Is Shariah Possible (II): Origins of a Cosmopolitan Venture

A moral philosophy characteristically presupposes a sociology. For every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world. [Alasdair Macintyre]

Any study of Muslim civilization – with the purpose of exploring the roots of law – cannot remain unaffected by a certain kind of arbitrariness as far as specific time spans concerning various formative and post formative legal developments are concerned. However, it can be said with certainty that during the time of pious caliphate, there was no formal body of religious law that can be understood as binding on all Muslims. The community, being a direct recipient of revealed word of God, had no need to indulge in formal interpretation as the text (being characteristically a recitation-text as indicated by the word Quran itself and the first revelation Iqra’a) naturally exercised authority through immediate oral methods. A striking example of this spontaneous textual authority is Abu Bakr’s admonition to Umar at the time of Prophet’s demise which automatically brought the latter out from a state of denial.

This spontaneity, however, does not imply normative singularity (as we shall see later in the detailed examination of the Quran as a source of Sharia’h) and there were differences of opinions among companions regarding meaning of various verses.

Similarly, the concept Sunnah was not understood to be taken as a authoritative binding source in a proper and well defined framework. It was a kind of exemplary Prophetic practice – not yet formally situated in history – having a quasi-authoritative character; a disposition, which has to be necessarily distinguished from a relatively formal framework developed by later scholars especially Shafii.

It is difficult to identify the triggering point in history where Islamic tradition began to transform itself into a coherent, encompassing and self-assertive social order from a crudely authoritative moral philosophy . In this regard, one of the best studies of historical development of Islamic civilization has been carried out by Marshall Hodgson.

In his majestically detailed work, Hodgson goes on to explain the early  origins of a certain piously conscious class within Muslim societies supporting a faith-based egalitarianism in contrast to ruling absolutism of Marwani caliphate. A striking characteristic of this class – which was later specialized to be accepted as Ul’ema - was the pronouncement of this expectation that Islam has to have its own system of law, ethics, education and set of governing principles for public as well as private life.

With regards to Muslim civilization as a whole, the most profound cultural implication of this universalistic phenomenon was the emergence of a global social concern. In the words of Hodgson:

[...] the Muslims, unlike the Jews, did not regard their own community as a unique and (in principle) hereditary body selected out from a world left otherwise without direct divine guidance. The Muslim community was thought of as one among many divinely guided communities such as the Jewish or Christian, all (at their origin) equally blessed. Thus far, Islam took explicitly the form that various Christian and Jewish bodies had implicitly been assuming under the confessional empires [...]. The difference between Islam and the other communities was that Islam was first to rule over and then to supersede all others. Islam was to bring the true and uncorrupted divine guidance to all mankind, creating a world-wide society in which the true revelation would be the everyday norm of all the nations. It must not guide an autonomous community like the Jewish; it must guide the practical policies of a cosmopolitan world.

This indeed was the aspiration which can be termed as the cornerstone of that sacred socio-moral vision we call Sharia’h or Islamic Canon. It is important to note that this sacred vision was as much informed by a will to act in opposition to the political reality of pre-Abbasid period as it was by the resolve to bring the whole ambit of individual life in accordance with divine will; or more specifically, to act as ordained by the Quran and Sunnah.

Filed under: Series & Sequels, Sociology of Religion, Suspended Judgments, Traditional Islam , Fiqh, Islamic Law, Shariah

Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (III): Grundnorm, a cosmological myth

To effectively address the original Weberian objection i.e. normative pluralism is substantively irrational, it is mandatory to reformulate the problem in concise terms, starting point being that change in Islamic law takes place by means of some interpretive mechanism called Ijtihad. What exactly constitutes it: Is it the interpretation of the textual source ab initio; is it merely a pseudo-clandestine thought experiment to seek out verdicts on issues on which there is no past consensus among jurists; or is it merely a different solution to an old problem, but one which is in sync with contemporary social reality?

Irrespective of the particular theoretical inclination favored, there is no doubt that multiple norms will be generated in any interpretive undertaking; a fact which is amply observed by the term ta’addud al-ahkam in traditional Islamic literature. That this multiplicity of norms gives an irrational character to the law is the contention I am presently trying to analyze.

In my view, basis of this contention can be traced back to Islamic legal history and literature with some effort. After the post-recognition phase of Madhabs (the schools of Islamic Law), Muslims jurists increasingly found it hard to espouse the concept of Ijtihad “proper” through the medium of ifta’a, thereby limiting the response of an independent jurist to the ambit of his own juridical school. At times, some of these jurists resorted to quasi-artificial casuistic methods in order to achieve equity between presumed universality of complete legal paradigm, i.e. Sharia’h, and its practical manifestation when it comes to application of law to facilitate the functions of a society. Most of these casuistic developments – for instance Istihsan (Juristic Preference), Istishab (Presumption of Continuity), Urf (Custom) – in medieval times were arguably instigated by the desire to achieve a rational character of the law, thereby circumventing an almost subjective and probably mistakenly understood and emphasized universality of norms. And if all these developments and the enormous literary genre evolved from them achieved a kind of “practical wisdom” in line with social reality of times, it seemed rationally inconsistent to a modern critical mind.

But there is more to this discourse than casuistry acquiring a contemptuous nuance in Islamic law.

The Austrian-American jurist Hans Kelsen argued in his theories of legal positivism that all newly discovered norms must conform to the Grundnorm, a kind of hypothetical higher logical condition. The argument has been contextualized islamically in recent times, whereby many modern scholars** of Islamic law have argued that the Islamic moral expression “obedience to Allah” is an expression of the transcendental myth that fulfills the function of grundnorm in Islamic legal discourse.

There is no doubt that this remarkable proposition serves to make Sharia’h and natural law compatible; however, the real use of it lies in disentangling two confusingly snarled threads that modernity has brought to the fabric of Islamic law. On one hand, there is an increased proclivity for stringent applications of law in various spheres of public and private life. There are two contrasting shades of this tilt: 1) the literalist “text as norm” approach generally subscribed by the Islamists, liberals and revivalists alike (albeit not always erroneous intrinsically) and 2) a kind of “formal jurisprudence” employing all the tools of discursive logic, yet envisaging the use of universal principles and clearly pronounced norms. On the other hand, there is a resort to casuistry, most of the times employing specious argumentation that is clearly extended to achieve specific preconceived ends. In many cases, the latter can be observed in localized jurists muddled between knowledge and identity issues related to their respective communities.

Most of the modern readings of Islamic law generally fail to acknowledge these subtle distinctions but so is the modern jurist who remains strangled, on one side, between the pursuit of legal as well as ethical application of law in the society and the quest to achieve formalized rationality of jurisprudential method on the other.

To drive the point home, it can be concluded that social change and legal developments cannot be visualized to act in water-tight compartments rather the former triggers the latter in more than one ways. It is imperative to understand that norm-creating activity is a perpetual human-divine legislative process which is validated – without exceptions – by a Grundnorm revealed as a guiding authority for the independent jurist (mujtahid). At the same time, it is not necessary that the content of all the newly discovered norms must be implicitly found in revelation; rather, these are deduced through the science of Islamic legal epistemology, commonly termed as Usul al-Fiqh in traditional jargon.

In modern times Islamic legal developments are at a juncture where these cannot be technically characterized as formally rational (in the modern sense of the word); however, the characteristic modern reading of the law which imply that jurisprudential method of medieval times was substantively irrational is not correct either. In fact these developments – at that time – were meant to achieve a kind of normative pluralism which inadvertently harmonized the law with the social reality and worldview of those times. ____________________________

**For instance read Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, “Islamic Jurisprudence“; Ebrahim Moosa, “The Allegory of Rule (Hukm): Law as Simulacrum in Islam“

Related:

• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (I): Normative Pluralism
• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (II): Ifta’a, Ijtihad and Social Customs

Filed under: Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Islam & Modernity, Series & Sequels, Sociology of Religion, Traditional Islam , Ijtihad, Islamic Law, Philosophy, Pluralism, Society, Sociology

Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (II): Iftaa, Ijtihad and Social Customs

The “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.
[Marshall McLuhan]

In 1913, Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanawi gave his famous juridical response to a British court in India. The seeker was a claimant who wanted to re-establish conjugal rights with his wife but his in-laws refused to let her join on the plea that she has apostatized and can no longer be his wife according to Islamic law. “Annulled”, wrote Thanawi while explaining that “unbelief causes annulment of the marriage contract and marriage of the claimant stands invalidated.“

During next seven years, the same fatwa was pronounced on ten different instances, albeit in marginally different contexts, by the same Mufti. However, in 1931, Mawlana Thanawi published an independent treatise dealing with the same issue at length and revised his previous opinion citing Maliki law as an authority instead of usual Hanafi law citations from al-Haskafi’s text or Ibn Abidin’s commentary.

Dr. Khalid Masud, in his paper on Apostasy and Judicial Separation in British India [included in this volume], analyzes the intricacies of these two fatwas (original and the revised one) at length and makes some interesting observations regarding social changes that took place between 1920 to 1930 in British India. He notes that the number of applications in the courts – seeking judicial separation from husbands – substantially increased in the span of these ten years. A large number of Muslim women were encouraged to declare themselves Christian and get their marriages dissolved by producing certificates of baptism.

According to Masud, situation became noticeable to an extent that some notable Muslim Scholars, for instance Dr. Iqbal in his famous lectures, questioned the validity of Hanafi law in this particular area and asked the Muslim jurists to exercise Ijtihad in order to reform the law. The debate triggered by these collective developments finally culminated into the revised fatwa of 1931, thus permitting the use of grounds in Maliki law – including husband’s impotence, cruelty or inability to maintain his wife – to dissolve a marriage instead of using apostasy as a legal device.

The normative shift in these fatwas, besides reflecting normative pluralism, also reflects another important dimension of legal change in Islamic Law: an almost inseparable construct of two mediums, i.e. Iftaa’ and Ijtihad.

Even though, many contemporary experts [1, 2, 3] of Islamic law argue that the terms ‘Mufti’ and ‘Mujtahid’ have been used interchangeably in pre-modern Islamic literature, it would not be entirely wrong to assert that fatwa still remains the primary medium of extending Ijtihad towards the society. For in actuality, it is only the Mufti (even today) who – inadvertently at times – creates and extends new legal norms to the level of positive law that works in a particular social construct.

It should not, therefore, sound surprisingly ‘liberal’ to a ‘traditionalist mind’ when a Maliki jurist from 14th century Spain, Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi, gives primary importance to social reality in his celebrated treatise on Islamic legal philosophy:

The rule is that you examine the given case in the light of Sharia. If it is correct according to the Sharia then consider its consequences in the conditions of its time and its people. If by its mention, your mind does not recall any evil then submit it to reason. If you feel that it will be accepted by reasonable people, then you may give your opinion in general terms if the case relates to a matter that is generally acceptable. If it cannot be generalized then give specific opinion. If the case in question does not accept this process, then it is better to keep silent; that would be more in conformity with the welfare of the people, legal as well as rational.

Having argued elsewhere, albeit not so eloquently, that Islamic law can be essentially experienced as a tradition of literature, I now use that observation to reassert that the available legal tradition – if hierarchically arranged and closely analyzed from primary texts (mutun) to commentaries / super commentaries (shuruh) to juridical responses (fatawaa) – can reveal a lot about normative pluralism in Islamic law and the inherent ability of law to perpetually adapt itself to the ever changing social conditions through well-knit and remarkably reasonable mediums.

concludes next…

Related:

• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (I): Normative Pluralism
• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (III): Grundnorm, a cosmological myth
• Tradition of Literature

Filed under: Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Islam & Modernity, Series & Sequels, Sociology of Religion, Traditional Islam , Ijtihad, Islamic Law, Philosophy, Pluralism, Society, Sociology

Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (I): Normative Pluralism

In my view, the most important crisis that Muslim society miserably failed to handle during Islam’s sojourn into modernity is diversity. By diversity, I mean religious heterogeneity in any form, may it be the pronouncement of legal injunctions, opinions regarding societal norms or something as personal as individual religious practices.

Therefore, whether it is the abundance of contradictory fatwas on issues as diverse as women leading prayers to Muslims attending Christmas celebrations to Islamic prohibition of images to what constitutes death, Pakistani brothers arguing about the bare heels of a Chinese sister during Hajj or my grandma’s queasiness while watching me pray in a manner other than our family’s religious school, there is an invisible urge to see a kind of religious monism; a CONSENSUS based on an almost Utopian unity of intelligibility, opinion and action.

I would go as far as contending that pluralism, when it manifests itself in any of the above forms does not resonate well with the conventionally perceived absolute nature of religious discourse. And this perception, while breeding religious exclusivism and thus extremism, also undermines the true rationalistic nature of Islamic legal tradition.

One of the foremost reasons for this intellectual aversion to disagreement is the nature of Muslim law itself. While majority of traditional Muslim jurists – and I prefer to restrict my comment to Sub Continent as I am aware of some exceptions outside – seem perfectly at ease with it, western legal sociologists have always struggled with the antinomies of permission and prohibition that exist for a single issue. Max Weber, for instance, while attributing these “variety of norms” to the irrationality of the law, stated:

The priestly approach to the law aims at a material, rather than formal rationalization of the law. The legal teaching in such schools, which generally rests on either a sacred book or a sacred law fixed by a stable oral or literal tradition, possesses a rational character in a very special sense. Its rational character consists in its predilection for construction of purely theoretical casuistry oriented less to the practical needs of the groups concerned than to the needs of the uninhibited intellectualism of the scholars – its casuistry, inasmuch as it serves at all practical rather than intellectual needs, is formalistic in the special sense that it must maintain, through re-interpretation, the practical applicability of the traditional, unchangeable norms to changing needs. But it is not formalistic in the sense that it would create a rational system of law.

Needless to say that these comments by Weber in Economy and Society generally pertain to any religious law and do not specifically consider the dynamics of Muslim positive law. However, while Weber scarcely commented on Islam (except of course his formulation of Kadijustiz), above analysis while comprehensively illuminating the problem of “variety of norms” as construed by the post-Cartesian mind also highlights the kind of confusion that still prevails regarding contextual literacies of the pre-modern Islamic legal tradition.

While some attribute this characteristic of variety of verdicts in Islamic law to quasi-irrational nature of Islamic law, others argue that normative pluralism has a perfectly established pedigree in Islamic law and that new norms are perpetually created and recreated through a perfectly reasonable process that is an intrinsic part of the law itself.

The key question thus, in my view, can be formulated in this way: When a jurisconsult – a mufti, mujtahid or a faqih more specifically – adjudicate according to new circumstances thereby adding to the already existing variety of norms, is it a symptom of irrationality of law, per se or the change thus driven can be attributed to some rational interpretive method called Ijtihad.

to be continued…

Related:

• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (II) : Ifta’a, Ijtihad & Social Customs
• Dynamics of Change in Islamic Law (III): Grundnorm, a cosmological myth

Filed under: Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Islam & Modernity, Series & Sequels, Sociology of Religion, Traditional Islam , Ijtihad, Islamic Law, Philosophy, Pluralism, Society, Sociology, Weber

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

Amal-e-Ahle Madina (3) – Imam Shafii’s Criticism

If Imam Shafii’s charge on the Medinese school has to be expressed with just one word, it would perhaps be ‘arbitrariness’ or more precisely, ‘inconsistency’. However the aim at present is not to ruminate over the entire significance of his criticism but just the aspect of relying over ‘practice’ rather than ‘traditions’.

Shafii’s case against Madinese is multidimensional and perhaps the most misunderstood partly because of its complexity and partly because he was the pioneer in laying down the foundations of Usul al-Fiqh. The latter though seemingly subtle is most telling because the reference to the problems of Usul (methodology) in his predecessors’ writings are occassional and peripheral as opposed to the thoroughgoing discussions that he has produced in his writings. The study of critcism directed at this alleged lack of method is apt to impair our vision unless we disentangle the different dimensions and set them against what is percieved as Medinese school in Shafii’s time. Only in this manner we might be able to visualise the lack of methodology in Medinese schools as a methodology itself.

I have already presented this beauteous simplicity of method in words of Malik and an equally uncomplicated riposte by a worthy contemporary. Its important to understand that Shafii’s criticism against the principle of amal-e-ahle Madina (practice of Madinites) is not against the practice of Madinites per se (which will obviously be understood as an intrinsic disapproval of practice if seen in the light of an equally important and strong case in favor of Hadith [1]) but against arbitrariness and inconsistency of approach.

In my opinion, major part of Shafii’s criticism against the practice of Madinites (as source of legal doctrine) should be seen in the light of his discussions of definition and validity of Ijmaa (juridical consensus) as a source of various rulings of Fiqh. However the times when this criticism should be seen as strengthening the case of Hadith is when Malikis prefer practice over Khabr-e-Ahad (a solitary hadith) and they always do so when both sources lead to diametrical conclusions. Keeping the discussion in the perimeters of Ijmaa, Shafii is found presenting his case repeatedly on two lines of reasoning. First and foremost is that a valid Ijmaa does not derive its cogency from the consensus of jurists of one region (Madina in this case) but becomes binding only if jurists of all the regions do agree about a ruling. Secondly, there are scholars from Madina disagreeing with the rulings regarding which Madinese bring the claim of Ijmaa as an evidence. This is the same line of reasoning which was used by Laith ibn Saad previously.

Even extending the discussion inside the realms of Hadith, it cannot remain uninvolved with the intricacies of Ijmaa. This is because Madinites according to Shafii cannot bring anything as a proof even when they are opining against an ahad hadith (a solitary tradition from Prophet) except a claim of consensus or a practice of some companion. On the other hand he brings argument after argument with amazing consistency to project their lack of method in deriving various rulings. Shafii’s critique is objective as his aim is not to bring about arguments in support of right doctrine but to lay down the right doctrine itself.

Pursuing the same aim, his predecessors (and especially Malik in this case) refered informally to variety of sources. Their attitudes were characterised by trust in respective doctrines whom they acknowledge as their authorities. For instance the doctrines of Ahl al-Raa’y (the people of opinion) and Ahl al-Hadith (the people of tradition). In Malik’s case this trust was specifically derived from the sacredness and continuity of ‘practices’ that constituted the Islamic way of life. As long as this trust remain unchallenged, no formal touchstones were required to test against and choose the particular source among many which ought to be made the basis of some legal ruling. However by the time of Shafii the scientific criticism on Hadith reached at a particular stage of development where it was not difficult for Shafii to insist about some overriding authority superceding all the other sources except Quran.

Therefore on the one hand subjective factors like intuitive conviction, commonsense, gumption and gut feeling about the veracity of a particular source were considered inconsistencies and arbitrary methods by Shafii. On the other hand agreed upon practice of a particular region, traditions from companions and all the claims of consensus were considered overridden in principle by traditions (in case of conflicts) which can be authentically traced back to the mouth of Prophet.
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1. As seen by Shacht for instance in his Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence.

Filed under: Ilm al-Ikhtilaf, Series & Sequels, Traditional Islam

Tradition (4) – Conclusion and more…

This would be my conclusive post building upon the character of tradition as portrayed in the first three entries of this series (1, 2, 3). I would very concisely highlight few important areas of thought which can be viewed from alternate perspectives by traditionalist and non traditionalist alike if they revisit their notion of the concept tradition.

Belonging to one or multiple traditions would seem totally at place if it is understood as a critical indulgence in our past in order to make our existence meaningful. I have briefly adumbrated in the last post that such a critical enterprise is necessary if we want to create and maintain different forms of knowledge in order to help us understand the world around us.

Which tradition(s) should one associate himself with?
Unless it is understood as a meaningful participation, people do not like to play their parts in keeping a conversation alive. Therefore the responsibility of keeping the tradition(s) alive solely rests upon the soulders of people who are existing in present and haven’t faded away in history themselves. The question above is generally asked when people (or a specific group of people) associate themselves with a particular tradition thereby making a statement that rest of the conversations are not worthy of their attention. Such statements set forth the foundation of a duality with groups of people on extremes deafening the atmosphere in between with noises of their respective conversations. It is very important to understand that different traditions can coexist simultaneously in a person simply because he is unable to understand the world around him in one language.

Traditions within a Tradition.
Sometimes in our effort to preserve a specific tradition we tend to confuse it with the concept of history. A living tradition is not like an event in history but an ever renewed phenomena needing fresh participants. While events in history ‘happen’ tradition has to be ‘created’ and ‘maintained’ if its character is understood as something built on eternal foundations. Such a living tradition should not be understood as a single converstion but a cluster where different conversations keep losing their signifcance and others keep gaining dominance. This nature of tradition should be understood as a normal phenomena. A valid example is of several Muslim Traditions belonging to the same Islamic Tradition and constantly keep enriching it in past as well as present.

The Art of Conversation – Education of Tradition or Traditional Education [1].
Active and meaningful participation in this figurative conversation cannot be attributed to human instinct. In other words its a behavior we have to learn and not something rooted in our creation. The process of this learning comprises of both formal and informal means of education. Keeping this in perspective, ‘education of tradition’ and ‘traditional education’ are two essentially different processes of learning. While former is a way to teach people how to imbibe a particular behavior, latter is way to protect the meanings of a mythical past from being contaminated by the contemporary concerns. This is based on an erroneous assumption that the organic link between the past and the present is broken and many unwanted dualities are imminent.

Conclusion.
I have just tried to provide here a sketch how various dichotomies and conflicts are founded on a false concept of tradition. The brands of dualities within Islam are not mentioned on purpose because the debate on Tradition Vs Modernism is not necessarily an Islamic debate. Though Islam has been at the forefront in prompting that debate at first place. A lot can be built on each of these concepts if we want to shed more light with specific focus on Islam. I leave it as a ceaseless exercise for later, insha’Allah.
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1. Another subtle difference highlighted by Dr. Yedullah Kazmi

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels