Faisal Devji: Christendom’s Muslim Midwife
[Faisal Devji is Associate Professor of History at the New School in New York. He has held faculty positions at Yale University and the University of Chicago, where he also received his PhD in Intellectual History. ]
The re-emergence of Islam as a European force and the spark this has given to efforts to re-Christianize the continent were made manifest last year in the wake of Pope Benedict’s controversial speech at Regensburg.
Not only did his Muslim opponents take Benedict’s words more seriously than most Catholics seem to have done; their protests also brought these words to the attention of millions of Christians whom the church could not otherwise have reached. In this sense, Islam is the midwife of Christendom, even more necessary to its self-definition now than in the days of the Crusades.
The same, however, cannot be said of the Muslim world, which only had to take Christian Europe seriously from the 18th century with the beginning of imperialism. For those familiar with the deep sense of anxiety as well as the crisis of confidence that Europe’s dominance once produced among Muslims and other subject peoples, it is interesting to note how Islam today calls forth similar feelings of insecurity and barely-suppressed hysteria among Europeans. Perhaps they have come to realize that there is no getting away from Islam, with which they will have to come to some accommodation.
We are told that the pope does not look with favour upon inter-faith dialogue, the religious version of multiculturalism. In doing so he joins religious and ethnic minorities in Europe, who have always viewed multiculturalism and ecumenism with some degree of suspicion. Inter-faith dialogue, after all, has always been a Christian enterprise that has sought to define other religious traditions in its own terms, even if with the most charitable of motives.
The duplex term “Judeo-Christian” provides a good instance of this, with a truncated Judaism deprived of its autonomy and attached to Christianity in the role of its progenitor. The term “Abrahamic religions” is the triplex extension of “Judeo-Christian,” this time including Islam to form a monotheist’s club. And while Muslims have always recognized Jews and Christians as misguided believers who are nevertheless deserving of paradise, the “Abrahamic” ecumenism their liberal representatives espouse has more than a whiff of proselytism about it.
In any comparative or ecumenical framework it is invariably a Christian standard that is used to measure up Muslims who must invariably fall short: thus the absurdity of accusing a religion without a church of refusing to separate church and state. Such an accusation was in fact leveled against Judaism much earlier, with the ancient kingdom of the Jews being seen by Christian writers as the very model of theocracy. The final conversion of the Jews in the term “Judeo-Christianity,” however, has freed theocracy up for Muslim occupation.
But however frightening its manifestations, Islam today displays an indubitable dynamism that cannot be confined within the stale and recycled categories of such European criticism. For the “Jewish Question” which exercised so many minds in 19th-century Europe has now become a “Muslim Question,” with almost identical terms used to describe the “problem” posed by Jewish and Muslim minorities in Europe. We should not forget that the “assimilation” and “secularization” that so many European Jews underwent to resolve the question they posed for Christendom did nothing to save them in the end.
Yet Muslims cannot be added to the “Judeo-Christian” condominium without wrecking it, since in many respects Muslims are closer to both Christians and Jews than each is to the other. Unlike Jews, they believe in Jesus, and unlike Christians, they are defined by a law and not by a church. Add dietary laws and other practices or beliefs to the mix and a clearer picture emerges of Islam as the nearest relative of both Judaism and Christianity. Yet this is also a false picture, because unlike its “Abrahamic” peers, Islam is not confined to the cloister of monotheism.
If for a thousand years Christendom has had Muslims and Jews as its closest religious neighbours, the same does not hold for Islam, whose peaceful as well as bloody borders with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism are much more extensive than those it shares with the other monotheisms. I would venture to suggest that Muslim relations with Hindus, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians have also been more creative and influential than those with Christians and Jews, the only place of which this is not true being the Mediterranean basin.
In other words, Christendom is inconceivable without Islam, but the reverse cannot be said to be the case despite Islam’s long acquaintance with Christianity....
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The re-emergence of Islam as a European force and the spark this has given to efforts to re-Christianize the continent were made manifest last year in the wake of Pope Benedict’s controversial speech at Regensburg.
Not only did his Muslim opponents take Benedict’s words more seriously than most Catholics seem to have done; their protests also brought these words to the attention of millions of Christians whom the church could not otherwise have reached. In this sense, Islam is the midwife of Christendom, even more necessary to its self-definition now than in the days of the Crusades.
The same, however, cannot be said of the Muslim world, which only had to take Christian Europe seriously from the 18th century with the beginning of imperialism. For those familiar with the deep sense of anxiety as well as the crisis of confidence that Europe’s dominance once produced among Muslims and other subject peoples, it is interesting to note how Islam today calls forth similar feelings of insecurity and barely-suppressed hysteria among Europeans. Perhaps they have come to realize that there is no getting away from Islam, with which they will have to come to some accommodation.
We are told that the pope does not look with favour upon inter-faith dialogue, the religious version of multiculturalism. In doing so he joins religious and ethnic minorities in Europe, who have always viewed multiculturalism and ecumenism with some degree of suspicion. Inter-faith dialogue, after all, has always been a Christian enterprise that has sought to define other religious traditions in its own terms, even if with the most charitable of motives.
The duplex term “Judeo-Christian” provides a good instance of this, with a truncated Judaism deprived of its autonomy and attached to Christianity in the role of its progenitor. The term “Abrahamic religions” is the triplex extension of “Judeo-Christian,” this time including Islam to form a monotheist’s club. And while Muslims have always recognized Jews and Christians as misguided believers who are nevertheless deserving of paradise, the “Abrahamic” ecumenism their liberal representatives espouse has more than a whiff of proselytism about it.
In any comparative or ecumenical framework it is invariably a Christian standard that is used to measure up Muslims who must invariably fall short: thus the absurdity of accusing a religion without a church of refusing to separate church and state. Such an accusation was in fact leveled against Judaism much earlier, with the ancient kingdom of the Jews being seen by Christian writers as the very model of theocracy. The final conversion of the Jews in the term “Judeo-Christianity,” however, has freed theocracy up for Muslim occupation.
But however frightening its manifestations, Islam today displays an indubitable dynamism that cannot be confined within the stale and recycled categories of such European criticism. For the “Jewish Question” which exercised so many minds in 19th-century Europe has now become a “Muslim Question,” with almost identical terms used to describe the “problem” posed by Jewish and Muslim minorities in Europe. We should not forget that the “assimilation” and “secularization” that so many European Jews underwent to resolve the question they posed for Christendom did nothing to save them in the end.
Yet Muslims cannot be added to the “Judeo-Christian” condominium without wrecking it, since in many respects Muslims are closer to both Christians and Jews than each is to the other. Unlike Jews, they believe in Jesus, and unlike Christians, they are defined by a law and not by a church. Add dietary laws and other practices or beliefs to the mix and a clearer picture emerges of Islam as the nearest relative of both Judaism and Christianity. Yet this is also a false picture, because unlike its “Abrahamic” peers, Islam is not confined to the cloister of monotheism.
If for a thousand years Christendom has had Muslims and Jews as its closest religious neighbours, the same does not hold for Islam, whose peaceful as well as bloody borders with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism are much more extensive than those it shares with the other monotheisms. I would venture to suggest that Muslim relations with Hindus, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians have also been more creative and influential than those with Christians and Jews, the only place of which this is not true being the Mediterranean basin.
In other words, Christendom is inconceivable without Islam, but the reverse cannot be said to be the case despite Islam’s long acquaintance with Christianity....