The contemporaneity of Averroes

By Mahmoud Hussein

Statue of Averroes (La Juderia, Cordova, Spain)

What is most lacking, perhaps, in our own day and age, is the audacity possessed by Averroes. Is such audacity -- which was as intellectual as it was moral, political and religious -- more difficult to summon during our age than his? Were he among us, today, what would Averroes do?

It goes without saying that he would compel himself to think for himself, to guard against authoritative arguments, to trust his reason and to distinguish between speculative thoughts and revealed facts. However, today, in order to maintain this position in most Arab countries, he would have to move mountains. He would have to begin by assuming responsibility for his own life as an autonomous individual and a unified subject -- which is not as easy as it sounds. He would be recuperating from the consequences of those colonial and post-colonial processes which had torn him from a traditional context without allowing him either the time or the means to formulate his position within the imposed urban matrix.

Before daring to overtly express an original thought, (our) Averroes would first have to settle accounts, as discretely as possible, with his conscience. He would have to assume for himself the right to have this very thought. And in assuming that right he would transgress all established authorities, both those that legitimate themselves in traditional terms, and those that do so by recourse to modernity. And today, he would have to begin by transgressing the power of those religious institutions which posit themselves as the arbiters of doctrinal issues at the heart of the community.

Averroes would be unlikely to wait for official interpretations. Rather, he would prefer to take upon himself both the burden of reading the texts for himself, and the risk of drawing his own conclusions. And in doing so he would fall foul of these institutions and find himself marginalised from the majority of believers surrounding him.

Confronted by an authoritative state whose perpetuation is premised on its ability to maintain a monopoly on political initiative, the philosopher would be forced to step out of line, abandoning the comfortable anonymity to be found in the national consensus demanded of its subjects by the state. And in doing so he would find himself exposed, vulnerable, having compromised his social position, his professional prospects, perhaps his freedom or even his life.

Nor would this be all. Arab countries are today characterised by the prevalence of a diffuse, encroaching and insurmountable conformism to which all subscribe, either more or less consciously, because it is the price to pay for peaceful cohabitation with neighbours, cousins or colleagues. This conformism constitutes a psychological cocoon, a protective net for today's petit bourgeois replacing, somehow or other, the lost solidarities of the village, the clan or the old job corporation.

To move beyond this carcan is essential for any free spirit specifically called upon to think for himself regardless of what others think. In such circumstances, to presume to be right, to insist on one's duty to think in the face of opposition carries a heavy price. The price exacted is one of solitude, of alienation, of every morning being unable to identify oneself in the faces that surround one.

And still there would be another trial to overcome -- for many the most painful and decisive. Whomsoever wishes to be master of his thoughts would have to, some day or other, defy the Father; which entails breaking the most intimate, the most deeply internalised image of authority. Confronting the future without paternal benediction means renouncing the immunity of childhood and its privileges of irresponsibility. Only then can the adventure of freedom begin. The funambulist would be left entirely to himself, but he would proceed without a rope.

When we no longer have as references the paternal word, the tacit acquiescence of the neighbour, the imperatives mapped out by the state or the caution of religious leaders, there is not much left on which one might rely for support should one stumble or fall.

Intellectual dissidence is promptly dubbed treason, and everything possible is done to marginalise the traitor, to expel him from the national community and to give the impression that he is no longer worthy of belonging to that on which he has turned his back.

The young Averroes, placed in this situation, would perhaps be led to doubt and question himself, at least in his heart of hearts. Am I still worthy of the historical legacy the Arabs have bequeathed me? Do I have the right to consider myself an integral part of this community when I have just objected to the authority of all those who speak in its name?

The proud, superb answer would obviously be: "Yes, because I am placed, without guardianship, in direct hold of this legacy to render it fruitful according to my understanding and conscience. Therefore I take my own stock of it. I address myself directly to all my ancestors, distant and close, ulama and sultans, scientists and artists, poets and novelists, and I call on each of them to account for his works. I decide to keep what I deem valuable and to ignore, criticise, or condemn what is not worthy of retaining for future reference. My loyalty to the ancestors is fiercely selective, which is precisely where my freedom begins.

"Of course I could make mistakes, wanting to filter everything through the sieve of my reason; and I boldly claim this right. (After all, those who have assumed power in the course of the modern history of the Arabs, and who have exercised it single-handedly, have made many mistakes. If in the future there were more people daring enough to think without fear of sometimes being mistaken, we would end up making less mistakes on the whole.)

"This freedom I claim as a right as much as a responsibility... the intellectual, cultural and technical heritage from whence I mean to draw my references does not end at the frontiers of the Arab world. I swim against a current that is today very powerful, and which seeks to restrict the horizon of the Arabs -- or of Muslims -- to their own territories, pretending to find there the secret of their past glories. I should simply like to state the self evident fact that, in a world that is becoming increasingly global, such a withdrawal means nothing less than asphyxiation. I should also like to recall a historical fact, one all too often forgotten, that the Arabs witnessed their centuries of grandeur, creation and progress only when they opened up to the rest of the world, when they identified their own horizon with that of humanity."

The Golden Age of the Arabs -- one of the greatest accomplishments of which was the oeuvre of Averroes -- was born from a formidable appetite for knowledge, from the desire to search, assimilate, reinterpret and, finally, to surpass the knowledge acquired by the civilisations preceding Islam.

At the end of the eighth century in Baghdad, finding themselves at the head of an immense, multi-ethnic empire, enlightened sovereigns understood that in order to properly govern this empire, bearing in mind the diversity of its peoples and the traditions they encompassed, they had to learn the ways of the Greeks, the Persians, the Byzantines and the Indians, all of whom had developed cultures which more advanced than that of the Arabs.

They encouraged the collection and the purchase of hundreds of Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and Chinese manuscripts covering every possible field of knowledge. They ordered that such manuscripts be systematically translated into Arabic in order to place them at the disposal of the learned who, arriving from all the corners of the empire -- Muslim but also Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian -- were to collectively synthesise this knowledge and then produce their own.

For three centuries this effort of research (ijtihad) was encouraged, allowing the emergence of exceptional individuals who were often great travelers as well as philosophers, scientists and experimenters as well as musicians and poets.

Only this rationalist and universalist impetus can account for the emergence, within just a few hundred years, of such figures as Al-Kindi, Al-Razi, Al-Khuwarizmi, Ibn Al-Haythm, Al-Biruni, Al-Farabi, Ibn Hazm, without mentioning Avicennes and Averroes, in Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Boukhara and Samarkand.

It was by granting the space to research, to express a diversity of opinion, that the Islamic world managed to produce that new knowledge which, in its turn, was to enlighten other civilisations, and especially that of a medieval Europe in search of its own renaissance. How can one fail to see that that which, a thousand years ago, gave the Arabs their impetus, remains an absolute condition for ensuring a confident entry into the new millennium?

For tomorrow, just as it was yesterday, this vision is not opposed to national or religious loyalties. On the contrary, the only means to maintain, enrich and renew such loyalties is to immerse them in the living flux of knowledge, to confront them with the creation and production of the other. This is what Europe did not fear to carry out vis-à-vis the Arabs when they carried the torch of the most advanced thinking. It is what assisted Europe in its flight and outdistancing of the Arabs.

In order to rediscover the thread of past glory, the Arabs need to learn from Europe what it once dared to learn from them -- to conjugate, in the present tense, the principle of reason and the values of freedom.