Elm (علم), A Science Of Pure Application (Part 2)

That the Quran is described as Hekma حكمة is not the same as when it’s described as Ketab, for the latter, as we saw in the last video, directly refers to the law-imparting, the constructive aspect of the text; the specific architectonic and structural side of the Quran; i.e., the framework on which is then mapped what’s called Hekma حكمة. The specific ‘plan’ of the book, i.e., Ketab كتاب, necessarily brings with it the most quintessential motifs and lessons of history, and Hekma حكمة, by its very nature, searches for the most quintessential of lessons.

Thus, the relation between Ketab كتاب and Hekma حكمة can easily be seen; what’s more, it mirrors what we said regarding the relation between the tools and their best use. The Ketab acquaints us with the mechanics of law, and Hekma shows us examples of their application. What’s implied here is that to every instance of the Ketab, there’s an equivalent in Hekma, that they are directly proportional to one another. But more than this, that Elm علم specifically pertains to this relation here. How can we recognize in certain situations the best course of action, as the example of the man of knowledge, Moses’ mentor, demonstrates? Is it not knowledge of how things generally play out, i.e., a certain prescience and foreknowledge of how things play out?

If we can accurately predict how things will play out, we have immediate recourse to the best way to conduct a situation. Hekma generally covers the sphere of possible action, of decision, of application, of contextual knowledge, and the Ketab the timeless, the ontological, the eternal; thus, the former accrues from the latter, and the latter foregrounds the former, but no relation between them is discernible without Elm. Not only is Elm the ability to know this, but it’s also the means by which to act, in certain situations, according to general principles derived from the Ketab, or in the Kantian phrase (a universal law) only here the categorical imperative rests upon the Ketab. Such an application, consistent with the notion that knowledge is proven only in application, consummates and gives us the notion of Hekma.

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1997. This quote is from Section I, [Akademie Edition pagination] 4:421.

The meaning that Hekma is epistemological can be seen here. It’s the reverse of the commonly held notion that knowledge equals the amount of information one possesses, or whether one scores high in some quiz that contains questions like ‘When was the Eiffel Tower built?’ or ‘Who invented the typewriter?’ The case is opposite; it’s something like calculating the fuel cost for a road trip; here, some knowledge of mathematics is required, and it’s a skill, the possession of which allows me to apply it in any sphere and handle various problems. This is knowledge or Elm; it’s a craft, a techne or technique that one is able to apply when the situation necessitates, like Joseph’s:

"And so will your Lord choose you, ˹O Joseph˺, and teach you the interpretation of dreams."

وَكَذَٰلِكَ يَجْتَبِيكَ رَبُّكَ وَيُعَلِّمُكَ مِن تَأْوِيلِ ٱلْأَحَادِيثِ (Quran 12:6)

It’s said that ‘God’ was teaching him; which is another noteworthy thing; not for the fact of what God was ‘teaching’ Joseph, but that He was teaching him; for what it means is that Joseph was being imparted a certain craft, a skill, something he could apply given the situation. For him, this knowledge was the ‘interpretation of speech,’ to analyze and deconstruct the symbolic, something which enabled him to interpret the king’s dream and help steer the kingdom away from economic ruin. Another expression that was used is Ne’ma نعمة:

"And perfect His favor upon you and the descendants of Jacob—˹just˺ as He once perfected it upon your forefathers, Abraham and Isaac. Surely your Lord is All-Knowing, All-Wise.

"وَيُتِمُّ نِعْمَتَهُۥ عَلَيْكَ وَعَلَىٰٓ ءَالِ يَعْقُوبَ كَمَآ أَتَمَّهَا عَلَىٰٓ أَبَوَيْكَ مِن قَبْلُ إِبْرَٰهِيمَ وَإِسْحَـٰقَ ۚ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ عَلِيمٌ حَكِيمٌۭ (Quran 12:6)

This is the same thing Solomon was referring to when he said that we were ‘given knowledge,’ with the definite article ‘al-Elm,’ العلم ‘the knowledge’; for in its context, it would have been interpreted not as the knowledge that made it possible to specifically conjure up the Queen’s throne, but rather the faculty that allows him to perform such feats in the first place, the same thing we mean when we use the phrase ‘scientific knowledge,’ for it’s often used with this ‘inclusive sense’ of being able to make a lot of things and solve a wide variety of problems.

Ne’ma نعمة here is the complement of Elm, the expression of Elm as an endowment, or something that’s beneficial to its wielder, something bountiful to its user, serving as an instrument in their hand, a certain craft that accompanies them throughout life and helps them solve crucial problems—in short, a gift. And this is the sense of ‘gift’ that we use when we call someone who’s exceptional at something ‘gifted’. Like Solomon in verse 19 of Surah 27 (The Ant), where he expresses gratitude with respect to what this faculty which God had endowed him with (being able to understand animal speech), he uses the word Ne’ma specifically:

"My Lord! Inspire me to ˹always˺ be thankful for Your favors which You have blessed me and my parents with, and to do good deeds that please You. Admit me, by Your mercy, into ˹the company of˺ Your righteous servants."

رَبِّ أَوْزِعْنِىٓ أَنْ أَشْكُرَ نِعْمَتَكَ ٱلَّتِىٓ أَنْعَمْتَ عَلَىَّ وَعَلَىٰ وَٰلِدَىَّ وَأَنْ أَعْمَلَ صَـٰلِحًۭا تَرْضَىٰهُ وَأَدْخِلْنِى بِرَحْمَتِكَ فِى عِبَادِكَ ٱلصَّـٰلِحِينَ (Quran 27:19)

Note the synthetic role of ‘knowledge-as-such’ in bridging the gap between ‘having’ and ‘doing,’ between possession and aptitude, between faculty and facility. It’s actually the thing that allows us to draw the line between man and animal, and in turn, between animal and the inanimate. For even there, sentience and ‘some ability to apply oneself’ and to be distinguished as that which does some definite thing, is an expression of this faculty. But in human beings, this faculty is markedly distinguished, namely in its ‘scale’; we’re not confined in this respect, by will or whim. We can develop a certain faculty; to learn some craft, build a business, or industry, or society around it, which an animal would never think to learn. But interestingly, even as we think about the cognitive limitation of animals, the limiting factor is not incapacity but inopportunity. Animals have as much of this faculty as falls to their share; they probably see as much value in being exposed to ours, as we see in being restricted to theirs.

Elm, as defined in the Quran, is thus to be taken in a much broader sense, first considering the epistemological dimension of the concept, that it’s methodic, not encyclopedic, and then considering the context of use; this way, we effectively embody the concept in the act of explaining it. In regards to the Quran, and specifically the type of Elm or knowledge that’s required to access it, to appropriately understand and assimilate the book, the same method is reflected in the steps just given, for this itself, the outlining of the conditions of knowledge happens to be the same method by which to understand the meaning of any Quranic proposition; that is to say, we don’t accept the apparent verdict of any word or phrase, i.e., what the word or phrase ‘seems’ to be saying, but rather we essay into the conditions of the possibility of its truth, for as Kant put it:

"The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience."

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998. This quote is found in the "Transcendental Aesthetic," A111/B147.

And to do this, it is essential to view the Quran as itself complete, that is, to see it as entirely comprehensible; this is important, as by ‘comprehensible’, we mean ‘comprehensible in its own terms’. When you read a novel or story of any length, you tend to confide this in the story; you form an unspoken pact with the novel that all its ‘meanings’ are to be found within its pages; you may occasionally wander outside the book, to a commentary or literary critique of it to understand some aspect of it, but you know that the information you obtain here in no way replaces or substitutes the experience of directly reading and engaging the text. But even here, the Quran differs, and it's this difference—which not many would consider far-reaching—that shows the philological or hermeneutical facility of the Quran.

For all the tools to be in the book, to not require anything outside the book save the language, is a huge claim.

How is this claim not contradictory, one may plausibly add, if the very linguisticality of the Quran is itself external or preconditional to its comprehensibility? The answer is that, much like in complex physics equations that explain the mechanics of the physical world, that enable you to phone a friend on the other side of the world, and moreover to do it from the window seat of a plane that itself is traveling across the world, to understand the speed of sound, of light, to learn about a distant galaxy; we start with simple numbers—natural, whole, rational, irrational, complex, etc.—and then build from these a proposition as complex as E = mc^2, or the Schrödinger equation, which, when broken all the way down, consists in the same elements used to count the number of apples in a fruit stall. The case is likewise in the Quran; the vernacular tongue, basic Arabic, is just the critical mass by which to make the sort of leap which number permits with applied sciences.

Once enclosed within the sphere of the Quran, the sort of exercise that begins to take shape is purely relational; it becomes a matter of understanding the relation between concepts. In fact, we obtain concepts from the relations between concepts, much like a word or a verse is formed from the constituency of words and phrases—they are not simply given to us. If given, they are given in the context of some relation. All ambiguity is an ambiguity of relation; for when it happens that we don’t know what a certain word means, what you’re really saying is, "I don’t know the context of the word; I don’t have, in the Kantian phrase, ‘the conditions for its possibility.’

"For I see that the word, though ambiguous, is still a system of words, of letters strung together in a certain way; these letters are not nothing, not things that are meaningless outside the construct of the word or sentence. They are the same thing which the mathematician or logician calls quantifiers, operators, variables; they are atomic propositions endowed with laws and rules, i.e., ways in which they can be combined and ways in which they can’t.

They convey operations covering various orders of logic, placeholders for principles that one would call metaphysical, placeholders for universals, for particulars, different forms of the copula. In fact, even as we descend into this fine system of pattern symbolics (as Whorf would call them) and study those fine, call them, computations, we find that the Quran accounts for them just as rigorously, and it’s as important for the studious reader to understand them as closely as any word or sentence or phrase.

"Or a little more—and recite the Quran ˹properly˺ in a measured way.

"أَوْ زِدْ عَلَيْهِ وَرَتِّلِ ٱلْقُرْءَانَ تَرْتِيلًا (Quran 73:4)

This condition points to a larger constellation in whose terms alone an ambiguous word is to be understood. The assimilation process thus varies in this way: from the ambiguity of the part, we proceed to the whole that subsumes and gives the part its meaning. We do this simply by understanding every context in which the designated word is mentioned. It’s strange how the word begins to hatch and its meaning slowly ‘emerges’ when opposed to every instance of its use, for as in Einstein’s theory of relativity, the uniformity of the speed of light is gleaned from the relativity of reference frames, the different perspectives from which judgment is cast. Strangely enough, the same methodology applies here, a model whose philological equivalent is found in the Kantian maxim (A111/B147, above); this is the trick that, once grasped, assures us as to the complete and ‘self-contained’ nature of the Quran.