Yes, it is, in Christianity as in its elder brother, Judaism. But not in Islam.
HT Cranmer
Q. Why is Islam so intransigent over Israel and the Palestinians?
A. How can it not be?
The reasons for Islam's intransigence are ancient and cultural. Israel is merely Islam's fracas du jour. The reasons pre-date Islam, and have remained constant throughout history up to and beyond the fall of the last Islamic (the Ottoman) Empire in the first world war, out of which collapse the Jewish state was born.
But first, a little theology to focus on the abiding philosophical, as opposed to cultural, chasm and antipathy between the Islamic worldview and that of Judaism-Christianity.
In their self-consciousness, self-descriptions and creeds, the three strands of Christianity, which is to say the Protestant, 'Roman' Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches all deploy the word 'catholic', in its strict meaning of 'universal'. This is because they share the common theological proposition that the offer made by Jesus Christ was and is universal: offered freely to all people who are free to reject it. This is because Jesus himself compelled no-one. A young man asked him how to attain eternal salvation and, not liking Jesus's answer, walked away, but Jesus did not call him back or condemn him, but, sadly, just watched him go. (Matt 19:22)
Such freedom is the opposite of Islam.
The Christian offering is based on the concept of a free divine will which ordains that human persons similarly have free will and reason. In his free will, Man is made in the image of God.
This proposition is an outrage to Islam.
Such questioning is anathema in Islam.
(Yes, all right, I know, Christians rarely live up to their creeds and ideals - but that believers can be faithless and unworthy does not alter the validity of their belief. As it happens, Christians believe that Jesus came to save sinners from themselves and it's just as well, isn't it? We can be a really horrible lot whom only God could love. Let us move on.)
I had a philosophy teacher who defined philosophical enquiry as 'a process of taking one careful step after another - backwards'. He meant that the proper response to any proposition is the question, 'But what do you mean by...?' Let us go back to the essence of the terms we shall use and agree upon them, and only then can we go forward together to any profit to either of us.
Going forward together is anathema to Islam.
The Hellenisation of Hebrew scholarship resulted in a happy merger of Greek dialectical metaphysical scholarship with the unique Jewish understanding of monotheism which, philosophically, is the most reasonable and subtle of all theist positions. It was from this happy marriage that, over millennia, the Christian theological twins of rational enquiry and liberty to choose developed, and continue and will continue to develop, in the very nature of the basic proposition.
Enquiry and liberty are forbidden in Islam which demands their opposite: submission.
The concept of free will is the single most important philosophical foundation underlying both Judaism and Christianity. It led Europe and the West to Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, political emancipation, the abolition of slavery and universal education. It is ab initio inimical to the fundamental tenet of Islam. The very word Islam means 'submission'. It admits of no free will and therefore no questioning, no discussion.
This is the opposite of Judaeo-Christianity.
In Mohammed's earliest reflections on what might be the links between Man and God, musing (as we see in the Qur'an) on the traditions of Judaism and Christianity, he said, 'There is no compulsion in religion'. At this point, he was just beginning, an insignificant tribal thinker in a brutal, patriarchal, polytheistic wilderness.
Gradually, his monotheistic insights (gleaned, as we know from his writings, from Judaeo-Christian thought) gained currency among and offered a prospect of political unity and strength to the bellicose tribes of the region. Mohammed and his prominent followers were instructed, they believed, by Allah. This conviction strengthened their arm, enabling them to conquer surrounding tribes very rapidly by the normative, that is to say, murderous methods of that place, culture and time.
Thus Mohammed's new religion was enforced over a vast area as violence and terror ensured submission to the new religion of submission by any who challenged either his teaching or the authority of his warlords who, as it happens, gained political power and wealth even as they spread the word. Thus Islam, a unified and militarised movement, quickly abandoned Mohammed's initially indulgent 'Judaeo-Christian' position of 'no compulsion', in favour of the more effective 'preaching by the sword'. Mohammed became a general, soldiering in the name of Allah.
Like all successful conquerors, Mohammed and his commanders recognised the limits of what was militarily, economically and politically practical. They found it convenient to permit disarmed non-submitters to co-exist on condition that their infidelity was invisible to worshippers of Allah (on penalty of death) and on payment of the taxes due to Allah's followers from second class citizens.
From its very beginnings, the Islamic proposition has been naked of all pretence to reason or the concept of free will, in its world-view. It stands on Mohammed's twin doctrines that Allah is, in his essential nature, so other that he is not bound by any human category, including rationality, and that the worshippers of Allah, those who submit to his inscrutable will, are not to be challenged, ever, for any reason, for to defy Allah's followers is to defy Allah himself, meriting death and eternal damnation.
Lucifer challenged God and by so doing became the Father of Evil, the Great Satan. Anyone who challenges the rulers of the worshippers of Allah is Satan against whom all the believers must make war until the end of time, which will come when the last infidel submits or is destroyed by the worshippers of Allah, in Allah's name.
To repeat: in the Islamic religion there is no reason, because Allah, being utterly other, is not bound by reason, a purely human category, and simply must be obeyed - submitted-to, without question. Ditto his prophet against whom no human authority can stand.
Allah may order, through his prophet and other spokesmen, mass murder, Jew-murder, self-immolation and various other practices which to the Judaeo-Christian mind seem unreasonable or even evil, which is oxymoronic because Allah is definitively good and merciful. (Goodness and mercy, unlike reason, are not merely human concepts. You may not question this mystery.) Even if both those things are true, Allah must be obeyed because defiance of the will of Allah is forbidden.
Allah is permitted, in Mohammed's theology, to be entirely capricious. His will is beyond question. If he is capricious, and of course no-one is permitted even to ask whether he is, there is nothing humans can or may do but they must submit to his will as mediated by his prophets, muftis, imams, caliphs, emirs and ayatollahs.
The interesting question is how the self-immolaters and infidel-killers receive Allah's orders. Obviously through the prophets, muftis, imams, caliphs, emirs and ayatollahs, but who says they are right? They do. Which takes us back to the question of authority in the society in which Islam, with its characteristic, essential intransigence, arose.
The Islamic concept of authority descends undiluted from the social culture of Mohammed's life and experience in the desert of the 7th century. The entire Islamic edifice is embedded in the social system of a desert-nomad, warlord patriarchy in which servants, slaves, women and children are owned, controlled, instructed and punished by armed men licensed by patriarchs whose will, in turn, is enforced by violence. Pre-Islamic tribal/political culture informs Islamic thought and leadership.Might is right. I have a big stick, and you will submit.
Admittedly Islam was a bit of an improvement, in the 7th century, on the brutality it displaced, giving some limited but undreamed-of rights to women, for instance, but only under conditions of general servitude... to men.
Jewish and Christian social mores were once similar, but both Jews and Christians, in their understanding of the human person and optimal societies, have moved cosmic distances from that mindset over centuries during which Islamic teaching has expressly and deliberately ossified the social rules and structures with which its prophet rules that it is co-terminous, for ever.
Islam's leaders taught from the beginning, leaving aside that momentary hesitation on Mohammed's part, that the Muslim worldview is the only one sanctioned by their god and that they are divinely instructed to kill or conquer any who defy that view. Defiant infidels are ipso facto Satan, waging war on Allah. For young, naive, inexperienced hearers of authoritarian Muslim leaders, Islamist jihad and Jew-hatred are no-brainers, not susceptible to reasoned questioning which anyway is forbidden by Allah. And so it goes on from generation to generation: the way, the truth and the death.
By its very nature, there is no place in such a system, where only might is right, for either reason or discussion, let alone reformation in the Christian sense. Reformation would mean radical transformation of a centuries old societal dispensation which holds that its social habits and its theology are one and the same, mandated by a god who defines them as immutable and to be enforced without change whatever the cost in human suffering and death of self or enemy.
In Islam time stands still, and humanity with it. And for Man to require 'justice' of Allah is blasphemy.
Christianity and Judaism both permit - no, recommend, their own development, in discussion, exploration in harmony with the observable fact of the forward progress over time of human thought and knowledge: aggiornamento, in worshipful dialogue with a Creator who has demonstrated by intervention in history that he is intimately engaged with and in reasoned dialogue with humanity.
This is the opposite of Islam.
Christianity goes further down this road than Judaism, with the belief that the creator actually went so far as to become human in order to demonstrate corporeally his immanence.
In Islam, the notion of divine immanence is blasphemy.
Is there hope of an Islamic Reformation, some time in the future? It seems improbable since Islam admits no development in religious thought. Islam does admit the development of non-theological thought. It supports the acquisition of material/scientific information but draws the line at accepting the consequences of that learning for the understanding of the human condition in the context of the transcendent.
How can there be a Reformation without reason? Islam proclaims that its divinity by his very nature has no connection whatsoever with reason. No wonder its leaders will not permit the translation of its scriptures, which, as Judaeo-Christianity knows, and one surmises that Mohammed well understood when he banned it, opens the sanctuary door to reasonable questions by non-scholars, questions which may lead to the overthrow of demagoguery and dictators. This is the religion of a fearful people.
Pope Benedict XVI's plea, in a talk to his scholar-peers in Regensburg, for a rapprochement between Christianity and Islam based on reason and mutual freedom to question in fraternal conversation, met with world-wide violence from Muslim mobs whipped up by teachers who lied to them about the Pope's words and his pacific intentions. And of course with howls of support for their lies from their useful idiots among the hard left and militant secularists, to whom reasonable Christianity is a far greater philosophical and ethical challenge than unreasonable Islam which they embrace on the basis that their enemy's enemy is their friend. They forget that first they came for the Jews...
So, back to the present conundrum. Palestine, Israel, two states? How? Islam admits the possibility only of one Jew-free (and of course, gay-free) Islamic state.
As the video at the top of this rather long post shows, it is bootless for Israel to offer anything but total submission, which of course means Jewish mass suicide. Islam will never allow Muslims to accept any offer from 'the Jews'. Only submission will do.
Historically, the Jews, like the Arabs, are a group of Semitic desert tribes, so, sort-of cousins, and consequently despised as only relatives can be despised. The pesky Jew-cousins have always denied the Arab-Muslim cousins' order to submit.
They would never, will never submit, never surrender their independence of soul, their adherence to reason or the freedom to question and think for themselves which has put them among the leading scholars in every discipline in every time and place. Therefore these stiff-necked infidel Jews and their freedom-loving infidel allies are The Great Satan and must be destroyed. QED.
Which is about as reasonable as this chap:
The defiance by Jews of violence which will not reason, and their proclamation of liberty of thought and will as the fundamental human attribute and the basis of human fulfillment, are why this blog stands with Israel.
The besieged Jews of Israel are civilisation's vanguard. Their enemies are the enemies of humane thought and liberty.
The Jews and especially the Israelis are defending the light of reason against the darkness of un-reason.
Israel is besieged by forces of of violent oppression which have survived since the dark ages by the deployment of lethal force by people who believe that their god - who is categorically unlike the God of the Jews and Christians - orders them to conquer and destroy in his name.
First they came for the Jews...
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The subject of this post being the religion of peace and its chosen enemies, a few rules regarding comments are needed - for the first time. O tempora...
- Unreasonable comments, whether accusing the writer of 'Islamophobia' or attributing all the world's ills to belief in 'sky-fairies', will not be welcomed, for obvious reasons (see discussion of 'reason', above).
- Ditto wailing about the 3000+ -years old accounts of tribal gods and desert warfare in the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible. That was then, this is now.
- Ditto that Islam preserved the Greek scholarly oeuvre. No, the Byzantines (Eastern Roman Empire/Greek Christians) did.
- Ditto complaints about 'the Crusades' for which there was, at the time, reasonable justification: defence against Islamic attack. (Were you there? What would you have done, without your 20th century head on your shoulders and your Enlightenment books?)
- Simple abuse will be deleted. If any, that is.
- My blog. My rules.
Great post. Good to have you writing at length again.
ReplyDeleteI stand with Israel too by the way.
Fascinating post. Much to think about there.
ReplyDeleteIslam seems like less of a faith and more of a government-type organisation.