Parable of the Bee

Parable of the Bee—

(Another excerpt from Ghazali & the Poetics of Imagination)

“Your Lord inspired [awha] the bee,” a delightful parable in the Quran begins. It describes the labor of one of nature’s most productive Bricoleurs — the bee. Addressing the bee, the passage continues: “Prepare for thyself dwellings in mountains and in trees, and in what [humans] may build [for you by way if hives]. And then eat of all the fruits and follow humbly in the paths ordained by the Sustainer. Then, from the bee’s innards a drink of many hues pours forth; in it is a remedy for all humanity. In all this, behold, there is a message indeed for people who think.” [Q. 16:68-69]

The parable of the bee is instructive. As a matter of habit, this insect draws from a diverse variety of sources – pollen and nectar – in order to produce a synthetic product that reflects all the colors and fruits of its immediate habitat. While the honey produced is in some way aggregate of many diverse types of nectar, it is simultaneously something very new and unparalleled. In the end, the bee not only produces a delectable substance but also furthers reproduction through cross-pollination that in turn generates new flowers and restarts the cycle for the future production of honey.

Similarly, in the reconstruction of ideas from fragments, it is often the case that ideas that were once the end products of a constellation of thoughts are now deployed in the reconstructive process as means for different ends….

“Bricoleur” is an appropriate descriptor for Ghazali. Extensive research has shown that he derived inspiration from a broad spectrum thinkers who preceded him…Not only did he reconstruct ideas, but he did so with an originality that was secreted into innovative interpretations.

…A Bricoleur “speaks” not only with things but also through the medium of things.
(pg 36-37)

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Commenting on the Bee verses in another work “Islam and Cultural Issues”, Professor Ebrahim Moosa writes, “The modus operandi of the bee can, in my view, be interpreted as the remedy for humanity. The passage encourages its readers to be like the bee: take knowledge from a variety of sources. It is finally up to individuals as well communities to synthesize these heterogeneous elements, wherever they find them, into something new. This is the continuous reality that Islam and the Qur’an require of those who claim to adhere to its message. Therefore, the notion of persistent labor like a bee, and specifically intellectual labor, is a crucial element of Muslim life and thought. The Prophet reminds Muslims to continue learning and to derive knowledge from a variety of sources, arguing that such knowledge is the lost treasure of the believer. Wherever he or she finds that treasure, they are deserving of it and can consider it their own, they are deserving of it and can consider it their own.

Following the insight of the bee, the debate about the origins and the provenance of what constitutes foreign knowledge as opposed to insider knowledge does not become an issue. Although those who have created authoritative boundaries for Islam believe that knowledge which comes from outside the Islamic heritage is less valuable and sometimes can lead to heresy, early Muslims intellectuals made no distinctions, between Chinese knowledge and Arabic knowledge. All of these philosophies were absorbed and synthesized into something new. Therefore, the notion of ijtihad, independent reasoning, is so central and so crucial to Muslim life. Divine realities can only be understood within cultural context. If Muslims are in North America or in China, they will always mediate the revelation and the inherited tradition through their local viewpoints and realities. One can not easily separate revelation from tradition.”
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I believe that the last sentence is quite informative. Those of you who have downloaded Dr Jackson’s lecture that I posted below hear him say that we do not only utilize Quran and Sunnah in our search for God’s Will at the exclusion of history, though rhetorically it sounds very appealing to some who are disconnected from the tradition, but that we are also greatly constrained by three centuries of discourse around these revealed texts, the period known as sacred history. This period has banished many meanings (legal/moral/theological) that can be derived purely based on language of the revealed texts. I would also add that, to an extent, we are also bound by legal-theological hermeneutics developed & elaborated upon the experience of our Salafs in the last 1000 years. Unfortunately, modern American Islamic discourse, more often than not, is disproportionately dominated by a certain interpretation of the works of 14^th century redoubtable Hanbali scholar and his students. They are taken to be the articulators of (and sometimes final words on) orthodox Islam at the exclusion of hundreds of Shafii, Maliki and esp. Hanafi scholars though most people now or historically were never Hanbalis. Hanbalis remained generally at the margin, either culturally or politically, and never enjoyed the statues that Hanafis did. From the very beginning Hanafis had complicated relationship established power, from Imam Abu Yusuf as the chief justice of the Abbasids under Haroon ur-Rasheed to Hanafi jurists (al-Sarakhsi, Ibn Hummam, Shurubulali, Shah Waliullah, Ibn Abideen, Maulan Tanwi etc…) under Mughal and Ottoman empires and beyond. According to some in our contemporary conversations these non-Hanbali scholars are not taken seriously or worse considered not even worth engaging!

Dr. Jackson makes a poignant statement regarding this. He says that in the modern world authority now is often confused with and often replaced by authorship. We invest more authority to those scholars whose writings we have more access too. Therefore in order to counterbalance, modern scholars need to bring these jurists into productive conversation with our modern context.

(here is one of my promised excerpts, more to come inshallah.)