Comment

Now that some of the furore over the Pope’s comments on Islam have died down and the requisite number of pleas — definitely needed — have been made about the need for introspection in Islam, it might also be a good idea to examine what Benedict XVI actually said.

The gist of his speech was that Europe and Western civilisation both need to re-examine their relationship with Christianity since in that religion lies the essence of the finest philosophical thought and that there is no dichotomy between faith and reason.

It’s an interesting thought. Belief in God is itself a leap of faith and a leap away from reason. The West’s greatest philosophers have long debated the point, and Spinoza’s Ethics is a superb example of such discourse.

The raging debate in the US —surely the pinnacle of Western civilisation — over evolution is a clear example of how faith gets outraged by reason and by scientific advances. Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution are disturbing to believing Christians and he himself knew that it would be so, since he delayed the publishing of his theory.

The Pope has a problem, undoubtedly. Christianity is losing its hold over the West and Catholicism is now strong only in South America and Asia. How to get believers back into the fold?

The best way, it seems, is to insidiously attack the world’s fastest growing religion, Islam. That the west and Christianity both see Islam as an evil force is hardly new. Dante consigned the Prophet Mohammed to a terrible fate in his journey through Hell. But even so, the Pope, as a professor of theology, ought to have known that his fervent inclusion of Greek philosophy into the ambit of Western Christian civilisation was inherently flawed.

Europe in the middle ages was a dark, horrific place. Christianity growth across Europe replaced the earlier shamanistic and druidic religions and the mighty intellectual flowering of the Greeks was forgotten.

It was, ironically, the efforts of a Muslim intellectual from Cordoba that re-introduced Aristotle to western civilisation. Averroes or Ibn Rushd, translated the great Greek philosopher’s works, since scribes in the monasteries were largely unimpressed by the peripatetic teacher.

To understand Aristotle is to reach Plato, surely the foundation of Western philosophical thought as we understand it. St Thomas Aquinas used Ibn Rushd’s scholarship, although he rejected his conclusions. Ibn Rushd also raised several theological questions about belief and reason and about the duality of God, which also entered Christian debate.

Apart from Ibn Rushd, Avicenna or Ibn Sina brought principles of modern medicine to Europe and Algazel or Al Ghazali pre-empted Averroes in his philosophical findings. For the record, which the Pope ignored, the Greeks were not Christians at this stage. The wilful, sometimes vengeful and always unpredictable natures of their Gods on Olympus led the Greeks towards a very deep understanding and study of reason. The Gods were indifferent to the needs of man: mankind did not therefore have to bow to the needs of the Gods. There is little common ground with Christianity here and it would not be stretching the point to say that Ibn Rushd’s rediscovery of Aristotle led eventually to the birth of the Age of Reason which led to a secular Europe.

Ibn Rushd’s beliefs on the duality of the Almighty also got him into some problems with the Islamic orthodoxy, but the spirit of inquiry was still alive in Islam at that point. It was an age when Islam was at the forefront of cultural thought — in science, in mathematics, in philosophy and architecture. It is, at the very least, bad manners for the Pope to ignore Islam’s contributions to Western civilisation.

At no point can anyone suggest that Islam, especially in its contemporary interpretations, does not have its problems that must be urgently addressed. But these problems are all very modern in their origins, the deep-seated Christian fear of Islam notwithstanding. The Semitic religions, in spite of their commonalities, have always had uneasy relationships with each other — the Christian torment of Jews is well-documented after all.

Which is why there is something very contemptuously facile and false in the Pope’s allusions to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. If the Pope indeed wants a full debate on the decline of his religion of choice in the circumscribed world in which he lives, he might look to the problems within rather than pointing fingers without.