FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Freethinker of Islam

Rant Number 421 8 December 2010

Freethinker of Islam

Who wrote the treatise De Tribus Impostoribus? ‘The Three Cheats’. The title of an anonymous, blasphemous pamphlet back in the Middle Ages. Hazardous material. Possession of it might have got you jailed, tortured and burnt at the stake. Because, scurrilously, the putative ‘imposters’ or deceivers of humanity were no less than the great founders of the three monotheistic religions: Moses, Christ and Muhammad. No wonder the author kept out of sight...

Many historical figures were fingered as responsible for De Tribus Impostoribus. From Emperor Friedrich II to Lord Herbert of Cherbury (An Englishman! Huh! It’d figure.) Actually, it might have been a Muslim. Chap called Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Zakarya Al-Razi. A celebrated physician and philosopher. His prolific works ranged from logic, cosmology, optics, theology, ethics, mathematics, chemistry, alchemy and of course maladies, such as a treatise on smallpox and measles. 17th century Europe was still using one of Razi’s big textbooks.

Razi’s medical authority is not in doubt. His attack prophecy, however, is pretty low. Professors Kraus and Pines write that Razi’s books contained ‘the most violent polemic against religion that appeared in the course of the middle ages’. Not bad for a Muslim, eh? Still, faith impels me to criticise Razi’s critique.

Razi asserts that prophecy is either imposture or nonsense: ‘How can a reasonable man believe in those old wives’ tales, based on contradictions, obdurate ignorance and dogmatic assertion? How can an all-wise Creator have chosen for himself one special people, so setting men in conflict with each other? Causing much strife, wars and bloodshed?’ He also claims that prophets are deluded. Demonic forces, natural or supernatural, deceive them.

But don’t most human beings need some kind of guidance? Yes, Razi replies, but human reason, intelligence are all humanity needs. And that it already has. Equally distributed across the whole human race. Don’t look outside for direction, look inside. The universal, equal gift of reason will suffice to guide you through the storms and stresses of earthly life.

For Razi the miracles performed by Moses and Jesus were cheats. But he gives no argument for that. He just asserts it. To call miracles ‘old wives’ tales’ is purely rhetorical or emotive language. Also,a case of petitio principi. The logical fallacy of begging the question at issue. Not too good for a logician...

But what about Muhammad? Muslims say his greatest miracle was the Qur’an. Which is inimitable – no one can produce anything like it, according to Islam. A putative proof of its divine origin. But we know Razi denied i‘jaz, the thesis of the inimitability of the Book. Hence the prophet of Islam must share the fate of Moses and Jesus in our freethinker’s demonology.

Next, equality. Here Razi seems on stronger ground. All human beings are equal – it would be a brave person who was to deny that in our egalitarian age. As brave as declaiming aloud sections of De Tribus Impostoribus before the Ka’aba in Mecca during the Haj. And the faculty of reason is equally spread throughout, no? Hence no need for prophets, for holy messengers, carriers of special revelation & holy books – your reason affords you all the light you need.

Funny, I don’t quite get this. Human beings – physically equal? Certainly not, otherwise every person would be an Olympic athlete. Don’t fret – I admit physical equality is not the issue. But then what? Intellectually equal? Hmmm...so every person must be a Newton, an Einstein or a Stephen Hawking – every thicky is as good as a genius. Artistically equal? Every maker of daubs is a Rembrandt, a Picasso, and every teenage dope-head a Beethoven or a Mozart. Morally equal? Everyone, even the denizens of Brixton Prison, is sensitive, warm, kind, selfless, caring, like Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Inayat Khan. It must be so. Fine. No problem, then. All kosher.

Actually, all human beings partake generically of the faculty of reason in the sense of being naturally endowed with intelligence and language use, that is a given. But a potential, natural capacity and its exercise are not the same. There are often social, educational, vocational, genetic, even ethnic reasons why many people will not actualise their potentialities. (Some may never have had them, alas.) Hence, empirically speaking, not all members of the human race are intellectually on a par. Prophecy is needed, at least for most.

Further, a certain Abu Hatim, an Ismaili writer, advanced an interesting objection. If all people really are intellectually equal and there is no need for special guides like the prophets, why is our Abu Bakr al-Razi setting himself up as a teacher and a guide? Is he claiming he made a great discovery his predecessors did not know? Then there must be at least one intellectually superior mind, that of Razi himself, and it is not true that all people are equal in the requisite sense. I would humbly add that Razi has been called ‘the unsurpassed physician of Islam’. He was a sharp critic of a famous forerunner, the Greek physician Galen. He also diverged from Muslim orthodoxy by positing not just one eternal being, God, but five Eternals. Hence Razi must have had a rather high, non-egalitarian view of himself as a thinker...

As for religion causing conflicts, wars and blah, blah, blah. Sure, but ideologues powered by ‘reason’, like the French revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, the imperialist fighters of WWI and II, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, democratic exporters of ‘freedom’ like Blair and Bush – they too have generated untold human misery, pain and sufferings. So, if you wanted to minimise human-made evils, your targets today should not be mainly religious, media lies notwithstanding.

As to brave champion of reason, the philosophers, they too squabble, fight and contradict themselves a great deal. Schopenhauer called Fichte, Hegel and Schelling ‘The Three Charlatans’. Verily, this hoax is undying.

The priest concludes that Razi’s strictures on religion are invalid. Clearly, he was too presumptuous, big-headed for his own good – literally, as he had ‘a large head, shaped like a sack’. Still, I like a statement he made towards the end of his life. Having gone blind, he refused an operation to restore his sight: ‘I have seen enough of the world’, he declared.

Spoken like a true philosopher.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli