1: The major stages in the intellectual progress

Jawdat Said, What are the main stages in your intellectual progress?

Thank, you, brother Rifa'ee, for this question. I feel obliged to let you know that it is not with great readiness that I usually answer questions. However, your questions seemed to me to reflect a sound comprehension of my intellectual endeavor, that you have already fathomed the nooks and crevices of that world. I likewise compliment your journal for your efforts in fostering thought.

Now when you inquire about the stages on my intellectual path, I find your question significant and subtle; but can I ever give a satisfactory answer to such question? Can anyone? Indeed, no matter how I try to reconstruct with any exactness the influences on my development, I don't think I can do justice to that. However, the mere attempt is not unuseful; it is our duty to try to recollect such factors.

Let me mention for instance that one day, and I was in the second elementary grade, we had taken a class about prayer, and had learned what a worshipper had to say during the last sitting; the textbook listed two versions of 'al-tashahhud, the set supplication in that posture', one reported by Ibn Abbas, and another reported by Ibn Mas'ood (two companions of the Prophet.) Anyway, I did not have at the time the experience of distinguishing one from the other. So, on my arrival home, I asked my mother to tell me about the difference. So she peered long, and at last she said, indicating one version: "It is this version that we adhere to; it is this that the Great Imam, Abu Hanifah, has chosen; this is our way, and the other version belongs to the Shafi'ite school."

That was her answer; so can you imagine the impact on my tender mind of that answer! At that time we did not have the boldness to ask; we felt too shy to ask the teacher or the father – but we did ask the mother. That is why it was my mother that I turned to, and she asserted that we adhered to the version chosen by the Great Imam Abu Hanifah. But the question that occurred to my mind after that I did not dare to declare even to my mother. It occurred to me that should a child from the Shafi'ite school of law return home and ask his mother, she would reply that they adhered to the version chosen by the Great Imam, Al-Shafi'ee. So I started to wonder how one could distinguish between what was right and what was wrong; I may add that that early enquiry is still the basic philosophical question that the world is yet to solve. Later, of course, the question was not just how to discriminate between the various sunni or shi'ite schools; it widened to an inquiry about the different religions, to believers and non-believers, to a general inquiry about the way to finding the truth. That childish and at the same time philosophical question has led me to what you ask in your fourth question, about my taking history to be a source of knowledge, besides the Qur'an.

But I find it quite hard to bring within the reader's reach how it came by that I traversed all the wildernesses until I came to take history to be the source of knowledge. It took me more than half a century, mauling over the question: How can I come to know, and how can I know that I know?

I ranged my vision over the skies seeking the qibla (metaphorically speaking, seeking the north star of truth.) That inquiry is a human one. Every human being must encounter that same question, the mind-boggling question: how to know the truth in all that ocean? How to get beyond empty talk? There have been people who tried to find their outlet in asserting that the truth was unattainable; there were such people in ancient Greek philosophy and in modern philosophy; and they have bumped into the wall of annihilism. And the simple uneducated man grapples with the same question; you hear the ignorant say: had we been born in such and such land, then our religion would have been that other religion – they do not deny it. It is as a hadith (tradition) of the Prophet's puts it: "Each newborn is born receptive to truth (upon the fitrah); it is his parents who make of him a Jew or a Christian [or whatever]." We find here the culture and patriarchal-glorification-and-infallibility (Aaba'iyyah in Arabic) as the source of knowledge. We find the Qur'an condemning the forefathers' being the source of knowledge. The ancestors and the environment should not be the source of knowledge. Rather, the situation must be reversed: An individual must possess the criterion of right and wrong, and then determine where the forefathers and environment were right and where they were wrong. Here, inadvertently, we touch on your question 8, about "patriarchal-glorification-and-infallibility", and whether that would mean breaking away with the Islamic heritage.

Perhaps the last intellectual stage I reached, and I do not claim to have issued from, was the discarding of the ancestors' authority. This issue of the ancestors' authority bears a lot of analysis – I mean the intellectual authority of ancestors, aba'iyyah, (i.e. patriarchal glorification and infallibility.) Indeed, to accept ancestors as a source of knowledge is a problem, but the consequences are equally dire should we ignore them; they are rather human beings, as we read about human beings in the Qur'an: "You are but men, - of the men He has created (5, 18)". You know my habit of choosing clauses of Qur'anic verses to be titles of my books; and I wish I could write a book entitled: " You are but men, - of the men He has created (5, 18)". This dilemma of idolizing ancestors harks backs to the fact that without the ancestors we would be nothing; it is in this context that you asked, very rightly, " Is not any growth without roots an illusion?" You see how ideas are called up through association; your questions link to each other, and on to other topics. You remind me of a revolutionary idea that I came across in a book by Malik bin Nabi (which, it seems to my mind to be The Birth of A Society), when he, in the course of a note introducing history, said: "History is change and development, since the passing time in which no development or growth takes place is a dead time;" and he illustrated with examples from the communities of ants and bees. In millions of years their life has remained unchanged; should we have eliminated a million years from their life, and pasted the earlier to the latter part, we would not have felt anything missing; but this is not so in the case of man.

Man is continually in the process of being shaped; we read in the Qur'an, "He adds to Creation as He pleases (35, 1)", " He creates other things of which you have no knowledge (16, 8)". Well, my brother Abdul-Jabbar, how badly we are in need of the truthful word and light! How deep is the darkness and dimness in which we live! How heavy are the shackles that pull us down and impede our progress and mobility! We read that the task of a prophet is " He releases them from their heavy burdens and from the yokes that are upon them (7, 157)".

Another intellectual juncture in my life took place towards the end of the forties, and I was then a student in Al-Azhar, in Cairo. It occurred to me one day that our instructors seemed to suggest to us that the end of time was drawing near, and that there would be not a day but worse than the previous day; so I reasoned to myself: "How can I devote myself to a system doomed to be worse today than it was yesterday, and worse tomorrow than it is today?" Indeed, had man's need for religion been less compelling, then religions would have been abandoned; as it is, no matter how twisted and warbled religions are represented, they remain grounded in the human intuition that this world is not there for nothing, that it exists in order to establish the truth, although for some the truth is put off until the Hereafter, since they cannot see it as feasible in this world.

Such reasoning brought me to wonder whence that idea of "the end of time" stemmed? Was there in the Qur'an such idea? I did read the Qur'an with that question in mind, but could not find it; instead I found " Anyone who has done an atom's weight of good, shall see it (99, 7)", " We will, without doubt, help our Our Messengers and those who believe (40, 51)", " If any think that Allah will not help him in this world and the Hereafter, let him stretch out a rope to the ceiling and cut himself out (22, 15)", and " Allah has promised, to those among you who believe and work righteous deeds, that He will, of surety, grant them, in this land, inheritance of power (24, 55)"; but when societies cease to see the 'process' of forming, when they cease to develop, they are frustrated. It is then that the idea of the end of time prevails; it is true in their case that time has come to an end.

Well, my brother Abdul-Jabbar, I am not one of those who can express their thought concisely and precisely; hence my many words which do not bear much sense. I find that I am addressing you and not the reader – it is so because it was you who stirred things and touched some soft spots and unhealed wounds.

The Muslim World has lived and is still living in wilderness. It is rising most slowly out of its slumber; that is how it appears to us who long to see the Muslim World shake off its sleep. But it does not appear like that to those who gloat over our sleep – for them we are moving fast towards wakefulness and understanding.

Well, brother, it is a difficult problem, that of ancestors. Without the forefathers, we are nothing, since it is the accumulated experiences of past generations that has brought us where we are; without them we must return to the cave and the food-gathering stage, when man lived in the forest, unable to cultivate the land. On the other hand, to be content with what the ancestors have left us, to stay where they have put us, is also a halting of history, and a return to the cave, though it is a different cave and in a different sense – it is bringing time to a standstill. The right relationship with the ancestors is as expressed in the Qur'anic verse, " From whom We shall accept the best of their deeds and pass by their ill deeds (46, 16))". But we seem to have put ourselves in a grave predicament – we are unable to go beyond the ancestors. Give us light, O God, give us light! We need to see things not in the way they were seen by our forefathers. It is a fact that over fourteen centuries the ancestors have been declining; it is a fact that with every new defeat the previous defeats appear slight.

Please do not take me wrong; I do not have any malice towards the ancestors; they did do their share; they did not have before them for guidance the history the we have before us; we should forgive them, but we should rid ourselves of the shortcomings we have inherited from them. We have to perceive that God's creation is a continuous affair (see the Qur'anic verse: He adds to Creation as He pleases '34, 1'.) As it is, those who forged ahead have been other nations, and the Qur'an teaches us that they must have the fruit of their effort: "Such days of varying fortunes We give to men by turns (3, 140)". We still fail to comprehend the realities of life and history – they seem to mean nothing to us; that is because we think that the Scripture precludes reference to them. The truth is that history and the Scripture work as a pair, like man and wife; life will be barren with either of them in isolation of the other.

The technology of writing and transmission of experience is a new phase in the life of man – man is indeed unique among living things in the world; other species have the germ of their behaviour in their genes; but man is not born with all his behaviour and future predetermined as is the case with the rest of living things. A human being is born knowing nothing, and learns his behaviour after that. Logicians used to say that man is a speaking animal, in the sense that he transmits experience through spoken words. We do not know when precisely man started to talk, but we do know with precision when he started to write. We know that exactly because man left his traces on stones, parchments, and paper five thousand years ago; this is what we call a text. There is something sacred about writing because it is this technical innovation that preserved human experience. Before writing, experiences were lost with the death of the person; an individual stored his experience in his brain, and the brain goes with the death of the human being. Eons of time passed in which man lived in the oral stage.

God did not reveal a book until people learned reading and writing (incidentally, Muhammad, the last prophet, could not read and write.) What God says about Adam is " And He taught Adam the names of all things (2, 31);" He says He taught him the names, not revealed a book to him. When man discovered speech, he started to give vocal symbols to concepts, he started to name things. Man can name something or a concept after gaining the experience and understanding; that is the way with all new physical and intellectual additions. Therefore when God says: " And He taught Adam the names of all things ", it does not mean He taught him all languages. Later, man acquired that skill of writing. The first word of the first sura of the Qur'an, which is God's final message to mankind is 'Read (sura 96)', an indication that the written symbol has no inherent value; it is we human beings who provide the specific relationship between the symbol and the referent. This puts us face to face with the problem of the text – a text, any text, has no value except in so far as it relates to the actual state of things; at the same time, the actual state of things will soon evaporate unless it is given some permanence in the text. In this way the text has acquired a vital role in man's life; man is unable to live without texts; and the techniques of storing knowledge have not been confined to writing; later the voice and the various sounds were added to it; and, later still, the visual dimension was introduced.

It is very, very slowly that we begin to appreciate the relation between the text and the real state of things, or the name and the referent. It is for such consideration that the Qur'an teaches us that if we get to know the world we shall believe in the Scripture's truth. It is so because to know the Book in isolation of the world we shall be misled – we read: " Soon will We show them Our signs (42, 53)", " but they threw it [the Book] behind their backs (3, 187)". For instance, if we continued to argue about cosmology on the basis of the revealed evidence, our argument could have lasted for ever; what cut the argument short is not the text, but explorations of the sky. There are so many facts in the earth and in the whole world that provide abundant evidence; the Qur'an urges us to examine both the evidence in the world around us and the evidence in our own being, in the nervous systems which stores experience, 'evidence of the selves in Qur'an terms'. Unless we realize and acknowledge that relationship between the revealed text (the Scripture) and the world of matter, which is the referent of the Scripture, we shall continue to dwell in the wilderness and to charge each other with blasphemy.

Another juncture in my intellectual life has been the reading of one line written by Muhammad Abdoh. He wrote: "Let those who lash out against religion lash out against their love of worldly pleasures." These few words seemed to tear apart another taboo; it dawned in on me that we could understand things in a new light. It was also shedding new light on things when I read a book, Islam at Crossroads, by Muhammad Assad. I realized again that things that seemed intractable really had solutions. I was beginning to realize that all problems could be solved. The crowning evidence of all that was when I read a verse of the Qur'an: " And He has subjected to you, as from Him, all that is in the heavens and on earth: behold, in that are Signs indeed for those who reflect (45, 13)." The phrase, "subjected to you" signifies offering a service without compensation. It means that we should be able to give the command, and have the universe obey; if the universe does not obey our command, then there is something wrong, not in the world, but in us.

The development of ideas, however, was very slow, though there were glowing moments. I was a student at the time, with my eyes and ears quite open, receiving signals that kept bombarding on my senses all the time; at the same time I analyzed those messages. Then in the middle of the fifties of the twentieth century I graduated from Al-Azhar. Around that time, I happened to come across a book by Malik bin Nabi, The Conditions of Revival. That was a really major stage in my growth. I did not at first reading understand what Malik was driving at, but I did realize that here was a new method of seeing and analyzing things. So I kept reading and reading, I read every line with great concentration; I brought points together, peered closely, then from a distance, then reflected and reflected. For instance, I read his book The Afro-Asian Idea more than thirty times. I taught it to others, starting with the chapter, 'The Afro-Asian Idea and the Muslim World'. The idea in Malik bin Nabi that had perhaps the most impact on my mind was 'proneness to being colonized'. This concept is a massive and pivotal one, and must be developed and elaborated beyond where Malik left it; it really is an echo of a Qur'anic concept "Whatever evil happens to you, is from your own soul (4, 79)." Malik was striking a note discordant with what we used to hear from Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdoh, or even Iqbal. It was really a shaking, a violent shaking when he reversed the direction from blaming things on the enemy, the colonizer, imperialism, the crusaders, Zionism, free-masonry, and all the other enemies – to blaming ourselves. Indeed, all those who stood up to discuss things, religious, agnostic, or atheist, would blame the others for our suffering, some or all of the above enemies. How muffled and murmured was the voice, if at all there was a voice, that spoke of our ills that give the others the chance to exploit us. Malik's was a giant step; it would throw the whole situation in a different cast; the responsibility for our ills was now put in the right place.

Malik was similarly galvanizing when he said: "When people in the Muslim World meet in conferences to discuss problems, they deem Palestine to be the prime problem of the Muslim World; this is a mistake, because, proneness to being colonized and the backwardness in which we live are the real disease, while Palestine, Eritrea, Cashmere, etc. are no more than symptoms of the real disease." I did have a jolt when he said: "The 'proneness to being colonized' took root in our world long before it occurred to the colonizer to come and occupy our land." He described a curve which he started with the emergence of the Islamic idea, from the call at the Cave of Hira' to the Battle of Siffin; and then to Ibn Khaldoon, and then it declines to colonization and backwardness. He was unusual and astonishing when he said: "the proneness to being colonized did not take shape in Paris, London, Washington or Moscow. It rose and took shape under the mosques' domes of the Muslim World, in Bukhara, Samarqand, Delhi, Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Al-Qairawan, in sum across the Tanjah-Jakarta axel."

He proved himself to be very perceptive of the source of our predicament when he said: A person who is ignorant of what the twentieth century has added to human knowledge will bring disgrace and derision to himself every time he opens his mouth to say something.

So you see, my brother Abdul-Jabbar, how slowly we grow, indeed at a snail's speed. It is not merely exceeding sloth with us; it is that we attach a sacred meaning to the sources of our backwardness, and we are even prepared to die in the way of preserving things the way they are.

So let me remember other stations in my intellectual growth. One of these has certainly been Muhammad Arkoun. He is a man that can talk in terms other than the sacred or condemned. (Malik used to say that the Muslim World can perceive things to be either pure and sacred or vile and condemned; that one can pass from one state to the other in a moment – a fighter for the truth now can very easily be said to be a traitor the next minute; a believer now can be condemned as a heretic and infidel the next day.)

My experience with Iqbal has been quite different from that with Malik. The latter was an electric engineer; the former was a poet, a mystic poet, who communed with human beings and (in his imagination) with the jinn, and soared in the heavens, having communion with angels and Redwan, custodian of the Paradise; he argued with the colonizer and the devil. Iqbal used to say: "My vision can perceive the very pulse of stars, and the blood circulation of the full moon." He fathomed the world, quantitively and qualitatively; to him man is the arm of the Divine Will. It was he who taught us that though the Qur'an and Islam appeared before the age of science they did herald the scientific way. It is he who awakened us to the value of the signs of the world around us and the world inside us when he said: The Qur'an counts the world around us and the world inside as a source to indicate the truth. It was he who illuminated, and still illuminates more, the Qur'anic verse: “Soon will We show them Our Signs in the regions of the world, and in their own souls, until it becomes manifest to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses all things (41, 53)?”

It was Iqbal who fathomed the significance of the 'seal of prophethood' and its importance. It is history which will reveal the importance of that idea. We do say that Muhammad, peace be upon him, is the last of prophets, but how deeply do we realize the significance of that fact? The whole line of prophets, from Noah until Muhammad, appeared within a period of five thousand years; that is the story of prophethood from beginning to end. But how will people be after a million years? Iqbal says in this connection: It was right that prophethood should come to a halt, because the signs in the world around and the world inside were coming to be the source of revealing the truth. It was Iqbal who helped me discriminate between right and wrong. That was when Iqbal said: the way to discriminate and assess the various systems, religions, philosophies and civilizations, is to study the kind of individual who is the outcome of any particular religion or philosophy.

Iqbal's scope was limited from the factual aspect; and yet, his intellectual scope was supreme. His perceptive vision solved for me the problem of shari'ah; he had massive ideas in this respect – he said that God's shari'ah, or law, is justice; whatever is shown to be just is God's shari'ah; it is around the axel of justice that the shari'ah revolves. But as to the details of jurisprudence they vary as the time varies; and people can come close or drive far from justice. He said this in the course of analyzing the history of the Turks and the Turkish thinkers during the Ottoman revolution.

There must be other original thinkers, but the few that I had access to all allot to man a vital place and give him a high role.

So what must I say next? How much do you discern of all that, and all the darkness surrounding us, and all the internecine killings among us? So where is the lamp? Where, in Heidegger's word, is the light? Let us say that so far I have tried to answer two of your questions, One and Two, that is, (1) the intellectual stations and (2) the intellectual components. At the beginning, my affiliation was with 'salafi' school (doctrine of first two or three generations of Islam;) another stage was with Al-Afghani and Abdoh; next it was Iqbal and Malik bin Nabi. Arkoun opened up the world of modernism. That was a challenging stop, since the West occupies a predominant place in the world; it would not be easy to discover its drawbacks. It was Iqbal again who helped me there; that is when he said, addressing the West: "That civilization of yours will be like the mother bird which will suffocate its little newborn; that is because the nest which is built on a feeble branch will not stay long. Your fire has not scorched me, because I follow Abraham's faith. Your glamour does not dazzle me, for I have lined my eyes with Al-Madinah antimony."

How to deal with the West is a problem; what we should do is to accept their best production and to bypass their blunder. What happens is that modernism is being served to us wholesale, with its good and bad aspects, and the problem with many of us is that they would either take it to be no more than delusion and corruption, and others would not and will not turn their attention to the Westerners' innovations and what avenues they have opened for mankind. Indeed, the Westerners have not only invented transportation means to replace the donkey, the mule, the horse and the camel; they have found a way for changing a ruler without bloody struggles. This latter is a more remarkable achievement accomplished in the West than the material things we are so keen to buy, to buy rather than to produce even today. We show no interest in the transferring of government in a civilized way; we are not yet ready for that.

Not many among us, secularist or Islamicist, believe in the power of ideas, that it is better to persuade people than to intimidate them. We are still below the level of acquiring the Western democracy, where governments are transferred through persuasion, though there is an amount of fraud, rather than through overpowering with the whip, with iron and fire. This democracy is a really new thing in the world, although it is also old from another angle. Muslims did have the upright way of rule, 'Al-Rushd' in Islamic terms, and when they lost that they somehow felt that something enormous was lost – as one Muslim scholar put it: "Would you like to have the Caesarian way of rule, every time a Caesar is gone another Caesar replaces him?" But then mankind marched on, for it is God's law that He enhances creation with new creations; He creates new things, as new means of transportation were created to replace the donkey, the mule and the horse.

The modern innovations have revolutionized people's conception of the universe; people's concept of the sun rotating around the earth, and the earth as the centre of the universe, this geocentrism, has all gone. People received that new concept with great alarm; men were ready to have others put to death, and to sacrifice their own life, rather than to let go of the old concept of things. This cosmological revolution was the beginning of all modernism; a new picture of the world was being drawn. There were then the steam engine, and the combustion engine, there were new means of transportation to replace the horse and the mule; new vehicles were being introduced that never occurred to the ancients, not even to their fancies. Then there was the telescope, and man could see the stars and constellations and galaxies. There was the microscope, and man was able to see the germs and the cause of many diseases and epidemics; man overcame many of those diseases and epidemics, and is still defeating others. But there was another Copernican revolution in sociology, although we have not yet perceived its impact. There has been a politico-socio-human revolution when men, not all but some, realized that the phenomenon of day and night did not come about by the rotation of the sun, but by the rotation of the earth. Before that, the sun appeared small, and so it was conceivable that it should run round us, but the earth appeared huge, and people did not even know its ends, so it was inconceivable that it should move; it had to be immobile.

It is through a reflection on history that one gets to understand the social phenomena. We have seen great, very great monarchs, apparently irremovable, and even if assassinated, they were just replaced by similar monarchs. We have seen the nations ignorant, passive masses, without a voice, prostrating themselves before whoever happens to occupy the seat of rule. But then, on the heels of the cosmological revolution, there was a social revolution. Monarchs were dwindling in size; they are no more in the advanced world than relics that are preserved as a curious remnant of the past, some still holding their post, but it is void of any power. Power and rule have been transferred to the hands of nations, though very slowly, and the trend is spreading over the whole world. This is really a remarkable achievement in social life. The ordinary man seems to increase in stature; or, which is saying the same thing, his awareness of history has increased.

People used to offer human sacrifices: It was Abraham who put a stop to offering human beings as sacrifices, and replaced that with a sheep. Indeed, I find in the Muslim ritual sacrifice of offering a sheep in devotion during the Greater Eid a symbol of the ovolution, the slow process in mankind’s comprehension.

Another giant step forward initiated by Abraham was advanced during his argument with the tyrannical ruler who bragged: I can give life, and can give death. Abraham's reply was: " But it is Allah that causes the sun to rise from the East: do you then cause it to rise from the West, (2, 258)." It was a decisive reference to the laws of nature. If the infidel in Abraham's story is stunned, the whole world was similarly overwhelmed and dazzled by the social revolution announced during the 'Farewell Pilgrimage' by Prophet Muhammad, when he referred to Abraham and the cutting off of the practice of offering human sacrifices. He said: "You all descend from Adam, and Adam was made from clay. No Arab has priority over a non-Arab, or a non-Arab over an Arab, no white over coloured or coloured over white, except through piety." He commanded that believers must not regress to a state of disbelief or aberration, cutting each other's throats. He admonished men to be kind in their dealing with women, who were in their custody, so to speak. Well, things have changed since then, in theory, though in practice the change has been all too slow.

Well, I have digressed a lot from your questions. But then, your questions are focused on our Islamic, and human, crisis. It appears to me that we view things from the angle of texts, and those texts have been emptied of their significance, and it is our duty to give back to those texts their significance. The message of all the prophets has been one and the same, no matter how we denigrate Christianity or Judaism as supporting polytheism and racism. The messages themselves are the same in essence: the gist of all prophets' teaching is 'al-tawheed: the Oneness of God.' It is al-tawheed which, if realized, no sin is too serious, and, if violated, no devotion avails.

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