Religion and Modernity in Conflict: Roman Catholic and Muslim Responses
Roman Catholicism's history of wrestling with modernity may provide helpful examples to Islam as it faces similar challenges.
by Gregory Baum
About the Author: Gregory Baum was the Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto; in 1975 he was given a cross-appointment to the Department of Sociology. Between l986-1995 he served as Professor of Theological Ethics at McGill University’s Faculty of Religious Studies. He is presently Professor Emeritus at McGill University. During the church council, Vatican II, he was a theological advisor at the Ecumenical Secretariat, the commission responsible for three conciliar documents: On Religious Liberty; On Ecumenism; and On the Church’s Relation to Non-Christian Religions. From 1962 he was the editor of The Ecumenist, an ecumenical review of theology, culture and society. Some of Dr. Baum’s most recent publications include Nationalism, Religion and Ethics (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Frieden für Israel: Israeli Peace-and-Human Rights Groups in Israel (Paderborn: Bonifatius Verlag, 2002) and Amazing Church (Novalis, 2005).
Religion and modernity in conflict is a very big topic. What I mean by modernity in this context is the new social world produced by two revolutionary developments: political democracy and industrial capitalism. As a Catholic theologian I am keenly aware that the Catholic Church resisted modernity from the very beginning; at the same time I am grateful that I was allowed to participate in the theological debates that steered the Catholic Church towards a more open attitude towards modernity.1 My acquaintance with this Catholic drama allows me to study with sympathy the wrestling with modernity now going on among Muslim religious thinkers. In fact, I have become aware of a certain affinity between Catholic and Muslim theological approaches to the complex phenomenon of modern society. In the first part of this paper, I shall tell the Catholic story, and in the second I shall turn to the debates among Muslims about faith and modernity and introduce the theology of Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim thinker I greatly admire.
Catholic reactions to modernity
The history of the resistance of the Catholic Church to modern society is well-known. Soon after the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1889, Pope Pius VI condemned the civil liberties in the breve Quod aliquantum of 1791. After the revolutionary unrest in 1830s, Gregory XVI published the encyclical Mirari vos in 1832, defending the feudal-aristocratic order, ordering Catholics to obey their princes and repudiating, in the name of the common good, certain civil liberties, including religious freedom. In 1864, Pius IX published the encyclical Quanta cura, accompanied by the famous Syllabus of Errors, vigorously reaffirming the condemnations of popular sovereignty, the liberal State, political democracy, the separation of Church and State, the civil liberties and religious pluralism.A civilisational conflict
The resistance of the papacy to modern society is usually interpreted as a defence of the feudal-aristocratic order and of the pope’s own religious and secular power. Yet the sociologists of the 19th century offered a much deeper analysis of this resistance. According to them, the clash between the old order and the new was more than a political or ideological quarrel; it was in fact a civilisational conflict, a clash between different forms of human self-understanding. The first social thinkers who developed this theme were two French royalists, declared enemies of the French Revolution, Joseph de Maistre and Louis-Gabriel de Bonald. Their ideas were subsequently explored by social thinkers who adopted a more objective approach. While there are differences between Alexis de Tocqueville and Émile Durkheim in France and between Ferdinand Toennies and Max Weber in Germany, they all agreed that the democratic and industrial revolutions were creating a new social world that altered the conditions of human existence, affected people’s understanding of the true and the good, and changed their vision of society. While liberal thinkers praised the emerging modernity, looked upon reason as the organ of human liberation and predicted inevitable progress, the sociologists had a more sober view of the new world in the making. They rendered a systematic account of the ambiguity of modern society. While they acknowledged the material and human progress brought by science, technology, democratic rule and industrial development, they also recognised that modern society generated a culture of individualism, utilitarianism and secularism that undermined the ethical traditions of the past and opened the door to political and economic policies devoid of any moral reference. Even Karl Marx, who was no friend of the feudal order and its religious inheritance, recognised the cultural upheaval and the decline of ethics produced by bourgeois society. These are quotations from the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.
I have made this excursion into sociological literature to show that the rejection of modernity on the part of the popes was not simply a stubborn defence of the old order. It expressed the feelings and the fears of ordinary people in the traditional regions of European society who sensed that the modern institutions undermined their culture, their faith and their identity. They recognised the civilisational conflict produced by modernity. The sociological analysis of the cultural upheaval in 19th century European society helps us to understand the rejection of modernity on the part of Muslims in many parts.
At the same time, the Catholic story, moving from rejection to critical openness, reveals the capacity of a civilisation to react creatively to changed historical circumstances and refutes the unfounded idea of Samuel Huntington that civilisations are bearers of unchanging values destined to clash. I still remember the polemics of Paul Blanshard who, writing in the 1940s and 50s, argued that Roman Catholicism, hostile to democracy, pluralism and the separation of Church and State, constituted a danger to the American Republic and prevented Roman Catholics from becoming trustworthy citizens. I met Mr. Blanshard in Rome during the Vatican Council when he was puzzled and did not know what to say. Neither he nor Mr. Huntington realised that civilisations and their religious traditions are inhabited by internal debates and thus capable of responding in innovative ways to the challenges of history. In the second part of this paper, I will show that such a debate is going on within Islam.
The Catholic story continues with Leo XIII who made some hesitant gestures in favour of democratic government. In 1892, he addressed the encyclical Au milieu des solitudes to French Catholic monarchists, demanding that they recognise the republican government of their county as the legitimate authority. Leo XIII argued that the Catholic Church can live and flourish in any form of government as long as her freedom is respected. Yet when he spelled out the Catholic idea of a just society, he left no room for democracy, pluralism and human rights. He tolerated the approval American Catholics professed for the separation of Church and State in their country, yet when he feared that this exception was being made into a universal principle, he wrote the encyclical Testem benevolentiae (1899) condemning as ‘Americanism’ the preference for secular government and religious pluralism.
Much better known is Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891 that recognised the exploitation and oppression of the working classes produced by industrial capitalism. He was appalled by the capitalist idea that the economy must be lifted out of its moral framework and controlled by the mechanism of the free market. Leo XIII did not believe in the hidden hand: he defended the traditional ideas of the just price and the just wage, for which there was no longer any room.
The subsequent popes - Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI and Pius XII - were uncertain about how to react to modernity. They were uncomfortable with liberal democracy and industrial capitalism and at the same time rejected the socialist alternative. Yet important developments took place among Catholic lay people living in pluralistic societies who were involved in political debates or who, as intellectuals, sought Catholic theological arguments in defence of democracy and human rights.
Jacques Maritain
The spiritual conversion necessary for a critical openness to modernity is illustrated in the extraordinary career of the Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, whose thought was to have a profound influence on the Catholic world, including the papacy. After he and his wife had become Catholics in 1906, he soon joined the ultra-conservative movement l’Action française under the leadership of Charles Maurras. In 1921 he published his book Antimoderne. When Pius XI condemned l’Action française in 1926, Maritain was deeply shaken. A year later, in 1927, he published Primauté du spiritual,2 in which he revealed his own anguish, analysed the crisis in the French Church, defended the teaching authority of the Pope and pleaded with Catholics to accept the recent condemnation. He argued that l’Action française had been condemned, not because of its conservative resistance to political liberalism, but because Charles Maurras, as a professed atheist, was not a suitable leader for a Catholic movement. Maritain tried to console his Catholic readers by insisting on the abiding truth of the Syllabus of Errors and the other papal documents condemning liberal errors: popular sovereignty, parliamentary democracy, the value-neutral State, and the superiority of personal freedom over truth and justice.3 Still, in this little book Maritain also suggested that to overcome the errors of modernity, Catholics should return to the sources of their faith and move forward in a new and original way.
Maritain’s next book, Du régime temporel et de la liberté,4 published in 1933, offers two new ideas. First, drawing upon the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, Maritain presents philosophical reasons for human freedom and human self-responsibility. Gifted with intelligence, moral consciousness and free will, people are never simply subjects of a temporal regime, they always transcend the regime as responsible agents. Human freedom is the ability to discover an objective order and to do the good. Maritain here offers a metaphysical foundation of human rights, quite different from the utilitarian arguments proposed by classical liberal theory.
In the same book, Maritain also makes a distinction between two different historical contexts in which the Church exercises its pastoral ministry: the sacred order of medieval and baroque society - and the profane order of modern society marked by the pluralism of truth and values. The Church’s conservative social teaching was appropriate while she was located in the sacred order, yet as she is moving into the profane order of the present, this teaching must be rethought and reformulated.
On the basis of these two ideas, Maritain wrote his massive L’humanisme intégrale in 1936, which carried on an open dialogue with modernity. Recognizing the new context for Catholic social teaching and relying on his understanding of the human person, he offered Catholic arguments in support of political democracy and religious and ideological pluralism. At the same time, he continued to reject liberal capitalism and called upon social and political actors to keep the economy firmly within a moral framework. A visible symbol of Maritain’s extraordinary evolution was his public support of the Republicans during the Spanish civil war against Franco’s Nationalist forces. In 1943, during WW II, while a refugee in New York City, Maritain published Christianisme et démocratie,5 in which he defended the liberal ideas of democratic pluralism and human rights as secularised values derived from the teaching of Jesus.
The new Catholic teaching
In the papacy, the breakthrough began with John XXIII (1958-1963). This Pope listened to the ideas of progressive Catholic thinkers; especially Jacques Maritain. He was also deeply affected by the horrors committed during World War II and the subsequent Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the United Nations in 1948. In 1963, John XXIII published the encyclical Pacem in terris which recognised the high dignity of every human being, defended human rights and religious liberty, and honoured democratic government. The idea of personal human dignity, it is worth noting, is not traditional church teaching. Because of its egalitarian implications, ecclesiastical teaching had avoided it. Traditional society recognised the honour of its members: yet they were honoured according to different levels of dignity.
In Pacem in terris John XXIII offered first theological arguments in the defence of human dignity. This dignity, he argues, is revealed in the book of Genesis telling us that humans were created in the image of God6 and in the Pauline letters, telling us that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, all human beings are called to become friends of God.7 The encyclical then turns to an argument based on reason:
Any human society, if it is to be well-ordered and productive, must lay down as a foundation the principle that all human beings are persons, endowed by nature with intelligence and free will, and that, for this reason, they have rights and duties that flow directly from their nature. These rights are universal, inviolable and inalienable.
With the previous popes and Catholic thinkers in general, John XXIII remains unreconciled to the unregulated market system. He and his successors respect markets as important institutions, yet they demand that they be guided by social forces and public law to promote the common good of society. Papal social teaching continues to lament that modernity produces a culture of individualism, utilitarianism and secularism that undermines the ethical values upon which society is based, opening the door to unrestrained struggles for power of individuals and nations.
Catholic social teaching recognises that every society is ambiguous. The Christian task is to discern the institutions and values that serve the common good and offer them support - and to discern the institutions and values that damage the common good and wrestle against them. Since John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, Catholic social teaching tries to performs this critical task in regard to modern society, an approach to which I refer as ‘critical openness to modernity.’ The word ‘critical’ is important because the new Catholic social teaching is not a surrender to classical liberalism According to John Locke, society is created by a social contract to which the citizens commit themselves because it serves their interests. Utility is the one value that sustains the cooperation of the citizens and grounds their civil liberties. By contrast, Catholic social theory is based on a metaphysical understanding of the human being, supported by reason and revelation, that summons forth an impulse to the love of neighbour, a commitment to solidarity and a yearning for social justice.
Muslim reactions to modernity
I now turn to the Muslim response to modernity. Here we find a resistance to modernity that shares many characteristics with the early Catholic rejection of the new world in the making. Muslims recognise that the individualism, utilitarianism and secularism produced by the western society undermine the religio-cultural cohesion they have inherited. Their opposition is not stubborn blindness to the Enlightenment; it is based rather on the awareness, confirmed by sociological research, that the construction of modernity produces a civilisational conflict in traditional societies.
It is important to note that the Islamic societies encountered modernity in its colonial form. Muslims recognised the aggression built into modern society, its will to triumph over the traditional cultures and its sense of superiority that legitimated the colonial conquest of the non-European world. Muslims were disturbed by the contradiction of modernity advocating democracy at home and imposing colonial domination abroad. We must remember that Algeria became a colony in 1830s, followed by Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Libya and distant India, and, after WW I, the establishment of colonial mandates in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. It is not surprising that Arabs interpreted the creation of the State of Israel as part of this wide colonial sweep, while we in the West thought of Israel as a house against death, a national home for a persecuted people.
A response to humiliation
Before describing the wrestling of Muslim thinkers with the challenges of modernity, I must make a few historical remarks that allow me to distinguish between various currents in contemporary Islam. In the second part of the 19th century, Muslim thinkers, humiliated by the colonial conquests, asked themselves why this defeat has taken place with so little resistance. Why have Muslim societies been unable to defend themselves against the European empires? The reply to this question was that Islam had become stagnant: it had ceased to inspire people, it had made them complacent and encouraged social passivity.
One reaction to this stagnation was the effort of a group of reformers who presented the Qur’an as the divine message empowering believers to react creatively in new historical situations. The first thinker calling for an Islamic renewal was the Persian Jamal al-Afghani (d. 1897). His work was continued by the Egyptian Muhamed ‘Abduh (d. 1905), the Lebanese Rashid Rida (d. 1935), the Tunisian Ibn Badis (d. 1940), the Egyptian Hassan Al’Banna (d. 1949) and the Turk Said An-Nursi (d.1960).9 These thinkers and their followers lamented the decline of the Muslim societies. They regretted that the people had been taught to read the Qur’an filtered through legal traditions created in the 9th century that became increasingly rigid in subsequent centuries. People were made afraid of new ideas and neglected to cultivate the empirical sciences. To revitalise Islam, the reformers read the Qur’an through the eyes of the salafi, i.e. the companions of the Prophet and the first three generation of his followers who felt free to apply God’s Word to the changing historical conditions. This return to the sources of the faith allowed the salafi reformers to move beyond the dominant legal interpretations of the Qur’an. They reread the Qur’an using principles of interpretation that were sanctioned by the ancient tradition. They paid primary attention to the Qur’anic message that recognised human reason as God’s gift to humanity and saw no contradiction between faith and intelligence.
In his faux pas at the University of Regensburg, Benedict XVI revealed that he was ignorant of this Islamic intellectual tradition - a topic to which I shall return further on. Yet it was on this basis of this teaching that the salafi reformers advocated educational and social reforms and engaged in an open dialogue with western ideas. At the same time, they denounced the individualism, utilitarianism and secularism produced by western modernity and urged political resistance to the colonial empires. Not surprisingly, the reformers were denounced by the colonial masters, the ruling sultans and conservative representatives of the Islamic tradition.
A second reaction to the stagnation of Islam moved in a quite different direction. Its leaders also argued that Muslim societies had been so easily conquered by western empires because their religion, following the dominant legalistic interpretation, had lost its spiritual flame and produced a culture of conformity. These leaders also returned to the faith of the salafi, the Prophet’s companions and early followers, but instead of learning from the creativity of the early generations, they insisted on a literal fidelity to their words and practices. They wanted to restore the society of the 7th century. They retrieved the rigid interpretation of Islam made in the 18th century by the idiosyncratic thinker al-Wahab who denounced the dominant form of Islam as false and corrupted. The new literalists rejected the reformers’ hermeneutic approach to the Qur’an and refused to dialogue with their Muslim critics. This literalist trend has often been called Wahabism: Western authors refer to it as Muslim fundamentalism.
Following the ideas of several contemporary authors,10 I like to distinguish four different trends in present-day Islam. 1) Muslim traditionalists, the great majority, who practice the religion they have inherited, 2) the salafi reform movement mentioned above, 3) the Wahabist or fundamentalist trend, and 4) the so-called modernists. The modernists are Muslim intellectuals living in the conditions created by modernity who offer a contemporary interpretation of Islam without worrying whether their hermeneutical principles are in keeping with the Islamic tradition. They try to reform Islam in the light of modern insights. As a Catholic theologian, I have special sympathy for the salafi reformers because they preserve the continuity of the tradition, because they apply hermeneutical principles to the Qur’an that can be defended by the Islamic sciences, and because they choose a discourse that assures ordinary believers that their inherited religion remains intact. I am fascinated by the salafi reformers wrestling with modernity. It has, in my opinion, a certain affinity with the entry of Roman Catholicism into critical openness to modernity describes in the first part of this lecture.
Tariq Ramadan
To give a concrete example of the approach taken by salafi reformers, I wish to introduce the thought of a distinguished Muslim thinkers, Tariq Ramadan, an author of many books, a teacher in the academy and the public forum, and the spiritual guide of vast numbers of Muslim men and women.
At the same time Ramadan is a controversial thinker. He is severely criticized by some conservative Muslim leaders, and he is denounced by ideological secularists in France.11 Because he sees himself as faithful to the Qur’an, some of his secular critics accuse him of being a fundamentalist in disguise and of promoting Muslim militancy in France. To understand the controversies around this thinker one would have to analyse today’s French political and intellectual culture, yet such an analysis could not contribute anything to a better understanding of Ramadan’s thought.
Tariq Ramadan, the son of Egyptian parents, was born in Geneva, is a Swiss citizen, received a Western education and subsequently studied in Egypt to become a Muslim theologian. He belongs to the ever growing group of Muslims who think of themselves as westerners, who want to be faithful to Islam and at the same time integrate into their western society to which they belong. This approach is revealed in the titles of his most important books, To be a European Muslim and Western Muslims and The Future of Islam.12 Ramadan is a major theological thinker whose work deserves a careful analysis which I am unable to offer in this lecture. What I wish to do is to report the intellectual measures taken by Ramadan to renew the relation of his Muslim faith to the modern western society to which he belongs.
Ramadan looks for a theological understanding of the context in which he lives. He rejects as no longer valid the distinction made by Muslims over many centuries between the homogeneous Muslim world (dar al-islam - the sphere of Islam) and the hostile non-Muslim world (dar al-harb - the sphere of war.) Ramadan recognises that the world has changed. Millions of Muslims are now living in Europe and the Americas and regard their western society as their home; conversely, Muslim countries, colonised by the West, have introduced many western legal institutions and, more recently, surrendered to the logic of global western capitalism. Today all societies are marked by some form of pluralism. While the salafi literalists still accept the traditional distinction between dar al-islam and dar al harb, critical Muslim thinkers are trying to find new theological concepts for understanding their historical situation. Ramadan suggests that believers go back to the sources of Islam to find a guide or a direction that will enable them to discover their religious mission in today’s world. In the days of the Prophet, he argues, men and women who came to believe in the Qur’anic revelation were asked to give witness to their faith before God and before the community made up of believers and non-believers. According to Ramadan, today western Muslims live in a similar situation, which he calls dar al-shahada (the sphere of witness). Their mission is to give public testimony of their faith by word and action.
Since western Muslim, must read the Qur’an and the tradition out of their historical situation, Ramadan argues, they should no longer rely on the religious guidance offered by teachers in the Orient; instead they will have to turn to their own western religious thinkers. At the same time, Ramadan sees himself as standing in the salafi reform movement started in the Orient by Al-Afghani and Muhamed ‘Abduh at the end of the 19th century. Ramadan actually wrote an intellectual history of this movement.13
Needless to say, contemporary salafi reformers in countries of Muslim tradition have their own way of defining their situation, different from Ramadan’s western perspective. If my time permitted it, I would present the religious thought of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic reformer, who defends democracy and pluralism in theological terms and promotes an alternative form of modernity based on Turkish historical experiences.14
Reading the Qur’an from the pluralistic cultural context of the West, Ramadan becomes keenly aware of the universality of the Qur’anic message. The legal tradition beginning in the 9th century tended to reduce the Qur’an to a message addressed to the Muslim community, while the earlier reading of the Qur’an emphasised the passages that revealing its universal meaning. The Qur’an reveals the origin, nature and destiny of humanity and the cosmos. We learn that all human beings are created by the breath of God and that the divine breath remains with them and in them, making them recognise their need of God and allowing them to love of God. This inward gift, called fitra, orients human beings to an ethical life in community. Thanks to this gift, humans are able to use their reason to distinguish between good and evil, struggle to overcome their selfishness, practice the moral virtues and - whether they know it or not - prepare themselves for eternal life. The universal message of the Qur’an is that human beings, wherever they may be situated, are called to surrender themselves to the divine will.
Remembering that Karl Rahner referred to non-Christians led by the Holy Spirit to be humble and trusting and love their neighbour as ‘anonymous Christians’, one is tempted to interpret Ramadan’s theology as suggesting that non-Muslims surrendered to God’s holy will are actually ‘anonymous Muslims.’ Important in the present context is that the universal message of Islam is the theological foundation for recognizing the high dignity of every human person and respecting his or her human rights. Reading the Qur’an out of their pluralistic situation makes western Muslims hear the divine message in a new way, summoning them to be respect people’s struggle to know the truth and practice the good, even if they should err. Thanks to this reading, Muslims can feel comfortable in western democracies, engage in dialogue with their religious and secular neighbours and participate in political debates.
Western Muslims will have their own reading of sharia, the path to the good life. Sharia sums up the commandments, rules and laws given to Muslims, intended to create a virtuous, just and benevolent society. I have no time to describe Ramadan’s careful interpretation of these traditions. Since my interest in this article is Ramadan’s creative wresting with modernity, I will make three remarks related to sharia.
i) Ramadan develops the traditional distinctions between the prescriptions of sharia that deal with divine worship and are applicable in all historical situations and the prescriptions that deal with social issues that depend on local customs and conditions and must be reinterpreted in a new cultural context. According to sharia, he argues, Muslims must obey the laws of the country in which they live and resist local laws only if they contradict their religious tradition. On his visits to Canada, Ramadan spoke against the effort of certain Muslims in Ontario to obtain their own, sharia-based arbitration court dealing with family and business conflicts: Canadian law, he argued, adequately protects the family and people’s legitimate business interests. Muslim-organised opposition to these courts eventually persuaded the Ontario government to drop this project, even though the government’s own report had favoured it.
ii) Ramadan denounces the use of sharia by reactionary Islamic governments to control the people and suppress their freedom. These governments sometimes introduce the ancient cruel physical punishments to give public evidence of their fidelity to sharia, while ignoring that sharia condemns oppression, exploitation and arbitrary rule. Sharia and dictatorship, Ramadan writes, are irreconcilable.
iii) Islam is challenged by the modern idea introduced by Kant that moral norms dictated by a superior power, even if divine, produces a heteronomy or foreign rule that diminishes human dignity. Ramadan replies to this that human action are not good because God commands them, but that God commands them because they are good. Since the divine gift of fitra and human intelligence orient human beings toward the true and the good, the function of religious laws is to awaken in people the moral awareness. The laws are therefore not imposed upon them from above; they simply remind people of their inner orientation towards the good. The laws do not produce an undignified heteronomy; they rather help people to be faithful to themselves.
The Catholic answer to the Kantian challenge of heteronomy is very similar. According to classical Catholic teaching, God’s laws remind people of their natural inclination toward the good, weakened by sin and easily forgotten, yet again and again aided by unmerited grace. This teaching is the theological basis for Catholic eudaemonism which makes the human quest for happiness and fulfilment the source of an ethics of the love of God and neighbour.
While western Muslims support democracy and pluralism and encourage interreligious dialogue and cooperation, they also offer a trenchant critique of modernity. Ramadan recognises the inner tension in modernity between the emancipator dimension sustained by democracy and the materialistic dimension fostered by the unregulated market system. Muslim faith is a social faith; it proposes a vision of a society pleasing to God and is therefore disturbed by the capitalist economy detached in principle from moral consideration. Since the material well-being of society is dependent on economic production and distribution, Ramadan argues, it is irrational to allow economic matters to be controlled by the laws of the market. While he praises democracy for summoning people to collective responsibility and concern for the common good, he recognises that the capitalist market promotes individualism, utilitarianism, competitiveness and consumerism and produces an unjust and unkind world.
Since Islamic faith implies a commitment to a social vision, Muslims in the West must be critics of their society and, allied with other critical citizens, wrestle for greater social justice. According to Ramadan, western Muslims should no longer think of themselves as a minority, acting simply to improve the situation of their own community; instead they should see themselves as citizens, co-responsible - following Muslim ethical principles - for the common good of society. Ramadan believes that Islam will make an important contribution to western societies. Sharia demands of Muslims in western societies an engagement for social democracy, for a market economy steered to serve the well-being of society, and for economic policies aimed at assisting third world countries to raise themselves from their misery. The Catholic reader of Ramadan’s vision of social justice is surprised by its similarity with Catholic social teaching.
Let me add that the idea that Muslims should act politically in their society following Muslim principles is the main reason why Ramadan is so severely criticized in France. The French Republic honours religion as a private affair and defends the religious liberty of its citizens, but recognises no place for religion in the public sphere. La laïcité of the French Republic is quite different from the separation of Church and State in the United States. In America, the idea of democracy implies that citizens may support their political ideas with ethical arguments drawn from their religion. The same is true in Canada. In North America, Ramadan’s understanding of responsible Muslim citizenship would provoke no scandal.
I conclude from this relatively brief analysis that Ramadan’s wrestling with the challenge of modernity has a certain affinity with the corresponding Catholic theological struggle which I described in the first part of this lecture. Ramadan i) recognised modern western society as the new context in which Islamic faith must be expressed, ii) he returned to the sources of the faith, rereading the Qur’an out of the new location, iii) he discovered in the sacred text the universal meaning of God’s Word, announcing the high dignity of all humans and their entitlement to respect, iv) he saw in this teaching the theological legitimation of modern democracy and pluralism, v) he recognised the sinister side of modernity in economic and political institutions emancipated from ethical norms and vi) he showed that the practice of Islam, providing social commitment, could have healing impact on western society.
This introduction to Tariq Ramadan’s ideas demonstrates that the thoughts of the contemporary generation of Muslim intellectuals deserve wider attention. The angry voices attract much more attention.
Benedict XVI’s faux pas
Pope Benedict XVI put a brake on dialogue with Islam when he removed Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald as president of the Pontifical Council of Interreligious Dialogue and assigned the interreligious activities to the Pontifical Council for Culture. Since Archbishop Fitzgerald is a well-known specialist on Islam and has relations with Muslim scholars all over the world, the Catholic press interpreted his removal as a signal that the Pope was not happy with the Church’s close association with Islam, introduced by John Paul II with the assistance of Archbishop Fitzgerald. John Paul II had repeatedly declared that Christians and Muslims believe in the same God and that in the future Christianity and Islam must become communities in respectful dialogue, never more communities in conflict.15 Yet Benedict XVI was not certain of this.
In a learned lecture on the relation of faith and reason given at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, the Pope suggested that Catholics and Muslims have different concepts of God. The Pontiff quotes a sentence addressed by the Christian Emperor Manuel II to a learned Muslim, a few years prior to the long siege of Constantinople at the turn to the 15th century: “Show me, the Emperor said, just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread with the sword the faith he preached.” Insensitive to present interreligious tensions, Benedict does not immediately clarify that this is not how the Catholic Church looks upon Islam today. This quotation without commentary produced an outrage among Muslims everywhere, in some parts even outbursts of irrational violence.
Of greater theological interest is how Benedict uses this quotation. He reports that the Emperor continues the argument, saying that spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable and, in fact, that violence is incompatible with the nature of God. Relying on a contemporary scholar, Benedict says, “For the Emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” But is this really Muslim teaching?
Let us follow Benedict’s reasoning. “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.” This belief is held by the great theologians of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas. Yet Benedict admits that the mediaeval thinker Duns Scotus introduced a voluntarism into Catholic theology that eventually produced the idea of God’s total freedom, not limited by reason, - the idea, in other words, that God could have done the very opposite of what God actually did.
What Benedict did not know is that the same ambiguity, the same debate about the relation of reason and revelation, exists in the Muslim tradition. Early Muslim thinkers read the works of Greek philosophy in translation and produced the Mutazilah school of thought that recognised a harmony between reason and revelation. While some of these thinkers became rationalists and were rejected by the mainstream, Mutazilite influence never disappeared. The reform movement in Islam beginning with al-Afghani (d. 1897) acknowledged human intelligence as a divine gift and honoured the rationality implicit in divine revelation.16
Benedict XVI did not realise that Muslims and Christians are heirs of the same internal debate about faith and reason and the influence of Greek thought, nor did he acknowledge that in significant moments of their history not only Muslim but also Christians have instrumentalised their faith to legitimate violent aggression.
The outrage produced by his lecture on September 12, 2006, persuaded Pope Benedict to give a speech on September 25 addressed to the ambassadors of countries with a Muslim majority and the representatives of the Muslim communities of Italy. In this speech he did not return to the topic raised in his learned lecture: he simply reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s respect for Islam, using the beautiful words drawn from Vatican Council II and the speeches of Pope John Paul II. He recognised the crucial importance of interreligious dialogue and cooperation in the present historical situation. He even added a sentence that could be read as an affirmation that Christians and Muslims worship the same God: “Christians and Muslims (must) manifest their obedience to the Creator who wishes all people to live in the dignity that he has bestowed upon them.”
Endnotes
1 Because Calvinism was an historical factor that fostered the creation of modernity, the Protestant reaction to democracy, human rights and industrial capitalism was more nuanced and more sympathetic than the Catholic refusal.
2 Jacques Maritain, Primauté du spirituel (Paris: Plon, 1927).
3 Op. cit. 106.
4 Jacques Maritain, Du régime temporel et de la liberté (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1933).
5 Jacques Maritain, Christianisme et démocratie (New York: Éditions de la Maison Française, 1943).
6 Pacem in terris, # 5.
7 Pacem in terris, # 10.
8 Pacem in terris, # 8.
9 For a history of this reform movement, see Tariq Ramadan, Aux sources du renouveau musulman (Paris: Bayard, 1998).
10 Alain Roussillon, La pensée islamique contemporaine (Paris: Théaèdre, 2005), Rachid Benzine, Les nouveaux penseurs de l’islam ( Paris: Albin Michel 2004) Abdou Filali-Ansary, Réformer l’islam? (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), Albert Nader, Courants d’idées en Islam (Montréal: Médiapaul, 2003).
11 The controversies around Tariq Ramadan are documented and analysed in Aziz Zemouri, Faut-il faire taire Traiq Ramadan (Paris: l’Archipel, 2005).
12 Other publications of Tariq Ramadan are L’islam et les musulmans, grandeur et décadence: dans le quotidian de nos vies (Beyrouth: Al-Bourag, 2000), Islam, the West and the Challenge of Modernity (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 2001), Peut-on vivre avec l’islam? (Lausanne: Favre, 2004).
13 See note 9.
14 M.H. Yavuz and J.L. Esposito, eds. Turkish Islam and the Secular State: the Gülen Movement (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2003); Islam in Contemporary Turkey: The Contributions of Fethullah Gülen, The Muslim World, vol. 95, no. 3, July 2005.
15 “It is my ardent hope that Muslim and Christian religious leaders and teachers will present our two great religious communities as communities in respectful dialogue, never more as communities in conflict.” (John Paul II, Meeting with the Muslim Leaders at the Omayyad Great Mosque, Damascus, Sunday, May 6, 2001); “Christians joyfully recognize the religious values we have in common with Islam. Today I would like to repeat what I said to young Muslims some years ago in Casablanca: ‘We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who created the world and brings his creatures to their perfection.’” (John Paul II, general audience, May 5, 1999: his address at Casablanca occurred on August 19, 1885.).
16 Albert Nader, Courants d’idées en Islam (Montréal: Médiaspaul, 2003) 39-47, 121-129.
