Definition of Certainty

The term qat is from the Arabic root qa-ta-^ra, which is literally translated as ‘to cut off' or ‘to chop off.'3 In legal theory, it is used in a technical sense and hence the Usulr definition of qat notably differs from its etymological lit­eral meaning.

2 An⅛⅞r⅛,FaiOttdal-usul, 1'.2discussions centred around the existential nature of cer­tainty can be found in Kamal Haydarrs al-Qat^r. Haydari notes that Usfilis concur that the nature of certainty consists of two salient properties. The first prop­erty is of disclosure (kashfiyya), according to which, certainty qua certainty always discloses objective reality (inkishaf al-waqi^f).

10 Muzalfar, Usul al-Fiqh, 2:29.

11 An¾⅛ FaraM,a,--usUl, corresponds with, or paves a path ('tarlq) to, objective reality He explains that Usulrs regard the relationship between certainty and its salient proper­ties as being essential (dhati).i3 To explain this further, he cites the fact that Muslim logicians and philosophers normally define a human being (insari) as a rational animal (al-haywan al-natiq), whose existential nature consists of the salient properties of rationality (natiqiyya) and animality (haywanijya). These properties establish the actual existence of a human being, and thus when a human qua human is created, the properties of rationality and animality are inescapably created with it, to the extent that if one of the two properties sup­posedly ceases to exist then a human being cannot be defined as a human being. Likewise, he explains that as soon as (or whenever) certainty is created, it is created with its essential properties of disclosure and correspondence. Its existence can never be devoid of these properties, for if it is then certainty cannot be defined as certainty qua certainty. 14 In line with this understanding, Haydari suggests that Usulis process what Ansari means when he states that certainty's “path cannot be affirmed or negated by the Divine Lawgiver.” They maintain that due to its existential nature, if it is supposed that God (or the Divine Lawgiver) negates even one of its two essential properties, then it would mean that certainty ceases to exist altogether. At this juncture, it is important to clarify that in contrast to certainty, Usulis uphold that the properties of disclosure and correspondence are not essential to the existential nature of conjecture.15 As such, they maintain that if God wants, He can affirm or negate these properties to conjecture. If He negates them (i.e., through scripture and reason) then, as shown in the previous chapters, conjecture cannot be deemed authoritative.

12 See Kama Haydarq a--Qat Drat Iqtjjtyyatlit wa aqsarntlit wa a⅛kamr--lιt, AO', for instance, also see Khurasani, kifaya, 263: Na'ini, FawaHd, 3:10-18; 'Araqi, Maqalat, 2:24: Isfahani, Nihayat al-diraya, 3:18, 392: Muzaltar, Usul al-fiqh, 2:28.

13 Haydari, al-Qat', 110.

14 It is important to note that apart from claiming that the relationship between certainty and the properties of disclosure and correspondence is essential, Haydari points out that it is also possible for one to say that these properties are necessarily correlated to the essence of certainty (lawazim al-dhat al-qat^e). This sort of relationship implies that the properties of disclosure and correspondence always come into existence whenever cer­tainty exists, but they do not define the very existence of certainty. For instance, it is like the relationship that exists between the number four and evenness or the relationship that exists between a human being and laughter. Although the properties of evenness or laughter do not respectively define the existence of number four or a human being, when­ever ‘four' exists, it exists with the property of ‘evenness': likewise, whenever a ‘human' exists, it exists with the property of ‘laughter.' Ibid.

15 1.,11.

chapter, conjecture (or evidence that generates conjecture) can be deemed authoritative, for according to God it discloses and corresponds with objective reality.

Based on the abovementioned analysis, it is possible to contend that it is incorrect to analogise the realm of creation (alam al-takwτnτ) with the realm of legalisation (alam al-tashrτ^cτ). In other words, just because it is not conceiv­able to separate the properties of disclosure and correspondence from cer­tainty in the realm of creation, it does not mean that they cannot be separated in the realm of legislation. It is plausible that in the realm of legislation an omnipotent Divine Lawgiver (or God) has the power to exploit laws of legisla­tion irrespective of how they are created in the realm of creation.

Nevertheless, although Usulis expound that the existential nature of cer­tainty comprises the properties of disclosure and correspondence, they do not always consider instances when it fails to accurately disclose and correspond

16 Ibid.; For instance, also see Muzaffar, Usul al-fiqh, 2:21-3; Isfahani, Nihayat al-diraya, 3:19.

Those who say that correspondence (tarlqiyya) and disclosure (kashifyya) are from the essentialities (dhatiyat) of certainty (qaf') and not through the postulation (ja^cT) of a postulator (ja^cil), [do so] because there can­not be a real synthetic [or composite] postulation (al-ja^,l al-tallfi) between an object and its essentialities... [Therefore,] an object can­not be removed or be separated from its essentialities. [However,] it is found that certainty is sometimes accurate and sometimes inaccurate. Thus, how is it possible to assert that [properties of] correspondence and disclosure are amongst the essentialities of certainty? It can be said that this [i.e., disclosure and reflection being essential properties of certainty] is only true from the [subjective] perspective of a person who possesses certainty (qati^f))7

Khumayni asserts that disclosure and correspondence are not essential prop­erties of certainty. He clarifies that Usfilis usually only describe them as essen­tial to justify Ansarrs claim that it is obligatory to follow certainty so long as it is existent.]« In his discussion, Khumaynr gives the impression that even though his Usfilr predecessors and contemporaries have sometimes utilised philosophical jargoning and typologies to explain concepts specific to legal theory, they have not delved deeper to consider their complete ramifications.

17 See KhumaynI, Tahdhlb, 2:8.

18 Ibid., 2:7-8.

19 and correspondence are essential properties of certainty, Khumayni simply explains that when certainty exists, a rational person who possesses it nec­essarily follows and acts in accordance with it because they believe with utmost conviction that it discloses and corresponds to objective reality.20 Like Khumayni, it is found that Khu’i in Misbah al-usul also opines that the remit of legal theory is exclusively concerned with establishing the authoritativeness of certainty in ijtihad, as opposed to discussing its existential nature. He thus proposes that issues ('masa^,il) related to its existential nature are debated in another discipline and are merely taken as basic assumptions within the dis­course of legal theory.21 However, it is important to note that Khb'i does not identify what exact discipline Usulis borrow, or ought to borrow, their assump­tions regarding the existential nature of certainty from.

Nonetheless, in response to Khumayni, Haydari in al-Qat^r attempts to take on the laborious task of justifying the prominent Usuli stance regarding the existential nature of certainty. He dwells deeper within the discourses of phi­losophy and logic and uses categorisations and typologies discussed therein to establish that certainty comprises the essential properties of disclosure and correspondence and thereby always accurately depicts objective reality. He starts by making a distinction between two types of knowledge, present knowledge (’ilm al-hudun) and acquired knowledge (’ilm al-husulτ).22 The former refers to knowledge a person attains without any mediation, such as the knowledge of their own being or the knowledge of ‘I am,' whilst the latter refers to knowledge a person attains through mediation after they cognise the external world. Haydari then explains that acquired knowledge is grasped by the mind of a person as 1) a concept (tasawwur), wherein the mind simply captures the immaterial form (sura) of an external object without its mate­rial or physical properties, or 2) an assent (tasdτq), wherein the mind assigns a judgment or a truth-value to the immaterial form of the external reality that it has captured.23 To further clarify the difference between concept and assent and how they are used within the Muslim discourses of logic and philosophy, Deborah L Black articulates that:

Conceptualization is the act of the mind by which it grasps singu­lar (though not necessarily simple) essences or quiddities, such as the concept of ‘human being'. Assent [tasdτq], by contrast, is the act of the

20 1.,2.'.¾.

21 Kh-⅛1, M⅛te⅛af-u⅞i⅛i.A.

22 Haydari, al-Qat’, 114.

23 Ibtd.. intellect whereby it makes a determinate judgment to which a truth-value can be assigned; in fact, conceptualization is defined in Islamic philoso­phy principally by contrast with assent. Thus, any act of knowledge that does not entail the assignment of a truth-value to the proposition that corresponds to it will be an act of conceptualization alone, not assent. More specifically, the Islamic philosophers link assent to the affirmation or denial of the existence of the thing conceived, or to the judgment that it exists in a certain state, with certain properties. Thus, assent presup­poses some prior act of conceptualization, although conceptualization does not presuppose assent. 24

The distinction between concept and assent allows Haydari to assert that acquired knowledge (or our knowledge of anything external to ourselves) can only be ascribed with a judgment of accuracy or inaccuracy at the level of assent and not at the level of concept He elaborates by giving an example of a proposition ‘a thief entered into a house,' which he points out is built of two components, a subject (mawdu^f) - ‘a thief' - and a predicate (mahmul) - ‘entered into a house.' He claims that the mind primarily grasps the subject and predicate as individual concepts through its faculty of sense perception, wherein sensory organs send messages to the mind enabling it to individually cognise the immaterial form or attributes of 1) a ‘thief,' and 2) the action of ‘entering into a house.' At this stage, because knowledge of the subject and the predicate exist as individual concepts, the mind cannot assent to them and thus assign a judgment of accuracy or inaccuracy. 26 In other words, the mind cannot judge whether a ‘thief' qua ‘thief' is accurate or inaccurate, and likewise it cannot judge whether the action of ‘entering into a house' qua ‘entering into a house' is accurate or inaccurate. Haydari notes that because the mind repeat­edly grasps the individual immaterial attributes of the subject and the predi­cate, they become present within it in an unmediated exact manner (or as dm al-huduri), whereby a person no longer needs to grasp the external world to know their immaterial forms. For example, if someone repeatedly perceives a chicken through their sensory organs, then their mind starts to acquire knowl­edge of the chicken, whereby its attributes (such as its appearance, smell, sound etc.) become immaterially present within their mind. Once present, they have unmediated knowledge of the concept of a chicken, insofar as even

24 Deborah L. Black, “Logic in Islamic Philosophy” in Edward Craig (ed.) Routledge Encyclo­pedia ofPhilosophy, 10 vols. (London: Routledge, 1998), 5:706-13.

25 Haydari, al-Qμt', 114-15.

26 1.,119-20.

if they do not physically perceive the chicken again, their mind possesses an exact depiction of it. Therefore, Haydari claims that because knowledge of the subject and the predicate (or for that matter, anything that is conceptualised through sense perception) exists within the mind in an unmediated manner, it can never be prone to error. Instead, he suggests that judgments of accuracy and inaccuracy only occur when the mind forms an association between two and more concepts it possesses by formulating a mental proposition that it can assent to. As such, the mind can form an association between its conception of a 'thief' and its conception of the act of ‘entering into a house' by formulating the proposition ‘a thief entered into a house.' Once it forms this mental propo­sition, it can assent or assign a judgment (or a truth-value) of how accurate or inaccurate the proposition is.27

Haydari then expounds that if it is found that in objective reality the mental proposition ‘a thief entered into the house' is in fact inaccurate, and instead the accurate proposition is ‘your brother entered into the house,' then in such a case the error specifically relates to the subject as opposed to the predicate of the proposition. He explains that this happens because the mind mistakes the ‘brother' to be the ‘thief,' as it fails to differentiate between the attributes of the ‘brother' and the attributes of the ‘thief,' due to them being the same.28 For instance, they may both have the same height and built, wear the same clothes, have the same style or manner of entering the house etc. Considering this, Haydari points out that at the level of conception, the mind possesses accurate knowledge of 1) the ‘thief,' 2) the ‘brother,' and 3) the act of ‘entering into the house.' However, at the level of assent, the mind falsely formulates a mental proposition in which it conjoins the concept of a ‘thief,' instead of a ‘brother,' with the concept of ‘entering into the house.' Haydari explains that this happens because its faculty of imagination intervenes with, and thereby, overpowers, its faculty of sense perception.29

Nevertheless, by citing this example, Haydari concludes that the mind (or knowledge/disclosure that we possess in our minds) always accurately corre­sponds to the external world (or objective reality) at the level of conception.

27 1.,-21-.

28 It must be noted that the inaccuracy cannot only come in the mind with regards to the subject (mawdff). It is possible for one to be mistaken about the predicate (mahmul) as well. For instance, in the example of “a thief entered the house,” in such a case a person can make a mistake with regards to the predicate, and thus conclude that “a thief entered the house,” whereas in objective reality the true proposition is that “a thief passed by the house.” Therefore, the subject in this case is accurate, rather it is the predicate that is mis­taken Ibid-

29 Ibld.,122.

The possibility of inaccuracy only occurs when it imaginatively formulates mental propositions at the level of assent. Considering this, he counters the criticism raised by Khumayni by responding that when UsulIs claim that cer­tainty accurately discloses and corresponds to objective reality, they do so at the level of conception, where the mind is able to acquire accurate knowledge through its faculty of sense perception.30 Therefore, if, for example, a person has certainty that ‘grass is brown,' then although this may not be accurate in objective reality, at the level of their conception it is, because their mind pos­sesses accurate knowledge of the concept of ‘grass' and the concept of ‘brown' and both correspond to objective reality.

2. IjaytltsAssumpo

It is apparent from HaydarI's defence of the majority UsulI position concern­ing the existential nature of certainty, that it itself relies on the epistemologi­cal assumption that the mind's faculty of sense perception is always accurate in cognising external reality (or objective reality) at the level of conception. However, it is important to know that the accuracy of sense perception and its reliability as a source of knowledge has been subjected to much scrutiny within western philosophy. In a recent publication entitled Epistemology: contempo­rary readings, Michael Huemer and Robert Audi provide a comprehensive anthology that surveys classical and contemporary positions on epistemology. The publication presents perception as one of the significant themes of episte­mology and shows that renowned western philosophers, including John Locke (d. 1704), George Berkeley (d. 1753), David Hume (d. 1776), Bertrand Russell (d. 1970), and A. J. Ayer (d. 1989) have thoughtfully raised important ques­tions that downplay its ability in accurately disclosing the external world.31 Although the epistemological discussions therein are outside the depths of my expertise, a common problem presented concerns errors in perception caused by the phenomena of perceptual illusions and hallucinations. For instance, the problem with sense perception is perhaps most candidly articulated in the fol­lowing passage:

Most people have noticed that vision can play tricks. A straight stick sub­merged in water looks bent, though it is not; railroad tracks seem to con­verge in the distance, but they do not; and a page of English-Ianguage print reflected in a mirror cannot be read from left to right, though in all other circumstances it can. Each of those phenomena is misleading in

30 1.,12¾.

31 Huemer, Epistemology, 27-31. some way. Anyone who believes that the stick is bent, that the railroad tracks converge, and so on is mistaken about how the world really is.

Although such anomalies may seem simple and unproblematic at first, deeper consideration of them shows that just the opposite is true. How does one know that the stick is not really bent and that the tracks do not really converge? Suppose one says that one knows that the stick is not really bent because when it is removed from the water, one can see that it is straight. But does seeing a straight stick out of water provide a good reason for thinking that when it is in water, it is not bent? Suppose one says that the tracks do not really converge because the train passes over them at the point where they seem to converge. But how does one know that the wheels on the train do not converge at that point also? What justifies preferring some of those beliefs to others, especially when all of them are based upon what is seen? What one sees is that the stick in water is bent and that the stick out of water is straight. Why, then, is the stick declared really to be straight? Why, in effect, is priority given to one perception over another?

One possible answer is to say that vision is not sufficient to give knowl­edge of how things are. Vision needs to be “corrected" with information derived from the other senses. Suppose then that a person asserts that a good reason for believing that the stick in water is straight is that when the stick is in water, one can feel with one's hands that it is straight. But what justifies the belief that the sense of touch is more reliable than vision? After all, touch gives rise to misperceptions just as vision does. For example, if a person chills one hand and warms the other and then puts both in a tub of lukewarm water, the water will feel warm to the cold hand and cold to the warm hand. Thus, the difficulty cannot be resolved by appealing to input from the other senses.32

This passage clearly establishes the shortcomings of sense perception. As such, it is possible to contend that if the first step involved in cognising the exter­nal and attaining knowledge of it can be flawed, then this necessarily implies that concepts (or the immaterial forms) of things present in our minds cannot always be relied on. Accordingly, this sheds doubt on Haydarrs claim regarding the accuracy of certainty at the level of conception. Although Haydarr does not provide a response to, nor does he consider, the problems with sense percep­tion, it is possible to take recourse to the seminarian discourse of philosophy

32 Martinich and Stroll, “Epistemology". to get an idea of how Muslim philosophers may respond to the problems of sense perception.

It is important to emphasise at this juncture that from the medieval period of 'Allama Hilli up to the present day, Usuli scholars have continually shown a keen interest in the study of philosophy and logic. Most traditional Shi'ite sem­inaries insist on completing an intermediary course in these disciplines prior to taking advanced classes in legal theory. At an intermediary (sutuh) level, students are usually required to complete Muzaffars treatise on logic, entitled al-Mantiq; together with Muhammad Husayn al-Tabataba'i's treatise on phi­losophy, entitled Bidayat al-Hikma and Nihayat al-Hikma. After completing these texts, students who wish to pursue further and specialise in Islamic phi- kosophy normaAy Lakeacoursefn al-A^sJ^^r al-A^ι^ba'a∫i'l-H'ιk^mc^t al-Muta'dliyya of Sadr al-Din Shirazi (d. 1640). Situated in Safavid Iran, Sadr al-Din Shirazi (more famously known as Mulla Sadra) is described as the single most impor­tant and influential Muslim philosopher in the last four hundred years.33 His major contribution to Muslim philosophy was his instigation of transcendent theosophy (Hikmat al-Muta^caliyya), wherein he attempted to fuse together the discourses of philosophy, theology, mysticism, and scriptural exegesis. Recent academic works highlight that Mulla Sadra's holistic approach to philosophy, together with his rather successful synthesis between the different discourses, has had a significant influence in shaping the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the orthodox Shi'ite Usuli thought.34 For instance, Tabataba'i, who, apart from being an Usuli jurist and an astute teacher of philosophy, is also renowned for his voluminous commentary on Mulla Sadra's al-Asfar, upholds that the denial of sense perception effectively leads to scepticism and the denial of the possibility of ever acquiring any kind of knowledge. In his Bidayat al-Hikma, Tabataba'i responds to sceptics who fault the erroneous nature of sense perception by asserting:

if perception is assumed to be incapable of revealing the reality tran­scending it, where does this knowledge come from that there does exist such a reality beyond perception, a reality which perception fails to reveal? Who has cognized that external sound consists of vibrations of a certain frequency and visible light has such and such a frequency in external reality? Does man discover the real external facts except through

33 For instance, see John Cooper, "Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi)”, 6:595-9: Ziai, “Mulla Sadra: His Life and Works”, 1125.

34 Paya, Islam, Modernity and a New Millennium, 175-84: Rizvi, “Only the Imam Knows Best: The Maktab-e Taflak's Attack on the Legitimacy of Philosophy in Iran” 487-503. the faculties of perception, the same external facts in perceiving which the senses make errors? In view of what has been said above, the sugges­tion that perception may not conform absolutely to what lies beyond it only amounts to a denial of the possibility of knowledge.35

Tabataba'! impresses the notion that by denying the accuracy of sense percep­tion one denies the possibility of acquiring knowledge, and if a sceptic admits that the acquisition of knowledge is impossible then they end up entangling themselves in a fallacious argument. This is because by admitting to being a sceptic, one admits to having knowledge of some kind (i.e., knowledge of their scepticism) and thus such a person ends up contradicting themselves.36 Therefore, it can be suggested that Tabatabar's (or the seminarian-Sadrian) philosophical outlook justifies Haydarrs assumption that sense perception is always accurate in cognising the external world and defends his assertion that at the level of conception acquired knowledge via our sensory organs always discloses and corresponds to objective reality.

3