Postscript: Dr. Hammou Al-Nakkari’s Interview in Saudi Arabia on Logic, Ibn Taymiyya, Taha Abderrahmane, and Philosophy in the Arab World

Postscript by Dr. Ahmed Mouna
Translated by Mawlana Saaleh Baseer

The translator’s notes are in brackets and adds the following note: The magnitude of this interview should not escape the eyes of any reader, that is, the appearance of a logician and a philosopher on an official Saudi TV broadcast, in the form of Dr. al-Nakkari. It should also be mentioned that both Dr. al-Nakkari and Dr. Mouna are two of Taha Abderrahmane’s primary students and logicians in their own right.

On the occasion of The National Philosophy Conference of Riyadh, themed this year as “Transcending Values for Cultures & Ethical Challenges in the Communicative Era,” the official Saudi press interviewed Dr. Hammou al-Nakkari’s in a wildly engaging dialogue that lasted two hours.

---

Hammou Al-Nakkari, a celebrated logician and philosopher (who has written a dozen books related to conceptual mathematics, pre-classical Arabic logic, notions of Tajdid and Taqlid, a dictionary of Sunni kalam terms, a synthesis on Western legal theory and Usul al-Fiqh, a mathematical comparison of Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya in logic, et bien beaucoup plus), revealed to the Arab world the contours of his intellectual life, crossing fifty years, both in his intellectual explorations of Islamic philosophical thought—contemporary and historical—and in his granular approach in constructing a philosophy, a system of thought, communicatively and argumentatively and ethically (tabligh, tadlil, and tawjih). 

In the following, we will work to clarify the distinctive features of Al-Nakkari’s pensée intellectuelle, who grounds his texts’ reader into les structures intellectuelles, seasoning into the reader a spirit of philosophy, gifting them the ropes of the philosophical method, galvanizing the reader to renew and deepen his analysis of philosophical thought in a shockingly productive fashion. Here, dear reader, are the most important discussions of this interesting and exciting dialogue. I wrote this due to what I know about Dr. Hammou Al-Nakkari: His intense dégoût in appearing on television or any other platform, (and this exchange took place only) after unyielding insistence and multiple follow ups, primarily through the labors of the distinguished Saudi journalist, Abdullah Al-Mudaifer. He convinced Al-Nakkari—thank God for that!

The provenance of philosophy among the Greeks, at least, starts with Socrates in his dialogues, coursing through his student Plato, symbolized by unfolding questions, and ending with Aristotle—the latter’s student—who raised, in the collection of his texts called the Organon, two central problems, according Al-Nakkari. The first problem was related to definition, and the second is grounded in reasoning (mafhūm al-hadd wa mafhūm al-istidlāl).

The first aspect examines the laws of constructing and formulating concepts, and the second aspect examines the law of deducting inferences in its theoretical and analogical dimensions. That is, explaining the avenues of proof, whether from the point of view of proving the truthfulness of one’s claim or from the aspect of refuting it by the objector. In general, philosophical analysés at this stage focused on forming methods of definition, paths of proof, methods of argumentation, dialectics, and debate. 

As for the Greek period, the philosophers focused their attention, says Hammou Al-Nakkari, on marrying logic and law, by focusing on legal rhetoric, which represents the third part of rhetoric—according to Aristotle—after literary rhetoric and political rhetoric; this synthesis was the source for the flourishing of legal logic at this point in history. 

Yet, in the Islamic ère of logic, Al-Nakkari argues the greatest proof for Islamic contributions to logic occur in the works of the Second Teacher (al-mu’allim al-thani), Abū Nasr al-Fārābī (d. 339/950). This towering figure’s thought forms as a breathtaking and unique intervention in the development of logic—but his fame didn’t shine in Muslim discourse in his era, as Dr. Al-Nakkari argues, for many reasons and they’re not really connected to academic discourse. In the time (fi hin) that Ibn Sina’s (d. 427/1037) manuals appeared—and he admits himself that he was unable to grasp the foundations of logic—neither did its arcane matter or its subtleties reveal itself to Ibn Sina—until he read the central texts of al-Farabi—we can say the same for Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), and whose commentaries, which can be easily seen, did not exceed anything that Aristotle himself wrote in logic. As for Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111), despite his remarkable and testified-unto labors, constructing an academic domain for logic (as an intellectual field of study in Islamic society), and particularly his creativity in producing new logical terms—ta’ādul, talāzum, and tamānu’—Ghazali did not depart from Aristotle’s Organon in logic in any way or fashion.

wa radhiallahu anhum ajmain! 

As for the stage in Christian Europe, Averroist logic witnessed a claire flourishing, as Ibn Rushd’s works proved a source of inspiration, celebration, and praise by European philosophers over many centuries- the Christian West considered him a faithful transmitter of Aristotle’s logical heritage, and even a great expounder of this patrimoine, without inserting himself. Or a la faute which can be explained as Ibn Rushd’s effort in excommunicating from Aristotle’s logic every trace of Islamic philosophy which, in Ibn Rushd’s view, was only tautology and sophistry (i.e., the additions from Ghazali were such and without value before Aristotle). Regardless, Ibn Rushd’s profound influence on the development of logic in this moment is unquestionable, especially with St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274).

During the next stage of logic, Dr. Al-Nakkari argues, logic became intertwined with mathematics. This was due to the Western logician’s attempts to expel the issues that mathematics faced in terms of its epistemic foundations, particularly in the angle concerning the ability to prove some mathematical meta-axioms. The difficulty of demonstrating proofs on these foundations led to a conceptual crisis, such as the parallel postulate in the Euclidian mathematical system. From this point, logic then began to be conceived in mathematical notation and logical symbols—concerned with notating propositional statements, axioms, and meta-axioms. And in this intellectual climate, a return was made to both Aristotelian and Stoic logic, presenting in a formal logic system concerned with the forms of these axioms and establishing its validity, without consideration of its content or topics. 

Logic transitioned from working out propositions and ideas to the stage of notating these axioms based on a set of rules and relationships that codify the methods of arrangement, that is, deduction, and in this way logic became a branch of mathematics. The trailblazers in this domain were mathematicians Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (d. 1716) and Friedrich Frege (d. 1925). Logic, as a consequence of these mathematicians, transformed from its previous concern with syllogisms and content to formalizing these statements in a set of axioms and implicative relationships, in paths of substitution, equivalence, schemata and interpretation, identity, and description—all forms of deductive reasoning. Under this canopy, logic was consecrated as a branch of mathematics.

In the final stage, and until today, logic primarily sits in the domain of the humanities, as it orders and regulates philosophical thought, and delimits the stages of dialogue, whether in the construction of statements, or the unearthing of proofs, or its ordering of premises. In sum, logic has become a technical science for laws of discourse-engagement, with argumentation of both sides (aqwāl al mukhālif). And this is exactly what is cited in Aristotle’s Topica. 

Logic and Legal Theory

Al-Nakkari proceeded, in clarifying the nature of the relationship between legal rationality and logic in this sphere, emphasized his position in a number of foundational texts, where he dived into remarkable detail and explication, from which are: A Theoretical Approach to Greek Logic Between Abu Hamid al Ghazali and Taqi al-Din Ahmad bin Taymiyya and For the Sake of a Resurrectionary Study in Usul al-Fiqh. The overview of this text was that Islamic legal theory was the logic of the Sharia. And the logician-cum-lawyer-theorist (mustadill), in the fields of lower Fiqh (law) and higher Fiqh (theology) there is no refuge save enmeshing themselves in the practice of istidlal, or formal Islamic argumentation: 1) The domain (rukn) connecting to implication (dalalah) and hermeneutics 2) domain that relates to formal argumentation 3) and, finally, the domain anchored in discourse theory and mutual-proof-exchange (lit. trans of Nakkari’s coinage Tanāzur)—and in this vein the mustadill deductively reasons out the necessary implications (min al malzumat ila lawazim), or from antecedents to its consequents or from premises to its conclusion. However, this fleshing-out of reasoning all occurs in a certain paradigme, which encompasses the limits of the discursive field he operates in. And, perhaps, we can say that the central contributions the classical Islamic legal theorists and logicians showed the world, in Dr. Al-Nakkari’s estimation, is the bundle of concepts formed when they described the deductive relationships in reasoning out the legal judgements in the Sharia. It is an intellectual labor that may only be described as pioneering. Yet despite the brilliance of the Muslim legal theorists, it remains, declares Al-Nakkari, incorrigibly necessary upon today’s Muslim scholars to engage with the contributions made in the Western legal and philosophical world, whether in the codification of their legal la raison d’être (en philosophie ou en métaphysique) or procedural law, and training oneself to understand and deal with its academic demands, a task that no Islamic scholar can be untutored in—especially with the stakes of unlocking new horizons in Islamic intellectual thought. Al-Nakkari’s recent publication “The Rationalist Foundations of Legalism in Western Legal Theory” is a pioneering example of this approach. 

Al-Nakkari’s Pioneering Logic Contributions vis-à-vis Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya

First it is important to note that Al-Nakkari, as a logician, has devoted much care, as part of his critical contributions to logic, to Ibn Taymiyya, in a trilogy: Theoretical Approaches to Greek Logic Between Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya; Ibn Taymiyya, the Logician Or Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians; Ibn Taymiyya’s Philosophy of Logic 

In Al-Nakkari’s elaboration of the intellectual value in the Taymiyyan construction of logic, he presents the lofty position Ibn Taymiyya holds in thought, and the epistemic modes that Al-Nakkari fortified himself with via Abu Nasr Al-Farabi, to the point that Al-Nakkari considers Ibn Taymiyya his Shaykh in logic despite the vast gap in time that exists between Al-Nakkari and Ibn Taymiyya. And this is a position we don’t find with Al-Ghazali, with the fact that Ghazali clutched logic from Ibn Sina, who learned it from Al-Farabi, without any creativity or artistic skill. The critical spirit that colored Ibn Taymiyyah’s evaluative efforts for logic constituted, according to Hammou, a continuity of that critical spirit that Al-Farabi demonstrated in his reading of Aristotle. The absolutely epistemic and unbending criticism that Ibn Taymiyya launched against Aristotle—whether in his theory of definition or argumentation—is nothing but evidence of his epistemically remarkable and penetrating insights in his scholarly labors. And Ibn Taymiyya’s project (in logic) centers on prioritizing logical particulars and temporal events in their particular contexts—over mental universals! It is for this very reason, Al-Nakkari argues, why Ibn Taymiyya categorically saw no worth in Greek logic, even if it provides truth in deductive reasoning. For the Muslim logician (who is  limited to Greek logic) will eternally be condemned to formal logic, unable to address any problématique or intellectual challenges that are moored in life in her particulars and details! C’est similaire à abstract mathematics as it’s condemned to formal language. Ibn Taymiyya, in his dazzling analytical mind, gave logical priority to particulars, through induction and analogy, in the construction of judgements, as a result of his visceral connection to physical events—it is this same Taymiyyan spirit wherein we saw positiviste science develop and prospérer in the West at the expense of formal logical reasoning, whose foundations are moored to hypothetical and mental universals. 

This nominalist character of Ibn Taymiyya that marks so much of his thought is responsible for leading Al-Nakkari to devote a not-unsubstantial part of his distinguished life-project to Ibn Taymiyya, so that he may overturn the present view (of Ibn Taymiyya as anti-logic and anti philosophy), showing him to the Arab-Muslim world as a roaring wonder of a logician and a philosopher, and that he may restore the proper place among philosophers owed to Ibn Taymiyya in light in his logical-cum-philosophical interventions. 

For Ibn Taymiyya is that singular genius, whose entire personality is brimming with a wonderously critical and theoretical outlook, who lived, interacted, and engaged with his historical era, with all of its ramifications and undulating colors (talāwīn), in a breathless manner. For, Ibn Taymiyya, as per Al-Nakkari, symbolizes the very spirit of philosophy in his interrogation of arguments in his era, in his deductive methods or propositional claims, and his rational refutations of his opponents; and in dialectiques when proving his philosophical and legal arguments.

Tajdid and Taqlid

The novelty and grace that characterize his intellectual efforts is not obscure from the reader who is apace with the published works of the logician Hammou Al-Nakkari’s, especially his attention to the concepts he works with, including his problematization of the conceptual pair: Ijtihad/Taqlid (or independent reasoning and imitation, literally– but al-Nakkari would disagree with these translations!)

None of us are ignorant to the awful connotations that has settled in our minds regarding notions of Taqlid, says al-Nakkari, which is reduced to “accepting a statement without evidence.” Al-Nakkari seeks to evaluate this concept on an entirely different conceptual plane. Taqlid to al-Nakkari is the attachment of an individual to a set of judgements/rulings that someone before him has established. And he finds it enough to inherit from this other as assumed. Through it, he looks and grasps the world around him. Taqlid is that natural and constitutive element in a human. For there is no existence except with imitation, (or some latching onto a family-resemblance of concepts, as Wittgenstein would argue). The language with which humans speak, declares Al-Nakkari, is the naked eye through which he encounters the world around him and was not learned except through Taqlid, with his association to a society or culture in a particular language. For this reason, we may say that Taqlid is the consequence of associating to a certain collective, in imitation, and is distinct in its experience of reality. And this associative act is the result of a paradigm, that is, a guiding model by which a scholar bases his reasoning and construction of arguments and dialectic. The development of knowledge in general depends on expanding or modifying this Taqlid, according to the context and position in which the said person is located– according to his specifics and circumstances. 

We may argue, as a result, that every reading is an expression of presenting and delaying (i.e., of choices), per every reader, anchored in a specific paradigm, relying on it for analysis– what is foundational to Al-Nakkari is not necessary for Ahmed (as way of example). An ascriptive trait of the quiddity to one is only accidental to another! In a similar fashion, what the first presents, considers, and proposes is not exactly what the second sees and believes. Therefore, we are faced with a precise and complex inferential process, and the reader’s choices are a major determinant in the nature of the results he arrives at. 

The belittling definition that we know is descriptive of a sect who is influenced by a certain doctrine and who then devotes all their attention to defending and seeking victory for this doctrine, and thus are called imitators (muqallidah). 

For Al-Nakkari, every Mujaddid, i.e., he traverses a road or a path, meaning, a new analytical path, that not a soul has ever preceded this person in walking that road. And the opposite is not true! (wa-al- ‘aks laisa bi-sahih!) (For jadda in Arabic means road, and its meaning carried over in Ottoman Turkish, still located in Istanbul today, with the road-signs displaying cadde.)

The Signature Features of the Philosophy of Taha Abderrahmane

In Al-Nakkari’s summary of the staggering, creative philosophical project of Taha Abderrahmane, he says about Taha Abderrahmane, his doctoral advisor and teacher, whom he studied under for many, many years—there are a number of central features that sharply distinguish the project of Taha Abderrahmane, of which are: 

1) His unyielding exploration for truth in all philosophical methods and judgements, which grounds his search for truth in all events and debates, and this serves as the philosophical outlook for him. Taha doesn’t content himself with those positions which suit or coincides with circumstantial fluctuations. 

2) His brazen intellectual courage—unmatched, I would add (La tudhahi)—in engaging critical thought, in a fashion that doesn’t allow him to submit uncritically to any established positions, or any conclusion that preceded him in philosophical judgements. For this trait pushes him to pause and contemplate and interrogate any philosophical issue that comes before him. 

3) His complete intellectual freedom in its most wide-eyed and unblushing form, that is to say, his freedom from any intellectual position that may have seemed a priori to a previous thinker, which leads Taha, as a polymath-logician, to open new horizons, utterly unprecedented and inconceivable in philosophy and logic—and this is, of course, only when he is certain the positions he’s critiquing or deepening were previously unproven or delimited. 

4) And, finally, Taha Abderrahmane’s lofty and creative Arabic expressions, where he elaborates his philosophical positions in a staggeringly literary form, by which the reader is able to grasp ideas in a fresh manner. And by virtue of this new spirit of imagination that Taha gifts to his reader, new concepts are brought forth that declare independence from the philosophical lexicon for the reader. The reader, in this wildly transcending experience of Taha, ascends to stages to levity and philosophical contentment. And we may say, without question, that minting of new concepts and philosophical terms in the texts of Taha Abderrahmane is one of his many avenues of intellectual creativity, so as to grasp and conceptualize the subject-content and topics of his philosophical discussions. And this is expressed in his texts in a coherent deductive language, gifting the critic and the defendant an anchoring axis (mawqa’ markazī). 

And limitless salutations upon our Lord Muhammad, his faithful family, and his world-seizing companions.—

Rah gayi rasm-i azan ruh-i bilali na rahi
Falsafa rah gaya talqin-i ghazali na rahi

The form of azan we have- but where the spirit of Bilal?
Philosophy abounds—but no longer the Ghazalian spirit 

Hazaron saal nargis apni be noori pe roti hain
Badi mushkil se hota chaman mein didawar paida

For a thousand years the daffodil wept—its death of color 
How deathly to raise a thinker from the garden of the ummah!

---

Disclaimer: Material published by Traversing Tradition is meant to foster scholarly inquiry and rich discussion. The views, opinions, beliefs, or strategies represented in published articles and subsequent comments do not necessarily represent the views of Traversing Tradition or any employee thereof.