Could There be a Husserlian Māturīdism?

Philosophy and Theology

Imagine a Venn diagram with a circle representing philosophy on the left and another for theology on the right. To what extent do (or should) the two circles overlap? Starting from the admittedly simplistic assumption that a philosophy is an account of truth grounded in naturally accessible reason, whereas a theology is one grounded in a reliably accessed superrational source, revelation, we can explore some permutations. A complete overlap between the two would mean that everything that can be understood by revelation could equally be reached through reason. This might be achieved by equating the two sources in some fundamental way, as is typically held to be the approach of Ibn Sīnā. In his Neoplatonic emanationist scheme, the Active Intellect is understood to provide the underlying basis for rational thought as such, with the ideal philosopher able to infer all secondary intelligibles from their primary premises. Yet such a philosopher is matched, if not surpassed, by the prophet’s ‘angelic intellect’, which intuitively grasps the same truths.

At the other extreme, a theology may be non-overlapping with any philosophy. Such would be the case of a thoroughgoing scripturalist theology, one that allowed no place for the integration of rational methods. This may be harder to isolate than one might imagine, since theologies typically develop at least some rational methods to maintain internal consistency among a body of revealed texts. In the Islamic tradition, we may suggest certain austere members of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth movement who would refuse to make any additional rational commentary upon the apparent words of scripture, instead relying on the compilation of passages and creedal summaries alone.

From these two outlying cases, it should be clear that most expressions of Islamic theology overlap with philosophy while retaining their own distinctive area of discourse. Where things become interesting are the particularities of the theological traditions in question, the extent and manner of their adoption of philosophical thinking, and the specific philosophies that they embrace. In this essay, I will focus on a permutation that is relevant to my own work, and which featured in my monograph Transcendent God, Rational World: A Māturīdī Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). As the subtitle indicates, the main theological tradition that I work within is Māturīdism, which should need no introduction. Suffice it to say for now that there is wide acceptance about the significance of the thought of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī and his tradition as an expression of Sunnī Islam, and respect for the balance that it strikes between the dictates of reason and revelation. The philosophy that I will first focus on is the thought of the major European philosopher and founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. I should note that my book does not only foreground Husserl among modern thinkers or rely solely on his methods in effecting a conversation with contemporary philosophy. Rather, a range of other philosophers, including many from the analytic tradition, as well as Christian philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion feature within its pages. Nevertheless, Husserl retains an importance within the book and especially in my ongoing project that it is unmatched by any other single representative. This decision deserves further explanation before exploring its theological implications.

The Philosophical Legacy of Edmund Husserl

Philosophy is known for its ‘big names’, figures who did not only present certain interesting ideas or arguments but provided a wider vision for rational inquiry. This amounts in many cases to a full-blown system or at least a set of theoretical and methodological principles for how to philosophise that can be applied by those who follow them, even after the span of centuries. Examples that spring to mind within the Western canon include Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Hume and Kant. I will suggest three measures for the success of a philosopher as such a ‘big name’: ambition, achievement, and influence. Ambition here refers to the extent of someone’s philosophical vision: the scale of the problems that they take up and the degree of comprehensiveness witnessed in their solutions. Achievement relates to the extent that those expansive ambitions are realised in their work (especially in terms of their writings). Finally, influence is the impact that their philosophy has on other philosophers and on wider society where relevant. I contend that Husserl fulfils these three measures to an impressive degree. Though not the only consideration in my choice to engage his philosophy, I think this supports my case for the relevance of a Husserlian perspective to the project of Islamic theology.

Husserl is one of the last philosophers who can truly be said to have envisaged a comprehensive philosophical system. Though he was wary about prior systems, this was not because of their systematicity but his criticism that they had fallen short of realising philosophy as a rigorous scientific endeavour. Husserl’s ambition, in other words, was the same ‘philosopher’s stone’ that had been sought by the likes of Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā and Descartes: the founding of philosophical activity on a definitive methodological footing. For Husserl, it was phenomenology that could provide the alchemical transformation that had eluded prior thinkers and led to the unresolved problems with which philosophy was burdened. Reflecting his first calling as a mathematician, Husserl’s programme included a reconstruction of logic according to its essential structures via the method of phenomenological description. But this was extended to a thoroughgoing critique of all the categories of intentional experience, and ultimately to significant topics in epistemology, metaphysics and beyond them to a grounding of the philosophical and even scientific disciplines that are built upon them. Many philosophers have pronounced that philosophy reached its culmination and perfection in their own system, only for the foolishness of that claim to be revealed swiftly after their demise (if not before!) Husserl’s approach is somewhat different. A relentless self-critic who constantly reperformed his analyses, and rewrote his texts, Husserl argued that philosophy had to become scientific in a way akin to the natural sciences. Though always open to refinement of his phenomenological philosophy, he desired to set down a common method that could be taken on by others and eventually reach genuine systematic advancements.

Husserl did not realise his vision to reshape philosophy as a phenomenological inquiry on his terms, though he did cultivate a cadre of students who worked closely with him on his project and who became significant philosophers in their own right. Important names here are Edith Stein, Ludwig Landgrebe and Eugene Fink. But the phenomenological movement became decisively shaped by the work of his most famous student, Martin Heidegger, who explicitly repudiated core aspects of Husserl’s scientific programme. In terms of influence, much of phenomenology until today has drawn so much from Heidegger that it cannot be termed Husserlian, even if a great number of Husserl’s central ideas have been absorbed within the so-called ‘continental’ philosophical tradition. Notably, there has been a recent resurgence in interest in Husserl’s own programme (not entirely explainable, though no doubt boosted, by the full recognition of Heidegger’s support for Nazism). The new generation of Husserl scholars have benefited from the ongoing publication of the Husserliana, the philosopher’s voluminous unpublished writings, which present a more rounded picture of the breadth and depth of his thought than those works published in his lifetime.

If his ambitions for the discipline of philosophy have not (yet) been realised, what about his specific intellectual contributions within it? This is a truly philosophical rather than historical question and so views are more liable to differ according to one’s perspective. In my judgement, the framework of Husserlian phenomenology is the best methodology that has hitherto been developed for clarifying the core topics of first philosophy (the philosophising that lays the foundational programme for the specific inquiries of the various philosophical disciplines as such). This is not to say that Husserl solved every problem or was even able to lay out this programme in full – nor did he claim to do so. It is notable that Husserl persistently named his books ‘introductions’ to phenomenology. He saw himself as heralding a new philosophical method with the capacity to resolve problems that had long been considered intractable. Hence, his solutions were tentative sketches of what he thought could one day be realised. It is for this reason that, though I do not think Husserl’s insights can be ignored, they should be read alongside and not at the expense of other significant work within contemporary philosophy. This point brings me back to my own project and how and why due consideration of Husserl’s achievements is relevant to articulating a contemporary Islamic philosophical theology.

Māturīdism as Constructive Theology in the Western Academy

Islamic theology in the sense that I have been discussing in this essay has historically been most obviously represented by the Arabic scholarly discipline known as ʿilm al-kalām. The journey of that genre to the present day and its reception and articulation within a range of non-Arabic vernacular languages, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, if not before, is an interesting historical story, though not one that I will tell here. – if it is given any attention at all – is understood through a set of Arabic texts, classical ones such as the works of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and Abū al-Muʿīn al-Nasafī, or later postclassical ones, such as ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-ʿĪjī and Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī. For academic intellectual historians, this tradition is important for tracing the development of the rational disciplines in Islamic civilisation, for Muslim ulema it can be the living basis for theological judgements today, even if remaining open to ongoing ‘verification’ by those who have mastered it. I would not situate myself wholly inside or outside either of those camps, but rather in the liminal space occupied by a contemporary academic philosophical theologian or proponent of kalām jadīd (renewed theology). I take intellectual history seriously on its own terms in dealing with the development and contexts of texts and, at the same time, I understand theological works as complete systems with a living application. Yet I do not view a perceived hierarchy of scholarly authority within the tradition as binding upon me. Rather, I see it as my task to place selected aspects of that tradition into constructive dialogue with the ideas of contemporary thought. To put it another way: the philosophy of Husserl would likely be irrelevant to intellectual historians, and possibly only relevant to many traditional ulema insofar as they see it as important to critique it. I envisage a different, rather more receptive reading.

These reflections are a good introduction to the way that I read the Māturīdī tradition within my book. Rather than reading ‘through’ the later tradition to uncover the proper received interpretation of its earlier figures, I initially work forwards in time, tracing doctrinal developments and shifts like a historian. Then, in considering a systematic problem, for example the interpretation of a given divine attribute, I analyse the differences between the various theologians with respect to it. This informs my preferred position within the tradition and feeds into my own constructive theological work. In principle, it would have been possible to have focused on any of the various historical periods of Māturīdī activity according to this method. In practice, I made the choice based on my understanding of the materials, to mainly focus on the system of al-Māturīdī himself, the early Samarqandī tradition that followed him, and a number of prominent classical-era Māturīdīs who succeeded them.

My contention here is that some of the most distinctive aspects of this school’s approach – constituting its theological essence so to speak – are most present in the earliest strata of its activity. I argue that al-Māturīdī’s fundamental theological method, and his specific deployment of such divine attributes as wisdom, creative action and speech deserve to be recovered as the basis for contemporary renewal. While I do not ignore developments after his time, especially in the historical periods just mentioned, I foreground al-Māturīdī. This is not because I consider him to hold special authority in virtue of his status as the school eponym, but rather that this status is itself underwritten by the coherence and power of his theological system. I recognise the sophistication of intellectual developments that occurred within the kalām tradition subsequent to the era in which al-Māturīdī lived. But I maintain, defensibly I feel, that theological genius should be distinguished from technical refinement. In the present case, I argue that the concession to ideas of the rival Ashʿarī school of Sunnī kalām in the classical period and to elements of a philosophical framework heavily indebted to Ibn Sīnā in the postclassical one dilute too far the coherence of al-Māturīdī’s system. I therefore suggest as an alternative a recovery of it while integrating select subsequent ideas within his tradition. All this, however, only leads to an internal reading of Māturīdi theology. To meet the intellectual challenge of today it then becomes essential to place that reading into external dialogue with contemporary thought, such as analytic philosophy, phenomenology and Christian theology. It is here, then, that we can return to Husserl.

Introducing Husserl to Māturīdism

As articulated at the outset, Transcendent God, Rational World as a work of theology does not completely overlap with any philosophy, let alone with selected insights thereof. What kind of engagement is therefore possible between Māturīdism and Husserl? Dialogue occurs most naturally at the places of their greatest confluence, which given Husserl’s circumspect attitude towards religious discussion (despite being a Christian), centres more on the ‘Rational World’ rather than ‘Transcendent God’ dimension of my book. Nevertheless, I show that there are some remarkable parallels between the two thinkers. Al-Māturīdī works from the idea that the world is fundamentally intelligible to the human subject. We are able to make sense of what we experience and this ultimately allows us to reason about the wise creator who has brought us into existence and sustains us for meaningful purpose. For God to bring a rational creation capable of knowing its creator into being just to perish would be vain and foolish, not wise. There is thus an irreducible teleological strand of thinking within the constellation of al-Māturīdī’s thought. Husserl shares this emphasise on intelligibility, analysing the way that the objects of the world are constituted in the consistent experience of human subjects. He points out in a famous passage that the essence of things, as established by the phenomenological method, does not demand the specific regularities that can be witnessed within the world. This, in turn, leads to an indication that at the other ‘pole’ of human subjective experience is a transcendent ‘divine’ being, God, who teleologically orders factual reality. The difference between the two thinkers under discussion is that whereas an Islamic theology builds certain kinds of arguments upon the rational establishment of God’s existence, Husserl’s theology ‘brackets’ even this most grounding of facts to achieve its objective of epistemologically clarifying reality. It is important to remember that Husserl insists that something existent that is bracketed in this way is not doubted and remains fully an object of one’s belief.

I see the ideas of Māturīdism (specifically those of al-Māturīdī himself) and Husserl to complement one another with each system possessing something significant to offer its counterpart. Husserl (along with his extension and critique by subsequent phenomenologists, as well as analytic philosophy) provides a powerful way to systematically reason about reality, and a set of tools for dealing with the central problems of logic, epistemology, and metaphysics that reappear as challenges for theologians in every age. He also provides an approach to philosophy rooted in rational self-responsibility, which amounts to a kind of rationally grounded ethics. Māturīdism builds on the purpose of our reasoning by considering our relationship to the wise creator upon which our reality depends. This leads to rational elaboration of the specific religious and ethical demands placed by God on the human subject, and consideration of revelation as a non-redundant source of guidance for the human condition and our ultimate eschatological destination.

Notwithstanding my efforts in this area, we are still in the early stages of constructively reading Husserlian phenomenology alongside Māturīdism and potentially other streams of thought within Islam. In so doing, we must acknowledge the profundity with which Christian thinkers have already grappled with many of these questions. Yet despite the great value of these texts, the Islamic tradition has its own distinct theological identity. This leads to exciting new possibilities for Islamic theology in taking its phenomenological turn, just as it leads to new vistas for phenomenology in taking an Islamic theological one.

Transcendent God, Rational World: A Māturīdī Theology is available on Open Access.

This article was initially commissioned for publication in Turkish translation by Sabah Ülkesi. The author acknowledges with gratitude the permission to publish the English version here.