Page 54 - Geopolítica del Mundo Actual. Una Visión Multidisciplinar

GEOPOLÍTICA DEL MUNDO ACTUAL. UNA VISIÓN MULTIDISCIPLINAR: Cultura de Paz, Conflflictos, Educación y Derechos Humanos
If the “Paradigm of Córdoba” remains highly relevant, it is because it continues to offer us useful guidelines for advancing the process of mutual accommodation and acceptance. As I have mentioned it previously, today, the central question facing Europe and the world is how to overcome their fear of Islam and to promote the “Paradigm of Córdoba” instead of the logic of reconquista. It goes without saying that this question is followed by a second question that is: how best Europe and the world can understand and accept the Islamic origins of modern Europe, as it emerged in this city through the work of philosophers like Ibn Rushd, while Muslims in Europe and around the world need to revise their perception of Islam by looking into its humanistic legacy.
Let me insist on the fact that the reductive essentialist view of Islamic heritage, which is typical of both orientalist and fundamentalist attitudes, runs contrary to Córdoba’s humanistic heritage. Rethinking humanist and nonviolent Islam today is a task much more urgent and significant than all the discussions on Islamic revivalism and on this the Andalusian experience of “Convivencia” is of a great importance. As you know, the notion of “Convicencia” was invented by Spanish historians to describe Christians, Jews, and Muslims living together more or less peacefully in medieval Christian Spain. But the concept, if not the word itself, has equally been applied to Jewish-Muslim coexistence in the medieval Arabic-speaking Islamic world. It is true that the Andalusian “Convivencia” had certain limits in its practice of a communal harmony, but it is also true that under the Ummayad rule of Spain, Jews lived in peace among the Muslims and attained an influence in Muslim courts and Muslim intellectual circles.
However, there is another aspect to the “Paradigm of Córdoba” which is more significant and relevant to our world and that is the tradition of humanist Islam which germinated in this city and blossomed in a later period in Persia and South Asia. This is a humanist Islam that is intellectually well constructed and philosophically rich, and unlike fundamentalist Islam which is violent and impatient, it is steeped in dialogue and deals on the plane of ideas and interpretation (tafsir) while paying premium attention to ijtihad and to
philosophical disputations.
Humanist Islam has been a historically
salient feature of the religion dating as far back the golden age of translation which lasted for a period of 150 years from about 767 to 912 A.D. This contact with “the philosophy of the ancients” (as Greek philosophy was often referred to by Muslim scholars) had a profound effect on the humanist development of Islam and was especially developed among Andalusian Muslim thinkers such as Ibn Rushd of Córdoba. This happened while an array of Sunni and Shi’i schools laid the basis of Islamist jurisprudence (fiqh) and some like the Jafari school entrusted the ijtihad to the Imam, who combined spiritual and temporal authority. The introduction and definition of philosophy in such conditions were more revealing than ever in elucidating and constructing a humanist trend in Islamic thought. Here we can point to the struggle between the two paradigms of “inherited knowledge” and “philosophical innovation” which became more intense when new bodies of culture were imbibed into a broad civilizational framework. Unlike the Shariah which came to acquire an aura of finality as part of a backlash against the currents of reform and change, philosophy (falsafah) contained all the seeds of future controversy with theology and theocracy.
Interestingly, the challenge was taken by Ibn Rushd (1198 AD) in Córdoba, who wrote many commentaries on the works of Aristotle and refuted theologians such as al-Ghazali to the point that he became identified in the West with “secular learning” It is well-known that Ernest Renan thought that the Aristotelian tradition of Ibn Rushd had eliminated Islam and put itself in its place.
According to Renan, with the death of Ibn Rushd in 1198 AD we witness a turning point in Islamic intellectual history and the Qur’an triumphs over “free thought” for at least 600 years. For a long time after Renan there was a unanimous agreement that Ibn Rushd’s death was a turning point for European as well as for Islamic intellectual history. As a matter of fact, Ibn Rushd or Averroes became the symbol of the rise of European culture and his death marked the downfall of Islamic humanism.The truth is that in the same
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