The foundations of a regenerated Muslim theology that restores seriousness to our lives (part 1)

We are there. After meditating on our sad metaphysical situation (read the trilogy “What would a revived Muslim theology look like in the 21stth century ? “)we concluded on this need to rebuild, on new foundations, a regenerated Muslim theology taking into account both Tradition and our times.

Because no one in France, and we regret it, seems to be tackling this task. There are just aspirations and incantatory words from certain Muslim intellectuals, always the same otherwise, on television sets. This (im)posture would be summed up in this quote: “there is no point in talking, you have to lie to the point”…

A sincere part of the French Mohammedan community is waiting for a serious theology to be produced so that it can attack the ideas of its time while remaining faithful to its principles.

First, let’s be honest : in the Sunni context, if Muslim theology was operative at its beginnings, it ended up experiencing a form of degeneration from the 14th century. We ended up no longer interpreting the world and reality, but rather the theological texts of the first masters.

There was therefore, after a formidable theological rise, an involution where what held the attention of decadent Muslim theologians was no longer existence and its mysteries but the fact of testing their conceptual and verbal agility in the face of a text of Plato, Aristotle, imam Al Baqillani or Al Razi which will thus contribute to creating a closed system generating “its own problems”.

In this sense, Paul Nwyia’s criticism is partially correct: “ Theological thought very quickly became, in the Sunni world, a decadent scholasticism, locked inside a system generating its problems and drawing from its own substance solutions which had no grip on reality. These problems and their solutions are known. It can be said that essentially they are identical in a treatise written by Baqillani in the 11th century and in the risalat al tawhid of Muhammad Abdou, who died in the 20th century. The persistence across nine centuries of the same type of language, the same language and a fixed problematic ne varietur is the sign that such thought lived outside of real time, nourishing itself from an interior secretion in the system, while the world changed and its problems became different “.

This assertion is only partially justified because metaphysics will remain the same forever since its content, that is to say the laws which structure it, cannot change, otherwise it would no longer be “metaphysics”. The perennialists (the school of Abdelhadi Aguéli) are right on this fact.

This idea, that in each new century, there must necessarily be a new metaphysics, destroys the very notion of metaphysics which, in essence, is outside the variations of time. But metaphysics, on the other hand, is a living and concrete discipline. “ When he clearly felt the transcendence of the Absolute, tells us Gaston Berger, the metaphysician reverses the direction of his meditationturns towards the world, looks at the same objects, the same phenomena, the same acts as those to which the ordinary man, the technician and the scientist are attached.

But he now sees them in a completely different light and as if illuminated by a new light. They are the same things (…). But they took their place in the universal order and I cease to see my memberships “. Also, when we talk about the need to have an updated metaphysics we above all mean the need for a vision regenerated by metaphysics.

The standard for a (balanced) Muslim will forever remain the Koran. And the Koran tells us that if there are metaphysical, physical and psychological laws and therefore, a part of permanence which makes up reality, there is also a part of mobility. But the Koran clearly reminds us that it is the mind (the qualitative) which must govern the body (the quantitative) and that consequently, it is the reign of quality (of the heart and the mind) which must direct the moving world of quantity (nature and the body).

Islamic involutionary theology born in the 14th century century did not even counter-argue with modernity and above all, it did not even perceive it as being a current of thought radically breaking with traditional wisdom. As a result of modernity, evolutionism, rationalism, nihilism, structuralism, transhumanism and now, post-truth were born. These are modern philosophical currents in the face of which classical Muslim theology can no longer offer the believer a theological grammar which can allow him to emancipate himself from these foamy doctrines but also and above all, which can help him to “walk straight on earth” to hope for his salvation.

We will have to wait at least five hundred years to see the first currents of thought claiming to be based on Islam appear and discuss with modernity, truly considering it as a rebellious vision of man and the world.. Among these currents, there were the traditionists represented by Abdelhadi Aguéli and his fellow student René Guénon, this current would subsequently be perpetuated by Schuon, Burckhardt and Valsan, all converts to Islam.

These Muslim metaphysicians will have a high-level debate with modernity and its multiple currents of thought. Just before, there was Shah Waliyou llah al Dihlawi who initiated the response that Mohammed Iqbal would continue in the 1920s. We will also have the salafiya movement, led by Al Afghani (d.1897), which will rather seek to resemble the moderns and catch up in terms of technical development. Now, constructing a metaphysics was for salafyia the least of its concerns. Fatal error!

Because, as we currently see, the communities of Islam throughout the world have dissolved in modernity by not having understood, even today, that modernity is not neutral and that its philosophy of Promethean man is, purely and simply, incompatible with the ethically-accomplished man (Al insane al kamil) as he is defined in and by the Koran.

And according to a visionary statement of the Prophet (saw), the dissolution of Muslim societies is not yet complete and complete social chaos still seems to lie ahead of them, and our turbaned and quietist chouyoukhs will be able to do nothing about it, because they are one of the nodes of the problem in the disintegration of Islamic metaphysics. A society without metaphysics is only the ruin of man.

Allow us to make this point: modern Muslims are always infatuated with things that are out of fashion, at independence they became infatuated with socialism in the 60s and 70s when socialist societies prepared their exit from socialism, they then fall in love with the consumer society when the West recognizes the impasse and seeks another model and finally, Muslim populations fall in love with social networks when their creators warn of the danger and many Westerners looking to return to real life.

It is proof of ultimate decadence to try to run behind ever outdated fashions; Are Muslim societies condemned to being obsolete? Muslims no longer manage to be precursors or visionaries but rather backward-looking and blinded as the Prophet (ç) announced – “You will blindly imitate other cultures to the point that if they entered a lizard hole you would enter it.”. And when the Prophet (ç) warns, through this hadith, that we will no longer have metaphysics and therefore, that we will go out of pure sentimentality according to the wind that blows the strongest, the little imbecile minds of the moment understood: he you have to dress differently and not, formally, look like the rest of the world.

Let’s go further! There are two types of men who share knowledge : the first are the empiriciststhose who affirm that the experience is sufficient, that is to say absolute, and who deny Transcendence. Then we have the metaphysicianswho testify that the experience is on the contrary insufficient and that “ the world would be abnormal if only what I grasp existed “.

Pure empiricists do not exist, it is enough just to note that the existence of others can never be the subject of an experience, it can only be inferred, this fact is “even radically inexperimentable, just as it’s impossible to be on the opposite sidewalk.” Brief ! It is impossible to be satisfied with the given.

In a second and final part, we will try to say what, in our opinion, the metaphysical and we will discuss what the theological suitcase of a theologian-teacher for future students within probable future institutes of theological studies and Muslim ethics in a disoriented French society.