Jihad

We are in jihad friends.

Enough of the "War of Terror" rhetoric. We are in Jihad, a conflict with greater depth than the idea of World War III. Jihad is the struggle for religious domination by Muslims. We are slowly but surely falling victim t our cherished ideal of "religious freedom" by suppressing public exressions of Christianity and promoting Godless secularism. This type of splintered and narcissistic approach to society makes the entire culture vulnerable to the inevitable take-over by the Ummah which has no conception of freedom of religion or individual rights - theirs is a view of submission to Allah and obedience to his decrees.

While America titillates to Paris Hilton's latest escapade, the Mujahid prepares dreaming of the eventual surrender of America to the shariah.

Islamic Reformation

The situation at hand is the result of a "Reformation" in Islamic scholarship and jurisprudence which took place circa 1100 AD with Imam Ghazali's rebuke of philosophical method in two books, The Incoherence of Philosophers and The Revival of Religious Science. Islam has already had a reformation, a return to the textual basis of Quran and Hadith and a Dehellenization. This is the reason there have been no major Islamic scholars in 800 years. Apologists for Islam will state that Muslims developed algebra, astronomy, etc, etc., but look at he historical record- this stops in the 12th century AD because of the rejection of systematic philosophy and the process of dehellenization.

We stand at risk in the West of the same by two different threats - dehellenization and the textualism of Evangelical protestantism and the dehellenization and deconstructionism of postmodern philosophy.

Why is Hellenism so important to the Catholic tradition and to Christendom?

The Lord Jesus Christ, my Lord and yours, dear reader, was born in, preached in and was crucified, died, buried and resurrected in a Hellenistic world. true under the dominion of Rome and its Latin armies, but nevertheless, Greek ideas, thought and culture, including language were the fabric of the society in which Jesus lived.

We may argue that he spoke Aramaic and indeed He did as the Gospel records, true He was "Jewish" but one gets a sense that "Jew" in the Gospel means something other than how we define this word today (another possible point of digression). Certain Apostles were appear to have been Hellenized Jews, Philip and Andrew are Greek names.

The scriptures in common use were the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures produced in Alexandria.

The Gospel of John starts with an intesely Hellenistic revelation of God, referring to the Logos - further examination of the Hellenic underpinnings of the first chapter of that Gospel are out of the scope of this discussion.

The Logos, the eminent concept which John equates with the Deity and which incarnates and becomes flesh and dwells among us is the essential mystery which overcomes the essentially transcendant God of other monotheistic faiths, most notably that deity proclaimed by Islam.

The Logos is an essentially Greek concept found in Stoic and Platonic sources. Indeed, many Greeks had an unrevealed monotheism based upon the Logos and one which is encountered most definitively in the philosophy of the Stoics. This philosophy, owing much to the insights of Zeno of Citium (335-263 BC) who saw a cosmos arranged through the influence of a universal principle called The Logos. It is this Logos that John the Evangelist proclaims to be God and incarnate in Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

The cosmological order the cosmos which was disordered by Original Sin has been renewed by the sacrifice of the Logos on the Cross. When read with the Hellenistic perspective the sensibility of the Gospels and the Epistles and the Apocalypse (the Unveiling) become much more clear.

Thus, when our Pope, Benedict XVI refers to the dehellenization of western culture, he referes to the loss of that referent - the Logos as the lens through which the scripture and indeed the ecclesial order must be perceived.

Furthermore it is the Greek mind which saw through the use of natural law the presence of the unseen Logos through its effects upon the Universal Order. From observation and the use of reason the Greeks inferred a monotheistic principle which made the Gospel easily adopted and the evangelization of the gentiles successful.

More on Ghazali - dehellenization

Pope Benedict XVI in his recent talks has referred to the dehellenization of the western intellectual tradition as a threat to its use for the capacity of reason.

This was precisely the goal of Imam al Ghazali in his Tahafut al Falasafiya (Incoherence of the Philosophers) and the Ihya Ulum al Din (Revival of Religious Sciences).

By eliminating the tradition of ontological and metaphysical speculation from the contex of Islam and reducing it on one hand to the process of legislation - fiqh, or theology (kalam) based only on Quran and hadith, the successive generations of Muslims became largely ignorant of anything outside the containments (limits) established by Ghazalian methods. (c.f. "Mr. Pope be within your limits" click here The term "limits" is a significant one in Islamic discourse, Quran 43:5 "Should we just ignore the fact that you have transgressed the limits?". By telling this to the Pope, these placard carriers tell us (non-Muslims) that we are not permitted nor qualified to discourse critically on the Quran, Muhammad or the Hadith or Islamic culture for that matter.

This dehellenization the elimination of the tools and methodology of Greek thought was sufficient to close the doors of natural science and medicine in the world of Islam for the past 800 years or so.

This then begs the question - what is so critical in the Greek patrimony that makes it a vital element of the Western tradition, one which made Islam for a brief period a classical civilization until its banishment?

Similarly, do we today witness a similar process in the secularization of Western thought starting with Kant and his "Critique of Pure Reason"? Does the Academy, especially in the US, consitute a similar threat to our cultural heritage by their adoption of irrational discourse in the forms of post modernism?

More on the irrationality of Al Ghazali and Immanuel Kant to come - Si Dios Quiere.

Islam - The religion of peace

From CNN:

The Basra demonstration came as an al Qaeda linked militant group vowed a war against the "worshippers of the cross" in response to the pope's speech.

"We tell the worshipper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya," said an Internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq's branch of al Qaeda, according to the Reuters news agency.

"We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen," said the statement.




Members of the Din As Salaam (Religion of Peace) have promised to protect the Christians who fall under their domain if they pay the Jizya (religious tax imposed upon Dhimmis).

The stupefaction of the Ummah

Catholics now faced with a growing threat from the Dar ul Islam need to develop a greater insight into the bases of the distinction between the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and the pillars of Al Din Al Islam. Urged by liberal pundits to dialog, for the Catholic there is an underlying problem in Islam - nearly a millenium of rejection of rational thought among Islamic scholars and clerics.

One reads historians of the liberal stripe who will lionize Islam as the great civilization that fostered high culture and religious tolerance while Christian Europe festered in the Dark Ages".

This is only partially true: the classsical period of Islamic civilization was known for great scholastic achievement and names like In Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) are well known at least in some educated circles. These works are treasured and cited by liberal academics as a defense of Islam. Truth be told - scholars of this caliber have not been produced from the Islamic world in nearly 800 years.

The major culprits of this decline of intellectual development, Abu Hamid Ibn Al Ghazali and later Ibn Taymiyya, set the stage for the rejection of classical learing in the Dar a Islam by converting the study of religion from on based upon reason to one based upon polemic and the threat of takfir (being pronounced and infidel). How is this possible for a civilization which had produced such a high degree of scholarship to abruptly cease this production within a few generations?

The answer is astonishingly simple and is based upon the rejection of scholasticim by the reformation initiated by Al Ghazali through the tahafut - The incoherence of the Philosophers - and the Ihya Ulum Al Din - the Revival of the Sciences of Religion. the Ihya established the bases from which Islamic theology would flow - excluded from the process were the Aristotelian peripatetic methods and neoplatonism seen in the classical authors - Ibn Sina, Al Farabi and Ibn Rushd.

Furthermore, the outflow of this Islamic reformation was to impact the West by a strange route, the development of the Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas. A little known benefit for the Church was that the influx of thought from Ibn Rushd and adopted in the Parisian School by a scholar, Siger of Brabant was the impulse which brought forth the mind of St. Thomas.

Through the rejection of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy and speculative theology, Al Ghazali drove the Islamic world away from the use of intellection and reason for a reliance upon the use of literal Quranic scholarship and the ahadith - the compilations of the sayings and actions of the Prophet.

Consequently much of what is regarded by western academics as good and beautiful from the "Golden Age" Islamic culture and civilization is regarded as kufr (infidelity) and bidah (proscribed innovation) or even worse, unheard of and ignored by the mainstream.

Which brings us to the problem of dialog today - it is not possible to build a bridge with a culture with which the Christendom has no common language. Far easier in the days of El Mio Cid and King Richard Lionheart than today because of the progressive closing of perceptions among the takfir making schools of mujahid islam - which rely upon a strictly salafist world view which condemns all of which is not literal interpretation of Quran and hadith and imposes a utopian view of Muslim life as live by The Companions of the Prophet and the first generations of Muslims as the example, the sunnah, to follow.

Yes historians blame the Mongols invasion, the reconquista of Spain and the colonialization of the Middle East for the decline in Islamic culture, but this decline was actually what made these events possible in the first place. The decline was caused internally and the Caliphates collapsed from within.

In the West we have a similar problem, having had our own Reformation and the succession of Revolutions, we too have rejected reason (similarities abound between Kant and Al Ghazali - more another time) and now in our decadence and intellectual barrenness we are visited with Jihad and like uncomprehending, spoiled children fail to see the reality of what is coming.

The Conversion of Ferumbras - the Sultan of Babylon

King Charles turned agayne.
He saugh under an holme tre
Where a knight him semed lay slayn.
Thederward he rode with swerde in honde.
Tho he saugh he was alyve;
He lay walowynge uppon the sonde
With blody woundes fyve.
`What arte thow?' quod Charlemayne,
`Who hath the hurte so sore?'
`I am Ferumbras,' he saide certayn,
`That am of hethen lore.'
`O fals Saresyn,' quod the Kinge,
`Thou shalte have sorowe astyte;
By the I have lost my two cosynes,
Thyn hede shalle I of-smyte.'
`O gentil Kinge,' quod Ferumbrase,
`Olyvere my maister me hightpromised
To be baptised by Goddis grace,
And to dyen a Cristen knighte.
Honure were it noon to the
A discoumfite man to slo,
That is converted and baptized wolde be
And thy man bycomen also.'
The Kinge hade pité of him than;
He toke him to his grace
And assyned anoon a man
To lede him to his place.
He sende to him his surgyne
To hele his woundes wyde.
He ordeyned to him such medycyn,
That sone myght he go and ryde.
The Kinge commaunded Bishope Turpyn
To make a fonte redye,
To baptise Ferumbras therin
In the name of God Almyghtye.
He was cristened in that welle.
Floreyne the Kinge alle him calle;
He forsoke the foule feende of helle
And his fals goddis alle.
Nought for than Ferumbras
Alle his life cleped was he,
And aftirwarde in somme place,
Floreyne of Rome cité.
God for him many myracles shewed,
So holy a man he bycame.
That witnessith both lerned and lewde:
The fame of him so ranne.