The Secular-Religious Dichotomy in Islam: Avicenna and al-Razi’s Counterpoint and the Paradox of Theology (Kalām)

By Tayseer Abu Odeh

Drawing on Tariq Jaffer’s argument in Razi: Master of the Qur’anic Interpretations and Theological Reasoning, and Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic, I will examine the ways in which Islam as a bounded category of sociopolitical, cultural, hermeneutic, and heavenly-ordained practice, constitutes a secular and religious dichotomy that makes up the dynamic categorization of Islam. I contend that Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Ibn Sina’a mark a groundbreaking turning point in the Islamic canon in terms of thinking, reading against the grain, and unsettling the secular-religious dichotomy.  Imbued with secular and religious semantic and philosophical lexicons and methods, both Razi and Ibn Sina demystify the essentialist paradigms of reason (aql) and the scriptural canon (naql), who exhibit a transgressive Islamic intellectual methodology that brings about a contrapuntal reading of the Quran, Islamic philosophy and system, and the multiple exegeses of Hadith  As asserted by Robert Wisnovsky, Razi has played a tremendous role in the post-classical tradition by the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a similar vein, as argued by Shahab Ahmed, the central philosophical epistemology of Islam is rooted in Ibn Sina’s designation of wisdom (hikmah) as a counternarrative to the Western discourse of falsafah (philosophy).

Islam, The World, and Clash of Categories 

In Covering Islam, Edward Said contends that Islam was and has been demonized by orientalists as being "a demonic religion of apostasy, blasphemy, and obscurity"(46).  There are a few imperialist and colonial epistemological discourses on Islam that the West keeps inventing, imagining, unsettling, and essentializing without scrutinizing the microcosmic anthropology and epistemology of Islam as being an amalgam of secular-religious civilization and culture.  In a similar fashion, in his book Islam in Liberalism, Joseph Massad attempts to challenge one of these ideological and hegemonic Western discourses that generate a falsifying representation of Islam as being the typical form of despotism and dogmatism, whereas the West is very often seen and viewed as the Utopian representation of democracy and enlightenment. Massad contends that such an image is ideologically manifested as “an act of self-constitution and projection as well as an imperial strategy that uses cultural assimilation and othering as tactics of economic and political domination (19). These cultural, colonial and postcolonial readings of Islam are grounded within a macrocosmic and postcolonial apparatus, whereas the microcosmic plurality of interpretations and exegetical threads of reading the Quran, and the secular-religious dichotomy of Islam as a pre-text, and pre-context seem to be also indispensable and inevitable as well, whether one abides by a secular or religious method of interpretation.

Subsequently, Shihab Ahmed sheds more light on the significance of hikmah as a philosophical breakthrough that would humanize people’s existence and ways of life. Hikmah is intended to be a secular-religious method through which Muslims can perfect their human soul and envision things by attending to “theoretical and practical real-truths to the extent of human capacity (16). Such an epistemological truth cannot be merely reduced to the Truth of God without envisioning the worldly truth and vice versa.  By the same token, Ibn Sina’ calls it Divine Science (al ilm al ilahi) because the very notion of hikmah constitutes a contrapuntal existential, ontological, and cosmological interplay between the man-made truth (al mawjud) and God-made truth (al wujud). Interestingly, the philological and semantic meaning of hikmah matches the way in which Ibn Sina internalizes "God as the sole Necessary Existent (Wajib al-wujud) upon W/which all other existents are necessarily contingent" (18). By suggesting my reading of hikmah and the dynamic interpretive methods embraced by Razi and Ibn Sina, I am not alluding to any hermeneutic attempt to reduce Islam to the religion-secular binary. On the contrary, I am attempting to reimagine and interpret what classical Arab philosophers would call “the unity of knowledge” by which scholars and practitioners of Islamic philosophy and theology can use wisdom or hikmah to explore the multiple semantic and epistemological implications of Islamic philosophy and Islam through studying rational sciences, physics, chemistry, logic (natural science) along with the foundational branches of religious sciences – law, hadith, mysticism, and theology, as asserted by Jaffer (36).  

Instead of falling into a self-reflective subjectivity of addressing Islam from an ideological standpoint, I would argue that the multifaceted hermeneutic implications of Islam as being profoundly affiliated with Kalam (theology) and Hikma (wisdom), as suggested by Ibn Sina’a, can be adequately and contrapuntally reconciled with the method of combining reason (Aqel) and scripture (Naqil), as suggested by Razi. Such an intellectual and interpretative reconciliation can be carried out, I believe, throughout a dynamic process of rethinking Islamic modernity, interpreting the Quran, and reimagining Islamic philosophy. However, it is worth bearing in mind that the modern Eurocentric representation of Islam should not be detached from the classical and scholastic categorization of Islam as being foregrounded by Muslim theologians and philosophers, as in the case of Iban Sina’a and Razi. As such, to understand the epistemological complexity of Islam, one needs to juxtapose the universality of Islam as a dynamic religious category with the idiosyncratic particularity of Islam as a historical reality lived and experienced by 1.8 billion Muslims whose languages, cultures, lifestyle, and ideologies are immensely diverse and irreducible.  In Secular Formations: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Talal Asad underscores the cultural interpretations of religion and secularity in terms of modernity and its historical weight. Asad argues that “the representations of the secular and “the religious” in modern and modernizing states mediate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences” (21). For Asad, modernity is not counternarrative to Islam. Yet, modernity is a humanist project in the making. So is Islam.  In a similar fashion, Angelika Neuwirth argues that the secularization movement in Islamic history and religion intersect in various secular and religious manifestations. In other words, for Neuwirth, the Islamic history cannot be divorced from the dialectical interplay between the sacred and the secular.

In Razi: Master of Quranic Interpretations and Theological Reasoning, Tariq Jaffer argues that Ghazali views the multiple manifestations of Islamic falsafa or philosophy as being passively reproduced within a kind of Avicennian paradigm within a fixed body of knowledge that is premised on an Aristotelian-Neoplatonic body of knowledge (22). Therefore, such a mode of interpretation, I argue, is confined by its lack of circumstantiality and secular worldliness. In his book which is entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Ghazali argues that “the falasifa naively believed that the proofs advanced by Aristotle, which were later elaborated upon by Farabi and Avicenna, qualified as rational demonstrations. In other words, Ghazali does not see a genuine substantial reasoning in falsafa (24). Unlike Ghazali, Razi and Ibn Sina’a argue that religion and its (tawil) should be always treated as a site of critique and intellectual engagement rather than a form of passive conformity that would deem religion as being limiting and fixed. The question that both Ibn Sina’a and Razi keep grappling with is: how can a philosopher or a theologian derive contextual and relevant interpretations from the philosophical canon without forsaking a genuine critical and moral value that can be drawn from (taglid)? Such a method resonates, roughly speaking, with what Theodor Adorno would call the intellectual power to hate and challenge tradition properly, and taking into account Shihab Ahmed’s method of reading Islam as a pretext, text, and a context. Jaffer emphasizes the powerful intellectual method embraced by Razi so rigorously and intricately. He succeeds in transforming his method of reading Razi through attending to the complexity of Razi’s (taglid) tradition that intersects with the Avicenian philosophical method in a dialectical mode of interpretation. Jaffer evidently argues that Razi "uses the Avicenian philosophical canon as a foundation; he records the parts of the Avicenian philosophical curriculum, and he organizes its issues into subdivisions so that they can be investigated in greater detail" (27). My contention here casts light on the dialectical and hermeneutic interplay between the scriptural interpretation of what Jaffer calls Razi’s system of thought, Avicenian philosophical paradigm of knowledge, and Shihab Ahmed’s secular reading of Islam. Such an epistemological dialectic, I argue, can be a read as a discursive method of reconciling the secular-religious interpretations of Islam and the scriptural and reason. The power of such a hermeneutic method lies in its interpretive and philosophical capacity to grasp the complexity and contradictions of the soul in Razi’s Mafatih al-ghayb and Ibn Sina’s epistemological modality of essence: an essence can be manifested in the external world that is very often bound up with peculiar qualities derived from that reality; it can exist in the mind as a process of mental reality; and it can exist in a kind of autonomous reality, be it human, animal, or inanimate object. The three epistemological modalities, I argue, can be explored contrapuntally as a dialectical method of secular-religion inquiry of Islamic philosophy. 

The cultural, terminological, and philosophical intersections between religion and secularity lurk within the scriptural, the divine, and the structure of feelings of Islam, to borrow the term of Raymond Williams. Shihab Ahmed proposes a contrapuntal reading of Islam that transcends most of the orientalist and classical representations of Islam. Ahmed poses a handful of compelling questions that center around the multiple meanings of Islam as a religious category. These questions draw heavily on the elusive correlation between Christendom, for instance, and Islam; Islam as a historical and anthropological text, Islam as a scriptural text, Islam as a discourse of poetry, love, wine, and politics.

The set of questions I may propose in light of Shihab Ahmed’s central argument, but not limited to, can be suggested as follows: what is Islam in the pre-Islamic era? What is Islam in the premodern era? Can we read Ibn Sian’a’s and Razi’s philosophical method of (aqil) reason and (naqil) as two major paradigm-shifting experiences of Islamic religious-secular dialectic? Wrestling with the secular-religious experience of Abu Al Ma’arri, a great Muslim poet and thinker, for instance, one can decipher the idiosyncratic possible interpretations we may derive from reading The Epistle of Forgiveness. In the introduction of The Epistle of Forgiveness, Gregor Schoeler reiterates that Al Ma’rri is a staunch dissident whose poetry and philosophy keep putting orthodoxical teachings and ideas into question, such as hell, heaven, and a bodily resurrection. Al Ma’rri’s mode of philosophy is a typical example of the way in which the secular cannot be separated from its religious dialectic. His satire is meant to be a form of secular-religious critique of sociopolitical injustices and human vices as well.

Works Cited

Al-Ghazali. The Incoherence of Philosophers. Trans. Michael E. Marmura. Uta: Brigham Young University Press, 2000. Print.

Al-Ma’arri. The Epistle of Forgiveness. Trans. Geert Jan van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler. New York: New University Press. Print.

Ahmed, Shahab. What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. Print.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. California: Stanford University Press. Print.

Jaffer, Tariq. Razi: Master of Qu’ranic Interpretations and Theological Reasoning. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print.

Massad, Joseph. Islam in Liberalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Print.

Said, Edward. Covering Islam. New York: Vintage, 1981. Print.

This blog post is based on a paper presented at the 'Religion as a Changing Category of Muslim Practice' workshop in May 2019.