ISLAM AND REASON—
If there is anything potentially offensive to a Muslim ear in the Pontiff’s use of the opinion of a Byzantine emperor of Muhammad’s contribution to the history of ideas, it is Benedict XVI’s implied hint that Islamic teaching is—or may be—unreasonable, and therefore at odds with God’s nature:
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The emperor, as a Byzantine is shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Let us quote a work of the noted French Islamist R Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
Some Western commentators have attacked this part of Benedict’s lecture for inaccuracy. Daniel Martin Varisco, “Chair” of Anthropology at laceName>HofstralaceName> laceType>UniversitylaceType>, thus argues that “Islamic doctrine nowhere teaches that Allah can contradict his own words or divine principles of justice. To say that Muslims worship a God so fickle as to contradict the Quran and force people to worship idols is, to borrow a phrase, beyond belief.”
“Beyond belief” is not that a prominent “Chair” is ignorant of Islam, but rather that he is so obtuse as to make that ignorance public. In fact, the Kuran—supposedly the literal word of Allah—is replete with mutually incompatible and contradictory quotes, because Allah changes his mind, and abrogates some verses in favor of others. The famous “there is no compulsion in religion” and similar “Meccan” verses were all abrogated by the infamous Verse of the Sword.
Of course Allah can contradict his own words: he can do anything, because he is not Allah-as-Logos. We cannot have complete transcendence and self-limitation at the same time. As for Professor Varisco’s “divine principles of justice,” their mention implies his belief that Islam upholds a concept of natural law and natural morality. That is nonsense. Islam has a moral philosophy and a legal code that explicitly denies the possibility of judgment based on natural morality or on the allegiance to any other source of authority but itself. It mandates submission to the letter of revealed law (Kuran) or to the precedent of the Prophet (Hadith). Analogies thus derived stand above reason, conscience, or nature. A Muslim knows that a thing is right simply because Allah says so, or because his prophet has thus said or done. There is no “spirit of the law” and no rationality behind the revealed law for human reason to discover. There is no critical discernment and revelation and tradition must not be questioned. No other standard of good and evil can be invoked. Islam’s denigration of the individual conscience befits the demand for an obedient servant’s prostration before a capricious master whose commands have no rational basis. The political consequences are crucial for societies that derive their concept of authority from this image. Any notion of freedom distinct from that implicit in that complete submission is forbidden and sinful.
It should be added that the Mutazila Islamic sect Mu’tazili in eighth-to-tenth century Baghdad tried to use the categories and methods of Hellenistic philosophy to assert free will and responsibility for one’s actions, and claimed—as per Professor Varisco—that Allah would be unjust if he predestined all human actions; but they were denounced as heretics. In orthodox Islam, any notion of freedom distinct from that implicit in the complete submission to the will of Allah is not an ideal, but a perilous trap. Only Allah creates our acts and enables us to act, while we are but transmission belts with a preordained balance of debit or credit that determines our destiny in the hereafter. Even prayer is a payment of debt, not communication, offered in the hope of placating a capricious and unpredictable Master.
So much for Logos: how can we assume it in a supreme being that is so transcendent as to be devoid of personality? As then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger himself wrote back in 1979, “the unrelated, unreliable, absolutely one could not be a person. There is no such thing as a person in the categorical singular.” In the end, Allah, the unknowable and unpersonable, is served out of fear, obedience, and hope of bountiful heavenly reward. Islam explicitly rejects the notion that “he who has my commandments and keeps them, he is it who loves me.” (John, 14:21) The Kuran states the opposite: “Say, if ye love Allah, follow me; Allah will love you and forgive you your sins.” (Kuran, 3:31) This “love” is merely a means of winning love and forgiveness. Ultimately, it is the love of the self.
THE REAL TARGET—If anyone should feel threatened by Pope Benedict XVIs words; it is the blasé, deracinated elite class of the West. It was to its members that he sent his warning to avoid the contempt for God and the cynicism that deems mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom. “A reason which is deaf to the divine, and which relegates religion to the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures,” said the Pontiff.
His targets understood and responded with bitter animus, notably The New York Times editorialist on September 16, who called Pope’s remarks about Islam “tragic and dangerous”: “A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue… He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology.”
That snide little diatribe hit the nail on the head: the problem for The Times is that Benedict dares uphold a doctrinal integrity—any integrity—and a discernible religious identity—any identity. It is of course futile to expect The Times to point out that riots and threats are not a constructive way to demonstrate that Islam is actually peaceful, or to invite Muslims “to bring us, and live out, teachings of Muhammad that are not evil and inhuman,” because the leading mainstream medium is not in the business of reportage and news analysis, it is on a mission of changing the world in its own image. In that endeavor Pope Benedict XVI is an enemy and an obstacle.
ONE FLAW IN AN ELOQUENT TREATISE—The only part of the Pontiff’s “Memories and Reflections” that was clearly addressed to Muslims came at the end of his lecture:
‘Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God’, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.
This is also the only segment of Pope Benedict’s lecture with which a reasonable person will take issue. He seems to suggest that Muslims can be “our partners in the dialogue of cultures” on the basis of God-as-Logos, and if that is so, he is wrong.
For all of the reasons quoted above, Islam is not amenable to dialogue. Among non-Muslims it seeks converts or subjects, not partners. After two decades of “dialogue,” many Christians have made many concessions and uttered many apologies for their side’s supposed past misdeeds, without getting anything in return. They merely encouraged the other side in the belief that there is no need for any “dialogue” since the apparent lack of rock-solid faith and conviction on the Christian camp makes their ultimate embrace of Allah and his prophet a logical outcome. Their expectations were kindled in 2001 when Benedict’s predecessor kissed the Kuran inside a mosque in Damascus—built from a desecrated Christian cathedral—and exclaimed, “May the hearts of Christians and Muslims turn to one another with feelings of brotherhood and friendship.” Such gestures encourage the hope that clear re-stating of Islamic dogma will prompt infidels to see the light.
WAS EMPEROR MANUEL RIGHT?—Let us leave the “controversy” well alone and look at the Emperor Manuel’s challenge to his learned Muslim interlocutor in full:
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith that he preached. God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.
The first sentence does not suggest that “Muhammad was evil and inhuman,” contrary to the perception of Muslim spokesmen and Western media pundits, but rather that Muhammad’s original contribution to the edifice of Islam—as opposed to the many elements he had borrowed from Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Arab paganism, etc.—was “evil and inhuman.”
This statement may be insulting or painful to some, so much so that they’ll kill elderly Italian nuns in Mogadishu and put West Bank churches to torch to make us feel their pain. That is irrelevant to the issue of its veracity. Emperor Manuel’s turn of phrase, while rhetorically charged, should be judged not by its impact on some people’s emotions but by its relation to the doctrinal and historical reality of Islam.
The doctrine of jihad—violence in the path of Allah with the objective of converting, killing, or else subjugating and taxing the “infidel”—was Muhammad’s most significant original contribution to world history and to the history of ideas, as I have argued elsewhere at some length. It defined Islam in its earliest days, it has defined the relations between “the world of faith” and “the world of war” ever since, and—as we’ve seen from the reactions to Pope Benedict’s lecture—it continues to define the mindset of Islam to this day
