Monday
After Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed Friday, many have reported on something he said in a speech before the PEN Club three months ago. As the New India Express summed it up, Rushdie stated that
a poem cannot stop a bullet, a novel cannot defuse a bomb, but we are not helpless, we can sing the truth and name the liars. We must tell better stories than the tyrants!
I’m one of Rushdie’s many fans, especially of Midnight’s Children. Today, however, I repost an essay I wrote on Rushdie’s debate with Islamic fundamentalism in his fantasy novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. There we see two medieval Islamic theologians squaring off, Ibn Rushd (a.k.a. Averroes) and al-Ghazali. Rushdie traces much of the religious infighting we are witnessing back to this famous debate, and the issues addressed apply not only to Muslims. It fact, they arise in all debates between Reason and Faith.
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ibn Rushd was a 12th century philosopher who believed that God gave us Reason to understand creation. The 11th century philosopher Ghazali, on the other hand (this according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) saw God rather than natural law as the basis of reality. In other words, the debate was set within Islam between Reason and what Rushdie regards as blind faith.
Like Rushdie, I’m in the Ibn Rushd camp. In the Episcopal Church we sometimes say that, when we enter church, we don’t check our brains at the door. God gave us this great gift to use it. Or as the Internet Encyclopedia puts it,
Ibn Rushd strived to demonstrate that without engaging religion critically and philosophically, deeper meanings of the tradition can be lost, ultimately leading to deviant and incorrect understandings of the divine.
Of course, we must guard against the sin of pride, as John Wilmot warns us in Satyr against Reason and Mankind. We can become too full of ourselves if we don’t let God guide us. (See Frankenstein.)
In Rushdie’s fantasy, jinn awaken the corpses of Ibn Rushd and Ghazli, who debate from their crypts. The rational Ibn Rushd opens the debate:
“Let us think of the human race as if it were a single human being,” Ibn Rushd proposed. “A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge. The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind’s long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age. It is not that God does not exist but that like any proud parent he awaits the day when his child can stand on its own two feet, make its own way in the world, and be free of its dependence upon him.”
The faith-based Ghazali pushes back:
“As long as you argue from God,” Ghazali replied, “as long as you feebly try to reconcile the rational and the scred, you will never defeat me. Why don’t you just admit you’re an unbeliever and we can take if from there. Observe who your descendants are, the godless scum of the West and East. Your words resonate only in the minds of kafirs [African blacks]. The followers of truth have forgotten you. The followers of truth know that it is reason and science that are the true juvenilia of the human mind. Faith is our gift from God and reason is our adolescent rebellion against it. When we are a;dult we will turn wholly to faith as we were born to do.”
Rushd counters that time is on his side:
“You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”
Once Rushd starts talking about the future, however, Ghazali feels on familiar ground:
“There,” said Ghazali,. “Good. Now, father of many bastards, you begin to speak like the blasphemer you are.” Then he turned to matters of eschatology, which, he said, was now his preferred topic, and he spoke for a long time about the end of days, with a kind of relish that puzzled and distressed Ibn Rushd.
And further on:
For what the living call life is a worthless triviality when compared to the life to come.
There are fundamentalist Christians who also believe this, making Ibn Rushd’s puzzlement relevant to more than just Muslims. As Ibn Rushd complains to the good jinn Dunia, Ghazali
believes that God has set out to destroy his creation, slowly, enigmatically, without explanation; to confuse Man into destroying himself. Ghazali faces that prospect with equanimity, and not only because he himself is already dead. For him, life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world.
It so happens that Ghazali has released a dark jinn from a bottle and told him to instill fear in humans. Doing so, he believes, will bring them to God:
“Teach them,” Ghazali said, “Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.”
“I can do that,” said Zummurud the Great. “They’ll be speaking my way soon enough.”
“Not yours,” Ghazali corrected him, but only mildly. When one was dealing with a Grand Ifrit one had to make certain allowances for his vast egotism.
Ghazali, however, has underestimated how much damage a fear-inducing jinn can do. In the book, he has literally let the genii out of the battle. Like many fundamentalists, Zummurud will indeed set himself up in place of God. In fact, he horrifies Ghazali when he manifests in the terrorism of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups:
As Ghazali would soon discover, however, sending the most potent of the dark jinn down the path of extreme violence could have results that alarmed the sender. The student soon surpassed the master.
Ibn Rushd is given one last chance for a counterargument, and it is a version of Rushdie’s comments at the PEN Club:
The enemy is stupid. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.
It can be hard to hold on to that idea in the face of terrorism, including Friday night’s stabbing. That Rushdie continues to make public appearances, even with a fatwa hanging over his head, shows that he is willing take chances in order to get the word out. Since he appears to have survived the attack, I suspect we’ll hear a lot more from him, even with evil jinn goading on people who wish him dead.