Faith and the Dialogue of Civilizations - Part 6 of 8
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
Sources of Conflict across Civilization Boundaries
Following our classification of classifications, we can also categorize conflicts across civilization boundaries:
- Dialogue between believing and non-believing systems of civilizations
- Dialogue between believing civilizations
- Dialogue within a civilization
Conflicts arise when systems of ideas compete for the same geographical, political, economic and emotive space. However, it is a truism that it is not ideas that cause conflict. Ideas, in and of themselves, are eternal. They do not fight; people do.
Every potential conflict is a potential opportunity. Oftentimes, civilizations interact, learn from each other and grow. At other times, they collide and leave a legacy of bitterness that in turn becomes the material for parochial and self-serving myths, feeding further conflicts.
While conflicts have multiple origins, two of the most endemic sources are claims of exclusivity and a reach for dominance.
Dialectic across Civilization Systems
While the conflicts between faith-based systems receive most of the advertising space, it is the global conflict between faith-based systems and non-faith based systems that is central to the future of humankind. This conflict arises because the global material civilization not only considers itself the sole repository of truth, but unlike the faith-based systems, has the technological, political and military means to impose its world view on other civilizations.
We seek the roots of the material civilization in the speculative stream of Greek philosophy. It was during the classical Greek period that rational thought reached its zenith. To the Greeks, the mind (nomos) was king. They produced a galaxy of great men --- Aristotle, Plato, Galen, and Euclid --- to name but a few. Rarely has humanity achieved the rational heights that the Greeks did. But for all their achievements, the Greeks remained bogged down with questions of “before and after”, “subject and object”, “cause and effect”.
We have covered the dialectic between Islam and Greek rationalism in the previous section. Greek rational thought reached the Latin West in the eleventh century through Muslim Spain. When the Conquistadores captured Toledo in 1086 CE, they became custodians of the vast libraries in that ancient city. The Latin Church initiated a vigorous program of translating Arabic texts into Latin, much as the Muslims had translated the Greek, Indian, Zoroastrian and Chinese works into Arabic three hundred years earlier. The universities at Palermo, Oxford, Paris and Cambridge were direct beneficiaries of the infusion of the accumulated knowledge from Islamic libraries.
It was now the turn of the Latins to justify their belief systems in the light of rational thought. However, in this dialectic, the response of the Medieval Latin West to the onslaught of rational inquiry was fundamentally different from that of the Muslims. The outcome was of profound significance to the development of human thought. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Some truths can be known only from revelation and belong to theology — for example, the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation. Some truths are proper to philosophy — for example, the physical constituents of bodies.” (Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 2, p. 141, 1987, Philosophy and Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.)
Thus the separation of what was religious from what was considered profane received a philosophical foundation. The Church was to be sa cred; science and sociology were to be secular. This bifurcated outlook has pervaded the development of Western thought since the twelfth century. European civilization went on to achieve new heights of rational inquiry in succeeding centuries. However, these heights were devoid of a firm anchor in faith.
The infusion of Greek thought into the Latin West received further stimulus when a large number of Greek scholars of the Eastern Orthodox tradition left Constantinople (now Istanbul) after it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rational thought attracted a great many thinkers so much so that this period is referred to as the Age of Reason. Hegel (1770—1831), considered by many to be one of the greatest rational philosophers of this age, proposed that history is the development from the subjectivity of the individual to the objectivity of the state. He was the father of dialectic philosophy and believed that the institutions of man develop only as a result of spiritual or material dialectics. The state was more important than the individual and thus the individual was to be submerged in the interests of the state. This view ran counter to individualism. But it has had two important offshoots. In the hands of the right wing German philosophers it formed the basis of German nationalism and Nazism. In the hands of the left wing philosophers, such as Karl Marx, it formed the basis of atheistic material dialectics, which is the philosophy of Communism. Both views have taken their enormous toll in human misery in the twentieth century.
The bifurcation of the sacred and the secular has now received global acceptance. The dazzling achievements of technology and the untold riches it has showered on humanity have convinced men and women in the far corners of the globe that the modern material civilization (not based on faith) offers the best hope for human felicity. So far reaching is the global reach of the material civilization that it shows up in human affairs with various masks. We merely state them here for reference. A full discussion may be found at www.historyofislam.com
- Man As Thinker
- Man as Consumer
- Man as a Factor of Production
- Man As Viewed by Behaviorists
- Man as Rebel
- Man and His Many Nationalities
- The Racial View of Man
(Continued next week)
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