READ! AND YOUR LORD IS MOST BOUNTIFUL Reading: The Basis of Science and Peace By JAWDAT SA’ID 1408 A.H. 1988 C.E. Translated into English by: Dr. Abdullatif al-Khayat 1 FOREWORD BY THE TRANSLATOR The idea of bringing out Jawdat Said’s every word in English has been borne a long time in my head. I find Jawdat Said as a voice that must be heard all over the world, that it holds a hope for a better humankind. I mean in this more than a reformer within Islam, for Jawdat Said is a thinker for the world. He merits to be counted as heralding a new world; and he brings to bear upon his philosophy a wide range of disciplines and writings. To say that he might be the most original thinker I have come across is not enough, for what we have here is the blue print for the well-guided humankind. Though many Muslim thinker have aspired to bring the two voices of Divine inspiration and human experience to work together for enlightening the human mind, those who have attained this objective in the highest degree can perhaps be counted on the fingers of one hand – and you are bound to count among them Iqbal, Malek Bennabi, and Jawdat Sa’id. Dr. Abdullatif Alkhaiat, 2 3 PREFACE In the Name of Allah Praise be to Allah. May peace descend on the chosen persons among Allah’s servants. The idea of this book has been on my mind, somehow or another, for quite some time. I have been turning it over in my mind and revisiting it multiple times , and I have done so for many years. Having grown up in an Islamic atmosphere, I had absorbed from the culture, quite naturally, a steady respect for knowledge and science. It has always seemed to me that knowledge, scientific or otherwise, must be handled in the most earnest spirit, so that we may clearly elucidate its features. Another thing which I always noticed is that our respect for knowledge and science is rather ideological and intuitive; that we do have a settled veneration for them, because of what the Qur’an says of them, but that this veneration was not based on comprehension and careful analysis. One may say that knowledge and science occupy at present a mythical, rather than a practical and active role, drawn from facts. When we think of knowledge and science as words, they seem to resonate deeply with us, but when we come to the real function of science, it is confused in our minds with superstitions and it gets confounded with the great mass of human culture – a gross heterogeneous mixture. From all this it became clear that it would be right for me to take up for discussion the topic of knowledge and science, notwithstanding the limitedness of my scope: I felt the urge to seriously delve into this topic, so that others may feel stimulated to direct their minds to the essence of knowledge and science and to really clarify their particulars. When I took up the pen to write, I had the above reflections in my mind, but after having taken some steps forward in this matter, something else was taking shape in my mind: that the laws which control the progress of knowledge and science were inseparably related to ‘reading’. If you trace the first steps of scientific research, you will soon realize that it did not develop in any significant degree before the discovery of writing. Before that there were ingenious experiments of course, but not much of their results remained after the death of the persons behind them. The persons around the ingenious experimenter would remember something of their findings, but memory has never been too reliable in retaining all the particulars. It was only with the invention of writing that scientific knowledge acquired a new memory, an indelible memory that did not vanish with the death of the particular individual. This was an important addition to the flourishing of scientific knowledge: what one person discovered soon passed to the rest of human kind, through the medium of the written word, and thus became the property of the entire species. Both the recording of science and its circulation occupy a major place in its development – and hence the vitality of writing. People no longer needed to reinvent the wheel. We may safely say that what one individual or some individuals discover will not be commonly known and preserved except through writing. From this it follows that scientific inquiry, and the ability to record and publicize it, must all work together for knowledge and science to grow and develop. Scientific inquiry generates knowledge and science, but the making of records and 4 publicization ensure their preservation and development – and in this way scientific knowledge can really serve its function. It is true that scientific knowledge was there before the ability to record and distribute, but it did not flourish until the development of these two faculties. Indeed, this relationship is reciprocal: for a researcher to delve into knowledge and science, they will have to study, and study means reading what has been written; and then for the new addition of scientific work to be recorded and publicized, more writing is necessary. It was for all such considerations that I decided to have ‘Read and Your Lord is Most Bountiful’ (From the Qur’an, Sura 96, verse 3) as the title to this book. Let me emphasize that the real purpose of writing this book is to discuss scientific knowledge, but it turns out that knowledge and science cannot proceed without reading: reading essentially proves to be the womb from which science comes into being and then develops and flourishes. And once scientific knowledge is recorded and publicized, it is possible for it to generate more science and knowledge – the more we act to see knowledge and science recorded and publicized, the more we help new knowledge to be generated: and that is what writing can do. No wonder then that the first word revealed in Heaven’s last message to humankind was ‘Read’ (the first word revealed to Muhammad) – it was this rather than any word related to faith or worship. And soon after, it was stated that to acquire knowledge and convey it you need writing “Who taught by the pen” (96:4). We may go on to say that, though writing was discovered five millennia back, its value was very limited until paper was discovered – and that happened fifteen hundred years ago. And then another giant step, printing, took place only five centuries back. This was really a huge event on the social and cultural level, a volcano which is still erupting. And before it had cooled down there appeared another giant step: the computer, which appeared no more than a few decades ago. But, in spite of all these inventions, knowledge and science still need a lot of effort to produce their effect; they need a lot of processing and simplification to make them accessible to all human beings – it is then that they do their part; it is then that man can realize his mission and fully attain his humanity: by eradicating corruption, by halting the spread of death and destruction. And that is a most sacred ideal that the species’ effort must be dedicated to realize. By making use of such scientific knowledge as has actually been realized, life will proceed smoothly and in a balanced way, not limping as we see its progress now. One may connect this to a traditional Islamic aphorism: “When you act on what you know, God will assist you in knowing what you did not know.” This brings up the problem of illiteracy: which is extremely prevalent in our communities. This is well-known and it must be a disgrace to all of us. However, this may be termed as ‘simple illiteracy’, for there is a more serious type of illiteracy, ‘complex illiteracy’: when we fail to find in our midst a leading group of enlightened and creative men and women: a group that seeks out any important knowledge that must be acquired by the community. That we lack such a group is more of a problem than that simple illiteracy. There is in the Qur’an intimation to this other type of illiteracy: people who can read and write but are still virtually illiterate: “And there are among them illiterates, who do not know the Book, but see therein their own desires,” (2:78); they are those who do recite the Scripture, but as at least two eminent scholars, Ibn Taymiyah and Qatadah, pointed out, these people do not 5 go beyond this recitation, do not understand the meaning of the verses. They do read and memorize, but without comprehension: the word ‘amanyy’ here means ‘recitation’ (see Ibn Taymiyah’s Al-Fatawa, Vol. 17, p. 434). The idea here is that our basic problem is that of our relationship with reading – reading in the widest and unrestricted sense, and reading as a directed process that is constantly updating itself. This is reading in its noblest sense: a self-correcting process that improves itself as it proceeds, and generates more tools for finer production. What happens so far is that, though humankind invented reading and writing five millennia back, too much of the reading material one comes across is not worthy of the time it consumes. Reading is such a vital activity that it is no exaggeration to assert that the future of humanity emanates from the tip of the pen (Did not the Muslim folks believe at one time that the whole of knowledge is condensed in the dot under the statement: ‘Bismi-Allah-alRahmani-r-Rahim’?) In writing this book, I have two purposes: One is: setting the reader on the path towards scientific knowledge.