Since the September 11 attacks by Muslim extremists in New York and Washington, D.C., most American Muslims have dissociated themselves from these attacks. And most American leaders, from President Bush on down, have similarly distinguished between Islam and terrorism, saying America's quarrel is not with Islam but with terrorists. Still, September 11 has prompted television and periodicals to run programs and articles on Islam and its relationship to Christianity and Western society. Having read and taught about Islam for many years at Goshen College, I would like to join the conversation.
Islam appeared 600 years after the time of Jesus. Arabs in the area of Mecca and Medina, were becoming aware of both Judaism and Christianity. They learned something about Judaism through Jewish colonies in oases north of Medina, whose merchants came to trade fairs in Mecca. And they learned something about Christianity from Christian monks at whose desert monasteries Arab trade caravans would stop in the course of their trips to Damascus. As a young man Muhammad accompanied one of these caravans. From these influences Muhammad became persuaded of the central truth of monotheism that there is only one true God of heaven and earth and that pagan, polytheistic Arabs should turn away from their many false gods to worship the one true God. Muhammad began to wonder when God would grant the Arabic peoples a revelation in their own language such as Jews possessed in Hebrew and Christians in Greek.
Muhammad claimed to have received an irresistible call to become a messenger of God while he was meditating in a cave one day, and he felt called to proclaim to his people in Mecca the words God gave him through the angel Gabriel. That experience is reported in Surah 96 of the Qur'an. The substance of the revelations given to Muhammad, or rather through Muhammad, in the following years is what we find in the 114 chapters of the Qur'an, in which Muhammad summons his people to turn to the worship of the true God and to obey him, on the one hand forsaking traditional evils such as gambling, drunkenness, infanticide, and prostitution, and on the other hand showing charity to orphans and the poor in general. The Qur'an provides numerous reminders of the consequences of obedience or disobedience to God's way reward or punishment, paradise or hell.
While Muhammad at first gained some converts in Mecca, he encountered increasingly serious opposition, even danger to his life. But he got a favorable reception in Medina, and it was here that his system got established. It was called Islam, which means submission, submission to God. And its central confession is the familiar affirmation that "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger." But even in Medina Muhammad met opposition to his message and even outright rejection from the Jewish communities in that vicinity. They snubbed his claim to be a messenger of God. In response Muhammad claimed that they had corrupted or falsified the revelation God had given them, else they would have acknowledged his revelation as an authentic one from God. This Jewish opposition was soon suppressed.
From this Islam has derived a very basic doctrine, namely, that although Jews and Christians have received revelations from God, they have not preserved these faithfully. Therefore God has had to re-issue this revelation through Muhammad and the Qur'an. And so, even though Jews and Christians are tolerated in Muslim societies as people of the book, according to Islam their faiths are corrupted versions of the faith that God has corrected in Islam. God has granted numerous revelations for example, through Moses and the Torah, through David and the Psalter, and through Jesus and the evangel. But these always got corrupted, so the final and definitive revelation was given through Muhammad in the Qur'an. This one, Muslims hold, has not been corrupted but has been faithfully preserved for these nearly 1400 years.
Given this basic understanding in Islamic thought, the overwhelming majority of the world's one billion Muslims, including American Muslims, see Christianity the way most Christians through most of Christian history have seen Judaism as a religion that has been superseded. Most Christians have thought that since Jesus is the fulfillment and correction of Judaism, Jews should have believed in Jesus as Messiah and become Christians. Judaism should have disappeared. That's how Muslims see Christianity. Because Islam possesses the latest and definitive revelation of God in the Qur'an, all Christians should have converted to Islam, and Christianity should have disappeared. This explains Muslims' notorious resistance to conversion to Christianity. As most Christians do not find any appeal in an invitation to convert to Judaism because it seems like a step backwards, historically and religiously, so Muslims are repulsed by any invitation to convert to Christianity, because they see such conversion as a return to an earlier and inferior and even corrupted religion that has been superseded by God's latest and final revelation through Muhammad in the Qur'an.
There is, however, one difference. Christianity sees itself as the fulfillment of the Jewish faith and hope and therefore retains the Hebrew Scripture, the Old Testament, as canonical Scripture. Islam does not see the Christian Bible as canonical Scripture, and therefore Muslims do not study it with the exception of some scholars, mainly those with some influence from Western education. As a consequence most Muslims never encounter those powerful stories of Jesus in the gospels. If they do, they are still inclined to take only what the Qur'an says about Jesus as ultimately trustworthy.
Islam's conviction that it possesses in the Qur'an the final and true revelation of God has led to mixed experiences. At first Islam was phenomenally successful. Within ten years of the death of Muhammad its armies had captured Damascus, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Within a century it had taken all of North Africa, crossed over into Spain, and was even pushing into France. In these conquests Islam inherited the economic, cultural, and scientific riches of the Byzantine and Persian empires. In many areas, such as the Middle East and Spain, the majority of the populations remained Christian for a long time. Only the governing structure was Islamic.
Taking over Byzantine civilization launched Islam into a centuries-long golden era that historians never tire of describing. Muslim Bedouins from the Arabian desert as well as converts to Islam from Christianity or descendants of such converts took advantage of Byzantine advances in the arts and sciences to fashion a genuinely great Islamic empire. Many historians consider it the greatest and most advanced civilization in the world at the time. Certainly it overshadowed European civilization, which had been thrown into the dark ages by the Vandal invasion and destruction of Rome and was only gradually becoming Christian. All these historical successes reinforced for Muslims their belief that Islam was the final and true revelation of God. After all, their faith had made Islam the world's supreme culture and civilization.
But then came the great reverses of the last couple of centuries. Somehow the west passed Islam. Some Westerners would call it the secular west. Muslims consider it the Christian west. In any case, it was the west that witnessed the phenomenal development of science, education, medicine, technology, the arts, industry, communication, and transportation, and with it economic and military power. One after another chunk of the Islamic world was reduced to a colony of European nations. Muslims were baffled. This didn't follow their script. This was not how it was supposed to be. Most observant and thoughtful people in the Islamic world experienced intensely mixed feelings. On the one hand they felt profoundly humiliated and resentful. On the other hand they envied Western progress and attempted to avail themselves of Western science and technology, as they had availed themselves of Byzantine civilization centuries before. Islamic societies worked at acquiring Western medicine, education, and technology, especially Western military science. But they always stopped short of buying into the underlying vision itself that lay behind Western advances openness to progress itself. The reason was the historic dogma of Islam as a final revelation, a revelation so final that it didn't need any development or improvement.
Here is where Christianity operates with a different mentality. Even if it also sometimes speaks of a final revelation, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, it actually sees this as a two-stage revelation consisting of Christ's first advent and his second advent, with the Holy Spirit guiding the church in its progress toward the kingdom of God in the time between the two advents. Christians have taken seriously Jesus's promise that the Spirit would guide them into further truth. They have therefore been open to forward movement in history. not only in science and technology but also in things such as democracy, the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, and human rights in general--things that to a considerable extent have contributed to the scientific, technological, industrial, and economic power of the West.
Some Muslims have been tempted by this vision of progress. A few of them about one hundred years ago were called modernists, because they called Islam to reopen the doors to interpretation of their faith, where scholars centuries earlier had declared those doors closed. But the stronger response in the Muslim world has been fundamentalism, the basic demand of which has been a return to early Islam, the Islam of the first four rightly guided Caliphs: Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali. Islamic conservatives see their community's backward situation today as the result of Islam's departure from the faith and practice of the earliest Muslim community. I don't know what an Islamic society would look like that really followed their radical proposal to return to seventh-century Islam. Meantime, interestingly, they avail themselves of the latest in twentieth-century technology to promote their cause of returning to seventh-century Islam.
The events of September 11 have sharpened up the comparison between Islam and Christianity. It is helpful to compare the primal images of the respective faiths. At the root of Christianity is the cross, which Christians take as the fundamental clue to what God is like and how we humans should live in love and forgiveness. The cross was followed by the suffering and martyrdom of members of the early church. Islam denies that Jesus was crucified, citing that noted verse in the fourth Sura of the Qur'an. For Muslims the primal image is Muhammad's victory over his Meccan enemies in armed conflict in those first four wars between Mecca and Medina, followed by Islam's lightning military conquests of Damascus, Jerusalem, and Alexandria in fact, of most of the Middle East.
Unfortunately Christianity has all too widely abandoned its primal image of the cross in practice, although it continues to make the cross an icon in personal and ecclesiastical piety. Christianity remains reminded of the cross, even if it resorts to the just war doctrine to rationalize its departure from the way of the cross. Islam, on its part, remains entirely consistent with its origins in its use of military force in the extension or defense of Islam today.
Christianity's problem in the past and present is its resort to military force in the extension and defense of Christianity and of Western society. That, unfortunately, merely serves to reinforce Islam's primal image and prevents the presentation of an alternative, the Christian primal image of the cross as the definitive expression of God's character as love and an expression of human suffering love as the way to overcome hostility and to find our way toward a new humanity.
Marlin Jeschke, is Professor Emeritus at Goshen College.
**This essay is not for distribution or duplication without the permission of the author.
Published SFP: 10/30/01
Comments about this article may be e-mailed to: John Fisher, johnjf@goshen.edu or to Marlin Jeschke marlinj@goshen.edu
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