The fundamentals of Muslim culture are derived from the religious experiences of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and his interpretations of this in theory as well as in practice. The Weltanschauung of the Muslims has been determined by the Quranic revelation. The theologians, politicians, jurists, philosophers and mystics, through all the centuries of Muslim history, have claimed to base their arguments and conclusions on the teachings of the Holy Quran. Even during the periods of the greatest intellectual activity, under the powerful impact of pre-Islamic cultures, the Muslim mind never doubted the essentials of the Quranic outlook.
Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, described three stages of intellectual development through which humanity has passed: theological, metaphysical, and scientific. The distinguishing characteristic of Islam which was the source and the driving force of its cultural development was a creative synthesis of these three stages. Islam is theological, metaphysical and scientific at the same time. Based on revelation, Islam, in essence, might be considered to be theological, but its theology has a core of metaphysics, and its theistic outlook is an ally of the scientific outlook.
The fundamental belief, which according to Islam is the basis of all true religions, is the unity of the ultimate reality. This ultimate reality called Allah is infinite, volitional, and rational. It is personal as well as impersonal, transcendent as well as immanent. It is supreme consciousness or knowledge whose chief attributes are power, reason, and love. According to the Holy Quran, everything comes into being through the creative will of God, Who, “notwithstanding infinite stores of potential power, creates and regulates things and events with a definite measure.” “His love covers everything.” He is the sustainer and cherisher of the worlds; all the worlds are unified in Him. Hence, we live in a universe and not a multiverse. God, in His essence, being spirit, nature as well as life, has a spiritual basis and a purpose.
God is the source as well as the goal of all existence and the purpose of life is the realisation in thought, as well as in practice, of this spiritual basis. This ultimate reality is not devoid of intrinsic values; all creation and evolution are the progressive realisation of these values. In the infinity of existence nothing happens by chance. Man’s own ideal nature is a manifestation of this reality; therefore, loyalty to God is loyalty to one’s own ideal nature. God is the principle of change as well as of permanence. The ultimate spiritual basis of life is eternal, though, in the words of the Holy Quran, “every moment God’s glory has a new effulgence.” Life changes perpetually according to principles that are eternal.
Western thinkers have acknowledged the intellectual unity of all aspects of Muslim culture. Muslim law, ethics, economics, politics, sociology and attitudes towards nature and humanity all are derived from the metaphysical background of a primeval unity. The pre-Islamic world had sundered what God had joined. The chief service of Islam was a re-integration of life in all its aspects. The very first line of the Holy Quran described God as ‘God of the worlds’; the world of matter is not separated from the world of the spirit by unintelligible or impassable barriers. The material world, too, is holy ground.
As the Prophet (pbuh) said, “The material world is a mosque.” Knowledge as well as virtue is an avenue of approach from creation to the Creator. Religion does not consist in belief, in dogmas or mysteries. As knowledge grows, more and more reverence develops along with it. The essentially religious people, according to the Holy Quran, are those who reflect on the workings of nature. Those who want supernatural proofs are directed by the Holy Quran to the obvious, to which they have become blind.
There is nothing like mechanistic, purposeless, blind and dead matter in Muslim thought. “Every creature and every aspect of nature is engaged in communion with the Creator, glorifying Him in a tongue which you do not understand.” Islam, therefore, repudiates every type of materialism, by spiritualising matter itself and making it akin to the spirit.
Pre-Islamic philosophies as well as religions had bifurcated existence and sundered the ideal from the actual. Spirit had made abortive attempts to free itself from body and from matter and in this vain attempt had stultified itself. In the attempt to exalt the spirit, matter with its laws and beauties was despised. This led to asceticism in the East as well as in the West. The demands of the body became a temptation and a risk. Nietzsche classified religions in two ways: those that say ‘yes’ to life, and those that say ‘no’ to life.
The revolution that Islam accomplished and the outlets for human energies that it created were due chiefly to this re-evaluation: the ascetic ideal was spurned as a life-negating outlook. Islam is accused by its critics as presenting fascinating pictures of a physical paradise, with beautiful men and women living in a beautiful environment enveloped in peace and beauty, but this overlooks that thereby Islam proclaimed the sanctity of the senses and envisaged the development of the spirit as manifesting itself also in the physical aspects of existence – value which are derided by pseudo-idealism and hypocritical spirituality.
In the present-day world all practical idealists and believers are engaged in the materialisation of this dream and the creation of conditions of freedom and social justice in order to create this very paradise on earth, where human relations and human environment can assimilate truth, beauty, and goodness. The goal of all human endeavours is the final identification of virtue and happiness. The way is not the suppression, but the realisation and sanctification of all those creative instincts with which life has equipped itself.
The result of this teaching was that the Muslim considered all nature including his or her body as divine, and it was not derogatory to human dignity to crave for physical beauty and physical well-being, provided it did not violate the laws of physical nature or the laws of social justice. Nature, which was despised by ascetic religions, is mentioned in the Holy Quran as replete with the ‘signs of the Lord’ and points to the ineffable unity of reason and love, the creative urge from which all creation emerges.
Islam turned the attention of humanity to the phenomena of nature. Instinct as well as reason is a revelation of the original life force. (The word ‘vahi’ is used in the Holy Quran for the prophetic revelation as well as the instincts of animals, whereby they pursue unerringly and, for our present knowledge sometimes miraculously, the purposes of their lives.) The Holy Quran was the first scripture which proclaimed the identity of revelation, reason and nature, and proclaimed that the contemplation of nature within and nature without is the highest act of worship.
The student of history is astounded by the sudden and marvellous metamorphosis of an illiterate people into the greatest seekers of knowledge and the assimilators of all values in human culture wherever they may have originated. This took a breadth of mind which could not have been expected from a society supposed to have a rigid theocratic basis. (Dean Inge, in his outspoken essays, has paid a tribute to the creative and assimilative periods of Islamic culture by saying that the Muslims sought knowledge from everywhere without any prejudice. They proved to be remarkable assimilators of foreign culture, which has not been the case in any society with a theocratic background.)
Islam uses the same word, ‘haq’, for God as well as for truth. In Islam the search for truth was identified with the search for God. It was the spirit of its teachings that released human energies in all directions. The Prophet (pbuh) said, “Knowledge is the lost property of every Muslim; he is entitled to get hold of it wherever he finds it.” “Seek knowledge even if you have to travel to China.” People who read these verses every day and imbibed their spirit have taught the methods of accurate observation and made the beginnings in experimental science.
It was the repeated emphasis in the Holy Quran on the study of nature in order to discover in it uniformities and adaptations that resulted in the development of a rational outlook. The history of Islam is free from the wars of religious bigotry and persecution except in a few scattered and individual cases where religion was exploited for the purposes of political power.
Similarly, in the history of Muslim culture there never has been a conflict between religion and science – unlike the history of the West which offers many examples of intellectual persecution and even martyrdom in the cause of science. The entire body of Greek scientific thought was rescued by the Arabs, and Muslim kings demanded scientific books as tribute in preference to gold. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus were revered as philosophical monotheists. Great philosophers and scientists like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) were devout Muslims and freethinkers at the same time.
Free and liberal thought was assimilated even by the mystics. It is a peculiar feature of Muslim culture that great Muslim mystics like Rumi, who are at the same time freethinkers and rationalists, tried to define the boundaries between intuition or religious experience and logical thinking, and to create a liaison between them. None of these great men ever suspected that either religious experience or the free exercise of rational activity ran counter to the spirit of Islam.
The spiritual odyssey of a person such as al-Ghazali is one of the most interesting biographies of a great soul. He plunged from dogmatic theology into rationalism and from rationalism into scepticism – from which finally he was rescued by religious experience. This, according to him, created a direct and intimate contact with higher realities through a more exalted state of consciousness which comprehends wider dimensions of being. This insight which not only solves some of the riddles of perceptual and logical knowledge, but opens up vistas of new values which do not destroy, but fulfil the values of the lower grades of existence.
Excerpted from ‘Philosophy in Pakistan’. Courtesy CRVP
