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book reviews 219 while universities in Muslim contexts are not yet ‘great contributors to the socio- cultural and civilisational advance of societ[y]’ (p. 36) as universities are in the European/Western world, they certainly represent a diverse array of attempts to weave Islam into modern pedagogic discourse. As evidenced by a conscious reflection on the part of Pakistani academics interviewed about the presence of Islam or Islamic principles as part of a Pakistani Higher Education ethos—whether successfully executed or not— Muslims are cognizant of their rich heritage of learning. Facing a number of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/article/27/2/219/2458813 by guest on 27 September 2021 socio-economic, political, cultural and linguistic challenges, some overlapping with other Muslim countries, others peculiar to Pakistan’s South Asian post- colonial nature, where Pakistani academics (exemplifying one Muslim context) are shown to be wondering where they should place themselves in space and time with respect to not just a rich past of Muslim empires, but Indian Muslims specifically. Therein, argues Muborakshoeva, lies the opportunity aptly referred to in the book’s title: able to critique themselves and their system, academics have the potential to harness the knowledge and creativity with which to revive and reform higher learning and make it in Muslim contexts so as to ‘open debates ...and critically approach the study of, the past and present heritage of their [respective] countries’ (p. 152). Soufia A. Siddiqi St. Anne’s College, Oxford E-mail: soufi[email protected] doi:10.1093/jis/etw001 Published online 23 February 2016 Averroes, Kant and the Origins of the Enlightenment: Reason and Revelation in Arab Thought By Saud M. S. Al Tamamy (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014, Library of Middle East History, 46), 280 pp. Price HB £56.00. EAN 978–1780765709. There is much to praise in this book, especially the light Professor Al Tamamy casts upon contemporary Arab thought. It is all too neglected by most Western scholars, even though the attempts of those living and writing in the Arabic-Islamic world to explain the dilemmas it faces today deserve all of our attention. Though not as commendable, Al Tamamy’s analysis of the European Enlightenment and its origins, is interesting—mainly for his focus on Kant as its major proponent. Of special interest here, at least to me, is Al Tamamy’s agreement with my argument that Averroes is not a precursor of that or any other Enlightenment, coupled with his refusal of any other common ground on how to read this most important thinker. The work’s fundamental question, why an Arab Enlightenment did not occur, is not and—truth be told—cannot be answered. So Al Tamamy replaces it by that of why the Western Enlightenment occurred. His answer focuses on Immanuel 220 book reviews Kant, above all on his time and locale. That is insufficient and, moreover, too beholden to a never examined premise identifying ideas as necessarily rooted in their historical epochs. A much simpler and more direct way to answer the question is to focus on the authors of the movement that came to be known as the Enlightenment, namely, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, De´nis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and even Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet, also known as Voltaire. For them, the recovery of the major writings of the past and the new emancipation from servile acceptance of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/article/27/2/219/2458813 by guest on 27 September 2021 religious dogma allowed citizens—all citizens—to aspire to understand things for themselves. This new freedom held much promise ...and many dangers. Rousseau was perhaps the only one to address those dangers, something he accomplished with rare eloquence. Simply put, appealing as recourse to reason and to the pursuit of science or humanistic knowledge might be, not all individuals have the capacity to pursue such avenues. Many will be led astray by such investigations, just as many will gracelessly abandon themselves to frivolous imitations of greater poetic and literary masters. As a result, the work necessary to the well-being of a nation will be neglected. Such at least was the dismal prognosis offered by the ever cantankerous Citizen of Geneva. Cantankerous, yes, but honest. In place of enlightened—perhaps better placed in quotations marks as ‘enlightened’—pursuits, Rousseau offered something more basic: dedication to civic duty and reliance upon conscience rather than reason. No one has answered Rousseau, though many have tried. Most important, Kant never made the attempt. That, I submit, is where the analysis of the Enlighenment and its relationship to the Arabic-Islamic world today ought to begin. This has escaped not only Al Tamamy, but also any number of contemporary Arab thinkers who might have addressed it: Muhammad al-Jabiri above all, but also Hasan Hanafi, Aziz al-Azmeh, Sadiq al-Azm, and the multitude of other thinkers whose writings Al Tamamy reviews in his first chapter. To state the issue more boldly: none of these thinkers, Al Tamamy included, has even addressed the question. Al Tamamy’s stated conviction that reason completes faith, another way of saying that reason is consonant with revelation, may well keep him from pursuing the task—one that cannot ignore the attack upon religion by the proponents of Enlightenment. No such reticence can account for the silence of at least two of these other thinkers. What turns them away from this pursuit or prompts them to raise other questions must be desire that a shackled reason—one promising technological, political, and economic advances—become the lodestar of Arabic–Islamic thought, not a reason that accepts no binding ropes. Alas, once loosed, reason is as recalcitrant to control as the many beings kept shut within Pandora’s chest. Consequently, Al Tamamy, ignoring Bacon and Machiavelli, begins his account of the European Enlightenment with Jean Bodin, then moves on to the natural law teaching of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Wolff and also to the moral and natural science inquiries of Descartes, Locke, and Hume. These, for Al Tamamy, are the thinkers most important for discovering Kant’s practical teaching. Because metaphysics rather than politics provides the ground for Kant’s embrace book reviews 221 of freedom, Rousseau is accorded only a passing reference. But perhaps one need not reach so far. Kant does not, at least not in his essay on Enlightenment. Rather, freedom is what characterizes human fulfillment. Enlightenment allows human beings to claim maturity, that is, to rely on their own judgment. Voicing that claim, daring to be mature, is an act of courage—one that has become possible only because his fellow citizens, like himself, enjoy the rule of an enlightenment monarch—even, at least in Al Tamamy’s judgment, a despot. Kant immediately puts strictures on such an expression of freedom, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/article/27/2/219/2458813 by guest on 27 September 2021 distinguishing between its permissible public expression in scholarly discourse and impermissible private voicing. The clergyman, public servant, or other citizen representing a higher authority may not speak his own mind, that is, act maturely. The limits are important and were not observed by the French proponents of the movement. Indeed, the claim of ability to reason for oneself in an orderly manner, rooted in a rejection of the received tradition—philosophic and ecclesiastic—led to a questioning of all authority, political as well as intellectual, and to the revolution that transformed European society. Whether adherence to the doctrines of Kant would be sufficient safeguard against such consequences remains to be seen, and Al Tamamy does not address the question. More must be said about Averroes, not least because Al Tamamy and I understand his teaching so differently. For reasons never explained, Al Tamamy favours George F. Hourani’s edition (London, 1959) and translation (On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, London, 1969) of Averroes’s Book of the Decisive Treatise (Kita¯bFaBl al-Maqa¯l) over mine and rejects—not refutes—my characterization of Averroes, replacing it by his own. Here is the issue: while we agree that Averroes is not a proponent of Enlightenment, we disagree about whether he is in favour of rationalism. I think he is, Al Tamamy does not (pp. 3 and 203). For Al Tamamy, those who hold views contrary to his are said to ‘cherry-pick’ among Averroes’s ideas. For me, the error stems, rather, from failing to understand the basic arguments Averroes expounds in his multiple writings and especially in the trilogy of which the FaBl is the centre-piece, literally and figuratively. (It seems, incidentally, that Al Tamamy ignores the relationship between the FaBl and its sequel, Kita¯b al-Kashf 6an mana¯hij al-adilla fı¯ 6aqa¯8id al- milla.) One reason Al Tamamy eschews such analysis is that he believes he alone understands how Averroes understood his relationship with his rulers, this even though Averroes never says anything about such an entente. That prejudgment must be contested along with the one that prompts Al Tamamy to assert a belief in progress in history and thus to reject—again, not refute—the approach of Leo Strauss (and also my own). Fundamental as these differences are, this is not the place to contest them. But they do merit notice. There are other, much more important questions, that deserve answers. Why, for example, do nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers writing in Arabic focus on Kant? Is it because he offers a version of enlightenment as freedom, albeit—as noted—one that depends upon Frederick? And, subsequent to Kant, who can deserve such attention? Curiously, with rare exceptions—6Abd al-RaAma¯n Badawı¯’s flirtation with Heidegger in al-Zama¯n al-wuju¯ dı¯ comes readily to mind—there are no major contenders.

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