Islam and Liberty

In this, the most recent of his many books, the Catholic theologian and social thinker Michael Novak sets forth a fundamental challenge to Muslims today: How can they make their religion, Islam, compatible with democracy, universal human rights, and liberty? Implicit in this question is Novak's own recognition that unless Muslims come to terms with democracy, a clash of civilizations may well be inevitable.

But how shall Islam come to terms with liberal democracy (meaning majority rule tempered by respect for minority rights and individual liberty)? Novak believes that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has access to a philosophic organon with which to address these questions. This tradition of philosophy, with its origins in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, is something that Islam shares with the Judeo-Christian world. After briefly surveying the transmission of Greek philosophy into Arabic and Latin and discussing some of the debates that drove medieval Arabic philosophy (debates that involved Jews and Christians as well as Muslims), Novak turns to what he calls the parting of the ways that separated Islam from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This falling out occurred over the question of man's free will. While the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian traditions admitted God's free will, Novak writes, they did not necessarily agree on whether God granted man freedom of volition. Christian and Jewish theologians argued that since God is free and man is created in God's image, man enjoys liberty of action as well. Muslims, however, disagreed. The majesty of Islam, according to Novak, lies in its emphasis on the transcendence, uniqueness, and utter incomparability of God. Thus Muslims could not conceive of man participating in God's freedom to choose His actions, but thought rather that man's will was necessarily limited by God, who has absolute volition over man. In other words, if God is really free, humans are really not.

Novak's account of the "Islamic" position on free will is in fact an account of one school of Islamic theology, namely, the Asharite school (which he does not explicitly mention in his book), whose founder Abu-l-Hasan al-Ashari died in 935 C.E. Ashari and his disciples hold an occasionalist theory of causation (so called because it sees every event as an occasion upon which God has directly acted). In this view, God is not only the primary but even the secondary cause of all things. Asharite determinism—which some scholars say is in no small way responsible for giving Islam its reputation for fatalism—was a reaction to an earlier school of Islamic theology, the Mutazilite (or literally "separatist") school. The Mutazilite theologians taught that a robust belief in Divine justice entails an equally strong belief in human freedom. Absent human freedom, asked Mutazilite authors, how could a just God fairly reward or punish man's behavior? For God to judge mere automatons would be absurd and unjust; hence humans must be free. While the Mutazilite-Asharite debate is an example of only one debate within Islam over the question of man's free will, it should be noted in fairness to Novak that Asharism eventually supplanted Mutazilite theology (except among the Shi'ites) and has become the dominant theological viewpoint among Islam's majority sect, the Sunnis.

Novak raises the issue of Islamic (or more precisely Asharite) theology in hopes of sparking a conversation with Muslims about human liberty, truth as an objective reality, and the nature of the state. Moreover, Novak sees that if Muslims are prepared (and he thinks that some are) to rethink their theology and philosophy, they will have to go back on a mission of serious inquiry into what he describes as their own magnificent intellectual resources. These include the works of the philosophers al-Farabi (d. 950), Avicenna (d. 1037), and Averroës (d. 1198)—all of whom wrote in Arabic.

Novak is correct to assume that if Muslims are to construct from their tradition atheory of liberty compatible with democracy, then...