AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): A large number of Islamic scholars, students and research scholars from across the world threw a challenge at the oft-repeated notion of the Muslim intellectual decline. The discussions focussed on the order of education, the relationship between primary texts and commentaries, the meaning of originality and creativity, and the need to study Islamic intellectual traditions within their own historical and scholarly contexts.
The event, the fifth annual Usul Forum, here on Saturday (July 25), was a major academic meeting devoted to the place of commentaries and marginalia in later Islamic scholarship. Held at the Aziz Mahmoud Hudayi Kulliyesi in Üsküdar under the theme “Marginalia in Later Islamic Writings: Stagnation or Renewal?”, the forum examined a question that has shaped much modern writing about Muslim intellectual history: whether the extensive tradition of commentaries and hawāshī represented a decline in original thinking or reflected a different form of scholarly work within a continuing intellectual tradition.
Prominent academic Dr Recep Şentürk opened the forum, organised by Usul Academy. The sociologist of religion stressed the importance of order in education and the role of the teacher in the development of a student. He said knowledge could not simply be presented to students randomly but had to be acquired through a proper sequence.
Dr Şentürk was the rector and is the founding president of Ibn Haldun University, and is currently the dean of the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar.
Students, he argued, could easily develop the impression that they understood a subject when attempting to study advanced material without the guidance of a teacher or the foundations needed to understand it properly. “When students try to teach themselves without proper guidance, they can easily develop the illusion that they are reading and understanding,” Dr Şentürk said. He stressed that the stages of education, the role of the teacher and the gradual development of the student were all important parts of the learning process.
The academic also spoke about the importance of understanding educational reform within its historical context. He said the work being discussed at the forum should not be seen simply as a rejection of the Islamic intellectual tradition. Instead, it represented an attempt to think about educational reform from within that tradition. He referred to other educational reform projects that emerged during the same period, including works produced in response to questions raised by European powers about the foundations of the Ottoman educational system. The work being discussed at the forum, however, represented a different kind of reform. “It was not a rejection of tradition, nor an attempt to imitate European or colonial educational models,” Şentürk said. “Rather, it sought to reform educational practices while remaining faithful to the underlying principles of the civilisation.” The central point of his remarks was that educational reform could be considered without abandoning the intellectual foundations of the tradition itself.
Dr Talal al-Azem, the Mohammed Noah Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and the Islamic Centre Lecturer in Classical Islam in the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Oxford, examined the question through the idea of a “paradigm”, which he described as a system of knowledge, practice and institutions governing a civilisation or historical order. He said such a system contained different areas, some of which stood at its centre while others remained on the periphery. A rupture, he explained, could take place when central parts of an existing order were displaced, when peripheral elements became central or when the whole structure was replaced by another one.
Dr Al-Azem said the 18th century witnessed a major rupture in India and the wider Muslim world, as the institutions and foundations of the existing civilisational order came under pressure and were gradually displaced. He situated the educational criticism discussed at the forum within this broader historical context. His remarks focused on the relationship between changes in the wider civilisational order and the question of how education was organised.
A central point of discussion was the distinction between criticism of the way knowledge was taught and rejection of the Islamic intellectual tradition itself. The argument presented was that the problem was not necessarily the existence of commentaries and hawāshī, but the possibility that students were approaching advanced works before properly mastering the primary texts of a discipline. Dr Al-Azem referred to the description of an age in which “rabbits had replaced lions”, a phrase used to criticise the decline of proper educational order. In the earlier model being discussed, students first studied foundational works and then moved to commentaries and more advanced texts. The criticism was that this sequence had been disrupted when students were taken to difficult commentaries before acquiring a firm understanding of the primary texts.
The discussion also stressed that the issue was educational rather than simply bibliographical. The question was not merely how books were arranged, but how students developed their understanding of a discipline. A student first needed basic knowledge, then the skills required for further study and finally the ability to engage independently with the wider field. The argument was that a commentary could deepen a student’s understanding when studied at the proper stage, but could become a barrier when approached before the foundations of the subject had been mastered.
Examples from logic and theology were used to explain this point. Students could be directed towards difficult commentaries in logic before properly understanding the primary texts. In theology, a student could spend a long period studying a single issue through a commentary and its associated hawāshī while still lacking a broader understanding of the subject. The argument was not that commentaries were without value. Rather, the concern was that they could be studied at the wrong stage and in the wrong order. The same concern applied to the practice of producing extensive notes and further commentaries without sufficient attention to the educational needs of the student.
Dr Mehmet Emin Güleçiyüz, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and a scholar of Islamic religious thought, challenged the continued influence of the idea that Muslim scholarship simply declined after a certain point in history. He said the same type of assumption could be found in other academic fields. “We still find these decline narratives influencing scholarship in other fields as well,” he said. “In political science, for example, some scholars continue to publish books that seem to assume that Muslims, at some point in history, simply stopped thinking and producing scholars.”
Dr Güleçiyüz then turned to the question of originality. He said that both the old decline narrative and some attempts to challenge it could rely on the same modern categories, including originality, creativity and intellectual dynamism. He questioned whether these categories should be accepted without first asking what they actually meant. “What does it mean for a text to be original? What makes something novel? How do we measure intellectual dynamism or creativity?” he asked.
He warned that rejecting the decline narrative without questioning the categories on which it was based could leave scholars arguing within the same intellectual framework. “We may win the argument, but remain trapped within the same framework,” he said.
Dr Güleçiyüz also spoke about the expectations that some young scholars had developed towards hawāshī literature. He said that, as an undergraduate, many students had been given the impression that these works were filled with completely original and unexplored ideas. Some scholars later became highly skilled at reading and understanding the texts, but disappointment could also follow because the works had not necessarily been written to meet the expectations later readers placed upon them.
The question, he said, was not whether all standards for judging scholarship should be abandoned. Islamic intellectual traditions had their own ways of assessing the importance and value of texts. Some works were copied repeatedly, studied and commented upon, while others were neglected or forgotten. Some manuscripts were only now receiving their first readers through digitisation. The later reception of a work could therefore not be treated as a simple measure of its intellectual value.
He referred to the term muta’akhkhir, used for a scholar who comes after earlier generations and works within an inherited intellectual framework. He argued that working within such a framework did not automatically mean that a scholar lacked originality. A scholar could inherit an intellectual structure while addressing new questions or producing work that had value within the scholarly community of the time. “The fact that a scholar belongs to a particular genre also does not automatically determine the originality of his work,” he said.
Dr Güleçiyüz also compared the question with changes in modern academic life. Journal articles, books, online videos and other forms of media all influence how knowledge is produced and circulated. The rise of machine-generated text has also created new questions about academic writing and the production of knowledge. Yet the form or medium of a work does not automatically determine its intellectual value. In the same way, the fact that a work is a commentary on an earlier text does not, by itself, determine whether it contains original ideas.
The wider argument was that scholars should ask more precise questions about commentaries and hawāshī. Rather than simply asking whether a work was “original” or “unoriginal”, they should examine what intellectual work it performed, what problems it addressed, how it engaged with earlier scholarship, how it was received and what its own scholarly community considered valuable. A text’s genre alone could not determine its intellectual worth.
The forum brought together several scholars working in different areas of Islamic studies. Dr Jonathan AC Brown, Dr Sami Ayoub, Dr Talal al-Azem and Dr Mehmet Emin Güleçiyüz spoke in the first session, chaired by Dr Recep Şentürk. The second session was chaired by Dr Ahmad Snobar, Associate Professor of Hadith Studies at Istanbul University. It included Dr Amjad Rashid, Dr Hamza al-Bakri and Dr Abdulhamid al-Turkmani. The third session was chaired by Dr Salah al-Din al-Shami, Islamic scholar specialising in the science of Hadith. It included Dr Mahmoud al-Masri, Dr Issam Eido and Dr Faraz Rabbani.
The presence of a large number of Islamic scholars, students and research scholars from different parts of the world gave the meeting an international character. The forum provided a setting for sustained discussion about the history of Islamic education and scholarship and about the assumptions that have shaped modern readings of later Muslim intellectual work. Its discussions did not suggest that every commentary or hāshiyashould automatically be treated as important, nor did they deny the possibility of educational weaknesses or problems in the transmission of knowledge. Instead, the speakers called for later Islamic scholarship to be studied with greater care and for the categories used to judge it to be examined rather than simply taken for granted.
The fifth Usul Forum was a wonderful and memorable academic conference that brought scholars and students together in Istanbul for a serious discussion of a subject central to the study of Islamic intellectual history. Its main contribution was to question the simple claim that the appearance of extensive commentary literature alone proves intellectual decline. The discussions showed that the issue involves much more: the order in which students acquire knowledge, the relationship between primary texts and later works, the standards by which scholarship is judged and the historical communities that produced and received these texts.
The conference called for a more careful study of later Islamic scholarship, one that avoids both the old claim that Muslim intellectual life simply stopped and the opposite assumption that every later work must automatically be celebrated.
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