Quora Answer: Why Has Islamic Philosophy Declined?

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why has Islamic philosophy declined?” 

There is no one simple answer to this.  Theology is a branch of philosophy, specifically positing on the Nature of God through logical, rational understanding.  It is from theological positions that we derive the creeds of the various sects.  There used to be a time when theology was the queen of the religious sciences.  That time is long past, and the Muslims of this age are enamoured with the literal interpretation of the Qur’an and the narrations of the Prophet (s.a.w.), without the foundational knowledge of deriving the Divine Intent, and the prophetic intent.  Thus, we have arrived at organised religion that defends outrages in the name of literalism. 

Some would claim that the decline of Muslim scholarship, and not just philosophy, came in the time of European colonialism or Muslim lands.  However, if Muslim civilisation had not regressed, how would this colonialism be possible? 

Some would claim this was because of scholars such as Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali (r.a.), and their attacks on Muslim rationalism.  But that ignores the fact that these scholars were themselves theologians, and therefore, theist philosophers, arguing from positions of kalam, scholastic theological rationalism. 

The truth lies somewhere in between these two eras.  Islam was built on the advances of the first three generations, covering the first 400 years of Muslim civilisation, which we call the Salaf.  After them, every generation is Khalaf.  The next 500 years or so was the flowering of Muslim civilisation, and Islam coalesced into the organised faith largely familiar today.  This was the age of great advances in the natural sciences, in mathematics, in engineering and all the fields of learning. 

Like any civilisation, there comes the third phase, where the people are content with what their ancestors have achieved, and become intellectually lazy.  This is the arrogance of success, and world domination.  They declared that everything that needed to be known was known, and closed the doors of ijtihad, independent reasoning.  Whilst this closure pertained to jurisprudence, it spread to all the religious sciences, and bred a sort of contempt for the “kuffar”, non-Muslims.  It was this attitude that made the ‘ulama, scholars, resistant to any new knowledge. 

For example, we note that the Ottomans were slow in the take up of the printing press, which stymied the development of their civilisation, leading to their eventual decline into the “Sick man of Europe”. 

For example, this was the age where stupid fatawa, legal opinions, arose, such as the fatwa against blood transfusion, and the fatwa against translating the Qur’an into “kuffar” languages. Both of these were from Al-Azhar, supposedly the premier centre of study for Sunni Islam. 

And then, when the Muslims were sufficiently weak, other civilisations overtook them, and dominated them, just as they did so in their time.  From colonisers, the Muslims became the colonised.  To maintain control, it was a common policy to remove centres of resistance, and that meant many genuine scholars were killed, exiled, or otherwise eliminated.  This hastened the decline of Islamic thought. 

Arising from this, the British sponsored the Wahhabi sect, a minor regional group of brigands and heretics, and they came to control the Haramayn, reversing the earlier fatawa branding them as heretics and banned from the haj.  Wahhabism is noted for its literalism, and eschewing of metaphorical thought.  It is a dumbed down theology for the literalist, with no respect for scholarship and nuance, and no understanding of the religious sciences. 

This is where Islam is now, in the 21^st century.  We have Muslims trying to revive scholarship, by bringing back the vibrant discussions on the deeper metaphorical ideas of the Divine Nature.  And we have Muslims equally recalcitrant that this is a form of shirk, treating the religion like and idol to be worshipped and theology like superstition to be believed in without understanding. 

What has exacerbated the situation, is this age of faux scholarship.  We have people who have studied the religion in the universities claiming to be ‘ulama, but with none of the ijazat, the chain of knowledge going back to the Prophet (s.a.w.).  We have people who think that all they require is the intellect, and take from the books without considering exegesis, context and intent.  And then we have traditional scholars, who have constricted the religious sciences to the extent that they can recite from the book by rote, but do not know modern science, economics and the people they are supposed to address.  Muslims harken back to an imaginary Golden Age of an Islam of their conception, and not reality. 

The question then, is how do we revive the intellectual traditions of Islam?  It begins with sincere questioning of everything, and sincere search for answers.  A sincere search for knowledge will not yield simple answers, but more questions.  People are afraid of uncertainty, so they limit an Unlimited God.  They should embrace that uncertainty of an Unfathomable God, and diminish the ego that imagines it can understand God, and surrender to the idea of having a good opinion of the Divine.  Muslims are far too enamoured with titles and stations.  God is not found in that. 

To revive our philosophical tradition, we must revive the values that allowed it to arise.  That means having the humility of accepting we do not know everything, and take the good from everywhere.  That means having the discernment of weighing whatever we take against Revelation.  That means having the childlike wonder of every state of realisation.  Hopefully, that time is sooner, rather than later.