The Bible of Militant Atheism

Contrary to the mainstream religious belief, incredulity and skepticism regarding the ultimate nature of truth, existence of God and eschatological claims of scripture is not an entirely modern phenomenon. In his famous thought experiment Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Ibn Tufayl the famous Muslim philosopher of 12th century Spain, aesthetically described discovery of God as the “joy without lapse, unending bliss, infinite rapture and delight” and inability to find Him as “infinite torture”. The curious and always speculative protagonist of the fable remains incessantly engaged between cosmological antinomies such as those put forward by contests between classical Greek eternalism and scriptural creationism; or the ones related to human origins such as spontaneous generation (understandably so, considering the scientific milieu of 12th century) or simple creationism as proposed by orthodox religion.

Ibn Tufayl’s classic as well as other such theologically flavored thought experiments of pre-modern period, for instance Avicenna’s “Floating Man”, can be characteristically distinguished from modernist discourse in three important ways: their peculiar guarded speculative approach towards theology, the careful selection of premises mostly leading towards theistic conclusions and most importantly aesthetics of literary exposition.

There were of course exceptions raising more formal agnostic queries regarding nature of God, for example the physician Zakariya Razi and Avicenna himself; however these undertakings, even though penned by intellectuals who were primarily scientists did not go as far as to purport an outright rejection of faith. In modern times, the western philosophical tradition having roots in enlightenment, especially Kant and Hume, provided basis for a scientific endeavor that gave rise to more formal and popular agnosticism – and indirectly atheism – whose main proponents were among logicians, paleontologists and physicists whose writings while popularizing science as it was never done before in the history of scientific culture, also extended the domain of science to purely philosophical realms including metaphysics, ethics and theology. Yet, the religion was never presented so antagonistically in opposition to reason as it is done so remarkably by Richard Dawkins in God Delusion.

Based upon extreme scientific naturalism, Dawkins’ thesis casts the proposition that atheism is a natural consequence of human evolution. All kind of religious faith, being impossible to be vindicated empirically, is necessarily dissonant with reason. Religion, as interpreted by Dawkins, is at the the root of much that is going wrong in the world. Moreover, the idea of God in human consciousness can be explained away as a naturally evolved impulse to believe in an omniscient and omnipotent entity, an indulgence which is byproduct of “something useful” or simply speaking an error in the grand evolutionary process.

Unlike some of his predecessors, for instance Thomas Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Stephen. J. Gould, who chose to describe themselves as agnostics rather than atheists, Dawkins does not accept the idea that outright atheism is simply dogmatic due to its unwarranted metaphysical claims about the non-existence of God without enough empirical evidence. Therefore, religion and science does not belong to two “non-overlapping magisteria” – a term coined by Gould – limited to their respective domains. Consequently, any question or claim related to existence of God should be strictly considered a scientific question; simply, because it cannot circumvent other cosmological queries concerning origins of human life and universe.

The approach of Dawkins is rightly expressed as militant atheism by many intellectuals as he is in favor of dismantling all practical religion and every procedure that facilitates or establishes basis for its survival. As explained succinctly by Karen Armstrong in her new book The Case for God, the approach taken by Dawkins has a peculiar reductionist tendency which is remarkably similar to religious extremists as each considers the other as the “epitome of evil”. In both discourses, oversimplifications and gross generalizations necessitate wrong premises, ultimately bringing out the absolute worst of the other; no wonder therefore, why Dawkins invoke the likes of Ibn Warraq and Christopher Hitchens to argue that a tolerant and respectable view of religion is equally reprehensible for all the wrongs committed by religious extremists. Indeed, the superficiality of logical analysis in such discourses does not demand intellectually laborious critique as similarities are not hard to draw.

The nature of God, as understood by Dawkins to present his case against religion, is vulgarly anthropomorphic. The reader is almost duped into believing that all theists, irrespective of the particular creed they ascribe to, believe in some kind of spirit out there; a kind of superhuman entity which Dawkins pejoratively equates with Russell’s ‘Cosmic Teapot’ or ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’. The idea of universal symbolism towards some transcendent ineffable entity beyond the capacity of vocation of language seems alien to Dawkins’ naturalist preoccupancy. The religious belief, therefore, as he vociferously advocates, is something stupid, naive and incapable to be hold by an intelligent and unbiased rational being.

Due to his proclivity towards oversimplification in matters metaphysical, Dawkins seems to advertently disregard the inherent ineradicability of unknowing in the nature of acquired religious truth. He does not acknowledge the fact that no theist claims explicitly that he is in possession of the ultimate sacred truth, except the reductionism loving religious extremists. The scripture itself closes the door on such kind of claim by contending that “there is nothing like the likeness of Him“. All we have are symbols pointing towards the nature of ultimate truth concerning God and sundry eschatological issues.

Probably due to his aphilosophical bent, Dawkins is apparently unable to comprehend that for a theist, there is beauty in this astonishment; a sense of awe that tends to make him humbly aware regarding the degree of obscurity of his own self in the macrocosm. But he would at least agree that science, no matter how much it achieves in reducing complexity that surrounds us, also shares this sense of awe with religion as it also had to consistently rely on an act of faith.

On this particular note, conjuring probability model to disregard the so-called God hypothesis is outrageously strange. Dawkins’ conclusion that “God almost certainly does not exist” cannot be philosophically taken as a knowledge producing utterance unless ‘probability’ is taken as synonymous for ‘truth’; a subtle yet important point, that was profoundly framed by Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery:

…we must not look upon science as a ‘body of knowledge’, but rather as a ’system of hypothesis’; that is to say, as a system of guesses or anticipation which in principle cannot be justified but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never justified in saying that we know that they are ‘true’ or ‘more or less certain’ or even ‘probable’”.

Because of strict evolutionary perspective that he sets up for himself, it was incumbent for Dawkins to give some kind of Darwinian origins to morality. Ultimately entailing the biological evolution of human intellect, this is perhaps the crassest assertion of the book; amounting to claim that our ancestors were less capable or probably less intellectually equipped to be objective in apprehending the ultimate reality. As Iqbal mentions in his second lecture on nature of religious experience, any such view regarding intellect being a product of evolution would “bring science into conflict with its own objective principle of investigation”. To find an appropriate expression of this conflict, he quotes Wildon Carr:

If intellect is a product of evolution the whole mechanistic concept of the nature and origin of life is absurd, and the principle that science has adopted must clearly be revised [...] How can the intellect, a mode of apprehending reality, be itself an evolution of something which only exists as an abstraction of that mode of apprehending, which is the intellect? If intellect is an evolution of life, then the concept of the life which can evolve intellect as a particular mode of apprehending reality must be the concept of a more concrete activity than that of any abstract mechanical movement which the intellect can present to itself by analyzing its apprehended content.

Dawkins wishes to portray the book as a consciousness raiser of sorts: regarding atheism being more reasonable than agnosticism, religion being the root of all evil, religious education being equal to child abuse, religion and morality being completely uncorrelated and atheism being an objective conclusion not to be ashamed of rather the only rational position one can possibly hold with a sense of pride. I think some of the aims were partially achieved, especially raising the atheist pride by providing a kind of polemicist manual to hold tightly.

But perhaps the real strength of the book lies in questioning the innermost religious convictions of the people who are equally awed by the respective magisteria of religion and science and want to bridge gaps. Regarding the kind of evidence that would convince him regarding the existence of God, Bertrand Russell once replied that if a voice from the sky would reveal to him each and every thing that is going to happen in next few hours and that would eventually happen also, he may consider the possibility of existence of God. I sincerely doubt that even in the face of such evidence, Richard Dawkins would even come close in considering the truthfulness of God hypothesis. To borrow the quip that he himself quotes in the book, he does not merely believe in non-existence of God, he knows.

Filed under: Books & Reviews, Philosophy , Agnosticism, Atheism, Dawkins, God, Religion

On Suicide Bombing

Originally published in Dawn (Books & Authors)

Is there a crucial difference between someone who kills in order to die and someone who dies in order to kill? – [Talal Asad]

Alasdair MacIntyre – while making a ‘disquieting suggestion’ in the beginning of his chef-d’oeuvre ‘After Virtue‘ – hypothesized that what we chiefly possess as a vocabulary of morality can best be understood as ’simulacrum of morality’ rather than the actual and true morality. He argued that we are so confident of the absolute objectivity of this contemporary moral paradigm, which guides and constitutes our language, reasoning and transactions, that any transposed hypothesis would most certainly seem utterly implausible, at least at first glance. In short, that we are being betrayed by the very language we use is a proposition that is not acceptable to us.

In these heavily nuanced Welleck Library Lectures on Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad not only vindicates MacIntyre’s thesis but also contributes in reshaping the ongoing narrative regarding terrorism and war. Asad’s discourse centers around the paradoxes presented by the modern sensibilities regarding morally justified and unjustified violence and the responses that are essentially triggered by these sensibilities. As the ruminations move from terrorism to suicidal terrorism and speculations regarding dynamics of horror associated with the latter, Asad aims to disturb his audience with arguments and counter arguments – at times phenomenological and often historical or textual – questioning modern notions of clash of civilizations, war ethics and various assumptions regarding what motivates suicide bombings including religious significance of sacrificial suicide.

Coming from someone who has identified religion as an anthropological category, Talal’s take on modern ethics governing kinds of violence and delimiting its extent is perhaps the most assertive part of his musings. The idea of clash of civilizations, in his view, is based on a false premise that Jihad is a ‘culturally distinctive expression of Muslim intolerance’. Moreover, selective history-making often tends to insinuate – albeit inadvertently at times – that civilizational values are evolved and transformed in undifferentiated societal compartments. “There is no such thing as clash of civilizations”, he contends,”because there are no self-contained societies to which fixed civilizational values correspond”. False premises thus lead to fallacious arguments which in turn supply vocabulary to the modern discourses that contain subjective and oversimplified entities to base conclusions upon.

Asad’s choice of texts – from left as well as right – is appropriate as he chooses the ones that are recent, foundational in respect to philosophical problematics and encompassing. Among these, his critique of Michael Walzer’s ‘Arguing About War’ is most profound. He does not see Walzer’s reiteration of war being a legally sanctioned activity as problematic; what he instead sees questionable is Walzer’s ingenuity with which he gives an absolute mutually exclusivity to ‘war’ and ‘terrorism’ and the manner in which he differentiates both on the basis of legality, vulnerability and fear of social disorder: Even a just war, in Asad’s opinion, infuses insecurity in public sphere and intrudes fear into private life. On the question of various motivations and intentions of suicidal terrorists, Asad looks objectively at wide range of western commentators as well as theorists and analyzes critically their explanations. In Asad’s view, all these explanations – whether theological, political or psychological – tell us more about ‘liberal assumptions of religious subjectivities and political violence’ rather than what is ostensibly being explained. Pointing out the kind of violence embedded in liberal thought, he writes,

More difficult is the question of the role of mortal violence in the continuing maintenance of the good political life. For in liberal secular society, one that apparently abjures political metaphysics, the morally autonomous individual has the right to choose his own life, and the sovereign state has the right to use violence in defense of the conditions for the good life.

In effect, Asad consistently contests the idea that an absolutely objective comment on the individual motivations of suicide bombers is possible. Obviously in line with the argument itself, the question of motive has to be left open ended as he develops his thesis; but he does enough to attain a shift in the central point around which the contemporary debates about individual acts of suicidal terrorism revolve. “The uniqueness of suicide bombing”, Asad opines, “resides elsewhere. It resides, one might say, not in its essence but in its contingent circumstance.”

In my opinion, the book achieves its primary purpose; that is to shift the contemporary discourse from the moral interpretations of individual acts of suicidal terrorism to the realization that these interpretive attempts are always limited by the inherent political, philosophical and historical subjectivities. Moreover, it raises an altogether new question: Why the individual acts of suicidal terrorism do impress us with far more horror than the brutalities that are committed by modern states; further more, what gives the kind of morally justified and civilized sensibility to the modern war while generalizing most of the other conflicts as terrorism.

The book can be misread and misunderstood, as Asad points himself but after all, it is a ‘disquieting suggestion’; the kind of transposed hypothesis that must seem implausible in order to be closer to truth.

Filed under: Books & Reviews, Philosophy , Books, Modernity, Philosophy, Reviews, Suicide Bombings, Talal Asad, Terrorism

Death of an Idea

The post was originally published on Pak Tea House blog.

A dead idea is an idea whose origins have been betrayed, one that has deviated from its archetype and thus no longer has any roots in its original cultural plasma.

-Malik Bennabi

It is amazing to discover the similarity with which history repeats itself in the cherished land of the pure. We often talk about the repeated military takeovers, political betrayals, judicial activism and ongoing misery of civil society but never fully realize the extreme ephemerality of our memories. At least I did not, until last night when almost accidentally, I picked up Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad from my bookshelf and went through a piece that was done in 1981 by one of the greatest liberal minds of Pakistan. The article is titled “General Zia is Now the Law”. Note that how explicitly the content becomes valid once you just change the names.

Now, General Zia has virtually destroyed the only peaceful recourse citizens had against the untrammeled abuses of power. On March 25, he fired at least nineteen senior judges when they refused to endorse his “constitutional order”, which restricts the civil courts, outlaws all political parties except the…[...]

Among the senior judges who declined to take the required oath of allegiance to this new “constitutional order” was Anwar ul-Haq, the chief justice of Pakistan, an appointee of General Zia, whose earlier compliances with the junta had done much to lower citizen respect for judiciary. Three of the six sitting judges of Supreme Court and a state High Court chief justice also refused. Another Supreme Court judge, Safdar Shah, had earlier fled the country on foot through the Hindu Kush Mountains. Twelve High Court judges, well known for their judicial integrity, were not invited to take the oath and automatically lost their posts.[...]

“A judiciary’s job is to interpret the law and administer justice, not to challenge the administration,” General Zia proclaimed at a March 27 press conference. As for lawyers, rule of law and civil liberties were none of their business. “They must mind their own business and not meddle in other affairs,” said the general[...]

For their defense of the rule of law, lawyers have been hit harder than the judges. A recent crackdown on the democratic opposition to the junta added another two thousand political prisoners, of whom a significant portion are lawyers. Since March, some two hundred senior High Court advocates have been jailed in Pakistan; the number of young attorneys in detention may be higher.[...]

Rarely in modern times have so many judges and lawyers shown such courage or suffered this much collective punishment in defense of the rule of law.

Eqbal Ahmad’s observations are telling in many ways. Even though they depict a silver lining in the form of constancy of purpose on the part of civil community to stand against the totalitarianism of despotic regimes, these also serve as a painful reminder. An admonisher that what we are witnessing recurrently may not be an experience entirely belonging to the momentary trivialities of the physical world; rather, most important nuances of this experience belong to the realm of ideas.

Its like a photographic reel that is playing itself time and again since last few decades. On the screen we can see a society, silent majority of which has not only learnt to survive without the food of ideas but over the years, has mastered the art of doing so.

In my opinion, it may be so that the present fulminations are not the result of continuing hegemonies of old actors with new masks but an idea that is breathing its last. Only time will tell whether we can collectively construct a new idea to hold ourselves together before becoming completely colonizable.

Filed under: Land of the 'Pure', Philosophy, Reflections , Eqbal Ahmad, Ideas, Martial Law, Pakistan

Ghamidi’s interpretation post – some afterthoughts about hermeneutics

Don’t have much time these days to write at length. Still mulling over some really thought-provoking comments on my Ghamidi’s interpretation post.

Is it a plausible conclusion that this fairly recent originalist attempt of fixing the ‘original intent’ of the revealed word can be seen as another tragedy to reduce Quran to the level of computer language, which is perhaps the only monosemous language in the world.

Can it be justifiably shown that historical context of each and every Divine verse is preserved and the ‘original intended meaning’ can be deduced from it without a tinge of doubt?

Contention that understanding the textual coherence (nazm) is mandatory to bring out the intended message almost leads one to assume that coherence is somehow a result of an exhaustive and unified process of textual criticism which is not apt to undergo revisions in times to come. Isn’t it against a seemingly more plausible contention that Quran is strictly an on-going and perpetual inter-communicative project between God and humanity; one that is naturally open to plural socio-ethical and legal interpretations?

To assert, as one brother seemingly does, that nihilistic delusion is a natural corollary to the claim that some degree of equivocalness is an inherent part of language, is a strange kind of interpretive extremism; an argument, which is itself an indicator how words are (mis) understood. Indeed, statements like ‘Philosophy tends to depart from from reality‘ reflect how unconcerned are engrossed interpreters of the text about the modern discourse that surrounds its nature.

As much as I contemplate with all my prejudices and extremely limited knowledge, I fail to see how a text like Quran can be merely viewed as a document with a strictly singular intent frozen in the past. Hasn’t it been shown with enough strength by many philosophical developments of last century that texts carry the burden of historical interpretation with them and its kind of impossible, if not futile, to go behind one ‘historical understanding’ and view them once again.

Texts are authors and readers – and not just authors and their utterances.

In my humble view, the present discourse goes well beyond the historical debates of logic, language and grammar and there are many bridges that have been built by modern philosophy between Abu Bishr Mattas and Abu Said al-Sirafis of our times.

Filed under: Islam & Modernity, Philosophy, Quran , Ghamidi, Language, Philosophy, Quran

Ghamidi’s interpretation of Islam: Is it a fad that will fizzle out with time?

I have stopped believing strongly since long that Javed Ahmed Ghamidi’s exposition of Islam, more or less like Mutizilite Islam in medieval times and Progressive Islam in modernity, is a fad that will fizzle out automatically with time; however, I still doubt that sometimes. It is primarily a better understanding of traditional Islam, cornerstone of which is Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, which moved me to drop my prejudiced (most probably) contention. Persevered deliberation made me realise that Ghamidi’s Islam, which I often call Contemporary School and which may going to be widely recognised as Islahi’s School, is a movement that would prove to be good for intellectual rejuvenation of Islamic thought; a kind of renaissance, which according to Javed Ghamidi himself began with Shibli Naumani in Indian Subcontinent.

The most striking feature of Contemporary School, to its proponents and those who agree with it, is its effort to posit a simplified and wholesome interpretation of religion. An interpretation which is commonly accessible because unlike classical interpretive methodologies, it is rooted in a singular divine text which can primarily be deconstructed through its language and historical context rather than tradition; an interpretation which is philosophically dynamic as it advances the ethical argument by way of inherent nature of man rather than any textually ordained source; an interpretation which is jurisprudentially liberating because it delimits the ambit of religious obligation by redefining the second most important source of classical jurisprudence, reducing it to a mere handful of practices; most importantly, an interpretation which is intellectually refreshing as it tends to reposition the categories of classical Islam’s legal archetype.

Yet, despite its entirely remarkable outlook, the school of thought in question poses complex paradoxes that seem unresolvable unless the underlying methodology is repeatedly tuned, tweaked and transformed into a consistent whole. A large part of blame, for this contradictory presentation, should be apportioned to modernity itself which has blurred the demarcating lines between various disciplines of religious knowledge, creating an atmosphere which is difficult for sensible and comprehensible communication. It no more matters whether you are getting a religious opinion from a jurist, philosopher or a traditionist; rather most of the times, it is the persuasiveness and sheer strength of argument with which one challenges the ostensible status quo of traditional scholarship that matters. However, whether traditional or contemporary, intensity of the argument should not be allowed to enshroud the underlying incoherence and inconsistency of the method.

Contemporary School asserts that the language of Quran, which is the single most important source text of Shariah, is not polysemantic in nature (a point about which I have already rambled once) and all differences of opinion due to apparent linguistic ambiguities will be resolved by referring to the context of revelation. The assertion, though attractive, is problematic on a number of accounts. It entails that a particular scholar or group’s insistence on absolute meanings of a verse is completely justified and all other explanations may not be seen as acceptable. It also disintegrates the problem of deconstructing the text by introducing an additional variable of context, differences of opinion regarding which will obviously be left unresolved. The magnitude of these contextual differences can be seen by comparing views of Islahi and Ghamidi on al-Ahzab 33: 59. Contemporary school insists that bringing out coherence (nazm) from the textual structure is the foremost principle and prerequisite of Quranic interpretation, which virtually reduces the possibility of true access of Quran to those individuals who have extraordinary command on language and have an exceptionally gifted mind that can appreciate high poetry in another language.

Indeed, we have enough evidence to substantiate that early generations of Muslims preferably interpreted the text through the simplest of meanings unless there is a specific directive from Prophet; otherwise, it seems hard to believe that some of the companions misinterpreted a seemingly straightforward trope, a caliph refused to comment on the meaning of ab’ba, and an exceptional master of language did not know the exact linguistic flavor of faatiris samaawat.

Coherence is a delight of mind and greatly improves one’s involvement in the divine text but it is not a prerequisite for understanding the message of God (not that Islahi contended so).

The ethical argument of Contemporary School is equally implausible, at least when it is applied to the details of religious interpretation. Philosophical skepticism of past two centuries have showed us decisively that ‘human nature’ is one of the most flimsy ground for establishing the moral argument. Even if one avoids the philosophical gibberish, it seems difficult to show arguably why swines and donkeys were made unlawful and camels were made lawful for human consumption; that too, when Ghamidi argues that Quran has prohibited only those comestibles which could not have been decided by human nature alone and Hadith (or Sunnah) cannot add to the Quran. Now, all of us know that camels and donkeys are not mentioned in Quran (in relation to food) and there are people in the world who have no qualms eating a plate full of sliced bacon.

It also seems strange how human nature alone, with its completely relative criteria of judgment, can be trusted to add into the ambit of religious prohibitions? Isn’t it true that Prophet himself used to ‘naturally’ dislike particular kinds of food and edible meat? If not an absurdity, it at least seems a dire contradiction that human nature can be understood as a primary ’source’ of religion on one hand and cannot be understood to define what is Shariah on the other. Is it also not ‘natural’ for men to grow hair on their faces? If it is, how it is not understood to be ordained by Shariah; if it is not, why should it be a recommended practice in religion at all.

By redefining what constitutes Sunnah, Contemporary School has actually redefined the established archetype of traditional Islamic law. The observation might seem exaggerated to some, as it has presumably happened partially in the past also; yet, the manifestation of any of the applied legal principles in the past has not been so consequential ever to delimit Prophetic legal authority to something like 27 practices. As already said, deducing Prophetic legal authority from established regional practices is not a unique idea, however limiting this authority solely to the transmitted practices – of majority – is a completely modernist phenomenon; one which is paradoxically simplistic and seemingly oblivious to methods of historical enquiry.

It is funny as it successfully circumvents the need of Prophetic traditions for proving extra-Quranic legal injunctions (of different shades from prohibited to obligatory) but seeks historical record to substantiate consensus of community.

As much as I mull over regarding the past, present and future of Javed Ahmed Ghamidi’s interpretation of religion, I see it quickly disentangling itself from the modernist tradition of Shiblis, Farahis, Azads, Iqbals and Islahis of the Subcontinent. It still remains doubtful whether history will remember it as a valid school of thought that steered Islam’s sojourn into modernity or another media-sect of Subcontinent, which struggled with itself to remain skeptical about all that reached us through tradition.

Filed under: Hadith & Sunnah, Islam & Modernity, Philosophy, Quran, Scholars, Suspended Judgments , Exegesis, Ghamidi, Hadith, Language, Modernity, Philosophy, Quran, Sunnah, Tradition

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

Cause, Creator and Epistemic Conjecture – III

David Hume, as Bertrand Russell suggests in the History of Western Philosophy, represents a kind of ‘dead end’ in a certain avenue of philosophical skepticism. Russell argues that it is impossible to go further in Hume’s direction and one can only hope for a relatively less skeptical construct.

Hume’s proposition adds considerably to the complexity of the problem while breaking it into two dimensional fractures. Namely metaphysical, which is rationalism and epistemological, which is empiricism.

A large part of 17th and 18th centuries saw notable philosophers struggling with this intriguing problem. It was Immanuel Kant, who for the first time, tried to reduce both these fractures to some extent. Nature of the world, according to Kantian construct, can be appreciated as a duality at two levels; namely noumenon (as it is) and phenomenon (as it appears to be). The causality, how we perceive it, only reigns in the world as it appears to us and cannot be conceived in the domain where things exist as they are. Human mind, as it cannot go beyond the phenomenal world, has no option but to concede to this cause-effect duo. We always need to beg causes in order to have a coherent experience. However, knowledge, even though based on this experience, is not derived from it.

Contrary to rationalists, we cannot explain the world without resorting to causality; contrary to empiricist, we must not derive the knowledge of noumena from experience.

Kant’s solution, though seemingly plausible, can be deemed problematic as far as application of Hume’s initial proposition to scientific episteme is concerned. Science’s claim, as I have already contended, is to yield knowledge (i.e. explain and predict) and if it is only concerned with the world as it appear to us, its claim is not justified. At maximum, it can claim to be descriptive; for it is through science that we can describe the phenomenon of sun rise but cannot reasonably justify the contention that sun will surely rise tomorrow. It is due to scientific certainty that we do not have any qualms in stating that ‘water gives life to plants’, but reason alone cannot be the basis of our expectation that water would keep on doing so in future.

What then are the bases for unflagging beliefs like these?

Excluding psychological and social domains, as I restrict myself to science, most contemporary solutions to the problem of causation put forth alternatives, which stem from the induction and probability theories. Bertrand Russell brilliantly posits his views on induction in the Problems of Philosophy. He writes:

The question we really have to ask is: ‘When two things have been found to be often associated, and no instance is known of the one occurring without the other, does the occurrence of one of the two, in a fresh instance, give any good ground for expecting the other?’ On our answer to this question must depend the validity of the whole of our expectations as to the future, the whole of the results obtained by induction, and in fact practically all the beliefs upon which our daily life is based.[...] The principle we are examining may be called the principle of induction, and its two parts may be stated as follows:

(a) When a thing of a certain sort A has been found to be associated with a thing of a certain other sort B, and has never been found dissociated from a thing of the sort B, the greater the number of cases in which A and B have been associated, the greater is the probability that they will be associated in a fresh case in which one of them is known to be present;

(b) Under the same circumstances, a sufficient number of cases of association will make the probability of a fresh association nearly a certainty, and will make it approach certainty without limit.

It is pretty obvious that Russell is trying here to circumvent Hume’s dilemma rather than resolving it. Inductive inference, as it is obvious from the above articulation, does not claim to bring about true conclusions from true premises; rather its objective is to yield probable conclusions from true premises. Hume’s argument, on the other hand, established two things beyond doubt; one, that it is impossible to prove that any inductive inference with true premises will have a true conclusion and two, that every inductive inference in future with true premises may yield a false conclusion.

The initial question therefore pops up in a new garb: Is it rational to accept an inductive inference?

to be continued…

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels

Cause, Creator and Epistemic Conjecture – II

The problem of causation remains an intriguing avenue of thought for philosophers, at least for the last few centuries. At the heart of it lies the proposition that causes and effects cannot be discovered by reason and all our explanations, in this regard, depend upon past experiences and observations. This proposition was best described by David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. He prepares his case while raising skeptical doubts about operations of human understanding:

[...] Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects. Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact[...] In like manner, when an effect is supposed to depend upon an intricate machinery or secret structure of parts, we make no difficulty in attributing all our knowledge of it to experience. Who will assert that he can give the ultimate reason, why milk or bread is proper nourishment for a man, not for a lion or a tiger?

It would amount to oversimplification if I continue elaborating the problem at hand without acknowledging the development of classification of causes by Scholastics during Middle Ages, especially when the Aristotelian notion of Motor Cause was substituted with Efficient Cause. Without going into unneeded details, it is appropriate to assume at this stage that causation, as we are discussing it now, is the efficient cause, that is: what acts in order to make something happen or exist. However, it does not mean that present discourse is completely unconcerned with ‘What a thing is made of’ or ‘Why it is how it is’; it is just that causation as we understand it conventionally is the one that is efficacious.

Interjecting this subtlety, I now return to what was being asserted.

According to Hume’s proposition, our understanding of any causal relation between an event A and B cannot truly escape our own impression of their constantly conjoined occurence. Our mental faculties keep inferring fallaciously that A is actually causing B, i.e. causing it to happen, or to be more precise, bringing it out of nowhere. Hume continues:

Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pronounce concerning the effect, which will result from it, without consulting past observation; after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation? It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second Billiard-ball is a quite distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. A stone or piece of metal raised into the air, and left without any support, immediately falls: but to consider the matter a priori, is there anything we discover in this situation which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion, in the stone or metal? And as the first imagination or invention of a particular effect, in all natural operations, is arbitrary, where we consult not experience; so must we also esteem the supposed tie or connexion between the cause and effect, which binds them together, and renders it impossible that any other effect could result from the operation of that cause.

Though seemingly tautological, Hume’s presentation literally establishes the impossibility of deducing anything about existence of a thing or event by reflecting upon the one with which it is conjoined. This effectively means, if I go back to my earlier example, that we cannot use ‘gravity’ to explain the phenomenon of falling of physical bodies without begging the question.

This deceitful inference, instigated by the idea of efficient cause, and the realisation that follows, point us towards various startling conclusions.

Foremost being that scientific laws may be based on unjustified causation as coexistence of A and B cannot be ideally called a ‘law’. It also purports an understanding of a purely Mechanical world where independant objects keep acting on each other, thereby producing change. It also means that causal laws of nature are not true logically and there is no concrete evidence that these will continue to hold in future.

to be continued…

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels

Cause, Creator and Epistemic Conjecture – I

There is no specific motivation of the present series. Like most students of knowledge, I too remain preoccupied in my humble capacity with the problem of asserting Islamic ideals while trying to avoid destructive engagements with modernity. Unlike many, I do believe that this assertion is not possible without formulating and promoting a new Islamic discourse that is validated by the conditions set by modernity. Brother Abul Hussein of Ahl al-Hadith blog has recently reminded us of another scholar who undertook one such contemporary discourse. Though being familiar with Badiuzzaman Said Nusri’s project since some time, I am not fortunate enough to read Risala-i-Nur directly. My extremely limited experience of Said Nusri is through secondary sources; a good deal of which came from Yamine Bouguenaya Mermer’s excellent philosophical buildups on Nusri’s ideas in Risala. The present rambles are mostly based on Mermer’s reflections.

Have you ever thought about the proposition that a stone might not fall on ground if you throw it from a height or a possibility that a cotton piece may not burn after coming in contact with fire. Albeit most of us consider such propositions to be absurd, these can be transformed into objective questions and help us analyze the problem of explanation in science.

For instance, one may ask: What will happen if a stone is dropped down from some height? The proposition that it might not fall on ground is just one of many and should be considered well for answering the question. Our mind however, deals instinctively with universals and as there are no stones which do not fall on ground if dropped from some height, it rejects all the other propositions which were should have been equally valid and logical. Excluding the metaphysical and subjective realm, these universal principles are nothing but causal relationships between the ‘act’ and ‘effect’ both of which are readily observable most of the times. In our example, the causality between the act of dropping the stone and the effect of its fall on ground is described as the law of gravity.

Our reliance on law of gravity to explain the falling of physical bodies is through sheer experience bounded by a set of conditions. We observe that things always fall when they are lifted and dropped and our mind do not record any exception to this experience. The physics we create to describe this experience is called ‘Gravity’ and we later use this physics to explain the same very phenomenon.

Is it logically justified then, to explain an experience through a causal law that is derived by the same experience?

Indeed it is a problem of science’s attribution of ‘necessity’ to physical laws which is based on presupposition of uniformity of nature through which science tries to achieve its two primary objectives; namely explanation and prediction. To put it differently, science is not satisfied merely with a plausible explanation of a phenomenon; rather it claims to establish knowledge of facts which are unobserved as yet. It is also true that science is reasonably successful in its generalizations of contended uniformities in nature and establishing universality of these generalized physical laws.

However truer is the contention that these laws have only experience on their side. For science can only state empirical matters of fact and cannot argue with a priori certainty. Philosophy, on the other hand, does that far efficiently and leads us to affirm that two events stand distinct even if they are related through an empirical law. This affirmation, though subtle, is the kernel of problem of causation.

to be continued…

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels