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| Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri |
Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri a philosopher and his thought
Al-Jabiri’s fame rests on his so-called Critique
of Arab Reason project, laid down in a set of writings published between
1980 and 1990; a decade of intense philosophical labors squeezed in
between periods of more politically engaged activity.
Personal background
Before taking a more detailed look at these
writings of the 1980s, I will highlight a few relevant aspects of Al-Jabiri’s
life. Al-Jabiri comes from Figuig, on the Moroccan-Algerian border – a
disputed area that was later the scene of the so-called ‘War of the Sand’
between the two newly independent countries in the early 1960s. Already during his high school years Al-Jabiri
became politically active in the Istiqlal Party. His political mentor at the time was Mehdi
Ben Barka, who arranged for him to begin writing for the Istiqlal periodical Al-Alam.
Al-Jabiri followed Ben Barka when the latter split from the party to found the
UNFP in 1959. Because of his involvement in leftist politics, Al-Jabiri was
incarcerated for a few months in 1963. He continued his activities in the UNFP
also after the mysterious disappearance of Ben Barka in 1965. In 1975 he joined
the USFP as it split from UNFP and became a member of its politburo.
Alongside his political work, in 1958 Al-Jabiri
had begun studying philosophy at the universities in Damascus and Rabat. In the
mid-sixties, when he was working on his doctorate, while also teaching philosophy at high
schools and helping with the writing of a number of textbooks. These books were quite
influential in shaping the thoughts of students during the late sixties and
early seventies. They emphasized the relationship between culture and society, and
the significance of knowledge and education to effectuate social change. Thus
they prefigure Al-Jabiri’s later scholarly preoccupation with epistemology (the
philosophy of knowledge) and its impact on history and politics.
Al-Jabiri was very much influenced by the
Moroccan-born geographer and historian Yves Lacoste, especially the latter's Marxist
interpretation of Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the
Third World (1965). He was so impressed by this study that he
decided to make the 14th-century courtier and scholar the subject of
his own doctoral research. In his findings, al-Jabiri presents
this medieval North African statesman and savant’s theory of the rise and fall
of civilizations as a structural and systemic alternative to the Ash‛ari
projection of history, through which Ibn Khaldun nevertheless managed to keep his
admiration for Ghazali’s Sufism intact
In this endeavour he was intellectually mentored by one
of Morocco’s leading philosophers at the time, M. Aziz Lahbabi: who would oversee Al-Jabiri’s first doctoral
thesis on Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history, which was submitted in 1967. Another
philosopher, Najib Baladi, directed Al-Jabiri’s further research for the
so-called doctorat d’état; a degree somewhat comparable to the German Habilitation.
This resulted in the publication of Al-Jabiri's first monograph, appearing in 1971
under the title The Thought of Ibn Khaldun: Asabiyya and State: Theoretical
Outlines of Khaldunian Thinking about Islamic History.
Aside from his academic career as a lecturer
and later professor of philosophy at Université Mohammed V in Rabat, throughout
the 1970s, Al-Jabiri remained preoccupied with his political work in the UNFP
and USFP. However, from 1980 onwards he decided to concentrate more on systematically
writing down his ideas regarding the relationship between knowledge and power in the
development of Islamic thinking.
Heritage Thinking
With this, Al-Jabiri
became one of the so-called heritage thinkers or turathiyyun. This
phenomenon of heritage thinking came up in the 1970s, so simultaneous with the
much better known Islamic resurgence that advocates explicitly political agendas.
Initially this was referred to as Islamic fundamentalism, but now we generally
call it Islamism.
However, the
motivations behind the rise of Islamism and the emergence of heritage thinking are
the same: Disillusionment with other, imported, ideologies, such as Nationalism, Panarabism, Marxism etc. By way of alternative, Muslims returned
to their religious and cultural roots in Islam. Some chose to become puritan
revivalists, focusing either on personal piety or translating their renewed
focus on Islam into political, i.e. Islamist agendas. This manifested itself in
different shapes and forms, ranging from gaining influence and power via the
ballot box to the most extreme forms of violent action. These interpretations
are grounded in literalist readings and understandings of Islamic Scriptures,
Qur'an and Sunna. And because the proponents of this approach claim that they
are thus reviving the legacy of Al-Salaf al-Salih, the pious ancestors, they
are called Salafis.
By contrast, the
heritage thinkers advocate not only a more comprehensive understanding of Islam
as a civilization, but also a critical and self-reflective examination of the
text corpus of traditional Islamic learning. Intellectually, this places heritage
thinkers on the opposite side of the intellectual spectrum from the Salafis.
Their challenge of uncritical and eclectic use by Salafis of only certain aspects of the
earliest Islamic tradition makes the heritage thinkers in effect an
intellectual counterforce to Salafi religious puritanism and Islamism.
Critiques of Arab Reason
In 1980 and 1982, Al-Jabiri
published his first two text collections on the Arab-Islamic heritage. We
and our heritage and Contemporary Arab Discourse. In these texts he
challenges the shortcomings of the existing readings of the Islamic tradition, namely:
Fundamentalist, Liberal and Marxist readings. According to Al-Jabiri, all three
fail both methodologically as well as in terms of vision. All three see
themselves as extensions of the Islamic tradition, but with Marxists and Liberals
being hindered by erroneous linear or teleological projections for the future, while
fundamentalists and traditionalists consider themselves the sole custodians of what
they have constructed as being the tradition, while they are in fact locked up
within this constructed tradition. Heritage thinkers, by contrast, embrace the tradition
without being taken over by it. Instead, they subject Islamic regimes of
knowledge to a critical examination.
In Al-Jabiri’s case he emphatically
moves away from modernity as a linear projection or a fixed historical trajectory
that civilizations must follow. As Muslims grapple with modernity, they
should not imagine that – like Western civilization -- they have to chronologically
pass through consecutive phases of renaissance, enlightenment, modernity and
postmodernity like the West did. The current situation is such that these are
all coexistent and intertwined. This also means that there is no single
modernity only a plurality of modernities. Al-Jabiri also makes point of
stressing that: 'Modernity is not a refutation of or break with the past, but an upgrade of the way we relate with tradition';
modernization is not an 'end in itself', but tied to the 'rise of the critical
mind', and an impetus aimed at 'changing
mentalities'.
In his writings from
the early 1980s, the core argument of his future epistemological thinking about
heritage is also already discernible: Namely that knowledge consists of two
aspects: A cognitive field and an ideological content. The cognitive field, in
turn, consists of the material knowledge or substance and of a thinking apparatus. From today’s
perspective, other than its historical value the substance of philosophical and
scientific knowledge from Arab-Islamic past is useless, but the thinking
apparatus, or systemic and methodological aspects of thinking through which
this substance came into being, remains of interest to Al-Jabiri’s project. Therefore
Arab Muslims must rid themselves of ideologically or emotionally informed
conceptions of tradition and its substance as an absolute reality that stands
outside time, and instead come to terms with tradition as relative and
historicized.
The only way to achieve that
is through what Gaston Bachelard called an 'epistemological break', not with the
tradition, but away from an understanding of tradition that is locked up within
itself. Methodological cues
for his own alternative interpretation of heritage, al-Jabiri found in the work
of structuralists like Ferdinand Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean
Piaget, as well as in the writings of poststructuralist philosophers such as
Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel
Foucault. From them he learned that reason can no longer be conceived in
Cartesian terms as a coherent, conscious and transcendent process. Instead,
reason is more accurately described as a collective understanding shaped by
culture and by what Piaget called the ‘cognitive unconsciousness’.
In the 1980s, Al-Jabiri unpacked all this in
great detail in what he called his Critique of Arab reason project: At
the core of this philosophical project is a trilogy of books, dealing with the
formation, structure and the political dimensions of Arab reason.
·
Takwin
al-Aql al-Arabi: a
historical study of the formation of Arab-Islamic thinking
·
Bunya
al-Aql al-Arabi: a
structural analysis of the epistemological order of Arab culture
·
Al-Aql
al-Siyasi al-Arabi:
an ideology critique
The historical analysis focuses on the
so-called or Asr al-Tadwin ‘period of recording or codification’ during
which ‘acceptable’ ways of thinking about Islam, both in terms of content and methodology,
were determined. This heralded a period of decline, because instead of
encouraging the production of new discursive forms, the tradition ended up only
reproducing existing knowledge. In his structural analysis, Al-Jabiri
distinguishes three different thinking apparatus, systems of knowledge or
epistemes. For this he used Arabic descriptor, namely:
·
bayani
or discursive reasoning
·
irfani or
gnosticism and intuitive thinking
·
burhani
or reasoning through the use of demonstrative proof.
Bayani thinking is based on explications of
texts drawing on Arabic grammar and rhetoric, and the literary legacy derived from
pre-Islamic times. It is applied in philology and linguistics, Qur’anic exegesis,
legal thinking or fiqh, and theology or kalam. A figure like the legal scholar
Al-Shafi’i looms large over this way of thinking, especially in terms of the
limitations he set on ijtihad or
independent reasoning, by restricting it to reasoning by analogy. Rather than
rationalist methods such as inductive or deductive reasoning language remains the
sole point of reference in bayani thinking. Pointing back to the historical
study, Al-Jabiri contends that bayani thinking has eventually prevailed through
the work of grammarians, jurists and theologians. Eventually, it became the
definitive mode of thinking about religion in traditional Islamic learning thanks
to the work of al-Ghazali,
As for irfani or gnostic thinking, its origins
too predate Islam, but it then continues to develop in Islamic contexts. It is not
only found in astrology, alchemy, magic, theosophy, illuminationism, and
strands of Shia thinking, but also in aspects of the work of Ibn Sina, who is
generally hailed as a key contributor to philosophical thinking in Islam. Irfan
or gnosticism is based on a dichotomy between manifest (zahir) and hidden
(batin) meanings of realities, including scripture. Al-Jabiri pronounces a
rather harsh judgment, when he insists that due to the combined influences of
Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali, and thus of irfani and bayani thinking, the
’irrational’ (not the same as unreasonable) has dominated thinking in the
Eastern parts of Muslim world.
While there have been early examples of burhani
or ‘rationalist’ in the East, such as the philosophies of al-Kindi, the Muʽtazila and al-Farabi during the Abbasid Caliphate of
Al-Ma’mun, in Al-Jabiri's mind the restoration of rationalism is associated with the 11-13th
century thinkers of the Muslim west. Al-Jabiri’s heroes from this classical era
are: Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd, Al-Shatibi, and Ibn Khaldun.
However, things are not always as straightforward with
this preferred list as Al-Jabiri might suggest: For example, Ibn Hazm was a
Zahiri legal scholar. Zahirism was pretty strict in its interpretations of the
scriptural texts, but also intellectually regimented and I think that is what
attracted Al-Jabiri. Moreover what Ibn Hazm also argues is that anything that
is not restricted by text, is left to reason and free choice
In regards to Ibn Rushd it must be noted that he actually did his work
under the puritan and repressive rule of the Almohads. Although some of its
emirs and viziers had an interest in philosophy, we should not forget that
Almohad comes from the name Al-Muwahhidun,
the upholders of the Unity of God (Tawhid), which is – incidentally – the same
name the Wahhabis of Arabia use for themselves. The affinities between the two
extend not only to intellectual outlook but also to the political enforcement
of their interpretations of Islam.
Here, I will only
highlight a few aspects of Ibn Rushd’s thinking that underpin Al-Jabiri’s
appreciation for Ibn Rushd and consider him as the epitome of critical and
realistic rationalism, on grounds of: His
commentaries on Aristotle; his persistent upholding of the law of cause and
effect in scientific and philosophical thinking; and -- in relation to religious and
metaphysical questions -- the establishment of a harmony between the bayani
proofs of revelation and the demonstrative proofs of philosophical truth that
do not pose a threat to the teachings of Islam.
Al-Shatibi’s work has been very important for a
reinterpretation of the casuistry into which jurisprudence or fiqh had
descended during and after the period of recording. His advocacy of more
attention for the Higher Purposes of Sharia or Maqasid al-Shari’a
offered an opportunity to rethink what the aims or objectives of Islamic law
are supposed to be. By re-establishing these as the most general points of
departure for Islamic legal thinking it
becomes possible to distinguish between the unchangeable and contingent aspects
of Islamic law.
So Al-Jabiri not only privileges the burhani
epistemological system over the much less rigorous bayani approach and in his view
outright irrational irfani ways of thinking; when it comes to individual
thinkers, he also has a preference for individuals from what are now Spain and
Morocco. In advocating the importance of the Muslim west and the figure of Ibn
Rushd in particular, he has used terms such as ‘Andalusian Resurgence’ and the
statement that ‘the future can only be Averroist’.
The impact
of the ideas of Al-Jabiri
The ideas of the
heritage thinkers are erudite and sophisticated, and their appeal is limited to
those echelons of Muslim societies with that have attained the highest levels
of education in the humanities and social sciences. Salafi thinking by contrast
holds greater appeal for professionals (engineers, doctors, lawyers) and
students and scholars of the natural sciences. Given the still rather limited
numbers of people in the Muslim world who make it into higher education, heritage
thinking only influences a fraction of Muslim societies. However, demographics
also show that most Muslim countries have a ‘youth bulge’ – as middle classes
grow and the numbers of people entering education increase accordingly, I
believe heritage thinking will become more important over the next generation
or so.
A further and probably more problematic obstruction to the spread of heritage thinking in the
present day is the continuing repression of the freedom of thought and expression
in many Muslim countries, and the concomitant attempts by a religious state
bureaucracy wishing to control what is taught about Islam.
Influence in Indonesia
In this respect, the
situation in Indonesia is different from many MENA countries. To find an explanation for the appeal and
purchase heritage thinkers like Al-Jabiri have in Indonesia, it is necessary to have some background knowledge of how Islam operates or is allowed to function in
Indonesia, and in particular what shaped the socio-political and intellectual
climate.
Islam in Indonesia: Historical Background
Indonesia is located on the far eastern
periphery of the historical Dar al-Islam, and it forms part of a wider
equatorial Islamic island world that also includes Malaysia and Brunei, as well
as the southern provinces of Thailand and the Philippines, and that is home to a
distinct Malay-Muslim culture. However, Islam only began to make inroads among
the local populations relatively late in the history of the Islamic expansion. In contrast to
many other parts of the Muslim world, Islam did not arrive through conquest,
but through peaceful means: Centuries- or even millennia-old trade routes across
the Indian Ocean were used by missionary figures, often associated with
transnational Sufi orders that held the social fabric of the Muslim
world-at-large together after the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate in the
mid-13th century.
Because of this geographical remoteness of the
so-called “heartlands” of the Muslim world and this late conversion it is
tempting to see Southeast Asians as superficial Muslims, with Islam only a
“thin veneer” over older deposits of Indian religions and indigenous animism. That
view is wrong. A growing body of scholarship on the history of Islam in
Southeast Asia shows that since Islam’s arrival, the religion has firmly
rooted in the region through extensive and intensive networking between
Southeast Asia and centres of Islamic learning in South Asia and the Middle
East. Travelers from the other side of the Indian Ocean and native scholars
from Southeast Asia both played an important role in this process. That means
that throughout the centuries, Muslims from what is now Indonesia were well
acquainted and conversant with developments elsewhere. So also the ideas of 19th-century Islamic
reformism and pan-Islamism advocated and spread by figures such as Jamal al-Din
al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida caught on with the Muslim
populations of what was then called Dutch East Indies.
As a result, Southeast Asian Muslim societies
experienced a division between Muslims who continued to adhere to traditional
Sunni Islam, remaining part of the Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jama’a. In
Indonesia and elsewhere in the region this tradition consisted of the Shafi’i
Law School, Maturidi kalam or theology, and the sober Sufism of al-Ghazali, all
filtered through localized cultural practices. On the other hand, there were
the proponents of Islamic reformism, both in its puritan and in its modernist
guises. These reformists referred to themselves as kaum muda, or the 'young group' or 'young people', in contrast to the traditionalists, whom they
called kaum tua or ‘old people’. It is a division that has remained
valid until today and – as will be explained later -- that also has a bearing on the
reception of heritage thinkers such as Al-Jabiri.
The Dutch colonial authorities were very wary
of such influences and came down heavily on any politicized manifestations of
Islamic reformism. Although all Islamic activities were closely monitored and
activists were kept under surveillance, the one area that the colonial
authorities allowed to develop for the purpose of the emancipation of the
Indies’ Muslim population was education and da’wa or dakwah in Malay. This
formed part of the Ethische Politiek (1901-1942): a redefinition of
colonial policy designed to give select elements of the colonized population a
modest stake in political administration and equip other segments of society
for making a contribution to the development of the economy and society. This
has resulted in a phenomenon that makes Indonesia rather unique in the Muslim
world, which remains important until now and which will also play a part in
the future reception of the ideas of the likes of Al-Jabiri: the emergence of
Islamic mass organizations.
The Islamic modernists were the first to take
advantage of this opportunity, establishing two organizations: In 1912, Ahmad
Dahlan,, the Imam the main mosque of the Sultanate of Yogyakarta, founded the
Muhammadiyah. Inspired by the thinking of
Muhammad Abduh it is now the most important modernist Muslim mass organization. In
order to meet this challenge and to counter competition for influence over
Indonesia’s Muslims, the traditionalists responded in 1926 with the founding of
the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). The NU is a much looser organization than the
Muhammadiyah, relying on extensive but informal networks centering around
Islamic boarding schools called pesantren, that bind scholars together through
family connections and highly personalized teacher (called kyai) - pupils
(murid) relations not dissimilar to that of Sufi orders.
Indonesia’s Muslim mass organizations not only
predate Middle Eastern Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood or South
Asia’s Tablighi Jamaat by a good decade, it also dwarfs them in terms of
the numbers of followers they can mobilize. In present-day Indonesia, both the
Muhammadiyah and NU have constituencies numbering in the tens of millions.
Like the Dutch, also Indonesia’s postcolonial
governments have made efforts to keep Islam at arm’s length of the political
process. Since 1945, Indonesian constitutions have never made any reference to
Islam. Attempts to introduce a reference to Islamic law into the constitution
were sabotaged by the secular nationalists led by president Suharto. While
Indonesia recognises that its population is in majority Muslim, it does not identify
as an Islamic state. Instead, the country has
emphasized its ethnic and religious diversity through the Pancasila or doctrine
of five principles – the first one of which states that every Indonesian must
believe in a Supreme Being – but without further specification
Except for the first decade of independence,
when Indonesia briefly experimented with liberal democracy, Islamic parties
were not able to operate freely. From 1960 until 1998, they were actually
outlawed, except for the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan
Pembangunan, PPP) -- that was tolerated by Suharto’s New Order regime from
the 1970s onwards as a symbolic opposition party in the electoral charades and
rubber stamp parliament that was allowed to function during those years.
After taking power, New Order regime envisaged
a role for Muslim professionals in its new economic development policies, and a
number of Muslim intellectuals saw this as a window of opportunity to advocate
the expansion of the Islamic education system and proposing a constructive role
for Muslim activists in developing the country. This presented the interesting
spectacle of a vast expansion of a network of State Islamic higher education
institutes (called IAINs in Indonesian), in a country that still refuses to
identify as an Islamic state.
The key figures in this process, were two
senior intellectuals, Abdul Mukti Ali, who served as Minister of Religious
Affairs (1973-1978) and Harun Nasution, the rector of the IAIN in Jakarta, and
the leader of the largest Muslim student union, Nurcholish Madjid. They formed
part of a newly emerging Muslim intelligentsia combining a secular state
education with Islamic learning, often complemented with postgraduate studies
abroad to obtain advanced degrees, in particular in places such McGill
University in Montreal and the University of Chicago.
The IAINs began promoting an interpretation of
Islam that was very different from either the traditionalist form of Islam
prevailing among Indonesia’s rural peasantry or the reformist tendencies found
among pious urban Muslims. Drawing on the historicized interpretation of Islam
by scholars such as the American-Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman, who acted as
supervisor and adviser to numerous Indonesian postgraduate students, in Indonesia this came to be referred to as cultural,
civil, and even cosmopolitan Islam.
In 1983, promoting this cultural Islam became
government policy through the so-called the Reaktualisasi or Reactualizaition
Agenda. For ten years this policy was coordinated and directed by Religious
Affairs Minister Munawir Sjadzali, a former Muslim diplomat with a political
science degree from Johns Hopkins University. This shift in policy was part of
an important political reorientation on the highest government level. As part of the Reactualization Agenda, the
Islamic education system was expanded further, and the writings of heritage
thinkers started appearing in the IAIN curricula and reading lists. Also
growing oil revenues ensured the availability of money to send talented young
scholars in larger numbers overseas for postgraduate studies, not only in the
Middle East, but also in North America, Australia and Europe.
The growing appetite for new ideas on religion, and Islam in particular, also led
to the emergence of a large translation and publication industry of works on
Islam, religion and politics. As intellectual omnivores, Indonesia’s Muslims
were not only interested in the writings of Arabic-speaking Muslim
intellectuals, but also in the work of Western scholars on Islam, as well as the
ideas of postmodern philosophers and postcolonial theorists. These respective
literatures reflect the scholarly interests of the heritage thinkers, and the
critiques they have written of both Islamic thinking and Western scholarship
about Islam.
Heritage thinking in Indonesia
I must point out that
Indonesian Muslims are not just interested in al-Jabiri, but also in the other
heritage thinkers from that generation, including Mohammad Arkoun, Hasan
Hanafi, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. Together they form what I call the Arab
quartet that has left a distinct mark on contemporary Islamic thinking in
Indonesia. In first instance, during the late 1980s and
early 1990s, Hanafi and Arkoun were better known in Indonesia than Al-Jabiri. For example, the leader of the NU in 1980s,
Abdurrahman Wahid also known as Gus Dur introduced, Hanafi’s notion of the ‘Islamic
Left’ in Indonesia. Thus we find that the leader of the largest traditionalist
Muslim organization promotes a set of ideas that many modernists in the
Muhammadiyah considered too progressive!
For the purpose of today’s
lecture, I will concentrate on the attraction of Al-Jabiri for certain Indonesian
Muslim intellectuals. In fact, given the way Al-Jabiri used to privilege the
ideas of thinkers from the supposedly “rational” West of the Muslim world, it
is somewhat surprising and puzzling what appeal such a Maghribi 'chauvinist'
thinker holds for Muslims from the allegedly 'irrational' East
Al-Jabiri’s breakthrough coincided with the regime
change of 1998-1999, when President Suharto’s cozying up to the Muslims
provided to be too little and too late to avert the inevitable. The aging president was
forced to step down and the two leaders
of the largest Muslim mass organisations in the country rose to the highest
offices in the land, with Abdurrahman Wahid from the traditionalist Nahdlatul
Ulama becoming president and Amien Rais of the modernist Muhammadiyah taking
the position of Speaker of the National Assembly. It is in this vibrant -- and to a degree also
unstable and even polarized -- milieu that the ideas of Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri
found root.
Al-Jabiri, Young NU Cadres and Islamic
Post-Traditionalism
Two
figures from younger generations of NU cadres and intellectuals, called Anak
Muda NU were instrumental to opening up Indonesia Muslim thinking to the ideas
of Al-Jabiri: Said Aqil Siradj, who is now the General Chairman of the NU; and
Ahmad Baso, a young writer who was the first to translate some of Al-Jabiri’s
writings from Arabic into Indonesian.
 | |
| Said Aqil Siradj |
Said Aqil Siradj used Al-Jabiri’s ideas for a book
in which he reinterpreted the notion of Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jama’ah (in
Indonesian abbreviated to Aswaja). Instead of understanding it as a historical school
of thought or mazhab, Siradj interpreted it as a manhaj or method. In
his view Manhaj Taqlid did not mean blind
imitation. Rather it meant a method of thinking, in other words an Manhaj
al-Fikr or epistemology
which in fact accommodated a lot of different approaches. For the later he drew inspiration from NU
leader Abdurrahman Wahid, who quoted a saying of the prophet that 'difference
within the Umma is a blessing' – to promote intellectual debate in the NU.
It was also Said Aqil Siradj who introduced Ahmad
Baso to Al-Jabiri’s writings, and thus motivate Baso into producing the first Indonesian
translation of a number of essays by Al-Jabiri, which were published under the
title Post Traditionalisme Islam or Islamic
Post-Traditionalism. From then on Islamic Post-Traditionalism became a new term
of reference for a way of critical thinking about Indonesian Islam among young
NU cadres and intellectuals. In his introduction to the translated essays, Baso
says that al-Jabiri’s return to the tradition is not a matter of picking and
choosing, but a holistic appropriation for the purpose of analyzing
Arab-Islamic thought in its theological, linguistic, juridical as well as
philosophical and mystical aspects. This is an approach that fits with the NU’s mission of rethinking Aswaja as defined
by Siradj and Gus Dur
In Baso’s interpretation of al-Jabiri
bayani or discursive thinking is more at
odds with its irfani or gnostic counterpart
than with burhani or demonstrative
reason. The reason for this affinity between discursive and demonstrative
reason is that the Qur’an, Islam’s core textual point of reference, recognizes
and encourages the use of human reason. However, Irfan, or Gnosticism, by
contrast calls into question the independent role for the human intellect.
According to Baso, this is why Al-Jabiri calls irfani thinking 'irrational'. It
is understandable that as an NU intellectual subscribing to the Shafi’i Mazhab,
Maturidi theology and Ghazalian Sufism, Baso has reservations against Al-Jabiri’s
outright dismissal of the spiritual legacy of the Muslim East.
 |
| Ahmad Baso |
But what Baso finds valuable is Al-Jabiri’s use of French
poststructuralism and postmodernism because it can help Indonesian Muslim
intellectuals in developing critiques of their own turath or heritage. Baso
also draws attention to Al-Jabiri calibration of different types of reason on
the basis of their shurut as-sihha, or ‘preconditions
of validity’ (syarat-syarat keabsahan in Indonesian). In Baso’s view that procedure that is comparable to Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason or the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, who also
investigated the conditions that make human rational activity possible.
By bringing
the philosophy of al-Jabiri into the discourse of Islamic Post-Traditionalism, Baso
claims that he is continuing Abdurrahman Wahid’s pioneering efforts of
introducing Indonesian audiences to Arab-Islamic heritage thinking about political
action, such as nationalism, indigenization (pribumisasi), secularization, and feminism. Al-Jabiri’s
concern with text criticism and discourse analyse will make thinking about
heritage and tradition in the NU intellectually more rigorous. It shows an
awareness that ‘language is not just a world-disclosing, but also a
world-constituting exercise, producing a discourse and a new reality in terms
of politics, religion, and imagination. Baso also sees Islamic Post-Traditionalism
as a‘new cultural strategy’ modelled after the articulation of the voices of
marginal people by intellectuals from South Asia who are involved in subaltern
studies. Al-Jabiri helps the new NU
intelligentsia to become organic intellectuals centered on NGOs engaged in
emancipating rural and newly urbanized Muslims through grassroots level
initiatives.
As a
translator of Al-Jabiri’s writings, Ahmad Baso observes that Al-Jabiri provides
a strategy, an “epistemological rupture” and paradigmatic revolution that will
overturn current Western-inspired modernist-liberal ideologies and replace them
with Indonesian Islamic alternatives. Through the ideas derived from Al-Jabiri,
Ahmad Baso and other Anak Muda NU see
themselves as continuing the anti-essentialist and non-reductive social ethics
of their mentor Abdurrahman Wahid, which was grounded in Pribumisasi Islam
– that is the ‘indigenization Islam’ into culturally specific contexts of
Indonesia.
At the
same time, however, Baso is acutely aware that the NU’s holistic framework with
it strong Sufi dimensions, stands in tense relationship to al-Jabiri’s unambiguous
privileging of rational (burhani)
thinking. This shows also that Baso is no
uncritical admirer of al-Jabiri, but – on the contrary – very acutely aware of
‘nationalistic’ tendencies that seem to infuse al-Jabiri’s interest in the
philosophies of the Muslim West, or Maghreb. As a Moroccan, al-Jabiri’s
preference for the intellectual heritage of the Maghreb may indeed lay him open
to the charge of chauvinism.
All
this attention for heritage thinking among NU intellectuals strengthens the
impression that traditionalist Indonesian Muslims are more progressive than
their modernist counterparts. This may be the case to some degree, but also in
the Muhammadiyah one finds an interest in the ideas of Al-Jabiri. It forms part
of a re-appreciation for the cultural context of religions by certain Islamic
modernists in Indonesia.
Al-Jabiri and Indonesia’s
Muslim Modernists
One such figure is M. Amin
Abdullah, a leading figure in the Muhammadiyah and philosopher trained in
Turkey, who eventually became rector the State Islamic University in Yogyakarta.
Building on his research from the early 1990s, in The Study of Religion;
Normativity or Historicity? In which he argues that contemporary Islamic
philosophy has to come to terms with its Western counterpart, but at the same
retain the normativity of Islam’s doctrine. Too often this is interpreted as an
‘intellectual invasion', or al-ghazwu al-fikry, and this makes it difficult to change the
resulting ‘reactive-defensive-emotional’ response into a
‘proactive-conceptual-argumentative’ one which was pioneered by heritage
thinkers such as al-Jabiri.
 |
| M. Amin Abdullah |
Amin Abdullah draws
predominantly from the triptych of the bayani, burhani, and irfani
epistemes which Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri had developed in his Critique of Arab
Reason. He says that Al-Jabiri’s critical approach covers a domain that is very
similar to that of Western philosophy of science, and it is for that reason
that Amin Abdullah proposes something that has not been tried before in Islamic
Studies.: Applying the findings of leading philosophers of science, such as
Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos, to the study of Islam.
Amin Abdullah considers the
dialectical historiographical meta-method of Lakatos particularly relevant
because it formulates an alternative that navigates between the falsification
process outlined by Popper and Kuhn’s paradigm shift. The distinctive aspect of
Lakatos’s research programme is that it consists of a ‘hard core', corresponding
to Kuhn’s paradigm, and a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses meant to
defend the core from being challenged and undermined – or from being falsified,
as Popper would call it.
Transposing these concepts
of these concepts of the philosophy of science to Islamic studies, the field’s
core is ‘normative Islam’ transmitted through traditional Islamic learning, while
‘historical Islam’ forms the ‘protective belt’. It is the conflation of the
two that prevents a critical study of Islam.
This is Amin Abdullah’s
plan as far as methodology and research agenda for a philosophy of Islamic sciences
goes, but – as mentioned earlier – the aim of this new way of studying
Islam is not just epistemological but also axiological: Namely To help find the
fundamental value lying behind the Islamic doctrine. The new way of
doing Islamic studies on the basis of the findings of the philosophy of science
and the sociology of knowledge requires a new research programme combining
linguistic-historical, philosophical-theological, and sociological-anthropological
approaches, offered by the historical, structural, and ideological analyses found in Al-Jabiri’s
Critique of Islamic Reason.
The main challenge of this
comprehensive research programme is how to reconcile the absolute truth claims
of the disciplines of traditional Islamic learning representing religious
knowledge with relativized truths claims and the scepticism of the modern
humanities and social sciences, which produce knowledge about religion(s)
by taking them as social phenomena. Navigating between extreme absolutes and
relativities, the outcome of Abdullah’s negotiation between religious sciences,
on the one hand, and the human sciences on the other is the ‘relatively
absolute’ approach.
Amin Abdullah also explains
that transcending the bipolarity of religion and science as two separate
entities with their own formal-material concerns, research methodologies,
criteria for truth or validity, and functionality means that a new foundation needs to be found for
the epistemological unity of religious and positivist-secular knowledge of, what
Abdullah calls, Etika Tauhidik -- an ‘Ethics grounded in Transcendent
Unity’. This clearly resonates with Ibn Rushd’s conclusion that revealed and
demonstrative scientific and philosophical truths are not incompatible.
For Amin Abdullah, Al-Jabiri’s
bayani, irfani and burhani systems of thought provide the structure for
transforming contemporary multidisciplinary Islamic studies into a twenty
first-century version of al-Ghazali’s equally comprehensive approach to
conventional eleventh-century religious sciences. It creates a dialogue between
the two in order to ‘humanize’ Islamic learning rather than ‘Islamize’
knowledge. The triangulation of Al-Jabiri’s critique of discursive, gnostic,
and demonstrative reason connects the domains of textual-normative and contextual-historical-empirical
analyses and offers the circularity which defines the desired dynamical
hermeneutics of Abdullah’s integrative-interconnective approach.
Conclusion
Here we have then a few
examples of the use of al-Jabiri’s philosophy by Indonesian Muslim
intellectuals from NU and Muhammadiyah backgrounds for their own respective
agendas.
However, the fact that a
Moroccan rationalist philosopher appeals to both of them, seems to show that
Al-Jabiri’s thinking has brought about a kind of meeting of the minds between Islamic
traditionalism and modernism that transcends a almost two-centuries old divide.
