Radical Theology versus Religious Radicalisa on Dominic Kirkham points out that ‘radical’ is used in two opposite ways and asks: What has SOF got to say?
One thing I often find disappointing about SOF is its apparent very low public profile. It never seems to register in contemporary discussions, its name never appears in any controversies, even in works related to its specific area of concern, such as Terry Eagleton’s recent study of Culture and the Death of God, it receives no mention. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t read enough or get out enough but, in my limited experience, no one ever seems to have heard of it. In a complex and conflicted world I often wonder where exactly SOF fits in. Does it have anything to say to world? If so, what? And where does it fit in contemporary discourse? The news these days is full of talk about ‘radicalisation’ and religion. Surely we should have something to say about that! After all is not the SOF movement supposed to be part of ‘radical theology’? Re-reading Trevor Greenfield’s excellent study, An Introduction to Radical Theology – which locates SOF securely within this tradition, indeed as something of a final outcome – one wonders if the term ‘radical theology’ is being used at all in the same way as it is currently in the news. Here it seems to be its very polar opposite: uncritical absolute allegiance to religious dictates, as we see in Islam, defended with total intolerance. I believe that it is in this seemingly paradoxical, if not contradictory, use of the word ‘radical’ we can begin to understand the significance of SOF. Here c Ayaan Hirsi Ali A recently published bestselling work by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic: Why Islam needs a Reformation Now, indirectly indicates how. What is portrayed here of Islam is a worldview and practice completely alien to anything in the West: a theocratic system which rejects any separation of politics and religion – ‘church’ and state – demands uncritical acceptance of and submission to revealed truth under clerical direction, and binds the individual into absolute conformity to an ‘honour’ system that denies
individual human right and is violently misogynistic: about the only innovative role Islam has allowed for women is in female ‘death brigades’! The template of Ayaan’s presentation is a division of Muslims into three broad categories which she calls Meccan Muslims (the overwhelming majority who practise their faith peaceably, as did Muhammad in his early days of revelation at Mecca), Medina Muslims (who enforce their beliefs more violently, as did Muhammad at Medina and the later years of his life) and then the modern Reformers (a small number of marginal dissident voices – ‘heretics’ – arguing for change in response to the challenges of modernity). Her thesis is that the Medina Muslims create the headlines to the exclusion, but with the connivance, of the passive majority and that, if there is to be change, the West must start to give more support to the minority of oppressed voices calling for freedom from intimidation and recognition of human rights. What makes the case of Islam of such concern is the extremity to which it continues to push fundamentalist religious views, which had once characterised millenarian cults and extreme sects in Europe’s past but from which we had thought to have progressed. This mindset affirms that the golden age of Islam was Muhammad’s own time and that history has nothing more to teach: history has ‘ended’. In other words reform is not a legitimate concept in Islamic doctrine and the proper goal of any Muslim ‘reformer’ must be a return to first principles: the hadith credit Muhammad with saying that future generations would always be tempted to fall away from his teaching so it is the task of every mujaddid/ leader to re-establish the pristine moment of foundation. The ideal of returning to the pristine days of the Prophet, fulfilling his expectation in both the Koran and hadith, is what attracts idealistic young Muslims from Dewsbury, Bradford and across the globe to Isis, in response to the
teaching they have learnt within their homes and communities. From here emerges, seamlessly, a visceral hatred of Modernity. The fate of ‘heretics’ like Raif Badawi highlights not only what happens to anyone who questions such views but even anyone who would suggest that such views should be questioned. The thesis of Ali’s book is that the monolithic world of Islam, immune to historical change and critical reflection, needs a Reformation, such as took place in Europe. Instead of Luther’s 95 theses she proposes a more modest 5: reassessing the semi-divine status of Muhammad and the Koran, challenging the cult of life after death, as well as obsession with the Sharia and the expectation on individuals to enforce Islamic law, together with abandoning the imperative to wage jihad. However, championing the precedent of the Reformation may not be all it seems in its consequences: the Reformation led to the violent fragmentation of Christendom and decades of unspeakable savagery, which was only resolved by temporal powers separating individual belief from public policy based on rational principles and human rights – the leitmotiv of the Enlightenment. Accompanying this – from the time of Spinoza – was the reformulation of our understanding of God. by Dominic Kirkham
was published by SOF Religion as a Human Crea on and launched on July 24th 2015 at the SOF But it is this that is the real outcome of the Reformation, in which SOF can be seen as an inevitable and final expression: God and religion for £10 pos ree from: are seen as human creations, in which wisdom is SOF Admin, not supernaturally dispensed from on high but 28 Frederick Road, inseparable from the poetic genius of humanity. It is this ‘radical’ theology that is the real 1JN. challenge to ‘radical’ Islam: engaging in the task of critical thinking and separating what are years in a religious undeniably commendable ethical values and cultural traditions from their traditional, tribal and theological underpinnings. This is the sort of post-Christian thinking that has been so brilliantly charted by Don Cupitt, particularly in his recent Creative Faith but also in The Meaning of the West, where he shows just how it is that an organisation like the NHS, whilst being inspired by Christian ideals, now expresses those ideals in a secular form far more effectively than
ever it did in the religious past. This discussion is not primarily political or social or economic – so familiar to our media and political leaders – it is a highly complex historical and cultural, but above all, theological matrix which I believe people by and large in a secular milieu no longer have either the capabilities or interest to deal with. This explains why, when it comes to understanding the contemporary dynamics of religious violence and radical belief, political leaders seem at such a loss as to what to say. In the face of the savagery of Isis, President Obama, amongst others, opined that this had nothing to do with the religion of Islam and that, ‘No religion condones the killing of innocents.’ But the command: ‘Fight and slay the Pagans wherever you find them’ (Koran: 9.5) seems explicit enough. Mr Cameron has instead sought to characterise the Islamism of Isis as some sort of ideology or ‘nihilistic death cult’ – whatever exactly that is – and the so-called radicalisation of young people NEW SOF TITLE From Monk to Modernity The Challenge of Modern Thinking
Annual Conference. Copies can be ordered Birmingham B15 After spending many order, Dominic Kirkham describes how he was driven to meet the challenge of modern thinking, an exercise which has proved both freeing and frightening. In a broad sweep from Neolithic times to the twenty-first century, he considers our human quest for meaning and a good life, and how we can engage in it today. ‘This thoughtful account of an intelligent man’s evolution towards humanism and the development of ideas in the modern world is most interesting.’ – Ethical Record
blamed on clandestine internet ‘groomers’ or arising from misrepresented political conflicts. After the journeying of so many young Muslims to Syria he then thought it appropriate to condemn those who quietly condoned Islamic extremist ‘ideology’ – which views women as inferior and homosexuality as evil – as aberrant. But none of this really fits. The reality is that these so-called ‘extremist’ Islamic views in fact turn out, on closer inspection, to be commonly accepted by Islam. As Foreign Office minister Baroness Anelay said recently in the House of Lords regarding the treatment of Raif Badawi and the denial of human rights: ‘The actions of the Saudi Government in these respects have the support of the vast majority of the Saudi population.’ (Saudi Arabia has public beheadings, women are banned from driving or appearing in public without a male escort…) What Isis does in Syria has ample support in Koranic teaching and is in fact exactly what ‘renewal’ looks like in Islamic history, from the Ash’arites in the eight century to the Almoravids, Whabbites and innumerable mahdi uprisings to the current theocratic regimes of Saudi Arabia and Iran. For various reasons of real politick we continue to delude ourselves otherwise. But lest one begins to sound Islamaphobic, it should also be said that every religion has its mix of ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’ bits, which prompt acts of heroic virtue in some and appalling atrocity in others. Regardless of this, the distinctive thing about all religions based on ‘revelation’ is that they tend to divide people into ‘them’ and ‘us’, or further, as the medieval crusading ballade of The Song of Roland puts it starkly: ‘They are wrong and we are right.’ In contrast, in the distinctive thinking of SOF all religions are creations of the human mind, together with all the other cultural creations of humanity, and there are no such fundamental distinctions to be made. This creates an inclusive playing field for all. And as all human activity is in a constant process of osmosis, it has to be evaluated on rational and humane principles with a view to what is best for all. It is with regard to this process that Islam has such a problem. As the case of Raif Badawi so clearly indicates, even those who might wish to
reconsider the place of faith and fear in the modern world are silenced. Moderate Muslim voices, such as Manzoor Moghul of the Muslim Forum, suggesting that ‘the Muslim community in Britain is somewhat backward in its thinking… refusing to change its old habits,’ are immediately shouted down as attacking ‘our religion’. Even modest rational steps from scholarly voices, such as that of the jurist Dr Usama Hasan, suggesting that the fasting laws of Ramadan should be amended to take into account the length of northern summertime, are denounced as subordinating God’s will to the ‘desires’ of human beings, even though seventh century Arabs had no awareness of the phenomenon of the ‘land of the midnight sun’. It is an argument that the traditionalists and extremists always win by claiming the more severe version is most ‘authentic’. But in doing so, as Tehmina Kazi of British Muslims for Secular Democracy points out, they are ‘failing to see that one of the highest virtues is actually reason’. This is also precisely why this conflict, between reason and the intransigence of tradition, is now such a specific problem to Islam: it makes no concessions to modernity or critical thinking, then feels threatened by any who suggest it should, which then just becomes an increasingly vicious circle of accusation and paranoia. As Kazi rightly notes, ‘This is born of an insecurity.’ However, it is an issue other religions, like the Catholic Church, have also been forced to confront: the Vatican Council II was called to try to resolve this seemingly endless Manichean duel between the Church and the World. In order to do this it found itself forced to make radical innovations on a whole range of issues, none more so than with regard to religious freedom. The document Dignitatis Humanae represented a complete break with the previous doctrine of the Church, much to the chagrin of traditionalists. It was also different in being the only one of sixteen major documents explicitly addressed, not simply to fellow communicants in the Catholic Church, but to the world at large, much as John XXIII had addressed his encyclical letter Pacem in Terris to ‘All Persons of Good Will.’ It is this that is the true scope of thinking all religions must now consider. Yet, despite the bold steps of the Vatican Council and with the weight of overwhelming
scholarship, the council’s reforming agenda was thwarted by a traditionalist reaction. In many areas of personal life, such as marriage, sexual identity and medical ethics, the church continues to fight a long rear-guard action of resistance to change. It is this experience that makes one wonder at the hope expressed by Ayaan Ali in the reform of the yet more monumentally traditional and anti-rational world of Islam. A consequence is that ultimately, in the face mutually incompatible thought worlds, people just drift away or become easy riders, ‘culture Christians’ or whatever with no clear dogmatic convictions, or alternatively fundamentalists with time. varying degrees of intransigence and anger. The problem for all fundamentalists and extremists in the face of Modernity – and one which Ayaan Ali says is the overwhelming experience of young Muslims growing up in the modern world – is one of cognitive dissonance, through which two contradictory and mutually exclusive views of the world drive the individual to extreme behaviour (‘radicalisation’). Sadly, as this is not a rational state, there is no rational solution and any attempts to provide one are doomed to failure. In the end what happens is that one horn of the dilemma is broken off, as happened with perestroika in the Soviet Union, and a whole ideological system collapses.
If there is to be hope of change which is neither the complete abandonment of religious sensitivities nor the extreme, unthinking submission to the past, then I believe a real alternative lies in the presentation of the naturalsupernaturalism of the thinking of SOF. With its sensitivity to the poetic nature of humanity’s religious past, its ethics of ‘solarity’ and respect for the extraordinary ‘ordinariness’ of life, just getting on with ‘it’ in one’s own way, needing no metaphysical juggernaut to deliver its message – all themes elaborated by Don Cupitt – it is in a unique position to address a key concern of our Here, if anything, this radical theology takes a leaf out the tradition of mystical Sufism and the apophatic spirituality, such as found in the writings of Meister Eckhardt and St.John of the Cross, that in the end the divine is no-thing, simply ecstatic be-ing. What is needed is an education, not as imparting information or dogma but, as Don notes in Creative Faith, education to enrich our perception and feeling: a therapy of conversion to the acceptance of life in its abundance, which we have been so privileged to be able to share. I believe this is the message SOF has for our time – a real antidote to the radicalised religion of today.