Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (20 page)

Still, the key point to remember here is not that Catholics are unable to pursue or sustain meaningful moral alliances with Muslims simply because Islam allows awful things that Catholicism does not. Rather, Islam’s acceptance of these things reveals fundamentally misplaced principles about sex, marriage, and women such that any alliance based on putatively shared values will founder on the ineluctable fact that these values are not actually shared at all.

8

An Honest Desire for Dialogue?

In the name of interreligious dialogue, it’s not uncommon for Muslim spokesmen to visit Christian churches, including Catholic parishes, with the stated goal of clearing up “misconceptions” about Islam. Such sessions often include the Muslim speaker’s downplaying the reality of jihad activity and Muslim persecution of Christians, and offering his Christian audience bland assurances that such things have nothing to do with authentic Islam.

On a larger scale, Muslims have engaged in several high-profile attempts at dialogue with Catholics in recent years, to which Catholics have generally responded with enthusiasm. Yet, there is less to these attempts at outreach than meets the eye. The two most visible and well-publicized attempts by Muslims to reach out to Catholics turn out, on close examination, to be thinly veiled exercises in proselytizing. All of these attempts at “dialogue” share several common characteristics, including most notably a downplaying and glossing-over of the differences between Christianity and Islam, an over-emphasis on the similarities between the two religions, and a call to Christians to abandon or modify certain of their core beliefs, while never budging an inch on Islamic doctrines.

These invitations to dialogue were both published in the wake of one of the most unfortunate episodes of modern Catholic-Muslim relations: the violent aftermath of Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg address.

“Things only evil and inhuman”

On September 12, 2006, in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI dared to enunciate some truths about Islam that proved to be unpopular and unwelcome among Muslims worldwide. Most notoriously, the Pope quoted the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Less frequently noted is that the pope followed this by recounting that Manuel II then

goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God,” he says, “is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”

Pope Benedict then demonstrated his awareness that talk about the nature of God would not impress those who commit the most religious violence—Muslims—because “for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” He recalled the medieval Muslim philosopher Ibn Hazm (994-1064), who “went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.”
¹⁸⁵

Later, after these words touched off an international furor, Pope Benedict emphasized repeatedly that he was not endorsing Paleologus’s characterization of Muhammad’s teachings, and reiterated his hope for the beginning of a “genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”

The initial response was not promising. Muslims rioted and in several countries murdered Christians who had, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with what the pope had said. And several days after the Regensburg address, a group of Muslim clerics in Gaza issued an invitation to the pope to convert to Islam, or else: “We want to use the words of the Prophet Muhammad and tell the pope: ‘
Aslim Taslam
’”—that is, embrace Islam and you will be safe.
¹⁸⁶
The implication, of course, was that the one to whom this “invitation” is addressed would
not
be safe if he declined to convert.

Then, a month later, came what seemed to be a ray of hope. On October 13, 2006, thirty-eight Muslim leaders and scholars, including some of the most prominent in the world, wrote an “Open Letter to the Pope” responding to what he had said at Regensburg. They established at the outset a respectful tone distinguishing them from the rioters and their clerical counterparts in Gaza, addressing the pope “in the spirit of open exchange” and heading up the letter with a verse from the Qur’an as an epigraph: “
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Do not contend with people of the Book except in the fairest way
. . . . (The Holy Qur’an,
al-Ankabut,
29:46).”
¹⁸⁷

“While we applaud your efforts to oppose the dominance of positivism and materialism in human life,” the scholars told the pope, “we must point out some errors in the way you mentioned Islam as a counterpoint to the proper use of reason, as well as some mistakes in the assertions you put forward in support of your argument.” Among the errors they enumerated was the pope’s claim that the Qur’anic statement “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) came from early in Muhammad’s career and was later superseded by more bellicose material. The scholars note, in accord with mainstream Islamic theology, that this passage actually came from late in Muhammad’s prophetic career, and “was a reminder to Muslims themselves, once they had attained power, that they could not force another’s heart to believe.”

They were right on both counts. The passage did not come from the time when, as the pope had said at Regensburg, “Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.” And Islamic law does forbid forced conversion, although this is a law that throughout Islamic history and today has often been honored in the breach. While quoting several other Qur’anic verses that appear to support the freedom of conscience, however, the scholars did not mention the imperative in Islamic law, founded upon another passage of the Qur’an, to wage war against non-Muslims and subjugate “the People of the Book” under the rule of Islamic law: “Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practice not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book—until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled” (9:29).

Although the Christians who have been fought against and “humbled” under the rule of the Muslims are free, within certain restrictions, to practice their religion, their state of being “humbled” is manifested not just in the payment of “tribute” (
jizya
) but in a complex of humiliating and discriminatory regulations designed to remind them that because of their rejection of Muhammad and the Qur’an, Allah has condemned them to suffer in this world and the next. Islamic law traditionally forbids the
dhimmis
, or protected people (the Islamic legal term for the “People of the Book” subjugated under Muslim rule), from building new churches or repairing old ones, holding authority over Muslims, making a public display of their worship (processions and even crosses on the outside of church buildings are forbidden), and more.

These laws are no longer fully enforced anywhere in the Islamic world, but they remain part of Islamic law, and Islamic supremacists today have, on several occasions, signaled their intention to revive them when they have the power to do so. In December 2011, Jordanian Sheikh Ahmad Abu Quddum explained Islam’s doctrine of jihad on Jordanian television: “This fighting is in order to remove obstacles. It is waged against countries, not against individuals. When we declare Jihad against Germany, for instance, it is declared against the German state, for refusing to allow Islam to spread to the people of Germany. We give them a choice: Either to convert to Islam, or to pay the
jizya
and submit to the laws of Islam.”
¹⁸⁸
That same month, Sheikh Nader Tamimi, the mufti of the Palestinian Authority, declared, “To the rulers of the West, this is the religion of Allah. Either you pay the
jizya
poll tax, or else you will bring the sword to your necks.”
¹⁸⁹
Hamas has stated that it will re-impose the
dhimmi
laws once it gains full control of the Palestinian Authority.
¹⁹⁰
And some Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, poised to take power after the “Arab Spring” uprisings, have indicated their intention to re-impose these laws, which led one Coptic Christian leader to vow that the Copts would resist to the point of martyrdom.

“There is no compulsion in religion,” certainly. Non-Muslims are not forced to become Muslim. But under the stipulations of traditional Islamic law, failure to convert would make their lives so miserable that they do convert simply to be able to live life with some dignity and hope. When Muslim forces conquered Egypt in the seventh century, it was 99 percent Christian; now, 1,400 years later, it is around 10 percent Christian. The Christians of Egypt did not emigrate; they are the ancestors of the Muslims of Egypt. Though most were not forced at sword point, over the centuries most of Egypt’s population converted to Islam to escape the institutionalized discrimination of dhimmitude. And so it was with non-Muslim populations all over the Islamic world.

That the thirty-eight scholars who wrote to the pope do not mention this, but rather give the impression that Islam allows for the freedom of conscience and for non-Muslims to practice their religions freely and unhindered, does not speak well of their sincerity. And unfortunately, this was by no means the only instance of disingenuousness in their letter.

Allah as absolute will?

The scholars disparaged the pope’s reference to Ibn Hazm dismissing him as a marginal figure in Islamic thought, and asserting “to conclude that Muslims believe in a capricious God who might or might not command us to evil is to forget that God says in the Quran, “
Lo! God enjoins justice and kindness, and giving to kinsfolk, and forbids lewdness and abomination and wickedness. He exhorts you in order that ye may take heed
(al-Nahl, 16:90).”

Yet what Ibn Hazm said was not exactly that Allah might command the Muslims to do evil. The pope characterized his views thusly at Regensburg: “Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” This would not be to command evil; it is, rather, a complete nominalism in which the appellations “good” and “evil” are applied arbitrarily and have nothing to do with the nature of the things to which they are applied. In Islam, as we have seen again and again, what is good is not a matter of the intrinsic nature of a thing; what makes something good is Allah’s fiat. The premier example of this is the exaltation of Muhammad as the “excellent example” (Qur’an 33:21) for believers. Although in a few places in the Qur’an Allah upbraids Muhammad for his sin, and Islamic tradition regards only Jesus and Mary as sinless, nevertheless all the sects and schools of Islam hold Muhammad in such high esteem that essentially if he did something, it is good to do, and Muslims must imitate him. This is not so much to say that Muhammad, or Allah, might command something that is against the absolute moral law; it is to say that there is no absolute moral law, save what Allah commands or Muhammad exemplifies.

The same rejection of absolutes occurs in Islamic cosmology. The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides described the Islamic thinkers with whom he was in contact as rejecting absolutes as illegitimately binding upon Allah’s will:

Human intellect does not perceive any reason why a body should be in a certain place instead of being in another. In the same manner [the Muslim philosophers] say that reason admits the possibility that an existing being should be larger or smaller than it really is, or that it should be different in form and position from what it really is; e.g., a man might have the height of a mountain, might have several heads, and fly in the air; or an elephant might be as small as an insect, or an insect as huge as an elephant.

This method of admitting possibilities is applied to the whole Universe. Whenever they affirm that a thing belongs to this class of admitted possibilities, they say that it can have this form and that it is also possible that it be found differently, and that the one form is not more possible than the other; but they do not ask whether the reality confirms their assumption.

[They say] fire causes heat, water causes cold, in accordance with a certain habit; but it is logically not impossible that a deviation from this habit should occur, namely, that fire should cause cold, move downward, and still be fire; that the water should cause heat, move upward, and still be water. On this foundation their whole [intellectual] fabric is constructed.
¹⁹¹

The abandonment of reason