The Prospects and Perils of Catholic-Muslim Dialogue by Robert R. Reilly

Author:Robert R. Reilly [Reilly, Robert R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Isaac Publishing
Published: 2014-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Prospects for Dialogue

What is revealed here and in other Catholic-Muslim dialogues, as mentioned before, is the profound problem of the ontological status of reason. Unless reason is embedded in God’s very being, unless He is Logos, humans would not be able to apprehend “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Such statements would be pure pretension, as would be the assertion that humans have inalienable rights, such as freedom of conscience and religion.

In conversation with a student in Rome, Benedict XVI made a statement that neatly summarizes the core of what is at stake for both Islam and the Catholic Church in any future dialogue. I will omit only one word from it, indicated by empty brackets. He said that “There are only two options. Either one recognizes the priority of reason, of creative Reason that is at the beginning of all things and is the principle of all things – the priority of reason is also the priority of freedom – or one holds the priority of the irrational, inasmuch as everything that functions on our earth and in our lives would be only accidental, marginal, an irrational result – reason would be a product of irrationality. One cannot ultimately ‘prove’ either project, but the great option of [ ] is the option for rationality and for the priority of reason. This seems to me to be an excellent option, which shows us that behind everything is a great Intelligence to which we can entrust ourselves.”

Of course, the missing word in the bracket is “Christianity.” The question is whether the word “Islam” could be inserted in its stead and the statement still be read correctly. Does Islam still have the option open for the priority of reason? As we have seen, it most certainly attempted to exercise that option under the Mu‘tazilites at a time generally acknowledged as being the apogee of Arab Islamic culture. One could have substituted the word “Islam” at that time, and the statement above would otherwise have stood unaltered as an expression of Mu‘tazilite beliefs.

There are Muslim thinkers today who are attempting something similar. There is a new venue in which to see what they have to say: the website Almuslih.org (the reformer). (It is in both Arabic and English.) There, some of the most brilliant minds in the Arab world, such as writer Sayyid al-Qimny, Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, the former Dean of Islamic Law at Qatar University, and Hassan Mneimneh, director of the Iraq Memory Foundation, and others address the situation today and what must be done to secure a democratic future with human rights. Invariably, they address the problem of the Islamic culture and cult from which it has come.

These reformers included the recently deceased Tunisian philosopher Lafif Lakhdar, one of the brightest lights in the Muslim world, who called for “an acceptance of the division between the domains of faith and politics.” He also stated that a reformed Islam “ends the conception of the world divided up into an Abode

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