The studies journal al-Basaʾir, in its fiftieth issue, publishes a new study by Sayed Mahmoud Al-Mosawi, under the title (Risali Culture as a Theory in the Social Sciences.. The Connotations of Risali Culture).
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Risali Culture as a Theory in the Social Sciences
The Connotations of Risali Culture
Mahmoud Al-Mosawi
Opening
Researching risali culture as a theory in the social sciences, and clarifying whether it is actually fit to be such, requires of us a sequential study of risali culture as a culture that has its connotations, and a definition of its fields and the frameworks of its epistemic movement; then we move on to researching that culture as a theory that has real ranges and contributions in life, including the prevailing social sciences. Since we researched the term risali culture, in its history and development, in a previous study[1], in this study we present a semantic inquiry through which we probe the depth of meaning with an approach we draw from the epistemic tools of risali Islamic thought. We will also deepen the research and advance it in a forthcoming study, to research the domains and ranges[2] that risali culture encompasses as a theory for reading and formulating its fields in the social sciences.
Introduction
Culture, any culture, is concerned with the rational human being in all respects: the paths of movement toward which he heads, and every kind of action that issues from him and that he performs, including his views, his actions and the network of relationships in which he is engaged. For culture is a kind of knowledge, or an epistemic tool, that addresses the intellect and interacts with the human faculty of thinking; in other words, it is the echo that resounds from human intellectual activity. By this intellect Allah has honored the human being and preferred him over those He created with a complete preference, as He taught him articulate speech, as in the words of the Exalted: “He created man, [and] taught him articulate speech.”[3] (Qurʾan 55:3–4), and the Almighty said: “Certainly We have honoured the Children of Adam, and carried them over land and sea, and provided them with all the good things, and preferred them with a complete preference over many of those We have created.”[4] (Qurʾan 17:70). He addressed him with the heavenly messages and sent to him the messengers and prophets. Likewise, when Allah taught Adam all the names, He made him a vicegerent on earth and made His angels prostrate to him from this aspect, as the Exalted said: “And He taught Adam the Names, all of them”[5] (Qurʾan 2:31), and this is a truth over which no two people disagree. From this starting point, we will be on a journey of exploring risali culture, as a culture expressing the quiddity of thinking, as a product issuing from intellectual reflection; so we will work on deconstructing it and digging into its contents in order to bring out its connotations and shades.
The Common Element in the Definitions of Culture
When we observe the broad definitions that have been put forward to express the concept of culture among sociologists, educationalists and others, we see that in their definitions they start from the actual components of human behavior according to the reality that a person lives and the surroundings with which that person coexists; that is, they try to discover the causes that influence a person in his movements regardless of their quiddity and their validity. For example, (Tylor), the author of the oldest scientific definition of culture, says that it is (that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom and all the other capabilities and habits that a person acquires as a member of society)[6]. He views those acquired kinds of knowledge from the standpoint of the person's membership in the society to which he belongs. Regardless of the soundness or unsoundness of the source of reception that Tylor mentioned, and our disagreement with him over it, he expresses culture, as a quiddity, by that body of knowledge which influences human life, and he notices an important one of its aspects, namely the aspect of influence on the life of the person himself. From this starting point, if we survey the many other definitions that express culture in terms of standards, values, systems, views, methods, behaviors, laws and so on, they share the view that culture, in sum, is (the system of views and ideas that influence a person's life and that determine the course of his behavior and the nature of his positions)[7].
The result that Sayed al-Modarresi[8] reached in his definition is the common and agreed-upon measure, relating to the aspect of its quiddity that moves human action, drives what a person adopts and determines his choices, so as to draw his path and his performance in life, regardless of its source, which we discussed in a previous study and will address later.
Culture in the Data of Islamic Thought
In this section we are not concerned with establishing the roots of the word (culture, thaqāfa) as an Arabic word exclusively through the Arabic lexicons or through the usages of the people of the language, for that does not yield much further benefit in studies intended to push toward presenting contemporary views in the service of the human being and his life, since a clear and complete lexical meaning is lacking as a textual statement matching its contemporary usages. However, we will touch on the linguistic inquiry that serves as a starting point into the expanses of meaning, and on the search for the semantic horizons of the word culture in general ingrained understanding and its approximation to the meaning in the Islamic sources.
The first person to match the word thaqafa with its foreign usages stated only that he matched it with the meaning close to it; he is the writer (Salama Musa, in an article of his on culture and civilization, which he published in the Egyptian magazine al-Hilal in 1927 CE, in which he considered himself the first to spread the word thaqafa. In his words: (I was the first to spread the word thaqafa in modern Arabic literature, and I was not the one who coined it myself; rather, I adopted it from Ibn Khaldun, as I found him using it in a meaning similar to the word (Culture) common in European literature)[9]. This approximation is an ijtihād (independent judgment) on the part of Salama Musa; therefore we must search for the common semantic elements, starting from the general aim of culture, which is guiding human behavior aright through knowledge, and match those meanings with the terms stored in our vast Islamic heritage, which came with Arabic words to which it gave depth of connotation. Therefore it is a mistake to entrust the foundation of a theory of culture to the few studies that dig into the word (thaqafa) as a linguistic term[10]. With this view we do not cancel the role of the linguistic connotation of the word thaqafa; rather, we give the semantic aspect greater importance and a wider space, since this word is fundamentally an approximation and an ijtihad by a certain person of the prevailing meaning of culture in the Western sphere, especially if we know that this person was secular in orientation, that is, he was not attentive to the Qurʾanic words and did not interact with them in particular. Therefore it is incumbent on us to look at the alternative words and terms that Islam brought as an intellectual system through the data of the Holy Qurʾan and the purified Sunna of the Infallibles (a), to dig into those terms, extract their connotations and suggestions, and probe their depths, as another attempt at semantic approximation with its usages.
In this context we point to an important observation: there is a state of fascination with, or captivity to, Western studies, or studies influenced by them, among many Arab intellectuals and thinkers in their modern studies. Therefore some writers do not take into account the nature of discourse and its characteristics in the aspect of vocabulary in Islamic thought, and so they deny the existence of epistemic materials within the Islamic framework like those found in the arena of Western circulation, merely because there is no correspondence in word or form. Our remarks apply to (culture) in terms of content, for Islamic studies abound in views in the field of knowledge, reflection and thinking from many angles; and even their formulation, although it is not a formulation with academic specifications, is within the objective methods followed in the eras in which they were produced, and is harmonious and consistent with the scholarly circulation of that time. Just as in sociology some have come to say that Ibn Khaldun founded it or laid its foundation stones, on the basis of the objective correspondence in meaning with modern sociology, even though he defined his work as the science of civilization and not sociology, we too must notice the semantic similarity in culture to see whether there is an alternative word in the Islamic heritage: not in order to pretend independence, but in order to draw from our religion what we are meant to be, and to notice its characteristics and distinctive features, rather than being in a state of captivity to, and compliance with, notions foreign to the Islamic value system. As ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Masiri expresses it in his book Fiqh al-Tahayyuz: (I have noticed that modern Arabs have not laid the foundations of any science at all. If they say in the West (developmental psychology), we too say (developmental psychology); if they say (industrial psychology), we repeat with them (industrial psychology); and if they say (deconstructive psychology), we hasten to say (deconstructive psychology). That is, we repeat after them what they say and adopt the sciences they devise; as for our founding new sciences in order to deal with our own problems, that is something that has not happened in the history of modern Arab civilization)[11], and there is no doubt that al-Masiri here means the Arab thinkers who were dazzled by Western civilization, not the scholars of Islam who renewed many sciences.
The conclusion we want to reach is that we use the word (thaqafa) as a common term and as an Arabic word that has connotations in knowledge in some way; however, we do not stop at its particular linguistic connotations, nor do we confine ourselves to its data and the forms of its circulation among Muslim scholars, so that no claims come afterward from some that religion has not given a clear concept of culture, or that it lives in estrangement in the religious milieu!, or the like, such as the theories put forward by Mohammed Arkoun, al-Jabiri and ʿAli Harb. We do not stop at that linguistic limit; rather, we set out toward semantic correspondence with the general purposes of culture, which is determining a person's intellectual system that draws his course in life, so that the real data that the Islamic religion brought may be revealed before us.
That is what risali culture offered and added, and many researchers did not pay attention to it; some ignored it and others belittled it. All of those came to be in a process of begging for fragmentary notions about culture from some thinkers, which they called theories of culture, as we find clearly in Zaki al-Milad in his book (al-Masʾala al-Thaqafiyya.. Min Ajl Binaʾ Nazariyya fi al-Thaqafa), where he discussed many of the thinkers' notions on culture with a kind of exaggeration[12], did not give risali culture attention at a fair level, did not speak of it as a theory at all, and mentioned it only in a passing context, as one of the indications that were added to the concept of culture, namely the approximation between (culture and insight), and he described it as brief and without elaboration[13]. The central question of his book is (Why has a theory of culture not appeared among us?), which is surprising from someone like him. But through these studies we will find the distinctive features and additions that risali culture added as a model in contemporary Islamic thought, and we will discover that it is a theory of deep profundity and comprehensive range, with pioneering additions and distinctive features.
The General Connotations of Culture
Some have counted 120 definitions of culture, and some have counted them up to 250 definitions[14]; however, those definitions were not all real definitions: some were a general description of it, and some point to its necessity, or to its domains, or to the repercussions of its existence. From those varied definitions in different parts of the world, which issued from multiple cultural quarters differing in outlook, we mention some samples:
1/ “Culture is the way of life of a people, including contractual patterns of thinking and behavior that comprise values, beliefs, rules, behavior, political institutions, economic activities and so on, which are transmitted from generation to generation through learning and not through biological inheritance”[15].
2/ The Englishman Edward Burnett Tylor defines it: “Culture is that composite whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and all the capabilities and habits of man as a member of society”[16].
3/ Until the year 1910 CE, American anthropologists used the term culture to express a set of traits specific to tribal societies. In the year 1920 CE, Ruth Benedict considered culture to mean a pattern of thinking and action that runs through collective activities of people, distinguishing them from all other human groups. In recent years, culture has become a term for describing the distinctive condition of the human being that makes him in harmony with his surroundings. All anthropologists emphasize that culture includes acquired and learned behaviors, not hereditary instinctive patterns”[17].
4/ “The use of the word (farhang), which means culture, has been observed repeatedly in Iranian literature before Islam and after it. One of the Iranian researchers of sound taste writes the following in a valuable study: (Some considered it synonymous with opinion, intelligence, intellect and good sense; others said that it means wisdom, learning, refinement and sound upbringing; and others held that it means art, knowledge, awareness, the ability to evaluate things, and the faculty of distinguishing the bad or the ugly from the good; it is within the bounds of moral virtue, the sum of good qualities, spiritual and moral virtues, and everything that falls within the sphere of ethics, behavior, speech and positive thought. They put forward similes and metaphors to interpret it as (the refinement of the spirit), (the cause of the purification of the soul), the occasion of leadership and rulership, (benefit and not causing harm), (the basis of a good reputation), (the soundness of the soul), (the cause of the heart's vitality), (the luminosity of the heart)”[18].
5/ The Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973) defines it as: a set of moral qualities and social values that the individual receives from his birth as initial capital in the milieu in which he was born; culture, on this basis, is the surroundings in which the individual forms his temperament and his personality[19].
6/ (Tirz) holds that it is a system of symbols that have significance or meaning, which the members of society form and preserve in order to organize the affairs of their lives[20].
7/ (Matthew Arnold) held that it, culture, is our attempt to reach total perfection by means of knowing the best in human thought, which leads to the advancement of humanity..., and religion is among the elements that man has drawn on in his attempt to reach perfection[21].
8/ On the meaning of the word culture in various languages, the dictionaries indicate that in French it is derived from the Latin word cultura and is used in the sense of planting, growing, treating and tending, and respect and worship; in Italian it denotes the totality of a person's knowledge, conditions, talents, and material and social inclinations; in English it is derived from the French culture, which in turn is derived from Latin, in the sense of planting, farming, growing, care and tending; in Russian it means intellectual sensibility, spiritual condition and the natural conceptions of the human being; in German kultur is the totality of the ways of life of peoples and their values; and in Greek kalliergia it means the good and the beautiful[22].
The Data of Language
Culture (thaqafa), according to the dictionaries of the Arabic language, is derived from thaqifa, which means quickness in learning, and “thaqiftu the thing: I mastered it; and thaqiftuhu: when you have gotten hold of it”[23]. There has also come the indication that it is an instrument by which crookedness is straightened, as in Lisan al-ʿArab: “The thiqaf is a piece of iron that the bow-maker and the spear-maker have, with which he straightens the crooked thing.”[24]. “The thiqaf is that with which spears are evened, and their tathqif is their evening[25].
And it is mentioned in Maqayis al-Lugha about the origin of the word thaqafa: (The thaʾ, the qaf and the faʾ are a single word to which the branches go back, and it is the straightening of the crookedness of a thing.
One says thaqqaftu the spear-shaft when you have straightened its crookedness. He said:
Looking as the straightener looks at the joints of his spear-shaft, until his thiqaf straightens what is bent in it
And thaqiftu this speech from so-and-so.)[26].
The data of language concerning thaqafa, as far as human action is concerned, are that it is an intellectual quality and a perceptive power that takes in knowledge and is capable of being aware of it, which is taken from the expression “mastery”; on the other hand, it is a material quality, consisting in gaining control over a thing and encompassing it.
As for the data of language concerning instruments, it performs the act of evening and straightening so that the thing moves away from crookedness, in order to hit the target and be able to perform the desired function.
Therefore the root of the verb (thaqifa) is a positive act concerned with gaining control over matters and encompassing them in the manner of correctness or of hitting the mark.
Culture in the Islamic Texts
The verb thaqifa has occurred in the Holy Qurʾan in six verses, all of them with a single meaning, namely finding and getting hold of the other, whether he is an enemy seeking sedition, which is in five verses, as in the words of the Exalted: “You will find others desiring to be secure from you, and secure from their own people; yet whenever they are called back to polytheism, they relapse into it. So if they do not keep out of your way, nor offer you peace, nor keep their hands off [from fighting], then seize them and kill them wherever you confront them, and it is such against whom We have given you a clear sanction.” (Qurʾan 4:91)
or the reverse of that, such as the enemies getting hold of the believers, which is one verse, in the words of the Exalted: “If they were to confront you they would be your enemies, and would stretch out against you their hands and [unleash] their tongues with evil [intentions], and they are eager that you [too] should be faithless.” (Qurʾan 60:2)
We find that the researchers who review the origin of the word thaqafa in the texts and its occurrence content themselves with mentioning these Qurʾanic verses, and content themselves with commenting that it came in the sense of finding. It did indeed come in this sense, but that does not mean its usage is confined to that, because, as we said, the act may be a material act and may be an intellectual, non-material act. Indeed, the finding intended in the verses is not mere finding, but getting hold of and encompassing the thing in a way that calls him to gain control over it in order to perform the act toward it.
With further research in our Islamic texts, we came upon a narration reported from Imam ʿAli ibn al-Husayn Zayn al-ʿAbidin (a) within the Treatise of Rights (Risalat al-Huquq), according to some narrations; it is not like the customary and well-known text of the Treatise of Rights in circulation, but it is reported in the book Bihar al-Anwar by al-ʿAllama al-Majlisi, as well as in the book (Man La Yahduruhu al-Faqih) by al-Shaykh al-Saduq, and likewise in Mustadrak al-Wasaʾil by al-Mirza al-Nuri. The narrated text mentions culture (thaqafa) as one of the rights of the young child over his father and the one who raises him, and it is as follows:
(As for the right of the young, it is mercy toward him, cultivating him (tathqīfuhu) and teaching him, pardoning him and covering for him, gentleness with him and helping [him, and covering] the offenses of his youth, for that is a cause for repentance, and being tactful with him and refraining from quarreling with him, for that is closer to his right guidance)[27].
The narration has important dimensions worth pausing at, among them:
1/ That cultivating the child is one of the rights of the child: it is the father's duty to work at cultivating his child just as he spends on him. Maintenance is among the basic material aspects that the child needs in his youth for nourishment and the soundness of the body, and culture is among the non-material aspects by which the intellect is set right and behavior is refined. This is an important point that shows us Islam's concern for human awareness from childhood; and because he is unable to master these qualities owing to his limited perception and his incapacity when young, it assigned this task to his guardian, which, if he carries it out, the child will be integrated in his personality. These are the preliminaries of the rightly guided personality, as he said: (for that is closer to his right guidance).
2/ In the first segment, the rights of the child in the aforementioned narration are: (As for the right of the young, it is mercy toward him, cultivating him, and teaching him). This triad consists of things that come to the child while he is in the position of the receiver and recipient of them, and the rights that follow it express the father's reaction to actions issuing from the child, as he must pardon him, cover for him and be gentle with him. What concerns us is the first segment, which can contribute to giving a positive connotation consistent with the linguistic datum and the ingrained mental understanding of culture in its common dimension.
Among the three rights is the psychological factor represented by (mercy), as a positive psychological atmosphere that prepares the personality for receiving; the epistemic factor represented by (teaching), to fill the areas of ignorance in the intellect and for it to acquire light for knowing things; and the third aspect, which is the middle one in order, (cultivating), which is guidance so that knowledge is put in its proper place, and it is in effect the correct direction of knowledge.
3/ That culture came in the middle between mercy, which is among the psychological factors, and knowledge, which is among intellectual actions, which gives us an indication that culture is linked to the intellect and to the soul together.
At the end of this journey, we recall once again the definition of culture that Sayed al-Modarresi mentioned, which relies on the common measure among the definitions:
Culture is: (the system of views and ideas that influence a person's life and that determine the course of his behavior and the nature of his positions)[28].
Let us move on to the additional connotations of risali culture.
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