If your religion teaches you that under some circumstances you have no moral responsibility for the loss of life of people who entrust themselves to your care, those who do business with you need to know “buyer beware.”
“It was God’s will.” Those were the words pronounced by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia. It was an act of God beyond human responsibility, he said of the tragic deaths of more than 700 people who were participating in the Hajj on September 24th. His words were an exact repeat of a Saudi king after the first such, and much larger, tragedy in 1990. Smaller stampedes, albeit with fewer deaths, have punctuated the hajj ever since.
Only a day before Mustafa Akyol, wrote an article in the New York Times entitled “Islam’s Tragic Fatalism.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/opinion/islams-tragic-fatalism.html. His reference was to a deadly construction mishap just a week earlier, but it could have been prophetic.
But why call the Saudi Muslim response to such events tragic? Tragedy is exactly what Sayyid Naguib al-Attas, a Malaysian Muslim scholar, told me Islam doesn’t have because it believes all things are in God’s hands not human hands.
And indeed the response by the Saudi religious teachers and government in the Hajj tragedy has been driven by two aspects of classical Islamic teaching: 1. that the exact moment of each person’s death is irrevocably fixed by God, and 2. that each person who dies during the hajj is a martyr who instantly attains paradise rather than awaiting the final judgment of the dead. (I believe that the Saudi response will also be guided by the generosity and hospitality taught by Islam, but that is for another blog post.)
The verses of the Qur’an asserting God’s complete knowledge and control over history clearly intend this news to be comforting.
(35:11) “And Allah created you from dust, then from a sperm-drop; then He made you mates. And no female conceives nor does she give birth except with His knowledge. And no aged person is granted [additional] life nor is his lifespan lessened but that it is in a register. Indeed, that for Allah is easy.”
(57:22-23) “No disaster strikes upon the earth or among yourselves except that it is in a register before We bring it into being – indeed that, for Allah , is easy – In order that you not despair over what has eluded you and not exult [in pride] over what He has given you. And Allah does not like everyone self-deluded and boastful.”
These ideas, that are also found in the Christian New Testament and in Christian doctrine, are intended (particularly as associated with John Calvin) to cut people down to size relative to God and reality. But not a small size, only the right size: the size where we are no longer continually anxious over that which is beyond our control anyway or boastful about that for which we have no responsibility. “In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind,” we read in Job 12:10, and “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord,” in Isaiah 55:8.
(Two articles on predestination and fatalism from a Muslim perspective may be found at http://www.islamawareness.net/Fate/fate_article004.html and http://www.onislam.net/english/ask-about-islam/faith-and-worship/islamic-creed/166231-does-islam-teach-fatalism.html. I leave to the reader to evaluate the arguments. They are similar to those I’ve read in many other Islamic sources. I don’t see how they differ from those put forward by Christian theologians.)
No doubt the reader immediately senses the problem. It is one thing to reassure us that the terrors of death and unknown suffering are in God’s hands and thus have ultimate meaning even if we cannot grasp it. It is quite another to assert a doctrine of divine omniscience and omnipotence that removes all human agency and hence leads humans to abandon all responsibility for their behavior.
Abdicating responsibility was never intended, either by classical Islamic teachers or by Christian theologians of a Calvinist sort. Seen through a certain lens of committed obedience placing freedom within the confines of divine omniscience is the perfect form of freedom. Knowing that God has fore-ordained everything, and that God’s intentions for human morality are known, then surely the human vocation is to follow God’s law regardless of the consequences either in the present or the future. This is what gives life meaning, not endless worry about why bad things happen to good people or suffering constant anxiety about creating a personal ethic in light of unknowable consequences. Submit to God’s will and do what is right. Leave the rest in God’s hands.
Except many of us, including many Muslims whose theological understanding extends back to groups like the Mutazilites, don’t buy it. For us freedom can’t merely be apparent; a way of acting that ignores the fact that God is really in control. To be human is precisely to grasp the big picture, and to know that I’m either creating the future or acting in a play that someone else has already written. And the latter, particularly for modern people whether Muslim, Christian, or otherwise simply isn’t adequately and fully human. We don’t merely enact God’s will within a divine plan. We create our future.
And this, going a step further, can be argued to be the only psychological basis for truly responsible human behavior. As soon as God can be blamed for tragedy, God will be blamed and humans will act irresponsibly. And this is particularly so if they don’t think they can change their ultimate destiny, regardless of what their religion teaches about their responsibility to obey God’s command.
Yet the assertion of human freedom to create the future can lead to the opposite extreme: the end of believing God knows the future and has the power to influence the way it unfolds. In the fully modern worldview God simply disappears as an active force in the world. God has no foreknowledge and exercises no power; assuming God exists. It is atheism in everything but name.
And psychologically it is argued that this leaves us with no one to either help us or judge us – a position so hopeless and anxious that apart from a few heroic souls most of us will abandon our purported freedom for base conformity with our animal desires and social pressures that rise only a little above them. Some even argue that all hell will break loose among those who don’t believe in it.
Between these extremes it seems to me is a place for real theological dialogue between Christians and Muslims.
But more importantly the events at the Hajj remind us of an urgent inter-religious dialogue about the limits of responsibility assumed by those with whom we enter into agreements, whatever their religion.
I still remember the two most dangerous automobile rides of my life, both with highly skilled but utterly reckless Muslim drivers in Malaysia and Indonesia respectively. Passing on blind curves, passing on the right, going far beyond the speed limit and the capacity of the road. And both drivers, when rebuked for this behavior, offered the same response, a common Malay/Indonesian Muslim response: “God sets the limits on human life.” Meaning that because God has predetermined the day and hour of everyone’s death it doesn’t matter whether you are in a car or lying in bed. When it is your time you are going to die. If it isn’t your time then you aren’t.
Which isn’t that different from a kind of Christian fatalism that runs deep in parts of American culture, and is documented as a serious factor in substance abuse and unhealthy lifestyles. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1779288/, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1779288/. Or for that matter the role that Premillenialist Christian views play in denial of human responsibility for climate change and its mitigation by politicians like Ted Cruz (and decades earlier interior secretary James Watt.)
Because in the case of the Hajj calamities, problems of substance abuse, and even distortions of public policy belief in God’s complete control of the future has led to tragedy. So it seems fair that we all ask that if your religion teaches you that you have no moral responsibility for the lives of people who entrust themselves to your care, those who do business with you need to know “buyer beware.”
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