Although the superficial substantive content of the Islamic sciences has changed little in the last thousand years, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw two major new influences on the way they were understood: formal logic and Ibn ‘Arab¯ı’s theory of wah.dat al-wuj¯ud. It was logic that was to shape the way the Islamic sciences would be studied in coming centuries. Greek logic and philosophy had reached the Islamic world too late and remained controversial for too long for them to have more than an indirect role in shaping the Islamic sciences. However, they came to be central to the teaching of the religious sciences.
We have already discussed the role of logic in education and the way it was taught. Among the Muslims of South Asia, the curriculum within which this logical instruction was embedded was known as the Dars-i
Niz.¯am¯ı. This curriculum was devised in the beginning of the eighteenth
century by the Indian Muslim scholar Niz.¯am al-D¯ın Sih¯alaw¯ı. It was not an innovation on his part, as it was based on versions of an Islamic curriculum that date back to about the thirteenth century. Niz.¯am al- D¯ın’s curriculum stressed dialectical skill. The student was expected to spend a great deal of time studying traditional logic, Arabic gram- mar, and rhetoric. As we have seen, instruction was based on a set of extremely concise textbooks, supplemented by a series of commentaries and supercommentaries. Classes consisted of detailed explorations of the difficulties implicit in the texts, with students and teachers competing to raise and resolve difficulties. Its most remarkable feature was that it
contained relatively little study of religion as such; Islamic law, Qur’¯an interpretation, and hadith were rather neglected. This last feature was much criticized by Muslim reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as a result, the Dars-i Niz.¯am¯ı has been partially sup- planted by new curricula like that of Deoband, which place more stress on primary religious texts and less on logic.
But why should Muslims have adopted such a curriculum? It was not the result of some accident of historical development in India, because very similar curricula had been in use earlier throughout much of the Islamic world and are still used in places like Qom in Iran and the faculties of divinity in modern Turkish universities. For now, I simply observe that the central goal of the Dars-i Niz.¯am¯ı curriculum was to teach the student how to understand texts through a deep knowledge of logic, the inner workings of language, and rhetoric. It did not focus on teaching the sacred texts themselves to the students or explaining to the students what these texts meant. This did have the virtue that the Dars-i Niz.¯am¯ı and its cousins could be pan-Islamic curricula that Shi‘ites and Sunnis of any of the four madhhabs could equally well study. Thus, Shi‘ite texts on logic and even on theology were taught in Sunni madrasas.
So far as I know, the Islamic scholars of that time do not explain the rea- sons for this turn toward logic. Something similar happened in Europe in about the same period, partly because of the intellectual excitement at the rediscovery of Greek philosophy and partly because university authori- ties did not want undergraduates studying or graduate students teaching theology, the central intellectual discipline of medieval Christianity. As we saw in Chapter 6, younger scholars in medieval European universities focused their attentions on problems of Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy. Perhaps similar forces were at work in the Islamic world. Islamic law, Qur’¯an interpretation, hadith, and traditional Kal¯am were mature disciplines, whereas the applications of logic, the new rhetoric, and philosophy to their foundations were new and exciting areas of research. Yet this does not explain the long-term popularity of the cur- ricula like the Dars-i Niz.¯am¯ı, in which logic, dialectic, and the profound study of language were and are central.
Whatever the conscious reasons for adopting a curriculum that stressed the methods of Islamic research over the content of Islamic law and belief, the fact is that the curriculum suited the situation in
which Islam found itself. No religious scholar could doubt that there was a true and single Law revealed by God to the Prophet Muh.ammad, but our knowledge of the Law is imperfect. Fiqh is a delicate web of infer- ences whose strength comes from a deep understanding of the texts on which it is based and from the efforts of dozens of generations of scholars patiently weighing and piecing together thousands of bits of evidence, employing all the tools of Arabic linguistics and rhetorical and logical analysis. An education in which logic and linguistics are studied dialecti- cally may have sharpened the mind of the student, but it also taught him a good deal of humility as he sought to divine the will of God. Sincere disagreement under such circumstances is inevitable and shows only that we are servants before God, not His privileged counselors.
the madrasa system, with its rationalistic curriculum, pros- pered for some six centuries, dominating religious education in the Islamic world and deeply influencing parallel systems of education. In the nineteenth century, it abruptly collided with the forces of modernism – colonial administrators, Christian missionaries, Muslim reformers, and Muslim revivalists. Where it survived at all, it was usually a shadow of its former self, reduced in wealth and prestige and often warped by the conflicting demands of modernism and its own past. Islamic education was swept up in a debate embracing European colonial administrators and intellectuals and parents in virtually every Islamic country. It was a debate that the madrasa professors were ill equipped to participate in.