What Are You Reading…On Islamic Philosophy

It’s good to remember, sometimes, when faced with the continuing horrors of the US war on terror and its Muslim/Islamist backlash, that there were a few centuries when Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted in Muslim Spain, and even did Aristotelian philosophy together, establishing an Aristotelian tradition that influenced St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. And so on. But I’d still suggest that the Aristotelian Islamic philosophy of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd has very little (or nothing…) to do with the Islamic philosophy currently practiced by both Sunnis and Shiia, Saudis and Iranians, Arabs and Persians, in the brutal religious wars and vicious propaganda battles currently ravaging the Muslim world, especially in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, where the aftermath of the terribly failed US invasion of Iraq is still playing out, or in Yemen, where the US military-industrial-insecurity complex is currently fighting a proxy war against Iran by arming the Sunni/Saudis to destroy the Iranian-backed Shiite/Yemeni militias, with the typically predicable results in horrible suffering among the Yemeni civilians, which horrible suffering is always available for viewing by US citizens on the international broadcast media, should anybody care to bear witness to it.

I’m no expert on Islam, but after several years of reading, I’d say American philosophers who want to understand the Islamist fundamentalist mentality that drives not only Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, but also the Shiite (Twelver) Iranian ayatollahs and Sunni (Wahabbi/Salafist) Saudi shieks, would do well to start by reading the Qur’an, always available online with multiple bilingual Arabic/English translations often differing greatly from each other, followed by the Muslim historians, Muhammed Ibn Ishaq (Surat Rasul Allah: Biography of the Prophet) and Muhammed Ibn Jarir al-Tabari (Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk: History of Prophets and Kings), who show how closely the Qur’an is interwoven with the violent events of Mohammed’s life: the Meccan Qurayshi persecutions, the hijrah to Yathrib/Medina, the Battle of Badr, the Battle of Uhud, the Battle of the Trench, the Treaty of Hudabiyah, the Conquest of Mecca, and the Muslim jihad to conquer the Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula (not to mention the expulsion and massacre of the Jewish tribes of Yathrib, the Banu Qaynuqa, Nadir. and Qurayza). And then I’d suggest checking out some Shiite accounts of the Massacre at Karbala, where Mohammed’s grandson, Husayn, and his infant son, were massacred on orders of the Sunni Caliph, Muawiya, setting off fourteen hundred years of Muslim civil war (fitnah) which is still going on today, and which can always be exploited to set Muslims against each other, for whatever sinister purposes the Western powers might have in mind, which don’t have anything to do with Christian missionary fervor or charitable desire to help the Muslim world, I’m reasonably sure…

A few brief days of study would show that the Muslim jihadis of Al Qaeda and ISIL and their misbegotten ilk are not just screaming religious fanatics and suicidal maniacs (although they sometimes may be that…) with a horrible delight in sacrificial slaughter, martyrdom and suicide bombing, but also confused, misguided souls pursuing what they have been taught and believe is the spiritual path of the Muslim religion of Islam (Arabic: submission), which demands that the Muslim holy warrior following the path of jihad sacrifice himself as a martyr (shahid) in the cause of Allah, to testify to the truth of the Islamist profession of faith (the shahadah): There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. And according to Sunni fundamentalist doctrine and Shiite martyrology, those who commit blasphemy or apostasy (shirk) by professing any other religion or god can rightfully be killed, as betrayers of Islam, preferably by the scarcely humane methods favored by ISIL and its ilk, which are modeled upon the sacrificial killing of sacred animal victims, and which, after all, are at least more direct, personal, and honest than the US drone strikes against Yemeni wedding parties which result in the suffering and death of the aforementioned innocent civilians, or the US bombings of Iraqi or Syrian cities like Mosul and Raqqa, which result in the sanitized killing of their dehumanized victims without the slightest trace of sympathy or empathy from the remote-control push-button killer…

Needless to say, I’m not endorsing these Muslim beliefs in self-sacrificial martyrdom or sacrificial killing, which I believe are directly contrary to the different understanding of self-sacrifice and martyrdom embodied, for example, in Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion and enshrined in the Christian doctrine of the Eucharist. But if we study the religious belief-system behind those Muslim beliefs, maybe we could come to understand that Muslim jihadists who follow the Sunni fundamentalist teaching or Shiite martyrs’ path actually do have a certain deeply-felt religious belief, based upon the conviction that God (Allah) can be identified with what Rene Girard calls ‘sacred violence,’ which compels them to commit their terribly violent actions, under the guise of Muslim jihad (‘fighting in the cause of Allah’), and which is not that different from Ancient Israelite doctrine of Yahweh-war enshrined in the Hebrew Torah (esp. Exodus Numbers Deuteronomy & Joshua) that also demands the slaying of apostates and the self-sacrificial martyrdom of the believer for the sanctification of Yahweh’s name (the Kidush Hashem). And then maybe we would also finally be able to deal with Muslim terrorist violence and Islamist terrorists in some more intelligent way than by destroying whole countries and massacring thousands of civilians, simply to kill a few hundred or so Muslim jihadis, who are mostly Western/Muslim recruits disgusted with the decadence and bigotry of Western culture and seeking refuge in a Muslim religion which they often don’t know much more about than you would, if you read the readings recommended above, especially the first eight or nine surahs of the Holy Qur’an, up to ‘Spoils of War’ (al-Anfal) and ‘Repentance’ (at-Tawbah)…

But don’t believe me. Also read scholars like Fred Donner (Mohammed and the Believers) or Asma Afsaruddin (Striving in the Path of God) who have a very different concept of Islamic fundamentalism than I do, and who believe Muslim jihad is not sacrificial warfare, but spiritual striving with the Qur’an. I’d like to believe them, too, but then I look up the latest ISIL video on jihadology.net and I’m back to the Qur’an…