Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (23 page)

For one thing, there is no single unifying authority, no pope of Islam, who can oversee and guide an Islamic “reformation.” Further stymying the possibility of reform is the belief that the Qur’an was dictated by Allah word for word, miraculously protected from scribal error, and contains no human element whatsoever. Then there is the high value placed upon juridical consensus in Islam; a matter upon which the various schools of Islamic jurisprudence have agreed is considered no longer open to question, since Muhammad promised that his community would not agree on an error. Since jihad warfare against unbelievers and their subjugation is rooted in the Qur’anic text and sealed by juridical consensus, it is unlikely in the extreme that it will ever be revisited on a large scale in the Islamic world.

***

Secularism is encroaching upon the West, making it ever more difficult to hold fast to the fullness of the Faith in a culture that is daily growing more hostile to it. In such a world it is always good to have allies. Pope Benedict XVI enunciated a noble aspiration in September 2012 when he said to young Muslims and Christians in Beirut: “It is vital that the Middle East in general, looking at you, should understand that Muslims and Christians, Islam and Christianity, can live side by side without hatred, with respect for the beliefs of each person, so as to build together a free and humane society.”
²¹²
It is indeed up to Muslims worldwide, particularly in Pakistan and Egypt, where Muslims are persecuting Christians with increasing ferocity, to demonstrate that that harmony is possible.

Yet a true ally is not one who is likely to turn and join one’s enemies in the struggle, or to initiate new hostilities within the alliance once the battle is won. The doctrines of Islam that inculcate among all too many Muslims hatred and suspicion of Christianity and Christians have never been reformed or rejected by any Islamic sect. Catholics who believe that their Muslim dialogue partners desire to establish a lasting friendship, or who trust Muslims to be faithful brothers-in-arms in the culture war, should proceed with full awareness of the contents of Islamic doctrine, and with an awareness of the many pitfalls involved.

Ultimately, the requirements of charity do not include the denial of the truth. We may want to believe that Islam is a spiritual cousin and a moral partner, and that idea may be greatly comforting; but its comforts will one day evanesce before the sword that the complacently self-deceived had thought they had staved off forever.

Epilogue

Is the Only Good Muslim a Bad Muslim? The Kreeft/Spencer Debate

On November 4, 2010, Robert Spencer and Peter Kreeft debated the proposition
“
The Only Good Muslim Is a Bad Muslim
”
at The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, in Merrimack, New Hampshire. Moderating was John Zmirak, a professor at the college. This transcript is presented with Dr. Kreeft
’
s consent.

Professor Zmirak: I’m very proud to have with me the most distinguished writers in their fields alive, the most distinguished Catholic philosophical writer in English, Dr. Peter Kreeft, and the leading expert on jihad and political Islam, Mr. Robert Spencer. Dr. Kreeft has written a book called
Between Allah and Jesus
exploring the interface and the interactions and the commonalities and divergences between Christianity and Islam. Dr. Kreeft is also a professor of philosophy at Boston College and has written more than forty-five books; I’ve read a large percentage of them and enjoyed them immensely. I’m very honored and proud he was able to make it. Mr. Spencer is author of ten books and he’s also the editor of JihadWatch.com.

Our topic is “Resolved: that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.” Mr. Spencer will be speaking first, in the affirmative, for twenty minutes, then Dr. Kreeft responds for twenty minutes, then there will be twenty minutes of them asking each other questions. Then I’ll pose a few questions. There will be opportunities for questions from the audience. So Mr. Spencer, if you would like to lead off . . .

Mr. Spencer: Thank you very much. Thank you all for coming and thank you to everyone at Thomas More College for hosting this. I think this is a discussion that needs to be had in the public square and is all too often ignored and not held where it should be, and so I hope that this will perhaps bring some needed attention to these questions. It’s a great honor for me to be appearing with Dr. Kreeft, who was my professor many hundreds of years ago.

Dr. Kreeft’s book
Between Allah and Jesus
is one that I read with great interest, and I certainly see what is the motive behind what he’s trying to do in it, insofar as I understand it correctly and why he would want to portray Islam in this manner. Now the question before us is somewhat uncomfortable; it even seems kind of insulting to say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim—especially in a context where we have a Catholic college hosting a debate and it’s as if one of the debate participants, namely myself, is saying that religious people of a certain kind should be discouraged from holding to their religion. It seems like something that other religious people should not be in the position of saying, and certainly it seems like something that most religious people would reject out of hand on the face of it and say, “Obviously this is not true, because we all know that the people who are committing violence in the name of Islam are twisting and hijacking the religion. If they only go back to the tenants of the Qur’an and of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, then this problem and attendant problems of terrorism and Islamic supremacism would evanesce.”

And I think it’s in that spirit that Dr. Kreeft wrote his book. It is something devoutly to be wished that people of good will of all faiths could find some common accord and work on that common accord for their shared values. We have even seen that happen between the Catholic Church and Islamic countries at the United Nations against various anti-life initiatives. And so this is something many people have great hope for. The great danger in holding such a hope is that many people fall into and project upon other religious people values which we ourselves may hold, and that therefore we assume that people of other religious traditions must also hold—when actually that’s not the case. And unfortunately I must say, with regret, that I did find a great deal of that kind of thing in this particular book. The idea, for example, is posited several times in the book by the Muslim character, who I think it’s fair to say is the hero of the story. Many times he says that jihad is an interior spiritual struggle. Now that is something that does exist in Islamic tradition. But tonight we are asking: Should Muslim piety be encouraged?

Should Muslim people be encouraged to be more rigorous and more devout and more fervent in their religious observance? So we have to go back to the wellsprings, to the teachings of Islam in the Qur’an and Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, who is held up in the Qur’an—as in chapter 33, verse 21, which calls him
uswa hasana
, or the Excellent Example of conduct. In Islamic tradition he is even exalted in many places as
al-insan al-kamil
, the Perfect Man. And in practice, in Islamic tradition, even though Muhammad is rebuked several times in the Qur’an (notably in chapter 80) for his sinfulness, in practice, in Islamic tradition, Muhammad is essentially the touchstone of all behavior, and if he did it, then it’s good and right and ought to be imitated. Now, that’s important for the present question, because when we have the Muslim character saying, “Jihad is an interior spiritual struggle,” he is in fact putting himself in the position of contradicting the words and example of Muhammad and the words of the Qur’an itself. There’s an entire chapter of the Qur’an, chapter eight, called
al-Anfal
: the spoils of war. There are no spoils of war in an interior spiritual struggle. There is no booty to be captured, there are no slave girls to be distributed among the warriors, and yet that chapter of the Qur’an and others contain instruction for doing just that kind of thing. And a fifth of the spoils are reserved for the Prophet himself; he took part in these wars, he actually fought seventy-eight battles during his career as the Prophet, and seventy-seven were offensive in nature. The Qur’an does not teach that jihad is an interior spiritual struggle.

The Qur’an almost unanimously when it speaks of jihad—and when it uses the Arabic word
jihad
in its various forms—means “struggle.” Of course in Arabic the word
struggle
has just as many connotations as
struggle
does in English: You can struggle to quit smoking, you can struggle to lose weight, you can struggle against Communism or have states struggling against one another. So it is also in Islam. But the primary meaning of the word
jihad
in the Qur’an is unmistakably
warfare
. The Muslim hero of Dr. Kreeft’s book further says that Muhammad never fought against Christians and Jews unless he did so in a defensive manner. That, unfortunately, is factually false. As a matter of fact, in the last battle of his career, right before he died, Muhammad went to Tabuk, which was a Byzantine imperial outpost, to fight a Christian garrison there. He didn’t actually find them there. They had left.

In chapter nine of the Qur’an are numerous teachings—which of course are portrayed as divine revelation which cannot be questioned and have to be obeyed by any pious and observant Muslim. These are instructions to wage offensive warfare against Jews and Christians—particularly in chapter nine, verse twenty-nine, which tells Muslims to fight against those who do not obey Allah and his messenger and do not forbid that which he has forbidden (in other words, don’t follow the strictures of Islamic law), even if they are the People of the Book, which is the Qur’anic designation for primarily Jews and Christians, until they pay the
jizya
(which is a tax) with
willing submission
and
feel themselves subdued
.

That verse became the foundation of an elaborate superstructure of laws that are still part of Islamic jurisprudence and of Islamic political law that Islamists, that jihad terrorists, that any Islamic supremacist wants to impose over the world today. These laws mandate that non-Muslims, the People of the Book, must pay a special tax from which Muslims are exempt. As a matter of fact, you can pretty much correlate in Islamic history the strength and aggression and rise of the great Islamic empires of the past with the size of the Jewish and Christian communities that were subjugated within those empires and were paying for that imperial expansion. When those communities were exhausted economically, then the Islamic empires went into decline. This is an absolute correlation that recurs again and again and again. The Christians and Jews in Muslim lands were subjugated in accord with that section of the verse, that last part where they must ‘pay the
jizya
with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.’ They never enjoyed equality of rights with Muslims. They were denied the right to build new houses of worship or to repair old ones; they were denied the right to hold authority over Muslims so that Jews and Christians were relegated to the most menial and degrading jobs in the society. They were subject to various other humiliating and discriminatory regulations.

Now this is, as I cannot emphasize enough,
still part of Islamic law.
This is not one sect or one school or one group that’s heretical that has made this part of their teaching. This is universal among all sects and schools of jurisprudence that are recognized as mainstream and orthodox by fellow Muslims. They all teach—you cannot find one that does not teach—the necessity to wage wars against unbelievers and to subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law. In fact, Hamas, in Gaza, has announced its intention, once it’s fully consolidated its power, to impose this system of dhimmitude and subjugate the Christians that remain there under institutionalized forms of discrimination. Gangs in Baghdad, without government authority to be sure, terrorized the Christian community—which I’m sure you know is terrorized on a more or less daily basis. There was just another massacre in a church in Baghdad the other day—they were knocking on doors in Baghdad last year and demanding payment of the
jizya
, this tax that amounts to protection money. You pay it and you don’t get killed. But you don’t pay it, or you transgress some of the other laws that are set out for these subjugated peoples, and then your life is forfeit.

These things are still part of the agenda for Islamic jihadists today. The Islamic jihadists routinely portray themselves in the Muslim community worldwide and among peaceful Muslims, as being the most pious, most observant—in other words, the best Muslims available. They are, in other words, the Muslims who present themselves as being the true, the pure Muslims. As a matter of fact, the worldwide Salafi movement is dedicated to restoring the purity of Islam as they see it. Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 after Kemal Ataturk abolished the caliphate in 1924, which was the symbol of the supranational unity of the Muslims that transcended all national boundaries. Ataturk abolished the caliphate in 1924. Hasan al-Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt as a direct reaction, because he believed that without the political aspects of Islam—that have never been considered separable from the religious individual aspects of spiritual observance in any Islamic tradition—without the political aspect of Islam that had been damaged by the abolition of the caliphate, Islam was not being fully observed in the world.