from the site :
The Catholic Thing
On the Fragility of Islam
By : James V. Schall, SJ
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
| By James V. Schall, S. J.
|
Islam
is the longest-lasting, closed, unchanging
socio-religious culture to appear among men. Its very
idea is that everyone worships Allah over time in the
same way, with the same simple doctrine. The major
change Islam looks to is not modernization or
objective truth but, in a stable world, the submission
to Allah of all men under a caliphate wherein no
non-believers are found.
We
still look back at communism, at least the
non-oriental variety, with some astonishment in this
regard. Almost no one thought it could “fall” without
a major military encounter. That it disintegrated so
quickly and so completely seems incomprehensible to
anyone but a John Paul II. He understood its frailty,
its failure to understand the human soul and its
origins.
Islam
is far older than Marxism. In the seventh century of
our era, Islam appeared suddenly almost out of
nowhere. It rapidly spread, mostly by military
conquest. Its immediate victims were the Byzantine
Christian lands and the Persian Empire. Both proved
incapable of rising to their own defense. Islamic
armies eventually conquered North Africa, the
Mediterranean islands, much of Spain, the Balkans, the
Near East, the vast land area from southern Russia to
India and Afghanistan and even parts of China.
Indonesia was a more commercial conquest.
Later
efforts of Europe to regain some of these conquered
lands worked for a while. The Crusades ultimately
failed though they indirectly prevented further Muslim
conquest of the rest of Europe. Spain, Greece, and
parts of the Balkans managed to regain their lands.
But the control of the Muslim lands by European powers
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made little
real inroads into Islam itself. Islam was exposed to
western power and science, but that did not effect any
significant inner conversion, except perhaps for
Muslim confusion about its own lack of science and
technology.
The
Muslim conversion of former Christian lands seems to
be permanent. What few Christians are left in these
lands are second-class citizens. They are under severe
pressure to convert or emigrate. Many forces within
Islam desire a complete enclosure of Islam that would
exclude any foreign power or religion. The Muslim
world is divided into the area of peace and the area
of war; the latter is what Islam does not yet control.
So
with this background, why talk of the “fragility” of
Islam? This instability arises from the status of the
text of the Koran as an historical document. The Koran
is said to have been dictated directly in Arabic by
Allah. It has, as it were, no prehistory, even though
it did not come into existence until a century or so
after Mohammed.
Scholars,
mostly German, have been working quietly for many
decades to produce a critical edition of the Koran
that takes into consideration the “pre-history” of the
Koran. Due to the Muslim belief that any effort to
question the Koran’s text is blasphemy, the enterprise
is fraught with personal risk to the researchers. The
idea that the text cannot be investigated, of course,
only feeds suspicion that even Muslims worry about its
integrity.
Much
of the philosophy within Islam, as we know, had roots
in scholars who were originally Christian or Persian.
This is well recorded in Robert Reilly’s The Closing of
the Muslim Mind. But even more, the Koran itself
seems to be composed of many elements from Christian
or Hebrew scripture. The very word Koran has roots in
liturgical books.
The
systematic denial in the Koran itself of the Trinity
and the Incarnation, the reducing of Christ from the
Messiah to another prophet, force us to inquire about
the connection between the Koran and Judaeo-Christian
Scriptures. The broader claim that Mohammed’s
“revelation” rewrote and made obsolete the earlier
revelation needs direct confrontation.
The
ecumenical movement has limited relations to Islam
pretty much to areas of mutual agreement. This is well
enough. But one cannot ignore the issue of truth about
a text and the grounds on which it is based.
Religion
or faith, even in Islam through Averroes, has been
conceived as a myth designed to keep the people quiet.
The scholars could quietly let the caliphs and the
imams rule if the intelligentsia were left free to
pursue philosophy, which was conceived to be
anti-Koranic in the sense that the Koran did not hold
up under scrutiny about its claims.
The
fragility of Islam, as I see it, lies in a sudden
realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran.
Is it what it claims to be? Islam is weak militarily.
It is strong in social cohesion, often using severe
moral and physical sanctions. But the grounding and
unity of its basic document are highly suspect. Once
this becomes clear, Islam may be as fragile as
communism.
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