Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (9 page)

This “very root of heresy” does indeed involve “an unworthy conception of God.” The idea that God created automatons that cannot but do as God wills—including reject him and suffer in hell for all eternity—is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian understanding of God. In Islam, not only is Allah not a father, he a slave master, and one so cruel that he creates beings for hell—in other words, he brings them into existence solely so that he may torture them. He does offer these wretched creatures a path to life, but bars them, solely on the basis of his arbitrary whim, from ever finding or embarking upon that path.

This is not the God who “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Indeed, the God of the Qur’an has no son to give, since it would be an offense to his transcendent majesty even to have one.

A God of both light and darkness

As we have seen, the Catholic concept that mankind’s alienation from God is manifested in an inclination toward sin is utterly alien to Islam. In Islam there is no concept of original sin. Although Adam and Eve begin in Paradise and are banished from it after their disobedience, and Satan vows to tempt the believers, ultimately even this is a manifestation of Allah’s active will. In the Qur’an, it is only Allah who inspires in the soul both “lewdness and godfearing” (91:8). The world-renowned Pakistani Muslim political leader and theologian Syed Abul Ala Maududi (1902-1979), who wrote a popular and influential commentary on the Qur’an, explains that this verse means that “the Creator has imbedded in man’s nature tendencies and inclinations towards both good and evil.”
⁷¹

That means that Allah is ultimately responsible not just for the soul’s inclination toward good but for its inclination toward evil as well. In other words, in sharp contrast to the Christian understanding that evil is the rejection of God, in Islam God is the source of evil. This is worlds apart from the proposition that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5)—for to place evil in the soul, Allah must have it to give, which would be utterly impossible in the Christian conception, since evil is the absence of God.

The Islamic concept casts the very goodness of God into doubt, as well as the nature of what is good. The grand and powerful Christian conception of a God who is love, and who endowed his human creatures with freedom so that they could respond to him in love, and who sacrificed himself in order to overcome impediments to their ability to do so, is replaced by the idea of a remote God who for reasons unexplained put both good and evil within man’s heart.

Allah is will

But for a believing Muslim, to suggest anything else would be blasphemous. No limits can be placed upon the sovereignty of Allah, the absolute monarch. That includes ones that would naturally arise from his being always good and true. Allah, the Qur’an says twice, is the best of “schemers”: “And when the unbelievers were devising against thee, to confine thee, or slay thee, or to expel thee, and were devising, and God was devising; and God is the best of devisers” (8:30; cf. 3:54). In this “devising,” Allah has no limitations whatsoever.

Indeed, at one point the Qur’an excoriates the Jews for suggesting limits to God’s power. The passage is ambiguous, but its principal import is plain enough: They dared to say that there was something Allah could not do: “The Jews have said, ‘God’s hand is fettered.’ Fettered are their hands, and they are cursed for what they have said. Nay, but His hands are outspread; He expends how He will” (5:64). Neither does he have any obligation to disclose any consistency or anything else in what he does: “He shall not be questioned as to what He does” (21:23).

What could the Jews have possibly meant, if any Jews ever said it at all? It is possible that they meant that God, being good, would be consistent, and would operate the universe according to consistent and observable laws. This would not have been so much a limitation on what God
could
do, but upon what he
would
do. As St. Thomas Aquinas explained: “Since the principles of certain sciences—of logic, geometry, and arithmetic, for instance—are derived exclusively from the formal principals of things, upon which their essence depends, it follows that God
cannot
make the contraries of these principles; He
cannot
make the genus not to be predicable of the species, nor lines drawn from a circle’s center to its circumference not to be equal, nor the three angles of a rectilinear triangle not to be equal to two right angles” (emphasis added).
⁷²

This proposition of divine consistency was all-important for the development of scientific inquiry. “The rise of science,” observes social scientist Rodney Stark, “was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, that handiwork functions in accord with
immutable principles
. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover those principles.” That process of discovery became the foundation of modern science. “These were the crucial ideas,” says Stark, “that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else.”
⁷³

Indeed, for an Islamic culture to affirm that God’s creation operates according to immutable principles would be nothing short of blasphemy. Allah’s hand is not fettered by consistency or by anything else. Allah is free to do anything he wills to do, without any expectations or limitations deriving from logic, love, or anything else. This idea made sure that scientific exploration in the Islamic world would be stillborn.

According to the physicist priest Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, the great Muslim philosopher al-Ghazali “denounced natural laws, the very objective of science, as a blasphemous constraint upon the free will of Allah.”
⁷⁴
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), although himself a philosopher, delivered what turned out to be the coup de grace to Islamic philosophical investigation, at least as a vibrant mainstream force, in his monumental attack on the very idea of Islamic philosophy,
Incoherence of the Philosophers
.

Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes, according to al-Ghazali, were not intellectual trailblazers worthy of respect and careful consideration. In positing that there could be truth that was outside of or even contradicted what Allah had revealed in the Qur’an, they had shown themselves to be nothing more than heretics who should be put to death and their books burned. Al-Ghazali accused them of “denial of revealed laws and religious confessions” and “rejection of the details of religious and sectarian [teaching], believing them to be man-made laws and embellished tricks.”
⁷⁵
He declared that the doctrines of Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi and Avicenna “challenge the [very] principles of religion.”
⁷⁶

Al-Ghazali, said scholar Tilman Nagel, “was inspired by a notion that we frequently see in Islam’s intellectual history: the notion that everything human beings can possibly know is already contained in the Koran and the
hadith
[the voluminous traditions of Muhammad’s words and deeds]; only naïve people can be made to believe that there is knowledge beyond them.”
⁷⁷

At the end of
The Incoherence of the Philosophers,
Al-Ghazali reveals how high the stakes are: “If someone says: ‘You have explained the doctrines of these [philosophers]; do you then say conclusively that they are infidels and
that the killing of those who uphold their beliefs is obligatory?
”
⁷⁸
He then concludes that they should indeed be pronounced infidels, and therefore, presumably, be executed.

Although Islamic philosophy lived on, it was never the same; it had effectively been put to death. After al-Ghazali and the defeat of the relatively rationalistic Mu‘tazilite party, there was no large-scale attempt to apply the laws of reason or consistency to Allah, or, therefore, to the world he had created. Fr. Jaki explains: “Muslim mystics decried the notion of scientific law (as formulated by Aristotle) as blasphemous and irrational, depriving as it does the Creator of his freedom.”
⁷⁹
The social scientist Rodney Stark notes the existence of “a major theological bloc within Islam that condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act.”
⁸⁰

By contrast, Fr. Jaki explains, in the Old Testament, “the faithfulness of the God of history is supported not only with a reference to another saving intervention of God into human affairs, but very often also by a pointed and detailed reference to the faithfulness of the regular working and permanence of a nature created by God.”
⁸¹
In contrast, the Qur’an affirms Allah’s changeability, even in what he reveals to mankind: “And for whatever verse We abrogate or cast into oblivion, We bring a better or the like of it; knowest thou not that God is powerful over everything?” (2:106).

The God whose message the Catholic Church preaches to the world has power over everything, but he does not exercise it with anything like this despotic inconsistency. In his absolute and unfettered sovereignty, Allah has doomed the Islamic world to over a millennium of intellectual stagnation and anti-intellectualism: A recurring idea in the Islamic world is that the Qur’an and Sunnah contain all that is needed for the proper functioning of human society, and everything else is either superfluous or heretical.

At this point we are worlds away from the God who blessed creation and human endeavor even to the point of becoming incarnate to save his creatures, and who in his goodness is consistent, such that observation of his creation and all intellectual endeavors are praiseworthy and worthy of the divine blessing. The Catholic notion of God, derived from biblical revelation, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and a venerable philosophical tradition, offers a notion of God that is almost diametrically opposed to the lone, capricious Allah of Islam. The God of Islam is not love. The God of Islam is
will:
absolute, untrammeled, unlimited will.

And so we do indeed worship the same God, as the Second Vatican Council tells us, but the operative aspects of that affirmation are, as we have seen in this chapter, extremely limited. Catholics and Muslims both consider themselves to be within the Abrahamic tradition, although they understand it in different ways, and believe in one God who created the heavens and the earth
ex nihilo
, although they understand him in vastly different ways as well. Catholics would be wise to avoid false irenicism, or worse, the indifferentism that arises from misreading what the Council is trying to say. Catholics have a responsibility to preach the gospel to Muslims just as much as to everyone else.

4

The Same Jesus?

“I feel a divine jealousy for you,” St. Paul tells the Corinthians, “for I betrothed you to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one husband. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough. (2 Cor. 11:2-4)

More in common than we think?

Interestingly, while Muslims and Arabic-speaking Christians call God by the same name, they differ on the name of Jesus: Muslims call him
Isa
, whereas to Arabic-speaking Christians he is
Yasua
. The latter is similar to the Hebrew
Yeshua
or Joshua, while the Muslim usage more closely resembles the name Esau. Clearly, there are also differences in how Christians and Muslims view Jesus—or else Muslims would be Christians. But since Muslims use the presence of Jesus in Islam as a basis for outreach to Christians, the identity and role of Jesus in Islam bears close examination.

Several years ago, Ibrahim Hooper, an American convert to Islam and spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the highest-profile Muslim organization in the United States, wrote an essay entitled, “Muslim and Christians: More in common than you think,” which has been and continues to be reprinted in all sorts of publications, usually around Christmastime.

Hooper begins with an evocative quotation: “Behold! The angels said: ‘O Mary! God giveth thee glad tidings of a Word from Him. His name will be Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, held in honor in this world and the Hereafter and in (the company of) those nearest to God.’”

Then he comes right to the point: “Before searching for this quote in the New Testament, you might first ask your Muslim co-worker, friend or neighbor for a copy of the Quran, Islam’s revealed text. The quote is from verse 45 of chapter 3 in the Quran.” Hooper then explains: “It is well known, particularly in this holiday season, that Christians follow the teachings of Jesus. What is less well understood is that Muslims also love and revere Jesus as one of God’s greatest messengers to mankind.”