Moderate Islam
A moderate Islam is undoubtedly the dream of many Westernized Muslims, Middle East diplomats, and businessmen, let alone the rest of us who receive daily reports of suicide bombings in the Middle East. We are told time and again by Islamic apologists that Islam is a peaceful religion. University and commercial presses flood the book market with studies that present Islam as one of three “Abrahamic faiths,” deserving of the same respect accorded to Christianity and Judaism, its doctrine and history notwithstanding. Many of the Islamic studies favored by university presses are apologetic in tone, cosmetic treatises produced in the wake of 9/11 to show that Islam is not the fanatical religion we take it to be despite the suicide bombings that have horrified the West.
There are exceptions, of course. Harvard University Press published Bernard Lewis’ semi-critical What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East ( 2002 ), ( 1) and more recently, the University of Chicago Press has released Rémi Brague’s historical study, The Legend of the Middle Ages. ( 2) Given the challenge facing Europe, and to a lesser extent North America — challenges resulting from an influx of Muslim immigrants who refuse assimilation and demand the right to live under their own law within the host country — it is incumbent on those who value their own traditions to become better acquainted with the newcomers.
Many readers may have grown up with the “ melting-pot” image that was once meaningful when immigrants to the United States were mostly of European origin. That image is frequently invoked to suggest that we have nothing to fear from a massive influx of immigrants from other cultures. The truth is that Europeans who entered North America in the 19th century may have come from different nations and may have spoken different languages but nevertheless possessed a common culture. Since the 1960s U. S. immigration policy has favored those of non- European origin. The favored newcomers have their origins not in what used to be known as Christendom but in the Middle East, northern Africa, and parts of Asia. A large majority of them seemingly have no intention to assimilate Western ways and use U. S. law to secure exceptions from the common law in support of their traditional ways of life.
To get an unbiased account of Islam, there is no better place to start than Ignaz Goldziher’s Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law. ( 3) The book has an interesting history. Responding to an invitation in 1906 to deliver a series of lectures in the United States, Goldziher wrote the lectures in German, but for reasons of health and his inability to secure a reliable English translation, never made the transAtlantic voyage to deliver them. A German edition was published in 1910, but a satisfactory English translation was not available until 1981 when Princeton University Press issued a translation by Andras and Ruth Hamori. Bernard Lewis provides the introduction. Goldziher, Lewis tells the reader, was a Hungarian Jew by birth and by virtue of interest and linguistic ability became a respected “ orientalist,” as Middle East scholars were called in the Vienna of his day. In the judgment of Lewis, as a guide to Muslim faith, law, doctrines, and devotions, Goldziher “ was much better placed than his Christian compatriots to study Islam and to understand the Muslims. To know rabbinic law and submit to its rules make it easier to understand the Holy Law of Islam and those who obey it.” Rémi Brague, whose work we will consider momentarily, similarly praises Goldziher as “perhaps the greatest student of Islam who ever lived.” (4) Goldziher begins his account of the origins of Islam by contrasting the long-suffering ascetic of Mecca with the Warrior Prophet of Medina. At Mecca, the Prophet’s message was an eclectic composite of religious ideas and regulations. “It was with borrowed blocks,” writes Goldziher, “ that Mohammed built his eschatological message. He did not proclaim any new ideas, nor did he enrich earlier conceptions of man’s relations to the transcendent and the infinite.” The revelations Mohammed proclaimed in Mecca, Goldziher maintains, did not establish a new religion but instead created a pious mood that found expression in ascetic practices that could also be found among Jews and Christians of the period, i.e., in devotions (recitations with genuflections and prostrations), voluntary privations (fasting), and acts of charity (almsgiving).
It was only after Mohammed and his followers were forced to leave Mecca and settle in Medina that Islam in 622 came into being. In Medina the long-suffering ascetic was transformed into a warrior, a conqueror, and a statesman. Goldziher suggests the move to Medina was in some ways detrimental to Mohammed’s character. Not long after arriving in Medina, Mohammed, to oblige his growing number of followers, gave approval to armed raids against Meccan caravans that passed near Medina on their way to Syria. War and victory soon became the means and end of his prophetic vocation. Whereas he had formerly disdained earthly possessions, he now set about regulating the distribution of plunder and fixing laws of inheritance and property.
Other changes in outlook took place. Whereas early passages of the Qur’an acknowledge as true places of worship monasteries, churches, and synagogues, in the Medina revelations Mohammed attacks his original teachers, the Christian monks and the Jewish scholars of scripture. Polemics against Jews and Christians, in fact, occupy a large part of the Medina revelations. Mohammed now places himself at the end of a chain of prophets, demanding recognition as the renewer of Abraham’s religion, as its restorer from distortion and decay. The triumphs that the Prophet and his companions soon gained against their adversaries served to strengthen belief in him and his mission among his followers.
Clearly, Islam did not enter the world as a fully formed system. The unfolding of Islamic thought, the fixing of the modalities of Islamic practice, and the establishment of Islamic institutions became the work of future generations. The religious congregation of Mecca was transformed in Medina into a rudimentary political structure, one might say, on its way to becoming a world empire. With conquest, the basis of the administration of state had to be laid. The codification of Islamic law thus took precedence over the development of an Islamic theology. Continued war and increasing conquests demanded the establishment of legal criteria for the conduct of war and for statutes to deal with the conquered peoples. Statutes were needed to clarify the position of subject peoples in the state and to regulate the economic situation created by the taking of spoils. Peace treaties granted to the subjected Christians of the Byzantine Empire, for example, allowed Christians to practice their religion but with some restrictions on its public manifestation, in exchange for the payment of a “ toleration tax.” (5) The word “Islam,” Goldziher reminds his reader, means submission. “ The word expresses first and foremost a feeling of dependency on an unbounded omnipotence to which man must submit and resign his will.” Submission is the dominant principle inherent in all manifestations of Islam: in its ideas, forms, ethics, and worship, and, of course, demanded of conquered peoples. Adherence to Islam means not only an act of actual or theoretical submission to a political system but requires the acceptance of certain articles of faith. Therein lies a difficulty.
The Prophet cannot be called a theologian. The development of a theology was necessarily the work of subsequent generations. Islam does not have the doctrinal uniformity of a church. Its history and inner dynamics, Goldziher shows, are characterized by the assimilation of foreign influences. He speaks of the dogmatic development of Islam under the influence of Hellenistic thought, the indebtedness of Islam to Persian political ideas, and the contribution of neo-Platonism and Hinduism to Islamic mysticism. As time passed, a new set of texts developed alongside the Qur’an. Firsthand accounts of Mohammed’s words and actions became the narrative known as sunna. Traceable to the days of the Prophet, through a chain of reliable authorities who handed down pertinent information from generation to generation, the sunna are given textual expression in the hadith, which show what the Companions, with the Prophet’s approval, held to be exclusively correct. As such they serve as a norm for practical judgment. (6) It became the vocation of the Islamic theologian to interpret the hadith, but not only that; his became the arduous task of deriving from the Qur’an a system of beliefs that are coherent, self-sufficient, and free of self- contradictions. “ For the Prophet’s beliefs,” Goldziher explains, “ were reflected in his soul in shades that varied with the moods that dominated him. In consequence it was not long before a harmonizing theology had to assume the task of solving theoretical problems such conditions caused.” ( 7) Once a holy writ had become established, there emerged around those formally defined texts, a tangle of dogmatic commentaries. The commentaries provided an inexhaustible source from which the speculations of systematic theology subsequently flowed. Given that theologians dispute with theologians, sects were inevitable. In chapterlength treatises, Goldziher explores the development of Sunni and Shiite Islam and similarly devotes considerable attention to asceticism and Sufism. His narrative ends by his taking notice of a promising PanMuslim movement and the Congress of Kazan, where in August l906 it was resolved that a single textbook could be used for Sunnis and Shiites and that teachers could be chosen indifferently from both sects. The hope for a Pan-Arab movement has faded. If anything, the difference between Shiite and Sunni has come more pronounced in the aftermath of the IranIraq War (1980-1988).
One hundred years and decades of scholarship later, the “ orientalist” of times past is now apt to be recognized as a professor of Middle East or of Islamic Studies. Rémi Brague, one of the most important contemporary French scholars, bears an even more specialized title at the University of Paris, “ Professor of Arabic Medieval Philosophy.” The premise that animates his latest study, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is that the Middle Ages is a period of history that has something to tell us about ourselves. He does not discuss the origins of Islam, but focuses on its medieval development, especially at the hand of the medieval Arabic philosophers.
Addressing the genesis of European culture, Brague acknowledges, “ Europe borrowed its nourishment, first from the Greco-Roman world that preceded it, then from the world of Arabic culture that developed in parallel with it, and finally from the Byzantine world. It is from the Arab world, in particular, that Europe gained the texts of Aristotle, Galen, and many others, once translated from the Arabic into Latin, fed the twelfth-century renaissance. Later the Byzantine world provided the original version of those same texts, which permitted close study and alimented the flowering of Scholasticism.” Where would Thomas Aquinas have been, he asks, if he had not found a worthy adversary in Averroes? What would Duns Scotus have contributed if he had not taken Avicenna as a point of departure?
Brague provides a set of distinctions rarely encountered in contemporary literature, i. e., between theology in Christianity and Kalam in Islam, between philosophy in Christianity and falsafa in Islam, elaborating on the terms and the difference in understanding they make. Islamic philosophy is usually seen as beginning with al-Kindi around the ninth century and ending with Averroes around the twelfth century.
No one contests the fact that Muslims continued to think after Averroes, but what remains to be defined is to what extent that thought can be called “philosophy.” There are in history highly respectable works that one would never call philosophical but which we would nevertheless describe as “wisdom literature” or “thoughts.” Heidegger, Brague tells us, would place “thought” on a higher plane than philosophy. Brague is particularly sensitive to the broader cultural context in which philosophy is developed. He finds that the opinions generally admitted within a given community provide the basis on which philosophy is built. Those opinions are historically conditioned, and they come in the final analysis, he maintains, from the legislator of the community. All medieval works were affected by this phenomenon. Within Christianity, revelation is the all-important communal bond. Muslim and Jewish revelations, which are presented as laws, do not pose the same problems as Christian revelation. Reconciling religion and philosophy is an epistemological problem in Christianity and may even be a psychological one, but in Islam and Judaism reconciling religion and revelation is a political problem. Unlike Islam and Judaism, Christianity includes the Magisterium of the Church whose teaching is granted authority in the intellectual domain.
The institutionalization of philosophy, Brague points out, took place under the tutelage of the Church and remains exclusively European. There was indeed something like higher education in all three Mediterranean worlds, but the teaching of philosophy at the university level existed neither in the Muslim world nor in Jewish communities. Jewish philosophy and Muslim philosophy were private enterprises. It is usual to compare the great philosophers of each tradition, for example, Averroes, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas, but the difference is that Thomas was one of many engaged in the same corporate activity, standing out it is true among countless obscure figures. Within Islam there is no corpus of canonical texts that lend themselves to disputatio. To illustrate the difference, Brague remarks, “You can be a perfectly competent rabbi or imam without ever having studied philosophy. In contrast, a philosophical background is a necessary part of the basic equipment of the Christian theologian.”
Leo Strauss, acknowledging the status of philosophy in Christianity, on the one hand, and Islam and Judaism, on the other, regards the institutionalization of philosophy in the Christian world as a doubleedged sword. The official acknowledgment of philosophy in the Christian world made philosophy subject to ecclesiastical supervision, whereas the precarious position of philosophy in the Islamic-Jewish world guaranteed its private character and therewith its inner freedom from supervision. Brague contests Strauss on this point, as would any Catholic scholar who has pursued a philosophical vocation.
Brague offers an interesting treatment of the difference between Christianity and Islam from the Muslim point of view. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) he takes as an authoritative source. In Ibn Khaldun’s view, as presented by Brague, within the Muslim community the holy war is a religious duty because of the universal character of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert all non-Muslims to Islam either by persuasion or by force. In consequence the caliphate and royal authority are rightly united in Islam so that the person in charge can devote his available strength to both objectives at the same time. “The other religious groups,” Ibn Khaldun believes, “do not have a universal mission and the holy war is not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense. It has thus come about that the person in charge of religious affairs in other religious groups is not concerned with power politics. Royal authority comes to those who have it by accident, and in some way that has nothing to do with religion and not because they are under obligation to gain power over other nations.” Holy war exists only within Islam and furthermore, Ibn Khaldun insists, is imposed by Sharia.
Its theological warrant aside, Brague asks how jihad is viewed from the vantage-point of Islam’s greatest philosophers. He puts the question to three Aristotelians, al Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, all of whom profess belief in Islam. All three permit the waging of holy war against those who refuse Islam, al Farabi and Averroes against the Christians, Avicenna again the pagans of his native Persia.
Al Farabi, who lived and wrote in the lands where the enemy was the Byzantine empire, draws up a list of seven justifications for war, including the right to conduct war in order to acquire something the state desires but is in possession of another, the right of combat against people for whom it would be better if they served but who refuse the yoke of slavery, and the right to wage holy war to force people to accept what is better for them if they do not recognize it spontaneously. Averroes, writing in the farthest western part of the Islamic empire, approves without reservation the slaughter of dissidents, calling for the elimination of a people whose continued existence might harm the state. Avicenna condones conquest and readily grants to the leader of his ideal society the right to annihilate those who are called to truth but reject it.
In general the philosophers express no remorse about the widespread bloodletting, and Brague offers some additional examples. Al Farabi has nothing to say against the murder of “bestial” men. Avicenna suggests that the religious skeptic should be tortured until he admits the difference between the true and the not true and is penitent. Averroes advocates the elimination of the mentally handicapped. In the final chapter of The Legend of the Middle Ages, Brague asks, “Was Averroes a good guy?” Yes, in spite of the fact that he condoned the extermination of the handicapped, favored the execution of heretics, and sanctioned what today is called ethnic cleansing. Thomas Aquinas accused him of being more the corrupter of Aristotelian philosophy than its interpreter.
Those who insist that Islam is a peaceful religion are either woefully ignorant of its history or willfully suppress a lot of textual evidence to the contrary. Ali A. Allawi, who has served as a Minister in several postwar Iraq governments, is neither. His recent book, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, is his attempt to understand Islam’s medieval past in the light of the future. (8) He tells his reader that the book is “one person’s attempt to understand the factors behind the spiritual decay of Islam and what the future holds if this process is not halted or reversed.” The book focuses not on Islam from its founding or on historical Islam but on Islam of the last two hundred years, from the early nineteenth century when Western imperialism forced an encounter with modernity for which Islam was not prepared.
Allawi approaches his topic with a description of the Iraq of his youth, the Iraq of the 1950s, a period in which the ruling class and cultural and intellectual elites had moved away from an overt identification with Islam. “Islam,” he writes, “was not a noticeable factor in daily life. Religion was mandatory in school . . . [but] nobody taught us the rules of prayer or expected us to fast in Ramadan. . . . . Women, not only in my own family but throughout the urban middle class, wore only Western clothes.” The only connection with a premodern past, he relates, was that his grandfather always wore the “distinguishing and dignified dress of robes and turbans of an old-line merchant.” Allawi continues, “I don’t recall ever coming across the word ‘jihad’ in any contemporary context. The prevailing rhetoric had more to do with Arab destiny and anti-imperialism.”
Secularism, he tells us, had the Muslim world by the throat. “Modernity was flooding in everywhere and people seemed to want more of it, cinemas and snack bars, cabarets and country clubs, freely flowing alcohol and mixed parties. Baghdad was turning into Babylon, its hedonistic predecessor of yore. And it was not much different . . . in Casablanca, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Tehran, Karachi, and Jakarta.”
But the cultural climate began to change in the l960s and not simply because of ascendant military dictatorships throughout much of the Muslim world. Almost imperceptibly, there had begun a re-spiritualization of Islam. The period called for reflection. The Muslim world was confronted with the fading of its own civilization, increasing indifference, and outright abandonment of the foundational and spiritual basis of the faith. By the end of the 1970s, spiritual Islam as a way of worship became eclipsed by a resurgent militant, political, and violent Islam that increasingly seemed to define Islam in the eyes of the West. In Allawi’s judgment, “political Islam” is but a manifestation of an ailment rather than the ailment itself. Sectarian, ethnic, and racial hatreds continuously trump the ideals of Islamic unity. “The murderous violence unleashed by Wahhabi-inspired Islamists was accompanied by laborious jurisprudential ‘justifications’.”
Allawi goes on to say that while Muslims may have a common political culture and share other affinities, there is no political unity among them. The idea of a pan-Islamic political unity is as chimerical as a union, let us say, of the English-speaking world. In spite of ideological unity at one level, the natural state of Islam is diversity, “tribal,” it could be said, given the broad range of sects and groups within it. Yet in Allawi’s judgment, given the power blocs confronting Islam — namely, the United States, a mercantilist China, and an expanding European Union — Muslim countries may have to forge a power bloc unique to themselves in the financial sector to bypass the Breton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The latter, he thinks, along with the World Trade Organization are largely subservient to the interests of Western powers.
In explaining the title of the book, Allawi writes, “The crisis of Islamic civilization arises from the fact that it has been thwarted from demarcating its own pathways into contemporary life. The Western world of modernity has been superimposed on its own world view, and Islam has been unable to relate to the modern world except through this awkward and painfully alien framework.” Allawi rejects Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis in A Clash of Cultures, (9) wherein Huntington speaks of the confrontation of Islam and Christianity. The “clash” as Allawi sees it, is between the secular materialist culture of the West and the spiritual culture of Islam. He warns, “If Muslims want the very things that modern technological civilization promises . . . they will have to acknowledge the roots of that civilization in order to become an active and creative part of it. Otherwise they will simply be a parasitic attachment to it. It is difficult to see how Islam can contribute to this civilization while rejecting or questioning its premises.”
Allawi has it partly right and partly wrong. The roots of Western civilization are indisputably Christian. It is the task of historians of science and technology to explain why modern science arose in Christendom and not in the lands of Islam, where seemingly the groundwork had previously been laid. Modern science is the product of Western civilization and no other. The Enlightenment repudiation of the Hellenic and Christian sources of Western culture has in our own day borne its inexorable fruit in the crass materialism that is as offensive to Christians as it is to Muslims. Absent Christianity, the West has little to defend but its material culture. But that said, the historical difference between Christianity and Islam cannot be ignored. Allawi rightly identifies with the spirituality of the Prophet at Mecca, as can many non-Muslims, but he fails to come to grips with the Warrior Prophet of Medina who inspired the violent spread of Islam. The contradiction defies resolution.
+ + + (Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.)
FOOTNOTES
1. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
2. Rémi Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
3. Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. by Andras and Ruth Hamori (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
4. Brague, op. cit., p. 21.
5. Goldziher, op. cit., p. 32.
6. Goldziher, op. cit., pp. 37-38.
7. Goldziher, op. cit., p. 68.
8. Ali A. Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
9. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
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