Opinion  | by David Van Biema

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Does Islam Flout Reason? Why the Pope's Case Is a Flimsy One

Sep. 19, 2006
Viewpoint: The issue is important, but Benedict has presented neither the evidence nor insight to make his argument stick
By DAVID VAN BIEMA
 

In a viewpoint entitled "The Pontiff Has a Point" in this week's TIME, the headline on the piece by TIME's Rome correspondent Jeff Israely announces that Pope Benedict's "take on Islam," as propounded in his controversial speech last week in Regensburg, Germany, raises "tough truths." In the part of the speech that has become famous, the Pope was actually putting forth only one central "truth"— certainly a provocative one—that Christianity is beholden to reason while Islam is not. My own viewpoint is that this supposed "truth" rings false in a number of ways.

But wait! Didn't the Pope apologize Sunday for the speech?
Well, he did and he didn't. He issued a statement saying that he is "deeply sorry for the reactions" of some Muslims. More specifically, he distanced himself from a 15th-century Byzantine emperor he quoted. Emperor Manuel II Paleologos's line that "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached," the Pope explained, does not "in any way express my personal thought." And he refers offended Muslims to a previous apology by the Vatican Secretary of State, who said that Benedict had meant only "to undertake... certain reflections on the theme of the relationships between religion and violence in general."

Maybe so. But to my eye, it seems that the part of Benedict's speech that deals with religious violence extends beyond Manuel's statement and is precisely a slap at Islam. The truly problematic text, in fact, is a mixture of quotes from the Byzantine emperor, his German translator Theodore Khoury, a medieval Muslim scholar named Ibn Hazm, and the Pope's own musings. In combination, they seem to suggest that Islam's idea of God is so oblivious to the virtue of reason that it tolerates unthinking violence in Allah's name.

It goes like this. Benedict quotes Khoury as saying that Islam understands God as "absolutely transcendent," so much so that the deity's "will is not bound up with any of our categories, even rationality." The Pope then quotes Khoury quoting "a noted French Islamist" paraphrasing Ibn Hazm, who lived in Cordoba during the 11th century, saying that "God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us." Got that? It's a lot of attribution, but I think that my colleague is correct when he concludes that "the risk [Benedict] sees implicit in this concept of the divine is that the irrationality of violence might thereby appear to be justified to somebody who believes it is God's will." Well, Benedict certainly knows a compelling "big idea" when he runs across it. To those of us (that is, everybody) who are trying to understand the behavior of the Islamic terrorist fringe, there is something almost theatrically satisfying, in a bone-chilling way, about the grand idea that irrational violence might be hard-wired into Islam. But like the Clash of Civilizations theory to which it is related, it's a huge accusation, and even if Benedict really wants to make it, Ibn Hazm is apparently a bad place to start.
My own authority on this point is Ingrid Mattson, professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and president of the Islamic Society of North America. Her view: Not only is Ibn Hazm a dead branch on the Muslim theological tree; but that even Muslim suicide bombers would not recognize Benedict's supposed Islamic teaching. Mattson was audibly frustrated when she heard the Pontiff had cited Ibn Hazm, saying "It's completely selective!" She went on to explain that the medieval Cordoban belonged to a literalist legal school known as the Zahiri, which never developed a community or a seminary. Their thought was picked up by a few Muslim intellectuals whose influence she says was never great. (She says they include the theological predecessors of neither today's Wahhab fundamentalists nor suicide bombers.)

Muslim thinking is not monolithic on faith and reason. If one wants to talk about non-mainstream positions, Mattson claims that the Zahiri's opposite number, the school called the Mu'tazilites, are more influential. They occupy what might be called the more liberal side of Muslim theology—thus they don't represent a current majority—but they exist, and remain a global school. And they have a high view of human reason as an essential means to understand God's will—consistent, says Mattson, with the idea of Natural Law articulated by the Pope's own church.

If the Mu'tazilites are a minority, what does Islam's broad middle think? Mattson says that it tends to believe that reason should be invoked "to understand scripture, to make analogies, to adduce particular rulings from universal principles and values." She says that compared to the Mu'tazilites, the middle "is not as confident of the ability of reason to be an independent source of knowledge and would need proof that what's being reasoned has a basis in scripture." The Pope might want to explore the subtleties of this attitude. But it's nowhere near Ibn Hazm. (In fact, it sounds a little like some conservative Christians.) Mattson says that even the Islamic radicals whom she calls "the vigilantes" are not using the kind of thought process implied by Benedict when they plan their deadly acts. They present a number of arguments for suicide bombings and the killing of non-combatants, but none of them, at least explicitly, appeals to revelation over reason. Many of their assumptions are faith-based, but faith-based assumptions are involved, by definition, in any believer's acts. We may find the terrorists horribly unreasonable, but that doesn't make them avid footsoldiers in a philosophical Islamic war on reason.

Benedict may wish to argue that somewhere in the minds of Islamic suicide bombers is an unstated understanding that if anyone tried to reason them out of their plans they would counter that logic had no role because this was the will of God. But that would be an assumption on his part. And that exposes the essential arbitrariness, at least for now, of the Pope's approach. If he wants to make an "essentialist" argument against Islam—that is, to suggest that there may be something in it that is intrinsically more friendly to fanaticism—then he needs to do it in some way other than the seemingly casual, off-the-cuff route he has chosen.

He has said that he wanted to provoke a "frank and sincere dialogue." Thus far, without really presenting any actual intellectual grist for such a discussion, all he seems to have succeeded in doing is provide an excuse for people who want to hurt someone in the name of Allah. It's a high price for a musing that was itself regrettably short on reason.