The Metaphysics of the Islamic Experience
By Michael Bakaoukas M.Sc., Ph.D.
“The Prophet Caricature”
As the official
It
is more than obvious that the Muslims are not in sympathy with the Westerners
(and vice versa). What divides the Western from the Islamic world is a profound lack of understanding and sympathy, that
is “the state of being simultaneously affected with the same feeling as
another” [2]. The philosophical
meaning of the Greek word “sympathy” (or “synaisthanesthai”)
was first analysed by Aristotle as follows:
“and if the virtuous man feels
towards his friend in the same way as he feels towards himself (for his friend
is a second self) – then, just as a man’s own existence is desirable for him,
so, nearly so, is his friend’s existence also desirable. But, as we saw, it
is the consciousness of oneself as good that makes existence desirable, and
such consciousness is pleasant in itself. Therefore a man ought also to share his friend’s consciousness of existence, and
this is attained by their living together and by conversing and communicating
their thoughts to each other; for this is the meaning of living
together as applied to human beings, it
does not mean merely feeding in the same place, as it does when applied to
cattle (IX.ix)
[The prerequisites for sympathy and
friendship]
(i) Friendship is
essentially a partnership. And (ii) a man stands in the same relation to a
friend as to himself; but the consciousness of his own existence is good; so
also therefore is the consciousness of his friend’s existence; but this
consciousness is actualized in intercourse; hence friends naturally desire each other’s society. And (iii)
whatever pursuit it is that constitutes existence for a man or that makes his
life worth living, he desires to share
that pursuit with his friends. Hence some friends drink or dice together,
others practice athletic sports and hunt, or study philosophy, in each other’s
company; each sort spending their time together in the occupation that they
love best of everything in life; for wishing to live in their friend’s
society, they pursue and take part with them in these occupations as best they
can.
Thus
the friendship of inferior people (phaulon) is evil (mochthera), for they take part together in inferrior pursuits [being unstable], and by becoming
like each other are made positively evil. But the friendship of the good is
good, and grows with their intercourse. And
they seem actually to become better by putting their friendship into practice,
and because they correct each other’s faults, for each takes the impress from
the other of those traits in him that give him pleasure – whence the saying:
‘Noble deeds from noble men’ (IX.xi)”.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trs H. Rackham, LOEB, Harvard University Press, 1990 (10th
ed.), IX. ix, 7-10, pp.563-565 and IX.xi,
5-xii, pp. 573-475
[the bold characters are mine].
Following Aristotle’s reasoning (op. cit.), we cannot
assume that the Muslims are sympathetic to the Westerners (and vice versa), for
they do not “wish to live in their society, to pursue and take part with them
in their occupations, to share their
consciousness of existence, to feel
towards them in the same way as they feel towards themselves, to acknowledge their existence as desirable for themselves, to live together,
to converse, to communicate their thoughts to each other, to desire each
other’s society”. The most we could expect from them is to become “strategical partners”, which is “the friendship of inferior
evil people
based on their interests and their inferrior
pursuits”. This lack of friendship and
sympathy leads to a gap of communication and to embarassing
conflicts like the “Prophet affaire”. In Derkheimian
terms, there is not “moral density” between these two segmental societies owing
to the fact that there are not social relations established between them
[3]. This profound lack of social
contacts,
understanding and sympathy between the Western and the Islamic
world has its historical economical-political and conceptual-philosophical origin.
As
Aristotle would put it, the
economical-political causes (and interests) are generated by the
different interpretations of justice and equality of the Muslims and the
Westerners. The general motive is always a passion for some conception of
justice. According to Aristotle, the principal and general cause of an attitude
of mind which disposes
men towards this conflict is that there are some who stir up sedition because
their minds are filled by a passion for equality, which arises from their
thinking that they have the worst of the bargain in spite of being the equals
of those who have got the advantage.
There are others who do it because their minds are filled with a passion
for inequality (i.e. superiority), which arises from their conceiving that they
get no advantage over others
although they are really more than equal to others. Thus inferiors
become revolutionaries in order to be equals, and
equals in order to be superiors. This is the state of mind which creates
conflicts. The objects which are at stake are profit and honour.
Other occasions, besides profit and honour, are
insolence; fear; the presence of some
form of superiority; contempt or a disproportionate increase in some
part of the state; that is to say, human’s passionate nature favours conflicts. Human passions operate intrinsically, or
from reasons inherent in its men nature. Human nature usually makes people to
“insult”, “terrorize” and attack their opponents, if there is not any kind of friendship,
understanding and sympathy.[4]
My aim herewith is not to analyse the “latent”
economical and political causes of the Muslims-Westerners conflict, as
manifested, e.g., in the anti-crusade war, in the Muslims’ holly war, in the anti-colonial
war, in the war for oil,
or in the “Prophet affaire” at issue, but to investigate into the
conceptual and philosophical origins of the Islamic reaction to “the Prophet
caricature”. In other words, why did Imam
abu Laban, leading
Muslim cleric of Denmark, say: "In my religion drawing images of Prophet
Muhammad is forbidden”?[5] To our
surprise, the answer to this fundamental
question is given by Aristotle’s philosophy which plays a basic role not only
in Christian’s but also in Arab’s religious philosophy. Thus, Aristotle should
be the bridgestone of the Christians’ and the Muslims’
attempt to reach dialogue, understanding and sympathy.
To begin with, the Arabs, formed by Mohammed into warlike people and
entrusted with the duty of propagating Islam by the sword, exercised a
destroying influence on scientific, philosophical culture wherever they
established themselves – and this for about a century after the death of the
Prophet. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria by Amru, the General of the Khalif Omar (640 AD), is a fact for which history
vouches. But when the first fervour of fanaticism had
passed, and the Mohammedan sovereignty setted down,
there arose among the Arabs a “western-like” philosophical movement. The first
scientific and philosophical efforts were directed to explain the Koran on the
basis of the ancient Greek philosophy. The theology thus created was at first
critical, but later assumed a certain dogmatic character; the same goes for the
medieval West where philosophy was assimilated by theology. The Arabs teachers
of theology were named Motekallemin
and later Motazalen, a
sect who rejected the blind faith in the Koran prescribed by the Motekallemin, and
adopted a rationalistic attitude towards its doctrines. From the time of the
establishment of the dynasty of the Abassidae (750 AD) Aristotelian philosophy was received
with favour among the Arabs. The Arabs owed their
first acquaintance with Aristotle’s writings to the Orthodox Byzantine Syrian
Christians, who not only had a Greek-Hellenistic culture, but also some of them
- like John Messuah
- were learned Greeks. These Greco-Syrian Christians took service as physicians
among the Arabs; they translated into Syriac and
Arabic at first treatises on medicine, and then philosophical writings; and as
the philosophy of Aristotle, because of the importance which it attached to the
observation of nature, had a special affinity with the medical sciences, this
philosophy first engaged the attention of the Greco-Syrian Arabs translators
and intepreters. [6]
In this sense, Aristotle provided the Arabs with a philosophical basis
for the chief doctrines of the Koran: the creation and inception of the world;
the unity and immateriality of God; the multiplicity of the Devine attributes;
providence in the shape of inexorable fate; and the resurrection of the body. Of
course, this basis to Islamic religion was furnished at variance with the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Nevertheless,
as we shall see, the new metaphysical principles were conceptualized by the
Arab religious
philosophers Motekallemin in an Aristotelian way as follows:
“-
The ultimate constituent elements of bodies are not Matter and Form, but Atoms.
- All
atoms are of the same kind.
- Every
accident is however, of its nature transient […] it
follows that to enable an accident to endure it must be created at fresh in
every successive moment. And as substance cannot exist apart from its accident,
the same is true of substance.
-
From this we are forced to conclude that in mundane things there is no
principle or power of action. […] It is God, and God alone, who creates the
accidents of activity and movement, and imparts them to substance.
- It
follows further that the combination of cause and effect which we observe in
the world is not based on a really existing relation, but arises from the fact
that God habitually joins certain activities which he Himself produces with
certain corresponding effects which He also evokes.
- Man
is not excepted from the universal law here laid down
[…] In anything which man effects he is merely the blind passive instrument of
God.
- It
is a further metaphysical principle adopted by the Motekallemim
that the possibility of things does not postulate matter as its subject or
substratum.
- On
the other hand, everything which imagination can picture, intellect must recognise as possible. Since the differences of things are
accidental, and since God can join to any atom any accident whatever, it
follows that whatever our imagination can picture may actually exist as it is
pictured […], and must therefore be rationally held to be possible.
- An
infinite quantity is an impossibility. Every actual quantity, and every actual number is, as such, determined,
and being determined, is limited”.
Moses Maimonides, Mores Nevochims, ps.I, c., 73,
These are briefly the fundamental
ontological principles of the Motekallemin based on Aristotle’s treatises Physics and Metaphysics [7]. On
these principles the first Arabs religious philosophers Motekallemin and Motazalen established
the proofs of the chief dogmas of Islam as follows: a). the existing
combination of atoms has been accomplished by God, and this being so, the world
cannot be eternal and infinite; b). We must suppose a cause which has brought it
about that a body has precisely this size and shape, and exists in this place
and at this time; this appropriation
supposes an appropriator, i. e., the God; c). in the case of the world,
existence pre-pondertates over non-existence.[8]
“If God were corporeal he would have a determinate
shape, and since a body of itself has no tendency to one shape rather another,
a higher determining power (‘appropriator’) should be assumed to give him
determinate form; he would, in this assumption, cease to be God, that is, the first
and higher Cause as represented by the very notion of his being”.
Moses Maimonides, Mores
Nevochims, ps.I, c.,
73, 74:
[1]. See “RSF appeals for calm and dialogue on Prophet caricatures”,
http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/71993.
[2]. “sympathy”: from Gk sympatheia<syn-pathes<pathos=feeling.
For the Greek origin of the word “sympathy” see The Oxford Encyclopedic
English Dictionary, Crarendon Press,
[3]. See Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour
in Society, translation with introduction by George Simpson, MacMillan, New York,
p. 92 ff.; Anthony Giddens, Durkheim, Fontana, London, 1978, p. 27
[4]. See Aristotle, Politics 1301a19, 1301b24ff, in Sir Ernst Barker, The Politics of Aristotle,
translated with notes, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1950 (2nd ed),
236, 240. Cf. Aristotle, Politics
1302a19-1302b18ff, in Barker (1950), 242-243.
[5]. See Walid Phares, “Commentary. The Cartoon Offensive: Part One”,
[6]. See Dr Albert Stöckl,
Handbook of the History of
Philosophy. Pre-Scholastic and Scholastic Philosophy, Vol. I, trs. T. A. Finlay, Fallon and Co.,
[7]. For the
Aristotelian origin of these metaphysical-logical principles and of Arab
philosophy in general see Aristotle,
Physics, trs
by Robin Waterfield and notes by D. Bostock, Oxford University Press, 1996, passim; Aristotle, Metaphysics,
introduction and commentary by W. D. Ross, vol. 2, Oxford at the Clarendon
Press, 1997, passim and Stöckl, Handbook
of the History of Philosophy, pp.290-311.
[8]. See Moses Maimonides,
Mores Nevochims,
ps.I, c., 73, 74:
[9]. The main character
of Islamic philosophy was set by the combination of Aristotle and Neoplatonism that had constituted an important tradition in
the late stages of Hellenistic philosophy and was represented by the Neoplatonic
commentators on Aristotle in Athens and Alexandria, such as Simplicius and John Philoponus,
and by Arab philosophers such as Al-Kindi (870), Al-Farabi (875-950),
Avicenna (980-1037), Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), Averroes (1126-1198), Abu’l-Bakarat
(1174-1175), Mulla Sadra
(1572-1640); see Stöckl, Handbook of the History of Philosophy, pp. 290-291, 310-311 and Fazlur Rahman,
“Islamic Philosophy”, in Paul Edwards, The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillam Publishing
Co., London, 1972, vol. 3, pp. 219-224.