Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (7 page)

THE RATIONALIST TRADITION:
THE MU
^c
TAZILA AND RA
Y

The Mu
^c
tazila moved the problem to the philosophical level, asking, What is the purpose of our existence on earth, and to what use should we put
^c
aql
_}
that marvelous gift from heaven? If God has created us intelligent, it is to carry out a plan. The rationalist opposition replaced the murder of the imam with the triumph of reason as the barrier against despotism. To achieve the ideal of the well- governed community, all the faithful must be enlisted as bearers of God’s most precious gift, the ability of the individual to think and analyze. By introducing reason into the political theater, the Mu
^c
tazila forced Islam to imagine new relationships between ruler and ruled, giving all the faithful an active part to play alongside the palace. Politics was no longer just a Kharijite duel between two actors, the imam and the rebel leader. A third element came on the scene: all believers who are capable of reasoning. The two conflicting trends within Islam, Kharijite rebels and Mu
^c
tazila philosophers, appeared on the scene very early and continued, under various names, to be active throughout Muslim history. Although their approaches differed, they shared one basic idea: the imam must be modest and must in no way turn to despotism. It was only on the subject of methods of realizing this ideal of the imamate that they diverged.

Both in the political theory of the imamate (the functioning of the institution) and in official Muslim history, the imam is weak. In theory obedience is required only if the imam follows the
shari
^c
a
which leads to happiness, harmony, and prosperity. In ancient Arabic
shara
^c
a
means “going toward the source of water,” that is, toward the element that assures life and renews energy.
¹⁵
But Islam is based on an absolute prohibition against confusing God with man, so the obedience owed to the imam must in no way be considered equal to that owed to God. The imam is never infallible in Sunni (orthodox) Islam. This is a fundamental difference between Sunni and Shi
^c
a. A Khomeini, an imam who claims to be infallible, a leader who cannot err, is not exportable to the lands of Sunni Islam. This does not mean that the regimes in power there and the fundamentalist opposition groups basing themselves on the sacred don’t dream of it. Certainly they fantasize about the extraordinary power of Imam Khomeini, but they cannot root that fantasy in any historical schema inherited from their ancestors, as can the Shi
^c
ites. From the beginning, the power of the Shi
^c
ite imam was quasi-supernatural, whereas Sunni Islam has been astonishingly pragmatic and hyper-rational. How is it possible to believe that a human being can avoid making mistakes?

The rationalist tradition of the Mu
^c
tazila triumphed and succeeded in burying a corrupt dynasty, the Umayyads, through the insistence on the preeminence of
^c
aql.
Unlikely as it seems, the Abbasids came to power riding the fiery steed of triumphant reason, which the Mu
^c
tazila proposed to a fantastic medieval Islam. Alas, very quickly the Abbasids fell into despotism, the Mu
^c
tazila became pariahs and
^c
aql
a shriveled exile, and the Muslim world rolled toward the precipice of mediocrity, where it now vegetates—in the mediocrity that is tacked on us as the essence of our “authenticity.”

How was it that politicians who fought against reason succeeded, and continue to succeed, in gutting one of the most promising religions in human history of its substance? The way of dissi- dence was prevalent within Islam from the beginning. But as intellectual opposition was repressed and silenced, only political rebellion and terrorism had any success, as we see so well today. Only the violence of the subversive could interact with the violence of the caliph. This pattern, which is found throughout Muslim history, explains the modern reality, in which only religious challenge preaching violence as its political language is capable of playing a credible role.

The Mu
^c
tazila intellectuals were not only philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, and astronomers; they were also Sufis, who found in religious texts everything they needed to bolster the idea of the thinking, responsible individual. It must be remembered that in the beginning scientific investigation was necessarily linked to the flowering of mystical reflection, in that the best homage one could render to God was the good use of one’s mind. The tension in Christianity in the early modern period between the church and scientific investigators, so well represented by Galileo’s fate, does not exist in Islam in normal times. Rather, political ambushes are artificially created in times of crisis, as in the threats against Rushdie or the condemnation of great thinkers like the Egyptian Taha Husayn in the period after World War II.

Abu Zahra has systematized the various divergences that occurred in Islam within three categories: the political category (he includes the Kharijites here); the legal category, which established four schools of law, the Maliki, Shafi
^c
i, Hanbali, and Hanafi; and the intellectuals, who focused on the very nature of belief, that is, the great philosophical questions like human destiny and the universe and its mysteries. He puts the Mu
^c
tazila in the last category.
¹⁶

One of the questions the Mu
^c
tazila debated, and which drew crowds, was the question of
qadar,
“predestination": are we free
(qadir)
to act and thus responsible for our fate, or is our destiny already fixed by God? One branch of the Mu
^c
tazila, the Qadiriyya, made this its central concern. Its adherents, the Qadiri, were “believers in free destiny, who thought that the human being was free to decide his own acts and so was responsible for everything he did, for evil as well as good.” If God has fixed the destiny of men, he is then responsible for the evil that exists on earth. Either man is free, or God is responsible for evil. But the latter proposition is impossible: “For if God created evil, he would be unjust.”
¹⁷

However philosophical they were, the Mu
^c
tazila found they couldn’t avoid politics. If one is a reasonable, responsible being, one can obey authority only under certain conditions, notably under conditions of popular representation. Any authority that does not come from the people does not bind their will:

The entry of the Mu
^c
tazila onto the political scene transformed and intellectualized it by bringing in new concepts: for example,
i
^c
tizal,
that is, taking a middle position, weighing the pros and cons. This issue was important because it brought up the question of tolerance. What should be done with a Muslim who commits a sin? Should one condemn him or take a middle position, a position of neutrality? The Mu
^c
tazila chose the second option—neutrality, and thus, tolerance. One cannot condemn someone without mature reflection on his conduct. This
xHizal
was the inevitable result of respect for reason. The obedience/revolt pattern of the Kharijites was replaced by another: obedience
(ta
^c
a)
/reason
(
^c
aql).
The Abbasids adopted the Mu
^c
tazila philosophy as their official doctrine for at least a century, the century of openness.
¹⁹
Openness meant embracing all human knowledge, including the scientific treatises and Greek philosophy now translated into Arabic.

Translation of the Greek humanistic heritage into Arabic started out as a government project under the caliph al-Ma
^c
mun and was carried on throughout the ninth century. Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (d. 873), a Christian, founded a school of translators which recruited its staff from among the most brilliant intellectuals of Baghdad and the whole empire. But they didn’t just translate the Hellenic heritage, as the Western stereotype depicts. They also turned to Iran and India to collect, translate, and synthesize everything that the genius of other cultures had accumulated before undertaking to augment and expand it. This importation and translation of foreign learning was enriched by original scholarship, producing the flowering of Muslim thought, which came to be known as
falsafa
(philosophy). Its practitioners, whether logicians, mathematicians, or physicians, were called
falasifa,
an all-inclusive term that later made their wholesale condemnation easy when the Abbasids succumbed to despotism and the cult of
ta
^c
a
relying only on the
ahl al-hadith
(Hadith people), religious authorities who stuck to a strict interpretation of the
shari
^c
a,
knowledge revealed in Arabic.
²⁰
Only this strictly limited interpretation, intended to affirm obedience as the main point, was fostered by the palace.

The activity of th
e falasifa
was called
kalam
(discussion), not only because it was based on the logical exposition of arguments, but also because these new ideas poured into the suqs and became a preoccupation of the masses. At the beginning of the ninth century the Mu
^c
tazila, with the blessing of the Abbasid court, orchestrated this scientific and speculative flowering. All the great names of scientific and philosophical learning belong to this era: al-Khwarizmi (d. 850), the father of algebra, a mathematician and astronomer; al-Kindi (d. 873), often called the first
faylasuf
(philosopher); al-Razi (d. 925), the great physician who was known in the West as Rhazes; al-Battani (d. 929), the father of trigonometry; and the metaphysician al-Farabi (d. 950), the author of
Al-madina alfadila
(The Virtuous City).

But very early the Abbasid dynasty, which took power carrying the torch of reason and mobilized the most brilliant minds among the Mu
^c
tazila to promote its propaganda, fell into palace intrigues. The result was that the opening to reason, personal opinion, and the cult of private initiative was condemned as a “foreign” enterprise. The
falasifa
were hunted down and the freethinkers condemned as infidels and atheists. To strengthen their despotic rule the Abbasids recruited their thinkers from the tradition of knowledge based on
tcfa,
banning reflection. This tradition is called the
shari
^c
a
creating the confusion that today blocks the democratic process by linking our blind obedience to the leader with our respect for religion. All calls for a rational relationship between the imam and his followers as well as any criticism of the leader are discredited as a rejection of Islam and a lack of respect for its principles and ideals. Thus in order to serve the needs of the Abbasid palace, the
shari
^c
a
was stripped of its questioning, speculative dimension. The imam became a violent, bloodthirsty despot, and only the Kharijite rebel tradition managed to continue to assert itself as a voice of opposition.

After condemning the Mu
^c
tazila as bearers of a foreign patrimony, the Abbasids of the period of despotism were assassinated by rebels from a Muslim
umma
cruelly deprived of
ra
^c
y,
the right to one’s own opinion. Greeks and Mu
^c
tazila became vermin that had to be wiped out. The Muslim world rumbled on toward obscurantism, with its enlightened intellectuals being systematically condemned and its people reduced to intellectual apathy. From then on, fanatical revolt was the only form of challenge which survived within a truncated Islam.

It is that Islam of the palaces, bereft of its rationalist dimension, that has been forced on our consciousness as the Muslim heritage today. It is that Islam of princes and hangmen that was reactivated after independence from colonialism in the 1940s through 1960s. Beginning in the 1970s, petrodollars financed the propaganda that encouraged submission and repudiated reflection. One of the immediate results of that financing was the sight of militant fundamentalists in the very heart of Saudi Arabia with the spectacular takeover of the Great Mosque of Mecca in November 1979 by the followers of Juhayman Ibn Muhammad al-
^c
Utaybi and Muhammad Ibn
^c
Abdal- lah al-Qahtani.
²¹
At the same time, the availability of oil money intensified the connection between official Islam, supported by the ideology of
ta
^c
a,
and militant Islam. The latter, the heir of the rebel fringe, the Kharijite reaction, is the inevitable offspring of official despotism disguising itself as obedience to the divine will.