Review

Reviewed Work(s): God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason by John Walbridge
Review by: Khaled El-Rouayheb
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society , Vol. 132, No. 1 (January-March 2012),
pp. 161-164
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7817/jameroriesoci.132.1.0161

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 Reviews of Books 161

the Topics, Tails, Themes, and Rhemes. At the same time, however, the general linguist who does not
know Arabic will have great difficulty in following the quotes from Sībawayhi, which are not transliter-
ated and quite often not even translated, only paraphrased. On the whole, the author would have made
things considerably easier for the reader by presenting a succinct theoretical framework together with
an accessible translated presentation of all the Arabic quotes to elucidate Kitāb Sībawayhi as a com-
municative grammar for both layperson and specialist, hence meeting the needs of both. Despite this
lack of conceptual unity, Amal Marogy’s monograph on the most important book of Arabic grammar is
nevertheless a valuable contribution to the study of (Arabic) linguistics and, together with other works
on Sībawayhi’s Kitāb, helps us to start to actually understand it.

Monique Bernards
Antwerp, Belgium

God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason. By John Walbridge. New York: Cambridge
­University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 211. $90.

Scholarship of the past fifty years on Islamic intellectual history has tended to focus on either the
early, formative period or the modern period. The intervening “post-classical” era, roughly from the
thirteenth century to the nineteenth, is therefore still largely unexplored and often the subject of ill-
informed conjecture. It has regularly been sweepingly dismissed as a period of general intellectual
and artistic “sclerosis” or “decadence,” and numerous explanations have been offered to explain this
supposed fact. The nineteenth-century French author Ernest Renan was one of the first to speculate
thus, but many modern political and religious movements in the Islamic world have been engaged in
a similar exercise. For liberal modernists, the villains responsible for “decline” are typically “obscu-
rantist,” “anti-rationalist” currents: Sufis, Ashʿarīs, or Ḥanbalī fideists. For fundamentalists (Salafīs),
the villains are typically the mystics, theologians, and philosophers who adulterated the “pure” Islam
of the pious earliest generations with Neoplatonism, Greek logic, unbridled speculation, and popu-
lar syncretistic practices. For Arab nationalists, it was typically “Mongol barbarism” and/or “Turkish
domination” that was to blame. For some secular Turkish historians, the violently puritan seventeenth-
century Ḳāḍizādeli movement led to the “triumph of fanaticism” and the end of Ottoman interest in
philosophy and natural science. Such grand narratives rest on little or no evidence and appear to tell us
more about the people making them than about the period in question.
In God and Logic in Islam John Walbridge presents a radically different “what went wrong?” nar-
rative. He argues that it is really only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the tradition of
studying the rational sciences in the Islamic colleges was weakened, giving way by and large to a much
more literalist and simplistic approach to the authoritative scriptures of the Islamic tradition, the Qurʾan
and the Sunna. The premodern assumption—as reflected in the college (madrasa) curricula in Otto-
man Turkey, Ṣafavid Iran, and Mughal India—that a student should undergo years of intensive study
of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, logic, jurisprudence, and theology (kalām) before being able to properly
understand the Islamic scriptures and to articulate legal opinions has come under intense pressure from
two directions: Westernized modernists, who typically revile the traditional colleges for being too
slow to accommodate modern concerns, and Islamic fundamentalists, who revile them for spending
too much time studying logic, rhetoric, and theology instead of focusing on the science of ḥadīth. The
weakening of traditional Islamic learning has led to an intellectual vacuum that is increasingly being
filled by a form of Islam that is crudely literalist, less tolerant of diversity in creed and practice, and
more cocksure about knowing God’s will than was common prior to the nineteenth century.
This is the main thesis of Walbridge’s book, and it is a bold one. A long line of secondary studies,
both Western and Islamic, has simply accepted at face value the self-presentation of various modern
Islamic movements that claimed to be “reviving” and “reforming” a moribund tradition. If Walbridge is
at all right, then the tradition was never as moribund as the self-styled reformers and revivers claimed.

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162 Journal of the American Oriental Society 132.1 (2012)

Instead, the modernists, reformers, and revivers were actively destroying a venerable and sophisticated
intellectual tradition while offering little besides platitudes, anti-intellectualism, and crude literalism.
This is certainly a thesis that deserves our attention.
The first part of Walbridge’s book is devoted to showing that reason played an important role in
Islamic religious life from the earliest stages. The argument is aimed in part against unsympathetic non-
Muslim observers who believe that Islam is a thoroughly irrational religion. It is also aimed at modern
Muslim fundamentalists who tend to believe that the Islamic creed and law are derived in a direct and
unproblematic way from the Qurʾan and Sunna, and that consequently disagreements on creedal and
legal matters can only be the result of willful and perverse misreading of these sources by heretics and
infidels. The legitimacy of using the term “fundamentalist” in an Islamic context has been questioned,
but Walbridge is surely right in pointing out the striking parallels between Salafism and Protestant
fundamentalism. Both emphasize the plain and literal sense of scripture and reject the authority of
tradition and precedent (unless these in turn have a secure basis in scripture). Both are markedly anti-
intellectualist and dismiss the relevance of rational disciplines such as logic, semantics, rhetoric, and
philosophy in the process of working out the creed and law. Both also tend to appeal to those with a
background in the technical and natural sciences who often import from their training an expectation
that there will be one and only one answer to any given question and who treat their scriptures as
printed textbooks. Walbridge argues that the connection between revelation and law was much more
complicated than such fundamentalists like to think. The very collection of ḥadīth involved a good
deal of sifting from a large mass of available traditions based on personal judgments concerning the
reliability of the transmitters, the notion of “reliability” being in part bound to a transmitter’s political
and sectarian allegiances. There is evidence that the precise legal import of ḥadīth as opposed to legal
precedent was contested in early Islamic law. In the earliest period, Islamic jurists recognized the living
tradition of a locality, especially of Medina, as authoritative, and only in the course of the eighth and
ninth centuries did the view that legal practices had to be based on explicit ḥadīth or the consensus of
the entire Muslim community take hold. Once formulated, this demand was difficult to argue against,
and it was widely adopted in theory. In practice, however, legal scholars continued to feel bound by
the precedent of the legal tradition to which they belonged, leading eventually to the crystallization of
the four classical schools of Sunni law.
Walbridge goes on to argue that Islamic civilizations from an early period encountered and deci-
sively repudiated a full-fledged Greek-inspired rationalism that would subordinate revelation to the
cosmology of pure reason. This school of thought—represented, for example, by al-Fārābī (d. 950),
Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185), and Averroes (d. 1198)—presented revelation as a symbolic rendering of the
eternal verities of Aristotelian philosophy in a manner comprehensible to the untutored masses. Such
claims were rejected by mainstream religious scholars such as the prominent theologian, jurist, and
mystic al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), and played a minor role in subsequent Islamic history. By contrast, the
view—akin to that of medieval Latin scholasticism —that reason could serve as a “handmaiden” for
religion gained widespread acceptance. Al-Ghazālī himself endorsed the use of Aristotelian logic in
Islamic jurisprudence and in later centuries a training in logic came to be seen as a necessary part of
the education of a jurist or theologian in most parts of the Islamic world. The “Illuminationist” thinker
al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191) worked out a synthesis of Neoplatonic philosophy and mysticism that came to
be very influential in later Iranian Shiite circles.
The second part of the book deals with the role of logic (broadly conceived) in later Islamic scho-
lastic culture. Walbridge notes the striking fact that by the early modern period madrasa students were
spending most of their time studying dense handbooks, commentaries, and glosses on grammar, logic,
dialectic, rhetoric, and the principles of jurisprudence. Students would typically commit a short but
complex handbook to memory and then have the text explicated and critically discussed by their teach-
ers. Almost every single word of the manual would be scrutinized, as attested by the numerous interlin-
ear and marginal annotations that so often appear on manuscripts and early lithographs. This scholastic
method of education has often been dismissed by modernists and fundamentalists alike, but Walbridge
makes an important point in response to this: the intensive training in logic, dialectic, rhetoric, and
jurisprudence prepared students for the intricate task of extracting law from its recognized sources,

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 Reviews of Books 163

and may have instilled in them a humility in the face of this task and a willingness to accept that there
may be a number of equally justified conclusions that can be drawn from the same legal sources. This
acknowledgment of the difficulty and uncertainty with which rulings are derived contrasts starkly with
the assumption that the “Islamic” position on an issue can be determined by simply resorting to a col-
lection of ḥadīth (apparently the avowed practice of some Pakistani lawyers today).
In the third and final part, Walbridge describes the erosion of traditional madrasa education in the
last two centuries. With the thoroughgoing educational reforms enforced by colonial administrators
or native modernizers, the madrasas came to be seen as a relic from the past whose economic back-
bone—the pious foundation (waqf)—was moreover often broken through nationalization or privatiza-
tion. Ambitious students now sought a modern education in Western-style schools. With traditional
Islamic learning in retreat, the book market became saturated with simplistic presentations of “Islam”
that pay no attention to the complexity of the derivation of legal rules or of the consequent scope for
disagreement on matters of law and creed (and hence make no mention of the various legal and theo-
logical schools that in previous times usually tolerated one another). An example of such literature is
the Islamiyat textbooks for university and college courses in Islamic studies in Pakistan. Similar crude
presentations of Islam are also characteristic of much of the literature emanating from Saudi Arabia
with its notoriously puritan and intolerant Salafī-Wahhābī interpretation of Islam. Walbridge concludes
by expressing his hope that the rational ethos of the Islamic learned tradition will be recovered. Without
this tradition, he writes, “the Qurʾān and the hadith will become nothing more than a screen on which
Muslims of various temperaments will project their own preconceptions, personal proclivities, and
prejudices” (p. 184).
Walbridge’s work is a welcome corrective to the many grand narratives of Islamic history that
lazily accept the self-presentation of various modern “reformers” and “revivers” and their denigration
of “post-classical” scholarship and traditional madrasa learning. I share Walbridge’s admiration for the
intellectual sophistication of the premodern Islamic scholarly tradition, and agree wholeheartedly that it
has been sorely misjudged in modern times by both Western and indigenous observers. I am, however,
not convinced that things have actually gone badly wrong in the Islamic world in the last two centuries.
To be sure, the disturbing presence of extremism, crude literalism, and mindless demagoguery in the
contemporary Islamic world is undeniable. However, extremism, literalism, and demagoguery did not
suddenly come into existence in modern times, and the belief that these phenomena are on the rise is
not firmly based on hard evidence; it may well be an inaccurate impression created by unprecedented
media exposure combined with a tendency to idealize the past (somewhat like the media-fed impres-
sion that violent crime is on the rise even during periods when this is demonstrably not the case). It
is misleading to compare the careful, intellectualist scholars of the past with the popular demagogues
of the present. The proper comparison is surely between past intellectuals and present intellectuals
(including figures such as ʿAbd al-Karīm Soroush, Ḥasanzāde Āmolī, Saʿīd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī, and Amīn
Aḥsan Iṣlāḥī) or between past demagogues and present demagogues. Recent studies by Muhammad
Qasim Zaman and Malika Zeghal (not discussed by Walbridge) suggest that traditionally trained Sunni
scholars in South Asia and Egypt retain considerable vitality and influence, but also that such scholars
are on the whole not especially receptive to modern liberal-humanist values. In Iran the traditional insti-
tutions of learning have retained a significant degree of continuity with the premodern past, and there,
too, the majority of religious scholars seem to be committed to the traditional rulings on blasphemy,
apostasy, and adultery that so offend modern Western sensibilities. Both Sunni and Shiite scholars fre-
quently maintain strong connections with Islamist movements and partake of these movements’ often
simplistic and demagogic discourse, perhaps in line with a long-standing scholarly tradition of address-
ing non-scholars “in accordance with their mental capacities” (ʿalā qadri ʿuqūlihim).
I am also less inclined than Walbridge to think that the idea of “reason” in the service of revelation
is sufficiently determinate in meaning to bring out the character and sophistication of the premodern
learned tradition. It seems to me unhelpful, for example, to state that Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a hero of
modern Sunni fundamentalism, “hated reason wherever it expressed itself in Islamic intellectual life”
(p. 5). Ibn Taymiyya was no incoherent madman and his works can be as argumentative as that of his
opponents. It needs to be spelled out in exactly what sense he was opposed to “reason.” Even better, we

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164 Journal of the American Oriental Society 132.1 (2012)

may need to reconsider the usefulness of an essentially contested concept whose precise sense is often
hard to pin down. To be fair, Walbridge does initially specify what he means by “reason” (pp. 16–17):
systematic resort to well-founded premises and sound argument. However, this definition is so formal
and general that it does not obviously exclude Ibn Taymiyya and his present-day Salafī admirers. It
is clear that Walbridge is invoking a richer concept of “reason”—one that he believes holds the key
to the reinvigoration of the Islamic religious tradition in the modern world. The rather thin definition
of “reason” that he actually gives is surely not sufficient for this purpose. It is much too optimistic to
think that “sound argumentation on the basis of well-founded premises” will yield specific positions
regarding, for example, the treatment of adulterers, apostates, and blasphemers, women’s rights, the
charging of interest, abortion, genetic engineering, or religious war. As the great majority of moral
philosophers from Aristotle to Bernard Williams have acknowledged, there is no prospect of supporting
one’s views on such matters with strictly rational, demonstrative arguments—at least not arguments
that would have passed muster among the logically well-trained scholars of Ottoman Turkey, Ṣafavid
Iran, and Mughal India.

Khaled El-Rouayheb
Harvard University

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