Building a Curriculum for a Culture of Peace Part V

From Dismissal to Engagement: Why a Culture of Peace Must Reject the Hunt for Contradictions

By Rebecca Abrahamson

A culture of peace cannot be built on dismissal. It cannot be built on the habit of glancing at another people’s scripture, tradition, or memory and saying, “This makes no sense, therefore it is invented.” Or, “Several versions of that text exist, therefore it is false.” That habit is not scholarship; it is scoffing dressed up as sophistication.

I learned that young. At nineteen, college loomed large and professors seemed grander than they really were. It was in vogue for some instructors to sneer at scripture and tradition under the above assumptions. Chris, a Christian student, and I had to fulfill a requirement in religious studies and so would drag ourselves to biblical Hebrew class for predictable dismissals of the text, I felt it was just so this instructor had an allowance to live as he pleased, Chris thought it was due to lack of Christian Grace. We had our debates, Chris and I, but one thing we shared: there is a lot more to scripture and tradition than easy, scoffing dismissal.

In class, our eyes locked twice. Once when the instructor said that “mistakes crept into the text” with that constant sneer that I found exhausting; Chris had already shared with me that God is the greatest poet, variety of texts is an invitation to study, not dismiss, and that uniformity was a Roman concept, “the conversion of Rome was the worst thing that happened to Christianity!” he once thundered over lunch, his hamburger half eaten and my kosher meal still unwrapped, I had paused to respect his intensity of feeling, though his words were lost on me at the time, “ today you ask someone, “are you Christian? And they answer, well yeah, everyone is. This is terrible, accepting Christ should be a personal choice, not because everyone else is!” he went on to say that differences in texts and tradition are because God’s message must take various forms. Variety thus buttresses veracity. He came down from his passionate stance and pointed to my lunch – go ahead and eat.

In class, we lacked the energy to address the power imbalance between professor and student, oh once as he went on about different names of God mean different authors, I said, “couldn’t this mean different aspects of God?” He reddened, jaw dropped but he quickly recovered his sneer and said, “is that what you believe?” no scholarship, just dismissal. Back to Chris, our eyes locked when the professor mentioned “mistakes” in the text with that permanent dismissive sneer. I wanted Chris to stand up for his faith, challenging the dogma that uniformity spells truth, I raised my eyebrows but Chris shook his head and, as usual, let it pass in favor of Grace and turning the other cheek.
On to Psalm 104 , wine making the heart glad, ah, this professor said, this inspired a friend to cure his alcoholism, Chris answered with a touch of irony: “But what if he was reforming the religion?” I added, “Well, maybe there is a misspelling, so it cannot be divine truth.” Our eyes locked again, this time in a small triumph in defense of authenticity and intellectual humility. For a moment, the spell broke. The professor’s scorn cracked, and so did our reserve under the classroom power imbalance.

I graduated. But the sting, and the deeper assumption behind it, remained: if you cannot make immediate sense of a text, and if there are various versions, then the text itself is late, corrupt, fabricated, or politically constructed.

The scorn did not have the simple roots that Chris and I had assumed, those roots hearken to a method of evaluating scripture and tradition that was popularized four hundred years after the ministry of Muhammad(pbuh). Four hundred years is a long time – memory fades, and inroads can happen more easily. Ibn Hazm, 11th century Muslim philosopher, made that inroad. Spinoza, 17th century, drew from Ibn Hazm’s methodology, and it made for a lot more than discomfort in a classroom. It made for the edification of dismissal of scripture, tradition, and history on the following model: lack of uniformity spells in-authenticity. Different versions spell falsification.

Let’s take a look.

The Qur’an (4:82) does say of itself, “Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would have found within it much contradiction,” but that verse is specifically about the Qur’an, and decidedly does not state that this standard applies to previous revelations.

Ibn Ḥazm took that reasoning and extended it into a broader rule: any scripture containing seeming contradictions is wholly false and not from God. His Al-Faṣl fī al-Milal wa-al-Ahwāʾ wa-al-Niḥal normalized a method: scour a rival scripture for apparent unresolved difficulty, use this as proof of fabrication, and then dismiss it as forgery. In his words: “Every book that contains falsehood is false and fabricated; it is not from God Almighty.

Thus…the corruption of the Jewish and Christian religions became apparent likewise. Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds.” (Volume 1, Page 93).

R. David Freedman, in his article “The Father of Modern Biblical Scholarship,” notes that Ibn Ḥazm was “the first in a line of Muslim thinkers who tried to dissuade Muslims from regarding the Hebrew Bible with any respect whatsoever…” Whatever personal, political, or intellectual resentments may have sharpened his tone, the result was clear: Ibn Ḥazm paved the way for rejecting Christians and Jews as non-entities.

Spinoza would adopt this method six centuries later – seeming inconsistencies in the Bible spelt tampering. You wonder – with the masses of God fearing Jews pouring over their texts in the centuries since it existed in our grateful hands, would not anyone else notice these so called inconsistencies and deal with them? Not in Spinoza’s school: drawing on generations of rabbis and scholars, or even kindergarten children in the local orthodox Jewish day school regarding how they deal with so-called inconsistencies, was a no-go zone. (R. David Feldman notes that Ibn Hazm may have derived his method from Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Rome and Roman emperor Julian the apostate – there we have that Roman uniformity-spells-truth influence that Chris eschewed!)

This is where the eleventh-century Muslim philosopher al-Ghazālī becomes important for a curriculum of peace. I have referred to him as “the Maccabee of the Muslim Ummah,” because he resisted the improper inroads of Neoplatonic philosophical assumptions into the realm of revelation. In the Tahāfut al-Falāsifah, al-Ghazālī confronted major Greek philosophical doctrines regarding Creation, God’s involvement in the particulars of our lives, and resurrection. Turning Greek philosophy on itself, he showed that an eternal Creator can indeed initiate the beginning point of Creation, that extrapolating science from our observation of nature does not contradict a constantly involved Creator, and that just as God can create from nothing, He can certainly resurrect.

When the Greek Seleucids captured the Temple in the 2nd century BCE, the Maccabees likewise resisted Greek influence that sought to make everything equivalent: they objected to concepts of sacred oil and limits to which animals can be used as sacrifices. Greek philosophy held that equality means sameness, but we will see that Abrahamic tolerance does not derive from sameness; it derives from respect for the differences within the monotheistic faiths and acknowledgment that differences are indeed part of the divine plan.

Greek thought, precise on the atomic level, is a wonderful tool for the sciences, where absolute precision is vital. You cannot have many opinions about how to engineer a sturdy bridge, there can be no faults or deviance in the scientific method. But seeming fault-lines in scripture, tradition, and history do not function the same way. They instead point to the variety that the Qur’an itself extols in its call to “race for virtue” and in declaring that other monotheists, ahle kitab, have a portion in the world to come.

We must unmask this Greek-influenced assumption: truth must mean sameness. If texts are not identical, there must have been tampering. If two communities differ, one of them must be false. If human beings are equal, they must become interchangeable.

Classical Islam treated other monotheists as communities standing within a shared history of revelation. Qatādah, as cited by al-Baghawī on Qur’an 5:48 and by al-Qurṭubī on Qur’an 21:25, states that al-dīn wāḥid wa-l-sharā’iʿ mukhtalifa – universal religion is one, while the covenants differ – so that the Torah, Gospel, and Qur’an share tawḥīd even as their legal forms remain distinct.

Muhammad(pbuh) likewise said, al-anbiyāʾ ikhwatun li-ʿallāt … wa-dīnuhum wāḥid – “the prophets are paternal brothers … and their religion is one” (Sahih al-Bukhari 3443, Sahih Muslim 2365) – thereby grounding diversity of communities within the unity of divine mission.

Al-Ṭabarī, commenting on Qur’an 29:46, commands disputation with Jews and Christians only bi-llatī hiya aḥsan, that is, with what is fairest and most beautiful in speech, by calling them to God through His signs rather than through abuse; and on Qur’an 60:8 he interprets an tabarrūhum wa-tuqsiṭū ilayhim as a directive to show benevolence and justice to peaceful non-Muslims “from all communities and religions.”

Nor does the tafsīr tradition flatten the People of the Book into a single condemned mass: on Qur’an 5:66 al-Baghawī speaks of an umma muqtaṣida, a “moderate” or “balanced” group among them, ʿādila ghayr ghāliya wa-lā muqaṣṣira – just, neither excessive nor neglectful.

These sources offer a classical Muslim basis for principled coexistence: one God, one prophetic religion in its root, differentiated covenants in law, courteous debate, and justice toward other monotheists.This is not relativism. It is disciplined diversity under divine sovereignty.
Muhammad’s(pbuh) polity in Medina also points in this direction. The Constitution of Medina is read by major scholars today as a pact that established a shared political order with Jews without requiring the erasure of religious difference.

Regarding interfaith discussion, my husband Ben notes: “a significant portion of Muslim-Jewish debate today is concerned with ‘finding contradictions in the Torah.’

This is not mentioned in the Qur’an or any ahadith. This technique was not common before Ibn Ḥazm. While Qur’an 4:82 links the divine origin of the Qurʾān itself with freedom from contradiction, Ibn Ḥazm universalizes that principle for the first time into a formal logical rule: any book containing falsehood is therefore wholly false and not from God. This is a philosophical move, indebted more to Greek logical method and its place in kalām (Greek-based logic), than to an explicit naqlī (text and transmission) proof.

Moreover, to establish fabrication by this method, it is not enough to point to an apparent contradiction; one must demonstrate that no sound interpretation, contextual limitation, figurative reading, scribal explanation, or translation issue can remove the tension. Otherwise the argument proves only the difficulty of the passage, not the falsity of the book by this Greek logical method.”

Thus, a curriculum for a culture of peace must identify the philosophical inroads that have no place in the study of scripture and tradition, and that some polemical habits are historical products, not eternal duties. Once that is understood, we can wrestle with contradictions rather than dismissing them, and without dismissing each other.

We can make eye contact under the gaze of a scoffing instructor and form a quiet pact that this matter bears more study. That is what Chris and I did, if only for a moment, when we shook loose those shackles.
—

See: R David Feldman, The Father of Modern Biblical Scholarship, Janes (19) 1989

Rebecca Abrahamson

http://www.alsadiqin.org
http://www.jewishpress.com/author/rebeccaabrahamson/