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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, All for One and One for All, Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Abdu. I read somewhere, and recently confirmed with 45 seconds or so of intensive research on the Internet, that the most common given name in the world is Muhammad. Apparently the most common surname is Chang, which to my mind raises the question of why we don't run into more people named Muhammad Chang. The reason for the popularity of the name Muhammad at least is clear enough, Muslim parents naming boys after the Prophet. Statistically speaking then, it's no surprise that two of the greatest Muslim thinkers of the early 20th century were both named Muhammad, Muhammad Abdu and Muhammad Iqbal. They came from nearly opposite ends of the Islamic world, Abdu growing up in Egypt and Iqbal in India. But they had more in common than just a name. Both were influenced by the traditions of philosophy and Sufism in the Islamic world, but looked also to more recent European thinkers. Both advocated a reformist view of Islam, rejecting fatalist and determinist elements in the tradition to make room for individual and social improvement. And both were politically active, involved in debates about how Islamic society could be reformed in the face of colonial domination by external powers. Colonialism was, of course, the bitter water in which Muslim intellectuals of this period were forced to swim. Foreign governments steered events in both India and the failing Ottoman Empire, which was at the time called the Sick Man of Europe. Many Muslim intellectuals thought colonialism was the disease, not the cure, and Muhammad Abdu was one of them. He was born in rural Egypt in 1849, at which time the Ottomans had lost control over Egypt, forced to recognize the governorship of their rebellious general Muhammad Ali. Obviously not to be confused with the rebellious Boxer. But as Abdu was growing up, the governors, or hadiths, of Egypt were under immense pressure from the colonial powers, especially the British. Abdu would later express resentment at this state of affairs, remarking, Here he was agreeing with his early mentor and ally, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani. Al-Afghani arrived to teach at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, passing himself off as a Sunni Muslim from Afghanistan. He had actually been born in Shi'ite Persia, where he had the opportunity to study classic works of philosophy not so commonly read in the Ottoman realms. He was thus able to instruct the young Muhammad Abdu in texts like Avicenna's Pointers and Reminders. Before long, Abdu would be publishing a set of glosses on Dawani's commentary on a theological treatise by the Mongol-era thinker Al-Iji. It's a remarkable example of the continuity of Islamic intellectual history, as Avicennan kalam continues to be relevant for intellectuals in late 19th century Egypt. But if Al-Afghani and Abdu took an interest in the past, they were no conservatives. To the contrary, they were reformists and modernizers who insisted that the Islamic tradition already contained the seeds of worthwhile ideas that had only later been discovered in Christendom. Darwinian evolution? It's anticipated in a verse of the Quran. Democracy? Its virtues are enshrined in Islamic teaching through the practice of shura or consultation among the community. Abdu left Egypt when the British invaded in 1882, joining Al-Afghani in Paris. From here, the two published a political journal, the Standard Forum for Political Dissent in this final phase of the Ottoman Empire. And I have to mention this fantastic title among the Egyptian periodicals, Mr. Sunglasses, after the nickname of the Jewish reforming intellectual who founded it. But Abdu would eventually break with Al-Afghani. This may be because Abdu came to advocate a degree of cooperation with the British in Egypt, moving away from his teacher's implacable opposition to colonialist power. He returned to Egypt and to Al-Azhar University, where he taught for a number of years before the government appointed him mufti, or chief judge of all Egypt, which to be honest, shows more faith in philosophy professors than I would. During this time, Abdu continued to promote a reformist agenda. He declared war on taqlid, the blind acceptance of tradition that we've so often seen condemned. Abdu took himself to be advocating a return to the true original teaching of Islam. He was convinced that weakness in Islamic societies in the face of colonial power was a punishment for a divergence from this teaching. The traditional scholars among the ulema, trapped within their sclerotic ways of thinking by taqlid, were only perpetuating an erroneous approach to Islam. For Abdu, nothing represented this error more than a belief in fatalism or determinism, that is, the view that God has predestined all that will happen. Such a belief naturally lends itself to passivity and quietism, an attitude of waiting to see what God has ordained. This is the opposite of what is needed to improve society, and what is demanded by Islam, individual action. For Abdu, political reform and religious commitment went hand in hand. This sentiment would find agreement with our second Muhammad, who we'll turn to now, and if I'm in the mood perhaps there will even be another Muhammad or two at the end of the episode. Muhammad Iqbal was born in the Punjab in the year 1877. This was a time of intellectual upheaval for Muslims in the subcontinent. We know already that there was continuity with the scholarly traditions of the past, for instance with the Khaira Badi school of Avisanizing philosopher theologians. But we also know that over in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century, the young Ottoman and young Turk movements were taking inspiration from European scientific and political ideas and challenging long entrenched institutions and ideologies. Things in India were no different. Leading the charge for the modernists was Syed Ahmad Khan, who died just at the end of the century in 1898. He founded the Aligarh University as a means of bringing westernizing education into India, a replacement of the Darci Nizami curriculum followed by religious scholars over the last few centuries. But, like his reform-minded Ottoman contemporaries, Khan was no slavish devotee of all European ideas. He pointed out that scholars had long ago responded to the Greek-Arabic translations by taking the best of the Hellenic heritage and discarding what was erroneous. He urged the scholars of his day to do likewise, by responding to recent scientific discoveries. He was confident that they would find nothing but agreement with Islam so long as the religious sources were interpreted properly. For Khan saw Islam as what he called a natural religion, in perfect harmony with whatever science could deliver. On the political front, meanwhile, reformers in India were proclaiming that democratic ideals could be discovered in the Quran and hadith. Such ideals were needed to stage a renewal of Islam in the subcontinent, to reverse what these modernizers saw as the backwardness of their co-religionists. A telling example is Khan's view on polygamy. Although Islam in theory allows a man to marry more than one woman, it also requires the husband to treat all the wives equally, but that is impossible in practice so that Islam effectively prohibits polygamy. Khan's ingenious interpretation, by the way, was taken over by Abdur in Egypt. Meanwhile, more traditionally minded scholars were insisting on the value of the Islamic sciences as they had been practiced for so many generations. A member of the Faragh-e-Mahal school tradition, which was still alive in the early 20th century, followed Khan's example by founding a new institution for those traditional sciences in 1919. A key point in the political debates of the time was the relationship between Islam and the state. Could Muslims living under colonial rule still be said to live within the sphere of the Islamic faith, called in Arabic dar al-Islam? Or does Islam demand that its believers recognize only political leaders who claim the mantle of religious authority? In 1922, an answer to this question came in a fatwa issued in Delhi affirming the need for a caliph who wields both secular and religious authority. The contrary view was that religion and politics can be, and perhaps even should be, separate. A people need not be united by religious allegiance, they can gather together as an independent nation. In the Islamic world, this secularist version of nationalist ideology has had its most famous expression in the rise of Turkey following the demise of the Ottoman Empire. But nationalism had supporters among Muslims in India as well, whose ideology would have a concrete focus after the partition of India and formation of Pakistan in 1947. Many have seen Iqbal as a forerunner of Pakistani nationalism, and it is true that early on he was attracted to the nation-state ideology. But in his later years, he turned against the whole idea of a state defined independently of religion. In fact, he remarked that nationalism was the greatest threat to Islam. That might sound a bit alarmist, but bear in mind the Mongols were no longer around. And Iqbal believed that nationalism, like the Mongols, had the power to break empires. He saw the nation-state as a distinctively Western development, in which nationalism replaces religion as the bond between people, something he connected to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Yet Iqbal was no knee-jerk opponent of Western ideas. To the contrary, he spent years studying at several European universities, including the LMU in Munich, where I work. I'm pleased to say that this is where Iqbal got his PhD. He then returned to India, settling in Lahore, where he became a leading poet in the Urdu language. Rejecting the idea of art for art's sake, Iqbal determined that his poetry would have political significance. He called his verses a song of war. During his time in Europe, Iqbal absorbed the ideas of Western thinkers, and drew on them for the rest of his career. A glance through a set of English-language lectures he gave in several Indian cities, published in 1934 under the title The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, gives one a sense of his wide range of influences. At one point, he quotes on a single page the pre-Socratic ancient philosophers Zeno of Aliyah, the Muslim thinkers Al-Ash'ari and Ibn Hazm, the Western philosophers Bergson and Russell, and the mathematician Cantor. Not exactly without any gaps, but still pretty impressive. Among the European thinkers, the most influential for Iqbal was Friedrich Nietzsche. We've seen a lot of surprising uses of European philosophical ideas in these podcasts, but perhaps none is more surprising than the spectacle of an Indian intellectual using Nietzsche to vindicate Islam. As you probably know, and as we'll be exploring in depth someday if all goes well, Nietzsche was a late 19th century German thinker who mounted a searching critique of Judeo-Christian values. He argued that Christianity consists in a self-abnegating embrace of weakness over strength, of the otherworldly over this world. Iqbal agreed with this assessment, and then added that just the reverse is true of Islam. For Iqbal, the Qur'an is the revelatory text that celebrates this world. It concentrates on the particular and concrete, demanding its readers to marvel at the physical world as an expression of God's might. In this respect, the Islamic revelation was fundamentally opposed to the abstract theorizing tendency we can see in Greek philosophy. So for Iqbal, it was a crass error to use Hellenic ideas to expound the Qur'an, as did the early philosophers and theologians in the Islamic world. The affinity for this world also accounts for the great achievements in natural science made by Muslims. These achievements, he hastens to add, lay behind the rise of modern science in Europe, with experimenters like Roger Bacon drawing on Muslim predecessors like Ibn al-Haytham. This aspect of Iqbal's thought makes him seem like a hardcore rationalist, along the lines of his fellow Indian intellectual Ahmad Khan or Abdullah Chavedat and Zia Gokalp of the Young Turks in the late Ottoman Empire. But Iqbal, like so many Muslim thinkers before him, saw no tension between extolling rational science and cherishing the prospect of super-rational intuition, as described in the Sufi tradition. There are, Iqbal notes, only three ways to reach knowledge. Experience of nature, the lessons of history, and intuitive union with reality. In the Islamic tradition, Iqbal could point to scientists like Ibn al-Haytham who learned from nature, and to Ibn Khaldun who learned from history. The Sufis alone achieved intuitive knowledge. But, again alluding to Western ideas, Iqbal rejects a strict opposition made by the American philosopher William James between mystical consciousness and normal everyday consciousness. The two are in fact continuous. The difference is that mystical intuition sees reality all at once, whereas rational inquiry takes things bit by bit. Iqbal thus gives his approval not to James, but to his fellow poet Rumi, who spoke of grasping the whole unity of the divine with the heart, rather than restricting oneself to the use of reason. In accordance with these Sufi-inspired ideas, Iqbal argues that the function of religion is not to lay down a rigid, unchanging law which all its adherents must forever obey. Together Islam has the flexibility to adapt itself to the needs of different peoples, places and times. For this idea, Iqbal refers to the earlier Indian Sufi thinker Shah Wali Allah. However it manifests in a given case, Islam is meant to be realized through political institutions. The original Muhammad was a lawgiver and leader, not just a prophet, a sign that Islam is politically engaged. Unlike Christianity, which Iqbal believes focuses only on salvation of the individual believer. Through its political manifestation, Islam guides its adherents towards a unified grasp of reality, and towards harmony with one another. Here lies the fundamental error of the nationalist project. The nation-state is built around ethnic or geographical identity rather than religious devotion. By separating a state from spirit, this political ideal creates what Iqbal calls a dualism which does not exist in Islam. But remember, Iqbal is a Nietzschean. When he speaks of achieving union through intuitive understanding, he does not mean an escape from this world. The ascetic traditions within Sufism are something he dismisses as corruptions, the result of influence from world-denying traditions such as Neoplatonism or Buddhism. In place of the false Sufism of unity with an otherworldly divinity, Iqbal wants to achieve unity within this world. This is his understanding of tawhid, the central Islamic tenet of God's oneness. He puts it as follows, Islam demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. And since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man's loyalty to his own ideal nature. This is the link between Iqbal's political thought, his Sufi-inflected ideas about knowledge, and his admiration for science. If God is in the world, then we know him by knowing the world in its wholeness and its unity, and reflecting that wholeness and unity in our political affairs. The ultimate aim for Islam is to achieve global solidarity in a kind of Muslim League of Nations. Geographical and racial divisions would be acknowledged only for facility of reference, as he puts it, rather than providing identity to the community as in the western nation-state. Easier said than done, of course. Iqbal was painfully aware that unity was hard to come by among the Muslims of India, never mind across the globe. So when it came to concrete political proposals, he was practical enough to suggest taking small steps toward the ultimate goal of Islamic unity. Within India, he thought it a good idea to assign different regions to different communities, and his goal of pan-Islamic unity did not stop him from urging individual Muslim countries to strive for internal coherence and strength. Just as Iqbal's epistemology makes a place for both rational science, which investigates the world one part at a time, and Sufi intuition, which sees the whole in one glance, so Iqbal's political theory recognizes the need for strong parts within the whole. The unified parts of the global Muslim whole could be nations, and within those nations, also individuals. The individual self must develop towards fulfillment, but it can only do so within the context of a well-run society. With his all-for-one and one-for-all theories of knowledge and politics, Iqbal set out a nuanced, moderate position. He did not adopt the hardcore rationalism of Ahmad Khan, yet he was equally critical of the conservative attitudes of the Indian ulema. Politically, he rejected the secular nation-state ideal of the young Turks. At the other extreme were thinkers like Abu'l-Ala Maududi, who wanted to see the founding of explicitly Islamic states defined by their adherence to the religious law. Iqbal influenced Maududi with his idea that Islam can provide a political ideology, but unlike him insisted on the flexibility and adaptation of Islam to historical change and the character of each given community. So there you have it, Abdou and Iqbal, two of the leading thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And you know, I do believe they've put me in the mood to mention one more recent Muhammad, the Algerian Mohamed Arqoun, who died just recently in 2010. Arqoun had something in common with me. No, not because I've decided to change my first name to Muhammad, though now that I think about it Peter Chang has a nice ring to it. What I mean is that he was also a historian of philosophy in the Islamic world. He devoted particular attention to the ethicist and historian Miskawe, a contemporary of Avicenna's, who made an appearance in this podcast in episode 134. Arqoun took Miskawe to be a central figure in a humanist movement that took place in the Islamic world in the 10th and 11th centuries. Arqoun was not just a historian though. He was also an original philosopher in his own right, with an approach shaped by French philosophical culture. He held a professorship at the Sorbonne. Being of Berber background, and having a foot in both Algerian and French culture, Arqoun was intimately familiar with the experience of being an outsider. This, along with his study of the very different worldview he found in medieval authors like Miskawe, led him to reflect on the nature of religious and social identity. Arqoun thought that the answer lay in what he called the imaginaire, the images and concepts through which a group perceives reality. The imaginaire defines the boundaries of what is thinkable for the adherents of a religion or members of a society. By remaining within these boundaries, Muslims adhere to the orthodoxy that defines them as a group. That orthodoxy is not determined by the Qur'an. Rather, the revelation is in itself open-ended, subject to an indefinite range of interpretations. The limits imposed by orthodoxy close down alternative readings of the Qur'an, establishing a concrete set of laws, practices, and even a specific form of reasoning. Thus, Arqoun distinguishes between the Qur'anic revelation and the Islamic reality that is made out of it. Living in multicultural, colonialist, and post-colonialist societies, all three Muhammad's – Abdu, Iqbal, and Arqoun – struggled with this issue of religious identity. In their different ways, they all drew a distinction between the revelatory message brought by the Prophet Muhammad and what had been made out of that revelation in subsequent centuries. This has been true of other recent thinkers too. From the conservatives who have adopted Ibn Taymiyya's Salafism to feminists like Fatima Mernissi, many modern Muslim intellectuals have questioned tradition, paradoxically proposing to renew Islam by going back to its ultimate origins. Yet, thinkers who arose long ago in Islamic history have remained relevant. Abdu was steeped in the traditions of eviscerizing kalam, Iqbal endorsed the universalist vision of Shah Wali Allah, and Arqoun took inspiration from Miskawe's humanism. Many other thinkers have turned to Averroes, seeing him as the arch-rationalist of Islamic history. For instance, yet another Muhammad, the Moroccan thinker Muhammad al-Jaberi, who, like Arqoun, died in 2010. Already in the year 1902, in fact, Iqbal engaged in a debate with one of his contemporaries, who lamented the indifference with which Muslims had greeted Averroes. Other thinkers with great currency in modern-day Islam include Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun. But among all the historical figures we've met, one in particular has given rise to a vibrant, still-living philosophical tradition. And you'll never guess what his middle name was. Join me next time as we look at the legacy of Sadr-Ad-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi, better known as Mullah Sadr, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. |