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Defenders of Reason In Islam – Mutazilism and Rational Theology from Medieval School to Modern Symbol by Richard C. Martin, Mark R. Woodward, Dwi S. Atmaja

DEFENDERS OF REASON IN ISLAM

Book introduction

In the late 1970s, the Indonesian modernist theologian Harun Nasution published a pamphlet in defense of a medieval Muslim “rationalist” ecological school known as the Mu’tazila.

This was somewhat unusual though Mu’tazili theology is discussed, sometimes positively, by modern Muslim scholars, very few have identified themselves with Mu’tazilism to the extent that Nasution has.

Mu’tazili rationalists had taught doctrines about divine unity, the historical context of revelation, and ethical answerability to God that ran counter to the religious beliefs held by most Muslims.

 Nonetheless, Mu’tazili intellectualism enjoyed the patronage of numerous caliphs and viziers during the first two and a half centuries of the Abbasid Age (viz. 800-1050).

 After the heyday of the school in the ninth and tenth centuries, Mu’tazili dominance in theological discourse (kalam) began to wane, giving way to more centrist and populist discourses, such as those of the Ash’ari and Maturidi theologians (mutakallimun), and the

Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafi’i jurisconsults (juquha’).

Theological rationalism did not altogether disappear in Islamic thought, however. Shi’i theologians continued to dictate and comment on medieval Mu’tazili texts as part of their madrasa curriculum.

After the eleventh century and the influence of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) in particular, the Aristotelian philosophical method rivaled the more disputation practices of the mutakallimun.

With the emergence of Islamic modernist thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, Mu ‘tazili rationalism began to enjoy a revival of interest among Sunni Muslim intellectuals.

 During this past century, the discovery of several Mu ‘tazili manuscripts hibernating in Middle Eastern libraries has led to an increase of scholarly interest in Mu’tazili texts by both Western and Muslim scholars.

The former have tended to interest themselves in Mu’tazili parallels with, and origins in, Christian and Hellenistic sources.

The latter have often seen in the Mu’tazili texts an indigenous rationalism that could be revived in the service of adapting Islam to the modern world. Although both motivations are pertinent to this study, the latter comes into focus especially in Parts II and III below.

The current study is structured by two short expositions of Mu’tazili doctrine, one dictated in Arabic in Iran toward the end of the tenth century, and the other written, as we have indicated, by Harun Nasution in Bahasa Indonesia in the late 1970s.

In his pamphlet on Mu’tazilism, Nasution several times cites a theologian, Qadi ‘Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1024).

Indeed, Nasution specifically cites a work attributed to ‘Abd al-Jabbar that had been published in Egypt in 1965 under the title Sharh al-usul al-khamsa (Commentary on the five fundamentals [of theology]).

 In addition to Nasution’s text, this study also presents the original treatise at the basis of the commentary, ‘Abd al- Jabbar’s Kitab al-usul al-khamsa (Book on the five fundamentals).

These two texts, ‘Abd al-Jabbar’s original treatise and Harun Nasution’s modernist commentary, form the two textual and historical foci of this study.

The identification, translation, and general significance of these two texts, considered together as examples of Mu’tazili thought and separately as discourses belonging to quite different historical moments, form the subject matter of Parts I and II (chapters 2 through 9) below.

The rest of this chapter and the next set the stage for considering the specific matters of text and context by discussing the history of Mu’tazilism and, more generally, the conflict between rationalism and traditionalism in Islam.

 Part III considers further the archeology of Mu’tazilism by modernist Muslim intellectuals – scholars who do not necessarily refer to themselves as Mu’tazilites, as Harun Nasution does, but who nonetheless find in the rationalism for which the Mu ‘tazili theologians are remembered a counterpoise to Islamist, including fundamentalist, movements.

From the Project of Orientalism to the Fundamentalism Project

Harun Nasution’s text, as well as the works of other modernist Muslim scholars we shall discuss in Part III below, raises the question of Orientalism – the colonial and postcolonial project to recover and reconstruct the classical religions and civilizations of colonial subjects.

That Orientalist scholarship was political in motivation and effect was argued lucidly in 1963 by the Egyptian Marxist intellectual Anwar Abdel Malek.

 Fifteen years later, criticism of Orientalism itself became a “project” that jolted academe and reverberated throughout the social sciences and humanities with the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism.’ Said characterized the discourse of Orientalism in a well-known passage that is itself polemical and rhetorical: