Islam and Christianity from a Schoun Viewpoint

I have been referred to an article at a website called sacredweb.com. The article, “Shadows and Strife: Reflections on the Confrontation of Islam and the West" by Rodney Blackhirst and Kenneth Oldmeadow, purports to look in-depth at the conflict between Christianity and Islam that was highlighted by the events of 9/11.

I originally expected a dispassionate analysis. Then I detected what seemed to be a Leftist bent. But then it veered into Islamic justification. Followed by an incorrect analysis of the Protestant Crusades against the Iberian enslavement by Muslim conquerors. And periodically back to deploring McDonald’s and Coca Cola in the Islamic world (which of course would not be over there if there were not daily customers for their products). And back and forth yielding no conclusion or conclusive information until nearly the end.

The article was written shortly after the 9/11 attack. I am forced to ask, yet again, in the face of the 9/11 attack: Is it the fault of the USA that we were attacked? Are we so evil that we are deserving of this? Is that not like blaming the rape victim for the action of the rapist? Yet: Is the US evil? Does the US intervene improperly, without provocation, without giving the Other a chance to stop doing [X]? Ask the Grenadans: should we not have intervened? Ask the Panamanians. In retrospect, perhaps the support which the US gave for strong governance in the Islamic world was the only way to ensure stability and minimal bloodshed. Removal of strong leaders, dictators to be sure, has resulted in more bloodshed and suffering than their governance caused. Certainly Sadam and Sons were brutal mass murderers and rapists. But total up the score since their removal, and its ongoing consequences what with one Islamic faction mass murdering another Islamic faction and Christians purged totally. And I ask myself, is the world better off with Iran under Shiite Islam than it would have been under the Shah?

So I backed up and asked, who are these authors? What is their background? And as far as I can determine, they are likely sociologists and they are acolytes of Frithjof Schoun.

Here was the clincher for me:

“it is important to remember the common roots of Islam and Christianity and to think of Islamic and Western civilizations as two sides of the same thing with Islamic/West tensions (as the Algerian scholar Hichim Djait put it) as “a battle raging in a single system.” Within this single system Protestantism (especially in its Calvinist forms) is the ultimate Christian response to Islam or, to borrow ideas from scholars like Norman Cohn, it is like a “shadow”, the “tails” side of the coin.”

This is patently absurd. Islam does not have roots in common with Christianity: Islam was a creation of a bloodthirsty madman mass-murderer and child rapist, who used the defective tales of Christianity that wound their way into Arabic culture on camelback to create a means to power. Further, to say that Protestant Christianity is a response to Islam is false. That statement appears to be an attempt to marginalize Christianity based on the irrationality of Islam.

“However, to understand Islam/West relations one must appreciate that it is not a clash of polar opposites but of contending similars. A recent commentator asked: “But why has all the trouble of the crusades and the whole history of enmity between Islam and Christendom been heaped upon the USA?” It is a good question. There is more to it than just the fact that the USA is an historical extension of European civilization. It is the nature of American Protestantism and its influence upon American ideology that really clashes with Islam, and they clash because, at their deepest levels, they are contending similars.

To sustain this view, of course, we must, as with traditionalist thinking generally, regard Protestantism (Calvinism especially) as, in a sense, an aberration or a perversion of the Christian tradition, a pathology created by the irritant Islam (within the single system). To put it plainly, the threat of Islam twisted Christianity out of shape.”

This is a perversion of history. The creation of Protestantism had everything to do with Roman Catholic abuses and nothing to do with Islam. Luther’s 95 Theses are absolutely NOT about Islam, they are about the doctrinal and functional abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, none of which involved Islam in any fashion. The RCC in turn fought to purge the Protestants. No Muslim involvement.

The Crusades (1096 to 1292) were offensives to recapture the Iberian peninsula from enslavement by the Muslims. Christian survivors were the slaves of the Muslims. The Protestant movement against RCC corruption occurred beginning in 1517. It was not a reaction of any sort against Islam.

And it becomes more ridiculous:

“To exaggerate the point: Protestantism is a Christian imitation of Islam, a Christianity adapted to Islam. The identification of America as the Great Satan, and converse Western portrayals of various brooding, turban-clad villains as the personification of living evil, take us very deep into a schizoid “single system” that is defining world events and the trajectory of our times.”

Protestantism is a return to the principles of the red print in the Bible; The Catholic church had taken upon itself some of the powers of God. Such power corrupted the Church, and the Protestant movement starting with Luther’s 95 Theses wanted to reform the Church, but was forced to secede from it. If anything, Islam is an epiphenomenon of Christianity.

This sort of perversion of history eliminates any truth value that might have been contained in this article. However, it is part of the cant of Shoun’s religio perennis, that there is one single religion underlying all religions.

Then, having corrupted the history of Christian Protestantism, the authors proceed to corrupt the tenets of Islam:

” Terrorism of the kind we have seen this week is clearly quite incompatible with the actual teachings of the Prophet and of the Islamic tradition. Both suicide and the taking of innocent lives are unequivocally prohibited by The Qur’an whilst jihad is in its fullest sense a spiritual ideal of self-conquest, and on the material and social plane can only constitute a defensive war to protect the faith and the faithful.”

This is unconscionably wrong. What the teachings of the Prophet say depends upon two things: which part of which Surah you happen to be reading, and which imam or mullah you choose to “interpret” it for you. READ THE QUR’AN. Then re-read this article. The Qur’an necessitates violent conquest. To deny that is either a delusion or a purposeful illusion.

I tried to stop reading at the point where the wisdom of ALL religious leaders of the past is invoked, including Muhammad(!):

” At times like these we would do well to return to the teachings of the great spiritual figures and ask ourselves what light they might be able to shed on these events, on our responses, on our ways of understanding ourselves and our world. One thinks of the great foundational teachers—Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, Guru Nanak to name a few—and of more recent leaders and thinkers who have confronted some of the deepest moral-political dilemmas of our time, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.”

But it is fascinating to see what else can be made up by these two. So I continued.

” In the last few centuries European civilisation has itself been the agent for the disruption and extirpation of traditional cultures the world over.”

I agree that the American Indian is now hardpressed to live within his traditional culture. But European civilization as “the agent”, world over? Not the communism (fascism in disguise) of the non-european USSR, China, Asian peninsula? Well, OK: the original communism was a European book. Were these not then the image of people of the Book, referred to earlier? These people of the Book, actually adopted and implemented the principles of the Book modified by the principles of the Book of Fascism. That was not the work of European civilization, which fought to rid itself of those things. And how does this relate to 9/11?

Moving on:

”The sophia perennis, ultimately, can lead us to that “light that is neither of the East nor the West” (the Qur’an: 24,35). It is the light towards which we are beckoned by the great mystics of all traditions, the light that moved Rumi to say:
“I am neither Christian nor Jew nor Parsi nor Muslim. I am neither of the East nor of the West, neither of the land nor sea... I have put aside duality and have seen that the two worlds are one. I seek the One, I know the One, I see the One, I invoke the One. He is the First, he is the Last, he is the Outward, he is the Inward.”

The Perennial Truth, or sophia perennis, is the work of Frithjof Schuon. It is based on the idea that all religions have a common metaphysic and that “God is the center: all paths lead to him”. This is a nice thought but intractably false. Buddhism has no god; Hinduism has 300,000,000 gods. The god of Islam is demonstrably not the God of Christianity. To think that they are the same underneath, a different facet of a single deity, a metaphysical fact of commonality concealed by literalist dogma, is wishful thinking, unsupported by any of the religions or any revelation for that matter. And logically unsupported also.

But the point is that this article was written from the religio perennis viewpoint, by two adherents who are probably sociologists and who are seeking to provide a truth value for their Shuonic religion. In other words, a rationalized approach which has an answer first, and supplies data (however tortured) to support the answer. Even that, though, does not justify the errors that have been foisted upon history here. Much of this writing is just false.

It is necessary from the Schuon viewpoint to associate all religions as limited facets of the same thing. This is the “insight” that is being wound toward, and is the reason for the fabricated history, which must be pounded into the correct placement in order for the common metaphysic to be accomplished.

If I had any respect for Shuon before this, it is now gone.