Islamic thought and the Islamic conception:
These terms have become widespread in contemporary writings, and many works have been devoted to them. Their subject is the presentation of Islam, its rulings, systems and objectives in a modern style, representing a mixture of scholarship, jurisprudence, thought, culture and philosophy that attempts to reconcile the prophetic inheritance with ancient and contemporary philosophical and intellectual schools and offer answers to the problems and challenges of the age.
There is no clear scholarly methodology for writing in these fields. Rather, such writing is subject to the “thought”, “conception” and “culture” of its authors. The more firmly an author is grounded in religious knowledge and the more disciplined he is in understanding the religious texts and deriving rulings from them, the closer he is to the truth and the further from error and aberration.[1] The reverse is also true, and is overwhelmingly more common. Most of those known for writing in this field are far from adhering to the disciplined religious methodology maintained by exegetes, jurists, muftis and renewers across the ages, either through ignorance of the sciences of the Qur’an and the Sunnah or because philosophical, intellectual, political and partisan tendencies dominate them and they suffer from an “inferiority complex” before contemporary Western civilisation.[2] Their writings have therefore contained many distortions and reinterpretations of texts and rulings and aberrant, objectionable views. These are a natural product of the attribution contained in these terms. Some who belong to this intellectual school itself have noticed this and said: “Many Islamic writers have tried to use ‘Islamic thought’ or ‘the Islamic idea’ to mean Islam.
Yet these writers, despite their merit, have unintentionally fallen into a serious error. How can divine revelation be a manifestation of human thought? Thought is a product of the mind’s perception of the existence surrounding it. Although ‘Islamic thought’ may correctly describe the products of Muslim thought that takes Islam as its starting point in all areas of life, it must never be used to denote Islam’s divine revelation, lest revelation be confused with thought.
Islam is wholly infallible, whereas Islamic thought is neither infallible nor sacred: it is open to error and correctness and to revision in its own age and in subsequent ages.
Some Islamic thinkers have tried to replace ‘Islamic thought’ with ‘the Islamic conception’, but this is an equivalent error. Conception is a purely intellectual process that admits truth and falsehood, as established in logic.[3] It cannot therefore be used to mean the universals of divine revelation. It may instead be used in its second sense, indicating that it is a product of the mind and is neither infallible nor sacred.”[4]
Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymin therefore said: “When one says ‘Islamic thought’, this means that Islam is thought. If the speaker intends by this expression ‘the thought of an Islamic person’, let him say ‘the thought of an Islamic person’ or ‘the Islamic thinker’. Instead of saying ‘Islamic thought’, we should say ‘the Islamic ruling’, because Islam is judgement, and the Noble Qur’an consists either of reports or rulings. As God says: ‘The word of your Lord has been perfected in truth and justice. None can alter His words, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing’ [al-An‘am: 115].”[5]
[1] The trial posed by this category is greater and more dangerous, because many people find their position confusing and the simple and ordinary people are deceived by them.
[2] The “inferiority complex” appears as conditional acceptance of, or admiration and fascination with, Western civilisation. It also appears as outright rejection and excessive hostility towards it in thought, culture and practice. Those of the latter orientation insist on presenting an “Islamic alternative” to the “Western” rival by formulating what they call Islamic thought, the Islamic system or Islamic doctrinalism.
[3] For logicians, knowledge has two divisions:
First: knowledge of the essences of things, called conception.
Second: knowledge of a relation between those essences, by negation or affirmation, called assent. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, The Criterion of Knowledge, edited by Dr Sulayman Dunya, Dar al-Ma‘arif, Cairo, 1961 CE, p. 265.
[4] Islamic Doctrinalism and Civilisational Change, p. 18.
[5] The Collected Fatwas and Epistles of His Eminence Shaykh Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymin, compiled and arranged by Fahd ibn Nasir al-Sulayman, Dar al-Watan, Riyadh, 1413 AH, 3/121. See also Bakr ibn Abd Allah Abu Zayd, A Dictionary of Prohibited Expressions, Dar al-Asimah, Riyadh, 1417 AH, pp. 360, 417.