Remembering the golden age of Islam

Dr Asad Q Ahmed challenges the claim that al Ghazali heralded the intellectual decline

KARACHI: The golden age of Islam emblematises the time when sciences, economics and culture flourished in the Muslim world. The rhetoric surrounding its decline blames the works of philosopher and theologian, alGhazali.

Challenging this populist claim, Dr Asad Q Ahmed, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, associate professor, helped the audience understand the works of alGhazali.

What a newly dated early Quran tells us about Islam

Ahmed was addressing the audience at a talk titled 'Islamic Invented Golden Age and the Golden Age of Islamic Studies,' held at the Institute of Business Administration on Wednesday. His areas of expertise include post-classical Muslim intellectual history and Islamic social and religious history.

Elaborating on the narrative of the 'golden age', Ahmed spoke about the initial 400 years of Islam. "This period marked the beginning of translation movements, when many Greek, Sanskrit and other language scriptures were translated into Arabic." It was a time when the rationalist tradition was dynamic, with Muslim scholars absorbing, naturalising and appropriating the scientific traditions, he claimed.

Many popular scholars, such as alFarabi, alKindi and Ibn Sina, contributed towards the progress of science in the Islamic tradition, he added.



According to Ahmed, alGhazali is wrongly attributed as the reason behind the decline. "The narrative of decline in the post-classical period of Islam, from the 1200s to the present, is an invention of rather uninformed Orientalist scholarship."

He said that researchers have discovered that a vibrant tradition sustained well into the late 19th and 20th centuries.

"We were led to believe that during the 11th and 12th centuries, there were attacks on Islamic scientific traditions by traditionalist scholars." The chief among these traditionalist scholars was alGhazali, who is believed to have heralded the decline of the golden age, claimed Ahmed.



However, this version of history is based on a meta-historical attitude of the Orientalist scholarship in order to partly colonise, partly pitch one history against another, he pointed out. The Orientalist scholarship presents historical 'facts' that contain no analysis of detail that is found in the technical texts of the Islamic tradition, he said denouncing the credibility of such texts.

To further strengthen his argument against the so-called attacks, Ahmed quoted excerpts from alGhazali's book, 'Tahafut al-Falasifa [Incoherence of the philosophers]'. Ahmed said that alGhazali only had an issue with metaphysicians. This was due to their use of faulty logic. He then quoted alGhazali and said that there is "neither firm foundation nor perfection in the doctrine they hold. They judge in terms of surmise and supposition, without verification or certainty."

"As far as Ghazali is concerned, there is no real clash between science and religions," said Ahmed, while explaining the philosopher's stance on the topic.



He said that Ghazali believed that "when the demonstrations of rationalist disciplines differ from the pronouncements of the transmitted religious texts, the scriptural proofs have to be reinterpreted or considered unauthentic."

Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2015.