Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (27 page)

Professor Kreeft: I think it is very probable indeed that it is a demonic deception, and I think it is very probable that the Qur’an is a mixture of three things. It claims to be a divine revelation; it could conceivably come from three and only three sources: the human, the demonic, or the divine. In the Catholic tradition, private revelations are not infallible; the devil loves to mess up private revelations to confuse even the saints to get whatever falsehood he can in with truths. It seems to me in the Qur’an you have a mixture of divine revelation at least influenced by, if not totally derived from, Judaism and Christianity, but maybe, maybe God sent an angel to Muhammad to get some messages through, and maybe a few of them got through, I don’t know.

Mr. Spencer: So are you saying that Islam is on par with private revelation like Fatima?

Professor Kreeft: No, no, I’m saying that there may be some supernatural good as well as supernatural evil in the experience that Muhammad claims to have had in that cave mixed with Muhammad’s own very human proclivities to a mixture of good and evil. Which would explain the mixture.

Mr. Spencer: Well, I don’t know. I go back to the cave, and the very earliest
hadith
, the very earliest traditions about Muhammad, are all about what happened to him in that cave. It’s very fascinating, because if you were a Muslim going to Muslim school to learn about Islam, then you would learn that Muhammad was praying in a cave, and the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him to recite, and he recited. That’s what ‘Qur’an’ means, recitation. And over the next twenty-three years he was given recitations to recite that were the words of God, the word of God, the perfect and eternal word of God that had existed forever with God in Paradise and was then being transmitted to Earth through Gabriel to Muhammad. Now, that’s a very nice story, that’s sort of the Sunday-school version, or, we could say, the Friday-school version.

But in the actual
hadith
about the incident, the angel is not named as an angel or as Gabriel. He is some sort of spiritual being who then presses Muhammad very hard on his chest so that he thought he was going to die and tells him to recite. And he says, “I can’t, I can’t read!” because he was thinking he would have to go get a printed text or written text and then recite it. And he presses him even harder and all the breath is going out of him! He’s like a cosmic thug pressing on Muhammad, forcing him and saying, “Recite!” And finally Muhammad says “OK, OK!” and he goes home, and he’s shaking with fear, and he says to his wife, “Cover me with a blanket,” because he’s shivering, and he says, “Woe is me, either poet or possessed.” By poet he didn’t mean Rod McKuen, he meant like someone who is receiving ecstatic demonic visions. And so, is that really the kind of story we would expect if it was Gabriel, the one who appeared to the Blessed Mother in the Gospel of Luke and tells her she’s going to be the Mother of Jesus? It’s a very different kind of story; it’s a very different character of story. And I think that, in itself, is very telling and revealing.

Professor Kreeft: It sounds suspiciously like some of the disturbing stories in some of the early parts of the Old Testament.

Mr. Spencer: I don’t know that there’s any comparable story in the Old Testament. I appreciate the—

Professor Kreeft: Jacob wrestling with the angel?

Mr. Spencer: But what does the angel do to Jacob that would terrify him to thinking he’s demon possessed?

Professor Kreeft: He breaks his hipbone.

Mr. Spencer: Jacob doesn’t go home and say, “I think I’ve just been demon possessed!,” does he?

Professor Zmirak: Dr. Kreeft, couldn’t we learn what we need to learn from Muslims by reading their books—but nevertheless energetically fighting their attempts to assert themselves in American society, restricting their entrance into our countries and just generally fighting political Islam and protecting our own religious freedom and our own political freedom by aggressively imposing our own values on our own societies? In other words, not permitting them polygamy, not permitting them honor killing or wife beating or any of the other aspects of
sharia
that they claim to be asserting and in some cases are trying to assert in the legal system as in Great Britain; couldn’t we get all this from your book? Your book tells us what we need to gain from Islam and so, “OK, fine, they can go home now.”

(Laughter)

Professor Kreeft: The long and complete and nuanced version of my answer to your question is yes.

(Laughter)

Professor Zmirak: We might actually agree more than I realized.

Mr. Spencer: Yes.

(Laughter)

Professor Kreeft: On the other hand, on the other hand, I would not necessarily condemn the idea of a foundation which arose and came up with this flaky proposal. The Clash of Civilizations, Islam vs. the West, could be at least mitigated if not overcome if we simply spent some millions of dollars buying a fleet of planes and using them for a kind of double-transportation system. Let’s take all our pop psychologists and put them in Muslim countries, and let’s tell them to send us some fiery mullahs to give us some spine.

(Laughter)

Professor Zmirak: I like that idea better than the one [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu once expressed in the Knesset, that they should translate
Sex and the City
into Persian and drop the DVDs all across Iran.

(Laughter)

Mr. Spencer: What the mullahs would do if they were imported here—I mean, we’re already seeing what’s happening, so I don’t think that that really would necessarily be a good idea. But it’s interesting to note also in terms of secularism and Islam that a lot of people have the idea that—and this is absolutely germane to the point of tonight’s discussion that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim—it might not even be so that a bad Muslim is a good Muslim. Because secularism has often been posited as an antidote to all this as in, “Well, they’re so pious, and their piety leads them into dangerous and violent directions, so therefore we have to make them less pious, so we’ll airlift
Sex and the City
into Iran or whatever.” But actually, you know, American culture is already there. And there is plenty of
Sex and the City
all over the Islamic world, make no mistake. Charles Glass was an American journalist who wrote a very fascinating book called
Tribes with Flags
in the ’80s; the book
Tribes with Flags
is an account of his crazy decision to walk from Antioch in southern Turkey to Cairo, down Lebanon into Israel all the way down. And of course in Lebanon he was kidnapped by Hezbollah and held as a hostage. And while he was there, he found that his captors were listening to Michael Jackson records and Madonna. They would come up to him and they would say, “Do you think American girls would find me attractive?”

(Laughter)

Mr. Spencer: And meanwhile they’re holding the Kalashnikovs on him! And they would go and pray and “
Allahu Akbar
,” and they were going to slit his throat. It’s a very straight journalistic account of what happened, but then at the end it gets very interesting because [Glass] starts having visions of the Virgin Mary who tells him how to escape from his captivity, and he does follow her directions and escapes.

Professor Kreeft: I have been told by numerous missionaries, most of them Protestants, that something is happening in the Islamic world in the last few decades that has never happened before: Conversions to Christianity are happening and almost every single one of them has to do with a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Mr. Spencer: Yes. Yes. There are visions of Mary that have appeared and been seen by really many thousands of people; it’s a phenomenon.

Professor Kreeft: Zeitoun! More people saw that miracle than saw any other miracle in the entire history of the world.

Mr. Spencer: Yes.

Professor Kreeft: Two million.

Mr. Spencer: In Cairo, standing on top of a church.

Professor Kreeft: Muslims and Christians together saw the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Mr. Spencer: So, yes, something is happening.

Professor Kreeft: And she, unlike you, was making peace signs.

(Laughter)

Mr. Spencer: Oh, I’m all for peace! But I think that peace without a realistic appraisal of the situation is just naïve, and could be suicidally naïve.

Professor Kreeft: I agree, I totally agree.

(Applause)

Professor Kreeft: The only thing you’ve said tonight, other than your conclusions that I disagree with, I think it was just a slip of the tongue, was you spoke of absolute good and absolute evil. Now, God is certainly absolutely good, but even the devil is not absolutely evil, because God created him. So how could Islam be worse than the devil?

Mr. Spencer: I don’t want to speak about the devil, he doesn’t interest me. But chapter ninety-one, verse seven of the Qur’an says that God “places evil within the heart of man,” which is markedly different from the Christian idea that evil is the absence of God’s presence in the soul, and evil is a rejection of God, not something that God actively encourages.

Professor Kreeft: But the Bible also says, “I create good and evil,” evil there being death and suffering, not moral evil.

Mr. Spencer: That’s a different kind.

Professor Kreeft: Maybe the Qur’an means that.

Mr. Spencer: Well we could trade verses all night —

Professor Zmirak: Wait, are you referring to the question of free will in Islam?

Mr. Spencer: Yeah, that’s just where I was going to go. In chapter thirty-two, verse thirteen of the Qur’an, Allah says “We” (he always speaks in the royal “we” even though he’s an absolute unity). He says, “If We had willed, We could have guided all men to the truth. But instead We will fill Hell with djinns (genies) and men.” So this is the god of Islam speaking, saying, “I could have brought everyone to a knowledge of the truth, but I just want to fill up Hell.”

Professor Kreeft: But, like Augustine, most Muslims also claim to believe in free will as well as infallible predestination.

Mr. Spencer: I don’t know where you’re finding them, because actually the Qur’an decisively rejects the idea of free will. It says repeatedly that Allah “leads astray those who he wills,” does not “allow to go astray” but he “leads astray those whom he wills and guides those whom he wills.” And this verse I just quoted to you is also echoed in chapter seven, verse one-seventy-nine, which also says, “I will fill Hell with men.” He could have decided to do otherwise, but he has decided to condemn people to a very luridly, lovingly, lavishly described vision of Hell in the Qur’an, and he’s sending them there because he wants to.

Professor Zmirak: Perhaps, Dr. Kreeft, I can ask you this, as a former Calvinist. In the Regensburg Address, Pope Benedict was talking about commonalities between Islam and Calvinism in their rejection of the idea that we can reason about God, because analogy does not apply to God. If we cannot reason about God, there can be no theology. Pope Benedict was talking about this as the beginning of the secularization of the Western mind. It seems to me that when the Muslims rejected the Mu‘tazilite option, when they rejected philosophy, they rejected Avicenna, they rejected Averroes, at the same time Thomas Aquinas was taking these thinkers and trying to reconcile faith and reason. The Muslims saw an irreparable divide, an insuperable divide, and they chose faith as opposed to reason. Pope Benedict seemed to be saying that with Calvinism and with the Reformation, the long process began of the West rejecting faith and only accepting reason. So is there some sense in which Islam and the secular West are kind of mirror images of each other? Two broken pieces of a puzzle?

Professor Kreeft: Yes! That’s very profound.

Professor Zmirak: Thank you.

(Laughter)

Professor Kreeft: Well, he didn’t make it up, the pope made it up.

Professor Zmirak: I’m proud of myself for remembering it.

(Laughter)

Professor Kreeft: Robert Reilly’s recent book,
The Closing of the Muslim Mind
, is very enlightening on that. It is a desperate philosophical mistake. It’s nominalism.

Mr. Spencer: Yes.

Professor Zmirak: All right, are there questions from the audience?

Questioner No. 1: I’m seeing a parallel with the Sufis and their piety—which you were lauding them for—and the Pharisees and their piety, which was really dirty rags because the inside was corrupt. So that’s what I put to you is the Sufis’ piety.

Professor Kreeft: Even the Gospel writers didn’t say that the only good Pharisee is a bad Pharisee. In fact, there were good Pharisees: Nicodemus was one of them, Joseph of Arimathea was one of them, Gamaliel was one of them, and he was St. Paul’s teacher. Here you have very good Pharisees, although many of the Pharisees were wicked people.

Questioner No. 2: This is one for Mr. Spencer. Since politics is a practical art that brings together strange bedfellows, factions, and coalitions of people and persons that normally would be opposed to each other, from a purely practical standpoint, couldn’t we say that the Christian West and Islam, individuals or political groups or nations, we can make a deal with the devil so to speak and cooperate with them in the United Nations on the global front to fight the kind of evils that Dr. Kreeft was talking about?