In the last eight years interest groups that enjoyed access to the Bush administration sought to facilitate their agenda and interests by vilifying Islam and Muslims in general.
They did so very successfully. It is clear to me that many of the abominations committed during the last eight years, including horrible wickedness we see in Iraq, were committed by individuals whose willingness was influenced by injurious pervasive rhetoric on Islam. The vilification of Islam and Muslims greased the wheels of torture and war crimes.
In a few weeks Obama will address the Muslim world in a major speech in Cairo. This will be an important speech that will hopefully mend fences between the US and the billion or so Muslims including American Muslims.
In this diary I will attempt to convey my own understanding of Islam in a sympathetic way.
I will focus on three issues. The perception of Islam in Christian Arab discourse. Islam as a reformation of the Catholic church and the related genderless God in Islam, which contrasts with the paternal masculinity of God in the Christian tradition. I will also summarize a few points to keep in mind when addressing the Muslim world.
To be clear I'm a committed atheist, indeed a cradle atheist, born and raised in a secular community made up of ethnically Jewish, Christian, and Muslim individuals whose cultural center was the Communist Party of Israel. I introduced myself here. In short, I don't believe in God.
Nevertheless, several years ago when I read the speech that Pope Benedict gave at the University of Regensburg (translation) I became aware that even reasonable people in the West are, willingly, ill informed about Islam. Let's begin the conversation with that speech.
Benedict's speech and the Arab Christian perspective on Islam
Benedict focused on a conversation between Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologus and a Muslim in the fourteenth century. He emphasizes an important idea that has remained central in eastern Christianity, which is that the early Christian church found fertile and well tilled ground in the Hellenized eastern parts of the Roman empire, in particular in Syria, Anatolia, and Alexandria Egypt. This Hellenic environment was the carrier of the extraordinary philosophical heritage of ancient Greece. It is where Christianity as we know it developed and whence Christian theology emerged. In fact, almost every Greek church father was either a Hellenized Syrian or Anatolian. These include the Three Cappadocian Fathers and St. John of Damascus. There is an idea that somehow the Greek philosophical tradition was destined to meet the church, and Semitic religious traditions, affording it its language, its heritage, and the environment for well reasoned theology. Islam in Benadict's reasoning, however, did not enjoy this symbiotic interlocking of Semitic traditions and Greek philosophical traditions. While reason and rationality are in direct harmony with Christian theology, Islam was basically incapable of reasoning:
for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
I was rather surprised by this view. First because it's contrary to how the Hellenic Christian theologians familiar with Islam understood and understand Islam and second because of the way Islam understands itself as a reformation of the Roman church.
Islamic thinking was also influenced by Hellenistic Christian philosophies. Indeed, following the liberation of Syria from imperial Roman occupation there were centuries of vigorous interaction between Hellenized Christian theologians and Islamic thinkers.
During this period an eastern Christian conception of Islam emerged. This was initially articulated by St. John of Damascus (who by way of interest benefitted from the protection of the Islam and was able to argue against the iconoclastic heresy that dominated the remnants of the Roman empire). Now St John of Damascus was born and lived in Syria, after its liberation and under Islamic rule. St John became, in fact, chief councillor to the Umayyad Khalifa as well as perhaps the greatest Greek father of the Church. When Benidict talks about reason and the Greek tradition in Christianity he is surely talking about St John of Damascus. St John of Damascus did not consider Islam a separate religion from Christianity. But a Christian heresy. Similar to the way Catholics view Lutherans and Baptists. The reader may want to explore the website of the St John of Damascus Institute of Theology in The University of Balamand.
To my mind St John's ideas evolved to the prevailing Islamophilic attitudes of Arab Christians and their modern day theologians. These are the physical remnants of the Hellenic church who having lived with and been enriched by Islam. They have in the main a much more favorable and reasoned attitude towards it. It seems very unusual to me that Benedict in a speech that talks about both the Hellenic tradition in Christianity and about Islam would ignore St John of Damascus as well as modern Syrian Christian thinking and instead quotes a minor Byzantine emperor whose ideas about Islam are not well accepted and are hostile principally because on the political environment of his time. Benedict celebrates Hellenic reason but avoids its main exponent whose work is not only relevant but is centrally catholic and deals with Islam directly. He celebrates the Hellenic tradition of Syria but ignores the fact the physical Church that emerged from this tradition remains a living Church in Syria with a well developed understanding and experience of Islam.
Islam was born protestant
Islamic thinkers, of course, do not view Islam as a Christian heresy. The view is that Islam is a reformation of Christianity, a protestant reformation. Indeed, Islam was born reformed. In Islam, there is no hierarchy, there are no religious orders, there are no bishops. Sunni Islam and its theology is not dictated to the faithful by a Bishop. Instead, it is defined by the consensus of the whole believing community. Each Muslim is a Bishop and a priest. Islam sought to bring down the institutional frameworks of the imperial Church that dominated the Middle East in the seventh century. Sunni Islam has competing schools of thought Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali all on equal footing in the consensus of the whole believing community. A short visit to as-Sakhra mosque in Jerusalem with its inscriptions indicates that Islam in the seventh century saw itself as correcting and reforming the Catholic church that dominated the eastern Roman empire. It was an uprising against the imperial Church and its institutions.
The gender of God in Islam
One of the main departures in Islam from a Christianity Hellenized in Syria and reformation back to Semitic roots is in the gender identity of God, as highlighted in Islam, Irigaray, and the Retrieval of Gender (1999) by the Islamic scholar Abd al-Hakim Murad.
Irigaray in the title refers to the French feminist Luce Irigaray who, as Abd al-Hakim explains, observes that it is in the West that "the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and discourse, is always paternal and masculine." For me this is no where more apparent than in Catholic Ecclesiology where the Church is the bride of Christ, God incarnate, the Son of God the Father. Here the Church is the image of a masculine Triune God that reveals His existence in Her. She is a reflection of Him and enjoys the communion of marriage between husband and wife. Abd al-Hakim observes that a "theology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also locates it in a gender, and inescapably passes judgment on the other sex." Of course, Christianity reveals the divine in a single unique incarnation thus passes judgment on the other sex for all time. Islamic theology, on the other hand, "confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead" because a "theology which locates it in a book makes no judgment about gender; since books are unsexed. The divine remains divine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving way on earth." Further while the Church sees itself as a feminine entity "Islam's community of believers never saw itself as a feminine entity, despite the interesting matronal resonances of the term umma. [...] The same 'desertlike' abstract difference of the Muslim God which draws reproach from Christian commentators also allows a gender-neutral image of the divine. Allah is not neuter or androgynous, but is simply above gender." Abd al-hakim then cites Sartaz Aziz, a quote that I grappled with some years ago:
I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God were formed by Islam because I was able to think of the Highest Power as one completely without sex or race, and thus completely unpatriarchal . . . We begin with the idea of a deity who is completely above sexual identity, and thus completely outside the value system created by patriarchy."
Indeed, one is not surprised by the pervasive reluctance of Muslim women to buy into the vilification of Islam by individuals who have political axes to grind, wars of liberation to conduct, and attempt to facilitate these things through vicious smear campaign.
A sympathetic view
In a few weeks Obama will give his major speech addressing all Muslims from the capital of the Muslim world Cairo. Ideally, that speech ought to keep in mind the recent history of American interaction with Islam. There are important points that we need to keep in mind.
- Islam is born explicitly universalist and internationalist. There is no notion of nationalism in Islam and it is explicitly hostile to tribalism and racism.
- On issues concerning justice Islam is liberationist in its theology. Anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism is built into Islam.
- Multiculturalism and the idea that there can be many center of culture is an idea in Islam. Indeed, Islam pioneered the modern notion of multiculturalism and its Turkish adaptation the Millet system.
- On economic issues Islam is progressive, in particular with regard to social welfare.
- Islam was born protestant, it (well at least the Sunni version) has no hierarchy and it has been a grass roots movement from its inception.
- Islam is democratic in the sense that everyone is politically involved in it. Everyone has a say.
- Islamic thinkers are open to rational discourse on issues not concerning religious tenants-on almost all other issues, in particular social issues. They do not have fixed ideas outside of a narrow domain.
- Islam like other religions is socially conservative. It has individuals that are very conservative socially. But it also has adherents that are socially liberal. It is certainly open to notions of gender equality and liberation.
Importantly, when speaking to the Muslim world consider the fact that every single individual considers herself a person that has a say in Islam and a person that is informed about Islam. Though tempting and consistent with popular perception of Islam and Arab culture, people do not hold their leaders in high regard, they are naturally suspicious of all forms of elitism. When speaking to the Muslim world you are addressing a grassroots movement to which a billion intelligent aware humans belong.
But, of course, Obama is aware of this.