Catholic and Enjoying It!
Just not sourced well enough. No need to borrow trouble. Meanwhile, between stonings of women, or cutting off their noses, or putting Down’s syndrome kids on trial for blasphemy, or beheadings, or car bombings, or blowing up Buddhist art, or massive oppression of Coptic Christians, or massive oppression of Chaldean Christians, or Christians martyred to the tune of 150,000 a year (and an awful lot of them martyred by the Religion of Peace) my point remains the same: while the majority of Muslims in the west function perfectly well and are good and decent folk, the fact remains that as a civilization-forming matrix, Islam is in major crisis and produces a bumper crop–a growing bumper crop–of radicalized people who are on a fast track toward the Bronze Age and whose primary enemies are not the largely mythical and unseen Jews and Americans they never meet, but the fellow Muslims they blow up in their mosque bombings.
Of course, many of these savage morons do live in the West too and blow up discos, subways and so forth when they are not beating or slaughtering their daughters for dating outside the Umma, or disseminating the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, or behaving and thinking like the hapless gits in Four Lions.
When your God is God who is so despotic and controlling he cannot even allow secondary causes, there is not going to be a matrix which allows for human freedom or the sciences to grow. Mike Flynn describes the problem in an essay you really should read:
Islam denied secondary causation. According to Maimonides [Guide to the Perplexed], Islamic theologians asserted that “when a man moves a pen, it is not the man who moves it; for the motion occurring in the pen is an accident created by God in the pen. Similarly the motion of the hand, which we think of as moving the pen, is an accident created by God in the moving hand. Only God has instituted the habit that the motion of the hand is concomitant with the motion of the pen, without the hand exercising in any respect an influence on, or being causative in regard to, the motion of the pen.” Al-Ghazali asserted in Tahafut al Falasifa [The Incoherence of Philosophy], that fire did not burn cloth. God caused the fire, and God caused the blackening and disintegration of the cloth; and it was only the habit of God that the one followed the other. Unlike Anselm of Canterbury, ibn Hazn claimed God need not even be faithful to these “habits.” Al-Ghazali wrote [in the Tahafut], “The imponderable decisions of God cannot be weighed by the scales of reason.” The great faylasuf Ibn Rushd countered with Tahafut al Tahafut [The Incoherence of the Incoherence], but in 1195 he was stripped of all his offices and exiled. As “Averröes,” his popularity in Europe was second only to Aristotle, but little noteworthy science was created in Islam after his time.
“The problems of physics,” wrote Ibn Khaldûn, “are of no importance for us in our religious affairs or our livelihoods; therefore we must leave them alone.” An exception was made for the “practical sciences” of astronomy, medicine, etc., where Muslim scholars made outstanding contributions of facts. But laws of nature and explanatory theories smacked of men limiting God’s autonomy.
In short, there is a reason that the Islamic world produces lots of despotic regimes and no Nobel Prize winners. It’s not because of race (adherents of Islam come in every race and color, like adherents of Christianity). It’s because of the religion and the culture it creates. When your cosmos is a Master/Slave cosmos, you create a culture and a politics that reflects that. People being people, Muslims remain free to respond to influences outside of Islam, just as Christians respond to influences outside of their religious tradition. So many Muslims are inspired by ideas (many of them Christian ideas, many of them post-Christian ideas) to which other Muslims are deeply hostile and perceive (often rightly) as fundamentally opposed to the doctrines of Islam. Hence the massive internal struggle in Islam, which Christians do well to pay attention to, since Islam must either be purged of its insane radicals, or the world can expect major bloodbaths wherever those radicals go.
Where it will end up, I have no idea. But I am skeptical that Islam is as “strong” as westerners are inclined to fear it is. I think Islam is, in many ways, very brittle. The problem is, post-Christian Western culture is even weaker. What we as Catholics can do is what we have always done when we listen to the Faith and not to the human traditions that blow around our politics and our culture: make common cause with non-Catholics (including Muslims) wherever possible. The Islamic tradition, for instance, has a strong emphasis on the same pillars of piety as Judaism and Christianity: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (Read, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6-8: the whole thing is a discussion of the Christian life as lived out in prayer, fasting, and almsiving). Islam has great reserves of healthy natural law morality (which is why it is repelled by the unnatural morality of the post-Christian west). Catholics can make common cause with this and, as opportunity presents itself, present the Christian case for perfecting natural law with supernatural revelation (that’s what Jesus is doing when he says, “You have heard that it was said ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’ but I say to your ‘love your enemy'”). Of course, that means that we Christians will have to do all that stuff we talk about, but Jesus says the thing is doable with his help.
The point is, Islam depends, to a very large degree on either natural law or elements of biblical revelation. We as Catholics can affirm and strengthen what is true in Islam in the hope that it will help to defeat what is false and evil in Islam. Not to “save Islam” but to save Muslims–for whom Christ died.
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