Religion, Historicism, and Agency: A Response to Gutas, Iqbal, and Reisman

Abstract

This article is a response to a fifteen year old debate between Dimi- tri Gutas, Muzaffar Iqbal, and David Reisman over the historical agency of the Islamic tradition in relation to the development of the natural sciences. Gutas initiated the debate by arguing that religious traditions are neither monolithic nor reified and, thus, cannot have agency in advancing or impeding scientific activity. Iqbal responded by defending an essentialist conception of Islam, one that then received sharp criticism from Reisman. Here, I at- tempt to provide a more balanced position, particularly between Gutas and Iqbal. While I agree with Gutas’ historicist approach to the study of religious traditions, I draw on MacIntyre to maintain that historical traditions can, indeed, have historical agency inso- far as we understand them not as reified entities, but as a form of historically-conditioned debate among adherents, participants who engage in dialectical debate over shared epistemological sources and who serve as actors in the world. In response to Iqbal, I argue that historical criticism does not have to be a threat to Islam if it is viewed as being directed at human epistemological claims about revelation, not at the ontological givens of revelation, itself, which can be taken to be timeless and unchanging. I attempt to demon- strate this by looking at the historical debates that arose among the Umma over the succession of the Prophet.