Are Miracles Real?

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Last week's interview with Laurent Guyénot stimulated much discussion and controversy. Some listeners wanted to hear more on miracles and what Islam says about them, while others insisted that Guyénot's critique of Christianity is misguided.

Canadian Muslim author Eric Walberg and I discuss miracles. Walberg discussed anomalous events in general, and miracles in particular, in his review of Jeffrey Kripal's How to think impossibly about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else. Since my doctoral dissertation compares medieval Moroccan miracle stories to contemporary personal experience narratives of anomalous events, I've thought about this topic quite a bit, which is why I didn't want to go off on such a huge tangent during last week's conversation with Laurent Guyénot. So today's the day for the tangent.

Guyénot suggested that Islam is less concerned with miracles, and more compatible with secular rationalism, than Christianity and Judaism. Though he isn't entirely wrong, it's actually a lot more complicated than that. Tune in for the details.

Excerpt addressing Guyénot’s question about Islam and miracles

Kevin Barrett: Laurent Guyénot raised the issue of how religious schools of thought (specifically Islam) think about miracles. In Christianity we know that they are considered religiously significant. When an alleged miracle or a story of a miracle comes to the attention of the church authorities, and they think it might be religiously significant, they investigate it. And it can end up becoming a proof of somebody's sainthood. They believe that miracles are related to whether or not somebody deserves to be canonized as a saint.

And in Islam, there's a parallel process with saints' miracles, which are called karamat al-awliya. But there's no institutional bureaucracy that decides whether or not this particular story is legitimate and whether it's a real karama or miracle. So the two types of religiously significant miracles in Islam are the saints' miracles, the karamat al-awliya, and then secondly, the mujiza.

The mujiza is a miracle of the prophets that God sends as proof of the prophet's mission. In Islam it's widely accepted that the prophet Muhammad peace upon him, the last and seal of the prophets, brought as his main miracle the message itself: the Qur’an. There are stories of other miraculous events around him, but they're all secondary to the main miracle of the message.

So those are the two religiously significant kinds of miracles: the mujiza, the miracle or proof of a prophethood—and that would include all of Jesus' miracles that we discussed, as well as Moses parting the Red Sea, etc.—and then there are the karamat, the saints’ miracles. But then what do you do with all of these other things you're talking about Eric like levitation? Some guy posts a video of himself levitating. How would muslims or christians think about that?

In Islam, it’s generally accepted that there are these kinds of events that may not have the religious significance of a prophet's miracle, a mujizah, or a saint's miracle, a karama. And probably the term that gets used the most often is the khariq al-ada خارق العادة which it means the shredding of habit or habituality. So the idea is that nature has what some scientists think of as laws, but they're not laws. That's just a metaphor. A law is when the government says you have to do this or else. But the the regularities in nature, which are often mathematical, are simply habits. That is, generally, when you let go of something, it falls to the ground. It doesn't just float up into the air. And usually when you lie down on your bed, you stay pressed into the mattress. You don't slowly rise up off the mattress. That's very rare. So if that happens, is it violating a law? No, there's no law. No government told you had to get stuck to the mattress. It's simply something that's inhabitual.

Now, this goes right in line with Hume's critique of causality, where Hume—and then Bishop Berkeley pushed it even further—said that there's no such thing as a cause. There's simply stuff that happens after other stuff happens. So if every time you lie on the bed, you press yourself into the mattress, it's not caused by gravity. There's no cause. It's just that you've observed that every time you ever lay down on the bed, you've gone into the mattress. So it's happened 100 times. The 101st time, you happen to float up into the air. That's an exception to the rule. And in the Islamic view that's a shredding of habituality. So the normal habitual action, or what we expect—that habit is suddenly broken. And something very inhabitable happens, to the extent it's so extreme that habituality is shredded like a veil that's shredded, revealing some deeper reality underneath.

So that's the term that gets applied in general to all such paranormal type events. And it's widely accepted in most parts of the Islamic world traditionally that these types of things do happen. And then there's a discussion about whether the fact that this particular holy man, wherever he goes, people are miraculously healed, and wild, fierce animals come up and roll at his feet and love him. And he knows what's happening at a distance. Maybe he even teleports. There are people here in Morocco who are said to occasionally teleport to Mecca. They don't need to take the plane to do the Hajj pilgrimage. There's one one person in Oujda, Morocco, here on the Algerian border, who went to sleep one night and supposedly woke up in Algeria the next day. He was a shrif or holy man.

So for all of these kinds of stories—whether they're all true or not, well, probably not—and if you want a collection of all these Moroccan stories about wild and crazy events and superstitions and such, read Westermark’s Ritual and Belief in Morocco. It's quite a collection of these kinds of things.

But getting back to Laurent Guyenot’s point: Is Islam less given to being focused on miracles? And the answer is, maybe a little less, in that the Quran is the main miracle of the prophet. That message is the miracle. But I think the actual ontology in the Islamic world is in some ways almost more open to accepting the reality of these inhabitual events, these shreddings of habituality, that occasionally happen. And I think one reason is that the ontology in the Islamic world is based on wujud. And wujud is the word that's translated as being in English. But what wujud actually means is finding. So in that sense there's no such thing as being, outside of finding. That is, everything that exists is found by somebody. You find it: that's how you know it exists. Somebody has to find it. There's no such thing as just pure existence without somebody finding it. And the act of finding is an active process. It’s like what quantum mechanics says. There's nothing there until somebody looks at it. The tree doesn't fall in the forest until somebody hears it. And so that's the implication of the notion of being as finding or wujud.

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