It is a pleasure to be back here at AEI and wonderful to see old friends.  But I can’t help but observe that the circumstances are strange.  If I have understood my assignment correctly I am supposed to speak about medieval Jewish thought and its relationship to medieval Islamic thought and the consequences that flow from that, including contemporary consequences.  I suppose for good measure I might say something about medieval Christian thought.

Now I do actually know something about medieval thought.  But I must confess that when I came to Washington and AEI I put all that aside – or I thought I had.  I came to do work on the contemporary relationship of religion and American politics and occasionally Middle East politics from the perspective of current issues of American public policy.

During my years here I aspired to conform to the cutting edge perspective for which AEI is justly famous.  I explored various possible topics.  For example: does democracy need religion, a question inspired by Tocqueville’s account of American democracy?  I explored the relationship of religion and the entrepreneurial spirit, a topic also suggested by Tocqueville.

Other topics were suggested to me by the work of colleagues: Religion and the Telecommunications Act; The Bible and the Dow.  Finally I thought I might have settled on a topic that particularly suited the mission of AEI.  I was contemplating a book entitled Is God a Libertarian?  Little did I know that all this was misguided—that what was really cutting edge was medieval thought – Muslim, Christian and even Jewish.

One sign of this was the urgent phone call I received a week ago from the office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.  Naturally I thought he might want my current reflections on the Crusader Artillery System.  But I was wrong. In fact what he wanted from me, as from others he consulted, was to confirm  some facts concerning the great Islamic philosopher al –Farabi, who lived in the 9th and 10th centuries, for a speech he was delivering that evening. In that speech, which was a very significant event in the war on terror, Wolfowitz spoke of  “the collision of misunderstanding between the Muslim and Western worlds,” a misunderstanding it was necessary to address.

“Today,” he said, “we are fighting a war on terror – a war that we will win.  The larger war we face is the war of ideas – a challenge to be sure, but one that we must also win.  It is a struggle over modernity and secularism, pluralism and democracy, real economic development.  To achieve victory in this larger conflict, we must work to understand the many facets of the Muslim world.”

The conflict to which Wolfowitz referred is, by his view, between different Muslim understandings, some better, some worse, not only from our perspective but from the perspective of the Muslim world itself.  For the sake of the good of the Muslim world he appealed to the great tradition of philosophic thought represented by men like al-Farabi.

Such is the character of our times.

My experience of the past few months, like that of many others, has shown how unpredictable life and politics may be and that the pursuit of sound public policies may prove to require unusual and unexpected questions and thoughts.  I am reminded of the experience of my late teacher Allan Bloom. 

After becoming a household name with a best-selling book, entitled The Closing of the American Mind, he was asked how he explained his success, especially in light of the fact that a portion of that book  was devoted to a dense account of how Western thought went from Socratic humanism to Heideggerian fascism.  He replied that when he was young he was an idealist and wanted to go to business school but decided to go into philosophy where the big bucks were.  After his success he returned to his first love, going over to the Chicago Business School for chats with Gary Becker about the family and its future, a subject both deeply cared about.

Applying this experience to my own I might say that when I came to AEI I had a yearning to apply myself to tax policy, well hidden I know, but am now forced to accept the fact that medieval thought is where the real public policy action is. 

What is responsible for this remarkable turn of affairs?  The answer of course is 9/11.  Like millions of people I didn’t know about 9/11, although I, along with some other people, was afraid something like it might happen. We had after all had a foretaste of what was to come – the bombings of our embassies in East Africa and the bombing of the USS Cole, not to mention other things.  There was a gathering storm, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, but no one could be certain how, when and where it would unleash its fury.  These events and many that have followed— the campaign in Afghanistan—near war between Pakistan and India—suicide bombings in Israel—have presented us with a variety of new questions – policy questions.

Some have suggested that we might need to return to the Middle Ages to find the answers to these questions and even to frame them properly.  How so?  What are the contemporary considerations which point us in this direction?  Well first is the common notion that our enemies, Bin Laden and others, yearn for the Middle Ages and want to return the Muslim world to them.  They often appeal to the authority of the theologian Ibn Taymiyyah who lived in the 13th and 14th century.  In addition, they seek a way of life and above all a politics governed by the Shariah, the comprehensive Islamic law which was elaborated and reached its completed form in the Middle Ages.  It is a way of life best known through the late Taliban regime and the country known as Saudi Arabia, a country which appears to have never left the Middle Ages but to maintain the tradition of that period.

The goal of our enemies, many of whom have links to Saudi Arabia or to Wahhabism, a sect within Islam which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia, appears to be to maintain the medievalism of Arabia and to extend it wherever possible and to use whatever means may be available, including of course terrorist violence. This ambit now includes Muslim countries as far apart as Nigeria and Indonesia and also Muslim communities living in the West, including this country.  It appears then that we need to understand this medieval imperative.

There is a second issue which appears to require that we return to the Middle Ages and which underlies the question I am asked to address today.  The premise of this question is the notion that once upon a time, in the Middle Ages of course, Christians, Jews and Muslims were more or less in something of the same boat, sharing a common medieval perspective. One aspect was a common intellectual inheritance and a discourse which transcended religious boundaries. Yet today’s Christians and Jews, especially America’s Christians and Jews, have left the Middle Ages far behind and do not long for it, but rather have embraced modern principles and progress and have found a modus vivendi between modern life and their ancient faiths.

Hence the question arises:  Why when almost the whole world acknowledges, sometimes quite reluctantly, that liberal democracy, American liberal democracy, is the modern success story and perhaps the success story of all time—and wants to emulate its success—are there people—substantial numbers of people—who detest us, that success and the conditions—democracy, freedom of religion, etc. - which give rise to it.  Why are most of these people Muslims, and why do they want, as was suggested earlier, to return themselves and their fellow Muslims to the Middle Ages?  Why unlike ourselves have they not put the Middle Ages behind them, at least as a way of life, and not gone forward?

There are a variety of considerations relevant to this question. But it has seemed possible that some important portion of the answer is to be found in the Middle Ages itself.  Muslims, Christians and Jews did share some things in this period. But perhaps there were important differences, in particular differences of thought, which might explain why the Middle Ages were for Christians and Jews the starting point of a process which has led to modern life whereas they appear to remain a fixed and eternal moment for Muslims.  If we understood those differences we might understand how to address a most urgent necessity – in fact two.

First if we understood these differences adequately we would have a better understanding of the state of the Muslim world and what it would take for it to move itself forward from the Middle Ages so that it is no longer a threat to us and to itself, but rather a partner in the future progress of humanity.  Second, if it is the case that some important difference within medieval thought was crucial to the emergence of modern life and to the ultimate success of American liberal democracy in particular, then it is possible that this difference is still operative. It would need to be recognized and nurtured.  That is to suggest that to assure our continued success we would need to nurture not only our modern and secular heritage but our medieval or religious one, at least properly understood.

These notions and questions have inspired this series of lectures and bring me to the question of medieval Jewish thought. Is there something about this thought which might help illumine the present orientation of Islam and address the problem it presents?  There is a good deal of force to the merits of this task and I want to praise Michael Novak for his wisdom in proposing this project and thank him for including me in it.  I will do my best to contribute to it.

But before beginning, I need to mention a few caveats.  First I must correct a relatively common misunderstanding by indicating that the radical Muslims who attacked us do not want to return to the Middle Ages.  They are radicals in the original and strictest meaning of the term.  They want to return to the roots.  Hence they do not want to return to the Middle Ages but rather the absolute roots of Islam, to the time of Muhammed and his companions when Islam first emerged into the world.  They do not want to return to the tradition as it existed prior to the decline of Islam in the 17th and 18th centuries and the rise of the West, for that by their lights would leave Islam in something like the same boat it has been in ever since – weak and inglorious. They want to return to a time when Islam enjoyed greater vigor, the time of its infancy and its youth. (I leave aside whether their conception of this period conforms to its reality.) 

They may and often do draw inspiration from important medieval figures like Saladin and Ibn Taymiyyah but the form of Islam they seek belongs, strictly speaking, to an earlier and different age.  By virtue of being this kind of radical, they are not so much medieval or traditionalist as they are modern - modern ideologues that is.  Indeed they have borrowed copiously from several other modern ideological movements, in particular, Communism and Fascism.  Hence in understanding this movement and addressing the threat it represents we will have to make use of modern tools of analysis as well as medieval ones.

All this is ably documented and argued in an article in the current issue of the Journal of Democracy entitled “Terror, Islam, and Democracy” and written by Ladan and Roya Boromound, two Iranian scholars, who have drawn upon their knowledge of modern revolutionary movements, beginning with the French Revolution and its infamous Reign of Terror, to illumine the contemporary situation.  There is neither time nor need for me to elaborate this point at present.  I will only mention that from the modern frame of reference, radical Islam most resembles Fascism with its peculiar combination of utopianism and a romantic longing for the past, especially an imaginary or invented past. 

Despite the importance of the modern characteristics of radical Islam as well as its pre-medieval focus, the Middle Ages retain their importance.  But they do so in a somewhat different way than first appeared.  The question is less what radical Muslims have borrowed from the Middle Ages but why modern Islamic thought has never, or almost never, found its way towards a liberal form of modern thought but only such forms as have been authoritarian or rather totalitarian, culminating now in radical Islam.  Why does there not seem to be any present day alternative to radical Muslim thought?  Is this somehow the result of the differences between medieval Muslim thought on the one hand and medieval Christian and Jewish thought on the other? Could it be otherwise, as Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz encourages us to consider?

The second caveat concerns Jewish thought.  After all, notwithstanding the best efforts of the worldwide, international Jewish conspiracy, Jews and their thought have been junior and minor players in the unfolding of both medieval and modern thought.  There must be limits to what light Jewish thought can cast on our problems.  These limits could be very severe.  Indeed they would be but for two things. 

First medieval Jewish thought, medieval Jewish theology, owes a very great deal to Islamic thought.  The greatest Jewish figures, like Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides, were extremely serious and learned students of the greatest Islamic thinkers and theologians and not a few minor ones as well.  This relationship was enhanced by the fact that for both groups of thinkers one of the central questions they faced was the question of law, Divine Law, Sharia if you like.  Hence Jewish thought can serve to clarify the distinctive differences of Islamic thought.

Second, medieval Jewish thought did exercise some influence on medieval Christian thought through men like Thomas Aquinas who was an avid reader of Maimonides. In part this reflected the great and open spirit of men like Thomas who were willing to learn from whatever quarter wisdom was available.  But it also reflects the fact that as with the Muslims, Christians and Jews share something terribly important in common – the Bible, at least the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.  Jewish thought is at the beginning and even at the end nothing so much as it is interpretation of the Bible and in this way could and did have a direct bearing on medieval Christian and even modern thought.

Let me also propose that the centrality of the Bible and the way it was or even had to be interpreted play a major role in explaining how and why medieval Western or Christian thought ultimately served as a kind of launching pad for modern thought.  One must keep in mind that an enormous proportion of the works of men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, not to mention Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, were devoted to Biblical commentary. In particular it has a great deal to do with the question of freedom which is so central to the difference between contemporary America and radical Islam as well as the relationship between freedom and the pursuit of the truth.  In this regard medieval Jewish thought can be helpful in understanding our present situation and how it developed.

By way of preview and looked at from our perspective let me say the following: What I will have to say will not lead, I expect, to the conclusion that God is a Libertarian.  So let me formally acknowledge that I am abandoning this project, even if it means I can never come home to AEI again.  But I can suggest that God is, however reluctantly, a small l liberal or small p progressive and perhaps even a small a American, even an entrepreneurially one to boot.  So He and I may still fit in here.

Let me turn now to medieval Jewish thought.  I will offer some necessarily general remarks about it and then conclude with some remarks about Islamic thought.  In what I have to say I will be very much guided by the thought of Moses Maimonides who is the figure who towers over all of Jewish thought even though he is not simply authoritative.  Indeed there were many Jewish sages who disputed his views or took a very different path.  In particular there were many who were opposed to his extraordinary openness to and pursuit of philosophy and science.  This hostility was so great that it managed to divide whole Jewish communities.  In some of them his Jewish opponents appealed to the Catholic authorities to proscribe and even burn his books and sometimes those authorities obliged.

Nevertheless due to the extraordinary power of his mind and the prestige he enjoyed as the greatest Jewish legal scholar Maimonides managed to set the framework for medieval Jewish thought.  That is he managed to ensure that there was a debate within Jewish thought, a debate between the conflicting claims of theology or faith and science, a debate which is partially concerned with human freedom and is a debate that has continued down to the present day.

Something similar may be said of the impact of Thomas Acquinas.  Thomas too was a great spokesman for and exemplar of the study of philosophy and science.   But this is not to say that Thomas was simply authoritative.  His books and teachings solicited a powerful critique, indeed very quickly – in the sphere of political theology from Marsilius of Padua and in theology generally from William of Ockham.  (Remarkably enough, these two men wound up together, holed up together one might say, under the protection of Ludwig of Bavaria as allies in Ludwig’s struggle with the Papacy.)  So powerful was this critique that it is William of Ockham rather than Thomas who is the reigning theological authority in the later Middle Ages.

Nevertheless, and as in the case of Maimonides, there was a debate, a debate whose framework was defined by Thomas and a debate which continues down to the present day.  In medieval Islam, there was also an important and critical debate, but a quite different one and therein lies an important part of our story to which I will return later on.  But first let me go back to Maimonides and Jewish thought.  I will focus on his approach to the question of freedom and the pursuit of truth which Michael Novak has identified as the key issues of this series.

Like all adherents of monotheism, Muslim, Jewish and Christian, Maimonides confronted a huge issue when addressing the question of human freedom.  For the God affirmed by all these faiths is the God who has created the heavens and earth and all that they contain.  The fact of creation bore the implication that God was, is and will be all-knowing and all-powerful, in philosophic jargon omniscient and omnipotent.  This bore the further implication or corollary that man might lack any freedom whatsoever, that everything he did was determined by God and that everything he experienced was the result of divine decree or fate. 

Maimonides of course affirmed the doctrine of Creation on the basis of the Biblical text and even strengthened the potential force of these implications by elaborating the doctrine that God had created everything entirely out of nothing, going beyond the literal meaning of the words of the Bible.  Yet he absolutely denied that this meant that man lacked freedom.  Here too his authority was the Biblical text.  In particular he appealed to the fact that so much of the Hebrew Bible is devoted to God’s promulgation of His law through Moses His prophet and lawgiver.  The prescriptions and prohibitions, the rewards and especially the punishments, implied that this law, like any law, presupposed that human beings were free to choose the good or the bad.

Indeed neither God nor Moses left this at the level of implication but stated clearly to the Israelites that now and forever they had a choice before them.  In laying out his case, one aspect of the law on which  Maimonides often focused  was a part that presupposed or combined both choice and thought or more precisely forethought. He enumerated various Biblical laws which required men to exercise precautions and assigned punishments to them if they failed to fulfill their responsibility.  What meaning and what justice, he asked, could these laws bear if everything was foreordained by God?

This was perhaps a particularly telling point for any educated or even semi-educated Jewish reader.  For traditional Jewish education, then as now, was focused from a very young age – 7 or 8 – on the study of the Talmud, the compendium of Jewish Law.  Also now as then, this education, which must begin somewhere, begins with the prosaic question of what is to be done if one man’s ox gores another.  This belongs to what we now call tort law.  It is tort law, then, which at a minimum proves that human beings have freedom, freedom not only to choose, but to think and to plan and that they are properly held accountable for doing all these things in the proper fashion.  Of course, this argument and such examples could not entirely dispose of the difficulties of Creation and human freedom or more precisely the paradox they present.

This paradox even found direct and concrete expression in the Biblical text through stories in which God apparently prevented men from exercising their freedom.  The most famous of these was God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.  Maimonides struggled manfully to interpret these stories in a manner which preserved both human freedom and Divine Justice, which preserved that is to say the multiple facets of the Biblical text.  He offered these interpretations not only in his more philosophical and technical works but in books and monographs for more popular audiences such as a little work known as The Eight Chapters.  This book, which is devoted to the relationship between Aristotle’s view of virtue and the teaching of the Law, devotes its very last chapter to an extensive defense of the fact of human freedom.

As was implied before, from time to time Maimonides found himself forced to admit that he had failed to provide a totally adequate solution.  But he insisted that in that event the proper course of action was to accept the paradox and to continue to try to penetrate it to the best of one’s abilities, using all tools available, including the resources of philosophy and science, rather than to resolve it neatly and speedily in favor of a deterministic and mechanical solution.  Human freedom deserved and needed to be affirmed in every way possible.  That included an assault on another threat to the recognition of freedom, astrology, the bastard child of science and even perhaps theology.  Maimonides peppered his works with critiques of astrology, which he had studied thoroughly to this end, and wrote a small monograph on the subject for the Jews of Southern France. 

The Bible offered, according to Maimonides, more than an adequate evidence of a presumption in favor of human freedom.  But what of progress and what of philosophy and science?  What need was there of them? What need could there be since the Divine authorship of the Bible guaranteed both its veracity and the eternity of its truths?  What could human art and in particular the arts of reason add?  Or to put the issue more sharply – Does not the Bible trace the origin of human art and reason to the evil Cain and his evil seed?  Worse still does not human knowledge or the pursuit thereof owe its emergence to the very first act of human disobedience – the partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge by Adam and Eve after they had been expressly forbidden to?  Is this not why God has given us the law which relieves us of the necessity of thinking about what we need to do by simply telling us – a law to which it is forbidden either to add or from which it is forbidden to subtract?  Yes, freedom we may have and need to exercise to comply with the law and God’s will.  But is there any reason why that exercise should apply to thought?

Maimonides reply may be described in something like the following terms: It is true and important that human understanding and human art and the so-called progress they represent has its origins in human disobedience and even evil.  We were not necessarily originally intended to be God’s co-creators as people often say today.  But that capacity was inherent in that freedom with which God himself had chosen to endow us.  Once it expressed itself, God accepted it and  gave it His qualified blessing.  The most powerful expression of this is the apparent fact that Moses is superior to Adam, so superior that it is he who has seen God face to face or nearly so, that he is superior by virtue of the wisdom and understanding he possessed, wisdom and understanding which presupposes our original disobedience and which is not entirely of direct divine origin.

There are to be sure limitations to the freedom human art and science may beneficially exercise, even severe limitations.  Human effort, wisdom and art are blessed subject to the qualification that they be devoted to divine and holy purposes.  They must start from and sometimes end with Biblical premises.  But those limits are not altogether easily defined.  For those purposes do not at all times and places have the same concrete meaning.  This is because the very exercise of human freedom, reason and art both for good and ill, have, as we know from the Bible as well as history, changed and will change the circumstances of men as well as what  might be required to fulfill God’s aims.  This even applies to the most fundamental and eternal of truths.

Moses, it is true, was prepared to understand these truths as deeply as they will ever be understood by man.  But this did not mean that the people he led out of Egypt, to whom the bulk of the Torah is addressed, were similarly well-prepared to understand or even remotely well-prepared.  Both God and Moses adapted themselves to these conditions to make possible the greatest possible understanding in the circumstances. As the Jewish sages had said, God and the Bible speak the language of men. We must do the same.  But circumstances may change and even improve and we should take the greatest possible advantage of that – up to and including things like the study of science and philosophy. 

This did not mean that we might ever expect to resolve fully the paradoxes or perplexities presented to us by the Bible or science or the discussion and debate between them.  None of us was likely to see God face to face.  But the exploration of these perplexities even to the point of heightening and deepening them was preferable in a variety of ways to sterile resolutions that might be offered by either theology or philosophy and the death of human vitality that such solutions would bring, even the death of human aspiration and longing for God. 

Such was Maimonides practice and recommendation for others; especially those admirable and gifted young people who, filled with impatient curiosity and longing for God, would be frustrated by any other approach and rendered stunted or worse.

One of the most beautiful passages in Maimonides’ work is to be found in the introduction to the book he devoted to perplexities and the perplexed – a book suitably titled The Guide of the Perplexed.  In it he speaks of the kind of person to whom it is addressed and literally to such a person, the individual to whom it is dedicated.  He is a person who runs the risk of feeling that he must either give up his deeply held faith or his God given gifts of understanding.  Maimonides proposes that he need not give up either if he is willing to work hard, be disciplined and be patient. His young friend and student was particularly lacking in patience.  Human freedom and reason remain qualified blessings.

As I said earlier, Maimonides’ view of human affairs was not simply authoritative.  But it did insure that at some times and places in the Jewish community there could be a vigorous and fruitful interchange between what we call theology and philosophy, even if that was attended by tension.  Something similar of course happened within the Christian community on  much larger scale.  As I mentioned before a great deal of this both depended upon and was carried on through Biblical interpretation.  Such interpretation often disputed Thomistic or Maimonidean interpretation. Nevertheless for our purposes the really salient point is that the discussion continued and out of it emerged the modern world, including America and its liberal democracy.  The human arts and sciences that have brought this about have been, as the religious tradition  always claimed, a mixed blessing.  Liberal democracy is good but it has had the Terror of the French Revolution, Fascism and Communism for its modern companions.  The medical sciences, which have brought relief from so many of our infirmities, now run the risk of deforming our natures.  We do not yet know and we may never know with certainty whether the exercise of our freedom and our reason will prove to be more blessing than curse.

But, here is a most important point: we know that we don’t know. We keep examining and debating these questions from the perspective of both theology and philosophy, at least in the United States where this debate retains enormous vitality.  America continues to explore Maimonides paradoxes and perplexities; perhaps that is because America is itself a paradox, combining as it does the most advanced forms of modern life and institutions along with the greatest religious vitality of any of the advanced modern countries.

It is also observable that it enjoys the greatest vitality and energy of any nation on earth.  Perhaps that is a result of the fact that the debate between theology and philosophy over the role of human freedom and reason continues.  This conforms to a suggestion made many years ago by Leo Strauss,  one of the two or three greatest men of the 20th century.  Speaking of the mutual influence of philosophy and theology within Western history, including their conflict and debate, he offered the judgment that this “unresolved conflict is the secret of the vitality of Western Civilization.”

But what of Islam?  Did not the same conditions exist within Islam to engender a debate like the one which occurred within Christianity and Judaism, which it has been suggested is one of the causes for the emergence of modern life, though not of course the only one?  If they did exist why did they not produce a similar, if not identical, result? 

The answer to the first question is certainly yes.  After all, Maimonides traced his own philosophic and scientific education to Muslim teachers, men like Ibn Sina, Ibn Bajja and above all to the philosopher known as al- Farabi who nearly single handedly revived the classical tradition of thought.  According to Maimonides, Farabi was the Second Master, second only to Aristotle himself. Through Maimonides and other means, Thomas too could be regarded as their students. The thought of these men could have underwritten something like the Maimonidean and Thomistic projects.

In fact one of Maimonides’ contemporaries, Ibn Rushd, known as the West as Averroes, played a particularly significant role among Jews and Christians through his massive commentaries on the works of Aristotle.  He could have laid the groundwork for something like the theological and philosophical tradition of Christianity within his own Muslim world. 

Indeed, he tried to do so and wrote an important work toward that end called the Decisive Treatise.  In it, Averroes who like Maimonides was a jurist as well as a philosopher, raised the question of whether the Sharia forbade, permitted or required the study of science and philosophy.  In the event, he argued that it required such study.  It is extraordinarily learned and brilliantly argued, drawing especially on the Qur’an, the favored text of today’s radicals.  But one cannot say that it was crowned with success.  Averroes was not the last figure of this tradition.  That distinction belongs to the great writer Ibn Khaldoun.  But for the most part, the vigorous debate and interaction between theology and science did not continue on into what we now call the modern period.

As I mentioned much earlier in this talk, this did not mean that there was not a significant intellectual debate within Islam.  But it was framed in a different way and by different kinds of figures – in particular two men.  One of them I have already mentioned – Ibn Taymiyyah.  He belongs to the 13th and 14th centuries.  The other is a man named al-Ghazzali who lived nearly two centuries earlier, in the 11th and 12th centuries.  I will say a couple of things about them but I want to observe generally that the themes of freedom and freedom of thought were among the casualties of the fact that it is these two great figures are the ones who are authoritative for the framework of Muslim thought. Let me add that I owe this judgment and insight to my first teacher in Islamic thought and history, Prof. Muhsin Mahdi of Harvard Univ., who is the greatest authority on the work of al-Farabi.  He remarked to a faculty seminar at Columbia Univ. that a great deal of the difference between the trajectories of Islam, Christianity and Judaism could be traced to the differences between Maimonides, Thomas and al-Ghazzali.

Hence first a word about Ghazzali.  Ghazzali was both a jurist and a theologian.  As a theologian he belonged to the school known as Asharism, which both before and through him came to be the dominant school.  This had a particular bearing for the question of freedom.  For the Asharite school resolved the great paradox of God’s Creation and human freedom by rejecting human freedom entirely.  Of particular interest to us is the fact that it did so by adopting as its own a form of natural science which was otherwise at the time considered inadequate and refuted.  It may have a familiar ring for it was known in the past as atomism.  Asharites were inclined towards it because its elaboration of material determinism reinforced the argument for Divine determinism or made the latter appear more scientific.  This might serve as a caution to us if we expect our own materialist science to be a bastion of freedom.

But Ghazzali’s distinctive contribution was his claim to have examined all forms of seeking for the truth and weighed their merits.  All but one – namely mysticism – were found wanting in the end.  Ghazzali legitimated mysticism within Islam and attempted to raise it to a most honored position, with considerable success.  Ghazzali and the change in religious orientation that he effected, a change which was embodied in his masterwork known as the Revival of the Religious Sciences did not, however, go unchallenged. It solicited an angry and trenchant critique by Ibn Taymiyyah who objected to this change as a departure from the original spirit and meaning of Islam.  He served as the inspiration for the founder of Wahhabism who undertook through the arms of the Saudi family to uproot all practices which were deemed to be illegitimate innovations – including the veneration of saints and other traditional and mystical practices.  It is thus that he continues to serve as the patron saint of contemporary radical Islam.

The struggle between these two men and their teachings has continued to have a powerful formative affect on Muslim thought. But one may suggest that from the point of view of modern life, the framework they create has certain limitations, at least as it has come to express itself in contemporary life. On the one hand, one has a mystical orientation which affirms the private and the individual but lacks a correlative public teaching which could inform political life. On the other hand, one has a trenchantly political teaching which offers little elaboration of the freedom of the individual. The Muslim world would profit from a new view, a new political view, which sought to combine the force and merits of these two sides. In modern times, significant figures have tried to break out of this framework.  At the beginning of the 20th century, two men Muhammed Abduh and Al-Afghani attempted to revitalize Muslim thought and life and to articulate an Islamic modernity. They did so in part by trying to resurrect the Islamic philosophic tradition within the context of theological discussion.  But their attempt has not yet been successful, as we are all painfully aware.

Of course, as historians will readily remind us, it is not only thought which defines the characteristics of life, whether ancient, medieval or modern.  Nor is it only thought which can explain differences in fortune. Political circumstances obviously play an important role, not to mention social and economic factors.  But here too one may suggest that certain aspects of thought are interconnected with these factors.  For example, for a time, indeed for a fairly long time, it appeared from human history that it was some form of monarchy or autocracy, rather than democracy, which was required for political health, stability and success. (I am not speaking here of justice.) During that period, Muslim monarchies were by far the most successful and the most spectacularly successful was a relatively recent one, the Ottoman Empire.  Perhaps there was a connection between that success and the fact that Muslim thought depreciated freedom.  It is at least worth noting that the most successful Muslim autocracies, including the Ottoman Empire, shared a distinctive feature: except for the Sultan or Caliph, all members of the ruling elite in such polities – soldiers, bureaucrats, etc. - were legally and formally slaves, personal slaves of the Sultan or Caliph.  Eventually for reasons which we must leave unexplored, freedom and democracy proved to be more potent sources of political success.  Under this dispensation, Western or Christian rather than Islamic thought had as we say today a comparative and competitive advantage.  This suggests that Michael Novak is correct in his intuition that an important contribution was made by the differences in medieval thought. 

There remains the pressing question of what we are to do about its consequences.  As for ourselves, and as I mentioned earlier, we should appreciate the vitality which comes from the kind of debate which has survived down the years in the Christian and Jewish world and whose present home is America.  As for the Muslim world, we must hope that it can recover and deploy the resources it once had available to nurture a similar debate.  In part this may mean renewed interest in the great figures I mentioned earlier.  It is significant that many moderate and progressive movements and institutions in recent history have sought the mantle of Ibn Khaldun by adopting his name. Others have looked to Averroes for inspiration.

The fact that this has not yet been successful is not altogether surprising. Modern Rome, by which I mean the advanced Western democracies, like ancient Rome was not built in a day.  Nor were the great Islamic empires of the past.  Several hundreds of years and many, many mistakes, to put it gently, have been required to bring us to the point we are now at.  As I said before, for a large part of this time it was not clear whether modern life was worth this effort. So to repeat, it is not surprising that the Muslim world has not yet joined the modern world in a fruitful fashion.

But time is pressing precisely because the modern world has brought with it a variety of curses including what are known as weapons of mass destruction. It would also be helpful if serious and thoughtful Muslims took a serious look at the manner in which we, especially in America, have successfully, if not decisively, wrestled with the paradoxes which confront believers in the one true God, in whom we like the Muslims profess belief.