Asad Q. Ahmed: An Introduction to Islamic Philosophy | The Place of Philosophy in Islamic Tradition

hello welcome to exploring the Quran in the Bible my name is Gabriel said Reynolds I'm at the University of Notre Dame in this episode I speak with one of the smartest people you will ever hear from online or meet in real life

Professor Assad Ahmed of the University of California at Berkeley we discuss generally Muslim philosophy the place of the philosopher in the classical Islamic World a place of philosophy the

accusations made against philosophy and philosophers and then we would return to the Quran and how Muslim philosophers read the Quran how they saw it as the word of God but still found in it

allegorical or metaphorical symbolic readings thank you so much for joining be really grateful if you take a moment to like this video and to subscribe to exploring the Quran and the Bible

hello Professor Ahmed thanks for being with me on exploring the Quran in the Bible thank you for having me we know each other from a while back uh from our our studies we were both in different stages

you've gone on to a very distinguished academic career so I'll start with a brief bio and then we're going to speak about philosophy and the Quran um some different questions in regard to

what is Islamic philosophy so I'll address that sort of separately just for its own sake uh and then some specific questions about how the data of the Quran raises philosophical questions so

I really look forward to this chat everyone um Assad Ahmed is the magistrati am I pronouncing that correct I think so okay is the

magistrated distinguished professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures at the University of California Berkeley uh he's also professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and affiliate professor in the department of philosophy and

director of the center for Middle Eastern studies at uh Cal Berkeley he received his ba in 2000 from Yale University majoring both in the department of philosophy and the department of

literature and he was awarded a PhD in 2007 from the Department of near Eastern studies at Princeton University Professor Amman specializes in early

Islamic social history and pre-modern Islamic intellectual history with a special focus on the rationalist disciplines such as philosophy logic

legal theories and astronomy he's the author of among other works the religious Elite of the early Islamic hijaz which was published with the University of Oxford in 2011.

and a translation of the section on logic and avicenna's deliverance also published with Oxford University press in 2011 and palimpses of themselves logic and commentary Muslim India

published with the University of California press in 2022. I know you've done a number of edited Works where you've both contributed and edited and a long list of Articles uh is there

something you'd like to add to that bio or something you'd like to edit or amend no thank you Professor Reynolds that's already too generous I'm very kind my pleasure yeah terrific I'm going to

start with a very general question that may not be very fair because uh it's so General but um how would you define philosophy generally um not specifically Islamic philosophy

just what is philosophy and how is it different from theology right yeah thank you for for having me first of all and it's a pleasure to be talking to you after such time um I think the first question as you as

you point out is a is indeed a general one and we can respond in general terms and perhaps we'll be able to dig deeper into the question of how we use these terms when

we talk about philosophy in Islamic world so let's say that we're thinking about philosophy in the post-enlightened age the way it's understood in Europe right so the certain trappings of this

discipline um you know one of them for example is that it is the free exercise of Reason unencumbered by specific outcomes so my objective in doing philosophy or

engaging in this discipline is not that I want to arrive at a particular conclusion but that I'm driven by certain principles that are preliminary

uh and certain methods both of which are not directed at any particular outcome nor Guided by any Dogma uh sometimes philosophical reasoning may

involve commitment to empiricism for example again in the western post-enlightenment tradition and the conclusions that are derived from these methods and principles are what we might call philosophy now within philosophy as

you know in the western tradition there's engagement with different you know methods of doing the work some of it is within the group of analytical the analytical tradition you would have

philosophy of mathematics for example and philosophy of language philosophy of mind and specifically logic and the various questions that it poses and then of course you have feels like political

philosophy and ethics and metaphysics and so on so generally speaking again using the expression philosophy insofar as it is

proximate to us in the western academic tradition that generally how I would Define it theology I would imagine we would say is uh you know exercise that does have an objective there is a

positive let's say Transcendent entity in a certain case and we're interested in you know God speak to use the expression of one Theologian we're interested in

finding out the nature of this this entity uh its attributes its Essence uh even the fact of its existence but that existence is normally given so it has a

certain outcome that is posited from the very beginning when theology becomes creedal no one can say that a certain dogmatic positions that have already been posited and one is looking to prove

them or to substantiate them so this would be apologetics more or less there could be one phase of theology sure but of course there are many different yeah so I suppose that would be a simple way to

begin and things to be critiqued and these definitions that I've given yes so then what would you say about uh moving to

the classical Islamic world um so I'm thinking the pre-modern uh Islamic world uh where uh obviously philosophy was an important intellectual

Enterprise so was theology but are those categories that later scholarship has imposed on a classical Islamic growth so for example would a Philosophers such as

early philosophers such as farabi or IBN Cena known in the west as evacena have would they have recognized themselves as philosophers and would everyone have seen that there's a clear distinction

between theology which may presumably be equated with Kalam and falsefo or philosophy does that distinction hold in the same

way in the classical Islamic world yeah so this is where things get dicey so okay both yes and no okay again let me begin on some some kind of a higher

order reflection on the problem right so if we're thinking of the term philosophy the way you and I use it in in English or in the cognitive languages um there are a number of ways we can

look for philosophy in the Islamic world and say whether they did philosophy right and therefore falling from that the answer to the question whether X and Y thought he was a philosopher would follow

so okay so there are a number of ways of doing this I can say okay let me look for a term in the Islamic tradition that might correspond to philosophy

right and one way to do so is that you can say that well you know for example philosophy May correspond to something called falsafar which is the translation of the Greek philosophy

um and insofar as we may be able to argue that falsa is the kind of thing I described earlier in the first question yes Muslims certainly you did fals about they were fellow you know they were philosophy before and so they certainly

did that but at the same time the Islamic tradition does not always look at that Enterprise that we qualifa so far as a non-dogmatic non-doctrinal

right right uh in fact in late Antiquity too you know the work of the Philosopher's philosophia was often seen by the Christian Heirs of that tradition

the elite antique commentators as a specific kind of Doctrine in the Islamic tradition it becomes right so in other words something like the doctrine or the position of the

parapathetics so it's not always understood it's just a translated so measure in literally means the Walkers uh so parapathetics meaning also walkers in the Greek

philosophical traditions exactly meaning Aristotle I guess Aristotle and those who follow him okay okay right so um so it becomes a specific Doctrine right so

fals of our philosophia is not exactly for the Muslim tradition uh what I described earlier as philosophy although one may argue one may when we try to

argue that uh Aristotle and his followers are unencumbered by underlying dogmatic doctrinal position whether that's the case or not it certainly was not always seen that way that's a very

interesting point right so against that then they would put for example you know um the philosophy of the sharakun right so the philosophy of the illumination is so they had

madalisha which is different from the philosophy of the philosophy or the peripatetics um so even within philosophical Enterprise first of all if there is the

question of a particular doctrinal a methodological position or an epistemological approach you already have divisions within philosophy which should not exist the term as it is given

so if you're looking if you're looking for some kind of an answer to your question in indigenous terms right terms that belong within the Islamic tradition or Arabic the response is not

straightforward okay that said let me Grant now for a moment that there is a such a thing as theology in Islam which you recognize as

Kalam right the work of the mother often translated as dialectical theologians or speculative theologians the Muslim tradition does very interestingly draw a

distinction between the work of these figures and the work that has been done for example by the philosopher sounds for example in the work of a scholar called the 13th century scholar

uh he has a word called the distinction between philosophy what he calls right metaphysics and here there he says something very similar to what I

actually have pointed out as a distinction between philosophy the way we understand it today and the way we understand the term theology he points out that for example in theology what

you're interested in is certainly to look at God's creation and understand it insofar as it would lead you to the knowledge of God his attributes his Essence and his existence so there is an

objective there that's already positive and the fact of that objective being there makes it a theological or kalami Enterprise right presumably philosophers

the philosopher are not doing it that way but again that is a big if because again there is an understanding that even within for example the field of

logic which is supposed to be formally dissociated from any material concerns yes the Muslim grammarian and Muslim and non-muslim logicians debated whether

logic itself is encumbered by Greek grammatical structures right so there's a specificity very interesting it will be modes of argumentation anyway those are some things I can say in trying to

complicate the question and also maybe a related question is to uh to consider the social aspect or the vocational aspect maybe it's a

better term of people we recognize as as Muslim philosophers um so I mean to use maybe uh avisan or even Cena as an example uh his work presumably was not limited

to um maybe uh maybe philosopher to use that term uh but obviously expand it

into other things including medicine Etc um so uh I mean would would it been Cena for example have seen himself principally as a philosopher who also did other things would he include those

other things like medicine maybe astronomy under the category of philosophy uh was or in other words was it was it a sort of coherent uh category

uh in the in the in the social context of the Islamic world to be a philosopher I think so I think if again if you're translating philosopher as

philosopher certainly is one and I think he sees himself as as such okay he is engaged in various disciplines even quranic exegesis but I think his starting point is lens is the arsotelian

tradition its reception and continuity and Lead antiquity and then his synthesis and transformation of that tradition but he's working within that tradition and as such he would be a philosopher his

reception could is indeed very different in different spaces in the Islamic tradition Christian right you know so so there is for example a term that emerges on which one of her colleagues has recently written a

wonderful book you know hikmah for example now later on I've seen among various uh you know people engaging in the same kinds of disciplines as a Hakim

um hikmah is a complicated term it may mean simply wisdom it may mean even knowledge epistemologically distinct non-dialectical discursive form of knowledge it could also mean the

combination of philosophy and its principles and methodologies with what we described as theology so ever Center transforms in the receptor history um let me end by saying again since

you're I'm reminding myself of it we can use the word hikma to translate philosophy that I had described before but as you can see even there we're going to have lots of problems right because it's not the peripatetic

tradition as such right all kinds of even if even if uh on a linguistic level one could recognize philosophy as love of wisdom in Greek the Greek word for

wisdom Sophia and hikmah usually rendered as wisdom uh but in fact yeah I see your point that the way hakima develops and is used uh in the Islamic world is distinct uh and this is a

related question but I wanted to throw in a quotation here from an article by Jose in I believe it's in the Cambridge companion to classical Islamic theology

but he wrote an article on Theology and philosophy there or contributed that article to the volume and uh um writes that Islamic philosophy quote

grew out of the desire by learned members of the community to uphold the authority of Islamic Revelation against arguments increasing posed by members of the many Divergent peoples who are

living in the lands United by the conquest so basically end quote so basically a contention that there is an apologetical agenda to Muslim philosophy

that uh it is a means to an end more or less um so one uses uh techniques and methods that would be recognized by non-muslims

but the goal ultimately is to make a defense of uh Islamic Revelation Quran Hadith Etc what do you think about that I I mean let me Begin by saying that I

will delete work in very high esteem especially he's working on so on this particular position I disagree

um I disagree because and you know any apologetics that seem to emerge out of the philosophical enterprising and falsify enterprising

the Islamic tradition are undergirded by the logic of the argument itself so as we will see every Sunday for example posits an entity that is necessary by virtue of itself

um whose existence is necessary by virtue of its Essence and this particular entity is presented or interpreted as God certainly in the

tradition but I don't think his intention was theological I don't think the intention was to posit this entity right objective of the Enterprise in that sense it's not apologetic that said

perhaps it occurs to me that professori was thinking of some arguments about the emergence of certain certain subcategories within philosophy as an

apologetic Enterprise so for example one of the earliest works that is translated into Arabic is the topics are Aristotle um and that you know tended to serve

dialectical purposes in inter-communal disputes Logics absorption the Islamic tradition itself perhaps and I say this with a big

perhaps may have been um determined by intercompassional debates but I tend to decide more with Professor Dimitri hewittas's position

that this is a much larger ideological a much larger Enterprise that that you know of translation and absorption of that goes into an old sicinian ideology

as absorbed and inflected by the Abbasid Revolution so um so I'm can we can you explain that a bit further I just I know you're channeling professor gutos of Yale University a bit there but uh

because you brought up the sasanians who maybe not everyone will know so this is the pre-islamic Iranian uh regime um uh and then the abbasids so who uh

become the the dominant political force um after their 750 in a way taking over for the Umayyads but how did you tie those together with this particular uh

uh uh context philosophical context that we're discussing yeah so Professor gutas I think has given to us I think the most robust theory of the translation movement the most robust robust

explanation as to why it happened translation from Greek into Arabic principally in principally but of course other languages do Sanskrit and um it's it's a strange thing that happened

and he explains it as perhaps second only two or perhaps at least I don't quite remember as important as the Industrial Revolution in the way it transformed Human Society right so it's a major thing that happens that required

explanation so in his Greek thought Arabic culture and I'm simplifying the argument here uh the point he makes is that the Abbasid had this as a larger

continuation of a uh of the Enterprise of the sassinets uh taken up by the latter towards the very end of their um of their control and dominance in the

region and one of the main reasons for it is that the abbasids who or Thai who are from the family of the Prophet uh When They carried out the success of review successful Revolution against the

umayyas the earlier Dynasty much of their support came from the East uh the Eastern provinces um and uh many of them of course a large number of them being non-arabic speaking

populations and there was a memory of this earlier ideological force of the sentence that may have been cultivated by them in view of presenting themselves

as the heir to the sustainers and furthermore of course many of the administrators in the court of the early Abbas is indeed derived from that same landscape so this is the kind of

simplified story right it's pretty compelling he looks at important and relevant sources and my own position is that of all the explanations and narratives we have out there of the

production of philosophy or the beginning of philosophy in Islam this is probably the more compelling one Association and there's a related question to this which actually

um I thought of because I've read a bit of Professor gutas's description of avasena in particular but in terms of the social context avisana obviously um coming a few centuries After the

ambassad Revolution but in terms of social context of philosophers that develops um in the classical Islamic world you know I have this notion uh presumably

it's a caricature and probably embarrassing for me even to admit but I I sort of this notion that well the theologians they were like fully immersed and engaged in Islamic Society

they were having debates at the medullist at the court of some Emir ruler uh they were probably they had day jobs probably as uh judges and so they

were also doing tourist prudence and they might have been imams at the local mosque and helping the community with daily problems all this but not philosophers philosophers were basically

locked in the room uh just thinking away and trying to deal with very complicated uh um maybe obtuse problems that no one

else cared about so um uh in in an article that I read was available online it's in the I think publicly available Stanford encyclopedia

philosophy he says in regard to avocena or ibencino um that I mean I've got a longer quotation here but he he says up until that time philosopher treatises on

discrete subject says up until it's time on discrete subjects and abstruse commentaries the dominant two forms of philosoph discourse as just indicated were matters for Specialists that could

not and did not claim endorsement or Allegiance from society as a whole um he goes on to say uh the philosophical Summa now that is of avasana did and avicenna who wrote in

different styles and genres to reach as many people as possible it's also noted above clearly intended as much so um I mean part of what he's arguing for is a change with avasana but generally that

not all philosophers were just in the rooms thinking away um maybe with a glass of wine or whatever uh they uh some of them were

really uh cared about making an impact on Islamic Society um and uh sort of inculcating philosophy among the masses what do you think about all that

right I know in this full code now I think that I do agree with him in philosophy as an as a proper Enterprise was always meant for the Adept and the

initiates and if he means by this is what he means that in the works of kindly for example in farabi and even have a Sana the major works are intended for internal technical dialectic and the

uncovering of Truth uh then they're all certainly doing that now with the vasana too he's right I mean he has allegorical poems for example and you know these

stories that that are meant and on some level to make accessible on a basic level his philosophical positions and his Enterprise so I see

that point too what I wouldn't would I wouldn't draw a distinction however in the work the theologians are doing and the philosophers are doing either because the works of theologians

are equally equally um you know foreboding they're difficult things yes yes you know the masses to be to be engaged

for example yes physical theory of the Dubai's for example or you know uh in um yeah early I think 9th century uh

theologians sorry yeah but what where they do start engaging them are in where we would find basic creedal positions right so I imagine that

something like the fair Akbar of um hanifa and the pseudo hanafi texts are meant to present certain basic creedal positions to Muslims who where

they stand in relation to for example their position on Abu Bakr and uthman and so on and those are supposed to be responses clear responses to underlying currents

of theology among the most and so on so I think those are perhaps meant for Mass consumption but the hard discursive dialectical work of theology um embedded in text like the guitar and

so on those are not for Mass consumption either so um I think they're to the distinction is not quite uh useful in my view

um yeah okay okay that's a really important point we are going to get the court on eventually there might be viewers if there if there are still Quran interested viewers I promise you we are going to get to Quran but I

really have wanted to take advantage of the opportunity of having Professor augment with us to just cover some basic questions of Muslim philosophy

um so yeah that's a really interesting point about theology being uh uh also a very technical science and Islamic tradition and as someone who's

done a bit of reading and been mystified more than once in that reading of Islamic theology I take that point to heart as I want to ask one more general question before we actually get to the

Quran which is uh sometimes there's a narrative out there and I think there's been a long Enterprise now of people trying to undermine this narrative but the narrative is that um you know there

was this period of flourishing of Muslim philosophy especially in um the context of the translation movement everyone thinks of met Moon

who's Calif I think between 8 13 and 833 uh And he supposedly had this institute for translation and sort of Think Tank

and Institute for event studies in Baghdad known as betel Heckman the the House of Wisdom uh I know their historical debates about whether what that actually looked like Etc but in any

case so like Islamic philosophy does great you know farabi I've been seeing everyone's doing wonderful there's all sorts of different movements and in sort of not only is the Greek traditional

philosophy saved in the Muslim World by Muslims and non-muslims um but also you know really new creative original philosophical ideas are

developed and articulated and then razali comes along uh in we're Dyson 11-11 but um uh yeah he writes at work

uh entitled The incoherence of the philosophers um uh in which he uh says well if you

hold certain sort of typical positions uh such as the world being Eternal um you're guilty of unbelief basically um and so the narrative is that

Muslim philosophy nothing really serious even if way out in the west you know verois will write a response to uh hazali but basically that's at the

beginning of the end is with rosali so um I don't know if you want to comment on that narrative probably you do um but I I also wanted you to address generally I mean even in the Heyday

where philosophers seen as sort of my teenage son would say sus were they suspect uh because they're always seeing

as you know basically irreligious and um they their goal really isn't for uh you know the glorification of Islam it's for their own intellectual exercise

which some then sometimes just takes them far away from traditional Dogma so any thoughts on all of that yeah I mean this is uh this is a question that's exercised so many of us

right but let me Begin by saying um um in a very straightforward way that the idea of lazali destroying philosophy in the Islamic tradition I think by now

has been put to rest now we don't we're not quite sure what to put in its place because we haven't done as much work on what I call the post-classical period uh

as we have in the Classical period because it's a relatively new field but wherever we have um and dug into the sources whether it's

in you know Fields related to physics or metaphysics or logic we have found gems we have found some interesting work that's happened and of course especially in astronomy too which uh you know

people like George saliva and Jimmy Rogers and Robert Morrison and others have worked so um the first point is that that looking at the sources that we're slowly digging

up we're not only discovering new texts and new dialectical forms and transformations of the content but we're also finding new names people who have sort of been buried in the

sources in the manuscript libraries and so on so that's point one I I disagree with that particular narrative but yes I I'm not the first one to do so I think

the earliest in my view the earliest and the strongest attack on that old orientalist uh narrative was by Professor George saliva

um and then you know slowly we have been doing the work to see what to put it in this place so that's one thing the second is let's go back to the question a Philosophers being sus and uh and what it meant means in the Islamic

tradition I think it would be important to remember that Socrates was also quite sus and in his time right brought before the cold corrupting the youth and so on so perhaps Oscars are always seen that

we're in larger societies because their point is to produce Paradigm shifts and that they always make people uncomfortable so in the Islamic tradition too certainly there is no

doubt and that even from the earliest period on there were attacks there were critiques as I mentioned earlier there is in you know very early debate on the

benefit of logic whether logic is a methodology Muslims should adopt or whether it's really Greek grammar that should be adopted um those are whether it's Arabic grammar they should be adopted because

logic from Aristotle is really an inflection of Greek grammar right so this is um so there are certainly um there were always questions of some sort now the question is whether this

kind of a societal um resistance as it is in every culture whether that produce the end of philosophy and no it certainly didn't if

we go to razali now and I'll take the story forward from here I think sometimes we forget to read text carefully I was earlier several introductions to his famous

and if we look at it carefully he is very clear that when it comes to mathematics astronomy geometry logic and various other disciplines medicine uh

Islam has absolutely no issue with such matters he says next the two following things the first is that if there are sciences that we have established as

demonstrative and if their conclusions collide with the conclusions or positions of received narratives let's say from the prophet then you have one of two Enterprises

that you must take up you may either interpret the profit's work now it's a statement on an allegorical level which he is not happy to do because he does not like that real he doesn't like

you know this kind of uh allegorical uh uh interpretations of things the other thing you should do he says is that you should then consider that the transmitted report has not been

authentically transmitted to you right so what he's saying is that the authority does lie with demonstrative science uh in cases of um a lack of Correspondence between the

two the transmitted and the rational disciplines you would jettison the transmitted one uh not not rejecting it or simply saying for example it's not authentic it doesn't correspond to what

we have discovered in reality so repeatedly in many different ways here in in the in the various introductions to is the half with he says this the

other thing to notice is that what was all the attacks in the the at the end of the day a certain metaphysical positions all right so for idea that that there is

no bodily Resurrection for example or the idea that the world is eternal for example or the idea that God's knowledge is not of particulars right those are

the three ones on the basis she declares people to be non-muslim and the method he adopts there again just to remind everyone is to say that philosophers claim that they have demonstrations of

these positions the Enterprise of the The Hobbit is to show that those demonstrations so-called demonstrations fall short of their claim they're not demonstrative they're not watertight

demonstration is such that it produces a resolve in the epistemic state of a person such that alternative possibilities cannot be entertained now given that he shows or he thinks he

shows that there is no demonstration of these positions then your adoption of them ultimately amounts to some kind of preference which is almost arbitrary

or you may incline most probably towards the position by but it's not a result given that the position he adopts is given that there is no demonstration of

these positions as Muslims you should therefore adopt positions that we consider to be Orthodoxy right in other words if two things are on the same epistemic level and the philosophers

have failed in their demonstrations then why would you adopt their position by jettison jettisoning in the position that Muslims would hold as quote unquote Orthodoxy right this is

I'm I'm being products in my response because it's part of a is a bit of a pet peeve of mine this this idea of the Golden Age so let me finish by saying after lazadi in my view some of the most

important and exciting in my view in fact the more important and exciting work in month in Logic for example and in metaphysics and the incorporation of

philosophy into the Muslim theological tradition the most exciting work actually happens after 13th century textbooks and the commentarial space that follows

um so anyway all this to say that it's a narrative that by now we should should get rid of right right terrific great okay so turning now to Quran and we'll

still be engaging with classical Islamic philosophy um but uh I mean uh for example you raised the question that gazali himself does

uh which is the problem that the philosophers tend to consider that the world is um uh is eternal um or that God does not know particulars

or that the um the body is not resurrected there's some sort of spiritual Resurrection only um so uh in in light of these doctrines

um I don't know if you would agree that all of them are in tension Within surface or I don't know

um maybe um a clear reading of the Quran uh or simple reading the Quran maybe but um could you comment generally on the way

in which I don't know maybe if we can stick with uh avicenna for now engages with the Quran um what sort of tools does he use to

negotiate apparent tensions between a simple reading of the Quran and his philosophically based principles yeah great thank you so evasana as you

know actually has short commentaries on various verses of the Quran and the question of their authenticity I leave open because I don't work on that question uh for that you would go to

domestic guitar system tradition and the nice fat fantasies that he has there so um but that aside the main the main angle that he tends to take with reference to the Quran is that it is an

allegorical text and his true meanings are accessible only to the Adept and to the initiates and you and I as commoners as common people are not able to access

it it does have certain benefits and that it produces a certain kind of habitats in us if we follow the legal aspects of precepts of Islam for example

we would be trained in a certain way to Incline increasingly towards the cultivation of our rational Soul well that's very interesting is that because

does it inculcate a certain a certain habit or habitat within us um because uh clear thinking is connected to certain uh sort of ethical

dispositions um that is behaving rightly avoiding evil does that contribute to clear thinking is that is that the point there the investment in this world and investment in in the bodily aspects and

faculties is something the more you invest in that the less preparation you would have for enlightenment and ultimately salvation after it's like okay so that means that the sort of the

uh somewhat ascetic program of the Quran in as much as it demands things like prayer fasting uh almsgiving uh could uh

separate oneself from attachment to this world or the Dunya and therefore engender a more sort of philosophical way of being

yeah and furthermore there may be other meanings deep meanings attached to any number of these things that only people like evasana and the prophets would know um you and I wouldn't

um okay so it is a Quran that is filled with these other motives and there is a zahiri presentation or a parent presentation but then a real meaning too um that is embedded within it and we can

certainly talk about that when we if we talk about prophetology and what he thinks about prophets and philosophers but uh so that's that's the general approach he has I I think we get into that topic right

now because I think a lot of people be interested because you just mentioned uh the common people won't know the allegorical sense or the uh the internal

uh balcony is supposed to be the Arabic word sense of the Quran um but people like avasana and the prophets would so that might be shocking

to many people to hear evasena in the same grouping there of the prophets so yeah could you could we just go ahead and address that question how did evasena see the prophets uh could

philosophers attain wisdom or knowledge such that the things accessible to profits become accessible to them sure well um episode now I don't think

would claim that he had reached that level but he was perhaps very cool so basically I should begin by saying that the position of the philosophers in the

Islamic tradition the philosopher is systematic and again it appears to me that it's not really driven as we were mentioning earlier by apologetics it's just it's the conclusions they arrive at

seem to be driven by a certain internal logic of the principles and methods so ever Center has among other things a theory of human psychology so if the

story would begin there among other things and um he would begin by telling you that you have something called the havasuh or the senses that are external senses and

their senses that are internal senses external senses you and I are familiar with right the sense of touch and taste and so on the five um those are received by the human mind

in the frontal lobe of the brain so we're still not talking about the intellect we're talking about something physical the brain and that image is then those images and and senses when

received in the frontal lobe would then start traveling backwards so the next phase would be where these images are recalled uh the next phase would be where they're mixed and then next phase where the mixtures of these images are

stored and ultimately you arrive at the back most uh lobe of the brain uh where something called more estimation takes place and this is the place you might

say where there's a move away from corporeal items because these are still images and things that you can imagine and see towards something that is non-corporeal so an example would be

that for example if you see a wolf you would have a feeling of fear uh a recognition that this is a predator now a feeling of fear or the recognition

that this thing is a predator is a non-corporeal non-sensible thing but it is associated with something sensible namely the image of uh of the wolf so

this is this is the last slope of the brain now human beings when they're born are born with an empty or prime intellect which is over various stages trained through Preparatory stages early

training of a child and the acquisition of basic forms of knowledge and ultimately arriving at a point where there is a body of knowledge that is available for uh recall for those

individuals as you ascend into the greater and greater abstractions you're also getting closer and closer to what is called the active intellect which is the intellect of the last sphere of the

cosmos in the Supra lunar between the sub lunar and superlunar world when you have trained yourself to a certain point abstracting yourself increasingly from

the corporeal items and as as long as you're reflecting on universal unchanging truths which is what the philosopher is doing at some point you would have a contact or this all with

the act of intellect which is the house of all of the bodies of knowledge universals uh to which human beings can have access now philosopher presumably

has this dissolve or contact and as you can see again I'm presenting this in a very simplified form as you can see this is a this is a turning away from corporeal items and the particulars of

this world increasingly on reflection on unchanging universals that's one aspect where philosophers and Prophets both engage now so just unchanging universals um

just to get maybe a bit further into what it means to have this connection with the active intellect it was great because you described it in sort of its cosmological Dimension but obviously it

also has an intellectual or maybe even psychological Dimension to it but um these these Universal these Eternal um and Universal

um items uh that would mean for example understanding Beauty truth goodness um other uh other principles

um not in a way connected to a specific object like I don't know a beautiful mountain or something but in in their purest sense absolutely yes um Eternal truths yes Universal truths

uh and I think you've described it very eloquently that's exactly what it would be now in the case of the philosopher and by the way this work that we just described access to the universal unchanging truths is the work of what he

calls rational Soul so this is not this is not associated with the brain this is something that is independent of bodily existence okay because obviously the body is concerned with particulars and

because of its nature it cannot engage universals and changing things it is invested in transforming and changing Nobles but I was describing earlier the

process of abstraction to show to you that epicenter recognizes their increasing abstraction that happens in the brain itself until we get to the back part the the the back lobe of the

brain so continuing the story here the last point I would say is here the philosopher and the prophet are very similar because they both have access to the active intellect

the prophets development is such that all truths are available to him along with all the steps in deriving those truths uh in in a you know in a single

moment so for example if you have a long math problem that takes 10 pages to resolve um the prophet would not only know the answer but he would have immediately access to all the various steps

immediately and simultaneously available to him now the last thing where does the Quran come in and where does Gabriel come in uh um the prophets also have brain that I

mentioned which is concerned with images so it it it is not that Muhammad was imagining Gabriel it is that there was a

presentation in his mind of this Gabriel uh who is bringing in fact these allegorical words to him but this imaginative or imag this inculcated

um and developed faculty of the Imagine or the imaginary faculty corresponds to his rational Soul as well so there is there is a kind of an allegorical presentation through images through

sounds and words of the realities that the prophet also knows that hides behind these particular things okay so in that sense the Quran and Gabriel and his

experiences are real uh for the prophet um and what they hide behind themselves are precisely the things that a philosopher would know these higher truths

um this is a bit of the you know again simplified version of the prophetology uh yeah yeah and you can see how every Center works at a sort of reconciliation between philosophical knowledge and the

revealed knowledge accessible to prophets so um this uh I'm not sure I could maybe maybe we should move on to some specific questions in regards to

the Quran I'm not sure I could conduct uh in a coherent conversation further on some of these uh philosophical questions which are um in regard to intellection

and the intelligibles and all of this uh it gets pretty for me it gets pretty complicated pretty uh quickly um so uh well turning then to specific questions of the Quran

um I wanted to ask about um how the philosophers we can stick with evacena or someone else or maybe just generally um deal with the question of divine

knowledge um you already mentioned that uh razali had a problem with uh their what he attributes a rejection of God's ability

to know particulars um but also with Divine will uh and the relationship between Divine knowledge and divine will

um so I think sort of mainstream Sunni theological idea is that things are basically um as God Wills them to be

um so uh I mean would philosophers generally um agree with that and would they um uh how would they account for evil

consequently um does God allow for evil to see will for evil I mean just to give a couple of

Quran verses famously which is Quran chapter or soda 113. opens uh pull out the bearable

so I take refuge in The Lord of Daybreak if that's the meaning of uh but then the key point is from the evil usually understood from the evil that he created

um so does God create evil was that a problem for the philosophers um and then uh I mean there are various verses which speak about God sort of leading astray so tadlil or idlal

leading people astray or sealing for example Quran chapter 2 verse 7 um God has placed seals on their hearts in their hearing

um so on their vision is Avail um so yeah could you speak I mean this hasn't been a very simple question to

respond to because I've raised a whole bunch of different things but uh how how would they work out the problem of divine knowledge and will in the light of evil yeah I mean this is a very difficult

question and it exercises both you and me and of course the larger tradition as whole um the philosophers are generally charged with the idea that if their

theory is taken to its logical conclusion they're not willing to Grant God free choice um and the reason for that again the

theory the positions being logically coherent is that if God is necessary in himself and if necessity is defined uh such that

it is not caused by anything right there is nothing external that causes it to become what it is it must be something Eternal and unchanging right so in other words one more time let's say if I'm

sitting right now and if I stand up there must be because I'm a contingent being some kind of a cause underlying my giving preponderance to standing up as

opposed to sitting down there must be a preponderator of some sort out there now this cannot happen with God because that would mean there's a cause that is affecting God affecting God in a certain

way and affecting his choice so this becomes a problem for uh for the philosophers because uh later on if you wish we can talk about their improve of The Eternity of The Eternity of the

world it ends with the idea that it must be some entity outside of contingent series of causes which is in which is necessary in itself so okay so God is

necessary in himself then his knowledge also cannot be changing um he cannot know that X will happen in

time uh at time T1 when he did not know it that it would not happen at time t 0 because at t 0 something maybe some created thing or some impetus something

must have caused him to change and but that cannot be implemented of God right right so in that sense his knowledge his eternal his knowledge is not changing his knowledge is universal also the fact

that he cannot have knowledge in particulars because particulars come to be and they pass away right so if X is not at one point and X is at the other point then to know that X is at a later

Point God must have been affected uh his knowledge must have been affected by the emergence of X the item at T1 right so I hope I've been clear so okay this means

that of choice is considered to be defined as something that does not exist now and will exist later there must be some kind of a change especially if choice is

caused by some knowledge of some sort um so this is a problem that the philosophers face and they are criticized about this especially with reference to the idea or choice because

it doesn't leave God any choice in creating the world again if you get into the questions of The Eternity of the world this is precisely the problem that

God cannot create a world in time you also cannot be generating knowledge and time or be generated by some item in terms of his knowledge and time right right no this this would be as you can

imagine tied to the problem of of evil right so if if all of um creation including evil emerges from

God as the ultimate cause then he is responsible for it and again the philosophers grapple with this idea the theologians on the other hand do have some ways out of this which are not ever

quite convincing and this is why they keep debating about it one of the positions that might that is taken by one really Muslim theological group is that well an item of

you know existence that you call evil at a certain time still constitute the best of all possible worlds it's it's best as a whole so you know the death of this innocent

child for example versus the life of this innocent child for example would be considered to be uh the death would be considered to be the better choice given the various set of effects that are

connected with that that death right so it's the best of all creation the best of all possible World another idea that is deployed is that well since God determines what is good and

evil the application of evil to him in the way we understand it tied to the notion of Justice would not apply you know things are evil because God said them to be so there's no inherent evil

quality in them so God created them as such so this would be the position of another theological group so these are some of the ways that the theological tradition grapples with with this question of Good and Evil and God's

knowledge but I think the philosophers do find themselves in a corner because okay yeah right well you you raised the

question of the uh the eternality of the world and I wanted I did indeed want to ask about that in part because the Quran explicitly speaks of God's creation of

the world uh on different occasions in in six days um so uh and you already sort of introduced us to the allegorical uh uh

reading of the Quran used by the philosophers so how do they work through that one I mean how can it be that the Quran seems to be so clear that I mean if we

understand we're I think also fettera is probably used at some place someplace else for the creation of the world uh there's a sort of fatted which I think alludes to the God's creation of the world um so if those if the Quran seems to be

so clear about that how do philosophers get around that and maintain with probably the classical Greek tradition that the world is eternal yeah I don't think they get around it

unfortunately and this is why how this attack comes around the the idea of the eternity of the world also shows up in later texts after Azadi by the Muslims such as

but it's generally something that they that they struggle with so let's first talk about what the argument is and then we can see whether they get out of it in some way right so the argument is well

for example the the argument for the necessary existing out of morals out of contingencies would be as follows we recognize basic modal Notions like necessity and possibility

the latter which I would call contingency is such that the existence of a is dependent on the existence of its cause let's call it B

and B if it is not necessary in itself and is necessitated by his cause seen is also dependent right so you can have an infinite series of causes and effects because none of them is necessary by

virtue itself each of them requires some cause it is necessary by virtue of its cause if you have a necessary insufficient cause you'll always have the effect according to the argument right if all elements of the cause are

present and they're necessary then you know proof you will have the the effect all the time so anyway at any rate there's a series of contingent causes and effects now if the series is eternal

it will never end and you cannot according to avasana you cannot have an actual eternity right because the series will continue forever and you will not end you will not end up at the final future endpoint which we are

experiencing right now you and I for example so uh what you need by definition in a series of contingent causes is that there must be something outside

of this series that is necessary by virtue of itself you must end the series at some point um I mean you may the other argument you might give is that well I don't need to have an infinite discrete series I could

have a circular series but that would as you can imagine would have the same problem right if he is caused by B and B is caused by a you're just going in a loop the dog right okay so you must posit something outside the infinite

regress or the Eternal circle of repetition and this ever Center and uh philosopher is in a tradition called the wajah

right which is necessary with respect to its existence uncaused by anything else and so on right necessary by virtue of

itself so this is the Everson and God now as we discussed earlier if this necessary cause necessary by virtue of itself existing by virtue of itself is

the cause and sufficient cause and necessary cause of the series then as long as it exists and it does exist eternally because it's necessary all the effects must also increase myself to

existence right right so the world then becomes Eternal with God or this necessary entity let's not call it God right now it is necessary in itself

um they draw one one important distinction now which doesn't get them out of the problem but because it still doesn't satisfy the literal

reading which is that they say well this necessary entity is causally prior in relation to all its effects but not

ontologically so right so in other words the example that is given is that if I have my hand on a doorknob and I'm turning the doorknob the hand being the cause of the Turning

once it's removed the doorknob would not turn anymore so at a certain causal priority in relation to the effect namely or not they're happening at the same time but of course even though it has a causal

priority ontologically the the existence of the two of them is simultaneous right so this is how God is prior to the world um in the sort of ontological but not temporal way

is that is that a good use of ontological there oh no biotological I do mean existence yeah temporal way but causally okay okay so not ontological

but causing it okay yeah yes possibly prior not ontologically so but as you can see this still means that the world is eternal with God so the idea that it's generated in time

so this wouldn't satisfy the theologians that he has this sort of priority or yeah uh causal priority but but not temporal or ontological okay and this is

one of the things as you know that was all the attacks in the halfway and as I mentioned his argument is that you don't have a good demonstration of this your demonstration falls short right right

um okay well I wanted to get maybe one more question in about the philosophers and how they deal with uh Quran and Revelation generally um which has to do with ethics

so uh uh I made an illusion earlier to a philosopher being there with a glass of wine and I did that because I think in his autobiography somewhere evasena speaks of drinking wine is that right is

that in there yes he gets a problem that he can't solve okay if I remember correctly I think it takes a little bit of wine goes to sleep and it's a result in the Stream and it

resolved in his dream brilliant yeah okay I'll have to try it out uh so um yeah I mean uh if if the Quran can be interpreted allegorically and presumably

also Hadith um what consequences does that have for their view of human society uh is it foreign

yeah so I mean if uh if things are allegorical then do you really have to follow the um the external or exoteric wording of

Quran or Hadith in the way that it establishes laws for a human society um uh you know drinking wine maybe is

one example uh so I don't know if that case I mean maybe it was just he he knew it was wrong thought it was wrong and did it anyway some people act that way but I mean uh yeah I mean how do you

construct uh ethics uh as a Muslim philosopher is that okay as a question does that make sense it does make sense again thank you for these you know engaging questions and I

don't know if I've I I'm uh Adept at answering them but I have been trying along the way so let's see in the question related to um yeah related to alcohol I was thinking

first to give you sort of a quick response as a joke which is that for the Hana fees it would generally not be a problem depends on what kind of alcohol you're having because foreign

specifically as Grape Wine but other kinds of wine might be okay that's not your question um um yeah uh how would you know what what would it mean for right maybe another

way sorry to jump in um I said but maybe another way to ask the question is um I mean the philosophers sort of think that oh these laws um these rules and it

could be anything I mean wine is sort of an obvious thing to choose but I mean it could just be you know punishment or family law or marriage law or whatever did the philosophers sort of think well

these are sort of fine um for the Common People the common folk um so I mean they don't I mean an earlier spoke about uh attentiveness to

Revelation and the laws generated by Revelation it could inculcate certain dispositions which are good um so I mean yeah does that mean the sort of the common people it's good for

them it's fine but it's not actually uh how God ultimately Wills uh a thinking person to act and uh maybe philosophers

have more freedom to do the things that they know are more appropriate yeah yeah no I wish I had an answer to this question and others have studied

biographies or philosophers which I haven't so again uh perhaps there's some response to this question in the in a large term that Professor gutas has

um in other words I don't know the extent to which I can't recall the extent to which any of these philosophers were um engaged in

uh keeping you know ritual um I do know for example it would be difficult to say I mean for example one example is Avery's right who's a hardcore Chilean of a very is also a

jurist works on law for example of course yes so I imagine he is someone who is in fact engaged in such things in meaning prayers and so on but I I haven't

studied it so I cannot say what I can say is that the lives of the philosophers in the Islamic tradition

um was often were often set as foils too Orthodoxy and by that I do mean ritual aspects of religion so you get

um poems for example um you know where I recently a student of mine for example just a couple of days ago sent me a poem

at the beginning of the hidayah of abhari the commentary on this physics text a larger textbook which becomes a main physics text for the tradition where a bashtune relatively contemporary

scholar has a few lines about how you are looking for the shifa of your soul in the Shiva Cena is playing with plays with these words but in the end reminds you that you have in the course of

things forgotten um the shifa or the Cure that will come from Muhammad so it is set as a foil which does make me wonder whether the

charge is that they are not attentive to the Quran and the Sunnah now again this may be all partisan dialectic so one example another example that comes

to mind is from you know the Modern Age there's a contemporary philosopher a physician and so on a modern philosophers and physician and someone who dies in 1928 his name is barakata

Ahmad his biography in the biographical literature states that he knew falsafar and he knew logic and medicine and so on but there was no trace of Hadith on his

forehead right so again although this man did write a commentary on tirmedi's You Know Drama right which is a question so I don't know how much of these things

are true but certainly philosophy and philosophers are at least rhetorically set apart from Orthodox but that's all I can say yes to study

their biographies yeah well this has been a brilliant uh uh reflection on pre-motor Muslim philosophy but also more generally on the problem of reading

the Quran uh through and with philosophy I really appreciated your Insight that philosophers even with Socrates in the Greek tradition uh they're meant to

change paradigms is that how you put it something like that and so they're all always inevitably seen as potential problems but also

um uh I'm very grateful for your uh your particular description of the way in which philosophers think through um questions of

um uh of the uh the eternals and what it means to be a beautiful true and good uh so yeah thank you so much I said for this time together

um is there uh we want to give you one last chance if there's something you would like to add that maybe I didn't ask and you I should have asked uh but also um do you have thoughts on if people

want to stay in touch with your work how they should do that um yeah on either of those two questions well the the only thing I really wanted to ask is ADD is to uh to express my

gratitude again for this opportunity I think that we all of us in Academia tend to do all this work as you're describing the philosophers in our corners and having an internal dialectic with each

other so it's important to have these kinds of um uh spaces where we can share our work as far as my own work is concerned uh as I just yeah I guess it's it's generally

quite Technical and um and it's really meant for colleagues like you and students and so on and but that said you know the effort that you're putting forward here and some others are putting forward I think

they're very important in trying to reshape the narratives the larger narratives um there are I'm happy to say a good number of young scholars who are doing

uh important work along the lines that we have discussed and I'm very hopeful that more more work will be done and we'll know more and more about philosophy in the post-classical phase

of so thank you for this opportunity again yeah thank you and one one final thing I said do you have a current project that you'd like to announce or share promote uh recent publication or something in progress

well the most recent one was the book you mentioned Pelham says sub themselves that that looks at uh logically logic text from South Asia and his commentary

tradition and using that presents some theories of commentarial writing in the Islamic tradition uh theories that are I

think they map on to the tradition that I studied but that may be a framework or guide or starting point for thinking about other kinds of commentaries but theories are also like all other theories will have to be modified and

seen of the fit the other textual Traditions within Islam outside of that I um I have too many projects and I think that's probably a problem so so I'm not

quite sure which one to mention but thank you for the question okay yeah Professor thanks so much for being with me on exploring the Quran about it's a pleasure thank you