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Kalam and Islam Pt 4 Part 4 of Kalam and Islam
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As for the role of kalam in defending Islam from heresies, Jahm and the Mu‘tazilites are certainly less of threat to orthodoxy today than scientism, the reduction of all truth to statements about quantities and empirical facts. The real challenge to religion today is the mythic power of science to theologize its experimental method, and imply that since it has not discovered God, He must not exist.
Here, the task of critique cannot be relegated to traditional proofs drawn from the literature of a prescientific age. Rather, it belongs to scientifically literate Muslims today to clarify the provisional nature of the logic of science, and to show how its epistemology, values, and historical and cultural moment condition the very nature of questions it can ask—or answer.
Omniscience is not a property of science. In physics today, at the outset of the twenty-first century, we do not yet understand what gives physical matter its mass, its most basic property. In taxonomy, estimates vary, but probably less than 3 percent of the living organisms on our own planet have been named or identified. In human fertility, many fundamental mechanisms remain undiscovered. Even our most familiar companion, human consciousness, has not been scientifically explained, replicated, or reduced to physical laws. In short, though we do not base our faith on the current state of science, we should realize that if science has not discovered God, there is a long list of other things it has not discovered that we would be ill-advised to consider nonexistent in consequence.
In short, attacks today on religion by scientism should be met by Muslims as Ash‘ari and Maturidi met the Mu‘tazilites and Jahmites in their times: with a dialectic critique of the premises and conclusions thoroughly grounded in their own terms. The names that come to mind in our day are not Ash‘ari, Baqillani, and Razi, but rather those like Huston Smith in his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, Charles Le Gai Eaton in his King of the Castle, Keith Ward in his God, Chance, and Necessity, and even non-religious writers like Paul Davies in The Mind of God and John Horgan in his The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind. Answering reductionist attacks on religion is a communal obligation, which Muslims can only ignore at their peril. This too is of the legacy of kalam, or the “aptness of words to answer words.”
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A final benefit of kalam is to realize from its history that there is some range and latitude in the beliefs of one’s fellow Muslims. In an Islamic world growing ever younger with the burgeoning population, there is a danger that those quoting Qur’anic verses and hadiths without a grasp of the historical issues will stir up the hearts of young Muslims against each other in sectarian strife. People like to belong to groups, and the positive benefits of bonding with others in a group may be offset by bad attitudes towards those outside the group. The Wahhabi movement for example, recast in our times as Salafism, began as a Kharijite-like sect that regarded nonmembers, including most of the Umma, as kafirs or unbelievers. Here, a working knowledge of the history and variety of schools of Islamic theology would do much to promote tolerance.
The figures we have cited, from Ash‘ari to Razi to Dhahabi to Ibn Taymiya, were men who passionately believed that there was a truth to be known, and that it represented the beliefs of Islam, and that it was but one. They believed that those who disagreed with it were wrong and should be engaged and rebutted. But they did not consider anyone who called himself a Muslim to be a kafir as long as his positions did not flatly deny the truthfulness of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). Imam Ghazali says in Faysal al-tafriqa:
“Unbelief” (kufr) consists in asserting that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) lied about anything he conveyed, while “faith” is believing that he told the truth in everything he said (Faysal al-tafriqa (c00), 78).
There is wide scholarly consensus on this tolerance of Islam, and we have heard from Imam Ash‘ari that he did not consider anyone who prayed towards the qibla to be an unbeliever, from Razi that he did not consider anyone to be an unbeliever whose words could possibly mean anything besides, and from Ibn Taymiya that he considered everyone who faithfully prays with ablution to be a believer. None of them believed that a Muslim can go to hell on a technicality.
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To summarize everything we have said, the three main tasks of kalam consist in defining the contents of faith, showing that it contradicts neither logic nor experience, and providing grounds to be personally convinced of it, and these three are as relevant today as ever.
First, the substantive knowledge of the ‘aqida each of us will die and meet Allah upon will remain a lasting benefit as long as there are Muslims.
Second, demographers expect mankind to attain close to universal literacy within fifty years. Members of world faiths may be expected to question their religious beliefs for coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy, and the work of Ahl al-Sunna scholars will go far to show that one does not have to hang up one’s mind to enter Islam.
Third, universal communication will make comparisons between religions inevitable. Blind imitation of ethnic religious affiliation will become less relevant to people around the globe, and I personally believe Islam has stronger theological arguments for its truth than other world religions. Indeed, Islam is a sapiential religion, in which salvation itself rests not on vicarious atonement as in Christianity, or on ethnic origin as in Judaism, but on personal knowledge. Whoever knows that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God is by that very fact saved.
So in the coming century, three areas of kalam’s legacy will remain especially relevant for Muslims: first, the proofs for the existence of God from necessity and design, second, the rebuttal of the heresy of scientistic reductionism and atheism, and third, promoting tolerance among Muslims. The latter is one of the most important lessons that the history of kalam can teach; that if Muslims cannot expect to agree on everything in matters of faith, they can at least agree on the broad essentials, and not to let their differences descend from their heads to their hearts.
MMV © N. Keller
(The above is the text of a talk given to the Aal al-Bayt Institute of Islamic Thought on 4 January 2005 in Amman, Jordan.)
NOTES
[1] Dhahabi goes on: “This is my own religious view. So too, our sheikh Ibn Taymiya used to say in his last days, ‘I do not consider anyone of this Umma an unbeliever,’ and he would relate that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, ‘No one but a believer faithfully performs ablution’ [Ahmad ((c00), 5.82: 22433. S], saying, ‘So whoever regularly attends prayers with ablution is a Muslim’” (Siyar al-a‘lam (c00), 15.88).
[2] Ibn Sina, the “Sovereign Sage” referred to by latter-day kalam authors here, had a number of heterodox beliefs. First, he believed that the world is beginninglessly eternal, while Muslims believe that Allah created it after it was nothing; second, he believed that Allah knows what is created and destroyed only in a general way, not in its details, while Muslims believe that Allah knows everything; and third, he held that there is no bodily resurrection, while Muslims emphatically affirm in it. Taj al-Subki’s above passage continues: “Is he [such a latter-day kalam author] not ashamed before Allah Most High to espouse the ideas of Ibn Sina and praise him—while reciting the word of Allah “Does man not think We shall gather together his bones? Indeed, We are well able to produce even his index finger” (Qur’an 75:7)—and mention in the same breath Ibn Sina’s denial of bodily resurrection and gathering of bones?” (Mu‘id al-ni‘am (c00), 80). Imam Ghazali, despite his magisterial breadth of perspective in ‘aqida issues, held it obligatory to consider Ibn Sina a non-Muslim (kafir) for these three doctrines (al-Munqidh min al-dalal (c00), 44–45, 50).
[3] The “Great Master” Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was the traitor who betrayed Baghdad and its whole populace to their Mongol slaughterers out of sectarian malice against the Sunni caliphate. In tenets of faith, he introduced philosophy into Shiism, reviving Ibn Sina’s thought in a Twelver Shiite matrix, and authored Tajrid al-‘aqa’id, the preeminent work of Shiite dogma to this day, in which he describes man as “the creator of his works” (Encyclopedia of Religion (c00), 6.324, 7.316, 13.265)—while the Qur’an tells us that “Allah created you and what you do” (Qur’an 37:96).
[4] The Associated Press on Thursday 9 December 2004 carried the story “Famous Atheist Now Believes in God,” in which religion writer Richard Ostling mentions that a British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has now changed his mind. “At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. ‘A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature,’ Flew said in a telephone interview from England.” He also recently said that biologists’ investigation of DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved” (U.S. National – AP Website, 9 December 2004).
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