Duncan Black MacDonald

“ Further, only by the constant exercise of its own functions can the intellect of man be thus raised. He must live rationally at all points; be able to give a reason for every action. This may compel him to live in solitude; the world is so irrational and will not suffer reason. Or some of the disciples of reason may draw together and form a community where they may live the calm life of nature and of the pursuit of knowledge and self-development. So they will be at one with nature and the eternal, and far removed from the frenzied life of the multitude with its lower aims and conceptions. ”

“ It is full of railings against the common people who know not the law and are accursed. They are too stupid to understand philosophy or argument. It is the duty of the Khalifa to guide them and especially to show them the distinction between God and His book. He who holds otherwise than the Khalifa is either too blind or too lying and deceitful to be trusted in any other thing. Therefore, the qadis must be tested as to their views. If they hold that the Qur’an is uncreated, they have abandoned tawhid, the doctrine of God’s Unity, and can no longer hold office in a Muslim land. ”

“ DEVELOPMENT OF
MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE,
AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
[2]
[3]
INTRODUCTION
In human progress unity and complexity are the two correlatives forming together the great paradox. Life is manifold, but it is also one. So it is seldom possible, and still more seldom advisable, to divide a civilization into departments and to attempt to trace their separate developments; life nowhere can be cut in two with a hatchet. And this is emphatically true of the civilization of Islam. Its intellectual unity, for good and for evil, is its outstanding quality. ”

“ It may be that we have read wrongly the whole history of the Fatimid movement; that it was in reality a deeply laid and slowly ripened plan to bring the rule of the world into the control of a band of philosophers, whose task it was to be to rule the human race and gradually to educate it into self-rule; that they saw—these unknown devotees of science and truth—no other way of breaking down the barriers of Islam and setting free the spirits of men. ”

“ We hold the tradition of the journey to heaven (mi‘raj, Qur. 17) of Muhammad as true, and declare many of the visions in sleep to be true, and we say that there is an explanation for them. We uphold the alms for the dead of the Muslims and prayer for them, and believe that God will help them therewith. We hold as true that there are enchanters in the world, and that enchantment is and exists. We hold as a religious duty the prayer which is held over the dead of those who have prayed toward Mecca, whether they have been believers or godless; we uphold also their right of testation. ”

“ In Aristotle there had been given what was to all intents a philosophical revelation. Only in the knowledge and acceptance of it could truth and life be found. And some must reach it; one at least there must always be. If a thing is not seen by someone it has existed in vain; which is impossible. If someone at least does not know the truth, it also has existed in vain, which is still more impossible. That is Ibn Rushd’s way of saying that the esse is the percipi and that there must be a perceiver. ”

“ Is it by some subtle connection of thought that the chapter on oaths and vows follows immediately that on horse-racing, and a section on the building line on a street is inserted in a chapter on bankruptcy and composition? One thing, at least, is abundantly clear. Muslim law, in the most absolute sense, fits the old definition, and is the science of all things, human and divine. It tells what we must render to Cæsar and what to God, what to ourselves, and what to our fellows. The bounds of the Platonic definition of rendering to each man his due it utterly shatters. ”

“ He possesses Rule and Conquest and Creation and Command; the heavens are rolled in His right hand and the created things are overcome in His grasp; He is separate in creating and inventing; He is one in bringing into existence and innovating; He created the creation and their works and decreed their sustenance and their terms of life; not a decreed thing escapes His grasp and the mutations of things are not distant from His power; the things which He hath decreed cannot be reckoned and the things which He knoweth have no end. ”

“ We teach that Islam is a wider idea than Faith (iman) , so that not every Islam is Faith. We believe that God turns the hearts upside down, and holds them between two of His fingers, that He lays the heavens upon a finger and the earth upon a finger, according to the tradition from the Prophet. We believe that God will not leave in Hell any of those who confess His Unity (muwahhid) and hold fast to the Faith, and that there is no Hell for him whom the Prophet has by his witness appointed to Paradise. ”

“ If there was ever a romance in history, it is the story of the founding of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt; if there was ever the survival of a petrifaction in history, it is the survival to the present day of the Assassins and the Druses; if there was ever the persistence of an idea, it is in the present Shi‘ite government in Persia and in the faith in that Mahdi for whom the whole world of Islam still looks to appear and bring in the reign of justice and the truth upon the earth. All these have sprung from the devotion to Ali and his children on the part of their followers twelve centuries ago. ”

“ But in Muslim countries, Church and State are one indissolubly, and until the very essence of Islam passes away, that unity cannot be relaxed. The law of the land, too, is, in theory, the law of the Church. In the earlier days at least, canon and civil law were one. Thus we can never say in Islam, “he is a great lawyer; he, a great theologian; he, a great statesman.” One man may be all three, almost he must be all three, if he is to be any one. The statesman may not practice theology or law, but his training, in great part, will be that of a theologian and a legist. ”

“ And he who remains of the believers, and has no intercessor, shall be brought forth of the grace of God, whose are Might and Majesty. So there shall not abide eternally in the Fire a single believer, but whoever has in his heart the weight of a single grain of faith shall be brought forth therefrom. And that he should confess the excellence of the Companions—May God be well pleased with them!—and their rank; and that the most excellent of mankind, after the Prophet, is Abu Bakr, next Umar, next Uthman, next Ali—May God be well pleased with them! ”

“ And, in truth, the very soul of Islam sprang from these solitary hermits, scattered here and there throughout the desert, consecrating their lives to God, and fleeing from the wrath to come. Even in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry we feel how strong was the impression made on the Arab mind by the gaunt, weird men with their endless watchings and night prayers. ”

“ For a philosopher to seek to teach them better is to expose himself to peril and them to the loss of that little which they have. But in his methods, on the other hand, Ibn Tufayl is essentially at one with al-Ghazzali. He is a mystic who seeks in Sufi exercises, in the constant purifying of mind and body and in the unwearying search for the one unity in the individual multiplicity around him, to find a way to lose his self in that eternal and one spirit which for him is the divine. So at last he comes to ecstasy and reaches those things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. ”

“ For fire burns by its nature according to those who hold the doctrine of nature—Whom may God curse!—But the truth is, that God creates the being burned in the wood when it is in contact with the fire, just as He creates the movement of the ring when movement of the finger exists. And there is no such thing as existence through causation or nature. So it is an impossibility in God that there should be a cause in the world which proceeds from Him without His choice, or that there should be a course of nature and that the world should exist thereby. ”

“ One day he mounted the pulpit of the mosque in al-Basra and cried aloud, “He who knows me, knows me; and he who knows me not, let him know that I am so and so, the son of so and so. I have maintained the creation of the Qur’an and that God will not be seen in the world to come with the eyes, and that the creatures create their actions. Lo, I repent that I have been a Mu‘tazilite and turn to opposition to them.” It was a voice full of omen. It told that the intellectual supremacy of the Mu‘tazilites had publicly passed and that, hereafter, they would be met with their own weapons. ”

“ While Muslim theology defines everything that a man shall believe of things in heaven and in earth and beneath the earth—and this is no flat rhetoric—Muslim law prescribes everything that a man shall do to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It takes all duty for its portion and defines all action in [67] terms of duty. Nothing can escape the narrow meshes of its net. One of the greatest legists of Islam never ate a watermelon because he could not find that the usage of the Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a canonical method of doing so. ”

“ He hears and sees, and no audible thing is distant from His hearing, and no visible thing is far from His seeing, however fine it may be. Distance does not curtain off His hearing and darkness does not dull His seeing; He sees without eyeball or eyelid, and hears without earholes or ears, just as He knows without a brain and seizes without a limb and creates without an instrument, since His qualities do not resemble the qualities of created things, just as His essence does not resemble the essences of created things. ”

“ In his devotion to the facts of the religious consciousness Ritschl did not go so far as to become a mystic, indeed rejected mysticism with a conscious indignation; al-Ghazzali did become a mystic. But, on the other hand, Ritschl refused absolutely to enter upon the nature of God or upon the divine attributes—all that was mere metaphysics and heathenism; al-Ghazzali did not so far emancipate himself, and his only advance was to keep the doctrine on a strictly Qur’anic basis. So it stands written; not, so man is compelled by the nature of things to think. ”

“ There is nothing for man but to fear and worship. The world is deceitful and makes sport of them that trust it.
Such is the oversong of all Muslim thought, the faith to which the Semite ever returns in the end. To this the later Murji’ites opposed a doctrine of Faith, which was Pauline in its sweep. Faith, they declared, saved, and Faith alone. If the sinner believed in God and His Prophet he would not remain in the fire. The Kharijites, on the other hand, held that the sinner who died unrepentant would remain therein eternally, even though he had confessed Islam with his lips. ”

“ That al-Farabi should have been so incisive a writer, so wide a thinker and student; that Ibn Sina should have been so keen and clear a scientist and logician; that Ibn Rushd should have known—really known—and commented his Aristotle as he did, shows that the human brain, after all, is a sane brain and has the power of unconsciously rejecting and throwing out nonsense and falsehood. ”

“ So it is not possible that there should come into existence a single thing of this world, for he is weak. So the God is not except one. And if they differ and their will is not carried out, they are weak and not able to cause the existence of a thing of the world. But the world exists, by common witness (mushahada) . So it stands fast that the God is one; and that was what was sought. So the existence of the world is proof of the Unity of God and that He has no partner in any act, and no second cause in an action. ”

“ In theology the spirit breathes through single chosen men more than through the masses; and, in consequence, our treatment of it will take biographical form wherever our knowledge renders that possible.
But whether we have men or naked movements, the begetters of which are names to us or less, three threads are woven distinctly through the web of Muslim religious thought. There is tradition (naql) ; there is reason (aql) ; and there is the unveiling of the mystic (kashf) . They were in the tissue of Muhammad’s brain and they have been in his church since he died. ”

“ No, because He is the creator of all by His will, the sustainer and destroyer by His will. Al-Ghazzali comes to this by a study of himself. His primary conception is, volo ergo sum. It is not thought which impresses him, but volition. From thought he can develop nothing; from will can come the whole round universe. But if God, the Creator, is a Willer, so, too, is the soul of man. They are kin, and, therefore, man can know and recognize God. “He who knows his own soul, knows his Lord,” said another tradition. ”

“ Mansel, a pupil and continuator of Hamilton, developed and emphasized Hamilton’s doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, and applied it to theology, maintaining that we cannot know or think of the absolute and infinite, but only of the relative and finite. Hence, he went on to argue, we can have no positive knowledge of the attributes of God. This, though disguised by the methods and language of scholastic philosophy, is al-Ghazzali’s attitude in the Tahafut. Mansel’s opponents said that he was like a man sitting on the branch of a tree and sawing off his seat. ”

“ But free intellectual life among the people was checked, and such learning as still generally flourished fell more and more between fixed bounds. Scholasticism, with its formal methods and systems, its subtle deductions and endless ramifications of proof and counter-proof, drew away attention from the facts of nature. The oriental brain studied itself and its own workings to the point of dizziness, and then turned and clung fast to the certainties of revelation. Under this spell heresy and orthodoxy proved alike sterile. ”