Knowledge: the Lost Camel of a Believer?

Knowledge: the Lost Camel of a Believer?

(Excerpted from “Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam” by Professor Ebrahim Moosa)

The question of innovation and continuity in tradition has never been an unproblematic one in Muslim societies. From Islam’s very inception in the seventh century and afterwards, Muslim intellectuals have found themselves embattled by this question. It has its roots in the furious debates about the Persians, especially Aristotelian philosophy and Neoplatonic mystical knowledge. Intellectuals have found themselves on both sides of the debate. A close examination enables one to see the clear battle scars on the knowledge handed down the centuries in the multi-dimensional and polyvalent Muslims intellectual tradition. For many scholars, like al-Farabi, al-Baqillani, Ibn Sina, al0Juwayni, al-Ghazali, and many others, there could be no boundaries in matters of knowledge. Knowledge itself could not be tainted by the religion, ethnicity, or beliefs of the producer of knowledge, since we have tools of independent judgment to evaluate it on its merits. Their attitude was shaped by the belief that “foreign knowledge” was the “lost camel of the believer.” Wherever believers find such knowledge, they were the most deserving of it. But these scholars have also had their opponents. Many luminaries in the early intellectual tradition balked at even studying the knowledge of “others,” let alone internalizing it and employing such knowledge to illuminate the teachings of Islam. For men like al-Shafii, Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Salah, and even more so Ibn Taymiyyah, knowledge that had its provenance in other cultures and civilizations had a corrupting influence on the legacy of the pious ancestors of early Islam. For them the teachings of the Quran and those of the Arabian Prophets were sufficient and could not be contaminated with the ways of thinking of other cultures.

This is but a brief and simplified snapshot of the kinds of debates that preceded us. Knowledge produced in those medieval contexts was not uncontested. In fact, what is often hailed as the high point of Islamic civilization and knowledge was also a period of contestation, conflict, and debate not very different from ours. Innovation in knowledge did not come without a price. Knowledge like the birth of a new style in art of miniature portraits, “is the result of years of disagreements, jealousies, rivalries ands studies in colors and painting,” says one of the characters of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. While the most gifted of painters, writers, and scholars will beget the innovations, to the rest will fall the “singular duty of perfecting and refining this style through perpetual imitation.” Both the innovators as well as the imitators deserve our respect, even though we acknowledge that we may no longer be able to agree with their views today.

(Page 112-113)