Fear and Trembling

What is there left to be said of the remarkable and provocative speech of the Pope? That he should draw such a stark and bold line between Islam and reason is quite surprising, to say the least. A few points here. Surely each tradition acknowledges the excess of truth over reason: can one ‘know’ Christ except through Grace or the Holy Spirit (even to use the word ‘know’ shows the bias of the Islamic perspective since ‘love’ would be more appropriate); Leo Strauss has Maimonides and the medieval Jewish tradition concurring and the reservations about depicting the ‘Father’ in the Orthodox Tradition are surely an indication of the fact that the divine essence is unknown.

The whole idea of mystery and seeing through a glass darkly also points to this excess and if we are ‘being’ then God is ‘beyond-being’ , the divine darkness. So, whilst all traditions can hardly dispense with transcendence one does not have to deduce from that that there is no immanence or analogy between the divine and the human. Any religion must have both and differences can only arise as to on which there is an emphasis.

Now, to claim that Islam is essentially or fundamentally irrational in that it conceives of its God as a Will that cannot be known , that is arbitrary , is quite remarkable in itself. Firstly, it ignores the whole tradition of philosophy in general and Islamic Aristotelianism in particular. The issue here is not whether Greek philosophy is alien to the spirit of Islam and , therefore, not something that one could reasonably cite as an example of Islamic thought that contradicts the Pope. Such a claim could, with some justification, be put to all of the Semitic monotheistic faiths: is there an irreconcilable difference in outlooks, aims and motives between Athens and Jerusalem? The point is, rather, that as a matter of fact, history, there have been traditions of an incorporation of Greek philosophy into the fold of Islam. And it is fairly well recognised that Islam was a continuation and transmitter of the classical heritage.


The second point is distinct but related to the historical argument above. Is it not true that the very possibility of Revelation , the very fact that there is a revelation, indicates that there is the ’entry’ of the divine into the world? (here one must be aware of differences in perpsectives: for the muslim it is the miracle of the book that is analogous to the logos-and not the example of the Prophet) . In addition to this, the contents of the revelation-and not just the fact of revelation- also establish a relation between transcendence and human affairs. The Law id the bridge betwen the two realms and it is in this way that something of the divine will can be known. Here one could add that the Names (or Attributes) have always been another way in which we can ‘know’ something of God-even as His Transcendence remains unquestioned and unquestionable.


Another way in which reason can know something of the ultimate reality is in the aim to establish political and social justice for these must also conform to human values and aspirations -or at the very least, take into account the human margin, human nature as it is. One could also add that God is closer to us than our own self (our own “jugular veins” is the Quranic phrase) and that “he who knows the finite knows the Lord. To this one could multiply examples of the importance of seeking knowledge and of education. And as with social and political justice, knowledge of Nature and History are not thought of as radically opposed to the spiritual message of Islam. In all these senses, then, the notion that Islam is somehow less related to reason and the world of human affairs is quite an astounding one. It remains to be noted that Gnostic tendencies are far stronger in Christianity than in Islam which was , in its early days, always accused of giving too much to the world and to sensuality, the body!


I think the really intersting issue is not whether Islam is essentially anti-classical (Allama Iqbal would famously say that hsi whole work aims to demonstrate just that point); no, the interesting thing is that what seems to underlie the Pope’s words are a fear that the thread that bound reason to Christianity has come undone: there is now a chasm between the human and divine. The divine is so far off that he can only be reached by a “leap of faith”, through ‘blind faith’. The very notion that thought and faith are deeply intertwined, that there is something unconditional before thought, that we believe in order to understand , not understand in order to believe (Anselm) is a view that has progressively become unhinged from the European tradition. Reason now stands autonomous , philosophy is no longer bound by the law (Leo Strauss). In the economic, political and cultural realms what relation is there between thought and action and a Christian perspective?

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