Rethinking Islam & the West

by Ahmed Keeler

  In this hierarchy of knowledge, those sciences pertaining to the knowledge of God, the spiritual and the metaphysical, were the highest, and those relating to the corporeal, the limited and the material, the lowest. Everything had its place, and when it was in its rightful position, mīzān was achieved. When looking at Islam, the Enlightenment in Europe saw only its achievement in the material sciences, which was indeed considerable. The Muslims received everything they could from the civilisations they were encountering that supported and conformed to the Islamic way of life: the zero, which made possible advances in the mathematical sciences, came from India; medicine and geometry from the Greeks; astronomy from the Greeks and Persians; statecraft from the Persians and papermaking from the Chinese. All were integrated, and some were further developed to enable Islamic civilisation to function. However, in Islam the material sciences did not take off on their own as they did in the West; rather, they formed part of a whole that, once established, was maintained and renewed by each generation. As an example, the astrolabe came from the Greeks, was improved by the Muslims, and then remained unchanged for a thousand years performing the same task perfectly. Engagement with the physical world was kept within bounds and was there to support a holistic way of life.

  From the earliest period, there evolved within Islam the spiritual and ethical science which came to be known as Sufism (tasawwuf, later also known in Shiʿism as ʿirfān). Sufism embodied a subtle understanding of the inner make-up of the human being and a system of practices that focused on disciplining and purifying the soul or self (nafs), that could bring the believer to attain sincerity of worship, and a state in which he or she might be granted experiential cognition or mystical knowledge of God (maʿrifa). This spiritual science embraced and developed another triad which has its origin in the Qur’an, and which defines three stages or stations in the journey of the soul: the evil-inciting soul (al-nafs al-ammāra bi’l-sūʾ, Qur’an, 12:53), the self-reproaching soul (al-nafs al-lawwāma, Qur’an, 75:2) and the soul at peace (al-nafs al-mutmaʾinna, Qur’an, 89:27). The hierarchy in the realm of knowledge and the higher educational system that grew up embodying it, ensured that the spiritual sciences were properly protected.

  The protection of Sufism and its place within the mainstream knowledge system ensured that it was accessible to any person who wished to follow the path to purify themselves and attain inner peace. In Christendom it was in the monastery that this peace was sought by the monks and nuns; in Islam it was available to all, from courtiers to scholars, merchants, craftsmen and husbandmen, both men and women. The traditional Islamic city has been described as a family monastery, engaging the whole community in a spiritual way of life – a way of life that permeated the whole civilisation.

  In Islam, all of the sciences existed within a framework of unity, harmony, and mutual interdependence, crowned by metaphysics and theology. The sciences were there exactly to produce a genuine ‘theory of everything’. It allowed for the individual to know and experience the reality of existence through the soul’s receptivity to revelation, the mystical cognition of the spirit, the reasoning of the mind and the acuity of the senses.

  The system of knowledge and the sharia, with its different levels and disciplines, spread right across Dār al-Islām, and scholars could travel, live and work almost anywhere in this unified cultural world. The multifaceted nature of the scholar’s engagement is beautifully described by Ross Dunn in his introduction to The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, when enumerating the different streams of travel and migration in which Ibn Battūta, the scholar, participated;

  First, he was a pilgrim, joining the march of pious believers to the spiritual shrines of Mecca and Medina at least four times in his career. Second, he was a devotee of Sufism, or mystical Islam, travelling, as thousands did, to the hermitages and lodges of venerable holy men to receive their blessing and wisdom. Third, he was a juridical scholar, seeking knowledge and erudite company in the great cities of the Islamic heartland. And finally, he was a member of the literate, mobile, world-minded elite, an educated adventurer as it were, looking for hospitality, honours, and profitable employment in the more newly-established centres of Islamic civilization in the further regions of Asia and Africa. In any of these travelling roles, however, he regarded himself as a citizen, not of a country called Morocco, but of Dar al-Islam, to whose universalist spiritual, moral and social values he was loyal above any other allegiance.

  THE WEST

  At the dawn of the 16th century, when the synthesis of knowledge was taking place in Islam, Western Christendom was in turmoil and being torn apart. As well as the cultural divide brought about by the Renaissance, there lay at the heart of this schism a profound theological problem within Christianity: the relationship between faith and reason. The problem did not arise until a higher understanding of logic, philosophy and metaphysics was introduced through the works of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae attempted to achieve the synthesis that had been realised in Islam but was unable to do so. Reason encountered fundamental contradictions when approaching the Incarnation and the Trinity. The Catholics did their best to keep reason within the domain of the sacred by allowing faith in the Christian dogmas to coexist with reason, in a marriage of convenience that was somehow resolved in heaven.

  However, Martin Luther did not mince his words regarding his attitude towards reason:

  Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.

  Thus, the Protestants, believing faith to be the only way of approaching the Deity, abandoned reason wholly to the secular realm with far-reaching consequences. The material realm became the only field with which reason could engage; it had no place in religion. The natural philosopher, embedded in the material world, arose, and in time would mutate into the modern scientist, who would eventually lay claim to all verifiable knowledge concerning our existence.

  The recently-emerged detached perspective of the Renaissance scholar, and the banishment of reason to the material realm, produced a new relationship with the natural world, which is chillingly described by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum. Nature would now be rendered the ‘slave of mankind’, and her secrets extracted by placing her ‘under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man, she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.’ The new sciences do not ‘merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.’ This desire to conquer, control and exploit nature was to erupt in a Protestant land, and that land would be England. The separation of faith and reason that had taken place within Protestantism ensured that the rational mind would be wholly focused on a material world that had been stripped of its spiritual meaning. But it was a French Catholic, Descartes, now thinking within the constraints of natural philosophy, who introduced the mechanistic way of looking at the world: ‘I have described this earth, and indeed this whole visible world, as a machine’. Within a century, Isaac Newton was to set in motion the image of the Clockwork Universe. Humanity was now on the way to manifesting this philosophy in the creation of a machine culture.

  What took place was a breaching of the mereological principle: ‘the whole can contain the part, but the part cannot contain the whole.’ Reason’s attempt to claim all knowledge reduced the human being to a thinking machine. The separation and descent of reason, accompanied by the senses, to the corporeal realm, set in motion the aberrations and myopia of a world created by the rational mind that was divorced from its natural context, and incapable of knowing or experiencing the whole. And we are surrounded by the effects of the unintended consequences that have inevitably ensued. In what follows I have outlined some of the most damaging.

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p; Thomas Newcomen was an ironmonger by trade and a Baptist lay preacher by calling. In the 1720s, he invented the first coal-fired steam engine to solve the problem of removing water from deep mines. He had no idea that the consequences of releasing the fossil fuels from under the earth and seas would be global warming and the possible destruction of life on earth.

  Albert Einstein solved an equation that had been eluding mathematicians for decades and was celebrated for it. He had no idea that this was one of the critical steps that would lead to the creation of the atom bomb. ‘If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker,’ he cried, and spent the rest of his life campaigning for nuclear disarmament.

  DDT was hailed as a miracle product in the 1940s and 50s and its inventor, Paul Hermann Mueller, received the Nobel prize in 1949. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book exposed the devastating impact that DDT was having on wildlife.

  Thomas Midgley was a celebrated mechanical engineer working for General Motors in the 1920s and 30s. He was responsible for two innovations. Firstly, to solve the knocking in car engines he added lead to petrol; for eighty years, all over the world, lead was spewed out into the environment, the toxic effects of which are still with us. His second invention was CFCs as a coolant in fridges and air conditioning; the consequence of this was to create a hole in the ozone layer. The environmental historian, JR McNeill stated: ‘Midgley had more impact on the atmosphere than any single organism in the earth’s history.’

  The Belgian-American chemist, Leo Baekeland, was surprised by his invention. ‘Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent.’ Some accident! Plastics have contaminated the oceans, the rivers, the water we drink and the air we breathe. It is only now that we are beginning to understand the impact that plastics are having on our health and that of the planet.

  Norman Borlaug was the mastermind behind the so-called Green Revolution that has been more aptly named the Chemical Revolution by the Indian conservationist and scientist Vandana Shiva. To produce super yields, the land has been poisoned, the water sucked out of the earth, and the traditional farming practices and knowledge destroyed. In India some 300,000 farmers have committed suicide in the last twenty-five years. In most of these cases it is because the imposition of chemical agriculture has plunged them into debt.

  Alexander Fleming invented penicillin, a miracle addition to the armoury in the war against bugs. In the modern environment of factory farming, people crowding and global travel, the bugs fought back and mutated. Now we have a super problem. Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, stated that if we don’t reverse present trends, ‘Superbugs will kill us before climate change.’

  Research scientists at Cambridge University and other leading institutions around the world are engaged in two major activities. Either, like the British Antarctic Survey, they are dealing with the problems caused by the unintended consequences of the past, or they are going deeper and deeper into matter, like the Nanoscience Centre, no doubt producing the next generation of unintended consequences, which are likely to be even more serious. We are testing the Chthonic Principle to its limits: the deeper you go into matter, the more dangerous the forces that are released.

  Nothing, however, demonstrates our perilous situation more than what is taking place in the science of Artificial Intelligence. Here we have the perfect scenario of man divorced from God playing God. In the 19th century, the idea that the scientist would create a living creature who would turn against his creator, was terrifying. The monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, embodied the nightmare. The early cinema took up the theme, and the mad scientist joined the repertoire as both a comedic and a terrifying figure.

  However, scientists are now taking us into a far more dangerous and sinister world. They are creating a monster that makes Frankenstein’s look pretty harmless. After all he could be dealt with. Two prominent scientists have been at the forefront of promoting the virtues of AI. Firstly, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical nuclear physicist, who in a recent BBC documentary, stated:

  AI is developing fast, no longer just relying on programmers telling it the rules, it’s learning to do amazing things by itself, faster and sometimes even better than we can. What’s more, it’s started to discover ways of doing things we didn’t know about. Now I don’t believe there’s any pixie dust that we have to sprinkle over the grey matter in our heads to bring about consciousness. There’s nothing our brains do that couldn’t in principle be replicated. I feel inspired by what AI can do today and I believe that, through AI, we’ll greatly extend our own capacities, changing our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine.

  Second, is the American inventor and futurologist, Ray Kurzweil, who in an interview expressed the view that:

  [Chips] will go inside our brains, they’ll connect our brains to the cloud, not just to do things like search and translate, but to actually extend the power of our thinking…and give us more neocortical modules and more hierarchy to our neocortex which will make us smarter, and enable us to create more profound music, to be funnier, to be more artistic, to basically enhance those qualities of humanity that we value.

  This belief that, in time, the scientist will be able to entirely replicate the human brain and indeed enhance its operation, leads us into a further and chilling chapter of the narrative of progress. When I first saw the standard evolution picture, from ape to man, with the addition of a cyborg leading the charge, I thought it was supposed to be a joke. But the AI fanatics are deadly serious, they really believe the next stage in evolution is the cyborg.

  It is difficult to know how to respond to such a total loss of understanding of the true nature of humanity and the miracle of Creation. The idea that a machine bound by algorithms can replicate the human being is absurd and profoundly disturbing. There are, in fact, many scientists who have expressed unease about the dangers that AI poses. Elon Musk went to the heart of the matter when he stated, ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning up the demon.’ A worried Bill Gates surmised, ‘I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.’ Stephen Hawking warned that ‘Artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’

  Serious questions are also being asked about the extraordinary theories that science is positing regarding the universe. How certain is the idea that our universe is 95% made up of dark matter and dark energy? The Cambridge particle physicist, Dr Harry Cliff, in his lecture at the Royal Society, demonstrated the fragility of this theory:

  When you hear the word dark in physics, you should get very suspicious, because it basically means we don’t know what we are talking about.

  Other fantastical ideas are coming out of the scientific imagination. There is no empirical evidence for string theory, and in the case of multiverse theory, empirical evidence is not even possible.

  In a documentary film made shortly before his death, Stephen Hawking was asked the question: ‘In physics there are these two huge theories – Einstein’s theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics. The Holy Grail for some time has been how can we draw these two together? It is what people refer to as the Theory of Everything. Do you think we will ever achieve that?’ He answered: ‘I think we will eventually discover a unified theory, though it may take longer than the twenty years I predicted forty-five years ago.’

  There is a very simple reason why a ‘theory of everything’ eludes the scientists. The material realm of the scientist is part of a greater reality. The mereological principle stands; the part cannot contain the whole. The scientist’s desire for unity is a fundamental and natural human aspiration, but it can only be realised through the totality of the human cognition.

  The machine world we inhabit, which has come out of the imagination of the reasoning mind, could be described as a cult, if we define a cult as a world that only makes sense according to its own criteria and does not connect into
reality. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson observed that modern man was cut off from heaven and from the earth. Like spacemen, we exist in our own artificial creation. The modern cult is a death cult, forming its world out of the annihilation of all previous cultures and the destruction of the natural world. But for the modern cult to come to fruition there had to be a marriage between the modern scientist and the newly-liberated merchant, which I shall address in the following chapter.

  4

  COMMERCE

  ISLAM

  The Qurʾan was revealed to a remote community that was astride one of the main arteries of trade and had control of a key product: incense. The role of merchant was embedded in the society, and numerous passages in the Qurʾan are addressed to the merchant. Again, in these passages we see an emphasis on the need for balance and equity in buying and selling.

  Those who, when they spend, are neither extravagant nor niggardly, but hold a just balance between those extremes. (Qurʾan, 25:67)

  Fill the measure when you measure, and weigh with a right balance; that is better and fairer in the end. (Qurʾan, 17:35)

  Woe to those who give short measure: those who, when they are to receive their due from people, demand that it be given in full – but when they have to measure or weigh that which they owe to others, give less than what is due! (Qurʾan, 83:1-3)