Islam will do for the men's movement in the next 25 years what Marxism has done to the feminist movement in the past 40. The next 25 years will be as transformational as the last 40, and in the end men will be respected once again. This will happen first in Europe.
Christianity has so deeply feminized, that it stands little chance. Too many doilies at churches, ladies. The men are emasculated. An emasculated man might as well be 100 years old. Henri Nouwen was the final nail in the coffin, fully articulating the vision of a therapeutic, sentimental, moralizing church with no vigor whatsoever. He is possibly the most popular writer across the Protestant-Catholic, liberal-traditional-conservative divides.
Western men have forgotten what it means to be a man, and churches are largely to blame for this. A "good" Christian man is a useful idiot for a woman. He serves her. Does she ever serve him? Hell no. She's supposed to be "empowered." Empowered to do what? In any case, feminism and feminization destroy everything they touch. Churches need to become places where men can be men, or it's over. Perhaps we can learn from African Christians, where the pastors have some testosterone. Still, anyways.
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
Seeds of Turmoil: The Biblical Roots of the Inevitable Crisis in the Middle East
By Bryant Wright, 222 pages, Thomas Nelson.
Wright offers a concise, crystal-clear analysis of Middle East politics from the get-go until now. His historiography is biblical. He interprets every past event from a biblical, theological perspective, endeavoring to show throughout his book how every significant incident fits into the divine plan.
This follows from the biblical view of history. The Lord has a plan for humanity, and will work things out in due time. As Wright notes again and again, the Father will not be mocked. Willful disobedience, lack of faith, and outright sinfulness, though part and parcel of biblical and post-biblical history, do not have power over God.
"The Lord is the master of history, so let us rejoice," is Wright's message, and he never falters from this line of thinking. He argues that Islam distorts the biblical message, even if Muslims claim the same Abrahamic lineage as Jews and Christians.
Islam, he notes repeatedly, has been a bloody, violent religion from its beginning. He reminds readers that Muslims conquered the long-Christian lands of North Africa and the Near East. Unfortunately, he avoids delving into the politics and theological turmoil that had deeply divided those Christians and alienated them from the Byzantine Emperor. Some of those Christians, Wright forgets to tell us, regarded their new Arab-Muslim masters as liberators.
Seeds of Turmoil, though an interesting read, is full of holes despite - or perhaps because of - the author's strongly-held views of Islam and Arabs.
Wright offers a concise, crystal-clear analysis of Middle East politics from the get-go until now. His historiography is biblical. He interprets every past event from a biblical, theological perspective, endeavoring to show throughout his book how every significant incident fits into the divine plan.
This follows from the biblical view of history. The Lord has a plan for humanity, and will work things out in due time. As Wright notes again and again, the Father will not be mocked. Willful disobedience, lack of faith, and outright sinfulness, though part and parcel of biblical and post-biblical history, do not have power over God.
"The Lord is the master of history, so let us rejoice," is Wright's message, and he never falters from this line of thinking. He argues that Islam distorts the biblical message, even if Muslims claim the same Abrahamic lineage as Jews and Christians.
Islam, he notes repeatedly, has been a bloody, violent religion from its beginning. He reminds readers that Muslims conquered the long-Christian lands of North Africa and the Near East. Unfortunately, he avoids delving into the politics and theological turmoil that had deeply divided those Christians and alienated them from the Byzantine Emperor. Some of those Christians, Wright forgets to tell us, regarded their new Arab-Muslim masters as liberators.
Seeds of Turmoil, though an interesting read, is full of holes despite - or perhaps because of - the author's strongly-held views of Islam and Arabs.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
American Crescent: A Muslim Cleric on the Power of His Faith, the Struggle Against Prejudice, and the Future of Islam and America
By Imam Hassan Qazwini, 282 pages.
Imam Hassan Qazwini's life has somehow managed to contain many of the most important elements of Islamic, Arabic, and American political and spiritual life. Though he has faced hardship at many times in his life, typical of the strong spiritual teacher, not once does he see himself as a victim.
Qazwini, a true spiritual sage, gains psychological and spiritual strength from life's injustices, including the horror of losing family members to the evils of Saddam Hussein's prison network. Unfortunately, Imam Qazwini's life personifies some of the nastier as well as nobler aspects of recent events.
The nobler parts have to do with his upbringing in the family of a great Shia Ayatollah – in fact he is a seventh-generation Islamic scholar. His early life mirrored the trials of countless Iraqis who had to run from the brutality of Saddam's security forces. Yet his father, who taught in seminaries and mosques across the Middle East and, eventually, America, was able to escape with the family to Kuwait.
Eventually, Imam Qazwini ended up with his family in Iran, as many Iraqi Shia did. His description of the life of a seminary student at Qom is fascinating, as it offers North American readers a glimpse of an unknown theological world:
“Seminary life was humble, intense, and rigidly scheduled. Classes started at six A.M. I would attend five sessions, one after another, and stop at noon for prayer.... There were no projectors or movie reels, no chalkboards or easels, and no desks or chairs.... We would follow along as he [the lecturer] read passages from texts hundreds of years old and offered his interpretation of the historical scholarship. With such a bare-bones approach, the teachers' passion and rapport with the class were essential.”
Imam Qazwini weaves his personal history into the history of Islam, as when referring to the great Islamic scholars who had studied and taught at Qom throughout the centuries. In this way, we get a good sense of the life and energy of the Islamic tradition, and of how individuals like Qazwini fit into the whole.
Qazwini emphasizes the centrality of the community for Islam, and the important place of imams in this. He brings alive the rich, varied Arab, Iranian, Shia and Islamic cultures, seeing the deeper meaning in everyday things:
“Once a student is accepted to the seminary, he is permitted, though not required, to wear the robe and turban of a religious leader. Most do so within the first two or three years of study. You can see the change a student undergoes when he begins wearing his seminary attire. He becomes more disciplined and dignified. Gone are the ribald jokes, loud laughing, fast walking, casual eating ..., and any reaction to insults or taunts.”
While offering North American readers a fascinating glance into the family life of conservative Arab Muslims, Qazwini also argues against some of the ruder bigotries of American feminists regarding the status of women in the Islamic world. He notes that “within the traditional Muslim family, women in most countries have broad license to pursue their ambitions,” adding that “Iran ... has more female members of Parliament on a percentage basis than the United States does in both houses of Congress.”
Qazwini also robustly defends Shia traditions, which come across in American Crescent as rich, varied, and mystical. He decries the destruction in Saudi Arabia of some very important Shia sites, refuting the Wahhabi accusation of polytheism. This kind of robust religious debate, whether between religions or within one religion, is sorely needed, and brings about more progress than whining or keeping silent do.
As well, Qazwini, who has lived in America for many years and has become a citizen, discusses delicate political issues such as the war in Iraq as an American. He thus shows that Muslims can be Americans, and that it is okay for Muslim Americans to speak out against American foreign policy while remaining loyal to the U.S.
Qazwini is a good teacher. Not only does the reader get a very real sense of the deeply devotional Islamic life he has led, but American Crescent also makes the reader want to learn more.
Imam Hassan Qazwini's life has somehow managed to contain many of the most important elements of Islamic, Arabic, and American political and spiritual life. Though he has faced hardship at many times in his life, typical of the strong spiritual teacher, not once does he see himself as a victim.
Qazwini, a true spiritual sage, gains psychological and spiritual strength from life's injustices, including the horror of losing family members to the evils of Saddam Hussein's prison network. Unfortunately, Imam Qazwini's life personifies some of the nastier as well as nobler aspects of recent events.
The nobler parts have to do with his upbringing in the family of a great Shia Ayatollah – in fact he is a seventh-generation Islamic scholar. His early life mirrored the trials of countless Iraqis who had to run from the brutality of Saddam's security forces. Yet his father, who taught in seminaries and mosques across the Middle East and, eventually, America, was able to escape with the family to Kuwait.
Eventually, Imam Qazwini ended up with his family in Iran, as many Iraqi Shia did. His description of the life of a seminary student at Qom is fascinating, as it offers North American readers a glimpse of an unknown theological world:
“Seminary life was humble, intense, and rigidly scheduled. Classes started at six A.M. I would attend five sessions, one after another, and stop at noon for prayer.... There were no projectors or movie reels, no chalkboards or easels, and no desks or chairs.... We would follow along as he [the lecturer] read passages from texts hundreds of years old and offered his interpretation of the historical scholarship. With such a bare-bones approach, the teachers' passion and rapport with the class were essential.”
Imam Qazwini weaves his personal history into the history of Islam, as when referring to the great Islamic scholars who had studied and taught at Qom throughout the centuries. In this way, we get a good sense of the life and energy of the Islamic tradition, and of how individuals like Qazwini fit into the whole.
Qazwini emphasizes the centrality of the community for Islam, and the important place of imams in this. He brings alive the rich, varied Arab, Iranian, Shia and Islamic cultures, seeing the deeper meaning in everyday things:
“Once a student is accepted to the seminary, he is permitted, though not required, to wear the robe and turban of a religious leader. Most do so within the first two or three years of study. You can see the change a student undergoes when he begins wearing his seminary attire. He becomes more disciplined and dignified. Gone are the ribald jokes, loud laughing, fast walking, casual eating ..., and any reaction to insults or taunts.”
While offering North American readers a fascinating glance into the family life of conservative Arab Muslims, Qazwini also argues against some of the ruder bigotries of American feminists regarding the status of women in the Islamic world. He notes that “within the traditional Muslim family, women in most countries have broad license to pursue their ambitions,” adding that “Iran ... has more female members of Parliament on a percentage basis than the United States does in both houses of Congress.”
Qazwini also robustly defends Shia traditions, which come across in American Crescent as rich, varied, and mystical. He decries the destruction in Saudi Arabia of some very important Shia sites, refuting the Wahhabi accusation of polytheism. This kind of robust religious debate, whether between religions or within one religion, is sorely needed, and brings about more progress than whining or keeping silent do.
As well, Qazwini, who has lived in America for many years and has become a citizen, discusses delicate political issues such as the war in Iraq as an American. He thus shows that Muslims can be Americans, and that it is okay for Muslim Americans to speak out against American foreign policy while remaining loyal to the U.S.
Qazwini is a good teacher. Not only does the reader get a very real sense of the deeply devotional Islamic life he has led, but American Crescent also makes the reader want to learn more.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Ch. 7. God and Being / Ontology
By Brian Welter
Nasr's conception of God and of being/ontology is based on hierarchical thinking that doesn't threaten the dignity of the person. He interweaves the ultimate equality of humans with the nature of divinely-ordered existence. God is higher than us.
Natural law, an Islamic natural law proceeding from the Greeks, undergirds much of Nasr's assumptions. Aristotle and Plato play a big role in Nasr's philosophy. He is unafraid to borrow at length from the Greeks in general, believing that they augment rather than threaten the Quran's teaching. The Greeks do not threaten Islamic or Quranic purity. Part of natural law – part of the healthy natural condition – is to accept and live according to the fact that creation is hierarchical. Nasr writes in The Garden of Truth, “On each level of being, existents both veil and reveal realities belonging to a higher level of existence.”1 God is central to the hierarchical nature of reality, and human growth can be envisioned as growth up the hierarchy. The inner, spiritual life is superior, higher up the hierarchy, than the outer, material life: “The goal of the spiritual life is to be able to lift up the veil of outwardness so as to behold the inward and subsequently come to know the outward in light of the inward. Spiritual realization enables us to see the outwardly invisible within the visible.... But that is only possible if we are able to penetrate into our own center and to life the veils within, to become interiorized, to gain inner vision.”2 In other words, the hierarchy is both an inner and an outer reality; we can climb up the ladder through our interior lives because the spiritual life is by its very nature hierarchical. Islam calls for each human to climb this ladder. In this sense, the spiritual vision of Islam is egalitarian. Each believer, Nasr points out, is a priest, and no hierarchy stands before the individual Muslim and God.
Nasr links God to the person. The individual is nothing without God: “Human beings qua human beings cannot enter the Divine sanctuary, but there is within us a reality that is already Divine. To be fully human is to realize our perfect servitude and to remove the veil of separative existence through spiritual practice so that God, transcendent and immanent within us, can utter 'I'.'”3 He argues in The Garden of Truth that the human being exists “to worship God and to seek His help in realizing our utter dependence upon the Divine Reality.”4 He highlights the Sufis' very existence as being for this state of “servitude.” Islamic spirituality is the spirituality of submission, which demands a hierarchical view of beings, with God at the summit and humans existing as servants. Yet this servanthood is accomplished through knowledge, which throughout his writings he emphasizes as a holy and necessary endeavor, and through love. This is not the typical master-servant relationship; nor does this hierarchy work in the way that feminists accuse patriarchy as working. It is an Islamic view of hierarchy, and as such revolves around a spiritual implementation of hierarchy. In fact, the one who journeys correctly on this path, Nasr promises, can enjoy a special relationship with God, a special participation in the hierarchy itself, in other words, because journeying on this path leads to deeper knowledge about God, which leads Nasr to write, “vision is directly related to knowledge.”5
The spiritual nature of existence and all life is grounded in God. The transcendent finds its meaning in God. All returns to God. God gives meaning to all other spiritual and non-spiritual reality. Though at times Nasr the philosopher sounds heavily influenced by Platonism, and the belief in universals or at least in another world of the truth, this other world is firmly grounded in God's transcendence. “The great mystery of existence is that it veils God by what is none other than Him... This truth is explicitly stated in the Quran.”6 Nasr tells a Sufi story to illustrate: “...The moral of this story is that the in-depth understanding of the truth that God veils Himself by what is none other than God can come only from spiritual realization.”7 Nasr again counters Western assumptions, this time feminist assumptions, about Islamic theology: “the traditional Islamic understanding of the Divinity is not at all confined, as some think, to a purely patriarchal image.”8 He aims for a fuller undestanding of God by going beyond gender: “Allah is beyond all duality and relationality, beyond the differences of gender and of all qualities that distinguish beings from each other in this world.”9
Nasr's theology also hinges on a hierarchical view of spiritual and human beings. He bases this on the workings of God, who constructs a hierarchical relationship with humans, which forms part of the essence of Islam: “This direct address from God, the One, to each human being in its primordial state requires total surrender to the Majesty of the Absolute, before whom ultimately nothing can in fact exist.”10 The hierarchical structure extends to all creatures, since “everything in the universe has its origin in the Divine Reality and is a manifestation of that Reality.”11
In this discussion in The Heart of Islam we get a sense of how God permeates the universe and makes Himself known to humans through nature without this becoming pantheism. This explanation relies on the hierarchical nature of creation's relationship to God, the unconditional surrender of all in creation to the higher being: “Everything in the total cosmos both visible and invisible is a theophany, or manifestation, of the Divine Names and Qualities and is drawn from the 'treasury' of God.”12 Nasr deftly explains how the universe is an extension of God without becoming untied in a panthesistic way with God. The words are clear and simple, reflecting Islam's clarity and simplicity: “The wisdom of God thus permeates the universe, and Muslims in fact see the cosmos as God's primordial revelation. Everything in the universe, in reflecting God's Wisdom, also glorifies Him.”13 Nasr concludes: “the very existence of beings is nothing but the consequence of the breathing upon the archetypal realities of all beings in the Divine Intellect of the Breath of the Compassionate.”14
Nasr's conception of God and of being/ontology is based on hierarchical thinking that doesn't threaten the dignity of the person. He interweaves the ultimate equality of humans with the nature of divinely-ordered existence. God is higher than us.
Natural law, an Islamic natural law proceeding from the Greeks, undergirds much of Nasr's assumptions. Aristotle and Plato play a big role in Nasr's philosophy. He is unafraid to borrow at length from the Greeks in general, believing that they augment rather than threaten the Quran's teaching. The Greeks do not threaten Islamic or Quranic purity. Part of natural law – part of the healthy natural condition – is to accept and live according to the fact that creation is hierarchical. Nasr writes in The Garden of Truth, “On each level of being, existents both veil and reveal realities belonging to a higher level of existence.”1 God is central to the hierarchical nature of reality, and human growth can be envisioned as growth up the hierarchy. The inner, spiritual life is superior, higher up the hierarchy, than the outer, material life: “The goal of the spiritual life is to be able to lift up the veil of outwardness so as to behold the inward and subsequently come to know the outward in light of the inward. Spiritual realization enables us to see the outwardly invisible within the visible.... But that is only possible if we are able to penetrate into our own center and to life the veils within, to become interiorized, to gain inner vision.”2 In other words, the hierarchy is both an inner and an outer reality; we can climb up the ladder through our interior lives because the spiritual life is by its very nature hierarchical. Islam calls for each human to climb this ladder. In this sense, the spiritual vision of Islam is egalitarian. Each believer, Nasr points out, is a priest, and no hierarchy stands before the individual Muslim and God.
Nasr links God to the person. The individual is nothing without God: “Human beings qua human beings cannot enter the Divine sanctuary, but there is within us a reality that is already Divine. To be fully human is to realize our perfect servitude and to remove the veil of separative existence through spiritual practice so that God, transcendent and immanent within us, can utter 'I'.'”3 He argues in The Garden of Truth that the human being exists “to worship God and to seek His help in realizing our utter dependence upon the Divine Reality.”4 He highlights the Sufis' very existence as being for this state of “servitude.” Islamic spirituality is the spirituality of submission, which demands a hierarchical view of beings, with God at the summit and humans existing as servants. Yet this servanthood is accomplished through knowledge, which throughout his writings he emphasizes as a holy and necessary endeavor, and through love. This is not the typical master-servant relationship; nor does this hierarchy work in the way that feminists accuse patriarchy as working. It is an Islamic view of hierarchy, and as such revolves around a spiritual implementation of hierarchy. In fact, the one who journeys correctly on this path, Nasr promises, can enjoy a special relationship with God, a special participation in the hierarchy itself, in other words, because journeying on this path leads to deeper knowledge about God, which leads Nasr to write, “vision is directly related to knowledge.”5
The spiritual nature of existence and all life is grounded in God. The transcendent finds its meaning in God. All returns to God. God gives meaning to all other spiritual and non-spiritual reality. Though at times Nasr the philosopher sounds heavily influenced by Platonism, and the belief in universals or at least in another world of the truth, this other world is firmly grounded in God's transcendence. “The great mystery of existence is that it veils God by what is none other than Him... This truth is explicitly stated in the Quran.”6 Nasr tells a Sufi story to illustrate: “...The moral of this story is that the in-depth understanding of the truth that God veils Himself by what is none other than God can come only from spiritual realization.”7 Nasr again counters Western assumptions, this time feminist assumptions, about Islamic theology: “the traditional Islamic understanding of the Divinity is not at all confined, as some think, to a purely patriarchal image.”8 He aims for a fuller undestanding of God by going beyond gender: “Allah is beyond all duality and relationality, beyond the differences of gender and of all qualities that distinguish beings from each other in this world.”9
Nasr's theology also hinges on a hierarchical view of spiritual and human beings. He bases this on the workings of God, who constructs a hierarchical relationship with humans, which forms part of the essence of Islam: “This direct address from God, the One, to each human being in its primordial state requires total surrender to the Majesty of the Absolute, before whom ultimately nothing can in fact exist.”10 The hierarchical structure extends to all creatures, since “everything in the universe has its origin in the Divine Reality and is a manifestation of that Reality.”11
In this discussion in The Heart of Islam we get a sense of how God permeates the universe and makes Himself known to humans through nature without this becoming pantheism. This explanation relies on the hierarchical nature of creation's relationship to God, the unconditional surrender of all in creation to the higher being: “Everything in the total cosmos both visible and invisible is a theophany, or manifestation, of the Divine Names and Qualities and is drawn from the 'treasury' of God.”12 Nasr deftly explains how the universe is an extension of God without becoming untied in a panthesistic way with God. The words are clear and simple, reflecting Islam's clarity and simplicity: “The wisdom of God thus permeates the universe, and Muslims in fact see the cosmos as God's primordial revelation. Everything in the universe, in reflecting God's Wisdom, also glorifies Him.”13 Nasr concludes: “the very existence of beings is nothing but the consequence of the breathing upon the archetypal realities of all beings in the Divine Intellect of the Breath of the Compassionate.”14
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Personhood in Islam: Harmony in Seyyed Hossein Nasr's Anthropology
By Brian Welter
Where is the holy located, in the individual or in the community? Protestants would emphasize the individual before God and the priesthood of all believers. Pre-Vatican II Catholicism would emphasize the intercessory role of the priest and the sacramental nature of the Church: extra ecclesiam nulla salvus. Certainly, Islam has traditionally located the holy in the community, the dar al Islam, the house of God. Apostates from Islam must be punished, just like the medieval and early modern Christian heretics tended to face a tough time in Christendom. But are apostates punished because the community has such a superior position viz the individual, or is apostasy such a big issue because individuals are so central to the Dar al Islam?
In Islam, what is the worth of the individual outside of the community? Does his value only consist in his adherence to the community? Seyyed Hossein Nasr has written extensively on the person and on nature, from his interpretation of Islam, and often to a Western audience that is firmly ensconced in a tradition of individual rights and the diminishment of collective identity, rights, and traditions. Yet how well does Seyyed Hossein Nasr represent Islam? Each chapter will discuss the basic arguments offered by Nasr, interwoven with possible objections by contemporary or twentieth-century Islamic thinkers such as Muhammed and Seyyed Qutub, Tariq Ramadan, and others. This will offer some possible assessments of Nasr's teaching from within Islam?
The “harmony” part of the study examines how Nasr's view of man and woman, following an Islamic view, distances itself from the Western feminist view of men and women being the same and therefore equal, to a view of women and men in harmony with each other, in accordance with Islamic tradition and the rights that it holds. This study will explore how, for Nasr, Islamic society envisions harmony rather than extreme democracy and freedom as exemplified in Western democracies today. In fact, unity, harmony, and the carrying on of tradition seem to be the focal point of Nasr's writing, the story behind the story. Likewise, Nasr's view of science, knowledge, and nature invoke harmony. Rather than dominating nature, science and knowledge should bring us into closer contact with God. Islamic science should be a spiritual science. The Islamic economy should bring about harmony rather than fierce, profit-making competition. It should build family and community rather than destroy the centuries-old human ecology and traditions, as Western-influenced capitalism is presently doing.
This study will, as much as possible, avoid references to Western or Christian thinkers in the attempt to understand Nasr within the Muslim world of thought. In his writings, it is this world of thought that Nasr tries to communicate to his Western audience. Despite this preoccupation with his Western readers, one cannot judge Nasr as a Muslim scholar except from within this Islamic tradition. How, then, does Nasr transmit his religious tradition of harmony to this West and the wider world?
Ch. 1. Dignity and Rights: Psychology and Spirituality
Nasr avoids an entitlement view of rights for the individual. He finds human dignity by locating God in the heart of the person. The Sufi mystic ultimately sees the world with God's eyes. Yet this comes through the arduous spiritual journey.
Nasr's Islamic approach parallels the Christian belief that human dignity rises from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, though Nasr does not indicate that this dignity also follows from the fact that we are made in the image of God, which is a cornerstone of Jewish and Christian anthropology: “The grandeur of the human state is not in that human beings can make complicated machines or conceptualize complex theories, but in that men and women are worthy of being addressed by God and being considered worthy of receiving His revelation and grace.”1 In a nutshell, Nasr's Islamic viewpoint does follow the Christian understanding that human dignity comes from the nature of God and the nature of human-divine relations: “To be human is to be capable of hearing the Word of God and being led back to Him.”2 Nasr pinpoints the individual's priestly function as being particularly noteworthy and full of dignity: “The fact that in the Islamic rites each Muslim – man and woman – stands directly before God in the daily prayers without any intermediary indicates from the Sufi point of view not only that each Muslim has a priestly function but also that there is a nexus linking each soul directly to God.”3
Ch. 2. Male and Female; Sexuality
Rather than equality-through-sameness, Nasr offers a traditional Islamic vision of the dignity of women and men that encourages harmony in the household and in society.
Certainly, Nasr follows the traditional Islamic teachings on sexuality.
Ch. 3.The Economy, Work and Leisure
Ch. 4. Community and Hierarchy
For Nasr, the world is necessarily hierarchical. God created the universe, and humans and spiritual beings, as well as animals and minerals and all else. God is the supreme ruler of all, and humans occupy a special place.
Ch. 5. Creation
“Esoterically speaking, all things by virtue of their existence, which is ultimately the Divine Breath, praise God, as the Quran asserts. They speak in silence of the mystery of existence, but most of us do not have the necessary power of hearing to grasp their silent words.”4
For Nasr, creation and humans, and God, who created the first two, are all linked through the dynamic mystery of God: “Although from one point of view creation is old, from another it is fresh and new. God's act of existentiation is ever present, and in fact existence is not so much a state as an act, as the existentiating command of God, 'Be!' This doctrine is of great significance not only for cosmology but also for the spiritual life.”5 Creation's youth is caused by the truth that God constantly sustains it, keeping creation in existence. Without this support, creation would cease to exist. This enchanted view of the universe, while not necessarily excluding the laws of Western science, demands something more than laws of physics and Darwinian evolution. Physics itself is an expression of God's support. Physics and the laws Western scientists have discovered depend on divine sustenance. Evolution too depends on God's sustenance; it exists because God wills it to exist. God is prior to and independent of physics and biology, and the laws discovered therein. This is the Islamic or at least Sufi re-enchantment of the world. God's generosity to creation is immediate and intimate: “In a deeper sense, every tree that we observe in the garden comes freshly from God's creative act.”6 Education is a spiritual journey, and the teacher is therefore a life teacher, a teacher of wisdom. This evokes the meaning of the Catholic terms “spiritual formation,” and lectio divina, both of which place spiritual growth above the need for a heavily critical outlook on life and the literary or religious canon and tradition. Education, for Nasr, is the guardian and transmitter of tradition, of spiritual and communal life, rather than about new discovery or revolutionary, radical thinking. This follows from his depiction of Islam as the middle way, something he also admires in the Greeks.
Ch. 6. Philosophy as Wisdom
The wisdom and teachings of the Quran govern what is valuable and not valuable knowledge. Knowledge foremost brings the believer closer to God. As such, knowledge is a lifestyle aid. It gives us the knowledge of the heart. Nasr writes at length about the intellect, which he situates in the heart. The knowledge of the heart – spiritual knowledge in keeping with Islam – governs the knowledge of the head. Science, in other words, falls under the knowledge hierarchy. Knowledge is subject to hierarch; otherwise, it would not lead to wisdom, but to the chaos of modern Western science and technology, which, Nasr repeatedly observes, is killing the planet, as well as the human traditions that dwell on it.
Ch.7. Science, and Knowledge
“Since in Islam the revelation came in the form of a sacred book, many Muslim sages have looked upon nature as a book of God...”7
Nasr portrays Islamic science and knowledge as holistic and unified around the oneness of the religion, a practice personified in the hakim. This knowledge strives for wisdom rather than for the Western-based need for advancement and the domination of the material world. Since Islamic knowledge is really a spiritual striving with God always on the mind, education and knowledge play a central role in the sacred. Knowledge in Islam is sacred, and the hakim is a kind of sacred man.8
Nasr highlights the spiritual and interpersonal nature of Islamic education, which does not seek to cultivate, above all, freedom of thought and a hyper-critical outlook, but which instead emphasizes the human dimensions of community, teacher-student relations, and knowledge itself. Knowledge builds community: “The transmission of knowledge has always had a highly personal aspect, in that the student has sought a particular master rather than an institution, and has submitted himself to that chosen teacher wholeheartedly. The relation that has always existed between the teacher and the student has been a highly intimate one, in which the student reveres the teacher as a father and obeys him, even in personal matters not connected with his formal studies. The atmosphere of these schools has been very relaxed and informal, without there being any great academic or financial pressure upon the student.”9 Nasr then ends this train of thought by gently though forcefully criticizing the modern, Western path: “Nor has there ever been the strong incentive to receive a diploma and then seek to benefit from its social and economic advantages, prevalent in so many modern educational institutions.”10 Education, for Nasr, is a sacred, personal endeavor, the goals of which are spiritual growth and community bonds: “That is why a person may often remain a student all his life, mastering one subject after another and going from one teacher to the next.”11
Ch. 8. God and Being / Ontology
Natural law: an Islamic natural law, or one too in debt to Christian law. Aristotle plays a big role in Nasr's philosophy. He is unafraid to borrow at length from the Greeks in general.
Nasr links God to the person. The individual is nothing without God: “Human beings qua human beings cannot enter the Divine sanctuary, but there is within us a reality that is already Divine. To be fully human is to realize our perfect servitude and to remove the veil of separative existence through spiritual practice so that God, transcendent and immanent within us, can utter 'I'.'”12
“The great mystery of existence is that it veils God by what is none other than Him... This truth is explicitly stated in the Quran.”13 Tells a Sufi story to illustrate: “...The moral of this story is that the in-depth understanding of the truth that God veils Himself by what is none other than God can come only from spiritual realization.”14
Bibliography
Fakhry, Majid,
Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism, A Short Introduction.
Gülen, M. Fethullah,
Khomeini, Sayyid Ruhollah Mousavi,
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein,
A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World.
The Garden of Truth.
The Heart of Islam.
Ideals and Realities of Islam.
Islamic Philosophy from the Origin to the Present.
Knowledge and the Sacred.
Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man.
Religion and the Order of Nature.
Science and Civilization in Islam.
Ozak, Muzaffer,
Irshad – Wisdom of a Sufi Master.
The Unveiling of Love.
Ramadan, Tariq,
Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity.
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam.
Qutb, Muhammed,
Qutb, Seyyid,
Social Justice in Islam.
Where is the holy located, in the individual or in the community? Protestants would emphasize the individual before God and the priesthood of all believers. Pre-Vatican II Catholicism would emphasize the intercessory role of the priest and the sacramental nature of the Church: extra ecclesiam nulla salvus. Certainly, Islam has traditionally located the holy in the community, the dar al Islam, the house of God. Apostates from Islam must be punished, just like the medieval and early modern Christian heretics tended to face a tough time in Christendom. But are apostates punished because the community has such a superior position viz the individual, or is apostasy such a big issue because individuals are so central to the Dar al Islam?
In Islam, what is the worth of the individual outside of the community? Does his value only consist in his adherence to the community? Seyyed Hossein Nasr has written extensively on the person and on nature, from his interpretation of Islam, and often to a Western audience that is firmly ensconced in a tradition of individual rights and the diminishment of collective identity, rights, and traditions. Yet how well does Seyyed Hossein Nasr represent Islam? Each chapter will discuss the basic arguments offered by Nasr, interwoven with possible objections by contemporary or twentieth-century Islamic thinkers such as Muhammed and Seyyed Qutub, Tariq Ramadan, and others. This will offer some possible assessments of Nasr's teaching from within Islam?
The “harmony” part of the study examines how Nasr's view of man and woman, following an Islamic view, distances itself from the Western feminist view of men and women being the same and therefore equal, to a view of women and men in harmony with each other, in accordance with Islamic tradition and the rights that it holds. This study will explore how, for Nasr, Islamic society envisions harmony rather than extreme democracy and freedom as exemplified in Western democracies today. In fact, unity, harmony, and the carrying on of tradition seem to be the focal point of Nasr's writing, the story behind the story. Likewise, Nasr's view of science, knowledge, and nature invoke harmony. Rather than dominating nature, science and knowledge should bring us into closer contact with God. Islamic science should be a spiritual science. The Islamic economy should bring about harmony rather than fierce, profit-making competition. It should build family and community rather than destroy the centuries-old human ecology and traditions, as Western-influenced capitalism is presently doing.
This study will, as much as possible, avoid references to Western or Christian thinkers in the attempt to understand Nasr within the Muslim world of thought. In his writings, it is this world of thought that Nasr tries to communicate to his Western audience. Despite this preoccupation with his Western readers, one cannot judge Nasr as a Muslim scholar except from within this Islamic tradition. How, then, does Nasr transmit his religious tradition of harmony to this West and the wider world?
Ch. 1. Dignity and Rights: Psychology and Spirituality
Nasr avoids an entitlement view of rights for the individual. He finds human dignity by locating God in the heart of the person. The Sufi mystic ultimately sees the world with God's eyes. Yet this comes through the arduous spiritual journey.
Nasr's Islamic approach parallels the Christian belief that human dignity rises from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, though Nasr does not indicate that this dignity also follows from the fact that we are made in the image of God, which is a cornerstone of Jewish and Christian anthropology: “The grandeur of the human state is not in that human beings can make complicated machines or conceptualize complex theories, but in that men and women are worthy of being addressed by God and being considered worthy of receiving His revelation and grace.”1 In a nutshell, Nasr's Islamic viewpoint does follow the Christian understanding that human dignity comes from the nature of God and the nature of human-divine relations: “To be human is to be capable of hearing the Word of God and being led back to Him.”2 Nasr pinpoints the individual's priestly function as being particularly noteworthy and full of dignity: “The fact that in the Islamic rites each Muslim – man and woman – stands directly before God in the daily prayers without any intermediary indicates from the Sufi point of view not only that each Muslim has a priestly function but also that there is a nexus linking each soul directly to God.”3
Ch. 2. Male and Female; Sexuality
Rather than equality-through-sameness, Nasr offers a traditional Islamic vision of the dignity of women and men that encourages harmony in the household and in society.
Certainly, Nasr follows the traditional Islamic teachings on sexuality.
Ch. 3.The Economy, Work and Leisure
Ch. 4. Community and Hierarchy
For Nasr, the world is necessarily hierarchical. God created the universe, and humans and spiritual beings, as well as animals and minerals and all else. God is the supreme ruler of all, and humans occupy a special place.
Ch. 5. Creation
“Esoterically speaking, all things by virtue of their existence, which is ultimately the Divine Breath, praise God, as the Quran asserts. They speak in silence of the mystery of existence, but most of us do not have the necessary power of hearing to grasp their silent words.”4
For Nasr, creation and humans, and God, who created the first two, are all linked through the dynamic mystery of God: “Although from one point of view creation is old, from another it is fresh and new. God's act of existentiation is ever present, and in fact existence is not so much a state as an act, as the existentiating command of God, 'Be!' This doctrine is of great significance not only for cosmology but also for the spiritual life.”5 Creation's youth is caused by the truth that God constantly sustains it, keeping creation in existence. Without this support, creation would cease to exist. This enchanted view of the universe, while not necessarily excluding the laws of Western science, demands something more than laws of physics and Darwinian evolution. Physics itself is an expression of God's support. Physics and the laws Western scientists have discovered depend on divine sustenance. Evolution too depends on God's sustenance; it exists because God wills it to exist. God is prior to and independent of physics and biology, and the laws discovered therein. This is the Islamic or at least Sufi re-enchantment of the world. God's generosity to creation is immediate and intimate: “In a deeper sense, every tree that we observe in the garden comes freshly from God's creative act.”6 Education is a spiritual journey, and the teacher is therefore a life teacher, a teacher of wisdom. This evokes the meaning of the Catholic terms “spiritual formation,” and lectio divina, both of which place spiritual growth above the need for a heavily critical outlook on life and the literary or religious canon and tradition. Education, for Nasr, is the guardian and transmitter of tradition, of spiritual and communal life, rather than about new discovery or revolutionary, radical thinking. This follows from his depiction of Islam as the middle way, something he also admires in the Greeks.
Ch. 6. Philosophy as Wisdom
The wisdom and teachings of the Quran govern what is valuable and not valuable knowledge. Knowledge foremost brings the believer closer to God. As such, knowledge is a lifestyle aid. It gives us the knowledge of the heart. Nasr writes at length about the intellect, which he situates in the heart. The knowledge of the heart – spiritual knowledge in keeping with Islam – governs the knowledge of the head. Science, in other words, falls under the knowledge hierarchy. Knowledge is subject to hierarch; otherwise, it would not lead to wisdom, but to the chaos of modern Western science and technology, which, Nasr repeatedly observes, is killing the planet, as well as the human traditions that dwell on it.
Ch.7. Science, and Knowledge
“Since in Islam the revelation came in the form of a sacred book, many Muslim sages have looked upon nature as a book of God...”7
Nasr portrays Islamic science and knowledge as holistic and unified around the oneness of the religion, a practice personified in the hakim. This knowledge strives for wisdom rather than for the Western-based need for advancement and the domination of the material world. Since Islamic knowledge is really a spiritual striving with God always on the mind, education and knowledge play a central role in the sacred. Knowledge in Islam is sacred, and the hakim is a kind of sacred man.8
Nasr highlights the spiritual and interpersonal nature of Islamic education, which does not seek to cultivate, above all, freedom of thought and a hyper-critical outlook, but which instead emphasizes the human dimensions of community, teacher-student relations, and knowledge itself. Knowledge builds community: “The transmission of knowledge has always had a highly personal aspect, in that the student has sought a particular master rather than an institution, and has submitted himself to that chosen teacher wholeheartedly. The relation that has always existed between the teacher and the student has been a highly intimate one, in which the student reveres the teacher as a father and obeys him, even in personal matters not connected with his formal studies. The atmosphere of these schools has been very relaxed and informal, without there being any great academic or financial pressure upon the student.”9 Nasr then ends this train of thought by gently though forcefully criticizing the modern, Western path: “Nor has there ever been the strong incentive to receive a diploma and then seek to benefit from its social and economic advantages, prevalent in so many modern educational institutions.”10 Education, for Nasr, is a sacred, personal endeavor, the goals of which are spiritual growth and community bonds: “That is why a person may often remain a student all his life, mastering one subject after another and going from one teacher to the next.”11
Ch. 8. God and Being / Ontology
Natural law: an Islamic natural law, or one too in debt to Christian law. Aristotle plays a big role in Nasr's philosophy. He is unafraid to borrow at length from the Greeks in general.
Nasr links God to the person. The individual is nothing without God: “Human beings qua human beings cannot enter the Divine sanctuary, but there is within us a reality that is already Divine. To be fully human is to realize our perfect servitude and to remove the veil of separative existence through spiritual practice so that God, transcendent and immanent within us, can utter 'I'.'”12
“The great mystery of existence is that it veils God by what is none other than Him... This truth is explicitly stated in the Quran.”13 Tells a Sufi story to illustrate: “...The moral of this story is that the in-depth understanding of the truth that God veils Himself by what is none other than God can come only from spiritual realization.”14
Bibliography
Fakhry, Majid,
Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism, A Short Introduction.
Gülen, M. Fethullah,
Khomeini, Sayyid Ruhollah Mousavi,
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein,
A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World.
The Garden of Truth.
The Heart of Islam.
Ideals and Realities of Islam.
Islamic Philosophy from the Origin to the Present.
Knowledge and the Sacred.
Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man.
Religion and the Order of Nature.
Science and Civilization in Islam.
Ozak, Muzaffer,
Irshad – Wisdom of a Sufi Master.
The Unveiling of Love.
Ramadan, Tariq,
Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity.
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam.
Qutb, Muhammed,
Qutb, Seyyid,
Social Justice in Islam.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Personhood in Islam and Christianity: Harmony in John Paul II and Seyyed Hossein Nasr
By Brian Welter
1. Dignity and Rights
2. Male and Female
3. Sexuality
4. The Economy, Work and Leisure
5. Community and Hierarchy
6. Creation
7. Philosophy, Science, and Knowledge
8. God and Being
1. Dignity and Rights
2. Male and Female
3. Sexuality
4. The Economy, Work and Leisure
5. Community and Hierarchy
6. Creation
7. Philosophy, Science, and Knowledge
8. God and Being
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Islam and the West
By Bernard Lewis, 217 pages, Oxford University Press, Oxford University Press, USD 16.95.
“Yet despite this perception of non-Byzantine Europe as an outer wilderness of barbarism and unbelief, there was at the time an awareness that the Europeans, even the western Europeans, were not simple barbarians like the other neighbors of Islam in the east and in the south. They were, after all, followers of a real religion, superseded but resting on an authentic revelation and thus vastly superior to the polytheists and idolaters whom the Muslims encountered in other regions.”
The West and Islam are more closely intertwined than either side would care to admit, and as Lewis' above words indicate, the two civilizations have had a unique relationship with each other. The West, formerly the Christian West or Christendom, feared and fought Islam (as in the medieval Reconquista of Islamic Spain and Portugal) in a way that it never did Buddhist lands or the New World.
The opening essay of the collection of writings by the famous American scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, makes this its central heint. Though an academic, Lewis manages in the forty pages of this chapter to describe in simple terms the panorama of European-Islamic history.
Lewis writes as historian, sociologist, economist, and political theorist, as in the following words: “It is not uncommon for an economy to be stimulated by the commercial impact of another, more active and technologically more advanced society. What is special in the European impact on the lands of Islam, especially in the Middle East, is that on both sides the agents and beneficiaries of the resulting economic change were aliens. The outsiders were of course Europeans.”
Another essay, “Translation from Arabic,” gives us a sense of Arabic's importance, which until the Renaissance, he notes, had been the most translated language in the world. In addition to being a scriptural language, it was the medium for law, philosophy, literature, commerce, and science for millions of people: “It was thus the equivalent in the medieval Islamic world of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in the West, as well as of the literary vernaculars until until the beginnings of the modern period.”
Islam and the West helps us Westerners look critically at ourselves and at how we have thought about and treated others: In one medieval story, “the Christian poet endeavors to give his readers ... some idea of the Saracen religion. According to this vision, the Saracens [Muslims] worshiped a trinity consisting of three persons: Muhammad, the founder of their religion, and two others, both of them devils, Apollin and Tervagant. To us this seems comic, and we are amused by medieval man unable to conceive of religion or indeed of anything else except in his own image. Since Christendom worshiped its founder in association with two other entities, the Saracens also had to worship their founder, and he too had to be one of a trinity, with two demons co-opted to make up the number.”
Lewis makes the important point in this essay and throughout the book that we Westerners are still looking at the Islamic world this way—still seeing in them some image of ourselves.
“Yet despite this perception of non-Byzantine Europe as an outer wilderness of barbarism and unbelief, there was at the time an awareness that the Europeans, even the western Europeans, were not simple barbarians like the other neighbors of Islam in the east and in the south. They were, after all, followers of a real religion, superseded but resting on an authentic revelation and thus vastly superior to the polytheists and idolaters whom the Muslims encountered in other regions.”
The West and Islam are more closely intertwined than either side would care to admit, and as Lewis' above words indicate, the two civilizations have had a unique relationship with each other. The West, formerly the Christian West or Christendom, feared and fought Islam (as in the medieval Reconquista of Islamic Spain and Portugal) in a way that it never did Buddhist lands or the New World.
The opening essay of the collection of writings by the famous American scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, makes this its central heint. Though an academic, Lewis manages in the forty pages of this chapter to describe in simple terms the panorama of European-Islamic history.
Lewis writes as historian, sociologist, economist, and political theorist, as in the following words: “It is not uncommon for an economy to be stimulated by the commercial impact of another, more active and technologically more advanced society. What is special in the European impact on the lands of Islam, especially in the Middle East, is that on both sides the agents and beneficiaries of the resulting economic change were aliens. The outsiders were of course Europeans.”
Another essay, “Translation from Arabic,” gives us a sense of Arabic's importance, which until the Renaissance, he notes, had been the most translated language in the world. In addition to being a scriptural language, it was the medium for law, philosophy, literature, commerce, and science for millions of people: “It was thus the equivalent in the medieval Islamic world of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in the West, as well as of the literary vernaculars until until the beginnings of the modern period.”
Islam and the West helps us Westerners look critically at ourselves and at how we have thought about and treated others: In one medieval story, “the Christian poet endeavors to give his readers ... some idea of the Saracen religion. According to this vision, the Saracens [Muslims] worshiped a trinity consisting of three persons: Muhammad, the founder of their religion, and two others, both of them devils, Apollin and Tervagant. To us this seems comic, and we are amused by medieval man unable to conceive of religion or indeed of anything else except in his own image. Since Christendom worshiped its founder in association with two other entities, the Saracens also had to worship their founder, and he too had to be one of a trinity, with two demons co-opted to make up the number.”
Lewis makes the important point in this essay and throughout the book that we Westerners are still looking at the Islamic world this way—still seeing in them some image of ourselves.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The Theology of Tariq Ramadan: A Catholic Perspective
By Gregory Baum, 178 pages, $21.95, Novalis, ISBN 978-2896-460-793.
“Because the Catholic Church first rejected modernity and then wrestled to find a theological approach that allowed a critical openness to modernity, I have great sympathy for a similar wrestling in Islam.... There is a certain family likeness between the Catholic and the Muslim theological effort to react creatively to the challenge of modernity.”
Baum's above words reflect his attempt to reduce the estrangement or sense of mystery that many Catholics feel towards Islam. The mainstream media caricatures of the religion and the sense of a clash of civilizations have been accepted uncritically by most people, almost subconsciously.
The Theology of Tariq Ramadan relates Catholicism to Islam, and shows how the latter can become a more stable, authentic part of Western Civilization. Many Anglo-American multiculturalists have already imagined how this integration can come about, but they do so with a healthy dose of condescension and belief that the only good Islam is a neutered Islam. This echoes their understanding of Christianity and religion in general – which naturally angers or scares Muslims and invites antagonism.
Baum, a Canadian Catholic theologian, writes as a friend of Islam, paralleling John Paul II's outreach to the Jews. He clearly respects what he believes Ramadan to be saying about European Muslims. When Baum disagrees with the Muslim scholar, he does so in a careful, discrete, and humble manner, showing that the point in hand is his interpretation of Ramadan's thinking.
Ramadan wishes to establish an Islamic theology that distinguishes between the universal and the particular. The universal injunctions of Islam usually revolve around God and human duties to God, whereas cultural issues relate more to the particular, and can change. Baum explains Ramadan's belief that individual Muslims not be allowed to interpret the Quran themselves, in contrast to Protestants, who have always been invited to read and interpret the Bible for themselves.
The Islamic theologian, now based partly at Oxford University, believes that Islamic scholars alone must interpret the Quran, as he follows the footsteps of the nineteenth-century Islamic reformer al-Afghani. Baum is equally clear and patient in explaining how and why Ramadan desires to respect and keep sharia law as the basis of Islamic society. This is not the harsh law the media portrays; Ramadan calls for an Islamic law that reflects God's desire to help people live good, holy lives.
Baum unearths the basic reading that Ramadan and similar Islamic reformers do of the Quran, showing how it parallels the reading of the Bible by some Christian Churches, including Catholics: “The reformist approach, he [Ramadan] explains, reads the Quran by taking into account the context of the verses and the intention implicit in them.”
Ramadan and the reform tradition he follows is actually a conservative movement because it demands that Muslims follow the interpretations of Islamic scholars. Again, Baum walks a theological tightrope to show that it is not fundamentalist interpretation because it seeks the living force of God that created the Quran and the human quest for God. It does not take a fundamentalist legal view of the Quran, in the style of the Taliban or Saudi Wahabi theologians, but believes that Muslims must follow the divine spirit of the Quran and Islam. Baum notes: “Ramadan as a Salafi reformist wants Muslims to transcend the regulations of the Islamic schools of law 'to rediscover the pristine energy of an unmediated reading of the Quran.'”
Muslims must closely follow the core inspiration of Islam, but because it is a universal religion for people of all times and places, cultural and other aspects of the religion can and sometimes must change, including shariah's calls for corporal and capital punishment. This allows his co-religionists to remain fully Muslim yet fully Western; in Ramadan's view, Western Muslims must be full citizens who participate in the political and cultural life of their societies. Rather than isolating themselves, they must use their civic participation as a means to witness their faith to the non-Muslim cultures.
Throughout these discussions, according to Baum, Ramadan remains steadfast in his desire that people follow the Quran. Muslims can reach out to secular, Western societies because Muhammad had relations “of trust and competence” with polytheists and other non-Muslims. Western Muslims should, like Catholics and Jews in these societies, have a dialogical relationship with these societies, avoiding assimilation while participating in civic and cultural life.
The Theology of Tariq Ramadan offers an important step forwards in inter-religious dialogue, an imperative because of the loud voices describing a clash of civilization. Baum hardly sees such a clash, and finds much in common between Ramadan's style of conservative, traditionalist Muslim reform, and the Catholic Church's long, often contentious and painful dialogue with modern, secular liberal societies.
Baum writes from the left-wing, feminist side of the Church that came out swinging from Vatican II, calling for revolutionary sexual moral change, married priests, female ordination, and liberation- and feminist-theology. In The Theology of Tariq Ramadan, at times he risks turning Ramadan into a Muslim version of himself and the Vatican II left-wing. Even with this weakness, the wide-ranging discussion, which refers to many other important Muslim thinkers such as Fethullah Gulen, is well worth the read, and can serve as a Catholic introduction to some currents of contemporary Islamic theology, and their relationship to Catholic thinking.
“Because the Catholic Church first rejected modernity and then wrestled to find a theological approach that allowed a critical openness to modernity, I have great sympathy for a similar wrestling in Islam.... There is a certain family likeness between the Catholic and the Muslim theological effort to react creatively to the challenge of modernity.”
Baum's above words reflect his attempt to reduce the estrangement or sense of mystery that many Catholics feel towards Islam. The mainstream media caricatures of the religion and the sense of a clash of civilizations have been accepted uncritically by most people, almost subconsciously.
The Theology of Tariq Ramadan relates Catholicism to Islam, and shows how the latter can become a more stable, authentic part of Western Civilization. Many Anglo-American multiculturalists have already imagined how this integration can come about, but they do so with a healthy dose of condescension and belief that the only good Islam is a neutered Islam. This echoes their understanding of Christianity and religion in general – which naturally angers or scares Muslims and invites antagonism.
Baum, a Canadian Catholic theologian, writes as a friend of Islam, paralleling John Paul II's outreach to the Jews. He clearly respects what he believes Ramadan to be saying about European Muslims. When Baum disagrees with the Muslim scholar, he does so in a careful, discrete, and humble manner, showing that the point in hand is his interpretation of Ramadan's thinking.
Ramadan wishes to establish an Islamic theology that distinguishes between the universal and the particular. The universal injunctions of Islam usually revolve around God and human duties to God, whereas cultural issues relate more to the particular, and can change. Baum explains Ramadan's belief that individual Muslims not be allowed to interpret the Quran themselves, in contrast to Protestants, who have always been invited to read and interpret the Bible for themselves.
The Islamic theologian, now based partly at Oxford University, believes that Islamic scholars alone must interpret the Quran, as he follows the footsteps of the nineteenth-century Islamic reformer al-Afghani. Baum is equally clear and patient in explaining how and why Ramadan desires to respect and keep sharia law as the basis of Islamic society. This is not the harsh law the media portrays; Ramadan calls for an Islamic law that reflects God's desire to help people live good, holy lives.
Baum unearths the basic reading that Ramadan and similar Islamic reformers do of the Quran, showing how it parallels the reading of the Bible by some Christian Churches, including Catholics: “The reformist approach, he [Ramadan] explains, reads the Quran by taking into account the context of the verses and the intention implicit in them.”
Ramadan and the reform tradition he follows is actually a conservative movement because it demands that Muslims follow the interpretations of Islamic scholars. Again, Baum walks a theological tightrope to show that it is not fundamentalist interpretation because it seeks the living force of God that created the Quran and the human quest for God. It does not take a fundamentalist legal view of the Quran, in the style of the Taliban or Saudi Wahabi theologians, but believes that Muslims must follow the divine spirit of the Quran and Islam. Baum notes: “Ramadan as a Salafi reformist wants Muslims to transcend the regulations of the Islamic schools of law 'to rediscover the pristine energy of an unmediated reading of the Quran.'”
Muslims must closely follow the core inspiration of Islam, but because it is a universal religion for people of all times and places, cultural and other aspects of the religion can and sometimes must change, including shariah's calls for corporal and capital punishment. This allows his co-religionists to remain fully Muslim yet fully Western; in Ramadan's view, Western Muslims must be full citizens who participate in the political and cultural life of their societies. Rather than isolating themselves, they must use their civic participation as a means to witness their faith to the non-Muslim cultures.
Throughout these discussions, according to Baum, Ramadan remains steadfast in his desire that people follow the Quran. Muslims can reach out to secular, Western societies because Muhammad had relations “of trust and competence” with polytheists and other non-Muslims. Western Muslims should, like Catholics and Jews in these societies, have a dialogical relationship with these societies, avoiding assimilation while participating in civic and cultural life.
The Theology of Tariq Ramadan offers an important step forwards in inter-religious dialogue, an imperative because of the loud voices describing a clash of civilization. Baum hardly sees such a clash, and finds much in common between Ramadan's style of conservative, traditionalist Muslim reform, and the Catholic Church's long, often contentious and painful dialogue with modern, secular liberal societies.
Baum writes from the left-wing, feminist side of the Church that came out swinging from Vatican II, calling for revolutionary sexual moral change, married priests, female ordination, and liberation- and feminist-theology. In The Theology of Tariq Ramadan, at times he risks turning Ramadan into a Muslim version of himself and the Vatican II left-wing. Even with this weakness, the wide-ranging discussion, which refers to many other important Muslim thinkers such as Fethullah Gulen, is well worth the read, and can serve as a Catholic introduction to some currents of contemporary Islamic theology, and their relationship to Catholic thinking.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis
By Philip Jenkins, USD 28.00, hardcover 340 pages, Oxford University Press.
Bucking the trend, Philip Jenkins sees a positive future for Christian Europe: “Nothing drives activists and reformers more powerfully than the sense that their faith is about to perish in their homelands and that they urgently need to make up these losses farther afield, whether overseas or among the previously neglected lost sheep at home.”
Jenkins places his optimism in the very core of Christianity's nature: “Death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion's structure and development.”
The opening chapters counter the media's announcements of the supposed death of European Christianity. Catholic vitality exists in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere through movements like Sant-Egidio and Focolore, which are lay-inspired, dynamic, and as intense as American-style Pentecostalism. According to Jenkins, these Catholic communities can potentially live out Pope Benedict XVI's call for the Church to become a “creative minority” in Europe.
God's Continent also chronicles how Christian immigrants to Europe parallel Muslim newcomers in tending to follow their practices just as intensely or more so in their new land than back in Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe. African charismatic Christians all over Europe are building a vast network of communities intent on maintaining the religious fervor of their own people in their new European milieu. Charismatic leaders are working hard, “day and night” in the words of one pastor, to return the missionary debt to Europe by resurrecting European Christianity.
Yet the author spends a great deal of time discussing Islam, and precisely why it is not on the verge of taking over Europe. He uses countless demographic charts and tables to show how, for instance, the birth rate of Muslims, famously exaggerated, is not only comparable to Western countries among European Muslims, but also in Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and, most surprisingly, Iran. This drop has been very recent—since the turn of the millennium—and very precipitous. Even Egypt's birthrate is well under 3.0 per woman.
While Westerners only seem to take note of the youthful character of the population of Muslim countries, Jenkins argues here as elsewhere that this is due more to the fact that these populations are one or two generations behind Western peoples in terms of secularization than to an effort to out-birth the West. Aside from Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a few other places, the Muslim baby boom has pretty much ended, especially as Muslim women become increasingly educated.
God's Continent also parallels the hysteria over Islam in Europe today with the hysteria one hundred years ago among American Protestants who feared that “backward” Catholics with their “superstitious beliefs,” high birth-rate, zealous community, and adherence to authority were threatening the very democracy and individualism of the country. The Protestant mainstream eventually judged Catholics to be as American as everyone else, and Catholics have tended to adopt individualism and the separation of church and state just as eagerly as the wider culture.
Jenkins' warnings, though, are well-grounded and reflect the need for action in somehow making young Muslims feel that they are a greater fabric of European society: “[I]n prosperous Europe, we find a cultish perversion of religion in which the bombings and beheadings almost become the central tenets of practice. In Europe too, unlike north Africa or south Asia, young enthusiasts are not subject to the very powerful constraints of traditional values and social structures, the iron laws of village and clan that mandate strict customary limits to the use of violence and disorder. Older Muslims complain of losing their children to militant recruiters.” (161)
The optimism of God's Continent comes, therefore, with a few warnings.
Bucking the trend, Philip Jenkins sees a positive future for Christian Europe: “Nothing drives activists and reformers more powerfully than the sense that their faith is about to perish in their homelands and that they urgently need to make up these losses farther afield, whether overseas or among the previously neglected lost sheep at home.”
Jenkins places his optimism in the very core of Christianity's nature: “Death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion's structure and development.”
The opening chapters counter the media's announcements of the supposed death of European Christianity. Catholic vitality exists in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere through movements like Sant-Egidio and Focolore, which are lay-inspired, dynamic, and as intense as American-style Pentecostalism. According to Jenkins, these Catholic communities can potentially live out Pope Benedict XVI's call for the Church to become a “creative minority” in Europe.
God's Continent also chronicles how Christian immigrants to Europe parallel Muslim newcomers in tending to follow their practices just as intensely or more so in their new land than back in Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe. African charismatic Christians all over Europe are building a vast network of communities intent on maintaining the religious fervor of their own people in their new European milieu. Charismatic leaders are working hard, “day and night” in the words of one pastor, to return the missionary debt to Europe by resurrecting European Christianity.
Yet the author spends a great deal of time discussing Islam, and precisely why it is not on the verge of taking over Europe. He uses countless demographic charts and tables to show how, for instance, the birth rate of Muslims, famously exaggerated, is not only comparable to Western countries among European Muslims, but also in Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and, most surprisingly, Iran. This drop has been very recent—since the turn of the millennium—and very precipitous. Even Egypt's birthrate is well under 3.0 per woman.
While Westerners only seem to take note of the youthful character of the population of Muslim countries, Jenkins argues here as elsewhere that this is due more to the fact that these populations are one or two generations behind Western peoples in terms of secularization than to an effort to out-birth the West. Aside from Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a few other places, the Muslim baby boom has pretty much ended, especially as Muslim women become increasingly educated.
God's Continent also parallels the hysteria over Islam in Europe today with the hysteria one hundred years ago among American Protestants who feared that “backward” Catholics with their “superstitious beliefs,” high birth-rate, zealous community, and adherence to authority were threatening the very democracy and individualism of the country. The Protestant mainstream eventually judged Catholics to be as American as everyone else, and Catholics have tended to adopt individualism and the separation of church and state just as eagerly as the wider culture.
Jenkins' warnings, though, are well-grounded and reflect the need for action in somehow making young Muslims feel that they are a greater fabric of European society: “[I]n prosperous Europe, we find a cultish perversion of religion in which the bombings and beheadings almost become the central tenets of practice. In Europe too, unlike north Africa or south Asia, young enthusiasts are not subject to the very powerful constraints of traditional values and social structures, the iron laws of village and clan that mandate strict customary limits to the use of violence and disorder. Older Muslims complain of losing their children to militant recruiters.” (161)
The optimism of God's Continent comes, therefore, with a few warnings.
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, David Levering Lewis
$29.95, hardcover 476 pages, W.W. Norton.
In God's Crucible, Professor David Lewis demonstrates the close relationship between Europe and the Islamic world. Europe in particular defines itself to an important degree through its feelings about Muslims and their cultures and beliefs.
Europeans, especially the emperors and popes, learned to work together in reference to the Muslim threat. The crowning of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 exemplifies this. Popes and emperors also collaborated against wandering, violent Germanic tribes such as the Lombards. The papacy's continued relevance, if not its continued existence, was by no means always assured.
In outlining the details of countless battles between empires or civil wars, God's Crucible takes us on a Lord of the Rings view of history -- men playing the game of power where, as Lewis writes, “peace is war by other means.” Rarely did a year go by without major conflagration, and when peace did break out, it only assured that, with the stockpiling of weapons and food for the next one, that next one would be more terrifying than ever.
As is so often the case nowadays, Lewis adopts a Friedrich Nietzsche view of religion, characterizing it, like war, as simply a power game. He regards councils, popes, preachers, and other holy people as simply players in the grand game rather than speakers of the truth. Lewis is a man spellbound by the Enlightenment and its unending cynicism, with a non-believer's skepticism in everything religious or truthful.
Having said that, his skepticism and materialism push him to do us the service of correcting the historical record, such as regards the belief that Arab Muslims spread their religion with the sword and their overwhelming numbers: “Long the conventional explanation, the human tidal-wave theory was abandoned in the early years of the last century, however, as new scholarship revealed the first Arab armies to have been dismayingly small – a few thousand at most to conquer Graeco-Roman Syria and fewer than twelve thousand, probably, to occupy Iran.”
Lewis' next words give a warning to current inhabitants of Western civilization: We have been fighting unending culture wars just as the early medieval Christian majority in the soon-to-be Muslim world had engaged in exhausting, demoralizing theological infighting for centuries. They often squabbled over the understanding of the nature of Christ's divine and human natures. The upshot of that early medieval squabbling? “Muslims also won because their enemies had exhausted themselves.”
Lewis does a particularly good job at showing how Europe became, in reaction to Islamic jihad, united through a common mythology. The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French poem about a Christian military tragedy in Muslim Spain, was used by medieval Christendom as a template for thinking about the heroic valor of Christian knights – and Christian Europe – in their “epic struggle” against Muslims.
Though Catholic readers should be wary of Lewis' coldness towards his own Western heritage and towards Christianity, which he all-too-often assumes to be uniformly violent and degrading, the author's powerful, succinct, and poetic writing powerfully sums up his discussions, as in the following:
“Arab knowledge in politics, economics, and technology sharpened by the close of the seventh century to an edge as fine as tempered steel.”
The author replaces religion as the bottom line of history with economics, emphasizing the commerce and cultural wealth that empires and open trade routes generated for multiple nations existing together across thousands of miles of steppes or mountain ranges and vast seas:
“If the road to conversion had been well-trafficked from the beginning of the jihad, by the first decade of the eighth century the road to Islam had become a conveyor belt [of trade] at full throttle.”
Lewis' wide-ranging, intuitive understanding of Western and Islamic history make God's Crucible a great adventure for the patient reader. It is well worth the few annoyances of his academic ideology and his sometimes overly descriptive style.
In God's Crucible, Professor David Lewis demonstrates the close relationship between Europe and the Islamic world. Europe in particular defines itself to an important degree through its feelings about Muslims and their cultures and beliefs.
Europeans, especially the emperors and popes, learned to work together in reference to the Muslim threat. The crowning of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 exemplifies this. Popes and emperors also collaborated against wandering, violent Germanic tribes such as the Lombards. The papacy's continued relevance, if not its continued existence, was by no means always assured.
In outlining the details of countless battles between empires or civil wars, God's Crucible takes us on a Lord of the Rings view of history -- men playing the game of power where, as Lewis writes, “peace is war by other means.” Rarely did a year go by without major conflagration, and when peace did break out, it only assured that, with the stockpiling of weapons and food for the next one, that next one would be more terrifying than ever.
As is so often the case nowadays, Lewis adopts a Friedrich Nietzsche view of religion, characterizing it, like war, as simply a power game. He regards councils, popes, preachers, and other holy people as simply players in the grand game rather than speakers of the truth. Lewis is a man spellbound by the Enlightenment and its unending cynicism, with a non-believer's skepticism in everything religious or truthful.
Having said that, his skepticism and materialism push him to do us the service of correcting the historical record, such as regards the belief that Arab Muslims spread their religion with the sword and their overwhelming numbers: “Long the conventional explanation, the human tidal-wave theory was abandoned in the early years of the last century, however, as new scholarship revealed the first Arab armies to have been dismayingly small – a few thousand at most to conquer Graeco-Roman Syria and fewer than twelve thousand, probably, to occupy Iran.”
Lewis' next words give a warning to current inhabitants of Western civilization: We have been fighting unending culture wars just as the early medieval Christian majority in the soon-to-be Muslim world had engaged in exhausting, demoralizing theological infighting for centuries. They often squabbled over the understanding of the nature of Christ's divine and human natures. The upshot of that early medieval squabbling? “Muslims also won because their enemies had exhausted themselves.”
Lewis does a particularly good job at showing how Europe became, in reaction to Islamic jihad, united through a common mythology. The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French poem about a Christian military tragedy in Muslim Spain, was used by medieval Christendom as a template for thinking about the heroic valor of Christian knights – and Christian Europe – in their “epic struggle” against Muslims.
Though Catholic readers should be wary of Lewis' coldness towards his own Western heritage and towards Christianity, which he all-too-often assumes to be uniformly violent and degrading, the author's powerful, succinct, and poetic writing powerfully sums up his discussions, as in the following:
“Arab knowledge in politics, economics, and technology sharpened by the close of the seventh century to an edge as fine as tempered steel.”
The author replaces religion as the bottom line of history with economics, emphasizing the commerce and cultural wealth that empires and open trade routes generated for multiple nations existing together across thousands of miles of steppes or mountain ranges and vast seas:
“If the road to conversion had been well-trafficked from the beginning of the jihad, by the first decade of the eighth century the road to Islam had become a conveyor belt [of trade] at full throttle.”
Lewis' wide-ranging, intuitive understanding of Western and Islamic history make God's Crucible a great adventure for the patient reader. It is well worth the few annoyances of his academic ideology and his sometimes overly descriptive style.
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