Islamic scholarship in hiding

But the Babtists have chastity balls, so they're no better.

In the United States, where Arab and Islamic Studies rely on funding from the Gulf States,

Yep--you're not getting scholarship from these places (*cough*Georgetown*cough*), you're getting press releases and talking points. And heaping helpins of tu quoque.

What needs to be done is the opening of Judeo-Christian studies centers in the Islamic world, but instead we pretend the misunderstanding is a one way street pointing to Blame The West.

BTW, the Atlantic article about the Sanaa mosque manuscripts is fascinating and should not be missed.

Dale:

For once, you who say "those d*mn Jesuits again" are right.

This Hoya is regretful that the Hilltop's "Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding" was endowed by ... Prince Alwaleed.

Ugh.

Larry:

Actually, I've sworn off Jesuit bashing since 2005. But I'm still willing to potshot institutions.

Crone is fantastic!

Anyone expecting the Muslim world to come crashing down because of textual criticism will be disappointed. If we invented a time machine and videotaped the Koran being compiled from different sources, it would still be blown off as Jewish-Christian-Infidel forgery and make barely a ripple (or provoke some angry anti-western riots). How much less an impact will any scholarly discourse have, especially after a legion of Ulema scholars go to work dispensing literary squid ink?

tmatt: "Check a SECULAR university's course offerings. The more prestigious the better, like in Great Britain.

Look for classes on textual criticism of the Bible. Count them.

Look for classes on textual criticism of the Koran. Count them."

While you are at it, tmatt, count the number of years Christianity has influenced Great Britain (or any other Western nation) vs. the number of years Islam has been present in that nation.

Perhaps that would explain why there are a greater number of classes (and scholars, and written works) examining Christianity.

Of course, that doesn't fit into your "Christianity is persecuted" theme, so you will disregard it and continue to insist on your "fact." Of course, if these universities were to suddenly change and have more classes doing critical examinations of Islam than Christianity, you would then complain that they were ignoring the "true" religion.

Such is the way when myth is involved. There is always an out for those holding to the myth. The question should not be "how can opponents disprove X" but rather "how can proponents prove X." We should put the burden on those holding the religion to prove its tenets.

In other words, Christians should be required to prove Christ rose from the dead, Muslims should be required to prove that Allah dictated the Quran to Mohammed, and Jews should be required to prove that God spoke to Moses and gave him the Decalogue.

Under these tests, religion always fails...and always will.

The same thing will happen in the Muslim world that happened when higher criticism was introduced in Christianity.

Islam fought a major controversy over the Koran's divine status. It was equivalent to the Arian controversy. You get rid of the Koran's divine status, and you've eliminated orthodox Islam.

This is not the case with Christianity, which was never "fundamentalist." You can find centuries of allegorical and non-literal interpretations of the scriptures. If anything, the "fundamentalist" revolt was for the sake of textual criticism. Luther wanted a sola scriptura basis because it would contradict the Catholic Churches extra-scriptural doctrines.

Here is a quick way to study this issue.
Check a SECULAR university's course offerings. The more prestigious the better, like in Great Britain.
Look for classes on textual criticism of the Bible. Count them.
Look for classes on textual criticism of the Koran. Count them.
Do the math.

Look for classes on textual criticism of the I CHing. Count them.
Do the math.

Come up with a meaningless number.

nd at a similar time frame look for an increase in humanistic thought in the Middle East. These are the two factors that will transition Islam away from violence and towards more peaceful paths.

Until that time Islam will turn to violence as its first tool, just as Christianity did during its early adolescence.

The problem with that, though, is that in the 1200 AD there weren't cell phone, international travel, internet, instant communication between thousands of people who can feel oppressed and who have nowhere else to turn to except extremism, or those people having access to nuclear weapons capable of wiping out potentially millions of people in an instant.

We don't have 200 years to fix this problem. I wouldn't be surprised if we have 2 decades. I do not have the answers to this problem, but I do know that we do not have time to sit here and wait for some Islamic Luther to post 95 theses on the stone of mecca telling people why it is wrong to blow people up.

I_Like_Dragyn: "We don't have 200 years to fix this problem. I wouldn't be surprised if we have 2 decades. I do not have the answers to this problem, but I do know that we do not have time to sit here and wait for some Islamic Luther to post 95 theses on the stone of mecca telling people why it is wrong to blow people up."

The theses did not stop Christians from killing. However, it did mark the beginning of the end. And the important thing to note is that it was not some outside force (or religion) that brought it about. It was change from within.

Islam will move away from violence when Muslims decide it is time to make that change. It may not take another 200 years. I don't know. But all of the stories and blog postings about honor killings and suicide bombings do nothing to move Muslims towards peaceful existence in the world. It simply cranks up the heat and fuels the fire of religious warfare.

Tell me...do you really want a Christian v. Muslim world war? Until and unless we decide that not all Muslims are evil incarnate, and that not every Christian possesses "divine truth" we will continue to move towards the day when the Muslim world and the Christian world go at each other.

Christians will call it Armegeddon, and will look for Jesus to come and break it up. The rest of us will simply die.

"The Crusades and Inquisitions took place roughly at 1200 AD...Just as Christianity resorted to violence as it entered its 12th century of existence, Islam has entered its violent phase in its 12th century." ds0490

The Crusades were not a reaction to criticism of the Bible. The Crusades were the natural and logical reaction to centuries of unprovoked Muslim atrocities. Here is one summary of a portion of Pope Urban II's speech, which led to the first of the Crusades:

"The noble race of Franks must come to the aid their fellow Christians in the East. The infidel Turks are advancing into the heart of Eastern Christendom; Christians are being oppressed and attacked; churches and holy places are being defiled. Jerusalem is groaning under the Saracen yoke. The Holy Sepulchre is in Moslem hands and has been turned into a mosque. Pilgrims are harassed and even prevented from access to the Holy Land."

Later, after the Muslim hoards kept advancing and had captured sections of Catholic Europe, later Crusades resulted. To characterize the Crusades as just Catholic violence is worse than absurd. We are not students in a madrass.

It's bad enough this world still has to engage in self-defensive crusades, but it just makes it really irritating to hear centuries-old terrorism, mandated by a book that can't be examined, dismissed as just Islam's evolution to peace. It's been going on since the eighth century, and the cost in blood and treasure that could have been put to good use is beyond calculation.

ds,
Of course the Jesus seminar was resisted and will always be. My point is that no one is trying to kill them. The disputes are verbal not physical.

But Muslims haven't learned this because they don't believe in that separation of law from religion. They need their Luther. We've all read this a million times by now, but it's true.

I'm not sure what rombald is getting at, I feel queasy even at some macabre jokes about 'killing.' My wife is a police psychologist. She just saw Dave Grossman speak and he used to be a Professor at West Point; he wrote popular books on the psychology of killing. He talked about what the Al Qaeda rebels did in the school in Chechnya, what was left out of the news. Only one other time have I asked her to stop relating the gruesome details of a crime scene. I despair for my fellow man when I hear such things. We are more monstrous than I realized.

I was a good lefty until I got older. Bad things started happening to me and my family and the 'tragic view of life' started making more sense to me. Things we couldn't plan for.

I think we need a strong, secular govt. Secular doesn't mean atheistic. It just means separating. You can't have these powerful impulses running the govt, because they are prone to overreach, and they also can't rationally justify themselves. Radical Islam needs to meet a political system that will not back down and apologize. We have have decades of nauseating post-modernism. We need to be proud of our ideals of freedom, reason, and secularism. Because rejecting secularism - OReilly goes on Fox and says he is definding the white, Christian, male power structure (!) - just means that when he is defeated, another religion can take its place. What is needed is a stable, rational structure, not just the religion come-lately.

But Americans I fear, don't even realize what made America great. The founders weren't raging Christians. Most know that. Today's Republicans are revisionists who love tax cuts and can't see their glorious past as anything but a mirror of their own know-nothing Evangelicism. I don't have any answers.

But our embrace of the certitude of our feelings and emotions (whether Muslim or Evangelical) will certainly lead to violence. We'll be monsters again.

If you look at some of the other threads here you'll soon realize that "ds0490" is a troll. We'd be wise to ignore him/her/it.

"Just as Christianity resorted to violence as it entered its 12th century of existence, Islam has entered its violent phase in its 12th century."

Boy, I missed that one, and hereby contradict my own above advice. Islam has been in a 'violent phase' practically since DAY ONE! Given the choice between sending missionaries and sending armies, Islam has almost without exception chosen the latter.

Charlie:

Given that both Christianity *and* Islam have been, since their inception, exposed to a multiplicity of cultures, religions, political systems, ethnicities, languages and philosopies since the day they began (and to a degree that would absolute bewilder the comfortable suburban mind that could credit rubbish like "The Principles of Social Evolution"), I'm afraid I have laugh to derision your comfortable suburban notion that "the more a culture is exposed to alternatives, the greater the likelihood of cultural mutation and experimentation and consequent decrease in dogma." Indeed, to even write a sentence like makes it exceedingly clear that the author hasn't the faintest idea what dogma actually is. To pit dogma *against* diversity is like pitting the skeleton of a gymnast against her ability to fantastic feast of physical prowess, agility and flexibility. Dogma is, in the Christian tradition, the skeleton of the Church that allows it to perform marvels of adaptation to the enormous diversity it encounters and embodies. There has been no "decrease in dogma" for the Church. Likewise, there has been remarkably *increase* in dogma in Islam. That's one of the reasons it is so brittle. It has very little capacity to develop its extremely (indeed overly) simple doctrines with the rich and subtle complexity that Christian dogma has.

Richard, presuming you agree with Lewis, would your belief in the ultimate truth in Christianity be changed if it could be demonstrated that the story of Christ did NOT, in fact, "really happen" in history as the Gospels describe it?

I ask this to better understand this strain of thought, not to antagonize anyone. Most Christians I have known explicitly tie their faith in God to their belief that the key events recounted in Scripture really happened in history (what some have called "time-machine true"). Can Christianity still be what it claims to be if those events didn't occur in real history?

Allen: That's an interesting question. Let me give a stab at an answer.

Not only have the internal inconsistencies between the Gospel accounts have been well-documented, but they were well-known in antiquity, and didn't really bother anybody too terribly much. In other words, the Gospels were accepted as such knowing full well that they didn't agree in every detail.

Given that the whole point of Christianity is that God chose to intervene in human history, to become man, to become circumscribed by time and flesh, to exist within His own creation and dwell among us--if that didn't actually happen, then no, Christianity can't still be what it claims to be. It would then simply become one ideology among many, one more collection of more-or-less good ideas. If Christ is not risen, we are to be the most pitied of men. (I will note that this is an element which distinguishes Islam from Christianity quite clearly; any notion of Incarnation is absolutely and totally false and impossible from the Muslim point of view, which suggests that to say that because we're both monotheistic we're basically the same with a few variations and bound to go through the same life cycle is a fallacy.)

However, to insist that either all the written accounts agree with each other on every detail and be, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as what we would have if we could watch a videotape of the events and transcribe it, or that it's all made up and a lie--whoever it is who might be making that argument, Christian or non-Christian alike, is missing the point. I refer you to The Mystery of Christ by Fr. John Behr, dean of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, Oxford D.Phil. and Doktorkind of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware; he makes the interesting point that modern historical study is quite divorced from the mindset that produced the Gospels. For the premodern mind, he says, truth is found in what something means; a text has a meaning in the present time for the people who write it and the people who read it. For the modern mind, truth is found, however, in what something meant; if we cannot recover what we think people thought about something at the time, then it's effectively meaningless for us now. Behr continues with this and says that for the postmodern mind, truth is found in what something will have meant--what its originators thought doesn't mean anything, what we can make of it now isn't important, what's important is how somebody down the road will have understood it. This isn't to downplay the question of historical accuracy, but it is to suggest that the Gospels were intended to convey the meaning of events with which those reading them were already familiar, not to give a clinical blow-by-blow account. As an earlier poster noted, the early Fathers were certainly not averse to reading several layers of meaning into the Gospels and Epistles.

Did it all really happen? Yes, I think so. I find it hard to believe that men like St. Peter who were weak and cowardly when Jesus found them would just decide to travel the known world, risking imprisonment and death, and ultimately die quite painfully for something they knew they had just made up. Which of the Gospel writers is the most accurate? That's to ask a question from a viewpoint which I'm not altogether certain they would have understood (except perhaps St. Luke), and again, they were trying to answer the question, "What does it mean?" Is there symbolism? Sure, if you want to call it that, but don't mistake "symbolism" with "it didn't actually happen". In its best expressions, Christianity is "both/and" rather than "either/or".

This is already too long, and I've no idea if a word of it makes any sense (I'm guessing your mileage may vary), so I'll cut it off here.

Richard

You better come up with some more analogies Shea. Why not turn to Star Wars this time?

I’d be interested by what these "well documented" inconsistencies are- often claimed i would say more often! One has to remember that in first century narratives were not automatically or even normally chronological-and only the gospel of John makes much apparent use of precise chronological information (ie "two years latter" rather than just “latter” or “ as he returned” ) . Similarly quote marks didn't exist - there's not a clear distinction between paraphrase and "this". When you remember those two most if not all of the supposed contradictions between the four gospels vanish, and a great many of them would be tenuous even were that not the case.

This doesn’t not change the fact that the Koran is analogous to Jesus -so proving the Koran is a human creation written by different people is analogous to provi0ng Christ was not divine as the article suggests- much further than just an attack on biblical inerrancy. Even the most extreme fundamentalist doesn't think the bible was only written / dictated by one human