Basit Bilal Koshul: Lenin in the Presence of God

In a three day event organised at LUMS by the university’s literary and religious societies, Basit Bilal Koshul eloquently interprets Iqbal’s poem, Lenin in the Presence of God (Lenin Khuda key huzoor mein).

The poem is not only unique in its setting but also rich in its content. It sets an imaginary monologue in which Lenin asks God about some of his unresolved queries. Now that he is able to affirm the Ultimate Reality directly through his conscience, he explains why his reasoning led him to commit that intellectual folly; a reason which was not blind and completely devoid of any rationale. Iqbal, through Lenin, presents his intriguing questions to God; questions that are not related to metaphysical beliefs but related to complex problems of this world. I reproduce below the translation of this poem by V. G. Kiernan:

All space and all that breathes bear witness; truth
It is indeed; Thou art, and dost remain.
How could I know that God was or was not,
Where Reason’s reckonings shifted hour by hour?
The peerer at planets, the counter-up of plants,
Heard nothing there of Nature’s infinite music;
To-day I witnessing acknowledge realms
That I once thought the mummery of the Church.
We, manacled in the chains of day and night!
Thou, moulder of all time’s atoms, builder of aeons
Let me have leave to ask this question, one
Not answered by the subtleties of the schools,
That while I lived under the sky-tent’s roof
Like a thorn rankled in my heart, and made
Such chaos in my soul of all its thoughts
I could not keep my tumbling words in bounds.
Oh, of what mortal race art Thou the God?
Those creatures formed of dust beneath these heavens?
Europe’s pale checks are Asia’s pantheon,
And Europe’s pantheon her glittering metals.
A blaze of art and science lights the West
With darkness that no Fountain of Life dispels;
In high-reared grace, in glory and in grandeur,
The towering Bank out-tops the cathedral roof;
What they call commerce is a game of dice
For one, profit, for millions swooping death.
There science, philosophy, scholarship, government,
Preach man’s equality and drink men’s blood;
Naked debauch, and want, and unemployment
Are these mean triumphs of the Frankish arts
Denied celestial grace a nation goes
No further than electricity or steam
Death to the heart, machines stand sovereign,
Engines that crush all sense of human kindness.
-Yet signs are counted here and there that Fate,
The chess-player has check-mated all their cunning.
The Tavern shakes, its warped foundations crack,
The Old Men of Europe sit there numb with fear;
What twilight flush is left those faces now
Is paint and powder, or lent by flask and cup.
Omnipotent, righteous, Thou; but bitter the hours,
Bitter the labourer’s chained hours in Thy world!
When shall this galley of gold’s dominion founder?
Thy world Thy day of wrath, Lord, stands and waits.

Dr. Basit Bilal Koshul is no ordinary sociologist-philosopher. Albeit exceptional, his qualifications cannot depict the true reach of his intellect as well as his interdisciplinary acumen. Like a good teacher and trained philosopher, he deliberately stayed away from making any value judgments and just raised some very important and thoughtful questions in the course of three days.

Marxist ideal, according to Dr. Koshul, is against the scientific study of matter; therefore the claim it makes cannot be justified through the categories of the framework in which it is firmly placed. While questioning the origins of this idea, Koshul argued that it is either a spiritual revelation from heaven or a formative process catalyzed by the secularization of a spiritual ideal; the ideal which is blind in a strictly spiritual sense. First few lines of the poem, in which Lenin accepts his worldly shortcomings as he now acknowledges the Ultimate Reality in front of his eyes, point toward this blindness . Koshul’s claim at this point was that:

All values lead to certain realities in this world. Any discussion of spiritual reality without a reference to material reality is nonsense and will lead to degenerate materialism.

I asked Dr. Koshul, if it is possible to give a universal description of Ultimate Reality (I had the metaphysical metalanguage of Perennialists in my mind with their physical counterpart, i.e. Grand Unification Theory of theoretical physicists). He responded that it is difficult, as we still do not even have a universal language for describing all the realities of this world.

Iqbal then raises the issue of civilizations and and alludes to the so-called clash between East and West. Dr. Koshul said that Iqbal’s claim of West being in utter darkness is a provocative claim. “Where can we find civilization?” is the exact question he phrased; especially in today’s world where groups of intellectuals in the west are claiming that their civilization is under attack by barbarians.

In this part of the discourse, Koshul’s content was extremely rich. He pointed towards the European history, right from the French revolution to the Nazi death camps, referring texts like the Cunning of History by Richard Rubenstein. There were subtle pointers in Dr. Koshul’s presentation towards the prevailing western art and architecture, finer nuances of economic activity like parallels between speculation in stock market and gambling, a culture of entertainment that ‘amuses one’s self to death‘ and claims that it is a human right to caricature and blaspheme God. According to Koshul, the question of civilization is still an open-ended question if one prefers to remain objective.

The final problem that the poem points towards is regarding religion vs secularism; a question that Iqbal has also asked (in a different way) in the last lecture of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam and a search in which Kant precedes him from his own perspective. Koshul was par excellence in this concluding part of the presentation. Trying not to lose objectivity, he did not ask whether religion is in crisis or not; rather, he asserted that if religion is in crisis, secularism is in as much crisis. “Where lies the hope for truth: In religion or secularism?” is the only objective question that can be asked. Koshul contended that science cannot affirm or negate the claims of metaphysics. If we believe that science can give us all the answers concerning our self and the Ultimate Reality, its a noble lie on which we are relying upon.

I asked Dr. Koshul if it is important at all to ponder over the question of Absolute Truth in the universe and Reality that surrounds and contains us (I had the philosophy of Pragmatism in my mind and I remember making a reference to it also, asking him for his comments). He replied that one may live meaningfully without any notion of Absolute Truth, keeping oneself within the ethical and moral bounds dictated by the society; however one cannot die a meaningful death. He added that his affiliations with Pragmatism are more in line with the likes of William James and Josiah Royce and he does not have a very high regard for Richard Rorty’s school.

It was an enlightening and educating experience. In my opinion, LUMS is lucky to have a scholar like Dr. Basit Bilal Koshul and Pakistan is fortunate to have him back.

Filed under: Iqbaliat, Scholars , Iqbal, Koshul, Philosophy, Poetry

Prophetic Experience of Revelation: Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman and Malik Bennabi

Can we become aware of God as we are aware of other objects?

As I contemplate more about the answer of this question, it occurs to me that the question is perhaps more important than the answer. Over the years, I have learnt to ask this question in innumerable ways and each time when it happens, this inquisitive process brings me another step closer to the cognition of Divinity.

Religious experience, as some of us take for granted, is a matter related to faith; one that cannot be justified on pure philosophical grounds and entailing arguments that cannot be contended with the tools of expression. The veracity of these arguments can only be judged within the domain of mysticism. There is a strong argument that this domain being irrational and obscure according to contemporary standards of knowledge is based upon categories which, while swaying on the fringes of vagueness, involve countless imponderables. Which effectively means that any narration of a mystic experience cannot be assessed accurately with conviction through conventional means of assessment.

There exists a counter argument to above, initiated primarily in our times by Perennialists and Sufi philosophers, which suggests that most of the knowledge for primitive civilizations came through pseudo-mystic experiences. To be more precise, primitive man acknowledged his experience of reality – which is ‘Natural’ for us – as a mystical experience and one that is unable to be deciphered rationally. The view tries to establish the validity of mystic experience like other experiences and asserts that mystic consciousness is mandatory in order to claim any knowledge of Absolute Reality.

Being totally oblivious to practical mysticism, I cannot claim to be intimate with the ‘Other Self’, yet I have come to believe that the philosophical contention of God being a metaphysical reality does not necessarily mean that God is physically meaningless. The Absolute Reality, as I have understood, can only be shaped meaningfully after conjoining the physical and metaphysical. This union of both the realms iterates within each one of us as we interact with the revelation. However, our inner self can only become aware of this union if it is completely at ease with the character of revealed knowledge; for we are not the direct recipients of this knowledge and neither being an audience to that historical happening.

Most of us cannot know God as we know other objects. We get knowledge of His self and attributes indirectly through humans who know Him better than us; humans who are the chosen ones and with whom God communicates through an incorporeal messenger, through inspirational dreams or directly from behind a screen.

Analyzing character of revelation vis-à-vis Prophet’s experience of it as a being in time is a comparatively modern phenomenon. To say the least, there are some contemporary slants to the problem which were not there previously. In addition, this experience of revelation is not merely an object of philosophical enquiry anymore but equally an object of scientific and psychological analysis; especially when the complete experience, which is extended on more than 21 years and has thousands of witnesses, has been downplayed by some of the modern critics, equating it with epileptic seizures and hallucinations.

Jalaluddin Suyuti mentions five different physical states of Prophet Muhammad during Wahy (mode of revelation) in his magnum opus about Quran and related sciences. It used to be an unidentifiable sound at times, trying to make the Prophet attentive for the revelation which usually followed. Most of the times, it was the Archangel Gabriel who either comes in the guise of a close companion reciting verses to be revealed or the message was directly inspired into Prophet’s heart. Revelation also used to come through dreams and Prophet used to remember everything afterwards like a real vision or experience. Suyyuti also mentions another way in which God may have communicated directly with the Prophet, as in the journey of Isra’a or as related in many Qudsi ahadith.

The narratives describing different states of the Prophet are not an object of present scrutiny; what concerns me now is how the modern discourse making sense of these narratives. Three modernist scholars, namely Muhammad Iqbal, Malik Bennabi and Fazlur Rahman, have discussed this matter in great detail. Here is a brief summary of their views:

Muhammad Iqbal: Highest State of Mystic Consciousness Transforms the Heart to Invite Revelation

Iqbal’s project is primarily philosophical. Throughout the first two chapters of Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal tries to reconcile the objectives of revealed religion and philosophy. According to him, the distinctions between both are in terms of greater details but both are one, as far as the original objective is concerned, i.e. acquiring knowledge. For Iqbal, mystic consciousness enables the self to interpret at a higher plane and is as valid as others methods of interpretation. He delineates the characteristics of the mystic experience and contends that there are intellectual and pragmatic tests to verify the knowledge gained through that experience. The example of Prophet Muhammad’s observation of a Jewish boy’s psychic abilities is a case study in carrying out such a test. Regarding claims of psychologists that Prophet was subjected to convulsive seizures, Iqbal takes stand that modern psychology has not yet devised the methods to differentiate between fruitless visions and divinely inspired messages.

Iqbal’s explanation of Prophetic experience of revelation is problematic on two related accounts. Foremost being that establishing the veracity of mystic experience in psychic domain does not automatically proves that Absolute Reality can be envisioned in a similar manner. Secondly, how can a mystic who is capable of acquiring knowledge of ultimate Reality through such an experience can need Prophetic Revelation for guidance?

Fazlur Rahman: Externality of Revelation is a Misunderstanding of Orthodoxy

Feeling-Idea-Word complex is the cornerstone of Fazlur Rahman’s discussion of the problem in his remarkable work on Islam. While insisting that revelation is not something external to Prophet, he asserts that the very idea of its external character is a gross misunderstanding of orthodoxy. Fazlur Rahman does not explicitly negate the being of an angel; neither does he deny the verbal character of revelation, as commonly believed during the days of turmoil. According to him, there was some ‘channel’ for the movement of Moral Law from its Source to Prophet’s heart but he does not speculate about this channel and rejects all the views of it that are quasi-mechanical; quite similarly as he rejects the ‘locomotive’ nature of Prophet’s ascension to heavens.

According to Rahman’s explanation, Prophet’s self in his ‘Quranic Moments’ was extended so much that it is virtually incomprehensible to identify his self as something distinguishable from the Divine Moral Law. In this state of ’self ascension’ the Prophet’s expression of this Moral Law is Quran.

The single most important problem in Rahman’s construct is the impossibility of explaining tradition in its light. He obviously notes that himself and rejects a large magnitude of tradition (most of which is authentic according to conventional means of judging traditions) and considers it not more than a piece of historical fiction. There are other problems of course, for instance the dependency of textual characteristics of revelation on Prophet’s personal being in a particular historical setting. Rahman explores solutions to these problems by visibly formulating and tweaking his methodology.

Malik Bennabi: Revelation is External to the Prophet

As far as I am concerned, Bennabi’s exposition of the problem is the one that is most plausible among the three and deserves wider recognition. In Quranic Phenomenon, he neatly disentangles the problem into three parts, i.e. mode of revelation, Prophet’s personal conviction and the position of his self in the phenomenon of Wahy.

Bennabi strictly differentiates between intuition/inspiration and the phenomenon called Wahy which, according to his definition, should be taken to mean a spontaneous and absolute knowledge of a non-conceived or even inconceivable object. It is appropriate to quote him directly on this point:

…from the intellectual point of view, intuition does not induce any observable certainty on the part of the subject. It rather creates a semi certainty which corresponds to what one would call a postulate. It is a knowledge whose proof is a posteriori. It is this degree of uncertainty which psychologically distinguishes intuition from wahy. Now, Muhammad’s conviction was absolute, with the assurance in his eyes that the knowledge revealed to him was impersonal, incidental and external to his self. These characteristics were so evident to him that there could never remain any shadow of doubt in his mind as to the objectivity of the ‘revealing source’. This is a primary and absolutely necessary condition for the personal conviction of the subject. [...] Is it by intuition that Muhammad himself could interpret the gestures of the mother of Moses, who abandoned her child to the currents of Nile? Is it also by intuition that he would have distinguished two kinds of intuitions in his verbal acts? One kind would include the verses of the Quran – since as sonorous syllables, it is part of those verbal acts – which he ordered immediately for transcription and the other, the ahadith, which he simply confided to the memory of his companions? If it were not for this clear awareness of this duality, so separated on the part of the subject, a similar comparison would simply be absurd.

Bennabi emphasizes the need to realize that Prophet Muhammad’s conviction stands as a direct evidence of the Quranic phenomenon and its supernatural character. According to Bennabi, Prophet Muhammad must have established two criteria to support his own conviction, i.e Phenomenological Criterion and the Rational Criterion. Explaining the first instance when Muhammad was dazzled by the light on the distant horizon as a ‘double sensation’, Bennabi asks:

Did he really hear and see this form? Or was this audio-visual sensation a mere subjective image [as Fazlur Rahman alludes to], surging through him as a result of a painful emotion that had driven him to the edge of the chasm? Was he the victim of over-excited senses?

Bennabi argues, while discussing the Phenomenological Criterion that these question must have occurred to a discursive mind like Muhammad’s, well before the critics of his time as well as ours. Being an engineer, he also asserts that the anomaly of Prophet’s visions is not physically unexplainable. His pointers towards the scientific arguments of luminous vibrations and a particular gamut of imperceptible frequencies below the visible band are the most interesting.

It is arguable and just a matter of personal opinion as to whose explanation among these three great thinkers is more accurate. There are finer nuances that need to be understood in order to compare their thoughts more objectively. The present effort is just an attempt to highlight an important discourse in modernist literature.

Filed under: Iqbaliat, Islam & Modernity, Philosophy, Quran, Scholars , Bennabi, FazlurRahman, Hadith, Iqbal, Modernity, Philosophy, Prophet, Quran, Tradition

Cause, Creator and Epistemic Conjecture – IV

Anyone having a cursory familiarization with scientific manner of enquiry can appreciate that it cannot function without employing the principle of induction. It is also appreciable with ease that scientific conclusions are at best ‘probable’ and cannot claim the degree of certainty which is usually insinuated during a scientific discourse. Keeping these observations and the foregoing analysis in backdrop, it is needless to show that an adequate justification of induction is mandatory in order to vindicate legitimacy of this sacred cow, we call science.

Although it lies at the heart of any scientific discourse, problem at hand is not about questioning the validity of induction, per se. Accomplishments of science are for all to see and rejecting the method behind these achievements would perhaps be too naive. The problem, therefore, is not to demonstrate the dubious nature of inductive inferences but that of examining the scientific claim of truth and certainty made through them. It can be conceded that science’s claim – as a method of discovery – cannot be contested; however justification of its cognitive claims can at least be called questionable and problematic.

To put it simply: Can technology and pragmatic successes of science be passed off as knowledge? Can we satisfactorily accept any scientific conclusion as embodying knowledge?

As it has been already alluded to, this argumentative approach moves in a different direction than Hume’s; and although modern philosophers of science, for instance Karl Popper and Rudolph Carnap, have decisively established the validity of scientific method through theories of critical rationalism – discussing notion of falsifiability amidst verisimilitude and irreducible conjecture -, the original problem of causation has been successfully circumvented. From this it can be firmly contended that scientific method cannot ascertain anything completely beyond doubt and does not yield true knowledge. Maximum that can be said about any scientific statement – in Popper’s words – is that although such a statement is unprovable, it remains in principle disprovable.

Though oversimplified, a quick example would help to move further: ‘Water causes plants to grow’ is a well established scientific conclusion unless falsified by demonstrating that plants can grow in the absence of water. This conclusive statement insinuates that its the water that gives life to plants; an implication which is conventionally accepted as an established truth. Insinuations like this are the reason why science is socially accepted as a function imparting true knowledge. However the construct formed through this process does not represent absolute truth but merely an episteme resting on conjecture and prejudice.

How and where to place the Creator – if there is any – in this seemingly well balanced and firmly placed construct of Cause and Conjecture?

To start identifying this divine station (of course in reference to Islam), it has to be explored how Muslim philosophical tradition views the problem of causation; or whether it addresses it at all in a manner which is objectively closer to the contemporary western philosophy.

Perhaps it would be justified to say that Muslim thinkers always viewed the problem of causation in a framework that assumed a presence of Creator. All of them were primarily trained in traditional Islamic sciences. Free thinking, as we understand it now, was an alien discipline; even non Muslim Peripatetic philosophers at that time were not free thinkers in contemporary sense of the word.

The Gordian knot challenging traditional Muslim thinkers was creativity of a cause. For them, assigning creative force to the causes – in any capacity – would ultimately meant to take some creativity away from God, thereby delimiting and redefining His role in everyday events. The contention, in turn, brought forth more complicated questions. Directly or indirectly related to causation, these questions – for instance true nature of the objects, their allegedly deterministic behavior and whether it can be predicted or not – stirred a long and continuing debate in Islamic tradition; a debate that is at least worthy of a quick survey.

to be continued…

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels