Valuing Islamic Tradition While Critically Engaging With It
In Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition, Joseph Lumbard writes about the dominance of Islamist ideologies in recent times and the neglect of what he calls the ihsani intellectual tradition. This living intellectual tradition of Islam, as William Chittick, writes, is not merely a preservation of transmitted texts. As Chittick points out,
intellectual knowledge cannot be passed on, even though teachers are needed for guidance in the right direction. The way to achieve it is to find it within oneself, by training the mind or, as many of the texts put it, ‘polishing the heart.’ Without uncovering such knowledge through self-discovery, one will depend on others in everything one knows.
A contemporary Muslim educational institution, like Zaytuna College, could potentially become a place where a living tradition of Islamic scholarship engages with the metaphysical and philosophical questions of our times. It could potentially be a place where foundations in both Islamic scholarship and the liberal arts provide students with the necessary tools for that engagement, or at least help in setting a foundation in profound learning of tradition, critical thinking, wrestling with ideas, criticism and relevance, and thinking for oneself, rather than blindly replicating.
Ideally, such an engagement in time will become more deeply trans-national (rather than solely an American one) as scholarship will engage across traditions with the classics of the Islamic tradition and modern philosophy. I was introduced to the contemporary Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahman’s works when I took a seminar on his works with Professor Wael Hallaq at Columbia University in the fall of 2014. In an interview with Jadiliya, Prof. Hallaq states:
The other trend or camp in modern Islamic thought is a thin one, and is emerging slowly but hopefully steadily and surely. This is the Islamic critical school spearheaded by the Moroccan language, logic, and moral philosopher Taha Abdurrahman, who has not succumbed to the Enlightenment modes of thought. His critical-constructive approach signals a promising innovating beginning from which a new path of thinking and re-articulation can begin.
To delve into Abderrahman’s thought for our purposes of highlighting a robust example of engaging critically with contemporary philosophy, we can see a project similar to Talal Asad’s project of interrogating the secular. Abderrahman asks why it should be acceptable for modernists to critique religion through the secular, but not for the secular to be critiqued through the religious? Rather, he takes it as his task to critique Western modernity through the means of ethics, and, in particular, Islamic ethics.*
Abderrahman laments the state of affairs in contemporary Islamic thought where it is as if some Muslims measure the extent of their modernization with the extent to which they cut themselves off from their traditions, histories, and institutions.
In doing so, however, they are imitating the modernity of others (specifically of Westerners). Furthermore, Abderrahman finds fault with these thinkers for seeking to derive solutions to the problems of modernity from the very same sources from which these problems emerged.* Yet, the same means that brought us into these problems cannot resolve them. As the Catholic Thomistic philosopher at Notre Dame, Alasdair Macintyre, has argued, “modern moral philosophy is a form of inquiry whose defeat has been from the outset predetermined by the terms in which the inquiry has been framed.”* Rather, for a way out, we need to appeal to a more solid foundation to derive ethics and morals from. Abderrahman, like Macintyre, points to theistic religion as this source.*
Abderrahman argues that ‘reason’ has been elevated in the West so much so that it were as if Westerners were the exclusive bearers of rationality, or at least certainly more so than their counterparts in non-Western societies.* Abderrahman points to how attempts at an Islamic Revival for the last century and a half have concentrated upon the idea of rationality, yet modern thinkers have been lacking in interrogating and rethinking these principles and discussions. Abderrahman goes further to say that these attempts are actually devoid of the spirit of modernity (rūḥ al-ḥadāthā — one of the titles of his books), for they are an exercise in imitation, rather than any creative, critical engagement with modernity as Abderrahman is calling for.*
In fact, as Abderrahman points out, many modernists who are staunch in their criticism of traditionalists’ dependency upon the ancients, are oblivious to their own following of (other) moderns.* For example, he points to “the fanatical adherence” in some parts of the Arab world to Cartesian rationalism following Taha Hussein’s (d. 1973) efforts which were “mesmerized by the charm of French culture.” This fanatical adherence does not pay attention to the critiques of Cartesian rationality that has caused other philosophers to go beyond this theory and school of thought.* As Abderrahman points out, being aware of these debates and disagreements and reinvestigating philosophical claims is extremely urgent, as those who accept religious ethics and those who deny them, often do not agree upon the same meaning of rationality.*
Sometimes, individuals and schools that promote ‘studying traditionally’ seem to be stuck in a preservation/replication mode. First, I should say that I recognize immense value to preservation and replication in order to have a foundation and a basis for engagement, rather than being completely wishy-washy and flimsy. The great professor of literature at Columbia University during the mid-twentieth century, Mark Van Doren, insightfully critiqued those who would completely jettison tradition, not realizing the value of memory as things shift dramatically:
The absolutists of the new are unaware that the present as they see it is “but an ambiguous sentence,” says Jacques Barzun, “out of its context.” The problem is one of reading — an art which they despise. The past, which they mistakenly identify as the sole concern of liberal education, puts them on the defensive. They think of it, in John Dewey’s words, as “a rival of the present,” and accuse the intellectual of wishing to make the present “an imitation of the past.” The problem is immensely more complicated than that. The educated person recognizes no dry stretch between now and then. They are one river, and the more he knows about its length the better. He wants to know where things came from that neither he nor any contemporary invented.
But once there is a foundation, and an awareness of the origins and paths that the rivers upon which we now sail came from, we must keep the conversation with tradition flowing. Thus, Abdal Hakim Murad insightfully contends that “Traditional Islam is not the replication of the positions of the ancients; it is to seek what they sought.”
Similarly, Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, shares how one of his principal teachers would say, “qif haythu waqafu, thumma sirr”, that is, “stop where they stopped and then proceed on.” At a retreat in Allentown, PA, about a month ago, Dr. Umar explained this to mean having an appreciation for the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of our predecessors, while recognizing that it is your responsibility to carry it forward. In other words, we must know the particulars of the questions of our time and place, and be able to draw from the collective legacy at our disposal and work out answers that are ours, that are appropriate for our time and place.
In his seminal article, “Islam and the Cultural Imperative”, Dr. Umar quotes extensively from Imam al-Qarārfī (d. 684 AH/1285 CE) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751 AH/1350 CE) about the would-be jurist who basically ‘cuts and pastes’ what is in the ‘old dusty yellow pages’, without any attention to the demands and particulars of the questioner. According to these classical scholars, such a person does not even have a whiff of true (and deep) understanding — the literal meaning of fiqh. Dr. Umar quotes al-Qarāfī as saying:
Persons handing down legal judgments while adhering blindly to the texts in their books without regard for the cultural realities of their people are in gross error. They act in contradiction to established legal consensus and are guilty of iniquity and disobedience before God, having no excuse despite their ignorance; for they have taken upon themselves the art of issuing legal rulings without being worthy of that practice…. Their blind adherence to what is written down in the legal compendia is misguidance in the religion of Islam and utter ignorance of the ultimate objectives behind the rulings of the earlier scholars and great personages of the past whom they claim to be imitating.
And in the words of Ibn al-Qayyim:
This is pure understanding of the law. Whoever issues legal rulings to the people merely on the basis of what is transmitted in the compendia despite differences in their customs, usages, times, places, conditions, and the special circumstances of their situations has gone astray and leads others astray. His crime against the religion is greater than the crime of a physician who gives people medical prescriptions without regard to the differences of their climes, norms, the times they live in, and their physical natures but merely in accord with what he finds written down in some medical book about people with similar anatomies. He is an ignorant physician, but the other is an ignorant jurisconsult but much more detrimental.
In other words, it is not just a matter of ‘going back into the past and engaging in a ‘cut and paste’ or mere literal translation of what was written before. What we prioritize in our specific circumstances is subject to change. This is not to say that there aren’t things which are so essential to the human experience that remain constant. There are indeed.
But as Dr. Jackson writes, “By separating essentials from coincidentals, the early carriers of Islam were able to accommodate the ‘harmless customs and prejudices’ of the various non-Muslim peoples.” Delineating those essentials from the “coincidentals” or circumstantials, is a crucial part of the task at hand.
Ebadur Rahman is a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He has previous degrees from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and is a graduate of the pilot seminary program of Zaytuna College.
