Knowledge

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KNOWLEDGE

The concept of knowledge in Islam is generally designated by two Arabic terms that have overlapping meanings but different connotations, ?ilm and ma?rifa. ?Ilm designates knowledge, the "science or study of" a field such as the Qur?an, prophetic traditions (hadith), grammar, dialectical theology (kalam), and astronomy. It also denotes the knowledge of God in particular. Ma?rifa acquired two different meanings, secular knowledge on the one hand and gnosticism (secret knowledge) on the other. This latter sense was particularly characteristic of the language of tasawwuf (Sufism). The mystical Islamic vision of knowledge expresses the celebrated Arabic proverb that "He who knows [has the gnosis of] his soul also knows [has the gnosis of] his God."

Other terms give the concept of knowledge in Islam an even richer complexity of breadth and depth. For example, shi?r also translates as knowledge, but usually in the special sense of learning or knowing something intuitively. One of the primary meanings of shi?r is "poetry." Fiqh means to understand or comprehend something, to have knowledge of something, particularly legal knowledge. The chief antonym or opposite of ?ilm is jahl, which connotes ignorance, but also includes the concepts of boorishness and cultural crudeness. Islam teaches that the time before the revelation of the Qur?an was a dark age of ignorance of knowledge of God. This era is called the Jahiliyya.

The Traditional Sense of Knowledge

The key sense of knowledge, in both Persian and Arabic, then, is the one attributed to ?ilm. This term is related to the Persian danish, the Latin scientia, and the Greek episteme. In ordinary English, this term refers to the concept of scientific knowledge. By adopting this sense of knowledge for the sciences, the subsequent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim epistemologies formulated natural science as having two major constituents: (external) sense experience and analytic conception. According to this epistemology, external senses provide the knowledge of the surface of bodies. Both sense data and analytical (mathematical and logical) axioms are constituents of an axiomatic system, which provided the genesis of contemporary notion of a "model." Such a system uses scientific laws to both explain and predict nature.

The nonobservational dimension of scientific knowledge employs concepts in a syntax depicting logical and mathematical axioms of the model used in scientific theory. Here, knowledge is achieved primarily by carrying out an analysis of concepts and making deductions of conclusions from premises according to valid rules of logic, thus preserving a correspondence of truth that continues, unbroken, from the premises to conclusion. Muslims contributed to the development of logic through the discussion of temporal modalities, including the modalities of necessity, impossibility, and contingency. Within these discussions, these modalities, along with temporal indexes, were relevant in evaluating the truth value of statements.

A small number of Muslims, such as Abu Hamid Ghazali (d. 1111), as well as a minority of European thinkers, such as René Descartes, followed the views of ancient Greek skeptics, who held that neither perception nor analysis provides certainty. In spite of such occasional skepticism, philosophers subsequent to Aristotle, including Muslims as well as Jews and Christians, followed Aristotle's classification of scientific knowledge into three kinds: theoretical (in which the subject-matter of knowledge is not related to the inquirer), practical (where the inquirer is involved in the inquiry), and productive (which aims to produce useful entities).

Whereas, in Aristotelian philosophy, there are three categories of scientific knowledge, there are five kinds of theoretical inquiries, or sciences. First, are the dialectical religious sciences, such as kalam (speculative theology) and fiqh (disciplined interpretation of the sources of the sacred law). Next is philosophy, understood as a study of being and a study of causes. Here subjects of inquiry are unrelated to physical bodies (things) in definition or examples. The next type of speculative inquiry is analysis, to which belong the disciplines of mathematics, logic, and music. Here the subjects of inquiry are not related by definition, but are conceptually related to physical bodies. Finally there are the natural sciences, such as physics proper, physics of motion, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, botany, and psychology. Here, both definitions and examples are related to bodies. Finally, there are the practical sciences, which include public management (with religious laws and politics as subdisciplines), and household management. Subdisciplines of the latter include the science of the household, civics, which concerns one's duty as a citizen, the science of the self, which includes the various senses, and the science of the soul.

Among all of the aforementioned sciences, the subdiscipline of practical science known as the science of the soul is most relevant to epistemology. Like those of its Western counterparts, Islamic epistemologies follow Aristotle's tripartite doctrine of the classification of the souls into vegetative, animal, and rational types. Two kinds of intelligence, the passive and the active, mark the rational soul. The passive intellect abstracts conceptual features from the sensible, such as the symmetry between two figures; whereas the active reason receives by intuition the first principles of science. Muslim philosophers and theologians, like other medieval monotheistic theologies, added a religious, spiritual dimension to the active intelligence.

Al-?aql (reason, intellect) has many functions in Islamic thought. In theology and law it is usually contrasted with tradition (naql or sam?). While a majority of epistemologies of physical sciences follow the Aristotelian model, in the mystical as well as the post–Ibn Sina (Avicenna, b. 980, d. 1037) traditions, Muslims go beyond the peripatetic (that is to say, Aristotelian) model. For example, the Muslim instrumental theory of knowledge emphasizes the intentional, pragmatic, practical, and normative senses of knowledge. Moreover, it also encompasses an account of knowledge as wisdom, which includes but goes beyond discursive science by seeking norms, and thus partakes of the search for the secret of the good life. For the religious devotee, the best life is lived in imitation of the lives of the prophets, like Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, and expressed by service to humanity in imitation of Imam Husayn and ?Isa (Jesus).

Three Senses of "Imagination" and a Creative Vision of Knowledge

Traditional epistemology divides the senses into the five external senses (sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing), and a set of "internal senses," such as memory. Muslims extend the Greek theories of internal sense, which included common sense and the notion of memory as "sense imagery," into refined accounts of "intentional" memory and three special senses of imagination. In this usage, a psychological notion is "intentional" if it fails the so-called rule of extensionality. This rule can be exemplified in the following way. Suppose "John thinks he loves Mary" and "Mary is a spy"; it does not follow that "John thinks that he loves a spy." A number of philosophers hold that intentional notions cannot be explained by a materialistic, reductionist psychology. Because Muslim philosophical psychology followed an experiential or a phenomenological method, it did not use materialistic causes to explain a number of psychological notions.

In this light, new Muslim theories of imagination extended beyond the passive, reproductive type to embrace creative and productive types of images experienced, in both waking and dream states, variously characterizing it as: (a) imagination providing cognitively significant icons, (b) imagination providing sacred and mystical insights, and finally (c) an intentional sense of imagination with pragmatic and prehensive significances (when the meaning of an event is different for every person, i.e., love).

The first sense of iconic imagination points to the creative role assigned to visions and dreams, and follows an earlier tradition, exemplified in the Hebrew Bible. It is the sense of Joseph's celebrated interpretation of the pharaoh's dream, where a specific dream has a social significance. The cognitive import of this interpretation points to an iconic imagery through a natural revelation. This medium (the dream) contains insights about future events, mediated by an agent, the pharaoh in this case, who is not a prophet; instead, he or she is a spokesperson who can be understood in the role of the religious archetype of the messenger. Consequently, in addition to its psychological and therapeutic significance, the iconography of mystical and religious symbolism and rituals contains cognitive information about the actual world.

The most celebrated of these kinds of symbolism is the light motif, employed by Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, all three of whom use light to symbolize self-realization and mystical progress. Plotinus takes this symbolism the furthest, using an allegorical or symbolic type of theology to express the emanation of the word from the One (which is supra-being) in the language of illumination (he also uses the analogies of a fountain of water and the reflection in the mirror). In a similar vein, the Qur?an depicts God as the Light of the Heavens and the earth. Following from this, the illumination philosophy of Suhrawardi depicts the ultimate being (God) as the Light of Lights, with the rest of the world being its emanation. Other symbolism includes drowning in the water (recalling the fish as a symbol of Christ in Christian iconography), and the flight of the birds toward the heavens. In Islamic carpets, four-footed animals depict the body, the tree symbolizes the various phases of life-experience, and a bird depicts the soul. Other ways of symbolically depicting the mystical way of self-realization include parables that tell of awakening (attaining puberty) and stories of birds caught by hunters.

These examples illustrate various different dimensions of the Islamic notion of knowledge. To begin with, the primary sense of knowledge used in science is to explain experience and to predict the future, in order to produce a technology that will control nature for useful projects. In contrast, the aim of the present iconographically related experience transforms a person through dealienation—through the recognition that an individual participates in a larger social or spiritual context. Consider the case of a young person who has fallen in love. This person begins to comprehend her or his transformation from a self-involved individual to an entity who is part of a union with a partner in the context of love, marriage, and family. To the members of such a couple, their child is a living testimony to their intended union through marriage.

In Islam, revelation and sacred insights are provided to a privileged few, such as the prophets, imams, mystics, and Ayatollah-jurists. These images imparted are not of particular objects, which are available through the senses, but of societal and meta-legal dictums, from the Qur?an and other sources, delineating religious social law (shari?a) and formal jurisprudence. It is the third sense of imagination, as an intentional sense of imagination with pragmatic and prehensive significances, that signals a radical departure of Islamic epistemology from the confines of mainstream, realistic, discursive epistemology. A paradigmatic case of this type of epistemology is the notion of prehensive imagination (wahm), as illustrated by the example of a sheep running away from a wolf, providing a symbolic representation of apprehension (realization) of fear.

Muslim philosophers took the Aristotelian notion of active reason, extended it, and incorporated it into their mystical framework. They began with the assumption that the distinguishing faculties of the human soul are passive and active faculties of reason. Passive reason expresses the soul's ability to abstract non-sensible relations from experience, for example, in observing the topological symmetry between two figures. In such an operation, the mind does not create a new datum in the actual world, but has the ability to abstract relations of particulars observed by the senses. A majority of the Muslim philosophers who followed Aristotle did not share the Platonic view that interpreted mathematical and other forms as suprasensible realities independent of human minds. A few philosophers, such as Shihab ad-Din Suhrawardi (d. 1234) and Mir Damad (d. 1631) adopted the realist ontology in taking mathematics to be re-cognition of actual entities and not intellectual abstraction from particulars. Most Muslim philosophers postulated that, unlike passive intellect, active intelligence demonstrates an ability to intuit the first principles of science, such as the premises of Euclidean geometry. They held that, as these axioms are derived by deduction, we can derive knowledge of arithmetic, various types of geometries, and other analytical sciences, which provide the frameworks that are used in the empirical sciences.

Theological Knowledge as an Activity

The celebrated theologian Abu Hamid Ghazali (1058–1111) proffered that philosophy should begin with an inquiry into how creatures should imitate the Divine will in the act of creation. This "vector" of will to life-reality is analogous to the theoretical axiom of the ancient Persian Zoroastrian religion, according to which believers, by positive living—for example, being engaged in farming, begetting children, developing cities, and creating social order—adopt a perspective that denies the evil force (Ahriman). Evil here is understood as the denial of life and the privation of all existence.

In this tenor, Ghazali outlined a list of mystical virtues, which are both epistemic and ethical. They include archetypal recall (memory), exuberance, intimacy, and a taste for life. Such a doctrine moves ontology from an investigation of substances to the pursuit of the good will. Ghazali posits that facts and values are interrelated. His thought also upholds an instrumental theory of knowledge, rejecting the so-called spectator theory, which places the mind of the agent outside of the object of knowledge. In contrast, Ghazali's instrumental theory of knowledge mixes ethics with a practical sense of knowledge.

Up to the last thirty years of the twentieth century, most investigators approached Islamic philosophy from the standpoint of Aristotlian thought. This approach imposed a limited rendering of Islamic epistemology in the peripatetic, static context of the discursive knowledge of external senses and axiomatic system. However, to take account of some of the refinements of Muslim epistemologies, it is necessary to use the frameworks of post-peripatetic Western philosophers. Recent Muslim investigators such as Nader El-Bizri use the conceptual frameworks of philosophers such as Gottfried von Leibniz (1646–1716), who held the nexus of metaphysics is monads as energy; Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who began his metaphysics by the temporal concept of "being-in-the world"; Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who proffered a process instead of a substance-event metaphysics); and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), who clarified the notion of "scientific model."

Mystical Knowledge as an Authentic Hermeneutic Dealienation

It is revealing that Ibn Sina, who was one of the most significant Muslim philosophers, wrote an Arabic version of Plato's Symposium, wherein he shared with the Greek philosopher the vision that love is the salvation of the human soul. For Plato, the highest knowledge is a confrontation with the Absolute Good, a stance that is analogous to the notion of Shahada (being an authentic witness to God's gifts—unique existence, guidance, and creation) as presented in Islamic mystical theology. In addition, Ibn Sina's version shares with Plotinus's vision a view of the mystical journey as a return to the origin and the ground of all existence.

For Ibn Sina, three main phases of this journey are alienation, love, and union. In the first phase, a person individuates his or her personality by building a castle, a wall of privacy, that protects and distinguishes the person from others. Soon, this castle or wall of protection imprisons the person and alienates him or her from the rest of humanity and nature. In the next phase, by falling in love, a person transcends his or her egocentric perspective to form a relation of intimacy, leading to the opening up of an authentic encounter with others. This is a phase that is often depicted through the archetypal role of the beloved, who acts as a mediator figure, a logos, or through the role of a prophet, who links the alienated self to its source. Finally the last phase is a mystical union between the person, symbolized as a river that flows toward Divine-nature, which is the origin, arche, as well as the completion of the person. This union is often depicted as a drop of water joining a river that returns it to an ocean.

The process of self-enlightenment in Sufism points to two distinct but interrelated dimensions of knowledge that can be illustrated in the common pedagogy used to teach a foreign language. The teacher instructs the pupil to perform externally imposed tasks, such as memorizing a set of words, using verb-conjugation flashcards, practicing writing exercises, and repeating sentences in conversation courses. The pupil obtains a certain level of knowledge in vocabulary and rules of grammar. Having reached this stage, the pupil can now recognize the content of a conversation and a written French communication. In a similar sense, the more persons in love share experiences, like cooking and traveling together, visiting each others' parents, and working on common tasks, the more they "prehend" each other's personality and are able to make crucial decisions such as marriage.

This notion of "prehension," as used in the philosophy of Alfed North Whitehead, signifies an epistemic, non-conscious state of immediate-intimacy and intuition, is also expressed by the Arabic-Persian term, hal, which refers to the role of the mystical master in directing his disciple. For example, a person believing himself to be pious is directed to walk into a bazaar carrying bloody pig meat on his shoulder, which makes people lose their respect for him. After such an experience, he loses his pride and is able to reflect authentically on the ground of his soul. Such tasks lead to self-knowledge as well as to self-strength, as the disciple learns that his happiness should not depend on gaining the approval of the common people. In the Sufic tradition, knowledge is thus associated with goodness, as in becoming a better person, and in learning to live in harmony with nature. It is a process of dealienation, enabling people to cope with responsibilities outside of parental protection as well as with problems, such as aging, and fates like death. In addition, knowledge is explainable in both theoretical terms and through practical experiences, as well as by its psychosomatic features, such as habits and unconscious behaviors.

Philosophical Knowledge as an Immediate Encounter with "Being"

Ibn Sina and a number of his successors challenged the peripatetic model of knowledge by adopting the phenomenological method, in which ontology is not separated from epistemology. Here, philosophy begins with the world as it is revealed in experience. Accordingly, Ibn Sina, Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274), Mulla Sadra (b.1571–1640), and others replaced the substance-event language of ontology with an intentional phenomenology of the mind's direct encounter with "being" (wujud, hasti). Subsequent, ontology proceeds by an application of "being" to three modalities (impossibility, contingency, and necessity), which then results in impossible entities (such as a round square), necessary entities (namely the Necessary Existent), and contingent entities (such as an entity of humanity, a unicorn, or a chair).

In the next phase, the mind encounters the subject of being-in the world—experience. This entity is not a Cartesian substance, but rather a field of experience. It is similar to the phenomenal self, or the notion of "a transcendental unity of apperception," as it is termed in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). It is also analogous to Martin Heidegger's (1889–1976) notion of "dasein." Unlike Aristotle and, later, René Descartes, (1596–1650), Kant, David Hume (1711–1176), and Heidegger, as well as a number of other Western thinkers, reject the view that a human soul is a substance.

The third phase is an inquiry for the inner-essence (dhat) of the self. This notion differs from another sense of (common) essence (mahiyya) shared by other members of the same species. For example, it is common to say that an essence of a child's mother, like the essence of any human, is her possession of a rational soul; but for the child, there is another, existential sense of "essence" (expressed by the Arabic-Persian 'dhat'), which concerns the peculiar dependence of a specific child to a particular mother. In Persian mystical poetry, God, or one's mother, is depicted as "the existence of my existence," or "the cause of the actualization of my life." The mystics seek a connection with this sense of essence. The nature mystics add a last phase to this process, namely a search for a dealienation or the unity of existence (wahadt alwujud). Here we come back to the celebrated Arabic proverb, that "he who knows [gnosis] his self-soul, also knows [gnosis] his God."

In the primary sense of knowledge as "scientific inquiry," Muslims philosophers followed the Greek tradition as outlined by Aristotle. In addition to a few innovations in logic, such as temporal and modal types of logic, the Muslim contribution to epistemology is found in secondary senses of knowledge. These include a phenomenological intentionality, the development of the pragmatics of an instrumental theory of knowledge, creative theories of imagination, and iconography. The crown of Islamic epistemology, however, lies in a unique application of the notion of unity (tawhid), which integrates persons with God, or the ultimate being of philosophers. Similarly, Judaism and Christianity seek an authentic encounter with the Divine, but Islamic mysticism seeks an identity beyond any duality. It follows the theme that the soul seeks no "otherness" from the One.

See alsoGhazali, al- ; Ibn Sina ; Mulla Sadra ; Tasawwuf ; Theology ; Tusi, Nasir al-Din .