Jihad as Equivalent to the Lord's Supper

Spengler

The normative Jewish writers of the second half of the 20th century, including Soloveitchik, Heschel, Wyschogrod (not to mention of course Buber) would not accept Maimonides' restrictions on so-called anthropomorphisms. Wyschogrod's essay on Maimonides in "Abraham's Promise" is remarkable -- I recommend it heartily. I am neither defending nor attacking Islam; I concur with many mainstream Islamic authorities that Jihad is the spiritual act par excellence of the religion. It is not merely a doctrine, but an existential requirement. One can batter about a doctrine and get nowhere. The question is: how does the theology express man's inwardness, his participation in Being? That is why Jihad is the cognate of the Lord's Supper. It is not something you can talk someone out of; it is what he is.

And if that doesn't frighten you, I have not done my job.

Brother William
One could almost say it's diabolical in its cleverness.

My approach is more basic and more simple: what is the human condition and how do men confront it? The inevitability of death permeates life. Life itself is not tolerable without the hope of immortality, whether we mean by that simple continuity of bloodlines (the pagan solution), reincarnation, or the Kingdom of God of the Christians. Christianity demands a clean break with paganism, namely rebirth into a new People of God through baptism. The Christian repudiates his Gentile flesh; his Gentile nature dies, and he is reborn. That is the meaning of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross. Sacrifice for Christianity (and of course Judaism) is a vicarious death. The Muslim sacrifices himself through Jihad; Jihad, by which I mean the actual, physical act of conquest thus has the same role in Islam as the Lord's Supper has in Christianity. A martyr's death leads to the afterlife, just as Holy Communion does in (Catholic) Christianity. Again, look up
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GJ12Ak01.html

Cargo,
Thanks for calling attention to "They Made a Democracy and Called It Peace." However, I am not a Heraclitan. In fact, I find Heraclitus abominable. One finds enthusiasm for Heraclitus among the Mephistophelians in the West, from de Rojas (in the preface to "La Celestina") through to the odious Heidegger.

I tend to deprecate philosophy as a set of parlor tricks, but the Heraclitan issue does not easily go away.

What is truth?, asked Pontius Pilate.

The trouble is that one cannot dispense with subjectivity. I agree with Kierkegaard that man's Being is the internalization of the Absolute, through a leap driven by passion -- but how does one know what the Absolute is? When Rosenzweig says that the truth we know is that to which we say "amen," what if we say "amen" to the wrong truth? It seems to me a simple proposition that universal peace only can come about if we believe that every life is sacred -- which is to say that God loves sinners, Downs Syndrome babies and crack whores as much as He loves billionaire Olympic gold medal winners with PhDs in physics -- and that we can take lives only in defense of a society whose greater purpose is to adapt human laws to this Divine intent. The Absolute that many nations internalize, though, is a perverse projection of their own image: they believe that God loves Frenchmen, Germans, Russians or whomever more than everyone else. That, I hasten to add, is different from the Jewish view that God holds Jews to a tougher standard. As Wyschogrod observes in his analysis of Heidegger in The Body of Faith the absence of Being is violence, and false Being -- for which another name is idolatry -- leads to violence.

Islam is a different matter. Violence (Jihad) is essential to the religion. Judaism and Christianity sublimate non-Being, or violence, through sacrifce; Jesus takes the sins of the world (false Being or inauthentic Being) onto himself and through the violence done to His person, expurgates those sins from humanity. Judaism, much earlier, sacrificed man's labor (in the form of animals and then through prayer) in what in Hebrew is called avodah, which tranlates equally well as work, service, or "service" in the sense of religious observance. But Islam sacrifices the Muslim himself, through Jihad: see "The Blood is the Life, Mr. Rumsfeld!" It is the old endemic violence of the pagan world organized according to the external forms of revealed religion, the eternal war of the tribe against all other tribes, mutated into a universalized coalition of tribes ring-fenced against the encroachment of empire.

Spengler

Why does America threaten the Muslim world in the way that, say, the Nazis threatened the Jews? To argue that a Jewish presence on a tiny strip of land threatens the Muslim world makes no sense, unless the emotional condition of the Muslim world is so aggrieved at the notion of Jewish return that it cannot bear the idea -- in which case we are dealing with a threat to pride and credibility, not a true threat. America knocked over Saddam Hussein, to be sure, and attempted to improve conditions for Iraqis, although blunderingly and stupidly, with the result that things well might be worse. It is true that Muslim life as we know it is threatened by globalization and American pre-eminence, a point I have made many times, but it is just as threatened by Asian domination of world trade in manufactures. America really doesn't care about the Muslim world, because it is too insular to understand it. Americans don't want to destroy Islam. They don't even really know what it is. Go back to the UN's Arab Development Report. With all the oil wealth, the Arab countries have managed effectively a negative return on capital during the past generation. To blame the West is, well, paranoid projection.

Spengler

First on mysticism, I take Kierkegaard's view. His Knight of Faith is a solid burgher who looks forward to a Sunday dinner of pigs' knuckles, and is able to live an ordinary life. Mysticism wants to unite humans with the Absolute; the human condition is to hover between anxiety and the Absolute in a continuous struggle to internalize the Absolute.

Second, I know any number of happy post-Christians (and post-Jews and post-Muslims), but they are the ones whose involvement in some facet of spiritual activity -- the arts, sciences, or even helping professions -- rises to the level of an alternative religion. Goethe could pray simply for the chance to complete the work of his hands. But few people can create their own pseudo-religion and live with it. Most people have to chew the Devil's sourdough without further condiment. And their spiritual lives are chaotic.



I studied the Kuran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.

Islamic decadence is rooted in its impersonal and empty monotheism. In contrast, Hebraic monotheism, as may be seen in the Biblical account of creation, seeks to probe the unity underlying the totality of existence—of man and the universe. Moreover, the creativity for which Jews are famous, especially in the sciences, is rooted in the Genesis conception of man's creation in God's image—the divine source of human creativity as well as the intellectual basis of Jewish faith. (In this latter respect, Judaism also differs from Christianity,)

Allied with these Muslims are postmodern liberals. These liberals are motivated by a hatred of Western civilization, primarily its biblical roots. Their pro-Muslim attitude—most pronounced in their support of the Palestinians—evinces an anti-Jewish animus. Academia is the seedbed of this unholy alliance of believers and atheists.