Indestructible Islam

One’s attitude toward Islam is likely to be determined by one’s attitude to Roman Catholicism. Western culture is so bound up with its classical and Christian sources that, given a historical perspective, the two are inseparable. Romantic interpretations of Islam speak of its beneficent presence in the West, overlooking its history of conquest, subjugation, and intolerance. From its inception, that is, from the preaching of the prophet Mohammed, Islam has been willing to use the sword to accomplish its ends, subjecting conquered peoples either to accept Islam or to suffer penalties ranging from taxation to death.¹A disposition to look upon Islam as just another religion somehow occupying a place in the West on a par with Christianity as a component of Western civilization ignores its adversarial character.

It is currently fashionable among the politically insouciant to distinguish between “Westernized moderate” Muslims and “radical” or “extreme” Muslims. The distinction may have some merit, but it blurs a fundamental truth. All Mohammedans subscribe to the principles enunciated in the Koran, principles which however interpreted unite them as brothers in a common cause and which unify them into a spiritual force aimed at world domination, a spiritual force intrinsically hostile to the West and especially to the Christianity which formerly unified the West. One cannot ignore this de facto teaching of Islam throughout the world, nor can one easily overlook the failure of moderate Islam to condemn the rhetoric and violence of the extreme.

Apart from the terrorist actions of September 11, 2001, a contemporary view of Islam must acknowledge its militant character. Mohammedanism stands alone among world religions in sanctioning violence.²Only in Islam do we find a fanatical pursuit for converts coupled with a drive to world domination. In Sudan today, Christians are attacked, killed, and butchered in the name of Islam; women and children are sold into slavery. In Nigeria, Muslim majority communities attack Christian communities that resist the imposition of Islamic law. In Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, churches are not permitted, Christian symbols in every form are forbidden as is Christian literature. Christian artifacts are searched out and destroyed. During the Gulf War American troops were prevented from attending Mass; even the celebration of Thanksgiving Day on the occasion of a visit by the President of the United States was forbidden. During the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars Saddam Hussein specified that Christians be used as mine-sweepers. In Indonesia death that has been inflicted on Christian communities is justified by passages in the Koran that permit militancy against those who reject Allah. These actions are perceived as sanctioned by Shari‘ah, that is, Islamic law.

The most comprehensive concept of Islam at the practical level is undoubtedly that of the Shari‘ah, “the highway of the righteous life leading to God,” the sum of divine commands to man. It includes law, moral principles, and the creed to which every Muslim must subscribe. The Shari‘ah is grounded in four sources: the Koran, tradition, consensus of the community, and personal interpretation. Thus it may be misleading to speak of Islamic law in the abstract. Although based on the Koran, Islamic law varies today by country and by geographic region. Attempts to relate the Shari‘ah to modern times as a practical system of law are confronted with a chasm between a Westernized, modernist minority and the conservative mass of the Muslim population. The reforms adopted by progressive urban Muslim societies have little significance for traditionalist communities in the rural areas which constitute the great majority of its adherents. Officials interpret Islamic law in the light of their own education and training.

Islamic law is severe in the penalties prescribed for offenses. Shari‘ah is broadly divided into duties the individual owes to Allah and those that he owes to his fellow man. For specific crimes the punishment is usually fixed. Traditionally offenses against the person, from assault to homicide, are punishable by retaliation, the offender being subject to precisely the same treatment as his victim. Offenses of this type are regarded as a civil injury and not a crime in the technical sense; it is the family and not the state that is entitled to retribution.

For apostasy, extramarital sex, and homosexuality the penalty is death; the same for highway robbery. Amputation of the hand is mandated for theft; 100 lashes for fornication; 80 lashes for unproved accusation of unchastity and for the drinking of any intoxicant.

The Koran preaches equality, yet in most Muslim countries a woman’s place is determined by a man’s will. In Koranic law, a husband can prevent his wife from traveling abroad; a father can marry off his daughter against her will, and she by law must obey. The Koran gives a husband the right to beat or scourge a disobedient wife. An adulterous woman is subject to death by stoning. Moreover, Mohammedans refuse to recognize laws that differ from theirs and call other people “infidels” who do not worship as they. To be born into a Muslim society means to be a Muslim for life, subject to the consequences of apostasy.

Reflecting on the militant character of Islam, one cannot easily dismiss statements such as the following: “It is the duty of every Muslim to stand up with the Afghan people and fight against America.” When Sheik Hamoud al-Shuabi was asked, “Should all Americans be their target,” he replied, “There is no difference between someone who approves of the war or supports it with money and one who is actively fighting.”³In Saudi Arabia, youth have been taught not only to hate America but that anyone who is not a Muslim is an enemy. They are taught the sanctity of martyrdom as they kill their enemies.⁴

How did this come to be? Is violence inseparable from the teaching of the Prophet? The history of Islam is instructive. The Mohammedan era begins in 622, the date of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca, where he had been persecuted, to Medina. In instructing his followers to pray, Mohammed at first had them turn toward Jerusalem. Later he instructed his followers to turn toward Mecca and to fulfill at Mecca those ancient pilgrimage rites instituted by Abraham and Ishmael. But Mecca was governed by a hostile tribe and not accessible to Mohammed’s followers. This situation provided the impetus to subdue Mecca. Mohammed encouraged his followers not only to conquer Mecca but also to intercept and raid the caravans of merchants going to and fro. Subsequent military pressure and diplomacy managed to unite disparate tribes throughout Arab lands. Emphasizing confessional pride, communal solidarity, Mohammed taught that brothers in faith are united more closely by religion than they are by blood. They were prohibited from fighting each other, but they could raid non-Muslims. This enabled the community to expand through the subjugation of others.

Among the community of faith there were undoubtedly those who made a sincere conversion and who really believed, but there were many more who, like the Meccan traders, found outward conformity profitable and who then contributed time and effort on behalf of the spread of Islam.

Mohammed preached to a society ripe for reform. The decline of the Roman Empire had left a complicated and fatigued society. In Egypt, Syria, and the East there was everywhere slavery, excessive taxation, and bureaucratic government interference in the lives of ordinary people. “To all of this,” writes Hilaire Belloc, “Islam came as a vast relief and a solution of social and economic strain. The slave who admitted that Mohammed was the prophet of God and that the new teaching had, therefore, divine authority, ceased to be a slave. The slave who adopted Islam was henceforth free. The debtor who ‘accepted’ was rid of his debts. . . . The small farmer was relieved not only of his debts but of crushing taxation.”⁵

Much of Mohammed’s teaching consisted of ideas which were peculiar to Christianity, ideas which distinguished Catholicism from paganism—for example, the unity and omnipotence of God, His personal nature, goodness, timelessness, and providence. Mohammed recognized God’s creative power as the origin of all things as well as His sustenance (conservation) of all that He had brought into being. In his teaching, he acknowledged good and evil spirits, such as Christendom recognized; the immortality of the human soul; personal moral responsibility and accountability after death, including punishment and reward. Although denying His divinity, Mohammed gave to Christ the highest reverence and venerated His mother.

In the beginning, Islam was regarded by Byzantine Catholics as a Christian heresy, not as a new religion, but soon its vitality and endurance gave it the appearance of a new religion.⁶Christians who were contemporary with its rise saw it not as a denial but as an adaptation and a misinterpretation of the Gospels and the teachings of the Apostles.

Within the span of a hundred years Islamic warriors conquered Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the whole of North Africa, and Spain. Within a lifetime after the death of Mohammed, half of the wealth and nearly half of the Christian Roman Empire were in the hands of Mohammedan masters and officials. Arabic military power conferred on its caliphs, who were at once its generals and successors of the Prophet, not only absolute authority but also great wealth.

The Arab conquest in the seventh century was the starting point of a new civilization in the southern basin of the Mediterranean. Abu Bakr, Mohammad’s first successor during his brief reign (632–634), led the armies of Muslims who reached southern Iraq and Palestine. Umar ibn al-Kattab (634–644), the second successor to Mohammed, conquered Syria, Palestine, Persia, and Egypt as far as the Cyrene and even Tripoli. When the Ommiad caliphs under Mo’ awiya took up residence in Damascus in 661, the campaign against Constantinople began. In 672, the city was besieged by land and sea in an attempt that was to last for seven years. In the West, Carthage fell into their hands and was leveled around 698. The conquest of Andalusia followed, with Mohammedan troops reaching as far north as the Loire in 731. Mingling with the peoples they subdued, the Arabs showed an extraordinary power of assimilation. Their culture had nothing original about it, so they were able to reap great benefits from the Hellenistic culture, exploiting the treasures of Greek thought.

In the East the intellectual and artistic legacy of the past, especially as diffused by the highly intelligent Syrians, enabled the Arabs to evolve, in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Córdoba. Those centers fostered a brilliant culture, one far superior to anything found in the West.

Islam in its early centuries, in the period we call the Dark Ages, particularly in the eighth and ninth centuries, produced the highest material civilization in the world. In that period Islam was far more lettered than was Christendom. It became for centuries the caretaker of the texts of Aristotle, the mathematics and natural science of the early Greek and Roman writers. No one who surveys that period can deny the rich and brilliant society of Moslem Spain, the age of the Fatimid califate and the caliphate of Córdoba in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Even the Norman kings of Sicily adopted the outward forms of the court life of the Islamic world and became generous patrons of Moslem scholars and men of letters.⁷

Medieval Europe inherited Greek philosophy indirectly through the channel of Syrian, Persian, and Arabic scholars, scientists, and philosophers. In the early centuries of Christendom, Greek philosophy was imported into Asia by Christian scholars who had studied in Athens before Emperor Justinian ordered the closing of the philosophic schools in a.d. 529. The Christian school in Edessa, founded in 563, taught the philosophy of Aristotle and the medicine of Hippocrates and of Galen. When the Syrians converted to Christianity, they had to learn Greek to read Sacred Scripture. Greek theology followed and with it Greek culture. When the school at Edessa was closed, its professors migrated to Persia. By that time many philosophical and scientific works had been translated from Greek into Syriac, which explains why even such an epoch-making event as the founding of Islam by Mohammed did not stop the spread of Greek philosophy.

The dynasty of the Abbassides caliphs, established in 750 by Aboul-Abbas whose successors were to reside in Baghdad from 762 until the middle of the thirteenth century, became an important catalyst in the transmission of Greek learning. Syrian scholars were soon employed as translators by the Baghdad caliphs. Continuing the same work under their new masters, the Persian scholars began to translate Greek texts into Arabic, sometimes directly from the Greek, sometimes from previously made Syriac translations. Among the authors translated were Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, and Theophrastus. Syriac scholars successfully transmitted Greek learning to the Arabs, who passed it on to the Jews and eventually to the theologians of the Christian West. The twentieth-century historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson provides the chronicle.

In his History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Gilson writes, “Like Christian faith, Islamic faith soon felt the need of an intellectual interpretation, be it only in order to correct the literal interpretations of the Koran upheld by the fundamentalists of those times.”⁸There soon emerged a school of Muslim theologians whose use of Greek philosophical insight to interpret the Koran was challenged by other theologians who repudiated the use of Greek philosophy. This controversy resulted in yet another generation of Arabic thinkers who, without losing touch with their religion, began to pursue philosophy for its own sake. Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), known in the Latin world as Averroes, writing as a philosopher, was careful to leave the door open for revelation, but this did not satisfy the theologian Al Gazali, who took it upon himself to challenge Averroes. In both Muslim and Jewish worlds their profoundly religious civilization created for philosophers a new problem unknown in classical antiquity, namely, the relation of faith to reason.⁹Gilson tells us, “A curious consequence of this situation was that, since Islamic theology was progressively separating itself from Greek philosophy up to the point of repudiating it, the great Christian theologians were to become pupils of the Mohammedan philosophers much more than the Mohammedan theologians.”¹⁰Arabic philosophy became a major source of medieval scholasticism. Once Aristotle was translated into Arabic, his influence spread to the limits of Islam’s dominion. Joseph Pieper describes this intellectual saga at length. “Within this cultural sphere, then, were written the great commentaries on Aristotle whose authors are mentioned on almost every page of the theological Summae of the thirteenth century.”¹¹Al Kindi, Al Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes are names whose philosophy is known to all contemporary students of St. Thomas Aquinas. To study Aquinas is also to study medieval Arabic philosophy. No major Catholic university is without its specialist in medieval Arabic thought. It remains part of the scholastic curriculum.

One can marvel at the way in which the mind of Western Christendom reconquered the lost world of Hellenic science and annexed the alien world of Moslem thought without losing its spiritual or religious integrity. The cultural historian Christopher Dawson gives an account of the courtly culture of medieval Europe in the second half of the twelfth century, speaking of it as the fruit of the Crusades. He describes the development of “a new aristocratic culture, which traveled in the opposite direction from the Crusades but along the same roads, from the Mediterranean to Northern France and Italy, and ultimately to Germany, England and Wales.”¹²The last Norman kings of Sicily adopted the outward forms of the court life of the Islamic world and became generous patrons of Moslem scholars and men of letters. It was through music and poetry and the vision of a new delightful way of life that the influence of the southern Mediterranean penetrated feudal society.

Following the lead of Córdoba, Toledo became a center of translation in the twelfth century. Toledo Archbishop Raymond of Sauvetat (1126–1151) established a school of translators which continued its activity for more than a century.¹³Scholars translated into Latin the whole of the Aristotelian corpus in its Arabic form. They also produced versions of the principal works of the great Moslem and Jewish philosophers, including Al Kindi, Al Farabi, Avicenna, Ibn Gabriol, and Al Ghazali. In a cosmopolitan effort, Jews, Arabs, and Greeks cooperated with Spaniards, Italians, and Englishmen. Averroes, born in Córdoba in 1126, jurist, physician, and philosopher, became for the West in the thirteenth century “the Commentator” on Aristotle. His influence was so great that the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance has with some justification been called Averroism.¹⁴Moses Maimonides, the great Jewish thinker of the twelfth century, was likewise born in Córdoba (1135). Maimonides, like Averroes, turned to the teaching of Aristotle as he prepared his Guide for the Perplexed, a book addressed to those whose faith in biblical revelation had been shaken by philosophy and science. Sometimes called the Jewish scholastic Summa, it was written in Arabic.

Josef Pieper provides this comparison between the state of learning at the time in Córdoba and Paris. “Here on the one hand was a great wealth of Arabic-Jewish philosophy; and on the other hand the schools of the West were at the same time producing little of value aside from strictly theological studies. The education available at the Faculty of Arts in Paris around 1200 rested chiefly on the ‘cult of law’ and ‘contained nothing that even remotely resembled a philosophical view of the whole of reality.’”¹⁵

Why did not the Arabs, in the Middle Ages so far advanced in civilization, so powerful in aims, not eventually attain the leadership of the world’s culture? Bernard Lewis, in his magisterial volume, What Went Wrong?, writes, “In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared to its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak and ignorant.”¹⁶From the sixteenth century onward, as Europe advanced in military, economic, and political affairs, Islam’s fortunes dramatically reversed. As Lewis remarks, “Middle Eastern technology and science ceased to develop, precisely at the moment when Europe, more specifically Western Europe, was advancing to new heights.”¹⁷

Gustav Schnurer, writing in the early part of the last century, suggests that the reason may be intrinsic. Lacking the fullness of Christianity, Islam lacked the determinant civilizing force associated with the Gospels. “Islam, by its principle of spreading belief with the sword, lacked the calm and organizing force possessed by Christianity, which is bent on developing the intellect and disciplining the will.”¹⁸Christian teaching gave women equal status to men. In preaching not war but peace, it gave a powerful impulse to the social order. Insisting on self-discipline, upon regulation of conscience consistent with the Gospels, Christianity produced a society quite different from Islam which, devoid of these principles, could only form states with despotic governments. Christianity laid the foundation for the development of the individual, no less than that of the nation, combining national strength with the greatest possible freedom of the individual consonant with peace and order.¹⁹

Bernard Lewis does not provide a clear-cut answer to his question, “What Went Wrong?” He is not satisfied with the suggestion that the disparity between Islam and the West is not the result of Islam’s decline but of a Western upsurge since that dates to the eighteenth century, if not since the Renaissance. Addressing a number of factors, economic, military, and political, which undoubtedly played a role, he hints that the cause may be much deeper, though he does not reach anything approaching Schnurer’s conclusion. “Reading Mr. Lewis’s book,” Karen Elliot House comments, “one is reminded that there are many reasons for the humbling of Islam and the rise of the West, ranging from superiority at ship building, which allowed small countries like Holland and Portugal to become powers, to Islam’s subjugation of women, which squandered the talent of half of its population. But the fundamental reason—best grasped if we read between the lines of What Went Wrong—derives from major differences between Christendom and the Islamic world.”²⁰Those differences cannot be ignored. Islam is a religion that commands obedience, not understanding, one that preaches conversion through force, not persuasion.

Perhaps the most conspicuous but not the most profound difference between Islamic and Christian civilizations lies in the status of women. The Turkish writer, Evliya Celebri, visiting Catholic Vienna in 1665, observed, “They [women] are honored and respected out of love for Mother Mary.” The fruit of Islam’s subjugation of women is felt not only in the family but also in society as a whole. In this, as in so many of its prescriptions and prohibitions, Islam is devoid of principled law.Islamic law is positive law. It is not grounded in a metaphysics or in a philosophy of nature and of human nature. Its arbitrary character stands at variance with Roman law and British common law, sources of the rule of law as we know it in the West.

Another difference is the role of Islamic clerics in the governance of the state. Christendom from its inception, following Christ’s admonition, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s,”²¹developed an understanding of the different roles played by church and state. As Augustine made clear in The City of God, the church is concerned with worship and with the spiritual and the intellectual sustenance of its adherents; the state is responsible for the common good, the material well-being of its citizens. Islam accepted no such dichotomy; the church is the state; the state is the church.

These differences are reflected in the discomfort Muslims feel when living among infidels under alien law. While Islam through the centuries was able to accommodate itself to those it conquered, it has proved unable to live with those it could not conquer. Witness its drive to form separate states under its own rule in Bosnia, Greece, the Philippines, and Indonesia and even to form a separate community in Birmingham, England.

Given its universally acknowledged material failure and its refusal to live peacefully in the West, what does the future hold? In the mid-decades of the last century, Hilaire Belloc warned, “The power of Islam may at any moment re-arise.”²²How could that be? Islam, Belloc tells us, is indestructible:

It has kept those Christian doctrines which are evidently true and which appeal to the common sense of millions, while getting rid of priestcraft, mysteries, sacraments, and all of it. It proclaims and practices human equality. It avows a commitment to justice and forbids usury. By its own light, it produces a society in which men are happier and feel their own dignity more than in any other [society].23

Never mind the disparity between the Shari‘ah of the professors and actual practice. Its doctrines, says Belloc, are “its strength and that is why it still converts people and endures and will perhaps return to power in the near future.”²⁴Belloc puts the question forcefully, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armied Mohammedan world which will shake off the dominance of Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?”²⁵Belloc is convinced that we fail to recognize that religion is at the root of all political movements and changes; Dawson would add, “the root of all great cultures.” Islam may be physically paralyzed, but morally it is intensely alive. There may exist an unstable equilibrium between its material incapacity and its moral vigor, but that is not likely to remain. No one can deny Islam’s vitality. As a body of doctrine it is relatively simple. Its sacred book, its code of morality, its organized system of prayer attract converts wholesale from those quarters unexposed to Christianity.

Given the universal breakup of Christianity in Europe, the culture based upon it has undergone a similar decay. The same is not true of Islam. The whole spiritual strength of Islam remains, from Egypt to Indonesia.

A contemporary of Belloc, the Spanish-born Harvard University professor George Santayana, writing in 1937 for an American audience, observed:

The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place. We still understand the value of religious faith. . . . On the other hand, the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialist future confront it with equal authority. Our whole life and mind is saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit—that of an emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.26

Since September 11, 2001, we have become accustomed to distinguishing the “terrorists” and the Taliban from Islam itself, an Islam often romanticized in the halls of the academy. Absent Christianity, is the West able to defend itself against Islam? Within the present cultural context, is the “emancipated, atheistic, international democracy” feared by Santayana any match for a militant Islam which finds abhorrent the new barbarism which the West has willfully embraced? Belloc and others such as Lewis would not count on it.

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Notes:

1. See the Qur añ: Sûrah 9.5 “And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give Zakah, let them [go] on their way.” Sûrah 9.14 “Fight them; Allãh will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them. . . .” Sûrah 5.33 “Indeed the penalty for those who wage war against Allãh and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land.” Sûrah 8.39 “And fight them until there is no fitnah (persecution) and the religion of all of it is for Allãh.” The Qur añ Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meanings, English revised and edited by Saheeh International (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia), 1997.
2. Many commentators allude to the Crusades of the Middle Ages as if they had political relevance to the present day. They are often cited as evidence that Islam has a justified grievance against the West, ignoring the fact that the Crusades were an attempt to recover Constantinople and the once Christian lands of Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, lands that had fallen to Muslim conquest. The religious and other wars of Europe, similarly cited as evidence of violence, find no mandate in the New Testament or in Christian teaching in any period, which teaching, to the contrary, admonishes peace, long suffering, and forgiveness. Just war theory associated with Catholic moral teaching places severe restraint even on warfare undertaken in self-defense.
3. New York Times, December 5, 2001, B1.
4. Cf. Dr. Sahr Muhammad Hatem of Riyahd in the London Arabic-language daily, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Dec. 21, 2001.
5. The Great Heresies (Rockford, Ill., 1991), 45–46.; reprint of 1938 ed.
6. St. Thomas disputed the view that Mohammedanism is a Christian heresy and had some harsh things to say about Mohammed himself. Speaking of Mohammed, he writes, “He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free reign to carnal pleasure. In all of this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men.” Lacking any sign of a divine mandate, “Mohammed said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which were signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Mohammed forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. by Anton C. Pegis as On the Truth of the Catholic Faith (Garden City, 1995), Bk. I, Ch. 6.
7. Cf. Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Gifford Lectures, 1948–1949 (London, 1950), 184 ff.
8. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York, 1955), 182.
9. In addressing the faith/reason problem in his Book of Religion, Alfarabi held that religion is dependent on philosophy. He looked upon religion as political in character, having more to do with rulership than creed. The founder of a religion is referred to as a supreme ruler rather than as a prophet. “Religion is opinions and actions, determined and restricted with stipulations for a community by their first ruler.” A virtuous ruler directs the community to its ultimate happiness, not to the goods of this world. The Political Writings, trans. and annotated by Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca, 2001), 93ff.
10. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 183.
11. Scholastik, trans. from the German by Richard and Clara Winson as Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy (London, 1960).
12. Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 185.
13. Córdoba and Toledo were not the only centers of translation. The first rendering of the Koran into a Western language was made by Robertus Retenensis in 1143 at the request of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. Cf. Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (London, 1955), 7.
14. Paul Oskar Kristeller, following certain French scholars, refers to it as “Paduan Averroism,” tracing its origin to Salerno at the beginning of the twelfth century and then to other Italian universities in the thirteenth century. He finds it flourishing at Padua in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where it continued to develop until the first part of the seventeenth century.
15. Scholasticism, 105.
16. New York, 2002, 151.
17. Ibid., 125.
18. Kirche und Kultur im Mittelalter, trans. George J. Undreiner (Paterson, N.J., 1956 [1936]), 440.
19. Ibid.
20. Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2002, W-10.
21. Luke 20:25.
22. The Great Heresies, 42.
23. Ibid., 55.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 73.
26. “Winds of Doctrine,” in The Works of George Santayana, Vol. VII (New York, 1937), 5.