With the downfall of the Soviet Union, I naïvely supposed that I would never again have to immerse myself in uncongenial reading about an all-encompassing ideology if I wanted to understand the contemporary world. No more would I have to pore over the Little Lenin or Little Stalin Library, put out by the English communist publishing company Lawrence and Wishart, or History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—Short Course, put out by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. No more Anti-Dühring or Critique of the Gotha Program for me!
Then along came Islamism, or so it seemed, and I had to start all over again. My knowledge of Islam and the Islamic world was very slight, confined to a passage through Iran during the Shah’s White Revolution, when I supposed that secularization was irreversible because North Tehran could have been in Europe. I also admired the tribesmen of Afghanistan, who seemed to me to be free and noble in a romantic way, though even I, callow as I was, understood enough to know that they would never be Scandinavian-style social democrats. I also bought a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at a pavement bookstall in Cairo, published in Kuwait, but I told myself that there were paranoid fools everywhere.
Since then, I have learned a little bit, and read the Koran (in English) and Sayyid Qutb—all the while trying to earn a living. I was not impressed by their intellectual or moral level, and frankly I would rather go to the dentist than read them again. But of course, Islam has given rise to more than one great culture, and I recognize that various Islamic societies still have their charms (provided one is not too low on the social scale, but perhaps that is true everywhere). Within limits, a whole society is not to be characterized solely by its political or religious arrangements. Moreover, the art and architecture of the greatest Islamic societies is in some respects unsurpassed, and while it differs in different parts of the world, it also has something in common. I’ve found I need a guide to help me to know what to think in this morass of prejudice, experience, and very partial knowledge of the subject.
Rémi Brague is an excellent guide, a vastly learned student of Islam, an Arabic speaker conversant with medieval Islamic writings and philosophy, as well as a renowned European medievalist who seems to be able to quote more languages than there were after the Tower of Babel. In this book, he gives a scrupulous, though overall not very flattering, picture of Islam, but he is careful to make the proper distinctions.
For example, we use the word “Islam” to mean more than one thing. First, there is the Islam that means a relationship to the Divine, “the abandonment without reserve of the entire person into the hand of God.” This, it seems to me, can be either a deeply spiritual attitude to life or a smokescreen for the most unscrupulous behavior—as, of course, can many other ideals. Second, there is Islam the religion preached by Mohammed in Arabia in the seventh century (the Islamic view that man is born Muslim need not detain us, any more than Rousseau’s assertion that man is born free). Third, there is Islam as a civilization that understands itself as opposed to all other civilizations, which it lumps together in the most non-multicultural way, though within itself it contains, and has always contained, many subdivisions. Fourth and last, there is Islam in the modern world, the assemblage of peoples who “have been marked by Islam as a religion and have inherited Islamic civilization.”
“It is important to make these distinctions,” writes Brague, “because many misunderstandings are produced when they are ignored.” We hear, “According to Islam . . .” or “Islam believes that . . .,” etc. By these words we leave the precise subject under discussion murky. They could mean several things. “The Muslim religion, in its authorized sources, believes that . . .” But also: “In the course of the history of Islamic civilization, there was the custom, in Islamic lands, of practicing something that implies that . . .” Or finally, it could mean, “According to certain opinion polls, Muslims today, in such-and-such countries, think that . . .” The last isn’t even the worst: “Often, in effect, we imagine that any Muslim who claims to speak in the name of the whole religion is representative of it.”
Brague makes short work of the concept of Islamophobia, as if to criticize any part of the religion were necessarily like an irrational fear of open spaces or of spiders. It is a cunningly devised term whose purpose is to head off all criticism in advance, to render it almost a psychiatric symptom, though as Brague throughout his measured book makes clear, there is a great deal to criticize.
I think he misses one point, however. Why, in the modern world, is uncompromising or fundamental criticism of Islam often dangerous to critics? Why is it virtually impossible in a Muslim country to criticize the personage of Mohammed, for example, even using exclusively Muslim apologetic sources to do so?
Many religions have not been very receptive to criticism or kindly disposed towards critics, to put it mildly. In the case of Islam there is the additional reason for intolerance of skepticism that its supposedly sacred text is the direct word of God, not merely the work of an inspired intermediary. To point out the deficiencies, contradictions, or even moral enormity of the text is therefore to criticize God Himself, and hence automatically to blaspheme.
Besides, the intelligent, believing Muslim, deeply attached to his religion, can see what happened to Christianity once criticism was genuinely free, both legally and socially. In Scotland, for example, with its millennial history of fervent Christianity, only twenty percent of the population now claims—one is tempted to say admits—that it is Christian. Ireland, especially Dublin, is now as fervently anti-Catholic as it was once Catholic, for example, when I first went there in 1969. In the oldest daughter of the Church, France, anticlericalism lives on in the absence of clericalism, and the term catho in intellectual circles is one almost of abuse, as if a believing Catholic must ex officio be a pétainiste. For intellectuals, there is only one thing worse than being catho, and that is being très catho. By contrast, having been a communist is like having had measles, or at worst a youthful peccadillo.
The intelligent, believing Muslim can see this perfectly well. If the fear of free discussion of the manifold weaknesses of Islam as a religion were removed, it would very soon deliquesce as Christianity has done in so much of the world. As Brague makes clear in this book, fear has always played a large part first in the spread and then in the maintenance of the religion (its penalty for public apostasy has always been death, even if the penalty was not always carried out), but there is now an additional reason to ensure that the nominally faithful are kept in a state of fear, namely the extreme intellectual fragility of the whole edifice in the modern world. A very badly constructed book such as no one would publish today, containing many contradictions, and much that is repellent from any point of view but its own, that claims that its content cannot be doubted, is ill equipped, whatever its poetic qualities, to withstand rational criticism; and where the Koran goes, there goes Islam. From the point of view of preserving the religion, then, it is the extremists, and not the moderates or reformers or liberals, who are right.
Liberally quoting from the Koran and the Hadiths, Brague answers questions about the nature of Islam as a religion by reference to literature that will be completely unfamiliar to non-specialists. His assumption is that human conduct, in the last
analysis, is determined by ideas, and that present ideas emerge from past ideas. If we wish to know what the attitude of the religion is to jihad, for example, we should study what has been said about it down the ages.
Jihad is not and has never been an end in itself: its purpose is to bring about a world of perfect peace, in which everybody submits to the will of Allah. Indeed, only by universal submission can such peace be obtained; and if submission to that will can be brought about only by violence, war, and indeed massacre, so be it. It is for the ultimate good of the world: the peace of the dead.
Brague examines many common myths or received opinions about Islam the religion. For example, it is commonly asserted that Islam, by contrast with Christianity in particular, is simple, but even if this is true, it would not necessarily redound to the credit of Islam. Simplicity is no guarantee of truth: the theory that all the ills of the world are due to Jews, or communists, or capitalists, or Freemasons, is simple enough, but is not therefore any the more worthy of belief. Moreover, Islam is not as simple as it is alleged to be: it requires many subsidiary beliefs and is not free of pagan elements.
Brague examines the supposed and frequently touted tolerance of Islam and finds it severely limited. There is and can be no equality of civic and legal rights in Islam, such as we now take for granted in the West, even in the breach. No one could possibly derive such an idea from the Koran, and since the latter is supposedly the eternal word of God verbatim, there will always be difficulty in Muslim polities in accepting such equality, even where, for the moment, it is politic to do so. You cannot be both dhimmi and equal.
In his un-strident and scholarly way, Brague examines other myths. He gives Islam, as civilization, its due. But the achievements had little to do with the religion itself. In his discussion of what Western culture owes to Islam, of its supposed indebtedness to it, Brague caused me laugh, or at least giggle, out loud:
Even where it is a question of material goods [in contradistinction to artistic or scientific ideas], is it really right to speak of indebtedness? Europe has “taken” goods from other civilizations that have become taken for granted by it. Thus, silk, tea, porcelain, paper—the last via the Islamic world—came from China. Or maize, tobacco, chocolate came from the New World. And nobody would dream of saying that, at least until recently, we owed a debt to the Aztecs, much less that we had to talk with infinite respect of the human sacrifice that they practiced, under the pretext that we eat tomatoes.
This, I suppose, might be regarded by some as inflammatory, as humor often is, but it must be remembered that, as the late Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko pointed out with regard to corruption, it takes two to be inflamed.
I trust that the book will soon be translated into English, though it will never be done by someone as learned as the author.
