Intellectual Traditions in Islam - Fourth Essay

The fourth essay is about "The Rational Traditions in Islam" by Muhsin Mahdi. He has divided rational traditions into two perspectives: Historical and Contemporary.

In historic perspective he talks about the French Encyclopaedist and their rationalism in detail which had great impact on some philosophers like Abu-Bakr Muhammad al Razi who opposed all forms of human authority in matters of knowledge even that of Prophets. His rational argument denies the special connectivity between Prophets and Divinity. He was responded to by Abu-Hakim al Razi.

All these rational debates resulted in two terms, one we can call extreme rationalism where anything which is religious was denied, and the other, rationalism which has, more or less, dedicated itself to trying to make sense. There were other Philosophers who said you can understand everything in complete rational terms but it may take hundreds or thousands of years to completly understand the reason behind everything. They acknowledge connectivity between Divine Authorities and Divinity (God). They believe that Prophets and divine authorities know the shortcuts so we can achieve results of our search in a given human life time.

Some other historic rational traditions talked about primary source of rationality. In Muhsin Mahdi's words "------the genuine rational tradition never says that there is nothing beyond reason because in almost in every case the doctine is that something must have generated reason, something must have been at the begining and that could not be the reason that we know.----It is the doctrine of the source, that there is a source of this expanded notion of reason, but that the source itself cannot be reason as we understand."

The other perspective which is marked by the present period, is considered as modern Islamic thought named as "the new wisdom". It tries to integrate a number of strands fro earlier Islamic thoughts and theologies mainly Mu'tazali theology. In course of development of New Wisdom, which was growing in Persia, got impacted by Ithna-Ashari or Twelver Shia's majority. Then Nasir al Din al Tusi's efforts added Mysticism and its thoughts in New Wisdom. Now New Wisdom is considered as complition of philosophy of rational thoughts; which can be attained through private illumination which could be in dream and visions. According to the author of this article "---The New Wisdom has a basic flaw, which was its fatal neglect of political and social problems." Weakness in New Wisdom is that it emphasizes on individual withdrawal rather than communal participation, and individual ethics than communal ethics. This was attacked by contemprory thinker Muhammad Iqbal (Allama Iqbal) who was completly inspired by modern European thoughts and started to look Islam through European prospective, which resulted in praising everything what Muslims had done in past which is useful for the modern world, but this limited Islam to one phase of history. According to author, Iqbal believed that something should be given to muslim to be proud of; and he ended up in claiming that Europe today is a hindrance in the way of man's ethical advancement. He tried to create spiritual democracy by taking best of technical and scientific advancements of Europe and best of ethics of Islam. But he was lacking the real thinking about political and social problems of his time.

Muhsin Mahdi thinks what is most hazardous today is that we don't think of Islam as a whole, rather limit it to certain phase of history which is already over.

He ended the essay with a question, what will we do as we approach the end of 20th century?