1: The major stages in the intellectual progress

Q. 1: What are some of the major stages in your intellectual progress?

A. 1: Let me admit at the outset that you succeed in what many have failed to do, by drawing from me answers to your questions. The reason you succeed is the perceptiveness with which you enter my world; you really touch on the finer details of that world. The points you raise do really reveal a mind that can appreciate the issues that keep preoccupying my mind. Thank you for all that.

Now you ask me about the major stages in my intellectual progress. It is an important and critical question, but can I do justice to it? Can one ever remember the circumstances that directed his intellectual growth? I don't think so. Nevertheless, the attempt is worthwhile; one in fact should try to trace such influences. Let me begin with this incident: I once returned home when I was in the second grade, having learned at school how to pray, and what to say in the final sitting position. The textbook we used at school mentioned two versions of the 'testifying supplication' for that position, one reported by Ibn Abbas, a companion of the Prophet's, peace be upon him, and the other reported by Ibn Mas'ud, another companion. Feeling puzzled why two different versions existed, I asked my mother on arriving home what was behind this difference. So she peered long at the comment on the two supplications and then said, pointing out one of them: "This is the right version which you should learn, for it is the one chosen by the chief of jurists, Abu Hanifah [the founder of one of the four schools of Islamic law, madhab in Arabic]; as for the other, it is for the followers of the Shafiite madhhab'." She did not feel the need for any further explanation. As for me, I did not dare to follow the matter up with my teacher or my father: like other children, I dared to ask my mother what I did not dare to ask a teacher or a father; but even with her, I felt too shy to persist any further. But it did occur to me then that if a child happened to be of the Shafiite madhab, and had returned home and asked his mother, she would say: "We are followers of the Great Imam, al-Shafii," and would have pointed out the other version as the more authentic one.

Now I can see that that elementary and childish inquiry is still the philosophical stumbling block which is not yet satisfied by men. The difference of course is that I went on later to inquire what should be one's reference in determining not only the Hanafite from the Shafi'ite madhab; nor even the Sunni from the Shiite position; but what should be one's reference in determining whether the believers or non-believers were nearer the truth. I find that this also relates to your fourth question, in which you ask: How would you place human history in relation to the Qur'an? And how can world history be so indispensable in approaching the Qur'an?

It is really hard work to bring to the reader's notice all the wilderness I had to trudge through until I came to perceive that history should be recognized as a source of knowledge. It took me more than half a century; I was all the time grappling with the question: How do I know that I know what I know? It was like a worshipper who seeks the right direction of 'qibla, or Mecca' to direct his face to while performing his prayer. How to know that there is a truth to seek, that life is not without a North Pole. Now I realize that the ignorant person who says: Thank God that we were born into the true religion; praise be to God that we were not born in the wrong place – that this poor soul is not in much worse position than the proud philosophers in the past and present who feel that their philosophy has brought them face to face with nihilism and nothingness. That man is controlled by his culture is true, and the Prophet, peace be upon him says: "Every human is born ready to follow the straight path. It is his parents who make of him a Christian, a Jew, a Magian, or whatsoever." One's environment is very often a source of knowledge to him; one's family and ancestors are very often his reference for choosing his creed, and this way is condemned in the Qur'an. An individual's social milieu or his ancestors may not be his criterion for knowing right from wrong in the Qur'an. And again I feel that this brings up your eighth question, in which you say: Are you calling to dissociation with the heritage of the past?

Does not this remind you of a line of Persian poetry cited by the previous Iranian president Khatami, which says: "Well, can you, when you bask in the soft breeze, sense the darkness and bewilderment we go through!" I say this in view of the difficulty I went through from one level to the next. As for the level I reached, though I cannot claim I have gone beyond, is breaking free from the control of the fathers. Let met be clear about the authority of ancestors: to hold them up as an intellectual reference is a mistake; but it is another mistake to ignore them. They are human beings, not less and not more; as we recite in the Qur'an: "You are humans, just like the humans He has created;" (5:18). I wish someone would write a whole book focused on this verse, "You are humans, just like the humans He has created;" though I have little hope of myself writing such a book, in the way I have written several books focused on Qur'anic verses. The doubt about following fathers comes from the fact that without the fathers we are nothing. You are quite right when you say: do you not agree that any advance in dissociation with the past is illusive and without any roots? When one is not confined to what he has received from the fathers, he may pick up or devise an idea that is quite revolutionary. I say this here because I remember what Malek Bennabi once wrote, I think in a footnote on his book, The Birth of A Community: History is change; it is development. That is so because a time that passes without bringing forth change and development is a dead time. Then he cited the example of ants and bees, that those species have had no change in millions of years, so that if you eliminate a million years of their history, the latter part can just connect to the earlier part with no loss detected. This is not so in the development of the human species.

Man is a process, for Allah adds to creation as He pleases [ref. to the Qur'an, 30:1]; and He creates things of which we are not aware. How dense is the darkness in which we live, and how heavy the shackles we bear! According to the Qur'an, Allah sends His prophets so that He releases men from their heavy burden, and from the yokes that are upon them [7:157]. But let me move on to another juncture in my progress: One day, late in the nineteen forties, and I was at that time a student at al-Azhar University, it occurred to my mind that our instructors taught us that we were drawing close to the end of the world, that no day but would be worse than the previous day. And so I reasoned, if so, if the faith we believed in was fated to be deteriorating day by day, why should one dedicate himself to serving such a failed doctrine? Indeed, had not man's need for religion been so deep, he would have given up all faith; but it so happens that no matter how badly people disfigure religion, men's need remains deeper than any distortions: man knows deep in his heart that this world is not there for no reason. Man knows deep at heart that truth is to be fulfilled, but because for many of us no justice seems to be realized in this world, some wait to see it realized on the Day of Judgment.

But where, I went on to think, did this idea, that the world was coming to a near end, originate? Did the Qur'an teach this? So I scanned the Qur'an to check, but I found nothing of that. Instead, I saw in the Qur'an, "Anyone who has done an atom's weight of good shall see it;" (99:7) "We will, without doubt, help Our apostles and those who believe, both in this world's life and on the Day when the witnesses stand forth;" (40: 51) "If any think that God will not help him in this world and the Hereafter, let him stretch out a rope to the ceiling, and cut himself off;" (22:15) and I found, "God has promised, to those among you who believe and work righteous deeds, that He will, of a surety, grant them in the land, inheritance of power;" (24:55). All the verses of the Qur'an, however, were not enough. When a society ceases to develop and grow, when it is no longer in a 'process', it will be despondent: there will settle in it the idea of the time coming to an end. Well, Abdul-Jabbar, I do not have the brilliant style that matches the issues I am handling. Hence, I use many words to express so little; and it is not enough that questions are intriguing, and that I try to satisfy you, but I must be fair to the reader and help him.

The Muslim World has strayed into the wilderness long enough. It is taking too long to walk out of it: people like you and me we feel that the Muslim World is too slow to awaken; although for those who relish watching our sleep, they feel that the Muslim World is moving too fast towards gaining comprehension. Now to get back to the point of ancestors, without the ancestors' experiences we have got to return to the cave or the forest. At that time man only gathered or hunted his food, before agriculture. It was what we have inherited from the ancestors that put us where we are. Therefore, the right attitude to the ancestors is that expressed in this verse from the Qur'an, "Such are they from whom We shall accept the best of their deeds and pass by their ill deeds;" (46:16). But we are still unable to go beyond our fathers, and I may only turn to God, to pray: "O, Lord! Gant us light! Enable us to see things for what they are, and not as our forefathers saw them!" For fourteen centuries things have, in the hands of our ancestors, gone down and down, and they have walked from one defeat to the next, and each defeat was worse than the previous one. Let me be clear here, that I have as much respect as any other Muslim does: They did their part; they did not have all the history we have to shed light on our way. They should be forgiven their shortcomings, but we are not justified in not getting rid of the negative aspects of our life; we are not justified in failing to comprehend how God keeps expanding creation, for God 'adds to creation as He pleases,' (the Qur'an, 35:1). It is now the others who fulfill this expansion of creation, and it is God's will that any people who endeavor, should reap the fruit of their effort, as the Qur'an says: "Such days of varying fortunes We give to men and men by turns." (3:140) The text, as we use it, works to block our understanding of things in the world and analyzing history: while the right approach is to view history and the revealed text as inseparable partners, for no offspring may be begotten without both parties doing their part.

We need to relate this issue of past generations to another point. Writing, the art of transmitting concepts and experience with symbols, is a new technology in the life of mankind. It is a decisive advance of man over all the other living beings. All other species possess all their abilities and bear their behaviors within their genes; but it is not so in the case of man: when he is born, a human being does not possess within his genes all his behaviors, nor is his future encoded there. A child is born knowing nothing, and from the moment it is born, it begins to learn things about how to behave in life. It is true what the ancients called man, 'a talking animal'; man transmits experience with words. Although we have no way of specifying the exact time when man started to talk, we do have exact knowledge about when man started to read and write; it is so because the written material, in contrast with spoken words, are inscribed on stone, on skin, or on paper; and we have such inscribed texts dating five thousand years back. We need to think of the written text as a great thing, as a sacred achievement, for it is the technique which has helped man to preserve his experience. Before writing, mankind's experience used to vanish and perish – the human brain dies with the death of man, and any experience that it may have acquired is bound to die with its death. For eons of time, man lived in an oral period, and God did not reveal any of His books until man was able to read and write. It is perhaps a reminder of this that the last prophet, Muhammad, was illiterate.

Having a book is a stage beyond that of just assigning names to things around man. Therefore, God does not say about Adam that He had revealed a book to him; he just says, 'And He taught Adam the names 'and nature' of all things;' (2:31) Man was enabled to utter words, and give vocal symbols to concepts; his ability to give names to things indicates his gaining knowledge of things, and of whatever fresh knowledge is revealed to his mind, physical or moral. In this way we understand, 'And He taught Adam the names 'and nature' of all things;' (2:31) not that God taught Adam all the languages of the world. Later, man learned how to inscribe symbols on paper, and was able to write the Qur'an. It was in the Qur'an, too, that the first revealed word, "Read," (96:1) was connected with this technique, the ability to write: the word 'read', which was the first word to be revealed to Prophet Muhammad, refers to this ability to encode words into graphic symbols, and then to decipher the same symbols when reading a text. A symbol is valuable in that it has no independent sense: it is we human beings who relate the sense to the referent by bearing a sense in our mind, and being aware that a specific word refers to something in the world.

This brings us to consider texts: A text is of no value except to the extent it is related to real things; at the same time, what we experience in the real world gets lost unless and until it is recorded in a text, and that shows how essential a text is in the life of man. Texts are invaluable in the life of men; more than that, several techniques are being discovered and applied to give permanence to uttered words, not only words but visual representations of the person who utters the words. It is very laboriously and slowly that we begin to understand the relationship between a text and the real world, or the reference and the referent. This is so vital that Allah uses the real world to testify to the authenticity of His Scripture. In this verse, "We will show them Our Signs in the regions of the earth and in their own souls, until it becomes manifest to them that this is the truth;" (41:53) it is shown that when one goes along in the light of both the text and the actual facts of the world, he will never be deluded. A revealing incident here is that men were disputing and even fighting incessantly about the nature of the sun and earth, about which orbited which; and the revealed text in their hands did not help in putting an end to that disputation. What actually brought that dispute to an end was when men turned their look upwards and saw for themselves how the earth orbited the sun. By exploring God's signs in the world, and exploring the nervous system, the reservoir which stores all the experiences, we can handle the revealed text properly. Unless we perceive and acknowledge that relation between the revealed words (the text), and the reality, (which is discussed in the text), unless we take both, we will go one straying in the wilderness and condemning each other.

Muhammad Abduh had a decisive effect on my progress. So had Muhammad Assad (in his book, Islam at Crossroads.) I began to see that one may come upon new solutions for problems, all problems. What mainly drove me to believe in this was looking again at this verse of the Qur'an: "And He subjected to you, as from Him, all that is in the heavens and on earth;" (45:13) I began to see that the world was there to do our bidding; and when the world does not obey our command, then it is not the world's fault; it is rather ours. I must assert here that my progress was slow; it took ideas such a long time to develop. At the same time I felt that there were moments of insight. About the time I graduated from al-Azhar University, in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century, I was all ears and eyes; always on the alert to hear and see new things, and to analyze what I saw and heard. It was about that time that I came upon a book by Malek Bennabi, Conditions of Revival, and it was such a major juncture in my intellectual progress. I did not understand it well the first time, but I did sense that there was here an unusual approach to things, a singular way of analyzing things. And so I read and read: later I pondered over every word of every book by Malek Bennabi. One of his books, The Afroasian Idea, I read maybe more than thirty times. I would reflect on ideas and bring them together, to analyze and compare. The greatest idea in Malek Bennabi is that of colonisibility, a people's proneness to be victims of imperialism. It is a vital concept, and it is our responsibility to develop the idea and carry it beyond where Bennabi left it. This idea really echoes the Qur'anic verse: "Whatever evil befalls you is from your own soul;" (4:79) What Bennabi was saying was very different from what we used to hear from al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and even Iqbal. It was such a jolt to me when he refrained from blaming the enemies, the colonizer, the imperialist, the crusader, the Zionist, the freemason, and all the other foes. No other speaker, Islamist or secularist, but charged the others and blamed them for what befell us. In contrast, the speakers would very little and in such a low voice speak, if they spoke at all, of our faults and mistakes, the factors that enabled others to manipulate us. It was such a giant step to turn our attention to our own responsibility. It was also another surprise when he said that whenever Muslims meet in conferences they would put forth the Palestinian problem as being the Muslim World's prime problem, and that, as Malek Bennabi declared, was a mistake – our real malaise was colonisibility, and our backwardness; Palestine, Cashmere, Eritrea, etc. were no more than symptoms of the disease. And it was no little shock when he said: Colonisibility hit us long before the colonizer ever thought of colonizing us. It came to take shape not in Paris, London, Washington or Moscow, but it took shape under the domes of mosques in the Muslim World, in Bukhara, Samarqand, Delhi, Teheran, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Kairawan, along the Tangier – Jakarta axis. I felt the value of the curve he drew of the progress of the Muslim culture, starting with the Angel's call to the Prophet, at Hira Cave, a first phase which came to an end at Siffeen Battle; a second phase which came to an end with Ibn Khaldoun; and then a descending phase which resulted in the retrogression and colonization. It was such an eye-opener to me when he said: A person who speaks now without being conscious of what additions were brought forth to human knowledge in the twentieth century must be the object of derision and mockery. Do you see, Abdul-Jabbar, how slow we are to come to understand things? We not only are averse to analyzing the factors of our backwardness, but we camouflage those factors with the best appearance, and we are very often prepared to die in defending them rather than change.

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