Thy Kingdom Come!
A Thought-Provoking Interview
As I was perusing the latest issue of Crisis magazine in the library a few nights ago, I came across an interview on pages 41-46 entitled "Knowing the Enemy: Dinesh D'Souza on Islam, America, and the Left's Responsibility for 9/11." The magazine's editor, Brian Saint-Paul (whom I met many years ago, when he worked for Envoy magazine) interviews Dinesh D'Souza, whose latest book is entitled The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. The interview has a lot of interesting points about modern Islamic perceptions of the West and how they got that way.
What I found most striking was D'Souza's treatment of why radical Muslims have the hatred for the West which resulted in 9/11. D'Souza rejects the claim that this is primarily a reaction to colonialism, since the United States itself did not have much of a historical colonial presence in Muslim countries. At the same time, he also rejects the oft-heard claim of American conservatives that radical Muslims "hate us for our freedom." D'Souza doesn't consider this to be fair: "For the past three or four years, I've been studying radical Islamic thought--specifically, the thinkers who have influenced contemporary radical Muslims. When you read their work, you find that there are no denunciations of modernity, no condemnations of science, no condemnations of freedom. In fact, their whole argument seems to be that the United States--through our support of secular dictators in the region--is denying Muslims freedom and control over their own destiny." D'Souza goes on to note that, in the wake of recent electoral successes in Algeria and Palestine, radical Muslims aren't even necessarily opposed to democracy.
What, then, DO they hate about America? D'Souza clarifies: "It's more accurate to say that they do not hate us for our freedom, but they condemn us for how we have used our freedom. The thrust of bin Laden's argument is that America has become a pagan, immoral society. That's bad enough for him, but he also sees the United States foisting its paganism on the rest of the world--both through its foreign policy and through its culture. And he believes that it's the duty of all good monotheists to rise up in rebellion against it. That's the real root of Muslim rage."
This is why D'Souza lays the responsibility for 9/11 on the cultural Left in America. The breakdown of traditional morality brought about by cultural liberalism is seen by radical Islam as a threat to the traditional values of Islam. "The radical Muslim position is not that they want to take over the world and make everyone a Muslim. Nobody claims that. Rather, Muslims think they need to rise up to prevent the pernicious influence of American atheism and American culture from destroying traditional Islamic culture."
It is because of this, D'Souza says, that even non-radical Muslims are reluctant to condemn terrorism. "On the one hand, they have a violent faction, which they dislike, acting in the name of Islam. But on the other, this violent faction is pointing to America as a pagan, depraved society, and the non-radicals largely agree and don't want to be seen defending that kind of society. That's why they keep their mouths shut." In fact, D'Souza says, this is why it's not helpful to look for "liberal" Muslims to counterbalance terrorism. While classical liberalism ("the idea that we must have the freedom to vote or to assemble or be religiously tolerant") has much support in the Islamic world, there is virtually no support for the new cultural liberalism. D'Souza points out that there are basically two groups in the Muslim world: radical Muslims and traditional Muslims. "Both are religiously and socially conservative." He sees the only real way to long-term victory over terrorism to consist in putting a wedge between the two groups.
And so D'Souza gives his suggestions on how to achieve this, and gain support from traditional Muslims. First, Americans must avoid condemning Islam as a whole. "The clash-of-civilizations idea has a grain of truth in it, but it is both tactically and morally wrong. In fact, it plays right into bin Laden's hands. He wants to construe the war in exactly those terms. If you dismiss Islam as being inherently violent or say the Prophet Mohammed (sic) is the founder of terrorism, then you're pushing the traditional Muslims into the radical camp." Instead, D'Souza urges Christians and conservatives to find common cause with traditional Muslims on moral issues.
This leads to his second suggestion, which is to "fight the war on terror by fighting the culture war at home." Working to restore traditional moral and religious values in the public sphere in America can "help improve America's image worldwide." Thirdly, "the U.S. government and its private citizens should do more to highlight the other America." By this, he means to make it clear that in fact, despite the impression the Islamic world may have, America still is, in many quarters, a Christian society, made up of decent people. "If traditional Muslims could see that there are hundreds of millions of Americans who go to work each day, who look after their families, and who practice traditional values, it would go a long way in undermining the radical Muslim claim that the United States is the fountainhead of global atheism."
D'Souza addresses other interesting points as well, and gives a somewhat new take on various matters of U.S. foreign policy, especially our relations with Israel and how to address those. The article is well worth checking out.
Thy Kingdom Come!
The Caliphate and Its Difficulties
I have been quite struck, in reading Reza Aslan's chapter on the "Rightly Guided" Caliphs, at how quickly the Muslim community became fractured after Muhammad's death, and how quickly all kinds of political intrigue began to come into play. There are interesting comparisons to be drawn to Christianity in this regard.
On the one hand, just about every issue that the Muslim community has had to deal with regarding the relation of religious to secular authority, and who should possess each of these, has its analogue in the Church's history. One could look in the East at the "Caesaro-papism" of which the Byzantine emperors are often accused, and in the West at the long saga of the temporal power of the papacy, which included everything from the early eleventh century, when Holy Roman Emperors could impose popes at will, to the High Middle Ages, when popes like Innocent III were able, for a brief time, to truly be the dominant authority in a Europe where nation-states had not yet fully formed. Then of course there was the Renaissance, when the popes often seemed little different from any other Italian princes, and often found themselves engaged in wars with Christian kingdoms.
On the other hand, while both Christianity and Islam have very checkered relationships to temporal authority, it is probably fair to say that these issues are more foundational to Islam than they are to Christianity. For the first three centuries of its existence, the Church had no temporal status whatsoever, and was largely persecuted; it was only after her doctrine and her basic structure as a spiritual entity was already fairly well-established that the Church had to begin working out her relations with temporal powers, and even then, there was fairly early on a clear articulation by the popes of the "two swords" of temporal and spiritual power, which were quite distinct, though by no means totally separated. It seems to me that Islam was not so fortunate in this regard. From the very lifetime of the Prophet, Islam was a religion that possessed a certain temporal power, and it was impossible to separate religious and temporal matters. Perhaps this is why it seems difficult to distinguish religion and politics in the Muslim world even today: when the Prophet served not only as a messenger of God but as a shaykh, a military leader, and a judge, it is natural to presume that a true Muslim community must embrace all aspects of society. The chances of success or failure for our current ventures in the Mideast are closely bound up with this dynamic.
Thy Kingdom Come!
Understanding Jihad; Semester Project
For obvious reasons, it is the doctrine of jihad that is of most concern to Westerners looking at Islam today, just as in many ways it was for our medieval forefathers. Apparently, perceived misunderstandings of jihad are also of great concern for Muslims themselves. Reza Aslan states that "the image of the Muslim horde charging wildly into battle like a swarm of locusts has become one of the most enduring stereotypes in the Western world." Certainly, most of us approach Islam with the understanding that holy war is an essential part of Islam in a way that it has not been for other religions.
This view has been challenged numerous times in recent years, as various figures stepped forward after September 11 to assure us that Islam was a religion of peace, that jihad meant primarily an interior struggle in the believer, etc. For many in the West, however, this has been hard to believe. Given our memory of the various Muslim incursions into Europe, whether at the time of the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, or the battles of Lepanto and Vienna in early modern times, it seems to many of us that, despite protestations to the contrary, Islam is an inherently militaristic religion. As one of my friends in college never ceased pointing out, Muhammad was a general as well as a prophet. (I cannot help recalling here a conversation my friends and I had with an imam from Pakistan in Britain shortly after September 11. While he tried to assure us that jihad was a purely defensive concept, he repeatedly dodged the question when we asked him if he considered the terrorist attacks which had just happened to be wrong, from an Islamic point of view--he was much more concerned with denouncing the war which America and Britain were currently conducting against Afghanistan.)
Aslan's treatment of this subject is quite thought-provoking. He maintains that the doctrine of jihad as Muhammad taught it is in fact basically a form of just-war doctrine, with very little religious implications. As with the question of the treatment of women, Aslan identifies the "classical doctrine of jihad", which distinguishes the dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and the dar al-Harb (House of War), as a creation of later Muslim legal scholars. He goes on to point out the different voices who have dissented from this view and argued for tolerance, especially in early modern times. While an extreme form of the jihad doctrine gained favor in post-colonial times, as seen in phenomena like Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, nonetheless, Aslan maintains, most Muslims do not support such activities.
It is definitely helpful to hear this perspective, which attempts to distinguish the teaching of the Quran from its later interpretation. I am left wondering how accurate Aslan's depiction is. Does the classical doctrine of jihad accurately reflect the teaching of Muhammad? And if not, is it then possible that Islam can be a religon of peace? Is it even conceivable that, as George Weigel has often suggested, the Islamic world as a whole can eventually be able to give a properly Islamic defense of tolerance and religious pluralism? These are the questions I hope to look at in my project for this semester.
Thy Kingdom Come!
The Prophet and Women
I have been quite fascinated by the picture of the Muslim community at Medina as sketched by Reza Aslan in Chapter 3, "The City of the Prophet." It does indeed seem axiomatic to most Westerners that Islam is misogynist, due to what seems to us the extreme veiling required of all women, or the practice fo polygamy. However, by the end of Chapter 3, Aslan has Muhammad looking like an extremely egalitarian individual who was very much on the side of women. I wonder how accurate this portrayal is.
On the one hand, it is definitely helpful to get a different perspective on the Prophet's many marriages, which were contracted for political reasons rather than self-indulgence. It is also interesting to read that the Quran, if taken as a whole, discourages polygamy, since one cannot treat all wives equally. And I found the background on the custom of hijab (veiling and seclusion) to be fascinating: according to Aslan, it was originally a status symbol, proudly adopted in imitation of the Prophet's wives, and it would seem that most Muslim women don't seem to see it as a symbol of oppression.
On the other hand, while it is interesting to read that there are now women attempting to separate the Quran's religious message from its social context, I wonder if this can produce results any more reliable than most of the feminist exegesis done on the Bible, which tends to indulge in speculation such as that which fueled The Da Vinci Code. Is it really possible that the same word can mean either "beat them" or "have intercourse with them", as Aslan states of Sura 4:34?
Finally, it seems that even though Muhammad probably is not fairly represented by the caricature of a self-indulgent misogynist who is willing to marry nine-year-olds, it still seems to me that one doesn't have to be a medieval polemicist to see that the difference between Muhammad's treatment of women and marriage differes radically from that of the New Testament. A wise and godly social reformer could limit the number of wives a man has, and urge him to treat them equally: it's quite another thing to insist, as Our Lord did, on monogamy without divorce, and to uphold celibacy for the sake of the kingdom as an ideal. Muhammad's laws, as wise as they might be, still remain very much on the level of the natural, when compared with the radically new vision brought by Christianity.
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
To See Ourselves As Others See Us...
One of the things that I hope to gain from this course is an ability to speak about matters Islamic from a more well-informed standpoint, and not have to say that all I know about it is what I read in the papers. It is easy enough for us as outsiders to believe we know all we need to know about Islam and write it off. However, anything which has been around for about 1400 years and claims nearly a billion adherents is bound to be a pretty complex phenomenon, and an educatied person ought to have a bit more familiarity with the ins and outs of it.
I make these reflections because I realize sometimes how many people probably approach our Catholic faith with the same broad generalizations and misconceptions, and I am aware of how frustrating this is. Ironically, one such instance came to me in reading Reza Aslan's book, "No god but God", which is one of the texts for our course. On pages 11 and 12, Aslan briefly discusses Christianity as it existed in Arabia prior to Muhammad. His treatment is in such broad strokes as to be quite inaccurate.
For instance, he says that "Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus posessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God." That may be a fair assessment of Tertullian's Trinitarian theology, but it has nothing to do with Montanism, aside from the fact that Tertullian later became a Montanist: Montanism was a heresy about the Holy Spirit and His gifts, not a Christological heresy.
Then, after listing a whole host of Christological heresies, including Arianism and Nestorianism, Aslan writes: "After Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome, all of these variations on Jesus' identity were replaced by the single orthodox position, most clearly presented by Augustine of Hippo, that the Son was 'of the same substance or being' as the Father--one God in three personae. All at once, the Montanists, the Modalists, the Nestorians, the Gnostics, and the Arians were declared heretics and their docrines suppressed." This is not just imprecise; it's inaccurate. Aslan presumably refers to the Council of Nicea, which DID come shortly after Christianity's legalization under Constantine. But far from suppressing heresies, the conversion of the empire to Christianity actually preceded the rise of many of them. For instance, the Arianism which Nicea condemned continued to be strong for the next fifty years, often with the empire's active support, while Nestorianism and Monophysitism didn't surface till a century after Nicea. Gnosticism and Montanism, on the other hand, were second- and third-century phenomena that were largely dead by the time Nicea came around. Augustine came about a century after Nicea and had very little part in the great Trinitarian controversies; the formula Aslan ascribes to him is associated primarily with St. Athanasius.
In the next paragraph, Aslan speaks of the Monophysites, who "rejected the Nicene doctrine confirming Jesus' dual nature." In fact, the Monophysites didn't reject Nicene doctrine, because Nicea had dealt with the Trinity, not with Jesus' two natures. And while it is true, as Aslan goes on to say, that Antiochenes stressed Jesus' humanity, while Alexandrians stressed his divinity, it is a fundamental mistake to consider them both to be forms of Monophysitiism: rather, the Antiochene school tended towards Nestorianism, while Monophysitism was a strictly Alexandrian phenomenon.
None of this, of course, substanitially affects the merits of Aslan's book; he's not aiming to give a history of Christianity. What it does show me is how hard it can be to get the facts of early Christian history accurate; it really can be a confusing mess to an outsider! Which gives me some sense of how imprecise or even inaccurate many Western assertions about Islam and its history must seem to Muslims.
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
The Missing Link
Well, I don't quite know how it happened, but it seems that my blog posting on Islam from last week has vanished completely into thin air. I will endeavor to figure out where it went, but meanwhile, I guess I'll press on. We had a useful conversation in class last week following up on that posting, I thought, looking at how the monotheism that Muhammad would have been familiar with in pre-Islamic Arabia was a diverse and indeed divided phenomenon. One can see why, faced with so many competing versions of Christianity, not to mention Judaism, Muhammad's extremely simple message of divine unity and uniqueness might have seemed like a welcome solution. Although, like many attempts to bring unity out of discord, it only made matters more discordant (like the Great Schism in the West, when the Council of Pisa, hoping to bring an end to the conflict between two rival claimants to the Papacy, elected their own candidate, thereby only compounding the problem with a three-way schism!). We now have, not two great monotheistic religions, but three.
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