April 25, 2016
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Harriet Taylor
Anyone watching debates about Islam between Muslims and non-Muslims will at some time have the frustrating experience of hearing a Muslim apologist expound views which seem to be blatantly contradictory, or which seem to be based upon statements which seem to have little or no support.
Why might this be so? Why do so many such arguments about Islam seem to get nowhere? Could it be that with Islam, we are operating on a completely different standard of truth and reason? Well, yes.
Here’s a quick philosophy lesson about truth, as understood within the West, within the Judeo-Christian tradition and within the scientific method.
Here’s one basic law of logic. The law of non-contradiction means that you can’t hold both that A is true, and that A is not true, at the same time. Simple.
And among the set of beliefs you hold, you aspire to consistency, that all of your beliefs can be true at the same time, without contradicting each other. It’s how police interrogators try to trip up criminals, by catching them in a contradiction. It’s how academics and scientists test their theories. Hardly seems worth stating, does it, it’s so obvious. Of course, people sometimes try to wriggle out of things by being vague. But the principle still applies, and it’s a powerful reason why knowledge advances, a powerful tool for getting closer to the truth.
And what is truth? Philosophers have argued about this for millennia, but there is a widely held general view, again which seems blindingly obvious – something is true if it corresponds to reality.
And, although it’s hard to get a good grasp of reality, and although our very act of observing things may affect them, most of us still have a view that there is a world beyond us, a world which operates according to law-like regularities. This is so both for those taking a secular view, and for those in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For in this tradition, God made a world which operates independently and according to laws; furthermore, God made people in His image, so that they are capable of understanding the regular, explicable world around them. Western scientific optimism in progress and discovery in a world which people can understand and control is largely of a piece with Judaic understandings of their role in creation.
Moreover, it’s a key to Western notions of individuality and independence of thought. Armed with reason, we can work things out for ourselves.
This is a thumbnail sketch of a world view which of course attracts considerable philosophical debate, but which in broad terms is the philosophy behind the successful scientific and academic endeavours of civilisation.
But in Islam, do we necessarily find the same account of truth and reason? Well, no. And that explains a lot.
In the Quran we find the doctrine of abrogation. The Quran is meant to be literally the word of Allah. But oddly, it keeps changing. So, like some criminal anxiously trying to make his story consistent, Allah aka Mohammed came up with a feeble explanation – the later verses are ‘better’ – they are ‘stronger’ than the earlier texts which are ‘weaker’. Note that since it’s all the eternal work of Allah, none of it can be discarded. So you end up with ‘strong’ truth and ‘weak’ truth, even where they make incompatible claims. This only makes sense if the law of non-contradiction is rejected.
But now you have a set of inconsistent beliefs. And logicians have proved that, from a set of inconsistent beliefs, you can generate any belief, true or false. This helps explain those endless debates with Islamic apologists wriggling around from claim to claim. The sad thing is that many of these are honestly claiming that what they are saying is true, just as they concentrate on verses which are convenient to whatever the current point of debate is.
And note, that the relationship between humans, Allah, and the world is completely different in Islam than the relationship between humans, God and the world in the Judeo-Christian view. The Islamic world operates according to the will of Allah – which can make anything possible. There is no notion that the world follows laws that we can aspire to understand. We are not made in Allah’s image – we are just made to worship him and obey him. This contrasts hugely with the tradition the West inherited and developed from Judeo-Christian thought. So, this sets a pretty low bar for truth, reason, order and consistency, and for our understanding of Allah’s world. We’re just his slaves. We submit to his ‘truth’.
And note this Islamic attitude to truth is also alien to other belief systems. Muslims are discouraged from questioning their religion. But the Buddha, for instance, instructed his followers to ‘examine my teachings as a goldsmith examines gold’. In other words, carefully and critically.
The idea of truth which springs from Allah is that something is true if Allah decrees it, if Allah has stated it. Not that the truth corresponds to an independent, regular world. This again explains a lot. So it doesn’t really matter then if Allah spouts inconsistencies – anything which Gabriel allegedly uttered to Mohammed comes from Allah and thus has to be true. This is a world view where allegedly ‘scientific’ claims about the nature of the world, such as the dubious embryology in the Quran, are true just because Allah said so. It’s the source of a statement which matters, not what it’s about. This is the complete reversal of the Western notion of truth, where what determines truth is what a statement is about. ‘Snow is white’ is true if snow is white; not if Allah said that snow is white.
In many ways, in Islam, truth and falsehood are more connected with persons and personality, than with an independent reality. There are many aspects of truth in Islam which show just how deeply it’s connected with personality.
Slander in Islam is quite different from slander in the West. A defence to slander in the West is that the claim you are making about another person is true. But in Islam, all that’s needed is that it’s inconvenient or embarrassing to the person. The person’s feelings are the key. This is why Islamic blasphemy laws are so dangerous. You can get accused of slander by saying things which are patently true, if they put Islam in a bad light. And the list of true things about Islam which make it Look Bad is very, very long.
And the doctrine of taqiya – basically of lying in order to advance Islam – also makes sense now. Since the Quran, the word of Allah, is a mass of inconsistencies anyway, and since truth in the Quran is so strongly connected with issuing instructions to humans who are hated unless they uncritically accept Allah’s word, well, taqiya, lying to support Islam and its adherents, seems a small footnote. It all just advances Allah’s cause.
The connection of truth with personality also sheds light on how in Islam it’s possible to say that a person’s word is worth less than another’s, just on the basis who they are – of their gender. Now, this is not on the basis of working out how reliable a witness might be for reasons such as how good a view they had of events, whether they had a history of lying, and so on, which would be quite legitimate. It’s just on the basis that testimony comes from a particular source – a woman’s mouth – that renders it worth half that of a man’s. This doesn’t make sense in the West. But in Islam, the source of a statement in and of itself is held relevant to its truth.
This link of truth with personality is indeed at the root core of Islam. Read the Quran and you can hear Mohammed panicking from start to finish about the ridicule he had from unbelievers who would not accept his claims. He thus conjured up a religion where accepting things as true because Mohammed said he’d heard it from Allah via Gabriel is core to its very foundation; a religion obsessed with who is a believer and who is an unbeliever; a religion where anyone who does not believe is threatened with Hell, a Hell described in lavish detail, over and over and over so that in the end, you either get bored with reading descriptions of how you’re going to be drinking boiling pus for eternity, or cave in and join Mo’s gang. Believe in an all-powerful, wilful god, slavishly do what he says – or burn forever.
In trying to combat Islam then, we are faced with an ideology so dangerous and destructive, that it attacks its adherents’ very reason, the very tools of independent thought. The way in which truth bends to the service of an inconsistent, hate-filled Allah, and his egomaniacal prophet, is a pillar which props up Islam, and which must be attacked if the edifice Mohammed constructed is to be dismantled.
And a last point – does this lackadaisical attitude to the truth remind you at all of postmodernism, of cultural relativism? No wonder the cultural relativists so often hold hands with Islam.
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