Evaluation of Orientalists' Methodology

Evaluation of Orientalists' Methodology

  Since Seyyed Hossein Nasr is one of the trusty followers of the Traditionalists, he believes in the existence of a close affinity between science and the sacred. He claims that the history of Islamic culture is replete with a connective relationship between spirituality and science, and that Islamic scientists have never believed in the existence of a rift between science and religiosity throughout the history of Islamic civilization, and that there is a relationship between the physical and non-physical world; however, during the Renaissance up till the modern age, any relationship between the sacred world and the material world has been severed as a result of the material world being awarded central position which had led to the non-physical world becoming denied or, at least, doubted. As a result, longitudinal worlds, once the belief of Islamic Gnostics, no longer command attention, and people make their own best to know the material world alone.

According to Nasr, modernity has confined truth to the material world level as far as the viewpoint of the intellectual is concerned, and because it has also become limited to this material level from the viewpoint of thinkers of modernism, so after the modern age, the majority of western researchers and orientalists will become unable to agree with each other. He says about it: Original difference between the Traditionalists and most of the other school of thinking, in relation to religious study, is resulted from their divergence of opinion about the nature of truth. Traditionalists do not validate the mutilated thinking about truth, which is nowadays predominant in the west, and which has originated from rationalism and empiricism prevalent after the European Middle Ages, and which provides the background for most religious research in academic circles. We should, however, remember that the opinion of the Traditionalists is the worldview which religions have created and developed up until the modern world down through the last thousand years.[i]

After the Renaissance, scholars and orientalists applied the same historical methodology to Islamic culture, civilization, and sciences in their attempts to study Islamic works. On this basis they created a rift between the knowledge of Islamic scientists and spirituality paying no attention to the profound relation between these two as had been accepted by Islamic scholars and scientists. Therefore, Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr is critical of the orientalists’ inability to truly understand the relationship between the sacred and science in the Islamic civilization. He states: If the description of sacred science should be accepted, it becomes clear that, no branch of science in the Islamic civilization is separated from the sacred and man has always been in this domain whether he deals with  Qanun al-Mas`udi or Ghiath ud-Din Jamshid Kashani's Treatise on Arithmetic or Mulla Sadra's Shawahid al-Rububiyyah. Of course, these works can be studied from the standpoint of worldly agnosticism and the separation of the divine element as it has been seen in the works of the majority of orientalists and their Muslim students.[ii]

He believes that many orientalists are unable to agree with the Islamic concepts simply because they do not have any sympathy towards it and, for many different factors, do not demonstrate any positive and sympathetic look to their studied culture: If a person wants to view a religion without any religious belief, he/she will not be able to agree with it, in the same way that you will experience some difficulty in observing a certain kind of music while being devoid of having any interest in it.[iii]

According to Nasr’s opinions, Islamic thought is based on particular ontological and cosmological principles. One of his ontological principles is that there are longitudinal worlds in the existence, the lowest stage of which is the material world and the higher stages being those of the spirit, imagination, intellect and the world of the archangel; the highest ontological status belongs to the level of Divine Essence or mystery of mysteries level. The ontological principles that form the intellectual foundation of Islamic mysticism are different from those of the modern world regarding mankind and God.

In the modern era, human beings center on earthly and material aspects, which are the lowest level of the existence from the Islamic mystical perspective, yet they consider themselves as being replaced with God. They believe only in the material world and, therefore, strive to acquaint themselves about this world alone. As a result, they limit themselves to the material world; the lowest level from the religious viewpoint. However, according to Islamic mysticism, the material world is merely a sign, or a symbol, of divine reality; and mysticism endeavors to elevate the human being from the material world and propel him towards higher ones. Accordingly, in Nasr’s view, since the Renaissance, the aim of human sciences has been to explore this material world and its contents and nothing more: The longitudinal hierarchy of creatures became the latitudinal order and such a thing led to the theory of evolution. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) and Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82) didn’t arrive at the theory of evolution on the basis of their experiments, but existing in a milieu in which God had become denied or not fully respected, this theory seemed to be the most plausible way to study the amazing variety of created beings without recourse to God's creative power.[iv]

From the viewpoint of religions, existence has longitudinal levels, some of which are higher than the material world. Traditionalists believe that the modern scientists' knowledge of the physical world, which is the prime of modernity, is still akin to the knowledge of the 1^st grade elementary student. However smart and talented he may be, he remains, nonetheless, in the 1^st elementary grade. Dr. Nasr, believes that the difference of opinion between religious scholars and those of the West, whose thoughts are plucked from the modern world, is due to their beliefs about reality. This discrepancy between religion and modernity is fundamental. Nasr, in his criticism of the modern era, mentions all the elements which are in conflict with Traditionalist thought: Lack of faith, the spreading of irreligious apathy, lack of rational vision, abandonment of sacred knowledge and the transformation of modern societies into the industrial phase have represented  the world of being levels unreal.[v]

According to the Traditionalists such as Huston Smith, modern man rejected revelation and religious traditions in favor of experimental science from which he expects solutions to the various problems in everyday life, whereas not only has experimental sciences failed to extend the modern world but it has severely limited it ontologically: When a new source of cognition (scientific method) was discovered, modernity appeared in the world. The success of the application of scientific methodology in solving problems of that era helped scientists prove their hypotheses and they were able to bring about change in the material world, Western scientists, therefore, searching for a powerful image, rejected revelation preferring to rely on scientific methods. Historians say: Western scholars in the 19^th century believed in the entity of the Atom more than any subject in the holy book.[vi]

Huston Smith, a notable Traditionalist supporting Dr. Nasr's ideas, also criticizes modernity: If we consider Traditionalists as the ones who observe the world through the window of revelation (i.e. myths and sacred texts), the new window of science which is referred to in the modern era would be miniscule and unable to reach over a human being’s nose. This means when we look at the world through the window of science, all we can see are the things which are lower than us and we can't see that which is higher.[vii]

Traditionalists believe that due to concentration on experimental sciences, cosmos cognition has not developed since the renaissance, and the metaphysic world, which is far superior and more real than the physical, has been largely neglected on account of it being impossible to be proved on the basis of positivism: The claims of religious scholars haven’t been recognized in experimental sciences, because they lie beyond the scope of these sciences. But the invisible world is not only real, but more valuable in that the visible world is merely its reflection.[viii]

He also adds the point that a lot of Western researchers of Islam, particularly in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, tried to acquaint themselves with Islamic culture and civilization by philology and the historical evaluation of civilizations and religions mainly with missionary intentions to disprove Islam. There were hardly any methodologists and thinkers among them. He commented about this: Unfortunately most of those, who started to research into Islam, were concerned either in Farsi and Arabic philology or the history of these two peoples and they were not true thinkers. Mostly they were missionaries who couldn’t bear Islam and wanted to disprove it. There were, of course, a few exceptions.[ix]