Christianity Civilizes

Does Islam? To the same extent?

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Comments

[Hector]

>>Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course.<<

This is true in Arabia, sub-Saharan Africa and a few other places, but Islam conquered large parts of the Judaeo-Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Zoroastrian worlds. I very much doubt most of those places were more civilised after the Islamic conquest, and I think they would very likely be more civilised now if they had not been converted - what would the world look like now if Byzantium had endured? Claude Levi-Strauss thought it tragic that Islam arose as it blocked potential communication between the Buddhist and Christian worlds for centuries - a communication which he thought would bring mutual enrichment to these two extraordinary faiths.

[James Soriano]

I agree with Hector’s point that Islam has had a civilizing effect in some places, and those places might be characterized as having a tribal or clan-based social organization.

Mohamed’s genius was in transforming the town dwellers of Mecca and Medina, as well as the surrounding bedouins, into a new and higher form of social organization, one not based on blood lineage but on a religion based community. This is the *umma,* or community of religious believers. In seventh century Arabia the idea was revolutionary. Mohamed’s own tribe, the Quraish of Mecca, felt threatened by it, resulting in his exile to Medina.

Islam has had a flawed heritage as a civilizing force, and it’s not just about the barbarous judicial punishments you point out.

The one thing that sticks in my mind is that Islam never developed a system of natural law.

It’s theology is voluntarist, meaning that God is understood as absolute will or power. The revelation “God is love” was not given to Islam. Mohamed approached the idea of divine love, but came up short. Thus we have the Islamic expression: “b’ism Allah al-Raham al-Raheem,” or “In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful.” “Compassion” and “mercy” do point to God’s love, but they don’t quite go all the way there.

The idea of God as absolute will spilled over into other areas of human activity, hampering the development of rule of law, constitution, and even science.

This was fortified by a related idea that with the Koran and with Mohamed’s death revelation is final and complete. Compare to the Christian notion that revelation still unfolds with the passage of time. The idea that revelation is final and complete crippled advances in science, law, and politics.

[Dmitri]

Slightly off topic, but relevant. A link to candid and interesting article from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Stanford researcher who is married to the conservative historian Niall Ferguson. She describes her personal path from Muslim Brotherhood in her native Kenya through atheism inspired by writings of Bertrand Russel and her friendship with Dawkins and the reasons for her recent conversion to Christianity. https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/

[BV]

Dmitri,

Thanks for sending us to this important article.

>>Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.<<

>>The Brotherhood preachers left nothing to the imagination. They gave us a choice. Strive to live by the Prophet’s manual and reap the glorious rewards in the hereafter. On this earth, meanwhile, the greatest achievement possible was to die as a martyr for the sake of Allah.

The alternative, indulging in the pleasures of the world, was to earn Allah’s wrath and be condemned to an eternal life in hellfire. Some of the “worldly pleasures” they were decrying included reading novels, listening to music, dancing, and going to the cinema . . .<<

This is why Islamism is so much more dangerous than communism. But at least commies believe in something that transcends the petty pleasures of the individual. This makes them dangerous to the decadents of the West.

>>Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.<<

AND NOW THE 'MONEY QUOTE':

>>Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.<<

[BV]

Hector,

I agree with all your points and they comport well with what I said. Would you say that Islam, "The saddest and poorest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), is better than no religion for the benighted non-Jewish tribalists of the Middle East? Suppose the only alternative for them is either Sharia-based Islam or secularism of the stripe of Russell, Dawkins, and Hitchens. Which would be better for them?

[BV]

James writes,

>>It’s theology is voluntarist, meaning that God is understood as absolute will or power.<<

This is an important point and is connected with the inanition of the Muslim world re: scientific advance. If all the power that gets exercised is exercised by God, then so-called secondary causes are mere occasions for the exercise of divine power: the only genuine cause is the causa prima. Why then investigate secondary or 'horizontal' causation in the physical world if all causation is divine causation?

[BV]

This blog has had its ups and down over the last 20 years of its existence. A lot depends on the quality of the commentators. At the moment, the commentariat comprises a number of impressive individuals: Vito, Hector, Elliot, James, Dmitri et al.

Thank you gentlemen! You are teaching me something. That was the idea when I set the thing up: to conduct my education in public and seduce others into helping me prosecute it.

[Hector]

Happy to be of service, Bill! And thank you for your wise and greatly life-enriching writing!

>>Would you say that Islam, "The saddest and poorest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), is better than no religion for the benighted non-Jewish tribalists of the Middle East?<<

Yes. Islam was certainly a vast improvement on the polytheistic pre-Islamic Arabian culture which was riddled with endless blood feuds. As for the contemporary world - a culture like that suddenly bereft of the religion which gives it social unity and identity would be disastrous, at least in psychological terms, for its people, many of whom aren't very well-educated; it's just a shame that for so many in the Middle East Islam is a narrow puritanical form of Sunni orthodoxy - the saddest, poorest form of Islam!

I just bought a copy of Clifford Geertz's short book 'Islam Observed' - haven't read much of it yet, but it appears to be excellent. It compares the development of Islam in two nations on the peripheries of the Islamic world - Morocco and Indonesia, two very different cultures. In both places (though in very different ways) Islam is eccentric and inclined to the mystical until the late nineteenth century when puritanical Salafist-style intepretations become more common in reaction to Western colonialism.

I also think we're finally starting to see what a society with truly no religion looks like in parts of the West - and it isn't pretty. With even the fumes of Christianity getting dangerously thin in places like Britain the reversion to paganism, tribalism, intolerance and irrationalism is alarmingly rapid.

>>Suppose the only alternative for them is either Sharia-based Islam or secularism of the stripe of Russell, Dawkins, and Hitchens. Which would be better for them?<<

Those are two extreme positions of course. For the poor I would say Islam is certainly preferable, since it brings some comfort, meaning and order to society and teaches the value of charity and so on. I think that New Atheist-type secularism is tolerable only for those in great economic comfort and security (an ultimately meaningless life probably does seem quite tolerable if you're a physically healthy, enormously self-regarding, rich best-selling author and tenured zoology professor at Oxford - but much of that is down to extremely rare good luck isn't it?). And I doubt that even the latter would be conducive to the poor of the Middle East becoming more economically prosperous, as though all of a sudden dropping Islam in such a radical fashion would bring in its train all the material benefits (if these benefits are indeed even linked to this phenomenon) of Western secularism. Alongside political liberalisation, a sort of 'Enlightenment' of the Islamic world is probably required, if possible (which I doubt), before this form of secularisation would be workable without devastating effects - but secularism's workability in certain countries relies on values present in the civilisation that have been inherited from certain religious traditions (Buddhism in Japan, Christianity and Buddhism in South Korea, Christianity and Judaism in the West) - values generally superior to those of Islam in my view. On the contrary, the aggressive secularisation policies under the Shahs in twentieth century Iran met with an extreme reaction which has led to the terrible problems we are all too aware of today.

As you know, Islam isn't a monolithic religion - there's an enormous amount of variation in practice and belief. The problem I think is that the versions which are most adaptable to Western society are eccentric forms of the faith and, as far as I can see, it is those who are arguing for Islam's more scripturalist forms (such as the Sunni orthodoxy of much of the Arab world) who are more correct in their understanding of what the faith entails - these latter forms, however, are considerably less compatible with Western values. And you're not going to persuade Saudi Salafists that they really ought to be syncretist Sufis.