By Mohammad Ali, New Age Islam
9 November 2021
The
Revivalist Project of Islam in Colonial Period in India With Reference To the
Writings of Syed Amir Ali and Shibli Nomani
Main
Points:
1. Muslim scholars, in the
process of reviving Islam.
2. System of values,
philosophy, education, and society; deeply ingrained in the Quran and the
Prophetic Sunnah
3. Revivalist project of
modernist Muslims was influenced by the ideas of western modernity.
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Under the title of this essay falls an
array of theological as well as socio-political issues that has concerned
Muslims over the last two centuries. But in this essay, I would like to discuss
two important questions: first, how Muslim scholars, in the process of reviving
Islam, imagined themselves as a rational community, and second, how they
employed the concept of progress, which is an expression of modernity in
itself, to put their community on the path of development.
Before any attempt to understand the
revivalist movements among Muslims, it is imperative to understand the deriving
forces that compelled Muslim revivalists to critically scrutinize the problems
that to their minds, were causing a hindrance to their advancement.
As the story goes, Muslims were contentedly
living in the lands their brethren had acquired centuries ago. With time they
nurtured a system of values, philosophy, education, and society, which was
deeply ingrained in the Quran and the Prophetic Sunnah, and yet again found
rooted even in the Aristotelian worldview. The worldview that they had
cherished for centuries was confronted right after they had been colonized.
The Muslim world was affected in many ways
by the European encounter. One was the realization of their inability to face
the challenges posed by the European economy, technology, and military might.
To scholars like the French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823-1892), the Europeans
had succeeded in their imperial advancement in the Muslim lands because of the
civilizational supremacy that they had over Muslims. He argued that since Islam
was opposed to reason and was not compatible with science, it rendered Muslims
abhorrent to science and reason as well. He argued that “starting from about
1275, the Muslim world plunged into ‘the most pitiable intellectual decadence’
whereas Western Europe entered ‘the great highway of the scientific search for
the truth.” Furthermore, in his lecture which he delivered on March 29, 1883,
he claimed:
“all those who have been in the East, or in
Africa, are struck by the way in which the mind of a true believer is factually
limited, by the species of iron circle that surrounds his head, rendering it
absolutely closed to knowledge, incapable of either learning anything, or of
being open to any new idea.”
It
does not stop here. Not only were Muslims believed as repugnant to science and
reason, they were also regarded as people who do not esteem human rights. To
counter such degrading claims, Muslim scholars conceptualized themselves as a
historical rational community which not only contributed to the advancement of
science and philosophy but also upheld the values of an egalitarian society. By
historical, I mean that the revivalist Muslim scholars in the late nineteenth
and the twentieth century did not believe that the contemporary Muslim world
follows the same path of reason and egalitarianism that their brethren had
trodden in the past.
There are two prominent scholars, Syed Amir
Ali and Shibli Nomani, whose views I would like to discuss here. They, like
several other scholars, committed their lives to produce literature in response
to the Orientalists’ claims of civilizational and ethnic supremacy. The project
that they undertook was multifaceted: on the one hand, they tried to discredit
the claims of civilizational supremacy of Western Europe over Muslims by
highlighting the accomplishments that Muslims had achieved in the past, and on
the other, they exhorted their fellow Muslims to continue the intellectual
legacy of the early Muslims in their own time.
Imagining Muslims as a Rational Community
Syed
Amir Ali (1849-1928) was a prominent scholar and jurist in colonial India. He
wrote multiple articles and books to defend Islam against the colonial and
orientalist intrusions. The most remarkable work that he produced is known as
The Spirit of Islam (1991). Though written in an attempt to refute the views of
orientalists such as William Muir, Amir Ali conceptualizes the origin of Islam
as a religion culminating during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet
acted as a teacher, a seer, who chalked out the most egalitarian and
rationalistic principles for mankind. For example, concerning the rights of
women, he argued that the Prophet initiated reforms for the first time in
history. ‘The reforms he instituted,’ writes Amir Ali, were immensely effective
‘and (introduced) marked improvement in the position of women.’ The Prophet
enforced respect for women as one of the essential teachings of his creed and
placed women on a footing of perfect equality with men in the exercise of all
legal powers and functions.’ He considered polygamy as a potential threat to
the rights of women, and therefore, he opposed it as an un-Islamic practice.
The progress of Islam, however, was halted
by dogmatism and orthodoxy. Amir Ali argued that Muslims maintained a rationalistic
attitude until the end of the tenth century. He hails Mutazilites and Muslim
philosophers, Hukama, such as Ibn
Sinā and Fārābī for their beliefs in free inquiry and free will. Interestingly,
he compares the Muslim orthodoxy headed by ‘ulema’ with the Christian
ecclesiasticism and held responsible theologians like ’Abul Hasan ’Ash‘arī
responsible for obliterating the rationalist spirit in Islam. One can assume
that Amir Ali’s reading of Muslim history corresponds to the conflict between
the Church and the practitioners of science and reason in European history.
Moreover, to him, Muslim ecclesiastics are as guilty in suppressing the
practice of free inquiry as are the Christian ones. He gives a fluent account
of how Muslims strayed from the path set by the Prophet himself,
“Patristicism was triumphant in every
quarter which owned the temporal or spiritual sway of the Abbasids: the college
of jurists had placed under the ban of heresy the rationalists and philosophers
who made the name of Moslems glorious in the annals of the world; a heartless,
illiberal, and persecuting formalism dominated the spirit of the theologians; a
pharisaical epicureanism had taken possession of the rich, and an ignorant
fanaticism of the poor; the gloom of the night was fast thickening, and Islam
was drifting into the condition into which ecclesiasticism had led
Christianity.”
Whereas Amir Ali advances a reductive
version of history which in its condemnation of ‘ulema’ parallels to the
history of the Church against the practice of free inquiry, Shibli Numani’s
project of reviving Islam seems to be more comprehensive.
Trained in a traditional education system,
Shibli Nomani (d. 1914) rose to prominence because of the score of books and
articles that he devoted to educating his brethren about their glorious past.
In his work on the second Caliph, Umar, and Jizya system, Shibli aimed to
emphasize that the Islamic governing system was based on just and egalitarian
principles. Shibli wrote detailed biographies of the Abbasid Caliph, al-Mamūn,
and the eleventh-century jurist theologian, al-Ghazālī, highlighting their
contribution to making the great Islamic civilization. These were the figures
that are thought to be responsible for changing the course of history in favour
of Islam, and therefore, worthy to be imitated, one for the rulers and elites,
and the other for ‘ulema’ in order to revive the decaying society of Muslims
during his time.
Shibli was disheartened by the plight of
the Muslim education system. As he believed that narrating the stories of the
past would do nothing good if the audience were not able to emulate the
resulting wisdom. He later boarded on a mission to reform the education system.
In 1892, he travelled far west in the Muslim world to observe and learn about
the Muslim intellectual life there. However, he returned disappointed as he
deemed the condition of the Indian Muslims was no different than their brethren
in Egypt, Syria, or Constantinople. Shibli imagined the intellectual challenges
of his time as similar to the philosophical challenges faced by the early
Muslims.
To deal with the intellectual challenges,
Muslims in the past had devised a sophisticated, yet complex,
philosophical-theological system, which they called Ilm-e-Kalām. Similarly, since history is repeating itself, Muslims
of his time, Shibli argued, needed the same strategy to deal with the modern
philosophical and intellectual questions.
It can be argued that Amir Ali and Shibli
succeeded in their attempt of making Muslims realize that they inherit the
legacy of a rational civilization. Because the generations that followed them
confidently started invoking the examples of Muslim rationalists, instead of
ulema or traditionalists, whenever they require to compare with the western
world. It is ironic because most of the time in history these rationalists were
abhorred by traditionalist scholars and were heavily marginalized.
The
Idea of Progress
In this part of the essay, I would like to
argue that the idea of progress was central to the project of revival in the
colonial period in India. The notion of progress was conceptualized during the
Enlightenment and is considered one of its main characteristics. In Hegelian
terms, progress is associated with history as an intelligible process moving
towards a specific condition--the realization of human freedom. Furthermore,
progress is also considered an expression of modernity and is complemented by
the notion of decline.
Soon after the colonial establishment,
Muslims were ready to indulge in the philosophy of Enlightenment and modernity.
The writings of Shibli and Amir Ali provide ample evidence about their being
well-versed in Western philosophy. Interestingly, Amir Ali believed that Islam
is an evolved image of the primitive religion that continued progressing
throughout the time of Prophet Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and culminated during
the time of the Prophet Muhammad. However, unlike Hegel, both Amir Ali and
Shibli Nomani believed in the disruption of the process of progress and thought
that this progression of history could potentially be turned backward, as was
the case with Muslim history.
In a progressive standing, they also
believed that certain things belonged to the past and as time advanced, they
became outdated. In changed circumstances, practicing or believing in those
outdated things creates a complex, and anachronistic situation for the
practitioner and believer. Therefore, they opposed several practices and
advocated for others in accordance with the need of their own time.
These revivalist scholars perceived history
not just in eschatological terms as was understood by the medieval Muslims, but
also in a mundane and futuristic way. It was an extraordinary change in the
history of the Muslim world to conceptualize time in this probable and
indefinite fashion. A result of such thinking was that Muslims came to believe
that the future is malleable and that they could determine their own path towards
it. Furthermore, they started believing that it was possible for Muslims to
become world-oriented along with Akhirat-oriented.
To study modern Muslim societies and ideas,
it is very important to understand the philosophical underpinnings of modernity
in modern Muslim thoughts. I have argued here that the revivalist project of
Muslim scholars was deeply influenced by the Western philosophical ideas,
which, in some way, was, of course, traceable to their own philosophical and
intellectual tradition. There is no doubt that Muslims adopted several Western
philosophical ideas in the process of reforming their own society. However,
they failed to acknowledge the fact and subjected themselves to a great
confusion.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islamic-society/reviving-colonial-india/d/125734
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