Islam and the Philosophy of History
How German philosophy of History irreversibly transformed modern Arab epistemology
The History Before History
“Generally, where a person finds it safe for his religion, there is no wrongdoing in traveling, especially for an interest such as this one. Furthermore, in all likelihood, this is the intention of His Majesty from this mission and the series of subsequent missions. The fruit this trip will bear, with the will of God, is the spreading of these sciences and crafts…” These words were part of the introduction written by Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801-1973), a young Muslim traditional scholar sent on a mission to Europe for his book The Extraction of Gold and the Overview of Paris in which he reported about his stay in the city upon his return to Cairo 1831. Tahtawi is considered to be the founding father figure in the process of modernizing Arab culture. Not only did he report on significant European scientific and cultural advancements, but he established Egypt’s School of Languages in 1835, overseeing the training of translators needed to initiate the effort of transferring knowledge from enlightened Europe into Arabic. Tahtawi personally translated significant French works such as Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In addition to his official administrative work in reorganizing education in Egypt, he also led a fruitful intellectual life, leaving works in linguistics, aiming at modernizing Arabic grammar and pedagogy, as well as Islamic legal works aiming at providing an Islamic legal base for the valorization of creativity, or ijtihad, away from taqlid, imitation of the tradition. In short, the encounter with Europe stimulated Arab cultural revival, a stimulation which would be retroactively described in later ideological literature as an alienating shock.
Tahtawi was not a “secular” figure, except that he would be celebrated as one later. He received traditional education and certification from Al-Azhar Islamic University. One of his official functions was to be an Imam, a religious leader, in Diwan Jihadiya, or the Ministry of Jihad, for its missions to Europe. The Ministry of Jihad of 19th century Egypt was responsible for the Egyptian military, public works, education of the state bureaucracy, and other functions and regularly employed European experts and non-Muslim bureaucrats. It was an official state institution and not the current Che-styled endeavor. In his description of Europe, Tahtawi’s focus was centered entirely around the issue of knowledge and the conditions needed for acquiring, verifying, and modifying it, including the authority of evidence. His book on Paris, as he wrote, aimed to instill in his Egyptian audience the love of knowledge, curiosity, and creativity, characteristics he repeatedly praised in Parisians. However, he also left much social commentary on the life of the French, men and women, private and public. His commentary is a far cry from the pathological obsessions with the demonization of the West, which became a stable feature of Arabic and Muslim literature a century later. There were no conspiracy theories or antisemitic remarks about the Jews living in Paris. He did think that having ancient Egyptian artifacts in Paris amounted to theft, but he did not exaggerate or sermonize.
If Tahtawi had any fish to fry, it was obviously with the Turks, which he constantly used for unfavorable comparisons. He did not show any passionate animus towards the French. His commentary about their own social life was primarily made in the tone of the disinterested observer. However, he passionately praised them for their love of knowledge and their warmth to strangers, and he was bewildered by the rapid changes in their style and fashion. He did, however, criticize their loose sexual mores, which he did not see as a threat to civilization but as part of the eccentricities of the French. In one playful, snarky remark, Tahtawi pondered over the fact that French women had no problem exposing their arms but were careful always to cover their legs despite the fact that “their legs are not that great, to begin with.” Given the historical context, we should have a very positive assessment of what he left us.
Tahtawi should be a role model for all men and women interested in knowledge and its transfer between cultures and societies. His cool-headed temperament, his appreciation of the other, and his openness to the world harmoniously coupled with a love for his people, his culture, and the place from which he came are remarkable virtues that we should all admire. In one part, Tahtawi responded to the repeated inquiries he gets from many people, presumably Egyptian Muslims, about the women in France. To which he responded, “We already explained that. But to summarize, when it comes to the modesty of women, the complications originate not in the difference between covering them or exposing them, but in the difference between good or bad upbringing, and the commitment to only one man, not being unfaithful in marital love, and the harmony between the couple.” Tahtawi himself seems to have lived his own advice, signing a prenuptial agreement in which he committed not to marry any other woman but his one wife.
This is not just one single example from history. The century after, Tahtawi left a wealth of Arabic literature, passionately trying to stimulate Arab cultural and intellectual life with borrowings from Europe. However, what we want to examine in Tahtawi’s literature is the question of history. In the introduction to The Extraction of Gold, Tahtawi dedicated nearly five pages to what we may call universal history, with which he prefaced his explanation of the reasons for his travels to Paris. He traced human history starting from an early “naive” and “natural” man who knew nothing but “inner things.” This man started to accumulate knowledge. He learned how to cook his food, make his clothes, and forge weapons. Then, he learned how to build ships and other structures, leading him to become more organized and build cities and states. This man then moved to systematic scientific knowledge of arts, crafts, and logic. Tahtawi then moved through the eras of empires and kings until he reached the current age occupied by less civilized nations and highly civilized nations, a group on top of which are the Europeans but also Egypt, the Moors, Yemen, and other Muslim and non-Muslim nations.
Interestingly, Tahtawi did not think about the West and Islam, but he spoke about the lands of “Egypt, the Levant, Yemen, the Geeks, the Persians, the Franks, Snar, and America.” Some of those words are territorial signifiers, and some are ethnic groups. Tahtawi did not speak about Islam as an abstract historical totality or as a total civilization. The historical account he gave does have an underlying implicit principle of progress, never explicitly stated, achieved through not consecutive epochs but the positive gradual accumulation of knowledge. In Tahtawi’s abbreviated universal history, the progress of universal humanity was identical to learning not through any “unfolding” but the accumulation of empirical knowledge. The conspicuous positivist meaning of such treatment was indeed present, albeit modestly, in classical Islamic texts, yet without ever fully developing into a philosophy of history or of progress. Tahtawi’s treatment itself is almost certainly not a result of classical Islamic learning but the heavy positivist French influence and the French developmental history common in the writings of Montesquieu and Voltaire and to which he was exposed through his regular interactions with French scientists. Moreover, the perspective is entirely retrospective. There was no attempt to speculate on the future or predict it because a concern with the history of the future was totally absent. Until that moment in time, the idea of a history of the future did not exist in Arab literature, and history was a domain exclusively of the past. I do not believe that anything here merits talking about a philosophy of history, and if we must, it most definitely will not be a Hegelian one.
Ibn Khaldun’s History
Another work that may have influenced Tahtawi’s historical thinking is the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun. This work rose to prominent cultural significance with the rise of modern ideologies in the Middle East, made by some to be a Hegel before Hegel or a Marx before Marx. Sati’ al-Husri, one of the most prestigious ideologues of Arab Nationalism, named his own son Khaldun. Born in Tunis, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was an orthodox Sunni thinker, author, and law professor who, in the 13th century, received classical Islamic education and certification in Islamic law and other Islamic sciences. His central status was acquired through his 7-volume encyclopedic work of universal history, known as the History of Ibn Khaldun, or in its full title as The Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events in the History of the Arabs and the Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries. The well-known Muqaddimah, a word that means introduction in Arabic, is only the first volume of the work in which, in a remarkably almost modern way, Ibn Khaldun lays the insights from his historical investigations about the life cycles of states, dynasties, and conditions in which groups gain and then ultimately lose power. Given the rising salience of the philosophy of history, it's perfectly understandable that Ibn Khaldun turned out to be such a significant figure in the 20th century. Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah discussions even introduced the abstract term assabiyah, social solidarity. His work came to be rightfully recognized as an earlier form of sociology and even a philosophy of History. But was it really?
Was Ibn Khaldun after the single causal law of all history? To this question, the answer is the title of the book itself; he was seeking “lessons” from “events.” Ibn Khaldun, a certified Islamic law professor, was an orthodox Sunni legalist known for his stern views of the law. Given what he understood by the concept of law and that he scholarly understood and practiced Islamic divine law, then it is highly doubtful and entirely unsubstantiated that he would have attempted to produce a law of history or extrapolate meaning from history. If we transpose the traditionalist classical Islamic conception of law onto his work, what we get is an empirical generalization identifying trends and not laws, not of history in the abstract, but of political history in a very narrow sense. In addition, Ibn Khaldun’s work was never understood to be of traditional significance to Islamic learning establishments. Until the late 19th century, Ibn Khaldun was not part of the classical canon taught at the most prestigious Islamic learning centers. When Muhammad Abduh, the central modernizing figure in the generation after Tahtawi, tried to introduce Ibn Khaldun’s work into the curriculum of al-Azhar University, it was rejected and dismissed by the rector because “it was not the tradition.” In Arab Islamic scholarship, Ibn Khaldun did not become what he is today before the 20th century after his work was printed for the first time, thanks to the efforts of Tahtawi in the middle of the 19th century in Egypt. The people who read Ibn Khaldun were the ruling Ottoman elite and state officials in Istanbul.
The fact that Ibn Khaldun was not considered part of the traditional curricula of Islamic learning institutions should not be passed casually. Religious authorities clearly did not see historical or political works as a source of religious meaning or significance. This shows that such religious institutions had a clear implicit distinction between the religious and lay in which political history belonged to the latter and not the former. An examination of what was in Islamic curricula until the late 19th century reveals traditional Islamic sciences of grammar, scripture, law, prophetic literature, and a large amount of Sufi literature of the tabaqat, a distinct biographical genre of Sufi saints.
The reason Ibn Khaldun’s work mattered to Ottoman elites was that it, as the title said, dealt with “Powerful” nations and dynasties. It did not deal with epochs or an abstract totalizing conception of Islam, a totalizing conception of an Islamic nation, or a totalizing conception of history, and it did not seek meaning but primarily dealt with political questions of power in the hands of concrete ruling dynasties. There was no epochal consciousness but a dynastic political history. In this, we can say that the five pages on universal history left by Tahtawi in 1828 contained more universal history than the seven volumes left by Ibn Khaldun. There was no universal metanarrative of history, nor did it contain a conception of the history of a future. Just like Tahtawi was thinking centuries later, for Ibn Khaldun, history was a discipline of things that had happened. In his introduction, Ibn Khaldun stated that his primary concern was to address the accuracy deficit of his less scrupulous predecessors. It follows from this that he believed he was working within an established historiographical tradition of the annals genre and not starting the philosophy of universal history, which claimed to find meaning in the “unfolding” events of history. Like many of his predecessors, he produced lessons from the events of the past, which allowed him to identify social tendencies, a practice that is as ancient as literature, developing into brilliant and insightful understandings of moral laws, not of history, but of socio-political change governed by a principle, not of historically determined progress, but of the morally determined cyclicality of political rise and fall due to the inevitable corruption of men. According to Ibn Khaldun, the differential that allows a new nomadic group to overtake the old decaying imperial dynasty is the wild and tough nature of the former and the soft and decadent nature of the latter. No one was actively making history or making historical epochs. The principle belongs entirely to the moral-political sphere. Moreover, those laws, if we must call them that, were not derived from a single and unitary idea of total history but from recognizing the causes of many akhbar, or Events in the History of the Arabs and the Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries. The brilliance and genius of Ibn Khaldun were not in inventing a fictitious philosophy of history but in his recognition of something akin to early positivist sociology or political science, which did not know “Islam” as an abstract historical total category but as a concrete religion in the traditional sense while recognizing the role of geography, climate, and subsistence in social life. This should not undermine our appreciation of Ibn Khaldun but allow us to think of his work in a better light.
There is another work of Muslim historiography which merits examination. The three-volume work is the History of al-Jabarti, authored by Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1753-1825), which he wrote late in his life and acquired significant importance since it was written on the cusp of major Arab cultural transformations and can be considered one of the last major Arabic works which decisively belong in their style to the pre-modern scholastic world. What made it an even more crucial historical work is that it documented, from an Egyptian point of view, the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt of 1798 and the subsequent rise of the ruler who later sent Tahtawi on his mission to Paris, Muhammad Ali Pasha, who is considered to be the founder of modern Egypt. Most importantly, Jabarti was a contemporary of Hegel, and both produced their works during the same time, and both experienced a Napoleonic invasion. However, unlike Hegel, Jabarti did not see a “world Spirit on horseback” but saw a mighty army of foreign invaders who really brought new curious things with them but whom Egyptians could not wait to expel.
Like in the case of Ibn Khaldun, with whom Jabarti seemed to have been familiar, the book was titled, albeit less modestly, The Awesome Compositions of Biographies and Events. For Jabarti, history has no meaning but “benefit in learning about these [past] conditions, taking warnings from them, and acquiring wisdom from knowing the vicissitudes of time, so a wise man may avoid the fate of those who perished from former nations, learn from their good deeds, avoid their bad utterances, and not cling to what is ephemeral and aim for the eternal.” For traditional religious men, meaning is sought in sacred religious history and not the history of international banditry and thievery. Moreover, Jabarti’s history included the biographies of many prominent Sufi figures and leaders of mystical orders whom Jabarti seemed to have revered. Lastly, Jabarti’s contempt for the French did not prevent him from admiring their advanced ways. He left a detailed account of the French tribunal held in 1800 for the assassin of a French general, and he admired the due legal process in which the young rebel was given a French lawyer to defend him and advocate on his behalf. Jabarti was so impressed by such due process that he copied all the transcripts of the court proceedings in his work.
Jabarti’s indignation from being ruled by French infidels, whom he deeply resented, did not result in a pathological theology of hatred or moral nihilism. It did not cause him to view things in light of a universal historic showdown between the forces of a total metaphysical “Islam” and a total abstract “Christendom.” There was no universal metanarrative of eternal Crusaders versus Jihad or a sense of historical victimhood. Many of the riots against the French, later to be described as resistance to imperialism by Western scholars, were often recognized by Jabarti as chaotic outbursts of banditry and turmoil, which Jabarti did not seem to view positively and which the religious authorities of Cairo constantly tried to cooperate with the French in ending. Only a revolutionary ideologue who does not understand religious thought would accuse such Islamic religious authorities of being corrupt tools of domination. They were acting on behalf of the principles of Islamic law that provide a hierarchy of values that prioritizes the values of preserving religion, life, and property. According to their logic, if a riot against the French was going to cause more loss of religion, life, and property than the presence of the French, then it was not desirable. That does not mean they did not view violence against the French as legitimate. Jabarti recorded that some religious authorities stirred armed efforts themselves but often retreated from their positions once they saw the amount of destruction caused with no good outcome and worked with the French authorities to restore order. Moreover, only two decades after the French evacuated Egypt, Tahtawi did not show any sign he held a sense of victimhood or grudge against the French for the timeless colonialist, imperialist endeavor.
To summarize, we can see that in the 19th century, the most prominent center of Arab Sunni learning, Cairo, a city that would come to dominate Arab mass and high cultures in the 20th century, there was no philosophical view that saw meaning in history, no idealism, no metanarratives, no abstract and total historical Islam, and no dichotomous or Manichean worldviews of an abstract and total West. We see the beginning of a notion of progress that is developmental, French, and positivist in origin, with an interest in learning and no obsession with international relations. The primary driver for Tahtawi’s generation, still traditionally pious, was not the loss of authenticity, a philosophical word that did not even exist in Arabic then, but the motivation to acquire knowledge. They had their virtues and their flaws, but they were a far cry from the later generations of Arab intellectuals we will discuss later on. Without romanticizing them, we can affirm that there were no sentiments of existential angst or siege. There was no air of revolt irritated by frightening total threats or mass politics. The mass phenomenon, the mass worship of politics, and the mass obsession with history have not been born yet. This line of cool-headed intellectual development continued up until the 1940s, and it is the one called the Arab “liberal age.” Without dwelling on it for long, it produced some of the most influential real Arab critical works, which led to real positive social changes in the Arab world. Qassim Amin’s Liberation of Women (1899) had a major effect on the change in women’s conditions, Abdulrahman al-Kawakibi’s The Nature of Despotism (1890), which for the first time brought Muslim despotism into public attention, Ali Abdel Raziq’s Islam and Governance (1925) which helped advance a secular conception of the state and paved the way for secular nation-states, and Taha Hussein’s On Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926) which was the beginning of modern literary criticism of the Islamic tradition. These works were not noncontroversial, but they were not just possible but socially transformative. During their pre-mass media time, the value of these works was far more significant than books published today. If we find a metric to measure the value of Western-educated intellectuals in less developed societies suffering from educational scarcity, we will find that those were significantly high in cost, investment, and effect.
This intellectual world was also open to disproportionate contributions from Arab Christian and Jewish intellectuals, women included, whose communities had a significantly higher rate of literacy and education than Muslims. This world of open culture continued until the Second World War when a new revolutionary progressive Arab culture emerged, eradicated the former, and established its hegemony in the age of mass culture, obsessively centering itself on the struggle against capitalism, the West and Israel, transforming the local culture in the process. The Jews were exiled, intellectuals like Taha Hussein were discredited, and the Christians were gradually excluded. In the process, the cultural war transformed entire societies. It dissolved traditional religious thought into revolutionary thought that is pathologically antisemitic, led to the gradual erosion of the moral foundation of Middle Eastern societies, reversed all the progress that had been achieved, and created a Middle East that is centered around dysfunctional, violent, and absolutist Arab republics with the moral support of the international left allied in a mission against Western “colonialism” and “imperialism.” This is a historical development that must be examined.
The Birth of History
It is likely that the first formal Arabic introduction of the Enlightenment’s concept of the philosophy of History happened at the hand of American Orientalist Harvey Porter. Porter (1844-1923) arrived in Beirut in 1870 and immediately joined the faculty of the newly founded Syrian Protestant College, currently known as the American University of Beirut, as a professor of History and Philosophy. In 1881, he published the first clear Arabic work explaining the philosophy of history in the form of a long essay. In the essay titled Philosophy of History, he explained to his readers with great clarity the difference between the pre-Enlightenment tradition of historiography and the modern philosophy of History. He opened his essay by saying, “The true science of history, that which is called Philosophy of History, is a recent discipline compared to history in general…. To define this new science precisely is a very difficult task, but we can say that it is the summary and essence of history discovered through speculating its purpose. Most [writers] believe that history is the narration of events truthfully and objectively… their science of history is the news of the rise of kingdoms and the fall of dynasties… this kind of historiography is flawed…what is the use of learning the history of the rise and fall of the Romans and the details of their lives? The purpose of the philosophy of History is much more. Its sphere includes the totality of events with their subjects and objects to uncover the essence of things.”