Islam’s own Enlightenment

In the concluding chapter of Voltaire’s 1759 philosophical novel Candide, the philosopher Pangloss and the eponymous hero, finding themselves in Constantinople, go to visit ‘a very famous dervish, who passed for the greatest philosopher in Turkey’. Acting as their spokesman, Pangloss quizzes the philosopher dervish on the problem of evil – the main subject of the novel. Dismissing the question as unimportant – ‘What does it matter’, he asks, ‘whether there’s evil or there’s good? When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?’ – the dervish instead commends silence. Unable to hide his disappointment, Pangloss tells the dervish that he had hoped ‘that we might have a talk about effects and causes, the best of all possible worlds, the origin of evil, the nature of the soul, and pre-established harmony’. ‘The dervish, at these words’, Voltaire writes, ‘slammed the door in their faces.’

Given the ironic tone that pervades Candide, it is difficult to know exactly how to interpret this passage. Since, at the most obvious level, the novel is a satire on the philosopher Leibniz’s thesis – represented by the comically naïve Pangloss – that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’, the dervish’s refusal to be drawn into a discussion on this question might be taken as commendable. Yet, while Candide, as Voltaire scholar Nicholas Cronk has written, gives us ‘a practical lesson in skepticism and freethinking’, the dervish’s almost nihilistic indifference to the problem of evil still leaves a bitter taste. While the passage might be read as a critical commentary on Islamic fideism, it is unlikely that Voltaire is really interested here in considering Islamic thought on its own terms. Rather, as both Cronk and Noel Malcolm have argued in relation to his other writings on ‘oriental’ topics, Voltaire uses Islam to suit his own ideological purposes – that is, as a way of attacking religious fanaticism, clericalism and hypocrisy in 18th-century Europe.

‘Dervish’ (from the Persian word for ‘poor’) is often used synonymously with ‘Sufi’. In Voltaire’s day, Sufism, a mystical form of Islam which seeks some form of direct communion with God, was a central component of Islamic thought and piety – as it had been for half a millennium or more. In the 18th century, almost all of the leading Islamic thinkers were Sufis of some kind, and many Muslim mystics devoted their lives to considering the kinds of questions that Voltaire’s dervish refused to answer. Indeed, the historian of Islam Reinhard Schulze has argued that it is in 18th-century Sufi thought that the roots of an ‘Islamic Enlightenment’ can be found. This Enlightenment was an indigenous, internally driven movement of Islamic renewal, which was justified with reference to a Hadith, or statement attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which predicted that God would send someone at the beginning of every century to renew (yujaddid) the Islamic religion. It was a movement that preceded direct contact with European Enlightenment thought and Western imperial dominance in the Middle East and wider Muslim world – a process traditionally said to have been initiated with Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798. This indigenous movement of Islamic renewal involved a critical and creative engagement with the pre-modern Islamic intellectual tradition, drawing in original ways on ideas from Sufism, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), rational theology (kalam) and philosophy (falsafa or hikma), paving the way for the emergence, in the later 19th century, of an Islamic modernism that sought to demonstrate the essential harmony of authentic Islam and Western modernity.

A key early figure in the development of this indigenous Islamic Enlightenment tradition was the Syrian Sufi and Islamic jurist ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi. Born in Damascus in 1641, al-Nabulusi died in the same city in 1731, though he travelled widely through Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and the Hijaz, writing no fewer than four travelogues. He also produced numerous works on Sufism and Islamic law, a manual of dream interpretation, as well as collections of poetry. That he saw himself as responsible for the renewal of Islam is indicated by a dream that he experienced in the final years of his life. As he related to one of his closest disciples: ‘I saw a vision that the four corners of the Kaʿbah had collapsed to the ground. I rebuilt them all as I was standing there, without touching them with my hands.’ ‘Surely’, the disciple who recorded this vision commented, ‘this is a sign of his renewal of Islam.’

Renewal, al-Nabulusi thought, was necessary, because Muslims were living through a period of spiritual, moral and intellectual decay. In particular, he took aim at those ‘pseudo-scholars’ who indulged in erroneous interpretations of scripture and Islamic law on the basis of their unthinking emulation of each other’s opinions (a practice known in Arabic as taqlid), their personal whims and desires, sophistical arguments and misguided suppositions. Here al-Nabulusi particularly had in mind the Qadizadelis, a puritanical movement of Islamic revival that had emerged in Constantinople in the 11th century denouncing ‘innovations’ such as smoking, coffee drinking, visiting saints’ shrines, the Sufi mystical concert, and various financial procedures and trading practices, and subsequently spread to Syria and other provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Al-Nabulusi’s own works included treatises defending smoking tobacco and listening to music, and his leading ideas were in many ways forged in reaction to what he regarded as the errors of his opponents.

Three features of al-Nabulusi’s thought, in particular, contain the seeds of an indigenous Islamic Enlightenment – his epistemology, in which he combines an emphasis on mystical experience with a tendency towards rationalism and empiricism; his emphasis on tolerance, both towards his fellow believers and to non-Muslims; and the movement that he makes in the direction of egalitarianism.

Al-Nabulusi was above all a Sufi. More specifically, he was a devotee of Ibn ‘Arabi, a 13th-century mystical philosopher, originally from Muslim Spain, who had settled in Damascus, and whose writings constitute the most elaborate and influential articulation of Sufi metaphysics. In particular, Ibn ‘Arabi and his followers became associated with the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, ‘the unity of existence’, according to which there is only one being, which in its purest form is identical with God, the phenomenal world having no existence in itself, being only a reflection or manifestation of the divine being. Al-Nabulusi moved to the Salihiyya suburb of Damascus in order to be near to the tomb of Ibn ‘Arabi, whom he described as his spiritual ‘milk-father’, and his many works on Sufism include a commentary on Ibn ʿArabi’s most important text, The Ringstones of Wisdom, and a long treatise on existence written from the perspective of Ibn ʿArabi’s school.

As a Sufi in the tradition of Ibn ʿArabi, al-Nabulusi thought that mystical experience provided the surest means to true and certain knowledge. In the introduction to his commentary on The Ringstones of Wisdom, al-Nabulusi outlines a three-tiered epistemological hierarchy: at the lowest level, he says, is knowledge based simply on imitating what others say; at the intermediate level is knowledge arrived at through reasoning and inference; while at the highest level is the gnosis acquired through spiritual ‘witnessing’ or ‘tasting’ – that is, a direct encounter with the divine. In one of his letters, he explains that this epistemological hierarchy applies particularly to the knowledge of metaphysical or divine realities: ‘Knowing God through [what the Sufis call] spiritual unveiling and direct witnessing’, he writes, ‘is a higher form of knowledge than knowing Him through rational inference and demonstration, which in turn is a higher form of knowledge than knowing Him through unthinking emulation and submission.’

While this emphasis on mystical knowledge might be assumed to be antithetical to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, in fact, as Schulze has noted, there is often a correlation between mysticism and rationality. For mysticism, like Enlightenment rationalism, puts the individual self at the centre of existence. Schulze argues that an important component of the ‘pre-history’ of Enlightenment rationalism is the emergence, in the late 17th-century German context, of Pietism, a movement of Protestant renewal that emphasised individual faith and spiritual experience over doctrinal orthodoxy. In his reading, al-Nabulusi’s mysticism similarly involves the emergence of ‘a very subjective individuality’, exemplified in a poem which includes such lines as:

I! Through me hearts are bewildered,

They do not know my origin:

I am Syrian, I am Indian;

I am Ottoman, I am Sicilian.

Schulze probably overemphasises the extent to which this kind of statement – which expresses the mystic’s identification with the unrestricted existence of God – is original to al-Nabulusi. Nevertheless, the Sufi mysticism represented by al-Nabulusi prepares the way, in the Islamic context, for something like what the philosopher Charles Taylor, discussing the rise of an individualistic ‘ethics of authenticity’ in 18th-century European thought, describes as ‘the massive subjective turn of modern culture’, characterised by ‘a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths’.

Al-Nabulusi, however, was not only a mystic. While mystical experience reveals the nature of God, when it comes to knowledge of this-worldly affairs – including, significantly, the resolution of issues of Islamic law – both reason and sensory experience have important roles to play. This resort to rational and empirical argumentation comes out strongly in al-Nabulusi’s treatises defending music and smoking.

The hostility of Islamic puritans – including al-Nabulusi’s opponents the Qadizadelis – to various kinds of musical activity is rooted in the fear that music is a kind of frivolous diversion (in Arabic, lahw) that distracts people from the remembrance and worship of God. While the Qur’an does not include any explicit statement about the lawfulness of music, Islamic exegetes traditionally interpreted verse 31:6, which condemns those people who ‘purchase frivolous speech’, as a reference to singing or other kinds of music. Accordingly, musical instruments – particularly stringed instruments and flutes – were often deemed to be forbidden. In al-Nabulusi’s view, however, it makes no sense from the perspective of scripture, reason, or custom to declare that musical instruments or the sounds that they make are absolutely forbidden. In and of themselves, musical instruments are simply pieces of wood shaped into particular forms, and the tuneful sounds that they make are analogous to the songs of birds, which no one would forbid people to listen to. Those jurists who declare listening to music absolutely prohibited, therefore, contradict both reason and nature.

Al-Nabulusi’s empiricism, meanwhile, comes out clearly in his defence of smoking. Chastising those who forbid tobacco without having tried it for themselves, he argues that a legal ruling that something is harmful ought to be based on ‘authentic experience’, which, he explains, means trying something repeatedly, not merely once or twice. ‘Experience and observation’, he claims, contradict the assertion that tobacco is a poison, for they show that ‘most people on earth, both Arabs and non-Arabs, devote themselves to smoking tobacco every day’, without a negative impact on their mind, body, or senses. While we might now dispute the accuracy of this claim, the emphasis on experimentation and observation is nevertheless striking. Equally remarkable is his resort to archaeological evidence. Reporting a tradition that the smoking of tobacco for medical purposes originated in the time of Nimrod (the Mesopotamian king of biblical and Islamic tradition), he suggests that this account is supported by a recent discovery of a water pipe at the foundation of a wall in one of the ‘ruined cities that belonged to the ancients’ on the route from Syria to the Hijaz. While al-Nabulusi, like European Enlightenment thinkers, was not practising or drawing on archaeology in the modern scientific sense, the emphasis on empirically derived knowledge is again noteworthy.

Just as we associate Enlightenment thought with rationalism and empiricism in epistemology, so, too, do we associate it with tolerance, particularly in matters of religion. Here, too, there are interesting and important parallels in the thought of al-Nabulusi. Again, this feature of al-Nabulusi’s thought reflects his deep devotion to the earlier Sufi thinker Ibn ‘Arabi, whose work provides a theoretical basis for a charitable attitude both to other Muslims and to non-Muslims. Since, according to Ibn ‘Arabi, all things are a manifestation of the divine being, it follows that all beliefs – ‘from the crudest form of idolatry to the most abstract religious philosophy’ – are really ‘beliefs about God’. In his thinking on the religious law, similarly, Ibn ‘Arabi argues that the Sharia is meant to be merciful and easy for people, while, in his teachings on soteriology (the fate of people in the afterlife), he suggests that even those who are condemned to hell will eventually be embraced by God’s mercy.

Al-Nabulusi embraced his master’s emphasis on tolerance and mercy. In his treatises on smoking, music and other controversial practices such as shrine visitation, he condemned what he saw as the bigotry and fanaticism (in Arabic, ta‘assub) of his Qadizadeli opponents. All things, he says, are allowed on principle, unless there are explicit injunctions in the Qur’an or Hadith indicating that they are forbidden; to forbid what God has permitted is in fact to claim divine qualities for oneself. While puritans like the Qadizadelis condemn music as a frivolous diversion, whether someone listens to music for frivolous purposes is in fact a matter of the heart, which only God can know. In other words, what matters is intention – as the very first Hadith recorded in the canonical collection of al-Bukhari puts it, ‘Actions are according to intentions’ (an idea, interestingly, that would be echoed by Adam Smith). For al-Nabulusi, since intention is something known only to God, and the law is based on certainty rather than conjecture, it is better to entrust judgement to God, rather than assuming it for ourselves. Indeed, drawing on another Hadith, he stresses that, when in doubt, it is a religious obligation to think the best of one’s fellow believers.

Significantly, al-Nabulusi’s tolerant attitude is also extended to non-believers – specifically, to Christians and Jews, the so-called ‘People of the Book’ (ahl al-kitab). Indeed, in recent years, al-Nabulusi has been celebrated as an exemplar of ‘religious pluralism’ who was committed to ‘the transcendent unity of religions’. For instance, in a treatise defending Ibn ʿArabi’s views on salvation against the criticisms of a Turkish convert to Islam, al-Nabulusi strongly endorses the notion that God’s mercy can embrace the People of the Book, who, by paying the jizya poll tax demanded of non-Muslims living under Muslim rule, acquire the same rights as their Muslim neighbours, and are able to achieve felicity in this life and – potentially – the next. In one of his letters, meanwhile, al-Nabulusi stresses that taqwa – the Qur’anic term for piety or fear of God – is a quality that God has entrusted to all religious communities.

Certainly, as with Pierre Bayle or John Locke, this is a theory of toleration, rather than of religious equality: al-Nabulusi still insists that Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule should pay the jizya poll tax as protected yet second-class citizens, and singles out the Muslim community as ‘the preferred community in this world and the next’. Nevertheless, al-Nabulusi’s own dealings with Christian and Jewish peoples, places and traditions were generally very positive. His travelogues feature numerous references to encounters with Christians and visits to Christian sites. In Bethlehem, for instance, he visited the Church of the Nativity, ‘seeking blessing through the traces of the sinless prophet and the good fortune of that encounter’. ‘Some monks’, he writes, ‘welcomed us, and were generous with their provisions to me and the brethren who were with me.’ Echoing his positive assessment of music, he recounted how the monks ‘let us listen to the sound of the oboe, making a sound like a blackbird or a nightingale’. Similarly, in 1712, al-Nabulusi engaged in a correspondence with the Greek Melkite Patriarch of Antioch regarding the nature of God and the philosophical question of the relationship between existence and essence. Though he differs theologically from his Christian correspondent (who was a fellow native of Damascus), al-Nabulusi’s tone towards the patriarch is deeply respectful: he goes so far as to describe him as ‘one of our brethren in the quest for detachment from the world, whose noble souls and subtle essences have become moons in the heaven of monotheism’.

Whereas his opponents had condemned smoking on the grounds that it was a custom of unbelievers, al-Nabulusi’s positive interactions with Christian monks and patriarchs reflect his view that the emulation of non-Muslims in non-religious matters was perfectly acceptable, so long as what was being copied was not itself reprehensible. In the context of making this point, he displays a certain admiration for the advanced level that European nations have attained in the cultivation of the secular sciences. The medicinal use of tobacco, he notes, was promoted by European physicians, who have ‘greater proficiency in the science of medicine and knowledge of the properties of things than the Muslims’. The Europeans’ superiority in medicine and the sciences, he reasons, is – perhaps counterintuitively – a consequence of the irrational nature of the Christian religion. Because Christianity is based on emulating the opinions of priests and monks, Europeans have more time to devote themselves to secular subjects. ‘For this reason’, he writes, ‘they have become greatly preoccupied with the sciences of the ancients, like medicine, astrology, geometry, and surveying, etc., so they are skilled in the regulation of human nature.’ Could we see this statement, appearing as it does in a treatise written in 1682, as a dim reflection of the first stirrings of the European Enlightenment?

Still, al-Nabulusi’s vision of a renewed Islam – like other 17th- and 18th-century programmes of Islamic renewal – is rooted in Islamic, rather than European, sources. A third element of that vision that is reminiscent of Enlightenment thought is his egalitarian tendency. Like other pre-modern systems of thought, the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition was fundamentally hierarchical. Aristotelian philosophers such as al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, for instance, held that there were different kinds of reasoning for different kinds of people, with the highest kind of reasoning – logical demonstration – being reserved for the philosophical elite, while ordinary people had to make do with poetic symbols of the truth. Sufis similarly held that higher metaphysical truths were restricted to those who had traversed the mystical path, and typically wrote with such initiates in mind.

Yet there is also a more egalitarian tendency within Islam, which, after all, does not have the equivalent of a priesthood, and sometimes this was reflected in the writings of scholars. Al-Ghazali, for instance, addressed his handbook on the pious life, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, to ordinary Muslims. More radically, the North African theologian of the Ashʿari school, Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Sanusi (d. 1490), the author of several very popular creedal works, argued that being able to logically infer the fundamental theological tenets of Islam was the duty of every believer, and that reliance on taqlid or blind emulation in faith was tantamount to unbelief. Al-Nabulusi wrote a commentary on al-Sanusi’s most influential creed, The Mother of Proofs, in which he affirmed al-Sanusi’s position that all adult and sane Muslims were legally obliged to acquire certain knowledge of the necessary qualities of God and his prophets through rational evidence, the unthinking emulation of the great scholars of Islam being insufficient to save a person from falling into unbelief.

Certainly, al-Nabulusi was not an out-and-out egalitarian: in other works, he outlines a threefold hierarchy of believers that corresponds to his three-tiered epistemological hierarchy: at the top are those whose faith is based on mystical experience, followed by those whose faith is based on rational evidence, with those who rely on imitation at the bottom. Yet he shared al-Sanusi’s optimism that ordinary believers could be taught difficult ideas, writing a commentary on his hero Ibn ‘Arabi’s great work, The Ringstones of Wisdom, that was aimed at a general readership, and delivering public lectures on that obscure and difficult text at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. In his work, then, we see the germ of the idea of an anonymous reading public that was to emerge in full force in the Arab world later, in the 19th century, and was an important part of the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas.

ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi was a remarkable and independent-minded thinker. But he was not unique. Indeed, he exemplifies a wider movement to renew Islam in 18th-century Islamic thought. That movement was rooted in Sufism, and shared al-Nabulusi’s rejection of the blind emulation of scholarly authority, his condemnation of bigotry and fanaticism, his interest in, and often charitable attitude towards, other religions, and his desire to democratise religious and other forms of knowledge. It is a movement found not only in the central Arabic-speaking lands, but which stretched across the world of Islam, its leading representatives including such figures as Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762), the West African Sufi Usman dan Fodio (d. 1817), and the Medinan mystic Muhammad al-Samman (d. 1775). These thinkers’ knowledge of developments in modern European thought was minimal at best, and their impulse to renew Islam came not from Western pressure, but from a sense of internal decay – a feeling that Islam as it was being practised in their time and place was not matching up to the original Islam taught by the Prophet.

In the 19th century, scientific, literary and philosophical texts associated with the European Enlightenment began to be translated into Arabic, first by Levantine Christians (particularly those associated with the Damietta circle in Egypt), and then at the behest of Egypt’s modernising ruler Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (r. 1805-48). He founded an Arabic printing press at Bulaq, in Cairo, and sponsored a translation movement of Enlightenment texts into Arabic led by the religious scholar Shaykh Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (d. 1873), who had spent five years in Paris studying France’s political, legal and intellectual culture and read widely in Enlightenment texts. Al-Tahtawi’s writings – and those of Syrian converts to Protestantism such as Butrus al-Bustani (d. 1883) and Mikhail Mishaqa (d. 1888) – helped to give birth to the Nahda, the ‘renaissance’ of Arabic thought on modern, liberal lines.

Yet while al-Tahtawi and other 19th-century Islamic reformers drew directly on European models, they did not adopt European thought wholesale, nor entirely jettison the Islamic tradition. Indeed, there was substantial continuity between their thought and that of their 18th-century predecessors. A notable feature of al-Tahtawi’s travelogue of his time in Paris is that what he finds most admirable in France is identical to what he sees as essential to true Islam: rationality, empiricism, independence of thought, an absence of fanaticism and a commitment to the common good, justice and equity – values that al-Nabulusi and other thinkers of the 18th-century Islamic Enlightenment had likewise embraced. Nor is it accidental that among the Arabic texts printed at Bulaq and other newly founded printing presses by the cultural entrepreneurs of the Nahda were many of the writings of al-Nabulusi, whose clear Arabic prose, commitment to popularisation, and tolerance chimed with the spirit of the time.

Far from retreating into the pious fideism imagined by Voltaire, then, Sufi thinkers such as al-Nabulusi were at the forefront of intellectual developments in the early modern Muslim world. Indeed, al-Nabulusi seems to exemplify an Islamic version of the ‘religious Enlightenment’ identified by David Sorkin. ‘Contrary to the secular master narrative’, Sorkin argues, ‘the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief but conducive to it.’ In his efforts to renew Islam, al-Nabulusi and his fellow 18th-century reformers likewise demonstrate the compatibility of religious and Enlightenment ways of thinking.