Download PDF | (Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture) Ian Richard Netton - Islam, Christianity and the Realms of the Miraculous_ A Comparative Exploration-University of Edinburgh Press (2018).
306 Pages
Foreword
The subject of miracles has seized both popular and scholarly imaginations from early times to the present. The year 2017 provided added interest with a major, and much-praised, exhibition and a major workshop. The exhibition, entitled Madonnas and Miracles, was held at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from 7 March to 4 June 2017.! In the words of the catalogue, the exhibition ‘reveal[ed] the significance of the home as a site of religious experience in the period. From visionary “living saints”, who conversed with the divine in their chambers, to ordinary laypeople who prayed the rosary before bed, to those who read heterodox books by the hearth, men, women and children practised religion in the home in a variety of ways.” As the exhibition showed, the Italian Renaissance was in love with all things miraculous.’
On 23 May 2017 SOAS, University of London, held an excellent, thought-provoking, workshop entitled Seeing is Believing: Miracles in Islamic Thought. This well-attended workshop was sponsored by the British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS) and hosted by the Department of the Near and Middle East, SOAS. Its two conveners were Dr Ayman Shihadeh and Dr Harith Bin Ramli. The workshop’s subjects ranged far and wide from a consideration of what God can actually do through a discussion of the evidence for Prophetic miracles to an analysis of prophecy in Messianic times.‘
This present volume of mine is the third in a comparative Islamic— Christian trilogy which seeks to present and explore various major aspects of these two world religions in dynamic contrast. The first volume focused on tradition; the second concerned itself with the mystical arena.’ This third volume completes the trilogy by an examination of the field of miracles in the Islamic and Christian traditions.
Bernard Lonergan’s seminal work Method in Theology’ may today appear somewhat dated. Nonetheless, it was valuable, and remains valuable, in that it presented a new and coherent series of taxonomies whereby the diverse fields of Christian theology might be inspected and rigorously interrogated. It did, however, focus primarily on method as its title implies. Lonergan stressed this methodological orientation when, referring to miracles, he wrote: “The possibility and occurrence of miracles are topics, not for the methodologist, but for the theologian.’ He thereby excuses himself from a full theological investigation of miracles in this work.’
This present volume of mine, as will become apparent in a reading of the text, also deploys a structural method, a narratological sieve, through which to analyse and compare the miraculous phenomena and narratives of which it treats. Thus, each chapter has a particular, and carefully structured, analytical ‘shape’ as follows:
* outline of the miracle event: Proto-miracle/Christian miracle/Islamic miracle * critiques and attitudes towards the miraculous events: 1. disbelief and scepticism 2. caution 3. belief 4, memory and memorialisation: a. the theme of a memory of a ‘divine presence’ in the world b. the theme of a memory of wholeness c. the motif of water or other rituals d. the metatheme of faith and doubt e. the metatheme of Church/Islamic authority ¢ the narrative arena In terms of narrative theory, chosen aspects of which will shortly be elaborated in the main text, this volume will interrogate the miraculous phenomena and narratives with which it deals from the following perspectives:
* universality
¢ multifacetedness
similarities and differences in content
¢ themes and metathemes (> abstract topoi) and motifs and metamotifs (> concrete topoi)
* repetition
* types and antitypes
* intertextuality
¢ the protagonist
* attitudes to the miracle
* significance of the miracle
¢ the narratological catalyst®
However, this volume is much more than just a dissertation on narratological method. It deploys that method to disclose the intertexts between the Islamic and Christian domains of the miraculous, and to disclose the theological grounds on which those miraculous narratives rest. Its primary focus is the literary and theological narration of the miracle, emphasising similarities and differences in motifs and themes, metamotifs and metathemes, all of which are grounded in Islamic and Christian theologies, whether those be popular, scholarly or both. ‘The academic perspective of this work is thus narratological, anthropological and phenomenological. The narrations of miracles are presented as if they actually occurred, whether or not they did so in historical reality.
There is no ‘faith perspective’ nor orientation. Furthermore, the miraculous narratives treated in this volume may be said to form an intertext with each other and possibly, but not necessarily, with other ‘miraculous events’ outside the phenomena treated here. In this way our volume seeks to avoid essentialism. In addition, the survey of what I characterise as the ‘proto-miracles’ which introduce each chapter are not intended necessarily to be the first of their kind, nor to reflect events not described in this volume; they are simply designed to be intertextual ‘introductions’ to the principal phenomena under discusssion. I have made various visits to places of pilgrimage and shrine, Islamic and Christian, both in Europe and in the Middle East, with a view to gaining a deeper understanding of why people associate certain miraculous events (especially healing events) with certain shrines, and why people of both the Islamic and Christian traditions perform the rite of pilgrimage to such shrines. On the Christian side the miraculous phenomena surveyed in this volume are drawn from the Roman Catholic tradition which, despite present-day cautions and caveats, is generally more disposed to accept the possibility of miracles.
This not to deny, of course, that there may be a wide disparity of attitudes towards the possibility and reality of miracles within the Catholic community itself. As Maya Mayblin reminds us:
Although consciously self-cultivating Catholics ... do exist, it is also fairly axiomatic that Catholicism as a marker of identity is not always and everywhere primarily about ‘belief or even practice over belief... Catholicism is open to identifications that index aspects of personhood beyond religious belief: kinship, territoriality, ethnicity, belonging; identifications that remain variously distanced, critical and uncertain with regard to Catholicism’s key propositional content.’
Of course, the same kind of wide diversities are easily apparent in the Islamic tradition/s as well. Thus the caveats and cautious approaches of both Christianity and Islam, often in ‘official mode’, will be noted throughout this volume. The Catholic tradition with regard to miracles contrasts mightily, of course, with the Protestant attitude, epitomised in the writings of the famous German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) who sought to ‘demythologise the New Testament’,'’ thereby denying the possibility of Christ’s miracles."
This volume of mine makes no such claims nor, conversely, any ‘faith statements either . It is solely concerned with the narrative of miracles, and an analysis of those miracles, from a phenomenological perspective together with an examination of how such narratives have become enbedded in popular, and sometimes official, aspects of Islamic and Christian theology and culture.
I must record here my warm appreciation and thanks to Professor Carole Hillenbrand for accepting this volume into her splendid series. I am very grateful too for the excellent work of my copy-editor, Lel Gillingwater.
Finally, once again, I am deeply indebted to the patience and forbearance of my family, in particular my wife Sue, as I laboured to produce this book. Thank you. This work is dedicated to them.
Ian Richard Netton , Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies University of Exeter
April 2018
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