A knife called 'dualism': the castration of Islam

Arts & Letters Daily have a worthwhile article on current reforms occurring in the Islamic world.

Some changes, such to laws regarding women, appear to be driven by the larger cultural (meta-cultural?) shift that has already seen women's legal status change in the Christian west over a much longer period. But imagine the Westminster Divines meeting to reformulate the legal status of women, and you might get close to what is now happening in some Islamic quarters.

Other changes, especially the growing desire to sever the link between politics and Islam, appear to reflect the Hellenistic dualism that has already castrated western Christianity. The bedrock assumption of western culture is that such a thing as 'non-religion' exists, and that some parts of life belong to it - for instance, government, science, justice and the law. These areas should not, it is said, be subject to religious influence or edict. But such a wish is nonsensical. Every part of life is subject to one god or another; it is all religious. The question is not whether you will serve a god, but which one you will serve. You may call your god 'secular', or 'democracy', but do not lie and call it 'neutral' or 'non-existent'.

This, by the way, (for those who have read it) is why Dan Flinn's Faith in Focus argument for moral neutrality in legal advocacy fails. For Dan, the only moral agent is the legal framework that will decide the case, and the lawyer must simply advocate the causes found within that framework by which his client's interests will be advanced. This, I suggest, leaves our own imago dei - our representation of God - aside. Advocacy of the god 'parliamentary legal system' replaces the advocacy of YHWH. And, despite Dan's commendable wish that young Christians bring their knowledge of God's justice to the legal system, such an advocacy as he recommends is unable to do so, right at the very root. Its god is parliament, not YHWH. Here then, now, we must bring the gospel to bear on the 'principality and power' of our legal system, and Christian lawyers must find ways to say "Christ is King".

The salient point for Islam, of course, is that in whatever we do, even eating and drinking, some god is being advocated. This is the truth to which dualism has already blinded us in the west. This is what Dan's university Legal Ethics 101 course has lied about (though at home he should have been unmistakably minded of it in Covenant Life 101). And if under the influence of dualism, Islam is about to give up the notion that politics belongs to Allah, then Islam too will surrender politics to another god, and in the process severely fracture the coherence of Islamic culture. Which will put it in the same position as the traditionally 'christian' west: having now a pantheon of multiple gods.

Perhaps, then, it is time to teach Covenant Life 101 all the more clearly, in order that we and our children may be ready with whole-of-life integrity as advocates of YHWH. Into the fracturing plurality of many gods, the infertility of Allah (with or without demos, technos, economos, environos, ethnos, ego, and whatever other idols are worshipped), we must take the seed of a better way to be human, and let YHWH give it the increase and blessing by the Spirit. (How's that for a Trinitarian image!)