Hillsdale College

Imprimis September 2006

“Freedom and Justice in Islam”
by Bernard Lewis
Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

Bernard Lewis, born and raised in London, studied at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, where he earned a Ph.D. in the history of Islam. After military and other war service in World War II, he taught at the University of London until 1974 and at Princeton University until 1986. He is currently Princeton's Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies. For many years he was one of the very few European scholars permitted access to the archives of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. In addition to his historical studies, he has published translations of classical Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew poetry. Professor Lewis has drawn on primary sources to produce more than two dozen books, including The Arabs in History, What Went Wrong? and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on July 16, 2006, on board the Crystal Serenity, during a Hillsdale College cruise in the British Isles.

By common consent among historians, the modern history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte—who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease. General Bonaparte—he wasn't yet Emperor—proclaimed to the Egyptians that he had come to them on behalf of a French Republic built on the principles of liberty and equality. We know something about the reactions to this proclamation from the extensive literature of the Middle Eastern Arab world. The idea of equality posed no great problem. Equality is very basic in Islamic belief: All true believers are equal. Of course, that still leaves three “inferior” categories of people—slaves, unbelievers and women. But in general, the concept of equality was understood. Islam never developed anything like the caste system of India to the east or the privileged aristocracies of Christian Europe to the west. Equality was something they knew, respected, and in large measure practiced. But liberty was something else.

As used in Arabic at that time, liberty was not a political but a legal term: You were free if you were not a slave. The word liberty was not used as we use it in the Western world, as a metaphor for good government. So the idea of a republic founded on principles of freedom caused some puzzlement. Some years later an Egyptian sheikh—Sheikh Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, who went to Paris as chaplain to the first group of Egyptian students sent to Europe—wrote a book about his adventures and explained his discovery of the meaning of freedom. He wrote that when the French talk about freedom they mean what Muslims mean when they talk about justice. By equating freedom with justice, he opened a whole new phase in the political and public discourse of the Arab world, and then, more broadly, the Islamic world.

The Weekly Standard

Socrates or Muhammad?
Joseph Ratzinger on the destiny of reason.
by Lee Harris
10/02/2006, Volume 012, Issue 03

To the memory of Oriana Fallaci
On September 12, Pope Benedict XVI delivered an astonishing speech at the Uni versity of Regensburg. Entitled "Faith, Reason, and the University," it has been widely discussed, but far less widely understood. The New York Times, for example, headlined its article on the Regensburg address, "The Pope Assails Secularism, with a Note on Jihad." The word "secularism" does not appear in the speech, nor does the pope assail or attack modernity or the Enlightenment. He states quite clearly that he is attempting "a critique of modern reason from within," and he notes that this project "has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly."

Benedict, in short, is not issuing a contemporary Syllabus of Errors. Instead, he is asking those in the West who "share the responsi bility for the right use of reason" to return to the kind of self-critical examination of their own beliefs that was the hallmark of ancient Greek thought at its best. The spirit that animates Benedict's address is not the spirit of Pius IX; it is the spirit of Socrates. Benedict is inviting all of us to ask ourselves, Do we really know what we are talking about when we talk about faith, reason, God, and community?

National Review Online

September 21, 2006, 6:28 a.m.

It’s 1938 All Over Again
A decisive battle.

By Michael Novak

The atmosphere these days is marked by the same mists that those who were in Paris and Berlin in 1938 can still recall. The air was heavy with ominous feelings that war was about to burst on Europe, like a violent autumn storm, with jagged lightning and clattering thunder.

The whole continent was in denial. There would be peace, there had to be peace. But there was not going to be peace. One could feel it in the air.

It feels like 1938 all over again.

The Wall Street Journal

The Pope's Divisions
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
September 21, 2006; Page A16

Although many Muslims have apparently found Pope Benedict XVI's recent oration at the University of Regensburg deeply offensive, it is a welcome change from the pabulum that passes for "interfaith" dialogue. Since 9/11, his lecture is one of the few by a major Western figure to highlight the spiritual and cultural troubles that beset the Muslim world. Think of the awfulness that we've observed in the last years: the suicide terrorism in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but especially the holy-warrior carnage in Iraq, where Sunni die-hard believers have tirelessly slaughtered Shiite women and children. Then think of the tepid, not always condemnatory, discussions these atrocities have provoked among devout, especially fundamentalist Muslims. We should have seen many more Westerners and Muslims posing painful questions about the well-being of Islamic culture and faith. With the exception of President Bush's remarks about "Islamofascism," which provoked dyspeptic reactions inside the U.S. government and out, the administration has generally avoided using powerful language connecting Islam to terrorism.

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

Tune out the static and hear Pope's challenge to us all
BY MICHAEL NOVAK
Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Because he had to find a paying job at the age of 12, my father did not get to finish high school, but he was nobody's dummy. So if he were still alive and asked me to explain exactly what Pope Benedict said in that speech in Regensburg, Germany, last week, which everybody is kicking around, I would have had to put it honestly and clearly, awaiting his inevitable counterpunches.

People are missing the point, Pop, I would have said. The Pope just pulled off a triple play and they are still arguing about a single pitch early in the inning.

The Wall Street Journal

The U.S. vs. Iran
By MICHAEL RUBIN
September 20, 2006; Page A26

The Iranian government continues to enrich uranium despite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's generous package of incentives -- and in defiance of the U.N.'s Aug. 31 deadline. Still, European officials hold out hope for the success of diplomacy. On Sept. 15, Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said, "We are really making progress. Never before have we had a level of engagement . . . as we have now." Diplomats will look for any hopeful sign from Iranian President's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's forthcoming U.N. speech. But can talk work? Successful diplomacy requires that both sides negotiate in good faith and honor commitments. That Tehran's track record undercuts confidence should not surprise. From its very inception, the Islamic Republic has eschewed diplomatic norms.

The New York Sun

What They Omitted

BY LAURIE MYLROIE
September 19, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/39873

Recently the Senate Intelligence Committee published the second phase of its investigation into Iraq. The document has an outrageously lengthy name: "Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Postwar Findings About Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare with Prewar Assessments, Together with Additional Views." It is a tendentious paper, reflecting Democratic posturing on the eve of the congressional elections. Four Republican senators on the committee complained in their dissent that it was written "with more partisan bias than we have witnessed in a long time in Washington." That is an apt characterization of the section dealing with Iraq and terrorism.

The Cross and the Crescent
(The Clash of Faiths in an Age of Secularism)

The Beach Lecture, Newbold College, Bracknell
September 18th 2006

I must begin this lecture by thanking the College for the invitation to give this year’s Beach Lecture. I am so grateful to Dr.David Trim for his considerable administrative help in making this possible. It is for Eileen and myself a joy to meet Dr Beach again, whom we have known over the years and whose commitment to ecumenical co-operation is well known.

The subject I have chosen: The Cross and the Crescent emerges from my keen interest in developing healthy relationships with Islamic scholars and leaders, as well as from my many visits to Muslim countries ever since I took up office as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1991. In retirement I continue to work in the field of inter-faith collaboration.

In 1942 Dr. William Temple in a famous phrase described ecumenical relations as the ‘great new fact of our time’. I wonder how he would describe the relationships between faiths today, and particularly the relationship of Islamic countries and the West? For myself I would say of this relationship that it is the most dangerous, most important and potentially cataclysmic issue of our day. This lecture attempts to describe why this is so, and to suggest some ways that we might be able to strengthen links between this close neighbour, in religious terms, and overcome the hostilities that are driving the West and Middle East apart.

Thirteen years ago Professor Samuel Huntington makes his own position very clear. According to him we are witnessing in our time a ‘clash of civilisations’. His own conclusion shocked many:
“Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power”.

The problem with statements like that- indeed, the most dangerous aspect- is that they run the risk of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies; that is, if enough people believe the thesis, a clash becomes more likely. A seriously disturbing feature of Huntington’s thesis is the assumption that the clash will arise not from extremists on the margins of Islam but from the very being, the heart of Islam. Once that assumption is believed then the ineluctable conclusion is reached- no dialogue is possible; a state of war exists between two quite different civilisations.

The Wall Street Journal

Wahhabi Colonialism
By MELIK KAYLAN
September 18, 2006; Page A18

Pope Benedict XVI recently cited a Byzantine-era critique of Islam, and the usual hubbub of outrage ensued. Various self-appointed and official Islamic spokesmen (they're always men), including the head of Turkey's religious affairs directorate (why does Turkey have one?), responded sharply in the name of their faith. One might argue that a confident, evolved religion welcomes all kinds of open debate. Or one might intone gravely that the West continues to mishandle its relations with the umma -- the sphere of active Muslim believers -- with the implied assumption that there is such a unified entity of tens of millions, and that they all feel outrage in the same way at the same time. Islamist polemicists, in particular, cherish the archaic umma concept, evoking, as it does, a premodern utopia of monolithic harmony.

Many in the West buy the notion, with its familiar en bloc echoes of the proletariat. But should the rest of us believe them? Do we insult Muslims by buying into it, too, or insult them the more by considering it antiquated and bogus?

The Wall Street Journal

What a Load of Armitage!
By VICTORIA TOENSING
September 15, 2006; Page A12

Richard Armitage has finally emerged from the cover-my-backside closet, "apologizing" on CBS for keeping quiet for almost three years about being the original source for Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column stating that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA and had suggested him for a mission to Niger. He disingenuously blames his silence on Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's non-legally based request -- any witness is free to talk about his or her testimony -- not to discuss the matter.

Put aside hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds squandered on the investigation, New York Times reporter Judith Miller's 85 days in jail, the angst and legal fees of scores of witnesses, the White House held siege to a criminal investigation while fighting the war on terror, Karl Rove's reputation maligned, and "Scooter" Libby's resignation and indictment. By his silence, Mr. Armitage is responsible for one of the most factually distorted investigations in history.