Posted on 11/28/2015 3:13:22 AM PST by markomalley
The “Islamic State” is, in crucial ways, a fiction rather than a reality. A state has borders, a central government, and a bureaucratic structure. None of this is true of ISIS, although some have spoken of ISIS as a proto-state. What we have in fact is an armed, slash-and-burn military force, seeking control over ever expanding territory.
The fictional “Islamic State” permits the West to ignore the deeper threat posed by Islam to Western institutions. Islam is the antithesis of Europe. Tolerating the intolerant has time and again had disastrous consequences. The recent destruction of a Russian airliner and the attacks in Paris are only two examples.
For insight into Islam, undistorted by current controversies, a good place to start is Ignaz Goldziher’s Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law. The book has an interesting history. Invited in 1906 to deliver a series of lectures in the United States, Goldziher wrote them in German, but for reasons of health and his inability to secure a reliable English translation, he never made the trans-Atlantic voyage to deliver them. A German edition appeared in 1910, but a satisfactory English translation was not available until 1981 (from Princeton University Press).
The great Anglo-American scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis provided the introduction. Goldziher, Lewis says, was a Hungarian Jew by birth, and by virtue of interest and linguistic ability became a respected “orientalist,” as Middle Eastern scholars were called in the Vienna of his day. In Lewis’ judgment, as a guide to Muslim faith, law, doctrines, and devotions, Goldziher was much better placed than Christians to study Islam and to understand Muslims. To know rabbinic law and to submit to rules makes it easier to understand the Holy Law of Islam and those who obey it. The French philosopher Remi Brague, a great living scholar in his own right, similarly praises Goldziher as perhaps the greatest student Islam ever had.
The word “Islam,” Goldziher reminds his reader, means “submission.” The word expresses first and foremost dependency on an unbounded Omnipotence to which man must submit and resign his will. Submission is the dominant principle inherent in all manifestations of Islam, in its ideas, forms, ethics, and worship, and it is, of course, demanded of conquered peoples. Adherence to Islam not only means an act of actual or theoretical submission to a political system but also requires the acceptance of certain articles of faith. Therein lies a difficulty.
The Prophet was not a theologian. Islamic theology was necessarily the work of subsequent generations. Islam does not have the doctrinal uniformity of a church. Its history and inner dynamics, Goldziher shows, are characterized by the assimilation of foreign elements. He speaks of Islam’s dogmatic development under the influence of Hellenic thought, its indebtedness to Persian political ideas, and the contribution of Neo-Platonism and Hinduism to Islamic mysticism. Differences between Sunni and Shia stem from external influences.
Remi Brague, who holds the title of Professor of Arabic Medieval Philosophy at the University of Paris (and winner of the 2012 Ratzinger Prize), has produced an equally illuminating volume entitled The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Addressing the genesis of European culture, Brague reminds his readers that Europe borrowed, first from the Greco-Roman world, then from an Arabic culture, and finally from Byzantium. Brague points out that for Christians revealed truth is the all-important bond. Muslim and Jewish revelations, which are presented as laws, do not pose the same problem as Christian revelation.
Reconciling religion and philosophy is an epistemological problem in Christianity, but in Islam and Judaism reconciling religion and revelation is a political problem. Furthermore, unlike Islam and Judaism, Christianity includes the Magisterium of the Church, with authority in the intellectual domain.
To illustrate the difference between Christianity and Islam, Brague draws upon the work of Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century Muslim scholar. According to Khaldun the Muslim community has the religious duty to convert all non-Muslims to Islam either by persuasion or by force.
Other religious groups do not have a universal mission, says Khaldun, and holy war is not a religious duty for them, save for defensive purposes. The person in charge of religious affairs in other religious groups is not concerned with power politics. Royal authority outside of Islam comes to those who have it by accident, or in some other way that has little to do with religion, and they are under the religious obligation to gain power over other nations. According to Khaldun, holy war exists only within Islam and is imposed upon its leaders by sharia law.
Theological warrant aside, Brague asks how Islam’s greatest philosophers view jihad. He puts the question to three Aristotelians – al Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. All three permit the waging of holy war against those who refuse Islam – al Farabi and Averroes against Christians, Avicenna against the pagans of his native Persia.
Al Farabi, who lived in the lands where the enemy was the Byzantine Empire, drew up a list of seven justifications for war, including the right to conduct war in order to acquire something the state desires, but is in the possession of another; and the right to wage holy war to force people to accept what is better for them if they do not recognize it spontaneously.
Averroes, writing in the western part of the Islamic empire, approved without reservation the slaughter of dissidents, calling for the elimination of people whose continued existence might harm the state. Avicenna similarly condones conquest and readily grants leaders the right to annihilate those called to truth, but who reject it.
Western leaders fighting ISIS generally fail to acknowledge the genuine motivation of those committed to jihad. Whether from cowardice or woeful ignorance, they (at Europe’s peril) continue to speak of “the far reaches of ISIS,” without confronting the real threat.
To me they fit the old time definition of brigands or warlords.
thanks for posting. Is definitely a political system cloaked in the burka of a religion ...
I agree with the sentiment of the article, but when he says the following he is wrong:
” A state has borders, a central government, and a bureaucratic structure. None of this is true of ISIS...”
ISIS has borders - the ends of the earth, or at least the ends of the Muslim ummah.
ISIS has a central government. It has a caliph.
ISIS has a real bureaucracy: “I feel like I am dealing with a respected state, not thugs,†said a Raqqa goldsmith in his small shop as a woman shopped for gold pieces with cash sent from abroad by her husband. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/world/middleeast/islamic-state-controls-raqqa-syria.html?_r=0
They have as much of a bureaucracy as the U.S. does: http://www.aymennjawad.org/2015/01/archive-of-islamic-state-administrative-documents
Furthermore, unlike Islam and Judaism, Christianity includes the Magisterium of the Church, with authority in the intellectual domain.
Catholicism has the Magisterium, not Christianity. Besides, the idea that some group of people is in charge is not unique in Catholicism. There are 2 splinter groups in Islam that both claim authority.
Interesting article, but failure in one part impacts the rest...
That is, the Christian Catholic faith.
There is nothing more dangerous than Islam.
It is a corrosive poison within any society.
John Quincy Adams on Islam
In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust, by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.
Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture, which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man. While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. It is, indeed, amongst the mysterious dealings of God, that this delusion should have been suffered for so many ages, and during so many generations of human kind, to prevail over the doctrines of the meek and peaceful and benevolent Jesus (Blunt, 1830, 29:269, capitals in orig.).
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