Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 189 - Subcontinental Drift - Philosophy in Islamic India.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... Subcontinental Drift. Philosophy in Islamic India. In the very first episode of this podcast series, I said that I would not be tackling the philosophical traditions of India or China. As you know, if you heard the recent announcement on the podcast feed, I've changed my mind about that. I will in fact be doing a spin-off series of episodes on classical Indian philosophy, working with expert Jainardhan Gennari. I'm very excited about it, and not only because it opens up a whole new range of potential puns. Indian cuisine alone offers mouthwatering possibilities for wordplay. If you think I'm going to curry favor with you by revealing any of those puns now already, you've got another thing cumin. Well, I might just be willing to do a couple of jokes about Indian-style bread, but unfortunately, none come to mind. In this episode though, we will be getting a foretaste of what the Indian subcontinent has to offer by following our current thread on philosophy in the Islamic world. India may not be the first nation to leap to mind when you think about the Islamic world, but in fact, Islam is the second most common religion in today's India, embraced by 13% of the population. And India has played a major role in the history of Islam. At a very early stage, scientific ideas filtered into the Arabic-speaking world, something we can trace especially in texts about astronomy and astrology. There was literary influence too. In a previous episode, I already made mention of the khalila wadhimna, an animal fable from India that was translated into Persian and Arabic. But up until the 11th century, the time of Avicenna, the subcontinent was still more or less foreign terrain from the Muslim viewpoint. The great scientist al-Biruni, a contemporary of Avicenna, wrote a massive treatise intended to change that. Entitled A Truthful Account of India, it was a wide-ranging discussion of the cultural practices and religious and philosophical beliefs of the inhabitants of this exotic land. Al-Biruni was in a unique position to gather and present this information since he found himself in the entourage of the Muslim warlord Mahmoud of Ghazna, who was making incursions into northern India from his base in modern-day Afghanistan. Al-Biruni learned Sanskrit and interviewed members of the Brahmin class who were brought from India by Mahmoud, receiving a crash course in classical Indian teachings. He was struck, as many have been since, by the parallels between these teachings and the ideas he knew from the Greek works available to him in Arabic translation. The Ghaznavid dynasty, founded by al-Biruni's master Mahmoud, was the first Islamic power to dominate Indian territory, but it was certainly not the last. A series of less enduring sultanates based at Delhi in the north maintained Islamic political presence in India for several centuries. The Delhi Sultanate managed to repel the advances of the Mongols around the year 1300, which as we've seen is more than we can say for many other Muslim leaders of that time. But in the late 14th century, India was invaded and Delhi sacked by a new Mongol wave led by Tamerlane. In the episode on philosophy in the Mongol period, I mentioned that Tamerlane's grandson Uleg Beg established a scientific center and observatory in Samarkand. He was following the precedent set by Hulagu, the Mongol conqueror of Baghdad and the patron of the Maraga Observatory which played host to so many philosophers and astronomers. It was in turn a descendant of the same line as Uleg Beg, the warlord Babur, who founded the powerful and long-lasting Mughal dynasty in the early 16th century. At first the Mughals, like the Delhi Sultans, held only the territory in northern India, but Akbar, the grandson of Babur, pushed both north and south, making good use of their relatively new gunpowder-based weaponry, as if the Mongols and their descendants hadn't been fearsome enough already. By the beginning of the 17th century, most of India was held by the Mughals, whose power had been extended into the enormous southern plateau called the Deccan. The Mughals rose to power at about the same time as the Safavids in Iran, and these powerful empires set the stage for two vibrant philosophical traditions. Actually, it might instead be better to think of a single tradition with two branches. Ideas flowed from Persia into India even as the empires were establishing themselves. Dawani, one of the philosophers of Shiraz, was invited to come to India. He turned down the offer, but did dedicate a work to a vizier of the subcontinent. Maybe he should have come in person. As things turned out, his rivals, the Dashtakis, would be much read in Mughal India. Credit for this is often given to a scholar and politician named Fathallah Shirazi. He was, as his name implies, from the city of Shiraz and had studied there with the philosopher Ghiyath ad-Din Dashtaki, the younger of the two Dashtakis. Fathallah came to India and joined the court of Akbar. Here he proved himself an all-round intellectual, doing astronomical research and even designing military equipment. It's not entirely clear how large a role Fathallah really played in disseminating the philosophical tradition of Shiraz. At least a share of the credit for building up a new tradition of philosophy in Muslim India should also go to Abd al-Hakim Sialkot I. A scholar of the Punjab region, Sialkot I was in favor at the court of the Mughal Shah Jahan. He was invited by the Shah to pass judgment on the disputes between Al Ghazali and Avicenna, on the usual contentious issues of the eternity of the universe, God's knowledge of particulars, and bodily resurrection. But perhaps the first really major Muslim thinker in India was the slightly later Mahmoud Jaonpuri. He lived in the first half of the 17th century and was active in northern India. Like Fathallah and Sialkot I, Jaonpuri was a well-connected individual, serving as tutor to one of Shah Jahan's sons in Bengal. He wrote a philosophical commentary on one of his own works. The commentary, called Ashams al-Bazigha, became a standard text on philosophy for subsequent generations of students in India. Jaonpuri gives us another example of the way that Indian scholars were responding to the intellectual tradition in Iran. As I've already said, the works of the Dashta keys were widely read, probably to a greater degree than philosophers whose names are more famous today like Mullah Sadra and even Avicenna himself. We do, however, find Jaonpuri engaging with Sadra's teacher Mir Damaad, and in particular with the latter's characteristic doctrine of perpetual creation. As we saw a few episodes back, Mir Damaad thought he could resolve the age-old disagreements over the nature of divine causation and the eternity of the universe by saying that all things are first created at the level of the perpetual. The everlasting models of all things are then made manifest in our temporal realm, in which they come to be and pass away. Jaonpuri sympathizes with what Mir Damaad was trying to do here, but he believes the theory has one small flaw—it's incoherent. Mir Damaad was supposing in effect that the same thing is created twice—once perpetually, and then again within time. For instance, Hayawatha the giraffe would exist perpetually as part of God's everlasting creative act, but she would also turn up around about the early 21st century on the African savanna. Thus Hayawatha would absurdly be prior to herself. Furthermore, Mir Damaad spoke of things at the level of perpetuity as being non-existent, echoing the Sufi idea that things are non-existent within God's power and then made manifest or existent when they are created. Again, this makes no sense to Jaonpuri. If anything, the perpetual things at the level of the divine should be more existent than the things in the temporal realm. Thus, Jaonpuri respectfully suggests that it would be better to return to the idea of eternal emanation, already found in the classic Muslim philosophers Al-Farabi and Avasana. It's a reminder that, even with all the Mongol era, Shirazi, and Safavid authors being read in this later period, philosophers of the formative period too continue to exert their influence. To some extent, even Avasana had been supplanted by more recent authors. We know he was read at least occasionally—hardly surprising since Avasana was so important to thinkers like the Dashtakis, who represented the cutting edge of philosophical thought at this period. For the most part though, India saw the emergence of a less Avasana-centered approach to the rational sciences known as the Darci Nizami. This curriculum seems to have evolved over generations, but it is called Darci Nizami in honor of Nizam ad-Din Siralavi, a scholar who took a significant hand in devising its standard version. He was a member of the leading scholarly family of Mughal India in the 18th century, the Farangi Mahal. This clan, based in the city of Lucknow, received favor from the Mughal princes and could count a number of influential scholars among their ranks. The earlier thinkers I've just mentioned, like Fathallah Shirazi, Abd al-Hakim Sialkhoti, and Mahmoud Jaanpuri paved the way for the Farangi Mahal family. In fact, Nizam ad-Din was a fifth generation student of Fathallah, and a work by Jaanpuri was one of the texts in the Darci Nizami curriculum. The point of the Darci Nizami was not necessarily to produce philosophers. Rather, students would read a selection of canonical texts, sometimes only in summarized versions, and be trained in logic and other fields so as to prepare them for work as government officials and jurists. Still, this pedagogical activity in the madrasahs naturally gave rise to a large number of commentaries and glosses on the texts included in the curriculum. And hopefully you've been convinced, by previous episodes, that the commentary form is entirely compatible with philosophical innovation and originality. Just in case you haven't yet been convinced, here's another example. One work on logic produced in India was the Sulam al-Ollum, or Ladder of the Sciences, by Muhyb Bellah al-Bihari, who died in the year 1707. Al-Bihari's treatise was tailor-made to be the subject of commentary, offering a dense survey of issues in logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology. His successors duly composed more than 90 commentaries and glosses on the Ladder of the Sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. Not only did the original text of al-Bihari find its way into the Darci Nizami curriculum, glosses and commentaries on his work also became standard reading, and these provoked still further reflection from still later authors. A fascinating issue to emerge in this complex textual tradition concerned the question of whether God can be defined. The obvious answer, in light of the usual Muslim belief in divine transcendence, was no. But how to justify this answer philosophically? Avicenna suggested one possible strategy, which was developed in one of the standard commentaries on al-Bihari. Since God has no body, and since his essence is the same as his existence, God is simple, but definitions always have multiple parts. The definition of human, for example, is rational mortal animal, and one can think of these three items, rationality, mortality, and animality, as the parts of the definition. So, to define God would be to compromise his simplicity by breaking him up into conceptual parts. But what Avicenna gave, he could also take away. We've seen numerous times that later thinkers were fascinated by his distinction between mental and concrete existence. It is one thing for Haya Watha to exist in my mind, and another for her to exist outside my mind. If we now apply this distinction to God, we can see that there is a problem with the argument I just sketched. Sure, God may be simple in reality, but why think he is also simple when he exists in my mind? If my idea of him has parts, that should give me the opportunity to offer a definition of him, without implying that God himself has parts. In other words, God could have conceptual parts, but remain simple in reality. To take a not-so-random example of how this proposal might be filled out, suppose I understand God as the necessary existent. God himself lacks all multiplicity, as Avicenna argued, but the idea of a necessary existent is obviously not simple. It has two ingredients, necessity and existence. The commentators and super commentators on Al-Bihari realize that there is a much more troubling issue lurking here. We've just seen that the rules that apply to God outside the mind might be different from those that apply to God as he exists mentally. Outside, he is simple, in my mind he may have conceptual parts. So why not think this is true for other things besides God? If I am only getting mental representations of the things out there in reality, how can I be sure that the features of these representations match the features of the things in themselves? The commentators are here raising a fundamental skeptical worry of the sort that emerged independently in early modern European philosophy, in philosophers like Descartes, Hume and Kant. The commentators of India are led to the same destination, but along a path entirely characteristic of later philosophy in the Islamic world. The issue that provokes the debate is a theological one, and the debate centers on one of Avicenna's standard distinctions, in this case the contrast between mental and concrete existence. We've seen before how that same contrast could push Muslim writers in a skeptical direction. The point already arose when we talked about Fakhradin al-Razi. But it's remarkable to see it being formulated here as a general problem of epistemology. In the end, the Mughal era commentators on al-Bihari stop short of drawing the radically skeptical conclusion that there can be no link at all between our ideas and things in the outside world. Rather, we have universal knowledge gleaned from our experience of external things, and are also able to grasp the peculiar characteristics of those things. As a result, we have mental representations that may, as the commentators say, reveal the nature of the outside things. But this still leaves a skeptical worry. We have no independent confirmation that our representations correspond to, or reveal, the things they are meant to represent. This point led a 19th century philosopher of India, Fadl al-Haq al-Khayr al-Badi, to go further and doubt that our ideas do ever succeed in capturing the essences of things in themselves. So far, we've been looking at the transplanting of ideas from elsewhere in the Islamic world onto Indian soil. But of course, this soil was not barren. To the contrary, the Indian subcontinent had its own ancient philosophical and religious traditions, the ones we'll be covering in that future series of episodes. Did Muslim intellectuals attempt to come to grips with these indigenous belief systems? Indeed they did. Under the great Akbar, it was decreed that religious scholars should work through a range of intellectual sciences, including medicine, logic, physics, mathematics, metaphysics, and history. They should also learn about the Hindu traditions, studying the Sanskrit language and acquainting themselves with the teachings of the Nyaya and Vedanta rules. Akbar was remarkable among Muslim rulers in India for his friendliness towards Hinduism, a policy which happened to be politically expedient as well. He even married Hindu women and allowed them to keep their religion, rather than converting to Islam. You might think it doesn't get much more friendly than that, but at least one member of the Islamic ruling class in India can give Akbar some serious competition when it comes to affection for classical Indian culture. He was a 17th century prince by the name of Dara Shihoo, the son and intended successor of the Shah Jahan. But upon his father's death, conflict erupted between Dara Shihoo and his brothers. This ended in Dara's untimely death on charges of irreligion. These accusations were obviously politically motivated, since Dara Shihoo's death paved the way for the accession of one of his brothers. But the prosecuting attorneys would have had plenty to work with, since in fact Dara was pretty daring in his ideas about religion. From a young age he was enthusiastic about the teachings of the Sufis, and trained with a beloved master to achieve ever greater degrees of spiritual enlightenment. He also engaged in Sufi practices like breath control, writing that he was able to pass through an entire night inhaling only twice. What really left him breathless, though, was the wisdom contained in ancient Sanskrit works like the Upanishads. Dara produced a translation of this text and pronounced it the oldest of the revelations sent by God to humankind. He considered the Upanishads superior to other revealed books like the Torah and the New Testament of the Christians. For him, this Sanskrit source could provide the key to unlock the deeper meaning of the revelation sent to Muhammad. To some extent, this was a well-established attitude towards Hinduism among Muslims. Islam standardly recognized Hindus and Buddhists, alongside Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, as peoples of the book, favored with prophets who brought the word of God. But Dara Shihoo went further than this by giving the Upanishads privileged place above all other revelations, apart of course from the Quran itself. He even daringly suggested that the Quran alludes to the Upanishads in a much-discussed verse that makes mention of a hidden book. What could this book be, reasoned Dara, if not the oldest of the revelations? To press home his point, Dara Shihoo wrote a treatise attempting to illustrate the agreement of the Islamic and Indian traditions. It is titled The Confluence of the Oceans. The phrase is taken from another verse of the Quran and symbolizes the meeting place between the two great religions. When an English translation of Dara's treatise was published in Calcutta in 1929, one reviewer dismissed it rather high-handedly, writing, This little treatise is not a work of deep insight or great spirituality. The subject matter is entirely matter-of-fact and consists of nothing but wooden terminological comparisons. It lacks both eloquence and inspiration. I find this amazing, because The Confluence of the Oceans is a truly remarkable document, and would be so even if it hadn't been written by a Mughal prince. In it, Dara Shihoo goes through the key ideas of the Hindu teaching as he understands it. He shows that the core ideas and vocabulary of this teaching correspond to Arabic concepts and terminology used by Muslim intellectuals, especially philosophical Sufis. Thus, the Sanskrit term maya is connected to the passionate love or ishq of the Sufis, and the Quranic names of God are matched to Sanskrit equivalents. Both the Islamic and Hindu traditions, explains Dara Shihoo, have more or less the same cosmological theories and similar ideas about the soul. In this context, Dara even alludes to Avasena's theory of the five internal senses, and as usual claims to find the same ideas in his Sanskrit sources. He touches also on more controversial points. After sketching the Indian theory that world cycles repeat over and over in an infinite loop of time, Dara says that this notion too can be shown to agree with the Qur'an. In proof, he cites verses on resurrection. To those Muslims who complain that on this theory Muhammad will no longer be the last of the prophets, Dara responds that it will be the very same Prophet Muhammad that returns in the next cycle. He will end the line of prophets in each and every iteration of the endlessly repeated history of the world. Dara is also prone to defend contentious ideas within Islam by referring to other religious traditions. One frequent point of dispute among Muslim theologians had been whether God is ever actually visible. Can he manifest himself so that we can actually see him? Of course, most philosophers would dismiss the idea out of hand, but Dara thinks it is possible, and claims as allies the many religious sages who have claimed to behold God. Dara says he is happy to find himself in agreement with them, whether they believe in the Qur'an, the Vedas, the Book of David, or the Old and the New Testament. For Dara Shikhu, the extensive agreement between the different religious and philosophical traditions known to him showed that no one people has a monopoly on wisdom or truth. But I'll tell you who did have a monopoly, the East India Company. The first half of the 18th century saw the collapse of both the Safavid and the Mughal empires, in the latter case paving the way for the era of British colonialism. This isn't the right podcast for getting into the reasons for the demise of these two mighty powers, I will just say that the fall of the Mughals was not only a matter of British conquest and exploitation at the hands of the East India Company. To some extent, at least, they succumbed to internal problems before the colonial depredation began. This is, however, the podcast to consider the fate of philosophy in the 18th century and beyond. In the last few episodes on the Islamic world, we'll be seeing not just how the tradition of figures like Avicenna or Mullah Sadr continued right down to the 20th century, we'll also be discovering how ideas from Europe were received among Muslims. But before we do that, there is a third empire to deal with. We've been to Persia and India and visited with the Safavids and the Mughals. Next time, you might want to listen with your feet up, perhaps on some sort of upholstered footstool, as we take on the Ottomans, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.