APPLICATION OF PHENOMENOLOGY ON FIQH: A PHILOSOPHICAL ENDEAVOUR BY HASSAN HANAFI

• Published date: 30 June 2021

Introduction

Hassan Hanafiis one of those great philosophers of the Muslim World who have spent their entire life to bring Islam at par with the spirit of the age. He made great academic and intellectual endeavors to harmonize Islam and sacred text with the need of the hour. His ultimate motive was to show that reason, revelation and reality belong to the one and the same genealogy.1 Hanafistarted the study of revelation in the Islamic context and applied the results on the New Testament as a case study. 2

“This engagement with material from two religious traditions”, in the words of Carool Kersten, “can be considered as the equivalent of Husserl's exploration of inter-subjectivity, just as expanding his research project into the comprehensive three-pronged critique of the intellectual histories of Islam, Europe, and the current cultural situation of the Muslim world. His Heritage and Renewal Project mirrors Husserl's concerns with the crisis affecting Western thinking and scholarship. Husserl had tried to resolve ‘radical life-crisis of European humanity' in The Crisis. The same has been done by Hanafiin his grand work Al-Turath wa al-Tajdid: Mawaqifuna min al-Turath al-Qadim. Hanafi's constant preoccupation is to re-establish the unity of Islamic Sciences.

“Whereas Husserl's The Crisis was the result of an attempt to absorb the concept of a ‘Life-World' into a transcendental phenomenology, Hanafi's ambition to present an alternative, philosophically grounded method for studying Islam was triggered by a comparable state of crisis he perceived in the field of Islamic Studies…….. Hanafi's sense of crisis was not limited to the way Islam was taught and passed on by traditional Muslims, but also extended to Islamic Studies as a field of modern academic investigation in both the Muslim World and the West,”3

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), being the principal founder of Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophers of 20th century. He left a huge and mighty legacy behind. His philosophy served as a gateway for Existentialism. The list of renowned philosophers, thinkers and authors is long who were influenced by him in some way or the other. Those who were inspired by him directly include: Martin Heidegger, Adolf Reinach, Eugene Fink, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Ludwig Landgarbe, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean -Paul Sartre, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hermann Weyl, Rudolf Carnap, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Marvin Farber, Hans Blumenberg and Colin Wilson etcetera. Hanafi is no exception.

Four very pertinent questions require answer here, which are as under:

i. What is Phenomenology?

ii. Why did Husserl feel the need of Phenomenology?

iii. What is Phenomenological method?

iv. How did Hanafi apply this method on the religious and revealed text?

Note: A glossary of the terms widely used in phenomenology and common in both Husserl and Hanafi is attached as Annex-A at the end of this paper.

Husserl was quite dissatisfied with the all the philosophical systems and theories in vogue at the time. Hence, he acutely felt the need of another authentic philosophy which he offered in the form of Phenomenology. In his famous and land-mark Vienna Lecture, which he delivered before Vienna Cultural Society on 7th and 10th May, 1935 with the original title “Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind”, he has identified the reason of Europe's sickness in the following words, “How does it happen that no scientific medicine has ever been developed in this sphere, a medicine for nations and supernatural communities? The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis. We are by no means lacking something like nature doctors. Indeed we are practically inundated by a flood of naïve and excessive suggestions for reform.

But why do the so richly developed humanistic disciplines fail to perform service here that is so admirably performed by the natural sciences in their sphere?”4 [Emphasis added].

(The Vienna Lecture was later named as, “The Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity”. It may be seen as Appendix I of The Crisis of European Sciences).

The vacuum created by the genuine humanistic sciences had led Europe to the spiritual sickness. Husserl further asserts in the same address, “Blinded by naturalism (no matter how much they attack it verbally), the humanists have totally failed even to pose the problem of a universal and pure humanistic science and to inquire after a theory of the essence of spirit purely as spirit which would pursue what is unconditionally universal, by way of elements and laws, in the spiritual sphere, with the purpose of proceeding from there to scientific explanations in an absolutely final sense”. 5

The need of a genuine humanistic science, urged Husserl to construct a solid and apodictic philosophy which he named phenomenology. However, Husserl is not satisfied either with the scientific or philosophical foundations set by the French philosopher, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and wishes to return to the things themselves, mercilessly ignored by Descartes, the father of modern philosophy. However, according to Husserl, any philosophy which downrightly rejects the real world and validity of subjective experience may not formulate a suitable epoche. Only as uncovering of the horizon of experience ultimately clarifies the “actuality” and the “transcendency” of the world, at the same time showing the world to be inseparable from transcendental subjectivity, which constitutes actuality of being and sense”.6

Husserl is pro-active in enumerating the dreadful effects hidden in the plain and simple denial of the world of flesh and blood. Most definitely it is the Life-world [Lebenswelt] with which we are going to deal before concluding Husserl. Life -world is a self-evident or the given universe which may be commonly observed by the subjects. Inter-subjectivity presupposes a life-world which unfortunately finds no space in the world of natural sciences; whereas the humanistic disciplines and philosophy have equally ignored it.

Husserl very regretfully observes in this regard, “But now we must note something of the highest importance that occurred as early as Galileo: the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is really given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable----our everyday life-world. This substitution was promptly passed on to his successors, the physicists of all the succeeding centuries”.7

For Husserl the life-world of men, animals and plants is entirely different from the world of geometry and mathematics, but it has never been given that value and worth which it deserves, rather it has been contemptuously ignored. He laments, “To it, the world of actually experiencing intuition, belongs the form of space-time together with all the bodily [korperlich] shapes incorporated in it; it is in this world that we ourselves live, in accord with our bodily[leiblich], personal way of being. But here we find nothing of geometrical idealities, no geometrical space or mathematical time with all their shapes”. 8

Here the question is: How can we retrieve the lost or rather never discovered life-world? Is there any way out of this rut? Can this vicious circle be broken? Husserl has confidence in his method, in his transcendental phenomenology that it may...