Mohammedanism: Lectures on Its Origin, Its Religious and Political Growth, and Its Present StateSnouck Hurgronje, C. (Christiaan)
Islamic
Mohammedanism: Lectures on Its Origin, Its Religious and Political Growth, and Its Present State
Snouck Hurgronje, C. (Christiaan)
Islam
Nevertheless, the unity of Islamic thought is by no means a word void of
sense. The ideas of Mohammedan philosophers, borrowed for a great part from
Neoplatonism, the pantheism and the emanation theory of Mohammedan mystics
are certainly still further distant from the simplicity of Qorânic
religion than the orthodox dogmatics; but all those conceptions alike show
indubitable marks of having grown up on Mohammedan soil. In the works even
of those mystics who efface the limits between things human and divine,
who put Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism on the same line with the
revelation of Mohammed, and who are therefore duly anathematized by the
whole orthodox world, almost every page testifies to the relation of the
ideas enounced with Mohammedan civilization. Most of the treatises on
science, arts, or law written by Egyptian students for their doctor's
degree at European universities make no exception to this rule; the manner
in which these authors conceive the problems and strive for their solution
is, in a certain sense, in the broadest sense of course, Mohammedan. Thus,
if we speak of Mohammedan thought, civilization, spirit, we have to bear in
mind the great importance of the system which, almost unchanged, has been
delivered for about one thousand years by one generation of doctors of
Islâm to the other, although it has become ever more unfit to meet the
needs of the Community, on whose infallible Agreement it rests. But, at the
same time, we ought to consider that beside the agreement of canonists,
of dogmatists, and of mystics, there are a dozen more agreements, social,
political, popular, philosophical, and so on, and that however great may be
the influence of the doctors, who pretend to monopolize infallibility for
the opinions on which they agree, the real Agreement of Islâm is the least
common measure of all the agreements of the groups which make up the
Community.
It would require a large volume to review the principal currents of thought
pervading the Moslim world in our day; but a general notion may be acquired
by a rapid glance at two centres, geographically not far distant from each
other, but situated at the opposite poles of spiritual life: Mecca and
Cairo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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