistemology studies
‘knowing’, it struggles to comprehend the criteria for distinguishing between
‘true’ or ‘adequate’ knowing and ‘false’ or ‘inadequate’ knowing. That, then,
leads to assessing what methods of justification best achieve the objective of
knowing something to be true.20 Now, as ever, epistemologists continue to devise increasingly complicated formulas to understand claims of knowledge.
For instance, Audi uses the terms ‘intrinsic’ – its value in and of itself – and
‘instrumental’ – concerning its value through what it leads to – when
contemplating the problematic associated with understanding occidental
epistemology. 21 Alston, on the other hand, uses the terms ‘internal’ and
‘external’ methods of justification of belief.22 Yet, regardless of those differences, it still remains only ‘plausible’ to convincingly know. In other words, we
might be able to know the ‘truth’, but we’re not sure how, or, even if, it exists
at all. The differences among epistemologists, here, exist only in assessing
the value of one model over another; that is, in methods of justification. 23
Simply put, different formulas for ‘justification’ include the methodology
used to understand what is considered truer and may adequately be labeled as
‘knowledge’. Audi’s methodology for acquiring knowledge employs the following
six basic premises: ‘perceptual, memorial, introspection, a priori, inductive,
and testimony-based’ – and much of occidental epistemology deals with the
reliability of knowledge from these sources. 24 For instance, a belief that the mug is coarse is perceptual, arising as it does from touch – tactile perception.
My belief that I walked through the streets of Seville on a sunny afternoon is
memorial, since it is stored in my memory. My belief that I am imagining a
rose garden is called introspection because it arises from ‘looking within’ – the
etymological meaning of introspection. Consider my belief that if a tiger is
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larger than a jaguar, and a jaguar is larger than a snow leopard, then a tiger is
larger than a snow leopard. A belief like this is called a priori – roughly based
on what is prior to observational experience. It arises through ‘reason’ based
on an understanding of the physical world, and is thereby dependent on the
three basic sources. Collectively, Audi considers these four epistemic sources
that lead to a fifth and sixth – induction and testimony. My belief that a flower
will not grow well without water for its roots is called induction because it is
formed on the basis of generalization from similar experiences with flowers.
Lastly, testimony-based knowledge arises when I form a belief on the basis of
being given information by someone or something I trust that must have
40
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relied on one of the previous basic sources. Taken together, these six methods
of acquiring knowledge explain ‘how we know’ and ‘how we distinguish
between true and false knowledge’. The trouble is, skeptics argue, that fallible
humans use them. Therefore, human fallibility is the fiercest argument that
skeptics put forward to deny the existence of true knowledge.25 For instance, a cup may be coarse to the touch, and we may then establish a belief that the
mug is, indeed, coarse. However, some defect on the tips of our fingers may
falsely give us the sensation of coarseness, when in reality the mug is smooth.
Just like that, skeptics put forward countless hypothetical arguments to dispute
that ‘knowing’ is at all possible.
Even though, epistemologists persist undeterred. While acknowledging
their fallibility, they still seek ‘true’ knowledge without committing on whether it is possible. They do so because only human beings are capable of the ‘kinds
of cognition required to build an airplane … to write Hamlet or compose a
symphony … how is it that we are able to engage in such sophisticated
thought and arrive at the capacious knowledge that we use to direct both our
everyday activities and our momentous achievements like flying to the
moon?’26 This perplexing paradox, along with a non-committal stance on whether knowledge is possible, leads to the attainment of knowledge being
‘plausible’ at best.
Aside from that, another noteworthy feature of occidental epistemology,
highlighting the ‘plausibility’ of knowing, is the ‘Gettier’ problem: a formula
that assesses criteria for justification of belief. Gettier states the following
formula for the justification of belief: ‘S knows P – if and only if: (i) P is true, (ii) S believes P, and (iii) S is justified in believing P’.27 Chisholm slightly varies this by proposing the following formula as providing the necessary and
sufficient conditions for knowledge: ‘S knows P – if and only if: (i) S accepts P,
(ii) S has adequate evidence for P, and (iii) P is true’.28 Ayer, too, suggests a formula for the sufficient conditions for knowledge as: ‘S knows P – if and on
ly
if: (i) P is true, (ii) S is sure that P is true, and (iii) S has the right to be sure that P
is true’. 29 Subtle differences aside, the above epistemologists are comparably suggesting that their formulas offer, at best, the ‘plausibility’ of knowing since
human fallibility precludes any surety. Now, this is the most bewildering of
epistemic circles that, as often as we seek the ‘truth’ and methods of justifi-
cation, human fallibility, as skeptics point out, prohibits us. In this respect, it
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is difficult to find fault with the skeptics, particularly when ‘S’ – that is, the
human being, is the epicentre of their respective formulas. To be fair, it is
possible to be justified in believing in something that is, in fact, false.
Denial
That epistemic conundrum brings us to an alternative viewpoint on the
modern occidental theory of knowledge – namely, on whether knowledge is
possible at all. Actually, skeptics doubt whether it is even possible for us to
find out if there is anything we can know. By proposing this, ‘skeptics’
The theory of knowledge and Qur’anic epistemology 41
discredit any attempt to establish the justification of belief by arguing that
‘there are good reasons, after all, for supposing that we cannot know the
kinds of things that most people think they can know’. 30 Supporting their claim, skeptics provide an impressive amount of information on human fallibility
and, thereby, delegitimize any pursuit of ‘true’, non-relativist knowledge.
For instance, consider remembering a beautiful meadow, overlooked by the
majestic Karakoram mountain range, then speculating that it may be nothing
more than a hallucination. The methods of justification, in this instance mem-
orial, include the potential for ‘pervasive error’, which lies at the root of
skeptical argument.31 As a matter of fact, that skeptical challenge can be
‘directed against all our beliefs about the external world, all our memory
beliefs, all our beliefs about the future; indeed, all our beliefs about any subject provided they depend on our memory for their justification or for their status
as knowledge’.32 The rejection of memory-based justification is plausible since memory is at least as fallible as vision. If any of the senses can deceive
through hallucination, then beliefs grounded in the senses may, also, be justi-
fiably undermined. Hence skeptics claim that the possibility of hallucination
prevents the observation of physical objects from being justified and precludes
‘things seen’ from constituting knowledge.
Concerning ‘pervasive error’, skeptics insist that while you may perceive rain
as falling from the sky, there are alternative explanations of how a person’s
sensory faculties may, wrongly, believe this. For instance, Descartes’ reasoning
that ‘some malicious demon of utmost power and cunning has employed all his
energies in order to deceive me’ is theoretically plausible and no contradiction
is involved in assuming all our present experiences are caused by evil spirits. 33
Similarly, Putnam imagines that an evil scientist has subjected a human being
to an operation. ‘The person’s brain has been removed from the body and
placed in a vat of nutrients, which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings
have been connected to a super scientific computer which causes the person,
whose brain it is, to have the illusion, that everything is perfectly normal.
There seems to be people, objects, the sky, etc … but really all the person is
experiencing is the result of electronic impulses from the computer to nerve
endings’.34 Both scenarios insinuate that it is logically possible to exist in this predicament and, since it cannot be disproven, we are not justified in believing
otherwise. Note, skeptics are not saying we are living in a vat of nutrients, or
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even that we are justified in believing so. They are saying that we are not
justified in believing otherwise. The skeptical position states: ‘you cannot rule
out the possibility that you are a brain in a vat, and without being able to rule
out that possibility, knowledge of the material world is impossible’.35
In total, skeptical arguments follow that every piece of empirical evidence
you might rely on to prove that you really are here, could be used to prove
that you are not. From a skeptic’s point of view, it is not reasonable for me to
have the beliefs that I do about things around me; hence, knowledge is
impossible. That, then, led to Hume maintaining that persistent contemplation
on knowledge will, eventually, challenge our claims to certainty.36 Kant, too,
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Islam and Pakistan’s Political Culture
proclaims that it ‘remains a scandal to philosophy … that the existence of
things outside of us … must be accepted merely on faith, and that, if anyone
thinks good to doubt their own existence, we are unable to counter his doubts
by any satisfactory proof ’. 37 The skeptics’ position leads to reductio ad absurdum; that is, if we act upon our belief that there are familiar physical
things around us, we will find we do not have any justified beliefs.
Moreover, skeptics show that we cannot have the kinds of knowledge that
many of us claim to have. And if skeptics challenge our most basic kinds of
knowledge, then they easily undermine the sophisticated knowledge distinctive
of human beings. Such problems have played a central role in occidental
epistemology. But more recent occidental epistemological trends take a different
attitude toward skepticism. Rather than responding to human fallibility, episte-
mologists struggle to promote better levels of understanding the ‘justification
for belief ’. It is plausible to be able to answer the skeptic by showing that
those beliefs can be securely defended by appeal to other beliefs not among those
deemed problematic. But skeptics maintain a monopoly on the construction of
the argument – they set the intellectual boundaries from which to react.
‘Every argument must proceed from some premise, and if the skeptic calls all
relevant premises into doubt at the same time, then there is no way to reason
with him. The whole enterprise of refuting the skeptic is ill founded because
he will not allow us anything with which to work’. 38 Keeping in mind the restrictions placed by skeptics on the justification of belief as a result of
human fallibility, or pervasive error, epistemologists are moving toward lesser
levels of qualified belief or contextualization.
Contextualization refers to a naturalized approach to epistemology. Quine
holds that ‘epistemology could find its answers by simply studying how
believers justify their actions’.39 Hence the real problem one faces in epistemology involves searching for a one-size-fits-all answer to ‘knowing’, or on ‘how to
have true knowledge’ in all societies and circumstances. When confronted by
human fallibility, this leads to ‘plausibility’ or ‘denial’. Therefore, what is
required is to simply understand how people rationalize their own actions and
what their methods of justification are. That is, precisely, what we intend to
accomplish by ex
amining Qur’anic epistemology.
Qur’anic epistemology – ‘certainty of knowing’
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Epistemology, at its most basic level, provides an insight into how a certain
society thinks. This includes social phenomena and interactions, leading to
experiences that ultimately involve some sort of knowledge, whether justifiable
or not, as an integral part of life. That means any epistemic account must
resort to fundamental principles, which could explain life, and the source and
acquisition of knowledge, its limits, and its objectives, and provide a deeper
and more comprehensive understanding of the world, the nature of human
relations, and what they entail in terms of duties, rights, and proscriptions. As
Al-Alwani makes clear, ‘since people’s thinking stems from their overall
The theory of knowledge and Qur’anic epistemology 43
worldview, their references, methods and theory of knowledge will be determined
by their own doctrinal foundation and ideals … which, in turn is based on
Qur’anic origins of thought. 40
Therefore, the Qur’an is an obvious place to start in developing an over-
arching Islamic epistemology. However, it must be recognized that one may
develop differing epistemologies from the Qur’anic text through differing
interpretations. Certainly, one must recognize that the Qur’an is not the same
as Islam writ large and that elements of Islamic epistemology could be
derived from other sources. Yet this study is not tackling the totality of Islamic
epistemology, but on the assumption that it begins to develop coherently, and
legitimately, based on insights the Qur’an shares. Thus, for this study, the
relevant questions are ‘What are the origins of knowledge in Qur’anic episte-
mology?’ and ‘How does the Qur’an approach “knowing” and “justification
of belief”?’ How does this influence our understanding of political culture in
Muslim polities?
It is ‘undeniable that various epistemological issues have been discussed in
Muslim philosophy with a significantly different orientation from that of
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