To Islam, From an Agnostic

[Frozenwolf150]

What of the current scholarly movement in Turkey to reinterpret the Quran for modern times? I think it shows promise for the future of Islam.

 

[Brainache]

What of the current scholarly movement in Turkey to reinterpret the Quran for modern times? I think it shows promise for the future of Islam.

Or is there another Schism on the horizon?

 

[Kopji]

An even more important aspect is the model of reality and what it implies about the significance of the world we live in. Medieval Christian theology, similar to Hinduism, asserts that the world we are born into is an illusion. This false world exists to distract us from the ultimate reality, which is called God (or Brahman) and the goal of our existence is to reunite with this God. In Christianity, this world is a corrupt fallen creation, and should only be used and exploited on our journey back to God. We should not be tempted by material things, and knowledge about this world only amounts to knowledge of an illusion.

Islam says the exact opposite. According to Islamic reasoning, if creation was an act of divine will, then this world is also real, and also important. This dualist model, as opposed to the strict idealism of Christianity, gave Islam a different attitude towards knowledge and the study of nature through science. Both worlds are "good" and there is no denigration of the material world. In addition, the Madhi (messiah) has yet to come, and Jesus is not considered the Madhi. Christian theology often views the world as one abandoned by the messiah, given the departure of Jesus, but Islam has no such problem.

I have a lot of trouble just accepting this part as factual. There are just too many wha..? questions.

How does one exploit an illusion?
If the meek will inherit the earth, what use is that? It implies worth.
If Christians teach that the Messiah abandoned the earth, what the heck is the second coming all about?
If 'in the beginning God created' is not an act of will, what is it? Why is that any different than what you say Muslims believe?

Islam just sees itself as a broader and more encompassing idea than other religions (mostly Christianity or Judism - religions of 'the book'). It is not "opposite" to them. To a Muslim, Jesus was a Muslim, so was Noah. An idea like - Maybe you are a Muslim and don't know it.

 

[metacristi]

What of the current scholarly movement in Turkey to reinterpret the Quran for modern times? I think it shows promise for the future of Islam.

Agree. With the condition that the 'gates of ijtihad' remain open continuously, the conclusions always in line with Modernity And of course that their reinterpretation of hadith become widely accepted in the muslim world.

Really the necessary next step would be nothing less than a real and durable muslim Enlightenment and here I think a 'catalyzer' is needed (we should promote the use of Reason, including via Quranic criticism on a par with Biblical criticism) to give a chance to a healthy dose of secularism and to the conclusion that unaided Human Reason can be, at least sometimes, more important than even what is written in the holy book ('the Quran is perfect' will never bring Enlightenment).

 

[tsig]

Of course it is incompatible with reason. Because there is no evidence that Islam is true, and plenty of evidence that it is false.
How is this changed in any way by the existence of an Arabic word for intellect? Why wouldn't there be an Arabic word for it? Guess what, there is a Swedish word for intellect too, which has nothing to do with Islam or any other religion.

Since this is just as true for other religions as it is for Islam, I have no idea why you think it's a roadblock unique to it.



Because it's not just "an Arabic word for intellect", but a specific philosophical and theological term of art.

The italicized statement is just dodging the hilited statement by saying "others do it too". ETA: it's also a strawman since Humes fork doesn't say it's unique to Islam.

I'm not sure why being a specific philosophical and theological term of art means anything, it certainly doesn't make an argument.

 

[A'isha]

The italicized statement is just dodging the hilited statement by saying "others do it too". ETA: it's also a strawman since Humes fork doesn't say it's unique to Islam.

No, it's not, since the argument had been advanced in this thread that Christianity is compatible with reason while Islam is not.

I'm not sure why being a specific philosophical and theological term of art means anything, it certainly doesn't make an argument.

Yes, it means it's a specific philosophical and theological term of art used to describe the use of reason and intellect in both fiqh and ʿaqīdah.

 

[Frozenwolf150]

I have a lot of trouble just accepting this part as factual. There are just too many wha..? questions.

I have the same questions too, except they're directed more at the contradictions within the beliefs of Christianity.

How does one exploit an illusion?
If the meek will inherit the earth, what use is that? It implies worth.
If Christians teach that the Messiah abandoned the earth, what the heck is the second coming all about?

The Second Coming is meant to destroy Earth in all its corruption. Doomsday believers see any strife and unrest as signs of the impending apocalypse. Yeah, it makes about as much sense as it sounds.

If 'in the beginning God created' is not an act of will, what is it? Why is that any different than what you say Muslims believe?

I don't know why Christians would believe we live in a fallen creation, yet also believe God declared it good.

Islam just sees itself as a broader and more encompassing idea than other religions (mostly Christianity or Judism - religions of 'the book'). It is not "opposite" to them. To a Muslim, Jesus was a Muslim, so was Noah. An idea like - Maybe you are a Muslim and don't know it.

True. The Quran mentions Jesus more than it does Muhammad.

 

[Kopji]

I have the same questions too, except they're directed more at the contradictions within the beliefs of Christianity.

Not to get too far off topic... Although many of my cousins are Quakers, I was raised in a tiny little sect of Mormonism called RLDS. I suddenly realized one day that it was just all impossible to believe anymore. I left, but I think I was not really able to give up entirely on belief. So on the way out I looked at an awful lot of religious and secular philosophical ideas as if my life depended on it. I was even a Baha'i for about a month, so am familiar with Islam. I enjoy philosophical Buddhism and Taoism. The only atheists I'd ever met were on the internet and I'd always thought that Atheists were pretty much a pain in the ass so hated to call myself one. I finally settled into Atheism (is just a stupid label), but stick a note on my monitor to try and be mostly kind.

Anyway, every religion has contradictions going on, like water is wet.

The Second Coming is meant to destroy Earth in all its corruption. Doomsday believers see any strife and unrest as signs of the impending apocalypse. Yeah, it makes about as much sense as it sounds.

I guess I never thought of it as a literal event. We were 'dispensationists' and had a peculiar view of history - a bit like things happening in cycles.

I don't know why Christians would believe we live in a fallen creation, yet also believe God declared it good.

Christians believe that God has big hopes for us. Faith in Christ is ascribed to us as 'righteousness', and so despite our imperfections we pass from death to life. This is sort of the core of 'grace' that we can't save ourselves. I actually respect this part of Christianity, it was a very foreign idea to me. Mormonism is a lot like Islam with it's emphasis on living a certain kind of life.

True. The Quran mentions Jesus more than it does Muhammad.

Jesus is "Issa" in the Quran.

If Christians ignored Paul's teachings from the NT and just read the Gospels, that would probably similar to Islam.

 

[Brainache]

...
Jesus is "Issa" in the Quran.

If Christians ignored Paul's teachings from the NT and just read the Gospels, that would probably similar to Islam.

Did your Comparative Religion class cover where Muhammad got his version of Jesus from?

What form of Christianity was being practiced around Muhammad when he, um,... began receiving revelations from the Archangel Gabriel?

 

[Kopji]

Did your Comparative Religion class cover where Muhammad got his version of Jesus from?

What form of Christianity was being practiced around Muhammad when he, um,... began receiving revelations from the Archangel Gabriel?

Sorry, I'm not the comparative religion class person, but most of the themes I mentioned earlier are easily googled on the web:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/globalconnections/mideast/themes/religion/

Some Muslims believe in a book of especially fake nonsense called Barnabas, and get a rather wacky view of Jesus from there. Otherwise most people in the region were probably fairly familiar with mainstream Judaism and Christian traditions.

I used to wonder how Muslims could possibly like someone like Mohammed, he seemed very unlikable compared to other religious figures. Rumi offers a sympathetic glimpse, and is very readable to a Christian audience who might want to understand how or why Muslims (at least Sufis anyway) see him in a more sympathetic light. Nobody is ALL bad, so perspectives that portray any religion or religious leader as all 'one thing' or another are probably missing something. Religious leaders have a definite genius for attracting followers.

 

[Frozenwolf150]

Did your Comparative Religion class cover where Muhammad got his version of Jesus from?

What form of Christianity was being practiced around Muhammad when he, um,... began receiving revelations from the Archangel Gabriel?

Oddly enough, we didn't cover that, but the information is readily available via Google. So you're looking at the influence of Eastern Christianity on the writings and beliefs of early Islam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Islam

I used to wonder how Muslims could possibly like someone like Mohammed, he seemed very unlikable compared to other religious figures. Rumi offers a sympathetic glimpse, and is very readable to a Christian audience who might want to understand how or why Muslims (at least Sufis anyway) see him in a more sympathetic light. Nobody is ALL bad, so perspectives that portray any religion or religious leader as all 'one thing' or another are probably missing something. Religious leaders have a definite genius for attracting followers.

It's interesting that you should mention that, since Muhammad has more in common with Jesus than the progenitors of Judaism in the way he's portrayed as closer to infallible. The Jewish patriarchs, like Abraham and Jacob, have their flaws and often behave in dishonorable ways, like how Abraham lies that his wife is really his sister, or how Jacob cheats Esau out of his inheritance and later their father's blessing. So I'm left wondering how people find figures like Muhammad or Jesus relateable, because their examples are impossible to follow.

 

[Brainache]

From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy...

That's what a Christian wrote in the 700's. He seems to think Arianism was involved. Makes sense.

 

[metacristi]

Hmm. I'm not sure about either of these claims. I don't think Islam has an inherent problem with reason (although I confess that my knowledge in that area isn't as hot as it might be), and I'm sure that certain expressions of Christianity are still very antagonistic towards reason. You've surely heard of Ken Ham and AiG, and there's more where that came from - muscular forms of belief which portrays blind faith as a virtue, reason as potentially misleading, and science as the enemy.

IME, both religions are happy to use reason and science as far as it helps to support their cause, but retreat to blind faith and "you can't prove God doesn't exist" as soon as they run out of material. A selection of arguments for a young Earth from AiG and certain prominent Muslims would be all but identical. The same's true of arguments from nature against homosexuality. You could make a case for reason being well-integrated in these beliefs, or for reason being sidelined, but I don't see an easy distinction between Islam and Christianity in this context.

Read, if you have the possibility, the book I was talking about in my first post, it's an excellent primer to certain aspects of Islamic theology and its, definitely marked, differences from that of Christianity (although I am way less optimistic than Reilly in the conclusions which can be drawn from that).

Now of course some loss of Reason is present also in Christianity, indeed even today. It can even be argued for example that there was a more or less general 'closing of the Christian mind' between 391 until Thomas Aquinas when the Christian theology moved strongly from Aristotelianism to neo-Platonism (still there was never an almost total de-Hellenization of Christian mind as can be argued in the case of sunni islam).

Also I know prima facie that Orthodox Christianity (which never had a Thomas Aquinas) is still Augustinian at core (faith and traditions is what count primarily) but nowhere can one see (for example even very devout people usually disagree with the political ambitions of some priests) the degree of indoctrination and loss of Reason common in the muslim world in spite of centuries now of exposure to Modernity.

As I said unfortunately islam in a worse position here than Christianity (even Judaism), with much smaller gaps for non trivial change (little room for a healthy dose of secularism for example or for arriving at the conclusion that not everything in the Quran is perfect). Not surprising in my view for Islam means finally submission, with people seen as 'slaves' of God (who cannot be argued with) instead of mere 'servants' (who can even argue with God if injustice is involved, Job for example argues with God over this issue).

I do not rule out the possibily that Reason will be finally regained in islam but it is also pretty clear to me that a truly modern islam (going well beyond merely accepting that Human Reason is important) will have little in common with the islam of the last 1400 years (it will still be called 'islam' only because people want so not because of a high degree of compatibility with the islam of today).

 

[sleepy_lioness]

That's what a Christian wrote in the 700's. He seems to think Arianism was involved. Makes sense.

Yes, there does seem to be some cross-over with Arianism. But I'd be wary of taking the word of early Christian commentators. After Nicaea, 'Arianism' became what Rowan Williams (the leading expert on it) called 'the paradigmatic heresy'. Everyone flung it as an accusation against those they disagreed with. Even today nobody's absolutely sure what Arius actually believed; most of his writings were banned and disappeared. So calling your opponents, whether other Christian sects or the new Islamic faith, 'Arian', might simply have been equivalent to calling them heterodox in the strongest terms you could think of.

 

[metacristi]

Agreed, as long as they wear what they want to wear out of their own free choice, there shouldn't be any problem.

And this is the key of the problem because they are far from being free. Unfortunately it's rather like here.

Indeed one would expect that in a free enough society* a sizeable minority of women would choose to not wear a hijab at all. Instead one can hardly find an uncovered muslim woman even in the West where they should not, in theory, fear of anything. I don't think these comparisons with the limits of freedom in the West can make islam look better.

Finally we must not forget that there is also a problem of defective religious education & masked coercion here, many of these women who choose to wear hijab 'freely' are rather like those girls in Hitler's Germany who recognized after the war that 'we did not think at the time that we were not free, on the contrary'. Absolute freedom does not exist anywhere. But this does not mean that the coercion existent in the West is on a par with that in the Islamic world (where personal freedoms do not really count). I have nothing against muslims but it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that we have no problem here.


*let's say like those imperfect societies of the West where 'silicon implants' are seen as a sign of a male dominated society by some 'feminist philosophers' even if many women choose not to have them without any problem

 

[Darth Rotor]

Christian theology often views the world as one abandoned by the messiah, given the departure of Jesus

Nope.
That is not actual Christian theology.
Not even close.
EDIT:

If Christians teach that the Messiah abandoned the earth, what the heck is the second coming all about?

Christianity doesn't teach that.

As to interfaith tolerance:
depending on where you are in the Muslim world, this feature varies considerably.

 

[Brainache]

Yes, there does seem to be some cross-over with Arianism. But I'd be wary of taking the word of early Christian commentators. After Nicaea, 'Arianism' became what Rowan Williams (the leading expert on it) called 'the paradigmatic heresy'. Everyone flung it as an accusation against those they disagreed with. Even today nobody's absolutely sure what Arius actually believed; most of his writings were banned and disappeared. So calling your opponents, whether other Christian sects or the new Islamic faith, 'Arian', might simply have been equivalent to calling them heterodox in the strongest terms you could think of.

OK, I get it. Like how in the 1950's every Alien was a "Martian", no matter what planet they came from.

 

[Earthborn]

Instead one can hardly find an uncovered muslim woman even in the West where they should not, in theory, fear of anything.

Really?

Sure, they are somewhat harder to recognise as muslim, but there are plenty of them living in the West.

 

[Brainache]

Really?

Sure, they are somewhat harder to recognise as muslim, but there are plenty of them living in the West.

Where I live, there is a fair number of Muslims and often I'll see groups of young Muslim women out and about. A lot of the time there is a mixture of looks. Some of them will be wearing head scarves and some not, some in the head scarves will also be wearing tight jeans and tops. Some without the scarves will dress more modestly.

It looks to me like they have a choice and wearing it or not wearing it doesn't say much about their devotion to Islam.

 

[metacristi]

Really?

Sure, they are somewhat harder to recognise as muslim, but there are plenty of them living in the West.

I don't think they amount to a sizeable minority though (at least not one expected in a free society). If in places where muslims are a minority one can see so many covered muslim women then there is a problem with your estimation (just go in East London for example and see for yourself). But of course I admit that I may be mistaken, among others because even the Quran is unclear about the necessity of wearing the headscarf (although I know very well about the fact that in Egypt for example 90% of women wear hijab). There is no mistake though in saying that the coercion existent in the muslim world is far from being on on a par with that in the West.

Err I should have answered: 'Really? You cannot count the uncovered muslims women either and there are basically no reliable polls to settle the problem. However there are theoretical (the hijab signify adherence to the ummah) and practical reasons (quite many honour crimes in the West related to this) which point to the fact that a majority of muslim women (too many for a free society) actually wear the hijab. Deluding themselves that they do that freely and rationally.'