COEXISTENCE OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE ON THE INTELLECTUAL HORIZON OF IBRAHIM HODŽIĆ

Last year marked half a century from publishing of the book by Ibrahim Hodžić O intelektualnom i primitivnom poimanju vjere i vjerskih propisa (On intellectual and primitive understanding of religion and religious regulations). Some critical observations assess this book about religion, rare and extraordinary in many respects, as “the first comprehensive theoretical work about Islam by an alim from Bosnia and Herzegovina written and published after 1945 in Bosnian.”

As the very title of the book clearly suggests, Ibrahim Hodžić's theological and apologetical thought pulsates with the living and spiritual faith which sees, positions and contextualizes Islam in vital, dynamic and developmental categories of existence. If Muslims strive to achieve civilizational progress, as well as moral renaissance, Hodžić believes that they must first change their static, backward. primitive and erroneous understanding of religion and science.

Religion and science do not conflict. They do not oppose or threaten each other. Truths of religion and scientific facts belong to separate realities. Moreover, religion and science cooperate and supplement each other. Since religion is not radically separated from knowledge, there is no strict and inseparable boundary between science and religion.

Hodžić liberally observes that God's transparency very well knows how far the borders of science reach, and that it does not make sense for God to discover scientific facts through religious revelations before scientists. If religious sources discovered scientific truths, human mind would only stagnate. Therefore, religious sources do not overtake human mind, they rather continuously drive and encourage it. No matter how progressive science is, new unknowns and secrets will always be discovered together with scientific discoveries.

The insistence on complementarity and correlation of religion and science in Hodžić's interpretation in no way reduces the power and dignity of different kinds of human cognition and experience of reality. While heart, mind and spirit are the most active elements of religion, science relies upon experiments, evidence and facts. Development of science allows people to get familiar with the whims of nature and unchangeable natural and cosmic laws, while religion provides them with spiritual education and moral strength to be in control of themselves. Both religion and science can be meaningful and retain their own dignity only if they remain loyal to the authentic position which guarantees them a permanent value on the Earth.

It seems that Hodžić addresses his meticulous observations about religion and science both to hardcore religious zealots and to agnostics at the same time, which can be discerned from his words: “Never can science replace religion in human souls. It is because science is a human creation while religion has the divine origin. Religion is not a product of reason and laboratory experiments (as science is). Knowledge that science gives us is one thing, and a spiritual ideal and chastity of the heart, which we find in religion, is another. (...) Since, human reason is a double-edged sword, and there is a danger that the man, in his wantonness, turns the blade of his reason straight into himself.”

Without any doubt, in his theological essays and speeches, with many arguments and quotes of Western European philosophers and thinkers, Ibrahim Hodžić strove to ensure the deserved dignity of both religion and science.

By all accounts, Hodžić's intention was to open Muslims' eyes before ideological traps of ungrounded and widespread confrontation of science and religion in the social atmosphere of socialist indoctrination and atheization at the time. As a sober intellectual, Hodžić daily observed increasing urbanization, industrialization and atheization of the society. At one point in his book he resignedly states that “some of our villagers who move into town easily abandon religion, as easily as their peasant dress”.

Hodžić reads and studies Islamic sources and Western European authors who are in favor of scientific and research spirit and development, but the social reality and backwardness of Muslims with respect to understanding religious truths and scientific progress warn him that reality is not in line with ideals. In the second half of the 20th century, social changes in socialist Yugoslavia of the time are more than obvious: a new industrial-technical mindset spreads among uneducated and unenlightened crowds who “lose the sense and taste of higher spiritual values”.

Faced with such scenes Hodžić, as an educated and enlightenment-oriented Muslims cannot stay indifferent. Hodžić is more than aware that Muslims insufficiently know their own religion and that this jahiliyet (ignorance) is the main culprit for the “wrongly formed religious being” of Muslims.

Even half a century after publishing of the book O intelektualnom i primitivnom poimanju vjere i vjerskih propisa the enlightening and modernistic thinking of Ibrahim Hodžić offers a multitude of valuable and inspiring motifs and messages.

Hodžić's proposition that primitive understanding of religion gave rise to “mental laziness” in inadequate interpreters of religion is equally up-to-date and present even today.

It suffices to describe, as an illustration, self-proclaimed and unlearned sheikhs who, on social networks and over communication channels inarticulately, backwardly, primitively, often even farcically and anti-scientifically speak about religion and in the name of religion.

The absurdities which Ibrahim Hodžić consistently pinpoints in his texts and which pertain to senseless refutations of scientific truths with seemingly religious truths that cannot be scientifically refuted have survived communist and single-party regime and taken hold in Muslim modernity.

Today, like half a century ago when Hodžić's book was published, quasi-ulama, with the same spirited zeal and rhetorical eloquence to futilely and unsuccessfully attempt to use ostensibly Qur'anic evidence to publicly refute the established scientific truths and evidence.

It seems that a seemingly insignificant detail contains the essential characteristic of publishing this book in 1971.

The book O intelektualnom i primitivnom poimanju vjere i vjerskih propisa was published by Majlis of the Islamic Community of Visoko, despite the fact that Hodžić most directly attributed the responsibility for primitive understanding of religion and religious regulations to official ulama – to unlearned hojas and insufficiently educated teachers and secular intelligentsia.

The fact that publishing this book familiarized public at large with Hodžić's ideas which emphatically self-critically observe the causes of Muslim belated spiritual and scientifical awakening is perhaps the most convincing evidence of the strong self-awareness of the community of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims at the time.

Among other things, this community of Muslims led by ulama was defined by the knowledge that science and scholars have the right to publicity, public criticism and public recognition, and that people should put an end to every kind of spiritual primitivism and backwardness by means of common-sense ideas and arguments. Ibrahim Hodžić belonged to such scholars and such a community, since he himself lived and worked believing that only scholars are aware of their ignorance “since ignoramuses cannot even see their ignorance”.

Reference:

• Hodžić, Ibrahim (2021), O intelektualnom i primitivnom shvatanju vjere i vjerskih propisa, Visoko: JU Medresa „Osman ef. Redžović“.