Muhammad Reconsidered

A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy

Anna Bonta Moreland

• Editorial: University of Notre Dame Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268107277
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Comparative Religion

Muhammad Reconsidered rectifies the failures of scholarly attempts to understand Islam in the West and to take Islamic theology seriously. Engaging Islam from deep within the Christian tradition by addressing the question of the prophethood of Muhammad, Anna Bonta Moreland calls for a retrieval of Thomistic thought on prophecy. Without either appropriating the prophet as an unwitting Christian or reducing both Christianity and Islam to a common denominator, Moreland studies Muhammad within a Christian theology of revelation. This lens leads to a more sophisticated understanding of Islam, one that honors the integrity of the Catholic tradition and argues for the possibility in principle of Muhammad as a religious prophet.

Moreland sets the stage for this inquiry through an intertextual reading of the key Vatican II documents on Islam and on Christian revelation. She then uses Aquinas's treatment of prophecy to address the case of whether Muhammad is a prophet in Christian terms. Muhammad Reconsidered examines the work of several Christian theologians, including W. Montgomery Watt, Hans Küng, Kenneth Cragg, David Kerr, and Jacques Jomier, O.P., and then draws upon the practice of analogical reasoning in the theology of religious pluralism to show that a term in one religion—in this case "prophecy"—can have purchase in another religious tradition. Muhammad Reconsidered not only is a constructive contribution to Catholic theology but also has enormous potential to help scholars reframe and comprehend Christian-Muslim relations.

CHAPTER ONE

Setting the Stage

It has been twenty years since Samuel Huntington set forth his controversial argument about the fundamental incompatibility between Islamic cultures and Western cultures influenced by Christianity.¹ Apart from the wider contested claims, he urged his readers to develop a deeper understanding of the basic religious assumptions underlying other civilizations.² Twenty-five years later, the need to understand non-Western religious traditions has become all the more pressing.

THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

While Huntington’s work has received sharp criticism in several academic circles,³ his thesis has shaped debates during the past few decades about Muslim emergence in the West. Western assumptions about “religion,” broadly speaking, color these encounters and ultimately hinder a fruitful dialogue among those from the secular West and those from Muslim majority countries. These assumptions come in two fundamental forms: “religion as universal norms” and “religion as extremism.” Historically, the development of the first assumption directly led to the second. Both are dependent on a founding myth of the modern that invents the term “religion,” either by paring it down to a meaningless lowest common denominator of universal norms for morality or by associating it with irrationality and violence. Neither of these modes of engagement provides a fruitful way of encountering actual religious traditions because the dimensions that are most crucial to particular religious communities—such as revelation, prophecy, sin, or righteousness—are either attacked as extremist or ignored as superstitious. This has particularly pernicious consequences for Western encounters with Muslim belief and practice.

Historically, the first assumption about religious belief that has emerged in modernity reduces religion to universal norms. Some would argue that Friedrich Schleiermacher is the quintessential modern religious thinker who, in trying to make religious belief palatable to his audience, robbed Christianity of its distinctiveness. In his On Religion (1799) he characterized religious belief as fundamentally a feeling of “absolute dependence” and then built a theology on this universal “religious self-consciousness” in Christian Faith (1821). In some readings, religion became a feature of human self-consciousness. Or one can look at Cleanthes’ defense of religious belief in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1776) to find God as the explanatory principle of the world. Once universal norms were found through anthropology, physics, philosophy, or ethics, traditional religious belief became superfluous. Michael Buckley traces this narrative in his At the Origins of Modern Atheism (1987) and its sequel, Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Project of Modern Atheism (2004). Buckley argues that the move to make religion “rational” paradoxically led to an atheism that equates religion with irrationality and danger. It was exactly the feckless religion invented, for example, by the universal norms of Descartes (mathematics), Newton (mechanics), or Kant (ethics) that turned religion into something at first unnecessary and eventually antihuman. It was the effort to set religious belief on solid rational ground that resulted in its own undoing.

God became an unnecessary explanatory principle of the universe and, ultimately, a projection of human needs and fears. Ludwig Feuerbach portrayed religion as a projection of human desires in his The Essence of Christianity (1841) and urged his readers to cast off this infantile crutch. Sigmund Freud translated this insight into the psychological arena in his The Future of an Illusion (1927), while Karl Marx developed this insight in economics in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (begun in 1843), as did Friedrich Nietzsche in philosophy in The Gay Science (1882). Reducing religious belief strictly to universal norms creates a certain tone deafness, making it impossible to understand what motivates and maintains many contemporary religious believers. Any attempt to understand religious traditions through this lens ignores the most fundamental aspects of religious belief. In Buckley’s terms, this move brackets the religious.⁴ Ironically, the attempt to make religion palatable to modern rationalists ultimately pushed religious belief into the realm of irrationality, a realm that endangered the modern political order.

Having now reached a point where religious belief is equated with extremism and violence, we will examine this assumption closely as it has become firmly embedded in Western consciousness and shapes encounters today with Muslims in particular. Muslims have been inserted smoothly into a fable about the death of religion in modernity. Modern Europeans who long thought that the religious commitments of old had finally subsided are finding themselves in a new situation. Schleiermacher’s early nineteenth-century “cultured despisers of religion” appear tame when compared to Europeans two hundred years later, who believe that religious belief inevitably breeds fanaticism and violence. Many in the modern West assume that since Hobbes and Locke, Hume and Kant had entered the European intellectual bloodstream, the rest of the world would eventually follow suit and lay aside the violent passions of religion. Here is Mark Lilla in a 2007 New York Times Magazine article on the fanaticism of religious belief: “Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”⁵

The terrorist attacks from 9/11 in New York to San Bernardino, from Paris to Brussels and elsewhere, have been conveniently folded into this narrative. Islamic extremists have no interest in Mark Lilla’s “Great Separation” between politics and religion outlined in his 2007 The Stillborn God. The problem with the account from Lilla and others lies in their insistence on equating religious belief generally—whether Muslim, Christian, or otherwise—with superstition, irrationality, and extremism. Those who are convinced by this narrative equate religion with terrorism. We cannot let religiously committed Muslims from around the world or Christians from the global South challenge our assumptions about either the irrational fanaticism of religion or the attraction of its substitute, the global marketplace.⁶

Consider Mark Lilla’s argument in The Stillborn God that before the wars of religion in the seventeenth century, humans generally had drawn on God when reflecting about political questions. In response to these wars, some European intellectuals moved away from “political theology.” Lilla’s book tells the story of this “great separation” in which, for children of Hobbes, “a decent political life could not be realized within the terms set by Christian political theology, which bred violent eschatological passions.”⁷ Religion, in Lilla’s view, can “express dark fears and desires,” it can “destroy community by dividing its members,” and it can “inflame the mind with destructive apocalyptic fantasies of immediate redemption.”⁸ We in the West are heirs to this fragile separation, but we live among those whose politics are still inflamed by their theology. In a 2014 article in the New Republic, Lilla writes, “Outside the Islamic world, where theological principles still have authority [sic], there are fewer and fewer objections that persuade people who have no such principles.”⁹ If drawing on theological principles to answer political questions leads to apocalyptic fantasies, it’s best to keep any theology out of the public square.¹⁰

William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence (2009) and David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions (2010) show how this narrative has been a legitimating myth of Western societies. As the myth goes, since religions had posed regular threats to civil order before the Enlightenment, securing peace entailed separating church from state and relegating religious beliefs and passions to the private sphere. Modern political life requires an unbiased secular foundation. Cavanaugh argues that religious ideas are no more likely to set off violence than a whole host of “secular” ideas. The modern West, in fact, invents these categories and then uses the idea that “religion” is violent in order to justify the violence of “secular” orders. We in the West are thought of as reasonable and dispassionate, while Muslim religious fanatics are prone to violence: “ Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is secular, rational, and peacemaking. And so we find ourselves regrettably forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.”¹¹ Hart observes that equating religion with violence ignores the fact that the modern secular age has been the most savagely brutal period of human history.¹² Both Cavanaugh and Hart trace the roots of this bloodshed to the birth of the nation-state in the emerging modern West.¹³

Learning to wean ourselves off of these assumptions about what constitutes religious belief and practice is the first step toward encountering Muslims with fresh ears. Religious traditions cannot be reduced to universal norms, as this move empties religious belief of its content in order to bring about a dangerously thin consensus—a consensus that many religious believers reject. But neither can they become reduced to irrational motivations for political action. Both assumptions about religious belief from those in the secular West—religion as universal norms¹⁴ and religion as irrational—fail to lead to fruitful dialogue with religious believers in general and Muslims in particular.

A genuine understanding of religious traditions has become a theopolitical necessity in the West. While many secularists expected an inevitable decline of religious belief as Enlightenment modernity took hold around the globe, it seems that the exact opposite has occurred. As the authors of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics wrote in 2009, “Over the past four decades, religion’s influence on politics has reversed its decline and become more powerful on every continent and across every major world religion.”¹⁵ These authors argue that despite the prediction of the “secularization theory,” the twenty-first century can ironically be coined “God’s Century.” In other words, religion has become and will likely continue to be a vital player in the global political realm. With regard to Islam in particular, Europe is now facing an influx of Muslim immigrants that does not fit this myth of the emergence and death of religion, does not subscribe to the seventeenth-century theists’ understanding of religion, and rejects the religious/secular divide imposed by European colonialists. For many new residents of Western Europe, religion forms the central fabric of their lives. How will a post-Christian Europe absorb these new residents into their local communities? And how will it develop an understanding of Islam that does not reduce it to modern universal principles applicable to anyone or equate it with extreme acts of violence?

Instead of shoehorning Islam into modern fabrications of “religion,” fruitful dialogue could emerge if we read Muslim religious claims through Christian theological traditions rather than in spite of them. Pierre Manent persuasively argues in Beyond Radical Secularism (2016) that Europeans (in his case, his fellow French citizens) are ill prepared both to incorporate Muslims into their political community and to understand Islam. This is due not only to prejudices and widespread ignorance about Islam, even though plenty of both abound. This limitation also results from Europeans’ having lost touch with their own Christian roots, whose laicité vocabulary is ill equipped to engage Muslims in serious terms. Manent suggests toward the end of his book that the Catholic Church is poised to work as a mediator between the secular West and Islam: “Given the spiritual fragmentation that affects the Western world, [the Catholic Church] is the fixed point that is concerned to relate itself intelligently to all the other points and to which the other points can try to relate.”¹⁶

An interpretation of Islam from within the Catholic tradition in particular offers an appreciation of one tradition from within the heart of another.¹⁷ Catholic interpretations of Islam have been riddled, of course, with dangerous medieval caricatures and violent polemic that continue into the present.¹⁸ Nevertheless, the Catholic tradition offers rich resources we can use to obtain a fresh understanding of Islam. The Catholic tradition offers intellectual resources and institutional networks to serve as mediator between Islam and the secular West since it has achieved a differentiation of the sacred from the secular that acknowledges the distinctiveness of the political realm without yielding to the thinness of the secular myth. It shares a guarded openness to the political liberalism of the West while remaining grounded in a religious worldview that is aligned in many ways with the Islamic tradition. Many Catholics still inhabit Charles Taylor’s “enchanted world,” despite living and working in modern cities and exhibiting many aspects of the “buffered self.” The Church has been understood to be late in embracing the modern world. But, as Ulrich Lehner persuasively argues in his The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (2016), “It was Catholicism that, at least during the first few decades of the eighteenth century, was able to interact productively with Enlightenment thought. Only the anti-clerical and anti-Christian attacks of Enlighteners—and especially the terror of the French Revolution—put a stop to this conversation.”¹⁹ To be sure, that engagement did not translate into an uncritical embrace of Enlightenment liberalism, but it did bear fruit in an openness to religious freedom and democratic forms of government during Vatican II. It is the argument of this book that the Catholic Church is particularly equipped to engage with Muslims in theological terms and that this will lead to salutary political consequences.

The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) is often understood as the Church’s delayed embrace of modernity. For some, this embrace represents a fundamental break from the past. For others, it betrays centuries-old traditions and practices. Both, however, overdetermine the “embrace” that the Council represented. While it clearly updated certain elements of ecclesial thinking, it also engaged in a critical renewal of the theological tradition in ways that challenged the assumptions of modernity. It may be, for example, that the documents provide an opportunity for a new openness to Islam but in a way that recovers pre-modern resources deep within the Christian theological tradition. That is, in fact, the method used this book. The documents of the Second Vatican Council provide fertile ground for dialogue with Muslims, and yet they leave crucial questions unresolved. One of the two most important questions about Islam about which the Council chose to remain silent is the status of Muhammad among Catholics, especially given everything else the documents affirm about Islam. George Anawati, O.P., one of the visionaries behind the conciliar statements on Islam, commented on why the Council made no mention of Muhammad: “Obviously, this is the most sensitive point for the Moslems, and the Catholic experts have chosen to deal with it—by ignoring it. Once the dialogue is underway, this central point will have to be considered in m...