GETTING ISLAM STRAIGHT Charles E.

Butterworth University of Maryland Prepared for delivery at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 28 - August 31, 2003

INTRODUCTION About half a century ago, two relatively unknown scholars delivered a series of lectures under the auspices of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation at the University of Chicago, one within two years of the other. They had much in common: country of

birth, ethnicity, educational formation, flight from persecution by tyrannic forces that brought them to asylum of sorts in the US, and a desire to explain contemporary politics as well as political thought by seeking its antecedents in the history of political philosophy. The books resulting from the lectures and

appearing in inverse order one and three years after their delivery are so well-known that the mention of their titles immediately suffices to identify their authors and the multiple controversies associated with their approaches: of Politics and Natural Right and History. Both Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin voice dismay over the way positivism has affected clear thinking about politics as well as about the moral and rational qualities needed for political life to flourish. Strauss goes further and castigates historicism, The New Science

especially radical historicism, for the impetus it gives to moral

Charles E. Butterworth myopia and relativism.

Getting Islam Straight

He then turns to a careful examination of

classical and early modern political philosophy in order to show that while ancient rationalism was decisively rejected at the onset of the modern age, it was never adequately refuted. a thorough-going critique of historicism as presented After

in the

work of Martin Heidegger and a detailed refutation of the social science positivism that can be traced to the influence of Max Weber, he turns to a new account of ancient political philosophy and of early modern political philosophy. Natural Right and

History stands on its own, to be sure, but it also serves as the grounding for Strausss subsequent interpretations of political philosophy within the Western tradition. Voegelin, persuaded that the existence of man in political society is historical existence, strives for a theory of politics that penetrates to principles and is, consequently, a theory of history (Voegelin, 1952; 1). He therefore views

the task of the political scientist to be that of building a new political theory, perhaps even a new science of politics: Much can be learned, to be sure, from the earlier philosophers concerning the range of problems, as well as concerning their theoretical treatment; but the very historicity of human existence, that is, the unfolding of the typical in meaningful concreteness, precludes a valid reformulation of principles through return to a former concreteness. Hence, political science cannot be restored to the dignity of a theoretical science in the strict sense by means of a literary renaissance of philosophical achievements of the past; the principles must be regained by a work of theoretization which starts from the concrete, historical situation of the age, taking into account the

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Getting Islam Straight (Voegelin, 1952;

full amplitude of our empirical knowledge. 2-3.)

This line of reasoning does not bring Voegelin to embrace Webers value-free science. To the contrary, he adamantly rejects that

attempt to move religion and metaphysics into the realm of the irrational (Voegelin, 1952; 22). For him, the restoration of

first philosophy metaphysics is of utmost importance, and he strives to accomplish that goal through a reinterpretation of rationalism. That reinterpretation is driven by the assumption

that one must link metaphysics, beginning with Greek metaphysics, to the religious experiences of the philosophers who developed it and then continue with medieval metaphysics and the corresponding dominant religion, Christianity (Voegelin, 1952; 24-26). For Voegelin, such a line of inquiry leads to the discovery of Gnosticism and its growth as well as to recognizing that the break between ancient and modern thought needs to be moved back from the sixteenth to somewhere near the ninth century, that is, from the renaissance and reformation to the middle ages. He

views Gnosticism as the attempt to found a society that will last forever and to replace the mysteriousness of human existence by knowledge the immanentization of the eschaton in his formulation. There is, of course, nothing surprising about that.

It is a tendency common to human beings, especially to the culture that grows up within human social and political

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Elements of Gnostic thought from medieval to They

modern times are ready to hand, according to Voegelin.

originate with Joachim of Flora, pass through Thomas Hobbes to Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach and Karl Marx, to culminate with Georg Wilhelm Hegel. Yet, at least in this book, Voegelin has no solution to this crisis in modern thought. He is content to have identified it

and to have shown how it is inextricably tied to human history. In the end, he can only hope that civilizing elements will allow mankind to resist its appeal (Voegelin, 1952; 133, 166, and 187189). Leo Strauss focuses on ideas and on the arguments set forth by those who expound the ideas, not on the historical events that surround them or to which they give rise. Nor does Strauss think

there is any meaning in history per se, no more at least than the consequences of ideas that capture the popular will from time to time. Thus it is by examining the reasons for historicism put

forth by its proponents that he discovers it to be untenable on logical and practical grounds (Strauss, 1953; 19-20, 20-21, 2324, and 24-25). For him, the goal is to achieve clarity about His

the dominant opinions of the day and their shortcomings.

success in that endeavor owes much to what he learned about revelation and philosophy from two great medieval philosophers, Alfarabi and Maimonides. Even so, he attributes no special power

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Getting Islam Straight

It remains for him an alternative, albeit a

powerful and frequently hostile alternative, to the rationalism pursued by philosophers. With one exception, no attention is paid to Islam or to thinkers within the Islamic tradition by either Voegelin or Strauss in these lectures. The exception is Averroes, a pseudo-

Averroes for Voegelin and an Averroes filtered through Christian and Jewish Aristotelians for Strauss (Voegelin, 1952; 142-143 and Strauss, 1953; 158-159). Voegelins account of Averroes and

Islam is as erroneous and limited as the source from which he draws. Though Strauss is correct in what he says about Averroes, Indeed, Strauss never It is a topic of

it tells the reader nothing about Islam.

does speak about Islam in any of his writings.

discussion for him only insofar as it sheds light on the question of divine law and the way philosophers within the tradition of Islam explain that law and the prophetic mission. Voegelin,

however, returns to Islam in the work whose title gives the theme to this panel, The Ecumenic Age.

THE ECUMENIC AGE, AN OVERVIEW The Ecumenic Age, volume four of the series entitled Order and History, fits into a larger program or project. It was meant

to illustrate the principle that the order of history emerges from the history of order. Accordingly, history was conceived

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as a process of increasingly differentiated insight into the order of being in which man participates by his existence. Moreover, such order as can be discerned in the process, including digressions and regressions from the increasing differentiation, would emerge, if the principal types of mans existence in society, as well as the corresponding symbolisms of order, were presented in their historical succession. Voegelin was of the opinion that the types of order were five: the imperial organizations of the Ancient Near East,

the revelatory form of existence in history, the polis, the multi-civilizational empires since Alexander, and the modern national state. To each of these corresponds a particular kind

of thought that shapes the way it comes into being and functions, namely, the cosmological myth, revelation as developed by Moses and the prophets of the Chosen People, the Hellenic myth, and the development of philosophy as the symbolism of order, Christianity, and, finally, modern Gnosticism. As is generally

known, the first three types along with their corresponding myths or founding representations were discussed in the first three volumes of Order and History, namely, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle. Originally, Voegelin had planned to discuss the other two types multi-civilizational empires and the modern nation state in three subsequent volumes that would have carried the titles

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Empire and Christianity, The Protestant Centuries, and The Crisis of Western Civilization. Now, however, Voegelin confesses to

having discerned that the structures that emerged from the historical orders and their symbolization were more complicated than he supposed (Voegelin, 1974; 1-2). this volume. So we have

It is followed by In Search of Order, the work that

puts a seal upon his attempts to elucidate how transcendental experiences enter and influence human history. In The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin sets out to write a history of history while avoiding the errors of Jaspers and Toynbee, neither of whom pays sufficient attention to the sacred and the influence it has upon human awareness through time. Central for Voegelin

is the assumption that the influence of the sacred lets man become conscious of his humanity as existence in tension toward divine reality or differently stated, that there is a kind of religious progress with Christianity marking the highest point. In this sense, history is not a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but the process of mans participation in a flux of divine presence that has eschatological direction (Voegelin, 1974; 5-6). Somehow, it now appears that even this assumption

has been called into question: If the puzzle of the symbolism is solved, however, the mystery of the process itself becomes even more awesome. For the spiritual outbursts are widely scattered in time and space over concrete human beings in concrete societies. The events, though they constitute structures of meaning in history, do not themselves fall readily into a pattern that

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could be understood as meaningful. Some of the structures constituted, such as the advances from compact to differentiated consciousness, bring the time-dimension in the flux of divine presence to attention; others, such as the cluster of events in the crosscut under discussion, appear to accentuate the process in its broadness, as it affects mankind in the spatial-dimension of existence. But in either case, the emergent meanings remain open toward the future of the process in time, as well as toward its eschatological fulfillment. I had to conclude: The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it, is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation. (Voegelin, 1974; 6.) Differently stated, history has no over-arching meaning as such or at least none that has yet been perceived. To be sure, human

beings strive to make sense of events as members of a particular political group and culture. The endeavor is manifested in the

various interpretations of existence put forth by these groups. Voegelins effort to survey such interpretations broadly and deeply alerts him to common features that point to a kind of unity without, however, culminating in a final, clear vision of order and meaning in time. For him to obtain such a vision seems

to be as impossible as it was for Moses to see God face to face. Notwithstanding, Voegelin perseveres and tries here to apply his new understanding of historical analysis to what he terms the "ecumenic age," namely, the period reaching from the rise of the Persian empire to the fall of the Roman. He assigns no precise

dates to these events, but casual remarks suggest that he puts the beginning point at about 550 B.C.E. and the end at about 650 C.E. (Voegelin, 1974; 118 and 142). He perceives the age as

Charles E. Butterworth

Getting Islam Straight This empire

marked by a new political unit, the ecumenic empire.

comes about by a totally new means of destruction plus a novel kind of spiritual creativity. ecumenic religions. The latter gives rise to great

Christianity is one, and Voegelin dwells at Islam is another, but it

length on its ecumenic manifestations. receives scant attention in this work.

Now Islam is nothing if it is not ecumenic.

A saying that

is widespread within the Islamic tradition identifies the Prophet Muhammad as having been sent to the red and the black, that is, to all people. The history of the early years of Islam, as the

faithful burst out of Arabia and carried their message as well as their dominion across the countries of the Middle East to the borders of China in one direction and across North Africa up through Spain to the gates of Poitiers in another, demonstrates how ecumenic an entity it was in the common sense understanding of the term. Still, Voegelin views Islam quite differently and

thus denies that it is truly ecumenic. Three considerations prompt that denial. Though distinct,

all three have in common Voegelins sense that Islam is flawed as a religion. First, his reading of the history of thought and action is that it points to a true perception of God: The ecumenic was

the age in which the great religions had their origin, and above all Christianity (Voegelin, 1974; 134). That above all means,

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Getting Islam Straight Judaism leads

inter alia, and not Islam (Voegelin, 1974; 12-13).

to Christianity which, as religion and as political movement, represents the fullest expression of the divine: A critical episode in the struggle for finding the balance of consciousness in the ecumenic society was the encounter of Judaism with philosophy in Alexandria, culminating in the work of Philo, the older contemporary of Christ. (Voegelin, 1974; 29.)1 Voegelins focus on Philo is so exclusive that he cites none of the philosophers within the Islamic tradition who also turned to the Alexandrian school and its offshoots Alkindi, Alrazi, Alfarabi, Avicenna, Ibn B~ jjah, Ibn T ufayl, Averroes, and Ibn . Khald n. Yet any single one of these thinkers must be deemed as

important a thinker and exegete of Greek philosophy, not to speak of the relationship between revelation and human wisdom, as Philo. Nor does Voegelin mention any of the Muslim theologians

and jurists who, having taken due note of Greek philosophy and the influence it seemed to have among learned Muslims, spoke for the faith and against such foreign influences. Even more

surprising, he says nothing at all of the Jewish thinker who most clearly pointed to the benefits faithful Jews could gain from the study of Greek philosophy and Judaism: Maimonides.

Second, Voegelin ascribes to the Prophet Muhammad imperial ambitions, then faults him for failing to bring a viable empire into being:

See also, ibid., pp. 178, 209-210, 251-254, and 331.

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The Byzantine and Sassanian models of an ecumenism which combined empire and church formed the horizon in which Mohammed conceived the new religion that would support its ecumenic ambition with the simultaneous development of imperial power. The case is of special interest as there can be no doubt that Islam was primarily an ecumenic religion and only secondarily an empire. Hence it reveals in its extreme form the danger which beset all of the religions of the Ecumenic Age, the danger of impairing their universality by letting their ecumenic mission slide over into the acquisition of world-immanent, pragmatic power over a multitude of men which, however numerous, could never be mankind past, present, and future. (Voegelin, 1974; 142143.) This criticism, all too indirect and brief, assumes that Islam gave rise to the dynastic form of rule that arose some three decades after the death of Muhammad. At the same time, it views

Muhammads revelation as different in kind and aspiration from that of Moses. It implies, in addition, that Muhammad is the one

who formed the new religion, not the one who was called by the divinity to do so. A fuller account of the caliphate such as

that carried out by Ibn Khald n (1858), Marshall Hodgson (1974), or Albert Hourani (1991) reveals the shortcoming of the assumption.2 The other two inferences forsake the realm of

scholarship for that of theological dogmatics. Voegelins third criticism of Islam has to do with its scriptures. His survey of the Quran leads him to the conclusion

See also the George F. Nafziger and Mark W. Walton exchange with Antony T. Sullivan (Nafziger, 2003 and Sullivan, 2003) as well as Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (Black, 2001) and my review of it (Butterworth, 2002).

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that it is as flawed in its approach to the world as were those of the Manicheans: A selection of pertinent passages from the Koran will best elucidate the problem of ecumenism as it appeared to Mohammed. His conception of spiritual history and its finality was on the whole the same as Manis. (Voegelin, 1974; 143; see also 143-145 and 138-142.) To illustrate this point, Voegelin quotes about seventeen verses from seven different Suras: Sura 3, } l Imr~ n (The Family of

Imr~ n); Sura 7, al-Ar~ f (The Heights); Sura 8, al-Anf~ l (The

Spoils); Sura 10, Y nus (Jonah); Sura 21, al-Anbiy~ (The Prophets); Sura 33, al-Sajda (Adoration); and Sura 48, alJ~ thiyya (Bending the Knee). Six verses from Suras 3, 10, 33,

and 7 (in that order) are cited to show how Muhammad viewed himself and his message in relation to other prophets and other books of revelation. Indeed, these verses are often cited in

order to indicate that Muhammad was not merely one among other messengers or prophets, but the last in a series of messengers and prophets, and that his message or book is superior to all others.3 As evidence that Muhammad views the world as locked in

mortal combat between the forces of good and evil as well as that Islam merely appeals to human desire for gain, Voegelin cites eleven verses from Suras 10, 21, 48, and 8 (again, in that order). One might also say, however, that these verses explain

why it is the prophets duty to help truth prevail and, if

See Quran 3.78 and 2, 10.38, 33.40, and 7.157-158.

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necessary, to resort to force in pursuit of that goal.4 As must be evident from these explanations, Voegelin reads the Quran selectively and interprets it in an unsympathetic, almost contemptuous, manner. He makes no attempt to read the

Quran as a book and discern its parts or to ask about how Suras as a whole present particular issues. He does not, in other

words, interpret it from the perspective of an intelligent, believing member of the faith from a perspective similar to the one he adopts when reading and interpreting the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. His dismissive account of Sura 8, verse The whole Sura, which serves as

42 stands out most egregiously.

a critique of the way Muslims conducted themselves during and after the Battle of Badr, sets forth principles for equity and valor in warfare and in the subsequent division of war booty. its entirety, the verse reads: Know that of what comes to you, one-fifth is for God and the Messenger, for close relatives, orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer. [This,] if you believe in Allah and what we have sent down to Our Servant about the Criterion Day and the Day of Assembly. Now Allah is capable of all things.5 To dismiss it with the following comment clearly does no justice to the text, much less the context: That rule, however, was probably seen by the faithful in the In

Ibid., 10.4; 21.16-18; 48.29; 8.40-41, 57, 59, 62, and Here and in what follows, translations from the Quran are

78.
5

my own.

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light of a welcome tax reduction, since under the preIslamic custom the chieftain was entitled to one-fourth of the loot. (Voegelin, 1974; 145.)

GETTING ISLAM STRAIGHT Today, more than ever before, it is necessary to have an accurate perspective about Islam, the religion and the culture arising from it. a sweeping manner? But is it possible to speak about Islam in such Is there some entity that can be denoted as

Islam, or are there merely multiple manifestations of Islam such that one risks falling into an essentialist fallacy by speaking so broadly of Islam? Perhaps. Yet it cannot be denied that

Muslims the world over agree with fellow Muslims about opinions they hold and actions they perform that identify them as Muslims and set them apart from those who are not Muslims. It is that

common core to which appeal must be made when speaking about Islam, above all when speaking about it as distinct from Judaism and Christianity. It is necessary to begin where Voegelin began, with the revelation of Muhammad as it has been passed down in the Quran. Rather than selecting verses here and there to show how they point to some preconceived notions of Muhammads mission and the appeal he made to his contemporaries, pagans as they were, a better task would be to search for the plan of this highly revered book. Whatever claims Muhammad might make about his own

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person and goal, speaking for himself or giving voice to divine directives, one must not fail to notice the very simple depiction of the world or, more accurately, of the worlds dual nature, one before our eyes and the one awaiting us after death made in the very first Sura of the Quran. This Sura that is so direct,

so full of promise, and so pregnant with demands upon the faithful is the one Muslims recite to one another in any number of circumstance happy and sad to give common voice to the beliefs they share. It, along with the ubiquitous description of

God as merciful and compassionate, must be the beginning point for any account of Islam: In the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the two worlds. The merciful, the compassionate. King of the day of judgment. You we worship and You we call upon. Guide us along the straight path. The path of those to whom You have given grace, Not those deserving anger nor those who have gone astray. Subsequently, it is necessary to ask about the different Suras and their relationship to one another. What might those who

assembled this work, whoever they were, have intended by this mingling of chapters about rules of conduct with others about past battles, trails and tribulations of the early Muslims, and even betrayals? Simply put, the Quran deserves as careful and

unbiased a reading as any other set of scripture. Here, to digress for a moment and return to the parallel

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evoked in the introduction, is another way in which Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin differ. Strauss reads texts all texts,

revealed or not with painstaking care and strives to ferret out the authors intention, then presents the fruits of that reading along with the detailed steps he took to reach them. Voegelin

reads just as widely and probably with as much care, but utilizes only snippets of any text or author to illustrate his point. He

is less concerned with how the author arrives at and defends an argument than with how that argument fits into a broader historical pattern, one the author does not necessarily serve in a conscious manner. Voegelin, persuaded that there is an order

in history, strives to see how it comes to light through the study of large bodies of discrete phenomena. Despite his claim

to the contrary, it is difficult to escape the impression that for him this order indicates progress. Strauss, focused above

all on the perennial tension existing between religion and reason or between the conflicting claims of the two to discern the truth of things, sees neither order nor progress in history beyond the obvious technological advances. But to return to the main argument, in order to get Islam straight, more attention must be paid to those who have sought to explain the religion, the culture, and the history of Muslims. The writings of key historians, jurists, and theologians are only now being discovered in the West, even though they have long been

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Getting Islam Straight Ibn Khald n, for

very well known in the Arab Middle East.

example, sought to distinguish between Islamic civilization along with its political manifestations and the Islamic religion. He

contended that forces other than religion whatever the status of a particular religion accounted for the way a given civilization or human social association developed politically, for the way it came into being, developed, and eventually disintegrated. Ibn Khald n, in other words, has a perception of

civilization quite opposed to that set forth in The Ecumenic Age. As noted, some contemporary scholars those with the deepest grasp of Islamic culture in all of its linguistic manifestations have followed Ibn Khald ns lead and are to be emulated precisely because they eschew facile generalizations. Finally,

due attention must be paid to those who toiled to show that human beings are similar in spite of their particular opinions and actions the philosophers who carefully explored the features common to law-giving and law-givers, ancient and medieval, while beholden to reason alone and laying claim to no sort of superhuman insight. Were such a course to be pursued, it is more than likely that Islam in all of its manifestations would come to light as an equal partner with Christianity and Judaism in the ecumenic age. It is possible after all that the features held in common by Judaism and Islam have been unduly neglected more because the

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children of Israel were deprived of political rule until quite recently than because there is any major difference between the two revelations.6 Followers of both revelations are equally rule of law. By

strong proponents of the contemporary password:

law, however, both groups understand the same thing divine or revealed law.

In his Treatise on the Art of Logic, Maimonides noted plaintively how religious law tends to affect reflection on political matters: In these times all that I mean, the regimes and the nomoi has been dispensed with, and people are governed by divine commands (Maimonides,1983; 161).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Black, Antony. 2001. The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butterworth, Charles E. 2002. Review of Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present. In Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. Volume 13, Number 4. Pp. 492-493. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. 1974. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 3 volumes. Hourani, Albert. 1991. A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Khald n, Abd al-Rah m~ n Ibn. 1858. Muqaddimat Ibn Khald n, . Prolgomnes dEbn-Khaldoun, Texte Arabe, Publi, DAprs les Manuscrits de la Bibliothque Impriale. Edited by M. Quatremre. Paris: Benjamin Duprat. Reprint; Beirut: Maktaba Lubn~ n, 1970. 3 volumes. _____. 1958. The Muqaddimah, An Introduction to History. Translated, Franz Rosenthal. Bollingen Series XLIII; New York: Pantheon Books. 3 volumes. Maimonides, Moses. 1983. Treatise on the Art of Logic. In Ethical Writings of Maimonides. Trans. and ed. with introduction, Raymond L. Weiss with Charles E. Butterworth. New York: Dover Publications (paperback edition); originally published, New York: NYU Press, l975. Nafziger, George F. and Walton, Mark W. 2003. The Military Roots of Islam. In Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society. Volume IV, Number 5. Pp. 31-32. Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures, 1949. Sullivan, Antony T. 2003. Understanding Jihad and Terrorism. In Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society. Volume IV, Number 5. Pp. 33-35.

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Getting Islam Straight The

Voegelin, Eric. 1952. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures, 1951.

_____. 1974. Order and History, Volume Four: The Ecumenic Age. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. _____. 2000a. Order and History, Volume Two: The World of the Polis. Edited with an Introduction by Athanasios Moulakis. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. _____. 2000b. Order and History, Volume Three: Plato and Aristotle. Edited with an Introduction by Dante Germino. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. _____. 2000c. Order and History, Volume Five: In Search of Order. Edited with an Introduction by Ellis Sandoz. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. _____. 2001. Order and History, Volume One: Israel and Revelation. Edited with an Introduction by Maurice P. Hogan. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.