Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

124 t CHAPTER FIVE
(zahir; Dawud’s followers were called Zahiris) sense of both the
Quran and the hadith—on pious, conservative grounds, to be
sure, but almost as surely as a reaction to a Mutazilite exegesis of
the sacred text that was based on somewhat free-wheeling analogy
(qiyas) and critical investigation of its meaning.
Exegesis lay at the heart of the debate over the conflicting claims
of faith and reason in the domain of revealed religion. The rationalizing
theologians wrested some of the rights of exegesis away
from the lawyers because they were more skillful in allegorical exegesis.
Traditionists were tied by their own legal premises to literal
interpretation of Scripture, a connection that committed them in
nonlegal passages to certain gross anthropomorphisms that the dialecticians
could devour with arguments. More, the theologians
permitted themselves a far wider exegetical range, and could apply
both learning and imagination to the text of Scripture, whereas the
traditionists were largely limited to rhetoric and philology. Just
how attractive a carefully wrought theological tafsir might be is
demonstrated by the position won among all segments of the Islamic
community by the monumental quranic commentary The Unveiler
of the Realities of the Secrets of Revelation by the Mutazilite
Zamakhshari (d. 1144).
Later the philosophers of Islam would make even bolder claims
than the early partisans of tradition. For the dialectical theologians
who came after the Mutazilites, rational discourse, whether in exegesis
or elsewhere, was complementary to and defensive of the
higher truths of revelation, but the philosophers, the Muslim Avicenna
or the Jewish Maimonides, regarded philosophy’s claim as
the higher one. Scripture figured truth for the unphilosophical
masses; philosophy uttered its very name. There can be no conflict,
however. Where Scripture appears to conflict with the conclusions
of demonstrative reasoning, it is a clear sign that the literal meaning
of Scripture must be interpreted allegorically, not by the lawyer
or the theologian, whose powers of reasoning are undermined by
faulty premises, but by the philosopher, who alone possesses truly
rigorous scientific knowledge.