We have found that the Holy Book opens the doors of knowledge wide, whether in terms of calling for it and enticing it, or in terms of expanding the vision to it in an amazing comprehensiveness and immersion, or in terms of its apparent and hidden levels, or in terms of its limitless future prospects, or in terms of status. Which he put in place for scholars who know God, or in terms of encouraging the use of various tools of knowledge to overcome the state of ignorance and shortcomings in which man was created (and God brought you out of your mothers’ wombs knowing nothing and made for you hearing, sight and hearts), and other creative and inventive Qur’anic colorings in dealing with Science.
We are indebted to this Qur’anic conception of science for all the types of intellectual and traditional knowledge produced by Muslims alike. The Muslims, in their meeting with the “First Sharia” before change entered it, were able to establish edifices of knowledge that still exert their influence. A book that began with “Read” and ended with “Taqwa” and made reading the path of piety, and did not set limits for it except those of intellectual integrity, was the catalyst for building a civilization of science and faith.
However, as Muslims entered into a kind of intellectual contraction, they began to draw the boundaries separating what they called “praiseworthy sciences” and “reprehensible sciences”, so the legal sciences and what is close to them of machine sciences became the sciences that the student of science demanded turnout for, and the philosophical sciences became sciences Forbidden approaching it becomes evidence of getting out of the bondage of religion, and from here the logic was narrowed, had it not been for him to find supporters, so he joined the path of legal education.
And he narrowed down the mental sciences, had it not been that astronomy found rivals for him, so he also joined the same corps, but philosophy, since at least the sixth century AH, had fierce opponents, so that Ibn al-Khatib warned his son against philosophy because it does not inherit “except skepticism and poor opinion.” Rather, Al-Baji, before him, warned his two sons against “reading something from logic and philosophy” because, according to him, that “is based on disbelief, atheism, and distance from the Sharia.” Thus, forbidden scientific areas were organized in the life of Muslims, and it was forbidden to approach them, so the results of this act were dire for the Muslim mind and its effects that He produces it, and every scholar sees that his forensic knowledge is the best knowledge and the one that deserves attention and celebration, and there was a consensus to depart from the sciences of philosophy except for the rare scholars, including Abu Ali al-Yusi, the author of the book “The Law in the Rulings of Knowledge and the World and the Rulings of the Learned”, which he demonstrated in his book Science is not forbidden at all, and he singled out the sciences of philosophy a special place in his book.
Philosophy is the science that contributed to the advancement of science, and all the great philosophers were knights in science, so Plato was a mathematician, Aristotle was a biologist, Descartes was a mathematician and innovator in it, Kant’s philosophy is based on Newtonian physics, and so were the philosophers of Islam and their great scholars, and that is why when Muslims legislated In the prohibition of philosophy, they began to get out of the way of theoretical science in which they were among its seat and founders, and their interest in the margins of science and its salt became abundant, and they left its crucifixion to the thinkers of the West who received the torch from the pioneer Muslims, and set out to explore its horizons, and achieve successive successes in it, until the earth began to speak their language, and under shade lush trees of knowledge.
* Director of the Center for Philosophical Studies at Mohamed Bin Zayed University for Human Sciences.
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