The Pope,
the Christians and the Muslims
Let the Dialogue Begin - Part 4
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
Pope
Benedict XVI has staked out a position that the
basis for interfaith dialogue ought to be the
Greek Logos, or reason. As students of history
we know that two global civilizations, Christianity
and Islam, came face to face with the rational
approach in the past, found it inadequate to address
the profound spiritual questions facing humankind
and either abandoned it or made compromises with
it. In view of our common historical experience,
must we not search for a higher platform than
reason from which to engage in a meaningful dialogue?
The Pope’s desire to engage in a dialogue
with other cultures is a welcome step. The need
and desirability of cross-cultural and inter-religious
dialogues has never been as great as it is today.
However, we must examine if Logos (reason) is
the appropriate basis for such a dialogue. If
it is not, then the dialogue itself will be deficient.
It is like building a precise instrument but to
the wrong specifications.
Christianity and Islam are not the only religious
traditions on this planet. Together they claim
less than a third of the human race. Every religion
claims to have the whole truth. Catholicism and
Islam are no exceptions to this. This exclusivist
attitude runs the risk of sabotaging a dialogue
even before it begins. We must ensure that the
basis for a dialogue is appropriate and suitable
for multiple cultures, some ancient and some not
so ancient, which are spread out over the vast
globe.
God is Truth. He desires that man should know
this Truth. “I was an unknown treasure”,
declares a Hadith, “and I willed it to be
known. Therefore, I created humankind”.
Divine Mercy has not only created humankind but
has endowed it with the capability to know Him.
The creation of humans is not without purpose.
“I created not humankind and the jinns except
to serve/worship Me”, teaches the Qur’an.
Men and women are thus charged with the responsibility
to know, serve and worship the Creator.
Humankind is endowed with all the tools necessary
to know the Truth. These include the senses, reason,
speech, the heart and the intellect. And overarching
it all is revelation which provides the ethical
framework for man’s life and the criterion
to differentiate right from wrong. Thus the means
for the acquisition of knowledge include the senses
(seeing, hearing, taste, smell and feeling), reason
(the mind, aql), speech (bayan), the heart (sadr
and the qalb), the intellect (bir) and revelation
(al Huda and al Furqan).
This propensity for knowledge is backed by the
precious gift of life that animates creation,
and the unique gifts of power and will that are
bestowed only on humankind. Life, power and will
are gifts from the Ruh (the spirit) so that when
a person is alive, he is endowed with life, power
and will. When he dies, these attributes disappear.
The gift of life integrates the faculties so that
they witness and comprehend the Truth as a unitary
whole. In other words, the senses, the mind, the
heart and the intellect do not operate on a stand-alone,
fragmentary basis. They interlace in ways that
no philosopher can decipher. They support each
other and perceive the same Truth.
God’s Truth is whole; it has no gaps or
contradictions in it. The means that are used
to know this truth must confirm this completeness.
If there are any gaps in the resultant understanding,
these are due to an incorrect application of the
means rather than in the Truth itself.
There are a host of questions surrounding the
place of Logos or reason in human affairs. What
are the attributes of reason? What are its assumptions,
its methods and its limits? Similarly, what are
the attributes of the senses, the heart, speech,
and the intellect? Does reason provide the common
factor to which all major religious and cultural
traditions can relate? Most importantly, does
reason enable us to know the divine Truth? Or,
is it so deficient that it will require corrective
lenses like the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope?
Reason is a noble faculty. In all of God’s
creation there is nothing nobler than a sound
mind, which is the repository of reason. But reason
is only one of the faculties that humans are endowed
with. It is not the king of the realm. With all
its nobility, it remains a foot soldier. It is
not the crown. It is only a supporting pillar.
The others are: the senses, intuition and the
heart. Each of these teaches in a different way
and each has its limitations. The universal cultures
of the world relate to these in different ways,
some emphasizing the spiritual over the mundane,
others emphasizing the practical over the abstract.
A dialogue must make room for differences in historical
experience.
Knowledge, like Truth, is one. The knowledge that
the mind accepts cannot be different from the
knowledge that the senses experience or the heart
feels. Overarching all the human faculties is
infusion, which is divine revelation that only
the spirit is privy to and which the intellect
can perceive.
It is not the body that contains the spirit. It
is the spirit that surrounds the body inside and
out. The reach of reason does not circumscribe
the spirit. It is the reach of the spirit that
circumscribes reason many times over. The contingent
existence of humankind is neither within the spirit
nor outside of it. It is the collective spiritual
experience of humankind that must form the basis
of a meaningful dialogue. Reason has a role in
this dialogue but only a supporting role.
Greek rational thought uses the methodology of
demonstrable arguments. It assumes a thesis or
an axiom and then proceeds to draw inferences
from it using rigorous proofs and critical thinking.
This method is used by lawyers and philosophers.
It is called the deductive method as opposed to
the inductive method used by empirical science
which depends on an observation, patient gathering
of data, sifting through it and building a theory
on the basis of observations. Greek thought is
“top down” as opposed to empirical
scientific thought which is “bottoms up”.
In their methodology, the Greeks made a large
number of assumptions, some of which constrained
them and some that have since been proven to be
false. We enumerate but a few of them: (1) the
eternity of the universe (2) denial of God’s
knowledge of particulars (3) denial of bodily
resurrection (4) the principle of subject and
object (5) the assumption of cause and effect,
(6) the universe was finite like a sphere and
(7) the principle of before and after. The constraints
of space prevent us from going into the details
of these assumptions. Suffices it to state here
that the principle of subject and object has been
demolished by the advances made in quantum mechanics.
We are a part of a knowing universe which interacts
with human observation. Man is not the subject
and the universe is not merely an object; they
are reflections of each other. The principle of
before and after is only an assumption that simplifies
understanding of the laws of nature but in the
process bypasses the sublime question: what is
time? We will address the issue of time in a future
article and point out how the application of Greek
Logos has resulted in the idea of a secular universe
bereft of the grace of God.
The Greek Logos (reason) is elitist. It is accessible
only to a few. It breeds arrogance. The elitist
heaven of the Greeks is cold, rational without
feeling or emotion. It is denied to the common
man. Should a civilizational dialogue at this
critical juncture in history be limited to an
arrogant few? Should it not be a dialogue accessible
to all human beings?
Let us give the ancient Greeks their due. They
were masters of the rational method. But it is
significant to remember that with all their logical
prowess, they remained pagan, worshipping Zeus
(the father), Apollo (the son) and a plethora
of lesser gods and goddesses. Corruption was rampant
in their society. Speculative philosophy, in the
absence of a criterion for what is right and what
is wrong is like a balloon without tether. It
wanders off with the wind. The Greek Logos is
not an autonomous process. It requires the guidance
of divine law to make it meaningful. As the Qur’an
cautions, “Indeed! Man transgresses all
bounds, considering himself self-sufficient. Nay!
We shall drag him….drag him by his forelock,
a lying, sinful forelock…”
Summarily, a dialogue across cultures cannot be
based solely on philosophical ruminations and
speculative reason. It must accommodate the collective
spiritual experience of humankind and be responsive
to hard facts about political experience and historical
lessons as well. It must also provide a basis
not just for academic discourse between priests
and professors but meaningful interaction across
cultures and civilizations based on universal
justice (to be continued).
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