Alaa Alkhatib
Originally published in Arabic on 18/08/2018
An inquiry into religious authority, knowledge, education, and the historical constraints on scientific reasoning in Muslim societies
1. Introduction
From roughly the late second Islamic century onward, religious scholars of different schools, ranks, titles, and specializations acquired an increasingly powerful role in Muslim societies. Their authority generally remained distinct from political rule, yet over time it developed into a major second layer of social and normative power. One of the mechanisms through which this authority was consolidated was ijmāʿ—scholarly consensus—which came to occupy an important place in Sunni legal theory after the Qur’an and the Prophetic Sunnah. Opposition to what had been established as consensus could carry serious religious and social consequences, ranging from exclusion and accusations of doctrinal deviation to, in some settings, charges of unbelief.
Once this structure of religious authority had matured, scholars increasingly claimed the right to speak authoritatively in the name of religion. Muslim society was often described through a distinction between al-khāṣṣa—the learned or socially and politically distinguished elite—and al-ʿāmma, the ordinary public without specialist religious learning. This hierarchy also affected access to knowledge and the authority to interpret it. In this respect, Muslim religious establishments participated in a broader historical pattern found in many religious civilizations: knowledge, literacy, interpretation, and institutional authority were often concentrated in a relatively narrow learned class.
The importance of examining the role of religious scholars in the history of knowledge is not merely historical. Elements of this authority continue to influence contemporary Muslim societies, affecting not only religious knowledge itself but also attitudes toward scientific method, critical inquiry, education, and intellectual autonomy—capacities that are indispensable in the twenty-first century.
This study does not argue that Islam, in its foundational message, is hostile to learning. On the contrary, the Qur’anic discourse repeatedly encourages reflection, observation, reasoning, and the pursuit of knowledge. The question addressed here is different: how did later Muslim religious scholars define knowledge, rank its branches, regulate access to it, and transmit those attitudes to society? The inquiry compares the structure of religious knowledge with other forms of human knowledge, examines historical attitudes toward science and education, and considers the delayed adoption of printing as a particularly revealing episode in the history of knowledge transmission.
Nor does this study attribute every failure of Muslim societies to religious or Islamist currents. Such a claim would be intellectually indefensible. Political authoritarianism, economic structures, war, colonialism, institutional weakness, and international conditions all matter. But excluding religious authority from the analysis altogether would be equally misleading.
In this study, the word shaykhs is used as a broad shorthand for Muslim religious scholars and clerical authorities across different schools, ranks, titles, and specializations. It does not imply that every scholar held every position discussed below. The argument concerns dominant or recurrent historical tendencies, not an absolute judgment on every individual scholar. [2]
2. Religious Knowledge and the Inverted Logic of Accumulation
Human knowledge is cumulative. Each generation inherits what earlier generations discovered and, at least in principle, adds to it. This is true of mathematics, medicine, the natural sciences, the humanities, and also of religious learning. Yet there is a structural difference. In most scientific disciplines, later knowledge may confirm, revise, supersede, or discard earlier conclusions. The authority of an idea does not rest primarily on its age; a newer explanation can replace an older one if evidence and method justify the change.
Religious knowledge often develops under a different logic. Every revealed religion begins from a sacred point of origin: revelation, prophecy, scripture, and the teachings attributed to the founding moment. The sanctity of that origin is intrinsic to religious belief and is not the subject of this critique. The problem arises when, over time, the aura of sacred authority expands beyond the foundational revelation to encompass those closest to it in time, then those closest to them, and so on.
This expansion may occur gradually and without conscious design. Yet it can produce a hierarchy in which proximity to the sacred past becomes a source of epistemic authority in itself. Arguments are then grounded not only in the foundational text but also in the readings of earlier generations. The danger is that the thought of the past begins to govern the present, while the present prepares the intellectual tools through which it will govern the future.
3. Religious Scholars and the Non-Religious Sciences
Many classical Muslim scholars ranked the religious sciences above other fields of knowledge, while recognizing certain practical disciplines—especially medicine, arithmetic, and necessary crafts—as socially useful or collectively obligatory. One of the clearest and most influential discussions appears in Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), particularly its Book of Knowledge.
Al-Ghazālī distinguishes between farḍ ʿayn, an individual religious obligation incumbent on every Muslim, and farḍ kifāya, a collective obligation that is discharged when a sufficient number within the community perform it. For him, the core of individually obligatory knowledge concerns belief, religious practice, and the avoidance of prohibited acts. Medicine and arithmetic can fall within collective obligations because society needs them, but they do not occupy the same rank as knowledge directly concerned with salvation and religion.
The point is not that al-Ghazālī denied all value to worldly knowledge. He explicitly recognized socially necessary disciplines. The deeper issue is the hierarchy he constructed and the educational consequences of that hierarchy. Reading and writing, for example, were not formulated as universal individual obligations in the way that basic religious knowledge was. Within a premodern society this may be historically understandable; but when inherited as a normative model long after mass literacy became essential to social and scientific development, the distinction becomes consequential.
Al-Ghazālī also warned that some forms of knowledge could harm certain people and argued that not every field should be opened indiscriminately to everyone. His attitude toward philosophy is a famous example. Such positions should be read in their medieval intellectual context, but they also illustrate a recurring paternalistic assumption: the learned elite decides what the ordinary believer is intellectually equipped to encounter. [3] [4]
3.1 Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037) was among the most influential philosophers and physicians in world history. His Canon of Medicine remained an important medical text for centuries. Yet his philosophical positions were also the object of fierce theological criticism. Al-Dhahabī, in Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, described him as a leading philosopher and noted that al-Ghazālī had declared both Avicenna and al-Fārābī unbelievers on specific philosophical doctrines. Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ went further in warning religious students against studying Avicenna’s works. The significance of these judgments lies not in the existence of intellectual disagreement—vigorous disagreement is itself part of intellectual history—but in the religious and social sanctions that could accompany disagreement. [5] [6]
3.2 Jābir ibn Ḥayyān and the Problem of Alchemy
Works attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān occupy a major place in the history of alchemy and early chemistry, although modern scholarship debates the authorship and dating of the Jabirian corpus. Ibn Taymiyya, writing centuries later, questioned Jābir’s standing and sharply condemned alchemy. Whatever judgment one reaches about medieval alchemy, this episode illustrates a larger problem: fields investigating nature could be evaluated primarily through theological or juridical categories rather than through an autonomous experimental methodology. [7]
3.3 Al-Khwārizmī
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī is foundational to the history of algebra and mathematical computation; the modern word algorithm ultimately derives from the Latinized form of his name. Yet later religious polemics could treat mathematics, astronomy, and the translation of Greek learning with suspicion when associated with astrology or philosophy. The historical irony is striking: disciplines that later became indispensable to global science could occupy a marginal or contested position within certain religious hierarchies of knowledge. [7]
3.4 Other Scientists and Philosophers
Similar tensions surrounded figures such as al-Kindī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, and Ibn al-Haytham. Medieval biographical and theological literature preserves harsh judgments against philosophers and natural scientists, sometimes questioning their orthodoxy or religious standing.
This does not mean that Islamic civilization was uniformly hostile to science. Such a conclusion would be as inaccurate as romanticizing the period as an uninterrupted “golden age.” Muslim societies produced major achievements in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, optics, geography, philosophy, and other disciplines. The point is narrower: religious prestige and scientific achievement did not always coincide, and the social authority granted to jurists and theologians often exceeded that granted to investigators of nature.
Nor is this an argument for diminishing the intellectual achievements of Muslim jurists and theologians. It is a criticism of a historical hierarchy that sometimes valued the reproduction and refinement of inherited religious learning more highly than forms of knowledge capable of producing cumulative empirical advances.
4. Religious Authority and the Method of Education
The problem extends beyond the ranking of disciplines to methods of education. Al-Ghazālī’s writings on the education of children give memorization an early role: the child first memorizes the creed, then gradually understands its meaning and develops conviction. In context, this reflects a premodern pedagogical model in which memorization was central to education across many civilizations.
The difficulty begins when memorization becomes not one pedagogical tool among others but the dominant model of learning. Rote transmission can reproduce information without cultivating the capacity to question, test, compare, or revise. In many Arab educational systems, the persistence of exam-driven memorization has long been criticized precisely because it can migrate from religious instruction into the teaching of other disciplines.
The issue, therefore, is not memorization itself. Memory is essential to learning. The issue is an educational culture in which the learner’s principal virtue is faithful reproduction and in which doubt, debate, experimentation, and independent reasoning are treated as secondary or potentially dangerous. [3] [4]
5. Educational Institutions in Muslim History
By the late medieval period, the great scientific dynamism associated with earlier centuries of Islamic civilization had weakened. Ibn Khaldūn, who died in 1406, stands among the last towering figures of the classical period whose work profoundly shaped later social thought. Over the following centuries, religious institutions remained among the principal organized centers of education across much of the Muslim world.
The history, however, requires nuance. The Ottoman Empire did not remain entirely without educational reform until the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, especially under the Tanzimat, the state attempted to build a more systematic public educational structure. The 1869 Regulation on Public Education (Maʿārif-i Umūmiyye Nizamnāmesi) established a comprehensive framework that included free compulsory primary education in principle. Implementation, particularly across distant provinces, was uneven. Modern scholarship therefore distinguishes between the legal creation of a system and its effective reach in practice.
Nor is it accurate to say that modern scientific higher education appeared in Istanbul only in 1928. Ottoman engineering education had institutional roots going back to the eighteenth century, while the Darülfünun developed through several nineteenth-century experiments and became a continuously operating Western-style university in 1900. The more defensible historical point is that modern mass education and modern universities expanded late and unevenly across many Muslim-majority societies, and that the gap between legislation, institutions, and broad public access remained substantial.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, illiteracy nevertheless remained extremely high in several Muslim-majority societies. The UNESCO data reproduced below provide a comparative historical snapshot. They should not be read as proving a single religious cause; literacy rates reflect state capacity, economic development, urbanization, gender, colonial conditions, schooling systems, and many other factors. They do, however, illustrate the scale of the educational challenge.
Table 1. Illiteracy Rates in Selected Countries in the Early Twentieth Century
| Country | Year | Illiteracy Rate (%) |
| Turkey | 1935 | 79.6 |
| 1945 | 69.5 | |
| Egypt | 1907 | 93.5 |
| 1937 | 81.4 | |
| Hungary | 1910 | 57.8 |
| 1934 | 31.4 | |
| Belgium | 1910 | 13.8 |
| 1930 | 5.6 | |
| Argentina | 1914 | 35.1 |
| 1947 | 13.6 | |
| Finland | 1910 | 44.7 |
| 1930 | 15.9 | |
| India | 1911 | 93.0 |
| 1931 | 90.9 | |
| Burma | 1911 | 70.6 |
| 1931 | 59.8 |
Source: UNESCO, Progress of Literacy in Various Countries: A Preliminary Statistical Study of Available Census Data Since 1900, 1953. Bibliographic record
Al-Azhar provides another revealing case. For centuries it was one of the most important centers of Islamic religious learning. Reformers such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh became associated with struggles over curriculum, reason, and institutional reform. The history is more complex than a simple conflict between “science” and “religion,” but the resistance encountered by reform projects demonstrates how difficult it could be to alter institutions whose authority rested partly on inherited educational forms.
The central question is not whether religious scholars alone caused educational underdevelopment. They did not. Political rulers held coercive power and bear enormous responsibility for the condition of public institutions. The question is whether religious authority contributed to an intellectual environment in which “knowledge” was too often identified first with religious learning and in which mass education, scientific specialization, and independent inquiry did not receive comparable normative urgency. [8] [9] [10] [11]
6. The Delayed Adoption of the Printing Press
The printing press was one of the decisive technologies in the history of knowledge. Movable-type printing dramatically reduced the cost of reproducing texts and helped expand the circulation of books, literacy, scholarly exchange, and eventually mass education in Europe. [12] [13]
The history of printing in the Ottoman Empire is frequently told through a dramatic story: Sultan Bayezid II allegedly issued a decree in the late fifteenth century prohibiting printing in Arabic script, supposedly under religious pressure, and the ban was later renewed. This story has been repeated widely, including in older scholarship and popular accounts. Modern historians, however, have shown that the documentary basis for the famous blanket prohibition is uncertain: no surviving Ottoman decree has been found that conclusively establishes the often-repeated version of the story. [13] [14]
What is beyond dispute is the larger pattern. Jewish, Armenian, Greek, and Christian Arabic presses operated in Ottoman lands before Muslim-run Arabic-script printing became established. In 1727, Sultan Ahmed III authorized İbrahim Müteferrika to operate an Ottoman Turkish press, and the enterprise began printing in 1729. Religious works remained outside the initial permission, while the first books focused on dictionaries, history, geography, and practical subjects. The slow institutional adoption of mass printing in Arabic script therefore remains historically significant even if the simplistic story of a single absolute ban is rejected. [13] [14] [15]
The causes were multiple: scribal and calligraphic interests, technical difficulties, economic incentives, political regulation, patterns of literacy and book demand, and religious caution all played roles. This complexity actually strengthens the broader argument of this study. The important question is not whether a single group “banned progress,” but why a technology with enormous potential for democratizing knowledge was integrated so slowly into the dominant institutions of knowledge production. [12] [13]
Some contemporary religious discussions still treat criticism of this delay as an attack on Islam or on the scholars of the past. A more productive approach is historical rather than apologetic: decisions should be understood in their own context, but understanding them does not require insulating them from criticism. [16] [17]
7. Did Religious Authority Retreat—or Reconsider Its Inherited View of Knowledge?
The hierarchy that placed religious sciences at the summit of knowledge did not disappear with modernity. Major contemporary scholars continued to distinguish between religious knowledge, which carries intrinsic spiritual merit, and other sciences, whose value may depend on their use. Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-ʿUthaymīn, for example, described sharīʿa knowledge as the knowledge principally praised in revelation, while acknowledging that other sciences can be beneficial and may even become obligatory when society requires them.
Such statements are not equivalent to hostility toward medicine, engineering, or technology. Indeed, modern religious institutions routinely use and support these fields. The deeper issue is conceptual: whether non-religious sciences are granted autonomous intellectual value or are primarily justified instrumentally—as useful insofar as they serve religious, social, or strategic ends.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, religious opposition or suspicion accompanied a variety of innovations in different Muslim societies: new communication technologies, cinema, television, philosophy, logic, and modern biological theories, including evolution. These reactions were not uniform, and religious scholars often disagreed sharply among themselves. But the recurring pattern shows the persistence of a gatekeeping role in which religious authority claimed jurisdiction over what society should learn, watch, teach, or investigate.
More reform-minded scholars softened many earlier positions. Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī, for example, wrote positively about reason and scientific mentality in the Qur’anic perspective. Yet even reformist discourse often retained the inherited hierarchy between “religious” and “worldly” sciences rather than fully rethinking the epistemic structure itself.
The question, therefore, is not whether contemporary Muslim scholars accept science. Most plainly do. It is whether the culture of knowledge has moved from permission and classification toward a deeper commitment to methodological doubt, falsifiability, open inquiry, intellectual autonomy, and universal education. [17] [18] [19]
8. Conclusion
The long accumulation of authoritarian political rule in Arab and Muslim societies, combined with inherited religious attitudes toward knowledge and education and with the widespread appeal of conspiracy narratives, contributed to a culture in which scientific method, critical doubt, and intellectual autonomy have often struggled to acquire the institutional authority they need.
The fundamental difference between scientifically advanced and scientifically weak societies does not lie in the innate intelligence of their populations. Nor can it be reduced to the number of books available, the size of a country, or even material wealth. Some Muslim-majority states possess immense financial and natural resources. The decisive issue is the construction of a culture in which scientific method shapes education, work, public debate, institutional decision-making, experimentation, and freedom of creativity.
Political emancipation from authoritarian rule is therefore only one dimension of a larger intellectual transformation. Muslim societies also need the freedom to examine inherited methods of religious reasoning and educational authority without treating criticism as hostility to religion. Such liberation is not necessarily a liberation from Islam. It may be necessary for protecting Islam itself from the intellectual enclosure created when generations of human interpretation acquire a sanctity that belongs properly to revelation.
The argument of this study is ultimately not against religious scholarship but against monopoly: the monopoly of interpretation, the monopoly of legitimate knowledge, and the confinement of reason within inherited boundaries. A living intellectual tradition should be capable of honoring its sacred foundations while allowing human knowledge to remain open, cumulative, self-correcting, and free.
Glossary of Key Islamic Terms
Ijmāʿ: Scholarly consensus; in classical Sunni legal theory, commonly treated as an authoritative source of law after the Qur’an and Sunnah, though its definition and scope have been debated.
Sunnah: The normative example and transmitted practice of the Prophet Muhammad, known primarily through hadith literature.
Farḍ ʿayn: An individual religious obligation incumbent on every accountable Muslim.
Farḍ kifāya: A collective obligation: if a sufficient number of members of the community fulfill it, the obligation is lifted from the rest.
Sharīʿa sciences / ʿulūm sharʿiyya: Religious disciplines concerned with revelation and Islamic normativity, including Qur’anic studies, hadith, jurisprudence, legal theory, and related fields.
Fiqh: Islamic jurisprudence: the human scholarly effort to understand and formulate practical rulings from the sources of Islamic law.
Taqlīd: Following an established scholarly authority or legal school without independently deriving the ruling from its primary proofs.
Takfīr: Declaring a professed Muslim to be an unbeliever.
Tafsīq: Declaring someone sinful or morally/religiously deviant (fāsiq), without necessarily declaring them outside Islam.
Kalām: Islamic dialectical or systematic theology.
Al-khāṣṣa / al-ʿāmma: Literally, the elite/specialists and the general public; historically used in different contexts to distinguish learned or socially distinguished groups from ordinary people.
Kuttāb (pl. katātīb): Traditional elementary school, often attached to a mosque or local religious setting, where children commonly learned Qur’anic recitation and basic literacy.
Editorial Note on the English Edition
This English edition is an edited translation rather than a literal rendering. Islamic technical terms have been transliterated and explained for readers without prior background in Islamic jurisprudence. Several historical formulations—especially those concerning Ottoman education, the institutional history of universities, and the printing press—have been qualified where modern scholarship makes the older, categorical formulation difficult to sustain. These adjustments preserve the study’s central argument while separating it from claims that are historically disputed.
References and Notes
Bracketed citations in the text link directly to the corresponding reference below.
- Original Arabic study: Alaa Al-Khatib, “The Fallacies of Islamic Jurisprudence: The Monopoly of Knowledge and the Confinement of Reason,” MENA Monitor. Source
- Alaa Al-Khatib, “Ijmāʿ: Binding Proof or a Major Jurisprudential Fallacy?”, 23 July 2018. Source
- Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn, Book of Knowledge. Source
- Al-Ghazālī, The Book of Knowledge, trans. Nabih Amin Faris (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1962). Source
- Al-Dhahabī, Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, biographical notices cited in the Arabic original. Source
- Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, Fatāwā Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, question 55, p. 209 (edition cited in the Arabic original). Source
- Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā, vol. 29, pp. 368–374 (edition cited in the Arabic original). Source
- Kiyohiko Hasebe, “On the Introduction of Compulsory Education in the Ottoman Empire,” Studies in the History of Education 51 (2008). Source
- UNESCO, Progress of Literacy in Various Countries: A Preliminary Statistical Study of Available Census Data Since 1900 (Paris: UNESCO, 1953). Source
- Istanbul University, institutional history of the Darülfünun and continuous university education in 1900. Source
- Istanbul Technical University, institutional history tracing Ottoman engineering education to 1773. Source
- Metin M. Coşgel, Thomas J. Miceli, and Jared Rubin, “The Political Economy of Mass Printing: Legitimacy and Technological Change in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Comparative Economics 40, no. 3 (2012): 357–371, doi:10.1016/j.jce.2012.01.002. Source
- Orlin Sabev, Waiting for Müteferrika: Glimpses on Ottoman Print Culture (Academic Studies Press, 2018). Source
- Orlin Sabev, The Müteferrika Press: Obstacles, Circumvention, and Repercussion According to Contemporary German Sources (1727–1741), and related research on early Ottoman print culture. Source
- Zeki Salih Zengin, “The First Stage of Publishing the Qur’an in the Ottoman Empire,” Belleten 87, no. 309 (2023). Source
- Daily Sabah, “Myths and Reality about the Printing Press in the Ottoman Empire,” 8 June 2015 (retained because it was cited in the Arabic original; supplemented here by academic sources). Source
- IslamWeb, fatwa no. 183651 on historical attitudes toward printing (source cited in the Arabic original). Source
- IslamWeb, fatwa no. 221035 on studying philosophy (source cited in the Arabic original). Source
- Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī, “The Concept of Knowledge and the Formation of a Scientific Mentality in the Qur’an” (source cited in the Arabic original). Source
