Critical Inquiry — Volume 32, Number 3

Daniel Heller-Roazen
Philosophy before the Law: Averroës's Decisive Treatise

1. Falsafa on Trial

Philosophy found itself before the Law from the moment it encountered Islam.¹ It was the price the classical practice paid for its survival beyond the confines of the Hellenistic world. Translated from Greek into Arabic in the wake of the foundation of Baghdad by the 'Abbāsid dynasty in 762,² the works of physics, metaphysics, logic, ethics, and political thought that constituted the classical tradition of demonstrative science were saved from the oblivion into which they otherwise might have fallen in being submitted to an unprecedented demand, which would alter them forever: philosophy was called upon to give reasons for itself in the face of the authority of the Qur'ān and the teaching of its prophet. To retain itself in translation, the classical discipline could not avoid this singular challenge, which at once threatened it with extinction and promised it the possibility of a new life. Philosophy, it has often been observed, then found itself in unexpected conditions.³ One may compare them to those of Christian Europe, where the classical practice of reasoning was also forced to accommodate itself to the principles of a new religion, as the teachings of the ancients were confronted with the creed elaborated by the fathers of the Church. Doctrine, in the Christian tradition, proved the domain in which the differences between the two were reconciled; pagan science and Church dogma were to be united, with varying success, in philosophical theology. The situation could not be the same in Islam, for the religion announced by Mu'ammad, in contrast to Christianity, had at its center neither faith nor dogma but an element at once theological and political: the Law (šarī'a), the single revealed body of prescriptions and prohibitions understood by the Islamic tradition to be simultaneously civil and religious, temporal and spiritual.⁴ Before the rule of such a Law and the order of a divine figure consequently conceived above all in the form of a Law-giver (šār'), the defense of falsafa, as philosophy was then called, could not be purely doctrinal, as it was in the Christian West; it could not take the form of a concordance of secular teaching and sacred dogma. Within the legal order instituted by Mu'ammad, which was at once political, social, and theological, the vindication of philosophy could only be juridical. If it was to acquire an Arabic afterlife, philosophy had to justify itself before not "sacred doctrine" (doctrina sacra), as in Christianity, but "jurisprudence" (fiqh).⁵ The new adepts of the ancient practice of reflection were obliged, in this way, to leave the domain of their art to secure the conditions of its existence: the falāsifa, as the Arabic successors of the Greek philosophers were called, were forced to become, in time, qawā'in and fuqahā', judges and doctors of the Law.

1. In what follows, the term Law is capitalized whenever it refers not to a particular legal obligation but to the theological and political order (šarī'a) of Islam.
2. On the historical, political, and social conditions of the 'Abbasid translation movement, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society (Second–Fourth/Eighth–Tenth Centuries) (London, 1999).
3. See, among others, Louis Gardet and Georges Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane: Essai de théologie comparée (Paris, 1970); Gardet, La Cité musulmane: Vie politique et sociale (Paris, 1954); Leo Strauss, "Introduction," Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952; Chicago, 1988), pp. 7–21; and Abdelmajid El Ghannouchi, "La Falsafa face aux pouvoirs religieux et politique à l'époque classique," in Actes du congrès international "Défi à la philosophie, Défi de la philosophie," Tunis, April 11–17, 1988 (Tunis, 1991), pp. 179–201.
4. It is the absolutely central position of law in Islam that moves some scholars to define the religion founded by Mu'ammad not only as a political theology or theocracy but, more precisely, as a political theology founded on the rule of law, that is, a "nomocracy." See Gardet, La Cité musulmane, p. 119.
5. On the relation of falsafa to fiqh in Islam and Judaism, as compared to that of philosophia to sacra doctrina in Christendom, see the perspicacious remarks by Strauss, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, which demand to be read in conjunction with his earlier texts on medieval Islamic and Jewish Arabic philosophy (collected in Philosophie und Gesetz, Frühe Schriften, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Heinrich Maier [Stuttgart, 1997]), especially Philosophie und Gesetz: Beiträge zum Verständnis Maimunis und seiner Vorläufer (Berlin, 1935), pp. 3–123, and the important essays "Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maïmonide et de Fârâbî" (1936) and "On Abranavel's Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching" (1937).

DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN is professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Fortune's Faces: The "Roman de la Rose" and the Poetics of Contingency (2003) and Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (2005), as well as the editor and translator of Giorgio Agamben's Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999). His forthcoming book is entitled The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, and he is currently preparing a critical edition of The Arabian Nights.