Limitations of spiritual and intellectual faculties
-Imam Sirhindi-A great achievement of the Mujaddid as a Renovator of faith consisted of his demonstrating the incompetence of knowledge gained through intellectual process as well as spiritual intuition to penetrate the metaphysical truths, such as, the gnosis of God, His attributes, the ultimate truth and reality of existence, etc.
He showed that the knowledge gained through either of these sources was neither beyond doubt nor free from mistake. He proved that the true knowledge of God could be had through revelation vouchsafed to the prophets for it occupied a higher place in comparison to intellect in the same way as intellect was superior to sensory perceptions. Thus, the knowledge of God and the correct way of divine worship could be known from the prophets alone. He established that the ancient Greek philosophers had committed grievous mistakes in understanding the true nature and attributes of God. This was because there was nothing like pure or abstract intellect nor there existed any pure and unmixed spiritual or ecstatic inspiration, free from all intrinsic influences. The mystics and theophists had blundered, explained Mujaddid, like the philosophers, because they failed to recognize that intellect and theosophy were both equally incompetent to get at the knowledge pertaining to God. this meant that the Prophethood remained as the only trustworthy medium of obtaining knowledge about God and his attributes and commandments.
The Mujaddid went further to affirm that the pure and unmixed intellect was a myth: human intellect was influenced by subjective patterns like one’s beliefs and concepts while external events and conditions also threw their weight in to the scale. Thus, the stand -point of intellect was always colored by one’s subjective consciousness and objective observations. The Mujaddid demonstrated that the intellect was a defective medium to discover the ultimate truth.
He also drew a line of demarcation between the purification of self and the purification of heart and explained the reason for making a distinction between the two. He afforded proof to show that one who upholds Prophethood from the core of his heart really possesses adequate reasons for his convictions. Thus, acceptance of prophetic information with the stipulation of its confirmation by one’s intellect really amounted to its rejection. He also explained that nothing in the Prophetic teachings was against human reason or intellect and that there was a lot of difference between a thing being beyond one’s intellect or understanding and its being against reason or logic.
The revolutionary concepts propounded by the Mujaddid about the nature of intellectual cognition and spiritual inspiration caused a flutter in the then intellectual and religious circles and opened the way to the new method of inductive reasoning. On the one hand, he gave a lie to the accepted notion of the day which were claimed to have been based on pure intellect, and, on the other, established the truth of Prophecy and transcendental realities known through it. It was, in fact, a concept attempting fundamental reconstruction of thought by rejecting the prevalent principles of thought and accepted mental impressions of the then intellectuals, religious and spiritual circles. It was not a products of its time-the the then scholastic disquisition or intellectual deliberations-for the world took a few centuries more to arrive at the same conclusion. It was a favor from God, a divine regeneration which helped him to discover the highest unitary principle of thought essential for the success of his revivalist call given at the beginning of the second millennium of the Islamic era.
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