25
November 2006
Why the clergy has made our heroes our heretics?
Our heroes are our heretics!
One
needs to look at the reasons why the entrenched clergy from the very beginning
of Islam to present day has always frowned at any attempt of "enlightened
moderation." Those who meditated science and logic came up with a lot of
questions and those questions are more often than not nipped in the bud.
Decline of the Islamic golden age was due to supremacy and ascendancy of dogma
over rationalism – for example, the lack of separation between faith and reason
– that is why the Muslim Arab world fell into scientific slumber just as the
Christian world woke up. Internecine wars, infighting and murder of rationalism
were the main causes for the decline of Islam. It is often disputed why Muslims
being 19.6% of the world's population, i.e. 2 billion, only have three Nobel
laureates in Science and literature, whereas Jews being only 0.2% of the
world's population, i.e. 14.1 million, have received 122 Nobel prizes in
science, economics, medicine and literature.
Islam's
vanished golden era cannot be treated in an academic vacuum. In a patent
symptom of dismissive generalization, noted clerics make sweeping statements
like "Muslims could regain their lost place with the promotion of book
reading culture, as distance from knowledge caused downfall of the Muslims in
the world." Everyone seems to mourn the lost glory; however the real
excruciating causes of decline are rarely argued. Rationalism was an essential
inclination amid the Muslim thinkers during the Golden Age of Islam; it was
toleration of ideas in which the so-called golden age of Islam flourished.
Thinkers then were more led by their own conscience than any provincial dogma,
a belief system they might have inherited from their ancestors. Decreed by the
Koran to seek knowledge and enthused by the riches of ancient Greek knowledge,
Muslims created a civilization that in the Middle Ages was the scientific
centre of the world. Jews, Christians and Muslims all contributed in this
flowering of knowledge and thinking, which lasted for at least 500 years and
covered the region from Spain to Persia.
Muslims
have not come out of emptiness; they incorporate values of spirit and
civilisations of that of Pharaohs, Hellenistic and Zoroaster; it is a
combination of all these that helped a great era of renaissance that was nipped
in the bud. The spirit of Greek science, literature and philosophy fell into
the hands of Muslims. With the conquest of Persia, the treasure chest of
knowledge of old twin civilisations—Byzantines and the Sassanids—had fallen in
the hands of the Arab armies. Instead of burning them, they made these
treasures the mainstay of their governance. In the spring of 633 CE, a grandson
of Khosrau called Yezdegerd, ascended the throne, and in that same year the
first Arab squadrons made their first raids into Persian territory. It is
believed that Greco-Rome is the origin of civilization, but it was the Iranian
civilization that was much older than that of Rome and was at par with Greece
in its richness, and that Iran made no less contribution to the historical and
cultural progress of the entire world. It was the Arabs' integration of cradles
of eastern civilisations that spewed elite luminaries responsible for the
enlightenment of an era. This from Saadi could not have come from intellectual
vacuum of minds; it was the embodiment of thousand of years of rich culture
with rationalist and logical Hellenistic thoughts combined with the liberty to
seek new frontiers of knowledge that led Saadi to say:
"The
sons of Adam are limbs of one another having been created of one essence. When
the calamity of time afflicts one limb, the other limbs cannot remain at
rest."
Maybe
enlightened and freed minds from dogma had a lot to do with discerning new
frontiers of science and technology; a closed mind's progress is arrested;
limitations of surroundings inundated by puritanical doctrine kills independent
investigation. Undoubtedly if Nobel Prize had existed 1400 years ago, Muslims
would have scored very highly in many fields. Islam did give to science
(790-850) Khwarizmi, (800- 860) Jawhari, (805-873) Kindi, (870-950) Farabi,
(920-980) Uqlidisi, (953-1029) Karaji, (965-1039) Haitam, (970-1036) Mansur,
(980-1037) Avicenna, (973-1048) Biruni, (1048-1122) Khayyam.
It
is most heart rending to see that Muslim Arabs who took over the introductory
effort done by the Greeks and Hindus in algebra produced the ultimate
algebraist Khowarizmi (9th century - his name is commemorated in the word
"algorithm;" his major work was entitled "jabr
wa'lmugabalah" (restoration and balancing) and from the first word in this
title we now have the word "algebra"), Ibn-Rushd (Averroës),
Ibn-Hayan (Geber), Ibn-Haytham (Al Hazen), and others, have had no prizes in
science or medicine. From 735 to 1300 the field of literature, sciences and
philosophy was definitely dominated by the regions under the influence of
Islam.
It
was this broad assortment of philosophers and thinkers that served as the
canvass of medieval Islamic conquerors. Customarily, Islam encouraged science
and learning because nomads of the Arab peninsula as conquerors were not bogged
down with dogma; their minds were like fresh slates, liberated from dogma of
their systems, the conquered reared a new breed of thinkers; Al-Razi, poet
Al-Ma'arri surfaced as new rationalists. A vacuum of knowledge or lack of free
thought could not have produced so many in the age of darkness. It was the
marriage of civilisations that made populace culturally and knowledge wise so
rich. All these philosophers owed their past to rich Hellenistic-Zoroastrian
and affluence of three monolithic religions. It was later infusion of this
crossbred multifaceted knowledge into Western Europe that stimulated the
"Renaissance" and the scientific revolution. Recent world events
belie the image cast on Islam's rich intellectual history; this rich
intellectual history credits its origins to intercourse of ideas between three
great civilisations – the Hellenistic, the Zoroastrians and the civilisation of
collective religions. The invading desert Arabs, free from intellectual
fixations and unspoiled with predetermined ideas, incorporated essential truths
of the three monolithic religions of God, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Impacts
of the Prophet's Armies emanating from a barren land to rekindle a new thought
were enormous, not just for Islam, but for Europe and the world. The conquerors
emerging form the barren heartland of Rub-ul-khali had to confront the riches
of the knowledge of the twin civilisations of the Byzantine and Sassanids who,
as conquered, laid open to new conquerors. The largely illiterate Muslim
conquerors turned to the local intelligentsia to help them govern, in the
process, they absorbed Greek learning; the West in those times had a slim
account of Greek knowledge. The knowledge was later translated into Latin by
Arabs who immersed themselves in Greek. Hellenistic culture had been spread
eastward by the armies of Alexander the Great so, in effect, it was an
"education jihad" – a campaign among all the Muslim countries to
strive for excellence in literacy and education in modern science. Dr.
Mahathir, truly a visionary leader, highlights that the early Muslims were
great scholars who excelled in math and the sciences and that today they must
inculcate toleration and rationalism required for the seed of knowledge.
The
Arabic language was synonymous with learning and science for 500 hundred years,
a golden age that can count among its credits the precursors to modern
universities, algebra, and the names of the stars and even the notion of science
as an empirical inquiry. Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because
there was within Islam a strong rationalist tradition, carried on by a group of
Muslim thinkers known as the Mutazilites. This tradition stressed human free
will, strongly opposing the predestinarians who taught that everything was
foreordained and that humans have no option but to surrender everything to
Allah. Under the Mutazilites 'enlightened moderation,' knowledge grew. These
rationalistic customs confronted its reverse when in the twelfth century,
Muslim conventional Puritanism reawakened that was led by Ghazali who
championed revelation over reason, predestination over free will. The Imam
described mathematics and medicine as Fard-E-Kefaya; he decisively placed those
as secondary to religious-ilm. It's ironical that with the kind of Muslim
thinkers we had in the past, many of today's Muslim orthodox model themselves
on perhaps Ghazali, and none on any of the great Muslim rationalists such as
Al-Raazi, Al Ma'ari, Omar Khayyam.
The
philosophical ideas that al-Ghazali was attacking were the ideas of Avicenna
and Farabi, some of which came from Aristotle while the majority came from
Plato and Plotinus. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980-1037), is one of the foremost
philosophers of the golden age of Islamic tradition that also includes Farabi
and Ibn Rushd. He is also known as al-Sheikh Rais (Leader among the wise men),
a title that was given to him by his students. His philosophical works were one
of the main targets of Ghazali's attack on philosophical influences in Islam.
In the west, he is also known as the "Prince of Physicians" for his
famous medical text Qanun "Canon". In Latin translations, his works
influenced many Christian philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas. The spread
of Hellenistic philosophy in the Muslim world would be first expounded on by
the first Arabic philosopher Kindi (800-865). He wrote many works on Greek
science and philosophy. He laid the foundation for others to follow in studying
philosophical works. His main contribution was the firm conviction that Greek
heritage contained important truths that Muslims could not afford to overlook.
As a mathematician he realized the importance of Aristotelian Logic. Farabi's
ideal rulers would be chosen for their intelligence and carefully educated in
science, philosophy and religion. According to Farabi, the best ruler for this
Muslim state would be a "philosopher-king", a concept described in
Plato's Republic. One of the most important contributions of Farabi, beyond his
political views and scientific philosophies, was to make the study of logic
easier by dividing it into two categories - Takhayyul (idea) and Thubut
(proof). He wrote several sociological books, including his famous work - Ara
Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila (The Model City). His books on psychology and
metaphysics were largely based on his own work. His interests in philosophy,
science and politics were greatly influenced by his teachers and travel.
Farabi's
father was of Persian! origin and was an army commander in the Turkish court.
Razi was perhaps the greatest freethinker in the whole of Islam, and the
greatest physician of the Islamic world and one of the great physicians of all
time. Razi was the native of Rayy (near Tehran), where he studied mathematics,
philosophy, astronomy and literature, and, perhaps, alchemy. Later, he went to
Baghdad where he studied medicine.
Modern
Nobel laureates within the world of Islam refer to Abul-'Alaa', Ma'ari,
Avicenna or Farabi, Khayyam or Razi in their Nobel addresses; these
rationalists of Islam are nearly forgotten in the maddarassas. The history of
the philosophical debate that was started by al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd would
continue at the hands of authors in the Islamic East in general, and in the
Ottoman lands after the eclipse of the Muslim rule of Andalusia. In fact the
famed sultan, Mehmet II ( a.k.a. fatih [conqueror] r.(1451-1481), ordered two
of the empires' scholars to compile books to summarize the debate between
Ghazali and Ibn Rushd. Both of these works have been published one of which in
a critical edition. This part of history needs yet to be written, but there are
no takers yet. Orthodoxy in Islam rarely allows the treatise of Ibn Sina
(Avicenna) (980-1037), Kindi (800-865 and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to become the
syllabus of mainstream thought process. A talib rarely knows about the real
heroes of Islam; only in a selective reverence we refer to Avicenna and
Averroes, but their thinking is not part of the Islamic milieu. We own them as
success of Islam but we down their thoughts. If Avicenna and Averroes's
thinking were to be the dialogue within Islam, the sun of the golden era would
have never set. We cannot cite Khayyam as an example of a great poet and
completely forget the message he gave. We may disagree with him, but
introduction of his thinking will help us to determine what pluralism is all
about. These thinkers of the golden era need to be revived and their books
should form an integral part of our academia. Khayyam is described as an
atheist, philosopher, and naturalist. The constant themes of Khayyam's poetry
are the certainty of death, the pointlessness of asking unanswerable questions,
the
mysteriousness
of the universe, and the necessity of living for and enjoying the present. This
is clearly reflected in the following verses taken from Rubaiyat:
"...How
much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting? Better go drunk and begging
round the taverns. Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yours will make a
cup, bowl, one day a jar...."
Professor
Ahmed H. Zewail, the only Arab to ever win a Nobel prize for science and, since
the death of the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, the only one among the 1.2
billion Muslims with that honor, quoted Dr. Taha Hussein in his Nobel
acceptance speech and said: "The end will begin when seekers of knowledge
become satisfied with their own achievements." Unfortunately the embryonic
renaissance in the late 700's to 1300 of Islam was not extinguished by the
satisfaction of its scientist's queries, rather it was killed on the altar of
dogma. Abdus Salam once wrote: "The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on
the verities of Allah's created laws of nature; however, that our generation
has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for
which I render thanks with a humble heart." Sad and tragic is the reality
that this scion of Pakistan was not allowed to be buried in his homeland. His
has been one of the most touching speeches; an orphaned son of a nation thanked
the luminaries on behalf of a nation who had disowned him.
"...
I thank the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Academy of Sciences for the great
honor and the courtesies extended to us, including the courtesy to me of being
addressed in my language Urdu. Pakistan is deeply indebted to you for this. The
creation of Physics is the shared heritage of all mankind. East and West, North
and South have equally participated in it. In the Holy Book of Islam, Allah
says:
'Thou
seest not, in the creation of the All-merciful any imperfection, Return thy
gaze, seest thou any fissure. Then Return thy gaze, again and again. Thy gaze,
Comes back to thee dazzled, aweary.'"
On
the global stage, it is these heretical scientists disowned by us who have
earned the greatest respect for Islam and not the orthodox clergy.
Historically, we have distorted our real heroes into heretics, and the
witch-hunt still continues. Dr. Abdus Salam is not the only one treated as a
heretic, we have the modern rationalist, Naguib Mahfouz – Nobel laureate in
literature. Citation of his work, 'Awlad Haratina,' in the Swedish Academy's
declaration of award of the Nobel Prize to Mahfouz in 1988 greatly angered the
Islamicists. His novel appeared in English under the title, "The Children
of Gebelawi." Shortly after the eruption of the Rushdie affair, the
leading 
fundamentalist, Omar Abd al-Rahman currently
imprisoned in the US for his role in the attack on the World Trade
Centre—declared that if they had killed Mahfouz in 1959 for writing 'The
Children of Our Alley,' Rushdie would never have dared write his novel. This
was taken as a fresh fatwa to kill Mahfouz. In 1994 an attempt on his life
failed, although the assassin plunged a dagger into his neck, leaving him
paralysed in his right arm. The crime of association of present day heroes of
Islam with their past intellectual ancestors have marginalised them. It was
same Mahfouz who presented the case of his twin civilisations so adequately in
the august forum of 'Swedish academy of sciences' and quoted great Muslim
rationalist poet Abul-'Alaa' Ma'ari, who was a supreme rationalist and asserted
everywhere "the rights of reason against the claims of custom, tradition
and authority."
Mahfouz said:
Permit
me, to present myself in as objective a manner as is humanly possible. I am the
son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy
marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic
civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic
one. One day the great Pyramid will disappear too. But Truth and Justice will
remain for as long as Mankind has a ruminative mind and a living conscience.
I
will, instead, introduce that civilization in a moving dramatic situation
summarizing one of its most conspicuous traits: In one victorious battle
against Byzantium it has given back its
prisoners
of war in return for a number of books of the ancient Greek heritage in
philosophy, medicine and mathematics. This is a testimony of value for the
human spirit in its demand for knowledge, even though the demander was a
believer in God and the demanded a fruit of a pagan civilization.
It
was my fate, ladies and gentlemen, to be born in the lap of these two
civilizations, and to absorb their milk, to feed on their literature and art.
The truth of the matter is that Evil is a loud and boisterous debaucherer, and
that Man remembers what hurts more than what pleases. Our great poet
Abul-'Alaa' Ma'ari was right when he said: "A grief at the hour of death
is more than a hundred-fold Joy at the hour of birth."
Nearly
a century later after Al Ghazali, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) made desperate efforts
to resist the trend by refuting al-Ghazali's Tahafut in his Tahafut tahafut
(The Incoherence of the Incoherence) and Fasl al-maqal (The Decisive Treatise),
but he could not stop it. Islam choked in the vice-like grip of orthodoxy. No
longer, as during the reign of the dynamic caliph al-Mamun and the great Haroon
Rashid, would Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars gather and work together
in the royal courts. It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the
Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al Rahman ibn Khaldun,
belonged to the fourteenth century." The Ashariyya led by Ghazali and Rumi
rejected the rationalists Mutazilis whom, in theirview, had forsaken religion
and had detracted from God and His revelation. In absence of Ashariyya, our history
might have evolved differently. When Ibn Khaldun in his 'Introduction in
absence' (Mogadameh) mentioned that Africans are black because of geographical
and environmental conditions, it was the Ashariyya who ended such scientific
observations by declaring people are black because God created them as such.
When Physicians tried to find the connection between the brain and hand's
movements, it was Ghazali who mocked scientific inquiry and stated "hands
move because God wants them to move" (Alchemy of Happiness, Kimiyaya
Saadat).
What
is more important is to know what happened to the Muslim world, why did it set
off into a self-destructive dichotomy leading to a coiled decline from 14th
century onward that it was and is unable to resolve. From a genetic point of
view, Muslim is no different from anyone else. Historically, of course, Arabs
and Muslims in Spain and Arabia were at the peak of their civilization when
so-called Christian Europe was in the Dark Ages. No doubt, without the Arab
scholarly works and translations from Greek philosophy to their original work
in astronomy, European development might not have taken place for another 500
years. Later it was Arab translations of the Greek manuscripts into Latin
interlaced with rich interpretations of 5000 years old civilisation that bred
philosophers like the 10th and 11th centuries of great thinkers, who strode the
East: Abu Ali Hasan ibn Haytham, also known as hazen; (a physicist, b. 965,
Iraq), Abu Rayham Muhammad al-Biruni; Biruni (astronomer, mathematician and
geographer,b. 973), and Abu Ali Hussein Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna (also
known as Avicenna, a physician and philosopher b. 981), Razi, (865-925),
Haytham Sufi (astronomer, 903-986), poet Umar Khayyam (1048-1131), poet Ma'arri
(973-1058 C.E.)
When
Prophet's Armies emerged from Arabian isthmus, seizing territory from Spain to
Persia, they took possession of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras,
Archimedes, and other Greek thinkers. One of the prime reasons attributed to
Muslims' intellectual enhancement throughout the middle ages is the
considerable contact of Greek rationalistic Philosophy on Muslim intellectuals.
Scholars say science found such goodwill in medieval Islam for numerous
reasons. Part of the charisma was based on experience of the unity of creation
that was the essential meaning of Islam. Moreover as a result of the influence
of Greek philosophy, the vast majority of the Muslim intellectuals of the
middle Ages preferred reason over faith as a guiding philosophy.
It
is this interaction with our rich past, which makes our present day heroes
associate themselves with the rationalists of the past. Shirin Ebadi in Iran is
another Nobel laureate suffering at the hands of the radicals. Shirin Abadi,
Islam's most famous daughter and a Nobel Prize winner in her speech to accept
the prize referred to her rich cultural integration with Islam. She said,
"Allow
me to say a little about my country, region, culture and faith. I am an
Iranian. A descendent of Cyrus The Great. The Charter of Cyrus the Great is one
of the most important documents that should be studied in the history of human
rights. I am a Muslim. In the Koran the Prophet of Islam has been cited as
saying: "Thou shalt believe in thine faith and I in my religion". That
same divine book sees the mission of all prophets as that of inviting all human
beings to uphold justice. Since the advent of Islam, too, Iran's civilization
and culture has become imbued and infused with humanitarianism, respect for the
life, belief and faith of others, propagation of tolerance and compromise and
avoidance of violence, bloodshed and war. The luminaries of Iranian literature,
in particular our Gnostic literature, from Hafiz, Mowlavi [better known in the
West as Rumi] and Attar to Saadi, Sanaei, Naser Khosrow and Nezami, are
emissaries of this humanitarian culture."
Prof.
Ahmad Zewail's use of the fast laser technique can be likened to Galilei's use
of his telescope, which he directed towards everything that lit up the vault of
heaven. Zewail tried his femtosecond laser on literally everything that moved
in the world of molecules. He turned his telescope towards the frontiers of
science. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry because he was the first
to conduct experiments that clearly show the decisive moments in the life of a
molecule – the breaking and formation of chemical bonds. He has been able to
see the reality behind Arrhenius' theory. His acceptance speech like Ebadi's
referred to his richness of twin civilisations that of Islam and Egyptian.
"Let
me begin with a reflection on a personal story, that of a voyage through time.
The medal I received from his Majesty this evening was designed by Erik
Lindberg in 1902 to represent Nature in the form of the Goddess Isis - or eesis
- the Egyptian Goddess of Motherhood. She emerges from the clouds, holding a
cornucopia in her arms and the veil which covers hercold and austere face is
held up by the Genius of Science. Indeed, it is the genius of science which
pushed forward the race against time, from the beginning of astronomical
calendars six millennia ago in the land of Isis to the femtosecond regime
honoured tonight for the ultimate achievement in the microcosmos. I began life
and education in the same Land of Isis, Egypt, made the scientific unveiling in
America, and tonight, I receive this honor in Sweden, with a Nobel Medal which
takes me right back to the beginning. This internationalization by the Genius
of Science is precisely what Mr. Nobel wished for more than a century ago."
Our
modern day laureates depict equally a sense of great connectivity to the rich
past and that has to become a standard. Most likely the Islamic Renaissance
that was about to be born 1000 years ago did not. We shall never know the
extent of the harm that some celebrated religious zealots caused to mankind and
civilization. We are once again at the crossroads; the only ways forward is to
connect with the world and help make ours a true charitable society, the only
way prosperity of mind can be ensured is through pluralism of ideas.
Paris
Sun, 26 Nov 2006 20:39:44 -0500
From: "Naim
Mahlab" <nsm@videotron.ca>
I firmly believe that
all humans are created equal and are endowed by nature with the same creative
instinct.
The environment we grow up in
either stunts this instinct or allows it to flourish.
Religion dulls this creativity by
providing ready made answers to all our problems. There is no more
reason to search for answers to
the puzzles of our environment, as the Holy Books have all the answers.
Societies that are ruled by
dogmatic religions do not develop.
A casual glance at our history
shows that whenever 'absolute faith' dominated a society, its growth was
stunted.
The absolute power of the
Catholic Church in the Dark Ages of European civilization, assisted by the
sword of
the Inquisition, arrested and
even reversed the advances made in the Iberian Peninsula.
Some thirty thousand human beings
were burnt alive in a ceremony that the Church had the audacity to call an
'Act of Faith' otherwise known as 'Auto da Fe',
People were encouraged to see these
horrible murders and to celebrate the glory of the Church.
Unbelievable as it may sound, the
last Auto da fe was held in Spain in 1825. A school teacher who
denied the divinity of Jesus, was
dispatched to his Creator in a fiery ceremony.
Does the passage of time actually
improve our species ?. I doubt it.
What happened in Germany in the
thirties and fourties shows that it does not take much to make
us regress to our brutish origins.
Naim S. Mahlab