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.
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.
posted by Corvus | 5:17 PM
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