God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason.

• Author: El-Rouayheb, Khaled
• Position: Book review

God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason. By JOHN WALBRIDGE.

New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. pp. xvi + 211. $90.

Scholarship of the past fifty years on Islamic intellectual history has tended to focus on either the early, formative period or the modern period. The intervening "post-classical" era, roughly from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, is therefore still largely unexplored and often the subject of ill-informed conjecture. It has regularly been sweepingly dismissed as a period of general intellectual and artistic "sclerosis" or "decadence," and numerous explanations have been offered to explain this supposed fact. The nineteenth-century French author Ernest Renan was one of the first to speculate thus, but many modern political and religious movements in the Islamic world have been engaged in a similar exercise. For liberal modernists, the villains responsible for "decline" are typically "obscurantist," "anti-rationalist" currents: Sufis, Ashcaris, or Hanbali fideists. For fundamentalists (Salafis), the villains are typically the mystics, theologians, and philosophers who adulterated the "pure" Islam of the pious earliest generations with Neoplatonism, Greek logic, unbridled speculation, and popular syncretistic practices. For Arab nationalists, it was typically "Mongol barbarism" and/or "Turkish domination" that was to blame. For some secular Turkish historians, the violently puritan seventeenthcentury IcadizAdeli movement led to the "triumph of fanaticism" and the end of Ottoman interest in philosophy and natural science. Such grand narratives rest on little or no evidence and appear to tell us more about the people making them than about the period in question.

In God and Logic in Islam John Walbridge presents a radically different "what went wrong?" narrative. He argues that it is really only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the tradition of studying the rational sciences in the Islamic colleges was weakened, giving way by and large to a much more literalist and simplistic approach to the authoritative scriptures of the Islamic tradition, the Qur'an and the Surma. The premodern assumption--as reflected in the college (madrasa) curricula in Ottoman Markey, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India--that a student should undergo years of intensive study of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, logic, jurisprudence, and theology (kalam) before being able to properly understand the Islamic scriptures and to articulate legal opinions has come under intense pressure from two directions: Westernized modernists, who typically revile the traditional colleges for being too slow to accommodate modern concerns, and Islamic fundamentalists, who revile them for spending too much time studying logic, rhetoric, and theology instead of focusing on the science of hadith. The weakening of traditional Islamic learning has led to an intellectual vacuum that is increasingly being filled by a form of Islam that is crudely literalist, less tolerant of diversity in creed and practice, and more cocksure about knowing God's will than was common prior to...