I'd like to welcome you to the 18th annual Conway Lectures at the Medieval Institute.
My name is Thomas Burman, and I'm the director of the Medieval Institute.
And before I introduce our speaker, I should give some thanks to our donor Robert Conway, a Notre Dame
alumnus of 1966, who's been a generous benefactor of the university and particularly to the Medieval Institute
itself, and whose gifts to the Medieval Institute allow us to do many of the events like this and allow us
to underwrite the scholarship of faculty and graduate students, but in particular to underwrite
this lecture series that we've been doing for almost three decades now. Now it's fortunate in this case, as it is in a
a numnber of these cases that the lecture is given
three different lectures, because there is so much to say
about the lecture by way of introduction, that we kind of spread it out over three over three different introductions,
and so my colleagues in Philisophy and Medieval Studies, Therese Cory and Stephen Gersh will be saying
more about our speaker in tomorrow and the next night's introductions, but I want to say a few things now.
Peter Adamson, our speaker for the next three nights, is the first Notre Dame alumnus to be invited to give these
lectures. Peter was a PhD graduate of the Philosophy Department in 2000. He was directed by Stephen Gersh,
our colleague in Medieval Studies.
 
He received his undergraduate education at Williams College, receiving his degree in 1994. While he was here
he focused on Arabic Neoplatonic philosophy and his dissertation work culminated in a series of publications
relating to early Arab philosophy including the Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of
Aristotle, published in 2002, as well as a monographic study about al-Kindi the great philosopher of the Arabs
in 2007, and also, in a collaborative translation with Peter Pormann of all of al-Kindi's works into English
that appeared in 20012.
But somewhere along the way, in particular about 2010, Peter launched off into a very interesting academic
direction that I think it's worth all of us thinking about.
He began a long series of podcasts called The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
And that series of podcasts, which is now more than 400 is ongoing. Peter has been on campus here
and at UC actually, these past few days, interviewing  more people for these podcasts
and they have covered a vast range of the history of philosophy, back to the pre-Socratics, including what we
think of as the Greek and Latin philosophical tradition, but also the vast Arab philosophical tradition, moving
out to India and currently into Africa.
This set of podcasts, which I highly recommend to you, and all you have to do is type into your search engine
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, and you'll get right there, includes just a fascinating range of both discussions by
Peter himself, but also interviews with other scholars on key philosophers or philosophical issues.
So you can listen to the podcast about, for example, the Maimonides Controversy, but you
also listen to a podcast called Sarah Stroumsa on Maimonides, the great authority on the philosophy
and intellectual work of Maimonides.
The podcast then let to a whole other scholarly venture, that is the publication of a multi-volume History of
Philosophy Without Gaps that has been coming out since 2014, including most recently
A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps: Philosophy in the Islamic World.
Now any of you who have looked at these volumes will know that they are beautifully written and often
quite entertaining and manage to communicate the importance of philosophy in striking ways.
It happens that, and I don't mind admitting it, that I quoted a sentence from the book on Islamic philosophy
recently in a thing I'm writing about the great Islamic philosophical theologian Mulla Sadra, and specifically
about Mulla Sadra's doctrine of tashkik al-wujud, what's called the intensification, a doctrine that helps explain
that existence comes in gradations or degrees, and after describing this beautfully, Peter says about this the
following: "Thus does Sadra have his cake and eat it too. Able to enjoy the sublime taste offered by the Sufis'
doctrine of the unity of existence without giving up Avicenna's fundamental contrast between divine
necessary existence and created contingent existence. It's that kind of insight and that ability to communicate
that I'm sure we're going to welcome over the next three days, as Peter Adamson gives a set of lectures
collectively titled "Don't Think For Yourself: Faith and Authority in Medieval Philosophy,"
tonight's lecture being specifically called "Taqlid: Authority and the Intellectual Elite in the Islamic World"
Peter Adamson
[Applause]
Okay, thank you very much for that very
kind introduction. Thanks for the
invitation to come back to my alma mater.
Go Irish.
And thanks obviously to all of you for
coming.
So as Tom just said this first
lecture is called "Taqlid: Authority
and the Intellectual Elite in the
Islamic World." I live in Europe, where
people actually ride bicycles, and
recently I was riding with my wife
through Munich. We came to an
intersection ahead of me my wife slowed
down, checking for oncoming cars, then
went across. It suddenly struck me that
it would be perfectly reasonable for me
to follow her across the intersection
without bothering to look whether it was
safe. After all my wife is reliable and
has good judgments, both in general and
when it comes to the rules of the road.
Also, she doesn't need glasses, I do.
Whereas I am a frequently distracted
philosopher, she's a normal person, so
when it comes to this kind of thing I
tend to trust her more than I trust
myself. And she'd hardly be crossing if
there were a car coming, so why not ride
straight across, trusting her implicitly,
as I do? I would quite literally be
staking my life on the assumption that
she made the right decision, but this was
a bet that I realized I would quite
happily make. Then I looked for traffic
anyway, just to be on the safe side, but
it got me to thinking about how we make
decisions, how we form beliefs, and the
fact that we often do so simply by
accepting the judgment of other people
whom we take to be authoritative.
Actually I'd been thinking about this
for a while anyway, because this very
issue lies at the heart of many of our
political controversies. We're
increasingly warned against taking our
beliefs from sources that were
previously considered authoritative.
Yesterday's paper of record is today
deemed fake news. Michael Gove, responding
to economists' gloomy predictions of
Britain's leaving the EU, ventured that
people in this country have had enough
of experts. Well credentialed scientists
with expertise in vaccinations or
climate change are greeted with distrust.
Part of the problem is that many
political issues are so vast in their
complexity and scope that they defy the
ability of individual
people to form beliefs in a way that
seems responsible. How many of us
understand enough about the atmosphere
to have a reasonably informed personal
opinion about climate change? Never mind
being in a position to critically
evaluate what specialist climatologists
have to say. On this and many other
issues we're apparently in the
politically and epistemologically
uncomfortable position of choosing whose
opinions we should blindly accept. What I
want to show in the lectures I'll be
giving here this week is that we can
learn something about blind acceptance
and how to avoid it
from a surprising source, namely medieval
philosophy. Surprising because medieval
philosophers have a reputation for
forming their beliefs in the most
uncritical of ways, bound as they were by
authority locked into inflexible
worldviews by their theological
commitments and threatened with
institutional sanction, or worse, if they
dared to step out of line. In these
lectures I will be implicitly
challenging such assumptions, but that's
actually not so novel. No expert in the
field would nowadays accept this
description of the medieval mindset as
slavish and merely imitative. My main
point will be a different one, namely
that medieval philosophers engage in
explicit and productive reflection on
this very question of when and how one
might responsibly form one's beliefs
based on authority. I'm going to be
covering quite a lot of territory both
chronologically and geographically,
although it will certainly not be
without any gaps. We'll be highlighting
authors and texts from the end of Late
Antiquity in the 5th century or so, down
to the time of the European Renaissance
in the 15th and 16th centuries, with
occasional forays even later than that.
And I'm going to be looking at three
distinct yet closely interconnected
medieval cultures. Some of what I will
say concerns Latin Christendom which
will be familiar taint terrain for many
of you, but I'll also be talking about
intellectuals in the Greek-speaking
Byzantine Empire and the culture to
which most of my own research has been
directed, the Islamic world. We'll be
meeting Christians there too, as well as
Jews, but in this first lecture I will be
focusing on a concept that has its
original home within Islam itself, and
more specifically in methodological
debates that raged between Muslim
scholars of law and theology.
Oh, I forgot to put the first slide up, so
these are the three medieval traditions
I'll be talking about.
So these scholars of law and theology
did us the favor of finding a single
word to describe the phenomenon we are
interested in. They called it Taqlid
This word, Taqlid, is often translated
as imitation, uncritical acceptance of
authority, or blind following. It comes
from a verb meaning to gird, there's a
word you don't use every day, to gird. Can
you gird anything other than loins in
contemporary English? I think not.
It can also mean to hang something upon
the neck, for example a necklace
placed on a sacrificial animal. Fairly
early in the Islamic tradition of law,
perhaps in Iraq around the end of the
8th century, it came to be used for
reaching judgments on the basis of
someone else's authority. Someone who
practices Taqlid, in Arabic a muqallid,
has not personally reflected as
to whether the judgment in question can
be grounded in the sources of Islamic
law, namely the Quran and the hadith, the
collected reports about the sayings and
deeds of the Prophet. Such reflection is
called Ijtihad or effortful reflection,
sorry effortful exertion. It relates to
the well known Arabic word jihad, which
means effort or struggle, and someone who
performs Ijtihad is a mujtahid. This
terminology was,, as I say first used in
legal context, but it quickly became
important for theologians too who began
to debate the question I've raised at
the start of this lecture. Is it alright
to form one's beliefs notably, one's
religious beliefs, just by following
apparently reliable authority, hence by
engaging in Taqlid? Or do we have a
responsibility to perform Ijtihad? Or, as
we might put it, should we really try to
think for ourselves? I actually want to
establish not just that medieval Muslim
thinkers had useful insights about this
question but an even more surprising
historical thesis. Some of you may
already have been thinking, when I
mentioned the typical prejudices about
medieval thinkers, that these prejudices
would not apply to at least a handful of
philosophers from the Islamic world.
These were figures I like to think of as
the Aristotelian avant-garde.
Men, and they were all men, but we'll get
to women on Thursday, so men like al-Farabi
Avicenna, whose real name was Ibn Sina and Averroes whose real name
was Ibn Rushd, who thought that all
important beliefs could be established
by pure reason. They did accept the
religious teachings of Islam but
emphasized that these teachings were
ratified and ultimately explained by
Aristotelian philosophy. For them
religion was really just a less
technical presentation of fundamental
philosophical truths, in a form that
could be appreciated by non philosophers.
With this the Aristotelian avant-garde,
espoused a rationalism more radical than
we find in practically any thinker of
medieval Christendom, in either the Latin
or Greek spheres. In Arabic they were
often referred to as the falasifa
from falsifa, which is of course just a
loanword from Greek, based on Greek
philosophia. Some have exalted the
falasifa, the Aristotelian avant-garde,
as the only true philosophers in the
Islamic world, and perhaps in any
medieval culture, precisely on the
grounds of their outright and unabashed
rationalism. But ironically, or so I shall
argue, the elitist rationalism of the
falasifa was itself an inheritance
from the Islamic legal and theological
tradition. It was by transposing the
legal and theological concepts of Ijtihad
and Taqlid to the context of
Aristotelian philosophy that the
Philosopher's were able to articulate
their own self conception as independent
thinkers who followed reason wherever it
might lead. And that, ladies and gentlemen
is what we call a thesis statement.
Let us return, then, to the debate over
Taqlid within Islamic law and
theology. Perhaps the most important
figure for the beginning of this debate
is Ci, the founding figure
of one of the four major schools of
Islamic law. Al-Shafiʿi is well known for
his endorsement of rational methods in
law, such as the use of analogy,
where the ruling in a clear case is
transferred to an unclear case because
the second case is relevantly similar to
the first. For instance,
and I'm going to use the example that
people always use, if wine is explicitly
forbidden by analogy whiskey is also
forbidden because it is intoxicating
just like wine. Ijtihad could include
the use of analogical reasoning but not
be identified with this or any
particular rational method. Rather, it is
the use of any such method to arrive at
an independently derived legal opinion
rather than uncritically accepting the
judgment of others, which of course is
Taqlid. Al-Shafi'i that himself does
not always use the termTaqlid in a
pejorative sense. It is good and proper
to be a muqallid when it comes to
following the Prophet and his companions.
But he thought that any jurist worthy of
the name should be willing and able to
perform Ijtihad, which he deemed
necessary because earlier legal scholars
had often disagreed or simply offered
decisions without any accompanying basis
at all. As Ahmed Al Shamsi has written,
whatever reasoning prompted such earlier
opinions was a black box and could not
be a basis for further jurisprudence,
Al-Shafi'i's followers were even more
forthright in their critique of Taqlid,
which for them came to have an
exclusively negative connotation. This
forced them to explain how they could
indeed be followers of al-Shafi'i himself,
a rather ironic project that calls to
mind the scene in Monty Python's Life of
Brian, in which Brian instructs his
deluded followers "you've got to think
for yourselves, you're all individuals," at
which point they all shout "yes we are
all individuals," and then a small voice
from the back says "I'm not." The Shafi'is
dealt with the problem by either
restating, and hence, in effect, personally
endorsing their masters own legal
reasoning to get around the black box
problem, or improving on that
reasoning by offering
corrections to what al-Shafi'i had said or
further evidence to support his findings.
This set a rationalist standard for
jurisprudential reasoning. A qualified
jurist is one who can supply an
evidential argument for each decision. In
contrast to this Taqlid was defined
already in the early 10th century as
Kabul Kabul Ahuja, accepting a position
without evidence or without a rationale
maybe. There's a famous debate among
scholars of Islamic law as to how widely
and for how long independent reasoning,
or Ijtihad, was practiced by jurists. It
used to be a commonplace to say that
relatively soon after the time of al-
Shafi'i and other school founders, jurists
simply stopped bothering with Ijtihad and
contented themselves with good old
uncritical Taqlid. But a now classic
article by Wael Hallak argued that the so
called gate of Ijtahid was never
closed, and at least if this means that
legal scholars at some point entirely
withdrew from personal reflection. To the
contrary we find even even later jurist
saying, for instance, that it is not
possible for there to be an age without
a mujtahid. Simply as a practical matter,
independent reflection was needed to
deal with new questions such
as the permissibility of using coffee
and tobacco. much discussed by jurists of
the Ottoman Empire. It has however been
argued that Ijtihad was applied in
exceptional cases by exceptional figures
and that most jurists since the Middle
Ages restricted themselves to studying
and following the tradition. The mujtahid
would be a bold and even iconoclastic
figure, one who effectively sought to
play the role of a new founder like
al-Shafi'i himself. In light of this, Sherman
Jackson has more recently suggested that
we simply think of Taqlid as a form
of legal precedence, dropping more
pejorative translations that have to do
with blind obedience. And if it's
translated as precedent,t it doesn't sound
nearly as bad, right? It sounds good, it
sounds like stability. We don't need to
wade into the historical debate over the
frequency and historical lifespan of Ijtihad. For our purposes it's enough to note
that in the Sunni traditions, it was
common to recognize a hierarchy of more
and less advanced legal scholars.
At the top would be the pure mujtahid,
who works out a legal reasoning for his
decision based directly on revealed
sources. At the bottom would be the
pure muqallid. This is the jurist who
simply memorizes previous decisions and
reapplies them. The same status is
occupied by ordinary people often, called al-awan, meaning the common people and
similar enforced to the ancient Greek
phrase hoi polloi.
By the way, parenthetically, people, do not
say the hoi polloi please. Hoi means the.
Yes? Okay, thank you. Public service
announcement over. So as that similarity
to hoi polloi implies, we're dealing here
with a straightforward epistemic elitism.
The legal scholar who performs Ijtihad
has real knowledge, whereas the ordinary
person or Taqlid bound judge is doomed
to ignorance, or more
optimistically, mere opinion. The elitism
stands even when we take into account
that jurists recognized other levels in
between the pure mujtahid and the
muqallid.
For instance, one might perform what was
called Ijtihad within a school or
affiliated Ijtihad, that is reasoning
within the dictates and principles of
one's chosen legal tradition. Another way
to qualify slavish passivity of common
believers was to allow a minimal form of
Ijtihad called "following" Ittiba,
which simply means pressing jurists to
confirm that they are basing their
judgments in revelation and not personal
judgment. So in other words, they tell you
what to think and you say you got
that from the Quran right, and they say
yes, and you say okay. So that's pretty
light touch Ijtihad. The Shi'i legal
tradition, meanwhile, attacked the
epistemic elitism of the mainstream
Sunni schools for being, in a sense, not
elitist enough. For the Shia, Islamic law
cannot be properly applied without the
guidance of the inspired imams who
descend from the family of the Prophet
through his cousin and son-in-law Ali.
What was for them unconstrained legal
reasoning as practiced by al-Shafi'i and
other Sunni jurists resulted in mere
opinion not knowledge. Yet as Shi'i legal
thought developed, it also made a place
for Ijtihad, of course within the
guidelines laid down by the imams.
So it is that we find shi'i scholars, too,
contrasting the knowledgeable scholar
from the typical believer who may and
indeed should engage in Taqlid. As one
scholar put, it it is incumbent on the
ordinary person to act by Taqlid if
he is incapable of a Ijtihad. Scholars who
engaged in rational Islamic theology,
which is my wordy translation of the
word Kalam, were concerned with and
often formally trained in Islamic law. So
it's no surprise that these debates
concerning the permissibility of Taqlid found their way into theological
discussions. I don't have time today to
delve this whole story any more than
I've told the whole story of Taqlid
in Islamic jurisprudence, but it can at
least be mentioned that the early
thinkers we usually group under the
heading of mu'tazilism generally took
themselves to be carrying out her
religious obligation to engage in
speculative inquiry. This was the view of
the leading thinkers of the Basra school
among the mu'tazilites, al-Jubawi and
Abu Hashem. It is reported to them that
they said the following: "whoever is
capable of knowledge of God becomes an
unbeliever, if he does not apply
knowledge to know God, regardless of
whether he abandons knowledge to pursue
imitation [that's Taqlid], doubt,
conjecture, or ignorance. We know of a
dispute between Abu Hashem and another
mu'tazilite, Abu Qasim al-Balkhi,
known as al-Qa'abi. Unusually within this
tradition,
al-Qa'abi held that ordinary believers who
engaged in Taqlid were just were doing
just what they should. He distinguished
between on the one hand an elite of
theologians who had the capacity, and
therefore the obligation, to pursue
knowledge of God through speculative
inquiry, and on the other hand those who
are morally obligated to apply Taqlid nad conjecture. These are the laypeople,
al-awam, the slaves, and many women. This of
course is simply the familiar elitism of
the jurists applied to the subject
matter of theology, with added sexism fpr
color. The more demanding attitude of the
mu'tazilites, who wanted all believers
to engage in what we might call anvIjtihad of theological reflection was
taken up by the most famous critic of
mu'tazilisim,
Al-Ash'ari. He and his followers, theAsharites, are sometimes thought of as being
less rationalist than these other
theologians, the mu'tazilites. There is
some reason for that, because of such
teachings as their divine command theory
of ethics, which they opposed to the
mu'tazilites view that humans can work
out their moral obligations through pure
rational reflection. But on the subject
of Taqlid, the Asharites are remarkably
rationalist too. Already in al-Ashari himself
we have the idea that the
Quran contains clear proofs and
arguments that establish God's existence
and his omnipotence over all created
things, and that proved the genuineness
of Muhammad's prophecy and the
obligation to follow his example. As
Richard Frank has written al-Ashari
assumes that the reasoned arguments are
probative and complete on the grounds of
theoretical reason alone, for if they are
not so than the Prophet's claim to
authority cannot be reasonably accepted.
Taking up this approach, later Asharites
cite the Quranic verse "most of them do
not know the truth so they turn away" as
a command to avoid Taqlid. One
theologian said that the verse shows
that to accept Taqlid is wrong and
that one must carry out the proofs and
demonstrations. They lack knowledge
because they turn away from reasoning.
Richard Frank has argued that in their
strictures against Taqlid, the main
concern of the Asharites was that
believers should be free of uncertainty,
A muqallid might not be an unbeliever,
but is a believer in only a qualified
sense, because their convictions might be
overturned by doubts that occurred to
them or are put to them by skeptics. In
the absence of secure proofs they will
inevitably be vulnerable to this
eventuality. And Frank is clearly right
about this. For instance he cites a
report concerning the Asharite
theologian al-Isfa'a Rahini who said that
the commoners are of two types. One
consists of people who are not wholly
lacking in a kind of reasoning, even if
it is imperfect in its
expression and its grounding. Such people
are truly believers and in the proper
sense know. The second consists of people
who are completely unenlightened in this
respect and have no real knowledge.
Rather, since they believe through Taqlid, their belief lacks integrity
and not one of them is free of
uncertainty and doubt. However, I suspect
that the Asharites had a further concern,
which is a specific case of what
philosophers now call epistemic luck.
Believers whose conviction, by the way I
when I was writing ,this I got to this
part I said oh, I know what I can call
this, epistemic luck, that's a really
cool phrase. And then I googled it, and
it's like, oh there's like a whole branch
of epistemology,
that sounds familiar now that I think
about it. Oh well. So this is
may be my coinage but not my original
coinage. So the epistemic luck believers
whose convictions are formed by tuck
lead will only be right if they happen
to follow reliable authority, and this
will be the case only if they happen to
follow authority that is in fact
reliable. Thus a report on another
theologian, Abu Qasim al-Ansari, has
him saying that those who lack knowledge
have only belief founded on conjecture
and opinion if they are right in what
they believe. They believe by an
unreflective acquiescence to the truth,
and if they fail to grasp the truth, they
are in error and deviate from the truth.
So basically the the right people got
lucky, the wrong people got unlucky. We
saw that the jurists qualified their
legal elitism by distinguishing between
levels of Taqlid, with one or more
middle positions between outright Taqlid
and fully independent Ijtihad. The Asharites did much the same in the
theological contexts. One of their
foremost theologians al-Juwayni said that
ordinary believers have knowledge in an
extended sense if they have a
sufficiently strong feeling of certainty
in their faith. He worried that demanding
full-blown rational inquiry from them is,
as he said, imposing an obligation that
cannot be fulfilled, so that they are
required only to have correct belief
that is free from doubt and uncertainty,
and they are not required to know. Not
required to know, that is, in this strict
and proper sense of the knowledge
attained by an expert theologian such as
al-Jawayni himself. Another
qualification that again, as in the legal
case, leaves the elitism standing, is that
the community as a whole must include
select individuals who perform inquiry.
In effect, the theologian is doing the
epistemic work for everyone else, just as
we saw that there might
need to be some mujtahids in law
without every Muslim needing to perform
Ijtihad. The ideas the ideas I've just
surveyed appear early in the history of
Islamic theology and are echoed in the
following centuries. Here my discussion
will be necessarily even sketchier, but
allow me to refer to just three later
theologians who took strikingly critical
positions towards Taqlid. I first want
to mention the Persian thinker, al-Dawani,
who talked about his own journey from
Taqlid to Ijtihad. There's gonna be a
long passage, but it's brillian,t so it's
worth it. Get comfortable. "I said to
myself, o soul which has these beliefs, do
you take them to be true and accurate on
the basis of intellect or pure Taqlid?
The soul replied, even though they are
tuck lead still they arise from
something true and from the discernment
of intellect." By way of proof, the soul
added, "when it comes to my beliefs I am
the muqallid of someone who is my mujtahid"
which, actually, is Mujahid's
because it's Persian, but it's basically
mujtahid, "and all his beliefs are true
since they arose through the discernment
of intellect.
Therefore my beliefs are all true. Even
though this proof has been constructed
in a perfect arrangement, still when I
place the argument on the scales of
intellect, it had no weight. So I debated
my with myself anew and asked my soul,
what do you believe about the truth of
the mujtahid ? Could it be that
there is an error among his beliefs or
not? My soul chose the first option. So I
said to it on that assumption, the major
premise of the proof which you built to
prove your believes is false, for whoever
errs cannot be given confidence such
that all his beliefs are certain to be
true and accurate. And this argument has
as its conclusion that not
all the beliefs of the muqallids are
true. Furthermore, if the aforementioned
assumption of the proof were true, then
it would follow that the beliefs of the
muqallids of every religion and creed
would be true by the same reasoning, and
then the soul could not respond." Notice
that he here invokes the consideration I
just mentioned, that tech lead exposes
believers to epistemic luck. If you are
not yourself engaging in Ijtihad, you
just have to hope that the sources of
your Taqlid beliefs knew what they
were doing. This is vividly supplemented
by the final point, that adherents of
religions other than as
could happily retain their false beliefs
by depending on Taqlid, with no less
justification than the Muslim muqallid.
And as you're going to see, that's
going to be a point that runs through,
especially, tomorrow's lecture. Around the
same time in the Islamic West in the
Maghreb,
we found the Moroccan scholar Mohammed
Ibn Yusuf al- Sanusi
taking an even stronger line against Taqlid
He lays down a blanket ban against
it, even for ordinary believers. This
Universalist view has been discussed in
a recent book by Khalid Al Rahab, who
explains that for al-Sanusi, every
Muslim must master the basics of Asharite
theology. This is sort of like all Notre
Dame students having to take theology
and philosophy classes, right, but for
everybody. Everyone has the
responsibility to engage in inquiry so
as to reach certainty, and those who
don't do this are unbelievers, when al-
Sanusi demands certainty, he's asking for
more than the subjective feeling of
confidence that al-Juwayni had in mind,
which could give the ordinary believer
knowledge in an extended sense. As I
pointed out elsewhere, theologians who
allowed Taqlid to the non expert were
depending not only on that feeling of
certainty, but also on the tacit
assumption that the non expert Muslim
has indeed gotten epistemically lucky. The
sources of belief he happens to follow
are indeed reliable. So his beliefs wind
up being true.
Right, so as al-Dawani observed, had an
ordinary Muslim been born a Christian or
a Jew, he or she would have had false
beliefs instead. You can see why that
would not not be enough for al-Sanusi/
He wants believers to do more than feel
confident in believing something that
is, fortunately for them, in fact, true.
Believers must go through arguments that
establish the truth of their beliefs.
Their feeling of certainty must be
earned and well justified. You may not
have heard of al-Sanusi, but he was an
extremely influential figure whose works
were received, among other places, in
sub-Saharan Africa. One short work of his
is still taught in modern-day Nigeria,
and in the centuries
after his death, there were commentaries
written on his works in Fulfulde. To
give you to give you an idea of the
esteem in which he was held, one story
circulating about him had it that a
member of his circle found himself
unable to cook meat, because mere
acquaintance with al-Sanusi made fire
ineffective. The point being, that his
associates were guaranteed to avoid
burning in hell. His intellectual legacy
included teachings on Taqlid by African
scholars, such as the 17th century Fulani
theologian Mohammed Alawi al-Maliki,
based in what is now the country of Chad.
Like al-Sanusi, he held that there is a
universal responsibility laid upon all
Muslims to avoid Taqlid and become
acquainted with argumentative proofs for
their beliefs about God. As Dorritot van
Dalen has pointed out, this general
demand was, in a way, an attempt to assert
the standing and importance of the
scholarly elite. Scholars should provide
guidance to common believers by showing
them, for instance, that the Quran
contains proofs of God's existence and
omnipotence. Van Dalen tells the story
of a West African town called Sijilmassa, where ordinary citizens were
quizzed to see whether they could answer
philosophical questions about the
oneness of God. In that sort of context,
theologians would have as reliable a
function in society as the driving
instructors, without whose help you
aren't going to get your license. And
this is an important point. As was noted
by early followers of al-Shafi'i, avoiding
Taqlid does not imply that you
actually do everything on your own with
no help. It's consistent with taking
advice. What
was in a legal context called
consultation, mushawara,
so long as the person who receives the
advice understands the reasoning
according to which the decision has been
reached. So you can be taken for a proof,
and if you understand it, that's enough
to avoid Taqlid. You don't have to
think of the proof yourself, right? In
this sense, even theologians who took the
Universalist view that all Muslims
should ground their belief in rational
understanding typically had a very
elitist position. When the early mu'tazilites al-Ashari and his followers al-
Sanusi or Muhammad Alawi said that every
believer should do a bit of theology,
that is all they meant: a bit of theology.
Enough to give them a secure well
justified confidence in the fundamentals
of their religion. As expert theologians,
these same figures would have seen
themselves as occupying a much higher
level of rational understanding. And that
goes double for theologians who, in a
more condescending fashion, advised that
ordinary believers avoid independent
inquiry entirely. One theologian who had
this sort of view was the great Asharite
theologian, philosopher, and mystic, al Ghazali,
who is as close as this series of
lectures has to a hero, as you'll be
seeing. He was a student of al-Jawayni,
who, to quote Richard Frank again, held
that real knowledge is the property of a
small elite, who are capable on the basis
of their own insight and ability of
independently working out the rational
demonstrations of the truth of their
belief against any conceivable
difficulty or counter-argument. Along the
same lines, al-Ghazali
reserved inquiry for the few and
prescribed pure Taqlid for the many.
And yet another version of that
hierarchy we saw in the context of
Islamic jurisprudence. He distinguished
between true scholars, who have knowledge
and genuine certainty, theologians, who
attain some rational understanding but
still accept many things in religion on
the basis of authority, and ordinary
people, who never get past Taqlid. He
did concede that some few might
rationally grasp the basic principles of
Islam on the strength of convincing
arguments found in the Koran, as already
proposed by al-Ashari, but generally al-
Ghazali thought it was not a good idea
for most people to indulge in
speculation. In fact he wrote an entire
work discouraging them from Kalam, the
pursuit of which would as likely lead
them astray as bring them to better
understanding. As Frank Riffle has written,
for al-Ghazali, in the case of the
ordinary people, Taqlid is not only
tolerated but welcomed, since an
acquaintance with independent thinking
would run the risk of having this group
of people fall into unbelief. In
al-Ghazali's most famous work, The
Incoherence of the Philosophers, Tahafut al-Falasifa, he aims the weapons
of the Taqlid debate on an unexpected
target, the falasifa, the Aristotelian
avant-garde. These self-satisfied,
self-styled philosophers claimed to be
outdoing the theologians in the use of
reason, as we'll see in a moment, but for
al-Gh azali they were just engaging in Taqlid with different sources. Instead of
blindly following a legal scholar,
theologian, or even a prophet, they chose
to follow Aristotle. Here we have an
example of being epistemically unlucky, in
the way that ordinary Muslims have
epistemic luck insofar as their Taqlid
leads them to embrace genuine truths
unreflectively. Since the philosophers
accept whatever the Aristotelians 
say on the basis of their authority, they
wind up embracing falsehoods instead. In
particular, they come to hold three
beliefs that qualify qualify as outright
unbelief: that the universe is eternal,
that God knows particulars and not
universals, sorry,
knows universals and not particulars, and
that the afterlife is purely a material
with no resurrection of the body. This is
the charge sheet laid against the
falasifa in al-Ghazali's
Incoherence. Actually, only the first of
these three teachings, the 
eternity of the universe is explicitly
present in Aristotle. The second one,
about God's knowledge, is distinctive of
Avicenna, though based on Aristotelian
premises. The third can also be ascribed
to Avicenna, that is really a more
general platonic commitment pervasive in
philosophies starting with late
antiquity. But no matter, al-Ghazali's
point, and his accusation, is that the
falasifas cannot prove these things.
How could they, since they're false? So
they've been led to believe them through
Taqlid, rather than a reliable
reasoning process. Anticipating
al-Dawani's pointed that Taqlid can
explain the religious beliefs of
non-muslims. Al-Ghazali even compares the
Philosopher's convictions to to the way
that Jews and Christians accept the
religious faith of their parents.
If al-Ghazali is the most famous critic
of the philosopher, then Averroes
would be the most famous critic of
al-Ghazali. In several works, including his
pointedly titled Incoherence of the
Incoherence, as well as his decisive
treatise, Fasl al-Maqal, he rebuts
al-Ghazali and along the way asserts an
epistemic hierarchy that mirrors and
seeks to replace the hierarchies we've
seen in muslim jurists and theologians.
In doing so he's taking up an earlier
rationalist theory of philosophical
supremacy offered a couple of centuries
earlier by al-Farabi. As explained in a
recent study by Feriel Bouhafa al-Farabi's
book of religion argues that
Islamic law is subordinated to
philosophy, in particular to ethics. as
Bouhafa puts it al-Farabi requires
merely that the jurist hold correct
beliefs and possess the virtues of his
religion. The jurists role is to accept
the judgments laid down by the religions
founder and his successors, if any. In the
case of Islam these would be the Prophet
Muhammad and the four rightly guided
caliphs, and then to apply these
judgments to new or unclear cases, thus
dealing with particulars rather than
reaching universal determinations about
human conduct. Similarly, the theologian
is someone who deals with theoretical
issues at the level of mere beliefs,
without having true understanding. In
both the practical and theoretical
spheres, such understanding is reserved
for philosophy, which provides knowledge
at the level of necessary and universal
proof, which is dignified with the level
of demonstration, burhan. Al-Farabi thus
states that all the excellent laws fall
under the universals of practical
philosophy, while the theoretical beliefs
in the religion have their
demonstrations in theoretical philosophy.
Al-Farabi assumes that very few people will
be in a position to understand these
issues at a philosophical, that is
demonstrative, level. So most adherents to
a religion will have to embrace it at
the level of mere belief, just like the
jurists and theologians. Al-Farabi
introduces an influential way of
thinking about this contrast, derived
from the Aristotelian logical tradition.
If philosophers grasp things at the
level of demonstration, then everyone
else
grasps at the level of dialectic and
rhetoric.
To put it another way, whereas
philosophers are in possession of proofs,
constructed in accordance with the
strictures laid down in Aristotle's
prior posterior analytics, normal people
hold their religious convictions having
been persuaded by the sort of discourse
analyzed in Aristotle's topics and
rhetoric. As al-Farabi puts it, dialectic
provides strongly held opinion
concerning the things for which
demonstration provides certainty, or most
of them. Rhetoric persuades about most of
the things that are not such as to be
demonstrated or the subject of
dialectical inquiry. The excellent
religion does not then belong only to
philosophers, or to those who are in a
position to understand things that are
only discussed in a philosophical way.
Rather, most of those who are taught and
instructed in the beliefs of the
religion and accept its prescribed
actions are not in that position, whether
this is by nature or because they are
too busy for it. These people are not
unable to understand commonly accepted
or merely persuasive things. Here the
word commonly accepted, the Arabic, is
mashur, is a technical term
corresponding to the Greek endoxon.
Endoxic propositions are those that
are acceptable for use in dialectical
arguments, as explained in Aristotle's
topics. They are acceptable because they
are held by just about everybody, or by
those reputed for wisdom. Only when we
seek demonstration do we insist on
premises that are in fact and without
doubt true, instead of settling for these
commonly accepted premises. So, for al-
Farabi
ordinary believers do not have certain
knowledge, but this is alright so long as
they have epistemic luck. If the beliefs
they accept through persuasion or
acceptance of commonly held views are
those of an excellent religion, they will
have good opinions and will perform good
actions. The label of ignorance is thus
reserved for those unlucky enough to
adhere to a wicked religion. The same
idea is expressed in the title of one of
al-Farabi's better known works which
sets out a philosophical cosmology,
anthropology, and political philosophy
under the heading Principles of the
Beliefs of the Inhabitants of the
Excellent City. In other words, philosophy
offers the true demonstrative basis for
things that members of the successful
religious and political community
believe without proof. It should, I think,
be obvious how close this
whole line of thought is to the ideas
about Taqlid and Ijtihad we found
among jurists and theologians. For al-
Farabi, the equivalent of the mujtahid
who thinks for himself and can give good
reason for his judgments, is the
philosopher who has grasped true
conclusions by means of demonstrative
arguments. Everyone else is engaged in
some form of Taqlid, following commonly
accepted ideas, or at best engaging in
some kind of merely dialectical inquiry
on the grounds of religious beliefs that
are taken for granted. This would be the
status of theologians, for instance. The
only distinctively religious figures not
subject to Taqlid are the original
lawgiver or prophet and his successors.
But they are the exception that proves
the rule, because they too have
understanding at a philosophical level.
In the case of the Prophet, perfect
intellectual understanding is fused with
the capacity to represent philosophical
truths in a rhetorically persuasive way
that will successfully induce Taqlid
in his religious followers, this being
the function of Revelation. And basically
Muhammad, for al-Farabi, is Aristotle but
with a book that can convince people
that is right. Al-Farabi thus accepts
wholesale the epistemic hierarchy of
the elite Islamic scholars, albeit with
new labels drawn from the Aristotelian
tradition. But he denies that the
scholars of Islamic law and theology are
the true elite who are capable of
engaging in independent reasoning. That
status is reserved for people like him,
the falasifa. For a more elaborate
statement of this philosophical version
of epistemic elitism, we can turn toAverroes. As a practicing Muslim jurist,
he was certainly well acquainted with
ideas about Ijtihad and Taqlid. In fact,
his own grandfather, who was also named
Ibn Rushd, explicitly set down a
hierarchy of scholars within the Maliki
legal school in three groups, first those
who practice Taqlid of Malik, the
school founder and his followers, by just
memorizing and repeating their opinions,
Second those who accept Malik's
authority and can determine what is
consistent with the school's teachings
but still cannot issue rulings on novel
cases. This corresponds to what we
already saw under the heading of Ijtihad
within a school, or affiliated Ijtihad.
Third, the elite who understand legal
methods and can issue novel opinions.
So this is the pure mujtahid. In a legal
treatise of his own, the famous Decisive
Treatise, Averroes took up the question
of the status of philosophy in Islam. He
boldly argues that philosophy is not
just permitted, but actually obligatory
for those who are in a position to
pursue it. Those who are not in al-Farabi's
words prevented by nature or
because they are too busy for it. With
equal boldness, he goes on to contend
that it is philosophers who are in the
best position to understand the true
meaning of the Quranic revelation. They
alone have independent access to the
truth through demonstrative reasoning.
Since the Quran is true, and truth does
not contradict truth, famous slogan, their
demonstrated conclusions can be used as
a kind of check or constraint on
possible interpretations of Scripture.
These aspects of the Decisive Treatise
are well known. Less commonly discussed
is the parallel Averroes draws between
law and philosophy. He is, here, a jurist
writing for other jurists, so it makes
sense for him to argue along the
following lines. If the study of
jurisprudence is licit or even
encouraged within Islam, then philosophy
is as well. For example, one cannot argue
against philosophical activity on the
grounds that it is an innovation, because
the prophets immediate followers did not
pursue it.
After all those early followers did not
do jurisprudence either, and no one
infers from this that jurists are doing
anything un-Islamic. Indeed, the
scriptural support for studying the law
would provide even stronger support for
studying philosophy. So he says, when the
jurist deduces from God statements, may he
be exalted, reflect you have vision, the
obligation to no juridical argument, how
much more worthy and appropriate is it
for someone who understands God to
deduce from this verse the obligation to
know intellectual arguments. In other words,
the philosopher can use the same verse
that the jurist uses. Among these
parallels between law and philosophy, the
most important, for our purposes, is that
the philosopher is like the
independently minded jurist, entitled to
engage in independent reflection. Averroes
cites a famous hadith, often brandished
by defenders of legal Ijtihad, to the
effect that the jurist who engages in
Ijtihad and reaches an independent judgement
is rewarded twice if the judgment is
correct, and once if he gets it wrong.
Averroea then adds, "but which judge is
greater than the one who makes judgments
about being," this being the philosopher.
Following the lead of al-Farabi
Averroes sets up an Aristotelian version
of the legal hierarchy recognized by his
own grandfather and other jurists. At the
top are those who engage in
demonstration, the philosophers. Then
those of the dialectical class who work
with non demonstrative arguments. That's
the theologians. And finally, ordinary
people who just believe by being
persuaded through a combination of
rhetoric and dialectic. These people
simply believe what they are told, either
because it has been put to them in a
powerfully convincing way, here
Averroes has in mind the
rhetorical power of rhetoric, or because
it is commonly accepted. Again that Aristotelian technical notion. A commonly
accepted proposition, as we've seen, is
one that everyone espouses or one taught
by reputable scholars. So as Averroes explains in his paraphrase commentary 
of Aristotle's topics, this
is Aristotle's work on dialectic, the
dialectical premise is an accepted
statement. It may be accepted by all, for
instance the statement that God exists,
or accepted by most people without being
rejected by the rest, or accepted by the
scholars and the philosophers without
being rejected by the masses. What of the
dialectical middle class? The class
between ordinary folk who simply accept
things by Taqlid and the philosophers
who engage in Ijtihad and are satisfied
only by demonstration. So standardly, one
is told that for Averies, the
dialecticians the mutakallimun, the
practitioners of theology, like I just
said. And he does say in a closely
related work, which is called, and this is a bit of
a mouthful, The Exposition of the Methods
Used in Arguments Concerning Religious
Doctrines, that the most adequate rank of
the art of Kalam is dialectical and not
demonstrative wisdom> But in fact, he
tends to think that the theologians of
his own culture, like al-ghazali and
other Asharites are failed dialecticians.
So they're not 
merely failing to be philosophers,
they're not even good dialecticians.
This is because they do not argue, as
they should, from
excepted premises, but instead proceed on
the basis of highly controversial and
abstruse assumptions, when they do things
like proving the existence of God. As a
result their arguments are as Averroes
says, fitting neither for the scholars
nor for the many. There should, in
principle, be theologians who carry out
useful tasks like defending the faith,
using non to moderate of arguments, but
Averroes sees his own society is
unfortunately including only two kinds
of people who behave as they should. The
ordinary person, who takes everything on
trust, the muqallid, and the
philosopher, who was a kind of
Aristotelian mujtahid. There's a lot
we can learn from these debates, apart
from the need to situate the teachings
of the Philosopher's within wider
Islamic culture. And maybe I should dwell
for just a second on the irony of this
this fact, that this hyper rationalism
that supposedly marks out the Islamic
falasifa as the most philosophical
philosophers of the Middle Ages, they got
their self conception as rationalist by
borrowing it from theologians and
jurists. So thats that kind of
clinical background of my paper. Okay,
apart from that we can also see now how
ambitious and even unrealistic it would
be to have a blanket ban on Taqlid. Averroes
f,rank elitism is of course,
rather unattractive. He envisions a tiny
handful of knowledgeable experts
surrounded by a huge mass of blind
believers, a conception typical among the
falasifa and also finding many
adherents of among theologians and
jurists. It may have seemed more
plausible in a time when most people
were not even literate, and when half the
population, the female half, was in any
case typically assumed to be incapable
of serious scholarly reflection. Again,
we'll get to that in the third lecture.
Still, unattractive or not, the elitist
position was not put for without good
reason. If the alternative to Taqlid
is to figure everything out for yourself,
then how many people will be in a
position to avoid Taqlid? You might
be an expert in particle physics,
economics, the plays of Shakespeare, or
the history of philosophy, but you're
unlikely to have expertise in all four.
In fact, you're unlikely to have
expertise just in the history
philosophy, as I am discovering to my
costs on a weekly basis. Even if you were,
even if you had expertise in all four of
these fields, there'd still be plenty of
other fields where you would lack even
rudimentary understanding. We might
therefore propose that Ijtihad should
be limited to only the most important
issues, or that as a community we should
engage in division of labor. Again the
Islamic juridical tradition anticipated
both moves. The Universalist we discussed,
who spoke out against Taqlid, wanted
all believers to understand a few
central religious topics, not particle
physics or Shakespeare. When it came to
more advanced legal reasoning, it was
also admitted that a jurist might be an
expert mujtahid in one area of the law
but an obedient muqallid in anothe,r
just as nowadays divorce lawyers are not
usually criminal attorneys as well. But
there are aspects of the Islamic legal
tradition that should make us wary of
even localized Ijtihad, this kind of labor
sharing. A point forcefully put by
defenders of legal precedent was that
individual judgments, even when practiced
by trained experts, is liable to go
astray. A much discussed example was the
case of arriving in a city and wanting
to know which direction to pray, so as to
face Mecca. Would it really make sense to
work this out for oneself, rather than
just adopting the local practice
followed by thousands of people? As one
jurist put, it it is extremely unlikely
that they could have made a mistake that
could be rectified by the reasoning of a
single person.
And indeed, the perils of Ijtihad are
plain to see. In the Islamic tradition,
it has often been fundamentalists who
adopted a Universalist posture and
polemicised against Taqlid. Proceeding
from the plausible assumption that
individual believers are responsible for
their own piety, these fundamentalists
have rejected the edifice of legal and
religious learning in favour of
returning to a direct engagement with
the revelation and evidence about the
Prophet and earliest generations of
Muslims. So you know the word Salafi?
That's what it means,
following the Salaf the Salaf, or the
original generations of early Muslims, so
they're saying to avoid Taqlid,
we abandon the entire tradition and go
back to the start.
Epistemicaly speaking, this is the
equivalent of political movements in the
United States and Europe, that encourage
their followers to to abandon
traditional news sources, academic
opinion, and the like. The more
sweeping the rejection of Taqlid, the
worse the results.
It's what Sandy Hook conspiracy
theorists like Alex Jones have in common
with Salafi jihadists, a comparison he
probably would not like, but which is
true. A more renewal, by the way, I
always like to know if the speaker is
almost done,
and the speaker is almost done. Last
paragraph. A more refined approach to the
problem of Taqlid would not require
being a mujtahid for each and every
topic we care about. Or if this is too
difficult, instead blindly following
the nearest authority at hand,
thus surrendering to the vagaries of
epistemic luck. What we need is a better
account of how to form one's own views,
while realizing that one is dependent on
the expertise and authority of other
people. As the historian Mary Beard
recently observed, the recognition of
complexity and difficulty is not an
admission of defeat, it is treating a
complex problem with the respect it
deserves. Doing this well means depending
on authority in an intelligent and
discerning way, which is a big part of
being a responsible believer and a
responsible citizen. I won't be able to
offer you a full account along these
lines in these lectures this week, but I
think I can show you that the medieval
philosophical tradition has valuable
resources that could point us in the
right direction, but to find out why you
will have to come tomorrow.
[Applause]
So I take my own questions?
[Question not captured by mic.]
Okay, so that's in the essay on enlightenment?
That's on that's the essay on
enlightenment that you're quoting from
there? Yeah, okay, that's really
interesting. Okay, so two things. First off,
all there's a hadith of the Prophet,
which I'm actually quoting in tomorrow
night's lecture, but sneak preview, that
every everyone is born a Muslim and
their parents make them a Jew or a
Christian or a Zoroastrian. So that idea
that everyone kind of comes into the
world's ready to get things right, and
then they're corrupted is certainly a
thought that you find in Islam and is
maybe one reason to think that, this
again is getting into the themes of
tomorrow night's lecture, but there's a
question about if you weren't just gonna
do what your parents said, what should
you do instead, and one idea is that your
natural gifts might point you in the
right direction, so it's kind of a an
epistemic optimism, which in a way is. I
mean, it's clearly very much at odds with
the epistemic elitism where 0.1% of the
population are getting it right and
everyone else has to engage in Taqlid,
right? And in fact, this is exactly the
sort of thing that the universalist camp
would point to when they say well, no, you
know, everyone can, at least for the
important things, everyone can do Ijtihad, right? Everyone can at least
understand some proofs, everyone's kind
of comes with enough equipment, right? So
that idea is certainly there. You don't
find that idea expressed very much by
philosophers, but they say something else
which resonates with your Kant passage,
which is that, okay, so when they say the
philosopher is the one who demonstrates
truth, they obviously don't mean the
philosopher demonstrates that there are
five chairs here, right? And in fact, they
don't mean that the philosopher
demonstrates anything particular at all,
because they're basing themselves on the
posterior analytics, and in the posterior
analytics Aristotle says that knowledge
in the strict and proper sense, episteme, comes from demonstrations, and there
are various
criteria that need to be satisfied for a
proof to be demonstrative, like the
premises have to be true, the argument
has to be sound or valid, so that
gives you soundness. But in addition to
that, some surprising things. For example,
the premises have to be necessarily true
to exclude possibility of error, and they
had to be universal and character. So
that means that when Aristotle, sorry when Averroes, he wouldn't mind me confusing
them, but when Averroes says that the
philosopher has demonstration of the
truth, what he means is Universal
necessary truths, not particulars. So
insofar as Kant is saying, well this
kind of expert knowledge, where you
believe what people say, that's really
only for contingent particular matters.
Averroes could probably agree with
that, but of course that's not what
they're arguing about. They're arguing
about things like can we show that God
exists. And that's that's actually a
strange example, because God is a
particular, but for him that would fall
under metaphysics, because God is the
source of being, and that's a universal
claim. Okay, yes.
[Question not captured on mic.]
Yeah, right, again I will talk a little
bit this about this tomorrow night.
I'll mention al-Ghazali's attack on
Shiism. So, a standard thing that happens
is that the Sunni theologians say oh you
Shi'is, you're pervasively pray to Taqlid
because you just follow your imams, so
we're the rationalists, you're not, right?
And so I think that the Shi'is were under
pressure in this sort of dialectical
situation to insist that there was a way
of being a Shi'i jurist and theologian as
well, without falling into outright
Taqlid. And to be honest, I think that
what they're saying, they would
probably disagree with this, but I think
what they're saying effectively amounts
to, let me  go back to this, so the middle
level, namely Ijtihad within a school,
because you can conceptualize, for
example, Ismailism, that's a brand
Shi'ism, as a school, or Shi'i
jurisprudence as a school within Islam.
Now of course what they would say, is no,
no, Shiite Islam is Islam, so that's not a
constraint, because the imams are the
only ones who can tell us what the Quran
means, right? But but they are, I think
they're inevitably committed to a form
of authoritative belief formation that
the Sunnis are not necessarily committed
to. Some Sunnis are committed to it
anyway, because they say, well you should
you should show Taqlid to the
Prophet, so they don't
they wouldn't drive Ijtihad that far
that you should avoid Taqlid even
with respect to the Prophet, but some
would. Some would say, as we'll see
tomorrow night, some would say no you use
reason even when you're trying to
understand why you're a Muslim in the
first place, and I don't think it's a
very difficult thing for a Shi'ite to
say.
Yeah?
[Question not captured on mic.]
That's an interesting question. Okay, so
the Brethren of Purity, Ikhwan al-Ṣafa, yeah,
so she's asking about the Brethren of
Purity, who are a rather mysterious group
of scholars from the 10th century in
Iraq, probably. So they're called Ikhwan al-
Ṣafa in Arabic. We don't actually know
for sure who they were. There's different
stories about this, and they wrote a set
of epistles which, kind of in an
encyclopedic fashion, goes through all
the departments of Aristotelian and
Platonist philosophy. So now they
are hardcore Platonists, or even
Neoplatonists, and they therefore think
that knowledge comes through contact
with, like, a celestial intellect, which is
has a double role, both forming the
cosmos and also bestowing knowledge on a
suitably prepared human mind. You get
similar ideas and Faravi, you also
get similar ideas, this actually connects
to your question, because you get similar
ideas also in Ismailism, and
some people think that there's a strong
connection between Ismailism and the
Brethren of Purity for this kind of
reason, so the real question for the Ikhwan,
I guess, would be who is it that's able
to do that? So is it only like the
Prophet and the Imam who were able to do it,
or is it the philosopher as well? And
here we start getting into the weeds of
the Ikhwans doctrinal sectarian
commitments, I tend to think that they
probably would allow the pure rational
philosopher to unite to the intellect, in
which case that's their version of Ijtihad,
right? And then if you don't do that,
you probably need to engage in some form
of Taqlid. Actually, maybe here
it's a good point to admit that at no
point did I say almost anything about
how Ijtihad works.
So once you've assumed once you've
accepted that humans should at least
sometimes engage in Ijtihad, okay, now you
owe us an epistemology. So you're going
to sit down and come to knowledge on the
basis of pure reason, how will you do
that? Well maybe you have first
principles, like first like axioms, maybe
you use experience and derive them
empirically, maybe you unite to a
celestial intellects, maybe you do all
three of those things. Then your Avicenna,
right? But, that, so there's
certainly a big story to be filled in
here, but I think they would probably be
basically with the philosophers.
Yeah that's a good question, I mean one
way of thinking about this might be that
what is it to be a Muslim? Well it,s to
believe that there is no God but God, and
Muhammad is His Prophet,
and so if you can get there using Ijtihad,
you might be done, because now you're a
Muslim. But yeah, correct,
yeah, but now we have to look at the fine
print, because if the because the
standard kalam proof for the existence
of God, and actually they might be
worth going through this briefly, just to
give you a sense of what these people
were being asked to do in rural Africa,
when they were told that they had to
like do sort of theology 101 if they
wanted to call themselves Muslims. Okay,
so what is a created object? A created
object is a substance which is atomic in
character, which has accidents, and the
accidents change. In fact they, they are
instantaneous. They come into being and
they go out of being. Things like motion
and rest are examples. So if something is
at rest like this lectern, I know the
lectern is actually hurtling through
space at an unbelievable speed and
rotating with the earth, but okay, let's
say it's at rest, the Aristotelian cosmos is
at rest, so even the accident
of rest is vanishing and being replaced
by another accident of rest at each
instant, okay? Now here's the argument:
since the substance, and all bodies are
substances, since the substance can't
exist without the accident, and the
accident comes into being,
therefore the substance must come into
being as well.
And the world is a substance, or made of
substances, therefore the world comes
into being,
therefore it was created, therefore God
exists. I leave it for you to decide if
that's a good arguments. Philosophers
tended to think it wasn't. And this is
what Averroes means when he says they
appeal to abstruse premises, like this
distinction between substance and
accident. This is not a commonly accepted
view right this is their specialist
physics, which isn't even true actually,
and it certainly isn't kind of intuitive.
But the reason I go through it, is to
point out that they would prove God, and
on the way, they would need the premise
that the world was not eternal. So this
is actually, and one of the things,
as probably a lot of you know, that
the debate over the world's eternity is
a kind of a big running problem in
Islamic theology, and it became a big
running problem in Latin medieval
philosophy, in part because of that. And 
something that I've often wondered is
why, because you might think, well, 
I'm God. Let's just say I'm God, it's a
little bit for sumptuous but it's just a
thought experiment.
So I'm God, and I can do anything. So,
presumably, it could be that there's an
eternal world, but also I could create a
non eternal world. I could just decide,
right? So actually, it looks like unless
you can prove that it's impossible the
world is eternal, or prove that it's
impossible the world comes into being
with a first moment in time, it should be
that philosophy can't tell you the
answer, right? Which is of course exactly
what Aquinas, Maimonides, and others say.
And so you might wonder, given
that the all these people believe in
divine omnipotence, why are they so
worried? And one of the reasons that
they're worried is that their proof
for God's existence in the first place
turns on denying the eternity of the
world, so they think if that if you
accept that eternal world you're
actually one step, it may be not one step
towards atheism, but you're depriving
yourself of their favorite proof. Another
reason would be the fear that,
if the world is eternal, then the world
is necessarily existence, and if it's
necessarily existence, then God had no
choice about making it, so there's a
couple of reasons why they're so hot and
bothered about this, but this is one of
them that this is the famous Kalam proof.
Yeah?
[Question not captured on mic.]
Yeah, so just in case not
everyone heard that, so the question is
what do the philosophers do if it looks
like there's a conflict between
Aristotle and the Quran, so basically who
wins in if things go bad, right? So the
answer that Averroes, so Averroes is the by far
the one who gives the most explicit
answer to this question, so this goes
back to that motto truth does not
contradict truth. So for him, it's
just taken as granted that the Quran is
true. What's not so clear is what the
Quran means. So he says that, following
a traditional idea about the Quran, that
there are different kinds of verses in
the Quran, some are clearly just
straightforwardly to be applied, like pay
a certain tax in this certain situation,
right, that's not
something you have to interpret
allegorically. Then there are some
passages which have to be taken
allegorically, and then there are some
where it's not clear whether to take
them allegorically or not. So for any
passage other than those that are
obviously to be taken in the superficial
meaning, there's a question of
interpretation. And when questions of
interpretation arise, what you need is a
way of constraining the field of
possible interpretations, and he can
suggest since training the field by
using the assumption that whatever the
correct interpretation is, it will make
the Quran come out saying something true.
So all you need to do is find out the
truth and then check your interpretation
against that. So in a way, by definition,
philosophy can't conflict with the Quran,
because philosophy is telling you what
the Quran means. Another way, I mean what
he says is truth does not contradict
truth, right? The Quran is true, philosophy
is true, so they can't contradict.
Now behind your question
might be the of course unjustified
fear that Aristotle
ever said anything untrue. So first the
first thingAverroes would say is you
you clearly don't understand Aristotle
if you're worried about that. The second
thing he would say, he could retrench
to a more reasonable position, where he
says well when I say philosophical
demonstration, I mean successful
philosophical demonstration. It so
happens that Aristotle is the person
who's lived on earth who's come closest
to doing that all the time,
and most successfully. He even says that. He
says that Aristotle is the most full
realization of the human species that
has yet been born. Not in quite those
words, but he says something like that in
one of his commentaries. But in the
unfortunate eventuality that Aristotle
makes a mistake, that would just show
that he wasn't being a philosopher when
he did that. So a philosopher, in the
strict and proper sense, takes
philosopher to be a success term. So it
means that you're demonstrating, and
demonstrations, like, valid,
sound demonstrations, they prove
something true in a demonstrative way. So
obviously they can't be wrong. But I mean,
the interesting thing here, is that you
don't like correct or reinterpret the
deliverances of philosophy using the
Quran and the hadith, rather the other
way around. So if there's an apparent
tension, what has to give is your
incorrect interpretation of scripture
not your correct
philosophical demonstration.
Yeah?
[Question not captured on mic.]
So, okay, so the philosopher
would of course say, well if they got
it from the Greeks, then good, because the
Greek epistemology is the correct one.
the mutakallimun will say, well, hang
on a second, our epistemology is not from
the Greeks, it's already from the Quran,
right? So, for example, remember
there was this line from al-Ashari
about the Quran including proofs and
demonstrations of the truth, right? So the
Quran, they would say, models for you the
right way to reason about God, as well as
telling you the truth about God. So
actually, an example would be that proof
we just went through. So they would say,
you know, when it says that God unfurled
the mountains like a carpet or whatever,
basically that's the point, right. So his
omnipotence, all these passages about his
omnipotent power, you know everything
kind of depends on him from moment to
moment, this kind of line in the
Quran? For them that's just the that
first premise, that accidents come into
being and pass away and are therefore
dependent on a creator. So they would
they would reject very strongly the
claim that their epistemology is in any
way un-Islamic. They would say it's
directly taken from the Islamic sources,
along with the proof itself. But I mean,
of course that's
not true, in some sense. I mean, the Quran,
I would say, under determines the question, I 
mean it doesn't answer the question
directly of which philosophical method
we should use when we reason, but they
could maybe more plausibly at least say
that their way of reasoning was
consistent with patterns of thought you
find in the Quran, or something. I mean
like I said before, the question of which
is the correct method to use to arrive
at knowledge, is a big
empty piece of paper that needs to be
filled in, but I will say something about
that tomorrow, so, join me.
