Karim Douglas Crow

The Arabic term al-aql / ―intelligence/understanding/ reason‖ is one among half-a-dozen of the most important concepts occurring throughout Islamic experience and thought. From the beginning of the Islamic era, it had been an opaque term, and Muslim scholars did not always agree that ‘aql was univocal in meaning. In its early Islamic unfolding the concept of ‘aql comprised the intersection of primarily Arab and Qur‘anic as well as Biblicic components with Hellenic and Iranian traditions. ‘aql became the carrier of multiple overlapping or diverging meanings, if not already before Islam among the old Arabs; it assumed particular significances in ethics, humanistic studies (adab), prosody and rhetoric, law, theology, philosophy, as well as in spiritual and metaphysical speculations.1

A review of the Islamic understanding of ‗reason‘ and ‗rationality‘ would have to deal with the chief disciplines wherein rationality played an extensive role: legal theory (usul al-fiqh), speculative theology (kalam), philosophy (falsafah) and rational spirituality (hikmah & ‘irfan). Attention should also be given to pronounced anti-rationalist features of Traditionalism. Language and ideas take political and theological expression through discourse, narrative, literary genre or technique, and community setting.2

In terms of contemporary discourse analysis or text semiotics, contextual employments of this term were commonly viewed by classical Muslim scholars to exemplify a form of textual polysemy admitting multiple significances when its meaning was appropriated by different circles. The attempts of the lexicologists from the 2nd century onwards subscribe to the goal of textual monosemy by searching for an original concrete sense or objective interpretation, through its derivation from al-‘iqal /the camel‘s binding cord. Successive layers of conceptual drift in linguistic usage over centuries have covered up the thought-forms and experiences of earlier notions. Such early conceptualizations might now appear strange or unfamiliar to many contemporary Muslims, although their foundations are still manifest in Islamic Tradition literature, religious and philosophical ethics, and spirituality.

Early Islamic creation teachings were inspired by the Qur‘an and closely related Biblicist (Jewish & Christian) traditions, yet they would grow to encompass the Hellenic emphasis on intelligible reality preceding and transcending the psycho-physical realms, as with the falasifah and related trends in philosophical Shi‗ism. During the twentieth century ‘aql enjoyed a reincarnation among modernist Muslim thinkers in the face of Western cultural and political challenges.3 Recently, there has been a growing interest among contemporary thinkers in al-nazar al-‘aqli/the ‗rational argumentation‘ of the Qur‘an.4 Today, ‘aqlmost often connotes ‗reason‘, mentality, or discursive mention, reflecting the brain conception prevalent in our contemporary mentality—(eg. ‘aqlilaktruni ‗electric brain‘, computer; or mukhkh ilaktruni).5

Reason

There are several views on how to understand or define ‗reason‘ and ‗rationalism‘. In the ancient and medieval worlds ‗reason‘ was often defined in practical terms as an innate trait or faculty of the person; or in a more theoretical vein as a non-spatial ‗substance‘ belonging to the immaterial realm of existence, while at the same time forming part of the human soul with the capacity for perceiving knowledge and exercising cognition. As an avenue for knowledge and a cognitive function, reason involves the distinction between innate ideas or conceptions (either as ‗intuition‘, or as inborn direct necessary knowledge), and that of acquired or demonstrative knowledge— including both sensory experience, revealed guidance, as well as formal rational-cognitive procedures for ascertaining truth. In addition, reason was always intimately linked with the affective (emotional) and intentional reality of ethical action at the level of conscience and will, and was deemed central to self-awareness and consciousness. However, in contemporary understanding ‗reason‘ is most often defined as a ‗mental faculty‘, namely, a faculty of the human ‗mind‘ having a distinct capacity for knowledge—in contrast to sense experience. This mentalist conception of reason was at the root of the opposition between Rationalism and Empiricism, since the latter gives priority to sensory data. ‗Science‘ proceeds from empirical observation and measurement, while its truth claims are generally seen to adhere to a canon of formal rational procedures yielding probability in most cases. Current notions of reason and mind almost always embrace a physicalistic ‗brain‘ or bodily conception, as in cognitive psychology based on empirical bio-genetic and neurophysiological studies that stress the biological basis of cognition by studying the neurophysiology of meaning-perception in humans.

These current notions of reason derive from the period of the Enlightenment and from Continental Rationalism, and they reflect a confidence in the unbridled powers of the human intellect (viewed in terms of ‗brain-mind‘) as a source of knowledge. Intellect was then conceived of in opposition to ‗faith‘ and uncritical acceptance of traditional revealed authority as well as to superstition and magic. The eighteenth-century European thinkers of the Enlightenment opposed the traditional Christianity of the institutionalized Church by rejecting ‗non-rational‘ factors of traditional spiritual authority and faith, and they viewed reason as contrasted with ‗feeling‘ or ‗emotion‘. Modern notions of reason and of rationalism arose out of this spirit of anti-supernaturalism, being an anti-religious and anti-clerical movement of utilitarian outlook stressing historical and scientific arguments against theism.

Thus, the notion of ‗soul‘ is now considered problematic due to its spiritualistic connotations, and the term ‗mind‘ has replaced ‗soul‘ in current western discourse. Presently, the term ‗rationalism‘ appears on the way to being replaced by ‗humanism‘; while the term ‗irrational‘ conveys a (negative) connotation of ‗spiritual‘ or ‗supernatural‘ associated with transcendent values. Contemporary discussions on consciousness and the philosophy of mind also reflect this conceptual drift toward a (monist) brain conception, where ‗mind‘ substitutes for the ‗soul‘ concept of the past. ‗Mind‘ is frequently allied with brain functions and given a physical locus, or alternatively it is denied any spatial locale and simply reduced to ―mental events‖. Recently, there have appeared a number of creative but tentative attempts to reconceptualize notions of ‗reason‘ and ‗intelligence‘ along anti-mentalistic or ‗personological‘ lines, several drawing on the experience and practice of older non-Western traditions or even popular ‗folk‘ conceptions. In the past several decades concepts such as ‗moral intelligence‘, ‗emotional intelligence‘ or recently ‗spiritual intelligence‘ have been popularized in attempts to broaden our conception of what constitutes human rationality and intellect.

The widespread misconception that the conflict between ‗Reason and Revelation‘ or between Science and Faith-based traditional authority experienced by Western-European and the subsequent contemporary Western civilization, must also have been experienced within the preceding Islamic civilization, should be laid to rest. (The very same misconception is behind Western puzzlement over why Muslims have not become more secularized.) This unwarranted assumption led in the past to patently wrong assessments of Muslim thought and experience, and continues to foster genuine misunderstanding concerning the real nature of Islamic religious and intellectual traditions. This misunderstanding arose partly from the Euro-centric worldview of Western imperialism inherited by postcolonial globalizing culture in a type of intellectual default; and partly out of entrenched ignorance and explicit hostility. In contrast to the western view, classical Islamic notions of ‗intelligence‘ or ‗reason‘ embraced the faith-induced dimension of knowledge yielding conviction and moral-volition in the operation of human intelligence, being intimately joined with its cognitive or perceiving-knowing dimension. This ‗practical‘ ethico-religious dimension of reason has a close connection with ethical endeavor and moral-volition (the faculty of conation). Ethics is the domain of practical reason or ‗prudential-mind‘ (‘aqlamali), involving the power of conation (volition, will-power): the impulse or striving to change one‘s behavior and act in accordance with the directives of both inner conscience and outer guidance or divinely revealed imperatives mediated in revelation.

The normative view in Islamic civilization was always that of faith-in-reason while also simultaneously recognizing the limits-of-reason. Remember that the very term for ‗reason intelligence‘ in Arabic, al- „aql, has at the core of its basic linguistic meaning the practical idea of ‗restraining‘ and ‗binding‘ as an interior self-imposed limit - of holding one‘s self back from blameworthy conduct (the polarity of ‘aqlvs. jahl / intelligence vs. ignorance, or wisdom vs. folly). In Islamic thought, those who taught that reason alone is the sole human authority in attaining truth were regarded as disbelievers. Such individuals were very rare - eg. the physician-philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi (d.313/ 925 or ca. 323/935 in Rayy) who denied prophecy and embraced Platonic and Galenic teachings, even while he wrote on the validity of alchemy as an empirical science and drew on Gnostic teachings in his cosmology. Rationalists attacked the Traditionalists and their doctrines on the basis of reason, claiming that much-but not all-religious knowledge may be known only by means of reason.

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