PART 2 - RETHINKING ISLAMIC BELIEFS

PART 2 - RETHINKING ISLAMIC BELIEFS
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II. Modes of Thinking

I would like to clarify and differentiate between the two modes of thinking that Muslim thinkers adopted at the inception of intellectual modernity in their societies (not only in thought), that is, since the beginning of the Nahda in the nineteenth century. I do not need to emphasize the well-known trend of salafi reformist thought initiated by Jamala l-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad 'Abduh. It is what I call the islahi way of thinking which has characterized Islamic thought since the death of the Prophet.

The principle common to all Muslim thinkers, the 'ulama' mujtahidun, as well as to historians who adopted the theological framework imposed by the division of time into two parts-before/after the Hijra is that all the transcendent divine Truth has been delivered to mankind by the Revelation and concretely realized by the Prophet through historical initiatives in Medina.

There is, then, a definite model of perfect historical action for mankind, not only for Muslims. All groups at any time and in any social and cultural environment are bound to go back to this model in order to achieve the spirit and the perfection shown by the Prophet, his companions, and the first generation of Muslims called the pious ancestors (al-salafal-sailih).

This vision has been faithfully adopted and assumed by the program of the InternationaI lnstitute of Islamic Thought (founded in 1981 in Washington DC., "for the reform and progress of Islamic thought"). The publication of the Institute's International Conference in the Islamicization of Knowledge notes that the "human mind by itself with its limitations cannot comprehend the totality of the matter."

This means that there is an "Islamic framework" constantly valid, transcendent, authentic, and universal in which all human activities and initiatives ought to be controlled and correctly integrated. Since the Islamic framework is part of the "Islamic legacy", one must always look back to the time when the Truth was formulated and implemented either in the model set in Medina by the Prophet and the Revelation or by recognized 'ulama'm ujtahidun who correctly derived the Sharia using the rules of valid ijtihad.

This is at the same time a methodology an epistemology and a theory of history. It is certainly an operative intellectual framework used and perpetuated by generations of Muslims since the debate on authority and power started inside the community according to patterns of thinking and representing the world specific to the islahi movement.

... To rethink Islam one must comprehend the socio-cultural genesis of islahi thinking and its impact on the historical destiny of the societies where this thinking has been or is actually dominant. To assess the epistemological validity of islihi thinking, one has to start from the radical and initial problems concerning the generative process, the structure and the ideological use of knowledge.

By this, I mean any kind and level of knowledge produced by man living, acting, and thinking in a given social-historical situation. Radical thinking refers to the biological,historical, linguistic, semiotic condition shared by people as natural beings.

From this perspective, the Revelation of Islam is only one attempt, among many others, to emancipate human beings from the natural limitations of their biological, historical, and linguistic condition. That is why, today, "Islamicizing knowledge" must be preceded by a radical epistemological critique of knowledge at the deepest level of its construction as an operative system used by a group in a given social- historical space.

We need to differentiate ideological discourses produced by groups for assessing their own identity, power, and protection, from ideational discourses, which are controlled along the socio-historical process of their elaboration in terms of the new critical epistemology.

... The difference between the new emerging rationality and all inherited rationalities-including Islamic reason-is that the implicit postulates are made explicit and used not as undemonstrated certitudes revealed by God or formed by a transcendental intellect, but as modest, heuristic trends for research. In this spirit, here are six fundamental heuristic lines of thinking to recapitulate Islamic knowledge and to confront it with contemporary knowledge in the process of elaboration.

1. Human beings emerge as such in societies through various changing uses. Each use in the society is converted into a sign of this use, which means that realities are expressed through languages as systems of signs. Signs are the radical issue for a critical, controlled knowledge. T

his issue occurs prior to any attempt to interpret Revelation. Holy scripture itself is communicated through natural languages used as systems of signs, and we know that each sign is a locus of convergent operations (perception, expression, interpretation, translation communication) engaging all of the relations between language and thought.

Remark 1.1: This line of research is directly opposed to a set of postulates developed and shared by Islamic thought on the privilege of the Arabic language elected by God to "teach Adam all the names." The ultimate teaching is the Qur'an as revealed in the Arabic language. These postulates command the whole construction of Usul al-din and Usul al-fiqh as a correct methodology with which to derive from the holy texts the divine laws. The core of Islamic thought is thus represented as a linguistic and semantic issue. (This is true for all religious traditions based on written texts.)

Remark 1.2: This same line is equally opposed to the philological, historicist, positivist postulates imposed by Western thinking since the sixteenth century. That is why we have made a clear distinction between the modernity (or rationality) of the Classical Age and the heuristic trends of the present rationality (Prefigurative Age). (I refer to my book, L'Islam hier, demain, Buchet-Chastel, second edition, 1982.)

“It is time to stop this irrelevant confrontation between two dogmatic attitudes-the theological claims of believers and the ideological postulates of positivist rationalism.

2. All semiotic productions of a human being in the process of his social and cultural emergence are subject to historical change which I call historicity. As a semiotic articulation of meaning for social and cultural uses, the Qur'an is subject to historicity. This means that there is no access to the absolute outside the phenomenal world of our terrestrial, historical existence.

The various expressions given to the ontology, the first being the truth and the transcendence by theological and metaphysical reason, have neglected historicity as a dimension of the truth. Changing tools, concepts, definitions, and postulates are used to shape the truth.

Remark 2.1: This line is opposed to all medieval thinking based on stable essences and substances. The concept of Revelation should be reworked in the light of semiotic systems subjected to historicity. The Mu'tazili theory of God's created speech deserves special consideration along this new line.

Remark 2.2: The Aristotelian definition of formal logic and abstract categories also needs to be revised in the context of the semiotic theory of meaning and the historicity of reason.

3. There are many levels and forms of reason interacting with levels and forms of imagination as is shown in the tension between logos and muthos, or symbol and concept, metaphor and reality, or proper meaning, zadhir and bitin in Islam.

Recent anthropology has opened up the field of collective social imaginaire' not considered by traditional historiography and classical theology. Imagination and social imaginaire are reconsidered as dynamic faculties of knowledge and action.

All the mobilizing ideologies, expressed in a religious or a secular framework are produced, received, and used by social imaginaire which also is related to imagination. The concept of social imaginaire needs more elaboration through many societies and historical examples. In Muslim societies, its role today is as decisive as in the Middle Ages because rationalist culture has less impact and presence there than in Western societies, which, nevertheless, also have their own imaginaire competing with various levels and forms of rationality.

4. Discourse as an ideological articulation of realities as they are perceived and used by different competing groups occurs prior to the faith. Faith is shaped, expressed, and actualized in and through discourse. Conversely, faith, after it has taken shape and roots through religious, political, or scientific discourse, imposes its own direction and postulates to subsequent discourses and behaviors (individual and collective).

Remark 4.1: The concept or notion of faith given by God and the classical theories of free will, grace, and predestination need to be re-elaborated within the concrete context of discourses through which any system of beliefs is expressed and assimilated. Faith is the crystallization of images, representations and ideas commonly shared by each group engaged in the same historical experience.

It is more than the personal relation to religious beliefs; but it claims a spiritual or a metaphysical dimension to give a transcendental significance to the political, social, ethical and aesthetic values to which refers each individual inside each unified social group, or community.

5. The traditional system of legitimization represented by Usuial l-din and Usuil al-fiqh, no longer has epistemological relevance. The new system is not yet established in a unanimously approved form inside the umma. But is it possible today, given the principles of critical epistemology, to propose a system of knowledge or science particular to Islamic thought? What are the theoretical conditions of a modem theology not only for political institutions, but also for universal knowledge, in the three revealed religions? We are in a crisis of legitimacy; that is why we can speak only of heuristic ways of thinking.

Remark5 .1: This line is opposed to the dogmatic assurance of theology based on the unquestionable legitimacy of the Shari'a derived from Revelation or the classical ontology of the first Being, the neo-Platonic One, the Origin from which the Intellect derives and to which it desires to return. That is why the problem of the state and civil society is crucial today. Why should an individual obey the state?

How is the legitimacy of power monopolized by a group over all other established groups?

6. The search for ultimate meaning depends on the radical question concerning the relevance and existence of an ultimate meaning. We have no right to reject the possibility of its existence. What is questionable is how to base all our thoughts on the postulate of its existence. Again, we encounter the true responsibility of the critical reason: To reach a better understanding of the relationship between meaning and reality, we must, first, improve our intellectual equipment-vocabulary, methods, strategies, procedures, definitions, and horizons of inquiry.

To illustrate all these theoretical perspectives, let us give an example from classical Islamic thought. Ghazali (d. 505/1111) and Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198) developed an interesting attempt to think Islam in their historical context ... The most relevant to our project is to be found in Faysal al-tafriqa bayn al-islam wa-al-zandaqa by Ghazali and Faslal-maqdl written as an answer by Ibn Rushd. Ghazali declared the falisifa infidels on three bases:

They deny the resurrection of the body; they deny the knowledge of particulars (juz'iyyit) by God; and they claim that God is anterior ontologically, not chronologically, to the world. These three theses are matters of belief, not demonstrative knowledge. The falasifa have been wrong in trying to transfer to demonstrative knowledge matters which, in fact, depend on belief. Ibn Rushd used the methodology of Usuil al-fiqh to solve a philosophical question; even the formulation of the problem, at the beginning of the Fasl, is typically juridical.

This does not mean that Ghazali chose the right way to tackle the question. Actually, the most significant teaching for us is to identify, through the discussion, the epistemic limits and the epistemological obstacles of Islamic thought as it has been used by its two illustrious representatives. The new task here is not to describe the arguments (cf. G. H. Hourani ed. trans. of Fasl), but to think the consequences of the epistemic and epistemological discontinuities between classical Islamic thought (all included in medieval thought) and modern thought (Classical Age, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, up to the 1950s; Prefigurative Age of a new thought, since the 1950s).