Weigel's Faith, Reason

I just finished my second reading of George Weigel’s latest book, Faith, Reason, and the war against Jihadism: a call to action and I highly recommend it for all readers, but especially for Catholic readers –as it provides a primer to, and places the context for one of the most important documents to come out of the Vatican since Benedict became Pope – The Regensburg Speech.

Weigel reminds us that the speech was an invitation to inter-religious dialogue and not just a swipe at Muslims as the media distorted it. The invitation was heard and responded to by Muslim theologians. That is well and good. But the second part of the speech was a call to Catholics, in particular, and the West in general to refresh their understanding of our heritage of reason. We cannot have any dialogue at all if 1. Muslims insist on a context of irrationality and 2. Westerners do not fully comprehend or value their own tradition.

Muslim irrationality is rooted in what Weigel and Benedict refer to as a defective concept of God and the substitution of submission for free will as man’s natural state. The Islamic supersessionist world view is one of conflict and dominion. It is, irrational, as it denies man’s ability for reason and responsibility to act in accordance with free will.

Benedict’s invitation to moderate Muslims is full of significance, and the engagement that will result will have repercussions for most of the world – theological, political and cultural. Like Weigel, I am optimistic about such an opportunity – mainly, because to be pessimistic is to cave-in like most of Europe has done.

Which brings us to the second point – we need to understand our tradition of reason in order to defend it. Weigel refers us back to the great heritage of Leo XIII as the father of “modern social doctrine” (I just love the Catholic breadth here, in the definition of modern!) and his retrieval of Thomistic philosophy which led to (among other things) the all-important separation of Church and state in the Western world and, much later Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. These two critical developments allows for a social and political structure that recognizes the importance and significance of free religious expression in a just and free society.

Weigel is realistic in his intent: he does not intend to ‘re-create the Islamic world in our likeness’. Instead, he calls the Muslims to their feet and demands that they re-evaluate and contain their jihadistic leanings (pretty tall order, let’s see…beginning with Mohammed, Taymiyya, al-Wahhab, al-Banna, Qtub…) to participate in the progressive, rational course of civilization. If they reject this participation, and choose the regressive, belligerent and irrational course of jihad – well, all bets are off.

Has any one else read it? Any thought or comments?

Nobody? Well, I happen to have read it and his similar pieces on eppc.org. There is no particular reason for anyone who bothers to be a member of this group not to read it, if for no other reason than to be aware of the perspective of someone who is often called upon to speak for American Catholicism on such topics. It is a short book.

Based on what I see around, I am not inclined to give my personal review in this forum. However, when some thought-provoking reviews come out, I can probably link to them or accept the risk of attempting to summarize.

More generally, for someone seeking balancing observations, there is John L. Esposito, whose Catholic credentials are as solid as Weigel's or Robert Spencer's; Karen Armstrong could be seen as an apostate. Of course, the usual suspects call him a “dhimmi” stooge.

Saying “cave-in like most of Europe” might be perceived as opposing just the sort of pluralism that is under discussion. As you know, Weigel's earlier The Cube and the Cathedral saw the problem as what Henri de Lubac (touchstone fails) called, “l'humanisme athée.” And a number of challenges were put forward by Ecclesia in Europa. And around that time, then Cardinal Ratzinger proposed the idea that admitting Turkey to the EU would mean that there was no cultural basis for it, but only a pragmatic fiscal one. But Integrating Islam presents a more complex picture of France in the last few, pre-Sarkozy, regimes.

As to the broader issue of recent Church History that you raise, and which is well within the scope of this group, a number of European critics have basic problems with the Regenberg speech. (And, yes, I have read it.) For one thing, it is hard for them to imagine that the Vatican did not understand that all world leaders today speak in the environment of sound-bites and Powerpoint decks. As such, the inclusion of a provocative quotation, even in a larger context, is itself provocative. As you probably know, among other things, the German original uses the word jihad in that particular part, as do all official translations except the English and Greek. Now, things did settle down with the “Open Letter” in response, and the Turkey visit went rather more smoothly.

As for the substance, rather than the form, it has been pointed out that calling for rapprochement with, and even more so taking responsibility for, the Enlightenment and Modernism, means some fancy theological footwork. More extreme secularists may simply say that this fails: in the end, all supernatural belief is trouble, just some more than others. This is not a particularly helpful position, if the goal is to understand and not just to be right. For that, the question raised is, why is a nuanced Catholic philosophy held up against a two-dimensional cartoon (I do imagine that is intentional) of Islam?

For example, how can the Quran be at once eternal and of its time? This is a question that goes right to the heart of whether militant jihad is basic. A believer need not accept that this is possible, but can perhaps see that it is cut from the same mold as what they believe. Or, closer to home, there are Protestant inerrantists that believe in the normal scientific evolution, as well those who more closely fit the fundamentalist stereotype.

Or, to take a safer, more neutral example, Hinduism kind-of is and kind-of is not just a construct of imperialist orientalism.

To say nothing of understanding secular humanism. All of which might be put forward as an ecumenical prerequisite.

Beyond what was said, how it was interpreted, and what it might deeply mean, there are closely related actions that have been judged critically. For example, moving the PCID under the PCC and passing over Fitzgerald for a cardinalship. (Yeah, I know that the Irish bookies say that might still happen when Murphy-O'Connor retires.)

I haven't read this book, but a couple of comments on the above posts.

enevada, setting preconditions such as, "We cannot have any dialogue at all if..." is not usually very conducive to dialogue. The most common one was, "We cannot have any dialogue at all if they don't renounce violence" but in almost every recent conflict which has ended in a peace agreement as opposed to a military victory, in fact dialogue was begun long before "they" did so.

Dialogue requires openness and humility, and beginning with the value-laden term "Muslim irrationality" and stating that it is "rooted in... a defective concept of God" is unlikely to be very conducive to dialogue. A recognition that Muslim thought is rooted in a very different worldview than western or Christian thought, with very different concepts of submission and free will, and that neither side understands the other, might just be prerequisites for dialogue.

MMcM, I'd certainly be interested in more of your thoughts. I agree fully with you that "the goal is to understand and not just to be right".

"how can the Quran be at once eternal and of its time?" - Mahmud Muhammud Taha's The Second Message of Islam is excellent in this regard. Of course he was hanged by an Islamist regime for his trouble, but this in itself reminds us that Islam is not monolithic and that many Muslims are wrestling with these issues.

Personally I'd back Michael Fitzgerald for pope, not just cardinal!

John,
Just to be clear the words and concepts of irrationality and the defective nature of God are not my own - they are Benedict's and later, Weigel's - although I do agree with them.

From Regensburg speech:
“The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.”

The entire speech I see as the very recognition of which you speak: of disparate and conflicting worldviews - and, it is our world view - that is, a free man who acts in accordance with free will that is conducive to a harmonious and peaceful existence on earth, whereas the Muslim concept of complete and total submission to Allah is not - unless we all accept those conditions.

Do you see that the two world views are of equal value and compatible? If so, could you explain or perhaps illustrate the ideal scenario in which the dialogue takes place and how it manifests itself in today’s world? This would be very helpful to me.

MMcM:

Thanks so much - there is a lot to your post, and I have some reading to do, thanks.

As to this question:

For that, the question raised is, why is a nuanced Catholic philosophy held up against a two-dimensional cartoon (I do imagine that is intentional) of Islam?

I imagine that you'll agree that it is the responsibility of the Muslims to provide their own nuanced philosophy of Islam to us - and that, in fact, is what Benedict is asking of them. The PR problem is theirs, not ours.

Again, thanks for your insightful response, and I too hope others join in.

>4 enevada: enevada - thanks for a thoughtful reply. In a topic which often ends up in polemic and polarisation I appreciate the opportunity to engage in dialogue. Hopefully it will be helpful to both of us, and others.

"it is our world view - that is, a free man who acts in accordance with free will that is conducive to a harmonious and peaceful existence on earth, whereas the Muslim concept of complete and total submission to Allah is not". If everyone in the world accepted our view, or if everyone in the world accepted their view, then it probably would be peaceful and harmonious. But the reality is that everybody in the world will never accept one or the other, hence the need for dialogue to try to find a way of living with both worldviews. If both continue to fight for dominance, there will be no peace and harmony.

"Do you see that the two world views are of equal value and compatible?"

As far as equal value is concerned, I think that's the wrong question. Dialogue is not trying to establish whether one is better than the other. Dialogue recognises that both exist side by side and tries to find a way of avoiding, managing or transforming tensions and conflict. As MMcM says in >2 MMcM:, "the goal is to understand and not just to be right".

Can they be compatible? I think there are many examples, at least on a small scale, where Muslims and Christians have found compatibility. In my own direct experience, during the period since the mid-1990s when the Nuba Mountains region of Sudan was liberated from the control of the governing Islamist regime, Christians, Muslims and followers of African traditional religions lived together in relative harmony. Palestinian colleagues tell me there is a great deal of cooperation between Muslims and Christians in Palestine in the face of a common enemy, the Israeli state. Muslims seem to live in relative harmony with everyone else in Kenya and South Africa. In Kenya they were notably part of the church-led Ufungamano process connected with democratisation and good governance; in South Africa they were very much part of the liberation struggle. Where Islam is not being subverted by political ideology, ordinary Muslims seem to get on quite well.

And maybe that's one of the keys to dialogue. There may be little point at the moment in opening a dialogue with the most militant ideological Islamists (although as I implied in my earlier post >3 John5918:, that argument was used by many governments to avoid opening dialogues with "the most militant" insurgents, and all eventually had to eat their words). The Sudanese church often had to tell well-meaning westerners who were urging them to open a dialogue with Islam that the time was not ripe because Islam in Sudan was controlled, or at least manipulated, by the Islamist military regime, and dialogue cannot take place between the oppressor and the victim. But that doesn't mean that dialogue wasn't going on at a local, unofficial, often personal level. Islam is not monolithic and the vast majority of Muslims are not militant Islamists - they are ordinary people trying to go about their daily lives within their religious and cultural context, just as you and I are.

"could you explain or perhaps illustrate the ideal scenario in which the dialogue takes place and how it manifests itself in today’s world?" I don't think there is an ideal scenario, but dialogue is going on, as I suggested above. Just this morning I read this - in "Catholic" Ireland!

Those who noticed Andrew Higgins' The Lost Archive in the WSJ the other day may wonder about “Christoph Luxenberg” and his theories on the origin of the Quran, which again bear upon the theological bases under discussion here.

Here is a better summary that is mostly supportive.

Here is Ms. Neuwirth's review.
Here are critical analyses by François de Blois and Simon Hopkins.
Note that while these are hosted by Muslim sites, who have an obvious stake, they are copied from peer-reviewed journals.

Christians may be more familiar with the similar Aramaic primacy theory.

As a matter of fact, I did happen to see the WSJ article. I hope others did as well - and will look at your supplemental reading suggestions.

Very interesting to read - thank you.

Neuwirth -the Berlin school, Crone -Princeton, de Blois -London - this is fascinating, but I am finding it difficult to find criticism or discussion from inside the Islamic world - people of Middle Eastern heritage and Islamic faith. Can you point to any?

Blois identifies Luxenberg as a Lebanese Christian, I see, but what has been the Islamic reaction to (not just) the book, but also the recent re-invigoration of the studies in Berlin?

I haven't read it myself, but A Muslim and A Christian in Dialogue by Badru D. Kateregga and David W. Shenk (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1997) comes highly recommended by colleagues working in the field of Muslim-Christian dialogue.

> 9

An interesting question. And one I don't know the whole answer to.

Were there protests and student strikes like in Cairo in the 20s until Taha Hussein recanted parts of On Pre-Islamic Poetry? I don't think so.

Not that there aren't people who would be willing to mount such protests. But it does not seem to have gotten enough attention.

For most belief systems, there are some who feel that any application of modern religious studies to theirs is out of line. And if there are sacred texts, that any modern textual studies of them are too. At the other extreme, I think it has been proposed half-jokingly in some topic here that all believers should recuse themselves from such studies, though that might significantly reduce the number of scholars.

In the case of Islam and Hinduism, the situation is further muddied by the implications of Orientalism and colonialism.

Not to posit post-modern relativism, but there are often similar protests about secular issues. And I think one must admit that in more oppressive regimes, religious protests can be a proxy for economic and political problems and that the astute despot even welcomes them as a release valve for those.

Even though, as Barney Frank (who represents the district I am in; before that, it was Fr. Drinan; draw conclusions if you wish) has said, those whose speech you must defend are not those whom you would invite to dinner, it cannot be ignored that it makes some practical difference whether the perceived offense is given by a scholar, even an amateur one with an agenda, or a right-wing xenophobic hate rag.

Walid Saleh, a Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, who was born in Colombia to Lebanese immigrants (you know, like Shakira), but grew up in Lebanon, wrote another critique, covering much the same ground as those already cited above.

The 2004 edition (there is a larger 2007 edition, but I don't have access to it) of interviews on the controversy, Streit um den Koran (summary contents; limited preview), includes sections with Soheib Bensheikh, the Algerian-born Grand Mufti of Marseilles, an Islamic modernist; and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, the Egyptian-born Dutch theologian, known for his Humanistic Hermeneutics of Islam. Quite as one would expect, and hopefully without oversimplifying, both call for a dynamic interpretaton of the Quran like the works johnthefireman and I alluded to above.

Perhaps more interesting, there are a couple of pages summarizing the reception in the Islamic World. It points out that much of it is limited by the lack of an English or Arabic translation; the former is now available, so perhaps we will see. The popular reaction has been to things like the NYT summary (3/2/2002). An even shorter account in Newsweek (7/28/2003) led to that issue being banned in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In fact, the Newsweek article seems to have fueled what online controversy there was (and mostly in English).

There were a pair of articles in the Lebanese Shiite magazine, Al-hayyat at-tayyiba (الحياة الطيبة). The first, which looks like it was written by someone who might have been raised in Germany, summarized Luxenberg's work. The second was a critique of it. I only have the second-hand German report to go on, since no library near me gets that magazine and what I believe to be their website has sections for articles that say nothing is available right now. But it seems that while being extremely skeptical of the conclusions, it appreciated a need for more study of the relationship with Aramaic. This is not something brand-new; Arabic grammarians have recognized the affinity with Aramaic and Hebrew, up to and including borrowing words, even if they didn't apply what we'd call modern linguistic theory to it all.

De Blois' critique was translated into Persian for Tarjuman-i Wahy (ترجمان وحى), a magazine on Quranic translation. A longer analysis appeared in Nashr-i Danish (نشر دانش), a cultural magazine, covering both Luxenberg and previous research on the language of the Quran in Germany.

One of the issues is that in the Middle East, and Syria in particular, only Christians know Aramaic; and due to increased specialization, even in the West, not many people study both Quranic and pre-Islamic language and culture.

Googling for كريستوف لوكسنبرغ turns up some articles in a German online ecumenical magazine, which not surprisingly translates everything into English, Turkish, and Arabic. And some blogs which say they are written by Syrians and Lebanese (perhaps studying abroad; I can't tell). While basically skeptical, a couple further note that even if it were in some sense true, it would still be trumped by faith. Which I think is pretty much what a LDS blog might say when confronting inconsistencies in the origin of their Scripture.

I agree with enevada's posts.

Weigel's book is great, maybe the best book I've read on the topic, but built on the thesis that the problem with jihadists is a faulty conception of God.

Impressive in its concision and depth.

#11:“While basically skeptical, a couple further note that even if it were in some sense true, it would still be trumped by faith.”

Yes, that reminds me of the deBlois’s comment on the evidence of Aramaic in the Quran:

“It might be useful to distinguish straight away what is new and what is not new in these theses. Muslim scholars of the classical period debated already the question of whether or not there is 'non-Arabic' (Aramaic, Persian, etc.) linguistic material in the Qur.an, whereby at least the more broad-minded authorities were content that there was; since God created all languages there is no reason why He should not have used words from different languages in His revelation.”

All languages? Old Church Slavonic? Esperanto?

I am happy the Berlin School is leading the way, as they did for much of the Christian exegetic tradition – and I’m also grateful for a German-born Pope, who is long familiar with this work and will bring it to a wider audience. And, MMcM, for people like you who scour the libraries in Chestnut Hill looking for Lebanese Shiite magazines – you may have to cross the river. But, still thanks for your thoughts and your efforts.

#10: John, thanks for the recommendation, I’ll track it down.

> 13 you may have to cross the river

No good, unless this and this are really the same due to changes in place of publication and subtitle. To say nothing of how much HCL access costs.

#14: Well, 2007 was a good year, but you can't expect Harvard to let just anyone into their libraries and read stuff for free:

"Harvard University’s endowment earned a 23.0 percent return during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007. With FY07 being one of the best performance years since the inception of Harvard Management Company in 1974, the overall value of the University’s endowment grew to $34.9 billion."

(Harvard Gazette, August 2007)

The usual suspects here at LT are busy second guessing the American electorate.

But meanwhile, the delegation responsible for A Common Word is in Rome.

ETA: Joint declaration.