The Liberal Ideas of Ibn Rushd

[music]

0:00:11.7 Paul Meany: I grew up in Ireland, and I was a teenager while the Syrian refugee crisis was in full flux. A lot of people I knew were absolutely terrified of Muslims coming into the country; they feared an alien culture that they believed to be repressive and brutal. And in some ways, you can’t blame people. All we ever saw in the media was what hyped up our fears most. We only ever heard about the bad of the Muslim world, none of the good.

0:00:33.9 Paul Meany: Being 100% honest, as a teen, I was no better than the rest. I bought into every single narrative about the Islamic faith having nothing to offer the West, but thankfully, my mind was changed. I was shown how wrong I was in my thinking when I started to read about Islam throughout history, that in fact, the Muslim world was for a very long time the centre of learning, progress and tolerance during what is often called by historians the Islamic Golden Age.

0:00:57.0 Paul Meany: Today we’re gonna be talking about a thinker that symbolises this golden age perfectly, Ibn Rushd, or as often referred to in the West, Averroes. A polymath in medical research, philosophy and jurisprudence, Ibn Rushd wrote about a wide variety of topics, particularly the ideas that would come into vogue not until the cherished Enlightenment era of the Western world.

0:01:15.7 Paul Meany: Joining me today to tell us about the life and importance of Averroes is my colleague Mustafa Aykol, a Senior Fellow at Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam and modernity. He is the author of three books: The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews became a Prophet of the Muslims; Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty; and his newest and brilliant book, Reopening Muslim minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom and Tolerance. Welcome.

0:01:40.7 Mustafa Aykol: Thanks so much, Paul. It’s a pleasure to have this conversation with you.

0:01:44.7 Paul Meany: So, before we learn about who Averroes is, can you explain what exactly the Islamic Golden Age was and how it challenges the caricature Westerners often have of the Muslim world?

0:01:54.9 Mustafa Aykol: Thank you so much, Paul. And allow me to say a few words even about this fear of the refugees that you mentioned, that you observed in your country, Ireland. There are bad people doing bad things in the name of Islam today, but they are really a small minority and, unfortunately, if you don’t know a society well, the worst people in that society attract your attention and you start to define the society from… Based on those worst experiences. The media helps that in a way, because Muslims who all do terrible things make the news and headlines; other Muslims, the overwhelming majority, who is peaceful and having decent lives, they don’t make the headlines.

0:02:41.8 Mustafa Aykol: And I’ll say this is a dynamic working on both sides of the civilisational divide. I mean, a lot of Muslims have stereotypical views about Western societies precisely because they don’t know those societies as well, and all they have in mind are some of the bad episodes in near history from Western occupation or colonialism, which should be all of course criticised and condemned, but they don’t know the average reality out there, which is actually much more nuanced, and which is in many ways similar to Muslim societies.

0:03:15.2 Mustafa Aykol: Now, coming back to your question, thank you for that. Yes, there was what scholars called the Islamic Golden Age, and most people put it between the 8th and the 13th centuries. Why do we call it the Golden Age? Because it was a time that, demonstrably, the Islamic civilisation was probably the most advanced civilisation on the face of the Earth. That means the Islamic civilisation was more productive in terms of technology, science, mathematics, philosophy, art. Islamic civilisation had hospitals when Europeans didn’t have, Islamic civilisation invented concepts, or developed concepts like algorithm, which comes from the name of al-​Khwarizmi, an Arab scholar, or Islamic scholars called mathematics al-​jabr, which became algebra in English.

0:04:22.0 Mustafa Aykol: So there are actually very interesting roots, there are words in the English language and the French too, with Arabic roots, showing that precisely that there was a big translation, there was a big borrowing from the Arab culture, which shows that that culture, actually not Arab, but broadly Islamic culture, was more productive. It was also a time when Muslims were more tolerant when compared to Christendom of the time, and that is evidenced in the fact that most of the time, Jews preferred to live under Muslim rule compared to Christian rule.

0:04:57.7 Mustafa Aykol: In fact, Jews, Sephardic Jews, that happened a bit later in the 15th century, but they fled from Catholic Spain to the Islamic Ottoman empire, because the Ottoman empire had given them much more freedom and a chance to flourish. So there was this time that really a lot of Muslims look back and say, “We were really great”, and there is some nostalgia, some pride in that. So I speak about this in my book, but I also call on my fellow Muslims to think, well, what was the secret of that golden age? Why it went down? And my answer is, well, it was great because it was cosmopolitan, it was open-​minded, and we lost that open-​mindedness and universalism, and that was the beginning of the stagnation and ultimately led to the crisis in modernity, where Islamic foundation, civilisation, sorry, found itself in a very under-​developed stage compared to the West, and that led to endless crises that are still with us today.

0:05:58.9 Paul Meany: And so Averroes is coming towards the end of this golden age. And so now that we know a little bit more about the times he lived in, could you tell us a bit about his life and career as a scholar? He was a real polymath, he wrote about all kinds of things like jurisprudence, medicine, science, astronomy. How is he so well-​read at a time when in Europe scholars had scraps of Aristotle and Plato to read alongside a really, really rudimentary view of science? He’s talking about some extremely advanced ideas and concepts, and he has so many more translations than the Western world. I’d like you to talk a bit about the culture he lived in, but also what he was doing and where he came from.

0:06:38.4 Mustafa Aykol: Sure. Averroes or Ibn Rushd, as his original name goes, was a Muslim scholar, judge, jurist and philosopher in Spain at the height of the… Or at the end of the… Towards the end of the Islamic Golden Age. And he of course was… I call him the last man standing in my book, I have a chapter, The Last Man standing, Ibn Rushd. The reason I call him that way, because he was living in the 12th century, and before that, Islamic civilization had began this great translation movement, which was a trigger to Muslim philosophy. It actually began in Baghdad, not in Spain, where Ibn Rushd lived; and Spain was the capital of the Abbasid Empire, which is the beginning of this golden age. And Muslims discovered books of Plato and Aristotle and Galen and Euclid Greek philosophers. They discovered them from Christians, by the way, we should not forget that. So Western Christianity had lost Greek philosophy, and really was in what many good people still call the Dark Age.

0:07:53.3 Mustafa Aykol: But Eastern Christians, especially Syriac Christians, preserved those books. But Muslims discovered them, and they said, this is fascinating, right? And they started to translate them, and that translation movement, which lasted for more than a century, Dimitri Gutas, an expert on that history, says it was the first time in human history that people… It was the first time in history which demonstrated that scientific and philosophical thought are international, not bound to a specific language or culture. That led to great philosophers such as Al-​Farabi, who, for the first time in the Islamic civilization, spoke of a civilization based on “Hurea”, that is freedom, and which he praised. That led to Avicenna or Ibn Sina, as he’s known, he was probably one of the greatest thinkers in human history, who combined Aristotle and Neoplatonism. And these were Muslims. I mean I should emphasize that all of these philosophers were believing Muslims, but they also believed that wild revelation, that is the Quran and The Prophetic Wisdom, is a guidance that came from God. They also believed that human nature and human intellect is also a source of finding wisdom and truth. That’s why Aristotle was an infidel, by Islamic definitions or Plato, but they didn’t see it a problem in learning from them. And that universalism, I think, was the trigger of this Golden Age.

0:09:23.0 Mustafa Aykol: And Ibn Rushd was building up on that, he was I think the last one to really uphold that tradition, and also he was responding to a reaction to that philosophy and rationalism, which basically ultimately criminalized that saying that these are deviant ideas that we don’t need, and which ultimately led to the decline of philosophy, the rejection of philosophy as an independent discipline, I should emphasize. So Ibn Rushd was this great commentator on Aristotle. He wrote three layered commentaries that powerfully influenced Europe and initiated an intellectual revolution in Europe, but unfortunately, his view remained less influential in the lands of Islam because he was the last representative of a trend that was already being pushed aside.

0:10:17.4 Paul Meany: So you said in the Western world, Averroes became a respected figure, and I’ve heard before that in Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy”, he’s awarded a place in limbo alongside other virtuous Pagans like Plato and Socrates and the Emperor Trajan. And in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, he’s cited as a great philosophical authority. What exactly did Western thinkers take from Averroes, but how it influenced their thought?

0:10:40.8 Mustafa Aykol: Sure, I mean, Dante was generous enough, I should say, but that’s normal in the world of his time. We should say that Raphael also in his very famous School of Athens, his painting presents Ibn Rushd as one of the founding fathers of the world, the world’s intellectual tradition. His works were translated into Latin and Hebrew, which is interesting, and those translations influenced both the Christian and the Jewish traditions. And I think he was understood more accurately in the Jewish tradition, and in the Jewish tradition, by the way, he’s very much in parallel with Maimonides the Great, whose from his own city, by the way, he was his contemporary, they were both great men of Cordoba. That’s why when you go to Cordoba today in Spain, you will, with very little distancing between them, you will find their statues, Ibn Rushd and Maimonides. And the idea was that there is [0:11:44.4] ____ thought that is out there, there’s a rational world, which is causal causal laws, which is natural laws, reason can discover these, philosophers can discover these regardless of their beliefs, they can be pagans, they can be anything, and we should build upon that and we should reconcile that with our scripture.

0:12:04.8 Mustafa Aykol: So that influenced, I think, a very important trend within Judaism, which later flourished in the Jewish enlightenment, the Haskalah, which made basically Jews a part of the modern world, most of the time pioneers of the modern world. In Christianity, I think he was sometimes misunderstood by the Averroists, so it led to a reaction from the Catholic Church. The Averroists were a condemned group, a heretical group in 13th century Europe, in France especially. But it started this idea that besides scripture, there is a rational world that has to be this… Studied on its own terms, and if there’s a conflict, you can reinterpret the scripture, because the truth doesn’t confront truth. And that really was a beginning, a major boost to what would become later the Renaissance, and even the Enlightenment. It’s just sad to me that Averroes or Ibn Rushd had this great impact on Europe that a lot of historians are acknowledging, but he had less influence on the Muslim world, and I think that is just an accident of history that needs to be revisited. And I think his wisdom needs to be re-​thought today.

0:13:20.6 Paul Meany: So, you mentioned the Renaissance, but Averroes was a polymath and a Renaissance man 300 years before the Renaissance, and hundreds of years before the Enlightenment. He already had some great ideas that would come to form the core of liberalism. Charles Butterworth, the Professor of Political Philosophy, in the beginning of your chapter on Averroes, you have a quote from this professor and he says, “An early version of the famous 18th century European enlightenment can be found in Islamic philosophy, particularly in the writing of Averroes.” So what views did Averroes have that came close to the Enlightenment thinkers that many people in the classical liberal world revere today?

0:14:00.8 Mustafa Aykol: Well, one is the idea of natural law. He believed that human nature and reason can build ethical values that are not limited to one religion, which meant that even if people are not Muslims, they can be ethically valued, they can be ethically sound, they don’t… The fact that they’re outside of your religious community doesn’t make them invaluable from a human perspective. So there was a humanism to it, and I think that was important. Another aspect to Averroes, Ibn Rushd, and I think which had an influence in Europe, and which I try to show in my book, was his belief in a free debate, which was not very common at the time. In one of his works, he says, “You should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the views of your opponent. Failure to do so is an implicit acknowledgement of the weakness of your own case.”

0:15:05.0 Mustafa Aykol: In other words, he says, “If you’re gonna have a philosophical argument, just really allow the other side to make their case in full,” which was not a popular idea at the time. We have other Islamic scholars writing at the time that children should be protected from snakes in the same way that the population must be protected from heretical ideas. That’s why Ibn Rushd’s own books got burned by the rigid orthodoxy in Cordoba, the people who attacked him ultimately towards the end of his life, because of his supposed heresy. And this approach of Ibn Rushd, and he himself exemplifies that, his greatest intellectual rival is Imam Al-​Ghazali who was the great Ash’ari ideologian who condemned the philosophers, although he was more nuanced than what some people think, but he ultimately criminalised philosophy to some extent, at least in the long run. And Ibn Rushd, whenever he responsed to Ghazali, he takes long quotes, sometimes page long, two-​page long quotes from Ghazali, he says, “This is what he says, and this is what I say.”

0:16:10.0 Mustafa Aykol: Now, it was a great intellectual we lost last year, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who traced how Ibn Rushd influenced some Jewish philosophers such as Rabbi Loew of Prague, who said, “Averroes’ words hold true for religion as well, so don’t… Allow the opponents of religion to speak their mind. That will show that our religious arguments are strong.” And then that how that influenced other thinkers, like even all the way to John Stuart Mill. So, I think he brought into a sort of approach to knowledge and free debate, which influenced certain minds in Europe. So in that sense, he was a humanist and he was a believer in a rational discussion with everybody making their case, which was a great thing at the time, which was not a very popular idea.

0:17:07.8 Paul Meany: But looking back at the past, often even the best and most eminent and famous philosophers often have some of the worst views on women. So you have people like Aristotle who think that women are kinda like mutilated men, you have people like Kant who said a bearded woman… Like a woman with intellect might as well have a beard ’cause it’s too masculine, all these philosophers throughout history who talk about justice and natural rights, who all of the sudden do a complete 180 and they degrade women and put them down to the status of second class citizens at best, and subhuman at the very worst. How did Averrous view women? He was a follower of Aristotle. Did he take his views on women? Or did he take any other kind of alternative sense towards equality?

0:17:51.3 Mustafa Aykol: You’re absolutely right. I mean, a lot of the great thinkers of the past were pretty terrible when it came to women. They lived in a culture of patriarchy, which sub-​sued or degraded women to a certain role in society and assumed that… It’s from their nature. And you can find those spheres certainly in the Islamic tradition as well. And I think they do not really come from the Quran, but the patriarchal culture of Islamic jurists and some of the people who narrated or invented certain things from the prophet Muhammed.

0:18:25.8 Mustafa Aykol: Interestingly, and that is one of the great things about Ibn Rushd, that Ibn Rushd was not a patriarchal thinker, and he actually pushed against that. And that’s very surprising, because Aristotle, as you rightly point out, wasn’t really great on women, he was also very demeaning. But another philosopher from Greek, the Greek teaching, Plato. And Plato has some other troubling views, but on women, Plato had very enlightened views, if you will. He said their intellectual capacity is the same with men, which was a very remarkable thing to say. Now, Ibn Rushd, in his commentary on Plato’s Republic, embraces this idea, and he says, “Yes, women can be philosophers and rulers, even clerics.” And so he’s convinced by the idea that women have the same intellectual capacity with men, but then he looks back into Islamic Society of his time, and he writes a very strong criticism of, let’s say, patriarchy. He says, “In these states,” which is Muslims States of his time, “However, the ability of women is not known because they are only taken for procreation there. They are placed at the service of their husbands and relegated to the business of procreation, rearing and breastfeeding.” And he says it as a criticism. And he says, “This is the reason for the weakness of these states.” So when you really disempower half of your society, the society itself gets weakened and becomes less productive.

0:20:04.6 Mustafa Aykol: Katrina Bello is a contemporary philosopher… Philosophy, really examined these very feminist views of Ibn Rushd, and she says his considerations on women offer a remarkably original insight, and very progressive and… Envisioned some of the debates in modern Europe. So yeah, on that issue too, Ibn Rushd was remarkably interesting and progressive and ahead of his time. And it’s sad that today some of the criticism he raised to Muslim society in 12th century Spain is relevant to certainly Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, or some other patriarchal societies we see in the Muslim world today.

0:20:49.0 Paul Meany: So if Ibn Rushd is such a forward-​thinking person, he had enlightenment values hundred years before John Locke ever put pen to paper, he thought women were equal to men years before Mary Wollstonecraft. Why do we never see him in any philosophy curricula? Has he been just ignored by the Western World, or is it just ignorance?

0:21:11.2 Mustafa Aykol: I think there is some recognition of him, and I see, of course, him being referenced by some philosophical classes, and so on, so forth. But yes, you’re right, that… If you’re speaking from the Western tradition, the Western historical understanding goes on like this, there were the Ancient Greeks, they were lost and then we rediscovered them, by whom that’s generally not mentioned, through whom. And then of course, we created the modern world renaissance and the enlightenment, and so on, so forth. So there are other civilizations out there like Islam or Hindus, or Chinese. Well, they have nothing to do with us, our story is a Western story. That’s a pretty common view, and of course, there’re scholars who push against that, but it’s still there. And I think that is very misguided, and that’s very unfair because the Great Western civilization had a lot of input from other civilizations, and primarily Islam, and the ideas of Ibn Rushd are just one thing that really influenced western enlightenment.

0:22:22.1 Mustafa Aykol: I, actually, in my book, I begin with the story of Ibn Tufail and his famous novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan”, which became a best seller in 17th century Europe in England and France and Holland, because of the humanism that it was actually promoting. So there are a lot of inputs from Islam into Western history, which should be acknowledged. Of course there are a lot of inputs into Islam from Ancient Greece and Hindu tradition, but that is a universalism, that’s the… That’s our universalistic heritage as humanity, and we people have this tendency to think that our people, whomever they are, our civilization, or our religion, or our church, or our political party has all the wisdom that is ever needed, which is a very narrow and misguided view, and it leads to intolerance, it leads to conflict, it leads to a lot of terrible things.

0:23:16.1 Paul Meany: Recently, I was reading Rose Wilder Lane and her “Discovery of Freedom,” and she talks about, there’s three attempts in human history on a more free society. The first is kind of the Abrahamic Biblical story, the third is the American Revolution. But the second one shocked me, it was the Islamic Golden Age, and the founding of Islam as a religion. She talks about the prophet Mohammed as a self-​made businessman, and she talks all about how the American world couldn’t have possibly existed without the Islamic world. She talks about Arabic numerals, how Mathematics and Engineering couldn’t have existed without the number zero. She talks about the advances of medicine, navigation, translation, all of these amazing ideas. She even talks about how the universities in the Islamic world, you could choose whatever courses you wanted, you didn’t have to do any mandatory courses, and this is exactly the vision of the founding father, Thomas Jefferson, who also had a great admiration for Islam. And so I’m wondering, do you think that American… Often, when you listen to many conservatives or some Republicans talk about Islam, they talk about how Muslims can’t integrate into America, they can’t have American values. But does it seem like American values and Muslim values aren’t actually that far away when you look at it historically?

0:24:38.5 Mustafa Aykol: Thanks for bringing that up, Paul. And I should say, Muslims have integrated to America quite well, in fact, especially to America, because I think the Muslim community in France has sometimes have a harder time in integrating because their full religious freedom isn’t respected there, right? There are some discriminatory laws in the name of some illiberals’ understanding of secularism, but Muslims have been integrating into America quite successfully, and I think that’s an important thing because if Islamic civilization will overcome the current illiberal tendencies that is quite dominant in the Middle East especially, and parts of South Africa, that will happen when Muslims see and experience the value of freedom. And that’s gonna happen mostly in the West. American Muslims mostly embrace freedom because they can speak up their mind, they can be as Muslim as they are, they can be critical of whatever they want to be critical, and the security will not be at your door next day as it can happen in the autocracies of the Middle East.

0:25:46.4 Mustafa Aykol: So this whole idea that Muslims are going… Coming here to transform and change our civilization and turn it into something bad as a fifth column, that is pretty misguided, and as someone who criticizes a lot of the intolerant illiberal autocratic tendencies in Islam today, I think we need to make it flourish, we need to make Islam flourish in free society, so it becomes an example for other Muslims to be inspired from.

0:26:15.5 Mustafa Aykol: Going back to Rose Wilder Lane, thanks for bringing that up, I refer to the late Wilder Lane in my epilogue, in my book. And yes, she says Islam was a religion that saved people from pagan gods and declared that man and… Men are equal and free, and Islam built a tolerance in human civilization with religious freedom. It’s interesting that Wilder Lane who wrote these in the middle of the 20th century, in 1943 to be precise, saw such a light in Islam, which shows that the current concern with Islam, sometimes the current paranoia about Islam, is a pretty new thing, it just began in the ’70s with the rise of extremists in the Arab World and elsewhere, and it’s understandable. But this shows that actually, if you take the broad view, if you compare Islam to the West in its 14 centuries long history, you wouldn’t say that Islam is a troubling civilization. Quite the contrary, there are many times Islamic world looked more tolerant and more pluralistic, and more free.

0:27:25.4 Mustafa Aykol: We are just at a bad time of the Islamic civilization right now, and if you looked at Christian civilization, Europe in the 17th century, at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, when Europeans were slaughtering each other for being Catholic or Protestant, you wouldn’t have very high views about Europe too. But it changed, and it changed with ideas of John Locke and Pierre Bayle, and the Enlightenment ultimately, which led to the American Revolution and the American Constitution. I believe we are at a similarly troubling time in the history of the Islamic Civilization. And precisely because of that, we have to make the case strongly for freedom and toleration, with its roots, authentic roots, in the history of the Islamic civilization and faith. And that’s what my new book is about, a return to reason, freedom and tolerance. So I’m not saying these are not unknown in Islam, but if their roots are there, but we just have to cultivate them.

[music]

0:28:47.7 Paul Meany: Thanks a mil for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, you can subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Portraits of Liberty is written and hosted by me, Paul Meany, and produced by Landry Ayres. You can also visit lib​er​tari​asm​.org to find more shows like this. I hope to see you next time.