First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Encountering Islam

Do not let them tell you that it can’t be done. Whatever you read, whatever you watch on CNN, however fashionable the sophisticated despair of the moment, don’t buy into the notion that it is impossible. Make a sign, and hang it on your bathroom mirror, read it every morning; "We have been down this road before." The process of dehumanization, the manufacture of mortal enemies, is underway. Inflaming the passions of the ignorant and credulous is easy; we are the ones who are hard – or we ought to be. Tying reason, compassion, the commitment to tolerance into an impotent knot – that is the real challenge to the would be tyrant. Make us believe that no one could live in peace with Muslims, that it is silly, delusional to try; get us on the bandwagon, agreeing that tolerance in general is a good thing, with this one obvious exception, that Islam is such a fundamentally flawed faith that it must be destroyed in order for the rest of us to be able to practice our tolerance. Use our own darkest humanist suspicions against us – that all religions are evil, but some are more evil than others, more urgent to eradicate – all in the name of freedom. It is what they said about the Jews, about the Japanese, the Native Americans, the heathens, the Africans – it was never true, in the end, but it always served the purpose of the moment well enough.

It is in the air again, friends; don’t believe it. Don’t let them tell you that there could never be a great civilization founded upon this primitive, superstitious, oppressive faith; that we the intelligent, we the modern, we the advocates of freedom and peace, could never live in creative harmony with these fanatics. Don’t let them tell you that it can’t be done, because it has been. And we who think of ourselves as Unitarian Universalists and humanists today, owe the very existence of these religious identities directly to the historical impact and influence of Islam. This morning I want to tell you three stories from the roots of our tradition, and I want you to remember them profoundly as this conversation heats up in our popular culture over the coming weeks and months and years. Don’t let them tell you that it can’t be done, because once upon a time, in a strange and marvelous place now lost, as surely as Atlantis or Camelot are lost, it happened.

Just for a frame of historical reference, let us recall that from the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the 13 original colonies in 1776, the United States of America has now existed officially for not yet quite 250 years. By historical convention, the Muslim empire on the Iberian peninsula, identified in English as Andalusia, spanned a period of more than seven centuries, three times as long as our own ‘most powerful nation in the history of the world’ has yet endured. From the advent of the Umayyad dynasty in 750, to the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews by fundamentalist Catholic monarchs in 1492, Al-Andalus, as it call itself, evolved into the intellectual and artistic center of the western hemisphere. In that place, during those centuries, the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, lived and worked and thought and prayed and built and fought side by side with one another, in a society controlled by Islamic rulers, but constituted by the interaction and mutual formation of these three distinct and interwoven world views and their adherents. For three times as long as it has been since George Washington’s threadbare troops crossed the Delaware in service of our modern notions of democracy, the Muslim culture of Al-Andalus struggled and thrived in its diversity, and laid the foundations for Europe’s intellectual resurrection and the eventual emergence of modernity.

There are three stories you need to know, that each turn upon something that happened in this remarkable era, in what Maria Menocal calls ‘a first-rate place’. The first of these episodes is the European rediscovery of Aristotle’s philosophy. It is perhaps too much to say that the texts themselves were lost after the fall of Rome; ‘temporarily mis-laid’ maybe. In fact, many of the Greek originals of the pre-Christian era thinkers survived, neglected in isolated monasteries, or studied in fragments by individual scholars. One of the engines of the Renaissance would be the enthusiastic and often successful treasure hunt initiated by Italian intellectuals to discover, re-unite, re-translate, and publish these remnants of the ancient golden age of philosophy. Yet this jubilant resurrection would not have gotten off the ground had it not been for the Muslim teachers of Andalusia, such as Ibn Rushd, or as he was known in the west, Averroes, who knew Aristotle from translations into Arabic, and who struggled in the tension between the philosopher’s reasoned observation of the world and the demands of revealed religion. That argument had been intellectually dormant in Christian-dominated western Europe; the principle reason for the neglect of the classical thinkers was the condemnation of the church, which recognized the dangers posed by such ideas to its paradigm of unquestioning faith.

Yet in the Andalusian city of Toledo, in the year 1136, a group of Christian monks, Jewish sages and Muslim teachers gathered to study together a new translation of Aristotle's De Anima. And it was through the commentaries and studies emerging from those sorts of scholarly endeavors that the provocative questions and theories of the ancient Greek thinkers began to create new excitement in the university classrooms of Paris, where the Catholic church anxiously and repeatedly banned their being taught. Although thinkers like the Christian Thomas Aquinas and the Muslim al-Ghazali would ultimately restore for the orthodox the primacy of acceptance in faith, nevertheless the ground had been laid for an enduring intellectual skepticism, a fuse that would in the course of history ignite the flames of the Enlightenment, and give substance to the formulation of modern humanism.

The next story, foundational to the heritage of what will become in our own day Unitarian Universalism, takes place in the aftermath, following the fall of Al-Andalus in 1492, when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella betrayed the last Muslim cities, and expelled the Moors and the Jews from Spain. It is easy to remember; the sun set definitively on this remnant of the old world in the same year that Columbus sailed to make enduring connections with the new world. I must trouble you with dates for a moment longer; in 1511, eighteen years after that fateful banishment, a child was born in the province of Huesca in Aragon, and given the name Miguel de Servet. He was a precocious boy; perhaps today we would diagnose him as somewhere on the spectrum of autism interpersonally, but he was plainly academically brilliant. By the time he was 13 years old, he spoke not only his native Spanish, Latin, and Greek, but also Hebrew, which it was a crime to learn or to teach – the assumption being that only Jews, who were supposed to have left the country, would have knowledge of it.

Young Miguel, smart and curious, grew up in a culture saturated with the intellectual and aesthetic influence of Islam, amidst the living memory, barely two decades old, of the religious diversity that had once characterized Al-Andalus. Within his own young lifetime, he witnessed the rise to power of the Spanish Inquisition, a fatal combination of the authority of the Catholic church with the state prerogatives of Catholic royalty. The initial purpose of this organization was to investigate the authenticity of alleged conversions to Christianity. Whenever Jews and Muslims were expelled from a region, there was almost always a triple choice offered them; leave the country, be martyred for their faith, or convert to the doctrines of the crown. Certainly many pragmatic Muslims and Jews, who were not highly invested in their religious identities and were not eager to leave their businesses, properties, and familiar surroundings, found it easier to embrace the third option. They became known as Moriscos – "little Moors" – and Maranos – literally "pigs," both as an epithet, and as a reference to their reluctance to eat pork. While some of these conversions were genuine, many others produced communities of crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims, who continued to believe and practice their original faiths in secret. Orthodox Catholic regimes became obsessed with eradicating these falsely converted Christians, whom they regarded as a threat both to the purity of the church, and to civil order. Some historians believe that Miguel de Servet’s mother was descended from such a Converso family of former Jews; perhaps this would explain how he had access to learn Hebrew. Undoubtedly he grew up witnessing the oppression and suffering that resulted from this attempt to enforce Christianity as the only true faith, in a society that less than twenty years before his birth had openly acknowledged the legitimacy of two other insistently monotheistic religious traditions. During his childhood, courts of the Inquisition were being established one after another where people could be tortured, strangled, and burned at the stake for religious convictions that their parents had openly practiced, and the most marked difference between the accepted and unacceptable theologies was the doctrine of the trinity. When he went off to college, at the age of 14 or 15, Miguel taught himself to read Arabic, for the specific purpose of being able to study the Islamic scriptures of the Quran in their original language.

Is it any wonder then, that in the intellectual arrogance of his 20^th year, after serving several terms as private secretary to an influential Catholic official, the young man Miguel took advantage of the newest technology in communications, and had printed a book, denouncing the distinctive Christian doctrine of the trinity? We know him today, of course, by his latin name, Michael Servetus; his two famous religious treatises, On the Errors of the Trinity, and The Restitution of Christianity, eventually got him burned at the stake by John Calvin, and are now regarded as some of the theological foundations of Unitarianism in western history. Servetus’s rejection of contentious dogmas, like the trinity and infant baptism, and his interest in religious diversity and tolerance, did not arise in a vacuum. They are the fading echoes of Andalusia, a last sad, and even angry, reprise of that era when Christians, Muslims, and Jews could explore their faiths and argue their philosophies in some degree of intellectual freedom. It is not too much to say that the martyr to whom we trace the origins of Unitarianism proper was a last fruit of the quintessentially Islamic culture of al-Andalus.

The third vignette in this trio begins in 1463, thirty years before Isabella and Ferdinand would complete the dismantling of Al-Andalus by formally expelling Jews and Muslims from Spain. On the other end of Europe, in the east, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II conquered what is now known as Bosnia-Herzegovina. As part of the establishment of his administration, he issued what has come down to us as his ahdnama, or proclaimed vow, which says in part:

Carefully preserved by the Christian monastery community to which it applied, this ahdnama is an example of the religious tolerance that was generally characteristic of the Ottoman administration throughout its empire’s 600 year history. My colleague and scholar Susan Ritchie quotes an edict from the following century, issued by the Pasha of Buda in 1548, which sought to suppress disputes between Catholic authorities and Protestant-leaning clergy in the town of Tolna, (in present day Hungary), which the Pasha ruled. It says in part:

It is impossible not to hear the echo of these words in the familiar text of the Edict of religious toleration issued at Torda two decades later by the Transylvanian parliament, and affirmed by the Unitarian King John Sigismund. While Ritchie observes that there is no demonstrable direct textual connection, the fact remains that at the time when the famous preacher Francis David, who would later advocate for Unitarian views and for principles of toleration at Sigismund’s court, was still serving as superintendent of the Magyar Lutheran churches, the Pasha’s edict concerning Tolna would have been the basis on which his congregations maintained their right to exist. The Edict of Torda in 1658, that first example of religious toleration to be promulgated in the west, is not, as we are sometimes invited to believe, a sudden, spontaneous flowering of forward-thinking European Enlightenment genius; rather, it is the natural progression of a policy and a philosophy that informed the Muslim Ottoman empire as well as the Muslim Andalusian culture over centuries. Both of our Unitarian monarchs, King John Sigismund, and his mother, Princess Isabella of Poland, who served as regent during his childhood, were protectorates of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the magnificent. If it had not been for his watchful eye from Istanbul, and his occasional military forays into eastern Europe, Unitarian Transylvania would quickly have been swallowed up, as it in fact was following Sigismund’s death, by the Catholic Hapsburg empire.

If not for the scholars of al-Andalus, there might have been no rediscovery of Aristotle to kick-start the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, thus to support the emergence of modern humanism. Without the recent memory of a religiously pluralistic society, Michael Servetus might have confined his quirky brilliance to the study of medicine, and ignored theology. Had the Ottoman empire not protected Isabella and John Sigismund, and modeled for them the structures of religious tolerance, institutional Unitarianism might never have gained its original foothold in the mountains of Transylvania. If it were not for the political, cultural and intellectual heritage of Islam, we would not be here in this room together, identified as Unitarian Universalist humanists, thinking as we do, today. In an era when Christianity had no response to the existence of other faiths but the crusade, the pogrom, and the inquisition, Muslim governments formulated practices of accommodation that enabled their citizens of diverse faiths to live in relative security, prosperity, and shared scholarship. There is no need to romanticize these achievements beyond their realities; religious prejudices, privileges, and even violence were still part of the fabric of those societies. It is not necessary for them to have been perfect in order for them to have been good; better, in fact, than any of their contemporary options.

More importantly, this history may serve to demonstrate that Islam, properly interpreted, has had as much capacity as any of the world’s other major religious heritages to underwrite a tolerant, intelligent, forward-looking culture. As we encounter the popular images of fundamentalist Islam in our own time, we in particular need to remember how much our own religious and intellectual identities owe historically to Muslim influence. Al-Andalus failed, it seems to me, because it was never self-reflective enough to announce its genius for accommodating pluralism as a conscious virtue. Perhaps we are wiser, today; perhaps we can defend a real commitment to religious liberty, even for those with whom we profoundly disagree, not just as an expedient compromise, but as an ethical commitment. It remains to be seen; we shall, I suspect, have the opportunity to find out before long, and to see whether our own experiment in creating a ‘first rate place’ will endure for another 500 years, or not.