Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 191 - The Young Ones Encounters with European Thought.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net, Today's episode, The Young Ones, Encounters with European Thought. At the beginning of our history of philosophy in the Islamic world, we saw an intellectual revolution, as Greek science was made available in Arabic in the 9th century. Three centuries later, Latin-speaking Christendom was transformed by the translation of works from Arabic. Now, as we reach the end of our journey through the Islamic world, history repeats itself yet again. From the Copernican revolution in astronomy to 19th century positivism, scientific and philosophical ideas flowed from Europe into the Islamic world. This was only to be expected in the Ottoman Empire, which was in direct contact with European civilization, but travelers from and to Europe also spread the new theories as far as the Mughal Empire in India. As with the original Greek-Arabic translation movement, some bemoaned the corrupting influence of the new foreign science. Others gladly embraced the European ideas, arguing that they offered a chance to revive Islam and strengthen Muslim political regimes against their enemies. Still others took a middle path, by proposing a more selective approach or by reinterpreting European philosophy so as to harmonize it with Islamic tradition. The process of negotiation unfolded in a fraught atmosphere, even an atmosphere of crisis, as territories long held by powerful Muslim states fell under the sway of colonial power. For intellectuals in the 18th and 19th centuries, the question of whether to adopt European ways of thinking was an urgent one. Could these ideas be used to reverse military setbacks, revive faltering empires, and renew the religion of Islam itself? Already in the 17th century, Qatad Chelebi, who we saw last time promoting a tolerant policy on coffee and tobacco, wondered if a scientific deficit could explain the fact that parts of the Ottoman Empire were going up in smoke at the hands of the Venetians. Yet there was also the option of returning to earlier traditions in the Islamic world. In this context, the Salafism of Ibn Taymiyya, which preached adherence to the teachings of the earliest Muslims, could suddenly seem more appealing than it had in previous centuries. It was duly taken up in the 18th century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose followers, the Wahhabis, would go on to create an independent state on the Arabian peninsula. But one didn't have to be a Wahhabi to think that there was a great deal of value in Islamic intellectual heritage. Two learned traditions in particular had been proving their resilience for centuries, Kalam and Sufism. Kalam, suffused with ideas from Avicenna, had survived the Mongols and been given new impetus at Shiraz. Standard works of logic and philosophical theology were studied by generation upon generation of students in Iran, India, and the Ottoman Empire. And, as we have seen, these works weren't just read and taught, they also provoked more commentary than an impetuous public kiss at an office party. It may be tempting to think that this scholarly tradition must have ground to a halt, or at least declined, as the Ottoman and Mughal empires expired, but we've learned to be wary of such temptations. The supposed death of philosophy in the east after Al Ghazali and the presumed intellectual decline after the Mongol invasions have both proved on closer examination to be largely figments of scholarly imagination. Much the same seems to be true here. Yet again, some historians have told a narrative of intellectual decline in the later Muslim empires. They have pointed to pessimistic observers like Khatib Chelebi himself, whom we saw lamenting the poor standards of the intellectuals in the 17th century. Of course, we need to bear in mind the universal human tendency to think that things aren't what they used to be. Just think of how parents always think their generation's pop music was better than the rubbish their kids listened to. On the other hand, sometimes things really do degenerate. The moms and dads of the 1950s were wrong to complain about Elvis, but their counterparts in the early 1990s were right to complain about Milli Vanilli. Plus, Khatib Chelebi was no fool. So let's suppose he was observing a real decline in scholarly sophistication. What might explain it? Just as Al Ghazali and the Mongols have been accused of causing earlier supposed retreats from philosophy, in this case the finger of blame would point squarely at the Qadizadelis. As we saw in the last episode, this puritanical religious group attacked both the Sufi orders and the scholars, or ulama, who concerned themselves with the rational sciences. Qadizadeli influence might explain a sudden withdrawal from those sciences in Ottoman society. It's a pretty plausible story at first glance. There is some evidence that the founder of the movement, Mehmed Qadizadeh, was hostile towards the rational sciences. Khatib Chelebi assigns to him the memorable quote, Who sheds a tear if a logician dies? But the Qadizadeli's posture with regard to the sciences was not unlike Al Ghazali's before them, an attitude of selectivity rather than outright opposition. We find them endorsing the study of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, and even approving of the vast array of philosophical ideas that had been domesticated within Islamic theology. In any case, whatever inroads they may have achieved against the sciences seem to have been short-lived. The heyday of the Qadizadelis was the mid-17th century. Not long after, around the turn of the 18th century, we find new madrasas opening in the cities of the Ottoman Empire. These schools would continue to train religious scholars and jurists in the rational sciences. Major change would come only in the 19th century with reforms inspired by European models of education. We find a similar picture among Muslims living in India. We saw in an earlier episode that the rather wonderfully named Faraghi Mahal family was responsible for carrying forward the rational sciences in 18th century India. In the 19th century, this tradition was still going strong, with a torch passing to another group in the city of Khairabad. Scholars of the Khairabadi school wrote on logic and philosophy throughout the 19th century. More than their predecessors, they tended to write independent works, focusing on specific problems in logic, rather than working their ideas into glosses and comments on earlier standard works. Still, they took inspiration from the many commentaries produced over the preceding centuries in India and Iran. They even cast their gaze as far back as Avicenna himself, engaging with him more than the Faraghi Mahalis had done. It's worth dwelling on that for a moment. Remember that Avicenna died in the middle of the 11th century, and here he is still being read carefully by the leading philosophers of India in the 19th century. Even Elvis may not prove to have such a long-lasting legacy. As for Milli Vanilli, they are already half forgotten. According to an informal poll I've conducted, most people guess that it's the name of an ice cream flavor. Of course, the Khairabadis were pursuing these activities under British colonial power in India a fact of some relevance for the school. One of their members, Fadl al-Haq al-Khairabadi, spent years serving the East India Company but was then involved in the 1857 uprising against the British. He was tried for treason because he supported a legal judgment approving of jihad against the British. Fadl al-Haq's punishment was deportation to a penal colony where he died in 1861. Yet even these traumatic events could not kill the Khairabadi's school. Fadl al-Haq al-Khairabadi's son, Abd al-Haq, enjoyed royal patronage and held posts in Tonk, Calcutta, and Rampur. His students would ensure the continuation of the school's activities into the early 20th century. In short, it would seem that such anti-scientific polemic as there was in both the Ottoman and Indian spheres did not derail the train of philosophical kalam. But the Qadiz ad-Dalis were training their sights on another target too, the Sufis. Were their attacks more successful in this case? And more generally, did philosophical Sufism survive into the modern age? For us, this is an important question given the long-standing links between Sufism and philosophy. Let's start to answer it not with the Ottoman Empire, but in India. We've already discussed the 17th century royal prince Dada Shikul and seen him drawing on Sufism to find harmony between the Islamic and Hindu religious traditions. A somewhat similar figure of the 18th century was Shah Wali Allah from the city of Delhi. Perhaps because he was living in a time of great political upheaval, Wali Allah was one of many Muslim thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries who sought to revive the religion of Islam itself. This idea of renewal was ironically a very old one. We see it, for example, in the title of one of Al Ghazali's major works, Revival of the Religious Sciences. Towards this end, Wali Allah composed The Conclusive Proof of God, a major work on the prophetic traditions known as hadith. In this and other works, he draws on the Sufi idea that the differences we see in things are representations of a higher unity. In particular, he works with the idea of a world of images, which we've seen in Ibn Arabi and in the Illuminationists. According to this theory, things in our world have archetypes, much like platonic forms, to which gifted individuals can gain access through their imaginative powers. Wali Allah proposes applying this doctrine to the phenomenon of religion itself. In a move reminiscent of Dara Shikhu's syncretic treatment of Islam and Hinduism, Wali Allah claims that the various religions of the world are just specific versions of the single paradigm religion shared by all mankind. The religious commandments and laws laid upon this or that population are providentially tailored to their own specific needs. The purpose of religion, and for that matter of all human society and all political institutions, is to bring humankind ever closer to a single shared perfection. Wali Allah's universalist vision is appropriate for the pluralist society he lived in, but it is in some tension with his commitment to Islam as the most perfect religion. He claims that Islam is unusual among religions, in that its legal provisions are not so closely suited to just one group. This is why Muhammad was the last to receive a prophetic revelation. The message he brought was most universal, and thus most final. This doesn't fit that well with Wali Allah's overall theory. All earthly religions are equal in being versions of the perfect exemplar religion, but apparently one earthly religion is more equal than the others. As for the Ottoman Empire, Sufism had also been playing a significant role there for many generations. Already in the early 15th century, we find the doctrines of Ibn Arabi being defended by Mullah Fanari. We might compare him to Al-Qunawī, the philosophical Sufi I covered alongside Rumi in a previous episode. Like Al-Qunawī, Mullah Fanari used the tools of Avicennan philosophy in order to expound the doctrine of wahtat al-wujūd, or unity of existence, which became the characteristic position of Ibn Arabi's followers. Fanari duly criticized At-Tuzi's claim that existence is ascribed to God and to created things in different but analogically related ways. Instead, Fanari insisted that existence is existence, whether it belongs to God, to a human, or to Elvis Presley, who I think we can all agree was more than merely human. Thus Fanari managed to safeguard the claim that existence is one. But as usual in philosophical Sufism, Fanari wanted to stop short of eliminating all distinction between the divine and the created. Anticipating the view of the Shirazi thinker Dawani, he suggested that one can still hold on to a distinction of sorts between God and other things by repeating Avicenna's point that God's essence is existence, whereas other things have essences that need to receive existence from a cause. In centuries to come, Sufism would continue to flourish in the Ottoman Empire, shrugging off criticism from opponents like the Qadiz Adelis. Ibn Arabi himself was honored in the early 16th century, when a lavish monument was built on his grave in Damascus on the orders of the Ottoman Sultan. A couple of centuries on from there, we've just seen how in 18th century India, Shah Wali Allah was working within the Sufi philosophical tradition. And about a generation earlier, we have a comparable Ottoman figure by the name of Abd al Ghani al-Nabalousi. He died in 1731, whereas Wali Allah died in 1762, and Elvis Presley died in 1977, or at least that's what they want us to believe. Like Wali Allah, Abd al Ghani was a well-rounded scholar who did draw on Sufism but also wrote on Hadith and composed poetry. And, like his Ottoman predecessor Mullah Fanadi, Abd al Ghani spoke out in defense of Ibn Arabi's unity of existence doctrine. God is the one true reality which can never be known but only appears to us in various guises. Abd al Ghani also practiced asceticism, undergoing a period of seclusion in middle age when he refused to socialize with anyone, purposefully deprived himself of sleep, and so on. But Abd al Ghani abandoned his hermetic lifestyle after a time, traveling widely throughout the Ottoman lands and adopting moderate religious views. He agreed with Khatib Chelebi's tolerant stance on practices like tobacco smoking, for instance. As for other religions, he was happy to debate theology with Christians, whom he considered brothers in thought, though like Wali Allah, he considered Islam the one true and universal creed. Moderates like Khatib Chelebi and Abd al Ghani an-Nabalousi tended to have a friendly, even enthusiastically welcoming, attitude towards the natural sciences. As Chelebi put the point, knowledge can never be harmful and ignorance is never beneficial. The narrative of decline would have it that anti-rationalist forces, such as the Khadiz ad-Dalis, made it impossible for science to flourish in the Ottoman Empire. Exhibit A for the indictment is the destruction of an astronomical observatory at Istanbul in 1580. We know from the earlier case of Maragha that such observatories could be centers for scientific research and so it was at Istanbul, where the astronomer Taqi Adin devised a plan for a steam engine and in 1577 made observations about Halley's Comet, parallel to those made in the same year in Europe by Tiho Brahe. But for Taqi Adin, this comet was the beginning of an unfortunate tale. He took it as an opportune sign for launching a military campaign against the Safavids. As I've mentioned before, as Shi'ite Muslims, the Safavids were always seen as rivals by the Sunni Ottomans. This expedition ended in failure, and it may be that the observatory was destroyed because the advice given by Taqi Adin turned out to be counterproductive. Alternatively, the demolition may have been an expression of a more general distrust of astrology. It seems in any case that it should not be blamed on anti-rationalist sentiment inspired by the Kaadiz ad-Dalis. In 1660, Ottoman astronomers were given something rather different to worry about, the Copernican account of the solar system. We've seen scientists of the Islamic world debating whether the Earth might in fact be rotating rather than standing still beneath revolving, heavenly spheres. Now they were confronted with the possibility that the Earth might in fact be orbiting around the sun as well as rotating on its own axis. This was thanks to an Ottoman scholar named Ibrahim Effendi, who translated a book on Copernican philosophy from French into Arabic. Ibrahim was convinced of the value of his translation, since it might help to rectify problems in the Ptolemaic, Earth-centered astronomical system. But he did not go so far as to endorse the Copernican theory. In a familiar pattern, the theory was met with a mixture of dismissive rejection, cautious interest, and eager acceptance. My favorite response came from a scholar who pronounced the heliocentric view plausible, drawing an analogy to cooking. It makes more sense to turn meat over a fire than turning the fire around the meat. Copernican astronomy wouldn't be the last European idea to get the Ottomans juices flowing. As the empire experienced military setbacks and lost territory, its intellectuals and leaders looked to Europe for new ideas and organizational techniques that might help restore the Ottomans to their former position of dominance. Already in the 18th century, organizational techniques from Prussia were borrowed for the Ottoman military. A much further reaching reform movement was launched in the mid-19th century, the Tanzimat. The Tanzimat introduced free-market economic policies and a thorough shakeup of the state bureaucracy and educational system, all inspired by models in Europe. The result was a fundamental reshaping of Ottoman political ideology. A group of intellectuals known as the Young Ottomans argued that the Tanzimat had not gone far enough. They pushed for a constitutional form of government and put their faith in the power of nationalism rather than religion. The Sultans had always drawn legitimacy from their status as defenders of Islam, never forgetting that the empire had begun thanks to conquests made by Turkish razis, or holy warriors. Now though, the ideal of unity between state and religion, or in Ottoman Turkish din ud-devlet, was being replaced by an ideal of separation of the two spheres. Things were taken still further by another generation of political activists, the Young Turks. For all their reforming zeal, the Young Ottomans had embraced the value of Islamic tradition. They had not challenged the status of the ulama, or religious scholars, and had frequently sought support for their political ideas in the core texts of Islam, for instance by citing reports about the prophet to argue for constitutionalism. But by the late 19th century the more radical Young Turks were embracing European materialism and scientism. One particularly interesting example was Abdullah Cevdet, who remarked that religion is the science of the masses whereas science is the religion of the elite. Like Al-Farabi in the time of medieval Islam, Cevdet believed that society should be led by those with rational understanding and that the role of religion was to bring along the common people to an outlook compatible with the teachings of science. Similarly, the leading Young Turk intellectual Zia Gokalp saw religion as serving a fundamentally social function, part of what he called culture as opposed to the rational achievements that qualify as civilization. Cevdet Gokalp and the other Young Turks looked not to Aristotle for their conception of science, but to European philosophers of the 19th century. Gokalp was particularly influenced by the sociologist Emil Durkheim, while Cevdet took inspiration from the materialist Ludwig Büchner and the positivist Auguste Comte. Darwinism, both biological and social, also played a role in the new ideology of the Young Turks. All these ideas were taken over by Cevdet and placed alongside thinkers from ancient Greece and the Islamic tradition in a massive treatise called Funun ve Felsive, meaning sciences and philosophy. For Cevdet, the findings of modern science could be found implicitly in the Islamic revelation. When we read in the Quran of God's ways, this is nothing but a reference to the laws of physics. The critics of the Young Turks could be forgiven for thinking that even such rationalist uses of revelation were mere lip service paid to Islam. The philosophy of some Young Turks was aggressively materialist, loudly rejecting the notion of a soul distinct from the body and more quietly thinking that even the existence of God was nothing but a convenient superstition. Of course, all of this did not go unchallenged, and some critics came from the ranks of the Young Turks' fellow reformers. A less radical stance, but one still friendly to science and European philosophy, was taken by men like Ismirli Ismail Haqi. Haqi was a classic product of the new educational system brought in under the Tanzimat. He did not want to dispense with religious tradition, or see it as serving a purely social function as Gokalp had suggested. Rather, he thought that modernity could be fused with tradition. He drew a parallel with the emergence of a new philosophical brand of kalam in the works of Fakhradin Ahrazi. Back in the 12th century, Ahrazi had woven Avicenna into Islamic theology to make it more relevant for his time. So must the intellectuals of Haqi's own time renew Islamic theology by drawing on the positivism of Kant. Haqi was thus occupying a middle position between conservatives and radicals. One conservative remarked that it had already been a mistake for the Abbasids to have Greek science translated in the first place, and that Ottoman scholars with European leanings like Haqi were repeating that error. Yet Haqi himself attacked the most radical of the Young Turks, accusing Tevdet of ignorance of Islam and helping to pave the way for his trial on charges of blasphemy. Another scholar who adopted this sort of middle position was Ahmad Hilmi. Hilmi can be grouped with the Young Turks. He criticized the ulama for their backward notions, embraced Darwinism, and insisted on the harmony between science and Islam. But Hilmi was drawn to Sufism as well, and rejected the crude materialism of thinkers like Tevdet. Hilmi also exemplifies a darker side of European influence. He drew on the racist theories then current in France to support the Turkish nationalism that he held in common with other Young Turks. And anti-feminist French authors served him well, as he angrily denounced the freedoms that were being granted to women in the new society that the Young Ottomans and Young Turks had helped to build. Hilmi was not merely imagining things. Already in the late 19th century, attitudes towards women were changing, not least among women themselves. It was increasingly possible for women writers to take part in political and religious debates, and take part they did. The last 200 years have seen an unprecedented development in the Islamic world, as women intellectuals have not just drawn on European ideas, but also gone back to the core text of Islam—to argue for the emancipation of women in Muslim society. If you've been thinking that it's about time we let the other half of the human race have its say, then, as Milli Vanilli put it when they got caught limb-sicking all their songs, you took the words right out of my mouth. So join me for a discussion of women scholars in Islam, next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.