Continuation of my Contentions Series.
Link to Shaykh Abd al Hakim Murad’s Contentions part 1.
30. The Abrahamic wandering, for us, but not for Levinas, is to polis, to umm al-Qura. It was Islam, not Judaism, which united Abraham and Odysseus.
Terms:
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Lévinas (wikipedia) - (Emmanuel Lévinas) - was a Jewish philosopher and Talmudic scholar from Kaunas in Lithuania, who moved to France, where he wrote most of his works.
For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (called ontology by Levinas). Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the ‘knowledge of love’ rather than the love of knowledge. In his arrangement, ethics become an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; because of this, an ethics of responsibility precedes any ‘objective searching after truth’. Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other.
- polis - the Greek term for city-state, from which the term ‘politics’ is derived.
- Umm al-Qura - (wikipedia, oh what would I do without ye) Umm al-Qura signifies “the center of villages” in Arabic. Though it is not a proper noun, it is mostly often used to refer to Mecca, a major city of Saudi Arabia. It is name of university of saudi Arabia located in Mecca.
The Abrahamic wandering which the Shaykh speaks of we should be familiar with. Abraham’s stories of travel are well known, and they led a vast area to consider themselves to be the ‘children of Abraham’ (Arabs and Jews).
Abraham (AS) according to some translates to “Father of Many”, and his ‘wanderings’ across northern Arabia and elsewhere will be remembered until the end of time.
The first part of the contention seems to mean that Abraham’s (AS) journey’s led to the development of communities and of societies.
I did some digging to determine how Levinas thought of Abraham (AS) but I could not relate what I found back directly to this contention.
What I did discover is that as a Talmudic philosopher he seemed intent having the Talmud presented in Greek in order to have the Talmud “express in Greek what Greece cannot express.”
In other words, the central theme in Levinas approach is that the talmud is a source for a type of philosophy which the Western philosophers had not experienced or expressed. But with a casual reading of Levinas, one finds an almost antagonistic approach towards Greek thought and an inherent superiority towards the Talmudic ideals which precludes any type of integration between these two vastly different worlds.
So, knowing that, looking back on this contention you’ll notice that polis, a greek term is used next to umm al-Qura an Arabic term.
Furthermore, and quite more explicitly, we find that the Shaykh tells us that Islam united Abraham (AS) a Semitic ‘hero’, and Odysseus, a greek hero.
So, in terms of philosophy there is some discussion going on here about the unifying force of Islam, how Islam managed to integrate the best of the ideals of the Greeks and the Semitic religious philosophies.
So it was the Muslims who preserved the Greeks work, who debated their ideas intensely within, leading to some of the brightest scholars in Islam. One need not look any further than Hujjat al Islam, Imam Ghazali, who personified this unification as with one hand he was able to discuss deep philosophical issues with those expounding Greek philosophy (with their same techniques in writing), and with the other hand he was able to write one of the best works on tassawuf that Islam has known.
On the other hand Levinas’s technique of trying to apply Talmudic ideals, after-the-fact, in the greek language seems a rather pitiful attempt at accomplishing a similar type of Western-Eastern intellectual discourse which existed in the Islamic world.
