Humanising law

One of the standard complaints against giving queers (by ‘queer’ I mean any person who does not conform to being definitively male-or-female and heterosexual: i.e. same-sex oriented, same-sex attracted, intersex, transgender people) equal protection of the law is that it is an offense against the Christian, or Judaeo-Christian (if Christians want to include the Jews rather than practising more traditional exclusion thereof), traditions of the Western civilisation. To put it another way, it involves de-Christianisation of law.

Controlling women
This is true. But so did giving women equal protection of the law and giving Jews equal protection of the law. Giving women the right to exit a marriage, and to control their fertility, was equally an “offense” against the Christian traditions of Western civilisation. Indeed, if one examines the Christianisation of Roman law, and of proto-common law, one sees the same pattern. As Christianisation advances, women lose the right to control their fertility, they lose the right to exit a marriage. Being so completely untrusted as decision makers in such key areas of their life, the natural corollary was that they lost control over property as well; hence the development of coverture marriage and married woman as chattel of her husband. A free women in C8th England had far more legal standing, property rights and social opportunities than a free woman in C18th England and the reason for the difference was a thousand years of Christianisation of law.

As institutions and technology developed, and the ambit of religion as a source of meaning and explanation (and so authority) shrank, the legal status of women rose in a steady unravelling of the aforementioned Christianisation of law. They regained property rights, they regained the right to exit a marriage, they regained control over their fertility. (Such rights and control having been features of Celtic, Germanic and late Republic/early Empire Roman law.) Women became legally and socially recognised as full decision-makers, with dramatic expansion of their social opportunities.

That Islam, particularly in the Middle East, has not experienced the same shifts—institutional and technological changes being either outside impositions or grudging adjustments to outside pressure—and the ambit of religion as a source of meaning and explanation has (after a temporary period of retreat) resurged, explains the precarious status of women in such countries.

Oppressing Jews
The case of the Jews is, if anything, even clearer. Christianisation of Roman Law involved a steady process of stripping Jews of legal protections and imposing ever more legal constraints. (Pagans were even more severely treated.)

The Germanic conquests of the lands of the former Western Roman Empire was generally a benefit to the Jews, since persecution of belief was not a feature of Germanic law. Indeed, the Carolingian dynasty valued Jews as revenue-producing, law-abiding believers in God. The relentless hostility of the Catholic Church, however, led to the steady stripping of legal protections from Jews and the imposing of harsher and harsher legal constraints. (To their credit, both Karl-lo-magne and his son Louis the Pious resisted the Church’s demands that Jews be stripped of rights, but the collapse of Carolingian power removed that block.)

It was only with a process of de-Christianisation of law that Jews were able to enjoy full legal protections. By the middle of the C19th, places where a monopoly Catholic or Orthodox Christian Church had the most power (the Papal states, Tsarist Russia, Romania) were where oppression of Jews were most intense. During the C19th and early C20th, the Catholic Church put considerable resources into promoting Jew-hatred.

It has been a standard Catholic refrain over the last few centuries that liberal modernity is evil because it gives people rights. Liberal modernity is evil because it gives Jews equal standing law; liberal modernity is evil because it gives women control over their fertility and the right to exit a marriage; liberal modernity is evil because it gives queers equal rights. The Catholic Church has been a strong proponent of the “insult of equality”—that it is an insult to decent, God-fearing Christians that Jews have the same rights as them, that women have control over their lives, that queers have equal rights. All this is even more intensely true in Islam.

Which leads to two questions: why is monotheism so hostile to equal protection of the law? Why has liberal modernity successively embraced equal protection of the law?


[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer.]

Reasons for Church hostility to Jews and Judaism

Pope Benedict has made it clear that the Jews bear no collective responsibility for the death of Christ. But it is hard to give the Church much credence for backing away from an accusation that it was overwhelmingly responsible for in the first place. Given that, according to the Gospel reports, Jesus was killed by a Roman method of execution by Roman soldiers under the authority of a Roman official, the lack of collective Jewish responsibility even at the time is perfectly clear. It is underwhelming that almost two millennia later that it is news that a Pope wishes to make it clear that Jews have no enduring moral responsibility.

Not that the Deicide accusation was ever the only issue. The early Christian Church, particularly after the alliance with Constantine, had a range of reasons for hostility to Jews and Judaism.

Competition: rabbis and priests competed for believers. We forget that within the Roman Empire, Judaism was an evangelising religion: it was only pressure from the Christianised Roman state (later reinforced by Islam as a ruling religion) that turned Judaism inward.

Preserving Jesus’s status as Messiah: if Jews were God’s Chosen People, yet failed to follow Christ, then either Christ was not Messiah or the Jews were betraying their role as the Chosen People. Holding Judaism and Jews to be at fault protected Jesus’s status as Messiah.

Allying with a Deicide state: if the Romans killed Jesus, then in accepting the alliance with Constantine, the Church was allying with a Deicide state. But, if the Jews killed Jesus, that protected Christian alliance with the Roman state, emphasized their “betrayal” of their role as Chosen People and improved priestly rhetoric against their rabbinical competitors. The accusation of Jews as a Deicide people was extremely useful for the Church and was kept going for as long as it was so useful.

Defusing Christ’s critique of priestly power: According to the Gospels, Jesus spent a great deal of time criticising priests and clerics. If that was identified as purely a rejection of Jewish priests and rabbis, then the Church was protected from having Jesus’ critique of priestly power being applied to it. So emphasizing how wrong specifically Jewish teaching was provided a shield against Christ’s critiques of misuse of priestly power being taken as having general (and so potentially embarrassing) application.

Subverting love thy neighbour: Critiquing Judaism and Jews created a category of person that the authority of God could be used against, further establishing the power of priests to invoke God to unilaterally strip people of moral rights and protections, and so giving them great authority as ‘gatekeepers of righteousness’. This is particularly clear in the preaching of St John Chrysostom.

While notionally these are generally attacks on Judaism, they naturally became attacks on Jews: for rejecting the true preaching, for rejecting Christ, for being Christ-killers, for following false teachers. In the case of subverting love thy neighbour, it had to be an attack on Jews, to create the category of those outside the full moral community as defined by priests.

This is why Philo of Alexandria’s adoption of natural law theory to justify a homicidal intolerance of queers was so dangerous (particularly, it turned out, for Jews) for it created a category of human beings who were in “metaphysical revolt” and (implicitly, a claim later made explicitly) metaphysically deformed who “put themselves” outside the moral community to the extent that they should be killed. (The accusation of being metaphysically deformed also being made against the Jews.)

The bigger the gulf between the anathematised and “proper” people, the more the effect of creating categories of morally rejected people to be unilaterally stripped of moral protections becomes both accepted and invisible. This move is very clear in the preaching of St John Chrysostom, when he goes from utilising Philo’s metaphors in preaching on a passage from St Paul which itself fairly clearly shows Philo’s influence to his preaching against those who fraternise with Jews.

The process of exclusion, of unilaterally stripping people of moral protections on the basis of metaphysical sins or claims, never just stops with the queers.

Monotheism and queers

On the matter of monotheism and homosexuality: it is slightly more complex than monotheism is simply against homosexuality (although that is the dominant tradition in the Abrahamic monotheisms and in Zoroastrianism), in that if you take out the bits of St Paul that come from Philo of Alexandria, then gay Christians do not have much of a problem. Jesus never condemned homosexuality, even by implication. Indeed, given, according to the Gospels, Jesus fairly clearly cured a Centurion's young lover, any implication is rather the other way. (Translations are usually coy on the point, but if you go back to the original wording and context, it is fairly clear. Just as in Omar Khayyam's "a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou", the 'thou' was likely a pretty Christian wine serving lad.) Similarly, Jesus’s “nothing that goes in your mouth makes you unclean” teaching was an attack on emphasizing form and mechanics over intent and effect on others.

But if you accept all of St Paul as canonical and authoritative, then, yes, there is a problem for queer Christians. Though the "we reject all of the Holiness Code except that bit" should be a bit of a give-away.

The problem is that the sexual logic of monotheism sees sex as separating us from the divine, except in procreation. And using God to strip people of moral (and other) protections is an obvious path for priests to get power and authority. Orthodox Judaism and Islam are full of it.

It is particularly easy for Christian priests and clerics if you fail to notice how Jesus's favourite target of denunciation in the Gospels are priests and religious teachers. (About which Jesus could manage vivid rant. Though Jeremiah had his moments.) Jesus seems to have been fairly clearly against using God to strip people of moral protections. That would seem to be the burden of how Jesus summarised his preaching. Hence the effort subsequently put into means of subverting love thy neighbour, which Philo was particularly useful for, since he did not adhere to it in the first place.

Avoidance

There are few markers of the pervasive intellectual dishonesty of much of the progressivist intelligentsia, than their willingness to state or imply other folk are fascists except for brown-skinned folk who actually are.

This thought was prompted by an engaging essay on cultural tensions in Iran. The essay takes a hopeful view that the mullahocracy is too antipathetic to powerful currents in modern Iranian culture to survive: a comforting thought.

It was the following passage which prompted the above thought:

Recent remarks by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, that Iran’s leaders in the last thirty years are all, in fact, Arabs and that their claims of being descendants of the prophet (symbolized by the black turbans they wear) reassert their Arab blood show clearly the continuing tensions between Persian identity and the Islamism of the rest of the Shia Middle East. Nasrallah needs to convince his followers thus that these Arab brothers have left nothing of a “Persian culture” to survive. These controversial comments indicate both the prevalence among ordinary Arabs of this view that Shiism might be an “un-Islamic invention”—and Iranian in origin. To justify his fealty to the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Nasrallah had to first make him an Arab.

That one of the sicknesses that infects Arab thought is self-conception as a master-race has long been clear. Indeed, dates as far back as the Ummayyad Caliphate. Yet the passage is a pertinent reminder, if one is aware of the wider context, of just how fascist Hezbollah (and, for that matter, Hamas) really is.

Of course, if one admits Hezbollah and Hamas are armed fascist movements, that makes Israel look better and one of the rules of much of the modern progressivist intelligentsia is that The Jewish State Is Always Wrong. Which is much easier to hold to if you romanticize its enemies rather than if you look at them in any sort of clear-eyed fashion (and not calling Hamas or Hezbollah fascist is romanticizing them).

The broader habit of romanticizing Israel’s enemies definitely extends to the Palestinians. So statements such as:

We are now in the 92nd year of a peace process in which the Palestinians are the first people in history to be offered a state seven times, reject it seven times, and set preconditions for discussing an eighth offer

are in incredibly bad form.

But the Western progressivist intelligentsia has long displayed, in Clive James’s lapidary phrase, “enormous resources of inattention”. Something that works overtime when it comes to received wisdom about the Middle East.

Still, such failing is hardly theirs alone. Abbas Milani’s own essay has a form of it. He makes much of Khomeini’s duplicity: promising sweetness and light when aspiring to power and cracking down savagely when he achieved it.

But Khomeini was, above all else, a Quranic literalist. He had the perfect example for such behaviour: the Prophet himself. Before power, Khomeini was acting as the Prophet of the Meccan suras spoke and acted. After achieving power, Khomeini acted as the Prophet of the Medinan suras spoke and acted, if in a modern context.

I have no doubt that Khomeini was a sincere follower of the Prophet. That included in his revolutionary strategy. But to admit that Khomeini was just following the Prophet’s example is to suggest a deep canker at the heart of Islam. And perhaps, even now, Milani just does not want to go there; at least not publicly.

About monotheism

This is derived from a comment I made in an email discussion group.


That there is a considerable amount of tendentious Catholic scholarship around is not news to anyone moderately well-read in history. Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce held that religions were incomplete philosophies because they could not tell the truth about the past: leaving aside entirely the issue of revelations and miracles, the problem of maintaining some moral and epistemic authority down the twisted path of events seems to be enough to cause problems. My favourite spectacle of such is various Catholic writers who end up attempting to argue (or, at least, strongly imply) that Western civilisation has been in decline since the Reformation: even on the simple metric of the proportion of the human population raised within the Catholic faith that is a nonsense, let alone if one applies wider criteria. It is one of those positions that, if you are left arguing for it, the time has come to examine one’s premises and, if you cannot bring yourself to do that, well, then, clearly Croce had a point.

It does not work to tell the story of the Reformation as either the noble Catholic defence of Christian tradition or the noble triumph of Protestantism. It was a time of appalling hatred and brutality. Those ignorant and naïve souls who claim that “Islam needs a Reformation” understand neither Islam (which is the belief in the authority of scripture On Steroids, With Boosters) nor the Reformation (historians still argue what percentage of the population of central Europe was killed or starved during the wars of religion, estimates ranging from about 15% to about a third with some regions losing up to 75% of their population). Europeans decided to generally eschew killing each other over religion in revulsion against having done so much of it and the realisation that neither side could overwhelm the other.

Wholesale slaughter of civilians only became the pattern of European history again when new sources of Absolute Moral Authority were imported into politics. But most of the techniques of totalitarianism were pioneered by the Catholic Church because totalitarianism is all about Absolute Moral Authority: in totalitarian states, commissars or gauleiters replace Papal legates, agitprop function as did friars and other Christian preachers, show trials replace auto de fe. We see propaganda, heresy hunts, inquisition, censorship, informers, even population culls: both the Albigensian crusade (1209-1229) and St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) foreshadowed the repression of the Vendee and the September massacres of the French Revolution. The problem with modern totalitarianism is not that it is Godless, but that it has substitute Gods, substitute Absolute Moral Authorities.

In the end, monotheism only comes in two versions: that which uses the authority of God to protect and succour one’s fellow humans and that which uses the authority of God to strip people of their moral protections. Most believers play both games, they just vary in how intensively and to whom they do it.

Priests, alas, get authority from using God to strip people of moral protections. It is notable that Jesus spends very little time in the Gospels preaching about the actions of temporal government and a great deal preaching against priestly power and the use of priestly rules and interpretations to strip people of moral protections. It makes priests inherently somewhat dubious vehicles for preaching the Gospel message: indeed, that tension – the doctrine of love thy neighbour being propagated by priests who get power and authority from subverting love thy neighbour so as to become the “gatekeepers of righteousness” – is, in many ways, the central dynamic of Christian history.

Taoism against forms

I once asked a friendly wizard (a disciple of the Archwizard) to summarise the difference between Buddhism and Taoism. He responded with this story:

The Tale of the Three Vinegar Tasters

Three sages (a Confucianist, a Buddhist and a Daoist) walk into a bar. There in the middle of the floor is a big cauldron. Sage 1 steps forward, says I'll handle this and takes a sip. "Ewww! It's sour!" quoth he and recoils from it.

Sage No.2 steps forward, has a taste and says yes. "It's bitter. But then, life itself is bitter, so it all fits really."

Sage No.3 has a taste and says "Hmmmmm. Probably REALLY good with fish and chips."

It made me laugh, but is also very Daoist, for it gave one much to ponder on very succinctly. About how to construe reality, and how to react to what we experience.

We are built to recognise patterns and structures – no learning (beyond that of each moment) or action would be possible if there were not patterns and structures to recognise and use – but there are many patterns and structures in nature to recognise. (Not to mention the varied ways we might react to particular ones.) It is an easy error, to give a recognised pattern or structure – particularly one that generates a strong reaction, either directly or due to powerful associations – more importance than is warranted by how reality is. (Or to think there is some definitively proper reaction to it.)

Aristotelianism, with its notion of defining forms – defining patterned structures – is particularly prone to this error, since it identifies forms in nature with forms in the mind: thereby claiming that our pattern and structure recognition is so perfect as to constitute identity between the pattern or structure-as-contained-in-the-mind and the pattern or structure in reality. For, if the form cannot be held in the mind, it cannot be defining in the way Aristotle wants it to be – particularly for his moral theory. Something that is too partial in its coverage, or too easy to be mistaken about, cannot generate moral obligations. This holdover from the Platonic insistence on the primacy of ideas is an error, for the process of abstraction that is the basis of thought is a taking from, it is not a taking of.

The Artistotelian error is two-fold. First, in seeing patterns and structures as forms: that is, as things which are defining in a separable way rather than specific aspects of a complex and unified reality. Being a table is part of what a table is, but it is only part of what structures any particular table. Our interactions with it are likely to be dominated by it being a table (and how useful it is as a table), but it being a table is not even remotely a complete definition of any particular table. Nor will our recognition of it as a table encapsulate either the full reality of a particular table or even our awareness of a particular table. (Taoist and Zen thought on how reality escapes from our words and categories is keenly aware of such problems.) As a prominent biologist has sagely noted, nature abhors a category: or, more accurately, reality is not contained by our categories. At best, it is partially described by them.

The second error follows from the first: having exaggerated the importance of what we grasp – indeed, the importance of a particular aspect of what we grasp – reality is then deemed to be able to be definitively judged and graded by that aspect. This turns up in all sorts of ways. For example, deeming what is simply a pattern in a particular culture to be defining.
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The familiar as definitive
St Paul, following in the footsteps of Philo of Alexandria (described by Josephus as one of the most eminent Jews of his day) in applying Greek natural law philosophy to the Judaic tradition of scriptural revelation, held that long hair is the glory of a woman but an unnatural shame in a man (1 Corinthians 11:13-15). For St Paul, if men let their hair grow, that is unnatural; but cutting it, that is natural (so Delilah was doing Samson a moral favour) – part of the function of hair being to help differentiate men from women. (Something that was very important to St Paul: St Paul-the-follower-of-Christ is in some tension with St Paul-the-follower-of-Philo-of-Alexandria.) Hair did indeed function, via particular usages, as a marker of gender in St Paul’s culture. (Philo thought that men who act like women should be put to death: something that St John Chrysostom, in his commentary on Paul’s epistles, agreed with.) But it is clearly nonsense to claim that such usages are a defining characteristic of human hair. St Paul has seized on the usage of hair he was familiar and comfortable with, and passed it off as defining of the nature of things in a way it is simply not.

A nice example of the same error is of Gerald of Aurillac meeting a woman working in the fields. Upon querying her, he found that her husband was sick and the work needed to be done. Gerald gave her money to engage a day labourer because

women should not do the work of men, for God has a horror of what is against nature.

As fine an example of nature meaning accepted background constraints (or the assumptions I am comfortable with) as one could hope to find. Once again, a specific cultural pattern is passed off as defining of the nature of things. If one expect things to have separably defining characteristics (rather than being an intersection of characteristics) and, what is more, have defining characteristics that determine inbuilt “proper” uses, it is a natural error to make.

A part not defining the whole
What St Paul and Gerald of Aurillac are doing in their statements is taking an aspect of something and exaggerating its importance. Aristotle on money and interest is a good example of the same error. In Aristotle’s view, money was sterile; it does not beget more money the way cows beget more cows. He held that "Money exists not by nature but by law" and that:

The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent.
Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural." (1258b Politics)

He especially disliked usurers:

...those who ply sordid trades, pimps and all such people, and those who lend small sums at high rates. For all these take more than they ought, and from the wrong sources. What is common to them is evidently a sordid love of gain..." (1122a, ETHICS)

Or, in the words of a sympathetic commentator:

Aristotle says that the usurer is the most unnatural of all practitioners of the art of money-making. The lending of money at interest is condemned as the most unnatural mode of acquisition. Aristotle insisted that money was barren. He did not comprehend that interest was payment for the productive use of resources made available by another person.

Money is a unit of account, a medium of exchange and a store of value – that is, it has possible future use as a medium of exchange. Delaying use of one’s money entails the risk of never getting to use it. Letting someone else have use of your money entails the risk of it failing to be fully returned. In both cases, the longer the delay, the greater the risk. Moreover, different borrowers, and different uses of the borrowed money, entail different levels of risk. Interest is a perfectly reasonable charge, a price, for the use of (someone else’s) money. It has the same moral issues as other prices: no more, no less.

What Aristotle has done is focused on a feature of money, treated it as fully defining and inferred a congenial conclusion from that. Coins are, indeed, physically sterile. Nor is this accidental, they are made of things that have strong physical stability across time because that aids money’s function as a medium of exchange: we accept money in exchange because we can use it in the future. Aristotle’s belief that the form in his head is defining of the function of the thing in the world has led him astray.

Aquinas followed Aristotle (“the Philosopher”) in incorrect construal of what is entailed by the use of money as a medium of exchange:

Now according to the Philosopher, money was invented principally for the effecting of exchanges; and thus the proper and principal use of money is the consumption or disbursal of it, according as it is expended on exchanges.
… that a man may take a price for what he is not bound to do; but a man with money is not in every case bound to lend it,—it is to be said that he who is not bound to lend may receive compensation for what he has done in lending, but ought not to exact more. But compensation is given him according to the equality of justice, if the exact amount is returned to him that he has lent. Hence if he exacts more for the use of a thing that has no other use than the consumption of the substance, he exacts a price for that which has no existence, and so the exaction is unjust.

Aquinas has just replicated Aristotle’s error. Which is the same error of St Paul on hair and Gerald of Aurillac on work. Focus on one aspect of something, declare it to be defining of proper purpose and make incorrect inferences about proper use there from.

The entire Catholic and Orthodox teaching on sexuality is also based on this error. It focuses on the fact that sex can be used for reproduction and takes that to be defining of sex (and, for that matter, of humans and of marriage). As biologist Johan Roughgarten points out, that is simply not how sex (or, for that matter, gender) works in nature. (Or marriage across the breadth of human societies.)

Congenial excluding
But such references to how things are in nature, or how people are (sexually varied), is completely unpersuasive against upholders of the natural law tradition, since the Aristotelian can (and does) simply dismiss any manifestation of reality as “aberrant” if it fails to conform to what has been decided has defining importance. In doing so – by allowing one’s conclusion to select its premises, to define contradicting facts as not evidence – the conclusion is insulated from rebuttal. So, you can claim that marriage is defined by procreation: that many cultures have had same-sex marriage does not count. Thus does the “nature of reality” “demonstrate” your conclusion, given any part of reality that fails to do so is “aberrant” and does not count. This is, no doubt, very consoling (and is extremely convenient for using philosophy to support religious doctrine). But it should not be confused with genuine understanding of reality. Or, for that matter, genuine compassion: which is grounded in people as they are – in all their variety and complexity – not whether they conform to your grading definitions of what a person “properly” is. Such blindness about reality can be the basis of great harm: as, of course, it is.

The example of usury is a very revealing example. In medieval economic thought the attack on usury was based on biblical texts such as Leviticus25:36 (or Exodus 22:25, Deutoronomy 23:19, various passage in Ezekiel 18 and Ezekiel 22:13) and the Sermon on the Mount, particularly Luke 6:35.

As ever, there are issues of scriptural translation and interpretation. The Parable of the Talents, including the version in Luke, suggested that interest itself was fine while the above passages have been variously translated as being against any charging of interest or only excessive charging of interest.

But, in medieval Catholic doctrine, usury was a mortal sin – depriving the sinner of salvation – and was a form of theft (it stole God’s time and took from the borrower, via the charging of interest, what was not the lender’s). Money, Scholastic doctrine held, was sterile so the notion of it being fruitful was unnatural. The overall presumption was that the usurer gained, illegitimately, from the borrower. By focusing on the relevant aspect of reality as definitive, conclusions congenial to the prevailing scriptural conclusion were reached.

All of which makes the scholastic attack on usury an excellent example of problems with natural law theory. Take a reductionist view of something’s form (money is round metal objects with no inherent generative power), and therefore its use (purely for exchange for goods), ignoring wider context (money is a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account whose use promotes gains from trade: while one has money, one has use of it; in loaning it, one is depriving oneself of alternative uses: use of it includes investing in productive assets). Declare use (earning interest) outside that reductive characterisation to be against the nature of something (money-as-sterile, money-is-for-exchange) and therefore illegitimate (in this case, thieving usury). Reaching the conclusion that doctrine wants.

This, needless to say, is exactly what is done with human sexuality.

Retreating towards reality
Unlike the victims of natural law theory of sexuality, bankers and money-lenders had powerful claims on the attention of the Church: not least because the Popes were both lenders and borrowers. So commentators began to feel the story was more complicated than charging-interest-is-the-thieving-sin-of-usury.

Hence the development of the theory of interest, as medieval commentators wrestled with commercial reality and issues such as risk, loss of use, delay and so forth. Which culminated in Pope Leo X, at the Fifth Lateran Council, (in the bull Inter Multiplices) ruling it was legitimate to take interest from the beginning of a loan and that:

Usury means nothing else than gain or profit drawn from the use of a thing that is by its nature sterile, a profit that is acquired without labour, cost or risk.

Which undermined most of the basics of the theory of usury. Loans were no longer free, time could (by implication) be sold. By implication, labour, cost or risk could make money fruitful. Use implied that ownership did not pass to the borrower, separating ownership from use (as with leasing a house or other asset). All that was left was a totally idle lender making an effortless profit with usurious intent. (But, by that stage, the Reformation was underway and the biblically-minded Protestants were to keep the usury debate alive.)

One can see some of the same pattern of retreat in face of reality over sex: the Catholic Church has a clear decision principle – maintaining the authority of the priesthood is the first priority. Clement of Alexandria claimed that any sexual act not undertaken with the intent of procreation “outraged nature”. Thomas Aquinas, more lenient, that all sexual acts had to be (potentially procreative to be legitimate:

there is the "vice against nature," which attaches to every venereal act from which generation cannot follow.

Which would bar sterile husbands or post-menopausal women from having sex. A strong interest group, so, according to the Catholic Church, it is fine if the procreative form is followed, even if procreation is not possible. (Any sex that does not involve a penis ejaculating into a vagina is out, however, since human intentions and aspirations are entirely subordinate to the form, the mechanics, of what we do sexually: the mechanics of sex is not merely a moral principle, it is a trumping moral principle.) This is not only form and function (i.e. sexual mechanics) trumping consent, it is form trumping function trumping consent. Hence Aquinas defines sex “against nature” as being worse than rape and medieval punishments for “sodomy” were typically more severe than those for rape. (It also runs into the small problem that Jesus did not think barrenness was grounds for divorce: thereby failing to define marriage by procreative purpose.)

All this intellectual superstructure is built on fundamental error about how patterns and structure work in nature, and our ability to indentify and infer from them. Forms do not define things, they define – at best – aspects of things. Our appreciations of pattern and structure are not identical with actual pattern and structure in the wider reality. We therefore cannot reliably apprehend some defining function of things so as to determine proper use sufficient to determine moral obligations.

Pattern, structure and humility
That things have pattern and structure is clearly true, and has to be for learning (beyond the most momentary) and action. This is why the universe can be expressed mathematically, can be expressed by the science of pattern and structure. But such mathematical expression is only expressing aspects of things, aspects of reality. The endless (2,500 years old and counting) philosophical problem of universals is built on an erroneous framing. On trying to turn pattern and structure into something it is not – something in itself or, at least, separably defining – and taking that framing as the only way to construe pattern and structure so that nominalism (that being individual things somehow excludes sharing patterns or recurring structures) is the only alternative. Pattern and structure is pervasive, it is just not separably and fully defining.

And we are built to recognise patterns and structures. As we have to be to function effectively as acting-with-cognition beings: consider how much successful such functioning there has to be to make a vast, technologically effective society – with its myriad interactions between people and with the world – to work. But thinking is not a process of identical apprehension of those patterns and structures in any sense that means we can fully define reality by some particular set of them.

We need to be more like the Daoist sage: more open to the reality and possibilities of things, less convinced that we can define in a way that excludes other perspectives. This does not abandon understanding, morality or compassion. On the contrary, if provides far more basis for all three, since we open ourself up more to what there is to discover, and how to act properly – particularly properly towards others – because we take them seriously as they are. That we do not, for example, take some narrow framing of what it is to be human, and of the nature of human aspirations, so as to cast millions of other fellow humans, and their aspirations, outside the realm of the “properly” human. We are not that “clever” and it is a profound arrogance to think we, or our theories, are so.

Why Latin Christendom overtook Islam (and Orthodox Christendom)

Scholars and others write about the golden age of Islam, how it created a brilliant, urban and urbane, sophisticated and scientifically curious civilisation when Latin Christendom was sunk in a Dark Age.

This is broadly true. Islam was the crossroads civilisation, the one in touch with all the other major civilisations of Eurasia, and so able to mix and match ideas. It had access to the achievements of Greek science. It had a common language of scholarship (Arabic). It used these advantages in a flourishing period of Classical Islam. Then Islam declined into a spreading stagnation—intellectual, scientific, technological, economic. So, the question arises, as Bernard Lewis famously asked, what went wrong?

What did not go wrong was the West. With exception of the Reconquista, Islam spent a thousand years generally advancing against Christendom until the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The stagnation of Islam was not caused by the West: on the contrary, it was the stagnation of Islam that allowed the West to counter-attack successfully and conquer most of Islam, to the extent that, by 1942, the only Islamic countries which were not protectorates or colonies were Turkey and Afghanistan. Even in 1453, when Sultan Mehmet II was about to take Constantinople, he was using guns which relied on infidel gunners.

So, what advantages did Latin Christendom, perched on a bunch of peninsulas on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, have?

The key factors are:
A range of political forms.
A range of legal forms.
Stronger use of the hereditary principle.
Effective competitive jurisdictions.
Belief in an ordered cosmos.
Ability to harness talent.

Most of these applied to also advantage Latin Christendom over Orthodox Christendom, which had the further disadvantage of suffering far more from Islamic and Mongol depredations.
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A range of political forms
Islam essentially only had one political model: autocracy. The autocrat might merely be a warrior king, or he might be able to claim extra religious sanction, but all Muslim rulership was autocratic. By contrast, Latin Christendom had republics, self-governing cities, hereditary monarchies and elective monarchies that varied notably within themselves and typically came to incorporate the representative principle, as it spread from the innovations of Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile. This political variety meant that Latin Christendom had far more institutional possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on.

A range of legal forms
Although Islam has a variety of schools of jurisprudence, it has only one basic set of laws, Shar’ia. While Islamic law was taken to come from God, in Latin Christendom, all law was human, even canon law. Latin Christendom had a wide range of legal system and laws, all of which were alterable. Latin Christendom had far more possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on plus the capacity to engage in legal experiments far more easily.

Stronger use of the hereditary principle
Not only was the hereditary principle much more widespread in Latin Christendom, applying strongly throughout the political and social structure, so much more stable across the society (since those who might attack hereditary suzerains were themselves holding their lands and service on the basis of the hereditary principle). It was also, with the evolution of primogeniture, much more stable in its internal operation within dynasties and landed families.

In Islam, warriors held tax farming rights, not lands, and these rights were revocable at any time, and were not heritable, being allocated according to the whim of the ruler. Amin Malouf contrasts the situation where peaceful succession occurred moderately regularly in the crusader states with the surrounding Muslim states thus:

Nothing of the sort existed in the Muslim states. Every monarchy was threatened by the death of its monarch, and every transmission of power provoked civil war … Let us note that in the Arab world the question is still on the agenda, in scarcely altered terms, in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Being landlords, the warrior elite of Latin Christendom had, compared to the Muslim warrior elite, much more interest in the long-term productivity of land and peasants, since that preserved (and hopefully expanded) their children(s) inheritance (what economists call longer time horizons).

Muslim traveller and chronicler ibn Jubayr noticed the difference, again contrasting the crusader states of Outremer with their Muslim neighbours:

Upon leaving Tibin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj—may God preserve us from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lots to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.

Incentives make a difference. There will be more investment in the creation and maintenance of productive assets, and better relations with people working those assets, the longer the time horizon of those controlling said assets. Over centuries, even a marginal difference in such things generation after generation will add up to major differences in economic outcomes and institutional development.

Effective competitive jurisdictions
Rulership in the Muslim world was autocratic. It was also unstable. The pattern of pastoralist conquest of settled river valleys establishing regimes which decay and are then replaced, as described by ibn Khaldun—and whose dynamics have been further explicated by more recent anthropological work, particularly by Phillip Carl Salzman—created fluctuating and unstable rulerships. This was not a good basis for institutional evolution. In particular, it was not a good basis for competitive jurisdictions to operate effectively in driving institutional development. Particularly once most of the Muslim Middle East became dominated by Ottoman rule.

Contrasting with the Middle Eastern pattern of isolated river valleys and coastal plains constantly threatened by nomadic hinterlands, Europe—as a mountainous peninsula of peninsulas, which inhibited unification ambitions while promoting the flow of ideas, goods, people and capital—had greater continuity in polities and in jurisdictional divisions. Competitive jurisdictions operated over time to develop institutions that embodied social learning including stronger defense of private property, more dispersed power arrangements driven by competition amongst jurisdictions to attract capital (financial, human, etc).

The same processes operated in the mountainous archipelago of Japan, but with less variety in law, political forms and cultural influences to work with. The Reformation—with its creation of greater religious variety—and the global break-out with the age of exploration making Latin Christendom the crossroads civilisation—the one in contact with all the others so able to mix and match ideas and capacities—magnified the effectiveness of competitive jurisdictions in driving technological, commercial and institutional development.

Belief in an ordered cosmos
From the C11th to the C13th centuries, all three of the Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) struggled with the impact of Aristotelian philosophy on the tradition of scriptural revelation. In Judaism (as epitomised by Maimonedes) and in Christianity (as epitomised by St Thomas Aquinas) Aristotelianism—and the belief in an ordered creation—won.

Not so in Islam. There the Aristotelianism of Ibn Rushd aka “Averroes” (whose writings were very influential in Latin Christendom) was decisively defeated by the occasionalism of al Ghazali. Mainstream Islam turned its back on the notion of an ordered cosmos, without which the further development of science is impossible. Even in contemporary Islam, there are continuing difficulties with science and a low rate of research and development.

I would argue that this outcome in Islam was significantly driven by the context of tribal society and predatory autocracy encouraging a particular conception of God whereby to suggest He was bounded in any way was a slight on His honour. Conversely, the notion of God—as the ultimate Good Authority—creating a structured order rather than being an arbitrary tyrant fitted in with Classical, Germanic, Celtic and (ultimately) Christian and Jewish notions of proper authority. Though, in both Christianity and Judaism, there were adherents of untrammelled Godly authority, these have always tended to lose out over time.

This belief in an ordered cosmos, assisted by the religious diversity after the Reformation (where priestly control over printing in Catholic Europe encouraged printing of banned books in Protestant Europe), the reaction against the Wars of Religion, plus the wealth of information brought back by the voyages of discovery and by exploration of the cosmos undermining Aristotelian physics, set the stage for the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and—coupled with the long-term effects of competitive jurisdictions and the diversity and forces for productiveness feeding into that—to Western economic, technological, intellectual and (for a while) territorial domination of the globe.

Ability to utilise talent
‘Islam’ literally means ‘submission’. A Muslim is ‘one who submits’. That is, submits to the word (and rule) of God. The trouble is, Islam is a system of layered submission, which turns it into a system of domination: believers dominate non-believers under the dhimmi system, men dominate women. In Latin Christendom, women were rulers and generals (Æthelflæd, Lady of Mercia, Mathilda of Tuscany), intellectual figures (Hildegard of Bingen), saints (Theresa of Avila), writers (Marie de France, Christine de Pizan) and so on in ways that were simply not true of Islam at the same time. There were far more women rulers in Middle Eastern history before Islam conquered the region than after.

Germanic law, Celtic law, Roman law before Christianisation all treated women much better than did Sharia. Even after Christianisation, Roman law and canon law were still better for women than Sharia. Which meant that Latin Christendom was better at harnessing the skills of its women than was Islam. As George Patton observed:

To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Muhammad and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing.

Latin Christendom used female talent much more than did Islam, an advantage that has accelerated over time.

In embracing new knowledge and technology, Latin Christendom became Western Civilisation. As a result of the Enlightenment, Western Civilisation also began to harness the skills of its Jewish population in ways that Islam had long since abandoned and far more than Islam had ever done. Consider simply how many Jews have won Nobel Prizes, particularly in science.

Islam as a system of domination
Classical Islam was far more tolerant (at least outside Arabia), and far better at harnessing the talents of conquered dhimmis, than later Islam. That was due to the shift in the costs of intolerance. When Muslims were a small ruling layer over a majority non-Muslim population, the costs of intolerance were high. As Muslims became a larger and larger proportion of the population, the costs of intolerance fell and its level rose. The long-term tendency of Islam has been to become less tolerant, not more. Ottoman rule was the most murderously intolerant at the end of its rule, not the beginning. Just as the Jews fled the Muslim Middle East after the creation of Israel, so Christians have also been leaving.

Which means that Islam is less and less able to harness the talents and perspectives of non-believers (except as guest workers).

One can see similar patterns within Latin Christendom of intolerance increasing as its costs fell (Norman-cum-Hohenstaufen Sicily; Reconquista Spain with the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscos) but the dominant long-term tendency in Western civilisation has been very much the other way.

Winston Churchill, in his book on the Sudan campaign of 1898, The River War, famously wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.
Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

There is something in what Churchill says. Islam is a universal monotheism without the softening factors of “love thy neighbour”, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and natural law theory. The things that saved Christianity from itself do not operate in Islam. One will search in vain for a text in Islam of similar sentiments and similar authority as Pope Paul III’s 1537 encyclical Sublimus Dei:

… to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

It is clearly in the intellectual tradition that fed into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Something that has not escaped the attention of, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran:

In his 7 December 1984 statement to the UN General Assembly's Third Committee, the Iranian representative, Mr. Rajaie-Khorassani, again put on record his country's position on the UDHR:

In his delegation's view, the concept of human rights was not limited to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Man was of divine origin and human dignity could not be reduced to a series of secular norms [...] certain concepts contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights needed to be revised. [Iran] recognized no authority or power but that of Almighty God and no legal tradition apart from Islamic law. As his delegation had already stated at the thirty-sixth session of the General Assembly, conventions, declarations and resolutions or decisions of international organizations, which were contrary to Islam had no validity in the Islamic Republic of Iran.[...] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which represented a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition, could not be implemented by Muslims and did not accord with the system of values recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran; his country would therefore not hesitate to violate its provisions, since it had to choose between violating the divine law of the country and violating secular conventions.

Islamic countries have felt the need to adjust the Declaration, issuing the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. It is precisely the universalism of the Universal Declaration (identified as “Judaeo-Christian”) that is objected to on Islamic grounds. (That there is an Organisation of Islamic Conference is revealing in itself: no one thinks to have an organization of Christian, Catholic or Buddhist states, for example.)

It is worth noting that as soon as the “love thy neighbour” precept is subverted, the behaviour of Christianity converges with that of Islam as the dynamics of universal monotheism—of supporting a (masculinized) divine sovereignty against which no human claims have standing—take over. Hence the Christian origins of dhimmitude, Georgian and Regency England and C18th Netherlands killing men for having sex at about the same rate as that of contemporary Iran as well as common law denial of property and other legal rights of married women.

Or sometimes even more so than in Islam. Consider the famous reaction of the Ottoman Sultan regarding the tens of thousands of Jews whose wealth and skills were now his to benefit from after Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Jews:

How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?

(Note the Sultan apparently does not consider Isabella worth noting as a ruler in her own right.)

Still, in its purest form, gospel Christianity bans one from using God to oppress one’s fellow human beings. In its purest form, the Islam of the Qur’an and the hadith permits, indeed requires, believers to use God to oppress their fellow human beings. People being people, Christians have often done precisely that, while many Muslims have failed to do so. But the underlying logics remain what they are.

Indeed, the most important dynamic in Christian history is that priests are the means by which Christianity is propagated but priests get their power from being “gatekeepers of righteousness”, from subverting love thy neighbour so that they can say who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down. Hence it is very apposite that the patron saint of preachers was a queer-hating, Jew-hating misogynist. That dynamic of propagating-but-subverting is at the heart of Christian history. Christ, after all, was crucified for subverting and denying priestly authority—what were the moneylenders in the Temple if not use of God to oppress one’s fellow humans?

The Quakers rejection of priesthood may not be coincidental to their very positive reputation. [Just as the oppressive history of the Catholic Church owes so much to its very elevated notion of priesthood.]

Plague and knowledge
The point is sometimes made that Islam suffered particularly from the effects of the Black Death. But, of course, so did Latin Christendom. The difference was that the Black Death in Middle Eastern Islam led to the undermining of commercial vitality and increased autocratic domination. Conversely, the Black Death in Latin Christendom had reverse effects: leading to more technological dynamism, commercialisation and mercantile power.

Similarly, Latin Christendom made massively more use of becoming the cross-roads civilisation than Islam had when it was so. Indeed, the exploration efforts of Prince Henry the Navigator, and Isabella’s sponsorship of Christopher Columbus, were both specifically aimed at outflanking Islam. At which they were spectacularly successful. (Henry and Isabella both being crusaders.)

The only reason the Muslim Middle East matters nowadays is because of oil: itself parasitic on Western technology. There are a lot of reasons for the long-term failure of Islam, but they are internal to Islam—to Islam as a religion and to the geography that created and moulded it. And oil itself is a curse as much as a blessing, since it entrenches autocratic rule and funds religious obscurantism in the same way silver flows undermined Iberian parliamentarism and entrenched autocracy and funded religious obscurantism in Spain and Portugal.

What is Middle Eastern Islam without oil? Try Afghanistan, or Yemen, or Pakistan, or Egypt. An American soldier makes the point very bluntly:

Had the Crusades not been waged; had the Habsburg Monarchy not turned back the Ottoman tide at the end of the 17th Century; had Isabel of Castile not driven the Moors from Grenada, you would not be reading this diatribe. You would be illiterate, ruled by a tyrant, and squatting on the dirt floor of a mud-brick shack picking your nose.

Perhaps the prospect of Muslim domination of Latin Christendom was not quite that much a near run thing. But its consequences would have been fairly grim. I doubt geography would have been enough, on its own, to counteract the other factors. As V.S.Naipaul observed, Islam is very thorough in its colonising of conquered lands.

All of which makes modernity very confronting for contemporary Islam. Hence the rise of Islamism and jihadi terror as modernising revolts against modernity both within Islamic countries and among Muslim émigré communities. Just as fascism and Nazism were modernising revolts against modernity in the period 1919-1945. Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Iranian regime are the equivalents of the NSDAP and similar movements.

No Islamic country has comparable power now to that of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in the 1930s, but the organising and destructive capacities of modern technology provide their own level of threat. And there are far less bases inherent within Islam both for a full embracing of modernity, or to oppose said modernising revolts against modernity.

The reasons why Islam stagnated and Latin Christendom did not—indeed, came, as Western Civilisation, to dominate the globe—still operate. And continue to generate policy dilemmas.

ADDENDA This post has been edited to clarify and extend (but not change) arguments.

It is not a Reformation that Islam needs

This extends a comment I made here.



The process of local cultures invading Christianity has also occurred in Islam. The Sufi traditions were full of that. But the effect is far more limited in Islam than in Chrisitianity, as Islamic reformers come through periodically and "purify" Islam by returning to the texts. When people say "Islam needs a Reformation" it shows they understand neither Islam nor the Reformation. Getting rid of "pagan" accretions and going back to the original texts WAS precisely what the Reformation was about and occurs in Islam regularly.

As Mark Durie points out about the Protestant Reformation:

Throughout the whole medieval period the idea of reformation (reformatio) was prestigious, and many reform movements chased after this ideal. Reformation meant going back to one's roots, and just about everyone agreed that this was a Good Thing. For medieval Christians, a reformed Christianity meant being more Christ-like, more apostolic, and more Pauline. …
The European Reformation - so often invoked in comparisons with Islam today - was driven by a desire to re-form Christianity a second time, taking it back to its roots. It sought to move ahead by going backwards. Its inner logic had nothing to do with the modern idea of progress or the Darwinian concept of 'evolution'. The Reformation was not a 'progressive' movement in the modern sense, but one which sought to 'regress', renewing the example of Christ and his apostles.
This is why Luther and other reformers encouraged believers to read their Bibles for themselves, in their own native tongue. Luther regarded it as the duty of every Christian to be constantly renewing their own faith from the original sources.

What Islam lacks is not Protestant belief in the primacy of scripture—on the contrary, Islam holds to that more strongly than the most fervid Protestant—but the Orthodox/Catholic notion of scripture as a product of the Church (the body of believers) and the world, as the direction creation of God, trumping Scriptures, as the indirect creation of God.

Conversely, Islam entirely lacks the Protestant notion of final interpreting authority residing in the believers and their consciences. Instead, it has a more "Catholic/Orthodox" view of final interpreting authority residing in the scholars, the ulema.

To put it another way, Islam combines the worst features of the Christian traditions (textual literalism and trumping clerical authority) and lacks the best features (this-world-based reasoning and individual conscience: the modern Western synthesis).

It is precisely because modern Western civilisation has largely dropped the authority of scripture and of priests while marrying Protestant notions of governance to Catholic/Orthodox notions of reasoning-grounded-in-this-world being not merely a but the source of truth, that the gap between Western civilisation and Islam is, in crucial respects, wider than it was between Christendom and Islam. At the same time, the capacity of Western examples and ideas has—due to communication and transport technology—to intrude into Islam greatly magnified.

Clash of civilisations (and other frictions) anyone?

This gap also makes it harder for Muslims to integrate into Western society: particularly if multiculturalist welfarism operates to systematically undermine any incentive to do so. As the work of Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels (long interview here, another here and another here) brings out rather starkly:

A French survey in Le Figaro showed that only 14 percent of the country's estimated five million Muslims see themselves as "more French than Muslim." Research (pdf) made by the German Ministry of Interior shows that only 12 percent of Muslims living in Germany see themselves as more German than Muslim. A Danish survey published by the pro-Muslim pro-democratic organization Democratic Muslims led by the Danish PM and Muslim Naser Khader showed that only 14 percent of Muslims living in Denmark could identify themselves as "Democratic and Danish."

A major sign of the failure of such integration in Europe is that younger generations of Muslims are generally more committed to their Muslim identity—one typically manifested against the surrounding Western societies—than their parents.

A poll published in February 2006 of British Muslims found that 40% supported the introduction of Shar’ia in parts of the UK while 41% opposed that: a December 2006 poll found support for Shar’ia was much stronger among British Muslims aged 16-24 [37%] than those over 55 [15%].) The latter poll also found that British Muslims over 55 were more likely to agree (56%) than to disagree (28%) that people in their area were more religious than 10 years ago. While those aged 16-24 were significantly more likely to rate religion as the most important thing in their life (90%) than those over 55 (76%); much more likely to support Muslim women wearing veils (74% to 28%), more likely to support making homosexuality illegal (71% to 50%), to think apostasy should be punished by death (36% to 19%), to support polygamy for Muslim men (52% to 18%), to think a Muslim woman should not marry without consent of her guardian (57% to 33%) and to admire organizations such as al-Qaeda that fight against the West (13% to 3%). (It is worth noting that 80% of 16-24 year old and 92% of over 55 British Muslims in the poll disagreed that al-Qaeda was to be admired.)

What generates these differences is not the lack of a Reformation, the lack of going back to Scriptures, but precisely the process of doing exactly that, of seeing the Qur’an, the hadith and the life of Muhammad as the source of moral knowledge and guidance. Of going back to the “roots” of Islam, precisely as the Reformation sought to do with Christianity.

Consider the comments of a prominent American Muslim, quoted here:

Dr. Ingrid Mattson, the woman who was invited by Hussein Obama to represent Muslims in the interfaith prayer of the Democrats Presidential convention, and who is the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), when asked whether Wahhabism is an extreme right wing sect of Islam, responded:

No it’s not true to characterize ‘Wahhabism’ that way. This is not a sect. It is the name of a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries. It really was analogous to the European protestant reformation.

Mark Durie again:

Australian Muslim Waleed Aly was entirely correct when he said Islam has already had its Reformation, and the outcome has been Islamic radicalism:

"Still, Western calls for an Islamic Reformation grow predictably and irrepressibly stronger, while those familiar with the Islamic tradition easily observe that radical and terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida and the Taliban, cannot be cured by Reformation for the very simple fact that they are the Reformation." [People like us: how arrogance is dividing Islam and the West, p.xv].

For those today whose world view is shaped by the ideal of progress, and look out upon Islam peering through the frame of Western assumptions about 'backwardness', 'progress' and 'evolution', Waleed Aly's insight can be difficult to grasp. Yet it is essential that it be understood and appreciated.
In today's world, if what is needed is more moderate manifestation of Islam, then the very last thing that could ever accomplish this would be an Islamic Reformation.

When Westerners say “Islam needs a Reformation”, what they typically mean is that they want Islam to go through an Enlightenment, to turn into something like post-Enlightenment Western religion. But they typically forget what Europe went through that “tamed” religion and religious claims. Worse, they fail to understand that the strands in Christianity that the modern Western synthesis is based on are absent from Islam. Worse still, they often lack any serious commitment to the virtues of the (sceptical) Enlightenment, and to (sceptical) Enlightenment values, while opposing the creation of serious incentives to encourage Muslim integration and Islamic adjustment.

They typically suffer under the cognitive flaws that George Santayana found in Bertrand Russell, of whom Santayana wrote:

His outlook was universal, but his presuppositions were insular.

It is a great foolishness, to burble on about the values of different cultures and then not take cultural (indeed, civilisational) differences seriously, as if somehow your particular presuppositions are some incipient human universal, just waiting to burst forth in all folk. As if you are not a product of specific history, while others are products of very different histories: differences that cannot be simply assumed to be inherently reconcilable. It is one thing to think a variety of cognitive perspectives aid decision-making (which, up to a point at least, the evidence is they do): it is another to presume they all embody some deep, ultimately conforming, unity.

It is not a Reformation that Islam lacks: Islam is experiencing an imported modernity while lacking much of what modernity grew out of in the West, making modernity an even more alien experience. Islam is the other universalist civilization, and operates on very different premises. Those different premises need to be taken seriously: to be not either wished away or treated as immutable features of human reality. For they matter to the extent that people act on them, so it is how people think about them that drives their significance.

As Muslim apostate Ali Sina points out, the difference between the Reformation in Christianity and Reformation in Islam is that there are some very real differences in the messages of the Gospels, New Testament and life of Jesus compared to the Qur’an, the hadith and the life of Muhammad:

What is the essence of the reformation in Islam? The essence of the Wahhabi belief is that man is not free but a slave of Allah. People are Ibad. (slaves)
This is diametrically a different discourse from the discourse of Protestantism and here is the essential difference between Christianity and Islam.
On the surface, there are many similarities between Christianity and Islam. Both believe in a God, both rely on an intermediary between man and God, both faiths are eschatological - have a hell, a heaven and an afterlife, etc. However, in their core, they are very different, in fact opposite to one another. The reformatio of both these faiths took the same road, but seaking [sic] the origin of their faith, they went opposite directions. Islam is not a continuation of Christianity, as Muhammad and Muhammadns claim, but it is an anti Christian belief in its core. Christianity advocates freedom of man, Islam, his slavery. One brings the message of liberation, the other, of submission.

(Ali Sina also argues there is not such thing as moderate Islam, only Muslims who do not wish to buy the whole package.)

I understand the temptation to try and “re-imagine” Islam, but such “re-imagining” is potentially disastrous if it is based on wishful thinking rather than accurate understanding.

ADDENDA Mark Durie has a post on the problems of reformation in Islam, particularly for women.

The Third Choice 2

This is the second part of my review of Rev. Dr. Mark Durie’s The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom, a book on treatment of non-Muslims in Islam. The Rev. Dr Durie is a former academic (linguistics) and Anglican (Episcopalian) preacher. The review started in my previous post and concludes in my next post.


Grading people
Having set out the basics of Islam (more thoroughly and clearly than I have seen done elsewhere), Durie moves on to the main part of the book, an examination of what Islam means for non-Muslims. Part of how Islam defines itself is against other faiths and their followers: particularly Christians and Christianity and Jews and Judaism. People are graded according to their submission to Islam. In Durie's words:

Islamic legal terminology makes reference to four different religious categories:
1. First and foremost there are genuine Muslims.
2. Then there is another category called hypocrites, who are renegade Muslims.
3. Idolators were the dominant category among Arabs before Muhammad appeared. The word for ‘idolator’ is mushrik, which literally means ‘associater’. These are people who commit shirk ‘association’ (from which the word mushrik is derived), which means saying that anyone or anything is like Allah.
4. The ‘People of the Book’ are a subcategory of mushrik. This category includes Christians and Jews. They must be considered mushrik, because the Quran names both Christians and Jews as being guilty of shirk ‘association’ for claiming that Allah has a son:

The Jews say, ‘Ezra is the Son of Allah’;
the Christians say ‘The Messiah is the Son of Allah.’(Q9:30) (Pp44-5).

So Muslims are committed to the idea that the perfect Qur’an is being truthful when it makes a claim that is not true, since Judaism claims no such thing about Ezra.

Islam is regarded as the original and eternally true revelation. One that was given to Jews and Christians as well, but they distorted it and have strayed from the path. Muhammad was Allah’s gift to Christians and Jews to correct their misunderstandings. Hence, according to the Qur’an, genuine Jews and Christians will become Muslims (Q3:199). While both Jews and Christians are treated negatively in the Qur’an, the Jews fare worse. Either way, Durie writes:

Condemnation is manifested in key theological claims, and incorporated into the daily prayers of every observant Muslim (p.45)

As Islamic commentary makes quite clear (Pp46-7).

Durie summarises the Qur’anic theology of non-Muslims in a series of propositions:

1. Christian and Jews who cling to their errors and fail to submit to Islam will go to hell (Q98:6).
2. Muslims are superior to other people and have the role of instructing them (Q3:110).
3. Islam’s destiny is to rule over all other religions (Q48:28).
4. To achieve this ascendancy, Muslims have to fight against Jews and Christians until they are defeated and humbled (Q9:29).
5. In the end-times, Christianity and Judaism will be destroyed (hadith).
6. There are also a range of (highly negative) theological claims about Jews (Pp47-9).

What this means for the attitudes and behaviour of individual Muslims will vary widely yet treatment of non-Muslims keeps returning to these Islamic foundations. In particular, Shar’ia requires an Islamized society: the consensus of Muslim scholars for centuries (p.49).

This flows from the nature of Muhammad as exemplar:

The simple theological explanation is that in his person Muhammad combined religious, political, juridical and military authority for the early Islamic community, and since Muhammad’s example is the best example, making no distinction between religion and politics has become normative for all Muslims (p.50).

Hence orthodox Islam has always taught that Shar’ia should be the basis of the state: something most Muslims still believe:

From this perspective, Islam is not just a religion, but a total way of life for a nation (p.50)

Which means that Islam does not conform to the standard Western notion of a religion, given that the religions Westerners have most experience with (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism) do not make such claims. Islam needs to be seen in its own terms, not as we might complacently project onto it.

Of course, the mullahocracy of Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sudan and Saudi Arabia—the most emphatic modern examples of trying to make Shar’ia the basis of society—are hardly model societies. Yet there is a strong strain of contemporary Islamic thought which argues that Islam—and specifically Shar’ia rule—will solve the problems of modernity. The salafi claim that what is needed is to get back to the original forms of Islam, rejecting “human accretions” in the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Durie is deeply sceptical of as a practical project, arguing it will either fail or create more of the same “human accretions” (Pp50-51).

One of the profound differences between Christianity and Islam is that the Gospels are a “public truth”, able to be read in an afternoon. The exemplary life of Muhammad, by contrast, is much more scattered in sources and usually requires literacy in classical Arabic. Which means that Muslims are highly dependant on religious scholars for basic details of their religion. Durie points out that there is a tendency to sanitize aspects of Muhammad’s life in the derivative sources. Often, Muslims themselves are ignorant of details and react with shock and denial when they are publicised: this without direct spreading of disinformation, such as highly selective presentations of Muhammad’s relations with non-believers (Pp52ff).
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Durie spends considerable effort detailing how Islam has (to use my term) an instrumental morality. That is, advancing submission to Allah is the overriding goal, so actions that facilitate that—including deception—are lawful. Durie makes it clear that deceptive behaviour towards non-Muslims is a recurring pattern and sanctioned by Islam (Pp56ff). As he points out, such a “utilitarian” ethic about truth-telling and lying is ethically damaging in its consequences (Pp8-9). A concern for truth not only connects one to how reality is, it creates a basis for common criteria of judgement. If truth as a norm is systematically sacrificed to some “higher goal”, there is no arbiter but power.

When Aristotelianism defeated its opponents in Latin Christendom and Judaism, the principle that truth is a criteria not properly sacrificed to the precepts of religion was also established. This has all sorts of consequences, not least of which is that the world can be investigated in its own terms: a necessary notion for science. But in Islam, Aristotelianism was defeated: so Islam acknowledges no basis for judgement outside itself—a reflection of both its whole-of-life nature and submission as its fundamental mode. This makes Islam’s interaction with others profoundly problematic since, even though Muslims may in practice (or even in belief), acknowledge such bases for judgement, it is always, in strict Islamic terms, an act of “bad faith” to do so.

The logic of belief versus that of believers
Durie wrestles with the distinction between Islam as a religion and what particular Muslims believes. Islam is a whole-of-life religion with a complex set of sources, hence the prolific nature of fatwa and the popularity of Islamic information websites. There are also Islamic teachings that are problematic in modern Western societies or otherwise awkward or embarrassing. Given the overriding need to present a positive image of Islam to promote submission to Allah, patterns of selective dissemination, or even active dissembling, develop aided by historical myths (such as the “golden age of Al-Andalus) and justified by the doctrine of lawful deception: processes that also affect Muslims leading to complex and uncertain patterns of belief and denial (Pp70ff).

Durie uses the case of female “circumcision” (i.e. female genital mutilation) and debates within Islam over it to examine the complex patterns involved. The Shafi’i school holds female genital mutilation to be obligatory, the other schools merely permitted: i.e. meritorious but not required. Durie notes the four responses typical of such debate: canonical support, canonical reform, simple denial, appeal to external criteria. These complexities mean that non-Muslims need to pay careful attention if they are to understand rather than being either credulously positive (“of course female genital mutilation has nothing to do with Islam”) or negative (“all Muslims support it”). Openness and careful attention to the truth is what Durie holds to be required (Pp74-7).

About non-Muslims
Having spent four chapters setting up the analytical structure, Durie then spends the next four chapters on the issue of Islam’s attitude and schema to non-Muslims. Starting, as one must, with the canonical example of Muhammad, whose interaction with non-believers Durie categorises as beginning and ending with rejection: the rejection Muhammad received and the rejection he ended up imposing on others (p.81). Durie notes the scholarly debate over the historical Muhammad but passes over it since his concern is with the theological construct of Islam: that is, the canonical teachings about the Prophet’s life which are the basis for Islamic doctrine and belief, not whether they are accurate renditions of the original events (p.82).

Durie takes the reader quickly through Muhammad’s family history, which had various painful elements (being orphaned, becoming a dependant poor relation, suffering hostility from more wealthier family members, having all his sons die young). At the age of 40, Muhammad began to have visions from the angel Jibril (Gabriel) that caused him great distress, but his older (and wealthy) wife Khadijah comforted him while her Christian cousin Waraqa declared him a prophet. Khadijah, followed by his young cousin Ali (who had been raised in Muhammad household) became his first converts.

After three years of secrecy, Muhammad began to preach openly. His tribe listened until he began to disparage their gods. Still, his preaching spread: mainly among the poor and dispossessed. At this stage, Muslims were a despised minority with only a few powerful defenders. Various travails followed which Muhammad turned into marks of authenticity, including the notion that God had chosen (in order) his people (the Arabs), his tribe (the Quraysh), his clan (the Banu Hashim) and him (p.88).

Deprived of protectors within the tribal system, Muhammad sought them elsewhere, eventually finding them when people from Medina asked him to lead their community, promising to accept his message of monotheism. Muhammad only accepted when they agreed a year later to fight on his behalf (Pp89-90). Durie points out that, even during the “peaceful” 10 years in Mecca, Muhammad used virulent rhetoric against those who rejected his message and foreshadowed his later “turn to the sword” (Pp91ff). This makes his holding out for military pledges more consistent. It is at this point the Islamic rhetoric about winners and losers begins to emerge (Pp95-6). As well as what Durie calls the ‘fitna worldview’ where Muslims are to fight until there is no persecution or slander (fitna) of Islam: it is at this point the theology of jihad is established with the aim of making submission to God, and so Islam and the Muslim community, universally dominant and so ultimately successful (Pp96ff).

From his Medinan power base, Muhammad waged war to establish submission to Allah, with verses extending the ambit of jihad until Muhammad eventually confronted all pagan Arabs with the choice of submission or the sword. In doing so, he abandoned various customary limitations on war (Pp100-1), becoming the first ruler to unite Arabia. Muhammad had former enemies killed when captured—particularly those who had mocked him personally or had left Islam—and mocked the bodies of those slain in battle against him (Pp101ff).

Durie points out the breadth of the doctrine of fitna such that anyone who opposes, criticises or contradicts Islam can be deemed guilty of fitna and so be targets of jihad (p.103). Muhammad also claimed the warrant of Allah to break a treaty he signed with Mecca, a city he proceeded to conquer on the grounds that they had breached the treaty (Pp103ff). The instrumental morality of Islam, where submission to Allah is the goal that justifies any action that advances it, is clearly in evidence.

The Medinan suras include description of non-believers as those who would seduce Muslims from their faith hence the injunction of enmity to unbelievers (Q60), thereby breaking the treaty they had signed with Mecca. Later, Muhammad attacked and conquered Mecca on the grounds they had broken the treaty: this established the canonical view that non-Muslims are inherently pact-breakers but Muslims can break any treaty if it advances Islam (Pp104-5).

The Meccan suras contain few references to Jews, mainly presenting Muhammad’s message as a blessing to them given he held himself to be completing their line of prophets. The original arrangement in Medina was one of mutual protection between Jews and Muslims. The Medinan rabbis are reported by the Qur’an to have pestered Muhammad with questions, who produced new revelations (i.e. Qur’anic verses) in response: one of his standard claims being they were deceivers who had distorted (or even falsified) the original message. One of the original biographers of Muhammad treats this questioning as fitna, an attempt to undermine Islam (Pp106-7).

Muhammad’s response to this questioning rejection was increasingly hostile. The Qur’anic verses against Jews become more and more severe and abusive of the Jews as deceiving, non-believers losers who had forsaken true guidance. Islam was both the first and final religion, Muhammad’s coming had not only abrogated Judaism, his message was what had always the true religion of Allah, the religion of Abraham. As Durie points out, Muhammad’s self-validation against Jewish questioning was total (Pp107ff).

Muhammad besieged the Jewish Qaynuqa for rejecting Islam, who surrendered unconditionally. A Muslim who was friendly with them interceded for them: a Quranic verse against being friends with Jews followed shortly thereafter (p.110).

There followed targeted assassinations against various Medinan Jews, then an injunction to kill Jews who fell into the hands of Muslims:

A profound shift had taken place in Muhammad’s understanding. Non-Muslims had rights to their property and lives only if they supported and honoured Islam and Muslims. Anything else was fitna, and a pretext for fighting (p.111).

Muhammad declared that the Earth belonged to Allah and his Apostle (and, by subsequent extension, to the people of Allah and his Prophet), it was by accepting Islam that you could be safe. The caliph ‘Umar, for example, was reported to have declared the conquered lands of Syria and Palestine as property that God had restored to the Muslims (p.111).

Muhammad then turned on the remaining Jewish tribes in turn. The Banu Nadir were attacked and driven out of Medina, their property being confiscated. The Qurayza were besieged and, after they surrendered unconditionally, the men were beheaded (600-900 according to varying accounts, except a few who converted) and their women and children distributed to the Muslims. Muhammad then attacked the Jews of Khaybar, who were given a choice of convert or die. After their defeat, they were provided with a third choice: conditional surrender thereby becoming the first dhimmis. Since Jews and Christians were both “people of the Book”, this treatment of Jews became the model for treating Christians also (Pp112-3).

Durie argues that the theology of fitna has created an enduring pattern of Muslims insisting on their greater victimhood (Pp113-4). Since criticising or rejecting Islam is worse than killing unbelievers, this is a game Muslims can always win: the point is the pattern of continually playing it.

Durie analyses Muhammad’s career as one of him responding to rejection by imposing even greater rejection on others. This theology of rejection (and of dominance) became the basis of the Islamic theology towards unbelievers: one that insisted on imposing on non-believers silence (no criticism of Islam), guilt (for rejecting the Prophet and his message) and gratitude (for being exposed to the message of, and able to live under, the rule of the people of Allah) (Pp114-6). All of this:

… can be grounded in the evolution of Muhammad’s own responses to rejection, and his violent and ideologically comprehensive imposition of failure and rejection upon all who refused to confess, ‘I believe there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet’ (p.116).

This review will be concluded in my next post.