The Quran and the Secular Mind In this engaging and innovative study Shabbir Akhtar argues that Islam is unique in its decision and capacity to confront, rather than accommodate, the challenges of secular belief. The author contends that Islam should not be classed with the modern Judaeo–Christian tradition since that tradition has effectively capitulated to secularism and is now a disguised form of liberal humanism. He insists that the Quran, the founding document and scripture of Islam, must be viewed in its own uniqueness and integrity rather than mined for alleged parallels and equivalents with biblical Semitic faiths. The author encourages his Muslim co-religionists to assess central Quranic doctrine at the bar of contemporary secular reason. In doing so, he seeks to revive the tradition of Islamic philosophy, moribund since the work of the twelfth century Muslim thinker and commentator on Aristotle, Ibn Rushd (Averroës). Shabbir Akhtar’s book argues that reason, in the aftermath of revelation, must be exer- cised critically rather than merely to extract and explicate Quranic dogma. In doing so, the author creates a revolutionary form of Quranic exegesis with vitally significant implications for the moral, intellectual, cultural and political future of this consciously universal faith called Islam, and indeed of other faiths and ideologies that must encounter it in the modern secular world. Accessible in style and topical and provocative in content, this book is a major philosophical contribution to the study of the Quran. These features make it ideal reading for students and general readers of Islam and philosophy. Shabbir Akhtar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. He has taught in the International Islamic University in Malaysia and has published widely on Islam, Christianity and current affairs. The Quran and the Secular Mind A philosophy of Islam Shabbir Akhtar First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Shabbir Akhtar All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwriting from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-93531-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 10: 0-415-43782-2 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-415-43783-0 (pbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-93531-4 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-43782-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-43783-7 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-93531-6 (ebk) To Nabeel and Foziea Contents A note on transliteration and abbreviations ix Introduction 1 PART I Quranic Islam and the secular mind 13 1 Locating Islam in the modern world 15 2 Human reason and divine revelation 57 3 The moral challenge of secular humanism 90 PART II An Arabic Quran: Assessing its authority 117 4 The book sent down 119 5 The book as ‘the frustrater’ 135 6 The scope of the book 157 7 The authority of the book 186 PART III A Quranic Lebenswelt in a secular age 215 8 A sign is enough – for the wise 217 9 Faith and the varieties of rejection 238 viii Contents 10 Human nature and the Quran 267 11 ‘Greater is God!’ 295 PART IV Conclusions 327 12 Preface to a philosophy of Islam 329 Notes 349 Bibliography 388 Index 393 A note on transliteration and abbreviations I have followed the Library of Congress system for Arabic transliteration. I retain the final ‘h’ to indicate feminine nouns. Arabic has no upper case but I have capitalized proper nouns and the initial word in transliterated titles of Arabic works. Some words can occur with an upper case (Al-Qur’¯an) and a lower case (qur’¯an). This is explained in the text. Elision of vowels is not indicated. Words such as ‘Shi’ite’ are now naturalized into English. In such words, the length of vowel, any diacritical dots, and glottal (’) and guttural (‘) stops are not indicated. Other naturalized words include Islam, Quran, Ramadan, Muhammad, fatwa, jihad, and so on. Abbreviations: References to the Quran are given in the text and are set apart by the use of a capital Q followed by the number of the chapter and verse. This is explained in Chapter 1, note 2. Other abbreviations used are standard. Note on sexism I have used inclusive language even at the expense of style. In a few cases, however, I could not avoid traditional language. For example, the Quran recognizes only men as prophets. It would be contrived to use gender-neutral language in such a discussion. Again, the Quran’s discussion of human nature uses the male as a prototype. Introduction 1 The aim of this book is to investigate the rationality and plausibility of traditional Muslim conviction, a conviction inspired by the Quran, the founding document and scripture of Islam. The context of our largely philosophical investigation is supplied by industrialized and secularized western and westernized societies. This ambitious task has not been attempted by any Muslim or non-Muslim analytical philosopher in our times. One book cannot fully address this problem but it can articulate the anxiety and thus create a framework for a dialogue between the interested parties. The vaguely felt Muslim sense of intellectual unease in the sec- ular world is here reduced to the precise project of developing tools for assessing, somewhat obliquely at times, the rationality of Islamic conviction. This essay is partly a philosophical contribution to the study of the Quran: a critical commentary on some controversial, that is, philosophically vulnera- ble, assumptions of the Muslim scripture. Although the Quran has stimulated an exegetical literature comparable in size and sophistication to New Testament exe- gesis and to rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Bible, modern philosophers have not probed its central claims. Why should exegesis be an exclusively theological discipline rather than a form of reflective philosophical inquiry? In the aftermath of revelation, why should the role of human reason be drastically attenuated to being analogical (in legal contexts) and otherwise merely exegetical? For Muslims, post-revelation, why should all applied reasoning, all theology, and all philosophy collapse into hermeneutics? Even Quranic hermeneutics should not be simply a close domestic attention to the text aimed solely at extracting what is useful to believers. The Quran is intended to be revelation addressed to humankind, not merely a fixed body of law and morals. I believe that Muslims should be alert to legitimate secular and inter-faith reservations about their scripture, ready to appreciate it in a way which supersedes the closed reverential commentary which continues to ambush the classical margins of the sacred text. The older static and nomological reading of scripture is no longer fully revelatory for it reveals nothing new about the essential state of modern humanity. Merely explicating a sacred text degrades and cramps its revelatory vigour. 2 Introduction An important intellectual deficit in the modern House of Islam is the lack of a living philosophical culture that could influence its narrowly religious outlook. Muslim society has been, internally, spared irreverent and abusive criticism but it has also forfeited an experience of the rigours of thoughtful secular probing which can extend the range of religious integrity and invigorate the intellectual and moral health of a civilization. For reasons explored in Chapter 2, many Muslims, including some men and women of genius, were siphoned off and wasted in the pursuit of mysticism and asceticism. These believers could have become philoso- phers. Islam’s resulting lack of an extant philosophical tradition is examined and explained at the end of Chapter 2. In this work, I counsel modern Muslims, as intelligent and reflective heirs of their faithful tradition, to establish a philosophy of Islam, in an analytical idiom. As there is no extant Muslim philosophical tradition, we must borrow terminology from analytical linguistic philosophy of religion developed primarily to reflect Jewish and Christian concerns. While natural (philosophical) theology is, as seen in Chapter 12, an endeavour common to these three faiths, many other Judaeo-Christian intellectual interests, in philosophy of religion and theology, find no parallel in Islamic thought. For instance, to take an example from the epistemology of doctrine, the Muslim interest in revelation, as we see in Part II, differs fundamentally, in crucial respects, from the modern Jewish and Christian interest. Indeed, some areas of theo-philosophical concern such as theodicy – the rational and moral justification of the ways of God, especially the justification of natural and moral evil in a God-governed world – do not exist in mainstream Islamic thought. This might partly explain the lack of a tradition of conscientious atheism in Islam, a theme of Chapter 3. 2 All thoughtful adult human beings are, in some measure, philosophers; all societies have a potentially philosophical component in their intellectual culture. While a society devoid of disciplined philosophical thinking has no practitioners who for- mally articulate philosophical problems, its members still entertain philosophical prejudices – as entertaining prejudice requires no training. Many fundamental opinions are absorbed from our heritage and environment and then taken for granted.