Autonomous reason’s rise to primacy in the modern West was a complicated affair.
As late as the 18th century, even European thinkers who championed the cause of reason questioned its panacean powers and dreaded its collateral liabilities.1 As fervently as Descartes insisted that accidental variations of context and substance be abandoned in favour of the exclusively abstract and decontextualized, thinkers such as the French Jesuit Gabriel Daniel questioned the authenticity of the kind of certainty the cogito ergo sum could actually deliver.2 As forcefully as Kant and the Aufklärer champions of the Enlightenment cast reason as an independent faculty insularly nested in some noumenal or mental realm, anti-Enlightenment intellectuals, such as J.
G. Hamann, pushed back, stressing the social, historical, affective and other dimensions of reason, while challenging its status as the exclusive means of knowing.3 Other objections to reason’s untrammelled authority came from Romantics, such as Fichte and Schelling, who stressed its utter inadequacy before the profound.4 Despite these challenges, however, what would eventually emerge as ‘Western modernity’ embraced reason as the preferred if not exclusive means of knowing, beyond what the senses could directly apprehend.5 This reason was autonomous and universal; and it transcended all accidents of time and place. As its own self-authenticating authority, it displaced the moral community as guarantor or umpire of the mind’s apposite use.6 Thus, insists Locke, ‘the floating of other men’s opinions in our brain makes us not one jot the more knowing’.7 Joined by the likes ofJ. S. Mill, he would scoff at ‘received propositions’ or ‘received opinions’.8 Meanwhile, Kant would condemn as a ‘simpleton’ anyone who ‘always allowed himself to be guided by other persons’.9 By contrast, he deemed originality a sign of genius.10 Knowledge, according to these men, is not a corporate entity but ‘the achievement of solitary men’.11 Stephen Toulmin characterizes this development as a move away from practical engagement in favour of epistemology.12 ‘Meaning’ in this context acquires a premium over ‘being’,13 and this casts aspersions on all forms of knowing that are grounded in tradition, authority, culture and similar modes of embodiment. This embrace of modern, autonomous reason rendered continuous progress, originality and innovativeness signatures of a proper commitment to rationality and thus civilization. This is unmistakably captured in Isaiah Berlin’s comment on Kant’s famous response to the question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’[E]nlightenment is simply the ability of men to determine their own lives, the liberation of themselves from the leading-strings of others, the fact that men become mature and determine what to do, whether it be evil or whether it be good, without leaning excessively upon authority... upon the State... upon tradition... upon any kind of established values on which the weight of moral responsibility is then squarely laid. A man is responsible for his own acts. Civilisation is maturity, maturity is self-determination — being determined by rational considerations, and not being pushed and pulled about by something or other over which we have no control, in particular by other persons.14
As the academic study of Islam reached maturity in the West in the 19th century, this autonomous, self-authenticating reason was well on its way to becoming the reigning regime of sense in the Western academy, at least ostensibly. This was not simply reason writ large, finally uncovered and laid bare in its unadulterated purity; this was essentially history normalized, internalized and then forgotten as history. Nevertheless, as the touchstone of the Western academy, this very particular understanding and valuation of reason informed the basic prism through which the study of Islam was pursued, exerting a significant impact on our understanding and valuation of Islam’s intellectual tradition.15 In this chapter, I shall compare and contrast three competing perspectives on the Islamic legal institutions of ijtihad and taqlid. I shall argue that two of these extremely influential approaches carry into their analyses Western modernity’s positive valuation of reason, as an autonomous, self-authenticating episteme, coupled with a negative valuation of mimesis,16 as a heteron- omous, historically bound means of authenticating claims to (religious) knowledge.
These polarities infuse their authors’ understanding of ijtihad and, especially, taqlid with certain biases and presuppositions that distort their actual value and function in Islamic law. Yet, while these approaches share this common point of departure in modern Western reason, this is obscured by their authors’ mutually contradictory conclusions on the question of the closing of the gate of ijtihad. By contrasting these approaches, therefore, with a third approach — my own — I hope to highlight the fact and impact of their common understanding and valuation of ‘reason’ and mimesis. Even where the influence of this modern Western perspective is ostensibly transcended, as is the case with one of these approaches, the author’s failure to acknowledge its impact on his earlier work, as well as his reading of those he critiques, leaves a number of contradictions and antinomies outstanding. In the end, the true nature of Islamic law, including taqlid and its mimetic underpinnings, remains inadequately understood.1
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