"A
madman is not someone who has lost his reason. A
madman is someone who has lost everything but his
reason," wrote English writer G K Chesterton,
adding, "Poets do not go mad, but chess players
do."
The Persians invented chess, but have
been prone to madness since Xerxes flagellated the
sea for obstructing his failed attempt to invade
Greece in the 5th century BC. Today's Persians
evince grandmasterly cunning in their maneuvers
against America, but are madder than Xerxes.
Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad thinks that
the Holocaust never happened, that there are no
homosexuals in Iran, and that the American cartoon
Tom and Jerry is an instrument of Zionist
propaganda.
Persia's leaders evince a sort
of thinking that in other countries
would constitute legal
grounds for commitment to a psychiatric hospital.
On January 5, 2005, Ahmadinejad said, "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."
How, then,
should one make sense of the joint statement
signed April 30 between the Vatican and a group of
visiting Iranian clerics, attesting to the
benefits of reason? According the May 1
L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI and the
Iranians agreed that "Faith and reason do not
contradict each other; although faith can in some
cases be above reason, it never can be against
it", and that "Faith and reason are intrinsically
nonviolent". In his September 2006 address in
Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI challenged elements
of manifest irrationality in Muslim theology, for
example, the view of some Islamic theologians 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." Outrage erupted against the
pope throughout the Islamic world.
On the
Easter Vigil last March, Benedict XVI baptized
Muslim journalist Magdi Allam into the Catholic
faith, who declared, "Beyond the contingency of
the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism
that has appeared on a global level, the root of
evil is inherent in an Islam that is
physiologically violent and historically
conflictive [see The mustard seed in global
strategy Asia Times Online, March 26,
2008]".
Muslim consternation knew no
bounds, although a Vatican spokesman averred that
Allam was speaking for himself.
Now, in
one of the weirder acts of recent diplomacy, a
delegation of robed and turbaned Iranian mullahs
has come to Rome to declare with due solemnity
that they share the pope's view that reason and
faith are compatible. The meeting was the sixth in
a long-scheduled series of discussion between
Iranian clergy and the Holy See, to be sure, but
unlike any of the previous encounters.
Iran's news agency hailed it as a great
propaganda victory for the Islamic Republic,
writing on May 2 in fractured English:
Spiritual head of the Roman Catholic
Church, Pope Benedict XVI in a meeting with
Iran's delegation to Vatican called for utmost
cultural and religious cooperation between the
two sides. He regarding faith and reason
discussed in the recent dialogues between Islam
and Roman Catholic Church said, "Faith and
reason are the two things that the world needs
them today more than any other time and this is
our duty to provide this need for the society."
He also appreciated Iranian delegation
for its present "Holy Koran", calling it a
precious book.
Head of Iran's Islamic
culture and relations organization Mahdi
Mostafavi responded Iran is ready to expand
cultural and religious cooperation with Vatican.
[sic]
Tactical aims condition some
part of Tehran's sudden regard for the sanctity of
reason. As the Catholic News Service reported on
April 29, Iran's government is searching for
allies against American-led efforts to isolate it:
L'Osservatore Romano has cited the
words of Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad,
praising the Holy See for its diplomatic
efforts. During an April 6 meeting with the new
papal nuncio in Iran, Archbishop Jean-Paul
Gobel, Ahmadinejad said that the Vatican has
been a positive force for justice, peace, and
the protection of human rights around the world,
L'Osservatore reported. Iran has been
maneuvering to secure the support of the Holy
See to counteract hostile pressure from the US
and European nations.
Nonetheless,
the issue transcends the near-term exigencies of
Iranian diplomacy. It is a double-edged sword, for
Islamic scholars can argue day and night that they
are just as reasonable as Christians or Jews. The
trouble with arguing reason to a lunatic, as
Chesterton suggested, is that lunatics more than
anyone else are sure of their own reasonableness.
What American author George Weigel calls
the pope's "new public grammar" for the "reform of
Islam" has an apparent disadvantage, namely that
no one depends more on reason than the calculating
paranoids of Persia. It is not deception, but the
expression of injured innocence, for the Iranian
mullahs to sign a document attesting to the
interdependency of faith and reason. Last year I
criticized the pope, perhaps unfairly, for placing
too great a burden on reason in the encounter with
Islam. The full statement reads (in my translation
from the Italian):
1. Faith and reason are both God's
gifts to humanity. 2. Faith and reason do not
contradict each other; although faith can in
some cases be above reason, it never can be
against it. 3. Faith and reason are
intrinsically nonviolent. Neither reason nor
faith should be used for violence; nonetheless,
at times, both have been ill-used to perpetrate
violence. In any case, these events cannot place
reason or faith in doubt. 4. Both of the
parties agree to cooperate in furthering
authentic religiosity, and in particular
spirituality, to promote respect for sacred
symbols and moral values. 5. Christians and
Muslims should proceed from tolerance,
recognizing differences, remaining aware of
things they have in common, and giving thanks
for these to God. They are called to reciprocal
respect, that is, to condemning derision of
religious creeds. 6. Generalizations should
be avoided when speaking of religion. The
differences between the confessions within
Christianity and Islam as well as the
differences in historical context are both
important factors to be taken into
consideration. 7. Religious traditions
cannot be judged on the basis of a single verse
or passage in their respective sacred texts. A
holistic vision and an adequate hermeneutic
method are necessary for their correct
comprehension.
The final point
contains a submerged mine on which the Muslim side
well might founder, for the application of reason
to sacred texts presents an existential threat to
Islam. As Pope Benedict has observed on many
occasions, no Catholic scholar of note doubts that
the Bible contains multiple authorship of key
texts as well as later redaction.
In the
Christian view, the Hebrew and Greek writings that
comprise the Bible are the word of God, but
through human witness, such that the occasional
error or contradiction poses no threat to faith.
Not so the Koran, which purportedly was
dictated word by word by the Archangel Gabriel to
Mohammed. Western scholars who have discovered
minor variants in ancient copies of the Koran take
their lives in their hands when they publish such
results (see Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci
code Asia Times Online, January 15,
2008).
To include under the rubric of
reason freedom for textual criticism threatens the
existence of Islam. With all due respect for
sacred texts, and without derision, scholars well
might seek to demonstrate that the Koran was
written in the 9th rather than the 7th century,
and not at all by Mohammed, who might or might not
have existed to begin with. My September 2006
critique of Benedict's Regensburg address did not
consider this dimension.
Then Cardinal
Ratzinger alluded to the inflexibility of Islam in
his 1996 interview book The Salt of the
Earth, and as Benedict XVI has returned to the
vulnerability of the Koranic text on subsequent
occasions, notoriously at a 2005 seminar with
former students at his Castel Gandolfo summer
residence (See When even the Pope has to
whisper Asia Times Online, January 10,
2006).
Just what Pope Benedict has in mind
is a matter of controversy. The Catholic writer
Weigel recently published a book entitled
Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism,
in which he speaks of an "an internal Islamic
civil war" between violent jihadis on one hand,
and the forces of Islamic reform on the other. The
forces of reform, he claimed in an April 12
Newsweek essay, include King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia.
According to Weigel, "Benedict XVI
has quietly put his pontificate behind the forces
of Islamic reform - and may have found a crucial
ally with a Saudi king who is wrestling with
Wahhabi extremism in his own domain." I see
matters very differently, for jihad is the
defining sacrament in Islam, the cognate of the
Lord's Supper in Christianity.
If we
believe Father Joseph Fessio's account of the
Castel Gondolfo meeting during an American
interview, this view of prospective Islamic reform
was advocated to the pope in 2005, but the pope
ruled it out on theological grounds. As Father
Fessio reported,
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.
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.
An 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." Fessio's remarks caused
something of a scandal, after which he apologized
for "making too crude a distinction" between the
Koran and the Bible, while insisting that he had
"paraphrased the Holy Father with general
accuracy".
At the end of the day, we have
two different accounts of the views of Benedict
XVI with respect to Islam, one (Weigel's) that
sounds very much like the view of the George W
Bush administration, and another (Fessio's) that
is consonant with the direr pronouncements of
Magdi Allam. Too much might be made of this
opposition. The pope is more than the theologian
Joseph Ratzinger, whose views on the petrified
character of the Koran are a matter of record: he
is the head of both the Catholic Church and the
Vatican State, whose pastoral as well as
diplomatic requirements impose the prudence of
high office.
Ratzinger the theologian well
knows that the absolutely transcendent god of
Islam is a different entity than the revealed God
whom Jews and Christians worship. As Father
Richard John Neuhaus wrote in a May 2 note on the
First Things website, "The Christian understanding
of God is not that of an omnipotent deity handing
down commands from on high, but that of God's
emptying himself of glory (kenosis) in
order to become one with his human creatures,
inviting and enabling us to be lifted up by
participation in his eternal life. In other words,
incarnation; in other words, 'the human face of
God'." I addressed this issue through the theology
of Franz Rosenzweig in a recent article.
Ultimately, neither the diplomats nor the
theologians will decide these issues. This is the
prerogative of converts like Magdi Allam. History
is not made by rational design but by the demands
of the human heart, which has its own reason as
well as unreason. Great institutions and sovereign
states will address each other, except in wartime,
with cautious respect; not so the individuals
whose existential needs ultimately steer the fate
of nations.
In this respect Benedict XVI
is wise, not only with his own 80 years, but with
the accumulated wisdom of the 80 generations since
the founding of his church. Neither Ratzinger the
theologian nor the bishop of Rome has the final
word; by receiving Magdi Allam into the church on
the eve of Easter he entrusted the great questions
to the hearts of the people who will carry it to
their eventual conclusion.
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