One of the many roles that a living intellectual tradition would play is to help people understand the nature of ideology, by which I mean any sort of sociopolitical program built on analyses of human nature that are deemed to be rational and scientific. Defined as such, ideology is rooted in the humanistic and secular theories that grew up in the Enlightenment. It does not include traditional religion, that is, premodern forms of religious thought, though it does include the various forms of politicized religion that are lumped together as “fundamentalism,” given that they represent specific varieties of modern thought.10
Ideology provides the theoretical framework for practically all political and social thought in the modern world, so there is no escape from its influence. Nonetheless, the intellectual tradition may suggest some of the ways in which we as individuals can navigate past its shortcomings. Specifically, I have in mind three important goals of this tradition: breaking the shell of dogmatism, asserting the absoluteness of the Real, and resuscitating the mythic imagination.
In any field of transmitted learning, experts have several important concerns. These include organizing and interpreting their knowledge and shoring up the reputation of those from whom knowledge is transmitted, that is, the “authorities.” In the Islamic context, attempts to prove the reliability of transmitted knowledge are obvious in the activities of theologians and jurists, given that their whole enterprise builds on the transmission of the Qur’an and the Hadith. But the same need is present in all transmitted knowledge.
It should be obvious that the fundamental transmitted knowledge of any culture goes largely unquestioned. People receive it as part and parcel of their language, customs, techniques, artifacts, and everything they take as normal. Such knowledge is never simply religious. It may just as well be scientific or political or historical. If people are sure about something, this is because it goes unquestioned in their trusted circles. In their view, “Everybody knows that.” We do not normally question the authority of those who establish the very structure of our categories of thought. Transmitted knowledge is woven into the fabric of our worldview, whatever that worldview may be.
Transmitted knowledge, then, is the type of knowledge that dominates over human culture, and modern culture is no exception. When we imagine that we know something, we have heard it from others. Nor can we claim that our own personal and experiential knowledge qualifies as intellectual, because we have received it from our sense organs, which are notoriously unreliable, and we have interpreted it in terms of the prevailing worldview.
In contexts where the authority of transmitted knowledge was sustained primarily by religious belief, there were few sources of authoritative transmitted knowledge, so there were relatively few categories of teachers. Nowadays, various systems of knowledge compete with each other with chains of transmission going back to the founding fathers. There is an enormous proliferation of privileged classes claiming to represent authoritative knowledge – scientists, engineers, doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, physicists, neurosurgeons, Orientalists. No matter what we want to say about the reliability of such knowledge, for you and me it is transmitted. What gives us confidence in it – if we have any – is that we trust the authority of the source.
If transmitted knowledge is our ordinary, everyday sort of knowledge, intellectual knowledge is something quite different. Knowledge only qualifies as intellectual when knowers know it at the very root of their own intelligence and without any intermediary – not even imagination and cogitation. In the terminology of Islamic philosophy, this sort of knowledge was called “noninstrumental” (ghayr ālī). This is because it does not depend upon any of the “instruments” of the soul, the faculties and powers of the mind. It does not come from outside the self, nor does it derive from sense perception, imagination, cogitation, or intuition. It wells up from the deepest realm of intelligence, which is nothing but the divine spirit, the intellect at the root of the human fiṭra.
In short, the role of the intellectual tradition was to make firsthand knowledge available to those who wanted it. It was to show people the way to move beyond what they had been told. It was a path to discover the ultimate truths of the universe within the depths of one’s own soul, the only place where truth can be found. This was the object of the quest. How many people reached the goal? Probably not very many. The point here is that the quest remained an ideal in Islamic society and that it kept aspiring philosophers and intellectuals focused on tawḥīd rather than takthīr.
Let me now turn to the first of the three goals of the intellectual tradition mentioned earlier – overcoming dogmatism. By “dogmatism” I mean the claim put forth by teachers or thinkers or ideologues that everyone must adhere to a certain set of beliefs and practices as transmitted from their own trusted sources and interpreted by themselves. Dogmatism is no doubt a fact of life in all societies. In the Islamic context, the dogmatists were usually jurists and theologians, who claimed that all truth had been revealed in the Qur’an and that their own interpretation of that truth had to be accepted. In modern society, dogmatism is found among believers in every sort of god – religion, science, democracy, socialism, progress, freedom, development, and so on.
One of the results of the gradual weakening of the intellectual tradition over the course of Islamic history was the increasing tendency toward dogmatic closure, especially with the shaping of the juridical and theological schools. Nonetheless, we need to remember that the theologians and jurists, however narrow their perspective may have been, played the necessary role of preserving the transmitted knowledge upon which the religion depends. Moreover, when and if the theologian-jurists brought about dogmatic closure, they did so only in the sphere of transmitted knowledge, not in intellectual knowledge. Catechisms and polemics cannot hold people back from striving to achieve firsthand knowledge of God, the cosmos, and their own souls. The deep-rooted quest for wisdom that is innate to the human spirit cannot be blocked by rhetoric and threats. Certainly, it remained an open path in Islamic civilization. In the West, however, with the rise of science and secularism, the quest for wisdom was largely debunked, and our great and respected thinkers began talking about the death of God and the death of metaphysics that goes along with it. These notions have since become foundational in modern forms of transmitted knowledge.
Al-Ghazālī among others frequently attacks the dogmatic mentality. In doing so he explains that transmitted knowledge too often becomes a veil that prevents any attempt to achieve intellectual understanding. He writes, for example,
The cause of the veil is that someone will learn the creed of the Sunnis and will learn the proofs for that as they are uttered in dialectics and debate. Then he will give his whole heart over to this and believe that there is no knowledge whatsoever beyond it. If something else enters his heart, he will say, “This disagrees with what I have heard, and whatever disagrees with it is false.”
It is impossible for someone like this ever to know the truth of affairs, for the belief learned by the common people is the mold of the truth, not the truth itself. Complete knowledge is for the realities to be unveiled from within the mold, like a kernel from the shell.11
The belief of the common people is precisely what they have received by way of transmitted knowledge. It is knowledge based on taqlīd, not taḥqīq. Only the latter gives access to ḥaqq, “the truth itself.” This word, the root of the word taḥqīq, means not only truth, but also reality, rightness, appropriateness, worthiness, and duty. In Qur’anic usage, it sometimes carries a sense similar to our modern concept of “right.” Nowadays its plural, ḥuqūq, is commonly used in talk of “human rights.” Often forgotten, however, is that the Arabic word can just as well be translated as “responsibility.” In the premodern discourse, rights and responsibilities were two sides of the same coin, both founded on the Absolute ḥaqq that is God.
When contemporary Muslim thinkers criticize taqlīd, the issue is always the interpretation of legal, social, and political teachings. To appreciate that it has nothing to do with taḥqīq, it is sufficient to note that they never attack taqlīd in all transmitted knowledge, only in the forms that they do not like. They themselves have taken what they know about Islamic history and society from others. Their criticism is addressed at the authority of those whose interpretation of Islamic law has come to be accepted. They are asking believers to stop imitating the old authorities and to start imitating the new authorities, who often seem to be themselves. They question the reliability of the transmitted knowledge that Muslims have been following for centuries. Most of them tell us that Islamic teachings have to be adapted to the times. Their basic argument, in other words, is that there are new forms of authoritative, transmitted knowledge that must now be imitated. This new transmitted knowledge has been established by contemporary theologians and jurists – now known as scientists, psychologists, biologists, sociologists, and critical theorists. The new authorities must be followed along with or instead of the old.
In the intellectual tradition, taqlīd was condemned in intellectual knowledge, not in transmitted knowledge or in the early stages of the quest for realization. In matters pertaining to social, legal, and other secondary affairs, taqlīd was considered appropriate, because transmission is precisely the source of such knowledge. We moderns have a rather different way of looking at things. We seem to think – or at least we act as if we think – that we should accept as given the popular consensus on the nature of the world, one that has been established by scientists, scholars, and the media. We ourselves, after all, lack the expertise. At the same time, we feel relatively free to be “creative” in our own thinking. We go about achieving creativity not by making contact with the transcendent source of creativity, which is the divine breath blown into the fiṭra, but by rebelling against the transmitted knowledge that forms the basis of law, religion, social order, and human relationships.
In short, taḥqīq demands not only knowing for oneself the First Truth and Absolute Reality, but also acting appropriately. The First ḥaqq delineates the ḥuqūq – human rights, duties, and responsibilities– by its very nature. Understanding these ḥuqūq requires conformity with them. Taḥqīq embraces both the cognitive act of knowing the ḥuqūq and the ethical responsibilities that follow upon the knowledge.
Ideology, in contrast, is built on the imitation of beliefs established by the fathers of modern thought, the prophets of modernity. These prophets in turn base their claims to authority on the scientific worldview established by the Enlightenment. From beginning to end, ideology demands belief in the authority of transmitted knowledge, not in truths that we have come to know for ourselves.
If one goal of the intellectual tradition is to overcome dogmatic thinking by breaking the shell, finding the kernel, and knowing the True Reality for oneself, a second is to assert the absoluteness of the Real. This means to see all things in terms of their ultimate point of reference. The methodology of taḥqīq assumes that human intelligence is adequate to the Real and that the Real is one. The truth and reality of God and the universe – their ḥaqq – can be known; the rights of God, people, and other creatures – their ḥuqūq – can be discerned; and the appropriate and worthy response to truth and right can be put into practice.
By saying that “human intelligence is adequate to the Real,” I do not mean to imply that the practitioners of taḥqīq ignored the insights provided by revelation in general and the Qur’an in particular. Certainly some theologians and jurists accused philosophers of denying God’s messengers, or Sufis of considering themselves greater than the prophets. The basic reason for such criticism is obvious: the self-appointed defenders of the tradition tried to impose dogmatic closure on all believers, but the philosophers and Sufis wanted to know for themselves. They refused to rely on any knowledge that they had learned by way of hearsay, even if religious and social conventions maintained that the knowledge was true and reliable.
We must not forget that revelation addresses both intellectual and transmitted knowledge. The two domains are already highlighted in the two halves of the Shahadah. The first half addresses tawḥīd, the foundation of all intellectual knowledge, and the second half prophecy, the principle of transmitted, religious knowledge. The first half transcends history, because it simply asserts the nature of things. The second half – “Muhammad is God’s messenger” – pertains to specific historical circumstances that can only be known by way of transmission.
Despite the dependence of the second half of the Shahadah on transmission, it raises questions about the nature of prophecy and revelation that are not contingent upon history and were considered accessible to intelligence without transmission. For example, what sort of human being is designated by the word “messenger”? Why should the authority of such a person be accepted? What is the difference between prophetic knowledge and merely human knowledge? What is the relationship between prophetic knowledge and ultimate human happiness?
The philosophers investigated these sorts of questions as intellectual rather than transmitted issues. They were not especially interested in the historical events surrounding Muhammad and other prophets, or in the details of the revealed scripture. Nor, in the early period, did they defend the graphic Qur’anic depictions of the afterlife as anything more than a rhetorical necessity. However, they were extremely interested in prophecy as the highest form of human perfection, and they were especially concerned with the immortality of the soul, which was to be achieved precisely through intellectual perfection.
For many of the theologians and jurists, the very act of asking questions about the second half of the Shahadah looked like unbelief. They wanted blind acceptance, without asking why. But the philosophers saw clearly that one cannot prove the authority of the Qur’an by calling on the Qur’an’s authority. If we are talking about knowledge and not simply belief, then one must prove – without recourse to authority – that the Qur’an has authority. In order to do so, one must establish a necessary role for prophets in human history. If such a necessary role exists, it must pertain to human nature. It follows that the necessity of prophecy must be discoverable within human nature without transmission. If one does conclude that transmitted knowledge plays an important or necessary role, then one can take full and confident advantage of it.
Because the philosophers discussed the three principles of faith with little explicit reference to transmitted learning and much mention of Greek antecedents, some historians have found it easy to ignore the thoroughly Islamic character of their writings. Such historians have allied themselves with the Muslim critics who attacked the philosophers because their interpretations did not coincide with theological and dogmatic readings. Nonetheless, in a broad view, philosophy and theology were largely in agreement, especially if we compare their positions with the beliefs that inform most modern forms of scholarship, not to mention ideology.
My basic point here is that Muslim intellectuals saw themselves as investigating things in the context of the most fundamental insight of the Islamic tradition, and they did not see their efforts as opposed to the goals and purposes of the ulama. They accepted that the prophets came to remind people of tawḥīd and to teach them how to live in conformity with the One God. They also believed, however, that the vast majority of people had one path to follow, and that those drawn to intellectual pursuits had another.
From the standpoint of the intellectual tradition, there is no antagonism between intellectual and transmitted knowledge. One can perfectly well discover the truth of things for oneself and at the same time recognize the necessity of transmitted knowledge. The standpoint of transmitted knowledge, however, is quite different. If we reject the possibility of intellectual knowledge, we are forced to cling to the shell of knowledge, and the result will be dogmatic closure. Without understanding that the primary truths must be known for oneself and in oneself, we will choose to imitate others and accept hearsay as the basis for belief and action.
It should be obvious that in modern times, we live in a society that considers this sort of intellectual knowledge as an absurdity or an impossibility. As a result, there is always a feverish search for reliable transmitted knowledge, and this helps explain the mythic aura surrounding scientific discoveries. People believe that science alone is qualified to uncover the secrets of the universe, and not only that, they accept the discoveries as reliable truth, not realizing that they are asserting their belief in the authoritative knowledge of the priesthood of science. As for ideology, it always appeals to the gods Science and Reason as its justification, and it calls out to the human hunger for guidance and meaning, aiming to mobilize those who believe in scientific progress and utopia.
Among Muslims, the new transmitted knowledge of the Islamist movements rejects the transcendent, ahistorical hope in salvation of the premodern tradition and replaces it with impossible dreams of a perfect society. Muhammad Arkoun has been especially astute in explaining how ideology has become the theoretical foundation for all the political factions vying for power in Muslim countries. As he puts it, Islam has been turned into “an instrument of disguising behaviors, institutions, and cultural and scientific activities inspired by the very Western model that has been ideologically rejected.”12
If two of the goals of the intellectual tradition are to overcome dogma and to assert the absoluteness of the Real, a third is to recognize the proper role of myth in human understanding and, if necessary, to revitalize mythic discourse. The Enlightenment succeeded in establishing the supremacy of instrumental rationality by rejecting the cognitive significance of myth and symbol, which are characteristic of scripture and much of religious discourse. The invisible realms to which the traditional language referred – God, the angels, life after death, human perfection – were seen as unintelligible and meaningless, because they could not be addressed by the empirical methodologies of instrumental reason.
On the Islamic side, the tendency of both theology and jurisprudence was to devalue the symbolic content of the religious teachings. Jurisprudence was interested in providing concrete guidelines for human behavior, and theology wanted to defend rationalistic dogmas abstracted from the symbolic language of the Qur’an. But these approaches were by no means adopted by the intellectual tradition. Sufis, and to a lesser degree philosophers, looked upon the signs and symbols of the Qur’an as a means to open up the soul to the presence of the Real in all things.
Modern scholarship has gone a long way toward rediscovering the role of myth and symbol in premodern civilizations and cultures. But modernity in general lacks the resources for understanding the real significance of what was going on. The reason for this is simply that it has failed to come up with a proper metaphysics, cosmology, and spiritual anthropology. By “proper” I mean “dealing with the ḥaqq of things,” not simply with things as they are described in the transmitted learning of an ideological and scientistic age. Contemporary academic sciences have in fact been constrained by the dogmatism of transmitted sciences such as physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. As a result, theorists have placed arbitrary limits on human possibility.
The real danger of instrumental rationality lies in the dogmatic and absolutizing claims made by its supporters. Instrumental rationality must play a certain role in any society, to be sure, but when it plays the dominant role, the traditional teachings about human nature are necessarily obscured. In the extreme case of the modern West, scientific knowledge itself has usurped the role of myth and symbol. This helps explain why scientism pervades the modern imagination, so much so that most people – religious people included – simply take its assumptions for granted. Scientism is a rationalizing ideology that has all the persuasive powers of technology, education, and the media to back it up. It provides the de facto theology for the civil religion of modernity. The many contemporary thinkers who criticize it have no effect on the thinking and preaching of our own home-grown theologians and jurists – the scientists, technocrats, and journalists who have long since established a new set of myths and symbols to drive the modern world.
Because of the omnipresence of scientism, few people have any sense of the full-bodied truth and total coherence of premodern worldviews, which established delicate balances between mythic imagination and rational inquiry. In the Islamic context, no one has analyzed this balance with more subtlety than the enormously influential thirteenth-century jurist, theologian, philosopher, and Sufi Ibn ‘Arabī. Let me summarize what he has to say on this vital issue.
Ibn ‘Arabī maintains that we must see myth and reason as coexisting in harmony. The Real necessarily appears dichotomously to contingent beings. God is both creator and destroyer, both merciful and wrathful. Any analysis of the divine attributes shows that they must be understood both positively and negatively, both in terms of transcendence and in terms of immanence. The reason for this is simply that in itself, the Real is both absent from and present with everything in the universe.
Human beings, made in God’s image, have a unique relationship with both God and the cosmos. This gives them the ability to grasp, understand, and realize God in both his distance and his nearness. Ibn ‘Arabī calls the faculty of understanding God as distant “reason” (‘aql) and the faculty of seeing God as near “imagination” (khayāl). What I have been calling “intelligence” or “intellect,” he calls “the heart” (qalb), an important Qur’anic term that designates the synthetic, spiritual nature of human awareness.
If the heart is to perceive the Word of God resounding in itself, and if it is to intensify its own spiritual instinct, it must open what Ibn ‘Arabī calls its “two eyes” – the eye of reason and the eye of imagination, or discursive thought and mythic vision. Only the fully realized heart can grasp the symbolic significance of revelation, because neither reason nor imagination on its own can see the fullness of the ḥuqūq – the truths, realities, rights, and responsibilities – established by the Absolute ḥaqq.
In Ibn ‘Arabī’s reading of the Islamic tradition, the eye of reason is the characteristic tool of the theologians and jurists. It is inadequate because it can only see God as transcendent. It recognizes that God cannot be known in himself, so it describes him as totally apart from every created thing and every quality. Left to its own devices, discursive reason will eventually reject the messages of the prophets – which are primarily anthropomorphic and mythic – and refuse to acknowledge that anything positive can be said about God.
In other words, excessive stress on rational thought pushes the divine into total transcendence. When this process is not kept in balance with the eye of myth and imagination, rational analysis eventually makes “the hypothesis of God” extraneous to rigorous, critical thinking. We see this process taking place in the mainstream development of Western thought. The end result is a scientific rationality completely oblivious to the ḥuqūq of God, the world, and the human soul. Excessive dependence on reason leads to agnosticism and atheism.
For its part, the eye of imagination sees God as immanent. It recognizes God’s signs and marks in all things. It perceives the universe as the theatre of divine significance, infused with intelligent and intelligible light. It finds God’s names and attributes manifest everywhere in the world and the soul, and it describes God in the positive terms supplied by revelation and the natural realm. This is to say that the eye of imagination feeds on myth and symbol, and it sees things not simply as signs and pointers to God, but as the actual presence of the Real. Left to its own devices, however, it will divinize the world and its productions and fall into takthīr, the assertion of many gods.
In Ibn ‘Arabī’s view, the heart is the unitary awareness at the root of the human selfhood. It is identical with the divine spirit that God blew into the clay of Adam, but it needs to be recovered, cultivated, and actualized. The goal of realization is to find the ḥaqq of the heart, the ḥaqq of God, and the ḥaqq of all creatures, and then to act according to all these ḥaqq s. No taḥqīq is possible unless one sees with both eyes, recognizing God in both his transcendence and his immanence, both his absoluteness and his infinity.
The heart, which is no different from realized intelligence, must employ the critical powers of reason to prevent associating other gods with God, or to avoid turning relative things into absolutes. But, if intelligence needs to employ reason correctly, it also needs to make proper use of imagination. It must undertake the mythic task of seeing everything as a sign and symbol of the divine. It must behold every creature as a “face” (wajh) of God and recognize that everything in the universe has a ḥaqq bestowed upon it by its Creator. It must keep the symbolic significance of things alive and respond properly to the living presence of God in the world. Only this attitude can allow people to respect the rights not only of God and other human beings, but also of the natural realm. When people fail to see the divine face wherever they look, they fall either into the one-sided transcendentalism that is characteristic of religious fundamentalism or the atheism and agnosticism that are characteristic of secular and scientific fundamentalism.
If the Islamic intellectual tradition has any help to offer to the modern predicament, it seems to me that it lies in the call to recover for ourselves – each of us individually – a proper understanding of our own nature. Otherwise, dogmatism and ideology cannot be avoided. The fundamental insight of the tradition is that in order to know the proper way of acting in the world and living out our human embodiment, we must know what the world signifies to us. In order to know the significance of things, we must know our own nature and our own proper destiny. In order to know our own nature, we must know the self that knows.
The point that is typically forgotten in discussions of who we are is that we cannot know the knowing self as object, only as subject. We cannot truly know ourselves except when object and subject are indistinguishable. The unity of knower and known, of self and world, of man and God, is the ultimate insight of tawḥīd. It is this alone that gives human beings the ability to see things as they truly are, to recognize the ḥuqūq of God, people, and things, and to act properly in response to the rights of God and the rights of man.
Offering a critique of dogmatism and ideology is a necessary first step if we are to recover a proper understanding of human nature. But proper understanding demands recognizing that the human self is grounded in a trans-historical intelligence and ultimately in Absolute Reality. As long as scientists and scholars persist in ignoring the fact that the soul cannot know the truth of things by standing on someone else’s shoulders, there will be no escape from dogmatism, which is grounded in imitation and turns transmitted information into absolutes. Until it is recognized that the only dependable and real knowledge is awareness of the First Real, there will be no escape from an ever more polarized world of ideological conflict.