Eclecticism in Islam, Arthur Jeffery, 1922

(from, The Muslim World, Volume 12 (1922), pp. 230-247)

Other Books and Articles by Arthur Jeffery

Eclecticism in Islam

Arthur Jeffery

Eclecticism has been a fairly frequent phenomenon in the history both of Philosophy and of Religion. We can almost regard it as an inevitable stage in the history of every movement of thought which loses contact with the vital impulse which gave it birth. In some cases it has been due to the process of exhaustion; the thought movement finding no further source of life and power in itself seeks to supply the deficiency by drawing outside sources. In other cases it is due to disconnection; the movement, being cut off from contact with its own source of life, seeks to fasten itself upon others. In either case the stage of Eclecticism is only one, stage from death.

Historically the most famous case of Eclecticism is that in Greek philosophy, when after the waning of the post-Aristotelian systems such a movement appeared and reigned till, after the final flicker of Neo-platonism, Greek Philosophy went out in the dark night of scholasticism. In this case it was due to exhaustion. Three hundred years of intense and abundantly fruitful thinking in Greece culminated in the system of Aristotle. That was its maturity, and we can watch the life force declining though the systems of subjectivism known as Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism till in the Eclectic period we find that the disputes of Academic and Peripatetic, Stoic and Epicurean, Pyrrhonist and the leaders of the New Academy, resulted in their agreements being made prominent and their differences softened, and the reigning philosophy became a patchwork of them all. "As intellectual vigour wanes," writes Stace,¹ "there is always the tendency to forget differences, to rest, as the Orientals do, in the good natured and comfortable delusion that all religions and all philosophies really mean much the same thing. Hence Eclecticism became characteristic of the schools."

This spirit was greatly stimulated by the Romans, for they had had no share in the real life that gave birth to Greek Philosophy, and their practical nature made them impatient of the subtle metaphysical distinctions of the schools. We are told that the hard-headed, pro-consul Gellius was so assured that their trifling disputes could be easily settled by a little tactful management, that, though no philosopher himself, he urged the Athenian philosophers to come to a compromise, and offered to mediate between them himself.

But even the compromises of the schools were insufficient to restore the decaying vitality of Greek philosophy, and new life was sought by incorporating Oriental elements The old religion of the Greco-Roman world was practically dead; the old philosophy had sought, in the post-Aristotelian systems, to become a religion, but had not succeeded, so a flood of Eastern cults was allowed to flow in.² The Egyptian faith of Isis; the Thraco-Phrygian cult of Attis, of Sabazius, of Cybelle; the Persian religion of Mithra, all had their following, and as Glover says,³ "it was not merely Gods that came from the East but a new series of religious ideas ... They orientalized every religion of the West and developed every superstitious and romantic tendency. In the long run, they brought philosophy to its knees, abasing it to be the apologist of everything they taught and did,- and dignifying themselves by giving a philosophic colouring to the mysticism."⁴

That there was a new source of life here, Neo-platonism is a witness,⁵ but though it gave a brilliant flash Plotinus, and showed a dim glow in Proclus and Pophyry, it quickly died away in the astrology and magic of Iamblicus. This was necessarily so, for the future belonged to Christianity which had come with a new source of life and power which the dying Paganism refused to consider.

In Jewish thought we have a similar period of Eclecticism, almost contemporary with that of Greek Philosophy, and largely indebted thereto. The solitary figure representing it is the Alexandrian Jew, Philo. In the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, cut off from the old associations of Palestine and in touch with the great movements of Gentile thought, Judaism began to lose its distinctiveness and thereby its vitality, and Philo's attempt to infuse energy was by an Eclecticism wherein he sought to blend Plato and Moses, crude Hebrew theology and subtle Greek metaphysics. The system was still-born.

We meet with the same phenomenon in Buddhism. The origin of the two great Schools is wrapped in obscurity, but it is clear that by the time the Indian monk Padmasambhava migrated to Tibet in the reign of Sron de Tsan, the Mahayana School had exhausted the primitive force of the movement, and was living by the incorporation of external religious forces. The Southern School, the Hinayana, has kept fairly close to the agnostic philosophy of the Buddha himself, and still preserves a more or less moribund existence, but the flourishing school is the Northern, which has been able to flourish because it has drawn into its system numerous practices of primitive animism, and borrowed largely from Hinduism, and later from Christianity.⁶ So much is this so, that in modern Mahayana Buddhism it is often difficult to find where the peculiarly Buddhist elements are. Writing of the Buddhism of Tibet, popularly known as Lamaism, Waddell says,⁷ "Primitive Lamaism may therefore be defined as a priestly mixture of Sivaite mysticism, magic and Indo-Tibetan demonolatry overlaid by a thin varnish of Mahayana Buddhism, and to the present day Lamaism still retains this character." The same may be said of popular Buddhism in China and Japan, and though there has been a big infusion of Hinayana Buddhism, the same holds good of it in modern Burma⁸. It is obvious, that this eclectic stage is only one remove from the death of Buddhism altogether in the Northern School.

Early Gnosticism was an attempt at an eclectic movement in Christianity, made by men who had realized the epoch-making nature of the new faith but had not entered into its spirit and knew nothing of its experiences.⁹ But Gnosticism had a short history.¹⁰ "The first attempt," says Windelband¹¹ "which the Gnostics made to create an adequate view of the world for the new religion, proceeded from the excited phantasies of a Syrian mingling of religions and, in spite of the employment of Hellenist philosophemes, led to such grotesque constructions, that the Church as it grew stronger and more definitive was obliged to reject them." The most striking eclectic movement in Christian history, however, is the modern movement called Theosophy, a weird conglomeration of Hinduism, Buddhism, Neo-platonism, Gnostic speculation, magic and psychism, with a faint odour of Christianity about the whole.¹²

This movement was begun and is mostly carried on people who had lost touch with Christianity as a personal religious experience, and failing to find life in the external forms, sought religious satisfaction in a gorgeous patchwork of many faiths in which each adherent lays the emphasis where he will. How little of genuine Christianity remains in it is evident from a perusal of Mrs. Besant's "Esoteric Christianity," or Mr. Leadbeater's "The Christian Creed," and his recent articles in "The Theosophist."

The corresponding movement in Hinduism is the Brahma Samaj, which Dr. Farquhar consider's the most influential of all the religious movements of the nineteenth century.¹⁴ Its founder, Ram Mohan Ray, though a Brahman by birth, was profoundly influenced by Sufiism, and later by the Christian missionaries at Serampore, but the fully eclectic nature of the movement is best seen in the third and greater leader, Keshab Chandra Sen, whose Service Book for Samaj meetings, the Slokasangraha, was a collection of texts from Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan and Chinese scriptures.¹⁵ It was a movement brought to birth by the conflict of East with West in the realm of intellect, and still is an attempt of educated Hindus to find relief from the impossibilities of the faith of their childhood but how little Hinduism there really is in it is evident from a perusal of S. Sastri's "History of the Brahma Samaj",¹⁶ and how little real religious spirit remains" in it, is seen from the activities of its present day champions.¹⁷ But eclecticism is not only characteristic of the Brahma Samaj, it is equally so of all the modern reform movements which attempt to stay the spiritual decay within Hinduism. We have only space here to refer to the work of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who taught that all religions were paths leading to the same goal.¹⁸ Dr. Farquhar reproduces a picture caused to be painted by him,¹⁹ which has for background three buildings, a Christian Church, a Mohammedan Mosque and a Hindu Temple, while in the foreground we see Christ dancing with Chaitanya before a group of religious devotees, Hindu, Moslem, Sikh, Parsee, a Chinese Confucian and an Anglican Curate, and to the left we find Ramakrishna himself pointing out the group to Keshab Chandra Sen and explaining to him the Unity of Religions.

When we turn to Islam, the question at once arises as to whether Islam as a whole is not an eclectic system. Arnold's words are well known - "Islam was born in the desert, with Arab Sabeanism for its mother, and Judaism for its father; its foster nurse was Eastern Christianity," and the investigations of European scholars since then have only served to make this clearer. One rises from the perusal of Geiger's "Judaism and Islam,"²⁰ and St. Clair Tisdall's "Original Sources of the Qur'an,"²¹ feeling the full justice of Dr. Zwemer's conclusion, that Islam "is not an invention, but a concoction; there is nothing novel about it except the genius of Mohammed in mixing old ingredients in a new panacea for human ills and forcing it down by means of the sword.²²

But was this a real eclecticism? It is undoubtedly true that Mohammed carried over into his system numerous beliefs and practices of the Pagan Arabs, e.g. the reverence for the Black Stone and the ceremonies of the Pilgrimage to Mecca. It is true also that for most of his eschatology he was indebted to Sabaeanism and Zoroastrianism,²³ and that he borrowed many legends from the Jewish Talmud and Christian Apocryphal Gospels. We may even go so far as to say that if we cut out what he borrowed from the "People of the Book" there is little left of Islam save its faults; but even so, was there not a great original force in Islam which was independent of, though it made use of these elements? There can be no doubt that this is so. Whether we agree with Becker and Caetani, that the life-force of the movement was political and economic rather than religious or with Macdonald agree that it was definitely religious, there is no doubt that there was a considerable living force there which was original and not dependent on the elements taken up into it.

It is not strange that this living force of Islam took up elements from the religious life of its day. Christianity did exactly the same thing. The man who takes up the Greek Gospels after a period of close and exclusive study of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Rabbinical writings, has no hesitation in declaring that Christianity is no mere offshoot of Judaism. Here is an entirely new irruption of religious life, and yet the amount of Jewish religious thought taken up it is obvious to the casual reader.

Outside the New Testament, Greek influence is as obvious in the formulation of the theology of the growing Church as Roman influence is on the development of its organization²⁴, and it is Dr. Clemen's thesis in his "Primitive Christianity and its non-Jewish Sources,"²⁵ that "like the Israelitish and Jewish religion, whose influence is itself evident, other religions have also left the mark on the oldest form of Christianity, even when it felt itself in the keenest antagonism to them." It is no wonder that Christianity should take over pagan festivals such as Christmas and Easter, and Christianize them, or that it should accept Greek thought and Roman organization and adapt them to her ends, for as Dr. Angus²⁶ -

Yet Christianity was not an eclecticism for as Angus immediately goes on to say - "Christianity gave what the world most needed - the driving power of personality and it was this spiritual driving power that took and used the elements it found around it, though it was ever far and independent of them."

It is so in Islam. The original force, whether political or religious, was this spiritual power of a personality; as happens, it expressed itself in terms of what it could draw from its environment, but its source was not there, and had they been absent it would have expressed itself in other terms. In its origin it is not an eclecticism, in sense of that term.

But unlike that of Christianity, the driving power of Islam has never been very enduring. Backed up by political or other aspirations, it has at various times spurted forth anew and continued vigorously for a while, but as a purely religious force it was soon spent. Among the Arabs themselves, with whom it had its birth, as a religion, it exercised very little influence. Sir Richard Burton, who knew the Bedouin well, writes - ²⁷

And his testimony could be paralleled by that of others who knew them as well, or even better, and from writers on the state of Islam among non-Arab peoples²⁸. As a religion, even since the first outburst, Islam has had to gain it renewal of strength by eclecticism. Only a few examples of this are possible within the limits of this article but, they are important and typical.

Let us first take the Pythagoreans of Islam²⁹, the politico-philosphico body founded by Abdallah ibn Maimun, and known in the tenth century as the Faithful Brethren of Basra. This curious School was obviously an attempt to find some real religious satisfaction which was not to be found in orthodox Islam. Theirs was a religion of consolation and redemption in which they aimed at the assimilation of the soul to God, so far as this is possible for man, and orthodox Islam could not, as ordinarily interpreted, help them to this. Their objection, as de Boer points out³⁰ was to reach another interpretation:

This new interpretation which should give them the "proper conception of the beauty of this world" and "the spiritual character of the world beyond," was necessarily sought in other religions with which they were acquainted and resulted in an eclectic system. As de Boer says -³¹

Their ethical system too was eclectic. Like Aristotle they set up the picture of an Ideal Man, but instead of being the expression of the result of a long philosophical discussion on ethical principles, he was like Aaron Matthew's ideal missionary, a composite figure whose features were borrowed from the characteristics of various people. "The ideal, and morally perfect man," they said, "should be of East-Persian derivation, Arabic in faith, of high (i.e. Babylonian) education; a Hebrew in astutest, and a disciple of Christ in conduct, as pious as a Syrian monk a Greek in the individual sciences, an Indian in the interpretation of all mysteries, but lastly, and especially, a Sufi in his whole spiritualistic life."³³ Necessarily such a system held no promise of life, and though the teachings of their Encyclopaedia are still canvassed, their religious movement died with themselves.

Turning now to a better-known and more justly famous movement, Sufiism, we find the same eclecticism. Its origin, also, was in an intellectual reaction from the barrenness of Islamic orthodoxy, and a spiritual thirst which was not there satisfied. "From the earliest times," says Macdonald, "there has been an element in the Moslem Church which was repelled equally by traditional teaching and by intellectual reasoning. It felt that the essence of religion lay elsewhere; that the seal and organ of religion was in the heart." 34 Or as Hughes in his Dictionary of Islam 35

The critical history of Sufiism has yet to be written. When it is it will settle for us the vexed question of its origin,³⁶ but whether it arose from a spontaneous up-springing of esoteric life in Islam, or was a Persian reaction against Arabism, or came from the Vedanta Philosophy of India, or as the present writer is inclined to think, was of Neo-platonic origin³⁷ there can be no doubt whatever that it has had to draw largely from non-Islamic sources, finding its real life in them, and only giving the whole system a coloring drawn from Islam. The Pantheism of the Sufi poets is not the rigid Monotheism of Islam, it is Vedantic; the Sufi rapture of the Union of the Lover with the Beloved is not the orthodox relation of Allah with His creature, it is the ecstatic rapture of Plotinus and his school; and there are elements of the Sufi teaching that seem traceable to survivals of the old Zoroastrian creed. In such an eclectic system, it was not wonderful that so many adherents found it difficult not to treat Sufiism as a system in contrast with Islam, and that there should have been, as Gardner points out,"³⁸ a tendency on the part of Moslem Sufis to break away from formal Islam as soon as they had reached a certain stage of their Sufi like." The source of life, that is, was non Islamic³⁹, and when the cloak of Islam was not longer useful, it was dropped.

This same non-Islamic character of Moslem mysticism is seen in the religious orders of Islam, with their course of mystical development, submission to the Master, ecstatic practices, such as the Zikr, and pantheistic philosophy.

Another outstanding case of Eclecticism in Islam is in the religion of the Bab, and its more modern form, Bahaiism. Its origin also was a spiritual hunger, which could find no satisfaction in Islam as taught by the orthodox. "It betrays," says Canon Sell⁴⁰ "a longing for a real, loving, personal guide, the revealer of God to man which can best be met by the acceptance of the Eternal Word." In its rise it was closely connected with the mystical Imamate doctrine of the Shias⁴¹, and with the system of the Sufis. Thus from its very origin it was infected with the eclectic spirit of Sufi mysticism and in its growth this has been intensified rather than diminished. It is curious that from some source or other it has drawn in a form of the quaint number mysticism of the Qabbalah, particularly in connection with the number 19, the number of chapters in Bayan, and in the earlier form made much of the doctrine of metempsychosis. The system has drawn freely on the stores that have been gathered by students of Comparative Religion, and in its later form it has become so far eclectic as to claim to be to a Christian, Christianity; to a Buddhist, the real teaching of Buddha; to a Sufi, the final revelation of the mystic way and the ideal man; to a Moslem, the appearance of the Mahdi. So far has this gone that Dr. Sell says: "It is not strictly correct to call them a Moslem sect, for they practically discard the Koran, and supersede Mohammed," thus following the tendency of all truly eclectic systems, and in spite of some enthusiasm roused for the movement in America and England,⁴² as a spiritual force to lay it has practically exhausted itself

The last of these eclectic movements in Islam that we have space to mention, is the modern Indian sect of the Ahmadiyyas, founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Khan in 1888, and now mainly championed by Khwajah Kamal­ud-Din, the leader of the Ahmadiyya Mission to England. The whole story of the movement had been written by the late H.A. Walter,⁴³ we are only concerned here to point out how truly eclectic it is. It is obvious to the outset that the origin of the Ahmadiyya movement as in the need felt by intelligent Moslems, who had their minds opened to Western knowledge and felt the force of Western criticism of Islam,⁴⁴ for some interpretation of Islam which should be more in accordance with modern knowledge, and provide a religious satisfaction which was not to be found in the Islam of the orthodox school. Ahmad himself had much contact with Christian missionaries during the formative years of his life, and Khwaja' Kamal-ud-Din, we are told; was educated in a mission College. Both, moreover, read widely in Comparative Religion, as witness the pages of The Review of Religions⁴⁵.

A reform of Islam being essential, and the Rationalist School of Aligarh⁴⁶ not finding favour, Mirza Ghulab Ahmad revived the Mahdi idea, and claimed that he was in himself the promised Mahdi, the descendant of the Prophet and the last of the Imams, who should make Islam prevail throughout the whole world. But as there was little inspiration in this, he also claimed to be the promised Messiah of the Jews and Christians, and later on in life, in another attempt to gain strength, proclaim himself the latest avatar of Krishna. Since his death further claims have been made for him. Mr. Walters quotes the following from a letter head of Ahmadi correspondence paper-⁴⁷

But not only is there a synthesis of religions on the person of Ahmad, there is one also in the beliefs held by his followers and taught by himself. For example, his conception of the Mahdi is composite. The orthodox expectation of the Mahdi is that he is to be a man of blood who will lead the last Jihad against the Unbelievers⁴⁸.

But Ahmad was a man of peace, and while retaining the conception of the Mahdi as the leader of a great Islamic Crusade, he tried to combine it with the preaching of peace which was characteristic of the preaching of Jesus. It is true that he claimed to be uncompromisingly orthodox, but as one reads the pages of his journal and pamphlets,⁴⁹ it is abundantly evident that his interpretations, and particularly his eschatology, is shot through and through with Sufi and Christian influences⁵⁰.

The same is true of the writings of his followers. The most famous of the English converts of the Ahmadiyya movement is Lord Headley. In 1915 he produced a little book entitled "A Western Awakening to Islam"⁵¹, which is such a weird mixture of Christianity and Islam that one wonders what would be the answer of an orthodox Doctor of the Faith, if it were presented to him as an exposition of Islam.

This unorthodox eclecticism is very evident too in their new English version of the Koran with Commentary, and of the writings and speeches of the present main pillar, Khwajah Kamal-ud-Din. During is recent visit to Madras he is reported to have said in the course of a lecture,-

Yet a further interesting proof of the need Islam has found all through its history of drawing in outside sources for the religious inspiration and life which it failed to find in itself, is found in the study of some of the minor offshoots of Islam. For example, the creed of those interesting and little-known people, the Yezidis, the devil worshipers of Islam is a fully fledged syncretism Dr. Isya Joseph writes of them,-

The same is true of the various branches of the Ismailians. For instance the doctrine of the Shungnani Ismailians, who dwell in the Russian and Bokharian province of Turkestan, is described by Semonoff in an article part IV of the first volume of "Mir Islama," as a curious mixture of Islam, Christianity and ideas of meten psychosis probably derived from Buddhist sources. Among them it is noticeable, that while the form of Religion is Mohammedan, the driving force is the "meten psychosis" belief. Not only, so, but the whole larger moment of the Ismailians was profoundly influenced Greek philosophy,⁵⁵ which lay at the root of its missionary zeal, and very much like the modern Ahmadiyya movement they were prepared to adopt any religious ideas and take on the coloring of any religious environment in order to accomplish their ends. As Arnold confesses,-

Further testimony to the same effect could be supplied in abundance if necessary, but the evidence gathered above is sufficient to demonstrate that even though in its origin and early growth Islam had an on original life-force of its own, that life-force was not sufficient to carry it very far, without the incorporation of new sources of life from outside. Wherever Islam has gone as a conquering force, it has soon exhausted its original store of religious energy and life-force, as the spiritual and intellectual conditions of Moslem lands in all periods of history bear witness. All its revivals of life and movements of missionary zeal have been due to the drawing in of fresh sources of life and this naturally suggests the question of the ultimate end of the process. One fact is certain, and that is that it must ultimately result in the passing away of Islam as Islam. As a spiritual life Islam is no longer able to vivify the body of the Mohammedan world, and the forces which do vivify it must inevitably change its character into their likeness. And therein lies the great hope of Christian missions among Moslems. In recent eclectic movements in Islam, Christian thinking has had a very strong influence, and if Christian missions in Moslem lands can increasingly leaven the thinking of the people, particularly the more educated people, with Christian ideals and the Christian spirit, then inevitably the life-force of Christianity working among them must transform them into its image. It does not follow from this that the Moslem world will bodily enter the fold of organized Christianity as we know it in our Western Churches; the more natural result would be that inside the Moslem world there should grow up a Christian Church, expressing its spiritual life in forms which may differ widely from those known in our organized Church life,⁵⁹ but be none the less genuine interpretation of the "life more abundant" which comes to men in and through our Lord and Master Jesus Christ.

Cairo, Egypt.

ARTHUR JEFFERY.

FOOTNOTES