Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (10 page)

He then goes on to adduce other Qur’anic passages about Jesus, saying that if Christians and Muslims understood all that they had in common, this mutual understanding would defuse a great many conflicts in the world: “As forces of hate in this country and worldwide try to pull Muslims and Christians apart, we are in desperate need of a unifying force that can bridge the widening gap of interfaith misunderstanding and mistrust. That force could be the message of love, peace and forgiveness taught by Jesus and accepted by followers of both faiths.”

Hooper adds: “When Muslims mention the Prophet Muhammad, they always add the phrase ‘peace be upon him.’ Christians may be surprised to learn that the same phrase always follows a Muslim’s mention of Jesus or that we believe Jesus will return to earth in the last days before the final judgment. Disrespect toward Jesus, as we have seen all too often in our society, is very offensive to Muslims.” He acknowledges that “Muslims and Christians do have some differing perspectives on Jesus’ life and teachings,” but doesn’t explore those, leaving the impression that they are largely insignificant.

In keeping with his irenic thrust, he says that Jesus’ “spiritual legacy offers an alternative opportunity for people of faith to recognize their shared religious heritage” and claims that “America’s Muslim community stands ready to honor that legacy by building bridges of interfaith understanding and challenging those who would divide our nation along religious or ethnic lines.”

“We have,” Hooper concludes, “more in common than we think.”
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Another CAIR presentation asserts that “like Christians, Muslims respect and revere Jesus. Islam teaches that Jesus is one of the greatest of God’s prophets and messengers to humankind. Like Christians, every day, over 1.3 billion Muslims strive to live by his teachings of love, peace, and forgiveness. Those teachings, which have become universal values, remind us that all of us, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and all others have more in common than we think.”
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Hooper’s article and the CAIR piece are both canny and compelling. They are reasonable, they are conciliatory, and they resonate with the spirit of the age—the spirit that would prefer to focus upon what we have in common rather than upon what divides us, and to see in every present or historical enemy a potential friend.

And there is apparently a great deal to recommend this point of view.

Less than meets the eye

Jesus in the Qur’an, as we have seen, is the Word of God, “a Spirit from him,” born of a Virgin, a miracle worker who numbered among his followers apostles who were exemplary in righteousness. Allah says that he “gave Jesus son of Mary the clear signs, and confirmed him with the Holy Spirit.” But then dissension arose among his followers—a fact with which no Christian could possibly disagree, although in the Qur’an it is attributed to Allah’s agency: “And had God willed, those who came after him would not have fought one against the other after the clear signs had come to them; but they fell into variance, and some of them believed, and some disbelieved; and had God willed they would not have fought one against the other; but God does whatsoever He desires” (2:253).

It is noteworthy, however, that although Hooper quotes Qur’an 3:45, which calls Jesus “a Word from Him,” that is, from Allah, he does not explain that the Qur’an’s understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the “Word of God” is significantly different from the biblical one. In the Qur’an there is nothing of the exalted theology of the
Logos
through whom the world was created. The idea that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1) is anathema to Islam. Rather, the Qur’an explains the term in language strongly reminiscent of the Christian theology of Jesus as the New Adam: “Truly, the likeness of Jesus, in God’s sight, is as Adam’s likeness; He created him of dust, then said He unto him, ‘Be,’ and he was” (3:59).

However, this is not an assertion of Christ the New Adam, as in St. Paul’s lapidary formulation that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). It is merely an affirmation of the Virgin Birth: Both Jesus and Adam have no earthly father, but were created by divine fiat, the divine word. While it is momentous enough that the Qur’an affirms the Virgin Birth, this miracle is given no greater significance in Islamic tradition than any of the other signs of the divine power. In fact, at one point the Qur’an even uses this same language in the context of another denial that Jesus is the Son of God: “It is not for God to take a son unto Him. Glory be to Him! When He decrees a thing, He but says to it ‘Be,’ and it is” (19:35).

Jesus says of himself (miraculously, as an infant in the cradle): “Lo, I am God’s servant; God has given me the Book, and made me a Prophet” (19:30). He is not divine; he is a servant of Allah (
Abdullah
, or slave of Allah: 4:172; 19:30; 43:59). The gospel is not a message about him but a book that he has received from Allah, who by this delivery made him a prophet.

Not the Son

The centerpiece of the Qur’an’s teaching about Jesus, in line with all this, is another sharp departure from orthodox Christianity: The Qur’an repeatedly and strenuously denies that Jesus is the son of God (to say nothing of God the Son). “The Jews say, ‘Ezra is the Son of God,’” the book asserts, although no Jews have ever been found who actually did say any such thing; “the Christians say, ‘The Messiah is the Son of God.’ That is the utterance of their mouths, conforming with the unbelievers before them. God assail them! How they are perverted!” (9:30). The Qur’an emphasizes that Allah has no son no fewer than twelve times (2:116; 10:68; 17:111; 18:4; 19:35; 19:88; 19:91; 19:92; 21:26; 23:91; 39:04; 43:81).

Not only does Allah “assail” those who affirm that Christ is the Son of God; as we have seen, he also warns them not to deify Jesus: “The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only the Messenger of God, and His Word that He committed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him. . . . God is only One God. Glory be to Him—That He should have a son!” (4:171).

The Qur’an declares that to say that Allah has a Son would be to impugn his total power and sovereignty. Indeed, to affirm that he has a son is “something hideous” that upsets the entire equilibrium of creation: “And they say, ‘The All-merciful has taken unto Himself a son. You have indeed advanced something hideous! The heavens are well nigh rent of it and the earth split asunder, and the mountains well nigh fall down crashing for that they have attributed to the All-merciful a son; and it behoves not the All-merciful to take a son” (19:88-92). The idea of divine sonship is conceived of in physical terms more appropriate to the Greek myths than to Christian theology, as the Qur’an dismisses the possibility that Allah could have a son on the grounds that he has no wife: “The Creator of the heavens and the earth—how should He have a son, seeing that He has no consort, and He created all things, and He has knowledge of everything?” (6:101).

Here again, we see the assumption that to affirm that Allah has a son would somehow impugn the ideas that he created everything and is omniscient. The first is reasonably easy to understand, as apparently the Qur’an was envisioning a God with a son after the fashion of ancient pagan schemata in which one god was responsible for the creation of one part of the universe, while another god created a different part. Why having a son would challenge Allah’s omniscience is less clear. The assumption is apparently that Allah would regard a son the way a farmer might: as someone who could help him with his tasks and make up for his deficiencies. Since in Allah there are no deficiencies, hence he has no son.

The Qur’an says that Jesus is “a sign unto men and a mercy from Us” (19:21)—that is, from Allah. Mary, too, is called a sign (21:90; 23:50). But a sign of what? In what way are Jesus and Mary signs of Allah in a way that the other prophets, and their mothers, weren’t? No explanation is given.

In Islam, not only is Jesus not the son of God, but to assert that he is renders one an infidel: “They are unbelievers who say, ‘God is the Messiah, Mary’s son.’ Say: ‘Who then shall overrule God in any way if He desires to destroy the Messiah, Mary’s son, and his mother, and all those who are on earth?’ For to God belongs the kingdom of the heavens and of the earth, and all that is between them, creating what He will. God is powerful over everything” (5:17). The beginning of that passage appears again in the Qur’an, as if it were a kind of refrain: “They are unbelievers who say, ‘God is the Messiah, Mary’s son.’ For the Messiah said, ‘Children of Israel, serve God, my Lord and your Lord. Verily whoso associates with God anything, God shall prohibit him entrance to Paradise, and his refuge shall be the Fire; and wrongdoers shall have no helpers’” (5:72).

The Qur’an envisions the Incarnation not as God becoming man but as a heavenly being visiting the earth without fully taking on human form. Thus it warns the Christians: “The Messiah, son of Mary, was only a Messenger; Messengers before him passed away; his mother was a just woman; they both ate food. Behold, how We make clear the signs to them; then behold, how they perverted are!” (5:75). Offering the fact that Jesus ate food as evidence that Jesus is not the Son of God manifests a deep misunderstanding of the nature of the Incarnation. The Qur’an apparently envisions it solely as God’s taking the form of a man but not becoming a man in any real sense; the idea that God would have “become like us in all things except sin” (Heb. 2:17) is a concept completely alien to the Qur’an and Islam in general. Where the Qur’an envisions the Incarnation at all, it does so only in the sense of God taking flesh as a garment, rather like a boss going incognito among his employees to see what they really think of him, but not becoming a fellow employee in any genuine sense.

A miracle worker, by Allah’s permission

In the Qur’an, this messenger of Allah, although emphatically just a human, does have the ability to perform miracles and even to raise the dead. But this is not to indicate (as in the Gospels) that he is divine, with his own authority and power over life and death; instead, he performs all his miracles only with Allah’s permission. Jesus tells the children of Israel: “I have come to you with a sign from your Lord. I will create for you out of clay as the likeness of a bird; then I will breathe into it, and it will be a bird, by the leave of God. I will also heal the blind and the leper, and bring to life the dead, by the leave of God. I will inform you too of what things you eat, and what you treasure up in your houses. Surely in that is a sign for you, if you are believers” (3:49).

This is a sharp contrast to Muhammad, who works no miracles. When the unbelievers demand a miracle from the new prophet — “And they that know not say: Why does God not speak to us? Why does a sign not come to us?” (2:118; cf. 6:37; 10:20; 13:7; 13:27) —Allah tells him how to respond: by saying that even if he did come to the unbelievers with a miracle, they would reject him anyway: “Indeed, We have struck for the people in this Koran every manner of similitude; and if thou bringest them a sign, those who are unbelievers will certainly say, ‘You do nothing but follow falsehood’” (30:58). It is significant that even though the Qur’an exalts Muhammad as the “Seal of the Prophets” (33:40) and Islamic tradition even further exalts him as the supreme example of human behavior (an idea based on the Qur’an’s designation of him as a “good example” (33:21)—indeed,
the
good example), it is Jesus who in the Qur’an is the miracle worker, not Muhammad. Jesus is designated the Word of God, not Muhammad. Jesus is born of a Virgin, not Muhammad. These and other undigested bits of orthodox Christianity in the Qur’an, and the Muslim holy book’s general exaltation of Jesus over Muhammad, are left unexplained in Islamic tradition, since it lacks a rational theology and a tradition of reasoning from Scripture: The divine fiat is all. But they remain as hints of a greater truth that over the centuries have led many a Muslim to discover a far greater truth than Islam encompasses.

They preach Christ not crucified

The Qur’an frequently criticizes the Jews, whom it terms “the most hostile of men to the believers” (5:82) and the slayers of the prophets (4:155). Yet they also draw the divine ire “for their saying, ‘We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God’—yet they did not slay him, neither crucified him, only a likeness of that was shown to them” (4:157).

This recalls Christian Gnostic texts that denied the Crucifixion on the grounds that, the material world being evil, Jesus appeared on earth as a mere phantasm, taking on only the
appearance
of human form, not its substance. Hence the crucifixion had to be an illusion. A Gnostic document called
The Second Treatise of the Great Seth
has Jesus recounting what actually happened:

For my death, which they think happened, (happened) to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death. For their Ennoias did not see me, for they were deaf and blind. But in doing these things, they condemn themselves. Yes, they saw me; they punished me. It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon Whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over all the wealth of the archons and the offspring of their error, of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance.
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Gnostics who left the Roman Empire to escape persecution in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries may have made their way into Arabia, for this idea of an illusory and deceptive Crucifixion certainly infiltrated the Qur’an and Islamic tradition. The idea that another was crucified in Jesus’ place often led the Gnostics to identify the crucified one as the apostle Thomas, since he was “called the twin” (John 11:16). In Gnostic literature, Thomas is frequently called “Judas Thomas,” a name he never bears in the canonical Gospels, but one which easily led to the idea that the one who was crucified was actually Judas Iscariot—a notion that is found in Muslim tradition.
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