The Road from Regensburg

FAITH Magazine March-April 2009

Islamic Inculturation Awaits an Effective Response

In the January 2009 issue of First Things Robert Louis Wilken, Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has powerfully argued that we must awaken to the extraordinary converting and staying power of Islam. Over the centuries he argues Christians "have seldom taken Islam with the seriousness it deserves or recognised it for what it is - a religion in the biblical tradition in which piety is wedded to statecraft."

Islam, he points out, made long-term, territorial conversions, in its first centuries "by a gradual process of soft coercion" of the conquered and later quite "peaceably" and "quiet(ly)". He goes on:

He warns against tending to dismiss "Islam as a historical relic, incapable of change and betterment, inimical to reason and science."

Wilken goes on to praise the two Islamic Open Letters which followed Regensburg, as respectively "thoughtful" and "unprecedented" not least in suggesting, in A Common Word Between Us and You, that "the prophet Muhammad was, perhaps through inspiration, restating and alluding to the Bible's first commandment." This was, as requested by this letter, the starting point of the resultant 'Forum' in Rome last November. Wilken points out that the actual historical, cultural and geographical context of Islam must also be relevant to this dialogue.

He does not give an analysis of what has given Islam seemingly greater staying power than Christianity - save for noting that "One of Islam's most enduring innovations was that religious law became also the law of the body politic" and that "Violence has been a persistent strain in Muslim history", referring to the respected Marshall Hodgson.

He goes on to ask:

Further Fruitful Convergence

On behalf of the Common Word Open Letter signatories Prince Ghazi received the Eugen Biser Award in Munich on 22nd November last. The letter was written in September 2007 on the first anniversary of the Regensburg lecture. Prince Ghazi gave thanks to God for the numerous events that had resulted from the letter. He then referred to the letter's exclusive emphasis upon our duty to love God, which excluded mention of God's love for us. In our January 2008 editorial, whilst acknowledging the significant move forward this letter represented, we, probably among others, had suggested that this lack reflected a lack in an Islamic tradition which has not emphasised friendship as the purpose of human existence. Prince Ghazi commented that:

He then goes on to mention one or two of the '99 names of Allah' which also "implicitly" (our emphasis) refer to God's love for us.

A Disharmonious Note: Pope is Catholic

After the fruitful November 'Forum' at the Vatican (see last edition of this column) for a while the official website for the A Common Word letter had on its home page a 14th November article from the United Arab Emirates' The National quality newspaper. The piece by Craig Nelson, associate editor, was entitled "Will mere talking bring about peace?"

The article's premise was that the apparent lack of clear Papal apology for the offence caused by the Regensburg lecture put a question mark over the value of the current dialogue. Moreover, it reported,

Pope on Logos and Islam: Politics or Truth?

The January 2009 edition of the journal Race and Class published a lecture entitled "A Syllabus of Errors: Pope Benedict XVI on Islam at Regensburg", which had been given to the 2008 Global Studies Conference at the University of Nebraska. In this Ralph Coury, Professor of History at the Jesuit Fairfield University, Connecticut, accused the Pope of falsely devaluing Islamic faith and culture. The Pope, he suggests, is self-consciously playing upon the European fear of an Islamic cultural takeover in order to promote a return to Christianity as the only solid basis to a civilised Europe.

Coury's major argument is that the Pope was very wrong to make such a big distinction between the Greco-Christian view of reason and the prevailing Islamic one. According to the Regensburg lecture, the Islamic approach allows for the intelligibility of the idea that God might act capriciously. In response to this claim about the potential of the Islamic God, Coury (like others before him) changes the category and responds with actual acts of Allah, viz. the Qur'anic statement that "God prescribed mercy for himself", and other Islamic uses of reason.

We would refer to our January 2007 editorial "Fostering the Regensburg Insight", especially the sub-section entitled "A Vital Debate within Islam". There we concluded that the various defences of Islam against the Pope's argument seem to miss and fall short of challenging his central point concerning "the necessary grounding of the nature of human reason in the nature of divine reason", indeed in God's very being as revealed by Christ.

Using arguments of Aref AN Nayed, who has often appeared in this column, Coury points out that the Pope's (and St John's) personalistic depiction of 'Logos' goes well beyond the Greek concept. Coury concludes that "Benedict's conception of reason and the rational God are ill-defined." In the Regensburg address Pope Benedict talked of a "mutual enrichment" of Greek and Christian thought which enabled the tradition to see reason as "creative and capable of self-communication". The Pope did not go into detailed justification of this description. However it might not be out of place to note that this rich, personal conception would seem closer than Greek logic to how self-conscious humans normally experience being reasonable.

Professor Coury brings out how the Islamic adherence to Greek-inspired philosophy and science which, as this column has highlighted, is widely acknowledged to have significantly diminished after the 12th century, was continued over later centuries by the Iranian Twelvers and the Hanafi legal school. He does not acknowledge let alone reflect upon the significantly more developed science and politics which Christian civilisation has enjoyed since the Renaissance.

He makes the oft repeated accusation that the Pope should have quoted Al-Ghazali not Ibn Hazn (see our editorial for a response).

Of the other "errors" proposed by Coury only one, concerning an historical attribution of a Qur'anic verse, is actually explicitly owned by the Pope as opposed to one of the people he quotes.

Pope's Short History of Salvation: Logos to Resurrection -Epiphany Sermon 2009

"God is at the origin of all things and governs all things, not as a cold and anonymous engine but rather as Father, Husband, Friend, Brother and as the Logos, 'Word-Reason' who

was united with our mortal flesh once and for all and fully shared our condition, showing the superabundant power of his grace. Thus there is a special concept of the cosmos in Christianity which found its loftiest expression in medieval philosophy and theology. In our day too, it shows interesting signs of a new flourishing, thanks to the enthusiasm and faith of many scientists who following in Galileo's footsteps renounce neither reason nor faith.