Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/Bonus Episode 002 - Don’t Think for Yourself, Chapter 1.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and this is a special bonus episode to give you all something to listen to while the podcast is on summer break. As some of you may have seen, I have a book coming out. Not another installment of the book series based on the podcast, you can get all six of those from Oxford University Press, and there are more on the way, but a volume called Don't Think for Yourself, Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy. It brings together a lot of the things I learned while I wrote the podcast on medieval philosophy in the Islamic, Latin, Christian, and Byzantine cultures, and adds some ideas from my other research. All of that is brought to bear on an issue that has become increasingly urgent in recent history, how should we form beliefs on the basis of expert authoritative testimony? The book will be published by University of Notre Dame Press and will appear in October 2022. You can pre-order it from their website, undpress.nd.edu, and get a 20% discount if you use the order code 14FF20. That's 14F as in fabulous book, F as in fantastic present for any gift-giving occasion, 20. To whet your appetite, I've recorded the first chapter, which you're about to hear. It introduces a central concept in the book, Taqid, which means the uncritical acceptance of ideas based on authority. In the rest of the book, I look at lots of other medieval ideas about belief and authority, for instance, the contest between Plato and Aristotle as authoritative authors, the attempts of women authors to establish themselves as authoritative, and the use of philosophy in interreligious debates. Again, you can get the book from Notre Dame University Press. It's called Don't Think for Yourself, Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy. As always, thanks to everyone out there for listening, and if you get the book, then thanks for reading. Chapter 1, Taqlid, Authority and the Intellectual Elite in the Islamic World I live in Europe, where people usually ride bicycles, and recently I was riding with my wife through Munich. We came to an intersection. Ahead of me, my wife slowed down, checking for oncoming cars, then went across. It suddenly struck me that it would be perfectly reasonable for me to follow her across the intersection without bothering to look whether it was safe. After all, my wife is reliable and has good judgment, both in general and when it comes to the rules of the road. Indeed, whereas I am a frequently distracted philosopher, she's a normal person, so when it comes to this kind of thing I tend to trust her more than I trust myself, and she would hardly be crossing if a car was coming, so why not ride straight across, trusting her implicitly as I do? I would quite literally be staking my life on the assumption that she made the right decision, but this was a bet that, I realized, I would quite happily make. Then I looked for traffic anyway, just to be on the safe side, but it got me thinking about how we make decisions and form beliefs, and the fact that we often do so simply by accepting the judgment of other people whom we take to be authoritative. I've been thinking about this for a while anyway, because this very issue lies at the heart of many of our current political controversies. We are increasingly warned against taking our beliefs from sources that were previously considered authoritative. Yesterday's paper of record is today deemed fake news. Well-credentialed scientists with expertise in vaccinations or climate change are greeted with distrust. Michael Gove, responding to economists' gloomy predictions of Britain leaving the EU, ventured that, People in this country have had enough of experts. Part of the problem is that many political issues are so vast in their complexity and scope that they defy the ability of individual people to form beliefs in a way that seems irresponsible. How many of us understand enough about the atmosphere to have a reasonably informed personal opinion about climate change, never mind being in a position to critically evaluate what climatologists might say? On this and many other issues, we are apparently in the politically and epistemologically uncomfortable position of choosing whose opinions we should blindly accept. What I want to show in this book is that we can learn something about blind acceptance and how to avoid it from a surprising source, medieval philosophy. Surprising because medieval philosophers have a reputation for forming their beliefs in the most uncritical of ways, bound as they were by authority, locked into inflexible world views by their theological commitments, and threatened with institutional sanction, or worse, if they dared to step out of line. I will implicitly challenge such assumptions in this book, but that is not so novel. No expert in the field would today accept this description of the medieval mindset as slavish and merely imitative. My main point will be a different one, namely that medieval philosophers engage in explicit and productive reflection on this very question of when and how one might responsibly form one's beliefs based on authority. I am going to cover quite a lot of territory, both chronologically and geographically. I will highlight authors and texts from the end of late antiquity, in the 5th century or so, down to the European Renaissance, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with occasional forays even later than that. The scope of the book will thus cover what one leading scholar of the field, John Maronbong, likes to call the Long Middle Ages. Furthermore, I am going to look at three distinct, yet closely interconnected medieval cultures. Some of what I will say concerns Latin Christendom, which is the more familiar terrain for many readers, but I will also talk about intellectuals in the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, and in the culture to which most of my own research has been directed, the Islamic world. There will be Christians there, too, as well as Jews. But in this first chapter, I want to focus on a concept that has its original home within Islam itself, and more specifically in methodological debates that raged between Muslim scholars of law and theology. These scholars did us the favor of finding a single word to describe the phenomenon I am interested in, taqlid. This word is often translated as imitation, uncritical acceptance of authority, or blind following. It comes from a verb, kalada, meaning to gird or hang something upon the neck, for instance a necklace placed on a sacrificial animal. Fairly early in the Islamic legal tradition, perhaps in Iraq, around the end of the 8th century, it came to be used for reaching judgments on the basis of someone else's authority. Someone who practices taqlid, in Arabic a mukalid, has not personally reflected as to whether the judgment in question can be grounded in the sources of Islamic law, namely the Quran and the hadith, or collected reports of the sayings and deeds of the prophet. Such reflection is called ichtihad, meaning effortful exertion. It relates to the well-known Arabic word chihad. And someone who performs ichtihad is a mujtahid. This terminology was, as I say, first used in legal contexts, but it quickly became important for theologians, too, who began to debate the very question I have just been raising. Is it alright to form one's beliefs, notably one's religious beliefs, just by following apparently reliable authority, hence by engaging in taqlid? Or do we have a responsibility to perform ichtihad? As we might put it, should we really try to think for ourselves? In addition to suggesting that medieval Muslim thinkers had useful insights about this question, I want to suggest an even more surprising historical thesis. Some readers may already have been thinking, when I mentioned the typical prejudices about medieval thinkers, that these prejudices would not apply to at least a handful of philosophers from the Islamic world. These were figures I like to think of as the Aristotelian avant-garde, men like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, who thought that all important beliefs could be established by pure reason. They accepted the religious teachings of Islam, but emphasized that these teachings were ratified and ultimately explained by Aristotelian philosophy. For them, religion was really just a less technical presentation of fundamental philosophical truths, in a form that could be appreciated by non-philosophers. With this, the Aristotelian avant-garde espoused a rationalism more radical than we find in practically any thinker of medieval Christendom in either the Greek or Latin spheres. In Arabic, these Aristotelians were often referred to as falāsifah, from fāsifah, which is of course just a loanword from Greek based on philosophia. Some have exalted the falāsifah as the only true philosophers in the Islamic world, and perhaps in any medieval culture, precisely on the grounds of their unabashed rationalism. But ironically, the elitist rationalism of the falāsifah was itself an inheritance from the Islamic legal and theological tradition, or so I shall argue. It was by transposing the legal and theological concepts of ijtihad and taqlīd to the context of Aristotelian philosophy that the falāsifah were able to articulate their own self-conception as independent thinkers who followed reason wherever it might lead. Let us return then to the debate over taqlīd within Islamic law and theology. Perhaps the most important figure in the beginning of this debate is Ash-Shafi'i, the founding figure of one of the four major schools of Islamic law. Ash-Shafi'i is well known for his endorsement of rational method in law, which would allow for standardization of legal practice across the enormous Islamic empire. With this, he ushered in a new phase of jurisprudence, in which the judgment of a class of trained experts would replace more informal legal customs which might differ from one place to another. A well-known example of the methods he proposed is analogy, where the ruling in a clear case is transferred to an unclear case, because the second case is relevantly similar to the first. For instance, if wine is explicitly forbidden, by analogy, whiskey is also forbidden because it is intoxicating just like wine. Ijtihad could include the use of analogical reasoning, but should not be identified with this or any other particular rational method. It is the use of any such method to arrive at an independently derived legal opinion rather than uncritically accepting the judgment of others, which of course is taqlīd. Ash-Shafi'i himself does not always use the term taqlīd in a pejorative sense. It is good and proper to be a muqallid when it comes to following the Prophet and his companions. But he thought that any jurist worthy of the name should be willing and able to perform ijtihad, which he deemed necessary because earlier legal scholars had often disagreed or simply offered decisions without any accompanying basis. As Ahmad al-Shamsi has written, whatever reasoning prompted such earlier opinions was a black box and could not be a basis for further jurisprudence. Ash-Shafi'i's followers were even more forthright in their critique of taqlīd, which for them came to have an exclusively negative connotation. This forced them to explain how they could indeed be followers of Ash-Shafi'i himself, a rather ironic project that calls to mind the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which Brian instructs his deluded followers, you've got to think for yourselves, you're all individuals, at which point they all shout, yes, we are all individuals. The Shafi'is dealt with the problem by either restating and hence in effect personally endorsing their master's own legal reasoning to get around the black box problem or improving on that reasoning by offering corrections to what Ash-Shafi'i had said or further evidence to support his findings. This set a rationalist standard for jurisprudential reasoning. A qualified jurist is one who can supply an evidential argument or proof, in Arabic hudja, for each decision. In contrast to this, taqlīd was defined already in the early 10th century as kubu'l kalbila hudja, accepting a position without proof. There was a famous debate among scholars of Islamic law as to how widely and for how long independent reasoning, or ijtihad, was practiced by jurists. It used to be a common place to say that, relatively soon after the time of Ash-Shafi'i and other school founders, jurists simply stopped bothering with ijtihad and contended themselves with good old-fashioned uncritical taqlīd. But a now classic article by Wal Halak argued that the so-called gate of ijtihad was never closed, if this means that legal scholars at some point entirely withdrew from personal reflection. To the contrary, we find even later jurists saying, for instance, that it is not possible for an age to be devoid of a mujtahid. Simply as a practical matter, independent reflection was needed to deal with new questions, such as the permissibility of using coffee and tobacco, much discussed by jurists of the Ottoman Empire. It has, however, been argued that ijtihad was applied in exceptional cases by exceptional figures, and that most jurists since the Middle Ages restricted themselves to studying and following the tradition. The mujtahid would be a bold and even iconoclastic figure, one who effectively sought to play the role of a new founder like Ash-Shafi'i. In light of this, Sherman Jackson has suggested that we simply think of taqlīd as a form of legal precedent, dropping more pejorative translations that have to do with blind obedience. We don't need to wade into the historical debate over the frequency and historical lifespan of ijtihad. For our purposes, it is enough to note that in the Sunni traditions, it was common to recognize a hierarchy of more and less advanced legal scholars. At the top was the pure mujtahid, who worked out a legal reasoning for his decision based directly on revealed sources. At the bottom was the pure mukalid. This was the jurist who simply memorized previous decisions and reapplied them. The same status was occupied by ordinary people, often called al-awām, literally the common people, and similar in force to the ancient Greek phrase huwā pālōy. The Arabic term al-jumhūr has the same meaning. As that implies, we are dealing here with a straightforward epistemic elitism. The legal scholar who performs ijtihad has real knowledge, whereas the ordinary person or taqlīd-bound judge is doomed to ignorance or, more optimistically, mere opinion. The elitism stands even when we take into account that jurists recognized other levels between the pure mujtahid and the pure mukalid. For instance, one might perform what was called ijtihad within a school, or affiliated ijtihad, that is, reasoning within the dictates and principles of one's legal tradition. Another way that common believers might avoid slavish passivity was through a minimal form of ijtihad called following. This did not involve requesting a full rationale for a judgment, but simply meant pressing jurists to confirm that they were indeed basing their judgments in valid sources of religious law and not personal opinion. The Shiite legal tradition, meanwhile, attacked the epistemic elitism of the mainstream Sunni schools for being, in a sense, not elitist enough. For the Shia, Islamic law cannot be properly applied without the guidance of the inspired imams who descend from the family of the prophet through his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. What was for them unconstrained legal reasoning, as practiced by Ash-Shafi'i and other Sunni jurists, resulted in mere opinion, not knowledge. Yet as Shiite legal thought developed, it also made a place for ijtihad, of course within the guidelines laid down by the imams. So we find Shiite scholars too, contrasting the knowledgeable scholar with the typical believer who may, and indeed should, engage in taqlid. As one such scholar put it, it is incumbent on the ordinary person to act by taqlid if he is incapable of ijtihad. Intellectuals who engaged in rational Islamic theology, or kalam, were concerned with, and often formally trained in, Islamic law. So it is no surprise that these debates concerning the permissibility of taqlid found their way into theological discussions. I don't have space here to tell this whole story, any more than I have told the whole story of taqlid in Islamic jurisprudence, but it can at least be mentioned that the early thinkers we usually group under the heading of Mu'athazilism generally took themselves to be carrying out a religious obligation to engage in speculative inquiry. This was the view of the leading thinkers of the Basra school among the Mu'athazilites like Abu Ali al-Jabaiy and his son Abu Hashim al-Jabaiy. It is reported of them that they held the following, We know of a dispute between Abu Hashim and another Mu'athazilite theologian, Abu al-Qasim al-Barkhi, known as al-Qaabi. Unusually within this tradition, al-Qaabi held that ordinary believers who engaged in taqlid were doing just what they should. He distinguished between, on the one hand, an elite of theologians who had the capacity and therefore the obligation to pursue knowledge of God through speculative inquiry, and on the other hand, those who are morally obligated to apply taqlid and conjecture. These are the lay people, the slaves, and many women. This is of course simply the familiar elitism of the jurists applied to the subject matter of theology. The more demanding attitude of the Mu'athazilites, who wanted all believers to engage in what we might call an ijtihad of theological reflection, was taken up by the most famous critic of Mu'athazilism, al-Ash'ari. He and his followers, the Ash'arites, are sometimes thought of as being less rationalist than the Mu'athazilites. There is some reason for that, because of such teachings as their divine command theory of ethics, which they opposed to the Mu'athazilite view that humans can work out their moral obligations through pure rational reflection. But on the subject of taqlid, the Ash'arites are remarkably rationalist too. Already in al-Ash'ari himself, we have the idea that the Qur'an contains clear proofs and arguments that establish God's existence and his omnipotence over all created things, and that prove the genuineness of Muhammad's prophecy and the obligation to follow his example. As Richard Frank has written, al-Ash'ari assumes that, The reasoned arguments are probative and complete on the grounds of theoretical reason alone. For, if they are not so, then the Prophet's claim to authority cannot be reasonably accepted. Taking up this approach, later Ash'arites cite the Qur'anic verse, Most of them do not know the truth, so they turn away, as a command to avoid taqlid. One theologian said that the verse, shows that to accept taqlid is wrong, and that one must carry out the proofs and demonstrations, so that those who practice taqlid lack knowledge because they turn away from reasoning. Frank has argued that in their strictures against taqlid, the main concern of the Ash'arites was that believers should be free of uncertainty. A muqallid might not be an unbeliever, but is a believer in only a qualified sense, because their convictions might be overturned by doubts that occur to them or put to them by scatics. In the absence of secure proofs, they will inevitably be vulnerable to this eventuality. Frank is clearly right about this. For instance, he cites a report concerning the Ash'arite theologian al-Isfara'ini, who said that commoners are of two types. One consists of people who are not wholly lacking in a kind of reasoning, even if it is imperfect in its expression and its grounding. Such people are truly believers, and in the proper sense, have knowledge. The second consists of people who are completely unenlightened in this respect, and have no real knowledge. Rather, since they believe through taqlid, their belief lacks integrity, and not one of them is free of uncertainty and doubt. However, I suspect that the Ash'arites also had a further concern, which is a specific case of what philosophers now call epistemic luck. Believers whose convictions are formed by taqlid will only be right if they happen to follow reliable authority, and this will only be the case if they happen to follow authority that is in fact reliable. Thus, a report on another theologian, Abu al-Qasim al-Ansari, has him saying that those who lack knowledge have only belief founded on conjecture and opinion. If they are right in what they believe, they believe by an unreflected acquiescence to the truth, and if they fail to grasp the truth, they are in error and deviate from the truth. We saw that the jurists qualified their legal elitism by distinguishing between levels of taqlid, with one or more middle positions between outright taqlid and fully independent ijtihad. The Ash'arites did much the same in the theological context. One of their foremost theologians, Al-Juwaini, said that ordinary believers have knowledge in an extended sense if they have a sufficiently strong feeling of certainty in their faith. He worried that demanding full-blown rational inquiry from them is imposing an obligation that cannot be fulfilled so that they are required only to have correct belief that is free from doubt and uncertainty, and they are not required to know. Not required to know, that is, in the strict and proper sense of the knowledge attained by an expert theologian, such as Al-Juwaini himself. Another qualification that, again, as in the legal case, leaves the elitism standing, is that the community as a whole must include select individuals who perform inquiry. In effect, the theologian is doing the epistemic work for everyone else, just as there need to be some mujtahids in law without every Muslim having to perform ijtihad. The ideas I've just surveyed appear early in the history of Islamic theology and are echoed in the following centuries. Here my discussion is necessarily even sketchier, but allow me to refer to just three later theologians who took strikingly critical positions toward taqlid. I first want to mention the Persian thinker, a Duwani, who talked about his own journey from taqlid to ijtihad. I said to myself, O soul which has these beliefs, do you take them to be true and accurate on the basis of intellect or pure taqlid? My soul replied, Even though they are taqlid, still they arise from something true and from the discernment of intellect. By way of proof, the soul added, When it comes to my beliefs, I am the muqallid of someone who is my mujtahid, and all his beliefs are true, since they arose through the discernment of intellect, therefore my beliefs are all true. Even though this proof has been constructed in a perfect arrangement, still when I placed the argument on the scales of intellect, it had no weight. So I debated with myself anew and asked my soul, What do you believe about the truth of the mujtahid? Could it be that there is an error among his beliefs or not? My soul chose the first option. So I said to it, On that assumption, the major premise of the proof which you built to prove your beliefs is false. For whoever errs cannot be given confidence such that all his beliefs are certain to be true and accurate. And this argument has as its conclusion that not all the beliefs of the muqallid are true. Furthermore, if the aforementioned assumption of the proof were true, then it would follow that the beliefs of the muqallid of every religion and creed would be true by the same reasoning, and then the soul could not respond. Notice that Dawani here invokes the consideration I just mentioned, that taqlid exposes believers to epistemic luck. If you are not yourself engaging in ijtihad, you just have to hope that the sources of your taqlid beliefs knew what they were doing. This is vividly supplemented by the final point that adherents of religions other than Islam could happily retain their false beliefs by depending on taqlid, with no less justification than the Muslim muqallid. Around the same time in the Islamic West, or Maqreb, we find the Moroccan scholar Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Sanusi taking an even stronger line against taqlid. He lays down a blanket ban against it, even for ordinary believers. This universalist view has been discussed in a recent book by Khalid al-Ruwaihib, who explains that for a Sanusi, every Muslim must master the basics of Ash'arite theology. Everyone has the responsibility to engage in inquiry so as to reach certainty, and those who do not do this are unbelievers. When a Sanusi demands certainty, he's asking for more than the subjective feeling of confidence that a juwani had in mind, which could give the ordinary believer knowledge in an extended sense. As I've pointed out elsewhere, theologians who allowed taqlid to the non-expert were depending not only on that feeling of certainty, but also on the tacit assumption that the non-expert Muslim has indeed gotten epistemically lucky. The sources of belief he happens to follow are indeed reliable, so his beliefs wind up being true. As a juwani observed, had this ordinary Muslim been born a Christian or Jew, he or she would have had false beliefs instead. You can see why that would not be enough for a Sanusi. He wants believers to do more than feel confident in believing something that is, fortunately for them, in fact true. Believers must go through arguments that establish the truth of their beliefs. Their feeling of certainty must be earned and well justified. Sanusi was an extremely influential figure, whose works were received among other places in sub-Saharan Africa. One short work of his is still taught in modern day Nigeria, and in the centuries after his death there were commentaries written on his works in Fulfide. The esteem in which he was held is exemplified in one story circulating about him, a member of his circle found himself unable to cook meat because mere acquaintance with a Sanusi made fire ineffective, the point being that his associates were guaranteed to avoid burning in hell. His intellectual legacy included teachings on Taqlid by African scholars, such as the 17th century Fulani theologian Muhammad al-Wali al-Maliki, based in what is now the country of Chad. Like a Sanusi, he held that there is a universal responsibility laid upon all Muslims to avoid Taqlid, and become acquainted with argumentative proofs for their beliefs about God. As Dorit van Dellen has pointed out, this general demand was, in a way, an attempt to assert the standing and importance of the scholarly elite. Scholars should provide guidance to common believers by showing them, for instance, that the Quran contains proofs of God's existence and omnipotence. Van Dellen tells the story of a West African town called Sijilmasa, where ordinary citizens were quizzed to see whether they could answer philosophical questions about the oneness of God. In that sort of context, theologians would have as reliable a function in society as the driving instructors, without whose help you aren't going to get your license. This is an important point. As was noted by early followers of Ash-Shafi'i, avoiding Taqlid does not imply that you actually do everything on your own, with no help. It is consistent with taking advice, what was in a legal context called consultation, so long as the person who receives the advice understands the reasoning according to which the decision has been reached. In this sense, even theologians who took the universalist view that all Muslims should ground their belief in rational understanding typically had a very elitist position. When the early Mu'tazilites, al-Ash'ari and his followers, a Sanusi or Muhammad al-Wali, said that every believer should do a bit of theology, that is what they meant, a bit of theology, enough to give them a secure, well-justified confidence in the fundamentals of their religion. As expert theologians, these same figures would have seen themselves as occupying a much higher level of rational understanding. And that goes double for theologians who in a more condescending fashion advised that ordinary believers avoid independent inquiry entirely. One theologian who had this sort of view was the great Ash'arite theologian, philosopher, and mystic al-Ghazali. He was a student of al-Jawaini who, to quote Richard Frank again, held that, Real knowledge is the property of a small elite, who are capable, on the basis of their own insight and ability, of independently working out the rational demonstrations of the truth of their belief against any conceivable difficulty or counterargument. Along the same lines, al-Ghazali reserved inquiry for the few, and prescribed pure taqlid for the many. In yet another version of that hierarchy we saw in the context of Islamic jurisprudence, he distinguished between true scholars who have knowledge and genuine certainty, theologians who attain some rational understanding but still accept many things in religion on the basis of authority, and ordinary people who never get past taqlid. He did concede that some few might rationally grasp the basic principles of Islam on the strength of convincing arguments found in the Qur'an, as already proposed by al-Ash'ari, but generally al-Ghazali thought it was not a good idea for most people to indulge in speculation. In fact, he wrote an entire work that was dedicated to discouraging common folk from engaging in theology. Its pursuit would as likely lead them astray as bring them to better understanding. As Frank Briffel has written for al-Ghazali, In the case of the ordinary people, taqlid is not only tolerated but welcomed, since an acquaintance with independent thinking would run the risk of having this group of people fall into unbelief. In al-Ghazali's most famous work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he aims the weapons of the taqlid debate on an unexpected target, the falasifa. These self-styled philosophers claim to be outdoing the theologians in the use of reason, as we'll see in a moment, but for al-Ghazali they were just engaging in taqlid with different sources. Instead of blindly following a legal scholar, theologian, or even a prophet, they chose to follow Aristotle. Here we have an example of being epistemically unlucky. Just as ordinary Muslims have epistemic luck insofar as their taqlid leads them to embrace genuine truths unreflectively, so philosophers accept whatever the Aristotelians say on the basis of their authority and wind up embracing falsehoods instead. In particular, they come to hold three beliefs that qualify as outright unbelief, that the universe is eternal, that God knows universals and not particulars, and that the afterlife is purely immaterial with no resurrection of the body. This is the charge sheet laid against the falasifa in the incoherence. Actually only the first of these three teachings, the eternity of the universe, is explicitly present in Aristotle. The second one about God's knowledge is distinctive of Avicenna, though based on Aristotelian premises. The third can also be ascribed to Avicenna, but is really a more general platonic commitment pervasive in philosophy starting with late antiquity, but no matter. Al-Ghazali's point, and his accusation, is that the falasifa cannot prove these things. How could they, since they are false? So they have been led to believe them through taqlid, rather than a reliable reasoning process. Anticipating a Dawani's point that taqlid can explain the religious beliefs of non-Muslims, Al-Ghazali even compares the philosophers' convictions to the way that Jews and Christians accept the religious faith of their parents. If Al-Ghazali is the most famous critic of the falasifa, then a Verroese would be the most famous critic of Al-Ghazali. In several works, including his pointedly titled Incoherence of the Incoherence, as well as his decisive treatise, he rebuts Al-Ghazali and along the way asserts an epistemic hierarchy that mirrors and seeks to replace the hierarchies we've seen in Muslim jurists and theologians. In doing so, he is taking up an earlier rationalist theory of philosophical supremacy, offered a couple of centuries earlier by Al-Farabi. As explained in a recent study by Feri al-Buhafa, Al-Farabi's book of religion argues that Islamic law is subordinated to philosophy, in particular to ethics. As Buhafa puts it, Al-Farabi requires merely that the jurist hold correct beliefs and possess the virtues of his religion. The jurist's role is to accept the judgments laid down by the religion's founder and his successors, if any. In the case of Islam, these would be the Prophet Muhammad and the four rightly guided caliphs, and then to apply these judgments to new or unclear cases, thus dealing with particulars rather than reaching universal determinations about human conduct. Similarly, the theologian is someone who deals with theoretical issues at the level of mere beliefs without having true understanding. In both the practical and theoretical spheres, such understanding is reserved for philosophy, which provides knowledge at the level of necessary and universal proof, which is dignified with the title Demonstration in Arabic Burahān. Al-Farabi thus states that all the excellent laws fall under the universals of practical philosophy, while the theoretical beliefs in a religion have their demonstrations in theoretical philosophy. Al-Farabi assumes that very few people will be in a position to understand these issues at a philosophical, that is, demonstrative level. So most adherents to a religion will have to embrace it at the level of mere belief, just like the jurists and theologians. Al-Farabi introduces an influential way of thinking about this contrast, derived from the Aristotelian logical tradition. Whereas philosophers grasp things at the level of demonstration, everyone else grasps them at the level of dialectic and rhetoric. To put it in another way, philosophers are in possession of proofs constructed in accordance with the strictures laid down in Aristotle's posterior analytics, and normal people hold their religious convictions having been persuaded by the sort of discourse analyzed in Aristotle's topics and rhetoric. As Al-Farabi puts it, dialectic provides strongly held opinion concerning the things for which demonstration provides certainty, or most of them. Rhetoric persuades about most of the things that are not such as to be demonstrated or the subject of dialectical inquiry. The excellent religion does not, then, belong only to philosophers, or to those who are in a position to understand things that are only discussed in a philosophical way. Rather, most of those who are taught and instructed in the beliefs of the religion, and accept its prescribed actions, are not in that position, whether this is by nature or because they are too busy for it. These people are not unable to understand commonly accepted or merely persuasive things. Here, commonly accepted, in Arabic, ma'shoor, is a technical term corresponding to the Greek endoxon. Endoxic propositions are those that are acceptable for use in dialectical arguments, as explained in Aristotle's topics. They are acceptable because they are held by just about everyone, or by those reputed for wisdom. Only when we seek demonstration do we insist on premises that are in fact, and without doubt, true. So for Al-Farabi, ordinary believers do not have certain knowledge, but this is alright, so long as they have epistemic luck. If the beliefs they accept through persuasion or acceptance of commonly held views are those of an excellent religion, they will have good opinions, and will perform good actions. The label ignorance is thus reserved for those unlucky enough to adhere to a false religion. The same idea is expressed in the title of one of Al-Farabi's better known works, which sets out a philosophical cosmology, anthropology, and political philosophy under the heading Principles of the Beliefs of the Inhabitants of the Excellent City. In other words, philosophy offers the true demonstrative basis for things that members of a successful religious and political community believe without proof. It should be obvious how close this whole line of thought is to the ideas about Taqneed and Ijtihad held among jurists and theologians. For Al-Farabi, the equivalent of the mujtahid, who thinks for himself and can give good reasons for his judgments, is the philosopher, who has grasped true conclusions by means of demonstrative arguments. Everyone else is engaged in some form of taqneed, following commonly accepted ideas or, at best, engaging in some kind of merely dialectical inquiry on the grounds of religious beliefs that are taken for granted. This would be the status of theologians, for instance. The only distinctively religious figures not subject to taqneed are the original lawgiver or prophet and his successors, but they are the exception that proves the rule, because these figures possess understanding at a philosophical level, in addition to the religious function they play. In the case of the prophet, perfect intellectual understanding is fused with a capacity to represent philosophical truths in a rhetorically persuasive way that will successfully induce taqneed in his religious followers, this being the function of revelation. Al-Farabi thus accepts wholesale the epistemic hierarchy of the elite Islamic scholars, albeit with new labels drawn from the Aristotelian tradition. But he denies that the scholars of Islamic law and theology are the true elite, who are capable of engaging in independent reasoning. That status is reserved for the philosophers. For a more elaborate statement of this philosophical version of epistemic elitism, we can turn to Imrosht, called in Latin and English, averroes. As a practicing Muslim jurist, he was certainly well acquainted with ideas about ijtihad and taqlid. In fact, his own grandfather, also named Imrosht, explicitly set down a hierarchy of scholars within the Maliki legal school, in three groups. First are those who practice taqlid of Malek and his followers by just memorizing and repeating their opinions. Second are those who accept Malek's authority and can determine what is consistent with the school's teachings, but still cannot issue rulings on novel cases. This corresponds to what we already saw under the heading of ijtihad within a school. Third are the elite, who understand legal methods and can issue novel opinions. In a legal treatise of his own, the famous decisive treatise, Iverroes takes up the question of the status of philosophy in Islam. He boldly argues that philosophy is not just permitted, but actually obligatory for those who are in a position to pursue it, those who are not, in Al-Farabi's words, prevented by nature or because they are too busy for it. With equal boldness, Iverroes goes on to contend that it is the philosophers who are in the best position to understand the true meaning of the Quranic revelation. They alone have independent access to the truth through demonstrative reasoning. Since the Qur'an is true, and truth does not contradict truth, their demonstrated conclusions can be used as a kind of check or constraint on possible interpretations of scripture. These aspects of the decisive treatise are well known. Less commonly discussed is the parallel Iverroes draws between law and philosophy. He is here a jurist writing for other jurists, so it makes sense for him to argue along the following lines. If the study of jurisprudence is licit or even encouraged within Islam, then philosophy is as well. For example, one cannot argue against philosophical activity on the grounds that it is and is an innovation because the prophet's immediate followers did not pursue it. After all, those early followers did not do jurisprudence either, and no one infers from this that jurists are doing anything un-Islamic. Indeed, the scriptural support for studying the law would provide even stronger support for studying philosophy. As he says, When the jurist deduces from God's statement, may he be exalted, reflect you who have vision, the obligation to know juridical argument, how much more worthy and appropriate is it for someone who understands God to deduce from this verse the obligation to know intellectual argument. Among these parallels between law and philosophy, the most important for our purposes is that the philosopher is, like the independently-minded jurist, entitled to engage in independent reflection. Iverroes cites a famous hadith, often brangished by defenders of legal ijtihad, to the effect that the jurist who engages in ijtihad and reaches an independent judgment is rewarded twice if the judgment is correct and once if he gets it wrong. Iverroes then adds, But which judge is greater than the one who makes judgments about being? This judge is, of course, the philosopher. Following the lead of Al-Farabi, Iverroes sets up an Aristotelian version of the legal hierarchy recognized by his own grandfather and other jurists. At the top are those who engage in demonstration, then those of the dialectical class who work with non-demonstrative arguments, and finally ordinary people who just believe by being persuaded through a combination of rhetoric and dialectic. These people simply believe what they are told, either because it has been put to them in a powerfully convincing way, Iverroes has in mind here the power of rhetoric, or because it is commonly accepted. Again, a commonly accepted proposition is one that everyone espouses or one that is taught by reputable scholars. As Iverroes explains in his paraphrased commentary of Aristotle's topics, The dialectical premise is an accepted statement. It may be accepted by all, for instance the statement that God exists, or accepted by most people without being rejected by the rest, or accepted by the scholars and the philosophers without being rejected by the masses. What of the dialectical middle class, the class between ordinary folk who simply accept things by taqlid and the philosophers who engage in ijtihad and are satisfied only by demonstrations? Standardly one is told that for Iverroes the dialecticians are the mutukalimun, practitioners of theology or kalam. He does say in a closely related work, the exposition of the methods used in arguments concerning religious doctrines, that the most adequate rank of the art of kalam is dialectical, not demonstrative, wisdom. But in fact he tends to think that the theologians of his own culture, like Alhazali and other Asherites, are failed dialecticians. This is because they do not argue as they should from commonly accepted premises, but instead proceed on the basis of highly controversial and abstruse assumptions when they do things like proving the existence of God. As a result, their arguments are, as Iverroes says, Fitting neither for the scholars nor for the many. There should in principle be theologians who carry out useful tasks like defending the faith using non-demonstrative arguments, but Iverroes sees his own society as unfortunately including only two kinds of people who behave as they should, the ordinary person who takes everything on trust, and the philosopher who is a kind of Aristotelian Mujtahid. There is a lot we can learn from these debates apart from the need to situate the teachings of the Falasifa within wider Islamic culture. For one thing, we can now see how ambitious, even unrealistic, it would be to have a blanket ban on taqlid. Iverroes' unvarnished elitism is of course rather unattractive. He envisions a tiny handful of knowledgeable experts surrounded by a huge mass of blind believers, a conception typical among the Falasifa and also finding many adherents among theologians and jurists. It may have seemed more plausible in a time when most people were not even literate, and when half the population, the female half, was in any case typically assumed to be incapable of serious scholarly reflection, even if women did belong to the social and economic elite. Still, unattractive or not, the elitist position was not put forward without good reason. If the alternative to taqlid is to figure out everything for yourself, then how many people will be in a position to avoid taqlid? You might be an expert in particle physics, economics, the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of philosophy, but you're unlikely to have expertise in all four. Even if you were, there would still be plenty of other fields where you would lack even rudimentary understanding. We might therefore propose that ichtihad should be limited to only the most important issues, or that as a community we should engage in division of labor. Again, the Islamic juridical tradition anticipated both moves. Those universalists who spoke out against taqlid wanted all believers to understand just a few central religious topics, not particle physics or Shakespeare. When it came to more advanced legal reasoning, it was also admitted that a jurist might be an expert mujtahid in one area of the law, but an obedient mukhalid in another, just as today, divorce lawyers are not usually criminal attorneys as well. But there are aspects of the Islamic legal tradition that should make us wary of even localized ichtihad. A point forcefully put by defenders of legal precedent was that individual judgment, even when practiced by trained experts, is liable to go astray. A much-discussed example was the case of arriving in a city and wanting to know which direction to pray so as to face Mecca. Would it really make sense to work this out for oneself, rather than just adopting the local practice followed by thousands of people? As one jurist put it, it is extremely unlikely that they could have made a mistake that could be rectified by the reasoning of one person. And indeed, the perils of ichtihad are plain to see. In the Islamic tradition, it has often been fundamentalists who adopted a universalist posture and polemicized against taqlid. Proceeding from the plausible assumption that individual believers are responsible for their own piety, these fundamentalists have rejected the edifice of legal and religious learning, in favor of returning to a direct engagement with the revelation and evidence about the Prophet and the earliest generations of Muslims. Ethistatically speaking, this is the equivalent of political movements in the United States, or Europe, that encourage their followers to abandon traditional news sources, academic opinion, and the like. The more sweeping the rejection of taqlid, the worse the results. It's what Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones have in common with Salafi Islamists. A more refined approach to the problem of taqlid would not require it being a mujtahid for each and every topic we care about, or, if this is too difficult, instead blindly following the nearest authority at hand, thus surrendering to the vagaries of epistemic luck. What we need is a better account of how to form one's own views while realizing that one is dependent on the expertise and authority of other people. As the historian Mary Beard recently observed, the recognition of complexity and difficulty is not an admission of defeat, it is treating a complex problem with the respect it deserves. Doing this well means depending on authority in an intelligent and discerning way, which is a big part of being a responsible believer and responsible citizen.