Man
is a questioning being; he raises questions to satisfy his thirst for
knowledge. The Qur'an is a model of the question-answer form of knowledge. Who
created the world and all that is in it? How did His creation take place? Why
was the world created at all? What is the place of man in it? The most certain
answer to all these questions was revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad
(SAWS). The history of revelation begins with Adam and ends with Muhammad
(SAWS). The Qur'an is the last and final revelation of God who has taken it
upon Himself to preserve it in all its purity of letter and spirit. It
particularly gives us knowledge of what virtue is and how it is to be attained.
The one condition of becoming virtuous in accordance with it, is unquestionable
faith in its veracity. 'Believe in order to understand' is the standard
of Divine knowledge for belief not only yields knowledge, but also provides an
impulse to action.
I
shall now turn from the Divine to the human sources of knowledge of the world
and its creator. These are intuition, sense-perception and intellection. Intuition
is inner-perception of the self (anfus),
an immediate certainty of the heart (fawad)
without the aid of the senses or intellect. It is a question put to one's own
self, the answer to which lies in meditating over the self where one encounters
Reality face to face. This inner experience is called ecstasy, and the
knowledge yielded by it is called esoteric, as opposed to the knowledge which
we call exoteric. Positivistic rationalists identify reality with what is
observable, and so regard the intuitions of the heart or feeling as
non-cognitive. But man is not an invention of the Renaissance; He is a creation
of God with Whom he has emotional involvement. As a form of human
consciousness, feeling is not devoid of cognitive content, but in its own way
is a source of knowledge and reaches the innermost core of reality.
The
Qur'an recognises not only the intuitions of the anfus, but also the sense-experience of afaq as a veritable
source of human knowledge: senses are the gateways of our knowledge of the
external world. Of these, the Qur'an specially draws our attention to 'hearing
and sight', the two major tools of science. The knowledge thus obtained, when
internalised, makes us see the signs of God in the sun, the moon, the
mountains, the rivers, the fields of corn, the orchards, in the clouds held in
the air, in the lengthening out of shadows, in the alteration of day and night,
in fact in the whole of nature revealed to human sense-perception. It is the
frequent emphasis of the Qur'an on the faculties of "hearing and
sight" that made self-consciousness the rational and scientific faculties
of man, and convinced Iqbal beyond any shadow of doubt that "the birth of
Islam . . . is the birth of inductive intellect". Scientific knowledge is
based on sense-experience, that is, on observation and experiment. Observation
is watching a fact; experiment is making a fact through a question put to
nature. We should not feel shy of asking questions, for it is the questions,
said the Prophet, which yield knowledge.
Sense-experience
gives us knowledge of the concrete and finite. Intellection gives us knowledge
of the abstract and immutable. The one is called scientific knowledge, the
other philosophic knowledge which the Qur'an calls hikmah (wisdom). Science is concerned with
facts, philosophy with the meaning of facts; it discovers the value and worth
of things. Science is analytic, philosophy is analytic as well as speculative.
Science tell us something about everything, but there are no things about which
it tells us everything. Its explanations are partial and quantitative; it is
concerned with the how and how much of things, and with their manner of acting.
But the mind of man is so constituted that it longs to know not only how things
act, but why they do as they do; it craves to know the why and wherefore of
things as well. This knowledge is provided by philosophy which seeks to
comprehend the world as a whole, particularly with regard to its meaning,
purpose and value for human existence, which concern it shares with religion.
Philosophy
is a consistent and persistent effort to think clearly. It is the art of
thinking things through. Its essence lies in a discursive movement of thought. Hujjah (argument) burhan (proof) and jadal (disputation) are
the three words which the Qur'an uses interchangeably for this discursive
exercise. The knowledge obtained through the discursive movement of thought is
certain only epistemically (ilm
al-yaqin). It does satisfy the mind of its certitude, but possesses
theoretical certainty at best, as opposed to what the Qur'an calls the
certainty of sight (ain
al -yaqin) characteristic of personal observation. The highest
degree of certitude belongs to the knowledge revealed by God to the prophets
which the Qur'an calls truth of assured certainty (haqq al-yaqin).
