Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian,soc.culture.arabic,soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: Re: Fundamentals WUZ Re: More questions for Anwar Saleh
From: minhaszt@ucunix.san.uc.edu (Zafar T Minhas)
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 05:08:27 GMT
Organization: University of Cincinnati

Before I get started, let me say one thing, Khomeini was a son of a bitch, and
I take little if anything he wrote seriously.

Now.......

Chapter 1: Islam and Europe

With the fading away of imperial power, which had made it possible for the
Occident to despise other cultures, interest in Islam has revived recently,
and the economic influence of oil-rich Muslim states has provided, for the
first time in 250 years, a practical motive for seeking to understand the
Muslim world. There is no lack of information available, and library 
shelves are heavy with books on Islam, but whether this spate of information
has provided  the keys to understanding - and to the empathy without which 
understanding can only be superficial - is another question. In any case,
those of us who see a need to build bridges across the frontier are never 
satisfied. An affirmation is nothing of the signal which carries it is weak
or distorted, and although it may be taht all such signals, by their very 
nature, lack strength and clarity, the attempt must be made, repeatedly, to
find the right words and the most effective means of communication.

Between Islam and Christianity, as between Islam and post-Christian culture,
communication has been hampered by very particular difficulties. Occidental
writing about Islam - what we would now call the works of the Orientalists -
has only too often been rooted in the bittere polemics of the Middle Ages.
From the time when Cristianity came into possession of the Roman Empire until
the 7th century it would have been reasonable too suppose that nothing could
stop the universal expansion of the Christian message. In the 7th century
Islam stopped it. From then on nothing shot of a piety capable of withstanding
the severest shock could save Christian from the unthinkable thought that God
had made a dreadful mistake. Palesting and other lands of the Near East, 
together with Christian Egypt, had been doevoured by a monster which appeared
without warning out of the Arabian sands; the foundation of the world had been
shaken and the shadow of darkness had come down upon the heart of Christendom,
the Holy Land

Since Islam was strong in arms and Christendom was weak, words were the only
available weapons against what was seen first as a 'heresy' and later a false
religion of satanic origin, and all the resources of language were pressed 
into the service of the propaganda campaign which might have brought a blush to
the cheeks of the late Dr. Goebbels. On can still catch its echoes in our time.
Pope Innocent III had identified Muhammad as the Anti-Christ; almost 700 years
later the explorer Doughty desribed him as 'a dirty and perfidous Arab'. In his
_History of Europe_, published in 1936, and a standard work in school for many
years after, H.A.L. Fisher called him 'cruel and crafty, lustful and ignorant'
and made reference to the 'crude outprourings of the Koran'.

The contemporary Muslim, however, is often less troubled by books which show an
open and clear-cut bias, whether this arises from a narrow denominational view
or as part of a generalized attack on traditional religion, than he is by works
which are sympathetic (or condescending) in intention, but whish in practice 
undermine the foundations of his faith. To take the most obvious example, many
writers who might be considered well-disposed work on the assumption that 
Muhammad was the 'author' of the Quran. To suggest that the Quran had a human
author, even if it is admitted that he was 'an inspired genius' is to do away 
with the religion of Islam. These authors refer readily to the 'greatness' of 
the Prophet; like sympathetic schoolmasters, they find in him much to admire,
and they are astonished by his magnanimity to his enemies. They rebut charges
that he was anything but sincere, brave and honourable and are shocked by the
scurrilous charges brought against him by earlier writers. At the same time
there emerges, quite unconsciously, that note of amiable condescnsion which -
ever since the end of the Roman Empire - Europeans have adopted towards the
'backward' or 'developing' people of the Third World.

There is a certain ambiguity in many of these books, as though their authors 
were unable to decide whether Islamis or is not a truly revealed religion. Even
the British Islamicist, W. Montgomery Watt, appears to be a victim of such
indecision. In his assessment at the end of _Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman_
he remarks in passing that 'not all the ideas that not all of the ideas he 
proclaimed are true and sound, but by God's grace ha had been able to provide
men with a better religion than they had before.' One suspects a slip of the 
pen here, since the author is Christian, and Christianity came before Islam;
but the ambiguity is apparent if one asks, first, why 'God's grace' should have
been only partially effective in Muhammad's case, and secondly, in terms of 
what absolute criterion of truth some of these ideas were true and others less
so. Transpose this to the Christian context and it might reasonably be asked 
how a believing Christian would respond to the statement that 'not all of
Jesus's ideas were true and sound', but that Christianity represented and
advance on Greek and Roman religion.

Where Christian writers are concerened, certain limitations are appropriate and
acceptable. One does not expect them to be untrue to the principles of their
own faith, and the fact that they are themselves believers gives them the
understanding of religion as such which opens doors and may, on occasion, lead
to the very heart of things; and there are some who understand very well to
speak of another religion with courtesy is not only a gesture of respect to its
adherents but is also a courtesy to God in the face of the mysteries of divine
Self-revelation.

to be continued.....

zafar




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