The Islamic Significance of Jordan Peterson
The world’s most popular intellectual preaches a set of ideas that shed great light on the contrast between the Abrahamic faiths
In our postmodern world, where we have come to denounce truth as an entirely subjective ideal, the question of life’s ultimate meaning has been deemed hopeless, if not silly. With the inevitable nihilism that such negligent dismissal of life’s most important question has brought to our depression riddled era, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Jordan Peterson’s rebellion against postmodernism in his attempts to unravel a moral map of life’s meaning in lectures, debates and books has caught huge global traction. He’s become, as a result, the world’s foremost intellectual in publicity of recent times, with an academically unmatched three and a half million subscribers on YouTube and five million in book sales.
“Not throwing out the baby with the bathwater” is a repeated mantra of Peterson which defined his phenomenal rise. His rise to fame relied on resuscitating the baby of value in ancient traditions of Judeo-Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and unconventional thoughts of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung that us modern snobs leave to drown in their scientifically impure bathwater. Although agnostic himself, he insists we ought to thank the maturation of Judeo-Christian ethic’s baby through enlightenment into our current civilisation for modernity’s spoils. Peterson berates, as much as anything, our easy dispense of Christianity’s baby of wisdom with the murky bathwater of the internally contradictory text, he himself admits, the ethic inhabits in an inconsistent bible.
When it comes to the prophet Muhammad’s(pbuh) message however, which bypasses the authoring dubiousness and inconsistency of Judeo-Christian scripture by providing a coherent, primary Quranic account of the same Abrahamic message the bible attempts to relay, Peterson’s support of religious systems abruptly stops. As Peterson uncharacteristically departs from appreciating the value he finds in every other ancient tradition by voicing a complete and vehement dismissal of Islam; despite Peterson’s anointment by culture as the modern supporter of religion, it’s his religious opposition in singling out the world’s most practised faith as having no value that makes Peterson’s most profound cultural stance towards religion not one of approval as commonly considered, but of severe disproval.
Prefacing the criticism he voices towards Islam by saying that it may come out of a place of ignorance, which is where he ought to stop as an academic, he proceeds to make ardent claims that he finds no wisdom in the religion, brutally discarding Muhammad(pbuh) as a totalitarian warlord.
The prophet Muhammad’s(pbuh) significance as someone who largely affirmed the Judeo-Christian ethic upheld by Peterson renders his claim of Islam’s lack of wisdom as a non-sequitur to start with. But as is about to be unravelled, by overlooking the common Abrahamic wisdom that Islam shares with Judeo-Christianity, a much bigger problem arises for Peterson in his dismissal of Islam. Because the real dilemma for him is how the core ideas defining his resonance covertly lie at the very heart of what distinguishes Islam from Judeo-Christianity or any other religion and philosophy. The widely successful ideas that Peterson espouses are found, through simple explication, to be distinct, essential features of the prophet Muhammad’s(pbuh) message, whom he ironically dismisses. By propagating ideas that particularly favour Islam over Judeo-Christianity’s lack thereof, Peterson turns out to have provided a western case of support for Islam’s proposition of Muhammad’s(pbuh) coming to correct and complete all misconstrued Abrahamic scripture.
While I proceed to display the Islamic significance of the psychologist’s message in how it perfectly maps onto that of the prophet Muhammed’s(pbuh) before him, I’ll simultaneously resolve the loosely levelled shallow points of scathing criticism Peterson makes towards the religion that hinder his view of such a clear symmetry between his beliefs and Islam.
It’ll be shown that to his dismay, Peterson fails to look past unfounded, superficial faults in Muhammad’s(pbuh) warrior figure and the religion’s intrinsic lack of separation between church and state, to realise the gems of wisdom in Islam that make it perfectly correspondent to his very own philosophy. In doing so, it’ll be made clear that he commits the same blunder he constantly accuses modernity at large for, in banishing a substantiated, historical mode of thought because of face value reservations that are in no way substantiated themselves, audaciously throwing out the baby with the bathwater himself while he accuses the rest of society of doing the same.
Fredrich Nietzsche, a mutual friend of mine and Peterson, will be used as an enriching reference point throughout an exposition of ideas the great German philosopher is widely considered to know best. Hopefully, I will fulfil Nietzsche’s recommendation to the western individual in which he encouraged discourse with Muslims for westerners to gain a more acute idea of their own culture, a recommendation Peterson completely ignores from his intellectual idol with his dismissiveness towards Islam and to any serious discussion with its followers.
On individual responsibility being the meaning of life
When asked in his many interviews for the reason his message resonates so emphatically, Peterson consistently answers that it's unequivocally down to him having a serious discussion of the relationship between individual responsibility and meaning, a relationship he preaches to be inextricable in boldly proclaiming that life's meaning is personal responsibility. In fact, all of Peterson's output in his lectures, 12 rules for life book and the 12 more he has just released, culminate into an ultimate mantra of his that "Responsibility is the meaning of life". He says it’s the allure of centralising responsibility to life's meaning that makes his message sell. He asserts that the meaning needed to sustain one's life is found through adopting personal responsibility and that the key to make life better, better not necessarily meaning happier, is to simply bear a greater load of responsibility. He admits to not understanding sufficiently why it’s the case that responsibility is most central to life’s meaning and so deems the conversation that better articulates that relationship to be the most important one our culture needs to have.
Now, this agnostic idea of localising life's meaning to individual responsibility vastly departs on face value to Islam's specified perception of life's meaning, that's commonly defined as the worship of a one God. But there’s a profundity to understanding how these two ostensibly different conceptualisations of life's meaning converge to become essentially the same when put through the lens of Islam's concept of creation. As the most foundational Islamic narrative to the human experience is that prior to the inception of each of our souls into life, we were given free agency in deciding whether we wanted to be on the same level of angels or responsibly undergo the risk of a test in life so that we be granted a higher place than angels upon success, or lower in the case of failure. Hereby informing us of the responsibility of an autonomous, active decision to embark on this test of life out of our own choosing, Islam explicitly centralises and clarifies the link between individual responsibility and life's meaning which Peterson yearns for.
In this way, Peterson's "Responsibility is the meaning of life" is a statement that every Muslim not only adheres to but believe cuts to the very core of what faith in Islam necessitates to be life's meaning: a continuous holding of responsibility for all deeds committed through life towards death. To be responsible in the most extreme sense of the word is to be accountable, and so Peterson's mantra of responsibility aligns purely with the Muslim view that all that life adds up to is a day of judgment in which we will be held perfectly accountable for every single one of our actions. In fact, this day of judgement is deemed in Islamic terminology as "yawm alqataa", translating into "the day of separation" where each person will be truly held responsible for themselves alone.
This alignment with Peterson's centrality of individual responsibility becomes truly significant when factoring in the obscurity of responsibility's value in the Judeo-Christian tradition that Islam purports to have come to correct. Because not only does Christianity lack a pre-existence of the soul to deprive it of Islam's aforementioned responsibility invoking inception story, but it far more problematically suffers from an age-long theological opposition to individual responsibility through its central message that Jesus came to die for our sins on the cross. This prime narrative of Christianity pits the religion's central concept of salvation against Peterson's dictum of responsibility. As atonement of sin through Christ abdicates individual responsibility in a way that makes the religion's core message antithetical to Peterson's fixation on responsibility, with the defect ironically being one of the major theological triggers of Christian conversions to Islam. As for the Judeo interpretation of the Old Testament, the emphasis of responsibility through the timely punishment of Israel's tribes is offset by how the basic details of accountability in life after death in concepts of heaven and hell are completely unclear and long-debated amongst Jews; Psalm 103:10 best depicts Old testament's ambiguity of responsibility in the words "He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities"¹.
It becomes clear from this why Peterson doesn't proclaim his mantra of "Responsibility being the meaning of life" in the breath of his esteemed Judeo-Christianity, as it would be contradictory in so many ways to the ethic. This opposes the mantra’s perfect alignment with Islam, which beyond its inception story, unequivocally expresses individual responsibility and accountability in verses that cross-cut the Quran such as (Chapter 4: Verse 165): ‘Every soul earns for itself, and no soul shall bear the burden of another, and even thus shall you return to your Lord’², and many other verses of the same kind in 12:15, 25:18, 39:7 and 63:38.
It becomes clear that by proposing a focality of individual responsibility to life’s meaning, Peterson fundamentally conflicts with his own stance of finding the Judeo-Christian ethic superior to Islam, as responsibility’s obscurity through New and Old Testament erodes a foundational value of it that’s found in the Quran. Peterson’s advocacy of responsibility’s primacy in obtaining meaning in life supports Islam’s belief in the Quran’s arrival to correct all misconstrued Abrahamic scripture that preceded it. It does so by pointing to how the Quran resolves a fundamental flaw of the Bible’s ambiguity towards individual responsibility by someone who is, if anything, biased against Islam in favour of Judeo-Christianity.
This reconciliation of life’s meaning through individual responsibility bears Islam’s profound resolve of a contention Peterson voices with the Nietzschean philosophy of the Übermensch, one of European philosophy’s most significant ideas that the Nazis completely misconstrued to predicate their ideology on.
Peterson, although deeply fond of Nietzsche as I am, rightly criticises the great philosopher for having gone too far in his commemoration of the individual by attributing to us, limited mortals, the ability to construe our very own meaning of life. However, he realises the very same problem arises with his own statement of “Responsibility being the meaning of life”, which he admits shares the Nietzschean defect of assuming, in its vagueness, that each individual can discover their own personalised meaning.
Islam’s significance here lies in how its aforementioned centrality of personal responsibility caters for Peterson’s and Nietzche’s philosophy of individuality while simultaneously evading the two thinkers’ defect of presuming that humans are in any way capable of contriving their own meaning through the religion’s provision of a sharable universal purpose. This points to Islam’s philosophical strength of proposing a meaning to life that emphasises individuality more than any other ideology within a shared purpose that’s rooted in a model of truth substantiated by the grand Quran and prophetic tradition, not one based on each of our severely limited and historically isolated capacity to devise a meaning of our own.
But Islam’s value to the Nietzschean issue with Peterson’s meaning of life is far further reaching than this. As what Peterson often forgets to critique in Nietzsche and in his own mantra of individualised meaning is that although it’s almost impossible to derive our own meaning, the greater problem still lies in the impossibility that each of our own individual meanings would find any true harmony in the societal context that humans exist in.
This is why the universality of Islam’s life meaning is necessary for achieving coherence between otherwise conflicting individual concoctions of meaning, which today’s secularised liberal society is finding a very hard time managing. Islam’s perfection here lies in its provision of a universal code of morality which provides a united ethical parameter for society to live compatibly within, while it maintains a divine law of individual variety that allows each person a wide margin in their social existence to manifest their own unique talents and psychological predispositions in a way which best suits both individual and society in tandem.
Like many in the west, Peterson casually criticises this collectivist ethic of Islam’s universality because of its political associability to Europe’s scarred medieval experience between church and state, which the Islamic golden age had nothing the like of in enacting Islamic law. Peterson boastfully cites the Bible’s “Render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, and render unto God that which belongs to God” as an adornment, that many Christians take it to be, over Islam under the self-defeating, strange assumption that a God can exist without having everything belong to him, and that there is a distinction between morality and the socio-economic requirements of life. Peterson ought to realise that such platonic delineation of moral distinctions to the periphery of philosophical discussion without an accompanying attempt to enact right and wrong societally is a severe immorality in itself³.
True virtue and the Jungian integration of the shadow
A trademark of Jordan Peterson’s global message is its emphasis on the Jungian integration of the shadow. This central idea to Peterson’s appeal is one he propagates heavily as a follower of Jung, which posits that true virtue can only be accrued through acquiring an option to act immorally and deciding voluntarily to take the moral route instead. It follows from a Nietzschean outlook I wholeheartedly share that people largely act virtuously not out of a true sense of morality, as morality has more or less lost its objective currency in the western ethical landscape, but because of an incapability or cowardice to act immorally. This very specified characterisation of morality is adopted to its extreme logical form by Peterson, who explicitly states that weak men can’t be virtuous. Following from this stance, Peterson urges his followers with necessity to grow into monsters who’ve integrated their capacity to inflict damage, hence the Jungian term integration of the shadow, as opposed to remaining like domesticated cats that masquerade in virtue and don’t cause harm only because of an incapability to.
What Peterson has done in his publicisation of the Jungian integration of the shadow, with its particular prescription of morality, is unintentionally popularise a substantial Islamic argument for the prophet Muhammad’s(pbuh)moral perfection, whose figure historically stands as a distinct symbol of the merging of morality and strength, of an extreme manifestation of the Jungian integration of the shadow. In Islam, Muhammad’s(pbuh) figure signifies perfection in mankind, with Peterson’s heavily propagated idea that virtuosity correlates with strength as one large element of what constitutes the prophet’s perfection, being the epitome of a man who coincided morality with worldly power.
The Quran and hadith brought by Muhammad exhibit Jung’s philosophy by explicitly conveying the upper hand‘s superiority to the lower hand and that a strong believer is more beloved to God than a weak one, making Islam’s message a far cry from the meek slave morality that Peterson well knows Nietzsche despised Christianity for.
From hearing Peterson articulate his precise conceptualisation of morality, you would think that the prophet Muhammad(pbuh) would be the perfect exemplar of his moral model. But instead, Peterson chooses to dismiss Muhammad’s(pbuh) position of power as emblematic of a warlord in what seems like a desperate attempt to misconstrue the prophet’s involvement in war to negate the fact he fits most perfectly into his very own specified model of moral perfection. This statement of Peterson completely ignores that, if anything, Muhammed’s(pbuh) taking up of arms and leading of wars is representative of the extremely tribal, archaic, infighting Bedouin environment the prophet was able to transform through his revolution into what precipitated into the most harmonious and peaceful civilisation relative to its time. Viewing Muhammed’s(pbuh) involvement in war as a necessary negative shows Peterson’s complete ignorance to the imperialistic context Islam arose from in sprouting out between the Sassanids and Byzantines where world empires were predicated on expansionism, unlike the world of today that has developed an unprecedented unilateral agreement over the sovereignty of the nation-state. Any historical analysis of an individual necessitates an appreciation of the vastly different environment and mode of culture that person inhabited compared to the one we exist today, which Peterson completely fails to do in viewing 7th century archaic Arabia from his completely transformed 21st-century civilised Canadian lens. This anachronistic superimposition of arbitrarily agreed on subjective modes of morality onto different paradigms of culture has no place in the advanced academic circles of Harvard and Toronto University that Peterson belongs to.
What’s truly ironic in this western anthropological fallacy that’s cast upon Muhammad(pbuh)’s war figure is how it’s barely applied to who is described to us as solely heroic in Alexander the great, because if it were he’d surely be coined Alexander the terrorist instead. The label of warlord is far more befitting to Alexander, who was a prime innovator in the endeavour of militaristic conquest but who’s instead celebrated to have achieved great success in accordance to the colonialist landscape of his time. What’s strange in Peterson’s anachronism here is that he applies a more nuanced academic approach to Muhammad’s(pbuh) marriage to a young bride, as a commonly held greater criticism of the prophet, saying it can be written off to the cultural mores of the time, while failing to apply the same analytical framework to Muhammad’s(pbuh) war figure.
It’s amusing that Nietzsche, who Peterson considers the most intellectually powerful writer he’s ever read and a precursory propagator of Jung’s idea that morality can only be perfected by acquiring strength, applies this shared moral philosophy with consistency towards Muhammad(pbuh), by having expressed admiration for the prophet as a man who exemplified perfect virtue in the attainment of both morality and worldly strength. Nietzsche evaded the orientalist trap of falsely labelling warlord onto Muhammad’s(pbuh) position of power, instead positively praising it as an achievement of Plato’s vision of the philosopher-king, by saying, “Plato thought he could do for all the Greeks what Muhammad did later for his Arabs”⁴. An intellectual idol to Peterson, Nietzche consistently heaped praise on Muhammad(pbuh) and never wrote one single negative sentence towards Islam in the over 100 references he made towards it, which says a lot from a man notorious for his most cynical scepticism towards religion. Even Jean Jacque Roseau, who, completely opposite to Nietzsche, is placed on the compassionate end of the great philosophers’ temperamental spectrum, to make him more inclined to find in Muhammad’s warrior figure a feature of repugnance, praised the prophet as an emblem of the combined morality and worldly strength that Peterson endorses his followers to realise; In his classic The Social Contract, Rosseau comments on the prophet “Muhammad was neither an imposter nor a sorcerer, but an admirable legislator who successfully combined spiritual and worldly power”⁵.
Peterson’s inconsistency in failing to attribute his own ideal of virtue to the prophet Muhammad(pbuh) as great European thinkers before him have, becomes exacerbated by ascribing Jesus to be the perfect human being instead. In fact, it’s an almost embarrassing paradox for Peterson to posit that weak men can’t be virtuous (the explicit title of a YouTube video of his with over a million views) while he simultaneously posits that Jesus(pbuh) represents moral perfection. As the weakness and deep subservience that emanates from Jesus’s(pbuh) crucifixion in Christianity’s seminal moment diametrically opposes the strength intrinsic to the true attainment of morality Peterson prescribes to his followers in the Jungian integration of the shadow.
To elucidate how contradictory Peterson is in ascribing moral perfection to Jesus(pbuh) over Muhammad(pbuh), it’s worth relaying Islam’s seminal moment in the conquest of Makkah to show, in comparison to the meek central story of Christianity, how distinctly aligned Islam is with Peterson’s Jungian conception of true virtue. When Muhammed(pbuh) completes the journey of the archetypal hero by returning back to his hometown of Mecca after he had adventured out, in a great feat of forgiveness, the prophet enacts an acute integration of the Jungian shadow by declaring, from a position of strength, general amnesty to the arch-rivals of Islam who drove him out of his hometown. Upon entry to Mecca, Muhammad(pbuh) addressed the people: “Oh Quraish, what do you expect from me today?” And they said, “Mercy, Oh Prophet of Allah. We expect nothing but good from you.” After their reply, Muhammed(pbuh) declared: “Today I will speak to you as Joseph spoke to his brothers. I will not harm you and Allah will forgive you for he is merciful and loving. Go you are free”⁶. Now, how Peterson sees Jesus’s(pbuh) submissive crucifixion to embody his ideal of morality more than this pardon of strength from Muhammad(pbuh) in the seminal conquest of Mecca, according to the particular ideal of virtue the psychologist himself espouses, is a complete mystery.
Although Peterson dismally overlooks Islam’s superior fulfilment of his central philosophy of the Jungian integration of the shadow over Christianity, his intellectual idol in Nietzsche certainly didn’t make the same blunder by holding Islam’s emphasis on worldly strength in great favour to Christianity, as he made explicitly and remarkably clear in the following passage of the Antichrist:
“Christianity deprived us of the harvest of ancient civilisation; it later deprived us of the harvest of the Mohammedan civilisation. The wonderful Moorish cultural world of Spain, basically more related to us, more talkative to sense and taste than Rome and Greece, were they met (I’m not saying what for feet), why? because they take action, because they owe their origin to man’s instincts, because they said yes to life, even with the rare and refined treasures of Moorish life! … The Crusaders later fought something that would have been better off lying in the dust — a culture against which even our nineteenth century should be very poor, very late … The German nobility is almost absent in the history of higher culture: one guesses the reason: Christianity, alcohol — the two great means of corruption … In itself there should be no choice, so little in view of Islam and Christianity than in the face of an Arab and a Jew… Either you eat a Tschandala, or you are not … “War with Rome on the knife! Peace, friendship with Islam!” ….. Nature neglected — perhaps forgot — to give them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts. . . Between ourselves, they are not even men. . . . If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousand fold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men. . . .”⁷
It becomes clear that when it comes to his analysis of Muhammad(pbuh), Peterson resorts to the same pseudo idealism he culturally fights against by misconstruing involvement in war as a necessary negative to deny the prophet’s fulfilment of a model of moral perfection the psychologist himself preaches globally. War is an almost inseparable part of human existence, which Muhammad’s(pbuh) involvement in, if anything, aids his claim over the pacifist Jesus(pbuh) of being a perfect guardian to humanity across all practical matters. Instead of viewing Muhammad’s(pbuh) warrior figure as a necessary flaw, Peterson should rather appreciate the Nietzschean view of war as the actualisation of the highest form of life where one sacrifices himself to fight for the greater good. Peterson should admit that what Nietzsche lamented as an over feminised Christian ethic contrasts poorly to the Islam’s perfect balance of feminine compassion and masculine aggression embodied by Muhammad(pbuh). If Peterson were to be a disciple of Nietzsche, which he very much is on a figurative level, I’m pretty sure he’d be kicked out of the discipleship for how much his gross misjudgement of Muhamed(pbuh) goes against everything his revered German thinker had to say on the matter.
Juxtaposing Muhammad(pbuh) and Christ’s(pbuh) seminal moments of respective strength and weakness points to much more than just Islam’s alignment with Peterson on the Jungian integration of the shadow, as it ultimately reflects the life-affirming nature of Islam that better matches Peterson’s philosophy of striving in the world compared to Christianity’s negation of life as a bad business.
Unlike the Christian one of Jesus(pbuh), Muhammed’s(pbuh) message and example shares Peterson’s attribution of importance to winning within the scheme of society’s dominance hierarchies, which the psychologist predicates so much of his global advice on. As the hippie over egalitarian treatment of people as equal in every way that Christianity takes Jesus’s(pbuh) example to represent is not found in the Islamic tradition where Muhammad(pbuh) accorded varying levels of respect to people of different rank; the prophet didn’t not extend the individual’s divinity towards a dismissal of hierarchy, and injunction to complete equality as Christianity does. Here, like Peterson, Islam recognises hierarchy as an innate feature of a successful society to be worked in accordance with, and not suppressed as it’s in the Christian tradition.
One clearly recognises how Islam opposes Christianity’s life negation to better fit Peterson’s life-affirming philosophy, through a historical appreciation of both religions’ effect. As the peak of religious practice in Islamic society coincided with the peak of the Islamic empire’s prosperity, to completely contrast with how the peak of Christianity’s societal practice coincided with the regressive medieval trauma of Europe. The ambition entwined with Muhammad’s message progressed barren Arab desert dwellers to the world’s greatest civilisation, whereas the indifference of Christianity’s message regressed Europeans from the great Roman empire’s light to the darkness of the Middle ages.
Peterson’s dynamic moral epistemology
Peterson is known to oppose common western thought in many significant ways. The single most important way he does so is epistemologically oppose the empiricist dogma we live in today that restricts all acquisition of knowledge to the scientific method. This being immeasurably important for how our western empirical orientation extends to restricting even moral knowledge to scientific fact, a restriction Peterson opposes in his belief that moral truths, with morality being referred to in its most broad meaning of what guides our direction in the world, cannot be obtained through science.
Contrary to the predominant belief of the modern individual, Peterson doesn’t naively mistake the enlightenment period or the existential one that followed it to be atheistic movements that espoused an idea that moral truths are exclusively deciphered, along with all other truths, by scientific reasoning. Instead, Peterson, who has bothered to read the European scholastic philosophical tradition, understands that the likes of David Hume, enlightenment’s leading thinker, and Fredrich Nietzsche, existentialism’s leading thinker, explicitly opined science’s complete insufficiency in being able to answer the ultimate question of how we should morally align ourselves in the world. Both Hume and Nietzsche, among other great European thinkers, considered sentiment, not logic, to be the essential component of our ability to arrive at moral distinctions. Peterson, as a modern-day western public intellectual, consistently echoes his shared belief with these most esteemed thinkers that science is limited to only describing the world as a plane of objects and that a more metaphysical element approximating spirituality is necessary to provide guidance on how to navigate those objects. I say this moral epistemological contention is the most fundamental difference Peterson has with the common western mode of thought because there can barely be anything more profound than a difference in the process by which we acquire the truths that guide how we ultimately align ourselves in the world.
The profound aspect here to Peterson’s agreement with religion that a sentimental process operating outside the purview of the scientific method is required to decipher morality, is that his distinct posit of what shape this sentimental process takes perfectly maps onto Islam’s fully articulated epistemological method of spirituality deriving moral truth. Peterson postulates that moral truths are derived through a dynamic process of embodied belief through action, which to his lack of knowledge distinctly reiterates Islam’s spiritual epistemology.
To explain this dynamic process of truth attainment, Peterson believes, in the same way that Islam does, that what we construe as scientific analysis only serves to direct us to what may be a moral truth and that the necessary element to actually believe in that moral truth is to act it out. And it is through an innate sentimental, and not empirically observed, positive feedback of the emotion accompanying an action that belief in the moral truth guiding that action becomes truly actuated- this sentimental element religiously attributed to spirituality. And so, this epistemological process is a cyclical one, and hence his referral to it as dynamic, where belief and action are inextricably linked in a cycle in which action induces belief in the same way belief is conventionally thought to induce action.
This dynamic epistemological process that Peterson unwittingly shares with Islam is commensurate with the theory of embodied cognition instigated by Valera. This theory, rooted in a Kantian philosophical background, postulates that cognitive belief has tentacles reaching out of our brain into the entire body of our species, inferring that for a moral idea to be truly believed it has to be acted out so that it be integrated into the body before it constitutes true cognitive belief; this theory contrasts with traditional cognitive science that restricts cognition to the brain.
In Islam, Peterson's idea that action begets belief in the same way belief begets action is not merely an esoteric product of speculative philosophy which the west considers it to be. Before Varela or Kant made reference to an idea that action and belief were far more interlinked than language deceives us of them to be, Muhammad(pbuh) expressed it to be at the very centre of Islam’s concept of faith. Throughout the prophetic tradition, we find Muhammad’s(pbuh) emphasis on the inextricability of belief and action in his instruction that it’s by acting in accordance to the Islamic jurisprudential framework of morality that a person spiritually acknowledges a one and only God. A hadith, symbolic in Islam, explicitly expresses truth’s dynamism, in which Muhammed(pbuh) responds to a companion who asked him what constitutes belief in Islam, to which the prophet replied that it’s the acting out of the Islamic ethic itself.
The central place of Peterson’s dynamic epistemology in Islam is demonstrated by how the biggest epistemological contest in the Islamic golden age between the period’s two greatest philosophers in Avicenna and Ghazali still presided over an agreement that the prescription to arriving at a true conviction of God was a dynamic process. Despite the two thinker’s disagreement over the primacy of spirituality over logic in coming to believe God, they both ascertained that logic was to be accompanied by the spirituality of a dynamic process of embodying the Islamic ethic so that a substantial, true belief in Islam could be arrived at. Because of this, despite Imam Ghazali's bitter difference with Avicenna, he resorted to use the same parable of the mirror as his rival predecessor to convey how knowledge of God is attained through action, to metaphorically depict Peterson’s dynamic epistemological process a thousand years before his or Varela’s intimation of it. The parable being a metaphorical representation of the human soul as a sheet of iron which when sufficiently polished, by acting out the Islamic ethic, can be made into a mirror that reflects the light of the knowledge of God more brightly.
Islam’s mirroring of Peterson’s epistemological position of truth’s dynamism manifests in one of the more important Quranic chapters in the 103rd chapter of Al-Asr, which goes “By the declining day, Man is in deep loss, Except for those who believe, do good deeds, urge one another to the truth, and urge one another to steadfastness”⁸. The Quranic ordering here of acting out what are believed to be good deeds before the urging of others to that belief portrays the same value of dynamic epistemology in Peterson’s famous rule of “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”, by conveying the importance of embodying a belief through action for it to be genuinely believed first so that it can then be effectively shared to others with integrity. It’s worth noting that it’s from this epistemological viewpoint that Nietzsche criticised intellectuals for espousing ideas that they didn’t act out in their personal lives, as for a person to truly believe in something, according to Nietzsche, it had to be acted out by that person so that it be physically integrated into their being.
And so it can be concluded that Islam’s epistemological conceptualisation of belief is a dynamic action-orientated one just as Peterson has repeatedly expressed his concept of belief to be, and which Christianity’s concept of belief most certainly isn’t as a religion that theologically struggles to instantiate in its teachings that anything more than mere cognitive belief in the Trinity by having Jesus(pbuh) in your heart is required for salvation. Here, Peterson’s better epistemological alignment with Islam over Christianity provides another avenue for him to explore Islam’s superior wisdom to the Judeo-Christian ethic that he assumes to be of greater truth.
Islam’s alignment with Peterson’s fundamental philosophical view that moral truth is derived through a dynamic process which necessitates action to ensconce true belief, expounds into the religion’s significance of providing the psychologist with a substantiated epistemological model to bolster the most controversial rule in his book 12 rules for life of “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”.
This rule of Peterson’s famous 12 connotes a political injunction which he consistently berates young student activists with, by instructing the need for protesters to act out what they proclaim to believe before they go out preaching it onto others. Although it’s the most politically significant rule in his book it’s also the most poorly proofed one due to its lack of an expression of its most important value which is an epistemological one. This being truth’s aforementioned dynamic element, which necessitates embodying truth by “setting your house in perfect order” to deem it properly believed before it can be imposed and urged on others in “criticising the world”.
Peterson avoids the mention of this integral epistemological value of the rule because of a theoretical lack in the European sphere of anything more than speculative to substantiate truth’s dynamism, a problem Islam, as aforementioned, resolves in its provision of a deep and elaborate spiritual explanation for how acquiring truth is dynamic. Islam’s superior articulation amongst ancient traditions of truth’s derivation from action provides Peterson with a rich scholastic expression to epistemologically validate a rule he most struggles to make a convincing case for. And so Islamic philosophy proves invaluable to Peterson here in providing a fully articulated answer to a question, he’s expressed the lack of a western explanation for, of how action begets belief in the same way belief begets action.
By overlooking this profound preemptive answer of Islamic philosophy to the embodied cognition question of how action begets belief, Peterson mimics a European tradition that ignores Avicenna’s similarly profound pre-emptive resolve of the iconic Nietzschean problem of Descartes’ presupposition of the “I” in the cogito ergo sum of “I think therefore I am” through the Muslim philosopher’s circumvention of the “I” in the alternative declaration of “There is existence”. It would be assumed that with Peterson’s well-known appreciation of art, Raphael’s depiction of Islamic philosophy’s value to European thought in The School of Athens’ portrayal of the Muslim Averroes would be a cue for him to at least gloss over what Islamic thought offers. Within Islamic philosophy, he would find a greater articulation of truth’s dynamism than what Europe’s scholastic tradition has to offer. But it becomes apparent that Peterson completely overlooks Islam and the scholastic tradition that accompanies it in his failure to recognise not only how compatible but enriching the religion can be to his philosophical outlook.
In conclusion
Peterson’s affectionate attachment to Judeo-Christianity makes his outright dismissal of its closest Abrahamic relative in Islam a peculiar one. It suggests that Islam’s differences with his most esteemed Judeo-Christianity repel his sensibilities so much to make him overlook the common Abrahamic religions’ value to Muhammad’s message. But what’s quite bizarrely realised on the contrary, through an expose of what Peterson believes in, is that the distinguishing elements of the psychologist’s philosophy align in a precise and complementary way with what differentiates Islam from Judeo-Christianity. Islam’s additive qualities to Judeo-Christianity of unequivocal central expression of individual responsibility, worldly strength as a component of virtue, and dynamic epistemology make its differences with the Abrahamic corpse of religion that predated it to be distinctions of integral wisdom according to what Peterson popularly believes to be true. Peterson’s negation of Islam becomes ironic here, in realising through an explication of the psychologist’s defining ideas, that he may very well be most significant for having resonated more than anyone else in the west as a preacher of a message that distinctly maps onto the prophet Muhammad’s(pbuh) before him.
Islam’s juxtaposition with Christianity reframes Jesus’ crucifixion, as the dividing narrative between the two religions, in a way that problematically hinders Peterson’s stated view of the story as one of most grand wisdom. Islam’s contrast with Christianity displays how the message of crucifixion fundamentally contradicts Peterson’s emphasis on individual responsibility and the virtue of strength through the story’s respective atonement of sin and meek display of subservience, which are missing elements of the prophet Muhammad’s(pbuh) version of Christ.
And not only did Muhammad(pbuh) correct these flaws of Christian’s narration of Jesus, flaws accorded unintentionally by a supporter of Christianity himself in Peterson, but he also espoused a dynamic embodied method of believing in Islam’s truth that conveniently fits, unlike any other religion, into the psychologist’s specified epistemological delineation of acquiring moral truth.
The question that naturally follows an appreciation of Peterson’s profound compatibility with Islam is how a man who‘s become so popular for his openly studious inquiry of truth be so completely ignorant to a distinct alignment his very own philosophy has with the world’s most popular religion. Entire articles could be written to answer this question as an exemplary case of the west’s general ignorance towards Islam. But there is one theory espoused by Jung that Peterson himself is most familiar with as a possible explanation of his very own ignorance. Jung proposed that many of people’s problems in life could be diagnosed to stem from a subconscious reluctance to face the full truth of a given problem to start with, out of a fear of what may come along with realising the full-blown reality. For Peterson, this fear could be tied to a complication of arrogance as he may attribute to himself way too much importance to seriously explore an unfashionable religion which may lead to ramifications, in possible conversion, of hurting a western ego that indulges in its sense of cultural superiority to its inferior east; after all, as Peterson should be well aware, arrogance is Islamically depicted as the epitome of man’s downfall in the story of Adam and Eve’s, through Satan’s refusal to bow down and worship God out of a heightened sense of self-importance.
Peterson should look no further than who he already idolises in Nietzsche as an example of a western thinker who rightly saw in Islam’s clear superiority to Christianity an injunction to openly explore the religion. It’s well documented that Nietzsche’s plan for his later years was to travel to Tunisia where he’d immerse himself amongst Muslims and explore Islam, only to be sabotaged by a debilitating illness that prematurely ended his life before his plans could be realised, to make us wonder of what could have become of arguably Europe’s greatest ever thinker.
Quite eerily, Peterson’s been recently struck by akathisia to debilitate him, in almost subliminal fashion, of resting still in the same way Nietzsche’s illness had. But Peterson still has time as long as he has some cognitive health and life in him to continue what Nietzsche’s fate didn’t allow for: to advance an exploration of Abrahamic wisdom past the confines of Judeo-Christianity into Islam as a religion that may offer a resolve to the bitter existential agnostic vacuum that both his and Nietzsche's philosophies ultimately suffer from without a transcendent purpose.
Until then however, Peterson’s ignorance will remain an epitome of the western spirit that recognises a divine profundity underlying the flawed texts of Old and New Testament but which somehow fails to give the time of day to the prophet Muhammad’s(pbuh) proposed corrected version of the same Abrahamic message.
References:
- Psalm, Chapter 103: Verse 10.
- Quran, Chapter 4: Verse 165.
- Muhammad Asad, Islam at the crossroads, p.g 28.
- Fredrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day; aphorism 496.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau, The social contract(Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1762) p.g 303–304.
- Ibn Hisham, Vol. II, p. 409
- Fredrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist; aphorism 60.
- Quran, Chapter 103
