For some years now, I've been involved in an academic inter-faith exercise that was originally sponsored by Lambeth Palace and really well supported by Rowan Williams but since his resignation as ABC, it has been run by Georgetown University. Here is the link for the Building Bridges seminar.
The original intention was for the seminar - which brings together around 15 or so Christian and a similar number of Muslim participants - to alternate between being convened in a 'Christian majority' and a 'Muslim majority' context; but in recent years the public events held in the latter which has basically been the Georgetown campus in Doha have been disappointing. One could spend some time analysing why that is the case - is interfaith 'mutual theologising' a concern of metropolitan western academia which has not equivalent elsewhere? Perhaps - and there are elements of how, despite our best efforts, there is a somewhat Protestant bias in what we do - the quasi-scriptural reasoning at the heart of much of our practice in small groups, for example. But there is little doubt that I've learnt much from the process and continue to do so - and it's fun engaging, disputing, arguing, theologising with some of the best theologians around such as Janet Soskice, John Milbank, Mona Siddiqui, Christoph Schwobel, Veli-Matti Karkkainen, Susan Eastman, Reza Shah-Kazemi and of course Rowan Williams himself. As well as hanging out with old friends who like myself prefer to define themselves as 'historians' like Feras Hamza, and biblical and Quranic scholars like Paul Joyce and Mehdi Azaiez.
This was the 15th instalment focused on Monotheism and its Complexities. I wasn't the only one who was concerned that such a topic could take a rather apologetic turn as a defence of the trinity. But in many ways the discussions were far more interesting than I had expected. The rich tradition of christology and the expositions and uses of the Trinity were set out for us by Schwobel. Richard Bauckham presented the Biblical texts and how the monotheism of Judaism was given a Christian reading and developed into a theology of three persons, one substance, with rather non-Aristotelian understandings of both key terms, Asma Afsaruddin presented the monotheism of the Qurʾan and hadith in her characteristically scholarly and rigorous manner, while I presented perhaps a rather complicated and complexifying reading of various arguments about the One True God in Islamic traditions, some tending towards the more transcendent theologically and others more mystically monistic.
At some point when the papers are ready for publication I will post mine on my academia.edu page. Suffice it to say that I did not help by sending one paper in and reading as a presentation something altogether a bit different and more engaged with contemporary usages of tawḥīd in Islamic discourses and trying to think through on my feet the ethical implications of the doctrine - the most difficult point being how do I square my own insistence upon the walāya and theosis (taʾalluh) centred doctrines and paths of what I consider Islam to be with our contemporary attempts at producing critical democratic understandings of faith?
Anyway, I look forward to many more years of such wonderful company and satisfying but also at times very cerebral working through key issues in our faiths. In particular, I have come to appreciate and love the Eastern Orthodox traditions and many elements of Catholic thought through these exercises and found a particular theological language for expressing my own ideas. It's always a pleasure to have the opportunity to think beyond the confines of my work as an intellectual historian and do more applied, interventionist work - doing the actual thinking and not just exegesis as a friend once put it.
Texts, Translations, Thoughts, Philosophy, Literature, Shi'i Islam, Urdu, Persian, Iran, India
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Introducing Philosophy in the Islamic World - brief but state of the art
Like many others, I am very much a fan of Peter Adamson's podcast the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps which is already the go to place for quick introductions to thinkers, problems and topics in philosophy including a large numbers of very useful episodes on Islamic philosophy.The two volumes on Classical and Hellenistic Philosophy have already appeared with Oxford and the volume on Islamic philosophy will appear later this year. There is little doubt that this endeavour fills in many gaps and gives us a richer, more textured and far more nuanced sense of the course of philosophy - understood in a more expansive sense - in the world of Islam.
Peter has also recently published a Very Short Introduction to Philosophy in the Islamic World.
It is good to see
this influential series of introductory texts expand their titles to include
more topics within the study of Islam. And for those of us animated by
intellectual history, this current offering by Peter Adamson is a welcome contribution indeed. Adamson
includes a short suggestion for reading and useful timeline that overlap with
his podcast and these represent the state of research and the most
instructive sources for a students seeking an entry into the study of
philosophy in Islam. This is essential because for too long students of the history of Islamic philosophy have had to rely upon survey works that are dated and involve questionable interpretations, sometimes far removed from the text and fail to take religion seriously. At the same time, shorter more thematic introductions tend to be either too general to be useful, seriously misleading for specialists, or textually unjustifiable.
The first question broached is exactly what do we call
this field of inquiry? For some time, the question of ‘Arabic’ versus ‘Islamic’
philosophy has been caught up in polemics which Adamson does not engage directly; his earlier Cambridge Companion opted for 'Arabic' philosophy which reflected the approach of many in that volume. The proponents of 'Arabic philosophy' have tended to insist on
the paradigm of Greek into Arabic and the need to stress the ‘secular’ pursuit
of the hellenizing falsafa tradition.
The latter tendency that prefers the appellation 'Islamic' insists upon the Qurʾanic, and sacred origins of the
philosophical pursuit of wisdom, and tends to face the problem of those Christian
and Jews who participated in the process. Arabic is also not terribly useful a
title as there were works of the tradition written in Persian and Ottoman among
other languages, and it tends to have a more narrow understanding of
philosophy. This issue of how much philosophy might engage and encompass is an open question particularly nowadays when issues of inclusivity and diversity are at the forefront and we wish to 'de-center' the European analytic tradition in favour of more expansive senses of philosophy. Recently, Peter Park has raised the question - usually articulated in 'cultural studies' and not philosophy - of the racism inherent in the activity of philosophising and marginalising Africa and Asia. Mohammad Azadpur has a broadly welcoming review here. Another positive review by Peter Fenves is here.
But returning to the debate on naming the field, Adamson, correctly to my mind, insists upon a more expansive sense
of philosophy that takes religion seriously and see philosophy beyond the
narrow ‘generic’ confines of falsafa.
In fact, much of the philosophy in the world of Islam did not conform to the falsafa paradigm. They tended to prefer the term ḥikma, synonymous with falsafa in the early period, but even then through a translation of Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic aware of the difference of the pursuit of the love of wisdom and sagacity itself. The latter traditions - what is commonly called post-classical now - preferred the term because it was rooted in the Qurʾan's own usage and because it suggested what was beyond the merely ratiocinative. For Adamson, even more significant
– and consistent with the current trend in the field – is his desire to extend
the study of the post-classical into the modern period; for too long,
historians have considered philosophy in the world of Islam to be a purely
marginal and historically distant phenomenon – even when most of us no longer
think the endeavour came to and end in the West with Averroes, the emphasis on falsafa has tended not to take the
developments further East in exegesis too seriously, partly misled to the
‘Islamic philosophy’ proponents who have at times promoted later thought as
primarily mystical or arational or even illuminationist in its essence.
The main text is
divided into six chapters: a historical preliminary followed by discussions on
reason and revelation, God and being, eternity, knowledge, and ethics and
politics. To an extent the choices emerge out of the history of the study of
the field, its old transposition of the medieval problem of reason versus
revelation and the assumption of the fatal nature of the attack of al-Ghazālī
on three critical doctrines of the falāsifa
seem to remain in the background. The historical chapter begins with the
translation movement and the early theological discussions of the Muʿtazila
inspired by Hellenic thought through to the centrality of Avicenna and his
reception through to the middle period developments and all the way into the
modern period with the re-emergence of European influence in modern thinking in
the likes of Iqbāl and others. Along the way every major thinker is checked and
some particular issues isolated for grey box discussion that show the
relationship between philosophy and the other disciplines in Islamic culture –
critical because philosophy was not as marginal as previously thought. It is thoroughly refreshing to see an account that puts philosophy back in its proper place!
The
second chapter does not engage in the medieval polemics that one might think from the title of reason and revelation.
Instead it is divided into three sections: the first of reason as a standard of
argumentation that we call logic, the second on the supremacy of reason engages
with the arguments on the superiority of philosophy over religion in the
thought of al-Fārābī and Averroes, and the third on the limits of reason begins
with al-Ghazālī’s internal critique followed by the expanding role of mysticism
and non-propositional thought culminating in the more holistic approach to
knowledge and the life of the mind in Mullā Ṣadrā. Chapter three moves onto the
proofs for the existence of God beginning with theological accounts and the
most successful proof for God as the necessary existence in Avicenna and then
the rise of monism in the later period. As Ian Netton suggested some time ago in his Allah Transcendent, the typology of proofs for the existence of God, or the very understanding of the nature of God, in the world of Islam shifted from a creator ex nihilo whose existence can be deduced from a contemplation of the cosmos and its design (and indeed the structure of the human body as microcosm) to Avicenna's rational ontological proof through to the radically monistic singular Being of Ibn ʿArabī.
The next chapter engages with the
problem of time and eternity and includes the famous attempt by Mīr Dāmād to
reconcile creation ex nihilo with an
eternal instrumentalist universe in favour of a model that is strikingly similar to Suarez's middle knowledge and which engages the famous Shiʿi notion of how it appears to us that God changes his mind or his decree (this latter is not in the chapter but can be analysed elsewhere in my own work, not least in my forthcoming chapter on Mīr Dāmād in the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy).
The fifth chapter on knowledge deals with it
as a state of being in the soul and includes discussions of the Avicennan
account of the stages of the intellect and the internal senses and the
distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and by presence. A critical box
within it presents the way to understand the problem of God’s knowledge of
particulars, within its Aristotelian context. Later thinkers worked outside of it through reorienting knowledge towards what the ancients called the 'identity' thesis of the intellecting subject and object. The final chapter on ethics and politics begins with the reception
of the tradition of the Nicomachean
Ethics and the Iranian tradition of ethics and statecraft but moves onto
Ibn Khaldūn’s theories on society and state and more modern reformist
discourses including feminism.
The main conclusion
of this brief whirlwind tour of philosophical reasoning in the world of Islam
is not only to insist that philosophy played a vital role in Muslim societies
and cultures but also to suggest that a more expansive sense of what is
philosophy. While retaining its significance for our modern engagements with
philosophy, Adamson allows us to see the course of philosophical reasoning in a
variegated mode in different contexts all the way up to our own times. Critics
will quibble about the lacunae and the choices of discussion but there is
little doubt that the volume represents the wide contours of interests in
Anglophone writings on philosophy in the Islamic world. This short introduction
will be invaluable for students of the study of Islam and also those interested
in contemporary trends in the study of inter-cultural philosophy and the
history of philosophy. What is now needed is a collaborative effort to produce
a new far more comprehensive history of philosophy in the world of Islam that
adequately grapples with the complexities and the varieties and builds upon the
growing picture of the intellectual history of Islam that we now possess.We need a fuller picture - warts and all - and the critical, the rational and the arational, with more careful consideration for the texts and the many 'minor' figures that animated the tradition and defined philosophy for their times even if we have forgotten who they were.
Avicennism, the Problem of the Intellect and Cross-Cultural Philosophy
Recently on the pages of the New York Times, in their philosophy blog The Stone, there was an interesting piece about the parochial nature of many anglo-American analytic philosophy departments. See here for the piece. Jay Garfield, an eminent specialist in Buddhist philosophy in particular, and Bryan van Norden, equally significant in the study of Chinese philosophy, raised the barely hidden secret of the problem of diversity in philosophy as a discipline. What this demonstrates is that those trained in analytic methods are perfectly capable of engaging in other traditions and considering the question of what constitutes a cultural tradition of philosophy. But not always so. Similarly those of us engaged in the study of philosophy in Islamic contexts need to take our field of inquiry out of the ghetto of Islamic studies and oriental studies.
It is in this context that one of the most exciting works of recent times has been penned by Mohammad Azadpur, professor at San Francisco State University, on a novel way of reading the work of the eminent medieval Islamic thinker Abū ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037): Reason Unbound.
Azadpur has written
an engaging and quite bold intervention in the ‘Avicenna’ debate. Should one
read Avicenna as a mystagogue, a Sufi with a deep commitment to philosophy as a
religious way of life in which he privileges mystical intuition over discourse
and ratiocination, or is Avicenna merely the foremost empirical rationalist of
the Islamic tradition, a Locke before his time? Each of these positions tends
to gloss over the specifics of the Avicennan texts and has a complicated
relationship with the commentary traditions upon his work, in particular the Shifāʾ and the Ishārāt which remained the primary school texts in the madrasa
curriculum of the Islamic East until the colonial period. Aligned to these
‘extreme’ positions is a question of method: how and to what end should be
study Avicenna? Are we interested in Avicenna as a pivotal moment in the
history of philosophy and hence we ought to adopt the methods of intellectual
history or at least medieval philosophy (the Greek into Arabic into Latin
approach) or should we engage with him as a philosopher or at least as a
thinker, perhaps even a sage? Both the title of the book as well as Azdapur’s
very first sentence make his approach quite clear: ‘Reason unbound’ suggests
that a ratiocinative approach to thought in Avicenna is impoverished, and his
desire to read Avicenna is motivated by the need to understand the modern
reception of Avicenna and its importance for a critique of modern Western
philosophy’. Therefore what is at stake is the definition of philosophy as such
– and the way in which he draws in a qualified sense upon the reading of Pierre
Hadot is clear – as well as a critique of Western metaphysics particularly
through the prism of Heidegger’s work. While this might to an extent accord
with Christian Jambet’s recent and important intervention on the nature of
philosophy in Islam (Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie islamique, Gallimard, 2011), it is certainly discordant with
other recent work on Avicenna such as Interpreting
Avicenna edited by Peter Adamson (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Therefore,
for philosophers interested in cross-cultural and comparative philosophy, it is
quite a thought-provoking contribution, which was debated in Comparative Philosophy volume 3 issue 2
in 2013, with contributions from Sarah Pessin, a specialist on Neoplatonism,
Nader el-Bizri, a Heideggerian who works on Avicenna and classical Arabic
philosophy and science, and Therese Cory, a specialist on medieval philosophy.
Pessin wonders whether the ‘Thomist’ assumptions of much reading of Islamic
philosophy is not just being supplanted by another and wonders about the role
of taʾwīl (about which Azadpur says
little). El-Bizri is broadly receptive and impressed with the desire to reflect
upon the spiritual in philosophy. Cory puts him in dialogue with medieval
theories of cognition and worries about philosophical elitism.
Drawing upon Hadot’s
paradigm of philosophy as a way of life and a set of spiritual exercises (and
one should remember John Cooper’s caveat that Hadot’s universalization of a
position from a rather slender textual basis). Azadpur argues that the Islamic
Peripatetic project initiated by al-Fārābī and Avicenna continues the late
antique (à la Hadot) conception of philosophy with the modification that the
cultivation of the soul/self – what Foucault influenced by Hadot called le souci de soi – culminated in a
psychological account of the nature of prophecy. In that sense philosophy in
Islamic Peripateticism was ‘prophetic’. Central to this prophetic turn was not
just an ethical commitment to virtue as knowledge (itself blandly an
Aristotelian observation) but also a process of taʾwīl or art of interpretation of the scripture in the direction
of philosophical reasoning. Since the philosophical care of the soul culminated
in prophecy, it was the latter that bridged not just the divine with the human
(since it was through prophets that theologically speaking God spoke to humans
and made a certain vision of reality communicable and concrete) but also the
rational with the supra-rational or the discursive with the intuitive. This
leads to the critique of Western philosophy through Heideggerian phenomenology:
the mind is directly (contra Kant’s denial of unmediated experience) linked to
the world and the role of philosophy is to clear obstacles that may cloud the
mind’s awareness of its context. Whether this necessarily avoids both
foundational epistemology (in the way critiqued famously by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) or
naïve realism are questions that, perhaps, remain. It does, however, suggest
how a reading via Hadot of the sources can accord with a Heideggerian
understanding of reality.
After the
introduction, Azadpur presents five chapters or steps of his argument and a
conclusion. The introduction itself is a rather straightforward presentation of
Hadot and a critique of existing approaches to the study of Islamic
peripateticism: first, he raises the well known critique of Straussian esoteric
reading in which it is assumed that philosophy in a religious context exists in
a hostile environment and hence thinkers needed to be very careful in their
formulation; second, what I would call the Greek into Arabic approach or
perhaps now the ‘Gutas’ school which considers Avicenna to be a rationalist par
excellence, a Muslim by accident; third, he also disagrees with Nasr’s
consideration that the Peripatetics divorced theory from practice. In all of
this, Azadpur is influenced by a well-known article of Muhsin Mahdi (published
in the pages of this journal), interestingly himself a Straussian, on how much
of the study of Islamic philosophy is motivated by Orientalist categories of
thought and approach. So far, so fairly straightforward: the key issue of
contention is rationality and the notion of philosophy. In chapter two he turns
of Corbin and Heidegger (via MacDowell and Dreyfus) on phenomenology and the
problem of how to access ‘das Ding an sich’. The turn to things in themselves
is also a turn to oneself and a more reflective consideration of one’s context
and involvement in the world, in being. Authenticity is merely a recognition of
this awareness and one avoids naïve realism because that awareness does not
commit oneself to the ‘myth of the given’: MacDowell’s form of realism posits
not only that we construct the world we inhabit through our conceptions but
also that the conceptual scheme in part of the world that we inhabit and in
effect makes us. Chapter three starts from this ethical consideration and turns
towards the technologies of the self in the thought of al-Fārābī and Avicenna.
They began with the ethical understanding and indeed end of philosophy – the
acquisition of eternal felicity pertaining to the existence of a soul – and
through the account of intellection (and the transcendent role of the active
intellect) to the culmination of the psychological account of prophecy. It is
therefore the Prophet’s ability and perfection of the soul, which presents an
exemplar for the philosopher of what is possible. It also demonstrates how
thought is not just ratiocination but also imagination (itself the highest
faculty of the intellect) as evident in the practice of the Prophet. Spiritual
exercises play a role in the cultivation. The next chapter moves onto the
examination of the notion of imagination and poesis (through the prophet) as a
critique of Kant. He wants the intellect to discipline the imagination in order
to receive the epiphany of the ‘spiritual realm’. Contra Kant, he wants the intellect to be more than a mere producer
of knowledge; it must prepare and discipline imagination to receive the forms
from the angelic realm/the active intellect. Chapter five gives a case study of
how this works in Avicenna’s famous exegesis on the light verse that engages
Ghazālī’s famous critique of Peripateticism and his eventual embrace of it.
Chapter six brings us back to Heideggerian phenomenology. This involves a
rehearsal of the metaphysics of the rational soul in Avicenna and in particular
his famous flying human thought experiment. The function of the flying human is
to make the subject aware of herself – and self-awareness is central to
Heidegger’s involvement in being. This is why one needs Prophets and human
exemplars to show us the work; that plays the role of Heidegger’s (in Corbin’s
terms) being-towards-beyond-death.
In his conclusion,
he returns to the importance of Peripateticism as an antidote to notions in
modern philosophy that reduce philosophising to rational naturalism – though
that already exists in various modes of the continental tradition. In effect,
Azadpur is supporting the argument of the Corbin school that Islamic philosophy
and its critique is more at home with the holistic, agonistic, being-centred
continental traditions of philosophy as opposed to the hard ‘rationalism’ of
the anglo-American analytic tradition (if increasingly in these times, it makes
any sense to perpetuate such a clear division). The second conclusion is that
Peripateticism’s care of the self and holistic approach to theory and practice
is actually continued in later Islamic philosophy: philosophy as the practice
of hermeneutic spiritual exercises is central to the tradition from Suhrawardī
and beyond. If anything the phenomenology and prophetological approach to
spiritual exercises was more explicit in Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā. While
Azadpur presents a new long tradition of Islamic thought, I would tend to break
down and emphasise the discontinuities as well not least because the thinkers
themselves saw it that way. Suhrawardī explicitly considered himself to be
reviving Plato and critiquing the wrong ‘rational’ turn of Avicenna, and his
own commentators such as Ibn Kammūna thought they were engaged in a ‘new
philosophy’. Similarly Mullā Ṣadrā’s approach while committed to philosophy as
a way of life, also considers Avicenna to have failed in that endeavour (in
fact there is more continuity with al-Fārābī whose Epistle on the Intellect as well as the pseudo-Fārābian Fuṣūṣ fī-l-ḥikma and al-Jamʿ bayn raʾyay al-ḥakīmayn play an
important role in Mullā Ṣadrā’s corpus).
Ultimately this is the work of someone interested deeply in comparative
philosophy or the philosophical enterprise as such – and perhaps the very
notion that one cannot do philosophy without a more global approach that takes
in different traditions. Therefore one cannot understand Heidegger or Kant
without Avicenna and Suhrawardī. The study of philosophy, which for most of us
means the Anglo-American (post-)analytic traditions, therefore requires that one engage in the
non-Western to refine and calibrate our very sense of the philosophical quest. Henry Corbin
would certainly have approved.