Souleymane Bachir Diagne is professor of philosophy and francophone studies at Columbia University. His fields of research and teaching include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African Philosophy. He is the current Director of the Institute of African Studies. His most recent book, which is the subject of this interview, is Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition.
What is your work about?
The book is a selection of authors and texts from the rich tradition of philosophy in the Islamic world, considering both the classical period and modern times. Authors and texts are selected with the goal of showing how they help us think about topics that are obviously important questions today: Islam and rationalism, pluralism, tolerance, and the open society.
What separates this book from other studies of Muslim philosophers and their relationship to the West?
What makes the book different from a classical presentation of the main figures of Islamic philosophy in history is that I have selected texts and authors to examine particular topics and questions that are challenges today. Thus after the first chapter that poses in general terms the very issue of the possibility of philosophical questioning in the world of Islam, the second chapter analyzes the report on a heated debate on translation of Greek philosophy into the Arabic language: the main issues in that second chapter are that of universality of logical and ontological categories, given the plurality (and equivalence) of human languages, and what Nietzsche has called the “philosophical grammars” that define them. That debate, I believe, should be a classic of the philosophy of translation. The third chapter is a Neo-Platonist and rationalist reading by Avicenna (the attribution of the text to that author is disputed but in its very nature the text can definitely be considered Avicennian) of an Islamic well-known narrative. It raises the question of interpretation in religion. Chapter 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 all pose in different ways the question of what French philosopher Henri Bergson has presented as an opposition between closed tribal morality and the open society, closed and dynamic religion. The texts examined in those chapters by authors such as Al Ghazali, Averroes, for the classical period, Al Afghani, Adel Razek, and Iqbal for the modern times are discussed to demonstrate the need for the world of Islam today to reconnect with its own dynamic cosmology, its own principle of movement and thus open up its modernity. Chapter 5 is the study of a philosophical novel written by Ibn Tufayl in the twelfth century. That text is quite striking by its modernity, as it is the first philosophical illustration of the genre that came to be known as “robinsonnade” after the novel Robinson Crusoe. It narrates the development of a child abandoned on an island raised by a deer and capable as he grows up to recapture the main elements of human civilization and reach the knowledge of intelligible notions, among which that of the one God and of natural religion. My reading of the text focuses particularly on the question of ecological ethics as the solitary human in his development by realizing his humanity realizes as well his responsibility vis-à-vis nature and other living creatures.
Chapter 10 revisits a text by Ghazali that translates philosophically a notion of pluralism that is present in the Quran and in prophetic traditions. That lesson obviously need to be heard today as is that of tolerance and respect even for the “infidel” which is the topic of the final chapter. That concluding chapter is devoted to a West African mystic and thinker who died in 1939 but left an enduring lesson of religious tolerance that hopefully will continue to be the face of Islam in West Africa and in our world.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
One aspect of my work in general is what I have called in an essay “decolonizing the history of philosophy”. As I discuss in the short conclusion to the book, if Muslims today certainly need to reconnect with the philosophical tradition which is part of their history, more broadly, when philosophers everywhere, in all department and schools, teach the history of their discipline they must aware that the so-called translatio studii, meaning the transmission/translation of Greek philosophy traveled through more places than just Rome and European capitals, through more languages than just European languages. Thus translatio studii went from Athens to Bagdad, to Cordoba, to Fes in Morocco, to Timbuktu in Mali and other intellectual centers of learning in Africa, meaning that it also happened in Arabic, in Hausa, in Swahili, or in wolof…
Who has influenced this work the most?
One philosopher whose work is important for my research in general is Henri Bergson. I have written on his work, on his influence on the thought of Senegalese poet and philosopher Leopold Sedar Senghor. In this book I come back to the conversation between his philosophy and the thought of the most important modernist Muslim philosopher for our times in my view: Muhammad Iqbal. That conversation appears to me the model of the many conversations between Muslim and Western philosophers that are presented in this book. The “affinity” between Bergson and Iqbal is at the center of this book and expresses its very spirit.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
I have been teaching Islamic philosophy for three decades, examining with my students texts by classical authors such as Al Farabi (9th century), Avicenna (10th century), Ghazali (11th-12th century), Suhrawardi (12th century), Ibn Tufayl (12th century), Averroes (12th century), as well as modern thinkers: Al Afghani (second half of the 19th century), Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), Tierno Bokar Salif Tall (1875-1939) or Ali Abdel Razek (1888-1966). Beyond a simple historical approach of the textx I wanted to show how their authors, both medieval and modern, help us address contemporary questions of pluralism, ecological ethics, or the open society.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
Today Islam certainly needs to be understood by Muslims themselves and by non-Muslims as well as an intellectual and spiritual tradition within which were raised important questions for our times. Pluralism and tolerance in our global multicultural world, separation of politics and religion among others.
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