Regarding the cuisine of the southeastern
United States, a local adage warns: "More
important than what it is, is what it was."
That applies to a stew that might include
marsupials, but not to religion.
Critics
of Islam quote the saber-rattling suras of the
Koran and recount the history of Muslim violence,
while apologists retort with peaceful-sounding
suras and cite Christian misbehavior. Pope
Benedict XVI's September 12 speech provoked a
fruitless debate over the remarks of a
14th-century Byzantine emperor about the
evils that Mohammed had
brought to the world. Nothing ever will
be learned, much less proved,
by this tedious and sophomoric exercise. Gathering
dust half-read on my desk are a number of books
recounting the supposed evils of Islam - by Ba'at
Yeor, Oriana Fallaci, Serge Trifkovic, and many
others. There is not a speck of theological
insight in the stack of them.
Western
policy toward the Muslim world appears stupid and
clumsy because its theological foundations are
flawed. It is not what it is, nor what it
was, but rather what it does that
defines a religion: How does a faith address the
paramount concern of human mortality, and what
action does it require of its adherents? I
addressed these issues under the title Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and
eternal life (September 19), explaining
that jihad does for Muslims precisely what
Communion does for Christians. It is not a
doctrine but a sacrament, that is, a holy act that
transforms the actor.
Three years ago I
reviewed in this space the only recent book on
Islam that explained jihad within the religious
life of the Muslim faith community, a collection
of writings by the Jewish theologian Franz
Rosenzweig, who died in 1929. [1] It is available
only in German. Rosenzweig's understanding of
Islam, to be sure, can be culled from his
English-language writings, but a new English
translation of his principal work last year was
ignored entirely. [2]
Oddly, the US left
and the neo-conservative right agree on method as
well as outcome, and produce quite similar drivel.
Professor Martha Nussbaum, a classicist, has
written a new book on Hindu religious violence, as
she wrote, "not only to present a case study in
the threat to democracy from religious tension,
not only to engage Americans in an informed
dialogue about India, but also to defuse the
inaccurate and unhelpful assumption that Islam is
a global monolith bent on violence". That is a
silly premise, for violence by other religious
groups does not bear upon the accusation that
Islam is inherently violent.
The
neo-conservative Max Boot, an enthusiast of
imperial small wars, wrote last week, "Religions
are not monolithic. They have no fixed, eternal
identity. Until the 18th century, Christianity was
a militant faith whose adherents did not hesitate
to kill 'heathens'. Throughout the Middle Ages,
Islamic states usually offered greater tolerance
to religious minorities and were more open to
secular learning than their Christian neighbors."
[3] Really? Is Boot talking about the Almohad
Dynasty that conquered Spain in 1148 and offered
the Jews conversion or death? Were the Almohads
"more open to secular learning" than the
contemporary Holy Roman emperor, Frederick II? The
fellow deserves a D-minus in a freshman history
course.
Theological illiteracy is epidemic
in the neo-conservative camp. The American
Enterprise Institute's Iran expert, former US
Central Intelligence Agency officer Reuel Marc
Gerecht, thinks that "Islam is akin to biblical
Judaism in accentuating the unnuanced,
transcendent awe of God". Gerecht is ge-wrong.
Worst of all is Norman Podhoretz of Commentary
magazine, who insists that Islam takes even a
stricter approach to idolatry than Judaism. [4]
These are the blunders of secular intellectuals
who approach religion from the outside. Because
the neo-conservatives propose to democratize the
Middle East, they also must insist that Islam can
be twisted into the pretzel that they prefer.
From the left, Professor Juan Cole, a
prominent Muslim apologist, summarized the problem
as follows: "The problem with the pope's
Regensburg lecture is that it laid out three
intellectual traditions as unchanging,
undifferentiated essences and then contrasted them
with one another, to the edification of his own
position. There aren't any essences." [5]
Islam, in Cole's post-modern view of
things, has no "essence", and therefore means
whatever anyone wants it to mean. He is quite
right to object to the undergraduate exercise of
cataloguing objectionable aspects of Islam and
presenting them as an "essence", but to say that
there "are no essences" is the same as saying that
"there is no Professor Juan Cole". Such are the
absurdities of the post-modern left.
So
much for the Americans of the left and the right:
they do not know, and they cannot learn. Irving
Kristol, the "godfather of neo-conservatism", once
told me that he had wanted to learn German so that
he might read Rosenzweig. If Kristol, the best
(and perhaps the only really keen) mind among the
neo-conservatives, had done so, we all might have
been spared a great deal of embarrassment. As
things stand, the United States is condemned to
trample about the Middle East until sufficient
grief and loss wake them up. In all fairness to
the Americans, it took World War I to awaken Karl
Barth from the complacency of liberal
Protestantism, or to shake Franz Rosenzweig out of
the coma of Hegelian philosophy.
Pope
Benedict XVI is a man of vast erudition and
insight, but his September 12 speech fell far
short of its purpose. Since then the pope has
offered so many qualifications that it is
difficult to know quite what he intended. It was
an act of great personal and intellectual courage
on the pope's part to state that Islam violates
reason. "In the beginning was the Logos,"
the pope cited John 1:1, translating logos
as "reason". But why was there a beginning at all?
That is, why did God bother to create the world?
The mainstream Islamic answer, going back to the
11th-century sage Muhammed al-Ghazali, is that
Allah bloody well felt like it. He did not have
to, and might as well not have. As Benedict
observed, Allah is "absolutely transcendent", that
is, absolutely capricious. It is this arbitrary
and capricious God, the pope implied, who demands
conversion by threat of violence.
At
Regensburg Benedict sought to identify reason in
Greek philosophy with the god of the Old
Testament: "The mysterious name of God, revealed
from the burning bush, a name which separates this
God from all other divinities with their many
names and simply declares 'I am,' already presents
a challenge to the notion of myth, to which
Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth
stands in close analogy."
But the god of
the Gospel of St John who "so loved the world that
he gave his only begotten son" is quite different
from Socrates' god. Although Socrates (in
Timaeus) has clever things to say about
how the world was created, he has little to
say about why it was created. Christianity
believes that God created the world in an act of
love; the Jewish sages (as Franz Rosenzweig noted)
debated whether God created the world out of
lovingkindness or righteousness. Muslims through
the ages have mocked the Judeo-Christian idea that
the Creator of the Universe has a special love for
the weak, the oppressed, the crippled, powerless:
Allah rewards those who do great deeds in his
name. He may have mercy on the miserable, but his
favorites are those who fight in his name. You
will find all of this in Rosenzweig.
In
this respect the Muslims are quite right: the
Christian idea in a fundamental respect is not a
reasonable one at all. In fact, the Muslim concept
of Allah is very close to the Greek notion of
divinity. The Greeks loved the beautiful and the
strong, and despised the weak and ugly. That was
as true for Socrates as for the most depraved and
effeminate Hellenistic tyrant. For all the wonders
of Greek thought, there is not a jot or tittle in
all the writings of the philosophers that suggests
the slightest degree of sympathy for the cripples,
prostitutes and publicans to whom Jesus
ministered. That is the great gulf fixed between
Islam on one hand, and Judaism and Christianity on
the other.
In the beginning, therefore,
was an act of love by God, an act that seems
ridiculous within the world view of the Greeks.
"In the beginning was the Logos," Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe argued, should be rendered,
"In the beginning was the Deed," the act of love.
Allah's aversion to the embarrassing pathos of the
Judeo-Christian god, who - incomprehensibly to
Muslims - suffers along with the least of his
creatures, resembles the god of the Greek
philosophers, the Prime Mover who himself cannot
be moved. It is easy to argue that Islamic
medieval philosophy resembles that of the Greeks
far more than its Christian counterpart.
The trouble is that Benedict is fighting a
two-front war, an exercise in which Germans
traditionally have done quite poorly. He wants to
oppose a reasoned sort of Christianity to the
irrationality of Islam. Benedict comes from a
country that was undone by a perverse sort of
voluntarism, namely the exaltation of the
individual will by the German neo-pagans. [6] The
notion that God began with an act of will, that
is, an act of love, makes the pope deeply
uncomfortable. In fact, he took a public swipe at
Goethe's rendering, "In the beginning was the
Deed," for just this reason.
In some ways
Goethe was a much better theologian than Benedict.
In another context I presented his Faust as
the modern Book of Job. [7] Benedict comes to the
Muslims attempting to argue philosophy and
doctrine, and the Muslim world responds with an
existential act: a jihad against the pope. Goethe
was right: in the beginning was the deed, the act
of love on the part of the Judeo-Christian god, as
opposed to Allah's act of caprice. The pope's
confusion and wrongfootedness during the past two
weeks, sadly, are the result of flawed theology.
He would do well to take a couple of days off with
a copy of Rosenzweig's The Star of
Redemption.
Only in the 19th century is there a
move away from it, because "metaphysics" seemed
so outdated. [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel now
tried to interpret music as just an expression
of the subject and of subjectivity. But whereas
Hegel still adhered to the fundamental idea of
reason as the starting point and destination of
the whole enterprise, a change of direction took
place with [Arthur] Schopenhauer that was to
have momentous consequences. For him, the world
is no longer grounded in reason but in "will and
idea" (Wille und Vorstellung). The will
precedes reason. And music is the primordial
expression of being human as such, the pure
expression of the will anterior to reason that
creates the world. Music should not, therefore,
be subjected to the word, and only in
exceptional cases should it have any connection
with the word. Since music is pure will, its
origin precedes that of reason. It takes us back
behind reason to the actual foundation of
reality. [Schopenhauer's view] is reminiscent of
Goethe's recasting of the prologue of St John:
no longer "In the beginning was the Word", but
now "In the beginning was the
Deed".
