Criticism
Philosophy as such has not been without criticism amongst Muslims, both contemporary and past. The imam Hanbali, for whom the Hanbali school of thought is named, rebuked philosophical discussion, once telling proponents of it that he was secure in his religion, but that they were "in doubt, so go to a doubter and argue with him (instead)." Today, Islamic philosophical thought has also been criticized by scholars of the modern Salafi movement.
There would be many Islamic thinkers who were not as enthusiastic about its potential. But it would be incorrect to assume that they opposed philosophy simply because it was a "foreign science". Oliver Leaman, an expert on Islamic philosophy, points out that the objections of notable theologians are rarely directed at philosophy itself, but rather at the conclusions the philosophers arrived at. Even al-Ghazali, who is famous for his critique of the philosophers, was himself an expert in philosophy and logic. And his criticism was that they arrived at theologically erroneous conclusions. The three most serious of these, in his view, were believing in the co-eternity of the universe with God, denying the bodily resurrection, and asserting that God only has knowledge of abstract universals, not of particular things (but it should be noted that not all philosophers subscribed to these same views).
In recent studies by Muslim contemporary thinkers that aim at 'renewing the impetus of philosophical thinking in Islam', Nader El-Bizri offers a critical analysis of the conventions of methodology and historiography that dominate the mainstream academic and epistemic approaches in studying 'Islamic philosophy' from 'archival' standpoints, within Oriental and Mediaevalist Studies, which fail to recognize the fact that 'philosophy in Islam' can still be a living intellectual tradition, and that its renewal requires a radical reform in ontology and epistemology within Islamic thought.
Read more about this topic: Islamic Philosophy
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)