"Mediaeval" Muslims

Or, a tale of two Islams

This article is a heavily edited excerpt of my book, The Lost Way to the Good.

“It’s sad, the shipwreck of a civilization, it’s sad to see its most beautiful minds sink without trace – one begins to feel slightly ill at ease in life, and one ends up wanting to establish an Islamic republic.”

Michel Houllebecq, The Possibility of an Island

Hamas atrocities and abductions, masked anti-Semites infiltrating pro-Palestinian marches, Pakistani rape gangs, honour killings, draconian sentences and stonings for Iranian women, Taliban veil police — add these layers to memories of 9/11, and Islam is not enjoying the best of publicity, especially in the US. Denunciation of Muslims as “mediaeval” is rife. And yet, as I wrote at greater length in The Lost Way to the Good, in Europe, perhaps because we are so much closer to Muslim nations and have so many more Muslims living in our countries, the attitude is more ambivalent.

Michel Houllebecq is a barometer. His earlier works are unmistakably hostile to Islam. But in his more recent novel Submission, published in 2015, we find something approaching a grudging admiration. A Muslim premier is elected, thanks to France’s large immigrant minority from its former North African colonies. The midlife academic protagonist — as ever, a projection of Houllebecq himself — cannot keep his job in the now privatized and Islamic university of the Sorbonne unless he converts. Thinking this over, he retreats to the Catholic monastery of Martel, named after the Frankish ruler Charles “the Hammer,” who in the 732 Battle of Tours repelled the Umayyad invasion from Gaul. But the protagonist’s sojourn in the cloisters evokes little more than nostalgia. Ultimately, he finds the Church a spent force with no future. In the end, finding certain benefits to the conservatively minded male – polygamy chief among them – he converts, and enjoys a breathtaking mystical experience.

Islam offers a social stability grounded in strong family ties and a resolute sexual ethic which Houllebecq seems simultaneously to rebel against and to yearn for. Typical of this conflict is The Map and the Territory, which hinges on the murder of a fictionalised version of Houllebecq himself. The obituary notes that before the famous author died, he was baptised secretly in a traditionalist Latin-rite Catholic church. And indeed, the non-fictional Houellebecq’s more recent essays reveal that he does attend the Tridentine mass from time to time. Though he finds himself taken in by the beauty of the liturgy, his belief dissipates once he leaves the West door.

Houllebecq’s vacillation about religion in general encapsulates what I consider the more European variety of angst about Islam in particular: the double fear that Islam threatens certain liberties, confronted with the dawning suspicion that some of its reasons for doing so may actually be justified. We must protest with all our strength against the murder and forced conversion of Christians in fundamentalist Islamic regimes, the violence against homosexuals and apostates, and the repressive controls over women in some Muslim countries. But such Wahhabistic interpretations do not represent the full spiritual and intellectual heritage of Islam. When westerners see Muslims settling together in tight communities with well-disciplined, devout families, when we hear the power and beauty of the muezzin’s call to prayer, when we discover the austere beauty of Islam’s artistic and musical heritage, many find something to admire, even to envy. Conversions by westerners are by no means few.

The European media deals with this ambivalence towards Islam by effectively splitting it into two different religions. One is the “mediaeval” cult of the fanatics responsible for Drummer Rigby, Charlie Hebdo and the rape gangs; the other is a proto-Enlightenment creed of tolerance and decency, the Blair Foundation’s “religion of peace.” Certain names are attached to this binary. The big baddy is the Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali, caricatured as an obscurantist ideologue who killed Islamic philosophy. His nemesis and our hero is the jurist Ibn Rushd, better known in the West as Averroes, and famed for his voluminous commentaries on Aristotle. Al-Ghazali’s magnum opus, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, is supposed to have led the Islamic world into submission to divine command theory and propagated the doctrine of an arbitrary, tyrannous God; Averroes’ noble retort, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, was a last-ditch attempt to separate theology from philosophy and restore a purely empirical approach towards the world. Alas, liberal critics opine, the Islamic world was too benighted to appreciate Averroes’ pellucid reasoning. But while Averroes’ philosophy died at birth in its native domain, it flowered rapidly here in Europe, and lucky us: this is supposed to explain the grievous disparity between today’s Islamic world (mediaeval ∴ bad) and the West (modern ∴ good). The Muslims threw away their best chance for a Reformation like ours, which has yielded us the incomparable paradise of diversity, equality and inclusion we now enjoy, though perhaps not without certain minor caveats.

Leaving aside the problems of valuing another culture by reference to a thinker it rejected as a heretic and judging Islam by the measure of 18th century European philosophy, there is a more basic issue with the tale of two Islams: it isn’t true.

1 Al-Ghazali is not the bogeyman

First, the Al-Ghazali bogeyman is a convenient myth. Rather than debunking philosophy tout court, Al-Ghazali criticised what he deemed Avicenna’s excessive interpretations of Aristotle: ideas such as the universe having always existed and never been created, the obliteration of the individual soul after death, and the impossibility of bodily resurrection. You might see why these could be problematic for an orthodox Muslim, as they would for a Jew or Christian. Al-Ghazali insisted that properly to understand the relationship between the divine and human will was a matter for mystical vision rather than philosophical apprehension, where the sense of “philosophers” was strictly limited to Aristotelians.

If, at risk of oversimplification, Al-Ghazali can be seen as swinging the theological pendulum away from reason and towards mysticism, then Averroes tried to pull it back with opposite and more than equal force. Averroes reacted to what he saw as Al-Ghazali’s obscurantism by narrowing their mutual forebear Avicenna’s philosophy to a far narrower reading of Aristotle. Where Avicenna had prioritised philosophy over divine revelation in the pursuit of truth but sought a rapprochement between the two, Averroes went further, and said that there was only one truth, which must be understood by philosophy alone: where scripture contested philosophy, it must be read only as an allegory. The Qur’an, which in Islam is considered divinely dictated, was to be subjected to human reasoning. Hence, having enjoyed the protection of the Caliph for decades, Averroes was deemed to have gone too far. In 1195 the Caliph ordered that Averroes’ books be burned and the study of “philosophy” (i.e. Aristotelianism) forbidden throughout the realm. Fortunately for Averroes, the Caliph later relented, so that by the time he died in 1198, he did so in freedom as a respected jurist; but there is no doubting the tumultuous air that whipped around him, and would whip Latin Christendom for centuries to come.

When western journalists cite Averroes as their poster boy for a new Islam, what they are really calling for is the end of anything remotely resembling orthodox belief. They are saying that the best thing for Islam would have been for it to cease to be Islam. Anyone with doubts about modern relativising and revisionist approaches towards the Bible should be able to sympathise with Muslims when they are presented with Averroes as the answer to all their woes. One might as well proffer Christians Kant.

2 Averroes is not the hero

The second myth is that under Averroes’s influence, the Islamic world would have become more diverse and hospitable. Long before his time, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived, had been working and studying together in the Islamic world, from the scholarly convivencia of Al-Andalus to the eastern reaches of Khorasan, where Christians were prized medics and architects. We need not pretend that it was a paradise of religious tolerance. Fines and persecutions waxed and waned. Nonetheless, For centuries after Averroes was (very quickly) forgotten in the Islamic world, it was far easier to be a Jew or Christian there than to be a Jew or Muslim in Latin Christendom — which is where Averroism flourished. The thesis that greater attention to Averroes would necessarily lead to religious pluralism and tolerance is demonstrably false.

East Syriac Christians were not only tolerated but highly valued in the caliph’s courts of 8th-11th century Iraq and Assyria, especially in the field of medicine. The leading medical school was a Christian foundation in Gundeshapur, Persia. A monastery since the fourth century and theological school from the sixth, the medical school boasted a vast library and scholarly tradition. There, Christians translated not only medical but mathematical and philosophical works from Greek into Syriac and Arabic, including works of Aristotle, Galen, Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy. One seventh century Deacon, Hunain bin Ishaq , became personal physician to caliph al-Mutawakkil. He had mastered Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Greek, and as well as translating over 260 works, wrote over 100 of his own. Life would have been far easier for Husain if he had converted to Islam. However, he saw Christians’ minority status not as a mark of divine disfavour: he saw it as a vital witness to the strength of their faith. Without that strength, today’s Christians living in the Middle East would not have survived the horrendous persecution they have endured in the last few decades: persecution which has accelerated thanks to western-sponsored “regime changes” which left Islamic warlords in charge. An Iraqi Christian priest I met on pilgrimage told me how his city of Mosul, home of thousands of Christians since the sixth century, was purged of Christians by the Islamic State, their churches destroyed and their women seized as slaves, to return pregnant if at all. I have spoken to Iranian Christians imprisoned for converting from Islam, and now living in diasporas in Turkey and Italy.

To be clear, I am under no illusion: Islamic fundamentalism is responsible for great evils and for the worst oppression of Christians since the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, Islamic rule was not always fundamentalist. It has at times been more tolerant, even if that tolerance was fickle, limited and came at a cost. Under Muslim rule in Córdoba in 951, a Christian monk, a Spanish Jew and Muslim doctors would gather to revise one of Hunain’s medical translations. Such collaborations were rather less likely in Latin Christendom.

3 Islamic philosophy did not die with Averroes

Thirdly, it is not true that philosophy died in the Islamic world after Averroes. The embarrassing problem for western secularists, though, is that the philosophy which burgeoned there is that older strand of the western tradition which European analytical philosophers try to forget: namely, derivatives of Platonism. In Europe, the Schoolmen and Reformers, busy with their syllogisms, had pushed the Platonic pursuit of wisdom as spiritual practice out to the peripheries where the artists, poets and mystics played, some of them - the irrational horror of it! - even women. Since Diotima at the Symposium, Platonists have held women in a higher regard than Aristotle literalists, for whom the fairer sex are little more than walking incubators. Imbued with Platonic philosophy, Sufism valued women sages while Latin Christendom was denouncing them as hysterical or heretical. Things may be rather different today — but don’t blame it on “mediaevalism.”

This broadly Platonic philosophical turn began with the twelfth century Persian Suhrawardi, who found in Neoplatonic writings the antidote to Averroes’ separation of faith from reason. Building on his foundations, the Andalusian Ibn Arabi and Persian Mulla Sadra, in the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, treated Neoplatonic philosophy as therapy for the soul and derived from it disciplines and spiritual exercises aiming at theosis. As little as they may be known in the West today, Ibn Arabi’s practices live on among the Sufis to this day. Mulla Sadra remains the preeminent philosopher-theologian of Shi’a Iran. I read that Plato is studied in greater earnest in the madrasahs of Qom and Iranian universities than he is in the West. This Platonic tradition was not a minority belief or niche pursuit in the Islamic world. It was the mainstream until the end of the nineteenth century. The reason this has escaped western attention can be gauged by certain orientalising assumptions of scholars in the last century, who wrote off all Islamic philosophy after Averroes because it was too Platonic and mystical for their tastes.

Final word: fundamentalism is not mediaeval

The origin of today’s Islamic fundamentalism is neither Platonic nor mediaeval. It was only after encounters between the Islamic world and Western modernity in the late 19th century that fundamentalism, and with it, hostility towards Jews and Christians began to rise. Averroes’ influence on the western Enlightenment bifurcation between faith and reason has something to do with this marked closure of mind. It also helped to whittle down the once dominant Platonic stream of Islamic theology to the threatened minority status it faces today.

The kind of fideism that spawns today’s Islamic fundamentalists was not the result of Muslims abandoning Averroes eight hundred years ago. It was provoked by Western empires invading Muslim lands fewer than two hundred years ago. The birth of the Muslim Brotherhood and the hardline reforms of Islamic countries can be traced to Muhammad ‘Abduh, whose influential 1897 Epistle on Unity urged measures to combat westernising influences. This, in turn, was a response to the Islamic renaissance in Egypt earlier that century, when the introduction of Western technological and social innovations divided Islamic thought. Opinion varied. Some welcomed every aspect of European modernity. Others wanted to adopt helpful technologies but were wary of their potential application and social consequences. ‘Abduh’s was one of the voices which called for the most caution and for a repristination of Islamic ideals.

Like conservative Christians today, nineteenth century Muslims wondered how much western influence they really wanted in their societies. And like Christians living in the West today, they were not given much choice by their colonists and conquerors, who were under the impression shared by modern liberals that their way is the only way. The very westerners who decry the imperialism of early modern Christendom and the imposition of western religion in foreign lands are the same who blithely proclaim the universality of western liberalism and western science, who insist on class or racial conflict as the only means of interpreting history, or who promote a nominalist discontinuity between sex and gender as the sole permissible understanding of human identity.

Those of us who are critical of modern technocratic Western society might therefore find some sympathy with ‘Abduh’s scepticism, while at the same time being wary of the extremes to which it has led so many Muslims, and may yet lead Christians. We do not want to be flooded by pornography, advertising, nihilistic consumerism, the reduction of people to units of capital, the breakdown of the family. Nor do we want public floggings, religious police, oppression of women, and such total contempt for other people that they become sub-human objects for rape, violence and hatred.

Hence, I think, the ambivalence which Houllebecq so aptly conjures. But surely such ambivalence is both intellectually honest and a less dangerous course than mutual demonisation. I don’t want to “establish an Islamic republic.” But I would like to get a little more mediaeval.