Word: ibn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...show that Islam sees God as so transcendent that reason is extraneous, Benedict cited an 11th century Muslim sage named Ibn Hazm. To establish the connection between this position and violence, he quoted a 15th century Christian Byzantine Emperor (and head of the Byzantine, or Eastern, Church) named Manuel II Paleologus. Paleologus criticized Muslims for "spreading [their faith] by the sword," both because "God is not pleased by blood" and because true conversion depended on reason. "Show me just what the Muhammad brought that was new," Paleologus said, in a passage quoted by Benedict, "and there you will find things...
...knew exactly what he was saying and regard the Islamic section of the 35-min. speech as a brave and eloquent warning of Islam's inherent violence and of a faithless West's inability to offer moral response. Yet Benedict's argument was slapdash and flawed. His sage, Ibn Hazm, turned out to have belonged to a school with no current adherents, and although reason's primacy is debated in Islam, it is very much part of the culture that developed algebra. Paleologus' forced-conversion accusation misrepresents the sweep of Muslim history, since more often than not, Islam has left...
...tendency of Westerners to ignore the critical role that Muslims played in the development of Western thought. Those who "forget" the decisive contributions of rationalist Muslim thinkers like al-Farabi (10th century), Avicenna (11th century), Averroes (12th century), al-Ghazali (12th century), Ash-Shatibi (13th century) and Ibn Khaldun (14th century) are reconstructing a Europe that is not only an illusion but also self-deceptive about its past...
...that the part of Benedict's speech that deals with religious violence extends beyond Manuel's statement and is precisely a slap at Islam. The truly problematic text, in fact, is a mixture of quotes from the Byzantine emperor, his German translator Theodore Khoury, a medieval Muslim scholar named Ibn Hazm, and the Pope's own musings. In combination, they seem to suggest that Islam's idea of God is so oblivious to the virtue of reason that it tolerates unthinking violence in Allah's name...
...goes like this. Benedict quotes Khoury as saying that Islam understands God as "absolutely transcendent," so much so that the deity's "will is not bound up with any of our categories, even rationality." The Pope then quotes Khoury quoting "a noted French Islamist" paraphrasing Ibn Hazm, who lived in Cordoba during the 11th century, saying that "God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us." Got that? It's a lot of attribution, but I think that my colleague is correct when he concludes that "the risk...