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Le Dogme et la Loi de l'Islam by Goldziher, Ignaz; Felix Arin Review by: Duncan B. Macdonald Isis, Vol. 4, No. 1 (May, 1921), pp. 64-66 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/224096 . Accessed: 09/05/2014 13:05 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.79.92 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:05:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Le Dogme et la Loi de l'Islamby Goldziher, Ignaz; Felix Arin

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Page 1: Le Dogme et la Loi de l'Islamby Goldziher, Ignaz; Felix Arin

Le Dogme et la Loi de l'Islam by Goldziher, Ignaz; Felix ArinReview by: Duncan B. MacdonaldIsis, Vol. 4, No. 1 (May, 1921), pp. 64-66Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/224096 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 13:05

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.92 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:05:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Le Dogme et la Loi de l'Islamby Goldziher, Ignaz; Felix Arin

ISIS. IV. 1921 ISIS. IV. 1921

historical fact and not as in the case of all other writers a mere pro- duct of the imagination ). This author is especially remarkable for his (( breadth of outlook, power of observation and fairness of

judgment )).

To conclude, anyone who cannot afford to make a long study of all the documents should read only IBN-HAzM's book. We must be grate- ful, however, to Mrs. SEELYE for having made accessible to us another source less valuable in itself yet worth considering. It is not possible to understand Moslem science if one does not know their religious thought; Mrs. SEELYE has given us one more key to their soul. We hope that the end of her translation will not be delayed too long.

GEORGE SARTON.

Ooldziher, Ignaz. - Le Dogmne et la Loi de l'Islam. Histoire du deve-

loppement dogmatique et juridique de la religion musulmane. Traduction de FPLix ARIN, vii-318 p. Paris, PAUL GEUTHNER, 1920.

This translation of GOLDZIHER'S Vorlesungen fiber den Islam appears ten years after its German original and six after it was itself finished. Yet that does not mean that GOLDZIHER'S work is in the least out of date and still less that it has been superseded by any later work. It is exactly as authoritative as it has been from the beginning and holds the same unique position among the books on Islam of the whole learned world. Those of us who are students of Islam know very well that GOLDZIHFER is the father of us all; and while we may disagree with him on details, we have always an uneasy consciousness that he may be right after all. The title of the French translation - an admir- able translation, often reading more easily, even for those who are familiar with German, than does GOLDZIHER'S somewhat involved style - limits the book more narrowly down to theology and law than does the original Lectures on Islam. According to the chapter-head- ings the book covers (I) MOHAMMED and Islam; (II) the legal devel- opment; (III) the theological development; (IV) asceticism and mysticism; (V) the sects; (VI) later formations. To each is added an array of notes and references, intended for the student who has access to the original sources and covering in this translation 50 pages of small type. A hardly adequate index of fifteen pages, reproduced without additions from the German, closes the book. But the subject- matter is wider than these rubrics suggest. It is the whole essence and being - genus, species and differentia - of Islam, taking that term as correlative to Christendom. It is true that GOLDZIHER care- fully avoids treating philosophy, but to the present reviewer that is

historical fact and not as in the case of all other writers a mere pro- duct of the imagination ). This author is especially remarkable for his (( breadth of outlook, power of observation and fairness of

judgment )).

To conclude, anyone who cannot afford to make a long study of all the documents should read only IBN-HAzM's book. We must be grate- ful, however, to Mrs. SEELYE for having made accessible to us another source less valuable in itself yet worth considering. It is not possible to understand Moslem science if one does not know their religious thought; Mrs. SEELYE has given us one more key to their soul. We hope that the end of her translation will not be delayed too long.

GEORGE SARTON.

Ooldziher, Ignaz. - Le Dogmne et la Loi de l'Islam. Histoire du deve-

loppement dogmatique et juridique de la religion musulmane. Traduction de FPLix ARIN, vii-318 p. Paris, PAUL GEUTHNER, 1920.

This translation of GOLDZIHER'S Vorlesungen fiber den Islam appears ten years after its German original and six after it was itself finished. Yet that does not mean that GOLDZIHER'S work is in the least out of date and still less that it has been superseded by any later work. It is exactly as authoritative as it has been from the beginning and holds the same unique position among the books on Islam of the whole learned world. Those of us who are students of Islam know very well that GOLDZIHFER is the father of us all; and while we may disagree with him on details, we have always an uneasy consciousness that he may be right after all. The title of the French translation - an admir- able translation, often reading more easily, even for those who are familiar with German, than does GOLDZIHER'S somewhat involved style - limits the book more narrowly down to theology and law than does the original Lectures on Islam. According to the chapter-head- ings the book covers (I) MOHAMMED and Islam; (II) the legal devel- opment; (III) the theological development; (IV) asceticism and mysticism; (V) the sects; (VI) later formations. To each is added an array of notes and references, intended for the student who has access to the original sources and covering in this translation 50 pages of small type. A hardly adequate index of fifteen pages, reproduced without additions from the German, closes the book. But the subject- matter is wider than these rubrics suggest. It is the whole essence and being - genus, species and differentia - of Islam, taking that term as correlative to Christendom. It is true that GOLDZIHER care- fully avoids treating philosophy, but to the present reviewer that is

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Page 3: Le Dogme et la Loi de l'Islamby Goldziher, Ignaz; Felix Arin

the weak point of his method. It is impossible to make the attitude of AL-GHAZZALI, for example, thoroughly intelligible without dealing with those of AVICENNA and AVERROES, as AQUINAS involves ABELARD and DUNS SCOTUS. And excluding philosophy excludes with it physical science, which would come under philosophy in a Moslem system of encyclopedia. All other activities, physical and mental, in the Moslem civilization fall under crafts, trades, occupations; a physician, fo- example, would be either a philosopher or a barber-surgeon; an architect would be a masterbuilder; any kind of artist would be a craftsman. This, of course, reminds us at once of medieval Europe and it may be said shortly that there was no break in medieval times between Islam and Christendom, each understood the other in a way that has never been possible since the renaissance.

But for the readers of this periodical the interest of GOLDZ1HER'S book must lie in the light which it throws on the position of science, in the modern sense, in Islam. Of that there is no explicit treatment, but it is made very plain by the whole drift of development that science has never been, in any true sense, a permanent, self-continuing element in that civilization. Only exceptional individuals have been interested in science, and schools of science have flourished only under the protection of princely patrons. The flowering times of Baghdad, Cairo and Cordova were short and left no heirs. This is the real

explanation of the puzzle of the impermanence of Moslem civilization. The university life of Islam turned steadily to theology and canon law and to their strictly ancillary disciplines. And these latter dwindled, through lack of independent life and interest, until philosophy became scholastic theology and astronomy became the art of constructing the ecclesiastical calendar. For fuller consideration of this primary historical fact I venture to refer to my paper of sixteen years ago, read before the St.-Louis International Congress and printed in its Proceedings. Of course, there were from time to time individuals interested in all the facts of the world. But they were few. AL-BERUNIq

stands almost alone in objective consideration of the non-Moslem world. The professed (( philosophers )- of various phases of the neo-Platonic Aristotelian amalgam - either enjoyed princely protec- tion or camouflaged themselves, sincerely or insincerely, with mysti- cism, or else externally (( conformed ?, confiding their real views to their own students. It is significant how early it was that Islam developed the idea of an economy of teaching, that truth must be different for different classes of minds, which led to the twofold truth of the European Averroists. In Islam truth was admittedly manifold, and some orthodox theologians were driven - between philosophy and dogmatics - to a doctrine practically that of the different classes

REVIEWS 65

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Page 4: Le Dogme et la Loi de l'Islamby Goldziher, Ignaz; Felix Arin

ISIS. IV. 1921

of (( judgments ) of our own day. But all these were isolated cases and it was only in the mystical schools that free speculation continued in any measure to flourish, with tendencies even there toward crystallizing into barren scholasticism.

The end could not be doubtful. Theology was not only the queen of the sciences; it came to reign alone and, so doing, became sterile. Such sciences as, through the ineradicable vitality of the human mind, survived, took forms which could relate themselves to theology - magic, astrology, alchemy. They could thus justify their existence by an assertion of usefulness. For the intellectual life of Islam had passed under the ban of utilitarianism. However excellently science in the abstract might be praised, the sciences were always divided into the praiseworthy and the blameworthy, and the blameworthy were those which could not give a useful reason for their existence; useful, that is, for man's life in this world or for his future salvation. Anything else man had better leave alone, even if there were nothing especially hurtful in it. A universally accepted and much quoted tradition from the Prophet is adduced in support of this position. ( It is part of the beauty of the Islam of a man that he should leave alone that which does not concern him. )) Under this ruling the pure sciences cannot be cultivated and only the applied sciences are possible, a position amply sufficient in itself to explain the decadence of Islam. And it must not be thought that this was the position of theologians and ethicists only. IBN KHALDUN, the Berber, who died A. D. 1406, while not technically a man of science like AL-BERUNI, has left us, in his

Prolegomena to History, a most open-eyed and intelligent picture of the whole Moslem civilization of his time, applying to it a very acute psychological and historical analysis. His book is unique in Arabic and he was evidently deeply interested, in the modern sense, in all the

phenomona of life. But this apparently unconscious attitude and practice of his were contrary to his explicit teaching, for, in at least two places in his book (DE SLANE'S tra,nsl., III, p. 185 f., 285 f., QUATRE- MERE'S text, III, p. 135 f., 258 f.), he lays down the position stated above and quotes in support of it the tradition.

Nothing of this will strictly be found in GOLDZIHER'S book; but its reader will easily see there within what narrow bounds the normal intellectual life of Islam was permitted to move, and will understand HEINRICH RITTER'S dictum that the ingenious but fantastic atomic scheme of the Moslem scholastic theologians is Islam's most character- istic and original contribution to the history of philosophy and not the derivative comments and supercomments of the Arabic-writing Aristotelians and neo-Platonists.

DUNCAN B. MACDONALD.

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