Killing the sacrifice

Although sacrifice is a common theme in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, it is also a subject through which all the dimensions of the divergence and differentiation of these two great traditions can easily be traced. We tried to show how the emphasis on whether the one sacrificed was Isaac or Ishmael has been understood as a privilege, a superiority attributed to the sacrificed one. But when one goes into the details of the story, we also saw that Isaac, to whom the badge of honor of being sacrificed is attributed, is portrayed in the course of the story as an extremely ordinary, helpless personality who understands not in the least his own self, nor God, nor prophethood, nor his father Abraham, nor the meaning of life.

According to the account of the Holy Bible, when Isaac hears, as a surprise, the command of sacrifice that his father, a prophet, had hidden from him, he falls at his feet and begs him not to kill him. In this account, the sacrificial event has absolutely no function such as bringing life and death close together, uniting them, and teaching the wisdom that both life and death belong to God. That is why the Judeo-Christian philosophy of sacrifice that later developed on the basis of these accounts sees it as a tradition belonging to archaic times, as a rite that must be and has already been surpassed. The necessity of shedding the blood of a living being as a sacrifice in order to draw near to God has been abolished. Perhaps other rites have been substituted in place of sacrifice, but Isaac's pleading with his father, who had hidden death from him, in order to cling to life has also determined the view of sacrifice.

The famous Jewish theologian Maimonides (Ibn Maymun), who was also quite nourished by Islamic kalam, argues in the Guide of the Perplexed that Moses was on a path in which he would abandon sacrifice in parallel with the historical development and evolution of society. But he argues that until he abandoned it, he had to continue performing certain practices that existed in society according to that society's level of understanding and development. So the matter is only one of timing. "A sudden transition from one point to its opposite is impossible, and man, by his nature, is not capable of abandoning at once what he is accustomed to." Therefore, although sacrifice is something that must be abandoned, it was not something that could be abandoned immediately in the times Moses lived; even if he practiced it, one has to look at his real intention and at the nature of the matter and take that as the reference.

In his book "Sacrifice and Sovereignty," in which he traces the points where Theology and Politics meet in Europe from Shakespeare to Bruno, Gilberto Sacerdoti treats the story of Moses precisely within this framework, with reference to Ibn Maymun. According to him, the people whom Moses had freed from slavery and tried to educate toward a monotheistic religion had been raised within a tradition containing a certain primitiveness. It would not have been possible to pull it out of that tradition suddenly. For a time he would carry on by acquiescing in those customs and even practicing them himself; "if, in setting the new principles, Moses had not been willing to retain some of the old principles too, none of this could have been realized. Thus the preservation of sacrifice became 'a skill that God devised for our benefit, in order to carry out His intentions'; therefore God's intention was to free them gradually from the barbarous and fabricated belief inherited from the ancestors, that sacrificing a living being was worship of God" (Sacrifice and Sovereignty, Dost Yayınları, p. 253).

One should not be surprised that this way of thinking, adapted to other subjects, is expressed by some people in almost the same words among us in the name of historicist thought about the Qur'an. First, although the mode of reasoning concerned with distorting religion uses historicist thought, this mode of reasoning is universal; it works at all times and in all places. Second, historicist thought also has a lineage running through Ibn Maymun, Spinoza, Hegel and from there to today.

Indeed, did not Hegel too say that he was astonished at how Islam could constitute an exception to the evolution he saw in history in the matter of religion? (in his Aesthetics). What could have been the thing that astonished him, as to how Islam, as a religion that came later, could be more backward than Christianity, a religion that came earlier? Did the miracles he attributed to Christianity truly belong to the message that Jesus conveyed, or were they merely delusions of his own philosophical thought? However deeply, thoroughly and flamboyantly it is thought, this is a true picture of the philosopher's God having turned into something entirely different from the God of Abraham, Ishmael, and even of Isaac and Moses.

The Jewish tradition, which first appropriated sacrifice to Isaac and then, by distorting the status and the role it wrote for him of being the sacrifice, killed the prophet in this way too, then killed sacrifice itself. In fact, sacrifice has never been an act of worship abolished from the Children of Israel, but with this distortion that they committed against their own ancestor Isaac, they lost the position from which to carry on the worship of sacrifice properly.

Yet with Ishmael, sacrifice turns into an event in which a sound belief in God is actually lived out and this test is attributed to all people, and thus acquires a magnificent meaning that is universal, liberating, egalitarian, life-giving, and that draws the relations of God and human, life and death, and religion and ethics onto a sound ground:

Sacrifice is not a bribe given to appease an angry god. Neither is God angry, nor does He need such a bribe.

Being sacrificed is the bare truth of our state of existence; we are asked to become conscious of it.

Death is true and comes sooner or later; we are subjected to a magnificent education so that, when it comes, we may meet it with steadfastness, and know that there is in fact no difference between life and death, that all of us belong to God and will in the end return to Him.

God has no need of the sacrifices offered. Their flesh does not reach Him, but a heart that has become conscious of it, intention and piety reach Him. Sacrifice is not something we give for God, but a lesson we take for ourselves, to revive ourselves.

Otherwise, the sacrifices we offer also belong to God. We experience giving to Him what belongs to Him. The sacrifice we must give Him, that is, the ransom, the redemption price of our being, He again bestows on us out of His grace and generosity.

Thus sacrifice penetrates our lives as the summit experience of the belief in tawhid, and only as an action. From this penetration a heart, a personality more compassionate toward other people and toward animals develops.

If the falsifiers of the Holy Bible, who have not felt this experience with this understanding, dress Isaac, who possessed the summit of this consciousness, in the guise of a person pleading for his life, what would they not do to people? Let Hegel too, who has not lived this experience of sacrifice, chase the ideal religion in his ideal universe as much as he likes. The only thing he will find will be his even more idealized ignorance (jahiliyyah).