September 9, Tuesday - Eurogress
Muslims and Christians: how can we live together?

Hasan Hanafi
University of Cairo, Egypt
  

A prototype of relations between Islam and Christianity exists throughout history. It may be characterized as a relation of certanity to conjecture, of apodicity to hypothecity, of evidence to paradox or even of rationality to irrationality.

Following the course of history, three phases may be distinguished where this prototype of relations exists. The first is the Patristic Period, crystallized in its Christelogy and the appearance of Islam at the end, making a final balance, taking part in the controversy and distinguishing between certainty and conjecture. Undoubtedly, Islam was not yet a culture. Islam was only a Revelation preserved in a book. historically authentic, having not passed through a period of oral transmission in which the narrations may have been amplified by popular imagination, by neighbouring cultures or by emotional projections. The raison d��tre of this new Revelation was precisely the conjectures of the Patristics and the danger threatening the ancient monotheism which Revelation from the beginning (since Noah, Abraham and Moses) had struggled to preserve. That is why Revelation in Islam, before having been developed into a culture of its own, should be considered in connection with the previous cultures, namely the Judeo-Christian culture in the Patristic Period. History of religion and most Orientalists have treated this period historically to show how Islamic Revelation is derived from a �Judeo-Christian origin�, misunderstood or apocryphal, and to make Islamic Revelation a historical amalgam.

The relationship between the Patristics and Islamic Revelation is not a historical one, a relationship of cause and effect, but rather it is an ideational relationship. Islam uneviled certainty amidst conjecture. Here are some examples:

At the end of the Patristic Period, Islam appeared to dissipate certain confusions concerning the person of Christ and to put an end to the trinitarian debate. It made a distinction between the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history. All trinitarian doctrines about the person of Christ express the Jesus of faith and never the Jesus of history. All of them are pure conjectures. They express the cultural milieu of the time, the religious history and the mythical background of the neighbouring areas, the personal intellectual education of the fathers, Creek or Latin, most of them were Gentiles, the allegory of emotional glorification of Christ or the underground political stream of interest-groups inside the Church. All of them have pros and cons. The pro in one doctorine is the con in the other. A purely negative definition, although it may be the only way to define the transcendent in Christology, is used to deny all possibilities of understanding. Apollinarius wanted, and with reason, the divinity of Christ to prevail over his humanity. The Son of God is closer to paternity than to filliality. Arius, also with reason, wanted the humanity of Christ to prevail over his divinity. Otherwise, God himself would be put in jeopardy. The Council of Nicea I declared the equality of the three persons. And formulated �One in Three and Three in One�, which is a negative compromise between the two opposite doctrines and which says nothing positive. The doctrine of the absolute humanity of Christ, that of Arius, was rejected by political manoeuvre in Alexandria, although, left to the pure reason, independent of group interest. it might have received the consent of the majority. Because the ancient monotheism founded by Noah and the Patriarchs, proclaimed by Moses and defended by the Prophets was in danger, and even threatened by an everlasting manipulation and confusion, Islam came to clarify the confusion, to clear the clouds and to put an end to all of these conjectures. It classified all of these images as those of the Jesus of Faith, never those of the Jesus of history. The Jesus of history was purely and absolutely human. The absolute humanity of Christ declared by Arius in the fourth century and continued in modern times in a different form by the antitrinitarian theology and the unitarian epic since Servetus in the sixteenth century, Socinus in the seventeenth century, Priestley in the eighteenth and Channing in the twentieth, appears to be a model of certainty midst to all other doctrines as mere conjectures.

From the beginnig of Christianity there was a confusion regarding the Data Revelata. There was no clear idea about what Revelation is. Is Revelation the history of salvation. the work of the Holy Spirit, the Event of Incarnation, the Person of the Redeemer or the Logos? And what is Logos? The Person seen or the Word pronounced, heard and transmitted? Although in the Gospel the words of Jesus, his appeal for perfect behaviour and eternal life were put forward. John and Paul came and put the Person of Christ forward, in front of his words, calling for the worship of Logos as Person, not for applying the words of Christ in human life. Revelation also became a vision or a dream, a telling of what will happen at the end of time and foreseeing the future of the world. A vision or a dream can occur to a disciple of the Prophet or even to anyone, continuously, until the end of time, not exclusively to the Prophet. Revelation became either the Person of the Prophet or a Dream of a Disciple and never the Word of God communicated to man via a Prophet who is a simple instrument of communication.

Islam appeared to clarify the confusion. Revelation is the Word of God verbatim, communicated to man via the Prophet exclusively. The Prophet is a simple instrument of communication. The words of God have to be kept authentic in history, transmitted from generation to generation in writing. Prophets, disciples, scribes, narrators, all of them are pure instruments of communication or transmission, outside the corpus of Revelation. Later on, in rnodern times, when the depersonification of Christianity occured and the Word prevailed over the Person, when the Word became the only vehicule of idea and where the ideas became an ideology, an Islamic model of certainty appeared, after a long history of conjectures.

Even if the Words have been relatively well-kept, from the beginning of Christianity, there was no distinction between Scripture and Tradition. The Scripture was a part of the Tradition and the Tcadition was a continuation of the Scripture. Whether the Word was of Christ or an interpration of a disciple or a formulation of an institution, all were sources of revelation, even if they were contradictory. For example: Christ praises the life in the Spirit, Paul glorifies the Person of Christ; Christ exhorts all to lead an ethical life, Paul and John formulate a dogma; Christ calls for love, Paul Hates; Christ forgives, Paul anathematises and damns; Christ perfects the law, Paul rejects the law; Christ humanises, Paul and John cosmologize and divinize; Christ gives a lesson of humility, modesty and peace; Paul proud and self-affirmative, harasses and persecutes; Christ simplifies; Paul and John complicate. The disciple left the Master and the institution followed the disciple. The Scripture says what Chirst said; the disciple and the institution create an independent tradition which was the immanent cause of all the so-called heresies. schisms and protest movements. Moreover. the canonization of the Scripture was done by a decision of the institution, the Church, Opting for the Pauline and Johannic tradition, not by a scrupulous historical research on the Ipsissima Verba of Christ. The justifications given were: Development of the germ, explication of the implicit (Episcopate being a part of the Apostolate) living tradition, not the dead, testimony of the spirit, not of the letter. Revelation being the Person not the Word, Scripture being a part of the Tradition. The works of the holy spirit in history never stop! And even more, the holy spirit preserves the Inerrart Tradition!

Islam, then, appeared to rectify the image, making a retour aux sources, to the Christianity of Christ, using Scripture as a criterion of the Tradition. Islam preconceived the Sola Scripture of Protestantism, the ethical Christianity of Harnack, the critical studies of Renan, the mythical interpretations of Strauss, Bauer and Feurbach.

Revelation omured to liberate human conscience from all yokes, natural social, political or ideological (myth, magic, superstition...) in order to prepare man for the perfect life. Revelation also endowed him with a Law which expresses human nature in its perfection. Law in the beginning was educative. Submission to the Law was a goal, as such, to tame the conscience. Once Law became formal and void and leads to hypocrisy, then love, humility, purity, faithfulness, truthfulness and such moments of sincerity are also used as means of education to complete the Law and to give it a real content. Revelation also crime to unveil in man what he feels, the sense of vocation, his commitment to accomplish his vocation on earth as vicegerent to God and the realisation of His Purpose. The ancient intervention of God from Noah until Christ has been left to man to realize the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Therefore, Islam came and rejected rnonasticism and monastic life as pure innovation, never as divine imperative, as if Islam was referring to Saint Antonius, founder of monasticism in the fourth century. Celibacy also with a persuasion from Matthiew stumbled on the figurative sense of the word �eunech� (Mt. XIV, 12) after injecting the statement on celibacy, adding it to Marcus (Mk. X, 11) to institutionalise the Ecelesiat. Throughout history this dissociation between the holy and profane, between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth resulted in Atheism, Secularism and the reaction of Death of God Theology. Photius, Luther and married priests left the Church, founding another.

Although the revolt against sin occured in modern times, the dogma of original sin had already been formulated in the Patristics. Man is sinful in blood and flesh. He carries the sin of Adam from his birth, from generation to generation until the end of time. Man is determined to sin; whatever good will he has, he is condemned to sin. Therefore, evil overwhelmed good. Evil is ontologically inherent in the tissue of the Universe. This is the condition of salvation. Man cannot save himself by himself. Because he cannot save himself from evil. he needs a Savior, the Christ Messiah. Man became passively cornered from beginning to end, encircled from right and left. Adam sinned for him and Christ saves him!

Islam appeared to return man to his innocense. Adam, because he is free, misbehaved. He repented and he has been forgiven. Every man is born innocent from any previous misbehavior done by others. Man is free. He is only responsible for his own deeds. Every man will account only for himself alone, not for his folks. Islam preconceived what the Enlightenment would express ten centuries later on.

From the beginning of Chirsianity, the necessary Divine Grace prevailed over human free will, if there was any. The appearance of Christ, the life of Christ, his birth, his deeds, his death, his resurrection, the life of the disciples and even the history of the Church, all of these are recipients of the Divine Grace. The Divine Grace is free, unconditional and massive. All efforts since Pelagius in the fourth century until Sartre in the twentieth to rectify the image and to make room for human free will apparently have failed to change the overwhelming Grace except by negation.

Islam appeared to make Grace conditioned by the free will of rnan, given to individuals rather than to a group or to nature. This grace is not external, but internal. The unexpected powers man feels in a situation of sacrifice are due to his sincerity and truthfulness, to the purity of his intentions, to the universalism of his goal and to the mobilisation of his existing powers to the extreme. An external help given to man just because of his name, of his participation in an institution or his dogmatic belief, is a mere pretension. Grace, then, is conditioned by the good action of man.

The relationship between Islam and Christianity as a relationship of certainty to conjecture appeared also in a second stage, in the late Middle Ages, Sp�tskalastik, where a real cultural interaction occured. This time there was a diffusion from the young Islamic culture to the old Christian culture through translation from Arabic to Latin. This period has usually been analysed and studied by medieval scholars, historians from the Christian side or apologists from the Muslim side. Neither history nor apologetics will provide anything new. Only phenomenology of culture describes cultural phenomena as living experiences in subjective and intersubjective conscience, which is the cultural conscience.

In early scholasticism, from the seventh century until the tenth, medieval Europe was in a process of transmitting Christian-Roman culture to the North and the Christianization of the Germans as well as of the Anglo-Saxons. In the same period, Islamic culture began, developed and reached its peak. Medieval Europe was ready to receive and Islamic culture was ready to give. In late scholasticism, from the eleventh century on, scholars have concentrated their efforts to show the impact of Islamic culture on medieval Europe. In this civilizational period, the impact is historical, not ideational as it was in the Patristic period.

Iconography was one of the causes of several schisms that occurred in Christianity in the eleventh century. Icons, recognized and utilized by Catholics, rejected and abandoned by Protestants, raised the question as to whether the concrete has any role to play in the representation of the Absolute. Can icons reduce the distance between God and man in prayer or meditation? Can icons persuade for truth, suggest an idea, provoke a memory? Are not icons based on absurdity: the figuration of that which has no figure, the visualization of that which is not visual? There is a very fine line to draw between iconography and idolatry. Islamic culture gave medieval Christianity another vision to solve the absurdity by making an absolute distinction between transcendence and figuration. God is transcendent and can never be figured.

Reason already began to prove its power in late scholasticorn. After the translation of Islamic philosophy from Arabic to Herbrew to Latin, reason began to claim its rights on faith. Medieval philosophers began to learn the lesson given by Islamic philosophy: Reason and faith are identical. The principles of reason are themselves the principles of faith. Dogmas are not mysteries which go beyond reason and which can only be believed through faith. Beranger of Tours, Nicolas of Amiens in the eleventh century. Abelard in the twelfth century, Siger of Brabarant and Latin Averoists in the fourteenth century, Giordano Bruno in the fifteenth century, all of them began to revolt against dogmas and mysteries as mere presuppositions, conjecture and even errors. The destiny of Christian disciples of Moslem philosophers was ahead of the Inquisition! Modern rationalists, Descartes and the Cartesians, continued the struggle already begun. The famous Cogito is a new form of the �Flying Man� of Avicenna. The man, despite the severing of his members, still exists as Awareness, If Descartes has extracted the Bible, the Church, the customs and the political rejainies from his method. leaving them to his temporary ethics, Spinoza came and applied the method in every aspect of life. God as Person disappeared as conjecture. the Transcendence of God reappeared as certainty.

The translation of Islamic culture into Latin began with the translation of science even before the translation of philosophy. Al-Kindi was known first in Medieval Europe as a chemist before being known as a scientist. In Islamic culture, natural sciences such as chemistry, physics, astronomy or biological sciences such as botany, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, medicine and even human sciences like psychology, psychophysics, physiognomy, geography, history and jurisprudence were experimental sciences based on observation and experimentation. Nature, although created by its events, occurs under the natural laws. Knowing these laws is a part of the Divine Knowledge. Spinoza later on, under the influence of Islamic mysticism, made from the natural laws Divine Attributes. The transcendence of God is a prolegomenon to the determinism of Nature. The identity between Spirit and Nature, between the holy and the profane, made experimental science possible. The research for the material and efficient cause is at the same time a research for the raison d��tre of Revelation which gives the formal and the final cause. That is why Aristotelian logic has been refuted as formal, void and tautological. Roger Bacon in the fourteenth century and under the influence of Islamic scientific thought made from experience the foundation of science. Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, accumulating all Islamic scientific thought with his own rational evidence and observation, systematized the experimental method in his Novum Organum, which became the point of departure of all modern sciences. Therefore, Alchemy became chemistry, astrology became astronomy and occult sciences became exact sciences.

In mathematics, medieval Europe stopped with Greek mathematics: the golden figure, the divine proportion, commentaries on the principles of Archemedes. In arithmetic, the addition was more numerology than arithmetic. Mathematics flourished in a culture where reason dominates, or where a power of abstraction exists, such as Islamic culture. The science of algebra had been discovered by al-Khawarasmi, optics as mathematical physics by Ibn al-Hytham and arithmetic by al-Beyruni. All the treatises have been translated to Latin and became the new mathematics of the time. The transcendence of God freed the human mind and gave man the dimension of the Infinite. Mysteries, magic, figures are limitations and induce conjectures. Transcendence, Infinity and abstraction are negations of all limits and induct certainty.

In medieval Europe, churches were the centres of learning. The Fathers were teachers, the priests were philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and doctors. Dogma contained all human knowledge and the Church knew everything. Learning was a legacy, received and transmitted from generation to generation. The holy learning could never be put into question. After the contact with Islamic culture, other centres of learning were founded and universities began. A new spirit of learning emerged: circles of discussions between equals, freedom of thought, absence of dogmatic presuppositions, argumentation and counter-argumentation, moral courage to protest and to negate. Dialecticians stood against theologians. Open inquiry prevailed over dogmatism. Enlightenment had already begun.

Civilization before being a material production is a sense or a cultural dimension of the conscience. After several contacts between medieval Europe and the Islamic world, in peace time, through merchants, wanderers and in war through the Crusaders, a sense of civilization was developed by the new-comers to the Islamic world. In urbanism, public paths with the canalization of smake through the wind outside the town to prevent pollution, open courtyard inside the houses with water and greens and with windows towards the sun. Arabic archs exprecsing the aesthetics of tree frosts, all these new styles were behind the late Roman and early Gothic architecture. New diagnostics, new medicines, new surgery and new methods for curing diseases have been borrowed from the so-called �Moors�. The technology of irrigation, measurement, lighting, transportation, accounting, management, etc. also contributed by Islamic culture have dominated until modern times. Kings and philosophers returned home full of memories from this civilization which they wanted once to destroy. When Charlemagne was receiving gifts from Haroun al-Rashid, when Richard the Lion-Hearted was cured by Salah al-Din, a new kind of human relations was discovered, based on courage, honesty, loyalty, truthfulness and humanism. Fredrich II corresponded with Ibn Sab�in and the Muslim philosopher answers, giving him a new view of the world, an absotute monism adopted later on in a spiritual ontology of Meister Eckhart and in the absolute idealism and romanticism of Hegel, Shelley and all Romantic poets and philosophers.

In modem times, Islamic culture continued to be one of the sources of change, one of the models of thought and social structures after the rejection of the medieval pattern of thought and life. Some philosophers, poets, writers, and social critics were consciously aware of this model which Islamic culture presents. Spinoza wanted to restructure religious authority in Judaism and in Christianity according to the Islamic model, that is without authority. Kant praised Averroes for making the history of mankind a history of reason. Hegel admired Islamic Monotheism and found his inspiration in the Islamic mystic poets, Saidia and Hafez. Richard Simon, Welhausen, Renan and most of the biblical critics wonder how Muslim scholars could keep their scripture historically authentic and adopt methods of oral transmission which critics of Hadith conceived to preserve the oral tradition from deviations, mistakes or addition. R. Simon learned Arabic for that purpose. Renan became an Orientalist and confesses in his preface to the Life of Jesus that he will apply in his history of Christianity the same methods that the Muslim biographers used in writing biographies of their Prophet. In more recent times, Bergson heard Iqbal on time and eternity and jumped from his chair, hallowing that he (Bergson) was hearing himself speak! Thomas Arnold, Bernard Shaw, Leopald Weiss, Pickthall, etc. everyone, when he is touched by an aspect in Islamic culture, whispers �If this is Islam, we are all Muslims�.

However, besides this conscious relationship between modern authors and Islamic culture, there is another unconscious stream in which some Islamic models or motivations appear, behind or underneath new systems in modem times. After the collapse of medieval patterns of thought, (based on looking for truth in an a priori source, following tradition, obeying authority, confining the limits of human reason and justifying dogma) which were under the constant strikes of the Renaissance and the Reformation, a new pattern appeared: rejection of all a priori sources of truth, criticizing tradition, revolting against authority placing unlimited confidence in human reason, beginning by clear and distinct ideas, looking for rational or concrete evidence and rejecting personification in God or in Nature. Here, Islam appears as motivations and intentions rather than results and conclusions. Until now, no scholar has tried to analyze the motivations of the Western culture in modern times as Islamic motivations.

The revolt against authority which chracaterizes modern times is a real human right. Man is free and responsible. He accomplishes his duty according to his own conscience. Man has a vocation on Farth. No obedience to any external authority, no limitation on his freedom of thought. This was the deepest inspiration of Western culture in modern times since the Reformation: freedom of interpretation of scriptures as Luther wrote in Freedom of the Christian, and since the Renaissance as Pic de la Menandola wrote in his Oration on the Dignity of Man or Giordano Bruno in his Heroic Flowers. The revolt against ecclesia, censorship, and tutorship has an Islamic motivation. Islam affirmed the freedom of man and his responsibility for truth without any obedience to any authority except his affliation to a universal principle, what Islam revealed as a priori principle of human nature, the Western World struggled to obtain with heavy losses during the Inquisition.

The revolt against rituals or what Luther called �works of faith� was paralleled to the revolt against dogma and mysteries. Rituals are not identical to good deeds. Ritual may lead to hypocrisy in all of its forms: two-facedness, social pride, poor wits, etc. Ritual also give a pseudo-salvation and induce the believers to illusion. From Descartes and the Cartesians through Kant and the Post-Kantians to Harnack and liberal Protestantism, the good deed became the only manifestation of faith. Religion became very simple and clear: Belief in a transcendent God and the accomplishment of good deeds. This is precisely an Islamic description of faith and action. What Islam declared as simple and clear has been obtained by modern philosophers after a long struggle and even without winning the battle conclusively.

After the collapse of the particularism of dogma and of rituals, a certain kind of universalism appeared in Western philosophy God ceased to be a determined Person. God became absolute, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. The Principles of Philosophy of Decartes, the Short Treatise of Spinoza or the Metaphysical Discourse of Leibniz could have well been written by a Mu�tazilite. The idea of God also became a universal idea no longer determined by dogma or tradition. What religions, dogmas and sects had dispersed, philosophy unified. Descartes, Spinoza and Kant are neither Catholic, Jew nor Protestant. They could unify themselves under one principle. The �Mathesis Universalis� of Leibniz could explain in universal terms the structure of the universe. His �Monadology� is pure description of the One and the Universe absolutely depersonified. Previously, Avicenna and Averroes had given the model.

Since the collapse of tht medieval pattern and the discovery of the so-called systems of thought and of nature as illusions, the idea of progress appeared as the tissue of man and history. Newton conceived a new system of physics. Kepter a new system of astronomy. Lovoisier a new concept of chemistary. The progress of science appeared to be the new hope of modern man. Then, the idea of progress became itself an object of a new science, philosophy of history. Instead of the medieval schism between the city of God and the city of earth, progress is shown as the internal logic in the development of the city of God itself as the development of humanity. Providence is itself the progress of mankind in history. Revelation is an educational process of humanity The accomplishment of that end means the independence of human conscience and the autonomy of reason and will. What Herder, Kant and Lessing declared as accomplished in the Enlightenment had already been accomplished eleven centuries before. Vico and Condorcet both declare the accomplishment of the ideal humanity once reason and freedom are realized. Auguste Come and Darwin found in science conformity with reality, the last stage in the development of humanity. Hegel declared the accomplishment of the absolute on earth. Man became perfect.

Although the revolt for social justice was a permanent denominator in human history since Spartacus and the revolt of slaves in the Roman empire or Donatus and the revolt of colonized nations against the colonial powers, social revolts essentially characterize modern times. Peasant uprisings since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; workers, popular and national 'movements in the eighteenth centtry; worker strikes and mass revolts in the nineteenth century and independent movements and liberation fronts in the twentieth century. New social ideals began to motivate the European conscience: social justice, equality, a society without classes, work as a source of value, protest against monopolies and exploitation. All Utopias known in Western culture, from Thomas Moore to B. Shaw, express a desire which Islam expressed as a realizable ideology adopted by organized masses forming a community. All socialist aspirations in modern times reveal a real Islamic motivation, natural and human.

Since the collapse of all a priori sources of truth under the heavy attacks on the Church, the clergy, the priesthood and after submitting the scriptures themselves to historical criticism, tracing every verse back to its historical source in the ancient cultural environment. the discovery of truth was left only to pure human effort. Since the human view is always unilateral, partial, partisan and susceptible to error, all systems, disciplines and sciences which have been built to give the naked reality a theoretical foundation were incomplete. Rationalism affirms its own and exclusive rights on reality. criticizing senses and proving that sensual testimonies may be illusions, criticizing experience and proving that experiences without rational and a priori foundations are incomprehensible. Therefore, rationalism ended in formalism, a unilateral aspect of rationalism. Then, experience reacted and affirmed its rights on reality as the only source of knowledge accusing reason of formalism, dogmatism, extremism and mechanism. Empiricism was also a unilateral reaction to formalism regarding the perception of reality. The European conscience was divided into two divergent trends, irreparably severed and disjointed. All efforts of synthesis between the two opposite trends failed. The critical philosophers have tried to juxtapose the two in a mechanical, stable and external way. Sensation, understanding and reason are three stages superimposed on each other; the first offers intuition, the second, categories and the third, ideas. Every stage deals with an independent world, the first with the external word, the second with the internal and the third with the superior. And even more, the system returned to the medieval pattern. �I had to destroy knowledge in order to make room for belief�, Kant says. A breakable synthesis which leads to positivism on one side and to mysticism on the other. Then absotute idealism came as a reaction to critical philosophy, offering a more dynamic synthesis where the abstract becomes identical to the concrete in a long dynamic and dialectical process, beginning with the hic et nunc which is the abstract to the concept which is the concrete. Principles of logic are themselves laws of history. This second effort of Hegel forgot the individual conscience as the core of this process. From this gap came all contemporary trends making the individual the center of the universe. This individual, until now, has never been focused: Individual existence by Kierkegaard, conscience by Husserl, will to power by Nietzsche, time by Bergson, Being by Marcel, dasein by Heidegger, body ty Merleau-Ponty, existence by Jaspers, experience by James, etc. All of them reject both previous efforts, formalism as well as empiricism, philosophy as well as science, falling down in an absolute individualism, emotionalism and voluntarism. Others, after long effort, became hopeless and preferred despair, and ended with scepticism, relativism, agnosticism and nihilism. All of them wanted to shoot at the target but all missed the focus. A human view is always unilateral despite gestaltism, integralism and totalism. Only Islam can direct the conscience to keep the focus of things, the integrality of truth and to keep the balance between extremes. Islamic monotheism can guide the European conscience in its wilderness and aberration and guide it towards the focus of reality.