THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: Freedom and God
Scruton, Roger
T H e P u R s u I T o f K n o w l e d g e Freedom and God by Roger scruton cried “Ecrasez l’infame!” Scores of enlightened thinkers followed him, declaring organized reli- FaCeD With the...
...Although the highest form of love transcends all sensual attachment, nevertheless there is contained within our sensual longings that intimation of our final home, which is with God, in the realm of illumination...
...But it is a travesty with a large and under Arabian soil has obliged us s f e h n o p u c n d n e d r O hat this is a travesty of Islam goes without tion, w u hich w pe as t e he d e iscove t ry o f o os il...
...The official left-liberal view is that Islam would be all well and good, if only it could go through a process of Enlightenment...
...T H e P u R s u I T o f K n o w l e d g e Freedom and God by Roger scruton cried “Ecrasez l’infame...
...He has sought to reach an agreement, a covenant, that will govern not only our relations with Him but our relations with each other...
...And so long as this is so, it will be impossible to assume that Islam fully grants the freedom to disagree with it, or the right to argue a little with its crusty old God...
...now Saudi Arabia by Ibn al-Wahhab (1703–1792...
...House Ad Half Horiz 4/3/08 8:28 PM Page 1 Tpopular following, rooted in a long-standing tions with the fossil community on top of them a e r d o o g k e e s o t saying...
...The Bible is the story of people who wrestled with the God of Israel, and brought him to His senses—or at any rate, to ours...
...It radicalized the Afghan tribes and spread south into India, being the major force behind what is now known as the Indian mutiny...
...However, the resemblance, as Brague reminds us, is only superficial...
...This rapidly growing orthodoxy ignores the fact that Islam had its Enlightenment, which even called itself by that name...
...If you cannot argue with God, you cannot argue with those who speak for him...
...And, like the inspired parables of Jesus, and the universalist doctrines of St...
...The Islamic Enlightenment occurred in the tenth and eleventh centuries of our era, under the influence of the “illuminist” philosopher Avicenna...
...And the severe super-mullah that the Wahhabites discern behind the words of the Koran is, at first sight, not very different from the divine patriarch who spoke to Moses from the burning bush...
...He belonged to a circle of thinkers who did their utmost to read the harsher edicts of the Koran in allegorical ways...
...gion to be the enemy of mankind...
...And all pose a manifest danger to humanity, by dividing believer from infidel, friend from foe, “us” from “them,” in ways that will not respond to rational argument...
...All involve a flight from reason into fantasy...
...He has not sought to compel our love—for love is not love when forced...
...T e h t a r , d o n i f e l e e t s t a t k n i h t t g o r w w o n y d o b y n a y l r t ha e p o r E f o e l p loo ny m u ullahs t have ha so d exasperated the p ha eo s - com n es o o nly throu h gh t a i gr i eem h en b t. B i ut the G y are surely e a p t a h s d n i m r o t h g e r s t e h t e h e r a he oPinions anD Customs advocated by these A g nd e. w T hen a you is can a not ri argu t e y e ou can u no t t co m e e c to r a civil word to say for them...
...Hence it is easy to interpret the Koran as forbidding us to question, or even to interpret, the direct commands of God...
...Hence the crucial question that we must ask of every religion concerns its attitude to the infidel: What freedom does it allow to the unbeliever and the apostate...
...It is to accept that collective violence and massacres originate in beliefs, and can be eliminated by replacing those beliefs with better ones...
...Awoken from their “dogmatic slumbers” by the Islamists, the atheists have turned in horror to the Jews and Christians who were quietly slumbering beside them in the bed of civilization, and shouted accusations in their ears that had not been heard for 200 years...
...As Rémi Brague points out in this issue, the Judeo-Christian tradition has portrayed God as standing in a free relation to his creatures...
...il fuels contain l ed - . way of reading the Koranic verses...
...And this cruel punishment is authorized by the Wahhabite clergy, sent to European cities on missionary duties from Saudi Arabia...
...But it is impossible The American Spectator’s 2008 Catalyst Essay Series: The Future of Individual Liberty – Elevating the Human Condition and Overcoming the Challenges to Free Societies Seamus Hasson “The Myth: Is there Religious Liberty in America...
...The illuminists have not been forgotten...
...Those who cite the holy book in justification of oppressive customs such as forced marriage, female circumcision, the stoning of adulterers, and the sequestration of women do so with no sense of blasphemy...
...Why shouldn’t it do the same for Muslims...
...Left-liberal opinion, than the belief in a God who never responds to our normally receptive to anything in the way of anti- arguments, that threatens the peace of modern Western prejudice, has stopped short of endorsing communities...
...4 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 R o g e R s c R u T o n That seems to imply a contrast with the Islamic vision...
...militant Islam, contenting itself merely with inventing a new offense—“Islamophobia”—for those who give voice to sentiments that it is too timid to express, but that it probably shares...
...All faiths, to these evangelical atheists, are rooted in dogmas that cannot be safely questioned...
...They own property across Europe, and send their Al-Wahhab was a bigot whose book-burning and missionaries into all our towns...
...There is a kind of anthropological naivety in this that matches the philosophical naivety of arguing as though the Enlightenment never happened...
...It brought disorder to the Arabian Peninsula and then went on to export that disorder to Persia and Afghanistan...
...Those are the questions that define the confrontation between radical Islam and the West...
...Not that the believers in Nothing have a clean record when it comes to bigotry and belligerence...
...Richard Dawkins Those of us who believe in something must face the challenge presented by these believers in Nothing...
...4 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 Roger scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books...
...After all, Enlightenment freed Christians and Jews from the oppressive shackles of an over-zealous faith...
...Islam means submission, and though this submission should be freely undertaken, it cannot be freely escaped...
...They may have mistaken the letter of the text, but they are confident in its spirit...
...There it might have burnt itself out, had it not been for the greatest tragedy that has afflicted our civilizaChristina Hoff Sommers “The Emancipation of Women: True and False Perspectives” Pierre Manent “Liberal Democracy and the Nation State” Brian Anderson “Freedom and the City” Roger Scruton “The Limits of Liberty” M a y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 4 1 T H e P u R s u I T o f K n o w l e d g e for us to be really and deeply at peace with them...
...This dynamic character of the God of Israel underlies the preaching of Jesus, whose attitude to fossilized customs and oppressive practices is well illustrated by his judgment of the woman taken in adultery: “Let he who is without fault cast the first stone...
...But to argue in these terms is to accept the weakest part of the atheists’ case...
...Are we in a state of war with those who reject our faith, or can we live together peaceably, submitting to a shared rule of law...
...For the only two reliable peacemakers known to mankind have been excluded from their way of life...
...It shook the Ottoman Empire, until finally confined to its place of origin...
...The radical Thanks to oil, people with whom we should have had mullahs who are currently patrolling the ghettoes distant but cordial relations have become, through no of Europe belong to the sect founded in what is effort of their own, indispensable to our well- being...
...Paul Johnson “Freedom and Property” Anne Applebaum “The Fate of Individual Liberty in Post-communist Europe” Rémi Brague “Liberty, Secular Government and the Western Inheritance” Robert Bork “Individual Liberty as the Constitution Understands It” The American Spectator is publishing a series of articles on the components of individual liberty, how freedom evolved in the West, and the future of Robert P. George “Academic Freedom and What it Means Today” individual liberty not only in Western society but in the rest of the world...
...Avicenna, no stranger either to wine or to women, was a Sufi, who believed that the soul ascends to God through love, and that love is inseparable from forgiveness...
...Scores of enlightened thinkers followed him, declaring organized reli- FaCeD With the sPeCtaCle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously is the most influential living example of this tradition, and his message, echoed by Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, sounds as loud in the media today as the message of Luther in the reformed churches of Germany...
...The faith of the Wahhabite mullahs conforms closely to the caricature of religion presented by the evangelical atheists...
...Unlike the mad mullahs—who seem to be unable to think about women as sexual beings, and also unable to think for very long about anything else— the Sufis saw sex in the elevated and romantic terms that we know from Dante and Chaucer...
...In their eyes the God of the Koran is an angry old man with a beard, a kind of supermullah, as fierce and humorless as his spokesmen here below...
...But they are more honored among Western scholars than among those who purport to speak for Islam today...
...In such circumstances, is it surprising if men don’t smile...
...Atheist and nihilist doctrines have, from the Jacobins to the Maoists, far out-performed the old religions when it comes to massacres and genocides...
...It is astonishing to Europeans, beneficiaries of the enlightened and satirical attitude expressed by Christ’s remark, to learn that stoning continues to be regarded as the appropriate punishment for adultery by a considerable number of the communities that have settled among them...
...By the time we reach the Psalms it is quite clear that we can talk to this God in the first person, that He responds to our free decisions as we to His, and that He is prepared to move with the times...
...Offending women have even been smuggled back to the Middle East to be executed as custom requires...
...There is a dynamic process of mollification, which begins with those maxims cheekily attributed to the Deity by the compilers of Leviticus—maxims that place the love of neighbor next to the love of God...
...Paul, the Islamic Enlightenment attempted to show that God accepts the freedom conferred on his creatures, and is more interested in loving than controlling them...
...He was incensed by heresy and proved the absolute orthodoxy of his views by cutting off the heads of those who disagreed with them...
...The movement that he began was one of sectarian violence, of witch-hunts against heretics and terrorist strikes against the infidel...
...Profoundly influenced by neoPlatonism, the Sufis had no difficulty in recognizing the centrality of erotic feeling to the human condition...
...monument-destroying rage extirpated what was left of Arabian civilization...
...The massacres and genocides that fill the pages of history have their origins in something far deeper than belief, and it is one of the tasks of religion to face up to this deeper thing, to conjure it from the darkness, to wrestle with it, and to cast it out...
...Wine is banned, and women are hidden...
Vol. 41 • May 2008 • No. 4
