Secularization an extension of the idea of primacy of reason

The following article is based on an interview by The Jakarta Post columnist Mochtar Buchori with Prof. Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born expert on Islamic studies from Goettingen University, Germany.

Dr. Tibi, who is also the 1998 Robert Bosch Fellow of Harvard University, visited Indonesia at the invitation of the Goethe Institut.

The son of a respected ulema family in Damascus, Tibi left Syria for Germany when he was 18. As a student leader and young lecturer in Frankfurt in the late 1970s, he was tortured by left- wing students, hospitalized and had to stop teaching.

The incident, a turning point in his life, marked the beginning of his relentless pursuit of Islamic studies for the next 20 years. A process which has eventually taken him back to his roots and a rediscovery of Islam.

Question: What kind of modernity do we want in the future? This has always been a big question in Indonesia. While some are eying Western modernity, not the majority of Muslim leaders. For them, Western modernity would lead the nation into a secular society, which is negating religion. What they want is Islamic modernity. Hence the question, what kind of Islamic modernity? A Turkish, Egyptian or Tunisian model? What is actually the Islamic paradigm of modernity?

Tibi: Number one, I think it is wrong to draw boundaries between civilizations. We have our Islamic civilization, and I come from West Asia and you are from Southeast Asia. Well, it's the same civilization. And then you have the civilization of the West. If you draw boundaries between civilizations, you would negate interactions.

The issue is not Western civilization. The issue is how Western modernity has been imposed on the world of Islam. The issue is that we don't like things being imposed on us but if you used and criticized the imposition on this, it doesn't mean that you isolate yourself.

We can learn from our own history. There are two major events in Islamic history. One: Islam stood under the impact of civilization. It was not Western civilization, there was no Western civilization at that time. Hellenism is the major source of Western civilization.

The other thing is the European Renaissance which can't be imagined without the Islamic impact on it. Between the ninth and the 12th century, three centuries long, Islamic philosophers read Greek philosophers, basically Aristotle, and they were under the impact and they liked that.

The important thing is that the Greek civilization was not imposed on the Islamic civilization. The adoption was within an actual freedom. As you know, in Islam, we refer to the teacher as the mu'allim. The first teacher between the ninth and the 12th century was considered to be Aristotle. At around that time, Al Farabi, who wrote Madinah al Fadilah, (The Perfect State) was only ranked by Muslims themselves as the second teacher.

So here you see an impact of Hellenism on Islam which led to a very positive outcome. The other event was the impact of the Islamic civilization on Europe on the eve of the Renaissance and on many European authors, in particular Descartes, who in his book on Italian Renaissance states he appreciates the Islamic impact on the Renaissance. And without Averroes (Ibn Rushd), the European Renaissance would have taken another shape.

So my conclusion from both these references, one a European impact on Islam, the other an Islamic impact on Europe, is that civilizational interaction is very important. And in our age, the age of globalization, I think interaction is inevitable. We live in an age of media, information, and structural globalization, and, therefore, it is very difficult to isolate oneself and say I don't want to be under the impact of the West.

Q: Where does modernity fit into this?

T: Modernity is something new. My academic teacher, the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, is one of the major theorist on this subject. There are some Muslims who see that modernity existed in Islam in medieval times. It was not modernity, it was enlightenment. I would argue that between the ninth and the 12th century we had an enlightenment, and our enlightenment preceded Western enlightenment.

Habermas said if we want to outline modernity, we can do this with one quote by the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant. This quote is "human reason is the first instant for making judgment and everything human forward should be subjected to justification in front of human reason". That means the basic source of knowledge is human reason.

If you read the Islamic philosophers from between the ninth and the 12th century, they argued: the difference in our enlightenment -- and that is what we can learn from it for our present -- Islamic philosophers did not negate religion.

In contrast, Islam was the basic element of the identity of their thought. But in the 12th century, Ibn Rushd established the doctrine of "double truth": there is a worldly truth and a religious truth. Philosophy is the knowledge for our daily life, wahyu (revelations) in the Koran is knowledge for our spiritual element, so he separated the spiritual and the worldly and he did not negate religion as the European philosophers of the enlightenment did.

But if we look earlier, the Europeans of the Renaissance were under the impact of Islam. They took this idea of Averroes and they were not against the church.

The Italian philosophers and non-Italian philosophers of the Renaissance separated religion and worldly affairs without negating religion, and I think we can draw on this Islamic legacy, Islamic rationalism and Islamic philosophy and try to develop our own concept of modernity.

Q: How do you define the concept?

T: Modernity at this moment is a Western concept. We are here scholars, enlightened people and not propagandists. So if we don't want to involve ourselves in propaganda, modernity is Western, modernity evolves in the West and modernity has been imposed on the rest of the world.

However, it is very important to distinguish between two components of modernity. Modernity is instrumental and institutional, that is, modern science and technology, and modernity is also cultural modernity, referring to the definition of man as a source of knowledge you know Decartianism: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore, I am). This is cultural modernity.

When the West came to Asia, when it came to the world of Islam, it did not bring its cultural modernity. It brought its instrumental modernity. When Napoleon came to Egypt, he came with an army and defeated the Islamic army with modern technology.

The Ottoman empire was stopped from expanding into Europe through modern technology, I did research on this. Already in the 18th century, an Ottoman sultan sent envoys to Europe, mainly to France. You see we Muslims had learned, "we created you as the most superior ummah", and then the Ottoman realized in the 18th century that "we are Muslims but we are not superior as the Europeans". Why?

Coming back from Europe, their envoys said the reasons were found in two words: science and technology. And that's why the Ottoman empire was the first Islamic part of the world which started to adopt Western modernity. But they adopted instrumental modernity, like weapons.

So for Muslims in the 18th and 19th century modernity meant: "You want to be modern, then import the European army." But we didn't import Rousseau, we didn't import her soul, we didn't import Emmanuel Kant. This was something which started later, in the 20th century. Now, at the end of the 20th century, the issue is being formulated in a different way.

Q: You mean...?

T: The world is now revolving against Europe, and also against the entire West. I mean not only the world of Islam, I mean Asia, Africa and also, to a certain extent, Latin America.

Modernization was perceived as Westernization. The Europeans did not like this. In the 1960s, when Americans started developmental studies on the third world, Chicago was the center of these studies, they coined the term "Westernization". What they meant by modernization was Westernization. The elite, like Soekarno, the place I came from, Nasser, and Africa's N'krumah, these people came to Indonesia and met in Bandung and they were Afro-Asian leaders who were not against the West but were against Western hegemony.

They were not against Western civilization because they operated in Western terms. They were talking about the nation- state, sovereignty, development. But this situation was changed since Bandung (the Asia-Africa Conference 1955). So now their revolts were not only against Western hegemony but against Western norms and values, like in an Islamic civilization.

People say we have our own norms and values and we need not borrow from the West. We only borrow science and technology from the West, not norms and values.

There is a threat at the moment. The process of this "Westernization" could lead to establishing barriers within civilization. And I think this is wrong. What I go for, I call myself a Muslim reformist. I want to understand Islam in the light of the late 20th century. Indonesia is a very good example. Islam came to Indonesia and Islam established its foothold in Indonesia because Islam was successful in merging with the Indonesian culture.

This is evidence that Islam is flexible, and I think this is the strength of Islam. So what we need here, we could develop our own model of modernity. There's no Islamic model of modernity. We can develop our own concept of modernity, however, without establishing barriers between us and the West so that there can be interaction.

Q: Could you give an example?

T: For instance, in the area of human rights. And by human rights I mean individual human rights. The concept of individual human rights is Western, and if we say that's not Western, we are lying to ourselves. But I mean why can't I, as a Muslim, accept the concept of human rights.

But I can provide some cultural underpinnings with this concept which comes from my civilization. I work with a Sudanese human rights activist, his name is Abdullah Nahim. We developed a concept of a cross-cultural foundation for human rights and it could also be done for something else in other areas, like when we talk about democracy.

Democracy is the same thing anywhere. You can say this is Western democracy, this is Islamic democracy, but you can't say there are two different kinds of democracy. But the cultural underpinnings should be different, like if I talk to an Islamic audience and I quote John Locke.

This is based on my experience in Cairo. People don't listen to me but if I talk about human rights. You can select Koranic verses, present them for supporting the idea of human rights and the people would listen it.

But I don't believe that Islamic human rights are different from other human rights because an Indonesian Muslim or an Indonesian Christian is a human as much as a European is human.

Q: Many people here fear that if you go too far in following your reason, then you will erode your faith, revelation will become less involved. Is there such a contrast between reason based on experience and reason based on revelation?

T: This is a very important question and the first epistemology we are employing. Aufklrung means the primacy of the reason for making a judgment, and then you have also the revelation. But I said Islamic rationalists found an exit out of this problem, like the 12th century Muslim Ibn Taymiyya, who was an antirationalist and a representative of orthodox Islam.

He said whether a person is Muslim depends on how he answered a question, "I judge through reason or I judge through revelation". But Islamic rationalists did not accept this imposition. They said these are two different areas. If you want to develop knowledge about nature, about our world, you need to make use of your reason.

In the spiritual area, wahyu (revelation) is basic, so I want to relate this issue with the problem of secularism in order to answer properly because secularization actually is an extension of the idea of primacy of reason, and here it is important to draw a distinction between secularization and profanation.

The problem of the West is that they stretch secularization to the extent that everything is profane. In the West there is nothing which is sacred. Even churches in the West are not sacred.

Modern theologians say God has been created by man, and you believe in it. But even God is no longer sacred. It is very important to say that there are areas that are sacred that can't be touched upon.

Of course, the primacy of reason should be established. However, there are areas which should be considered as sacred, for instance the concept of honor is the same in the Islamic civilization. This is something which cannot be explained fully in rational terms. But you see, honor is sacred, so that's why there are sacred areas in the Islamic civilization that can't be touched upon, and I think here we need to establish the limit of reason.

Now there is something like that going on in the West which is not what I want because I consider myself a rationalist and also as somebody who believes in the universality of concept of reason.

Q: Something is going on in the West? What do you mean?

T: In Europe you have postmodernists, and they say there is a reason but there is no objectivity. There are different truths and these different truths could coexist with one another and none of these truths could argue that one truth is the best.

Postmodernism is even worse than expressed rationalism. Expressed rationalism tries to explain everything in the world rationally. You can't explain everything you asked because there are limits of the reason. But to say that there are limits to the reason doesn't mean that there is no truth, no objectivity.

Postmodernists say there is no objectivity and, therefore, I believe that the concept of postmodernism is not for us because we Muslims believe there is a truth. Then the thing is that we distinguish between religious truth, which is sacred, and rational truth, which is based on human reason, which can subjected to further examination and verified.

Q: So sacred truth cannot be verified?

T: Sacred truth cannot be verified. I discussed this at length in September 1989 with Sheik al-Ashal because there are Islamic fundamentalists. Islamic fundamentalists are not traditional, they are modernists. They say every truth is in the Koran, and the Koran is the source of science and technology. And Sheik al- Ashal, who is an author, said no, and I like this because, again, in the tradition of Islam, you have religious truth and scientific or rational truth.

He said if you want to apply the concept of science and technology to the Koran, then you have to verify everything said in the Koran, and there is no iman (faith), and here is the danger. Therefore, he said, we have to separate the Koran, which is not an encyclopedia of science.

The Koran is a sacred revelation and cannot be subjected to verification. So to put a limit on the reason, however not to the extent of going so far of saying that there is no truth of postmodernism, I am against postmodernism.

Q: Postmodernism is not acceptable, even for Muslims...

T: Let me put it frankly. Postmodernism is a fashion, a Western fashion, and, you see, we have our problems. But the West also has its problems, and the basic problem of the West, I am talking about culture and civilization, is the crisis of meaning.

Who am I? What is my frame of reference? And I call this an identity crisis, what is the meaning which creates and determines my identity. This is a problem now in Europe. And this is a crisis of meaning. And in this crisis of meaning, a fashion comes up, all kinds of fashion. I believe postmodernism is one of the elements or components of this Western crisis of meaning, and it's not for us because our crisis is different.

Q: Another thing we in Indonesia do not entirely understand is the expression Islamization...

T: I wrote about this recently in Theory, Cultural and Society, a journal. Before I addressed the Islamization of knowledge, I asked about culture and knowledge. Does every culture have its own knowledge? Is knowledge human? Or is knowledge determined by a concrete specific culture like we want to enquire into nature? Is there an Indonesian approach to the study of nature and a German approach? Or is an approach rational or nonrational?

And I believe knowledge is human, reason is human. Maybe there are different ways to reaching knowledge but in pursuit of knowledge, reason is the basic issue, and reason does not have ethnicity or nationality, and my evidence for this is Islamic history.

Islamic philosophers between the ninth and the 12th century are of the view that knowledge is rational. And they did not see any difference between their knowledge, they being Muslim and Greek knowledge because both Greek knowledge and Islamic knowledge were based on human reason. This is my point of departure.

The second point is Islamization, Islamists in the Arab world, and I believe the concept came from the Arab world. I'm an Arab and an Arab German, but please do not misunderstand me because this is the place where I come from. They say Arab culture is the source of Islam. But you see Arabs number 240 million and Muslims are 1.3 billion, so the majority of Muslims are not Arab. There is some truth in it, in the area of culture, because Islam was revealed in Arabic and the major development of Islam took place in a core area.

Islam came very late, for instance, to Indonesia and other parts of the world. And now when you study political Islam, the major intellectuals who are producing the body of political Islam come from Egypt and also from Pakistan.

The concept of Islamization was developed in Cairo by Islamists and by the Islamization of knowledge they say there was a difference between the West and us and these people want to establish barriers.

They say the worst thing that happened to Islam in contemporary history was that Muslims sent students to Europe. The first one was an Egyptian sent to Paris from 1826 to 1831. He went back to Egypt and started spreading Western culture but he was not Westernized. He was an Islamic reformist. Another one was Mohamad Abduh, who lived in Paris.

The people who talked about an Islamization of knowledge said we should stop this, no more sending of Islamic students to the West. We should come back to our roots but the roots they mean are not even Ibn Rushd, not even Ibn Sina. The roots they mean are Ibn Taymiyyah, and they want to put fiqh (study of laws pertaining to ritual obligations) in the place of philosophy. In Islamic history, if you study intellectual history from between the ninth and the 12th century, there was a great struggle within Islam between fiqh and philosophy on the issue of the primacy of reason and the primacy of revelation.

So, in short, I believe the concept of the Islamization of knowledge is an ideological and not an epistemological concept.

On the one hand, Islamization of knowledge seems to exact popular faction among Muslims but the introduction of science to Islamic schools seems to be rather difficult. It is not easy for the madrasa (Islamic schools) to articulate that science education does not reduce religious education. You can teach Islam even by using physics because it is not antireligion. Why the objection? Some say it will reduce the Islamic character if you put in more science education.

Take the Al Azhar University in Cairo as an example. The university used to be just the center for Islamic sciences, meaning the syariah (Islamic law), the Koran and the hadith (Prophet's practices, sayings and traditions), not physics, not chemistry. Then in the 1960s president Nasser started to modernize Al Azhar by introducing modern sciences but until today even the building where you teach sciences and Islamic sciences are separate and there is very little interaction between them and this is wrong.

Islamic education would not be in the sciences because in the sciences there is one physic, there is no Islamic physic and there is no Western physic. I mean, this wall is white or green. A Muslim would say this, a Christian would say this and an unbeliever would say this. But Islamic education is like training in Islamic values. You can be a physicist, a social scientist or whatever discipline. At the same time, you learn Islamic values and try to relate one to the other in the sense that I'm a Muslim scholar... science is science but my values are standard values.

It is very important to educate people in Islam but you must say what is Islam because there are so many varieties of Islam. To quote a friend, who said his ideas are based on three things: there is no one Islam, there is no official Islam, there is no one Islamic truth... this is a kind of Islamic modernity. So if you want to educate Muslims in Islam, first you have to read the Koran. But in order to understand the Koran, you need interpretation. Do you teach them the Ibn Rushd or do you teach them Ibn Taymiyyah?

I mean both are Islam, so what Islam are you going to teach? If you teach them Ibn Rushd, they will become rationalist. If you teach them Ibn Taymiyyah, they will become supporters of political Islam. So it makes a big difference.

Q: What are the basic concepts of international Islamic universities, like the ones in Kuala Lumpur and Madinah? In what way do they differ from other ordinary universities? It is said that the principle of the international Islamic university is the tawhid...

T: No one can be a Muslim without believing in the tawhid (declaration of the oneness of God), and so why talk about the tawhid in international Islamic universities because this is self-evidence?

As far as I know about this project on international Islamic universities, there are things that are desirable and there are things that do exist. What is desirable?

Islam as a religion is tawhid but Islam as a religion is based on five pillars: the tawhid, prayers, zakat (alms to the poor), fasting during Ramadhan and the haj. But when you get into details, Islam is different from one place to the other. In terms of doctrines, you have Hanafi, Syafi'i, and Sunni Islam but we are still all Muslims, and there are people who accept the Shi'a or do not accept them, or the Alawi, the Ahmadiyyah, and as Muslims and this is wrong.

The idea of Islamic international universities should be based on the Koranic verse "we have created you as tribes and different peoples to get to know each other", so we need to acknowledge there is an Indonesian Islam, this is Islam. This is culturally different from Moroccan Islam and Saudi Islam.

It's wrong to impose one Islam on other Muslims and that is what the Saudis are doing. I believe the Saudis are trying to exploit this idea of international universities for the spread of Wahhabism (a steadfastly fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in the tradition of Ibn Hanbal and the theologian Ibn Taymiyyah).

So we have Islamic institutions and we have a dialog with the West. But also an inner Islamic dialog because there is no inner Islamic dialog. You see, before we talk to the West, we need to talk with one another and we need to practice Islamic tolerance among one another because what happens is, if I my understanding of Islam and if your Islam is different, who says that you are not a Muslim.

For example, African Islam are very different from Arab Islam. Senegalists believe in black magic, and they believe also in drumming and argued they were part of Islam but the Arab ambassadors said no. I was asked to mediate what is Islamic and what is non-Islamic. I said Islam adjusts to other conditions and Islam and Africa are not alien. Islam in Germany is alien because the Turkish migrants do not want to adjust to Europe and so their understanding of Islam is contrary to Europe and I have developed a concept of Euro-Islam which makes Muslims feel at home in Europe and in Indonesia.

You know Islam is not Indonesian. Islam came from Arabia. It came to you and you have been able to indigenize Islam so Islam is now a part of your culture but pre-Islamic culture elements are still there and this is nothing wrong about this.

Q: How do you see the Islam fundamentalist movement?

T: First the term fundamentalism is not an Islamic term. It was coined in the U.S. in the 1920s with the Protestant movement. There is no Arabic term for that. There was a translation and it was refused. They said there was no fundamentalism in Islam but there is an Egyptian professor at the University of Cairo and he himself is a fundamentalist, his name is Hasan al-Hanafi. He published a best-seller book Al-ushuliah Islamiyah (Islamic Fundamentalism), and in that book he says the Islamic awakening can be described best as ushuliah (fundamental).

Now, my problem is not the label. You can take different labels for the very same phenomenon. The phenomenon is politicization of Islam, of Islamic symbols for articulating issues which are not religious, cultural, economic or other issues.

The main body of political Islam -- political Islam is also another name for fundamentalism -- is the idea of the Islamic state. They say the West established the nation-state, and the West exported the nation-state to the world of Islam, and the result has been dividing Islamic ummah (unity). Now you have 55 Islamic nation-states.

Islamists argue that the nation-state is a conspiracy of the West against Islam, dividing Muslims in order to rule them, and we should reverse this and go back to the idea of Islamic ummah. But first we need to kill the nation-state. And instead of the nation-state, you establish the daulah Islamiyah (Islamic state).

And the daulah Islamiyah is not an end in itself, it is one step toward establishing a larger unity of Islam, one Islamic ummah in one polity. But the basic idea of the daulah Islamiyah is the Islamic state.

In the Koran, the term daulah never appears. The Prophet never used this term, so this is evidence that this concept is not Islamic because in Islam you have the Koran, the hadith, and also there are other Muslim scholars who elaborated on hadith, tafzir and Koran. And hadith sciences, if you study the hadith until the beginning of the 20th century, there is no use of the concept of daulah Islamiyah. Then syariah, there is talk about ta'bir syariah, implementation of the syariah.

The syariah is not the law of the state. My family, an ulema family, are specialists on syariah and they have nothing to do with politics and this is an indication that syariah has nothing to do with politics. Syariah deals which things like how to conduct a marriage, how to deal with inheritance, how to divorce for a man and for a woman and how to settle personal issues, but it has nothing to do with the state.

Fundamentalists make the syariah state laws and this is new in Islam. This is an invention. And things that come from God, I need to accept them, if I refuse them, I am not a Muslim. But if something comes from a human, we can take it or leave it and I don't take fundamentalism because it comes from humans and this is spreading throughout the world of Islam.

Now even in your country you have a crisis, and fundamentalists say they have a solution. And they coined "the Islamic solution", after one Egyptian Muslim brother in the 1970s. The Islamic solution is directed against an "important solution", so democracy, socialism and a government regime, all these are important solutions from the West and as Muslims need to have their own solution, they called it the Islamic solution. The Islamic solution is daulah islamiyah, the Islamic state.

So like here in Indonesia, they would say that if you establish an Islamic state based on syariah, all problems of Indonesia would be solved. There would be no unemployment. The problem of demographic explosion would be solved. Environment pollution would be solved. Male urbanization would be solved. No more crimes, I mean it's magic.

Window A: To quote a friend, who said his ideas are based on three things: there is no one Islam, there is no official Islam, there is no one Islamic truth... this is a kind of Islamic modernity.

Window B: So like here in Indonesia, they would say that if you establish an Islamic state based on syariah, all problems of Indonesia would be solved. There would be no unemployment.