Religious Texts As Exercises In Critical Thinking
Religious Texts As Exercises In Critical Thinking
M. Bakri Musa
Excerpt #10 from my Qur’an, Hadith, And Hikayat: Exercises In Critical Thinking
The literature on critical thinking is written mostly by Westerners, using examples familiar to their societies. As such it would be difficult for Malaysians, Malays in particular, to relate. If you cannot relate to a problem or material, it becomes less meaningful and those exercises become less relevant or appropriate for learning. This was the early challenges faced by the American Philosophy Professor Edward Muad Omar teaching at the University of Qatar. By using examples and materials Malays and Muslims could relate to, I hope to reduce those difficulties and increase their relevance.
I am not trying to give commentaries or translations. There are already volumes devoted to that. Rather I am using those texts as exercises in critical thinking, and only that. Those ancient scholars have done their part with their encyclopedic contributions, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. However, they were addressing the ummah of their time. Their challenges were very different from ours. So should be the solutions.
We must be prepared to accept the fact that the burden they carried was salt while ours, cotton, as per the earlier fable of the two donkeys. If we were to blindly follow the edicts of the ancients, we may in fact not be lightening our load but the very opposite. Hence the need to exercise critical thinking on reading those ancient texts; likewise when we unthinkingly apply those ancient edicts to contemporary problems and challenges.
Engaging our critical faculties would help us better appreciate the message of the Qur’an and the wisdom of our Prophet. That could only enrich our lives. Those texts would then become more meaningful instead of being mindless incantations in ancient Arabic. On a personal level, using those examples as well as our lores, novels, and hikayat is also my way of getting reacquainted with my faith, culture, and literature.
Like any skill, critical thinking can be learned and strengthened. Once acquired it becomes habitual or automatic. As such it would be useful and appropriate to first review as well as understand the learning process.
There are many obstacles to critical thinking, some obvious and others less so. A major and indispensable component of critical thinking involves asking questions and evaluating the responses. Unlike in debates where the concerns are with such superficialities as displaying one’s oratorical prowess and scoring points, critical thinking is concerned with enlightening the issues and elevating one’s understanding of them. It is not a contest.
The obstacles to critical thinking specific to Malays include our religious beliefs and practices; our socio-cultural elements, in particular our deeply entrenched feudalism; and our narrow, destructive language nationalism.
Malay leaders may take umbrage to my assertion that religious beliefs are significant barriers to critical thinking. Islam, at least during its Golden Age, robust discussions were very much the norm; hence the encyclopedic productions of those early scholars. They were critical thinkers. Today’s Muslims would do well to emulate them. Nor were those ancients afraid of learning from the atheistic Greeks. Knowledge is knowledge; they all originate from Allah.
In exercising our critical faculties, we would not be imitating the secular scientific West, as many contemporary Muslim leaders imply, rather the best of our illustrious intellectual ancestors.
Peruse Imam Ghazzali’s severe criticism of Ibn Sini and Ibn Rashid in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and the equally pungent rebuttals in Ibn Rashid’s The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Those intellectual battles would make the current discussions among Third World Muslim intellectuals more like junior high school debates.
It is this glaring deficit of critical thinking and rational analysis (and with that the consequent vigorous differences in views and opinions) in contemporary Muslim discourses that have yet to be appreciated much less remedied. As per Shabbir Akhtar in his The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam, “An important intellectual deficit in the Modern House of Islam is the lack of a living philosophical culture that could influence its narrowly religious outlook.”
We have created this unnecessary but formidable psychological barrier to critical thinking by dismissing it as “un-Islamic” or alien, specifically Western practice. This is the conceit behind the “Islamization of Knowledge” fad. It is part of the current general antipathy towards the use of reason (akal).
It is the supreme irony that while the Qur’an emancipated the ancient Bedouins, making them give up their many odious personal and cultural practices, today it has been degraded into an instrument to repress its believers. The American Muslim leader Ingrid Mattson referred to that as “spiritual abuse.” How apt!
The scientific method or way of thinking is not Western rather that those who conceptualized and practiced it first were from the West; likewise with capitalism and free enterprise. The West introduced both but does not own them. Had the Islamic civilization of yore not crumbled, then critical thinking would have been an Islamic concept as those ancient Muslims practiced and were adept at it. As for capitalism, Benedict Koehler asserted in his book, Early Islam And The Birth of Capitalism, ancient Muslims practiced a primordial form of capitalism.
Remnants of our feudal culture are among the many impediments to critical thinking. In feudal culture you do not question your fate; that is fixed and determined at birth. At the top of the feudal heap are the sultans whose positions are sanctioned by the Malay version of Islam that considers sultans as Allah’s representatives on earth. As you do not and cannot question God, you cannot likewise challenge His representative on earth. Unasked is why does God need any representative.
Malay language per se is not an obstacle to critical thinking except that language nationalists have subverted the school system such that this skill is not valued or taught.
Next: Excerpt #11: Thinking About Thinking