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To: JasonC
The old adage has it that disorders in the world follow disorders in the heads of the dons by one hundred years. I think it has been a somewhat faster process in recent times, but still something about like that.

That's frighteningly true, especially considering the "hegemony" of post-modernism in our universities.

Another thought. What happened to Muslim rationalism? Thomism has ebbed and flowed within Catholicism in relation to other contemporary philosophical movements. The West in general fell from the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason through rationalism, unitarianism, agnosticism and finally materialism, although the process finally seems to be reversing.

Could it be that Islamic scripture and tradition can't be reconciled with reason?

23 posted on 10/09/2001 10:36:02 AM PDT by Aquinasfan
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To: Aquinasfan
I've discussed this subject before, in this and previous threads. There was no incompatibility between medieval Islam and the rationalism of medieval Islamic philosophy, in men like Alfarabi (Al-Farabi), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Avicenna was Rahman's favorite from among those, incidentally. Their thought influenced Acquinas himself quite a bit, directly and indirectly, through Maimonides, various Aristotle scholars at Paris, etc.

But by the time of Averroes, Muslim theologians had come to distrust that whole rationalist tradition as moving toward secularism. And Al-Ghazali basically ended that tradition, with his attacks on previous Islamic philosophy (cf. his book "the incoherence of the philosophers"). He did so on the basis of a general skepticism about the capabilities of human reason, later echoed in the west in the arguments of Hume. And in its place, he urged a literalism about texts received as revelation, against any human interpretation of them tainted by such a weak instrument (reason), which was later echoed in the west by Protestant literalism. He was more sympathetic to mystic claims about religious experiences, later echoed in the west by romanticism and existentialism.

We in the west have had the same spectrum of reactions to scholastic philosophy, but it made a difference whether those came from within or from outside religious tradition. They had all of these at once, effectively from within. To ward off rationalism, it was the religious authorities themselves who undermined the authority of reason, in medieval Islam. In the west, though some who don't know the history assume the same relation between reason and religion, the story was quite the other way around. Here it was the secularists who attacked reason, with various brands of skepticism and various forms of irrationalism. They still are, in the case of the postmodernists you mentioned.

Here, because religious authorities claimed to be able to reason about metaphysical topics, secularists set out to undermine man's claims to knowledge about such things. While in Islam, it was the relatively secularist philosophers (especially when you get to Averroes, who is much more secular than Avicenna) who upheld the claims of reason, and the theologians who attacked it.

Secular skeptics may drift, but eventually they are governable by reason, because even those who do not recognize an ability to arrive at real truth by reason have no alternative standard to appeal to. Various forms of fashionable irrationalism aren't formed enough to have a direction; they soak up ambient influences instead (from politics, the arts, etc). And religious authorities who recognize the power of reason can always be reasoned with. But a religious authority that does not recognize any human ability that can come near the authority ascribed to revelation, is bound to the literal text of whatever its traditions hand on as revealed. Means of adaptation are closed off, and with it advances in established justice.

If the political principle informing such an attitude is individualistic, as with some types of literalist Protestantism, even that can be not much of a problem, because people will each make their own modifications and adaptations to the times, willy-nilly. And there are some texts it is doubtless safer to be literalist about than others - the Sermon on the Mount is sounder moral ground, and more timeless, than Leviticus, for example. These mitigate dangers that are nevertheless still recognizably present, and were seen in early modern religious authorities within Christendom, as well as in Islam.

Religious tolerance is of relatively recent date even in the west, and had to be learned by states through harsh experience, long after it had been taught in theory by a few. What is missing in the Islamic world is an authority to recognize such changes in practice as religiously legitimate, because reasonably just. There are plenty who support such changes in the Islamic world. But they are usually determined secularists, hostile to religion in general; or inconsistent eclectics who paste together ancient and modern without any justification or system. Neither has any specifically religious legitimacy.

The result is that decent people who see value in their religious traditions, and thus are not willing to side whole-heartedly with the secularists, are thrown into the hands of extremists. Religious legitimacy seems to be monopolized by those who want a 7th century society, and who are determined in their hostility to modernity and the west. Those who will not side with either, seeing impiety on one side and injustice on the other, "lack all conviction". (In Iran a woman who does not wear a veil commits a crime; in Turkey a woman who wears one does; in neither is she free to do so if her conscience tells her to, or not to if it does not).

What they deserve and need is a defense of the authority of their conscience in such matters, against a raving criminal literalism on one side of them, and a persecuting unbelief on the other. The former need to be told that they are not the final word on what constitutes piety, and that obvious injustice cannot be the will of "the Merciful and Compassionate". The latter need to be told that piety itself is not their enemy, and that freedom means freedom of conscience, thus also of religion, and even the right to be wrong (if some of the secularists would have it that way, and some will), without being coerced for that alone.

25 posted on 10/09/2001 2:32:00 PM PDT by JasonC
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