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2 Hirsi Ali, atheism and
Islam By Spengler
attracted to the messianism of Karl
Marx. Marxist intellectuals found it easy to
convert to the so-called neo-Thomism colored by
the Enlightenment rationalism of Francisco Suarez.
Bolshevik brawlers in Germany in the 1930s often
crossed the line from Red to Brown. And Muslims
find it easier to be atheists than to be
Christians or Jews.
Allah, as I have
argued in this venue elsewhere, is a very different
sort
of god than YHWH and Jesus. As Benedict XVI
explained in his September 2006 Regensburg
address:
For Muslim teaching, God is
absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound
up with any of our categories, even that of
rationality. Here [Professor Theodore] Khoury
quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R
Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so
far as to state that God is not bound even by
his own word, and that "nothing would oblige him
to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will,
we would even have to practice"
idolatry.
What does it mean for God to
be "absolutely transcendent"? In the normative
doctrine of the 11th-century Muslim sage Abu Hamid
al-Ghazali, Allah does not limit himself by
ordering the world through natural law, for
natural laws would impinge on his absolute freedom
of action.
There are no intermediate
causes, in the sense of laws of nature. Mars
traverses an ellipse around the sun not because
God has instituted laws of motion that require
Mars to traverse an ellipse, but because Allah at
every instant directs the angular velocity of
Mars. Today, Allah happens to feel like pushing
Mars about in an ellipse; tomorrow he might just
as well do figure-eights.
Allah is
everywhere doing everything at all times. He sets
the spin on every electron, measures the jump of
every flea, the frequency of every sneeze. That
notion of a god who accepts no limitation, not
even the limit of laws of nature that he created,
characterizes mainstream Muslim thought since the
11th century. St Thomas Aquinas wrote of its
deficiency, drawing on the critique of the
12th-century Jewish theologian and philosopher
Moses Maimonides.
A century ago, the great
German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig
summarized the problem as follows (my
translation):
This has been the doctrine of the
ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. The whole
impact of divine creative power crashes into
every individual thing at every single moment.
It is not so much that every thing is "renewed"
at every moment; rather, it is "created" with
hide and hair. Nothing can save itself from
Allah's frightful, infinitesimally-split
providence. The idea of "renewal" of the world
[in Christian thought] maintains the connection
between the individual thing and the one
creation, and thereby with the unity of
existence, precisely because it comprehends it
within the whole, and thus grounds providence
within creation.
But this [Islamic]
interpretation of providence as constant
interference on the part of the creator destroys
any possibility of such a connection. In the
first case, Providence seen as the renewal of
the act of creation through events is the
fulfillment of what essentially is set into
creation; in this [Islamic] case, providence -
despite its intrinsic interference into creation
at every moment and in every case - is a
permanent competition between acts of creating
and the unity of creation, in fact, a
competition between God the Ruler of the World,
and God the Creator. It is magic, not a sign
made by God the World Ruler for God the Creator.
Despite its vehement and haughtily
carried-forward idea of the unity of God, Islam
slides into a monistic paganism, if one might
use that expression; God competes with God at
every moment, as if it were the colorfully
contending gods of the pagan pantheon rolled
into one (emphasis added).
Allah
is no more subject to laws of nature than the
nature-spirits of the pagan world who infest every
tree, rock and stream, and make magic according to
their own whimsy. The "carried-forward idea of the
unity of God" to which Rosenzweig refers, of
course, is the monotheism carried forward in
outward form from Judaism, but dashed to pieces
against the competing notion of absolute
transcendence.
As Rosenzweig observes, "An
atheist can say, 'There is no God but God'." If
God is everywhere and in all things, he is nowhere
and in nothing. If there are no natural laws,
there need be no law-giver, and the world is an
arbitrary and desolate place, a Hobbesian war of
each aspect of nature against all. Contemplation
of nature in Islam is solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short. It is not surprising that
Islamic science died out a generation or two after
al-Ghazali.
It is a commonplace
observation that Islam is "fatalistic". Muslims
typically conclude any statement about the future,
eg, "I'll see you at work tomorrow morning," with
the qualifier, "Insha'Allah", "God willing".
Because God is everywhere and in every action,
acting without intermediate causes, the
Judeo-Christian concept of divine providence is
inconceivable in Muslim terms. If Allah refuses to
be entangled by intermediate causes, no divine
plan could possibly exist that humankind cannot
understand directly, but works itself out through
God's intermediaries. Rather than providence,
Islam believes in the old pagan fate, the
summation of the innumerable capricious acts that
Allah in his absolute transcendence performs at
every instant.
Allah is everywhere, which
is to say that Allah is nowhere in particular.
Allah's world is indistinguishable from the
primeval world of paganism, in which the
"colorfully contending pantheon" of nature-gods
arranges a chaotic and incomprehensible show at
every moment. The world without Allah would look
not much different; if Allah acts in a whimsical
manner without the constraint of laws of nature,
we cannot tell the difference between Allah's
actions and chaos.
It would be misguided
to file this away as a curious relic of Medieval
theology without direct bearing on the spiritual
character of Islam. On the contrary, the absolute
transcendence of Allah in the physical world is
the cognate of his despotic character as a
spiritual ruler, who demands submission and
service from his creatures. The Judeo-Christian
God loves his creatures and as an act of love
makes them free. Humankind only can be free if
nature is rational, that is, if God places
self-appointed limits on his own sphere of action.
In a world ordered by natural law, humankind
through its faculty of reason can learn these laws
and act freely. In the alternative case, the
absolute freedom of Allah crowds out all human
freedom of action, leaving nothing but the tyranny
of caprice and fate.
The empty and
arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the
Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which
God orders the world out of love for humankind, so
that we may in freedom return the love that our
creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to
Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the
love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.
Hirsi Ali has my unqualified admiration.
The courage which guided her journey from Somalia
to the Netherlands still prompts her to warn of
the dangers before the West at great risk to her
own life. I have a similar admiration for Orhan
Pamuk, now in virtual exile from his native
Turkey, and Rushdie, who remains in danger of a
Muslim death warrant, and other Muslim apostates
who refuse to be intimidated. Courage, Winston
Churchill said, is the first of the virtues, for
without it, one does not have the opportunity to
exercise the others. Yet it is not the only
virtue, and I hope that Hirsi Ali's journey takes
her further, beyond atheism.
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