Jihad Or Itjihad: Religious Orthodoxy And Modern Science In Contemporary India

By S. Irfan Habib

While Europe was still stuck in the Dark Ages, scientists in the Islamic world were tranlsating Aristotle, and making huge strides in astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. Two thousand years later, the idea of 'scientific progress' seems to be locked in a hopeless war with Islam. When and how did Islam lose its enthusiasm for the workings of the natural world?   S. Irfan Habib, one of the country's foremost historians, traces teh trajectomy of how 'mainstream' Islam came to question modern science - beginning with the reformers of the nineteenth century and ending with present-day idealogoues. Through the lives of famous men like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, he demonstrates that the modern-day promulagtion of Islam and its followers as 'anti-modern' and 'anti-science' is a myth that leads, quite literally, to explosives consequences. Habib also channels his scholarship to both history and Islam to question the controversial idea of 'Islamic science' as a category distinct from 'modern', 'Eurocentric' science.   In an engaging, easy style that belies the weightiness of the questions it seeks to answer, Jihad or Itijihad challenges both stereotypes and propaganda. This book places in perspective the relationship between Islam and science today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350295564

S. Irfan Habib

S. Irfan Habib is a historian of science and of political history. He has edited and authored several books on the history of science. His last book To Make the Deaf Hear: Ideology and Programme ofBhagat Singh and his Comrades has been translated into several Indian languages. At present he holds the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Chair at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.

Book preview

Jihad or Ijtihad?

Religious Orthodoxy and Modern

Science in Contemporary Islam

S. IRFAN HABIB

To Atiya, my wife, in whom I see an apt example of a Muslim

whose world is open to new ideas, who is eclectic and assimilative of

anything good from any religion or culture.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

1. Introduction

Heterogeneity and Early Science in Islam

2. Reconciling Science with Islam in the Nineteenth Century

3. What is ‘Islamic’ in Islamic Science?

Some Insights from Nineteenth-Century India

4. Modern Science and Islamic Essentialism

5. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

Striving for a Composite and Pluralist India

6. Conclusion

Articulating for Islamic Science: An Essentialist Project

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Preface

This book is not in any way about the history of science in Islam, though there are a number of instances when I had to journey into Islamic history. The need to do so was to explain several contemporary concerns and issues. But my focus here is to engage with some serious fundamentalist formulations, about science in Islam, that are being peddled as Islamic science’. And this is not being done simply to question the Eurocentrism of modern science but also to inform believers that modern science does not conform to their Islamic faith and values’, thus an urgent need for an Islamically (sic) validated science, whatever that means.

Let me also point out that I have more issues with Islamism than Islam per se. I see Islamism as a political ideology, with political not theological objectives, though it masquerades as resurgent Islam. In a postcolonial context, it has grounded itself as a valid political, as well as intellectual, response, reading people’s frustrations with callous governments and cynicism regarding the future. While science and technology have brought about light and darkness simultaneously, Islamist interlocutors emphasize merely its darker side. They delink Islam from modern science and its manifestations—negative or positive. As an alternative, they advocate Quran and hadis-centric science, ignoring the fact that the Prophet emphasized the use of reason for the pursuit of knowledge, in fact, even to understand the Book. The captives taken from the Battle of Badr, were freed on different conditions. One of the conditions was that if a prisoner could educate ten Muslims he would win his emancipation. Note that these prisoners were not Muslims and so were not supposed to impart knowledge based on the Quran or hadis. This was possible during the Prophet’s time and had his approval.

It is strange, and ironic as well, that early contributors to science and philosophy in Islam never felt the need to wed science with religion. While today, in the words of Ahmad Dallal, ‘when Muslim participation in the production of the universal culture of science is dwindling, they call for bringing the two together.’

There are even attempts to establish that the Quran and hadis are the true sources of all valid scientific knowledge for believers. Again, early commentators never felt the need to ‘advocate an understanding of the Quran as a source of scientific knowledge.’

Most of the chapters in this book try to contrast the position of Muslim modernists of the 19th century with those of the present-day ideologues. Despite being practicing Muslims, we seldom find anyone from the 19th century promoting the Quran as a book of science. Rather, most believe that the Quran just inspires believers to pursue knowledge. They were convinced that scientific knowledge, like anything else in cultures and civilizations, evolves and progresses through exchange with each other and not merely within exclusive domains.

The title of the book is not to provoke. Both jihad and ijtihad are at the core of Islam. While the former is the most misunderstood and misused term ever, the latter has been forgotten. The real jihad was defined by the Prophet himself when he said after his return from a battle: ‘We return from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad, the more difficult and crucial effort to conquer the forces of evil in oneself and in one’s own society in all the details of daily life.’

Yet, we all know how jihad is perceived today. The gradual disappearance of ijtihad, or independent and rational thinking, was initially confined to legal matters but later expanded to include other areas as well. By the nineteenth century, particularly after colonization, scholars felt that the lack of ijtehad had led to intellectual stagnation. The poet/philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, for instance, saw ijtihad as the catalyst for Islam’s intellectual resurgence, whereas the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Muhammad Abduh, considered it a break from traditional scholarship. Today, even a proponent of Islamic science, Ziauddin Sardar, concedes that with the disappearance of ijtihad, science in Islam has become a matter of history.

New Delhi

S. IRFAN HABIB

1

Introduction

Heterogeneity and Early Science in Islam

Ibegan thinking of and writing these essays almost ten years ago. They are imbued with my sense of discomfort at the growing fundamentalism in Islam and in the world generally. The mess in global politics can be held partially responsible for the emergence of this perversion called political Islam, which has successfully purged it of all humanitarian and pluralist values. This caricatured Islam is reflected in the realm of the history of science as well, which prompted me to dwell upon the Islam and science debate. Some writings on the Islamization of science that I read were couched in scholarly phraseology and hence did not succinctly explain the methodology of this process called Islamization. Further readings ¹ revealed that there are several ways of arriving at this magical entity termed Islamic science’— something that can apparently relieve the Islamic world from the grip of the monster called modern science. The fundamental premise of all the players in the game, despite their inner differences, is that modern science is not neutral: it is ‘Western’ in character and spirit, so it is bound to a certain culture. This opens up the possibility of creating an Islamic science. It may be possible to create an Islamic science if Muslim scientists produce some original work. However, this sort of symbolization is apocryphal. ²

Modern science is sometimes called Western science because it was developed by those living in the West. These included Christians, Jews, atheists and others. In our times, significant contributions have been made by Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Indian scientists, and a Pakistani one who was denigrated in his own country because he did not belong to ‘mainstream’ Islam.³ It is this pluralism that needs to be reinstated once Eurocentrism, which has held sway since colonization, is displaced. The crucial lesson to learn is from the rise and decline of the history of science in Islamic civilization itself.

It is difficult to find an Islamic scholar who will not vouch for Islam’s seminal contribution to science and yet reiterate that Islam is not in conflict with science. They invariably hark back to the early centuries of Islam to establish the veracity of their claims and flaunt names from Islam’s history of science such as Al-Khawarizmi, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, al-Razi and Omar Khayyam. No one can dispute the fact that these scholars, along with several others, significantly contributed to scientific creativity in Islamic civilization and should be credited with helping the flowering of modern science in the West. It was through the Arab philosophers and scientists that the rich patrimony of Greek learning reached the leading lights of modern rationalism. The father of modern scientific research, Roger Bacon, was a disciple of the Arabs.⁴ By virtue of patronage at the highest level during the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the foundations of rational and natural sciences were laid when the House of Wisdom (Bait’ul’Hikmah), which welcomed scholars of all creeds, religions and beliefs, was established.

However, all those who make such claims—and rightly so— forget that this particular phase in Islamic history was marked predominantly by the Mu’tazilite school of philosophy, which was based on freethinking and rationalism. It was an ecumenical setting for science, where savants of nearly all creeds and origins worked towards a common purpose.⁵ And this was not something new, it was a long established pre-Islamic tradition in the Near East, where translation of scientific and philosophical texts from Greek to Syriac took place and then some scholars rendered it into Arabic as well. According to A.I. Sabra, ‘the translation movement in the early Abbasid period was not a sideline affair conducted by a few individuals working in the dark under threat of being found out and thwarted.’⁶ He calls it a massive movement which took place in broad daylight under the protection and active patronage of the Abbasid rulers. Indeed, in terms of intensity, scope, concentration and concertedness, it had had no precedent in the history of the Middle East or of the world. Large libraries for books on ‘philosophical sciences’ (hikma, or al-ulum al’hikmiyya) were created, embassies were sent out in search of Greek manuscripts, and scholars (Christians and Sabians) were employed to perform the task of translation, all of this at the instigation and with the financial and moral support of the Abbasid caliphs.⁷ Commenting on the translation movement undertaken in Baghdad, Dimitri Gutas says ‘On a broader and more fundamental level, its significance lies in that it demonstrated for the first time in history that scientific and philosophical thought are international, not bound to a specific language or culture.’⁸

One more crucial aspect, which needs to be highlighted, is the role that should be assigned to Islam during this spurt of scientific efflorescence. Apparently because of the importance of that role in world intellectual history many scholars have been led to look at the medieval Islamic period as a period of reception, preservation and transmission …⁹ Sabra points out that reception here may be used as an harmless and value-free category but it does not really describe the event adequately. ‘Reception’ might connote a passive receiving of something being pressed upon the receiver, and this might reinforce the image of Islamic civilization as a receptacle or repository of Greek learning.¹⁰ But this is not what happened; the transmission of ancient science to Islam would be better characterized as an act of appropriation performed by the so-called receiver. Greek science was not thrust upon Muslim society any more than it was upon Renaissance Europe. What the Muslims of the eighth and ninth centuries did was to seek out, take hold of and finally make their own a legacy which appeared to them laden with a variety of practical and spiritual benefits … ‘Reception" is, at best, a pale description of that enormously creative act.’¹¹

George Sarton, the father of the modern history of science, also strongly felt that Muslim intervention was not just concerned with rehabilitating Greek texts, but, according to him ‘they did not simply transmit ancient knowledge, they created a new one’.¹² Going further and placing Islamic triumph in the context of his own time (early twentieth century), Sarton says:

The superiority of Muslim culture, say in the eleventh century, was so great that we can understand their intellectual pride. It is easy to imagine their doctors speaking of the western barbarians almost in the same spirit as ours do of the ‘Orientals’. If there had been some ferocious eugenists among the Muslims; they might have suggested some means of breeding out all the western Christians and the Greeks because of their hopeless backwardness.¹³

Sarton imagines that those among his contemporaries who condemn the East and lionize the West lack an understanding of science, for it is in science that Islam reveals its strength. Given the present state of Islam, it is difficult to believe what Sarton wrote in the early twentieth century about Islam’s accomplishments in science, and one even wonders at the appearance of free thinking so early in its history. One simple explanation is that when Islam expanded into foreign lands outside Arabia, Muslims came into contact with Egyptians, Syrians and Greeks living in these regions. Greek philosophy and rational sciences existed in these lands and naturally influenced the early Muslims. Their blind faith in divine revelation was thus confronted by rational thought and many began to question the viability of the dogmas in the divine scriptures. Such an experience was quite new to the Muslims who were intellectually challenged to reconcile some of the implausible scriptural texts with reason. Most of the scientific accomplishments of Islamic civilization can be unquestionably located during this phase, when ijtihad or independent reasoning was the prerogative of the lay believer. This glorious era in the history of scientific accomplishments gradually came to a close from the eleventh century onwards, and ijtihad or freethinking became suspect and regarded as harmful to the future of Islam. The Quran as it was revealed to Prophet Mohammed is available to us, even today. But the religious leadership among Muslims, the hidden church or the invisible Vatican, does not allow us to engage with the revelation on our own terms. We are free to recite but not to interpret.¹⁴ There are some other reasons for the decline but this particular factor had an impact on the very spirit of Islam; taqlid (following established tradition) became the reigning paradigm and continues even today.¹⁵

If we look at the history of the rise and fall of civilizations, their science included, then the decline of science in Islam is not really unusual. Most of the other major civilizations met with the same fate, including the Greek, erroneously considered the genesis of modern Western science. The growth of knowledge has occurred through shifting centres of excellence. No civilization or geographical area has been able to sustain its vitality for more than a couple of centuries. Islam played its part by enhancing the dignity of Greek science and also by enriching it materially. In the words of the Turkish historian of science Aydin Sayili, ‘when the torch of science went to another society which was eager to cultivate it, its very passage to a new environment with fresh possibilities of development for science constituted a change favourable to its progress’.¹⁶

Islamic contributions by way of translation from Arabic to Latin were indeed indispensable. It was through this century of translation that the torch of science passed from Islam to Europe.¹⁷ The outline of the history of Islamic science’ in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages by A.I. Sabra, the historian of seventeenth-century optics and of Arabic science, begins:

the term ‘Islamic science’, like the alternative term ‘Arabic science’, refers to the scientific endeavours of individuals and institutions in the medieval world of Islam. These endeavours began in the middle of the eighth century, in the form of a vigorous translation effort centered in Baghdad, which continued throughout the ninth and into the tenth century. They reached their highest levels of achievement at different times and places over a period extending to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Afterward came a period of stagnation and even impoverishment, though faint traces of this tradition were still to be seen in the Middle East when Napoleon led his expedition to Egypt in 1798, bringing with it some of the early seeds of a new scientific awakening.¹⁸

Sabra also points out that Islam was the binding factor in an otherwise divergent amalgamation of science in the Muslim world, pursued by Arabs, Persians and Turks as well as Christians and Jews. He emphasized the error of dubbing the entire effort of translating the Greek scientific and philosophical heritage as no more than a matter of ‘reception’—as passive absorption rather than an act of ’appropriation’. The effort itself, and the grandiose scale on which