Books: The Prospects and Perils of Catholic-Muslim Dialogue Pamphlet by Robert R. Reilly

Is a dialogue with Islam possible?

by Thomas Patrick Burke

An insightful new book argues that there are serious philosophical obstacles.

Since 2000, official dialogues have been conducted quietly between Catholics and Muslims in the U.S. One learns that surprising fact from this excellent short book by one of the Catholic participants. Robert Reilly has long been a student of the Muslim world and has published one of the most insightful scholarly books about it in recent years: The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

In it he tells the story of how the Sunni world, after initially welcoming Greek philosophy during the middle ages, turned its back on it, and on reason itself, regarding it as an unacceptable limitation on the divine power, excluding thereby everything that the West understands by ethics, with devastating results that are still making themselves felt.

The very idea of a dialogue with Muslims will seem dubious to many Americans at the present time. How can you dialogue with someone who is trying to kill you? But the starting point of the book is the fact that a dialogue is already taking place, for good or ill, and needs to be assessed. Here I will summarize the book's argument and at the end hazard a suggestion or two for the dialogue.

The book has several main parts. The first deals with the origins of the dialogue.

The impetus for it came from the Catholic side, of course, which has viewed it as a practical necessity. Pope Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council in the 60s already encouraged this kind of approach to Islam. But the recent practical urgency meant that certain preliminary questions which would normally have to be raised before entering into any serious dialogue were not given an overwhelming amount of attention, the author makes plain.

What is the purpose of a dialogue? In this case, the purpose seems chiefly to have been the practical one of finding common ground, especially after 9/11. And no doubt this has been a necessity, so far as it may be possible. But the prime purpose of a dialogue is to arrive at understanding. Logically the first task of any dialogue is to clear away serious misunderstandings. But this means that a dialogue only makes sense where there is a mutual desire for understanding. Each side must want to understand the other better. And this presupposes that each side expects to benefit from the conversation, to learn something to its advantage. Where this mutual desire for dialogue holds, the success of the dialogue is almost guaranteed. On the Catholic side this precondition clearly holds good. But it is far from obvious, and it is even stretching credulity, to think that it holds on the Muslim side.

The reason for this statement is derived from certain qualities of Sunni thought since the mediaeval event described above, which the author goes on to explain. In expelling reason from the domain of theology, which took place officially in the 9th century by order of the Caliph, Islam expelled also the very concept of Nature, and the order of Nature.

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