Islam and the Promotion of Knowledge

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

Preface

It cannot be gainsaid that, in general, Western colonialism exercised a baneful influence on the Third World. A particularly insidious aspect of Western colonialism is what the eminent British anthropologist Peter Worsley has perceptively described as *colonization of the mind. Western colonialism, premised as it was on the assumed superiority of Western civilization, deliberately sought to depreciate and disparage the cultural and intellectual legacy of non-Western civilizations. Thus, Lord Macaulay, one of the key architects of the British colonial empire, boasted that a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. A far more disastrous aspect of Western colonialism is that it sought to create a replica of the colonial world-view in the minds of the colonized people through the introduction of a new system of education. The educational policy of the colonial rulers was aimed at producing a new breed of colonized people who would be Asians and Africans in their physical features but Europeans in their thinking, values, and manners. European colonialism succeeded in producing a Westernised native elite in the Third World countries, who looked down upon their own values and traditions and who considered Western ideas, cultural patterns, and manners as inherently superior to their own.

Western colonialism brought about disastrous consequences in the Islamic world, particularly in Egypt and Turkey. The Westernised Muslim intellectuals, such as Taha Husain in Egypt and Zia Gokalp in Turkey, took pride in disclaiming the cultural and intellectual legacy of Islamic civilization and in identifying themselves with Western values and cultural traditions. The colonial syndrome in respect of the Western-educated Muslim elite is marked by three interrelated characteristics (i) an exaggerated view of Western civilization and the assumption of its inherent superiority (ii) a sense of inferiority and embarrassment vis-a-vis the Islamic legacy (iii) a sense of alienation from the community. The Western-educated Muslim elite lacked rapport with the Muslim community due to their lukewarm response to the Islamic tradition and their assumed air of superiority. On the other hand, their slavish imitation of Western values and Western culture evoked at best a mixed reaction in their Western mentors. With the collapse of Western colonialism during the latter half of the twentieth century, the fortunes of the Western-educated Muslim elite declined drastically.

The 1970s witnessed a growing resurgence of Islamic consciousness in the Islamic world as well as among Muslims living in the non-Islamic world, including Europe and the United States. This resurgence was brought about by the demise of Western colonialism, the failure of Western-inspired ideologies and political systems in the Islamic world, a growing consciousness that Islam can provide a viable alternative, and a desire to regain one's cultural roots and recover a sense of identity. Some Muslim intellectuals, who were fired by a renewed sense of Islamic commitment, embarked on an ambitious project to highlight the salience of the cultural and intellectual legacy of Islamic civilization in the context of modern times. They sought to undertake, as a first step, a critical reappraisal of the premises and assumptions of Western social sciences and to work out an Islamically-oriented alternative.

The movement for a radical reorientation of the social sciences and the humanities in an Islamic framework owes a great ideal to the vision, dynamism, and drive of the late Professor Ismail Raji al-Faruqi. He was instrumental in initiating and directing a concerted effort in this direction through a series of discussions, workshops and seminars. After his unfortunate assassination in 1986, his vision and commitment to the reorientation of the social sciences in an Islamic framework has been kept alive by a dedicated group of Muslim scholars and intellectuals at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in the United States and at the International Islamic University in Malaysia.

Introduction

The question of the nature of perception and consciousness at various levels of existence has engaged the attention of philosophers and sages since the beginnings of human civilization. Advancements in the natural and human sciences during the latter half of the twentieth century have thrown a good deal of light on this vexed problem.

Biologists define an organism as something, which perceives, which searches for information, and has some means of organizing and storing its perceptions (Thorpe, 1974: 29-30). Information processing and coding in organisms is carried out through DNA molecules. Even the simplest biological organism is far more complex than the most complex machine designed by man. eminent French biologist has observed that one single cell of a simple bacteria like Escherichia coli contains information equivalent to all the volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica put together.

Researches in biology, ethology, and sociobiology have brought to light the fascinating world of animal communication. The whales have a song pattern, which contains about two hundred notes. They have a signal system, which is peculiar to the species and which serves to indicate the presence of a whale to all other whales within a hearing distance of three hundred miles of ocean.

The honeybees communicate with each other through a complex dance language that emanates from the sounds they make with their wings. The dancer bee emits sound signals that help the drones to find out where she is located as well as the direction of the feeding site. At the same time, the followers emit sounds that vibrate the comb. The forager stops her dance when she receives these signals and delivers samples of the food that she has collected.

The reindeer is able to recognize by voice alone other members of its herd. The gorillas in the wild communicate with each other through a vocabulary of about a hundred different kinds of sounds and gestures. Similarly, the chimpanzees have a fairly elaborate repertoire of sounds, facial expressions, and gestures, which serve the purpose of communication.

Man is differentiated from all other living things as well as from the rest of nature in respect of certain distinctive characteristics, which are described by biologists as species specific. These include the distinctive structure and constitution of the human brain, which makes possible the emergence of self-consciousness, language and the cultural process, the universal existence of the incest taboo in human society, and the unique ability of man to transcend his biological needs as well as the concrete situation of which he is a part. The symbolic nature of man's uniqueness leads him to create a world of meanings and values which overrides biological survival (Momin, 2000).

There are fundamental and qualitative differences between animals and man in respect of consciousness. The term consciousness involves three basic components: (a) an inward awareness or sensibility (b) an awareness of self or self-consciousness (c) consciousness of unity. Although consciousness may be said to exist in a rudimentary form among some species of animals, consciousness of self or a fully self-reflective consciousness is absent among animals (Thorpe, 1974: 308; Eccles, 1984).

Modern researches in neuroscience have greatly expanded our understanding of the human brain. The human brain, which on an average weighs about 1350 grams, contains ten thousand million (10%) cells and ten million billion (10'') macromolecules. It has an estimated hundred million neurons. Each neuron is a nerve cell with one or more dendrons that sends and receives electrochemical signals. The nervous system is one of the first recognizable features of the human embryo. The brain has a highly complex and differentiated structure, The cerebrum performs all major mental functions, including reasoning, will, memory, and intelligence. The hypothalamus located in the diencephalon helps control emotions. The frontal lobe controls speech, planning, and reasoning. The cortex facilitates advanced mental functions such as symbolic communication or language. The parietal lobe interprets sensory signals and integrates information.

The relationship between the mind and body, consciousness and things, subject and object has been a subject of speculation and debate since ancient times. World religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism, posit a fundamental complementarity between the mind and body. Asian philosophical and medical traditions view the mind and body in a unitary and interactionist framework. This unitary vision suffered a decline with the ascendancy of the Cartesian-Newtonian world-view in the seventeenth century. This world-view, based as it was on the ideas of Rene Descartes (d.1061/1650), Francis Bacon (d. 1036/1626), and Isaac Newton (d. 1140/1727), saw the universe as huge clockwork governed by determinate and inexorable laws. The French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes considered the human organism as a machine, reducible to simple mechanical operations. He drew a sharp distinction and dichotomy between the mind and body, consciousness and things, and regarded them as independent substances. Since the seventeenth century, mechanistic explanations of the relationship between the mind and body have dominated modern science. There has been a pervasive tendency to reduce the whole range of human experience to physico-chemical processes. Thus, Francis Crick, who along with two fellow scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1962 for deciphering the genetic code, recently observed that "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells." Similarly, the French physiologist Jacques Monod has claimed in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity that our unique self as well as our personal experiences can be explained entirely in terms of our genetic structure.