Belief in it is an obligation and raising questions regarding it is a heresy”
(Fakhry, 1983: xvii). But Malik, against his own intentions, was thereby
staking out one of the corners of philosophical turf. The Muslim intellectual
community went on for generations after this, taking various sides on the issues
which arose directly out of the anthropomorphic scripture: the responsibility
of humans as against the providence and power of God, and then to more
metaphysical issues surfacing in these discussions.
Various philosophical issues are provoked by anthropomorphic religion
which are not shared by more cosmologically oriented religions such as Con-
fucianism, Taoism, or Indian mysticism. The philosophical confrontation with
anthropomorphism focused attention on the nature of transcendence and
infinite perfection and their relations to limitation and contingency. The issue
of free will arose distinctively in the West, not in India or China, and with it
the nature of causality and determinism. It is the character of the oppositions
generated by religious doctrine, as much as the slant of that doctrine itself,
that is fateful for the trajectory of philosophical problems.
It is distinctive of the Western religions, not the Eastern, that philosophers
devoted much effort to proofs of the existence of God. Such proofs from a
religious viewpoint are superfluous; the philosophers were not free in any case
to consider whether God does not really exist. The justification was sometimes
offered that proofs were needed in order to convince unbelievers or convert
members of other faiths, but this seems a patent rationalization: Christians,
Muslims, and Jews could not convert one another by proving the existence
of God, since all three faiths admitted this, and the differentiating items of
faith were not proved in this fashion;^3 and atheist unbelievers were an imagi-
nary foil under these authoritarian regimes. The philosophers’ construction of
proofs for items of faith was a matter of creating a turf for pure intellectual
activity within the institutional space of the religious schools. These proofs
became grounds on which metaphysical and epistemological doctrines could
be worked out. With a sufficiently complex network of philosophers, such as
arose in Christendom by the late 1200s, it was no longer a foregone conclusion
that one would have to succeed in proving the existence of God or the immortal
soul. By the time of Ockham and his followers, it was acceptable to conclude
that these items could not be conclusively proved by reason; this was taken as
demonstrating the superior power of faith, and also of demarcating the terri-
tory of distinctively philosophical techniques.
The religious communities did not set out to have philosophies. Virtually
all of them began with the notion that intellectual life is superfluous, indeed
an obstacle to religious devotion. But the very structure of having specialists
in sacred texts created an intellectual community with its own dynamics.
Greater abstraction and self-reflectiveness about one’s own tools was one of
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^391