Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (6 page)

Thus, the contemporary Canadian Muslim writer Abdul Rashid, a veteran of Christian-Muslim dialogue in Ottawa, explains that “the Holy Koran tells us that God created the human being on ‘
fitra
’ (7:172; 20:30)”—that is, with knowledge of the Supreme Being and of the difference between right and wrong. “Thus,” Rashid continues, “Islam rejects the notion that people are inherently sinful. Each child is born innocent and free of sin.” Allah “revealed, through His chosen prophets, the right path but left it to human beings to follow it or to reject it.”
⁵³
And his ability to follow it is unhindered by any innate inclination toward sin, although Satan the tempter is always close at hand.

Slave of Allah

Because man is not made in Allah’s image, he is in essence merely Allah’s slave, and because he has, even as the result of his transgression, no knowledge of good and evil, he must obey Allah’s commands purely as a matter of fiat—without reasoning from them or about them. Consequently, Islam never developed any kind of natural theology, and indeed never could have. And because there is no idea of original sin, there is, furthermore, no understanding that any community of human beings will of necessity be imperfect and incomplete. In other words, alien to Islam is the idea that it is impossible to establish the kingdom of God on earth.

“Of those We created,” says Allah in the Qur’an, “are a nation who guide by the truth, and by it act with justice” (7:181). These are the Muslims, whom Allah addresses directly in a related passage: “You are the best nation ever brought forth to men, bidding to honor, and forbidding dishonor, and believing in God” (3:110). The Muslim community, because it is the “best nation” and guides by the truth, calling people to honor and forbidding dishonor, is able to establish a perfectly just society on this earth.

Yet even in this vision of a just society, we are already worlds away from the Christian understanding of the human person’s having an innate dignity stemming from being made in the image of God and endowed with free will, albeit marred by original sin: a being, in the lapidary phrase of the Byzantine funeral service, “full of grandeur and weakness.” For the Muslims are the best of people who “guide by the truth,” even if they fall short now and again.

These examples from Christian and Muslim holy texts reveal only a few of the significant differences between the Muslim and Catholic understandings of how God deals with his creatures. Ultimately, these differences indicate significantly different conceptions of God himself.

What about Abraham?

Yet we are all still children of Abraham, aren’t we? Jews, Christians, and Muslims all know and cherish the accounts of Abraham, who through his devotion to the true God became “the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen. 17:4-5)—don’t we?

Certainly some people at the highest levels of the U.S. government think so. In November 2011, President Barack Obama sent greetings to Muslims worldwide on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim feast day commemorating Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son (who in Islamic tradition was Ishmael, not Isaac) as a sign of his willingness to obey God. “As Muslims celebrate this Eid,” Obama wrote, “they will also commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son by distributing food to those less fortunate around the world. . . . The Eid and Hajj rituals are a reminder of the shared roots of the world’s Abrahamic faiths and the powerful role that faith plays in motivating communities to serve and stand with those in need.”
⁵⁴

Obama wasn’t blazing any new trails. In December 2006, his predecessor, George W. Bush, said this in his greetings to Muslims on Eid al-Adha: “For Muslims in America and around the world, Eid al-Adha is an important occasion to give thanks for their blessings and to remember Abraham’s trust in a loving God. During the four days of this special observance, Muslims honor Abraham’s example of sacrifice and devotion to God by celebrating with friends and family, exchanging gifts and greetings, and engaging in worship through sacrifice and charity.”
⁵⁵

When President Bush spoke of “Abraham’s example of sacrifice and devotion to God,” he probably had the Genesis accounts of Abraham in mind. In Genesis, the story of Abraham is one of fidelity to God and how it is rewarded. The Lord tells Abraham that his faith in God will redound to the benefit of all mankind: “By your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice” (Gen. 22:18).

And when President Obama spoke of “the shared roots of the world’s Abrahamic faiths,” he was apparently assuming that Islamic accounts of Abraham shared the same expansive and generous vision: one of God blessing all the nations of the earth because of, or even by means of, Abraham’s immense faith.

However, Muslims do not accept Genesis as inspired Scripture. They believe that the Old and New Testaments contain the remains of what once were legitimate revelations from God, but which Jews and Christians have dared to tamper with to the extent that they cannot be trusted. What Muslims believe about Abraham comes primarily from the Qur’an, which does not present Abraham either as “the father of a multitude of nations” or as one through whom “all the nations of the earth” shall “bless themselves.”

Although it lacks those elements, the Qur’an does hold up Abraham as a “good example” for the Muslims—
uswa hasana
, the same appellation given to Muhammad elsewhere (33:21). In Islamic theology, Muhammad’s example is, with very few exceptions, the believer’s supreme guide. When the Qur’an says that Abraham also is a “good example,” however, it is in reference to a specific instance: when Abraham says to his pagan relatives, “We are quit of you and that you serve, apart from God. We disbelieve in you, and between us and you enmity has shown itself, and hatred for ever, until you believe in God alone” (60:4).

Abraham is held up to the Muslims as a model of emulation, then, only when he declares his everlasting enmity and hatred for those who do not follow what Muslims believe to be the true religion.

In that same verse, the Qur’an then adds a critical caveat: “Except that Abraham said unto his father, ‘Certainly I shall ask pardon for thee; but I have no power to do aught for thee against God.’” In other words, Abraham is a good example for believers
except
when he says that he will pray that Allah will pardon his pagan father. The
Tafsir al-Jalalayn
, a venerable and respected Qur’an commentary written by two mainstream and revered Muslim scholars, emphasizes that this is “an exception where the excellent example is concerned, meaning that you should not imitate him in that by asking forgiveness for unbelievers.”
⁵⁶

Abraham’s hatred is exemplary; his prayer for forgiveness is not.

“Shared roots of the world’s Abrahamic faiths,” indeed. Although it is clear that Islam emerges from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, it so radically recasts that tradition as to render the value of any common-ground appeals dubious at best.

3

The Same God?

In the Qur’an, Allah tells Muhammad not to argue with the “People of the Book”—that is, the Jews, Christians, and a few other groups who are considered to have received a genuine revelation from Allah, even though they later distorted that revelation: “Dispute not with the People of the Book save in the fairer manner, except for those of them that do wrong; and say, ‘We believe in what has been sent down to us, and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is One, and to Him we have surrendered’” (29:46).

Many Christians, including many Catholics, accept this assertion at face value, and not without reason. As we have seen, there are so many similarities between the Bible and the Qur’an—their main characters, their preoccupations, their perspectives on numerous issues—that it is easy at first glance to regard Muslims as close allies in theism against a common foe of unbelievers.

Supporting this is the linguistic identity between the two religions’ names for God. Arabic-speaking Christians, including Eastern Catholics such as Maronites and Melkites, use the word “Allah” for the God of the Bible. Flowing from this is the common use among both Christians and Muslims of many Arabic interjections that feature the word “Allah”:
Inshallah
(“God willing”),
Smallah
(“in the name of God”),
Wallah
(“by God”),
Allah ma
’
ak
(“God be with you”), and others.

Interestingly, Coptic Christians never use these expressions. Possibly due to centuries of Muslim harassment and persecution in Egypt, they replace the word
Allah
with
Rabb
(“Lord”). However, among Arabic-speaking Christians the Copts are an exception in this. Most use the same expressions that Muslims use, although not in reference to the God of the Qur’an but to the God of the Bible.

In any case, Catholics accept that Muslims and Catholics worship the same God above all because the Second Vatican Council says so.

The mind of the Church

Any examination of Islam and its relationship to Catholicism should, of course, be guided by the mind of the Church. And so we turn to the Second Vatican Council’s two statements on the Church’s relationship with Muslims.

The more important of these is the briefer one, both because it is found in a dogmatic constitution while the other is in a declaration, and because in its two sentences it contains more statements of fact.
Lumen Gentium,
the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, tells us that the “plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind” (16).

Here it is almost more important to clarify what this text does
not
say than what it does. For the first statement, that “the plan of salvation also includes” Muslims, has led some—mostly critics of the Church—to assert that the Council Fathers are saying that Muslims are saved and thus need not be preached the gospel, as they’ve already got just as much of a claim on heaven as do Christians.

This is obviously false. This statement on Muslims comes as part of a larger passage that begins by speaking of “those who have not yet received the gospel” and concludes by reaffirming “the command of the Lord, ‘Preach the gospel to every creature.’” It speaks of the possibility of salvation for those who “through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.”

Clearly, then, Muslims figure in the “plan of salvation” not in the sense that they are saved as Muslims, that is, by means of Islamic observance, but insofar as they strive to be attentive to and to obey the authentic voice of the creator whom they acknowledge and who speaks to them through the dictates of their conscience. The conciliar statement also wisely adds the qualification that Muslims
profess
to hold the faith of Abraham. The Church does not definitively affirm that Muslims do actually hold that faith, but only notes that they believe they do.

In affirming Allah’s oneness, his omniscience and omnipotence, his mercy and judgment, Islam’s concept of God coincides with Christianity’s to an important degree. Thus, Peter Kreeft writes disapprovingly that “many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, do not believe what the Church says about Islam . . . : that Allah is not another God, that we worship the same God.”
⁵⁷
Indeed, as far back as 1076 we find Pope St. Gregory VII writing to Anzir, the king of Mauritania, that “we believe and confess one God, although in different ways.”
⁵⁸

But although the Church affirms that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, obviously this does
not
mean that we believe in the same God in every particular. For the teachings of Islam describe a God who, although one and powerful and a judge, is in other important respects substantially different from the God of the Bible and the Catholic faith. Catholics do not believe that Muhammad was a prophet or that the Qur’an is God’s word, and Muslims do not believe that Jesus is the son of God or the Savior of the world, or that God is triune, and so on. In declaring that both Muslims and Catholics together adore the one and merciful God, the council could not have meant that Muslims and Catholics regard God in exactly the same way, or that the differences are insignificant.

It would do no outrage to
Lumen Gentium,
then, to examine these differences carefully, and from them to speculate on the prospects for Catholic/Muslim cooperation.

The second Vatican II reference to Islam must be understood in light of that of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church; it comes in the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions,
Nostra Aetate
:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.