Mutahhari Social and Historical Change

An Islamic Perspective
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4835-5557-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 164 Seiten

In these two essays, the late Muslim scholar Murtaza Mutahhari examines society and history. His discussion demonstrates clearly his wide-ranging knowledge of Western as well as Eastern thought through the ages. One of Mutahhari's principal aims is to refute historical materialism. To his mind, the theory is both invalid and incompatible with Islam, despite published views of some Muslim intellectuals who cite sacred texts to support it. Mutahhari explains exactly where they misread the Qur'an and refers to numerous other verses as he argues the Marxism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism are Western theories totally at odds with virtually every facet of Islamic thought.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mutahhari, Ayatullah Murtaza

Weitere Mitwirkende

Campbell, R.

Leseproben

  The Nature of History We can define history in three ways. In reality, we can speak of three sciences related to history that bear a close relationship to one another. First is the science of past events, and the conditions and circumstances of people in the past, as distinct from present conditions and circumstances. Every condition, circumstance, or event, so long as it pertains to the present time, is an event of the day or a current of the day, and the recording of such events amounts to keeping a journal. But when its time has lapsed and it has been joined to the past, an event becomes part of history. Therefore, the science of history in this sense means the science of finished events and the conditions and circumstances of bygone people. The chronicles of lives, careers, and victories written in every nation fall in this category. The science of history in this sense is, in the first place, particular; that is, it is a science of a series of personal and individual phenomena, not a science of universals and of a range of laws, criteria, and relations. In the second place, it is a narrative, not a noetic, science.13 Third, it is a science of “being,” not a science of “becoming.” Fourth, it pertains to the past, not to the present. We term this kind of history “narrative history.” The second science is that of the laws and norms governing past lives, which is gained from research, investigation, and analysis of past incidents and events. The content and questions of narrative history, that is, past events, are considered the sources and elements of this history. These events have for history in the second sense the force of the materials that the natural scientist assembles in his laboratory to analyze, synthesize, and study for the purpose of discovering their nature and properties, discerning the cause-and-effect relationships among them, and inferring general laws. The historian in the second sense seeks to discover the nature of historical events and the cause-and-effect relationships among them in order to find a range of formulas and criteria that can be generalized to all similar instances, present or past. We term history in this sense “scientific history.” Although the subject matter of scientific history consists of events belonging to the past, the concepts and formulas that it elicits are not restricted to the past, but can be generalized to the present and future. This consideration makes history very profitable; it makes it one of the bases of human knowledge and places man in command of his future. There is a difference between the work of the scientific historian and that of the natural scientist. The subject matter for the natural scientist’s research is a range of extant, objectively present materials, which he will consequently examine and analyze in an objective and experimental fashion, but the materials the historian studies existed only in the past. Only information about and records of them are at the historian’s disposal. The historian in his deliberations is like a trial judge who renders judgment on the basis of the evidence and testimony given in the case, not on that of personal eyewitness. Accordingly, the historian’s analysis is a logical, rational, and mental analysis, not an externally and objectively, based one. The historian carries on his analyses in the laboratory of the reason, with the instruments of ratiocination and deduction, not in an outward laboratory, with such instruments as the retort and the alembic. Therefore, the work of the historian more resembles that of the philosopher than that of the natural scientist. Like narrative history, scientific history pertains to the past, not to the present, and is a science of being, not of becoming. Unlike narrative history, it is universal, not particular, and noetic, not purely narrative. Scientific history is really a branch of sociology; it is the sociology of past societies. The subject matter of sociology includes both contemporary and past societies. If we restrict sociology to the study of contemporary societies, scientific history and sociology will be seen as two distinct, but closely related and interdependent, sciences. Third, the philosophy of history is the science of the transformation and development of societies by stages and of the laws governing this transformation and development. In other words, it is the science of the becoming of societies, not of their being. Readers may wonder if it is possible for societies to have both a being and a becoming, such that the former is the subject of one science, called scientific history, and the latter, that of another, called the philosophy of history. No combination of the two is possible because being is static and becoming is dynamic; so one must choose between these two. Our conception of past societies must be either one of beings or one of becomings. Readers might also bring up the general and inclusive problem that, overall, our knowledge or conception of the world—and of society as a part of the world—is a conception of either static or dynamic phenomena. If the world, or society, is static, then it has being, not becoming. If it is dynamic, it has becoming, not being. Accordingly, the most important division among philosophical schools divides philosophical systems into two primary groupings: philosophies of being and philosophies of becoming. The philosophies of being have postulated that being and nonbeing are unsusceptible to combination and that contradiction is impossible. They have postulated that, if being is, then nonbeing is not and, if nonbeing is, then being is not. Therefore, one must choose one of the two. Because being necessarily is, as the world and society are not mere ciphers, then stasis governs the world. The philosophies of becoming have regarded being and nonbeing as susceptible to combination in the unity that is motion. Motion is nothing other than this: that a thing is and, at the very same time, likewise is not. Therefore, the philosophy of being and the philosophy of becoming are two wholly opposed conceptions of existence, and one must choose one or the other. If we join with the first group, we must postulate that societies have had being and not becoming, and if we join with the second group, we must postulate that societies have had becoming and not being. Therefore, either we have a scientific history and no philosophy of history or we have a philosophy of history and no scientific history. This sort of thinking concerning being and nonbeing, motion and stasis, and the principle of the impossibility of contradictions is one of the characteristics of Western thought and arises from unawareness of the question of the philosophy of being (the question of being) and especially the profound question of the substantive reality of being, as well as a series of other questions. First, that being is equal to stasis, in other words, that stasis is being and motion is a combination of being and nonbeing (a combination of two contradictories), is a flagrant error that has befallen some schools of Western philosophy. Second, what is under consideration here does not relate to that philosophical question. What is under consideration here is based on the assumption that society, like any other living being, is subject to two kinds of laws: (1) those that govern every species within the limits of its specificity and (2) those that pertain to the transformation and evolution of species and their transmutations into other species. We term the first kind of laws the laws of being and the second, the laws of becoming. Some sociologists, including Auguste Comte, have noted this point. Raymond Aron says of him: Statics and dynamics are the two basic categories of Auguste Comte’s sociology and are related to the philosophy whose broad outlines I have sketched. Statics consists essentially in examining, in analyzing what Comte calls the social consensus. A society is comparable to a living organism. It is impossible to study the functioning of an organ without placing it in the context of the living creature. By the same token, it is impossible to study politics or the state without placing them in the context of the society in a given moment. … As for dynamics, at the outset it consists merely of the description of the successive stages through which human societies pass.14 Let us consider every species of living being, including all the mammals, reptiles, and birds. Each has a range of laws peculiar to its specificity; so long as it remains within the limits of that specificity, it is governed by those laws, such as the laws relating to the embryonic stage of an animal, to its health and illness, to its diet, to the nature of its reproduction and nurture of offspring, to its instincts, to its migration patterns, or to its mating habits. But according to the theory of the transmutation of species, transpecific evolution, in addition to the laws peculiar to each species within the compass of its specificity, another set of laws exists that relates to the transmutation of species, the evolutionary transition from a lower species to a higher one. These laws take the form of a philosophy and are occasionally called the philosophy of evolution, rather than the science of biology. Society, too, in being a living organism, is described by two kinds of laws: biotic and evolutionary. The laws that apply to the causes for the appearance of civilizations, the causes for their decline, the conditions of social life, and the general laws presiding over all societies in all their phases and transformations, we term the laws of the being of societies. The laws that apply to the causes of the...