Reconciling revelation with reason
Salim Mansur
National Post
Friday, October 03, 2003
nationalpost.com.
The subject of reform, Islam or Muslim, is old, but now has assumed an urgency that is unprecedented.
It is glib to speak about reforming Islam. Islam, as the breath and light of Muhammad, is the spiritual nourishment equally for beggars and princes of the Muslim world.
It is proper to speak about the reform of Muslims. For whatever is Islam in practice -- or for that matter Judaism and Christianity -- and how it is received, understood and made the template of cultures, it will remain at the human level merely a reflection and refraction of the conduct of Muslims.
Muhammad said, "Islam began as a stranger and will become once more a stranger." He meant Muslims, like other communities preceding them, would become corrupt and the message that elevated them in history would be forgotten.
But he also said, "God will send to this community, at the head of every hundred years, one who will renew for it its religion." He confirmed reform and renewal are inherent aspects of any people's willingness to be receptive to the spirit of their age.
The Prophet's words are reassuring, but there is also a prerequisite. A well-known Koranic verse reads, "Verily God does not change the condition of a people till they change themselves."
The events of 9/11 have a much wider context than simply the deranged, or evil, psychology of Muslim fanatics who perpetrated them. This is the failure of the Muslim world -- which is almost entirely situated within the developing countries of Asia and Africa -- to meet the multi-layered challenge of modernity and democracy in the 20th century.
For the Muslim world, its centre collapsed a long time ago. So long as the world was predominantly an agrarian economy, the diversity of Muslim cultures and the Islamic civilization remained vibrant. Once the Europeans pioneered the basis of a new scientific-industrial civilization, the Muslim world fell behind, its vitality sapped, its centre depleted.
It is not that the Word of God no longer addressed the condition of the Muslim world. On the contrary, the vast majority of Muslims no longer hear God in the dramatically altered conditions of the world in which they appear as a poor specimen of bygone times.
Herein lies the problem and challenge of Muslim reform. The political and cultural realm Muslims inhabit belongs to another age, and is incongruent with the requirements of our times. This system now weighs upon Muslims with deadening effect, and its inertia prevents them from becoming open and receptive to a world that mocks them for their failure they may only deny by compounding the problem.
As the poet William Butler Yeats noted -- it now seems a long time ago -- when the centre of a culture collapses, "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned." In such times there is paucity of hope for reason to prevail, and good may only be expected when once the poison in the bloodstream of that culture has exhausted itself.
Any serious student of the Muslim world can provide countless names of Muslim thinkers during the past 200 years tinkering with some aspect of hermeneutics, the science of textual readings, that might contribute to an understanding of the sacred text of Islam, the Koran, in keeping with the spirit of the modern age. The irony is, however, that the cultural system within which Muslims reside, enclose and remove them from hearing ever fresh the Word of God when they read the Koran. Textual interpretations may help individual Muslims reorient themselves to their world, but there is insufficient evidence from Muslim history that it would bring about a Muslim reform.
There was a moment in Muslim history, the 8th-to-9th century, when a rationalist theology flourished briefly in Baghdad. But the zealotry of the literal-minded reactionary men of the mosques and religious schools snuffed this earliest venture of reconciling revelation with reason.
This banishment of Muslim versions of Spinoza anticipated what took place in Europe with the Inquisition and religious wars during several centuries of the medieval age. The difference is illuminating. Europe eventually emerged from the close-mindedness of that history into the open-mindedness of the modern world it created for itself and others.
Muslims have much to learn from Christians, for Christianity has the longest, most profound and liberating experience with that entire reform process initiated by Christians of Europe, and spread over more than 300 years through which the world of the Inquisition made its transition into the world of modern science and democracy. Christianity as an institutionalized faith not only survived but came out, as a result of this process, renewed and strengthened, its ideals more brightly restored, more widely spread, more deeply sown in a world not less wanting of spiritual sustenance.
There is no one singular towering personality of Christian reformation who Muslims can take for their guide. They can draw benefit learning from Augustine and Luther as they may from Galileo and Newton. They also need to learn from Cromwell and Washington.
The discovery of America with Tocqueville is no less essential than rediscovering the inquisitiveness and openness of the mind that brought desert Arabs to embrace Persian and Greek, Indian and Chinese civilizations as Muslims encountered them, and then achieving greatness in the process of assimilating their knowledge.
Muslims of the first generation took to heart what the Prophet advised, "Go unto China seeking knowledge." Muslims of the present generation not only misread the Koran, they have denigrated the Prophet into their self-image of men without love, seething with rage.
The Koran speaks of peoples and cultures in failing to reform their beliefs vanished. It warns, "If God please, He will remove you and bring a new creation [in your place]."
Muslims have been standing indecisively for a long time at the fork of world history. It is their choice to embrace the modern world and prosper, or remaining inconsequentially enclosed within their cultural system vanish into oblivion.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario, London.
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