The Role of Computers in Business
The System of Government in Russia
Mass Media
Nanotechnology
Knowledge is the Ability to Make
Everyone Around You Feels Smarter
RELIGION IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
EDUCATIONAL MOVEMENTS THROUGHOUT HISTORY
ТЕКСТЫ ДЛЯ САМОСТОЯТЕЛЬНОЙ РАБОТЫ И ПОДГОТОВКИ ПРЕЗЕНТАЦИИ РЕЗЮМЕ
Islam in European Thought
From the time it first appeared, the religion of Islam was a problem for Christian Europe. Those who believed in it were the enemy on the frontier. In the seventh and eighth centuries armies fighting in the name of the first Muslim empire, the Caliphate, expanded into the heart of the Christian world. They occupied provinces of the Byzantine empire in Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt, and spread westwards into North Africa, Spain and Sicily; and the conquest was not only a military one, it was followed in course of time by conversions to Islam on a large scale. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries there was a Christian counter attack, successful for a time in the Holy Land, where a Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was created, and more permanently in Spain. The last Muslim kingdom in Spain was brought to an end in 1492, but by that time there was a further Muslim expansion elsewhere, by dynasties drawn from the Turkish peoples: the Saljuqs advanced into Anatolia, and later the Ottomans extinguished what was left of the Byzantine empire and occupied its capital, Constantinople, and expanded into eastern and central Europe. As late as the seventeenth century they were able to occupy the island of Crete and to threaten Vienna.
The relationship between Muslims and European Christians, however, was not simply one of holy war, of crusade and jihad.There was trade across the Mediterranean, and the balance of it changed in course of time; from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards the Italian ports expanded their trade, and, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ships from the ports of northern Europe began to appear in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. There was also an exchange of ideas, and here the traffic moved mainly from the lands of Islam to those of Christendom: Arabic works of philosophy, science and medicine were translated into Latin, and until the sixteenth century the writings of the great medical scientist Ibn Sina were used in European medical schools.
Separated by conflict but held together by ties of different kinds, Christians and Muslims presented a religious and intellectual challenge to each other. What could each religion make of the claims of the other? For Muslim thinkers, the status of Christianity was clear. Jesus was one of the line of authentic prophets which had culminated in Muhammad, the 'Seal of the Prophets', and his authentic message was essentially the same as that of Muhammad. Christians had misunderstood their faith, however: they thought of their prophet as a god, and believed he had been crucified. The usual Muslim explanation for this was that they had 'corrupted' their scriptures, either by tampering with the text, or by misunderstanding its meaning. Properly understood, Muslim thinkers maintained, the Christian scriptures did not support Christian claims that Jesus was divine, and a passage of the Qur'an made clear that he had not been crucified but had somehow been taken up into heaven. Again, Christians did not accept the authenticity of the revelation given to Muhammad, but a proper interpretation of the Bible would show that it had foretold the coming of Muhammad.
For Christians, the matter was more difficult. They knew that Muslims believed in one God, who might be regarded, in His nature and operations, as being the God whom Christians worshiped, but they could not easily accept that Muhammad was an authentic prophet. The event to which Old Testament prophecy had pointed, the coming of Christ, had already taken place; what need was there for further prophets? The teaching of Muhammad, moreover, was a denial of the central doctrines of Christianity: the Incarnation and Crucifixion, and therefore also the Trinity and the Atonement. Could the Qur'an be regarded in any sense as the word of God? To the few Christians who knew anything about it, the Qur'an seemed to contain distorted echoes of biblical stories and themes.
With few exceptions, Christians in Europe who thought about Islam, during the first thousand or so years of the confrontation, did so in a state of ignorance. The Qur'an was indeed available in Latin translation from the twelfth century onwards; the first translation was made under the direction of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. Some Arabic philosophical works were well known in translation, those which carried on the tradition of Greek thought. There was very limited knowledge, however, of those works of theology, law and spirituality in which what had been given in the Qur'an was articulated into a system of thought and practice. There were a few exceptions: in the thirteenth century, some of the Dominican houses in Spain were centers of Islamic studies, but even these declined in later centuries. On the Muslim side, rather more was known, and indeed had to be known. Christians continued to live in some Muslim countries, and particularly in Spain, Egypt and Syria, and many of them lived through the medium of the Arabic language. Knowledge of what they believed and practised was therefore available, and it was necessary for administrative and political purposes. The extent of the knowledge should not be exaggerated, however: its limits are shown in such works as al-Ghazali's refutation of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ[1].
Looking at Islam with a mixture of fear, bewilderment and uneasy recognition of a kind of spiritual kinship, Christians could see it in more than one light. Occasionally the spiritual kinship was acknowledged. There is extant, for example, a letter written by Pope Gregory VII to a Muslim prince in Algeria, al-Nasir, in 1076. In it he says:
There is a charity which we owe to each other more than to other peoples, because we recognize and confess one sole God, although in different ways, and we praise and worship Him every day as creator and ruler of the world [2].
There has been some discussion of this letter among scholars, and it seems that its significance should not be overstated. It has been suggested that there were practical reasons for the warm and friendly tone in which Gregory wrote: the need to protect the shrinking Christian communities of North Africa, the common opposition of the Papacy and al-Nasir to another Muslim ruler in North Africa, and perhaps the desire of merchants in Rome to have a share in the growing trade of the port of Bougie (Bijaya), in al-Nasir's domains. In other letters, written to Christians, Gregory wrote of Muslims and Islam in harsher ways. Nevertheless, the terms in which the letter is written show that there was some awareness at the time that Muslims were not pagans, and this is the more surprising because it was written just before the beginning of the greatest episode of hostility, the Crusades.
A more commonly held view was that which saw Islam as an offshoot or heresy of Christianity. This was the view of the first Christian theologian to consider it seriously, St John of Damascus. He had himself been an official in the administration of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus, and knew Arabic.
He includes Islam in a section of his work on Christian heresies: it believes in God, but denies certain of the essential truths of Christianity, and because of this denial even the truths which it accepts are devoid of meaning. The most widely held belief, however, was that which lay at the other end of the spectrum: Islam is a false religion, Allah is not God, Muhammad was not a prophet; Islam was invented by men whose motives and character were to be deplored, and propagated by the sword[3].
Solitude and Creativity
One could say that we are congenitally predisposed to suffer, even though it is probably wrong to impute to nature this discouraging condition that contradicts the instinct for self-preservation. More likely it is millenia of culture that have contaminated the will to live. Whatever the reason, it is a fact that human suffering is pervasive, sometimes imperceptible but at other times so brutally in evidence as to override all else.
Let it be clear that I am no friend of pain, but wherever we look it is there. To echo Kierkegaard:
I am not the man who thinks that we ought never to suffer; I despise this paltry wisdom, and if I have a choice I prefer to bear pain to the bitter end. Suffering is beautiful, and there is vigor in tears; but one should not suffer like a man without hope[4].
Human suffering has not only its shocking aspects, but also those of a more discrete nature that nevertheless carry significant weight. Loneliness, for example. We know well enough what it is, but only when we experience it personally does it touch us deeply. Isolation, like other emotional experiences, reaches a threshold beyond which words lose their meaning. We cannot communicate our most intimate experiences to others. And this is not due to the physical absence of people around us, but rather, paradoxically, to their presence. It makes itself felt the moment we are in contact with others, when we believe we ought to feel their nearness and support, but don't.
Thus we conclude that our loneliness is not due to a difficulty in having relationships but is rather a question of inner suffering that can be neither cured nor alleviated by external presences. We become tragically aware of solitude as a basic human condition[5].
One reason for that sense of alienation goes back to our most formative moments when essential needs like mirroring and tenderness were not met. When such deep desires are not gratified, one is obliged to create within oneself the response that others were not able to give. It is this surrogate fulfillment in the world of the imagination that makes us aware for the first time of our innerness. In other words, on both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, frustration motivates creative fantasy and with it the awareness of one's inner dimension. To acquire this knowledge means in a certain sense to become capable of understanding one's personal truth. This is always mute. When it is expressed, it is communicated in silence. If one really has to speak, what results is a translation of silence.
The contact with solitude allows us to avoid indoctrination; in fact, to create a complete Weltanschauung in this situation would mean deriving one's knowledge of reality exclusively from within. That is why, for example, it is so difficult for some children to start school. That which is proffered now clashes with something more vital and individual.
But at this point we make another tragic discovery: we learn that the world outside does not belong to us. In life's difficult moments we are always alone, because the other has no power to help us, however much he or she may want to. In such a predicament not even an invitation to conquer the outside world proves of interest. Sometimes the commitment to acquiring material wealth can be a defense against the deep fear of remaining alone. When we give up such external defenses, we enter a realm where we can no longer participate on the collective level because of our irreprehensible individualism.
A person who lives consciously and intensely is considered dangerous by the collective because this is the very level on which truths are gathered.
In solitude—understood not as detachment from others but as a feeling of being alone among our fellows—we represent a truth that can unmask and denounce the falsity that circulates in the external world. The great figures in history, those who changed our vision of the world, drew their truths from the wells of their solitude.
One must not, of course, fool oneself into thinking there is no price to be paid for this. On the contrary, the price is very high: the suffering one feels when one tries to communicate and becomes aware of the distance between oneself and others. This totally personal experience cannot be translated into words, but it is as binding on us as an intimate secret. Many existential tragedies are due to this kind of life, one that offers us the opportunity of making our own the most intimate and profound aspects of things, but deprives us of human warmth and relationships. Every time we mingle in the community, in social situations, the flimsiness of conventional relationships is brought home to us.
A conventional relationship is not a substitute for, but the exact opposite of, an authentic one. The words it uses are virtually empty and have no expressive power. Such relationships are common in everyone's life, and so we live an almost uninterrupted sequence of exchanges that could be called insignificant if it were not for our few desperate attempts to save at least the semblance of a real bond. Even when the chance for an authentic relationship presents itself, we are so out of the habit and unprepared for it that the fear of being inadequate pushes us into adopting false behavior.