The Pope's Lecture

Question:-

Pope Benedict XVI's recent lecture in Regensburg, Germany (Sept 2006) has been received with condemnation and violence in the Muslim world. Read this short lecture to see how disproportionate and absurd this response is: http://tinyurl.com/j7uuh. What do you think?

Comment:-

Thanks for the reference. I have read it and I think that the response in the Muslim world is certainly disproportionate. He was quoting a book by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

The offending passage reads:-

“In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that Surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (F×< 8`(T) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

The Pope did also point out that the Quran states that there is no compulsion in Religion. It is also necessary to point out that the Pope and the Emperor he quotes do not have sufficient knowledge of Islam and the concept of Jihad which is much wider than armed warfare and refers to striving and has a spiritual dimension. Its military or political aspect was not meant for conversion but for defence of the faith and the faithful against attack. The Pope appears to say that the Quran contradicts itself by later condoning conversion by means of force. This is certainly a distortion.

Apart from this it is not true as we can see from the Old Testament and other religious Scriptures that “violence is incompatible with God”.

Certainly Muslims were engaged in wars and civil wars but that is no different from the same thing that Christians were involved in. However, unlike Muslims, they most certainly persecuted heretics, conducted campaigns of ethnic cleansing and forced conversion as in Spain and there were many wars between Catholic and Protestant. There were Crusades against Muslims and they fought back.

It is not, therefore, any kind of justice or objectivity to point only to one side for defects and the other for virtues. This can also be reversed by the other side. One can most certainly object to that kind of prejudice especially in these sensitive times.

The fault, for the strong Muslim Reaction, I am almost certain, lies in the selective reporting of reporters which distorts almost everything they report, and usually for sensationalist and mischief making reasons.

But Muslims are not the only ones to fall for this sort of deceit.

All people should have learnt not to trust reporters. In view of the mischief they make, the Law should most certainly require that this kind of distortion should be severely punished and reporters should be required to undergo correct training before being let loose on the public.

Question:-

Do any of the Muslims find some merit in what the Pope has said?

Comment:-

The Pope is dealing with a problem of Christianity and not of Religion in general. But he has not really solved the problem Christians would be better off going back to the teachings of Jesus. They would be even better off by adopting Islam.

Here I propose to present the problem of religion as the Pope sees it and to show the Islamic solution.

The Pope was discussing:- "the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran.” He said: “It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason".... "

The Pope continues:- "The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry."

According to the Pope, Christianity as found in Europe is the result of the amalgamation of the Hebrew tradition and Greek thought. The Greek Logos is the Christian Word which is God and means Reason. He says:-

"This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe."

From the Islamic point of view Allah is certainly transcends all things and can do as He will, but He creates by His Word, the creative force, the Universe and this refers to all the laws that create the regularities by which we recognise things. Reason, therefore, refers only to the created world. The Word is God's but not God. His Attributes, that relate the Creator to Creation, are also the categories of thought by which we understand things.

Human beings made of earth also contain the Spirit of God. And they have been taught the Attributes. (See Quran 32:9, 2:30-31, 2:37-38, 16:2 15:29, 8:24 etc.) They, therefore, have three levels of functioning and three sources of knowledge:- Consciousness, conscience and will refer to the Spirit and man is capable of insight and of receiving inspiration and revelation. The faculties for thought, feeling and volitional action refer to the mind that is capable of creating concepts and reasoning or data processing. The body consists of many kinds of processes including the reception of sensations, processing and reaction. In general there is some interaction between these to various degrees, but each has its main sphere of functioning.

But all three sets of faculties come from Allah, have been created to serve a purpose and are to be used for Allah. Aql or Intelligence does not refer only to what in the West is called Reason - or conversely Reason is much more than what is known as such in the West.

It follows that Islam does not have the following problem that Christianity faces:-

The Pope points out:- "In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness."

This dehellinisation took place in three stages. In the first, faith was seen as other than thought and reason. In the second, religion was to be liberated from Philosophy and Theology and identified with Ethics. The third stage that continues today recognises the limits of reason and reduces reason to science, to what is observable and measurable and excludes faith and conscience and ethics as being wholly subjective and therefore unable to form communities or relate to Reality.

This according to the Pope is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs that opens up the possibilities of conflict and chaos. "In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions."

So he pleads:-

"The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today."

The Pope, however, failed to mention several important things:-

(1) He failed to make explicit, though it is implicit in his Lecture, that Greek rational thought, the influence of which created Christianity, actually corrupted the religion which was essentially a continuation of the Hebrew religion based on revelation, faith and law.

(2) Originally, Christianity, in common with Hebrewism before it, was based on faith and, therefore, on a super-rational faculty. But later the Catholic Church influenced by Greek rationalism adopted the Theology of Thomas Aquinas where faith and reason were reconciled. The fact, however, is that Thomas Aquinas, a follower of Aristotle, obtained his ideas from Muslim Philosophers, particularly, Ibn Rushd also known as Averroes. But the Church, like other institutions that feel threatened, in order to protect itself against the new Religion Islam found it necessary to fight against Islam by deeds and words, to malign Islam, ignore its contributions to the progress of civilisation and its own debts to it, and instead to attribute Western civilisation to the influence of the pagan cultures of Greek and Rome from which they adopted many practices. This also included Roman Law while the Hebrew Law was abandoned despite Jesus’ support for it.

(3) That the modern Western Civilisation is based on Science and the technologies it gives rise to, which is based on empirical investigation and mathematics rather than purely logical verbal arguments. The Christian Church opposed this for a long time until it lost the battle. That is what caused the third stage of dehellinisation.

(4) That this scientific attitude came into the West from Islam, and that was probably why it was so strongly opposed by the Church.

(5) In fact Western Civilisation is based on disestablishment of Religion. The Catholic Church dominated all thought, social, economic and political affairs for some time. It ran a Theocratic Dictatorship. But eventually it succumbed to the increasing secularisation pressure from three inter-dependent directions – ideas based on science, commerce based on Capitalism and the revolt of the kings and aristocracy and later the democratisation process. The religion itself disintegrated as a result of the revolt that brought about the Reformation. All these can be attributed to the influence of the new ideas that flowed into Europe from the Islamic world especially as a result of the collisions through the Crusades that also had the consequence of opening up routes to other parts of the world including Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, their ides and resources.

The result of the conflict between the Church and these Secular authorities was a tacit agreement that Spiritual matters would be left to the Church and Worldly matters would be left to the Secular Institutions. The result was a kind of schizophrenia, the division of life into compartments and numerous dichotomies such as those between spirit and matter, ethical and practical, values and facts, Idealism and Materialism, intellectuals and labourers, theory and practice, masters and servants, rulers and ruled owners and workers, consumers and suppliers. Religious ideas could now be divorced from facts, and Science, commerce and politics would function without moral values. Within the individual the intellect was separated from the physical action, the intellectuals were not required to do physical work, lost contact with the practical, and were not required to consider the facts, while the manual workers were not required to think or make decisions. All this has psychological, social as well as environmental consequences. The separation of man from the environment and the idea that he can dominate and exploit has led to the increasing irresponsible wastage, pollution and disruption of the environment with which he is interdependent.

But obviously, life is a unity in which all things interact and are interdependent; therefore some kind of bridges had to exist. Between owners and workers there arose managers, and between rulers and ruled we have administrators. Between values and facts we have meanings and between intellect and action we have feelings and emotions, and between the intellectuals and labourers we have artists and charity workers. However, these trinities remain uncoordinated and therefore, often in mutual contradiction or conflict, pulling in different directions causing loss of mutual understanding, confusion and disintegration. The awareness of the underlying unity is wholly lost, the main reason why the concept of God is not understood and religion has declined in the West, resulting in the decline of morality and self-discipline which must be increasingly replaced with coercion and imposed discipline and making the State into a machine, governed by rules rather than human intelligence.

The cure for all this is obviously the understanding, propagation and application of the notion of Tawhid – the acceptance of the Unity of God and surrender to Him.

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