CHAPTER 2. NOT–RELIGION: A SHORT SURVEY ON THE APOPHATIC GOD OF ISLAM ISLAM
A. Beginnings
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the influential117 American missionary S. Marinus Zwemer (d.1952) emphasized what the famous philosopher David Hume (d.1776), the Jesuit scholar W. Glifford Palgrave (d.1888), earlier missionaries such as T. Patrick Hughes (d.1911) and many others had already pointed out. Accordingly, if asked, Muslims invariably point to the profession of faith “lā ilāha illā Allāh” [“there is no god but god”] as the core of their faith.118 However, the profession of the absolute divine oneness says virtually nothing about the ipseity of the god to whom they “submit” [islām] themselves. What
“god” means is not stated, but simply assumed to be self-evident. There is this
“god” whatever it is, and there is no other. It is a “simple and uncommunicable Oneness” as Zwemer puts it.119 At the core of the profession of oneness lies the unity of a primal negation, “there is no god”, and a subsequent affirmation, “but god,” which still says nothing on what god really is.
117 See J. I. Smith 1998, p.361.
118 Zwemer 1905, p.15-17.
“There is no God but God. ... In this one sentence, is summed up a system which ... the Pantheism of force, or Act, thus exclusively assigned to God. ... All is abridged in the autocratical will of the One great Agent.” This statement of Palgrave was later cited by many intellectuals writing on Islam. (E.g. Zwemer 1905, p.65; Hughes 1885, p.147.)
119 Zwemer 1905, p.66; emphasis mine.
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The tension in the profession of faith only reflects or summarizes the broader theological tension manifested in the Qur’ān and the prophetic reports. The emphasis on god’s being absolutely dissimilar, unique and transcendent is as strong as it could be; but we also find that god is ubiquitous and nearer to us than our jugular vein.120 It will hardly slip even from the attention of an unacquainted reader of the Qur’ān that the absolute, transcendent god is also immanent, manifested sometimes in corporeal and gendered terms: a god merciful [raḥmān] and compassionate [raḥīm] as the womb [raḥm] of a mother who nourishes, protects, and brings life; or an admonishing and just father whose wrath should not be aroused.121
The coexistence of abstract transcendence and anthropomorphism, understood to be inconsistent, debases Islam twice for David Hume (d.1776):
Were there a religion (and we may suspect Mahometanism of this inconsistence) which sometimes degraded him so far to a level with human creatures as to represent him wrestling with a man, walking in the cool of the evening, showing his back parts, and descending from Heaven to inform himself of what passes on earth; while at the same time it ascribed to him suitable infirmities, passions, and partialities, of the moral kind.122
In this lively passage full of corporeal images of god, Hume is in fact simply extrapolating from his information on the Hebrew Bible in order to describe Islamic theology.123 Based on his representations of the exotic and irrational
120 Q.50:16. See Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī 1957, Vol.1, p.89. For an English translation, see al-Ghazālī
in Watt 1994, p.74. (Watt’s translation has a typo as it cites Q.5:16 instead of Q.50:16.)
121 Some of the most intensively debated verses among Muslim theologians in terms of anthropomorphism were Q.7:54, Q.10:4, Q.13:2, Q.20:5, Q.25:59, Q.32:4, Q.57:4.
122 Hume in Bailey and O’Brien 2014, p.172.
Interestingly, the passage was later modified in a way that narrows the wide critique specifically to Islam by removing the Biblical references to god’s wrestling and showing his back parts. (Cf.
Hume 1757, p.49.)
123 While we can find a couple of Islamic accounts on “wrestling with god” both in early doxographical and later mystical writings, there is no similar account on god “showing his back parts” to my knowledge. Rūzbihān Baqlī (d.1209) quotes Abū al-Ḥasan al-Kharaqānī (d.1034)’s ecstatic outburst [shaṭḥ] on his wrestle with God which al-Kharaqānī eventually lost. (See Ernst 1985, p.38.) However, Baqlī’s recently edited commentary on ecstatic sayings was clearly not available to Hume. It is most probable that Hume was indeed thinking of Jacob’s famous Biblical wrestle, which became the reason of his renaming as “Israel” (cf. Genesis 32:22-30). By the time of Hume, the wrestling Jacob had already found illustrious artistic expression in the paintings of Breenbergh (d.1657) and Rembrandt (d.1669).
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Islam, Hume sees it as an inconsistent hodgepodge of a distant, transcendent god and rude anthropomorphism.124 While anthropomorphism is universalistic and even relatively pluralistic and tolerant, it is this unspeakable god of Islam who is so transcendent that he ends up producing abject believers:
“who can express the perfections of the Almighty?” say the Mahometans. Even the noblest of his works, if compared to him, are but dust and rubbish. How much more must human conception fall short of his infinite perfections?125
This inexpressible transcendence of god, for Hume, is actually the expression of a divine tyranny, “over and above” the believers who turn into pitiful slaves without agency at the hands of their religion—in the hands of a god that indeed mirrors them.126
Also for “god’s showing his back parts,” Hume is relying on the vast Jewish, and more probably Christian, literatures on the vision of Moses on the Mount Sinai. “I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen (Exodus 33:23; emphasis mine).” This passage in the Hebrew Bible became a key source of not only Jewish, but also Christian mystical traditions. Indeed, Denys Turner argues that this passage constitutes one of the two “main linguistic building blocks of the Western Christian tradition,” along with the “Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic. (Turner 1995, p.11.)
Moreover, God’s showing His pack parts was a major metaphor for scripture-oriented theological reflection in Martin Luther (d.1546) himself. Accordingly, while “the theologian of glory” tries to look on God face to face, “the theologian of the cross” looks only on what Luther calls God’s
“backward parts” [posteriora]. (See Janz 1998, p.7.)
124 D. B. MacDonald (d.1943)’s critique of the inconsistent juxtaposition of immanence and transcendence very much echoes that of Hume. MacDonald argues that
[Muḥammad had a] bundle of contradictory ideas... His Allāh, on one hand, was an awful unity, throned apart from all creation, creating, ruling, destroying all.
But on another hand, he is depicted in the most frankly anthropomorphic terms both of body and of mind; and on yet another, phrases are used of him which, fairly interpreted, can mean nothing else than immanence. (MacDonald 1910, p.24.)
In any case, what appears as “Islamic theology” was an “awful unity,” and “so essential a contradiction.” “Muḥammad was no systematizer; certainly he had no coherent system of theology.” (MacDonald 1910, p. 36.) The same justification for the Muslim theological inconsistencies appears again and again, including in surprisingly recent works. The British scholar A. S. Tritton (d.1973)’s influential Islam: Belief and Practices (pbl.1951), for example, repeats MacDonald’s argument: “Muḥammad was a preacher not a theologian, so it was left to his followers to reduce his ideas to a system.” (Tritton 2013, p.36.)
125 Hume 1757, p.52; my emphasis.
126
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As Hume’s extrapolation from the Biblical sources also indicates, the sense of absolute transcendence speaks to “Semites” in general, meta-historically covering all Muslims, Jews, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other groups. Not only iconophobia,127 but also an anti-pluralist fanaticism and religious intolerance are strictly connected to their ultra-transcendent god.128 Many “base” and “nonsensical” ascetic practices of Jews and Muslims, such as circumcision, owe themselves to the arbitrary pleasure of this tyrant god.129 However, the most significant result is the immorality of the Semitic religiosity for Hume. The pompous ascetic practices, most notoriously “the most vicious and depraved” Muslim practice of fasting devoted to the glorification of a god (whose glories cannot be expressed) not only create abasement but also ethical corruption.130 Every practice that Hume identifies as “ascetic” also draws his
Where the deity is represented as infinitely superior to mankind, this belief, though altogether just, is apt, when joined with superstitious terror, to sink the human mind into the lowest submission and abasement, and to represent the monkish virtues of mortification, penance, humility, and passive suffering, as the only qualities which are acceptable to him. (Hume 1757, p.65.)
127 Extremely afraid of any form of idolatry,
some theists, particularly the Jews and Mahometans, have been sensible; as appears by their banishing all the arts of statuary and painting, and not allowing the representations, even of human figures, to be taken by marble or colors; lest the common infirmity of mankind should thence produce idolatry.
(Hume 1757, p.56.)
128
The intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of god, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists. The implacable narrow spirit of the Jews is well known. Mahometanism set out with still more bloody principles; and even to this day, deals out damnation, though not fire and faggot, to all other sects. (Hume 1757, p.61.)
129 The “smile and favor” of the tyrant god “renders men forever happy; and to obtain it for your children, the best method is to cut off from them, while infants, a little bit of skin, about half the breadth of a farthing.” (Hume 1757, p.52.)
130
The practice of morality is more difficult than that of superstition; and is therefore rejected. For … it is certain, that the Ramadan of the Turks [i.e., Muslims], during which the poor wretches, for many days, often in the hottest months of the year, and in some of the hottest climates of the world, remain without eating or drinking from the rising to the setting sun; this [Ramadan], I say, must be more severe than the practice of any moral duty, even to the most vicious and depraved of mankind. (Hume 1757, pp.105-106.)
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critique as embodying pompous piety devoid of ethical content. Fasting an entire day has “distinguished marks of devotion,” but Hume rather defends the ethics of the daily, individual-oriented, world-affirming, simple, and thus, early capitalistic economic life. Activities such as “restoring a loan” and “paying a debt” have an ethical dignity and a pious dimension that does not exist in the pseudo-ethics of servanthood to an ultra-transcendent god.131
The standards of the current ethics of daily economics, which Max Weber (d.1920) famously traces back to sixteenth century Europe, were not in harmony with what Hume observes as Jewish or Islamic theology.132 A rich variety of moralists, theologians and intellectuals of the time championed what would be called “early modern ethics of economic life,” i.e., an individualist ethics that focused on self-interest and individual agency instead of social, political, ethical institutions and mechanisms for the well-functioning of the capitalistic market, and the society.133 This ethical paradigm, to be monumentalized in the work of the moralist Adam Smith (d.1790), later to be known as the father of the now- disembedded, abstract discipline of “economics,” defined a new normative yardstick against which they widely measured other moral systems. Within this context the apparently unknowable, ultra-transcendent god, which entails a lack of individual agency and morality, would become a common bogeyman for many theologians and philosophers soon after the emergence of the first chairs of Islamic [“Arabic”] Studies in Europe in the late seventeenth century.
The critique of the Semitic divine transcendence in Leibniz (d.1716), Herder (d.1803), Kant (d.1804), and Schlegel (d.1829) among others has such an infallible ethical dimension. It underlines individual agency and religious pluralism as opposed to institutionalism, fatalism and parochial fanaticism.
Leibniz finds a primordial spirituality in Islam and Judaism, while he argues that Islamic theology is an inferior form of natural theology.134 For Kant (d.1804),
131 Hume 1757, p.108.
132 Weber quotes Benjamin Franklin (d.1790), a good friend of Hume, as a document of “the spirit of capitalism” in its “classical purity”: “[N]ever keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend’s purse for ever. … It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.” (Franklin in Weber 2001, p.15.)
For Franklin’s letters to Hume and a brief introduction to the connection between the two figures, see Franklin 1760.
133 Dewald 2001, p.172.
134 Almond 2010, p.22.
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Judaism and Islam exercise the Semitic prohibition of images to express the ineffability, thus, the supposed superiority of their god. “The Jews,” writes Kant cynically, “like the Mohammedans, despised the maxims of other religions, since it was they who were uniquely in possession of a deity.”135 The parochial anti- pluralism of Semitic religions is inextricable from the ineffability of their god, in Kant’s perspective. Very much like Hume, Kant sees the Muslim ascetic practices as primitive customary “formalities,” not only morally empty but also unspiritual, harsh and dogmatic. Thus “Kant gradually divorces Islam from any ethical content (in contrast to Christianity, whose practices relate directly to practical concepts and the ‘moral good’).”136
The theology of an ultra-transcendent god and the poor morality it produces is inconsistent with modern ethics and rationality; thus it belongs to the religiosity of the past. For Herder (d.1803), Schlegel (d.1829) and Hegel (d.1831), Islam is the name of an already eclipsed form of religiosity137 that by definition serves as an all-explanatory category for Muslim phenomena.138 Islam, “cleansed of any nationalism,” is an “improved” version of Judaism, while their shared, “oriental”
concept of the unknowable, irrepresentable god leaves no space for individual agency or morality.139 Hegel’s critique of Islam rests explicitly on the norms of this new ethics of economic life. Under the inaccessible divine oneness of Islam, says Hegel,
all bonds disappear. In this oneness all individuality of the Orient falls away, all caste differences, all birthrights. No positive right, no political limitations of the individual is available. Property and
135 Kant in Almond 2010, p.34.
Indeed the argument was present even around a millennium before Kant in the apologetic and polemical writings of Christian theologians under early Muslim rule. See e.g. Abū Qurrah in Bertaina 2007, pp.395-430.
136 Almond 2010, p.37; emphasis mine.
137 Hegel puts it succinctly: “Islam has forever vanished from the stage of history at large.” (Hegel in Almond 2010, p.111.) Also see ibid. pp.64-65; 100.
The same approach delineates the nineteenth and early twentieth century Christian missionary writings on Islam as well. See J. I. Smith 1998, pp.362-366.
138 Since the 1970s until his death, Edward Said (d.2003)’s studies displayed that this application of “religion” as an all-explanatory category for pre-modern peoples is not only alive, but also still very prominent. (See Said 1979, pp.299; 332-333.) The most famous contemporary example zealously continuing the same essentialist paradigm of eclipse is Bernard Lewis’ politically engaged writings. See e.g. B. Lewis 2002.
139 “The One of the Orient is much more the One of Judaism.” (Hegel in Almond 2010, p.126.)
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ownership, all individual purposes are null and void ... and this invalidity, in manifesting itself, becomes destructive and devastating.140
The pure negation in favor of an absolute god abolishes all human constructs, hierarchies and discourses, whereupon reason, freedom, ethics and economic systems are built. “It is easy to see what is left [over], namely, what is completely abstract, or totally empty, and determined only as what is ‘beyond’; the negative of representation.”141 Three qualities of “emptiness,” “abstraction” and
“negativity,” which indicate agency, critique and morality in post-modern study of apophaticism, are the pejorative indicators of their complete deprivation according to Hegel as well as Kant.
Many scholars of religion of the following century kept the connection of the excessive divine transcendence in Islamic theology to the theme of Islam as the religion of the past, which already appeared in German idealism. The suggested absence of regenerative power in Islam to respond to modernity was actually the result of this ultra-transcendent god, who was distant, non-incarnate, and as Sell’s Faith of Islam (pbl.1907) put it, “sterile.”142 In his Ten Great Religions (pbl.1889), C. F. Clarke (d.1888), one of the early American theologians to scrutinize eastern religions, and a member of the Transcendental Club, perfectly summarizes all of these problems that originate from the divine transcendence:
Immeasurably and eternally exalted above, and dissimilar from, all creatures, which lie levelled before him on one common plane of instrumentality and inertness, God is one in the totality of omnipotent and omnipresent action, which acknowledges no rule, standard, or limit save his own sole and absolute will. He communicates nothing to his creatures, for their seeming power and act ever remain his alone, and in return he receives nothing from them; for whatever they may be, that they are in him, by him, and from him only. And secondly, no superiority, no distinction, no pre-eminence, can be lawfully claimed by one creature over its fellow, in the utter equalization of their unexceptional servitude and abasement. … [Muslim God is]
tremendous autocrat, this uncontrolled and unsympathizing
140 Hegel in Almond 2010, p.122; emphases mine.
141 Hegel in Almond 2010, p.117; emphases mine.
142 “In Islam there is no regenerative power. Its golden age was in the past. … Islam is sterile, it gives no new birth to the spirit of a man.” (Sell 1907, p.48.)
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power… He himself, sterile in his inaccessible height, neither loving nor enjoying aught save his own and self-measured decree, without son, companion, or counsellor, is no less barren for himself than for his creatures, and his own barrenness and lone egoism in himself is the cause and rule of his indifferent and unregarding despotism around.143
The strong connection of Islamic divine negativity with theses like oriental despotism, religious violence, immorality, and inability to respond to modernity was carried to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when comparative studies in religion attained institutional and subtler forms.