On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2006-2018

by James V. Schall

This book is an account and evaluation by a renowned political philosopher and professor of several key and often shocking actions in the decade from 2006-2016. These incidents, in one way or another, had Islamic origins.

The author discusses the difficulty that Europeans and Americans have in recognizing that this militancy is not just caused by "terrorists," as if that were some kind of independent movement or mind-set. Violence has a source. No one undertakes it without a cause that is worth, in his mind, the risk even of death. Islam is unique in its description of a world within Islam that supposedly lives peacefully by the law of Allah, and a world outside of this sphere which is a world at war with Islam.

Fr. Schall also reflects on the similarity of Islamic voluntarist philosophy, which is necessarily used to account for the many contradictions found within the Qur'an, and the voluntarism that is found now present in most western societies and governments. The study of Islamic thinking and of western nominalism show common roots. Both, in different ways, end up with a world devoid of any natural order.

His main concern is the abiding existence of Islam over time, a constant prodding to achieve the goal of submission of all to Allah as a political and cultural fact. This book is a record of Schall's own reaction and understanding of the incidents in which Allah was claimed as the reason for the crisis caused by various shootings, bombings, and killings.

Genres: Nonfiction, Islam

263 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2018

About the author

Fr. James V. Schall, SJ was Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown University.

He was born in Pocahontas, Iowa, January 20, 1928. Educated in public schools in Iowa, he graduated in 1945 from Knoxville, Iowa High, and then attended University of Santa Clara. He earned an MA in Philosophy from Gonzaga University in 1945.

After time in the U.S. Army (1946-47), he joined the Society of Jesus (California Province) in 1948. He received a PhD in Political Theory from Georgetown University in 1960, and an MST from University of Santa Clara four years later. Fr. Schall was a member of the Faculty of Institute of Social Sciences, Gregorian University, Rome, from 1964-77, and a member of the Government Department, University of San Francisco, from 1968-77. He has been a member of the Government Department at Georgetown University since 1977.

Fr. Schall has written hundreds of essays on political, theological, literary, and philosophical issues in such journals as The Review of Politics, Social Survey (Melbourne), Studies (Dublin), The Thomist, Divus Thomas (Piacenza), Divinitas (Rome), The Commonweal, Thought, Modern Age, Faith and Reason, The Way (London), The New Oxford Review, University Bookman, Worldview, and many others. He contributes regularly to Crisis and Homiletic & Pastoral Review.

He iss the author of numerous books on social issues, spirituality, culture, and literature.

Reviews

[william mahlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Jesuit 100 xs smarter than the Pope.

Not the religion of peace, but of chickpeas. The Pope needs to read this book right away. Muslim Brotherhood Georgetown would suppress this great book.

[Richard Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written series of stories about Islam terrorist attacks. This is an important book to read; unfortunately, Western cultures are not paying attention. They are distracted by their own culture and they lack religious and spiritual fundamentals. So, they are losing countries -- slowly, but unceasingly. It is important to read this.

Short answers: "Terrorists" are uniformly motivated by the same religious storyline they've learned, mostly from the Koran. It never changes. It is persistent. Some good insights about why Muslims see terrorist attacks (as the West calls them) as jihad and religious based. The Muslims do not see these as terrorism but as furthering the will of Allah to conquer the non-Muslim world. Also, Islam never gives up ground. They may suffer setbacks, but they remain. They persist -- over centuries. The Western world basically does not even understand the religious drive behind all this. The West just prefers to ascribe such attacks to lunatics, not mainstream humans in Islam. That's not it -- in fact they do not see this as lunacy. They see it as fulfilling God's will. Some take it so far as to kill non-Muslims. Allah wills them to do this.

One explanation for why Islam does not analyze this killing as being amoral is that the Koran and Islam teach that Allah is all powerful. He can will killings of non-Muslims and the next day he can advise tolerance. Non-Muslims can temporarily live in Muslim countries, but they are drive out or converted. They cannot stay long. He can change his mind day by day, month by month, century by century. If Islam suffers military defeats, Islam sees this just as Allah's will. And that will likely change soon.

A current strong and effective strategy of Islam is to infiltrate the West by immigration. Muslims do not integrate into Western culture. They also grow by high birthrates compared to Western culutures. So they win; they come to dominate; they come to take over and instill Sharia law. They appear to bide their time and wait until they can take over the West by using the West's own ideas of democracy. But Muslim does not go back the other way; it's all one direction -- to conquer the entire non-Muslim world. They as extremely patient and persistent. The West is not. The author strongly believes the West will fail in trying to maintain Western culture and civilization.

[David Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of articles James Schall wrote during 2002-2018 which all address the topic of Islam. At some indefinite point they seemed to become mostly redundant, repeating the same essential points over and over. Since for me some of those points I already knew and accepted, at times it felt like he was preaching to the choir. However, I don't mean to say by this that what he says in the articles is any less true for being reiterated many times over a decade or two. On the contrary, his insistent emphasis points conveys his seriousness. I would like to only focus on some points which were new for me, or expanded under in my awareness under his treatment.

One area of interest to me is his observations about the voluntarism intrinsic to Islam, as he sees it. The following is one of his standard summations of this point. It is one of the most important consistent messages throughout his book, if not the most important.
"In its voluntarist option, Islam has sought to protect itself from the severe criticism that arises from reason, especially against its practical denial of the principle of contradiction. As there are many inaccuracies and contradictions in the Qur'an, Muslim thinkers early on recognized that they faced a serious problem, a problem intrinsic to their dealing with Greek philosophy. As Aquinas noted in the Summa contra gentiles, many profound attempts by Averroes and Avicenna in particular were made to deal with the relation between Muslim revelation and reason.
The result in general went with al-Ghazali that the basis of things was not logos but voluntas. This meant that Allah could say one thing one day and another thing the next. If Allah were limited to reason, it was thought, he would not be all-powerful; he would not be the master of both good and evil. The result of this line of thinking was to place the will of Allah at the center of things, both moral and physical. Every existing thing could at any time be otherwise. The only law was Allah's changeable will. Each thing could be its opposite, if Allah so willed. The only proper attitude to such a god was not to try to make sense of his decrees and demands but to submit to them no matter what they held. Anything less was considered blasphemous and would be punished as such." pgs. 222-223

He worries about the difficult Islamic voluntarism poses to deep, consequential dialogue with Islam and confrontation of Jihadist violence. He writes, "We must begin to ask the question of truth both of ourselves and of Islam. Is Islam true or not? We cannot ask this question if we think that no truth as such exists. If we think that truth does not exist, we are left with only power, in which whoever wins is the stronger." Pg. 239. He argued that basically the incoherence of Islam was accepted in the name of emphasizing Allah's complete power and man's complete powerlessness. Schall in part hopes for progress in dialogue with Islam through the much delayed critical edition of the Qur'an that is supposed to be coming out which compares variant texts of the Qur'an that survived 'Uthman's purges of all rival texts of the Qur'an.

If Schall is right that voluntarism characterizes Islamic theology to a pervasive extent, there does seem a parallel with aspects of modern Western culture in which Schall also observes a degree of voluntarism. It does seem to me that reason or logos is suppressed to a great extent out of a kind of secular (subterranean metaphysics) piety toward diversity and equality. The philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote, "The nominalism which is the dogma that has separated from experience, and which, therefore, cannot be controlled by experience, has become the publicly dominant form in the West."

In contrast to the voluntarism of Islam, "the going forth to baptize and teach all nations (by Christians) carried with it a position on the validity of reason in any culture." (pg. 101).

Schall believes that the teaching that the Qur'an is in effect coeternal with God (he does not use the language of coeternality) is a result of challenges to the Qur'an's historicity in its confrontations with Judaism and Christianity over the apparent alterations of Biblical stories in the Qur'an.

Schall often rues the lack of critical engagement with Islam, not least by Christians. He remarks in one place that Thomas Aquinas's Summa contra gentiles still seems like the major Christian effort to define what Islam is. He makes the observation to point out the death of articulation on the subject. "Our contemporary mode of approach is liberal and irenic." He also commends Hilaire Belloc's The Great Heresies chapter on Islam as prescient. Despite the Muslim lands dropping out of the modern picture as a serious threat for some three hundred years after the Battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683, he realized that "we shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future." Belloc noted that the spiritual foundation of Islam had proven immovable and its area of occupation did not recede, but on the contrary advanced. Schall claims that Islam is the only spiritual force on earth which Catholicism has found an impregnable fortress. At least twice in the history of the West, Islam almost overcame Europe, once at Portiers in the eighth century and once at Vienna in the seventeenth century. "Islam is the one heresy that nearly destroyed Christendom through its early material and intellectual superiority," Belloc wrote. Schall also commended and reflected on the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict XVI as "the first important papal document in modern times that addresses in any way, in the light of its record, the question 'What is Islam?'"


Books I'd like to read, or that I desire to read more, as a result of reading this book are:
The Great Heresies by Hillaire Belloc (especially the chapter on Islam)
Summa contra gentiles by Thomas Aquinas
The Regensburg lecture
The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert Reilly
The Caliph al-Mahdi and the Patriarch Timothy I: An 8th Century Interreligious Dialogue by Wafik Nasry
111 Questions on Islam by Samir Khalil Samir

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have a tendency to rate all of Father Schall's books in four or five star category, but this particular writing would not qualify. The book is a series of essays that have been written previously and then placed in book form. That does not in itself disqualify it from some of his better publications, but if one were to read just one or two of the chapters, one would essentially understand his view on the subject matter. No sense in reading the book in it's entirety.

[Me · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a time of moral relativism this view of Islam shouldn’t be discounted and ought to heard.

[Robert Pocock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Clearly and concisely written. Somewhat repetitive in content. May have been more effective if actually quoted from the Qur’an and from Muslim “leaders” to support its case.

[William]

A must read for a realistic perspective of what Islam is, and what it is not.