Is Islam Really Mathematics?

When History and Religion Conflict

August 27, 2013 at 7:47pm By Wesley Muhammad. Ph.D 8/27/13

Of all of our studies, History is most attractive and best qualified to reward our research. The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad

Candor is not a rationalistic ideal; it is the necessary condition for all responsible dialogue. Van Austin Harvey

1. The Scientist and the Priest There is a scene in the 1999 movie, Stigmata, that really resonated with me. One of the main characters, Father Andrew Kiernan, was a former scientist (chemist) who became a Catholic priest who investigated alleged miracles for the Vatican. The Vatican had a vested interest in explaining away and debunking all reported miracles, and it was expected of Father Kiernan that he would do just that. His skeptical, scientific background made this easy for him, as most miracle claims were bogus. However, Father Kiernan stumbles upon a particular case which he could not explain away. Requesting resources to scientifically pursue the matter further, his superior, Cardinal Daniel Houseman, denies the request and orders him to leave the matter alone. When Father Andrew protests, Cardinal Houseman dismisses him and bemoans: Andrews problem is that he cant decide whether he is a scientist or a priest.

A scientist or a priest these are not only two different vocations, but usually also two radically different approaches to the pursuit of knowledge and two different sets of expectations in that regard. The conflict between Father Kiernan and Cardinal Houseman, as well as Farther Kiernans own internal conflict (scientist vs. priest), nicely illustrates this. As a scientist, Father Kiernan was willing to follow all empirical leads, assess the facts on their own terms, and go wherever the evidence led him, even if the evidence led him to conclusions that conflicted with all of his prior experience and expectations. As a scientist he is expected to be open-minded and incredulous at the same time. As a priest, however, he is expected to be credulous and unquestioningly faithful to the doctrines of the Church. His pursuit of knowledge is circumscribed by the parameters set by the superior religious authority, in this case Cardinal Housemen. Father Kiernans pursuit was also inhibited by some of his own religious beliefs and presuppositions. As Father Kiernan investigated a (unbeknownst to him) related case,

his religious presuppositions (that no atheist could receive the stigmata) got in the way of his investigation. Only when he shed those presuppositions could he discover the truth.

I am a Muslim. I was formerly an atheist. By training and by profession I am an historian, specifically an Historian of Religion. This means that I am trained and engage in the historical-critical (scientific) study of religious texts and traditions. Like my non-Muslim colleagues I too insist on producing "historiography freed from the chains of theology," in the fine words of scholar of Islam Maxime Rodinson. Some say that, like Father Kiernan, my problem too is that I cannot decide whether I want to be a scientist or a priest or, rather, a critical historian of religion or a faithful Believer in and Student Minister of the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Islam). Some people believe that I must be one or the other. I actually believe that I can be both. I confess, though, that this is a very difficult tightrope to walk and to walk this tightrope today is also to bear a heavy cross. But I firmly believe that this Islam of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad obligates us to walk this tightrope as the only proper way to do this Islam. I know that my insistence on being a Believer and a critical historian of Islam causes many fellow Believers some distress, and in turn they give me stress :-). I live with Father Kiernans internal conflict (scientist with integrity vs. faithful Believer), and it can be very stressful. My situation, however, is not totally like Father Keirnans. I have the wonderful advantage in that the religious authority to whom I as a Believer and priest (i.e., Student Minister) answer, the Honorable Brother Minister Farrakhan, is the opposite of Cardinal Houseman. Instead of seeking to circumscribe my research even my most controversial researches Brother Minister Farrakhan has not only encouraged my freedom of inquiry, but he has made available to me all the resources I need in order to do my job as an historian effectively. More on this later.

2. The Problem of Faith and History

Religious Studies scholar Prof Van Austin Harvey wrote a classic book in 1966 entitled, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief. Harvey wrestled with the problem of faith and history and concluded that it is impossible for a true believer in the doctrines of a revealed religion (like Judaism, Christian, and Islam) to also be a historian of that religion. In other words, a selfconfessing Christian cannot also be a critical scholar of the history of Christianity. By implication no self-confessing Muslim can be a critical historian of Islam either. According to Harvey, this is because the historians craft requires that he/she remain intellectually free to challenge, to doubt, and if necessary to reject the validity of a historical (or religious) source. Harvey was convinced that a believers pre-commitments prevented him/her from subjecting those sources to the critical scrutiny that is the first obligation of the historian. For example, Biblical Higher Criticism has demonstrated that the Jesus of the Pauline Epistles and of the Gospels is/are emphatically not the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The latter was a much more modest though revolutionary preacher in contrast to the divine Christ-figure of Paul and John, for instance. Christian believers are thus confronted with what theologians call the problem of faith and history, i.e. the problem of the seeming irreconcilability of religious belief and historical data. A critical historian must subject all sources, claims and evidence to cross-examination. Harvey

concludes that a believing Christian cannot be a true historian of Christian origins because his/her pre-commitments (e.g. to the divine Christ-figure of Paul and John) will have a falsifying influence on his/her critical judgment. Gottfried Hagen points out that this is no less a danger in Islamic studies: for the historian piety becomes an obstacle to objective research.[1]

I believe that Harvey and Hagen are correct as it relates to most Judiasms, Christianities and Islams. For reasons that I will outline below, however, I do believe that the Islam of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the exception. I also believe, though, that the way this Islam is practiced (or done) by the majority of Believers today does put it in the same category as the other Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams and makes Harveys point applicable here as well. That is to say, even Muslims of the Nation of Islam today are not free from the problem of faith and history, but we should be. I believe that the way we as Black people in America generally do religion (Christianity and Islam) is unhealthy, unproductive, and actually hinders our progress as a people. There tends to be (among other things) significant obscurantism and anti-intellectualism the way we do religion. We tend to keep our heart/spirit and our mind/intellect estranged from each other and thus religion is much more of an emotional experience than an intellectual experience for us. We the Nation of Islam were taught that our Islam is mathematics, and mathematics is Islam. And can be proved in no limit of time. This means that our Islam not only permits but requires empiricism and intellectuality. However, unfortunately we in the Nation have fallen into the same obscurantism and anti-intellectuality that characterizes the other religious communities, Black and White. I will have more to say on this later.

3. The Historical-Critical Method and the Priests Problem

In 19th century Europe a new science was born called history. The science of history was/is not simply the recording of facts about the past.[2] It was/is the critical (operative word here, to be explained below) attempt to recover the past by means of the patient analysis of evidence, the judicious rendering of judgment and the insistence on impartiality and truthfulness. Far from being merely a reporter, the historian must be able to discern the meaning and importance of facts, establish causal relationships between the facts and place them in some kind of meaningful order. Often confronted with conflicting data and alternative interpretations, the historian must develop critical tools in order to discriminate among them. He undertakes analysis, synthesis, and judgment on historical problems. The aim of historical investigation is understanding, and this is achieved when the relationships between facts can be explained.

From this new science called history developed a specialized approach to the study of religion in particular: the Historical-Critical Method (HCM). The historical in HCM means the interpreting of religious texts and traditions against the background of what we can know about their historical setting. Thus, the Torah is to be interpreted against what we know of the background of ancient Israels Ancient Near Eastern linguistic,

cultural, and theological context, not the third century BCE Greek context of Alexandria, Egypt, or the seventeenth century CE English context of the King James Bible. The word critical in Historical-Critical Method is, well, critical here. Critical means the application of our historical knowledge to the religious texts or traditions under study unfettered by religious or ideological strictures. This is of extreme importance, and will be elaborated upon below. The application of the HCM to the Bible in the 19th century was a traumatic event for Protestantism. The recent attempts to apply it to the Quran are proving no less traumatic for Muslims. Scholar of Islam Fred M. Donner has recently come to the same general conclusion regarding Believing Muslims as Harvey did over forty years ago regarding Believing Christians: that there is a radicle discontinuity separating religious belief and history and, thus, an unbridgeable gulf separating the historian and the believer.[3]

There are two principles which are crucial to the proper employment of the HCM and crucial to historys ability to remain a science: the principle of the radicle autonomy of the historian and the principle of the communal assessment of the historians conclusions. The conflict between Father Kiernan and Cardinal Houseman in Stigmata illustrates a common phenomenon when science tries to intrude into the church: the conflict between, on the one hand, a Believer aspiring also to be a scientist and, on the other, a religious authority (e.g. a cardinal, imam, minister of a mosque, etc.). This conflict revolves around the freedom of inquiry and the question of intellectual integrity and honesty. Because the religious authority seeks to protect the integrity of the religious doctrine as he received it and is thus inclined to restrict any inquiry that may threaten this integrity, the historian must have complete or (in Harveys words) radicle autonomy and freedom from any and all religious authority that would circumscribe research and inquiry. R.G. Collingwood put it bluntly:

So far from relying on an authority other than himself, to whose statements his thoughts must conform, the historian is his own authority and his thought autonomous, selfauthorizing, possessed of a criterion to which his so-called authorities must conform and by reference to which they are criticized.[4]

This is important. Because history, like all other sciences, aspires to be knowledge rather than mere belief or conjecture, it requires (among other things) methodical skepticism, impartiality, and a vigorous adherence to rational, objective procedures. In order for the historians endeavor to have any real value at all to anyone, it must proceed irrespective of all interest groups or interested parties. As Donner notes:

As historians and scholars we must pursue our researches wherever they lead us, even if the results of our explorations seem unsettling to some whether they be fellow scholars or believing Muslims.[5]

Or religious authorities. All major religions of the world today suffer from deleterious accretions that have developed over time around the initial core of the religion. These accretions choke life out of the original message. The message of Jesus was not the Christianity of the post-Nicean Church, nor was Prophet Muhammads Islam the same as that of the 14th century Sunni (or Shiite) ulema or religious scholars. The historian of religion uses his tools and methods to peel away the accretions, give them context, and then try as best as is possible with the available data to recover and reconstruct the original meaning of the religious text and tradition. As Harvey noted, the nature of historical knowledge itself requires the complete autonomy of the historian to scrutinize all claims that comes to him, otherwise he or she will cease being a thinker and seeker of knowledge but will become instead merely a mediator of other peoples beliefs. He/she then abdicates his/her role as a scholar/critical historian/scientist.

The historian must do his work with autonomy because he must with impunity be able to step outside the proverbial box of status quo views and ideas if his work will advance communal understanding. As Norman F. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider explain:

At any level of historical study the successful student will be the one who is not going to be trapped within the confines of familiar concepts and techniques. He must be prepared for the intellectual aspiration and experimentation that makes possible conceptual growth and entry into a new level of thinking. The greatest obstacle to learning history is the students reluctance to try an unfamiliar approach or to examine a new kind of problem. This self-defeating inhibition precludes the student from ever finding that he is capable of original and superior work.[6]

This principle was beautifully expressed as well by the Honorable Brother Minister Farrakhan:

Critical thinking makes the critical thinker stand on the shoulders of the person they are reading and take the discipline to another level closer to the absolute. There is nothing perfect except God and his Truth, so every discipline you should grow in it. But if you are not growing and you are only quotingthen you have been trainedto get in where you fit in, and dont make no trouble.[7]

But making trouble is expected of the critical thinker and even mandatory for the historian, because his craft often requires the overturning of accepted and contemporary ideas imperfectly conceived in route to a more absolute understanding of the past and thus a much clearer and brighter guiding light for the future.

4. Keeping the Scientist Honest

The historian of religion keeps the religion honest and helps minimize the possibility that the ignorance of the religious masses can be manipulated by the religious elite la Pope Leo Xs disputed but no doubt authentic statement: This myth of Christ has served us (the Church) well. But who, then, keeps the historian honest? Since the historian must be able to operate with radicle autonomy, what is to prevent his work from falling into mere subjectivism? What mechanisms are in place to check the historian so that he does not become as tyrannical and falsifying as many religious authorities have become? The mechanism is the second above mentioned principle of the HCM: the communal assessment of the historians conclusions.

Insofar as history aspires to be knowledge rather than belief, the historian must give reasons for what he/she asserts and his/her arguments and conclusions must be capable of rational assessment and made available to a community of individuals with the competency to assess them. As Collingwood says:

History has this in common with every other science: that the historian is not allowed to claim any single piece of knowledge, except where he can justify his claim by exhibiting to himself in the first place, and secondly to anyone else who is both able and willing to follow his demonstration, the grounds upon which it is based.[8]

The priest or the believer appeals to faith as justification for their religions doctrines. Why should we believe that God is three distinct persons and one distinct person at the same time, even though this makes no rational sense? Faith. Why should we believe that the Prophet Muhammad literally mounted an animal that has the body of a horse, face of a human, and the wings of Pegasus, flew up through the seven heavens conversing with dead prophets along the way, met God, and then returned to earth on that winged creature? Faith. Regardless of the lack of evidence for or the rationality (or lack thereof) of such doctrines, they are to be accepted on faith alone. The historian may have faith in his conclusions, but his faith has no more probative or persuasive value than does a lawyers faith in the innocence of his client. In court he must justify his faith in his clients innocence by appeal to data and sound arguments that are acceptable to a jury who remains to be convinced. The historians conclusions and arguments likewise must be submitted before a jury of his/her peers to be rationally assessed. His/her conclusions are to be vetted, so he/she can do nothing by fiat.

5. Is Islam Really Mathematics?

I was an atheist before I was a self-acknowledging Muslim. I went from sincere Christian to bitter atheist in the twinkle of an eye after I sat down with an historian and he revealed to me the religious lies that I had been told all my Christian life. He was not an atheist

himself and what he shared with me in no way demanded discarding God, but I was so incensed at having been lied to for so long by religion, I threw the baby out with the bathwater. It was the words of the Honorable Brother Minister Farrakhan that eventually brought me back to God. However, I was still not prepared to come back to organized religion (so I did not join the mosque) because no one could ever again get me to surrender my God-given intellectual faculties, and this is what almost all organized religion require. I said then (and I say today): Damn that. But this all changed February 24, 1991. On that day the Honorable Brother Minister Farrakhan delivered his profoundly important, Who Is God? address at Christ Universal Temple in Chicago. That day changed my perspective on religion (and thus my life) forever. Why? It is not because I had heard for the first time the realty of God. I watched that lecture as a Five Percenter, so I knew who God was. But I never saw such a reasoned, intellectual defense of this (or any other) religious belief like I saw on that day. I saw in Farrakhan on that day what I had never seen in anyone else prior to that: intellectualized religion. Where most religious people expect us to believe their religious tenets, especially the most difficult ones, on faith, Farrakhan took the most difficult aspect of the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and presented before the world a highly reasoned legal case as if he were in a world court (and he was). I left that auditorium saying, If I ever do religion again, it must be that mans religion. I joined the mosque a year later.

Farrakhan exemplified and brilliantly illustrated for me on that day what the oft repeated words, Islam is mathematics, mean. The actual statement from the Supreme Wisdom Lessons is: After learning Mathematics, which is Islam, and Islam is Mathematics, it stands true. You can always prove it at no limit of time. This means that this Islam is an empirical and an empiricists religion, NOT a dogmatists religion. This means that this Islam must be approached as one approaches mathematics. Its claims therefore not only can but must be proved. And Farrakhan on that day set out to prove - rationally, methodically and mathematically - the central and most controversial religious claim of the Nation of Islam. He personified and personifies Islam is mathematics. Most of us in the Nation of Islam today and in the broader Black Muslim community do not do our Islam like that. We Black Muslims have become very dogmatic in our religious approach, all the while arrogantly quoting Islam is mathematics. Too often we unwittingly make mockery of this truth that Islam is mathematics. Because this Islam is mathematics, it must be rationally defensible in all of its aspects and it must (and it will) be consistent with the known facts (not theories) of the world: biology, chemistry, history, archaeology, etc. If our Islam does not, then it is not mathematics and cannot be proven at any limit of time. This is not to say that this worlds knowledge should be expected to be able to prove every aspect of this Islam. It cannot, because this worlds knowledge has not progressed that far yet. It is to say, however, that every aspect of this Islam is subject to cross-examination and empirical demonstration. The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad apparently was well aware of this, which is why (I suppose) he often offered $10,000 to whoever could prove this teaching false. He was very confident that this Islam is mathematics.

After 23 years of cross-examining these Teachings I too am very confident that this Islam is indeed mathematics and can been proven in no limit of time (aye, I was not

taught by God in Person, so I needed to be convinced). Thus, as a historian of religion and an Islamic Studies scholar I am much more optimistic than is Fred Donner about the possibilities of a Believer also being a critical historian of Islam. There may very well be a radicle discontinuity separating orthodox Islamic religious belief from history, but there can be no such discontinuity between an Islam that is mathematics and history. I have always treated the teachings of Elijah Muhammad the same way I treat every other religious teaching: as truth-claims to be weighed and cross-examined. Because this Islam is mathematics, Believers need not have the understandable fear that other religious believers have in this process, the fear that the rug of your faith will be pulled from under your feet by the empirical scrutiny of the scholar/scientist. If our Islam truly is mathematics, it will survive the cross-examination and we should come out of that process with a greater understanding of and deeper conviction in the various aspects of this Teaching. Jews, Christians and (other) Muslims to one degree or another must legitimately fear the scholars inquiry. Not the Followers of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

One of the reasons Minister Farrakhan brought me to Chicago was, in his words, to freely pursue your scholarship. He knew and he said that I was imprisoned within the Academy (the academic system of colleges and universities), and he was right. As a very junior faculty member at a major university, my research was circumscribed and limited by, not any religious authority, but by the academic-political authority of the university and its culture. The Minister absolutely freed me from those strictures. The most amazing thing, however, is that he did not bring me to Chicago with the expectation that I would swap one circumscribing academic-political authority for another circumscribing religious authority. That is to say, he is not to me a Cardinal Houseman. He has allowed and made it possible for me to pursue my work as a scholar/historian with total freedom and as a (Black) Muslim. While I was in the Academy I was expected to keep my particular religious affiliation a secret, while others could wear theirs on their sleeve. I am now free to be myself, both as a Believer and as a scholar. This freedom is wonderful, but it does have costs. Exercising this freedom has in fact alienated me both within the Academy (they dont like that I am a Black Muslim) and within my own Nation of Islam (many dont like that I insist on a scholarly approach to this Islam). Many of my academic colleagues feel that I am too Black Muslim to be in the Academy, and many of my fellow Believers believe that I am too academic to be a good Muslim Follower of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and helper of the Honorable Brother Minister Farrakhan. Most days I feel homeless. But I know freedom always has its price, and I know that this is my cross to bear. In the end, I pray that by successfully bearing this cross I can play my part in demonstrating to the world that Islam is, in fact, mathematics and can be proven in no limit of time.

[1] Gottfried Hagen, "The Imagined and the Historical Muhammad," Journal of the American Oriental Society 129 (2009) 98.

[2] See the important work, Norman F. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider, How to Study History (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1967).

[3] Fred M. Donner, The historian, the believer, and the Qurn, in Gabriel Said Reynolds (ed.), New Perspectives on the Qurn. The Qurn in its historical context 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 2011) 25-37.

[4] R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946) 236.

[5] Donner, The historian, the believer, and the Qurn, 31.

[6] Cantor and Schneider, How to Study History, 8.

[7] This quote by the Honorable Brother Minister Farrakhan was sent to me. I am still trying to locate the exact speech.

[8] R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946) 252.