Posted on 12/01/2003 6:20:40 PM PST by quidnunc
"The coming millennium will go down in world history as a struggle between Orient and Occident, between the church and Islam, between the Germanic peoples and the Arabs," proclaimed Franz Rosenzweig in 1920. These ominous words appear in a collection of the German-Jewish theologian's writings about Islam, published in Berlin earlier this year. It is the most dangerous book I have read in a generation, for Rosenzweig (1886-1929) considered Islam a pagan "parody", "caricature" and "plagiarism" of Christianity and Judaism.
"Why publish a book of Rosenzweig's writings on Islam now? Doesn't that pour oil onto the fire in which the Western world sees the lands of Islam as a feared and despised enemy?" asks the book's co-editor Gesine Palmer, a theologian associated with the German Evangelical Church. A fair question: for good or ill, the Rosenzweig revival is a hallmark of civilizational war.
By coincidence, the neo-conservative icon Leo Strauss was a Rosenzweig protege, having spent 1922-1925 at the latter's Frankfurt Lehrhaus for Jewish education. Later Strauss rejected Rosenzweig in favor of what he called classical political rationalism. In so doing, I argued previously, (Neo-cons in a religious bind, June 5), Strauss became "irrelevant to what neo-conservatives call World War IV because it is a civilizational war, that is to say, a religious war".
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Mix these elements together, and the iron fist of religious war pokes through the velvet glove of enlightened ecumenism. Since Voltaire and Lessing, the enlightened view has held that minor details distinguish the "three great monotheistic religions". Rosenzweig, however, provides sophisticated intellectual support for the anti-Islamic gut instinct of American Christians.
Most of the German-language material in the Palmer-Schwartz collection can be found easily in Rosenzweig's book The Star of Redemption, available in English translation. Few Americans have the training to read it, for Rosenzweig writes in the extinct dialect of Kantian idealism. What he says about Islam, however, is reasonably straightforward. I translate from the present edition and summarize below.
Judaism began with a people, and then became a congregation, and eventually a religion, Rosenzweig argues. Christianity began with a congregation into which it then selected its people, the "new Israel". Islam, he avers, was concocted as an institutionalized religion to begin with, as a parody of Judaism and Christianity. This, however, had dreadful consequences. "Mohammed took over the notion of Revelation from the outside, which left him stuck with the pagan idea of creation as a matter of course," Rosenzweig wrote.
Allah merely is the apotheosized image of an Oriental despot, emphatically not the Judeo-Christian God of love. Rosenzweig altogether repudiates the notion of Islamic culture. As a caricature, Islam is entirely sterile: "Islam never created an Islamic art, but rather took into its service pre-Islamic art … The pre-Islamic state, namely the Oriental state in its Byzantine form, made Islam into its state religion; the pre-Islamic spirit of the Koran adopted either pre-Islamic rationalism or mysticism and orthodoxy. In Europe, by contrast, in Christian Europe, there arose something new: Christian art, and a Christian state."
Love requires the Judeo-Christian God to create the world. By contrast, "the God of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily. By contrast, it is most characteristic of rabbinic theology that it formulates our concept of the divine power to create in the question as to whether God created the world out of love or out of righteousness."
Allah's creation for Rosenzweig is a mere act of "magic". Muslim theology "presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah … despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism."
By paganism Rosenzweig refers to a specific mindset as well as a political system which crushes individual identity into the whole. In the pagan state, he wrote in the Star, "The individual does not stand in relation to the state in the way that a part stands in relation to the whole. On the contrary, the state is all, and its electricity pulses through the veins of every individual." Unfortunately, Palmer and Schwartz do not include in their edition this and other relevant passages about paganism in general.
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(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
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The oil and fire are already there in montrrous abundance. Islam has killed millions in conquering 1/5th of the world. It will continue to do so at every opportunity. 9/11 just gave us a small dose of what has been happening world wide in recent periods as well as throughout the last 1,400 years. The question is whether we are going to surrender in political correctness and cowardice, or whether we are going to confront Islam for the aggressive madness and threat to the rest of the world that it it is. As far as irritating Islamics, they were born irritated.
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