Islamic Intellectual History: Atomistic Conception of The Universe

[now] thou deemest so firm, pass away as clouds pass away: a work of Allah, who has ordered all things to perfection! Verily, He is fully aware of all that you do!”(27:88). Perfection here means completion, in this context it is the completeness of the mountains construction, Allah is referring to its most finite element in relation to His knowledge of it.

Allah set the image firm in the scholars minds from the first days of Islam, if the mountains are made of Jawhar (substances), standing firm as large rocks, they will pass like clouds (of particles) when Allah orders the trumpet blown, therefor matter is being held together by a force that will no longer exist at that moment.

Imam Suyuti the Mujadid of his time and an Ash’ari wrote in his tafsir (commentary) to verse 27:88 “And you see the mountains, you notice them, at the moment of the Blast, supposing them to be still, stationary in their place, because of their tremendous size, while they drift like passing clouds, [like the drifting of the] rain when it is blown around by the wind, in other words, they [the mountains] will be drifting in like manner until they [eventually] fall to the ground, whereby they are flattened before becoming like [tufts of] ‘wool’ [cf. Q. 101:5] and then ‘scattered dust’ [cf. Q. 56:6]”(Tafsir al Jalalayn, 27:88).

The mountains which are firm in the ground will first be uprooted as dust (gravity and the fundamental forces no longer exist), then they will begin to float (“when the hills are uprooted from their spots”, Tanwir al Miqbas min Tafsir Ibn Abbas: 56:6) then pass like the clouds of “scattered dust” (56:6). The idea of matter itself being made of small particles is firmly established in the Quran, and that these substances in there current form will one day no longer exist in this manner and change will occur was made vividly clear.

If time is discrete, something not all theologians spoke about or agreed with, then Allah’s act of sustaining it from moment to moment means that it is sustained for a moment then when that is finished that moment needs to be sustained again, (time is born from entanglement, and entanglement occurs because of motion) there is no limit to how finite a time this occurs on and it isn’t to say Allah is not also acting in these moments but he decreed we have free will and choices in life, meaning he also responds to our actions in the Universe which is illustrated by the verse “You did not throw, when you threw, but Allah threw” (8:17).

The issue with some translations referring to the world as being annihilated and recreated isn’t with the process, but the image of the world not existing then existing, it is annihilated and then recreated, even though this is mentioned as being a finite process the words used to describe it conjure in the mind the world being destroyed then recreated which is a false image, what is being referred to here is something impossible to perceive and time is clearly and apparently fluid and continuous, meaning no scholar ever witnessed a moment of un-creation to speak of the matter in these vivid terms.

In fact Allah in the Quran challenges us to see otherwise, “Blessed is He in Whose hand is the Sovereignty (of the universe), and, He is Able to do all things. Who hath created life and death that He may try which of you is best in conduct; and He is the Mighty, the Forgiving, Who hath created seven heavens in harmony. Thou (Muhammad) canst see no fault (flaw) in the Beneficent One’s creation; then look again: Canst thou see any rifts?(67:1-3)

The scholars used science to explain the Quran, not philosophy. In his work, Risalah fi istihsan al-khaud fi’l-kalam, Imam al-Ash’ari replied to questions regarding motion, rest, body accident, atom, and space by saying that “the Prophet (saws) wasn’t unaware of all these things. Moreover, one can find the general principles (usul) underlying these physical issues and problems explicitly mentioned in the Quran and the hadiths”.

The Scholars associated this action of re-creation after annihilation with Aradh (the accident) rather than with the Jawhar (the substance). But once we know that the Jawhar cannot exist without the Aradh, the accident (Aradh) can be thought of as the forces sustaining the Jawhar (substance), this is equivalent to the four fundamental forces of the universe without which quantum particles could also not exist as described by modern physics.

By such a process they attributed the act of the universe being sustained, to the forces acting on the substances (Jawhar), and thus through this manner Allah is the continuous sustainer of the Universe. The discussions in Imam al Ashari’s lifetime were not merely scientific, but involved issues that clearly touched upon religious beliefs, they necessitated the active participation of the religious scholars. And answers to these problems where deduced from the general principles contained in the Quran and the Hadiths.

Imam al-Ashari quotes both the Quran and Ahadith to establish that Allah asks man to study these signs in the universe. For example, he quotes the following Quranic passage to show that there is a scriptural basis for the definition of Aradh (accident) as “that which cannot endure, but perishes in the second instant of its coming-to-be”, Allah says “Ye look for the transient things (arad) of this world, but Allah looketh to the Hereafter (8:67).

The Ash’ari’s called the existence of indivisible particles “al-juz’ alladhi lam yatajazza’”, literally meaning “the part that cannot be divided” (which came to be inaccurately termed atom in english). These particles are the most fundamental units that could exist, and out of which the whole world is created.

The First major characteristic of the Ash’ari atoms (Jawhar) is that they are devoid of size or magnitude (kaam), and are completely homogeneous like the Higgs boson, in fact a closer look at there description will show that the word atom is inadequate, because there are types and it is impossible to think water is made from the same atoms as dirt indicating the general nature of the discussion which they understood in more complex terms. Being devoid of size or magnitude in other words means, they are entities without length or breadth, but which combine to form bodies possessing dimensions, this bears a very close resemblance to quantum particles as we know them today behaving as waves, or particles existing in the field. They therefore differ from the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus or those of Epicurus in Greek philosophy, which are always presented as having magnitude.

The Second main characteristic of the Ash’ari atoms is that they are determinate or finite in number. Thus, in opposition to all schools of Greek atomists, who believed in the infinite divisibility of matter, and who maintained that atoms are infinite in number, the Ash’ari rejected the infinity of atoms on the basis of the Quranic verse: ‘And He counteth all things by number’ (Chapter LXXII, verse 28), meaning at some point this divisibility will stop and “the part that cannot be divided” is the smallest particle (Jawhar).

The Third important characteristic of the Ash’ ari atoms is that they are perishable by nature. The Ash’ari’s maintain that the atom (Jawhar) cannot endure two instants of time. At every moment of time the atoms (Jawhar) come into being, and pass out of existence (This is not unlike Quantum field theory, all particles are excitations of fields and the Higgs Boson was observed by exciting the Higgs field, the particle was observed momentarily then it went back into the field, In the words of Imam al-Baqillani, the accident “perishes in the second instant of its coming-to-be.”). Each atoms duration (baqa’) is instantaneous. Its momentary existence is made possible ultimately through Allah’s supervention upon it through the accident (Aradh) of duration, which, like all other accidents, is perishable.

When conceptualizing the universe the Ash’ari’s “atomize” matter, space, and time, as a result of which the universe becomes a domain of separate, concrete entities which are independent of each other, there is no connection between one moment of their existence and the next.

The idea of atomism (Atomic nature of the universe) itself had a long history in both Eastern and Western thought. Out of the different philosophical and religious molds in which this idea has been conceived throughout that long history, have arisen such a wide variety of its formulations that, content wise, no single definition can adequately express and comprehend them.

From the classical atomic theory of Greek philosophical speculation, to fifth-century atomism of Indian religious sects, from the atomism of Kalam (Theology) in ninth-century Islam to that of the European Renaissance and to the atomic theory of modern science, one fundamental idea, and the only one, that has remained common to all these theories is the idea of the finitude of the divisibility of particles constituting the material world. This is assuming that those variants which convey the idea of the divisibility of substance ad infinitum (continues divisibility) are excluded, otherwise, they have nothing in common.

By similitude the relevance of Greek Philosophy to Orthodox Islamic intellectual thought is as significant to Islamic history as someone finding an isolated tribe in the middle of the Amazon who had not left their lands and introduced the idea that the world is vast, except in this instance Allah had already spoken about the natural phenomena in the Universe and the smallest particle in existence in both the Quran and Sunnah, it nudged in some directions the understanding of what was already there and after careful consideration the eventual outright rejection of its particulars occurred.

The Greek philosophers them self relied on the the revelations of persian prophets, Plato for instance often quotes the persian Prophet Zoroaster (the majus in the Quran).

Just like it has been theorized and cant be establish which came first the “Chicken or the Egg” we cant establish the exact minimal extent of that influence to overall Orthodox Islam, muslim scholars where not interested in philosophy or philosophical thought they where interested in science and the scientific nature of existence and outright rejected such methods until it was deemed necessary to refute them with the emergence of the Mutazila and other heretical sects.

For the first few hundred years of Islam, Orthodox Islam fought the heresies of the Philosophers, ensuring that the identity of Islam was well defined by producing works outlining its Creed (Aqeedah), Theology, Law (Fiqh), History, Language and much more, which was done by its scholars throughout its lands. Imam al Ash’ari did this from the central Lands of Islam while Imam Maturidi, the other main Islamic school of Aqeedah is named after him, did this from central Asia and there where many others.

Muslim Scholars where well aware of the divisions that was to occur, there is the famous hadith, The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) stood among us and said: “Those who came before you of the people of the Book split into seventy-two sects, and this ummah will split into seventy-three: seventy-two (will be) in Hell and one in Paradise, and that is the jamaa’ah (main body of Muslims).”(Abu Dawood), the Main body of Islam as we know it today is Sunni Islam, which comprises roughly 90% of the Muslim population, the devision being over the very things the philosophers liked to debate over, Aqeedah (creed) and the nature of Allah and existence, about which they held heretical views.

Imam al Ghazali one of Islam’s major theologians wrote the work “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” which dealt a blow to Philosophy in Islamic lands which historically it never recovered from. It is an insult to one of Histories Greatest minds to relabel his works as philosophy as has been the case by modern academics. What they wrongly perceived as philosophy was the science that existed in his time and Imam al Ghazali was careful to separate the two. Beyond specific scholars in history, in various parts of the Islamic world adopting some of there views, we are only interested in understanding the atomic theory of kalam as one of several theories of nature formulated by the Ullumah.

The atomistic theory of nature is Islamic insofar as it has a Quranic basis, it was based not only upon the teachings of the Quran concerning nature, but also specific theological perspectives of the revealed Book and science as it was understood in the day. There are other theological interpretations of the Quran, which have been used by other intellectual schools like the Maturidi school of Aqeedah.

For over a thousand years Orthodox Islam was defined in the follwoing manner, when the Imam of the late Shafi‘i school of Law (Madhhab, meaning the entire school relied on his works) Imam Ibn Hajr al-Haytami was asked for a fatwa identifying as-hab al-bida or heretics, he answered that they were “those who contravene Muslim orthodoxy and consensus (Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama‘a): the followers of Sheikh Abul Hasan al-Ash‘ari and Abu Mansur al-Maturidi, the two Imams of Ahl al-Sunna” (al-Fatawa al-hadithiyya (c00, 280).

It shouldn’t be surprising that Islamic Orthodoxy, Sunni Islam, or Ahl al Sunnah wal jama’ah is defined by its Aqeedah (creed) and not it’s Fiqh (Laws). A person can make mistakes in Law and he would be committing a sin but if he makes mistakes in his Aqeedah (creed) that can take him out Islam entirely, short of this are the heretical sects which just fell short of being outside of Islam altogether. In fact the famous hadith of the 73 sects “My ummah will be divided into seventy three sects. All of them will be in the Fire except one”, (Muslim, no.976), the Ulluma defined by the Aqeedah of these groups not there fiqh, and the one group is Sunni Islam.

There are many different groups having different Fiqh beliefs based on the four madhhabs but the number of groups that varied in Aqeedah numbered 73, all have already come in history, and this is identified by the content of what they believed and not just their names alone.

Islamic theology is based on an ethical rather than speculative imperative, this point is worth emphasizing, in essential terms, the debate between kalam (Theology) and falsafah (Philosophy) was not a debate between two world views, one Islamic the other un-Islamic or less Islamic, it was a debate between two particular perspectives interpreting the Islamic sacred Texts one failed to arrive at sound conclusions and was deemed a flawed methodology.

Moreover, “belief” means holding something to be true, not merely believing what one’s forefathers or group believe, such that if they handed down something else, one would believe that instead. That “belief” is blind imitation without reference to truth or falsity, it is not belief at all. Allah specifically condemns those who reject Islam out of such reasons, by saying:

“When they are told: ‘Come to what Allah has revealed, and to the Messenger,’ they say, ‘It suffices us what we found our forefathers upon’—But what if their forefathers knew nothing, and were not guided?” (5:104).

In short, Islamic Theology exists because belief in Islam demands three things:

(1) to define the contents of faith;

(2) to show that it is possible for the mind to accept, not be absurd or inconsistent;

(3) and to give reasons to be personally convinced of it.

One of the first groups in recorded history to speak about the theory of atomism in Islam was the heretical sect the Mu’tazili, during the first half of the third(AH)/ninth(CE) century, although it is possible that the idea had already been discussed earlier, early islamic scholarship was largely an oral tradition which changed with the spread of writing tools.

However, it is quite certain that by the middle of the third/ninth century, atomism had become firmly established in the theological circles of Islam as a theory which commended itself as the antithesis of Aristotelianism. According to an account of early kalam atomism given by Abu Hasan al-Ash’ ari (d.330/941), the founder of the Ash’ari school of Theology (kalam), in his Maqalat al-Islamiyyin, that early ninth-century Mu’tazilite figures as Abu’l-Hudhail al-’ Allaf (d. 226/840), al-Iskafi (d.241/855), Mu’mar ibn ‘Abbad al-Sulami (d.228/842), Hisham al -Fuwati (a contemporary of Mu’ ammar), and ‘Abbad ibn Sulayman (d. 250/864) all accepted the atomic theory in one form or another.

This atomism theory by the Mu’tazilite theologians was later rejected, refined and extensively developed by the Ash’arite school, this being one aspect of its teachings, especially by Abu Bakr al-Baqillani (d.403/1013). After the fourth-tenth century it was the atomism of Ash’arite Theology which flourished in Islam, having as its exponents such famous names as al-Ghazzali and Fakhr al-Din Razi (d.606/1209).

Ash’ari Theology has remained to this day the dominant Sunni school of theology and the other being the Maturidi school.

The science of kalam has its roots in the earliest theological and political debates in the Islamic community concerning such problems as free will and predestination, the question of whether the Quran is created or uncreated, the relation of faith to works, the definition of a believer, and many more. All these issues arose out of specific internal factors and developments, already existing within the community, that were both religious and political in nature.

These debates led to the emergence, during the first(AH)/seventh (CE) century, of various sectarian groups with distinct, definable views which distinguished them from the majority of the community, and which thus placed them in the extreme fringes of the community (Ummah). The most famous of these groups were the Murji’ites, Qadarites, and Khawarij.

It was out of these early theological trends and manifestations that the first systematic theological school emerged, namely, the Heretical Mu ‘tazilah.

Islamic theology had to combat a number of external factors, the first was the theological attacks against the very tenets of Islamic faith, carried out by religious groups such as the Jews, Christians, and Manichaeans, as well as the Materialists, who were all intellectually armed with the tools of Greek logic. Another factor was the introduction of Greek philosophical ideas into the community through translations of Greek works into Arabic.

The nature of the new challenge was twofold, one methodological, the other doctrinal. At the methodological level the challenge involved finding rational answers to the fundamental problem of relationship between revelation and reason, of which the question of legitimacy regarding the use of logic or dialectical methods in theological discussions, was just one aspect. At the doctrinal level, the challenge involved the problem of identifying and formulating authentic criteria of orthodoxy in the face of conflicting claims to “Islamicity”.

The challenge facing Abul Hasan al-Ash‘ari and Abu Mansur al-Maturidi was to: (1) define the tenets of faith of Islam and refute innovation; (2) to show that this faith was acceptable to the mind and not absurd or inconsistent; and (3) to give proofs that personally convinced the believer of it. Though not originally obligatory itself, kalam became so when these aims could not be accomplished for the Muslim polity without it, in view of the Islamic legal principle that “whatever the obligatory cannot be accomplished without, becomes itself obligatory.”

Imam al Ashari was the first to succeeded in safeguarding the identity of Orthodox Islam, for the first 30 years of his life he had been a Mutazili himself, which he learnt from his uncle a prominent Mutazili scholar, then upon seeing the prophet (saws) in a dream who instructed him to teach his sunnah, he left the group and began systematically dissecting its arguments exposing its weakness and faults, this conversion to Orthodox Islam, the Mutazilah never recovered from and eventually ceased to exist.

Imam al-Baqillani, a student of Imam al-Ash’ari, was most responsible for its refinement and detailed formulation. As regards the other Ash’arite doctrines, apart from Imam al-Baqillani, it was Imam al-Ghazzali and also Imam Fakhr al-Din Razi, who further elaborated on them to produce a more refined exposition.

Although the Ash’ari’s accepted the necessity of rationalization of faith, they were generally opposed to the rational methodology and speculation of the philosophers (falasifah), revelation is explained by rational thought rational thought does not produce revelation. So there was an order of precedence that had to be maintained to safeguard the meaning of the original message in the Quran from distortion, to which they employed the various islamic sciences in formulating their conclusions.

In one respects, the Ash’ rites possessed an independent spirit of intellectualism. Unlike the philosophers, they were not bound to any particular school of Greek philosophy. This spirit was productive of some of the severest criticism of Aristotelian physics. Consequently, the Ash’ari’s were able to develop many original ideas pertaining to the sciences of the universe, particularly in the theory of atomism.

According to Imam al Ghazali, kalam, theology could not be identified with the Aqeedah (creed) of Islam itself, but rather was what protected it from heresy and change. He wrote about his long experience in studying kalam (Theology) in a number of places in his Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din (Revival of Religious Science), one of them just after his beautiful ‘Aqida al-Qudsiyya or “Jerusalem Creed” (Aqeedah he wrote in Jerusalem). After mentioning the words of Imam Shafi‘i, Malik, Ahmad, and Sufyan al-Thawri, he mentioned that (speculative) kalam, theology, is unlawful—by which they meant the Mu‘tazilite school of their times.

Imam al Ghazali gives his own opinion on discursive theology, saying:

“There is benefit and harm in it. As to its benefit, it is lawful or recommended or obligatory whenever it is beneficial, according to the circumstances. As to its harm, it is unlawful whenever and for whomever it is harmful”…

“As for its benefit, it might be supposed that it is to reveal truths and know them as they truly are. And how farfetched! Kalam theology is simply unable to fulfill this noble aim, and it probably flounders and misguides more than it discovers or reveals. If you had heard these words from a hadith scholar or literalist, you might think, “People are enemies of what they are ignorant of.” So hear them instead from someone steeped in kalam theology, who left it after mastering it in depth and penetrating into it as far as any scholar can, and who then went on to specialize in closely related fields, before realizing that access to the realities of true knowledge was barred from this path. By my life, theology is not bereft of revealing and defining the truth and clarifying some issues, but it does so rarely, and about things that are already clear and almost plain before learning its details”.

“Rather, it has one single benefit, namely guarding the ordinary man’s faith we have just outlined [the Jerusalem Creed] and defending it by argument from being shaken by those who would change it with heresies”.

In this and other passages of his works, Ihya ulum al-din, al-Munqidh min al-dalal, and Faysal al-tafriqa which summarize his life experience with kalam theology, Imam al Ghazali distinguishes between several things. The first is ‘ilm al-Aqa’id or the knowledge of the basic tenets of faith, which we have called above “personal theology,” and which he deems beneficial. The second is what we have called “discursive theology,” or kalam properly speaking, the use of rational arguments to defeat heretics who would confuse common people about tenets of faith, Imam al Ghazali believed this is valid and obligatory, but only to the extent needed.

The third we may call “speculative theology,” which is philosophical reasoning from first principles about God, man, and being, to discover by deduction and inference the way things really are, this Imam al Ghazali regards as impossible for kalam to do.

As for the role of kalam in defending Islam from heresies, Jahm and the Mu‘tazilites are certainly less of a threat to orthodox today than scientism, the reduction of all truth to statements about quantities and empirical facts. The real challenge to religion today is the mythic power of science to theologize its experimental method, and imply that since it has not discovered God, He must not exist which itself is against the scientific method since declaring something impossible on the basis of no evidence is not science but speculation.

The heart of traditional kalam theology is that—after the shahada “there is no deity but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah,” and after acknowledging Allah’s infinite perfections and transcendence above any imperfection—it is obligatory for every Muslim to know what is (a) necessarily true, (b) impossible, or (c) possible to affirm of both Allah and the prophets (upon whom be peace). These three categories traditionally subsume some fifty tenets of faith.

(a) The twenty attributes necessarily true of Allah are His (1) existence; (2) not beginning; (3) not ending; (4) self-subsistence, meaning not needing any place or determinant to exist; (5) dissimilarity to created things; (6) uniqueness, meaning having no partner (sharik) in His entity, attributes, or actions; (7) omnipotent power; (8) will; (9) knowledge; (10) life; (11) hearing; (12) sight; (13) speech; such that He is (14) almighty; (15) all-willing; (16) all-knowing; (17) living; (18) all-hearing; (19) all-seeing; (20) and speaking—through His attributes of power, will, knowledge, life, hearing, sight, and speech, not merely through His being.

(b) The twenty attributes necessarily impossible of Allah (21–40) are the opposites of the previous twenty, such as nonexistence, beginning, ending, and so on.

(c) The one attribute merely possible of Allah (41) is that He may create or destroy any possible thing.

The attributes of the prophets (upon whom be peace) similarly fall under the three headings:

(a) The four attributes necessarily true of the prophets (42–45) are telling the truth, keeping their trust, conveying to mankind everything they were ordered to, and intelligence.

(b) The four attributes necessarily impossible of them (46–49) are the opposites of the previous four, namely lying, treachery, concealing what they were ordered to reveal, and feeblemindedness .

(c) The one attribute possible of them (50) is any human state that does not detract from their rank, such as eating, sleeping, marrying, and illnesses not repellant to others; although Allah protected them from every offensive physical trait and everything unbecoming them, keeping them from both lesser sins and enormities, before their prophethood and thereafter.

When one reflects on these fifty fundamental tenets of faith, which students memorized over the centuries, it is not difficult to understand why Ash‘ari-Maturidi kalam was identified with Islamic orthodoxy for over a millennium; namely, they are the tenets of the Qur’an and Sunna.