Islam and Logos Page 4
When the discussion turns toward a consideration of creation, I once again complicate things unnecessarily by dragging Aristotle into the discussion. The universe is created by God and, therefore, a manifestation of God’s mind. Therefore, we can know the mind of God by studying creation. Every time I make an overture like this I am stopped by the Islamic notion of the word of God. Citing Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, I claim that pagans will be held accountable for their actions even though they lack any revelation because unaided reason can derive the moral law from creation. Every time I make a claim like this it has to be translated not only into Farsi but also into the philosophical framework of Islamic sola scriptura, which claims that all knowledge comes from the prophets. There is simply no possibility of a figure like Aristotle in this conceptual framework.
And yet Aristotle is vital here. The truth is that Aristotle was on track of the same thought as Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, namely of God understood as he alone who, having always been there, strictly qualifies as the one who causes everything else to exist, an elaboration of the idea of cause to explain bare existence itself, the existence of anything at all. What is more, in a passage, Metaphysics, 1063b37-1064a4, not referred to in the major commentaries, Aristotle says that the natural sciences deal with what is subject to change; and the theoretical sciences — mathematics, logic, rhetoric — deal with what is permanent but not apart from the world, whereas Aristotle’s postulate, to explain why there is anything at all rather than nothing, does not change; and being ex hypothesi the most permanent thing there is, it exists apart from the world.
Looking at all of this from a less academic perspective, when I was in India in 2015 I visited a class in a Catholic school. When the teacher asked the students if they had any questions, a Hindu named Samil stood up and asked if I could come up with a scientific proof for the existence of God. I said, "Sure", and proceeded to say:
Nothing comes from nothing; there is something; therefore, there was never nothing. This something could not bring itself into existence, because to do that, it would have to exist before it existed. Therefore, something else had to bring it into existence. That something is what Aristotle called the uncaused cause and the unmoved mover. Aquinas ends his proofs for the existence of God by saying that “this being all men call God.”
On another occasion I wrote the following:
If there were ever nothing, there could never be something. Since it's obvious that there is something, then there was never nothing. Since material beings come into existence, decay, and go out of existence, the something that preceded everything else could not have been material; it had to be a spiritual entity that was dependent on nothing else. That is what all men call God. ("Diary of a Tortured Soul," Culture Wars, March 2003.)
What I would also like to have said in the discussion referred to earlier is that if reality is a bridge, then God is the bedrock beneath the river bottom that prevents the bridge from collapsing into the river. When engineers build bridges, they build forms and then pump the water out of the forms to get to that bedrock. Those engineers could pour an infinite amount of concrete into those forms, but if that concrete didn’t rest on something that didn’t move, the bridge would not stand. The fact that the bridge is standing is an indication that something did not move. If we were to remove that bedrock, the bridge would collapse. The same thing is true of any other reality. The construct that each of us lives in could be called our “world.” These individual worlds are not private, isolated entities, cut off from each other. The fact that you are reading this sentence is some indication that my world has a lot in common with your world. Each individual world is based on a reality which is based on the ultimate reality, the bedrock which keeps the bridge in the air, the thing which all men call God. God infuses the world with its ratio, its intelligibility. The same is true for each personal world. If God were removed from either, each would collapse into non-intelligibility and non-being.
God cannot be removed from the universe, even though Nietzsche imagines that he could be murdered. But even the fantasy has an air of impossible unreality about it. “Who gave us the sponge,” Nietzsche writes, “to wipe away the whole horizon?” It would be easier to wipe away the entire horizon with a sponge than eliminate God from creation. God, however, can be removed in some sense from the lived psychological construct which we call, in the colloquial sense, our “world.” I stress the caveat “in some sense.” As Augustine says in his Confessions, “Even those who set themselves up against you do but copy you in a perverse way.” St. Augustine also said that the mind of man could find no rest until it found rest in God. So the mind is like the bridge, which will be in motion (which is to saying falling into the river) until it finds its rest (i.e. lack of motion) in the bedrock which supports it, which is analogous to God, whom the Psalmist terms “my rock.” Once it finds that rest, the structure known as an individual’s “world” will grow in coherence, comprehensibility, and stability.
If the mind denies God, it will never find that rest. As a result, the structure that is built ultimately in God, the thing that is known as an individual’s world, will be in a constant state of motion toward disintegration without God, lacking coherence, comprehensibility and stability — in other words, in a constant state of motion toward death. On its way down, the mind will be frustrated because it cannot function properly. It will be constantly at odds with itself, frustrating the very purpose for which the mind was made in the very act of thinking. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan described the mind as “its own place.”
Now let me return directly to the discussion and the issue of Aristotle. When I bring up Aristotle, I am accused of being a polytheist because he worshipped many gods. No, I say. Logos was part of the universe because the universe was created by God. Of course, this claim is predicated on a notion of the Trinity. Creation is the revelation of God the Father, a concept which is heretical in two ways according to Islam. First of all, because it is predicated on the Trinity and, secondly, because of the claims it makes about unaided human reason. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, I claim, merely articulated what was already there. They were midwives for Logos and, like midwives, they brought the concept of God’s eternal pre-existent Logos into the world. When I make this point, the imam says that Aristotle is not necessary. I respond by asking, necessary for what? God’s death on the cross was necessary for the salvation of the human race, as is the Church he founded as the source of grace. In conceding that Aristotle is not necessary for salvation, I in effect concede the imam’s position, since he is only interested in what is necessary. Since Aristotle is not necessary can't he be dismissed along with philosophy in general?
There is, however, more to be said about Aristotle. One of them has already been hinted at and is expressed vigorously by James Higgins in his definitive study of Aquinas and Aristotle (“St. Thomas's Pedagogy: Ignored, Rediscovered, and Applied,” Heythrop Journal, July 2009):
The reason for the devaluation and neglect of Aristotle’s argument may admittedly lie in the digression that immediately follows, where he turns, straight after his rational, metaphysical ‘break-through’, to fanciful cosmology and the question how many ‘prime movers’ to posit. From riding two horses at once, then, he comes a cropper, so delighting the sceptics with his dotty speculation about whether we should say 47 or 55, and why.
Higgins goes on to make another powerful point:
Arguments usually consist of separate steps; and some of them, notably those at the end, may be less vital than the others and can for good reason be edited out. Despite Bertrand Russell’s advice (in his History of Western Philosophy) that Aristotle’s argument ‘proves the existence’ of so many prime movers (and therefore nothing at all), we need not doubt that Russell himself understood that editing principle just as well as the rest of us. Aristotle likewise.
Higgins draws attention to a further statement made later on by Aristotle restating the original argument:
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Since this is a possible account of the subject and if it were untrue the world would have originated out of nothing, the difficulties are now resolved... There is an unmoved mover. It is eternal, a reality, actual ... a mind, nous. This prime mover, then, exists of necessity... On such a principle the heavens and the world depend.
As Higgins states, this is made more striking by its position, being placed “after the main point has been made, as obiter dicta: that is to say, as ways of viewing, or reviewing, the result — and not, ways of proving it.” Aristotle can in truth be defended very effectively against the accusations made against him.
Finally, to return briefly to the discussion, the imam then brought up Hume and Marx. How does the believer deal with them? he wonders. By refuting them, I say, but that is only possible if they are measured against Logos. I claim that Hume and Marx can be refuted by showing where they deviate from Logos, but then Nasiri claims that since Logos is a Greek and therefore pagan concept, this means fighting the infidel on his own terms, something which is pointless at best and tantamount to idolatry at worst. This attitude leads to a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment, which isn’t necessarily bad, but with that rejection goes a rejection of all philosophy, including Plato, Aristotle, and the idea of Logos, which is crucial to the application of Gospel principles to future contingencies.
It should be obvious by now that the history of western philosophy is in many ways the reverse of the history of Islamic philosophy. After Aquinas integrated the good in Aristotle and the Greeks into a Scholasticism which came up with a synthesis of faith and reason that respected the claims of both, the West betrayed the hard won enculturation of Logos that Aquinas achieved and turned from reason to will. The nominalists of the Middle Ages had always posed a threat, but their latent threat became overt when Martin Luther demonized reason as a whore and thereby opened the door for Nietzsche, who would complete Luther’s train of thought at the end of the 19th century with his attack on Christ/Socrates and the promotion of Dionysian will as the alternative.
The parallels between the Ash’arite School of Islamic thought and modern philosophy which are so striking at first glance are ultimately predictable because of the limited number of available options when it comes to the relationship between thought and being. Like David Hume, al-Ghazali insisted that there is no “natural” sequence of cause and effect. According to al-Ghazali,
The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary... Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not in being necessary in itself, incapable of separation... The agent of burning is God... For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only simultaneity, not causation, and in reality there is no other cause ... but God.
Aquinas identifies this claim as “the error of the Law of the Moors,” but it is also the error of David Hume and Jacques Derrida. Like the Deconstructionists, “Al-Ghazali taught that the intellect should only be used to destroy itself.” David Hume is as vehement in his rejection of faith as al-Ghazali is in his rejection of reason, but both men find common ground in their mutually shared skepticism, which denies a Logos which includes faith and reason. In a universe which is purely a manifestation of God’s will, God becomes a Nietzschean. All philosophers become sophists, and truth, as Thrasymachus predicted, becomes the opinion of the powerful. In a statement that had direct relevance, as we shall see, to the birth control discussion I had with the imams in Qom and the second thoughts the Ayatollah Khamenei was having over the government’s support of population control, Sheikh Nabhani “taught that there was no such thing as morality in Islam; it was simply what God taught. If Allah allowed it, it was moral. If He forbade it, it was immoral.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Logos of Sex
The result of the triumph of Ash’arism in the Islamic world is the curious duality of the third world, which accepts the technology which is the fruit of the West’s acceptance of Logos, but not the philosophy which would allow its proper application. In this regard, Islam is no different than the post-Enlightenment West. In applying a fundamentalist sola scriptura understanding of the Koran to modern technology, certain issues have fallen through the cracks, and human sexuality is one of the most significant.
I then tried to deal with the Logos of sex. Humans were created by God, a fact which implies that there is a Logos to human sexuality; therefore, it would be wrong to interfere or deliberately disrupt that Logos by denying, for example, its procreative dimension by contraception. As I am waiting for the imam’s response, someone brings up coitus interruptus, which the Imam defends, claiming that “just because you open a can of coke doesn’t mean that you have to finish it.” By now others present have joined in the discussion. In what amounts to a tacit rebuke of what Nasiri just said about coke and sex, one claims that coitus interruptus leads to prostate cancer. Someone else claims that sodomy between a husband and wife is permitted because it is not forbidden by the Koran. The imam does not dispute this, prompting me to contend that a sola scriptura approach to the Koran has hampered Islam’s ability to deal with sexual issues, which I go on to claim are the most crucial issues facing the Islamic Republic of Iran at this moment in its history.
On February 7, 2013, Stratfor, the global intelligence agency, announced that the economic sanctions which the United States had imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran were beginning to “unravel.” On February 6, 2013, the European Union’s Court of Justice removed Bank Saderat, one of Iran’s largest foreign exchange banks, from the sanctions list. Bank Mellat, Iran’s largest bank, had already been removed from the sanctions list a week before on January 30.
Following the announcement of the European Court of Justice, United States Vice-President Joseph Biden proposed high level talks to end the nuclear impasse. The proposed talks were rejected by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameni, but taken together with the Obama Administration’s decision in the fall of 2012 not to attack Iran militarily, it looked as if a major change in policy were in the offing.
Unfortunately, looks can be deceiving, especially in diplomatic circles. What looked like a thaw in relations acted as a cover for covert psychological operations. Once the economic sanctions were beginning to unravel and the military option had been taken off the table, Iran was subjected to an even more intense version of sexual-oriented psychological warfare than the campaign that was unleashed on Palestine during the spring of 2002. During discussions with clergy and women’s rights activists during my stay in Tehran in 2013, I heard repeated reports of covert dissemination of pornography. We are not talking simply about the sale of bootleg copies of R-rated Hollywood movies on the streets. We are talking about the covert distribution of pornographic DVDs gratis to the population at large. During the night, these DVDs were dropped off at people’s houses like so many bottles of milk or newspapers. Oftentimes, the target of these psy ops could have his DVDs replaced by leaving them outside his house where the already viewed DVDs were picked up.
Pornography was only one aspect of this attempt to resexualize the culture as a prelude to returning sexuality to the status it enjoyed as a form of political control under the Shah. The dissemination of contraception propaganda and devices, begun under the Shah in collaboration with the Rockefeller Population Council, was an even more effective as well as pernicious form of using sexual liberation as political control.
Biden’s overture was rejected by the Supreme Leader, but the fact that he made it at all indicates that the U.S. bargaining position had been weakened by the European Court of Justice’s decision, and that it would continue to weaken over time as more and more countries jockeyed for favorable positions vis a vis resuming trade with Iran. “Some naive people like the idea of negoti
ating with America [but] negotiations will not solve the problems,” Khamenei said in remarks that were posted on his website. “If some people want American rule to be established again in Iran, the nation will rise up to face them.”
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, responded to Biden’s overture in a way that was both cautious and positive. If we put the removal of the military option together with the unraveling of the sanctions plus Biden’s offer to negotiate together, it looked as if the U.S. was trying to negotiate with Iran from a position of strength that was only going to diminish with time. That meant increased psychological warfare, which would explain the fact that pornography was being delivered to the doors of Iranians like daily newspapers.
The Iranian leadership, however, was under its own form of pressure, one which was every bit as urgent as the pressure which the expiring sanctions had placed on the Obama Administration. The Islamic government’s acceptance of contraception had created a demographic time bomb which was going to destroy the revolution from within. Widespread use of the birth control pill had created a feminist fifth column in Iran that was waiting to be manipulated by Western-funded covert operations. In this respect the Green Revolution demonstrations of June 2009 were a harbinger of things to come. Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani claimed that women played a major role in the Green demonstrations of 2009, when “Iran’s body politic was invaded by feminine power.”
My contention that the sola scriptura approach to the Koran has hampered Islam in dealing with sexual issues finds independent corroboration in a speech which the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameni gave on October 10, 2012. In that speech Khameni claimed that it was a mistake not to abandon the population control policies which the Islamic revolution of 1979 had inherited from the Shah. Khameni claimed that: