Islamic Research Methodology

There is no doubt that the internal and external challenges faced by Islamic society also had a significant impact on the emergence of Islamic philosophical thought and the formulation of its concepts. For example, the far-reaching effects resulting from the Arabs’ transition from nomadic life to civilized life, as the scholar Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun put it, cannot be discounted. Likewise, we must take into account the political and social events preceding and following the Great Fitna, especially the emergence of Islamic sects. As for the external challenges, they resulted, in part, from the attempts of these sects to counter the views and arguments of scholars of other prevalent faiths at the time, such as Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy, and the remnants of ancient Gnostic doctrines in the East.As innovators in the field of scientific method innovation, from which Europe benefited, starting with the Renaissance.To clarify, we say that the ancient method associated with Aristotle’s name was based on deduction derived from logical reasoning and rational judgment, whereby the researcher extracted conclusions from existing premises. For the Greeks, knowledge begins with the whole, while the particular is not science.The majority of Islamic thinkers rejected this approach and adopted a new approach based on induction, i.e., reliance on practical experience and experimentation. In contrast to Greek thought, these thinkers sought to arrive at the truth by moving from the particular to the universal, while revealing the connections between things.Muslim thinkers had multiple strong motivations to reject Aristotle’s logic and methodology, evident in the writings of scholars of the principles of jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh), theologians (mutakallimun) , and jurists. Imam al-Shafi’i, for example, who established the foundations of the science of the principles of jurisprudence, criticized Aristotle’s logic because it was based on the peculiarities of the Greek language, which differed from Arabic. This led to contradictions when applied to Islamic scholarship. Linguists and jurists supported the idea that Aristotelian logic was linked to the Greek language and its peculiarities, and that it contradicted Islamic logic.Theologians (mutakallimūn) also rejected this logic based on their rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics, which contradicted Muslim theology. Since this logic was closely related to that metaphysics and its principles were intertwined with its principles, they had no choice but to reject it. Finally, the jurists, in turn, rejected it, through their most prominent representative, Ibn Taymiyyah, who criticized it for several reasons, the most important of which were: its failure to keep pace with Islam’s direction to meet changing human needs, while its principles are comprehensive and fixed; and the failure of the Companions and Imams to engage with this logic, despite their advances in knowledge, and thus their fear of deviating from that tradition.A contemporary Islamic thinker demonstrates that these valid reasons are not the only ones behind Muslim scholars’ rejection of Aristotelian logic. In any case, they amount to nothing more than the negative aspects they discovered in it, which they relied on to undermine it. The real reason for their abandonment, he argues, lies in the constructive aspect of their criticism, embodied in the experimental or inductive method mentioned above—that is, one based on experience and governed by the laws of induction. Such an experimental method expresses the spirit of Islam, not as an existential or philosophical doctrine, but rather as a mode of practical life that rejects abstract reasoning and thought.This clearly demonstrates the error of those who assume that Muslim thinkers in general relied on Aristotle’s logic. It is well known that Aristotle was based on the syllogistic method, which expressed the spirit of Greek civilization, which was based on philosophical and intellectual considerations and did not recognize empiricism. This, in turn, differed from the spirit of Islamic civilization.It can be said that the arrival of Islamic thinkers to the method of induction was the result of suffering and experience, after which they scientifically discovered the sterility of the Greek method based on formal reasoning . This reasoning, as we mentioned, was associated with an early stage of human development and, consequently, was of limited use in subsequent eras, as it began with general premises and ended with partial results. Its goal, then, was to establish proof of a known truth, not to uncover a new one.It is worth noting that both parties used the word analogy in a different way. According to Aristotle, analogy refers to an intellectual movement in which the mind moves from a general judgment to partial judgments, or from a general judgment to a specific judgment by means of the third term.On the contrary, the Muslims’ analogy moves from one partial state to another partial state, because there is a commonality between them.There is another possibility of confusion between the fundamentalist analogy (i.e., analogy in the view of scholars of the principles of jurisprudence) and the Aristotelian analogy (which is the third method of inference in Aristotle’s logic) . The source of the confusion may arise from the fact that they appear to be of the same nature, as thought shifts from particular to particular. In reality, there is a significant difference between these two approaches to analogy, as evidenced by the following two points: Theologians and many of the fundamentalists – before the era of Al-Ghazali – considered the fundamentalist analogy, or the analogy of the absent to the present, to lead to certainty, while Aristotelian representation leads only to conjecture.The fundamentalists traced analogy back to a type of scientific induction based on two ideas or laws:

A- The law of causality, i.e. every effect has a cause, meaning “the ruling was originally established for such and such a reason.” So the ruling prohibiting alcohol is caused by intoxication.

B- The law of consistency in the occurrence of events, i.e.: if the stated cause exists under similar circumstances, it produces a similar effect (i.e., the certainty that the cause ( the cause of the original ) exists in the branch) , so if it exists, it produces the same effect. So if intoxication in wine leads to prohibition, then we find that intoxication.In any other drink, we are certain that it is forbidden. There is, then, a system in things and a regularity in the occurrence of events.Muslims based their fundamental analogy on the two laws on which John Stuart Mill based his scientific induction in the nineteenth century. If induction can arrive at universal, fixed relationships, it is because it is based on the fact that natural events are consistent or regular. For Mill, induction is to conclude from several specific instances of a phenomenon that this phenomenon occurs in every instance similar to this instance, or to specific instances in some respect. It is based on the assertion of order in the world, and he expresses this by saying, There are things in nature which, if they occur once, will inevitably occur again if they exhibit a sufficient degree of similarity in their phenomena .