This lecture aims to show that the history of the rationalist disciplines (ma'qulat, such as logic, philosophy, astronomy, etc.) in Muslim South Asia was driven by non-trivial social and political contexts. Taking up the example of a theological debate on the finality of the Prophet, the presentation examines how reformist and establishment scholars deployed various technical tools in rationalist scholarship (especially logic) to argue for the validity of their position on this issue. In the process, they breathed new life into several subfields of the rationalist disciplines. This brief period of focus on the relevant technical tools was not due to some predictable orientation of texts, but was the product of the complex layers of the cultural, social, political, and technological landscapes of nineteenth century Muslim India.
Asad Q. Ahmed (PhD Princeton 2007) is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Deliverance of Avicenna: Logic (2011), The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz: Five Prosopographical Case Studies (2011), and the editor and co-editor of several volumes on Islamic thought and history.
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