Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (16 page)

And fight in the way of God with those who fight with you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors. And slay them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you; persecution is more grievous than slaying. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, slay them—such is the recompense of unbelievers—but if they give over, surely God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is God’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for evildoers. (2:190-193)

This passage is one of the foundations for the frequent Muslim apologetic claim that the Qur’an allows for fighting only in self-defense, since Allah does not love aggressors. Some schools of Islamic jurisprudence, however, teach that non-belief in Islam is itself an act of aggression, since Islam is the original religion of all mankind, and no one can reject it in good faith. Maulana Bulandshahri, an Islamic scholar who has written a contemporary commentary on the Qur’an, explains: “The worst of sins are Infidelity (
Kufr
) and Polytheism (
shirk
) which constitute rebellion against Allah, The Creator. To eradicate these, Muslims are required to wage war until there exists none of it in the world, and the only religion is that of Allah.”
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This would be a
defensive
war, for unbelief in Islam is inherently aggressive.

In any case, Muslims must fight against those who have expelled and persecuted them until “there is no persecution and the religion is God’s.” This is an open-ended call to make war against non-Muslims solely on the basis of their not being Muslims. For “the religion” will not be entirely “God’s” until all people accept the truly divine religion, which is Islam. Furthermore, Islam does not envision a world that is entirely Muslim until the end times, when Jesus returns and “breaks the crosses”; consequently, this directive to fight until “the religion is God’s” (repeated in Qur’an 8:39) is an open-ended command to remain in a state of warfare with non-Muslims, and to work toward their subjugation under the Islamic law, until the consummation of all things.

The third occurrence of the “slay them wherever you find them” phrase in the Qur’an refers to the “hypocrites,” who initially accepted Islam but then rejected it:

How is it with you, that you are two parties touching the hypocrites, and God has overthrown them for what they earned? What, do you desire to guide him whom God has led astray? Whom God leads astray, thou wilt not find for him a way. They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of God; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper. (4:88-9)

This verse offers Qur’anic support for Muhammad’s pronouncement of a death sentence on those who apostatize from Islam: “If anyone changes his religion, kill him.” These hypocrites who are trying to lure other Muslims to discard their faith as well are not to be befriended until they “emigrate in the way of God,” in other words, until they leave their homes in Mecca and join the Muslim community in Medina. The death penalty for apostates is still part of Islamic law, taught by all eight schools of Islamic jurisprudence: the four principal Sunni schools, the Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanafi, and Hanbali; the smaller Ibadi school that is found principally in Oman; the even smaller Zahiri school; and the Shi’ite Jafari and Zaidi schools.

This strikes at the heart of the Catholic idea of the dignity of every human person and the right of that person, endowed by God with free will, to exercise his conscience without coercion. Islam claims that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256) but hedges around this apparent concession to religious liberty and the freedom of conscience with so many caveats, not least among them being onerous restrictions on the freedom and livelihood of non-Muslims in the Islamic state, that it becomes effectively meaningless.

Pope Benedict XVI has written, “Muslims share with Christians the conviction that no constraint in religious matters, much less the use of force, is permitted.”
¹³³
This is certainly true, although all too often honored in the breach. However, Islamic doctrine does not consider the depriving of non-Muslim
dhimmis
of basic rights, or the death penalty for apostates from Islam, to be “constraint in religious matters.” The convert from Islam is free to continue in his apostasy and be killed, and the
dhimmi
is free to continue as a non-Muslim in the Islamic state, suffering institutionalized discrimination. The death penalty for apostasy and the second-class status mandated for
dhimmis
are not considered constraint but simple justice.

Since the foundation of Catholic morality is equal dignity of all human beings before God, this also strikes at the heart of the compatibility on life issues that many Catholics assume exists between Catholicism and Islam.

What’s more, at its very core Islamic morality owes more to coercion and conformity than to the cultivation of genuine virtue and as such stands yet again at the polar opposite of Christian morality.

The empire of fear

The Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, once complained that “Australian law guarantees freedoms up to a crazy level.”
¹³⁴
(A “mufti” is a Sunni Muslim scholar who interprets Islamic law in a way that his followers regard as authoritative.) Yet freedom is an indispensable prerequisite for any cultivation of real virtue. Thus, in guaranteeing freedom even a post-Christian West makes it more possible to be virtuous than the seemingly more upright Islamic world. With its stonings, amputations, and death penalties for an array of offenses including apostasy, Islam has created not a framework in which people can become genuinely good but an empire of fear.

Muslims don’t dare step out of line; not because of love for God or a real desire to please him, but because they are afraid of what would happen to them if they departed from Islam’s vision of morality. Catholics concur with Muslims on many of the sins for which Islam prescribes these draconian punishments; there is no disagreement between the two on whether theft or adultery or blasphemy is sinful. But when the punishments for them are as harsh as Islam commands, the obedience that follows is not the free decision of the human being to choose the good but a simple conformism of terror.

That kind of conformism is the foundation of Islamic morality. For theft, the divinely ordained penalty is amputation: “And the thief, male and female: cut off the hands of both, as a recompense for what they have earned, and a punishment exemplary from God; God is All-mighty, All-wise” (Qur’an 5:38). This is also the penalty, along with crucifixion, for the ill-defined sin of doing corruption on Earth: “This is the recompense of those who fight against God and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land. That is a degradation for them in this world; and in the world to come awaits them a mighty chastisement” (5:33).

The Qur’an does not contain a command to stone adulterers, but this penalty is prescribed in Islamic law as based on Muhammad’s example. One
hadith
explains:

The Jews brought to the Prophet a man and a woman from among them who had committed illegal sexual intercourse. The Prophet said to them, “How do you usually punish the one amongst you who has committed illegal sexual intercourse?” They replied, “We blacken their faces with coal and beat them.” He said, “Don’t you find the order of
Ar-Rajm
(i.e., stoning to death) in the Taurat (Torah)?” They replied, “We do not find anything in it.” ‘Abdullah bin Salam (after hearing this conversation) said to them, “You have told a lie! Bring here the Taurat and recite it if you are truthful.” (So the Jews brought the Taurat.) And the religious teacher who was teaching it to them put his hand over the Verse of
Ar-Rajm
and started reading what was written above and below the place hidden with his hand, but he did not read the Verse of
Ar-Rajm
. ‘Abdullah bin Salam removed his (i.e., the teacher’s) hand from the Verse of
Ar-Rajm
and said, “What is this?” So when the Jews saw that Verse, they said, “This is the Verse of
Ar-Rajm
.” So the Prophet ordered both the adulterer and the adulteress to be stoned to death, and they were stoned to death near the place where biers used to be placed near the mosque. I saw her companion (i.e., the adulterer) bowing over her so as to protect her from the stones.
¹³⁵

Another
hadith
places the command to stone adulterers in the original Qur’an: Ubayy ibn Ka’b, whom Islamic tradition identifies as an early compiler of the Qur’an, explained that the Muslim holy book’s thirty-third chapter once contained 213 additional verses, including this one: “The fornicators among the married men (
ash-shaikh
) and married women (
ash-shaikhah)
, stone them as an exemplary punishment from Allah, and Allah is Mighty and Wise.”
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The second caliph, Umar, was worried:

I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, “We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book.” And consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession. . . . Surely Allah’s Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him.
¹³⁷

The Christian, in rejecting these harsh punishments, must not allow himself to be maneuvered into the opposite extreme position that society has no right or responsibility to proscribe immoral activity. Certainly in the past there were Western societies more Christian than our own that set forth strict moral codes. Still, in the Christian scheme, for moral choices to be a manifestation of virtue they must be made in freedom, out of a desire to do good—not merely to avoid punishment, or under the power of coercion.

Islam does not see virtue this way. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini once thundered, “Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors!”
¹³⁸
Thus, it is no surprise that hardline Muslim groups like the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, al-Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya, and others like them enforce Islamic morality by means of terror. The headlines give us no shortage of recent examples: Al-Shabaab in May 2012 bombed a Mombasa nightclub that served alcohol, just as Muslims in Lebanon the previous month bombed a Christian-owned restaurant that served alcohol.
¹³⁹
In January 2012, a Muslim named Sami Osmakac was arrested in Florida with a plan to bomb Tampa-area nightclubs.
¹⁴⁰
Also in May 2012, a group of devout Muslims in Morocco stoned and assaulted a woman whom they thought was dressed in too revealing a manner, stripping her naked in public.
¹⁴¹

Such instances are distressingly common in the Islamic world. Needless to say, the idea of enforcing moral codes by violence and terror is utterly alien to the spirit of Catholicism.

Even Dinesh D’Souza, perhaps before he came to agree with the Islamic critique of Western immorality, wrote in 2004, “Consider the woman in Afghanistan or Iran who is required to wear the veil. There is no real modesty in this, because the woman is being compelled. Compulsion cannot produce virtue; it can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.”
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Yet three years later D’Souza warned, “When you make America synonymous with permissiveness, when you dismiss serious moral offenses with a no-big-deal attitude . . . you are driving the traditional Muslims into the arms of the radicals.”
¹⁴³

D’Souza appeared to be unaware that something quite similar to Western “permissiveness” was already written into Islamic law, albeit with a fig leaf of morality over it.

A similar Muslim fig leaf lies over the objective evils found in that area where many Christians most strongly presume to have an ally in Islam: marriage and sexual morality.

7

A Shared Sexual Ethic?

Indeed, in the area of sexual morality, the correspondence of Islamic statutes with Catholic teaching seems exact. The Qur’an instructs:

And approach not fornication; surely it is an indecency, and evil as a way. (17:32)

Fornication, adultery, the sanctity of marriage, the importance of bearing children—in all such areas, many Catholics believe that Catholic and Muslim moral teaching are essentially identical. Yet, there are serious differences that have up to now received far less attention than the similarities, although they are no less important. For although fornication and adultery are indeed forbidden in Islam as in Christianity, and there are other apparent moral similarities between the two religions, the Muslim understanding of marriage and sexual morality differs so greatly from the Christian understanding that it renders those similarities void of meaning.