Ramadhan 1427H: Culture of Consumption

I have pondered a lot and finally concluded the I belong to a culture of consumption.

Try asking a Muslim in Pakistan about the first thing that spontaneously comes to mind about the month of Ramadhan and in most of the cases the answer will somehow be related to consumption. The quantity reigns with significance throughout the holy month; may it be variety of food or recitations of Quran. Large hoardings all along the road are persuading people to consider their special Iftaar offers in order to consume maximum food with minimum disbursal of money. The most popular Imam in the vicinity is the one who recites fast and relieves the burden of standing too long in Qiyaam. My friends disagree with me; their contention being that what I am positing with a religious slant is merely a cultural thing.

So I stepped back, brooded over and realised that I too have an equal proclivity for consumption like my cultural siblings. As far as fasting is concerned religion has failed to transform this culture of consumption into one of abstinence. It may also mean that the culture has successfully deformed the kernel of revelation producing nothing beyond ritual.

The month of fasting does not bring along a climate conducive for sowing seeds of taqwa anymore; it has just become a celebrated festival in our part of the world.

Filed under: Land of the 'Pure', Reflections, Sociology of Religion

Pope should not waste time reading all the people who wrote about Ibn Hazm; he should instead read Ibn Hazm.

If Pope’s evidence (the famous 14th century dialogue) to beef up his argument against Islam being a violent religion was fragile, flimsier was this allusion that Islamic teachings defy all the inherent reason in the universe. In fact, his remarks were pathetically blatant lacking sufficient concern for historical reality and an in-depth knowledge of Muslim philosophy. After reading the text of Ratzinger’s speech quite a few times, I am still perplexed regarding the line of his reasoning; namely that faith in an absolutely transcendent God whose acts and will cannot be grasped completely by human reason can possibly lead one to conceive His images which are capricious and may be against all truth and goodness. The argument becomes further ironic as Pope strangely chooses to abduce views of a multifarious Muslim writer who can equally be classified as a quasi-liberal writer/poet, a literal jurist, a controversial philosopher, an innovative grammarian or above all a compassionate ethicist.

Even scanty readings of Ibn Hazm would fail to portray him primarily as an absolute fatalist which Joseph Ratzinger was able to do inadvertently for his Christian audience with such an ease. The intuitive reason which Ratzinger calls creative and self communicating when combined with sound human perception and understanding of language is the first and foremost source of all human knowledge according to Ibn Hazm. It was one of his earliest projects to advocate a sound system of logic so that the revealed word of God can be defended without taking refuge in circular arguments. Times right before his were famous for determining value of logic as a means for attaining absolute truth. There were debates, for instance between Christian logician Abu Bishr Matta bin Yunus and the Muslim philologist Abu Said al Sirafi in early tenth century, resolving controversies whether logic is a form of universal expression or not. Ibn Hazm wrote extensively against the holders of extreme view of man tamantaqa tazandaqa (whoever practices logic practices heresy). In reposnse to his opponents, who objected with the counter-argument that early generations of Muslims did not resort to demonstrative argumentation and proofs rooted firmly in logic, he replied that they witnessed the revelation directly and were not exposed to contrastive beliefs.

An alternate undertaking in parallel was to refute the philosophers and theologians who elevated logic to a station where it can be used independantly as a means for attaining truth thereby superceding and replacing revelation. Many consider him as a pioneer in methodological rejection of hellenistic metaphysics of that time which was voiced by many Muslim philosophers with slight shifts in semantics. Here, the Pope is partially right as Ibn Hazm advocates an unbridgeable gap between the Creator and creation. However the underlying aim in Ibn Hazm’s discourse is not to establish that human beings are not responsible for their own actions by being submitted to Divine Will but to define a supreme station for God where there is no room left for speculations. Ibn Hazm achieves this with ease as he has the revealed word of God to fall back to, and which he uses as a touchstone to establish veracity of any claim regarding His ultimate nature.

Ratzinger however speculates erroneously when he hypothesize that Ibn Hazm’s God could have done everything against the truth and virtue. Ibn Hazm does not push his God away in order to grant him more divinity (as the Pope contends) but asserts that we cannot comprehend fully the particulars of God’s wisdom and will instead remain in need of His favours always. He pits these arguments against some of the Mutizilites who were presumably in favor of basing ethics on human reasoning, even at the cost of statements in the Quran. His often misunderstood contention that God can reward evil and punish good is completely subjective as he never claimed that God in fact does so. His contentions are rooted in a constantly recurring theme that humanity always needs objectively sustainable communication from the Creator as we cannot achieve salvation through reason alone. He and his God calls it the divine mercy and love, on which depends the destiny of all creation; and that is the only real analogy as far as Ibn Hazm is concerned.

Ibn Hazm can easily be misunderstood if his different positions are not disentangled carefully. Moreover his various intellectual stances can be put forth as an evidence for contradictory assertions. He tried all his life to bridge gaps between reason and revelation and describe the human condition and thought in relation to revealed word of God. His literature is depictive of human beauty and love of God. According to Ibn Hazm, we constantly need God to reveal us who He is, why He created us and what should we do and what we should not in order to attain His pleasure. It is one of His favors that He gave us the power to reason and contemplate both within our selves and with others. However all human contemplation, cogitation and criticism should take revelation as the starting point.

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On a different note, I completely agree with what thabet has said and do share his feelings. Pope’s speech may have been full of inaccurate assertions and misreadings of Muslim theology (kalam) yet he has asked some challenging question which should be responded satisfactorily by contemporary Muslim scholarship. His major contention is that Islamic weltanschauung incorporates violence as a valid methodology and this world view is theologically rooted in the understanding of God’s nature and character. Why should these questions invoke anger, hate and murder instead of inciting positive and objective confrontation on intellectual fronts.

Among 20+ people that I have asked in the past week, none cared to read what Pope has actually said though they were aware that he has said something very wrong. A Christian member of Pakistan’s parliament who proposed the house to ask clarification from Vatican before passing a unanimous resolution of condemnation was forced to sit in protest. No major or minor newspaper (of Pakistan) took pains to translate and publish the entire speech or even its controversial parts. However none of them failed to make a great news story out of it. Its sad that Muslims of the world seems to be a big rabble lead by the pirates of intellect. Even sadder is the realization that there is still no light at the end of the tunnel.

Filed under: Criticism & Comments, Debates & Disputes, Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Philosophy, Scholars, Traditional Islam

Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive, Son of Awake)

My next choice for this series is Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Ibn Tufail – a Spanish Muslim philosopher, physician and scientist from 12th century. Simon Ockley’s translation can be found here in pdf. A better and modern translation is by Lenn Goodman but it is not available on the internet unfortunately.

Its a story of a boy, the nature of whose existence was shadowy to an extent that there are two completely rivaling accounts of his origins. One account ascribes his origin to spontaneous generation, deducing from intricate details of matter that eventually evolved into life. The other account is necessarily a legend, a human drama in which a royal infant grows up away from society and culture. The boy represents an ideal man with an innate desire to ‘know’. Being totally isolated from ‘intelligent’ life he gradually becomes morally conscious. He discovers shame, jealousy, aspiration, desire, eagerness to possess and practical reasoning with time and as his doe foster mother gets old, he learns to love and realises death as she dies.

Its an extended (but not tediously protracted) philosophical narrative, encompassing all forms of knowledge and discovery. To know is necessarily an obligation for Hayy ibn Yaqzan. He desperately seeks to understand his being in time and locate his space in cosmos. His search guides him through various disciplines of knowledge; for instance anatomy, physiology, metaphysics and spirituality. Discovering the unity of cosmos and its boundedness through reasoning, he discovers God and through his self imposed [quasi]ascetic ‘code of conduct’ he finds a way of his salvation and felicitousness. At the age of 35, when he had not communicated with anyone except himself, he meets Absal; an anchorite refugee from a land of coventional ‘true believers’. Absal is a perfect model of a religious man, a zealot who has learnt many langauges to gain mastery of scriptural exegesis. His first reaction is a deep sense of fear for his faith as he encounters an exotic being i.e. Hayy. But his fears are dropped soon as he comes to know that Hayy do not have a clue of any langauge. In good faith he tries to teach him to speak and communicate in order to make him aware of knowledge and religion. However he soon discovers that Hayy is already aware of the ‘truth’; to envision which, his own (Absal’s) intellect bears nothing except revealed symbols.

Hayy formally proselytizes judging Absal’s good intentions and the veracity of his message and as the duo associate with one another, Absal introduces Hayy to his culture and people. As Hayy gets familiarised with this civilisation, two basic questions continue to puzzle him in great deal. Firstly, “Why people must need symbols to assimilate and express the knowledge of the Divine?” and continue understanding matters of Divine world literally. Secondly, being completely oblivious to ritualistic sense, he continues to wonder why there is an obligation to indulge one’s self in rituals of prayer and purity. Though he never regrets submitting himself (in good faith) he kept on wondering why people of this ‘religion’ consume more than their body needs, possess and nurture property diligently, neglect truth by purposefully indulging in passtimes and fall an easy prey to their desires. He finally decides to accompany Absal to his land, thinking that it might be through him that people encompass the true vision and ‘realize’ truth rather than ‘believing’ it with their seemigly narrow kens.

What follows is a tale of a neophyte philosopher teaching people to get above their literalism and open another eye towards reality. His audience on the other hand, recoil in their apprehensions and being intellectual slaves to their prejudices close their ears. He consequently realises that these people are unable to go beyond their usual appetites and proclivities. He also grasps that masses of the world are only capable to recieve through symbols and regulatory laws rather than being receptive to unstained and plain truth. Both men return back to their isolated world but this time Hayy as the teacher and Absal as his disciple. They continue searching their ecstasies until they met their ends.

Besides being a surpassingly great philosophical romance, its a unique story told by a philosopher who characterised himself as an autodidact. It was a fictional thought experiment to bridge gaps between reason and revelation, struggling to make it known that rejecting any of theses would mean rejecting a part of truth and trying to laydown a perpetually self evolving construct where reason is necessarily the caliph of revelation. It is a must read for all the times and a tradition that should always be kept alive.

Filed under: Books & Reviews, Philosophy

Is Quran a simple and straightforward document?

To say that Quranic language is completely devoid of any lexical ambiguities may lead one to infer that at least one interpretation can be claimed as universal. This would be a rendering which in principle can be accepted as absolutely monolithic if correct analytical tools are agreed upon by all. The argument can be extended to contend that one can reach the ‘true’ purport of an ayah primarily through literary methods. Ruminating whether one can be sure to discover this original intent and limning methods to substantiate authenticity of any such discovery is not my present objective. I just want to assert in this entry that Quranic language is partially polysemous and its not a very straightforward document to interact with.

This characteristic embedded in the very design of Arabic language should not be confused with two seemingly contradictory facts emanating from the Quran itself. One, that Its a perspicuous Book with clear verses of established meaning and two, that It contains firm (Muhkamaat) and ambiguous (Mutashabihaat) verses. Shah Wali Ullah presents an exposition of both these claims in al-Fauz al-Kabir fi Usual al-Tafsir. He lucubrates that when Almightly says in Quran that its a clear book revealed in Arbic proper with unambiguous and clear verses,

the intention is to avoid going deep into the interpretation of allegorical verses, in drawing the picture of realities of God’s attributes, in determining the doubtful and in the narration of stories in minuteness.

On the other hand firm vesres are those from which the masters of speech (ahle lughat) can take only one meaning while ambiguous are those which admit duality in meanings. An example of this are words employed which are common to two meanings for instance lamas[tum], which means both the sexual intercourse and as well as touching with hand. Another case is when there happens to be a possibility of both the copulative conjunction and commencement of new sentence; for instance the verse Wa ma Yala’m Tawilahu Illalah wa al-Raasikhun fil Ilm. Intersetingly, the import of Shah Wali Ullah’s explanation implies that the verse of Mukam and Mutashabih ayahs is itself abstruse and ambiguous to some degree. There are of course various other reasons, for instance different figures of speeches causing obscurities in text. Works on the language of Quran are full of such discussion and would perhaps move me later to dedicate a complete post. The present concern, as I have mentioned above, is regarding various interpretations of seemingly firm and unequivocal portions of Quranic text.

It has reached through various reports that even Prophet’s companions sometimes understood various verses differently. Anas narrates that Umar, while addressing from pulpit, mentioned fakihaatin wa abba (fruits and fodder) and said that we understand fakiha but it is very difficult to say what is ab’ba. Ibn Abbas narrates that he did not know about the meaning of faatiris samawat till two bedouins came to him with a dispute, giving him an indirect clue what that phrase might have meant. Suyyuti includes long lists of words and phrases with their meanings narrated from Dhahak and Ibn Abbas. Knowledge of connotations associated with different words is also necessary to help eliminate the ‘wrong’ interpretation. An important question is regarding the basis to know whether a particular connotation understood by the interpreter was originally intended or not. A valid example is Ibn Abbas’ (who is one of the major source of classical exegetes) inclusion of music while explaining phrases like lahw al-Hadith and wa antum Saamiddoon.

What then do we mean by agreed upon universals of language? What we must know in order to determine the reference of an expression? Is it legitimate to disregard and discard agreed upon historical interpretations using tools of linguistic and literary criticism only? Isn’t it true that what we choose to eliminate also has valid basis in language though not always in historical context of revelation? What is the correct priority of sources of understanding Quran? What comes first in Quranic hermeneutics – knowledge of language, tribal dialects and jahilia poetry or Hadith, context of revelation and understanding of Companions and their students? Is it a valid assertion that understanding of Quran would always remain evolving and there would always be room for new interpretations?

The fact that answer to these questions are multifarious and sometimes extremely complicated implies that Quran by itself is not a very straightforward document. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say (in the words of Fazlur Rahman) that Quran is as ’straightforward’ and as organically coherent as life itself.

Filed under: Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Quran