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Faith
and Reason in Islam -Islamic Ideology 13 Jul 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com Faith and Reason in Islam By
Asma Afsaruddin Common Ground News Service Notre Dame, Indiana - In the wake of Pope Benedict
XVI's Regensburg address, it is useful to recapitulate the views of a tenth
century Muslim historian by the name of al-Mas'udi (d. 956) on the relationship
between faith and reason, which are particularly pertinent today. In a famous historical work, al-Mas'udi maintained
that the Byzantine Christians of his time had gone into a civilisational
decline because they had rejected the pagan Greek sciences as basically
incompatible with Christianity, whereas Muslim civilisation was prospering
because it had successfully assimilated the learning of the ancients and continued
to build on it. In other words, it was the Muslims who had successfully blended
faith with reason and had thus left the Christians behind. As such, it is
highly ironic that Pope Benedict would use the words of a fourteenth century
Byzantine emperor to redirect the same accusation at Muslims in the
twenty-first century. In al-Mas'udi's day, the great translation movement
which had started in Baghdad in the ninth century was bearing rich fruit,
making Greek philosophical texts accessible to Arabic-speaking Muslims and
effecting a genuine intellectual revolution in the Islamic world. In this
period, Muslims displayed a remarkable receptivity towards knowledge and
learning, regardless of its source. Persian works of literature and philosophy
and Indian treatises on mathematics were also translated and studied alongside
Greek works. Some of the best-known philosophers of the medieval period –
Avicenna, Averroes, al-Farabi – were Muslims, and their thought was influential
in medieval Europe as well. Without this intellectual and cultural legacy that
was transmitted to Europe from the Islamic world, there may well have been no
European Renaissance! Pope Benedict's statements, therefore, unfortunately
point to a basic lack of knowledge about this organic continuity between the
learning of the pre-modern Islamic world and that of the post-Renaissance West.
He is not alone in this. Many otherwise highly-educated Westerners (and Muslims
as well) are often quite ignorant of these historical connections. There are
rejectionist Muslims today who would deny that Islamic thought and learning has
in any way been influenced by non-Islamic sources. They too need to acquire a
more accurate knowledge of the historical inter-connectedness between the West
and the Muslim world. This is why so many find the "clash of
civilisations" thesis credible today. There is a danger, however, when anyone argues that
their own religion and civilisation had/has a monopoly on reason and had/has
effected the best synthesis between faith and reason. Such triumphalism is a
serious impediment to dialogue and for any kind of sustained civil discourse.
If dialogue is what the Pope is after, setting up a reified Islam as a straw
man in order to posit the superiority of Western civilisation and its
supposedly unique values is a non-starter. Dialogue is better-served through
the humble acknowledgment of commonalities, of one's own sins and of one's
connectedness to the other. To set the record straight on a number of points
raised by the pontiff in relation to Islam, it is important to point out that
Muslims through time have subscribed to a spectrum of views on the dialectical
relationship between faith and reason. Two main trends remain influential
within Sunni Muslim thought today. One is represented by the Ash'ari school of
thought and is fideistic so that faith or revelation always trumps reason. The
other is represented by the Maturidi school of thought which holds that reason
independently of revelation can arrive at the same truths. Both schools of
thought are considered equally "orthodox" within Sunni Islam, with
Maturidi thought gaining ground. The Mu'tazila (known as the Rationalists) in
an earlier period claimed that there was no incompatibility between faith and
reason and the Shi'a have also historically emphasised the rational basis of
their school of thought. One cannot, therefore, simplistically and reductively
portray Islam as preferring one over the other i.e faith over reason or vice
versa, nor can one portray Christianity, or perhaps any other faith tradition,
in this manner either. The key to getting along with one another is,
therefore, to learn the truth about one another and avoid trading in pernicious
stereotypes. In fact, Professor Richard Bulliet of Columbia University has recently
coined the term "Islamo-Christian civilisation" to describe our
shared heritage. This is a term and concept that deserves to gain broader
currency. To address the deteriorating world situation today
and the problem of ostensibly religious extremism, we have to make the
eradication of global poverty and promotion of the dignity of ordinary human
beings a top priority. We have to reinsert moral and ethical values in the
public sphere and in international diplomacy, and hold our leaders accountable to
such values. This would be the best way to undermine extremist platforms which
feed off the grievances of the poor and the powerless. It is on such common
ground, constructed on universal ethical principles, that diverse groups of
people, faith-based and secular, can come together. October 17, 2006 http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2874 Asma
Afsaruddin is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the
University of Notre Dame and author of the forthcoming The First Muslims:
History and Memory (Oxford: OneWorld, 2007). Note: Articles listed under "Middle East
studies in the News" provide information on current developments
concerning Middle East studies on North American campuses. These reports do not
necessarily reflect the views of Campus Watch and do not necessarily correspond
to Campus Watch's critique. http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=2983 Posted by SultanShahin at 2:05 AM http://rethinkingislam-sultanshahin.blogspot.com/2009/07/faith-and-reason-in-islam.html |
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