More of God's Unruly Friends

Qalandar Dervishes Journey to Multan:

A Note On Romantic Orientalism

The “Western religious imagination,” like the “West” itself—as an entity separate and distinct from the Afro-Eurasian oikumene—is a “modern” (i.e., post-Medieval) invention. Romanticism, a product of Protestant Europe, offered a modern interpretation of the Western religious imagination that has found its way—with much lost in translation—into religious and political movements and discourse in “West” and “East” alike.

In the 18th and 19th centuries CE, Romantic Orientalism looked “East” in a way that was continuous with its critical stance towards the European Enlightenment. 19th century Romantic Orientalism in the American grain (e.g., that of the New England Transcendentalists and fellow travelers of the “American Renaissance”) assumed a similar posture towards “East” and “West” but appealed to “Eastern enlightenment” as a corrective to the prevailing forms of American Protestant religiosity. Paul Zweig summarizes the point this way:

The nineteenth century transposed the religious
quest for salvation into a variety of secular idioms. Emerson’s poet, as the “complete man,” was also the saved man, delivered from partialness and dependency, Emerson’s version of original sin. This was Whitman’s idea, too. It is worth noting that Leaves of Grass was written during one of America’s periodic religious revivals. In a personal note, Whitman referred to his book as a “New Bible”….
Zweig, Walt Whitman (1984), pp. 12-13. See also M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971).

For Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and others of the American Renaissance, Romantic Orientalism became a means of creating a uniquely American (and, at the same instant, cosmopolitan) alternative to what they experienced as the majoritarian view of Christianity. Literary critic (and life-long student of Romanticism) Harold Bloom calls this majoritarian view the “American Religion”—where the Divinity is subsumed in the figure of Jesus Christ who loves each and every American individually and with whom each and every American can have a personal relationship and, thereby, enter the charmed circle of grace. This Jesus in turn underwrites American understandings of democracy, capitalism, and freedom (these terms are NOT synonymous, though they are often used interchangeably in informal conversation). In this religion, American government and way of life are presumed to be Divinely sanctioned and the “Myth of American Exceptionalism” receives religious justification. Contemporary critics of this ideology continue to draw upon the writers of the “American Renaissance” for inspiration. See also Bloom, The American Religion (1992) and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005).

In an effort to invigorate their efforts to de-stabilize the “American religion” and what they came to regard as its reductively economic view of the individual and God (as Bloom puts it, slightly tongue-in-cheek, the God of the American religion has been transfigured over time into “Jesus Christ, CEO”), the American Romantics appealed to “Asian religions” (Islam included among them). Many found in the Persian poetry produced by Muslims from 1050 CE to 1600 CE (Emerson’s dates) an expansive view of the Divine—at once imminent and yet always beyond reach—a view consonant with Romantic notions of life as a visionary quest (or, as in the work of world historian Marshall Hodgson, religion as an imaginative [ad]venture).

Hodgson chose one of the Romantics’ “Asian religions,” Islam, to be the subject of an epic study. He brought to this study an appreciation for the American Romantic’s expansive visionary religion (perhaps most forcefully articulated in Emerson’s writings and in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) tempered by sobering evidence gathered in historical research. For Hodgson, history showed that Muslims were/are as culturally and religiously creative as any human beings, but they face challenges unique to the modern period; nevertheless, despite his deep sympathies, he felt that the jury is still out as to whether Islam (or, indeed, any religious tradition), in its institutional or presently instantiated form, has the wherewithal to meet those challenges. Perhaps my favorite line in all of Hodgson:

But if there are Muslims whose confidence in God Himself is strong enough so that they dare risk everything, even community prestige or solidarity, for the sake of truth, then for such Muslims, facing historical realities and coming to terms with even the most painful of them is encouraged by the Islamic tradition itself. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 3, pp. 437-438.

In the Prophet Muhammad, the historian found an exemplar of three virtues which, he felt, would ensure the continuing vitality of the tradition into the future, if modern Muslims cultivated them: magnanimity, imaginative piety, and personal courage. One might compare here S. H. Nasr’s essay “The Prophet and Prophetic Religion” (1967). Hodgson’s appreciation of Islam is less idiosyncratic than that of the “American Renaissance” writers but, so far, it has had a negligible impact upon its American audience.

In my own experience with and among Muslims, I have found no shortage of magnanimity and personal courage. But the Romantic emphasis upon imaginative piety is as underdeveloped among Muslims today and—indeed, among all people of faith—as it was when Hodgson wrote four decades ago. If anything, the last three decades have witnessed the ascent among people of faith of an imaginatively impoverished textual literalism and exclusionary communalism. The results of the neglect of this aspect of the Romantic genius are to be seen everywhere and will no doubt remain with us for generations to come.

The Role of Religious Studies in the Academy

So long as human beings insist upon their illusions, there will be a crying need for the academic study of religion.

God's Unruly Friends

The "owaysi."

The First Millennium

Garth Fowden has broken through the impasse of Western and Muslim historiography with his latest book Before and After Muhammad (see Michael Pregill's excellent review here).

On page 48, Fowden crystallizes in a single sentence the thesis which underlies my 2008 doctoral dissertation Modern Qur'anic Hermeneutics:

"The refusal of many in the Islamic world to acknowledge the late antique pluralism to which the Qur'an responds undermines their grasp on history and their access to the context and contacts which are Islam's birthright" (emphasis added).

I alluded to this fact throughout my dissertation, beginning with my epigram from the Qur'an (25:30): "And the Messenger says, 'O Lord! Verily my people [mis]take this Recitation [for something] without roots'" [my translation].

The sacred history of the Islamic tradition, a triumphalist narrative (like all sacred histories), has had the unintended consequence of impoverishing Muslims' appreciation of their own past. Severing themselves from that past has had one advantage: it allowed Muslims to claim that their religion was sui generis. But no religion is sui generis, and Muslims have substituted myth for history for so long that, in Fowden's wonderfully Biblicist expression, they have traded their own rich historical inheritance for a mess of ideological pottage.

Fowden promises further work in this vein and I can only say that it will be welcomed by all who wish to see the historical narratives of Muslims and "the West" made to conform more faithfully to the historical record.

Notes On Al-Kindi

Did Islamic philosophy pass Al-Kindi by?

No, but it could not rest with his achievement. As Peter Adamson remarks in his study of Al-Kindi, “the history of philosophy is a competition” (Adamson, 3).

Did Al-Kindi’s competitors improve upon his work?

That is debatable.

“The school of Kindi went in no way beyond the master” (T. J. DeBoer, 106). Perhaps there was no compelling reason to.

DeBoer’s criticism of Alkindian theology (‘ilm al-ilahiyat) applies to all theological speculation: “Man has always attributed to his God or Gods the highest of his own possessions” (DeBoer, 104).

What is invented and what is discovered is a vexed question.

What Santayana had to say about Platonism applies equally to Al-Kindi's work, insofar as Al-Kindi was indebted to Plato:

Plato's "humanistic" philosophy "expresses and fosters" the "spiritual side" of human nature. "Platonic metaphysics projects into the universe the moral progress of the soul. It is like a mountain lake, in which the aspirations and passions of a civilized mind are reflected upside down; and a certain tremor and intensity is added to them in that narrower frame, which they would hardly have in the upper air. This system renders the life of the soul more unified and more beautiful than it would otherwise be. Everything becomes magical, and a sort of perpetual miracle of grace; the forms which things wear to the human mind are deputed to be their substance; the uses of life become celestial spheres enclosing the earth. A monstrous dream, if you take it for a description of nature; but a suitable allegory by which to illustrate the progress of the inner life: because those stages, or something like them, are really the stages of moral progress for the soul" (from "Soliloquies In England," excerpted in the Modern Library edition of The Philosophy of Santayana, pp. 368-9).

Santayana's "Realms of Being"

The stimulus that calls animal attention to some external fact, in provoking an act of the body, also presents some image to the mind. Moreover this labor of perception may be more or less welcome, pleasant, or life-enhancing, apart from its ulterior uses; and sometimes this incidental emotion is so strong that it overpowers the interest which I may have had originally in the external facts; and, I may suspend my action or continue it automatically, while my thought is absorbed in the image and arrested there. As I was jogging to market in my village cart, beauty has burst upon me and the reins have dropped from my hands. I am transported, in a certain measure, into a state of trance. I see with extraordinary clearness, yet what I see seems strange and wonderful, because I no longer look in order to understand, but only in order to see. I have lost my preoccupation with fact, and am contemplating an essence.

Realms of Being, pp. 6-7.

For Santayana, "essence" is not unmediated contact with what really exists; he was not a naive realist but a "critical" one. Something in our environment stimulates our senses and draws our attention. Our attentive response to that stimulus is a complex psycho-physical act. Part of our response will consist of pure, animal reflex; but another part--what might be described as a kind of neural surplus--endows that stimulus with a subjective interest or a meaning that is recorded by our emotion-laden intelligence in symbolic form. Santayana asserted that contemplation of that "datum" can have a salutary effect upon the person who experiences it because resident within it is all that the human organism can actually claim to "know" about the world.

This implies that our knowledge of the found world does not consist of "brute facts." By means of our sense organs, we "ingest" (as it were) brute facts as we encounter them, but our relationship to them does not rise to the level of conscious apprehension; instead, they are reflexively negotiated without gaining entrance to our store of knowledge--not, at least, as brute facts. The only things that enter our store of knowledge are the symbols that our nervous systems generate in response to stimuli. It is the complexity of the homo sapien's neurophysiology that determines its apprehension of the world. We see through a lens--not outside or beyond it. And we cannot factor out the distortion our lens introduces to our vision because we have no way to determine what that factor might be: we cannot escape the mechanism we inhabit; we simply are that mechanism.

Interestingly, this state of affairs did not cause Santayana anxiety. He concluded a peace treaty with his human, all-too-human constitution--accepting it for what it was. This acceptance is, in fact, an attribute of a consciousness that inhabits--in some sense or to some degree--what Santayana termed the "Realm of Spirit." Such a consciousness acquires the distinction traditionally referred to as "wisdom."

What is distinctive about Santayana's "Realm of Spirit" is the attitude that one adopts towards the "essences" one apprehends--and entrance into the "spiritual realm" depends entirely upon that attitude. Here we find Santayana's youthful enthusiasm for Schopenhauer paying dividends. For while it is subjective interest that draws our attention to elements in our environment and initiates the process of symbolic appropriation, it is a willed indifference to those subjectively acquired symbols that elevates them to the status of pure essence. Our passions put us on the road to our "philosophical" destination, but only dispassion permits us entry into the Promised Land of "spirit."

With Santayana, we hail the return of the late Hellenistic Sage.

Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (d. 866)

Abu Yusuf al-Kindi, known to history as the "philosopher of the Arabs," would be better remembered as Peter Adamson has suggested: an eclectic and synthetic thinker who was an enthusiastic heir of late Hellenism as it emerged anew in the vibrant intellectual milieu of 9th century Baghdad.

To limit Abu Yusuf to his ethnicity or tribal affiliation would be as ridiculous as limiting Seneca to his provincial roots by naming him the "philosopher of the Iberians." Both thinkers transcended the parochialism implied by such labels to become figures of world-historical importance: Sages for the Ages.

As a Muslim intellectual, al-Kindi exemplified the rich potential of the Irano-Semitic-Hellenic humanism that is falsafa. Indeed, one might even say he invented it--although I would prefer to argue that it invented him. In other words, al-Kindi was attuned to the temper of his times and became, as a consequence, what Emerson might term a "representative man." To read al-Kindi is to become acquainted with the sophisticated, urbane, and intellectually progressive Islam that the 'Abbasid court cultivated in the century that followed the fall of the Damascene Umayyad dynasty (750 CE).

Dr. Freud De Trinitate?

I wonder if anyone has written a Freudian analysis of the love triangle that is the Christian dogma of the Trinity. Not to debunk it, of course--there's no "debunking" something that cannot first be "bunked." But the mental effort that has been expended over the centuries to make this doctrine appear indispensable to religious believers suggests a longing that the dogma is offered to fulfill. What is that longing and how might such a belief potentially satisfy it? These, it seems to me, are pertinent questions that someone of Dr. Freud's stature (or someone versed in his thought) might be in a position to fruitfully pursue.