Summer/Fall 2008
THE GOD OF ABRAHAM
AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Richard L. Rubenstein served as Florida State’s Robert O. Lawton Distinguished professor of religion for many years, leaving the university in 1995 to assume the presidency of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, a post from which he retired in 1999. A renowned figure in contemporary theology and the study of religion and society, Rubenstein is best known for his numerous works dealing with the theological implications of the Holocaust and the phenomenon of modern genocide in general. He lives in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he continues to teach and write. The following is an edited excerpt from his newest book in progress.
As the United States finds itself in what has been officially characterized as a “war against terror,” we would do well to reflect on the question of whether the "clash of civilizations" that Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argued could be the fate of humanity in the 21st Christian century is already upon us.
According to Bassam Tibi, a devout Muslim, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, and professor of International Relations at Germany’s Göttingen University, the “clash of civilizations” is both real and dangerous. Tibi comments:
After September 11 we can no longer afford to confine ourselves to warning of Islamophobia, if civilizational discord is addressed. The rhetoric of dismissing “The Islamic Threat” and the so-called “Myth of Confrontation” can no longer be pursued free of context. Discord can be related to clashing worldviews and it can assume a military shape. What else than a threat was September 11…? It is not correct to play down what happened in New York and Washington as an act of a small group or a “crazed gang;” this argument conceals instead of enlightening. In short: on September 11, an act of irregular war took place. That act was equally an assault on the values and the concept of order of the West. The event is placed in a civilizational context which cannot be overlooked.
Nevertheless, Tibi counsels us that we must distinguish between Islam as a religious faith and Islamism or fundamentalism which, he argues, is “an outcome of the politicization of Islam. This is a distinction that other scholars would challenge, claiming that ideally, Islam knows no separation of the religious and political spheres.
Men do not blow themselves up in a spectacular attack on the preeminent icons of American financial and military power or in the thwarted attack on the White House, symbol of American political power, merely to inflict harm on as many and as elite a group of the enemy as possible. Though present, such motives were subordinate to a larger objective, the challenge of radical Islam to American and Western civilization.
At the height of the first Gulf Crisis in September 1990, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed the onset of a "New World Order." After the end of the Cold War and the apparent victory of American arms in the Gulf War, it appeared plausible to elites within the United States that such a “world order” might indeed be emerging. In reality, the Gulf War was followed by intensifying international disorder rather than order. As Tibi has observed, the unexamined principles behind Bush's "world order" are based upon a fundamentally secular and anthropocentric view in which the nation-state is regarded as the sovereign unit of action in world order and which acknowledges no superordinate principle or power-center that cannot be derived from the state’s interest in maximizing its own power or, when necessary, maintaining a power equilibrium with its neighbors. This system of international order is achieved by commitments on the part of the sovereign states to interact peacefully and to honor mutually recognized boundaries. For the West, the nation-state is thus a secular rather than a divine institution.
With the rise of the secular nation-state, there was a growing acceptance of the ideas of human rights and democracy, at least among those who could with credibility claim membership in the nation. These ideas were expressed authoritatively in the American Declaration of Independence (4 July1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August1789). As we know, the American Declaration proclaimed the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and are “…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The French Declaration stated that “all men are born and remain free and equal in rights” and that “the aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and inprescriptible rights of man.” Moreover, Article 10 of the French Declaration stated explicitly: “No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order (italics added).”
Although both the American and the French Declarations make mention of the “Creator” and the “Supreme Being” respectively, they are purely secular documents. “The source of all sovereignty,” the French document tells us, “lies essentially in the Nation.” Moreover, both the American and the French Revolutions were the intellectual offspring of the philosophical revolution known as the Enlightenment. The fundamental outlook of the Enlightenment was stated precisely and succinctly by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! (Dare to be wise!) Have the courage to use your own understanding! (1784)
Unconditionally rejecting any form of religious heteronomy, that the ultimate source of authority comes from a source other than and superior to human beings, Kant expressed an attitude of absolute autonomy before any authority claiming a privileged source of knowledge or values. As a Protestant, that did not present much of a problem to Kant. At the times, it most certainly did for the Roman Catholic Church which claimed that its teaching authority in matters of faith and morals rendered the autonomy fostered by the Enlightenment wholly unacceptable.
Unfortunately, while the secular international order, originating in the Enlightenment, has provided a goodly measure of freedom, security, and dignity for the West and its allies, the ideal of a secular world order has never been accepted in most of the non-western world. As the elites and then the masses in the non-Western world gained cultural self-consciousness, they began to question and then reject the West's project of universal secular, cultural hegemony. Nowhere has that counter-movement been stronger than in Islam where the self-conscious rejection of the West was given authoritative expression in the thought of such thinkers such as Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949), Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi (1903-1979), and Sayyid Qutb (1903-1966). These men were arguably among the most influential Islamist thinkers of the twentieth century. All three have had an enormous influence not only in the Muslim world but, through the actions of radical Islam, in the contemporary world of global politics. All of us have been affected by their thinking. For example, all three were adamant opponents of the establishment of the State of Israel because of non-negotiable, but passionately-held, religious principle as well as the negative consequences they believed Israel entailed for Palestine’s Arab population. Their opposition to Israel is succinctly and uncompromisingly expressed in the charter of Hamas, an organization that traces its roots to the Muslim Brotherhood and its founder, Hassan Al-Banna:
The Islamic Resistance Movement maintains that the land of Palestine is Waqf, land given as endowment for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection. One should not neglect it or [even] a part of it, nor should one relinquish it or [even] a part of it. No Arab state, or [even] all of the Arab states [together], have [the right] to do this; no king or president has this right nor all the kings and presidents together; no organization, or all the organizations together - be they Palestinian or Arab - [have the right to do this] because Palestine is Islamic Waqf, land given to all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection.
The charter also quotes Hassan Al-Banna:
Israel will exist, and will continue to exist, until Islam abolishes it, as it abolished that which was before it." [From the words of] The martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, Allah's mercy be upon him.
What secular Western decision-makers and intellectuals may fail to recognize is that Israel’s Islamist opponents cannot simply be dismissed as terrorists. They may use terror as a weapon to achieve their objectives. Nevertheless, their theological opposition to both Israel and the infidel West, is rooted in centuries of Islamic tradition. As Professor Mary Habeck has observed concerning Qutb, al-Banna, and Mawdudi in her recent book on jihadist ideology:
None of these theorists could have had any impact in the Islamic world if their arguments had not found some sort of resonance in the religion of Islam.
Insofar as the Jews ever had any chance to secure Arab consent to their presence in a Palestine ruled by a Muslim majority, it would have been as dhimmis, second-class subjects, compelled to submit to far harsher conditions than the second-class status of Israeli Arabs that Western observers such as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt have found so objectionable. However, even that status is no longer available to Israelis who, by resisting the Muslims, are reckoned as harbis, those who use armed force and refuse to submit to Allah’s call (da’wa) against whom faithful Muslims are obliged to make war. Once again, the charter of Hamas is instructive:
The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.
Clearly, these verses constitute a religiously-legitimated license-to-kill. We return to this issue in subsequent chapters of this work.
Of the three Islamist thinkers we cite, many consider Sayyid Qutb to be the intellectual father of modern radical Islam and one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. Qutb was influenced by Mawdudi and, through his writings and the teaching of his brother, Muhammad Qutb, Qutb has influenced such Al-Qaeda leaders as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s leading theorist. Qutb also influenced Ayatolah Ruhollah Khomeini and Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Qutb is the spiritual and intellectual opposite of Immanuel Kant. For Qutb, man-centered cultural modernity has been the spiritual destroyer of the West and now threatens to destroy the Islamic world as well. Impressed with modern western culture as a young man, he came bitterly to reject it as corrupt and immoral after being assigned by Egypt’s Ministry of Public Instruction to study the education system in the United States from 1948 to 1951. American support of the birth of the State of Israel added to his bitterness. Qutb came to see all of modern culture as jahiliyyah, the barbarism, heedlessness and ignorance of God that characterized pre-Islamic Arabic society. He used the term with great effect to designate all that is alien to Islam in the modern world, including all attempts to modernize that tradition. He offered an informed and sophisticated analysis of the weaknesses of capitalism, communism, and nationalism alike, all of which he saw as jahiliyyah. He taught that it was the task of true Muslims first to separate themselves from jahiliyyah and then to seek to destroy it in order to build an authentic Muslim state on its ruins.
Qutb took as his model the example the Prophet Muhammad who left Mecca in 622 (year 1 Hijira), where jahiliyyah prevailed, for Medina, only to return eight years later, to overthrow idols, and proclaim Islam. Qutb argued that world peace and order could only be achieved under the banner of Islam which, he regarded, as alone fit for world leadership. Regarded as subversive by President Gamal Abdul Nasser, Qutb was imprisoned in 1954 and subject to brutal torture. He was, however, permitted to write and much of his literary output comes from his prison years. Briefly released in 1964, he was accused of participating in a failed attempt to overthrow Nasser’s regime in 1965 and executed August 29, 1966. With his death modern radical Islam had gained its first philosopher-martyr.
Opposing the twin western doctrines of the sovereign state and the supposedly inalienable rights of the individual in the private sphere, Qutb insisted that human institutions have no sovereignty, that Allah alone, the perfect Sovereign, rules. In effect, he proclaimed an alternative universalism to that of the West, the universalism of what he believed to be "true religion." In place of the Western-originated system of sovereign states or the pax Americana, Qutb and such thinkers as Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi confidently predicted the triumph of a pax Islamica. Regrettably, for a very long time, Western thinkers paid scant attention to the works of these men. Today, their ideas have appeal among large sectors of the world's Muslim population and limit their rulers’ ability to cooperate with the West.
Ironically, it is because of the heritage of the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, characterized by Islamic radicals as jahiliyyah that Muslims have been able to migrate to the West in large numbers and freely to practice their religion. As a result, the “clash of civilizations” is no longer between two distinct but geographically separate civilizations. Globalization involves reciprocal interaction. According to Professor John Kelsay of Florida State University, an eminent authority on Islam, “The rapidity of Muslim migration … suggests that we may soon be forced to speak not simply of Islam and, but of Islam in the West.”
That hour is now upon us. The situation we face is unlike World War II in which states confronted each other with relatively well-defined borders, uniformed armed forces, and a capital that served as the nation’s command center. Victory then consisted in the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and the decapitation of its capital and leadership. Now, the West is confronted by a virtual, hydra-headed, network entity lacking defined borders but global in its reach and commanding loyalty unto death of a critical mass of devoted believers. Even without a sophisticated technological infrastructure, this virtual state is potentially as capable of acquiring devastating weapons of mass destruction as is the Western-style sovereign state. Indeed, it may already have done so. On February 4, 2004, Dr. A. Q. Khan confessed on Pakistani television that he was responsible for providing nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Moreover, members of his network are suspected of having provided such technology to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, possibly with the knowledge and cooperation of elements within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). We can name but not entirely locate that virtual community. It is the ummah of radical Islam.
Regrettably, there is considerable confusion concerning the nature of the secularization process so bitterly opposed by Islamic radicals. Secularization is definitely not atheism nor is it necessarily unabated materialism. Secularization makes of religion a matter of individual choice without legal penalty. Admittedly, this is contrary to the way religion has been understood in Islam. Hence, secularization may not be a viable option in historically Muslim lands. Nevertheless, at least in the West secularization is considered the most viable policy option in those jurisdictions in which a multiplicity of religions co-exist. The fact that there are mosques in Rome today, that Pope John Paul II has visited Rome’s ancient synagogue and Pope Benedict XVI has visited synagogues in Cologne, and New York is indicative of the fact that, however reluctantly at first, the Roman Catholic Church has accepted religious freedom and diversity. And, at least in the Muslim diaspora, this is a choice that Muslims must accept if there is to be any degree of religious peace in the world.
At present, nothing comparable to Second Vatican Ecumenical Council of 1962-65 has taken place in Islam that would permit the kind of relatively free and equal coexistence of Islam with non-Islamic religions that has developed in Christian lands. Thus, mass immigration of Muslims into western lands carries with it the possibility that Christian culture and religion could eventually be subordinated to Islam Such subordination is not outside of Muslim historical experience. Predominantly Muslim Asia Minor was once the heartland of the Fathers of the Church; Algeria can claim as her native son Augustine of Hippo (354-430) one of the greatest of the Fathers of the Christian Church.
Subordination of Christianity to Islam is an outcome to which some highly influential Muslim leaders publicly and explicitly aspire. For example, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, one of the most influential Sunni clerics and satellite TV preachers, often makes the claim that "Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror." In a fatwa posted on the website www.islamonline.net (December 2, 2002), Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi wrote of the "signs of the victory of Islam," citing a well-known Hadith (Islamic tradition):
The Prophet Muhammad was asked: 'What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?' He answered: 'The city of Heracles will be conquered first' - that is, Constantinople... Romiyya is the city called today 'Rome,' the capital of Italy. The city of Heracles [later to become Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice - once from the South, from Andalusia (Spain), and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.
Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi qualified his statement by adding, “I maintain that the conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology.…”
Similar sentiments have been expressed by other mainstream Muslim leaders, such as the Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd Al-Rahman Al-'Arifi, Imam of the mosque of the King Fahd Defense Academy, who discussed the same Hadith in a website article entitled, "Don't be sad, Allah is with us" in which he wrote "... We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians, who carve crosses on the breasts of the Muslims in Kosovo - and before then in Bosnia, and before then in many places in the world - will yet pay us the Jiziya (the poll tax paid by non-Muslims under Muslim rule), in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam..."
I do not believe that it stretches the imagination to suggest that before American and perhaps European Christians accept the status of dhimmis and pay the jiziya tax “in humiliation,” there could be a tragic but monumental struggle in which much blood would be shed.
Although these Imams speak of the Muslim "conquest" of Europe as a consequence of Islam's superior message, neither they nor the late Pope John Paul II, who in November 2002 pleaded for a reversal of Italy’s declining birthrate in an unprecedented address before the Italian parliament, have been unaware of the power of mass immigration to bring about religious and cultural change. An informed estimate of the consequences of declining birthrate and mass immigration was offered by Bernard Lewis, an internationally recognized authority on the Middle East, in a widely discussed 2004 interview in Die Welt (Hamburg) in which he stated that “Europe will be Muslim by the end of the century.” In this context, we can understand the Pope's concern for "the crisis of the birthrate" and his plea that the crisis be confronted now.
Professor Kelsay sees clearly the nature of the conflict that lies before us:
Much of the contemporary return to Islam is driven by the perception of Muslims as a community with a mission to fulfill. That this perception sometimes leads to conflict is not surprising. In encounters between the West and Islam, the struggle is over who will provide the primary definition to world order. Will it be the West, with its notions of territorial boundaries, market economies, private religiosity, and the priority of individual rights? Or will it be Islam, with its emphasis on the universal mission of a transtribal community called to build a social order founded on pure monotheism natural to humanity?… The very question suggests a competition between cultural traditions with distinct notions of peace, order and justice. It thus implies pessimism concerning the call for a world order based on notions of common humanity.
In a similar vein, Bassam Tibi, who fully appreciates the cultural conditions that have made it possible for him to be both a faithful Muslim and an honored teacher at Göttingen, Harvard and Cornell, has commented that “fundamentalism has become an issue affecting Western societies in search for models for the Islamic communities: communitarianism or integration as individual citizens/citoyens.”
Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike consider themselves spiritual descendants of Abraham. They are somewhat united in recognizing the God of Abraham as their God. Nevertheless, they are seriously divided by their very different understandings of the identity of Abraham and what the God of Abraham requires of us. For Jews and Christians Abraham is the first of the Hebrew patriarchs; for Muslims Ibrahim is the first of the Muslim prophets and Islam alone is Ibrahim’s true religion. The American poet Robert Frost used to say that good fences make good neighbors. In a globalized age, we seldom have the security of fences. If indeed we are faced with a “clash of civilizations,” the choice before us is either speech or the sword, and today, the sword may no longer be a blade but a weapon of mass destruction surreptitiously delivered without an identifiable return address. If we are unable through “words and persuasion” fully to resolve our present crisis, it is nevertheless true that only through speech and dialogue can the crisis be managed. As spiritual descendents of Abraham, each in our own way, the choice before may very well be fraternity through dialogue or fratricide.
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