Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Isma'l R. al Frq

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Jan., 1968), pp. 110-111
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1201909 .
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The
Journal
of
Religion
of salvation
by
faith
("not
void of
works"),
the
operations
of
grace,
and the divine
gift
of free
will-perhaps
the most central and
passionate
of Milton's convictions
(Patrides
finds
Milton,
like
others,
less than
satisfactory
in his
handling
of this hard
question).
In connection with the last two books of Paradise
Lost,
a
chapter
on "The
Christian View of
History"
is
abridged
from the author's
monograph
on that
subject.
He ends with the "last
things": death,
the
resurrection,
the
judgment,
and
eternity.
Throughout
his
book,
Patrides'
very
full
documentation,
in both text and
notes,
if at moments it threatens to obscure
Milton,
serves
everywhere
to
place
him in the
central or the sometimes
divergent
currents of
patristic
and Reformation
theology.
In
opposition
to those who would make Milton too
broadly Christian,
he
emphasizes
the Protestantism of both the treatise and the
poem;
but he does not take the one as a
sufficient
gloss
on the other. This authoritative book is
manifestly
of
great
value for
both students of Milton and students of Reformation
theology
and the traditions it
inherited and modified.
DOUGLAS
BUSH, Cambridge,
Mass.
RAHMAN,
FAZLUR.
Islam. New
York:
Holt,
Rinehart &
Winston, 1966.
xi
+
271 pages
including Bibliography. $8.95.
Claimed
by
its
publishers
as the work of an author who writes "as a Muslim"
(dust
jacket)
and
by
its author as an
interpretation
"in an Islamic sense"
(Preface),
this
book is a
descriptive
and
interpretive
account of Islam and of the
general history
of
ideas in the Muslim world.
Beginning
with a brief historical
survey-Muhammad
and the
Qur'an-the
book turns to the
prophetic traditions-law, theology, philoso-
phy, mysticism,
the
sects, education,
reform movements-and concludes with a
chapter
entitled
"Legacy
and
Prospects."
The book is
certainly
one of the most
comprehensive
in the field and is
very
well written.
It is not
by
accident that the first sentence of this book refers to H. A. R. Gibb. The
latter has been the author's teacher at
Oxford;
and his
book, Mohammedanism,
the
author's
guide
and model.
Indeed,
a
single
look at the two tables of contents reveals
the
identity
of the ideational
plans
or frameworks of the two books.
In the
analyses
of the
Prophet's
life and of the
Qur'an
the author has indeed written
as an
objective
scholar and a committed
Muslim;
in that of the historical
develop-
ment,
as an
objective scholar;
and in that of the
prospect
of
Islam,
as neither. He sees
the
problem
of the modern Muslim as one of "how to transform this transcendence
[of
the transcendent realm of God and the other
world]
into some form ofimmanence"
(p. 229). Recognizing
that "such a transformation has
partly
taken
place
in the
West" and that "the Western modern
[sic!
Professor Fazlur Rahman has not heard
of the
Incarnation!]
mind has transformed the notion of transcendence into imman-
ence,"
he bemoans that "in Islam the
question
has not
yet
been raised"
(p. 230).
The fact is that as
quintessence
of and heir to
Semitic,
rather than Greek or ancient
Egyptian religion,
normative
scriptural
Islam has taken its stand on
transcendence,
the
metaphysical,
ontic
disparity
of creator and
creature,
of God and
man,
of God
and
world,
and
repudiated every attempt
at
confusing, infusing,
or
uniting
the two
despite
the
possibility
of a
cognition by
man of the
ought-to-be issuing
from the
transcendent realm. The author is
pleading
here
aginst
a
6,ooo-year-old
wisdom
which,
for the
Muslim,
is itself a divine communication about
divinity.
Throughout
the
chapters
on modernism and the
future,
the author confuses Islam
with Muslim ideas about Islam. Like the lesser
variety
of uninstructed
anthropologists,
he accuses "Islam" of
having "partly compromised
with this
process...
of
history
... at the
political
level in the
post-classical period
and at the
spiritual
level in the
I IO
Book Notes
later Middle
Ages" (p. 235). Further,
he accuses ibn
Taymiyah
of
accepting
the
dictum,
"The sultan
(the political authority)
is the shadow of God on earth" as a
hadith of the
Prophet (p. 239)-which
is
plainly
false. Ibn
Taymiyah prefaced
the
statement with
"ruwiya," usually preceding
a common
saying,
and nowhere claims
for it the status either of "hadith" or
"quasi-hadith." Moreover,
to accuse Ibn
Taymiyah
of
contributing
to the
absurdity
that "an
unjust
ruler is the shadow of God
on earth"
(p. 239)
is to misunderstand the
quotation,
the
page, chapter,
and book in
which it occurred as well as the whole
message
of Ibn
Taymiyah dedicated,
as it
were,
to arouse the Muslims to shake off the absolutist
yoke
of
Genghis
Khan's
Muslim descendants. He
imputes
to Sunnism the "extreme" of
"uncompromising
determinism"
(p. 241-42), forgetting
that no Sunni determinism ever denied human
responsibility,
however extreme was its submissiveness to divine
omnipotence
and
decree. The author
speaks
of "official
theology" (p. 244),
a notion which is
likely
to
consternate his fellow
Muslims,
that
is,
if
they
had not
by
then been insensed at the
historistic,
reductionist claims that " the doctrine of the Will and Power of God ...
was accentuated
by
Sunnism to meet a
particular challenge
in
history" (p. 242);
that "historical
exigencies... [were]
erected into a
permanent
orthodox
dogma"
(p. 243). Surely
the diatribe that "in the orthodox
dogmatic thesaurus,
there is little
that can counterbalance these
principles
. .. of a sure
fatality
of the moral
sense,"
of
Islam's version of "the Christian doctrine of
'Justification by
Faith"'
(p. 243)
is
uncalled for
by any
standard. With neither evidence nor
sensitivity,
he calls the third
generations
of Muslims
(in
the second
century A.H.),
who
stood at the
apex
of Muslim
and world
power,
affluence and
glory, "politically
disillusioned and
morally
starved
masses...
[whom]
the
public preachers...
consoled and
satisfied..,
.by holding
out Messianic
hopes" (p. 245).
Examples
of this abound in the last three
chapters, raising
the
question
of the
general
character of this book. The
publishers
included it in their
"History
of
Religion" series,
edited
by
E.
O. James.
But is it not a cardinal
principle
of
Religion-
swissenschaft
to
put
one's own
presuppositions
in
ipdchi
when
writing
about
religion?
that an
engagement
in the faith under
question,
where it
occurs,
should
help
reveal the
eidos of the
phenomenon investigated
? that to
explain
a
religious
datum
merely by
the
historical context
attending
its birth is historical reductionism? This book leaves
much to be desired on each of these counts. It
may
not be
argued
that the
author,
being
a
Muslim,
is entitled to see his faith as he
pleases,
without
implying
offense to
scholarship.
On the other
hand,
Western orientalists
may rejoice that, finally,
a
Muslim scholar has learned to
speak
their
language
and direct to Islam the same old
accusations
they
had so
long imputed
to the faith of their adversaries. The fact
remains that for Muslims this book is an
inseparable part
of Western literature on
Islam.
ISMA'IL
R. AL
FXRUEQI,
Syracuse University.
ROBERTSON,
EDWIN H.
(ed.).
The
Way
to Freedom:
Letters,
Lectures and
Notes, 1935-1939,
from
the Collected Works
of
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer.
Vol. II. Translated
by
EDWIN H.
ROBERTSON and
JOHN BOWDEN;
with an Introduction
by
EDWIN H. ROBERTSON.
New York:
Harper
&
Row, 1966. 272 pages. $4.50.
The
Way
to Freedom is the second of the three volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's
collected works
being
edited
by
Edwin H. Robertson for the
English-reading public.
The selections are taken from the four
large
volumes of Bonhoeffer's Gesammelte
Schriften (Munich, 1958-61)
and are
arranged chronologically.
Whereas the first
volume,
No
Rusty
Swords
(New York, 1965),
had sections entitled "The
Making
of a
III