Atomism in Early Islamic Thought & its Relation to Pre-Islamic Iranian Thinking

By: Josef Van Ess

 

Mulla sadra was not particularly fond of atomism; he believed in the – at least virtually – infinite divisibility of things. But he knew quite well that in early Islam, especially in Mu`tazilite thinking, atomism had played an important part. His knowledge was filtered through Ibn Sína/Avicenna and the later Iranian tradition. Avicenna had refuted the atomists in the Physics of his Shifa’, and his commentator Fakhr al-Dín al-Razí had enumerated the arguments against them in his Mabahith al-mashriqiyya. Mulla sadra was not against the Mu`tazilites per se, but he favored somebody among them who was already beyond atomism, namely Abu ’l-husain al-Basri, a theologian of the early 5.11. century whose ideas had been taken up in Khwarazm and then survived among the Imamiyya. He called him the most intelligent representative of the school.[1] Abu ‘l-husain had a solid training in philosophy; we still possess the notes on Aristotle’s Physics, which he had got from his teacher Ibn as-Samh. Aristotle’s Physics was the work people had to read if they wanted to argue against atomism in a philosophical way.

The early period, however, was different. Aristotle was not yet prominent in Islamic theological thinking, and philosophy did not yet exist. Atomism came up in Islam some time before al-Kindí, the failasęf al-‘Arab, transplanted Greek metaphysics onto Muslim soil. This does not mean that atomism was simply discovered earlier, as part of a Greek heritage which was ubiquitous in the Ancient World.

Those who brought it up did not refer to Democritus or Epicurus; both of them, Greek atomists as they had been, were never translated into Arabic. When we want to understand the phenomenon we have to first forget our Western associations and to take it as such, in its own environment, as an independent and original system; the question of its “sources” has to be answered later.

This is all the more true since we have to take into account the possibility of the “source” not being Greek but Indian instead. The alternative has been highlighted since the beginning of this century in Orientalist research, but the problem turned out to be insoluble until today, mainly because of the philological difficulties involved.

The first Mu`tazilites to talk in atomist terms, those who invented the system so-to-speak, were Mu`ammar and Abu ’l-Hudhail. But they were not the first Mu`tazilites as such. The founding fathers of the movement, Wasil b. `Aěa’ and `Amr b. `Ubaid, did not yet see any need for providing the theological or political issues they wanted to treat with a speculative infrastructure.

The situation changed one generation later, with a thinker about whom we do not know much but who was of quite considerable influence: Čirar b. `Amr. He was not yet an atomist either, but he paved the way for those who were to come by establishing a coherent framework, a “system” as we might call it, which could serve as a key for solving all individual questions.            Abu ’l-Hudhail met him in his youth and developed his own approach in critical argument with him. We shall therefore briefly deal with him first.

It is not easy to reconstruct Čirar’s thought. What we have in hand are only a few fragments, or even less than that: some doxographical reports preserved in the works of later authors, above all in Ash`ari’s Maqalat al-islamiyyín. The problem is exactly the same as in the case of the Pre-Socratics: we have to find the nerve of the system, the main concern, which led to the results mentioned in our sources. In the case of Čirar, this concern seems to have been epistemological.

He observed that we never grasp an object as such; we perceive only parts of it, outward phenomena like color or smell, temperature or surface structure. We put these parts together in our mind; this is how we get the impression of being confronted with something coherent, a “body” according to the terminology of the time. But this body does not have a substance, an ov’oia of its own; it is only a conglomerate of its parts, a “bundle” as we might say.

As a matter of fact, Richard Sorabji has talked about “bundle theories” in this respect; he has found similar examples in Greek philosophy, for instance with the church father Gregory of Nyssa, but also with a man like Job of Edessa, a physician at the court of al-Ma’męn, one generation after Čirar.

We may wonder how a theologian, whether he be a Christian or a Muslim, can work with such a theory. The phenomena enumerated by Čirar are only perceived by our senses; by this way we can never get to any spiritual reality like God. But for Čirar God was a completely different matter. He did not see any necessity for proving His existence by rational speculation. For this, He had revelation, i.e. the Qur’an. Nor did he believe that God is an object; rather God is the Other. Čirar’s theology was totally apophatic; God does not have any attributes, “qualities” as people used to say afterwards (sifat).

We cannot say that He is knowing; we can only say that He is not ignorant. These negative statements never from a bundle; only in Paradise shall we find out what God really is, His “quiddity” (mahiyya). The bundle theory thus remained restricted to the sublunary world; therefore there was no problem in its being sensualistic. As a matter of fact, sensualism was nothing unusual in early Mu`tazili theology. Čirar’s contemporary al-Asamm proceeded from the same assumption; this is why he felt justified to call everything which exists a “body”.

It was only the next generation, and especially Abu ’l-Hudhail, who discovered the deficiency of this approach. Abu ’l-Hudhail abandoned Čirar’s apophatic theology and started talking about divine attributes instead; he was also the first theologian to elaborate a proof for the existence of God. He recognized that the “bundles” do not tell us anything about reality but only stand for the idea we have of it. Reality is on a level different from our perception; it comes about through creation.

It is true that reality consists of parts, too, but these parts have to be more than mere conceptional entities. We do not know whether Čirar ever reacted against this attack; he had left the town by then where Abu ’l-Hudhail had met him, or perhaps he was already dead. But he had, as a matter of fact, never dealt with the issue of creation, and the vocabulary he used facilitated, at a certain point, Abu ’l-Hudhail’ criticism. He had called the phenomena which we perceive and make into a bundle not only “parts” (ab`ad) but also “accidents” (‘arač).

Abu ’l-Hudhail now interpreted this term in an Aristotelian way: “accidents” are of a secondary nature, they are only the outward appearance of something behind it, which must be called a “substance” (jawhar). This substance consists of other substances, which are its parts, and these parts are to be conceived as atoms.

He called the atom as it was called in Greek: al-juz’ alladhí la yatajazza’, but he defined it as the “single substance” (al-jawhar al-fard). The accidents are as it were riding on the atoms, and the visible objects, the “bodies”, are created by God insofar as He puts their atoms together. God does so, in His wisdom, with a certain geometrical sense of order; bodies are no longer irregular conglomerates but need a certain minimal amount of atoms: eight as said Mu`ammar, in order to make them into a cube – or six, as said Abu ’l-Hędhail, having the six directions in mind which mark the spatial dimension of each material being.

By integrating God into the picture the two atomists had switched from epistemology to ontology. No longer did they focus on man who collects impressions from the outer world and puts them together in his mind; they rather explained how this outer world itself comes into existence. But they still proceeded as theologians, completely different from the spirit of Greek cosmology. To them, coming into existence meant bringing into existence, creation, and they knew from the Qur’an that God creates every object instantly, by his word “Be!”; the concept of evolution was completely unfamiliar to them. Abu ’l-Hudhail clearly recognized the implications which this Quranic axiom had for the system: The creative Word exists itself before all creation; therefore it can only be a kind of hypostasis which in itself is, in a way, not created. This may have been the reason why he refrained from saying that God creates the atoms first and then puts them together; God is not an architect who slowly constructs complicated things, like the skilful of the Greeks. God does not act by His hands, He acts by His will.

The atoms are immaterial as long as they are isolated and exist as single entities; only in combination do they acquire corporeality and dimension. It is the combination that matters most, the ta’líf as Abu ’l-Hudhail said, the putting together. This is what God does when he says “Be!”, and since it is a mere momentary action we have to define it as an accident, an accident which He adds to the atoms He wants to combine.

An accident, however, never possesses duration or permanence by itself; God therefore also has to guarantee its existence. He does not create a thing only in its first moment of existence; He creates it all the time. This again was a Qur’anic idea; it explains why God can so easily ``repeat’’ His creation when He gathers all mankind for His last Judgment. To say it in Abu ’l-Hudhail’s terms: since God creates a thing by adding the accident of “combination, cohesion” to its atoms He can always withdraw this same accident; this is what we call disintegration, “destructuring”, decomposition, death, in order to use the Greek term. And He can also add it again; this is what is going to happen in the moment of resurrection when He creates a new earth and resuscitates all human beings. He collects so to speak their bones. But this would be a biblical metaphor, which was not used in Arabic; Abu ’l-Hudhail rather expresses himself in terms of a scientific theory.

This scientific theory, however, always served a theological purpose; Abu ’l-Hudhail wanted to demonstrate the omnipotence of God. He changed a materialist model into an instrument of monotheism; this was his main achievement.

In this respect he differed completely from the Christian church fathers; they had detested atomism since it belonged to a world where God was replaced by the principle of chance. In saying so they had Democritus’s atomism in mind; they never thought of giving it a new, creationist turn. For the Muslims, on the contrary, the problem rather consisted in finding out whether such a turn was really feasible. Abu ’l-Hudhail had been very original, but in a way, like all original thinkers, he was also a little bit naďve.

The opposition against his theory was formulated by somebody who had been his disciple and, incidentally, was his nephew, Abę Ishaq an-Naîîam, the man whos counter-arguments continued to be quoted throughout the centuries, even in Mulla sadra’s works. He saw that his uncle’s initiative stood in a certain tradition, and he knew that this same tradition also furnished the tools by which to refute the model Abu ’l-Hudhail had proposed. The Zenonian paradoxes, for instance, seemed apt to serve this purpose. Naîîam took them up and added further examples on the same line.

Zeno had come from an Elatian background where it was customary to stress the immutability of being as against the principle of continuous change inherent in Democritus’s atomism. This is an interesting aspect of the discussion; we can, unfortunately, not dwell on it due to the brevity of time. Suffice it to say that Naîîam replaced atomism by a concept, which ultimately remounted to Stoicism; he thought that bodies do not consist of smaller entities which are put side by side but rather of other bodies which interpenetrate and mix. The Stoics used to call this krasiV di’ ólou. But the idea  was again not taken over in its genuine Greek form; the “bodies” which were now supposed to be the primary elements of all terrestrian being were not only normal material entities but also phenomena like color, odor etc., i.e. things which Čirar would have called “parts” or “accidents”. Like Abu ‘l-Hudhail, Naîîam did not only stand in a Greek but also in a Muslim tradition.

But what kind of tradition was it then, where did it come from? The Greek elements are unmistakable, but on the other hand Stoic texts were as unknown to the Arabs as those of the ancient atomists. We have to look into another direction: Sasanid Iran. What Naîîam called “interpenetration” (mudakhala or tadakhul in Arabic) not only corresponded to the krasiV di’ ólou of the Stoics but also to the gumecisn of duelist cosmology.

Dualist systems, whether in Zoroastrianism or in Manichaeism, had no place for the concept of creation, at least not in the sense of creatio ex nihilo; they rather explained being as a mixture of the two primordial principles of Light and Darkness. In Iraq, Muslim intellectuals were aware of this notion, and some of them even found it appealing enough to take it over.

They did, however, not become happy with it; duelist thinking does not fit into monotheism. Ultimately they were outlawed as heretics, zanadiqa as one used to call them. This is a point which deserves our special attention, for several reasons.

Firstly, because the term was derived from Middle Persian. A zindiq (which, in Arabic, is the singular of zanadiqa) was originally somebody who applied the wrong zand, the wrong commentary to the Avesta; the Zoroastrians had coined the word in order to revile the Manichaeans.

Among the Muslims – and this is the second item we have to retain – the zanadiqa whom they took to be crypto-Manichaeans inside their own community were considered to be sensualists, people who only believed in what they perceived by their senses.

And thirdly, not all of these zanadiqa had opted for the concept of mixture and interpenetration. There is at least one among them, a man by the name of Nu`man, an Arab as it seems, who worked with an atomist model; he maintained the finite divisibility of bodies and defined the atom as a three-dimensional body whose substance is either light or darkness.

Unfortunately, he remains for us a completely enigmatic and isolated figure. But his mere existence shows that the antithesis between  Abu ’l-Hudhail and his nephew Naîîam was prefigured in an Iranian milieu which, for some time, exerted a certain influence on the contemporary Muslim scene. Abu ’l-Hudhail and Naîîam both lived, at the beginning of their career, in the Iraqi town of Basra where a considerable number of the population was speaking Persian as their mother-tongue, together with Arabic, and they both are said to have had disputations with duelists or at least to have written books against them. For some time, the relationship had still been one of opposition and respect alike. The persecution hit only the Muslims who had come too close to dualism; among the dualists themselves many still enjoyed the status of ahl adh-dhimma.

What is important in this picture is that all the theologians I mentioned, Čirar as well as Abu ’l-Hudhail and Naîîam, came to Baghdad rather late, with an accomplished “system” in their baggage. Baghdad, however, was the place where the translation movement started. They all, at a certain moment of their life, went to the capital in order to satisfy their ambition at the Abbasid court; but the ideas with which they wanted to succeed were not derived from foreign texts. We do not have any indication that they ever used one of them. The influence rather went the other direction; the translators, most of them Christians and not Muslims, incorporated part of the vocabulary which had been elaborated by the theologians, into their own language. This does, however, not mean that the Muslim theologians kept completely aloof from the Greek tradition. Iran had taken over Greek philosophy in the so-called Sasanid renascence, under Khosraw Anōshirwan, during the sixth century, two or three generations before the advent of Islam. When Justinian closed down the school of Athens in 529 several philosophers who had taught there sought asylum in Ctesiphon, i.e. in Sasanid Iraq, especially those who had not yet adopted the Christian faith like Damaskios or Simplikios, the famous commentator of Aristotle. It is true that they did not stay long; perhaps they did not feel at home in a milieu with a foreign language and foreign habits. But they seem at least to have come with the hope of encountering a spirit like theirs. And there were other philosophers at the Sasanid court who were of Iranian descent; we need only think of a man like Paulus Persa.

Ctesiphon is also the place where Indian influence merged with the Greek one; the Arabs later on profited from it: in medicine, in astrology, in arithmetic, possibly even in lexicography. We may wonder whether this also applies to atomism; we would then, even in this delicate question, not be dealing with a mutually exclusive alternative but with a dialogue of civilizations.

Iran then seems to be responsible for the complex tradition in which Abu ’l-Hudhail developed his originality. Half a century after his death, however, the situation began to change; the diffuse tradition was gradually replaced by an explicit one which was distinctly Greek. In philosophy this was, to a large extent, the achievement of Kindí and his team. Kindí did not like atomism; he refuted it in one of his treatises. He preferred Neoplatonism instead; therefore he asked his Christian collaborators to translate texts like the so-called Theology of Aristotle or the K. al-Khair al-mahč which was to become the Liber de Causis.

Something new had been started there; Baghdad took, as it seems, its distance from Iran. But we should not forget that the Abbasid capital had been founded only a few miles away from ancient Ctesiphon. The awareness of belonging to a greater cultural unity was much older than Kindi. The translation movement had been started by the caliph al-Mansęr, albeit not so much in philosophy as in mathematics, astrology, and medicine. Mansęr’s program was inspired by the imperial ideology of the Sasanids as Dimitri Gutas has recently shown.

The “House of Wisdom” (Bait al-hikma) which came to serve as a kind of “bureau” for the translators was modeled after the Sasanid palace libraries, and it even seems to have got its name from there. The dialogue of cultures had begun once the Muslims had entered Iraq. There is nothing astonishing in this; a dialogue of this kind is only interrupted if we interrupt it ourselves.

 

Notes