Shabbir Akhtar - The Quran and the Secular Mind

The aim of this book is to investigate the rationality and plausibility of traditional Muslim conviction, a conviction inspired by the Quran, the founding document and scripture of Islam. The context of our largely philosophical investigation is supplied by industrialized and secularized western and westernized societies. This ambitious task has not been attempted by any Muslim or non-Muslim analytical philosopher in our times. One book cannot fully address this problem but it can articulate the anxiety and thus create a framework for a dialogue between the interested parties. The vaguely felt Muslim sense of intellectual unease in the secular world is here reduced to the precise project of developing tools for assessing, somewhat obliquely at times, the rationality of Islamic conviction.

This essay is partly a philosophical contribution to the study of the Quran: a critical commentary on some controversial, that is, philosophically vulnerable, assumptions of the Muslim scripture. Although the Quran has stimulated an exegetical literature comparable in size and sophistication to New Testament exegesis and to rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Bible, modern philosophers have not probed its central claims. Why should exegesis be an exclusively theological discipline rather than a form of reflective philosophical inquiry? In the aftermath of revelation, why should the role of human reason be drastically attenuated to being analogical (in legal contexts) and otherwise merely exegetical? For Muslims, post-revelation, why should all applied reasoning, all theology, and all philosophy collapse into hermeneutics?

Even Quranic hermeneutics should not be simply a close domestic attention to the text aimed solely at extracting what is useful to believers. The Quran is intended to be revelation addressed to humankind, not merely a fixed body of law and morals. I believe that Muslims should be alert to legitimate secular and inter-faith reservations about their scripture, ready to appreciate it in a way which supersedes the closed reverential commentary which continues to ambush the classical margins of the sacred text. The older static and nomological reading of scripture is no longer fully revelatory for it reveals nothing new about the essential state of modern humanity. Merely explicating a sacred text degrades and cramps its revelatory vigour.

, many Muslims, including some men and women of genius, were siphoned off and wasted in the pursuit of mysticism and asceticism. These believers could have become philosophers. Islams resulting lack of an extant philosophical tradition is examined and explained at the end of Chapter 2.

In this work, I counsel modern Muslims, as intelligent and reflective heirs of their faithful tradition, to establish a philosophy of Islam, in an analytical idiom. As there is no extant Muslim philosophical tradition, we must borrow terminology from analytical linguistic philosophy of religion developed primarily to reflect Jewish and Christian concerns. While natural (philosophical) theology is, as seen in , an endeavour common to these three faiths, many other Judaeo-Christian intellectual interests, in philosophy of religion and theology, find no parallel in Islamic thought. For instance, to take an example from the epistemology of doctrine, the Muslim interest in revelation, as we see in Part II, differs fundamentally, in crucial respects, from the modern Jewish and Christian interest. Indeed, some areas of theo-philosophical concern such as theodicy the rational and moral justification of the ways of God, especially the justification of natural and moral evil in a God-governed world do not exist in mainstream Islamic thought. This might partly explain the lack of a tradition of conscientious atheism in Islam, a theme of Chapter 3.