Page 2 of 2 The faith that dare not
speak its
name By Spengler
Islam as
pagan, and Allah as an apotheosized despot. He
began, that is, with a general characterization of
pagan society, that is, society in the absence of
God's self-revelation through love, and then
considered Islam as a specific case of a paganism
that parodies the outward form of revealed
religion. God's self-revelation as an act of love
first makes possible human individuality: the
individual human is an individual
precisely
because he is loved.
Berman seems shocked to discover that
radical Islam promotes a culture of death. He
writes:
There is nothing especially novel or
bizarre in noticing that al-Banna displayed an
eager interest in the esthetic cult of death.
The classic history of the Muslim Brotherhood,
The Society of the Muslim Brothers by
Richard P Mitchell, which appeared in 1969, was
quite lucid on this topic even then.
Al-Banna came up with a double phrase
about the importance of death as a goal of jihad
- "the art of death" (fann al-mawt) and
"death is art" (al-mawt fann). This
phrase became, in Mitchell's description, a
famous part of al-Banna's legacy.
Stringing together his own paraphrases
with al-Banna's words, Mitchell wrote: "The
Koran has commanded people to love death more
than life" (which, I might add, is a phrase that
we have heard more than once in terrorist
statements during the last few years, for
instance in the videotape that was made by the
Islamist group that attacked Madrid in 2004).
And al-Banna continued, in Mitchell's
presentation: "Unless the philosophy of the
Koran on death replaces the love of life which
has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught.
Victory can only come with the mastery of the
art of death."
Paganism everywhere and
always is a culture of death, for the simple
reason that pagans know that their time on Earth
is limited. Again, Rosenzweig:
The peoples of the world foresee a
time when their land with its rivers and
mountains still lies under heaven as it does
today, but other people dwell there; when their
language is entombed in books, and their laws
and customs have lost their living
power.
And further:
War as it was known to the peoples
of antiquity was in general only one of the
natural expressions of life, and presented no
fundamental complications. War meant that a
people staked its life, for the sake of its
life. A people that marched to war took upon
itself the danger of its own death. That
mattered little as long as the peoples regarded
themselves as mortal. [4]
Extinction
is the eventual fate of the Gentiles, which they
postpone by perpetual war in defense of their
land:
[Unlike the Jews] the peoples of the
earth cannot be satisfied by the affinity of
blood; they drive their roots into the night of
the earth, itself dead but also life-giving, and
take from the permanence of the earth their own
permanence.
Their will towards eternity
clings to the earth and its dominion, to
territory. The blood of their sons flows upon
the soil of their homeland; for they do not
trust to the living community of blood-relation,
were it not anchored in the steady ground of the
earth. The earth nourishes, but it also binds,
and where a people loves the soil of its
homeland more than its own life, it remains
subject to the danger - and this danger hangs
over every people of the world - that even if
that love saves the soil of the homeland from
the enemy nine times, and with the soil also
saves the life of the people, nonetheless the
10th time the soil will be more loved than life,
and the life of the people will be spilled out
upon it. [5]
Pagans fight to the
death for their land and culture, knowing that
each fight might be the last, and one fight
inevitably must be; for that reason all pagan
culture exalts death. Parenthetically Nicholas
Wade, in his recent book Before the Dawn,
cites new research estimating a 40% attrition rate
due to war of men in primitive society.
When Western political scientists speak of
"totalitarianism", they refer to "modern regimes
in which the state regulates nearly every aspect
of public and private behavior" (Wikipedia).
Rosenzweig explains something deeper: the
individual has no identity separate from the group
and therefore cannot act in opposition to it.
Arthur Koestler's broken protagonist cannot help
but admit absurdly false charges at his show
trial; Socrates cannot help but drink the hemlock;
the Germans cannot help but follow Adolf Hitler's
orders. Because the individual is merely an
instrument of the totality, not an individual,
there is no capacity for doubt.
And that
is precisely what Professor Ramadan means when he
says that there is no possibility of doubt in
Islam. Again, here is Berman:
In Ramadan's view, ancient Greek
influences on Islam have never allowed for the
kind of tension or difference between the sacred
and the non-sacred that exists in Western
thought. The ancient Greek influences on Islam
have never allowed for a Promethean spirit of
rebellion, and have never allowed for a sense of
the tragic. That is because in Islam, as per
Ramadan (and here he invokes the medieval
philosopher Ibn Taymiyya), the zone of the
sacred contains only a single concept, which is
tawhid, or the oneness of God.
Tawhid leaves no room for tensions,
rebellions, or doubts. A deep and tragic sense
of doubt is not even a conceptual possibility.
[Ian] Buruma in the [New York] Times
Magazine pursued this philosophical matter
sufficiently at least to ask Ramadan if he has
"ever experienced any doubts himself". Ramadan
replied: "Doubts about God, no." And Buruma
seems not to have realized that, in responding
with this easy certainty, Ramadan was surely
offering more than a self-confident
autobiographical observation. Doubt, in
Ramadan's interpretation, can exist only within
the limits allowed by tawhid - meaning
that, for a proper Muslim, doubts about God are
literally inconceivable. A Muslim, in Ramadan's
formulation, may forget, but a Muslim cannot
doubt.
This idea of oneness is an
empty construct, a philosophical soap bubble that
Western philosophers have popped as a preliminary
exercise since the days of Parmenides. To pose
unity is also to pose multiplicity, as we know
from Plato's Parmenides dialogue, Immanuel Kant's
antinomies, and a great deal in between and since.
As a "philosopher" Ramadan would not pass
a freshman course. "Oneness" in the sense of
tawhid derives from the all-consuming
tyranny of traditional society. Ghazali's use of
the term is quite different from the Jewish motto,
"YHWH is echad," which means (as Michael
Wyschogrod demonstrates clearly) "unique" rather
than "one" in the Parmenidean philosophical sense.
For the Judeo-Christian god to self-reveal through
love, he must become differentiated, either
through YHWH's anthropomorphic love for Abraham,
or through the Christian Trinity in which God
becomes Man.
If we ignore Ramadan's
trivial philosophizing, we observe immediately
that tawhid to Ramadan (and to normative
Islam since no later than the 11th century) means
the crushing of individual identity through the
absolute demands of pagan society. For a vivid
view of this from the inside of Islam, I recommend
the works of the Arab world's leading poet,
Adonis, as I reported in a May 8 essay on his
work. [6] Here, once again, is what Adonis said
about oneness in a television interview this year:
I believe it has to do with the
concept of "oneness", which is reflected - in
practical or political terms - in the concept of
the hero, the savior, or the leader. This
concept offers an inner sense of security to
people who are afraid of freedom. Some human
beings are afraid of freedom.
Interviewer: Because it is
synonymous with anarchy?
Adonis: No, because being
free is a great burden. It is by no means easy.
Interviewer: You've got to
have a boss ...
Adonis:
When you are free, you have to face reality, the
world in its entirety. You have to deal with the
world's problems, with everything ...
Interviewer: With all the
issues ...
Adonis: On the
other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content
and not have to deal with anything. Just as
Allah solves all our problems, the dictator will
solve all our problems.
Precisely what
relationship Professor Ramadan might have to
Islamist terrorism, I will leave the experts to
argue out. But his relationship to 20th-century
neo-paganism is unambiguous: he preaches a much
older form of paganism, next to which Europe's
20th-century totalitarians were upstarts.
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