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Do Muslims worship
idols?
By Spengler
Is
what divides Islam and the West a minor
misunderstanding, or an incipient war of
civilizations? One's answer often depends on
whether one sees Islam as a variant of
Christianity or Judaism, or a pagan conqueror
cult. Pat Robertson, the prominent American
evangelical, claims, "The struggle is whether
Hubal, the Moon God of Mecca, known as Allah, is
supreme, or whether the Judeo-Christian Jehovah
God of the Bible is Supreme."
President
George W Bush and his advisors, by contrast, aver
that Christians and Muslims worship the same God,
an argument restated recently by Daniel Pipes, a
neo-conservative Middle East analyst. "However
hostile political relations may be, a common
'children of Abraham' bond does exist and its
exploration can one day provide a basis for
interfaith comity," wrote Pipes.[1]
No
individual can speak for Christendom in such
matters, but the most prominent voice belongs to
the pope, the leader of the oldest and largest
Christian denomination. Although Benedict XVI has
expressed sympathy for Islam, he states quite
plainly that the "martyr ideology" of Islamist
terrorists amounts to an odious form of idol
worship. Most Muslims, and emphatically the Muslim
clergy, support this "martyr ideology".
The pope made these comments at the
anniversary celebrations of the Allies' Normandy
landing, at Caen Cathedral on December 6, 2004
[2], and included them in a German-language volume
released last March [3], just as he was elected to
the papacy. The title translates as "Values in
Times of Upheaveal". Had these remarks appeared in
English, they no doubt would have stirred up
controversy, but it is surprising that they were
ignored in the world press.
Benedict
argues that peace flows from the informed
conscience, which in turn causes men to band
together to share responsibility for justice. With
the prostration of European Christianity,
conscience turns into an instrument of secular
ideology, whose cynicism and self-interest leads
men to turn on their neighbors. Quite the opposite
of a pacifist pladoyer (final speech) ,
Benedict's book warns that the West must
strengthen its own values in order to achieve
peace:
The graves of World War II present
us with a mandate. It is to strengthen the
forces of the good, to support, work, live and
suffer for those values and truths which God has
established to hold the world together. God
promised Abraham that he would not destroy the
city of Sodom if 10 just men were to be found
there. We should make every effort to make sure
that the 10 just men are not lacking who might
save a city. As a practical matter,
Benedict XVI stands closer to Robertson than to
Bush. He did not say that Muslims worshipped
idols, but he denounced the "martyr ideology of
terrorists", which "turns God into an idol by
which man worships his own will". Given that the
great majority of Muslims, and particularly Muslim
clerics, support suicide bombing, the pope in
effect averred that idol-worshippers comprise the
Islamic mainstream.
Unlike American
evangelicals, the pope does not eschew Islam as
such. On the contrary, in a May 13 speech before
the Italian senate, he stated:
The rebirth of Islam is not only
bound up with the new material riches of the
Muslim lands, but also it is fed by the
knowledge that Islam is in a position to offer a
spiritual base that is valid for the life of a
people. The traditional Christian basis that
made Europe seems to be fleeing from the land of
the old Europe, which, notwithstanding the
persistence of its political and spiritual
power, has come to be seen ever more as
condemned to decline and
crumble. Benedict's respect for Islam
does not vitiate his abhorrence of religious
terror, however. Here is the full citation from
the December 2004 speech:
God, or divinity, can turn into the
means to make absolute one's own power and one's
own interests. An image of God that has been
turned thus into an instrument of partisan
interests, that identifies God's absoluteness
with one's own community or its set of
interests, destroys law and morality, by
elevating what is relative into the absolute.
The good then becomes whatever serves one's own
power. The actual difference collapses between
good and evil. Morality and law become
instruments of partisan policy. This gets even
worse when religious fanaticism, the fanaticism
of the absolute, informs the will to put
everything in the service of one's own
interests, and thus turns completely blind and
brutal. God has become an idol by which man
worships his own will. That is what we see in
the martyr ideology of the terrorists, which, to
be sure, in isolated cases simply expresses
desperation at the injustice of the world. By
the way, we also have before us Western sects
that are examples of irrationalism and
perversion of the religious, and show how
dangerous religion becomes when it loses its
compass. [4] We may assume that the
pope is well aware that the vast preponderance of
Muslim opinion supports the "martyr ideology of
the terrorists". Last year, the Pew Global
Attitudes Project [5] polled Muslims in four
countries, all nominally allied to the United
States, as to whether suicide bombings were
justifiable. In three of the four countries,
substantial majorities declared that suicide
bombings were justified not only by Palestinians
against Israelis, but also by Iraqis against
American soldiers.
Response to Pew Global
Attitudes Survey question: "Are suicide bombings
justifiable?"
|
Country |
"No" |
"Yes" |
| By
Palestinians against
Israelis |
| Turkey |
67 |
24 |
| Pakistan |
36 |
47 |
| Morocco |
22 |
74 |
| Jordan |
12 |
86 |
| Against
Americans and Westerners in
Iraq |
| Turkey |
59 |
31 |
| Pakistan |
36 |
46 |
| Morocco |
27 |
66 |
| Jordan |
24 |
70 |
Because
Islam has no centralized religious leadership, it
is hard to quantify the extent to which Muslim
clergy promote terrorist "martyr ideology", but
anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that the great
majority of Muslim religious leaders support
suicide bombings, for example. Among Sunni
Muslims, the leading authority is Mohammed Sayed
Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of Cairo's al-Azhar
mosque. Sheikh Tantawi has gone back and forth on
the issue several times, but his most recent
pronouncement (in May 2004) held that
circumstances warranted Palestinian suicide
attacks against Israelis, adding that anyone who
blew himself up while defending Islam against an
aggressor died a martyr's death. [6] A survey of
the debate among Muslim clerics about suicide
attacks by Haim Malka appeared in the Spring 2003
issue of the Middle East Quarterly, concluding:
Since the outbreak of the current
Palestinian intifada, in September 2000, the
Palestinian resort to suicide attacks has won
widespread Arab public acceptance as a
legitimate form of resistance against Israeli
occupation. Some Muslim clerics and other
commentators justify them on political, moral
and religious grounds. Even those attackers who
bomb and kill women and children are hailed as
martyrs for their heroism in confronting the
enemy. [7] Benedict XVI does not set
out to attack Islam, but to preach to the
secularized West. His mission is evangelical, not
political. He warns against raising the banner of
secular enlightenment against "fanatical" Islam:
It appears that two great cultural
systems are crashing against each other - the
"West" and Islam. To be sure, they embody quite
different forms of power and moral orientation.
But what is this "West"? And what is this
"Islam"? Both are multi-layered worlds with
great internal differences - worlds which act
upon each other in many ways. The crude
contraposition of the West and Islam is
inappropriate. Many commentators tend to deepen
the contrast by counterposing enlightened reason
to a fanatical, fundamentalist form of religion.
That would make the order of the day to destroy
fundamentalism in all of its forms and help
reason to its ultimate victory, which would
tolerate enlightened forms of religion, but only
because it recognizes them to be enlightened,
because they subject themselves to the criteria
of reason. [8]
The failings of
Islam as practiced by Muslims are a mirror in
which the West can see its own failings, in the
pope's account. Secular ideology, which in its
extreme forms produced fascism and communism,
worships the brute will with the same idolatrous
fervor that drives the Islamist suicide bomber.
Benedict ignores the critique of Islamic theology
produced by such Catholic writers as Alain
Besancon (see Has Islam become the
issue? Asia Times Online, May 4, 2004).
Rather, he holds accountable Islam as well as the
West for the perversion of moral purposes in the
service of the will.
No one should mistake
for sentimentality Benedict's demand that the West
hold itself accountable for its own flaws,
however. The present pope sees the world with
brutal clarity and makes no excuses for an
Islamist ideology that recalls the ideology of the
Germany of his youth.
"Im Deutschen
luegt man, wenn man hoeflich ist," said J W
Goethe - if you are polite in German, you are
lying. In his mother tongue, the pope writes with
Teutonic candor; it might be a good thing that few
Muslims read German.
Notes
[1] Is Allah God? by Daniel
Pipes, New York Sun, June 28
[2] See Auf der Suche nach dem
Frieden. No English translation of this
address appears to have been circulated on the
Internet.
[3] Joseph Ratzinger (Pope
Benedict XVI) Werte in Zeiten des Umbruchs
(Verlag Herder: Freiburg in Breisgau 2005). 156
pages, euro 8.90. Page 142 (my translation).
[4] op cit, page 131.
[5] A year after Iraq war ,
released March 16, 2004.
[6] "Anatomy of a
Flip-Flop," by Hadia Mostafa, in Egypt Today, June
2004.
[7] Must Innocents Die? The Islamic
Debate over Suicide Attacks
[8]
Benedict XVI, op. cit, page 130.
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