Faith, Philosophy and the Reflective Muslim by Zain Ali (review)

Shabbir Akhtar laments that too many Muslims are ‘embarrassingly unreflective’ concerning their faith in the religiously diverse contemporary context. If he is anywhere close to the mark then we should be thankful for Zain Ali’s recent work: Faith, Philosophy and the Reflective Muslim. I certainly am. Zain seeks to be a reflective Muslim, by which he means those ‘of Islamic faith who have come to acknowledge that people of other religious and non-religious persuasions are as educated and concerned with seeking truth and avoiding error as they themselves are’ (3). Such a position is, of course, a sensible one and it leads Zain on a clear-thinking, philosophically careful and largely original exploration of how such a reflective Muslim might hold on to their religious beliefs when faced with a variety of weighty philosophical questions posed by the apparent hiddenness of God and the reality of religious diversity.

Zain’s main thesis is that any Muslim might find their religious beliefs to be rational via the adoption of some key ideas from the influential philosopher William James. The most important of these is James’s notion that there are certain circumstances where we are entitled to hold beliefs that venture beyond our available evidence. Which circumstances might these be? According to James – or more properly according to the development of James’s ideas by John Bishop – these sorts of ‘faith ventures’ are justified when one is in the position where there is: (a) evidential ambiguity, (b) the potential for a choice being motivated by passion, (c) significant implications arising out of any choice, and (d) a need to make a choice. Faith, Philosophy and the Reflective Muslim amounts to an argument for why Muslim faith can properly be held as this sort of faith venture.

Zain begins by outlining the Jamesian belief ethic, taking special care to emphasise the model as only suitable for decision making in situations of evidential ambiguity. These are situations where assessment of the rational and empirical evidence is unable to adjudicate whether some belief is true because it is inconclusive or ambiguous. Zain provides us with straightforward, everyday examples that aim to show the reasonableness of Jamesian decisions; in particular, the choosing of whom to court as a marriage partner and the choosing of a pathway to safety in a blizzard. He then takes it to be the case that religious faith fulfils the requirements for a Jamesian belief ethic on the grounds that the evidence for the existence of God is genuinely inconclusive, and that therefore the key beliefs of world’s religions are epistemologically counter-balanced. To simply assume this is an interesting choice since, while he is not alone in taking this position – he finds support from thinkers like John Hick and Robert McKim – it is controversial. Zain recognizes the controversy but chooses to not to build a detailed case in defence of this assumption. Soon we will see why this matters, but from this starting point Zain uses the remaining chapters to outline how a Jamesian approach to belief might be properly Islamic, and might resist some key objections found in contemporary religious epistemology.

So, next, Zain adopts al-Ghazali’s faith journey as a test case for his Jamesian approach. This move is both original and intuitively sensible at the same time. Surely al-Ghazali is a model reflective (and orthodox) Muslim if ever there was one: his famous personal faith crisis (recounted in The Deliverance from Error) grew, at least in part, out of an acknowledgement of both religious diversity and epistemic uncertainty. Zain argues that al-Ghazali’s refreshed Islamic belief is better explained as an uncertain Jamesian faith venture, rather than as a discovery of epistemic certainty through Sufi mystical experiences (as Ghazali himself claimed). In other words, for Zain, al-Ghazali’s mature faith bears all the hallmarks of a passional choice based on unclear evidence, and not an essentially epistemological one...