What Came First --- The Philosopher Or The Ideas?

I have emphasized cultural forces other than the direct influence of explicit philosophical ideas. I have done so because I think these factors explain what is going right in today's world.

However, I have not yet attempted to re-integrate these new observations with the question of the role of explicit philosophical ideas. A good place to start examining the role of those ideas in history is with the history of Ancient Greece, a history that produces results which might seem surprising.

A reader sent me the following recollection of a common Objectivist interpretation of the role of ideas in history, which gave me a sense of recognition:

Long time ago I recall seeing a poster created by an Objectivist depicting "the history of ideas in the world" (the actual title was more fancy). Time ran from left to right, spanning the Greek era to the present. In vertical bands were stacked intellectual disciplines: art, music, history, science, etc., with philosophy occupying the uppermost band. In tracing the connection of ideas, a striking, dominant pattern emerged. This was a downward, diagonal slant of influence. The layout was nicely executed and the message striking: fundamental ideas invariably shape the sciences and humanities, under time delay.

Philosophical ideas can have such an impact, and they have a crucial and irreplaceable role in history—but the question here is the exact nature of that role.

The problem with the view represented by the chart described above first struck me many years ago at a conference on Ancient Greece, when I first grasped a crucial aspect of the timeline of Greek intellectual development: the fact that this timeline is the opposite of the one presented in that chart with the diagonal lines of influence.

The development of Greek culture at its height did not go from the top left to the bottom right, from abstract philosophy down to art and the sciences. It went the other direction, from upper right to bottom left—and the most interesting part about the intellectual history of Ancient Greece is that the greatest Greek philosopher, Aristotle, comes last, after most of the important developments in Greek science, politics, literature, and art.

I won't attempt to create my own graphic representation of Greek history. A summary of some of the top achievements of Greek thought will do. Remember that all of the dates here are in years BC, which means that they go "backwards," with the higher numbers representing earlier dates.

In medicine, the key breakthrough was made by Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BC), whose essay "On the Sacred Disease," written about 400 BC, argued that diseases are not caused by gods or by supernatural forces but instead have natural causes.

In history, Thucydides (c. 460–400 BC, though the date of his death is not known for certain) wrote the first scientific work of history, the History of the Peloponnesian War, which used rigorous research and the comparison of first-hand accounts to separate fact from legend. This work was researched and written from 423 to 411 BC.

Greek sculpture and architecture reached its height with Phidias (c. 490–430 BC), who is considered responsible for the design and sculptures of the Parthenon (though some historians think these may have been created by his students).

Greek drama reached its pinnacle with Aeschylus (525–426 BC), Euripides (c. 480–406 BC), and Sophocles (495–406 BC). The last of their plays was first staged in 401 BC.

Science reached an important peak with the theories of Anaxagoras (500–428 BC), who was accused of being an atheist because he attempted to give natural explanations for such phenomena as eclipses, meteors, and rainbows, and because he taught that the sun and planets were not gods but were made of natural materials such as stone and metal.

In politics, the Athenian state was fundamentally reformed by Solon (638–558), while the statesman who presided over the height of Athenian power was Pericles (495–429 BC).

How does all of this relate to the history of Greek philosophy? While Greek philosophy made some important innovations beginning with Thales (c. 624–526 BC), there was in these early years no strong differentiation between philosophy and science or the other specialized fields, and the views of the early Greek philosophers were a confusing maelstrom, ranging from those who taught that change was impossible (Parmenides, 515–480 BC) to those who taught that there was nothing but change (Heraclitus, c. 535–475 BC).

Philosophy did not fully emerge as a separately defined field until Socrates (c. 470–399), who defined the specific questions addressed by the discipline. The ideas of Socrates, however, were only systematized and widely popularized by his student Plato (c. 427–347), whose philosophical school, the Academy, was founded around 385 BC.

And the pinnacle of Greek philosophy was achieved under Plato's student Aristotle (384–322 BC), whose works were mostly composed after the founding of his Lyceum, in the years 335–322 BC.

Notice the pattern: Greek art, literature, science, history, and medicine reached a crescendo of achievement in the second half of the 5th century BC—while Greek philosophy reached its crescendo of achievement one to two generations later, in the middle of the 4th century BC.
In short, Aristotle was a product of the Golden Age of Athens, not the other way around.

The great founders of Athens did not write the city's laws because they read Aristotle's Politics; Aristotle wrote his Politics after studying the history of Athens and other city-states. Greek science and medicine did not arise because scientists read Aristotle's Metaphysics or Categories; rather, the achievements of earlier scientists (and scientist-philosophers), laid the foundations for Aristotle.

The great Greek dramatists did not write their plays after reading Aristotle's Poetics; rather, Aristotle's Poetics was an attempt to explain the art of the great Greek dramatists. And the great sculptors of Athens did not create art that glorified man's potential because they were inspired by Aristotle's description of the "great-souled man." Rather, Aristotle's exalted conception of man was inspired by these artists, and by the real-life examples of the thinkers and statesmen he had studied and observed.

When I fully realized this progression, I was particularly struck by the role of art, which is the non-verbal companion to philosophy. The fact that the height of Greek art preceded that of Greek philosophy—and by nearly a century—I find to be highly significant. Greek artists were able to train themselves in the minute and accurate observation of the world, and to grasp man's heroic potential well before these things could be fully, explicitly defined by the philosophers.

This history suggests a progression that should, in fact, seem natural and unsurprising: that new ideas arose first from achievements in the special sciences—from physics, mathematics, history, medicine, biology, and politics. These achievements were paralleled by advances in literature and art, which expressed, often in implicit, non-verbal form, the new conception of human life that was suggested by advances in other disciplines. Then at the end of this process, a great philosopher was able to explain what made all of those previous achievements possible, to identify their implicit method, and to draw, in explicit terms, the widest implications for our conception of human life and potential.

This should be no surprise, because it represents a natural inductive process. Thinkers have to arrive at preliminary conclusions about the world on a narrower, more concrete level, before systematic philosophers can then draw wider and deeper conclusions on that basis.

Nor does the fact that the philosopher is, in a sense, following the achievements of those in specialized fields imply that philosophy is irrelevant.

First, we should recognize that the scientists, historians, and statesmen were themselves steeped in the philosophical discussions that were pervasive in Greece's Golden Age, during the era of the "Sophists." (The Sophists have a bad reputation—and many were advocates of philosophical subjectivism—but "Sophist" was something of a catch-all term for the itinerant teachers and burgeoning professional intellectuals of the era.) This was particularly true of the scientist-philosophers, from Thales through Pythagoras, through Anaxagoras. But philosophy as a separate discipline, considered apart from particular scientific questions—and particularly systematic philosophy, a connected system of ideas applying to all aspects of human life, rather than a mere set of particular musings—does not arise except as the product of a long chain of intellectual development.

Second, philosophy did have an impact, particularly on the practice of science. (The two volumes of an overview of Greek science sitting on my bookshelf are titled "Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle" and "Greek Science After Aristotle," with Aristotle as the dividing line in recognition of his profound impact both as a scientist and as a philosopher.) And Greek philosophy was central to the profound influence that Greek ideas had in subsequent centuries throughout the Mediterranean and within the Roman Empire. Greek philosophy helped to shape and sustain Classical Civilization.

But one of the great historical mysteries, in my mind, is why Aristotle did not have more influence on the Classical world. I have not studied Classical history after Aristotle thoroughly enough to have settled on a single hypothesis as to the reason for this, but I am confident in saying that we do not see the explosion of profound new ideas in other fields that are suggested by that diagonal slanting chart showing philosophy as the intellectual driver of all other fields. Aristotle was more the summit of previous Greek intellectual achievement than he was the foundation for subsequent Classical achievements.

So what, then, is the role of the philosopher? As a clue to the answer, note that Aristotle did serve precisely the role of a catalyst for an explosion of knowledge—but not in the Classical era. Representing the pinnacle and integration of Greek intellectual achievement, he was able to transmit that achievement to the late Middle Ages, serving an indispensable role in the launching of the Renaissance.

In what way was Aristotle both the end product of the achievements of Greek civilization, and then later the source for the revival of Classical ideas and the Greek spirit?

The best statement I can give of my view of the role of philosophy in history is a broad analogy between the intellectual progress of a civilization as a whole and the inductive process by which a single individual comes to grasp a high-level abstraction.

When an individual comes to grasp or originate an important new idea, he begins with observation of the world, from which he draws concrete, lower-level conclusions. This is analogous, in the progress of a civilization, to advances in the specialized fields. Then as a man makes more observations and takes actions that produce new results, this evidence leads him to further, more complex conclusions. As he begins to build on previous conclusions to grasp a vast new abstraction, a man often—usually, in my experience—grasps it first as a vague "sense" which he cannot yet define in words. This, I suggest, is the analogy to the role of art, which is the means by which a culture often expresses a new idea in images and metaphors, before its philosophers are able to capture them in words.

Finally, as the pinnacle of an individual's inductive development, there comes the moment when he can name his new concept or hypothesis in words. At this point, a whole series of previous observations and lower-level abstractions are integrated into a wider sum, and connections and implications that had been merely implicit before are now captured explicitly. This is the analogy to the role of philosophy.

In discussing the process of concept-formation in the mind of an individual man, Ayn Rand wrote that "the process of forming a concept is not complete until its constituent units have been integrated into a single mental unit by means of a specific word." This is what makes a concept objective and allows it to be retained and transmitted. Something similar applies to the role of philosophy in the intellectual development of a civilization. Aristotle, as the pinnacle of Greek philosophy, served the role of defining the essence of the Greek achievement—the discovery of reason—in explicit, objective terms, which allowed that achievement to be encapsulated and transmitted, even across many centuries. That is why Aristotle's ideas had such a profound influence when they were rediscovered and embraced at the end of the Middle Ages.

As I said earlier, I have previously emphasized the role of the specialized sciences as a source of knowledge, which may have seemed to downgrade the role of philosophy. A few readers have rather hastily interpreted this to mean that I am denying the importance of philosophy in history. Far from it. Instead, I am attempting to define more precisely what that role is. Philosophy is not the starting point of knowledge, but it is a kind of ending point: its job is to form the widest new conclusions that are made possible by knowledge in other fields—which then serves to integrate, protect, and explain that knowledge.

To return to my analogy to the formation of a concept, the explicit identification of a new philosophical idea makes it possible to understand and retain all of the knowledge on which that idea is based, and to use this knowledge as a foundation for the development of further conclusions and abstractions. Just as naming the concepts of "dog," "horse," "snake," "bird," and so on, enables a man to form the wider concept "animal" (or more specialized concepts like "amphibian"), so the scientific postulates that diseases have natural causes or that the planets are made of stone allow one to form the wider philosophical concept of "natural law."

Instead of the top-down view of history that I have been criticizing, in which philosophical ideas "trickle down" to spur developments in specialized fields, I am suggesting a reciprocal relationship in which achievements in specialized fields provide the inductive basis for wider conclusions in philosophy—which then serves a crucial role in solidifying that knowledge, making explicit its deepest assumptions and widest implications.

If a philosopher fulfills this role (as Aristotle did for the Greeks), the whole sum of these achievements—the achievements of specialized fields, as integrated and interpreted by philosophy—can then serve as an even more powerful base for further achievements in those specialized fields, from physics to politics, which will then provide an inductive base for new philosophical conclusions, and so on, in a virtuous cycle of intellectual and material progress.

The role of the philosopher, historically, is not as the sole motor of all progress, but rather as the observer, defender, promoter, and intellectual amplifier of that progress.

All of this implies, of course, the existence of a good philosopher, one who views his job as being to learn from the specialized fields and to draw conclusions from their achievements. The essence of bad philosophy, and of the malignant impact of bad philosophical theories on history, is the attempt by philosophers and intellectuals, not to learn from achievements in other fields, but to explain them away. It is the attempt, not to amplify new knowledge, but to neutralize it.

The philosophy of Plato, for example, can be seen as an attempt to salvage a role for mystical intuition—turning away from this world and looking inward in order to "recollect" the realm of "pure forms"—in the face of the nascent scientific outlook of his era. Similarly, during the height of the Scientific Revolution in the West, Immanuel Kant declared that he "found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." In an earlier article in this series, I cited a more colorful example: Mary Shelley and writing of her novel Frankenstein. As I wrote,

Most of us think of it as just another science fiction story or horror flick, but this novel is actually a fascinating window into an important cultural moment, a moment at which something went terribly wrong among the world's intellectual elite. The novel was written at the height of the Scientific Revolution and in the first years of the Industrial Revolution. Science and technology were about to transform human life, resulting in the most profound and sustained improvement of the human condition that man had ever known. Yet Mary Shelley and her circle of friends were immersed in the trend of "Gothic" literature, which was based on a fascination with the mysticism of the Middle Ages. And so, on the eve of a scientific-technological revolution that was about to improve human life, she instead wrote a story about how science and technology would create monsters that threatened to destroy mankind. It is a powerful example of an intellectual clinging to philosophical preconceptions, refusing to alter them in the light of new evidence provided by the world around her.

This explains what went wrong, whenever it has gone wrong in history: the influence of bad philosophy is to reverse the relationship between facts and ideas, rejecting the first in order to preserve the second. In so doing, the malevolent or misguided intellectual acts to wipe out achievements in science, politics, economics, literature, and art.

In describing what went right—the reciprocal, inductive relationship between philosophy and specialized fields—I have focused on Ancient Greece, which is particularly clear case because it was the beginning, both of philosophy and of virtually all of the sciences. It may be helpful to look briefly at a few examples of what went right in later eras.

Let us begin in what may seem like an unlikely time: the late Middle Ages, in the centuries prior to the Renaissance. But this is in fact a logical place to begin if we want to ask: where did the Renaissance come from?

One objection I have heard to the previous installments in this series is that the misinterpretation of the role of ideas in history that I am criticizing is merely a rationalistic error made by a few young Objectivists, but that it is not widely held by other Objectivists. Yet I have found that this erroneous view is pervasive, not usually as an explicitly stated idea, but as an implicit assumption. I saw it some time ago, for example, in an online discussion with a very accomplished Objectivist intellectual. In response to a claim that there was a period of significant technological advance in the late Middle Ages, this philosopher dismissed such a phenomenon as impossible because it preceded the first significant pro-reason philosopher of the era, Peter Abelard (1079–1142 AD). In other words: no significant progress is possible until a philosopher comes along to make it possible.

But we must also ask: what makes the philosophers possible? Abelard and subsequent pro-reason philosophers were made possible by the revival of learning in the West after the chaos of the Dark Ages—a process that began more than two centuries before Abelard and included a revival of commerce and construction, as well as technological progress.

, through my wife, to the history of architecture. I find architecture to be a particularly revealing window into a culture. As Sherri likes to remind me, architecture doesn't tell you what people were saying; it shows you what they were doing.

The history of architecture, for example, reveals the full depth of the collapse of the West with the fall of the Roman Empire. Here is how it is described in Marvin Trachtenberg's Architecture: From Pre-History to Post-Modernism, the standard textbook on the history of architecture: "The end of Roman political and social institutions, of cities, wealth, and culture, meant a steep decline in monumental art. From about 500 to after 700 [AD] little was built…. [W]hat survived were mostly small, boxlike structures limited to one or two rooms crudely proportioned and constructed." This "architectural depression" came to a clear end with the Carolingian Renaissance, the revival of architecture and learning under the rule of Charlemagne, who unified Europe and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800.

What inspired this revival was not pro-reason philosophy; Charlemagne saw himself as reviving Christian learning and as deriving his moral authority as emperor from his coronation by the pope. But he was also inspired by the concrete example of Classical civilization. The people of the Middle Ages were aware that they were the inheritors of what had once been a great and powerful civilization, and they were eager to regain their former glory. Thus, Charlemagne called his domains the "Holy Roman Empire," and he instituted a building campaign taking Roman ruins as its model. Here is how Trachtenberg describes it:

The traditions of Roman architectural practice were gone, but Roman buildings remained standing throughout Europe—looming physical presences which even in ruins inspired awe, admiration, and often imitation…. The last Roman Emperor in the West had been deposed in 490, but the idea of the Empire had not died…. The political entity that [Charlemagne] created out of fragments of Western Europe had nothing in common with the Roman political system, yet it was meant and perceived as a revival of it…. Even though Charlemagne spent most of his long reign on one military campaign after another, he had time to establish a strong official policy of reviving "lapsed" Roman culture.

Part of this program of revival was architectural; it would lead to the development of Romanesque architecture, from which Europe developed the amazing structural achievements of High Gothic architecture. But Charlemagne also sought out scholars across Europe and gathered them together at a school that would eventually become the University of Paris. This revival of learning, originally intended as a revival of Christian scholarship, would eventually lead to a rediscovery of Classical learning, to the rise of pro-reason philosophers, and to a revival of the ideas of Aristotle—which would happen, in the 12th and 13th centuries, at this very same school, the University of Paris.

I am not suggesting that the Carolingian Renaissance is a competitor to the full-scale Renaissance of the fourtheenth century. I am pointing it that it was the first, necessary precursor.

The crucial spark that planted the seeds of the fourteenth-century Renaissance was started because Charlemagne wanted to revive the glory of Ancient Rome. The centuries from Charlemagne to the Renaissance are a longer, far more tortuous form of what we see in the world today. Today, nations around the world look at America and at the extraordinary wealth and vibrancy of Western civilization, and they say, in effect: we want that, too. Even if they don't understand what makes Western civilization possible, they are led to investigate it, to emulate it, and to be transformed by it in ways they don't realize or expect.

What led Charlemagne to revive Europe was, in effect, an early version of what I call the "metaphysics of normal life." As with the example of America for people in China or India today, the example of Rome brought to Charlemagne and his followers a vision of what was possible for Europe, which led them to ask how they could achieve what the Romans had achieved. Today, the Chinese conclude that to match the West they need skyscraper, shopping malls, and universities. The men of Charlemagne's day concluded that they needed a unified political system, architectural monuments, and scholars—and this created the preconditions for Europe's rebirth and a cultural context in which later pro-reason philosophers like Abelard and Aquinas could have an impact.

As a final example, let me briefly indicate what I think this analysis implies about the historical role of the philosophy of Objectivism. We hope that Objectivism will be the foundation for a "Second Renaissance" of pro-reason and pro-liberty ideas. But we should also recognize that Objectivism is the product of enormous cultural achievements in many fields during the 18th and 19th centuries.

I don't think it diminishes Ayn Rand's philosophical achievement in any way to point out how much it was dependent on a vast range of achievements that preceded it. In fact, Ayn Rand's philosophy is strengthened when we recognize it as an inductive integration of the achievements of both philosophers and non-philosophers who came before her. All of these achievements were, of course, made possible by the revival of Aristotelian philosophy and its consequences: a renewed confidence that knowledge was to be gained by reasoning from observation of the world, and the subsequent liberation of secular learning from the control of the Church.

But the centuries that preceded Ayn Rand offered significant new accomplishments built on top of this foundation by scientists, artists, and businessmen.

I could cite a number of important examples: the political theory developed and implemented by America's Founding Fathers, which demonstrated for the first time the mechanics of a free society, or the literary trend of Romanticism, which influenced Ayn Rand's own novels and her view of the role of art. But the most interesting factor is the role played by the Industrial Revolution, which Ayn Rand herself credited as the indispensible inductive basis for her view of the role of the mind in human life.

It is interesting that Ayn Rand began her career as a novelist and only later become a philosopher, because her novels can be seen as a step in the inductive process by which she developed her philosophy. The characters and events in her novels were inspired by observation of real individuals and events. Could Ayn Rand have projected the character of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, for example, without observing the career of Frank Lloyd Wright? More to the point, in Atlas Shrugged, could Ayn Rand have conceived of the character of Nathaniel Taggart without the example of Commodore Vanderbilt, or someone like him? Could she have conceived of Henry Rearden, who works his way up from a child laborer at a coal mine to become a steel magnate, without the example of Andrew Carnegie? And so on; her journals contain notes on her observations of various individuals, both famous and obscure, who inspired characters in her novels.

But in creating these characters—and given the ambitiousness of her esthetic goals—she was led to investigate what principles defined her characters and made them possible, and this is what led her to develop her philosophy. As she tells us, in her essay "The Goal of My Writing,"

Since my purpose is the presentation of an ideal man, I had to define and present the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires. Since man's character is the product of his premises, I had to define and present the kind of premises and values that create the character of an ideal man and motivate his actions; which means that I had to define and present a rational code of ethics.

It is not that her characters were all modeled on some specific individual, but that they were modeled on her observation of many real individuals. They are a stage in the process of induction: from observation of real people and events, she created characters who essentialized a particular character trait or world view—and that essentialization served as an abstraction from which she could then draw larger, philosophical conclusions.

The Industrial Revolution and the history of American capitalism was clearly the inspiration for many characters and events in Atlas Shrugged—and this, in turn, enabled her to draw some of the profound philosophical conclusions in that novel, most especially the conclusion that reason is man's means of survival.

But what is interesting is that the Industrial Revolution and the development of American capitalism was not the direct product of any previous philosophical projection. Philosophers such as John Locke developed the notions of individual rights and representative government, while other philosophers, from Francis Bacon on, had projected the practical value of scientific knowledge, and these ideas helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. But I have always been intrigued by the fact that no one was able to predict the degree to which the Industrial Revolution would transform human life—no one even came close—or to guess beforehand what a fully free, scientific and technological economy would actually look like.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, imagined that the political framework he helped create would lead to a agrarian society of independent yeoman farmers—never realizing what his own principles would lead to when fully realized.

I don't just mean that no one guessed the specific inventions and technologies that would emerge. What I mean is that no one guessed, or could have guessed, all of the legal structures, business organizations, individual attitudes and lifestyles—the entire way of life of a modern capitalist society. The philosophers laid an intellectual foundation for capitalism and the Industrial Revolution—but modern capitalism was, in effect, created by the capitalists. It was created by the innovators who conceived of ever more complex forms of the division of labor, who developed the extraordinary complexity of modern capital markets, who developed entire new economic institutions such as lines of credit and insurance, and who pioneered the legal theory behind patents and the corporation.

In effect, what I am pointing out is that the full moral and philosophical basis of capitalism was not and probably could not have been identified before the fact. It could only be identified after the fact, by any intellectual who was willing to look at the facts honestly and draw the conclusions they suggested. Some thinkers drew important conclusions in the fields of economics and history, but Ayn Rand was the only one to draw the full philosophical implications of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism.

That, among other reasons, is why her philosophy is so crucially needed today. It is needed because it serves the function of philosophy: as a new abstraction that integrates, preserves, and magnifies all of the knowledge produced by the scientists, economists, novelists, businessmen who came before it. It represents the greatest such sum to date, the highest integration yet made of what humanity has learned in the five millennia of human civilization.
Is this crucially important? Of course it is.

Ayn Rand's ideas are important for a reason far wider than helping the West avoid a civilizational collapse. For such a modest goal as not collapsing, the current state of knowledge prior to Ayn Rand might well be adequate. The real reason we need Ayn Rand's ideas is because they open to mankind a swifter, straighter, more certain road to even higher achievements—achievements made possible by exploiting the enormous integration of knowledge captured in her philosophy, and by building new specialized knowledge and further philosophical insights on top of this summit.

Ayn Rand's ideas make it possible to ensure that what has gone right keeps going right, that things go right in an ever-expanding portion of the globe—and that even more things go right in the future.

If my view is correct—to the extent that I have offered, in this series of articles, a new and original perspective on the current state of the world and of the role of ideas in history—what does it imply about what we should do, both as Objectivists and as individuals attempting to live and succeed in the world? That is the question I will address in the final article in this series.

2006 Top Stories

Top Stories of the Year: The Cartoon Jihad

The #3 top story of the year is the improbably named "cartoon jihad," which made clear to the West the nature of our enemy's goal in the War on Terrorism: not any specific demand or goal, but an all-encompassing Western submission to Muslim rule. This is covered in the first three news links below, and in the first feature article (a longer version of which appeared in our print magazine).

But while the "cartoon jihad" demonstrates the Muslim world's threat to the West, we also pose a cultural threat to fanatical Islam. The single most under-appreciated story of this year is the steady drumbeat of opposition to Islam coming from Muslims living in the West, and from liberal Muslims within the Middle East. TIA has covered this story in detail, but when I started to compile the top stories of the year, even I was surprised by the number and frequency of these reports (up to as recently as a few weeks ago), a sampling of which is provided in links #3 through #9 below, and in the second feature article.

The abstraction that integrates both stories—the Cartoon Jihad and the Muslim Civil War—is provided in link #4: this is a "global civil war." Islam and the West are not simply fighting each other; each side is fighting an internal battle of ideas.

Top Stories of the Year

Are There Two Sides to the Clash of Civilizations?

Cartoon Jihad and World War

"The Critical Spirit"

The Global Civil War

The Next Iranian Revolution

Islam "Within the Limits of Reason"

Aayan Hirsi Ali Escapes the "Mental Cage of Submission"

Freedom Fighters Against the Iranian Regime

The Muslim Civil War: Afghanistan vs. Pakistan

Feature Articles

Publish or Perish, by Robert Tracinski

The Lessons of the "Cartoon Jihad"

"The Escaped Prisoner", by Robert Tracinski Wafa Sultan's Forward Strategy of Intellectual Freedom

Top Stories of the Year Commentary by Robert Tracinski

1. Are There Two Sides to the Clash of Civilizations?

February 7, 2006

Europe's confrontation with the threat of Islam has been building from some time, especially since the murder early last year of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for making a film critical of Islam. The choice Europe faces is whether to assert its own semi-forgotten Enlightenment legacy—or to accept submission to Muslim overlordship. Today's papers are filled with assessments of this conflict.

In today'sNew York Post, Fred Siegel calls this a "time of testing" for Europe, and comes to a pessimistic conclusion: "It has long seemed almost inevitable that either Islam would be Europeanized or Europe would be Islamized. The European reaction to date suggests that the latter seems more likely." That is echoed by Lee Harris in National Review Online, who doubts whether the "clash of civilizations" between Europe and Islam actually has two contestants: "In order for there to be a clash of civilizations, it is necessary for there to be two civilizations, both of which are prepared to defend their deepest cultural values."

Meanwhile, back at the New York Post, Ralph Peters shows why US conservatives, who have generally sounded the alarm against Islam in this case, are still not quite up to the job. In his column today, his religious-right premises override his pro-American sense of life, as he condemns the Mohammed cartoons as "irresponsible" for showing "intolerance of faith." Peters does get one thing right: this is Europe's comeuppance for spending the past few decades disengaged, taking the Muslims' side in the deadly conflicts in the Middle East while imagining that Muslim violence is only aimed at Israel or at American "imperialism"—and not at our civilization. For my main link on this topic, however, I haven't chosen any of these items. Rather than choosing Europe's critics—even when they have a point—I want to end by giving the floor to those who are actually involved in the fight. Here, a European newspaperman defends his paper's decision to reprint the cartoons and says of the Muslims: "they are asking not for respect but for submission." This is the essential issue.

"Tolerance toward Intolerance," Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, Washington Post, February 7

Much of the US reporting about the fracas made it appear as if Europeans just don't get it—again. They struggle with immigration. They struggle with religion. They struggle with respect for minorities. And in the end they find their cities burning, as evidenced in Paris. Bill Clinton even detected an "anti-Islamic prejudice" and equated it with a previous "anti-Semitic prejudice." The former president has turned the argument upside down. In this jihad over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe's supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression against their own religious minorities….

Now they are asking not for respect but for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules. Does Bill Clinton want to counsel tolerance toward intolerance?

2. Cartoon Jihad and World War, February 7

It is interesting that there is one country in the Middle East that has actually defended Europe in what commentators are now calling the "cartoon jihad": Lebanon, where a liberal, Westernized majority is still struggling to break free from the fascist-turned-Islamist dictatorship of Syria. The article below also indicates a wider pattern: the "cartoon jihad" is part of the wider world war between Islam and the West. Note the pattern of connections: Syria is using the cartoon jihad to stir up factional violence in Lebanon, in order to maintain its control there—while the Syrian dictator meets with Muqtada al-Sadr, who is using the cartoons to incite violence against Danish coalition soldiers in Iraq.

"Syria Seen as Instigator," Washington Times , February 7

In Beirut, the anti-Syrian coalition that dominates the Lebanese government apologized to Denmark for the burning of its consulate on Sunday, while charging that Syrian intelligence agents had sparked the trouble to destabilize their country. "The acts of sabotage that happened in [Sunday's] protest are the start of a coup d'etat by the Syrian regime that aims to transform Lebanon into another Iraq," said the coalition.…

Protesters demanded that Danish troops be removed from Iraq when more than 4,000 people rallied yesterday in the southern [Iraqi] city of Kut. Such demonstrations have largely been organized by Sheik al-Sadr, whose Shiite religious party won 30 seats in December parliamentary elections. Sheik al-Sadr held talks yesterday in the Syrian capital, where he expressed solidarity with the government and said "our common enemies—Israel, the United States, and Britain—are trying to spread strife among us. The people will not fall for this."

3. "The Critical Spirit," March 21

[T]hings are not all going the Islamists' way. Yesterday, I linked to an article about a little-reported pro-secularism manifesto by 12 Western intellectuals, most of them Muslim apostates who escaped (both physically and mentally) from the Middle East. Below is a link and excerpt from the manifesto itself. Note that, in condemning "religious totalitarianism," these intellectuals also feel the need to pointedly reject "cultural relativism," grasping that subjectivism actually empowers dogmatism, rather than offering an alternative to it.

Combine this with Wafa Sultan's impassioned defense of the Enlightenment, and a new MEMRI transcript of a Syrian poet declaring (courtesy of MEMRI) that the Arabs are culturally "extinct", and you have the early beginnings of a broader intellectual reformation of the Muslim world.

"Together Facing the New Totalitarianism," Salman Rushdie, et al., Jyllands-Posten, February 28

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field….

We reject "cultural relativism," which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom, and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia," an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas. We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism. back to top

4. The Global Civil War, March 23

Today's Washington Times column by Suzanne Fields is a bit rambling (like most of her columns), but it offers one big idea that is very clarifying: her description of the War on Terrorism as a global civil war, inspired by Tony Blair's recent comment that this is not a clash of civilizations, but "a clash about civilization"—which I suspect was inspired, in turn, by Wafa Sultan's similar comments.

This captures the most striking fact about this war: only half of the conflict is being fought overseas—and the other half is an internal cultural and ideological struggle against anti-American, anti-Western intellectuals on the home front.

"The World at Civil War," Suzanne Fields, Washington Times, March 23

The contentious and ever more partisan argument over whether Iraq is finally convulsed in a civil war misses the point, it seems to me. Maybe it's the entire world that is finally convulsed in a civil war.

Tony Blair, who is even more embattled at home than George W. Bush is here, put that proposition in play this week, though not exactly in those terms. "This is not a clash between civilizations," the British prime minister told a press luncheon in London. "It is a clash about civilization."…

"The only way to win is to recognize that this phenomenon is a global ideology," Mr. Blair said, "to see all areas in which it operates as linked, and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists." Just so. But the weakness of the West is that a lot of us want to believe that we can wish the clash of, or about, civilization(s) away if we just wish hard enough.

5. The Next Iranian Revolution, May 5

One of the most important facts to realize about Iran is that it has a tradition of secular thought, a tradition that was submerged by Khomeini's Islamic revolution but never eradicated. That's why there is a rich vein of dissent within Iran. Below, I link to two stories on this issue.

The second of these stories is an interview with an Iranian living outside of Iran, who is trying to organize a non-violent uprising against the regime and wants America's support. He opposes military action, but it is interesting that he thinks cutting off Iran's oil—something TIA Daily has been advocating—would cause the regime's collapse.

The first link below is to a story about the arrest of a liberal Iranian philosopher. Pat Mullins sent me this link with the following comment: "The Iranian philosopher and intellectual historian, Ramin Jahanbegloo, has been imprisoned by the ayatollahs. Why? As one spokesman for the Iranian regime said, 'Nobody is being detained in Iran because of expression of ideas.'

What a perfect Orwellianism!

"No, the ayatollahs have good reason to fear him.

"Educated at the Sorbonne, he has taught at Harvard, published dozens of books and articles on figures like Machiavelli and Von Clauswitz, and interviewed such Western intellectuals as Isaiah Berlin. Happily, he is not Iran's answer to Edward Said, another regurgitation of the West's queasy academic stomach. "In a September 2000 article—introduced with a quotation from dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel—Jahanbegloo called on Iranian intellectuals to challenge the authority of the theocratic mullahs.

"More important, if you can get through the academic jargon, he also urges them to reject Marxism and postmodernism in the name of 'humanism,' 'liberalism,' 'critical rationality,' and 'individualist and democratic ideals,' including 'negative liberty'—Isaiah Berlin's concept of the individual's freedom from the state.

"How many intellectuals in the West would condemn Marxism, Postmodernism, and Islamism as all variations on the theme of 'anti-humanism'? Jahangeloo isn't a great philosopher by any means, but he is a thinker of intellectual independence and moral courage. Perhaps he'd make a good candidate as first president of the Secular Republic of Iran."

"Iran Detains Liberal Intellectual,"AP via New York Times, May 4

A liberal intellectual has been arrested in Iran, the first detention of a prominent academic since the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year, a Cabinet minister said Thursday. Ramin Jahanbegloo, head of the office of contemporary studies at the private Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran, was arrested earlier in the week on charges of espionage and violating security measures, the state-controlled IRAN Persian daily newspaper said…. The philosopher was arrested April 27 at a Tehran airport, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences said Thursday. It said he was to have arrived in Hungary on May 3 as part of a European trip that would have included stops in Austria and Poland.

Jahanbegloo was scheduled to participate in a round-table of philosophers in Hungary….

"Undoing the Ayatollahs," David Horovitz, Jerusalem Post, May 4

In Washington a few days ago, I met with a longtime Iranian-born opposition activist who, among other efforts, is a member of the National Union for Democracy in Iran, a three-year-old, US-based opposition group which seeks, it says, "to promote a strategy of nonviolent political defiance to the rule of the dictatorial theocracy in Iran, and set the conditions for a transparent national referendum," under which Iranians would "determine their future form of government in a free, fair and democratic manner."

At first, the people of Iran supported the revolution because they were afraid of modernity; it created an identity crisis. Five minutes after the regime was in power, they realized their mistake, realized that religion is not an answer for politics. The people are now, for the most part, completely opposed to the regime. And the regime needs crisis after crisis—whether it is taking American diplomats hostage, war with Saddam, Salman Rushdie—to distract attention from its inability to deliver. Everybody who knows the regime knows that it is impossible for it to reform from within….

But the opposition leaders haven't really stepped up to the plate. Those who truly don't like this regime and really want the regime to go, they don't have a political message beyond that. Hating the regime is not sufficient. You need to have a plan for what happens next. They lack that. And they are so disunited….

The message from those outside, particularly America, has to be that they will be with the Iranian people to the end…. People in Iran need to feel in their bones that America is with them and behind them…. If the right message is sent, if there is some organization outside, they will regroup…. It starts with small groups of students gathering at different strategic locations at the university and all starting to sing the national anthem at the same time. Other students join them. Some guards come and beat them, there's a small fight, and then other students come. If the number rises above 10,000 and the protest lasts more than four hours, then the regime cannot sustain itself. As few as that? Yes, because people would quickly join en masse. Everyone is waiting to join something….

How worried should the West be by the nuclear drive and horrible rhetoric? Extremely worried. They should not be sleeping at night. If they are sleeping at night they are fools….

This is a war between two opposing ideologies that only one can survive. There can be no coexistence. Therefore the West needs to defeat this ideology completely, and it should do this by supporting the people of Iran to overthrow the Islamic regime, create a democratic definition of Islam, institutionalize that, and then spread it through the other Islamic countries. Otherwise Western civilization is in grave danger.

We should take this regime seriously and try to end it as quickly as possible. We should not only focus on the nuclear program. What about biological weapons, a single bottle poured into a lake? It's a mindset. There are so many ways that they can harm the West….

Stop the flow of oil into Iran. Iran is a net importer of refined oil products. The transportation system will collapse within a few months and the regime with it.

6. Islam "Within the Limits of Reason," May 5

It is not just Iran where Islamic theocracy is in trouble. For a thousand years, Islam has needed its Thomas Aquinas—the philosopher who elevated philosophy from being "the handmaiden of theology" and established the idea that reason sets the limits for religion. Now some intellectuals in the Muslim world are starting to argue for the same idea.

Below are profiles of two such intellectuals, courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute. One of them offers, not 95 theses, but 27 propositions in favor of a secularized interpretation of Islam. The other proposes "religion within the limits of reason." Both are philosophical mixtures—but reason and secularism seem to be the dominant elements of the mixture.

"Algerian Reformist Malek Chebel: 27 Propositions for Reforming Islam," Nathalie Szerman,

Middle East Media Research Institution, May 5

Malek Chebel, a renowned anthropologist focusing on the Arab world, is one of today's prominent French-speaking North African intellectuals. In 2004, he established, in France, the Foundation for an Enlightened Islam…. In his Manifesto for an Enlightened Islam (Manifeste pour un islam des lumières), Chebel puts forth 27 proposals for extensively reforming Islam. He turns to the values of the 18th-century European Enlightenment for guidance, when rationalism and secularism guided the drive towards cultural, social, and political progress.

Chebel suggests a number of basic comprehensive reforms to enable profound change in the Arab world. He combines reform in religion, politics, the judiciary, education, women's rights, etc….

The Preeminence of Reason over All Other Forms of Thought and Beliefs: There is a general phenomenon of denial of science and progress in the Islamic world. In order to reform Islam, Islamic countries must review their religious education and adapt the Koran to the realities of the modern world. In so doing, they should get in touch with the lost, enlightened, Islamic civilization.

Society to Be Managed by Politics, Not Religion: This proposition refers to secularization (Ilmaniyya). Politics should be separated from religion and enjoy supremacy over religion. Chebel clarifies that the West was capable of such huge progress only because it escaped the hold of the Church….

The Preeminence of the Individual over the Community: The fact that the community prevails over the individuals in Islam has delayed—and sometimes prevented—the emergence of a private sector encouraging self-expression. However, by claiming and repeating that Muslims are responsible for their actions and must bear their consequences, we begin to establish a distinction between the collective level and the individual level. According to Chebel, free choice allows for individual responsibility, which in turns allows for progress. "Religion Within the

Limits of Reason: Lafif Lakhdar," Middle East Media Research Institute, May 5

On March 17, 2006, the weekly magazine of the Israeli daily Haaretz published an intellectual profile of Tunisian-born reformist thinker Lafif Lakhdar…. Lakhdar, a former columnist for the Saudi-owned London daily Al-Hayat, was fired on the instructions of the paper's owner, Saudi Prince Khaled ibn Sultan, for describing the Saudi regime as "barbaric" on an Al-Jazeera talk show…. "The plan I proposed includes the introduction of modern sciences in the institutions of religious education, as well as comparative history of religion and psychology and sociology of religion, so that students will be able to understand the religious text in terms of modern logic….
"Culture should be free, and every artist and every researcher should be free to write about all religions without any restriction."

Q: "Does that include the Danish cartoonist?"

"Yes. It includes humor and satire…. That is a secular principle: separation between religion and politics, and between religion and artistic and literary creation, and between religion and scientific research. This is the greatest achievement of modernity. The clerics must not be allowed to intervene in these matters."

7. Aayan Hirsi Ali Escapes the "Mental Cage of Submission," May 18

Why is it that women are emerging as the strongest, most principled, most courageous critics of Islam? I know that women have the most reason to fight Islam, since they are its most oppressed victims. But I find it interesting—and somewhat sad—that I cannot think of a single Arab or Muslim man who has spoken out as boldly as Wafa Sultan or Aayan Hirsi Ali (or, among Europeans, with the passion of Oriana Fallaci).

Hirsi Ali has written a book titled The Caged Virgin (which I will review soon), denouncing Islam's criminal mistreatment of women. But her decision to leave Holland and come to America—the true homeland of anyone who has broken free from what Hirsi Ali calls "the mental cage of submission"—reminds me of the title Wafa Sultan has given to the book she is writing to denounce Islam: The Escaped Prisoner.

FrontPage Magazine deserves a mention for its article describing Hirsi Ali as "Holland's Cassandra." In another excellent article, Christopher Hitchens recalls an event at which he met Hirsi Ali and muses: "I never know whether or not it's right to mention, with female public figures, the fact of arresting and hypnotizing beauty." But the fact that Hirsi Ali is a beautiful woman is crucially important, because it makes her that much more powerful a symbol of Islam's sexual oppression of women—and, more broadly, of the life-hating evil of Islamic fundamentalism.

But I will give the last word on Hirsi Ali's move to America to Hirsi Ali herself, in the resignation letter she sent to the Dutch parliament. (This link was brought to my attention by Harald Waage via HBL.)

"Tweede-Kamerfractie/Persverklaring Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Engels)," Aayan Hirsi Ali, Verdieping Trouw (Netherlands), May 16

I came to Holland in the summer of 1992 because I wanted to be able to determine my own future. I didn’t want to be forced into a destiny that other people had chosen for me, so I opted for the protection of the rule of law. Here in Holland, I found freedom and opportunities, and I took those opportunities to speak out against religious terror….

Issues related to Islam—such as impediments to free speech; refusal of the separation of Church and State; widespread domestic violence; honor killings…—these subjects can no longer be swept under the carpet in our country’s capital. Some of the measures that this government has begun taking give me satisfaction. Many illusions of how easy it will be to establish a multicultural society have disappeared forever. We are now more realistic and more open in this debate, and I am proud to have contributed to that process….

In the fall of 2005 I told Gerrit Zalm and Jozias van Aartsen, the leaders of the VVD, that I would not be a candidate for the parliamentary elections in 2007. I had decided to opt for a more international platform, because I wanted to contribute to the international debate on the emancipation of Muslim women and the complex relationship between Islam and the West…. [I]t is difficult to live with so many threats on your life and such a level of police protection. It is difficult to work as a parliamentarian if you have nowhere to live. All that is difficult, but not impossible. It has become impossible since last night, when Minister Verdonk informed me that she would strip me of my Dutch citizenship.

I am therefore preparing to leave Holland. But the questions for our society remain. The future of Islam in our country; the subjugation of women in Islamic culture; the integration of the many Muslims in the West: it is self-deceit to imagine that these issues will disappear.
I will continue to ask uncomfortable questions, despite the obvious resistance that they elicit. I feel that I should help other people to live in freedom, as many people have helped me….

That transition from becoming a member of a clan to becoming a citizen in an open society is what public service has come to mean for me. Only clear thinking and strong action can lead to real change, and free many people within our society from the mental cage of submission. The idea that I can contribute to their freedom, whether in the Netherlands or in another country, gives me deep satisfaction.

Ladies and Gentlemen, as of today, I resign from Parliament. I regret that I will be leaving the Netherlands, the country which has given me so many opportunities and enriched my life, but I am glad that I will be able to continue my work. I will go on.

8. Freedom Fighters Against the Iranian Regime, May 25

As [Michael] Ledeen points out, the real news from Iran is a new wave of protests by secular dissidents against the theocratic dictatorship. Regime Change Iran has posted photos of student protesters holding signs that read, among other things, "This is not a seminary, it is a university."

MEMRI is also reporting on the protests, including declarations by the students that "We Don't Want Nuclear Energy"—a clear contradiction of the oft-repeated claim that Iranians are so "nationalistic" that even dissidents will back the regime in a standoff over Iran's nuclear program. Finally, the New York Sun, the only newspaper that, despite its small size and meager resources, has repeatedly devoted coverage to Iranian dissidents, has a good round-up covering the whole range of anti-regime protests, which I link to below.

" Determined Foes Mount Challenge to Iran's Mullahs," Eli Lake, New York Sun, May 25
In Tehran, university students staged a second day of strikes over the firing of eight professors and the new policies enacted by Tehran University's president.

In Tabriz, the regime tried to quell riots earlier this week over a cartoon depicting members of the Azeri minority as cockroaches. In Qom, the theocracy was absorbing the aftershocks of a candid interview from Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, who told an Iraqi news agency that the current Islamic Republic has failed to deliver the democracy it promised in the 1979 revolution. The stirrings inside Iran are the most serious challenge to befall the mullahs since the protests that accompanied the 2003 commemorations of the July 9, 1999, Tehran University student rebellions. They also suggest the regime that America and Europe are now hoping to cajole into suspending its nuclear program may be more fragile than intelligence agencies recognize. One of the steering committee members of Iran's largest student organization chapter at Tehran Polytechnic University, Abbas Hakim Zadeh said in an interview from Tehran Tuesday that his organization was now 90% in favor of rejecting slow reform in favor of nonviolent resistance…. Yesterday, Mr. Zadeh said the country's largest student organization, Takhim Vahdat, rejected any direct talks between America and Iran if the negotiations centered around security guarantees in exchange for promises on nuclear enrichment. "If there is any dialogue and conversations or negotiations between the Islamic Republic and the international community, whether the United States or other countries individually or collectively, if it is around the nucleus of human rights, democracy and the openness in Iran, it is something worthwhile to consider," he said…. A colleague of Mr. Zadeh at Tehran Polytechnic University, Bijan Pouryousefi, said yesterday that Iran's student movement was reaching out to form a more unified front with labor unions and women's groups.

9. The Muslim Civil War: Afghanistan vs. Pakistan, September 26

While President Bush has so far offered no clear response to Pakistan's surrender, there is one man in Washington who is raising a spirited protest: Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, whose nation is in danger of once again becoming the victim of Pakistan's treachery. Musharraf is also in the US, and the two men have engaged in a war of words over the past few days, recounted in the two stories below.

Karzai's performance on this issue is heroic and extraordinary. Note here that he pretty clearly accuses Pakistan of becoming a state sponsor of terrorism, while he advocates shutting down the Pakistani madrassahs—fanatical religious schools that are used to indoctrinate terrorists—and imprisoning the fanatics who run them.

"Afghan Leader Slams Musharraf's Policies," Sharon Behn, Washington Times, September 26
The political divide between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf became increasingly acerbic yesterday, with the Afghan leader accusing his counterpart of pursuing policies that foster terrorism.

The outburst came on the eve of a critical meeting in which the two men will join President Bush in the Oval Office to discuss ways to improve their cooperation in fighting a revitalized Taliban insurgency. In a reference to Pakistan, Mr. Karzai said in an address at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars yesterday that there will be no peace in the region until nations stopped using religious extremism as a means of promoting policy.

"For all of us in the world to be safer, we must remove the need for groups, organizations or state entities—and here I am beginning to be very careful in my remarks—of reliance on religious radicalism as instruments of policy," he said. "The increased attacks on Afghanistan and the cross-border activities; the loss of US, Canadian soldiers; the burning of mosques and attacks on children...is the continuing of reliance on radicalism as an instrument of policy," Mr. Karzai said….

In his Washington address yesterday, Mr. Karzai said many of the terrorists afflicting his country get their start in religious schools, or madrassas, in Pakistan…. Mr. Karzai…urged Gen. Musharraf to shut down the madrassas and imprison those who teach there.

"Military action in Afghanistan alone is not going to free us of terrorism. Going to the source of terrorism—where they get trained, motivated, financed and deployed—is necessary now," he said.

"Musharraf Lashes Out on US 'Book Tour'," Daily Telegraph, September 26

General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, has attacked his Afghan counterpart on his controversial tour of America. Gen Musharraf, who is visiting the US with the twin aims of promoting his memoirs and representing his country, told Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, that he should stop blaming Pakistan for his own country's instability.

Responding to Mr Karzai's claims that Pakistani religious schools are fanning terrorism across the border, he said: "The sooner that President Karzai understands his own country, the better."

He added that Mr Karzai - who is also in the US—was partially to blame for disenfranchising the majority Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan, and warned that the Taliban cannot be defeated by military might alone. back to top

TIA Daily Feature Articles

10. Publish or Perish

The Lessons of the "Cartoon Jihad"

by Robert Tracinski The central issue of the "cartoon jihad"—the Muslim riots and death threats against a Danish newspaper that printed 12 cartoons depicting Mohammed—is obvious. The issue is freedom of speech: whether our freedom to think, write, and draw is to be subjugated to the "religious sensitivities" of anyone who threatens us with force. That is why it is necessary for every newspaper and magazine to re-publish those cartoons, as I will do in the next print issue of The Intellectual Activist. Click here.

This is not merely a symbolic expression of support; it is a practical countermeasure against censorship. Censorship—especially the violent, anarchic type threatened by Muslim fanatics—is effective only when it can isolate a specific victim, making him feel as if he alone bears the brunt of the danger. What intimidates an artist or writer is not simply some Arab fanatic in the street carrying a placard that reads "Behead those who insult Islam." What intimidates him is the feeling that, when the beheaders come after him, he will be on his own, with no allies or defenders—that everyone else will be too cowardly to stick their necks out.

The answer, for publishers, is to tell the Muslim fanatics that they can't single out any one author, or artist, or publication. The answer is to show that we're all united in defying the fanatics. That's what it means to show "solidarity" by re-publishing the cartoons. The message we need to send is: if you want to kill anyone who publishes those cartoons, or anyone who makes cartoons of Mohammed, then you're going to have to kill us all. If you make war on one independent mind, you're making war on all of us. And we'll fight back.

But the issue of freedom of speech is too clear, and too well settled, in the West, to be worth spending much time debating it. What is far more interesting is the fact that such a debate is occurring, nonetheless. This is a fact from which the Western world can draw some crucially important conclusions.

The West has long been aware that, while we hold freedom of speech as a centerpiece of our liberty, the Muslim world does not recognize this freedom. Before now, however, our worlds have rarely collided. The Muslims have not usually dared to extend their dictatorial systems to control our own behavior within our own cities. The Salman Rushdie affair—the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 death edict against the "blasphemous" novelist—was an ominous warning, but Americans did not take it seriously.

Now, seventeen years later, the Muslim fanatics are making it clear: you don't have to come to our country, you don't have to be a Muslim. Even in your own countries and under your own laws, you will not be safe from our intimidation.

For the whole Western world, this is an opportunity to learn an important truth about the goal of the Islamists. Their goal is not to achieve any specific political demand or settlement. Their goal is submission: our submission to their will, to their laws, to their dictatorship—our submission, not just to one demand, but to any demand the Muslim mobs care to make. Europe particularly needs to learn this lesson. The Europeans have deluded themselves into thinking that this is our fight. If only Israel weren't so intransigent, if only the US weren't so belligerent, they told themselves—if only those cowboys didn't insist on stirring up trouble, we could all live in peace with the Muslims. And they have deluded themselves into thinking that they can seek a separate peace, that having the Danish flag on your backpack—as one bewildered young Dane described it—would guarantee that you could go anywhere in the world and be regarded as safe, as innocuous. Now the Europeans know better. With cries of "Death to Israel" and "Death to American" now being joined by cries of "Death to Denmark", every honest European can now see that they are in this fight, too—and they are closer to the front lines than we are. Threats against American cartoonists, when anyone bothers to make them, are toothless; there is no mob of violent young Muslims in the United States to carry them out. European writers and filmmakers, by contrast, are already being murdered in the streets. The first people to find themselves living under the sword of a would-be Muslim caliphate are Europeans, not Americans.

The lesson here is not just that the Islamist ideology of dictatorship is a threat to Europe. It is also that the dictatorships themselves are a threat. The advocates of cynical European "realpolitik" deluded themselves into thinking that, if they just made the right kind of deals with Saddam Hussein, or with the Iranian regime, or with the Syrian regime, then the dictatorships over there would have no impact on us over here. But we can now see that the anti-Danish riots did not explode spontaneously: they were instigated by the dictators, by the regimes in Iran and Syria. To their credit, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and now US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have been pointing out this connection. The lesson for Europe: if you accommodate and appease the dictators, they won't leave you alone. Having gotten some of what they want, they will come after you and take the rest. Europe ought to have learned that lesson, at terrible cost, in 1939; this ought to refresh their memory.

If we want to know why these lessons have not been learned before now, the cartoon jihad also gives us clues to the answer. Note that those who are supposed to help us learn those lessons—the left-leaning intellectuals and newspaper editors, the people who have traditionally posed as the brave defenders of free speech—have been the first to collapse in abject submission to Muslim sensibilities. The New York Times, for example, dismissed the cartoons as "juvenile" and explained that refusing to publish even a single image of the cartoons "seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols."
Note how the New York Times—like many other left-leaning newspapers—hides behind the evasion that the Danish cartoons are "silly" or "juvenile." On the contrary: the best of the Danish cartoons provided a far more serious, hard-hitting, thought-provoking commentary than has been provided in the pages of these same newspapers. While the mainstream media has drooled that Islam is "a religion of peace"—in the midst of yet another Muslim war—it was left to a Danish cartoonists to suggest that Mohammed himself, and the religion he represents, might be the bomb that has set off all of this violence. (To see these cartoons, go to the simply named website muhammadcartoons.com.

But the prize for most abject surrender to Muslim dictatorship has to go to the leftist academics. The first to decry the Bush administration as a creeping "fascist" dictatorship, they are, perversely, the first to fawn in admiration before the world's actual fascists. If you think that's an exaggeration, read an op-ed in Sunday's New York Times by Stanley Fish, a famous "Postmodernist" university professor and defender of "political correctness." Fish writes:
"Strongly held faiths are exhibits in liberalism's museum; we appreciate them, and we congratulate ourselves for affording them a space, but should one of them ask of us more than we are prepared to give—ask for deference rather than mere respect—it will be met with the barrage of platitudinous arguments that for the last week have filled the pages of every newspaper in the country….

"[T]he editors who have run the cartoons do not believe that Muslims are evil infidels who must either be converted or vanquished. They do not publish the offending cartoons in an effort to further some religious or political vision; they do it gratuitously, almost accidentally. Concerned only to stand up for an abstract principle—free speech—they seize on whatever content happens to come their way and use it as an example of what the principle should be protecting. The fact that for others the content may be life itself is beside their point.

"This is itself a morality—the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors."

For years, the left has told us that the foundation of freedom is subjectivism; if you are never certain that you are right, you will never be certain enough to "impose" your views on others. But will you be certain enough to defend your mind against those who want to impose their beliefs on you? If Fish is any indication, the answer is "no." Note how he bows with almost superstitious awe before the fanaticism of the Muslim mobs, while describing the old-fashioned liberals' defense of free speech as hypocritical, superficial, "condescending."

And now the "hate crimes" laws pioneered by the left in the name of political correctness, are being invoked by Muslims to suppress publication of the Mohammed cartoons by a Canadian newspaper. The intellectuals of the left, having built a reputation as defenders of free speech by striking a pose of defiance against innocuous threats at home, have now become the leading advocates for self-imposed submission to the Muslim hordes abroad. Interestingly, intellectuals on the right have now become the loudest, most strident voices in defense of free speech, for which they deserve our admiration. Blogger Michelle Malkin has waged a particularly effective crusade on this issue. And she is not the only one; I linked to many good articles on the topic in last week's editions of TIA Daily.

But the right has its own contradictions, it own source of sympathy with the enemy. For years, conservative intellectuals have been demanding greater "sensitivity" to "religious sensibilities"—at least, to the religious sensibilities of Christians—and calling for a great role for religion in the "public square." The have waged a long crusade to allow religion to serve as the basis for laws against abortion and homosexuality, and for the subordination of science to religion, demanding that this be a "nation under God" rather than a "nation under Darwin."
And so we have seen a few prominent conservatives falter badly in the cartoon jihad. Prominent neoconservative scion John Podhoretz wrote a column in last Friday's New York Post that sounds an awful lot like Stanley Fish's column quoted above:

"For many people, the way to grant Muslims the recognition they crave is to patronize them—to give them nice little nods and winks and talk about what a nice religion they have. That kind of recognition is unsatisfying and condescending. The impulse behind the original publication of the cartoons in Denmark last September was to cut through the condescension. They were literally provocative—designed to provoke discussion about how to deal with the phenomenon that Carsten Juste, the editor of the newspaper that published them, called the 'self-censorship which rules large parts of the Western world.'

"Well, as Juste and his staff have learned to their sorrow, while some of that self-censorship may be the result of cowardly political correctness, some of it is clearly due to simple prudence. Juste and his underlings have been in grave physical danger for months, ever since the cartoons were published. And it would not be too much to say that they and the world would have been better off if they had exercised a little more self-protective caution in the first place."

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt—a much more dedicated religious conservative—practically squirms with discomfort at the idea of someone criticizing religion. He echoes the idea that the Danish editors were "irresponsible" for printing the cartoons because they could have predicted that it would "provoke" a violent reaction—but he adds a more pro-American gloss to it. He says that the cartoons were irresponsible because the enemy will use them as propaganda to incite riots and try to gain support among Muslims.

"In a wired world, there aren't any inconsequential actions, and everything is grist for the propagandists among the jihadists. That doesn't mean censorship, or even self-censorship. Only a bit of reflection before rushing off to start new battles which divert attention from those already underway. There is a chasm of difference between serious commentary on the Islamic challenge facing Europe and the West…and crude, sweeping anti-Muslim propaganda. It isn't necessary to defend the latter in order to uphold and praise the former."
(See more more of Hewitt's commentary on this issue.)

The weakness of the conservatives is that they think the essence of the West is our religion, our "Judeo-Christian tradition"—rather than our Enlightenment legacy of individual rights and unfettered reason. Conservatives try to evade the clash between religious authority and freedom of thought by claiming that religion provides the moral basis for liberty. But the clash cannot be avoided, and conservatives are forced to choose where they will draw the line: where respect for religious prohibitions, in their view, takes precedence over respect for the individual mind. On this issue—involving a religion alien to American traditions—most conservatives have had no problem drawing the line in favor of freedom. But will they draw a different line when their own religious dogmas are challenged? This is the final lesson of the cartoon jihad. The real issue at stake is not just censorship versus freedom, but something much deeper: the need to recognize the real essence of the West. The distinctive power and vibrancy of our culture, the source of our liberty, our happiness, and our unprecedented prosperity, is our Enlightenment tradition of regard for the unfettered reasoning mind, left free to follow the evidence wherever it leads. And this controversy has given our minds plenty of evidence to follow, and plenty of fearless conclusions to draw.

11. "The Escaped Prisoner"

Wafa Sultan's Forward Strategy of Intellectual Freedom

by Robert Tracinski

On March 1, TIA Daily linked to a MEMRI TV video of Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan on al-Jazeera television, in which she denounced Islam as the source of the warfare and oppression in the Middle East and declared:

The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.

This was, I thought at the time, a statement that ought to set off a revolution. And that is precisely what it is doing. Dr. Sultan's remarks set off a wave of reaction in the Muslim world, and thanks to the efforts of MEMRI, she has been profiled by several major newspapers over the weekend. What Wafa Sultan has to say is crucially important. How she says it is inspiring.
Here is a longer excerpt from the MEMRI transcript of her appearance on al-Jazeera. Bear in mind as you read this that she was speaking in Arabic to an Arab audience.

(To appreciate even better Dr. Sultan's fiery, uncompromising manner, see the MEMRI TV video, available at http://www.memritv.org/ or alongside the New York Times article linked to below. One TIA Daily reader who recommended that link to me compared Dr. Sultan's performance, quite accurately, to the kind of intensity of conviction one sees in old interviews with Ayn Rand.) Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete….

Host: I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?

Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean….

Host: Who came up with the concept of a clash of civilizations? Was it not Samuel Huntington? It was not Bin Laden. I would like to discuss this issue, if you don't mind...

Wafa Sultan: The Muslims are the ones who began using this expression. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said: "I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger." When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and began this war. In order to start this war, they must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels. My colleague has said that he never offends other people's beliefs…. Who told you that they are "People of the Book"? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them "those who incur Allah's wrath," or "those who have gone astray," and then come here and say that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?

I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to believe in it. Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?

Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural...

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran....

Wafa Sultan: Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern….

Wafa Sultan: The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. Fifteen million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

This was Wafa Sultan's declaration of intellectual independence from Islam. It was a declaration, by an Arab speaking in Arabic to an Arab audience, that Islam is a backward, violent religion, and that a secular, free society—a culture of science, independent creative thought, and political freedom—is superior to the Islamic culture of faith. I have been in favor the Forward Strategy of Freedom as a military and diplomatic policy, a policy of knocking down Muslim tyrannies in the Middle East and replacing them, as far as is possible, with the institutions of a free society. But we can't expect the generals and politicians to win this kind of broad cultural battle all on their own, with only the tools available to soldiers and diplomats. Western intellectuals have to get into this fight, too. What we need even more than the Forward Strategy of Freedom is a Forward Strategy of Intellectual Freedom—an attempt to spread the values of reason, secularism, and independent thought to the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Mainstream Western intellectuals are not interested in this task. Their allegiance is not to reason, but to subjectivism, which has led them full circle to an admiration for dogmatism—so long as it is the dogmatism of others, which we are not to judge. Thus, the intellectuals are too busy appeasing Islam, like the administrators at Yale, who eagerly recruited a former Taliban spokesman as a "special student" to be considered for a subsidized enrollment at an Ivy League college, despite the fact that he has only fourth-grade education. (See the latest on this.)

So the Forward Strategy of Intellectual Freedom has been left to Wafa Sultan.

Who is Wafa Sultan? A profile in Sunday's New York Times tells her remarkable story. It begins with a remarkable act of intellectual independence: the decision, not just to question one particular interpretation of Islam, but to question all of the religion, down to the root. Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood. But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said. "They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god." She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County…. All are now American citizens. But even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.

Her writings brought her to the attention of al-Jazeera which—though it may now regret the decision—started having her as a guest on its talk shows in July of last year.

The New York Times profile describes the effect Dr. Sultan has had on others. It is a tribute to the liberating effect that the example of one courageous individual can have on others.

Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims. Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die…. In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private…. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs." And I am happy to report that Dr. Sultan is just getting started. According to the New York Times report:

Dr. Sultan is "working on a book that—if it is published—it's going to turn the Islamic world upside down." "I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book." The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster." "The Escaped Prisoner" is precisely what Wafa Sultan represents: an intellectual escape from the mental prison of Islamic dogmatism. The New York Times profile quoted above shows a clear admiration for Dr. Sultan. But not every Western media source approves. They don't approve because Dr. Sultan is not a "moderate Muslim." The media doesn't mind profiling Arab critics of Islamic fanaticism, so long as they don't challenge the politically correct, Multiculturalist idea that there is nothing wrong with Islam itself, that Islam has been "distorted" through wrong "interpretations," so that it's teachings merely need to be "moderated."

This explains why a profile on Wafa Sultan in today's Los Angeles Times takes such a negative, snide, dismissive tone. It practically presents Dr. Sultan as an agent of the vast Zionist conspiracy imagined by the Muslims. But the flurry of interest among non-Muslims contrasts oddly with the near silence among Muslims themselves, many of whom say she is a largely unknown figure not causing any particular stir. "I haven't come across any indication that people are discussing her," said Abdulaziz Sachedina, a University of Virginia Islamic studies professor who was blacklisted eight years ago by Iraqi Ayatollah Ali Sistani for his reformist ideas that women were equal to men and all Abrahamic faiths were equally respectable…. Sachedina said he agreed with some of her remarks, including her criticism that too many Muslim rulers fail to protect human rights. But he objected to what he called her "vilification" of the entire tradition.
Other Muslims questioned why groups outside the faith were so avidly promoting a non-Muslim to criticize Islam, a practice that has occurred before and is a sore spot in the Islamic community, particularly since many respected Muslims also advocate change. "Reform is alive and well within Islam, but it will only happen by those from within Islam and not those who hate Islam," said Hussam Ayloush, who heads the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But the fact that Wafa Sultan is not a "moderate Muslim" is precisely what makes her so important. What the Arab world needs—and what we need to deploy as our primary intellectual offensive against Islamic fanaticism, is not such a watered-down version of the same violent Islamic dogmas. As I remarked when I originally covered this story on March 1, the reason I admire Wafa Sultan is that "She's no 'moderate Muslim'—she's an uncompromising firebrand in the defense of reason and freedom."

Let us hope that this firebrand can set off a conflagration of independent thought. And let's do whatever we can to add fuel to those flames and spread them across as much of the globe as possible.

What Has Jerusalem To Do With Athens?

TIA Daily • November 28, 2006

What Has Jerusalem to Do with Athens?

Part 1: Pope Benedict XVI Turns Tertullian on His Head

by Robert Tracinski

Editor's Note: I have not yet completed my "What Went Right?" series, but in the meantime, the story below was so timely that I thought it important to start this new article today. Over the next week, I will post the second part of this new article, as well as the next installment of "What Went Right?"—RWT

Pope Benedict XVI arrived yesterday in Istanbul on a visit that crystallizes an important aspect of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.

Radical Islam is a rising force in quasi-secular Turkey, and the pope's visit has been met with mass protests by Turkish Muslims in response to comments the pope made earlier this year regarding Islam.

In a September 12 speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, Benedict quoted a dialogue written between 1394 and 1402 by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus. According to Benedict, Manuel's philosophical tract, written as a dialogue between the emperor and "a learned Persian,"ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an…. In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point—itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself—which, in the context of the issue of faith and reason, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting point for my reflections on this issue. ---In the seventh conversation…, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.

But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels," he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words:

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

"God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...."

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.

The focus of Muslim outrage has been narrow and superficial: Benedict's quotation of Manuel's description of Islam as "evil and inhuman." But the speech itself is actually about faith, reason, and force, and it has wide implications for the nature of the clash between Islam and the West, for the relationship between religion and secularism within the West, and for judging the relative threats posed by Islamic and Christian fanaticism.

This speech is all the more important because Benedict is a more philosophical and readable pope than his predecessor. Popes always operate on a broad philosophical level, especially relative to Bible-thumping American Evangelicals, but in the speeches and papal encyclicals I have read, John Paul II never seemed fully comfortable with philosophical argument. His writings always vacillate between philosophical argument and quotations from scripture, as if John Paul II were vacillating between appeals to reason and appeals to Biblical authority.

Benedict, by contrast, is at home in the realm of philosophy, and with the exception of an overly scholarly vocabulary, he is capable of setting forth a clear and readable argument that is understandable to the non-believer.

The reason for this is revealed in the opening of Benedict's speech, as he recalls his experience as a theology professor at the University of Bonn in 1959. The faculty of the university, he writes, shared the ideal "that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason." Theology, then, is presented as being based on the same rationality as secular academic disciplines. In that spirit, Benedict also describes his tolerant reaction to an atheist colleague: "even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason…: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question."

This statement is the context in which Benedict introduces his comments on Islam. He introduces Islam's belief in spreading religion through the sword as a contrast to contemporary Christianity's dedication to defending the faith through reason and persuasion.

Much of Benedict's contrast between Christianity and Islam focuses on the theological issue of whether God is bound by reason (the Catholic view) or inscrutable to reason (the Muslim view). Remember earlier that he described Manuel's view that "not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature" as "the decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion." He then quotes a commentator on the text of Manuel's dialogue: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." If the Muslim god is not bound to obey the dictates of reason, then his followers are not required to respect reason in the minds of their fellow men.

But Benedict has larger goals for which this theological difference is merely a springboard. Those goals are revealed by his reference to Manuel's Christian religious views as being "shaped by Greek philosophy"—something of which Benedict approves. In fact, he makes the connection between Christianity and the Greek philosophical tradition the main subject of his speech.

Previous Catholic theologians and philosophers, from Thomas Aquinas on down, have argued that Christian religious faith and secular classical learning are compatible. Benedict goes a step further.

The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10)—this vision can be interpreted as a distillation of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry….

[D]espite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature.

Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria—the Septuagint—is more than a simple…translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: not to act "with logos" [i.e., according to reason] is contrary to God's nature. [Emphasis added.]

What is really radical about Benedict's speech is not its references to Islam, but its attempt to argue that the classical Greek tradition of reason is an indispensable part of Christianity. The idea that Christianity did not spread to Greece "by chance" and that the Greek translation of the Old Testament is an "important step in the history of revelation," together with his later claim that the New Testament "bears the imprint of the Greek spirit"—all of this implies the absorption of the Greek tradition into the foundations of the Christian faith. In effect, Benedict is adopting the works of Plato and Aristotle as part of the revealed word of God.

Benedict spends much of the rest of his speech decrying the "dehellenization" of Christianity—that is, attempts to separate Christianity from the Greek influence.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity—a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. He argues against these various attempts, including the most recent one, "which is now in progress."

In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux.

See what I mean about an overly scholarly vocabulary? Translated into more familiar terms, Benedict is arguing against a kind of Christian Multiculturalism in which Greek-influenced Christianity is just a European variant on Christianity, with other regions free to adopt non-Western interpretations of the faith. I don't know much about the political power struggles within the Church, but I suspect that this theory is an attempt to legitimize African Christianity, which tends to be more mystical and emotionalist—that is to say, more un-Greek—than European Christianity.

Benedict has some tart words for this Christian Multiculturalism.

This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed…. [T]he fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself. [Emphasis added.]

The integration of Greek philosophy and Christianity, in Benedict's view, is the foundation both of Christianity and of Western Civilization in general.

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history—it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

In Benedict's view, the founding tradition of the West is not the Judeo-Christian tradition but rather the Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman tradition—as one unified tradition.

This is an extraordinary claim, and one that departs from much of the history of the Church—and one that is, as the rest of Benedict's speech will demonstrate, philosophically untenable.

The early Church father Tertullian (c. 155–230 AD), despite being born into the late classical world, was contemptuous of secular classical learning, and once asked, rhetorically, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, or the Academy with the Church?" (This is the same Tertullian who said, of the doctrine of the Trinity, "I believe it because it is absurd.") In his view, the philosophical tradition of Athens was irrelevant to and incompatible with the religious tradition of Jerusalem. Yet that is precisely the view that Benedict is turning on its head.

Thus, reversing Tertullian's question, we may ask of Benedict: what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?

This article will be continued in a future edition of TIA Daily.