Islamic Philosophy
I have noticed that Arab students at West Valley, when asked where they are from, usually say "Persia", no matter where they are actually from (even if they are not from Iran). I find it sad that they don’t feel comfortable saying "Iran" or "Iraq" or whatever, names that would be understood. I also find it funny, because they know they can usually get away with saying "Persia"; they can pretty much rely on our students’ ignorance of world geography.
I find that our students will usually not give voice to overtly discriminatory attitudes towards people of other races or religions; but when it comes to Arabs, all bets are off. Encouraged by the American media, students will say Muslims are different; they are fair game. However, when I ask my non-Arab students what they know of Muslim religion or culture or history, the answer is almost invariably "nothing". They simply parrot horror stories they have heard in the media.
Indeed, philosopher of religion John Hutchison says that "throughout its history to the present moment, Islam has suffered what can only be called a "bad press" in the western world." (439) It will be important in discussing Islam at West Valley to dispel some of that bad press.
We can begin by dispelling the following cultural and historical misunderstandings, some of which spring from ignorance of Islamic religion and philosophy.
1. We must note that the association of "Muslim" with "Arab" is misleading. Islamic people are scattered all over the world. According to Smith, there are 50 to 70 million Chinese Muslims, and some 30 million in black Africa, in addition to those in the "Islamic belt" from Morocco all the way east to Indonesia and the Philippines. There are more Muslims in Indonesia alone than in the entire Arab world. (Smith, 258) "Mohammed" is the most common male name in the world. (Smith, 224) Not all Muslims oppose Israel, and not all Muslims cloister women.
2. Christians and Jews often do not realize that Muslims have far more in common with them than with Central and East Asian religions. Like Christianity, Islam is dualist, monotheist, supposes a transcendent, creator God, has a book and a prophet, and views humans as unique individuals (human individuality is not an illusion, as it is in Hinduism and Buddhism). For Muslims as for Christians, human life is serious, because you get only one chance. The early Muslims were persecuted for their faith, just like the early Christians.
3. Indeed, Islam views itself as the culmination of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Hebrew prophet Abraham was married to Sarah, who had no son, so Abraham took up with Hagar, a black woman. Hagar conceived and bore Abraham a son, Ishmael. Meanwhile, Sarah became pregnant with Isaac, and insisted that Hagar and Ishmael be banished. Muslims say Ishmael went to the place that was to become Mecca, and thus Muslims see themselves as the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar. Muslims honor Abraham as the ultimate moral model of submission to God’s will, the central Islamic virtue, because Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac. Muslims also honor Jesus, Moses, Adam, and Noah, and consider Alexander the Great to be a prophet.
4. Non-Muslims tend to think of Islam as monolithic. In fact, there are numerous sects of Islam, just as there are numerous sects of Christianity, with widely differing beliefs. For example, one extreme Muslim sect, the Kharijites, view holy war as a duty (the "sixth pillar of Islam"), and claim that God commands the killing of infidels. The Sufis, by contrast, are Muslim mystics who stress the unity of God and believer.
5. Islam has the reputation of a world-view that tolerates slavery and enslaves women. In fact, the Koran stresses the equality of all men, and accords women no less honor and respect than other Western systems, i.e., not much but not any worse than the rest. In some respects, the Koran is even rather progressive: for example, it forbids primogeniture and stipulates that daughters inherit as well as sons (though not equally). The Koran does not command that women be veiled and secluded. It says only "Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks closely round them (when they go abroad). That will be better, so that they may be recognized and not annoyed." (33:59) "Extremes that have evolved from this ruling are matters of local custom and are not religiously binding." (Smith, 253) The Koran does not mandate or even mention clitoridectomy.
6. People in the non-Muslim West do not realize that like Christianity, Islam has an active "social gospel". It is seldom realized that Saddam Hussein is a socialist, and that revolutionary Marxism finds many sympathizers in Islamic lands. One of the five pillars of Islam is charity, and Muslims have a religious duty to give a portion of their wealth to aid the less fortunate. Muslim societies claim not to have problems with desperately poor or homeless people, since charity is mandated.
7. Christians and Jews often do not know that Islam has a much better record than they do on racism. Islam is not at all racist, and in fact, stresses racial equality, which accounts for much of its success in Africa, China, and Southeast Asia. "The ultimate test in this area is willingness to intermarry, and Muslims see Abraham as modeling this willingness in marrying Hagar, a black woman whom they regard as his second wife rather than a concubine." (Smith 254)
8. Americans think Black Muslims have the same beliefs as other Muslims. This is false. As far as orthodox Islam is concerned, Black Muslims are heretics because they proclaim the racial superiority of blacks. (As is well-known, Malcolm X left the Black Muslims when he discovered that there was no historical precedent for their racism in Islam.) In fact, the doctrines of the Black Muslims are so bizarre they are hardly recognizable as Muslim at all. Robert Poole, who was to become Elijah Mohammed, the self-proclaimed "Messenger of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America", claimed to have received the following revelation in 1931. The story is a kind of "racial theological history, which [Malcolm X] earnestly subscribed to until almost the last year of his life. It was a kind of intellectual "Fantasia" that rivaled, in its fabulous loopiness, the racial anthropology of "Mein Kampf". Original humankind was black, appearing about seventy trillion years ago. A sublime civilization, which founded the city of Mecca, and even exercised dominion over Mars, it was presided over by twenty-four wizards, or "wise scientists," who created the animals and made the mountains, and even "deported" the moon from the earth. One of the wizards, a malcontent named Mr. Yacub, born about sixty-six hundred years ago and known as the "big-head scientist," because he had an oversized cranium, learned how to breed races scientifically. When, for his seditious agitation, he was exiled from Mecca to the Isle of Patmos – later famed for the Book of Revelation – he contrived as revenge ... a means of creating a "bleached-out white race of devils." Mr. Yacub knew that black men contained two germs, black and brown, the lighter being the weaker. Through an eight-hundred-year process of genocidal cunning – by means of needles inserted into the brains of unsuitably darker infants – that progressed from the black race to a brown, a red, and then a yellow race, the project at last produced a blond, pale-skinned, blue-eyed devil race, which wound up in the caves of Europe. In time ... Moses was chosen by Allah to "civilize" these devils, the first with whom he succeeded being the Jews. But all the pallid devil race eventually gained ascendancy, through "tricknology," and finally seized into slavery a portion of the Original People, the tribe of Shabazz, who had been led into Africa fifty thousand years earlier to harden and toughen them for their pre-destined ordeal." (Marshall Frady, "The Children of Malcolm", The New Yorker, October 12, 1992, p. 68)
9. Muslims have an undeserved reputation for sexual licentiousness. True, the Koran explicitly sanctions polygyny, and Mohammed himself practiced it. But polygyny is rare in Islamic countries, except in Africa. The Koran also enjoins a man to have only one wife if he cannot deal "justly and equitably" with multiple wives. Since love and esteem must be distributed equally among all wives, and since this ideal is usually unrealizable, most contemporary Muslim jurists agree that the import of all the koranic passages taken together is that monogamy is the ideal.
10. Islam in theory is somewhat more tolerant of other faiths and ethical views than is often supposed. This is partly because Islam sees Christianity and Judaism as forerunners of its own religious tradition. The Koran says, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:257) and later, "To every one have We given a law and a way. ... And if God had pleased, he would have made [all humankind] one people [people of one religion]. But he hath done otherwise." (5:48) The principle of religious toleration was incorporated into the charter of Mohammed’s city Medina, at least for Jews and Christians. They were permitted to practice their religions freely, and had equal civil rights with Muslims. In fact, Muslims have much to be proud of in the area of religious tolerance. In India, Spain, and the Near East, Christians and Jews lived peacefully under Muslim rule, practicing their religion freely and even holding positions of power in the state, for centuries. Christians, not Muslims, expelled the Jews and the Moors from Spain; the Jews had enjoyed a golden age there under Muslim rule. By contrast, although Turkey has been Muslim for centuries, the seat of the Eastern Orthodox church remains Istanbul to this day.
11. Islam has a reputation for religious frenzy resulting in holy wars. This view is understandable in view of the amazing fact that within one hundred years of the founding of Islam, Muslims ruled an empire two or three times the size of the Roman empire. War and intrigue were the major occupations of the first three caliphs (successors) after Mohammed (two of whom were killed by poison daggers). But according to Smith, Islam has not spread by the sword any more than Christianity. Smith says the Koran, like the New Testament, deprecates war and violence. He cites the following verse of the Koran in support of this claim: "Defend yourself against enemies, but do not attack them first: God hates the aggressor." (2:190)
The Koran does not appear to be unequivocally clear on this point, however. Hutchison cites the very same verse in full context to support the exactly opposite conclusion: "holy war is repeatedly enjoined by the Qur’an" (455). The verse in full says: "Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors. And stay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out ... and fight then until persecution is no more and religion is for Allah." (455, my emphasis) The last clause could be read to enjoin both war in self-defense against persecution and war to spread Islam aggressively even when it is not being persecuted ("fight then until ... religion is for Allah").
However this issue is resolved, it is clear that both Islam and Christianity have much innocent blood on their hands. "Indeed, if comparisons are what we want, Muslims consider Christianity’s record as the darker of the two. Who was it, they ask, who preached the Crusades in the name of the Prince of Peace? Who instituted the Inquisition, invented the rack and the stake as instruments of religion, and plunged Europe into its devastating religious wars? Objective historians are of one mind in their verdict that, to put the matter minimally, Islam’s record on the use of force is no darker than that of Christianity." (Smith, 256f) Many Muslims, like many Christians, are ashamed of the acts of violent aggression that have been undertaken by corrupt individuals in the name of their religion.
Finally, a word about jihad (Islamic holy war). "To Westerners, it conjures scenes of screaming fanatics being egged into war by promises that they will be instantly transported to heaven if they are slain." (Smith, 257) Yet it is often forgotten that Christianity, too, promises salvation to those who die in Christian holy wars.
Thus, we see many common misunderstandings of Islam. But Islam isn’t much like Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism. Islam has several distinctive features. Some of these follow.
1. Human nature is not seen as "fallen" or "corrupt" in Islam; there is no concept of original sin, as in Christianity. According to Islam, humans do wrong because they "forget themselves".
2. Islam prescribes rules for behavior for its adherents in much more detail than any other major world religion. Muslims know exactly how they are supposed to behave. "Every major type of action is classified on a sliding scale from the "forbidden", through the "indifferent", to the "obligatory"." (Smith, 243)
3. Mohammed was a military leader, unlike any other founder of a major religion, so the detailed discipline of Muslim life is perhaps not surprising; it is simply military in flavor. Once he assumed leadership in Medina, Mohammed made alliances with neighboring peoples and organized an army to conquer Mecca, which had rejected him and his teachings. (Mecca was seized in 630 CE). Mohammed was the first Arab to use trench defenses. "In the last ten years of his life he personally led no less than twenty-seven military campaigns and planned thirty-eight others." (Hutchison, 446) Muslim writers claim that these military campaigns were defensive.
4. Many Muslim scholars insist the Koran cannot be translated, and that converts learn to read Arabic. Translations of the Koran to other languages have been failures, in the sense that they have not conveyed what Muslims find interesting about it. Carlyle and Gibbon both complained that it was dull and frustrating to read. Hutchison is struck by "the miscellaneous character of the Qur’an, where lofty speculations or somber reflections on the last judgment lie side by side with directions on how to enter a house and other equally homely details." (450) But Muslims memorize and recite the Koran more than they read it. It apparently sounds compelling in Arabic – perhaps only in Arabic. As Smith says, "Crowds in Cairo, Damascus, or Baghdad can be stirred to the highest emotional pitch by statements that, when translated, seem banal. The rhythm, melodic cadence, the rhyme produce a powerful hypnotic effect. Thus the power of the koranic revelation lies not only in the literal meaning of its words but also in the language in which this meaning incorporated, including its sound. The Koran was from the first a vocal phenomenon: we remember that we are to "recite" in the name of the Lord! Because content and container are here inseparably fused, translations cannot possibly convey the emotion, the fervor, and the mystery that the Koran holds in the original. This is why, in sharp contrast to Christians, who have translated their Bible into every known script, Muslims have preferred to teach others the language in which they believe God spoke finally with incomparable force and directness." (Smith, 234) These phenomena pose extremely interesting questions for linguists and philosophers of language!
5. Most religions are extremely vague in their descriptions of life beyond this one. Not so Islam. Descriptions of heaven and hell is Islam are more concrete and worldly than in any other major religion. In Muslim heaven, for example, people (souls?) recline on couches inlaid with jewels, surrounded by "immortal celestial youths" and "large-eyed celestial damsels" (houris). They drink "with goblets and ewers and a cup from a flowing spring, from which they will suffer no headache nor will they become intoxicated." They also eat whatever they like ("such fruits as they may choose, and such flesh of fowl as they may desire"), and presumably never get fat.(As cited by Hutchison, 449)
The religious similarities between Islam and Christianity, and the fact that both the Middle East and the West valued and cultivated the study of the ancient Greek philosophers, make for many philosophical similarities, particularly in philosophy of religion. All of the standard problems in Western philosophy of religion arise as much for Islam as for Christianity, particularly the problem of evil, the problem of creation ex nihilo, the problem of predication of an infinite being, the problem of personal identity in a disembodied state (the afterlife), the problem of miracles, and the "predestination" version of the free will problem. Even much of the actual philosophical argument is the same. Because of the similar concepts of God, similar arguments for the existence of God are found in Islam and Christianity, e.g., the teleological and cosmological arguments. Finally, Islam and Christianity both see the world as God’s creation and thus interesting and worthy of study. Hence both value reason and scientific investigation, and thinkers in both religions strive to reconcile their world-views with science as much as possible.
Islam has produced a few great philosophers – al-Farabi (875-950 CE), Avicenna (Abu ali ibn Sina) (980-1037 CE), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126-1198). But "after Averroes, no philosopher of comparable stature emerged in Islam. Historians have no fully adequate explanation for this lack, but the fact is clear." (Hutchison, 470) The writings of both Avicenna and Averroes were bitterly attacked as heresy by fellow Muslims. There may be no such thing as "orthodox" Muslim philosophy, as opposed to theology.
All three of the great Muslim philosophers are already studied in classes in Medieval Philosophy in Western philosophy curricula. Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes made important contributions to the topic of the reconciliation of faith and reason, the basic topic for philosophers of the Western medieval world. Avicenna, the greatest of the three, formulated the distinction between necessary and contingent being, and this distinction was of great importance through the modern period in the West. Nevertheless, the Islamic philosophers are still not very well-known. The reason is simple: most professional philosophers don’t pay much attention to the Western Medieval period. They may have had a general upper-division survey course, but few philosophers make Medieval Philosophy their specialty, since the problem of justifying faith by reason isn’t exactly a hot issue anymore (Kant is usually thought to have made it obsolete). Aside from the famous "proofs" for the existence of God by Anselm and Aquinas, the Christian medieval philosophers aren’t any better known than the Islamic ones. Medieval philosophy is a rather esoteric specialty. There are very few job openings for it, mostly in Catholic universities, and the Catholic universities are usually not looking for Islamic specialists.
1. I have no substantive recommendations to make regarding how we teach about Islam in our comparative religion classes in the philosophy department, because we are already doing what I consider the right things: emphasizing common misunderstandings about it, reading selections from the Koran and distinguishing between what the Koran says and how it is interpreted in various sects and cultures, distinguishing between "folk" and esoteric versions of Islam, noting the heretical nature of the Black Muslim movement, etc.
2. Most Philosophy 1 textbooks already mention Avicenna and his influence. Most mention also the contribution of Arab scholars in preserving ancient Greek texts during the Dark Ages in Western Europe. We could be sure to mention this in class also.
3. We would certainly study al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes in more depth if we offered a specialty class in Medieval Philosophy; but such a class is an upper-division philosophy elective.
4. Arab contributions to mathematical logic should be noted in Philosophy 2 and Philosophy 9.
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