When the Lights Hurt the Eyes

Prem #374
Thanks for the anuvAdam, thats a good one. sheel means good conduct, I believe.

PS: Have you been competing against tea leaves lately? :)

DRUMZ #378
``Whats the meaning? Whats the point of life? ``

DRUMZ, this is a question which invariably turned up to trouble me as a burning issue whenever exams approached, I donot know why :)

I personally believe this question cannot be answered with certainty, because its answer cannot be verified or corroborated and hence its a matter of faith.

I believe the Hindu philosophy says that our inherent finiteness limits our comprehension of infinity, implying that some questions are beyond answering until Self-realization. It also says, I believe that the absolute is also a bhogkartha or enjoyer of creation, through his creatures, or an audience/participator in `leela` or the playing out of prakriti, meaning the absolute affirms life and vice versa.

On the other hand, IMO, even the essentially anthropological `mirror question` of why man created God(if one chooses to see it that way) cannot be answered with certainity or verifiablity either, I believe. Extrapolations on the meaning of life and man based on rationality and hard information impose their own limitations on man`s self-image,IMO. If the concept of a multisplendored wellthought-out God carries the power to make man less of a tree hanger with a beeper and more `Godlike` in his own defination, then finally which is God and which is man :)?

DRUMZ #379 On the subject, I read somewhere that the word ``Gehennem`` (meaning ``hell``, and used in urdu, arabic, hebrew) is after a place that actually existed in ancient jerusalem. Something to do with executed prisoners being tossed there and the place was considered to be the pits (dead bodies and so forth). I wonder if you or hamzad or others more learned than myself came across this.

ALso, on Allah, the dictionary simply says Al is the arabic ``the`` and Lah is God (as in ``You the man!!``) - any connection of Lah to Ra (the ancient Egyptian sun God? And any connection between the common theory that the Prophet loved cats (this being among the many irrelevant and dumb theories prevalent among us muslims) and the fact that cats were venerated in ancient Egypt (with plenty of cat mummmies still sitting around in Cairo Museum).

Were the Greek philosophers Muslim?

by

Macksood Aftab

Some of the most influential personalities in human history are those of the Greek philosophers and scholars, such as Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. The Ancient Greeks worshipped many gods, but now there is evidence that some of the most influential of the Greeks may have been Muslim or very close to it.

Plato, for example, is considered the founder of modern monotheism. Even though he lived in Greece, in western philosophy the origin of monotheism is traced back to Plato. Plato`s philosophy later played a large role in the development of Christian as well of Islamic thought. After the fall of Greece, the neo-platonistic tradition was kept alive in the then flourishing Islamic world.

Socrates was Plato`s teacher. Almost all of his writings were destroyed, but from the records we have left, we find that encouraged the youth of Athens to question their ideas of gods (for which he was sentenced to death) and overall seems to be very Islamic in tone.

Plato`s principal student was Aristotle. Aristotle`s principles dominated the world for a millennium after his death. One example is the creation of logic. Never before in the history of mankind was logic discussed or taken as a science. There is absolutely no evidence of this before the time of Aristotle. This is astonishing to many historians, because they claim that every event in human history is based on an event that occurred before it. For example, Einstein`s theory of relativity was based on works of previous scientist of the 19th and previous centuries. But never has anything or any philosophy been created ex nihilo -- out of nothing. Only the messengers of God can introduce entirely new knowledge or science. Therefore, in a way the creation of logic can be considered a kind of divine act. And indeed, Aristotle was in fact regarded as an ancient prophet by certain Medieval Islamic scholars and certainly as an intellectual messenger by the rest. Much of Ibn Sina`s philosophy is based on the work of Aristotle.

Aristotle, furthermore, was the teacher of Alexander the Great. It has been argued by many Islamic scholars that the mention of the ``Two-horned one`` or Zul-qarnain in the 18th Chapter of the Holy Quran is actually referring to Alexander the Great. In this chapter he is presented as a righteous servant of God.

The Quran says that God has sent messengers to all nations, and it would seem illogical if God did not send prophets to the thriving civilization of the ancient Greeks. Given this and the fact that Alexander`s teacher was Aristotle, whose teacher was Plato, and whose teacher was Socrates, linking them all to certain common beliefs, which could, in light of the above evidence, surely be Islam.

Drumz #378,#379

If you want to get a global view of philosophy of religion,since Islam & before the 7th century ,you may .Islam more is a way of life ,a believe system ,more sort of submission & not philosophers like here through ages who were explorer of thaught ,reason & questioning ,which is not part of any religionbut a pursuit of Philosophical science.

Religion is faith & doesnt expect any change in its core belief .

Ancient and Early Medieval

Later Medieval

Modern German Philosophers

Modern British and American Philosophers

Nineteenth-Century Developments



Ancient and Early Medieval

Plato viewed as the highest of all things the good that was above all being and all knowledge, identified it with the divine nous, and attempted to raise the human spirit into the realm of ideas, into a likeness with the Godhead; which taught men to rise to the highest by a process of abstraction disregarding particulars and grasping at universals, and conceived the good of which it spoke not in a strictly ethical sense, but as, after all, the most utterly abstract and indefinable, entirely eluding all attempts at positive description. Neoplatonism went the furthest in this conception of the divine transcendence; God, the absolute One, was, according to Plotinus, elevated not only above all being, but also above all reason and rational activity. He did not, however, attempt to attain to this abstract highest good by reasoning or logical abstraction, but by an immediate contact between God and the soul in a state of ecstasy.

This tendency was shared by a school of thought within Judaism itself, whose influence upon Christian theology was considerable. The more Jewish speculation, as was the case especially at Alexandria, rose above an anthropomorphic idea of God to a spiritual conception, the more abstract the latter became. In this connection Platonism was the principal one of the Greek philosophical systems toward w c this Jewish theology maintained a receptive attitude. According to Philo, God is to on, `` that which is `` par excellence, and this being is rather the most universal of all than the supreme good with which Plato identified the divine; all that can be said is that God is, without defining the nature of his being. Between God and the world a middle place is attributed by Philo to the Logos (in the sense of ratio, not at all in the Johannine sense), as the principle of diversity and the summary of the ideas and powers operating the world.

When the Gnostics attempted to construct a great system of higher knowledge from a Christian standpoint, through assimilating various Greek and Oriental elements, and worked the facts of the Christian revelation into their fantastic speculation on general metaphysical and cosmic problems, this abstract Godhead became an obscure background for their system; according to the Valentinian doctrine, it was the primal beginning of all things, with eternal silence (sige) for a companion.

In the development of the Church`s doctrine with Justin and the succeeding apologists, and still more with the Alexandrian school, the transcendental nature of God was emphasized, while the Scriptures and the `religious conscience of Christendom still permitted the contemplation of him as a personal and loving Spirit. Theology did not at first proceed to a systematic and logical explanation of the idea of God with reference to these different aspects. Where philosophical and strictly scientific thought was active, as with the Alexandrians, the element of negation and abstraction got the upper hand. God is, especially with Origen, the simple Being with attributes, exalted above nous and ousia, and at the same time the Father, eternally begetting the Logos and touching the world through the Logos. In opposition to this developed a Judaistic and popular conception of God which leaned to the, anthropomorphic, and also a view like Tertuilian`s` which, under the influence of Stoic philosophy, felt obliged to connect with all realities, and thus also with God, the idea of a tangible substance. In this direction Dionysius the Areopagite finally proceeded to a really Neoplatonist theology, with an inexpressible God who is above all categories, both positive and negative, and thus is neither Being nor Not-being; who permits that which is to emanate from himself in a descending scale coming down to things perceived by the senses, but is unable to reveal his eternal truth in this emanation. With this doctrine is conconnected, after the Neoplatonist model, an inner union with God, an ecstatic elevation of the soul which resigns itself to the process into the obscure depth of the Godhead. The ethical conception of God and redemption thus gives place to a physical one, just as the emanation of all things from God was described as a physical process; and as soon as speculation attempts to descend from the hidden God to finite and personal life, this physical view connects itself with the abstract metaphysical.

In the West there was long a lack of scientific and speculative discussion of the idea of God. Augustine, the most significant name in Western theology, sets forth the conception of God as a self-conscious personal being which fitted in with his doctrine of the Trinity; but as his own development had led him through Platonism, the influence of that philosophy is found in the idea of God which he developed systematically and handed down. He conceives God as the unity of ideas, of abstract perfections, of the normal types of being, thinking, and acting; as simple essential in which will, knowledge, and being are one and the same. The fundamentally determinant factor in the conception of God by the Augustinian theology is thus pure being in general.

Back to Table of Contents

Later Medieval

Scotus Erigena, who gave Dionysius the Areopagite to Western theology, though Augustine was not without influence upon him, fully accepted the notion of God as the absolute Inconceivable, above all affirmation and Erigena. all negation, distinguishing from him a world to which divine ideas and primal forms belong. He emphasizes the other side of this view-that true existence belongs to God alone, so that, in so far as anything exists in the universe, God is the essence of it; a practical pantheism, in spite of his attempting to enforce a creative activity on the part of God. The influence of this pantheistic view on medieval theology was a limited one; Amalric of Bena , with his proposition that God was all things, was its main disciple.

In accordance with its fundamental character, scholasticism attempted to reduce the idea of God into the categories which related to the laws of thought, to being, in general, and to the world. It began by adapting the Aristotelian terms to its own purposes. God, or absolute being, was to Aristotle the primum mobile, regarded thus from the standpoint of causation and not of mere being, and also a thinking subject. The ideas and prototypes of the finite are accordingly to be found in God, who is the final Cause. God, in Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, is not the essential being of things, but he is their esse effective et exemplariter, their primum movens, and their causa finalis. Aristotelian, again, is the definition of God`s own nature, that be is, as a thinking subject, actus purus, pure, absolute energy, without the distinction found in finite beings between potentiality and actuality. In opposition to Thomas, Duns Scotus emphasized in his conception of God the primum ens and primum movens, the element of will and free causation. The arbitrary nature of the will of God, taught by him, was raised by Ockham to the most important element of his teaching about God. Upon this abstract conception of the will of God as arbitrary and unconditioned depend the questions (so characteristic of scholasticism from Abelard down) as to whether all things are possible to God.

About the end of the thirteenth century, by the side of the logical reasonings of scholasticism, there arose the mystical theology of Eckhart, which attempted to bring the Absolute near to the hearts of men as the object of an immediate intuition dependent upon complete self-surrender. The Neoplatonic conception of the Absolute is here pushed to its extreme, and Dionysius has more influence than Thomas Aquinas. The view of God`s relation to the world is almost pantheistic, unless it may be rather called acosmistic, regarding the finite as naught. This is Eckhart`s teaching, although at the same time he speaks of a creation of the world and of a Son in whom God expresses himself and creates. This God is regarded as goodness and love, communicating himself in a way, but not to separate and independent images of his own being; rather, he possesses and loves himself in all things, and the surrender to him is passivity and self-annihilation. The ruling ideas of this view were moderated by the practical German mystics and found in this form a wide currency. On the other hand, pantheistic heretics, such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit combined antinomian principles with the doctrine that God was all things and that the Christian united with God was perfect as God.

Back to Table of Contents

Modern German Philosophers

The independent metaphysical systems of the philosophers, which embraced God and the world, did not at first make any profound impression on the thought of theologians. Spinoza`s pantheism was by its very nature excluded from consideration; but the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff, with its conception of God as a supremely perfect, personal Being, in whom all possible realities were embraced in their highest form, and with its demonstration of God`s existence, offered itself as a friend to Christian doctrine, and was widely influential. In so far, however, as the theologians adopted any of its conclusions, it was with little clearness of insight or independent thought as to the relation of these metaphysical concepts to the Christian faith or as to their own validity.

A new epoch in German philosophy, with which theology had and still has to reckon, came in with Kant. Confidence in the arguments by which God`s existence had been proved and defined was at least shaken by his criticism, which, however, energetically asserted the firm foundation of moral consciousness, and so led up to God by a new way, in postulating the existence of a deity for the establishment of the harmony required by the moral consciousness between the moral dignity of the subjects and their happiness based upon the adaptation of nature to their ends. Fichte was led from this standpoint to a God who is not personal, but represents the moral order of the universe, believing in which we are to act as duty requires, without question as to the results.

But for a time the most successful and apparently the most dangerous to Christian theology was a pantheistic philosophical conception of God which took for its foundation the idea of an Absolute raised above subject and object, above thinking and being; which explained and claimed to deduce all truth as the necessary self -development of this idea. With Schelling this pantheism is still in embryo, and finally comes back (in his ``philosophy of revelation ``) to the recognition of the divine personality, with an attempt to construct it speculatively. In a great piece of constructive work the philosophy of Hegel undertook to show how this Absolute is first pure being, identical with not-being; how then, in the form of externalization or becoming other, it comes to be nature or descends to nature; and finally, in the finite spirit, resumes itself into itself, comes to itself, becomes self-conscious, and thus now for the first time takes on the form of personality. For Christian theology the special importance of this teaching, was its claim to have taken what Christian doctrine had comprehended only in a limited way of God, the divine Personality, the Incarnation, etc., and to have expressed it according to its real content and to the laws of thought.

The conservative Hegelians still maintained that God, in himself and apart from the creation of the world and the origin of human personality, was to be considered as a self-conscious spirit or personality, and thus offered positive support to the Christian doctrine of God and his revelation of himself. But the Hegelian principles were more logically carried out by the opposite wing of the party, especially by David Friedrich Strauss (in his Christliche Glaubenslehre, Tubingen, 1840) in the strongest antithesis to the Christian doctrine of a personal God, of Christ as the only Son of God and the God-Man, and of a personal ethical relation between God and man. Some other philosophers, however, who may be classed in general under the head of the modern speculative idealism, have, in their speculations on the Absolute as actually present in the universe, retained a belief in the personality of God.

The realist philosopher Herbart, who recognized a personal God not through speculations on the Absolute and the finite, but on the basis of moral consciousness and teleology, yet defined little about him, and what he has to say on this subject never attracted much attention among theologians. The Hegelian pantheistic `` absolute idealism,`` once widely prevalent, did not long retain its domination. Its place was taken first in many, quarters, as with Strauss, by an atheistic materialism; Hegel had made the universal abstract into God, and when men abandoned their belief in this and in its power to produce results, they gave up their belief in God with it. Among the post-Hegelian philosophers the most important for the present subject is Lotze, with his defense and confirmation of the idea of a personal God, going back in the most independent way both to Herbart and to idealism, both to Spinoza and Leibniz. Christian theology can, of course, only protest against the peculiar pantheism of Schopenhauer, which is really much older than he, but never before attained wide currency, and against that of Von Hartmann. The significance for the doctrine of God of the newer philosophical undertakings which are characterized by an empiricist-realist tendency, and based on epistemology and criticism is found not so much in their definite expressions about God-they do not as a rule consider him an object of scientific expression, even when they allow him to be a necessary object of faith-as in the impulse which they give to critical investigation of religious belief and perception in general.

Theology, at least German theology, before Schleiermacher showed but little understanding of and interest in the problems regarding a proper conception and confirmation of the doctrine of God which had been laid before it in this development of philosophy beginning with Kant. This is especially true of its attitude toward Kant himself and not only of the supranaturalists who were suspicious of any exaltation of the natural reason, but also of the rationalists, who still had a superficial devotion to the Enlightenment and to Wolffian philosophy. In Schleiermacher`s teaching about God, however, the results of a devout and immediate consciousness were combined with philosophical postulates. In his mind the place of all the so-called proofs of the existence of God is completely supplied by the recognition that the feeling of absolute dependence involved in the devout Christian consciousness is a universal element of life; in this consciousness he finds the explanation of the source of this feeling of dependence, i.e., of God, as being love, by which the divine nature communicates itself. For his reasoned philosophical speculation, however, on the human spirit and universal being, the idea of God is nothing but the idea of the absolute unity of the ideal and the real, which in the world exist as opposites. (Compare Schelling`s philosophy of identity, unlike which, however, Schleiermacher acknowledges the impossibility of a speculative deduction of opposites from an original identity; and the teaching of Spinoza, whose conception of God, however, as the one substance he does not share.) Thus God and the universe are to him correlatives, but not identical-God is unity without plurality, the universe plurality without unity; and this God is apprehended by man`s feeling, just as man`s feeling apprehends the unity of ideal and real.

Back to Table of Contents

Modern British and American Philosophers

In Great Britain and America the idea of God has undergone many vicissitudes. In the period of Deism , 1650-1800, the doctrine of God was profoundly affected by certain modern questions which were already emerging: the scientific view of nature as a unity, the denial of the principle of external authority, the right and sufficiency of reason, and the ethical as compared with the religious value of life. The deists yielded to none of their contemporaries in affirming that God was personal, the cause of the fixed providential order of the world, and of the moral order with its rewards and punishments both here and hereafter. The cosmological was the only theistic argument. God`s wisdom and power were expressed neither in supernatural revelation nor in miracle. His nature was perfectly apprehensible to man`s reason. He was, however, absolutely transcendent, i.e., not merely distinct from but removed from the world, an absentee God. This process of thought reached its negative skeptical result in David Hume; the being of God could be proved neither by rational considerations nor by the prevailing sensationalist theory of knowledge. Outside of the deists, the demonstration of the being and attributes of God by Samuel Clarke was thoroughly representative of the time. Something must have existed from eternity, of an independent, unchangeable nature, self-existent, absolutely inconceivable by us, necessarily everlasting, infinite, omnipotent, one and unique, intelligent and free, infinitely powerful, wise, good, and just, possessing the moral attributes required for governing the world. Bishop Butler (Analogy of Religion) held as firmly as the deists the transcendence of God, and if he made less of the cosmic, ethical, and mysterious than of the redemptive side of the divine nature, this is to be referred not to his underestimate of the redemptive purpose of God, but to the immediate aim of his apologetic. Accepting the fundamental tenet of Matthew Tindal , i.e., the identity of natural and revealed religion, he shows that the mysteries of revealed religion are not more inexplicable than the facts of universal human experience. Thus he seeks to open a door for God`s activity in revelation-prophecy, miracles, and redemption A new tendency in the idea of God appears in William Paley. The proof of the existence and attributes of the deity is teleological. Nature is a contrivance of which God is the immediate creator. The celebrated Bridgewater Treatises follow in the same path, proving the wisdom, power, and goodness of God from geology, chemistry, astronomy, the animal world, the human body, and the inner world of consciousness. Chalmers sharply distinguishes between natural and revealed theology, as offering two sources for the knowledge of God. In this entire great movement of thought, therefore, God is conceived as transcendent. God and the world are presented in a thoroughly dualistic fashion. God is the immediate and instantaneous creator of the world as a mechanism. The principal divine attributes are wisdom and power; goodness is affirmed, but appears to be secondary: its hour has not yet come.

In America during the same period Jonathan Edwards is the chief representative of the idea of God. His doctrine centers in that of absolute sovereignty. God is a personal being, glorious, transcendent. The world has in him its absolute source, and proceeds from him as an emanation, or by continuous creation, or by perpetual energizing thought. As motive for the creation, he added to the common view-the declarative glory of God-that of the happiness of the creature. On the basis of causative predestination he maintains divine foreknowledge of human choice-a theory pushed to extreme limits by later writers, Samuel Hopkins and Nathanael Emmons. His doctrine of the divine transcendence was qualified by a thorough-going mysticism, a Christian experience characterized by a profound consciousness of the immediate presence, goodness, and glory of God. His conception of the ethical nature of God contained an antinomy -which he never resolved; the Being who showed surpassing grace to the elect and bestowed unnumbered common favors on the nonelect in this life, would, the instant after death, withdraw from the latter every vestige of good and henceforth pour out upon them the infinite and eternal fury of his wrath. Edwards` doctrine of God and its implications later underwent, however, serious modifications. In the circle which recognized him as leader, his son reports that no less than ten improvements had been made, some of which, e.g. concerning the atonement, directly affected the idea of God. Predestination was affirmed, but, instead of proceeding from an inscrutable will, following Leibniz, rested on divine foreknowledge of all possible worlds and included the purpose to realize this, the best of all possible worlds (A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, New York, 1900; S. Harris, God, the Creator and Lord of All, ib., 1896). The atonement was conceived as sufficient but `not efficient for all (C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, Philadelphia, 1865), or, on the other hand, as expressing the sincere purpose of God to redeem all sinners (A. E. Park, The Atonement; Introductory Essay, Boston, 1859). Divine sovereignty was roundly affirmed; for some it contained the secret of a double decree, for others it offered a convincing basis for the larger hope.

Back to Table of Contents

Nineteenth-Century Developments

During the nineteenth century a new movement appeared in English thought. Sir William Hamilton held that God was the absolute, the unconditioned, the cause of all (Philosophy of the Unconditioned, in Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1829). But since all thinking is to condition, and to condition the unconditioned is self-contradictory, God is both unknown and unknowable. Following in the same path H. L. Alansel (Limits of Religious Thought, London, 1867) found here the secret by which to maintain the mysteries of the faith of the church in the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and other beliefs. Revelation was therefore required to supplement men`s ignorance and to communicate what-human intelligence was unable to discover. Hence the dogmas concerning God which had been found repugnant or opaque to reason were philosophically reinstated and became once more authoritative for faith. In his System of Synthetic Philosophy Herbert Spencer (First Principles, London, 1860-62) maintains on the one hand an ultimate reality which is the postulate of theism, the absolute datum of consciousness, and on the other hand by reason of the limitations of knowledge a total human incapacity to assign any attributes to this utterly inscrutable power. In accordance with his doctrine of evolution he holds that this ultimate reality is an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed, the same which wells up in the human consciousness. He is neither materialistic nor atheistic. This reality is not personal according to the human type, but may be super-personal. Religion is the feeling of awe in relation to this inscrutable and mysterious power. With an aim not unlike that of Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold sought to reconcile the conflicting claims of religion, agnosticism, evolution, and history, by substituting for the traditional personal God the `` Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.`` Side by side with this movement appeared another led by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, based upon a spiritual philosophy, which found in the moral nature a revelation of God (Aids to Reflexion, London, 1825). This has borne fruit in many directions: in the great poets, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning; in preachers like Cardinal Newman, Dean Stanley, John Tulloch, Frederick William Robertson, and Charles Kingsley; in philosophical writers, as John Frederic Denison Maurice and James Martineau. The idea of God is taken out of dogma and the category of the schools and set in relation to life, the quickening source of ideals and of all individual and social advance. Religious thought in America has fully shared in these later tendencies in Great Britain, as may be seen by reference to John Fiske, Idea of God (Boston, 1886), unfolding the implications of Spencer`s thought, and, reflecting the spirit of Coleridge, William Ellery Channing, Works (6 vols., Boston, 1848), W. G. T. Stead, `` Introductory Essay `` to Coleridge`s Works (New York, 1884), and Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, and Sermons (in Centenary edition of his Works, New York, 1903). An idea of God based on idealism, represented in Great Britain by John Caird, Philosophy of Religion (London, 1881), Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (ib. 1893), in Canada by John Watson, God`s Message to the Human Soul (New York, 1907), has received impressive statement by Josiah Royce, The Conception of God (ib., 1897), and The World and the Individual (2 vols., 1899-1901). God is a being who possesses all logical possible knowledge, insight, wisdom. This includes omnipotence, self-consciousness, self-possession, goodness, perfection, peace. Thus this being possesses absolute thought and absolute experience, both completely organized. The absolute experience is related to human experience as an organic whole to its integral fragments. This idea of God which centers in omniscience does not intend to obscure either the ethical qualities or the proper personality of the absolute.

DRUMS---378 & 379

Naoozo-billah(God fobid!) No muslim thinks of the Prophet(saw) as God or Mecca as Eden.This is heresy,blasphemy,& shirk.

The pre-Islamic society was Jahiliyaa because of some very immoral practices which had become tradition & culture.It was in its materialistic glory because of the trade-route boom.The overland route from China to Europe was closed because of Persian war.

They were jahiliyaa just like some present day developed societies are increasingly becoming jahilyaa right amidst us now.

Israel as perhaps you are aware is the title of Jacob(harat Yaquoob) and Bani-Israel is the progeny of his tribe.In arabic it is written with a hamza & yay and not with alif.I`m aware that in hebrew it does translate into what you wrote.

Elohim is for Allah but the true word is YHWH or Jehovah---one who cannot be named.Maybe Ibrahim,Abraham,& Elohim has the same suffix.It is important to note that the Hebrew language has been tremendously influenced by Pehalvi-farsi because of their long sojourn(Cyrus days)in Iran-Iraq.Like Youm(day) e Kippur(kaffara) or RoshHashanaa(Roz e Hasanaa).Present day Hebrew was revived only during the last century by one single immigrant from Russia.With the reconvening of the diaspora in Israel the yiddish,arabic,judaic & other languages have made a Khichhree of it.All the old testament names for angels & prophets are the same.It would be an interesting study though I am more comfortable to trace Indo-Germanic,arabic,farsi roots only.

Joseph son of Jacob of Canaan,present Palestine,was sold into slavery when pyramids were being constructed.I do not think any Egyptian influence,especially for religious terms,would be there among bani-Israel.It was there that Moses received the scriptures while delivering them from Pharoahs` bondage.



The Barhaman connection,if I may conjecture,cannot be ruled out.It is possible that the thirteenth lost tribe of the jews ended up near abouts Afghanistan & Kashmir.The lending on interest is prevalent only among Pathaans in perhaps the entire muslim world.The Kashmiri & Pathaan facial features with the prominent aquiline nose is another lead.

But then let us not make Kashmir another Palestine.;).

The religion of Tagore & so many other ``hindus`` was Brahmoosamaaj(if I`m not misinformed) & therefore,perhaps,as much muslim as christains(true ones) or jews.

WELCOME!

Hamzad: One more thing....

Israel comes from ``one who struggles with God`` God being EL in this case. Are azrael and Gibrael not borrowed from Hebrew? I believe Gabriel means something like ``friend of El.`` So my question, If El refers to God in Hebrew, and u have the same character called Gibril in Arabic, does the Il not refer to God? If it refers to ``one who is`` are u saying there is no correlation between Gabriel and Jibril?

I suppose the EL doesnt carry over in Gabriels other names (Ruh UL a`zam, etc)?

Ive always thought that Allah was directly linked to El and Elohim which come from the Egyptian ``El`` meaning the source-a concept similar to brahma.

Hamzad: Why? Because people are followers and not leaders. Muslims see Muhammed as a God and Mecca as being Eden. They cant understand that Muhammed was educating a primitive people, that his mission was a movement, to begin with him-not end with him. Ameer Ali in ``spirit of Islam`` touches on this. Muhammed didn`t outlaw slavery, yet created an environment in which it would be virtually non existant in a couple hundred years...

Thanks for the etemology. Its interesting that u dont link Allah with the God El, and u dont use ``Ilah`` (god) either. This may be a stretch but can u trace the origins of Elohim?

Sadna/prem: Both your posts are very informative. Ive always had an affinity for Hinduism. Sadna, I inherently agree with your explanation of the inherent nature of things. You and prem have explained very well HOW things work, yet WHY they work still alludes me. Whats the meaning? Whats the point of life?

Recently ive been toying with the idea of there being no bearded white guy up there. That everything we percieve is the materialization of thought. Everything we make (including situations with others) is the result of our creative instincts (in effect we ourselves are creators-we are Brahma). We create the situations we find ourselves in so that we can learn from them (ie a mother who loses her son is here to learn the lesson of independance, not being too connected). A philosopher could ask who created the first thought, but such a question is bound by a linear interpretation of time. Of course none of this explains WHY.

See if we are Allah and Allah is us, and we have a strong link with the spiritual world, why has no religion ever answered the Question of WHY? Shouldnt we be able to find the answer ourselves?

PS: Can someone explain Brahma and its relation to the demigods? Is there sort of a heavenly society out there?

Peace.

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING

Chowk Editors,

Your site has been taken over by the 12 head.

Wake up...............

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

I did not post # 372.

Chowk managers,

Either your system is messed up. Or, someone here is mentally sick.

In either case, you have a challenge on your hands.

Regards.

re: sadna # 373

Guruji??? Jee, aap mujhe sharminda kar rahi hain :)

The anuvAadum is as follows -

Yesham na vidya, na tapo na danam,

Those who have no education (in the widest sense), no determined pursuit, no generosity of spirit

na gyanam, na sheelam na guno na dharmah,

no real knowledge, no sheel (cant find an exact english word for that - perhaps appropriate, courteous behavior), no good traits, no understanding of the right and proper

Te martya loke bhuvi bhar bhutah,

such people are mere burden on this earth

manushya roopen mrigashcharanti.

and, in human form, are nothing but grazing deer.

Prem #370

I understood most of it, but guruji, kshamisi?, tvam anuvAdah karosi, aham grateful :)

Prem,DRUMS,tahmad,dost-mittar--others:

Couldn`t resist sharing this with you guys.

The sacred in a secular age

As the Ramadan debates enter their third week, Omayma Abdel-Latif discusses the Islamisation of the West with John Keane

`Secularity has won a reputation for humiliating the Muslims through the exercise of Western double standards in Kuwait, Algeria and Palestine, through the corrupt despotism of comprador governments and through the permanent threat of being crushed by the economic, technological, political, cultural and military might of the American-led West.`

In 1934, T S Eliot wrote in the Choruses from the Rock: ``It seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why or how or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before.``

Eliot was reflecting upon the secularism that seemed to be taking Europe by storm. The concept was gaining credence among statesmen, academics and journalists. Today, Professor John Keane suggests that, in a wholly unexpected reversal of fortunes, this concept has become the object of cynicism, and even outright hostility.

When Professor Keane published his critique of the doctrine of secularisation, in which he exposed its dogmatic nature and prophesied its inevitable doom, he was accused by many secularists of attempting to turn Britain into a ``theocracy``.

Professor Keane, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy and a professor of politics at the University of Westminster, has written extensively on the ``nostalgic return to the traditional notion of the sacred``. Among his many works are Democracy and Civil Society (1988), The Media and Democracy (1991), the prize-winning biography of Tom Paine, A Political Life (1995) and Reflections on Violence (1996). For him, this phenomenon calls into question a number of issues. Has secularism lost the battle against faith? Was the marginalisation of religion in Christian Europe at the root of intolerance for other faiths? Will the return to the sacred, which Keane and others believe is sweeping across Europe, set up bridges of tolerance and understanding between Islam and Christianity, or will it revive old rivalries?



The army of Sulayman the Magnificent before Vienna in 1952 -- one of the many images that seem to lie at the root of continuing European anxiety about Islam as an ``external threat``

(source: The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World)



The discussion:



Why is it that, although secularism is now the standard mode of government in most Muslim states, Islam remains the archenemy of secularist claims to universal acceptance?

Today`s ``secular`` hostility towards Islam is obviously a restatement and variation on the old theme of the Satanism of Islam, and helps explain why most contemporary Muslim scholars mistrust or reject outright the ideal of secularism.

There is a widespread impression among most Muslims that European talk of secularity is arrogant, and that it has always been a cover for hypocrites who think Muslims can progress only by following the path marked out by the West, which includes the renunciation of religion.

In the European context, the doctrine of secularism certainly helped to tame Christian fundamentalism and nurture the values of civility and power-sharing, but the attempted secularisation of the 20th century Muslim world has produced dictatorship, state-enforced religion, the violation of human and civil rights and the simple destruction of civil society.

In a word, secularity has won a reputation for humiliating the Muslims through the exercise of Western double standards in Kuwait, Algeria and Palestine, through the corrupt despotism of comprador governments and through the permanent threat of being crushed by the economic, technological, political, cultural and military might of the American-led West.

Do the anti-secular sentiments prevailing in the Muslim world worry the West?

The militant Islamic rejection of secularism within the geographical crescent stretching from Morocco to Malaysia understandably worries many in the West. The material stakes are high, and the concern that anti-secularism will prove to be a cover for brutal power-grabbing instead of benign power-sharing remains high. But this has been untested as yet.

Let me give the example of Hama, the Syrian town, which is a terrifying symbol. In 1982, the armed forces of secularism drowned their opponents -- members of the Muslim Brotherhood -- in a blood bath. For those living in old democracies, such an example has served as a reminder that secularism shelters violent intolerance and, more generally, that we live in times marked by religious protest, the return of the sacred, and the general desecularisation of political and social life.

What are the bases for your conclusion that secularism is a dogma that threatens the free-thinking pluralism of democracy?

Suspicion of secularism is warranted, in my view, by the fact that most contemporary secularists have sacralised it unthinkingly. They suppose that during the past few generations, religious illusions have gradually disappeared and that this is fortunate, since it leads to the extrusion of religious sentiments from such domains as the law, government, party politics and education.

The separation between church and state, they have argued, releases citizens from irrational prejudices and promotes open-minded tolerance, which is a vital ingredient in a pluralist democracy. The modern quest for personal meaning and salvation has taken the place of religion, becoming what some describe as the ``invisible religion of self-expression or self-realisation``.

Secularists believe that there is a decline of organised religion, that, more and more, the religious experience is privatised so that it becomes a matter of personal choice -- of those quiet moments of reflection -- but no longer a public issue. This is the meaning of secularism.

The contemporary defenders of the doctrine of secularism exaggerate the durability and the open-mindedness of ``secular`` ideals and institutions, and fail therefore to provide a more democratic understanding of religion and politics, because they cannot see that the principle of secularism is itself self-contradictory and therefore unable in practice to provide relatively stable guidelines for citizens interacting freely within the laws and institutions of democratic civil societies and politics.

So does that mean that secularism could collapse under the weight of its own contradictions?

I don`t wish to suggest that it will collapse any time soon because it has nurtured among citizens the idea that the struggle for power based on religious differences is something of the past. There is, however, a widespread sense that the doctrine of secularism has had a pacifying effect in countries previously torn by religious conflict, but nevertheless the question of the limits of secularism should be central to political reflection and analysis.

Despite their success, secularist ideals and institutions tend to produce difficulties and provoke demands for the termination of secularism.

What are these limits?

Perhaps the most striking one is its theoretical and practical affinity with political despotism. Secularists will probably consider this remark akin to blasphemy. Another limit is the view that the struggle for secularity was a struggle for toleration of difference, because this view fails to spot the inherent dogmatism of secularism.

It is not just that various political attempts to institutionalise secularism (in France, Turkey, and some Middle Eastern countries in the second half of the 20th century) have been riddled with such violence and coercion that they qualify as experiments in ``internal colonialism`` or, at the level of principle, that the early [Christian] advocates of secular freedoms typically denied others -- Jews (``children of the devil``), Roman Catholics and, most recently, Muslims (``violent, ignorant, uncivilised and fanatical``) -- such freedoms, as if otherwise benign secularists had suffered a temporary failure of imagination, courage or will in extending their own universal principles to others.

The problem actually runs deeper, for the principle of secularism is, arguably, founded upon a sublimated version of Christian belief in the necessity of deciding for non-Christian others what they can think or say, or even whether they are capable of thinking and saying anything at all.

Will the return to religiosity in Europe revive old rivalries in a clash of civilisations, or could it allow the Christian West, which abandoned religion long ago, to grasp the fact that Muslims continue to believe?

There is a complicated process, and there are two areas involved: one is the clash of civilisations and the other is the question of religiosity. On the clash of civilisations, there has been an endless debate of Huntington`s thesis, which, in my opinion, is too simple and has strong Orientalist implications that are undesirable.

It is quite clear now, more than ever, that Islam is a force within Western civilisation, with 20 million Muslims living in the European Union alone, and that there is a slow and sometimes difficult sea change occurring within Europe: for example, the public tabling of the politics of faith, the need for compromise and the need for greater toleration of different forms of religious belief. So Huntington`s Napoleonic forecasting of a future clash of civilisations underestimates those complexities and has potential political implications.

On the question of religiosity, there is a sort of renaissance of religiosity, respect for the sacred and the possible belief in the sacred. This takes various forms, but the trend is definite and there are good reasons for it. How this process is seen from the point of view of Christianity and Judaism within Europe remains unclear. But such a process is contradictory: on one hand, there is the danger of the reassertion of a Christian fundamentalism, or rather a Judaeo-Christian fundamentalism, which will consequently breed hostility toward living, breathing Muslims, and hostility toward what they stand for. There are signs of this, but there are also signs of the need within areas of Church for reconciliation and understanding.

This process needs to be strengthened, and it can only be strengthened by the authorities at various levels, all the way from Prince Charles`s efforts to promote dialogue between the two faiths down to various civic experiments to bring about some understanding between Muslims, Jews, Christians and others.

As I see it, compromise, mutual understanding and living together in a civil society without violence are possible, but politics will determine whether that is the strong option.

So could this be the reason for the outcry in the West when Muslims attempted to defend the sacred from distortion, as was the case with Salman Rushdie, for instance?

I think that today, at what appears to be the end of the saga, there is a sizable body of opinion in Britain and elsewhere in the world which understands why many Muslims were offended by that book [The Satanic Verses]. There was no uprising of Rushdie supporters after the official reconciliation between Iran, Britain and Salman Rushdie himself; no one said that this was proof that Muslims had to back down, that ``we have taught them a lesson, we have humiliated them and shown them what the universal principle of freedom of opinion is all about.``

It has been a very quiet and considered reaction, which again reinforces the point that there was and is a body of opinion which values the importance of compromise, of quiet reconciliation and reducing passions in matters concerning the sacred.

This is a symptom of the long-term quiet revolution in favour of the sacred. What I mean by that is a revolution in which a large number of people develop a certain respect for the possibility that there is a god and that the cosmos has an ultimate meaning.

How would you respond to Rashed Al-Ghenoushi`s statement that a secular state is semi-Islamic?

Sheikh Ghenoushi surprised me in the first ever conversation I had with him, when he pointed out that Christian Europe came late to embrace the principles of a civil society. That was something of a sacrilege, because here -- I thought, and most scholars believed -- civil society was a European invention par excellence and others followed suit.

Al-Ghenoushi argues that the ethos and structure of the civil society came much earlier and had their roots in the Muslim societies, while Europe has had some difficulty in catching up. But my belief is that Christian Europe has to some degree caught up in its growing official respect for human rights, toleration of differences... In this respect, it has come to understand what was always understood within the tradition of Islam: that there is sanctity of human beings.

Christian secularising civil societies in Europe have -- after five centuries of bloodshed and bigotry -- managed to establish spaces in which there could be public consideration of the relationship between human beings and nature, the world and the cosmos. These spaces of public consideration and reflection are -- according to Al-Ghenoushi -- an intrinsic feature of the Islamic doctrine.

There is a growing sense of religiosity outside, and sometimes against, the Church. One could argue that a certain type of ``Islamisation`` of the Christian/secular West is occurring -- Islamisation in the sense that the Church could be still be there, but not as dominant as it used to be.

There is a certain anxiety within Western democracies that the Muslim world will wage an attack on Western values and create disarray. How would you view the notion of political Islam within this context?

The European anxiety has very deep roots -- the Crusade mentality, the war on Islam that dates back to the very birth of Europe. So part of the whole idea of Europe is that it was infected with this bigotry and this anxiety about the external threat.

The anxiety is partly driven by the dislike of violence and the unfortunate association of Islam with guns and terrorism, which produced the phenomenon of Islamophobia -- a major source of the on-going anxiety. Nonetheless, there is an emerging perception that Islam, paradoxically, can be a force for civility, power-sharing, liberalisation of authoritarian regimes -- the highest concentration of which on the face of the earth is now found in that belt stretching between Morocco and Malaysia.

Turkey is a case in point: there is some guilty anxiety among commentators about how support for the Turkish regime requires opposition to power-sharing and civil society. Therefore, some liberal opinion is in favour of an Islamic renascence, because it is seen correctly to be largely a force for tolerance, and that applies to the on-going concern over Algeria. There is no decent civilised power-sharing outcome possible in that terrible terrorised context, unless there is public and international recognition of the legitimacy of Islam as a political, social and cultural force.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

re: Sadna # 365

Thank you. But human beings who can`t, or don`t, or are too timid to think for themselves, who are always running to others asking what they should do with their lives, who can`t stop reading tea leaves, are not much of an improvement over cockroaches.

Kind of like the proverbial mrigas -

Yesham na vidya, na tapo na danam,

na gyanam, na sheelam na guno na dharmah,

Te martya loke bhuvi bhar bhutah,

manushya roopen mrigashcharanti.

Prem,DRUMS,tahmad,dost-mittar--others:

Couldn`t resist sharing this with you guys.

The sacred in a secular age

As the Ramadan debates enter their third week, Omayma Abdel-Latif discusses the Islamisation of the West with John Keane

`Secularity has won a reputation for humiliating the Muslims through the exercise of Western double standards in Kuwait, Algeria and Palestine, through the corrupt despotism of comprador governments and through the permanent threat of being crushed by the economic, technological, political, cultural and military might of the American-led West.`

In 1934, T S Eliot wrote in the Choruses from the Rock: ``It seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why or how or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before.``

Eliot was reflecting upon the secularism that seemed to be taking Europe by storm. The concept was gaining credence among statesmen, academics and journalists. Today, Professor John Keane suggests that, in a wholly unexpected reversal of fortunes, this concept has become the object of cynicism, and even outright hostility.

When Professor Keane published his critique of the doctrine of secularisation, in which he exposed its dogmatic nature and prophesied its inevitable doom, he was accused by many secularists of attempting to turn Britain into a ``theocracy``.

Professor Keane, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy and a professor of politics at the University of Westminster, has written extensively on the ``nostalgic return to the traditional notion of the sacred``. Among his many works are Democracy and Civil Society (1988), The Media and Democracy (1991), the prize-winning biography of Tom Paine, A Political Life (1995) and Reflections on Violence (1996). For him, this phenomenon calls into question a number of issues. Has secularism lost the battle against faith? Was the marginalisation of religion in Christian Europe at the root of intolerance for other faiths? Will the return to the sacred, which Keane and others believe is sweeping across Europe, set up bridges of tolerance and understanding between Islam and Christianity, or will it revive old rivalries?



The army of Sulayman the Magnificent before Vienna in 1952 -- one of the many images that seem to lie at the root of continuing European anxiety about Islam as an ``external threat``

(source: The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World)



The discussion:



Why is it that, although secularism is now the standard mode of government in most Muslim states, Islam remains the archenemy of secularist claims to universal acceptance?

Today`s ``secular`` hostility towards Islam is obviously a restatement and variation on the old theme of the Satanism of Islam, and helps explain why most contemporary Muslim scholars mistrust or reject outright the ideal of secularism.

There is a widespread impression among most Muslims that European talk of secularity is arrogant, and that it has always been a cover for hypocrites who think Muslims can progress only by following the path marked out by the West, which includes the renunciation of religion.

In the European context, the doctrine of secularism certainly helped to tame Christian fundamentalism and nurture the values of civility and power-sharing, but the attempted secularisation of the 20th century Muslim world has produced dictatorship, state-enforced religion, the violation of human and civil rights and the simple destruction of civil society.

In a word, secularity has won a reputation for humiliating the Muslims through the exercise of Western double standards in Kuwait, Algeria and Palestine, through the corrupt despotism of comprador governments and through the permanent threat of being crushed by the economic, technological, political, cultural and military might of the American-led West.

Do the anti-secular sentiments prevailing in the Muslim world worry the West?

The militant Islamic rejection of secularism within the geographical crescent stretching from Morocco to Malaysia understandably worries many in the West. The material stakes are high, and the concern that anti-secularism will prove to be a cover for brutal power-grabbing instead of benign power-sharing remains high. But this has been untested as yet.

Let me give the example of Hama, the Syrian town, which is a terrifying symbol. In 1982, the armed forces of secularism drowned their opponents -- members of the Muslim Brotherhood -- in a blood bath. For those living in old democracies, such an example has served as a reminder that secularism shelters violent intolerance and, more generally, that we live in times marked by religious protest, the return of the sacred, and the general desecularisation of political and social life.

What are the bases for your conclusion that secularism is a dogma that threatens the free-thinking pluralism of democracy?

Suspicion of secularism is warranted, in my view, by the fact that most contemporary secularists have sacralised it unthinkingly. They suppose that during the past few generations, religious illusions have gradually disappeared and that this is fortunate, since it leads to the extrusion of religious sentiments from such domains as the law, government, party politics and education.

The separation between church and state, they have argued, releases citizens from irrational prejudices and promotes open-minded tolerance, which is a vital ingredient in a pluralist democracy. The modern quest for personal meaning and salvation has taken the place of religion, becoming what some describe as the ``invisible religion of self-expression or self-realisation``.

Secularists believe that there is a decline of organised religion, that, more and more, the religious experience is privatised so that it becomes a matter of personal choice -- of those quiet moments of reflection -- but no longer a public issue. This is the meaning of secularism.

The contemporary defenders of the doctrine of secularism exaggerate the durability and the open-mindedness of ``secular`` ideals and institutions, and fail therefore to provide a more democratic understanding of religion and politics, because they cannot see that the principle of secularism is itself self-contradictory and therefore unable in practice to provide relatively stable guidelines for citizens interacting freely within the laws and institutions of democratic civil societies and politics.

So does that mean that secularism could collapse under the weight of its own contradictions?

I don`t wish to suggest that it will collapse any time soon because it has nurtured among citizens the idea that the struggle for power based on religious differences is something of the past. There is, however, a widespread sense that the doctrine of secularism has had a pacifying effect in countries previously torn by religious conflict, but nevertheless the question of the limits of secularism should be central to political reflection and analysis.

Despite their success, secularist ideals and institutions tend to produce difficulties and provoke demands for the termination of secularism.

What are these limits?

Perhaps the most striking one is its theoretical and practical affinity with political despotism. Secularists will probably consider this remark akin to blasphemy. Another limit is the view that the struggle for secularity was a struggle for toleration of difference, because this view fails to spot the inherent dogmatism of secularism.

It is not just that various political attempts to institutionalise secularism (in France, Turkey, and some Middle Eastern countries in the second half of the 20th century) have been riddled with such violence and coercion that they qualify as experiments in ``internal colonialism`` or, at the level of principle, that the early [Christian] advocates of secular freedoms typically denied others -- Jews (``children of the devil``), Roman Catholics and, most recently, Muslims (``violent, ignorant, uncivilised and fanatical``) -- such freedoms, as if otherwise benign secularists had suffered a temporary failure of imagination, courage or will in extending their own universal principles to others.

The problem actually runs deeper, for the principle of secularism is, arguably, founded upon a sublimated version of Christian belief in the necessity of deciding for non-Christian others what they can think or say, or even whether they are capable of thinking and saying anything at all.

Will the return to religiosity in Europe revive old rivalries in a clash of civilisations, or could it allow the Christian West, which abandoned religion long ago, to grasp the fact that Muslims continue to believe?

There is a complicated process, and there are two areas involved: one is the clash of civilisations and the other is the question of religiosity. On the clash of civilisations, there has been an endless debate of Huntington`s thesis, which, in my opinion, is too simple and has strong Orientalist implications that are undesirable.

It is quite clear now, more than ever, that Islam is a force within Western civilisation, with 20 million Muslims living in the European Union alone, and that there is a slow and sometimes difficult sea change occurring within Europe: for example, the public tabling of the politics of faith, the need for compromise and the need for greater toleration of different forms of religious belief. So Huntington`s Napoleonic forecasting of a future clash of civilisations underestimates those complexities and has potential political implications.

On the question of religiosity, there is a sort of renaissance of religiosity, respect for the sacred and the possible belief in the sacred. This takes various forms, but the trend is definite and there are good reasons for it. How this process is seen from the point of view of Christianity and Judaism within Europe remains unclear. But such a process is contradictory: on one hand, there is the danger of the reassertion of a Christian fundamentalism, or rather a Judaeo-Christian fundamentalism, which will consequently breed hostility toward living, breathing Muslims, and hostility toward what they stand for. There are signs of this, but there are also signs of the need within areas of Church for reconciliation and understanding.

This process needs to be strengthened, and it can only be strengthened by the authorities at various levels, all the way from Prince Charles`s efforts to promote dialogue between the two faiths down to various civic experiments to bring about some understanding between Muslims, Jews, Christians and others.

As I see it, compromise, mutual understanding and living together in a civil society without violence are possible, but politics will determine whether that is the strong option.

So could this be the reason for the outcry in the West when Muslims attempted to defend the sacred from distortion, as was the case with Salman Rushdie, for instance?

I think that today, at what appears to be the end of the saga, there is a sizable body of opinion in Britain and elsewhere in the world which understands why many Muslims were offended by that book [The Satanic Verses]. There was no uprising of Rushdie supporters after the official reconciliation between Iran, Britain and Salman Rushdie himself; no one said that this was proof that Muslims had to back down, that ``we have taught them a lesson, we have humiliated them and shown them what the universal principle of freedom of opinion is all about.``

It has been a very quiet and considered reaction, which again reinforces the point that there was and is a body of opinion which values the importance of compromise, of quiet reconciliation and reducing passions in matters concerning the sacred.

This is a symptom of the long-term quiet revolution in favour of the sacred. What I mean by that is a revolution in which a large number of people develop a certain respect for the possibility that there is a god and that the cosmos has an ultimate meaning.

How would you respond to Rashed Al-Ghenoushi`s statement that a secular state is semi-Islamic?

Sheikh Ghenoushi surprised me in the first ever conversation I had with him, when he pointed out that Christian Europe came late to embrace the principles of a civil society. That was something of a sacrilege, because here -- I thought, and most scholars believed -- civil society was a European invention par excellence and others followed suit.

Al-Ghenoushi argues that the ethos and structure of the civil society came much earlier and had their roots in the Muslim societies, while Europe has had some difficulty in catching up. But my belief is that Christian Europe has to some degree caught up in its growing official respect for human rights, toleration of differences... In this respect, it has come to understand what was always understood within the tradition of Islam: that there is sanctity of human beings.

Christian secularising civil societies in Europe have -- after five centuries of bloodshed and bigotry -- managed to establish spaces in which there could be public consideration of the relationship between human beings and nature, the world and the cosmos. These spaces of public consideration and reflection are -- according to Al-Ghenoushi -- an intrinsic feature of the Islamic doctrine.

There is a growing sense of religiosity outside, and sometimes against, the Church. One could argue that a certain type of ``Islamisation`` of the Christian/secular West is occurring -- Islamisation in the sense that the Church could be still be there, but not as dominant as it used to be.

There is a certain anxiety within Western democracies that the Muslim world will wage an attack on Western values and create disarray. How would you view the notion of political Islam within this context?

The European anxiety has very deep roots -- the Crusade mentality, the war on Islam that dates back to the very birth of Europe. So part of the whole idea of Europe is that it was infected with this bigotry and this anxiety about the external threat.

The anxiety is partly driven by the dislike of violence and the unfortunate association of Islam with guns and terrorism, which produced the phenomenon of Islamophobia -- a major source of the on-going anxiety. Nonetheless, there is an emerging perception that Islam, paradoxically, can be a force for civility, power-sharing, liberalisation of authoritarian regimes -- the highest concentration of which on the face of the earth is now found in that belt stretching between Morocco and Malaysia.

Turkey is a case in point: there is some guilty anxiety among commentators about how support for the Turkish regime requires opposition to power-sharing and civil society. Therefore, some liberal opinion is in favour of an Islamic renascence, because it is seen correctly to be largely a force for tolerance, and that applies to the on-going concern over Algeria. There is no decent civilised power-sharing outcome possible in that terrible terrorised context, unless there is public and international recognition of the legitimacy of Islam as a political, social and cultural force.