The Qur'an and the Secular Mind; A Philosophy of Islam (2008) - Shabbir Akhtar

2 Introduction
An important intellectual deficit in the modern House of Islam is the lack of
a living philosophical culture that could influence its narrowly religious outlook.
Muslim society has been, internally, spared irreverent and abusive criticism but
it has also forfeited an experience of the rigours of thoughtful secular probing
which can extend the range of religious integrity and invigorate the intellectual and
moral health of a civilization. For reasons explored in Chapter 2, many Muslims,
including some men and women of genius, were siphoned off and wasted in the
pursuit of mysticism and asceticism. These believers could have become philosophers.
Islam’s resulting lack of an extant philosophical tradition is examined and
explained at the end of Chapter 2.
In this work, I counsel modern Muslims, as intelligent and reflective heirs
of their faithful tradition, to establish a philosophy of Islam, in an analytical
idiom. As there is no extant Muslim philosophical tradition, we must borrow
terminology from analytical linguistic philosophy of religion developed primarily
to reflect Jewish and Christian concerns. While natural (philosophical) theology
is, as seen in Chapter 12, an endeavour common to these three faiths, many other
Judaeo-Christian intellectual interests, in philosophy of religion and theology,
find no parallel in Islamic thought. For instance, to take an example from the
epistemology of doctrine, the Muslim interest in revelation, as we see in Part II,
differs fundamentally, in crucial respects, from the modern Jewish and Christian
interest. Indeed, some areas of theo-philosophical concern such as theodicy – the
rational and moral justification of the ways of God, especially the justification
of natural and moral evil in a God-governed world – do not exist in mainstream
Islamic thought. This might partly explain the lack of a tradition of conscientious
atheism in Islam, a theme of Chapter 3.
2
All thoughtful adult human beings are, in some measure, philosophers; all societies
have a potentially philosophical component in their intellectual culture. While a
society devoid of disciplined philosophical thinking has no practitioners who formally
articulate philosophical problems, its members still entertain philosophical
prejudices – as entertaining prejudice requires no training. Many fundamental
opinions are absorbed from our heritage and environment and then taken for
granted. These are philosophical presuppositions; and even anti-philosophical religious
believers meticulously follow their philosophical prejudices. If a person can
think systematically about truth, existence, knowledge and value (both moral and
aesthetic), such a person is potentially a philosopher. If we add causation and the
identity of persons and objects, we have the central themes of ancient and modern
western philosophy.
Perhaps there is an intrinsic connection between philosophy and civilization.
Once we develop beyond the level of customary thought, we must wonder
about the right way to live and the role of reason. Do the constitution and
structure of knowledge permit reason to perform the functions assigned to it?
What is the metaphysical constitution of the natural universe which enables and