Comments



Alan replies to yesterday's post! At last, dialogue! I'll make a comment on this comment later. I've also included some further links at the end.



Roger,



I think you missed the boat on this one.



"It also seems to be true . . . the putting down of Pure Land

Buddhism."



--Yes, but these aren't religions of the Book. They do have

their sacred texts -- scads of them -- but those texts aren't

nearly as central to those religious traditions as their

respective scriptures are to the Big Three monotheisms.

-- The religious traditions of East Asia that you mention do have

blood on their hands, but much less of it than do the religions

of Europe/North Africa/Central Asia.

-- You haven't shown that such violence as they have committed is

in any way tied to the content of their sacred texts, which is

RDC's charge against Islam; to my knowledge their is no such

relationship (and very little violence in those texts).



"Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to

religious scripture . . . Wow. The man seems to have misplaced

1400-1800 some years of Western history. I guess he feels like

the fundamentalism thing gets him off the hook[.]"



RDC's case here would be stronger if he elaborated on the

extension of the term fundamentalism as he defines it here.

Nonetheless, he's basically on the mark: fundamentalism, as

scholars use the term, is a phenomenon that began in the late

19th century. A "nonhistoric approach to religious scripture"

can only be formulated after fully historical approaches to

religious scripture have been developed -- source criticism and

form criticism and that sort of thing. Fundamentalism was and

is, among other things, a reaction to these trends. You may

consider this too narrow a definition of fundamentalism, and

certainly there were fundamentalist-like tendencies earlier in

church history. However, it was not and could not have been

there from the beginning. It requires, for example, fairly

widespread lay literacy. When you extend the notion of

fundamentalism to Islam, the picture is complicated further; but

the point is that fundamentalism is not simply a synonym for

primitive or dogmatic religion, or for religious bigotry.



So yes, I think the fundamentalism thing does get 1400-1800 years

of Western history off on a techicality, only it's a more

important technicality than you realize.



"And surely the extermination of almost all native peoples, as a

program of the European-Native encounter, justified throughout

its history with multitudinous reference to scripture, was a mere

flyspeck on the vision of the Weltgeist, surely."



The conquistadores were not reading their marching orders

straight out of the Old Testament. As you know, the theological

justification for the Roman Catholic part in the

conquista/conversion/genocide came from a complex mix of

scholastic theology, canon law, and whatnot; and at times there

were interventions on the side of the indigenous peoples (cf.

Bartolome de Las Casas.) Fundamentalism that wasn't. The term

is, arguably, more applicable to, e.g., our genocidal antepasados

here in Texas; but I'll deal with that point after I've discussed

the nature of the Qur'an as divine revelation.



". . . perhaps we should look at the gentle texts from the

"quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs". Our reading today will

be from selected old Testament books. "



A pedantic quibble here: The Age of the Patriarchs extends only

to the time of the Covenant with Moses at Sinai, recounted in the

Book of Exodus, and hence none of the texts you cite are,

strictly speaking, from the Age of the Patriarchs.



But more important: One thing that immediately strikes the

Western reader (i.e., me) about the Qur'an is that, unlike the

Christian Bible, it's all of a piece. What happened is that

Mohammed would go out into the desert to meditate. One day he

started hearing voices. He came back into Mecca and told people

what he was hearing. They said, "It's the voice of God." He

kept on listening, and telling people what he heard. They

remembered it, and wrote it down. God was pretty direct and to

the point. This is the way things are. Do this, and you'll be

happy. Don't do this, or you'll be sorry.



And that's the Qur'an. It's not a miscellany of every

conceivable kind of document produced over a thousand-year

period. No archaic histories emerging out of oral tradition. No

long passages of "Jehosaphat begat Jedadiah". No Songs of

Solomon that snuck in past the censors to embarrass future

generations of prudes. No

we-can't-decide-which-version-of-the-story-to-use-so-let's-include-all-four.

None of the ravings of a John of Patmos.



RDC is correct when he says (in the complete article), "The Quran

is a notoriously difficult text to understand in some ways. For

one thing, it lacks almost any sense of context: Verses are

addressed to mysterious Yous and Theys from an equally mysterious

We." This remark highlights one of its differences from the Old

Testament, where the context within a historical narrative is

generally very clear. Now, I suggest that when an utterance is

made in the second person directed to a nonspecific You, when the

content of that utterance makes it possible to take the utterance

to be of universal applicability, (applicable to all people in

all places and at all times, or at all times subsequent to the

time of the utterance), that is a natural way to interpret the

utterance. And so those utterances have been interpreted in the

Islamic tradition. On the other hand, when an utterance is

reported in the third person, in the course of a narrative of

events quite remote in time and space, it takes a good bit of

contortion to interpret that utterance as of universal

applicability.



The relevance of all this to our discussion? Two things. First,

when you ask,



"I mean, who takes Judges literally?"



Let's consider again the hypothetical Anglo in Texas in the

1800's opening his Bible and reading "Now go and smite Amalek,

and spare them not; but slay both men and women," and deciding

that Jehovah's instructions to the Israelites a few millenia ago

were directly applicable his own relations with his Kiowa

neighbors. How someone can read it that way, as I suppose has

been done all too frequently, is beyond my imagination; but you

can't call it a "literal" reading. Even if you ignore the

context in a historical narrative, there's that pesky word

"Amalek," which is a proper noun, denoting a particular group of

persons who ain't around any more. It takes quite a bit of

sophisticated hermeneutics to conclude that anything that God may

have said about them should be applied to the Kiowas. (Unless,

of course, you already know what conclusion you want to come

to.)



But the Qur'an isn't like that. Not only does the context-free,

second-person form of its injunctions give them every appearance

of being intended as universal commandments, but there are no

bothersome questions about whether the Kiowas ought to be treated

like the Amalekites were treated. The word is "infidels", which

clearly includes you and me, and all those who reject God's

revelation to his Prophet Mohammed.



Second, and more important: I suggest that your attempt to refute

RDC's claim about the centrality of war in the Qur'an with these

citations from the Old Testament fails, because, given the nature

of the Qur'anic revelation, the entire Qur'an is central to Islam

in a way that (no one in her right mind thinks that) everything

in the Bible is central to Christianity. Imagine a Christian

being handed a Bible asked, "OK, where's the meat? If I've only

got time to read a small part of this thing to get the most

important ideas, what should I read?" The Christian might

recommend the Sermon on the Mount, the Passion of Christ, perhaps

some of the letters of Paul; but no one, I venture to say, would

point to Judges 21 or 1st Samuel. Whereas it's quite plausible

for the Muslim to say, "All of the Qur'an is equally important;

it's all the Word of God." So matching quotation for quotation

misses the point.



"This development of the religious community outside of the halls

of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the

flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of

church and state[.]"



I agree that RDC is on very shaky ground here. In the Christian

case, I'd attribute the alleged flexibility (although there's

probably a better word) more to the fact that neither of the men

you might call the founders of the religion, Jesus and St. Paul,

founded political states, whereas Mohammed did.



Re Judaism, about which neither of us have said very much (in my

case because I don't know very much): I think RDC is right about

the nonpolitical nature of Diaspora (rabbinical) Judaism. Temple

Judaism is another matter, and to the extend that certain

Orthodox sects may be attempting to reinstate it in Jerusalem,

they're clearly a destructive force in contemporary Palestine.

But I don't know what I'm talking about here.



BTW, apparently James Carroll makes the counterargument to RDC's

in Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: " Carroll

proceeds according to a straightforward thesis: In the aftermath

of Constantine's conversion (AD 312), the church became an organ

of the Roman state, and as a consequence, its integrity was

irreversibly compromised." (Erik Tarloff, writing in Slate last

January.)



" Briefly, the question of how tolerance . . . Christianity as a

political force."



The question will depend to a degree on how you define

"tolerance": I would argue that there are important differences

between, say, the view currently hegemonic in the West that

religious beliefs are entirely a matter of private conviction,

and the quite different view, found at many times in European

history, that belief cannot be compelled. The former is, as you

indicate, the aftermath of Europe's exhaustion from its

fratricidal religious wars. But the point is that, after

Protestants and Catholics had killed each other in sufficient

numbers for enough centuries that they got good and sick of it,

there was enough doctrinal room in Christianity for them to work

out a modus vivendi, a new understanding of the relationship

between secular and religious authority, between the public and

the private, so that they no longer felt a need to kill each

other, and yet they still considered themselves believers. By

extension, this new-found tolerance caused them to lose the urge

to kill, or ( in many, but still too few, cases) even to convert

nonChristians. It's not the place of a nonMuslim to say whether

or not similar room exists in the Islamic tradition, but I take

RDC's point to be (and I say this in the light of my own

preliminary and uninformed reading) it's hard to see where it

could be found.



"There is an . . . ignorance armed with a diploma."



First, I agree that "Why do they hate us?" is a stupid question.

There are a whole lot of "they"s who hate us for a whole lot of

different reasons (not to mention the problems with the referent

of the "us"). But to the point: RDC teaches history of

religion. I suggest that your gripe is not with him or with the

way he teaches his subject, as with the discipline itself; you

think that he would present a more accurate picture of history if

he taught not History of Religion but History of Everything Ever

Justified in the Name of Religion. The conquistadores, Cromwell,

and the Croatian bishops were all mass murderers, but if you

think that their crimes deserve a central place in the history of

the particular human phenomenon known as "religion" -- well,

let's just say I think the burden of the argument is on you.



Love & peace,



Alan





For a modern justification of those Judge's quotes, see the Rationalchristianity site.





A good link to a Net argument about the posting of John Chrysostom Homilies Against the Jews (or Judaizers), in which the conversation twists around the context of apparently anti-semitic language. There's a website devoted to the golden tongued John - .



A good link to a Southern Baptist dissenter from the Southern Baptist Convention's most recent pronouncement on the cosmic place of women.





Here's a nice link to the relationship of the Ottomans and the Jews, from the 14th century up to the 1881, when the Sultan officially pronounced against the blood libel story -- that Jews killed little Christian boys and used their blood in some satanic ceremony. A story, by the way, that the Russian Czar believed and the Pope, at that time, was unwilling to condemn.

.



Finally, here's a link to a book by Bat Ye'or on Islam and non-Islamic people. . There is also a preface to the book, online, from Jacques Ellul. I haven't read the book, but the intro makes it pretty evident that this book is going to deal harshly with Islam. Bat Ye'or interprets dhimmi, or the Islamic pact with non-Islamic people, in the light of the obligation to fight -- jihad. Also, the Serbian-Bosnian conflict is obviously in the background of Ellul's essay.