ABSTRACT
Introduction As the twentieth century dawned, Darwin’s thought, as it awaited its theoretical vindication, had already long been ensconced in what has since been described as its ‘eclipse’. The evolutionary worldview, by contrast, was more alive than ever. In an epoch dominated by scientific materialism, the evolutionary philosophy of a French Jew, Henri Bergson (1859-1941), was to infuse that worldview with a new ethos in which religion and spirituality could be explored alongside science with unimpeachable intellectual respectability. This was because of his decisive contribution of making it possible to be at once religious and progressive. The reach of his influence included Muslims in and beyond the francophone world. One of them, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, boldly compares his influence to the decisive impact of Aristotelianism on earlier Islamic philosophers.1 Bergson hardly looks like a promising candidate for such a role. His philosophy, far from adding up to a system, has little explicit to say about God, and the Frenchman rejoices under the epithet of ‘anti-rationalist’. What he did offer was a way of integrating science and spirit within a single worldview which actually accorded the latter the upper hand, wrapping the whole within an evolutionary framework. It could be said that his project was to link the theory of evolution to the intimate human experience of temporality, converting the evolutionary worldview into a fully fledged philosophical doctrine.2 The result is a vision of cosmic man, heroic and Promethean. This chapter sets out to evaluate Diagne’s surprising claim and to examine how in actual fact Muslim thinkers responded creatively to the new intellectual mood generated by Bergson’s thought by exploiting it to fashion a new ‘founding moment’.
