One of the longest-running debates in philosophy is over the existence of free will. Does free will exist or not? Some say it does, others say that the nature of the universe is deterministic. For religious believers, some think that God has foreordained every event and has fully determined the future. What a person believes on this matter has serious implications for how they behave.

In In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam, Milton Viorst writes:

In Islam, as in Christianity, the debate between free will and determinism that has raged through the centuries is more than a theologian’s quibble. A conviction that God scripts every move can only produce in mankind an impaired sense of personal responsibility. It breeds a gloomy judgment of human potential. It implies a hapless humanity, unable to mobilize its earthly resources to resolve its problems. It creates a willingness to accept, as God’s will, conditions as they are. Of what service is human initiative, of what relevance personal exertion, of what help human decency, if God makes the calls?

In Christianity, the contest between the two visions has, under the long influence of secular thought, tipped in favor of free will. In Islam, the signs suggest that it is tipped the other way.

Surely the sense that all is foreordained lies near the root of the problem that weighs so palpably on Islamic culture. Muslims acknowledge as much. It is hard to deny that determinism’s pervasiveness in the Muslim mind has placed shackles on the earthly development of Islamic civilization.

Viorst offers here a very interesting and unusual explanation for many of the problems which the plague the Muslim world. As they say, ideas matter, but when people try to explain what’s going on they tend to look at things like economics, wars, and so forth — in this case, an important factor may be a single, basic religious doctrine about the nature of the world: we are not free to significantly alter the course of the future because events will all go the way God intends them, whether for good or for ill (at least when it comes to our individual fates).

When people have an attitude like that, only bad things are going to happen. Such an attitude is going to be helpful for dictatorial rulers, though, because if people can’t change things, then they aren’t going to rise up to change their system of government very readily. Passiveness in the face of adversity is not a good attitude to adopt, but it’s an expected attitude for people who have decided to leave everything in the hands of God. The question is, can this attitude be changed?

 

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