by lotp
Words and ideas matter. Whether we're aware of them or not, the ideas we absorb shape our lives and our choices in deep ways.
Often the ideas we form start with the stories we hear, like this very ancient one:
At the beginning of things, YHWH took a handful of mud and formed a creature. Bending down, he came close, so intimately close that his breath flowed into the nostrils of the creature and Adam ("made of earth") truly lived....
YHWH called Adam's descendent Abram to pick up his tents from the pastoral areas around wealthy Ur and to move his flocks through a long route to a new land, one that was not dominated by either the great city empires of the Two Rivers nor the chariots of Egypt. In that place-on-the-edge YHWH made a covenant with Abram, giving him a new name and the promise that the lands around him would be belong to his descendents. No more would they be homeless. And although for a while his descendents remained Hebraoi ("those who wander, the marginal ones") and even found themselves in bondage, YHWH led those who kept the covenant into the land promised to them. "When Israel was a child I loved him and I called my son out of Egypt".
Many centuries later an exile, looking back on his experiences through the lens of his education both in the commentaries of the children of Israel and also of the Greek philosophers, wrote a book with an audacious claim:
En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos.
In those few words John packed layers of meaning. Arche means beginning of time, but also can be used to indicate social or legal prominence, power, causation.
Logos, too, carried layers of meaning: spoken word, the word of God through his prophets and by which He created. (It is significant that, unlike the seers of surrounding cultures, Hebrew prophets were not seized by ecstatic trances. Instead they heard YHWH speak intelligibly -- and sometimes argued back.)
But logos also meant 'meaning' itself, the truth behind words, the patterns and connections that raise the world from being a chaos of unpredictability to having purpose and resonance. And finally, John's readers who were educated in Greek learning would remember that the great Euclid used logos to describe the means by which things which are otherwise different in their very natures, such as number and space -- or God and man - could be brought into relationship with one another.
In the beginning (of time, of precedence, of causation) was the Logos (the word, the meaning, what makes meaning possible, what can bring us into relationship with what is otherwise totally beyond our power to reach). And that Logos was with God -- and that Logos was God.
That was John's claim. And so Christian theology was from its start grounded both in the stories of a very personal YHWH - a God who got his hands dirty and was intimately bound to his people in a complex and dramatic story of promise, suffering, fulfillment, disobedience, renewal -- and also in the challenge posed by Greek thought which celebrated human reason and sought to understand the very roots and heights of what is. Nor was such a theology entirely new, since there were already Jewish teachers who had pondered related matters with sophistication and devotion.
It is both the personally related God and the God of meaning, Robert Reilly tells us, that Islam rejected, with consequences that are playing out today.
The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Islamist Crisis chronicles the encounter of Islam with Hellenistic thought and Christian theology. Islam committed intellectual suicide, he writes, when those who sought to apply reason to theology were ultimately suppressed in favor of strong assertions that Allah was unknowable, utterly transcendent, arbirtrary in his demands and not subject in any way to human understanding -- only to obedience.
Hence this hadith:
The Holy Prophet said: Allah created Adam when he created him. Then He stroke his right shoulder and took out a white race as if they were seeds, and He stroke his left shoulder and took out a black race as if they were charcoal. Then He said to those who were on his right shoulder: Towards paradise and I don't care. And He said to those who were on his left shoulder: Towards Hell and I don't care.
Al-Ghazali and others used such passages to insist that God is not obligated in any way, including by his own nature. We must call him just, but he is not bound by any notion we might have of what justice entails. Philosophy has no place in theology, nor can the world be understood by it. Allah is, first, foremost, and totally, transcendent. Allah is pure will. He acts as he chooses, without limit. We cannot understand. We can only obey.
Reilly quotes many contemporary Muslim thinkers who are very aware of the disastrous results of such thinking in the Arab and broader Muslim world today: rejection of science, justification for despotism, a disconnect with reality, the inability to relate cause and effect.
One need not be a believer in any religious tradition for this book to be an important one to read. In this review I've fleshed out a few elements of Jewish and Christian thought that Reilly assumes, and highlighted only a small portion of the substantial evidence he assembles regarding the rejection of meaning that came to dominate Islam.
Nor is this merely a historical concern. The spiritual leader of Egypt's terror group Jemaah Islamiyah is quoted as specifically emphasizing the central importance in Islam of the concept of al-fikr kufr: by the very act of reasoning one becomes an infidel. Or, as Taliban placards in Afghanistan proclaim, "Throw reason to the dogs - it stinks of corruption."
But doctrine is one thing and daily life is another. Although many Muslims are poor and illiterate, others in the Islamic world who hear sermons about al-fikr kufr increasingly navigate a world filled with the products of science, the debates of reason and political systems in which the meaning of justice is a lively concern. Reilly quotes modern Muslims who call for a renewal of Islamic theology and a modern synthesis of faith with elements that were forced out centuries ago. Our media are full of stories about those who are chosing to cling ever more tightly to the abyss, instead.