Islamic Education, Madrassah Reform, Rationality and Dawkins

>>>>......
At the moment even the best scholars I`ve heard speak base their arguments on logic which even a bright undergrad student of philosophy could refute since they are the same arguments made by medieval scholars. Arguments which Hume and Kant etc. refuted amongst others (e.g. the First Cause argument or the Design Argument and which Dawkins, in his excellent recent polemic, The God Delusion has again refuted).
....... <<<<<

First islam has to come to terms with the fact that it is also based on the same pretense that other religions of its time were based on and will face the same arguments as others get.

Essentially, other religions have retracted to the realm of individual or mass hullicination i.e., I as a person cannot accept that god is dead, hence I believe, though you are free to not follow me and I wouldn`t bomb you to pieces for that.

.....

``Where has God gone?`` he cried. ``I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God`s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.``
Nietzche


http://www.news.faithfreedom.org/index.php

Mr. Naqshbandi,

I recently came across your article on the subject at chowk. At the moment I would keep my self restricted to the issues on the subject mentioned above not rationality and Dawkins.

I am sure there are people, who would agree to change the concept of Islamic education and reforms in meddrassahs by changing or reviewing the current syllabus to more contemporary needs and demands, not only for survival but to meet the challenges of change.

My idea of a maulvi, clergy or Pesh Imam is quite contrary to what it is today.

The person who is your leader (Imam) during the prayers should be educated and capable of your leader in worldly issues as well. He should not be looked down upon instead the people should look towards him for guidance not only in religious but worldly matters as well.

Now, the question is “How to make it possible?” and “How long will it take?”

Is it just a dream? Or can it be transformed in to reality?

Any idea or comments?

With best regards,

Umer Farooq

Naqshbandi

There would be no disagreement if we accept that Absolute and Certain Knowledge resides only in Allah or howsoever else that Absolute Reality is called by different people, and not in the pages of any book or with any human, living or dead. Nor should we accept any claims to the contrary.

#126 by Naqshbandi

Man, instead of being miniscule is actually a microcosm who contains within him the macrocosm.

We don`t differ on that. I said that much in #118 in `` till the tiniest sub-atomic particle`` of which of-course man is made of. But so is everything else ... don`t you think?

zeemax/kaalchakra

First of all, I have not attained to any kind of knowledge!
Secondly, Absolute knowledge of all things is with Allah alone--yet Man has been
given the capacity to reach a higher knowledge of Allah than any other creature--angels included. This is why he is ashraf al makhluqat--the noblest of creation. And the Messenger of Allah is the noblest of all creatures since his knowledge of Allah is the greatest. This knowledge of Allah is called gnosis or ma`arifat in Urdu and Arabic. It is the attainment of a degree of this gnosis that is the goal of the Sufi path--this is the `certain knowledge` which Imam Ghazali speaks of and which he found in the sufi path alone.

You see, Man, instead of being miniscule is actually a microcosm who contains within him the macrocosm.

As Iqbal said: mumin hai tau hain usmein gum aafaaq/if he is a mumin [true believer] the heavens are lost inside him [his heart] .i.e. the perfect man -- al insaan al kaamil --a sufi concept -- is the macrocosm of creation. To use a Christian metaphor--God created Man in His image--an honour accorded not even to the archangels!

#124 by kaalchakra,

Well, a better term than `Allah ki marzi` is `Allah ki Raza`a`. There`s a difference as Marzi is human and challengable but Raza`a is divine and unchallengable.

`Mashiat` literally means ``to go along``. Acceptance, submission to God`s laws if you will.

It has been split into three parts by Islamic scholars:

1) The laws of biological life, which are laid down in Qura`an through revelation. Man has liberty to accept or reject these, but there`s a direct causal relationship with the decision.

2) The laws of the external universe, which are fixed and unchangable. Man can acquire knowledge of these laws, but cannot alter them.

3) The laws of God (or Raza`a) which constitute God`s programme, or agenda, or destiny if you will. These are unknowable by man, and one can only submit to these and follow unquestioningly in total faith as God`s `Mashiat`.

As per above, the Absolute and Certain Knowledge possible is limited to (1) & (2). Venturing into the domain of (3) is considered Kufr in Islam. That is why Sufis are not regarded as being in the Islam mainstream because their search extends into the third.

Hope it helped ... but doubt if by much :-)

Raw_Dust, Zeemax

One interesting bit was about where Al-Ghazali (and Islam) ended up trying to understand the nature of Absolute Reality (Allah, or Brahman, or God or whatever else one may call That Reality) - the subject of intense meditation all around the globe since the dawn of human consciousness.

One approach led to the conclusion that Absolute and Certain Reality was unknowable, beyond comprehension. As Raw_Dust says, Absolute and Certain Knowledge lay ONLY with Absolute Reality (let`s call that Reality Allah).

The other approach was to claim that one had actually found that Absolute and Certain Knowledge, and all disagreements with what one claimed was such knowledge constituted error (resulting, for instance, from not fully understanding Allah ki marzi, or a closed heart, or insufficient application to the task).

There is a famous prayer: Rabb e Zidni Ilma. God, increase my knowledge.

Absolute and certain knowledge is with Allah, all humans can hope for is some infinitesimally small portion of that ``knowledge`` to be revealed to them by Allah. But acquiring knowledge related to material world is irrelevant as the Truth (knowledge for the salvation of Man) has already been revealed by Allah to humans in its perfect form i.e. Quran.

kaalchakra:
Allah is possessor of absolute knowledge. He is not bound by the causal chain but exists outside the chain. Allah is capable of doing the absolute evil since, Allah by definition is not bound by human reason and moral strictures. I came across a brilliant exposition of this fascistic concept by Rosenzweig:

---

``The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god`s unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism.``

Zeemax

I wasn`t immediately clear about the relationship of `Mashiat-e-Aizdi` with apparent futility of innovation once absolute and certain knowledge had been received. Some search suggested (there isn`t much public information on `Mashiat-e-Aizdi`!) the phrase to mean ``allah ki marzi.``

This appears to be part of the general argument a lot of Muslims use very often to explain their views - ``Allah knows best.``

Clearly, that approach to interpreting reality must be central to holding on to any definite corpus of absolute and certain knowledge. IMO, Aasif will enthusiastically agree (although he seems to have gotten terribly busy :().

(if `Mashiat-e-Aizdi` means anything other than un-understood will of God, will be glad to learn more about this profound concept).

#119 by anil

Perhaps the first person who interpreted and expressed `Mashiat` was Ali, who said the following (loosely translated):

``I found Allah in the failure of my intentions``

This was striking because most people even at that time ascribed their successes to God`s intervention, but Ali said quite the opposite ... he ascribed his `failures` to God`s intervention, and accepted it.

Later scholars expanded on the concept, clarified and built upon it, by demystifying `Allah` in the term `Qadir-e-Mutliq`, which means `Law Giver of Totality`. This is based on the Quranic text appearing several times ``Inallah ala qullun shey un Qadeer.``.

Allama Parvez, for example, described it as the ultimate power over `cause & effect` which in its totality is beyond reason (f`ahm) of man, but he goes on to say that if we trace back to the beginnings of cause & effect, we`ll find nothing but an undecipherable law of `Qadir-e-Mutliq`, which governs all nature of things. That is `Mashiat-e-Aizdi`.

Rgds

Re: # 118

Zeemax Sahib:

What is the source and developer of `Mashiat-e-Aizdi` concept in Islam?

Anil

#117 by kaalchakra

Hope this is not too heavy. But you like heavy stuff.

`Mashiat-e-Aizdi` is one of the most profound concepts in Islam. It addresses the vital question `why do bad things happen to good people`, and directly points towards the `mysterious tune` and the `unified entirety` at which point Einstein concluded his research as he could go no further. So did Stephen Hawkings.

Thus I beg to differ with ``No innovations contary to that knowledge can be or should be accepted.`` Innovations should and can be accepted only till the point where man begins to believe himself to be bigger than the sum of the whole to whom he belongs, and that`s where he must stop and think. That is going against nature and a recipe for swift destruction. That is what Islam terms as `enemies of Allah` and those who have other Gods than Allah. I.e. at-least, in my opinion. Perhaps Asif/Masadi/Urstruly can grace us with their opinions.

I do not believe time to be a measurable commodity. I believe time to be endless and without form or measurement - but I do believe in lifespans within lifespans within still more. From the ages to eras to milleniums to centuries to decades to years/ days/ minutes and so forth till the tiniest sub-atomic particle, everything is a living organism and with a lifespan, at the end of which it merely turns into something else. All an organism does at the end of its lifespan is to be compressed into another but with the resulting ever increasing density, till the time that lifespan reaches near zero but the density is close to infinity. This is clearly observable in compression of knowledge in succeessive generations, the current digital age and so forth. When the final stage of this compression comes, that will be the end of the universe (note the Eschatological religions) and another big bang, and start all over again in perhaps other forms.

Islam identifies all of the above, but no Mullah will explain it. Islam as an organised / ritualistic faith is quite attractive as well and sufficient for most.

But then again, perhaps I read more into it than was intended :-) Here Ghazali enters.

Zeemax

Agreed completely.

Once absolute and certain knowledge has been found and the method of discovering that knowledge has been learnt then the only intellectual growth (Aasif`s concern here) worthy of interest would consist in applying that same knowledge consistently in all walks of life everywhere. No innovations contary to that knowledge can be or should be accepted.

That`s a very high level of intellectual attainment, and it would be great to know if Aasif has already found such knowledge.

#114 by kaalchakra

Does Islam constitute or provide absolute and certain knowledge?

It is only man`s conscience which makes him appear to himself as unique, and vainly observing nature of things from a distance apart, when man is no more than a miniscule and insignificant part of nature and the known and unknown universe as a whole - a unified organism - consisting of animate and inanimate objects, all dancing to a mysterious tune.

Islam identifies that mysterious tune as `Mashiat-e-Aizdi`, and the whole in its unified entirety as Allah. The only source of the only absolute and certain knowledge.

But Naqsh may differ.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009348
On a Wing and a Prayer
Grievance theater at Minneapolis International Airport.

BY DEBRA BURLINGAME
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Those are the words that started it all. Six bearded imams are said to have shouted them out while offering evening prayers as they and 141 other passengers waited at the gate for their flight out of Minneapolis International Airport. It was three days before Thanksgiving. Allahu Akbar: God is great.

Initial media reports of the incident did not include the disturbing details about what happened after they boarded US Airways flight 300, but the story quickly went national with provocative headlines: ``Six Muslims Ejected from US Air Flight for Praying.`` Yes, they were praying--but let`s be clear about this. The very last human sound on the cockpit voice recorder of United flight 93 before it screamed into the ground at 580 miles per hour is the sound of male voices shouting ``Allahu Akbar`` in a moment of religious ecstasy.

They, too, were praying. The passengers and crew of flight 93 lost their valiant fight to take back the plane just one hour and 20 minutes after it pushed back from the gate. Until the hijackers stormed the cockpit door, they were just a handful of Middle Eastern-looking men on their way to sunny California. So, yes, let`s be exceedingly clear about the whole matter. Some 3,000 men, women and children are dead because the unassuming people on those airplanes did not look at them and see murderers. Or dangerous Arabs. Or fanatical Muslims. They saw a few guys in chinos.

In five years since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. commercial carriers have transported approximately 2.9 billion domestic and international passengers. It is a testament to the flying public, but, most of all, to the flight crews who put those planes into the air and who daily devote themselves to the safety and well-being of their passengers, that they have refused to succumb to ethnic hatred, religious intolerance or irrational fear on those millions of flights. But they have not forgotten the sight of a 200,000-pound aircraft slicing through heavy steel and concrete as easily as a knife through butter. They still remember the voices of men and women in the prime of their lives saying final goodbyes, people who just moments earlier set down their coffee and looked out the window to a beautiful new morning. Today, when travelers and flight crews arrive at the airport, all the overheated rhetoric of the civil rights absolutists, all the empty claims of government career bureaucrats, all the disingenuous promises of the election-focused politicians just fall away. They have families. They have responsibilities. To them, this is not a game or a cause. This is real life.

Given that Islamic terrorists continue their obsession with turning airplanes into weapons of mass destruction, it is nothing short of obscene that these six religious leaders--fresh from attending a conference of the North American Imams Federation, featuring discussions on ``Imams and Politics`` and ``Imams and the Media``--chose to turn that airport into a stage and that airplane into a prop in the service of their need for grievance theater. The reality is, these passengers endured a frightening 3 1/2-hour ordeal, which included a front-to-back sweep of the aircraft with a bomb-sniffing dog, in order to advance the provocative agenda of these imams in, of all the inappropriate places after 9/11, U.S. airports.

``Allahu Akbar`` was just the opening act. After boarding, they did not take their assigned seats but dispersed to seats in the first row of first class, in the midcabin exit rows and in the rear--the exact configuration of the 9/11 execution teams. The head of the group, seated closest to the cockpit, and two others asked for a seatbelt extension, kept on board for obese people. A heavy metal buckle at the end of a long strap, it can easily be used as a lethal weapon. The three men rolled them up and placed them on the floor under their seats. And lest this entire incident be written off as simple cultural ignorance, a frightened Arabic-speaking passenger pulled aside a crew member and translated the imams` suspicious conversations, which included angry denunciations of Americans, furious grumblings about U.S. foreign policy, Osama Bin Laden and ``killing Saddam.``

Predictably, these imams and their attorneys now suggest that another passenger who penned a frantic note of warning and slipped it to a flight attendant was somehow a hysterical Islamophobe. Let us remember that but for their performance at the gate this passenger might never have noticed these men or their behavior on board, much less have the slightest clue as to their religion or political passions. Of course, that was the point of the shouting. According to the police report, yet another alarmed passenger who frequently travels to the Middle East described a conversation with one of the imams. The 31-year-old Egyptian expressed fundamentalist Muslim views, and stated the he would go to whatever measures necessary to obey all the tenets set out in the Koran.

The activist Muslim American Society (MAS) issued a press release within hours of the incident, demanding an apology and announcing a ``pray-in`` at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. Standing just a short distance from the Pentagon, where five years ago black plumes of smoke from the crash of American Airlines flight 77 could be seen for miles, the assembled demonstrators complained that African-American Muslims, accustomed to ``driving while black,`` must now cope with the injustice of ``flying while Muslim.`` This brazen two-step is racial politics at its worst; none of the imams are African-American. MAS, which teaches an ``Activist Training`` program with lessons on ``how to talk to the media,`` must have been thrilled when one cable news outfit, suckered by the rhetoric, compared the imams` conduct to that of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat in the face of institutional racism. One wonders what the parents of the three 11-year-olds who died on flight 77--all African-American kids on a National Geographic field trip--would make of this stunning comparison.

Today, MAS Executive Director Mahdi Bray says his organization wants more than an apology. He wants to ``hit [US Airways] where it hurts, the pocketbook,`` and, joined by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), will seek compensation for the imams, civil and federal monetary sanctions, and new, sweeping legislation that will extract even bigger penalties for airlines that engage in ``racial and religious profiling.`` An investigation by the Department of Homeland Security`s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is under way. Not incidentally, it is the ``fatwa department`` of MAS that pushed for segregated taxi lines that would permit Muslim cab drivers at the Minneapolis airport to reject passengers carrying alcohol.

Here`s what the flying public needs to know about airplanes and civil rights: Once your foot traverses the entranceway of a commercial airliner, you are no longer in a democracy in which everyone gets a vote and minority rights are affirmatively protected in furtherance of fuzzy, ever-shifting social policy. Ultimately, the responsibility for your personal safety and security rests on the shoulders of one person, the pilot in command. His primary job is to safely transport you and your belongings from one place to another. Period.

This is the doctrine of ``captain`s authority.`` It has a longstanding history and a statutory mandate, further strengthened after 9/11, which recognizes that flight crews are our last line of defense between the kernel of a terrorist plot and its lethal execution. The day we tell the captain of a commercial airliner that he cannot remove a problem passenger unless he divines beyond question what is in that passenger`s head and heart is the day our commercial aviation system begins to crumble. When a passenger`s conduct is so disturbing and disruptive that reasonable, ordinary people fear for their lives, the captain must have the discretionary authority to respond without having to consider equal protection or First Amendment standards about which even trained lawyers with the clarity of hindsight might strongly disagree. The pilot in command can`t get it wrong. At 35,000 feet, when multiple events are rapidly unfolding in real time, there is no room for error.

We have a new, inviolate aviation standard after 9/11, which requires that the captain cannot take that airplane up so long as there are any unresolved issues with respect to the security of his airplane. At altitude, the cockpit door is barred and crews are instructed not to open them no matter what is happening in the cabin behind them. This is an extremely challenging situation for the men and women who fly those planes, one that those who write federal aviation regulations and the people who agitate for more restrictions on a captain`s authority will never have to face themselves.

Likewise, flight attendants are confined in the back of the plane with upwards of 200 people; they must be the eyes and ears, not just for the pilot but for us all. They are not combat specialists, however, and to compel them to ignore all but the most unambiguous cases of suspicious behavior is to further enable terrorists who act in ways meant to defy easy categorization. As the American Airlines flight attendants who literally jumped on ``shoe bomber`` Richard Reid demonstrated, cabin crews are sharply attuned to unusual or abnormal behavior and they must not be second-guessed, or hamstrung by misguided notions of political correctness.

Ultimately, the most despicable aspect about the imams` behavior is that when they pierced the normally quiet hum of a passenger waiting area with shouts of ``Allahu Akbar``and deliberately engaged in terrorist-associated behavior that was sure to trigger suspicion, they exploited the fear that began with the Sept. 11 attacks. The imams, experienced travelers all, counted on the security system established after 9/11 to kick in, and now they plan not only to benefit financially from the proper operation of that system but to substantially weaken it--with help from the Saudi-endowed attorneys at CAIR.

US Airways is right to stand by its flight crew. It will be both dangerous and disgraceful if the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation and, ultimately, our federal courts allow aviation security measures put in place after 9/11 to be cynically manipulated in the name of civil rights.

Ms. Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. ``Chic`` Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Naqshbandi bhai, I do wish to return your attention to the issue that both you and Imam Ghazali recognized as of utmost importance: Does Islam constitute or provide absolute and certain knowledge?

I will be grateful if you shared your view. Thanks in anticipation.

Re #111,
``why?``

Because that is the very kind of knowledge that he believed could not lead to God.

I vageuly recall seeing Hamza Yusuf on PBS (I think it was a documentary on Islam which aired 2-3 years ago). He could not stop talking about Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) flying into skies at night to meet Allah Almighty. He spoke with typical certainty and calm of a sub-intelligent aalim ...

And Hamza Yusuf is regarded as a scholar by moderate Muslims of this day and age. Go figure. Ummah is yet to hit the bottom here ...

Tariq Ramadan seems to have a similar mindset. I met him once at a gathering several years ago. Upon finding out I am an Ahmadi-Muslim, he immediately wanted to pick an argument regarding the ``last prophet`` issue ... even as people were mingling and chatting all around us. He pointed out that ahadith leave no doubt that Prophet Muhamamd (pbuh) is the last prophet. I politely shook his hand, made eye-contact, and with a smile remarked that this is a matter of interpretation of ``last``. We then moved past each other.

He came across as another aalim - somewhat brash and one with narrow viewpoints ...

Re: # 109

why?

Re: # 108

Well, none of them are Pakistanis but they are taken seriously in the Muslim world amongst the educated, traditional, Sufi-orientated Muslims.

Shaykh Abd al Hakim Murad (TJ Winter) addressed the Pakistani parliament a couple of years ago too.

Re #101 ``I know very well that ten is more than three..``

It is ironic that Imam Ghazali would choose a mathematical statement as an example of `true and certain` knowledge.

Hamza Yusuf, Shaykh Abd al Hakim Murad, Shaykh Yacoubi, Tariq Ramadan ....

Asif, are these people taken seriously by Muslims livining in Muslim countries, by Arabic Media, or by Pakistani media?

(also, you didn`t confirm whether Islam was or was not about `absolute and certain Knowledge.``)

Zahra, your comments are valid criticisms but to be fair to scholars such as Hamza Yusuf, Shaykh Abd al Hakim Murad, Shaykh Yacoubi, Tariq Ramadan and others, they ARE taking steps to tackle the ignorants within the community but these are largely ignored by the mainstream media as it doesn`t make exciting news coverage!

Hamza Yusuf, especially, is doing a lot.

I heard the first half of Hamza Yousuf`s commentary/opinions. I could not listen to the complete version. Thank you to YouTube.

I understand the intent behind a rebuttal. Things should be viewed in the right context as well. Still, I feel like questioning all these muslims scholars on the following:

a. How many of them have taken a stand or have exuded similar enthusiasm when one sect of Muslims was killing the other sect in different Muslim countries? What is the contribution of these ulema to pacify and assist the ummah in gaining peace and harmony and getting rid of negativity toward their fellow muslims?

b. I have read somewhere that the Muslim Scholars cared to put their minds together and wrote a profound letter to the Pontiff. Ironically, the Pontiff and his colleagues did read the letter and took it in positive stride (whatever that means). Would anyone in places like Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, Afghanistan .... ever care to decipher any such attempt? In fact, would these scholars ever undertake such a heroic initiative?

I may be completely ignorant of any such attempts or move made by our scholars. They may have been a beacon of hope and peace among their respective areas. Somehow, their efforts have not been getting enough media attention. No doubt, non-Muslims are being relied upon to create peace and harmony in the Muslim countries.

Why did not Turkey or Morocco or King of Brunei or Indonesia assist Iraq or Afghanistan or Kashmir or Palestine in coming out of their miseries? Shouldn`t the muslim professionals, intellectuals, thinkers, philosphers and clergy all over the globe conduct some introspection?

We keep on reading about dialogues around pluralism and inter-faith efforts among islam, judaism, and christianity. Based on the series of events in the current day world, there is a bigger need for having within-faith communication among muslims from different parts of the world. Ironically, the ulema have not even touched the pulse to understand the root cause of this ongoing anarchy.

Rebuttals are a way of responding to make your point and illuminate the opponent. I just wished similar approach was taken to tackle the ``ignorants`` within.

Naqshbandi and Abarahamic/Ghazali BS cannot comprehend that ``knowledge`` can be acquired and debunked while considering ``God`` as a meaningless (hence irrelevant) construct.

Entertaining this possibility will knock the heavenly daylights out of the Godhead that sits on top of abrahamic cult.

I am so happy that at last Daniel Pearl`s ghost can safely travel in intersteller space and collide Moon and bounce happily back and fall on earth into Jameson Hall passing its protective roof non-invasively and noiselessly and hope to live in the Hall for ever after in peace without fear of being caught and its ghostly head chopped off.

``Thus I came to know that whatever is known without this kind of certainty is doubtful knowledge, not reliable and safe, that all knowledge subject to error is not sure and certain.``

From wikipedia website`s entry on Ghazali:

Ghazali`s influence has been compared to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas in Christian theology (he has been called the ``Thomas Aquinas of Islam`` by some), but the two differed greatly in methods and beliefs. Whereas Ghazali rejected non-Islamic philosophers such as Aristotle and saw it fit to discard their teachings on the basis of their ``unbelief,`` Aquinas embraced them and incorporated ancient Greek and Latin thought into his own philosophical writings.

---

einsteinwallah says: Apparently Ghazali was incoherrent to his own view of rejecting any ``knowledge subject to error`` because such knowledge ``is not sure and certain``. He just knew that he was right in rejecting non-Islamic philosophers because of their unbelief. Never mind that concept of unbelief with what was going to be ``revealed`` to a psychotic at a future date is total non-sense. May be Ghazali had a time travel machine. Or, may be he had developed a sure fire test of non-belief.

One more para from the wikipedia entry:

``In the next century, Averroes drafted a lengthy rebuttal of Ghazali`s Incoherence entitled the Incoherence of the Incoherence; however, the epistemological course of Islamic thought had already been set.``

No wonder Islam is so much in trouble. If Islam had such friends, philosophers and guides then it does not need enemies.

re: Asif # 101

A great post.

``Then I said to myself.... is not sure and certain``

seems to contain (and correct me if I am wrong) the essence, the core, and the distinctiveness, of Islam as a religion - Absolute and Certain Knowledge.

Nasah,
you will find this extract from al-Ghazali`s autobiography interesting:


From my youngest years in the prime of life, my thirst to seize the profound reality of things was a natural instinct or tendency which God placed in me not by my choice or conscious decision. As I approached adolescence, while still young, the traditional bonds had already loosened and my inherited tendencies20 had broken down. I perceived that Christian children grew up as Christians, young Jews grew up in Judaism, and young Muslims in Islam. I had heard the tradition (hadith)21 that the prophet -- peace be upon him -- said: ``Everyone is born with a sound nature (fitra),22 it is one`s parents who make one into a Jew, a Christian or a Magian.``23

An interior force drove me to research the reality of original human nature, and that of the beliefs which derive from conformism to the authority of parents and teachers. I tried to discern among the elements which are taught by rote and accepted without question, which discrimination gives rise to so much controversy regarding what is true and what false.24

Then I said to myself, ``My aim is to perceive the deep reality of things; I wish to seize the essence of knowledge. Certain knowledge is that in which the thing known reveals itself without leaving any room for doubt or any possibility of error or illusion, nor can the heart allow such a possibility.25 One must be protected from error, and should be so bound to certainty that any attempt, for example, to transform a stone into gold or a stick into a serpent would not raise doubts or engender contrary probabilities. I know very well that ten is more than three. If anyone tries to dissuade me by saying, No, three is more than ten, and wants to prove it by changing in front of me this stick into a serpent, even if I saw him changing it, still this fact would engender no doubt about my knowledge. Certainly, I would be astonished at such a power, but I would not doubt my knowledge.

Thus I came to know that whatever is known without this kind of certainty is doubtful knowledge, not reliable and safe, that all knowledge subject to error is not sure and certain.

-Ghazali, al-Munqidh min al Dalal, full translation at http://www.ghazali.org/books/md/IIA-02main.htm

Nasah, parents don`t force their children but it is common for parents to impart their
own values--whether religious or atheist--onto their own children. I`m sure Dr. Dawkins is bringing up his own children as atheists--probably fundamentalist ones at that!

The point is, I think, that once children reach the age of maturity, they should be
encouraged to think for themselves. Obviously, most people will remain on their parents` faith
(or lack of faith) but this isn`t always so as the large number of interfaith conversions prove.

Thanks for that Zahra. :-) It was interesting. Here is an article I`d like you to read too:

Benedict XVI and Islam: the first year
Abdal Hakim Murad (Dr. T. J. Winter)

In the immediate aftermath of the election of Joseph Ratzinger to the Papacy, Muslim reactions to the new pontiff were diverse and confused. Turks were dismayed by his very public opposition to their membership of the European Union, a view rooted in his conviction that ‘Europe was founded not on geography but on a common faith.’ Others pointed to the absence of any mention of Muslims from his inaugural address (a fact welcomed by the Jerusalem Post) as a hint that Vatican willingness to open minds and hearts to dialogue with Islam was now at an end. Despite this, however, some Muslims, most notably Akbar Ahmad, welcomed the appointment of a man of considerable seriousness and intelligence, in the hope that he would reinvigorate the world’s moral debate. This Muslim ambivalence seems set to continue, partly thanks to the fact that a year into his papacy, Ratzinger has not spoken or written in any substantial way about Islam, realising, perhaps, that fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

His Polish predecessor had certainly recognised Islam’s immense importance, and had sought to encourage a friendly Muslim view of the papacy. This bore fruit in a remarkable outpouring of Muslim commemorations upon his death. The Shaykh al-Azhar described his demise as ‘a great loss for the Catholic Church and the Muslim world. He was a man who defended the values of justice and peace.’ The then Iranian president Khatami praised John Paul as a master of three spiritual paths: philosophy, poetry, and artistic creativity. Yusuf al-Qardawi commended his opposition to Israel’s ‘apartheid wall,’ and asked Muslims to offer their condolences to Christians. In Afghanistan, a Taliban spokesman said that ‘even though some have launched a Crusader war against Islam, the pope’s voice was for bringing peace to the world.’ Overall, the Muslim world’s affection for John Paul was clear.

John Paul had earned this distinction in multiple ways. Often impulsive, he could not be said to have maintained a distinctive ‘Islam policy’, but he made several significant gestures which indicated his awareness of the religion’s growing importance and its spiritual integrity. In 1985 he became the first Pope to visit a Muslim country, and in 2001 the first to enter a mosque, where he annoyed ultra-conservative Catholics by kissing a copy of the Qur’an. ‘Your God and ours is the same God, and we are brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham,’ he told a Muslim crowd. His appeal, he said, was to ‘authentic religious Islam, the praying Islam, the Islam that knows how to join in solidarity with the needy.’ He distinguished this clearly from extremism, which he seldom failed to condemn.

To date, Ratzinger has shown few signs of continuing this theologically-unarticulated but sincere desire to reach out in affirmation. On the contrary, he has already shown himself to be sharply judgemental. He worried Muslims across Europe when, in an August 2005 meeting with imams in Germany who were worried about discrimination against their community, he made it clear that the only issue he wished to raise was ‘Islamic terrorism’. Apparently echoing a standard right-wing claim (made by Joerg Haider, Pim Fortuyn and Jean-Marie Le Pen in particular), he has said that ‘Islam is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.’ Another theme which he shares with the far right is his apparent belief that Muslims in Europe cannot be ‘assimilated’: ‘Islam makes no sort of concession to inculturation.’ (He does not seem to have noticed the immense differences in Muslim cultural style across the world.)

Such misunderstandings are the staple of Italy’s leading anti-immigration writer, Oriana Fallaci, who, at the time of writing, is in court on charges of incitement to religious hatred. Fallaci is the author of three anti-Muslim works popular in right-wing circles, and offers views of the usual xenophobic type: ‘Islam sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom.’ One of the most striking acts of Benedict’s papacy to date has been his unusual granting of a private audience to Fallaci in the papal palace at Castelgandolfo. The meeting was arranged discreetly, but was discovered by an Italian journalist, and later acknowledged by the Vatican press office. The content of the consultation was not made public, but Muslim sources noted that Fallaci, who had repeatedly condemned the previous pope’s commitment to dialogue with Muslims, has been consistently supportive of Benedict.

The Vatican’s apparent volte-face with respect to Muslims is not the work of Ratzinger alone. The sociologist Renzo Guolo, in his book Xenophobes and Xenophiles: Italians and Islam, notes a ‘turnaround in the Italian bishops’ conference in recent years.’ A new right-wing spirit has taken hold in many quarters. Cardinal Biffi of Bologna, for instance, has called for the closure of Italy’s mosques and for a new law banning Muslim immigration, ‘because these people are outside our humanity.’ So widespread is this kind of talk that even the traditionally anti-clerical party, the Northern League, is experimenting with the crusader’s sword. The Euro-MP Francesco Speroni, for instance, has called for a ban on allowing Muslims to enter Italy, prompting one human rights activist, Rinella Cere, to conclude that ‘a “pact with the devil” was clearly being made between sections of the Catholic church and the Northern League.’ And although the previous pope had made clear his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, many influential Church officials now seem to be supportive of Washington’s belief that Western models of government and society can be imposed through force of arms. Once, according to one Catholic journalist, Sandro Magister: ‘Vatican diplomacy did not separate itself from the policy of maintaining good relations with Arabic dictators, especially the secular and nationalistic ones. In the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, this policy obtained conditions of relative privilege for the Chaldean Christians.’ However, in the new atmosphere, ‘The Holy See … does not exclude the possibility that military forces could intervene as “missionaries of peace” when necessary. Present-day Iraq is one of these cases of necessity, in the judgment of Vatican leaders.’

That Ratzinger is part of this new hardening of attitudes towards Muslims may be deduced from some of his most significant reshuffles of Vatican officialdom. The generally eirenic Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, formerly head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and a well-known adversary of Ratzinger, has been sacked and demoted to run the papal mission in Egypt. Ratzinger has also moved to distance himself from Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the previous pope’s Secretary of State, who is widely regarded as pro-Palestinian, and remains a close friend of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah. Sodano’s likely successor is widely expected to be Cardinal Ruini, the former president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, who has been outspoken in insisting that Muslim children in Italian schools should not have the right to study their own religion, because, Ruini believes, this would involve ‘dangerous social indoctrination.’ In Palestine, two key appointments have added to the pessimism of the beleaguered Palestinians. Sabbah has been given a new auxiliary bishop, who will succeed him automatically in two years’ time: this is Fouad Twal of Jordan, regarded in Israel as far more acceptable than Sabbah, who has been a fearless critic of Israel’s policies in the occupied territories. No less symbolic has been the choice of Pierbattista Pizzabella as bishop of the Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel. Pizzabella has regularly outraged Palestinian human rights activists by his outspoken support for Israel, and his appointment was loudly applauded in right-wing circles. One Anglican Palestinian leader calls him ‘very bad news’, and sees him as a sign that the Vatican is determined to draw a line under its former support for Palestinian rights, in favour of a pro-Israel strategy that will tie it in with wider right-wing aspirations for the Middle East. In making such an appointment, Ratzinger must have known very well the symbolic gravity of the step he was taking.

Ratzinger’s seeming harshness is regularly interpreted as a sign of a larger change of heart that has come over the Catholic church in recent years in response to the growing demographic significance of Islam in Europe, and the rise of Wahhabi terrorism. However he is not primarily a politician. His emerging Islam policy is ultimately rooted in a distinctive kind of theology. In particular, it should be taken in the context of his wider conservative conviction that Catholicism alone can guide human beings to true salvation, a view that his predecessor had seemed less anxious to advertise. Muslims may wince at his opinion of Islam, but his views on non-Catholic Christians have hardly been less trenchant. He was the leading contributor to the ‘definitive and irrevocable’ Catholic declaration Dominus Jesus in the year 2000, which insisted that non-Catholic churches ‘are not churches in the proper sense,’ and implied that non-Catholics are naturally destined for hellfire. He certainly subscribes to the traditional view that the ordination of Anglican priests is ‘utterly null and void,’ making most church-going in England a kind of theatre, a dim groping after a truth that may only be reliably found in Rome. In fact, his formal position, and his habit of mind, are far from any kind of pluralism, and his criticisms of Islam must be seen in this light. It is not quite correct to say, as some Muslims have done, that he has singled out Islam for a unique condemnation; he is, by the logic of his conservative theology, passionately critical of everything that fails to be ‘in communion with Rome’.

Among Muslim commentators there has as yet been little consideration of the ideas which drive this 78-year old Vatican insider, and which might supply a clue to understanding his view of Islam. Many Muslims think that Christianity in Europe ‘has lost its vision and is becoming a club for the elderly’ (Lord Carey’s allegation about the Anglican Church), in stark contrast to the American situation, where Christianity is politically dominant. Yet as the most significant survival from Europe’s religious past, and as an institution still immensely respected even by many secular Europeans, the Vatican is potentially an important interpreter of Islam to a Europe which now finds itself inhabited by twenty million Muslims, whose rights are increasingly under threat or actively denied by right-wing politicians and municipalities, and where Islamophobic violence is increasingly common.

Ratzinger’s knowledge of Islam is clearly patchy, and based on little practical engagement. The thinkers he prefers to hear tend not to be academic specialists in non-Christian religions, but activists and pastoral theologians. One advisor who has conferred with him on Islam, Joseph Fessio, believes, for instance, that ‘Islam is stuck. It’s stuck with a text that cannot be adapted, or even be interpreted properly,’ a view that Vatican Islam experts such as Daniel Madigan dismiss out of hand. Another rising star said to be close to Papal thinking is Piersandro Vanzan, a Jesuit professor at the Gregorian University in Rome. In early 2006, Vanzan co-authored a piece in the Catholic journal Studium which enthusiastically reproduced standard far-right discourse on Islam, complete with notions such as ‘moderate Islam, properly speaking, does not exist.’ Like Fessio, Fallaci and other self-appointed advisors on Islam, Vanzan has no expertise in Islamic studies, and is regarded as an embarrassment by the better-informed; yet this type of journalistic denunciation, unable or unwilling to distinguish the extreme from the orthodox, appears to be increasingly prominent in Ratzinger’s circle. The dismissal of Fitzgerald, a genuine Islam expert, is symptomatic of this tendency.

It helps to remember that Ratzinger is a European; more particularly, he is intensely Bavarian, and therefore not from a district with a long historic engagement with Islam (Poland, with its ancient and respected Tatar communities, seems to have been a different case). He is an accomplished pianist, a lover of Goethe, baroque sculpture and fine wine, who is less comfortable in other languages than his predecessor. The references in his many theological texts are mainly to the very introspective world of German theology; indeed, it is probable that he knows Lutheran theology better than he does the Catholic theology of the Third World. Bavaria lies at the heart of Europe; and indeed, was the beating heart of Nazism, the most intense of European attempts to reject non-white, non-European others.

Ratzinger is no Nazi; indeed, his thought is in large measure best understood as a reaction against the kind of modernity which produced the twentieth century’s great science-obsessed totalitarianisms. Yet he is deeply European. Faced with several Third World candidates, at the conclave in April 2005 the cardinals deliberately chose an icon of Europeanness, perhaps as an attempt to stem Europe’s drift away from Christianity. The appointment of a European was not really a surprise; what was more interesting was the choice of an icon of the anti-totalitarian reaction which saw the twentieth-century’s violence as a consequence of modernity, not as a strange aberration. Here Ratzinger parts company dramatically with other Catholic thinkers such as Hans Küng, a former friend, whose reading of the times is much more optimistic and upbeat than his own. Indeed, Ratzinger investigated and chastised such men during his time at the helm of his Vatican Congregation, the distant descendent of the Inquisition.

To understand the new pope, it helps to remember that despite this watchdog role he was once a leading light of the ‘moderate progressive’ wing of the Church. During the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s he collaborated with reformist figures such as Karl Rahner in pushing the Church roughly in the direction which had been urged by the Protestant reformers four hundred years before. The Tridentine Mass was scrapped, the notion of the clergy as a separate caste of human beings came under fire, many picturesque medieval traditions were banned, and space was given to lay Catholics in discussing issues once monopolised by the hierarchy. The backdrop was not, however, a stern bible-fundamentalism, but the curious idealism of the post-war years. Apparently oblivious to the threatening presence of a Soviet empire implanting nuclear warheads in silos across Eastern Europe, many in the West believed that it was time that religious conservatism gave way to a more ‘inclusive’ and affirmative attitude to human desires, which could allow Christians to participate in the playful culture of the modern West. Ratzinger, who in his early thirties cautiously committed to this view, repented suddenly when his students at the University of Tübingen’s Faculty of Catholic Theology, inflamed by Marxist ideas in the heady excitement of 1968, walked out of lectures shouting ‘Curse Christ! Curse Christ!’ From that time on he has solidified his position as a leading critic of what he saw as the naïve optimism of the 1960s, which had caused many in the church to read Vatican II as a populist moment. His abiding suspicion remains that Vatican II was a plughole through which faith and tradition drained, to be replaced by a liberal Protestant modernity.

Perhaps out of guilt at his own former flirtation with liberalism, for the remainder of his busy career as a bishop Ratzinger dedicated himself to a crusade against subversion by the secular, egalitarian culture of the West. He came to oppose the principle that regional bishops’ conferences might take decisions separately from the Vatican hierarchy. Most conspicuously, he used his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to defend the fortress of the Church from the barbarian liberal hordes without. Theologians who, despite the recent lessons of Hitler and Stalin, and the example of materialist secular culture, were influenced by a naïve modern optimism, were reproached, usually in private, but on occasion in the eyes of the world. This is why Küng, after being stripped of his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian, compared Ratzinger’s Congregation to the KGB. Liberation theologians in Latin America were too optimistic about the possibility of successful revolutionary activism on behalf of the poor. Liberals trying to ‘update’ the Church only seemed to do so with reference to a surrounding secular culture of change and triviality. Hence the lethal danger, as Ratzinger saw it, of allowing popular preferences to shape worship. ‘I am convinced,’ he wrote, ‘that the crisis in the church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy.’

Ratzinger’s idealistic opposition to modernity found expression in the pages of the journal Communio, which he helped to launch in partnership with his friend, the Swiss anti-modernist Hans Urs von Balthasar. Abandoning the unpleasantly liberal atmosphere of Tübingen, he moved in 1968 to Regensburg to launch a new faculty where he energetically trained dozens of neo-conservative thinkers. Many of these, like the American Joseph Fessio, have served as staunch buttresses against the rise of Protestant agendas and modernising tendencies in the church, and were steadily recruited by John Paul II to fill the college of cardinals that one day would elect a new pope.

The theology which Ratzinger championed through this period was not the dusty repetitions of the thirteenth-century monk Thomas Aquinas that had dominated the Catholic world before Vatican II. Neither, however, was it the kind of subjective free-thinking which some feared would result from the Church’s convulsions in the mid-1960s. In common with many Catholics seeking renewal, Ratzinger returned to the fourth-century North African thinker St Augustine, and his medieval interpreter Bonaventure. Crisis, for Ratzinger, was not an excuse for inaction, but for a fearful recollection of human sinfulness; and Augustine and Bonaventure, with their heavy emphasis on original sin, the inherited defect with which they thought all humans are born, have often served as the foundation-stones of attempts to produce Catholic renewal. Ratzinger is certainly convinced of the radical sinfulness of human beings; and it is this conviction which underpins his onslaught on liberalism and liberation theology, and his scepticism about non-Christian religions. Without the sacraments of the Catholic Church, all is implicitly a form of wickedness, although it may contain broken fragments of the truth.

In his understanding of Judaism and Islam, Ratzinger is guided by the same Augustinian pessimism, which he finds ultimately in the letters of St Paul. Rituals of wudu and ibada are essentially worthless, as they lie outside the grace which is only mediated by God’s one true church. As he writes: ‘the law of Moses, the rituals of purification, the regulations concerning food, and all other such things are not to be carried out by us, otherwise the biblical Word would be senseless and meaningless.’ Such rituals are ‘slavery’, from which submission to the Church alone offers salvation. The Semitic principle is thus categorically inferior; Jews and Muslims, he seems to imply, are slaves, and their ability truly to please God must be Biblically doubted.

But it is not only ‘the Law’ which is ruled by sin; for Ratzinger, sin also dominates modernity, which represents the ‘human threat to all living things.’ It reduces everything, including religion, to blind cause and effect. Hence in modern eyes the Bible is not to be understood as a story leading to a conclusion, each of whose parts can only be read in terms of that conclusion, but as a series of disconnected fragments subjected to arguments over authorship. For the moderns, too, the idea of a medieval consensus as forming part of the sensus fidelium, the view of the community of believers (an idea resembling the Muslim principle of ijma’), is meaningless. But in the Pope’s eyes, the credibility of divine providence is hopelessly undermined by the Protestant idea that most past believers were radically mistaken. And if Catholics retreat from some previous certainties about doctrine and scripture, he believes, then there will inexorably be a retreat from others, until ‘finally, quite a number of people have the abiding impression that the church’s faith is like a jellyfish.’

Like many Muslim and Eastern Orthodox Vatican-watchers, the new Pope regards the Catholic Church as suffering from a deep crisis. Theology, despite attempts at firm control from the centre, has been wandering in the direction of subjectivism. The prohibition of the Tridentine Mass and its replacement with assorted forms of worship in local languages has not only cut congregations off from a source of unity, from centuries of devotion and from a language unpolluted by modernity, but has opened the floodgates to trivial experiments which can make worship resemble a form of entertainment. As he frankly says, ‘One shudders at the lacklustre face of the post-conciliar liturgy as it has become, or one is simply bored with its hankering after banality.’ Sexual abuse by clergy, and subsequent cover-ups by bishops, have gravely damaged the moral authority of the church in many places (two out of every seven graduates of one American seminary have died of AIDS; major newspapers claim that half of American priests are homosexual; several US dioceses have filed for bankruptcy in the face of claims for compensation by molestation victims). In Europe, the number of priests falls by one percent every year. All this amounts, in Ratzinger’s eyes, to ‘a dark and tragic night which has fallen upon the Church.’ ‘Everything,’ he feels, ‘is in a state of disintegration.’

There are Muslims who regard this as an opportunity for Islam; and it is certainly the case that conversions from Catholicism have increased in recent years, although numbers are still small in historic terms. Yet it is far from clear that the ‘crisis’, as the pope sees it, of the West’s most significant moral and spiritual institution, will be helpful to Muslim progress. Europe is sinking into a mood of increasing liberal intolerance of traditional values, as was shown earlier in 2005 when EU commissioner Rocco Buttiglione was forced to resign when he refused to condemn Catholic teachings on homosexuality. If liberalism is excluding religious believers from high office, there is reason to expect that a more thorough-paced persecution will follow, with the hounding of all those whose consciences prevent them from accepting homosexualist, feminist or other liberal beliefs. Ratzinger writes well about the ‘agnosticism which no longer recognises doctrinal norms and is left only with the method of putting things to a practical test.’ While he does not agree with his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, that the separation of church and state is a heresy, he is clear that the radical indifference of national governments to religiously-grounded morals may result in a slippage into tyranny. Terrorism was invented by the French Revolution; in Bonaparte’s anti-religious empire it became the political norm of the first European Union. The danger is that a deep-seated secular indoctrination of Europe may in the long term produce a similar result. For Ratzinger, as in classical Muslim thought, the religious scholar is not to be the ruler; but neither is the ruler to be immune from counsel by the scholar or from the ethics set forth in revelation. Muslims may be nervous that religious authority in Catholicism is highly centralised and, in principle, monolithic (the point on which classical Muslim and Christian political theory most obviously diverge), but will need to welcome Catholic endeavours to hold rulers accountable to timeless moral absolutes. Catholicism is clear that the separation of church and state does not mean that governments are not allowed to be religious.

Sacred politics is the kind of area in which Ratzinger’s interpretation of Islam will need to be more fully informed. Perhaps assuming that Islam will take as long as Catholicism did to accept the idea of democracy, he is sceptical about the authenticity of popularly accountable government in Muslim societies. Here, again, he would benefit from studying major cases such as Turkey and Indonesia, where Muslim theologians were at the forefront of the democratisation process and of opposition to authoritarian military regimes. There is certainly a difficulty in the idea, implicit in right-wing Catholic discourse, that Islam’s scholars operate in a democratic way to produce political authoritarianism, while the Church operates in an authoritarian way to support the idea and practices of political democracy. A reading of Noah Feldman’s study of Islamic discussions of popular sovereignty, After Jihad, would help the Vatican to resolve this apparent conundrum.

Ratzinger can also seem to be in the grip of a latent contradiction when he considers Islam’s powerfully conservative social instincts. In his book Salt of the Earth (1997) he notes that ‘Islam is opposed to our modern ideas about society;’ yet elsewhere he is famous for his insistence that Catholicism is itself radically opposed to many such ideas, and to the intellectual habits of modernity of which they are the expression. The same tension reappears where he writes, explaining the recent Islamic revival, that ‘in the face of the deep moral contradictions of the West and of its internal helplessness … the Islamic soul reawakened.’ His reluctance to speak at length about Islam, as opposed to holding private sessions with anti-Muslim activists, probably stems from a deep internal ambiguity about a religion which has conserved its liturgy and its family morality intact, which has no significant ‘gay lobby’, which is clear about the nature of men and women, and which reads scripture as an integral and authoritative whole in the way all Christians once did. If, as he suspects, the relativism in Christian theology, liturgy and moral practice which has become so prevalent is a sign of distance from God, then how is one to interpret Islam’s massive success on the same issues? Particularly disturbing, one may guess, is the realisation that whereas Catholic decision-making since the First Vatican Council has been authoritarian and top-down, a method hardly challenged by John Paul II, Islamic ijma’ is a result of egalitarian debate among scholars over centuries of the kind Ratzinger would call ‘congregationalist’; and yet the internal integrity of liturgy and doctrine which an ultramontane, authoritarian church was meant to defend seems to have been better achieved, in many ways, by the apparently chaotic mechanisms of Islam. Catholic intellectuals who, in the wake of René Guénon, have converted to Islam often offer precisely this reason to justify their choice. Could it be that Vatican neoconservatism is hostile to Islam because it is privately impressed by it, not because it is primarily exercised by issues of ‘integration’ and democracy?

If so, we may be able to untangle one of the great mysteries surrounding Ratzinger’s Islam-talk. Rahner and the other script-writers of Vatican II approached Islam in terms of those issues that matter most to Muslims themselves. ‘Upon the Muslims, too, the Church looks with favour,’ they said, and the reasons they gave concerned Islam’s self-identification with Abraham, its reverence for Jesus and Mary, its concern with the Last Judgement, and its life of prayer and fasting. It is noteworthy that Ratzinger has hardly engaged with Islam on these levels, preferring, instead, to pick up the current rhetoric about the ‘crisis of Islam’. This is odd, given that he generally deplores the reduction of religious discussions to issues of sociology and politics. Here, perhaps, is a suggestion that Islam’s intactness is too large a fact for him to be ready to address, although he may well be preparing himself for some future statement.

Whatever the reasons for the new conservatism, Muslims must seek allies. The disliked and impoverished Muslim minorities of Europe, resembling in many ways fugitive monotheists in Roman catacombs, cannot muster the strength to campaign for a greater tolerance of non-liberal values. It is therefore crucial for Muslim communities to forge ties with other defenders of traditional humanity, and to wish them well. The Catholic church differs from Islam on some moral issues, such as contraception and divorce, but generally it advocates the set of ethics which is normal to sacred societies, and which underpinned the greatest cultural achievements of medieval Europe, both Muslim and Christian. Like Islam, it is not only a matter of private faith and worship, but of rules fixed in revelation (the pope has spoken against ‘the view that the Decalogue on which the Church has based her objective morality is nothing but a ‘cultural product’ linked to the ancient Semitic Middle East’). With Ratzinger holding the tiller, the church is unlikely to accept further concessions to the values of the secular establishment, still less to the Jacobin and Hitlerian demand that ‘priests should not meddle in politics’. The challenge will be to convince Muslim communities that it is conservatives, not liberals, who are our most natural partners in the great task of guiding Europe back to God, and that Ratzinger’s criticisms are grounded in respect, perhaps even in something approaching envy; not in any kind of racism or populist chauvinism. Whatever some Muslims may claim, the fact that far-right parties benefit from the new Vatican language about Islam does not mean that the Church is seeking to retrieve its former popularity in Europe by riding the tiger of the new xenophobia.

European Muslims are thus faced with an interesting dilemma. Should we support the Vatican because it advocates those traditional values which are the foundation of social and political stability, and develop the cooperation on social issues that Muslim and Catholic leaders have achieved in the past (the 1994 UN Population Summit was one example)? Such a collaboration might provide support to embattled traditionalists in bodies such as the Church of England, apparently on the brink of validating homosexual practices. This is an attractive notion; yet should we not be wary of a man whose sense of Europe’s true identity substantially excludes us? After all, if Turkey cannot join Europe because of its Muslimness, how far can Turks in Hamburg be accepted as Europeans? Tariq Ramadan has criticised the Pope’s Christian definition of Europe, on the grounds that ‘we must recognise that all the monotheistic faiths are part of Europe’s roots.’ His understandable fear is that Ratzinger’s ideas about Semitic religions will comfort the growing legions of European chauvinists and Islamophobes. However it is by no means clear that a generic monotheism of the kind Ramadan commends will be sufficient to defeat relativism in Europe.

Does this mean that Muslims stand to benefit more in an officially Christian Europe? American Muslims, ruled by an effectively theocratic administration in which presidential speeches are intensely Biblical and the state provides massive funding for Christian social movements (but not Muslim ones) would probably resist this notion. An increasing number of American Catholic bishops denounce the ‘accommodationist’ Catholic politicians who do not follow the Church’s line. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, for instance, complains that ‘too many American Catholics – maybe most – no longer connect their political choices with their religious faith in any consistent, authentic way.’ Yet a larger alliance between Catholics and the politically-dominant Evangelicals, a scenario sometimes predicted by American Muslims, in reality seems unlikely. Support for a violent response to Saddam Hussein, for instance, was strongest in Bush’s Evangelical constituency; whereas the Catholic bishops opposed it. The theological tensions between the two large sects of American Christianity have been intensified by Dominus Jesus, and the cooperation in issues of religious politics (on the abortion issue, most notably) has probably progressed as far as it can.

Europe cannot be like America; and a strong religious presence here will not have the militaristic consequences which American Muslims have witnessed with such dismay. The Evangelicals in Europe are far weaker, and think differently on political matters. A Europe defined in Christian terms is more likely to take its guidance from Ratzinger than from any reformed thinker (there are few Southern Baptists here, and as for liberal Christian thinkers, these typically do not differ from the secular consensus on moral issues, and are hence irrelevant). Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the continent’s current coldness towards the claims of Christianity is a permanent condition. The increasing witness of Muslims may ironically trigger a Christian revival, as the Belgian novelist Jacques Neirynck has forecast. In that situation, the continent’s ethico-political domination by the Vatican would probably enhance the sense of security of the majority population, and this can only be in the interests of Muslims, for whom the threat is not the Church, but the far-right movements which may claim Christian principles, but will, we may reasonably hope, always be kept at a firm distance by Curial institutions that can never decisively reject the rulings of Vatican II.

Many Muslims have been uncomfortable with Ratzinger because of his public statements about Islam. Yet we should be wary of emotional responses; and act in our interests, which are also those of a well-integrated, tolerant and successful Europe. Benedict XVI may not quite intend it, but on balance, his policies are likely to be good for Islam.

Parents forcing their children to acept their religion is a form of child abuse.(DAWKINS)

AGREED 100%. Kids should not be allowed to handle guns, cars, spouses, and RELIGION before the age of 16.

Another interesting read -
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2OTUmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTcwMDkxNTgmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk5
Picture this: Middle East Coexistence House
Monday, October 23, 2006

By THOMAS E. FRANKLIN
PHOTOGRAPHER AND WRITER
Danielle Josephs, center, of Teaneck initiated a living/learning dorm at Rutgers ` Douglass College that includes 11 students.
THOMAS E. FRANKLIN / THE RECORD
arrowDanielle Josephs, center, of Teaneck initiated a living/learning dorm at Rutgers` Douglass College that includes 11 students.

For those who say that Muslims and Jews can`t get along, there`s a group of Rutgers students who say not only can they get along, they can live under the same roof.

That roof is Jameson Hall, a women`s residence at Douglass College where 11 students with varying backgrounds and religions have voluntarily chosen to take part in the groundbreaking Middle East Coexistence House.

Within the group, there are five Jews, three Muslims, one Hindu, one Christian and one agnostic in the new ``living-learning`` community. Launched in September as part of the Global Village -- a residential environment designed to promote intercultural appreciation and global awareness -- the experiment has caught the watchful eye of many, including the college television channel mtvU, whose cameramen documented the students` first day.

``The goal is to have each woman serve as an ambassador in her own community, spreading the values of mutual understanding, mutual respect and coexistence,`` says Danielle Josephs, a senior from Teaneck. ``Real change always starts with a seed. One person can make a difference, and if we have 11 ambassadors who can then go out into their communities and debunk stereotypes and educate people, we can play a role in facilitating that change.``

This unique house of understanding was actually born out of hate. The idea came to Josephs when as a freshman in 2003 she unwittingly came upon a pro-Palestinian rally on campus, where painted signs and epithets spewed out such venom as ``Death to Jews`` and ``Zionism is Racism.``

``Something needed to be done,`` she says. ``We needed to broach this difficult subject rationally and constructively, and create a platform for some kind of productive dialogue on this issue.``

Time passed, but an idea grew. ``A kind of light bulb went off,`` Josephs says. ``I said I needed to establish a house in which Jewish and Muslim women can live, learn and prosper together.`` So she recruited women with contrasting backgrounds and beliefs, but with a similar commitment to bridging the cultural gap.

The roommates are mixed, living mostly in pairs in a dormitory setting. They have adorned the halls with posters and photographs of key figures of all faiths, with the belief that education breeds tolerance. Josephs says they casually get together each evening in the dorm, studying or talking politics. Everything is open for discussion, especially religion.

``The most awesome thing about this house is we can disagree,`` says Nadia Sheikh. ``And if we don`t happen to agree, it`s OK.``

``People are just people,`` adds Hilary Nicoll. ``There is a difference between fundamentalism and everyday people.``

On a recent weeknight, a few of the women gathered to watch a documentary Josephs had on her PowerBook. As they sat on a bunk in the dark, leaning on one another to get a better look, the scene was more reminiscent of a pajama party than of people who`ve hated each other for centuries.

Josephs, who is Jewish and wore a T-shirt with the Star of David, was flanked by the scarf-clad Leila Halwani, a Lebanese-American Muslim from Clifton, and Sara Elnakib, an Egyptian-born Muslim from Paterson. The scene was an example of what the Middle East Coexistence House is all about, and perhaps a sign of what the Middle East could be.

``We`ve been living together almost two months,`` says Josephs. ``It`s been a fascinating experience so far. I`m looking forward to the rest of the year. After this experience, I think we can make a real change.``

Asif - Thanks for another perspective. I will come back on that. In the meanwhile, please do read the following article. That`s Time`s cover story from 11/27.

The Passion of the Pope
With his blunt talk on Islam, Benedict XVI is altering the debate between the Muslim world and the West. On the eve of his visit to Turkey, TIME looks at the roots of the Pope`s views--and how they may define his place in history
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1561120,00.html

Interesting paras......
``That approach includes Islam. In Ratzinger`s 1996 interview book Salt of the Earth (with Peter Seewald), he noted that ``we must recognize that Islam is not a uniform thing. No one can speak for [it] as a whole. There is a noble Islam, embodied, for example, by the King of Morocco, and there is also the extremist, terrorist Islam, which, again, one must not identify with Islam as a whole, which would do it an injustice.`` This sophisticated understanding, however, did not keep Ratzinger from slapping down a bishop who wanted to invite peaceable Muslims to a papal ceremony in Fatima, Portugal, or, in 2004, from objecting to Turkish E.U. entry on grounds that it has always been ``in permanent contrast to Europe,`` a contrast his other writings made clear had much to do with religion.

Islam played a particular role--as both a threat and a model--in the drama that probably lies closest to Benedict`s heart: the secularization of Christian Europe. In the same 1996 book, he wrote that ``the Islamic soul reawakened`` in reaction to the erosion of the West`s moral stature during the 1960s. Ratzinger paraphrased that soul`s new song: ``We know who we are; our religion is holding its ground; you don`t have one any longer. We have a moral message that has existed without interruption since the prophets, and we will tell the world how to live it, where the Christians certainly can`t.``

After Sept. 11, Ratzinger`s attitude toward Islam seems to have hardened. According to Gibson, the Cardinals in the conclave that elected Ratzinger made it clear that they expected a tougher dialogue with the other faith. After the London subway bombings in July 2005, the new Pope responded to the question of whether Islam was a ``religion of peace``--as George W. Bush, among others, has always stressed-- by saying, ``Certainly there are also elements that can favor peace.`` When he met with moderate German Muslims in the city of Cologne that August, Benedict delivered a fairly blunt warning that ``those who instigate and plan these attacks evidently wish to poison our relations.`` In Rome, he removed Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, a relatively dovish Islam expert, as head of the Vatican`s office on interreligious dialogue and replaced an ongoing study of Christian violence during the Crusades with one on Islamic violence today. And he has stepped up the Vatican`s insistence on reciprocity--demanding the same rights for Christians in Muslim-majority countries that Muslims enjoy in the West.``

WAS Zahra. Thanks for the links.
I agree that Muslims have themselves to blame for their own problems by and large.
Thanks for the links. The Pontiff`s remarks were disingenious. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf has given an
excellent rebuttal to him too here:

Hi,
#68..
No HINDUS dont have gods that say ``convert the heathen`` and ``do this or else!!``.
Yes the tribals in each state have their ``own gods`` that are like local village zamindars, lusty, jealous and in general fully anthropomorphic ``like humans``.

Its a pity the middle eastern religions carry the stamp of the savageness of their areas of origin! All blood and gore.

Between them how many people have they killed? Either crusading or rampaging thru peacefull societies.

The atrocities of Torquemada (spanish inquisition) , Cortez & others in south america, The arabs in Africa are just too terrible to recount here.

In comparison, howmany thousands or millions did hindus or buddhists kill?

Meanwhile the christians have reformed to such an extent, it was christian america that saved muslim ass in cosovo!

While the high & mighty in the arab world were either dozing off in oblivion, or partying over the successes of the janjavids in (black) darfour.

Jayen

Asif -

Hi. AA. After a long time, I have read something by you. An interesting narrative! Some of your questions are quite appropriate, but I do not get a sense from this article that Muslims are meant to live in a world where everyone (non-Muslims) can co-exist. It should not be us vs. them - west vs. the rest of the Muslim world. I do not think it was intentional; but something was missing somewhere.

I totally agree with your stance on living through this world with flying colors vs. eternally preparing for the world after death. If that was the only purpose of human existence then we did not need human civilization and could have lived with apes and their ilks in some caves in and around Himalayas. Living in this world means dealing with human beings, learning to live with other sects and religions and people from different colors and creed.

Last but not least, the US does not have to step on any Muslim soil to create any havoc. The Muslims all over the world are enough to kill and bury their own people alive. Why are we so hesitant to accept it?

I have been following Benedict XVI`s remarks on reason and rationality. There was a beautiful article I had read a few weeks ago. Now, I cannot find it. The following links include some interesting perspectives and equally interesting rebuttal.

What the Pope Gets Right ...
By decrying the use of violence in the name of God, Benedict is challenging Muslims to confront hard truths
By RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1561148,00.html

And Where He`s Still in the Dark
Benedict`s definition of what it means to be European ignores the positive contributions of Islam
By TARIQ RAMADAN
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1561146,00.html

Enjoy.
Z

#91
Ama yaar,

How about translating this piece for those of us who are unable to read scribble-scribble?!!

You Pakistanis are such lazy bums!

THE THRIVING SUFISM IN PAKISTAN

(note the article at the bottom)