Islam is the unexploded bomb of global
politics. US foreign policy - the only foreign
policy there is, for the United States is the only
superpower - proceeds from the hope that a modern
and democratic Islam will emerge from the ruins of
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Through democratic
institutions, Washington believes, the
long-marginalized Shi'ites will adapt to religious
pluralism. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's Islam, fixed
in amber since the High
Middle
Ages, will metamorphose into something like
American mainline Protestantism.
Alas, the
available facts suggest that the opposite result
will ensue: more freedom equals more
fundamentalism. Not the secular Shi'ite parties
but the pro-Iranian religious parties dominate the
Iraqi polls. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood
quadrupled its vote despite heavy-handed measures
to intimidate its supporters; Hamas threatens to
displace Fatah in the Palestinian elections this
month; Hezbollah has become the strongest
electoral as well as military force in Lebanon;
and, most important of all, Mahmud Ahmadinejad
crushed a more pragmatic opponent in last June's
Iranian presidential elections.
Islam was
founded as a theocracy, such that the Western
innovation of church-state separation remains
alien to its culture. Is it possible for Islam to
reform? A negative answer implies that
Ahmadinejad's January 5 call for world domination
falls within the Islamic mainstream. He told an audience of
religious students, "We must believe in the fact
that Islam is not confined to geographical
borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a
universal ideology that leads the world to
justice. We don't shy away from declaring that
Islam is ready to rule the world. We must prepare
ourselves to rule the world." The previous day,
the London Guardian leaked a European
intelligence report detailing Iran's efforts to
acquire technology required to build nuclear
weapons. A very few writers, including this one,
have rejected the possibility of Islamic
reformation, to the stony contempt of universally
accepted opinion.
Now Pope Benedict XVI
has let it be known that he does not believe Islam
can reform. This we learn from the transcript of a January 5
US radio interview with one of Benedict's students
and friends, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, the provost
of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, posted
on the Asia Times Online forum
by a sharp-eyed reader. For the pope to refute the
fundamental premise of US policy is news of
inestimable strategic importance, yet a Google
News scan reveals that not a single media outlet
has taken notice of what Fessio told interviewer
Hugh Hewitt last week. No matter: still and small
as Benedict's voice might be, it carries further
than earthquake and whirlwind.
Fessio
described a private seminar on the subject of
Islam last year at Castel Gandolfo, the papal
summer residence:
The main presentation by this [start
new-window link here] Father [Christian] Troll
http://www.sankt-georgen.de/lehrende/troll.html
was very interesting. He based it on a Pakistani
Muslim scholar [named] Rashan, who was at the
University of Chicago for many years, and
Rashan's position was Islam can enter into
dialogue with modernity, but only if it
radically reinterprets the Koran, and takes the
specific legislation of the Koran, like cutting
off your hand if you're a thief, or being able
to have four wives, or whatever, and takes the
principles behind those specific pieces of
legislation for the 7th century of Arabia, and
now applies them, and modifies them, for a new
society [in] which women are now respected for
their full dignity, where democracy's important,
religious freedom's important, and so on. And if
Islam does that, then it will be able to enter
into real dialogue and live together with other
religions and other kinds of cultures.
And immediately the holy father, in
his beautiful calm but clear way, said, well,
there's a fundamental problem with that because,
he said, in the Islamic tradition, God has given
His word to Mohammed, but it's an eternal word.
It's not Mohammed's word. It's there for
eternity the way it is. There's no possibility
of adapting it or interpreting it, whereas in
Christianity, and Judaism, the dynamism's
completely different, that God has worked
through his creatures [emphasis added]. And
so it is not just the word of God, it's the word
of Isaiah, not just the word of God, but the
word of Mark. He's used his human creatures, and
inspired them to speak his word to the world,
and therefore by establishing a church in which
he gives authority to his followers to carry on
the tradition and interpret it, there's an inner
logic to the Christian Bible, which permits it
and requires it to be adapted and applied to new
situations.
The interviewer then asked
Fessio, "And so the pope is a pessimist about that
changing, because it would require a radical
reinterpretation of what the Koran is?" Fessio
replied, "Yeah, which is it's impossible, because
it's against the very nature of the Koran, as it's
understood by Muslims."
Hebrew and Christian scripture claim
to be the report of human encounters with God.
After the Torah is read each Saturday in
synagogues, the congregation intones that the
text stems from "the mouth of God by the hand of
Moses", a leader whose flaws kept him from
entering the Promised Land. The Jewish rabbis,
moreover, postulated the existence of an
unwritten Revelation whose interpretation
permits considerable flexibility with the text.
Christianity's Gospels, by the same token, are
the reports of human evangelists.
The
Archangel Gabriel, by contrast, dictated the
Koran to Mohammed, according to Islamic
doctrine. That sets a dauntingly high threshold
for textual critics. How does one criticize the
word of God without rejecting its divine
character? In that respect the Koran resembles
the "Golden Tablets" of the Angel Moroni
purported found by the Mormon leader Joseph
Smith more than it does the Jewish or Christian
bibles.
I claim no originality
whatever in this matter, for I simply follow the
leading Muslim authorities, who are unanimous that
Islam is in no need of reform. The immutable
character of Islamic revelation makes the subject
of Koranic criticism into a minefield. It is
universally known among scholars that alternative
texts of the Koran have been discovered in various
archeological sites - something of an
embarrassment for the Archangel Gabriel - but the
subject has disappeared from the media. [1] When
Newsweek in 2004 published a brief mention of the
work of the pseudonymous German philologist
Christoph Luxenberg, the government of Pakistan
seized the entire print run. Luxenberg became
famous for re-translating the Koran to read that
martyrs would receive raisins in Paradise rather
than virgins. One finds nearly 12,000 Google
references to Luxenberg but not a single hit on
Google News. The subject, once so passionately
debated in editorial columns, has vanished from
the media in their entirety.
It is
dangerous to publish anything that Muslims might
interpret as blasphemy, as Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's
largest newspaper, discovered when it
published 12 cartoons of Mohammed, some portraying
the Prophet in violent acts. Muslim protests and
threats caused two of the cartoonists to go into
hiding. After Arab foreign ministers condemned
Denmark for refusing to act against the newspaper,
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen
offered a near-apology in his New Year's address.
Strange as it may seem, the pope must
whisper when he wants to state agreement with
conventional Muslim opinion, namely that the
Koranic prophecy is fixed for all time such that
Islam cannot reform itself. If Islam cannot
change, then a likely outcome will be
civilizational war, something too horrific for US
leaders to contemplate. What Benedict XVI thinks
about the likelihood of civilizational war I do
not know. Two elements of context, though, set in
relief his reported comments concerning Islam's
incapacity to reform.
The first is that
Benedict's comments regarding the nature of Muslim
revelation are deliberate and informed, for his
primary focus as a theologian has been the subject
of revelation. In his 1953 doctoral thesis,
biographer George Weigel reports, Joseph
Ratzinger, the future pope,
... following Bonaventure, argued
that revelation is "an act in which God shows
himself"; revelation cannot be reduced to the
propositions that result from God's
self-disclosure, as certain forms of
neo-scholasticism tended to do. Revelation, in
other words, has a subjective or personal
dimension, in that there is no "revelation"
without someone to receive it. As Ratzinger
would later put it, "where there is no one to
perceive 'revelation', no re-vel-ation has
occurred, because no veil has been removed".
[2]
The Judeo-Christian view of
revelation, as summarized above by Father Fessio,
expresses the mutual love between Revealer and
recipient of revelation, a concept alien to Islam.
[3]
A second element of context is
Benedict's admiration for the US separation of
church and state. In an essay published in this
month's issue of First Things, Benedict makes the
remarkable (for a pope) statement that the US
model is what the early church really had in mind.
He proceeds from the famous argument of Pope
Gelasius I (492-496) that "because of human
weakness (pride!), they have separated the two
offices" of king and priest. Neither the state
church model of Northern Europe nor the secular
model of France, Italy and Spain has sufficed,
Benedict observes. But he continues:
Situated between the two [failed]
models is the model of the United States of
America. Formed on the basis of free churches,
it adopts a separation between church and state.
Above and beyond the single denominations, it is
characterized by a Protestant Christian
consensus that is not defined in denominational
terms but rather in association with its sense
of a special religious mission toward the rest
of the world. The religious sphere thus acquires
a significant weight in public affairs and
emerges as a pre-political and supra-political
force with the potential to have a decisive
impact on political life.
It is
useless to bemoan the fact that Americans do not
understand what they are until a European comes
along and explains it to them; that has been true
since Alexis de Tocqueville. It is most promising
that a European, indeed one who speaks with the
authority of the throne of St Peter, has explained
the difference between the Christian foundation of
the US political system and theocratic Islam -
even if the explanation came in the form of a
stage whisper. I expect this to have profound
consequences.
Later in the same essay,
Benedict takes up a theme I have addressed over
the years, namely the moral cause of Europe's
demographic implosion (see Why Europe chooses
extinction, April 8, 2003), writing:
Europe is infected by a strange lack
of desire for the future. Children, our future,
are perceived as a threat to the present, as
though they were taking something away from our
lives. Children are seen - at least by some
people - as a liability rather than as a source
of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare
today's situation with the decline of the Roman
Empire.
My investigation of the causes
of Europe's present decline was inspired by
comments of then-cardinal Ratzinger in a
book-length interview with the German journalist
Peter Seewald published in 1996 as The Salt of
the Earth. Nothing is really new in Benedict's
present formulation except, perhaps, his sense of
urgency as the hour grows late and the moment of
truth approaches. In the cited essay, Benedict
excoriates the pessimism of Oswald Spengler, who
claimed to have discovered a deterministic pattern
of rise and fall of civilizations. Instead, he
argues that "the fate of a society always depends
upon its creative minorities", and that
"Christians should look upon themselves as just
such a creative minority".
I agree with
the pope, not with my namesake. My choice of
nom de guerre is ironic rather than
semiotic. The fact that the West still has such a
leader as Benedict XVI in itself is cause for
optimism. It might be too late for Europe, but it
is not too late for the United States, and that is
where the pope's mustard seeds may fall on fertile
ground.
Notes 1. See Toby
Lester, "What is the Koran?", in The Atlantic
Monthly, January 1999. 2. God's Choice
by George Weigel (HarperCollins: New York, 2005),
p 167. 3. For more background see Oil on the flames of
civilizational war, December 2, 2003.
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