Ridwan al-Sayyid
The Kantian Questions and Arabic Thinking Today
(excerpt)

(...)
The first time that I was confronted with Kant's Four Questions was in the winter of 1973, at a seminar led by Hans Kueng at the Faculty of Catholic Theology in Tuebingen. Hans Kueng later became notorious for daring to take issue with the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church on the question of papal infallibility. Neither I nor my colleagues of the time knew much about German philosophy, so we thought that Kueng was engaged in a debate with another professor, Ernst Bloch, author of The Principle of Hope, and did not realise that he was really involved in an ongoing dispute with his other colleague at the faculty, Karl Josef Ratzinger, who at the time was already theological adviser to the Second Vatican Council. Later he was appointed Cardinal and recently, as we all know, he was elected to follow John Paul II as Pope Benedikt XVI. (...) We noticed that Bloch and Kueng got into heated arguments, while Ratzinger, who was also a professor at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, continually broke in to remind them of Kant's question. (...) According to Kueng, Kant judges human beings according to three different criteria: their knowledge, the consequences of their actions and their capacity for hope. (...)

In 1978 I became editor of a magazine called al fikr al-arabi (Arabic Thought) which featured a special theme in every issue. One of these, which I helped prepare for publication in 1981, was about university study in today's world. In the course of my work I began to correspond with the Egyptian professor Dr Hasan Hanafi. He was writing a paper on the conflicts between various University faculties. After providing a short introduction to Kant's essay on humanity, Dr Hanafi asked why it was that in classic Islamic philosophy, the issue of What is the human being? is ignored. I asked him whether he could discuss this issue in the context of a paper on the history of philosophy. In response, Dr Hanafi came back with two papers. The first bore the title, Is there any study of human nature in medieval Islamic philosophy? Having considered this, Dr Hanafi's second question was: Why is there no such study in the whole of Arabic and Islamic medieval writing? This second article aroused the interest of a well-known Maghrebin professor, Abdullah Al Arwi, who wrote to our magazine and promised to prepare an article for us on that same topic. He sent us a paper on the history of philosophy. Shortly afterwards, an American orientalist of Lebanese origin, Dr George Maqdisi, replied to Dr Hanafi's article with an essay on Religion, Law and Scholarship in Classical Islam. Sadly, Dr Maqdisi passed away in 2002.

To this day, Maqdisi's thoughts on this topic remain unsurpassed in their intelligence. He wrote that the task of a university is to pass on the legacy of humanism and thus to carry on the work of enlightenment. This idea of a university originates in Islamic thought and did not come to the West until later. Maqdisi believed that the classical university education, which was built on the three cornerstones of rhetoric, logic and theology is an instrument by which students are enabled to engage seriously with humanism and theology. With their emphasis on rhetoric, Muslims were contributing to the rise of humanism well before the Europeans, whose medieval philosophy was only interested in copying theological texts. This is Maqdisi's explanation of why the West did not think about human beings as such until the Enlightenment. Maqdisi also realised that the topic was discussed in Islam in the Middle Ages and that thinking on this question had been in a process of continual development since the ninth century. George Maqdisi also noted that the Koran had a word for the human being as such: insan. In Indo-European languages the concept of insan was diluted into more differential terms such as person, man, mother etc.

I was only able to find Kant's question What is the human being? reflected in Islamic thought in the works of three Sufi mystics, al-Hallaj in the tenth century and Ibn Al Arabi and Ibn Sab'in in the 14th century. Ibn Sab'in came to this question while responding to questions raised by King Frederic II of Sicily. However, the answers of all three philosophers were based to some extent on personal experience. For all three, a human being equates simply to freedom meaning freedom from earthly things. They name as examples freedom from one's wife, one's child, freedom from power and finally freedom from money. This is an example of perfect humility in adoration of God's greatness. This explanation could be based on an interpretation or an adaptation of dualistic thinking, for instance when thinking of the opposite termini free man and slave.

The American orientalist Franz Rosenthal (whose work The Muslim Concept of Freedom Before the 19th Century I translated in 1979 together with the late Dr Maan Ziyadeh) believed that Muslims from the Middle Ages up to the time of Tahtawi in 1831 only knew two meanings for the word freedom: firstly in the context of a free man as opposed to a slave, and secondly in the sense of an act of free will as opposed to destiny, that is to say, freedom as opposed to God's omnipotence. I don't really like this explanation, because it is based on generalised adaptations of certain concepts from the Middle Ages (e.g. human, freedom, slavery and human acts) and does not take into account the specific differences between scholastic theology, Adab literature and the Islamic Law. I don't believe that questions such as the nature of humanity or the freedom of the will can be answered with concepts drawn from our theological and literary legacy; I think it is more helpful to discuss them with the aid of our philosophers and Islamic legislation.

Oddly enough, we do possess a book from the ninth century by Al Muhasibi with the title The nature of reason and its true meaning. Although Al Muhasibi had a tendency to Sufism, he did not use its language. He wrote that it is reason that makes man different from all other creatures, and he asks then directly what reason is and how it may be defined. He asks What is reason?, and answers straight away: "Reason (alaql) is a personal illumination or a gift to mankind". All people are fundamentally the same, but they differ in knowledge and understanding.

The theologians were the first to develop this insight, but it quickly became a common theme among those scholars who sought to determine the basic methodologies for determining Islamic law. There were different opinions on reason and its meaning. Some believed that we are born with reason or that it has to do with intuitive knowledge, others thought that reason is something we learn through our upbringing and that a child's environment plays an important role. This second definition would make reason, as a learned faculty, the first premise for mankind's humanity - on condition, however, that reason here is not something dependent on intellect, but has more to do with what Kant called practical reason.
(...)

 
Ridwan al-Sayyid
The Kantian Questions and Arabic Thinking Today
(excerpt)

© Ridwan 2006