Ismail Faruqi Online

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  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: The Romantic Relapse of Europe

    Reading Time: 6 minutes

    From Chapter 4: “The Romantic Relapse of Europe” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Russian Pogroms

    The prognosis of the last paragraph (Chapter III) was the reality on the American scene. Most of the rabbis ministering to the Jews of America were educated in the Reform seminaries of Europe, and the first seminary in America (Cincinnati, Ohio) belonged to the same group. The absence of persecution and of ghettos and the religious freedom guaranteed by the American Constitution promoted acculturation and assimilation of Jewish immigrants from Europe. In America, it was hard to be anything but a Reformed Jew. The voice of orthodoxy, of traditionalism, was certainly present; but it was overwhelmed by the universalism and secularism of American society in the matter of religion. The situation radically changed in the nineties when a wave of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe sent a flood ofjewish immigrants to America. The demography of American Jewry was turned upside down. In a decade, American Jewry became overwhelmingly orthodox and the voice of Reform Judaism became that of a minority. What happened in Russia to bring about this Jewish exodus happened in various degrees in the rest of Europe.

    The Enlightenment never took root in Russia. Enlightenment ideas relevant to science, to trade and industry, did. These ideas mixed with deep mystical hopes for national restoration and produced the Europeanising industrialisation of Peter the Great. The outcome of this nineteenth century process was a surge of “Mother Russia” feeling coupled with a secularising will to progress. As to the Jews who up till then were living as strange aliens in city and village, the surge could only lead to their Russification. The movement produced some strong advocates — Peretz Smolenskin, Leo Pinsker, etc. — to persuade the Jews to russify themselves — a transformation as difficult to achieve for the Russian Jews, as it was for Russian Christians to promote perseverently.

    The main reason why the Enlightenment proved to be a very indigestible novelty was the unpreparedness of the Russian mind. Russian experience was radically different from that of Western Europe. At last as far as the intelligentsia is concerned, if not the majority of the people, the Russian Church was as guilty as the Catholic Church in the exercise of her dominion. That is why the forces of progress could countenance neither courtship nor alliance with the Church. Moreover, the Church – saw – and did so rightly – that the new movement for progress threatened her own power and therefore did everything it could to oppose and retard it. That is why the new movement leaned farther away from the Church, toward secularism. Furthermore, Christian Russia had no tradition of religious reform, no tradition of Renaissance, scholastic, Cartesian or Enlightenment rationalism. Whatever Enlightenment ideas the Russians of the nineteenth century had were borrowed from Western Europe. And since the whole of Napoleonic Europe was pitted against Russia, the borrowed ideas had to be adopted if and only after they have been fused into the overall “Russia” feeling. As for the Jews, the overwhelming majority of them were, like their Christian neighbors, still living in the crass ignorance of the Dark Ages. It was as if modernity had suddenly burst upon them. It is not surprising therefore that they neither understood nor accepted the Christians’ half-hearted emancipation of them. The event of modernism was dazzling to both Christian and Jew.

    This context explains why the Russian Christian’s demand for Russification was not an “invitation,” not an “emancipation,” but rather an ultimatum. When heeded, it brought quick results, as when Jews quickly rose to highest rank in the service of Czar and country. But when it was received with hesitancy, no time was lost in patient acculturation. The Enlightenment’s ideas of tolerance and reasonableness were quickly transformed into resentment and hate. In little time, even as the Jews were russifying themselves, the most violent pogroms broke out against them without apparent reason or cause. This sad Russian outcome was equally that of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe, but not for the same reason.

    B. European Persecution

    1. The Ideational Groundwork

    Ever since it triumphed over paganism, the Christian Church had stood for the ideal of the universal community. It expanded itself as religion as well as wordly dominion under the aegis of that ideal; and, in fact, it was well suited toward that objective ever since Jesus had decreed: “God is indeed capable out of these stones to raise children unto Abraham” and Paul, “By one Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free”Matthew 3:19; I Corinthians 12:13. The Reformation gave the coup de grace to Christianity’s ideal of the universal community. In fact, the Reformation was the result of a storm which, gathering long before, was only triggered by Luther’s proclamation of the 95 theses. The numerous peoples of Europe rallied around their princes in order to shake off the authority of the Catholic Church, an authority which had become a “Byzantine” yoke, full of corruption, full of evil, bearing little or no resemblance to the universalist ideal it claimed itself to be.

    Instead of this worthy Christian ideal, the emerging Protestant leadership tilted toward Congregationalism to justify its breaking away from the Mother Church. But Congregationalism itself needed justification, and this was sought in something outside the Church when ecclesiastical history could not be found to support it. The Renaissance had already impressed the leadership with naturalism and the road lay open for a justification of the new religious autonomy with values intrinsic to the congregation as a distinct and separate human unit. These feelings constitute the germs out of which nationalism grew in Europe. In its prince and dynasty, each new autonomous Protestant congregation began to see a focus around which the people could rally to form the “nation” as a super-entity destined to carry out a “holy” mission of self-realisation. This contributed heavily to the growth of the centralised monarchies, and, in turn, gave the social cohesion necessary to keep the burgeoning European city together and its population attached to the “national” government. European nationalism grew as the universalism of the Church receded; and, by the end of the eighteenth century, it was strong and mature enough to give the Enlightenment and its political offspring — the world-order of the French Revolution — the most violent counter-action.

    The Enlightenment preached its rationalism to Europeans already committed to Christian dogma as well as to Renais¬sance naturalism. These were too ingrained in Europe’s consciousness for pure rationalism to succeed. Hence, practically all Enlightenment thinkers compromised rationalism to make room for both the Christian faith and naturalism. If this compromise could not be effected on the level of pure reason, then it was done on that of practical reason and judgment. Immanuel Kant, the prince of the Enlightenment, lectured on geography and international relations where universal rationalism did not stop him from predicating a “natural” inferiority to the Asian races, nor from asserting that to be black is an argument. Instead of purging it of such compromise or aberration and hence making the Enlightenment more viable and stronger, the next generation of Europeans suspected and repudiated it altogether. Theirs was a failure of nerve; for they could not countenance what lay at the end of the road the Enlightenment opened, namely rationalist repudiation of Christian dogma along with the Church’s authority which the Reformation had attacked, and universalist repudiation of ethnocentrism in favor of a world order founded on the equality of all mankind. Against the Enlightenment therefore, they levelled argument after argument which sought to redefine man in terms of ethnic history, language and race. Blood or life, the earth with its plains, mountains, rivers and forests, and a vague past in the myths and legends of the Middle Ages, became the elements out of which the new ideology was constituted.

    Evidently, such elements are not properly conceived by reason. They are the object of feeling and human instinct. A worldview built upon reason has no room for them; but one built upon them cannot only satisfy the trend toward naturalism (what could be more empirical than nature?) but allow plenty of room for accommodation of Christian dogma on the experiential basis of immediate feeling. The genius of Friedrich Schleiermacher was one of exchanging a crumbling foun¬dation of the faith — universal reason — for the solid one of per¬sonal experience, of ineffable feeling. The “Romantic” revolution was in full swing. The arts — literature, painting, sculpture and music — were already filling the European mind with visions of a new order in which each ethnic group saw itself as the vortex of human history, a manifestation of the absolute on earth. Pregnant with the hopes engendered by a century of rationalism and universalist humanism, the conscience of Europe welcomed the Revolutionary army of Europe as a genuine “emancipating” force. But it turned cynical when that force disclosed the ugly head of France’s imperialism, and surrendered itself with spite to its romantic enemy. The national wars which engulfed Europe in the sequel were the insane attempts of a sick man trying to cure himself of his disease with more of the same.

    How could the Jew fit into this new order? Under a universalism based on reason rather than religious affiliation, the Jew was given a place where he could contribute to the public welfare, the commonwealth or universal utility. But under a nationalism based on the romantic feeling of unity, of sharing in a mystical experience of common history, of communion with a particular “mother earth,” of participation in a Chris¬tian tradition of values, he was most definitely an alien. The European Jew himself oft led and contributed to this romanticism, for its affinity with an age-old ethnocentrism of his own, the “Chosen People” complex. But his service only accelerated his own doom. For in the eye of the European Christian, the forces of a new rejection of the Jew as a foreign body were gathering momentum. It was only a matter of time before these would explode into political action. The transformation brought about by romanticism presented the European to himself as rooted in a given blood and soil and grown under a legacy of Christian values. Whether believer, secularist or atheist, he acknowledged the legacy to be constitutive, regard substance, nor to return them to their ghettos devoid of civic liberties, but of bringing about a “final solution” to their problematic existence in Europe.

  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: The Emancipation and its Aftermath

    Reading Time: 9 minutes

    From Chapter 3: “The Emancipation and its Aftermath” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Revelation vs. Reason

    The revelation which came to Muhammad (SAAW) summoned reason to prove the thesis of Islam. It never asserted its truths in defiance of reason, nor did it ever seek to overwhelm the noetic function of the mind. On the contrary, it always sought to convince its audience in harmony and unity with reason. When the Mu’tazilah sought to give reason an edge over revelation, or the Murji’ah to give revelation an edge over reason, the Muslim mind demurred and held its original position tenaciously, namely, that no contradiction between reason and revelation is final; that no disparity between them is beyond overarching and composition by reconsidering the meanings of revelation which might have been misunderstood, or the conclusions of reason which might have gone astray. From al Ma’mun to al Mutawakkil (197-232 A.H./813-847 A.C.), the three decades of Mu’tazilah ascendency, the problem acquired crisis proportions and was then solved forever.

    Unlike Islam, Christianity was deeply committed to one side. Jesus’ cool argumentation with his disciples quickly gave way to Paul’s outcry that Athens had nothing to do with Jerusalem. “The Greeks seek after wisdom. But we teach Christ crucified unto the Jews a scandalon and unto the Greeks foolishness . . . God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; .. . the weak . .. the base … despised things … things which are not to bring to naught the things which are” (I Corinthians, 1). Islam’s rational wind had to blow on Christian Europe a long time before it awakened her gradually from her dogmatic slumber. Thomas of Aquinas had to be excommunicated for his rationalist “Averroism” before he regained acceptance; and Bruno, Galileo and countless others had to suffer persecution or death for daring to oppose reason to revelation. In Islam, revelation stood alone and had no institution divinely appointed to guard it. It had to speak for itself, to convince its audience and safeguard its truth by its sheer power to win the assent of the free mind. In Christianity, the Church was the guardian of its revelation by divine appointment, and it fought ferociously to save its domain against attack by reason and its stepdaughter, natural science. However detracted or resisted, the forces of reason gradually won. The magisterium of the Church was slowly but surely ignored, and her prestige in the circles of learning and science suffered terrible blows, as any history of science in the West would show.

    B. The Enlightenment

    The Enlightenment, which animated intellectual life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served as basis for much of science and culture in the West. It was a movement which adopted the standpoint of reason in reordering the worldview of Christian man. Priority was taken away from faith and the Church and restored to reason. Reason was declared a public prerogative of everyone who cared to cultivate it. No one could be excommunicated from its realm. It could not be combated by authority, but by itself and under its own rules. Its cultivation and use became the criteria of truth, of virtue and merit, not one’s affiliation to the Church. Human beings came to be recognised as rational by nature; and it is this nature, rather than revelation or the teaching of the Church, that became the basis of human association, of government and social order. “Religious tutelage,” the most degrading of all, as Kant had called it, was replaced by a new freedom in which rules were self-imposed and where all men — Jews included — were recognised as possessing an innate right to participate. Overnight, the Jews who had hitherto existed on sufferance, as aliens in the land, became equal citizens of a universal community of humans based on their participation in the realm of reason. Their actual enfranchisement however had to await the political reconstitution of Europe.

    C. Emancipation, at Last!

    This did not tarry. France, where the new rationalist spirit had been fermenting since and even before Descartes, burst into the new era under the war cry of the Revolution: Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite! It exported the new ideology to Europe as its revolutionary (later, imperial) army swept away one European monarchy after another. As French soldiers entered a city, the walls of its Jewish ghetto came tumbling down. The Jews emerged as equal citizens of the new regime everywhere. Laying aside all their legal and social incapacities, the Jews of Europe plunged headlong into the new paradise whose gates were now flung wide open before them. It was a genuine “emancipation.”

    As they entered into their new lives, they first had to learn the vernacular language of the land. This they did with such vehemence that in one generation their masses in Central and Western Europe forgot Hebrew or Yiddish, their own ghetto language, and appropriated the vernacular languages of Europe as their own. Their sons could now enter the universities, join the national army, or serve in public office. Every section of society was now open to them. Their previous inexperience in agriculture prompted them to live in the cities, and to invest their efforts in industry, trade, finance, the profess¬ions, communications and city development. Their social recovery was amazingly strong and swift. By 1797, they began to find their place even in the elected legislative bodies of Europe. Rather than a tolerated stranger, the Jew found himself perfectly at home in the expanding, industrialising, nation-states of Europe. His religious difference from the rest lost its importance in the new wave of secularism in all matters. In traditional normative Christian doctrine, no relevance of religion to civic life was claimed. This was the “realm of Caesar.” If in actual practice this was not the case, and the Church did interfere and oft dominated, its power had been shaken by the Reformation and completely swept away by the nationalising British monarchy, the rationalising Englightenment, and finally, the secularising French Revolution. Now, reason alone — hence national utilitarianism — in which all men participate in degrees independently of their religious affiliation, was declared the basis of all civic decisions. Therefore, it was reasoned, the Jew may freely join in the new life of Europe on equal par with the Christian.

    D. Assimilation and Reform

    The greatest advocate of Jewish assimilation in Europe was Moses Mendelssohn, who lived before the French Revolution and helped to spread the “Enlightenment” mentality in Germany. He translated the Talmud into German for the double purpose of acquainting the Germans with Judaism, and the Jews who had already forgotten Hebrew, with their own faith. His classic counsel to his fellow Jews was to Germanise themselves in every respect and remain loyal to the Jewish faith which he conceived as something applicable to the religious sphere, a realm reduced to the internal relation of self to God, not unlike Christianity. However, Mendelssohn insisted that whereas Judaism is not a creed – the mind of a Jew being free to accept any conclusion of reason – the Jew ought to follow Jewish law. This was easier said than done. Mendelssohn founded a periodical in Hebrew to bring assimilation and the new culture to the conservatives who still lingered and hesitated.

    How to apply Jewish law to the external deed and, at the same time, to observe European custom and social ethic was never solved. The Europeans, for their part, expected the Jews to obliterate all that distinguished them from Christians. When the Jews resisted, the Christians compelled them to do so, no more in the name of religion, but in that of nationalism and national culture. Even their names, the Jews had to change or have them arbitrarily changed for them.

    Assimilation generated its own momentum. The Jews’ exposure to the cultural and religious life of Europe produced in them an inferiority complex towards their Christian neighbors which they began to emulate even in the religious field. This emulation is the foundation of Reform Judaism, a new sect whose very name is indicative of the Christianised Jewish outlook. “Reform” has changed the liturgy, legitimised liturgical use of the vernacular languages instead of Hebrew, eliminated the long recitation of piyyutim and Torah, introduced the choir and playing of musical instruments in the synagogues. Some of these reforms were introduced into the Adat Jeshurun Synagogue in Amsterdam in 1796, and they were adopted in toto by the synagogues of Seesen in 1810, and of Hamburg in 1818. Slowly but surely, the new “Reform” spread to most other synagogues of Western Europe.

    Emancipation and its consequence, assimilation, continued to produce problems for Judaism. Above all, it exposed Judaism to the same rending strains to which Christianity was already exposed, especially, Biblical criticism. Detached, objective examination of scripture had previously exploded the claim that the Pentateuch was the writing of Moses, or that any part of the Hebrew scripture was revealed by God verbatim. Historical textual analysis had established that the scripture had come from widely different traditions and disparate periods of time. It uncovered many discrepancies and mistakes in the Biblical text. All of this had forced the Christians to alter their theory of revelation. Partly, they recoursed to allegorical interpretation to fit the text into Christian doctrine; and partly, since the whole ofjewish history was for them a propadeutic to the incarnation, they began to regard the scripture as a profane history of a profane people, a text whose holiness lies not in every word or page, or in every event or statement it recorded, but in the general movement of history it expressed, the movement which culminated in the advent of Jesus.

    For the Jews, this posed a terrible dilemma. To hold their old view of scripture as revealed verbatim to and written by Moses is to go counter to science, history and reason. To accept the findings of science and history is to sack the foundation of the Jewish faith. None of the luminaries of the period — Isaac Jost, Leppold Zunz, Solomon Steinheim, Samuel Holdheim — could find a way out. The inevitable conclusion pressed itself upon the minds of Jews: If the law of Judaism is the work of men — talented but human — of different times and places, it could not escape the relativity of history. Its validity, therefore, is relative too, and hence, restricted. Indeed, there is little or no reason why its cumbersomeness may not be removed and its provisions altered to fit the new situation. The whole normativeness of the law fell into question and the law was altered or violated with impunity.

    With Abraham Geiger, the greatest of Reform thinkers, the last step was taken when he raised the question of the relation of Judaism to the ethnic entity of the Jews. His Hegelianism suggested to him that universalism and ethnocentrism were two contradictory theses whose dialectical opposition was necessary for human progress. Ethnocentrism, he reasoned, had fulfilled its purpose in the past. In modern times, it should have no place in the Jewish heart. Therefore, Geiger counselled, all references in the Bible to the election, distinctiveness or particularism of the Jews, must be excised and repudiated. He reinterpreted Jewish messianism as referring not to a national saviour but to an age where all humans would cooperate together for their greater happiness and felicity.

    To the question, what course should a Reform congregation pursue, Samuel Adler, noted American Reform Jew, answered: “The first and most important step … is to free its service of shocking lies, to remove from it . . . things and wishes which we would not utter if it had to be done in an intelligible manner. Such are the lamentations about oppression and persecution, the prayer for the restoration of the sacrificial cult, for the return of Israel to Palestine, the hope for a personal messiah, and for the resurrection of the body. . .” (David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism, New York, Mac-millan, 1907, p. 483). All the above-mentioned recommendations of Reform leaders the Pittsburgh Conference of 1885 enacted as a constitution for Reform Judaism; notably, legitimising the Jew’s rejection of verbatim revelation of the Bible, of all Jewish laws not adapted to modern civilisation, dietary laws, laws concerning priestly purity, and of Jewish exclusivism on the religious, cultural and social levels.

    It is not surprising that Reform thinking reached its most daring level in America where there was no “ghetto” tradition. It was hence unavoidable that American Jews would assimilate most, that assimilation would continue to corrode Jewish identity until hardly anything of it is left. As one American rabbi observant of the scene put it: “America is a terrible drain on Jewish identity; but the American university is for it a dis¬aster area.” The fact is that under the corrosive influence of secularism and assimilation, Judaism became in America little more than the arbitrary decision of the Jew to be different, not in fact to be different, but only to think of himself as different.

    Reaction to the Reform line of thinking was strong but had little to offer besides conservatism, or the will to preserve the tradition. Intellectually this is not a happy alternative; for the contradiction essential to the nature of Judaism and that of modernity is not solved, but an attempt is made to live with it in complacency. Modernity, with its scientific objectivity and relativism of all history, has brought an irreversible orientation to the mind of the Jew. For him to hold to the letter of scripture as well as to the gains of modernity constitutes an insoluble dilemma. Max Lilienthal, David Einhorn and Bernard Felsenthal have all put it most aptly, in a language reminiscent of Theodore Parker, the father of unitarianism. Law, they held, has a spirit and a body. The former is the decalogue, or the moral law innate to man’s consciousness. The rest is the body. The Talmud is that body. It can be only buried once the spirit has left it. Furthermore, if we ought to deny the divine laws themselves once they have lost their spirit and effectiveness, we ought to deny, a fortiori, the Talmudic laws which we know to have been the dated – and hence dead – works of human rabbis of bygone ages.

    Had this trend continued to develop in Europe and America without interruption, Judaism might well have become a religious movement little distinguishable from the numerous other forms of pietism engendered by the “Radical Reformers” of Christianity. As it might be expected, there would have always remained some conservatives who could live with the contradiction. But with the overwhelming majority of Jews in West Europe and America subscribing to Reform thinking, the major currents of Jewish life and thought would have followed the same course. The Russian Revolution of 1918 would have given this movement tremendous impetus because the goals of Reform Judaism would have accorded beautifully with the total assimilation objective of Russia, as well as with its goal of secular revolutionary progress.

    History, however, had other goals.