Introduction

Today, the students and researchers of Muslim philosophical and scientific knowledge ask: Whereas Muslims transmitted knowledge to the Europeans, what went wrong with their own civilization’s philosophical knowledge and scientific culture that today Muslims have lagged behind the Western civilization? What went wrong that the Muslims abandoned rationalism and put an end to ibn Rushd’s threefold system of “truth”—rhetorical (religious); dialectical; and philosophical (empirical)? There is no single reason for the decline of Islam’s early inventive cultures of scientific and philosophical eminence that for centuries led the world in many areas. It is tragic, both in a historical and a human sense, but many factors contributed to the stagnation of rationalism in Islam. Rationalism of the Mu’tazilites—a rationalist school of Islamic theology that flourished in the cities of Basra and Baghdad—who believed that the arbiter of whatever is revealed has to be theoretical reason, was challenged by the Ash’arites—the foremost theological school of Sunni Islam which established an orthodox dogmatic guideline based on clerical authority founded by the Arab theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari who had laid the foundation of an orthodox Islamic theology. By some, it is also attributed to al-Ghazali (1058-1111), whose arbitral book, The Incoherence of the Philosophy, professed that causality was an illusion and rational philosophy futile. Ibn Rushd of Cordova, on the other hand, in his work The Incoherence of the Incoherence, rejoined that God created a logical universe of cause and effect, and argued, that he who repudiates causality, actually repudiates reason. Al-Ghazali, though, had denounced speculative philosophy believing that philosophical skepticism puts limits on divinity, he did not reject scientific investigations. 

The biggest blow to Islamic rationalism was the fall of the Arab dynasties at Baghdad in the Middle East and Cordova in Arab Spain. In 1493, the Christians conquered Spain, ending eight centuries of Muslim rule. They massacred Muslims and Jews, and expelled many of them from Spain, but retained their philosophical and scientific works. In Baghdad, the crushing impact on the Muslim heartland by successive waves of invasions, led by the Savage Mongols, who threw millions of books in the Euphrates River and burned many libraries in Baghdad to ashes, followed by the Turkic Seljuks, the European Crusaders, the Ayyubid Kurds, the Tamerlane Mughals, and finally the Ottomans, who were promotors of mystical philosophies, gradually destroyed the centers of rational philosophical and scientific knowledge.

Abandonment of Rationalism and Philosophical Knowledge

When the books and libraries of a nation or a society are destroyed, there creates a vacuum of knowledge and cultural emptiness, which results in building new societies by the new rulers. One of the most important reason for the loss of wealth of knowledge was that the Arab rulers who loved philosophical knowledge did not establish institutions like the House of Wisdom at Baghdad in other parts of their empire. They should have set up universities and colleges all over the world of Islam. After the Abbasids, later caliphs, sultans, and monarchs who could have patronized and supported centers of learning, were focused on consolidating their positions and fighting battles. Peoples in all walks of life, fearful of the turmoil of the foreigner’s attacks and oppression of the new rulers, looked for solace in religious literacies, specifically in spirituality instead of philosophical argumentation. Muslim lands were now flooded with Sufi saints who were revered for their miracles and teachings of love and peace. Thus, mysticism, known as Sufism, became an inclination and a sigh of relief for the Muslim masses. 

Sufism provided a new and peaceful ideology to the caliphs and monarchs. Newly-converted to Islam, the Mongols, the Mughal rulers, followed by the Ottoman Turks, who instead of patronizing scholars of philosophical learning, began to patronize Sufi saints. The chapter of ibn-Rushd’s philosophical thought was closed and that of al-Ghazali’s mystical outlook was encouraged. Islamic history of knowledge has throughout been dependent on the rulers who would prefer to patronize the genre of knowledge which would cater their needs in consolidating a hold on a variety of people, traditions, customs, and cultures. Followers of Sufism would prove peace-loving and submissive subjects, who instead of asking for their rights from their rulers, started seeking the blessings of saints. Since reason could challenge the rulers, belief in collective piety, hope, and confidence in God’s grace triumphed over the earlier concept of Classical Islam: “submission to God is submission to reason.” Thus, a wave of individualistic quest for God engulfed the seekers of love and peace, and masses of Muslims started seeking solace in prayers and in music as sama in the Sufic-inspired services.  

With the rise of Central Asian Turkic rulers, Arabic language which proved to be the best medium for philosophical cognition, was replaced by the Persian language with the result that most philosophical works onward started appearing in Persian. Significant philosophical trends after ibn Sina were attempts to reconstruct holistic systems, that help refine, rather than challenge and refute philosophical propositions and religious questions. A new trend in philosophy, the “Philosophy of Illumination” of Shihab al-Din Suhrawardy (1153-1191)—second only to ibn Sina—revived with the rise of Sufism. This system defined a new method, the “Science of Lights,” which maintains that human beings obtain the principles of science immediately via “knowledge of presence.” Almost half a century after the execution of Suhrawardy, philosophy of Illumination was viewed as a more complete system. Its aim was to expand the structure of Aristotelian philosophy to include carefully selected religious topics, defending the harmony between philosophy and religion. This gave rise to Mulla Sadra’s (1572-1641) theory of the unity or sameness of the knower and the known. Sadra’s view of theo-philosophy continues to influence Muslim philosophical knowledge even today.

Why Muslims Failed to Bring About an Islamic Renaissance

Social paradigms, cultures, and geo-political circumstances play a very important part in the formation of a literary, socio-political, or even a religious social order. We know that the ethos of pre-Islamic Arabian literary, cultural, and traditional etymology inherited by the people who embraced Islam were devoid of philosophical cognition and rational intellectualism. But the Arabs living mostly in the Arabian desert as roaming nomads. They remained engaged in fighting with each other in groups and tribes which made them warriors. Though they were intelligent people who very soon adopted the new religion of Islam—a discipline intertwined with reason and spirituality. The way of Islam revealed in the Qur’an as deen-e-Islam or the “way of Islam,” according to its believer is neither dogma nor an illusion. The Qur’an does not speak of Islam as the “religion of Islam,” rather it is referred to throughout as deen. It is different from those disciplines interpreted as religions and are viewed as dogma. If Islam were a dogma, many Arab believers and scholars would never have touched the rationalistic philosophy and free thinking of the pagan Greeks. 

After the first four “Rightly Guided Caliphs,” when the first Umayyad caliph Mu’awiya established his rule in the seventh century, a period of intellectual activity began. In order to overturn the tradition of election of a caliph which could have been a Socratic way, Mu’awiya, tempted by Plato’s famous pronouncement, “Until philosophers are kings, or kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy,” took Neoplatonism as a viable rationale to establish a dynasty of hereditary caliphate. For the power monger Mu’awiya who was entrusted the role of scribe by the Prophet to take down the revealed Qur’anic verses during the life time of the Prophet, the philosophy of Plato proved a big blessing. However, Mu’awiya did not patronize Jewish, Christian, and Syriac thinkers and philosophers who were scholars of Greek philosophy, but did give them protection. 

When the Abbasids, who were also Arabs, defeated the Umayyads with the help of the Persians, the influence of Persian language and culture started posing a big challenge to the Arabic language. In order to meet the Persian infiltration with a superior intellectual weapon, Caliph al-Ma’mun founded the House of Wisdom known as Dar-al-Hikmah to translate Greek philosophy and sciences into Arabic. Thus, a golden era of Muslim intellectualism began, which also curbed the Persian renaissance of the tenth and eleventh centuries and brought revolutionary changes in Muslim thought and scientific achievements. In short, patronage of the Hellenistic philosophy was not the intrinsic passion of the Arab rulers, but rather it was a kind of political weapon—used at times to intimidate the theologians or Fuqaha, and at another time to subjugate political rebels or curb foreign cultural influences. Thus, great Muslim thinkers from al-Kindi to ibn Sina, as well as many scientists, got seriously involved in the pursuit of scientific exploration and rational thinking. Unfortunately, first the Crusades and then the Mongol onslaught brought the fall of the Arab Abbasids of Baghdad, and the spectrum of power slipped out of the hands of the Arabs, which also marked the demise of rational and free thinking. The decline of knowledge in the Muslim world dates roughly from the beginning of the twelfth century—at the end of the Crusades—and an irreversible decadence when Baghdad was burned to ashes. 

When the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the world of Christendom, after having lost the third and final Crusade, proclaimed with great merriment the death of Islam for good. But the rise of the Ottomans and the Turkic-Mongol race known as the Mughals revived the power of Islam. Since both the Ottomans and the Mughals as patrons of mystical Islam, were, though, mostly secular rulers, they banned the Arab thinker ibn Rushd’s rational and scientific discourses of theoretical openness, intellectual intuitiveness, and political freedom. The Ottomans and Mughals believed that rationalism and the separation of politics and religion would weaken their monarchic and authoritarian rule. They promoted the notion that Islam as a religion and its history is the crucial rationale of Islamic discipline and that the truth of its doctrine lies in spirituality. Thus, there was neither a sociopolitical inclination, nor a cultural requirement for the philosophical appreciation, question of an Islamic renaissance never arose.

Today, despite the rising trend of scientific knowledge in the Muslim world, Muslims still construct their polity on the original Islamic rules of community. But an inclination to modernity also exists. Oliver Leaman on page 150 of A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy, argues:

During the “Nahda” or the “Arab Renaissance” movement of the nineteenth century, the challenge to Islamic thought was clear. How can the Muslims develop a view of society which incorporates the principles of modernity, yet at the same time remain Islamic?… [According to the modernists], “Islamic Renaissance” should follow the Western Renaissance, and put religion in its place; only in this way can the Islamic world participate in the material and political successes of the West.

Though modern time has seen radical change in the traditional scheme of education, but the world of Islam has failed to produce successful “Renaissance men” like Leonardo da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Francis Bacon, and many others. Painting, making sculptures and depicting many forms of fine art work has remained forbidden in Islamic discipline, which according to Leonardo is an important medium to express knowledge of the world acquired by simply looking at it; the secret being “to know how to see.” Pico living in Florence published a remarkable work as On the Dignity of Man, portraying man as the spiritual center of the universe or perhaps man is one focus and God the other. Such views were offensive for the Muslims who believed in an Omnipotent, Transcendent One God. Bacon’s famous boast, “I take all knowledge for my province,” is for the Muslims to challenge the All-knowing God they believe and remember daily in their prayers.

Question of Enlightenment in Islamic World?

While the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals lost their glories, the European nations went from strength to strength, acquiring more and more territories and trade centers, and succeeded in defeating the Muslims on land and sea. Today, Muslims are divided into nations, lacking an understanding of the Western challenges and its imperialistic threats. Instead of looking back to their past glory, they need to comprehend that the past cannot be revived. Unfortunately, there still exists in all Muslim societies an “Islamist-Utopia” thinking, which stands as an impediment to scientific and political modernity. It is time to move forward. New IT technology and modern scientific exploration can help them catch up quickly the time they have lost. 

Muslims need to understand that during their Golden Era, the religion of Islam was never an obstacle in their pursuit of philosophical and scientific exploration sponsored by rational thinking, which should not be an obstacle now. Today, the pace of technology is so fast, its impact so deep, that our lives will be irreversibly transformed. The coming era will neither be utopian nor dystopian; it will drastically transform the concept of human beings relying on the conviction to give meaning to their lives. Today, a global IT revolution of “Scientific Enlightenment” is knocking at the door of the whole of mankind, an enlightenment where human intelligence will give way to the artificial intelligence of supercomputers. Time is gone for a seventeenth-century type of Renaissance. In the present era of history of knowledge, the grand role of philosophy as the supreme form of intellectual life, the queen of knowledge and the guide of religious and worldly life, has been demoted to that of handmaiden of science. Today it is “Science as the mother of all knowledge.” The modern period is day by day projecting the increasing authority of science over other cultures, religions, and social fields. Science as a technique has presented in practice a different outlook from the one found in theoretical philosophy and the dogmatic approach of religions. Religion and philosophy now only serve to legitimize models of progress that are wholly ideological. In science many answers enjoy a general consensus because people agree on the assumptions of questions and the application of concepts within that discipline.

The Rise of European Power

In the seventeenth century, when European nations began to colonize the continents of America and Australia, they acquired immense wealth from overseas. This enabled them to undertake colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Muslim world. European imperialism in the Middle East, India under Muslim-rule, and Southeast Asia, was a final blow to the quest of knowledge in the world of Islam. Colonialism drowned the Muslim world in economic recession and divided it into many nation-states with arbitrary borders. Muslim nations were spending money on battles—some on disputes with each other and some fighting for their freedom from their European masters—rather than on scientific and educational projects. In the twenty-first century, almost all Muslim nations are part of the developing world with many problems such as poverty, economic stagnation, educational regression, and above all, political instability. 

Throughout the history of Muslim philosophy, Muslim scholars have been arguing and writing mostly for intellectuals and other philosophers. But in the Western world it was understood that there is a need for philosophy to be read, understood, and practiced alike by the intellectuals and non-intellectuals. Many complex arguments and multiple contradictions need to be addressed to achieve a simple and clear intellectual vision for the common man and his world. The world is moving rapidly ahead, while Muslims, still basking in their past glories, are struggling to revive their lost golden period of philosophical and scientific eminence. Therefore, the struggle today between Muslim fundamentalists and liberals continues to dominate the global intellectual and political scene. Since people are now instantly connected by a network of information and knowledge exchange, humans are impelled to think and act globally in a world where philosophy is no longer viewed as the “queen of knowledge.” The western world understands that philosophy is now understood through science, phenomenology, and linguistic analysis. Scientific education and research, and the growth of intellectual consortiums have generated a new scientific form of global interpretation. This should be seen as an act of progressive transformation of philosophy, actualized by the scientific revolution in the West where philosophy has now attained a place in the scientific arenas. The world of Islam today is far behind the West in scientific knowledge.

The modern age is, day by day, increasing the authority of science over cultural, religious, and social fields that fall under the jurisdiction of philosophy. In the West, science and technology have succeeded on account of their practical utility, becoming more and more a series of easy techniques and less and less a complicated system by presenting a more practicable outlook than the one found in theoretical philosophy. Cutting-edge neuroscience research and the boundless frontiers of computer science have enabled transfer of knowledge and power from intellectual minds to average students. Neurobiology is amazingly drawing philosophy closer to science. Because it is easy to agree on the application of philosophical concepts within the scientific system, consequently, many unanswered questions of philosophy have been answered by science enjoying a general consensus. Therefore, today, instead of looking back to philosophical analysis and rational enquiries, as initiated by al-Kindi and many other Muslim philosophers of the ninth century, Muslims need to understand philosophy through science. 

Copyright © 2020 Mirza Iqbal Ashraf