Last week’s Sightings newsletter notes that a recent New York Times essay contest on the ethics of meat eating doesn’t deal with religion in any meaningful way:
[The winning] essay makes its arguments without referring to religion. Yet for many vegetarians and meat-eaters, one’s diet and its ethical implications is based on religious law, or one’s spirituality. In fact, some of the most ardent defenders of meat-eating and vegetarianism have been revered religious figures. Religions have dietary laws that stipulate what can and cannot be eaten, and how one is to eat what is permissible.
It is an astute observation, and one that was recognized on RD in an essay by Beatrice Marovich, which offers a reading of morality and meat through religion. What I find fascinating in the Sightings piece is the allusion to the Rasa’il Ikhwan as-Safa (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity).
Long before the term “Ikhwan” came to be a shorthand for the Muslim Brotherhood, it referred to a 10th c. Shi’ah rationalist, philosophical movement based in modern-day Iraq. According to the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS), publishers of the most recent translation of the Epistles in English:
Besides the filial observance of the teachings of the Qur’an and hadith, the Brethren also reverently appealed to the Torah of Judaism and to the Gospels of Christianity. Moreover, they heeded the legacies of the Stoics and of Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Nicomachus of Gerasa, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, Proclus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus.
The members of the Brethren were polymaths who engaged with a multi-faith world in a pluralistic manner. Their rationalism integrated the highest philosophy of the time to produce scientific exploration. As part of that exploration, much like in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is a meditation on the relationship of humankind and nature:
Their aim, as they explain, is ‘to survey the merits and fine points of animals, their admirable traits and wholesome natures, and to touch on man’s overreaching, oppression, and injustice against the creatures that serve him—the beasts and cattle—and his heedless ingratitude for God’s blessings.’
…The animals become living, speaking rebukes of human waywardness, faithlessness, negligence, and insensitivity.
In this reflection, it’s clear that man has a higher responsibility to God’s creation than simple subjugation. The treatise is more broadly about what we would now call environmentalism, providing an ethical framework for the care and nurture of nature. This document from a millennium ago presages many of the debates we have in the contemporary period.
The simple, offhand reference from Sightings actually opens up various doorways on ethical thinking, rationalism, science, interfaith relations, and philosophy from a Muslim perspective. The suggestion that this work had impact outside the Muslim community is important not only for understanding the power of the epistle, but also ways in which we think of relationships between faith communities in the modern period. We could take the best from each other a thousand years ago, but see only worst of each other now.
