CHAPTER 2. NOT–RELIGION: A SHORT SURVEY ON THE APOPHATIC GOD OF ISLAM ISLAM
B. Birth of the Science of Religion
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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.
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belonging to the same “family,” even if they were separated by a great distance in space or in time. Thus the nineteenth-century Englishman could presume that there was an essential tie between him and an Athenian of the fourth century BCE, whereas a medieval Mohammedan from North Africa, for all his knowledge of Aristotle, presumably could not claim the same kinship.146
The pluralistic vocabulary provided by linguistics not only helped in constructing a universalist Western identity with Hellenic origins, but also its re-presentation of Islam as a Semitic religion undermined the latter’s claim for universalism and pluralism despite its ethnic diversity. With the rise of the study of religion as a linguistic endeavor, ethnically more accurate earlier ethnographic representations of Islam as a local (Indian, Turkic, Persian etc.) colorful phenomenon were eclipsed by a monolithic Semitic religion at the end of the nineteenth century. Its universalism and pluralism were also undermined by the representations based on the long-lasting wars with Europe: Islam was the religion of sword. Its rapid expansion and wide presence around the world was the sad result of this deep intolerance against other religious truth-claims, forced conversions and inhumane violence. This extreme and indiscriminate violence, very much like the concept of “oriental despotism,” in turn, directly nourished from the ineffable transcendence of god in Islam, who is, as E. Sell (d.1932)’s Faith of Islam (pbl.1907) put it, “far beyond the reach of the human understanding.”147 The Religions of the World (pbl.1917),148 an Outline Introduction to the History of Religions (pbl.1926),149 and the Elements of Comparative Theology (pbl.1937) argued in the same lines. The latter also employed distinct terms for negation, such as mysterium tremendum popularized by R. Otto. Accordingly, violence, immorality, and oriental despotism followed this unrestrained transcendence of the Muslim god:
Like the oriental monarch or leader He [the Muslim god] is
“indulgent.” … The “ethical monotheism” of the Hebrew prophets was on quite a different level from this militant “omnipotent monotheism” of Muhammed. The latter succeeded indeed in
146 Masuzawa 2005, p.168.
147 Sell 1907, p.47, 189.
148 “He was thought to be all-wise and all-powerful, and to be the absolute despot of the world. It was useless for man to hope to understand him, but God would be merciful if man submitted to him.” (Barton 1917, p.99.)
149 See T. Robinson 1926, p.183.
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raising the morality of a demoralized Arabia, but it was mainly an appeal through fear, not an appeal to the essentially ethical character of God. Allāh is the sheer personification of the numinous, omnipotent, terrible, supremely great, capricious, arbitrary, the mysterium tremendum, urgent in appeal, fostering in the creature a sense of his utter creatureliness and nothingness. … As the “Wholly-Other” He is transcendent, at the expense of being immanent. … The divine sovereignty is so absolute that there is hardly any room left for human freedom.150
While this now-mundane representation of Islam as an intolerant, anti-pluralistic religion of the sword had a sustained polemical career,151 its renewed Semitization with the academic study of religion produced much more significant immediate consequences when combined with the polygenetical linguistics.
Semitic languages, unlike Indo-European languages, were poor in terms of inflection, thus, inherently uncreative and rigid. Von Humboldt (d.1835)’s argument that language determined thought and culture had an immense influence on later continental philosophy. In M. Heidegger (d.1976)’s famous words, “language is the house of Being.”152 Under this assumption, inflexible languages meant essentially unchanging thinking capacities and cultural behavioral patterns.153 “Semites” comprising a trans-historical group of Arabs (or Muslims), Jews, and other groups were thus (1) homogeneously the same wherever they lived; (2) incapable of producing high level knowledge, arts, artifacts; (3) themselves being ethnically unchanging peoples, living in unchanging territories.154
“Semitic religiosity,” having been superseded by a Hellenized Christianity, was for European theologians of the last two centuries essentially an extrapolation and generalization from the dominant representations of Judaism and Islam as law-oriented, thus, rigid and violent forms of religiosity incompatible with the values of modernity. Accordingly Judaism and Islam were nomocentric, focusing
150 F. H. Smith 1937, p.93; my emphasis.
151 At least in late ninth century the Byzantine Christian writings began to become “more overtly polemical and antagonistic” that employed these themes of violence. (See Goddard 2000, pp.56- 57.) For even earlier arguments from ‘Irāqī Christians, see e.g. Abū Qurrah in Bertaina 2007, p.403 (English trans.), p.445 (Arabic original). Also see J. I. Smith 1996, pp.54-55.
152 Heidegger 1982, pp.5-22.
153 For an early critical approach, see Said 1979, p.96.
154 E.g. see W. R. Smith 1894, pp.1-6; T. Robinson 1926, p.172, 188.
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on the letter of their scriptures, instead of the spirit. Hellenization meant transcending not only the Semitic past, but at the same time attaining a new,
“modern” phase and form of a universal and ethical religiosity unprecedented in world history. Religiosity, associated with conservatism, was now the eclipsing paradigm, referring to formalism, localism, dogmatism, and absence of agency.
In this larger scholarly discursive change, from its very inception in late nineteenth century as an academic discipline with its institutions and networks, the comparative study (or science) of religion was directed towards the analysis of “world religions,” where “religion” emerged as an all-explanatory category for the lives of non-modern people, i.e., locals.155 Within this context, negativity was an inherent aspect of Islamic theology that rendered it unethical and unfit to be called “modern.”