Islam and Logos Page 3

  That is precisely the problem with Schall’s book, but it is also the problem with Benedict's speech. At this point we come to the attack on Logos which was not mentioned in the speech, the Jewish attack on Logos, which manifests itself not by the threat of invasion from without, as is the case with Islam, which has sought to spread its faith by the sword and military conquest, but the threat of subversion from within, otherwise known as revolution. If the Muslim is alogos, because of Mohammed's imperfect understanding of the monotheistic traditions he absorbed from his position beyond the borders of a collapsing Greco-Roman civilization, the Jew is anti-Logos, for a very simple reason, namely, because of his rejection of Christ. Islam did not reject Christ. Islam failed to understand Christ, as manifested in its rejection of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and ended up trying to mask that misunderstanding by honoring Jesus as a prophet.

  The situation with the Jews is completely different. The Jews were God’s chosen people. When Jesus arrived on earth as their long awaited Messiah, the Jews, who, like all men, were given free will by their God, had to make a decision. They had to either accept or reject the Christ, who was the physical embodiment of Logos.

  As in his Regensburg speech so in his interview with Peter Seewald (Benedict XVI, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times (2010)), Benedict seems to have a double standard when it comes to Logos. Muslims are guilty until proven innocent when it comes to terrorism and contempt for Logos, but the Jewish rejection of Logos (which is mentioned in Scripture) as well as Israeli involvement in state-supported terrorism, never gets mentioned, certainly not as a cause of Muslim terrorism. The Jewish rejection of Logos is dealt with in great detail, of course, in my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit (2008) and the main aspects of this also can be found in my book The Catholic Church and the Jews (2016).

  The double standard, then, haunted the Benedict papacy from its inception and it showed no signs of abating. There is no theological or scriptural basis for treating Jews as somehow less inimical to Christian interests than Muslims. Well, maybe it depends upon whom you ask. And in this context, it may very well have depended on which Benedict you asked or which Benedict answered. When it comes to the Jews, the two Benedicts were pursuing two different courses. Benedict the pope affirmed that Jews must accept Jesus in order to be saved, but Benedict the German professor opined that the old prayer for their conversion, the one referring to the “perfidious Jews,” “was offensive to Jews and failed to express positively the overall intrinsic unity between the Old and New Testament.” Hence the need for “a new formulation” which “shifts the focus from a direct petition for the conversion of the Jews in a missionary sense to a plea that the Lord might bring about the hour of history when we may all be united.” All of these conflicting claims would be much easier to adjudicate if there were one pope who had one public persona, and if that public persona, the papal “we,” were the only source of the pope’s public utterances. Then the pope, whether it be Benedict or Francis, would know that every time he opened his mouth in public he would have a clear set of criteria to follow, the main set being embodied in Sacred Scripture. If that were the case, life would be simpler for the pope and for the rest of us as well. But being restricted to speaking only as the papal “we” would have significant consequences, both theological and political. Fidelity to the gospel message of preaching conversion, which is precisely what St. Peter did when he went to Jerusalem, would mean the end of dialogue.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  What is Islam?

  So, what exactly is Islam? To answer the question at least preliminarily, there are in effect two Islams, one at war with the other. There is the Shi’a triad which begins with the Hezbollah-Palestinian faction in the west, moves to the Alawite Assad regime in Syria, which is aligned with the Ayatollah Sistani Shi’a in Iraq, who are aligned with the Shi’a Islamic Republic of Iran. They are now at war with the Sunni/Wahhabi/Salafist triad, which is supported by Israel, Turkey, and the Wahhabi regime in Saudi Arabia. Caught with its pants down when the Arab Spring arrived and deposed American puppets like the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the American State Department, under the leadership of geniuses like Hilary Clinton and John McCain, threw their support to Salafist insurgents like Morsi in Egypt and God-knows-who in Libya and gave their imprimatur to the new boss, who, compared to the old boss, harbored an even more virulent hatred of Israel and was intellectually even less equipped to run a government than the secularist totalitarians they were so avid to depose. The result was chaos, epitomized by the murder of the U.S. ambassador and his staff in Benghazi, brought about by the very people that Hilary Clinton and John McCain put into power.

  True to their Enlightenment prejudices and the failed policies of the ’70s that drove the Shah from power in Iran, the State Department invited a number of “women leaders” from the Islamic world to take part in a summer-long program of feminist brainwashing at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana. For some reason known to Allah alone, the Joneses were selected to be the host family for one of these young ladies. Fatemah, which is not her real name, had come here fresh from the coup in Libya, newly anointed as a feminist leader of the future who could be counted on to spread feminism and the moral corruption of women that invariably accompanied it among her sisters in Libya — all in the name of freedom, of course.

  Feminism, you may remember, was one of the first things that Paul Wolfowitz promoted after the conquest of Baghdad, indicating that it was the appropriate punishment for conquered backward peoples, like the Catholic parents who send their children to St. Mary’s College and the children of the Salafists in Libya. Unfortunately, things never work out as planned by the Masters of the Universe. After lavishing money on fifth-column feminists in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz nearly got himself killed when an RPG hit the room below his in the hotel where he was staying in Baghdad. The spectacle of Wolfowitz running out of the hotel in his underwear was a sign of hope insofar as it showed that Iraqis understood feminism and how to deal with Jewish revolutionaries intent on corrupting the morals of their daughters. As the result of a gesture similar to firing an RPG at Paul Wolfowitz’s hotel room, the U.S. ambassador to Libya got killed by the people he liberated. After an intense late night conversation, Fatemah, the woman leader of the future who got billeted to our home, began to express a hatred for Israel that was even more intense than her hatred for the late Muammar Khaddafi. So Israel and the State Department are sowing dragons’ teeth and are in for a rude awakening, of which the murder of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens is only the prelude.

  Shi’a Islam has a magisterium which is not separate from the state. The Islamic Republic of Iran is based on the Velayat-e faqih, or governance of the guardians. The guardians, analogous to the Archons of Plato, ensure that democracy remains within the bounds of Sharia, which is to say, the laws of God. If any group in Islam has the potential of breaking out of the intellectual impasse which has resulted from the Islamic sola scriptura reading of the Koran, it is Shi’ite scholars like Javadi e Emoli, whose thoughts on the relationship between freedom and the moral law I have cited a number of times in talks. Shi’a Islam denies that every Muslim has the right to his own interpretation of the Koran. Shi’a Islam believes that something like a Church, i.e., an organization providing moral guidance, is necessary for salvation and for the proper functioning of the state.

  Science was the regnant lingua franca under the Shah and all of the other secular regimes which the United States and Britain put in power in the aftermath of World War II. It was based on the bifurcation of Logos which Descartes bequeathed to the West when, disgusted with the legacy of Christendom and the wars of the 17th century (he was a soldier in the Battle of White Mountain when the Magic King of Bohemia was deposed), he divided the world into the res cogitans, which was subjective, and the res extensa, which was its objective opposite. Morals got banned from that universe because no one, least of all Descartes, could figure out how they
applied to balls moving in space, and the result was economics as pseudo-physics, Capitalism, and the world as we know it now.

  By the time Imam Khomeini founded an Islamic republic based on the rule of the guardians and total abolition of the separation of church and state which had characterized all of the secular Islamic regimes in the Middle East, the Enlightenment state was showing signs of strain. In the intervening three decades since then, it has all but completely collapsed. The American experiment in ordered liberty failed completely during the thirty-some crucial years that spanned the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Shorn of the religious input that the Catholic Church had provided, however incompletely, America was unable to prevent the complete eclipse of its own democratic principles and their replacement by the crudest form of Jewish plutocracy, symbolized best by the role which casino mogul Sheldon Adelson played in the 2012 presidential elections, or in the twenty-some standing ovations that the entire American Congress gave to Binyamin Netanyahu in the Spring of 2011 in order to keep Jewish money flowing into their coffers. When asked what kind of government America’s founding fathers had created, Benjamin Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, by the time George W. Bush left the White House in 2008, it was clear that we couldn’t keep it and that America had entered a state of totalitarian decadence that was the antithesis of everything that America’s founding fathers had sought to maintain.

  In our quest for the answer to the question “What is Islam?” I made a visit in 2013 to Qom, which is an oasis in the desert roughly one hundred miles south of Tehran, and is the holy city of Shi'ism. I was taken to the house of Hojjatoleslam Nasiri, an Islamic scholar who is editor of the 110 volume edition of the Hadith, which is to say, a collection of religious stories, reports, and traditions ascribed to Muhammad and/or his pious companions which number in the hundreds of thousands. The title Hojjatoleslam indicates a rank just below that of ayatollah, and on the following day we would be joined with another cleric, Hojjatoleslam Hosayni, who would make his own contributions to our discussion, and by Arash Darya-Bandari, who studied at Berkeley.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Faith and Reason

  We launched into a discussion of the relationship between revelation and philosophy, which I initiated by citing Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech and the claim he made therein that that Arabic philosophy stopped when Averroes was rejected as a heretic after failing to reconcile Aristotle’s claim that the world is eternal with Scripture’s claim that it began in time. In coming up with the doctrine of two truths, Averroes was only trying to reconcile a dispute in Sunni Islam between the Mu’tazila, who had been influenced by Aristotle and believed in free will, and the Ash’arites, who believed in predestination, the position of the overwhelming majority of Sunni Muslims. According to a gloss on our conversation which was forwarded to me later,

  the Mu’tazila maintained that in the event that there is a conflict between reason and revelation, that reason trumps revelation. The Ash’arites believe the opposite. The Shi’a position is that there can be no contradiction between the two, as revelation is not irrational or anti-rational, but trans- or supra-rational, and conflicts arise only because revelation is not properly understood, because reason is not pure (it is mixed up with emotions and illusion), or that reason has overstepped its bounds and transgressed into the compass that is rightly scripture’s. Waliyic Islam goes into this at some length also.

  The Shi’a position on revelation is similar to the Catholic position. Both religions claim to be based on a canonical set of writings, which are both perfect — which is to say, efficacious for salvation — and complete — which is to say, compiled definitively at a certain period of time, after which no new revelation will be added. This is where the problems start. If all knowledge comes from revelation, and revelation is complete at some point in the past, how do you adjudicate the moral liceity of new technologies like credit default swaps or birth control pills?

  The Catholic answer is Sacred Tradition, which is “like a mirror, in which the Church during its pilgrim journey here on earth, contemplates God, from whom she receives everything, until such time as she is brought to see him face to face as he really is” (Austin Flannery, Vatican II: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents (1980), p.754). Sacred Tradition “comes from the apostles” and “makes progress in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on... Thus, as the centuries go by, the Church is always advancing toward the plenitude of divine truth, until eventually the words of God are fulfilled in her” (Flannery, p.754).

  Any attempt to deal with the relationship between revelation and reason in Islamic thought invariably runs into the Islamic version of sola scriptura, at which point all discussions run the danger of hitting a brick wall, ours being no exception to that rule. In retrospect, I think it was a tactical error to talk about Logos when I could have used the more accurate word tradition to convey the same thing. This might have circumvented triggering the Islamic aversion to pagan philosophy, which it sees as a form of idolatry. Nasiri considered Averroes a heretic because Averroes took Aristotle seriously. Given the sola scriptura approach to revelation, there is no explanation of how a body of scripture which is complete at a certain period of time can find application to future contingencies which the writers of scripture could not have imagined. Sola scriptura forces the believer to misstate the question by asking what the Koran has to say about credit default swaps and birth control pills.

  The way out of this dilemma is some form of sacred tradition based on Logos. This allows the believer to claim that “Sacred Scripture is the speech of God” (Flannery, p.755), but it also allows the application of scriptural principles to future contingencies. The Catholic Church rejects sola scriptura, because, among other reasons, it invariably leads the interpreter of scripture into an intellectual dead end. The Church “does not draw her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone” (Flannery, p.755) because that would preclude dealing with any future contingency not included in Sacred Scripture. The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone, which is based on both Scripture and Tradition. In fact, “Tradition, sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others” (Flannery, p.756).

  Sacred Tradition is bound up with Logos, which is to say, unaided reason’s ability to discern the order of the universe, because it claims that: “God, who creates and conserves all things by his Word, provides men with constant evidence of himself in created realities...” Dei Verbum, the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation then cites Romans, 1:19-20: “For what can be known about God is perfectly plain to them [i.e., the pagan Romans] since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity — however invisible — have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made. That is why such people are without excuse: they knew God and yet refused to honor him as God or thank him; instead, they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.” Dei Verbum claims that “God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.”

  According to a gloss sent to me after the interview, Islam would reject Saint Paul’s claim because “The Shi’a position is that [unaided human reason] is necessary but not sufficient. As Hj. Nasiri pointed out: each of the philosophers believes his position to be the most reasonable, and without revelation, there is and can be no criterion with which to assay the correctness of a given position.”

  In continuing the discussion, Arash Darya-Bandari makes it clear that the Ayatollah Javadi, however, has a slightly different position, claiming

  that reason itself sees
its own limitations. For example, reason sees that its ambit is conceptual, and that concepts are discrete and finite, that reality is continuous and infinite, and that therefore, its epistemic ambit is limited.

  But then, after undercutting what Saint Paul and Sacred Tradition have to say about unaided human reason, the Ayatollah Javadi goes on:

  to affirm the importance and indeed the indispensability of reason, stating that a person who fails to abide by its dictates “will be taken to Hell, plea as he might (on the Day of Judgment) that he never saw anything in scripture (pertaining to these imperatives)”: (rather,) he will be told, “you were endowed with intelligence, and (it was) your intelligence (which) decreed these (imperatives) to you.” (Human) intelligence is “the proof (sufficient unto) Islam” {hojjat ol-islam}, and its dictates are the dictates of (our) religion.

  Whether the Ayatollah Javadi would accept the idea that “God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason” is a question I cannot answer. He lives in Qom, but he didn’t take part in our symposium. Catholics believe that there can be no conflict between faith and reason, but Muslims believe that there is no possibility of conflict between the Koran and all ideas because the Koran is the source of all knowledge. The more the mullahs revert to sola scriptura the more imperiled any dialogue becomes; in fact, every discussion that starts out with sola scriptura as its premise veers perilously close to the story of the Muslims and the Library of Alexandria. Either what is in the library contradicts the Koran, in which case it is heretical and should be burnt, or it repeats what is in the Koran, in which case it is superfluous and should be burnt. There is no escape from the inexorable logic of sola scriptura.