Few authors have left as deep an impression on modern-day Muslim thinking in the Indian subcontinent as Allama Iqbal. Given his laudable efforts to reformulate the basic theoretical teachings of Islam in a manner that would be appropriate for modern times, especially his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, I would like to take the occasion of this lecture in a series named after him to reflect on thirty-five years of studying Islamic thought.3 The questions I asked myself in preparing the talk went something like this: is there anything about traditional Islamic thought that makes it more than an historical curiosity? Is it relevant to the very real and concrete problems that all human beings, not just Muslims, face at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Should Muslims continue the common practice, acquired in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of ignoring their own intellectual heritage in attempting to reformulate Islamic teachings?
My general answer to these questions is that Islamic thought is indeed far more than an historical curiosity. It is a valuable repository of profound teachings about the human predicament. Not only is it relevant to contemporary concerns, it is far more relevant than any of the sciences, technologies, and ideologies that occupy the minds of most contemporary thinkers, Muslim or otherwise. In fact, traditional Islamic thought is so relevant to Muslim attempts to deal with contemporary issues that, if it is not recovered and rehabilitated, authentic Islamic thinking will cease to exist. In other words, there will be no escape from what dominates most contemporary Islamic thought already, which is warmed-over ideology disguised by a veneer of Islamic rhetoric.
If genuine Islamic thought ceases to exist, the religion of Islam will lose touch with its living roots and no longer function as an alternative to modernity. One might think that this would be a good thing – is this not precisely what the reconstruction of Islamic thought is all about? The problem here is that modernity is propelled by a certain type of false thinking that is intensely antithetical to the three principles of Islamic faith – tawḥīd, prophecy, and the Return to God. The antidote to false thinking is not blind faith in new forms of transmitted knowledge, but rather true thinking. Any sort of true thinking must be anchored in the nature of reality itself, which is expressed Islamically in the three principles.
To think in Islamic terms one needs to reconnect one’s thought to the transcendent truths from which Islam draws sustenance. This needs to be done not only by having recourse to the guidelines set down in the Qur’an and the Hadith, but also by seeking help from the great Muslim intellectuals of the past, those who employed the Qur’an and the Hadith to clarify the proper role of thought in human affairs.
To explain what I mean by the proper role of thought, I need to recall the primary position given to thought throughout Islamic history. By “thought” I mean the human ability to be aware of things and to articulate this awareness in concepts and language. For those familiar with the Islamic worldview, it is not too difficult to see that thought has always been considered the single most important component of human life, and that it must be attended to before all else.
The primacy of thought is made explicit in the first half of the Shahadah, the testimony of faith: “There is no god but God.” This is the one truth upon which all of Islam depends. The tawḥīd that is expressed here is not contingent upon the facts and events of the world. It is essentially a thought, a logical and coherent statement about the nature of reality. In the Qur’anic view of things, tawḥīd guides the thinking of all human beings inasmuch as they are true to their innate disposition (fiṭra). Every messenger from God came with tawḥīd in order to remind his own people of their humanity. In this way of looking at things, true thought is far more real than the bodily realm, which is nothing but the apparition of thought. This is not to say that the external world has no objective reality, far from it. It is to say that the universe is born from the consciousness, awareness, and thought of the divine and spiritual realms.
It should be obvious that by real thought I do not mean the superficial activities of the mind, such as reason, reflective thinking, ideation, cogitation, and logical argumentation. Rather, I mean the very root of human existence, which is consciousness, awareness, and understanding. The Islamic philosophical tradition usually referred to this root as ‘aql, intelligence. Thought in this sense is a spiritual reality that has being and life by definition. In contrast, the bodily realm is essentially dead and evanescent, despite the momentary appearance of life within it. Intelligence is aware, but things and objects are unaware. Intelligence is active, but things are passive. Intelligence is living, self-conscious, and dynamic, but things are empty of these qualities in themselves. In its utmost purity, intelligence is simply the shining light of the living God, a light that bestows existence, life, and consciousness on the universe. It is the creative command whereby God brought the universe into being, the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his clay, and the divine speech that conveys to Adam the names of all things.
Islamic forms of thinking take it for granted that God is the source of all reality. The universe and all things within it appear from God in stages, just as light appears from the sun by degrees. The spiritual world, which the Qur’an calls the Unseen (al-ghayb), is the realm of life, awareness, and intelligence. The bodily world, which the Qur’an calls the Visible (al-shahāda), is the realm of death, unawareness, and unintelligence. The closer a creature is situated to God, the more immersed it is in the light of intelligence, consciousness, and thought. Angels and spirits, who inhabit the Unseen, are vastly more intense in luminosity and intelligence than most inhabitants of the visible realm.
In this way of looking at things, human beings, who were placed on the earth to be God’s vicegerents (khalīfa), are nothing but thought. Their awareness and consciousness determine their reality. Their thoughts mold their nature and shape their destiny. The great Persian poet Rūmī, a true master of the intellectual tradition, reminds us of thought’s primacy in his verses,
Brother, you are this very thought –
the rest of you is bones and fiber.
If roses are your thought, you are a rose garden,
if thorns, you are fuel for the furnace.
If rosewater, you will be sprinkled on the neck,
if urine, you will be dumped in the pit.4
It is human nature to understand that we are essentially thought and awareness, but we forget it constantly. We are too preoccupied with our daily activities to stop and think. We are too busy to remember God and apply the principle of tawḥīd to life, a principle that guides all true thought back to the One Origin of thinking. Without the constant reorientation of thought by the remembrance of the One, people can only forget their innate human disposition.
If thought determines our present situation and our final outcome, what about the content of thought? Toward what end should thought be directed? The position of the Islamic tradition has always been that thought must be focused on what is real, and nothing is truly real but God, the Real (al-ḥaqq). The whole activity of thought must be ordered and arranged so that it begins and ends with the supreme reality. Moreover, moment by moment, thought must be sustained by awareness of the Real. Forgetting God, one needs to recall, was Adam’s sin. In his case, the sin was quickly forgiven, because he immediately remembered. But most people do not remember, especially in modern times, and the consequences have been disastrous. As the Qur’an puts, “They forget God, so God forgets them” (9:67). Being forgotten by God is to be cut off from the awareness of Reality and to fall into illusion and unreality.
True thought, then, accords with the divine spirit that lies at the core of human awareness. It is to understand things as they are. Things can only be understood as they are if one is aware of them in relation to the Creator who sustains them moment by moment. True thought is to see things in relation to God. This is precisely the meaning of tawḥīd.
Rūmī tells us repeatedly about the proper object of thought, and he often reminds us that true thought is living intelligence, or another kind of vision. Take these verses:
To be human is to see, the rest is only skin.
To see is to see your beloved.
If your beloved is not seen, better to be blind.
If your beloved is not everlasting, better not to have one.5
Rūmī is saying that human beings are governed totally by their awareness of goals and desires. Any thought, any vision, any understanding that is not informed and guided by the awareness of God’s overwhelming and controlling reality loses sight of the nature of things and forgets the purpose of human life.
In speaking of traditional Islamic thought I mean intellectual, not transmitted, learning. As noted already, four main areas of inquiry dominated the concerns of the Muslim intellectuals: metaphysics, cosmology, spiritual psychology, and ethics. As for the various branches of intellectual learning that resembled what we nowadays call “science,” they focused on secondary issues pertaining to cosmology. Most Muslim intellectuals were not interested in such issues per se, but only inasmuch as they could throw light on the primary topics.
The basic characteristic of Islamic intellectuality was its unitary vision. The various sciences were not understood as separate and independent realms of inquiry, but as complementary domains. The more one investigated the external world – the domain of cosmology – the more one gained insight into the internal world, the domain of spiritual psychology. The interrelationship among the fields of intellectual inquiry is especially obvious in these two realms.
On the philosophical side of the intellectual tradition, the importance of the interrelationship between cosmos and soul is already apparent in the expression al-mabda‘ wa’l-ma‘ād, “The Origin and the Return,” which was prominent enough to be the title of books by both Avicenna and Mullā Ṣadrā, arguably the two greatest Muslim philosophers. As Islamic philosophy developed, the return of the soul to God, al-ma‘ād, became more and more the focus of attention. Although Western scholars usually translate this term as “eschatology,” the philosophers who discussed it were not primarily concerned with death, afterlife, and the resurrection. Rather, they wanted to understand and explicate the nature of the ongoing and ever-present human ascent toward God.
Moreover, even though metaphysics and cosmology center on God and the cosmos, both were studied with the aim of understanding the true nature of the human soul. The simple reason for this is that we cannot understand ourselves without understanding God and the universe. Only in terms of a true comprehension of the nature of things can people orient themselves in relation to their own ultimate concerns. Only on the basis of a correct orientation can they set out to achieve the goal of human life, which is to be completely human.
In short, the purpose of intellectual studies was to prepare the ground for achieving human perfection. Perfection can only be reached by “returning” to God, that is, by bringing oneself back into harmony with the true nature of things. Both philosophers and Sufis were striving to become what it is possible for human beings to become. To use the expression that was made famous by Ibn ‘Arabī, the goal of human life was the achievement of the status of insān kāmil, “a perfect human being.”
In his attempts to reconstruct Islamic thought, Allama Iqbal was much concerned with overcoming taqlīd or imitation and reviving ijtihād, the independent judgment that allows a person to make sound legal decisions on the basis of the Qur’an and the Hadith. But, as he well knew, the word taqlīd has two opposites in the Islamic sciences. If we are discussing jurisprudence and the Shariah, its opposite is ijtihād, and Islamic law holds that Muslim believers have the duty either to follow someone else’s ijtihād, or to be mujtahids themselves. In the intellectual sciences taqlīd’s opposite is taḥqīq, verification or realization.
Taḥqīq derives from the same root as ḥaqq, which means truth, reality, appropriateness, rightness, responsibility, and duty. taḥqīq means not only to understand the truth, rightness, and appropriateness of things, but also to respond to them correctly by putting into practice the demands that they make upon the soul. By its nature, understanding of any kind is intensely personal. One can understand the ḥaqq of things only for oneself and in oneself. A muḥaqqiq is someone who knows without the intermediary of transmission and acts appropriately. He fulfills his responsibility toward God, creation, and society on the basis of a verified and realized knowledge, not on the basis of imitating the opinions and activities of others.
When great Muslims of the past, such as Rūmī or al-Ghazālī, criticized taqlīd, they were not criticizing imitation of the ulama in matters of the Shariah. Rather, they were attacking taqlīd in questions of understanding. You cannot understand God or your own self by quoting the opinions of others, not even if the others are the Qur’an and the Prophet. The only way to understand things is to find out for yourself, even though you need the help of those who already know. The goal was to allow people to think properly, not to follow someone else’s thinking. On the basis of proper thought, people can reach a correct understanding of the objects that pertain strictly to intelligence. The first and most important of these objects is tawḥīd, the one truth that underlies every other truth.
The real disaster that looms over the Islamic tradition has little to do with ijtihād and everything to do with taḥqīq. A society without living mujtahids can continue to function more or less adequately on the basis of imitating the scholars of the past. A society without living muḥaqqiqs, however, has surrendered the ground of intelligence. It cannot hope to remain true to its principles, because it cannot understand its principles. What I am saying is that tawḥīd can only be understood through realization, not imitation and certainly not through ijtihād. Once Muslims lose sight of their own tradition of understanding, they have lost the ability to see with the eye of tawḥīd.
To lose the ability to see with the eye of tawḥīd means to fall into seeing with the eye of shirk, or associating other gods with God. If the Qur’an considers unrepented shirk the one unforgivable sin, this is no doubt because it entails an utter distortion of human understanding, a corruption of the human fiṭra, and an obscuration of the intelligence that is innate to every human being.
Given that tawḥīd is the primary duty of every Muslim, and given that tawḥīd can be defined negatively as “the avoidance of shirk,” it follows that avoiding shirk is the primary duty of every Muslim. And, just as tawḥīd is the first principle of right thinking, so also shirk is the first principle of wrong thinking. In other words, shirk is an intellectual issue, just as tawḥīd is an intellectual issue. Any form of thinking that is not rooted in tawḥīd necessarily participates in shirk.
By mentioning the “rehabilitation” of Islamic thought, I mean to suggest that the Islamic intellectual tradition is suffering from a grave illness. Although a good deal of thinking goes on among contemporary Muslims, little of it has roots in the Islamic intellectual tradition. It frequently calls upon the Qur’an and the Hadith as witness, but it is based on habits of mind that were developed in the West during the modern period. These habits of mind, if judged by the principles of Islamic thinking, are misguided and wrong-headed. In other words, they are rooted in shirk, not tawḥīd.
If we accept that traditional Islamic thought is gravely ill, it will be obvious that recovery demands intensive care. Among other things, it will involve a thorough re-evaluation of the nature of intellectual health. It will necessitate careful scrutiny of the great texts of Islamic philosophy and theoretical Sufism and a serious attempt to understand Islamic principles by way of realization, not imitation.
Before rehabilitation can begin, the illness must be correctly diagnosed. The diagnosis of an intellectual illness depends upon recognizing error for what it is. The problem here is that the illness is omnipresent, not only in the Islamic world, but also elsewhere. It is so much a part of the way that most people think that they imagine it to be natural and normal. Like someone suffering from a debilitating disease since childhood, people have lost any sense of what health might involve. This disease is co-extensive with the worldview that informs modern thought.
It is very difficult to characterize the modern worldview with a single label. One word that has often been suggested is “scientism,” the belief that the scientific method and scientific findings are the sole criterion for truth. Like most belief-systems, scientism has become second nature to its believers. It is a basic characteristic of the modern worldview and the contemporary Zeitgeist. People see the world and their own psyches in terms of what they have learned in schools, universities, and television documentaries. It is simply assumed that the universe described by science is the real universe. If religious teachings are taken seriously, they are understood as pertaining merely to ritual and morality, not to the “real world,” since only science provides reliable knowledge of the universe.
One of the many implications of the scientistic worldview is the common belief that the cosmology and natural sciences developed in the Islamic intellectual tradition were early stages of what we nowadays call science, and that most of these early findings have now been proven false. But a basic fallacy informs this view of premodern science: the assumption that its aims and goals were the same as those of contemporary science. If this were true, then indeed the premodern ideas would be incorrect. However, the fact is that the Muslim scientists, all of whom were trained in the intellectual tradition, were busy with a task that is far different from that which occupies modern scientists. In order to understand the Islamic intellectual tradition, it might be better to avoid altogether the use of the word “science” to designate what they were doing, given that this word has been pre-empted by the empirical methodologies that characterize the modern period. Instead, we need to recover a term that represents the real goal of Muslim intellectuals.
One possible name for both the methodology and the goal of this tradition, a name that was in fact commonly employed, is ḥikma or “wisdom.” This word has the advantage of not implying a scientific and empirical approach to things, and it also has the advantage of being a divine attribute. In English, it makes perfect sense to say that God is Wise, but not that he is Scientist. The English word “wisdom” and the Arabic word ḥikma have preserved enough of their ancient meaning to imply both right thought and right activity, both intellectual perfection and moral perfection.
In contrast, modern scientists long ago abandoned any claim that science can help people find the road to right activity, not to speak of moral perfection. The role of science is simply to provide more power over God’s creation. Science does not and cannot address the issue of understanding the true nature of the universe, because the true nature of the universe cannot be understood without reference to the transcendent, intelligent, unseen principles that govern the universe. Nor can science address the issue of how we are to find the wisdom to employ correctly the power that we gain over creation. That is the job, scientists will tell us, of theologians, moralists, and politicians.
Another name that fairly describes the goal of Islamic thought is taḥqīq. The focus of Muslim intellectuals was not on the practical affairs of this world, but on the full realization of human intelligence. This demanded not only discovering the ḥaqq of things, their truth and reality, but also acting in accordance with that ḥaqq. This could only be determined by reference to al-ḥaqq, the Real, the absolute reality that is God. Taḥqīq demands both right thought and right activity, both intellectual perfection and moral perfection.
The Islamic quest for wisdom was always a quest to achieve unity with the divine light or the divine spirit. By the nature of the quest, Muslim intellectuals knew from the outset that everything had come from the One and will return to the One. Their quest was not to “believe” that God is one, because they already knew that God is one. The unity of Ultimate Reality was too self-evident to be doubted. The quest was to understand the implications of unity thoroughly and completely.
In brief, the purpose of searching for wisdom was what we can call “the taḥqīq of tawḥīd,” and it had two complementary dimensions: it meant first to verify and realize the truth of tawḥīd for oneself, and second to put that truth into practice in all thought and activity. The goal, in other words, was spiritual transformation. This was understood to involve a total conformity with the divine attributes (ṣifāt) and character traits (akhlāq). It was often called ta‘alluh, “deiformity,” or takhalluq bi akhlāq Allāh, “assuming as one’s own the character traits of God.”
Tawḥīd was considered both the seed and the fruit of human possibility. It was the seed that was planted in human awareness, and it was the fruit of the soul’s tree – perfect understanding and perfect activity. In such a view of things, it was impossible to separate the realms of learning into independent domains. The taḥqīq of tawḥīd was a holistic enterprise that yielded a unified vision. This vision demanded the unity of the human subject with the cosmic object, that is, the conformity of the full human soul with the cosmos in all its grandeur. Soul and cosmos were seen as complementary manifestations of the One, Single Principle. When God created Adam in his own image, he also created the universe in his own image. Perfect understanding means the ability to see all things in their proper places, as divine images and in their relationship with their Source.
The basic position of the tradition was always that understanding the knowing self, the subject that takes the cosmos as its object, was essential to the quest. It was impossible to ignore the self or to pretend that it was anything other than an integral part of a greater whole. It is here in particular that the Western tradition diverged from the Islamic. Any careful investigation of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, the fathers of modern thought, shows that they completely ignored the complementarity of soul and cosmos. Bryan Appleyard does a brilliant job of analyzing this phenomenon in his Understanding the Present. For example, he writes,
Protestantism and the Renaissance had effectively prepared the way: the first by insisting on the moral centrality of the individual and the second by its celebration of heroic humanism. The price was the expulsion of the self from the world. For science made exiles of us all. It took our souls out of our bodies.
The tendency is evident in the primary philosophers of the Enlightenment. Descartes provided a philosophical correlative of Protestant internalization. ... Kant removed the real world beyond the possibility of ordinary human knowledge. Both placed the world that was the object of scientific investigation beyond the realm of the self. The key paradox of the modern was established: science was everything we could logically know of the world, but it could not include ourselves. ... The more we knew, the less we appeared to have a role. The world worked without us.6
I said earlier that modernity is governed by a certain type of false thinking, and I suggested that one name for that thinking is “scientism,” which is false because it makes unwarranted claims. But there is a much deeper reason why scientism is essentially false, and that is because science, by its very presuppositions, negates tawḥīd and affirms takthīr.
By no means do I mean to say that takthīr is inherently false. Rather, it is short-sighted and incomplete. It misses the important points, because it denies implicitly, if not explicitly, the ultimacy of the One Reality that stands beyond all other realities. Once we understand things in terms of tawḥīd, we can understand the origin and destiny of the cosmos and the soul, and we can also grasp the present status of the world in which we live. Tawḥīd answers the ultimate questions and allows people to orient themselves in terms of real beginnings and real ends.
If takthīr is to have any legitimacy, it must be oriented and governed by tawḥīd. Takthīr without tawḥīd can at best analyze, differentiate, divide, and classify, but it cannot provide a unifying vision. Any perspective based on takthīr denies implicitly that existence has a purpose. It rejects the idea that human aspirations to achieve moral and ethical betterment and to become intellectually and spiritually perfect have any grounding in objective reality. Consequently, this perspective means that the more takthīr is intensified, the less we as human beings will appear to have any role at all to play in the cosmos.
The Muslim cosmologists paid a good deal of attention to takthīr, but for them it was a divine attribute. It was God’s activity of bringing the universe into existence. When they investigated the Origin of all things, they were attempting to understand the nature of takthīr. In effect, they saw God as al-mukaththir, “He who produces the many.” In contrast, when they discussed psychology and the return of the soul to God, the primary issue was how the soul could be a muwaḥḥid, “someone who affirms the One, who establishes Unity.” How can we, beings who dwell in multiplicity, unify our vision and activity and return happily and freely to God?
In the intellectual tradition, we can understand takthīr as the divine principle that makes multiplicity appear from the One. Tawḥīd can then be understood as the complement of takthīr. It designates the divine and human principle that reintegrates the many into the One. The philosopher Afḍal al-Dīn Kāshānī, for example, tells us that the Universal Intellect is God’s vicegerent in the Origin, which is to say that the cosmos in all its multiplicity appears from unity on the basis of the radiance of the divine omniscience. In contrast, human beings are God’s vicegerent in the Return, which is to say that the human role in the cosmos is to take multiplicity back to unity.7
In brief, the intellectual tradition recognizes both takthīr and tawḥīd, but takthīr is kept subordinate to tawḥīd, which is to say that the many is seen as forever governed by the One. The world and all things within it stay in the hands of the Real and can never leave. The proper role of takthīr can only be understood in terms of tawḥīd. Once we see that God created human beings to act as his vicegerents and unify the whole of creation through their spiritual and moral perfection, then we can understand why God brought multiplicity into existence in the first place. Real understanding and real knowledge depend on grasping the ultimate end of human existence, which corresponds with the ultimate end of creation itself. Moreover, human completion and perfection depend on acting in conformity with real knowledge.
The Islamic worldview might be characterized as takthīr in the service of tawḥīd. In contrast, the scientific worldview can be characterized as takthīr without tawḥīd. This can be seen clearly in the fruit of modern learning. Take, for example, the ever more specialized nature of the scientific, social, and humanistic disciplines; the disintegration of any coherent vision of human nature in the modern university; the unintelligibility of the individual sciences to any but the experts; and the total incomprehensibility of the edifice of science and learning as a whole. When takthīr rules over human thought, the result can only be analysis, differentiation, distinction, disunity, disharmony, disequilibrium, and dissolution. Given that modern science and learning are rooted in the world’s multiplicity, not in God’s unity, their fruit is division and dispersion without end, not unification and harmony.
One of Iqbal’s great insights, which he did not follow up as he might have, was his understanding that modern science yields disunity and dissonance by definition. He wrote,
We must not forget that what is called science is ... a mass of sectional views of Reality. ... [T]he various natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a piece of its flesh. Nature as the subject of science is a highly artificial affair, and this artificiality is the result of that selective process to which science must subject her in the interests of precision.8
Modern science wants “precision” in order to separate things out from their overall context. Only after a “highly artificial” view of reality has been manufactured can we ignore the objectivity of moral and ethical principles and justify the view that human beings have the right to control God’s creation as they see fit, without the guidance of wisdom.
Perhaps the power of takthīr becomes most obvious in the realm of ethics and morality. For the Islamic intellectual perspective, adherence to right activity and actualization of “praiseworthy character traits” (akhlāq ḥamīda) are demanded by the objective nature of things. After all, the world is actually and truly a display of the divine attributes, and the human soul is actually and in fact made in God’s image. Any human soul that does not actualize the divine character traits – such as wisdom, justice, mercy, compassion, love, and forgiveness – has failed in the task of achieving human status.
A methodology that yields an unbridgeable gulf between truth and ethics is ignorance, not knowledge. Such an approach ignores the ḥaqq of things – both their true nature and the moral demands that they make upon us. Under the reign of takthīr, intelligence and virtue are torn from their roots in the real world. The net result can only be the dispersal of human excellence in a vast range of unrelated endeavors, with no connections to be made between knowing and being, science and ethics. The raw power that is accumulated through acquiring instrumental and manipulative knowledge results in the loss of human goodness.
I said that there is a fundamental difference between the Islamic intellectual tradition and modern learning. One way to understand this is to see that Muslim intellectuals were striving to achieve a unitary and unified vision of all things by actualizing the transpersonal intellect, the divine spirit latent in the human soul. In contrast, modern scientists want to achieve an ever more exact and precise understanding of things, one that allows for increased control over the environment, the human body, and society. To the extent that this control is achieved, however, it is given over to the ignorant and forgetful selfhood – what was called “caprice” (hawā‘) or “appetite” (shahwa) in the texts. It is not put into the hands of the fully actualized intelligence of God’s vicegerent on earth. This is especially obvious in the various forms of government that have appeared in the modern world, all of which take advantage of scientific, technological, and bureaucratic power to instill docility into their subjects.
Another characteristic of the intellectual tradition that places it in stark contrast with modern learning is the intensely personal nature of the quest. Taḥqīq aims at the discovery of the ḥaqq within the seeker’s own intelligence. That intelligence was understood, and, indeed, experienced, as the supra-individual, transpersonal, universal breath of awareness. Every seeker of wisdom had to learn metaphysics and cosmology for himself or herself. Each had to follow the path of self-discovery as a personal calling. In other words, aspiring philosophers had to relearn the nature of the cosmos for themselves, not depend on what was written in the authoritative texts. From a modern perspective, it looks like they were trying to “reinvent the wheel.” Implicit in the metaphor is the technological application of knowledge that is a primary motivation for scientific research and was in no way part of the quest for wisdom. Actualizing wisdom can only be achieved in realization, which is awakened intelligence and ethical activity.
It is a common misinterpretation of Islamic intellectual history to say that Muslim scholars made scientific discoveries but then failed to follow up on them, so the torch of learning passed to the West. This is to read the empirical methodology and practical goals of modern science back into the intellectual methods and spiritual goals of the wisdom tradition. The goal was not to establish a fund of transmitted knowledge which other scientists could imitate and build upon and from which technologists could draw for practical ends. The goal was to discover the truth for oneself.
Rūmī sums up the difference between a muḥaqqiq and a muqallid – between someone who thinks for himself and someone who imitates others – in the following verses:
A child on the path does not have the thought of men.
His imagination cannot be compared with true taḥqīq.
The thought of children is of nurses and milk,
raisins and walnuts, crying and weeping.
The muqallid is like a sick child,
even if he offers subtle arguments and proofs.
His profundity in proofs and objections
drives him away from true insight.
He takes the collyrium of his secret heart
and uses it to offer rejoinders.9
Rūmī, then, speaks for the whole Islamic intellectual tradition when he says that no one can achieve true and real understanding until he stops imitating others and finds out for himself. The implication for the modern situation is clear: there can be no rehabilitation of Islamic thought unless Muslim thinkers put the taḥqīq of tawḥīd back at the center of their concerns.