Why Islam tends towards tryanny, remains brittle, and breaks its people

I found this explication sobering and depressing. A physician living among Muslims thoughtfully explains:

"[T]he problem begins with Islam’s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between temporal and religious authority. Muhammad’s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.

"But [Muhammad's] model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet’s death, with some—today’s Sunnites—following his father-in-law, and some—today’s Shi’ites—his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world.

"The second problem is intellectual. In the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between church and state, liberated individual men to think for themselves, and thus set in motion an unprecedented and still unstoppable material advancement. Islam, with no separate, secular sphere where inquiry could flourish free from the claims of religion, if only for technical purposes, was hopelessly left behind: as, several centuries later, it still is.

"The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice—intellectual and political—will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible."


NOW, what does the West do about rising Islamic terror?


"[T]he problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament of God to man. If they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs.

"People grow angry when faced with an intractable dilemma; they lash out."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_when_islam.html

 

I agree with everything with one clarification: There is a clear difference between eastern and western Islam. The Islam to which you refer is the Islam of "The Holy Land." Second generation Muslims that are born in the western world do not always share in the difficulties you described.

Pug

 

The few Muslims that I know well seem typically apolitically Canadian. They are from Lebanon, which always managed to separate church and state better than some countries, that is, until it fell apart in religious strife in the 1970s.

 

Repeating what pugbelly said, what is described is more a difference in cultures rather than religion. It's true that the religion, Islam, and culture are intertwined in many areas that Islam dominates. I have some friends that are Islam and they are very very religious and dedicated to their faith but don't suffer from the problems described because they've been socialized into the western culture.

 

Orson, you frustrate me. You have this annoying habit of posting very inflammatory excerpts written by other people, then disappearing. Why not post your own words?

Most religions give us some (supposedly) divinely sanctioned way of ordering our lives here on earth, don't they? All religions inject themselves into the realm of the secular in some manner.

I agree that the form of Islam, it's Semitic God as lawgiver model, kind of exacerbates that blurring of distinctions. But Judaism obviously has that same form and has adapted to modernity exceedingly well.

I think that Islamic history very early shows a gap between the Caliph, technically the leader of the faith, in his worldly role as emperor, and the religious demands of theocratic purists like the Kharijites. This tension erupted into civil war within 30 years of Mohammed's death. The party of Ali (leadership should remain in Mohammed's house) clashed bloodily with the Kharijites (leadership should be determined by piety alone), while Mu'awiya, the governor of Syria, was establishing his own dynasty of Umayyad Caliphs. This had pretty much resolved itself in Mu'awiya's favor by 661. (Mohammed died in 632.) The capital was moved from Medina to Damascus and a Byzantine-style civil service gradually established, reducing the power of the Companions and the Community. (One of the lasting results of that crisis was the rise of the Shi'ites.)

My point is that Islam's theocratic ambitions have always been as much a dream of the pious as a historical reality.

Does the history of Islam really illustrate that fanatics rise to the top? Isn't it more common in Islam for temporal rulers to be criticised by religious dissidents for their lax observance and for their compromises? Again, the heavenly ideal rarely describes the earthly reality.

And might the potential to challenge power in the name of principle sometimes be a good thing? Contrast it with Byzantine emperors ruling on earth as God's regent and huge international church organizations claiming to be divinely established and guided by God himself.

Weren't the Abbasids and many other Islamic dynasties the patrons of countless scholars?

I agree that our civilizations have since evolved in diametrically opposite directions. The West gradually turned to secularism, to the concerns of this world, and away from a dream of transcendence. While religion continued to exist in the West, it was shoved into a corner, turning into something for Sundays and for the next life, not for weekdays at work. It becamse separated from everyday life and increasingly vestigial.

In Islam, post al-Ghazzali, the medieval fascination with transcendence found a modus vivendi with worldly scholarship through a kind of Neoplatonic synthesis, in which the events of this world were interpreted as signs and symbols of another, higher, realm. So while the West turned to science and commerce, the Muslims embraced Sufism.

But my point is that all of the elements were (and are) present in both civilizations. There have been Islamic natural philosophers. There have been Christian Neoplatonists. The West has had its theocrats, its pietists and its crazy political fundamentalists. Islam has plenty of rulers and intellectuals with resolutely secular interests.

What's different is the balance of forces and the whole historical dynamic. And that's a very complex historical matter that shouldn't be treated simplistically.

I think that a lot of what we are currently seeing in the Islamic world is a reaction to European colonialism and to contemporary cultural globalization. Muslims see their civilization under assault by the increasingly ubiquitous styles of the West. So many of them grasp desparately at their own culture, at things that are indisputably theirs. And that inevitably means an increased interest in Islam. Unfortunately, probably because the motivation for the revived religious interest is political, we see it take the form of political-Islam and Islamic legalism. It becomes a determination to cleanse their societies of contamination. That kind of reaction might turn out to be disfunctional in the longer term.

I think that's ridiculous.

I think that if Muslims want to be part of the modern world, a modernist form of Islam needs to prevail. If Christians want to be a part of the modern world, a modernist form of Christianity needs to prevail. If Jews want to be a part of the modern world, a modernist form of Judaism needs to prevail.

That's true for all of the many religious traditions.

If their adherents want to participate in the world of science and technology, they need to be able to conceptualize the world in that novel manner. That doesn't mean rejecting religion necessarily, but it does mean finding a form of religion that doesn't flatly contradict the scientific way of looking at things.

I think that Islam certainly has that ability, just as Christianity and the rest of them do.

 

I think it's also important to point out that the Middle East was at one time a leading source of advancement in most areas in which it now lags behind. This seems to indicate that Islam, by itself, does not hinder its followers in such matters.

The point has often been made: If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three—and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now? Some have posed the question in a different form—not 'What has Islam done to the Muslims?' but 'What have the Muslims done to Islam?' (Lewis, 2002).

I don't know how Islam has supposedly caused the Middle East to take a back seat to the West now, when it did not in the past. It seems that doctrines adopted by Islamic leaders in the Middle East have stifled the region's progress, as progress is currently defined. At any rate, it seems that Islam, per se, is not to blame.

Resource:

Lewis, Bernard (January, 2002). "What went wrong?" The Atlantic Monthly 289(1). pp 43-45. Retrieved 18 April 2004 from
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/01/lewis.htm.

 

Lewis' Book...

Tracy,
I'm glad that you referenced this excellent work in your contribution to this thread. Indeed, Lewis explores the dynamic of "what went wrong?" with Islam and Muslim society between the 16th century and today. I agree that it is not the religion itself that seems to halt progress, but rather how Muslims reacted to western advances and used/transformed the religion of Islam as an anti-progressive belief system to preserve a mythical view of the past "glory days".

I used the book heavily in a recent research paper for my graduate program, which was titled "Perceptions of Islam in the West: How are western attitudes influenced by knowledge and education?".

That being said, what I discovered was that familiarity, including intense academic study of Islam on the part of western scholars, actually seems to heighten, not lessen, the negative perception that western people have towards the religion and its history/culture. Sadly, it seems that "the more you know about it, the less you like it" from a western perspective. This is in total contrast to what I expected to find - which is that knowledge and familiarity creates empathy. In the case of Islam, familiarity (on the part of western scholars and experts) seems to breed contempt.

- Carl


- Carl

 

Although I can't quote anything at the moment but personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I would agree with this statement. I've lived in the Middle East for 5 years now, 2 in Saudi Arabia, and 3 in the UAE. While both would be considered "Gulf" cultures, and are both Islamic, the differences between the two are startling. Indeed, the leadership of the UAE is determined to make this country, and particularly the emirate of Dubai, the regional hub in terms of free-trade zones, IT and e-commerce, media and journalism, finance, and more. In contrast, in Saudi the newspapers are cautiously optimistic over a rumor that Saudi businesswomen will no longer need a male guardian to handle their business affairs in the near future. My students in Saudi used to tell me that they wish they could go back to Prophet Mohammed's time, because everything was perfect then. My students in the UAE tell me they have to learn, learn, learn, to help develop their country and push it forward in the future of globalism. Islam is certainly not incompatible with "progress," however that term might be used. The UAE is living proof of that.

BTW, Tracy, is your MA from Incarnate Word a DL program? I wonder, since the commute to San Antonio from San Angelo would be a mite long! I used to teach at Incarnate Word, so am always curious to hear about the happenings there.

Regards,
Adrienne

 

Yes, my Incarnate Word program is 100% web-based DL. UIW offers several graduate and undergraduate programs entirely by DL. It also participates in eArmyU, which is a U.S. Army program to deliver educational services to soldiers. This is all good for me, since the drive to San Antonio from here is about 4 hours!

 

Re: Lewis' Book...

Carl,

That's an interesting finding. Any idea as to why that might be so?