Page 55 - Geopolítica del Mundo Actual. Una Visión Multidisciplinar

GEOPOLÍTICA DEL MUNDO ACTUAL. UNA VISIÓN MULTIDISCIPLINAR: Cultura de Paz, Conflflictos, Educación y Derechos Humanos
way that some like Ibn Taymiyyah in Sunnism and Mulla Baqir Majlisi in Shi’ism followed al-Ghazali and wrote against the falasifah, in the same way Ibn Rushd fashioned not only the curriculum of the Jewish and Christian intellectual worlds, through Maimonides and Saint Thomas Aquinas, but his spirit of humanism was developed in the Andalusian experience of Islam.
Therefore, I think his struggle against Islamic orthodoxy and his uncompromising stand for humanistic Islam contributed to what I call the “Córdoba Paradigm”. The new direction which Islamic intellectual life took was determined most of all by this “Paradigm of Córdoba” expressed notably by the doctrinal gnosis (irfan) of Ibn Arabi. With Ibn Arabi, Islamic humanism left Spain which had been the point of contact between Islam and Christianity and set of for the East.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his book, The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, describes Ibn Arabi’s migration from Andalusia to Syria as the
“parting of the ways between Islam and the West” and the fact that “the Islamic world was becoming even more fully conscious of itself as an Orient (mashriq) in both a geographical and symbolical sense”, while the West, which had been in many ways an “Orient” in the ishraqi sense of the term was now becoming an “Occident”.
But I think with the end of the humanist trend in Andalusian Islam, we should trace the efforts of innovation and inclusiveness in Islamic thought in the next 500 years in Persia and in India. But it was a student of the School of Isfahan in 17th century, by the name of Mulla Sadra who contributed to Islamic humanism and renewed the “Paradigm of Córdoba” in correlating the wisdom of the ancient Greek and Muslim sages with the inner meaning of the Islamic thought. Mulla Sadra was one of the best reminders that Islamic philosophy has a living intellectual tradition within it which, while being Islamic, is also profoundly rationalistic and nonviolent. A tradition of harmony and peace in which for humanists such as Mulla Sadra the lion and the lamb lie down together.
Much of the intellectual and spiritual efforts of Mulla Sadra can be found in the vast philosophical culture of South Asian Islam and especially in the figure of the Punjabi poet
and philosopher, Mujamad Iqbal. In the same manner as Sadra, Iqbal tries to reconcile perennial principles with the possibilities of change. Iqbal, therefore, stresses the fact of change and the dynamic nature of human society. That is why he stresses the permanent need for ijtihad. For Iqbal, “the closing of the door of ijtihad is pure fiction, suggested partly by the crystallization of legal thought in Islam and partly by that intellectual laziness which, especially in periods of spiritual decay turns great thinkers into idols. It is in the light of this understanding based on the humanist tradition of Islam that Iqbal both underscores the importance of humanist Islam as a source of inspiration and criticizes the prevailing conditions in the Muslim countries as falling short of this source.
For this purpose, he is convinced that the Islamic world is confronted by new intellectual forces, which were unleashed by the extraordinary development of human knowledge. One feels sure that Iqbal approaches the idea of an intercultural Islam with an eye on the “Paradigm of Córdoba” and this mystical ode by Ibn Arabi:
My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran.
It is Iqbal’s fidelity to the humanistic and inter-faith dimension of the “Paradigm of Córdoba” which defines his basic attitude to intercultural tolerance and political moderation. In his attempt to reconstruct the humanist thought of Islam, Iqbal seems to call upon the anti-orthodox spirit of Andalusian Islam to play the role it fulfilled in Islamic history. In the same fashion as Iqbal, a companion of Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad symbolizes the rise above sectarian approaches in Islam and adopts once again the political and philosophical outlook of the“Córdoba Paradigm”. Azad expresses this paradigm in the following words:
“Truth has many facets and conflict and hatred arise because people claim a monopoly of truth and virtue.”
For Azad the inter-faith dialogue and
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