|
Reflections on the Statements of the Pope:
History, the New Worlds... and Islam
Dr.
Radwan al Sayyid(*)
It is not easy to identify the aims lying behind
the lecture of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg, Germany(1),
entitled "Reason and Faith". Did he want to expose a new image and a new
interpretation of the historical evolution of the Christian faith, reconciling
thus Catholic tradition with modern secularism by linking Catholic "faith" to
Greek philosophy which, according to him, has set the foundations of modern
Europe? If this was his intention, then he missed the point because the
intention of the Hellenistic revival during the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment eras was twofold : the first intention was embodied in a humanist
and anti-religious aspiration aiming at using Greek paganism against Catholic
tradition precisely; the second seeking to reconstruct the European identity,
considering that it was the Greeks who established the first nationalisms and
the first States, being distinct from the other Aryan and indo-European
peoples. It is known that the Catholic Church has chosen since the beginning of
the 10th century (or possibly before that, according to the historians from the
French Annals School), to belong to Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. In case this
was the intent of the Pope, he is not in line even with the past of his own
church!
Did the Pope want to debate with his opponents
among the Protestants with whom he has struggled during his whole life by
arguing that the unicity of Christian theology had not changed since, as he said
in the lecture, the production of the "the Greek translation of the Old
Testament at Alexandria-- the Septuagint" in the second century A.D. and since
the New Testament found a new version thanks to Saint Paul? If this was his
objective, he, again, missed the point. The Protestants have stood along with
modernism, secularism and Judaism and did away with the mild Greek character of
the Old Testament as well as the Hellenistic "Gnostic" nature of the New
Testament. Besides, the major Protestant churches are almost empty of the
faithful and the followers who have been drawn by the new evangelistic movements
and the excitement of the immediate experiencing of Jesus, without the need for
any theology or scripture!
If the Pope was not addressing the modernists in
whose life there is no longer room for religion, nor addressing the Protestants
and the New Evangelists who heed no attention neither to the Old Greek germ cell
nor to the New one, to whom was he speaking then ? Let us first summarize the
Pope’s lecture and try to grasp its essence, before going back to our attempt to
comprehend his intentions.
Pope Benedict XVI began his lecture by recalling
those years when he began, in 1959, teaching theology at the University of
Rezensburg where he used to meet with his Protestant colleagues. They would
discuss about the possibility of getting together, since the said university is
made of two faculties: one faculty for Catholic theology and the other for
Protestant theology.
Then he chose to start his reflections on the
issue of reason and faith by quoting a part of a dialog between Byzantine
emperor Manuel II Paleologus (1391-1425) and a Persian Muslim scholar of which
the underlying idea was that God has a reasonable nature, that is why faith,
according to him, is connected to reason, meaning by this the reasonable free
will.
Quoting Professor Adel-Theodore Khoury, a Catholic
theologian and islamologue of Lebanese origin who edited in 1966 the dialogs of
Emperor Manuel II with Moslems, the Pope stated that the notion of the non
violence of the divine Being and, as a consequence, Its reasonable nature
started off with the Greek (Hellenistic) philosophy. The word “Greek” has two
meanings. The term Greek traditionally means in Christianity the Orthodox
religious tradition and Orthodoxy was the religion of Emperor Manuel II, the
initiator of debates. But the Pope has chosen, without any good reason, the
second meaning of the term: the ancient Greeks who have created the renowned
philosophical tradition through the famous three philosophers whom he mentioned
in his lecture: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In this respect, I say that the
Pope’s choice of the second meaning is biased because those philosophers were
not Christian and had no connection with the non violent experience of Jesus. On
the other hand, the Orthodox religious tradition was against violence in the
name of religion. He would rather have adopted the first meaning of the term
instead of relating non violence to the influence of Plato. Undoubtedly, if
Emperor Manuel II himself were still alive and had read the lecture of the Pope
he would have laughed for the simple reason that Orthodoxy was one of the first
victims of the religious violence waged by the Catholic Church (Pope Urban II in
1095 A.D) against the Islamic East. The Crusaders conquered Constantinople and
occupied it for more than fifty years in the name of Jesus the violent and not
in the name of Jesus the pacifist or the reasonable!
Then the Pope presents a new interpretation of the
Old Testament which we can summarize as follows: the Old Testament became more
civilized after having been translated into Greek. In this way, he avoided
invoking the violent image of Yahweh (Jehovah) in the Torah. The non violent
Greek New Testament was brought by Saint Paul who headed for Macedonia following
a vision he had in his dreams (A Greek Macedonia?? The Ancient Greeks never
considered Macedonia as such and they said of Alexander the Macedonian who
conquered Athens that he was a savage barbarian). Besides, Greek was the first
known language in which the Bible was spread in the world (May be the original
Gospel books were written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, or in Hebrew, but
the most ancient copies of the Bible as they spread in the world were in Greek
and date back to year 225 AD). One of these copies starts by the famous
expression: “In the beginning there was Logos, and Logos was God”. And here the
Pope unites between divinity and the word (i.e. reason) and Nous / Nouç (i.e.
intellect). For the Pope, the rapprochement of Platonic philosophy, knowledge
and reason were to take place only in Macedonia by Saint Paul! For this reason,
Christianity was not civilized in the East where it first appeared, but in
Europe. Therefore, the Christian identity of Europe emerged allowing the making-
and manufacturing- of European Christianity and Christian Europe! I think that
this made-up interpretation of the two parties, Christianity and Europe, would
have pleased Ibn Taimiyyah, the author of the great treatise against
Christianity al-Jawab al-Sahih Li-Man Baddala Din al-Masih (The Correct Answer
to those who changed the Religion of Christ)(2) wherein he said “The Romans (the
word “Romans” in the Koran and Arabic language designates the Greek Byzantines)
did not become Christian, it is Christianity that became Roman / Byzantine”.
This would have also pleased former French President Giscard d’Estaing who
presided over the committee that drafted the stillborn Constitution of Europe.
The introduction of that Constitution stated that the deep roots of the European
identity were Christian (there is no harm in this) and, on this premise, if
Moslem Turkey were to join the European Union, this would spell an irretrievable
disaster on the eternal Christian identity. And this is exactly the point of
view of the current Pope which he mentioned four years ago during the debates on
this constitution when he was at that time Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith and his name was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The Turks
think that his lack of love for them dates back to the period when he was
Archbishop of Munich where he was surprised by the way the wives of Turkish
workers were dressed and veiled.
After the connection he deduced between Greek
reason, Christianity and Europe, the Pope moved on by exposing his own reading
of the history of theology and the image of God as perceived in Christianity.
The (original) Catholic theology is the one of Logos, or the theology of reason
and faith (with the exception of a minority not worth mentioning such as Duns
Scotus). He mentions that among the prominent figures of this theology are St.
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine was in fact a Gnostic follower of Plato
but it was not the case for Thomas Aquinas who founded the “scholastic” theology
for Catholicism and drew the theological admixture from Al-Ghazali in his
opposition with Averroes.(3) In this admixture, the Greeks (Aristotle in
particular) were systematically integrated through the establishment of the
Moslem Ilm al-Kalam on the basis of formal logic. Christian mysticism is
Platonic but the institutional theology, in the same way of Ilm al-kalam for
Asharites and Mutazalites, is based on the logic of Aristotle. This might be the
right place to read the “reasonable image of God” for the Pope who is in the
first place an eminent professor of Catholic theology! That is why one has to
carefully consider his theological interpretation of medieval Christian history.
In Catholicism and Orthodoxy, there are two types
of theology as is the case in Islam and Judaism, but in Protestantism there is
only one. The two theologies, if it can be accurately said, are the following:
the first one is the theology of mercy, care and benevolence; the second one is
of infallibility and justice. These two concepts also exist in Islam and Judaism
while Protestantism knows only one theology, that of mercy, grace and selection,
which takes on an extremist character as it is the case for some Jewish
theologians; a point that will be tackled later.
In other words, the image of God among those who
adopt the theology of mercy and benevolence is one of mutual freedom. According
to this view, God is absolutely beyond similarity with humans and cannot be
subject to their criteria. “God is unlike anything that ever crossed your mind”.
God, out of mercy and grace, sent messages and chose to care for all beings that
He created. Yet, He is not bound by any obligation whatsoever except for His own
will and desire to do so in accordance with His Wisdom, Grace and Ultimate
Purposes which are beyond perception. In opposition to this absolute freedom of
God, there is the relative freedom of humans, standing between faith and
apostasy, good and evil, along with the texts and teachings that show the humans
the two paths of good and evil and the consequences of having chosen the one or
the other.
But in this theology, there is a kind of
determinism and a part of implied dependence (one will remain in the realm of
God’s care and mercy whatever one does). But in the other theology, that of
infallibility and justice, which we will call the theology of mutual commitment,
God and human beings both enjoy freedom but they are bound by the obligations
resulting from this freedom. God is bound by what He chooses to be committed to
(Mutazalites call this “promise and threat”), for it is no infallibility or
justice if God shows the right path to one human being and not to another and
that He extends his mercy to a sinner and does not reward someone who performs
his duties and abides by the teachings. God has to commit to His promise and
threat and it is impossible for Him to lose that Divine attribute. On the other
hand, human beings create their deeds which have no bearing on freewill and
predestination, and accordingly they are fully accountable for their actions.
Faith is then a grace, mercy and generosity from
God according to the theological trend of mercy, while it is an obligation and a
right for the followers of the theology of infallibility and justice. Grace,
Mercy and Care take on more important dimensions for Jewish theologians since
they believe of their election by God as a people and a religion and not as
individuals. The idea of choice and election is very strong among Protestants
but it is reserved to individuals. On the other side, the theology of duty among
Mutazalites, some Catholics and Orthodox believers gets to the limit of putting
God in a strict rational realm, particularly with regard to humans when they
say: God has to do this, He should do this and shouldn’t do that!. Yet, the
question of the transcendent Divine Being in the Abrahamic religions has imposed
common obligations despite differences among theologians. Thus, there must be a
possibility of creating a relationship between the two sides: the transcendent
and unique divinity on the one hand and humans on the other hand. That is why
there were heresies of the Sufis, Kabbalists and Gnostics that the institutional
theology could never accept because they had gone beyond all religious
institutions and cancelled the clergy authority by claiming the unity of the
universe and the direct link between God and humans outside the “legal” channels
of prophets and books, and in Christianity, vis-à-vis incarnation of God
Himself! And that is why Moslem theologians talked about measuring the absent
(God) against the observed (Man’s intellect, values and faculties) to establish
a connection between absoluteness and relativity through His Attributes of Power
and Care (for Asharites and Catholics), and through His Acts with what they name
Grace for Mutazalites and those who were influenced by them among Jewish and
Orthodox theologians.
So what was the point of that digression? The Pope
was trying to talk about a difference with regard to the image of God between
Christians and the followers of the two other monotheistic religions,
particularly Islam because Judaism had gone beyond the (denial) of Jehovah by
adopting the Greek rational heritage too. This interpretation of the history of
theology is exclusively known to the Pope and may not be elaborated except by
him. All the medieval Catholic theology is based on the same foundations and
methods known by Moslem theologians from Syriacs, the Orthodox and the Greek
philosophers and in which they admitted Catholics and Jews and, to a lesser
extent, the Orthodox and Syriacs because the two latter groups had known the
Greek heritage and logic before Muslims. Catholicism, then Orthodoxy, departed
from Platonism and adopted a semi-Aristotelian trend out of fear of indulging in
the Gnostic drift against which the first Fathers of the Church fought and in
which Augustine and others fell into and hardly came out of. If the institution
of the church had not drawn its authority from that of the state, or run
parallel to it, Catholicism would have become another Gnostic religion like the
Gnosticisms of the Hellenist period. The experience of the Greeks with Plato and
Aristotle is shared among monotheistic religions and is not restricted to
European Christians or the Catholics who took it from Moslems and shared it with
them.
Accordingly, rationalism in Christianity is
limited and concentrated in the organizational and authoritative hierarchy and
not in the scholastic theology that had remained shared between Islam,
Christianity and Judaism. The theology of Maimonides tends to the Asharites
doctrine but lately it has been discovered that several texts of the Mutazalites
were used by Jewish groups in Baghdad, Egypt and Andalusia. So where did the
enlightened Christian specificity -that the Pope talked about with regard to the
image of God and in which he included the Jews but excluded the Moslems- come
from?? Surely not from Catholic theology, nor from the history of the Church,
but from the humanistic European experience during the last four centuries which
has become universal through the postulate of Man’s “Natural Right”. Drawing on
this premise, the image of humans and that of the world had changed and
accordingly the image of God has changed for the Pope after the struggle by the
Vatican against the Papal Authority in a counter reform that lasted for three
centuries. It was modernity which was brought by the Protestants and some Jews
that stirred the Catholic Church to re-address all these issues. It also obliged
the rigid and dying Catholic institution to compete once again at the turn of
the twentieth century, benefiting for its repositioning from the negative
effects of inhumane radical trends of humanitarians.
Then the Pope proceeded to considering the issue
of modern times or the criticism of modernity before putting forward his
conclusions and deductions. He thinks that the main feature of religious thought
during the last four centuries and up until the twentieth century has been the
dehellenisation or the ridding of theology and Christian thought of the Greek
philosophical influences. To date, this process has gone according to him
through three stages:
The first is that of (Protestant) Reformation; the
Pope states that the aim of this stage was to return back to the pure form of
faith as it first appeared in the scriptures without any philosophical
influences. Apart from theologians, philosophers also contributed to this era
such as Emmanuel Kant who wanted to set the philosophical thinking aside to make
room for faith. The second stage was that of liberal theology that lasted up to
the twentieth century. In this era, eminent theologians such as Adolf von
Harnack continued this process, founding it on the postulate of Pascal in his
distinction between the God of philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob. Harnack wanted to return back to the first fervent message of Jesus that
was submerged by the accretions of theology and Hellenistic philosophy. The
matter was more radicalized with the age of industrialisation and technology
since the concern was to consider theology as a science to be incorporated into
the “science of history” on the one side and to measure its scientific accuracy
-including other human sciences- against the accuracy of pure and applied
sciences. Theology related to faith was not subject to experimentation; hence,
the inquiry into the nature of God was practically excluded from the lively and
evolving scientific field and religion was taught as a positivist system.
Then came the third stage of dehellenisation,
which is the contemporary era of cultural pluralism. At this stage, it was held
that Christian hellenisation took place in past times and that is why we should
allow Neo-Christians to experience their identities, circumstances and contexts
as their Greek predecessors did before. Thus, they could produce their specific
religion in line with their own culture and traditions in the era of pluralism.
The Pope sees in this point of view a perversity and a lack of rationality.
Hellenisation for Christianity is not a borrowed cover that can be removed, but
a part of Christianity itself.
The Pope concludes his lecture on “Faith and
Reason” by calling for a return to the philosophical mind and not confining the
mind and rationality to the product of direct experience and its criteria. This,
he believes, does not mean to deny technology or the age of Enlightenment but
rather build up on them. According to the Pope, it is necessary to redress the
relation between reason and faith by means of mutual recognition and by looking
positively at the historicity of this relation and the different religious
traditions, Christianity in particular. He also stressed the necessity to
reconsider the words of Emperor Manuel II “Not to act reasonably, not to act
with logos, is contrary to the nature of God”.
The Pope lays the responsibility of the status of
religion on those who insisted on dehellenisation and the denial of
philosophical and rational theology since the 16th century. He divided this to
three stages starting with the 16th century; Protestants are held responsible
for the first two stages while secularists and pluralist experimentalists bear
the responsibility for the last stage. Once again, this is a point of view which
the Pope upholds alone, especially with regard to the understanding of the
evolution of the religious thought in Europe during the last four centuries. In
reality, the issues related to religion and which have been raised since the
16th century constitute three main points: the first one is the relation between
religion and the Church, and the relation between the Church and the State. The
second is the relation between Reason and Faith. And, lastly, the status of
religion in human life. Protestant Reformation has aroused, since the 16th
century and forward, the relation of religion and salvation with the “religious”
institution, i.e. the Catholic Church. This was preceded by many insubordination
acts against the authority of the Church since the 13th century which marks the
end of the Crusades. To hush these revolutions, the papal authority sought the
help of the armies of (the faithful) kings and the armies of the Vatican itself.
It completed this process by the establishment of Inquisitions.
It is clear then that it was not a question of
dehellenisation but rather the following enquiry: is religion (or faith)
possible without the institution and what is the authority of the institution if
it exists? What are its limits? Here, the Pope equates between faith and the
institution as he considers rebellion against the institution as disobedience
against religion and faith. This vision of course proved to be wrong.
Protestantism won the struggle, thus weakening the institution but without
causing religion and faith to wane. The papal authority failed during the 16th
and the 17th centuries to put an end to the Protestant insubordination,
contrarily to the preceding rebellions. The reason was that the State had
gradually separated from the Church. Consequently, the Church was unable to wage
crusades abroad, nor impose its authority through the armies of Christian kings
inside Europe. So during the first stage, it was not a question of the essence
of theology but the necessity of the (Catholic) institution to ensure the
survival of the Christian religion. The Church used to utilize the scholastic
theological system to impose its hegemony over the Christian world. It was then
normal that when this power is destabilized, the theological construction that
supports it or gives it legitimacy would be broken down.
The other question that was aroused in the 18th
century or the so-called the Enlightenment era touches upon the relation between
faith and reason. There were the rationalist atheists who considered that
religion was in the process of disappearing and that the rest was no more than
individual and personal tendencies. This kind of thought culminated in the
radical ideas of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th, century. However,
earnest thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Locke, Leibniz and Spinoza had no illusions
about the possibility of the disappearance of religion or of the religious
faith. Yet, they no longer expected the possible continuity of the (rational
theology), that is founding the personal faith on the rationale of Plato or
Aristotle. Hence, they rather came back to Averroes’ thesis that scholars and
theologians had excluded as was mentioned before for the rationalized theology
of Al-Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas. Averroes talked about two truths: one is of
faith, the other of evidence. The first pertains to the realm of religion and
faith while the second is related to the realm of the cosmos and corruption, or
the sensitive faculty and experience. The Pope considers such dichotomy as a
marginalization of the religious question, for he is still obsessed with the
role of institutional theology. But, on the other hand, he cannot consider this
as another stage of dispossessing religion from its philosophical or
intellectual arms. In reality, Kant, Hegel and Spinoza were protecting the deep
religious faith from the drifts of radical enlighteners such as Hume, Feuerbach
and Nietzsche, as well as the extremist ideas of Evangelists, but not from the
remaining members of the Catholic Church. In addition, there were feelings among
outstanding scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries that the scientific faith or
faith in science (mathematics and physics) dropped the need for religion or for
faith, and religion had but a little use in ethics. A new vision of the world
was developed while Catholicism was still engrossed in defending the authority
of the Church and not religious faith.
Why does the Pope feel so alarmed? He is afraid of
the diminishing role of religion in European public life. However, European
experience with religion during recent centuries has been specific and not
universal. What is going on in the United States, Asia and Africa is a blatant
evidence of this. In all continents, including some parts of Europe, faith and
religious effervescence are gaining ground. That is why the solution he is
suggesting (redefinition of reason and its role) is not in line with the
evolving reality. It seems that he is still frustrated at what happened during
the inter-war period and during the Cold War. Life has changed and radical
secularism in no longer the real problem but rather the new non-institutional
religions. Fear is legitimate and justified in this regard even if it is very
doubtful that the religious institution will be successful in restoring its
power and glory among the followers of the three religions. The institution is
suffering from the revival trends and fundamentalist movements escaping from its
authority and which feel no need to any institutional dimension or discipline of
any kind. The Catholic scholastic theology had totally collapsed in the 18th,
century, as did the Orthodox Jewish religious institution after the
mid-twentieth century as well as the Sunni Asharites. Revival trends have
flourished unrestrained by any theology. This is the real challenge that all
Abrahamic religions are confronted with.
Pope John Paul II was aware of this issue and
accordingly appointed Cardinal Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith to have the Catholic Church under control so that it would
not disintegrate in an era of major mutations. Since the early 1980’s, Jean Paul
II concentrated his efforts on fighting Communism in Eastern Europe. By the
early 1990’s, he started his fight against totalitarian and other despotic
regimes, while calling for human freedom and love, fighting poverty, injustice
and the other human diseases, and addressing the followers of other religions
whom he considered as allies and partners in faith and in the universal fate.
Jean Paul II sensed the beat of history and
participated in its making. As for the current Pope, he rather seeks to position
himself within Europe, asking anew the questions that have been tackled for over
a century. Yet, the major problems are undoubtedly taking place in the Catholic
Church, not because of the attack by the Neo-Evangelicals and the old
Evangelical followers, but also because of the aggravation in the issues that
have not been settled for over three decades. These are new worlds for mankind
where Hellenic theologies or the proposed reconciliation between Faith and
Reason are of no avail.
The detailed review of Pope Benedict XVI’s
lecture and its context shows that it has nothing to do with Islam as it seemed
to me at first sight. It is mainly concerned with the restoration of Europe to
Christianity and of Christianity to Europe. This project, regardless of its
validity, the possibility of its implementation and the ways of being aware of
it, has close links with Islam. At first sight, it seems that these links are
not direct, but it is not the case. In order not to open what I am trying to
point out with regard to the close relationship between the Pope’s lecture and
Islam to interpretations, I will begin by translating the introductory paragraph
of the lecture where Islam was mentioned:
“ ...when I read the edition by Professor Theodore
Khoury(4) (Münster University) in 1966 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. It was probably the emperor
himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between
1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater
detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely
over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals
especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning
repeatedly to the relationship of the three Laws: the Old Testament, the New
Testament, and the Koran. In this lecture I would like to discuss only one
point-- itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself-- which, in the context of
the issue of faith and reason, I found interesting and which can serve as the
starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation edited by Professor
Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor
must have known that sura 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It
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 Koran, concerning holy war. Without descending to
details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the
“Book” and the “infidels,” he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with
the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in
general, in these words: “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 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 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 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 Hazm,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
practice idolatry”.
I refer to this long quotation to show the context
within which the Pope mentioned Islam and the prophet. Having said that, he
immediately proceeded to debating the issue of Faith and Reason, and how the
reconciliation between Christianity and modernity was achieved in Europe, as I
said before in my detailed commentary of the lecture. I think that there are
four questions that are worth considering and debating in this respect:
- The context and conditions where the supposed
dialog between the Byzantine emperor and the Persian scholar took place;
- The topics mentioned in the dialog or the debate;
- The understanding of Adel Theodore Khoury and
the Pope of the debated issues and its repercussions;
- The significance of quoting this particular
dialog by the Pope under these particular circumstances.
The context and the conditions where the dialog or
the debate between the emperor and the Persian scholar took place are clear. The
Ottomans, after having conquered Anatolia in the beginning of the 14th century,
began to take over Byzantine territories until they occupied all of Minor Asia
and some countries in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Italian islands and
everything else except for Constantinople which they could not take over in
spite of repeated sieges. The Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus (which
literally means “book scientist”) was not a foremost statesman, but he was
versed in the Greek and Church cultures and familiarized with Islam. During the
second long siege of Constantinople and Ankara in 1391 by Sultan Bayazid I
(1389-1402 A.D.), Emperor Manuel II Paleologus had the opportunity to meet many
Moslems among the messengers of the Sultan, as well as the visitors to the
Palace of Bani Othman including Arab and Foreign scholars, prisoners and
mediators. Hence, it is very possible that he met and debated with a Persian
Muslim scholar. Yet, the claim that Islam spread by means of the sword is not a
new Byzantine accusation against Islam. These allegations, which started in the
8th and 9th centuries, include four main claims: that Islam preaches violence in
spreading faith, that Islam indulges in sensual delights, that Islam upholds the
Jabriyyah (predestination) trend, and that Islam has alienated, deformed and
overturned the Christian faith. Emperor Manuel II Paleologus could have been
unbiased for he was fully aware that his struggle against the Ottomans and that
opposing the Byzantines to the Arabs were not about spreading religion but was
rather a political and military conflict over control and conquests. He knew for
sure that this was not preached by the Quran but dictated by the reality. Even
during the Crusades, most of the population in the Levant and Egypt were still
Christian, Orthodox or Syriac despite their being under Islamic control for more
than six centuries. It was also the case for the population of Minor Asia during
the emperor’s era, for most of them were still Christian at that time. In fact,
the emperor could not admit the separation between military conquest and the
movement of spreading Islam while he was under siege, hearing the proclamations
of Jihad. After the lifting of the siege, he continued his struggle against the
Moslems in his debates because Timur Lenk had attacked the Ottomans on his way
back from the Levant and from Central Asia. Ultimately, Sultan Bayazid was
defeated and captured by Timur Lenk, thus extending the Byzantine Empire for
another fifty years until the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the
Ottomans in 1453.(5)
The most dangerous part in Emperor Manuel II’s
debates against Islam lies in his correlation between violence in the name of
religion, and “the image of God” in Islam. Violence, according to him, is
opposed to reason. God is Nous (nouç) or Logos in the Platonic concept, which
Emperor Manuel II along with Adel Khoury and the Pope, considered as the essence
of the Christian religion. In fact, there are three fallacies or flaws in this
respect. First, violence in spreading faith was not unfamiliar to the Byzantine
religious heritage (violence against the Bulgarian, the Slav and other
Mediterranean peoples). Second, war is not part of the image of God (May He be
exalted) in Islam. Rather, Jihad is an organizational defensive matter. The
third flaw is related to the Pope himself. When one refers to a quotation, the
aim is to affirm or to refute it. Since the Pope did not refute this quotation,
this could mean that he considers Islamic discourse as violent and, accordingly,
doesn’t fit into his statements on the reconciliation between the Christian
religion and modernity in Europe, and the image of God as opposed to the violent
jihad.
The inability to assimilate this matter is not
clearly manifest in the statements of the emperor who was besieged by Muslim
armies at the beginning of the 15th century as in the claims of Professor Khoury
and the Pope in early 21st Century. In this regard, three questions are worth
discussing: the image of God in Islam, the meaning of Jihad in the past and the
present, and the image of Jihad and Islam in the contemporary global
circumstances. In these three questions, the two foremost men proved to be
wrong. The Divine Being who is graceful, transcendent and infallible in the
Islamic Ilm Al-kalam theology refers to absolutism, not irrationality. This is a
well-known fact not only in Ilm al-kalam but also in Jewish and Christian
doctrines, with all their currents. Both the Platonic and Aristotelian heritage
was employed by Christian theologians to confirm the concept of transcendence
because the Old Testament portrays a concrete image of a violent God, and
because God was incarnated in Christianity. Professor Khoury and the Pope are
two eminent scholars in Christian and Jewish theology; the former has been
teaching Islamic studies for 40 years and has published scores of books on the
image of Islam, both in the past and the present. Hence, it is surprising that
he referred to a quotation from Ibn Hazm (taken from Arnaldez) to substantiate
the “strangeness” of the Islamic notion of God’s infallibility as if this were
not known to Orthodox Christians, especially Catholics. Being an interpreter of
the Holy Quran -he wrote an interpretation of the meanings of the Holy Quran in
German in 12 volumes based on the most authoritative books written by Muslims
on Quran’s interpetation- how could he not understand the connection between the
verses “He cannot be questioned for His acts, but they will be questioned (for
theirs)”(6) and “ He hath inscribed for Himself (the rule of) mercy”.(7)
Besides, how is it possible to link violent “jihad” to the image of God, which
is a purely “Platonic” concept to Mutazalites in particular, “a Being without
attributes”, as mentioned by Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina whom Professor Khoury is
fond of? And since the Quran is mentioned, where is Jihad or war ever mentioned
arbitrarily and not to counteract an aggression? In addition, where does the
Koran mention that Jihad is used to spread the Islamic faith or to oblige the
defeated to convert to it? The Pope justified -following Theodore Khoury- the
emperor’s claim that Muslims spread religion through violence, despite of the
Quranic verse that contradicts this claim, by arguing that this verse was
revealed when the prophet was powerless and that Islam, in view of a set of
developments recorded in the Quran, changed this state of affairs. (Doesn’t
Professor Khoury, who is an interpreter of the Quran, know that the verse
denouncing coercion in the chapter of al-Baqara (The Cow), was one of the latest
revealed chapters (year 625 AD), a time when the Prophet was at the peak of his
power in Al-Madinah?). Where are these late verses that claim the spread of
Islam by sword? I can understand that Emperor Manuel II engaged in these debates
to defend himself and his empire against Muslim attacks that weren’t undertaken
in the name of religion, but I fail to understand the justifications put forward
by these two foremost theologians in the 21st century.
Let us discuss the circumstances and implications.
Since the early 1990’s, the outcome of “the clash of civilisations” thesis is
reaching huge dimensions. Huntington and others state that Islam has bloody
borders. After the 11th September events, Islam became a global problem since it
is considered to incorporate a strong worldwide fundamentalist movement that
advocates violence (in the name of Jihad). During the latest months, President
George Bush has frequently used the term “Islamic fascism” instead of “Islamic
Jihadism”. Professor Khoury has been working over the four last decades on
rectifying the perception of Islam in Europe and the West, and particularly
within the Catholic Church. Pope Jean Paul II was famous for his great awareness
of this issue. That is why he insisted on dialog with Muslims while he was
condemning America’s wars in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. This stance
stemmed from his belief that the nature of relations between Christians and
Muslims would decide the fate of the world. However, it seems that the current
Pope does not show the same level of awareness, not because he is hostile to
Islam but because he owns a self-absorbed vision aspiring to restore Europe and
immunize it through Christian faith. Pope Benedict XVI neutralized Judaism by
incorporating it in the Greek and Christian heritage, then he proceeded to
making the Protestants and secularists approve of his introverted vision. Yet
Christianity is a major and widespread religion. It is well known that the
number of Christians, even Catholics, is larger outside Europe than inside it.
Therefore, his self-centred vision will worsen the problems of Catholic
Christians inside and outside Europe.
The regression in the Vatican’s project was
blatant when the Pope changed the name of the “Pontifical Council for
Inter-religious Dialogue” to the “Council for Cultural Dialogue”. This
represents a step backward after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) which
recognized Abrahamic faiths and recommended a partnership with them and an
introductory dialogue with other religions. Also, the famous magazine, Islamo-Christiana,
is no longer published by the Vatican. All these occurrences hold no promising
future for hope, openness or dialogue. The problem does not lie in the Pope’s
negative perception of Islam, but rather in this self-centred and introverted
vision as well as the apprehension of the other and the incorporation of this
major global religion into the illusory project of Christian Europe. What Pope
John Paul II tried to do was: to establish a new world governed by the values of
freedom, justice and peace, and to combat poverty, hunger, social inequality and
family disintegration.
The presentation of the Pope to his lecture in
this way may have been unintentional since it is not related to Islam nor is it
a debate for, or against it. However, his introduction to the lecture cannot be
deemed a mere coincidence. Besides, the world’s attitude vis-à-vis Arabs and
Muslims and the vision of Islam are causes for alarm and drive in feelings of
fear and worry.
Allah's is the command before and after.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(*) Editor-in-Chief, al-Ijtihad, Beirut, and
editorial advisor at the “al-Tasamuh” magazine, Muscat.
(1) The lecture was given on 12 September 2006.
(2) Al-Jawab al-Sahih Li-Man Baddala Din al-Masih,
Ibn Taimiyya, appeared in several editions among which that of Dar al-Assima,
Riyadh (1414 A.H.) in six volumes; ed. Dr. Ali Hassan Nasser, Dr. Abdulaziz
Ibrahim Al-Askar and Dr. Hamadan Hamad (editor’s note).
(3) Tahafut al-falasifa (Incoherence of the
Philosophers), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, ed. Majid Fakhri and Maurice Bouyges, 4th,
Edition, Dar al-Mashreq, Beirut, 1990.
Tahafut al-tahafut (The Incoherence of the
Incoherence), Ibn Rushd, ed. Dr. Soleymane Dunya; the first edition appeared in
1964 in two volumes, Dar al-Ma’aref, Cairo (editor’s note).
(4) Pr. Adel-Theodore Khoury is a contemporary
German academic of Lebanese origin specialized in theology and interfaith
relations. He is also a lecturer at the Catholic Theology Faculty of the
University of Munster, Germany, and presides over the Committee for
Interreligious Dialoge (editor’s note).
(5) By Ottoman Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror, son
of Sultan Murad II, (835-886 A.H./1432-1480) (editor’s note).
(6) Al-Anbiaa, verse 23
(7) Al-Anaam, verse 12.
|
