The Challenge of Pluralism and the Middle Way of Islam

Abstract

There is a story from a classic of Islamic spirituality2 about four quarrelling travellers, a Persian, a Turk, an Arab, and a Greek, who argue about how best to spend a single coin, which is the only piece of money they have between them. They all desire grapes, but they do not realise this because each speaks a different language. A traveller hears them quarrelling and buys them a bunch of grapes. Everybody is in a state of yearning, because there is an inner need existing inall of us, a basic urge to remember our original state of unity, but we give it different names and have different ideas of what it may be. The travellerlinguist in the story represents the sage, the man or woman of spiritual insight, who knows that the other travellers all yearn for the same thing. Such a person is the harmoniser or peacemaker, who is able to resolve the misunderstanding and strife between the travellers and fulfil all their needs with a single coin. The single coin is, of course, tawhid, the divine unity, which is the ground of all diversity. There is a special need at this time, in the midst of all the rhetoric about theclash of civilisations, to issue a strong warning about the consequences of exaggerating differences. More than ever, we need traveller-linguists who can translate from one ‘‘language’’ into another to bring to light the convergence of people’s deepest aspirations. I would like to challenge the dangerous doctrine of the clash of civilisationsby finding common ground between the Anglo-Saxon spirit and Islamic values and virtues in the idea of the ‘‘middle way’’. According to the late President of Bosnia, ‘Alija ‘Ali Izetbegovic,3 the source of this convergence is an Englishman, the thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon, who ‘‘set the entire structure of English philosophical thought on two separate foundations’’: inward experience, which leads to spiritual insight, and observation and experimentation, which is the basis of modern science. Bacon never attempted to reduce everything to either a scientific or a religious outlook, but sought to establish a balance between the two: ‘‘This aspect of Bacon’s genius is considered by most Englishmen as the most authentic expression of English thought and feeling.’’ President Izetbegovic then adds that there is ‘‘another important fact aboutRoger Bacon which has never been sufficiently studied and recognised: the father of English philosophy and science was a student of Arabic.’’ Indeed, helectured at Oxford in Arab clothes. He was strongly influenced by Islamic thinkers, especially by Ibn Sina, and to this influence can be attributed the character of Bacon’s thought and, through him, perhaps the origin of the middle way as an important guiding principle in English life. He stressed the need for balance: balance between reason, observation, and science, on the one hand, and faith, on the other; balance between individual freedoms and rights, and wider responsibilities within society; balance between utilitarian morality, or pragmatism, and the highest ideals; and balance between a practical concern with the everyday needs and a hunger for transcendence. Another Bacon, Sir Francis Bacon, is well known as one of the fathers of thescientific revolution in England, a champion of empiricism who held that we must purge the mind of prejudice, conditioning, false notions, and unanalysed authority – what he called the ‘‘Idols of the human mind’’ which distort and discolour the true nature of things – and rely instead on direct experience, observation, and ‘‘true induction’’ as methods of gaining sound knowledge.4