January 29, 2005

Historical Views of Islam

Years ago when I was teaching the Great Books, my first task every semester was to divest my students of their ahistorical view of classical literature. Most wanted to treat Greek legends as if they had been created in toto -- born full grown like Athena. Part of the problem stemmed from Edith Hamilton's handbook of classical mythology, which failed to differentiate between archaic and classical Greek literature, or Greek and Roman variations on central characters. Hence, students picked up the Iliad assuming that Achilles would be killed (with an arrow to the heel, of course) on the last page, when in fact that Roman legend didn't emerge until centuries after Homer lived.

I used the analogy of the history of science to drive home a simple fact: literature, philosophy, and theology have histories. You wouldn't want to be treated by a fourteenth century physician, I'd say; medical knowledge has a history. Ditto chemistry, physics, or astronomy. I could see faces light up -- that magic moment all teachers long for -- and before long the best students were writing and speaking of the history of thought in ways that allowed them to grasp the creation of different genres and categories.

That was especially important when teaching classical literature, of course, since the Greeks were busy creating a vocabulary upon which later knowledge would rest. And today, it's important to keep in mind that Islam, like Christianity, has a history. Whatever its public face today, it isn't stagnant, and what we see now isn't what's always been, or even the only manifestation of it that exists around the world today.

Daniel Pipes addresses this in a reply to Lawrence Auster, who'd characterized Pipes's approach to Islam as "ecumenist." Pipes writes:

Lawrence Auster characterizes my approach to Islam as "ecumenist" and his own as "civilizationist." I prefer to call my approach historical and his essentialist. That is, I emphasize that things change over time and he sees them as static. For example, he emphasizes continuities going back centuries, I focus on the vast changes since I began studying Islam in 1969.

At the core of his argument is the view that "moderate Islam cannot exist." To which I reply that Islam can be whatever Muslims wish to make of it. I commend to him the study of Muslim history, so that he can for himself understand how (to take two extremes) Bosnian and Najdi Islam turned out the way they did, with one among the most tolerant and the other surely the most stringent.

And he warns Auster, and the rest of us, of the dangers of presentism:

The Auster view of premodern Islam ("the glories of medieval Islam are largely a myth. It was a parasite civilization whose achievements were mainly the work of its subject peoples such as Byzantines, Jews, and Indians, and it declined when it eventually killed off its host") is a superficial projection backwards of today's problems. Indeed, its very premise ("a parasite civilization") is oxymoronic. There was a true and vital civilization of Islam and (to take a convenient date) in 1005 it represented the best that humans had attained at that time in terms of learning, governance, and general advancement. I suggest that Auster ground himself more in this civilization before dismissing it.

Stephen Schwartz also argues for viewing Islam historically, the better to understand where it is today and what it's likely to become tomorrow. He warns that the principal threat to Iraqi stability comes from the Wahhabis across the border in Saudi Arabia. It is this strain of Islam, and not Islam qua Islam, that Zarqawi draws upon when he condemns democracy and threatens all who support it:

The ideology of Zarqawi and his acolytes has a brief history in Islam. The Prophet Muhammad himself never predicted that his community of faith, or umma, would fall back into unbelief. Until the rise of Wahhabism in the desert wastelands of central Arabia 250 years ago, such accusations, as well as allegations that Muslims had surrendered to polytheism or apostasy, were exceedingly rare in the Islamic world. For Wahhabis, however, they are standard theological practice, since Wahhabism aims, above all, at control.

Both men understand that, contrary to the pronouncements from doomsayers on the cynical left and the isolationist/nationalist right, political progress can be made in the Middle East. They don't underestimate the difficulties ahead, but neither do they argue that cultural proclivities or religious beliefs are historical determiners that make the future the same as the past. That's what happens when you read history and understand that the past is filled with paradoxes, and that all thought has a history. Crude determinism, whether of a Marxist or pseudo-Hegelian variety, has no place in the discussion.

— Winfield Myers

| Jan. 29, 2005 | 10:23 AM