3
AL-RAWANDI (B. C.820-830 C.E.)
Al-Rawandi started as a Multazilite, but was expelled from their company for heresy. He then began a series of ferocious attacks on the Multazilites and, thanks to a refutation of his work by al-Khayyat, al-Rawandi's book against his former colleagues is known in part-the work is called the Fadihat al- Multazila, or the Ignominy of the Multazilites. Al-Rawandi never hesitated in broaching subjects long considered both taboo and dangerous, and it is not surprising that before long he was branded an infidel and a zindig, both in the narrow sense of someone believing in dualism and in the wider sense of a freethinker. He was publicly accused by the Mu`tazilites, and eventually had to leave Baghdad because of government persecution. In his attacks on his former friends, alRawandi showed their inconsistencies and deduced heretical conclusions from their principles.
As H. S. Nyberg' has shown, al-Rawandi was condemned and expelled by the Mu'tazilites for his Aristotelian tendencies, which questioned the central orthodox dogma of the creation ex nihilo and of the creator. We know that alRawandi wrote a book on the eternity of the world; however, this work has not survived. It is significant that it was often philosophers and doctors who took him seriously, and some even came to his defense-al-Haytham, for example, showed that the putative refutations of al-Rawandi were plain wrong.
Al-Rawandi undoubtedly taught dualism in one of his books and, for a time, turned toward Shi i doctrine of a moderate kind, finally cutting all intellectual links with the Muslim community and ending as an atheist.
The Mu'tazilites also accused al-Rawandi of attacking the Prophet, the Koran, the Hadith, revelation in general, in sum, whole of the Sharma, in such works as the Kitab al-Damigh, the Kitab al-Farad, and the Kitab al-Zumurrudh. But as Nyberg and others have pointed out, al-Rawandi was only drawing the logical conclusions of the principles held by the Multazilites themselves.
The extracts we possess of al-Rawandi's Kitab al-Zumurrudh show exactly why he was seen as a radical and dangerous heretic: It contains a trenchant criticism of prophecy in general and the prophecy of Muhammad in particular, maintaining that reason is superior to revelation. Either what the so-called prophets say is in accordance with reason, in which case prophets are otiose and unnecessary since ordinary human beings are equally endowed with reason, or it does not conform to reason, in which case it must be rejected. For al-Rawandi all religious dogma is contrary to reason and therefore must be rejected: "The miracles attributed to the prophets, persons who may reasonably be compared to sorcerers and magicians, are pure invention." As for the Koran, far from being a miracle and inimitable, is an inferior work from the literary point of view, since it is neither clear or comprehensible nor of any practical value, and is certainly not a revealed book. Besides, its putative literary miraculousness "is hardly relevant, as probative evidence, in regard to foreigners to whom Arabic is an alien tongue."2
Al-Rawandi attacks all religious ritual as futile, and says any knowledge acquired by the so-called prophets can be explained in natural and human terms. According to at least one authority, al-Rawandi rejected the very possibility of a satisfactory rational answer to the question of God's existence and the rationality of His ways.'
Al-Rawandi's other views seem to include the eternity of the world, the superiority of dualism over monotheism and the vanity of divine wisdom. AlMa'arri, in his Risalat al-Ghufran, attributes the following lines to al-Rawandi, addressed to God:
Thou didst apportion the means of livelihood to Thy creatures like a drunkard who shows himself churlish.
Had a man made such a division, we should have said to him,
"You have swindled. Let this teach you a lesson."
No wonder Al-Malarri exclaimed in horror, "If these two couplets stood erect, they would be taller in sin than the Egptian pyramids in size."4
ABU BAKR MUHAMMAD B. ZAKARIYA AL-RAzI (865-925 c.E.)
Perhaps the greatest freethinker in the whole of Islam was al-Razi,S the Rhazes of medieval Europe (or Razis of Chaucer), whose prestige and authority remained unchallenged until the seventeenth century. Max Meyerhof also calls him the greatest physician of the Islamic world and one of the great physicians of all time,' while for Gabrieli, he remains the greatest rationalist "agnostic" of the Middle Ages, European and Oriental.' Al-Razi was a native of Rayy (near Tehran), where he studied mathematics, philosophy, astronomy and literature, and, perhaps, alchemy.
It is possible that Al-Razi studied under that shadowy figure the freethinker Eranshari, who, according to al-Biruni, "did not believe in any of the then existing religions, but was the sole believer in a religion invented by himself, which he tried to propagate."" Eranshari may thus have influenced Al-Razi's rather similar dismissal, as we shall see below, of all religions.
It was at Baghdad that Al-Razi learned medicine. At that time Baghdad was a great center of learning, and Al-Razi had access to libraries and well-equipped hospitals, one of which he later directed.
Al-Razi is credited with at least two hundred works on a wide variety of subjects, with the exception of mathematics. His greatest medical work was an enormous encyclopedia, al-Haw , on which he worked for fifteen years, and which was translated into Latin in 1279. Al-Razi was a thorough empiricist, and not at all dogmatic. This is evident from his extant clinical notebook, in which he carefully recorded the progress of his patients, their maladies, and the results of the treatment. He wrote what was perhaps the earliest treatise on infectious diseases-smallpox and measles. It is based on his own painstaking empirical observations, not neglecting any aspect of those diseases that might help in their treatment-heart, breathing, and so on. He wrote on a vast number of medical topics -skin diseases, diet, diseases of the joints, fevers, poison, and so on.
Al-Razi was equally empirical in his approach to chemistry. He shunned all the occultist mumbo jumbo attached to this subject, instead confining himself to "the classification of the substances and processes as well as to the exact description of his experiments." He was perhaps the first true chemist (as opposed to an alchemist).
Al-Razi's general philosophical attitude was that no authority was beyond criticism. He challenged tradition and authority in every field to which he turned his attention.
Though he had great respect and admiration for the great Greek figures of the past-Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen-he was not at all overawed by them:
He does not hesitate either to modify their philosophical conclusions if he believes that he knows better, or to add to the store of accumulated medical knowledge what he has found out by his own research and observation. Whenever, for instance, he treats a particular disease he first summarises everything he can find in Greek and Indian sources, . . . and in the works of earlier Arabic doctors. He never fails to add his own opinion and his own judgment; he never adheres to authority as such.9
Like a true humanist, al-Razi has boundless faith in human reason. As alRazi himself wrote in his book of ethics, The Spiritual Physick:
The Creator (Exalted be His Name) gave and bestowed upon us Reason to the end that we might thereby attain and achieve every advantage, that lies within the nature of such as us to attain and achieve, in this world and the next. It is God's greatest blessing to us, and there is nothing that surpasses it in procuring our advantage and profit. By Reason we are preferred above the irrational beasts, ... By Reason we reach all that raises us up, and sweetens and beautifies our life, and through it we obtain our purpose and desire. For by Reason we have comprehended the manufacture and use of ships, so that we have reached unto distant lands divided from us by the seas; by it we have achieved medicine with its many uses to the body, and all the other arts that yield us profit ... by it we have learned the shape of the earth and the sky, the dimension of the sun, moon and other stars, their distances and motions .... 10
AI-Razi denied the Islamic dogma of creation ex nihilo. For him, the world was created at a finite moment in time, but not out of nothing. Al-Razi believed in the existence of the five eternal principles: creator, soul, matter, time, and space. "The ignorant Soul having desired Matter, God, in order to ease her misery, created the world conjoining her with matter, but also sent to her the Intellect to teach her that she would be finally delivered from her sufferings only by putting an end to her union with Matter. When the Soul grasps this, the world will be dissolved."" Al-Razi seems to be even impugning the Muslim Unity of God, "which could not bear to be associated with any eternal soul, matter, space or time."
In The Spiritual Physick, al-Razi is absolutely unique in not once referring to the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet-a practice common in such worksor to any specific Muslim doctrine. A. J. Arberry describes his attitude as "tolerant agnosticism" and "intellectual hedonism," and "though its origins in classical philosophy are obvious, it reflects very characteristically the outlook of the cultured Persian gentleman, constantly down the ages informing Iranian thought and life."12 He advocated moderation, dispapproved of asceticism, enjoined control of one's passions by reason, and, under the influence of Plato's Philebus, developed his theory of pleasure and pain-"pleasure is not something positive but the simple result of a return to normal conditions, the disturbance of which has caused pain."
On life after death he reserved judgment, and tried to allay the fear of death by reason, in a manner reminiscent of Epicurus. His attitude to death is summed up in a poem he wrote in old age:
This is like a breath of fresh air after the dogmatic certainties of al-Ghazali and his beloved, pathological imagery of the torments of hell.
At last, we come to those views of al-Razi that earned him universal condemnation from Muslims for blasphemy. Ibn Hazm, Nasir-l-Khusraw, al-Kirmani, and even al-Blrun! joined in the chorus of reproach. Unlike al-Kind!, al-Razi sees no possibility of a reconciliation between philosophy and religion. In two heretical works, one of which may well have influenced the European freethought classic De Tribus Impostoribus,'4 al-Razi gave vent to his hostility to the revealed religions. Al-Razi's heretical book On Prophecy has not survived, but we know that it maintained the thesis that reason is superior to revelation, and salvation is only possible through philosophy. The second of al-Razi's heretical works has partly survived in a refutation by an Ismaili author. Its audacity will be apparent as soon as we examine, with the help of Paul Kraus, Shlomo Pines,' 5 and Gabrieli, its principal theses.
All men are by nature equal, and equally endowed with the faculty of reason, which must not be disparaged in favor of blind faith. Reason further enables men to perceive in an immediate way scientific truths. The prophets-these billy goats with long beards, as al-Razi disdainfully describes them-cannot claim any intellectual or spiritual superiority. These billy goats pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves spouting their lies and imposing on the masses blind obedience to the "words of the master." The miracles of the prophets are impostures, based on trickery, or the stories regarding them are lies. The falseness of what all the prophets say is evident in the fact that they contradict one another-one affirms what the other denies, and yet each claims to be the sole depository of the truth, thus the New Testament contradicts the Torah; the Koran, the New Testament. As for the Koran, it is but an assorted mixture of "absurd and inconsistent fables," which has ridiculously been judged inimitable when, in fact, its language, style, and its much-vaunted "eloquence" are far from being faultless. Custom, tradition, and intellectual laziness lead men to blindly follow their religious leaders. Religions have been the sole cause of the bloody wars that have ravaged mankind. Religions have also been resolutely hostile to philosophical speculation and to scientific research. The so-called holy scriptures are worthless and have done more harm than good, whereas the "writings of the ancients like Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Hippocrates have rendered much greater service to humanity.... The people who gather round the religious leaders are either feeble-minded, or they are women and adolescents. Religion stifles truth and fosters enmity. If a book in itself can constitute a demonstration that it is true revelation, the treatises of geometry, astronomy, medicine and logic can justify such a claim much better than the Quran, the transcendent literary beauty of which, denied by al-Razi, was thought by orthodox Muslims to prove the truth of Muhammad's mission." 16
In his political philosophy, al-Razi believed one could live in an orderly society without being terrorized by religious law or coerced by the prophets. Certainly the precepts of Muslim law, such as the prohibition of wine, did not trouble him in the least. It was, as noted earlier, through philosophy and human reasonnot through religion-that human life could be improved. Finally, al-Razi believed in scientific and philosophical progress-the sciences progressed from generation to generation. One had to keep an open mind and not reject empirical observations simply because they did not fit into one's preconceived scheme of things. Despite his own contributions to the sciences, he believed that one day they would be superseded by minds even greater than his.
It is clear from the above account that al-Razi's criticisms of religion are the most violent to appear in the Middle Ages, whether European or Islamic. His heretical writings, significantly, have not survived, and were not widely read; nonetheless, they are a witness to a remarkably tolerant culture and society-a tolerance lacking in other periods and places.
NOTES
1. H. S. Nyberg, Deux Reprouves: 'Amr Ibn Ubaid et Ibn ar-Rawandi dans classi- cisme et declin culturel (symposium de Bordeaux) (Paris: Centre d'etudes superieures specialise d'histoire des religions de Strasbourg, 1957), pp. 131-35.
2. "Ibn al-Rawandi," in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), p.
3. "Ibn al-Rawandi," in Encyclopedia of Islam, supplement, p. 95.
4. Quoted by R. A. Nicholson in "The Risalatul Ghufran," in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1900, 1902.
5. P. Kraus and S. Pines, "al-Razi," in Encyclopedia of Islam, pp. 1134-36.
6. M. Meyerhof, "Thirty-three Clinical Observations by Rhazes," Isis 23, no. 2 (1935): 322 f.
7. F. Gabrieli, "La Zandaqa an I" Siecle Abbasiole," in L'Elaboration de l'Islam (Paris, 1961).
8. Alberuni [aI-Biruni], India, trans. Edward Sachau (London: Kegan Paul, 1914), p. 627.
9. R. Walzer, Greek into Arabic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 15.
10. Al-Razi, The Spiritual Physick, trans. A. J. Arberry (London: John Murray, 1950), pp. 20-21.
11. S. Pines, "Philosophy," in Cambridge History of Islam, ed. P. M. Holt, Ann Lambton, and Bernard Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), vol. 2B, p. 803.
12. Introduction to al-Razi, The Spiritual Physick, p. 11.
13. Ibid., p. 7.
14. See M. Hunter and D. Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
15. Kraus and Pines, "al-Razi," p. 1134-36.
16. Pines, "Philosophy," p. 801.