Now this attitude, my understanding, is built on Euro-centric understanding of what rationality is. That is to say the reason that Muslims didn’t become modern like Europe did was because they denied this [Hellenic] trend within their own tradition. [Hazeli] wrote against philosophy and undermined the validity of philosophy in his famous book [IB] The Collapse of The Philosophers. Rationalists like [Iban Rosh] known in the west as [Everos] were not accepted and didn’t have a legacy in the Islamic world but were translated into Latin and avidly read and promoted and prompted the scholastic tradition of Aquinas and others which was in a sense the beginning of a kind of pre-modern form of rationality in European circles. And the assumption that somehow if Muslims had paid less attention to their faith based and religiously oriented and spiritual components and had concentrated more on the rationalist and philosophical aspects of their own intellectual preoccupations, then they would have been able to develop along the lines of Europe and they would not have been at odds with modernity. The assumption being of course that they view of reason implied in this is the instrumental reason of the enlightenment; independent autonomous human reason that exercise his control over the forces of nature that promotes the domination humans over nature and over society, the ability to plan social and political projects for a kind of Utopia on earth. If you will a sort of inverted view of religion where religion is here and now the goals of religion are realized in a material and earthly domain not in a here after and in other worldly domain, which is the raison d’être of communism which is in the sense a kind of monotheistic totalitarian region if you will, of course that’s open to debate but is often treated that way by people who are interested in the history of ideas and in the spread of modernity.

And I feel that one of the misunderstandings with this at the root of conflict and tension between the Islamic world and leading western nations, Euro-America if you will is this assumption somehow that those peoples, that large section of the world are incorporable without understanding what modernity is and unless they shake themselves free of these old fashioned and backward looking, religiously-oriented views of themselves and of history they can never join the advanced nations of the world and be part of the new social and political and economic order that modernity represents in the minds of most Euro-American societies. The fact is that religion is not going away. That people now talk about de-secularization. That religion in the public sphere is a reality even in Europe and America and a political force. And so there has to be a new understanding of the role that region can play and rationality has to also be re-examined. And here I think that the Islamic tradition has something to offer which unfortunately Muslims themselves are not necessarily aware of because they have had away of overthrowing and of erasing their own understanding of what human reason is and the limits of reason within the total context of their anthropology; the emotional and the social and the ethical aspects of reason and they’ve adopted the view of instrumental reason, purveyed by the enlightenment and which is seen as the guarantor of success scientifically and technologically in order to become modern. That’s my main point which I summarize in ten minutes, amazing. That’s it.

Interviewer: Thank you. Now when you have, are there particular thinkers to whom you would look in the Islamic tradition as articulating this vision of reason rationality and would you be speaking predominately from an Arabic speaking view or would it be broader than the classical Arabic speaking tradition?

Karim: Very good question. Thank you. I had a number of thinkers in mind and I could have talked in detail about them. [Hazeli] the 11th century Muslim thinker who attacked philosophy actually was extremely indebted to the [Hellenic] philosophical tradition. And there’s a revision going on now of his work and his legacy. There is a very important manuscript which have been uncovered and are being published by a Malay scholar in Oxford which showed [Hazeli] himself was heavily indebted to the [IB] world view and that his attack on philosophy was a polemical work done at the service of the state. He in fact encouraged and helped certain aspects of the Hellenic philosophical disciplines penetrate into classical Muslim religious thinking, particularly [IB] the legal theory and Kalam theology as well as philosophical ethics. But this has yet to be brought out and uncovered. Most students of Muslim thoughts would disagree with me based on the consensus up till now and if you read Hans Kung of course [Hazeli] is one of those black figures who attacks rational in depth enterprise and is responsible for the backwardness of Muslims whereas [Iban Rosh] is a hero because he was so thoroughly Aristotelian although [Iban Rosh] was on of the leading [IB] magistrate of the Maliki Legal School in Spain and became very influential for legal; developments on the north and the western world of Islamic Maliki School, and so therefore he had a double role. And it’s very interesting how he could reconcile these two aspects because he had a double theory. Rationality and philosophy could be pursued because it doesn’t encroach on or it doesn’t negate or rival the religious sphere of the revealed law and legal system which Muslim’s social sphere is built on. So he was able to live both lives. A total rationalist philosophically and one of the greatest Aristotelian commentators who ever lived and yet a major figure in Sharia developments for Muslim religious law. Even Haldun is another very important figure and he’s often pointed to by European students of Islam who want to point out to an exemplar who could have served as a model to move Muslims towards the more enlightenment view of reason. After all he was the founder of sociological discipline of history; he was an original thinker who came up with ideas such as supply side economics. I believe Ronald Regan used to like to quote Haldun in that respect. And various other notions especially concerning political theory of dynastic change which were never really pursued in the Muslim world. And it seems to have been a unique exception. And he was not translated into Latin and has no Western influence until modern colonial studies of the Arab north African Islam uncovered him to the western mind although there was an interest in Haldun among certain Ottoman intellectuals in the 18th and 19th Centuries. But even Haldun is a bit of an anomaly because he himself turned his back on these earlier philosophical historical approaches of his. He was the chief judge of the Maliki right in Cairo for many years at the end of his life. And in his final edition of his great book The Introduction to History, he basically dismisses philosophy and logic as unnecessary while misleading subjects that should not be taught or encouraged. He turned his back on that earlier period when he was the tutor to the king of Granada in Andalucía and wrote special précis of logic and philosophy for him, King Abdul Rahman whom he hoped to train as a kind of philosophical ruler-king; applying Plato’s theory of the ideal ruler to him. Muslim took Greek philosophy so seriously that they actually attempted to do things like that, which was never done in the west, with the possible exception of some renaissance figures. And even Haldun therefore is looked as a possible precursor to modernity. Why didn’t they follow his lead people say, Hans Kung included and others? They could have entered modernity the way the Europeans did if they had embraced that form of rationality. But then they are stuck with explaining why even Haldun himself turned his back on that in his later years. And they usually end up saying well he was too absorbed with his mystical attachments. He was a major figure in a certain [IB] North African Sufism and this obsession with mysticism just as [IB] turned him away from rationality and from pursuing rationality to it’s logical conclusion which would have promoted a more scientific and eventually a more technologically active stance that could have brought Muslim societies into a more modern position viz-a-viz developments in Europe. To my mind I think the best examples for us and here we come across the problem that you raised, is it in Arab language phenomenon, was there another sphere within the Islamic cultural domain, namely the Iranian and Persian which somehow is more open to a rationalist tradition?