Christian-Muslim relations blog

I particularly appreciated the selection from Mahfouz’s novel Children of the Alley. I found the concluding pages of the novel thought provoking yet troubling. On the one hand, much of the depiction of Rifaa — his death, the the disappearance of his body, the variant accounts of his four friends — seems to correlate with the Islamic understanding of the origins of Christianity. Read in this sense, the novel’s concluding scenes might appear something of a something of an allegorical statement or critique of the Christian narrative, with the novel’s final words, “Why is forgetfulness the plague of our alley?” an indictment of the Christian forgetting of the prophetic message of Christ.

On the other hand, the depiction of the community established by Ali seems to nuance this straightforward reading somewhat. Ali’s community is recognized as a new community within the alley, “just like Gabal’s,” and enjoys equal position and prestige with the other communities in the alley. Read in this light, Ali’s interpretation of Rifaa’s life — which coincidentally results in his own prestige and power — fits into an established pattern of the distortion of a message, so that it leads people back to their worldly happiness. The interpretation of the novel as an allegory of Christianity, then, becomes less of a unique indictment and more of a concern with the reception of prophetic messages

I am left with the question of the extent to which Mahfouz engages and critiques Christianity uniquely, as opposed to perhaps a more human tendency toward “forgetfulness” (the allegorizing of Christianity — four different messages, disappearance of a body, deriving from a previous religious community, etc — seems obvious). Does the vision of competing religious communities, each with their share in the “gangsterism” of the alley, mean to indict one particular religious identity, or the human tendency to distort religion in toto? If the latter, does the criticism embrace Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism?

One central conceits of Rida’s critique is his repeated assertion that the educated and worldly among European Christian abandon their faith in the course of their education: the fully rational, he suggests, reject Christianity. This conceit underpins a series of comparisons between Christianity and Islam in the second article. Trinitarian doctrine, for instance, reveals the pagan heritage of Christianity, because it “extinguishes the light of the mind” by commanding the reason to believe that three are one and one is three.  It is this sort of claim, among others, which “banishes independence of thought and will” by compelling Christian obedience to Church leaders. As a result, Rida can claim that the cultural flourishing of European civilization is in fact independent of Christian doctrine: “the Europeans did not achieve all of this until they discarded the Christian teaching.” In stark contrast stands Islam, which almost immediately gave birth to a sprawling civilization and social order: Muhammad’s teaching was beneficial to humanity precisely because it offered a rational basis for culture and moral doctrine, whereas the Christian civilization was irrational.

What exactly is the meaning of “reason” operative in Rida’s writings?  His frequent invocations (in this article and later ones) of the maneuverings of post-Christian European intellectuals (and, for instance, early historical-critical accounts of the development of the biblical canon) bespeak an account of reason which is quite similar to a European enlightenment understandings of the concept. Perhaps the best example of this concept is the conceit of a rational arbitrator who judges between Islam and Christianity on the basis of their accomplishment of the three objectives of “religion” in general. Is this an accurate assessment of Rida’s notion of rationality?  Or is the Islamic notion with which Rida works in some significant way different from the Enlightenment idea? More generally, what sort of understanding of “reason” is necessary to effectively mediate and distinguish between religions? Does Rida’s idea suffice for this task?

I found Elias of Nisibis’s dialogue with the Vizier particularly interesting.  After working through the precise doctrine attached to the Christian understanding of God’s one substance and three hypostases, the vizier demands to know why, if Christians are truly monotheists, they confess that God is three hypostases.  This doctrine, as the Vizier sees it, is easily misrepresented and leaves Christians vulnerable to the charge of polytheism of which they are innocent. Elias replies with a question: why do Muslims speak of God as having hands, eyes, and the like? Certainly they do not hold that God has corporeal eyes or limbs; this interpretation merely confuses the hearers.

It is a question which proceeds immediately to questions of fundamental theology and epistemology. The Vizier has a response ready: these are the affirmations of the Qur’an, which must be understood in a non-literal way. Elias makes the same response: the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is affirmed by the Gospel, but it must be understood in a doctrinally nuanced manner.  This view of the question is properly ordered: the Trinity is known by faith, with rational accounts of it merely trying to render it comprehensible without displacing the scriptural foundation of the doctrine. In neither the Qur’an nor the Christian scriptures is the content of doctrine susceptible to proof merely on human rational terms.  

By taking the conflict to its ground in fundamental theology, however, does further conversation become impossible?  The Vizier affirms that “certain points that are debatable” which Muslims would contest still perdure. At what level does that debate occur?  Must it remain in the purely rational register of the preceding paragraphs, or does Elias’s argument open the way for an exchange and evaluation, on specifically scriptural terms, of Christian and Islamic doctrines of God?  

I was struck in this reading by the simultaneously traditional and apologetic quality of Aquinas’s defence of Trinitarian doctrine.  This responds to an Islamic criticism of the Christian doctrine of Christ’s generation which criticized the Christian doctrine of the Trinity on the grounds that it entailed God’s having a wife.  Aquinas relies on the so-called “psychological analogy” first developed by Augustine to establish a doctrine of divine generation which is “intellectual” rather than “fleshly.” In human beings, the act of understanding “conceives” a concept which is expressed as an audible word and exists interioly as a “word of intellect.”  In God, this “word of intellect” is neither distinct from His being, since this is its source, nor is it accidental to his being, for God is simple. A similar argument applies to the act of Love, which is identified with the second procession, the Holy Spirit. Thus, Aquinas judges he has offered an account of the Trinity of persons which does not compromise the divine substance.

To my eyes, this argument avoids several of the pitfalls of other approaches to Trinitarian apologetics we have thus far encountered and offers an additional challenge to unitarian monotheism. It emphasizes a logic of relationality — there are two principle mental acts, understanding and will, which proceed from the origin — as opposed to simply trying to find the number three in God and thus rendering the persons imperfect; and precisely by this logic, it avoids attributing some divine attributes to one person and some to another.  

Is this an apt summary of the points toward which Thomas is driving?  How far is the argument “apologetic” — demonstrating the coherence of a claim that unity can be trinity — as opposed to constructive, offering further insight into the Christian doctrine of the Trinity?  If these are Thomas’s aims with this interior account of the Trinity, how would they be controverted? The most obvious response, it seems to me, would be to claim that “understanding” and “love” do not sufficiently escape the trouble of attributing particular attributes to particular persons and thereby depriving, for instance, the Holy Spirit of understanding.  Furthermore, there seems to be an implicit “offensive” argument in Thomas’s argument, inasmuch as it stakes out a claim that a God who has the capacity either to know or to love must have a hypostatic word and love.  Does this argument find itself fleshed out more in later polemics?  What are the likely responses to Thomas’s defensive and offensive arguments? 

Warraq offers a recitation and criticism of an innovative argument for the triunity of persons in one divine substance.  In order to be perfect, the argument runs, the divine substance must combine both sorts of number, even and odd. Any number which does not include both even and odd numbers falls short of “the perfection of number” and hence admits of deficiency.  The advantage of this argument seems to lie in its “offensive” payoff: by making unity alone a sign of deficiency, the Christian can claim that it is only Trinitarian monotheism which appropriately preserves the divine perfection. This argument, quite clearly, begins from the shared affirmation of Christians and Muslims that God is one, and proceeds from there to demonstrate the rational suitability of attributing threeness to the divinity.  

Despite these strengths, Warraq’s response reveals its weakness.  The Christian doctrine of the Trinity does not entirely transcend the number one: each of the three hypostases are one. Are they, then, imperfect and deficient?  If they are, how can they be divine? If they are not, then the argument from three as a perfect number seems to demand a division of the individual persons into three, as well.  In either case, Christians are forced to either rapidly multiply hypostases, or to exclude the persons from the divine substance on the grounds of their deficiency.

Warraq’s line of criticism raises two different sorts of questions.  The first concerns the Christian response: is there a way of affirming the perfection of the individual persons without dividing them into component parts?  That is, how can the tendency toward a kind of modalism which would make each hypostasis a “part” of the godhead be resisted without simply postponing the question?  Would there be a distinction made between the perfection of the divine substance and the perfection of a hypostasis?  

The second line of questions concerns the flaws of the Christian argument itself.  Does it, perhaps, assign too much value to the number of hypostases, as opposed to their relationship with each other?  Beginning with the rationality of relationships within a unity, for instance, might lay the groundwork for a more compelling apologetic argument.  A common Western argument of several centuries later, advanced by Richard of St. Victor, takes this approach: one person alone cannot love, and two alone are opposed to one another in their love, but if there are three there are both objects of love and and a communion in loving each person — Father and Son love the Spirit, et cetera.  Would such a front-loading of relationality — in Richard’s approach, or something similar — avoid Warraq’s critique of the numerological argument? Was such a line of argument, focused on relationships, ever advanced by Christian apologists against Islam? 

Sidney Griffith’s chapter on the genre and content of Christian theology in Arabic, particularly apologetic literature, raises interesting questions for Trinitarian theology.  In light of the preference in Christian-Muslim polemics for arguments from reason, Christian articulations of the Trinity situated the doctrine in the context of Islamic discussions of “the ontological status of the divine attributes” (Griffith 95).  This claim effectively reduced the the typical attributes describing God’s “essence and action” to three “substantial” attributes, namely existing, living, and speaking (95). These attributes, in Griffith’s phrase, “indicate the three persons or hypostases of the One God” (95).  

I would like to see this argument fleshed out more extensively, particularly in regard to its continuity with and fidelity to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan understanding of the Trinity.  What is a “substantial attribute” as distinct from any one of the others? Are existing, living, and speaking to be identified with the particular persons of the Trinity? If so, how could “living” and “speaking” fail to be attributed principally to Christ, the Word who declares ,”I am the Life”?  Again, if a “substantial” attribute is to be identified with a particular person of the Trinity, how is the relationship of the Triune persons reflected in the relationship of the three substantial attributes? Alternately, if a “substantial attribute” is not to be identified with a particular person/hypostasis, what does it mean to say that these three attributes “indicate” the three persons of the Trinity?  These specific questions drive towards a more general concern, that of how the doctrine of “substantial attributes” can remain faithful to the scriptural foundations of Trinitarian doctrine. What was the influence of this approach to Trinitarian theology in the wider Christian world?

Hoyland’s account of Doctrina Jacobi draws attention in particular the the way in which early Christian (and Jewish?) apologists criticized Islam via its account of prophethood.  Doctrina Jacobi V.16 encapsulates this.  After describing the death of a candidatus at the hands of muslims, the character Justus relates his brother’s comments about Muhammad: “He is false for the prophets do not come arms with a sword.”  Several sentences later, the same theme is repeated: “there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men’s blood.” This seems to suggest a somewhat developed theology of prophethood in Christian circles, which demanded that prophets be men of peace.  Precisely the political violence surround the Islamic expansion, therefore, undermines Muhammad’s claim to the status of a prophet like Jesus or the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

Particularly in light of earlier readings from this semester (e.g. Wansbrough), which asserted that the Qur’an emerged as a dramatization of the Judeo-Christian theology of prophethood, this line of argument raises several questions.  First, what were the operative theologies of prophetic identity in Jewish and Christian circles at the time of the Islamic expansion? Did these theologies develop in response to the growth of Islam? Second, to what extent does “prophethood” remain a contested theological category in the Christian and Jewish responses to Islam?  And finally, does this line of argumentation compel us to ask new questions of an analysis like Wansbrough’s, or change how we evaluate it?

Amina Wadud’s essay on the rights and roles of women in Islamic society raises a number of pressing questions about the relationship between Islamic revelation, familial structures, and the ordering of society.  She attempts to bridge a fundamental tension between two assertions. First, she wants to argue that the Qur’an does not stipulate a particular social order, but permits a wide array of social arrangements. Thus she claims, “The Qur’an does not divide the labour and establish a monolithic order for every social system which completely disregards the natural variations in society” (161).  In fact, she judges that the Qur’an acknowledges the need for variation in society, and allows these to develop.  

On the other hand, Wadud devotes considerable space to setting forth Qur’anic view of a particular social institution — marriage and the family — and describing its contribution to Isamic society. The Qur’anic procedure for divorce, which undeniably grants an advantage to men over women, is acknowledged; it does not seem to admit the relativizing and contextualizing that Wadud elsewhere engages in.  She proceeds to argue that the Quranic view of marriage and resolving marital differences provides “an ideal obligation for men with regard to women to create a balanced and shared society” (166). Clearly there is something of considerable value here, with considerable value for Islamic society however it develops. But is it merely an ideal? Or is there more force to the Qur’anic principle? More generally, how is the relativizing and contextualizing approach to Islamic society to be balanced with a recognition and defence of the goods of the traditional Islamic social order?

The basis for the identification of the Imam is, in Shi’ite Islam, found in his sinlessness; the Imam must necessarily be immune from any sin.  For this reason, it is necessary to affirm that “the Imam should be designated for the Imamate since immunity to sin is a matter of the heart, which is discerned by no one save God Most High” (Peters 123).  Clearly, there is an epistemological line of reasoning at work here: if sinlessness is necessary, the true Imam cannot be identified by human beings, but must be identified by God or through Muhammad. In this way, the problem of human beings judging the sinlessness of another is avoided.  

And yet, this solves only part of the problem: the one who is designated by God must still be recognized by human beings.  As a result, the commentary puts forth two methods for this to occur: first, by it being revealed by someone else immune to sin, like Muhammad; and second, by the designated person working miracles to prove his claim to the Imamate.  This maneuver, on one interpretation, only seems to postpone the problem by a stage of regression: it is human beings who must perceive and accept the miracles worked by the imam-presumptive, and so the recognition of a new Imam nonetheless falls, albeit in a more limited sense, to human judgment.

The Shi’ite idea of “designation,” then, raises important questions about the relationship between divine and human recognition in the acceptance of authority.  In the first place, what is the rationale for the claim that the Imam must be sinless? More significantly, what is the theological basis for the claim that the Imam will be recognized based on miracles?  Is the Imam presumptive must “prove” himself through the working of miracles, to whom must he prove himself? Does some doctrine of providence play a role in both the working of miracles and the recognition of the Imam?  If so, what is its content?

In his account of the origins of Islamic legal schools, Wael Hallaq makes a strong case that the root of any authoritative doctrine was the knowledge of the law possessed — or allegedly possessed — by a particular legal scholar.  Hallaq observes that the “eponyms” of a given school were perceived by later generations to possess “mastery of legal theory, Qur’anic exegesis, hadith and its criticism, legal language,” and so forth (Hallaq 157). These figures were constructs, coalescences of the expertise of previous and subsequent generations, in whose person the methodology and principles of an entire legal school were thought to rest.  In spite of this fact, it remains true that in the period of personal school — when the eponymous theorists themselves were operating — law was principally a matter of learning and knowledge, in the various fields described in the above quotation. Whether with regard to an individual historical jurist, or with reference to the eponymous “founder” of a school, “it was in the persons of individual jurists that [legal] authority resided,” and thus Islamic law itself had an epistemic ground, rather than a political, social, or religious one (Hallaq 165).

Intentionally or not, Masud’s paean to progressive legal development complicates this portrait.  He observes, for instance, that “the material source of Islamic law, especially about family relations, is the pre-Islamic social customs” (Masud 85).  Thus, the established body of Islamic jurisprudence should be studied and reinterpreted principally with reference to social context (87). Jurisprudence developed and continues to develop as a result of social change; the authority of the doctrines of various schools of jurisprudence rests solely on their utility, a fact which justifies “pushing for the acceptance of whatever is socially practical and useful” (89).

The balance of these two claims raises several compelling questions.  Most significantly, if Hallaq’s account of the various degrees of authority attributed to the founders of schools — Hadith and Quran, legal theory and language, et cetera — is accurate, is the straightforwardly social-contextual account of Masud undermined?  Or would Masud make the critique at a more fundamental level, and argue that the moral doctrines of Qur’an and hadith themselves are entirely socially conditioned, and hence admit of development and indeed contradiction? Hallaq defends the thesis that, in a considerable respect, Islamic jurisprudence had its grounding in the expertise of a given individual, and in the value of his interpretations as epistemic claims.  Where is the balance to be struck between admitting development in legal theory, and respecting the foundational truth-claims of Islam and its jurists?