Is the Matter of Metaphysics Immaterial? Yes and No

Never in our history have Muslim scholars posited that revelation alone (sola scriptura) is enough, as opposed to revelation illumined by reason and tradition (prima scriptura).

Given the fallibility of the human intellect on one hand and humanity’s propensity for self-delusion on the other, scholars understood that intellectual training—in essence, a spiritual discipline—was a prerequisite to a sound understanding of revelation. The condition of human responsibility vis-à-vis revelation is intellect (¢aql in Arabic); intellect is imperative for faith and moral agency. Hence, enhancing the intellect’s ability to receive and realize the gift of revelation has always been at the center of Islamic learning. The scholars also believed that it is training in philosophy, more than in any other discipline, that hones and refines the intellect’s ability to reason well, and metaphysics and mathematics were at the heart of that training.

Muslims always recognized that rationality was a major part of faith and aided in its substantiation. This necessary symbiosis between reason and revelation provides a sturdy balance that protects people from both falling away from faith through an unexamined reliance on fallible reason and falling into provincial fanaticism through a faith that fails to employ reason. Faith and reason (naql and ¢aql in the Islamic tradition) are the two wings on which a believer takes flight; lacking either, he is like a bird with a broken wing, floundering on the ground in purposeless paralysis, agitated and helpless. 

The two extremes of prioritizing faith over reason, as in the staunch traditionalist schools, and prioritizing reason over faith, as in the schismatic school of the Mu¢tazilah, emerged early in Islamic history as a dialectic that found its resolution in the moderate Sunni tradition, which provided the balance between the two. For example, where a literal reading of a revealed text leads to rational inconceivability or contradicts a scientific certainty, the tradition will place reason over a literalist reading and move to a figurative understanding of the text. One example is the famous tradition, “The Black Stone is the Hand of God on earth”: A literal reading would lead to an absurdity, as it is inconceivable that God has a physical hand contained in time and space, both creations of God.

Reason was also enlisted in understanding the two revelations of nature and scripture. Muslims understood that God’s self-revelation was twofold: the composed Qur’an (al-kitāb al-tadwīnī) and the cosmic Qur’an (al-kitāb al-takwīnī). Hence, the natural sciences were pursued with zeal because they were seen as a source of religious knowledge that strengthened one’s faith; Imam al-Ghazālī argues that the study of anatomy and physiology is among the greatest means of fortifying faith. Pre-modern Muslims, unlike their modern counterparts, saw design everywhere, and behind it a Designer (al-muśawwir). They knew it was necessary to explore the advances and discoveries of previous civilizations and incorporate them into their own body of knowledge. Like the leading thinkers of Western civilization today, Muslim intellectuals were great syncretists, which gave them an advantage over more provincial civilizations with xenophobic attitudes toward foreign cultures. Robust debates took place between the nascent Muslim culture and the preceding civilizations and their sciences, especially the Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian traditions. 

The Prophet ﷺ had instructed his followers to “seek knowledge even in China,” and he taught them that, “Wisdom is the lost vehicle of the believer. Wherever he finds it, he has more right to it.” Thus, after discovering the richness of the Greek and Persian wisdom traditions, they were quick to integrate the best of what each had to offer into their studies. 

The Crisis of Metaphysics

Modern philosophy, by and large, has abandoned the pursuits of earlier metaphysics for a number of reasons. At the heart of the matter is the ancient debate about universals themselves, a conflict between the essentialist approach of the “realists” or “moderate realists” committed to what became known as the via antigua (the “old path”), and the nominalist approach committed to the via moderna (the “modern path”), championed by William of Ockham (d. 1347) in the Christian world, and arguably by Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) in the Muslim world.⁸ Increasingly in Europe, philosophy and theology parted ways, and the “handmaiden of the queen of sciences,” untethered from theology, was now free to establish her own dominion, with a special emphasis on the empirical sciences; this, of course, failed to recognize that replicable subjective experience is also soundly empirical. Eventually, the overarching project of fortifying faith with reason, which had so preoccupied philosophers in the past, was largely relinquished. Only in the Catholic tradition and Eastern Islam did some vestiges of this project remain. 

Unfortunately, the term “metaphysics” has been highly contested for some time now, its meaning ranging from new age occultism to David Hume’s famous assessment:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?” No. “Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?” No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.⁹

Today, religious sciences are entirely divorced from “worldly” sciences, and the physical sciences are, in turn, divorced from the ethical considerations of the religious sciences. Here lies the root of our current crisis: In the West, we have elevated a particular type of reason and divorced it entirely from revelation, and, in the Muslim world, Muslims have rightly elevated revelation but largely divorced it from reason, which grants it a sound metaphysical foundation. Muslims long ago abandoned philosophy, both speculative and empirical branches and their concomitant pursuits, and of late have naively adopted Western science and its concomitant technologies, laden as it is with materialistic metaphysical assumptions; little or no thought has been given to the personal and societal upheaval such wholesale importation of these technologies might have on peoples and places. In this, they have failed to grasp something fundamental and consequential: Western science cannot be divorced from its metaphysics. The two are inseparable. It is their metaphysics that produced their science, and if one adopts a civilization’s science without understanding that it is the product of a particular worldview, one is unwittingly adopting that civilization with all of its attributes, including its social and spiritual ailments. This is not a critique of science; on the contrary, it is an affirmation that science is worthwhile when it serves a society, and it can only serve a society when its embedded assumptions are spiritually sound, but this can be ascertained only if those assumptions are fully revealed and understood. It is only then that a society can make a conscious choice about those assumptions and whether they are compatible with its own worldview, values, and religious traditions; if they are not compatible, they will suffocate and suppress the pre-existing ones. In many ways, the embrace of Western science and its inherently materialist worldview has taken a toll not just on Muslim societies but on the entire planet and its inhabitants, even its flora and fauna.

The moral concerns of a culture are too often set aside in the current pursuit of scientism and the worship of the idol of progress. Ethics, in particular, is impoverished when metaphysics is ignored. In America and in European countries, and in their satellite societies that have adopted Western science wholesale, we find certain humanistic ethical considerations based mostly upon utilitarian concerns, but their proponents offer no sound rational method of determining what is ethical and what is not. Currently in the West, it is the Catholic Church alone that maintains a rigorous ethical approach that is rooted in metaphysical principles, but that metaphysical foundation is not easily accessible to lay people, and the Church has lost its centrality in the lives of many believers. As such, the results of the Church’s rigorous ethical reasoning are often ignored by many of its adherents, who decide for themselves what path to take—which is the essence of heresy (from the Greek, “to choose for oneself”). 

In the Muslim world, the current ethical concerns are not approached methodically. The philosophical tools that enable scholars to do so are rarely taught, and, when they are, it is usually without the depth and rigor necessary for crafting creative responses to ethical and other challenges. Even theology, when taught in the major Islamic learning centers, is mostly a truncated version, denuded of the deep metaphysical insights of its earlier practitioners. By the nineteenth century, students at Al-Azhar University in Cairo and other institutions were being handed highly reductive summaries of profoundly complex theological works; most did not have the requisite background to understand the content of such works. 

This intellectual, moral, spiritual—and invariably political and economic—decay left Muslims with an utter inability to respond creatively to the current civilizational challenges, something that past generations had been able to do when faced with crisis. In the absence of such effective responses, Muslim societies were overwhelmed by the challenges and increasingly fell into disarray and self-destructive reactionary modes. Invariably, this prompted criticism from unlearned malcontents within the society. New narratives were put forth to explain the malaise of Muslim societies, placing the blame squarely on the abandonment of “worldly” sciences and on the scholars who emphasized spirituality and “otherworldliness,” all of which were seen as having blunted the competitive edge of Muslims vis-à-vis their historical rivals in Europe, culminating in the colonization of Muslim lands. Undeniably, some truth resides in this reasoning, but the primary cause of the decline, it seems, was the drift away from the philosophical method of inquiry in the metaphysical and physical sciences, both of which had flourished in the early period of Muslim dynamism. 

This profound decline, and the colonization and subjugation of the Muslim lands at the hands of peoples many previously held in sheer contempt, sired a fateful turn in the late nineteenth century: Muslim societies became obsessed with mastering material sciences, especially engineering and medicine. The best intellects were often encouraged to pursue those fields with utter disregard for the social sciences—not just history and sociology but also the more important sciences of language and philosophy, both natural (using inductive reasoning) and speculative (using mostly the deductive method). All the major branches of learning suffered with this monomaniacal and ultimately quixotic quest, which ironically caused a brain-drain in the Muslim world due to Western universities that aggressively pursued “social sciences” resulting in a dearth of engineers and doctors in their societies. The Muslim and Hindu obsession with those professions filled this void in the West with an influx of immigrants. Again, with a strange twist of irony, the people in the West who often manage and oversee those recruited doctors and engineers usually have backgrounds in subjects such as history, political science, international relations, business management, and philosophy. 

Philosophical End Game

The ancients and their pre-modern inheritors understood reality to be objectively knowable: Mind and matter—the immaterial qualitative and the material quantitative—symbiotically engaged one another in a synthesis called “reality.” The requisite tools to accurately perceive the correspondence of mind and matter were to be found in language and number. But with the advent of the moderns, a new view emerged that was rooted in ancient notions that had largely been refuted and rejected: Namely, that reality is subjective, and, ultimately, all we can ever really know is the contents of our own minds. Even this latter Humean-Kantian thesis was challenged by post-structuralist philosophers, who argued that the world, while indeed subjective, was governed by power structures artificially constructed through language and culture, and that “discourses of power” determine the “subjective reality” for most people. 

This fragmentation of reason has made basic communication and dialogue increasingly frustrated. Sense is overpowered and repressed by sensibility, and feeling now determines meaning. In this post-modern philosophical world, the human being as a triad of appetites, emotions, and reason is replaced with a fluid being whose unstable self, formed in the crucible of destabilized language, is a bundle of experiences with no sustaining source and no essential nature. Instead, our thoroughly post-modern man, woman, or something-in-between is urged to liberate himself, herself, or zerself from the shackles of a socially constructed reality and recreate an “authentic” human being in “its” own absolute and immaculate conception of what it means to be a person: the human as a self-referential work of rebel art, and each person “its” own rebellious artist, with rebellion as a sufficient raison d’etre. It is no coincidence that the first rebel inspires many of today’s artists, who have always been the antenna of a society’s movement.

The irony of this postmodern project is that even as society disintegrates and communities fragment into echo chambers of increasing insularity, people become less and less individualistic and more and more predictable in their self-expressions. The signs are many and include but are certainly not limited to these: reckless abandon regarding sexuality, tattooed, and even mutilated bodies, escapism via manufactured music and mass entertainment, and angst-ridden youth living in a nature-deprived world of mediated reality, their obsessive-compulsive addictions further alienating them from self and other. Meanwhile, those who cling to any “traditional” sense of the world are also lost and more often than not lack entirely the tools to penetrate the confusion and arrive at clarity about the causes of this contagion. Only a deep understanding, based in first philosophy, can lead us to a sound diagnosis and an efficacious treatment plan. This project demands a cadre of young people willing to devote their lives to the perilous pursuit of knowledge that is both rational and revealed.