Victory in the religious wars of
the 17th century went to the author of learned
theological texts, Cardinal Richelieu, and a
self-immolating mystic, Joseph du Tremblay, the de facto
chief of the
French state and his principal
diplomat and spy. By contrast, American strategists are
children of the Enlightenment, for whom religion at best
is a convenient civic myth (Leo Strauss), or an outmoded
ideology to be manipulated.
One pores
through American government studies on Islam without
finding as much as a sentence on the question: what is
the spiritual experience of believing Muslims? Muslims
fly airplanes into skyscrapers, or walk into
supermarkets with bomb belts, or pull Kalashnikovs from
under their wares in the Sadr City bazaar because the
West confronts them with an existential threat. Of what
does this existential threat consist? The Islamic
specialists at American think-tanks stand baffled before
such fervor. They are ideologues trained in analyzing
structures of belief. But the vast majority of Muslims
have no interest in ideology in the sense that the
modern West understands the term. Religion for them is
an existential matter, of one substance with the
smallest details of their daily lives. Secular Americans
press their noses against the window-glass, gazing at
Islam from the outside in.
A horrible example is
Cheryl Bernard's 2003 Rand Corporation study, entitled
"Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources,
Strategies". (1). Professor Bernard provides cheerful
advice on how to manage the different strains of Islam,
which she chops up into "Traditionalists",
"Fundamentalists", "Modernists", and "Secularists".
According to Bernard, "Fundamentalists reject democratic
values and contemporary Western culture. They want an
authoritarian, puritanical state that will implement
their extreme view of Islamic law and morality. They are
willing to use innovation and modern technology to
achieve that goal. Traditionalists want a conservative
society. They are suspicious of modernity, innovation,
and change. Modernists want the Islamic world to become
part of global modernity. They want to modernize and
reform Islam to bring it into line with the age.
Secularists want the Islamic world to accept a division
of church and state in the manner of Western industrial
democracies, with religion relegated to the private
sphere."
Her formula is: 1) "Support the
Modernists first." 2) "Support the Traditionalists
against the Fundamentalists." 3) "Confront and oppose
the Fundamentalists." 4) "Selectively support
Secularists."
Saddam Hussein (unmentioned in
Bernard's document) was a Modernist, but never mind
that. Bernard assumes that the Traditionalists, who
maintain their own websites, are sufficiently unfamiliar
with Google so as not to notice that America supports
their enemies the Modernists, let alone the Secularists.
With Bernard's game plan in mind, consider the case
of "Traditionalist" Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, Washington's hope for a peaceful transition
to a democratic Iraqi state. Sistani's theological
writing can be found categorized by subject on the
Internet. (2).
The ayatollah's concerns hardly
overlap with those of the American occupation officials
whom he refuses to address directly. On the contrary,
what preoccupies him are the minutest issues of daily
existence, most of all the question of ritual purity
within traditional society.
For Sistani,
"theology" is an entirely different topic than it is to
modern Christians or Jews, for whom theology addresses
man's relation to God, and their dialogue in the form of
prayer. That is why the experience of prayer is the
subject of endless elaboration by Christian and Jewish
theologians. Here is the Vatican's chief theologian,
Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, in the first chapter of
Feast of Faith:
"The basic reason why
man can speak with God arises from the fact that God
himself is speech, word ... Through the Spirit of
Christ, who is the Spirit of God, we can share in the
human nature of Jesus Christ; and in sharing in his
dialogue with God, we can share in the dialogue with
God. This is prayer, which becomes a real exchange
between God and man ... Christian prayer is addressed
to a God who hears and answers ... Here the gift of
God promised unconditionally to those who ask is joy,
that 'full' joy which is the expression and the
presence of a love which has become 'full'. The
reality is the same in each case. Prayer, because of
the transformation of being which it involves, means
growing more and more into identity with the
pneuma of Jesus, the Spirit of God (becoming
an "anima ecclesiastica
"); borne along
by the very breath of his love, we have a joy which
cannot be taken from us."
As
Ratzinger observes, Christian (as well as Jewish) prayer
is a dialogue among lovers. "The soul prayers in the
words of the Psalms: let not my prayer and your love
depart from me (Psalm 66:20). "It prays to be able to
pray - and this is already given to the soul in the
assurance of Divine Love," wrote the Jewish theologian
Franz Rosenzweig, believing that Jews and Christians are
infatuated with God, and prayer is their opportunity to
exchange lovers' intimacies. They never tire of talking
about talking to their beloved, that is, about the
nature of prayer. One might compare Ratzinger's essay to
Man in Search of God by Abraham Joshua Heschel,
the best-read Jewish theologian of the postwar period.
Sistani's interest in prayer is an entirely
different matter. In all the mass of his writings
available on the Internet, he has nothing more to say
about the content of prayer than the following:
"Prayer is an audience with the Creator,
convened at prescribed daily times. Allah has outlined
the times at which prayers are said and the manner
which they must be conducted. During this audience you
be fully absorbed in the experience. You talk to Him
and invoke His Mercy. You come out of this encounter
with clear conscience and serene heart. It is quite
natural that you may feel the presence of Allah while
you say your prayer. Above all, prayer is a
manifestation of inner feeling that we all belong to
Allah, the Most High, who has overall control over
everything. And when you utter the phrase, 'Allahu
Akbar' at the start of every prayer, all material
things should become insignificant because you are in
the presence of the Lord of the universe who controls
every aspect of it. He is greater than everything. As
you recite the chapter of 'al-Fatiha', you say, 'You
do we worship, and You do we ask for help'. Thus, you
rid yourself of dependency on any mortal. With that
exquisite feeling of submission to Him, you enrich
your spirit five times a day."
Less important than the differences in content -
"audience" rather than "dialogue", "submission" rather than
"love" - is the difference in emphasis. With this perfunctory
preface, Sistani begins a lengthy treatise on when,
where, with what clothing, and in what bodily positions
prayers may be said. His concern is not the spiritual
experience of prayer, but establishing communal norms
for prayer. Where the Christians and Jews gush with
loquacity on the subject, Muslims have remarkably little
to say about the experience of prayer. Reading through
Muslim sources, I am at loss to find anything remotely
resembling Ratzinger's quite typical discourse on
prayer.
In fact, virtually all of Sistani's
writings address communal norms for behavior, including
the most intimate. Ritual impurity (janabat) is a
central concern, especially in the case of sexual
relations. He writes, for example:
"If a person has sexual intercourse with a
woman and the male organ enters either of the private
parts of the woman up to the point of circumcision or
more, both of them enter janabat, regardless of
whether they are adults or minors and whether
ejaculation takes place or not.
"If a person
doubts whether or not his penis penetrated up to the
point of circumcision, ghusl [bathing] will not
become obligatory on him.
"If (God forbid!) a
person has sexual intercourse with an animal and
ejaculates, ghusl alone will be sufficient for
him, and if he does not ejaculate and he was with
wudhu [ritual ablution] at the time of
committing the unnatural act, even then ghusl
will be sufficient for him. However, if he was not
with wudhu at that time, the obligatory
precaution is that he should do ghusl and also
perform wudhu. And the same orders apply if one
commits sodomy.
"If movement of seminal fluid
is felt but not emitted, or if a person doubts whether
or not semen has been ejaculated, ghusl will
not be obligatory upon him.
"It is obligatory
to conceal one's private parts in the toilet and at
all times from adult persons, even if they are one's
near relatives (like mother, sister etc.)
"It
is not necessary for a person to conceal the private
parts with any definite thing, it is sufficient, if,
for example, he conceals them with his hand.
"While using the toilet for relieving oneself,
the front or the back part of one's body should not
face the holy Ka'bah [shrine in the Great Mosque,
Mecca.]
"If a person sits in the toilet with
the front part of his body or the back facing the
Qibla [direction towards the Ka'bah] , but turns the
private parts away from that direction, it will not be
enough. Similarly, when the front part of the body or
the back does not face Qibla, as a precaution, he
should not allow the private parts to face that
direction.
"In the following three cases, the
anus can be made pak [clean] with water alone:
If another najasat [uncleanliness], like
blood, appears along with the faeces.
If an external najasat reaches the anus.
If more than usual najasat spreads around
the anus.
"In the cases other than those
mentioned above, the anus can be made pak
either by water or by using cloth, or stone etc,
although it is always better to wash it with water.
"If the anus is washed with water, one should
ensure that no trace of faeces is left on it. However,
there is no harm if color and smell remain. And if it
is washed thoroughly in the first instance, leaving no
particle of stool, then it is not necessary to wash it
again."
In calling attention to these portions of
Sistani's theology I do not mean to deprecate him. On
the contrary, he addresses the inhabitants of
traditional society for whom spiritual experience means
submission, that is, submission to communal norms,
whence the individual derives a lasting sense of
identity. In the most intimate details of daily life,
culture and religion become inseparable. For traditional
society it is the durability of communal norms that
lends a sense of immortality to the individual, a life
beyond mere physical existence. That is why prayer in
the Judeo-Christian sense, the lovers' exchange between
God and the individual soul, does not come into
consideration within Muslim theology. Allah is the
all-powerful sovereign of the world before whom the
individual dissolves; the individual's submission to the
ummah, the community of Islam, is a spiritual
experience of an entirely different order.
To this the Americans can only come
as destroyers, not saviors. America by its nature
disrupts traditional order. It is the usurper of the Old
World, the agency of creative destruction, the Spirit
that Denies, to whom "everything that arises goes
rightly to its ruin" (Goethe) - in short, the Great
Satan. America is the existential threat to Islam.
**************************
The above
considerations should serve as a response to a Muslim
reader of Asia Times Online who contributed the
delicious parody below:
Dear Spengler, I am Spengler writing to
myself. Rereading some of my previous writings have
awakened an important glitch in my learning process. I
am writing this note to myself so that I won't forget
it by the time I wake up tomorrow morning. Why do I
claim to know much about Islam by making sweeping
erroneous comments like, "The God of Mohammed is a
creator who well might not have bothered to create. He
displays his power like an Oriental potentate who
rules by violence, not by acting according to
necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the
law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily,"
[from my article You love life,
we love death], or "Not so Allah, the beneficent,
the merciful. For Islam, the notion that man's
failings more powerfully awake God's love than man's
merits is an absurd, indeed an impossible thought.
Allah has pity upon human weaknesses, but the idea
that he loves weakness more than strength is a form of
divine humility that is foreign to the God of
Mohammed," wrote the Jewish theologian Franz
Rosenzweig.
I seem to read only non-Muslim
writers to forge my knowledge of Islam (who may have
tremendous biases against Islam. Why would I ask
someone who has never swum, but analyzed swimming with
consummate abilities, watched swimmers swim, talked to
many of them, etc etc - about how swimming is as an
experience?). What should I do?
Dear concerned
Spengler, As a first rule, you should pick up
several translations of the Koran, some done by
Muslims, some done by non-Muslims, and go from there.
You can also read Muslim scholars who can communicate
with the West in its own discourses, like S H Nasr or
Guy Eaton.
By no means am I biased against
Islam; I go directly to the most reputable Islamic
sources. Rosenzweig's method, though, appeals to me.
What interests Rosenzweig is not religious apologetics,
but the experience of the individual believer in the
daily practice of religion. One can find quotes from the
Koran or the Hadith supporting any position one cares to
support, but the obvious remains the obvious. Islam on
the one hand, and Christianity and Judaism on the other,
speak to different people about different things.
French state and his principal
diplomat and spy. By contrast, American strategists are
children of the Enlightenment, for whom religion at best
is a convenient civic myth (Leo Strauss), or an outmoded
ideology to be manipulated. 
