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ON THE MOVEMENT OF PHILOSOPHY IN RELIGION 8/26/2002
It is important for all people of sincerity to call a spade a spade where the need to do so arises, notwithstanding one's hardened position on a question. Since its 7th century inception Islamic philosophy (which has been historically seen by most orthodox Muslims as something bordering on, if not a straight-out heresy within Islam) --- like Christian philosophy in its own internal debates with Christian dogmatic theology and denominational church rulings and pronouncements --- has had to do battle with Islamic theology and the confining strictures of religious legalism.
It has had to take the critical and often dangerous path of mostly respectful, sometimes skeptical, yet critical analysis while heroically seeking to maintain an informed faithfulness to a liberated, free will interpretation of Divine Revelation as received through the Holy Qur'an, and as vouchsafed by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Moreover given its situation as an on-going but increasingly potent heresy, relative to orthodoxy since the 11-12th century, Islamic philosophy has been graced by Allah's mercy to be in a position to better deal with the manifold problems confronting Islam in the modern, and now post-modern world than has Islamic orthodoxy which to a great extent remains mired in elaborated medievalisms and a by-gone vision of the world in which Islamic religious power was the political and economic equal to, rival of or superior to Western European Christendom.
On the other hand, Christian philosophy either basically gave full sway to Christian apologetic theology's demominationalism during the 15th-18th century European Protestant Reformation and later the Enlightenment. Such denominationalist theology (re: Martin Luther, John Calvin and the Jesuit Orders of Roman Catholicism particulary) produced reasoned polemics and broadsides to be used against other, dissenting Christians first, the then new scientific worldview in their theories of creation secondly and lastly other non-Christian religions, especially Judaism.
Or that philosophy became subsumed in naked secularist humanist philosophy's aggressive attempts to totally deny a primary or even any place at all for God in the realm of an elevated Reason; i.e. the reasoning of European and nominally Christian philosophers declared that a reasonable approach to God was the height of irrationality and backwardness. Thus, metaphysics and ontology and ancient questions of primary being in Western philosophy were devalued, discredited or discarded and with them traditional ethical and axiological valuations which need some kind of metaphysical grounding. In place of metaphysics we got the secularist and/or scientifically envisioned basis of Western thought in the likes of David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Friedrich W. Nietzsche. The secularist litanies about God since the Age of Reason plays something like this: God is beyond sound mind having created the universe in a deist manner and then retired to allow man to run things; is the product of human sense-psycho-projection or an awful collective delusion; is a tool of the ruling classes to keep the economically exploited masses mired in escapist irrelevancies having nothing to do with social change; is dying as scientific clarification of the natural order evolves, or is indeed dead or should have died --- for mankind has come of age in rational maturation and has no further need for God.
All this has led to the Western philosophical post-modernism of the 1960's-1980's with its skeptical and nihilist emphasis in moral relativism, language dismemberment, a de-constructed, fragmented individuality and miniscule personalism as the only possible way to discourse about reality. It has also led to philosophy's slow demise as the queen of Western intellectual endeavors. Because of the failures of science to usher in the new world, the two World Wars, the sordid role of capitalism, and the uncertainties of a bio-technocratic future, I think the balance is swaying back to a philosophy informed of at least Kantian kind of respect for metaphysics, the mystical and ontological questions. Hence, Islamic philosophy for me is a way to hold fast to religion, while simultaneously holding to a critical assessment of social, particularly the racial and class infused reality of black oppression in America.
