The Quranic tradition of fragmented knowledge

 

Remembering my high school days (madrasa) I couldn’t imagine that my understanding of the Qur’an would be changed on such a profound level. Of course, it is a matter of knowledge and new information in the first place but my approach to the Qur’an was socio-holistic which was reasonable then but unsatisfactory. When al-Ghazali launches his attack on Ibn Rushd it was in between an intellectual clash of philosophical nominalism and philosophical realism and this clash gave such a nice and profound color to the Islamic tradition that needs to be more exploited.

Philosophical nominalism drew its main principles and goals from Revelation and that was primarily a tradition that cultivated a culture of dispersed and fragmented knowledge and that all the different kinds of perspectives should be aggregated with care and precision. The people of Mecca back than criticized the methodology of fragmented Revelation (why the Book is not revealed jumlatan wahideten = all at once); because they expected that the Book will provide a totalizing explanation of everything but that was not the case. The conservation of the Qur’an represents a remarkable collective work of the community as it is possible to demonstrate that numerous orthographic idiosyncrasies in the earliest Quranic manuscripts are the result of one single archetype. This statement could be challenged, and it is by those who are claiming that later corrections are a demonstration of the non-existence of an exemplar from a very early date but that is very doubtful regarding the available data collected from the earliest Quranic manuscripts. Following traces of available data, the existence of a single archetype is obvious so regarding the basic Quranic consonant text extreme fluidity and volatility of the text were prevented at a very early time with permissibility to read the vowels and even consonants in different ways. The basic Quranic skeleton text was pretty inelastic but the vowel arrangement was elastic, to say it briefly in economic terms. To some degree, the system had been built on randomness and volatility which gave to the Text a possibility to counter fragility.

There is no Islamic tradition without the Book but there is a huge discrepancy in how we see it nowadays and how it was in the first century and the following decades. What I wish to point out is that Islamic tradition started as a tradition of fragments as the Book was not revealed in totality at once and that the standard Quranic consonant text was a primarily multiform text that nurtured a culture of polycentrism expressing directly that our reality is structured by a multitude of different variables.

As F. A. Hayek would say: “Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge: But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.“

The history of the Quran is contained in the fact that knowledge is fragmented and locally diversified and that is I assume one of the reasons why from generation to generation the Quran was transmitted and taught as an intrinsically multiform text with different kinds of variants. It is impossible to speak about a language holistically, for example, and Sibawayh had that knowledge when he started to write his famous grammar al-Kitab as he was living in a tradition where it was known that knowledge is fragmented and localized and so was the language. In which way you will put vowels and give a proper meaning to the basic skeleton text of the Quran has been a specific tradition in Islam to these days, but what kind of philosophy stood behind that is more important from my point of view.

Almost from the beginning of the year, we started to live our lives, managed by the so-called scientific models and now we are witnessing hot debates regarding how many of those models were just acts of a dart-throwing chimpanzee. Models can be truth-makers in that small world isolated and restricted within the model itself but they can’t be transferred unconditionally to the real world. That is identical to the reading tradition of the Qur'an in some way. As I said, traditionally it was permissible to arrange vowels in different kinds of ways with the possibility of different reading outcomes with the fact that tradition developed a verification system to recognize wobbly variants. Everyday learning and data collecting help a lot but the reading tradition of the Qur’an in its morphological structure reminds us that big data and overconfidence could give as an illusion of knowledge and that we need to aggregate our perspectives very carefully.   

How we read a particular paragraph depends on the knowledge that has been collected generationally and collectively, so before any intervention in the real world through scientific models, it is necessary to see to what extent we have the necessary amount of information. Al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun would underline the impossibility to know everything and that is why the Revelation is in its essence fragmented and multiform. Universal and totalistic knowledge is left to God, and it is primarily up to us to respect articulated scientific but also non-articulated knowledge specific to each individual. This is why the Qur'an can be read in many ways because Revelation tended to be adaptable to reality and it was such that the Arabs didn’t have one standardized language in which everyone in totality spoke. Looking at multiple variants is far better than to limit yourself at just one variant. Even when there is a disagreement between variant readings by understanding those differences we provide better insight regarding the textual history of the Qur'an where different readings of the Text coexist in the same text. In reality, it is freaking hard to make a good model especially when you are not even sure about your basic information regarding some phenomenon with all those localized and specific details, which is why scientific models are becoming more diverse, and this is especially evident in economics where everything depends on several specific localized variables. As we often look at the Qur'an in totality and err when we do so, it is also necessary for science to calm the reins and accept that sometimes we don’t know much before we continue to insist on implementing models with a multitude of uncertainties and unknowns.