Islam and Modernity

Sunday, April 7, 2002
© The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

Readings:
Genesis 16: 1-6 The Conception of Ishmael
Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar; and Sarai said to Abram, "Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my maid; it may be that I shall obtain children by her." And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai… and he went in to Hagar, and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, Hagar looked with contempt on her mistress, Sarai. And Sarai said to Abram, "May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my maid to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!" But Abram said to Sarai, "Behold, your maid is in your power; do to her as you please." Then Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar, and Hagar fled from Sarai into the wilderness… [and bore a son, named Ishmael, who became the father of the Bedouins and of Islam. And later, Sarai bore a son, Isaac, whose son, Jacob, would be called Israel.

Theology at Clash of Civilizations
by Jack Miles, Cross Currents, Winter 2002, Vol. 51, No 4.

Secretaries of state may have to learn some theology if the current clash between Western and Muslim civilization is to yield to disengagement and peaceful coexistence, to say nothing of more fruitful kinds of relationships. To suppose that we can achieve security by dealing with [Osama bin Laden] as a common criminal and with the Muslim governments that harbor his movement as secular governments unconcerned with the religious dimension in his appeal is to fight this new war as if it were the last war.

To say this is not to dignify the man but to recognize that containing the threat he poses may entail promoting a true alternative to him in the world where he originates. This task, in turn, will require more theology than it takes to issue a routine and utterly uninformed declaration that, of course, Osama bin Laden does not represent true Islam. Who does represent true Islam? "Will the real Islam please stand up?" This is the kind of question that our military and diplomatic institutions are designed never to ask and never to notice that they are not asking…

Engaging a jihad for the soul of Islam as if it were an international manhunt for a common criminal is a battle plan guaranteed to fail. How can we make war against all the nations that have harbored the agents of Osama bin Laden when the United States itself is one of those nations? We have done so unwillingly and unwittingly, but how witting or willing was Egypt to harbor the Muslim Brotherhood agents who assassinated President Anwar Sadat? So far, the paper trail left by the World Trade Center saboteurs has led to friendly Arab states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates rather than to Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan... How very clever to implicate just those regimes in his crimes.

But in the long run, there cannot be any definitive sorting out of good Muslim states from bad ones. It is the Muslim umma as a whole that has harbored this murderous movement within it, and it is the Muslim umma as a whole that must somehow be persuaded to break with it… Just as militant communism could not be militarily defeated in the last clash of civilizations, so militant Islam cannot be militarily defeated in the new one… Peace will come not when any one terrorist and his network of secret agents have been "surgically" excised but when an authentic alternative vision has emerged within the House of Islam that makes the vision of victory-by-terrorism irrelevant and unwelcome.

The development of such an alternative vision, however, will require a major paradigm shift in Western diplomacy. It will no longer suffice to treat religion as a mere happenstance ("I happen to be Jewish," "I happen to be Muslim" [or even, I happen to be Unitarian!]) and therefore as a political irrelevancy. This method of dealing with religion politically may have served us well enough in overcoming Christianity's own hideous wars of religion. But the old way will not meet this new challenge, for it takes off the table just the topic that militant Islam finds most compelling. One can no more discuss that topic without discussing theology than one can discuss communism without discussing ideology. Theology is the ideological element in religion, and nothing at this moment could be more tragically evident than that we have ignored it to our peril.

Sermon
It’s interesting that we would sing the hymn, "My Country Is the World," and think that its message, that we are to conceive of the world as one, is full of hope and promise and is the truest of messages we could sing. Maybe.

Modernity. It is the word that is used to refer to the effects of modernism. Modernity. The effects of modernism are profound, and so much of our world at this moment is shaped by people’s passionate defense or attack of it. We are particularly sensitive to these because we, Unitarians, are, as much as any one group, responsible for modernity.

Modernity has given rise to secular democracies. Modernity has given rise to the expanse and influence of modern science. Modernity has given rise to the international community, "My Country Is the World," but defined not by religious sentiment but by the ascendancy of Western capitalism and consumerism. Modernity is rooted in the individual ownership of property, and yet has yielded multinational corporations. Modernity has brought about a deep and abiding secularism or, at least, a suspicion and diminishment of religion and a vagueness about the recognition of the religious impulse. Because we are the architects of modernity it is a difficult challenge for us to understand the depth of the yearning for God amongst our contemporaries. Modernity has yielded psychology, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, in fact, individual rights and liberties, including free speech, freedom of movement and association, and a personal freedom that borders and sometimes crosses over into pornography, licentiousness, Dionysian excess, hedonism, what was, when religion was part of the center of life, sins of the flesh. The twin towers of modernity’s worldwide influence, are the statue of Lady Liberty erected in Tianaman Square by the students during their revolts in China in the latter part of the 20th century, and the thin, cylindrical, vertical, distinctive Coca-Cola bottle, which can be purchased even in some of the most remote regions of Africa, Central and South America, and the South Pacific.

The symbols of modernity include the modern university, whose aim is the unfettered pursuit of knowledge wherever that pursuit takes the pursuer. In other words, there are no boundaries to the free mind, so heresy, blasphemy, and a scientific pursuit that outstrips our moral and ethical sensibilities are all possible. The symbols of modernity include the Pentagon and the White House, symbols of democracy; and the World Trade Center, once the symbol of international business, and the ascendancy and supremacy of capitalism and consumerism. In other words, the targets for the September 11th attacks!

Reinhold Niebuhr, whom we quoted in last week’s second reading, once wrote, "Myth is truer than history." The Lenten sermon series that we concluded last Sunday had this as its underlying premise, that "Myth is truer than history." In other words, the religious imagination, which produces myths and stories and metaphors, points to something truer than the facts we can assemble into a meaningful pattern. The religious imagination points to what we called the unseen order of existence.

Modernity has a mythological dimension to it, too, and points to an unseen order. That mythological dimension is supplied by modernity’s chief creation, modern science. Modern science has given us a three-tiered universe: the micro-universe of quantum mechanics, the macro-universe of astro-physics, and the ordinary world we can see. But, we still think like medievalists in a way, pushing the micro-universe "down there" in the nether regions of the infinitesimally small, and the macro-universe we shove way "up there" into the vast black hole of space, such that the yield, as one religionist said, is this: "The fundamental mistake of modernity has been to collapse all of this [reality, all three tiers] into a one-storied universe; the physical universe, and that’s all there is." (Huston Smith, "The Good News of Damnation," delivered 4/6/02) Modernity has yielded a stubborn materialistic idolatry; that this ordinary reality, this one tier, is the only one there is. And, since it is liberal thought that has created modernity, this is why I’ve said it is our challenge to find the religious as something in and of itself, and not as a modifier of political or social liberalism, in order for us to escape the idolatry we’ve created! We have to dive into human experience to find the religious and the mythical dimensions that are truer than history, that point to an unseen order, that are more than the one-tiered, materialistic universe we’ve made up, when even science itself points to at least a three tiered one! This is what the critics of modernity are trying to say. That the modern world has created this false sense of materialism as all the dimensions and layers of reality. And, since we are the primary architects of modernity, if it is to be corrected at all, it is for us to do. And we can start that correction by listening to the most vociferous critics of modernity. And that is Islam!

The jihad of Islamic fundamentalists is aimed at destroying the worldwide civilization born of modernity. The jihad is aimed at democracy, capitalism, consumerism, individual liberty, secularism, hedonism, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, civil rights, and everything that is the product and the consequence of Western civilization. Islamic fundamentalists are at war with modernity because, simply put, to them modernity has destroyed all that is sacred and poisoned humanity’s present and its future. It is an affront to Allah.

I am not going to spend this morning’s sermon talking in depth about Islam, although I would suggest that together we find a means to explore and understand this religion. This morning I am going to suggest that we are participating in a clash of civilizations: between modernity and Islam. Not all Muslims are taking up arms against modernity, although much of the conversation within Islam itself has to do with which part of Islam will lead what is called dar al-islam, the "House of Submission," against the dar al-harb, the "House of Warfare," which is the modern West and is an apt description of the 20th century in the West; and the answer to that will give us whether we will be fighting with arms or standing arm in arm with another civilization.

Islam is one of the three religions called, "people of the Book." Along with Christianity and Judaism, Islam is a Western religion, but one with a Persian background. The Muslim’s spiritual lineage is traced back through Mohammed, through the wandering Bedouin tribesmen, to Ishmael, which means that all of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament are claimed, as well as the Quran; Jesus, Moses, Abraham, are all prophets, with Mohammed being the last. But, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are all called "people of the Book" because they understand historical writings, the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran, to be revelations of God’s encounter with humanity. That is their distinctive characteristic and their commonality, although all three claim three different books as Divine revelations.

Mohammed, the chief prophet of Islam, was born in Mecca in 570 A.D., and provided the model for the heroic journey that is Islam’s spiritual model. Islam is the Arabic word for "surrendering oneself to God," or "submission," and it was after a purifying time in the desert that Mohammed submitted to the will of Allah, and in that intense personal struggle of the religious ascetic, came to offer himself as a servant of God. The Arabia of Mohammed’s time was a disparate group of tribes that worshipped different gods and warred among themselves. Mohammed offered an absolute view of God which linked the individual directly to the Creator, and which had a strong ethical component as a measurement of that link. "Islam is the determination to implement, in the physical texture of the world, the command of God or the Moral Imperative," wrote Islamic scholar Fashur Rahman (Religions of the World, Reynolds et al). Mohammed attacked the idols of the tribe and kinship group, the idols of race, ethnicity, and social standing, and the idol of earthly life, that we think this life "represents the [final] boundaries of human hopes and fears." (IBID) Through his rise as a military and a religious leader, Mohammed was able to unify the disparate Arab world in a way that became characteristic of Islam itself. It is a unified worldview, ascribed to by millions of differing economic, social, ethnic, and racial makeup. This unified worldview is not that of modernity, and the effect of the difference is dramatically portrayed by Malcolm X in his autobiography, when he concluded his pilgrimage to Mecca, stood with millions of various ethnic and racial and economic and national backgrounds, and realized for the first time in his life his identity not conditioned by his ethnicity, his race, his economic status, or the nation of his origin.

The umma is the whole Islamic world at any given time in history, with no national borders or local, cultural characteristics, or common languages save for the Quran. In other words, the umma comprises a civilization, which is at odds with modernity. "The clash of civilizations question, from the Muslim side, is whether the umma can join the international community or whether it must incorporate the international community into itself." (Jack Miles, "The Clash of Civilizations," Cross Currents, Winter 2002) And from the standpoint of modernity the question is one of the possibilities of peaceful co-existence. That term again, eh? But, what we call the "war on terrorism" is a jihad, a holy war to Islamic extremists who see the clash of civilizations between modernity and the umma, between Isaac and Ishmael in the family of humanity, as an international form of the prophetic struggle; to the extent we see it only as a clash between countries which harbor terrorists and countries that don’t, we will miss the larger, religious context that makes up the world as Islam represents it. One commentator set the larger context we struggle to understand: "To suppose that we can achieve security by dealing with [Bin Laden] as a common criminal and with the Muslim governments that harbor his movement as secular governments unconcerned with the religious dimension in his appeal is to fight this new war as if it were the last war." (IBID)

Mahatmas Gandhi once said, "Religion is like a cow. It kicks! But, it gives milk, too." (IBID, Smith) Last week we concluded the Lenten sermon series by suggesting that the liberal religious view of existence is that at its core, it is a heart (as opposed to orthodox Christianity’s view that it is a gallows), and this is to be an ever expanding heart of compassion, love, mercy, forgiveness, and that this core, this heart, is part of an unseen order that reveals itself to us most profoundly in moments of great incongruity; like that of the execution of an innocent individual by a culture representing the highest form of law and religion of its time. Islam represents existence and that unseen order in an entirely different way. That there is a singular moral and ethical core to existence, which is Allah and is revealed through the scripture of the Quran and in humanity’s willingness to submit to Allah. It is from this submission that the moral and ethical life is derived, and peace results from an unfathomable diversity of peoples. Mohammed’s central message included a comment on time. "The Quran taught that people could find peace despite constant change if they centered their lives on a relationship that time could not destroy. All who clung to the transitory world as the ultimate possibility would anguish over its impermanence." (Religions of the World, 595) To the liberal religionist, on the other hand, the transitory world itself contains ultimate possibilities.

And what is an equal possibility is that both Islam and modernity, and Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and all other religions, have a claim to violence. "I can say with confidence that the killing dimension of religion is an interfaith phenomenon." (Is Religion the Problem?, Martin Marty, Tikkun, 3/26/02) All religions kick, but they give milk, too. And the religious impulse is part of the structure of human consciousness, and not a stage in human history that will pass away. So it is for us to recognize who we are as human beings, in all our glory and in all our tragic possibilities. And from this recognition seek the sweet taste of religion in communion with those very different from ourselves.

In a radio address shortly after the two bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, ushering in the atomic age that began beneath the bleachers of Amos Alonzo Stagg football field at the University of Chicago, the University’s President Robert Maynard Hutchins quoted a medieval theologian about "the good news of damnation." The good news that Hutchins relayed is that we now know about damnation, about the human capacity to destroy, to damn creation by acts of unfathomable destruction. Thus, we know salvation, too! Born of the great civil war of our country were Abraham Lincoln’s words of appeal to both sides in the conflict, to be "again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." We know that the salvation of the human race is dependent not upon the result of this clash of civilizations, but upon humanity’s ability and willingness to negotiate this clash such that it does not destroy itself. We know our capacity for destruction. We know damnation, regardless of the religious tradition that may have differing understandings of what that damnation entails. We know damnation. Thus, we can know salvation, the saving of life, too. Let us aim all our prayers, all our capacities to understand, and all our efforts towards the saving of life.AMEN.