booklogging

This is a substantial book, written by someone who formerly professed Islam and now writing under a pseudonym [for reasons of safety, presumably -if you don't know why, then read the book and work it out for your self] having become disillusioned by the Rushdie affair. It takes its cue from Bertrand Russel's 'Why I am not a Christian'. I would say that this book needs to be on a reading list for Christians who are encountering Islam and truing to make sense. Certainly for me it would have been useful about 10 years or more ago as I was tyring to find out about and weigh up Muslim claims. Of course it is polemical, it would be hard for it not to be in the circumstances but it contains things that need to be heard whatever the fianl verdict on some of it.

It is a bit of a rag-bag of objections to Islam and somewhat promiscuous in its sources for critique. On the whole it seems well documented and draws on a wide range of sources and it appears to be pretty thourough. There are chapters on historical origins, the Qur'an, the hadith and sunna. the character and biography of Muhammed, political and social issues, histories of Islam in relation to conquest and science and of dissent within Islam. There are also sections dealing with the apologetic claims for eras of Muslim tolerance and equality.

The arguments about origins do not seem to be held consistently; various theories of documentary origins for Qur'an and Hadith are advanced but none of them seems to be settled upon with the result that a demolition job is done but with incompatible 'tools' and alternative [to Muslim orthodoxy] hypotheses. I felt that this undermines his argument somewhat although it is good to be introduced to some plausible ideas about origins. So while questions are raised by this about the likelihood of the normal Muslim account of origins, we don't get a consistent alternative. Admittedly it may be too early to do so. Be that as it may, it is certainly a challenge to Muslim scholarship which cannot really be ducked, especially as Muslim apologists like to use similar historical-critical tools to attempt to undermine Christian claims; it would be only fair that they subject their own traditions and documents to similar scrutiny; of course this they are unwilling to do. I have myself stopped a Muslim short in his attempt to convert me when he started to talk about the literary history of one of the gospels in an attempt to evade its challenge. The way I did so was to say simply: "If you are going to approach Christian scriptures in that kind of way then what will happen if I do the same with the Qur'an?"

The main challenges that I think this book presents to Muslims are: to deal with the inconsistencies in their accounts of Muslim origins; to meet the challenge of literary, redaction and historical criticism with regard to Qur'an, hadith and sunna; to meet the theological and philosphical difficulties with maintining the idea of the Qur'an as the eternal and unchanging word of God; to step back from the doctrine of Muhammed's perfection -it really can't be sustained; to look again at the issues of un/fair treatment of non-muslims in history, the Qur'an and worldwide today; to address the human rights of women, slaves, dhimmis.

After reading this book it does seem hard to see how Islam as currently configured can meet these challenges fairly an head-on. Its history has bequeathed, apparently, a fairly inflexible belief system where the inhumanity of latter-day extremists does actually apprear to be securely founded in the Qur'an, hadith and the Sunna. The only hope that I can see for a humane Islam based on its traditional sources, is to find a way to marginalise the Medinan suras and to see the Meccan 'revelations' as the most authoritative [which pretty much reverses the doctrine of abrogation], or to find ways to relativise the inhumanities [sanctioning genocidal violence, rapine, deceit and lust] by some kind of historical contextual method [though this then requires, I would have thought, some kind of alteration in how the Qur'an could be understood to be the word of God].

It certainly altered my approach to Muhammed. Previously I have tried to answer the question "What do you make of Muhammed?" by trying to recognise that he may have had some genuine encounter with God and message from God but I wasn't sure how to tie that in with Christian slavation history. I couldn't beleive the Qur'an to be God's word, not least because it quite clearly errs [for example in declaring that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is of Father, Son and Virgin Mary and in its misreporting of Biblical incidents; an elementary mistake confusing Miriam sister of Moses with Mary mother of Jesus, for further example]. Nevertheless I want to keep faith with the possibility that there is something of God in it all. Now I am more firmly convinced that the Qur'an inthe form we now have it has much in it that was added long after the time it was putatively written [ditto the hadith] and that Muhammed may have started with something genuine [the call to monotheism and a compassionate view of God] but was later corrupted by power and may even have made up a 'revelations' to suit political exediencies. A sinning prophet is not a problem for me: David and Moses both were presneted as having their weaknesses. Muhammed's weakness may have been fatal to his credibility though ... but then, is it that those verses/sections and hadith attributed to himwhich are inhumane and lacking in compassion are actually the interpolations of later 'muslim' rulers and interest groups [as documented and hypothesised earlier in the Ibn Warraq book]? Can we really know the real Muhammed. Certainly the one presented by tradition, once you dig deeper than the initial gloss, seems a cruel and venial figure. Is this him or is this the image that later 'followers' wanted to bolster their power and justify their tactics?

The Ibn Warraq book seems to want it both ways: both to claim that much Muslim tradition was made up later, and to see [the later] Muhammed as a venial and mandacious bandit. I'm not sure we can have it both ways, though either is deeply challenging to Islam, and the questions can't be unasked.
Why I Am Not a Muslim. Paperback 428 pages (March 1, 2003) Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1591020115

Eiser, J. Richard. 1994. Oxford, Blackwell. 0631191291
My main interest in this book was in seeing an account of mind as emergent which also related to the social dimension and took into account developments of thinking in relation to chaos and so on. This the book does. It is occasionally heavy-going for a non-specialist like myself but it is sufficiently interdisciplinary to enable me to grasp the main points most of the time [I think].

The thrust of the book is towards developing a way of conceptualising attitudes but in order to do so we have to take some account of what it is that we do when we think and take attitudes and there are a whole load of philosophical and psychological issues to be taken into account, not to mention what thinking about artificial intelligence means. So there are chapters on the mind-body issue,on identity, on different philosophical approaches [Cartesian, Lockean, Humean etc] all of which are discussed in a wya that gets to the meat of the ideas and doesn't always come up with the conventional answers. there is a consideration of quantum physics mo9stly to gain some feel for whether it offeres any insights that might help, likewise fractal geometry and chaos. In sum the book seems to argue for an approach based on the idea of emergence; that human beings are basically embodied and mind emerges from the massive complexity and parallel processing of our brains and the self-referenetial nature of our thoughts in a social context whihc allows us to model others' minds and refer the modelling to ourselves.

For me it is the latter that makes it really interesting: the important role of the social in forming us as self-conscious subjects. Towards the end of the book there is some discussion about human collectivities in relation to what emerges from the interaction of humans and in the light of an emergent model of intrasubjective mind -is there an inter-subjective mind? The answer seems to be that the human brains connexions are of such an order of magnitude that an intelligence comparable to human is unlikely to emerge. So whatever our 'noosphere' [a term Eiser does not use] may be, or whatever our collectivities might be, they are not conscious in a way comparable to ourselves.

The upshot of this for my work seems to be that it is fair enough to think about the Powers as emergent from human collectivity but not to think of them as having intelligence in a way like humans [perhaps more like jellyfish or squirrels?]. It seems to me that it is possible to see how they might be learning 'organisms' within the terms described in this book: the processes associated with the connexions between individuals and artefacts in their respective environments could form habitual pathways as well as provide feedback mechanisms allowing for adaptation. In this way various nexuses of responses and initated behaviours can arise which would give a collectivity a 'character' and an identity. Overall it may not be as intelligent as its human components but for some more specialised 'tasks' it might be more so.

What attracted me to this book was that it wrestles with an issue of why the church is so often inhumane, it promised to look at notions of original sin and to draw on some basic theological perspectives of Irenaeus of Lyons. The fact that is is also by my wife's pastoral tutor was also influential in that it brought the book's existence to my attention.

So what about the arguments and all that? Dr Bartlett starts with a consideration of how the church looks to outsiders and, no surprises here, it's not a pretty sight. The author is a historian and obviously well-read in literature and it shows as he uses literary sources to exemplify how Christianity is seen by its cultured despisers. He diagnoses the causes of inhumane Christianity as: [1] denial of the proper goodness of creation and within that of the real goodnesses of human living and createdness; [2] seeing pride as the cardinal aspect of fallenness and sin; [3] collusion with unjust social orders; [4] institutional church becoming master rather than servant; [5] uncritical supernaturalism. Most of these, he asserts, flow from a de facto Christological heresy of a form of monophysitism or even loose gnosticism which devalues the real humanity of Christ.

I think that one of the most important aspects of the exploration in this book of how these causes of inhumanity work out into anti-life practice is the consideration of original sin, particularly the Augustinian/Calvinistic strands and particularly in how they provide backdrop and justification for disciplinary practices and mentalities that are oppressive. and tend towards devaluing human being. Dr Bartlett commends Irenaeus of Lyons as an alternative approach to issue of humanity and sin which are less likely to incur the entailment of inhumanity that the Augustine-Calvin axis is capable of generating. Linked to this there is a strong questioning of the idea that pride is the cardinal sin. I only missed in this part of the arguments a reference to Alistair McFadyen's treatment of the same topic making a similar point in Bound to sin. The doctrines of total depravity and the concepts behind the TULIP acronym also get rough treatment, and rightly so. This is a nice rebuttal of the excesses of the Reformed theological position whilst remaining Anglican, I think.

The chapter on sexuality manages to avoid the most pressing controversies and I ay that not to criticise for to have made a clear commitment to one side or the other would have been to lose what needs to be heard probably on both sides of current debates. I felt that the treatment of celibacy was particular interesting The chapter on busyness which ends up dealing with issues of self-righteousness is important and deserves to have a wide readership.

One of the things I valued in this book is that it is a kind of exemplar of what it preaches. So it is steeped in pastoral concerns and life-situations and not simply an abstract considering of doctrines and history. I found helpful also the reflections on the rule of Benedict in its sitz-im-leben and of the example of St.Francis of Assisi. The only thing that really grated with me was the several-times used description of humanity as the pinnacle of God's creation. I think this grated because it seems to me that such descriptions lie too close to the [admittedly largely spurious] claims made for human dominion which result in abuse of the rest of the creation with which we interact and have responsibility for. Perhaps 'pinnacle' connotes to me power without responsibility. It would be good to see further exploration of this topic in relation to the humane theme as I actually think that they are very compatible.

I found the Dr Bartlett's evident appreciation of Anglican divines such as Hooker and Taylor to be one of those pleasant deiscoveries that things that one has held dear and come to believe have not arrived de novo but have a history and a context that provides avenues of further exploration.

Overall I don't think that there is any particularly new theological ground broken here. However what is stated is a comprehensible and coherant set of arguments which commend a humane vision of Christian faith and show how other visions are simply missing the central concerns of Christian revelation and reflection over the centuries. You won't find a blueptint or manifesto for particular reforms here, you do find a gently passionate plea for a theology and ecclesiology that reflects the love of God for the creation and particularly the human 'pinnacle' of that creation. It is a warm comendation of the kind of 'open' evangelicalism that I, for one, think needs positive restatement and this book does that.