Islamic wisdom

Christian Century, May 15, 2007 by Jon Wright, Jason Byassee

AFTER FOCUSING EARLY in his life on topics in analytic philosophy and religion, David Burrell, C. S. C., turned to studying comparative issues in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He is the author of Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) and Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, 1993). He has also authored two translations of the works of the great medieval Islamic theologian Abu Muhammad al-Ghazali: Al-Ghazali on the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God (Islamic Texts Society, 1993) and Al-Ghazali on Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence (Fons Vitae, 2001).

A priest in the Congregation of the Holy Cross, Burrell is a professor at Notre Dame and has directed the university's Jerusalem program, housed at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute. We talked to him about current characterizations of Islam and about his own interfaith experiences.

It has become common to speak of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. Is there such a clash? If so, how should Christians respond to it?

The standoff between Europe and the Ottoman Empire from 1492--when Europeans gained access to two continents to exploit and so turned their back on a long war of attrition with Islam, which commenced in the time of the Crusades--to 1799, when Napoleon landed in Alexandria, certainly continued a "clash of civilizations." The clash was exacerbated by the fall of the two great imperial polities of Islam: Ottoman and Moghul.

Europe's refusal at the end of World War I to grant independence to the Arab regions that had assisted it in dismantling the Ottoman polity, together with Lord Balfour's support of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, nipped Arab aspirations in the bud. The resulting resentment against "the West" has fueled aggressive Islamist strategies.

The clash will continue if we continue to stiff-arm countries like Iran or do things like block the entrance of Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan to the U.S., despite his being cleared by U.S. and Swiss security agencies. But the clash need not continue. We could attempt to understand this history and offer support to those who continue, despite this history, to want to work with us.

What do you make of Pope Benedict's Regensburg address in which he suggested that Islam struggles with the relationship between faith and reason--a point he illustrated by citing the views of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor?

The talk was poorly constructed and ill-conceived. No one tries to demonstrate a recondite thesis with a scrambled example, and that is what Benedict did. Poor composition, one would tell a student. Yet because we know the pope to be intelligent, all kinds of theories are advanced to explain why he did such a dumb thing. He should have admitted to a gaffe.

You've stressed in your own writings that Christian-Jewish-Muslim conversation is not a new idea--it was already a key dimension of Christian intellectual life in the Middle Ages. Can you give some examples of this?

Thomas Aquinas is a model for Jewish, Christian and Muslim relationships. Most Aquinas scholarship derives from northern Europe, but he was a Mediterranean. He lived in Naples, where Arabic translations were commissioned. Land travel was impossible. The crusaders came through that region, which allowed for cultural exchange. He drew deeply on the Islamic scholar Avicenna.

Aquinas was also beholden to the Jewish scholar Maimonides, a Sephardic Jew who was forced out of Cordoba by Muslims who were resisting the Spanish Reconquista (the Muslims were al-Qaeda types). Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, a classic synthesis of Christian theology, is actually an interfaith and intercultural achievement. Maimonides wrote the Guide to the Perplexed to show Jews that they should study philosophy to deepen their faith--which was Aquinas's goal also--and Aquinas read the Guide as soon as it was translated.

Can you point to a specific way that Islam and Judaism can illuminate Christian theology?

Take the doctrine of creation, for example. Islamic belief revolves around an understanding of creation. Redemption is found in the giving of the Qur'an. The analogue for the Holy Spirit in Islam is accepting the Qur'an, living by it and building a community based on it. Muslims lack the drama of redemption that Christians have.

Christians' neglect of the doctrine of creation is evident in the Nicene Creed. The creed treats redemption extensively but makes creation seem like nothing but a stage-setting for redemption. This kind of separation between nature and grace can turn into a kind of paganism, for if grace is a gift, what then is nature? Something that is just given? That would be Aristotle's view. He presumed that the world always existed. The notion of a single Creator was simply off the page for him.

When I first wrote about Aquinas I totally missed the centrality of creation in his thought, even though I worked on his names for God. After I began learning about Islam, I looked back and saw that Christians can't understand the process of redemption if we skip over creation. If you believe in a single Creator (as Judaism and Islam do), you have a chance to see your life as a vocation, rather than as a career in which everything you do is simply on your own initiative. With a free Creator, creation is a free gift.